Two of our largest books have gotten some recent attention.
First, Joseph Epstein praised Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate in Saturday's Wall Street Journal:
To attempt a novel modeled on "War and Peace" is easy; to write one that is unembarrassing by comparison is not. Far from embarrassing, "Life and Fate" is one of the great novels of the 20th century. The book has more than 150 characters, panoramically representing almost all strains of Russian life during the nightmarish Stalin years; various plots and subplots are neatly interwoven with detailed descriptions of battles and penetrating excursuses on totalitarianism, on the history of the persecution of the Jews...on the evolution of morality and kindness.
and today, Salon published an interview with Alistair Horne (author of A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962) called "Bush's Favorite Historian" in which we learn that Sir Alistair was recently invited to the White House for a chat with the president.
Other gleanings from the piece include:
Bush has apparently read the whole of A Savage War (or at least has been briefed on it well enough to be able to discuss its finer points).
We can add General Pinochet to the list of the book's admirers.
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