or decades, Yale professor John Lewis Gaddis has been one of the leading historians of the Cold War. My curiosity was piqued then, in 2006, when he produced The Cold War, a relatively compact overview of the era. The fifteen years since the dissolution of the Soviet Union seemed to be just enough time to start taking a more detached historical look back.

Insofar as I am an American born in the 20th Century who just finished reading a history of Russia, much of the ground Gaddis covers felt very familiar. This should be no surprise, since Gaddis' view of the Cold War has been informing conventional wisdom (and his students at Yale) for decades. And despite the passage of time, including the events of 9/11, Gaddis' latest text does not stray much from a traditional analysis of the era. In this case, I think that is a good thing.

Unlike Philip Longworth, who strangely tries to pinpoint America's exclusion of the Soviet Union from the Marshall Plan as the point of no return that triggered the Cold War, Gaddis explores the much deeper and more complex roots of the conflict. First, he points to several World War II-related issues that divided the Allies: the delayed opening of a second front on the continent and the possibility that the Soviet Union would reach a separate peace with Germany; the need to reconcile professed Anglo-American ideals of self-determination with Stalin's territorial demands in Eastern Europe; the occupation of defeated enemies; and the atomic bomb.

Gaddis then turns to a series of security dilemmas, which he defines as:

[S]ituations in which one state acts to make itself safer, but in doing so diminishes the security of one or more other states, which in turn try to repair the damage through measures that diminish the security of the first state. The result is an ever-deepening whirlpool of distrust from which even the best-intentioned and most far-sighted leaders find it difficult to extricate themselves: their suspicions become self-reinforcing.

Because the Anglo-American relationship with the Soviet Union had fallen into this pattern well before World War II ended, it is difficult to say precisely when the Cold War began.

Nonetheless, Gaddis goes on to discuss several post-war situations which fit the definition above: the continued presence of Soviet troops in Iran and Stalin's desire for territorial control of the Turkish straits; the Soviet refusal to participate in the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which prompted George Kennan's "Long Telegram" and led to the U.S. policy of containment; and the subsequent formulation of the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine as the good cop/bad cop implementation of the new policy.

The best chapter in the book is the one least focused on the United States and the Soviet Union. In Chapter IV, title "The Emergence of Autonomy," Gaddis turns his attention to the rest of the world. He first devotes several pages to the origins of the so-called "non-aligned" countries which tried to steer a third course. Gaddis then turns to the various satellite states, and emphasizes that it was often these governments that determined the actions of their superpower sponsors, and not the other way around:

"Non-alignment" was not the only weapon available to small powers seeking to expand their autonomy while living in the shadow of superpowers: so too was the possibility of collapse... Korea's history after the Korean War provides a clear example. [Syngman Rhee's] most effective argument was that if the United States did not support him--and the repressive regime he was imposing on South Korea--that country would collapse, and the Americans would be in far worse shape on the Korean peninsula than if they had swallowed their scruples and assisted him.

The Soviet Union, it is now clear, had a similar experience with Kim Il-sung in North Korea. He was allowed to build a Stalinist state, with its own cult of personality centered on himself, at just the time when Khruschev was condemning such perversions of Marxism-Leninism elsewhere. The country became, as a result, increasingly isolated, authoritarian--and yet totally dependent on economic and military support from the rest of the communist world... Both Washington and Moscow therefore wound up supporting Korean allies who were embarrassments to them.

And who would, of course, end up dragging both the Americans and the Soviets (not to mention the Chinese) into the first hot war of the Cold War era.

One topic I was surprised to find missing from Gaddis' history was the effect of the Cold War on the domestic policy of the United States. In particular, I think it is interesting to consider what impact the Cold War had on the Civil Rights Movement in America. In his stellar From Jim Crow to Civil Rights (and the class he taught at UVA on constitutional history), law professor Michael Klarman demonstrates how intertwined the history of the Cold War and the history of civil rights were:

The importance of the Cold War imperative for racial change is hard to overstate and probably difficult to fully appreciate in our post-Cold War era... Most of the era's domestic issues -- the role of religion in public life, whether to build interstate highways, the public school curriculum (especially once the Soviets beat the Americans into space) -- were debated in Cold War terms. In such an environment, supporting racial reform because of its international implications was perfectly natural.

One cannot be certain, but the Cold War imperative for racial change seems to have been more than just rhetoric. The State Department, not known as a bastion of racial progressivism, strongly urged racial reform for Cold War reasons. In 1949, Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson defended the president's controversial order desegregating the military on the ground that segregation violated democratic principles and was "damaging to our country's reputation with millions of people around the world." The Cold War imperative was front and center when the administration began filing civil rights briefs in the late 1940s. Eisenhower and Kennedy, neither of whom was personally or politically inclined to support genuine racial reform, found Cold War arguments among the most convincing for ending segregation.

Though not the most noble motive for supporting civil rights, this attitude does highlight one of the clearly positive effects that the Cold War had on American society. In the competition to win the hearts and minds of the non-aligned populations of the world, America sought to better its race relations. It worked to close the most significant gap between American rhetoric and American reality. I am not suggesting, nor was Klarman, that the Cold War is the main (or even a relatively major) cause of the gains made by the Civil Rights Movement. Klarman spends dozens of pages analyzing other influential social and political trends. But this demonstrates just how deep an influence the Cold War had in domestic American policy, and Gaddis would have done well to devote some attention to it.

Still, The Cold War is a solid survey of the international side of the conflict, and will serve a particularly valuable role as the era fades deeper into the recesses of history.

omehow I missed the news last week that the company that gets most of my money, Amazon, is buying the company that gets the rest of my money, Abebooks:

Amazon has acquired twelve year old Canadian company Abebooks (formerly the Advanced Book Exchange), the companies just announced. AbeBooks is an online marketplace for books focusing on used, rare and out of print titles for sale by independent booksellers - it currently has 110 million books for sale from 13,500 sellers.

The company has been around since 1996 and fills a niche for Amazon in hard-to-find or out-of-print books. Rather than hold its own inventory, it acts as a digital marketplace for established booksellers.

