SUNDAY, OCTOBER 24, 2010 MEMOIR REVIEW BY THOMAS W. LIPPMAN “
times all three. Two of those lead- ers were named Bhutto: Zulfikar Ali, prime minister in the 1970s, deposed in a military coup and later hanged by order of his suc- cessor, and his daughter Benazir, prime minister from 1988 to 1990 and again from 1993 to 1996. She was assassinated as she attempt- ed to return to power in 2007. The current president, Asif Zardari, was her husband. Wealthy, well-educated and deeply political, the Bhuttos have sometimes been described as the Kennedys of Pakistan, complete with Harvard degrees and violent deaths. But they are more like Renaissance Europe’s corrupt Borgias, as becomes all too appar- ent in this intensely personal, vengeful narrative by Fatima Bhutto, granddaughter of Zulfi- kar, niece of Benazir and daugh- ter of a third slain Bhutto, Bena- zir’s brother Murtaza. Yet another Bhutto, Shahnawaz, younger brother of Murtaza, was poisoned in 1985. There are really three books within “Songs of Blood and Sword.” One is an account of Pa- kistan’s appalling history since the 1950s. One is a young wom- an’s memoir of her family, which has been at the center of that his- tory. The third is a detective story: Who was responsible for the fatal police shooting of Mur- taza Bhutto in 1996? The author’s conclusion, reached after interviews with scores of her father’s friends, pro- fessors and political allies, is that the police shot Murtaza on orders from his sister Benazir. The moti- vation, according to Fatima Bhut- to, was that Murtaza, once re- leased from the jail where Bena- zir’s government had confined him, was challenging Benazir and her husband for control of the Pakistan People’s Party and thus posed a threat to the vast
I Pakistan’s dysfunctional family
SONGS OF BLOOD AND SWORD A Daughter’s Memoir By Fatima Bhutto Nation. 470 pp. $26.95
n the 63 years since Pakistan became an independent country, it has had rulers who were incompetent, cor- rupt, dictatorial or some-
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I think you’ll find an explosion of surprises.” — Bert Fields, attorney for Gary Condit, describing the book that the ex-congressman is writing about the Chandra Levy affair. Condit won’t shop the book to publishers until the trial of Ingmar Guandique, accused of killing Levy, concludes.
LAW
STAY OF EXECUTION Saving the Death Penalty From Itself By Charles Lane Rowman & Littlefield. 164 pp. $19.95
Washington Post editorial writer Charles Lane succinctly makes the case in this slim volume for shrinking the death penalty in order to save it. The Supreme Court has pruned around the edges in recent years, barring capital punishment for offenders who are mental- ly retarded or were juveniles at the time they com- mitted the crime. But Lane argues that state legis- lators and Congress should now take the lead in ensuring that capital punishment is reserved for “the worst of the worst” crimes.
He would limit the death penalty to acts of genocide, terrorism and the most heinous pre- meditated murders, such as those involving tor- ture and rape, while excluding single murders committed in the course of more common felo- nies, such as robberies. Lane would also central- ize state decision-making about who gets charged with capital crimes. He is not too concerned about
alleged racial bias or executing the innocent, neither of which he says is as large or ineradicable a problem as foes insist. Rather, he is troubled most about the inconsistent way capital punishment is applied. But Lane’s eminently reasonable proposals are unlikely to be well re- ceived among lawmakers skittish about ratcheting back the war on crime or local prosecutors reluctant to cede control over capital punishment. —Seth Stern
bookworld@washpost.com MEMOIR
THE HILLIKER CURSE My Pursuit of Women By James Ellroy Knopf. 203 pp. $24.95
FATIMA BHUTTO
The Bhuttos pose in northern Pakistan for one of the last photos of all of them together. From left to right: Shahnawaz (murdered in 1985), Benazir (assassinated in 2007), Murtaza (assassinated in 1996), Sanam, Nusrat and Zulfikar Ali (executed in 1979).
