Jonathan Littell
The Kindly Ones
Chatto & Windus, 2009
984 pages
£20.00
ISBN 978-0701181659

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Natural immunity is one of the great puzzles of epidemiology: for reasons not fully understood, certain small populations seem resistant to HIV, whereas for most people, exposure inevitably means contracting the virus. Max Aue, narrator of Jonathan Littell’s novel The Kindly Ones, argues that succumbing to the temptation of evil is also a matter of statistical chance: some are born in circumstances of contagion; others are blessedly (and, Aue thinks, self-righteously) immune. “I am guilty, you’re not, fine. But you should be able to admit to yourselves that you might also have done what I did,” he berates the reader.  “Always keep this thought in mind: you might be luckier than I, but you’re not a better person.”

By now, dozens of articles have been written on Littell’s fictional memoir of ex-SS officer Aue, first published in French as Les Bienveillantes in 2006 and released in Charlotte Mandell’s English translation earlier this month. Most critics have taken passages from Aue’s prefatory apologia, like the one cited above, to mean that anybody could have been born into Aue’s position, and that therefore Aue is supposed to represent everyone (or at least everyone coming of age in interwar Germany).

Then the scorecards are raised: The Kindly Ones is a daring achievement because it portrays Nazis as credible and possibly sympathetic human beings. The Kindly Ones fails because it continues to make people like Aue into ghouls and perverts, inaccessible to rational inquiry. Or, most smugly, The Kindly Ones fails because it portrays Nazis as plausible human beings, which they’re not. These three categories of response all imply that Aue’s insistent wish to be seen as Everyman (“I tell you I am just like you!” he later cries) must also be Littell’s wish for Aue. In fact, not only will nearly all readers find Aue impenetrably foreign, nearly all Nazis probably would have as well.

Aue’s early life reads like a concordance of psychoanalytic case studies. He was born 15 minutes after his twin sister, whose infant wrist was tied with red string to mark her primogeniture; he was allergic to his mother’s breast milk, but with envious memories of his sister’s nursing; he was abandoned by the father he adored; he was in love with his sister; he was furious with his mother and stepfather for their betrayal of his father’s memory. In another writer’s hands, this background might have become a source for dark comedy, but Littell has Aue dwell on these traumas with such violent longing that the potential for humour usually collapses long before the would-be punch line.

Littell surely does not intend Aue to be a representative sample either of humankind or of Nazism. This is clear from the way that Littell plucks at random from Freudian and tragedian sources. Aue as personnage de fiction is an overt construction, a collage of allusions—a creature we’re neither meant nor able to imagine without simultaneously picturing Littell right there beside him, making him, willing him into being.

Aue’s appearance is only hazily described; precise portraiture is instead reserved for his fixations. Take this statue, Apollo with Cithara, which Aue sees during a brief trip to Paris:

One detail struck me: regardless of the angle from which I looked at his eyes, painted realistically directly on the bronze, he never looked me in the eye; it was impossible to capture his gaze, drowned, lost in the void of his eternity. The metallic leprosy was blistering his face, his chest, his buttocks, almost devouring his left hand. [...] Looking at him, I felt overcome with desire, with a wish to lick him; and he was decomposing in front of me with a calm, infinite slowness.

Aue maintains throughout the novel that we are obsessed with the beings who are nearly our reflections, but not quite: one’s twin sister, for example, or, for Germans, the Jews. The statue that attracts Aue, then, is perhaps another case of near-likeness—like Aue, a fabrication, and increasingly “impossible to capture” because of the leprosy of history.

Littell delights in classical reference, whether implicitly (as in the Oresteia borrowings that critic Dan Mendelsohn traces so well) or explicitly (as in Aue’s repeated use of the adjective “homeric”). Even naming his narrator Aue, so close to the Latin greeting “hail”, suggests continuity between Aue’s impeccable classical education and his daily life in the SS, peppered as it is with Heil Hitlers and Sieg heils.

While Mendelsohn has traced The Kindly Ones’ Aeschylean conceits, the novel’s aspirations to epic form help articulate the difference between Aue and his creator Littell. Whereas Aue fashions himself as a latter-day Achilles, as often antagonised by his supposed allies as by his enemies, a more apt analogy would make Littell, not Aue, the besieger: after a near-thousand page attempt, we feel that Littell has never won access to the core of his character. Littell has imagined Aue as Homer imagined Troy: strong, handsome, almost impregnable. And whereas most readers know from the start that the Achaeans ultimately win, the drama of The Kindly Ones lies in watching its author try a succession of strategies to get inside the character he has somehow envisioned and yet not really known.

The author’s siege on his character, not a simple prurience, prompts many of the grotesque and bizarre sexual and scatological scenes that have garnered so much critical disapproval. They are notably repulsive, overly frequent and far too long, but one can imagine their having been part of the fiction-making process, albeit a part that perhaps ought to have been set aside by the final draft. We can picture Littell, early in writing, wondering how on earth to understand his character and deciding to start with the one thing that every killer, victim and bystander irrefutably have in common: a body. And then, having found that slender and fragile bridge, writing his way into every possible sensation that body might experience or desire. The process may well be helpful to the writer, but the result for the reader is a brutalisation of the notion of empathy: “feeling-in” becomes “forcing-into”.

Because this struggle towards interiority dominates Littell’s efforts, the novel is less convincing as a portrait of an age or a milieu; inflated critical appraisals comparing Littell to Tolstoy and Flaubert will inevitably disappoint readers. But for envisioning one of the most alien and most alienating characters in recent literature and trying doggedly to make him somehow penetrable and recognisable to human understanding, Littell deserves to be commended. A book that tests the limits of our capacity for empathy—even if, in the process, the book and the empathy fail—helps in some small way toward our definition of the human.

Laura Kolbe is reading for an MPhil in American Literature at Jesus College, Cambridge.

William I. Hitchcock
Liberation: The Bitter Road to Freedom, Europe 1944-1945
Faber and Faber, 2009
464 pages
£25.00
ISBN 978-0571227723

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“Liberation” is a justification for war that has proven resistant to time and history, with one shining precedent of success: Europe’s liberation from Hitler. The 20th century’s truly Just War. The traditional heroic WWII tale begins with the painful Allied invasion of France in 1944, the stalwart fighting at the beachheads and the eventual move into Normandy. Then, the troops crush the Nazi occupiers, pushing them back across the Seine, into Belgium. Finally, liberating the concentration camps on their way, they sweep across Germany to shake hands with the Soviets in May 1945.

