Tom's Review of Books  

Tom Engelhardt from TomDispatch has an interesting set of book recommendations for Christmas. I like the alien invaders analogy.

At the top of my 2007 list is the new paperback of Mike Davis' Planet of Slums. Talk about a single book taking you on a wild ride across a planet you hardly knew was there! It's not just a matter of wholesale global urbanization, which is stunning enough in itself. (After all, since the late 1970s, in China alone, more than 200 million people have moved from the countryside into cities, with another 250-300 million expected to follow in the coming decades.) Nor is it just the impoverishment of so many new city dwellers. It's also the de-linking of the city in whole regions of the globe from all industrial processes, meaningful jobs, or well-being of almost any kind. Not the city with slums, in other words, but the city as slum. And Davis, typically, was there first. "Instead of cities of light soaring toward heaven," he writes, "much of the twenty-first century urban world squats in squalor... Indeed, the one billion city dwellers who inhabit postmodern slums might well look back with envy at the ruins of the sturdy mud homes of Catal Huyuk in Anatolia, erected at the very dawn of city life nine thousand years ago." To wield a phrase from the 1960s, this book is mind-blowing. Davis is one of a kind. If you haven't met him on the page, start here.

The World Without Us by Alan Weisman hardly needs me to recommend it. It was, after all, a bestseller. But once you accept Weisman's premise -- that, by some unknown means, in a single historical moment (this one, to be exact), humans were removed wholesale from the planet, the book is anything but downbeat. It's a riveting exploration of how the traces of the heavy hand of humanity would slowly disappear and, everywhere, nature would return. As a dyed-in-the-wool city boy, I have to admit that there was something moving about that return of nature -- you can't help rooting for it -- and gripping about the way Weisman describes the dismantling of my home town, New York City, starting with those flooded subway tunnels almost the moment the power -- and so those 753 underground water pumps goes dead. Imagine! Sooner or later, Second Avenue, on which I took a bus to school so many mornings as a child, will be a river. This book is, in fact, an infernally clever way to grapple with climate change, without claiming to be about it at all.

Even here, by the way, put Mike Davis at the head of the class. In the final chapter of his 1999 book Dead Cities, he began dismantling a great city, London, in what would become the Weisman-ian manner. Of course, to my mind, the single greatest literary dismantling of a city (and a civilization) takes place violently in H. G. Wells' 1898 novel, The War of the Worlds. With gusto, Wells turned the task of taking London apart over to his "Martian" invaders. (I first read that book under the covers, after curfew by flashlight, at about age 12 or 13, and practically scared myself to death.). After hearing a heartless discussion about the British extermination of the Tasmanians, Wells reputedly decided to turn the tables, fictionally at least, on imperial Britain. In the process, he invented most of the tropes of the invader-from-outer-space sci-fi novel. Ever since then, we humans have been imagining scenarios in which implacable aliens with superweapons arrive to devastate our planet. What if, as Davis and Weisman might both agree, it turned out that the implacable aliens were us?

Speaking of that, I noticed that one of my favorite (tiny) "travel" books -- ostensibly by bus deep into Africa, but in fact by research deep into European colonial history -- was reissued this year by the New Press: Sven Lindqvist's "Exterminate All the Brutes." (The title, of course, is taken from Kurtz's mad scrawl in Conrad's Heart of Darkness). What a ride through the planetary past Lindqvist takes you on as "progress" and "extermination" leave Europe hopelessly intertwined, cut a swath across four continents, and arrive back home as the god of slaughter, machine gun in hand, in August 1914. In a sense, you could think of this book as the story of how the Jews of the Holocaust were essentially the Africans of Europe. Read it and weep, as they say. (Or check out my old Nation review of it by clicking here.)

And talking about cutting a swath of destruction across a country, don't miss Dahr Jamail's first book, Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq -- and, while you're reading it, think of us as the invading Martians. I hardly need to extol Jamail to Tomdispatch readers, but his book offers a remarkably fresh glimpse at what those "Martians" looked like and felt like through Iraqi eyes. This book should outlast the war it recorded (even given Washington's urge to remain in Iraq forever).

On more purely American ground, not to say Ground Zero, stands Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America, which explores the full range of bizarre responses to the 9/11 attacks -- the set of fantasies that Americans, the media, and especially the right-wing and the Bush administration conjured up in about 30 seconds. It offers a genuinely original window into the American psyche, for those brave enough to peek. Where did all those fantasies of manly men and women-in-need-of-protection come from anyway in a nation that mainly watched 9/11 on TV? Faludi is convincing when she argues that they emerged from an American mythology whose origins are as old as the Puritans and which has been etched, almost like a genetic code, into our national consciousness. The Terror Dream has largely been reviewed as a 9/11 book, but, believe me, it's so much more fascinating and deeper than that.

Oh, not that I haven't recommended it before, but if you're in that classic, history-can't-repeat-itself-can-it mood, Juan Cole's Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East is the book to cure you. Yes, Virginia, it all happened before. The invasion bringing "liberation" and "democracy," behind which were the grandiose dreams of a "Greater Middle East." The miscalculations, the unexpected, bitter guerrilla war that followed, the full fiasco. The difference? Napoleon's disaster took a mercifully short three years to unfold and he, at least, brought along a corps of scientists, rather than private security cops and crony corporations, and some of them found the Rosetta Stone.