The thing to watch is whether/how Amazon integrates its Amazon marketplace with Abebooks. Some sellers list on both sites, but there are major differences. The biggest difference from a buyer's perspective is that Amazon forces its sellers to charge a set shipping fee ($3.99) while Abebooks lets sellers choose their own (I've seen everything from free shipping to $8.00 per book).

ith the news out of Villa Park that Gareth Barry is free to leave for Liverpool, the Reds' central midfield looks to be getting a bit crowded. And as we all know, the central midfield at Arsenal is decidedly uncrowded.

The perfect solution that would make everyone happy (especially me)? Liverpool should sell Xabi Alonso:

Arsène Wenger wants Xabi Alonso to form a Spanish midfield axis with Cesc Fábregas at Arsenal next season, provided Liverpool dramatically lower their £18m price for the marginalised playmaker. Arsenal have made an initial approach for the 26-year-old Alonso, who has been told he can leave Anfield for the right price.

He and Fabregas could be our dynamic Spanish duo. Like Arseblogger I rate Alonso higher than Barry, so I'm very excited at this possibility (slender as it may be based on one British newspaper source). Alonso has quality experience in the Premier League and continental competitions, and is a first team international. Plus, that's a pretty cool name. Come on Arsene, just buy him already!

t was a sad coincidence that I was in the midst of reading a history of Russia when I heard that Alexander Solzhenitsyn had died. I had just finished the chapter on the decline of the Romanov empire when I decided to take a break and have some dinner. While I waited for the stove to heat up, I checked the news online and saw the story. When I returned to Philip Longworth's Russia, it was not more than fifty pages before Solzhenitsyn's name popped up.

And he was mentioned in an interesting context. Longworth listed him as one of the "few" dissidents in the Soviet Union, where "there was no sign of serious discontent." This comes at the start of an extended analysis on how surprising the rapid disintegration of the Soviet Union was, considering how well-functioning it appeared to be:

As late as the 1970s and even in the 1980s there was no obvious indication of impending disaster. Indeed, the auguries read well. The Soviet Union was as mighty in weaponry as its only rival; surprising as it may seem, its population was as contented as that of the United States; and there was hardly a ripple of dissidence or nationalism anywhere in the Empire.

Surprising indeed, and consider me unconvinced by Longworth's thin sourcing. It may or may not be true, I am not a Russia expert, but this defense of life in the Soviet Union comes near the end of a book in which Longworth seeks to either minimize or rebut many of the great sins committed by the various Russian empires and its rulers.

Discussing Ivan the Terrible, he states that while "Ivan was indeed responsible for terrible massacres," so were the Spanish conquistadors, Lorenzo de' Medici, Louis XI, and Queen Mary. As such, Longworth argues that Ivan should not "be judged outside the context of his own turbulent and violent times." Perhaps, though it is only a paragraphs late that Longworth concedes that the "murder of Ivan's opponents and suspected opponents had begun in 1563... In effect Ivan was given carte blanche to punish those who disobeyed him and anyone he considered a traitor -- without the formality of a trial. Never fear, however:

The purge was not the whim of a half-crazed paranoiac, which is the line of one popular genre of literature about Ivan. His plan was to eliminate opposition to his exercise of autocracy, which he deemed essential if Russia were to fulfill its imperial potential.

If Longworth is just rebutting the specific claim of mental illness, that is one thing; though is it worth mentioning that Ivan "killed his own eldest son in a fit of rage." But to suggest that Ivan cannot be condemned for his bloody reign either because everyone else was doing it, or because it was justified by his autocratic ambition seems far too sweeping a pardon for Ivan's behavior. Longworth seems almost eager to justify the death and destruction:

Advantage was also gained from Ivan's massacres, for they had helped to complete the revolution in landholding begun by the Tsar's predecessors.

As long as there was a reason, I guess. Longworth is similarly blasé about anti-semitism in Russia and Russian pogroms against Jews. For the most part he simply fails to discuss these issues. When he does, he is quick to make clear that it was not Russia's fault:

Hostility to Jews had been imported into Russia, as into every other Christian country, with the writings of the Church Fathers. Yet Russians themselves were no more anti-Semitic than other European peoples, and less so than many... Anti-Semitism in the Empire was for the most part characteristic of certain subject peoples rather than the Russians themselves, having been entrenched for centuries among Ukrainians, Balts, and Poles.

And there you have basically the only paragraph in the whole book about the treatment of Jews. Don't look for "pogrom" in the index, you won't find it. The only mention of pogroms is the Khmelnytsky Uprising in which Cossacks and Ukrainians killed tens of thousands of Jews. Only the briefest reference to the Pale of Settlement, and none about Tsar Alexander III's May Laws, setting harshly discriminatory policies against Jews, the expulsion from Kiev, or the Kishinev pogrom.

Longworth glosses over other Russian missteps as well. Thus the discussion of World War I moves quickly from a brief mention that Nicholas II made "a series of questionable appointments and decisions" to the fighting itself. Longworth makes no reference to Russia's pre-war support for Serbia or its full mobilization order, which many credit with triggering the broader conflict. I am not suggesting that Russia was more responsible that Austria-Hungary, or Germany, or Serbia itself, but the omission seems notable in light of Longworth's diligence in analyzing the causes of other Russian wars, such as the Crimean War and World War II.

It came as no surprise then, after this perpetual defense of Russia, that Longworth places the blame for the Cold War squarely on the shoulders of the West. But according to Longworth, the Cold War was not caused by disagreement over how Europe should be governed (though he is quick to point out that "Stalin stuck to the letter of his agreement with the Western Powers), or even the ideological tensions between capitalism and communism:

[T]he Cold War could have been avoided even after Churchill's 'Iron Curtain' speech of March 1946. The curtain fell only over a year later, when the Marshall Aid programme was introduced to help Western European countries to recover from the war. Its terms had been designed to be unacceptable to the Soviet Union and its followers... So, when the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia applied for Marshall Aid, and learned that as beneficiaries they would be subject to public American scrutiny on a collective basis, like all other beneficiaries, they withdrew. It was, after all, unthinkable that the Power which had done most to defeat the common enemy should be exposed to what was tantamount to public humiliation.

