Die with honor

My brother and sister both highly recommended reading Hadji Murad by Leo Tolstoy, and what can I say- for an evening read (about 130 pages) it is gripping and the writing, even in translation, is so elegant you wish you also had been born on a large estate with private tutors and a sense of your own importance. Instead, you are a cog in the machine reading Tolstoy while swaths of destruction expand daily in Iraq, and commentators on the BBC mock common sense (« How many have died in Iraq ? Why don’t we call for intervention there ? Why does the West care so much about Darfur ? »). n.b. When I do the google image search for the book cover, what do I find but that Steve Reeves acted the part of Hadji Murad in a film... Reeves was a friend of my father when I was a child in Italy...