Since 2001 The Common Review has published essays about the books and ideas that matter. Whether the topic is women and Islam or the pleasures of Proust, we are committed to tough, street-smart prose that will challenge, amuse, and sometimes offend—all in the service of building the most thoughtful community of readers in America today. Scroll down to view selected articles from the Spring 2009 issue of the magazine. Better yet, subscribe today ($17.95 for four issues) or pick up a copy of The Common Review at your local bookstore.
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From the Editor
Does torture work? In this springtime in America, the question grips many minds—not whether “enhanced interrogation,” replete with water boarding, wall slamming, and sleep deprivation, is morally defensible in the framework of the American republic. These practices, we are told, have been abolished by the new administration, and the Justice Department memos that authorized such methods in recent years have now come to light. If former Vice President Dick Cheney has his way, classified government documents should also be made available that, he claims, will prove that enhanced interrogations made the nation safer. ... To think about issues of tyranny and freedom in the modern state, and particularly in a modern democracy that still casts itself as a protector of human rights, one must turn to Orwell. No writer has more effectively sliced through the rotten carcass of bad reasoning than St. George, and his classic political allegories, Animal Farm and 1984, hold more political wisdom than any quantity of Justice Department memos can ever hope to match. Read this article
Feature Articles
Barack Obama’s campaign for the presidency set an avalanche of critics, pundits, and common readers rifling through the pages of his early autobiography Dreams from My Father. The book was a magnet for the throngs of Americans of seeking to unravel the psychology of a public figure—the first viable black presidential contender who is now, of course, the president. What did these readers find? And what were they looking for? Americans have usually demanded genuineness of their leaders. Readers of the author Obama were looking for proof of his sincerity, his integrity, his moral center. In the argot of today’s politics of charisma, they were hoping to find the “real” Obama. The country has always expressed a personal interest in its contenders for the Oval Office. The traditional answers applied, of course, except that Obama was a candidate like no other before him. Read this article
Reviews
In The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty, Singer tries to show how contemporary philosophers, the world’s great religions, and figures as diverse as Rick Warren and Bill Gates should all inspire us to do more for others. Then he provides counterarguments to the most common objections to charitable giving. Instead of dismissing those objections as emanations of greed or false consciousness, he sincerely searches for their roots in human psychology and looks for ways that we can overcome them. He demonstrates that personal giving does real good for people living in extreme poverty, and then presents institutions and individuals whose efforts have made a difference. Finally, recognizing that most of us will not live up to the standards of these saints, Singer suggests a modest program of charitable giving, public service, and political action that anyone could reasonably follow without feeling complicit in the slaughter of the innocents. Read this article
It is tempting, nonetheless, to suspect Atwood of prescience and her publishers of preternatural quickness in producing Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth almost simultaneously with the collapse of the global economy. Is there a whiff of sulfur about the pages of this unusual and often enlightening book? Serendipitous timing or not, Atwood is not interested here in analyzing current financial crises, much less prescribing remedies for them; she is no economist. Instead, she is curious about the mental construct behind the notion of debt, “that peculiar nexus where money, narrative or story, and religious belief intersect, often with explosive force.” Read this review
