Europe
Domino
The glitz and fanfare surrounding Vladimir Putin's May 7 inauguration led many to compare the event to a czar's coronation. A better analogy would be a shotgun wedding: everyone knew the real reason for the event but was too polite to name it. When the new president, in his brief and stiff speech, proclaimed, "We have one motherland and one people," everyone in Russia knew he was talking about Chechnya, the war that brought him to power and the consequences of which form the central challenge of his tenure. READ MORE >>
Warming Up
Absolving Adolf
There's something more than a little disingenuous about the demands for Patrick Buchanan's political excommunication coming from several Republican presidential candidates, not to mention the former "Crossfire" host's media chums. Buchanan's sympathy for Nazi Germany's strategic predicament is hardly new and is certainly not a secret. For more than 20 years, he has been publicly ventilating his peculiar penchant for a revisionist assessment of both Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. READ MORE >>
The Stasi and The Swan
In the spring of 1995, Jim Clark, who had spent half his life spying on others, was sure someone was spying on him. He first noticed the person when he got off the plane in Germany. Now, at the train station in Bonn, he could see the man's reflection in the ticket counter window. He knew from experience that people do silly things when they think they're being watched, but he did them despite himself: zigzagging across the terminal, spinning around, even walking backward. READ MORE >>
The Open Society
Exile and the Kingdom
Messianism, Zionism, and Jewish Religious Radicalism By Aviezer Ravitzky. Translated by Michael Swirsky and Jonathan Chipman (University of Chicago Press, 303 pp., $17.95) READ MORE >>
Keep it.
Dicks
In July, 1994, when Bill Clinton was touring Europe, the president's aides were, well, awestruck by the tenacity of Richard Holbrooke, then the United States Ambassador to Germany. What accounted for this reaction? During the president's visit to Germany, Holbrooke was, as one official put it, "a whirling dervish." He managed to wangle his way into top-level meetings and hounded White House staff to get airplane and helicopter seats close to Clinton. READ MORE >>
The Forest and the Trees
Landscape and Memory by Simon Schama (Knopf, 652 pp., $40) READ MORE >>
A Groom of One's Own
Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe by John Boswell Villard Books, 412 pp., $25 I. READ MORE >>
