By The Beachwood Book Club

Heraldo Muñoz, the ambassador-permanent representative of Chile to the United Nations, is in town today to discuss his new book, A Solitary War: A Diplomat’s Chronicle of the Iraq War and Its Lessons, at an event with the Board of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Muñoz is the former president of the UN Security Council and chairman of the al-Qaeda and Taliban Sanctions Committee. Here is the introduction to Solitary War.
*
On Sunday, January 30, 2005, an upbeat President George W. Bush spoke from the Cross Hall of the White House to congratulate the Iraqi people on their successful election of delegates to a National Assembly. The election had signified the launch of an unprecedented democratic process in the country. The Iraqis, defying terrorist threats that had created an atmosphere of insecurity, had gone to the polls in massive numbers to exercise their sovereign right to vote.
During his speech, President Bush specifically thanked the United Nations, an organization that he described as having provided “important assistance in the election process.” Months later, in September 2005, at a packed UN General Assembly meeting attended by more than 150 world leaders, President Bush thanked the UN once more for having “played a vital role in the success of the January elections” in Iraq, and for supporting the drafting of a new constitution. He then requested that the United Nations “continue to stand by the Iraqi people as they complete the journey to a fully constitutional government.”
By contrast, about three years before, in October 2002, Bush had warned the UN that failure to act against the Saddam Hussein regime would lead the organization “to betray its founding and prove irrelevant to the problems of our time.” And in the run-up to the invasion, on March 17, 2003, Bush had severely criticized the UN Security Council for not “living up to its responsibilities.”
These disparities in the American stance toward the UN were due to the late recognition that the UN was the only legitimate institution able to broker a viable alternative to permanent military occupation so that the United States could begin disengaging, at least politically, from Iraq. The Bush administration’s plans for a transition to an interim Iraqi government had been soundly rejected by the Iraqis in 2003. A key player in the process, the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, had even refused to meet with any American official! So, at the request of the United States, the United Nations stepped in to consult with all concerned parties and develop a solution to hand sovereignty back to an interim government, one that was chosen largely by UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi. This set in motion an unprecedented democratic transition process, which completed its first key stage in the January 30, 2005 elections, followed by the approval of the new constitution in October 2005.

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Posted on June 12, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

“On June 7, S.E. Hinton will make a rare appearance and accept the Tribune’s Young Adult Book Prize at the “Chicago Tribune Printers Row Book Fair,” the Tribune notes. “The Outsiders, Hinton’s first and most famous book, was first published 41 years ago, when Hinton was only 17. The book has sold more than 13 million copies and become a standard on middle-school reading lists.”
In connection with that appearance, the Tribune published “The Brotherhood of S.E. Hinton” on Saturday, a fine essay by Lizzie Skurnick.
Here are some other Outsiders resources and tidbits.
Let’s do it for Johnny, man. We’ll do it for Johnny!

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Posted on June 3, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

Scott McClellan’s book has not really been “reviewed” yet, but in the political world it’s the book-of-the-moment.
And, indeed, it’s a stunner.
But what’s stunning isn’t so much the validation of things we already know – the war in Iraq was a blunder of historic proportions and Karl Rove lied about the Valerie Plame affair – but that the book comes from a former press secretary who stood before not only the White House press corps but the nation and endlessly repeated untruths that amounted to propaganda of the worst kind.
Not that it’s shocking that untruths came from that lectern what’s shocking is that McClellan has actually come clean in an apparent fit of conscience.
That’s the shock.
Look at Ari Fleischer, for example, hitting the talk shows to malign McClellan as a former loyalist whose body must now be occupied by an alien.
Press secretaries know a lot, and what they don’t know they don’t want to know. It’s too bad so many of them go to their graves with their secrets – or in the case of Ted Sorenson, endlessly burnishing the myths that do a grave injustice to the nation they purportedly serve.
Some of the early reports on the McClellan book stake its importance on the notion that this is the first such memoir from a close Bush aide, but you could practically open your own store with the number of books from insiders (Paul O’Neill, Richard Clarke, Joseph Wilson) and outsiders (Bob Woodward, John Dean, Kevin Phillips) that fairly paint this administration as the most incompetent, anti-intellectual, mentally unstable, religiously fanatic, authoritarian and anti-democratic bunch of yahoos in American history. Nixon may have subverted the Constitution, but he didn’t rewrite it.
Only the willfully blind can proclaim this administration anything other than an unmitigated disaster.

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Posted on May 29, 2008

By Connie Nardini

The Dalai Lama/The Universe In a Single Atom
Do you know what E=MC[2] means? Have you always wanted to? At least for bragging rights? The Dalai Lama does, and he can explain it from a non-mathematician’s viewpoint.
Really.
The subtitle of his book is “The Convergence of Science and Spirituality.” In this case, the spirituality means his deep understanding of Buddhism. The Dalai Lama has spent much of his time, since being exiled from Tibet, traveling the world and meeting scientists of every political persuasion to discuss with them their theories and discoveries. Now, this is a man who grew up in a palace of too many rooms for him to ever visit, a childhood devoted to learning all the ancient writings of Buddhists from Buddha himself on down. And the story of how he became the Dalai Lama sounds like some kind of voodoo to Western minds.

