Roy's War Talk was on the display, but so was Joan Didion's Fixed Ideas - America since 9.11 (remember 9/11? No? Wait till the summer and fall of next year.), Christopher Hitchens' A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq and Noam Chomsky's Power and Terror: Post-9/11 Talks and Interviews. Even in this category, the competition is ferocious.
War Without End (Anton La Guardia), At War With Ourselves (Michael Hirsh), Dreaming War (Gore Vidal), Power Trip (John Ferrer), Full Spectrum Dominance (Rahul Mahajan), Empire (Niall Ferguson), Target Iraq (Norman Solomon), etc.įor those publishers - and authors - who missed the boat, but still want to take advantage of this window of opportunity, there is an old recycling trick: Simply publish for a relatively modest price a short 100-page or so collection of essays already published in the past year or two in various venues. That the gates are only opened for a very short while before the public is led to the next big thing (or entertainment) forces authors and publishers to rush their carefully packaged products to press. With a shelf life of two to four weeks, good timing is a matter of life and death (or profit and loss) in the publishing business. The Los Angeles Times' reviewer went as far as to say it was a "bitterly poetic and ruthlessly philosophical " No wonder, it sells! So was Ann Coulter's latest diatribe against the Liberals, Treason: The Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism.
Chris Hedges' War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, with his subliminal machismo, was selling briskly, we were told. It trickles down the pipeline toward Hollywood, all the way to book publishers and authors.Įnticing titles competed for the buyers' attention. War is money - and not just for the military-industrial complex. There, on a five-foot square table dedicated to "Current Events," laid some 50 different works, each neatly piled in small bundles of a few copies, a majority of which was about war and US power.
Roy's short collection of essays, War Talk, we made one of our customary visits to Kepler's, our wonderful local bookstore in Menlo Park, CA. A week or so after having received a review copy of Ms. Supporting our local businesses is sort of a civic duty in this household.
Swans Commentary: Arundhati Roy's "War Talk," by Gilles d'Aymery - ga159 SwansĪrundhati Roy's War Talk Book Review by Gilles d'Aymery
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