Malcolm Gladwell Investigates "The Outliers"

(Originally published in the Newark Star-Ledger in November 2008)

In Malcolm Gladwell’s wonderful new book, “The Outliers: The Story of Success”(Little, Brown, $28), the New Yorker writer explores the meaning of success, and how the outliers, the human anomalies in society like billionaire Bill Gates or the members of the Beatles, become the successes they are, how the community we are in forms us, why timing is essential and how class has a direct effect on the success or failure of even the most brilliant people.

Like his mega-bestsellers “The Tipping Point” and “Blink,” Gladwell pulls out fascinating scenarios, such as why most successful Canadian hockey players are born in January, February or March, and why the 10,000 hours that two teenagers named Lennon and McCartney spent playing in German strip clubs in Hamburg led to their explosive success as the Beatles, and why some of the most powerful lawyers in New York were born in the 1930s and were the children of Jewish garment workers. Gladwell takes the readers on brilliant tangents that are then carefully assembled into the meaning of what success is and how it happens.

Gladwell, 45, spoke with freelance writer Dylan Foley at a cafe in New York City.

Q. What was the first part of the book?

A. I guess it was the Jewish lawyers. It was such an obvious thing. All the guys come from a similar background--they were born in the 1930s and their parents were Eastern European immigrants who worked in the garment industry. I wondered how the culture put them at an advantage.

Q. Why does it take 10,000 hours to master both rock-and-roll music and computers?

A. I found patterns, consistent patterns, with incredibly long periods of apprenticeship. Whether it was the Beatles playing in the Hamburg clubs for eight hours a day, six or seven days a week, or a teenage Bill Gates sitting in front of a computer screen for thousands of hours, it all seemed to make for powerful insights, which led to the idea of work and its centrality to success.

Q. Why do the birthdates of Canadian hockey players matter?

A. I was trying to address these powerful, contextual idea. How important is individual effort and how large a role does the outside community play in the lives of these young hockey players? I am not introducing totally novel ideas, but in the end the birthdate matters for physical maturity, and that affects the attention the children receive .

Q. In Lewis Terman’s genius study in the 1920s, a researcher thought he could select out the bright men and women who would run society. What were the shocking results?


A. Terman believed that intellect would triumph over everything, that if you have a fine mind, nothing can stop you. Terman found out after years of following his kids that there was a shocking disparity. Most of the poor kids in the study did not do well in later life. It turns out that class plays a big factor in success.

Q. At one point in the book, an upper-middle-class boy, who turns out to be black, is being taught the rules of the class game, while a poor white mother is unable to advocate for her child in the face of authority. What does race show here?

A. I found that it was important to have this racial reversal in the book. Class is more important than race. We know that if we come up from a privileged background, that we get a leg up in life. I came from a privileged environment. My parents , a math professor and a family therapist, did not have money, but we were still privileged, not in material possessions but in knowledge. This knowledge gives you everything in the world. This is actually a liberating idea in this time of economic turmoil. Even if a family loses its money, this does not imperil the child. A child is only impoverished if a parent is not actively involved in the child’s development.

Q. At the end of the book, you address your mother’s escape from rural poverty in Jamaica, which was fostered by both your brilliant grandmother and the social unrest that opened up educational opportunities for her. What was the experience of reporting on your mother?

A. Much of what I’d learned about my mother was during my reporting. I had an oversimplified, romantic view of my mother’s history. Her story was actually much more remarkable in real life.

Francine Prose on Death and Grief by the Lake

(Originally published in the Denver Post in October 2008)

In Francine Prose’s novel “Goldengrove”(HarperCollins, $25), the drowning death of 17-year-old Margaret rips her sister Nico and her parents apart with grief. In her tragic and illuminating new fiction, Prose uses Margaret’s death to explore how a family both fails and succeeds to come to terms with a sudden tragedy.

For Margaret, the summer in upstate New York was her last one before she would have left town for college. A sensual beauty, Margaret was a budding torch singer with a rebel boyfriend and a sister who idolizes her. When she drowns in the lake in front of the family house, the 13-year-old Nico is devastated. The girls’ mother submerges her grief in a addiction to painkillers and the father obsessively researches a 19th century doomsday cult, becoming more and more distant.

For Prose, the first part of the new novel was an interest in precocious girls like the doomed Margaret. “I went to a very conservative high school,” said Prose in an interview at a diner near her Manhattan home. “The nurse checked the girls every day to see that they were wearing stockings. Quite a number of students in the years ahead of me would have fit Margaret’s bill, but there wasn’t one in particular. I was thinking about the experience of looking up to the older girls.”

“I’ve spent a lot of time around teenagers,”noted Prose. “I was one, then I had my two sons. A lot of the experience of writing about Nico was trying to recreate what it was like to be a 13-year-old girl. I reread ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ and I went out and looked at friend’s daughters, to see how they were acting. Kids are often capable of being 14-years old and 40-years old at the same time.”

The 60-year-old Prose is the author “Household Saints” and 13 other books of fiction. The recent publication of “Goldengrove” comes after a busy summer as the president of the PEN American Center, a chapter of the world’s oldest human rights and literary organization. During the Beijing Olympics, her group championed the cause of more than two dozen Chinese writers being persecuted by the Chinese government.

For the setting of the novel, Prose tapped into her own teenage experiences of unsupervised trips with others kids to lake houses, including the exploding teenage hormones.

“In high school, I would visit friends who had lake houses, and there was always something so sexy and unsupervised about the visits,” said Prose. “When friends learned how to drive, we’d take trips to the lake houses. Sometimes the parents were there, and other times they were not.”

The odyssey of “Goldengrove” allowed Prose to explore teenage lies and fabrications. “One of the things the book is about is teenage lying, and like every teenager, I was an expert at it,” she said. “So were the girls in the novel. You were counting on parental distraction. In this case, the parental distraction was a hideous grief that is so intense that the parents can’t be blamed for being distracted. The parents are suffering. Everyone in the novel is suffering. So much of the story for me is how people deal with suffering.”

