"So many books, so little time" is definitely the lesson of autumn 2009. Lest anyone believe there is no point in coming to P&P to hear an author, let me quickly disabuse you of that. Let me review some the excellent talks last week that most of you missed: Tim Flannery, Denis MacShane and Max Cleland.
Last
week, for example, Tim Flannery, a
leading advocate for controlling the rate at which climate is changing and
certainly one of the most dynamic, spoke to perhaps 80 people. His small book
is called Now or Never, but his
talk belied the title. There is much we can do as individuals or as a nation
and whatever we do is better than not doing anything. Here’s the sad
part: Tim Flannery, an Aussie, who chairs one of the panels for the Copenhagen climate conference, says that the world needs
the Congress to pass the Waxman-Markey bill so the U.S. can play a leadership role at
the Climate Conference. We had to tell Tim that there is no way Congress can
act by December. 
The
day before we hosted a visit by Denis
MacShane, an urbane, liberal, articulate British MP, who has written
a persuasive book called Globalising
Hatred: The New Antisemitism. MacShane headed a parliamentary inquiry
that found an intersection between right wing hatred of Jews because they
represent modernity, Islamic anti-Zionism, and left wing European fashionable
anti-Semitism stemming from pro-Palestinian or anti-Zionist sentiments. He
argues that the problems of the Middle East do
not stem from a little country that borders only a handful of Arab nations, but also, the West cannot tolerate any expressions of
hatred against Muslims and Islam.
Max Cleland is an American hero who served this country as much as one man can: he fought in Vietnam with valor and lost three limbs. He was elected U.S. Senator from Georgia in 1996, but when he ran for reelection his opponent Saxbe Chambliss allowed ads to run on TV that questioned Cleland’s patriotism because he voted against going to war in Iraq. His book Heart of a Patriot is a frank discussion of his anger and depression that he hopes will reach many veterans, of whom he says “The mental and emotional wounds … have been far more difficult to overcome.” Asked about the wisdom of expanding American troops in Afghanistan, Senator Cleland was very skeptical, asking what the objectives are and whether they can be achieved by even as many as 200,000 troops.