The Marshall Plan was undoubtedly a major tool in the United States' new policy of containment. But to suggest that this caused the Cold War, rather than to acknowledge it was a weapon in the already-burgeoning conflict, is just silly. Longworth is laughably suggesting that the terms of the Marshall Plan, and the Soviet Union's inability to get cash for itself, were more responsible for the Cold War than the underlying post-war political tensions in Europe and the ideological divide between the American sphere and the Soviet one. I'll have more on this soon, as I've just started John Lewis Gaddis' recent The Cold War. Suffice it to say he tells a different story.

Longworth is also forgiving of the flaws of Vladimir Putin's early reign. He acknowledges that Putin's polices "were certainly authoritarian, but they were not directed towards a restoration of an all-encompassing state sector nor to the suppression of democracy as some suggested." You see, it was the good kind of authoritarianism. The best line:

In December 2003 Putin won an overwhelming endorsement from the electorate. Managed democracy was working. It might not meet the highest standards of constitutional politics, but was no worse a travesty than the American presidential election of 2000 had been.

Wow. Now I am no defender of Bush v. Gore. I thought it was awful law then, I think it is awful law now. But I think it bears no equivalence to an election where the incumbent wins 71% of the vote in the absence of free speech or a free press.

Perhaps it is I who have approached the book with a slanted perspective; after all, I am an American descended from Polish Jews. And perhaps Longworth is struggling against a perceived Russophobia that he feels compelled to combat at every turn. But the angle taken is so constantly pro-Russian, and so poorly sourced at exactly these pivotal moments, that it comes across more like whitewashing than a legitimate defense.

This posture is unfortunate in light of the book's overall strength (which I would have preferred to be able to emphasize), and costs Russia a full star in my rating. Longworth covers a tremendous period of time, from the 9th century to the present, and does so at a modest, measured pace. He generally does well in identifying the key actors and events, though the book definitely presumes a modest familiarity with European history.

From the start, Longworth consciously focuses heavily on the political and military history of the Russian state/empire. There is little discussion of social or cultural issues. Religion is only discussed insofar as the Orthodox church played a political role in Russia, or when the faith of particular groups affected their loyalties either toward or away from Moscow. But this is a 300-page book, and it accomplishes what it needed to, aside from the bias described above; I've got Figes and Service to fill in the details. If Longworth had just stuck to the facts, he would have succeeded admirably.

ad news from Moscow: Alexander Solzhenitsyn has died. He was a Nobel laureate and a literary giant. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is one of my favorite books and has been since I first picked it from a summer A.P. English reading list more than ten years ago; Cancer Ward is excellent as well. I own a copy of The First Circle, waiting to be read.

Solzhenitsyn was not afraid to speak truth to power, be it the Soviet regime that imprisoned him, or, in his infamous speech at Harvard's 1978 commencement, modern Western culture. His voice will be missed.

pparently, William Gallas will keep the Arsenal captain's armband for the coming season. While I am disappointed that it won't be Fabregas or Toure, I don't see that Wenger had much choice, even if he were inclined to follow my sage advice. Considering Gallas' Birmingham tantrum last season, I can only imagine his behavior if he were demoted.

News from another source of controversy: Emmanuel Adebayor says he wants to stay:

"Now I can tell everyone that, yes, I will sign a contract," Adebayor told the club's official website.

"I never told anyone I would be leaving this club, never ever. I'm very happy we've found a solution."

Adebayor added: "I have three years left on my contract and I'm putting two or three years more, so I'm very happy being part of this family."

Well, I will believe it when I see it. Adebayor and his agent have been nothing but trouble this summer, and part of me wants Wenger to show him the door. Nevertheless, he is a talent, and it appears he has lowered his previously outrageous wage demands:

Adebayor has been tracked by AC Milan, Barcelona and Real Madrid this summer, but decided to stay in London after Arsenal agreed to increase his wages to about £70,000 a week.

That's quite a bit lower than the £100,000 a week that Adebayor reportedly demanded, and is apparently what Arsenal has been offering for weeks. It would still be a significant raise (double, in fact), but who is to say he does not deserve that after the season he had? I do not want to reward his bad off-season behavior, but there are really only two choices: sell him, and lose our most productive striker from last season, or sign him to a new long-term contract so that the fans and the team have a reason to welcome him back.

ince it is nearly impossible to imagine most American newspapers running a feature article on the popularity of our professional historians (or anything about historians at all), I am almost embarrassed to link to this article from Britain's Sunday Times asserting the superiority of British historians:

British historians are writing more fluently than ever, and with authority, on subjects people want to read about. Furthermore, with the decline in university funding, they are more professional and commercially orientated than they used to be. A decade ago, few academic historians had agents; now all the powerhouse agencies have a small but lucrative clutch of professional historians whose books they know they can sell worldwide.

I love British historians, and own many of the titles listed in the article, including Ian Kershaw's two-volume Hitler, Antony Beevor's The Battle for Spain, and Christopher Clark's Iron Kingdom. I will read almost anything written by Martin Gilbert or John Keegan (absent from the article as non-academics). I also recently read the excellent Lincoln written by Richard Carwardine, a professor at Oxford; British historians are skilled at examining their former colonies as well (in fact, Carwardine's book won the Lincoln Prize).

In contrast, think about the most talented Americans: Gordon Wood or James McPherson or David Kennedy. It is very tempting to generalize that the best American historians write about America, while the best British historians write about the world.

hen I was twelve years old, I participated in a student exchange program in Japan. I lived with a Japanese family for two weeks, went to school with the children, and visited Tokyo, Mount Fuji, and some very cool Shinto shrines. My lifelong fascination with Asia, and Japan in particular, originated from this trip. It was my first international travel, and it opened my eyes to how different, and how similar, the rest of the world is.

