Sarah Palin is noteworthy in American public life for many things: her lightning-rod reputation in the press, her wink and gravity-defying hair and wardrobe, her governance of the petrostate Alaska, her folksy half-Canadian patois, her likeness to the comedian Tina Fey, her unmatched ability to rally the neoconservative and cultural-conservative base.

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She is not noteworthy for her breadth or depth of political knowledge -- nor should she be for her interest in it, as her score-settling-obsessed memoir Going Rogue proves once and for all. Indeed, I read the painfully unserious -- morally and politically -- memoir in search of some, any, foreign policy, to understand better the politician who nearly was a heartbeat away from the presidency and seems sure to run for executive office again.

My theory, now resoundingly disproven, went something like this. During the campaign, Palin suffered a number of humiliations, her lack of basic knowledge about foreign affairs chief among them. Most famously, during her agonizing interview with ABC's Charlie Gibson, she flubbed a question about the six-year-old Bush Doctrine of military preemption and later implied her knowledge of international affairs comes from Alaska's geographic proximity to Russia.

Since the campaign and her resignation from the governorship, Palin has engaged in just one public appearance and made just a handful of public statements. Nevertheless, these have at least evinced policy coherence entirely missing during the campaign. In a July opinion piece for the Washington Post, she provided a standard conservative argument against a cap-and-trade approach to combating climate change. In a speech in Hong Kong in September, she provided boilerplate libertarian-conservative talking points on the Federal Reserve and Asia policy. Perhaps, I thought, we were witnessing a rare political adolescence, an ideologically incoherent candidate going through the policy furnace and emerging forged. Perhaps Randy Scheunemann, the former foreign-policy advisor to John McCain, and others still working with Palin had helped her crystallize her world view. Perhaps there might be evidence of a nascent Palin Doctrine in Going Rogue.

Perhaps I need to lay off the sauce. The book, as one might have predicted, provides little evidence of any awareness of foreign policy, let alone serious thought about the world and America's place in it. Take, for instance, Palin's description of her first meeting with McCain, when he hoisted her onto his ticket and foisted her onto the unsuspecting world. Senior advisor Steve Schmidt -- cast as one of the many villains conspiring to keep Palin down throughout the book -- spends the initial vetting session grilling the governor on the subjects that might pose the greatest liabilities to the then-losing ticket. The McCain folks mention her daughter's pregnancy. They ask about her firing of her brother-in-law. And Schmidt starts in on international affairs.

"[He] wanted to know whether I understood the origin of the conflict [in Iraq], the history of the Middle East, and how thirteenth- and fourteenth-century differences had evolved into today's murderous rivalry," Palin writes. She tells us she did -- but she shows us she did not, defensively pushing back on Schmidt for being undercutting and cranky (she later criticizes his diet and describes him, delightfully, as slumping like a "pile of laundry"). She provides no description of any answers she gave to his questions, which I doubt were always so historical in nature.

So too with her assessment of her prep work for her vice presidential debate with Joe Biden, a lion of the senate and former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. A spate of McCain advisors prepared her for the televised event, with Scheunemann and others providing her with note cards, briefing books, and canned answers on the most important topics. They also overloaded her with -- sigh! -- too much time in wardrobe, leaving her little time to study up on, say, the United States' two ongoing wars, or relations with friends like Europe and adversaries like Iran. Ultimately, the McCain advisors insisted that she not attempt to counter Biden or really debate him on substance at all, she writes.

These two passages mark Going Rogue's two real engagements with foreign policy, the sole prerogative of the executive and a responsibility of the vice president -- though Palin dismisses the subject as "certainly foreign to most governors." The book does delve into military and defense policy, though in a cursory and, at this point, shopworn manner. She mentions her son's service overseas and her interaction with Alaska troops a few times, for instance, as well as meetings with world leaders, glossed over in a paragraph. She also includes a single, dry 261-word passage on the September 11 attacks, the most crucial foreign-policy event of the past 20 years, explaining what she did that day, how Alaskan forces reacted, and how her family later volunteered at the site. (For contrast, a letter she pens in the voice of her son Trig's "creator" drags on for 623.)

Rather than admitting her campaign mistakes and showing some newfound heft, Palin defends her old foreign-policy canards. While denying that she ever said "I can see Russia from my house" (that was Fey), she reiterates her zany commentary on Russia's proximity to Alaska. She notes that some constituents "sent [her] photos of themselves standing on the Alaska shore with Russia visible over their shoulders" -- and lauds the "hard-core" athlete Lynne Cox who swam from one to the other across the Bering Strait in 1987. (Isn't that where they film The Deadliest Catch?)

It is not clear what this has to do with anything. At another point, she writes of trying to describe "frequent Russian incursions by figuratively referring to Vladimir Putin entering our airspace." Count me lost there. Since Alaska's founding as a state, there has never been a Russian incursion onto its land or into its airspace, figurative or literal, according to the U.S. Armed Forces.

Ultimately, Going Rogue goes rogue as a political memoir, demonstrating what can only be described as a persistent and guileless lack of knowledge of even basic foreign-policy or domestic political issues. It is what we might have expected from Palin. And it is much less than anyone should expect of a candidate for one of the most powerful offices on Earth.

Consumer spending in the United States may be down, but an interest in Ayn Rand certainly is not. Sales of Rand's last novel, the vigorously pro-capitalism fable Atlas Shrugged, have seen a huge leap in 2009, briefly outperforming even President Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope on Amazon's best-seller list. Few 1,000-page, half-century-old tomes can claim so much.

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At tea parties and town halls nationwide, amid outrage over government bailouts of Wall Street banks and Detroit carmakers and the supposed socialization of health care, protesters speak of "going Galt," refusing to work in what they see as a socialist economy, just as Rand's hero John Galt did. Even the mea culpa of Rand's most famous fan and follower, former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, has done little to dent the appeal of her radical individualism and libertarianism, which Rand shaped into a philosophy she called Objectivism. But all this makes a certain amount of sense. Perhaps more surprising is the Ayn Rand boom that is building in another mass democracy: India.

Not only do Indians perform more Google searches for Rand than citizens of any country in the world except the United States, but Penguin Books India has sold an impressive number of copies -- as many as 50,000 of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead each since 2005, a number comparable to sales there by global best-seller John Grisham. And that's not counting the ubiquitous pirated copies of her works that are hawked at rickety street stalls, sidewalk piles, and bus stations -- an honor that Rand, a fierce defender of intellectual property rights, probably would not have appreciated.

As modern India continues to undergo seismic economic and cultural shifts, not to mention the current global recession, Rand is emerging as a touchstone for a new generation. For many Indians, she is a tonic of modernization, helping to inspire a break with India's collectivist, socialist past. Rand's mixture of capitalist boosterism and self-empowerment is an irresistible combination for a range of Indians, from think-tankers to corporate barons to pop stars.

Rand's celebration of independence and personal autonomy has proven to be powerfully subversive in a culture that places great emphasis on conforming to the dictates of family, religion, and tradition. Gargi Rawat, a correspondent and news anchor for top tv channel ndtv and a former Rand admirer, says Rand's theory of the supremacy of reason and the virtue of selfishness adds up to "the antithesis" of Indian culture, which explains the attraction for Rawat in her youth and for many rebellious Indian teens today.

Unlike in the United States, Rand's most popular novel in India-anecdotally at least-is not the overtly political Atlas Shrugged, but her earlier novel, The Fountainhead, in which Rand's political views are muted. The novel tells the story of Howard Roark, an architect who refuses to compromise his designs for clients or the public in a heroic expression of personal will. It is Rand's most accessible work, and also the one that makes the strongest emotional appeal to those who feel suppressed by attempts to put the collective ahead of the individual.

In recent years, the so-called "Howard Roark effect" has swept across wealthy Indian society. Shortly after winning Miss India Earth, the country's top beauty pageant, in 2005, Niharika Singh cited The Fountainhead as her favorite book. "Ayn Rand helped me win the crown," she declared. Other stars, including biotech queen Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, actress Preity Zinta, and soccer-player-turned-dancer Baichung Bhutia have all credited Rand with helping them succeed.

Beyond personal inspiration, however, the Indian excitement for Rand today is linked to a larger enthusiasm for the country's inchoate but powerful drive for development and wealth. Since the 1984 assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, India has seen a gradual shift away from socialism, much appreciated by Rand's fans. Vikram Bajaj, a 45-year-old entrepreneur who considers himself an objectivist, has lived through Rand's evolution from an ignored outsider to a popular prophet of capitalism. When he discovered Rand, taxation rates for high earners were hovering at 85 percent of income; now, with her books widely available, that upper rate is only 30 percent.

