Of course, there’s more of Grann to read—his older stories in the magazine (I’m particularly interested in his piece on Rickey Henderson, one of my favorite baseball players ever), and his book The Lost City of Z. I’ve felt for a few years now that I’ll soon take a lonely, shut-in vacation weekend someplace new and just bang that out in 48 hours.

When I heard this week that Grann had penned a new piece forThe New Yorker, I was thrilled. In the two hours it took me to read, I tried—not too hard, I ‘spose—to get some real work done; but I couldn’t tear myself away.

David Grann’s “The Yankee Comandante”

Grann tells the heartbreaking story of William Alexander Morgan, an American runaway whose role in the Cuban Revolution made him a hero in the early years of Castro’s rule. In the United States, he was an enigma. The CIA had no idea what to do with him, or why he was there, or what for. Though it’s a tale of international intrigue, set in the context of the Cold War and Cuba’s drive toward communism, its heart is in the humanity of it all: Morgan’s looney bravado, his romance with another Cuban revolutionary, his experiments breeding bullfrogs, his dreams for his new country.

Now if I were Rick Morrissey—and trust me, as a guy who likes sports and words and words about sports, I certainly wouldn’t mind being a successful columnist—I’d tell that story and follow it with something like this: Most baseball players would love the opportunity to sign an autograph for a young lady—Ozzie Guillen was not ‘most baseball players.’ Look, I’m going to draw a line: to the left, I’ll put the 699 baseball players active in 1995 on Major League Baseball rosters who would have loved to sign an autograph for a young lady; to the right, I’ll put Ozzie Guillen. Not to belabor the point, but Ozzie Guillen is D-I-F-F-E-R-E-N-T. And explicit.

In Morrissey’s Ozzie’s School of Management: Lessons from the Dugout, the Clubhouse, and the Doghouse, most stories follow that formula: Ozzie does something crazy, Morrissey tells the reader just how crazy Ozzie’s being, then fit it into an overall motif about Ozzie’s purposefully crazy attitude.

As a White Sox fan, I’m familiar with Guillen—first the light-hitting, decent-fielding shortstop, then the maddeningly average manager. Given that Ozzie’s School of Management is mainly, and perhaps rightfully, focused on Guillen’s larger-than-life personality—sweeping his managerial shortcomings under, uh, first base?—many of my quibbles aren’t worth addressing on a book blog.

But much of Ozzie’s School of Management deals with how Guillen came to leave the organization he spent over a decade with as a player and almost a decade with as a manager, so it’s kind of impossible for me to totally divorce my feelings for/about him from Morrissey’s portrayal of both the man and his exit from Chicago. And given that the 2011 season was a 180-day-long dry socket for White Sox fans, it’ll be difficult to set my feelings aside. I’ll do my best.

Ozzie’s School of Management is divided into ten sections—Morrissey calls this a “Ten Commandments format” in the acknowledgements—that represent Guillen’s baseball philosophy. The problem with this construction, and this is likely to be the case when you’re dealing with someone as inconsistent and hypocritical as Guillen, is that it provides the reader with a false expectation for rigidity. One would assume these ten lessons are the manager’s unbreakable rules.

As Morrissey’s willing to admit throughout Ozzie’s School of Management, Ozzie will break his own rules all the time—which wouldn’t be so annoying if it weren’t for Morrissey’s constant insinuations that Ozzie’s inconsistency, blowups, and generally brute behavior were engineered to foster a winning baseball culture. Guillen’s no mad scientist. He’s just a mouth.(And probably a drunk.)

Some of these lessons include banal, managerly tropes about all men on the 25-man roster being equal, keeping team and family separate, protecting your players from the media by taking the blame, and keeping your guys’ heads clear.

Just like in real life, Guillen talks a lot in Ozzie’s School of Management—his long, stream-of-consciousness diatribes forming much of the narrative. (This includes quotes from Ozzie’s eight-year stay in Chicago and never-before-read snippets from Morrissey’s work during the 2011 season.) And along the way, he says some funny things, cops to not really liking Paul Konerko, longs for a football-style substitution system in baseball (yes, seriously), and takes credit for putting Adam Dunn on the field for most of 2011 (which was, for non-baseball fans out there, one of the worst offensive seasons ever).

