Monday, April 30, 2007

Music: Current count 13102 [13079] rated (+23), 860 [855] unrated (+5). I've had a rough week personally, home alone, with Laura gone to New York and Detroit. Did at least get Recycled Goods done, but it hasn't been posted yet, so I'll hold back the website update.

• Mary J Blige: Reflections (A Retrospective) (1992-2006, [2006], Geffen): No dates, no notes, nothing admitting that the steadiest soul singer of the last decade is a fit subject for history. But are the four new cuts bait for profit taking, or just a relatively thin new album camouflaged with old hits that don't quite add up to a canon? I've never become a fan, so I figured a best-of might help. And it does, sort of. B+
• Celebrate! Songs of Praise (1994-2006 [2007], Columbia/Legacy): The problem with modern gospel is simple enough: old-fashioned gospel used to try to compete with secular music in the hope of saving sinners, but the new stuff just tones secular music down, retreating to the safe catchphrases of praise; still, it's nowhere near as dumbed down as CCM, and does keep a beat. B
• Celebrate! Songs of Worship (1994-2006 [2007], Columbia/Legacy): The surprising thing here is how many of these pieces fit neatly inside the soul music framework foregoing the raise-the-rafters enthusiasm that marks so much contemporary r&b as gospel-based; such songs make for easy, uneventful listening; exceptions include Tye Tribbett's call and response, Tramaine Jackson's sneaky elevation of "Amazing Grace," and Nancey Jackson, who simply didn't get the memo. B
• Peter Erskine: As It Is (1995 [1996], ECM): Drummer-led piano trio. John Taylor is the pianist -- his usual wry, subtle tendencies evident, self-effacing as usual. Palle Danielsson plays bass. Actually, Taylor wrote five tracks to Erskine's two -- two others were by non-group members -- so it isn't all that clear why Erskine gets top billing. Based on his work with Weather Report, he's probably the more marketable name, but that tells you little about what's going on here. I particularly like the bits where piano and drums gallop along. But a lot of it is just too subtle to grab me. B
• Bebel Gilberto: Momento (2007, Ziriguiboom/Six Degrees): Bossa nova royalty, daughter of João but not Astrud -- mother is another singer, Miúcha, sister of Chico Buarque. Where her first album looked forward with electrobeats, this one feels old fashioned, especially on the delicately fractured "Night and Day." B+(*)
• Stefon Harris: Black Action Figure (1999, Blue Note): Hugely hyped. I've always been a skeptic, but the vibes are the best thing here, not that there isn't plenty of star power as well: Jason Moran, Steve Turre, Gary Thomas, Greg Osby. A major label production. B+
• Putumayo Presents: Women of the World Acoustic (1994-2006 [2007], Putumayo World Music): Album cover draws a thin caucasian woman with long red hair and acoustic guitar, the ideal here even if it doesn't reflect any of the actual women featured here: five from Europe, three from Africa, two from Latin America, a trio from Canada; pleasantly pointless, safe to say that if R. Crumb went to update Hot Women he wouldn't pick anyone here. B-
• Todd Snider: Peace, Love and Anarchy (Rarities, B-sides and Demos, Vol. 1) (2000-04 [2007], Oh Boy): He's made a career out of coming from the wrong side of the tracks, or to follow his geography lessons, the wrong side of the river. He's not down and out, but he's far enough out to consort with those who are down, and he's comfortable with their world even if sometimes they rattle his nerves. He doesn't look like he's itching for success, but he's achieved some anyway: since 1994 he has three albums plus a best-of for MCA; four on Oh Boy, counting the live Near Truths and Hotel Rooms -- a good place to start, as it stitches the first five albums together with monologues that add to the songs; and last year's record of the year, The Devil You Know, on New Door. That's success enough to set his old label off scrounging for scraps, which is what we're served here. The majority are solo demos, only two of which led to album cuts -- not counting "East Nashville Skyline," which turned into an album title. Others are cut with a band, probably album outtakes -- "Old Friends" sounds like the seed for "You Got Away With It" without the ominous overtones. No documentation, no dates, no stories, so I'm only guessing. Most likely "Barbie Doll" and "Combover Blues" were skipped as too obvious, but that makes them pop out here. The other songs are more nuanced, and that makes them stick. I wonder whether they're serious about more vols. There's gotta be some gunk at the bottom of the barrel, but they haven't hit it yet. A-
• Peter Stampfel: Antonia's 11 (2006, Blue Navigator): Robert Christgau took me to see Stampfel twice, and both times made a scene ordering up "Fucking Sailors in Chinatown." So I first heard the song around 1978, but it's never been on an album before -- a streak that continues, given that this 11-song tribute is technically no more than a free bonus packaged with issue #9 of Michael Hurley's Blue Navigator magazine. Stampfel led the Holy Modal Rounders out of the '60s folk scene and into the farthest reaches of "Hoodoo Bash" -- the climax of Hurley's Have Moicy!, another Antonia song. Half the book is devoted to her: discography, interview, a memoir by Stampfel, excerpts from Antonia's Digest, photos. The disc is limited to previously unrecorded songs, which tend to be sweet ("Chinatown" included) rather than raunchy, but "Cajun Polka" kicks up its heels. A full-scale all-star tribute album might be a good idea, but having heard Stampfel it's hard to imagine anyone else. A-

Jazz Prospecting (CG #13, Part 7)

Don't have much jazz prospecting to show for last week. As expected, I spent most of the work on May's Recycled Goods column, which is done and in the pipeline. Didn't even have much in the way of jazz reissues: Mosaic, Blue Note, and Concord haven't responded, and I haven't looked up Verve in a while. Also short on major label reissues, so I've been catching up on world music. Two good ones in the upcoming column are Papa Noel's Café Noir (Tumi) and Tinariwen's Aman Iman: Water Is Life (World Village). Meanwhile, incoming jazz is piling up. I should start closing out the column in the next two weeks. I'm still finding it all rather overwhelming.

Slavic Soul Party! Technochek Collision (2007, Barbès): I had this on the world shelf until I read the fine print, discovering that this Gypsy brass band is firmly rooted in the five boroughs of New York, and that the names I recognize are downtown jazzers, starting with leader Matt Moran. He's better known in these parts as the vibraphonist with John Hollenbeck's Claudia Quintet, but here he sticks to drums and composes everything not credited to Trad. or Toussaint. A-

Bebel Gilberto: Momento (2007, Ziriguiboom/Six Degrees): Bossa nova royalty, daughter of João but not Astrud -- mother is another singer, Miúcha, sister of Chico Buarque. Where her first album looked forward with electrobeats, this one feels old fashioned, especially on the delicately fractured "Night and Day." B+(*)

Vusi Mahlasela: Guiding Star (2007, ATO): He's a guitarist, singer, songwriter -- fellow South African Dave Matthews calls him "a voice during the revolution, a voice of hope, like a Woody Guthrie or Bob Dylan of South Africa." Matthews owns the label introducing Mahlasela to the US, and guests, as does Derek Trucks, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, and others. All told, they pull enough tricks out of the bag you wind up with a whirlwind tour of South African music from mbaqanga to mbube but no real sense of where Mahlasela fits into it. Perhaps everywhere. B+(**)

Secret Oyster: Sea Son (1974 [2006], The Laser's Edge): Danish instrumental group, not sure whether they intended to play fusion or progressive rock, but they're so upbeat they they missed the boat on krautrock -- probably too busy partying. B+(*)

Nino Rota: Fellini & Rota (1952-2003 [2007], CAM Jazz): From 1952 until his death in 1979 Rota composed music for Federico Fellini's movies. This is presumably the original music, as collected in a 1996 compilation, with a more recent coda by pianist Enrico Pieranunzi. As with so many soundtracks, the logic remains on screen, and the selections -- some quite marvelous -- don't flow so much has hop all over the map. I've somehow missed most of Fellini's famous films, but recognize the circus atmosphere of several of these pieces. Rota was less innovative than Ennio Morricone in using electronics, but otherwise worked from a similar pallette. B+ [May 8]

The Jazz O'Maniacs: Sunset Cafe Stomp (2005 [2007], Delmark): The group is a German trad jazz band, founded in 1966 by then-18-year-old cornet player Roland Pilz. He had Louis Armstrong and Bix Beiderbecke on his mind, but the group name derives from a 1924-27 group led by trumpeter Charles Creath. Eight-piece band, with sax, banjo, tuba, and washboard, as well as the more standard cornet, clarinet, trombone, piano. Pilz sings a bit, in a style blatantly patterned on Armstrong, his accent more pointed in the introductions. Much fun. I don't get anything from the several labels that specialize in trad jazz these days, so it's hard to compare beyond that. B+(**)

Chicago Underground Trio: Chronicle (2006 [2007], Delmark): The groups vary between duos, trios, and quartets, so I just file their records under Chicago Underground. The constants are Rob Mazurek on cornet and Chad Taylor on drums. They're joined here by bassist Jason Ajemian, who I know primarily from Triage, a group with Vandermark 5 members Dave Rempis and Tim Daisy. The bass takes the lead early on, setting up recurring patterns that resemble minimalism but with more fractal chaos. Mazurek continues his computer work, but that seems more incidental here than on recent records -- you don't much notice him until he pulls out the cornet, when he drives the record home. [B+(**)]

Contemporary America: Another Center (2007, Adventure Music): A meeting of musicians from seven South American countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Venezuela. I don't quite know what to think about it: sounds more European than what I think of as Latin, a music for us more centered in the Caribbean, and therefore more Afro. Most pieces have vocals, and they can gum up the works, but not always. In any case, it pays to focus on the details, where the individual musicians register their diversity, and their virtuosity. B+(*)

Unpacking:

• Antonio Adolfo e Carol Saboya: Ao Vivo/Live (Points South)
• Carl Allen & Rodney Whitaker: Get Ready (Mack Avenue): May 8
• Anjani: Blue Alert (2006, Columbia)
• Black Light Burns: Cruel Melody (I Am Wolfpack): ex-Limp Bizkit guitarist Wes Borland
• Michael Brecker: Pilgrimage (Heads Up)
• James Brown: The Singles, Volume Two: 1960-1963 (Hip-O Select, 2CD)
• New Wonderland: The Best of Jeri Brown (1991-2006, Justin Time): four new songs
• Leonard Cohen: Songs of Leonard Cohen (1968, Columbia/Legacy)
• Leonard Cohen: Songs From a Room (1969, Columbia/Legacy)
• Leonard Cohen: Songs of Love and Hate (1970, Columbia/Legacy)
• José Conde y Ola Fresca: Revolucion (Mr. Bongo): advance, May 22
• Dirty Dancing (Legacy Edition) (RCA/Legacy, 2CD)
• Enders Room: Hotel Alba (Intuition)
• Ibrahim Ferrer: Mi Sueño (World Circuit/Nonesuch)
• Funkadelic: By Way of the Drum (1989, Hip-O Select)
• George Gee and the Jump, Jivin' Wailers Swing Orchestra: If Dreams Come True (GJazz)
• Bobby Hebb: That's All I Wanna Know (Tuition)
• Robert Irving III: New Momentum (Sonic Portals)
• Erol Josué: Régléman (MIS): May 22
• Charles Mingus: In Paris: The Complete America Session (1970, Sunnyside, 2CD): May 22
• Abra Moore: On the Way (Sarathan)
• Judith Owen: Happy This Way (Couragette): advance, May 22
• Susan Pereira and Sabor Brasil: Tudo Azul (Riony)
• Pharoah's Daughter: Haran (Oy! Hoo)
• Joshua Redman: Back East (Nonesuch)
• Saltman Knowles Quintet: It's About the Melody (Blue Canoe)
• The Unseen Guest: Out There (Tuition)

Purchases:

• Bud Freeman: Chicago/Austin High School Jazz in Hi-Fi (1957, Mosaic)
• Charles Lloyd: Of Course, Of Course (1964-65, Mosaic)

Sunday, April 29, 2007

Books

Sometime back in September or October of 2006 I came home from a browse at the bookstore and started to put together a list of the more/less promising, interesting, and/or appalling books I noticed crowding the politics, current affairs, and history shelves. I spent several weeks coming up with most of what follows, before it got out of hand and I lost track. I've finally decided I might as well post this on the blog before it becomes a mere history snapshot. I've made a couple of quick passes to clean it up and add a few new items, but it's nowhere near up to date. Since then, I've made substantial changes to my books section, and will keep working on this in that area. The old section was sketched out but never populated. Since then I've made quite a few comments in the blog on various books. I've now gone back through the blog and a few other sources and copied that information to the books section.