Barun Mitra is the founder and director of the Liberty Institute, which hopes to be India's equivalent of the United States' libertarian Cato Institute and has recently received a grant from an American foundation to launch a Web initiative promoting "Ayn Rand in India." He has been a Rand devotee since the early 1980s and even met his wife through a Rand discussion group.

To Mitra, Rand offers a blueprint for India to develop as a democratic and capitalist society at the same time. He hopes that Rand and her libertarian doctrines can enable India to provide a counterexample to the so-called "Asian model" of economic development, which holds that a certain level of authoritarian government and stifled liberty is a prerequisite for a surging economy. If India can achieve double-digit growth while remaining democratic, Mitra thinks, it could become a model for the rest of the world. Rand's philosophy, Mitra says, can help Indians "moor ourselves to fundamental economic and moral principles."

It's unclear whether Rand will ever become the definitive textbook of modernization for India: Her ideas about religion, capitalism, and society are too anathema to India's traditional culture ever to be adopted completely. But Rand will continue to inspire India's emerging creative class and corporate titans, not to mention the ambitious youth who make up her most passionate fan base, in India as around the world. For those fans, Ayn Rand is truly a prophet of things to come.

In a scene early in Vikram Chandra's massive 2006 cops-and-robbers novel Sacred Games, the small-time gangster Ganesh Gaitonde sells some stolen gold and feels, for the first time in his life, wealthy and powerful. He goes looking for pleasure on the streets, and a pimp offers him "a high-class cheez." But no sooner is Gaitonde left alone with the prostitute than he begins to feel set up. He has only one way of finding out whether his "cheez" is as high-class as promised. "Speak English," he orders the woman. When she complies, Gaitonde cannot understand the words, but it doesn't matter. "I knew that they were really English," he thinks to himself. "I felt it in the crack of the consonants."

The prostitute's utterances in English earn her fee, just as the Indian novelist who chooses to write in English has often been accused, especially by readers and critics at home, of being inauthentic or a sellout, forcing characters with their roots in the words and worldview of some other Indian language to "speak English." The debate, of course, is old, fraught with the historical baggage of India's British colonial past. In fact, the book now considered the first Indian novel, Rajmohan's Wife, was written in English in 1864 by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, a young magistrate of the Raj.

But the tension has taken on a new form amid the growing appeal of the "global novel" -- a story that is pitched not just to a national but a worldwide audience, and thereby necessarily written in English. As the Indian novel in English, assisted by India's rising profile in global affairs, finds an audience wherever English is spoken, it often seems to sacrifice the particularities of Indian experience for a watered-down idiom that can speak to readers across the globe.

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Often such books are received very differently by those at home and those away. For instance, Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger (2008), the story of an antihero and a cutthroat new culture that rests upon and often perpetuates the inequities of the old India, won the Man Booker Prize and is now a global hit. Yet within India, the best-selling book did not make the short list for the Vodafone Crossword Book Award, the country's most prestigious prize for novels in English.

The use of English -- which often makes the Indian novelist both writer and translator-generates major problems of language and perspective that can be off-putting for Indian readers. Sacred Games is written in high-flown and lyrical English, but even so, the reader is persuaded that its narrator is an uneducated gangster because Chandra flecks his English with resonant Hindi words that he leaves untranslated. The novel generates, like Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children did a generation ago, its own tongue, neither wholly imitative nor entirely invented.

But in the hands of lesser writers, much of the specificity and charge of Indian life is simply lost when rendered in English, becoming paler, weaker, and more simplistic. So what readers around the world frequently find instructive, fresh, and moving about Indian novels available to them in English is often experienced by Indian readers as dull, clichéd, and superficial.

 

Indeed, globalization has spawned a kind of hackneyed Indian (really, South Asian) novel that, even as it tells a story, acts as a primer on Indian and Pakistani history, politics, and culture, self-consciously offering bits of potted history and contextual explanation that seem absurd coming from characters rooted in a particular world. Such novels typically use history as a crutch, pegging their tales to wars of independence, revolutions, famous assassinations, or other public events. But for all their epic canvas, they are often novelistically banal and unambitious, content for the most part to repeat the familiar gestures of an enervated realism. The result, in books like Manil Suri's The Age of Shiva (2007) or Ali Sethi's The Wish Maker (2009), is homogenized, almost cynically calculated works that inhibit the power of the novel to illuminate a particular view of life or moment in history, and that seem, like any other consumer good, to want to stupefy rather than activate the imagination and intelligence of the receiver.

In contrast, some of the best Indian novels of the last two decades, whether in English or in translation, are largely unknown to American readers. A classic example is Kiran Nagarkar's Cuckold (1997), which is set in the royal court of the 16th-century Rajput kingdom of Mewar and told in a rich and powerful English that is easily the equal of the best Indian prose writing in English today. Another example is Fakir Mohan Senapati's Six Acres and a Third, first published more than a hundred years ago but only recently translated into an English worthy of its original Oriya. A riotously satiric village comedy, it is one of the earliest and greatest Indian novels, but it appeared in the United States in 2005 to no reviews and no press.

The response of Indian critics to the so-called global novel has frequently been to invest the fiction of regional (or in Indian parlance "vernacular") Indian languages with the magic tag of "the authentic." But this perspective itself is an instance of simplistic binary thinking. Not all Indian writing in English panders to a Western audience or reduces the gold of Indian life into the base metal of English; nor does all vernacular literature deserve the aesthetic label of authenticity.

India is so multilingual and multicultural that it might be more truthful to think of every Indian novelist, whether writing in English, Urdu, Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, Kannada, Telugu, or Gujarati, as a kind of translator. No novelists, whatever language they work in, can be said presumptively to be "authentic," as they sometimes are in the literary-critical wars in India today. Rather, novels earn their authenticity through their attention to specific details of character and situation and through the ingenuity of their problem-solving.

A better measure to judge the Indian novel in English should perhaps be "the specific," which is a less barbed and problematic concept than "the authentic." For it is in the details presented and the others left out, that any novel reveals the quality of its engagement with life and the presumptions it makes about its audience. All too often these days, the slice of Indian literature available to Western readers is at once too specific -- excelling in stating the obvious -- and not specific enough. The "global novel" has had to make many compromises to ensure its dominion.

What follows is the Ultimate AfPak Reading List -- an amalgamation of syllabi from classes I've taught at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. I've included a variety of reading, from books I've found particularly insightful on the topic to significant reporting on everything from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to al Qaeda's media strategy.

Links are included whenever possible, but be forewarned that some of the journal articles are subscription only. And in some cases I've included my general comments about the work and specific page numbers.

Categories are organized thusly:

• Afghanistan: The Soviet Invasion, 1979-1989 & the Rise of the Taliban, 1994-2001
• Afghanistan: Under the Taliban 1994-2001 & the Rise of the Religious Warriors and Their Al Qaeda Allies
• Afghanistan: The Resurgence of the Taliban and al Qaeda from the Battle of Tora Bora in the Winter of 2001 to Today
  
• Pakistan: General Interest
• Pakistan: The Jihadists Post-9/11
  
• Al Qaeda: General Interest
• Al Qaeda: From Its Formation in 1988 to 9/11
  
• Al Qaeda: The Organization and the Ideological Movement Since the 9/11 Attacks
• Al Qaeda: Media Strategy from 1988 to the Present
• The Underlying Causes of the 9/11 Attacks
  
• Islamist Terrorism and Its Intellectual Influences

If you think there's something that should be on here and isn't, email us at Bergen@newamerica.net or Tiedemann@newamerica.net. This is very much a work in progress.

Afghanistan: The Soviet Invasion, 1979-1989 & the Rise of the Taliban, 1994-2001

• Bearden, Milton. "Graveyard of Empires, Afghanistan's Treacherous Peaks." In How Did This Happen? Terrorism and the New War. Ed. Gideon Rose and James F. Hoge Jr. (New York: Public Affairs, 2001).
• Bradsher, Henry. Afghan Communism and Soviet Intervention. (London: Oxford University Press, 1999).
• Crile, George. Charlie Wilson's War, The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History. (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003).
• Feifer, Gregory. The Great Gamble: the Soviet War in Afghanistan (New York: Harper Collins, 2009).
• Urban, Mark. War in Afghanistan. (London: Macmillan Press, 1988).
• Yousaf, Mohammad and Mark Adkin. Afghanistan -- The Bear: The Defeat of a Superpower. (London: Leo Cooper, 1992).

