Sheehan's thesis is simple but no doubt true, especially for those of us who recall the Cold War Years 1945 - 1990. The military horrors of WWI and WWII were so startlingly awful that when the United States and Russia squared off in 1947, the Europeans were able to give up military adventurism, leave the warring to the two great powers. Despite continuing crises in Berlin (and Cuba, and North Korea, and Viet-Nam), and while no one was looking, they created "the largest economic bloc in the world," the European Union. Its members now create

one quarter of the world's gross national product and one fifth of the world's commerce.

This wonderful novel's hero (and Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? has a narrative style and flow as rich as a great novel) is a man now barely remembered, Robert Schuman. Not the composer, dummy. His name was spelled "Schumann." The inventor of the European Union was a French foreign minister with only one "n" and no lieder at all to his name. By 1949, he and many of his peers knew that Germany's recovery "was unavoidable." With this --- and the history of so many wars --- how could France remain secure in the mid-twentieth century? The answer was simple ... and relatively small potatoes, to start with. A cartel was created to control the heavy mining and production of six countries, what was soon to be termed the Inner Six: France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Italy.

This association of nation-states, technically known as the European Coal and Steel Community, was to change the face of European power (and power-politics) forever. According to Sheehan, the ECSC created an "institutional template [that] expressed a radically new approach to the European order."

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The Yiddish Policemen's Union
Michael Chabon
Harper Audio/Recorded Books

Our bruised, slightly alcoholic, melancholic detective is Meyer Landsman. He elects to solve the mystery of the murder of a Tzaddik Ha-Dor, a man who might be the messiah, if the time were right. It's not, so this one --- Mendele --- becomes a junkie who uses his tefillin for a tourniquet and plays chess for enough money for a fix. I told you it was screwy.

I also want to tell you it is plain, down-home, up-against-the-wall, out-and-out, non-stop overwhelmingly fascinating, crammed with enough tricks to remind you of the best of Nabokov. (And, like Nabokov, chess plays a central role, including an end-game with --- impossible, almost --- three white knights). It is sour, bitter, funny, filled with word- and mind-games.

In the string-maker's jargon --- Zimbalist, the man who makes it possible for the faithful to evade the Sabbath --- their women "are born pregnant." A gun is a sholem, a peacemaker. in Sitka, there is a special frequency on the shoyfer --- the mobile phones --- for Jewish mothers "to call their sons home for lunch."

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Measuring
The World
Daniel Kehlmann
Carol Brown Janeway,
Translator
(Pantheon)

I can always tell when I have gone bonkers over a writer's writing when I find myself disgorging long chunks of quotes instead of tending to my knitting ... a review. Well, I just can't do it. Kehlmann's prose --- and the translation by Janeway --- is so fetching that I'm going to give up right here. Kehlmann's way with words convinces me that you and me and that dumb Don DeLillo, Sherrilyn Kenyon, Daniel Steele and any of the rest of them who presume to tell a story with a hum-drum plodding novel should be taken out, chained down and abandoned on the rocks for the hyenas and toadwort. Measuring the World is spirited, short, funny, wildly eccentric. You not only get Humboldt but shy Gauss, ancient Kant, mad Leibniz, anxious young Weber ... all seeded generously with aperçus on physics ("space was folded, bent, and extremely strange..."), aging ("How had he grown so old? One didn't feel right any more, one didn't see right any more, and one thought at a snail's pace. Aging wasn't a tragedy. It was a farce...")

And the ultimate warning on the ultimate dangers of the black hole of science: "A bearded university professor with a bald head and round spectacles presented them with a tiny glass flask containing cosmic ether that he had separated out from the atmosphere with a complicated filtration system. The little flask was so heavy that it needed to be lifted with both hands, and its contents radiated such as darkness that even at a short distance things lost their clarity."

