Category Archives: 50 Books for 2010

An archive of all posts from my 50 Books for 2010 blog (www.50booksfor2010.com).

#20: Rise to Globalism

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Last month, The New Yorker ran a full-page piece on Stephen E. Ambrose, American historian extraordinaire and author, most famously, of Band of Brothers. (Yes, that one.) Ambrose, whom the reporter describes (not inaccurately) as “America’s most famous and popular historian,” appears to have joined the long list of respected writers and academics whose zeal for sculpting a superior narrative was undermined by the dubious methods they used along the way. As Dwight D. Eisenhower’s biographer, Ambrose, who died in 2002, took pride in the “hundreds and hundreds of hours” he spent with the president over the course of five years.

As it turns out, these hours turned out to be just as phantasmal as, say, weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, or an honest politician. According to The New Yorker article, the deputy director of Eisenhower’s presidential library and museum recently discovered the president’s schedule, which revealed that “Eisenhower saw Ambrose only three times, for a total of less than five hours. The two men were never alone together.” In an understatement, the deputy secretary mused, “[Eisenhower] simply didn’t see that much of Stephen Ambrose.”

Notwithstanding the historian’s posthumous humiliation, it is quite clear just how he ascended to the zenith of American history-telling. In the 1997 eighth revised edition of Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy Since 1938, Ambrose joined with Douglas G. Brinkley (ironically, the Stephen E. Ambrose Professor of History at the University of New Orleans at the time) in recounting the events, decisions, and people that shaped the course of the twentieth century and set the standard for the one following.

Reading a pre-9/11 history book feels a bit fantastical at times, as when the introduction to the book presciently concludes, “America in the 1990s was richer and more powerful — and more vulnerable — than at any other time in her history.” In general, however, Rise to Globalism is every bit the thorough (although not detached) retrospective one would expect from a titan in the field such as Stephen Ambrose. Somewhat surprisingly, the most interesting nuggets are not the minutiae of political decision-making or military strategies but Brinkley and Ambrose’s perspectives on them.

As one clear example, it is quite obvious from the outset of chapter fifteen, Reagan and the Evil Empire, that the authors are not particularly fond of President #40. This is made abundantly clear in recounting the American involvement in the Israeli-Lebanese war in the early 1980s. Whether describing Reagan as “[blundering] in Lebanon as badly as Carter had blundered in Iran” or claiming that “no one, most of all Reagan himself, ever seemed to be clear on the purpose of that involvement,” Rise to Globalism is unapologetically ambivalent at best about the Reagan administration.

Of course, this is a perfectly valid evaluation, and one that helpfully reminds the reader that a history textbook this is not. (Of course, recent developments in the Texas public school curriculum raise doubts as to whether some history textbooks are even history textbooks. But I digress.) The authors’ perspectives are not partisan, it should be noted; of President Jimmy Carter, they praise his emphasis on human rights, which “struck a responsive chord among the oppressed everywhere,” but ultimately concede that “all the goals were wildly impractical and none were achieved.”

Especially fascinating is the nuanced tale of the Vietnam War, in which the reader is taken beyond soldiers, fighting, politicians, and election campaigns and into a deeper look at the underlying shifts in national societies themselves. Of course, these changes cannot be understood in isolation, and Ambrose and Brinkley deftly portray the interacting elements of politics and public sentiment. (The American fascination with the atomic bomb’s potential to establish permanent world hegemony is but one of several intriguing developments explored within this context.)

At times, Rise to Globalism is unforgiving in its assessments of American arrogance and impulsiveness, a tendency that lends credibility to their praise at other moments. (Commenting on the American commitment to Vietnam, despite elected officials’ many reassurances that the United States was not “fighting a white man’s war against Asians,” the authors ponder, “Why had the Americans not heeded their own warnings? Because they were cocky, overconfident, sure of themselves, certain that they could win at a bearable cost, and that in the process they would turn back the Communist tide in Asia.”) A similar attention to detail is displayed in coverage of the Cold War; perhaps most remarkable is the illuminating fact that, strenuous attempts at differentiation notwithstanding, most American presidents of the era closely mimicked their immediate predecessors’ foreign policies.

