Hey, It Beats Reading People

Wow. I'd totally forgotten how much I enjoyed reading The New York Review of Books. I probably forgot because the free online content is so-so at best. The trick is to find a library or bookstore with a print a print edition, becaues then you're sometimes in for a treat.

In the Oct. 6, 2005 issue, for example, there is not only a very fine article by Tony Judt about the problematic differences between eastern and western European memories concerning the Holocaust (i.e., eastern Europe had to content with Soviet occupation, and thus are more liable to regard the horrors of Communism as on par or worse than that suffered by Jews in the Holocaust), but also Adam Hochschild's withering assessment of the newly installed exhibition at the Royal Museum for Central Africa (just outside Brussels, Belgium), called La mémoire du Congo: Le temps colonial. (Hochschild is best known -- to me, anyway, since my household is now half-Belgian -- for his fabulous, must-read book about King Leopold II's tyrannical ravaging of Congo, King Leopold's Ghost.) Oh, and this isn't to mention at all Garry Wills' article, 'Bush's Fringe Government', which I briefly write about here.

Rarely has an evening spent reading rather than working been so educational.