A couple of books sliding past my eyes this week, the kind I would wish to read but know I probably won’t. I pass on to you…perhaps to get a considered opinion.

Barbara Ehrenreich is one of those activist/authors I am always on the look out for. Her latest seems far afield for my taste, as for Dwight Garner, the reviewer in the Times

Ms. Ehrenreich is a person worth knowing, and “Living With a Wild God” gets us as close as we are likely to get. But this discursive and repetitive and claustrophobic book is more fully about the mystical experiences she began having as a young girl, experiences she has long been wary of speaking about, perhaps with reason.

Too bad.  I think a good, serious investigation could be done of these ‘strange encounters,’ but apparently this is not it.

Carlotta Gall, the NY Times reporter in Afghanistan and Pakistan for over a decade, has a new, and damning book about the latter.  Titled “The Wrong Enemy,” I wonder how closely it confirms the hidden (from us) analysis of US State and Defense, and if so, what ideas are in circulation.  Pakistan, as everyone knows, is a nuclear nation.

With its focus on Pakistan, “The Wrong Enemy” is a valuable contribution to a hefty body of work on the American war in Afghanistan that has become stale and somewhat hackneyed. It provides a raw, unvarnished and important look at one of the darkest and least understood parts of the Afghan war.

“The Wrong Enemy” is not the first book to grapple with Pakistan’s role in Afghanistan. Others have done so, including Ahmed Rashid’s “Descent Into Chaos” (2008) and Barnett R. Rubin’s “Afghanistan From the Cold War Through the War on Terror” (2013).

But Ms. Gall’s treatment of Pakistan’s role is the most comprehensive. She does not, however, let the Afghan or American governments off the hook.

Reviewed for the Times by Seth Jones,  an Afghanistan expert at the Rand corporation.  I’d like to see another review from someone not so tied into the American defense posture, for balance — though from the reading I’ve done, there’s no reason to think Gall has much of it, whether reporting or opinion, is far from being ‘awfully’ accurate.