Despite having been written in the late 1990s, at a time when American influence could hardly have been more pervasive, Rise to Globalism is remarkably circumspect in its prognostications for the future. The book ends as President Bill Clinton’s second term begins, a period of unprecedented peace and prosperity for the West; and yet, in the last sentence, the authors caution that “no one would claim that he had wrought a global utopia of free-market democracies.” If Stephen Ambrose were alive today, a sequel, or at least an updated edition, would be in order. The times, they are a-changin’, but Rise to Globalism‘s relative old age has yet to relegate it to the dusty side of the bookshelf.

#19: The Reluctant Fundamentalist

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Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist takes an interesting approach to storytelling. The narrator is a Pakistani man sitting in a Lahore cafe, and from the outset it becomes clear that the narrative will move and flow only at his bidding. Ostensibly, his audience is the “uneasy American stranger” seated across from him, who manages to jump or look alarmed at virtually everything, but his book-long monologue makes it abundantly clear that the reader is the host’s true target.

“Do not be frightened by my beard,” the Pakistani, whose name is Changez, reassures his guest. “I am a lover of America.” And with that, Changez launches into an account of his life and times in the United States, beginning with his undergraduate years at Princeton University and soon followed by his interview and eventual employment at a valuation firm, Underwood Samson. Inevitably, a romantic entanglement materializes, as Changez’s new employer competes for his attention against Erica, the type of girl who wore “a short T-shirt bearing the image of Chairman Mao” as if it had personal meaning.

Changez finds himself gaining headway into American corporate culture; meanwhile, his relationship with Erica runs a parallel course. The only hitch, it seems, is her inability to release herself from the memory of her old boyfriend, Chris, who had died of cancer the year before she met Changez. On some level the latter man feels vulnerable, threatened even, at his seemingly disadvantageous position, but with a sense of irony at feeling jealous of a dead man.

Then, as often happens in recent literature, came September 11. Changez, on assignment in Manila for Underwood Samson, was in his hotel room preparing to return to the States when he saw the news on television. “I stared as one — and then the other — of the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center collapsed. And then I smiled.” Changez’s instinctual pleasure was not, he assures his listener, in response to the violent act itself but as an acknowledgment of what it symbolized, “the fact that someone had so visibly brought America to her knees.” Fearing what such a reaction might provoke in his colleagues, he wisely keeps this sentiment to himself.

As the story progresses, however, the disparity between Changez’s corporate breeding and his national and cultural identity grows ever larger. Erica, afflicted with anxiety and depression following the attacks in New York, withdraws for long periods; each time he sees her, she has shrunk to a fraction of the person he had seen the time before. His conflicted relationship with her mirrors his increasingly frayed connection to the United States, as perceived American self-righteousness and machismo soon supersede concerns for maintaining some semblance of the existing (and precarious) global order, a development that holds dubious implications for Changez’s native Pakistan. “It will perhaps be odd for you,” he tells his guest, “…to imagine residing within commuting distance of a million or so hostile troops who could, at any moment, attempt a full-scale invasion.”

Towards the end of his story, Changez describes an emotional farewell with Erica, which immediately follows her verbal longing for her deceased lover. As Changez prepares to leave her, “she gave me a hug and afterwards she stood there, looking at me. But he is dead, I wanted to shout!” To Changez, the statement is an equally appropriate analysis of American innocence. Nostalgia for a mystic past is hardly empathetic when one exerts such overwhelming control over the present. “I had always thought of America as a nation that looked forward,” Changez muses. Following September 11, “for the first time I was struck by its determination to look back.” His attempts to ingratiate himself into Erica’s life met resistance from the same impulse that denied his easy assimilation into American culture.

These sentiments, while hardly original, are easily comprehensible and are expressed in an enjoyable format to boot. Thus it is all the more disappointing when the narrator descends into the occasional, yet dispiriting, cliche. Upon returning to the States from an aborted assignment in Chile, for example, Changez suddenly sees his destination in a new light. “…I was struck by how traditional your empire appeared. Armed sentries manned the check post at which I sought entry…once admitted I hired a charioteer who belonged to a serf class lacking the requisite permissions to abide legally and forced therefore to accept work at lower pay; I myself was a form of indentured servant whose right to remain was dependent upon the continued benevolence of my employer.” Melodrama aside, it is difficult to ascertain exactly how these disjointed fragments coalesce with the rest of the narrative.