The undisputedly just cause for Europe’s liberation often leads us to forget the mass destruction that accompanied it: the innocents pulverised in carpet-bombings, the countless civilians robbed, raped, slaughtered, displaced along the way to Hitler’s defeat. In Liberation: the Bitter Road to Freedom, William I. Hitchcock offers a revisionist history that shows how the pursuit of a noble cause also brought immeasurable suffering to those liberated. Hitchcock explains why liberation was “a time of cruel paradoxes”, an experience that Europeans—unlike neo-conservative “just warriors”—are “slow to wish on others”. On the darker side, liberation unleashed cruelty and indiscipline against the enemy. More than speaking to the uncontroversial truth that “war is bad”, Hitchcock demonstrates that the liberation project in Germany was just as much about vengeance as it was about benevolence.

Hitchcock, a professor of history at Temple University, begins with the landing in France. For the sake of military strategy, the Allies virtually obliterated cities like Caen and Brest. The French bore the bombings stoically, but their relief at liberation was mixed with mourning for meaningless death, destruction of crops and farms, food shortages. The ethical dilemmas of liberation were grisly. The lack of high-precision weaponry meant that liberation was mixed with grief for millions of French, Dutch and Belgian citizens: breaking Hitler’s Atlantic fortresses cost the lives of 20,000 Norman civilians alone. Alive to this, Hitchcock only reluctantly weighs between the lesser of two evils, utilitarian language that strategists are so quick to embrace:

This harvest of innocent life by the liberators was not malevolent, as the [Nazi] atrocities described above were. But it was deliberate, because the Allied leaders reluctantly accepted civilian deaths as part of the price to be paid for achieving victory.

Mass indiscipline also took its toll on civilians. For soldiers, battle was a struggle to survive, and for some, non-chivalrous hatred of the enemy was at times the only fuel that kept them going. Brutalised and underequipped, they were not only “our good boys”, as correspondent Ernie Pyle wired home, but also bad boys—who looted, drank and stole from the liberated locals. In Belgium they received “a warm welcome with the bitter taste of loss”. In Brussels, the military went from having flowers rained upon the GIs to having to launch a large-scale campaign against venereal disease and prostitution. The number of assault complaints increased sharply. American soldiers wasted food stocks, occupied houses and humiliated their inhabitants. The Liège press referred to them as “gangsters”. Hitchcock quotes a police commissioner praying in September 1945: “O Lord, deliver us from our liberators.”

The picture Hitchcock paints of the war in Germany itself is altogether darker. The myth of “liberation”—defeat, reconstruction and the Marshall Plan—began as a project designed not simply to defeat Nazi Germany, but to destroy it, unleashing as it did a vengeance against German civilians. Hitchcock’s account of Allied carpet-bombing of cities is chilling: 2.7 million tons of bombs dropped; 3.6 million dwellings destroyed; at least 305,000 civilians killed, amongst them around 80,000 children; countless cultural sites destroyed forever. Neither Arthur “Bomber” Harris, chief of the UK’s Bomber Command, nor Churchill was at pains to hide his hatred for all Germans or the desire for “just” revenge. Stalin sent his “Armies of Justice” on a mission to rape and kill, the account of which defies all imagination. Much of the destruction wrought by the Allies in Germany was of a different character to that which occurred elsewhere. It was not simply the collateral damage of military strategy, as in France and Belgium; rather liberation in Germany entailed destruction for destruction’s sake.

Hitchcock’s Liberation speaks to the notion that gruesome revenge and indiscriminate slaughter offer neither fair punishment nor true justice. Rather, they spoil the chance for honest self-reflection and obstruct systematic justice. But one doubts that, as Hitchcock muses, the Germans felt “the weight of their consciences, which perhaps whispered to them that they had richly earned this awful fate”. In fact, Germans often blamed “the War” rather than themselves for their suffering. The terror of Allied area bombing increased Hitler’s popularity. After the war, the extended process of liberation turned Germans into exhausted subjects, who submitted by turns to Soviet socialism or American paternalism, with “normalisation” not to arrive until the 1990s.

Arriving as brutal conquerors and occupiers of the “defeated enemy nation”, the Americans and Brits brought undisciplined havoc to Germany as they did elsewhere. It was over several months, and only gradually, that they “chose to transform themselves into liberators”, rebuilding and investing in the country. The Americans and Brits decided not to dismantle West Germany, which meant hanging on to qualified civil servants through a policy of “gratifying forgetfulness” that fell short of denazification. In the East, anti-fascist propaganda suppressed the Red Army’s injustice for decades, and the post-war Soviet occupation of East Germany actually prevented sincere feelings of guilt or forgiveness among East Germans. Presenting long-term effects, Hitchcock delivers the largest blow to the rosy picture of just warriors crossing the Rhine to establish freedom and democracy in Berlin.

Liberation covers largely unremembered occurrences of 1944-45, like Holland’s famine, where 16,000 Dutch civilians starved to death in early 1945. Such disasters often remain confined to national historiography, yet Hitchcock integrates them into a larger Brueghelian picture of Europe at the end of the war. Given these experiences, it hardly surprises Hitchcock that to many Europeans all military force has become ethical anathema and discussion of it has been reduced to mantric condemnation of civilian deaths. Hitchcock goes further and reminds us that, in the case of Germany, what is now misremembered as liberation was, in reality, equal parts vengeance. Combining social, political and military history, Liberation at times tries to cover simply everything and trails off into strategic minutiae not all pertinent to the subject. Yet as a project to give a voice to the bitter fates of the liberated it succeeds. It is a timely book carefully re-opening discussion about the very nature of what is often seen as the paradigmatic Just War.

Therese Feiler is reading for a DPhil in Theology at Exeter College, Oxford.

Peter Singer
The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty
Picador, 2009
214 pages
£14.99
ISBN 978-0330454582

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Peter Singer and Jimmy Cayne are not natural allies. Singer is an Oxford-educated philosopher, a vocal vegetarian and an anti-poverty crusader. Cayne is a high school dropout who, until recently, feasted on bacon, salmon and red wine before beginning his workday as CEO of Bear Stearns. Yet in Singer’s new book, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty, Cayne makes a cameo appearance—not as a villain, but as a good corporate citizen.

