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
