Books in Brief
Yoga Hotel by Maura Moynihan (Regan, 304 pp., $13.95). Maura Moynihan was brought to India as a teenager much against her wishes when her father, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, was appointed the United States ambassador there. By the time the family returned to America, young Maura had conceived a deep, clearly lifelong passion for the subcontinent and its people. She also acquired fluent Hindi.
As her collection of five sparkling short stories and a novella prove, her affection for and knowledge of things Indian go far beyond any adolescent crush on the exotic. She views Indians of all social classes with a keenly observant, wickedly witty eye. In “The Visa,” she neatly skewers a sleek upper-class, married male, Vinod, who shamelessly hits on mousy Melanie Andrews working in the visa section of the American embassy to get a much-prized visa for the United States for himself and business associates. Highly entertaining and clever as many of the stories are, Moynihan also shows a devastating awareness of just how hollow and hypocritical some Americans can be–as in her story “High Commissioner for Refugees,” in which a young U.N. official, newly posted to Delhi, comes up against the reality of a Tibetan monk who’s been a prisoner, tortured by the Chinese for three years.
At a recent book promotion in Washington, Moynihan read aloud one of her stories, “A Good Job in Delhi,” doing all the characters in their various Indian accents and reducing her audience to helpless nonstop laughter–easily topping Peter Sellers’s tour-de-force in “The Party.” One trusts her publisher, Judith Regan, will have her do her own audio.
–Cynthia Grenier
Terrorists, Despots, and Democracy: What Our Children Need to Know (Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, 116 pp., $10 in print, free electronically at www.edexcellence.net). Uniting thirty contemporary public philosophers’ essays with an excerpt from Lincoln and the speech to the United States Congress by Tony Blair, this collection offers guidelines for schoolteachers who want to explain the war on terrorism to children.
Its criteria are eclectic, putting Richard Rodriguez alongside Victor Davis Hanson, and linking Lynne Cheney’s clearsighted commitment to our national spirit with William Galston’s nervous palpitations about Iraq. In addition, the recommended bibliography at the end seems a bit hasty, since it includes both Whittaker Chambers’s “Witness,” an excellent read for any young person, and the discredited “The Authoritarian Personality” study by Daniel J. Levinson and Frankfurt School adherent Theodore Adorno.
Other contributors include Kenneth R. Weinstein on the perils of American niceness, E.D. Hirsch Jr. on moral progress, Stephen Schwartz on America and the crisis of Islam, and Stanley Kurtz on the doctrine of preemption.
Lamar Alexander underscores an important point in his “Seven Questions About September 11.” He asks, “Is 9/11 the worst thing to happen to the United States?”–and he responds, “The answer is, of course, no, but I’m surprised at the number of people who say yes. It saddens me to realize that those who make such statements were never properly taught the history of our country. Many doubted America would win the Revolutionary War. The British sacked Washington and burned the White House to the ground in the War of 1812. In the Civil War, we lost more Americans than in any other conflict, as brother fought against brother. The list goes on. Children should know why we made these sacrifices and fought for the values that make us exceptional.”
“Terrorists, Despots, and Democracy” represents a major step toward that worthy goal.
–Richard Datchery
