NONFICTION:COUNTER-JIHAD TREND
Rock the Casbah; Rage and Rebellion Across the Islamic World
by Robin Wright (Simon & Schuster)
With the Arab Spring still unfolding, former Washington Post reporter Robin Wright’s latest book puts the popular uprisings that have swept the Arabic-speaking Middle East from North Africa and the Levant to the Persian Gulf littoral in the context of a larger movement: counter-jihad. Muslims around the world, she writes, are “increasingly rejecting extremism. The many forms of militancy — from the venomous Sunni creed of al Qaeda to the punitive Shiite theocracy in Iran — have proven costly, unproductive, and ultimately unappealing.”
In other words, Osama bin Laden’s efforts produced a result contrary to his intentions. After 9/11 dragged the United States into the Middle East in force, Muslims turned not toward extremism but moderation. According to Wright’s survey of the Muslim world, bin Laden’s message was dead long before the Navy Seals brought him down in May. “Rock the Casbah,” then, is an introduction to the Muslim world 10 years after 9/11, and the author’s purpose is partly to illuminate and partly to instruct.
From Wright’s perspective, Americans’ view of Muslims and Islam hasn’t caught up to the reality. In spite of developments in the Middle East and elsewhere in the Muslim world, she argues, the past decade here in the United States was “shaped largely by fear of everything from a global clash of civilizations to a new neighborhood mosque.” What’s now required of Americans and their elected officials “is moving beyond fear as the most influential factor in decisions.” And that, she argues, “means more exposure to Muslims or education about Islam.”
Regarding this last, Wright’s book succeeds handsomely. As one of this country’s top Middle East reporters for more than four decades, she deftly escorts her readers around the region.
Wright paints broad strokes across a very wide canvas, and so it’s inevitable that the picture will have an occasional distortion. To be sure, her fellow Americans would do well to learn more about the faith of their Muslim neighbors. As we’ve all been witness to this last decade, and as Wright’s book reminds us, Muslims are already part of the fabric of this country. Lee Smith, Washington Post Writers Group
FICTION:YOUNG ADULT
The Predicteds
by Christine Seifert (Sourcebooks Fire)
Christine Seifert is known for her essays on Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight” saga and for coining the term “abstinence porn.” In her debut young adult novel, “The Predicteds,” Seifert shows she can almost compete on Meyer’s turf.
Sixteen-year-old Daphne has just moved to Quiet, Okla. Her high school is involved in PROFILE, a new program that can predict a student’s capacity for committing a violent crime. Daphne isn’t convinced the program is legitimate, but she’s more than a little involved because it was created by her mother.
During her first week at Quiet High, a student brings a gun to school and goes on a shooting spree. Daphne is spared because Jesse, a mysterious and attractive classmate, stuffs her into a cabinet and overpowers the shooter. Students and their parents decide that PROFILE is more relevant than ever and want the findings released to the public.
As Daphne and Jesse start to fall for each other, rumors about Jesse’s past and his mysterious relationship with the shooter’s sister spread throughout the school.
Seifert has clearly been studying the “Twilight” novels. Her idea of “abstinence porn” is shown in the way Jesse and Daphne interact with each other: They have a tumultuous emotional affair, but hold back from sex. Seifert is clearly posing an interesting question in “The Predicteds.” What happens to people who know predictions about themselves? Can the future be altered? Or, if you are told at a young age that you are a violent offender, does that information persuade you to become one? Summer Moore, The Associated Press
NONFICTION:WORLD ECONOMY
Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China
by Ezra F. Voge. (Belknap/Harvard Univ.)
Twenty-six years ago, an American vice president went to the western Chinese city of Chengdu with a message for China: America is here to help. In a speech to students from Sichuan University, George H.W. Bush said the United States would allow China access to a far greater range of American technologies — some with military applications — than other communist countries were granted. American firms, he said, were eager to invest in China. American consumers, he predicted, would soon hanker after Chinese goods.
An American vice president wouldn’t visit China again until last month, when Joe Biden addressed a similar audience of students from the same university, in the same city. Only this time, the message was completely different. Instead of promising markets, investment and technology, Biden pledged that the U.S. Treasury would make good on the trillion bucks it owes Beijing. It raises the question: Do the schedulers at the White House lack imagination, or are they just trying to help a scribbler draw a parallel?
The Bush and Biden trips to Sichuan bookend one of the world’s greatest stories: the rise of China and its emergence as a global juggernaut. How China got to this point — last year it surpassed Japan as the world’s second-biggest economy and Germany as the nation with the most exports — is the story that Ezra F. Vogel tells in “Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China,” a masterful new history of China’s reform era, and perhaps the clearest account so far of the revolution that turned China from a totalitarian backwater led by one of the monsters of the 20th century into the power it has become today.
Vogel picked one man on whom to center his tale: Deng Xiaoping (1904-1997). His main argument is that Deng deserves a central place in the pantheon of 20th-century leaders. For he not only launched China’s market-oriented economic reforms but also accomplished something that had eluded Chinese leaders for almost two centuries: the transformation of the world’s oldest civilization into a modern nation.
“Did any other leader in the twentieth century do more to improve the lives of so many?” Vogel asks. He clearly believes that Deng — known in the West mostly for engineering the slaughter of protesters in the streets near Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989 — has been wronged by history. His tome is an attempt to redress the balance.
John Pomfret, Washington Post Writers Group
