Since his acclaimed first novel, The Naked and the Dead, was published exactly 50 years ago, Norman Mailer has been at or near the center of our literary stage. His novels, essays, short stories, criticism, and political and social reportage have earned him much recognition and admiration, including the National Book Award and two Pulitzer Prizes. At the same time, his work has often been controversial, due to his choice of (and approach to) subject matter. One perceptive critic, Louis Menand, wrote in 1985 that “Mailer’s life and times are [his] great subject and if we were to string together his omnibus collections . . . one would have a history hard to beat for completeness and impossible to beat for moral nuance.” Others have called him outrageous, combative, eogcentric, even distasteful. Mailer, age 75, now allows us the chance to finally decide for ourselves with the publication of The Time of Our Time, a collection which represents the entire range of the author’s work.

This generous anthology holds Mailer’s selections of his best writing. In over 1,200 pages, the excerpts and pieces appear in the order of the year they refer to, rather than the year they were written. In this, his 31st book, Mailer places fiction, narrative nonfiction, interviews, and other writings side by side. With a body of work arranged in this manner, comparisons and observations are easily made. Striking is the sheer range of Mailer’s intellectual curiosity and his willingness to pursue difficult topics. Among them, the 1967 march on the Pentagon to protest the war in Vietnam, the 1968 and 1972 political conventions, the CIA, Watergate, the lives of Maria and Lee Harvey Oswald, Marilyn Monroe, boxing, modern art, sex, feminism, ancient Egypt, and the life of Jesus. Mailer’s keen powers of observation and insight enable him to bring a unique sense of immediacy to whatever he’s doing; there is a realistic, human understanding of all of his subjects. Also remarkable is his willingness to try different genres. As he writes, “if there is one fell rule in art, it is that repetition kills the soul.” This has not been a problem for Mailer, as is evidenced in this volume. I can confidently assert that there is much in The Time of Our Time to admire. Likewise, there is much sure to offend and disturb. Commenting on his goal as a writer, Mailer said in an 1958 interview “that the final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary to exacerbate the moral consciousness of people.” At this goal, Mailer has succeeded with a body of work that is truly a testament to a prolific career.

Reviewed by Roger Bishop.

he political face of Europe changed more between 1989 and 1999 than in any other decade since the period between 1939 and 1949. With the end of the Cold War and the fall of Communism, new opportunities arose in Europe for freedom and democracy. But these were often accompanied by difficult economic challenges and sensitive political problems such as what role the former Communist leaders should play. In the former Yugoslavia there was the ultimate nightmare of war, ethnic cleansing, and thousands of refugees. How can we in the West understand what has happened in that part of the world? For many of us, the most authoritative and readable guide has been Timothy Garton Ash. For the last 20 years his incisive reporting and insightful analysis in The New York Review of Books and such books as The Uses of Adversity and The Magic Lantern have illuminated complex issues and introduced us to a broad range of diverse personalities. Ash is both an Oxford historian and a sharp-eyed journalist with a passion for accuracy. His magnificent new collection, History of the Present, offers an abundance of riches. There are reflective analytical pieces that help the reader understand events in historical perspective. He notes, for example, that if a diplomatic observer had gone to sleep after the Congress of Berlin in 1878 and awoke now, there would be a few surprises, but much would be familiar. “In the so-called Contact Group, he would see representatives of the same powers France, Britain, Germany, and Russia pursuing their national interests through their national diplomats and national armies. . . .” He continues, “It begins to look almost as if the whole twentieth-century European story of postimperial federations and communist multinational states was merely an interruption of a longer, underlying process of separating and molding peoples into nation-states.” Other pieces offer the immediacy of encounters with individuals whose lives have been transformed by events. One particularly memorable person is Ash’s friend Helena Luczywo in Warsaw. When he first met her in 1980 she was deeply involved in preparing a samizdat (underground) magazine allied with Solidarity and the workers’ revolution. “Today she is the key figure behind the most successful newspaper in the whole of postcommunist Europe,” the author writes. Why did she initially get involved as a political activist in the 1970s? “Oh, I don’t know. Just a sense of decency,” she told Ash.