The main organizing model here is the shopping list: things that look to be really worthwhile reading, things that look good but may not be necessary, things that are probably good but not in my interest area at the moment, things that look like stuff I already know, things that I know better than, things that don't look like much of anything, etc. During the course of this I read some of the things near the top, and I kept running things I had already read, so those are in a list at the bottom.

Almost all of these books were released since June 2006, including paperback reissues of earlier books. The lists are far from comprehensive, but give a rough idea of how much good, bad, and ugly reading has appeared recently. This strikes me as a tremendous increase over the last five years. That in itself is a measure of growing problems. Whether one should be optimistic about their recognition remains to be seen.

As I rebuild the books section, I'll try reorganizing these lists more topically, although I'll probably keep the shopping list breakdown within categories.

Top Picks

These are recent books of prime interest. I'd say that the chances I'll eventually read any book on this list is greater than 50%. Some I've already bought.

• Taner Akcam, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (Henry Holt).
• Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone (Knopf).
• Andrew Cockburn, Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy (Macmillan).
• Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (2007-01, Henry Holt).
• Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East (2007-02, Knopf, paperback). Have had this since the hardcover came out. Big book.
• Atul Gawande, Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance (2007-04, Henry Holt).
• Greg Grandin, Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (2006-05, Henry Holt).
• Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy (Yale University Press, paperback). I have this, but haven't gotten around to it. Thought it looked like the best book on how the right-wing machine works.
• Chris Hedges, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (Simon & Schuster).
• Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change From Hawaii to Iraq (Times Books). I've read Kinzer's All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror, a good history of Iran focusing on the anti-Mossadegh coup.
• Anatol Lieven and John Hulsman, Ethical Realism: A Vision for America's Role in the World (Knopf).
• David Lindorff and Barbara Olshansky, The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush From Office (St. Martin's).
• Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (Penguin).

Wish List

These are books that I wish I had time to read, but I probably won't get around to. Some could move up, especially if my interest shifts in their direction.

• Ali Abunimah, One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse (2006-10, Henry Holt).
• Tariq Ali, Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of Hope (2006-12, Verso). Actually, I don't have much interest in Castro or Chavez, but I've read three straight books by Ali.
• Karen Armstrong, The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions (2007-04, Knopf, paperback).
• Jack Beatty, Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900 (2007-04, Knopf).
• Morris Berman, Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire (WW Norton).
• Sarah Chayes, The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban (Penguin).
• Joseph Cirincione, Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons (2007-01, Columbia University Press).
• William Easterly, The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (Penguin; paperback scheduled Feb. 27, 2007). I have, but haven't read, Easterly's well-regarded The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics (MIT, paperback).
• James K Galbraith, Unbearable Cost: Bush, Greenspan and the Economics of Empire (2006-11, Palgrave Macmillan, paperback).
• Jeff Goodell, Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America's Energy Future (2007-04, Houghton Mifflin, paperback).
• Michael Grunwald, The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise (2007-03, Simon & Schuster, paperback).
• Jacob S. Hacker, The Great Risk Shift: The Assault on American Jobs, Families, Health Care, and Retirement and How You Can Fight Back (Oxford University Press).
• David Harvey, Limits to Capital (2007-01, Verso, paperback).
• Steven Hiatt, A Game As Old As Empire: The Secret World of Economic Hit Men and the Web of Global Corruption (2007-02, Benett-Koehler).
• Zachary Karabell, Peace Be Upon You: The Story of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Coexistence (2007-02, Knopf).
• Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood (Beacon Press).
• Elizabeth Kolbert, Field Notes From a Catastophe (2006-12, Bloomsbury, paperback). Read most/all of this in New Yorker.
• Bill McKibben, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future (Henry Holt).
• Chris Mooney, The Republican War on Science (Basic Books, paperback).
• John E. Mueller, Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them (Simon & Schuster).
• Sari Nusseibeh, Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life (Farrar Straus and Giroux).
• Roland Paris, At War's End: Building Peace After Civil Conflict (Cambridge University Press, paperback).
• Steven Poole, Unspeak: How Words Become Weapons, How Weapons Become a Message, and How That Message Becomes Reality (Grove/Atlantic).
• Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World (2007-01, New Press).
• Gérard Prunier, Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide (Cornell University Press). Author has a previous book, The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide.
• Jill Quadagno, One Nation, Uninsured: Why the US Has No National Health Insurance (2006-10, Oxford University Press, paperback).
• David J. Rothman and Sheila M. Rothman, Trust Is Not Enough: Bringing Human Rights to Medicine (New York Review of Books).
• Susan Sered/Rushika Fernandopulle, Uninsured in America: Life and Death in the Land of Opportunity (2006-10, University of California Press, paperback).
• Seth Shulman, Undermining Science: Suppression and Distortion in the Bush Administration (2007-01, University of California Press).
• David Sirota, Hostile Takeover: How Big Business Bought Our Government and How We Can Take It Back (Crown).
• Paul Starr, Freedom's Power: The True Force of Liberalism (2007-04, Perseus).
• Alex Steffen, ed., Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century (Abrams).
• Alexander Stille, The Sack of Rome: How a Beautiful European Country With a Fabled History and a Storied Culture Was Taken Over by a Man Named Silvio Berlusconi (Penguin).
• Dan Tapscott, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (2006-12, Penguin).
• Thant Myint-U, The River of Lost Footsteps: Histories of Burma (2006-12, Farrar Straus and Giroux).
• Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Knopf). I've generally avoided books that tightly focus on Bin Laden and Zawahiri -- what interests me more is the context. This looks like it might be the exception.
• Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty (paperback).

Lesser Interests

These are books that pique my interest, but are in an area where there is no practical chance I can get to them given everything else I need to read. In other words, these are books that look like they should be on one of the above lists, but got arbitrarily moved out.

• Iain Anderson, This Is Our Music: Free Jazz, the Sixties, and American Culture (2006-11, University of Pennsylvania Press).
• David A Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (2007-01, Houghton Mifflin).
• Tom Bissell, The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam (2007-03, Knopf).
• Ned Blackhawk, Violence Over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (2006-11, Harvard University Press).
• Taylor Branch, At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68 (Simon & Schuster, paperback). I have, but have not read, the two previous volumes, a luxury I hope to get to sooner or later.
• Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (2007-02, Knopf, paperback).
• Eric Foner, Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction (2006-11, Knopf, paperback).
• John Gimlette, Theatre of Fish: Travels Through Newfoundland and Labrador (2006-11, Knopf, paperback).
• Jerome Groopman, How Doctors Think (2007-03, Houghton Mifflin).
• Paul Kriwaczek, Yiddish Civilization: The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation (2006-10, Knopf, paperback).
• Mark Kurlansky, The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell (2007-01, Random House, paperback).
• Lawrence Lessig, Code: Version 2.0 (2006-12, Basic Books, paperback).
• John Newhouse, Boeing Versus Airbus: The Inside Story of the Greatest International Competition in Business (2007-01, Knopf).
• Narendra Sarila, The Shadow of the Great Game: The Untold Story of India's Partition (2006-12, Avalon).
• Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (2007-02, WW Norton, paperback).
• David Silbey, War of Frontier and Empire: The Phillipine-American War, 1898-1902 (2007-02, Hill and Wang).
• Rory Stewart, The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq (Harcourt). Stewart also wrote a travel book on Afghanistan in 2002, The Places in Between (Harcourt, paperback), evidently well-regarded. In Iraq he worked for CPA.
• John Szwed, Crossovers: Essays on Race, Music, and American Culture (2007-01, University of Pennsylvania Press, paperback).
• Jen Trynin, Everything I'm Cracked Up to Be: A Rock & Roll Fairy Tale (2007-02, Harcourt, paperback).
• Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors (2007-03, Penguin, paperback).
• Scott Weidensaul, Return to Wild America: A Yearlong Search for the Continent's Natural Soul (2006-10, Farrar Straus and Giroux, paperback).
• George Weller, First Into Nagasaki: The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on Postatomic Japan and Its Prisoners of War (2006-12, Crown).

Other Recommended

These books look to be worthwhile for one reason or another, but unless I develop a narrow research interest I doubt that I'll ever get to them.

• Christian Alfonsi, Circle in the Sand: Why We Went Back to Iraq (2006-10, Doubleday).
• David L. Altheide, Terorism and the Politics of Fear (AltaMira Press, paperback).
• Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, paperback).
• Anthony Arnove, Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal (2007-01, Henry Holt, paperback).
• Benjamin R Barber, Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole (WW Norton).
• Howard Brick, Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Society in Modern American Thought (2006-12, Cornell University Press).
• Howard Brody, Hooked: How Medicine's Dependence on the Pharmaceutical Industry Undermines Professional Ethics (Rowman & Littlefield).
• Noam Chomsky, Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy (Henry Holt).
• Charles Clover, The End of the Line: How Overfishing Is Changing the World and What We Eat (2006-11, New Press).
• Jonathan Cohn, Sick: The Untold Story of America's Health Care Crisis -- and the People Who Pay the Price (Harper Collins).
• Mark Danner, Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror (paperback).
• Michael Eric Dyson, Debating Race (2007-02, Perseus).
• Fawaz A Gerges, Journey of the Jihadist: Inside Muslim Militancy (Harcourt).
• Manuel G. Gonzalez, The Politics of Fear: How Republicans Use Money, Race and the Media to Win (Paradigm, paperback).
• Jan Crawford Greenburg, Supreme Conflict: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Control of the United States Supreme Court (Penguin).
• Dilip Hiro, Blood of the Earth: The Battle for the World's Vanishing Oil Resources (2006, Nation Books, paperback).
• Leslie Holmes, Rotten States? Corruption, Post-Communism, and Neoliberalism (Duke University Press, paperback).
• Georgina Howell, Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations (2007-04, Farrar Straus and Giroux).
• Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War (Crown).
• Paul Joseph, Are Americans Becoming More Peaceful? (2006-10, Paradigm).
• Eric Klinenberg, Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America's Media (2007-01, Henry Holt).
• Barry M Lando, Web of Deceit: The History of Western Complicity in Iraq, From Churchill to Kennedy to George W Bush (2007-01, Other Press).
• Lewis Lapham, Pretensions to Empire: Notes on the Criminal Folly of the Bush Administration (2006-09, New Press).
• Steven D Levitt/Stephen J Dubner, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explains the Hidden Side of Everything (2006-11, Harper Collins, paperback).
• T. Christian Miller, Blood Money: A Story of Wasted Billions, Lost Lives and Corporate Greed in Iraq (Little, Brown).
• Zeev Maoz, Defending the Holy Land: A Critical Analysis of Israel's Security and Foreign Policy (2006-04, University of Michigan Press).
• Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival: How Conflicts Within Islam Will Shape the Future (WW Norton).
• Benjamin L Page with Marshall W Bouton, The Foreign Policy Disconnect: What Americans Want From Our Leaders but Don't Get (University of Chicago Press).
• Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006-10, Oneworld).
• Fred Pearce: When the Rivers Run Dry: Water -- The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-First Century (2007-03, Beacon Press, paperback).
• Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, The Best War Ever: Lies, Damned Lies, and the Mess in Iraq (paperback). I've read their previous Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War in Iraq.
• James Risen, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration (Simon & Schuster).
• Gerry Schumacher, A Bloody Business: America's War Zone Contractors and the Occupation of Iraq (MBI).
• Joseph E. Stiglitz, Making Globalization Work (WW Norton). Presumably this is a popularization of a more technical book that Stiglitz co-authored, Fair Trade for All: How Trade Can Promote Development. I've read the latter.
• Cass R. Sunstein, David Schkade, Lisa M. Ellman, Andres Sawicki, Are Judges Political? (Brookings Institution).
• Barry Werth, 31 Days: Gerald Ford, the Nixon Pardon and a Government in Crisis (2007-02, Knopf, paperback).
• David S Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945 (2007-04, New Press, paperback).

