A most remarkable interview in the Wall St Journal over the weekend of the 'Son of Hamas', "They Need to Be Liberated From Their God'.
Mosab Hassan (Joseph) Yousef is the son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, a founding leader of Hamas, the terrorist organization, and he tells his story of how he went from Jihad to Jesus while spying for Israel and shaming his family.
Mr. Yousef tells me that he was horrified by the pointless violence unleashed by politicians willing to climb "on the shoulders of poor, religious people." He says Palestinians who heeded the call "were going like a cow to the slaughterhouse, and they thought they were going to heaven." So, as he writes in the book, "At the age of twenty-two, I became the Shin Bet's only Hamas insider who could infiltrate Hamas's military and political wings, as well as other Palestinian factions."
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"I converted to Christianity because I was convinced by Jesus Christ as a character, as a personality. I loved him, his wisdom, his love, his unconditional love. I didn't leave [the Islamic] religion to put myself in another box of religion. At the same time it's a beautiful thing to see my God exist in my life and see the change in my life. I see that when he does exist in other Middle Easterners there will be a change.
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As the son of a Muslim cleric, he says he had reached the conclusion that terrorism can't be defeated without a new understanding of Islam. Here he echoes other defectors from Islam such as the former Dutch parliamentarian and writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
Do you consider your father a fanatic? "He's not a fanatic," says Mr. Yousef. "He's a very moderate, logical person. What matters is not whether my father is a fanatic or not, he's doing the will of a fanatic God. It doesn't matter if he's a terrorist or a traditional Muslim. At the end of the day a traditional Muslim is doing the will of a fanatic, fundamentalist, terrorist God. I know this is harsh to say. Most governments avoid this subject. They don't want to admit this is an ideological war.
A book review by Dwight Garner that really makes me want to get this book.
A Woman’s Undying Gift to Science
I put down Rebecca Skloot’s first book, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” more than once. Ten times, probably. Once to poke the fire. Once to silence a pinging BlackBerry. And eight times to chase my wife and assorted visitors around the house, to tell them I was holding one of the most graceful and moving nonfiction books I’ve read in a very long time.
A thorny and provocative book about cancer, racism, scientific ethics and crippling poverty, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” also floods over you like a narrative dam break, as if someone had managed to distill and purify the more addictive qualities of “Erin Brockovich,” “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” and “The Andromeda Strain.” More than 10 years in the making, it feels like the book Ms. Skloot was born to write. It signals the arrival of a raw but quite real talent.
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The woman who provides this book its title, Henrietta Lacks, was a poor and largely illiterate Virginia tobacco farmer, the great-great-granddaughter of slaves. Born in 1920, she died from an aggressive cervical cancer at 31, leaving behind five children. No obituaries of Mrs. Lacks appeared in newspapers. She was buried in an unmarked grave.
To scientists, however, Henrietta Lacks almost immediately became known simply as HeLa (pronounced hee-lah), from the first two letters of her first and last names. Cells from Mrs. Lacks’s cancerous cervix, taken without her knowledge, were the first to grow in culture, becoming “immortal” and changing the face of modern medicine. There are, Ms. Skloot writes, “trillions more of her cells growing in laboratories now than there ever were in her body.” Laid end to end, the world’s HeLa cells would today wrap around the earth three times.
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Bought and sold and shipped around the world for decades, HeLa cells are famous to science students everywhere. But little has been known, until now, about the unwitting donor of these cells. Mrs. Lacks’s own family did not know that her cells had become famous (and that people had grown wealthy from marketing them) until more than two decades after her death, after scientists had begun to take blood from her surviving family members, without their informed consent, in order to better study HeLa.
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This is the place in a review where critics tend to wedge in the sentence that says, in so many words, “This isn’t a perfect book.” And “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” surely isn’t. But there isn’t much about it I’d want to change. It has brains and pacing and nerve and heart, and it is uncommonly endearing.
1984 is long gone, we live in the Brave New World. Aldous Huxley wrote the far more prescient and prophetic Brave New World fifteen years before George Orwell wrote his.
If you ever had any confusion about the differences between the two, check out Brave New World vs. Nineteen Eighty Four through the talented work of Stuart McMillen.
Remembering Brave New World which I read for the first time last year, I was reminded of this piece by Mark Steyn on Sexual Liberty
In terms of sexual identity, we’re freer than almost any society in human history, at least in terms of official validation of our choice to “redefine” ourselves in defiance of biological and physiological reality.
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At some point we will come to see that the developed world’s massive expansion of personal sexual liberty has provided a useful cover for the shrivelling of almost every other kind. Free speech, property rights, economic liberty and the right to self-defence are under continuous assault by Big Government. But who cares when Big Government lets you shag anything that moves and every city in North America hosts a grand parade to celebrate your right to do so? It’s an oddly reductive notion of individual liberty. The noisier grow the novelties of our ever more banal individualism, the more the overall societal aesthetic seems drearily homogenized—like closing time in a karaoke bar with the last sad drunks bellowing off the prompter “I did it My Way!”
I very much liked Lillian Hellman's Pentimento when it came out even though her reputation for honesty was challenged early on and most famously by Mary McCarthy who said of Hellman, "Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the."
But I had no idea she was Stalin's Trollop, a blackmailer and a racist to boot. John Zmirak convinced me.
A youthful convert to orthodox Communism, Hellman never wavered in her loyalty to the Moscow Party Line. She whitewashed the artificial famine in Ukraine, praised the grotesque Purge Trials, and backed Stalin's alliance with Hitler.
