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brb

brb has written 33 posts for The Berlin Review of Books
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By brb ⋅ March 30, 2011 ⋅ Post a comment

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The Seductions of Poetry

By brb ⋅ March 9, 2011 ⋅ Post a comment

The Poetry Lesson, by Andrei Codrescu, is a lucid yet playful book, that slips between memoir and fiction, jaunty anecdote and pure tangent, as it describes the first lesson of an ‘Introduction to Poetry Writing’ course, in the last year of its teacher’s institutional career. While Codrescu’s displays a light touch and an elegant frivolity throughout, the very cleverness of his approach leads reviewer Rupert Thomson to ponder what is left of the sense that a passion for poetry will achieve anything.

The Narcissism of the Plagiarist

By brb ⋅ February 23, 2011 ⋅ Post a comment

German defence minister Karl Theodor zu Guttenberg finds himself embroiled in a plagiarism scandal. Suspicious passages have now been documented on two thirds of the pages of his PhD dissertation, and at least 19 authors and several institutions have been identified as sources. Why did a successful politician think he could get away with such blatant cheating? The answer, writes The Berlin Review’s editor Axel Gelfert, is a simple as it is worrying: it is a classic case of narcissism.

Interview: Humphrey Davies on Egyptian Writing

By brb ⋅ February 17, 2011 ⋅ Post a comment

Leading Arabic-English literary translator Humphrey Davies, who has lived in Cairo for the past 35 years, paints a picture of contemporary Egypt through words and graphic narratives. Speaking to Sophie Roell, co-editor at FiveBooks and contributor to TheBrowser (which commissioned the interview), Davies explores the political dimension of everday life in pre-2011 Egypt by looking in depth at five recent books by Egyptian writers: Alaa Al-Aswany’s ‘The Yacoubian Building’, Ahmed Alaydi’s ‘On Being Abbas El Abd’, Khaled al-Berry’s ‘Life is More Beautiful Than Paradise’, Khalid Al Khamissi’s ‘Taxi’, and Magdy El Shafee’s ‘Metro’.

The Great Rubber Robbery: How Julius Fromm’s Condom Empire Fell to the Nazis

By brb ⋅ January 28, 2011 ⋅ Post a comment

In ‘Fromms: How Julius Fromm’s Condom Empire Fell to the Nazis’, Götz Aly and Michael Sontheimer tell a meticulously researched story of how entrepreneur Julius Fromm, who had built a lucrative enterprise around a series of inventions and improvements of latex production techniques, lost his ‘condom empire’ in the process of ‘Aryanization’ in Nazi Germany. However the injustice persisted until well after the fall of the Nazi regime. Following Julius’s death in 1945, the Fromm family attempted to regain possession of their property, yet in 1951 they were merely offered a settlement that required the Fromms to pay (!) 174,300 West German marks to Otto Metz-Randa who, as a profiteer of the ‘Entjudung’ had gained ownership in 1939. Why then, asks reviewer Leon Rocha, did the American publisher tone down the original title of the book, ‘Wie der jüdische Kondomfabrikant Julius F unter die deutschen Räuber fiel’ (‘Fromms: How the Jewish Condom Manufacturer Julius F. Fell Prey to German Robbers’)?

Rage, Time, and the Politico-Religious Revenge Banks

By brb ⋅ December 7, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

In his recent book ‘Rage and Time’ (originally published as ‘Zorn und Zeit’ in 2006), Peter Sloterdijk, best-known to the English-speaking world for his ‘Critique of Cynical Reason’, published in the 1980s, tells a compelling story of the mediations, exploitations, and translations of rage through, and into, the great religious and political ‘cosmologies’ of Western civilisation. ‘Rage and Time’, according to reviewer Francisco Klauser, is a powerfully written book about the sociopolitical ordering, coding, and accumulation of rage; a book which, in sum, acknowledges and investigates the role of rage as one of the driving forces of human history. However, while Sloterdijk’s narrative is rich in suggestive power, his analysis of the upcoming sociopolitical challenges in the 21st century remains essentially incomplete — the future of rage has yet to unfold.

The Fame Game

By brb ⋅ November 19, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

Every Friday morning, postmasters in the United States send out over a million copies of ‘US Weekly’ to subscribers. ‘US Weekly’ is only one of many periodicals that report, and sometimes fabricate, events in the lives of the rich and famous. Where does this cult of celebrity come from? Fred Inglis, in his ‘Short History of Celebrity’, traces the historical origins of celebrity in the modern sense to eighteenth-century London — according to Inglis, ‘the first city to construct itself as a city in a form that would prove recognizable to modernity’. Inglis’s narrative quickly moves from London’s aristocracy and the arcades of Paris to the money- and gossip-obsessed New York of the Gilded Age. Somewhat problematically, according to reviewer Alex Prescott-Couch, he extends his analysis of ‘supreme celebrities’ to the quintessential 20th-century dictators Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin. While he may have overshot the mark in this respect and while some attempts at conceptual disaggregation might have been in order, Inglis manages to draw the reader into tales of the rich and fabulous, while at the same providing much elegantly written material for a closer analysis of the phenomenon of celebrity.

Germany Goes Global: Farewell, Europe?

By brb ⋅ October 2, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

On the eve of the 20th anniversary of Germany’s reunification on 3 October 1990, Ulrike Guerot reconsiders Germany’s place in Europe. Having been, for the longest time, the great engine both of Europe’s economic strength and its political unity, Germany is falling out of love with, or at least is becoming more indifferent towards, the very European Union it helped to bring into existence. A new-found pragmatism and growing global ambitions — as indicated by the government’s ongoing efforts to gain a seat on the UN Security Council — show that the country’s perception of its place in a globalised world are shifting. In Europe, too, Germany is gradually replacing foreign policy by hard-nosed trade policy. The challenge to the future of the European Union is profound.

What are the Humanities For?

By brb ⋅ July 26, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

Martha Nussbaum, in her latest book, warns of a world in which “the humanistic aspects of science and social science — the imaginative, creative aspects of rigorous critical thought” are being lost. Instead of surrendering to “thin market norms” and the demands of the labour market, education must rediscover its goal of creating citizens who are both compassionate and capable of critical thinking. While the impetus behind such demands is laudable, it would be irresponsible — writes reviewer Stephen John — to ignore the shortcomings of Nussbaum’s book in the name of political expediency. Too often she succumbs to hasty overgeneralization, lumping together different trends and developments and, in the process, overlooking sources of political agreement and convergence. While the book’s message is important, it fails in its ambition to map out the future shape of education.

Tracing the Origins of Islamophobia

By brb ⋅ May 27, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

Recent polls conducted by a number of polling institutes indicate that, in the minds of Germans and Europeans, Islam – more than any other religion – is associated with negative feelings. A recent edited volume, ‘Islamfeindlichkeit – Wenn die Grenzen der Kritik verschwimmen’ (roughly: ‘Islamophobia: When the Limits of Criticism become Blurred’), traces the origins of these negative connotations, along with more recent expressions of resentment towards a visible presence of Muslims in Western societies. But, argues reviewer Mohammed Khallouk, the book may also be read as a manifesto for cultural dialogue, with the goal of finding a consensus on values.

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