Surplus Recommended

These books also look to be worthwhile, but are outside of my interest areas or likely to be redundant.

• Cynthia Barnett, Mirage: Florida and the Vanishing Water of the Eastern U.S. (2007-04, Regional).
• Sidney Blumenthal, How Bush Rules: Chronicles of a Radical Regime (Princeton University Press).
• Eric Boehlert, Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush (Free Press).
• Douglas Brinkley, The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Coast (Harper Collins).
• Robert M. Cassidy, Counterinsurgency and the Global War on Terror: Military Culture and Irregular War (Greenwood).
• Michael Cobb, God Hates Fags: The Rhetorics of Religious Violence (New York University Press).
• Joe Conason, It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush (2007-02, St. Martin's Press).
• Christopher Cooper, Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security (Henry Holt).
• Harm de Blij, Why Geography Matters: Three Challenges Facing America: Climate Change, the Rise of China, and Global Terrorism (2007-01, Oxford University Press, paperback).
• Brian Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism: A History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement (PublicAffairs).
• Peter Eisner, The Italian Letter: How the Bush Administration Used a Fake Letter to Build the Case for War in Iraq (2007-04, Rodale Press).
• Gail A Eisnitz, Slaughterhouse: The Shocking Story of Greed, Neglect, and Inhumane Treatment Inside the US Meat Industry (2006-11, Prometheus Books, paperback).
• Barbara Finlay, George W Bush and the War on Women: Turning Back the Clock on Progress (2006-11, Zed Books).
• John Ghazvinian, Untapped: The Scramble for Africa's Oil (2007-04, Harcourt).
• Gershom Gorenberg, The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (2006-03, Times Books; 2007-03, Henry Holt, paperback).
• Karen J. Greenberg, ed., Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib ().
• Jed Home, Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City (Random House).
• Robert D Hormats, The Price of Liberty: Paying for America's Wars (Henry Holt). Goldman Sachs vice-chairman. Henry Kissinger sez, "Robert Hormats mounts a compelling argument that America faces large-scale economic catastrophe due to lack of a long-term, fiscally sound strategy for meeting military and security needs as well as domestic obligations."
• Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (WW Norton).
• ST Joshi, The Angry Right: Why Conservatives Keep Getting It Wrong (Prometheus).
• Alan Kennedy-Shaffer, Denial and Deception: A Study of the Bush Administration's Rhetorical Case for Invading Iraq (Universal, paperback).
• Sonia Kolhatkar/James Ingalls, Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence (2006-10, Seven Stories, paperback).
• Adam LeBor, "Complicity With Evil": The United Nations in the Age of Modern Genocide (2006-11, Yale University Press).
Miguel Leon-Portillo, Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico (2007-04, Beacon Press, paperback).
• Mark London, The Last Forest: The Amazon in the Age of Globalization (2007-02, Random House).
• Loren D Lybarger, Identity and Religion in Palestine: The Struggle Between Islamism and Secularism in the Occupied Territories (2007-03, Princeton University Press).
• Lisa Magonelli, Oil on the Brain: Adventures From the Pump to the Pipeline (2007-01, Doubleday).
• Joseph Marguilies, Guantánamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power (Simon & Schuster).
• Stephanie Mencimer, Blocking the Courthouse Door: How the Republican Party and Its Corporate Allies Are Taking Away Your Right to Sue (2006-12, Simon & Schuster).
• Steven H. Miles, M.D., Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror (Random House).
• Paul Molyneaux, Swimming in Circles: Aquaculture and the Death of Our Oceans (2007-01, Avalon, paperback).
• Augustus Richard Norton, Hezbollah: A Short History (2007-03, Princeton University Press).
• Ronald L Numbers, The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design (2006-11, Harvard University Press, paperback).
• Michael B Oren, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present (WW Norton).
• Robert Young Pelton, Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror (Crown).
• Geoffrey Perret, Commander in Chief: How Truman, Johnson, and Bush Turned a Presidential Power Into a Threat to America's Future (2007-02, Farrar Straus and Giroux).
• Frances Fox Piven, Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America (2006-11, Rowman & Littlefield).
• Anna Politkovskaya, Putin's Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy (2006-12, Henry Holt, paperback).
• Tariq Ramadan, In the Footsteps of the Prophet: Lessons From the Life of Muhammad (2006-12, Oxford University Press).
• Dina Rasor/Robert Bauman, Betraying Our Troops: The Destructive Results of Privatizing War (2007-05, Palgrave Macmillan).
• Erik Reece, Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness: Radical Strip Mining and the Devastation of Appalachia (2007-02, Penguin, paperback).
• J Timmons Roberts, A Climate of Injustice: Global Inequality, North-South Politics, and Climate Policy (2006-12, MIT Press).
• Joseph Romm, Hell and High Water: Global Warming -- the Solution and the Politics -- and What We Should Do (2006-12, Harper Collins).
• Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army (2007-02, Avalon).
• Danny Schechter, When News Lies: Media Complicity and the Iraq War (Select Books, paperback + DVD).
• Richard Sennett, The Culture of the New Capitalism (2007-01, Yale University Press).
• Stephen A. Silvinski, Buck Wild: How Republicans Blew the Bank and Became the Party of Big Government (Thomas Nelson).
• Daniel Jordan Smith, A Culture of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular Discontent in Nigeria (2006-11, Princeton University Press).
• Norman Solomon, War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death (2005-06, John Wiley).
• Steven Strasser, ed, The Abu Ghraib Investigations: The Official Independent Panel and Pentagon Reports on the Shocking Prisoner Abuse in Iraq (Public Affairs, paperback).
• Ray Takeyh, Hidden Iran: Paradox and Power in the Islamic Republic (2006-10, Henry Holt).
• Helen Thomas, Watchdogs of Democracy? The Waning Washington Press Corps and How It Has Failed the Public (Simon & Schuster).
• Werner Troesken, The Great Lead Water Pipe Disaster (2006-12, MIT Press).
• Jonathan B Tucker, War of Nerves: Chemical Warfare From World War I to Al-Qaeda (2007-02, Knopf, paperback).
• Peter Douglas Ward, Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future (2007-04, Collins). I've read a lot of Ward in the past, but this strikes me as a stretch.
• David Warsh, Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations: A Story of Economic Discovery (WW Norton).
• Harriet A Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans From Colonial Times to the Present (2007-01, Doubleday).
• Maureen Webb, Illusions of Security: Global Surveillance and Democracy in the Post 9/11 World (2006-11, City Lights Books, paperback).
• Kristian Williams, American Methods: Torture and the Logic of Domination (South End Press).
• W Frederick Zimmerman, ed., Basic Documents About the Treatment of Detainees at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib ().
• Howard Zinn, A Power Governments Cannot Suppress (City Lights, paperback).

Reference

These are items that might be worth having for reference purposes, but aren't likely to be recommended for interpretive insights.

• Stanley Crouch, Considering Genius: Writings on Jazz (2007-04, Perseus).
• Simon Frith, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock (2007-02, Cambridge University Press).
• The Iraq Study Group Report (2006-12, Knopf).
• George McGovern and William R. Polk, Out of Iraq: A Practical Plan for Withdrawal Now (Simon & Schuster, paperback). Read the Harpers excerpt. Better than I expected.
• Riverbend, Baghdad Burning II: Girl Blog From Iraq (2006-09, Feminist Press at CUNY, paperback).
• Melissa Rossi, What Every American Should Know About Europe: The Hot Spots, Hotshots, Political Muck-Ups, Cross-Border Sniping, and Cultural Chaos of Our Transatlantic Cousins (2006-11, Penguin, paperback).
• John Tirman, 100 Ways America Is Screwing Up the World (2006-08, paperback).
• Mick Winter, Peak Oil Prep: Prepare for Peak Oil, Climate Change, and Economic Collapse (2006-11, Westsong, paperback).
• Bob Woodward, State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III (Simon & Schuster). Haven't read the first two parts either, which seem to be of value mostly for original quotes and lessons on how the press got suckered.
• Worldwatch Institute, State of the World 2007: An Urban Planet (2007-01, WW Norton, paperback).

Undecided

These are books that could go up or could go down. Some I haven't really looked at yet; others are simply unclear, compromised, or oddly constructed.

• John Agresto, Mugged by Reality: The Liberation of Iraq and the Failure of Good Intentions (2007-03, Encounter Books).
• Kwame Anthony Appiah: Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2007-02, WW Norton, paperback).
• Ravi Batra, The New Golden Age: The Coming Revolution Against Political Corruption and Economic Chaos (2007-01, Palgrave Macmillan).
• Robert K. Brigham, Is Iraq Another Vietnam? (Public Affairs). Seems doubtful this comparison by a McNamara collaborator will pan out.
• Bryan Douglas Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies (2007-04, Princeton University Press).
• Jeff Chester, Digital Destiny: New Media and the Future of Democracy (2007-01, New Press).
• Clayton E Cramer, Armed America: The Remarkable Story of How and Why Guns Became as American as Apple Pie (2007-02, Nelson Current).
• Matthew Crenson, Presidential Power: Unchecked and Unbalanced (2007-04, WW Norton).
• Lanny Davis, Scandal: How "Gotcha" Politics Is Destroying America (Palgrave Macmillan): From a Clinton Admin insider, who most likely has his own ax to grind.
• Daniel H Deudney, Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory From the Polis to the Global Village (2006-12, Princeton University Press).
• Tyler Drumheller, On the Brink: An Insider's Account of How the White House Compromised American Intelligence (2006-11, Avalon).
• Ronald Dworkin, Is Democracy Possible Here? Principles for a New Political Debate (Princeton University Press).
• Mary Eberstadt, ed, Why I Turned Right: Leading Baby Boom Conservatives Chronicle Their Political Journeys (2007-02, Simon & Schuster).
• Juliet Eilperin, Fight Club Politics: How Partisanship Is Poisoning the House of Representatives (Rowman & Littlefield).
• James Fallows, Blind Into Baghdad: America's War in Iraq (Vintage, paperback). Collects his Atlantic Monthly reports. I'm suspicious whenever Andrew Sullivan and David Brooks applaud.
• Stephen Flynn, Edge of Disaster: Rebuilding a Resilient Nation (Random House). A professional disaster-monger, last time wrote America the Vulnerable: How Our Government Is Failing to Protect Us From Terrorism. This time argues that natural disasters may be even worse.
• David Friend, Watching the World Change: The Stories Behind the Images of 9/11 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
• Indur Goklany, The Improving State of the World: Why We're Living Longer, Healthier, More Comfortable Lives on a Cleaner Planet (2007-01, Cato Institute, paperback).
• Jeffrey Goldberg, Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide (Knopf).
• David Gratzer, The Cure: How Capitalism Can Save American Health Care (Encounter Books).
• John Gribbin, The Origins of the Future: Ten Questions for the Next Ten Years (2006-11, Yale University Press).
• Regina Herzlinger, Who Killed Healthcare? America's $2 Trillion Medical Problem, and the Consumer-Driven Cure (2007-04, McGraw-Hill).
• Stanley Hoffmann, Chaos and Violence: What Globalization, Failed States, and Terrorism Mean for US Foreign Policy (Rowman & Littlefield).
• Douglas Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop (2007-03, Perseus).
• Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon, The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation (Hill & Wang).
• Barbara J King, Evolving God: A Provocative View on the Origins of Religion (2007-01, Doubleday).
• Steven E Landsburg, More Sex Is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics (2007-04, Simon & Schuster).
• Eric Larsen, A Nation Gone Blind: America in the Age of Simplification and Deceit (Avalon, paperback).
• Charlie Leduff, US Guys: The True and Twisted Mind of the American Man (2007-02, Penguin).
• James Mann, China Fantasy: How Our Leaders Explain Away Chinese Repression (Penguin).
• Amy Dockser Marcus, Jerusalem 1913: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (2007-04, Penguin).
• Greil Marcus, The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
• William J Middendorf, A Glorious Disaster: Barry Goldwater's Presidential Campaign and the Origins of the Conservative Movement (2006-11, Basic Books).
• Brian Patrick Mitchell, 8 Ways to Run the Country: A New and Revealing Look at Left and Right (2006-11, Greenwood).
• Sharon Moalem, Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease (2007-02, Harper Collins).
• Scott E Page, The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies (2007-01, Princeton University Press).
• Bill Henry Paul, Future Energy: How the New Oil Industry Will Change People, Politics and Portfolios (2007-02, John Wiley).
• Charles Pernow, The Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters (2007-04, Princeton University Press).
• Ann Pettifor, The Coming First World Debt Crisis (2006-11, Palgrave Macmillan).
• Orrin H Pilkey/Linda Pilkey-Jarvis, Useless Arithmetic: Why Environmental Scientists Can't Predict the Future (2006-12, Columbia University Press). It's probably easy enough to shoot holes in mathematical models, but where does that leave us?
• Arnold S Relman, A Second Opinion: Rescuing America's Healthcare (2007-04, Perseus).
• Bamaby Rogerson, The Heirs of Muhammad (2007-02, Penguin).
• Barry Steidle, The Devil Came on Horseback: Bearing Witness to Genocide in Darfur (2007-03, Perseus).
• Milton Viorst, Storm From the East: The Struggle Between the Arab World and the Christian West (2007-04, Random House, paperback).
• James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing (2007-01, Oxford University Press, paperback).
• Stephen M. Walt, Taming American Power: The Global Response to US Primacy (WW Norton, paperback).

