Facts Are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade Without a Name
Timothy Garton Ash is well known as an astute and penetrating observer of a dazzling array of subjects, not least through his many contributions to the <i>New York Review of Books</i>. This collection of his essays from the last decade reveals his knack for ferreting out exceptional insights into a troubled world, often on the basis of firsthand experience. Whether he is writing about how “liberalism” has become a dirty word in American political discourse, the problems of Muslim assimilation in Europe, Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, Günter Grass’s membership in the Waffen-SS, or the angry youth of Iran, Garton Ash combines a gimlet eye for detail with deep knowledge of the history of his chosen subjects.<br /><br />Running through this book is the author’s insistence that, whatever some postmodernists might claim, there are indeed facts--and we have both a political and a moral duty to establish them. By practicing what it preaches, <i>Facts Are Subversive</i> shows why Timothy Garton Ash is one of the world’s leading political writers.