In an article from our last print issue inaugurating a new feature in the magazine, Michael Tomasky describes a book that changed his life:
The idea of "life changing" led me to reach into the memory hole for those rare occasions when reading a book so fired my mind that, while I was immersed in it, I could think of nothing else. You know the feeling: You can't wait for work or class to finish so you can plow back into the book; as you near the end, you actually slow down because you don't want it to stop and can't imagine not being able to read it anymore.It turns out that it's a novel, Milan Kundera's The Joke, that met for me the above criteria: The book is quite political and contains within its pages lessons about how people adapt to the larger political contexts in which they live. These are lessons that were and are more universal than one might assume -- given that Kundera was assaying totalitarian society -- about what can happen when the stirrings of the soul are thwarted by the imperatives of the state.
And Sudhir Muralidhar reviews the new movie Nothing But the Truth based on the Judith Miller controversy:
Nuance, however, is not Hollywood’s specialty, so it’s no wonderthat the film adaptation of the story traded in some of the thornierissues at the heart of the case for cleaner, easier to dramatize ones.Rachel Armstrong (Kate Beckinsale), the heroine at the center of thenew film Nothing But the Truth, is not Judith Miller.Yes, she goes to jail for refusing to name a source who revealed theidentity of a covert CIA operative (Vera Farmiga). Yes, that CIAoperative is married to a former ambassador who writes op-eds arguingagainst the current government’s foreign policy. Yes, she is hounded bya particularly aggressive and determined special prosecutor (MattDillon). But Armstrong doesn’t have any of the political baggage thatmade Miller’s case so interesting, and, as a consequence, her story isfar less challenging and compelling than the real one that inspired it.
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--The Editors
