Books

To Love What Is
By Alix Kates Shulman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 180 pages, $22

The most remarkable and memorable part of the story Alix Kates Shulman tells in her latest memoir, To Love What Is, comes early on, before the main event. The book is mostly about what happened after Ms. Shulman’s 75-year-old husband had a terrible fall from a sleeping loft in her rural Maine retreat: He suffered significant and lasting brain damage, and she refused to institutionalize him, even though he must be supervised every waking hour. To Love What Is is a chronicle of the organization and sacrifice involved in keeping her husband at home with her in New York City—a maze of traps and dangers to a disoriented, brain-injured person.  read more »

Rapture for the Geeks: When AI Outsmarts IQ
By Richard Dooling
Harmony, 272 pages, $25

You know the Evolution of Man chart? The drawing in biology textbooks illustrating our progress from knuckle-dragging monkey to upright, intelligent marvel? (Well, at least a few men turned out that way.) One of the most popular spoofs of the much-spoofed drawing includes a final picture of a man hunched over a computer, looking just as simple-minded as the furry fellow at the back of the line. Recently, I’ve been seeing this chart over and over again in daydreams and nightmares, only in this version, the geeky modern guy shrinks and gets swallowed by a MacBook, which morphs into a human-size robot, then some kind of nightmarish version of the Terminator, pointing a huge laser gun right at me.  read more »

Desire: Where Sex Meets
Addiction
By Susan Cheever
Simon & Schuster, 174 pages, $23

Every so often in this thin book about “sex addiction,” the sea of psychotherapeutic gobbledygook parts and John Cheever, the author’s famous father, peeks through. He appears literally, mixing the young and heartsick Susan Cheever a gin and tonic as he nurses one of multiple daily Scotches (or later, in his belated sobriety, wanting to know how to operate a dishwasher, with a child’s enthusiasm). And he appears literarily, in brief but lyrical passages from Ms. Cheever about ice floes nudging one another on the East River, or the stubborn, sickly-sweet smell of the tacky 1970s cologne Canoe clinging to her sheets after one of her many one-night stands.  read more »

The Partnership: The Making
of Goldman Sachs
By Charles D. Ellis
The Penguin Press, 729 pages, $37.95

Around 1990, I read somewhere that over half the graduating class at Yale had signed up to be interviewed by Goldman Sachs. I found the thralldom to Mammon that this bespoke by turns amazing, discouraging and in its way disgusting, and I said so in the column I was writing at the time for this paper.

At that point, this once-great Republic had not yet turned—twice—to 55 Broad Street for its secretary of the Treasury: under Clinton, Robert E. Rubin, and now, even more significantly, Henry W. Paulson Jr., who in the eyes of many is really running this nation in distress, both out front and behind the scenes.  read more »

Knowing something about comics—and something about Art Spiegelman—is a prerequisite to enjoying Breakdowns (Pantheon, $27.50), a reissue of some of the artist’s edgy early work, prefaced by new comics of a simultaneously autobiographical and theoretical nature (“The fetid odor of his self-absorption made me gag”), and capped off with an autobiographical and historical afterword. In short, whether or not you enjoy Breakdowns—which is in roughly equal parts provocative, funny, sad and self-indulgent—you’ll learn a lot about Art Spiegelman.

My own interest in Mr. Spiegelman is mostly limited to Maus (1991), his Pulitzer Prize-winning comic book that made the Holocaust new and freshly horrible, and shlepped the horror across the Atlantic to Rego Park, Queens, where Mr.  read more »

Eat Me: The Food and Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin
By Kenny Shopsin and Carolynn Carreño
Alfred A. Knopf, 260 pages, $24.95

I’m proud to say that I’ve never been thrown out of Shopsin’s General Store. This is due primarily to the fact that I’ve never visited it, neither in its two hallowed West Village nooks nor in its current, humbler digs amid the multiethnic scrum of the Essex Street Market. But on a more hypothetical level, I have a gut feeling that Kenny Shopsin—founder, owner, chef and foul-mouthed philosopher—would take a shine to me.

At least, I hope to God he would. The list of those who have crossed Mr. Shopsin and suffered the consequences is long and illustrious; a request for corn chowder, hold the bacon, for instance, will not be granted, but may well get you your soda poured over your head, followed by summary ejection and lifetime banishment.

“From the beginning, I was different from your average grocer,” Mr. Shopsin considerably understates near the beginning of Eat Me: The Food and Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin, his brilliant, hilarious and infuriating sociocultural manifesto masquerading as cookbook.

