Fall 2005 Editors' Picks

Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 By Tony Judt. Penguin Pr: Penguin Group (USA). Oct. ISBN 1-59420-065-3. $39.95.

It is precisely this concern—not only that history will be forgotten but that it will be misremembered (indeed dismembered and put back together more palatably)—that drove Judt to write his sweeping Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. It's not something he had planned from the start of his distinguished academic career—the London-born author is currently director of the Remarque Institute—but in a way he's been stewing about it for a long time.

Living in Vienna in the late 1980s, Judt recalls reading polls stating that "35 percent of the population not only didn't want to hear about what happened [in the war] but would rather not have Jewish neighbors. Once you get past the sense of how appalling this is," he concludes, "you have…to think again about the way the war was remembered and the lessons filtered in." But, Judt told LJby phone, most postwar histories tell the same "happy Sesame Streettale [that] everyone worked out their problems by 1945."

The real story, of course, was far more complicated. Even as the few Jews who survived the death camps returned home (unbelievably, Judt recalls, one Dutch Jew was told, "You were lucky—we suffered terribly"), many countries trumped up largely imagined pasts of heroic resistance. This "drawing of a veil across the past" was the price paid for postwar prosperity and stability, and Judt doesn't condemn it outright. Though morally unforgivable, it was also politically inevitable, he argues; astute politicians of the day—from De Gaulle to Churchill—understood that there was no real alternative. "The need to put all of that behind you and pretend that there were no internal hatreds, no memories, no impossible gulfs between communities," Judt says, "was pretty crucial not only if you wanted to rebuild the economy but rebuild societies."

In Western Europe, reckoning with this past didn't really begin until the next generation—Judt's own. These baby boomers may have forgotten that in the immediate postwar years no one knew the cycle of depression, fascism, and war "wouldn't happen all over again," observes Judt. But they had another task—breaking the stranglehold of collective amnesia. The reckoning took place still later in Eastern Europe, where memory had a different role. "A combination of memory and force" allowed communism to last as long as it did; for those who could remember, particularly within the Soviet Union, victory in World War II legitimized the Soviet regime. With new generations, ties of memory loosened, and the system—already discredited in the Soviet satellite states—unraveled.

The American experience is different; as Judt points out, Americans recall the 20th century as one of "success, progress, prosperity, and victory." Thus, when they criticize Europe as overregulated, they fail to recognize the dynamic of memory and forgetting: constructing these societies was "not some decision taken by a bunch of Socialists to build a welfare state but a 'prophylactic' decision that can prevent the past from happening again."

Memory often obscures as much as it reveals; thankfully, history here acts as an antidote. Judt's is a formidable balancing act; his respect for the complexities of human experience never folds into moral relativism. "You can't simplify into nice, tidy, moral categories," he says, "but at the same time, you can't take the moral categories out, because then you're not telling the truth."—Tania Barnes

Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture By Ariel Levy. Free Pr. Sept. ISBN 0-7432-4989-5. $25.

"Sex is one of the most interesting things we as human beings have to play with, and we've reduced it to polyester underpants and implants," Ariel Levy writes in her fascinating and furious critique of "raunch culture," Female Chauvinist Pigs. She describes a world where the concept of a sexually liberated woman is corseted into the very narrow clichés of what's hot—Playboy bunnies, strippers, and porn stars—and promoted (and bought and sold) by the very people it suffocates. With a magazine writer's energy and accessibility, Levy, who first wrote on the subject for New York magazine, considers the roots of the problem—which she sees in an incomplete Women's Movement—and talks to a wide variety of women about sex, finding a pervasive chauvinism at work in what they say and do. For the teenagers, lesbian bois, and other partygoers she interviews, sex is about scoring, social status, and getting attention—not desire, pleasure, companionship, or the myriad benefits of full, and diverse, sexual expression. "We have a very sexualized culture that is actually very narrow-minded about sexuality," Levy tells LJ, and confusion, especially for teens, follows when the political message is all abstinence. What can we do about it? "Talk about what desire is, what sex is," recommends Levy, "there is more to it than just saying no."—Rebecca Miller

An Unreasonable Woman: A True Story of Shrimpers, Politicos, Polluters and the Fight for Seadrift, Texas By Diane Wilson. Chelsea Green. Sept. ISBN 1-931498-88-1. $27.50.

It is not often that a publisher has to worry about scheduling a book tour around an author's jail term, but then Diane Wilson is no ordinary writer. In 2002, the then 52-year-old former shrimp boat captain–turned–environmental/political activist jumped the fence at a Dow Chemical plant in her hometown of Seadrift, TX, climbed a 70' tower, and chained herself there for eight hours to protest Union Carbide's denial of responsibility for the 1984 chemical plant explosion in Bhopal, India, that left thousands dead. (Dow, which now owns Union Carbide, has refused to clean up the site.)

"At the trial, the district attorney said I was a very dangerous woman," says Wilson, who is appealing her four-month jail sentence but expects to lose. "Believe me, I was not like this when I first started my activism." Her memoir, An Unreasonable Woman(see review, p. 175), traces the remarkable transformation of an ordinary working-class mother of five, who in 1989 read a newspaper article that identified her impoverished Calhoun County as the most polluted in the country.