My interest in Asia has been largely contained to the cultural realm. I am a big fan of Asian cinema (from Kurosawa to Stephen Chow), went through a brief (but intense) anime phase, and have been deeply involved in Zen Buddhism since college. My historical knowledge of the region is must more limited. I got a heavy dose of Chinese history from the Teaching Company's "From Mao to Yao: 5000 Years of Chinese History" which I listed to during my commutes to Fort Benning last year, and a basic overview of contemporary China from Jasper Becker's very flawed The Chinese.

Japan's history remained more of a mystery to me. My knowledge of World War II gave me some sense of Japan's military history, at least in the post-Pearl Harbor years, but the rest was unknown. To remedy this, I purchased two books: Marius Jansen's very thick The Making of Modern Japan and Andrew Gordon's slimmer A Modern History of Japan. The books cover the same chronological period, from the rise of the Tokugawa shogunate around 1600 to the present day. While Jansen spends 333 pages getting to the Meiji Restoration, Gordon is there on page 61; Gordon seemed the better place to start.

I have previously discussed one of Gordon's major themes: the rise of Japanese nationalism and how it was shaped by tensions with the West after the Opening of Japan. As the turn of the century came and went, Japanese nationalism took a particularly militant turn, with wars against China, Russia, and the annexation of Korea in just a fifteen-year span.

While some blame must be laid on the West for the imperialist example it set, internal developments in Japan were of great significance. Furthermore, the rapid transformation of Japan in the late nineteenth century, from an isolated island to a world power, created new and exacerbated existing social, economic, and political tensions:

Three related projects of Japan's modernizing elite provided the context for the unexpectedly turbulent politics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the drive for empire, the industrial revolution, and policies of nation-building.

Imperialism shaped domestic politics in large part because it was expensive... As the government mobilized people behind wars it unwittingly fostered the belief that the wishes of the people, whose commitment and sacrifice made empire possible, should be respected in the political process.

The rise of industrial capitalism in late nineteenth-century Japan brought on a related set of politically important changes... Industrialization then produced a growing class of wage laborers, skilled male workers as well as female textile workers. These people tended to cluster in the cities, especially Tokyo and Osaka. They played key roles in political agitations of the early twentieth century.

The impact of nation-building programs on politics was also profound... Electoral politics encouraged a vigorous partisan press, political parties, and other practices of democratic political systems: speech meetings and rallies, speaking tours and demonstrations. By the 1890s, hundred of legal, open political rallies were convened each year in major cities. This was something new in Japanese history.

Unfortunately, Japan's democratic institutions were budding at the same time its imperialist ambitions were rising, ensuring inevitable tensions between a heightened security environment and the instability of democratic politics. This instability increased dramatically in the early twentieth century, with the rise of popular protest movements (from socialists and feminists to hard-liners clamoring for expanded military aims) and violent riots on a nearly annual basis.

The domestic and international realms were further altered by the First World War, which brought dramatic gains to Japanese industry after Asia was largely cut off from European traders. These gains were temporary, however, and Japan's economy struggled in the late 1920s, only to be compounded by worldwide depression at the end of the decade. In the face of such trauma, the Japanese opted for stability and security:

[B]eginning with the years from 1929 to 1932, a combination of shocks--economic depression, intense social conflict, military expansion, and the assassination of prime ministers and leading capitalists--transformed Japan's political system. By the end of the 1930s, independent political parties, business associations, producer cooperatives, labor unions, and tenant unions were replaced by a series of state-controlled mass bodies intended to mobilize the nation for its "holy war" with China and bring harmony and order at home.

It is impossible to overstate just how much Japan's experience of World War II was primarily a conflict with China, not a conflict with the United States, contra the U.S.-centric view of the world. Thus many Japanese historians date the start of the "Fifteen-Year War" to the Manchurian Incident of 1931, which led to full-scale warfare with China by 1937. Animosity with the United States was an ancillary consequence of Japanese aggression on the continent:

Tensions between the United States and Japan had been building for some time. Throughout the 1930s, the Americans supported Chinese self-determination with strong words, but they had committed no significant resources to the Nationalists... But in July 1939, hoping to send a signal of resolve that would deter Japanese expansion, Roosevelt broke off the Japanese-American commercial treaty. This step freed the United States to place an embargo on exports to Japan, if deemed necessary.

It was deemed necessary after the Japanese used its Nazi alliance to gain Vichy France's permission to enter Indochina. When Japan fully occupied the peninsula in July 1941, the U.S. escalated its embargo and, with international cooperation, cut off Japan's foreign oil supplies. The Japanese responded at Pearl Harbor, of course, followed by the Pacific War, the atomic bombs, and the occupation of Japan. Gordon makes an interesting point regarding the long-term consequences of Japanese aggression within Asia:

Initial hopes among Indonesians, Filipinos, and Vietnamese that Japan would forcefully promote national liberation were betrayed. Even so, the brief interlude of Japanese control had an important long-run impact. Independence movements organized during the war, whether with inconsistent Japanese aid or in the face of Japanese repression, survived into the postwar era. They ultimately doomed the continuing hopes of the French, Dutch, and British for a return to the prewar system of colonial control.

Quite a bit of irony there. Militant Japanese nationalism was initially inspired by their experience at the hand of Western imperialists, led the Japanese on their own doomed conquest throughout the continent, but still ended up crippling the Western colonies in Asia. This is a particularly intriguing consequence knowing what we know about the subsequent history of the Indochine peninsula.

There are revelations like this scattered throughout Gordon's text, which gives an effective overview of modern Japan. These gems are often overwhelmed, however, by his semi-encyclopedic approach to the revolving cast of politicians, business leaders, and bureaucrats, and the movements they led. Fortunately there is a good index, as well as appendices listing the prime ministers as well as the post-1945 Diet elections.

Covering 400 years in 300 pages necessitates a quick chronological pace, but Gordon sometimes moves so swiftly that it is difficult to catch the thread of his analysis. While he does well to expedite the discussion of World War II, which is well covered elsewhere, I would have welcomed a better foundation of Sino-Japanese relations over the years, and a deeper investigation into the role (real and perceived) of the Emperor of Japan. In addition, Gordon's attention to religion tends to focus on the shifting balance of power between Buddhism and Shintoism, rather than the substance of those faiths and how they influenced the Japanese people and their leaders.