The few gratifying moments come in talks about Guillen’s early career, from his early days in the San Diego Padres organization to his debut in Chicago in 1985. It’s not difficult to trace the origins of the World Series–winning manager’s love for the game (his philosophy is a little more difficult to follow or understand). As someone who grew up with the White Sox, hearing stories about the days before I was born—which include Ken “The Hawk” Harrelson’s turn at general manager—is a treat, especially from someone as candid as Guillen. Credit Morrissey for the research and willingness to reach out to guys in all corners of the baseball world.

Morrissey’s other contributions, however, are not so stellar. Befuddling, cliché-packed similes—“Guillen…is to subtlety what Hugh Hefner is to abstinence…” / “…fire can stand next to a tree, but it won’t become a tree…”— are packed in around each fiery quote from Ozzie, a side-by-side that makes Morrissey’s writing seem even more inessential. And this raises a question: Why not write the book in conjunction with Guillen, rather than shadow him and fill the text with entries from the Handy-Dandy Sportswriters’ Guide to Metaphor? While sporting pseudo-autobiographies have a rich history of boring the shit out of everyone ever, a book written with as dynamic a figure as Guillen—rather than about him—surely would have more potential.

The more I think about this book, the more I’m bothered by how hurried it all feels. Morrissey compiled quotes and information during the 2011 season, and after Guillen walked away from the White Sox in late September, a spring release in 2012 made perfect sense for Morrissey and Times Books. But what are we—the readership—left with? A book organized around ten commanding principles that aren’t so important, apparently, that the guy who owns these principles—this is his school of management, right?—can’t seem to follow them on a day-by-day or hour-by-hour basis. It’s a structure that confuses. Shouldn’t an editor at Times Books, at some point along the way, stepped in and said, hey, maybe it’s not a great idea to organize the book around clichés that are kind of pitched aside in pithy sentences halfway through the chapter. Maybe it could have been called Ozzie’s School of Being a Lunatic or Ozzie’s Guide to Losing a Fan Base in Six Seasons—anything else, really. I can’t help but think a looser timeline might have helped out. Or a willingness to publish better writers who know more about the subject.

Most bothersome, however, is the total lack of original or not completely pig-in-shit lazy thought that pervades the book. Morrissey is willing to go along with whatever Guillen says about baseball—he knows about it because he played it!—no matter how stupid. Morrissey’s approach creates an echo-chamber wherein a totally mindless approach—gut not brain!—to baseball is promoted as being somehow against the grain or old school.

Take my favorite example, Guillen’s approach to scouting reports. As Morrissey tells us, Guillen does one thing with advance scouting reports on upcoming opponents: throws them away! Aside from how disrespectful this is to members of the organization charged with writing/distributing such information—and it’s quite—who wants to know less about their opponent? And does Morrissey point out the insanity of the practice?

Nah. It’s just Ozzie being Ozzie.

Remember the slightly weird-albeit-necessary way that novel presented us all its necessary heaps of context and back story – by having characters sit in a room for hours on end discussing the history of Vatican corruption and biblical revision? We didn’t really notice how boring it was at the time, so wrapped up in the nitty-gritty details as we were.  But later, after we’d had a chance to decompress, what we saw (or what I did) was how thinly written every mouthpiece was for those thick slices of history that Dan Brown was so ready to divulge, how wooden every character really was in the wake of a novel seemingly motivated not at all by character but by agenda.

Cue Kino, Jurgen Fauth’s cinematic, fun, more 20^th-century answer to 2003’s phenomenon. I don’t believe that Fauth had any intention of writing a debut that fits that bill, but that’s exactly why it works.  It is, somehow, a completely unpretentious period piece, thick with history but which maintains that cinematic quality. Cinematic, of course, because it not only presents us with a rich account of filmmaking in the Weimar Republic, but does so in a way that plays out like a movie, with realized protagonists and antagonists — and, just as often, the mystery of which characters might fall into which of those categories at any given time. It’s an adventure steeped in the tragic details of the postwar world, but still a book that somehow manages an overall funness. Mina Koblitz, our more-flawed-than-unflawed 21st-century heroine, would likely be at home on HBO’s Girls, a faux-Bohemian law school dropout Brooklynite who lives off her new husband’s money as she struggles to figure out just what it is she cares about. Home from a cancelled honeymoon and with her husband, Sam, running a deathly fever in the hospital, Mina finds a mysterious delivery on her doorstep: the original canisters of film from a movie Mina’s grandfather directed – a film thought lost to history, burned by the Nazis before Klaus Koblitz fled the country to come to Hollywood.  Mina is forced to choose between the ticking time bomb of her grandfather’s last surviving film (coupled with a chance to learn more about her hazy family origins) and honoring her very recent wedding vows by staying beside Sam, a ticking time bomb in his own right, as he hovers in uncertain sickness. The tug-of-war is uncomfortable; Fauth makes sure you feel it.