This is the most egregious of Hamid’s errors, an admittedly minor one in the spectrum of literary flaws, but one that, nonetheless, could just as easily have been uttered by Michael Moore as penned by a serious author. Ultimately, Mohsin Hamid is exactly that; now, if only the filmmaker could take a few notes from him.

#18: The Big Short

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In describing the behavior of Wall Street bankers prior to the financial crisis, many adjectives have been bandied about. Greedy, say some; arrogant, claim others. What is only now beginning to gain ground on these populist declarations of discontent is a third, and far more horrifying, descriptor: stupid. This trait may at first seem less offensive to those of us who flaunt our self-prescribed moral superiority over these perceived miscreants. The reality, however, is anything but comforting. In The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball and Liar’s Poker, dabbles in the thriller genre, often to hilarious effect, as he details the inner workings of a financial world that was truly ill-prepared for its inevitable Waterloo.

I’ll admit it: The Big Short is a very, very entertaining book. Mine is an admission whose sheepishness can only be understood once one has finished reading the book. It reads like a John Grisham novel, yet John Maynard Keynes is a far likelier neighbor on a library shelf. Lewis is profligate in his use of such terms as “big Wall Street firms” (32 occurrences, according to Google Books) and he is wont to transcribe entire conversations whose accuracy is often questionable but whose content leaves the reader in stitches.

Ultimately, it is funny, isn’t it? Here were our best and brightest, as David Halberstam might say, assuring us that our money was safe, that real estate prices would continue to rise, that subprime loans were the healthy product of a heightened ability to reduce risk, not a house of cards upon which much of the global economy now rested precariously. And they were wrong, not because they intentionally lied (though some did), but because they failed to recognize the bright red flags everywhere on (and sometimes off) their own balance sheets.

The Securities and Exchange Commission’s civil lawsuit against Goldman Sachs this week has resulted in even more vitriolic rhetoric against investment bankers and their ilk, a demographic Lewis takes no pains to please in The Big Short. He opens his book with this: “The willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grown-ups remains a mystery to me to this day.” And he ends it on an account of his lunch with an investment banker, his old boss at Salomon Brothers, recounted with equal parts nostalgia and regret. In between, he rips apart much of the industry, railing against “the madness of the machine” and buttressing his anecdotes with footnotes that occasionally take up half the page.

It’s hard to say whom Lewis ridicules more, the bankers or the ratings agencies: while The Big Short is premised on the fact that high-powered bankers failed to research or even understand their own investments, Lewis makes it painfully clear that the foundation upon which all risk analysis rested was the highly coveted — and, it turns out, highly manipulable — ratings from industry leaders such as Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s. According to Lewis, employees of these firms, instead of conducting far-reaching investigations into the nature of subprime collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), simply took at face value much of what the banks told them. And since there were large fees to be had for each rating bestowed on these shadowy financial instruments, Moody’s and S&P had significant incentive to perpetuate the subprime industry.

In one particularly enlightening passage, Steve Eisman, one of the book’s central characters whose disgust for Wall Street types figured prominently into his investing strategy, explained the lack of incentives for analysts at ratings agencies, a misalignment that helped to create and foster the crisis. “‘They’re underpaid,’ said Eisman. ‘The smartest ones leave for Wall Street firms so they can help manipulate the companies they used to work for. There should be no greater thing you can do as an analyst than to be the Moody’s analyst…So why does the guy at Moody’s want to work at Goldman Sachs? The guy who is the bank analyst at Goldman Sachs should want to go to Moody’s. It should be that elite.'”

The Big Short is filled with quotes such as this. And although not all of them are as penetrating or as keenly observant of the recession’s underlying fault lines, each is helpful in piecing together a panorama of the landscape that existed in and around these “big Wall Street firms.” Michael Lewis has not compiled a tell-all here; if he has revealed any industry secret, it is simply the astonishing truth that, in the subprime lending business, there were none. When the dust had settled around our financial ground zero, it soon became apparent that even Wall Street had failed to understand Wall Street. In this, if nothing else, it shares the same fate as Main Street.

#17: Crowdsourcing

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“No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else,” quips Bill Joy, a Sun Microsystems co-founder. This declaration was articulated as a paean to the wisdom of crowds, the subject of Jeff Howe’s 2008 book, Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business. Why limit yourself to a small, expensive subset of the available talent, the argument goes, when a global network of freelancers will gladly do the job better for little or free?

