September 1, 2002

President George Bush has revealed that he is reading a gung-ho study which argues that war is too important to be left to generals, it has been reported by The Guardian of London. In an interview he let slip — very deliberately it is believed — that he is reading Supreme command by Eliot Cohen, an academic at Johns Hopkins university, which argues for the primacy of civilian control of the military.

The book, the product of 15 years research, contains no directly relevant material on Iraq — the issue being debated in the President’s policy making circles — but Cohen is an enthusiastic supporter of invasion, whereas the US’s senior generals are believed to be extremely sceptical.

Cohen’s book analyzes the performance of four successful war leaders — Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Georges Clemenceau and David Ben-Gurion — to illustrate the importance of strong political leadership in times of conflict, and of Talleyrand’s remark that war is too important to be left to the generals.

The book especially admires Churchill’s control of the military, which will go down well with the American president, who has installed a bust of Churchill in his office.

Cohen has come out in favour of attacking Iraq. The book has been strongly recommended by rightwing reviewers. However, the Washington Times, points out: “Mr Cohen does not satisfactorily deal with an incompetent president.”

Tolstoy reunion

Ninety people from vastly differing walks of life boarded a train that would take them to the south of Moscow. They had only one thing in common — their ancestry. They were all the descendants of one of Russia’s greatest thinkers and social reformers, the writer Leo Tolstoy.

Having travelled from all over Europe and the United States, they are gathering to mark the 150th anniversary of the publication of Tolstoy’s first story. The reunion is taking place in Tolstoy’s country estate Yasnaya Polyana, which was turned into a literary museum by the Soviets and the chief guest was Tolstoy’s granddaughter who is 87 years old and lives in Sweden.

The estate director who is Tolstoy’s great-great-grandson says he wants to make the reunion a regular event and planned a week of events such as haymaking, berry gathering and hunting to recreate scenes from Tolstoy’s life. Tolstoy wrote classics such as War and peace and Anna Karenina.

Osama in a book?

Author Giles Foden is writing a book titled Zanzibar, which chronicles the events surrounding the bombing of US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998. The men convicted in the bombing were all suspected to be members of Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda. Hence Osama has a role to play in the novel. A role, Foden is quick to add that is not central to it. Foden won the Whitbread First Novel Prize for the novel The last king of Scotland an account of Idi Amin, the Ugandan dictator. Zanzibar is a pre-September 11 project and at the time of the attacks Foden had submitted six or seven drafts of his novel. It is slated for a September 2 release.

More millions for Beckham

The most famous man in the UK, footballer David Beckham, has signed a multi-million pound deal to pen his autobiography. Just 27, Beckham says this autobiography will reveal details of his career and life and will be published next autumn.

His previous attempt includes David Beckham: my world, written more than two years ago, but the footballer says that this will be his first real autobiography. A spokeswoman for publishers HarperCollins said Beckham would be getting “professional help” with the writing.

The managing director of HarperCollins General Books, called the deal “the publishing event of 2003”, adding, “David will give us a fascinating insight into the private life of a man whose every move is followed on the world stage.”

Booker prize stakes

The Booker longlist is out! This time around two of Britain’s most senior award winners are vying with a 26-year-old former restaurant dishwasher. Jon McGregor’s first novel, If nobody speaks of remarkable things, has been nominated for this year’s 50,000 Booker prize, alongside more renowned writers such as Anita Brookner, William Trevor, Michael Frayn, Zadie Smith, and 25 other writers. McGregor’s story has been hailed by a reviewer as a work which shows how “the power of love and the power of language reveal that miracles are everywhere if we only know how to look for them”.

Brookner and Trevor who are both 74, are in the running for their latest offering, with The next big thing and The story of Lucie Gault.

Another contender for the prestigious award is Unless, a novel by Carol Shields, which ironically pokes fun at literary prizes.

Zadie Smith’s second novel, which her publishers Hamish Hamilton hope will achieve the blockbusting sales of her first, White teeth, made the list despite arriving in proof form a few days before the judges’ deadline.

The field was picked from an original entry of 130 books. From it a shortlist will be chosen next month. The winner of the award will be announced in October.

Remarkably, all the judges had read every one of the other 129 books by the end of July. Headed by Lisa Jardine, of London University, the judges are David Baddiel, writer and comedian; Russell Celyn Jones, novelist; Sally Vickers, novelist and psychologist; and Erica Wagner, literary editor of the Times.

Having a go at Mugabe

Doris Lessing who was raised in Zimbabwe recently used the platform of the Edinburgh Book Festival to have a go at the Zimbabwean president, Robert Mugabe. She said, “What’s going on in Zimbabwe is a terrible story. It’s a strange thing, but people who are mad in political contexts, or who are religious fanatics, can get away with it, and their madness is somehow excused.”

