Content & Context

This Week:

February Book Blog
Places & Culture
Weekly Digest

FEBRUARY BOOK BLOG

So far this weblog has dealt mostly with culture, but once a month, it will do justice to the other half of this magazine’s name, as a supplement to B&C‘s weekly Web exclusive Book of the Week. Were you to actually obtain all of the books reviewed here, your den would soon resemble the office of B&C editor John Wilson, with stacks of books sprouting from the floor and surrounding the room like Stonehenge. But perhaps you’ll find a few worth following up on, and deem the rest of these reviews—sampling the arts, history, culture, science and ideas—a worthy substitute for the books themselves.

Book News:

Have Clancy and King saturated their markets? Slow sales for some best-selling authors made for a disappointing Christmas season for booksellers, says the New York Times.
Random House looks to plug leak of leaving authors after editor ouster, from the New York Times.

Earlier: Publishing president driven from Random House after merger. From the New York Times.

Libraries to cut back on Harry Potter orders this time, from the BBC.
Armageddon expected to be best-seller, war or no war, says the Washington Post.
10 writers to watch in 2003, from Book Magazine.
A look at the National Book Critics Circle nominees, from the Christian Science Monitor.

Book Reviews:

Latest book from Harvard’s Randall Kennedy’s studies interracial romance, from the New York Times Book Review.Related:Read the Times‘ interview with Kennedy
Grisham’s latest is thin on plot, from the Seattle Times.
Latest Crichton thriller exaggerates downside of biochemical technology, from the New York Review of Books.
Steven Pinker’s contrarian take on nature versus nurture in The Blank Slate, from the New York Review of Books.
Is truth stranger than science fiction, asks futurist novelist? From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
Portuguese professor in London breaks ground in theoretical physics with Faster Than the Speed of Light, from the NY Times Book Review.

More theoretical physics: Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, in the NY Times.

Dante scholar pens literary mystery The Dante Club, from the NY Times.
Vast subject summed up smartly in Introduction to English Poetry, from the Canadian Globe and Mail.
The reach of grace: British journalist searches Sierra Leone for her father’s killers, from the Christian Science Monitor.
Hills at Home is wittiest family portrait since The Corrections, from the Christian Science Monitor.
Transplanted San Francisco English teacher writes about her Hemingway Book Club of Kosovo, from the Christian Science Monitor.
New biography shows the coldness of Carnegie, from the Economist.
Russell Baker on H.L. Mencken, the pride of Baltimore, in the New York Review of Books.
A chilling account of Russia’s Kursk submarine tragedy, from the Washington Post.
Newsman’s memoir blander than title suggests, from the Washington Post.

From B&C:

Book of the Week
Books of the Year 2002 and follow-up
Recommend a book review for the March book blog: nbierma@booksandculture.com

Skip to Digest

PLACES & CULTURE

From the New York Times:

ROME, Feb. 13—Ah, the wonders that greet a visitor to Rome! Look up, and spires and domes scale the sky. Look down a bit, and the chipped remnants of ancient columns stand tall, defying the passage of time. Look down again, at street level, and there it lurks: the spell-breaking, reverie-rupturing contribution of many of today’s Romans, in swirls and swishes of black and blue, like bruises on a beauty who deserves so much better. Graffiti is here, there and everywhere, an enduring vexation that seems to be flourishing of late. It creeps like a stubborn vine across the pale yellow- and clay-colored buildings near the Campo dei Fiori. It sprouts in the shadows of the Colosseum. It skirts Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, and it hems the Via del Corso. … In few other environs does graffiti seem as incongruous as in Rome, even though Italians invented the concept and coined the word for it. And in few other environs is it as revealing a window into the present-day spirit of the place.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/14/international/europe/14ROME.html

