Captive: My Time as a Prisoner of the Taliban
by Jere Van Dyk

—Reviewed by Angilee Shah

Last year was a banner one for high-profile American journalists arrested abroad. Journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee in were held in North Korea for almost five months. Roxana Saberi spent just over four months in Iranian prisons. Their stories of trying to report from hostile countries were captivating and challenging. Were they courageous or reckless? Was their imprisonment a mark of aggression or the right of sovereign nations upholding their local laws? And why would a journalist take such big risks in the first place?

Jere Van Dyk’s imprisonment memoir, Captive, cuts to the core of these questions. Van Dyk was held by the Taliban in Pakistan for 45 days in 2008. He was on an ambitious mission that went awry — to become the first Western journalist in 10 years to cross the border from Afghanistan and report from the tribal areas. A contributor to CBS News and The New York Times, Van Dyk was working on a book on the Taliban. It had been six years since Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was beheaded in Karachi, and Van Dyk spent his days in a dark room wondering if he would also be killed.

This is not a memoir with easy answers about good and evil, however. It is one that complicates issues of journalistic license, one in which Van Dyk’s anxiety and ambivalence about being a prisoner of the Taliban is palpable.

The structure of the book mirrors Van Dyk’s experience. It begins with an explanation of his long history exploring Afghanistan, where he first visited in the 1970s and repeatedly returned throughout his career, even embedding himself with the mujahideen in the 1980s. He knew the customs of Pashtun society, and the fractures in the Taliban, Pashtun paramilitaries, Pakistani army and intelligence. He was ready for this ultimate task — it seems he tries to convince not just the readers, but himself of that. “This time I would be traveling with the Taliban,” he writes. “My life would be in their hands every minute, in Pakistan, where there were no American soldiers. I had to go, and I wanted to do this. I was scared.”

Van Dyk continues on to chronicle in drawn-out fashion his days of captivity. He notes the conditions, the temperature, his health and routine. He explains Pashtunwali, the code of the Pashtun people, and how his captors upheld that code while grappling with the Taliban’s version of Islam. He was their prisoner-guest, a foreigner whom they could kill at anytime but were also duty-bound to treat well and protect with their lives. They would offer him the best food they had, and go on to ask him to come up with large sums of money in exchange for his release.

What happens in the course of his captivity is interesting; what happens to Van Dyk’s mind is more interesting. Because the Taliban group that held him allowed him to write — he was their guest, after all — the text is in the moment. He is equivocal about everything from the Taliban and America, to Islam, his captors and his situation. “I was afraid,” and “I was not afraid,” alternate on the pages. Of the leader of the group that captured him, Van Dyk writes: “But part of me liked him. He was smart, quick, strong, committed, and he treated me with respect. He could order my death in a second.”

Captive is the memoir of a complicated person. Van Dyk was held not just by the Taliban, but by his own desire to get close to them. He does not come up with a judgment of his own actions or a flat condemnation of the actions of others, but he does offer insight into why some people are so drawn to dangerous storytelling. “I knew, long ago, that I would be a traveler, that I would see the world, that it would be cold and I would be lonely, but I had no choice,” he explains. “I wanted to be in the world.”

Excerpt: “I had entered another world. Twenty-five years ago, a part of me had wanted to join the mujahideen, these men who put their rifles on the ground and bowed down behind their weapons, touching their foreheads and their turbans in the dirt. How I admired the simplicity of their worship and the humility of theses very tough men before God. Now here I was. It was different now. I didn’t want to join these new holy warriors. I was doing this to survive so that they wouldn’t kill me. I had to be careful.”

Additional Reading: In Afghanistan: An American Odyssey by Jere Van Dyk, Enemy Combatant: My Imprisonment at Guantanamo, Bagram, and Kandahar by Moazzam Begg and Victoria Brittain, War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges

Angilee Shah is a freelance journalist who writes about globalization and politics. You can read more of her work at www.angileeshah.com.

*Photo courtesy Talk Radio News Service.

The Rise and Fall of Modern American Conservatism: A Short History
by David Farber

—Reviewed by Adam Fleisher

David Farber argues that modern American conservatism is a “disciplinary order generated by hostility to market restraints and fueled by religious faith, devotion to social order, and an individualized conception of political liberty.”

The movement’s high point, by Farber’s count, was the election of Ronald Reagan. And then it came crashing down, felled by a “zealous faith in the free market system” during the presidency of George W. Bush. Farber, a professor of history at Temple University, sketches the lives of six leading American conservatives to support his characterization of conservatism, but his thesis is not quite sustainable.

Farber starts with Robert Taft, who began articulating some of the tenets of contemporary conservatism in response to the New Deal. Taft did not begrudge Roosevelt’s goal of creating a better life for American workers. But he believed that the best way to do so was for individuals to make their own decisions, not for the state to attempt to impose order on the economy.  Farber argues that Taft’s sentiment is the epitome of conservatives’ “absolutist” faith in the free market.

This is where the difficulty with Rise and Fall surfaces. Farber’s characterization of conservatives as market fundamentalists is refuted by the rest of his analysis — of conservatives as adherents to traditional values, religion, and social order. Conservatives argue that a functioning society requires more than just a free market, which creates alongside wealth and opportunity a great deal of social upheaval. With this view of society has come a great debate amongst conservatives about just how much — and by whom — the market should be tempered. The distinction between conservatives and liberals isn’t simply about whether or not to discipline the market, but rather about how to achieve the discipline it needs.