wealth they had amassed through spectacular corruption. “Benazir and her cronies were now backed against a wall,” Fati- ma writes of her father, who to her was the only person in the family who could do no wrong. “Murtaza’s threat was manage- able for them when he was be- hind bars and access to him and his ability to speak to the people were restricted. Now that he was free, he was unstoppable.” Fatima Bhutto found no smok- ing gun, but she unearthed plenty of circumstantial evidence, in- cluding the fact that the police took her wounded father to a hos- pital where they knew no sur- geon was on duty, and that the scene of her father’s killing was hosed down and cleansed of evi- dence within a few hours. A tri- bunal concluded that Murtaza’s killing could not have happened without orders from high author- ity.
She is disgusted that the chain
of death in the Bhutto family has resulted in Asif Zardari’s becom-
ing president. “This is the legacy Benazir has left behind for Paki- stan,” her niece writes — a “sapro- phytic culture” in which Zardari is the organism that lives off the corpses. Do not invite Fatima Bhutto and Asif Zardari to the same dinner party. She lives in Karachi, but judging by her ac- count of its political environ- ment, she might be well advised not to return there after her U.S. book tour. Fatima Bhutto, a journalist who was educated at Columbia and the University of London — breaking the family’s Harvard tradition — is not yet 30 years old, and her youth shows in this undisciplined book. It is at least 50 pages too long, larded with self-indulgent emotional out- bursts and personality sketches of minor characters, and her re- flexive anti-Americanism is tire- some. Her occasional references to U.S. policy sound like snippets of a conversation with Che Gue- vara, whose poster Murtaza Bhut- to mounted in his room at Har-
vard. She actually believes that U.S. troops herded Vietnamese villagers into urban communities because “that made it much easi- er for the US army to bomb civil- ians in their separated enclaves,” as if that were the Army’s objec- tive. Yet her book will be valuable to readers who want to understand why Pakistan is such an ungov- ernable mess. In her account, the country’s entire political culture is based on corruption, violence, opportunism, mendacity and a feudal economic system. Even the revered Zulfikar, whose mantle everyone in this book tries to claim, tinkered with the constitu- tion to advance his own power. “He was a polarizing figure,” his granddaughter writes. “You ei- ther loved Zulfikar or hated him.” She loved him, but then she used to love her Aunt Benazir, too.
bookworld@washpost.com
Thomas W. Lippman is an adjunct senior fellow for Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
James Ellroy looms large in American crime fiction. The author of hard- boiled detective novels such as “L.A. Confidential” and “The Black Dahlia,” he’s a man of grim wit and bleak, staccato prose. Be thankful he’s not your ex-boyfriend, though. When it comes to relation- ships, he’s a bit of an over-sharer. In his memoir, “The Hilliker Curse,” Ellroy details his lifelong ob- session with women — from his mother (whose maiden name was Hilliker), murdered when the author was 10 years old, to his various flings, flames and strolls down the aisle. Ellroy’s early dalliances are frequently humiliat-
ing for him, often grotesque. “My zits popped in the throes of my real and her feigned passion,” he writes of a formative roll in the hay. “I was stagger- ingly uncool and required deep pore cleansing and dermabrasion.” There are tales of X-ray goggles, home invasions and adultery.
But Ellroy remembers wanting more than just carnal satisfaction. He’s a born romantic on a quest to find the One, the Red Goddess, a big-time, all- consuming love. It’s an obsession that has fueled his literary career, pro- pelling him from gutter-dwelling golf caddy to best-selling author. “I know that women I have summoned in dreams and mental snapshots will make their way to me,” he writes. “Divine presence forms the core of my gift.” He’s not a total sleazebag, just a little self-absorbed.
