HISTORY

F R O M C H I C A G O

TRAVELS IN THE REICH, 1933–1945

Foreign Authors Report from Germany

Edited by OLIVER LUBRICH

“Given the glut of books about Nazism that rehash familiar ground, Travels in the Reich achieves no mean feat in approaching the subject in a new way. . . [It] gives readers the rare opportunity to peer into Nazi Germany through the eyes of outsiders.” —Times Higher Education Cloth £19.50

DUKE ELLINGTON’S AMERICA

HARVEY G. COHEN

“Extremely intelligent and formidably researched.” —Claudia Roth Pierpont, New Yorker

“Harvey G. Cohen’s new book illuminates

Ellington’s career as never before, and also helps to deepen our understanding of larger trends and issues in American politics and culture.”

—Times Literary

Supplement

Cloth £26.00

Trade enquiries to: UPM, 0117 9020275 Distributed by John Wiley, 01243 779777

The University of Chicago Press www.press.uchicago.edu

LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2010 / Jan 2011

THE STATE WE’RE IN

CHRISTOPHER COKER

GROUND ZEROES CULTURES OF WAR: PEARL HARBOR/HIROSHIMA/9–11/IRAQ

★

By John W Dower (W W Norton & Co/The New Press 596pp £22.99)

JOHN DOWER WAS provoked to write this book by the almost instant decision to christen the ruins of the World Trade Center ‘Ground Zero’, a name originally associated with the atomic attacks on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. In observing how the ruin quickly became an icon of American victimhood, he was struck, as a historian, by how little his own countrymen knew of their own terror bombing of Japanese cities in 1944–5, which had culminated in the two atomic attacks. We remember the atom bomb for the iconic photograph of the mushroom cloud, taken by the Enola Gay’s tail-gunner, George Caron. It soon became the logo of fifty-five companies in New York and even, more bizarrely, the Miss Atomic Bomb Pageant in Las Vegas.

Dower’s book opens with the largely unchallenged connection drawn by the US media and the American public between al-Qaeda’s surprise attack and Japan’s ‘day of infamy’ sixty years earlier. It takes the analogy much further, addressing US failures of intelligence and imagination both in 1941 and 2001. The 9/11 Commission singled out ‘imagination’ as one of the central failures revealed by the attacks. It went so far as to recommend that the best way to avoid another surprise attack was to ‘bureaucratise the imagination’ – an oxymoron, adds Dower, that we can picture the bureaucrats taking seriously to heart by forming committees, preparing flow charts, and perhaps even creating a National Imagination Agency (NIA).

The book also explores the many factors that contributed to Japan’s successful postwar recovery and reconstruction on the one hand, and to the lamentable disintegration of Iraq as a society and as an economy on the other. Even if the insurgency had never broken out after the fall of Saddam, the US simply wasn’t prepared to play the role of occupying power that it had in 1945. The neo-conservatives, then in the ascendant in Washington, were market fundamentalists who lacked the sense of public duty shown by the experts who worked for MacArthur in Japan. And although MacArthur’s military advisers had been dedicated to creating a sound capitalist economy, what they understood by reconstruction was very different from what the neo-conservatives had in mind in Iraq. Sixty years ago it meant land reform, the emergence and encouragement of organised labour and trust busting, as well as ‘economic democratisation’. By contrast, the Bush administration put up much of the country’s economy for sale, outsourcing the task of reconstruction mostly to