As Farber in fact notes, the economic freedom espoused by William Buckley’s National Review was grounded in “deeper values and revealed truths,” in contrast to the relativism and secularism of the left. The real absolutist faith, in that instance, was the sort of liberalism that insisted freedom does not require virtue. Barry Goldwater made similar critiques in The Conscience of a Conservative, arguing that man is not just an economic animal, but a “spiritual creature with spiritual needs and spiritual desires.” Phyllis Schlafly thought women uniquely capable of bringing virtue to American society since they had not been corrupted by the self-interested pursuit of personal power and financial gain.

Moving to Reagan, Farber argues that conservatism became politically successful “by claiming moral superiority, critiquing economic egalitarianism, relishing bellicosity, and embracing cultural nationalism.” That claim, however, loses some of its explanatory power when Farber rightly discusses Bill Clinton’s sympathy to conservative ideas — an embrace that helped Clinton enjoy what now looks like the most successful presidency for conservatism other than Reagan’s. Clinton famously declared the era of big government over, and regularly said things like “family is the foundation of American life,” assimilating conservative critiques of liberalism into his own agenda. And he ran budget surpluses without economy-killing levels of taxation, not to mention signing the legislation ending welfare as we know it.

Rise and Fall’s emphasis on the conservative sympathies of Clinton sets up the argument that when George W. Bush ran for president, conservatism was king, and so Bush could run as an “avowed conservative,” in Farber’s words.  But Bush didn’t run as an avowed conservative. He ran as a “compassionate conservative” in 2000, which for the left was an oxymoron and for the right a redundancy. And in his successful reelection campaign, Bush didn’t tack right so much as run on staying the course in Iraq and in contrast to Kerry’s “flip-flopping.”

In any case, for the conservative movement, inextricably linked to the president, compassionate conservativism was certainly a political disaster. Bush may have cut taxes, but he also presided over a massive expansion of the federal government, both in terms of spending and its involvement in people’s lives. Where Reagan had once said that the most terrifying words in the English language are, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help,” Bush declared “We have a responsibility that when somebody hurts, government has got to move.”

“The Fall” part of Farber’s title hinges on conservatism being about an absolute faith in the market and Bush being an absolute conservative. Neither of these is quite right. But there is one perhaps very interesting harbinger of the future of conservatism and the Republican Party looming in Rise and Fall. In discussing Reagan’s rise to the presidency, Farber notes that Jimmy Carter had won by running as an outsider, promising to bring change to a corrupted Washington. Alas, Farber writes, with perhaps a hint of understatement, Carter “was unable to deliver on those hopes,” and the economic troubles he inherited merely worsened. By 1980, Americans were willing to listen when Reagan offered lower taxes, less regulation, and a rebuilding of military might to challenge Soviet expansionism. Farber calls these prescriptions “conservative answers to some of America’s major problems.” And that seems to be what Rise and Fall really shows: the fortunes of conservatism, like any political movement in a democratic society, depend on articulating solutions to pressing problems, and getting results.

Excerpt: “William Buckley and his merry band of conservative intellectuals despised this materialist, even Marxist, formulation in which man was reduced to economic creature and government to a necessary Big Brother tasked narrowly with expert management of the nation’s economy.  They believed in the politics of the moral crusade and religious affirmation; a virtuous citizenry should demand public policies that affirmed Americans’ core beliefs and defended against apostasy of all kinds. Goldwater, at a gut level, felt much the same and caught the National Review crowd’s attention with his blunt defense of spirituality and morality in politics.”

Further Reading: Dead Right by David Frum and Dead Right by George H. Nash

*Photo of Ronald Reagan on television, at the 1976 Republican National Convention, courtesy Dana Graves.

Hostage Nation: Colombia’s Guerrilla Army and the Failed War on Drugs
by Victoria Bruce and Karin Hayes, with Jorge Enrique Botero

—Reviewed by Angilee Shah

When three American contractors were taken hostage after their plane crashed in the jungles of Colombia in 2003, Victoria Bruce and Karin Hayes were positioned well to tell their stories. The duo had just finished a film about the kidnapped presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt. But the authors write in the prologue that there was little interest and not much of a market for a book about hostages taken by the Colombian rebel army, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC).

The proposal sat on the shelf for years, but the three hostages became an “unshakable part” of the authors’ lives, even though they’d never met. Bruce, Hayes and Colombian journalist Jorge Enrique Botero talked about them on a first-name basis, keeping up with the twists and turns of their ordeal. “What we realized as the years went by was that there was little as journalists or filmmakers that we could do. All three of us attempted to escape the emotional grip of the difficult and consuming subject by taking on new projects, far away from the jungle prison camps.”

By the fall of 2006, however, Bruce, Hayes and Botero began to see the personal dramas that had gripped them for years in a new context. They reformulated their hostage story into a bigger narrative, chronicling “the most wealthy and lethal insurgent army in the world” and the U.S. policies that played a role in creating it. Botero became a central character when he became the only journalist to interview the three American hostages, providing proof that they were still alive five months after their capture.

The authors narrate Hostage Nation from a broad, all-knowing perspective. They disappear into their retelling and shift from one point-of-view to another. They describe the contractors’ plane crash from the vantage of former FBI negotiator. They go deep into the jungle with a low-level FARC soldier who helped run the hostages from one location to the next. The story unfolds piece by piece, revealing intersecting information about drug trafficking, foreign policy, contractor culture, plane safety, the Catholic Church, hostage negotiation and Colombian history.