No Interest

There are lots of books I have no interest in. So many, in fact, that it's necessary to subdivide them. In many cases they're just wrong-headed. Some may have value, but look to be too personal, at too small a scale to be very useful to me. (Of course, some books like that turn out to be exceptions.)

My "no interest" lists continued in the extended body.

No Interest: Major Figures

This particular subdivision groups books by or often about major figures. Memoirs by political figures are almost by definition self-serving. Most biography is no better, but there are exceptions (promoted elsewhere if that looks likely).

• John Ashcroft, Never Again: Securing America and Restoring Justice (2006-10, Center Street).
• James A. Baker III, "Work Hard, Study . . . and Keep Out of Politics!": Adventures and Lessons From an Unexpected Public Life (Penguin).
• Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins, Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11 (Harper Collins).
• Michael Bar-Zohar, Shimon Peres: The Biography (2007-02, Random House).
• L. Paul Bremer, My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope ().
• Uri Dan, Ariel Sharon: An Intimate Portrait (2006-10, Palgrave Macmillan).
• Karen DeYoung, Soldier: The Life of Colin Powell (Knopf).
• Scott Dikkers, Destined for Destiny: The Unauthorized Autobiography of George W. Bush (Simon & Schuster).
• Thomas H. Kean and Lee. H. Hamilton, Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission (Knopf).
• Jeane J Kirkpatrick, Making War to Keep Peace (Harper Collins).
• Stanley Meisler, Kofi Annan: A Man of Peace in a World of War (2006-12, John Wiley & Sons).
• Yossi Melman, The Nuclear Sphinx of Tehran: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the State of Iran (2007-02, Avalon).
• Pervez Musharraf, In the Line of Fire (Free Press). Politicians' books normally sink to the bottom list, but politicians don't normally hawk their books on the Daily Show, where he didn't come off as an American lackey.
• George Tenet, At the Center of the Storm ().
• James Traub, The Best Intentions: Kofi Annan and the UN in the Era of American World Power (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
• John Yoo, War by Other Means: An Insider's Account of the War on Terror (2006-10, Grove/Atlantic).
• John Yoo, The Powers of War and Peace: The Constitution and Foreign Affairs After 9/11 (2006-10, University of Chicago Press, paperback).
• Tony Zinni and Tony Koltz, The Battle for Peace: A Frontline Vision of America's Power and Purpose (Palgrave Macmillan).

No Interest: Minor Figures

These are memoirs by minor figures, some of possible interest, and minor level journalism, including many books about soldiers and war operations.

• Said Hyder Akbar, Come Back to Afghanistan: Trying to Rebuild a Country With My Father, My Brother, My One-Eyed Uncle, Bearded Tribesmen, and President Karzai (2006-10, Bloomsbury, paperback).
• Lawrence Anthony: Babylon's Ark: The Incredible Wartime Rescue of the Baghdad Zoo (2007-03, St. Martin's Press).
• James Ashcroft, Making a Killing: The Explosive Story of a Hired Gun in Iraq (2007-04, Virgin Books).
• John R. Ballard, Fighting for Fallujah: A New Dawn for Iraq (Praeger Security International).
• Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (2007-02, Farrar Straus and Giroux).
• Moazzam Begg, Enemy Combatant: My Imprisonment at Guantanamo, Bagram, and Kandahar (New Press).
• Gary Berntsen, Jawbreaker: The Attack on Bin Laden and Al Qaeda: A Personal Account by the CIA's Key Field Commander (Crown): Well, at least I got a book out of the deal.
• Nicholas Blanford, Killing Mr Lebanon: The Assassination of Rafik Hariri and Its Impact on the Middle East (2006-10, IB Tauris).
• Kristin Breitweiser, Wake-Up Call: The Political Education of a 9/11 Widow (Warner Books).
• Lt. Carey H. Cash, A Table in the Presence: The Dramatic Account of How a U.S. Marine Battalion Experienced God's Presence Amidst the Chaos of the War in Iraq (W Publishing Group).
• Mary Cheney, Now It's My Turn: A Daughter's Chronicle of Political Life (Simon & Schuster).
• John Crawford, The Last True Story I'll Ever Tell: An Accidental Soldier's Account of the War in Iraq (Penguin, paperback). I read a bit of this, but didn't find it very illuminating. No surprise that the military sucked, Iraq sucked, the war sucked. This was one of the first of what now are dozens of soldier accounts.
• Nonie Darwish, Now They Call Me Infidel: Why I Renounced Jihad for America, Israel, and the War on Terror (Penguin).
• Michael DeLong, A General Speaks Out: The Truth About the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (2007-03, MBI, paperback).
• Larry Devlin, Chief of Station, Congo: Fighting the Cold War in a Hot Zone (Perseus).
• Larry Diamond, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq (paperback).
• David Feige, Indefensible: One Lawyer's Journey Into the Inferno of American Justice (Little, Brown).
• Brigitte Gabriel, Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America (St. Martin's).
• Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, My Year Inside Radical Islam: A Memoir (2007-02, Penguin).
• Mike German, Thinking Like a Terrorist: Insights of a Former FBI Undercover Agent (2007-01, Potomac Books).
• Michael Goldfarb, Ahmad's War, Ahmad's Peace: Surviving Under Saddam, Dying in the New Iraq ().
• Richard Jadick, On Call in Hell: A Doctor's Iraq War Story (2007-03, Penguin).
• Joshua Key, The Deserter's Tale: The Story of an Ordinary Soldier Who Walked Away From the War in Iraq (2007-01, Grove/Atlantic).
• R. Alan King, Twice Armed: An American Soldier's Battle for Hearts and Minds in Iraq (MBI). "As unconventional as any soldier this side of T.E. Lawrence, . . . Armed with a Palm Pilot, a Koran, and a nuanced respect for Middle Eastern culture, King arranged the capture or surrender of almost a dozen of the most wanted villains from Saddam's regime."
• Ray Lemoine and Donovan Webster, Babylon by Bus: Or, the True Story of Two Friends Who Gave Up Their Valuable Franchise Selling "Yankees Suck" T-shirts at Fenway to Find Meaning and Adventure in Iraq (Penguin).
• Richard S. Lowry, Marines in the Garden of Eden: The Battle for An Nasiriyah (Penguin).
• Thomas Mowle, ed, Hope Is Not a Plan: The War in Iraq From Inside the Green Zone (2007-03, Greenwood).
• Omar Nasiri, Inside the Jihad: My Life With Al Qaeda: A Spy's Story (Perseus).
• Sean Naylor, Not a Good Day to Die: The Untold Story of Operation Anaconda (Penguin, paperback).
• Patrick K. O'Donnell, We Were One: Shoulder to Shoulder With the Marines Who Took Fallujah (Da Capo Press).
• Tim Pritchard, Ambush Alley: The Most Extraordinary Battle of the Iraq War (Random House, paperback).
• Martha Raddatz, The Long Road Home: A Story of War and Family (2007-03, Penguin).
• Deborah Rodriguez: Kabul Beauty School: An American Woman Goes Behind the Veil (2007-04, Random House).
• Gary Schroen, First In: An Insider's Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan (Random House). He was the guy in the field, so this is likely to be authoritative but blinkered -- the seeds of the fiasco.
• Michael Smith, Killer Elite: The Inside Story of America's Most Secret Special Operations Team (2007-03, St.Martin's Press).
• Bing West, No True Glory: A Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah (Bantam Books, paperback).
• Trish Wood, What Was Asked of Us: An Oral History of the Iraq War by the Soldiers Who Fought It (2006-11, Little Brown).

No Interest: Politics Left/Center

Most of these are political campaign books by Democrats, centrists, liberals, or self-described progressives of one sort or another. Books advocating a progressive alternative to the religious right are listed here. Some critiques of the right or politics in general also fit here, but the more promising ones have been promoted.

• Randall Balmer, Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America (Basic Books).
• Zbigniew Brzezinski, Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower (Perseus).
• David Callahan, The Moral Center: How We Can Reclaim Our Country From Diehard Extremists, Rogue Corporations, Hollywood Hacks, and Pretend Patriots (Harcourt). Author of The Cheating Culture, he probably has some points, despite an annoying preference for railing against the left. "Callahan argues that the problems for most Americans are not abortion and gay marriage but rather issues that neither party is addressing -- the selfishness that is careening out of control, the effect of our violent and consumerist culture on children, and our lack of a greater purpose."
• Jimmy Carter, Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis (paperback).
• Lou Dobbs, War on the Middle Class: How the Government, Big Business, and Special Interest Groups Are Waging War on the American Dream and How to Fight Back (Penguin).
• John Edwards, Home: The Blueprints of Our Lives (Harper Collins).
• Rahm Emanuel, The Plan: Big Ideas for America (2006-08, Public Affairs).
• Laura Flanders, Blue Grit: True Democrats Take Back Politics Form the Politicians (2007-04, Penguin).
• Al Franken, The Truth (With Jokes) (Penguin, paperback).
• Steven F. Freeman, Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? (Seven Stories).
• Amy Goodman, Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, and the People Who Fight Back (Hyperion).
• Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth (Rodale, paperback): Saw the movie. Book is mostly useful for its illustrations, which are slick and impressive.
• Mark Halperin and John F. Harris, The Way to Win: Taking the White House in 2008 (Random House).
• Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten, One Party Country: The Republican Plan for Dominance in the 21st Century (Wiley).
• Gary Hart, The Courage of Our Convictions: A Manifesto for Democrats (Henry Holt).
• Garrison Keillor, Homegrown Democrat: A Few Plain Thoughts From the Heart of America (Penguin, paperback).
• John Kerry, This Moment on Earth: Today's New Environmentalists and Their Vision for the Future (Perseus).
• Joe Klein, Politics Lost: How American Democracy Was Trivialized by People Who Think You're Stupid (Doubleday). Did read a bit of this, but didn't get far, realizing that Klein is part of his subject problem.
• George Lakoff, Whose Freedom? The Battle Over America's Most Important Idea (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
• George Lakoff, Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, paperback).
• Shelley Lewis, Naked Republicans: A Full-Frontal Exposure of Right-Wing Hypocrisy and Greed (Random House, paperback).
• Terry McAuliffe, What a Party! My Life Among Democrats: Presidents, Candidates, Donors, Activists, Alligators, and Other Wild Animals (St. Martin's Press).
• Robin Meyers, Why the Christian Right Is Wrong: A Minister's Manifesto for Taking Back Your Faith, Your Flag, Your Future (John Wiley & Sons).
• James Moore, The Architect: Karl Rove and the Master Plan for Absolute Power (Crown).
• Ralph Nader, Seventeen Traditions (Harper Collins).
• Geoffrey Nunberg, Talking Right: The Politics of Language -- How the Right Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show (Public Affairs).
• Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (Crown).
• Keith Olbermann, The Worst Person in the World: And 202 Strong Contenders (John Wiley).
• Bill Richardson: Between Worlds: The Making of an American Life (2007-03, Penguin, paperback).
• Richard Dean Rosen, Bad President (Workman, paperback).
• Ryan Sager, The Elephant in the Room: Evangelicals, Libertarians, and the Battle to Control the Republican Party (John Wiley & Sons).
• Senator Chuck Schumer, Positively American: Winning Back the Middle Class One Family at a Time (Rodale Press).
• Sam Seder, F.U.B.A.R.: America's Right-Wing Nightmare and How to Wake Up From It (Harper Collins).
• Linda Seger, Jesus Rode a Donkey: Why Republicans Don't Have the Corner on Christ ().
• J Matthew Sleeth, Serve God, Save the Planet: A Christian Call to Action (2007-04, Zondervan, paperback).
• Paul Waldman, Being Right Is Not Enough: What Progressives Must Learn From Conservative Success (Wiley).
• Jim Wallis, God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It ().

