Book reviews

In the August/September 2006 issue of Policy Review, Peter Berkowitz discussed With All Our Might: A Progressive Strategy for Defeating Jihadism and Defending Liberty (edited by Will Marshall, published by Rowman and Littlefield) and The Good Fight: Why Liberals — and Only Liberals — Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again (written by Peter Beinart, published by Harper Collins). Not having read either book I can't comment in any detail, but Beinart comes across badly from Berkowitz's review. Marshall's book sounds slightly more useful.

In the Times Literary Supplement, Kenneth Anderson gives a sharp and thoughtful analysis of Francis Fukuyama's After the Neocons: America at the Crossroads. Also in TLS, although not in the current edition, Rosemary Righter (July 19th) has reviewed Paul Kennedy's The Parliament of Man.

In the New York Times Book Review, Michiko Kakutani excoriates Richard Posner's Not a Suicide Pact.

In the Boston Globe, Katherine A. Parker reviews The Zero, and Chris Cleave's Incendiary. Both in differing ways bring an element of black comedy to bear on the aftermath of terrorist attacks. The former is a novel centering on a man invovled in the rescue operations at the World Trade Centre who shoots himself in the head but survives suffers "gaps", which in Parker's words are "periods of time that are lost to him, or at least to the consciousness through which this story is told"; the latter a 234 page letter to Osama bin Laden from a woman whose husband and 4-year-old son were killed in the London transport bombings in 2005.