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Afghanistan: Under the Taliban 1994-2001 & the Rise of the Religious Warriors and Their Al Qaeda Allies

Books

• Dorronsoro, Gilles. Revolution Unending: Afghanistan, 1979 to Present. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). Dense, authoritative study.
• Gutman, Roy. How We Missed the Story: Osama bin Laden, the Taliban, and the Hijacking of Afghanistan (Washington, DC: USIP Press, 2008).
• Maley, William, ed. Fundamentalism Reborn? Afghanistan and the Taliban. (New York: New York University Press, 1998).
• Rashid, Ahmed. Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. (Paperback Edition)

Articles

• Cullison, Alan and Andrew Higgins. "Inside al Qaeda's Afghan Turmoil." Wall Street Journal, August 2, 2002.
• Pyes, Craig and William Rempel. "Slowly Stalking an Afghan ‘Lion.'" Los Angeles Times, June 12, 2002. This is the best account of the plan to assassinate Ahmad Shah Massoud, which was a prelude to the 9/11 attacks.
• Sirrs, Julie. "The Taliban's International Ambitions." Middle East Quarterly 8.3, Summer 2001. Academic Search Premier.
• George Washington University's National Security Archive has a useful collection of declassified U.S. State Department documents about the Taliban.

Afghanistan: The Resurgence of the Taliban and al Qaeda from the Battle of Tora Bora in the Winter of 2001 to Today

Books

Four books about the U.S. war against the Taliban in Afghanistan detail how that war was prosecuted:

• Bernsten, Gary. Jawbreaker: The Attack on Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. (New York: Crown, 2005). CIA officer recounts the fall of Taliban and the battle of Tora Bora.
• Naylor, Sean. Not a Good Day to Die: The Untold Story of Operation Anaconda. (New York: Berkeley Publishing Group, 2005). Army Times reporter gives a deeply reported account of Operation Anaconda.
• Schroen, Gary. First In: An Insider's Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan. (New York: Ballantine, 2005).
• Fury, Dalton. Kill Bin Laden: A Delta Force Commander's Account of the Hunt for the World's Most Wanted Man (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2008).
• Chayes, Sarah. The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban. (New York: Penguin, 2006). A journalist-turned-aid worker based in Kandahar for four years after the fall of the Taliban provides an interesting and important account of mistakes made by all the players in the reconstruction of Afghanistan.
• Dobbins, James. After the Taliban: Nation-Building in Afghanistan (Dulles, VA: Potomac Press, 2008).
• Dorronsoro, Gilles. Revolution Unending: Afghanistan, 1979 to the Present (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
• Giustozzi, Antonio. Koran, Kalashnikov, and Laptop: the Neo-Taliban Insurgency in Afghanistan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).
• Johnson, Chris and Leslie, Jolyon. Afghanistan: The Mirage of Peace. (London: Zed Books, 2004). Two long time aid workers paint a bleak picture of Afghanistan following the fall of the Taliban.
• Jones, Seth. In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan. (New York: Norton, 2009).
• Kilcullen, David. The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
• Maley, William. Rescuing Afghanistan. (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2007). A concise book that examines the problems and possible solutions in Afghanistan following the fall of the Taliban government.
• Rashid, Ahmed. Descent into Chaos: The U.S. and the Disaster in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia. (New York: Penguin, 2008).
• Semple, Michael. Reconciliation in Afghanistan. (Washington, DC: USIP Press, 2009).

Articles

• Anderson, John Lee. "The Taliban's Opium War." New Yorker, July 9, 2006.
• Barno, David. "Fighting 'the other war': Counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan, 2003-2005." Military Review. September/October 2007.
• Bergen, Peter. "Winning the Good War," Washington Monthly, July 2009.
• Bergen, Peter. Testimony before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, February 15, 2007.
• Byman, Daniel. "Talking with Insurgents," The Washington Quarterly, April 2009.
• Dobbins, James. "Ending's Afghanistan's Civil War." Testimony presented before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, March 8, 2007.
• Dorronsoro, Gilles. "The Taliban's Winning Strategy in Afghanistan," Carnegie Endowment, June 2009.
• Glasser, Susan B. "The Battle of Tora Bora: Secrets, Money, Mistrust." Washington Post. February 10, 2002.
• Hastert, Paul. "Operation Anaconda: Perception Meets Reality in the Hills of Afghanistan." Studies in Conflict and Terrorism. 28: 1, January/February 2005, 11-20 is useful.
• Johnson, Thomas and Mason, M. Chris. "All counterinsurgency is local," The Atlantic, October 2008.
• Johnson, Thomas and Mason, M. Chris. "No Sign until the Burst of Fire: Understanding the Pakistan-Afghanistan Frontier," International Security 32:4, spring 2008.
• Johnson, Thomas and Mason, M. Chris. "On the edge of the big muddy: the Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan," China and Eurasia Form Quarterly, 5:2, 2007.
• Neumann, Ronald. "Borderline insanity: thinking big about Afghanistan." The American Interest 3 (2), November/December 2007.
• Rashid, Ahmed. "Afghanistan: On the Brink." New York Review of Books. June 22, 2006.
• Rohde, David and David Sanger. "How the ‘Good War' in Afghanistan went bad." New York Times. August 12, 2007.
• Rubin, Elizabeth. "In the land of the Taliban." New York Times. October 22, 2006.
• Rubin, Elizabeth. "Karzai in his Labyrinth," New York Times Magazine, August 4, 2009.
• Rubin, Barnett. "Saving Afghanistan." Foreign Affairs. 86.1, January/February 2007.
• United States Assistance Mission to Afghanistan. "Suicide attacks in Afghanistan." September 1, 2007.
• Van Ham, Peter and Jorrit Kamminga. "Poppies for peace: reforming Afghanistan's opium industry." Washington Quarterly, 30 (1): 69-81, winter 2006-2007.

Pakistan: General Interest

Books

• Abbas, Hassan. Pakistan's Drift into Extremism: Allah, the Army and America's War on Terror. (London: M.E. Sharpe, 2005). 89-177.
• Abou Zahab, Mariam and Roy, Olivier. Islamist Networks, The Afghan-Pakistan Connection. (London: Hurst, 2004).
• Bennett-Jones, Owen. Pakistan: Eye of the Storm. (New Haven, CO: Yale, 2002).
• Cohen, Stephen. The Idea of Pakistan. (Washington, DC: Brookings, 2005). Well written general history. 61-200.
• Haqqani, Husain. Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military. (Washington, DC: Carnegie 2005).
• Yusufzai, Rahimullah. Most Wanted: Profiles of Terror. (New Delhi: Lotus/Roli, 2002). 132-144, Interrogations of Omar Sheikh and Maulana Azhar.

Articles

• Fair, C. Christine. "Militant Recruitment in Pakistan." Studies in Conflict and Terrorism. 27.6, November/December 2004.
• Mishra, Pankaj. "Death in Kashmir." New York Review of Books. September 21, 2000.
• Mishra, Pankaj. "Kashmir: Unending War." New York Review of Books, October 19, 2000.
• Sheikh, Omar. "My Big Adventure." Harpers Magazine. January 2002.
• Stern, Jessica. "Pakistan's Jihad Culture." Foreign Affairs, November/December 2000.

Pakistan: The Jihadists Post-9/11

Books

• Abbas, Hassan. Pakistan's Drift into Extremism. Allah the Army and America's War on Terror. (London: M.E. Sharpe, 2005). 201-236.
• Corera, Gordon. Shopping for Bombs: Nuclear Proliferation, Global Insecurity, and the Rise and Fall of the A.Q. Khan Network (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
• Frantz, Douglas and Collins, Catherine. The Man from Pakistan: the True Story of the World's Most Dangerous Nuclear Smuggler (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2007).
• Hussain, Zahid. Frontline Pakistan: the Struggle Within Militant Islam. (New York: Columbia, 2007).
• Jamestown Foundation, Pakistan's Troubled Frontier: the Future of the FATA and the NWFP (Washington, DC, 2009).
• Musharraf, Pervez. In the Line of Fire. (New York, Free Press: 2008). 197-281.
• Nawaz, Shuja. Crossed Swords: Pakistan, its Army, and the Wars Within (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
• Pearl, Marianne. A Mighty Heart. New York: Scribner, 2003. 113-189.
• Riedel, Bruce. The Search for al Qaeda: Its Leadership, Ideology, and Future (Washington, DC: Brookings Press, 2008).
• Schmidle, Nicholas. To Live or Perish Forever: Two Tumultuous Years in Pakistan (New York: Henry Holt, 2009).

