SUGGESTED FICTION

Lena Andersson, Willful Disregard: A Novel About Love, translated from the Swedish by Sarah Death (New York: Other Press, 2016) ("We are drawn to love in order to feel that someone is seeing us." Id. at 43.).

Margaret Atwood, The Heart Goes Last: A Novel (New York: Nan. A. Talese/Doubleday, 2015).

Lauren Belfer, And After the Fire: A Novel (New York: Harper, 2016).

Lauren Belfer, City of Light (New York: The Dial Press, 1999) ("'Miss Barrett, have you ever noticed that there is a certain type of reformer who likes to help only the helpless? Who takes it as a personal affront when the people he or she wishes to view as subjugated become independent? . . . Have you ever noticed that ypee of reformer?'" Id. at 158.).

Lauren Belfer, A Fierce Radiance: A Novel (New York: Harper, 2010).

Ethan Canin, A Doubter's Almanac: A Novel (New York: Random House, 2016) (If you would be a real seeker after truth, you must at least once in your life doubt, as far as possible, all things.---Rene Descartes).

Emma Cline, The Girls: A Novel (New York: Random House, 2016).

Reed Farrell Coleman, Where It Hurts: A Novel (New York: Putnam, 2016).

Michael Cunningham, A Wild Swan and Other Tales (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015).

Jean D'Ormesson, The Glory of the Empire: A Novel, A History, translated from the French by Barbara Bray, with introduction by Daniel Mendelssohn (New York: New York Review Classics Books, 2016) ("Each of us carries within him all the world's past, and we find there only what we put in it. We create our own history according to our class and tastes, our education and heredity, our time and the circles we move in.  Especially since Marx and Freud, it is clear that objectivity in history is a mirage that the traveler over the deserts of bygone ages, thirsty for truth and certainty, can never reach" Id. at 354.).

Louis de Bernieres, The Dust That Falls From Dreams: A Novel (New York: Pantheon Books, 2015).

Amitav Ghosh, Flood of Fire (New York Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015).

Abby Geni, The Lightkeepers: A Novel (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2016).

Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies: A Novel (New York: Riverhead Books, 2015).

Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2016) (See Isabel Wilkerson, "Chained Relations," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 6/12/2016.).

Garth Risk Hallberg, City On Fire: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2015).

James Hannaham, Delicious Foods: A Novel (New York: Little, Brown, 2015).

L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between, with introduction by Colm Toibin (New York: New York Review Classics Books, 2002).

Adam Haslett, Imagine Me Gone: A Novel (New York: Little, Brown, 2016).

John Irving, Avenue of Mysteries (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015).

Raymond Kennedy, Ride a Cockhorse, introduction by Katherine A Powers (New York: New York Review Books Classics, 1991, 2012).

Stephen King, Under the Dome: A Novel (New York: Gallery Books, 2009).

Lynne Kutsukake, The Translation of Love: A Novel (New York: Doubleday, 2016).

Clare Mackintosh, I Let You Go: A Novel (New York: Berkley Books, 2016).

Gregory Maguire, After Alice: A Novel (New York: William Morrow, 2015).

Ian McEwan, Nutshell: A Novel (New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2016).

Ian McGuire, The North Water: A Novel (New York: Henry Holt, 2016).

Herta Muller, The Fox Was Ever the Hunter: A Novel, translated from the German by Philip Boehm (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2016).

Marie NDiaye, Ladivine: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2016).

Christopher Nicholson, Winter (New York: Europa Editions, 2015).

Chigozie Obioma, The Fisherman: A Novel (New York: Little, Brown, 2015).

Ann Patchett, Commonwealth: A Novel (New York: Harper, 2016).

Iain Pears, Arcadia: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2016).

Terry Pratchett, Mort, introduction by A. S. Byatt, illusions by Omar Rayyan (London; The Folio Society, 2016) ("Mort thought that history was thrashing around like a steel hawser with the tension off, twanging backwards and forwards across reality in great destructive sweeps."  "History isn't like that. History unravels gently, like an old sweater. It has been patched and darned many times, reunited to suit different people, shoved in a box under the sink of censorship to be cut up for the dusters of propaganda, yet it always--eventually--manages to spring back into its old familiar shape. History has a habit of changing the people who think they are changing it. History always has a few tricks up its frayed sleeve. It's been around a long time." Id. at 103.).