Howe’s enthusiasm is very nearly unequivocal. He predicts that today’s tech-savvy youth will “help accelerate the obsolescence of such standard corporate fixtures as the management hierarchy and nine-to-five workday,” concepts he deems to be “artifacts of an earlier age when information was scarce and all decisions…trickled down from on high.” And Howe’s praise of the community as exemplified in crowdsourcing is so complete that it borders on subservience: “Yes, communities need a decider,” he concedes in his concluding chapter, but while “…you can try to guide the community…ultimately you’ll wind up following them.”

The author’s unabashedly optimistic chronicle of the ascendancy of crowdsourcing (a label he created) brings to mind a phrase once made famous by former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan: “irrational exuberance.” Jeff Howe’s full-fledged advocacy for the crowd’s potential is equally as overreaching as Jaron Lanier’s dire warnings on the same topic. In You Are Not a Gadget, Lanier writes ominously, “We [have]…entered a persistent somnolence, and I have come to believe that we will only escape it when we kill the hive.”

Both authors fail to account for some basic rules of human nature. Lanier laments that “when [digital developers] design an internet service that is edited by a vast anonymous crowd, they are suggesting that a random crowd of humans is an organism with a legitimate point of view.” To which Howe would undoubtedly respond, Damn right. In fact, he explicitly states that “a central principle animating crowdsourcing is that the groups contain more knowledge than individuals.”

Howe and Lanier are each right in their own ways. Crowdsourcing does indeed represent an entirely new model of work, one that transcends business and could upend a sizable chunk of existing corporate practices. Many of Lanier’s fears, while understandable, are not feasible now or in virtually any other conceivable time horizon. And yet he is right that crowdsourcing will never replace the value of specialization. While Howe correctly lauds the democratization of decision-making — for example, aspiring filmmakers are no longer beholden to studio executives’ every whim — his populist celebration of online egalitarianism is not bounded by realistically described limitations. “The crowd possesses a wide array of talents,” Howe writes, “and some have the kind of scientific talent and expertise that used to exist only in rarefied academic environments.”

The key word here is “some.” Howe notes Sturgeon’s Law (“90 percent of everything is crap”) and briefly admits that this may present an inaccurate portrayal of reality: “a number of the people I talked to for this book thought that was a lowball estimate.” Even for the ten or fewer percent that actually do provide reasonably intelligent contributions to the marketplace of ideas, much will be repetitive or non-cumulative. A thousand people with a hobbyist’s interest in chemistry may all eagerly contribute to a forum on noble gases, but it hardly follows that they will achieve any real breakthrough that eludes far more studied experts in the field.

Ultimately, it is not so much the anecdotes that undercut Howe’s thesis, nor is it his own repetition (which, in one particularly egregious case, consisted of several sentences copied wholesale from an earlier section of the book). Instead, it is his idealism that brings to mind countless earlier predictions of technology’s ability to transform human nature, prophesies that have more often than not been proved demonstrably untrue. It remains to be seen what will become of crowdsourcing; will it go the way of the flying cars that American prognosticators naively envisioned over half a century ago? This seems unlikely, and yet so does the author’s vision of a crowdsourcing revolution in business. The truth will likely lie somewhere in the middle, lodged comfortably between Jeff Howe’s crowd-fueled utopia and Jaron Lanier’s “hive mind” hell.

Happy new year

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For those of us who measure the passing of time by the first pitch of successive baseball seasons, our annual celebration is now upon us. Tonight, the boys of summer return. Even better for those of us who plead allegiance to the vaunted red B, they will descend upon Fenway Park in Boston, where the hometown Red Sox host the World Series champion New York Yankees. (My fingers nearly mounted a mutiny as I finished typing that sentence.)

With a pitching rotation that includes newcomer John Lackey, Josh Beckett, and Jon Lester as the first three starters, the Sox are looking to be a team of solid defense and great pitching. For the first time in recent years, however, Boston’s lineup is looking vulnerable. We’ll need either a few career performances from unexpected players, a major acquisition sometime prior to the trading deadline, or both. For many years, the Sox used to be a team built to make it to the playoffs but without the depth to last once they got in. This year they may have the opposite problem.