Articles

• Anson, Robert Sam. "The Journalist and the Terrorist." Vanity Fair, August 1, 2002.
• Bergen, Peter and Paul Cruickshank. "Kashmir on the Thames." The New Republic. September 4, 2006.
• Cohen, Stephen Philip. "The Jihadist Threat to Pakistan." The Washington Quarterly. 26.3, Summer 2003.
• Cohen, Craig and Derek Chollet. "When $10 billion is not enough: rethinking U.S. strategy toward Pakistan." The Washington Quarterly. Spring 2007.
• Fair, C. Christine. "Militant Recruitment in Pakistan." Studies in Conflict and Terrorism. 27.6, November/December 2004.
• Haqqani, Husain. "The Role of Islam in Pakistan's Future." The Washington Quarterly. 28.1, Winter 2004-05.
• Hersh, Seymour. "The Getaway." The New Yorker. January 28, 2002.
• International Crisis Group, "Taliban Propaganda: Winning the War of Words?" July 2008.
• International Crisis Group, "Pakistan: the Militant Jihadi Challenge," March 2009.
• International Crisis Group. "Pakistan's Tribal Areas: Appeasing the Militants," December 2006.
• Nawaz, Shuja. "FATA: A Most Dangerous Place," CSIS 2008.
• Rashid, Ahmed. "Pakistan on the Edge." New York Review of Books, October 10, 2002.
• Warrick, Joby. "U.S. and Pakistan: A Frayed Alliance." Washington Post. October 31, 2007.
• White, Joshua T. "Pakistan's Islamist Frontier," Center on Faith and International Affairs 2008.

Films

• The Journalist and the Jihadi: The Murder of Daniel Pearl. Produced and directed by Ahmed A. Jamal and Ramesh Sharma. Narrated by Christiane Amanpour. HBO, 2006.

Al Qaeda: General Interest

• 9/11 Commission Report. (New York: Norton, 2004). An authoritative account and actually a good read, surprisingly so for a government report.
• Atwan, Abdel-Bari. The Secret History of al-Qa'ida. (California: University of California Press, 2006). A concise primer.
• Anonymous/Scheuer, Michael. Through Our Enemies' Eyes: Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam and the Future of America. (Washington, DC: Brasseys, 2002). (Paperback edition). Written by the former head of the bin Laden unit at CIA. Well researched, analytically sharp.
• Bergen, Peter. The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of al Qaeda's Leader. (New York: Free Press, 2006). A collection of interviews with those who have known bin Laden and key documents such as the founding minutes of al Qaeda.
• Bergen, Peter. Holy War, Inc: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden. (New York: Touchstone, 2002). Reporting on the ground about al Qaeda around the world. Easy read (I think.)
• Burke, Jason. Al-Qaeda: Casting a Shadow of Terror. (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2003). A really sharp combination of on the ground reporting and analysis.
• Coll, Steve. Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001. (New York: Penguin Press, 2004). (Paperback edition) Deeply reported. Won the Pulitzer for best non-fiction book of 2004.
• Coll, Steve. The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century (New York: Penguin Press, 2008). An absorbing read about a family caught between the 7^th and 21^st centuries. Finalist for a Pulitzer in 2008.
• Lia, Brynjar. Architect of Global Jihad: the Life of Al Qaeda Strategist Abu Mus'ab al-Suri (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).
• Sageman, Marc. Understanding Terror Networks. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). Sageman's groundbreaking sociological analysis of who joins al Qaeda and affiliated groups.
• Wright, Laurence. The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. (New York: Knopf, 2006). A gripping narrative of the jihadist movement from its birth in Egypt in the mid-20th century up until 9/11. Won the Pulitzer Prize for best non-fiction book of 2006.

Al Qaeda: From Its Formation in 1988 to 9/11

Books

• Fandy, Mamoun. Saudi Arabia and the Politics of Dissent. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999. 177-194.
• Fouda, Yosri and Nick Fielding. Masterminds of Terror. Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 2003. 73-87, 105-122, 123-147, 196-202.
• McDermott, Terry. Perfect Soldiers: The Hijackers-Who They Were, Why They Did It. New York: HarperCollins, 2005. An excellent narrative.
• al Zawahiri, Ayman. Knights under the Banner of the Prophet (2001). This document is Zawahiri's autobiography, and it also outlines his political philosophy. It runs about 75 pages and is essential reading to understand him.

Articles and documents

• Ali Mohamed's plea agreement, reprinted as "Excerpts from Guilty Plea in Terrorism Case." New York Times. October 21, 2000.
• Al Qaeda Training manual
• "Cracks in the Foundation-Leadership Schisms in Al Qaeda from 1989-2006," Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. New York: Combating Terrorism at West Point, 2007. 1-26.
• Court transcript of USA v. Usama bin Laden (the embassy bombings trial) provides a wealth of material. Entire transcript of the trial available here.
• The most important testimony is from the following days: Testimony of L'Hossaine Kherchtou, February 21 and February 26; Testimony of Essam al-Ridi, February 14, 2001; Testimony of Jamal al-Fadl, February 6, 2001.; Testimony of FBI Agent John Anticev, February 27, 2001; Summation of Ken Karas, May 1, 2001.
• Cullison, Alan. "Inside Al Qaeda's Hard Drive." The Atlantic Online. September 2004.
• Cullison, Alan and Andrew Higgins. "Computer in Kabul Holds Chilling Memos." Wall Street Journal. December 31, 2001.
• Cullison, Alan and Higgins, Andrew. "Saga of Dr. Zawahiri Sheds Light on al Qaeda Terror." Wall Street Journal. July 2, 2002.
• Kippenberg, Hans and Tilman Seidensticker, eds. The 9/11 Handbook. London: Equinox Publishing, 2006.
• Lewis, Bernard. "License to Kill: Usama bin Ladin's Declaration of Jihad." Foreign Affairs, November/December 1998.
• Mneimneh, Hassan and Makiya, Kanan. "Manual for a Raid." The New York Review of Books. January 17, 2002 (Essential).
• Nasiri, Omar. Inside the Jihad, My Life with Al Qaeda: A Spy's Story. New York: Basic,
• 2006. A gripping account of one man's embrace of militant jihadism and his training in the camps in Afghanistan.
• Rohde, David and Chivers, C. J. "The Jihad Files." New York Times. March 17, 2002 and March 18, 2002.
• Wright, Lawrence. "The Man Behind Laden: How an Egyptian doctor became a master of terror." The New Yorker. September 16, 2002. (Note, this is more than 20,000 words in length and is subsumed in Wright's 2006 book The Looming Tower.)

Al Qaeda: The Organization and the Ideological Movement Since the 9/11 Attacks

Books

• Clarke, Richard, ed. Terrorism: what the next president will face, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, July 2008.
• Farah, Douglas. Blood from Stones: The Secret Financial Network of Terror. (New York: Broadway, 2004).
• Gerges, Fawaz. The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global. (New York: Cambridge, 2005). Well researched account of how the global jihadist movement is riven by internecine ideological disputes and petty feuds. P. 185-250.
• Greenberg, Karen, ed. Al Qaeda Now: Understanding Today's Terrorists. New York: Cambridge, 2005. A stimulating collection of essays.