Singer heaps praise upon Cayne’s company: “Bear Stearns—before its sale to JPMorgan Chase during the 2008 crisis—made sure that neither apathy nor selfishness prevented its leaders from doing the right thing.” Such a pronouncement would be considered lavish praise for any corporation—but especially for Bear Stearns. When the investment bank collapsed in March 2008, one industry insider called it “payback” for a “firm that seemed to be overly selfish and overly interested in their own gains”. But for Singer, Bear is a beau ideal of benevolence. The firm required all of its senior managing directors to donate 4 percent of their salaries and bonuses to charity, and it checked their tax returns to make sure they complied. In 2006, according to Cayne, the firm’s senior managing directors donated more than $45 million (£32 million) combined. “As far as I know, we are the only company that has this type of policy,” Cayne said.

To be sure, Singer and Cayne do not entirely see eye-to-eye on all matters of philanthropy. Cayne’s charitable giving goes to museums and private prep schools, among other causes. By contrast, Singer believes that “philanthropy for the arts or for cultural activities is, in a world like this one, morally dubious”. He chastises the Metropolitan Museum of Art for paying $45 million for a single Duccio panel painting when the same amount of money could have funded 900,000 cataract operations for people in developing countries “who can’t see anything at all, let alone a painting”. Singer donates 25% of his income to anti-poverty groups each year. (All royalties from The Life You Can Save will go to Oxfam.) Comparatively, Cayne is much less generous: in 2006, his charitable trust gave gifts amounting to 7 percent of his CEO compensation. By Singer’s personal standards, Cayne is still a scrooge.

Nevertheless, Singer sees enormous potential in the Bear Stearns model of employee giving—albeit, with important modifications. Singer suggests that employers withhold 1 percent of every employee’s paycheck, which would then go to an anti-poverty organisation of the employee’s choice. Workers could opt out of the program, but the default would be to donate (and, specifically, to donate to an organisation that fights global poverty rather than a posh prep school, ornate opera house or other “dubious” cause). If major corporations, universities, and other employers adopted Singer’s suggestions, it “would yield billions more for combating poverty”.

For those who are familiar with Singer’s philosophy, the employee giving proposal will stand out as one of the more innovative elements of The Life You Can Save. To a large extent, the book rehashes arguments that Singer has already made elsewhere—starting with his 1972 essay “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”. Singer argued then—as he does now—that from a financial perspective, it is relatively easy to save a life in the developing world. He cites a statistic from William Easterly—a New York University economist who is famously skeptical about the effectiveness of third-world aid. Easterly acknowledges that the World Health Organization’s efforts against malaria, diarrhea, respiratory infections and measles save approximately one child’s life for every $300 (£210) spent. That is roughly the price of a new wool single-breasted suit from Marks and Spencer, or dinner for two with a fine champagne at Brasserie Blanc. When we spend our money on fine clothes or fine food, Singer says, we are valuing frivolous fun above the lives of real human beings.

Yet if every £210 suit is another child’s life, then every £21 hardcover book is a tenth of a child’s life and every £2.10 latte is one-hundredth. Does Singer’s argument imply that all luxury spending is problematic? Yes, but he does not ask us to become bare-bones ascetics. Rather, he sets out specific standards for charitable giving based on income level, and he asks his readers to abide by them. Everyone should strive to donate at least 1 percent of their income to anti-poverty efforts, he says, but someone like Jimmy Cayne should be giving close to 30 percent. (The full set of standards is posted online here.)

More than one thousand people, from China to Chile, have logged onto Singer’s website and pledged to abide by his percentage-of-income standards. Tim Harford—the Financial Times columnist who once penned an “economic case against philanthropy”—now says that Singer’s book has motivated him to donate to Oxfam. William Easterly, writing in the Wall Street Journal, is less persuaded. According to Easterly, “Mr. Singer argues from a small number of… examples that it is relatively easy to do good things for the poor,” even though much aid is wasted due to corruption and incompetence.

But Singer only needs “a small number of examples” to prove his point. Even Easterly would have to acknowledge that some aid organisations are effective. For example, the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital treats women who suffered debilitating injuries in childbirth that cause them to leak urine and feces continuously; for as little as £100 per surgery, the hospital can cure the condition with a 93 percent success rate. (Singer’s Australian publisher is giving 5 percent of its proceeds to the hospital.) As long as well-run organisations like this exist, and until they are fully funded, donors can be reasonably confident that their charitable donations are going to good use.

Granted, this is not a message that many will want to hear during a deep economic recession. As reviewer Katha Pollitt wrote in the Nation, “the gods of publishing must have had a good laugh” when they arranged for Singer’s book to come out when “so many are broke”. Yet in some sense, The Life You Can Save has appeared at the perfect moment. As a result of the financial crisis, the world has a rare opportunity to put Singer’s ideas into action.

Barack Obama has already imposed a $500,000 (£360,000) compensation cap on bank executives who receive bailout money. Gordon Brown is calling for a global code on bankers’ pay. The public is demanding some sort of change in the way that top executives are remunerated. But as one executive compensation consultant told the Los Angeles Times recently, people in his industry are “pretty damn smart” and will come up with ways to skirt the caps. Companies will compensate their CEOs with restricted shares instead of providing stock options or cash bonuses. They will offer their CEOs new perquisites that do not count toward the $500,000 cap. CEOs might be breakfasting on red wine, bacon, and salmon once again—this time, on their companies’ tabs.

Imagine, however, if Obama and Brown—instead of imposing quixotic compensation caps—forced banks to adopt Bear Stearns-style policies for top executives. Banks might implement an “opt-out” 1 percent plan for the rest of their employees. Unlike compensation caps, bankers might actually embrace such an approach. (Cayne says that most executives found that charitable giving was “incredibly gratifying”.) And unlike compensation caps, society might actually benefit as a result.

Inevitably, some senior executives will object to Singer’s stipulation that their donations go to anti-poverty efforts. They will fight for the right to donate to museums, musical groups and other organisations that Singer deems “dubious”. And whereas Singer believes that developing-world aid is almost always more cost-effective (from a life-saving perspective) than domestic aid, an argument he makes forcefully in One World (2002), it seems unlikely that Singer’s suggestion will garner support unless it allows for gifts to local causes. Even so, a plan that raises the quantity of charitable giving—regardless of which charity—is preferable to a plan that raises the quality of the executive dining room menu, and Singer’s proposal would do more than that. The £32 million from Bear executives alone in 2006 could have funded, by one estimate, 45 million meningitis or measles vaccinations in the world’s poorest places.

Of course, there still is one problem with the “Bear Stearns Plan”: there are few brands that are as associated with ignominy (though “Bernard L. Madoff Securities LLC “and “Stanford Financial Group” give “Bear Stearns” a run for its money). We might call it the “one percent doctrine ”, except that Dick Cheney has already dragged that moniker through the mud. The Bear Stearns Plan is an idea whose time has come—but whose name has yet to arrive.