QASSIM PROVINCE, Saudi Arabia—From the air, the circular wheat fields of this arid land’s breadbasket look like forest-green poker chips strewn across the brown desert. But they are outnumbered by the ghostly silhouettes of fields left to fade back into the sand, places where the kingdom’s gamble on agriculture has sucked precious aquifers dry. … Saudi Arabia may sit atop the world’s largest oil reserves, but the other side of the geological coin is that the country also sits atop one of the world’s smallest reserves of water. It does not have a single lake or river. … Muhammad H. al-Qunaibet, a hydrologist and government adviser, estimates that the country uses 6.34 trillion gallons of water a year for agriculture, but says that only a third of that is replaced through rainfall.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/26/international/middleeast/26SAUD.html

BEIJING, Feb. 5—As a child in the 1960’s, recalled Huang Rui, an artist, nothing seemed nobler than to become a worker, and no workplace seemed better than the 798 Electronic Components Factory. On the northeast edge of Beijing, mostly making parts for the military, it offered all the prestige and security of a leading state enterprise. … The factory, like many state behemoths, was nearly bankrupt by the end of the 1990’s, and most of a work force that once surpassed 10,000 had retired or been laid off. … But over the last 12 months or so, in a sudden and unplanned turn that Mr. Huang has helped spearhead, much of the complex has been rented by avant-garde artists, art dealers, designers, architects and advertising agents—creative types who have noses for great spaces and low rents. The dozens of new tenants, pulled in entirely by word of mouth, are spontaneously creating what by this spring will be a classy pocket of studios, galleries, music clubs and stylish offices, all in an otherwise drab, suburban factory zone. … “Up to now Beijing hasn’t had this kind of community anywhere.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/06/international/asia/06BEIJ.html

DIGEST

• Postmodernism was supposed to be a fortunate break for Christianity. Unlike modernism, which praised secularism as the route to progress and dismissed faith as irrational and irrelevant, postmodernism affirms the epistemological value of perspective, irony, and resonance—which draw on spiritual belief. But the conventional wisdom of our cultural power brokers—academia and the media, for starters—is behind the times, says David Brooks in a lucid and provocative essay in the latest Atlantic called “Kicking the Secularist Habit.” A “recovering secularist,” Brooks seems to caution religious readers from celebrating his declaration of independence from secularism. After all, he says, secularism was at least inert—its ideal world was calmly material, where progress was logical and religious fervor an aberration. But September 11 has shown us how central and complex belief is in a globalized world: “Now we are looking at fundamental clashes of belief and a truly scary situation—at least in the Southern Hemisphere—that brings to mind the Middle Ages, with weak governments, missionary armies, and rampant religious conflict,” Brooks says. “We are inescapably caught in a world of conflicting visions of historical destiny.” So if postmodernism means the world will take a new look at Christianity after all, it must just as earnestly appreciate Islam.

Secularism is not the future; it is yesterday’s incorrect vision of the future. … Western foundations and universities send out squads of researchers to study and explain religious movements. But as the sociologist Peter Berger has pointed out, the phenomenon that really needs explaining is the habits of the American professoriat: religious groups should be sending out researchers to try to understand why there are pockets of people in the world who do not feel the constant presence of God in their lives, who do not fill their days with rituals and prayers and garments that bring them into contact with the divine, and who do not believe that God’s will should shape their public lives. Once you accept this—which is like understanding that the earth revolves around the sun, not vice-versa—you can begin to see things in a new way.http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2003/03/brooks.htm

Related from the Atlantic:

“The Next Christianity” by Philip Jenkins

From 1942: “Will the Christian Church survive?“

Related from B&C:

Mark Noll on Philip Jenkins’ The Next Christendom

Philip Jenkins reviews The Future of Christianity

• Speaking of Islam: One of the wisest voices in the post-September 11 dialogue about human dignity, religious freedom, and global conflict is David Blankenhorn, founder of the non-partisan New York-based think tank Institute for American Values. In recent Sunday editions of the Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel (reprinted here at IAV’s Web site), Blankenhorn deconstructs the arguments of Osama bin Laden’s little-noticed “Letter to America,” a response to the “Letter from America” which Blankenhorn helped to organize (links to these documents are provided in the piece). First, Blankenhorn says, we need to straighten out the twisted reasoning bin Laden demonstrates in his letter. Then we need to take a look at our definitions of Islam and fundamentalism.