In the novel, Nico makes the comment that instead of their grief drawing her family together, it blew them apart. “There are two ways grief can go,” explained Prose. “It can pull people together or it can blow them apart. Nico’s family is essentially a happy family, and regardless of what Tolstoy says, happy families are not all alike. The family has to deal with a sudden, horrible loss, and the extent to which you are not equipped to deal with this grief determines how your family will go on after this.”

Nico’s grief is made much worse by the fact that Margaret drowned while Nico was with her. “For Nico, death is obviously a great mystery and she’s trying to deal with the mystery of absence and loss,” she said. “It’s a human inability to address the idea of ‘How could this person be here, then now not be here?’ You can’t get your mind around it.”

The second half of the novel is consumed by Nico’s strange involvement with Aaron, Margaret’s boyfriend. The two of them torturously act out events from Margaret’s lost life. Nico’s hard ride into adolescence comes with the realization that her parents can’t save her anymore.

In the hands of a lesser writer, Aaron’s bizarre and dangerous relationship with Nico would be just a sick scenario. Prose, however, makes Aaron’s grief real and palpable, explaining some of his unacceptable behavior.

“The boyfriend Aaron is also doubly unable to deal with Margaret’s death,” said Prose. “I had to make his character sympathetic, for I knew that if he was some creepy older guy going out with a 13-year-old girl, the novel would fall apart. When I realized that he was in his own state of grief and trying to reverse what had happened, his character came together for me.”

Dylan Foley is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Shalom Auslander on Whether "to Circumcise, or Not to Circumcise" His Son

(Originally published in the Newark Star-Ledger in October 2007)

In his memoir “The Foreskin’s Lament”(Riverhead, $25), Shalom Auslander writes with rage, fear, humor and much profanity about growing up in a dysfunctional, strict Orthodox Jewish family in upstate New York and his raging against a vengeful God that he can’t stop believing in. He desperately wants to protect his pregnant wife and unborn son from God’s wrath and destruction. The central conflict in the memoir is whether he should circumcise his son or not.

Auslander’s engrossing story alternates between the present, where he awaits the birth of his son, and his grim, blackly comic past in a house with an alcoholic, abusive father and a death-obsessed mother and a life hemmed in by the 613 Jewish religious laws, from keeping kosher to marrying Jewish. Yeshiva teachers hammer in that God is always angry and that Anne Frank was killed because the Jews assimilated. Ever the rebel, he prays for the death of his father and tries nonkosher beef jerky at the age of nine. It is then a slippery slope to eating McDonald’s, reading pronography and shoplifting. Auslander is sent to a reform yeshiva is Israel, becomes a religious zealot, breaks his faith and sleeps with a prostitute. Again and again, he curses the God he believes will crush him. He is saved by marrying an escapee from a British Orthodox community with a sailor’s mouth. The final break with his family is searing and irrevocable.

Auslander, 37, was raised in the Orthodox Jewish enclave of Monsey, N.Y., and was educated at yeshivas in New York and Israel. He is the author of the story collection “Beware of God,” and lives in Woodstock, N.Y. with his wife and son. Auslander spoke with freelance writer Dylan Foley at a restaurant in New York City.

Q. How did you decide to write this memoir?

A. When my book of short stories came out, my editor suggested I write some articles and try to get on “This American Life.” I wrote a couple of stories and I wrote a few more, then it developed into a full book. I hated myself for writing a memoir. In the literary world, pornography is a step up. There aren’t many that I admired. They all had endings that mine didn’t seem to have. I don’t wake up with a family. I don’t get over God. As I was writing, I realized, “Here I am , about to become a father. I am not picking out Nike shoes and football wallpaper. I am worrying about God and whether to commit a brutal act on my son’s little willie.” There is no room for excitement or joy.

Q. Throughout the book, you have an ongoing, ranting conversation with God. He is also your only confident. Why?

A. He was my imaginary (jerky) friend. Because I went through so many changes, from practicing to not practicing, in the family and out of the family, I had no choice but to confide in him. He knows everything. He’s like an evil siamese twin that I can’t get rid of.

Q. How would you describe your dysfunctional childhood household?

A. At some point, I called my mother “the belle of the misery ball.” She was obsessed with death and dying. Everything with her was incredibly sad or syrupy sweet. You never felt that there was anything genuine there. My father was an angry, untalkative, unemotional father, who I was terrified of as a child.

Q. You gather up all the pornography and sex toys in your house and burn them, risking an almost certain beating from your father. Why?

A. There is a hierarchy. If I do something to appease God, then there was this sense in my head that He would protect me when the time came. I was an idiot. I knew that I wouldn’t get hit by my father, but I would get hit by my father in heaven. A lot of the stuff I did, whether it was my Nixon impersonation to stop my father from hitting my brother, or burning the pornography, was to save my family by the rules I was taught. In the early part of the book, I was trying to save my family, while in the later part of the book, I was trying to save my son. Full salvation for me meant relief from God.

Q. You went down a slippery slope from eating Slim Jims and McDonald’s cheeseburgers, to shoplifting literary works and musical soundtracks. Could you describe your fall from grace?

A. I started stealing things that I needed in my new world. I began stealing soundtracks and things that made me happy. It’s funny that it would be “West Side Story.” It’s a good album, but there was a real thought in my head that I might get away with marrying Maria. She looks Jewish, wears a skirt and covers her hair. In Manhattan, I was stealing glimpses of the outside world--art books, poetry books. I had an attraction to the darker writers. I was stealing Stephen King, things goyish.

Q. After the birth of your son, your ties were truly severed with your family. What happened?

A. In the first place, it was a severing that I wished for and worked hard at. There was an insistence on maintaining a certain myth of family that never existed and it caused everyone a lot of pain to maintain that story, which is a bad metaphor for religion. Blood is thicker than water, but thinner than the five books of Moses. I was shocked. To see my newborn son in his car seat on the dining table and to feel that rage coming from my parents, I thought, “I can’t do this.”

Q. Before you were married, you write about having a cheeseburger and having sex with a hooker in your car on the same night. What was the response to that story?

A. She sat on my hat, by the way. I was giving a reading in London. I told that story. There was time for one last question. An 80-year-old man with a yarmulke pushed himself up on his cane. His hand was shaking. I thought, “Oh, no, I’m going to get an earful.” He asked, “Which was better, the hooker or the hamburger?” I said, “I don’t remember. I was having them at the same time.” He looked like someone from my past, but there was no judgmental nature to him.


