The Power Sweepstakes

Idi Amin and Yoweri Museveni are the twin subjects of a new book, Slow Poison, by the eminent anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani. In it, Mamdani seeks to revisit their years in power as well as more generally the contradictions of decolonization and state formation in Uganda. A personal story as well as one of wide-ranging scholarship, Slow Poison, Howard W. French argues in his review, is a “bracingly contrarian portrait of Amin and Museveni.” “Ultimately,” French writes, “the lesson one derives from Slow Poison is that authoritarians who perpetuate personal power inevitably hollow out their countries’ institutions and create vacuums when they die or are overthrown. Any stability they seem to provide is illusory.” Read “Mahmood Mamdani’s Uganda”

A Firm Sense of Resolve

Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff’s Your Name Here is an experiment on many different fronts at once: A co-authored novel that that seeks to resist the easy temptations of lyrical realism, Your Name Here also attempts to be a work of political fiction that does not avow one politics alone. Reviewing the novel, Jess Bergman writes that Your Name Here dramatizes the tensions and possibilities of political art: “By making frequent, jarring reference to the military operations pulverizing Iraq and Afghanistan at the time of its writing, the novel…finds a canny way to capture how the drumbeat of war colonizes our imagination, no matter how far removed we may be from the front lines.” Read “Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff’s Sweeping Anti-War Novel”