Like this, here's a notice: I have a short book review in the Nation this week, on Nick Turse's Kill Anything that Moves. Pick up an issue of the magazine to check it out.
This is the book:
This is the magazine:
Part of what I say is this:
The great contradiction of the war, and another lesson of this book, is that even as the United States officially downplayed the popularity of the Viet Cong insurgency, many US soldiers used it as a rationalization for slaughtering individual Vietnamese and even entire villages. A few common adages, quoted by Turse, bear this out: “If it’s dead and Vietnamese, it’s VC.” “Kill ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out.” “The sooner they all die, the sooner we go back to the World.” And when civilians were “accidentally” killed? One marine explains: “No problem, just stick a chicom [Chinese communist] grenade on ‘em, or an AK[-47], they become VC.” Another, defending the murder of children: “Tough shit, they grow up to be VC.” So why were we in Vietnam?
The real story of what the Vietnamese rightfully call “the American War” is not so much unknown as insufficiently recognized, less “untold” than too seldom acknowledged. In 1988, the late Alexander Cockburn wrote in this magazine that “My Lai remains a symbol, just an intimation of what happened in that destroyed land.” Despite intensive (and ongoing) efforts to suppress that horrible reality—much of this book relies on files from the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group, a secret Pentagon project to investigate allegations of American atrocities, only to hide them from the public—it is Turse’s immense achievement to have written a book that painstakingly chronicles at least a fraction of the murders and gang rapes committed in our name.
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Brahna and I this weekend went to the exhibit on Proust at the Morgan Library. I was disappointed by how small it was, but also thought the curators might have intended the room as reminiscent of the famous cork-lined bedroom in which Proust wrote the Recherche. That would be witty of them. The exhibit was mostly notebooks and revised proofs of Swann's Way, but also had some interesting photographs of Illiers, the town after which Combray is modeled. However moving I found those pictures, and to lean over Proust's own notebooks and see a name like "Villeparisis" or "Albertine"--or to see the many revisions that led to the first sentence, "For a long time, I used to go to bed early"--it was a little inside baseball-ish, not quite trying to bring new readers into the Proustian tent. Who knows, really, if there is space for them? Maybe that was the point of the small room.
In any case, last week I came across this photo by Man Ray of Proust on his deathbed, 2 days after he died. 1) Shocking to see him with a beard--and looking so much like Steve Carrell in Little Miss Sunshine, and 2) Shocking to see him without those big eyes. Enjoy:
