SUNDAY, JUNE 6, 2010 “ DRAMA
PLAYWRIGHTS IN AN HOUR By Various Authors Smith and Kraus. Paperback, $9.99 each
So your date has invited you to a play by Sarah Ruhl. May- be her name rings a bell. Maybe the play, “In the Next Room (or the vibrator play),” jogs your memory. Maybe you wonder why your date has invited you to this particular one. Ultimate- ly, you have to admit, you don’t have a clue about Ruhl or her plays. You could wing it — and hope your date doesn’t notice. Or you could pick up a copy of “Ruhl in an Hour,” one of 27 slim volumes in the “Playwrights in an Hour” series just re- leased by the theater books publisher Smith and Kraus. The paperbacks are less than 100 pages long, inexpensive, and fit in a back pocket. Though compact, each book contains a wealth of information on the selected playwright — Aeschylus to Ayckbourn — that will get any novice out of a date jam or provide a veteran playgoer with fresh insights on an old favor- ite. The series delivers succinctness with depth. Robert Brus- tein, the founding director of both the Yale and the American Repertory Theatres, writes a nugget-filled, two-page introduc- tion for each volume: “For [Samuel] Beckett, life was damna- tion, but language was redemption,” or Tom Stoppard moved theater “backward in form and forward in subject matter.” The meat of each book is an extended essay exploring the playwright’s work and historical place in theater and world culture. These essays, written by scholars, critics and working stage artists, provide a more nuanced and intellectual por- trait than the summaries of Cliff Notes. The series puts a good many greats in the spotlight — Sophocles, Shakespeare, Chekhov, Ibsen, O’Neill, Miller, Williams, Wilde, Shaw, Strind- berg, Hansberry, August Wilson, Shepard — but misses other compelling figures such as Brecht, Lanford Wilson, Inge, Fey- deau, Pirandello and Ionesco. In April, the publisher plans to release 18 more volumes featuring, among others, Mamet, Pinter, Durang, Kushner, Tina Howe, Marsha Norman and Wendy Wasserstein. Each volume has a brief timeline of events that are con- temporaneous with the plays; if concision goes too far any- where, it is here — a more relevant chronology would make for a handier reference work. It doesn’t add much to our un- derstanding of Moliere’s “Tartuffe” to know that in the year after its production in 1669, minute hands appeared on watches. Far more useful are the play excerpts at the back of each volume. Once you’ve figured out what Ruhl’s “In the Next Room” is all about, you can sample some of the dialogue. Brustein gives the storyline of the Tony-nominated work in his introduction: “Set in the late nineteenth century, against the background of the invention of electricity, [“In the Next Room”] is a study of the relationship between science and sensuality, or decorum and passion, as demonstrated through the attempt, by the heroine’s doctor-husband, to cure hysteria by inducing orgasm.” Let the after-play conversation begin.
— Steven Levingston
levingstons@washpost.com SOCIETY
LOSING OUR COOL Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World (and Finding New Ways to Get Through the Summer) By Stan Cox. New Press. 255 pp. $24.95
The air-conditioner has transformed our lives. Thanks to it, peo- ple migrated south en masse, Las Vegas and Phoenix became thriving desert oases, and retail customers could shop in the sum- mer. The AC’s impact is the topic of “Losing Our Cool,” by Kansas environmental writer Stan Cox. Despite its gelid glory, Cox suggests, the air-conditioner may not be such a good thing. The AC accounts for nearly 20 percent of the electricity used in the average American home. The influx of new residents to Florida has decimated sensitive ecosystems. Phoenix — a city that could hardly exist without air-condi- tioning — struggles to support the water demands of its 1.5 million people. Chil- dren now spend too much time indoors, becoming sedentary and overweight. Cox writes in simple, direct prose. He
spaces out statistics with anecdotes and fun facts, making a po- tentially boring subject interesting. He only aggregates informa- tion, however, offering no original reporting. He suggests alterna- tives to air-conditioning, including limiting house sizes and plant- ing vegetation on roofs and near windows to create barriers against the sun. Or people can simply go outside, adjust to the heat and humidity and meld with the environment. “We can be- come more resilient human beings,” Cox writes.
