Nicholson Baker, U and I: A True Story (New York: Random House, 1991).
Julian Barnes, Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story (New York: Vintage International, 2012) ("I have lived in books, for books, by and with books; in recent years, I have been fortunate enough to be able to live from books. And it was through books that I first realized there were other worlds beyond my own; first imagined what it might be like to be another person; first encountered that deeply intimate bond made when a writer's voice gets inside a reader's head. I was perhaps lucky that for the first ten years of my life there was no competition from television; and when one finally arrived into the household, it was under the strict control of my parents. They were both schoolteachers, so respect for the book and what it contained were implicit. We didn't go to church, but we did go to the library." Id. at ix. "And I remain deeply attached to the physical book and the physical bookshop." Id. at xvii. "There will always be non-readers, bad readers, lazy readers--there always were. Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communication between absent author and entranced, present reader. Nor do I think the e-reader will ever completely supplant the physical book--even if it does numerically. Every book feels and looks different in your hands; every Kindle download feels and looks exactly the same (though perhaps the e-reader will one day contain a 'smell' function, which you will click to make your electronic Dickens novel suddenly reek of damp paper, fox-marks, and nicotine). ... I have no Luddite prejudice against the new technology; it's just that books look as if they contain knowledge, while e-readers look as if they contain information...." Id. at xviii.).
Sven Birkerts, The Other Walk: Essays (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2011).
Nancy Marie Brown, The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2007).
Nancy Marie Brown, Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise, with a New Foreword by Alex Woloch (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 1982, 2008) ("Every admirer is a potential enemy. No one can make us hate ourselves like an admirer--'de lire las secrete horreur du devouement dans des yeux'--nor is the admiration ever pure. It may be us they wish to meet but it's themselves they want to talk about." Id. at 12.).
J. M. Coetzee, Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, edited by David Attwell (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 1992).
Rita Dove, ed., The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry (New York: Penguin Books, 2011) (I am very please that this anthology includes Robert Pinsky, Samurai Song.).
Andre Dubus III, Townie: A Memoir (New York: Norton, 2011).
David Gilmour, The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, Its Regions, and Their Peoples (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011) (For the German poet [Goethe], Palermo was also a paradise, and Sicily as a whole was 'the clue to everything'. 'To have seen Italy without having seen Sicily,' he bizarrely warned, was 'not to have seen Italy at all.' Yet to see Sicily in the eighteenth century was to see a place with no trace of that epoch except in the profusion of its buildings, for the island was immune to the spirit of the Enlightenment. As the Sicilian historian Rosario Romeo observed, the only European development that the island welcomes was the Counter-Reformation; the Protestant Reformation, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment had virtually no impact. Unlike Naples, Sicily contained only a handful of reformers, and even they were too timid and tepid to advocate the abolition of feudalism.... Aristocrats in other parts of Italy were showing increasing interest in visiting their estates and making them more productive, but in Sicily landowners did not follow the trend. Instead of riding from time to time over their latifondi, seeing what was happening on their farms, they stayed in Palermo, trundling up and down the marine front each afternoon in their carriages, attended by their liveried footmen. When the great Neapolitan viceroy, the Marquess of Caracciolo, arrived in Palermo in 1781, the nobles united to impede his reforms, especially those that might have led to a reduction of their feudal powers." Id. at 123-124. "Italy's unease at the start of the millennium was exacerbated by intellectuals who demonstrated their anxieties by writing books with titles as stark as The Death of the Fatherland, If We Cease to Be a Nation and Is Italy a Civilized Country?, sometimes containing an equally pessimistic subtitle such as Why Italy Cannot Succeed n Becoming a Modern Country. Many were fixated by the 'problem' of the national character, and one newspaper editor ascribed the country's shortcomings to the nature of its people, who were wily, deceitful and amoral, who possessed no 'spirit of service' and who were too attached to their mothers. The sense of national identity such as it had been, seemed to have disappeared, and increasing numbers of Italians were now questioning the legitimacy of the state. The Northern League, which became the third party in Italy in 2008, had long denounced the Risorgimento and claimed that unification had been a mistake. Now the Resistance, the second sacred experience of modern Italian history, was being discredited by politicians of the Right. A mayor of Rome publicly denied that fascism was evil, a minister of defence praised the brutal soldiery of Salo, and a speaker of the Senate pronounce the Resistance to be a myth that ought to be abandoned. Berlusconi made his own opinions clear in 2002 by refusing to lay a wreath to the partisans and going on holiday to his villa in Sardinia instead." "By the start of the millennium it was hard to discern a sense of pride in being Italian, unless the country's football team was playing well, except for that pride understandably engendered by the high quality of exports exhibiting 'Italian style' and 'made in Italy'. Although Italy was still a unitary state, it was evidently not a united one." Id. at 392-393.).
Robert E. Goodin, On Settling (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2012) (This extended 'essay' is very much worth reading, remembering, and applying. From the bookjacket: "In a culture that worships ceaseless striving, 'settling' seems like giving up. But is it? On Settling defends the positive value of settling, explaining why this disdained practice is not only more realistic but more useful than an excessive ideal of striving. In fact, the book makes the case that we'd all be lost without settling--and that even to strive, one must first settle." "We may admire strivers and love the ideal of striving, but who of us could get through a day without settling? Real people, confronted with a complex problem, simply make do, settling for some resolution that, while almost certainly not the best that one could find by devoting limitless time and attention to the problem, is nonetheless good enough. [The perfect is the enemy of the good?] Robert Goodin explores the dynamics of this process. These involve taking as fixed, for now, things that we reserve the right to reopen later (nothing is fixed for good, although events might always overtake us). We settle in some things in order to concentrate better on others. At the same time we realize we may need to come back later and reconsider those decisions. From settling on and settling for, to settling down and settling in, On Settling explains why settling is useful for planning, creating trust, and strengthening the social fabric--and why settling is different from compromise and resignation." "So, the next time you're faced with a thorny problem, just settle. It's no failure." I would like to have seen some discussion of the relationship between settling and reaching a consensus.).
Jill Lepore, The Story of America: Essays on Origins (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2012) ("To say that the United States is a story is not to say that it is fiction; it is, instead, to suggest that it follows certain narrative conventions. All nations are places, but they are also acts of imagination. Who has a part in a nation's story, like who can be a citizen and who has a right to vote, isn't foreordained, or even stable. The story's plot, like the nation's borders and the nature of its electorate, is always shifting. Laws are passed and wars are fought to keep some people in and others out. Who tells the story, like who writes the laws and who wage the wars, is always part of that struggle." Id. at 3. "The story of America isn't carved in stone, or even inked on parchment; it is, instead, told, and fought over, again and again. It could have gone a thousand other ways." Id. at 4. "In The Anti-Intellectual Presidency: The Decline of Presidential Rhetoric from George Washington to George W. Bush,, political scientist Elvin T. Lim argued that the problem isn't that presidents appeal to the people; it's that they pander to us. Speech is fine; blather is not. By an "anti-intellectual president' . . . Lim meant, with a handful of exceptions, everyone from McKinley forward, presidents who, in place of evidence and argument, offered platitudes, partisan jibes, emotional appeals, and lady-in-Pasadena human-interest stories. Sloganeering in speechwriting became common place that, in 2009, the National Constitution Center hosted a contest for the best six-word inaugural. ('New deal. New day. New world.') Public-spirited yes; nuanced, not so much." Id. at 313.).
Zakes Mda, Sometimes There Is a Void: Memoirs of an Outsider (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011).
Richard Russo, Elsewhere: A Memoir (New York: Knopf, 2012) ("Our second day on the road, around dawn, we were awaken by a call form the motel's front desk. During the night somebody had broken into my car, smashing in the windshield with a tire iron. . . . The front seat and floor were vacuumed, but tiny glass shards had worked their way into the fabric of the seat cushions, and by the time I drove back to the motel where my family anxiously awaited, my undershorts were pink. My mother would now have to ride in the other vehicle. 'Which car do you want to drive?' I asked Barbara. That is, would you rather have my mother in your car for the next seven hours or bleed from the ass in mine? After twenty-five years, she was used to such choices. Still, she seemed to debate this one for a long time." Id. at 98. Also, see Meg Wolitzer, "His Mother, Himself," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 12/9/1212.).
Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 2012) ("In spite of India's much-trumpeted secularism, Indian governments from the mid-seventies onward...had often given in to pressure from religious interest groups, especially to those claiming control of large blocs of votes. By 1988, Rajiv Gandhi's weak government, with elections due in November, cravenly surrendered to threats from two opposition Muslim MPs who were in no position to 'deliever' the Muslim electorate's votes to the Congress Party. The book [i.e., The Satanic Verses] was not examined by any properly authorized body, nor was there any semblance of judicial process. The ban came, improbably enough, from the Finance Ministry, under Section 11 of the Customs Act, which prevented the book from being imported. Weirdly, the Finance Ministry stated that the ban 'did not detract from the literary and artistic merit' of his work. Thanks a lot, the thought." "Strangely--innocently, naively, even ignorantly--he hadn't expected it. ... [I]n 1988 it was possible to believe in India as a free country in which artistic expression was respected and defended. He had believed it...." "To be free one had to make the presumption of freedom. And a further presumption: that one's work would be treated as having been created with integrity. He has always written presuming that he had the right to write as he chose, and presuming that it would at the very least be treated as serious work; and knowing, too, that countries whose writers could not make such presumptions inevitably slid toward, or had already arrived at, authoritarianism and tyranny. Banned writers in unfree parts of the world were not merely proscribed; they were also vilified. In India, however, the presumption of intellectual freedom and respect had been ever present except during the dictatorial years of ;emergency rule' imposed by Indira Gandhi between 1974 and 2977 after her conviction for electoral malpractice. He had been proud of that openness and had boasted of it to people in the West. India was surrounded by unfree societies--Pakistan, China, Burma--but remained an open democracy; flawed, certainly, perhaps even deeply flawed, but free." Id. at 116-117. "When a thing happened that had not happened before, a confusion often descended upon people, a fog that fuddled the clearest minds; and often the consequence of such confusion was rejection, and even anger. A fish crawled out of a swamp onto dry land and the other fish were bewildered, perhaps even annoyed that a forbidden frontier had been crossed. A meteorite struck the earth and the dust blocked out the sun but the dinosaurs went on fighting and eating, not understanding that they have been rendered extinct. The birth of language angered the dumb. The shah of Persia, facing the Ottoman guns, refused to accept the end of the age of the sword and sent his cavalry to gallop suicidally against the blazing cannons of the Turk. A scientist observed tortoises and mockingbirds and wrote about random mutations and natural selection and the adherent of the Book of Genesis cursed his name. A revolution in painting was derided and dismissed as mere impressionism. A folksinger plugged his guitar into an amp and a voice in the crowed shouted 'Judas!'" "This was the question his novel had asked: How does newness enter the world?" Id. at 343. Also, see Donna Rifkind, "A Fictional Character," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 10/14/2012.).
Will Schwalbe, The End of Your Life Book Club (New York: Knopf, 2012) ("You can no longer assume, the way you could when I was growing up, that anyone is reading anything" Id. at 4. "I'd become weary of my work, for all the same boring reasons privileged people get sick of their white-collar jobs: too many meetings, too much email, and too much paperwork." Id. at 24. Commenting on Karen Connelly, The Lizard Cage: "In an era of computers, there's something deeply poignant about a political prisoner with his scraps of paper, about a prison convulsed in the hunt for a pen, and about Connelly's recognition of the importance of the written and printed word. It's easy to forget in our wired world that there are not just places like prisons where electronic text is forbidden, but whole countries, like Burma, where an unregistered modem will land you in jail or worse. Freedom can still depend on ink, just as it always has." Id. at 132. "Evil almost always starts with small cruelties." Id. at 151. "She felt whatever emotions she felt, but feeling was never a useful substitute for doing, and she never let the former get in the way of the latter. If anything, she used her emotions to motivate her and help her concentrate. The emphasis for her was always on doing what needed to be done." Id. at 194.).
