Word: fitzgerald
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...however, back in the Reagan era with its dream of a Star Wars anti-missile defense system. Reaganites and indeed many Russians believe Ronald Reagan's threat to develop such a system contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union (a thesis examined by historian Frances FitzGerald in her recent book Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan and Star Wars and the End of the Cold War). Critics then scoffed at the viability of Star Wars. They are scoffing too at the new missile shield. The difference is this system is not only being tested but is also being...
...another intellectual, Frances Fitzgerald, takes a determined run at Reagan in her new book, "Way Out There in the Blue" (Simon & Schuster, 592 pages, $30). Fitzgerald goes for the unambivalent version - a Reagan who is cheerfully, dangerously clueless, a simpleton actor who performs superbly when standing on chalk marks and reading from a script, the GOP's Prince Myshkin. Fitzgerald takes her title from the cliche in Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman": "Willy [Loman] was a salesman... He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine." Ronnie Reagan is Willy...
...Fitzgerald, author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning treatise on Vietnam, "Fire in the Lake," has devised a cunning booby trap. She equates the mystery of Reagan with the mystery of "Star Wars," his plan (visionary or goofy, depending) to erect an umbrella of space-borne laser and particle-beam weapons to protect America from nuclear attack. She examines Star Wars (the Strategic Defense Initiative, SDI) and pronounces it no mystery at all, but merely an expensive, stupid idea. The same, she suggests, may therefore be said of Reagan. He cooked up SDI, she thinks, mostly to deflect the nuclear-freeze...
...Fitzgerald's most interesting chapter is her first - her effort to locate Reagan as a figure in American myth, specifically, in exceptionalism and the salvation doctrine of the American civil religion. In 1979, Reagan visited the NORAD base hollowed out of the core of Cheyenne Mountain, Colo., the nerve center of American air defenses. The base commander told Reagan that from there, the military could track an incoming nuclear missile but could do nothing to stop it. Fitzgerald writes: "[The story] resonates with Biblical and mythological overtones... Reagan can be seen as the innocent, the American Everyman...
...keen depiction of a lost Pakistani generation will invite comparisons with F. Scott Fitzgerald, though perhaps a closer analogue would be the late Robert Bingham, who did for overly rich young New Yorkers what Hamid is doing for their Pakistani counterparts. And given the focus on substance abuse, one might even call it a Pakistani Trainspotting, minus some luridness and plus a smattering of Urdu. Could this novel have been set in New York? Probably not. The corruption among the elite, the nuclear threat and the constellation of gender and social issues in Pakistan work in a constellation that would...