Michael Burleigh
Grease My Palm
Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security
By Sarah Chayes
W W Norton 262pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
Thieves of State is instructive, though not in ways Sarah Chayes intended. Intellectuals are often attracted, like moths to the flame, to power, especially if that power consists of regimental insignia on the arms and phalanxes of aides called Bob or Chuck with laser wands to highlight PowerPoint presentations of kinetic kill rates.
In the following passage, Chayes describes a ‘gaggle’ at the Afghan headquarters of General David Petraeus, Commander of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF):
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Perception is a weird thing. Lawrence Durrell saw Hydra as a ‘great horned toad’ but Henry Miller thought it resembled a ‘huge loaf of petrified bread’. Niko Ghika painted it as a series of neat white and orange squares.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-call-of-the-wine-dark-sea
The minimalist Fumio Sasaki 'confesses that as he began to purchase fewer consumer goods, his meals shrank in size. He decluttered and lost weight. Accumulation is not just an economic way of life but a form of embodiment too. Enlightenment is reduction.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/gardens-of-emptiness
'The river’s desecration mirrors Colombia’s long history of violence: "for years we treated it like a sewer," says Ahmed, a survivor of a particularly brutal paramilitary massacre, "just like we treated each other".'
Patrick Wilcken on the Magdalena.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/troubled-waters-3