Hello Everyone

My travels to the East coast last weekend swept away any doubt about the importance of the current wave of bestselling books about the Bush administration. In airport lounges, on planes, and in the New York City subways people everywhere are getting their news, not from the Times or from the weekly newsmagazines, but from a handful of books by people who enjoyed unfettered access to the current administration. I especially noticed an abundance of copies of Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack as well as a handful of copies of Richard Clarke’s Against All Enemies, (which, at the moment, come in at number one and number six respectively on Amazon’s Top 100). The content of these books is interesting, but so is the phenomenon behind them. According to many who have been following this trend, we are in uncharted territory. In the Times, David K. Kirkpatrick explains why all of this is unprecedented and suggests that the administration’s vigilance over the information that ends up in newspapers and magazines has caused a spillover into books. Here is the article.

For the last several months, the web site of the British Library has been hosting the online diary of Saad Eskander, Director of the Iraq National Library and Archive (INLA). As many readers are likely aware, the Library was looted in the early days of the American invasion, and Eskander has spent much of his time since trying to rebuild his collections under perilous conditions.Reading through the diary it quickly becomes apparent that Eskander and his team are faced with far greater challenges than simply picking up the pieces of the wrecked library. Instead they face daily threats to their lives, and the laundry list of wound and killed friends and colleagues and many more near misses makes one wonder how the library staff can go on living in Baghdad. At the end of 2006, Eskander compiles a list (scroll down) of violent acts committed against INLA staff and their families and determines that 70 have been killed since the conflict began. The number has ticked higher in subsequent months.Last month, Eskander posted an entry (scroll down) about the day that al-Mutanabi Street, the home of Baghdad’s outdoor book market and just a short distance away from the INLA, was bombed. “This day will be always remembered, as the day when books were assassinated by the forces of darkness, hatred and fanaticism,” he says. “Tens of thousands of papers were flying high, as if the sky was raining books, tears and blood.”As a whole, the diary is an incredible chronicle of lives lived under siege and put in terrible danger to keep Iraq’s cultural institutions from disappearing entirely.via The Eclectic Chapbook, which also remarks on a BBC program about Eskander and the INLA.

Along with the New Yorker, the only magazine that I read regularly is Colors. Since it comes out every two months or so, spotting a new one on the newsstand is a real treat. Each issue is devoted to a specific theme, from the very broad like Water, to the very narrow; at one point an entire issue was devoted to a South American wood chopper named Rolando Trujillo. The new issue that I read today is all about the city of Birmingham, Engand. In typical Colors fashion, this issue combines the testimony of individuals with statistics and striking photography to give a surprisingly insightful picture of its subject. Colors is one of the few examples of putting the magazine medium to good use.Heard on the RadioThere was a quick review of The Kalahari Typing School for Men by Alexander McCall Smith on All Things Considered this afternoon. I’ve heard from several people that his series of books (this new one is the fourth) is worth reading. They are detective novels. The hero is a woman named Precious Ramotswe. The setting is Botswana. I’m told that this exotic locale sets these already charming stories apart. And since I have always loved stories set in faraway places, I hope to get around to this set sooner rather than later.