No Interest: Politics Right

Same general thing, only from the right. Includes some self-critiques aimed at redeeming the right.

• Fred Barnes, Rebel in Chief: Inside the Bold and Controversial Presidency of George W. Bush (Three Rivers Press, paperback).
• Matthew Continetti, The K Street Gang: The Rise and Fall of the Republican Machine (Doubleday).
• SV Dale, Jeb! America's Next Bush (2007-02, Penguin).
• John Danforth, Faith and Politics: How the "Moral Values" Debate Divides America and How to Move Forward Together (Penguin).
• John Dean, Conservatives Without Conscience (Penguin).
• Tom DeLay, No Retreat, No Surrender: One American's Fight (Penguin).
• Jim Geraghty, Voting to Kill: How 9/11 Launched the Era of Republican Leadership (Touchstone, paperback). This at least revels in the right's pathology.
• Ed Gillespie, Winning Right: Campaign Politics and Conservative Policies (Simon & Schuster).
• Newt Gingrich, Winning the Future: A 21st Century Contract With America (Regnery, paperback).
• Victor Gold, Invasion of the Party Snatchers (Sourcebooks).
• Wynton C Hall, The Right Words: Great Republican Speeches That Shaped History (2007-02, John Wiley).
• Hugh Hewitt, A Mormon in the White House? Ten Things Every Conservative Should Know About Mitt Romney (Regnery).
• David Horowitz, The Shadow Party: How Hillary Clinton, George Soros, and the Sixties Left Took Over the Democratic Party (Thomas Nelson).
• Mike Huckabee, From Hope to Higher Ground: 12 STOPs to Restoring America's Greatness (2007-01, Center Street).
• Gregg Jackson, Conservative Comebacks to Liberal Lies: Issue by Issue Responses to the Most Common Claims of the Left From A to Z (Jaj). Thumbed through this in the bookstore, stopping at Israel, where the responses were utterly fact-free.
• David Kuo, Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction (Free Press).
• David Limbaugh, Bankrupt: The Intellectual and Moral Bankruptcy of Today's Democratic Party (Regnery).
• Frank Luntz, Words That Work: It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear (Hyperion). Legendary GOP wordsmith, which may make this into something of a primary source.
• Kevin McCullough, Musclehead Revolution: Overturning Liberalism With Commonsense Thinking (Harvest House, paperback).
• Bill O'Reilly, Culture Warrior (Random House).
• Bill Sammon, Strategery ().
• Mark W. Smith, Disrobed: The New Battle Plan to Break the Left's Stranglehold on the Courts (Crown).
• Andrew Sullivan, The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get It Back (Harper Collins).
• Michael D Tanner, Leviathan on the Right: How the Rise of Big Government Conservatism Threatens Our Freedom and Our Future (2007-03, Cato Institute).

No Interest: Miscellaneous Leftism

These are books written from various leftist perspectives that may or may not be valid but don't strike me as especially useful or interesting. They're down here to help thin out the low-level recommended lists, where most of them started out. Also included are a few books on such well-worn subjects as Iraq war propaganda.

• Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, Behind the War on Terror: Western Secret Strategy and the Struggle for Iraq (2003-10, New Society, paperback).
• Sharon Beder, Suiting Themselves: How Corporations Drive the Global Agenda (Earthscan/James & James).
• Susan Buck-Morss, Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left (Verso, paperback).
• Kenneth J Campbell, A Tale of Two Quagmires: Iraq, Vietnam, and the Hard Lessons of War (2007-02, Paradigm, paperback).
• Walter A Davis, Death's Dream Kingdom: The American Psyche Since 9-11 (Pluto Press, paperback).
• Stephen Duncombe, Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy (2007-01, New Press).
• Thom Hartmann, Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class and What We Can Do About It (). Described as a "radio host," which makes me suspicious. I did find an earlier book -- The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight: The Fate of the World and What We Can Do Before It's Too Late -- intriguing enough to pick up, but haven't gotten to it.
• Linda McQuaig, It's the Crude, Dude: Greed, Gasoline, and the American Way (Thomas Dunne).
• Greg Palast, Armed Madhouse: Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf? China Floats, Bush Sinks, the Scheme to Steal '06, No Child's Left Behind, and Other Dispatches From the Front Lines of the Class War (Penguin).

No Interest: Wrong-Headed

These are books singled out for their wrong-headedness.

• Fouad Ajami, The Foreigner's Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq (Free Press).
• Bruce Bawer, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West From Within (Doubleday).
• Peter Beinhart, The Good Fight: Why Liberals -- and Only Liberals -- Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again (Harper Collins).
• Tony Blankley, The West's Last Chance: Will We Win the Clash of Civilizations (Regnery).
• Patrick J. Buchanan, State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America (St. Martin's).
• Zev Chafets, A Match Made in Heaven: American Jews, Christian Zionists, and One Man's Exploration of the Weird and Wonderful Judeo-Evangelical Alliance (2007-01, Harper Collins): Enough fish out of water here this might actually be interesting, but the phenomenon is revolting, and celebrating it perverse.
• Alan Dershowitz, The Case for Peace: How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Can Be Resolved (2006-08, John Wiley, paperback).
• Dinesh D'Souza, The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11 (Doubleday).
• Steven Emerson, Jihad Incorporated: A Guide to Militant Islam in the US (Prometheus).
• Michael D Evans, Showdown With Nuclear Iran: Radical Islam's Messianic Mission to Destroy Israel and Cripple the United States (Nelson Current).
• Noah Feldman, What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation Building (Princeton University Press, paperback).
• Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (Penguin).
• Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
• Francis Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy (2007-03, Yale University Press, paperback).
• John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (Penguin, paperback).
• Peter W Galbraith, The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End (Simon & Schuster). He can be an astute observer, but his intimate involvement with the Kurds poisoned his perspective and contributed to the problems.
• Bill Gertz, Enemies: How America's Foes Steal Our Vital Secrets -- And How We Let it Happen (Crown). Previous books: Breakdown; The China Threat; Betrayal; Treachery: How America's Friends and Foes Are Secretly Arming Our Enemies.
• Dore Gold, The Fight for Jerusalem: Radical Islam's Secret Plan to Take the Ancient Holy Land (2007-01, Regnery).
• Mary Habeck, Knowing the Enemy: Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror (2006-01, Yale University Press; 2007-03, paperback).
• David Horowitz, Indoctrination U: The Left's War Against Academic Freedom (Encounter Books).
• Fred Charles Ikle, Annihilation From Within: The Ultimate Threat to Nations (2006-10, Columbia University Press).
• Alireza Jafarzadeh, The Iran Threat: President Ahmadinejad and the Coming Nuclear Crisis (2007-01, Palgrave Macmillan): Scott Ritter identifies Jafarzadeh as front man for Israeli intelligence leaks.
• Robert Kagan, Dangerous Nation: America's Place in the World From Its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (Knopf).
• Robert D. Kaplan, Imperial Grunts: On the Ground With the American Military, From Mongolia to the Philippines to Iraq (Random House): I've read everything else by him, and regard him as a useful reporter-historian and a dangerous ideologue. I gather he's gone off the deep end this time. Thought I'd wait until the paperback came out, which happened recently. Still waiting.
• Efraim Karsh, Islamic Imperialism: A History (Yale University Press).
• Sean Kay, Global Security in the Twenty-First Century: The Quest for Power and the Search for Peace (2006-03, Rowman & Littlefield).
• Matthew Levitt, Hamas: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad (2006-05, Yale University Press).
• Michelle Malkin, In Defense of Internment: The Case for 'Racial Profiling' in World War II and the War on Terror (Regnery).
• Michael Mandelbaum, The Case for Goliath: How America Acts as the World's Government in the Twenty-First Century (2007-01, Perseus, paperback).
• Peter Navarro, The Coming China Wars: Where They Will Be Fought and How They Can Be Won (Pearson Education).
• Ralph Peters, New Glory: Expanding America's Global Supremecy (Sentinel). Also wrote Never Quit the Fight (Stackpole).
• Melanie Phillips, Londonistan (Encounter Books).
• Stephen Schwartz, Is It Good for the Jews?: The Crisis of America's Israel Lobby (2006-09, Doubleday): Argues Israeli lobby should dump Democrats and join neocon Republicans.
• Larry Schweikart, America's Victories: Why the U.S. Wins Wars and Will Win the War on Terror (Penguin).
• Rupert Smith, The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World (Alfred A. Knopf).
• Robert Spencer, The Truth About Muhammad: The Founder of the World's Most Intolerant Religion (Regnery).
• Mark Steyn, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It (Regnery).
• Kenneth R. Timmerman, Countdown to Crisis: The Coming Nuclear Showdown With Iran ().

No Interest: The Rest

Useless books (most likely) that don't fit cleanly into any of the other no interest categories.

• Herman Badillo, One Nation, One Standard: An Ex-Liberal on How Hispanics Can Succeed Just Like Other Immigrant Groups (Penguin).
• Mark Bowden, Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America's War With Militant Islam (Grove/Atlantic). As opposed to Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, and for that matter Iran in 1953, where the Islamists were doing our bidding.
• Arthur C. Brooks, Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism (Perseus). Argues that conservatives are more compassionate because they give more to charity.
• Richard C Bush/Michael O'Hanlon, A War Like No Other: The Truth About China's Challenge to America (2007-03, John Wiley).
• Anderson Cooper, Dispatches From the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival (Harper Collins).
• James S Corum, Fighting the War on Terror: A Counterinsurgency Strategy (2007-02, MBI).
• Robert Dallek, Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power (Harper Collins).
• David Dunbar, ed., Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can't Stand Up to the Facts (Hearst Books, paperback).
• Ron Fournier, Douglas B. Sosnik, Matthew J. Dodd, Applebee's America: How Successful Political, Business and Religious Leaders Connect With the New American Community (Simon & Schuster). A portrait of America obtained by interviewing patrons at Applebee's restaurants, written by Clinton and Bush hacks, endorsed by Hillary and McCain. I'm kind of fond of the riblets, myself, but they didn't interview me.
• Stefan Halper, The Silence of the Rational Center: Why American Foreign Policy Is Failing (2007-02, Perseus).
• Lawrence E Joseph, Apocalypse 2012: A Scientific Investigation Into Civilization's End (2007-01, Broadway Books).
• James Kynge, China Shakes the World: A Titan's Breakneck Rise and Troubled Future and the Challenge for America (Houghton Mifflin).
• Dick Martin, Rebuilding Brand America: What We Must Do to Restore Our Reputation and Safeguard the Future of American Business Abroad (2007-01, AMACOM).
• Bill McKibben, Hope, Human and Wild: True Stories of Living Lightly on the Earth (2007-01, Milkwood, paperback).
• Andrea Mitchell, Talking Back . . . to Presidents, Dictators, and Assorted Scoundrels (2006-12, Penguin, paperback). Too bad Sleeping With the Devil has already been used.
• Eugene R Sheppard, Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile: The Making of a Political Philosopher (2006-12, Brandeis University Press).
• Juan Williams, Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America -- and What We Can Do About It (Crown).

