The United States is now rivaling those who burned the Great Library of Alexandria as cultural destroyers. Having deliberately built a base upon Babylon, a new report from the British Museum notes:
- damage to the dragons decorating the Ishtar Gate, one of the world’s most famous monuments, from attempts to prise out the relief-moulded bricks
- broken bricks inscribed with the name of Nebuchadnezzar lying in spoil heaps
- the original brick surface of the great processional route through the gate crushed by military vehicles
- fuel seeping from tanks into archaeological layers
- acres of the site levelled, covered with imported gravel – which Dr Curtis said would be impossible to remove without causing further damage – and sprayed with chemicals which are also seeping into the unexcavated buried deposits
- thousands of tonnes of archaeological material used to fill sandbags and mesh crates, and equally damaging, when that practice stopped, thousands more tonnes of material imported from outside the site, contaminating the site for archaeologists forever.
Dr. John Curtis, the writer of the report, noted that his charges “should not be seen as exhaustive, but is indicative of the types of damage caused.”
The Call by Yannick Murphy: The always interesting author of Here They Come and Signed, Mata Hari returns with a novel that whips up a worldview from a rather quirky set of limitations: namely, the call logs that a veterinarian maintains as his son is unexpectedly put into a coma and an unforgiving economy denies him work. What emerges is a surprisingly optimistic, often funny, and very moving account on how one family uses acceptance and forgiveness as a way to atone for hard knocks. (
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber: Forget Franzen and Eugenides. If you're looking for a social novel that counts, Diana Abu-Jaber is the author you're looking for. Building from the free-form exploration of consciousness and identity in Crescent and the gripping procedural structure of Origin, Abu-Jaber's latest novel is her finest, equally fluent with gutterpunk culture and smarmy real estate men. It has been suggested by The Washington Post's Ron Charles that you will likely gain some pounds while reading this novel. This is certainly true. Abu-Jaber's description of food is so precise that it often made me want to do more cooking. But I very much admired the way in which Abu-Jaber presents all her characters as unwitting victims of rough capitalism, which permits them some dignity even as they perform terrible acts.
The Last of the Live Nude Girls by Sheila McClear: This memoir isn't so much about the decline of the Times Square peepshow, as it is about one young woman's efforts to pull herself up by by her bootstraps when presented with few economic options. Filled with self-introspective candor and a quiet dignity, McClear's story is one that might befall any of us in these volatile times. While McClear does get back on her feet, her book leads one contemplating the terrible fates of other young women now moving to New York and falling into deadlier vocations. (