He is, of course, an accomplished writer, despite Kino betraying what read to me like some first-novel blemishes. Dialogue feels rehearsed into veritable monologues in DaVinci Codestyle at times, when sufficient info isn’t conveyed by the more clever avenues of epistolary-format emails between Mina and her husband Sam or the personal journal entries of Kino himself, pulled from a nearly half-century-old diary he was forced to keep throughout his stay in a mental institution. Characters are occasionally seen taking somewhat confusingly elaborate actions in the modern-day (2003) portions of the book, in lieu of characters whipping out cell phones to get the answers they need. But Fauth’s ambition coming into his debut novel is already so vast – the seamless mirroring of the Weimar and the World Wide Web, The Iraq War and World War II, the history of filmmaking and the uncertain future of it – that his earnest efforts create something so darn likable and engrossing that it’s hard to care about any hairline cracks that might show. Besides, Fauth seems to call out these elements himself with a portion of the literally crippled Kino’s journal in several tongue-in-cheek, unapologetic moments:

The missing leg had taught me about flaws early on, about living with limitations. I took it as a sign that I was special, and when I began writing for the movies, I figured that I wanted them to be like my body, unique through their mistakes and missing limbs. Watching a perfect movie is like climbing a smooth wall–there’s nowhere for your fingers to grab hold. I was always looking for something broken, a scar, a sign of struggle or damage, something that didn’t fit, a crack that would create a space for everything that wasn’t perfect.

With these footholds and spaces, what we’ve got on a silver platter is a pseudohistory lesson, a dark comedy, and perhaps most principally, a story about the legacies (and tightly held grudges) of the family unit. I won’t begin to ask how Fauth can so faithfully render a cast of relatives so ill at ease. Even when you know where Kinomight be headed, there’s enough to keep you guessing and moving. Mina can be grating as hell with her incongruous moments of apathy or crassness, but at least we can understand her frustrations and the bind she never chose to be in. It’s her involvement in the Koblitz genealogy that brings the book to its interesting peak question of intellectual property, the nature of what’s possible to share, create, and own, or even to keep. I have no answers of my own by the end, but choose instead to ascribe to Kino’s own glowing declaration, in his only on-screen appearance:

“Remember, no matter what, Mulberry Island remains. Anything is still possible.” Someone…mumbled something off-camera, and Kino waved them off angrily. “Cut!” he shouted, and the screen went black.

Coming up much sooner, however, we’ll have a review of Jurgen Fauth’s Kino, an adventurous debut novel that melds the history of German film with modern-day Hollywood — a book that makes you want to read more books and watch many more movies.

We’ll also be telling you about the nonfiction peach Ozzie’s School of Management by Rick Morrissey, an investigation into the techniques of “baseball’s most colorful and irresponsible manager.” Colorful is a pretty diplomatic way of saying it. I expect that any direct quotes from Guillen himself will need to be censored by your DBC reviewers.

There is not a margin in which to let one’s mind wander as they read Aerogrammes, James’s jam-packed and hectically lovely short story collection.  Nor is there a moment to stop and wonder when these narratives might first have entered our writer’s mind, because the results appear to have been edited for years, flawless in their execution and always turning our eye toward a new someone and somewhere at precisely the right time – that is to say, just before our present characters show us the full extent of their vulnerability.