Suzanne Rindell, The Other Typist: A Novel (New York: Berkley Books, 2013).

Suzanne Rindell, Three-Martini Lunch: A Novel (New York: G. P. Putnam, 2016) ("Memoirs are a tricky genre. It is a little-known secret: We are never the heroes of our own stories, unless we are lying." Id. at 498.).

J. K. Rowling (aka Robert Galbraith), Career of Evil (A Cormoran Strike Novel) (New York: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown, 2015).

Anuradha Roy, Sleeping with Jupiter (India: Hachette India, 2015).

Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights: A Novel (New York: Random House, 2015).

Richard Russo, Everybody's Fool (New York: Knopf, 2016).

Cathleen Schine, They May Not Mean To, But They Do: A Novel (New York: Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016) (See Penelope Lively, "Some Extra, Just for You," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 6/19/2016,).

Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara De Vos: A Novel (New York: Sarah Crichton Books/ Farrar. Straus & Giroux, 2016).

Natsume Soseki, Kokoro, translated from the Japanese and with a foreword by Edwin McClellan (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2006) (friendship, loneliness, death).

Ayelet Tsabari, The Best on Earth: Stories (New York: Random House, 2016).

Junichiro Tanizaki, Naomi, translated from the Japanese by Anthony H. Chambers (New York: Vintage International/Vintage Books, 2001).

John Wyndham, The Kraken Wakes (New York: Penguin Books, 1953, 2008).

Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life: A Novel (New York: Doubleday, 2015) ("'Well, Harold,' Avi would say, perplexed and irritated," Don't know what to tell you, then. You know as well as I do that I can't do anything if the victim won't speak.' I remembered thinking, as I very rarely thought, what a flimsy thing the law was, so dependent on contingencies, a system of so little comfort, of so little use to those who needed its protection the most." Id. at 356.).

LOOKING FOR ANTICHRIST/EVIL

Bernard McGinn, Antichrist: Two Thousand Years of the Human Fascination with Evil (New York: HarperSanFrancisco/HarperCollins, 1994) ("This book is not written for those who are convinced that Antichrist is imminent . . . Rather, I write in the conviction that Antichrist has already come--that is, that the most important message of the Antichrist legend in Western history is what it has to tell us about our past, and perhaps even about our present attitudes toward evil." Id. at xii. "The nature of Antichrist's malice as the image of absolute human evil has varied over the centuries . . .  Still, it is clear that the dominant view of ultimate evil has not been one of cruel tyranny so much as one of deception, the masquerading of the lie that perverts the good that saves. Each age has had to contend with it own forms of deception. These deceptions have done more than anything else to shape the development of the Antichrist legend." "I would suggest, in closing, that contemporary forms of deception, especially deception on a worldwide scale never possible before, might spur our meditation on the meaning of the legend of Antichrist as the image of essential human evil. The dominance of appearance [branding, marketing, etc.?] over substance [over fact?] may not have been invented in the electronic era, but some contemporary social critics remind us that deceit has reached new levels of sophistication as we approach the beginning of the third millennium. [Note: This book was published, and thus the comment was made, in 1994, so the third millennium has yet to arrive. Now it has.] Even the recent Fundamentalist interpretations of Antichrist have emphasized how their literal Final Enemy will be a master of deception, both in himself and in his ability to project an artificial image of his intentions to the world through the latest means of communication." Id. at 279. Food for thought, especially for those concerned with political evil.).

"EVERYDAY FORMS OF RESISTANCE MAKE NO HEADLINES."