A good place to start for those interested in recent Japanese history, but I look forward to the depth of Jansen's book.

ohn Banville writes beautiful prose, and his Booker prize-winning The Sea is no exception. Even those who disliked the book seem compelled to grant him that (Michiko Kakuktani excepted). In addition to a master of style, Banville also seems like a bit of a jerk:

'It is nice," said John Banville on Monday night, "to see a work of art win the Booker prize."

This, of course, moments after his book had won the Booker. An air of superiority is an expected sin with an artist, though not usually worn so openly as this. Is it deserved in this case?

Banville openly displays the breadth and depth of his intelligence in his writing, but a large vocabulary does not a great novel make (thus Kakutani's complaint that The Sea's narrator "talks like someone with a thesaurus permanently implanted in his brain"). The real question is whether Banville puts his words to worthy effect. The Sea is the second Banville novel I have read, having tangled with The Book of Evidence a couple years back. That novel, short-listed for the Booker, shares the lyricism of The Sea, but is notably more dark and dense, as one might except for a book narrated by a murderer from his jail cell.

The Sea has a more ethereal feel to it, much of it spent in self-conscious memories of the narrator's youth. Max Morden, recently widowed, has recently returned to Ballyless, the seaside village where his family summered when he was a child. He rents a room in a house called the Cedars, which in his childhood had been the vacation residence of the Grace family. After a brief, foreboding meditation on the sea, the narration begins with a foggy introduction to that family:

The first thing I saw of them was their motor car, parked on the gravel inside the gate. It was a low-slung, scarred and battered black model with beige leather seats and a big spoked polished wood steering wheel... The front door of the house stood wide open, and I could hear voices inside, downstairs, and from upstairs the sound of bare feet running on floorboards and a girl laughing. I had paused by the gate, frankly eavesdropping, and now suddenly a man with a drink in his hand came out of the house. He was short and top-heavy, all shoulders and chest and big round head, with close-cut, crinkled, glittering-black hair with flecks of premature grey in it and a pointed black beard likewise flecked. He wore a loose green shirt unbuttoned and khaki shorts and was barefoot. His skin was so deeply tanned by the sun it had a purplish sheen.

After this teasing glimpse the novel begins its jumbled and irregular rotation between three general timeframes: the youthful summer at Ballyless with the Grace family, the final months in the life of Max's wife Anna, and Max's present stay at the Cedars. The setting switches with little obvious structure, reflecting the troubled mind of the narrator in his struggles to make sense of the recent loss of his wife and the memories that haunt him.

It is only later that we get a fuller glimpse of the Graces: Carlo and Connie, their twin children Chloe and Myles, and Rose, the nanny (of sorts):

I first saw her, Chloe Grace, on the beach. It was a bright, wind-worried day and the Graces were settled in a shallow recess scooped into the dunes by wind and tides to which their somewhat raffish presence lent a suggestion of the proscenium... Mr. Grace, Carlo Grace, Daddy, was wearing shorts again, and a candy-striped blazer over a chest that was bare save for two big tufts of tight curls in the shape of a miniature pair of widespread fuzzy wings... The blond boy, the swinger on the gate--it was Myles, I may as well give him his name--was crouched at his father's feet, pouting moodily and delving in the sand with a jagged piece of sea-polished driftwood. Some way behind them, in the shelter of the dune wall, a girl, or young woman, was kneeling on the sand, wrapped in a big red towel, under the cover of which she was trying vexedly to wriggle herself free of what would turn out to be a wet bathing suit.. I noticed too that the boy Myles was keeping sidelong watch, in the evident hope, which I shared that the girl's protective towel would slip. She could hardly be his sister, then.

Indeed, that is Rose, whose connection with the family is only vaguely conveyed. The remaining pair, Mrs. Grace and her daughter Chloe, the soon-to-be objects of Max's boyhood affections, are given more extended exposition over the course of the novel. Indeed, the greater portion of the book is spent in memories of that summer, rather than the more recent scenes involving Anna, or the present return to the Cedars.

At first blush this seems odd: why emphasize that the narrator is recently-widowed if the majority of the novel will be spent in the distant past, before he had met his wife? It appears that Max can only approach his recent loss cautiously, tangentially, and for brief moments. The physical return to Ballyless is accompanied by a psychological return to the summer of his youth, which is basically just an escape from his grief and loss: a physical escape from the home he shared with his wife and a psychological escape from thought of her death. As the story of what happened that summer in Ballyless unfolds, it becomes clear why those particular memories remain especially vivid, and why they are brought to the front of his mind by the recent loss of his wife. Interspersed in this extended recollection are the fragments of Max's raw feelings about his wife's death as they bubble to the surface, the memory of his last months with her, and the state he has been left in by her death and his flight to Ballyless.

This study on the motives and machinations of memory is interesting and largely successful. It does seem to this reader that Banville's vocabulary, while no reason for the scorn heaped by Kakutani, unnecessarily weighs down the text. Banville is right to resist the anti-intellectual populist tendency to dumb everything down, but his overcompensation places esotericism on an undeserved pedestal of its own. This book is worth the effort, but bring your thesaurus.

ust a few days after Arsene Wenger said he wanted to sign another midfielder, Arsenal has gone and... you guessed it... signed another midfielder: Portugal Under-21 Amaury Bischoff.

Considering this summer's loss of Flamini, Hleb, and Gilberto from the Arsenal midfield, and the general obsession we fans have with the transfer season, this would normally be grounds for great excitement. But let's just say that my eyebrows are raised at this:

He only ever made one senior appearance for Bremen, in a 2007 Uefa Cup tie against Celta Vigo.

Now this was news about four weeks ago, so maybe this is not the signing Arsene Wenger was talking about (fingers crossed). Bischoff left Bremen at the end of his contract, so it is unclear what transfer fee, if any, will be owed by Arsenal.