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Honoring the Hitler/Stalin pact, she joined the Communist-sponsored Keep America Out of War Committee (which promptly dissolved when Hitler invaded Russia), and lauded Stalin's invasion of neutral Finland.
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As she stood up for the inalienable right of cosseted screenwriters to get rich writing scripts they'd vetted with Soviet spies, Hellman oozed approval of Communist puppet regimes from Eastern Europe to China. She denounced Roger Straus (of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) for publishing Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In fact, she created her own little KGB in the publishing world, keeping hostile books out of print and hounding her enemies. As Koenig recalls: "When a journalist wrote a piece she disliked, she told him that if he didn't print a retraction she would tell his employer (this was when such things mattered) that he frequented gay bars. It was no coincidence that the plot of all Hellman's hit plays turned on blackmail."
From a review of Barbara Ehrenreich's new book, Bright-Side - How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America.
It’s more than a little refreshing to know that Barbara Ehrenreich doesn’t care whether you smile. Indeed, she’d rather you not. ..., she accuses positivity-freaks of corrupting the media, infiltrating medical science, perverting religion, and destroying the economy. ... she pushes back against a kind of cultural pressure so totalizing we sometimes fail to notice its existence.
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Ehrenreich seems less worried about what positivity fans value than what they ignore. Her idea of a life well-lived, as she repeatedly tells us, involves storming into the world and demanding progressive political change. Positivity’s decidedly inward focus—in which the solution to every problem lies in a mere attitudinal shift—thus seems troubling, a “retreat from the real drama and tragedy of human events.”
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Platitudinous happy-talk seems so harmless that most of us barely notice it, yet it can be a burdensome, even bullying, attempt to enforce emotional conformity. Consider, for instance, the “pink-ribbon culture,” a rose-tinted world Ehrenreich steps into when she is diagnosed with breast cancer.
“Positive thinking seems to be mandatory in the breast cancer world,” she writes, “to the point that unhappiness requires a kind of apology.” Dour pathology slides are out; “remembrance” teddy bears are in.
From Dwight Garner's review, A Turning Ride in Europe as Islam Gains Ground of Christopher Caldwell's new book.
Through decades of mass immigration to Europe’s hospitable cities and because of a strong disinclination to assimilate, Muslims are changing the face of Europe, perhaps decisively. These Muslim immigrants are not so much enhancing European culture as they are supplanting it. The products of an adversarial culture, these immigrants and their religion, Islam, are “patiently conquering Europe’s cities, street by street.'
"Reflections on the Revolution In Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West" (Christopher Caldwell)
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Muslim cultures “have historically been Europe’s enemies, its overlords, or its underlings,” he deposes. “Europe is wagering that attitudes handed down over the centuries, on both sides, have disappeared, or can be made to disappear. That is probably not a wise wager.”
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The problem, in Mr. Caldwell’s view, is less about sheer numbers than cultural divergence. What’s happening in Europe is not the creation of an American-style melting pot, he writes, because Muslims are not melting in. They are instead forming what he calls “a parallel society.” Newcomers to England now listen to Al Jazeera, not the BBC. They are hesitant to serve in their adopted country’s militaries. (As of 2007, Mr. Caldwell notes, there were only 330 Muslims in Britain’s armed forces.) Worse, these immigrants are bringing anti-Semitism back to Europe.
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The most chilling observation in Mr. Caldwell’s book may be that the debate over Muslim immigration in Europe is one that the continent can’t openly have, because anyone remotely critical of Islam is branded as Islamophobic. Europe’s citizens — as well as its leaders, its artists and, crucially, its satirists — are scared to speak because of a demonstrated willingness by Islam’s fanatics to commit violence against their perceived opponents. There exists, Mr. Caldwell writes, a kind of “standing fatwa” against Islam’s critics.
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It is hard to argue with his ultimate observation about Europe today: “When an insecure, malleable, relativistic culture” (Europe’s) “meets a culture that is anchored, confident, and strengthened by common doctrines” (Islam’s), “it is generally the former that changes to suit the latter.”
Count your blessings (you could be rich)
According to a new book, You Are Really Rich, You Just Don't Know It Yet, this is the monetary value of those little moments that were previously considered to be priceless. Shrewdly tapping into the mood of recessionary re-evaluation that has seen many of us question what's truly important now that our bank accounts are rattling empty, a team of researchers asked a thousand British people what made them happy.
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But the figures here are less important than the sentiments, namely the reassurance that, as a nation, deep down we prioritise human interactions above commercial transactions. Shopping wasn't cited as a life-enhancing activity, although we do it constantly; whereas being part of a community was pegged at £33,698, something many of us take for granted.
"You are Really Rich: You Just Don't Know it Yet" (Steve Henry)
The mysteries of love explored in Terminal Bliss, a review of A Happy Marriage
"A Happy Marriage: A Novel" (Rafael Yglesias)
The second chapter opens on a bleak night 30 years later. Margaret, now Enrique’s wife, is in her 50s, at the end of an excruciating three-year battle with cancer. “You have to help me die,” she begs her husband. This is a tall order. She needs him to nurse her; to prevent anyone from sustaining her when she falls into a coma; and to tell her parents she won’t be buried in their family plot — tough tasks, but also concrete ways he can help. Harder is accepting that her life is ending, that “their marriage was a mystery he was going to lose, despite 27 years living inside it, before he understood who they were.”