Daniel Hemel, an MPhil candidate in International Relations at New College, Oxford, is writing a thesis on global financial regulation. He is a Senior Editor of the Oxonian Review.

Dambisa Moyo
Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and
How there is Another Way for Africa
Allen Lane, 2009
288 pages
£14.99
ISBN 978-1846140068

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At Harvard in the mid-1990s, a young Zambian graduate student listened rapturously to Professor Jeffrey Sachs’s prescriptions to bring prosperity to developing countries through the free market. Sachs later abandoned many of his free-market prescriptions in favour of large-scale aid flows from the West to the developing world—and Dambisa Moyo, the former student in Sachs’s auditorium, felt deceived.

“It’s completely hypocritical and it was a great disappointment,” Moyo said at a recent event in Oxford. “I think he’s very dishonest… To me, as an African, the fact that he would dole out the prescriptions he does to other people [in Latin America, Poland and Russia] but doesn’t when it comes to Africa suggests to me he thinks we’re different.”

It is this sense of betrayal, not just by Sachs but by the larger international community, that fuels Moyo’s repudiation of aid as the solution to African poverty. It is the subject of her new book, Dead Aid, which makes a controversial anti-aid argument that should be read, if only to ignite discussion and force aid advocates to justify the status quo.

After setting out to debunk the “myth” that aid works, Dead Aid calls for an end to massive governmental and multilateral aid flows to Africa within five years, including all grants and heavily subsidised loans. Moyo’s claim is that turning off the aid tap will shock African governments into accountability by forcing them to innovate and find non-aid fundraising mechanisms. She spends most of the book describing the multitude of alternatives to “free money”, offering an exhaustive menu of free-market mechanisms that range from collective regional bonds and international debt markets, to small-scale development through domestic savings and microfinance. While she makes a strong argument for private sector strategies, she fails to explain how they can improve governance without the complementary emergence of viable democratic institutions and checks on executive power.

Moyo is the first to point out her argument is not new. Although it fails to engage with previous development theories and critiques, Dead Aid offers a fusion of classic dependency theory (blaming Africa’s underdevelopment on Western policies, namely aid) and free trade advocacy (promoting local growth through international trade and foreign investment). Though her ideas are clearly influenced by the tutelage of (a younger) Sachs and Oxford economist Paul Collier, Moyo dedicates her book to Peter Bauer, aligning herself with a martyr of classical liberalism, long maligned for his staunch criticisms of aid.

Despite her adept polemical positioning, Moyo’s actual diagnosis of aid’s ills remains painfully weak. In the preface, Moyo writes, “This book is a consequence of my thoughts and deliberations over the years.” Indeed, the book relies heavily on personal thoughts and deliberations rather than in-depth, or even cursory research. The first section rejects a litany of possible explanations for African poverty, leaving aid as the sole possible culprit of underdevelopment.

Instead of making a compelling empirical case for the detrimental effects of aid, Moyo launches a haphazard assault on alternative explanations for the continent’s economic stagnation. Without names or sources, she swiftly dismisses longstanding, well-researched arguments that have variously attributed Africa’s economic failures to the continent’s geography, climate change, colonial history, ethnic diversity, civil conflict and weak institutions. The reader is hardly convinced. For example, in order to shunt aside “historical factors, such as colonialism”, she proffers but a single paragraph (four sentences ending with a maddening footnote that cites the Wikipedia entry on the 1885 Berlin Conference).

Moyo repeatedly simplifies the complex challenges facing African countries today in order to overemphasise the extent to which aid is inhibiting economic growth. Ultimately, in bypassing context and the nuances of specific challenges, she weakens her own anti-aid argument. She decries aid for enabling corruption, engendering “laziness”, creating dependency, inciting civil wars and hamstringing civil society. These are important allegations, and familiar topics of conversation for any observer of Africa and development issues—but they are not grounded in evidence.

Throughout Dead Aid, Moyo insists on referring generally to the whole of Africa, and occasionally “Africans”, all the while describing Aid amorphously with a capital “A”. One cannot help but wonder what particular contexts and aid programmes Moyo has in mind, when the only “country” that appears in any detail in her narrative is an imaginary development hell-hole named Dongo, and when the only specific aid project she references is hypothetical, a malaria-net distribution scheme. Notably, this recurring hypothetical anecdote seems unlikely to fit Moyo’s own definition of “Aid”, as most “large-scale multilateral aid packages”, which go to governments, do not involve bed net handouts in rural areas. (The reference may refer to Sachs’s tireless advocacy for free bed nets throughout Africa.)

Despite serious shortcomings in Moyo’s dogmatic diagnosis, the book makes a compelling case for diversifying development funding by exploring private sector options. The list of free-market mechanisms Moyo recommends for financing growth is impressive, moving from the global to the individual scale. For example, she urges individuals to lend directly to African entrepreneurs through Kiva.org. Her big-ticket item for making the cycle stop is the international debt market, where African countries can work their way into investment viability.

Whether African countries can in the near future afford the sorts of loans that would create viable investment markets is unclear, particularly given the economic crisis that has dried up available credit across the globe. Yet Moyo reminds the reader that millions of dollars already sit on the continent in savings, money that could be invested at home, were attractive markets to emerge.

Once Western governments buy the argument that aid does not work, Moyo suggests they look to China for a development model that promotes growth. Moyo’s claim that, “in the last sixty years, no country has made as big an impact on the political, economic, and social fabric of Africa,” is dubious. But she is more focused on applauding China’s public and private “investment assault” than shoring up any sort of historical argument. Protectionists who detest the flood of cheap Chinese goods into African markets and human rights advocates who abhor China’s contentious non-interference policy will hardly be placated by Moyo’s somewhat bizarre presentation of opinion poll data, which is supposed to confirm that China’s presence is good rather than exploitative for Africans. (They may also be interested to know that Moyo was recently proposed as a board member of Lundin Petroleum, one of the Western oil companies active in Southern Sudan.)

As contentious as her arguments are, Moyo herself looks poised to become a lightning rod for debate. She vociferously decries the “glamour aid” culture, faulting it for disenfranchising African politicians and their constituencies. Yet the hubbub surrounding the release of Dead Aid reveals the irony of the book’s endeavour: if Moyo hopes to persuade Western donors and African recipients to abandon aid, she can succeed only by catapulting herself into the heart of the glamour-aid fray she so fervently condemns. So far, the former Goldman Sachs investment banker seems to be doing just that; the society pages of the Guardian recently attended one of Moyo’s book launches at the (glamorous) Hôtel Balzac on the Champs-Elysées.