Colm Toibin, New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families (New York: Scribner, 2012) (From "Jane Austen, Henry James and the Death of the Mother": "If it had suited novelists to fill their books with living mothers . . . then they would have done so. In Novel Relations Ruth Perry takes the view that all the motherless heroines in the eighteenth-century novel--and all the play with substitutions--'may derive from a new necessity in an age of intensifying indiiduaism' This necessity involved separating from the mother, or destroying her, and replacing her with a mother-figure of choice. 'This mother,' Perry writes, 'who is also a stranger may thus enable the heroine's independent moral existence'." "Thus mothers get in the way of fiction; they take up the space that is better filled by indecision, by hope, by the low growth of a personality, and by something more interesting and important a the novel itself develops. This was the idea of solitude, the idea that a key scene in a novel occurs when the heroine is alone, with no one to protect here, no one to confide in, no one to advise her, and no possibility of this . [Note: The eighteenth century, the age without the Iphone, the Ipad, laptop Mac, Internet, Google search, email, text messaging, tweeting, or Facebook; in short, a world in which one could actually be alone, in solitude, for more than 30 seconds. Sigh.] Thus her thoughts move inward, offering a drama not between generations, or between opinions, but within a wounded, deceived or conflicted self. The novel traces the mind at work, the mind in silence. The presence of a mother would be a breach of the essential privacy of the emerging self, of the sense of singleness and integrity, of an uncertain moral consciousness, of a pure and floating individuality on which the novel comes to depends. The conspiracy in the novel is thus not between a mother and her daughter, but rather between the protagonist and the reader." Id. at 3. From the bookjacket: "Acutely perceptive and imbued with rare tenderness and wit, New ways to Kill Your Mother is a fascinating look at writers' most influential bonds and a secret key to understanding and enjoying their works.").
John Fabian Witt, The Accidental Republic: Crippled Workingmen, Destitute Widow, and the Remaking of American Law (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2004) (From the bookjacket: "In the five decades after the Civil War, the United States witnessed the development of a profusion of institutions designed to cope with the nation's exceptionally acute industrial accident crisis. Jurists elaborated the common law of torts. Workingmen's organizations founded a widespread system of cooperative insurance. Leading employers instituted welfare-capitalist accident relief funds. And social reformers advocated compulsory insurance such as workmen's compensation." "John Fabian Witt argues that experiments in accident law at the turn of the twentieth century arose out of competing views of the loose network of ideas and institutions that historians call the ideology of free labor. These experiments a century ago shaped contemporary American accident law; they laid the foundations of the American administrative state; an they occasioned a still hotly contested legal transformation from the principles of free labor to the categories of insurance and risk. In this eclectic moment at the beginning of the modern state, Witt describes American accident law as a contingent set of institutions that might plausibly have developed along a number of historical path. In turn, he suggests, the making of American accident law is the story of the equally contingent remaking of our accidental republic.").
John Fabian Witt, Lincoln's Code: The Law of War in American History (New York: The Free Press, 2012) ("This is a story about war in America. To be more specific, it is the story of an idea about war, an idea that Americans have sometimes nurtured and often scorned. The idea is that the conduct of war can be constrained by law." Id. at 1. "In August and September 1862, Dakota warriors associated with the Sioux Nation had launched a bloody series of assaults to reclaim land they had ceded to the United States. Disputes had arisen over payment for the land. The Dakota attacked white settler homesteads across the southern part of the state, killing 358 settlers in all, including women and children." "The American response was swift and ferocious. Major General John Pope...ordered Colonel Henry Hastings Sibley to treat the Dakota 'as maniacs or wild beast,' and declared his intent 'utterly to exterminate' them. Pope's attitude was shared widely. 'Nits,' one soldier told Colonel Sibley, 'make lice.'" "Yet in September and October, when he took into custody some 2,000 Dakota Indians, Colonel Sibley did not execute them summarily. Instead,he convened a five-officer military commission and tried the Dakota for murder and related crimes. Minnesota settlers complained bitterly about the delayed retaliation against the Dakota.... But the settlers did not have to wait long. The military trials began two days after Sibley had begun to take the Dakota into custody. On the first day, the commission tried sixteen men, sentencing ten to death by hanging and acquitting six others. When the trials conclude on November 3, the commission had heard charges against 392 Dakota for murder, rape, and robbery. The commission convicted 323 warriors, 303 of whom were sentenced to death." "Historians of the Dakota conflict have focused on the procedural shortcomings of the military commissions, which were considerable. Most rials were extremely short: some lasted no more than five minutes. Key evidence was often provided by cooperating witnesses who otherwise faced execution themselves. No defense counsel appeared." "But the more interesting question is not whether the military commission trials were paragons of civil libertarian virtue (they were not), or even whether they lived up to the already dubious standards of trials in nineteenth-century courts (they did not). The real question is why U.S. officials held trials at all. Summary executions, after all, had been standard practice for American solders capturing Indians since the seventeenth century...." "At a moment when the South had captured thousands of Union soldiers, when Lincoln's critics pilloried him for initiating barbaric war of servile insurrection, the North could not afford to draw the charge of cruelly executing prisoners of war. And so, after agonizing over the cases for a month, Lincoln resolved them by applying a principle drawn from the laws of war. Distinguishing between those Indian warriors who had participated in massacres and those who had fought against soldiers and militia, he approved the death sentences of thirty-nine Dakota warriors and left the sentences of the other unresolved." "Rarely if ever had U.S. military force against Indians been so closely regulated by law. But then, the United States had rarely been prepared to execute so many Indian warrior at once, by law or otherwise. The military commissions had served to restrain the use of sheer force. But commissions had also been a legitimating device, a way of moving forward with mass executions on an unprecedented scales." Id. at 330-334.).
John Fabian Witt, Patriots and Cosmopolitans: Hidden Histories of American Law (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2007) ("From the bookjacket: "Ranging widely from the founding era to Reconstruction, from the making of the modern state to its post-New Deal limits, John Fabian Witt illuminates the legal and constitutional foundations of American nationhood though the little-known stories of five patriots and critics. He shows how law and constitutionalism have powerfully shaped and been shaped by the experience of nationhood at key moments in American history...." "Each of these individuals [i.e., James Wilson, Elias Hill, Crystal Eastman, Roscoe Pound, and Melvin Belli] came up against the power of American national institutions to shape and constrain the directions of legal change. Yet their engagements with American nationhood remade the institutions and ideals of the United States even as the national tradition shaped and constrained the course of their lives.").
I know. I am a one-person book club.
Monday, December 31, 2012
SUGGESTED READING FOR LAW STUDENTS
Akhil Reed Amar, America's Unwritten Constitution: The Precedents and Principles We Live By (New York: Basic Books, 2012) (This is the sequel to Amar's America's Constitution: A Biography. "I argue that the written Constitution itself invites recourse to certain things outside the text--things that form America's unwritten Constitution. When viewed properly, America's unwritten Constitution supports and supplements the written Constitution without supplanting it." Id. at x-xi. I could not help but wonder, what would it be like, what would be the consequence, were the peoples of the United States of America to have a national "read in" where we all read and talked about Amar's two books. A discussion less about whether one's 'loves' and 'hates' the Constitution, less about how one might want to amend or tweak the Constitution. But rather, using Amar's books as the jumping off point, a discussion of what does the constitution--written or unwritten--actually say and mean. That is, an apolitical discussion about the Constitution; or, the U.S. Constitution from a Martian's perspective. Also, see Robert P. George, "Interpretative Freedom," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 12/23/2012.).
Allan Hunt Badiner, ed., Mindfulness in the Marketplace: Compassionate Responses to Consumerism, with a foreword by Julia Butterfly Hill (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 2002) (From Bo Lozoff, "How Not to Feast from the Poison Cake": "So what has gotten so out of whack in modern times? Why does it seem so complex and draining merely to pay the bills and just get by?" "For one thing, our consumer culture encourages us from the time we're born to have ceaseless desires. To put is simply, we want so much , all the time, that we have not even noticed how much quality of life we have given up...." "A second related culprit of our imbalance is the role of 'career' in our lives. Career seems to have become the accepted hub around which everything else revolves, We choose career over our health. We choose career over or mates and children. We choose career over our time to study, pray, walk, hike, meditate, participate in community life. We fuss over our children's potential careers like it's the most important thing in the world. If our child wants to take a year or two off between high school and college, we freak out. We worry they'll 'get behind.' Shat does that mean? What's the message?" "Career is not deep enough to be the center of life. Career is not who you are. It's something you do for twenty or thirty years and then you stop. If you sink all your identity into it, then your life hasn't started until your career begins, and it's basically over when your career ends.... Career hardly scratches the surface of who you are. Character and virtue and wisdom and joy are the mark of a person, not one's choice of career. Contentment is a virtue. A lack of materialistic ambition is not such a bad thing." Id. at 105, 106. From Stephen Prothero, "Boomer Buddhism": "What seems to be lost on most countercultural Buddhists is the possibility that it may be America's destiny to not make Buddhism perfect but to make it banal. It is, of course, far too early to determine what America's effect on Buddhism will be." Id. at 161, 163.).
Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets Since the Great Depression (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2012) (From the bookjacket: "Just as today's observers struggle to justify the workings of the free market in the wake of a global economic crisis, an earlier generation of economists revisited their worldview following the Great Depression. The Great Persuasion is an intellectual history of that project, Angus Burgin traces the evolution of postwar economics thought in order to reconsider many of the most basic assumptions of our market-centered world." "Conservatives often point to Friedrich Hayek as the most influential defender of the free market. By examining the work of such organizations as the Mount Pelerin Society, an international association founded by Hayek in 1947 and later led by Milton Friedman, Burgin reveals that Hayek and his colleagues were deeply conflicted about many of the enduring problems of capitalism. Far from adopting an uncompromising stance against the interventionist state, they developed a social philosophy that admitted significant constraints on the market. Postwar conservative thought was more dynamic and cosmopolitan than has previously been understood." "It was only in the 1960s and '70s that Friedman and his contemporaries developed a more strident defense of the unfettered market. Their arguments provided a rhetorical foundation for the resurgent conservatism of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan and inspired much of the political and economic agenda of the United State in the ensuring decades. Burgin's brilliant inquiry uncovers both the origins of the contemporary enthusiasm for the free market and the moral quandaries it has left behind.").
Martin Duberman, Howard Zinn: A Life on the Left (New York: The New Press, 2012) ("In the fall of 2002, an episode on the hugely successful TV series The Sopranos depicted Tony Soprano's son reading a copy of A People's History and telling his father that Columbus murdered and tortured Indians. Tony--Italian, of course--is outraged, and a family conflict ensues, ending with Tony yelling that he doesn't care what his son's teachers or his book says, 'To me, Columbus will always be a hero.' The episode led to a large surge in book sales (it passed the million mark in 2000). Rupert Murdoch's Fox network had optioned A People's History for a miniseries on TV three or four years earlier, but before long Fox dropped the project--Murdoch must have realized what the book actually said." Id. at 299.).
Tamar Frankel, The Ponzi Scheme Puzzle: A History and Analysis of Con Artist and Victims (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2012) ("America is ambivalent toward con artists. It does not condemn them as it would, say, the slayers of helpless elderly people, even though the actions of con artists may have a similar devastating effect on their victims, and even though their methods may be just as heartlessly cruel...." "[T]rust and honesty are indeterminate, and realizing that people follow many routes with different measures of truth and honesty, we may conclude that 'a little dishonesty' will always be there. So a little dishonesty is acceptable or even justified." "Here lies our greatest danger. A society that accepts a little dishonesty as a way of life is headed toward deception and abuse of trust on a grand scale. Because con artists resemble us, the true danger is that we might become like them. Knowing that fully self-enforced honesty cannot be achieved does not mean that accepting a little fraud, deception, and just a bit of breach of trust is the way to go." Id. at 188-189.).
Chrystia Freeland, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else (New York: The Penguin Press, 2012).
