Bookends

It's been awhile sir we've graced this page with the pages we've turned around the office here at The Daily Wenzel. Most eagerly making the rounds has been Gautum Malkani's Londonstani, a tale of first generation Indian youth growing up middle-class and British. Combining elements of A Clockwork Orange and Trainspotting, it chronicles their bling-filled, cellphone-boosting, class-cutting days as they try to establish meaning and identity.

Meaning and identity are also central to Prof. Ross Haenfler's Straight-edge: Hardcore Punk, Clean-living Youth, and Social Change. Haenfler spent almsot ten years observing the Denver straight-edge scene, and his book is an exploration of how American youths use the no drugs, no alcohol, no meat or promiscuous sex of straight-edge as a catalyst for personal change. Sean Marchetto's Tune In, Turn On, Go Punk makes great companion reading.

We've also been readind T. Christian Miller's Blood Money: Wasted Billions, Lost Lives and Corporate Greed in Iraq. The title pretty much tells you exactly what's going on in the book, but nevertheless, Miller does an admirable job documenting the mishandling of Iraqi reconstruciton. While she perhaps spends too much time dwelling on the failures (or maybe there really have been so few successes), she puts most of the blame of the Bush Administration's failure to plan and prepare for the reconstruction. Yes, companies like Haliburton have walked away with billions, but only because Government oversight has allowed it. Events unfolded with a speed and complexity that planners simply did not predict.

Finally, on a more light-hearted note, we have also been perusing the new Gorillaz' "biography" Rise of the Ogre. Quite fun.