The Smithian

Samantha Power will come to the job [as US Ambassador to the United Nations] with a deep and nuanced understanding of how the UN works. Her latest book, Chasing the Flame, chronicled the life and death of Sergio Vieira de Mello, the top UN official who was killed when terrorists struck the UN Compound in Iraq in 2003. Since the publication of the book…Power has been a vocal advocate for the safety and security of UN humanitarian workers around the world. This is a critically important issue [as] The UN has become a preferred target of Jihadi organizations in South Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, the Horn of Africa and the Sahel…The UN is now gearing up for a major mission in Mali where the UN will almost certainly come under direct assault from Jihadi groups in a way that…could be unprecedented…On Syria, her influence could be lasting. Power is best known for her…A Problem From Hell: America in the Age of Genocide, which was hugely influential in liberal foreign policy circles. The book argues that the institutions of US foreign policy failed to respond adequately to the big mass atrocity events since World War II.

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There is not much literature that illuminates the story of Taiwan before 1949, the year Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalist party were chased out of Mainland China by the Communists…Prior to ‘49, Taiwan was occupied by the Portuguese, Dutch, and Japanese until the end of World War II. It is a land of divided loyalties, a people who struggle to define themselves in a colonized homeland…My mother tells…of running to hide from American planes that were bombing the country. My father tells…of how things got worse when Nationalists came to “liberate” Taiwan. People were shot. Families starved. Nobody could be trusted…This novel tells the story of…the bright but least favored son of a wealthy Taiwanese family, coming of age at the end of World War II…The history of Taiwan and the Taiwanese is…one that should not be forgotten. Wu’s writing is compelling as a witness to this story.

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Rosie, it turns out, did much more than drive rivets.

“The post-presidency has evolved since World War II into a big business…”

The Atlantic has a great photo retrospective on the end of World War 2. The story contains an image of Levittown, New York. Levittown was one of the country’s first planned suburban communities. It was also an ideal-typical example of how American Apartheid was created in suburbia. Non-whites, and other ethnic “undesirables” were explicitly prohibited from living in Levittown. These rules would be in place in similar communities all across America where they would be enforced by physical violence in the public sphere, and also by the law in the form of restrictive housing covenants. the Atlantic’s caption of the Levittown photo contains no such information. Images of the past when viewed in the present are a representation of reality. These realities tell us just as much about our present concerns as they do about the supposed “facts” of the past…

…based on [perhaps]  the most widely read and best-selling novel of the Chicano literary canon…Written by Rudolfo Anaya and published in 1972, the book tells the coming-of-age story of a young boy under the guidance of his mentor—a curandera or healer—in New Mexico during the Second World War…the novel has been included on a list of most frequently challenged books in U.S. school systems for its sexual references and violence…

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[look of the hour]

…after World War II, Harry Truman responded to Stalin’s Soviet Union with the doctrine of global containment. He created the National Security Agency, the CIA and a peacetime draft. That was the birth of the peacetime emergency state, and it has been with us ever since.

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…a tense and authentic portrait of WWII-era segregation and prejudice.

For more than half a century, members of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association gathered here every Dec. 7 to commemorate the attack by the Japanese that drew the United States into World War II. Others stayed closer to home for more intimate regional chapter ceremonies, sharing memories of a day they still remember in searing detail. But no more.

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…a Dutch film that tells the true story of the “forbidden” relationship between Waldemar Nods, a 19-year-old student from Suriname, and Rika van der Lans, a married Dutch woman in her 40s, and mother of 4 children. The pair meet in the 1920s, fall in love, and Rika becomes pregnant soon thereafter, causing a scandal with far-reaching consequences, leading up to the World War II…

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Whenever I need to be reminded of…beautiful implausibility, I reach for my copy of Marguerite Duras’ The War. In this slender memoir of World War II, Duras shares episodes from her life in occupied Paris, where she belonged to the French Resistance under the leadership of the country’s future president, Francois Mitterrand. Duras describes war and its tragic consequences with heart-wrenching simplicity. Her language is spare, her voice riveting. The result is like reading a life.

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