Favorite books of 2002 - includes poems

Sometimes I think that since it's almost the end of the world, I should just go ahead and have that cannoli, then smoke that Camel while I read that Danielle Steel. Is there only enough time left for short stories? But what if it's not quite the end of the world? Should I finally read a self-improvement book? Should I color coordinate my reading with the terror palette? Fried Green Tomatoes. Devil in a Blue Dress. The Yellow Wallpaper. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. Red Badge of Courage.

This year, I noticed that most of my reading was of the get-me-out-of-here genre. On cross-country flights I risked being so engrossed I wouldn't notice my seatmate's sneaker heels were smoking. The Lovely Bones (Little Brown), by Alice Sebold, was a transcontinental, non-smarmy surprise. Fall on Your Knees (Scribner), by Ann-Marie MacDonald, did the page-turning trick. You've read about Everything Is Illuminated (Houghton Mifflin), by Jonathan Safran Foer, except perhaps for how let-me-read-this-to-you hysterical it is. My seatmate looked at me as if my shoes were smoking.

The Glass Palace (Random House), by Amitav Ghosh, is set primarily in Burma, Malaya, and India from 1885 until the present. The teak industry is a character. The story of Indian soldiers in the condescension of the British army is heartbreaking. The details of the local and international politics are fascinating.

Daughter of Fortune (Harper Perennial), the sixth novel by Isabel Allende, got me across country and back. I did not lower my shades so people could better see episodes of Everybody Loves Raymond. I'd never read any Allende before and was swept up in the big story woven from strands from China, England, Chile, and gold rush California.

(Confession: I never finished more than seventy-five pages of that Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri I recommended last year. Now that I'm living in one, I just can't bear to read more from it in my spare time.)

Kate Clinton is a humorist.

By Ruth Conniff

Chris Hedges, veteran war correspondent for The New York Times and winner of the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism, has written a powerful indictment, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (PublicAffairs).

Hedges writes from the depths of his own near despair, as he tries to recover from a fifteen-year addiction to the adrenalin rush of war reporting: from the killing fields of Central America and Bosnia to the "turkey shoot" of Gulf War Iraq, the refugee camps of Africa and Palestine, and the bombed-out formerly cosmopolitan cities of Sarajevo and Pristina. War and death are his life's work. This book, a long personal essay grappling with the overwhelming darkness he has witnessed, is an existential effort. Courageously and eloquently facing his own worst nature in self-deprecating and sometimes shocking passages, Hedges tackles a timeless human dilemma--the struggle, as he puts it, between the Freudian forces of love and death.

Hedges reviles the lies of nationalism and "self defense," the stupidity and mindlessness of "patriotic" imperatives to kill a dehumanized enemy. He despises the surreal loss of perspective in the wars he has witnessed around the globe, and, he adds, in this country after September 11.

Hedges doesn't spare his colleagues. "The notion that the press was used in the [Gulf] war is incorrect," he writes. "The press wanted to be used. It saw itself as part of the war effort." He is disgusted by a media that "apes slogans and euphemisms," and helps a willing public to distance itself psychologically from the real costs of war waged in our name.

"And yet," he writes, "despite all this, I am not a pacifist.... The poison that is war does not free us from the ethics of responsibility."

He rooted for swift intervention in Sarajevo and Kosovo. Not out of a romantic sense that the forces of "right" would triumph over the forces of "evil," but merely to stem the murderous crime wave that was engulfing the civilian populace whose suffering he documented so well.

"There are times when force wielded by one immoral faction must be countered by a faction that, while never moral, is perhaps less immoral," Hedges argues. "We in the industrialized world bear responsibility for the world's genocides because we had the power to intervene and did not. We stood by and watched the slaughter in Chechnya, Sri Lanka, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Rwanda where a million people died."

This is a most timely book, particularly for readers struggling with the moral ambiguities of an imminent attack on Iraq that is sure to be an overwhelming high-tech assault on civilians, and yet, at the same time, a war against one of the world's most repressive dictatorships.

"This book is not a call to inaction. It is a call to repentance," he writes. Hedges wants us to realize we carry within ourselves, in our warlike ways, "the seeds of our own obliteration." We have to give up our simplistic identification with one side or the other in every armed conflict, and face our morally messy condition.