What We’re Reading

Mike Boyer

• Virginia Quarterly Review, Fall 2007, special issue on “South America in the 21st Century.” VQR has tapped dozens of the continent’s best writers in an effort to paint a picture of where Latin America stands today—from the street level—including drug wars in Colombia, protests in Caracas, and transsexuals in Lima. It’s an extraordinary effort that deserves kudos.

Christine Chen

• Bartle Bull (real name) has an essay in Prospect titled “Mission Accomplished,” in which he says that the large, important questions about Iraq have been resolved positively and that the country is unified, has embraced democracy, and avoided civil war. Although there is certainly still violence in the country, he adds, it’s largely criminal and not ideological, and it’s local rather than national or transnational. Um, I call bull on that. But still, he does make some interesting points.

David Francis

• Horseman, Pass By, by Larry McMurtry. If you liked No Country for Old Men (the book or the movie), you’ll like McMurtry. He writes about the conflict between the “old” West (cattlemen) and the “new” West (oilmen) in Texas after the end of the second World War.

Blake Hounshell

• Global Risk: Business Success in Turbulent Times, by Seán Cleary and Theirry Malleret. Stirring prose it’s not, but the book’s timing is impeccable.

Prerna Mankad

• Nouriel Roubini’s Global EconoMonitor. Roubini expands on his recent FP Web exclusive and paints a frightening picture of an approaching U.S. recession. It’s not only “inevitable in the next few months,” the NYU professor writes, but it may well be a “meltdown of the financial system of a severity and magnitude like we have never observed before.”