Articles

• Atran, Scott. "Mishandling Suicide Terrorism." The Washington Quarterly. 27.3, summer 2004.
• Bergen, Peter. "War of Error." The New Republic, October 22, 2007.
• Burke, Jason. "Al Qaeda: Think Again." Foreign Policy. Issue 142, May/June 2004.
• Cruickshank, Paul and Ali, Mohannad Hage Ali. "Abu Musab al Suri: Architect of the New al Qaeda." Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 30:1, 2007.
• Cullison, Alan and Higgins, Andrew. "Al Qaeda Acolyte, One of Many, Vows to Die for the Cause." Wall Street Journal. December 30, 2002.
• Elegant, Simon. "The Jihadis' Tale." TIME. January 27, 2002.
• Hegghammer, Thomas. "Terrorist Recruitment and Radicalization in Saudi Arabia." Middle East Policy, 13.4: winter 2006.
• Hoffman, Bruce. "Al Qaeda, Trends in Terrorism, and Future Potentialities: An Assessment." Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 26.6, November-December 2003.
• Hoffman, Bruce. "The Changing Face of al Qaeda." Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 27.6, November/December 2004.
• Hoffman, Bruce. "Is al Qaeda on the run or on the march?" Middle East Policy 14:2, 2007.
• Hoffman, Bruce. "Rethinking Terrorism and Counterterrorism Since 9/11." Studies in Conflict and Terrorism. 25.25, September 2002. 303-316.
• International Crisis Group Reports about JI here.
• Kessler, Glenn. "Saudis Tie al Qaeda to Attacks." Washington Post. May 14, 2003.
• Petrou, Michael. "Lebanon's new terrorist threat." Macleans.ca, July 9, 2007.
• Singapore. Ministry of Home Affairs. White Paper: The Jemaah Islamiyah Arrests and the Threat of Terrorism. This is an enormously through investigation of JI in Singapore, which will be of particular interest for anyone researching JI.
• Stern, Jessica. "The Protean Enemy." Foreign Affairs. 82.4, July/August 2003. 27-40
• Whitlock, Craig. "The New al Qaeda Central." Washington Post. September 9, 2007.
• Wright, Larry. "The Master Plan." The New Yorker September 11, 2006.

Al Qaeda: Media Strategy from 1988 to the Present

Books

• Miles, Hugh. Al-Jazeera. (London: Abacus, 2005).
• Weimann, Gabriel. Terror on the Internet. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2006. The most authoritative account of terrorists' use of the Internet.

Articles

• Coll, Steve and Glasser, Susan. "Terrorists Turn to the Web as a Base of Operations." Washington Post. August 7, 2005.
• Coll. Steve and Glasser, Susan. "The Web as Weapon." Washington Post. August 9, 2005.
• Jones, David Martin. "Out of Bali: Cybercaliphate Rising." The National Interest. Spring 2003.
• Kimmage, Daniel and Ridolfo, Kathleen. "Iraqi Insurgent Media: The War of Images and Ideas." Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. 2007.
• Lia, Brynjar. "Al-Qaeda Online: Understanding Jihadist Internet Infrastructure." Jane's Intelligence Review. January 1, 2006.
• Lynch, Marc. "Al Qaeda's Media Strategies." The National Interest, summer 2006.
• Wallace-Wells, Benjamin. "Private Jihad." New Yorker. May 29, 2006.
• International Crisis Group. "In Their Own Words: Reading the Iraqi Insurgency." Middle East Report N°50. February 15, 2006.
• Khatchadourian, Raffi. "Azzam the American: The Making of an Al Qaeda Homegrown." The New Yorker. January 22, 2007.
• Rogan, Hannah. "Abu Reuter and the E-Jihad." Georgetown Journal of International Affairs summer/fall 2007.
• Rumsfeld, Donald. "New Realities in the Media Age." Speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, February 16, 2006.
• Torres, Manuel R., Jordán, Javier and Horsburgh, Nicola. "Analysis and Evolution of the Global Jihadist Movement Propaganda." Terrorism and Political Violence 18.3.
• Weimann, Gabriel. "Virtual disputes: the use of the internet for terrorist databases." Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 29:7, 2006.

The Underlying Causes of the 9/11 Attacks

Books

• Berman, Paul. Terror and Liberalism. New York: Norton, 2003. Argues that the jihadist threat is similar to the fascist or communist threat in terms of both its ideology and goals.
• Hudson, Rex. The Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism: Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why. (Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 1999).
• Krueger, Alan. What Makes a Terrorist. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. 1-52.
• Pape, Robert. Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism. New York: Random House, 2005. Argues that campaigns of suicide terrorism are more motivated by nationalism than religion.
• Richardson, Louise. What Terrorists Want. New York: Random House, 2007. 38-103.

Articles

• "How the Arabs Compare: Arab Human Development Report 2002." Middle East Quarterly. 9.4, Fall 2002. 59-67. Academic Search Premier.
• Atran, Scott. "The Moral Logic and Growth of Suicide Terrorism." The Washington Quarterly 29.2, spring 2006. 127-147.
• Bergen, Peter and Swati Pandey. "The Madrassa Scapegoat." The Washington Quarterly 29.2, spring 2006. 117-125.
• Bergen, Peter. "What were the causes of 9/11?" Prospect Magazine (U.K) Issue 126, September 2006.
• Bergen, Peter and Michael Lind. "A Matter of Pride." Democracy. Winter 2007.
• Czwarno, Monica. "Misjudging Islamic terrorism: the academic community's failure to predict 9/11." Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 29:7, 2006.
• Doran, Michael Scott. "Somebody Else's Civil War." In How Did This Happen? Terrorism and the New War. Eds. James F. Hoge Jr. and Gideon Rose. New York: Public Affairs, 2001. 31-52.
• Gabriel, Richard A. "The Warrior Prophet." Quarterly Journal of Military History. Summer 2007.
• Moghadam, Assaf. "Suicide Terrorism, Occupation, and the Globalization of Martyrdom: A Critique of ‘Dying to Win.'" Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 29.8: December 2006. 707-729. (A critique of Pape, see his book above
• Nacos, Brigitte. "The Terrorist Calculus Behind 9-11: A Model for Future Terrorism?" Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 26.1: January-February 2003. 1-16.
• Ruthven, Malise. "How to Understand Islam." New York Review of Books. November 8, 2007.
• Wiktoroqicz, Quintan and Kaltner, John. "Killing in the name of Islam: Al-Qaeda's justification for September 11." Middle East Policy, 10:2, summer 2003.

Islamist Terrorism and Its Intellectual Influences

Books

• Benjamin, Daniel and Simon, Steven. The Age of Sacred Terror. (New York: Random House, 2002). 38-94.
• Cook, David. Understanding Jihad. (Los Angeles: University of California, 2005). An erudite explanation of the history of jihadist thought.
• Firestone, Reuven. Jihad, the Origin of Holy War in Islam. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 13-18 and 47-65.
• Hoffman, Bruce. Inside Terrorism. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1998. 87-129.
• Gerges, Fawaz. The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global. (New York: Cambridge, 2005). Well researched account of how the global jihadist movement is driven by internecine ideological disputes and petty feuds. 1-80,119-151.
• Kepel, Gilles. Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam. (Cambridge: Belknap Press, Harvard 2002. 1-20.
• Kepel, Gilles. Muslim Extremism in Egypt, the Prophet and Pharaoh. (California: University of California Press, 1986 (1st ed.)). 36-67.
• Lewis, Bernard. The Political Language of Islam. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 71-90.
• Qutb, Sayyid. Milestones. American Trust Publications, 1991.
• Ruthven, Malise. A Fury for God. The Islamist Attack on America. (New York: Granta Books, 2002). 72-98.

Articles

• Berman, Paul. "The Philosopher of Islamic Terror." New York Times Magazine. March 23, 2003.
• Gertz, Clifford. "Which Way to Mecca?" New York Review of Books. June 12, 2003.
• Paz, Reuven. "Islamists and Anti-Americanism." Middle East Review of International Affairs. 7.4, December 2003.
• Takeyh, Rey and Nikolas Gvosdev. "Radical Islam: Death of an Ideology." Middle East Policy, 9.4, Winter 2004. 86-95.

As the long, hot summer of our discontent came to a close, vacationers the world over reluctantly reshelved the books they had dipped into during their precious days of leisure, as they sought escape from the anxieties of the global recession. In the best of times, such reading is more attentive and suffused with wish-fulfillment than the harassed skimming that book lovers manage during the busy work year. But these are far from the best of times. This year, as Italians, French, and Spaniards drove to the mountains or to the Mediterranean; as Russians with rubles headed to Sochi and Cyprus; as Germans flocked to Baltic Sea cottages; as the Japanese jetted to America or Europe or trained to Tokyo's Shonan beach; and as Britons went anywhere with a forecast for sun, they packed engrossing reads they hoped would plunge them into imagined worlds more satisfying than the reality outside the printed page.

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Rarely has this kind of distraction been more needed than now, in the midst of an economic annus horribilis that has seen inflation, unemployment, and fiscal crisis rise and spread across the globe. Americans had a great hand in causing this tumult, but it was an American author, the Mormon fantasist Stephenie Meyer, who was most useful in beguiling both overseas and American readers away from their troubles -- at least for a while -- as they devoured the four volumes of Twilight, her red-hot, cold-blooded teen vampire series. Those books were bestsellers on every continent that has a bestseller list -- even if the euphemistic French romantically rechristened it Fascination and the Germans called it Bis(s), meaning "bite."