In 1992, Ash visited former East German Communist Party leader Erich Honecker in prison. Honecker relates that he had often spoken on the phone with West German chancellors Helmut Schmidt and Helmut Kohl. “A quarter century of divided Germany’s tragic, complex history,” Ash writes, “is, it seems to me, concentrated in this one pathetic moment: the defiant, mortally sick old man in his prison pajamas, the dog-eared card with the direct number to Chancellor Kohl.” Ash, who describes himself as “an agnostic liberal,” has lavish praise for Pope John Paul II, whom he describes as “simply the greatest world leader of our times.” None of the other credible candidates for this designation Gorbachev, Kohl, Vaclav Havel, Lech Walesa, Margaret Thatcher matches the pope’s “unique combination of concentrated strength, intellectual consistency, human warmth, and simple goodness.” By emphasizing the inalienable rights of each human being, the pope has supported the cause of those without economic, political, or cultural power.

Anyone who wants to better understand the last decade in Central Europe will benefit from reading this stimulating and perceptive book.

Roger Bishop is a regular contributor to BookPage.

Hal Crowther writes prose the way Stevie Ray Vaughan played guitar: with inexplicable passion, punctuated by explosive bursts of finger picking laid down over an inviting carpet of swampy soul. There’s not much dancing around on stage. You either get it or you don’t.

Most of the 28 essays in this book were first published in The Oxford American, with others appearing in the Independent Weekly and the Spectator. They are, by necessity, economical and straight to the point. Magazine and newspaper editors evaluate prose by the inch, not by the depth of thought in the prose. Some of the best essays in this collection are based on actual events into which the writer has wandered without much expectation. “The Last Wolverine” is about his literary idol, James Dickey. In 1,500 words or less, he builds him up into a literary lion, then tears him down with an account of the poet’s visit to the office of Time magazine, where Crowther was employed as an editor. Dickey spoke to an audience of would-be poets and accentuated his lecture with an inappropriate comment of a sexual nature to one of the women present, then grabbed Crowther in a drunken headlock that very nearly turned out his lights.

In “From Auschiwitz to Alabama,” he bemoans the horrible medical experiments that were performed on unsuspecting black Alabamians by the federal government, but he resents that people outside the South would blame Alabama instead of the federal government. Writes Crowther: “The U.

S. Public Health Service was not controlled by Alabama racists, or in collaboration with them. These sweet doctors were most attracted, it appears, by a passive, impoverished rural population with no tradition of standing up for itself.” By the time you get through reading this collection of essays you realize that Crowther has a love-hate relationship with the South that is as complex (and bizarre) as that of any fictional character created by William Faulkner or Tennessee Williams. You’ll want to pat him on the back just as often as you’ll want to put a headlock on him with the intent of turning out his lights.

A journalist’s edgy enthusiasms I tend to measure all literary journalists against Joseph Mitchell, who was a literary journalist before anyone and certainly any self-respecting journalist ever thought of putting the two words together. This is no more fair than measuring a novelist against Mark Twain or Henry James, I concede, but when you find your rock in the firmament you tend to cling to it.

Ron Rosenbaum, I’m happy to say while mixing my metaphors, is more than fit to touch the hem of Mitchell’s garment. Their writing differs, of course. Mitchell sinks more completely, almost with abandon, into his subjects, and Rosenbaum, though he doubtless would deny it, sometimes writes with a sense of knowingness edging into mockery that is foreign to The Master. But all in all, Rosenbaum’s collection, The Secret Parts of Fortune: Three Decades of Intense Investigations and Edgy Enthusiasms, is a worthy bookshelf companion to Mitchell’s McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon and Joe Gould’s Secret.

