[Culture minister Margaret] Hodge has spent the past six months in a consultation process that asks some unsettling questions. What, really, is the point of a public library in the 21st century? How should libraries respond to today’s 24/7 culture and the greater availability of cheap books? Why can’t that beardy librarian double as a barista?

What has been done to public libraries in the United States is now being done to public libraries in Britain.

Q. What will surprise us?

A. That people in political life–however remote their fame may be in relationship to a 10-year-old kid–have no difficulty embracing the notion that they are on “Billy’s” radar. Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Gerald Ford, Bob Dole, Nancy Reagan, Ralph Reed and many others sign collectible trading cards and 8 x 10 photos for their young fan like they are superheroes.

Washington Post blogger Steven Levingston talks to Bill Geerhart about Little Billy’s Letters: An Incorrigible Inner Child’s Correspondence with the Famous, Infamous, and Just Plain Bewildered.

At Slate Deborah Blum writes about the height of Prohibition madness.

Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.

A piece at National Public Radio bemoans the trivialization of American culture.

Perhaps the tendency to trivialize is born of bandwagonism or laziness. Idiomatically speaking: It’s easier to tear down than to build up. Or maybe we devalue valuable things because, as Herbert Marcuse observed, of society’s tilt toward repressive desublimation. In Marcuse’s mind, our capitalist culture renders a strong, often threatening urge into something weak and nonthreatening. For instance, marketers learn to satisfy our desire to be closer to nature by selling us Patagonia fleece jackets that we wear in our all-terrain Land Rovers driving to the mall.

This desublimation is repressive, Marcuse asserted, because it muffles social criticism and supports addictive consumerism. Consequently, contemporary society is spiritually and intellectually stagnant.

In the Washington Post, Patrick Anderson reviews Henry Porter’s The Bell Ringers.

This is a sophisticated, engrossing and important political thriller. Porter wants us to see that the same technological tools that can be used to fight terrorism or to make government more efficient can also, in the wrong hands, be used to destroy freedom. Perhaps Porter’s most important updating of Orwell is to show how corporate money might work with political corruption to create a dictatorship behind a democratic facade.

Recommended with reservations.

In The Guardian Naomi Klein alleges that corporate culture has taken over the US government.

No one approached the task of auctioning off the state with more zeal than Bush’s much-maligned defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. Having spent 20-odd years in the private sector, Rumsfeld was steeped in the corporate culture of branding and outsourcing. His department’s brand identity was clear: global dominance. The core competency was combat. For everything else, he said (sounding very much like Bill Gates), “We should seek suppliers who can provide these non-core activities efficiently and ­effectively.”

. . .

Though it’s too soon to issue a verdict on the Obama presidency, we do know this: he favours the grand symbolic gesture over deep structural change every time. So he will make a dramatic announcement about closing the notorious Guantánamo Bay prison – while going ahead with an expansion of the lower profile but frighteningly lawless Bagram prison in Afghanistan, and opposing accountability for Bush officials who authorised torture. He will boldly appoint the first Latina to the Supreme Court, while intensifying Bush-era enforcement measures in a new immigration crackdown. He will make investments in green energy, while championing the fantasy of “clean coal” and refusing to tax emissions, the only sure way to substantially reduce the burning of fossil fuels. Most importantly, he will claim to be ending the war in Iraq, and will retire the ugly “war on terror” phrase – even as the conflicts guided by that fatal logic escalate in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Recommended.

Terry Gross of WHYY’s Fresh Air interviews Roya Hakakian.

In the Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley reviews Margaret MacMillan’s Dangerous Games.

When political leaders are ignorant of history, as the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld triumvirate most certainly was, yet seek to employ it toward their own ends, the inevitable result is a distortion of history that is unwitting at best, deliberate at worst. It is easy to find in the past justifications or excuses for doing what one wants. It is rather more difficult to examine the past thoroughly and objectively and to learn whatever lessons it may teach us, however inconvenient they may seem.

The Economist has a review of Martin Jacques’s When China Rules the World: The Rise of the Middle Kingdom and the End of the Western World.

For The Nation George Scialabba reviews books by two authors who would like to lay claim to modern liberalism.

