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Oh, BTW, the gentleman pictured above was Isambard Kingdom Brunel, of Bristol, a brilliant 19th Century engineer. He is posed beside his ship, the SS Great Britain, the first large ocean liner to use a screw propeller. His proud irrelevance reminds us of our own.
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Self-loathing for Beginners
by Lynn Phillips
(If you’re going to do it, do it right.)
Self-Loathing for Beginners is a wickedly funny guide to appreciating self-loathing properly done. Whatever your current level of self-loathing expertise, SL4B will help you to style your self-loathing to succeed in fashion, show business, interpersonal relationships and art. And that is great news, because maximizing your self-loathing is a trend you’ll hate yourself if you miss.
Now available in Britain via Aurum Press Ltd. as I Can Make You Loathe Yourself
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The Eight O’Clock Ferry From the Windward Side
Clive Stafford Smith’s strangely charming memoir of his days defending detainees at the Guantanamo Bay gulag meanders into a real-life critique of pro-torture theory. Without ever fully defusing the logic of the “ticking bomb” rationale for torture, Smith reminds us in a civil, almost bemused way that this argument has little relevance to the reality of the cases he has seen. In the safety vs. justice debate, Smith’s argument amounts to: “Our safety will be procured by torturing men who, if they ever had any useful information, have it no longer? You’ve got to be kidding.”
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The Dark Side
With the cheerful perversity of a forensic entomologist, Jane Mayer dissects the Bush administration’s dark materials. You can get a taste of her journalistic thoroughness and glee from her July 14th Harper’s interview. The main thrust of her investigation is into the illegality as well as the inefficacy of “The Program” as the fasces of Cheney’s sadistic interrogation policies are known. Mayer kicks ass and names names. A staff reporter for teh New Yorker since 1995, she has been filing regular reports on the war on terror since ’03, and a number of her pieces can be found on their site.
The Search for Osama — The Dark Sites — Outsourcing Torture — and more.
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Get Your War On
Without an inside track or an investigator’s skills, Rees cuts to the war’s quick. He’s clear-eyed, profane and funny. His computer-graphic everybodies, like us, find themselves sinking in quicksand; we know better than to struggle; but that doesn’t mean that we can’t complain. David Rees rocks.
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Life Without Shackles
Sexy, loose, boozy, rich and notorious. What’s not to like about Ava? Well, okay, maybe her ex-husbands Mickey Rooney, Howard Hughes and Artie Shaw, or her other ex-husband and sparring partner, Frank Sinatra. But she’s all yours, now, thanks to Lee Server’s Ava Gardner : “Love Is NothingӅ. If you’re still hungry for large-living, dead icons, Server can also offer you his equally amusing bio: Robert Mitchum : “Baby I Don’t Care””. Server can’t conjure up the tabloid soul of Hollywood like Nathanial West in Day of the Locust, Bruce Wagner in The Chrysanthemum Palace, or Kenneth Anger in Hollywood Babylon, but he’ll do well enough on a cloudy day, when you’re tired of counting the number of people who think dinosaurs and humans co-existed.
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Torture 101
How best to celebrate this blessed new day than by giving your nostalgic uncles, sadistic bosses and boyishly morbid nephews a book all about the vile things people of every religion and clime have contrived to do to each other throughout history? Author Daniel P. Mannix was a frequent contributer to “True: The Man’s Magazine.”, and his prose style has that jokey but lurid twang men in the Fifties, who are now in their fifties, so loved. Before you wrap it, you might want to dip into it a bit yourself. Reading about bloody, genocidal Aztec sacrifices might help you understand what scale of discomfort your government is referencing when it claims it isn’t torturing detainees.
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Cosmos-politan
If you’ve ever wondered whether the human mind is a sort of shackle all on its own, this is the book you can’t finish that thought without. It is a new translation of Witold Gombrowicz’s classic (40’s) excursion into the joys and pitfalls of obsessive paranoid narrative, the nearly universal impulse to imagine that one thing leads to another. Droll, sexy and smarter than a slap, Witold has accomplished the impossible and made serious philosophy fun. A pleasure and a charming antidote to every conspiracy theory on your list. Buy two. You’ll want one to cuddle with on snowy nights.
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Torture, Ow!
Here we have a book that is everything we hope not to be: Self-serious, depressing and certain. But someone’s got to do it, and who better to edit a compendium of essays on torch-ah than than Kenneth Roth, the head of Human Rights Watch, the group that goosed McCain into falling out of goose-step with the administration on this issue. This is the perfect gift for all those on your gift list who would like to save the world, but need to be tortured into doing it.
Contributors include — Michael Ignatieff on whether torture is ever justified, Juan Méndez on the victim’s perspective, David Rieff on why the human rights community is naive about torture, Jamie Felner on domestic torture within US prisons, Sir Nigel Rodley on negotiating with torturers, Julia Hall on rendition to torturing countries, Jim Ross on the history of torture. Stop! Enough! Just buy it and give it away to the deserving.
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