Rosenbaum prefers the term “narrative nonfiction” to literary journalism, which, as he correctly says, sounds too highfalutin. In a foreword, filmmaker Errol Morris himself something of a narrative nonfictionist nails Rosenbaum pretty squarely by describing his “grand scheme . . . to squash grand schemes, to defeat our natural tendency to retreat into easy answers and bogus explanations.” Morris refers to Rosenbaum’s metaphor of “the lost safe-deposit box” a device that Rosenbaum used in his Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil “a metaphor for truth that exists but may be beyond our grasp.” Well, truth, schmooth sometimes you just want to have fun. One of the book’s chief pleasures is learning about all sorts of quirky ideas and the oddball characters who believe in them.

There is, for instance, the Rev. Willard Fuller, a dental faith healer with the inspiring message, “The Lord’s out there fillin’ teeth!” Indeed he is, and the good news is that he doesn’t require an actual laying on of hands to fill cavities, straighten crooked teeth, or grow new ones. It seems the Lord also works through the U.

S. mail.

Then there’s Robin Leach of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, much more high-profile and prosperous than the Rev. Fuller but, in his own way, no less deranged. Asserting that he documents what he calls, without a scintilla of irony, the “passion for privacy” of the rich and famous, Leach grows indignant when Rosenbaum suggests that Lifestyles could be considered “porn for the wealth-obsessed.” Not deranged, but certainly monomaniacal, is Ralph Waldo Emerson III in his quest to unseat Charlie Douglass, the King of Canned Laughter, with “real” canned laughter. Trouble is, he’s too good. His canned laughter does sound more natural than Douglass’s, but the networks don’t like it because it’s too different from Douglass’s more artificial-sounding laughs, which audiences have grown used to.

And deranged on an empyrean scale are the scholars of the Dead Sea Scrolls, or at least many of them. In fact, there appears to have been some sort of Curse of the Scrolls that has driven a disproportionate number of scholars to drink, depression, or religious dementia. Those who weren’t crazy were consumed by ambition or a Fred C. Dobbs-like passion for secrecy. “The Riddle of the Scrolls” is one of the best pieces in the book. In it, Rosenbaum gives a brief rundown of the loony crusades to find the Ark of the Covenant and thereby forcibly bring on the Messiah, Judgment Day, or some other calamitous cosmic event satisfying to the souls of moonstruck religionists of various stripes. But in the course of his research, I wish he had learned that it is the Book of Revelation, not Revelations.

This is not just a litany of wackos, far from it. All sorts of people and topics are covered, from Mr. Whipple of “don’t squeeze the Charmin” fame to Yale’s Skull and Bones society. He gives a nice appreciation of Ben Hecht, one of the first Americans to raise his voice about the Holocaust when it was happening, and one of Murray Kempton, “our Gibbon.” “The Catcher in the Driveway” is another superior piece that stands out from an excellent bunch. It is about not just his attempt to find J.

D. Salinger’s home, and Salinger himself, if possible, but about explaining the meaning of Salinger’s isolation and silence and “the compelling seductiveness of the silence.” In the latter goal, at least, he succeeds.

Roger K. Miller is a freelance writer in Wisconsin.

ÊCarl Hiaasen, a columnist for the Miami Herald, has the type of job many of us wish we had: He gets paid to complain. What does he rail against? Injustice, greed, crime, pollution, guns, you name it. In that, he’s like an opinionated neighbor, up on current events and unafraid to share his views.

Hiaasen, who has also written several best-selling novels, including Strip Tease, Tourist Season, and Lucky You, writes on issues dealing almost exclusively with Florida. It might seem that this type of writing would be too parochial, but after reading a few pieces it is sadly apparent that while the names of the cities and personalities may change, the outcome is frequently the same. Unfortunately, it seems most municipalities can boast of corrupt, lazy, or merely stupid politicians; and the situations the author describes, such as inadequate social services, could also apply. It’s clear Hiaasen is a champion of the underdog, a knight in the battle against the dimwits, half-wits, and nitwits who manage to rise to undeserved levels of power within the halls of government. Going through these columns, it also appears that the cliche is proved: the more things change the more they stay the same. Hiaasen’s writings span almost 20 years, and the same topics keep popping up (i.e. drugs, guns, crime, and the ubiquitous political problems). It would seem that some people don’t get much smarter over time.

