Daily Read: Dimock on Torture, Music, and Literature

Peter Dimock's just published book, George Anderson: Notes for a Love Song in Imperial Time, is a novelistic intervention in contemporary anguish about the legality of torture. 

In a starred review, Publishers Weekly explains,

The novel takes the form of a letter from Theo Fales, editor and memoir ghostwriter for former CIA operatives, to David Kallen, a government official who directed Special Forces trainers to torture him before signing a document that led to the legalization of torture by the George W. Bush administration. Fales attempts to teach Kallen a method he devised as a, "means by which every person rids the self of its inordinate attachment to empire and creates reciprocity."

It's a brief but challenging book, interweaving music and literature to interrogate the roles of lawyers and journalists regarding the use of torture.   It is worth a read by anyone exploring how the constitutionality of "enhanced interrogation" should be decided.

RR