Sometimes I actually open The New York Review of Books, and I'm rewarded this week by a review of Saturday I'm looking forward to and a piece by Daniel Mendelsohn about Tennessee Williams' women (I assume the hed writer means "the women in Tennessee Williams' plays," but that's much too long to fit given the pleasingly gigantic type sizes the NYRB uses on the cover). Guy Lawson reviews the new book about Rwanda, Shake Hands With the Devil; and Brian Urquhart, whose name I am very proud of having learned to spell some years ago, writes about Sadako Ogata's (still working on that one) book The Turbulent Decade: Confronting the Refugee Crisis of the 1990s.

Since I have Russia on the brain, I'm particularly intrigued by Gary Shteyngart's essay on Vladimir Voinovich's Monumental Propaganda. Shteyngart writes: "If all Russian writers (as Dostoevsky said) are supposed to come 'from under Gogol's "Overcoat," ' Voinovich has come directly out of Gogol's 'Nose.' " How could anyone stop reading there? Anyway, in the same issue is this notice for an event at the New York Public Library that sounds extremely interesting:

The Question Of Torture
Wednesday, June 1, 2005
at 7:00 PM
Celeste Bartos Forum

A discussion moderated by Kati Marton: journalist, author and human rights activist [fyi: married to Richard Holbrooke] with:

—Mark Bowden: Atlantic Monthly contributor and author of Black Hawk Down

—Mark Danner: Author of Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror

—Darius Rejali: author of Torture and Democracy

—Elaine Scarry: Author of The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World

Tickets are $10 general admission and $7 for Library Donors. Buy tickets through SmartTix here.

These events tend to sell out, so if you know you want to go, act quickly. I notice, in a quick scan of the NYRB's contents, that there are no women reviewers/essayists or poets this week (one or two of the books being reviewed are written or co-written by women, but mostly not). Hardly unusual, but unnecessarily annoying. Even aside from the eye-rollingly retro gender-equity thing, there's plenty to say about what the NYRB could do to appeal more consistently to me and my friends (my principal resource on this question so far), but I'll save that for another day.

The Question Of Torture [NYPL]
Abu Ghraib: The Hidden Story [NYRB, via MD's homepage]
The Logic of Torture [NYRB; subscribers only]
New Yorker pieces by Danner [MD's homepage]
Very useful collection of Abu Ghraib and torture links by Julia Lesage [Jump Cut]