Book Review Pages
The Kathmandu Post Review of Books
Vol. 3, No. 21
Issue Coordinator: Manjushree Thapa
Martin Chautari for
CSRD and The Kathmandu Post
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Essay
Reviews
- Companero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara (Jorge G. Castaneda)
- The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination (Donald Worster)
- War and Anti-War (Alvin and Heidi Toffler)
- Thumbnail Reviews of Recently Received Titles
Proud Publishers: American Literary Magazines
Proud Publishers: American Literary Magazines
Samrat Upadhyay
In a world propelled by the market economy, the literary world, too, is rife with an attitude that prizes profit-making above valuing works of literary merit. The book publishing world is subject to the same laws as the rest of the market, so some American publishers treat art as commodity, as we already observed in the case of the beauty (Arundhati Roy) and her beast (The God of Small Things): readers forgot that the woman on the back cover was not a model endorsing the book, but the author who spent torturous hours writing it. One corner of American publishing, however, has consistently published quality work without glossy book covers or sales spawned by prominent displays in national bookstores.
American literary journals and magazines take pride in publishing fine works of established authors and introducing new talent to the public. With an average circulation of only about 2,000, often operating on a shoe-string budget, and continuously threatened with extinction, these journals nonetheless have been proliferating across America, especially with the tremendous growth of creative writing programs in the past decade. In a sense, then, literary magazines are more reliable sources of real literary talent existing in the country because they publish writers whose work they admire, not writers they think will sell. They thereby eliminate a large contingent of commercial writers with their plot-driven drivel.
The 1999 Poets Market lists more than 1,000 American and Canadian literary journals and magazines (or "little" as they are sometimes called) which are open to poets, and the 1999 Short Story and Novel Writers Market (both published by Writers Digest Books, Cincinnati, Ohio) lists about 600 markets for short story writers. Not all of the magazines listed are of a literary nature; some carry exclusively mystery or horror genre. But a large number of magazines explicitly state that they don't care for genre writing, and that any theme or style is acceptable as long as it is of "high quality" (implying, with some degree of accuracy, that genre writing cannot be of high quality).
Among the journals that have acquired giant reputations, The Paris Review, published out of New York despite its name, is a strong leader. Started by George Plimpton and Peter Matthiessen, this journal consistently publishes interesting contemporary writing, as well as interviews with eminent authors under "The Art of Fiction," and "The Art of Poetry." Other journals of considerable repute are The Georgia Review, Iowa Review, The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, and Ploughshares. Many journals are affiliated with universities and colleges, thereby relying on a dedicated tribe of other academic writers as subscribers. Some critics say that this network fosters incestuous relationships among academics (who purportedly have brains of the same feather), and therefore stunts innovative writing. But the truth is that many literary journals boldly publish experimental fiction and poetry, and delight in exposing American audience to international writing. For example, Manoa, published by the University of Hawaii, devotes each issue to publishing Asian/Pacific writers in addition to American writers, providing a lively forum for international work of diverse nature. Overall, most journals are extremely rigorous in their selection process, and stories abound of big-name writers getting miffed when small-time journal don't accept their work.
So how hard is it to get your work published in these journals? Consider this: a journal like Shenandoah gets about 500 story submissions a month, and it publishes 16 stories a year, which means that you have a 1/400 chance of getting published in that journal anytime you submit. Extreme competitiveness, combined with delay in response time (journals can take a year or more to say no), have forced many writers to resort to what is known in the industry as "simultaneous submission": sending the same story to several journals at once to increase chances of getting published. A few editors frown upon this practice, and old-timers nostalgically recall the days before computers when writers meticulously typed one copy of a story and prayed that the editor's dog wouldn't eat it. Despite the ethical question raised by simultaneous submission, many editors now accept this practice.
What makes some journals especially interesting is that they are run entirely by students in creative writing programs. This doesn't mean student-run journals are shabbily produced. Indiana Review, edited by Masters of Fine Arts students at Indiana University, won the American Literary Magazine Award in 1996. Hayden's Ferry Review, edited by students at Arizona State University, is one of the few journals chosen to publish Associated Writing Programs Intro Awards winners, and it was ranked in 1991 by Columbia University as among the top one percent of literary magazines in the country.
And of course there's a whole new breed of literary journals cruising in cyberspace. Web magazines, or e-zines, can offer wide readership to beginning writers who are having a tough time getting published in the print journals. With names like Lonzies Fried Chicken Literary Magazine and Zuzu Petal's Quarterly Online, these internet lit mags have become popular in the last few years, even as they raise concern about quality control.
