Word: greenfeld
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...home," says novelist and longtime friend Josh Greenfeld, "Mario is the Godfather." The author's pals complement his deep family relationships. The group, which includes Vogel, Catch-22 author Heller and novelist and playwright Bruce Jay Friedman, gets together for a boys-only lunch every month. Friedman recalls encountering Puzo's writing when he hired him as an assistant editor for the adventure magazines Male and Men. "You knew that he was a natural and a master storyteller," says Friedman. "I'm just disappointed that I didn't become his agent." Plans for a new book are already under...
This scene is emblematic of the world portrayed in Karl Taro Greenfeld's Speed Tribes (HarperCollins; 286 pages; $23), a fast and strutting view of a neon-lit capital that might be called Notes from the Tokyo Underground. In place of the kimonoed ladies and the men in gray flannel suits who form so much of our sense of Japan, Greenfeld pulls back the curtain on a much more colorful and disaffected group -- gangsters, good-time girls, gold-toothed bikers and punks. The economic boom of the '80s, in which Japan's assets grew 80% in just four years, produced...
...Greenfeld's gold-chain demimonde no more represents all of Japan than Bret Easton Ellis' world of tan, designer-drug nihilists represents America. Like Ellis, Greenfeld sometimes comes close to succumbing to the brand-name hypnosis he wishes to satirize. Moreover, he never really explores the meaning of the rebellions he describes. Instead, he gives us a kind of up-to-the- minute CD: a collection of snappy, driving vignettes that show how the cutting edge draws blood...
...Greenfeld does argue that as long as we live in a modern world we will indeed live in a nationalist world. If nationalism disappears, she writes, "the world in which we live will be no more, and another world, as distinct from the one we know as was the society of orders that it replaced, will replace it. This post-national world will be truly post-modern, for nationality is the constitutive principle of modernity...
Stripped of ideology and politics, Nationalism provides a rich and lucid account of a concept that has for too long remained obscure in much academic literature. By providing a clear theoretical basis for her work, which she then applies convincingly in her case studies, Greenfeld provides the tools to tackle the complex issue of nationalism and its consequences...