Salon.com > Books

Salon.com > Books http://www.salon.com Sun, 27 May 2012 13:20:45 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Exclusive: The Paris Review, the Cold War and the CIA http://www.salon.com/2012/05/27/exclusive_the_paris_review_the_cold_war_and_the_cia/ http://www.salon.com/2012/05/27/exclusive_the_paris_review_the_cold_war_and_the_cia/#comments Sun, 27 May 2012 13:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12927367 In 1958, the Paris Review’s George Plimpton wrote his Paris editor with a grand proposal. The Russian author Boris Pasternak had just been awarded the Nobel Prize. But under pressure from the Soviets — humiliated that "Dr. Zhivago" had to be smuggled out of the country — he refused it. “The Pasternak affair has caused such a stir here,” writes Plimpton from the journal's New York office, “and is in itself an event of such importance in lit’r’y history that we feel the Review somehow should chronicle what has happened…” Writing to Nelson Aldrich, the Paris editor, Plimpton suggests short statements by a “variety of authors asked to comment. What does Sartre have to say on this matter ... Aragon, Neruda, Waugh? Here [in New York] we have Niccolo Tucci … digging up statements, mostly from writers who (as he is himself) are refugees from tyranny…” Plimpton goes on to suggest that the Congress for Cultural Freedom, largely and covertly funded by the CIA, might fund brochures to help publicize the issue.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/05/27/exclusive_the_paris_review_the_cold_war_and_the_cia/feed/ 0 “People Who Eat Darkness”: The disappearing blonde http://www.salon.com/2012/05/20/people_who_eat_darkness_the_disappearing_blonde/ http://www.salon.com/2012/05/20/people_who_eat_darkness_the_disappearing_blonde/#comments Sun, 20 May 2012 21:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12923090 Lucie Blackman, 21, went out for the afternoon in 2000, phoning her roommate and best friend Louise to arrange a meeting later that night. Lucie never showed up, and within a few days she'd become one of those vanished blondes whose fates fuel headlines and hours of speculative media coverage. She was British, a former flight attendant, and she and Louise were living in Tokyo. They were also bar hostesses, a profession with a very specific meaning in Japan, difficult to explain to foreigners and not entirely clear to the Japanese themselves. Lucie both did and didn't match the classic Missing Blonde profile, and for a while the mystery of what happened to her threatened to lapse into permanent obscurity.

One thing made a difference: The actions of Lucie's father, Tim Blackman, who arrived in Tokyo to join his other daughter, Sophie, in publicizing the search and prodding the police. Richard Lloyd Parry, Tokyo bureau chief for the Times of London, covered the case as it unfolded, first over the course of several months while Lucie's whereabouts and abductor remained unknown, and finally for the six years it took to try the man accused of killing her, Joji Obara. The book Parry wrote about the case, "People Who Eat Darkness," is an exceptionally perceptive and nuanced look at a terrible crime, one that put nations, institutions and family members at odds, and often into bitter and toxic conflict.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/05/20/people_who_eat_darkness_the_disappearing_blonde/feed/ 3 Corporate criminals gone wild http://www.salon.com/2012/05/18/corporate_criminals_gone_wild/ http://www.salon.com/2012/05/18/corporate_criminals_gone_wild/#comments Fri, 18 May 2012 11:45:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12922201 "Inside Job," Charles Ferguson's Oscar-winning documentary film on how government, Wall Street and academia colluded to deliver us the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, made a powerful case that something was very very rotten at the heart of the American political/economic nexus. His follow-up book, "Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America," can be considered the legal brief that dots every "i" and crosses every "t" in his argument. A tightly argued, profusely footnoted and deeply enraged castigation of everyone involved, "Predator Nation" isn't just a factually unchallengeable account of how Wall Street blew up the global economy. It's a denunciation, a call for justice and a warning: After getting away with the crime of the century, Wall Street still isn't satisfied.

