The Standard Reader

For obvious reasons, losing–to say nothing of losing big–is an underanalyzed phenomenon. Perhaps all the dreck in “self-help” publishing has driven out the potentially good stuff. Perhaps I just don’t know about other good writing in this area. Whatever the case, I started reading Rob’s manuscript as a duty, continued as a pleasure, and ended up revisiting it more than once to reflect on it with profit.

Given my limited credibility on Rob, I suppose I’ll just say this: Read >Winning Smart after Losing Big. It’s a quick read. You’ll enjoy it. And I think you’ll find it more than fun, more than interesting, but really thought-provoking–and, yes, deep.

–William Kristol

The Wrong Side of Brightness by Austin Bay (Jove, 231 pp., $6.99). Desert Storm is over–as decreed by Washington. Peter Ford, a battalion operations officer, is in his tank on the bank of the Euphrates in Iraq after the U.S. ejection of Iraqi troops from Kuwait. Across the river is a Shia village. As Ford and his fellow troopers watch, a contingent of Saddam Hussein’s thugs begins to slaughter men, women, and children–and the “Rules of Engagement” forbid the American soldiers from intervening.

Ford nearly disobeys his orders, seething as he bears witness to the Iraqis’ carnage through his tank’s gunsights. But as a disciplined soldier he resists. He agonizingly watches the jumpsuit-clad leader of the killers shoot a nurse to death, a murder that awakens a horrific memory of another nurse’s slaying in another country years before.

Austin Bay, a public-affairs columnist, WEEKLY STANDARD contributor, and colonel in the Army Reserve, unwinds a tale of evil across four continents. With “Jumpsuit” as a major player, this vivid thriller pivots on the illicit African traffic in diamonds and weapons that fuels corruption. Greed and power, idealism and evil, weave a lethal series of circumstances that Ford, now an ex-Army officer, must navigate and which illuminate his own scarred youth and family.

Austin Bay’s plot is alarmingly plausible in the vicious landscape of the past dozen years. His cast varies from the military to investment banking. These characters and their international settings are terrifically convincing. This is a gritty tale with an ethical core, neatly executed.

–Woody West

Twentieth Century Attitudes: Literary Powers in Uncertain Times by Brooke Allen (Ivan R. Dee, 241 pp., $26). What’s most likable about Brooke Allen’s essays is how smoothly they shift from literary journalism to literary criticism. She briefs the reader with some biographical background on her subject–and, two seconds later, we’re in the middle of a fine discussion of the farcical elements in Iris Murdoch’s fiction.

It is not the critic’s only task to drive the reader down long roads of philosophical speculation; there is also the necessary work of simply singling out writers and even making introductions if necessary. Allen develops a compelling case for the mastery of Henry Greene, for instance–and, because I trust her, I’ve ordered three of his novels to read.

Her observations about Evelyn Waugh (to take an author I do know) are important and true. She notes that Waugh’s early novels are better than his late work and his very best novel was his first: the peerless “Decline and Fall.” She concludes that Waugh was far more than some jazz-age figure; he was a truly singular comic genius like Jonathan Swift.

Allen can be quite bold in her opinions (see especially the spanking she delivers to feminist academics in her essay on Virginia Woolf). But she fills her writing with intelligence and equanimity, making her boldness seem really not so wild after all, but the logical conclusion of good sense and an orderly mind.

–David Skinner