---
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
Reviews: game & book
GAME
Burnout Legends PSP
PSP
☆ ☆ ☆
I love causing a $100,000 worth of damage because I've been driving recklessly faster than 200 miles per hour. I can't help it, it's a weakness. Thankfully, I can indulge at any time and at any place now that Burnout Legends has arrived. Anyone familiar with the Burnout series will feel right at home playing Legends, since this isn't truly a new game as much as a compilation or greatest hits collection.
The sense of speed and danger is still present on this version. Races can go awry pretty quickly if you're not careful, especially since you're driving through freeways and tracks with oncoming motorists who just don't know how to get out of the way.The crash mode is just as much fun as the console versions.The PSP's screen does a nice job of showcasing the destruction you can cause with one car and the right attitude.
If you're sick of the lack of quality games on the PSP, pick this one up. It's not really an original game, but I'd rather have a good game that I might have seen in some form before than an original game that sucks. It's available for $49.99.
Charley Forsyth
BOOK
Beyond Belief
By Deborah Lipstadt
Free Press, $20
Available in Paperback
1/2
I'm leery of labeling books as "important." Usually such books are self-indulgent and pompous far more than they
make any real political statements. Deborah Lipstadt's book is not one of these. In all honesty, it is quite possibly one of the most critical books any of us will ever read.
This non-fiction piece details the response of the American media to the Holocaust. It is a common, grave misconception that the atrocities of the Nazis were not discovered in full until the concentration camps were liberated towards the end of World War II. Lipstadt presents evidence
was happening (and what would happen) to European Jewry as early as 1933, and especially in 1935 when the
that the press - and by extension, the newspaper-loving FDR - knew what
Nuremburg Laws were passed (similar to our own Jim Crow laws).
Lipstadt traces the roots of American journalists stationed in Berlin in the early 1930s, who wrote articles of warning that were killed by editors and thus unseen by the American public. It is outrageous to see that such respected publications like the Christian Science Monitor, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, hell, even the New York Times praised Hitler in editorials, only to
jump ship on him when his true intentions became clear. The historical anal-
sis continues on past the 1936 Olympics, into the actual war and finally ends when the heinous damage had been done.
Beyond Belief, more than anything, stresses both the need for a responsible press corps and the need of the public and government to trust its press corps. The idea that "it can't possibly be that bad" didn't cut it then and it shouldn't cut it now. Racial cleansing and genocide didn't begin or ed with the Nazis, but Lipstadt challenges us to ask ourselves if we would allow such acts when we're privy to the grim details.
Being unable to see Lipstadt speak here a few weeks ago, I promptly picked up her book. If an aware American citizen doesn't finish it outraged, I would be shocked. At the very least, it should be required reading in at least some journalism, political science and history courses. At the most, it should be required reading for everyone, a painful and tragic lesson about the price of skepticism.
-Kelsey Hayes