The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives by Gilbert Achcar (Metropolitan, 2010)
This short review deems a new book that explores “the differing views of Arabs and Israelis over the migration of Holocaust survivors to the Middle East after World War II” bold and expansive. Achcar, a professor of development studies and international relations, argues that the Palestinians are engaged in “the last major anticolonial struggle.”
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell (Random House, 2010)
A new novel by Mitchell is, according to the writer Dave Eggers, “a straight-up, linear, third-person historical novel, an achingly romantic story of forbidden love and something of a rescue tale–all taking place off the coast of Japan, circa 1799.” This might come as a surprise to readers of Cloud Atlas, Mitchell’s best-known work, which plays stunningly with narrative structure in a manner which many term–somewhat wrongly according to Eggers–“postmodern.”
The book follows Jacob de Zoet, the son of a pastor who takes work in Japan as a bookkeeper with the Dutch East Indies Company. He struggles to remain faithful to Anna, a woman he left in Holland, and it is here that Eggers finds the most to praise: “Mitchell knows how to write about lust held at bay, and the love story offers the book’s greatest rewards.” Readers should be aware that, in spite of the novel’s linear narrative and the love story at its core, it is a very challenging book–“a novel of ideas, of longing, of good and evil and those who fall somewhere in between.” But, offers Eggers, “it offers innumerable rewards for the patient reader and confirms Mitchell as one of the more fascinating and fearless writers alive.”
Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars From Gutenberg to Gates by Adrian Johns (University of Chicago, 2010)
Law professor Jeffrey Rosen reviews this new book by history professor Johns, who looks at our contemporary dispute over intellectual property and privacy from a historical perspective, arguing that since the arrival of the first printing press in England in 1471 “corporations have tried to defend their economic interests by searching for intellectual piracy in the private sphere of people’s homes.” Johns offers theory alongside anecdote–and even stories of actual pirates–in this effort, which Rosen summarizes as a “challenging, richly detailed and provocative book.”