"If you have already got 96 percent of what you want," Ferguson told Salon, "why not take the remaining 4? That's where the culture of American finance is right now, and I think it's really dangerous for the country."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/05/18/corporate_criminals_gone_wild/feed/ 45 Can you identify? http://www.salon.com/2012/05/17/can_you_identify/ http://www.salon.com/2012/05/17/can_you_identify/#comments Thu, 17 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12921315 The news of recent research documenting how readers identify with the main characters in stories has mostly been taken as confirmation of the value of literary role models. Lisa Libby, an assistant professor at Ohio State University and co-author of a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, explained that subjects who read a short story in which the protagonist overcomes obstacles in order to vote were more likely to vote themselves several days later.

The suggestibility of readers isn't news. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's novel of a sensitive young man destroyed by unrequited love, "The Sorrows of Young Werther," inspired a rash of suicides by would-be Werthers in the late 1700s. Jack Kerouac has launched a thousand road trips. Still, this is part of science's job: Running empirical tests on common knowledge -- if for no other reason than because common knowledge (and common sense) is often wrong.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/05/17/can_you_identify/feed/ 43 “The Aleppo Codex”: The bizarre history of a precious book http://www.salon.com/2012/05/13/the_aleppo_codex_the_bizarre_history_of_a_precious_book/ http://www.salon.com/2012/05/13/the_aleppo_codex_the_bizarre_history_of_a_precious_book/#comments Sun, 13 May 2012 21:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12919242 An ancient and priceless book, a murky history of evasions and coverups, an underground of sinister and possibly violent dealers, a former spy who drops tantalizing hints and a wily 84-year-old millionaire who says stuff like, "The problem with this story is that it could damage your health": Are these the ingredients for a cheesy, improbable historical thriller? Yet "The Aleppo Codex," Matti Friedman's account of his attempts to learn the history of one of the world's most precious books, sports all of these assets, and it's nonfiction. If reporting this story damaged Friedman's health, it probably happened when he realized what he'd stumbled into and his reporter's heart started beating in doubletime.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/05/13/the_aleppo_codex_the_bizarre_history_of_a_precious_book/feed/ 13 Augusten Burroughs: Conquer trauma by letting it go http://www.salon.com/2012/05/12/augusten_burroughs_conquer_trauma_by_letting_it_go/ http://www.salon.com/2012/05/12/augusten_burroughs_conquer_trauma_by_letting_it_go/#comments Sat, 12 May 2012 19:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12919143 Many people continue to feel influenced and even controlled by the things that happened to them a long time ago. Sometimes, people harbor dark, traumatic memories from childhood. Or fragments of memories — incomplete scenes, uncomfortable feelings, perhaps even a sense of certainty that something specific and terrible happened to them, but little more than this.

Others experienced something traumatic in adulthood that continues to affect them day to day many years later. Maybe an assault has left a person afraid to leave their home or enter a particular neighborhood.

For a certain kind of person this will be the end of the story. What ever experience they endured essentially continues to this day, ever present in the background, shaping the choices made on a daily basis, affecting the quality and range of their life. This kind of person might be angry all the time or feel guilty or afraid. They just accept these states as a part of themselves.

Then there are people who are keenly aware of their experiences, who are psychologically ambitious; they wish to “get over” these historical traumas and might see a therapist to help them.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/05/12/augusten_burroughs_conquer_trauma_by_letting_it_go/feed/ 78 Why did we move to Paris? http://www.salon.com/2012/05/12/why_did_we_move_to_paris/ http://www.salon.com/2012/05/12/why_did_we_move_to_paris/#comments Sat, 12 May 2012 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12919208 Paris’s neighborhoods, the arrondissements, are organized like a twist. They spiral from the river like toilet water flushing in reverse and erupting out of the bowl — a corkscrew or what have you, a flattened pig’s tail, a whorling braid notched one to 20. But if you walk from one neighborhood to the next, there is little to suggest the numbers changing. So it was confusing. Anyway, if you began in the middle of the Seine and snaked around, we lived on the Right Bank in the top of the third arrondissement, called the haut Marais, the upper Marais, on Rue Béranger, a quiet little street curling down from Place de la République.