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Posted on May 27, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

In a piece called “The Mystery of Violence,” the Economist writes about Chicago’s latest efforts to restrain what is essentially gang crime:
“April’s violence has inspired new plans, some more helpful than others. The ineffectual governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich, announced on May 6th a $150m scheme for which there is no $150m. Chicago’s police chief intends to make residents feel safer by sending out SWAT teams in full battle gear. More promisingly, Mr Daley wants to keep pools and parks open late and offer more teenagers summer jobs. This will help keep more children busy and out of harm. But it will have little effect on the most violent.”
Aside from noting how our governor is apparently an international laughingstock, the question remains: What will effect violence?
“Chicago’s leaders must use many tools to fight violence,” the magazine says. “One is right under their noses.”
That would be Project Safe Neighborhoods, a federally-funded program under the auspices here of U.S. attorney Patrick Fitzgerald that combines “tough gun policing, federal prosecutions and – most important, or so researchers found – meetings with former felons to deter them from returning to crime.”

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Posted on May 22, 2008

By Max Eddy

It’s no surprise that in the wake of the film Iron Man’s “rip-roaring” success that the comic series is seeing quite a bit of new activity – and none too soon. Iron Man has always struck me as a C-List Superhero, someone who gets called in when Superman and Batman are off fighting each other and Spider-Man is too embroiled in angst to get out of bed. They’d call Thor but he’s so dreadfully pagan. That aside, he’s been around since 1963, and has been badly in need of a swift kick to the rear to get going again. There’s been a surge of new titles riding the movie’s coat tails, with Invincible Iron Man #1 among the front runners.

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Posted on May 18, 2008

By The Beachwood Booklist Affairs Desk

Two for $10, or $5.99 each.
1. Polar Shift/Clive Cussler
2. Angels Fall/Nora Roberts
3. Twelve Sharp/Janet Evanovich
4. Light From Heaven/Jan Karon
5. Crisis/Robin Cook

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Posted on May 14, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

This is catch-up week here at Reviewing the Reviews. Let’s polish off this stack that’s been hanging around for a few weeks so we can start fresh again next time out.
Gang Bang
“Visitors to Chicago in the 1990s, were likely to know the names of three architectural landmarks: Sears Tower, Soldier Field and the Robert Taylor Homes,” University of Chicago history professor Jane Dailey wrote last month in a Tribune review of Sudhir Venkatesh’s Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets..
Um, no. Wrigley Field would make that list, but if you’re going to include a housing project – and you really shouldn’t – Cabrini-Green is better-known to the outside world. I mean, that’s where the Evans’ lived on Good Times.
Dailey is more on target stating that Chicago’s public housing projects were “Neglected to the point of abandonment by Chicago’s municipal government” and that Robert Taylor residents were “Caught between the Black Kings [gang] and a municipal government unwilling to provide the most basic services.”
Which goes a long way toward explaining the utterly rationality and hidden complexity of poor people’s relationships to gang bangers and their government. And that seems to be the core of what Venkatesh’s book is about.

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Posted on May 13, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

A weekly (usually) look at the magazines laying around Beachwood HQ.
Antifood
I’m sure the story of Grant Achatz, the internationally renown chef of Alinea in Lincoln Park who was struck with tongue cancer a few years ago, isn’t new to many people in Chicago. But frankly, I never really paid attention. Perhaps that’s why I found the New Yorker’s account this week so fascinating, though I think even those who already know the story will enjoy this piece.
Besides the obviously tragic irony of a chef losing his sense of taste, this is a story about the sense of taste itself, as well as the school of molecular gastronomists he belongs to that turns cooking into a science fair project for erstwhile art students.
I find this kind of cheffery and consumption decadent and even immoral – there are no limits to the luxuries we can gloriously bathe ourselves in as we refine our tastes evermore while huge swaths of the world go hungry – but read for yourself and see if you are offended somehow by dehydrated bacon wrapped in apple leather swinging from a metal contraption.
“The meal was almost comically elaborate,” D.T. Max writes of his visit to Alinea in March, “involving twenty-four courses and costing three hundred an seventy-five dollars, with wine. The food starts off at the savory end of the spectrum, and slowly turns sweeter, concluding with coffee, in the form of crystallized candy. Most items could be eaten in a bite or two, but the procession took four and a half hours. I had liquefied caramel popcorn in a shot glass, and a bean dish that came on a tray with a pillow full of nutmeg-scented air. The plate of beans was placed atop the pillow, forcing the aroma out. I sampled a “honey bush tea foam cascading over vanilla-scented brioche pudding,” in the words of the young man who brought it. There was also a dish centering on a cranberry that had been pureed and then re-formed into its original shape. The berry was then prepared on a device called the Antigriddle, which Achatz had helped design. The Antigriddle froze the bottom of the berry but left the top soft.

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Posted on May 9, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

You’d think a book about a year in the life of Walter Payton High School might merit a cover story in the Tribune book review, but no, it’s not only relegated inside the flimsy little journal of nothingness, it’s relegated to the second half of a review that pairs it with a book about life in a Los Angeles school.
I understand the thinking, but I also understand the lack of imagination; a book inside Payton High – whether good or bad – offers an opportunity to check the clips about clout and the theories about magnet schools to fill out a larger picture. Sometimes, in other words, a book review can be – and should be – more than just a book review.

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Posted on May 6, 2008