And they don’t leave the war on drugs out of it. “Plan Colombia,” the U.S. policy conceived during the Clinton administration, expanded in the Bush years, and recently reduced in scale by President Obama, was meant to wipe out guerrilla armies and their cross-border drug trade. It involved heavily contracting and subcontracting military operations. While the U.S. and Colombian governments have declared the policy a success, Hostage Nation says that estimations of declines in cocoa cultivation “could only be interpreted as a twisted analysis of the [U.S.] State Department’s own data.” A State Department report says that cultivation has increased since the three American hostages’ ordeal began, despite the U.S. spending $3 billion in military and nonmilitary aid.

The hostages — Thomas Howes, Keith Stansell and Marc Gonsalves—worked for California Microwave Systems, a subcontractor of Northrop Grumman, which was hired to carry out large chunks of Plan Colombia. When they were taken into the jungle, the U.S. had the benefit of being able to distance itself from private contractors and avoid negotiating, which, in those early post-9/11 years, wouldn’t have sat well with the government. A rescue attempt could have result in the hostages’ murders. When Botero got permission to interview them, the prospects for their release were grim. “As they continued past village after village, each more isolated and impoverished than the last,” the authors write, “Botero felt like a visitor to a war that interested no one.”

The American hostages and Ingrid Betancourt were rescued in 2008; the Colombian army took advantage of an intelligence breach and gave soldiers fake orders to release their high-profile captives. But there are still Colombian hostages left in the jungle and Plan Colombia has not eliminated the FARC or the drug trade. Hostage Nation thus becomes essential reading, an alternate viewpoint, as the fight against drugs is evaluated in Mexico and Afghanistan and around the world.

Further Reading: Out of Captivity: Surviving 1,967 Days in the Colombian Jungle by Marc Gonsalves, Tom Howes, Keith Stansell and Gary Brozek, Imperial Grunts: On the Ground with the American Military, from Mongolia to the Philippines to Iraq and Beyond by Robert D. Kaplan, Until Death Do Us Part: My Struggle to Reclaim Colombia by Ingrid Betancourt

Angilee Shah is a freelance journalist who writes about globalization and politics. You can read more of her work at www.angileeshah.com.

*Photo courtesy kozumel.

Peddling Peril: How the Secret Nuclear Trade Arms America’s Enemies
by David Albright

—Reviewed by Adam Fleisher

After the major powers acquired nuclear weapons in the early years of the Cold War, the expected proliferation around the world didn’t happen. One big reason is that building nuclear weapons from scratch isn’t easy. The technology is exceedingly complex, the price tag high. But the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) deserves some credit too. In formally recognizing the five nuclear states as of 1968, the treaty exacted a pledge from signatories to stop spreading nuclear technology.

And yet some 40 years later, David Albright’s Peddling Peril has a rather disconcerting story to tell. In spite of the NPT, interested states — and even groups — were able to buy facilities and components piecemeal without drawing the attention of weapons inspectors, or even the sellers of those parts.

The NPT, like so many Cold-War-era international arrangements, was concerned primarily with interactions between states. The Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan, who is the focus of Albright’s intriguing albeit wonk-ish study of the current state of proliferation, “took advantage of this loophole on an unprecedented scale,” before he was finally stopped in 2003. Albright, who runs the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington, DC-based think tank focusing on nuclear weapons proliferation, credits Khan with creating the illicit trade in nuclear weapons technology all on his own.

First, however, Khan helped Pakistan develop its nuclear capacity. In the 1970s, he was living outside Amsterdam with his Dutch wife and working for a contractor involved in building gas centrifuges — the tubes that spin uranium gas at high speeds to create the highly enriched uranium used in nuclear weapons. Khan was a spy, and over his years working in Europe he collected the information and some of the components for building the centrifuges back in Pakistan.

As soon as Benazir Bhutto, then prime minister, appointed him head of Pakistan’s nuclear project, Khan set about collecting the rest of the parts while also filling gaps in his knowledge. He sent buyers around the world to get critical, albeit small, pieces of the nuclear puzzle. They found willing sellers, and most purchases were legal because nobody expected Pakistan to build a centrifuge plant one piece at a time — which is more or less what happened. As Albright puts it, “the convergence of easy money and weak controls on the sale of high tech equipment created a perfect storm that Khan and his associates exploited.”

Khan went on to play a central role in Iran’s efforts to enrich uranium by selling used gas centrifuges and then allegedly providing more advanced design plans for free. His network also sold Libya 10,000 centrifuges, basically handing the country an entire off-the-shelf nuclear program — and the ability to produce four nuclear weapons a year.  (Libya came clean in the wake of the Iraq war.)  North Korea worked from designs courtesy of Khan, who offered centrifuges and access to Pakistani expertise.

Peddling Peril ominously observes that with the exception of al Qaeda, just about everyone who tried to get help from Khan eventually got it. And even al Qaeda might have succeeded were it not for 9/11. At the time, an NGO known as Ummah Tameer-e-Nau (UTN) that was ostensibly conducting relief work in Afghanistan was actually providing cover for work on developing nuclear weapons. Though the United States government has, according to Albright, “released little information about UTN’s activities,” he thinks that UTN would probably have “provided extensive and ongoing assistance to nuclear efforts in Afghanistan” if not for American intervention. And while these efforts seem to still be halted, Albright says al Qaeda and other international terrorist organizations haven’t indicated that they’ve given up on attacking a Western target with a nuclear weapon. At any rate, al Qaeda’s efforts to create a smuggling network within Afghanistan demonstrate that in this new age of proliferation, even a technologically backward state can host a nuclear weapons program.

