What Birnbaum's Reading

Metropolis - Elizabeth Gaffney

Cast of Shadows - Kevin Guilfoyle

Torture and Truth - Mark Danner

The Stone Fields - Courtney Angela Brkic

God Lives in St. Petersburg - Tom Bissell

Tropic of Night - Michael Gruber

100% Evil - Nicholas Blechman & Christoph Niemann

Review of Deborah Lipstadt's History on Trial by
Charles Taylor (Salon.com)

Tom Scocca's hilarious send-up of the epistolary exchange between NYT's Solomon and J.S. Foer (The NY Observer)

Lionel Shriver's piece "Why Ruin Your Life" on Motherhood (The Guardian)

Tom Schone's review of David Thomson's The Whole Equation (The Guardian)

Samantha Power's NYT Op-Ed (Feb 10, 2005) "Court of First Resort" on the International Criminal Court

"The End of the Counter-Culture: Hunter S. Thompson, 1939 - 2005," a toxic screed by Stephen Schwartz (The Weekly Standard)

Adam Gopnik's review of Ian Davidson's Voltaire in Exile (The New Yorker)

Tom Bissell's essay "Thriller" (The Believer #22)

-Robert I. Birnbaum

radical teacher #71

Every time I visit a newsstand in Seattle, it seems like I find five new-to-me publications I HAVE to read. Last night was no exception; while at the Bulldog News in the U District I picked up Radical Teacher, a triennial "socialist, feminist, and anti-racist" teaching journal put out by the nonprofit Cambridge, MA Center for Critical Education.

Strange as it may be that teachers are not naturally feminist and anti-racist, and despite their usual political alignment with the Democratic party, the profession tends to be pretty conservative. So Radical Teacher was a refreshing read. #71 is a book review issue, which includes reviews of a wide range of reading from histories of teacher strikes to analyses of the longstanding rift between literature and composition faculties in university English departments. The reviews were good reviews, too: smart but down to earth, clear but still complex, informative in and of themselves and still making me want to go out and read the books reviewed.

Often when I read a so-called "radical" journal I end up either feeling like I am not "radical" enough or irritated at how impractically "radical" the writers are, but the tone of the whole thing was a refreshing combination of radical and practical, just like good teaching should be. So I decided to subscribe, and wouldn't you know, they offer a discount for part-timers like myself. It's nice to see radical writers going beyond talk into action and being radical businesspeople as well. So I perused the clearance sale of back issues, ordered a few that looked promising, and made a pledge to myself to become a "sustaining" subscriber as soon as that full-time position comes through.

-angie kritenbrink

Tu Fu and me

I've been reading and teaching poetry for the past three weeks. Kenneth Rexroth's 100 Poems From The Chinese has just about the most kickass translations of Tu Fu anywhere. After you start reading those poems, you start living them. No kidding. I was driving along listening to the NPR fund drive and drinking a tall bottle of dark beer in my rattling car, and all of the sudden a flock of ducks appeared next to me. This is early March, and there's a cold snap happening, and the river is frozen over in even its swiftest rapids. I felt so bad for those birds, flitting their articulate wingtips toward no hope at all of an easy night's rest. If that isn't a Tu Fu poem moment - travelling, drinking, birds - I don't know what is. I haven't seen the birds at all since, but I haven't seen their frozen bodies on the riverbanks either. Then Ira Glass came on the radio and starting talking to me about how much my contribution mattered, and so I kept drinking my beer in my rattling car, feeling just like a sad Chinese guy looking out through the silk screen window of my lonely little hut.

- Drew McNaughton