James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 1985) ("The fact is that, for all their importance when they do occur, peasant rebellions, let alone peasant 'revolutions,' are few and far between. Not only are the circumstances that favor large-scale peasant uprisings comparatively rare, but when they do appear the revolts that develop are nearly always crushed unceremoniously. To be sure, even a failed revolt may achieve something: a few concessions form the state or landlords, a brief respite form new and painful relations of production and, not least, a memory of resistance and courage that may lie in wait for the future. Such gains, however, are uncertain, while the carnage, the repression, and the demoralization of defeat ate all too certain and real. It is worth recalling as well that even at those extraordinary historical moments when a peasant-backed revolution actually succeeds in taking power, the results are, at the very best, a mixed blessing for the peasantry. Whatever else the revolution may achieve, it almost always creates a more coercive and hegemonic state apparatus--one that is often able to batten itself on the rural population like no other before it. All too frequently the peasantry finds itself in the ironic position of having helped to power a ruling group whose plans for industrialization, taxation, and colletivization are very much at odds with the goals for which peasants had imagined they were fighting." Id. at 29. "Everyday forms of resistance make no headlines. Just as millions of anthozoan polps create, willy-nilly a coral reef, so do thousands upon thousands of individual acts if insubordination and evasion create a political or economic barrier reef of their own. There is rarely any dramatic confrontation, any moment that is particularly newsworthy. And whenever , to pursue the simile, the ship of state runs aground on such a reef, attention is typically directed to the shipwreck itself and not to the vast aggregation of petty acts that made it possible, It is only rarely that the perpetrators of these petty acts see to call attention to themselves. Their safety lies in their anonymity. It is also extremely rarely that officials of the state wish to publicize the insubordination. To do so would be to admit that their policy is unpopular, and, above all, to expose the tenuousness of their authority i the countryside--neither of which the sovereign state finds in its interests. The nature of the acts themselves and the self-interested muteness of the antagonists thus conspire to create a kind of complicates silence that all but expunges everyday forms of resistance form the historical record." Id, at 36. Perhaps there is a lesson here for legal scholars and law students: perhaps the official records (e.g., judicial opinions) and unofficial records (e.g., news reports) do not inform us as to what is really and truly going on in society, at least not at the 'lower' end of society. So, we miss the things which are simmering below and may eventually bubble up. Yet, how does one get to the real facts?).

(MIS)HANDLING ENEMY COMBATANTS?

Robert Ignatius Burns, The Jesuits and the Indian Wars of the Northwest (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 1966) ("To kill in the heat of battle was one thing. To prosecute criminal trials against enemy warriors afterward was quite another. The Interior Indian knew nothing about law courts or capital punishment. These things were strange and frightening. He could have understood fighting on until the scales were balanced, or perhaps exacting some alternative compensation. But this White way was iniquitous. When the tribesmen reflected further that the Whites never yet won a war in the Interior, though they had blundered unhappily through protracted campaigns, and that they had just sustained the humiliating and total defeat of their professional warriors, the surrender demands could only appear perversely illogical." "Worse, the Indian war criminal or patriots had been killed in a very special way. They were hanged by the neck, convulsively leaping and pitching at the end of a heavy rope, with all the repulsive gaminess, distortions, and discolorations attending death by strangulation. It is unlikely that the Indians appreciated the difference between a sharp drop though a proper gallows, as happened amid solemn ceremonies after a court trial, and the quaky popular lacing with its shattering horrors for the spectators. After this war Colonel Wright would hang his many Indian victims in the crudest fashion, on a handy tree limb, by kicking over a keg or wheeling away a gun lumber. After the Cascades fight in 1856 the local chief was hanged in a particularly messy performance. After vainly offering the army a ransom of ten horses and two squaws, this chief was hoisted by a rope over a tree branch; the dangling, struggling figure managed a defiant comment, and in the end had to be shot." "The Whites seemed obsessed with  this form of punishment . . . . So familiar were the Indians with this White compulsion, that in April 1854 the Snohomisg had anticipated and appeased the Whites by voluntarily hanging two of their own people guilty of killing a White man. The hanging of Leschi particularly struck the dian imagination, so that by mid-1858 even friendly braves  voiced their preference for death in battle. Id. at 260-261)

