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"The Feeling of What Happens"
I feel, therefore I am: A scientist asks, What, exactly, is consciousness?
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[09/21/99]

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"Words Fail Me," "Sin and Syntax" and "Sleeping Dogs Don't Lay"
Three new guides to grammar and style approach the rules with a liberal informality and a healthy dash of humor.
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Ivory Tower
Thicker than blood
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[09/20/99]

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"A Book of Reasons"
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By Dustin Beilke
[09/17/99]

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"I'm ambivalent about revenge, as you can see. I think it's sometimes appropriate. It's not legal but it's sometimes appropriate.

"I think if I had lived in Europe in the post-Holocaust period I would have taken revenge. This is how it should have been, in some ways; there should have been more justice, there should have been more retribution, there should have been more biblical justice -- an eye for an eye.

"The idea that we allowed Nazi war criminals to come to this country and help us build our space program is abominable. I mean Werner Von Braun belonged in jail, not [venerated] as a hero. The victors -- England, France, others -- who didn't seek any kind of justice were just looking at tomorrow, not worrying about yesterday. The problem is that by doing that they created Pol Pot, they created Milosevic, and they created others who have promiscuously engaged in continued genocide, because they realize genocidal killers get away with it. That's the message of the 20th century: Genocide works. Genocidal killers get away with it."

Just Revenge By Alan M. Dershowitz Fiction Warner Books 352 pages

The lesser evil, Dershowitz believes, would have been to punish Germany after the war -- "even if it meant Germany went over to the communists. It would have been better for Germany to have become communist than to reward it by rebuilding it so quickly after the war.

"I remember reading in college, in Dostoevski's 'The Brothers Karamazov,' that one of the characters asks, 'If by torturing and killing a child we could produce total happiness for the world, would it be just?' He just throws the question out; he doesn't give an answer. And it stuck with me for a long, long time, and in [the novel] I try to give an answer, but there's no perfect answer."

In 1962, when he was a law student, Dershowitz was asked to go to Israel with Telford Taylor, the chief U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg, and help broadcast the trial of Adolf Eichmann. He didn't do it. "I had a clerkship coming up, I was worried about my own career, and I didn't go.

"Sometimes I think I should have done [it]. There was a chance in the '60s to really get those sons of bitches, but they got away with it, and they died happily in the arms of their families. And since I don't believe in the hereafter, that's it. They'll never have to pay a price for it. That's one reason I had to write this book. I had this feeling of wanting a just revenge. I had to get it in fiction at least."

Still, Dershowitz finds fiction hard to write, and "Just Revenge" was especially so. "I first thought about writing it about 20 years ago, when I discovered how many of my family were killed during the Holocaust. But I didn't think I had the talent to put together a novel on the Holocaust. It's daunting.

"The thing that's so frustrating for me is, I know I can't write like Kafka, I know I can't write like Bellow, I know I can't write like Roth, like Dostoevski, and I normally don't go into an area unless I think I can do it as well as the next person. But in literature I made a clear decision. I'm gonna write small novels and try to create a new genre -- the ethical thriller. Some books are plot-driven, some are character-driven. Mine is ethical-issue driven -- driven by one or two great moral ethical dilemmas that have to be resolved."

Kafka would probably have approved. He once wrote, "I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us ... We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves ... A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us."

Dershowitz uses different words, but he's saying almost the same thing. "When I teach ethics [at Harvard], I teach 15 problems, what I call the intractable problems." He outlines one, which happens to be one of the subplots in "The Advocate's Devil": What if a man is convicted of murder and sentenced to death, and another man comes into a lawyer's office and confesses to the crime. Should the lawyer break his oath of attorney-client privilege and turn in the guilty client?

"I once taught this in a class and there was actually a shoving match, the students were so angry with each other over their views. Then I knew I had a good one. Because there's no right answer to that."
salon.com | Sept. 21, 1999

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