We’d chosen the apartment so we could be within walking distance of nearly everything. I’d overlooked its darkness and short ceilings for location’s sake: 15 minutes to Notre Dame; 25 to the Louvre.

Earlier generations of Americans wanted to live on the other side of the Seine, in the Latin Quarter, where artists and students rambled, but the Left Bank had long ago priced out the artists and students. Now it was home to the rich of Paris, the wealthy of the retired-expat class, and Russian moguls, while the youthful and creative tended to live on the Right Bank, especially in the higher, cheaper numbers, the 19th or the 20th — if not the Right Bank of Berlin, or Toronto.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/05/12/why_did_we_move_to_paris/feed/ 90 Robert Caro’s bloated LBJ biography http://www.salon.com/2012/05/07/robert_caros_bloated_lbj_biography/ http://www.salon.com/2012/05/07/robert_caros_bloated_lbj_biography/#comments Mon, 07 May 2012 18:40:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12916162 “Even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked.” When Bob Dylan wrote that line in 1964, the naked emperor was Lyndon Johnson, which makes that image perhaps the most disturbing in all of Dylan’s apocalyptic work.

By stripping down Lyndon Baines Johnson to his essence, Robert Caro has himself become an American legend. Since the publication of "The Path to Power" in 1982, Caro has transformed LBJ’s life into a cautionary tale of Shakespearean dimensions. In some wonky circles, the release of a new volume is heralded like the Summer of Love release of “Sgt. Pepper's.” Can Caro possibly top his “Revolver"?”

I am proud to be one of those wonks. Anticipating the release of "The Passage of Power," I went full-metal LBJ, and reread every word of the previous 1,040 page “prequel” – “Master of the Senate.” Much like catching up on the last season of “Mad Men” before the new one begins, I time-traveled like the hero from the new Stephen King JFK-themed novel back to 1958, as the Master Senator (and Master Biographer) prepared for their rendezvous with world history.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/05/07/robert_caros_bloated_lbj_biography/feed/ 26 “Bring Up the Bodies”: Hilary Mantel’s power play http://www.salon.com/2012/05/07/bring_up_the_bodies_hilary_mantels_power_play/ http://www.salon.com/2012/05/07/bring_up_the_bodies_hilary_mantels_power_play/#comments Mon, 07 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12913486 "Bring Up the Bodies," Hilary Mantel's follow-up to her Man Booker Prize-winning 2009 novel, "Wolf Hall," is a high-wire act, a feat of novelistic derring-do. Mantel makes bold not with form -- by now meaningful experimentation in that area seems exhausted -- but with the very material that brings most readers to novels in the first place: our imaginative identification with fictional characters and the experiences we feel we're sharing with them.

As with "Wolf Hall," the central character in "Bring Up the Bodies" is Thomas Cromwell, master secretary to King Henry VIII of England. The son of a drunken, abusive blacksmith, Cromwell has risen about as high as any commoner could hope to, entirely on the strength of his acumen, industry, cunning and resilience. As an often-quoted passage from "Wolf Hall" declares, "He is at home in courtroom and waterfront, bishop's palace or inn yard. He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/05/07/bring_up_the_bodies_hilary_mantels_power_play/feed/ 2 Partisan death jam http://www.salon.com/2012/05/06/partisan_death_jam/ http://www.salon.com/2012/05/06/partisan_death_jam/#comments Sun, 06 May 2012 21:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12915050 If you thought the debates over the debt ceiling last year – one of the most striking examples of political dysfunction and gridlock in recent memory -- were over, think again. Although Republicans agreed to a small raise and to put off discussion of the issue until after the upcoming 2012 elections, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told Fox, “We’ll be doing it all over” in 2013. Clearly, the partisan rupture that’s dividing Washington is not going to heal any time soon, but how did things get so dire to begin with?

