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When Skateboards Will Be Freeby Saïd Sayrafiezadeh
A poignant memoir of how radicalism destroyed an American family.
Saïd Sayrafiezadeh is a true child of the revolution: Shortly after his birth, his father abandoned him and his mother in order to devote himself to the socialist cause, following it back to his native country of Iran. Reviewing When Skateboards Will Be Free for Bookforum, Peter Manseau writes, “[Sayrafiezadeh’s] tale of how utopian dreams led to both the dissolution of a marriage and a disillusioned childhood, When Skateboards Will Be Free, plays out like the fate of the past century’s revolutions in miniature: When things fall apart for the Sayrafiezadeh family, one can only look back and wonder how they ever stayed together in the first place.”
The Body Broken: A Memoirby Lynne Greenberg
A 20-year-old injury returns with devastating consequences.
Twenty-two years after surviving a car crash at age 19, Lynne Greenberg began suffering neck pain. Doctors told her that one of her vertebrae was still fractured, and her new memoir, The Body Broken, recounts her subsequent plummet into drugs and depression and the toll it exacted on her relationship with her children. In its review, Publishers Weekly wrote: “Harrowing stuff, and when Greenberg keeps her prose spare and direct, as when she describes with cold, gory precision watching her leg being sewn back together, the result is powerful.”
In the Shadow of the Giantby Joseph Contreras
Why is Mexico trying to be like United States?
The recent violence in Mexico has led to comparisons with Iraq and Pakistan, but in his new book, In the Shadow of the Giant, former Newsweek reporter Joseph Contreras points out the country Mexico resembles most: The United States. Mexico’s obesity rate is second only to the United States among industrialized nations; recreational drug use is soaring; and Wal-Mart is its largest private employer. Animating Contreras’ account is the question of whether Mexico is sacrificing its national culture in order to become an economic colony of the United States.
U.S. Versus Themby J. Peter Scoblic
How movement conservatives caused the war in Iraq.
The sixth anniversary of the war in Iraq passed last week without much attention. Conservatives have written the whole thing off as the heretical pursuit of the Bush administration. But in U.S. vs. Them, J. Peter Scoblic, the executive editor of the New Republic, argues that the war in Iraq is, in fact, the culmination of conservative principles, not a betrayal of them. Reviewing the book for the Washington Post, Fred Kaplan wrote: “The neocons' military unilateralism, shunning of diplomacy as ‘appeasement,’ scorn of international institutions as ‘unwelcome checks on American power’—all these notions, Scoblic argues, are rooted in un-prefixed American conservatism, a movement founded by William F. Buckley in the 1950s, which fused the once-separate strands of libertarianism and religious traditionalism into a crusade against Roosevelt's New Deal at home and Truman's containment abroad.”
In a Free Stateby V.S. Naipaul
A fictionalized memoir by the Man Booker International Prize nominee.
The Man Booker International Prize, which honors one writer every other year for their lifetime’s work, shortlisted 14 nominees last week. Among the favorites must be Trinidadian author V.S. Naipaul, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001. His 1971 Booker Prize-winning book, In a Free State, slips in and out of different genres—the novel, autobiography, documentary. “How does the expatriate fare after he leaves the island? Is he better off in a bed-sitter than in a wooden house off a dusty road on a tropical island?” Thomas Lask asked in a review in the New York Times. “The author doesn't quite put it that way. He lifts the argument above and beyond geographical circumstances, beyond material success and social position. These new stories focus on the failure of heart, on the animallike cruelty man exhibits to other men and on the avarice that, as Chaucer's Pardoner told, is the root of all evil. Are we in a free state really? Or are organisms driven by the violent compulsions within us?”
