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California Literary Review

Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category

The Common Secret by Susan Wicklund

by John R. Guthrie

January 2nd, 2008

Her home was invaded in her absence. Both muddy boot prints and anti-abortion pamphlets were left behind. Her driveway was barricaded with barrels of concrete to keep her from going to work. Threatening phone calls and letters arrived regularly. Her daughter’s school was invaded and the child harassed to tears. She endured the death of colleagues who were gunned down by anti-abortion zealots. On occasion local authorities were indifferent to her plight, so an armored vest and a .38 caliber revolver became part of her clinic attire.

Notes From Italy: The Oversized Embassy

by Peter Bridges

November 6th, 2007

Nor, it seems, do Americans get out of their diplomatic fortress the way they used to. Italians say they do not have the American friends and acquaintances that they used to. What do embassy officers do with their time? Like many professionals in this country, they spend hours in front of computer screens, busy with e-mail. That may be work, but it has little to do with representing the United States.

Hanna Rosin Discusses God’s Harvard

by Paul Comstock

October 9th, 2007

“Tensions often arise between secular teachings and Biblical beliefs. Many students are reading, say Kant and Nietzsche for the first time. They may be alarmed, but they also may find those writers intoxicating.”

The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt

by James Abourezk

September 10th, 2007

Mearsheimer and Walt have written an excellent exposition of the Israel Lobby, both in articles and in their most recent book. But they have had to spend a great deal of words and time assuring their readers that they are not anti-Semites, an accusation that has been the main force of the attack on them by the Israel Lobby. There is a well-rehearsed chorus of Israel supporters lying in wait for whoever dares to criticize Israel’s policies, ready to pounce, catlike, and with great force on the unfortunate miscreant. What is interesting is that I have yet to see any of Mearsheimer and Walt’s pro-Israel critics challenge the accuracy of what they have written. Those critics rely on the charge of anti-Semitism, as well as vague, unspecified allegations of inaccuracies in what they have written.

Look Homeward America by Bill Kauffman

by Robert C. Cheeks

July 5th, 2007

He is not much impressed with modernity, rejecting with certitude McDonald’s transfatty fries, the inter-state highway system, television, the decline of literature, and a pernicious militarism that has sponsored the “great American diaspora.”

A Talk With Cullen Murphy, Author of Are We Rome?

by Paul Comstock

June 27th, 2007

“That said, the thinking that lay behind the invasion of Iraq—the notion that we could transform a society more or less overnight, and in the process “jumpstart democracy” in the entire Middle East—was a colossal act of hubris. And it was essentially a Roman act. It was undertaken with America-centric motives, and with little understanding of the people on the receiving end, or of their ability to oppose us. Those haunting words from Velleius—’as if on a picnic’—pretty much sum up our approach to this and to too many other things.”

Dear Minister, America is Headed Down; Can It Reverse Course?

by Peter Bridges

June 13th, 2007

In my view, the Americans’ most serious problem for the longer term is the development of a new class of super-rich, while at the same time their middle and lower classes find themselves increasingly burdened by debt and worried whether their jobs will be “outsourced” to India or China.

Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature by Lewis Dabney

by Ron Capshaw

June 4th, 2007

1916 Princeton, a young and still slender Edmund Wilson was advised by professors to “seek the truth, no matter where it lay or who it hurt.”

The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West by Niall Ferguson

by David Loftus

April 24th, 2007

Niall Ferguson is hot—about as hot as a historian can get.

The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East - by Robert Fisk

by Peter Bridges

April 24th, 2007

The title of Fisk’s new work is a mocking one, taken from a campaign medal his father won as a British officer in the First World War–which few people, and certainly not Fisk, see now as having been a war for civilization.

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