One of the problems with a collection such as this is the tendency for overkill. Choosing columns dealing with the same subjects again and again may be of interest to regional readers, but they might lose their appeal to a national audience.

Whether mourning the death of a state treasure (in this case an eight-foot, half-blind alligator) or suggesting that people actually be paid to leave the state, thus easing its over-crowding woes, this thought provocateur blends the pundit’s tools of insight, foresight, and hindsight to try to get readers to share their sense of outrage. Sometimes it works, as when Hiaasen tells the sad tale of murdered policemen, calling for the politicians to display some backbone in tough gun-control legislation; sometimes it doesn’t, when he writes of certain environmental injustices unique to the southeast.

Readers of Kick Ass will appreciate Hiaasen’s sincerity and moral courage. He is unafraid to speak his mind, knowing full well that he may incur the wrath of those he writes about. ¦ Ron Kaplan is a writer from Montclair, New Jersey.

The best of damn near everything Sometimes it’s nice to have someone else do the work for you. You can’t read everything. Various yearly anthologies try to save readers the trouble of filtering out the lesser nominees for our disposable income and spare time. Prominent among them are Houghton Mifflin’s Best Of series.

The Best American Essays 1998, edited this time by acclaimed practitioner Cynthia Ozick, is the feast of fine writing we’ve come to expect from this series. The 25 contributors range from the venerable William Maxwell on Nearing Ninety to John Updike’s lovely meditation on the art of cartooning. The Best American Short Stories 1998 ($27.50, 0395875153), guest-edited by Garrison Keillor, includes 20 stories by authors such as Meg Wolitzer, Carol Anshaw, and, inevitably, John Updike. Each of these stories surprised and delighted me, Keillor writes. He isn’t alone.

A newer series, The Best American Mystery Stories 1998 ($27.50, 0395835860), edited by the alphabetical Sue Grafton, offers 20 forays into crime and punishment. The authors range from old standbys like Edward D. Hoch, John Lutz, and Donald Westlake, to surprising additions, such as Jay McInerney.

Those were the days, my friend I am rare among American males, I venture to say, in liking to hang out clothes on a clothesline. It was traditionally a female task, but I like it. It is evidence of work accomplished, as Barbara Holland says in Wasn’t the Grass Greener: A Curmudgeon’s Fond Memories. It was ritual, she writes. It was what corporations now call job satisfaction. Alas, in this age when what corporations call job satisfaction is anything but, the operative tense of the verb is past. Now I cannot hang out clothes. A whimsical fate has landed us in one of those spanking new, soulless suburban developments where no one, male or female, hangs out clothes. Other than my wife, probably no one else wants to. It would be taken as a sign that you are too cheap to use the dryer, and the hanging clothes would get in the way of the kids on their motorized three-wheelers. Perhaps it’s even forbidden.

Holland writes, in 33 witty and thoughtful essays, not so much about things we have, like soulless suburbs, but about things we haven’t any longer, like clotheslines, that contribute to the soullessness. She argues that in losing them we lost a part of ourselves.

Though there is scarcely a dull page in the book, the chapters on abstract topics, such as idleness and worries, are better or at least more intellectually engaging than those on concrete items, such as radiators and desks.

For instance, in civilized places, she says, idleness, once the prerequisite for religion, poetry, philosophy, and other thought, has become a character flaw, and in America we’ve managed to stamp it out almost completely. Work stole our days, but entertainment ate everything left over. She writes about the homogeneity that is draining out of our culture, and has the temerity to suggest that diversity is not exactly a force of nature: The unnaturalness of diversity is obvious from the number of children’s books trying to sell it. This remark will have the thought police knocking at her door.

Some chapters those on psychiatry and war, particularly are less convincing than others. Each reader will have his or her own disagreements with some items. I take her point on the lack of heroes, but on this I am with Bertolt Brecht, who pitied not the nation that lacks them, but the one that needs them. And each of us could add to her list: personally, I yearn for the time when retired politicians did not supplement their munificent public pensions by shilling in TV commercials.