Q. The rabbis in school hammered you and your fellow students with a wrathful God, and warned that what killed Anne Frank was the assimilation of the Jews. Could you describe your education?

A. It was intense., but it was not a question of hypocrisy. My teachers believed what they were teaching 100 percent. That’s much scarier. I absorbed the fear. The Holocaust was a much different thing. I know for myself that it was incredibly baffling that you’d tell young children these things without any context, that it might happen to you. I am not a journalist. I am not a researcher. If you write a book, it tends to be taken as a statement about the Orthodox Jews or the Holocaust. It’s not that at all. All I can say is this is what happened. This is what I went through. For me, the larger discussion I’d like to have is on family and the conception of God.

G.B. Tran's Glorious "Vietnamerica," a Graphic Family History

In cartoonist G.B. Tran’s turbulent Vietnamese family history, his maternal grandfather abandoned hisgrandmother and children in 1945 to fight the French and American armies for 30 years. His grandmother then had a child with a French colonel, while on Tran’s mother’s side, his uncle was drafted to fight for the corrupt South Vietnamese regime. His parents and siblings finally fled Saigon on one of the last flights in 1975, leaving promising lives and careers in ruins. The American-born Tran captures this sweeping and exhilarating story in his beautifully drawn graphic memoir “Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey” (Villard, $30). Tran succeeds in stripping away the layers of silence to find hidden stories in America and Vietnam that explain his parents’ experience, the horrors of war, the trauma of assimilation in a new country, and the costs of family separation and reconciliation.

Tran, 34, is a comics writer and illustrator living in Brooklyn. Tran spoke with freelance writer Dylan Foley at a teashop in New York City.

Q. Did you set out to write an epic story of the tumultuous histories of both Vietnam and your family from 1945 to present?

A. I really mean it when I say that I was trying to write the smallest story possible. I was telling my father and my mother’s story. To understand the weight of their decisions, I needed to understand where they came from. I’d ask my relatives a simple question, like “Who was So-and-So’s father?” They’d say, “He was a French colonel, but he’s now dead.” Wasn’t he the enemy? There was so much that wound up on the cutting-room floor. I could have written a thousand pages.

Q. Your father starts out in the book as a hard, uncommunicative immigrant man. Through the stories, you peel back the layers and you see the destruction of his life in Vietnam. How did you do this?

A. That is the journey I went through. I was your typical kid — I hated my parents, I couldn’t talk to my dad and there was this huge culture clash. Learning about his past, I understand where some of his opinions come from. People have asked me, now that I’ve done this book, has my relationship with my father changed? My relationship with my parents has evolved, but not necessarily for the better. We still have some issues.
Every story I’d pick up on my father from his brother, his sister, or his best friend in Vietnam led to another part of his personality. Being with my parents in Vietnam in 2001, that was the first time I saw him truly surrounded by family and friends. I saw chumminess with his friends for the first time.

Q. You’ve said that writing this book broke your heart. Why?

A. It was awful. My wife had to watch me go through this project. It is one thing to hear stories about your family. It is another to run them through your own filters and to tell them. It was an intense feeling to draw my mother as a teenager, or to draw my grandfather joining the (anti-French revolutionary) Viet Minh. It was an enlightening experience overall. The humor in the book was intentional. I didn’t want people to read this book and think of it as 300 pages of depression. The best stories cover a broad emotional range.

Q. Why did you decide to write this family history as a graphic memoir?

A. I don’t necessarily see myself as a great writer or as a great illustrator, but when they are combined, I make decent comics. I am drawn to the interplay of images and words. That storytelling potential endlessly fascinates me. I didn’t want to just do a comic on my parents’ lives. I wanted to take advantage of all the tools that the medium has.
I wanted to make a book that could never work in another medium.

(Originally published in the Newark Star-Ledger on January 23, 2011)

Sean Wilentz's Historical Take on Bob Dylan

Sean Wilentz is a prominent Princeton University history professor, known for his recent weighty tome on the Reagan era and his essays in the New York Review of Books. Wilentz has now focused his incisive historian’s eye on the career of the nation’s most famous troubadour in “Bob Dylan in America” (Doubleday, 400 pp., $28.95).

Robert Zimmerman left his native Minnesota for New York in January 1961 and soon changed his name to Bob Dylan for the sound. In a thrilling book that is part biography and part social history with a deep musical analysis, Wilentz explores the influences of Woody Guthrie, Blind Willie McTell and Pete Seeger on Dylan’s music and his spiritual bond with the Beat Generation. For Wilentz, it is also personal; his father ran an influential bookshop in Greenwich Village when Bob Dylan was a rising folk singer nearby. Wilentz pieces together the classic recording sessions of “Blonde on Blonde” in 1965-66, Dylan’s decline in the 1980s and his repeated comebacks. Wilentz lays out nuanced arguments on the profound effect Dylan has had on expanding the American consciousness in his five-decade career as a singer and songwriter.

Wilentz, 59, spoke with freelance writer Dylan Foley by telephone from his home in Princeton.

Q. What made you want to write a book on Bob Dylan?

A. The book goes back to the late 1990s. I had written an essay on Dylan’s “Time Out of Mind” and started writing for his official website, taking the facetious title “historian in residence.” One writes books because you want to find things out. When I finished my book on the Reagan era, I figured that it was now or never to write something coherent about Bob Dylan. The book is not a conventional biography, but I realized that my essays would give me a way to both address his work and its context. There was an autobiographical element, but I didn’t want it to become a major theme in the book.

Q. Why do you think Dylan has always had a rocky relationship with the press?

A. I think he felt very badly burned by his early interviews. He saw how the media chewed up whatever was creative, new and interesting, and spit it out again, and he saw them trying to do it to him. Early on, there was the piece where some girl in New Jersey claimed she had written “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and then there was the article that exposed his real name and the myth that he created about himself. He was angry that people were snooping on him. I don’t think Bob Dylan likes people defining him. I think he likes defining himself with his art.

