Books in Brief
Winning Smart after Losing Big: Revitalizing People, Reviving Enterprises by Rob Stearns (Encounter, 150 pp., $16.95). He's been my friend for over thirty years, from the time we were roommates at Harvard and spent hours comparing the ingenious techniques Radcliffe girls used to tell us to get lost. But having disclosed my bias, let me say that Rob Stearns has written one heck of an interesting book. Part autobiography, part reflection on the human condition, part hard-headed and insightful advice, "Winning Smart after Losing Big" is an unusual work.
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.
|