When congressional scholars Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein say “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks” – the title of their book – they’re being serious (subtitle: “How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism”). Mann, the W. Averell Harriman chair and senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, and Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, began the Congress Project in the midst of the 1978 midterm campaign to track the institution as it evolved. What they’ve found since hasn’t been encouraging.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/05/06/partisan_death_jam/feed/ 40 My dad’s 30-year coming out http://www.salon.com/2012/05/06/my_dads_30_year_coming_out/ http://www.salon.com/2012/05/06/my_dads_30_year_coming_out/#comments Sun, 06 May 2012 18:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12915266 I must’ve been eight or nine the one time my dad took me along to meet Bart. This was somewhere near Tompkins Square Park. What I recalled was a shaggy shock of blue hair, and feelings of both elation and terror: On the one hand thrilled to be old enough to be taken along one night to the city to meet a guy with blue hair, and on the other frightened of the jagged dark in the Alphabet City of the late '80s. In my memory Bart looked like Warhol, but maybe that was just part of the dream pedigree I had for my dad, the one that looked to White and Genet and not "Will & Grace." But I did think that my dad once said he’d gone with Bart to sell drugs to Allen Ginsberg, so maybe in this case my retrospective fantasy — that if he’d had a secret life, it could at least have been an exciting one, something worth escaping his surface life for — was accurate. I remembered hearing for the first time about AIDS, and I remembered my dad walking around for some months, maybe years, as though accompanied by ghosts. It was selfish and obscene for me to look back and want his secrets, the secrets I’d come here to try to clear up, to have hidden amazing things: It meant I have at best ignored and at worst aestheticized the fact of what must have been unimaginable pain. Like any gay man of his age, he’d watched a great number of his close friends die of AIDS, but unlike many of those men, he was not able to talk about it to the people closest to him, the people he lived with. Maybe the reason he liked "Will & Grace" and not so much White and Genet — though, now that I think of it, I did give him "The Married Man" once and he told me it was the best novel he’d ever read — was that all he wants now is to be normal and happy. He wanted to marry Brett and drink boxed wine and take Yoshi out for walks and watch "Mamma Mia!" until their DVD player caught fire. I myself had never been less than loathsome on the subject of "Mamma Mia!" and I felt terrible about it, but I didn’t want to digress into overemphatic apology, and I would stand by my derision of "Mamma Mia!"

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/05/06/my_dads_30_year_coming_out/feed/ 7 “Frankenstein” remixed http://www.salon.com/2012/04/30/frankenstein_remixed_salpart/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/30/frankenstein_remixed_salpart/#comments Mon, 30 Apr 2012 19:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12912119

Whatever interactive fiction is (and we’re still figuring that out) it suffers from all the problems of traditional fiction and then some. The vast majority of novels and short stories aren’t much good, but when a branching fiction — along the lines of the old “Choose Your Own Adventure” children’s books — fails to engage, the first impulse is to blame the form rather than the content. Let “Frankenstein,” just released by Inkle Studios and Profile Books, serve as a reproach to that reflex. The app is a creative, subtle and sensitive adaptation of Mary Shelley’s classic novella, and it has singlehandedly renewed this critic’s hopes for interactive fiction.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/04/30/frankenstein_remixed_salpart/feed/ 2 “Words Like Loaded Pistols”: The not-so-lost art of rhetoric http://www.salon.com/2012/04/30/words_like_loaded_pistols_the_not_so_lost_art_of_rhetoric/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/30/words_like_loaded_pistols_the_not_so_lost_art_of_rhetoric/#comments Mon, 30 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12910408 When people use the term "rhetoric" these days, they usually mean empty language -- be it high-flown or spoken in high dudgeon. A few may think of rhetoric as a deadly classical discipline devoted to the exhaustive parsing and labeling of figures of speech: zeugma, anyone? Yet as Sam Leith points out in his delightful and illuminating "Words Like Loaded Pistols: Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama," we live in the most rhetorical era in human history, surrounded by and embroiled in argument, enticement, invective and panegyric wherever we turn.