Q. In your exquisite essay on the making of “Blonde on Blonde,” the reader almost feels as if he is in the studios in Nashville and New York. What kind of access did you get?

A. I was very fortunate to listen to tapes of the studio recordings of “Blonde on Blonde.” Along with other sources, I was able to piece together how the songs evolved. My proudest discovery was that Rick Danko played during the New York sessions. Only the Nashville musicians were listed on the album. I broke my own rules and did some interviewing for this essay. I am not a journalist and find interviewing too subjective. I’m a historian. I am much better at reading dead people’s letters.

Q. What effect has Bob Dylan’s 50-year career had on the American cultural scene?

A. I think he’s the greatest American songwriter of the last half of the 20th century and the early 21st century. That’s the most important thing. He brought together so many strains of American life and culture that was ahead of the rest of the country. Dylan was able to entertain and arouse people’s intelligence, as well as their understanding of music and culture.

(Originally published in the Newark Star-Ledger on September 19, 2010)

Alaa al Aswany Writes of the Far Reach of the Mubarak's Dictatorship

Egyptian's novel satirizes expatriates' lives under surveillance

By Dylan Foley

(Denver Post photo illustration)

In his new novel "Chicago," the best-selling Egyptian writer Alaa al Aswany has written a dark comedy about the lives of Egyptian graduate students and faculty at the University of Illinois in the years after Sept. 11, where they face the pressures of politics, love, sex and racism. The long arm of the corrupt, dying dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak​ is never far away, as the Egyptian secret police meddle in the students' lives.

In the novel, Nagi is a political dissident who comes from Cairo to study medicine in Chicago. He encounters Shaymaa and Tariq, whose love affair is preceded by a dance of sexual repression, and the professors Ra'fat and Salah, who have denied their Egyptian background with tragic consequences. Hovering over the students with menace is Danana, the bloated and corrupt student leader and secret police informer.

For al Aswany, the motivation to write a satire of his fellow Egyptians in the United States came from the desire to explore the troubles the students face and the rancid dictatorship at home. "You write fiction because you feel that some people are suffering," said al Aswany in a telephone interview from his home in Cairo. "You are trying to explain and understand these kinds of situations."

Though he spent three years studying dentistry in Illinois in the 1980s, he swears "Chicago" is not autobiographical. "As a novelist, you write from your own experience," he said. "That's why I wrote about Chicago, and did not write about New York. I was inspired by real people, but that does not mean that I copied what really happened into the novel. You have my imagination to take into account."

Even the rebellious Nagi can't seem to escape the chains of the dictatorship. "Nagi is an honest person, but he pays the price of being born in the dictatorship and not a democracy," said al Aswany. "A dictatorship tries to control everything and the Egyptian dictatorship is no exception. When you are studying in America, you become more important to the regime. You are going to have a much better education, and if you go home, you become one of their men."

"Writing for democracy is my duty. It could be dangerous, but writing and fear do not mix." Alaa al Aswany (Getty Images file)

Throughout the novel, Nagi mocks the corrupt Egyptian government and the Egyptian students in America who still cower before the secret police. "Nagi and I have many things in common," he said. "I have many of his opinions. I have been accused of being Nagi myself. This is not true, but his views on democracy and religion are similar to mine."

When the Egyptian dictator plans a visit to Chicago, the dissidents organize a surprise protest. Al Aswany creates a biting portrait of Egyptian expatriates abroad and how noble causes and idealism are all squashed by the strongman's boot.

Although his book is a satire, al Aswany draws full- blooded characters. Even Shaymaa and Tariq, the virginal 30-year-olds, have a touching romance as they seduce each other. His American characters are also nuanced. Other characters, such as two middle-aged Egyptian professors, are sad figures who are cruelly humbled in the end. One has denied his Egyptian heritage and the other regrets fleeing Egypt in the late 1960s.

"Professor Ra'fat in the novel doesn't have the right formula for immigration," said al Aswany, "because he decided to cut off his roots and tried to become totally Americanized. It doesn't work, because it is not natural. It has a profound effect on his personality.

"The story with Professor Salah is more complicated," he said. "He left his

(The Denver Post)

country after it was defeated (in the 1967 war against Israel). When he left Cairo, his Egyptian lover accused him of being a coward. At one point, he immerses himself in nostalgia and begins to think that leaving Egypt was not the right choice."

Al Aswany, who is in his early 50s, is a practicing dentist and newspaper columnist in Cairo. His last novel, "The Yacoubian Building​," was an Arab-language best seller; "Chicago" has already topped all best-seller lists in the Middle East. In a region with high rates of illiteracy, "Chicago" has already sold an astounding 150,000 copies.

Being a dissident in Cairo comes with a price. Al Aswany's writer friends are routinely picked up by the police for questioning or thrown in jail. Despite chances to go abroad, al Aswany stays in Egypt.

"Writing for democracy is my duty," said al Aswany. "It could be dangerous, but writing and fear do not mix. Writing is not something you can do when you are afraid. The editor of my newspaper was arrested for writing that Mubarak was sick. My problems haven't been as bad yet."

Twenty years ago in America, al Aswany said he had an epiphany. Despite being a dental surgeon, his true calling was going to be writing fiction.

"When I was in America, I learned how to have a clear vision," said al Aswany. "I realized that I was going to be a novelist, and that I was going to write about the Egyptian people, the people that I know. It didn't make sense to stay abroad. The human situation changes every minute. You can't write about your home country if you do not live there. For me, if I am not in my country, I am not truly myself."

Dylan Foley is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn, N.Y.

(Originally published in the Denver Post on December 21, 2008)

Mike Davis on Death by Car Bomb

Historian traces murderous evolution of a serial killer

By Dylan Foley

Mike Davis calls the car bomb the "poor man's air force," delivering the payload of a WWII-era bomber to a target.

Historian Mike Davis' grim, entrancing new book, "Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb," tracks the murderous life and evolution of the car bomb from the 1920 bombing of Wall Street to the daily multiple suicide car bombs in Iraq that cause death, terror and mayhem.

Davis calls car bombs the "poor man's air force" that can deliver the bomb payload of a World War II-era bomber right to the door of a police station or barracks from Baghdad to Sri Lanka, where collateral damage, otherwise known as civilian deaths, is a given in sowing more terror.