At her recent book talk in Oxford, Moyo said that Dead Aid was “designed to open up dialogue”. To this end, the book is already a great success. But a “clarion call for change” Dead Aid is not. Lacking evidence and specificity, and completely disregarding the disparate, though uniformly difficult political realities of Africa’s countries, Dead Aid is neither prescription nor plan. Readers excited by the free-market optimism and private sector solutions presented in Dead Aid are left wondering just how to get involved in the apocalyptic and opaque Africa the book describes. Add the challenge brought by the global financial crisis, and surely Moyo has plenty of fodder for her next book contract (publication set for 2010).

Zoe Marks is reading for a DPhil in Politics at St. Cross College, Oxford.

Peter Porter
Better than God
Picador, 2009
80 pages
£8.99
ISBN 978-0330460675

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The title of Peter Porter’s latest volume seems to suggest a plucky young poet making a beeline for the Dawkins set of fashionable atheists. But Porter recently turned 80 and Better Than God is his 17th collection of verse. He is already half-a-century deep in considerations about the relative merits of faith and reason. The present volume makes it clear that, to him, belief in God is not merely illogical, but undesirable.

When he emerged in the early 1960s, Peter Porter was loosely associated with the Movement poets, but his work was distinguished from their anti-modernism by his recognition that aesthetic appreciation was vital to personal as well as creative fulfilment. Throughout his work, he has expressed distaste for the sort of corrosively quotidian existence that, in his first collection, he memorably described as “the life that kills, the death that lives”. Now that Porter’s “tired body” has obligingly caught up with the “ageing soul”, (a process he describes in “Opus 77”), we might expect a more personal fear of death to stalk his work, with the poet cracking the same grim jokes as before, but with a grainy croak to the voice.

Throughout Better than God, however, he chides the impersonal “sprawling melodrama of Creation” for its bad taste, and it becomes clear that what actually frightens Porter about the proximity of death is the likelihood that eternity will be dull: the afterlife that kills.

Once dead any half-decent line will seem poetry
And ‘pretty well’ may pass for priority.
You’re no longer tied to your pituitary.

Yet Life confronts the artist with an entirely different set of obstacles. In “Detoxing Dante”, it is a rigorously systematic view of the world. In “Money and Stravinsky”, he uses the example of the great Russian composer to address the fear that the invisible hand of the market might rudely clip the viewless wings of poesy. Elsewhere, he addresses the pressure of a great historical weight in his poem charmingly titled “Henry James and Constipation”:

De Quincey had my trouble—opium
For him; for me, inaction, looking on,
The bathroom stalled, the crucial moment gone.
The Bread of Culture, eaten crumb by crumb,
Chokes off all other appetite, and we
……Who will one day be prints exist in effigy.

Poems such as “What’s Playing in Eternity?” and “No Infelicitous Phrases Need Apply”, raise the prospect of infinity as a stifling aesthetic plateau, an “endlessly extended Eden” in which “the whole close patterning is seen at once”, where “everything is perfect, and of no concern”. Eternity, he suggests, would flatten the intimate thrill of experience. “Will there be sufficient here of stuff/ We call, if not quite Life, then circumstance?”

The octogenarian Porter clearly has a great deal more roughage in his aesthetic diet than the young Henry James, and—without straining too hard—has produced a witty and formally compact essay on the unthinking consumption of art and literature.

In his collected lectures, Saving the Wreck (2001), Porter identified Robert Browning as the poet who most successfully brought the past into relation with the present by perfecting the range and flexibility of the dramatic monologue. Browning used this form to give voice to a number of historical figures, allowing their concerns to address those of the poet’s own times. Porter argued:

The longer we live and the more art piles up, the more opportunities we have to choose from the complete range of the past those qualities we judge to be the most effective for us, and therefore most helpful to our contemporaneity.

For Porter, Browning’s work served as an example of how poetry could determine priority. The creative act could perform the work of criticism and select salient instances from the vast reaches of history.

But in Better Than God, Porter expresses less confidence, and he struggles to conceal his sense of powerlessness in the face of such abundance. If the craving for culture “chokes off all other appetite”, then how can it nourish us? Porter’s ventriloquist act provides few answers to this question. His dramatic monologues emphasise neglected figures and telling anecdotes from the past, but they are perhaps too concentrated and transparent to add up to anything other than an amusing lyric.

Paradoxically, Porter is a writer who reveals more when the scene he represents is deliberately oblique. In “Lost Among the Lizards”, he explicitly dramatises the attempt to infer significance from something opaque and unyielding. The poet endeavours to find out whether geckos dream and, if so, what this “Lizard Anthropomorphism” might mean, roping in Cicero, Leopardi and Empson along the way. Towards the end of this exercise, however, he admits defeat and retreats back into his imagination: “if I’m wise/ I’ll break into a book where living is/ Forever independent of surprise.”

But Porter is at his most effective when he drops the mask and unmuzzles his satirical fangs. He remains the poet who once translated Martial and channelled the spirit of John Marston to denounce the “Conde Nast world” of the swinging sixties. But in this present collection his disgust is tempered by compassion and a nagging awareness that this time his response might be disproportionate to what he observes. This is true of “Young Mothers in the Square”, which deliberately recalls “Afternoons” by Philip Larkin:

A shadow falls across the lawn;
Is it the poet’s unearned scorn?
How can they play, as Gray observed,
Unconscious of their fate? The curved
Blades of their death swing round
Like Frisbees looping to the ground
Where everything is burgeoning,
A rose, a laptop, someone’s bling.

At times, Porter can seem to play the part of a demented tarot dealer gratuitously flourishing death’s card, but his robust formal command prevents him from sounding grotesque. The neatly arranged couplets and the blithe trot of the tetrameter help establish the scene and the disapproving view of the poet. But just as the rose that sits somewhat anonymously alongside “someone’s bling” recalls the earlier description of the poet as “an old rose branching on a stem”, so his moralising perspective is shyly and gradually introduced into the scene he derides.

Is the scorn really deserved? Are the mothers any less conscious of their fate than the poet or his illustrious predecessor, Thomas Gray? Instead of vitiating the impact of his point of view, this troubled stanza seems somehow appropriate in a collection where Porter has thoroughly and conscientiously probed the value of his own writing in an increasingly distracted world.

Jonathan Gharraie is a DPhil student in English Literature at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford. He is working on D.H. Lawrence and exile.