But probably the most important loss she discusses is childhood. Holland is not the first to report it missing Neil Postman talked about it years ago but she has some interesting reports on what it was last seen wearing. Primarily it wore a more carefree attitude. Children’s lives used to be freer, less supervised. Their recreation was not organized by adults into leagues, teams, and clubs. It wasn’t even called recreation. It was called play.

Children played with one another, big kids, little kids, higgledy-piggledy, and what they learned they learned from each other, for good or ill. Nothing that involved a grown-up telling us what to do, and how, and when, could possibly be called Ôplay,’ Holland writes. In a mere quarter-century of adult interference, games that kids not adults had passed down from generation to generation for centuries, like Ring-around-a-rosy and London Bridge, have all but disappeared.

The author does not make the connection, and I’m not sure I can, either, but somehow I feel that this disappearance is connected to her comment that personal prosperity has come to be the measure of our worth as human beings. We won’t be good so let’s be rich. In similar spirit, Florence King, another insightful essayist, said we live in the Republic of Nice, where, since we no longer believe in personal immortality, we lust after fleeting fame.

You do not have to be over 50 to enjoy this splendid, subversive little book. Its societal concerns transcend age groupings. Consider that four years ago, David Gelernter, a professor of computer science in his forties, wrote a book, 1939: The Lost World of the Fair, in which he argued that his parents’ generation ordered life better. And that Gelernter was one of those severely wounded by an explosive device mailed by Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, also no geezer, who had his own quarrels with our society.

Roger Miller is a freelance writer. He can be reached at roger@bookpage.com.

More Matter: Essays and Criticism By John Updike Alfred A. Knopf, $35 ISBN 0375406301 Review by Roger Bishop John Updike is one of our most respected and honored, as well as prolific, novelists and short story writers. He also has published several volumes of poetry. But, he says, I set out to be a magazine writer, a wordsmith as the profession was understood in the industrial first half of the century, and I like seeing my name in what they used to call Ôhard type.’ He fell in love with the New Yorker when he was a child and, for over 40 years, has been a frequent contributor. Appearing under the same Rea Irvin-designed title-type and department logos as White and Thurber and Cheever and those magical cartoons was for me a dream come true. It still is. Though he has also written for other publications, most of Updike’s nonfiction has appeared in that magazine. Every eight years or so he gathers together his periodical pieces and other occasional writings and publishes them in a book. The fifth collection, More Matter: Essays and Criticism, is, like the earlier ones, a diverse cornucopia of riches. In this, his 50th book, Updike’s wide-ranging, intellectual curiosity matched with his lucid and graceful prose make a potent combination. (An earlier such collection, Hugging the Shore, received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.) A few of the many subjects discussed are: New York as reflected in American writing since 1920; the adventure of installing a burglar alarm; haircuts of different kinds (a piece that attracted more mail than any magazine writing he has ever published); the lives of Isaac Newton, Helen Keller, and Abraham Lincoln; Mickey Mouse; the art of Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol; and appreciations of three New Yorker stalwarts who were paternally kind to me : William Shawn, Brendan Gill, and William Maxwell.

Of particular interest are Updike’s observations on writers and writing. He notes the competitive nature of the literary life, where writers eye each other with a vigorous jealousy and suspicion. They are swift to condemn and dismiss, as a means of keeping the field from getting too crowded. It does not surprise us, then, when he says: A writer, I have found, takes less comfort in being praised than in a colleague’s being panned. In reviewing a biography of Graham Greene, he generalizes: The trouble with literary biographies, perhaps, is that they mainly testify to the long worldly corruption of a life, as documented deeds and days and disappointments pile up, and cannot convey the unearthly human innocence that attends, in the perpetual present tense of living, the self that seems the real one. Whether the literary work under consideration is by a contemporary U.