Rebecca Redwood French, The Golden Yoke: The Legal Cosmology of Buddhist Tibet (Ithaca & London: Cornell U. Press, 1995) ("This book presents the 'golden yoke' of Buddhist Tibet, the last medieval legal system in existence in the middle of the twentieth century.... The practice of law in this unique legal world, which lacked most of our familiar signposts, ranged from the fantastic use of oracles in the search for evidence to the more mundane presentation of cases in court." "Buddhism and law, two topics rarely intertwined in Western consciousness, are at the center of this work. The Tibetan legal system was based on Buddhist philosophy and reflected Buddhist thought in legal practice and decision-making. For Tibetans, law is cosmology, a kaleidoscopic patterning of relations which is constantly changing, recycling, and re-forming even as it integrate the universe and the individual into a timeless mandalic whole." "This book also critiques our idea of legal culture. It argues that we conceal from ourselves the ways we do law by segregating things legal into a separate space with rigidly defined categories. The legal cosmology of Buddhist Tibet brings into question both this autonomous framework and most of the basic presumptions we have about the very nature of law, from precedent and res judicata to eule-formation and closure." Id. at xiii.).
Stuart P. Green, Thirteen Ways to Steal a Bicycle: Theft Law in the Information Age (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2012) (From the bookjacket" "In this full-scale critique, Green reveals that the last major reforms in Anglophone theft law, which took place almost fifty years ago, flattened moral distinctions, so that the same punishments are not assigned to vastly different offenses. Unreflective of community attitudes toward theft, which favor gradations in blameworthiness according to what is stolen and under what circumstances, and uninfluenced by advancements in criminal law, theory theft law cries out for another reformation--and soon.").
J. Bradford Jensen, Global Trade in Services: Fear, Facts, and Offshoring (Washington, D.C.: Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2011) (From the backcover: "The service sector is large and growing and international trade in services is expanding rapidly. Yet there is a dearth of empirical research on the size, scope, and potential impact of service trade. The underlying source of this gap is well-known--official statistics on the service sector in general, and trade in services in particular, are inadequate." Jensen "finds that, in spite of US comparative advantage in service activities, service firms' export participation lags behind manufacturing firms. Jensen evaluates the impediments to service trade and finds evidence that there is considerable room for liberalization--especially among the large, fast-growing developing economies.").
Gary Krist, City of Scoundrels: The 2 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to Modern Chicago (New York: Crown, 2012).
Sanford Levinson, Framed: America's 51 Constitutions and the Crisis of Governance (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2012) (From the bookjacket: "In Framed, Levinson challenges our belief that the most important features of our [federal and state] constitutions concern what rights they protect. Instead, he focuses on the fundamental procedures of governance such as congressional bicameralism, the selection of the President by the electoral college, and the dimensions of the President's veto power--not to mention the near impossibility of amending the United States Constitution. These seemingly 'settled' and 'hardwired' structures contribute to the now almost universally recognized 'dysfunctionality" of American politics. "Levinson argues that we should stop treating the United States Constitution as uniquely exemplifying the American constitutional tradition. We should be aware of the 50 state constitutions, often interestingly different--and perhaps better--than the national model. Many states have updated their constitutions by frequent amendment or by complete replacement via state constitutional conventions. Indeed, California's ungovernable condition has prompted serious calls for a constitutional convention. This constant churn indicates that basic law often reaches the point where it fails and becomes obsolete. Given the experience of so many states, [Levinson] writes, surely it is reasonable to believe that the U.S. Constitution merits its own updating." "American constitutions, at both the state and national levels, generate important questions both about the meaning of American democracy and about the capacity of government to meet contemporary challenges. We should emulate the Framers and ask if our constitutions need fundamental change.").
Jonathan Levy, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England, 2012) ("The spread of capitalism has brought the insecurity of the sea to the land. Human beings had long associated the power of chance with the capricious tides of he high seas. Now the image of the ship on stormy waters became a powerful metaphor for the perils and possibilities of life under capitalism. Nineteenth-century Americans spoke of howling winds, thunder claps, unknown breakers, and tempests and storms and cyclones that wept over the deep--for which they were not responsible. But they had learned to cope with them, and even to profit from them. As daunting as the task of managing risk could be, there was also the existential thrill of taking a risk. That tension was at the very operational and moral heart of both capitalism and a rising liberal order." "In the nineteenth-century Americans had their own term for this tension, for all of the sudden economic twists and turns, booms and busts, and ups and downs that were newly and inexplicably in their midst. They called them 'freaks of fortune." "Within the context created by the freaks--by the economic chance-world of capitalism--the history of risk comes into view." Id. at 1. "The thread that runs consistently through risk's history is a moral one. For risk triumphed in the nineteenth-century United States in the context of the nation's moral struggle over freedom and slavery. A generation--financiers, abolitionists, actuaries, jurists, preachers, legislators, corporate executives, philosophers, social scientists--developed a vision of freedom that linked the liberal ideal of self-ownership to the personal assumption of 'risk.' In a democratic society, according to the new gospel, free and equal men must take, run, own, assume, bear, carry, and manage personal risks. That involved actively attempting to become the master of one's own personal destiny, adopting a moral duty to attend to the future. Which meant taking risks. But it also meant offloading one's risk onto new financial corporations--like when a wage worker insured his productive labor against workplace accident, an ex-slave open a savings account, or a Wall Street financier hatched a corporate profit-sharing and employee benefit plan. A new vision of what it meant to be a free and secure actor thus took shape in the new material and psychological reality created by the modern American corporate financial system." Id. at 5.).
Thomas K. McCraw, The Founders and Finance: How Hamilton, Gallatin, and Other Immigrants Forged a New Economy (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2012) ("During the early 1790s, the simmering Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania came to full boil. Despite Gallatin's efforts to pacify the rebels, they attacked individual collectors and set fire to the barns of farmers who complied with the tax. In July 1794, 500 armed men gathered near Pittsburgh and began threatening all manner of mayhem--firing shots into the air, interfering with the courts, robbing the mails, and planning an assault on federal property in Pittsburgh. It was the first serious domestic challenge to the national government under the Constitution, and was met by decisive action." "Urged on by Hamilton, President Washington sent a force of about 12,500 militiamen into western Pennsylvania--an overwhelming display of federal power. Hamilton himself traveled from the capital in Philadelphia as a civilian observer. As he wrote Angelica Church, his sister-in-law, 'A large army has cooled the courage of those madmen & the only question seems to be how to guard best against the return of the phrenzy . . . Twas very important there should be no mistake in the management of the affair.' The militia arrested about twenty rebels, two of whom were convicted of treason and sentenced to hang. Washington, concluding that the proper lesson had been taught and learned, commuted these sentences. But Gallatin always regarded the incident as an gross overreaction by the federal government. It confirmed his worst suspicions about Hamilton, whom he came to think of as a tool of wealthy Easterners unconcerned with the West." Id. at 203.).
Aryeh Neier, The International Human Rights Movement: A History (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2012) (From the bookjacket: "Discussing the movement's origins, Neier looks at the dissenters who fought for religious freedom in seventeenth-century England and the abolitionists who opposed slavery before the Civil War era. He pays special attention to the period from the 1970s onward, and he describes the growth of the human rights movement after the Helsinki Accord, the roles played by American presidential administrations, and the astonishing Arab revolutions of 2011. Neier argues that the contemporary human rights movement was, to a large extent, an outgrowth of the Cold War, and he demonstrates how it became the driving influence in international law, institutions, and rights. Throughout, Neier highlights key figures, controversies, and organizations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and he considers the challenges to come.").
Andrew Nikiforuk, The Energy of Slaves: Oil and the New Servitude (Vancouver, Toronto & Berkeley: David Suzuki Foundation/Greystone Books/D & M Publishers, 2012) ("As noted by the French philosopher Fabrice Flipo, the story of fire tells us that no energy is clean, free, or unlimited and that the use of every Promethean tool must be carefully measured. Only justice and respect can defeat excess. In the absence of proportion and scale, energy invites destruction and dispersion. And it create a servitude that blinds master and slave alike." Id. at xi. "[E]very form of energy consumption, from slavery to oil, involves, somewhere, a sacrifice." Id. at 2. "Before coal and oil, civilization ran on a two-cycle engine: the energy of solar-fed crops and the energy of slaves." Id. at 3. "The Atlantic slave trade wasted energy like a leaking pipeline. Over a three-hundred-year period, as many as 10 million Africans crossed the Atlantic in chains. For every successful import, two to five corpses littered the high seas or African slave ports." Id. at 13. 'It would take a new energy master to unshackle this order of human slavery. Although fossil fuels at first promised widespread liberty and virgin utopias, they eventually delivered something different: an army of fuel-hungry mechanical workers that would require increasingly complex forms of management and an aggressive class of powerful carbon traders. Without much thought, we replaced the ancient energy of human slaves with a new servitude, powered by fossil fuels." Id. at 17. "In 1957, Admiral Hyman Rickover, father of the nuclear submarine, gave a sobering speech to a group of U.S. physicians in St. Paul, Minnesota...." "Rickover told his listeners that he didn't know of a society where reduction in energy slaves--human or petroleum--had not resulted in in a decline of civilization. 'Our civilization rests upon a technological base which requires enormous quantities of fossil fuels,' he continued. 'What assurance do we have that our energy needs will continue to be supplied by fossil fuels? The answer is--in the long run--none'" Id. at 57-58. "Noisy leaf-powers, expensive SUVs, and glowing smartphones dominate modern life as fully as did servants in a nineteenth0century Brazilian 'Big House.' The average North American or European consumer thinks of these inanimate servants as entitlements. And although our comfort providers and labor savers number in the billions, we largely pretend that they do not exist. U.S. plantation owners at least earnestly debated the morality of living off the sweat of their shackled servants. Their modern descendants take immediate offense at any discussion about the carbon emissions of their mechanical servants." Id. at 63. "High energy consumption nourishes highly narcissistic cultures. Since the 1970s, when domestic oil production peaked in the United States, the country has refused to recognize any real change in its energy fortunes. As noted by the essayist Daniel Altman, self-obsessed Americans tend to do what they want regardless of the consequences for other people. Some believe that they are entitled to superhuman wealth even when the country's dwindling oil supplies deliver nothing but debt. Many Americans consistently reject taxation that might serve future generations or the current good of their communities. Explains Altman, 'In recent decades Americans have encountered far more inequality and far less social mobility than their parents. But narcissism leads these same Americans to reject redistributive tax systems.'" Id. at 223-224. "[I]t would take five times more energy than the current global supply to extend these profligate habits to the rest of the world". Id. at 224. "Lowering energy demand is a radical prescription. It is as revolutionary as the abolition of U.S. slavery or the redistribution of land in nineteenth-century Russia, says Vaclav Smil. But our health, our freedom, and our humanity depend on a moral reassessment of mastery and slavery in all energy relationships. Our debilitating servitude to the concentrated forces of fossil fuels has just one proper solution: a radical decentralization and relocalizing of energy spending combined with a systematic reduction in the number of inanimate slaves in our housefuls and places of work." Id, at 227.).
James T. Patterson, The Eve of Destruction: How1965 Transformed America (New York: Basic Books, 2012) ("Many Americans, stunned by these pivotal events, have subsequently identified 1965--the year of military escalation, of Watts, of the splintering of the civil rights movement, and of mounting cultural change and polarization--as the time when America's social cohesion began to unravel and when the turbulent phenomenon that would be called 'the Sixties' broke into view. They were right to see 1965 as a year of exceptionally rapid and widespread change, through by no means was all of it for the worse. The tumultuous times that erupted in 1965 and that lasted into the early1970's differed greatly from the early 1960s, which, for the most part, were years of political and social consensus that resembled the 1950s." Id. at xiii. "[T]he unrest besetting the nation as of late 1965 unnerved many people who lived through it and who viewed it in hindsight as a pivotal time. Conservatives shaken by the pace of change, sensed that an inexorably expanding rights-consciousness--a 'rights revolution' --was undermining a durable and long-cherished culture of rules and responsibilities, and they were quick--even in 1965--to voice their fears. One such anguished observer was former president Dwight Eisenhower, who wrote a friend in October, 'Lack of respect for law, laxness in dress, appearance and thinking, in conduct and in manner, as well as student and other riots with civil disobedience all spring from a common source: lack of concern for the ancient virtues of decency, respect for law and elders, and old-fashioned patriotism.'" Id. at xiii-xiv. I want someone to write about what I think is a marked contrast between two groups of Americans: those who were coming of age at the beginning of "The Sixties"--that is, those who were, say, 13-19 in 1965-- and those coming of age at the beginnings of "The Seventies"--that is, those who were 13-19 in 1974. Less than a decade separates the two, but I suspect that some interesting, deep and profound contrasts would be found therein.).