Adam Bradley
Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop
Basic Civitas, 2009
304 pages
£12.15
ISBN 978-0465003471

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Ever since hip hop went mainstream in the early 1990s, public conversations about the genre have tended to focus on content rather than form. Hip hop’s explicit lyrics, long condemned for their glorification of violence, homophobia, sexism and even racism, continuously overshadow what Adam Bradley, in his new book, deems a bona fide Western poetic form.

Bradley’s Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop offers a respite from a public conversation that has focused almost exclusively on guns and their influence on impressionable youth. Rather than trying to justify or “explain” the objectionable content of hip hop music, Bradley shifts the conversation into a more positive light, focusing on the linguistic innovations of rap and their connection to canonical poetry. In doing so, he repudiates the conventional wisdom that rap exists in a “low culture” vacuum, disconnected from other forms of poetry. Referencing Shakespeare, Coleridge and other canonical poets in his analysis, he signals that the book’s intent is not to revise the definition of poetry, but rather to prove that “Rap is a Western poetic form”.

To illustrate his point, Bradley, an English professor at Claremont McKenna College in California, dissects the mechanics of rap verse. He tracks the appearance of “the Anglo-Saxon tradition of accentual or strong-stress metre” in hip hop verse, showing how rap lines typically contain “the same number of natural speech stresses”. Connections between rap and canonical poetry abound. For example, Bradley compares the Run DMC lyrics “I’m from DMC in the place to be/ and the place to be is with DMC” to Shakespeare’s line from Macbeth, “Fair is foul, and foul is fair”. The reference to Shakespeare signals Bradley’s appreciation of “traditional” literary poetry; rather than attacking our notion of “the canon”, Bradley validates it by constantly referencing dead, white, male poets as a standard of comparison.

The book considers how a rapper’s use of rhyme can, as it gains complexity, expand the possibilities of language. Bradley cites Immortal Technique’s lyrics: “The bling-bling era was cute but it’s about to be done/ I leave you full of clips like the moon blockin’ the sun.” The artist is taking aim at superficial rappers and hoping to devastate them, to leave them artistically dead, or in other words, “full of clips”.  A person “full of clips” is riddled with bullets, and the experience of death is like the darkness of a blocked sun. Fittingly, “full of clips” sounds like “full eclipse”. The paronomasia, best appreciated when spoken aloud, foregrounds the sonic pleasures of hip-hop, and shows how, as verse that is meant to be spoken, rap lyrics describe experience and become an experience in themselves.

Book of Rhymes offers many such examples from mainstream and underground artists, and Bradley’s love of the genre comes through as he describes the linguistic play of rap that is by turns witty and darkly comic, inventive and lyrical. His close readings of lyrics teach as much about poetry as they do about rap. For instance, he introduces and explains antanaclasis—the repeated use of the same word, each time with a different meaning—with Cam’ron’s “I flip China/ my dishes white china/ from China.” Here the word “china” signifies heroin, crockery and a country. He explains how the rapper’s rhyme, like poetry, works with and against the rhythm of the beat, offering Jay-Z’s lyrics on American Gangster (2007) as an example: “Blame Oliver North and Iran-Contra/ I ran contra-band that they sponsored.”

To his credit, Bradley manages to educate the reader without coming across as condescending. He clearly has multiple reading audiences in mind; the allusions to literature and cultural theorists will satisfy the academics, but all references are made within Bradley’s text. The accessible format—no footnotes, bold font and a good deal of white space on the page—will no doubt lure in hip hop enthusiasts without disappointing them.

But some of those readers will  be disappointed by the utter lack of female artists in the book, which is perhaps more a reflection of  misogyny and inequality in the rap world than it is a scholarly neglect. Bradley cites Lauryn Hill’s verse once, and he mentions Missy Elliott and MC Lyte without citing their rhymes, surely a slight in a book so focused on lyrics. There’s no Da Brat, Lil Kim, Foxy Brown or even Queen Latifah. One laudable inclusion is Jean Grae’s line from “Hater’s Anthem”, in which she calls herself “The cancer-toker, the Mad Hatter, the Jabberwocky of rap”. In recasting herself as a hero of hip-hop, Grae uses kenning, a device popular in Anglo-Saxon verse, in which she replaces her own name with compound phrases. Still, Grae’s self-promotion aside, women are hard to find in this text. The women of rap have been praised for offering a distinct, female point-of-view—alternative lyrical content in a rap world with few alternatives. That Bradley dismisses them from his analysis perhaps suggests an unacknowledged prejudice that persists about male and female poets: Ted Hughes was a genius, Sylvia Plath was a nutter; male poets are wonderfully introspective, neurotic female poets write about their feelings.  Bradley’s emphasis on form over content also fails to address the problem of originality in ghostwritten lyrics and formulaic “gangsta” music made at the behest of greedy record executives.

Nevertheless, Bradley succeeds, as scholars so rarely do, in bringing to bear the tools of the academy in an analysis of popular cultural forms. One sees in the Bradley’s conceptual framework flickers of Dylan’s Visions of Sin, the 2004 volume by Oxford professor of poetry Christopher Ricks, which made a compelling case for a serious, academic interpretation of Bob Dylan’s lyrics. Ricks makes a scholarly argument about content, reading Dylan’s lyrics in the context of their relationship to sin and virtue, whereas Bradley makes a scholarly argument about form, reading rap lyrics in the context of poetic devices and tradition. But both are academics braving a vicious peanut gallery in the Ivory Tower, extending the methodology of literary criticism to objects of popular consumption.

Academic feuds often manifest as contests between defenders of the Western canon and proponents of popular art. Bradley refuses to choose sides in those tedious skirmishes, instead highlighting the continuities between “traditional” verse and the poetry we hear from our headphones every day. In fact, Bradley offers a way in which literary studies can evolve without breaking completely from tradition; he shows that the tools of the academy—traditionally used to analyse Coleridge or Wordsworth—can apply, and with an equally productive result, to the rhymes and movements of the everyday street.

Amanda Johnson is a doctoral student in English at Vanderbilt University in the United States, focusing on images of race in the Trans-Atlantic, post-Enlightenment world.

George Tillman Jr.
Notorious
Fox Searchlight, 2009
123 minutes

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To many who memorialise the 1990s American rap scene, Notorious B.I.G. was, to borrow his own words, “the greatest there ever was”. Born Christopher Wallace, Notorious B.I.G. (or Biggie Smalls) was at once a homegrown poet of the Brooklyn streets and a larger-than-life critic of the very industry that brought him monumental success.  From the start, he was also an artist prepared to confront his own demise. In one of many eerily prophetic songs he wrote about his own death, Biggie said: “I’m ready to die, tell God I say hi.”