—Aaron Leitko
leitkoa@washpost.com
POLITICS REVIEW BY ALAN WOLFE Feint to the left, attack from the right
THE MENDACITY OF HOPE Barack Obama and the Betrayal of American Liberalism By Roger D. Hodge Harper. 260 pp. $25.99
W
ith all the attention being paid to the discontents moti- vating the Ameri- can right, the time
has come for a scathing attack on Barack Obama from the left. Rog- er D. Hodge, former editor in chief of Harper’s magazine, claims to offer one. I would love to read a compelling explanation of why our current president, de- spite his legislative achieve- ments, has ceded so much turf to the political right. Obama, in my view, has never quite recognized how obstructionist Republicans have become and has failed to confront them vigorously. His de- cision to escalate the war in Af- ghanistan is likely to prove a trag- ic error. And his failure to chal- lenge Cheney-like accumulations of power in the executive is worse than a political mistake; it is a be- trayal not only of liberalism but of democracy. Alas, Hodge’s critique is not
convincing and, in the oddest of ways, not even from the left. “The Mendacity of Hope” is a sloppily organized, badly argued and deeply reactionary book unlikely to have any influence at all on the way Americans think about their president.
Although Hodge devotes a chapter to foreign policy, the main charge he levels against Obama is that, like all politicians in the United States, he serves at the pleasure of a financial oli- garchy. If one looks at what Oba- ma does rather than what he says, Hodge insists, the president serves his corporate masters well, structuring the stimulus to please Wall Street, designing a health-
federalists who hated democracy and loved money, and virtuous Jeffersonian republicans who stood for liberty and detested fi- nancial corruption. That many of the latter owned slaves, opposed the modernization of their society and could be ruthlessly intolerant of human foibles does not bother him. At one point Hodge de- scribes himself as among those “who pretend to eighteenth-cen- tury citizenship.” He got that right. Citizens in the 18th century did not worry much about health care because they died so young. Hodge is smart enough to real-
JAY LAPRETE / ASSOCIATED PRESS President Obama speaks last week during a rally in Columbus, Ohio.
care plan so that insurance com- panies can make a killing and serving as a cheerleader for glob- alization, even if doing so means effectively dismantling the New Deal. Money talks. Obama listens. There is an obvious truth in all this; money, of course, buys influ- ence, and Citizens United, the Su- preme Court’s 2010 decision equating free speech with lavish corporate spending, will enable money to buy even more. In such an environment, it can hardly be surprising that the United States does not have, and in all likeli- hood will never have, socialized medicine. But to damn the major health-care reform law for which Obama pushed so hard as “ab-
surdly misconceived,” “porcine” and “the worst of all possible out- comes” is to dismiss out of hand the very real benefits it will pro- vide to those who otherwise would be totally at the mercy of the market. Hodge may think he belongs on the left, but such indif- ference to the needs of real people is chilling in its lack of compas- sion.
Only a conservative, moreover, would choose to leave Obama and the modern world behind to write so much about the nation’s found- ers instead. In Hodge’s simplistic reading of American history, there were two forces competing for influence when the Constitu- tion was adopted: Hamiltonian
ize that his leftism masks an af- finity with the right. “The Tea Par- tiers,” he writes, “are not wrong to be angry with Obama and the Democrats.” He would like to see people of his persuasion join forces with libertarians such as Ron Paul. “To Americans,” he writes, faithfully adhering to the 18th-century reactionaries he so admires, “all arbitrary power should be suspect, whether it originates in a private corporate bureaucracy, a public welfare agency, a public-private monopo- ly, the CIA, or the Department of Homeland Security.” How Hodge can reconcile that position with his support for a state strong enough to regulate capitalism is beyond my capacity to figure out. An alliance between the tea
party and leftists fed up with Obama is unlikely ever to hap- pen; I somehow doubt that either Sarah Palin or Ron Paul would have as many nice things to say about Hodge as he does of them. We still need a critique of Obama from the left. To be effective, it will have to be grounded in real- ity. “The Mendacity of Hope” is not.
bookworld@washpost.com
Alan Wolfe teaches political science at Boston College and is the author of “The Future of Liberalism.”
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