Leave it to Knopf to enchant us over and over again, this time around with a variant landscape of everything from early 20^th century pro-wrestlers to chimpanzee adoption to fiscally-motivated marriages between ghosts and mortals. With exception to the latter (an exception that James’s convincing storytelling makes it hard to concede), the vignettes throughout Aerogrammes uphold our notion of the Possible, solidly grounded in what could reasonably happen to its characters in the modern world, but allowing us a hungry glance toward the fantastic edge of each reality.  All of this our author does in prose that glides so smoothly you’d think you’re hydroplaning between covers. It doesn’t even slow you down to notice how sad she’s made you feel.

Saffa put the baby in a cardboard box and waited. He tried to appear cool against the questioning eyes of the vendors, tried to ignore the mewling sound that the baby had begun to make. He fixed a careless gaze on the rice seller across from him, whose own baby straddled her back within a red wrap, perhaps the same careless position in which the baby chimp had been before its mother took one wrong step and flew into the sky.

There are other ways to bring us into this raw place, and James calls on them all. Grown children witness to the deterioration of a parent, aged dancers who will never again recapture their expressive beauty, war-torn and unexpectedly alcoholic reunions, the literary paranoia that follows trauma, siblings who can’t and won’t recognize one another despite every conceivable effort to. James ends each story with a note of fear or uncertainty, but never resignation. We’re held in suspension at the peak of a moment we know can’t take us along. The only cure for the way it leaves us is, of course, to read the next story — and so, of course, there will always be too few.

The titular story in Aerogrammes is the book’s connective tissue, the epicenter of every theme. Abandoned in a nursing home by his distracted son, Mr. Panicker befriends his neighbor May. She needs his help to communicate with the recipient of her charity donations, an Indian boy whose true identity Mr. Panicker doubts. With quiet, straightforward prose, the story’s close-third-person narration, strong elderly characters, and fiercely maintained ties to Indian culture represent the collection as a whole.

She smiled, enchanted by the name settling like dust over the picture, and touched her forefinger to the boy’s face, drawing from this some strength. They spent minutes like this without a word, and for Mr. Panicker, for now, this was enough.

And it’s reasonable to think that the title Aerogrammes calls back to this story because what James has presented is enough, too. Even when the ending of a story leaves you seeking the falling end of the arc, what we’re given is enough. Though our characters may not take the time to speak, their actions are enough. We might not see the future headed towards ghost marriage, for example, but it’s a projection that’s reasonable enough, logical enough. To be given enough is more perfect, of course, than being offered positively everything. Enough is not enough to spoil us, only to motivate us, and the best kind of motivation to come from a book like this is to try to write something with an empathy that can even come close.

As such, it (or you) proceeds at a glacial pace—until the end where, cliche be damned, it comes together.

There are big characters in Wichita. Abby, mother of two fully grown boys, lives a polyamorous lifestyle—one man living in her house, one man tented in the backyard. Seth, Abby’s youngest son, is a bipolar transient with cutting wit and a posse that includes strippers, drifters, and other outcasts. Bishop, the backyard lover, is a chemist who devotes most of his time to engineering the perfect recreational drug, logging the effects of each trip with jarring precision.

And then there’s our protagonist, Lewis Chopik, brother of Seth and son of Abby (and her ex-husband, Virgil). Lewis just graduated from Columbia, cumma sum laude. (Yes, Seth makes the obvious ejaculation joke.) After getting dumped by his girlfriend—and being hyper-aware of his academic Virgil’s expectations for his scholarly future—Lewis heads back to Wichita, where he spent most of his childhood. It’s not difficult to see the seeds of conflict here. New York City! Wichita! East Coast Academia! Whatever the fuck there is in Wichita!

Perhaps it’s the anticipation of a tired conceit—(a) white person graduates college, (b) white person realizes college might not be the bridge to adulthood after all, (c) white person ends up back home, (d) white person finds self (+ the whole Midwest yokels v. East Coast elitists thing)—or the hope that Abby, Seth, and Bishop (among others) will do something more than get high, talk about existentialism, or get high some more, but there’s something quite sleepy about the first 200 or so pages of Wichita. Ziolkowski shows us these dynamic characters, but little else. It’d be like if Falling Down was all about Michael Douglas’s character before he went off the deep end—you know, here he is pumping gas, here is making his lunch, here he is relaxing after a long day! It’s a slow build, in other words. It’s a slow build, in other words.