I like his versatility and his price, but when did we start poaching the Bundesliga bench?

y wife and I have been making the most of my unexpected return from Kuwait, and last night we saw the musical version of "The Color Purple" at the Fox Theatre. The Alice Walker book is a personal favorite, so my hopes were definitely tempered by reservations about how a book with so many richly drawn characters and such a dramatic personal journey for the protagonist would be successfully condensed into a two-act performance.

The short answer is, it was not. The sets and costumes were beautiful, most of the songs hit just the right pitch, and the performances were generally quite good (Felicia Fields steals the show as Sophia). But the novel portrays nearly the entire life of its protagonist, Celie, from the depths of pain and despair at the hands of her abusive father and husband, to the peaks of joy and relief when she declares her independence and when she is reunited with loved ones. The overly-condensed tale told in the musical version severely flattens this emotional range, in sometimes unnatural ways. The character redemption and reunions which provide the dramatic climax and catharsis in the book are quite jarring in the musical, and simply do not ring true. This dislodges the suspension of disbelief necessary to fully submerge into the depths of Celie's journey.

The musical might be more enjoyable for those who have not read the book, although I question whether one can make sense of the plot at all without that gap-filling knowledge. I liked the music, I loved the set production, and Felicia Fields' performance was almost worth the money itself. And it is impossible not to appreciate any evening spent at the Fox. But the strongest feeling I got from the night was the urge to pull the book out and relive the genuine experience of Alice Walker's creation.

ow I am not saying that I actually caused this, but can it really be a complete coincidence that just as I was wondering when the Booker longlist would be released (having finished John Banville's The Sea), I find that it was released today? The list:

The White Tiger - Aravind Adiga
Girl in a Blue Dress - Gaynor Arnold
The Secret Scripture - Sebastian Barry
From A to X - John Berger
The Lost Dog - Michelle de Kretser
Sea of Poppies - Amitav Ghosh
The Clothes on Their Backs - Linda Grant
A Case of Exploding Mangoes - Mohammed Hanif
The Northern Clemency - Philip Hensher
Netherland - Joseph O'Neill
The Enchantress of Florence - Salman Rushdie
Child 44 - Tom Rob Smith
A Fraction of the Whole - Steve Toltz

This list is notably light on the regular "heavyweights," like Carey, McEwan and Coetzee (only Carey actually had a book in contention); Rushdie seems to be carrying the load for the perennials. The shortlist will be announced on September 9, with the winner announced on October 14. I would put good money on Netherland making the shortlist, and decent money on it winning the whole thing.

UPDATE: What do you know, the bookmakers agree.

aving heard nothing positive from anyone who has actually used Windows Vista, it is far past time for Microsoft to attempt to re-introduce the product. I was so weary of it that we purposely "downgraded" to Windows XP on the new Thinkpad my wife bought me last year (an option discontinued by Microsoft on June 30). And considering John Cole's initial frustrations yesterday, I'm glad I did. XP works for me. But at least Microsoft is acknowledging the problems:

"We know a few of you were disappointed by your early encounter,” the company says on the site. “Printers didn't work. Games felt sluggish. You told us — loudly at times — that the latest Windows wasn't always living up to your high expectations for a Microsoft product. Well, we've been taking notes and addressing issues.”

That does not mean I am going to run out and get it. In fact, I doubt I will upgrade the operating system at all, so my first experience with Vista will come with my next computer. Considering my last Thinkpad was going strong after five years, Microsoft may well be onto its next product before I come aboard.

n interesting theme of A History of Modern Japan is the rise of Japanese nationalism. Not just the jingoistic variety of the 1930s, but the basic sense of nationhood that most of us take for granted. For example, one of America's heroic national myths is that a country of immigrants became a melting pot where we are all Americans first, overcoming our differences. In this post-colonial world, we have seen numerous countries struggle with the tension between nationalism and arbitrarily-drawn borders: think of the break-up of Yugoslavia or the violence in Iraq. We usually attribute this difficulty to the problem of merging such disparate racial/ethnic/religious groups under one umbrella.

It comes as a surprise then that a country like Japan, an island that has had a basically stable, homogeneous population for centuries, did not develop a true national identity until well into the 19th century. In discussing the "unequal treaties," imposed on Japan by the Western powers (like the Opium War treaties in China), Andrew Gordon emphasizes that the humiliation felt by the Japanese did not stem from deeply-felt nationalism:

[I]t would be misleading to conclude simply that these treaties trampled a preexisting national pride and sovereignty. Rather, from the early 1800s through the 1860s, the very process of dealing with the pushy barbarians created modern Japanese nationalism. Among shogunal officials, in daimyo castles, and in the private academies where politically concerned samurai debated history and policy, a new conception took hold of "Japan" as a single nation, to be defended and governed as such."

What this suggests is that national identity is only necessary, or even useful, in an oppositional relationship. It only makes sense to prioritize our status as Americans when our primary comparison is with non-Americans. Thus the revolutionary-era America sees most former colonists identifying strongly with their individual states rather than the new nation, and antebellum tensions inspired the Yankee and Dixie labels.

So long as Japan remained relatively isolated and free of foreign exposure, there was little need to define oneself as Japanese. Japanese as opposed to what? For the same reason, there was no need to explore what it even meant to be Japanese. It was much more important to identify with one's daimyo, the local feudal ruler. Only with the humiliation of the treaties, and the need to come to terms with this treatment at the hands of foreigners, did the Japanese become Japanese and start thinking about what that meant:

Beginning in the mid-1880s, a drive to preserve or revive a so-called traditional Japanese culture emerged in a mood of confrontation with Western-oriented reformers... As this happened, many older cultural forms were dramatically reshaped. Later generations came to view these as "traditional" and typically Japanese. In the process they articulated new concepts of "Japanese-ness." The Noh theater, for example, survived in part because government officials promoted it as a Japanese parallel to Western opera... Modern martial arts such as judo, sports such as sumo wrestling, and arts such as the cultivation of bonsai plants were both transformed in practice and took on symbolic meaning as emblems of Japanese-ness for the first time."