Mr. Shopsin does, technically, run a restaurant, in the sense that he makes food for people to eat on the premises, and in exchange they give him money. But Shopsin’s has always seemed to be a personal proclamation more than anything else.

Together with his wife, Eve (who died a few years ago and to whom the book is solely and charmingly dedicated in top-of-the-eye-chart type), Mr. Shopsin started his small shop in the early 1970s, selling everything you’d expect a general store would. The difference was that he didn’t believe in the American retail edict that the customer is always right; to the contrary, “until they show me that they are worth cultivating as customers, I’m not even sure I want their patronage.” The feeling has not infrequently been mutual. “A lot of people get out of here real fast,” Mr. Shopsin notes with pride.

THE BOOK, LIKE THE store, is an elegy to a dying New York, one where a shop owner can bathe his kids in the sink while he’s making tuna salad, and tell the Health Department to fuck off when they point to the turkey sitting out on the counter all afternoon.

Which sorts of actions should not be confused with an aversion to rules. Mr. Shopsin has established lots of rules over the years, including: no copycat orders (“I don’t like people who can’t think for themselves”); no parties larger than four (“they don’t interact with other customers”); and absolutely no substitutions (this being, perhaps, understandable in light of a menu that has contained as many as 300 soups at a time). But what if you’re deathly allergic to, say, peanuts? See ya! “Go eat at a hospital,” Mr. Shopsin adds helpfully.

Survive all the hazing, however, and you’ll learn that Mr. Shopsin genuinely loves running his restaurant, and he welcomes people who understand the world he’s trying to cultivate. That world is defined by the quality of its relationships—both among customers and between customers and staff. (This may not seem too different from small, locally owned shops all over the country, but you can’t do anything quietly in New York.)

As with many highly principled people, there’s a whiff of protesting too much in Mr. Shopsin’s worldview. It’s not about “us” and “them,” he insists, but of course it’s all about that—he says he can tell whether a new patron is going to “work out” the moment he or she enters the store.

OH, YES: THERE ARE recipes, too. A lot of them, all straightforward and without pretense. Some, like mac ’n’ cheese pancakes, look really good. Instructions are along the lines of what you might expect. (“If you like your eggs more cooked, cook them more.”) But Eat Me isn’t about the recipes, which are just a conduit to get you from one Shopsin treatise to the next.

Those treatises are wonderfully written, though in that regard they’re jarring. Carolyn Carreño, who receives a co-author credit, presumably took Mr. Shopsin’s words from interviews and his own writings and then knitted it all together. While the result is highly readable, it’s at odds with Mr. Shopsin’s righteous bombast. It feels too clean and reasonable, as though someone had stuffed Mr. Shopsin into a nice new suit and combed his hair. There’s something disconcerting about calm, measured sentences from a guy who describes looking up the skirts of the “young girls” leaning over to scoop ice cream, or who says things such as “Bacon pancakes and bacon french toast both remind me of pussy.” You feel as though the book should arrive already spattered in grease and guacamole.

Mr. Shopsin says that the process of putting his book together was similar to raising children, which he says “allows you to go through your life a second time.” It’s a touching observation, and it’s clear that despite the financial difficulties that have plagued Mr. Shopsin and his store from the beginning (hence the multiple moves), his children are all devoted to him, to the shop and to the philosophy that guides it all. He writes without bitterness, “Shopsin’s has never been about making money. It is our lives.”

As for the book, Eat Me is probably the safest way to understand and appreciate Kenny Shopsin: At least he can’t kick you out in the middle.

Jesse Wegman is managing editor of The Observer. He can be reached at jwegman@observer.com.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
By Stieg Larsson
Alfred A. Knopf, 480 pages, $24.95

My review copy of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, by the late Swedish author Stieg Larsson, is covered with statistics about its success in Europe—it sold nearly one copy for every three Swedes; the books in the trilogy beat Harry Potter on the French charts—and the plans, likewise, for its success over here—a first printing of 150,000 copies; “outreach” to 25 Swedish consulates all over the United States.

One’s reaction to information of this kind—at least my reaction—is to think, It’s probably terrible, but there must be something to it. And in this case, that reaction is correct: The book is terrible, but there’s certainly something to it.

The story—of a crusading financial journalist drawn into the sinister secrets of a wealthy industrialist family while simultaneously seeking revenge on a different industrialist who has sued him for libel; getting involved with a beautiful, damaged young goth hacker; and carrying on a long-term, easygoing adulterous affair with the co-publisher of his little magazine, Millennium—is ridiculous. The incidents are preposterous.