The world of American literary magazines is an exciting one, providing many opportunities for serious writers to flaunt their craft. Even that old curmudgeon T. S. Eliot once said, "Without literary magazines, the vitality of the world of letters is greatly reduced."
(S. Upadhyay is the fiction editor of Hawaii Review, 1733 Donaghho Rd., Honolulu, Hawaii 96822, USA)
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Companero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara
Author: Jorge G. Castaneda
Publisher: New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997
Che in Today's World
Hari Roka
Many biographies have been written on the legendary revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara, the latest of which is Jorge G. Castaneda's Companero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara. As a long-time professor of political science at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and a visiting professor at many U.S. universities, Castaneda is well-positioned to write about Che's significance in present-day North American politics. He does so with thoroughness and care.
Companero begins at a little school of La Hingura, in the Bolivian southeast, where, with the help of the CIA, the Bolivian Army captured and executed Che. Through the description of Che's death, the author succinctly expresses his own belief that the revolutionary's vision is still relevant today, as are the values of his generation. The book's best writing is found in these beginning pages, starting with the vivid first sentence: "They uncovered his face, now clear and serene, and bared the chest wracked by forty years of asthma and months of hunger."
The rest of the book follows Che's life chronologically, beginning with his birth, in 1928, to a family of blue-blood aristocrats in Rosario, Argentina. He was a brilliant student who read voraciously during his frequent asthma attacks. Willful and spirited as a teenager, he began to mature in his views after leaving Argentina for trips through the American continent while completing his medical studies. By the time he reached Chuquicamata, Chile, the site of the world's largest open-cut copper mine and a bastion of the Chilean Communist Party, he had witnessed much poverty, injustice and exploitation. He was particularly impressed by the dedication of one communist couple actively fighting for "bread for the poor." It is said that Ernesto Guevara then started to become "Che." After Chuquicamata, Castaneda describes Che to be in a state of revolutionary incubation, speaking passionately against "Yankee" imperialism and Latin American subjugation as he toured Peru, Panama, Mexico, Guatemala, Venezuela, Costa Rica and Bolivia.
It was in Bolivia, after witnessing the National Revolutionary Movement's failure to effect socio-economic transformation, that Che first realized that politics-whether traditional or revolutionary-could be complex and contradictory. Later, in Guatemala, he saw the collapse of President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman's reforms with the naked intervention of the United States. At that time his Peruvian first wife, Hilde Gadea, who was a true revolutionary, helped him become a Marxist Leninist.
In 1955, Che met several friends of Cuba, including the student leader Raul Castro. Raul's brother Fidel Castro impressed Che as an extraordinary man, and they soon organized a group, trained them in armed combat, and launched the Granma expedition for Cuba's revolution. This was Che's first experience of organizational work. Having entered Cuba, he spent a year and a half waging guerrilla warfare from the hills of Sierra Maestra, and introducing, to the poor farmers they lived among, the idea of "land to the people." Dissidents in the cities - middle-class democrats, doctors, lawyers, small businessmen, and communists - funneled them money, guns and information. Incredibly, the fighters eventually grew to the thousands who marched into Havana in triumph in 1959, ending the regime of Falguenio Batista. This event marks a break between the failure of Latin America's democratic left in the 1950's and the emergence of a new revolutionary subjectivity with Che and Castro as its leaders. It was this revolutionary leadership which faced the 1961 US "Bay of Pigs" provocation, and also survived the "Missile Crisis" of 1962.
Castaneda then follows Che's work in the Cuban government, paying close attention to divergences between his views and Castro's. In his work setting up Cuba's trade links with the Soviet Union, Pakistan, India, Japan and Indonesia, and later, in his capacity as the Minister of Industries, Che engendered international support for the revolution, and thus helped transform Cuba from a playground for US gangsters to an austere experiment in socialism. Yet, though he sought Soviet alliance in some matters, he began to question the increasing Soviet influence over the Cuban economy. He also expressed disappointment at the class privileges of the Soviet Union's government and party officials. Moscow, in return, accused Che of following Maoist principles in his continued calls for armed revolution. Che was even accused of espousing the theories of the hated Trotskyites.
Che's growing contradictions with Havana's leadership, especially Raul Castro, led him to take off, with a small group of fighters, to participate in the unsuccessful rebellion waged by Congo's Committee for National Liberation. Visiting Tanzania, Mali, Guinea, Ghana, Algiers, and Egypt at that time, Che wrongly assumed that opposition to imperialism could unite groups that had themselves been at war with each other. The failure of African revolutionary efforts was a difficult lesson for him in the limits of internationalism.
