By Steve Rhodes
Catching up.
Baggage Fee
“Dear American Airlines, Jonathan Miles’s fine first novel, takes the form of a letter to the titular air carrier, which has stranded Benjamin R. Ford, the book’s middle-aged protagonist, in O’Hare Airport on the way to his estranged daughter’s wedding,” Richard Russo writes in the New York Times. “One doesn’t take this premise literally, of course. As Bennie waits to be put on another flight, he has a lot of time on his hands, enough to miss first the rehearsal dinner and then the ‘wedding’ itself (quotation marks courtesy of Benjamin, who’s just found out that his daughter is marrying a woman), but not enough to write a novel. The premise works though, because, as anyone who’s ever been stalled in an airport knows, time crawls.”
“Indeed, airport time goes so slowly in the ‘purgatory’ of O’Hare that there’s plenty left over for Benjamin, a former poet who now works as a translator, to read and translate large sections of a Polish novel, as well as to digress into an impressive array of cultural issues, large and small. Bennie’s digressions don’t all advance the story, but they’re great fun and serve an important purpose by lightening the narrative load.”
Dear American Airlines
Just for fun.
Shirts and Skins
“For thirteen centuries, between 1200 B.C. and the second century A.D., the Jews lived in, and often ruled, the land of Israel,” David Remnick writes in The New Yorker. “The population was clustered mainly in Judaea, Samaria, and Galilee. The Jews’ dominion was long but not eternal. The Romans invaded and, after suppressing revolts in A.D. 66-73 and 132-135, killed or expelled much of the Jewish population and renamed the land Palaestina, for the Philistines who had lived along the southern seacoast. After the conquest, some Jews stayed behind, and the faith of the Hebrews remained a religio licita, a tolerated religion, throughout the Roman Empire.
“[Author Benny] Morris revealed that in forty-nine of these villages the indigenous Arabs were expelled by the Haganah and other Jewish military forces; in sixty-two villages, the Arabs fled out of fear, having heard rumors of attacks and even massacres; in six, the villagers left at the instruction of Palestinian local leaders. The refugees, who probably expected to return to their homes in a matter of weeks or months, went to Gaza and the West Bank, and also to surrounding Arab countries – Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, and Syria – where, to this day, they have never been fully absorbed.
“Morris’s aim was not simply to invert the standard Zionist narrative. He provided a stark picture of the anti-Semitism that infected the Arab leadership, including the influential mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Muhammad Amin al-Husseini, who refused any compromise with the Zionists and, in the forties, promoted anti-Jewish propaganda from Berlin and recruited Bosnian Muslims for the S.S. Morris quoted the many leaders among the Palestinians and the Arab countries who vowed to eliminate the nascent state of Israel and force the European Jewish arrivals back to where they came from. But he also wrote at length about acts of wartime cruelty committed by the Jewish victors against the Palestinians.”
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“But, just as the Arab world’s rejection of the 1947 partition plan pushed Israeli leaders toward an even harsher view of their adversaries, Yasir Arafat’s rejection of the peace proposals proffered by Ehud Barak in 2000 at Camp David and at Taba, Egypt, coupled with the second intifada, which followed, disillusioned Benny Morris to the point of embitterment.”
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Strange Bookfellows
The top five authors on a recent New York Times Nonfiction Best Sellers list.
1. Barbara Walters
2. Fareed Zakaria
3. Chelsea Handler
4. Augusten Burroughs
5. Ron Paul
Pack Man
The New York Times recently asked various authors to recommend reading to the presidential candidates. The New Yorker’s formerly pro-war George Packer revealed a lot about himself and the press corps by assigning John McCain to read The Forever War, by Dexter Filkins of the New York Times.
“[W]ritten not by a defeatist but by a reporter whose every romantic notion of Iraq and war was obliterated by sustained contact with experience.”
So . . . someone opposed to the war or in the least an early observer of its folly is a “defeatist”? And what business is it of a reporter to have “romantic notions” about Iraq and war?
Finally, McCain is the one who famously says that only fools or frauds romanticize war. I’m sure McCain could gain insight from Filkins’ book, but he doesn’t need a lecture from George Packer.
God Bless America
Not only can it happen here, it did. Again.
Posted on June 13, 2008