The Politics of Anti-Semitism
Edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair.
AK Press, 192 pages, $12.95 (paper).

Ever since the onset of the al-Aksa intifada, the old Zionist complaint that any attack on Israel is an attack on the Jewish people has gained more cultural currency than perhaps at any other moment since the establishment of the state of Israel. Indeed, the subject of anti-Semitism has become so common a topic of invocation in the mainstream media that it has nearly eclipsed journalistic acknowledgment of any other form of racism. While anti-Semitism is by no means a nonexistent phenomena, the problem is that we are no longer living in the middle of the 20th century, and anti-Semitism sure ain't what it used to be.

Unfortunately, Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair's Politics of Anti-Semitism does little to reassure us otherwise. Culled from the pages of the editors' own periodical, Counterpunch, the book is an unsettling mix of old-fashioned anti-Jewish rants – Cockburn, for example, contends that Zionists control the media, while Jeffrey Blankfort argues that the Israeli lobby controls U.S. foreign policy – with more nuanced and truly enlightening discussions of the subject by contributors ranging from controversial Israeli journalist and Gush Shalom founder Uri Avnery to late, great Palestinian intellectual Edward Said.

While I would hesitate to recommend The Politics of Anti-Semitism to anyone seeking a definitive set of opinions on anti-Semitism, its peculiar combination of racist and anti-racist essays is a wonderful monograph on the left's schizophrenia on the role Jews play in contemporary politics. No stranger to controversy, Cockburn is surely aware of this and has taken yet another opportunity to provoke us to think critically about a topic of intense political relevance. Unfortunately, that's no excuse for taking the kinds of positions he does, because in the end, racism is still racism. For that, both Cockburn and his coeditor should be roundly condemned. (Joel Schalit)

Drop City
By T.C. Boyle.
Penguin, 497 pages, $14 (paper).

I got T.C. Boyle's new novel, Drop City, for Christmas, and it was a good winter to read it: the weather's been nasty, my house is cold, and the roof leaks, so I'd sit there with the book on my lap, shivering and thinking about a group of spaced-out hippies from California trying to survive their first winter living "off the land" 150 miles north of Fairbanks, Alaska. In an odd way I remember having the same feeling one wet, wet winter in the early 1980s when I read Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion under a leaky roof in an unheated flat in Hayes Valley. Because, like Kesey, Boyle has an amazing knack for making you feel like you're in a story, like you're sitting there in a claustrophobic homemade cabin under a sod roof with a bunch of people who've all given each other crabs and there's no way to get out since there aren't any roads and it's 20° below zero outside and the nearest town is 12 miles down a frozen-solid river.

The other thing Boyle is good at is creating characters who are real, so real that they evolve significantly during the relatively short plot timeline (the story takes place over about six months), and you come to like some and hate others for no reason except that you feel like you're living with them, and since it's a commune, well, some of them are really cool and some are just jerks.

Drop City is also genuinely funny in parts, not laugh-out-loud funny like Water Music (far and away Boyle's best book and one of my favorite books of the past 20 years) but funny in the way life in a late-1960s commune was funny, just because it was. And all the very real issues that were part of that time (sexism, racism, drug problems, the selfishness and stupidity of white kids, et cetera) slip in without hitting you over the head. In the end so do love and celebration and survival and a genuine appreciation for a hard, wild place. (Tim Redmond)

Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence
By Andy Clark.
Oxford University Press, 240 pages, $26.

Despite several claims to the contrary, Andy Clark's latest book, Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence, is a futurist manifesto. His visionary tale of the digital near-future first invokes a sci-fi nerd's utopia of wearable computers, cyberware enhancements, and swarm intelligence and then defends it from the straw-man skeptics and Luddites who worry the Internet strips us of our humanity. Clark fights fire with fire and argues that an inclination toward tool use and technology is central to human nature. If we're all "natural-born cyborgs," why not embrace his futurist vision?

