I received a flyer from Interlink Publishers/Olive Branch Press (a very good publisher - I've reviewed some of their books in the past) for a mammoth book the war in Iraq, World Tribunal on Iraq: Making the Case Against War. It's 574 pages (eep!) and includes dozens of essays from all sorts of people on the war. Here's the description:

This book is that testimony, expertly introduced by activist Müge Gürsoy Sökmen, Booker Prize winner and peace activist Arundhati Roy, and the noted human rights scholar Richard Falk. As Roy notes in her introduction, this is an attempt to “correct the record—to document the history of the war not from the point of view of the victors but of the temporarily—and I repeat the word “temporarily�—vanquished.� Every aspect of the war is examined—from its legality, to the effects of cluster bombs and depleted uranium, to its ecological impact, to the history of US and British military interventions of Iraq, to the role of international institutions and corporations in the occupation, to the use of torture, and to strategies of resistance.

An introduction by Arundhati Roy - I feel like I should read everything she writes because it matters so much - it is writing about the world that changes the world. She records things so they can not be denied or disappeared. And clearly she worries that the truth of this war is going to disappear into rhetoric over the coming years; become a history about the definitions of torture and WMDs and insurgency.

How can we believe that water boarding is torture, agree that the US should not engage in torture and then refuse to discuss water boarding while discussing torture and later argue that only nonspecified bad things are done to bad people? Is it only torture if it is done to us? Is it only torture if we aren't doing it? And how did discussions of torture devolve into the same kind of conversations we were having ten years ago about sex in the Oval Office?

How did we get here?

Big questions that have no answers or at least not answers that I can come up with. And then I get this advance notice on a book about Iraq and opposition to the war and essays on what was illegal about it and morally wrong about it and the history of western intervention in the region and the use of torture and on and on and on.

And I wonder if I can read this - if I can sit down and read it all and then somehow write about it. I just don't know if I can - and honestly, I wonder if a single person in this country would want to read my thoughts on it if I did.

A long day today, and I don't know why. I think I'll review some picture books and somehow get my brain to rest.

Another adult book for the You Should Read This Awards - PopCo by Scarlett Thomas. I really had to think about this one but one of the subplots concerns a search for pirate treasure which I know would appeal to teens and the main storyline, about how corporations brand and market useless items to consumers - primarily kids and teens - should wake up more than one complacent reader. I think it would work for the high school crowd. What adult book do you think a teenager would love?