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Summary
Summary
Booker Prize-shortlisted author Monica Ali's long-awaited second novel brings readers into the vivid world of a London restaurant kitchen.
Summary
This novel opens with a mysterious death in the cellars of a smart, cosmopolitan hotel and over the course of the ensuing pages, peels back the layers of polyglot London to reveal the melting pot which exists below.
Author Notes
Monica Ali was born October 20, 1967. She is a British writer of Bangladeshi origin. She is the author of Brick Lane, her debut novel, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2003.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Monica Ali was born October 20, 1967. She is a British writer of Bangladeshi origin. She is the author of Brick Lane, her debut novel, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2003.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (10)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Arestaurant kitchen is a functional substitute for hell. Flames leap, plates fly-knives and fingers, too. They're also the default place immigrants, legal and otherwise, find work. At London's Imperial Hotel, the setting for Monica Ali's In the Kitchen, nobody speaks the same language and everybody is underpaid. Ali, acclaimed author of Brick Lane, nails the killer heat, killer fights and lethal grease buildup, all of it supervised by a "simmering culinary Heathcliff," Gabriel Lightfoot, executive chef. Lightfoot dropped out of school at 16 to begin paying his kitchen dues, working crazy hours with crazy people while studying food chemistry and Brillat-Savarin. Along the way, he picked up scarred hands and a ravaged psyche. At 24, given his own restaurant, it went straight up his nose. Now, almost 20 years later, two wealthy Londoners have agreed to back Gabriel in a new restaurant, Lightfoot's, where he'll serve "Classic French, precisely executed. Rognons de veau dijonnaise, poussin en cocotte Bonne Femme, tripes a la mode de Caen." In postmodern balsamic-drenched London, Gabriel is confident traditional French is poised for a comeback. Then the naked corpse of a Ukrainian night porter is discovered in the Imperial's basement, his head in a pool of blood. There is no one to claim the body. The ripple-free effect of a human death unhinges Gabriel. He develops a voluptuous need to self-sabotage. Visual manifestations include a Dr. Strangelove arm tic, shaking limbs and violent bald-spot scratching. Gabriel cheats on his fiancee and lies to his lover. The story is told in the third person, but through Gabriel's point of view. Intimacy juggles distance: "After a certain point, he could not stop himself. His desire was a foul creature that climbed on his back and wrapped its long arms around his neck." Ali is brilliant at showing loss and adaptation in a polyglot culture. Her descriptions of the changing peoplescape are fresh. But inside Gabriel's head is not the most compelling place to be. A tragic nonhero, he thinks with his "one-eyed implacable foe." It does not help that a recurring dream crumbles him, and since Gabriel doesn't understand the dream, neither does the reader. It assumes an unsustainable importance. You can play Freud or you can turn the page. Ali is not plot-averse: she provides a mysterious death, a hotel sex-trade scam, a slave-labor scheme, missing money and a dying parent. Yet Lightfoot is a character in search of a motive. It's a tribute to Ali that we care. Here is a true bastard, ravaged and out of control. In the Kitchen has the thud and knock of life-inexplicable, impenetrable, not sewn up at all. As Gabriel's lover is fond of saying: "Tchh." (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
The turbulent, multicultural London backdrop is the same, but the dutiful Muslim wife in transition, who drove the action of Ali's brilliant debut (Brick Lane, 2003, etc.), has been replaced by a very different kind of protagonist: a talented chef in midlife crisis. The future looks rosy for 42-year-old Gabriel Lightfoot. He has turned around a failing restaurant in an old London hotel and secured financial backing to open his own establishment, a lifelong dream. Marriage is in the cards with gorgeous girlfriend Charlie, a jazz singer. Yet the novel's first sentence signals the crack-up to come. A Ukrainian kitchen porter has been found dead in the restaurant basement. Another porter, young, rail-thin Lena from Belorusse, appears to be homeless. Gabe invites her to his place, a favor for which she matter-of-factly offers sex in return. Lena is cold and hardunsurprising, since she was trafficked into prostitution and is on the run from her brutal pimp. Gabe is startled to realize that he does indeed want to have sex with Lena, in fact is falling for her. Charlie finds out and dumps him. A visit to his dying father in the former mill town where he was raised brings back childhood memories. Meanwhile there's a kitchen to be run. Ali does a superb job of evoking this histrionic, occasional violent workplace manned by "a United Nations task force." She hints too at the dark world of bonded labor that lies beyond the kitchen, as a major scandal involving the hotel maids threatens to erupt and Gabe plays detective. It's too much for him; he has two panic attacks before losing it completely and roaming the streets like a madman. Ali takes risks here, and not all of them pay off. Gabe's obsession with Lena and subsequent breakdown are not wholly convincing, and Charlie gets shortchanged as a character. Moment to moment, however, the novel is engrossing. Flawed but still impressive, the work of a fearless writer determined to challenge herself. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Gabriel Lightfoot has a lot on his plate. As executive chef at London's luxurious Imperial Hotel, he must contend with demanding customers, a bully of a general manager, and a kitchen staff that runs the gamut from bellicose to perverse. So when a Ukrainian porter is found dead in the restaurant basement, Gabe knows his already challenging life is about to become even more so. Shortly after the porter's demise, Gabe encounters Lena, an eerie, ethereal young woman from Belarus who is clearly harboring secrets about the deceased. She piques Gabe's curiosity and his passion (and just when he was about to propose to his longtime girlfriend, Charlie). More trouble awaits on the domestic front: Gabe's father has been diagnosed with cancer. All this personal chaos threatens to foil Gabe's plans of opening his own restaurant. (He has worked so hard to please his two backers, a slick member of Parliament and an even oilier businessman.) Man Booker Prize finalist Ali (Alentejo Blue, 2006) is at her best describing the din and drama of a hotel kitchen. (The pastry chef is forever hopped up on happy pills, and a chef de partie positively revels in rude gestures.) Ali deftly interweaves a collection of compelling plots in this powerful portrayal of a man whose life is slowly spiraling out of control. Fans and new readers alike are sure to embrace this talented novelist, who possesses a wise and original voice.--Block, Allison Copyright 2009 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Rumsfeld testifying before the Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, May 2004. BEFORE meetings in the run-up to the Iraq war, Bradley Graham writes, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld would make chitchat with Secretary of State Colin Powell. "He'd talk about something that he knew was a hot button for Colin. It might be about voting rights or immigration or education or abortion," one participant recalled. "And Colin, who is usually a cool head, would lose his cool. And I'd think to myself, Wow, Rumsfeld is screwing with his head. That's when I decided he was a very dangerous man." Graham's "By His Own Rules" is less a biography of Rumsfeld than a study of Rumsfeld as a Washington archetype: the operator, the insider, the bureaucratic infighter. It does cover Rumsfeld's life from childhood on - his enthusiasm for wrestling and squash, his attitudes toward money, his marriage - but only cursorily. At the book's heart is Rumsfeld's behavior in committee meetings and boardrooms, with the focus on the skirmishes that marked the gradual deterioration of the war in Iraq. The title is meant literally. Rumsfeld is one of those executives who are fond of lists, aphorisms and bromidic rules for living. Graham, a veteran Washington Post correspondent, traces Rumsfeld's management style through initiatives, guidelines, directives and the memorandums that Rumsfeld sent in such blizzard-like profusion that Pentagon employees took to calling them "snowflakes." The result is a book that is overlong but authoritative and judicious, particularly on questions of where responsibility lies for decisions about the Iraq war. Elected to Congress in 1962 at age 30, Rumsfeld, Graham writes, was a reformer who "never met an organization he didn't want to change." He co-sponsored what became the Freedom of Information Act, and reliably fought for civil rights legislation. He was a darling of this newspaper and so skeptical about the Vietnam War that when Henry Kissinger saw Rumsfeld and his wife, he would sardonically flash the peace sign. Rumsfeld also had what Graham calls "a deep moral streak." While running the Pentagon, he refused on ethical grounds to meet with defense-industry executives. And Rumsfeld got things done. Bosses liked him better than subordinates did. He was "high on energy and intensity and low on frills and compliments." Richard Nixon put him in charge first of the Office of Economic Opportunity, then of wage and price controls, and made him ambassador to NATO. Under Gerald Ford he became the White House chief of staff and then defense secretary, the youngest in history. (He would later become the oldest.) He kept Ford's trust while sidelining his rivals, Kissinger and Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. Such talents served him well as chief executive of the pharmaceuticals company