DEMOCRATIC STAGECRAFT: CAMOUFLAGING THE CLASS NATURE OF STATE POWER

Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (New York: Viking, 2016) ("Power (whether social, economic, or merely symbolic) is rarely probed. Or if it is, it never becomes so urgent a national imperative as to require an across-the-board resolution, simultaneously satisfying a moral imperative and pursuing a practical cause. We know, for instance, that Americans have forcefully resisted extending the right to vote; those in power have disenfranchised blacks, women, and the poor in myriad ways. We know, too, that women historically have had fewer civil protections than corporations. Instead of a thorough-going democracy, Americans have settled for democratic stagecraft: high-sounding rhetoric, magnified, and political leaders dressing down at barbecues or heading out to hunt game. They are seen wearing blue jeans, camouflage, cowboy hats, and Bubba caps, all in an effort to come across as ordinary people. But presidents and other national politicians are anything but ordinary people after they are elected. Disguising that fact is the real camouflage that distorts the actual class nature of state power." Id. at 311.). 

CHRISTENDOM'S LONG HISTORY OF ANTI-SEMITISM

Malcolm Hay, Europe and the Jews: The Pressure of Christendom on the People of Israel for 1,900 Years, introduction by Thomas Sugrue, preface by Walter Kaufmann (Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1992) (From the back cover: "Originally published as Foot of Pride in 1950, this admirably documented and thought-provoking book by historian Malcolm Hay examines the indignities and cruelties Jews have suffered at the hands of Christians and others in the West, from St. John Chrysostom in the fourth century to Hitler in the twentieth. Using Hitler's concentration camps as a point of departure, Hay leads us on a tour of devilish scenes and spectacles which have been produced by Christian hatred of Jews for some nineteen hundred years. He reveals to us the 'chain of error' in the history of anti-Semitism--the infiltration into history books of contemporaneous misunderstandings prejudices, libels, slanders, and simple mistakes, and the perpetuation of these distortions by historians too slipshod or unconcerned to check their sources and work on the original material of their studies." From the "Introduction":"[A] message of warning is necessary for those Americans who read the book. Mr. Hay has never been to America, and he has not included in his book any material on anti-Semitism in the United States, A reader might therefore be tempted to believe that  one exists here, and to congratulate himself upon the restrain and tolerance of his countrymen, who have never ordered the Jews to leave their homes, never confiscated their goods, never accused them of ritual murders, never burned them at the stake. Such temptation should be resisted, Americans are as anti-Semitic as the Gentiles of other nations; they have thus far expressed their anti-Semitism less violently than the Germans and Russians of this century and the French and Spaniards and British of other centuries, but only because it has irritated them less. As Christians they are naturally infected with the notion that the Jews bear a holly guilt and are living in a state of penance, doomed to a miserable 'difference' and deservedly burdened with discrimination and segregation. The discrimination and segregation are politely arranged in the United States, and are carried out by the 'Gentleman's Agreement' so effectively publicized by Laura Z. Hobson's recent novel of that same name; but they are not less real or effective because of the manners which attend them. It is not, after all, the degree to which anti-Semitism is expressed which is important; where it exists at all it is engaged in murder--the murder not of Jews, but of Christians. An anti-Semite is a dead Christian; his prejudice has strangled his faith." Id. at xviii-xix. ).

James Carroll, Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews: A History (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001) (From the book jacket: "In a bold and moving book hat is sure to spark heated debate, . . . James Carroll maps the profoundly troubling two-thousand-year course of the Church's battle against Judaism and faces the crisis of faith it has provoked in his own life as a Catholic. More than a chronicle of religion, this dark history is the central tragedy of Western civilization, its fault lines reaching deep into our culture.").

LIBRARY OF ARABIC LITERATURE 7

A'ishah al-Ba'uniyyah, The Principles of Sufism, edited and translated by Th. Emil Homerin (Library of Arabic Literature) (New York & London: New York University Press, 2014) (The principles of Sufism: repentance, sincerity, remembrance, love.).