It is safe to say that these efforts were successful: Noh theater, sumo wrestling, and bonsai plants continue to be strongly symbolic of Japanese culture to this day. Of course, the character of this rising Japanese nationalism was not entirely benign. As the Japanese bridled against the influence of the colonial Western powers, many Japanese came to believe that Japan should not just be free of Western influence, but strong enough to emulate their imperialism:

[T]he Meiji rulers accepted a geopolitical logic that led inexorably toward either empire or subordination, with no middle ground possible. They saw the non-Western world being carved up into colonial possessions by the strong states of the West. They decided that Japan had no choice but to secure its independence by emulating the imperialists... As this doctrine took root in a world of competing powers, it contained a built-in logic of escalation. Conceivably Japanese leaders could have defended national independence and prosperity in Asia by promoting trade and emigration with both neighbors and distant nations, without seeking an imperial advantage. But no leaders believed this was possible. The behavior of other powers hardly encouraged them to change their minds.

While this does not justify the Japanese aggression to come, it raises interesting questions about the West's culpability in setting such poor precedents in its treatment of the world. How else should the Japanese have seen the interaction of nation-states other than through the ruler/ruled paradigm with which the Western powers divided up the world? As they developed their own sense of racial superiority vis-a-vis the rest of Asia, why shouldn't they take up the Japanese Man's Burden and dominate their inferior neighbors on the continent? Little surprise then that this is just what happened in the coming decades.

uly is a particularly stupid time to be paying much attention to national polling of the presidential election. After all, Michael Dukakis was up by seventeen points in July. But in case you needed more evidence, here are four polls released in the last 24 hours:

Obama (D) 51%, McCain (R) 39% (Research 2000)
Obama (D) 48%, McCain (R) 40% (Gallup)
Obama (D) 48%, McCain (R) 45% (Rasmussen)
McCain (R) 49%, Obama (D) 45% (USA Today/Gallup)

Now that last poll has been filtered through a pretty questionable "likely voter" model (Obama is up 47-44 among registered voters, for a seven point swing between RV and LV). But still, what possible rational reaction can you have to these numbers other than to shrug your shoulders and pray for November to come soon?

here seems to be a consensus that Wuthering Heights is a book that must be read. So say high schools across this nation, the New Lifetime Reading Plan, and the authors who voted for the 100 Most Meaningful Books. As this book makes clear, however, just because something must be read does not mean it must be enjoyed.

The surface problem with Wuthering Heights is that the characters are just so horrifically unlikeable. There is simply no one to identify with: Mr. Earnshaw is a doddering fool who overtly favors his adopted child, Heathcliff, to the detriment of his biological children: Catherine, who grows up wild and self-centered, and Hindley, who grows up spiteful and bitter. It does Heathcliff no favors, either, giving him a taste of the glories of monied life before Earnshaw's death and Hindley's return doom him to the subservience his low birth would seem to dictate. The Linton children are weak, vain, and walk blindly into the wicked webs that issue forth from the Heights. Even the primary narrator, the servant Ellen Dean, is unable to fully scrub her own defects from the story, in which she is complicit in the interweaving tragedies that sweep the two families. It is only with the next generation, in the closing chapters of the book, that pity or hope seems at all appropriate.

Heathcliff, the driving force of the novel, defies the expectation that there must be some hidden romantic soul that will eventually break through his troubled veneer and make him the hero of the tale. Instead, his evil simply grows and grows, testing the outer limits of the reader's sympathy with each fresh atrocity.

Though this makes Heathcliff quite detestable by the book's end, it could work. There is, after all, no requirement that characters be likable. The length and depth of his Achilles-like rage is impressively portrayed. So if Heathcliff's thirst for vengeance were justifiable, or even just believable, the novel would really work.

But that's the problem that lurks beneath the surface. The entire plot basically hinges on one point: that Heathcliff and Catherine were truly in love. That is the only way Catherine's marriage to Edgar Linton is such a betrayal, the only way Heathcliff's multi-generational devotion to revenge bears any sense of justice. But it just does not seem true. There is nothing about the way Heathcliff and Catherine interact that strikes me as love. Mutated obsession, yes. But not love. The childhood scenes take place too fast, the shifts in the balance of power too sudden, to get any sense of why the Earnshaw household is the way it is, or how love could blossom under that roof.

And without real, genuine love, this is essentially a book about a bunch of psychological defectives torturing each other and their children. The book does have its strengths. As I said, the endurance of Heathcliff's villainy is breathtaking. The claustrophobic setting of the novel and the incestuous relationships of its inhabitants play off each other quite effectively (it's easy to forget there is even a world beyond the moors, let alone other people). These strengths, however, can not mask the basic defects of the plot.

ne of the paralegals in my office has been begging me for days to make some plain chocolate chip cookies for her. This was a bit of a challenge, since all of the recipes I normally use contain oatmeal, or walnuts, or multiple varieties of chocolate chips. Even more so since the chocolate chip cookie is simultaneously one of the most simple and yet most difficult cookies to perfect. Everyone knows what they think a chocolate chip cookie should taste like, but no one agrees. Soft or crisp? Thin or fat?

I decided to search on Allrecipes for their most popular recipe, which turns out to be called Award Winning Soft Chocolate Chip Cookies (the hyperbolic names on Allrecipes are its one flaw; when I copy a recipe onto my index cards, I leave the name behind).

Based on several of the reviews, I made a few alterations to the basic recipe, adding baking powder, salt, and more vanilla extract (the key to any decent chocolate chip cookie):

2 cups butter, softened
1 1/2 cups packed brown sugar
1/2 cup white sugar
2 (3.4 ounce) packages instant vanilla pudding mix
4 eggs
2 tablespoons vanilla extract
4 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking soda
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
4 cups semisweet chocolate chips

Preheat your oven to 350F. Cream the butter and sugar, and then beat in the pudding mix. Stir in the eggs and vanilla. Add the flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt, and stir until blended. Stir in the chocolate chips. Refrigerate the dough for 30-60 minutes (this is an essential step with butter-heavy dough like this; it prevents the cookies from baking flat).