It's interesting to see, through Twilight's global reach, that American cultural hegemony persists, even as the economic catastrophe Americans helped feed has taken a bite out of everyone else's peace of mind. But despite the vampire's lure, international bestseller lists and literary experts reveal that each country also produced its own regional or national favorites this year -- books steeped in nostalgia for easier or more valiant times that offered a localized prescription for relief. Examining these homegrown contenders produces a sort of Rorschach portrait of different notions of literary escape that prevail worldwide at this unsettled moment.

In Italy, for example, which has one of Europe's lowest per capita book-buying rates, reading as a hobby has never really caught on except among elites (one specialist blames Italy's late industrialization and the attraction of the abundant 3-D sources of inspiration there: art, landscape, architecture, and caffè society). But the credit crunch has prompted anxious Italians to buy nonfiction books that analyze the economic meltdown. The most heralded novels there this year have been consoling fictions set in bygone eras, like Tiziano Scarpa's Stabat Mater, in which Antonio Vivaldi comes to the rescue of an orphaned Venetian cello whiz, and Cesarina Vighy's L'Ultima Estate, a coming-of-age story that follows its female lead from the struggles of the Italian dopoguerra, through the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, and on to the safe harbor of the 1990s.

In Russia, reading is a favorite national pastime even in the age of biznesmeni, and headings on Web sites like Moi Lyubimi Knizhki (My Beloved Little Books) reflect the earnest Russian passion for letters. Despite the switch to the market economy in the 1990s, which brought pulp fiction to the masses, high-quality literature lives on. Muscovites and St. Petersburgers can be seen on the subways reading classic fiction year-round -- Twain and Tolstoy, Shakespeare and Gogol -- so caught up in their pages that they miss their stops.

And for every Russian you spot reading a cheap edition of Odin Raz Ne Dostatochno (Once Is Not Enough, by Jacqueline Susann), you might see another reading the poems of Anna Akhmatova or the cynical but emotionally charged novels of Sergei Minaev, New Russia's Jay McInerney. In Dukhless (meaning soulless), he presented a coke-dusted portrait of greedy, lustful, aspirational Moscow-in-the-'90s, while in his new novel, R.A.B. (which means slave), he indicts corporate dystopia. Although Meyer's quartet is popular in Russia, too, her books are among the top 50 bestsellers, not the top 10. Minaev's R.A.B. beat the vampires to the dachas, as did Lyudi v Golom (People in the Nude), by Andrei Astvatsaturov, a wry, brainy novel about present-day St. Petersburg intellectuals (Russian critics compare the author to Henry Miller and Woody Allen, his characters to Mikhail Lermontov's cad Pechorin), and The Falcon and the Swallow, the newest installment in a historical-fiction series by Boris Akunin about a detective named Erast Fandorin. (Boris Akunin is a pen name, coined in honor of the revolutionary philosopher Mikhail Bakunin.)

Russians use the word kulturny -- cultured -- more freely and less self-consciously than people in any other country, and they love books that remind them of their country's august imperial and cultural heritage, particularly at the present moment, when national pride is high and when recently attained economic prestige is under threat. One nonfiction book in the Russian top 10, however, points to present practical concerns: Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, in translation. Not content to take refuge in the fantasy of past triumphs, Russians bent on future greatness are reading Outliers to ferret out the secrets to success that Gladwell has unearthed and see if any might work for them.

Germany, on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, also finds itself in the midst of a surge of patriotic fervor, and German authors are riding the wave. Last fall, a Nobel Prize judge offended many book lovers when he suggested that American fiction was too self-absorbed to interest readers in other countries. However graceless the imputation, it touched upon an underlying truth: Some writing appeals chiefly to a national audience, over whom it holds greater sway than over readers outside the author's borders. Certainly, the current craze in Germany for detective novels set in rustic Alpine locales may not travel well beyond the Schwarzwald. In this year's hit version, Föhnlage, by Jörg Maurer, a man tumbles to his death during a concert at a Bavarian resort.

Lately, Germans also have been stirred by the emergence of a domestic literary wunderkind, Daniel Kehlmann, whose much-translated 2005 novel, Measuring the World, a playful, entwined biography of the 19th-century explorer Alexander von Humboldt and the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, sold a million and a half copies in Germany alone. Kehlmann's new novel, Ruhm (Fame) brings together the stories of nine disparate characters, and the author's fame excites prospective readers as much as his fiction. Two other big German books hint at the thought that nobody needs to leave Germany these days to have a thoroughly excellent adventure: Tilman Rammstedt's Der Kaiser von China (The Emperor of China), in which a German boy uses a Lonely Planet guide to write letters home from an imaginary trip to China, and Thomas Klupp's Paradiso, a sinister road trip that takes its characters from Potsdam all the way to Munich (a distance of some 400 miles, about the mileage between New York and Pittsburgh).

In France, nostalgia for the past has fueled the engine of the country's identity for centuries. The priority isn't to move forward, but to enjoy the luxurious amenities of the wagon-lit while admiring the scenery and the players. As such, France is well positioned to ride out the economic downturn, drawing down the blinds to block out unwelcome sights. The most popular book touching on the financial crisis in French librairies this year was Émile Zola's novel Money, written in 1891, about 19th-century speculation and fraud. "I'm not one of those who rails against money," Zola wrote. "I support the principle that money, well-used, profits all humanity."

This year, Americans were able to sample the redolence of French denial in the movie Summer Hours, about three busy French grown-ups who sell the family country house after their mother's death and consider too late the value of the tradition they've discarded. But in France, that was last year's cinematic reverie. In July, a film opened there, Le Hérisson (The Hedgehog), adapted from Muriel Barbery's 2006 novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog, which more than a million French readers bought in hardcover. The French publisher Gallimard produced a paperback timed to the film's release that topped the French Amazon.com list that month. A witty, intricate portrayal of the inner lives and interactions of the residents of a Parisian apartment building, The Elegance of the Hedgehog centers on two wise, world-weary females: the 54-year-old concierge, Madame Michel, who considers herself "one of the multiple cogs that make the great universal illusion turn ... according to which life has a meaning that can be easily deciphered," and a precocious preteen named Paloma, given to wry observations like, "He's so conservative that he won't say hello to divorced people." Halfway through the novel, an observant Japanese man named Kakuro Ozu moves into the building and helps Madame Michel and Paloma embrace joie de vivre, as proper French citizens should.

It's fitting, somehow, that in Barbery's novel it takes a Japanese newcomer to remind two Frenchwomen of the art of living. The genius of great contemporary Japanese writers for grafting Western sensibilities to their own ends was apparent long before Kenzaburo Oe won the 1994 Nobel Prize in Literature. The undisputed literary main event in Japan this summer partook of that hybrid tradition; it was the June release of Haruki Murakami's novel 1Q84, its title a play on George Orwell's 1984. The book -- which is not available yet in English -- sold more than a million copies in Japan in the first two weeks of its release.

Why has this book succeeded so well in Japan? For one thing, before the book's release, the author closely guarded details of its contents to increase its mystique and build buzz, having learned a lesson from publicity campaigns past. For another, as a New York-based Japanese book designer who read it explained, its setting in a not-too-distant halcyon era removes it from the commotion of the present. Japan suffers from the global crisis like other countries, even if the yen's comparative strength means that more Japanese than usual have been traveling abroad. On a flight to Chicago in June, two Japanese tourists were observed sharing one copy of 1Q84, the man reading the first half as his female companion held the book open to her place. Presumably, by the time of Japan's August Obon holiday (a little like Thanksgiving combined with Memorial Day), more copies were on hand for readers who hungered for Murakami's surreal, fusiony nostalgia and whose appetite for his book had been fanned by the shrewdly engineered scarcity of the commodity.

If the Japanese-British author Kazuo Ishiguro's moody novel The Remains of the Day, set at a hinge moment of British imperial decline, had come out this year instead of in 1989, it would have satisfied a contemporary British taste for retrospection. Britons began the summer in an indignant mood, outraged by news that their elected officials in the House of Commons had been billing their luxury expenses to voters and fiddling with the accounts of their second homes. A nonfiction book that benefits from the current rancorous British mood is Ben Goldacre's Bad Science, which debunks unscientific hokum with scorn and humor, attacking the villains who manipulate the common people.