G. D. Searle, where he turned a $28 million loss into a $72 million profit and brought aspartame to market; he got similar results in the early 1990s as C.E.O. of the General Instrument Corporation, a pioneer in high-definition television that needed a favorable hearing from the Federal Communications Commission. Rumsfeld's ability to work Congress and the regulatory bodies helped him in business. By the end of the 1990s he was worth between $50 million and $210 million. But he was more than a glorified lobbyist. He amassed information patiently and thoroughly, and would not be bullied into acting before he had mastered it. And he has never lost his ruthlessness in questioning structures kept in place by mere inertia. As a candidate, George W. Bush had called for armed forces that were "agile, lethal, readily deployable and require a minimum of logistical support." Rumsfeld seemed ideal for the task. "I've never been in a company where I couldn't save 15 percent," he said in 2001. The fascination of Rumsfeld, the tragedy of him, is that the Iraq occupation was nearly wrecked by the kind of mistakes he had spent his career diagnosing. By the time Rumsfeld resigned, the day after Republicans were routed in the 2006 midterm elections, the United States was on the verge of outright defeat. The replacement of his strategy with that of the so-called surge has stabilized Iraq greatly. GRAHAM'S Rumsfeld is vain and peremptory, but sometimes effective and wise. Rumsfeld was rightly skeptical of the ambitious Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi, who, having won the ear of other American war planners, gave them a wildly inaccurate picture of the situation in Iraq. Rumsfeld's plan for invading Iraq was excellent, "an evolutionary advance over what Rumsfeld had found on the shelf," and American forces took Baghdad in 21 days. Graham's view of Rumsfeld's role in abuses of prisoners is nuanced. Rumsfeld doubted that the Defense Department should be in charge of interrogating suspected terrorists in the first place. He authorized harsh interrogation techniques at Guantánamo in December 2002, with a flippant remark about forcing detainees to stand for long periods ("I stand for 8-10 hours a day"), but rescinded them the following month. Still, a Pentagon panel headed by former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger later blamed Rumsfeld for the way the techniques he had initially approved in the controlled environment of Guantánamo "migrated to Afghanistan and Iraq where they were neither limited nor safeguarded." Graham seems to share this verdict. After a career of moving from triumph to triumph, Rumsfeld, during his second stint as secretary of defense, somehow managed to get the least out of the people around him. The 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act had formalized the role of the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in a way that Rumsfeld considered an infringement on civilian control of the military. In his early months, he quarreled with both the Joint Chiefs chairman Hugh Shelton and the Army chief Eric Shinseki. One three-star admiral tells Graham that it would have been futile to raise misgivings in such a "bullying, dismissive" climate. Rumsfeld has been accused of keeping forces in Iraq unnaturally low as a way of showing how efficiently a reformed military could operate. Graham sees this as only part of the story. It is true that during the invasion Rumsfeld constantly sought ways to "off-ramp" units if Iraq were to fall sooner than expected. But by 2005 he began to think seriously about how many troops were necessary to fight an insurgency. He came to the wrong conclusions. There is little about David Petraeus in this book, but there is much about the retired Army general Jack Keane, who helped develop the case for the surge. The United States had a "short-war strategy," Keane complained to Rumsfeld in September 2006. "Nowhere in it is there a plan to defeat the insurgency ourselves." Changing course, he explained, would require as many as 28,000 more troops. Keane describes Rumsfeld as shocked at the news, "as if he was hearing it for the first time." American forces, it turned out, were a bit too flexible. They were configured in such a way that they could pack up and leave anytime, and that was not lost on the insurgents, or on bystanders picking sides. In this light, Rumsfeld is not just an inside-the-Beltway archetype but a particularly American one, the sort of person in whom a healthy skepticism toward established practice shades into contempt for it. His philosophy is that of the corporate Man in the Gray Flannel Suit in his boardroom, but it is also that of the itinerant Rambling Man in his boxcar: Don't pin me down. Both types fail to see that "agility" and "innovation" can be, in some contexts, synonyms for frivolity and lack of commitment, or that, pursued immoderately, flexibility can itself become a dogma. Christopher Caldwell is the author of "Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West."