Tonight, at 8:05 PM, be near a TV. Josh Beckett. C.C. Sabathia. Red Sox-Yankees at Fenway Park. And happy new year.

#16: Americans in Paris

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Americans have long been fascinated with World War II. There are many reasons for this, not the least of which is the United States’ outsized self-portrayal as the conflict’s deus ex machina. However, Charles Glass’ new book, Americans in Paris: Life & Death Under Nazi Occupation, is not merely another ode, in a long line of them, to American wartime heroism. Indeed, it is the moral ambiguity of many of the book’s real-life subjects and their actions that separates this work from the neatly packaged pop culture depictions that characterized, say, the fictional Band of Brothers. (I write this as someone who enjoyed that series and is currently an avid watcher of The Pacific. However, while these series’ entertainment value is indisputable, their historicity is dwarfed by meticulously researched non-fiction.)

Glass, ABC News’ former chief correspondent for the Middle East, has compiled a moving portrait of life on the ground in Paris during the German occupation. Even in borrowing from a wide array of sources, the author admirably pieces together the war years’ disjointed fragments and transforms them into complete narratives. As vignettes within the overarching theme of Paris in the war-torn early 1940s, they combine to form a panorama of a world-class city brought almost, but not entirely, to its knees.

Notable amongst the ensemble cast are Sumner Jackson, a surgeon for the American Hospital in Paris whose dedication to his craft was matched only by his devotion to the Allied cause; Clara de Chambrun, caretaker of the American Library of Paris and detester of both the Nazi invaders and the French résistants; and Sylvia Beach, proprietor of the bookstore Shakespeare & Company and tireless friend of literary giants James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway. But by far the most complex and perplexing character is Charles Bedaux, introduced here as “le millionaire américain.” His business exploits, fueled by an entrepreneurial spirit that launched him to wealth and status as an “efficiency engineer,” consumed all his energies and, eventually, himself.

Although born in France in 1886, Bedaux was naturalized as an American in 1917 and quickly went to work establishing himself as a consultant. While living in St. Louis, Bedaux had an epiphany: “‘I soon found that engineers had assigned units of measurement to power of all sorts — fuel, water, electrical. Why, I wondered, couldn’t a wholly scientific and mathematical measurement of manpower be ascertained?'” As Glass then goes on to explain, the narcissistic Bedaux soon created just such a unit of measurement, and dubbed it the ‘B’ unit, for ‘Bedaux.’ What the businessman lacked in tact, however, he more than compensated for in ingenuity, as his modification of Charles Winslow Taylor’s efficiency methods led to Bedaux’s ascension to the upper rungs of not simply the American, but also the European, social ladder.

It was Bedaux’s association with unsavory individuals and regimes that eventually led to his demise — socially, financially, and even physically. Ultimately, his failures could be traced to his underlying philosophy, an either amoral or immoral worldview (depending on the reader’s own) that found its simplest expression in Bedaux’s own words: “‘A man loves his country. He makes laws for the glory of the flag. He traces the outline of a national ideal he would like to live up to, but his stomach, his need for trade are essentially international. He is a patriot, and a sincere one, but when his money is concerned, he blissfully commits treason.'” Such unabashedly self-interested sentiments, while easily in keeping with modern corporate behavior, are nevertheless as shocking to read openly in a book as they must have been when they were first enunciated decades ago.

And yet the actions of Charles Bedaux were not, in any strict sense of the term, treasonous. (As Charles Glass notes, Bedaux was guilty of “trading with the enemy,” however.) In fact, as the reader discovers late in the book, the ever business-minded Bedaux did take sides in ways that were not immediately apparent as the war dragged on. History is a harsh arbiter, and what made sense at the time will be dissected in ivory towers and living rooms for generations. Perhaps this is the lesson learned from the arguably collaborationist activities of Clara de Chambrun’s son and his wife as well. Indeed, there are innumerable aspects of wartime decision-making that eventually become permanently etched into lore as gallantry or cowardice, loyalty or betrayal. But in these delicate moments, in which every second marks the making of history, one’s legacy is hardly a consideration.

#15: The Ask

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I’m not exactly sure what The Ask was about. The first sentence reads, “America, said Horace, the office temp, was a run-down and demented pimp.” Later, describing the apartment rented by Don Charboneau, the long-estranged son of the protagonist’s college friend: “He had never owned much, but now he was down to the card table, one folding chair, a saucepan, some smudged water glasses, a spoon. Papers lay curled under the radiator.” Sam Lipsyte, the author, celebrates these adjectives of derision (“run-down!” “demented!” “smudged!” “curled!”), even revels in them, and the result is a viscerally repulsive read.