S. or a European or South American author, or an author who wrote decades ago, Updike’s criticism is often astute and compelling. He wears his learning lightly, but he is familiar with the author’s other writings and her or his life. Although often generous with his praise, Updike can offer devastating criticism. Writing about a late work of Edith Wharton: Comedy is, perhaps, a natural mode for aged authors. The momentousness of being alive the majestic awfulness is felt most keenly by the young, and human existence comes to seem, as death nears and perspective lengthens, gossamer-light, such stuff as dreams are made on. On Edmund Wilson’s journals: The journals are not quite literature, yet they have an unpreening frankness and an energetic curiosity that stimulates our appetite for literature. Ê ÊAgain showing keen insight into the work of American writers, Updike says, . . . Faulkner, at his most eccentric and willfully windy, thought he knew what he was doing. Dreiser will never be, so muddied is his prose at the source, a model of stylistic integrity. John Updike is indeed a thoughtful wordsmith, a literary craftsman worthy to walk in the footsteps of those illustrious New Yorker writers he admired from afar many years ago. ¦ Roger Bishop is a regular contributor to BookPage.

Last October, on the occasion of John Kenneth Galbraith’s 90th birthday, he was honored with a reception and dinner at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. At that time he was presented with a festschrift of essays by, among others, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Derek Bok, and Robert Heilbroner. That work, under the title Between Friends: Perspectives on John Kenneth Galbraith, has just been published. Through it we gain a better understanding of the person and his economic and political ideas.

To Carlos Fuentes, Galbraith is a Quixote of the Plains, an economist whose subject is no less than concrete human beings, their well-being, their health, their education, their hope . . . Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., notes that for Galbraith theory . . . is not an end in itself. Its function . . . is to explain, illuminate, and, if possible, improve the conditions of life. Politics and government in this perspective are not digressions for economists but are central to their work. John Kenneth Galbraith has been one of the most notable public intellectuals of the last 40 years, or since the publication of his still relevant book The Affluent Society. He is known for his many other books, including The New Industrial State and The Nature of Mass Poverty. In one of my favorite essays, Galbraith’s son Peter discusses how his father sought a role in the major foreign policy questions of the Kennedy administration. Contrary to the wishes of the Secretary of State, Ambassador Galbraith expressed his views directly to the President. The views, in hindsight, were good and prescient, including in particular Galbraith’s early opposition to U.

S. military involvement in Vietnam. Peter closes by noting that the greatest and most common vice of politicians and bureaucrats is cowardice. John Kenneth Galbraith is the most courageous man I have known.

Virtually since the end of World War II foreign writers have been discovering and reporting on the New Germany in books usually with that term (or the New Germans ) in the title. One of the most recent, in 1996, was The Politics of Memory: Looking for Germany in the New Germany, by the New Yorker’s Jane Kramer, but there have been many others in preceding decades by equally notable writers, such as Alistair Horne, John Dornberg, and David Marsh.

You’d think after more than a half-century the topic, not to mention the country and its inhabitants, would have put on a few years. But no, all three are evergreen, and newer Germans keep coming along to be discovered by people like Frederick Kempe, whose Father/Land: A Personal Search for the New Germany is a worthy successor to all those searches for now-not-so-new Germanys.

Kempe, who is the editor and associate publisher of the Wall Street Journal Europe and founding editor of the Central European Economic Review and has covered German affairs as a journalist for 20 years, has, as his title and subtitle indicate, a stake beyond the professional in this. This personal element helps make Father/Land immensely readable. Both his mother and father were German immigrants, and in his search for the new Germany he unearths some old family skeletons.

In going through papers after the death of his father, a World War II U.

S. Army veteran who had come to the United States in 1927, the author discovers strong evidence that he was an admirer of Hitler, an anti-Semite, and a racist. A Jewish friend tells him not to magnify the significance of this, that it is little more than what was standard at the time. However, he also learns of another family member’s actions whose significance is beyond magnification.

This man, a great-uncle who remained in Germany after the war, had long been the subject of family rumors. No one knew the enormity of his monstrous acts until Kempe, by diligent poring through German archives, learned he was a vicious, sadistic Nazi thug and very probably a murderer of the Jews who came under his control. The man was never prosecuted, and he died a pious worker for the Mormon Church to which most Kempe family members belonged.