The mystery of what’s at the heart of a marriage can’t be unlocked, or even fully captured in words. But Enrique and Margaret are anything but common, distinct both as characters and in the endurance of their love.
I missed Unfaithfully yours, the cover story in Time by Caitlin Flanagan, but it's relevant if only as a measure of what's been lost
In the past 40 years, the face of the American family has changed profoundly. As sociologist Andrew J. Cherlin observes in a landmark new book called The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today, what is significant about contemporary American families, compared with those of other nations, is their combination of "frequent marriage, frequent divorce" and the high number of "short-term co-habiting relationships." Taken together, these forces "create a great turbulence in American family life, a family flux, a coming and going of partners on a scale seen nowhere else. There are more partners in the personal lives of Americans than in the lives of people of any other Western country."
An increasingly fragile construct depending less and less on notions of sacrifice and obligation than on the ephemera of romance and happiness as defined by and for its adult principals, the intact, two-parent family remains our cultural ideal, but it exists under constant assault. It is buffeted by affairs and ennui, subject to the eternal American hope for greater happiness, for changing the hand you dealt yourself. Getting married for life, having children and raising them with your partner — this is still the way most Americans are conducting adult life, but the numbers who are moving in a different direction continue to rise. Most notably, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in May that births to unmarried women have reached an astonishing 39.7%. (See pictures of love in the animal kingdom.)
How much does this matter? More than words can say. There is no other single force causing as much measurable hardship and human misery in this country as the collapse of marriage. It hurts children, it reduces mothers' financial security, and it has landed with particular devastation on those who can bear it least: the nation's underclass.
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Or is marriage an institution that still hews to its old intention and function — to raise the next generation, to protect and teach it, to instill in it the habits of conduct and character that will ensure the generation's own safe passage into adulthood? Think of it this way: the current generation of children, the one watching commitments between adults snap like dry twigs and observing parents who simply can't be bothered to marry each other and who hence drift in and out of their children's lives — that's the generation who will be taking care of us when we are old.
Roger Scruton on Beauty and its corruptions
Kitsch is a mould that settles over the entire works of a living culture, when people prefer the sensuous trappings of belief to the thing truly believed in. It is not only Christian civilisation that has undergone kitschification in recent times. Equally evident has been the kitschification of Hinduism and its culture. Massproduced Ganeshas have knocked the subtle temple sculpture from its aesthetic pedestal; in bunjee music the talas of Indian classical music are blown apart by tonal harmonies and rhythm machines; in literature the sutras and puranas have been detached from the sublime vision of Brahman and reissued as childish comic-strips.
Simply put, kitsch is a disease of faith. Kitsch begins in doctrine and ideology and spreads from there to infect the entire world of culture. The Disneyfication of art is simply one aspect of the Disneyfication of faith -and both involve a profanation of our highest values. Kitsch, the case of Disney reminds us, is not an excess of feeling but a deficiency. The world of kitsch is in a certain measure a heartless world, in which emotion is directed away from its proper target towards sugary stereotypes, permitting us to pay passing tribute to love and sorrow without the trouble of feeling them.
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The paradox, however, is that the relentless pursuit of artistic innovation leads to a cult of nihilism. The attempt to defend beauty from pre-modernist kitsch has exposed it to postmodernist desecration. We seem to be caught between two forms of sacrilege, the one dealing in sugary dreams, the other in savage fantasies. Both are forms of falsehood, ways of reducing and demeaning our humanity. Both involve a retreat from the higher life, and a rejection of its principal sign, which is beauty. But both point to the real difficulty, in modern conditions, of leading a life in which beauty has a central place.
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To point to this feature of our condition is not to issue an invitation to despair. It is one mark of rational beings that they do not live only -- or even at all -- in the present. They have the freedom to despise the world that surrounds them and to live in another way. The art, literature and music of our civilisation remind them of this, and also point to the path that lies always before them: the path out of desecration towards the sacred and the sacrificial. And that, in a nutshell, is what beauty teaches us.
Fyodor Dostoevsky once made an enigmatic remark, "Beauty will save the world" about which Alexander Solzhenitsyn organized his Nobel Lecture on Literature in 1970
And so perhaps that old trinity of Truth and Good and Beauty is not just the formal outworn formula it used to seem to us during our heady, materialistic youth. If the crests of these three trees join together, as the investigators and explorers used to affirm, and if the too obvious, too straight branches of Truth and Good are crushed or amputated and cannot reach the light—yet perhaps the whimsical, unpredictable,
unexpected branches of Beauty will make their way through and soar up to that very place and in this way perform the work of all three.
And in that case it was not a slip of the tongue for Dostoyevsky to say that “Beauty will save the world,” but a prophecy. After all, he was given the gift of seeing much, he was extraordinarily illumined.
And consequently perhaps art, literature, can in actual fact help the world of today.
From a review of Why You Are not Your Brain via Mindful Hack
The most mysterious thing about the human brain is that the more we know about it, the deeper our own mystery becomes. On the one hand, scientists tell us that we are nothing but 3 pounds of electrical flesh inside the skull, a trillion synapses exchanging squirts of neurotransmitter.
And yet we feel like more than the sum of these cells.
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The question of how the brain creates the mind - how these subjective experiences emerge from a piece of pale gray meat - is one of the essential questions of modern science. And yet, despite decades of research, we aren't remotely close to an answer.
