Facts Are Subversive

the long version

The author is well known as an astute and penetrating observer of a dazzling array of subjects, not least through his many contributions to the New York Review of Books. This collection of his essays from the last decade reveals his knack for ferreting out exceptional insights into a troubled world, often on the basis of firsthand experience. Whether he is writing about how "liberalism" has become a dirty word in American political discourse, the problems of Muslim assimilation in Europe, Ukraine's Orange Revolution, Gunter Grass's membership in the Waffen-SS, or the angry youth of Iran, he combines a gimlet eye for detail with deep knowledge of the history of his chosen subjects. Running through this book is his insistence that, whatever some postmodernists might claim, there are indeed facts, and we have both a political and a moral duty to establish them.