AMERICA

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FREEDMAN TOWN

Ben H. Winter, Underground Airlines: A Novel (New York: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown, 2016) ("Now I see things differently. It took me some time, but I know the secret now. Freedman Town serves a good purpose--not for the people who live there, Lord knows; people stuck there by poverty, by prejudice, by laws that keep them from moving or working. Freedman Town's purpose is for the rest of the world. The world that sits, like Martha, with dark glasses on, staring from a distance, scared but safe. Create a pen like that, give people no choice but to live like animals, and then people get to point at them and say Will you look at those animals? That's what kind of people those people are. And that idea drifts up and out of Freedman Town like chimney smoke, blacks get to mean poor and poor to mean dangerous and all the worlds get murked together and becomes one dark idea, a cloud of smoke, the smokestack fumes drifting like filthy air across the rest of the nation." Id. at 140. What if the American Civil War never happened? How would America look?).

HOW LAW IMPACTS BEHAVIOR

Lawrence M. Friedman, Impact: How Law Affects Behavior (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2016) ("This small book, as the title suggests, is about impact: about how law affects behavior. . . The sheer volume of work [in impact studies] is a problem, a barrier. . . I thought I saw a real value in treating the subject synthetically. Value in trying to simplify. Value in setting our an outline, a structure, the bones and the skelton, leaving our (as one would have to) the muscles, nerves, and glands. Value in trying to show some sort of order underneath the chaos, some sort of harmony in all the conflicting voices and noises. Value in trying to provides a series of hooks to hang all the scholarship on. Value in trying to classify and to suggest some menacingly categories, The result o, n the pages that flow, is my modest attempt to do those various things." Id. at ix.  From the book jacket: "Law and regulations are ubiquitous, touching on many aspects of individual and corporate behavior. But under what conditions are laws and rules actually effective? A huge amount of recent work in political science, sociology, economics, criminology, law, and psychology, among other disciplines, deals with this question. [NOTE: Perhaps that suggests that one cannot really know the law-as-a-discipline well unless one has a fair grasp of those other disciplines. Food for thought.] But these fields rarely inform one another, leaving the state of research disjointed and disorganized. Lawrence M. Friedman finds order in this cacophony. Impact gathers recent finding into one overarching analysis and lays the groundwork for a cohesive body of work in what Friedman labels, 'impact studies'." "The first important factor that has a bearing on impact is communication. A rule or law has no effect if it never reaches its intended audience. The public's fund of legal knowledge, the clarity of the law, and the presence of information brokers all influence the flow of information from lawmakers to citizens. After a law is communicated, subjects sometimes comply, sometimes resist, and sometimes adjust or evade. Three clusters of motives help shape which reaction will prevail: first, rewards and punishments; second, peer group influences; and third, issues of conscience, legitimacy, and morality. When all of these factors move in the same direction, law can have a powerful impact; when they conflict, the outcome is sometimes unpredictable.").