Now, with Khan no longer selling nuclear secrets and materials but with parts of his network still in place, North Korea seems to be the biggest facilitator of illicit nuclear programs. Though the country denies any involvement in the Syrian building that Israeli warplanes destroyed in September 2007, Western intelligence authorities have identified it as a reactor based on a North Korean design. And in addition to state-sponsored proliferation networks, Albright reports that purely profit-driven networks also arise.  What all proliferators have in common is the knowledge that suppliers anywhere in the world “can be tricked into selling them sensitive goods.”

So where does this leave a nonproliferation regime? Ideally, writes Albright, we shouldn’t have to rely solely on intelligence services to come in after the fact, as with Khan, or to rely on military interventions, as the Israelis did in both Iraq in 1981 and more recently in Syria. As proliferation is no longer about states offering direct assistance to other states, efforts to stop proliferation must go beyond enforcement at the state level. So the suppliers of materials like aluminum tubes that can be used to build centrifuges (but also have legitimate uses) need to be the “first line of defense.” Peddling Peril highlights the German and British model, in which companies and governments cooperate to “identify illicit procurement attempts before an enquiry becomes a sale” as something the United States should emulate.  It might not be foolproof, but at least the companies that supply products have better knowledge and experience with identifying illicit buyers and the front companies that they often use. That is, just as efforts to procure nuclear technology have become more diffuse, so too must the efforts to prevent that proliferation.

Excerpt: “States such as Iran, Pakistan, and North Korea continue to use their nuclear programs to create state-sponsored smuggling networks that seek the most effective ways to bypass export regulations, hide the end user, and avoid detection.  For-profit, transnational smuggling networks can periodically arise and rival sophisticated suppliers in their ability to sell nuclear facilities and capabilities.  All these networks have learned that suppliers in any country, inclying the United States, can be tricked into selling them sensitive goods.  By using trading companies, intermediary shippers, and complex payment schemes, these networks can use any country as a transshipment point.  They can successfully target any supplier, making their orders through a nearly endless stream of unwitting intermediaries.

Further Reading: On Nuclear Terrorism by Michael A. Levi and The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes

Adam Fleisher is a law student at the University of Virginia.

*Photo courtesy Andy Zeigart.

Charles Bukowski lived and wrote all over Los Angeles. He devoted a short piece, a June 1974 installment of his “Notes of a Dirty Old Man” column in the L.A. Free Press, to the hunt for home. He recalls his moves from the famed (and recently landmarked) DeLongre Avenue court, to a house with a girlfriend, to a “modern apartment,” and finally to Hollywood and Western, where he felt “in love with the world again.” Below, the newspaper column in full, pulled from a new collection featuring his unpublished or long unseen work, Charles Bukowski: Absense of the Hero, edited by David Stephen Calonne.

To find the proper place to write, that’s most important; the rent should be reasonable, the walls thick, the landlord indifferent, and the tenants depraved, penurious, alcoholic, and lower middle-class. With the advent of the high-rise apartments, small courts, with their own private entranceways, have more and more vanished, and the wonderful characters that once infested these places have vanished along with them.

I lived for eight years on a front court on DeLongpre Avenue, and the poetry and the stories flourished. I’d sit at the front window typing, peering through excessive brush onto the street; I’d be surrounded by beer bottles and listening to classical music on the radio, sitting in my shorts, barefooted, my fat beer belly dangling. I was surrounded by rays and shadows and sounds, and I made sounds.

My landlord was a drunk, my landlady was a drunk, they’d come down and get me at night…. “Stop that silly typing, you son of a bitch, come on down and get drunk.” And I’d go. The beer was free, the cigarettes were free, they fed me; they liked me, we talked until 3 or 4 in the morning. The next day they’d knock on the door and leave a bag of something: tomatoes or pears or apples or oranges, mostly it was tomatoes. Or often she’d come with a warm meal — beef stew with biscuits and green onions; fried chicken with gravy and mashed potatoes, and bean salad with cornbread. They’d knock, listen for my voice, then run off. He was 60, she was 58. I put out their garbage cans every Wednesday, eight or 10 cans gathered from the courts and the apartments in back. The alcoholic next to me fell out of bed at 4 each morning; there was an ATD case in one of the apartments in back; 14 Puerto Ricans lived in one of the center courts, men, women, and children, they never made a sound and slept on the rug next to each other.

Mad people came to visit me — Nazis, anarchists, painters, musicians, fools, geniuses, and bad writers. They all imparted their ideas to me thinking that I would understand. Some nights I would look around and there would be from eight to 14 people sitting about the rug, and I only knew two or three of them. Sometimes I would go into a rage and throw them all out; other times I just forgot it all. Nobody ever stole from me except one who professed to be my friend and was always fingering my bookcase, slipping first editions and rare items under his shirt. The police raided continually but only took me in once or twice, yes, it was twice. Once they came bearing a shotgun, but I told them I was a writer and they left. Yes, it was a good place to live and to write.

Then love came and I moved out and into this house with this lady. She was good to me and it worked well, I liked her two children; there was space and shadow, a crazy dog, and a large backyard, a jungle of a backyard with bamboo and squirrels and walnut trees, wild rosebushes, fig trees, lush plants. I wrote well there — many love poems and love stories; I had not written too many of those. I walked about and it felt as if the sun was inside of me; I was finally warm, and things seemed humorous, gleeful, easy; I felt no guilt about my feelings. Yet, that finally went bad as those things do go bad. One or both begin to build resentments; things that once seemed so marvelous no longer seem that way. Each blames the other — it’s you….you did this, you said that, you shouldn’t have acted that way, you….