William F. Buckley Jr., if I recall correctly, once declared wearily that he was determined not to read another book vindicating liberalism or reflecting on its prospects until his grandmother wrote one. Old Billzebub may have been right, for once: liberals do seem peculiarly given to anxious self-examination and self-justification. Still, an uneasy conscience is better than no conscience, which has been the general rule among conservatives since 1980 at least. So let us attend, even if a little wearily, while Alan Wolfe and Jedediah Purdy examine contemporary liberalism’s entrails and peer into its future.

Andrew O’Hehir at Salon reviews Archie Brown’s The Rise and Fall of Communism.

This is still an exceptionally difficult subject for Americans to confront with any clarity, I think. Our political life remains haunted in peculiar ways by the specter of Communism, which has become (to mix metaphors) an all-purpose ideological cudgel to use against one’s enemies.

In the Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley reviews Ward Just’s Exiles in the Garden.

On WHYY’s Fresh Air Terry Gross interviews Jeff Sharlet, author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power.

On Twitter Ron Charles links to an article by Christina Hoff Sommers in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Dr. Sommers asserts that errors in feminist scholarship are particularly persistent because every correction is viewed as a personal attack.

The complaint against Kendall and Gwendolyn Myers makes surprisingly interesting reading.

The Washington Post’s Marie Arana interviews Eduardo Galeano.

In The London Review of Books Hilary Mantel recalls her years of public service.

Who’d be a social worker, anyway? The problem was the same then as now. Communal expectation was riven by contradiction. You were a busybody and a do-gooder, interfering in private life; or you were a useless, gormless, uncaring drain on the public purse. Whichever role you were cast in you had to get on with the job.

In the Times Oliver Kamm asserts that liberal over-sensitivity to the beliefs of others is undermining freedom of speech.

But respect for ideas is never an entitlement. It depends on their intellectual resilience in public debate. No free society can treat people’s deepest beliefs as sacrosanct. They are fair game for hostile and derisive criticism. That is how knowledge advances.

In the Washington Post, Marie Arana reviews Chesa Boudin’s Gringo: A Coming of Age in Latin America.

Eventually, Boudin admits, the American left is the real destination of his journey. “I came to see Latin America,” he writes, “as a prism through which I could better understand my own roots in the radical left in the United States, and the role my country plays in a global society.”

So, there we have it. Though we await desperately needed insights into the promise that has always been Latin America, we get the shaky road map of a callow young man.

Bookforum has Michael Kazin’s review of D. D. Guttenplan’s American Radical: The Life and Times of I. F. Stone.

Larry Rohter at the New York Times notes the passing of Mario Benedetti.

In a career of more than 60 years, Mr. Benedetti wrote more than 80 books, addressing subjects that range from love and middle-class frustration in Montevideo, the Uruguayan capital, to the pain of exile. He also worked for decades as an editor of literary and political magazines and was a film, literary and theater critic for newspapers in Uruguay and elsewhere in the Spanish-speaking world.

On National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, Rebecca Roberts interviews Bao Pu, editor of Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang.

Chiang emerges as a flesh-and-blood man rather than the buffoonish cardboard-cutout figure he has generally been portrayed as. China’s nationalist leader is revealed as a tormented soul, as prone to bursting into tears as into angry tirades, who through force of will conquered his own demons to — as he saw it — lead his people out of colonial oppression and moral decay to forge a strong, unified nation.

The Washington Post has Laura Tyson Li’s review of Jay Taylor’s The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China.

For those who hoped that the rainbow nation emerging miraculously from the ashes of apartheid would bed down into a pluralistic and genuinely multiracial democracy, this trio of books provides a painful dose of disappointing scepticism.

The Economist offers a capsule review of R.W. Johnson’s South Africa’s Brave New World: The Beloved Country Since the End of Apartheid, Andrew Feinstein’s After the Party: Corruption, the ANC and South Africa’s Uncertain Future, and Alec Russell’s Bring Me My Machine Gun: The Battle for the Soul of South Africa, from Mandela to Zuma.

Not recommended.

In The Atlantic Monthly, Christopher Hitchens returns to Marx.