But, in some ways, it suits the storyline. In New York City, time moved quickly for Lewis: he was on cocaine some of the time, for one, and his five years (not four) at Columbia went by so quick he couldn’t (or chose not to) meet his deadlines for fellowships and graduate programs, and it’s New York! The consummate fast city. Time moves slower in Wichita. Whenever a character notes the timeline (“This happened yesterday…blah blah blah”), it’s difficult to believe—has it really been one day?

Oh, it has. And it’s grating. You feel like Lewis—how do people live in Wichita? He tries meth. He fantasizes about sleeping with just about anyone. He doesn’t practice his German or think much about what to do with his graduation gift from Abby ($5000). He’s just around.

On the East Coast, his father’s side (the academic side) wonders where he’s going. Virgil’s a professor at Columbia; his brother and brother’s wife are at NYU, Cyrus (“the paterfamilias”) emeritus at Harvard. There are expectations for Lewis: don’t be a fuck-up. And with an academic family, being a fuck-up isn’t so black and white. To most families, Seth’s probably a fuck-up—drifting around, getting a tattoo on his face, marrying an older cokehead, etc. And that’s no different with the Chopiks; Seth’s barely considered a member of the family anymore. For Lewis, however, the expectation is that he plies his craft in a serious, humorless academic field; a noble career dedicated to scholarship. No tractor-humping in the Midwest.

This is probably the dullest conflict in Wichita, that between the East Coast academia and the Midwestern (perceived) aimlessness. All the academics speak in italics (“That was really quite inconsiderate…”), with little regard for humanity outside the Ivy League. It’s a broad, boring caricature. But that’s all later resolved.

When the action finally picks up in Wichita, it’s dizzying. The characters, deftly developed in the early going, are fleshed out in the course of a tornado chase—Abby has started a storm-chasing business with a new-agey feel—that brings out something in everyone there: Abby is sharp, Bishop is daring even when not cooking up a batch of synthetic peyote, and Seth is suicidal. It’s a tragic but not unforeseeable ending—one I’ve already half-spoiled—that feels right. It’s the catalyst that helps resolve every conflict left—a sharp turn that’s neither gratuitous nor forced.

There’s a bow—or some resolution—put on the whole thing that makes it all feel right, that makes it feel like Ziolkowski knew what he was doing all along. That it’s a debut is surprising in retrospect; how Ziolkowski felt confident enough, self-assured enough to guide us through some forgettable moments, all the while building to an emotional, fervent finish is beyond me.

It’s a bold novel. Big characters acting small, rising to the occasion when called, when it’s right.

Although I don’t think that confession will come as a surprise to Mr. Freese, who seems to expect ineptitude and personal failure from anyone who went through the “broken” public school system between the years of 1970 and 2012, and who is now – God forbid! – a book blogger. I’ll be transparent about the fact that we DBC book bloggers were approached, unsolicited, to read Ifs, and then I will quote this passage from Freese’s entire essay-length diatribe about said bloggers:

Narrowness prevails for these bloggers, revealing a weak background in the very subject matter they presume to evaluate. These are not critics…nor readers, nor reasonable evaluators; rather, they are Costco customers rummaging through jeans or sneakers. The pretense at being educated and well-read is pronounced and in hilarious poor taste. The personal posturing they give to themselves is worthy of a Swiftian barb. They are cultural boors.

(And you all wondered where I got such great jeans and sneakers.)

I could go on, because Freese offers many more pages of chastisement on this particular subject, but I’ll stop there for two reasons. One, there is a vast array of other things Freese takes the time to excoriate and it’s best not to forget that. Two, I should fairly point out that Freese casts this whole essay in a light he deems “hyperbolic.” Well, okay, but hyperbolic toward what sort of redeeming end? There is no concession made toward bloggers throughout, being young and (by extension) ignorant as they are. No matter how Freese chooses to cast the tone of each essay, the core is that of ranting, and the result is stacked heavily against us, no matter who comprises that “we.” I can see the literary gesture outward toward someone who must agree with his insular sentiments, someone, somewhere, but I can’t see where that narrative gaze falls.

