East is East: PW talks with Martin Jacques

by Parul Sehgal — Publishers Weekly, 9/21/2009

Jacques reveals the implications of China’s assuming the status of the world’s biggest market and most influential superpower in When China Rules the World.

You write that China is playing a long game that’s very subtle and hard for the West to understand. Is this a consciously articulated strategy or a modus operandi central to Chinese consciousness?

I think it’s both. Because the U.S. is such a recent creation, the American timescale is extremely short. China’s civilization goes back 5,000 years, and the Chinese constantly access very distant history to illustrate the problems of the present. Kissinger once asked Zhou Enlai what he thought about the French Revolution, and Zhou Enlai said, “It’s too soon to say.” With that mentality coupled with its size and growth, the balance of power is constantly being reconfigured in China’s favor, and they can be patient. But it’s also conscious strategy; after the “century of humiliation,” they prioritized creating the best possible circumstances for development, and they’ve tried to get on with the countries that they perceive to matter.

According to you, the rise of China will be “profoundly traumatic” for the U.S. Why don’t we hear more about the U.S.’s waning power?

Imperial

By William T. Vollmann. Viking, $55.

Parul Sehgal, Time Out New York/ Aug 13–19, 2009

William T. Vollmann’s big, baggy monster of a book begins with the stories of those who share his singular obsession with Imperial County: the illegal immigrants hurdling the border fences and wading through the fetid New River to reach the poorest area in California. Vollmann seeks a metaphorical ingress into the heart of Imperial, and his sprawling study—which seeks to be an almanac, history and psychic census of the region—is a sensual chaos.

 

That Imperial deserves a substantive treatment is never in doubt. A sliver of desert land that’s been artificially irrigated into prodigious if insecure fertility, the county has a history and a future that can be read as a microcosm of any number of hot topics: immigration, ecology, homeland security, and labor and women’s rights. But Vollmann drowns his readers in detail: oral histories, local songs, newspaper headlines, street signs, medical records, snapshots and statistics on precipitation, the rising salinity of the lakes, cash harvests, crop yields. For all the data, our knowledge of Imperial never accrues. The book’s sections don’t communicate with, let alone build upon, each other; they eddy sluggishly.

An Interview with Michael Sandel

The Examined Life: PW Talks with Michael Sandel

by Parul Sehgal — Publishers Weekly, 8/31/2009

In Justice, Sandel reveals the philosophical roots of contemporary cultural and political debates—and would Kant have defended Bill Clinton during Lewinsky-gate?

What drew you to philosophy?

I’d always been interested in politics, and after college, I thought I’d spend a term reading my way through the history of political philosophy and maybe run for office. But figuring out the meaning of justice, freedom, equality and democracy took longer than I anticipated. I still haven’t been able to disentangle myself from these questions.

How can familiarity with these timeless philosophical debates assist us in decision making? (A rather utilitarian question, I suppose!)

Naming Nature

By Carol Kaesuk Yoon. W.W. Norton, $27.95.

Parul Sehgal, Time Out New York/Issue 727 : Sep 3–9, 2009

All species have an idiosyncratic method—called an umwelt—of perceiving the world: For dogs, the earth is a riot of scents; for bees it is a seductive highway of ultraviolet light. The human umwelt predisposes us to find patterns. Just as Chomsky claimed that our brains are hardwired for grammar, so they are for taxonomy—we have an innate propensity to “perceive clusters” and hierarchical relationships. Even toddlers know how to distinguish a tiger from a tomato, and realize that both a German shepherd and a Chihuahua are dogs.

 

But as New York Times writer Carol Kaesuk Yoon points out in her fascinating new book, science has chipped away at our ability to harness our umwelt. Modern taxonomists have undermined the creative art of naming, moving it out of the realm of the senses and into the laboratory. An extreme example occurred in the 1980s, when a group known as the cladists claimed that fish didn’t exist, arguing that it doesn’t make sense to group together such genetically diverse organisms as tuna, salmon and lungfish.

An Interview with Bruce Bueno de Mesquita

‘Politics Is Predictable’: PW Talks with Bruce Bueno de Mesquita

by Parul Sehgal — Publishers Weekly, 7/13/2009

In The Predictioneer’s Game, Bueno de Mesquita illustrates, with a mathematical model that quantifies self-interest, how we can use game theory to predict—and influence—future events.

When did you become aware of game theory’s potential?

In my first semester of graduate school, I read one of the first important mathematical treatments of political science by William Reichert. Reichert claimed to prove results, and the proof of one of the results was wrong. I discovered the error and became enormously excited that for the first time in my experience in political science, I could make the statement “This is wrong”: not “I think this is wrong” or “It’s my opinion that it’s wrong” or “I don’t agree.” It was just wrong.

Dreaming in Hindi

By Katherine Russell Rich. Harcourt, $26.