In the first volume of Capital (the only one to be published in his lifetime; the succeeding ones were works of Talmudic exegesis by his disciples), he has capitalism speaking in the words of Shylock; includes an extract from Timon of Athens wherein money is described as the “common whore of mankind”; and offers still another denunciation of the cash nexus, from the Antigone of Sophocles. One of the most famous phrases of Marx’s vast correspondence during the writing of the book expresses his hatred for having to work on “the economic shit,” and one recalls Lenin’s revealing opinion about gold—that it was fit only to supply the flooring for public lavatories. One pleasure in the rereading of Marx is to savor the trenchancy and aptness of his literary allusions.

Recommended with reservations.

Recommended.

At The New Republic, Michael Tomasky reviews Leonard Downie Jr.’s The Rules of the Game.

“Once you credit them like that,” he said, “you do all their work for them. They should have been worried about us. Let them worry. Let them wonder if we’re carrying a tool or if we have a crew. I’d like to go back, do it properly, deface the thing with red paint so there’s no swastika visible. You can’t have the main street, a shopping and commercial street, in a civilized city patrolled by intimidators who work for a Nazi organization. It is not humanly possible to live like that. One must not do that. There may be more important problems in Lebanon, but if people on Hamra don’t dare criticize the SSNP, well fuck. That’s occupation.”

Michael Totten recounts an attack on Christopher Hitchens in Beirut.

At Three Percent Chad W. Post examines the furor over the inclusion of arts funding in stimulus spending.

The New York Times has Martin Walker’s review of Jonathan Brent’s Inside the Stalin Archives: Discovering the New Russia.

If one hero emerges from “Inside the Stalin Archives” it is Aleksandr Yakovlev, a former Columbia University graduate student and Soviet ambassador to Canada, and perhaps the real intellectual author of glasnost and perestroika. Yakovlev, badly wounded in the Nazi siege of Leningrad, was a traditional Russian intellectual who had a bumpy career in the party until Gorbachev brought him onto the Polit buro to be its most liberal voice. After Gorbachev’s fall, Yakovlev continued to campaign for full disclosure of the Soviet past, and he tells Brent of one of the pivotal moments in the last days of the Soviet regime. In the winter of 1991, when Lithuanian crowds began demonstrating against Soviet rule, Gorbachev asked Yakovlev, “Should we shoot?”

At the Guardian, Simon Reid-Henry talks about Fidel and Che: A Revolutionary Friendship.

At Slate David Greenberg reviews William E. Leuchtenburg’s biography of Herbert Hoover.

Insignificant presidents force their authors into strained claims that their present obscurity is undeserved, while giants like FDR defy encapsulation in 200 pages. So Hoover is a choice assignment. Understanding the advent of the New Deal is impossible without insight into his failures. And yet Hoover is largely forgotten: In 2004, John Kerry’s presidential campaign stopped comparing Bush’s dismal record on job creation to Hoover’s when polling discovered that most Americans barely knew who he was.

The New York Times has David Kusnet’s review of Jeff Madrick’s The Case for Big Government.

To those who ask whether any country has ever taxed and spent its way to prosperity, Madrick offers two answers: the United States and its major competitors. In America, the greatest growth in public spending came during the most prosperous period in American history, the 25 years after World War II, when the federal, state and local government budgets “reached roughly 30 percent” of gross domestic product “and income levels in America became more equal.” Among the world’s most prosperous nations, most have higher rates of taxes and public spending, and many may have higher living standards, than the United States. “There really is no example of small government among rich nations,” Madrick observes.

Recommended with reservations.

The curious thing about the Zizek phenomenon is that the louder he applauds violence and terror–especially the terror of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, whose “lost causes” Zizek takes up in another new book, In Defense of Lost Causes–the more indulgently he is received by the academic left, which has elevated him into a celebrity and the center of a cult.

In The New Republic, Adam Kirsch reviews Slavoj Zizek.

The Guardian has images of the front pages of newspapers following Barack Obama’s historic election victory.

“My policy is as radical…as the constitution,” said FDR during the 1932 election campaign when he was accused of wanting to nationalise the utilities.

The Economist reviews H. W. Brands’s biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

At the Atlantic Monthly, James Fallows explains why China is so awful at managing its own reputation.

A Google-news sweep reveals that first reaction in America is that the Nobel committee, in line with their prize-awarding colleagues in other fields, now see it as their God-given mission to cut the world’s only remaining superpower down to size. To prevent in literature what has happened in film (a cultural field in which Sweden and France were once world players – but no more). Or even in science.