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Alva Noë, a philosopher at UC Berkeley, argues that consciousness remains a mystery because we've been looking in the wrong place. In his provocative and lucid new book, Noë writes that scientists have been so eager to locate the mind in the brain that they've neglected to consider the possibility that our mind might not be inside our head.
Another review from Scientific American
The reason we have been unable to explain the neural basis of consciousness, he says, is that it does not take place in the brain.
Consciousness is not something that happens inside us but something we achieve. it is more like dancing than it is like the digestive process.
To understand consciousness the fact that we think and feel and that a world shows up for us we need to look at a larger system of which the brain is only one element. Consciousness requires the joint operation of brain, body and world. "You are not your brain. The brain, rather, is part of what you are."
It sounds like the Cosmic Dance
Everything we think we know about babies is wrong
In The Philosophical Baby developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik compiles the latest in her field’s research to paint a new picture of our inner lives at inception — one in which we are, in some ways, more conscious than adults.
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Alison Gopnik: One of the things we discovered is that imagination, which we often think of as a special adult ability, is actually in place in very young children, as early as 18 months old. That ability is very closely related to children’s ability to figure out how the world works.
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Both Piaget and Freud thought that the reason children produced so much fantastic, unreal play was that they couldn’t tell the difference between imagination and reality. But a lot of the more recent work in children’s theory of mind has shown quite the contrary. Children have a very good idea of how to distinguish between fantasies and realities. It’s just they are equally interested in exploring both.
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They already seem to appreciate the difference between the kinds of morality that comes from empathy and the kind that comes from our conventional rules. From the time they are two, they recognize both are important but in different ways. That’s pretty amazing
"To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour."
William Blake
I'm a big fan of microphotography and Dr. Gary Greenberg opens up a whole new world that lies under our feet.
"A Grain of Sand: Nature's Secret Wonder" (Gary Greenberg)
Ah the wonders of the web where all sorts of connections can be made while I wait to clear the fifteen inches of snow that appeared overnight. Ah, the great pleasures of a snow day.
A while back, I started a draft post on the pre-posthumous memoir by J.G Ballard after I came across this interview about his new book in LA Weekly
I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.
I believe in the non-existence of the past, in the death of the future, and the infinite possibilities of the present.
"Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton: An Autobiography" (J. G. Ballard)
I tucked it away in draft form until this morning when I happened upon Happy St David's Day at Brits at their Best, a favorite blog of mine.
St. David (Dewi Sant in Welsh), a bishop of Wales (c 500-589) became its patron saint (as well as the patron saint of vegetarians and poets). Today the Welsh wear a leek in memory of some ancient battle against the Saxons where Bishop David advised them to wear leeks on their hats to distinguish themselves from their enemies. Knowing that a storm was coming, coincidentally yesterday I made a potato and leek soup (absolutely delicious with lots of bacon bits and parsley as garnish).
Checking with the Catholic encyclopedia I learned that St David was conceived in violence, the product of the rape of his mother, a nun, by Sandde, King of Ceredigion, said by some to be King Arthur's nephew. According to legend the poor woman gave birth on a cliff top during a violent storm.
David founded a number of churches and monasteries among them Glastonbury, Bath and Leominster, all while living a life of austerity (no meat, no beer) and great holiness. His last words 'Be joyful, and keep your faith and your creed. Do the little things that you have seen me do and heard about" has become a very well-known phrase in Welsh 'Do the little things in life'. My little thing for St David.
Here's the famous Welsh singer, Bryn Terfel, who gives shivers to The Anchoress, singing a lullaby, a love song, from Wales, courtesy of the Cat and David, best Brits.
Sleep my baby, at my breast,
Tis a mothers arms round you.
Make yourself a snug, warm nest.
Feel my love forever new.
Harm will not meet you in sleep,
Hurt will always pass you by.
Child beloved, always youll keep,
In sleep gentle, mothers breast nigh.
Sleep in peace tonight, sleep,
O sleep gently, what a sight.
A smile I see in slumber deep,
What visions make your face bright?
Are the angels above smiling,
At you in your peaceful rest?
Are you beaming back while in
Peaceful slumber on mothers breast?
Do not fear the sound, its a breeze
Brushing leaves against the door.
Do not dread the murmuring seas,
Lonely waves washing the shore.
Sleep child mine, theres nothing here,
While in slumber at my breast,
Angels smiling, have no fear,
Holy angels guard your rest.
Was I surprised to that that lullaby was prominently featured in the movie Empire of the Sun, based on the semi-autographical novel of the same name by J.F. Ballard. I'd come full circle
Produced by Steven Speilberg with screenplay by Tom Stoddard, Empire of the Sun, released in 1987, tells the story of a young boy from an aristocratic British family living in Shanghai in 1941 just as the Japanese invaded. Separated from his parents, young Jamie is captured and taken to a Japanese POW camp for British civilians where he comes to admire both the Japanese and the captured American pilots. Jamie is played wonderfully by a very young Christian Bale who is befriended by a laid-back captured American pilot Basie played by John Malkovich.
When I watched the trailer again, I remembered how much I loved the movie. A critical success, it won no Oscars despite several nominations. I just bought it on Amazon for less than $10. You can too.
