Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe (and What You Need to Know to End the Madness)
By Arianna Huffington
Knopf, 388 pp., $24.95
Arianna Huffington is angry and, as her subtitle suggests, she has a lot to say about it. A former Republican supporter, she blasts away with the righteous indignation of a betrayed lover. She is enraged by the record of the present administration, which she calls "team terror" and likens to the Three Stooges and a murderer's row. But her name-calling is supported by page after page of evidence.
Her fury at the Republicans is matched by her disdain for and disappointment with the Democrats who, she writes, have remained silent out of fear of appearing soft as the right's power has grown. But her greatest scorn is reserved for the media, who she says have allowed the Republicans to frame the current debates on the war in Iraq, terrorism, health care, stem-cell research, gun control, on their own terms. In her chapter "The Media: Equal Time for Lies," she argues forcefully that the media, by claiming to present a balanced view, insist on giving two sides to all issues, when there are not two valid sides to issues of fact. She concludes with this damning conclusion: "The Right's orgy of greed, hubris, and arrogance will go down as an era marked by the celebration of selfishness and naked brute force." She is hopeful that the the era is about to end.
The Uncertain Art: Thoughts on a Life in Medicine
By Sherwin B. Nuland
Random House, 224 pp., $25
Originally published in The American Scholar, these essays do not create a coherent volume. Unlike Sherwin B. Nuland's two previous books, "How We Die" and "The Art of Aging," this one has no theme or structure.
The liveliest and most engaging essays are based on personal experience. As a young doctor Nuland responded to the call "Is there a doctor in the house?" while at a Broadway show, attending to a stricken man while the rest of the audience studiously avoided acknowledging the entire incident. Traveling to China to see for himself if the claims made for acupuncture as an anesthetic were accurate, Nuland observed several operations, and drew his own thoughtfully nuanced conclusions. He befriended a courageous and literate patient awaiting a heart transplant and corresponded with him while his disease grew more and more desperate and his chances of receiving a life-saving heart less and less likely. Nuland reports the patient's musings and his moving responses to them.
The more academic essays - a history of the humors, a discussion of the great medical books from ancients onward, the role of the medical school within the university - read like dry exercises in scholarship. But the most surprising and delightful essay is a discussion of Thomas Eakins's famous "Portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross," which uses a combination of medical research and art history to reinterpret the traditional reverence accorded the doctor in that painting.
Evening Is the Whole Day
By Preeta Samarasan
Houghton Mifflin, 340 pp., $24
From the start of this novel, we are told that Chellam, the wretched servant girl, will be reviled, expelled, and sicken and die, and that Uma, the more fortunate daughter in the house where Chellam serves, will fly away from Malaysia to Columbia University. Uma's large, originally Indian family - successful lawyer father; bitter, helpless mother; aged, ill, demanding grandmother; eccentric uncle; adoring younger sister; and alert baby brother - live in the once-elegant Big House on
Knowing Chellam's fate transforms the many accusations, taunts, and threats she bears from a random series of abuses into a fatal downward spiral. But the explanation for Uma's departure only takes shape as her past life is exposed. Her family's history, revealed in detailed dramatic narrative, includes ancient slights and lasting resentments, secret adulteries, and incidental incest. For Chellam, there is no escape from misery and death. But Uma will chase the dream of an America where you can arrive a nobody and become a senator or a millionaire. It's reassuring to see that, despite its devaluation here, this dream still has currency on the other side of the world.
Barbara Fisher is a freelance critic who lives in New York.