The Buda's wagon of the title was not technically a car - it was a horse-drawn wagon packed with explosives and iron slugs that exploded in front of the headquarters of J.P. Morgan and Co. in Manhattan, parked there by Mike Buda, an anarchist angered by the U.S. government's execution of his friends Sacco and Vanzetti. The bomb killed 40 and injured 200, and was an explosion heard around the world.

Secret passed along

"Buda's Wagon" is relentless, where the bodies mount from IRA car bombs in the 1970s to the Hezbollah suicide attacks against the U.S. Embassy and the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, sending reinforced concrete buildings shooting 100 feet in the air and forcing the U.S. to withdraw from Lebanon.

In the 87-year history of car bombs, the state apparatus of terror is never far away. Bill Casey's CIA in the 1980s gave car-bomb technology to the mujahadeen in Afghanistan, which later used the technology to attack the World Trade Center for the first time, in 1993. The Indian Army taught the Tamil rebels of Sri Lanka how to build such bombs, and the rebels later used suicide bombs with zest against the Indian soldiers.

For Davis, the desire to write about car bombs came from witnessing their hypnotic power. "It's an awful subject," Davis said in a telephone interview from his home in San Diego. "I lived in Northern Ireland in 1974-75 (during the height of the Troubles). I witnessed several car bombs. I was horrified by the unbelievable violence of them."

Davis, a 61-year-old history professor at the University of California at Irvine, said the conventional wisdom was that car bombs had started with the IRA, but his reading of history proved otherwise.

Used in the 1940s

Car bombs were used with great effect by the Stern Gang​, a Zionist terrorist group that targeted military, civilian and economic targets in 1940s Palestine to derail peace talks between the British and more moderate Zionists. Arab terrorists responded by using car bombs against Jewish settlers. The Viet Cong used car bombs against American targets in Saigon in the 1960s.

The true democratization of the car bombs came with the fertilizer bomb, used by leftist radicals in Madison, Wis. In blowing up the Army Mathematics Research Center at the University of Wisconsin, a blast that killed a physics researcher, the student bombers used an obscure pamphlet from the Wisconsin Fish and Game Department. "It was how to have fun making new duck ponds by blowing them up with ammonium nitrate fertilizer," said Davis. Now two men with fertilizer, gasoline and shovels could make a very powerful bomb.

Exponential power

"Car bombs are used by state intelligence agencies and groups that have genuine grievances, like the Provisional IRA​ and the Basques," said Davis. "Car bombs have huge seductive power. It gives the user exponentially more striking power, and the ability to dismantle a part of the economy," like blowing up London's financial district or destroying Indonesia's tourism industry.

"The seduction overpowers any realization of how much moral damage has been done," said Davis, "and how civilian deaths are inescapable. Like (former Defense Secretary) Donald Rumsfeld​'s 'smart bombs,' there is no way you can use a car bomb precisely."

The middle of the book recaps the horrors of Beirut in the early 1980s. With 52 armed groups vying for control, the CIA, Israel's Mossad, and Syrian, Iranian and Iraqi intelligence agencies all had a hand in financing car bombs. Hezbollah's suicide car bombs upped the ante.

"Hezbollah used suicide bombers to ensure the bombs got up the steps of the buildings," said Davis.

"Buda's Wagon" speeds up as it goes on, with car bombs destroying U.S. Embassies in Africa, a synagogue in Tunisia and Russian targets in Chechnya. Though Davis mostly uses existing sources, he lays out the geopolitical consequences in a clear, brutal manner. Groups like the ISI, Pakistan's secret service and America's alleged ally in the War on Terror, seem to be bankrolling a lot of terrorist groups, from India to Afghanistan and Indonesia.

"The ISI more closely fits the image that the public has about al-Qaeda of centralized terror," said Davis. "Arguably, the ISI has been the most powerful terrorist network in the world, certainly since the war in Afghanistan.

Found on the Internet

"I argue in my book that the state intelligence agencies are the principal vector for spreading car-bomb technology internationally," said Davis. "Now we've come to the point where you can find this information on the Internet. You don't need specialized training anymore."

In Iraq, the car bomb is king. Suicide bombs are the weapon of choice, accelerating from one a week to one every eight hours nationwide. "A lot of the suicide bombs in Iraq are unnecessary," said Davis. "They could use many kinds of sophisticated detonators, but there are a surplus of martyrs."

On why there has not been a flood of car bombs in the United States, Davis has few consoling words. "We've been very lucky," he said. "This is not a situation where you can count the rational probability. Safety depends on an absence of groups of radicals who want to kill hundreds of people.

"The car bomb just seduces people with its cheap, destructive power," he said. "It's a Pandora's box. Once you open it, it is hard to understand how you would close it."

Dylan Foley is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, N.Y.

(Published in the Denver Post on April 5, 2007)

Ian Buruma on Muslim Alienation in Holland

A look at unmoored Muslims in the wake of van Gogh's murder

By Dylan Foley

In 2004, Dutch filmmaker and political gadfly Theo van Gogh was shot and killed on an Amsterdam street by Mohammed Bouyeri​, a Dutch-born Islamic radical. Van Gogh​, the grandnephew of the painter Vincent van Gogh, had made films and written newspaper columns that Bouyeri had deemed insulting to his Muslim faith.

After the murder, the acclaimed Dutch-British journalist Ian Buruma went back to his native Holland to cover the aftermath of the murder. What Buruma discovered was a society that prides itself on its openness and liberalism grappling with Islamic radicals, as well as their treatment of their own Dutch-born Muslim youths.

In his resulting book with its grim subtitle, "Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance," Buruma writes a wrenching account of a polarized Dutch society. The Dutch, who had thrown off the strictures of their own Christian conservatism four decades ago, are now faced with a vocal and small minority of radicalized Dutch Muslims. The Dutch radical right grumbles about Holland being swarmed by immigrants, a tiny selection of Islamic extremists threaten jihad and the Muslim and non-Muslim moderates are squeezed in the middle. Van Gogh's murder is a window into the common failures of immigrant integration in Europe and the violence that can be related to free speech.

