Ron Slate's blog
January 7th, 2009
on The Shameful Peace: How French Artists and Intellectuals Survived the Nazi Occupation, by Frederic Spotts (Yale)
“Everything we did was equivocal. We never quite knew whether we were doing right or wrong. A subtle poison corrupted even our best actions.” This was Sartre’s incisive post-war assessment of the behavior of French artists and intellectuals during the German occupation of 1940-1944.
January 4th, 2009
on A World of Trouble: The White House and the Middle East, by Patrick Tyler (Farrar, Straus)
As the Obama administration prepares to take the reins of American foreign policy, one wonders not only if and how the new president will depart from George W. Bush’s inert approach to the Israeli-Palestinian debacle, but also how Obama’s advisers (often recycled Clintonites) regard the ambitious but failed policies of Bill Clinton and the 1993 Oslo Accords.