OTTOMANS, TURKS, WAR OF OTTOMAN SUCCESSION, AND ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

Yair Auron, The Banality of Indifference: Zionism and the Armenian Genocide (New Brunswick, NJ, & London, England: Transaction Publishers, 2000) ("This book seeks to examine both the attitudes of the Jewish community (the Yishuv) in Palestine (Eretz Israel) and of he Zionist leadership toward the massacres committed by the Turks against the Armenians at the turn of the twentieth century. These atrocities began in the massive destruction of Armenians during the first World War. This book seems also to make the reader aware of he genocide of the Armenian People." "At the same time, the book raises theoretical and philosophical questions. . . : the debate over the concept of genocide, and the uniqueness of he Holocaust in comparison to other instances of genocide, including the Armenian genocide." "The central part of the book comprises chapters that discuss 'The Reactors' (tp the destruction of the Armenians) and 'The Indifferent' (to it). The quantitative division between 'The Reactors' (the larger part) and "The Indifferent' (the smaller part) should not mislead us. In reality, the vast majority of the Yishuv was indifferent and only a small minority reacted." Id. at 1. "I have chosen as the moto of the present book a passage from our Jewish sources: 'Thus was created a single man, to teach us that every person who loses a single should, it shall be written about him as if he has lost the entire world, and every person who sustains a single soul it shall be written about him as if he has sustained the entire world.' (Mishna, Sanhedrin, IV. 5). The passage was revised in later versions and the phrase 'from the People of Israel' was added so that the line no longer reads 'every person who sustains' or 'loses a single soul,' but rather 'every person who sustains or loses a single soul from the People of Israel.' In editions of the Mishna generally available today we usually find the later 'amended' version." "In this context, it is worth quoting one sentence form 'In Praise of Forgetting,' a controversial article by Yehudi Eliana that appeared in the Hebrew daily newspaper, Ha'aretz, on March 2, 1988. Elkana wrote, 'From Auschwitz came, in symbolic terms, two peoples: a minority which claims "'it will never happen again," and a frightened and anxious majority which claims "it will never happen to us again."'''  "Between those two versions, in the tension between particularism and universalism, fluctuates Israel society and the public debate within it. The crime of genocide is an extreme and total case of harm inflicted by humans beings on other, innocent human beings. One of the indirect aims of this book is to increase our sensitivity to this aspect of human  life--beyond what has happened to us to raise awareness tooth occurrence of genocide or genocidal acts in the past and the present, before our very eyes, and to the danger of its occurrence in the future. [] It is important, I believe, to encourage the individual to think about this phenomenon, to examine his stand, his personal responsibility, and his possibilities to react. Genocide is an evil against which we must struggle in order to minimize its appearance as far as possible." Id. at 2-3. From the back cover: "Yair Auron is senior lecturer at The Open University if Israel ad the Kibbutzim College of Education. He is the author, in Hebrew, of Jewish-Israeli Identity, Sensitivity to World Suffering: Genocide in the Twentieth Century, We Are All German Jews, and Jewish Radicals in France during the Sixties and Seventies.") .

Eric Bogosian, Operation Nemesis: The Assassination Plot That Avenged the Armenian Genocide  (New York: Little, Brown, 2015) ("It has often been argued that Armenia was 'sold out' for oil. The loudest voice here belonged to Vahan Cardashian, who made it his ronal crusade to let the world know how Standard Oil and the Harding administration had colluded to abandon the Armenian cause in their drive to acquire a foothold in the Middle East. And as it became more and more clear that Turkey was digging in its heels and would fight to keep its last territories (namely, eastern Asia Minor, what many Armenians call 'western Armenia'), all parties understood implicitly that what was important was Iraq. To sum up, by 1923, the Armenians didn't have anything that the West desired, but the Republic of Turkey did." "What made [Iraq] so very valuable now was oil. Not that the British would ever admit that fact. Speaking in 1922, the British foreign secretary, Lord Curzon, couldn't have made it more clear that Britain's seizure of Mesopotamia/Iraq was not about oil: 'I do not know how much oil there ma be in the neighborhood of Mosul or whether it can be worked at a profit, or whether it may turn out after all to have been a fraud.' It is doubtful that Curzon was unaware of the value of northern Iraq." "Perhaps no direct connection can be made between the loss of the 'Armenian mandate,' or the genocide itself, and the world's appetite for oil and other mineral rights. But once the war was over, once the territories of the former Ottoman Empire were divvied up to everyone's satisfaction, any lingering outrage and the impetus on the part of the West to defend and fight for Armenian rights simply evaporated. Now that the exploitation of Turkey was a fait accompli and access to oil (guaranteed by international agreements) enriched all the parties involved, the tragedy of the Christians in the Ottoman Empire became a footnote of history, one that many would work hard to erase altogether." Id. at 273-274.).

Stefan Ihrig, Ataturk in the Nazi Imagination (Cambridge, Massachussets, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2014) ("This analysis of Ataturk in the Nazi imagination thus illustrates the flux in images about Turkey in Germany and the very specific societal and political factors that always influence such kinds of perception: Our national, societal, and personal views and discourses about the 'Other' are much more about us than about any actual 'Other'; they are dependent on time and place, on fears, expectations, plans, and dreams. We must always be wary of alleged traditions and continuities. More often than not they are construed and imagined rather than real. There is no 'eternal Turk' in the German national psyche or in German history. The image of 'the Turk' has often changed over the course of the centuries--massively so in the twentieth century--and it will change again." Id. at 230.).