Parul Sehgal, Time Out New York

Westerners at a spiritual or career crossroads have long made pilgrimages to India, looking for God or ganja—but grammar? So begins journalist Katherine Rich’s contrarian memoir of transplanting herself from New York to the desert town of Udaipur to learn Hindi. Motivated by a passion “for learning languages and understanding what learning a second language does to the brain,” Rich finds her casual Hindi lessons becoming an obsession. Having survived two bouts with cancer, and now recently fired from her magazine-editing job, Rich admits, “I no longer had the language to describe my own life. So I decided to borrow someone else’s.”

But India proves inconsiderate; to learn its language, Rich must tolerate its men and women (portrayed as lascivious and insipid, respectively). Her vitriol toward her fellow students and her host family erodes the reader’s sympathy.

An Interview with Rebecca Solnit

Paradise Found: PW talks with Rebecca Solnit

by Parul Sehgal — Publishers Weekly, 6/29/2009

In A Paradise in Hell, Solnit surveys responses to disasters and discovers that people finding meaning—even exhilaration—in healing and rebuilding their communities.

What constitutes a disaster? Does the current economic crisis qualify?

It’s a question of scale. Disaster scholars distinguish an emergency—an incident such as a building burning down—from a disaster, which is a regional disruption like Hurricane Katrina. Of course, there are always complications—9/11 directly affected a small part of lower Manhattan, but disrupted the global economy and was used to make major foreign policy shifts. Economic crises can resemble sudden physical disasters—notably in the questioning of the status quo: the Argentinean economic crash of 2001 functioned like a disaster in catalyzing positive change, including a rebirth of civil society. Iceland has had a similar rebirth since its October 2008 economic crash, and in this country, we are seeing interesting improvisation and radicalization around the depression, and I expect we’ll see a lot more.

Why do you think survivors of disasters are depicted as victims even when (as you point out) their testimonies argue so vigorously to the contrary?

Tracy Kidder

Leaving New England: PW profiles Tracy Kidder

by Parul Sehgal — Publishers Weekly, 6/15/2009

Northampton was the perfect place to meet Tracy Kidder.

The winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award (for The Soul of a New Machine, Back Bay, 1981) wrote about Northampton, Mass., in Home Town (Random, 1991), describing it as “the kind of town a lot of Americans think they would like to live in, think they used to live in. The truth is of course that Main Street, USA, doesn’t exist and never did exist, thank God.”

It is Kidder’s particular sleight of hand that renders the familiar mysterious—apparent in his books House (Houghton Mifflin, 1999), chronicling a couple building their own home, and Among Schoolchildren (Avon, 1989), in which he followed a Holyoke, Mass., schoolteacher for a year. But Kidder says, “There’s nothing ordinary about any human being. We all walk around with the most complex structure in the known universe perched on our shoulders. The question of why we do what we do is always very complicated and to me it’s always interesting.” With patience, however, and some sleight of hand of one’s own, Kidder, 63, can be persuaded to admit that his two books to venture outside of New England are devoted to particularly important material.

The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday

By Neil MacFarquhar. Public Affairs, $26.95

Parul Sehgal, Time Out New York 

Neil MacFarquhar (The Sand Café) offers an impressionistic brief of his time in the Middle East—first as the child of engineers based in Libya and later as the Cairo bureau chief for The New York Times. He spotlights ordinary individuals—a Kuwaiti sex therapist, a Lebanese chef, the writers of a sly Saudi sitcom that pokes fun at patriarchal rules, and a host of journalists and professors—bent on extraordinary creative resistance to domestic repression and foreign interference, juxtaposing their efforts with an efficient summary of American blunders in the Mideast. MacFarquhar’s criticisms are reasonable and rooted in his frustration with the U.S.’s poor management of its image: how it contributed to Hizbollah’s rapid ascent, and how certain types of aid are designed to divert money back to American corporations and give rise to a nasty sibling rivalry among recipient nations. For all his immersion, MacFarquhar, thankfully, never goes native; his search for the pulse of the Middle East vies with his quest for “an excellent adventure,” and he delights in eccentricity—Gadhafi’s bevy of all-female bodyguards, for example, or an Egyptian help line that explains the finer points of recent fatwas.

Gabriel García Márquez

By Gerald Martin. Knopf, $37.50.

Gerald Martin’s laudatory biography of Gabriel García Márquez unfurls with cinematic splendor. Readers might feel as if they’ve picked up one of the magical realist’s novels, for here are the family, friends and folktales that the writer fictionalized: the superstitious grandmothers, the solitary patriarchs, the unwittingly alluring schoolgirls and the murder that inspired A Chronicle of a Death Foretold.

Martin is enormously sympathetic in his re-creation of García Márquez’s impoverished childhood, and handles his ensuing incarnations—the reluctant law student in thrall to Woolf and Faulkner, the brothel enthusiast, the leftist friend of Fidel Castro—with clarity and continuity. Accounts of the life dovetail with brilliant précis of Latin American literature and politics. Even if the book’s plea for the writer to be recognized as the successor to Cervantes devolves into hagiography, its scholarship is peerless. Every poem, newspaper editorial and novel is encapsulated and receives masterful analysis, as Martin demonstrates how García Márquez seized on the “essential Latin American problematic of that era: genealogy…a crucial matter in a continent that has no satisfactory myth of origin.”