—Timothy R. Smith
smitht@washpost.com HISTORY
THE LIBERTY BELL By Gary B. Nash. Yale Univ. 242 pp. $24
It is an unlikely central character for a book: a silent, 250-year- old bell. Yet in “The Liberty Bell,” a biography of our nation’s “nearly sacred totem,” Gary B. Nash provides a stirring historical account of the icon that is America’s “Rosetta Stone or . . . Holy Grail.” Nash describes the bell’s journey in 1752 from England to
Philadelphia and its centuries-long ascension to fame as a harbin- ger of freedom. The bell gets its name from its inscription, which comes from Leviticus: “Proclaim Liberty Thro’ all the Land to all the Inhabitants Thereof.” Originally cast by the venera- ble Whitechapel Bell Foundry, the bell was to be placed in a tower above the State House in Philadelphia. But it broke upon arrival. Local artisans recast it, and in August 1753 the bell tolled for the first time to summon members of the legislature. Nash addresses myths surrounding the bell, including that it pealed after the ratification of the Declaration of Inde- pendence on July 4, 1776 (false), that it
was nearly scrapped for junk (true), and that it cracked in 1835 when it rang out to announce the death of Chief Justice John Mar- shall (false — Nash asserts it more likely cracked in 1843, when it rang for the anniversary of Washington’s birthday that year). Nash spares no detail, including fascinating anecdotes (both
Confederate President Jefferson Davis and civil rights leader Mar- tin Luther King Jr. have stood in its presence) and bizarre asides (a best-selling T-shirt in the City of Brotherly Love reads, “I came to Philly for the crack”).Nash is a UCLA history professor, and the book reads like an archaic college lecture, but his subject is sur- prisingly interesting and well deserving of the attention. —T. Rees Shapiro
shapirot@washpost.com
KLMNO
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In 1955, President Eisenhower had a heart attack [which] began a process that fundamentally changed the way Americans viewed food.”
LEBANON REVIEW BY KAI BIRD Small country, high stakes Read about it in Political Bookworm
at6voices.washingtonpost.com/political-bookworm
ASSOCIATED PRESS Destroyed vehicles litter the site of the massive bomb attack that tore through former prime minister Rafik Hariri’s motorcade in 2005.
BEWARE OF SMALL STATES Lebanon, Battleground of the Middle East By David Hirst Nation. 480 pp. $29.95
THE GHOSTS OF MARTYRS SQUARE An Eyewitness Account of Lebanon’s Life Struggle By Michael Young Simon & Schuster. 295 pp. $26
M
ichael Young’s Lebanese mother — recently wid- owed — first took her 7-
year-old son home to Lebanon in 1970. I too arrived in Beirut that year to study at the American Uni- versity of Beirut. It turned out to be a dangerous autumn. On Sept. 6, 1970, Leila Khaled and other members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hi- jacked four commercial airplanes. Khaled’s attempted hijacking of an El Al flight failed when her American comrade was shot dead by an Israeli air marshal and she was knocked unconscious. Three days later, Khaled’s comrades hi- jacked a fifth plane and landed it next to two other hijacked aircraft at Dawson’s Field, an abandoned British military airport in north- ern Jordan. My high school sweet- heart was on that plane. She and hundreds of other passengers were held hostage for four days. Miraculously, everyone survived, and all the hostages were even- tually released. The “Black September” hijack- ings instigated a brutal civil war in Jordan, where King Hussein’s Bedouin troops killed thousands of Palestinians and finally ex- pelled Yasir Arafat and the Pales- tine Liberation Organization from Jordan. Arafat’s bid to turn the Hashemite Kingdom into a Pales- tinian republic was thus soundly defeated. But his guerrilla fighters fled to Lebanon’s refugee camps; their presence there soon sparked Israeli invasions in 1978 and 1982, and a bloody sectarian civil war lasting from 1975-90. I left Beirut in 1971, but Michael
