| THE POLITICS OF TRUTH A Diplomat's Memoir Joseph Wilson New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2004 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-7867-1378-3 | ||||
| ISBN 0-7867-1378-X | 513p. | HC/BWI | $26.00 | |
| Page 42: | "Hearty shrubs sprung from the hardpan, only to be munched by herds of goats..." |
| S/B "Hardy" and "sprang". |
| Page 45: | "...the stench of death mingling with formaldehyde, two stiff specters, each in its wheelchair, and the coffin maker in his ash-and-dandruff-speckled blue worsted sweater." |
| I believe this should be "spectres." Also, the series of clauses should be set apart by semicolons, not by commas. |
| Page 46: | "...there were a limited number of vendors of essential supplies..." |
| Number error: S/B "was." |
| Page 54: | "Susan had several more surgeries as the vestiges of the gas gangrene were cleaned out of her tissue and excessive bleeding was staunched." |
| Word choice: S/B "stanched". |
| Page 105: | "...with Taha Yassin Ramadan, another hard case given to wearing pearl-handled pistols backwards in twin holsters in order to effect the cross-handed draw of an Old West gunslinger..." |
| Word choice: S/B "affect", since the fancy firearms were an affectation. |
| Page 112: | "It was nerve-racking, to say the least, as we were organizing evacuation of families out of Iraq, which required much rapid coordination." |
| S/B "nerve-wracking". |
| Page 123: | "That is why when dealing with such a determined leader, diplomacy be backed by both sustained international will and the credible threat of force when necessary." |
| Missing word: S/B "diplomacy must be backed". Also, insert a comma after "why". |
| Page 159: | "...only to have hostilities break out a mere matter of weeks later in what the Israeli's called the Yom Kippur war." |
| Unneeded apostrophe: S/B "what the Israelis called". |
| Page 188: | "Cacao beans, the raw material for chocolate, was the big cash crop for several centuries..." |
| Number error: S/B "were". |
| Page 192: | "Rumor had it that one was an escape route down some hidden corridors to safety, and the other was to a bedroom where he either napped or bedded willing maidens. He was not called the father of his country for nothing." |
| Perhaps it's my lack of diplomatic experience. But I fail to understand how one might "nap" a maiden, willing or otherwise. I checked on-line dictionaries. One definition in Merriam-Webster is "to raise short fibers on the surface of a fabric." I suppose you could stretch this to fit by calling hairs fibers and the skin a fabric. The rest I leave to imagination; but I don't really think this is what Wilson meant. The Compact OED was no more help. It did supply two other definitions, which I think are from Britain: To name the winner of a race (e.g. a horse or a greyhound); or to score five times in a row (in a card game.) You might stretch either of these to fit; but again I doubt they match Wilson's meaning. Probably I should let the matter "doze" there. |
| Page 202: | "At 11:30 P.M., late on election night, the chief justice of the constitutional court announced that 51.17 percent of the vote had been cast for Omar Bongo."1 |
| Since Wilson previously states that a second round of elections is triggered only when no candidate gets more than 50% of the votes, it's unclear why he protests this result for "short-circuiting" the election process. Perhaps he suspects the French of some nefarious interference; but if so he never says so in this book. |
| Page 209: | "L'Événement du Feudi, later reported that Dominici traveled to Paris several months after the elections in Gabon to meet with Delaye, only to find himself accused, essentially, of lying." |
| Extra comma: S/B "L'Événement du Feudi later". (This probably happened because a phrase describing L'Événement du Feudi was edited out.) |
| Page 213: | "Joulwan was one of the army's most experienced 'warrior-diplomats,' brimming with command presence and a master of the evocative sound bite." |
| I don't doubt it. But apparently his command presence was not sufficient to gain him a proper introduction in the book. This is the first occurrence of the name "Joulwan". Only later do we learn that it introduces General George Joulwan, CINC of the U.S. European Command and Commander of NATO. |
| Page 216: | "After meetings at the air force base in Incirlik, we continued on to the Iraqi town of Zakho, just across the border, to see our Special Forces who were based there to support the Kurds." |
| Capitalize "Special Forces" while putting "air force" in lower case? |
| Page 231: | "By contrast,just across the border,in Bratislava, Slovakia, the government was much more ambivalent..." |
| Missing spaces? Or just aggressive auto-formatting? |
| Page 233: | "In the fall of 1995, we traveled to Geneva to meet with Mrs. Sadako Ogata, the U.N. high commissioner for refugees..." |
| Wilson goes on to discuss the efforts of various relief organizations in Africa. This is certainly noteworthy and may be chronologically accurate. But to me it feels like a digression, because the subject of the chapter is Bosnia. |
| Page 316: | "Unlike Pat, what I heard Powell unwittingly say was that U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441 was working. After all, he and the president both made clear that the scientists responsible for doing the research and development of Iraq's WMD had either been secreted in neighboring countries, or else threatened with death if they cooperated with the inspectors. In either case, they were clearly not able to work on their programs." |
| I don't follow Wilson's logic here. Surely, if Iraq had been able to set up R&D facilities for its scientists outside its borders, it would have made sure they could carry out R&D in those facilities. And the threat of death has always been a powerful motivator. Nothing in Wilson's narrative explains why it would not be effective in keeping the hypothetical work on WMD both hidden and humming despite the presence of inspectors in Iraq. |
| Page 320: | "And in a place like Iraq, where politics is a blood sport and where you have these clan, tribal, ethnic and confessional cleavages..." |
| Does "confessional cleavages" refer to the hostility between Sunni Muslims and Shi'ite Muslims? The meaning is not clear from context. |
| Page 370: | "That requirement had led me to take the Foreign Service exam, and my diplomatic career was soon underway." |
| Arrggghh... |
| Page 423: | "An offensive was of choice could no longer be masked as self-defense." |
| Typo: S/B "war of choice". |
| Page 426: | "Though peremptorily denied by the administration, our all-volunteer military is suffering long-term damage..." |
| Dangling participle: S/B "Though it's peremptorily denied". |
| Page 427: | "The exposure of a clandestine operative is a reprehensible breach of a trust between our political leadedrship and those who risk their lives to keep America safe." |
| Typo: S/B "leadership". |
| Page 456: | "David Shipley... kept space available for me for weeks while I determined if I was going to have to attach my own name to the uranium story to make the administration finally come clean with the American people on the fictiion of the sixteen words in the president's State of the Union address." |
| Typo: S/B "fiction". |
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