Yet Che left the Congo believing, more than ever, in guerrilla warfare. He then went to Bolivia to carry out the unsuccessful guerrilla mission that led to his capture and cold-blooded execution. In these last chapters Castaneda again focuses on the conflict between Castro and Che, and highlights the fact that Castro did not authorize a rescue mission, even when it was clear that his life was endangered: "Fidel might well have decided that a Che martyred in Bolivia would better serve the Revolution than a Che living frustrated and discouraged in Havana." Indeed, Castaneda seems to exaggerate the conflict between the two leaders at times.
Nevertheless, he ends the book with clear appreciation for Che's successes, and critical sympathy for his failures. With its footnotes, first-hand research and many interviews, Companero provides a sometimes overly-detailed, but mostly well-written, record of this legendary revolutionary's life. Che's bold vision of the international revolutionary cause, his charismatic personality, his willingness to struggle, and the many victories and defeats of his generation are worth reexamining at this time of the gathering of imperialist and capitalist forces.
(H. Roka is an alternate member of CPN(ML)'s Central Committee)
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The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination
Author: Donald Worster
Publisher: New York: Oxford University Press, 1994
Environmental History : A New And Practical History
Jagannath Adhikari
General academic history suffers from two main lacunae. Firstly, it has not dealt with nature and its transformation under the influence of past human experiences or (culture) and vice-versa. Secondly, academic history has no inclination to produce any guidance for public action. To fill this gap, the new academic field of "environmental history" has now been instituted in most western universities. The Wealth of Nature by Donald Worster is ideally suited to understand the theoretical ideas and practical uses of this new academic field. And even though this book is mainly concerned with ecological developments in the United States (which are entirely different from ours), it provides a good example of how history can be of guidance for public action to solve everyday problems confronted by people.
Even though the book contains sixteen essays written at different periods and for different occasions, they all underpin one main argument: that nature cannot be conserved through the institution of the market or by the materialist world-view of industrial capitalism developed since the 1776 publication of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. Worster considers technological or economic solutions alone to be insufficient for the effective conservation of resources, or for maintaining the natural order. He asks for a total change in culture with a set of new values that emphasize non-material ends in life and an aesthetic apprehension of nature, by which he means the understanding of the beauty of unaltered nature. At present, modern life rests on progressive, secular and materialistic philosophies which make production and consumption the sole ends of life. The author argues that unless we challenge such philosophies at their foundations by adopting other ends in life - like material simplicity and spiritual richness - environmental goals cannot be achieved. The habit of aesthetic apprehension discussed in the book is an ability to see the whole rather than pieces. Unaltered creation and the conserved landscape represents wholeness, and there is beauty in it.
The essays presented in The Wealth of Nature can be categorized into three main sets. The first set of essays describes the meaning, scope and practical application of environment history, which the author defines as the 'interdisciplinary study of the relations of culture, technology, and nature through time.' The essays, particularly 'History of Natural History' and 'Transformation of the Earth,' discuss the connections that history has made with other fields like ecology, geography and anthropology.
The second set of essays deals with problems faced by US society in areas like agriculture, soil conservation, public land and national parks, water management and river training. In all these essays, the author describes the historical development of these problems in order to identify their root causes. These essays conclude that the attitude of profit-maximization and the treatment of resources merely as objects have been the main causes of the varied problems in the above fields. The problems of the dust bowl, the increase in the incidence of cancer due to pesticides and fertilizers, the loss of topsoil, large-scale flooding, the decline of the water table, and the salinity of soil have been considered in the book as the result of the unethical commercialization of nature.
In the last set of essays, the author discusses the philosophical and religious foundations for the environmental movement in the US pursued by leaders like Henry David Thoreau, John Muir and Aldo Leopold. The impact of religion in shaping the minds and characters of these environmental leaders is discussed. Similarly, there is also a discussion on the shift of approaches taken by ecological scientists, and on its impact on controversial arguments on topics like natural order, harmony, ecological climax and stabilization, and on the recent approach of chaos in nature. The author agues that the contradictory theories developed by scientists are the result of the social conditions at the time of the formulation of these theories; because what a scientist observes or can observe is conditioned by his/her mental development, which is shaped by the social environment. Moreover, the author blames Judeo-Christianity for instilling a value system that emphasizes 'anthropocentrism', i.e., placing man as the supreme creation of God, allowing us to subdue and dominate nature. This has been detrimental to the environment. Worster also considers many arrogant scientific ideas and inventions to be the products of this value system. He criticizes the most popular concept of 'sustainable development' on grounds that this concept also treats the natural world as a means to serve the material demands of human species; it is thus based on the assumption of the supremacy of science in its ability to determine or exactly study natural phenomena. Furthermore, the author considers this concept of "sustainable development" to be merely a product of political negotiations.