I had to move quickly. I searched the streets for a plausible place, somewhere a man might possibly get off a short poem. The afternoons and mornings mingled: First and last month’s rent, $200 security, $75 cleaning, references. None of the places even seemed livable, and the landlords and managers gave off the worst of vibes: greedy, suspicious, dead-meat creatures. One of them wouldn’t even look at me; he just kept staring at his TV set and tolling off the charges. I began to feel dirtied, like an imbecile, a man without a right to hot and cold water and a toilet to rent as his own. There was actually no place to be found. In weariness I simply paid somebody and began moving in.

It was a modern apartment, a place in the back, up one flight, apartment 24. There was a garden in the center and two managers, man and wife, who lived downstairs and they never left the premises; one of them was always there, especially the lady, who dressed in white and walked around with a little brown bag and often caught the leaves as they fell from the bushes; she got them before they hit the ground. She was immaculate, face heavy with white powder; she wore much lipstick and had a rasping voice, a voice that always gave the sound of somebody lying. Her husband had the booming voice, and he boomed about the Dodgers and about God and about the prices in the supermarket. My first night there the phone rang and he told me that my radio was on too loud; they could hear me all over the court. “We can hear you all over the court, Hank,” he said. He insisted that we call each other by our first names. My radio had not been on loud. I turned it off. Then somebody started playing an accordion. “Oh, that’s beautiful!” I heard a voice. The guy ran through all the Lawrence Welk tunes.

She was always there, ubiquitous, most ubiquitous, and I’d have a hangover, be coming down the stairs, listening, thinking, she’s not around, I’ve gotten by her this time. And I’d have my bag of empties full of ashes and crap, the bottom wet and wanting to rip open, myself feeling like vomiting, I’d get down on the ground and then go through an opening in the back garage in between the cars, trying to get to the trash container, and out she’d pop with her broom: “It’s a nice day, isn’t it?” “Oh yes,” I’d say, “it’s a nice day.”
And she was always at the mailboxes when the mail came, she was out there with her broom; you couldn’t get your mail. Or if somebody unknown came to the court she’d ask: “What do you want?” On warm days she placed herself in one of the deck chairs and reclined, and it seemed as if all the days I lived there were warm. And others came out and joined her and one was allowed to listen to their voices and their ideas.

The modern apartment-dwellers are all the same; they spend much time scrubbing and waxing and dusting and vacuuming; everything glistens — stoves, refrigerators, tables; the dishes are washed immediately after eating; the water in the toilet is blue; towels are used only once; doors are left open, blinds parted, and under the lamps you can see them sitting quietly reading a safe paperback or watching a laugh-track family-affair comedy on a huge TV screen. They buy knickknacks and ferns, things to hang about, fill the spaces; a Sunday afternoon at Akron is their Nirvana. They have no children, no pets, and they get intoxicated twice a year, at Christmas and at New Year’s.

There were two small couches in my place about a foot and a half wide. Upon one of these I was supposed to sleep. It was impossible to make love to a woman on either one of them. I discovered 18 roaches behind the refrigerator, and whenever I typed the woman below me beat up on her ceiling with a broom handle. And there was always somebody knocking on my door saying that I was disturbing them. Then one day all the tenants were given forms saying that there would be an automatic $5-a-month boost for each apartment. The roach spray I used almost cost me that. The writing had dwindled, almost stopped. My editor phoned me and assured me that every writer had his slumps. He said that I had five years left; that I needn’t write anything for five years and that I still could make it. I thanked him….

And I lucked it. I found this court just off of Hollywood and Western; I found it by getting the inside that somebody was moving out before that somebody moved out. It is my kind of neighborhood — massage parlors and love parlors are everywhere; taco stands, pizza parlors, sandwich shops; cut-rate drugstores full of wigs and old combs, rotting soap, hair pins, and lotions; whores night and day; black pimps in broad hats with their razor-sharp noses; plainclothes cops shaking down people at high noon, checking their arms for needle marks; dirty bookstores, murder, shakedowns, dope. I walk up Western Avenue toward Hollywood Boulevard and the sun shines inside of me again. I almost feel in love again, My people, my time, the taste of it….

I’ve only been here a week and just last night I looked around, beer bottles were everywhere, the radio was on, and in my place there were some people who live in this court: a guy who runs one of the love parlors, two guys who work in a dirty bookstore, and a dancer from one of the bars. We talked about dildoes, shakedowns, some of the ladies of the boulevard and the avenue; we talked about the freaks and the good people and the hard-hearted; we talked all through the night, the smoke curling, the laughter O.K. We ran out of beer and the delivery boy came in high and screwed-up and stayed an hour. We sent out for chicken and potatoes and cole slaw and buns. The night rolled easy. Finally I called an end: I’d been drinking beer since 11 a.m. They left in good form. I went to the bathroom, pissed, and then went to bed. Hemingway couldn’t ask for better. The light was coming through; I was in love with the world again. Ah.

Copyright 2010 by the Estate of Charles Bukowski. Reprinted from the new collection Absence of the Hero: Uncollected Stories and Essays Vol. 2 1946-1992, Edited and with an introduction by David Calonne, by permission of City Lights Books.

*Photo courtesy revrev Homepage photo courtesy Roger Jones.

Science vs Religion: What Scientists Really Think
by Elaine Howard Ecklund

—Reviewed by Angilee Shah

The 2005 lawsuit known as the Dover trial pit religion against science in the most virulent of ways. Parents challenged a school district’s requirement that intelligent design be taught alongside evolution in high school biology classes. The judge’s ruling — that intelligent design is not science, but rather an intrusion of religion on a state institution — sparked criticism and praise from all sides. Around the same time, Congress tried to loosen restrictions on embryonic stem cell research — another flashpoint in the battle between science and religion — only to face criticism and a veto.