Library Journal Review
From the immigrant world of East End London in Brick Lane, shortlisted for the 2003 Man Booker Prize, Ali moves into the culinary world of a once posh London hotel restaurant, again capturing the multicultural layers of modern London. Gabriel Lightfoot, executive chef for the Imperial Hotel, dreams of owning his own restaurant but must first contend with the UN task force that is his kitchen crew. His life becomes even more complicated when the body of a Hungarian porter is found dead in a storeroom. Still, restaurant troubles are nothing when compared with his personal life. His girlfriend is pressuring him about marriage, unaware that he's sleeping with a Russian kitchen girl, and his ever-difficult father is dying of cancer. Gabe's two stories entwine, the pressure mounts, and, finally, he loses his bearings. With sometimes sly humor, Ali deftly sheds light on the irony of struggling in a land with abundant opportunities. For all fiction readers. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 2/1/09.]-Donna Bettencourt, Mesa County P.L., Grand Junction, CO (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Arestaurant kitchen is a functional substitute for hell. Flames leap, plates fly-knives and fingers, too. They're also the default place immigrants, legal and otherwise, find work. At London's Imperial Hotel, the setting for Monica Ali's In the Kitchen, nobody speaks the same language and everybody is underpaid. Ali, acclaimed author of Brick Lane, nails the killer heat, killer fights and lethal grease buildup, all of it supervised by a "simmering culinary Heathcliff," Gabriel Lightfoot, executive chef. Lightfoot dropped out of school at 16 to begin paying his kitchen dues, working crazy hours with crazy people while studying food chemistry and Brillat-Savarin. Along the way, he picked up scarred hands and a ravaged psyche. At 24, given his own restaurant, it went straight up his nose. Now, almost 20 years later, two wealthy Londoners have agreed to back Gabriel in a new restaurant, Lightfoot's, where he'll serve "Classic French, precisely executed. Rognons de veau dijonnaise, poussin en cocotte Bonne Femme, tripes a la mode de Caen." In postmodern balsamic-drenched London, Gabriel is confident traditional French is poised for a comeback. Then the naked corpse of a Ukrainian night porter is discovered in the Imperial's basement, his head in a pool of blood. There is no one to claim the body. The ripple-free effect of a human death unhinges Gabriel. He develops a voluptuous need to self-sabotage. Visual manifestations include a Dr. Strangelove arm tic, shaking limbs and violent bald-spot scratching. Gabriel cheats on his fiancee and lies to his lover. The story is told in the third person, but through Gabriel's point of view. Intimacy juggles distance: "After a certain point, he could not stop himself. His desire was a foul creature that climbed on his back and wrapped its long arms around his neck." Ali is brilliant at showing loss and adaptation in a polyglot culture. Her descriptions of the changing peoplescape are fresh. But inside Gabriel's head is not the most compelling place to be. A tragic nonhero, he thinks with his "one-eyed implacable foe." It does not help that a recurring dream crumbles him, and since Gabriel doesn't understand the dream, neither does the reader. It assumes an unsustainable importance. You can play Freud or you can turn the page. Ali is not plot-averse: she provides a mysterious death, a hotel sex-trade scam, a slave-labor scheme, missing money and a dying parent. Yet Lightfoot is a character in search of a motive. It's a tribute to Ali that we care. Here is a true bastard, ravaged and out of control. In the Kitchen has the thud and knock of life-inexplicable, impenetrable, not sewn up at all. As Gabriel's lover is fond of saying: "Tchh." (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
The turbulent, multicultural London backdrop is the same, but the dutiful Muslim wife in transition, who drove the action of Ali's brilliant debut (Brick Lane, 2003, etc.), has been replaced by a very different kind of protagonist: a talented chef in midlife crisis. The future looks rosy for 42-year-old Gabriel Lightfoot. He has turned around a failing restaurant in an old London hotel and secured financial backing to open his own establishment, a lifelong dream. Marriage is in the cards with gorgeous girlfriend Charlie, a jazz singer. Yet the novel's first sentence signals the crack-up to come. A Ukrainian kitchen porter has been found dead in the restaurant basement. Another porter, young, rail-thin Lena from Belorusse, appears to be homeless. Gabe invites her to his place, a favor for which she matter-of-factly offers sex in return. Lena is cold and hardunsurprising, since she was trafficked into prostitution and is on the run from her brutal pimp. Gabe is startled to realize that he does indeed want to have sex with Lena, in fact is falling for her. Charlie finds out and dumps him. A visit to his dying father in the former mill town where he was raised brings back childhood memories. Meanwhile there's a kitchen to be run. Ali does a superb job of evoking this histrionic, occasional violent workplace manned by "a United Nations task force." She hints too at the dark world of bonded labor that lies beyond the kitchen, as a major scandal involving the hotel maids threatens to erupt and Gabe plays detective. It's too much for him; he has two panic attacks before losing it completely and roaming the streets like a madman. Ali takes risks here, and not all of them pay off. Gabe's obsession with Lena and subsequent breakdown are not wholly convincing, and Charlie gets shortchanged as a character. Moment to moment, however, the novel is engrossing. Flawed but still impressive, the work of a fearless writer determined to challenge herself. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Gabriel Lightfoot has a lot on his plate. As executive chef at London's luxurious Imperial Hotel, he must contend with demanding customers, a bully of a general manager, and a kitchen staff that runs the gamut from bellicose to perverse. So when a Ukrainian porter is found dead in the restaurant basement, Gabe knows his already challenging life is about to become even more so. Shortly after the porter's demise, Gabe encounters Lena, an eerie, ethereal young woman from Belarus who is clearly harboring secrets about the deceased. She piques Gabe's curiosity and his passion (and just when he was about to propose to his longtime girlfriend, Charlie). More trouble awaits on the domestic front: Gabe's father has been diagnosed with cancer. All this personal chaos threatens to foil Gabe's plans of opening his own restaurant. (He has worked so hard to please his two backers, a slick member of Parliament and an even oilier businessman.) Man Booker Prize finalist Ali (Alentejo Blue, 2006) is at her best describing the din and drama of a hotel kitchen. (The pastry chef is forever hopped up on happy pills, and a chef de partie positively revels in rude gestures.) Ali deftly interweaves a collection of compelling plots in this powerful portrayal of a man whose life is slowly spiraling out of control. Fans and new readers alike are sure to embrace this talented novelist, who possesses a wise and original voice.--Block, Allison Copyright 2009 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Rumsfeld testifying before the Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, May 2004. BEFORE meetings in the run-up to the Iraq war, Bradley Graham writes, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld would make chitchat with Secretary of State Colin Powell. "He'd talk about something that he knew was a hot button for Colin. It might be about voting rights or immigration or education or abortion," one participant recalled. "And Colin, who is usually a cool head, would lose his cool. And I'd think to myself, Wow, Rumsfeld is screwing with his head. That's when I decided he was a very dangerous man." Graham's "By His Own Rules" is less a biography of Rumsfeld than a study of Rumsfeld as a Washington archetype: the operator, the insider, the bureaucratic infighter. It does cover Rumsfeld's life from childhood on - his enthusiasm for wrestling and squash, his attitudes toward money, his marriage - but only cursorily. At the book's heart is Rumsfeld's behavior in committee meetings and boardrooms, with the focus on the skirmishes that marked the gradual deterioration of the war in Iraq. The title is meant literally. Rumsfeld is one of those executives who are fond of lists, aphorisms and bromidic rules for living. Graham, a veteran Washington Post correspondent, traces Rumsfeld's management style through initiatives, guidelines, directives and the memorandums that Rumsfeld sent in such blizzard-like profusion that Pentagon employees took to calling them "snowflakes." The result is a book that is overlong but authoritative and judicious, particularly on questions of where responsibility lies for decisions about the Iraq war. Elected to Congress in 1962 at age 30, Rumsfeld, Graham writes, was a reformer who "never met an organization he didn't want to change." He co-sponsored what became the Freedom of Information Act, and reliably fought for civil rights legislation. He was a darling of this newspaper and so skeptical about the Vietnam War that when Henry Kissinger saw Rumsfeld and his wife, he would sardonically flash the peace sign. Rumsfeld also had what Graham calls "a deep moral streak." While running the Pentagon, he refused on ethical grounds to meet with defense-industry executives. And Rumsfeld got things done. Bosses liked him better than subordinates did. He was "high on energy and intensity and low on frills and compliments." Richard Nixon put him in charge first of the Office of Economic Opportunity, then of wage and price controls, and made him ambassador to NATO. Under Gerald Ford he became the White House chief of staff and then defense secretary, the youngest in history. (He would later become the oldest.) He kept Ford's trust while sidelining his rivals, Kissinger and Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. Such talents served him well as chief executive of the pharmaceuticals company G. D. Searle, where he turned a $28 million loss into a $72 million profit and brought aspartame to market; he got similar results in the early 1990s as C.E.O. of the General Instrument Corporation, a pioneer in high-definition television that needed a favorable hearing from the Federal Communications Commission. Rumsfeld's ability to work Congress and the regulatory bodies helped him in business. By the end of the 1990s he was worth between $50 million and $210 million. But he was more than a glorified lobbyist. He amassed information patiently and thoroughly, and would not be bullied into acting before he had mastered it. And he has never lost his ruthlessness in questioning structures kept in place by