Eight of the best articles on the turmoil in Egypt

The Daily Beast has tagged eight essential pieces of longform journalism about the political upheaval in Egypt.

One article on the list:

"America's Islam Anxiety in Egypt and Beyond"
Esquire, Juan Cole; June 4, 2009

In an excerpt from his 2009 book, Engaging the Muslim World, Juan Cole shows how American politicians misunderstand the Muslim Brotherhood, now a peaceful, democratic movement that opposes radical Islam yet still wants to achieve moderate Islamic states. The Brotherhood has mostly abandoned its violent beginnings, and despite being banned in Egypt continues to work within the political system to move the country toward an Islamic republic. But U.S. politicians continue to lump it in with terrorist groups, while supporting Muslim groups who actually oppose democracy in Egypt.

Read about the other recommended articles.

The Page 99 Test: Engaging the Muslim World by Juan Cole.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five books on America at war, 1812

Born and raised in Maine, Alan Taylor teaches American and Canadian history at the University of California, Davis. His books include The Divided Ground, Writing Early American History, American Colonies, and William Cooper’s Town, which won the Bancroft and Pulitzer prizes for American history.

His latest book is The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies.

For the Wall Street Journal, Taylor named a five best list of books about America at war in 1812. One title on the list:

The War of 1812
by Donald R. Hickey (1989)

Most Americans know little about this war, save for a few patriotic icons: the national anthem written about the British bombardment of a Baltimore fort; the naval victories of the USS Constitution (Old Ironsides); the dastardly British burning of the White House; and the revenge taken at New Orleans by Andrew Jackson and his Tennessee riflemen. That selective memory casts the war as a heroic defense of the homeland from British invaders. Donald R. Hickey shows that this "forgotten conflict," as his subtitle has it, began as an American invasion of Canada—which went badly from beginning to end. Canadians, take heart, for Hickey knows that you won the war. But he also knows that you lost the peace treaty, which gave the U.S. a free hand to conquer Canada's Indian allies and protectors. That conquest enabled the Americans to dominate the continent.

Read about the other books on Taylor's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six books about speeches that changed American politics

James Ledbetter is the author of Unwarranted Influence: Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Military-Industrial Complex.

For The Week magazine, he named six books about speeches that changed U.S. politics.

One title on the list:

King’s Dream by Eric J. Sundquist

Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech is probably the most celebrated American speech not given by an elected official. Sundquist’s masterful research ties King’s 1963 address to Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, and Frederick Douglass, and teases out the extensive connections between King’s ideas and the culture and politics of his time.

Read about the other books on Ledbetter's list.

The Page 99 Test: Eric Sundquist's King's Dream.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stanley Fish's top five sentences

Stanley Fish is the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor and a professor of law at Florida International University. He has previously taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Johns Hopkins University, Duke University, and the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he was dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

One of the world's foremost authorities on John Milton, in 2006 Fish applied the "Page 69 Test" to his book, How Milton Works.

His new book is How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One.

One of Fish's top five sentences, as told to Slate:

Ford Madox Ford (from The Good Soldier, 1915): "And I shall go on talking in a low voice while the sea sounds in the distance and overhead the great black flood of wind polishes the bright stars."

In this sentence, the personal voice of the narrator is absorbed by the sea sounds (a deliberate pun) that began as background and end by taking over the scene of writing.

Read about Fish's other favorite sentences.

The Good Soldier also appears on John Mullan's lists of ten of the best spas in literature, ten of the best failed couplings in literature, and ten great novels with terrible original titles, and on the Guardian's list of ten of the best unconsummated passions in fiction.

The Page 99 Test: The Good Soldier.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten immigrants' tales

E. C. Osondu was born in Nigeria. He won the 2009 Caine Prize for African Writing, and his fiction has appeared in The Atlantic. He received his MFA from Syracuse University and currently teaches at Providence College in Rhode Island.

His debut story collection Voice of America was published by HarperCollins late last year.

At the Guardian he named his top 10 immigrants' tales.

One title on the list:

On Black Sisters' Street by Chika Unigwe

Someone once pointed out to me some really splendid buildings in Nigeria and proudly announced that they were built by hardworking Nigerian girls who were working really hard in Italy. I would have liked to have given him this novel, which chronicles the harrowing lives of young African prostitutes in Europe and what they have to sacrifice and suffer to put up that huge mansion that this fellow was ever so proud to point out to me.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Also see Matthew Kaminski's five best novels about immigrants in America.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six books that draw visitors to their authors' home towns

Oberlin professor Anne Trubek's new book, A Skeptic’s Guide to Writers' Houses, has been hailed as "a remarkable book: part travelogue, part rant, part memoir, part literary analysis and urban history."