It was during these tumultuous years that Elaine Howard Ecklund entered the fray to record the conflict from the nation’s ivory towers. A sociologist at Rice University, she spent four years surveying and interviewing scientists at 21 top American universities and found that the fault lines are not quite where intelligent design watchers might imagine. Like the lead characters of the Fox series “Bones” (which incidentally began in 2005) and, stretching back further, the protagonists of the 1985 Carl Sagan novel Contact, it turns out science and religion can and do coexist in labs and office hours around the country (though probably without the sexual tension). As Ecklund observes, “The ‘insurmountable hostility’ between science and religion is a caricature, a thought-cliché, perhaps useful as a satire on groupthink, but hardly representative of reality.”

On one hand, what Ecklund found was not surprising: 53 percent of the 1,700 scientists she surveyed reported having no formal religion, compared to only 16 percent of Americans in general. But 47 percent are part of a formal religion, mostly in Protestant or Jewish traditions. Ninety-four percent of these religious scientists subscribe to evolution. Of the nonreligious scientists, over 20 percent call themselves spiritual in different ways.

The numbers tell a compelling story, but of greater interest are the character sketches she creates from her 275 interviews. She quizzes natural and social scientists from several fields — physics, chemistry, biology, sociology, economics, political science and psychology — about their beliefs and childhoods, and probes into their perspectives on one of academia’s most unspoken taboos. She finds out how they handle religious students in their classrooms and asks thought-provoking questions about their relationships with colleagues who have different beliefs.

The result of these interviews is seriously thought provoking. An atheist physicist is “just astonished at this sort of viral faith-based thinking [which] only exists because parents infect their children and then there’s a new generation and they go on to affect more.” A Christian psychologist struggles with pastors’ use of pop psychology, “which they often do because they think they’re psychologists.”

Ecklund pays particular attention to religious scientists who often feel that they are practicing “closeted faith” because of stereotypes about religion among scientific circles. Some scientists’ assumptions that being religious means being fundamentalist—with the automatic rejection of evolution, family planning or stem cell research — are largely unfounded. The gulf between religious and nonreligious scientists is not so huge, it turns out. “What religious scientists fail to realize, however,” Ecklund writes, “is that a significant proportion of their colleagues, although not religious themselves, are open to talking and thinking about matters of faith.”

Ultimately, Ecklund pulls for these religious scientists because she sees them as an essential bridge between the scientific world and the American public. “If scientists are too heavy-handed, they might turn the potential leaders of American society off from an interest in science altogether,” she cautions. Not to diminish these lofty concerns, what is most enticing about Ecklund’s study is the up-close look at a part of university lives that have until now been largely a mystery.

Excerpt: “Religion does come up periodically in Raymond’s physics courses. Many of the students who come from the area surrounding the midwestern research university where he teaches were raised in religious homes and are challenged by the thing they learn in his courses: ‘The students are aware of it, that they’re being pulled in different directions from what they were taught when they grew up, especially around here.’ When I asked what he does when students bring religion up in his physics classes, he responds simply, ‘I just ignore it. They’re in the big time now!’”

Further Reading: Belief: Readings on the Reason for Faith by Francis S. Collins and Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers by Christian Smith.

Angilee Shah is a freelance journalist who writes about globalization and politics. You can read more of her work at www.angileeshah.com.

*Photo courtesy Kevin Dooley.

Reset: Iran, Turkey, and America’s Future
by Stephen Kinzer

—Reviewed by Angilee Shah

Stephen Kinzer’s 2007 book Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq was fourteen chapters about fourteen instances in which the United States “was the decisive factor in the overthrow of a particular government.” It demonstrated that Kinzer has an uncanny ability to draw unexpected links between histories of many places. Reset is another accomplishment in that regard. It is a dual history of emerging democracies, histories that resonate with America’s own democratic narrative. Iran and Turkey, Kinzer argues, make for excellent partners in the Middle East because they have, embedded in their cultures, a struggle for democracy.

If all this sounds too far-fetched, particularly with oft-maligned Iran, Kinzer’s work begs the reader to take a longer view. In the early 1900s a democratic movement in Iran arose against — and ultimately capitulated to — British and Russian occupiers. “Iran’s first experiment with democracy was over, crushed by foreign powers,” Kinzer writes. “It left a vivid imprint on the nation’s collective psyche.”

Kinzer parallels this history of Iran with the rise of Turkey as a democratic nation. He chronicles the journey of Mustafa Kemal, better known as Atatürk, the founder and first president of the Republic of Turkey. While Turkey became a republic with an exiled caliphate, Reza Shah, installed in a British-engineered military coup in Iran, sought to create an enlightened kingdom. Both leaders valued higher education and women’s rights, but brutally repressed opposition and were uncomfortable with ethnic diversity. Atatürk’s reforms took hold and created institutions that facilitated Turkey’s bumpy road to democracy. Reza Shah’s legacy was a propped-up two-generation dynasty.

In the throes of the Cold War, the United States removed the democratically-elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in the covert Operation Ajax and installed Reza Shah’s son. “[American leaders] might have looked at Iran’s democracy and recognized a partner…” Kinzer writes. “Instead they looked at its nationalization of an oil company and saw an enemy.” Turkey’s military might during the Korean War, on the other hand, made it a partner of the U.S., and eventually a member of NATO.

U.S. actions in Iran set the stage for the Islamic Revolution and the reign of Ayatollah Khomeini. Clerics emerged as leaders from the wreckage of a corrupt regime that had crushed civil society. Relations between Iran and the United States deteriorated. In the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq War, Donald Rumsfeld, moonlighting as a Middle East envoy, allied with Saddam Hussein and helped Iraq cover up its use of poison gas and “unconventional weapons.”