Laure Marchand & Guillaume Perrier, Turkey and the Armenian Ghost: On the Trail of the Genocide, foreword by Taner Alcam, translated by Debbie Blythe (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queens's University Press, 2015) ("Is it best to legislate against historical revision or to fight it on the field of ideas, as suggested by the great historian Pierre Vidal-Naqurt? The purpose of this book is not to answer this somewhat philosophical question: both options are valid. While clearly acknowledging the historic lie, Vidal-Naquet declared himself to be against the passing of memory laws. 'In the case of the massacre of the Armenians, the Turkish state is clearly revisionist,' he wrote. That is the only intellectually valid argument in the face of opponents of legislative intervention." "By exploring the living reality of the genocide and its consequences for Turkish and Armenian societies by a century of denial, and by following the twisted pathways of the memory of this 'great crime' still denied by its perpetrators, this collection of our reports and inquires gives the lie to all those who accept historical revisionism or take lightly this 'ancient history.'" Id. at 5.).

Sean McMeekin, The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany's Bid for World Power (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belkap/Harvard U. Press, 2010) (From the bookjacket: "The Berlin-Baghdad Express tells the fascionating story of how Germany exploited Ottoman pan-Islamism in order to destroy the British Empire, then the largest Islamic power in the world. Meanwhile, the Young Turks harnessed themselves to German military might to avenge Turkey's hereditary enemy, Russia. Told from the perspective of the key decisionmakers on the Turco-German side, many of the most consequential events of World War I--Turkey's entry into the war, Gallipoli, the Armenian massacres, the Arab revolt, and the Russian Revolution--are illuminated as never before." From the text: "Since the martyrdom of Muhammad's nephew and son-in-law Ali, slain while praying in a mosque in 661, 'Shiat Ali', or Ali's followers, have believed that only Ali's descendants can be true Caliphs--with the implication that the Umayyad, Abbasid and Ottoman Caliphs recognized by orthodox Sunnis were never accepted as such by Shia Muslims. In most of the Islamic world, Shias have remained a small minority sect, which helps explain why they were largely invisible to Western policy-makers like Kitchener, whose own experience with Islam was confined to Sunni-dominated British Egypt and India." "Shiites were not invisible, howeve, in southern Mesopotamia, where Ali's son and heir, Hussein, was slain and gruesomely decapitated at the battle of Karbala in 680. Contrary to common belief today, Persia was never the symbolic centre of Shia Islam, with most of the lands comprising today's Iran won over for the Shiat Ali only under the Safavid dynasty in the sixteenth century. Iraqi Karbala, not Iranian Tehran, Qom or Meshed, is the second Mecca of Shia Muslims, Just as Sunnis must, if physically and financially able, make the hajj to Mecca once before they die, so, too, are the Shia faithful expected to make the 'Karbalajj' to the tomb of Hussein in lower Mesopotamia.  . . . Until Britsih vessels took over Indian hajj traffic in the modern era, it was much easier for Shias from the subcontinent to make a sacred prigrimage to Mesopotamia than for Sunnis to reach the distant Hejaz. With Persia perched in between Karbala and India, Shias dominated the shortest land route between Asiatic Turkey and thge subcontinent." Id,. at 201-202.).