Larsson tells us what kind of open-faced sandwiches his characters make—what kind of toppings, what kind of bread—and, once, the square footage of a room, but not what things look like or how people feel. There’s a gratuitously gory scene of hideous revenge on a character who’s barely appeared, and the dark secret at the center of everything seems completely arbitrary. To call the dialogue wooden would be an insult to longbows and violins.

AND YET, I HAD no trouble finishing the book—on the contrary, I raced through it, even while I disliked it, and myself for reading it. So what was it that compelled me? Maybe the story possesses an organic coherence, so that it doesn’t matter if the incidents are absurd; or maybe the very fantastical nature of those absurdities creates a mesmerizing dreaminess. Maybe it doesn’t matter if the dialogue is wooden, so long as each wooden remark points inexorably to the next; or maybe reading about fully realized human characters takes too much energy, and Larsson’s sketchy figures get the job done just as well. Maybe the quality of a story matters less than the teller’s conviction; or maybe this book appealed to a part of me, but just not a part I like. Maybe I’m a snobbish spoilsport for even posing these questions; or maybe there’s no reason that a thriller can’t be well written, too, nothing to exempt a thriller from the full weight of literary judgment—no reason to choose between judging a book “gripping” and judging it “terrible.”

Because it is indeed gripping, but it’s gripping not regardless of but in spite of its failings—its failings make it much less satisfying.

But The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is the first book of a trilogy—maybe, when they release book three, it will all make sense.

Will Heinrich is the author of The King’s Evil (Scribner). He can be reached at wheinrich@observer.com.

Turkmeniscam: How Washington Lobbyists
Fought to Flack for a Stalinist Dictatorship
By Ken Silverstein
Random House, 195 pages, $24

Two years ago, when I was a press officer for the United Nations in Iran, government agents tried to sting us. In an effort to discredit the U.N., every week I was visited by two fat, profoundly bearded and poorly dressed “TV producers”; they offered us unprecedented access to large national audiences on the condition that we weave criticism of the regime into our work. Of course, we turned them away and thus preserved our organization’s ability to remain in the country as a neutral aid rather than a propagandist for regime change.

Ken Silverstein, Washington editor for Harper’s, tells in Turkmeniscam of another sting, one that he concocted to snare four of the capital’s major lobbying firms. He induced these firms to vie for a fake but hefty contract to publicize the “strengths” of the Stalinist dictator of the Central Asian republic of Turkmenistan. Two of the firms, APCO Worldwide and Cassidy & Associates, tripped over themselves in their eagerness to champion one of the world’s most repressive regimes. In so doing, they became would-be accomplices of a demented, plundering despot.

Some of the lobbyists came from careers as high-ranking government insiders from both parties. In earlier life, they might have been Wilsonian idealists, but now, as deceptive denizens of K Street, they’re deeply into realpolitik, hustling for a fat paycheck by trying to make a tyrant palatable to U.S. policy makers.

AFTER CONSIDERING VARIOUS possible “clients,” Mr. Silverstein settled on a corrupt country with a “bloodcurdling” record on political rights and civil liberties—and an interest in rapprochement with the West. Then, with a cover story, business cards, a bogus Web site (that linked to nothing), vague allusions to Middle Eastern players and a sharp new suit from Hugo Boss, he wormed his way into the confidence of top lobbyists. He had the help of a seemingly knowledgeable and elegant-looking sidekick who, in his one verbal contribution to negotiations, blathered on nonsensically. Mr. Silverstein feared the jig was up, but the conferees reacted with sage nods of approval along with offers to build a useful coalition among politicians and the chattering classes.

From these interactions, Mr. Silverstein secretly recorded the particular tactics and inducements that lobbyists deploy to handle advocacy, policy change, damage control, reputation management and investment promotion. One of the prospective lobbyists tempered his pitch with a caveat—“Anyone who tells you they can get a congressman to do what you want ought not to be believed, but we can get in the door and make the case”—and yet, in the absence of rounded information and against a backdrop of longtime interactions, many legislators and other policy actors accept the case as made.

If Mr. Silverstein’s sting came easily, so did the lobbyists’ blandishments—they know how to win earmarks, to craft perceptions and to turn negative images into positive ones. Mr. Silverstein doesn’t make the argument that lobbyists are engaged in something of a carefully orchestrated sting themselves, but their handiwork smacks of swindle. That is, legislators, diplomats and the media are goaded into buying into a varnished depiction of the horrific situation in the “client” country.