The evidence he presents in support of this argument proves to be the strength of the book. Clark covers a great deal of territory, from virtual reality interfaces to Internet search engines, from medical research to cognitive neuroscience. He explains each example in plain terms, and deftly highlights both its relevance to his thesis and its implications in general. But the argument the examples support suffers from just the kind of dogmatic overstatement it aims to counter. Clark is far too quick to label a biological trait "distinctly human," even on the basis of monkey and mouse research that would seem to contradict his claim.

More troubling is the way in which Clark glosses over more tangible concerns about his futurist program. He joyfully describes an interconnected world that will "enable us to press new knowledge from electronic trails of use and access," but he engages its real dangers only very briefly in the book's final chapter. In response to the threat of ubiquitous surveillance, he suggests only "a kind of leap of faith, or democratic optimism" about technology. What this leap entails is never clear.

With its lofty rhetorical aims, Natural-Born Cyborgs reads like a pamphlet for the digital age. The language is awkward and the thesis insubstantial, but ultimately Clark demonstrates great skill at synthesizing information and raising important questions. The issues that emerge from the book will surely provoke an impassioned response – which for the casual reader may be an end in itself. (Dan Engber)

The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century
By Paul Krugman.
W.W. Norton, 426 pages, $25.95.

In all fairness, Paul Krugman should consider mailing part of his royalty checks from The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century to George Bush. Before Bush, Krugman's mostly mainstream New York Times columns seemed unlikely to produce a best-selling anthology. But ever since the president-to-be prevailed in the Supreme Court, Krugman (whose day job is that of economics professor at Princeton University) has written with the urgency of a man who not only can't believe what he's seeing played out on the public stage but also can't believe that everyone else acts like it's normal.

One particular bugbear is the shifting rationale for Bush's tax cut, a proposal that, Krugman writes, originated as "a political gesture designed to ward off a challenge from [Republican presidential contender] Steve Forbes and satisfy the conservative base. Only later did the administration make the providential discovery that it was also just the thing to fight recession, promote family values and cure the common cold." The book's "California Screaming" section focuses on the energy-deregulation coup pulled off by power companies, which "made it easy, almost irresistible ... to manipulate the market. In fact, to believe that the generators didn't engage in market manipulation, you had to believe that they are either saints or very bad businessmen, because they would have been passing up an obvious opportunity to increase their profits."

On the other hand, Krugman is a passionate advocate for free trade in general and the World Trade Organization in particular, apparently seeing no incongruity in arguing that the route to greater international economic equity lies in freeing the hand of corporate capital while otherwise professing shock at the ascendancy of "ideas that would have been beyond the pale not long ago – inherited wealth is good, poor people don't pay enough taxes." It will be interesting to see if Krugman can hold his edge after Bush. Let's hope he gets the chance soon. (Tom Gallagher)

Elizabeth Costello
By J.M. Coetzee.
Viking Press, 230 pages, $21.95.

Five years ago at Princeton University, J.M. Coetzee stood at a podium for the first of a series of lectures on human values. Instead of delivering a formal speech, he read his audience a story. It begins with the arrival of a novelist named Elizabeth Costello at a fictional American college, where she has been invited to give a series of lectures. Costello's speeches – which make up most of Coetzee's story – turn out to be an impassioned remonstration against the cruel treatment of animals, an expansion of the familiar analogy of slaughterhouses to concentration camps, and a meditation on the limits of human empathy. What might sound shrill from Coetzee's own mouth is filtered through his characters, both Costello and the auditors who question her. His story interweaves argument and character with devastating pathos: when the steely Costello is brought to tears as her son drives her to the airport, our compassion for her is a form of concession.

The Princeton lectures were published as The Lives of Animals in the following year, alongside responses from Peter Singer and others. Now they have been republished as the central chapters of a novel, Elizabeth Costello. The new book is arranged as a series of "Lessons," or accounts of Costello's academic travels. In almost all of them we find her arriving at a university, interacting with colleagues, and either giving or hearing a lecture on some topic in literature and ethics.