Books in Brief: 2004/2
non-required readingby Paul Grant
Summertime is always special. Just take a look at all the life bursting from the ground after months of dormancy. It works wonders for the soul. In the educational cycle, students can set aside Chemistry and Accounting for a few short weeks, and regenerate, and refocus.
Summertime is an opportunity to travel, break habits, meet new people, and expand one's horizons. What a better time to pick up some new, diverse books! Here are some non-required reads for the long, hot days ahead. It's a subjective list compiled by yours truly, InterVarsity employee and urbana.org writer Paul Grant. Just some fun books that won't make you a genius or an apostle.
The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness
by Virginia Postrel
HarperCollins, 2003; 237 pages
see book on amazon.com
What to Afghan peasants and Beverly Hills brats have in common? They both care immensely about beauty. Economist Virginia Postrel of the NY Times made this stunning discovery after reading a story about impoverished central Asian peasants opening nail salons. She initially assumed the customers had been seduced by Western consumerism. The more she investigated, and cast new eyes on trends in the United States, she realized how much she'd had it wrong all these years. Beauty is a fundamental human urge. Abraham Maslow had it all wrong: that pioneering psychologist compiled an eponymous "Hierarchy of Needs", attempting to predict human behavior according to environmental realities. First, Maslow said, come basic biological needs, like itches, breathing and alleviating pain. Then come survival needs like drinking water, eating food and protecting against the elements. The list continues, with beauty, art and style at the top, at the level of luxuries.
As it turns out, as usual human behavior is far more complex. Beauty is not a luxury; it is a basic human drive. As the industrial revolution fades, and its strict emphasis on bare-bones efficiency open for discussion, the American economy is becoming more aesthetics-driven. The rise of style-conscious coffee-houses, color photographs in the NY Times, or persistent feminine spending on makeup, several generations in to the feminist movement: These do not indicate growing decadence in America, or the dumbing-down of America, or lingering patriarchy. Instead, Postrel recommends we view these trends as liberation from industrial age movements to capture the soul and lock it into a production machine.
I don't agree with everything said here, but this book has triggered some long-needed thought in my life on the reasons for my gut-feelings about much of my daily life. It's packed with little "a-ha" moments. It's not a celebration of luxury, but a call to rethink modernity itself.
Post-Soul Nation: The Explosive, Contradictory, Triumphant, and Tragic 1980s As Experienced by African Americans (Previously Known As Blacks and Before That Negroes)
by Nelson George
Viking, 2004; 242 pages
see book on amazon.com
Nelson George is a New York based African American journalist who was very active throughout the eighties. He is uniquely qualified to provide this chronology of that decade through the eyes of African America.
The book is arranged chronologically, starting in 1979 and concluding in 1990. Each chapter is a collection of dates, notes and observations, such as "May such-and-such, 198x: Al Sharpton, an unknown minister in Harlem, interviews several young black victims of police violence for a local radio program. The ensuing uproar catapults Sharpton to ... etc. etc."
The fact of the matter is, our culture is still so segregated that much of this book will be news to people not exposed to African American culture. It's quite an entertaining and eye-opening piece. George steps away from the pointillism to demonstrate broader trends as well, such as the arrival of crack cocaine in the inner city, or the rising gender wars within the black community, or the rising rates of college attendance among African Americans.
There are two faults to the book: It's New York centric, making occasional forays into the outside world. George sticks to his little island the bulk of the time. The other fault: George puts disproportional emphasis on independent film and theater, making next to no mention of that cornerstone of African American culture, the church. One would think the black church didn't evolve at all in response to all the remarkable cultural transformations listed here.
Crabwalk
by Günter Grass
Harcourt, 2003; 240 pages
see book on amazon.com
This short novel by Nobel prize-winning German author Günter Grass has caused quite a stir in its homeland. Grass is touching in "don't touch here" places in the German heart: the topic is the suffering of German citizens during World War II. Crabwalk is a fictionalized version of a true event: the sinking of a ship carrying thousands of refugees by a Russian submarine in January 1945. The disaster was not a war crime, because the Wilhelm Gustloff was no civilian ship. It was a warship, but it was on a mission to save East Prussian Germans from the Soviets' scorched-earth campaign on the Eastern front.
The title refers to the sideways gait of crabs; in the same way the author feels the need to approach the topic in a roundabout manner. Grass is continually pointing out the evil of the Nazi regime, and the complicity of run-of-the-mill Germans in their own oppression. He also pours contempt on the Communists for their self-praise in having "liberated" (East) Germany from the Nazis: such thinking puts the evil of the Nazi regime in the third person. The Nazis did this to us.
But German suffering in WWII was just as real as Allied suffering. Right and wrong doesn't change that. The Germans were wrong; the Russians were wrong in raping and pillaging, and the West was wrong in torching Leipzig. (In case this is an unfamiliar story: Allied bombers dropped enormous loads of incendiary bombs on that German city, killing far more citizens than the Nuclear bombs in Japan.) Grass argues that accounting Germans among the victims of WWII is not the same as arguing the right and wrong of the war itself.
