Laila Lalami

Michiko Kakutani loved Seymour Hersh’s new book, Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib.

Mr. Hersh’s revelations this spring about Abu Ghraib and a corrosive internal report prepared by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba were picked up by other publications around the world and helped lead to Pentagon investigations and Congressional hearings on abuse at the prison. And much of his post-9/11 reporting - which frequently provoked controversy and criticism when it first appeared - has since come to be accepted as conventional wisdom: that intelligence on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (used by the Bush administration to sell Congress and the American public on the war) was selective, sensationalized or just plain wrong; that a group of conservative, utopian civilians dominated thinking about Iraq at the Pentagon; that the C.I.A. was a deeply troubled agency with a director, George J. Tenet, who would not last in the job; and that the Bush administration’s war and postwar planning for Afghanistan and Iraq was seriously flawed.

Read the review in full here.

Indian poet Arun Kolatkar has passed on. I’ve never read his work, but Kitabkhana posted a lovely poem.

As I’m sure has been mentioned all over the sphere, the ALA celebrates Banned Books Week now through October 2. Booksense picks (warning: PDF file) for this year include Fahrenheit 451 and Stones From the River. You can also check out the ALA’s list of the 100 most frequently challenged books of the last decade.

Newsweek catches up with Faiza Gu

Terry Teachout’s biography of George Balanchine is now available. (Seems like only yesterday he was talking about secluding himself to finish off the manuscript.)

Scott Turow and Susan Orlean talk about what it’s like to receive dozens of galleys and being asked to blurb books. My favorite part of the article is toward the very end:

“My advice to readers, in general, is to ignore blurbs,” Turow says. “There’s too much personal political complication in how these advance comments are secured.”
Instead, he offers, read reviews and heed word-of-mouth buzz. In short, arm yourself with substance.
“If you know nothing else about a book and see only blurbs, I would say to most people, ‘You don’t know anything about that book at that point. Except that somebody had a way to get to Scott Turow.’ ”

Sagan passed on earlier this weekend. Read the WaPo obit. I remember reading Bonjour Tristesse at seventeen or eighteen, and how the voice completely enraptured me for days.

Daily Kos is reporting that a chain email is being sent around which starts off with a few historical facts about Iraq and then claiming that a verse in Qur’an 9:11 (note the verse number) prophesizes that the Arabs will awaken a “fearsome eagle.” Read the whole bloody mess here.

The Christian Science Monitor rounds up some industry reactions to Kirkus Reviews’ decision to allow authors to pay $350 to have their books reviewed by the up-til-now fiercely independent service. Here’s one representative sample.

Teresa Weaver, the book editor at the Atlanta Journal Constitution, is the kind of person Kirkus claims will be interested in its new products, but she has strong reservations. “Charging publishers for reviews seems to cross a really important, indelible line. Will reviewers truly have the freedom to pan a book by a publisher who has paid $350? Or even $95? Money taints the process, no matter how sincere the motivation behind the plan.”

The article doesn’t, however, quote any self-published authors, for whom this new pay service is at least partially intended.

Several articles remember the Palestinian American intellectual. Here’s one by Tom Paulin, who will also speak at the Edward Said conference to be held at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London later this week. Here’s a rememberance by a fellow Columbia professor Hamid Dabashi in Al-Ahram . And a profile by Ghassan Karam.