GROWING OUT OF AN article last year in Harper’s, Turkmeniscam is a nimble contribution to the literature on the maneuvers of high-priced and impactful wheelers and dealers in the nation’s capital. As such it viably offers a supplement to this year’s important investigation by The Washington Post into Gerald Cassidy of Cassidy & Associates, a kingpin of domestic lobbyists.

With windbags and shills dominating the cast of characters, Mr. Silverstein’s clever exposé has some of the fun of an Elmore Leonard novel. He has an eye for the shady gesture, the persuasive detail and the big picture. The reader may wish that his sting could have been somehow prolonged so that we could see what documents and activities APCO Worldwide and Cassidy & Associates would have hatched for Turkmenistan. But Mr. Silverstein’s budget was small and his timeline short.

And his methods proved controversial: When his article first appeared in Harper’s, other inside-the-Beltway reporters joined lobbyists in criticizing the “unethical” tactics of his master-of-disguise investigative journalism. In rebuttal, Mr. Silverstein points to his field’s long but now largely dormant tradition of undercover reporting. He also is eloquent in criticizing the expectation that reporters merely “repeat the spin from both sides. … ‘Balance’ is not fair. It’s just an easy way of avoiding real reporting … and [of] shirking our responsibility to inform readers.”

Stings are sometimes necessary if you want to get the whole story. The Iranians found them useful in ferreting out our non-subversive intentions; when we didn’t go for the easy critique they tried to plant, they came to quasi-trust us. By the same token, Mr. Silverstein’s trick is most useful and necessary for showing how lobbyists’ gloss can trump context and integrity.

Dorn Townsend is a freelance reporter based in New York City. He can be reached at books@observer.com.

Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism
By Bernard-Henri Lévy
Random House, 233 pages, $25

Yes, he’s a celebrity who wears expensive suits. But he’s a real-deal philosopher, too, so let’s put on our thinking caps and review the principles of Bernard-Henri Lévy’s political thought as presented in Left in Dark Times, a manifesto with a subtitle suitable for the barricades, A Stand Against the New Barbarism.

Beware the four pillars of totalitarianism—the Absolute, History, the Dialectic and Disease. The Absolute, Mr. Lévy explains, is the dream of a utopian society emptied of politics and conflict; History is the one-way path to utopian salvation; the Dialectic is the final arbiter of the meaning of events and experience in the light of History’s goal; and the idea of Disease is what, in totalitarian regimes, substitutes for the idea of Evil, replacing that old, religiously rooted notion with a clinical, materialistic image of noxious bacteria or a virus that must be purged from an infected body.

Mr. Lévy’s principles translate into support for Israel (like all nations imperfect, but that’s the nature of politics sans messianism); engaged solidarity with political causes of the oppressed around the world (“there is no economy of pity,” Mr. Lévy declares); and a righteous brief against censorship for the sake of appeasing Islamic theocrats (because using the doctrine of “tolerance” to justify the curtailment of free speech reneges on the republican promise of a political sphere absolutely separate from the realm of faith—and the messianism that never trails far behind).

THOSE PRINCIPLES LED Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president who was at the time still running for office, to wonder aloud why his friend Bernard-Henri Lévy refused to endorse his candidacy. Mr. Sarkozy was, after all, the first “post-ideological” French politician, cut more from the cloth of the centrist American politics that Mr. Lévy prefers.

It’s a good question, and Left in Dark Times is Mr. Lévy’s alternately ponderous, angry and impassioned answer—an attempt to hold tight to the left, a left Mr. Lévy considers himself bound to “almost genetically.” It’s no wonder, then, that he writes with such urgency about the need for his “family” to reconsider its ideals and orthodoxies in the light of shifting global politics and the frequent intramural clashes between committed leftists. Take, for example, the question of humanitarian intervention: Mr. Lévy is staunchly in favor, rejecting the notion that “foreign” cultures are inviolable, “unknowable,” deserving of respect simply for their otherness.

Indeed, Mr. Lévy is withering toward the bien-pensant notion that societies are ecosystems whose balance the West disturbs at its own peril. “The idea that cultures are as inevitable as climates or soils,” he writes “… is no less hateful when it warns us against the devastating effects that the abolition of the burqa or the outlawing of the genital mutilation of young girls might have on the local culture than when it’s telling us that human rights expire once they are removed from the places that bred them.” As evidence, he points to the abolition of capital punishment in France in 1981, under the presidency of François Mitterrand—it was the end of the guillotine’s 200-year reign, but “[n]either the West, nor philosophy, nor France, fell to pieces when the ‘keystone’ was shattered.”

