more books of interest to P-listers reviewed in today's NY Times

[Doug Millison]

Mirrors of Destruction
War, Genocide, and Modern Identity
By OMER BARTOV
Oxford University Press

http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/b/bartov-destruction.html

  "Indeed, the ratio of innocent civilians killed in war has grown 
progressively since 1914. The difference is that following the 
devastation of World War II, Western nations have had both less 
inclination and less need to fight each other; when they did go to 
war, it was against non-Western lands, and it was the latter that 
took the main brunt of human and material destruction. "

"During the last two centuries, however, major transformations in 
demographic patterns and social organization, in politics and 
industry, and in science and technology have had an immense impact on 
the practice and theory of war, as well as on its imagery and 
mythology. The availability of unprecedented quantities of ever more 
effective weapons, along with seemingly unlimited and increasingly 
pliable human reserves, and the growing capacity to mobilize these 
resources by the modern industrialized nation-state, greatly enhanced 
war's destructive potential. This was a prospect both terrifying and 
exhilarating, repulsive and fascinating. It has evoked the wildest 
fantasies and the most nightmarish visions. Characteristically for an 
age of rapid changes, the reality of total war and genocide 
consistently remained one step ahead of its image. Ours is a century 
in which man's imagination has been conducting a desperate race with 
the practice of humanity. And precisely because the mind could no 
longer catch up with man-made reality, it conjured up visions of the 
future that surpassed all known forms and dimensions of destruction 
and thereby created the preconditions for even greater suffering, 
pain, and depravity."

---

http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/r/rosenberg-dreams.html
Dreams of Being Eaten Alive
The Literary Core of the Kabbalah
By DAVID ROSENBERG
Harmony

"The cabala, Rosenberg tells us, ''is obsessed with failed sex, 
especially the spilling of semen in sleep or masturbation.'' To 
highlight this obsession he offers the most startling excerpt in his 
book, one that begins with Isaac's lengthy and electric explanation 
of a dream in which he has been seduced by a woman -- 'You, 
scrollworm,' she whispered, 'I can read your mind' ''(presumably this 
is Lilith, who preys on the vulnerable soul during sleep) -- and 
fathered a child, whom, upon discovering, Rebecca has decapitated and 
chopped up for a stew. Rosenberg's strength is his ability to convey 
both the high dramatic force of the piece and the uncanny 
defamiliarizing of the biblical text on which it is based, while at 
the same time retaining an earthy humor that is almost contemporary. 
When Isaac has finished relating his story, Rebecca tartly says: ''I 
told you it was not good to practice union while drunk with the new 
wine. . . . You reproach yourself in your dreams but I have seen the 
results; I cannot hide it. I find your dried seed in the sheets in 
the morning. If you must have wine -- no more than a glass.'' This is 
Rabbi Moses de Leon as Lenny Bruce."

from the review at 
http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/09/10/reviews/000910.10wils.html

We meet Lillith in GR (649) , Vineland (166), and Mason & Dixon (no 
page reference handy, but I posted on it in some detail during the 
MDMD).


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