Using a cookie scoop to ensure the cookies have a uniform size (ensures uniform baking), place the dough on baking sheets lined with parchment paper. The scoops can be placed pretty close together, since the dough does not spread much during baking. This is helpful since this recipe makes a big hunk of dough (I ended up with 94 cookies, enough to send some to my wife's office as well).

Bake for 10 to 12 minutes (10 for darker baking sheets, 12 for light ones), then cool on wire racks. Take them out before they look done, and they will cool just right.

I think they turned out great. They are soft, light, and buttery. The vanilla pudding mix keeps them moist, which is nice when you plan to bake a day (or two) before serving, which I usually do when bringing baked goods to the office. I think my paralegal will be pleased.

UPDATE: They were very popular. So much so that the paralegal who asked for them only got two before they were gone. I even had a gentleman from another office stop by the next day to ask for the recipe.

en Smith posted this a few days ago, but I thought it was so striking (and amusing) that it was worth repeating. As everyone knows by now, Senator Obama recently visited Afghanistan and Iraq as part of a congressional delegation including Senators Hagel and Reed. While in Iraq, he accompanied General Petraeus on a helicopter tour, resulting in a number of striking photos, such as this one:

While Senator Obama spent the day with the troops, Senator McCain visited former President George H.W. Bush in Kennebunkport, resulting in this unfortunate image:

Not a good day in image contrast for Senator McCain. Due respect to the former President, but that sign on his golf cart might as well say "Get off my lawn!" (It actually reads "Property of #41 Hands off!"). One candidate looks presidential, the other decidedly geriatric. And remember, it was Senator McCain's idea for Senator Obama to take this trip. Oops.

ast season certainly had its share of triumphs and disappointments for Arsenal. There was a good bit of despair among fans after Thierry Henry departed for Barcelona without a big-name replacement coming in, and the media fed on this with predictions that Arsenal would drop out of the top 4 (with the cursed Spurs tipped to move up).

So when the season started rather brilliantly, there was renewed faith in Arsene Wenger's youth and transfer policies. A particularly pleasant surprise was the emergence of Matthieu Flamini and Manual Almunia as regular first-teamers.

Well, the honeymoon ended. Arsenal were embarrassed in the Carling Cup by hated rivals Tottenham, and embarrassed in the FA Cup by hated rivals Manchester United. Along the way Arsenal was hit by a series of injuries, culminating in the horrific broken leg suffered by newcomer Eduardo. Though the weakened squad rose to defeat AC Milan in the first knockout round of the Champions League, the quarter-final matchup against Liverpool proved to be too much. And it was another draw with Liverpool that signaled the end of Arsenal's fading hopes for a Premiership title, finishing a close third, just two points behind Chelsea and four behind champions Manchester United (some consolation: Spurs a distant 11th place).

The end of the season also saw the beginning of a series of prominent departures from the club. The least surprising departure was that of Jens Lehmann, who had not handled his benching with much professionalism. The free transfer of Mathieu Flamini was disappointing to many, but who can blame the player: with no transfer fee necessary, AC Milan was able to offer him exorbitant wages that Arsenal was never going to try to match. In contrast, I have no hesitation in condemning the behavior of Alexander Hleb, whose £11.9m transfer to Barcelona came as a relief after the ridiculous whining the club had to endure as Hleb and his agent tried to force Arsenal's hand. It makes Gilberto's quiet departure to Greece all the more admirable, and burnishes the luster of his six years of solid service in the Arsenal lineup.

Anyone can do the math, and see that Arsenal lost three midfielders in rather quick succession this summer. The club has seen only two and a half players brought in. The half belongs to Carlos Vela, who already belonged to Arsenal but is now returning from a loan in Spain and will compete for a spot up front, all the more important considering Eduardo is to not set to return until September at best, and Emmanuel Adebayor is still trying to weasel his way to Barcelona.

The other purchases both look set for roles in the midfield. The first was teenager Aaron Ramsey, brought in from Cardiff in a £5m move and apparently slotted for a role in central midfield. Whether he can complement Cesc Fabregas the way Flamini excelled at remains to be seen. Out on the wings Arsenal will be featuring its recent £12m signing from Marseille, Samir Nasri. Nasri is acclaimed as an ideal replacement for Hleb, and he fits the bill for a Wenger signing: young, French, relatively affordable. With Abou Diaby, Gael Clichy, and William Gallas, Nasri is another piece in the continuing French contingent at Arsenal (supplanting the losses of Henry and Patrick Vieira).

The Adebayor saga remains to be resolved. He still has several years left on his contract, but the status quo is clearly not going to work. I think he misplayed his hand this off-season, and may be the odd man out after the Ronaldinho and Hleb transfers.

Wenger, on the other hand, still seems to be in the market for another midfielder. Gareth Barry has been prominently rumored after his attempts to leave Aston Villa, though Wenger is typically tight-lipped.

Suffice it to say that there will have to be several new faces in the first team fielded against West Bromwich Albion on August 16, with Eduardo and Tomas Rosicky still out injured. Unlike the start of last season, however, I already have a lot of faith in this squad. The youngsters matured tremendously over the last campaign, and Fabregas and Toure have cemented themselves as team leaders. That William Gallas is the captain in their place is a continuing travesty, but Wenger made that choice and the team is stuck with it for now. I am excited to see Vela, Nasri, and Ramsey in action, and when Eduardo and Rosicky are back in form, this should be a fun team to watch.

omehow, despite being someone who loves to bake and spends an embarrassing amount of time surfing the Internet, I never realized how many blogs there are devoted largely or entirely to baking. I have been a devotee of Allrecipes and Joy of Baking since I started baking during my first year of law school, but somehow failed to stumble upon any baking blogs. And what a loss that turns out to have been.

It should come as no surprise that blogging is a great medium for sharing and discussing the science of baked goods. In fact, my favorite aspect of Allrecipes has always been the user reviews, which can give great recommendations for how to tweak the basic recipe. The ability of an individual baker to write a blog, include a recipe, photos, and play-by-play instructions, and then get comments from readers, is that much better.

I added a new category of links to my sidebar, and will point out Butter Sugar Flour as a particular favorite.