At the Guardian, John Sutherland examines the reaction to Le Clézio’s Nobel win.

For National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, poet Andrei Codrescu speaks of Wall Street’s sweet deal.

Ah, where were we? The economy, yes: $700 billion is more than enough money to buy every able-bodied American a chain saw, a solar-powered generator and a stake in a communal well and windmill. Also, red dirt and plum trees.

Recommended with reservations.

Terry Gross of Fresh Air interviews Robert Baer, ex-CIA operative and author of The Devil We Know.

Writing for Salon, Edward McClelland covers David Foster Wallace’s McCain’s Promise, Cliff Schecter’s The Real McCain, Paul Begala’s Third Term, and Matt Welch’s The Myth of a Maverick.

When scholars of the Obama presidency try to answer the question “Who Was John McCain?” — or, more pointedly, “Who Were the Two John McCains?” — they should start by reading what journalists had to say about him. Four new books about McCain, by four liberal authors, show how difficult it’s been for a politician with middle-of-the-road instincts to operate in a polarized era. Writers loved McCain during his first run for the presidency, in 2000. But eight years later, they think he’s a flip-flopping hack.

At n+1 Mark Greif writes of the political theology of the GOP.

If I had to play for one side or the other, and I had no other thoughts or feelings but the will to side with genius, I’d play for the Republicans. The GOP convention trumped the Democratic—because some intelligence there is, in their control room, who can conceive of mastery on the grandest scale; a moral monster, to be sure; a jinni of evil; a trafficker in political eschatology, unafraid to trespass on myths of the gravest consequence. Someone behind the scenes held the key and boldly turned it: someone foresaw that the means of hatching a McCain triumphant was to make of him a risen God. This was the burden of the Vice Presidential and Presidential addresses, and the galvanism of the last few days.

While writing for The New Yorker, George Saunders doesn’t blink, for he is Right.

I’m finding it hard to concentrate, as my eyes are killing me, due to I have not blinked since I started writing this. And, me being Regular, it takes a long time for me to write something this long.

Where was I? Ah, yes: I hate Élites. Which is why, whenever I am having brain surgery, or eye surgery, which is sometimes necessary due to all my non-blinking, I always hire some random Regular guy, with shaking hands if possible, who is also a drunk, scared of the sight of blood, and harbors a secret dislike for me.

In “What Would Allende Say?” at n + 1, Luke Epplin examines the lasting influence of a political project that never came to completion.

WHYY’s Fresh Air interviews Ron Suskind. Suskind’s book, The Way of the World, alleges criminal behavior in the push for war with Iraq.

That compassion is natural to human beings there is no question. But does it pertain to our higher or to our lower natures? As even or precisely those who take compassion for a virtue acknowledge, it is an emotion. Can an emotion be a virtue? Yes, if the keynote of virtue is naturalness in the sense of spontaneity or authenticity. No, if what defines virtue is the perfection of our nature through the triumph of reason over passion. For this reason the long history of thought about compassion (stretching back at least 2,500 years now) has revolved around just this issue.

Clifford Orwin writes of today’s slippery wedge emotion at In Character.

Laura Miller at Salon probes Barack Obama’s reading history.

A taste for serious fiction is rare in the American male these days, but Obama has it. According to several friends, he even tried his hand at writing short stories during those early years in Chicago, and he recalls priggishly scolding his half sister, Maya, while she was visiting him in New York, because she chose to watch TV instead of reading some novels he’d given her. Among the authors he favored during his years of intensive reading were Herman Melville, Toni Morrison and E.L. Doctorow (cited as his favorite before he switched to Shakespeare). He has also mentioned Philip Roth, whose struggles to shrug off the strictures of Jewish American community leaders must have resonated with the young activist.

At The Chronicle of Higher Education, Maurice Isserman wonders whether the left will ever learn to communicate across generations.

James Donald at the China Post covers the recently concluded Taipei International Book Exhibition.

Things turned more serious when a well-travelled Li [Ang] told the audience of her concern over mounting political and economic pressures preventing Taiwan’s culture from reaching the rest of the world.

The New York Times is running a piece on Senator George Allen’s (R-VA) sleazy attacks on challenger Jim Webb’s novels.