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Hard Truths

I marked a couple of quotes in the April 26, 2007 issue of The New York Review of Books. The first two come from Amos Elon's review of Sari Nusseibeh's memoir, Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life. The first is on the first Intifada, from 1986-93, which Nusseibeh played a prominent role in coordinating:

When it first broke out, he was as stunned by it as everybody else. Indirectly, it was his brainchild. Before December 1988, seven hundred soldiers sufficed to keep order in the occupied territories. After the outbreak of the first intifada, eight thousand troops were unable to pacify Gaza alone. [ . . . ] Draconian measures were taken to suppress the uprising. Mayors were dismissed, arrested, and dumped over the Lebanese and Jordanian borders. Houses were demolished; entire areas were confiscated or redefined as military zones. The uprising spread to every Palestinian university. New military orders granted the army near-absolute power over faculty appointments, student admissions, and curriculums. At Birzeit, professors were asked to sign loyalty oaths. They refused, and the army closed the university indefinitely. It would be reopened only after more than four years had passed. Nusseibeh continued to give his [philosophy] courses at his father's office.

The Israelis were not prepared to defeat a dedicated campaign of civil disobedience whose violence consisted only of throwing stones. Their punitive measures stimulated more opposition. Incredible as it may seem today,t he Israelis hoped that Islamic militancy could be used to fight Palestinian nationalism and gave a helping hand to Hamas, at that time mainly a social welfare organization.

The Israelis arrested Nusseibeh, and tried to plea bargain him into exile. When he refused they dropped the charges rather than risk a public trial. The Israelis always denied that the Palestinians offered a partner for peace, which is one reason they didn't want to draw attention to Nusseibeh.

The second quote concerns Arafat and the Palestinian Authority the Israelis put in place to end the Intifada:

[Nusseibeh] offers a rare insider's view of the disorder, incompetence, mismanagement, and widespread corruption in the Palestinian government Arafat formed in 1994. The new Palestinian ministers and other highly placed Palestinians had arrived from exile in Tunis unprepared for their tasks. Some were aging revolutionaries in elegant Armani suits. They hadn't been to the West Bank since 1948 and did not understand the problems and needs of its people. Nor did they bother to learn. They were dazzled, Nusseibeh writes, by the trappings of power, the state visits, the new flow of uncontrolled international development funds, their luxury cars, the adulation of West Bank Palestinians. They had no inclination to study reports or to listen to the local people who worked for them. Some were thoroughly corrupt. A few were simply "malevolent thugs." They acted as if they were demigods to the people under them, but ran to Arafat for permission to hire a secretary.

Some -- former members of the security services among them -- rushed to make deals with shady Israeli businessmen in order to enrich themselves quickly with monopolies on gas, food supplies, and other vital commodities. Only after dire warnings from the World Bank did Arafat agree to appoint a commission of inquiry into such corruption. Nusseibeh was one of its members. The commission submitted a devastating three-hundred-page report. More than 40 percent of the Palestinian Authority's budget was said to be squandered through corruption and mismanagement. Arafat read the report but did nothing about it. "Why, we asked, had he not put an end to it?" Nobody was demoted or brought to trial. The chieftains continued their plunder.

Arafat's legacy of corruption is linked in the minds of many Palestinians with his failure to deliver anything out of the Oslo accords -- the combination has much to do with the recent electoral success of Hamas. It's tempting to argue that Israel anticipated and planned on Arafat's failure. Most likely they weren't that clever, but there were plenty of Israelis who wanted Arafat to fail and who contributed at every opportunity.

The second set of quotes comes from William Dalrymple's review of two books on the British empire in India: Nicholas B. Dirks, The Scandal of Empire: Indian and the Creation of Imperial Britain, and David Gilmour, The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj. The first quote reminds us how easy it is to think of Bush's Iraq war as just another stab at old-fashioned imperialism:

As anyone who has ever studied the story of the rise of the British in India will know well, there is nothing new about the neocons. The cynical old game of regime change -- of installing puppet regimes propped up by the West for its own political and economic ends -- is one that the British had perfected by the late eighteenth century. Sometimes the similarities are almost uncanny. By the end of the 1790s, the hard-liners who were calling for regime change found that they now had a president who was not prepared to wait to be attacked: he was a new sort of conservative, aggressive in foreign policy, bitterly anti-French, and intent on turning his country into the unrivaled global power. It was best, he believed, preemptively to remove hostile Muslim regime that presumed to resist the West.

The first to be targeted was a Muslim dictator who had usurped power in a military coup. According to misleading British sources, this focus on anti-Western opposition was a "furious fanatic," who had "perpetually on his tongue the projects of Jihad." He was also deemed to be "oppressive and unjust, [and a] perfidious negociator." Yet in this case, the dictator was not Saddam but Tipu, sultan of Mysore, and the president, Henry Dundas, the president of Parliament's Board of Control. In 1798 Dundas sent Richard Wellesley to India with instructions to replace Tipu with a Western-backed puppet prince. Mysore was duly invaded and Tipu was killed in the lucrative war of 1799.

Dirks paints a nasty picture of the British in India. Gilmour pushes the usual pro-British line, which remains suspect:

But amid all the tales of hard work and evenhanded justice, you never get any impression of the many clearly negative effects that British rule had on India. For all the irrigation projects, new railways and imperviousness to bribes, the Raj presided over the destruction of Indian political institutions and cultural and artistic self-confidence, while the economic figures speak for themselves. In 1600, when the East India Company was founded, Britain was generating 1.8 percent of the world's GDP while India was producign 22.5 percent. By 1870, at the peak of the Raj, Britain was generating 9.1 percent, while India had been reduced a poor third-world nation, a symbol across the globe of famine and deprivation.

One of the arguments that the US and UK should hasten a clean exit from Iraq is that they uncritically inherit this long history of damaging third world countries, whether in the name of empire or other supposedly noble intents. Given such a past, a little isolationism would be a step in the right direction.

Monday, April 23, 2007

I've been collecting each week's music notes under Sunday dates for several years now, so that's where I've always put the Jazz Prospecting notes. But Jazz Prospecting isn't posted until Monday, and effectively that's when the weekly roundup closes. So starting today I'm filing it all under Monday dates.

Music: Current count 13079 [13059] rated (+20), 855 [853] unrated (+2). Just working on the usual household projects, trying to keep from getting buried too deep. Should spend next week on Recycled Goods, then shift back to Jazz Consumer Guide the following week, this time to try to close it out rather quickly -- meaning 2-3 weeks.

• Christina Aguilera: Back to Basics (2006, RCA, 2CD): Gee, two discs, 22 songs plus a "bonus video" -- this must be her Blonde on Blonde, Exile on Main Street, London Calling, Sign O' the Times. That boggles the mind. But then I haven't heard her previous albums -- whatever she has to line up against Highway 61 Revisited, Let It Bleed, The Clash, Dirty Mind. C+
• Rashied Ali/Leroy Jenkins Duo: Swift Are the Winds of Life (1973, Survival): Old LP. This has been reissued on CD by Knitting Factory's archival series, although that too may be out of print. Exactly what it sounds like: the founder of all avant-jazz violin and Coltrane's great free jazz drummer. A-
• The Next Voice You Hear: The Best of Jackson Browne (1972-96 [1997], Elektra): Southern California singer-songwriter, literally the missing link betwen the Eagles and Warren Zevon, but less interesting than either, not least because he's far less offensive. Had a substantial critical following up through 1977's Running on Empty, the title of which prefigured the rest of his career. The only thing I'm struck by here is how much the early songs remind me of the Eagles. I never knew the later ones, and they don't remind me of much of anything, although one of two new songs is pretty listenable. B-
• Best of Chris Isaak (1985-2006 [2006], Wicked Game/Reprise): Sounded good at first, a guy who played rockabilly with a pop-modernist shine, a bit like Marshall Crenshaw but not that good; also not that smart, as evidenced by the Roy Orbison cover, and the fact that after two decades he doesn't have a song to call his own. Also disappointing that this comes with no discographical notes, as if he doesn't want a history either. B-
• Leroy Jenkins/The Jazz Composer's Orchestra: For Players Only (1975, JCOA): LP, recorded live at Wollman Auditorium, Columbia University, New York, with: Roger Blank, Joseph Bowie, Charles Brackeen, Anthony Braxton, Jerome Cooper, Bill Davis, James Emery, Romulus Franceschini, Sharon Freeman, Becky Friend, David Holland, Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre, Diedre Murray, Dewey Redman, Charles Shaw, Sirone, Leo Smith. Not as much violin as I'd like, but there's so much firepower here it would be a shame not to use it. But rather than risk cacophony, the instruments get a round robin of solo shots, always remarkable, often spectacular. A-
• Tim McGraw: Greatest Hits Vol. 2 (1994-2006 [2006], Curb): Son of baseball pitcher Tug McGraw, which probably helped with the name recognition end of the marketing. He couldn't have made it on his voice, which is passable-plus but wouldn't stand out in a crowd of dozens of less successfully marketed non-stars. Haven't heard the first volume, or any of the albums, so I'm just testing the waters here. Two collaborations indicate that he has no substance: one is with Nelly, an amusing crossover with a beat; the other is with Faith Hill, who is awful. I hear they're married, which probably explains something -- probably that sex appeal is more marketable to country fans than music. C+
• Justin Timberlake: Futuresex/Lovesounds (2006, Jive/Zomba): Didn't spend enough time with Justified to fall for it as so many other did. Check this out from the library and didn't spend enough time with this either, although it's not inconceivable that I'm underrating it. But since everyone thinks it's (perhaps only slightly) inferior, for now I'll grade them the same, and hope I get back to them in the future. Good soul singer -- "blue-eyed" would be spurious to add at this point, since I doubt that it makes any difference. Some possible hits. B+

Jazz Prospecting (CG #13, Part 6)

Another week. No snow, unlike the previous two. Some of the trees are bouncing back, but some still look disgusted. First baby ducks on the river. Guess it's spring. This last week has been something of a daze, as I've been trying to juggle too many projects, and taking frequent breaks to chill out. Keep playing stuff, but haven't been able to concentrate all that much. I think I played the Ralph Alessi record five times before making up my mind: the clincher was when I went back and only played the cuts with Ravi Coltrane -- I had been wondering what he contributed, and the answer's not much. But I still didn't get the little HM squib written. I figure the home projects will keep me distracted for a couple more weeks. Second computer is assembled but hasn't been smoke tested yet, let alone loaded and configured and all that. Looks good, but will take some time to get it all sorted out.

Schedule looks like this: I need to focus on Recycled Goods this week. I'm actually far enough ahead there I could coast this month (58 records done, 10 in top section), but I need to keep moving on it or I'll get trapped later. Following week I want to start closing out Jazz Consumer Guide. It looks to me like I have more than enough records for a column, without even dipping far into the 162 -- count 'em -- in the pending file. Also need to get back to working on the Robert Christgau website, which has remained unchanged for a couple of months now. And then there's my other writing interests. Maybe I'll start feeling better about music if I make some progress elsewhere.