The substance must be stored with care, said the professor, cleaning the dirty lenses of his glasses, it was extremely flammable. As for him, he'd dismounted the experiment; besides what was in the flask there was nothing left over, and he recommended it be buried deep underground. It was also better not to look at it for too long. It wasn't good for the temper.

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The Sanity We Are Born With
A Buddhist
Approach to Psychology
Chögyam Trungpa
(Shambhala)

Among patients, theoreticians, and therapists alike, there seems to be great concern with the idea of some original mistake which causes later suffering --- a kind of punishment for that mistake. One finds that a sense of guilt or being wounded is quite pervasive. Whether or not such people actually believe in the idea of original sin, or in God for that matter, they seem to feel that they have done something wrong in the past and are now being punished for it.

It seems that this feeling of basic guilt has been passed down from one generation to another and pervades many aspects of Western life ...

The problem with this notion of original sin or mistake is that it acts very much as a hindrance to people. At some point, it is of course necessary to realize one's shortcomings. But if one goes too far with that, it kills any inspiration and can destroy one's vision as well. So in that way, it really is not helpful, and in fact it seems unnecessary. As I mentioned, in Buddhism we do not have any comparable ideas of sin and guilt. Obviously there is the idea that one should avoid mistakes. But there is not anything comparable to the heaviness and inescapability of original sin.

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Medieval and
Renaissance
Treasures
Paul Williamson,
Peta Motture,
Editors
(Victoria and Albert/Abrams)

Adipose cherubs decorate a 16th Century candlestick from Saint-Porchaire, France. A bowl from Naples gives us a gorgeous ring of stylized angelic fat kids gathering bunches of oranges. The message, according to the editors, was E no se po mangiare senza fatiga ("Please don't eat the daisies..." oops, I mean, "If you don't work you don't get nuttin' to eat.")

Even the Holy Child was no anorexic. In a statuette from the fourteenth century, the ivory infant looks like a baby Newt Gingrich; indeed, Mary seems to be mouthing the words, "What hath God wrought?"

This volume is slim but superb. It is so exquisitely laid out you want to take up residence on Cromwell Road, across from the V&A Museum, where you could go see these caskets, stained glass windows, ivory figures, bowls and diptychs, in person, daily.

There is a sad passage on the loss of so many objects d'art over the centuries. The Robespierres of the French Revolution were not all that different than China's Gang of Four: anti-intellectual slobs who destroyed a gorgeous heritage, stomped on their grandparents' artifacts, thought they were doing their heirs a favor by dumping gorgeous works of art out the windows, down the cistern, into the wells. As Diderot observed, the plebeians will forever use revolution as an exercise to destroy their own children's glorious history.

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Generals
Die in Bed
Charles Yale Harrison
(Annick/Firefly)

Not long ago, we reviewed The Somme by A. D. Gristwood, which told us of WWI through the eyes of the wounded (some, indeed, self-wounded ... just to get out from under. Do they still do that?) Generals Die in Bed tells of the life of those who lived and worked and suffered and died in the trenches.

There have been countless other you-are-there novels, but this is the first one that I have come across that details the shooting of a callous officer by his own troops (do they still do that?), the looting of a whole city (Arras) by the allied troops, and the looting of the incoming packages from home: "The mail for the battalion comes up. Most of the boys to whom the packages are addressed are either wounded or killed. We share them among ourselves." And, most haunting, the casual murder of young German soldiers trying to surrender:

"Bitte --- bitte (please --- please)."

Their voices are shrill. They are mostly youngsters.

They throw themselves into the crater of a shell hole. They cower there. Some of our men walk to the lip of the hole and shoot into the huddled mass of Germans. Clasped hands are held up from out of the funnel-shaped grave. The hands shake eloquently asking for pity. There is none. Our men shoot into the crater. In a few seconds only a squirming mass is left. As I pass the hole I see the lips of a few moving.