While I appreciate that Freese doesn’t gravitate towards the rosy, “children are our future”-type idealism associated with our nation’s youth (a sunniness that can be dangerously unproductive), I felt as I read that his years spent as a teacher ought to give him a less crotchety view of adolescence, or at least one that isn’t so matte and universally dismissive. Surely he’s seen exceptions to the rule that he has derived without being asked, the rule of thumb about pubescent ignorance that he insists on pouring thickly over class after class of pupils? He does, in fact, beg the youth of today to become something and to be their best:

Perhaps the best inheritance you can give to close ones is the way in which you lived, as opposed to how well you saved and planned…so, choose.

…but this kind of entreaty only comes after a litany of insults that shockingly, in the mind of this particular recently-adolescent reader, fail to motivate:

The last book read, they seriocomically inform me, was the one I assigned as a book report…Some have “bravely” ventured into Greenwich Village. Many are bereft of any cultural context. They are unglued, disparate, like scree kicked up by a hiker’s boot. History was half an hour ago. They have little knowledge of film, less of books…They read them only for the extra credit, teacher scrip. Consumed with grades…they are not stupid (far from it) but ignorant. They are victims of their affluence…they are simply money-oriented, crassly so…they merely reflect the emptiness of their parents…

And on. And on. And on.

Freese has the impassioned indignation and more than enough occasion to want to write something motivational, enlightening, instructive. He wants, clearly, to get us all to a better state of mind, one that he believes will heal what’s broken about our society. But his ratio of complaints to proposals feel perilously stilted, and most of This Möbius Strip of Ifs reads like a stone weight being lifted off Freese’s chest, and subsequently rolled right onto our own. Its 164 pages offer a mix of complaint and self-congratulation, the latter term all I can really muster for whatever motivates someone to provide a hefty snippet on page 13 of an adoring email sent by a former student to our writer himself, an excerpt that includes phrases like “your class was a bright light in the mind-numbing bleakness” and “you changed the way I experienced literature, art, and life.”

Ultimately, I don’t need to be a Freese fan; his devotees are an enthusiastic crowd.  More than one review for this book deemed it “remarkable,” and it is, genuinely, pretty nice to see the exchange system this book creates.  For those that do, in fact, connect to the material, what they feel they’re really doing is having a conversation with Freese, and the flash-length essay format of many pieces in this collection enacts the way good conversations generally do evolve, subject to subject, just conclusive enough to move from one to the next. Many Amazon reviewers, I was impressed to find, gave the book five stars while saying openly that they didn’t agree with the stance Freese takes on certain issues. Personally, it is not my disagreement with Freese’s sentiments that taints this collection for me, but rather the commanding, rhetorical, overwhelming harrumph with which each sentiment is expressed. There’s really very little climactic discussion that can follow a sigh so heavy.

In this context, Roya Hakakian’s Assassins of the Turquoise Palace is a great read, an example of the pathetically infantile pettiness carried by the Khomeini-Khameini regimes. Hakakian’s subject is an assassination in September 1992, the gunning down of four Iranian-Kurdish leaders at a Greek restaurant (Mykonos) in Berlin. At a meeting of opposition members, two “hulking, bearded figures” executed the killings with a chilling lack of precision, firing a silenced machine gun with little regard for who was and wasn’t hit.

Almost immediately in Assassins, the reader knows the identity of the gunmen (and their watchman). What we don’t know, and what keeps the suspense going, is who ordered it—who paid the triggermen, who wanted the men dead, and why. Of course, tying the loose ends are not difficult in the early going. We know that Noori and his companions opposed a brutal, murderous regime. Being on Khameini’s shitlist is, essentially, a death sentence. And once we meet two men on the “team,” Rhayel and Yousef, it’s clear they were put up to it. All signs point to Tehran.

But Hakakian’s not writing a crime novel; her story has breadth. In the aftermath of the shootings, Parviz—a survivor—uses media contacts to get his story out. Fearful that a soft-on-Iran German government will deport the assassins and refuse to investigate the scope of the killings, Parviz pushes a narrative of conspiracy. While German government figures immediately point to the possibility of rival Kurdish independence groups being involved, Parviz feels—or knows—that it’s all smoke meant to distract from Iran. With deft cleverness, Parviz leaks information to different newsmen, anxious to get the story out. And while Parviz seems almost gleeful in his mischief, it’s heartbreaking to know what drives him, Hakakian painting a vivid picture: the pain of silence, no mention of the murders in papers or on television; his friends gunned down, later swallowed up in the news cycle.