"My first visceral reaction on the murder was that I knew Theo van Gogh," said Buruma in a telephone interview from Amsterdam. "I had been on his talk shows several times. My reaction was surprise. Nobody expected this."

Muslim-baiting messages

Van Gogh was famous in Holland for his newspaper columns, where he delighted in baiting Muslims by using offensive terms. His last movie, created with Ayaan Hirsi Ali​, a Sudanese-born politician and social activist, became his death warrant. It was a film called "Submission," consisting of naked women with verses of the Koran inscribed on their bodies.

Bouyeri, van Gogh's killer, was an aimless young man filled with rage. He developed his fundamentalist Muslim ideology by reading dubious translations of the Koran on the Internet. "Bouyeri was a loser," said Buruma. "He was a pathetic figure but a dangerous one. Adolescents and young men who don't know their place in the world fall into a kind of despair and are attracted to deadly causes. They dream of sacrificing themselves and others to a great cause. Bouyeri was an example of that, a loser who hadn't found his place in the world."

For all its self-congratulatory liberalness, Holland has fostered a Muslim immigrant underclass. In the 1950s and 1960s, single men from Morocco, Turkey and other Muslim countries came to Holland to take the hard, dirty and low-paying jobs the Dutch would not do. They mined coal, worked in gas plants and heavy-industrial factories, destroying their health in the process. The men's families followed and their children were born in Holland. The immigrants wound up in concrete ghettos, their children left with limited options.

Permanent outsider status

"The original immigrants did not really have immigrant status," said Buruma. "They had an in-between status that left them hanging. Their children were often lost between two worlds."

The alienation of Dutch Muslim immigrants is similar to the alienation of other Muslim immigrants in Europe, noted Buruma.

"In Western Europe, and Holland is an example, even though immigrants are tolerated, it is very difficult for them to become Dutch or British or German," said Buruma. "It is hard for them to know what to assimilate to. They are not hated, but are treated as outsiders."

The bleak subtitle of Buruma's book, "The Limits of Tolerance," permeates his story. "In a small, exclusive and relatively free society, words didn't come at a price," said Buruma. "You could insult each other without it leading to any violence. With extreme religious believers, if you insult God, you insult them."

In the book, van Gogh comes across as an unappealing character. He relentlessly mocked Islam, accusing a whole religion of bestiality. If he had an opponent who was Jewish, he'd use anti-Semitic slurs. "Theo had a polemical side on his Web site and in his magazine columns where he showed himself at his most belligerent and hostile," said Buruma.

Buruma spends time with Hirsi Ali, in the aftermath of van Gogh's killing. The charismatic Ali underwent horrific female circumcision as a girl in Africa. She came to Holland as a political refugee, lost her faith and became an atheist and crusader for battered women in the Muslim community and was elected to the Dutch parliament. She also became a strident critic of Islam. With numerous death threats, Hirsi Ali had bodyguards 24 hours a day.

"The value of Hirsi Ali is that she's started the debate on Islam in the first place," said Buruma. "She brought attention to the social problem that there are immigrant women who are abused by their husbands and that Islam is used for justification for this. She's also been useful in making people less naive on the revolutionary movements in Islam. She's misguided. She's a convert. She was a believer and now she's an atheist. She attacks religion more fiercely that someone who was never religious."

Hope for Dutch Muslims

In his interviews for the new book, Buruma met with several people who hold the hope of Holland's Dutch Muslim community in their hands, from a prison chaplain to a devoutly religious law student. "One has to be very careful not to be monolithic about Muslims," he said. "There is a small revolutionary fringe that is dangerous, but you have more thoughtful people who are trying to reconcile religious beliefs with the secular life in Western democracies. They have to be encouraged."

Hirsi Ali left Holland for America, Buruma said. "Life here became increasingly impossible for her. ... Hirsi Ali has joined the American Enterprise Institute," he said of the conservative think tank. "She's ambitious. She wants to play a role in a bigger world."

Dylan Foley is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, N.Y.

(Originally published in the Denver Post, November 5, 2006)

Whitney Terrell on Race, Incest and Murder in "The Huntsman"