At The Week magazine she tagged six books that draw visitors to their authors' home towns.

One title on her list:

Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

“If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles,” Whitman writes. At his house museum in Camden, N.J., visitors go to see Whitman’s boot soles, to see his stuff. Whitman’s poetry tries to bridge the divide between the material and spiritual worlds. Writers’ houses, monuments to the imagination, do the same.

Read about the other books on Trubek's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six of the best three-word-title books

Deborah Batterman is the author of the short story collection, Shoes Hair Nails.

At Flashlight Worthy, she came up with a list of quality books with three word titles. Her pitch for these titles:

Book titles that cut to the chase with three simple words are easy to remember, not just for their brevity; they have an archetypal undercurrent reminding us of beginning, middle end; dawn, noon, and dusk; the three phases of the moon.

The last book on Batterman's list:

Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia
by Elizabeth Gilbert

There's some symmetry here, I admit, in opening and closing the list with books by women who found themselves falling off a cliff, so to speak, into a life more spiritual. It's never an easy, straightforward path, and Gilbert underscores the triad of her title with an explanation, in the introduction, of the number three as representing 'supreme balance'; within the threefold structure she has deliberately incorporated 108 tales (36 times 3), symbolic of the traditional Indian japa mala necklace, strung with 108 beads.

Gilbert's memoir, of course, became a runaway best seller and movie, which speaks to the appeal of stories that manage to incorporate romance and spirit. Those critical of the book want more, I daresay, of the kind of wisdom issuing from Miller's book. Those who admit to loving it clearly understand that the courage it takes to see things for what they, rather than what we'd like them to be. One clear message echoing through both books: when the student is ready, the teacher appears.

Read about the other books on Batterman's list.

Visit Deborah Batterman's blog.

Read--Coffee with a Canine: Deborah Batterman & Maggie.

Writers Read: Deborah Batterman.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best books on Americans abroad

Charles Glass is a broadcaster, journalist and writer, who began his journalistic career in 1973 at the ABC News Beirut bureau with Peter Jennings. He covered the October Arab-Israeli War on the Egyptian and Syrian fronts. He also covered civil war in Lebanon, where artillery fire wounded him in 1976. He was ABC News Chief Middle East correspondent from 1983 to 1993. Since 1993, he has been a freelance writer in Paris, Tuscany, Venice and London, regularly covering the Middle East, the Balkans, southeast Asia and the Mediterranean region. He has also published books, short stories, essays and articles in the United States and Europe.

With Marina Jankovic at FiveBooks, he discussed some favorite books about his countrymen in other countries, including:

The Quiet American by Graham Greene

This is your only book written by a non-American about an Englishman and an American in Vietnam as the French colonialists are leaving. Let’s talk about the American character, Pyle. He starts off as an idealist and ends up a murderer. Was America’s presence in Vietnam motivated by idealism?

In the case of Pyle, he was Ivy League, innocent, believed that America was a force for good and should go out and do good in the world. As the French were reluctantly leaving Vietnam, he felt that someone had to go and pick up the white man’s burden and that could only be America as only America was pure and good. He then takes part in an assassination and a devious plot to plant bombs on bicycles whilst blaming the Vietminh.

This was written before the American war in Vietnam. Graham Greene saw it coming. And it was the idealism of liberals in America that led to the invasion of Vietnam by the armed forces. They should have read the book first and realised what they were doing. I think many of them did know what they were doing but they thought it was worth it. They were clearly wrong, for America and certainly for Vietnam.

What about the love triangle in the book, involving the Englishman Fowler, Pyle and a local Vietnamese girl, Phuong?

It’s a very well-told story and it’s also the old empire and the new empire wooing the non-aligned, soon to be colonialist, world. The new empire seems at first to be more attractive than the old, but turns out to be every bit as vicious.

Does the English character realise his empire is coming to an end?

Very much so. The character’s only pleasure in life is no longer sex, it’s his opium pipe and going into oblivion, denying his existence and surviving on that. This is very much a view of England at that time. A country that had lost its empire and had to find a new mission. Now, unfortunately, it has found that mission in being the Ghurkas of the United States, but at that time it wasn’t clear where it was going. He very well represents what England was going through as it withdrew, as it turned over to an empire, a new American one which was consciously taking over from the French and British empires. The French and British very much looked down on them and felt they wouldn’t do as good a job as they had done. But, in fact, they did pretty much exactly what they had done, as all of them were very destructive.

So what is the fundamental error of colonialism?

That’s another subject and not really literary but I suppose its fundamental flaw lies in telling other people what to do in their own countries.

Read about the other books tagged by Glass at The Browser.