"There are pivotal points in people's lives, and if they don't move on it, their lives are lacking for it," Wilson tells LJ. In her case, she chose to launch a grass-roots campaign to stop Formosa Plastics and other chemical companies from further dumping their toxic waste into the fragile bays along Texas's Gulf Coast. When town meetings, letter-writing, and lawsuits had little effect, Wilson undertook more drastic acts of civil disobedience, including staging several hunger strikes, until finally in 1994 she won "zero discharge" agreements (meaning no liquid effluent discharge into the environment) from Formosa and Alcoa.

"This is the story of the power of one individual to effect change," remarks Chelsea Green publisher and cofounder Margo Baldwin. With Wilson's book, Baldwin explains, the Vermont-based publisher of books on sustainable living is returning to its original intent of doing "exciting, important titles that would inspire as well as address practical aspects." Baldwin had stepped out of the day-to-day running of the company but returned in late 2002 out of concern that its focus had grown too narrow. "We didn't drop the how-to," says Baldwin, "but we felt we had to publish broader-visioned books that would reach a wider audience."

At the same time, Chelsea Green is making another departure, reissuing Molly Bang's pictorial biography, Nobody Particular: One Woman's Fight To Save the Bays (Sept. ISBN 1-931498-94-6. pap. $10), which Holt published in 2000 as a children's picture book. Bang's striking black-and-white story panels set against a backdrop of color illustrations, Baldwin thought, hadn't found its right audience the first time. She decided it would be interesting to promote the book as a young adult graphic novel to accompany Wilson's memoir.

This past June, Wilson attended BookExpo America in New York City, but further book promotion plans depend upon the outcome of her appeal and the ruling's timing. Chelsea Green is working on a contingency plan, including videotaping Wilson for a virtual tour and having her do some podcasting from jail. "If worst comes to worst," says Baldwin, "we may sell books outside the jailhouse to help publicize her plight and raise money for her legal defense fund. I'm sure we can find a lot of 'unreasonable women' to participate!"—Wilda Williams

Beasts of No Nation By Uzodinma Iweala. HarperCollins. Nov. ISBN 0-06-079867-X. $16.95.

Uzodinma Iweala has an abiding obsession with authenticity. Maybe it's his age—at 22, he shares this preoccupation with his generation. Or it's his background—he was born into privileged circumstances in Washington, DC, to parents of Nigerian descent. To convey the brutality of war authentically—which he sees as both part of his (Nigerian) heritage and deeply alien to it—therefore becomes a kind of fixation. On the one hand, writing a first novel about a child soldier in the midst of a brutal civil war in an unnamed African country has some resonance for him; on the other, it also takes a certain mental leap.

It was not a leap Iweala was always prepared to make. Certainly, he had talked to many people who had lived through conflict—whether they be Nigerians who experienced their country's civil war firsthand or Ugandan child soldier China Keitetsi. He had gleaned a sense of what "suffering and uncertainty do to a person's mental state," he tells LJ by email. Still, he worried, given his more fortunate background, "whether or not I actually had the right" to tell this story."

Despite, and indeed becauseof, this concern, Iweala has produced Beasts of No Nation, a harrowing slip of a novel that, call it what you want—brutal, beautiful, pathétique (all of those things are true)—is above all convincing. It is no wonder that at times he found it grueling work. "It wasn't necessarily the most pleasant novel to write, to be honest," he says. "It's never a very pleasant thing to spend so much time with violence."

Iweala's age may have helped him along—lending him the right amount of chutzpah to give it a go. When asked if he was afraid of being dismissed because of his youth, he replies, "I was afraid and still am. But…you don't have to be young to get dismissed. That's a benefit of being young: you have the chance to screw up and try again."

Still, claims Iweala, "it would be dishonest of me to say that one who hasn't lived through that can ever really know what it feels like." It is a testament to his considerable skills that his narrator, the hapless Agu, undoubtedly does.—Tania Barnes

The Tiger in the Attic: Memories of the Kindertransport and Growing Up English By Edith Milton. Univ. of Chicago. Oct. ISBN 0-226-52946-0. $22.50

Edith Milton adores 1066 and All That, the 1930 parody of a student history text. She hadn't known the book as a child in Nazi Germany. It was one of those intensely British concoctions that she discovered in her years of English childhood. In 1939, at age seven, Edith Cohn, with her older sister Ruth, was among the German Jewish children given special kindertransport by British refugee organizations that placed them, unaccompanied, with local families as Nazi horrors escalated. With the Harvey family, "Aunt" Helen, "Uncle" Bourke, and their daughters Diana and Valerie, Edith grew to delight in such 1066 admonitions as "History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember."

Now Milton, who reunited with her mother in the United States in 1946, has produced a multilayered enchantment of what she "can remember" of those years between a barely recalled German childhood and her subsequent American life (covered eloquently in the last part of the book). A freelance writer who lives in California and New Hampshire, she has previously published fiction. Why the move to memoir? 1066 echoes in her email from New England, "I'd always understood that the entire world I'd grown up in was on its way to oblivion…. I felt I should write down more of what I could remember."

