It’s a fascinating insight into West Point. Samet, a civilian professor of English literature wrestles with what to teach plebes. Looking at a sea of students told on the one hand to be open-minded, critical thinkers and on the other to operate as obedient, loyal followers of orders she wonders what readings to select for 18-year-olds who upon graduation will be leading soldiers in battles in Afghanistan and Iraq. The simultaneous insider’s and outsider’s view of the Academy was very interesting and Samet is at her best when she focuses there. Surprisingly, she’s least interesting when she references English literature, her specialty. And while she writes well there were long passages that left me glassy-eyed and bored. Too many long passages.
Jul 272010
It’s an interesting thesis. Jane Ziegelman, a food historian working at the Tenement Museum traces the food history of five immigrant families that settled on the lower east side of Manhattan: German, German Jewish, Irish, Russian Jewish, and Italian. She suggests that immigrants were aggressive assimilators with one exception. They hung onto the food of their homelands and Americans absorbed their foreign foods, taking on new things like pale ales, frankfurters, hamburgers, bagels, pasta, etc. Unfortunately, the book is short on story and long on fact making it read more like an endless encyclopedia entry than a compelling piece of non-fiction.
unist dictatorship in the world. Nothing seems to have deviated from the 1950s Mao-ist playbook: god-like worship of the premier, state controlled propaganda and media, rigorous policing against free enterprise or any information from the outside world, and famine of extraordinary proportions. Demick is the Beijing bureau chief of the LA Times and bases much of her story on interviews with defectors who have escaped across frozen rivers into China and then into South Korea. This book won this year’s Samuel Johnson Prize.