These revelations add a personal strand to what is the central thread of this book, as of all the earlier books on New Germany: the burden of guilt the country carries for the Holocaust. For various reasons Kempe believes the current generation is dealing with this burden better than their parents and grandparents did (or indeed could). He also provides a useful perspective on it by examining the position of Germany’s Turkish population.

Most thinking Germans realize that in killing its Jews, Germany killed a big part of itself. Pre-war Jews were proud of being German, fought for their country, and added distinction to its literary, musical, and scientific reputation out of proportion to their numbers. It is ironic, and not exactly nice, that some Germans now yearn for their Jews, given the Turks.

Because the Turks, who at 2.5 million far outnumber the Jews at their height, are not assimilating the way Jews did (or wanted to do). Moreover, many look for their identity not to Germany or even Turkey, but to Islam. Ironies abound: what with the touchy relationship between Islam and Jews, this leads Germans to fear that, should this Islamic trend intensify, the Jews in Germany will again not feel secure, and leave.

Overall, though, Kempe is enthusiastic and optimistic about the country’s present and future. It has adopted the American economic model, which is clearly no sin in the eyes of a writer connected with the Wall Street Journal organization, albeit most Germans prefer more of a Sozialstaat (social welfare state). It has adopted American-style democracy, though Germans fret over the stability of a borrowed political system.

And it has unquestionably adopted American ways. Unlike the French, Germans readily incorporate American English into their language. They cannot seem to get enough of American pop culture. This has gone so far as a rip-off of David Letterman’s TV show, Late Night with Harald Schmidt, right down to loony street conversations and mocking of the audience.

In other words, the Germans are becoming less German. Whether their becoming more American is as good a thing as the author seems to believe is a matter for each reader to decide.

Roger Miller is a freelance writer. He can be reached at roger@bookpage.com.

This is Robert D. Kaplan’s vision of America’s future: a collection of city-states where political power and decision making are concentrated locally. Rather than set broad policy and enforce law, the federal government would provide a protective shield against such hazards as global terrorists and computer hackers and supply aid such as specialized military units for floods and earthquakes. This new political arrangement is what Kaplan describes as an empire wilderness, vast, remote, decentralized. And this outlook forms the cornerstone for Kaplan’s new book, An Empire Wilderness.

It is best described as a political travelogue, one pilgrim’s impressions formed while progressing down his country’s interstates and back roads. The journey is set in the West, where Kaplan shakes his East Coast shackles and witnesses America’s still-open, still-developing vistas. He travels some of the same trails as Kerouac. But where Kerouac wrote for the Beat Generation, Kaplan writes for a Baby Boom Generation which approaches the 21st century harboring worries about old age and the future of its offspring.

Kaplan, a contributing editor of The Atlantic Monthly, has established a niche for himself with this style of writing. He traveled through Bosnia and made controversial political observations in his best-selling Balkan Ghosts. And he roamed from West Africa to Central and South East Asia to pen The Ends of the Earth. In An Empire Wilderness, Kaplan visits such places as Fort Levenworth, Kansas, Orange County, California, Tucson, Arizona, Nogales, Mexico, and Vancouver, Canada, developing some intriguing insights into America’s future: Foreign policy will, over the decades, be increasingly influenced by the military, as war, peacekeeping, famine relief, and the like grow too technical and complex for civilian managers to control. Despite attempts to curb the number of immigrants from Latin America and Asia, large scale immigration may have to continue, if for no other reason than to provide an army of younger workers to support America’s retirees. Efforts to revive decaying urban downtowns are threatened by suburbanization and computerization. No one needs to go [downtown] to shop, see a movie, or go to a fancy restaurant. And the residents can be hooked up to the world from their homes. Thus, the essence of An Empire Wilderness is a glimpse at a horizon that Kaplan sees as neither too bright, nor too bleak. Recalling Rome, Athens, and other empires that have risen and fallen, Kaplan somewhat cryptically predicts that the changes being experienced in America are part of an evolution toward finality. The next passage will be our most difficult as a nation, he writes, and it will be our last. John T. Slania is a writer in Chicago, Illinois.