This isn’t the first time that Lessing, the author of The grass is singing, has been critical. In 1956 the Rhodesian government declared her a “prohibited immigrant” due to her involvement with the Communist party and anti-racist politics.

She also criticized the contemporary literary scene saying, “Young writers want to have very large advances and go to a lot of parties. It’s not all their fault, it’s part of selling books, of promotion. It’s the atmosphere of the literary world.”

Back to square one

Desperate to overturn his conviction, disgraced novelist Jeffrey Archer filed an appeal in court. But the judge, in no mood to entertain the thought, refused to relent. In jail for what the judge referred to as the most serious case of perjury in English criminal history, and “an extremely distasteful case”, Jeffrey Archer is a best-selling thriller writer and one-time deputy chairman of Britain’s Conservative Party. He proved to be an embarrassment for the party, which had nominated him as candidate for mayor of London.

He was jailed for four years in 2001 after a jury found him guilty of lying and forging his diary to conceal paying a prostitute for sex. He won a lawsuit against a newspaper after it reported the tryst winning half a million pounds in the process. Later a jury found that he had indeed lied by forging his diary. A decision was still pending on a separate request to re-examine his stiff sentence.

Black Thunder under attack

An account of Operation Black Thunder is fanning controversy in India. The former director general of (East) Punjab police K.P.S. Gill and Jathedar Gurcharan Singh Tohra, the former president of Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, have slammed its author, Sarabjit Singh. They allege that in Operation Black Thunder: an eyewitness account of terrorism in Punjab, Singh has maligned Tohra who ostensibly gave his approval for the 1984 Operation Bluestar.

To add fuel to fire former Punjab chief minister, Parkash Singh Badal, alleged at a press conference that Tohra had given his tacit approval to prime minister Indira Gandhi to send troops into the Golden Temple complex during Operation Bluestar to flush out Khalistani terrorists led by Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale causing many deaths and vast damage. In 1988 Operation Black Thunder militants were flushed out militants from the Golden Temple without bloodshed.

In response, Tohra is suing both Badal as well as Sarabjit Singh for defamation. In an interview, Gill said, “This is a highly personalized account of the Operation Black Thunder. The author (former deputy commissioner of Amritsar) Sarabjit Singh believes that he was the one who was running Operation Black Thunder...The book does not mention that Operation Black Thunder was initially code named as Operation Gill. Later they changed the name to Operation Black Thunder and it was a coordinated one.”

Tohra is now planning to write his own book so that the ‘truth comes before the people of Punjab’.

Rubbing the wrong way

Martin Amis is also courting controversy in a new book about the political executions and terror of Stalin’s Soviet Union. Russian historians and human rights activists who have referred to the book as ‘haughty’ and ‘unacceptable’ have attacked the account.

Titled Koba the Dread: laughter and the twenty million, the book will record the terror caused by the Cheka, Stalin’s secret police, and the famines of Soviet collectivization, in which an estimated 20 million perished. In his book Amis asks why ‘laughter refuses to absent itself’ from the tragedy, and concludes that the period best fits into the literary genre of a ‘black farce’.

Many were enraged by the comment and Nikita Petrov, a historian, said: “I have some doubts about the role of laughter in understanding Soviet history because in that there is an element of haughtiness of the author, who is a citizen of a country that has not experienced (the things Russia did).”

Austen breaks record

Buyers travelled from as far away as the US to buy the books. A rare edition of Jane Austen’s classic Pride and prejudice was sold in an auction for 40,000. The three volumes which were found in a Scottish castle were expected to go for about 12,000. The price broke all previous records for a Jane Austen book.

The owners did not realize that they had all three volumes of the novel till they decided to move out of the castle. They called book experts to identify their find. “We initially found volume three in the tower,” said Sibbald. “This in itself was a very exciting find. Later, my colleague and I were cataloguing some books in the hallway and found volume one. The hunt was then on for volume two.” They found that too to complete the set.

Originally Pride and prejudice was written in the form of letters in 1796-7 under the title First impressions. It was first published in 1813 and quickly became a best-loved novel.

Charting calligraphy

UNESCO and the Pakistan Calligraph-artists Guild have collaborated to publish M. Athar Tahir’s Calligraphy and calligraph art. A thesis on the evolution of this genre in contemporary art, the work gives a historical background of its evolution and charts the spread of classical calligraphy in Pakistan. Written in English, the book provides a new theory about the convergence of Western and Muslim aesthetics and the genres this union has spawned.

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