A Superhero Manqué and His Battle Against Czech Indifference For most foreigners who visit the capital of the Czech Republic, the most memorable experience tends to be a stop at Prague Castle, a walk along the Charles Bridge at night, or perhaps a dinner cruise on the scenic Vltava River. For me, it’s stepping in dog shit. I have never visited a city with...
Belarus, the Land of No Applause Unlike other dictators, who speak of their love for “freedom” and “liberty,” President Aleksandr Lukashenko of Belarus is admirably blunt about his disdain for any trace of liberalism. “We have had so much so-called democracy that it has made us nauseated,” he said in April, after a mysterious bomb struck the Minsk metro, killing eleven...
Daze of War: The Russia-Georgia Conflict on Film 5 Days of War a film by Renny Harlin (Anchor Bay, USA, 2011) The new film 5 Days of War, which purports to recount the 2008 conflict between Russia and Georgia, opens with an epigraph attributed to the American politician Hiram Warren Johnson: “The first casualty of war is truth.” It’s a strange way to begin...
Lost in the Levant: Lebanon Reappraised The Ghosts of Martyrs Square: An Eyewitness Account of Lebanon’s Life Struggle Michael Young (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010) A country of just four million people, Lebanon has enchanted, infuriated, rewarded, and bedeviled the legions of outsiders who have intervened in its affairs. In part because of its diverse religious composition (the country boasts...
Menace à Trois: Alliances with Iran and Turkey? Please. Reset: Iran, Turkey, and America’s Future Stephen Kinzer (New York: Times Books, 2010) Stephen Kinzer’s Reset: Iran, Turkey, and America’s Future might be a must-read if we lived in an alternate universe. As with most easily offered solutions to long-running problems, its general proposition is ostensibly alluring. To navigate its way through the intractable morass of Middle...
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...