Decoding the New Taliban: Insights from the Afghan Field

Edited by Antonio Giustozzi
(Columbia University Press, 318 pp., $40)
 

My Life with the Taliban
By Abdul Salam Zaeef

Edited by Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn
(Columbia University Press, 331 pp., $29.95)

For the handful of people in charge of saving the U.S. economy, it’s been a grueling season. The last eight months have featured endless back-and-forths, tense stalemates, and spirited confrontations. Larry Summers, the president’s chief economic adviser, has drawn blood with his lacerating quips. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has dropped expletives to signal his frustration. Even their aides have gotten in on the action.

And, in those rare instances when the wonks get a break, they step outside their conference rooms, loosen their ties, and do the same thing all over again. On a tennis court. For years, Summers, Geithner, and a variety of deputies have stared each other down from opposite sides of a three-foot-high net. These tennis relationships have played out on courts from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to Davos, Switzerland, and on pretty much every flat surface in Washington, D.C. It turns out that tennis is the unofficial sport of the Obama financial team. And, if you want to understand the way its members go at it behind closed doors, it’s worth watching them go at it with tightly strung rackets.

Happy is the eye that saw all this, but our souls were anguished by what our ear heard." This is the refrain of an ancient poem in the liturgy of Yom Kippur, a lament for its author's belatedness.

I.

Between fireworks and celebration this July 4 weekend, I took some time to read Sean Wilentz's excellent treatment of the War of 1812--a controversial war that produced, among other things, our national anthem.

During college, I had a bloc of friends who were opposed to "The Star Spangled Banner." They thought it elevated tacky militarism above America's other endowments and wanted it replaced by the (excellent, but far less succinct) "America The Beautiful."

Now celebrating her twentieth year as the host of the world's most influential talk show, Oprah Winfrey is to television what Bach is to music, Giotto to painting, Joyce to literature. Time magazine hit the nail on the head when it recently voted her one of the world's handful of "leaders and revolutionaries." (Condoleezza Rice wrote Oprah's citation: "She has struggled with many of the challenges that we all face, and she has transformed her life.

Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin, which formally opened in early September, three years after its completion, is the most talked-about work of architecture since Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Libeskind's building attracted some 350,000 visitors even before its exhibits were finally installed this season, making it an architectural destination of the first order, though many who came to see it were impelled by religious and communal reasons rather than by aesthetic ones. The enthusiastic reception for Libeskind's building is altogether appropriate, for it is in many respects a profound and powerful work of art. And yet it is not exactly a success: there remains the question of how well this extraordinary architecture serves the complex purposes of this institution. Apart from Gehry himself, who has improbably popularized this kind of demanding and idiosyncratic expressionism, Libeskind is the most conspicuous beneficiary of the so-called Bilbao Effect. Gehry's masterpiece has prompted cultural institutions around the world to clamor for similarly adventurous buildings that will generate as much publicity as the Basque branch of the New York-based multinational museum chain (though the realization that such a coup may be a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon has eluded many patrons). The glittering precedent of Bilbao was certainly a major factor in Libeskind's being chosen to design additions to the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and the Denver Art Museum, both of which hope to raise their international profiles with his exceptionally assertive designs.