Gilles Kepel recently signed his latest book Beyond Terror and Martyrdom at Politics and Prose, an independent book store here in DC. Librarians tend to be book signing whores, and I am no different from my more traditional sisters in the profession. I like collecting signed books, and DC is the perfect city for these events. Most authors of note will have a signing somewhere in DC at some point in their book tour. Politics and Prose is a must for an author like Kepel, and he clearly knew the place and the audience.
I sat in an audience of aging, corpulent armchair Marxist, typical for the Connecticut Avenue neighborhood the store caters to. Prof Kepel smiled and spoke right to them without ever pandering to their limited political assumptions. He was critical of US policy, but never unfair (and the book bears this out). It was a rare show of personal and professional confidence within a very competitive CT/ME policy "marketplace of ideas" that often leaves top analysts on the defensive and sniping at each other; for example, the recent Hoffman vs. Sageman cat fight.
Prof. Kepel's talk reminded me of a similar talk (though not a book signing) I attended ten years earlier. Iranian director Dariush Mehrjui sat at the front of a small auditorium at the Kennedy Center. He was there to talk about his then new movie The Pear Tree. He, too, was a man at the top of his game, talking with, but never pandering to, his audience. He bore a relentless barrage of idiotic "gotcha" questions with a philosophic smile that was something akin to beautiful.
Prof Kepel's audience wasn't as difficult as Mr Mehrjui's that night, but I could still see the smile of a man at the top of his game. Ten years after my first such smile I can still say they're beautiful.
If you' were expecting a review you'll have to look elsewhere. I'm not done with the book yet but here's the Economist's review, and two recent interviews, one at The Chronicle of Higher Education, and another at Foreign Policy.
Ubiwar notes that Prof. Kepel is going to be giving a talk in London on December 11th. Perhaps a British reader of this blog could ask him what he meant by "perfidious Albions."