"Empire of the Sun" (Steven Spielberg)
There is a lost book by Dickens, one that recorded some of the most remarkable encounters of his life. Within it, he catalogued the stories told him by the women – prostitutes, confidence tricksters, thieves and attempted suicides – whom he interviewed before they were admitted to Urania Cottage, the refuge for fallen women he established in Shepherd’s Bush in the 1840s and effectively directed for a decade or more. The money – substantial sums, for this was “high-end philanthropy” – came from the immensely wealthy Angela Burdett-Coutts, but the initial scheme and much of its everyday direction was Dickens’s alone, his most important and most characteristic charitable venture.
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He was the greatest novelist of the age, Burdett-Coutts its richest heiress, and they were determined to offer a chance to people who had none, or only bad ones. They could only help a tiny proportion of the great tide of vulnerable young women who washed up in the prisons and workhouses of mid-Victorian England, but they did so with determination, energy and imagination.
Dickens's Refuge for Fallen Women
But overall, it is striking how clear-minded the Urania project was and how realistic and thorough in execution. Dickens and Burdett-Coutts were simply unwilling to be indifferent to the suffering that surrounded them, and unfailingly energetic in pursuing the chances of change for the better. Urania gave those who entered its doors decent food and clothing, some education, a library, a garden and even music lessons from Dickens’s old friend John Hullah, Professor at King’s College London.
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"Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women" (Jenny Hartley)
Realizing they must offer more if they want to replace religion, a new new atheist like Ronald Aronson wrote that the
“the most urgent need” for secularists today: a coherent popular philosophy that answers vital questions about how to live one’s life.”
Peter Steinfels examines The New Atheism, and Something More in his review of Living without God
A “new atheism must absorb the experience of the 20th century and the issues of the 21st,” he wrote. “It must answer questions about living without God, face issues concerning forces beyond our control as well as our own responsibility, find a satisfying way of thinking about what we may know and what we cannot know, affirm a secular basis for morality, point to ways of coming to terms with death and explore what hope might mean today.”
“religion is not really the issue, but rather the incompleteness or tentativeness, the thinness or emptiness, of today’s atheism, agnosticism and secularism. Living without God means turning toward something.”
For Mr. Aronson, that “something” is not the ideal of an autonomous individual striding confidently into the dawning future but the drama of an interdependent humankind embedded in complex systems of forces, knit into networks of natural environment, historical legacies, social institutions and personal relations.
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More originally, he argues that this interdependence should summon gratitude — gratitude “for,” even if not “to.” Giving thanks, he recognizes, has been central to religion, and secular culture needs to be enriched with an equivalent.
A disastrous marriage drove her to etiquette and more startling accomplishment
along with her best-selling guide, Etiquette (1922), she wrote six novels, scads of journalism, and a 500-page book on architecture; had a long career in radio; designed her own high-fashion clothes; endorsed everything from cigarettes to gingerbread; and built a 15-story apartment house that still stands at the corner of Madison Avenue and 79th Street in Manhattan. She lived in 9B, and her friends filled the rest of the building.
Laura Claridge's Life of Emily Post a review by Laura Shapiro
"Emily Post: Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of American Manners" (Laura Claridge)
Melanie Phillips in a Revolution You Can Believe In
The seditious role of the community organiser was developed by an extreme left intellectual called Saul Alinsky. He was a radical Chicago activist who, by the time he died in 1972, had had a profound influence on the highest levels of the Democratic party. Alinsky was a ‘transformational Marxist’ in the mould of Antonio Gramsci, who promoted the strategy of a ‘long march through the institutions’ by capturing the culture and turning it inside out as the most effective means of overturning western society. In similar vein, Alinsky condemned the New Left for alienating the general public by its demonstrations and outlandish appearance. The revolution had to be carried out through stealth and deception. Its proponents had to cultivate an image of centrism and pragmatism. A master of infiltration, Alinsky wooed Chicago mobsters and Wall Street financiers alike. And successive Democratic politicians fell under his spell.
His creed was set out in his book ‘Rules for Radicals’ – a book he dedicated to Lucifer, whom he called the ‘first radical’. It was Alinsky for whom ‘change’ was his mantra. And by ‘change’, he meant a Marxist revolution achieved by slow, incremental, Machiavellian means which turned society inside out. This had to be done through systematic deception, winning the trust of the naively idealistic middle class by using the language of morality to conceal an agenda designed to destroy it. And the way to do this, he said, was through ‘people’s organisations’.
Writer Jan Morris remarries wife she wed as a man.
Morris described her transformation from male to female in two autobiographical works, Pleasures of a Tangled Life and The Conundrum.
She described how, as a man, he never felt homosexual but always regarded himself as 'wrongly equipped'.
Morris is also the author of Pax Britannica, a three part history of the rise and fall of the British Empire, which she started writing as a man and concluded when she was a woman.
Other works include portraits of cities including Oxford, Venice and New York.
Elizabeth said yesterday: 'I made my marriage vows 59 years ago and still have them.
'We are back together again officially. After Jan had a sex change we had to divorce.
'So there we were. It did not make any difference to me. We still had our family. We just carried on.'
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The couple have already planned to be buried on a small island on the River Dwyfor behind their house, with the inscription on the headstone to read: 'Here are two friends, at the end of one life.'
I read Conondrum when it was first published and all the rage. Morris described her voyages across sexual boundaries in the same beautiful and haunting way she wrote about the cities she visited and lived in around the world. She's an admirable woman and I'm delighted that she was with her true love for 59 years.
