Celsius 7/7
by Michael Gove
Phoenix, $128
Yes, the title Celsius 7/7 is a play on Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 and, yes, the British Conservative parliamentarian and columnist for The Times is as far right as Moore is left. This slim, 153-page book got a lot of coverage on its release last August - historian William Dalrymple called it a 'confused epic of simplistic incomprehension' and Pankaj Mishra said Gove was creating 'a climate of hysteria which makes sober analysis and careful decision-making almost impossible'. Gove, 39, is an up-and-comer in British politics. Celsius 7/7 has been variously reviewed as 'a ferocious philippic directed against Islamists and their western appeasers' (Daily Telegraph), 'a surreal screed, a perfervid pamphlet' (The Guardian), and 'provocative and convincing ... [but] the opposite danger, or moral absolutism, is tantamount to that which we fight - totalitarianism itself' (The Observer). Certainly, Gove's claim that the attacks on New York and London were part of a sustained campaign, not a reaction to bad foreign policy, isn't proven, but he makes a convincing case for using force to stem the spread of Islamic fundamentalism.