So where was I? Oh, right: the protagonist. That would be Milo Burke, development officer at…well, we don’t know where. This is because, unfortunately, Lipsyte decided to leave the narrating to this pathetic little man, who apparently felt that revealing his university’s identity would be anathema to his nihilist philosophy. (I’m being generous, of course; there’s no way Milo actually has a discernible philosophy.) Thus, we are left with a story of a man whose wife is having an affair, whose job is never really gone after his firing and whose firing is always imminent when he is actually working. Along the way he rekindles a friendship with Purdy Stuart, an old friend from college. The renewed relationship is one of subservience, however, as Milo is actually recruiting Purdy to donate a large sum of money to the university, a task whose outcome will determine Milo’s fate as a development officer. Unfortunately, I could not bring myself to care. Maybe this is because of sentences like, “It might sound ridiculous now, but he had been one of the first to predict that people really only wanted to be alone and scratching themselves and smelling their fingers and staring at screens and firing off sequences of virulent gibberish at other deliquescing life-forms.” Perhaps there is nothing technically wrong with this sentence, other than the fact that it is not interesting. But isn’t that reason enough to stop reading?

Unfortunately, I have trouble putting a book down once I’ve started it: the economic logic of sunk costs has never really penetrated my actual decison-making processes, so I struggled on. I read of Milo’s increasingly strained relationship with his wife; apparently home life becomes somewhat awkward following the revelation of an affair. Persevering readers will also find more about Purdy Stuart, who continues to hang out with old college buddies, literally paying to keep them around, as he fights his way through a present that he never wanted by pretending that the past has yet to end. In other words, Purdy is dealing with a slightly more acute version of the notorious phenomenon known as mid-life crisis.

Perhaps I’m being overly harsh. Parts of The Ask were humorous or even touching. But Lipsyte’s unwillingness to take his own writing seriously undermines his readers’ ability to fare any better, and his overemphasis on dialogue leaves his characters looking and feeling like half-finished caricatures of real people. Some of the basic elements of humanity are there, but you have to squint really hard and ignore the glaring omissions. At some point, it becomes easier to just give up. Considering the fact that Milo Burke has already reached this point by the beginning of the book, anyone who manages to finish reading The Ask deserves a pat on the back simply for finishing ahead of its protagonist.

#14: The Post-American World

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Fareed Zakaria is a very reasonable man. In this sense, the contrast between him and the rest of mainstream American punditry is stark indeed. Coming from anyone else, a book with the title The Post-American World could plausibly entail an exercise in sensationalist doomsday forecasts; from Zakaria, we know that such is not the case. Some conservatives and patriots may disagree with the book’s contents, but it is impossible to dismiss as a self-loathing work of anti-nationalism.

Zakaria has the distinct privilege of combining his position of respect and influence within the court of American public opinion with the nuanced perspectives he has gained from his initial outsider status. In 1982, the author was an eighteen year-old Indian student on a flight to the United States, about to embark on a four-year educational journey in a country where he would eventually settle. “The preceding decade had been a rough one in India,” writes Zakaria, “marked by mass protests, riots, secessionist movements, insurgencies, and the suspension of democracy.”

But something has happened since then — in India, in China, and in many other nations as well. Zakaria calls this something “the rise of the rest,” as “countries all over the world have been experiencing rates of economic growth that were once unthinkable.” Unsurprisingly, given the title of his book, Zakaria is not merely interested in this economic phenomenon as a historical anomaly, but also as an indication of America’s rapidly changing role in the new era. In this, our twenty-first century edition of a brave new world, “the distribution of power is shifting, moving away from American dominance. That does not mean we are entering an anti-American world. But we are moving into a post-American world [emphasis in original], one defined and directed from many places and by many people.”

