Ron Suskind

The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism
By Ron Suskind
Harper, 432 pages, $27.95

With little warning and less explanation, Ron Suskind has written the year’s most brazenly experimental novel. It’s not entirely successful, but then the boldest experiments are often inconclusive. Mr. Suskind summons deceased aesthetic forms as an intervention on the now—but he’s not indulging in ironical pastiche. Moving, manipulative, maudlin, The Way of the World reanimates the conventions and contrivances of 19th-century realism with a seriousness too deadly to be a matter of mere style.

It’s all here: a cast of characters that sprawls across class and circumstance to represent the totality of a historical moment; central moral truths restated so often as to be less repetition than incantation; an all-seeing narrator who intrudes at regular intervals to tell the reader what it all means.  read more »

You might think Jonathan Mahler would have been pleased when he heard on the afternoon of July 18 that Guantánamo detainee Salim Hamdan was going to face trial just as Farrar, Straus and Giroux was getting ready to publish the book that Mr. Mahler had spent the last four years writing about him.

Instead, the 39-year-old journalist panicked a little. He hadn’t expected the trial so soon, and the timing made him self-conscious. What if readers thought his book, a rigorous chronicle of the Supreme Court case that led up to the trial, was just some thrown-off quickie meant to expire and disappear within a few news cycles?

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Ron Suskind came under immediate fire on Tuesday when his new book, The Way of the World, hit bookstores. One of the book's revelations—that the Bush administration ordered the C.I.A. to forge a letter from the head of Iraq intelligence to Saddam Hussein to support the notion of a link between Iraq and 9/11—was reported in The Politico and elsewhere.

Deputy White House Press Secretary Tony Fratto struck back as soon as The Politico reported the scoop on Tuesday night, telling reporter Mike Allen that the "allegation that the White House directed anyone to forge a document from Habbush to Saddam is just absurd.  read more »

Politico was first to the line in the race for Ron Suskind's embargoed new book, reporting last night at 11:23 PM that according to Mr. Suskind's reporting, the White House had ordered the CIA to forge a "back-dated, handwritten letter from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam Hussein" in order to strengthen the link between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks. The book, entitled Way of the World, had been under lock and key ever since the 500,000 copies HarperCollins ordered for the first print run had come in.

As she prepared to go home yesterday, HarperCollins publicity director Tina Andreadis braced herself for a long, nervous night.  read more »