The good in Assassins is in these heartbreaking vignettes, the living making do without their friends or family members. Of course, the ongoing investigation—and ensuing lengthy trial—has much to do with their collective grief. Hakakian divides these two worlds in some respect: the investigation and the grief. With the sustained gravity in the sections on Parviz and Sara and Shohreh, bringing the killers to justice seems secondary.

That’s not to say the investigation isn’t dazzling: political conflicts of interest, press leaks, (for an American) a strange trial system in Germany, and a whole other cast of characters whose stories Hakakian deftly fleshes out. And, on top of all of this, a broad conspiracy involving Khameini and Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani. (Side note: for an American like me, a vast, state-sponsored conspiracy—which might be called terrorism—is so easy to call bullshit on. But as Assassins shows, or the trial of the Mykonos killers shows, it is a thing, really. And it’s a thing that’s so weirdly small in scale and petty, almost infantile, this desire to blow away old political foes for sport. Anyways.)

The two worlds meet at times—Shohreh’s courtroom outbursts, Parviz’s fear that the seemingly dutiful German legal figures would be bought out, the Iranian-Kurdish diaspora flooding the gallery—a collision that produces compelling text. And credit to Hakakian not only for her investigation but also for her smooth, readable prose.

But it’s the division between the two is heartening: there are these German officials prosecuting murders, hopeful to find those responsible for the Mykonos assassinations. Whenever the bereaved has a moment to emphasize the sheer, absolute importance of the Germans’ task—before or after the trial—the legal officials shrug and assert, almost heartlessly, that they’re just doing their jobs.

And I like to think there’s a lesson there. Doing your job, putting your head down and working—as a prosecutor or an investigator or a judge—sometimes means doing good, doing things that will make a group of oft-discriminated people feel some level of retribution, that will expose a murderous regimes pathetic attempts to squash its opposition abroad. Suspense isn’t the only thing that will make you extra-aware of your heart.

We’re just busy. We promise! We still think about blogging—all the time.

Anyways, we’ve got a lot coming around the bend.  A few reviews in April, more in May, and then a summer full of reading and lounging and sipping and writing. It’s going to be a good time.

Roya Hakakian’s Assassins of the Turquoise Palace
It’s not Hakakian’s fault that some blurbs compared Assassins to Truman Capote’s classic In Cold Blood. As one should expect, there is no comparison. Still, Hakakian’s story is memorable, well told, and makes an allegedly vast conspiracy—involving the state-sponsored targeted assassination of the Iranian-Kurdish (is that the right way to say it?) diaspora all over the world—sound downright plausible. It makes your heart point, but in a rational, measured sort of way. Review forthcoming.

Three things I try to avoid talking about publicly: Immigration, the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the CMKM Diamond penny-stock case. The instant you open your mouth about any of those things, you’re fucked, almost no matter what you say.

To wit, Beinart, who has faced a fury of criticism from the right and left and center in the last month or so. Daniel Greenfield thinks The Crisis of Zionism is proof of Beinart’s anti-Zionist, leftist Islamist motives. Mark LeVine, a professor at UC-Irvine, criticized Beinart’s “liberal Zionist fantasy,” accusing him of historical ignorance and naivete regarding the imperialist roots of Zionism. And Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic believes Beinart’s idea to boycott goods and services produced in occupied territories (i.e., the settlements) won’t work and, further, “for historical reasons,” is “pretty unpleasant.”

When it comes to writing about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as with all hugely divisive topics, it’s likely that you won’t please anyone.

Or as Taibbi put it, you’re fucked.

So what is there to say about The Crisis of Zionism? It is something of a mess, its author trying-trying-trying to please everyone, to forge some sort of middle ground in a conflict devoid of moderate voices. Though it does a great job of outlining the current issues plaguing American-Israeli affairs—the tremendous gulf of ideals between President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu—it doesn’t go far enough out on any limb, and ultimately proposes a fairly tepid solution to a serious problem.