"Conundrum (New York Review Books Classics)" (Jan Morris)
"The World of Venice: Revised Edition" (Jan Morris)
"The World: Life and Travel 1950-2000" (Jan Morris)
Spengler reviews the new book by two Harvard scholars, one Jewish, one Christian, entitled "Resurrection: The Power of God for Christians and Jews in Life and death in the Bible and is so enthusiastic about it, I ordered a copy right away.
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"Resurrection: The Power of God for Christians and Jews" (Kevin J. Madigan, Jon D. Levenson)
Modern materialism has weaned the industrial world off spiritual food, like the thrifty farmer who trained his donkey to eat less by reducing its rations each day. "Just when I got I had him trained to live on nothing," the farmer complained, "the donkey had to die!" Like the donkey, the modern world has died when its spiritual rations were cut to nothing. We refuse to acknowledge that our deepest needs are no different from those of Biblical man. We fail to nourish them and we die.
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The hope of traditional society for life on this Earth - for men cannot tolerate life on this earth without the promise of eternal life - is precisely the same as it was in late antiquity. Four hundred million Christian converts in Africa and perhaps a hundred million in China are evidence enough that much of the world will abandon broken traditions and embrace the promise of life. Man is still Biblical man, and the Bible yet again may prove a guidebook to life as it did two millennia ago.
Theology should reclaim its throne as queen of the sciences because it is our guide to the issues that will decide the life and death of nations. Levenson and Madigan have done an enormous service to their own and to many other disciplines by clarifying the Biblical understanding of life and death.
Sick of politics, I find myself reading theology and biblical commentary more and more and discovering just how deep and rich it can be. I am in awe of Pope Benedict the theologian and hang on his words. As Gerard Baker observed in The London Times
what is most striking, as hundreds of thousands observe this Pope in person for the first time, is not the visual symbolism, the crowds or the made-for-TV events, but the imposing beauty and power of his words.
It’s already a cliche in Rome that the crowds came to see John Paul but they come to hear Benedict. Among those familiar with his career, his reputation was always that of a fierce intellectual — the theologian and author of dozens of dense tracts on Christianity. But what was missing was an understanding of Benedict’s remarkable capacity to use words to speak to the emotional part of the human brain.
Of course, the Pope will already have known that the US, unlike the Europe he hopes still to convert, is a religious place. True, as in Europe, there are a growing number of so-called cafeteria Christians, those who like to choose from a menu of moral and doctrinal options, who believe religion should be essentially a kind of divine validation of their own lifestyle rather than a call to sacrifice and commitment. But America is still fundamentally receptive to the religious principle, the idea of a single truth rather than a moral chaos of equally valid beliefs
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Shortly before he became Pope, Benedict told a congregation: “Christianity is not an intellectual system, a collection of dogmas, or a moralism. Christianity is instead an encounter, a love story, an event.”
This idea of faith as a love story — God’s love for his people, and our love for Christ, the human face of God — is what Benedict seems to want us to understand as the defining theme of his papacy.
The effect of a living faith is experiencing life as a gift and living in the realms of love unbounded. Far preferable than the "living death" of much of modern culture.
Thus Christians rescued themselves from the maelstrom of death that took hold of the late Roman Empire.
"Our benchmark for Americanness is apple pie," she writes.
"But ask yourself. How often do you eat apple pie? How often do you eat Chinese food?"
Are you surprised to learn that there are 40,000 Chinese restaurants in the United States, more than the number of McDonalds, Burger Kings and KFCs combined?
New York Times reporter Jennifer 8 writes "The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food"
From the review in the Chicago Tribune:
The heart of "The Fortune Cookie Chronicles" lies beyond the table to where people work and live: behind the menu, behind the cash register, behind the wok. Lee's writing is at its most compelling in her profiles of immigrants, legal and illegal, many of whom have "paid tens of thousands of dollars" to human smugglers so they can spend "twelve-hour days and six-day weeks . . . frying, delivering, waiting tables, stirring, busing, chopping" and, more often than not, risking their lives and livelihood in the process. Lee traces the journey of immigrants from Fuzhou, a region in China that is "the single largest exporter of Chinese restaurant workers in the world today" to New York, a major nerve center for job postings:
After a set at a hotel in Washington State, I was dragged into a long, drawn-out discussion with a graying, balding New Ager who just couldn't get over my evangelical background. "You seem so smart," he kept saying. "How could you buy into that stuff?"
Here's a guy wearing a crystal around his neck to open up his chakra, who thinks that the spirit of a warrior from the lost city of Atlantis is channeled through the body of a hairdresser from Palm Springs, and who stuffs magnets in his pants to enhance his aura, and he finds evangelicalism an insult to his intelligence. I ask you: Who's the redneck?
From a review by Ed Driscoll quoting Redneck Nation by Michael Graham.
"Redneck Nation: How the South Really Won the War" (Michael Graham)
Why should critics have all the fun? No reason at all, so with that, I've decided to publish my ten favorite books read of 2007 even if they weren't all published in 2007. These were books that I read and finished with great satisfaction in all that I learned from stories well told.
Fiction.
I'm a big reader of fiction of all sorts, yet this year, thrillers were my favorites.
Since I love anything Charles McCarry writes, I was delighted with his new book Christopher's Ghosts where we learn more about Paul Christopher's childhood in Germany with an American father and a German mother and his first love, a half-Jewish beauty. His parents are anti-Nazi and living in great peril and his mother disappears. It takes twenty years but Paul returns as an American spy and takes vengeance on his mother's tormentor, the Gestapo chief Stutzer.