A more cool-tempered nonfiction pick was Antony Beevor's D-Day: The Battle for Normandy, which has pleased those Englishmen who like to imagine that 1944 never ended (there are more of them than you might think). And two fictional books set at a useful remove from the present crisis made it on to EasyJet: Me Cheeta, an uproarious fake autobiography of the chimp who acted in the old Tarzan movies (it sends up tell-all celebrity memoirs as it revisits Hollywood's golden age), and Hilary Mantel's novel Wolf Hall, set five centuries ago, which reimagines the life of Henry VIII's powerful minister Thomas Cromwell. After wielding enormous influence for more than a decade, Cromwell fell under suspicion, was imprisoned in the Tower of London, and was executed in 1540 -- his head boiled and set upon a spike on London Bridge. Wily MPs, take note.

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The book Britons, and all of us, probably should have been reading was Anthony Trollope's 1875 page-turner, The Way We Live Now, his searing indictment of a corrupt society caught up in a Bernard Madoff-like British Ponzi scheme. (In July, Newsweek put that book at the head of its "Books for Our Times" list.) And yet, at home and abroad, most of us were looking for a refuge from unquiet headlines, not a reminder of them.

It's not that anyone was necessarily craving pabulum. In Israel, for example, the hot book has been Alon Hilu's controversial historical novel about a Palestinian boy, The House of Dajani, which won a prestigious literary prize but was delaureled after it was discovered that a judge on the jury was related through marriage to the author. In Chile, dutiful literati set themselves the task of reading Roberto Bolaño's lengthy novel 2666, less because they wanted to (according to one Chilean poet and novelist) than because foreign acclaim made them think they ought to. And in Spain this year (as every year) the Holy Bible was a big seller -- and nobody would call the Bible a light read.

Still, is it so surprising that Italian, Russian, German, French, and Japanese readers mostly are choosing to fill their reading hours with visions of balmy decades and glorious traditions past? And is it so surprising that, around the world, vampires fueled daydreams, not nightmares? A vampire saga will never win a Nobel Prize, but vampires, having no nationality, need no passports to cross international borders, no excuse to find an audience. A vampire doesn't need to worry about retirement. And falling under the spell of terrifying creatures that don't exist, if only for a few hours on a lakeside hammock, just may have made the reemergence into the twilight of 2009 a little bit less hair-raising.

Footnotes in Gaza
By Joe Sacco (December 2009, Henry Holt)

Cartoonist-reporter Joe Sacco journeyed to Rafah, a town in the Gaza Strip that is notorious for conflict. Sacco spent over a year absorbing daily life in an attempt to uncover details of Israel's four-month occupation of Gaza in 1956. Footnotes provides a visual history of that difficult time of conflict in the Middle East and of Sacco's more recent experiences there.

 

Trotsky: A Graphic Biography
By Rick Geary (October 2009, Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Geary's latest work, Trotsky, seeks to unpack the duality of a man who was as much demonized as he was revered. In this visual portrait of one of the Soviet Union's most dynamic early communist leaders, Geary tells the story of Leon Trotsky's life and his rise to political power.

 

The Vietnam War: A Graphic History
By Dwight Jon Zimmerman and Wayne Vansant (September 2009, Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

A longtime writer on military subjects, Zimmerman creates a political timeline of the war in Vietnam in images, beginning in the 1960s and continuing through the capture of Saigon in 1975. The story jumps back and forth from Vietnamese jungles to the Watergate Hotel, encapsulating a powerful, tumultuous time in world history.

 

Red Star Over Russia: A Visual History of the Soviet Union from the Revolution to the Death of Stalin
By David King (September 2009, Abrams)

With a collection of more than 550 images, ranging from advertisements and political posters to photographs and magazine pages, Red Star Over Russia offers a history of the images that defined the Soviet Union, evoking the drama of the communist era. King, formerly art editor of London's Sunday Times Magazine, has unearthed otherwise lost Soviet artists, celebrating them as creative forces of their time.

To say that Farouk Hosni doesn't much like Israel is putting it lightly. According to the Anti-Defamation League, he has called it "inhuman," and "an aggressive, racist, and arrogant culture, based on robbing other people's rights and the denial of such rights." He has accused Jews of "infiltrating" world media. And in May 2008, Hosni outdid even himself, telling the Egyptian parliament that he would "burn right in front of you" any Israeli books found in the country's libraries.

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What's shocking is not just that Hosni has said these things, but that he is Egypt's culture minister -- and even more scandalous, that he is the likely next head of UNESCO, the arm of the United Nations sworn to defend cultural diversity and international artistic cooperation. Less surprising but also sadly true is that Hosni's opinions about Israeli culture are par for the course among Egypt's intelligentsia, for whom 30 years of official peace with the Jewish state, the longest of any Arab country, have done virtually nothing to moderate its rampant Judeophobia. If anything, the opposite might be true.

This affair has sparked protests from prominent intellectuals and politicians in Israel and around the world. And the only reason Hosni even has a shot at the UNESCO job, which he'd be the first Arab to hold, is because, in a major reversal, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently lifted his country's opposition to the Egyptian's candidacy. How this came to pass remains shrouded in mystery. All that's known is that on May 11, Netanyahu met with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and was convinced not to block the culture minister's candidacy in return for some unpublicized conditions. A few weeks later, Farouk Hosni penned an apologetic article in Le Monde, retracting his statement on book burning. Soon after that, he pledged that Egypt's culture ministry would translate literary works by two Israelis, Amos Oz and David Grossman. This seemed like a significant concession because official Egyptian policy mostly bars translation from Hebrew to Arabic -- or at least any dealings with Israeli publishers.

But what appeared to be signs of positive change in Egypt's literary elite were actually just reflections of its deep-seated hostility to Jewish and Israeli culture. Hosni was quickly and widely attacked as "courting Zionist influence" by his fellow members of the Egyptian intelligentsia. In fact, Gaber Asfour, the head of Egypt's National Translation Center, immediately denied any link between the translations and Hosni's UNESCO campaign. He clarified that there would be no translation of the Israeli authors from Hebrew at all, but rather from existing European translations, so as not to have to actually deal with the Israeli rights-holders themselves. Although there are certainly a lot of books about Israel on the market in Egypt -- most of them full of conspiracy theories or tendentious views of Jewish history -- Egypt's head translator said he wanted to publish more, if not directly from the Hebrew. For his justification, he quoted an Arabic proverb: "Who knows the language of a people is safe from their evil."

This whole imbroglio only serves to highlight the Egyptian literati's generally hateful and hidebound views of Israel, which are often more virulent than those of the Egyptian public at large. To this day, Egyptian cultural figures and academics are professionally barred from contacts with Israelis. Even the faculty senate at the American University in Cairo passed a resolution urging a boycott of Israeli scholars and schools. In July, the longtime management of the Atelier du Caire, the main gathering place for the city's artists and writers, fell to a coup mounted by a group of disgruntled members; the charge was incompetence and catering to Israelis. And Egypt's greatest modern writer, the late Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, was nearly expelled in 2001 from the Egyptian Writers' Union simply because many of his books had been published in Israel.

Indeed, this only confirmed what Mahfouz once told me in the early 1990s: "The intellectuals who grew up under Nasser will never accept Israel," he said. "They imbibed hatred of Israel with their mothers' milk -- it is deep in their blood."

So why do Egyptian intellectuals fear Israeli influence so intensely? The constantly invoked explanation is that Egyptian intellectuals, the self-styled conscience of the country, cannot accept Israelis in the absence of a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace, and especially not as long as Israel "oppresses" Palestinians. Although this rationale usually includes a pro forma reference to "occupied lands" and "Israeli aggression," what most of them mean is that Israel's existence itself is the barrier to peace in the region. Few Egyptian intellectuals (unlike many ordinary Egyptians) acknowledge Israel's right to exist, and even Mahfouz, whose books and films were banned in many Arab countries because of his support of peace talks with Israel, admitted he originally did so because he realized that military victory was not likely (though he greatly admired Israel's literary culture, technology, and its democracy -- however flawed).

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The Egyptian generation that has grown up under Mubarak -- who has worked for peace while often fostering resentment of Israel with his rhetoric at home -- may be just the same. Then again, most of these Egyptians are not listening to Mubarak, but are following those in the media trained under Nasser or inspired by the semi-tolerated opposition group the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots in al Qaeda and beyond, even the militant Lebanese Shiites in Hezbollah.

