US vacation 4: New books from Kramers

There is a fantastic bookstore right by Dupont Circle in Washington DC called Kramers, and as usual I had to spend a buck too many there. This time I bought Everyman by Philip Roth, one of my favorite American authors. I have already read it (yes, it is quite a short novel) and I liked it from the first line (“Around the grave in the rundown cemetery were a few of his former advertising colleagues from New York…”). A winding story about life, death, temptation, illness, and thoughts about why the choices in life ended up the way it did.

I also bought SAIS-professor Zbigniew Brzezinski’s new book Second Chance, which deals with American foreign policy during the most recent three presidents (Bush, Clinton, Bush). As usual, Brzezinski’s analysis is sharp, critical, and he tells us all how things should have been run in a very Brzezinski-esque way. The book is informative, enjoyable, but also sad. US foreign policy and American superpower could have been developed and used so differently since that Wall came down.

Barack Obama’s The audacity of hope also ended up in my suitcase, although I have not yet read his first book Dreams from my father. I will try to read them both and review them in Aktuellt i Politiken. As a start, don’t miss this article about Obama from The New Yorker, I found it very informative. Why cannot articles in Swedish magazines be allowed to carry on like that?