Little War, Big Problems A Little War that Shook the World: Georgia, Russia, and the Future of the West By Ronald D. Asmus, Palgrave MacMillan, 272 Pages No current nation al leader possesses more cunning than Vladimir Putin. Evenhis present position as Russia’s prime minister and putative second-in-command allows for a degree of strategic cover that the former president has...
South Africa's Fading Promise South Africa’s Brave New World. By R.W. Johnson; Allen Lane; 646 pages; £25. “I miss the times that we chanted slogans in the street. It’s much easier than building a country.” — Jay Naidoo, former South African minister for reconstruction and development and African National Congress member of parliament In April of 2008,...
‘Frankenstein’ redux Review of Young Frankenstein at the Kennedy Center Opera House The funniest scene in “Young Frankenstein,” the Mel Brooks musical adapted from his 1974 film, now onstage at the Kennedy Center, occurs toward the end. The show’s eponymous doctor leads his monstrous creation in a tap-dancing routine. Performing a duet of “Puttin’ on the Ritz,”...
The Ugly American: : A Rhodes Scholar Goes South Gringo: A Coming-of-Age in Latin America Chesa Boudin, Scribner, 2009 Chesa Boudin is the biological son of two terrorists and was raised by another pair of terrorists. He was 14 months old when his birth parents, ex–Weather Underground members Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, took part in a 1981 Brinks truck robbery in which they...
The Guru of Conventional Wisdom The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria W.W. Norton, 2008, 304 pages. Fareed Zakaria is one of the most influential foreign affairs commentators in the world. Only forty-five years old, he is the editor of Newsweek International and hosts a weekly discussion show on CNN in which he interviews major political figures from around the world....
A Lapdog in Wolffe's Clothing Renegade: The Making of a President By Richard Wolffe; Crown; 368 pages; $26.00 Last month, Politico’s Ben Smith served up a juicy story about the controversy surrounding Renegade, former Newsweek correspondent Richard Wolffe’s book about the Obama campaign. There seemed to be no shortage of staffers at the magazine willing to speak ill of their former colleague, whom they accused...
Battlefields of the Heart Reviews of 5 plays at the 2009 Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, West Virginia Farragut North ★★★½ Stephen Bellamy, the protagonist in Beau Willimon’s “Farragut North” — onstage at the Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, W.Va. — could be any of the young denizens who joined Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and have since...
Indictment of matrimony at odds with gay marriage Noel Coward’s “Design for Living” — now in revival by the Shakespeare Theatre Company — shocked audiences when it premiered on Broadway in 1933. It’s not hard to see why. The play, about a polyandrous relationship between two men and a woman, makes no apologies for its liberationist view of sex and relationships and could...