Generals Die in Bed was published in 1930. According to editor Robert Nielsen, one officer responded, "I have never read a meaner, nastier and more foul book." Another said it was "pure obscenity." Twelve years after the end of the war, a few books --- A Farewell to Arms, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Coward, The Somme were published and, for the first time, spoke of the real obscenity of those on the front lines, being forced into daily acts of carnage against their equals, against their hearts, against themselves. Generals Die in Bed is one of the great documents of the new honesty.

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Thoreau's
Laundry
Ann Harleman
(Southern Methodist University Press)

In 2003 we reviewed Tumbling After by Susan Parker. It told, for the first time, at least in our memory, a refreshingly direct account of one who cares for a disabled family member, in this case, Susan's husband. He was not a quadriplegic when she married him but after the bicycle accident and for the rest of his life he is just that, a man with no use of arms nor legs (nor bowel nor bladder).

Susan has apparently, over the years, cared for him lovingly and well; what she tells us of her new life is funny, tender and heart-rending. When we lose something (a part of the body; a part of our history) things can go strange. The one you married yesterday may be someone else tomorrow. To care for Ralph (or Simon, or whoever it is over there in the wheelchair) turns into a full-time job, and certainly changes your day-to-day.

Some choose to take it on with patience and affection and humor. Others disappear or call in the martyr chip (or the nursing home manager). Those who choose to stay with it are part of Susan's story ... and, in this book, Ann Harleman's.

In "Thoreau's Laundry" and "Meanwhile" we encounter a husband with CPMS, chronic progressive multiple sclerosis. What's a good woman to do? According to Dr. Jacques, Simon's urologist,

Zere are two kind of woman. Zee kind which divorce zee 'andicapped and zee kind which marree zem.

Only two? No. There are others. There are those who choose to stay on with Ralph and Simon and Dan and take care of them, no matter what. And, too, there are those who choose to stay on with the Ralphs and Simons and Dans and, while ministering to them, take on another man. A lover? Yes. With guilt? Sure. With shame? Maybe. With love? Why not?

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Ooga-Booga
Frederick Seidel
(Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)

Anyone who has the wit to name a book of poetry --- published by the much respected Farrar, Straus, and Giroux --- Oogba-Booga has our vote. Especially one who can write the King James version of a love song to a landing field: "The East Hampton Airport is my harbor. / I shall not want..."

Or, this on old man love:

I enter the jellyfish folds
Of floating fire
The mania in her labia can inspire
Extraordinary phenomena and really does cure colds.

Seidel's poetry is not only passion (and airports), but love and death, with wonderful lines such as his telling us that he finds his own poetry "incomprehensible." And

I spend most of my time not dying...

Or

I like your brain. Your pink. It's sweet...

Or

The butterflies titter and flutter their silk fans,
End-of-summer cabbage butterflies, in white pairs.

There are times when it may get to be a bit too much, "Mother Nature went to China, / China the vagina." But we have to forgive Seidel because he is funny and sophisticated, so sophisticated that he wants to die in Paris. "I mention I am easily old enough to die:"

The value of life which will end is unbearable.

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review

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After the Fall
Poems Old and New
Edward Field
(University of Pittsburgh Press)

His early poetry was devoted to Hollywood fare, Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, Joan Crawford, Mae West. There is a touch of bitterness at what must have been the saddest realization of them all: to grow up gay in America, a place where to show one's love openly was to invite violence and arrest. Now, traveling through Turkestan, he writes,

Desolation filled me as I saw
everywhere the men
out walking, holding hands
or with arms around each other,
friends kissing on street corners.

In the 40s and 50s, he recalls, "I had suffered for nothing, / been punished for nothing. / Not only my parents had been crazy, / but where I grew up was crazy --- " Yet most of his poems are filled with a good-natured fun. In one of his funniest, he tells of leading his blind friend, "a blink," around New York, hand on shoulder, while kids are jeering, truckers leaning out of their windows to make cat-calls. There is (again) the touch of sadness, "I found / after lonely years of near suicidal misery, / my role in life, helper."

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