The Greeks and Romans studied and scrutinized rhetoric so intently because they understood it to be the very stuff of power, specifically the power of persuasion -- which, as Leith points out, is even more potent today than it was in the fourth century BC, when Aristotle produced the first treatise on the subject. The master's "Rhetoric" is a work which (unlike much of his scientific writing) remains as useful today as it did in ancient Athens; Leith sprinkles shrewd tips from it (such as, construct your argument so that your audience thinks it's their own idea) throughout his book. "He was the first person," Leith writes of Aristotle, "really to grasp that the study of rhetoric is the study of humanity itself."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/04/30/words_like_loaded_pistols_the_not_so_lost_art_of_rhetoric/feed/ 11 A cartoonist gets personal http://www.salon.com/2012/04/30/alison_bechdel_salpart/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/30/alison_bechdel_salpart/#comments Mon, 30 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12911215 Over three decades, Alison Bechdel's comics have grown increasingly intimate. Her alt-weekly strip, "Dykes to Watch Out For," was as emotionally true as it was funny and shrewd, but as with other great political cartoons of the era, like "Bloom County" and "Doonesbury," the travails of its cast -- a gay-community ensemble whose lives Bechdel chronicled from the Reagan era through the first anxious decade of a new century -- only hinted at the life of the artist herself.

Her own personality burst out more explicitly in 2006 with the appearance of "Fun Home," a masterful graphic memoir about her relationship with her clever, exacting and very closeted father, who taught school and ran a funeral home simultaneously, and whose death under mysterious circumstances raised the possibility of suicide. Critics justly heaped acclaim on "Fun Home," praising its intricate narrative architecture and honest, despairing voice. In reconstructing her path from girlhood to womanhood, from nervous young diarist to nervous young artist, Bechdel overturned many of her family's myths, and a host of broader cultural ones.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/04/30/alison_bechdel_salpart/feed/ 1 U.S. foreign policy, brought to you by ExxonMobil http://www.salon.com/2012/04/29/u_s_foreign_policy_brought_to_you_by_exxonmobil/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/29/u_s_foreign_policy_brought_to_you_by_exxonmobil/#comments Sun, 29 Apr 2012 18:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12910544 The greatest strategic challenge facing ExxonMobil Corp., the largest oil company in the world not owned by a state, is access to new oil reserves. Resource nationalism – the inclination of many Middle Eastern and other post-colonial governments to control their own oil – has locked the corporation out of many oil opportunities. This has led ExxonMobil to riskier political frontiers in Africa and Asia, countries where the government is too weak or corrupt to produce its own oil. Also, in these states, oil and gas production exacerbates internal conflicts and incites guerrilla armies because controlling an oil or gas field can be a ticket to sudden wealth.

When Exxon and Mobil merged in 2000, Exxon inherited a number of Mobil properties in conflict zones – in Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, and Indonesia. The latter property – a highly profitable natural gas field on Indonesia’s Sumatra peninsula – drew ExxonMobil’s executives immediately into the bloody war for independence being waged by the Free Aceh Movement, known by the initials G.A.M. ExxonMobil paid Indonesian military forces to battle G.A.M. around the perimeter of its fields; human rights investigators accused the Indonesian forces of engaging in widespread torture and abuses. G.A.M. rocketed and attacked ExxonMobil and its employees, seeing the corporation as complicit with the Indonesian military.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/04/29/u_s_foreign_policy_brought_to_you_by_exxonmobil/feed/ 6 “Farther Away”: Franzen on Wallace http://www.salon.com/2012/04/29/farther_away_franzen_on_wallac/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/29/farther_away_franzen_on_wallac/#comments Sun, 29 Apr 2012 12:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12911069 Jonathan Franzen wants you to like him. In "Mr. Difficult," a 2002 New Yorker essay, Franzen identifies two types of authorship: the Status model, devoted to the pursuit of difficult art at the expense of commercial gain, and the Contract model, which privileges the enjoyment and connectedness of the reader. Franzen is, in his own estimation, "a Contract kind of person." His novels don't ask more of the reader than she is willing to give in turn. "[T]o build the reader an uncomfortable house you wouldn't want to live in: this violates what seems to me the categorical imperative for any fiction writer."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/04/29/farther_away_franzen_on_wallac/feed/ 16 “When women were birds”: Reading blank journals http://www.salon.com/2012/04/29/when_women_were_birds_reading_blank_journals_salpart/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/29/when_women_were_birds_reading_blank_journals_salpart/#comments Sun, 29 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12911092 If you are a reader who cares about nature, wilderness, our place in nature, writing and nature, how to choose a course of action when something you care about is threatened, the lifelong search for voice, and what it means to be a woman in this world, you will have crossed paths with the work of Terry Tempest Williams. Perhaps you grew up reading Aldo Leopold, John Muir, Edward Abbey, Gary Snyder and Bill McKibben and, loving their work, still felt something missing -- that your relationship with these issues was not fully rendered. Then you discovered Williams, and, not unlike Alfred Stieglitz’s famous response when he first saw Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings, you might have breathed: "At last! A woman on paper!"

