Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

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This week on nybooks.com: Salman Rushdie’s memoir, the war in Syria, the Holocaust in Poland and Lithuania, Obama’s victory, Chris Ware’s comics, and the fictional world of Gerald Murnane. Plus drone killings and the Leveson inquiry into the British press.
The Salman Rushdie Case Zoë Heller A man living under threat of death for nine years is not to be blamed for occasionally characterizing his plight in grandiloquent terms. But one would hope that when recollecting his emotions in freedom and safety, he might bring some ironic detachment to bear on his own bombast. Hindsight, alas, has had no sobering effect on Rushdie’s magisterial amour propre.
How Syria Is Being Destroyed Charles Glass Both the regime and the rebels are alienating the people they are ostensibly trying to cultivate, as they jointly demolish Aleppo’s economy and monuments, the lives and safety of its citizens, and the social cohesion that had, until now, made it a model of intersectarian harmony.
How, and What, Obama Won Mark Danner Clamorous and overpowering, campaign images are vivid as dreams and vanish as quickly. Was it real, that huge white aircraft hangar in Columbus, Ohio, the night before the election?
Hitler’s Logical Holocaust Timothy Snyder Historians tend to see World War II from two perspectives: one as the battlefield history of the campaigns by, and against, Germany; the other as the destruction of European Jews. As Hannah Arendt suggested long ago, these two stories are in fact one.
A Triumph of the Comic-Book Novel Gabriel Winslow-Yost The past decades have seen an unprecedented amount of serious attention paid to comics, and for good reason: they’re better—stranger, subtler, more ambitious—than ever before.
The Quest for the Girl from Bendigo Street J. M. Coetzee Is there a site, loosely to be called an imaginary world, where all the personages in Gerald Murnane’s fictions have their existence?
					ALSO IN THE DECEMBER 20 ISSUE Elizabeth Drew on the election, Charles Simic on Saul Steinberg, Ronald Dworkin on the case against color-blind admissions, Gordon Wood on 1775, Charles Baxter on John Banville, Joshua Hammer on the Port Said massacre, part three of Janet Malcolm’s piece on Michelle Malakova, and more.
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			It’s Time to Stop Killing in Secret David Cole After four years and hundreds of killings authorized in secret, the most the president has been able to offer us about the scope of his most awesome power is a handful of vague paragraphs in a handful of administration officials’ speeches, which experts must then parse for clues as to what the rules might actually be. This is more akin to what law looked like in the Soviet Union than to what it should look like in the United States of America.
			Protecting Powerful Men Jonathan Freedland As a tool for getting powerful men out of immediate trouble, the public inquiry has a long history in Britain. Sir Brian Leveson’s investigation into “the culture, practices and ethics of the press” is fully in keeping with this tradition.
			EVENT Bach’s Christmas Oratorio Selected by Cathleen Schine Musica Angelica, the wonderful Baroque ensemble for which traffic-averse early music lovers on the west side of Los Angeles are eternally grateful because they are so good and because they are not downtown, is performing Bach's Christmas Oratorio in Santa Monica. See the calendar for more recommended events this month.