The Quiet American is among Robert McCrum's books to inspire busy public figures, Malcolm Pryce's top ten expatriate tales, Catherine Sampson's top ten Asian crime fiction, and Pauline Melville's top 10 revolutionary tales.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best moustaches in literature

At the Guardian, John Mullan named a list of ten of the best moustaches in literature.

One entry on the list:

Ignatius J Reilly

A moustache is one element in the eccentric appearance of the protagonist of John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces. "Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs". Ignatius claims that his sometimes "sneering moustache" filters out the stench of the world around him.

Read about the other moustaches on the list.

A Confederacy of Dunces also appears among Michael Lewis' five favorite books and on Cracked magazine's list of classic funny novels.

Also see: Ten of the best beards in literature.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best thrillers with terror themes

Howard Gordon—the longtime executive producer of the hit TV series 24—is the author of Gideon's War.

For the Wall Street Journal, he named a five best list of thriller plots with terror themes.

One novel on the list:

Black Sunday
by Thomas Harris (1975)

I tend not to re-read books, but somehow this one draws me back again and again. One reason may be that Michael Lander, who pilots the TV blimp hovering above football stadiums, is Thomas Harris's most terrifying monster. Like Hannibal Lecter, another of the author's creations, Lander is brilliant, although instead of applying his considerable talents to serial murder and gourmet cannibalism, Lander devotes his genius to a simple yet eerily plausible plan to turn the blimp into a giant bomb that will kill tens of thousands, including the president, at the Super Bowl. For Lander, committing mass murder would be the final, desperate, seemingly inevitable act of a man whose pathology and biography Harris describes in detail; first, as an abused child, then as a cuckolded husband, and finally as a disfigured prisoner of war shunned by the military for cooperating with his North Vietnamese captors. Lander works in league with Palestinian terrorists, a conspiracy tracked by the book's hero, the formidable Mossad agent David Kabakov. That this exquisitely plotted novel's geopolitical context is the Arab-Israeli conflict gives it an unsettling relevance even now, 35 years after its publication.

Read about the other books on the list.

Black Sunday appears on Gerald Seymour's list of five riveting novels about terrorism.

--Marshal Zeringue

5 essential books that explain the myths & facts about China

Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom is a Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine, and a co-founder of The China Beat blog. His books include Global Shanghai, China's Brave New World, and Twentieth-Century China.

His latest book is China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know.

For The Daily Beast, Wasserstrom came up with five essential books that will explain the myths and facts about China, including:

Richard McGregor’s The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers. Published last June, this is the newest book on my list. Its author is a former Financial Times Beijing bureau chief who has just relocated to Washington, D.C.

THE SURPRISE:

Its argument that the events of 1989-1991 (the Berlin Wall tumbling, the Soviet Union imploding) may have strengthened rather than weakened the position of the Chinese Communist Party. The fall of communist leaders in other parts of the world provided those in Beijing with a very special diagnostic opportunity—a chance to figure out (with the help of official think tanks that worked overtime on the subject) why their counterparts in other settings had lost control, so they could avoid making the same mistake. What emerged was a focus on raising living standards, efforts to co-opt entrepreneurs and members of the newly emerging middle class, and find new ways to stir up and guide popular nationalism that has proved, so far, a very effective strategy.

THE NEWSWORTHY TAKEAWAY:

One of the most informative chapters is on connections between the party and the military, a subject that made headlines while Defense Secretary Robert Gates was in Beijing last week.

Read about the other books on the list.

Also see Wasserstrom's list of five good short books on China.

--Marshal Zeringue

Julie Christie's seven favorite books

Julie Christie, the British movie legend whom Al Pacino called "the most poetic of all actresses," was born in Chukua, Assam, India.

Among the directors she worked with more than once: Robert Altman in McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) and Nashville (1975); John Schlesinger in Billy Liar (1963), Darling (1965), Far from the Madding Crowd (1967) and Separate Tables (1983) (TV); and Warren Beatty in Shampoo (1975) and Heaven Can Wait (1978).

She named her seven favorite books for The Week magazine. Two novels on her list:

Look at Me and A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

This American writer dazzled with Look at Me, which describes, among other things, the manipulation of images by the increasingly abstract versions of capitalism that have replaced manufacturing industries. Egan’s books cover an astonishing range of themes, all inter-related, global as well as personal. Written before 9/11, Look at Me reveals an extraordinarily prescient vision. A Visit from the Goon Squad follows a group of diverse characters across several decades, going back and forth across time. We’re always conscious of their future lives, so different from anything they could have imagined. Only a writer with Egan’s gift for intricate structuring could have pulled this off.

Read about the other books on her list.

--Marshal Zeringue