A woman on paper.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/04/29/when_women_were_birds_reading_blank_journals_salpart/feed/ 1 Tyranny of cloth diapers http://www.salon.com/2012/04/29/freedom_from_cloth_diapers/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/29/freedom_from_cloth_diapers/#comments Sun, 29 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12911174 Kids love hearing the story of their birth and, growing up, I was no exception. I came into the world just as feminists began demanding that women be allowed to labor naturally, huffing and puffing their way through contractions, husbands and friends in the delivery room for emotional support.

My mother would have none of that. She was gassed into a twilight sleep and shot up with opiates for the pain. Flat on her back and feet in the stirrups, she pushed on command until I fell into the doctor's arms. My arrival – another girl! -- was announced to my dad, who sat with other bored men in the waiting room. He would first see me through a window, where I was displayed among the other newborns, swaddled tight and sleeping.

One final detail I insisted that my mom include with each retelling: "And then you got a shot?"

"That's right," she would say, referring to the heavy dose of estrogen once routinely injected after a birth. "That way my body wouldn't make milk, and I could go back to work." I couldn't help myself; I cheered.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/04/29/freedom_from_cloth_diapers/feed/ 93 Urban revolution is coming http://www.salon.com/2012/04/28/urban_revolution_is_coming/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/28/urban_revolution_is_coming/#comments Sat, 28 Apr 2012 22:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12911152 From Paris in 1871 to Prague in 1968 to Cairo in 2011 and eventually the streets of New York City, cities have long been a hotbed of radical movements. Over the decades, urban protests have been spurred by everything from unemployment and food shortages to privatization and corruption. But were they also caused by the geography of the cities themselves? The question has particular resonance this week, as Occupy prepares for a series of large May 1 protests in cities around the country.

Geographer and social theorist David Harvey, the distinguished professor of anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and one of the 20 most cited humanities scholars of all time, has spent his career exploring how cities organize themselves, and when they do, what their achievements are. His new book, "Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution," dissects the effects of free-market financial policy on urban life, the crippling debt of middle- and low-income Americans and how runaway development has destroyed a common space for all city dwellers.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/04/28/urban_revolution_is_coming/feed/ 15 “The Cove”: A mysterious skull http://www.salon.com/2012/04/28/the_cove_ron_rash_salpart/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/28/the_cove_ron_rash_salpart/#comments Sat, 28 Apr 2012 12:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12911175 Ron Rash's atmospheric, strangely uncomplicated novel, "The Cove," begins with a scene of melancholy and abandonment, the promise of obliteration, and a shocking discovery. It is 1953 and a man called Parton, a scout for the Tennessee Valley Authority, is investigating a remote parcel of land in North Carolina's Appalachia for inhabitants who will have to be evicted in advance of the valley's inundation. In a small notch -- from which the book takes its title -- over which looms a light-exterminating, anvil-shaped cliff, he finds a deserted farm. Pasture fenced by sagging barbed wire, a collapsed barn, a cabin and two wells are the desolate relicts of past life and labor. The general doominess of the setting is further enhanced by an ash tree decked in charms against evil forces, dead American chestnut trees (victims of the plague that wiped them out across the land), and the memory of the now extinct Carolina parakeet. Parton, thirsty, manages to winch up a bucket of water from one of the wells -- and with it a human skull.

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