But in The Tiger in the Attic, Milton is not content merely to reminisce. She deftly ponders the very contours of memory and truth, as when she writes, "None of this is entirely reliable, of course—over the years the landscape of memory shifts and its details rearrange themselves." With wit and charm, she even questions family photographs, wondering whether such images really articulate a purer truth. "[A] sense of fallibility—a sense that memory is changeable, that words are slippery, that the meaning of events and the interpretations of feelings can fluctuate over time—has always been an essential part of me," she tells LJ. "It was certainly intensified by growing up in three different cultures…. When I realized how much the acknowledgment of uncertainty had made its way into the book…I decided to welcome it: to celebrate doubt and make it a central theme."

The result is one of ineffable beauty and powerful authenticity. The tiger of the title is first encountered as a trophy rug in the Harvey drawing room, but Milton defines the arc of its existence—from a life in West Bengal ended by the bullets of empire to its sojourn in the Harvey attic and its ultimate removal—as one emblem of an era's disappearing act. She says that her process of writing was "like nudging the zoom toggle on a digital camera." What Milton "can remember" gives us the best kind of history, an expression, she says, of her "intense gratitude for these small gifts of grace" from a formative interlude that has blessed her life ever since.—Margaret Heilbrun

Seven Lies by James Lasdun. Norton. ISBN 0-393-057542-2. $23.95.

Anyone reading James Lasdun's Seven Lies would think that he grew up behind the Iron Curtain, so astutely does he render life under totalitarianism and the attendant risks of imagining something better. In fact, he comes from a comfortable London home. His novel was inspired partly by stories of rampant informing that emerged when Stasi files were opened after the Berlin Wall fell and partly, he confides to LJ, by the desire to find "a kind of prism or point of view that could enable me to write about this country, to which I am a stranger in some ways."

Lasdun's hapless hero, Stefan Vogel, grows up a confused and unpopular child in East Germany, longing for America as the embodiment of everything missing in his own sorry existence. Having been raised in Seventies and Eighties England, when "everything good and functional about the country was daily being torn apart by the ravages of Thatcherism…and you had the sense that the world you inhabited was somehow lacking something," Lasdun says he understands the idea of America as the good life writ large. He wanted to examine this idea from the perspective of someone from a totalitarian regime but found his focus only after 9/11: "Suddenly I had use for a character who would look at certain tendencies developing rather rapidly in today's America that have a kind of resemblance to things that go on in totalitarian regimes."

From the time his mother proclaims him a gifted poet, Stefan is entangled in a series of rapidly escalating lies that finally result in shocking betrayal. Of every misstep, he protests weakly that "it had already happened." As Lasdun shows, though external circumstances "provided the kind of slightly intensified crucible in which the chemistry of his own personality undergoes its various transformations," Stefan is guided less by outside forces than by his own desire for a larger existence. Is the personal always implicated in the political? Must we create fictions about ourselves to survive? These and a host of other arresting questions spill forth as we contemplate Stefan's story. Here is one novel that feels lived in rather than simply read.—Barbara Hoffert

The King in the Window by Adam Gopnik. Miramax: Hyperion. Oct. ISBN 0-7868-1862-X. $19.95.

"You find yourself in a confrontation with absolute evil and you are planning not to think?" says Mrs. Pearson indignantly to poor Oliver in Adam Gopnik's thoroughly entrancing The King in the Window. An American boy in Paris, Oliver has encountered the wraiths that live in windows and water. Through sheer accident they have made him their king as they battle the soul-stealing Master of Mirrors. It's a crucial passage showing, refreshingly, that in a world where instinct is frequently celebrated over reason, Gopnik wants his young hero to realize that "the only way he is going to do the things he has to do is to think his way out."

This is another book for the Potter generation meant to engage lively ten-year-olds but just as appropriate for the thinking adult. The conflict between the world of windows and water and the world of mirrors and computers is no mere child's play. "It's the difference between metaphor and irony," explains Gopnik to LJ, "between windows that let you look out into the world and mirrors that only show you the same thing." Gopnik worries that his book will be seen as antitechnology, but that's not his point. Like most parents, he explains,"I see it as a struggle to get our children to turn away from screens and into thinking imaginatively."

Gopnik got his inspiration for this book in 1997 while standing in the children's room of the American Library in Paris, where he lived at the time while writing for The New Yorker. Surveying the peaceful room, full of books he worshipped, he thought, "I'd love to write a book to put in here." That night was Epiphany, and when his young son, Luke, put on the holiday's golden crown and saw his reflection, he cried, "Look, Daddy, the king in the window!" Suddenly, Gopnik had not simply the book's title but the impetus to write an entire first chapter in a single sitting. The initial draft was completed in Paris. Subsequent drafts introduced the fascinating conceit that in the mirror world, with everything reversed, it is space rather than time that flows. Oliver's sidekicks Charlie and Neige, who embody, respectively, the best of American and French culture, also gained clearer definition. In the end, with Paris blanketed in snow, Oliver learns the importance of "logic over magic," yet his odyssey still gives us a thoroughly magical book.—Barbara Hoffert