Explorer Arm Rest

Modern nationalism is a language of the blood: a call to arms that can end in the horror of ethnic cleansing. But it is also a language of belonging: a call to come home. In Blood and Belonging, Michael Ignatieff explores both sides of nationalism in a personal odyssey that begins in the nightmare of former Yugoslavia and ends with his return to his adopted homeland, Great Britain's disunited kingdom. In the devastated cities and towns on either side of the Highway of Brotherhood and Unity that links Zagreb and Belgrade, Ignatieff asks how ethnic pride turned into ethnic cleansing. In a journey between Frankfurt and Leipzig, he asks whether the nation that disgraced modern nationalism can lay to rest the ghosts of its past. And in Ukraine, he asks how a new nation can dig itself out of the ruins of the Soviet empire. In Quebec, Ignatieff returns to his own roots as a Canadian and asks why a nation like Quebec, which is already a master in its own house, believes it needs a state of its own - particularly given the claims of Indian First Nations within that province. In the mountains of Kurdistan, the world's largest stateless people - the Kurds - are fighting the Turks, the Iraqis, and themselves to establish their own nation-state. When, Ignatieff asks, does national oppression justify armed struggle? In the final journey of the book, he visits Northern Ireland, where twenty-five years of strife have exposed the fault lines and fissures of a British national identity at the breaking point. Blood and Belonging is a profound and searching exploration of one of the most complex and volatile issues of our time.

A dark, brilliant novel of astonishing pitch, set in Provincetown, a "spit of shrub and dune" captured here in the rawness and melancholy of the off-season, "Tough Guys Don't Dance is the story of Tim Madden, an unsuccessful writer addicted to bourbon, cigarettes, and blonde, careless women with money. On the twenty-fourth morning after the decampment of his wife, Patty Lareine, he awakens with a hangover, considerable sexual excitement, and, on his upper arm, a red tattoo bearing a name from the past. Of the night before, he remembers practically nothing. What he soon learns is that the front passenger seat of his Porsche is soaked with blood and that in a secluded corner of his marijuana stash in a nearby woods rests a blonde head, severed at the throat. Is Madden therefore a murderer? He has no way of knowing. As in many novels of crime, the narrative centers on violence--physical, sexual, and emotional--but these elements move in their orbits through a rich constellation of character as Madden tries to reconstruct the missing hours of a terrible evening. In the course of this in-quiry a bizarre and vividly etched gallery of characters reappears to him as in a dream--ex-prizefighters, sexual junkies, mediums, former cons, a police chief, a world-weary former girl friend, and Mad-den's father, old now but still a Herculean figure, a practitioner of the sternest backroom ethics. "Tough Guys Don't Dance represents Mailer at the peak of his powers with a stunningly conceived novel that soon transcends its origins as a mystery to become a relentless search into the recesses and buried virtues of the modern American male. Rarely, as many readers will discern, have the paradoxes ofmachismo and homosexuality been so well explored.