therapy themselves. Agent: Giles Anderson,
Anderson Literary. (Mar.)
The Barefoot Lawyer:
A Blind Man’s Fight for
Justice and Freedom in China
Chen Guangcheng. Holt, $28 (352p) ISBN 978-
0-8050-9805-1
As this riveting memoir recounts, Chen
grew up poor and blind in rural China,
China: beatings, torture, a multiyear
prison stint, and finally, house arrest. He
then describes how, defying the odds, he
escaped to the American embassy, where
he petitioned online communities to support his case and demand his release. At
last he broke free and moved, with his
family, to the U.S. The picture of the
Chinese government that emerges from
this story is one of blatant corruption and
blind rule-following, brutally punishing
prisoners for even minor infractions or
requests. Chen has an excellent sense of
pace and attention to detail, and he knows
how to fill in cultural gaps for those less
familiar with China. The result is an eminently readable, albeit chilling memoir
that will grip the attention of readers
everywhere. (Mar.)
Boswell’s Enlightenment
Robert Zaretsky. Harvard Univ., $26.95
(282p) ISBN 978-0-674-36823-1
This sparkling work is a partial biography of one of the 18th century’s most
arresting figures—someone often taken to
be emblematic of that intellectually critical era. Zaretsky (A Life Worth Living),
professor of French history at the
University of Houston, sees James
Boswell—known for “his oddness, his
youth, and his melancholy”—as
embodying the Enlightenment’s many
conflicting currents and torn by them all.
Seeking to escape from conflicts between
the flesh and Protestant religiosity, and
between the ancient and modern, the
young Scot sought and gained the
acquaintance and counsel, much of it
unsettling to him, of some of the age’s
great figures—Samuel Johnson, Voltaire,
Rousseau, David Hume, John Wilkes,
and Pascal Paoli—in a famous two-year
tour of the Continent. Boswell’s earnest
search for answers to life’s bewildering
puzzles continues to fascinate. Zaretsky
brilliantly, sometimes movingly, adds to
that fascination. It’s frustrating, however,
that he leaves his protagonist in mid-life,
before Boswell takes up his classic Life of
Samuel Johnson. Also, though Zaretsky
opens the book with a short, lively cri-
tique of Enlightenment scholarship, he
doesn’t indicate how, if at all, his portrait
of Boswell alters our present knowledge of
the era. So convincing are Zaretsky’s
observations, so sure his touch, that one
wishes for more—a longer, fuller study of
his subject. (Mar.)
Deep Violence:
Military Violence, War Play,
and the Social Life of Weapons
Joanna Bourke. Counterpoint (PGW, dist.),
$28 (356p) ISBN 978-1-61902-463-2
War and violence are deeply ingrained
in the cultural and linguistic context of
modern American and English culture,
argues Bourke ( The Story of Pain), a British
academic who has written prolifically on
war and its effects on society. In her
opinion, popular culture’s enthusiasm for
weaponry, specifically weaponry that uses
the language of sport to couch the raw and
harrowing reality of killing other people,
and the essentially empty gestures of
international bans on various weapons of
war merely obscure social complicity in
mass violence. “We are all responsible for
war,” Bourke notes, but the relentless cul-
tural imperatives she critiques make an
alternative seem daunting and difficult to
achieve. From bluff, hearty diaries and
memoirs from WWI soldiers, which
describe combat as a “sport with no holds
barred,” to the enduring popularity of
war-related play, movies, and other forms
of “militainment,” the details offered are
telling and disturbing. The use of graphi-
cally violent first-person shooter video
games as military recruitment and
training tools particularly troubles
Bourke, who quotes combat veterans
using games and movies as analogies to
actions that are all too real. While her dis-
section of war and weaponry in culture is
astute, a closing chapter on resistance and
rejection of these norms is thin on exam-
ples of how to transform our culture and
leaves the reader less than hopeful. Agent:
Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (Mar.)
★ Entrepreneurship for the Rest
of Us: How to Create Innovation
and Opportunity Everywhere
Paul B. Brown. Bibliomotion, $26.95 (176p)
ISBN 978-1-62956-055-7
New York Times columnist Brown
(Creating a Winner) examines what makes
entrepreneurs successful in this excellent
business guide aimed at helping readers
improve their own companies. A 30-year
student of entrepreneurship, he distills
the knowledge he has amassed into a series
of lessons for employees and management
at any company, with a particular focus on
larger organizations. Instead of emphasizing what entrepreneurs do, Brown