Minor bookkeeping note: starting this week I'm filing my weekly reports in the notebook under Monday's date instead of Sunday. That way the blog and notebook line up better. For those who don't know, the notebook is sort of a superset of the blog -- i.e., drafts of stuff that appears in the blog plus other things that don't, mostly because there's little reason for anyone else to care about them. But some people did read it in pre-blog days. Don't know about now. One little thing I've added to the weekly reports is an "unpacking" list of records received. I don't at present see any need to put that up here.

Graham Collier's Hoarded Dreams (1983 [2007], Cuneiform): A bassist and well-regarded composer who started out in the late '60s, a protean period when Britain's modern jazz musicians could still span avant-garde and fusion, where there was little distance between music abstractly composed and explosively improvised. This particular piece was commissioned by the Arts Council of Great Britain for performance at the Bracknell Jazz Festival. Collier conducts a large group: 5 reeds, 5 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, 2 guitars, piano, bass, drums, including many recognizable names, both local (John Surman, Kenny Wheeler) and from far afield (Ted Curson, Tomasz Stanko, Juhanni Aaltonen). Framed for solos, some quite rivetting, but mostly loud and a bit ugly for my taste. B+(*)

Hugh Hopper: Hopper Tunity Box (1976 [2007], Cuneiform): Long before I had any particular interest, much less expertise, in jazz, I developed a peculiar fondness for Anglo prog-rock -- the sort of thing British art school grads did, as opposed to the much more common dropouts. At one point I had all seven Soft Machine albums, enjoying the first two for Kevin Ayers' loopy songs, and Third for Robert Wyatt's loopier "Moon in June," but not getting much out of the later work. But the recently released live album Grides makes a pretty good case for them as a jazz group, as does Elton Dean's subsequent career. Hugh Hopper was the bassist. This was his first solo after the group folded, using several shuffles of musicians. Mostly soft-edged fusion things, although the two saxophonists have some edge when they get the chance: Elton Dean on 3 cuts, and especially Gary Windo on 4. B+(*)

KCP 5: Many Ways (2005 [2007], Challenge): KCP stands for Karnataka College of Percussion. Based in Bangalore, they are a trio: two percussionists on mridangam, kanjira, morsing, ghatam, udu; and vocalist R.A. Ramamani. The latter is the dominant presence, her voice stretching and swaying in the classical Indian manner, but more often than not hurried along by the rhythm. 5 stands for two western musicians: pianist Mike Herting, who comps with or without the rhythm, and 82-year-old Charlie Mariano, whose unmistakable alto sax is positively angelic. B+(**)

The Leaders: Spirits Alike (2006 [2007], Challenge): The group name appeared on four albums from 1986-89, counting one as The Leaders Trio. The latter was just the rhythm section: pianist Kirk Lightsey, bassist Cecil McBee, and drummer Don Moye. The whole group added Lester Bowie on trumpet, Arthur Blythe on alto sax, and Chico Freeman on tenor or soprano or clarinet or flute, whatever. Bowie and Moye came out of the Art Ensemble of Chicago; Freeman and Blythe were building up substantial catalogues, including a few records together; Lightsey and McBee were guys you'd recognize if you ever read album credits. So they were a credible group, and Mudfoot (1986, Blackhawk) was a fine album, with a particularly delightful spin on Sam Cooke's "Cupid." Twenty years later, only two Leaders remain -- McBee and Freeman -- and the Replacements are more firmly perched in the mainstream: Bobby Watson (for Blythe), Eddie Henderson (for Bowie), Billy Hart (for Moye), and Fred Harris (for Lightsey). Harris lacks credentials as a leader, but acquits himself well enough. But that's about all anyone does here. Sure, this is elegant, intricate postbop, crafted by genuine talents. I suppose if I hadn't expected more I'd be less disappointed. B

Bob French: Marsalis Music Honors Bob French (2006 [2007], Marsalis Music/Rounder): Veteran New Orleans drummer, in 1977 took over his father's group, the Original Tuxedo Jazz Band, which in turn dates back to Oscar "Papa" Celestin in 1910. AMG lists only this album under French's name plus a dozen-plus sideman credits, starting with a Snooks Eaglin date in 1977 -- the latter underreported, no doubt. Musicians here include Branford Marsalis and Harry Connick Jr., who hog "Take a Closer Walk With Thee." Everything else is trad New Orleans if not necessarily trad jazz. French sings "Bourbon Street Parade," "You Are My Sunshine," and "Do You Know What It Means (to Miss New Orleans)" -- the latter joined by Ellen Smith, who also sings "Basin Street Blues." Seems like standard fare, but this is as much fun as any New Orleans tribute in the post-Katrina era. [B+(***)]

Alvin Batiste: Marsalis Music Honors Alvin Batiste (2006 [2007], Marsalis Music/Rounder): First non-drummer in the series; second New Orleans denizen. I never doubted the good intentions behind this series, but it seemed to me that the first batch (Michael Carvin, Jimmy Cobb) steered them too far into the mainstream to be of much interest. But that doesn't matter with the second batch: the party in New Orleans is meant to be accessible, and Branford Marsalis just works to heat it up even more. Batiste is a clarinetist, born 1937, with just a handful of albums, including one on India Navigation I heard and didn't think much of. This one takes a while to engage, but it seems like each of Edward Perkins' four vocals kicks in a higher gear, so by the end Batiste is soaring. An honor indeed. B+(**)

Matt Lavelle Trio: Spiritual Power (2006 [2007], Silkheart): Plays trumpet, flugelhorn, bass clarinet -- 1, 3, and 3 cuts respectively here. Born 1970, turned on by Louis Armstrong, studied with a Sir Hildred Humphries, who had direct links to Roy Eldridge, Billie Holiday, and Count Basie. Evolved through what he calls "the 'Smalls' thing" before joining William Parker's Little Huey Orchestra. Has a previous album on CIMP and a group called Eye Contact with one record. This one's a trio with bassist Hilliard Greene and drummer Michael T.A. Thompson, both contributing big time. Avant like it's meant to be: sharp, shocking, bursting with creative ideas. The liner notes cite Roy Campbell as a model, but Lavelle adds a level of difficulty and sonic surprise with his emphasis on flugelhorn and bass clarinet. Took me a while to even recognize the latter. A-

David S. Ware Quartet: Renunciation (2006 [2007], AUM Fidelity): Allegedly "the last ever U.S. performance by David S. Ware's revered Quartet" -- not sure whether that's a statement about Ware, Matthew Shipp, William Parker, and the drummer du jour (in this case Guillermo E. Brown) or about the U.S. The Quartet goes back to 1990, when Parker was established as Cecil Taylor's bassist and the others were practically unknown. For a while it was tempting to compare them to the Coltrane Quartet, but by now they've lasted three times as long. Recorded live, this adds one more slice to Live in the World, its immediate spontaneity compensating for the fact that they break no major ground. Ware is mesmerizing, Parker magnificent, and Shipp one of the few pianists who can hold his own in this company. A-

William Parker & Hamid Drake: First Communion + Piercing the Veil (2000 [2007], AUM Fidelity, 2CD): Not missing a marketing angle, this is subtitled "Volume 1 Complete," with a new Parker-Drake duo album, Summer Snow, sporting a "Volume 2" note. Volume 1 is what Universal would call a Deluxe Edition or Sony/BMG a Legacy Edition, where the 2001 release of Percing the Veil is now padded out to fill two discs. The padding in this case is a live tape from two days before the studio date. It is the sort of broader context that adds depth to a classic album even when the filler isn't on the same level -- rarely in this case. It pays to focus on Drake here. Parker spend a fair amount of time off-bass -- especially in the studio sessions, where he indulges in exotic wind instruments (bombarde, shakuhachi) and percussion -- but that just gives Drake more variations to respond to. But he's so attentive that he provides a prism for interpreting Parker. And he shows you his whole range, including tabla and frame drum. A-

William Parker & Hamid Drake: Summer Snow (2005 [2007], AUM Fidelity): A "volume 2" five years after their previous duo, Piercing the Veil. The bass and drums sets are much the same, with Parker perhaps a bit more grooveful, but the exotica is harder to follow, perhaps because their growing expertise is making it more exotic. It's also making it subtler, quieter, and harder to follow. Also possible that the drummer who had so much to prove first time has grown comfortable with his laurels, or is merely letting Parker set the pace instead of meeting him more than half way. B+(**)

Rob Brown Trio: Sounds (2006 [2007], Clean Feed): Actually, not sure of the date: notes say it was recorded on November 23, but don't bother with the year. The title piece debuted at the 2005 Vision Festival, so 2005 is also possible. Brown's an alto saxophonist I've mostly encountered on William Parker albums. He has everything you'd want in that role, but has had trouble establishing himself on his own. It's hard to find fault with this: he breaks the usual sax-bass-drums trio format with Daniel Levin's cello and Satoshi Takeishi's taiko drums and percussion; he varies the free jazz mix with a ballad and a Tibetan folk song. It's almost a tour de force, but not quite, lacking something you can't prescribe until it hits you. B+(**)

Henri Salvador: Révérence (2007, Circular Moves): Born 1917 in French Guiana, still alive and active, no recording dates, but presumably this is recent: French chanson so natural, so lithe, so effortlessly swinging you have to wonder what's up. For one thing Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil make appearances, and there are jazz cats mixed in with the frogs. Salvador's discography goes back at least to the '40s. I've never heard him before, so have no idea where this stands in his oeuvre. A-

Juliette Greco: Le Temps D'Une Chanson (2006 [2007], Sunnyside): French actress, doesn't sing so much as talk her way through songs with genuine dramatic flair. Born 1927, associated with Jean-Paul Sartre, Boris Vian, Miles Davis. Backed here by orchestra and guests -- Michael Brecker and Joe Lovano the best known, accordionist Gil Goldstein the most effective. Non-French songs I know, like "Volare," seem hokey, but fare like "Les mains d'or" make an impression. Like Salvador, a legend first heard at the tail end of a long career, so hard to judge. B

Enrico Pieranunzi/Marc Johnson/Joey Baron: Live in Japan (2004 [2007], CAM Jazz, 2CD): Just simply a real good piano trio. I'm not sure what makes this work so well, what to say about them, why it works, or why it even matters. Will hold this back until I get some answers. [B+(***)] [May 22]

Joel Frahm: We Used to Dance (2006 [2007], Anzic): Mainstream saxophonist, plays both alto and tenor, but not specified which here -- pictures show tenor. Born 1969 in Wisconsin, studied at Manhattan School of Music. Three previous albums on Palmetto, 4-8 sideman credits per year since 1997, many with singers -- he's exceptionally skillful in that role. He's playing with a group here previously associated with Stan Getz: pianist Kenny Barron, bassist Rufus Reid, drummer Victor Lewis. Doesn't sound like this has much to do with Getz, but it's a good group for Frahm, and he plays a strong game. [B+(**)] [May 1]

And these are final grades/notes on records I put back for further listening the first time around.