These more extremist influences might seem to sit uneasily beside other equally popular ones. There is, for example, a lingering euphoria among Egypt's cultural elite from U.S. President Barack Obama's June 4 address in Cairo (though tempered, of course, with irritation at his references to the Holocaust and his reaffirmation of America's bonds with Israel). Seeming incongruities like this one can also be seen in the many Egyptians who mourn Michael Jackson while downloading chanted Koranic verses for their cellphone ring tones, and who watch racy clips of Lebanese singer Haifa Wehbe while cheering on Hamas. But these apparent contradictions shouldn't lull anyone into thinking that the Egyptian cultural elite is thawing in terms of Israel. Indeed, the Hosni brouhaha is just the most recent demonstration of the extreme paranoia against Jews that exists in Egypt.

Should Hosni's bid to be head of UNESCO succeed, as is likely, it could obscure the truly virulent prejudice that passes for cultural understanding among the Egyptian intelligentsia. Despite his apology for offering to burn books, Hosni told the Egyptian station Dream TV in July that he will oppose normalization with Israel until "two states exist" and the "Palestinian people get their right." And whatever the United Nations decides in the end, his gut feelings about Israel and the Jews are not likely to change.

On a cold winter morning in late 1989, when a young man approached Günter Grass at the central train station in Hamburg and accused Germany's most famous living writer of being a "traitor to his fatherland" (Vaterlandsverräter), he was expressing a nasty form of what was then a common sentiment. The Berlin Wall had fallen only weeks before, the reunification of the eastern and western halves of the country was on the horizon, and the public was enthused by the tides of history that finally seemed to be turning in its favor. Grass, however, wasn't just abstaining from the national celebration; he was doing his best to dampen it, arguing in speeches and articles that East Germany would do better to maintain its independence for a while, rather than rush into the arms of the West. For many Germans, this call for caution was an act of betrayal.

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Twenty years later, Grass's journals from that fateful year, published in January under the title Unterwegs von Deutschland nach Deutschland (Journeys from Germany to Germany), elicit a different response. Throughout the book, Grass assumes the mantle of Cassandra, his dissenting voice opposed—or simply ignored—by a society giddily riding the crest of historic events. Today, however, Grass is no longer charged with treason when he recounts his efforts to slow the march toward reunification. Regardless of which part of the country he is in, his public readings are now accompanied by nods of recognition.

Indeed, the national consensus on reunification has met Grass's skepticism more than halfway, and it's worth noting the great distance it traveled in doing so. That reunification would be a triumph was the conventional wisdom both in Germany and abroad. With a united Germany on the horizon in March 1990, the cover of Time magazine asked, "Should the World Be Worried?" British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher did not hesitate to answer that question in the affirmative: In addition to her public efforts to halt reunification, she privately gathered the English-speaking world's most prominent German-history scholars to discuss how Europe should prepare for the renewed expression of Germany's war-making national character. The prevailing opinion throughout the West was that the new Germany would quickly surmount any economic hiccups and that the real challenge would lie in ensuring that the strengthened country remained cooperative on the international stage.

Enter Grass, a natural candidate to puncture those predictions. Grass won the Nobel Prize in 1999 for his work as a novelist, but in Germany he's more readily identified with a parallel career as his society's moral truth-teller, the self-styled embodiment of its national conscience. In his 50 years of public life, Grass has exposed his fellow citizens to countless jeremiads, targeting everything from militarism to acid rain, from mistreatment of immigrants to the exploitation of the working class.

Grass's literary sensibility, psychological acuity, and sensitivity to moral cant have helped him look clearly at his country's many self-delusions. His early critique of Chancellor Helmut Kohl now seems especially farsighted. In a 1990 essay, "A Bargain-Basement Deal Called East Germany," Grass argued that Kohl's government was encouraging Westerners to see the East not as a polity in need of justice but as an undervalued property to be bought low and, presumably, sold high later. Even at the time Grass was writing Journeys, evidence against Kohl was accruing: The one-to-one currency exchange that he offered won many votes from Easterners whose purchasing power suddenly multiplied, but it also multiplied the debts of Eastern industries, condemning many of them to immediate bankruptcy. As Grass notes in his journal, many Easterners quickly regretted the votes they cast for Kohl's plan, some even fatalistically pleading that they were too ignorant of the laws of capitalism and democracy to avoid succumbing to the allure of Kohl's promised shortcut.

Grass's criticism extends to Kohl's heavy-handed mechanism for codifying reunification. The West German government arranged for East Germany to be annexed under the West's existing constitution, dispensing with a reunification produced through cooperation by equal parties. Instead, the East was made to conform overnight to the West's laws, standards, and regulations. The process left no political room to articulate a defense for any positive aspect of life in East Germany, though there were plenty of arguments to be made in favor of the East's education and child-care systems and its fostering of gender equality. Grass shows a Federal Republic of Germany that is comfortable displaying nationalist swagger and materialist entitlement—a dismaying portrait.

Most of all, however, Grass bristled at the lazy triumphalism of his fellow citizens. This was not simply an aesthetic judgment. Grass was sure that the giddy public discourse cultivated in 1990 was incapable of addressing the weighty issues confronting the country. The refrain in those days was that "the train has left the station"—reunification was beyond anyone's control to stop. In a February 1990 letter to the editor of Der Spiegel, Grass pointedly asked whether anyone else had noticed the foreboding quality of the metaphor. "A train that can't be stopped, that can't respond to signals," Grass wrote, "is destined for a catastrophic accident."

Today, Germany finds itself picking through the wreckage of the accident that Grass saw coming. East Germany's landscapes have not "bloomed," as Kohl promised. Instead, its economy is stagnant, its prospects are precarious, and its mood is foul. The region is trapped in a downward spiral of residential and commercial flight westward. East Germany's shrinking cities have proven a boon not only for the urban planners charged with managing their slow-motion collapse, but also for the extremist neo-Nazi groups and neo-Communist parties that have amply recruited from their stranded populations.

It's not that the German government hasn't tried to spark the economy of its Eastern annex. For the past 20 years, West German residents have transferred about 5 percent of their annual national GDP to their fellow citizens as part of the stimulus-cum-infrastructure project dubbed "Building Up the East" (Aufbau Ost). And the infrastructure throughout the former German Democratic Republic is now indeed first-rate: The four-hour car ride from Hamburg to Berlin that Grass took in 1990 over uneven East German roads has been replaced by a 90-minute high-speed commuter rail line.

But Grass's argument that reunification was motivated by the West's desire to flip the East like a dilapidated apartment building has now become a damning truism, unwelcome as it was at the time. Indeed, the East's continued lag in economic development has less to do with the quality of the area's concrete or currency than with the country's straining solidarity. Today's East and West Germans harbor deep mutual suspicion. The stereotypes are deeply ingrained and readily conjured: "Ossis" are racist, lazy, and self-pitying, while "Wessis" are self-centered, money-obsessed, and arrogant. Statistics show that Germans from opposite sides of the former border rarely marry, and they sometimes seem to make efforts to avoid mingling socially. As the German parliamentary president admitted in 2007, "The fact of the matter is, ‘Ossis' and ‘Wessis' can't stand each other."

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It shouldn't have to be this way. Easterners are fortunate that among the few symbols testifying to the potential of their region is the country's current chancellor, Angela Merkel, who grew up in Templin, a town in the countryside of the former East. Even beyond Merkel's election to the chancellorship—which for East Germans had something of the meaning that Barack Obama's election as U.S. president had for African Americans—former East Germans have more than earned the respect of their fellow citizens for their very real accomplishment 20 years ago in peacefully bringing about the end of the dictatorship, contributing to German history its only example of a successful democratic revolution.

Despite these opportunities for creating a narrative of mutual respect and reconciliation, Grass has not tempered his critique; if anything, the sold-out speaking tour he has undertaken around the two Germanys this year for the book (which Grass's publisher says has sold well for a collection of journal entries, if nothing on the scale of The Tin Drum) has reinforced the apocalyptic prophecies he made two decades ago. His only concession is that his judgments might not have been pointed enough: "Sometimes I ask myself if I should have been clearer with my criticisms," he said at a reading at a university in Munich in April. Here, Grass's judgment shows signs of being faulty: Although they accord him respect for his intellectual courage and his demonstrated prescience, few Germans are clamoring for a less restrained Grass. The country is aware that Grass's political judgment can sometimes be carried away by his moralism.

Eventually, someone will have to take the lead in fostering a conversation about reunification that moves past the black and white of Kohl's bluster and Grass's baiting, beyond the back-and-forth accusations of treason and imperialism. If Grass isn't the person to drive that train, however, he's at least the one who brought it to the station.