Kal Raustiala & Christopher Sprigman, The Knockoff Economy: How Imitation Sparks Innovation (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2012) ("This book challenges the conventional wisdom about innovation and imitation...." "What we find is that even though others can freely copy in [certain] industries, creativity remains surprisingly vibrant. [W]e will explore a clutch of industries in which copying does not necessarily kill or even impair creativity. In some, copying actually spurs innovation--an effect we call the 'piracy paradox'. In others, social norms protect the interests of originators and keep innovation humming. Imitation may also force innovators to structure their creativity in ways that make it less vulnerable to copying. The details vary, yet in all of these instances copying tends to lead to transformation rather than decimation." "Our main message is an optimistic one: surprisingly, creativity can often co-exist with copying. And under certain circumstances, copying can even be good for creativity." Id. at 7.).
Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, American Lynching (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2012) (From the bookjacket: "A history of lynching in America over the course of three centuries, from colonial Virginia to twentieth-century Texas." From the "Epilogue": "How 'American' is lynching? It is American insofar as it was a practice that defined 'Americans' for those willing to use collective violence against those they would exclude from the terms of citizenship and community. It is American insofar as the most important divisions in American life, divisions over property, race, social class, labor, and gender, have been invoked at various times for various purposes to explain or justify lynching. In particular, it is American insofar as it became a peculiar practice of regulating and controlling one racial population in in order to assert a particular kind of white supremacy. What is perhaps most distinctively 'American' about lynching is that its apologists produced a discourse that explained different social roles and promoted both actual and discursive violence in order to exalt those who occupied some of those roles and control and debase others. [] Finally, lynching is American insofar as we have an enduring history of the practice from the origins of the nation to the present." Id. at 154.).
William Soulder, On a Farther Shore: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson (New York: Crown, 2012) ("In 2006, the World Health Organization announced its endorsement of the use of DDT to combat malaria, mainly in Africa. The WHO had never lifted its approval of DDT for this purpose, but that year the agency decided an affirmative commitment to the insecticide was needed. The move was backed by most environmental groups--as it certainly would have been by Rachel Carson had she been alive to do so. But the myth that Carson wanted a total end to the use of chemical pesticides persists." "Carson would be less tolerant of the lack of action to reverse or at least slow global warming caused by fossil fuel consumption. George W. Bush had promised during his campaign for the presidency in 2000 that he wanted carbon dioxide emissions regulated by the EPA as a greenhouse gas pollutant. Within weeks of taking office in 2001 he reversed his position. Bush also announced the United States would not sign on to the Kyoto Protocols, an international agreement intended to limit greenhouse gases, In June 2001, the National Academy of Sciences--which Bush ha asked to look into the global warming question--reported to the president that global warming was real, that human activity was the main cause, and that things were getting worse. Bush did nothing then, and little--apart from improvements in automobile fuel consumption--has happened since. Rachel Carson would find nothing new in the unwillingness to confront the problem. Human arrogance and disregard for the collateral damage we inflict upon the environment was a story she knew well." Id. at 395. Also, see Elizabeth Royte, "The Poisoned Earth," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 9/16/2012.).
John Tobin, The Right to Health in International Law (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 2012) (From the bookjacket: "The link between health and human rights has been recognized for many years, but the distinctive feature of the past decade has been increasingly visibility of the right to health in both domestic and international law. It is now commonly invoked by actors within civil society, academics, health professionals, lawyers, and courts in various jurisdictions as a tool to address health inequalities, in matters ranging from access to medicines and the availability of affordable health care to sexual and reproductive health. At the same time, it has be roundly challenged by human rights sceptics who have described it as poorly grounded, nebulous, and incapable of implementation." "This book provides a comprehensive discussion of the status and meaning of the right to health in international law. It traces the history of this right to reveal its nexus with public health and the longstanding recognition that a State has a responsibility to attend to the health needs of its population. It also offers a theoretical account of its conceptual foundations which challenges the position held by some philosophers that health is undeserving of the status of a human right. The book develops an interpretative methodology that provides a persuasive account of the meaning of the right to health and of the obligations it imposes on States. The result is an understanding of the right to health that is thoroughly grounded in international obligations, practical, and provides essential guidance to States that are genuinely committed to addressing the health of their populations.").
Allan Hunt Badiner, ed., Dharma Gaia: A Harvest of Essays in Buddhism and Ecology, with a foreword by H.H. Dalai Lama (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 1990) (These essays explore the link between Buddhism and ecological consciousness. "The Buddhist tradition, in all of its historical and cultural manifestations, encourages greater identification with the natural world." Id. at xv. "As the crisis of feeding the world's population grows, breeding of animals for human consumption becomes less acceptable--out of compassion for the suffering of animals, and the awareness that it is a grossly inefficient use of water and grain. A new relationship with the animal kingdom is part of our changing perception of the Earth. Animals are part of us, and part of our [Buddhist] practice." Id. at xvii. From Chatsumarn Kabilsing's "Early Buddhist View on Nature": "Buddhism views humanity as an integral part of nature, so that when nature is defiled, people ultimately suffer. negative consequences arise when cultures alienate themselves from nature, when people feel separate from and become aggressive towards natural systems. When we abuse nature, we abuse ourselves. Buddhist ethics follow from this basic understanding. Only when we agree on this common ground can we save ourselves, let alone the world." Id. at 8, 8. From Padmasiri De Silva's "Buddhist Environmental Ethics": "The survival of modern economic systems depends upon insatiable consumption. A simple way of life no longer satisfies most people; they demand that a wide range of goods and services be available at all times. Buddhism calls for a modest concept of living: simplicity, frugality, and an emphasis on what is essential--in short, a basic ethic of restraint. In the West, public discussion has been more concerned with the adequacy of resources than with the sustainability of current lifestyles...." Id. at 14, 15-16. "Destructive patterns of consumption generate unending cycles of desires and satisfactions." Id. at 17.).
Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets Since the Great Depression (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2012) (From the bookjacket: "Just as today's observers struggle to justify the workings of the free market in the wake of a global economic crisis, an earlier generation of economists revisited their worldview following the Great Depression. The Great Persuasion is an intellectual history of that project, Angus Burgin traces the evolution of postwar economics thought in order to reconsider many of the most basic assumptions of our market-centered world." "Conservatives often point to Friedrich Hayek as the most influential defender of the free market. By examining the work of such organizations as the Mount Pelerin Society, an international association founded by Hayek in 1947 and later led by Milton Friedman, Burgin reveals that Hayek and his colleagues were deeply conflicted about many of the enduring problems of capitalism. Far from adopting an uncompromising stance against the interventionist state, they developed a social philosophy that admitted significant constraints on the market. Postwar conservative thought was more dynamic and cosmopolitan than has previously been understood." "It was only in the 1960s and '70s that Friedman and his contemporaries developed a more strident defense of the unfettered market. Their arguments provided a rhetorical foundation for the resurgent conservatism of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan and inspired much of the political and economic agenda of the United State in the ensuring decades. Burgin's brilliant inquiry uncovers both the origins of the contemporary enthusiasm for the free market and the moral quandaries it has left behind.").
R. M. Douglas, Architects of the Resurrection: Ailtiti na hAiseirghe and the Fascist 'New Order' In Ireland (Manchester & New York: Manchester U. Press, 2009) ("One of the more anomalous aspects of modern Irish history is the supposed non-emergence of any significant fascist or extreme-right movement during the twentieth century. This is all the more curious in light of the fact that independent Ireland before the Second World War, with its underperforming peasant economy, its sizable Northern irredenta and its variety of political and paramilitary groups contesting the legitimacy of the state, conformed more closely in many respects to the profile of the authoritarian states of Eastern Europe than to the liberal-democractic systems of the West. A growing scholarly consensus nevertheless maintains that no significant Irish counterpart of the ultra-right Continental movements of the interwar period ever arose, and that the most likely candidates for this heading ... were not in fact fascists...." Id. at 1. "The political movement at the centre of this study, Ailtira na hAiseirghe ['Archiects of the Resurrection'], has .... been virtually overlooked in English-language studies of Irish political history. Id. at 2. Aiseirghe's rise--and, no less importantly, the cultural environment in which it emerged--indicates that Ireland's supposed immunity from political extremism directed not merely against the legitimacy of the regime but the ideology upon which the state itself was constructed, is due for re-evaluation. The appearance of Aiseirghe and other pro-Axis and anti-democratic movements in the early 1940s shows that discontent with the system of parliamentary democracy itself, as distinct from the performance of individual governments, ran much deeper in Irish life than has ever been recognized, and that explanations of the regime's survival in the turbulent mid-century years must take into consideration the incompetence of its enemies as well as the sagacity of its defenders." Id. at 3. "In an unpublished manifesto probably written in the sprig of 1940, 'Ireland a Missionary-Ideological State?' O'Cuinneagain began to lay down the basic principles of his evolving political programme. It was first of all necessary, he argued, to reject the commonly held fallacy that the regimented pattern of life in the Continental fascist countries was in some way alien to the Irish mentality...." "The real question was not whether Ireland or any other country was amenable to 'discipline', but whether there existed 'a particular Gaelic ideal, corresponding to the Nazi or Fascist ideal, which could rouse and inspire the whole people of the Ireland of 1940?' In O'Cuinneagain's view...the only such objective that conformed to 'the requirements of the character of our racial genious' was the 'task of European and world re-Christianisation'. Among the Catholic countries, neither Mussolini's Italy, Franco's Spain nor even Salazar's Portugal--far less 'priest-impoverished France'--could provide a 'perfect example of Catholic national government'. Nor was the training and dispatch to foreign countries or missionaries sufficient to achieve this objective. 'The world requires to be shown in the twentieth century that Christianity can be practised in the world--not merely in the cloister!' Ireland's manifest destiny, then, was to prove it by her example the compatibility of faith and modernity, and thus to provide a practical as well as an ethical alternative to the materialistic heresies of capitalism and Communism. But it was futile to hope for any advance in this direction so long as the country retained its existing system of 'purely passive or administrative but non-directional government,'. Id. at 63. Read that last passage carefully. Scary! Think about the many Americans who aggressively argue that the United States is essentially a 'christian nation'. Thinks about certain current members of the United States Supreme Court whose Catholic conservatism underlie their legal reasoning and judicial opinions.).
Tamar Frankel, The Ponzi Scheme Puzzle: A History and Analysis of Con Artist and Victims (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2012) ("America is ambivalent toward con artists. It does not condemn them as it would, say, the slayers of helpless elderly people, even though the actions of con artists may have a similar devastating effect on their victims, and even though their methods may be just as heartlessly cruel...." "[T]rust and honesty are indeterminate, and realizing that people follow many routes with different measures of truth and honesty, we may conclude that 'a little dishonesty' will always be there. So a little dishonesty is acceptable or even justified." "Here lies our greatest danger. A society that accepts a little dishonesty as a way of life is headed toward deception and abuse of trust on a grand scale. Because con artists resemble us, the true danger is that we might become like them. Knowing that fully self-enforced honesty cannot be achieved does not mean that accepting a little fraud, deception, and just a bit of breach of trust is the way to go." Id. at 188-189.).
Chrystia Freeland, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else (New York: The Penguin Press, 2012).