The main problem with The Crisis of Zionism is that it doesn’t really know where it’s going. It seems that Beinart is only hyper-aware of who he might offend. So at the outset, Beinart makes it clear that he is (a) a Zionist and (b) worried about the future of Israel—the crisis, i.e. the failure of American liberal Jews to defend democracy in the Jewish state. This would be a perfectly fine thesis, were Beinart to support it anywhere in the nine chapters that follow the introduction.

Instead, Beinart writes about the state of affairs in Israeli-Palestinian politics, the American-Israeli relationship, the changing demographics in Israel, Jewish identity, the liberal roots of Theodor Herzl, etc. All of which are worthy topics, and super-relevant to a book about Israel in 2012. But in sum, these issues run counter to Beinart’s very thesis. That is to say, the real crisis of Zionism—or crisis of Israel—is that the country, under Netanyahu, is swinging further and further to the right. As the old-enough-to-remember-Palestinians-as-neighbors folks die off, the young-enough-to-only-remember-Palestinians-as-enemies folks comprise more and more of the electorate, and the two-state solution—or, at the very least, an end to demolishing Arab homes and expanding Israeli settlements—becomes a fantasy.

Beinart ultimately places the onus of saving Israel on the shoulders of American liberal Jews. In his conclusion, he wonders why American Jews—who are, statistically speaking, very liberal—are so secular. Or, beyond that, why they seem to have no relationship with Israel. His solution is for more Jewish children to attend private Jewish schools, having found a relationship between this attendance and a kinship with Israel.

This is a very clear, well-defended idea. Beinart’s statistics are, on the surface, sound. And if more liberal Jews, imbued with American notions of democracy and equality, were to settle Israel or speak out about its transgressions, that could very well spark change.

Further, Beinart proposes a boycott on all goods produced in Israeli settlements. And a language protest meant to draw a distinction between Democratic Israel (what’s inside the green line) and Non-Democratic Israel (what’s outside the green line).

(This idea of a protest/boycott has people quite inflamed. As someone who doesn’t have the perspective of folks like Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, I’ll decline comment on the sensitivity of Jewish people re: boycotts and the like.)

But before this is offered in the conclusion, Beinart explores the relationship between Netanyahu and Obama, and the influence wielded by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Beinart’s chapter on Netanyahu is brilliant, describing the Prime Minister’s relationship with his father’s (Benzion) radical, anti-Arab ideas, his idolization of the tremendous English bigots Winston Churchill and Richard Meinartzhagen, and his well-known contempt for the two-state solution.

Obama’s foreign policy, meanwhile, has been shackled by an American political landscape that is pro-Israel (or anti-Arab—depends where you’re standing, I guess). And in the current political context, being pro-Israel means pro-Netanyahu, or pro-Likud. Owing in some part to this political reality, Netanyahu has had the leverage to bully Obama, meeting with members of congress (like House Majority Leader Eric Cantor) who promise total allegiance to Israeli policy.

Additionally, anyone who turns on the news in 2012 knows that the chances of war between Israel and Iran get better with each diplomatic pound of the chest.

What I’m saying is that, in sum, these problems—Israel swinging to the right, their most influential ally supporting them no matter what, settlements continuing, etc.—seem too large for a boycott or a long-term devotion to Jewish schooling. Really, I’m not sure what the solution is from an American perspective. For what more can we hope but a dovish party taking control of the Israeli Knesset? As long as Netanyahu is in power, the chances of a softening of Israeli policy re: settlements or the two-state solution are slim to none.

Beinart’s solution is heartfelt, genuine, put forth out of a devotion to the Zionist dream. Given that, his willingness to criticize Israel and Israeli policy is refreshing. His is a balanced worldview. But he seems hyper-aware of the impending backlash in his writing, trying too hard to court those who might disagree, proffering a solution that is inspired, but naive.

Still, Beinart doesn’t deserve the criticism he’s received. When you write about Israel and Palestine, you do so knowing what detractors will say. Their critiques will not focus on your writing, but you. To those on the far right, The Crisis of Zionism shows that Beinart’s a turncoat, an anti-Israeli American leftist. To those on the far left, his book is not only wrong, but demonstrates a tremendous historical ignorance and naivete. He can’t win.

Call it the Taibbi theory—call it whatever. It’s true.