Tom Bissell
Articles by Tom Bissell
Amis in the 21st Century
THE SECOND PLANE: SEPTEMBER 11: TERROR AND BOREDOM
By Martin Amis
Alfred A. Knopf, 211 pages, $24
Martin Amis’ The Second Plane is a collection of essays, short fiction and book reviews arranged in order of composition. It thus functions, in some ways, as a walking tour of the motley post-Sept. 11 mind—its fears, madnesses, misapprehensions and insights. While the book’s first essay, written in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, aches with the same “reflexive search for the morally intelligible” (as Mr. Amis elsewhere calls it) that animates the desperate relativism of the paleo-left, the end of the book finds him, having now enlightened himself on modern Islam’s intellectual traffic jam, condemning the very same left’s “hemispherical abjection” to the “Thanatism” of radical Islam. read more »
Weighing Iraq in the Balance: Good Intentions, Bad Arrogance
Weighing Iraq in the Balance: Good Intentions, Bad Arrogance