Rebecca Redwood French, The Golden Yoke: The Legal Cosmology of Buddhist Tibet (Ithaca & London: Cornell U. Press, 1995) ("This book presents the 'golden yoke' of Buddhist Tibet, the last medieval legal system in existence in the middle of the twentieth century.... The practice of law in this unique legal world, which lacked most of our familiar signposts, ranged from the fantastic use of oracles in the search for evidence to the more mundane presentation of cases in court." "Buddhism and law, two topics rarely intertwined in Western consciousness, are at the center of this work. The Tibetan legal system was based on Buddhist philosophy and reflected Buddhist thought in legal practice and decision-making. For Tibetans, law is cosmology, a kaleidoscopic patterning of relations which is constantly changing, recycling, and re-forming even as it integrate the universe and the individual into a timeless mandalic whole." "This book also critiques our idea of legal culture. It argues that we conceal from ourselves the ways we do law by segregating things legal into a separate space with rigidly defined categories. The legal cosmology of Buddhist Tibet brings into question both this autonomous framework and most of the basic presumptions we have about the very nature of law, from precedent and res judicata to eule-formation and closure." Id. at xiii.).
Stuart P. Green, Thirteen Ways to Steal a Bicycle: Theft Law in the Information Age (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2012) (From the bookjacket" "In this full-scale critique, Green reveals that the last major reforms in Anglophone theft law, which took place almost fifty years ago, flattened moral distinctions, so that the same punishments are not assigned to vastly different offenses. Unreflective of community attitudes toward theft, which favor gradations in blameworthiness according to what is stolen and under what circumstances, and uninfluenced by advancements in criminal law, theory theft law cries out for another reformation--and soon.").
J. Bradford Jensen, Global Trade in Services: Fear, Facts, and Offshoring (Washington, D.C.: Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2011) (From the backcover: "The service sector is large and growing and international trade in services is expanding rapidly. Yet there is a dearth of empirical research on the size, scope, and potential impact of service trade. The underlying source of this gap is well-known--official statistics on the service sector in general, and trade in services in particular, are inadequate." Jensen "finds that, in spite of US comparative advantage in service activities, service firms' export participation lags behind manufacturing firms. Jensen evaluates the impediments to service trade and finds evidence that there is considerable room for liberalization--especially among the large, fast-growing developing economies.").
Gary Krist, City of Scoundrels: The 2 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to Modern Chicago (New York: Crown, 2012).
Sanford Levinson, Framed: America's 51 Constitutions and the Crisis of Governance (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2012) (From the bookjacket: "In Framed, Levinson challenges our belief that the most important features of our [federal and state] constitutions concern what rights they protect. Instead, he focuses on the fundamental procedures of governance such as congressional bicameralism, the selection of the President by the electoral college, and the dimensions of the President's veto power--not to mention the near impossibility of amending the United States Constitution. These seemingly 'settled' and 'hardwired' structures contribute to the now almost universally recognized 'dysfunctionality" of American politics. "Levinson argues that we should stop treating the United States Constitution as uniquely exemplifying the American constitutional tradition. We should be aware of the 50 state constitutions, often interestingly different--and perhaps better--than the national model. Many states have updated their constitutions by frequent amendment or by complete replacement via state constitutional conventions. Indeed, California's ungovernable condition has prompted serious calls for a constitutional convention. This constant churn indicates that basic law often reaches the point where it fails and becomes obsolete. Given the experience of so many states, [Levinson] writes, surely it is reasonable to believe that the U.S. Constitution merits its own updating." "American constitutions, at both the state and national levels, generate important questions both about the meaning of American democracy and about the capacity of government to meet contemporary challenges. We should emulate the Framers and ask if our constitutions need fundamental change.").
Jonathan Levy, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England, 2012) ("The spread of capitalism has brought the insecurity of the sea to the land. Human beings had long associated the power of chance with the capricious tides of he high seas. Now the image of the ship on stormy waters became a powerful metaphor for the perils and possibilities of life under capitalism. Nineteenth-century Americans spoke of howling winds, thunder claps, unknown breakers, and tempests and storms and cyclones that wept over the deep--for which they were not responsible. But they had learned to cope with them, and even to profit from them. As daunting as the task of managing risk could be, there was also the existential thrill of taking a risk. That tension was at the very operational and moral heart of both capitalism and a rising liberal order." "In the nineteenth-century Americans had their own term for this tension, for all of the sudden economic twists and turns, booms and busts, and ups and downs that were newly and inexplicably in their midst. They called them 'freaks of fortune." "Within the context created by the freaks--by the economic chance-world of capitalism--the history of risk comes into view." Id. at 1. "The thread that runs consistently through risk's history is a moral one. For risk triumphed in the nineteenth-century United States in the context of the nation's moral struggle over freedom and slavery. A generation--financiers, abolitionists, actuaries, jurists, preachers, legislators, corporate executives, philosophers, social scientists--developed a vision of freedom that linked the liberal ideal of self-ownership to the personal assumption of 'risk.' In a democratic society, according to the new gospel, free and equal men must take, run, own, assume, bear, carry, and manage personal risks. That involved actively attempting to become the master of one's own personal destiny, adopting a moral duty to attend to the future. Which meant taking risks. But it also meant offloading one's risk onto new financial corporations--like when a wage worker insured his productive labor against workplace accident, an ex-slave open a savings account, or a Wall Street financier hatched a corporate profit-sharing and employee benefit plan. A new vision of what it meant to be a free and secure actor thus took shape in the new material and psychological reality created by the modern American corporate financial system." Id. at 5.).
Thomas K. McCraw, The Founders and Finance: How Hamilton, Gallatin, and Other Immigrants Forged a New Economy (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2012) ("During the early 1790s, the simmering Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania came to full boil. Despite Gallatin's efforts to pacify the rebels, they attacked individual collectors and set fire to the barns of farmers who complied with the tax. In July 1794, 500 armed men gathered near Pittsburgh and began threatening all manner of mayhem--firing shots into the air, interfering with the courts, robbing the mails, and planning an assault on federal property in Pittsburgh. It was the first serious domestic challenge to the national government under the Constitution, and was met by decisive action." "Urged on by Hamilton, President Washington sent a force of about 12,500 militiamen into western Pennsylvania--an overwhelming display of federal power. Hamilton himself traveled from the capital in Philadelphia as a civilian observer. As he wrote Angelica Church, his sister-in-law, 'A large army has cooled the courage of those madmen & the only question seems to be how to guard best against the return of the phrenzy . . . Twas very important there should be no mistake in the management of the affair.' The militia arrested about twenty rebels, two of whom were convicted of treason and sentenced to hang. Washington, concluding that the proper lesson had been taught and learned, commuted these sentences. But Gallatin always regarded the incident as an gross overreaction by the federal government. It confirmed his worst suspicions about Hamilton, whom he came to think of as a tool of wealthy Easterners unconcerned with the West." Id. at 203.).
Aryeh Neier, The International Human Rights Movement: A History (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2012) (From the bookjacket: "Discussing the movement's origins, Neier looks at the dissenters who fought for religious freedom in seventeenth-century England and the abolitionists who opposed slavery before the Civil War era. He pays special attention to the period from the 1970s onward, and he describes the growth of the human rights movement after the Helsinki Accord, the roles played by American presidential administrations, and the astonishing Arab revolutions of 2011. Neier argues that the contemporary human rights movement was, to a large extent, an outgrowth of the Cold War, and he demonstrates how it became the driving influence in international law, institutions, and rights. Throughout, Neier highlights key figures, controversies, and organizations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and he considers the challenges to come.").
Andrew Nikiforuk, The Energy of Slaves: Oil and the New Servitude (Vancouver, Toronto & Berkeley: David Suzuki Foundation/Greystone Books/D & M Publishers, 2012) ("As noted by the French philosopher Fabrice Flipo, the story of fire tells us that no energy is clean, free, or unlimited and that the use of every Promethean tool must be carefully measured. Only justice and respect can defeat excess. In the absence of proportion and scale, energy invites destruction and dispersion. And it create a servitude that blinds master and slave alike." Id. at xi. "[E]very form of energy consumption, from slavery to oil, involves, somewhere, a sacrifice." Id. at 2. "Before coal and oil, civilization ran on a two-cycle engine: the energy of solar-fed crops and the energy of slaves." Id. at 3. "The Atlantic slave trade wasted energy like a leaking pipeline. Over a three-hundred-year period, as many as 10 million Africans crossed the Atlantic in chains. For every successful import, two to five corpses littered the high seas or African slave ports." Id. at 13. 'It would take a new energy master to unshackle this order of human slavery. Although fossil fuels at first promised widespread liberty and virgin utopias, they eventually delivered something different: an army of fuel-hungry mechanical workers that would require increasingly complex forms of management and an aggressive class of powerful carbon traders. Without much thought, we replaced the ancient energy of human slaves with a new servitude, powered by fossil fuels." Id. at 17. "In 1957, Admiral Hyman Rickover, father of the nuclear submarine, gave a sobering speech to a group of U.S. physicians in St. Paul, Minnesota...." "Rickover told his listeners that he didn't know of a society where reduction in energy slaves--human or petroleum--had not resulted in in a decline of civilization. 'Our civilization rests upon a technological base which requires enormous quantities of fossil fuels,' he continued. 'What assurance do we have that our energy needs will continue to be supplied by fossil fuels? The answer is--in the long run--none'" Id. at 57-58. "Noisy leaf-powers, expensive SUVs, and glowing smartphones dominate modern life as fully as did servants in a nineteenth0century Brazilian 'Big House.' The average North American or European consumer thinks of these inanimate servants as entitlements. And although our comfort providers and labor savers number in the billions, we largely pretend that they do not exist. U.S. plantation owners at least earnestly debated the morality of living off the sweat of their shackled servants. Their modern descendants take immediate offense at any discussion about the carbon emissions of their mechanical servants." Id. at 63. "High energy consumption nourishes highly narcissistic cultures. Since the 1970s, when domestic oil production peaked in the United States, the country has refused to recognize any real change in its energy fortunes. As noted by the essayist Daniel Altman, self-obsessed Americans tend to do what they want regardless of the consequences for other people. Some believe that they are entitled to superhuman wealth even when the country's dwindling oil supplies deliver nothing but debt. Many Americans consistently reject taxation that might serve future generations or the current good of their communities. Explains Altman, 'In recent decades Americans have encountered far more inequality and far less social mobility than their parents. But narcissism leads these same Americans to reject redistributive tax systems.'" Id. at 223-224. "[I]t would take five times more energy than the current global supply to extend these profligate habits to the rest of the world". Id. at 224. "Lowering energy demand is a radical prescription. It is as revolutionary as the abolition of U.S. slavery or the redistribution of land in nineteenth-century Russia, says Vaclav Smil. But our health, our freedom, and our humanity depend on a moral reassessment of mastery and slavery in all energy relationships. Our debilitating servitude to the concentrated forces of fossil fuels has just one proper solution: a radical decentralization and relocalizing of energy spending combined with a systematic reduction in the number of inanimate slaves in our housefuls and places of work." Id, at 227.).
James T. Patterson, The Eve of Destruction: How1965 Transformed America (New York: Basic Books, 2012) ("Many Americans, stunned by these pivotal events, have subsequently identified 1965--the year of military escalation, of Watts, of the splintering of the civil rights movement, and of mounting cultural change and polarization--as the time when America's social cohesion began to unravel and when the turbulent phenomenon that would be called 'the Sixties' broke into view. They were right to see 1965 as a year of exceptionally rapid and widespread change, through by no means was all of it for the worse. The tumultuous times that erupted in 1965 and that lasted into the early1970's differed greatly from the early 1960s, which, for the most part, were years of political and social consensus that resembled the 1950s." Id. at xiii. "[T]he unrest besetting the nation as of late 1965 unnerved many people who lived through it and who viewed it in hindsight as a pivotal time. Conservatives shaken by the pace of change, sensed that an inexorably expanding rights-consciousness--a 'rights revolution' --was undermining a durable and long-cherished culture of rules and responsibilities, and they were quick--even in 1965--to voice their fears. One such anguished observer was former president Dwight Eisenhower, who wrote a friend in October, 'Lack of respect for law, laxness in dress, appearance and thinking, in conduct and in manner, as well as student and other riots with civil disobedience all spring from a common source: lack of concern for the ancient virtues of decency, respect for law and elders, and old-fashioned patriotism.'" Id. at xiii-xiv. I want someone to write about what I think is a marked contrast between two groups of Americans: those who were coming of age at the beginning of "The Sixties"--that is, those who were, say, 13-19 in 1965-- and those coming of age at the beginnings of "The Seventies"--that is, those who were 13-19 in 1974. Less than a decade separates the two, but I suspect that some interesting, deep and profound contrasts would be found therein.).