In the book's last essay, the Worster criticizes Adam Smith for not linking 'the wealth of nations' with 'the wealth of nature', even though the former is just a part of the latter. As a result, Worster argues, Adam Smith's approach of individual freedom for the accumulation of wealth has been successful in increasing the wealth of nations, but at the cost of the wealth of nature. To save the world from ecological crisis, the author opines that new ideas in the form of a new religion are required to maximize the wealth of nature.
Even though The Wealth of Nature mainly deals with ecological problem vis-à-vis economic and ecological policies in the US, it can be useful for policy makers in Nepal, since Nepal is also adopting some of the policy measures experimented on and implemented in the US. Four main nature conservation approaches have been adopted in the US, including accepting a moral responsibility (land ethics) towards nature; adopting a utilitarian approach (currently much in practice in Nepal also); bringing nature under public or common ownership; and engendering an aesthetic apprehension of nature or aesthetic spiritualism. In the future, new, context-bound approaches will enhance the wealth of nature. Ideas suitable for a country like Nepal, facing different historical realities regarding natural resources, may well be found in the field of environmental history.
(J. Adhikari is conducting research on food security and the environment)
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War and Anti-War
Authors: Alvin Toffler and Heidi Toffler
Publisher: New York: Bantam Books, 1994
A War Zone of Mind Battles
C.K. Lal
The future may already be a "colonized territory." In an apparent extension of Edward Said's postulates on colonialism/Orientalism ("The corporate institution for dealing with the orient-dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for domination, restructuring and having an authority over it...") and Michel Foucault's concept of power/knowledge (that the two implicate each other), Ziauddin Sardar of Middlesex University argues: "Anticipating the future nowadays means little more than forecasting the future. And forecasting is one of the major tools by which the future is colonized. No matter how sophisticated the technique - and they are becoming more and more refined and complex - forecasting simply ends up projecting the (selected) past and the (often privileged) present to a linear future."
In that mission of colonizing the future for the Pentagon, Alvin Toffler appeared as an advance foot-soldier in the seventies of the American Century with Future Shock. The book had the intellectual worth of a Mac Burger and sold just as well. Having quenched the reader's thirst as deceptively as a can of Coke, Toffler followed up with The Third Wave and Power Shift, and, in between, with a bag of chips tantalizingly termed Previews and Premises.
The underlying assertion in these airport lounge yawn-combat accessories was that Americans were invincible because they had knowledge. In the end, Americans did win the Cold War, and the role of the creators of authorized knowledge wasn't negligible in engineering that victory. In the expression of Tim Flannery (The Future Eaters), human beings did "eat the future."
Winning the Cold War, however, has not been enough. The Americans must now win the peace too, for the "knowledge-based" "third-wave" societies of the West to foreclose the future for the non-West. In come the intellectual marines: the Toffler couple - Alvin and his wife Heidi - with War and Anti-War.
The main contention of this book is that peace is an interlude in anticipation of war, and Leon Trotsky is right: "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you." A catchy phrase, perhaps, but similar ideas have been expressed by Vegetius in the fourth century: "Let him who desires peace prepare for war;" by George Washington in the eighteenth century: "To be prepared for War is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace;" and more recently in 1984 by Ronald Reagan: "It is weakness... that invites adventurous adversaries to make mistaken judgments."
Having started with these assumptions, the Tofflers traverse familiar terrain to arrive at fairly predictable conclusions. The first part of the book sets the stage of a trisected world where first, second and third wave civilizations of agriculture, industry and knowledge respectively are poised for inevitable confrontation.
In the second part, lessons of the Arab-Israeli War are applied by the Pentagon to transform itself into the most futuristic fighting force of the world. (The Pentagon brass is intelligent because they ask their officers to read Third Wave). Part three records and extends the CNN coverage of the all-out American assault on Iraq. Part four weaves a spin of the manipulation of information, and the book ends by setting the agenda of "anti war" for the West in part six, misleadingly titled "Peace."