Wynton Marsalis: From the Plantation to the Penitentiary (2006 [2007], Blue Note): My wife expressed interest in this album, telling me that she had read a rave review in Counterpunch. I chased down Ron Jacobs' review anyway, but couldn't get past the third line: "It's just enough bop and bebop so it doesn't put one to sleep like a Kenny G solo, but it's not a Coltrane avalanche of sound like those from Coltrane's thundering Ascension, either." Now, there's no information there: Marsalis has recorded 40-50 albums since 1981, and he has never once risked comparison to Kenny G or Ascension. He started off reminding Art Blakey what narrowly construed hard bop sounds like. If he's picked up any tricks since then, they've been old ones, like extending his trumpet mastery from Woody Shaw back to Freddie Keppard, and fumbling to imitate composers like Ellington. I had figured this album for his move into Mingus agitprop, but that doesn't pan out on several levels. He's more song-oriented, but has less in the way of message, and his hired singer handles his hokey lines with cool detachment. On the other hand, the music shows he's working in soundtrack mode: each piece is accompanied by a formal description -- modern habanera; alternating 2-beat country groove, soca, cumbia, swing; walking ballad; etc. -- and he's more inspired as a musicologist than as a polemicist. Indeed, if you could skip past the words this might be one of his more enjoyable albums. But if he meant for you to just enjoy the music, he would have left the words out, right? For one, I find the plantation-to-penitentiary arc narrow, condescending, and disturbing. It's not that there's no truth to it, but it's such a cliché I don't see what you can do with it. I suppose his use of stereotypes is meant to convey some irony, but in an album that's more scold than rant it's hard to be sure. "I ain't your bitch and I ain't your ho" comes off as awkward from him as if Don Imus said it. And speaking of awkward, the closing rap makes Buckshot Lefonque sound real. (But I doubt that when he goes to dis "Camus readers" he's really thinking of George W.) I thought about pitching this for a standalone piece in the Voice, but Francis Davis beat me to it. I don't feel mean enough to single this out as a dud. If he had a smarter, hipper lyricist able to work on a human rather than mythic scale, he might be onto something. But he persists in surrounding himself with ideological flatterers like Stanley Crouch, so this is what he gets. B

Ralph Alessi & This Against That: Look (2005 [2007], Between the Lines): One of those group names that comes from the previous album title, although the only musician both times, aside from the leader, is bassist Drew Gress. The quartet this time is filled out with Andy Milne on piano and Mark Ferber on drums, plus Ravi Coltrane appears on four cuts. Coltrane isn't much help -- he provides shadings on slow pieces that at best are atmospheric, but are filler compared to the fast ones. Let loose, the rhythm section is terrific, and setting Alessi's tart trumpet free. B+(***)

Unpacking:

• Alan Bergman: Lyrically, Alan Bergman (Verve): May 8
• Marc Broussard: S.O.S.: Save Our Soul (Vanguard): advance, June 26
• Ron Carter: Dear Miles, (Blue Note): advance, June 19
• Darby Dizard: Down for You (One Soul)
• Paquito D'Rivera Quintet: Funk Tango (Sunnyside)
• Elin: Lazy Afternoon (Blue Toucan)
• The Essential Maynard Ferguson (1954-96, Columbia/Legacy, 2CD): advance, May 22
• The Essential Benny Goodman (1934-52, Columbia/Bluebird/Legacy, 2CD): advance, May 22
• Holly Hofmann/Mike Wofford: Live at Athenaeum Jazz, Voume 2 (Capri)
• Niño Josele: Paz (Calle 54)
• Abbey Lincoln: Abbey Sings Abbey (Verve): advance, May 22
• Martirio: Primavera en Nueva York (Calle 54)
• Charlie Mingus: Tijuana Moods (1957, RCA Victor/Legacy): advance, May 22
• Térez Montcalm: Voodoo (Marquis)
• Mark Murphy: Love Is What Stays (Verve)
• Joshua Redman: Back East (Nonesuch)
• James Blood Ulmer: Bad Blood in the City: The Piety Street Sessions (Hyena)

Saturday, April 21, 2007

Jimmy Carter: Palestine Peace Not Apartheid

Note: The Books section is currently in partial disarray as I'm in the middle of breaking up the hardwired index page and replacing it with a bunch of subject headings driven off a rather hacked approximation of a database. But I've rushed ahead to update the website because the Carter book page also collects a couple of earlier posts relating to the book. The following post is just the new section. Another option would be to just post a link here. I don't have a compelling reason one way or another, but I'm inclined to keep dumping my book reports out initially in the blog, even when they are backed up elsewhere. I expect that there will be quite a few of these in the following weeks as I try to file big piles of recently read books.

I doubt that there is anything more terrifying about the power of the right-wing media in America than the extent to which Jimmy Carter has been and continues to be villified in public. One obvious, even if petty, example is Bernard Goldberg's ranking Carter high on his list of "101 People Who Are Screwing Up America." It's easy enough to see why Carter was voted out of office in 1980, although even there a sober assessment of history shows that he made some hard, unpopular calls that have largely been vindicated. He managed to break the spiral of inflation even though the short term economic cost was extreme. He recognized the long-term threat of rising oil costs even though he was unable to do much about it. And he made virtually the only significant contribution to peace in the Middle East by any American in the last fifty years. He staked a strong claim to always telling the truth, in contrast to his predecessor Nixon and, for that matter, every President who followed him.

But even if it is debatable how good, or great, a President he was, his service as an ex-President is impossible to fault, unless you have a particularly bloody political axe to grind. Yet this short, simple, logical, humane solution to a grave problem that has been rendered intractable by sheer demagoguery has elicited an almost unprecedented torrent of character assassination from Israel's apologists and propagandists. Brings to mind the saying, methinks they doth protest too much. After all, there is no sound basis for arguing with the solution: it's been laid out again and again, in the series of UN resolutions, in the Camp David accords between Egypt and Israel which Carter himself negotiated, and in many other forms. What's strange is the contortions so many go through to deny the obvious. What's bizarre is that there's been no solution. Carter's too kind to explain why that is; he simply wants to put us back on the right path. It is in fact the path he's always been on -- a point he makes by sketching out his own personal experience with Israel.

Carter talking about his first visit to Israel in 1973, when he was governor of Georgia, contemplating his run for president (p. 30):

At that time, Foreign Minister Abba Eban was the best-known Israeli, famous for the eloquence of his speeches in the United Nations, and I was excited when he invited us to meet with him. Not surprisingly, he was full of ideas about Israel's future, some of which proved to be remarkably prescient. He said that the occupied territories were a burden and not an asset. Arabs and Jews were inherently incompatible and would ultimately have to be separated. The detention centers and associated punitive and repressive procedures necessary to govern hundreds of thousands of Arabs against their will would torment Israel with a kind of quasi-colonial situation that was being abolished throughout the rest of the world. When questioned, he replied without explanation that the solution to this problem was being evolved. (I knew that some Isaeli leaders were contemplating massive immigration from both Russia and the United States plus encouraging Arabs to emigrate to other nations.) Eban explained his extraordinary role in the United Nations by saying, "If I were foreign minister of the only Arab nation surrounded by thirty-nine hostile Jewish ones, I would turn to the U.N. for support."

Eban's great skill was his ability to play to the prejudices of West: the patronizing colonialism that once honored itself as the "white man's burden" and now establishes common ground between Israel and the West; the matter-of-fact racism of the "incompatibility" of colonizers and natives; the "repressive procedures" that necessarily follow. What the quote shows is that Israelis in high positions knew what they were getting into, even if they underestimated how many Jewish immigrés they could attract and how many Palestinians they could cajole into exile.

When Carter was president, in 1978, working toward the Camp David peace treaty between Egypt and Israel (pp. 44-45):

Unfortunately, my working relationship with Menachem Begin became even more difficult in March, when the PLO launched an attack on Israel from a base in Southern Lebanon. A sightseeing bus was seized and thirty-five Israelis were killed. I publicly condemned this outrageous act, but my sympathy was strained three days later when Israel invaded Lebanon and used American-made antipersonnel cluster bombs against Beirut and other urban centers, killing hundreds of civilians and leaving thousands homeless. I considered this major invasion to be an overreaction to the PLO attack, a serious threat to peace in the region, and perhaps part of a plan to establish a permanent Israeli presence in Southern Lebanon. Also, such use of American weapons violated a legal requirement that armaments sold by us be used only for Israeli defense against an attack.

After consulting with key supporters of Israel in the U.S. Senate, I informed Prime Minister Begin that if Israeli forces remained in Lebanon, I would have to notify Congress, as required by law, that U.S. weapons were being used illegally in Lebanon, which would automatically cut off all military aid to Israel. Also, I instructed the State Department to prepare a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israel's action. Israeli forces withdrew, and United Nations troops came in to replace them in Southern Lebanon, adequate to restrain further PLO attacks on Israeli citizens.

It's worth noting that this same pattern recurred in 1982 and in 2006, and in both of those cases US presidents (Reagan and Bush) gave Israel the green light to invade. Both invasions resulted in immense damage to Lebanon. They also turned out to be major public relations disasters for Israel and the US. Carter wasn't the first US president to reign in Israeli excess -- Eisenhower put an end to the 1956 Suez War -- but he may have been the last. Carter may have been the only US president to view peace between Israel and the Arabs as more valuable than Israel's alignment with US military interests in the region. (Curiously, the main thing the US military needed in the region to promote its presence was enemies, which Israel was uniquely able to provoke. As such, the US often wound up promoting Israeli aggression.)

Carter provides a rather oblique history of the founding of Israel (pp. 65-66):

Nationalism became a powerful force in nineteenth-century Europe, and it influenced Jews living there to create the Zionist movement. In Western Europe, the unique identity of the Jewish population was threatened by assimilation into Christian and secular society. But almost three-fourths of Jews were living in Eastern Europe, where persecution continued, and it was there that the seeds of Zionism were nourished. Although a majority of Jewish emigrants went to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, increasing demands were heard for the establishment of a Jewish state -- both to escape oppression and to fulfill an interpretation of biblical prophecies.

Although exact data are not available, it is estimated that in 1880 there were only 30,000 Jews in Palestine, scattered among 600,000 Muslim and Christian Arabs. By 1930 their numbers had grown to more than 150,000.

The Arabs in Palestine fought politically and militarily against these new settlers, but they could agree on little else and dissipated their strength and influence by contention among themselves. The British, who succeeded the Ottoman Turks after World War I as rulers of Palestine, attempted to contain the bloody disputes by restricting immigration of Jews to the Holy Land, despite desperate appeals from those who faced increasing threats and racial abuse. And then came the world's awareness of the horrors of the Holocaust, and the need to acknowledge the Zionist movement and an Israeli state.

This is a rather muddled account, hiding many significant details. The Zionist movement started in Russia in the 1880s. Palestine at that time was part of the Ottoman Empire, a conglomerate which recognized rights of many linguistic and religious groups. The Ottomans had welcomed most of the Sephardic Jews exiled from Spain during the Inquisition, but few had actually settled in Palestine. The Zionist movement was different, because it aimed specifically at Palestine with nationalist overtones and perhaps more importantly because it occurred at a time when European powers were tearing at the Empire by demanding capitulations -- grants of special rights within the Empire (e.g., France wanted to "represent" Maronite Christians in Lebanon; Russia laid similar claim to Orthodox Christians; the best Germany could argue for was the Jews). The Ottomans went back and forth on this, allowing immigration over two brief periods, which may have increased the Jewish population in Palestine from 5% to as much as 10%, but it had no real effect until the British took over. And this is where Carter loses the ball.

Great Britain, in 1917, before it had any claim or presence in Palestine, issued the Balfour Declaration, declaring their intent to turn Palestine into a "Jewish homeland." Their aim in doing so was to establish a British territory secured by Jewish colonists, who would depend on the British for protection against the locals. The Palestinians, in turn, were manipulated much as the British had been doing from Egypt to India, with favors to local elites -- such as the Husseini clan, one of whom was appointed the Mufti of Jerusalem. Like most British plans, it didn't really work out all that well. After major Zionist immigration in the 1920s, Palestinian revolts in 1929 led to restrictions, which were eased in the 1930s to allow an influx of German Jews, which in turn led to the revolt of 1937-39 and further restrictions -- needless to say, at a time when European Jews were most desperately in need of sanctuary from Nazi aggression. The British were so tone-deaf in this regard that they rounded up all the German Jews who managed to reach their shores and shipped them off to Australia and Canada to be jailed as enemy aliens. On the other hand, the Zionists lobbied against allowing Jews to emigrate anywhere but Palestine, so nobody comes off looking very good here.

Carter gives the British a relatively free ride here. The problem with that is not just that the British deserve a large share of the blame -- they did, after all, try the same partition trick in Ireland and India, with disastrous results in both cases -- but that it obscures the fundamental reason the Palestinians had