Kal Raustiala & Christopher Sprigman, The Knockoff Economy: How Imitation Sparks Innovation (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2012) ("This book challenges the conventional wisdom about innovation and imitation...." "What we find is that even though others can freely copy in [certain] industries, creativity remains surprisingly vibrant. [W]e will explore a clutch of industries in which copying does not necessarily kill or even impair creativity. In some, copying actually spurs innovation--an effect we call the 'piracy paradox'. In others, social norms protect the interests of originators and keep innovation humming. Imitation may also force innovators to structure their creativity in ways that make it less vulnerable to copying. The details vary, yet in all of these instances copying tends to lead to transformation rather than decimation." "Our main message is an optimistic one: surprisingly, creativity can often co-exist with copying. And under certain circumstances, copying can even be good for creativity." Id. at 7.).
Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, American Lynching (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2012) (From the bookjacket: "A history of lynching in America over the course of three centuries, from colonial Virginia to twentieth-century Texas." From the "Epilogue": "How 'American' is lynching? It is American insofar as it was a practice that defined 'Americans' for those willing to use collective violence against those they would exclude from the terms of citizenship and community. It is American insofar as the most important divisions in American life, divisions over property, race, social class, labor, and gender, have been invoked at various times for various purposes to explain or justify lynching. In particular, it is American insofar as it became a peculiar practice of regulating and controlling one racial population in in order to assert a particular kind of white supremacy. What is perhaps most distinctively 'American' about lynching is that its apologists produced a discourse that explained different social roles and promoted both actual and discursive violence in order to exalt those who occupied some of those roles and control and debase others. [] Finally, lynching is American insofar as we have an enduring history of the practice from the origins of the nation to the present." Id. at 154.).
William Soulder, On a Farther Shore: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson (New York: Crown, 2012) ("In 2006, the World Health Organization announced its endorsement of the use of DDT to combat malaria, mainly in Africa. The WHO had never lifted its approval of DDT for this purpose, but that year the agency decided an affirmative commitment to the insecticide was needed. The move was backed by most environmental groups--as it certainly would have been by Rachel Carson had she been alive to do so. But the myth that Carson wanted a total end to the use of chemical pesticides persists." "Carson would be less tolerant of the lack of action to reverse or at least slow global warming caused by fossil fuel consumption. George W. Bush had promised during his campaign for the presidency in 2000 that he wanted carbon dioxide emissions regulated by the EPA as a greenhouse gas pollutant. Within weeks of taking office in 2001 he reversed his position. Bush also announced the United States would not sign on to the Kyoto Protocols, an international agreement intended to limit greenhouse gases, In June 2001, the National Academy of Sciences--which Bush ha asked to look into the global warming question--reported to the president that global warming was real, that human activity was the main cause, and that things were getting worse. Bush did nothing then, and little--apart from improvements in automobile fuel consumption--has happened since. Rachel Carson would find nothing new in the unwillingness to confront the problem. Human arrogance and disregard for the collateral damage we inflict upon the environment was a story she knew well." Id. at 395. Also, see Elizabeth Royte, "The Poisoned Earth," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 9/16/2012.).
John Tobin, The Right to Health in International Law (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 2012) (From the bookjacket: "The link between health and human rights has been recognized for many years, but the distinctive feature of the past decade has been increasingly visibility of the right to health in both domestic and international law. It is now commonly invoked by actors within civil society, academics, health professionals, lawyers, and courts in various jurisdictions as a tool to address health inequalities, in matters ranging from access to medicines and the availability of affordable health care to sexual and reproductive health. At the same time, it has be roundly challenged by human rights sceptics who have described it as poorly grounded, nebulous, and incapable of implementation." "This book provides a comprehensive discussion of the status and meaning of the right to health in international law. It traces the history of this right to reveal its nexus with public health and the longstanding recognition that a State has a responsibility to attend to the health needs of its population. It also offers a theoretical account of its conceptual foundations which challenges the position held by some philosophers that health is undeserving of the status of a human right. The book develops an interpretative methodology that provides a persuasive account of the meaning of the right to health and of the obligations it imposes on States. The result is an understanding of the right to health that is thoroughly grounded in international obligations, practical, and provides essential guidance to States that are genuinely committed to addressing the health of their populations.").
MOSTLY ROBERT AITKEN ON ZEN BUDDHISM
Robert Aitken, Encouraging Words: Zen Buddhist Teachings for Western Students (New York: Pantheon, 1993).
Robert Aitken, The Gateless Barrier: The Wu-men Kuan (Mumonkan), translated and with a Commentary by Robert Aitken (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990).
Robert Aitken, The Mind of Clover: Essays in Zen Buddhist Ethics (New York: North Point Press/ Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984) ("Hedonism ... is the trap of ego-indulgence that will not permit any kind of censor, overt or internal, to interfere with self-gratification. The sociopath, guided only by strategy to get his or her own way, is the extreme model of such a person. Certain walks of life are full of sociopath, but all of us can relate to that condition. Notice how often you manipulate other people. Where is your compassion?" Id. at 11. "Freedom from karma does not mean that I transcend cause and effect. It means I acknowledge that my perceptions are empty and I am no longer anxious to keep my ego bastion in good repair. Does a stranger walk through the ruined walls? Welcome stranger! How about a dance?" "The readiness to dance is the readiness to learn, the openness to growth." Id. at 107. "Hakuin Zenji says, in effect, 'Heaven is here and we are God, but we don't realize that fact.' Thus we live selfishly and create poverty, exterminate Jews, and bomb innocent peasants; we drug ourselves with chemicals and television, and curse our fate when the cancer of human waste appears in our own precious bodies. We ignore the near, the intimate fact that heaven lies about us in our maturity, and thus we cannot apply any of its virtues." Id. at 162.).
Robert Aitken, The Morning Star: New and Selected Zen Writings (Washington, D.C.: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2003).
Robert Aitken, Original Dwelling Place: Zen Buddhist Essays (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1996).
Robert Aitken, The Practice of Perfection: The Paramitas from a Zen Buddhist Perspective (New York & San Francisco: Pantheon Books, 1994).
Robert Aitken, Taking the Path of Zen (New York: North Point Press/ Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1982) ("Emptiness is simply a term we use to express that which has no quality and no age. It is completely void and at the same time altogether potent. You may call it Buddha nature, self-nature, true nature, but such words are only tags or pointers." "Form is emptiness and as the Heart Sutra also says, emptiness is form. The infinite emptiness of the universe is the essential nature of our everyday life of operating a store, taking care of children, paying our bills, and other ordinary activity." Id. at 41. "The many beings are numberless, / I vow to save them; / greed, hatred, and ignorance rise endlessly, / I vow to abandon them; / Dharma gates are countless, / I vow to wake to them; / Buddha's way is unsurpassed, / I vow to embody it fully." Id at 62. "Nobody fulfills these 'Great Vows for All," but we vow to fulfill them as best we can. They are our path." Id. at 62. "The way the world is going, the Bodhisattva ideal holds our only hope for survival or indeed for the survival of any species. The three poisons of greed, hatred, and ignorance are destroying our natural and cultural heritage. I believe that unless we as citizens of the world can take the radical Bodhisattva position we will not even die with integrity." Id. at 62. " 'Tell me,' he said, 'What is it that all the Buddhas taught?' Bird's Nest Roshi replied by quoting from the Dhammapada: Never do evil, / always do good; / keep your mind pure--- / thus all all the Buddhas taught. So Po Chu-i said, 'Always do good; never do evil; keep your mind pure--I knew that when I was three year old.' 'Yes,' said Bird's Nest Roshi, 'A three-year-old child may know it, but even an eighty-year-old man cannot put it into practice.' " Id. at 88.).
Robert Aitken, comp. & annon., Zen Master Raven: Sayings and Doings of a Wise Bird, with illustrations by Jennifer Rain Crosby (Boston: Tuttle Publishing, 2002) ("During one of the early gathering at Tallspruce, Badger asked Raven, 'How can I get rid of my ego?' Raven said, 'It's not strong enough.' 'But I'm greedy,' Badger said insistently 'I'm self-centered and I tend to push other folks around.' Raven said, 'Like I said.'" Id. at 26. "Wolverine asked, 'Do you practice going with the flow?' Raven asked, 'Is that a practice?' Wolverine asked, 'What is practice?' Raven said, 'Going against the grain.' Wolverine asked, "Sounds hard.' Raven said, 'Uphill.'" Id. at 176.).
Robert Aitken, A Zen Wave: Basho's Haiku and Zen, with a foreword by W. S. Merwin (New York & Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1978).
Robert Aitken & David Steindl-Rast, The Ground We Share: Everyday Practice, Buddhist and Christian, edited by Nelson Foster (Boston & London: Shambhala, 1996).
Nelson Foster & Jack Shomaker, eds., The Roaring Stream: A New Zen Reader, with a foreword by Robert Aitken (New York: Ecco Press, 1996) (By Han-shan: "Want to know a simile for life and death? Compare them to water and ice. Water binds together to become ice; ice melts and turns back into water. What has died must live again, what has been born will return to death. Water and ice do no harm to each other; life and death are both of them good." Id. at 52. By Haung-po: "So the sutra says: 'What is called supreme perfect wisdom implies that there is really nothing whatever to be attained.' If you are also able to understand this, you will realize that the Way of the Buddhas and the Way of devils are equally wide of the mark. The original pure, glistening universe is neither square nor round, big nor small; it is without any such distinctions as long and short, it is beyond attachment and activity, ignorance and enlightenment. You must see clearly that there is nothing at all--no humans and no Buddhas. The great chiliocosms, numberless as grains of sand, are mere bubbles, All wisdom and all holiness are but streaks of lightening, None of them have the reality of Mind. The Dharrmakaya, from the ancient times until today, together with the Buddhas and Ancestors, is One. How can it lack a single hair of anything? Even if you understand this, you must make the most strenuous efforts. Throughout this life, you can never be certain of living long enough to take another breath." Id. at 90, 94. By Takuan: "The Right Mind is the mind that does not remain in on place. It is the mind that stretches throughout the entire body and self." The Confused Mind is the mind that, thinking something over, congeals in one place." 'When the Right Mind congeals and settles in one place, it becomes what is called the Confused Mind. When the Right Mind is lost, it is laking in function here and there. For this reason, it is important not to lose it." "In not remaining in one place, the Right Mind is like water. The Confused Mind is like ice, and ice is unable to wash hands or head. When ice is melted, it becomes water and flows everywhere, and it can wash the hands, the feet, or anything else." "If the mind congeals in one place and remains with one thing, it is like frozen water and is unable to be used freely: ice that can wash neither hands nor feet. When the mind is melted and is used like water, extending throughout the body, it can be sent wherever one wants to sen it." This is the Right Mind." Id. at 274, 277-278.).
Steven Heine, Zen Skin, Zen Marrow: Will the Real Zen Buddhism Please Stand Up? (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2008).
Robert Aitken, The Gateless Barrier: The Wu-men Kuan (Mumonkan), translated and with a Commentary by Robert Aitken (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990).
Robert Aitken, The Mind of Clover: Essays in Zen Buddhist Ethics (New York: North Point Press/ Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984) ("Hedonism ... is the trap of ego-indulgence that will not permit any kind of censor, overt or internal, to interfere with self-gratification. The sociopath, guided only by strategy to get his or her own way, is the extreme model of such a person. Certain walks of life are full of sociopath, but all of us can relate to that condition. Notice how often you manipulate other people. Where is your compassion?" Id. at 11. "Freedom from karma does not mean that I transcend cause and effect. It means I acknowledge that my perceptions are empty and I am no longer anxious to keep my ego bastion in good repair. Does a stranger walk through the ruined walls? Welcome stranger! How about a dance?" "The readiness to dance is the readiness to learn, the openness to growth." Id. at 107. "Hakuin Zenji says, in effect, 'Heaven is here and we are God, but we don't realize that fact.' Thus we live selfishly and create poverty, exterminate Jews, and bomb innocent peasants; we drug ourselves with chemicals and television, and curse our fate when the cancer of human waste appears in our own precious bodies. We ignore the near, the intimate fact that heaven lies about us in our maturity, and thus we cannot apply any of its virtues." Id. at 162.).