Biggie’s lyrical predictions were realised in 1997, when he was killed in a drive-by shooting at the age of 24. Upon his death, Biggie joined Tupac Shakur (shot at 25 a year earlier) as a martyr of the East Coast-West Coast rap feud and a potent emblem of the triumphs and fatal excesses of 1990s rap music.

Notorious is the long-awaited biopic of Wallace’s life. Although ostensibly a Biggie-focused film, a large part of Notorious is devoted to the Tupac-Biggie feud. Tupac’s death in particular prompted an almost Kennedy-like media obsession, with some postulating that Biggie played a part.  Notorious is executive producer Sean “Diddy” Combs’s attempt to match the Tupac devotion—and, in typical fashion, to cash in on it—by framing Biggie’s life as a classic conversion narrative.  In this version, a loveable Biggie travels from sin to success and redemption. The West Coast conspirator’s bullet ends his life at its peak.

In framing Biggie’s life as a redemptive journey, Notorious joins the succession of similar biopics that have become a hallmark of theatergoing. From La Vie en Rose to Milk and Selena, the biopic tends to chronicle a public figure’s journey from humble, oppressed roots to success; he or she then triumphs, either to fade into obscurity or be cut down in the prime of life. The genre is particularly fitting for musicians, providing an elegiac form for notables who are often remembered for musical snippets rather than epic statements or lives. As the audience witnesses the musician’s rise to fame, the pain they feel in loving an artist thwarted by early death is assuaged by the sense that they are soaring upwards through a life fully lived.

Notorious follows this template, so it should, in theory, be the perfect tribute. The stuff of Biggie’s life is ripe for a biopic-style resurrection, and much of his music—and hence, our soundtrack—concerns his passing and legacy. (This sentiment is best encapsulated in the titles of his two most famous albums, Ready to Die and Life After Death, that latter of which was released posthumously).

But the film fails to deliver on the promise of epic fulfilment. Notorious plays more like an ill-conceived mash-up between a low-budget music video and a Behind the Music special than the conceptually rich biography it could have been. The film might also be overly commemorative; the death foretold in Biggie’s flashback narration and suicidal musings saps the remaining story of any life.

Perhaps most importantly, for an homage to a musician, there is surprisingly little music. Notorious pales in comparison to Selena, the critically acclaimed biopic in which the slain musician’s most beloved songs are interwoven with her rise to fame. By that film’s end (the obligatory candlelight vigil), the audience has grown to love Selena’s work. Notorious viewers searching for a similarly satisfying intercut montage will have to go elsewhere. “Juicy” hardly lifts the gloom of impending death that hovers above the film.  “Hypnotize” is featured twice, at the opening and as a prelude to Biggie’s death, while “One More Chance/Stay With Me”, a dirge-like ballad, sets a somber tone. And where is “Mo Money Mo Problems”, the rapper’s catchphrase song?  Buried in a crowd scene.  The film has Biggie express the song’s sentiment once—frustratingly, Puffy gets to utter most of the aphorisms—but it’s not enough to save Notorious from its myopically maudlin overtones.

Why not feature “Mo Money”, Biggie’s most danceable tune, more prominently?  Because if Notorious is to be a conversion narrative, Biggie’s success and redemption cannot be separated.  Although Biggie knew cold, hard cash could attract enemies, the film (quickly beginning to feel like Puffy’s film) embraces wealth as a sign of growth, not as a sign of an increasingly problematic life. Money is in almost every shot: it is in the license plates of busted cars and the golden leaves that frame young Chris’s Brooklyn window; in the sparkling marquee of a “CHECKS CASHED” sign above the street where Chris is dealing drugs and in the earrings of every woman at his funeral.

The only color dimming all this green is the crimson red of Death Row’s Suge Knight, first seen posturing ominously in the colour of the Bloods gang at the SOURCE Awards.  Despite a limp critique of the media’s role in the East-West feud, the film goes on to lend credence to the Death Row-Bloods theory of Biggie’s assassination, with a red-coated henchman eyeing the rapper outside his LA release party. As Biggie drives away on his final trip, the traffic light switches from yellow to red, and Biggie turns to face his killer.

The ensemble cast mesh well, but there are few standout performances.  Angela Bassett is underused as Biggie’s devoted mother, and an enthusiastic Derek Luke is so much better looking than his real life counterpart that it takes a minute to realize you are watching a young Puffy. The exception is Lil’ Kim, portrayed by Naturi Naughton. Her talent is palpable, and her furious responses to Biggie’s slights are some of the only genuine performances in the film.  Unfortunately, they are overshadowed by over-the-top sex scenes, which seem to stand in for a more thoughtful take on the excesses of 90s rap culture.

As our protagonist, Jamal Woolard fills Biggie’s shoes, but only size-wise.  Biggie Smalls could negotiate his street-dealer rapper and teddy bear personas, but the film sticks to the softie image. Woolard’s portrayal is perpetually sleepy; at points where he might yell or laugh, he plays it straight, pursing his lips. Puffy seems to move most of the action, making the well-known, non-musical episodes of Biggie’s life feel empty. The young Chris deals crack to a pregnant lady, and we neither approve nor condemn. He cheats on and beats various women, and it’s unconvincing. He just doesn’t seem like the jealous, abusive type—but then, he doesn’t seem to have much of a personality at all.

In the film’s most moving scene, Biggie’s funeral procession, his mother’s utterances of grief and pride are interspersed with original footage of fans lining the streets of Brooklyn, clapping and dancing to his songs. Details like this evince a heartfelt dedication to Wallace’s memory. Though hampered by poor production values and a cramped script, the love comes through.

However, even covered in gold chains, the Biggie Notorious gives us is more of a pawn than the screen-filling presence fans knew him to be.  One could easily view the arc of Biggie’s life as following the predetermined path of success and destruction that the biopic formula (and Puffy’s adulation) set out for him, but Notorious B.I.G. deserves more credit. Biggie Smalls was beloved for his world-weary brand of hedonism and fresh lyrical style, not just his end. The movie is a faithful rendition, but it isn’t big enough.

Rebecca Rosen is reading for an MSt in English at Jesus College, Oxford.