Young spent his childhood there, and today he is the opinion editor of the Daily Star, Beirut’s highly re- garded English-language news- paper. He has now written a heart- felt defense of his Lebanese coun- trymen, their patchwork sectarian political system and their para- doxical liberalism. Young defends Lebanon’s sectarianism on socio- logical grounds. Its mosaic of Mar- onites (his mother’s family), Druze, Greek Orthodox and Sunni and Shiite Muslims is the untidy reality. And while he admits that its system can be dysfunctional, his book celebrates the fact that an independent Lebanon has sur- vived the Palestinian-induced chaos, the civil war, numerous Is- raeli invasions and the Syrian oc- cupation (1976-2005). His book is less a memoir — we learn almost nothing about Young’s personal life — than a journalistic account of the Cedar Revolution that took place in the wake of the assassination of for- mer prime minister Rafiq al-Hari-
ri on Feb. 14, 2005. The charismat- ic billionaire politician was almost certainly murdered by Syrian in- telligence agents. In response, an outraged Lebanese polity arose al- most as one to throw out the occu- pying Syrian army. Young’s sympa- thies clearly reside with the secu- lar-minded, anti-Syrian pluralists — those who, in the words of the Druze chieftain Walid Jumblatt, want to see a Lebanon modeled on the commercially vibrant plural- ism of Hong Kong rather than on, say, the drab uniformity of Hanoi. But the promise of the Cedar
Revolution has been stymied, Young argues, by the Shiite-based Hezbollah (the Party of God), which he fairly describes as “mainly an autocratic, semi-se- cret, military, political and reli- gious organization more powerful than the Lebanese state.” Young is outraged by Hezbollah’s provoca- tions — and blames it for the Is- raeli onslaught during the sum- mer of 2006 in which much of Lebanon’s newly rebuilt infra- structure was demolished by Is- raeli bombing. If Young’s “The Ghosts of Mar-
tyrs Square” provides readers with an excellent roadmap to Leba- non’s political morass of the last five years, David Hirst’s “Beware of Small States” has a larger theme and a broader historical sweep. Now in his early 70s, Hirst has cov- ered the Middle East for the Guardian since 1963. He is intrep- id and unafraid of controversy. He has twice been kidnapped. Au- thoritarian governments in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Syria have banned him. And let’s just say that his criticisms of Israel have not earned him any friends in the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, known as AIPAC. Hirst’s earlier book, “The Gun and the Olive Branch,” came out just weeks after Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat made his dramatic visit to Jerusalem in November 1977. Hirst was highly critical of Is- rael, and a review in The Washing- ton Post complained that his book was “an accusative sniffle amid the opening chords of an anthem of hope.” But after three more dec- ades of unending enmity, atroci- ties and asymmetrical warfare, Hirst’s revisionist narrative of the Arab-Israeli conflict no longer seems so very controversial. To- day, the Israeli school of New His- torians — specifically Benny Mor- ris, Avi Shlaim and Tom Segev — echoes many of his arguments. Hirst’s new book is a history of
Lebanon’s fragile democracy over the last 100 years. Like his earlier work, it is rigorous and yet provoc- ative. His theme is that the history of modern Lebanon is one of re- lentless interventions by the French, Americans, Syrians and, above all, the Israelis. I am partic- ularly fascinated, however, by his reporting on the growth and resil- iency of Hezbollah, and how its relatively tiny but highly disci- plined militia managed to fight Is- rael to an inconclusive stalemate in the 2006 war. Hezbollah re- mains a state within the small state, re-armed with tens of thou- sands of missiles and heavily
Kai Bird, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, is the author of
“Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis, 1956-1978.” He lives in Kathmandu.
GRAND CENTRAL PUBLISHING HACHETTE BOOK GROUP
funded by its Shiite allies in Iran. Hirst virtually ends his book with a prediction that this is a recipe for what he says will be the next Middle East war. Hirst and Young have spent most of their adult lives in Leba- non. Each in his own way is a keen
analytical observer and coura- geous reporter who knows Leba- non as well as anyone. So both of their books should be required reading for understanding the roots of what seems, inevitably, a coming conflagration.
bookworld@washpost.com
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