Haunted by a Spectre

Paul Krugman, The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 (Norton, 2009). . My only literary prediction for 2009 is that we’re all going to be reading a lot more books about what was formerly known as The Economy, and is currently variously called The Crisis, The Collapse, Things Are Going to Get Worse Before They Get Better, The Brink of Great Depression II, and “A Spectre Is Haunting…” The spectre is haunting not just Europe, as the opening line of Marx and Engels’... 
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Books of the Year, 2008

A couple of weeks ago, London’s Times Literary Supplement (TLS, Nov. 28, 2008) published its “Books of the Year” issue, kicking off the “best of 2008” season. It’s an annual ritual in which TLS asks 40 or so writers to name books they’ve liked in the last year. The cast of reviewers runs alphabetically from Thomas Ades to A.N. Wilson this year, with such luminaries as A.S. Byatt, Margaret Drabble, Doris Lessing, Joyce Carol Oates, George Steiner, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams,... 
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How Dumb Can You Get?

Mark Bauerlein, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future [Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30] (Tarcher/Penguin, 264 pages, $27.50, 2008) I’m a feet-on-the-ground kind of guy, so I seldom have visions. But a year or so ago, while I was in the library of the little university where I teach, something odd happened. At first, I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. Downstairs, the students were busily at the computer terminals, looking up... 
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Art that takes your breath away

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Of Memory and Monuments

  *** Stephens Gerard Malone, I Still Have a Suitcase in Berlin (Random House Canada, 319 pages, $32.95 Cdn., 2008)   In Berlin you'll find more monuments to the catastrophes of history than in any other city in Europe. Given German history, I suppose that's appropriate. This spring, civic officials unveiled the city's latest memorial. Located at the edge of the Tiergarten, Berlin's central park, it's right across the road from one of the German capitol's largest... 
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Career Moves

Neil Gross, Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher (Chicago: University of Chicago, 367 pages, 2008) 1. Richard Rorty (1931-2007) was, to my mind, the most interesting philosopher of the last quarter of the 20th century, an enviably clear and brilliant writer, and politically, one of the most sensible leftwing “public intellectuals” to grace the American forum. He was also something of an odd duck. Rorty was a precocious 15-year-old student at the University of Chicago in 1946; a... 
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Not for Everyone

*** My favourite right-wing columnist, the Globe and Mail's Margaret Wente, confidently informs me that university is not for everyone because "a lot of kids just aren't smart enough" ("Who needs university anyway?", May 23, 2008). I should report that this bit of belated, but vital intelligence was conveyed to me thanks to the failure of the Globe's online pay-for-view plan. Like other major newspapers, the Globe has now abandoned its online subscription program (the New... 
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What Have We Learned? What Have We Forgotten?

Tony Judt, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century (Penguin, 2008) Historian Tony Judt’s telling use of the biblical phrase, “the years the locusts ate,” which he employs to describe the years since the fall of communism in 1989, can pretty well be applied, as he demonstrates, to our memory of almost everything after World War II. The British-born Judt, who directs New York University’s Erich Remarque Institute, is the author, as some readers will recall, of the... 
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Letter from Berlin: Fahrenheit 451 Revisited

*** BERLIN–Some things I take personally. This is one of them. That’s because I write books. So, whenever people burn books–whether it’s the ancient library of Alexandria, Egypt going up in flames nearly two millennia in the past, or the 2003 torching of the National Library in Baghdad just five years ago, at the beginning of the U.S. invasion of Iraq–I take offense. And it’s personal. When the temperature reaches Fahrenheit 451, the degree at which paper burns, books like... 
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Letter from Berlin: “We are now beginning our descent”

  *** When the nice Lufthansa captain, piloting an airbus or a 7-something-7 somewhere in the heavens above Berlin, announces in a mild German accent that we’re beginning our approach for a landing, the only question these days is, We’re descending, but into which airport? Last week, some of Berlin’s 2.4 million eligible voters cast their ballots in the city’s first referendum in recent history over the question of the region’s airports. This probably isn’t the sort of story that will... 
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