Kinzer’s history continues, folding in short narratives of Saudi Arabia-US relations and of Israel and Palestine. While the United States’ string of foreign policy failures in the Middle East has been documented at length in many recent books, Kinzer’s work ultimately is an ambitious blueprint, a plea really, for the United States to take a different course. He wants the United States to loosen its joined-at-the-hip policies with Saudi Arabia and Saudi Arabian money. He suggests using Turkey, with its democratic and Muslim institutions, as a mediator. Turkey, he says, is in a unique position given its good relationships with Hamas and the Taliban, as well as with Israel and the United States. Kinzer asks for diplomacy with Iran based on the recognition that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will not hold power forever, and that Iran’s theocracy belies the persistence of democratic values. “Agreement comes first,” he says. “Changes in behavior follow.”

Excerpt: “Evening was falling over Tehran when news of that day’s terror attacks [September 11, 2001] was first broadcast. Spontaneously, groups of people carrying candles began walking through the streets to express sympathy and support for the United States. They converged at one of the city’s main squares and stood in silent witness, reflecting a visceral sense of solidarity that many Iranians, despite the vicissitudes of history, feel with Americans. This vigil was the only pro-American demonstration held that day in any Muslim country.”

Further Reading: All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror by Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq by Stephen Kinzer, and Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World by Vali Nasr.

Angilee Shah is a freelance journalist who writes about globalization and politics. You can read more of her work at www.angileeshah.com.

*Photo courtesy mr.beutel.

Europe’s Promise
by Steven Hill

—Reviewed by Adam Fleisher

The Europe Steven Hill describes in Europe’s Promise sounds like a terrific place, sort of like a continent-sized Lake Wobegon where everything is done better than in the United States. He argues that Europe is not a sclerotic welfare state, as many Americans mistakenly assume. Instead, Hill says, Europe’s model of social capitalism harnesses the power of dynamic economic growth to provide a broad and deep social safety net that eliminates the risk and uncertainty of modern life.

Hill, a San Francisco-based expert on political reform, spent ten years traveling to Europe to research. The book came out before the current crisis, and Hill is sanguine about the ability of the European capitalist growth engine to sustain its generous social benefits. He argues that its taxes aren’t so high, since governments provide so much in return. Unemployment is only slightly higher, and the economy isn’t staggering under the weight of regulations and all-powerful unions. Europe’s healthcare system works better because there’s no profit motive, and Europeans are healthier because of an “informal” sector that facilitates healthy living. Europe is at the forefront of the post-carbon world, while its non-combative approach to foreign policy enables potential adversaries to engage around mutually shared interests.

In short, Europe is the future, and it works. Hill argues that Americans should want — or already do want — to be more like Europe, but our politicians won’t deliver: “There simply is no viable political party to stand up for the economic interests of the average person.” Europe’s Promise places a lot of the blame on our winner-take-all electoral model that, as opposed to proportional representation, creates a “clash of adversarial forces” and prevents consensus-building and broadly representative democracy.

In some sense, however, America does have a European-style “workfare” state. Hill studies the benefits our elected representatives enjoy, but it’s become increasingly clear in recent months that many more state and federal employees have packages that might make Europeans blush: from early retirement to 100% healthcare coverage to pensions that provide almost as much, or even more, than a full-time salary. Just like in Europe, this largesse is being questioned as states struggle to balance their budgets. But unlike in Europe, here the benefits are not evenly distributed by any means.

Perhaps Americans are simply skeptical about the ability of the state to actually deliver all those benefits. After all, there are always tradeoffs, and in many respects, the American system helps Europe be Europe. Although Hill acknowledges the argument that Europe “free rides” on the American defense umbrella, he claims it is irrelevant since European foreign policy is not based on brute military force. But if America were no longer a military superpower, would Europe still have the luxury of a foreign policy without hard power? And without the export of the high-end innovation of America’s profit-driven healthcare, would Europe be able to achieve the same health outcomes at lower costs?

Speaking of cost, Hill notes that sustaining the “workfare” state is challenging because Europe doesn’t have enough people to work — and to pay the benefits of retirees. Immigration is its only hope for population growth. Europe’s Promise acknowledges the continent’s difficulties with assimilation, but it elides the question of why, if governments so generously facilitate child-rearing, there has been no population boom. Still, Hill focuses on the positive: “lower birthrates have positive ramifications for the ecology of a threatened planet over the long term.”

The more immediate problem, however, is that without enough workers to tax, Europe may not have enough revenues to sustain its very generous benefit structures. And that seems to be the problem at the heart of social capitalism: it turns out that eventually you run out of your own money too.

Further Reading: 10 Steps to Repair American Democracy by Steven Hill and The European Dream by Jeremy Rifkin

*Photo above courtesy douglemoine. Homepage photo courtesy stevec77.

Small Change: Why Business Won’t Save the World
by Michael Edwards

—Reviewed by Angilee Shah

Anyone who has worked in the nonprofit sector, with big or small organizations, has likely felt pressure to think about markets and quantify outcomes in a corporate style. Michael Edwards’ Small Change does much to explain and challenge this kind of corporatization of the nonprofit world.

Now a distinguished senior fellow at the progressive New York City think tank Demos, Edwards is a relief and development nongovernmental organization (NGO) veteran who has, since 1982, held senior positions with Oxfam and Save the Children. He has worked for the World Bank and the Ford Foundation managing huge grant programs for giants of the nonprofit world.

