The New York Sun, January, 2008

A review of The Hunt for Nazi Spies: Fighting Espionage in Vichy France.

During the German occupation of France in World War II, Suzanne Desseigne, a French woman with fascist sympathies, initiated contact with the Nazis. She became the mistress of a German soldier who recruited her to conduct espionage missions against the collaborationist Vichy regime in Southern France and French North Africa. Her mother described the Nazi spy as "a young French girl who, from the age of fifteen, while her peers were playing without a care in the world, felt the danger of Bolshevism and of the Jewish conspiracy." She remained, even after her arrest and imprisonment, a devout traitor, assaulting other inmates who did not share her commitment to the Nazi cause.

The Globe and Mail, December, 2007

A review of Other Colors: Essays and a Story.

The novels of Orhan Pamuk, Turkey's most celebrated and controversial man of letters, have been translated into some 20 languages. His novels Snow and My Name is Red are widely considered world-class achievements. The themes of Pamuk's oeuvre include the conflict between the East and the West, the tension between Islam and modernity, and the intense melancholia of his native Istanbul. Admirers find his style complex, multilayered and allegorical; detractors find him faddish and incomprehensible.

The New York Sun, July 2007

A review of The Last Days of Europe: Epitaph for an Old Continent.

Last month, en route to the British Library, I strolled past the Tiger Tiger nightclub in Piccadilly. I was on foot because it was a beautiful day and because there is a distinctly creepy mood, these days, on London's tubes and busses. Signs everywhere remind passengers that they are on CCTV. The police presence is heavy and visible. To be sure, the odds of any one bus blowing up are tiny, but the ubiquitous security prompts the unwelcome thought that there are people about who seek to better those odds. Days later, I flew out of Heathrow airport, where the mood was creepier still. Lines snaked for hours through claustrophobic security screening pens, and passengers stared balefully at the earnest sniffer dogs, wondering how much confidence to place in that goofy spaniel's nose.

The New York Sun,September 2007

In 1995, having read Olivier Roy's The Failure of Political Islam (1992), Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes asked, "How can someone who knows so much be so completely wrong?" Mr. Roy's latest work, Secularism Confronts Islam, prompts the very same question. It is a remarkable book: articulate, original, lucid, without a paragraph that fails to contain an interesting thought. It is clearly the product of a wide-ranging intelligence in possession of a refined analytic sensibility, a first-rate historical education and a generous spirit. And one wonders how someone who knows so much could have written it.

The New York Sun, November 2007

A review of: A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today.

In the wake of the First World War, leaders of the Western powers — Britain, France, Italy, and America — assembled in Paris to redraw the maps of the world. From the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, they meatballed together Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia; they invented Iraq and Jordan ex nihilo. They ignored Indochina. They knew little about the religions, ethnic loyalties, and national aspirations of the people affected by their decisions. Had they devoted a tenth the mental energy to understanding these issues that they did to their vigorous carnal exertions, argues David A. Andelman in A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today (John Wiley and Sons, 326 pages, $25.95), the world today would be a safer place.

Washington Post, May 2007

ISTANBUL: Bulent and Dogu are easygoing young Turks and unlikely authoritarians. Bulent just returned from the hippie trail in Southeast Asia, and Dogu's son is named Cosmos. But when the military recently threatened to settle Turkey's disputed presidential elections, they approved, suggesting just how hard it is to sort Turks into familiar political categories.

New York Sun, May 2007

According to the dust jacket, church historian Philip Jenkins intends God's Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe's Religious Crisis ( Oxford University Press, 289 pages, $28) to function as a calming salve, a reassuring counterpoint to "overheated rhetoric" about Christian Europe's imminent collapse under the weight of secularization and Muslim immigration. This may have been his intention, but it is not his achievement. His achievement — and it is considerable — is to have compiled one of the most patient and comprehensive cases extant for utter pessimism about Europe's future. To see this, one need only change the dust jacket and cross out his repeated reassurances that what he notes is not really so alarming as it seems. There is no need even to change the title.

New York Sun, February 2007

THERE HAS OF late been a tendency to interpret the opinions of Ayaan Hirsi Ali — known, like the Bengal Tiger, for being fantastic to look at, exotic in a frightening way, and highly endangered — by appealing to what one might call her Torquemada Complex. This was most famously evoked by Timothy Garton Ash, who remarked in the pages of the New York Review of Books that "[h]aving in her youth been tempted by Islamist fundamentalism … Ms. Hirsi Ali is now a brave, outspoken, slightly simplistic Enlightenment fundamentalist." While this comment is silly — What, after all, does an "Enlightenment fundamentalist" believe? That the oeuvre of Thomas Paine is entirely literal and infallible? — I should in fairness note that the rest of Mr. Garton Ash's essay on Europe and Islam is sensible, thoughtful, and lucid. But somehow his least felicitous remarks came in conjunction with similar observations made by Ian Buruma in "Murder in Amsterdam" (2006) to represent the received European wisdom about Ms. Hirsi Ali. Despite the exemplary sanity of her campaign for the rights of Muslim women, she is frequently said to be not quite right in the head, and despite the obvious intelligence she projects, she is often implied to be somehow, you know, a bit thick.

New York Sun, March 2007

AMERICANS WITH A friendly disposition toward France have many reasons to hope for Nicolas Sarkozy's victory in the presidential elections in April. The interior minister and leader of the Union for a Popular Movement is the most dynamic and exciting politician France has produced in years. He is a loyal admirer of America, which he calls "the greatest democracy in the world." He has promised to overhaul the sclerotic French social welfare state and reform France's second-rate educational system. Unlike his chief rival, the pretty airhead Ségolène Royal, he is not a tired socialist who declares money the "lifelong enemy."

New York Sun, March 2007

IT TAKES ON average 62 working days, 16 separate documents, and the equivalent of $5,000 to acquire the permits to open a business in Italy. In France, it takes 53 days, 15 documents, and $4,000. In America, it takes a mere four days, four documents, and $166. In The Future of Europe (MIT Press, 172 pages, $24.95), economists Alberto Alesina and Francesco Giavazzi provide a wealth of such examples to buttress their argument that Europe is on a state-subsidized train to economic and political irrelevance, but as anyone who has tried to do business in Europe knows, those statistics alone are all you really need.