"Christopher's Ghosts" (Charles McCarry)
Daniel Silva is a new favorite spy thriller writer who is a pleasure to reread. Gabriel Allon is an expert art restorer specializing in Italian Old Masters and also a secret spy in Special Operations. He walks in sadness since his infant son was killed and his wife driven irretrievably mad by a bomb in Vienna that was meant for him. In The Secret Servant, he travels to Amsterdam to find out who killed an Israeli professor who was compiling reports on the dangers of militant Islam when he uncovers an Al Qaeda plot to kidnap the daughter of the American Ambassador to London.
"The Secret Servant (Gabriel Allon)" (Daniel Silva)
I liked the Secret Servant so much that I read The Messenger again and enjoyed as much as the first time. When the Vatican is targeted for attack, Allon must find a way to infiltrate a Saudi terrorist network which he does with a beautiful American art expert Sarah Bancroft.
"The Messenger" (Daniel Silva)
A Vatican thriller is The Secret Cardinal by Tom Grace. Nolan Kilkenny, a former Navy Seal, is called to Rome after the death of his wife and son to help his father's best friend, Malachy Donaher, the Cardinal Librarian of the Holy Roman Church. There he meets Pope Leo who tells him of Yin Daoming a cardinal "in pectore", who for twenty years has been imprisoned in a Chinese jail whom the Pope wants brought to Rome so he can be elevated to Cardinal. Then the Pope dies, Kilkenny's team is in China and the Chinese learn of the rescue attempt. A real thriller as well as a fascinating look at the persecution of Christians in China along with a lot of high tech toys.
"The Secret Cardinal" (Tom Grace)
What happens when a Gen X blogger named Cassandra starts ranting about the economic disaster that begins to unfold as boomers start retiring. Call it Boomsday and another hilarious book by Christopher Buckley who brought us Thank You for Smoking.
"Boomsday" (Christopher Buckley)
Non-fiction
In his inimitable way, Mark Steyn deals with the demographic crisis in Europe and the challenge of radical Islam in America Alone, what he calls "some light reading for the new Dark Ages". The paperback is coming out in January 08.
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"America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It" (Mark Steyn)
Gentle Regrets is the first book I'd read by Roger Scruton and he completely won me over with stories and thoughts from his life whether they be on architecture, the deadening nihilism of Communist Eastern Europe, music or his years as a "voyeur of holiness" .
"Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life" (Roger Scruton)
With his great skill of making a complex story intelligible through the stories of the real-life characters involved, Jonathan Harr tells a riveting detective story in The Lost Painting, The Quest for a Caravaggio Masterpiece. From a clue in an obscure Italian archive by one art student through to its public unveiling in the Dublin museum in 1992, Harr tells us the story of how a lost painting by a great master was found.
"The Lost Painting" (Jonathan Harr)
I think I bought Cultural Amnesia as much because I loved the phrase 'necessary memories' as for all the great reviews it received.
Clive James, the famous and prolific British critic, is a brilliant writer who, through a collection of 110 biographical essays that are much like a box of chocolates in that you can only read two or three at a time, "plumbs the responsibilities of artists, intellectuals and political readers."
"Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts" (Clive James)
I was most impressed with the persuasive argument Dan McAdams, a " narrative psychologist" makes in The Redemptive Self that Americans really are different because of the stories they tell about their lives. He finds that the highly successful, the best-adjusted, most productive and caring adults describe their lives as overcoming adversity and transforming that adversity as a way of connecting with others with hope in the future which, in the end, is the American story.
"The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By" (Dan P. McAdams)
He was 18 when he knew he wanted to write, but he couldn't finish anything.
So he trained as a librarian, worked in a printing plant and then a bookstore. Not until mid life when a friend said to him, "If you don't really take this seriously, you're going to die before you get a book out.", did he get going.
Per Petterson is Norwegian and not that many Norwegian books are translated into English.
If you're a Norwegian writer, you are not visible in the world," he says. "The door of the English language is very hard to open for a Norwegian writer."
Still Out Stealing Horses sneaks up on people. "It snuck up on the world."
"Out Stealing Horses: A Novel" (Per Petterson)
It's appeared on several best of the year lists including the Time magazine, the National Book Critics Circle, the New York Times and won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in June.
Northern Light is the review that made me want to read the book.
Per Petterson is a writer who has accepted the hand fate dealt and embraced the lifelong project it implies.
"All I ever think about," he says, "is families."
Elizabeth Samet has written a memoir about her ten years spent teaching English at West Point where all her stereotypes about officers were exploded and where she found a great hunger among the students for literature.
Samet attributes these young people's literary fervor precisely to their combat future. While freshmen down in Manhattan at Columbia and NYU think about jobs and paychecks they'll secure after graduation, and hook-ups they make before it, cadets have a rigorous regimented existence in class and out, and they know they will assume command of 30 men and women when it's over, probably in a hot zone. The prospect throws them into hard questions of life and death, duty and sacrifice, courage and leadership, and they probe great works to figure them out.
All of them, Samet included, "feel a palpable pressure to consider every moment's practical and moral weight." The pressure magnifies the import of Macbeth contemplating the murder of Duncan, Penelope waiting for her husband, Stevens's "Oh! Blessed rage for order"--Samet doesn't have to convince them to respect Shakespeare, Homer, and the rest. The war has done that already.