By Dylan Foley At the beginning of Whitney Terrell's "The Huntsman," a slain white socialite named Clarissa Sayers is pulled out of the Missouri River a few miles outside of Kansas City. Her African-American boyfriend becomes the prime murder suspect. Terrell takes the very unsettling American subjects of race and class, and develops a brooding, beautiful novel about what divides black and white America. "The Huntsman" is a rich, literary work that examines the wounds of racism and questions the meaning of memory and history. "People in Kansas City live stratified lives, where most whites inhabit a world where the African-American population does not intrude," said Terrell in an interview from his Kansas City, Mo., home that is three blocks from Troost Avenue, the de facto racial divider of the city. Terrell's book about race in Kansas City allows the reader to extend this examination to the rest of the United States. "Any particular place can be universal if you know about it well and write about it well," he said. "For me, Kansas City is that place." The central character of "The Huntsman" is Booker Short, an African-American ex-con from Oklahoma farm country who jumps his parole to come to Kansas City, looking for Mercury Chapman, the white officer who commanded his grandfather's unit during World War II. The grandfather had saved Chapman's life in Europe, and Booker holds him to that debt. Chapman sets Booker up as the groundskeeper at a rural hunting club patronized by Kansas City's white elite. Booker soon becomes involved with the wild daughter of Thornton Sayers, a powerful federal judge. Booker comes to Kansas City to find out the truth behind Chapman's involvement in the wartime hanging in France of a black soldier for rape. Terrell takes the reader on a 150-page flashback of Booker's farm life in Oklahoma under the thumbs of his stern grandfather, Chapman's childhood memory of Kansas City and both older men's memories of what really happened during the war. Clarissa initially not victim In Booker's train-hopping escape to Kansas City, Terrell shows hints of Faulkner's "Wild Palms": "The train seemed to voyage not so much through physical counties as through partitions in time. (Booker) woke from dozing to see a man in a red riding jacket, posting through the trees." Terrell switches gears, writing stark images of Booker's interest in Clarissa: "She wore an undershirt and suspenders, like a man, and he could see under the ruststained fabric the precise curve of her breasts." "Booker developed as a necessity of plot," said Terrell. "It was originally Chapman's body that was going to be found in the river. Then I changed it to the girl. I needed a character to break the membranes of the city, to force the white community to deal with the black community. Booker is that instigator. "The "huntsman' in the novel is different people at different times - it is a person coming to make you tell your secrets," Terrell said. "Booker is hunting for the truth over what happened during the war, while Clarissa knows other secrets. They are outsiders, provoking the establishment." Terrell grew up in the wealthy white community of Kansas City. "I went to the private schools, and lived a very privileged life," said Terrell. "I used to hunt with my grandfather in a hunting club outside the city, similar to the one in my book. We would drive down Highway 71, that would take us through the black neighborhood." Terrell's odyssey as a writer took him away from Kansas City, first to college at Princeton, then Paris, New York and Brazil. "When I left Kansas City, I thought it was the most boring place," said Terrell. "I thought I had to have adventures to be a writer." It was at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he worked with the African-American writer James McPherson, that Terrell's attitudes toward Kansas City changed. "James talked a lot about race and class in society and literature," said Terrell. "I realized that everything that I wanted to write about was in Kansas City." After 10 years away, Terrell moved back home in 1996 and now teaches at a local college. "The Huntsman" is set in 1993, when the Missouri River flooded its banks. The river becomes a character in the novel, its surging waters spitting up dead bodies, but at the same time providing a possible means of escape. Terrell draws Booker with full-bodied strokes. The reader watches him evolve in the novel from an earnest and lonely farmboy to a decisive, hard man. "Booker does have some personal bitterness to the white society," said Terrell. Book marketed as mystery Judge Sayers in Terrell's hands becomes a dangerous man, but is hardly a cartoon villain. "Though Sayers does some inhumane things, I was writing from his point of view," said Terrell. "I had to be an advocate of that point of view." For some inexplicable reason, Viking has marketed The Huntsman as a mystery. Though the novel has tinges of both mystery and thriller to it, the book is more concerned with digging into painful issues like race than providing a bloody whodunit to the reader. "My goal was to write about history and memory," said Terrell, "and how the blacks and whites viewed things differently." In the novel, Chapman fondly remembers Eve, a black housekeeper who saved him from indifferent parents: "He remembered her scent's mixture of wet wool and chives cut from the garden, more clearly than he did the details of his own mother." Her grandson Clyde, now a pillar in the black community, remembers Chapman and other whites as using his family. By examining the fractured race relations of Kansas City, Terrell forces readers to look at the painful racial histories of their own hometowns. Terrell's next book is about Kansas City and the municipal corruption that built its freeways. Like William Kennedy and his Albany novels, Terrell hopes to mine the murky depths of Kansas City, despite the publishing industry's unease about books on race. "The issue of race and issues of land have destroyed this city and many American cities," said Terrell. "To write well about this city, you have to write about both blacks and whites. You're going to have to write across racial lines." Originally published in The Denver Post on November 18, 2001

Marie Phillips on Setting the Olympian Gods in Modern-Day London

(Originally published in the Newark Star-Ledger in December 2007)

In her debut novel “Gods Behaving Badly”(Little Brown, $24), the British author Marie Phillips has updated the story of the Olympian gods, set in a dilapidated house in London. The twelve gods have lost most of their powers. Aphrodite, the goddess of love, is reduced to being a phone sex operator; Apollo, the god of the Sun, is a TV psychic; Ares, the god of war, promotes the War on Terror; Artemis, the goddess of hunting, is a dog walker, and Dionysis, the god of drinking and excess, is a nightclub owner.

For four centuries, the extended family of bitter gods has been living, sleeping together and fighting in a filthy house. Two mortals, Alice and Neil, become entangled with the lecherous, self-centered Apollo. Zeus kills Alice and Neil, following in the footsteps of Orpheus, must go down through the London subway, to Hades, the underworld, to rescue his beloved Alice from the world of the dead. Phillips has written a raucous tale of Greek gods run amok in modern times.

Phillips, 31, was raised in North London and educated at Cambridge University. She has worked as a researcher for the BBC and as a bookseller. Phillips spoke with freelance writer Dylan Foley from her home in London.

Q. How did you come up for the idea of ”Gods Behaving Badly”?

A. It was very much a Eureka moment. A friend of mine was making a documentary about a school on an American air base and I was doing the sound recording. A philosophy teacher was talking about how the gods of the ancient world were more human and complex and had very dark sides, which is much different than the god in the Judeo-Christian religions, who is a benign, loving presence. What would happen if the Greeks were right and we were wrong? The Greek gods would still be around because they are immortal. I thought this would be a great idea for a novel.

Q. What kind of research did you do for the novel?

A. I started off with reading “The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony” by Robert Colasso. It’s this incredibly impressionistic book. It looks at the gods very schematically and artistically, and it sparked my imagination. Then I read Robert Graves and others on mythology in a more methodical way. It is not really the facts in the research that are most useful, but the time that you get to develop this great imaginative world.

Q. Why have the gods lost most of their powers?

A. Belief in the gods of Olympus has not worn well. Except for a few fanatics in Greece, no one believes in these gods. A lot of this story is the metaphor of aging, the fear of aging and a fear of mortality. When you are young, you think you are the center of the universe. As you get older, you don’t get the attention you used to get. As we lose our powers, we start to feel irrelevant.

Q. The gods all have jobs. How did you give them out?

A. I knew the gods were going to lose their powers, so I knew they had to have jobs. I was thinking through the characteristics of each god and what would suit them. Dionysis being a club owner and Athena being an academic struck me as obvious, but Apollo being a TV psychic allowed me to play around with my own experiences working on a live TV show. The jobs for the gods came quite organically and were quite good in letting me develop the characters. Since many of the people who read the book won’t know anything about the Greek gods, it also allowed me to summarize who they are and what their powers were.




Q. You make Hades the underworld similar to a suburb of London. Why?

A. There’s this road that is called the North Circular Road, which goes around the northern part of London, where I am from. The road is lined with these endless, fake Tudor houses. Every time I drive down the road, which is constantly, I look out the car window and say, “This is hell.” When I die, I am going to end up in one of these little houses.