Robert Aitken, The Morning Star: New and Selected Zen Writings (Washington, D.C.: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2003).
Robert Aitken, Original Dwelling Place: Zen Buddhist Essays (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1996).
Robert Aitken, The Practice of Perfection: The Paramitas from a Zen Buddhist Perspective (New York & San Francisco: Pantheon Books, 1994).
Robert Aitken, Taking the Path of Zen (New York: North Point Press/ Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1982) ("Emptiness is simply a term we use to express that which has no quality and no age. It is completely void and at the same time altogether potent. You may call it Buddha nature, self-nature, true nature, but such words are only tags or pointers." "Form is emptiness and as the Heart Sutra also says, emptiness is form. The infinite emptiness of the universe is the essential nature of our everyday life of operating a store, taking care of children, paying our bills, and other ordinary activity." Id. at 41. "The many beings are numberless, / I vow to save them; / greed, hatred, and ignorance rise endlessly, / I vow to abandon them; / Dharma gates are countless, / I vow to wake to them; / Buddha's way is unsurpassed, / I vow to embody it fully." Id at 62. "Nobody fulfills these 'Great Vows for All," but we vow to fulfill them as best we can. They are our path." Id. at 62. "The way the world is going, the Bodhisattva ideal holds our only hope for survival or indeed for the survival of any species. The three poisons of greed, hatred, and ignorance are destroying our natural and cultural heritage. I believe that unless we as citizens of the world can take the radical Bodhisattva position we will not even die with integrity." Id. at 62. " 'Tell me,' he said, 'What is it that all the Buddhas taught?' Bird's Nest Roshi replied by quoting from the Dhammapada: Never do evil, / always do good; / keep your mind pure--- / thus all all the Buddhas taught. So Po Chu-i said, 'Always do good; never do evil; keep your mind pure--I knew that when I was three year old.' 'Yes,' said Bird's Nest Roshi, 'A three-year-old child may know it, but even an eighty-year-old man cannot put it into practice.' " Id. at 88.).
Robert Aitken, comp. & annon., Zen Master Raven: Sayings and Doings of a Wise Bird, with illustrations by Jennifer Rain Crosby (Boston: Tuttle Publishing, 2002) ("During one of the early gathering at Tallspruce, Badger asked Raven, 'How can I get rid of my ego?' Raven said, 'It's not strong enough.' 'But I'm greedy,' Badger said insistently 'I'm self-centered and I tend to push other folks around.' Raven said, 'Like I said.'" Id. at 26. "Wolverine asked, 'Do you practice going with the flow?' Raven asked, 'Is that a practice?' Wolverine asked, 'What is practice?' Raven said, 'Going against the grain.' Wolverine asked, "Sounds hard.' Raven said, 'Uphill.'" Id. at 176.).
Robert Aitken, A Zen Wave: Basho's Haiku and Zen, with a foreword by W. S. Merwin (New York & Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1978).
Robert Aitken & David Steindl-Rast, The Ground We Share: Everyday Practice, Buddhist and Christian, edited by Nelson Foster (Boston & London: Shambhala, 1996).
Stephen Batchelor, Buddhism Without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening (New York: Riverhead, 1997).
Steven Heine, Zen Skin, Zen Marrow: Will the Real Zen Buddhism Please Stand Up? (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2008).
SUGGESTED FICTION
Martin Amis, Lionel Asbo: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2012) ("'Mn. Well. I tried being loved. Thought I'd like it. Didn't do a fucking thing for me . . . " Id. at 249.).
J. G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun: A Novel (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 1984, 2005) ("It was not the anger of the Japanese that most disturbed Jim, but their patience." Id. at 6. "Sitting beside Basie as he polished his nails, Jim realized that the entire experience of the war had barely touched him. All the deaths and starvation were part of a confused roadside drama seen through the passenger window of the Buick, a cruel spectacle like the public stranglings in Shanghai which the British and American sailors watched during their shore leaves. He had learned nothing from the war because he expected nothing, like the Chinese peasants whom he now looted and shot. As Dr. Ransome had said, people who expected nothing were dangerous. Somehow, five million Chinese had to be taught to expect everything." Id. at 256.).
J. G. Ballard, The Kindness of Women (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991) ("For the first time I was living in the endless present that owed nothing to the past." Id. at 121. "Women were ruthless from an early age, and needed to be." Id. at 161. "Dick entered hospital for observation, passing into the paradoxical world of modern medicine, with all its professional expertise, ultra-modern technology, and complete uncertainty. As Dick pointed out ... the qualities traditionally ascribed to patients--self-delusion, a refusal to face the truth, irrational hope, and a despair born of underlying pessimism--in fact were those of their doctors." "'You have to realse,' he whispered to me when a nurse had declined to answer a direct question about his suspected cancer, 'that the first and most important job of medical science is to protect the profession from the patients. We unsettle them and make them feel vaguely guilty. We ask questions they know they can't answer--the only thing they really want us to do is go away, or pretend that there's nothing wrong with us. What they like best of all is to admit us to hospital and then hear us say we feel fine, even if we're at death's door.'" Id. at 295.).
John Banville, Ancient Light: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2012) ("The statisticians tell us there is no such thing as coincidence, and I must accept they know what they are talking about. If I were to believe that a certain confluence of events was a special and unique phenomenon outside the ordinary flow of happenstance I woold have to accept, as I do not, that there is a transcendent process at work above, or behind, or within, commonplace reality. And yet I ask myself, why not? Why should I not allow of a secret and sly arranger of seemingly chance events?....Why was she there, and why was he?" Id. at 175-176.).
Roberto Bolano, Woes of the True Policeman: A Novel, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011, 2012) ("...but all I became was s literature professor. At least, thought Amalfitano, I've read thousands of books. At least I've become acquainted with the Poets and read the Novels.... At least I've read. At least I can still read, he said to himself, at once dubious and hopeful." Id. at 86.).
James M. Cain, The Cocktail Waitress (London: Hard Case Crime Novel/Titan Books, 2012).
T. Coraghessan Boyle, San Miguel: A Novel (New York: Viking, 2012) (Also, see Tatjana Soli, "Untamed Island," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 10/28/2012.).
Stephen L. Carter, The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2012) ("It is in the nature of men, sir, especially great men, to see themselves as indispensable. Whereas it is in the nature of women to see their friends and families as indispensable." Id. at 454.).
Michael Chabon, Telegraph Avenue: A Novel (New York: Harper, 2012) ("Gwen followed Aviva into the bathroom, fighting the urge to apologize, wanting to point out that if you were white, eating shit was a choice you could make if you wanted; for a black woman, the only valid choice was not to." Id. at 60-61. "'I bet Gwen feels like she's been living in a fantasy world. Black midwife and a million white mommies. Black people live their wholes lives in a fantasy world, it is just not their fantasy.'" Id. at 363.).
Michael Chabon, Werewolves in Their Youth: Stories (New York: Picador, 1999) (From "Green's Book": "Emily turned to Green. 'What is it with this tattoo shit, Marty? Can you explain this phenomenon?' 'Well,' Green said. He could feel the weak grin guttering on his lips. He knew what Freud had said about tattooing, of course, and he had his own private theory that people who tattooed themselves, particularly the young men and women one saw doing it today, were practicing a kind of desperate act of self-assertion through legerdemain, holding a candle to a phrase written in invisible ink, raising letters and lines where before there had been only the blankest sheet of paper. Don't throw me away, they were saying. I bare a hidden message. 'It's difficult to say.'" Id. at 83, 97.).
Junot Diaz, This Is How You Lose Her (New York: Riverhead Books, 2012) ("She was depressed and sad and missed her father and her friends, our neighbors. Everyone had warned her that the U.S. was a difficult place where even the Devil got his ass beat...." Id. at 138. Also see, Leah Hager Cohen, "Love Stories," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 9/23/2012; and Francine Prose, "Beyond the Circle," New York Review of Books, 11/8/2012).
Dave Eggers, A Hologram For the King: A Novel (San Francisco: McSweeney's Books, 2012) ("'Dear Kit, The key thing is managed awareness of your role in the world and history. Think too much and you know you are nothing. Think just enough and you know you are small, but important to some. That's the best you can do'" Id. at 102-103.).
David R. Gillham, City of Women: A Novel (New York: Amy Einhorn Books/G. P. Putnam's Books, 2012) ("'You know what I believe? I believe God is a confidence man. And that love is his favorite swindle.'" Id. at 67. "'Untrue,' Ericha says. 'I have learned that fact quite well. Compromise is the lesson of the day. It's easy to do. A pregnant woman with a yellow star must walk in the freezing rain because Jews are barred from public transport. Just don't look. A man is beaten by the police in front of his children. Don't look. The SS march a column of skeletons, in filthy striped rags, down the middle of the goddamned street. But don't look,' she whispers roughly. 'You avert your eyes enough times, and finally you go blind. You don't actually see anything any longer.'" Id. at 100-101.) Have you ever been in a meeting and, as you take in the character of the people in attendance, ostensibly your colleagues, you conclude that most would not hesitate in turning you over to the gestapo were the opportunity to arrive.? I often find that I am in just such situation. And, then, I begin to wonder about myself. "Of course, the overarching question--the question I continually asked myself as I was writing City of Women--was and is: What would you do? It's easy to watch from a comfortable distance as people make choices with life-or-death consequences. Characters in a book make their decisions and roll the dice. They succeed or fail, they live or die. But the question is: If you were Sigrid, and a young woman you by the arm as you sat in a cinema, and begged, Please say that we came here together, what would you do? What would any of us do?" Id. at 389-390.).
Peter Heller, The Dog Stars: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2012) ("That we have come to this: remaking our own taboos forgetting the original reasons but still awash in warnings." Id. at 48. "The difference maybe between the living and the dead: the living often want to be numb the dead never do, if they never want anything." Id. at 158. "All the choices we can't see. Every moment." Id. at 212.).
Scott Hutchins, A Working Theory of Love: A Novel (New York: The Penguin Press, 2012) ("[T]his is the great peril of bachelorhood--that you 'll become airy and insubstantial that people will peer straight through you." Id. at 4. Also, see James Hynes, "Fooled Again," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 11/25/2012.).
Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station: A Novel (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2011) (From the backcover: "In prose that veers between the comic and the tragic, the self-contemptuous and the inspired, Leaving the Atocha Station is a portrait of the artist as a young man in an age of Google searches, pharmaceuticals, and spectacle.").
Henning Mankell, The Shadow Girls: A Novel, translated from the Swedish by Ebba Segerberg (New York: New Press, 2011, 2012.) ("Jesper had been the youngest of four and had seen his siblings leave home as quickly as they had been able. At twenty he informed his mother that his turn had come. When Jesper woke the following morning he couldn't move. His mother had tied him to the bed. It took him a whole day to talk her into letting him go. First she had forced him to promise to come and see her three times a week for the rest of her life." Id. at 33.).
Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth: A Novel (New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2012) ("As I saw it, Professor Canning was suffering from a gross intellectual malfunction." Id. at 30. Also, see Kurt Andersen, "I Spy," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 11/25/2012.).
Lawrence Osborne, The Forgiven: A Novel (London & New York: Hogarth, 2012) ("Truly, the world had not promised anything to anyone and no man ever lived the way he wished." Id. at 64.).
Orhan Pamuk, Silent House: A Novel, translated from the Turkish by Robert Finn (New York: Knopf, 2012) ("[L]et me at least give you some final advice, listen to me, Recep: be open-minded and free, and only trust your own intelligence, do you understand? I was silent, hanging my head, and I thought: Words! Pluck the fruit of knowledge form the tree in paradise, Recep, take it without fear, maybe you will writhe in pain, but you'll be free, and when everyone is free the true paradise will be established, the real paradise on this earth where you will have nothing to fear. Words, I was thinking, a bunch of sounds, that are said and then vanish into the air . . . I fell fell asleep thinking of them" Id. at 310. Also, see Francine Prose, "Broken Homeland," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 11/21/2012.).