This is not as radical as it sounds. Kurt Vonnegut broached the topic long ago in Slaughterhouse Five. But Grass is on to something else: the nature of German interaction with the past, now that even the Communists are gone. There is currently a very fresh ferment of German re-identification going on, and Grass is one of the foremost in this movement.
This novel is also a masterpiece of narration and language. It is stunning in beauty and haunting in cadence. Grass (employing the crab-walk theme) uses triple negatives to dispassionately discuss the evening gown of a dying woman floundering in icy waves.
Lake Wobegon Days
by Garrison Keillor
Penguin, 1995 (reissue); 352 pages
see book on amazon.com
Now nearly twenty years old, Garrison Keillor's collection of vignettes from a fictional town in Minnesota is making a generational jump to younger readers. Lake Wobegon Days' initial appeal lay in Keillor's validation of a culture that is perpetually under the radar screen in America, in eye-for-detail brushstrokes. He lampoons and loves the villagers in equal measure, all in the rhythms of language common to Norwegian and German American farmers. It's a truly funny book, but it's always understated.
Keillor reminds the reader of the essential foreignness to American mainstream society of the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Norwegian immigrants; anyone fussing (on either side of the debate) over current Asian or Latin American immigrants' assimilation or lack thereof, would do well to read this book. The pain of being a forever foreigner on the land of one's birth has rarely been given as eloquent a voice in current literature of immigration. Lake Wobegon Days deserves to be promoted from quirky documentary comedy to masterful contribution to the question of American identity itself.
The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency
by Andrew McCall Smith
Anchor, 2001; 240 pages
see book on amazon.com
This is the first in a rapidly growing series of light novels on the (mis)adventures of Precious Ramotswe, Botswana's only female private detective. Mma Ramotswe bumbles her way through several cases from straying husbands to witch-doctors, while fulminating on the flaws of Botswanan society as it tries to be modern and Western. This is a good story, to be sure, but the real draw here is the character of Mma Ramotswe herself. She is one of the most beautiful personalities in recent literature.
Down-to-Earth Spirituality
by R. Paul Stevens
InterVarsity Press, 2003, 208 pages
see publisher's page
This book is about the holiness of walking with God in the mundane moments of life, from family to work to aging. It's basically a collection of essays on the life of Jacob, that biblical character who lived life so fully. I recently took to reading one chapter a day while on the bus-ride to work. Jacob was a man of passion. He shot first, and asked questions later. He was an object as well as a subject: sometimes life happened to him, but a lot of the time he was right there in the fray. He thought with his brain and with his heart alike.
R. Paul Stevens is a pastoral tour-guide par excellence. He alternately puts us in Jacob's sandals, filling in the gaps with colors; or he pulls us aside to discuss Jacob's actions and their grander significance. A great book for learning to worship God in real life.
Monster of God
by David Quammen
W.W. Norton & Company, 2003; 384 pages
see book on amazon.com
The sole science book in this list, this isn't even a proper science book. Monster of God is a tour of the jungles of the world and the jungles of the human mind, as several "super-predator" animals are profiled. The author discusses Lions, and Tigers and Bears, Crocodiles and Sharks, and their at times bewildering coexistence with humans. The focus here is on those very rare species that remind us that we are occasionally prey. This is not a discussion of animals that kill. Though dogs and piranhas also can kill, so can bacteria and viruses. What sets the "super-predators" apart is not a scientific category, but an emotional category in the nether regions of neurospace. Normal people have nightmares about being eaten by sharks and lions.
David Quammen starts in India, in a national park home to Asia's only remaining lions. Remember Sampson and David's biblical encounters with the beasts? Now their Asian terrain is a few square miles in a densely populated country. But maintaining the Lions' preserve is not the same as helping whooping cranes survive. Lions behave like animals, and love to stray and eat cattle and children. At the same time, culture and religion are wrapped up in the lions' fate, as a sect of Hindus worship a lion God, while forcing a minor caste of pastoral people to live in the lion preserve.
Moving to Romania, the Transylvanian and Carpathian uplands of which contain the majority of Europe's remaining bears, Quammen examines the culture of bear-hunting. The bears are far from endangered in Romania, in part because the hunting culture has established protections for the bears' habitat, along with a network of wardens who keep poachers out, and mostly keep the bears in. The fascinating section here was published as a feature in the Atlantic Monthly last year - a discussion of Romania's most passionate hunter ever, the Communist Dictator Nicolai Ceausescu. Ceausescu was deposed and executed by his own people to near universal global celebration. He was a monster of a tyrant, and this chapter is a fascinating history of his favorite hobby: shooting bears in cages and corrals. It gives us an insight not just into the perversions of a dictator, but the relationship between absolute power and absolute (moral) corruption.
Quammen feels that the ecological culture wars surrounding these big animals is off the topic. The real issue is who we are as humans. The ways we think and feel about the big animals have scarcely changed, while everything else in the world has changed. There's something about the terror of being eaten that is very primal to our humanness, and Quammen wonders what it will mean for the human experience, should these animals disappear altogether. Fascinating.
Anyway, these are a few great books for this summer ... enjoy them!
Unless otherwise noted, all materials on the urbana.org web site are Copyright InterVarsity Christian Fellowship / USA. All rights reserved.
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