Instead of wallowing in national self-depression, however, Zakaria welcomes this new period. He notes that the American share of global GDP has remained relatively constant for decades; and he elucidates the truths hidden behind the alarmist (and often misunderstood) statistics about American decline. But while Zakaria’s prognostications leave plenty of space for a bright future, his is not a utopian vision unencumbered by hard facts. (One notable exception is his diagnosis of the American economy: “The economic dysfunctions in America today are real, but, by and large, they are not the product of deep inefficiencies within the American economy.” The first edition of his book was printed in April 2008, just months before the economy bottomed out; a later paperback edition included a new preface predicting that “the current economic upheaval will only hasten the move to a post-American world.”) Indeed, Zakaria levels criticisms in a variety of areas, decrying the United States’ “highly dysfunctional politics,” acknowledging that “the American school system is in crisis,” and dubbing the nation an “enfeebled” superpower. In his final chapter, “American Purpose,” Zakaria asks, “How did the United States blow it? [It] has had an extraordinary hand to play in global politics…Yet, by almost any measure…Washington has played this hand badly. America has had a period of unparalleled influence. What does it have to show for it?”

That is a question whose answer will depend on the person, but Zakaria’s prescription for American healing, while hardly groundbreaking, is based in historical precedent: more multilateralism. Contrary to some who argue that idealism is always the refuge of lesser nations while realpolitik is embraced by hegemons, Zakaria points out that the United States “was the dominant power at the end of World War II, when it founded the United Nations, created the Bretton Woods system of international economic cooperation, and launched the world’s key international organizations. America had the world at its feet, but Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman chose not to create an American imperium.”

Interestingly, Zakaria’s ideas have found traction in the administration of President Barack Obama. The results are mixed: Obama’s extended hand to Iran was met with a clenched fist and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has been left largely unaffected, but Obama was able to broker a deal between the heads of the Chinese and French states at the G-20 summit, and the United States and Russia recently finalized a nuclear arms reduction deal. It remains to be seen exactly what will follow from the American presidency’s renewed emphasis on diplomacy, but early returns indicate some potential for positive results. We may live in a post-American world, but if Fareed Zakaria has any say in the theater of global politics, the United States will be far from playing a bit role.

#13: The Informers

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The Informers is a case study of words: words uttered carelessly, meaningfully, traitorously. It concerns itself with not only the interpretations, but also the appropriateness, of these words, of rhetoric itself, and in so doing questions the way we write and understand histories.

Yes, histories. What Juan Gabriel Vásquez has constructed is a web of intermingling stories, centered on the World War II era and thereafter in Colombia. These narratives alternatively corroborate and contradict; even in recounting the same events, one’s telling is always somewhat different from another’s. Calling on historical orators — from Demosthenes to Jorge Eliécer Gaitán — the author draws attention to the lasting and powerful effects of speech and memory on the lives of those who have spoken and heard.

On the surface, The Informers is the tale of Gabriel Santoro, the son and namesake of a venerated Colombian rhetorician, and his stubborn attempt to recapture and reassemble the missing pieces — the deliberate omissions and deceptions — from his late father’s life. Much of Gabriel’s (the father’s) story is related by a lifelong friend: Sara Guterman, a Jewish German emigré whose father was among the lucky few of his compatriots to successfully invent a new life in Colombia, was instrumental in helping Gabriel (the son) put together the various components that comprised his father’s life.

What is reality to one is fiction to another, however, and it is soon apparent that the son understood very little of the truth of his father’s past. Deep in the throes of an apparently life-ending illness, the senior Santoro tells his son, “Memory isn’t public, Gabriel.” This proclamation is indirectly the result of the dying man’s scathing review of his son’s book, A Life in Exile, which chronicled the life story of Sara Guterman and the struggle of German immigrants to find acceptance in a Colombia beset with war-heightened xenophobia.

The son, however, feels differently than his father on the subject of remembering. Meanwhile, Sara remains almost indecipherable, seemingly ambivalent at times, suspended as she is between the imperative to record a tragedy for posterity and the loyalty she feels to a lifelong friend. What is left in the end is Gabriel the younger’s version of events, a retelling of past cowardice that suggests a personal betrayal of its own. The Informers is neither a political nor a journalistic endeavor, but the ideas within resonate in both arenas, as Vásquez masterfully shoves the public and private spheres into an uncomfortably small space. The result is an unsettling, and highly relevant, set of difficult questions. In an era of unprecedented media ubiquity and the much-ballyhooed shrinking of personal privacy, The Informers provides no easy answers, but at least it has done us the service of starting a necessary conversation.