Books in Brief
Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation That's Changing Your World: Why You Must Know How the Blogosphere Is Smashing the Old Media Monopoly and Giving Individuals Power in the Marketplace of Ideas by Hugh Hewitt (Nelson, 225 pp., $19.99). Maybe someone will go after me on grounds of conflict of interest for writing about this little volume. So I'll confess to having been a friend of Hugh Hewitt's for more than twenty years, since he clerked on the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C.
Since I knew Hugh years before he became hughhewitt.com, I can testify that back in the old days Hugh read big books, and naps were not unusual. He had a toe or two in the media, but his big media gig was in the slow lane of a public television show in Los Angeles.
Now I can't think of Hugh without thinking of speed, for speed it is--speed at the keyboard--that you need to make an impact as a blogger, which Hugh became three years ago. Hugh still has much else to do: He's got a radio talk show, still practices law, teaches in law school, and writes weekly columns (including for us, at weeklystandard.com). But it's in the blogosphere (explained in Blog) that Hugh has hit his most rapid stride, for there he posts as fast as news breaks.
Blog has the longest subtitle I've seen in a while, at least for a book published in a recent century, but it's all true to the book. For Blog is about the impact of the blogosphere upon the old news media. More broadly, it is about how "every single information hierarchy is under siege." It becomes a book for business executives, pastors--just about everyone, since all of us require information of one kind or another. Not surprisingly, one way to help yourself in this new era, Hugh says, is to become a blogger, like him.
Hugh Hewitt may be what the Wall Street Journal has called him--"the unofficial historian of the blogging movement." But for sure he's its lead evangelist. "You have to read this book very quickly," he writes. Quickly, so you can go online.
--Terry Eastland
My Father's Rifle: A Childhood in Kurdistan by Hiner Saleem (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 99 pp., $17). Since the Iraq war, the history of Iraqi Kurds under Saddam Hussein and their movement for independence has taken on particular relevance. Though that makes Hiner Saleem's memoir of his childhood in 1970s Iraq timely, it would be a shame if this charming little book garnered attention only on that account. Saleem is an accomplished filmmaker (his film Vodka Lemon was a critical success), and My Father's Rifle, his first book, is as gently compelling as his films. He writes crisply, with economy and restraint, which allows him to treat several themes in his childhood completely and without sentimentality.
The son of an Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga fighter, Azad (as Saleem renames himself) describes a childhood dominated by the patriotic obligations of his family and his nation. As Cold War politics cynically force the Kurds under the power of the Baath party in Iraq, Azad's father futilely hopes for the best. Meanwhile, Azad struggles with his father's wishes as he nurtures artistic interests.
As a personal recollection, the book has more to do with how Saleem came of age in this tumultuous period than with the tumults themselves. And yet, he manages both to give a tender childhood portrait and to render the political circumstances behind that childhood. In the relation with his father, Saleem provides both the excitement and sadness of a child outgrowing his parent as well as a portrayal of the naive Kurds' captivity to Baath oppression. The charm of this wonderfully compact book lies in Saleem's ability to present the child's perspective while subtly conveying the wisdom of the man whom that child became. The result is a poignant memoir even more compelling than its background politics.
--Daniel Sullivan