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University Challenge (Primary School Edition)… Young contestants with remarkable memories in high-pressure, high-stakes, televised tournaments? In the footsteps of Gail Trimble, Slumdog Millionaire and Nupur Lala (of Spellbound fame) comes an even younger, even cuter cast of competitors (ranging in age from seven to eleven), and they’re coming to a theatre near you. The Sheldonian Theatre, that is. The Sunday Times previews “Off the Heart”, the competitive poetry recital scheduled for the last day of this year’s Oxford Literary Festival (5 April 2009). The Times and the BBC sponsored contests in 1,500 schools across the UK and have winnowed the field down to a dozen declaimers. A ten-year-old boy from Iran who spent two years inside a refugee camp will recite TS Eliot’s “Macavity: The Mystery Cat.” Evidently, criminal animals are all the rage. The most oft-recited poem was Roald Dahl’s “The Pig”, which tells the story of a swine who eats a hog farmer for lunch.

Hog Farmers Are Being Eaten Alive… not by their pigs, but by competitive pressures. Chef Jamie Oliver  says that UK pork farmers are an endangered species. So it’s a surprise to see that hog farmers are well-represented on the books pages of British newspapers this weekend. The Guardian reviews Solace of the Road, the story of a fourteen-year-old girl who lifts a ride from a hog farmer and heads westward along the A40. It is the second posthumous publication by Siobhan Dowd, a writer of young-adult fiction who died of cancer in 2007.

Posthumous Literature is the Life of the Book World… so far in 2009. Last week, we reported that the posthumous publication of David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel was generating controversy in critics’ circles. This week, Roberto Bolaño’s posthumously published novel 2666 wins the (US) National Book Critics Circle award for fiction. (The best biography award goes to Patrick French for The World Is What It Was: The Authorized Biography of VS Naipaul—which the Oxonian Review’s Jonathan Gharraie assessed last spring.)

Roberto Bolaño once said that the word “posthumous” sounded like a Roman gladiator. With the late Heath Ledger winning an Oscar for Dark Night, and with works by Nabokov and Kerouac on the way, it’s a word we’re hearing often. Indeed, too often for footballer Eddie Turnbull, who won a posthumous award from a church in Leith, Scotland earlier this year. Turnbull is alive—and upset that he was not invited to the ceremony: “I would have been there but, because I was dead, obviously no one told me about it.”

An Irish Wake… Until 1962, if a dead body was carried through the door of a pub in Ireland, the proprietor was legally required to store it in his cellar alongside his beer kegs until the coroner could hold an inquest. Today, pub owners in Ireland are pleased to see anybody coming through their doors—even if the body has no pulse. This week, the New York Times raises its glass to writer Bill Barich and his new book A Pint of Plain: Tradition, Change, and the Fate of the Irish Pub. As the Times notes, the nation of Nigeria now drinks more stout than Ireland (though as the Times fails to note, Nigeria also has thirty-three times as many people. While the “Celtic Tiger” economy roared ahead, the Irish retreated into their homes: they went from drinking 70 percent of their alcohol in pubs at the beginning of the decade to 47 percent in 2007. Barich chalks up the change to—among other factors—tougher drunk-driving laws…Meanwhile, in the Wall Street Journal, County Cork native William Birdthistle proposes that the pub in Ireland may not be as doomed as these statistics suggest. Ending his review on a note as bittersweet as a pint of Murphy’s, Birdthistle writes: “With the wings of Ireland’s economy so badly singed, one wonders whether the treasured pub will return with poverty as it fled with wealth….”

One Irish-style pub that will not survive is Oxford’s own Rosie O’Grady’s on Park End Street. The Oxford Mail reports this week that the pub’s new owner, a native of County Down, is “completely gutting it” and “turning it back into a traditional English pub format”. He tells the Mail: “the days of Irish bars have passed”.

The Best Bar Near Naples is at the rail station in Pompeii, says Cambridge classicist Mary Beard, who in this week’s Guardian takes us on a tour of the city where she spent a decade researching her new book. Harvard University Press has “sexed up” the title for American audiences: it was called Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town when it appeared in the UK last year; now it’s The Fires of Vesuvius. This week, the New York Times hails it as “engrossingly mischievous“. Beard meanders through the lurid, louche life of the Latins (”There seem to be phalluses everywhere”). There seem to be pubs everywhere too: by one estimate, Pompeii was home to 158 bars—in a city with a total population of 12,000 to 15,000.

A Posthumous Pub Crawl…Speaking of hog farms, and posthumous publications, and perishing pubs, the Times republishes George Orwell’s 1946 essay on the “ten qualities that the perfect pub should have“. Elsewhere, the Times worries that at the current rate of closure, the last pub in Britain will close in 2037.

“Some People Are More Equal than Others”… We would be thinner, healthier, and happier if incomes were distributed more equally. That’s the (paraphrased) argument of Snowball in Orwell’s Animal Farm—and of epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson (University of Nottingham) and Kate Pickett (University of York). In a new book, The Spirit Level, Wilkinson and Pickett argue that the social ills of the UK and US can largely be attributed to income inequality. Consistent with the egalitarian ethos of their argument, Wilkinson and Pickett have posted their evidence for all to see—for free—on their website, EqualityTrust.org.uk. The Guardian and the New Statesman (unsurprisingly) are convinced; the Economist (unsurprisingly) is not. Admittedly, the charts and graphs are compelling—although the argument brings to mind a popular cartoon about correlation and causation. Is it possible that in countries where mental illness and drug abuse are endemic, efforts to improve the lives of the lower classes are less likely to succeed? France, for example, has higher tax rates than any of the Scandinavian nations, but it also has higher inequality—and more social problems. Wilkinson and Pickett suggest that inequality is a cause of social ills, but could it instead be a consequence?

A Period Is Not Just a Punctuation Mark… In April 2006, the book world went wild after it was revealed that a second-year student at Harvard had published a novel that plagiarised passages from bestselling chick-lit writer Megan McCafferty. Now, a soon-to-be first-year at Yale is reprinting McCafferty’s writing word-for-word! The twist: she has McCafferty’s permission. McCafferty is one of 92 female writers who have shared stories of their first menstrual experiences in My Little Red Book, an anthology edited by 18 year-old Rachel Kauder Nalebuff. Nalebuff says she “wanted to evoke Mao’s Little Red Book, the manifesto distributed to all Chinese citizens during the Cultural Revolution”. We’re not so sure about the allusion: menstruation may be traumatic, but the Cultural Revolution (20 million dead) was rather worse. Still, the Chicago Tribune calls it “charming”, and the New York Times loves it so much that it reviews the book twice. The first review is more fawning (Abigail Zuger predicts that the book will “sell briskly for centuries to come”) but the second review has a better title: “There Will Be Blood”.