Q. In your conception of the modern underworld, you envision gigantic gaming halls where people play Scrabble for all eternity. Why?

A. There’s a bit in “The Odyssey,” a short moving passage where Odysseus goes to hell. He speaks to some of the people there. They are so unhappy because they have no bodies. They drink the waters of the River Lethe to forget. A lot of my conception of the underworld came from this. If you had no body forever, what would you do? Entertainment to stave off boredom would be the only thing left. The economy of the underworld became these strange casino-like complexes. They wouldn’t need money, so it wouldn’t be gambling. There would be enormous Scrabble or Boogle rooms that would go on forever.

Peter Hessler on the Insanity of Driving in China

In 2001, the New Yorker writer Peter Hessler got his Chinese driver’s license and embarked on a journey along China’s Great Wall. For the next seven years, Hessler drove through the countryside, exploring the dying villages and the exploding factory towns. In his masterful new book, “Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory” (Harper, 448 pp., $28), Hessler examines the earth-shattering social and economic changes in China, mixing beautiful travel writing, social analysis and history.

In his travels across China, Hessler picked up migrants and told their stories. He and a friend also rented a house in the countryside outside Beijing for $40 a month and became enmeshed in village life. In one dramatic section, Hessler finds himself frantically driving his country neighbor’s dying son to a Beijing hospital, battling with doctors to save the boy. In the last section, on the factory town of Lishui, Hessler chronicles the world of an upstart factory, where a gigantic pirated machine spits out bra parts.

Hessler, 40, went to China with the Peace Corps in 1996 and was the New Yorker’s China correspondent from 2000 to 2007. His two acclaimed earlier books are “River Town” and “Oracle Bones.” Hessler spoke with freelance writer Dylan Foley by telephone from his home in Ridgeway, Colo.

Q. You weave together journalism, memoir and history in your book. Why?

A. In all three of my books, I tried to do this. I see myself as working somewhere between journalism and academia. I admire the immediacy of journalism, but with academia, what I admire most is doing a longitudinal study, where you follow a place or a group of people for a period of years and see how they change.

Q. Why did you open the book with several epic drives following the Great Wall of China?

A. I wanted to start the book with a journey. You get a survey and, along the way, I touched on the issues that were interesting in China, like migration of workers and the dying rural villages. There was also this massive road building and construction going on.

Q. Could you tell us about the driving boom in China?

A. This was a country where nobody had cars 20 years ago. By the time I got my license, the car boom was starting. There were as many as 500,000 new drivers a year. It was pretty chaotic. I sat in on a driving course and realized that the teacher didn’t know much about driving. It was the blind leading the blind.

Q. What interested you in renting a house in a rural area outside Beijing?

A. I had moved to Beijing in 1999. I realized, after 18 months, that I didn’t have the connection to the place that I really wanted to have. I missed the rural China I knew in the Peace Corps. I missed the outdoors. It was for personal reasons, not as a writing strategy.

After Wei Jia (his neighbor’s son) became sick, I knew I was going to write about the village. (The medical emergency) was probably the most powerful experience I had in China. The time in the hospital was frightening and challenging. You find out you can’t control everything and you can’t fix everything.

By Dylan Foley In 2001, the New Yorker writer Peter Hessler got his Chinese driver’s license and embarked on a journey along China’s Great Wall. For the next seven years, Hessler drove through the countryside, exploring the dying villages and the exploding factory towns. In his masterful new book, “Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory” (Harper, 448 pp., $28), Hessler examines the earth-shattering social and economic changes in China, mixing beautiful travel writing, social analysis and history.

In his travels across China, Hessler picked up migrants and told their stories. He and a friend also rented a house in the countryside outside Beijing for $40 a month and became enmeshed in village life. In one dramatic section, Hessler finds himself frantically driving his country neighbor’s dying son to a Beijing hospital, battling with doctors to save the boy. In the last section, on the factory town of Lishui, Hessler chronicles the world of an upstart factory, where a gigantic pirated machine spits out bra parts.

Hessler, 40, went to China with the Peace Corps in 1996 and was the New Yorker’s China correspondent from 2000 to 2007. His two acclaimed earlier books are “River Town” and “Oracle Bones.” Hessler spoke with freelance writer Dylan Foley by telephone from his home in Ridgeway, Colo.

Q. You weave together journalism, memoir and history in your book. Why?

A. In all three of my books, I tried to do this. I see myself as working somewhere between journalism and academia. I admire the immediacy of journalism, but with academia, what I admire most is doing a longitudinal study, where you follow a place or a group of people for a period of years and see how they change.

Q. Why did you open the book with several epic drives following the Great Wall of China?

A. I wanted to start the book with a journey. You get a survey and, along the way, I touched on the issues that were interesting in China, like migration of workers and the dying rural villages. There was also this massive road building and construction going on.

Q. Could you tell us about the driving boom in China?

A. This was a country where nobody had cars 20 years ago. By the time I got my license, the car boom was starting. There were as many as 500,000 new drivers a year. It was pretty chaotic. I sat in on a driving course and realized that the teacher didn’t know much about driving. It was the blind leading the blind.

Q. What interested you in renting a house in a rural area outside Beijing?

A. I had moved to Beijing in 1999. I realized, after 18 months, that I didn’t have the connection to the place that I really wanted to have. I missed the rural China I knew in the Peace Corps. I missed the outdoors. It was for personal reasons, not as a writing strategy.

After Wei Jia (his neighbor’s son) became sick, I knew I was going to write about the village. (The medical emergency) was probably the most powerful experience I had in China. The time in the hospital was frightening and challenging. You find out you can’t control everything and you can’t fix everything.

Q. You spent two years writing about the bosses and workers at a bra component factory. What made you keep going back?

A. In China, people don’t tell you the important stories the first time they meet you. I had talked with the guys at the factory more than 10 times before Master Luo told me the story of how he pirated the machine from another company. Master Luo was great. You could tell by his face that he had incredible wisdom. He had little formal education and had worked all over China.

Q. After 11 years in China, why did you return to the United States?

A. I didn’t want to get pegged as a China writer. I wanted to learn new skills and how to write about new things.

(This interview was published in the Newark Star-Ledger on February 20, 2011)