Philip Pullman, Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm: A New English Version (New York: Viking, 2012) ("There is no psychology in a fairy tale. The characters have little interior life; their motives are clear and obvious. If people are good, they are good, and if bad, they're bad.... The tremors and mysteries of human awareness, the whispers of memory, the prompting of half-understood regret or doubt or desire that are so much part of the subject matter of the modern novel are absent entirely. One might almost say that the characters in a fairy tale are not actually conscious." Id. at xiii.).
Carlos Ruiz Zafon The Prisoner of Heaven: A Novel, translated from the Spanish by Lucia Graves (New York: Harper, 2011, 2012) ("'In this world, everything is a fake, young man. Everything except money.'" Id. at 12. "'[I]f you don't trust a novelist, who are you going to trust?'" Id. at 194.).
Will Self, Umbrella (New York: Grove Press, 2012).
Robert Sheckley, Store of the Worlds: The Stories of Robert Sheckley, edited by Alex Abramovish & Jonathan Lethem (New York: New York Review Books, 2012).
Steve Stern, The Book of Mischief: New and Selected Stories (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2012) (From 'Moishe the Just': "When you expose one just man, you as good as exposed the lot. We understood this better after the storm finally broke in Europe." Id. at 109, 123.).
Amor Towles, Rules of Civility: A Novel (New York: Viking, 2011).
Mario Vargas LLosa, The Dream of the Celt: A Novel, translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010, 2012) ("Was all of history like that? The history learned at school? The one written by historians? A more or less idyllic fabrication, rational and coherent, about what had been in raw, harsh reality a chaotic and arbitrary jumble of plans, accidents, intrigues, fortuitous events, coincidences, multiple interests that had provoked changes, upheavals advances, and retreats, always unexpected and surprising with respect to what was anticipate or experienced by the protagonists." Id. at 98.).
Tom Wolfe, Back to Blood: A Novel (New York & Boston: Little, Brown, 2012) (Also, see Thomas Mallon, "The Heat Is On," NYT Book Review, Sunday, October 28, 2012.).
J. G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun: A Novel (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 1984, 2005) ("It was not the anger of the Japanese that most disturbed Jim, but their patience." Id. at 6. "Sitting beside Basie as he polished his nails, Jim realized that the entire experience of the war had barely touched him. All the deaths and starvation were part of a confused roadside drama seen through the passenger window of the Buick, a cruel spectacle like the public stranglings in Shanghai which the British and American sailors watched during their shore leaves. He had learned nothing from the war because he expected nothing, like the Chinese peasants whom he now looted and shot. As Dr. Ransome had said, people who expected nothing were dangerous. Somehow, five million Chinese had to be taught to expect everything." Id. at 256.).
J. G. Ballard, The Kindness of Women (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991) ("For the first time I was living in the endless present that owed nothing to the past." Id. at 121. "Women were ruthless from an early age, and needed to be." Id. at 161. "Dick entered hospital for observation, passing into the paradoxical world of modern medicine, with all its professional expertise, ultra-modern technology, and complete uncertainty. As Dick pointed out ... the qualities traditionally ascribed to patients--self-delusion, a refusal to face the truth, irrational hope, and a despair born of underlying pessimism--in fact were those of their doctors." "'You have to realse,' he whispered to me when a nurse had declined to answer a direct question about his suspected cancer, 'that the first and most important job of medical science is to protect the profession from the patients. We unsettle them and make them feel vaguely guilty. We ask questions they know they can't answer--the only thing they really want us to do is go away, or pretend that there's nothing wrong with us. What they like best of all is to admit us to hospital and then hear us say we feel fine, even if we're at death's door.'" Id. at 295.).
John Banville, Ancient Light: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2012) ("The statisticians tell us there is no such thing as coincidence, and I must accept they know what they are talking about. If I were to believe that a certain confluence of events was a special and unique phenomenon outside the ordinary flow of happenstance I woold have to accept, as I do not, that there is a transcendent process at work above, or behind, or within, commonplace reality. And yet I ask myself, why not? Why should I not allow of a secret and sly arranger of seemingly chance events?....Why was she there, and why was he?" Id. at 175-176.).
Roberto Bolano, Woes of the True Policeman: A Novel, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011, 2012) ("...but all I became was s literature professor. At least, thought Amalfitano, I've read thousands of books. At least I've become acquainted with the Poets and read the Novels.... At least I've read. At least I can still read, he said to himself, at once dubious and hopeful." Id. at 86.).
James M. Cain, The Cocktail Waitress (London: Hard Case Crime Novel/Titan Books, 2012).
T. Coraghessan Boyle, San Miguel: A Novel (New York: Viking, 2012) (Also, see Tatjana Soli, "Untamed Island," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 10/28/2012.).
Stephen L. Carter, The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2012) ("It is in the nature of men, sir, especially great men, to see themselves as indispensable. Whereas it is in the nature of women to see their friends and families as indispensable." Id. at 454.).
Michael Chabon, Telegraph Avenue: A Novel (New York: Harper, 2012) ("Gwen followed Aviva into the bathroom, fighting the urge to apologize, wanting to point out that if you were white, eating shit was a choice you could make if you wanted; for a black woman, the only valid choice was not to." Id. at 60-61. "'I bet Gwen feels like she's been living in a fantasy world. Black midwife and a million white mommies. Black people live their wholes lives in a fantasy world, it is just not their fantasy.'" Id. at 363.).
Michael Chabon, Werewolves in Their Youth: Stories (New York: Picador, 1999) (From "Green's Book": "Emily turned to Green. 'What is it with this tattoo shit, Marty? Can you explain this phenomenon?' 'Well,' Green said. He could feel the weak grin guttering on his lips. He knew what Freud had said about tattooing, of course, and he had his own private theory that people who tattooed themselves, particularly the young men and women one saw doing it today, were practicing a kind of desperate act of self-assertion through legerdemain, holding a candle to a phrase written in invisible ink, raising letters and lines where before there had been only the blankest sheet of paper. Don't throw me away, they were saying. I bare a hidden message. 'It's difficult to say.'" Id. at 83, 97.).
Junot Diaz, This Is How You Lose Her (New York: Riverhead Books, 2012) ("She was depressed and sad and missed her father and her friends, our neighbors. Everyone had warned her that the U.S. was a difficult place where even the Devil got his ass beat...." Id. at 138. Also see, Leah Hager Cohen, "Love Stories," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 9/23/2012; and Francine Prose, "Beyond the Circle," New York Review of Books, 11/8/2012).
Dave Eggers, A Hologram For the King: A Novel (San Francisco: McSweeney's Books, 2012) ("'Dear Kit, The key thing is managed awareness of your role in the world and history. Think too much and you know you are nothing. Think just enough and you know you are small, but important to some. That's the best you can do'" Id. at 102-103.).
Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists: A Novel (New York: Weinstein Books, 2012) ("For what is a person without memories? A ghost, trapped between worlds, without an identity, with no future, no past." Id. at 25. "'...The garden has to reach inside you. It should change your heart, sadden it, uplift it. It has to make you appreciate the impermanence of everything in life,' I say. 'That point in time just as the last leaf is about to drop, as the remaining petal is about to fall; the moment captures everything beautiful and sorrowful about life. 'Mono no aware,' the Japanese call it.'" Id. at 163.).
Peter Heller, The Dog Stars: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2012) ("That we have come to this: remaking our own taboos forgetting the original reasons but still awash in warnings." Id. at 48. "The difference maybe between the living and the dead: the living often want to be numb the dead never do, if they never want anything." Id. at 158. "All the choices we can't see. Every moment." Id. at 212.).
Scott Hutchins, A Working Theory of Love: A Novel (New York: The Penguin Press, 2012) ("[T]his is the great peril of bachelorhood--that you 'll become airy and insubstantial that people will peer straight through you." Id. at 4. Also, see James Hynes, "Fooled Again," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 11/25/2012.).
Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station: A Novel (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2011) (From the backcover: "In prose that veers between the comic and the tragic, the self-contemptuous and the inspired, Leaving the Atocha Station is a portrait of the artist as a young man in an age of Google searches, pharmaceuticals, and spectacle.").
Henning Mankell, The Shadow Girls: A Novel, translated from the Swedish by Ebba Segerberg (New York: New Press, 2011, 2012.) ("Jesper had been the youngest of four and had seen his siblings leave home as quickly as they had been able. At twenty he informed his mother that his turn had come. When Jesper woke the following morning he couldn't move. His mother had tied him to the bed. It took him a whole day to talk her into letting him go. First she had forced him to promise to come and see her three times a week for the rest of her life." Id. at 33.).
Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth: A Novel (New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2012) ("As I saw it, Professor Canning was suffering from a gross intellectual malfunction." Id. at 30. Also, see Kurt Andersen, "I Spy," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 11/25/2012.).
Lawrence Osborne, The Forgiven: A Novel (London & New York: Hogarth, 2012) ("Truly, the world had not promised anything to anyone and no man ever lived the way he wished." Id. at 64.).
Orhan Pamuk, Silent House: A Novel, translated from the Turkish by Robert Finn (New York: Knopf, 2012) ("[L]et me at least give you some final advice, listen to me, Recep: be open-minded and free, and only trust your own intelligence, do you understand? I was silent, hanging my head, and I thought: Words! Pluck the fruit of knowledge form the tree in paradise, Recep, take it without fear, maybe you will writhe in pain, but you'll be free, and when everyone is free the true paradise will be established, the real paradise on this earth where you will have nothing to fear. Words, I was thinking, a bunch of sounds, that are said and then vanish into the air . . . I fell fell asleep thinking of them" Id. at 310. Also, see Francine Prose, "Broken Homeland," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 11/21/2012.).
Philip Pullman, Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm: A New English Version (New York: Viking, 2012) ("There is no psychology in a fairy tale. The characters have little interior life; their motives are clear and obvious. If people are good, they are good, and if bad, they're bad.... The tremors and mysteries of human awareness, the whispers of memory, the prompting of half-understood regret or doubt or desire that are so much part of the subject matter of the modern novel are absent entirely. One might almost say that the characters in a fairy tale are not actually conscious." Id. at xiii.).
Carlos Ruiz Zafon The Prisoner of Heaven: A Novel, translated from the Spanish by Lucia Graves (New York: Harper, 2011, 2012) ("'In this world, everything is a fake, young man. Everything except money.'" Id. at 12. "'[I]f you don't trust a novelist, who are you going to trust?'" Id. at 194.).
Will Self, Umbrella (New York: Grove Press, 2012).
Robert Sheckley, Store of the Worlds: The Stories of Robert Sheckley, edited by Alex Abramovish & Jonathan Lethem (New York: New York Review Books, 2012).
Steve Stern, The Book of Mischief: New and Selected Stories (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2012) (From 'Moishe the Just': "When you expose one just man, you as good as exposed the lot. We understood this better after the storm finally broke in Europe." Id. at 109, 123.).
Amor Towles, Rules of Civility: A Novel (New York: Viking, 2011).
Mario Vargas LLosa, The Dream of the Celt: A Novel, translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010, 2012) ("Was all of history like that? The history learned at school? The one written by historians? A more or less idyllic fabrication, rational and coherent, about what had been in raw, harsh reality a chaotic and arbitrary jumble of plans, accidents, intrigues, fortuitous events, coincidences, multiple interests that had provoked changes, upheavals advances, and retreats, always unexpected and surprising with respect to what was anticipate or experienced by the protagonists." Id. at 98.).
Tom Wolfe, Back to Blood: A Novel (New York & Boston: Little, Brown, 2012) (Also, see Thomas Mallon, "The Heat Is On," NYT Book Review, Sunday, October 28, 2012.).
Stefan Zweig, Confusion: The Private Papers of Privy Councillor R. von D., translated from the German by Anthea Bell, and with an Introduction by George Prochnik (New York: New York Review Books, 2012).
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