mere inertia. As a candidate, George W. Bush had called for armed forces that were "agile, lethal, readily deployable and require a minimum of logistical support." Rumsfeld seemed ideal for the task. "I've never been in a company where I couldn't save 15 percent," he said in 2001. The fascination of Rumsfeld, the tragedy of him, is that the Iraq occupation was nearly wrecked by the kind of mistakes he had spent his career diagnosing. By the time Rumsfeld resigned, the day after Republicans were routed in the 2006 midterm elections, the United States was on the verge of outright defeat. The replacement of his strategy with that of the so-called surge has stabilized Iraq greatly. GRAHAM'S Rumsfeld is vain and peremptory, but sometimes effective and wise. Rumsfeld was rightly skeptical of the ambitious Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi, who, having won the ear of other American war planners, gave them a wildly inaccurate picture of the situation in Iraq. Rumsfeld's plan for invading Iraq was excellent, "an evolutionary advance over what Rumsfeld had found on the shelf," and American forces took Baghdad in 21 days. Graham's view of Rumsfeld's role in abuses of prisoners is nuanced. Rumsfeld doubted that the Defense Department should be in charge of interrogating suspected terrorists in the first place. He authorized harsh interrogation techniques at Guantánamo in December 2002, with a flippant remark about forcing detainees to stand for long periods ("I stand for 8-10 hours a day"), but rescinded them the following month. Still, a Pentagon panel headed by former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger later blamed Rumsfeld for the way the techniques he had initially approved in the controlled environment of Guantánamo "migrated to Afghanistan and Iraq where they were neither limited nor safeguarded." Graham seems to share this verdict. After a career of moving from triumph to triumph, Rumsfeld, during his second stint as secretary of defense, somehow managed to get the least out of the people around him. The 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act had formalized the role of the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in a way that Rumsfeld considered an infringement on civilian control of the military. In his early months, he quarreled with both the Joint Chiefs chairman Hugh Shelton and the Army chief Eric Shinseki. One three-star admiral tells Graham that it would have been futile to raise misgivings in such a "bullying, dismissive" climate. Rumsfeld has been accused of keeping forces in Iraq unnaturally low as a way of showing how efficiently a reformed military could operate. Graham sees this as only part of the story. It is true that during the invasion Rumsfeld constantly sought ways to "off-ramp" units if Iraq were to fall sooner than expected. But by 2005 he began to think seriously about how many troops were necessary to fight an insurgency. He came to the wrong conclusions. There is little about David Petraeus in this book, but there is much about the retired Army general Jack Keane, who helped develop the case for the surge. The United States had a "short-war strategy," Keane complained to Rumsfeld in September 2006. "Nowhere in it is there a plan to defeat the insurgency ourselves." Changing course, he explained, would require as many as 28,000 more troops. Keane describes Rumsfeld as shocked at the news, "as if he was hearing it for the first time." American forces, it turned out, were a bit too flexible. They were configured in such a way that they could pack up and leave anytime, and that was not lost on the insurgents, or on bystanders picking sides. In this light, Rumsfeld is not just an inside-the-Beltway archetype but a particularly American one, the sort of person in whom a healthy skepticism toward established practice shades into contempt for it. His philosophy is that of the corporate Man in the Gray Flannel Suit in his boardroom, but it is also that of the itinerant Rambling Man in his boxcar: Don't pin me down. Both types fail to see that "agility" and "innovation" can be, in some contexts, synonyms for frivolity and lack of commitment, or that, pursued immoderately, flexibility can itself become a dogma. Christopher Caldwell is the author of "Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West."
Library Journal Review
From the immigrant world of East End London in Brick Lane, shortlisted for the 2003 Man Booker Prize, Ali moves into the culinary world of a once posh London hotel restaurant, again capturing the multicultural layers of modern London. Gabriel Lightfoot, executive chef for the Imperial Hotel, dreams of owning his own restaurant but must first contend with the UN task force that is his kitchen crew. His life becomes even more complicated when the body of a Hungarian porter is found dead in a storeroom. Still, restaurant troubles are nothing when compared with his personal life. His girlfriend is pressuring him about marriage, unaware that he's sleeping with a Russian kitchen girl, and his ever-difficult father is dying of cancer. Gabe's two stories entwine, the pressure mounts, and, finally, he loses his bearings. With sometimes sly humor, Ali deftly sheds light on the irony of struggling in a land with abundant opportunities. For all fiction readers. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 2/1/09.]-Donna Bettencourt, Mesa County P.L., Grand Junction, CO (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.