Because al-Qa`ida and similar groups seek to portray this crisis as a war against Islam, we must deny them this definition. We can begin by describing what we oppose more precisely. There are about 1.2 billion Muslims in the world—about one of every five inhabitants. Among all Muslims, probably a minority are Islamists, meaning that they view Islam as the defining feature of politics and want to ensure that Islam is the state religion. Among Islamists, a significant minority, who themselves are hardly unified, can be described as salafists (or revivalists) … Among this group, only a small fraction, who typically call themselves jihadis, believe that the goal of establishing this timeless Islamic order is justifiably pursued by violence. … Osama bin Laden and his comrades, at least in practice, are takfiris—one fringe of a small fraction of a minority of a sub-group called Islamists, who are probably a minority of Muslims.http://www.americanvalues.org/html/reading_an_enemy.html

• And speaking of evil: As a Calvinist, I was fascinated to read this poignant essay on “the normality of evil” by Time magazine’s Lance Morrow, since Morrow seems to lean toward a Calvinist notion of total depravity—that sin is inherent and subtle in us all. Sin is less like a monster and more like a “fungus,” as Morrow puts it (of course, no mainstream magazine writer has been allowed to say “sin” for years now). It’s interesting to hear this perspective, because our popular culture functions with a simplistic view of evil—nearly every movie and television show portrays human nature as basically good (so who needs salvation?), and promotes the view that this normal goodness is threatened only by a minority of deviantly evil people who must be vanquished by righteous heroes. Our commercial news media (including Time, which obsessively runs story after story on Saddam Hussein) follow suit, suggesting that evil resides in a few cartoonish villains such as Saddam, Osama bin Laden, and the Washington snipers. And we Christians, like President Bush, can function with black-and-white notions of a monolithic righteous “us” versus an evil “them” when it comes to the country’s “culture wars” and foreign policy—though our own sanctification is ever unfinished. Sin is subtly pervasive in every soul, stubborn and self-immolating, and manifests itself in every area of life—underscoring our desperate need for Christ’s transformation. Of course, Morrow stops well short of that last phrase as well, and saying that evil is “shallow,” an “electric current” that passes through people and cultures “from time to time” isn’t quite the idea either. But Morrow is off to an intriguing start, and a gracefully written one at that. (And speaking of the commercial news media, Morrow’s almost sermonic piece runs within pages of Time’s gossip page, with breathless coverage this week of Michael Jackson and “The Bachelor.”)

Even if it’s elusive and even if the term is used brainlessly, evil is still there—a mystery, a black hole into which reason and sunshine vanish but nonetheless … there. Talk to the children with chopped-off hands in Sierra Leone. It is as fatuous to deny the existence of evil as it is to toss the word around irresponsibly. The children of the Enlightenment sometimes have an inadequate understanding of the possibilities of the Endarkenment. The question is how evil exists, how it works. The truth about evil that needs attention now is its shallow, deadly, fungus quality. … Opportunistic evil passes like an electric current through the world and through people, or wanders like an infection that takes up residence in individuals or cultures from time to time. http://www.time.com/time/columnist/morrow/ …

• And speaking of the complexity of evil, and the stain of sin in the soul, there’s Bob Greene, the disgraced syndicated warm-and-fuzzy columnist. A morally elastic guy like Bill Clinton made you long for a guy like Greene—a preacher of moral simplicity and nostalgia for a supposed idyllic time gone by in America. But Greene turned out to be strikingly similar to Clinton—obsessively ambitious, compulsively womanizing, and leading his national following to believe he was something he wasn’t. This Chicago magazine report, co-written by media critic Steve Rhodes, doesn’t make the Clinton connection, but it’s the most in-depth profile of Greene since his resignation last fall. http://www.chicagomag.com/pressbox/021803pressbox.htm