To those who counter that France legislated the change for itself, Mr. Lévy deals his trump card: “Are we more worried about the destabilizing effects of an overly brutal infusion of human rights—or about the effects, destructive in another way, of the massive, high-dosage infusions of pure fascism that are the Arab, Hindu, Khmer, and other fundamentalisms?” The liberal piety of respect for the other, Mr. Lévy argues, is based on a false premise: The drive toward “purity” in Islamic culture grows from the same ideological root as the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini; it is, in fact, not “other” at all.

FOR THE GENERATION OF Americans who associate French philosophy with Jacques Derrida’s clever evasions, Bernard-Henri Lévy’s decisiveness risks seeming almost gratuitously un-French. But in fact he emerges from a strain of French thought that’s had far less play in college classrooms, one that includes the philosopher (and, like Mr. Lévy, prolific journalist) Raymond Aron, who insisted that any political philosophy worth its salt had to address the practical question “What should the minister do?”; and Julien Benda, who wrote in The Treason of the Intellectuals (1927) that in the decades leading up to World War I, Europe’s thinkers and writers, “who for centuries had exhorted men, at least theoretically, to deaden the feeling of their differences, have now come to praise them, according to where the sermon is given, for their ‘fidelity to the French soul,’ ‘the immutability of their German consciousness,’ for the ‘fervor of their Italian hearts.’” Mr. Lévy sees in the progressivism that emphasizes the inviolable nature of indigenous cultures and identities the same inversion of intellectual values Benda saw in Nietzsche, deceptively updated in the form of liberal “tolerance for difference.”

This puts Mr. Lévy squarely at odds with radical left critics of imperialism such as Noam Chomsky. And it leaves him lonely, too. Mr. Sarkozy’s personal charm and moderate politics make him an agreeable conversation partner, but his attitude toward the two things Mr. Lévy holds most dear—the importance of ideas, of straight thinking about the global situation, and a corollary sense of France’s continuing responsibility toward its own past (“not dwelling on the crime,” Mr. Lévy writes, “but creating a constructed, well-informed, organized memory of it”)—is a deal-breaker. “Our first memory-free president,” Mr. Lévy teases. “The first of our presidents to wish all ideas well, because he really is indifferent to them.”

Mr. Lévy counterposes his own fever dream of 20th-century French history, delivered in the rhetorical mode of prophecy. But neatly ordered prophecy: Mr. Lévy (a Frenchman after all) prefers his idea-trees to follow evenly numbered, rationally divisible paths. He highlights four historical events, each linked to a facet of the leftism Mr. Lévy wants to separate, once and for all, from what he believes to be the soft-headed liberalism of “tolerance” on one side, and from the proto-fascist, incipiently anti-Semitic radicalism of thinkers like Slavoj Žižek on the other: The May ’68 uprising of workers and students against Gaullist social conservatism, which teaches anti-authoritarianism; the atrocities committed by France in Algeria, which teach anti-colonialism; the depredations of Vichy collaboration, which teach anti-fascism; and finally, at the bottom of it all, the legacy of the Dreyfus Affair, the false conviction of the French army lieutenant Alfred Dreyfus for treason. The subsequent outcry and his eventual exoneration split French society cleanly in two: clerical, anti-Semitic, statist vs. secular, universalist, individualist. “And France, a century later, returns there,” Mr. Lévy writes, “every time one side starts to prefer injustice to disorder; every time the other side stands up against the injustice—no matter how minor, or apparently harmless, or costly to repair.”

These memories interlace with reflections on his long career of political activism (most recently in Darfur) and are studded with passionately held positions on every issue current on the world stage. Whether or not you agree with him on Mr. Sarkozy’s neoliberalism, or the Palestinians, or the nature of terrorism, you will be convinced of this: Ideas matter to him, even more than a sharp suit.

Damian Da Costa is on the staff of The Observer. He can be reached at ddacosta@observer.com.

Supreme Courtship
By Christopher Buckley
Twelve, 285 pages, $24.99

In Supreme Courtship, Christopher Buckley’s most recent portrait of Washington through the looking glass, a massively unpopular president, clicking through the cable channels late at night at Camp David, comes across a rerun of a prime-time reality television show called Courtroom Six. By morning he’s made up his mind: He’s going to nominate “judge” Pepper Cartwright to the Supreme Court.

Charming, brash, Texan, Pepper Cartwright is not observably intelligent, yet prone to dishing out zingers in response to male plaintiffs on Courtroom Six. She packs a pistol, and “shimmies” into her jeans—and we know what it means for a woman to shimmy.  read more »