The West won the Cold War by fragmenting Eastern Europe. The next agenda is to break the back of China, a potential challenger in the short-term. The Tofflers speak through George Yao, the Cambridge and Harvard educated Deputy Prime Minister of Singapore, a "thirty-seven year old brigadier-general with a laser-like intellect" who imagines a future China composed of hundreds of Singapore-like city-states." Obviously, it will be the West that will guarantee them peace, just as they did in the former Yugoslavia. An insult to the intellect? Well, propaganda is never any better.
To make sense of War and Anti-War, perhaps it is useful to resort to a Marxist critical framework. From a socialistic perspective, research conducted by liberals views societal problems as resulting from immediate causes. Hence liberal scholars propose ameliorative programs of action without questioning and seeking alternatives to the underlying system that generates and perpetuates social inequities in the first place.
The Tofflers urge the world to fight the "anti-war" on the space delineated by the West, using the moral justifications of the West, relying upon the knowledge of the West, and employing tools manufactured by the West, to arrive at an outcome acceptable to the West. If this is the future war-zone, then the first battle of minds is already lost for the non-West. Ziauddin Sardar is right: the future is already an occupied territory whose liberation is the most pressing challenge for the peoples of the non-West if they want to inherit a future made in their own likeness.
"Force rules the world-not opinion," observed Blaise Pascal, "but it is opinion that makes use of force." Spin-masters like the Tofflers help create a climate in which Americans repeatedly bomb sanction-stricken Iraq, dirt-poor Sudan and strife-torn Afghanistan almost at will. This brazen call for a New World Order, in the words of the damning indictment of Noam Chomsky, "proceeds-in the US completely and in Britain to a large extent not only without criticism but without any public awareness about it.... This action is in fact a call for lawless world order in which the powerful will rule. The powerful happen to be the United States and Britain, which is by now a pathetic puppy dog that has abandoned any pretense of being an independent state."
War and Anti-War is pure hype, designed to draw the attention of the non-West away from the pursuit of peace. It is precisely for that reason that a critical study of the book is necessary to understand the ways of neo-imperialism.
(CK Lal is an engineer)
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Recently Received Titles
Author: various
Thumbnail Reviews
Trends, Issues and Policies of Education in Nepal (1998, Kathmandu, CERID) by Hridaya Ratna Bajracharya, Bijaya Kumar Thapa and Roshan Chitrakar is an analytical introduction to achievements and limitations in educational development in Nepal. The authors examine the educational policies included in the Ninth Plan (1997-2002) and discuss at length the major current issues related to education in Nepal. In the final chapter, the authors conclude that there is a lack of "procedural co-ordination" in the development of programmes by the various donors and the "effectiveness of donor contributions in bringing educational development in Nepal remains an area for investigation."
Rudraksa: Mahatwa ra Kheti Prabidhi(Dhankuta, Pakhribas Krishi Kendra) by Chet Nath Kanel is a fine introduction to one of the most religiously important plants in Nepal and its cultivation practices. The author claims that Rudraksa has also assumed economic, medicinal, aesthetic and environmental importance before describing its cultivation in a few hilly districts in east Nepal. The last four chapters detail the cultivation techniques, including ways to tackle diseases and post-harvest procedures before the rudraksas reach the market.
The First Five Years: A Critical Perspective on Early Childhood Care and Education in India(1998, New Delhi, Sage Publications) edited by Mina Swaminathan brings together 16 essays that examine various experiments in early childhood care and education (ECCE) in different parts of India. The different authors discuss multiple approaches to ECCE, both from a macro and a micro perspective. The book should be useful to educational planners, practitioners and activists in Nepal as well.
I Power (1998, Kathmandu, Ekta Books) by Ken Afful explains the strength of the power of individuals in organisations, irrespective of their rank or status. This booklet draws upon the writer's experiences and studies on individual and organisational behaviour. It develops the concept of self (I-power) and then, WE and THEY power. This book will be of use to those organizations suffering from 'personality clashes' as it explains how recognition of the other I's and subsequent creation of the WE can result in the reduction of tension and other negative elements within organisations.
Appropriate Post Harvest Technology of Fruits in Nepal: A Case Study of Apples (1996, Kathmandu, Udaya Research and Development Services) by Krishna B Shrestha is an analysis of technologies that need to be developed to reduce post harvest losses of fruits in Nepal. Based on rigorous studies done in Rasuwa and Kathmandu for the case of apples, some of the author conclusions are presented in specialist language not accessible to the general reader.
(Reviews provided by Martin Chautari)
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