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When she thinks back upon her Harvard/Yale years, she finds them an induction into "doubt and disenchantment," whereas "West Point won me back to a kind of idealism." She finds little sexism in the place, either: "Being a woman is immaterial to many of my colleagues." And while the 1960s counterculture "helped to make the American soldier come to seem a rather strange and exotic creature to many civilians: an anachronistic conformist," Samet encounters "outrageous, uncompromising individuals" and "arch-rebels," and alumni remain "concerned that cadets' minds be exercised with sufficient vigor."
"Soldier's Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point" (Elizabeth D. Samet)
“At some point in the nineteen-sixties, Hell disappeared. No one could say for certain when this happened. First it was there, then it wasn’t.”
The Catholic Novel is Alive and Well in England by Marian Crowe explores Catholic novels in First Things.
Why Catholic Novels?
They provide an experience somewhat akin to reading those weighty Victorian novels, imbued with moral seriousness and ethical concern, in which human acts had momentous import in a meaningful universe. Christian readers have a special interest in these novels, however, for they bring to life doctrines rendered insipid and prosaic due to long familiarity and frequent repetition in creeds and liturgy.
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At this point I need to define what I mean by the term Catholic novel. I do not mean simply a novel by a Catholic or one with some Catholic material, but a work of substantial literary merit in which Catholic theology and thought have a significant presence within the narrative, with genuine attention to the inner spiritual life, often drawing on Catholicism’s rich liturgical and sacramental symbolism and enriched by the analogical Catholic imagination.
The Catholic imagination, says Andrew Greeley, is one that is sacramental, that “sees created reality as a ‘sacrament,’ that is, a revelation of the presence of God.” Some novels are deeply engaged with Catholic material, but almost exclusively in a negative or hostile sense. Such novels are sometimes considered Catholic novels, and some Catholics find it bracing and expansive to enter a fictional space that confronts them with the shadow side of the Church. Yet the Catholic novels that most engage my interest are those that include some kind of sense that Catholicism, no matter how flawed the institutional Church and no matter how weak and sinful individual Catholics, is a locus of truth.
If you know about the English Catholic novelists like Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh and probably about the American Catholic novelists like Flannery O’Connor, J.F. Powers, and Walker Percy, Crowe's piece will give you many new authors to explore.
Last week, I read and quite enjoyed the character of
"Cardinal Galsworthy" (Edward R. F. Sheehan), a book by a former reporter for The New York Times that's become a minor cult classic. That I had the chance to have dinner with the author last week has nothing to do with my hearty recommendation.
I'm reading What's the Matter with California by Jack Cashill who went around that state asking people What's the Matter. By far the best answer came from Larry Harvey who founded the Burning Man festival.
His answer to the question What's the Matter - "a petulant sense of entitlement."
"As he sees it, the nation's obvious abundance has spawned a lifeless materialism. Unrelieved, this materialism has infected us with a "moral coarsening and a growing cynicism" and a "supine passivity" that Harvey finds decidedly "unhandsome."
A few other things I especially liked were some new anacronyms
SWAG as in Sophisticated Wild-Assed Guess
ABETTO, short for A Blind Eye to the Obvious
ABATU or A Blind Acceptance of The Unproven
When a grown child cuts off communication with a parent, the parent(s) feel shame, disillusion and hurt. Even if they have done nothing wrong, Even if their other children turned out fine.
Joshua Coleman's new book, When Parents Hurt, can help such parents cope and carry on.
His website is here - whenparentshurt.com - along with excerpts from the first chapter
Dear Mom,
I have decided that I don’t want to have any contact with you ever again. Please don’t write or call me anymore. I can’t stop thinking about all of the ways that you were never there for me when I was growing up. Whenever I see or talk to you, I just end up feeling depressed, angry, and upset for weeks afterwards. It’s just not worth it to me and I need to get on with my life. Please respect my wishes and don’t contact me again.
Letter from Clarice, 23 to her mother, Fiona, 48
I predict that this book is going to cause of lot of arguments among people who just can't believe it, liberals and conservatives.
"Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth about Compassionate Conservatism" (Arthur C. Brooks)
Author Arthur Brooks, once a registered Democrat now an independent, is a professor at Syracuse University and a behavioral economist.
From Beliefnet: Philanthropy Expert: Conservatives Are More Generous.
The book's basic findings are that conservatives who practice religion, live in traditional nuclear families and reject the notion that the government should engage in income redistribution are the most generous Americans, by any measure.
Conversely, secular liberals who believe fervently in government entitlement programs give far less to charity. They want everyone's tax dollars to support charitable causes and are reluctant to write checks to those causes, even when governments don't provide them with enough money.
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"These are not the sort of conclusions I ever thought I would reach when I started looking at charitable giving in graduate school, 10 years ago," he writes in the introduction. "I have to admit I probably would have hated what I have to say in this book."
Still, he says it forcefully, pointing out that liberals give less than conservatives in every way imaginable, including volunteer hours and donated blood.
Three "rowdy philosophers" from New Jersey have ranked the 101 most influential people who never lived in a new book. Allan Lazar, Dan Karlan and Jeremy Slater wanted to show how "characters of fiction, myth, legends, television and myth have shaped our society, changed our behavior and set the course of history."
Here are the top ten.
1. The Marlboro Man
2. Big Brother
3. King Arthur
4. Santa Claus
5. Hamlet
6. Dr Frankenstein's Monster
7. Siegfried
8. Sherlock Holmes
9. Romeo and Juliet
10. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
You can find the entire list at 101influential and leave your own comments once they get the site working correctly
