In Sunday's Book Review: 'The Great War for Civilisation,'

by Robert Fisk
=====================================================

Review by GEOFFREY WHEATCROFT

A breed of reporters have made the Middle East their home and
their career, few of them better known than the Englishman
Robert Fisk. Now in his late 50's, he is one of the most
controversial journalists of the age, winner of numerous
prizes, much admired by some, including colleagues who
respect his obsessive attention to detail and sheer physical
courage, execrated by others because of what has been seen as
his open hostility to Israel, America and the West.

Now comes "The Great War for Civilisation," his Big Book (and
how) and his testament. A vast overview of the region, it
makes use of every clipping and notebook he has ever kept and
runs in no particular order. At least in part, it is a
stimulating and absorbing book, by a man who speaks Arabic,
who has known the region better than most and has met the
leading players.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/books/review/11wheatcroft.html?8bu&emc=bu

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'Buffalo Bill's America,' by Louis S. Warren
Review by GEOFFREY C. WARD

"Buffalo Bill's America," by Louis S. Warren, is well written
and exhaustively researched, the weightiest and surely the
most ambitious book ever published about Cody and his times.
No one interested in Buffalo Bill, 19th-century show business
or the many meanings of the American West will want to pass
it up. But it is also likely to spark almost as many
arguments as it seeks to settle.

One by one, Warren examines each act of Cody's pageant in
search of all it can tell us about his audience's complex and
conflicting attitudes toward everything from race and
masculinity to labor strife and overseas adventuring. But he
sometimes labors too hard to find larger meanings in what
was, for all its supposed educational value, a gussied-up
circus.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/books/review/11ward.html?8bu&emc=bu