So it is not a surprise that popular ideas about how business can help provide development solutions is a matter of great concern to Edwards. Books such as R. Glenn Hubbard and William Duggan’s treatise on the ability of free markets to help alleviate poverty, The Aid Trap, are a direct comment on the shortcomings of Edward’s life work. Seizing on the excesses and greed underlying our current financial crisis, Edwards rebuts, “Expecting price competition, the profit motive, short-term deliverables, and supply-chain control to bring about a world of compassion and solidarity is, to say the least, a little strange.”

Over the last 20 years, businesses have been making more explicit their “social and environmental objectives,” giving rise to a blurring between corporate and nonprofit sectors. Philanthrocapitalism was a term coined by Matthew Bishop and Michael Green in their book of the same name, which argues in favor of businesses solving social ills. What is missing from philanthrocapitalist endeavors, Edwards argues, is upheaval, a questioning of the systems that give rise to societies’ developmental needs. Business and markets, he says, can only produce “small change — limited advances as it is, not as it could be if we summoned up the courage to confront the deeper problems and inequalities that capitalism creates.”

Edwards’ call for a kind of separation of powers is a compelling one. Civil society, as he sees it, should be free from the constraints of the market and the “business is best” philosophy to seek sustainable solutions and “human fulfillment” over time, rather than quick fixes that meet bottom line. After all, he asks, how do you measure empowerment? What happens when billionaires like Carlos Slim garner immense decision-making power over education? Philanthrocapitalism can deliver laptops to kids, for example, but falls short in creating the conditions for communities to combat their problems for themselves. Microfinance might have reduced poverty in Bangladesh, but Edward points out that the country remains a “socially and politically dysfunctional state.”

There is plenty of need in the world and therefore plenty of space for many different approaches to solving problems. The question that remains unanswered by Edwards’ short but broad book is, have traditional nonprofits done any better than philanthrocapitalists? Have they met the needs of the poorest communities in the world and have they been able to include the voices of those they seek to help? What is needed to make a truly persuasive argument against current trends in NGO management is a solid explanation for why different approaches to relief and development cannot coexist and something that is precisely what Edwards is fighting against: a quantified, even corporate review of the successes and failures of traditional nonprofits.

Excerpt: “If I was ever invited to address the philanthrocapitalists, what would I say? ‘First, a big vote of thanks for taking up the challenge of entrepreneurship for the public good. Without your efforts, we wouldn’t be having this debate, and the world would be further from the commercial and technological advances required to cure malaria and get microcredit to everyone who needs it. But don’t stop there. Please use your wealth and influence to lever deeper transformations in systems and in structures, be open to learning from civil society and not just teaching it the virtues of business thinking, measure the costs as well as the benefits of your investments and interventions, learn more rigorously from history, and redirect your resources to groups and innovations that will change society forever, including the economic system that has made you rich. That’s not much to ask for, is it?’ Well, perhaps it is. None of these things are high on the philanthrocapitalist agenda, because they would transform the economic system completely and lead to a radically different distribution of its benefits and costs. Nevertheless, if the rich genuinely want to change the world, then an honest consideration of these challenges is the best place to start.”

Further Reading: The Aid Trap by R. Glenn Hubbard and William Duggan, Philanthrocapitalism: How the Rich Can Save the World by Matthew Bishop and Michael Green, and The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability

Angilee Shah is a freelance journalist who writes about globalization and politics. You can read more of her work at www.angileeshah.com.

*Photo courtesy coffeego. Homepage photo courtesy sandwiches.

If you’re looking to read something hard-backed and heavy at the beach this year, Zócalo has selected the non-fiction books that piqued our interest and that we plan to haul to the shore over the next few months. Below, our contributors’ 15 recommended titles for nerdy summer reading.

Andrew J. Bacevich’s Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War: The former U.S. Army Colonel broadly critiques the country’s foreign policy, including Barack Obama’s expansion of the war in Afghanistan.

Tom Bissel’s Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter: A fiction writer once addicted to the console explains why Grand Theft Auto and all the diversions like it are more than just a chance to release violent urges.

H.W. Brands’ American Dreams: The United States Since 1945: The author of several books of American history and politics takes a comprehensive look at a half-century.

Pascal Bruckner’s The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism: The prolific French essayist explains why guilt actually hurts the West’s attempts to address the wrongs of its past.

William Dalrymple’s Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India: Monks, mystics, dancers and poets reveal traditions of old in a rapidly modernizing country.

Sarah Ellison’s War at the Wall Street Journal: Inside the Struggle To Control an American Business Empire: The former Journal reporter goes deep into the battle for the paper.

Christopher Hitchens’ Hitch-22: A Memoir: Part personal musings, part history, part political commentary from the controversial British writer.

Eugene Kaplan’s What’s Eating You?: People and Parasites: A creepy but thorough compendium of crawling things.

Amitava Kumar’s A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb: How the war on terror transformed art and pop culture around the world.

Dominic Lieven’s Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace: A professor of history at the London School of Economics, Lieven reinterprets Napoleon’s famous defeat in 1814.

Sebastian Mallaby’s More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite: Clear explanations of that most mysterious organization.

Raghuram G. Rajan’s Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy: How inequality precipitated the financial crisis, and still threatens the economy today.

Barry Rubin’s The Muslim Brotherhood: The Organization and Policies of a Global Islamist Movement: The first broad analysis of the group.

Jeff Scheshol’s Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court: What was at stake in the historic battle, when Roosevelt tried to reorganize the court, and why it matters for today’s politics.

Megan K. Stack’s Every Man in This Village is a Liar: An Education in War: The L.A. Times foreign correspondent remembers covering successive crises in the Middle East.

*Photo courtesy lorello.