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Eliot Weinberger
Karmic Traces: 1993-1999 New York. New Directions. 2000 200 pages. $15.95, ISBN 0-8112--1456-7
THE TITLE DERIVES from the penultimate essay, which gives Eliot Weinberger's collection its thematic unity: the past as revealed by ancient sources that provide insights into what individuals, cultures, and civilizations once were. The same phenomenon, often simplified as "deja vu," is applicable to history as well. Events, major and minor, form repetitive patterns, so that the biblical curse of Ham (itself imperfectly understood) wends its way through history's "cunning corridors," as T. S. Eliot describes them in "Gerontion," and descends tragically upon blacks, thus becoming the slaveholding South's...