Sean McMeekin, The Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, 1908-1923 (New York: Penguin Press, 2015) ("To make sense of all this human loss, to find meaning in the plight of millions of forced refugees, and in nearly as many painful and agonizing military and civilian deaths, is surely impossible. At the least, after the passage of a century we can begin to reckon with the geopolitical consequences. The Ottoman Empire had limped into the twentieth century still standing--if not tall, then as some passable facsimile of its earlier fearsome self. Despite European encroachment into his empire in the form of the Capitulations and financial oversight, Abdul Hamid II was still recognized as sultan by millions of Ottoman subjects, Muslim, Christian, and Jew alike, and million more Muslims farther afield looked on him as caliph of the Islamic world. True, the upheaval of 1908-9 had toppled the Hamidian regime and shaken the sultanate to its foundations, but, judging from reports filed from as far away as the Raj in India, some kind of homage was still paid by global Muslims even to the Young Turks' puppet sultan Mehmed V (Reshad) until 1917, and then to Mehmed VI (Vahdettin) until he was deposed by Kemal on November 1, 1922--to be replaced as caliph if not sultan, by Abdul Mecid II, until Turkey abolished the caliphate itself in March 1924. Of all the enduring changes brought about by the wars of the Ottoman Succession, this must rank as among the most important. For the abolition of the caliphate, Mustafa Kemal has often been given credit--or the blame (in the latter case notably by, among many others, Osama bin Laden). But in truth it was the empire's crushing defeat in 1918 that had destroyed the prestige of the Ottomans, no less than defeat put paid to the Hohenzollerns, Habsburgs, and Romanovs in Europe. The difference, in the Turkish case, is that the fall of the dynasty also destroyed the last institution uniting the world's (Sunni) Muslims--and linking them by extension to the caliphs of Islam's classical age. As if to give the point emphasis, King Hussein proclaimed himself caliph of all Muslims upon hearing the news from Turkey in March 1924--only to lose control of Mecca to the Wahhabi Ikhwan warriors of Ibn Saud scarily six months later. Because Ibn Saud himself has no claim to legitimacy other than his own puritanical ferocity, since 1924 there has been no caliph to unite the world's Muslims. The Islamic world has never been the same." Id at 284-485. "After two ulf wars and now a third pitting the United States and its allies against the Islamic State, Iraq has arguably become an even greater geopolitical sore point than Israel/Palestine. Clearly the borders established by British diplomats after the First World War . . . have not held up we.., Ottoman Mosul and the other Kurdish (and Turkish) areas of the north were never meant to be yoked together with the predominately Arab Ottoman vilayets of Baghdad and Basra in the south. Owing to the close proximity of he Sunni triangle near Baghdad and the Shiite holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, the Sunni-Shite divide in Iraq is more volitile in Iraq than anywhere else in the Islamic world, leading to dangerous centrifugal tendencies among Shiites looking east to Iran and Sunni Muslims looking south into Arabia for succor and sponsorship. In the sectarian warfare between these groups, as in the ethnic struggle between Iraq's Kurds, Arabs, and Turkmen, Iraq's smaller minorities of Christians and Jews have mostly tried to keep their heads down and avoid the crossfire. The horrendous violence in Iraq, which followed the toppling of Saddam Hussein's Baathist regime in 2003, has taught the world, among other bitter lessons, that it had taken one of history's most brutal dictators to keep a lid on seething tribal, inter-ethnic and interfaith tensions of this fragile country cobbled together by British imperialists. Serious civil violence in post-Ottoman Iraq began as soon as 1920 and continues to this day." Id. at 493.).

Sean McMeekin, The Russian Origins of the First World War (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belkap/Harvard U. Press, 2011).

Eugene Rogan, The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East  (New York: Basic Books, 2015) ("The centenary of the Great War attracted little commemoration in the Middle East . . . [Yet,] in the Middle East more than any other part of the world, the legacies of the Great War continue to be felt down to the present day." Id. at 406. "The deportation of Armenians was conducted openly by government orders. The Young Turk leadership had decreed an early recess of the Ottoman parliament on 1 March 1915, which left Interior Minister Talat Pasha and his colleagues a free hand to enact law without parliamentary debate. .  . " "Alongside the publicly declared measures f forced displacement, the Young Turks issued secret orders for the mass murder of Armenian deportees. The extermination orders were not written down by there communicated orally to provincial governors either by their author, CUP Central Committee member Dr Bahaeddin Sakir, or by other CUP officials, Any provincial governor who asked for written conformation of the orders or otherwise opposed the mass murder of unarmed civilian faced dismiss and even assignation, When one district governor in Diyarbakir Province demanded written notice before carrying out the massacre of Armenians from his district, he was removed from office, summoned to Diyarbakir, and murdered en route." Id. at 172-173.).

Ronald Grigor Suny, "They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else": A History of the Armenian Genocide (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2015) (Rationalizing brutality, cruelty, deportation and genocide in the name of security: "Through April, May, and June, the principal reason given for arresting, deporting, or killing Armenians was because of desertion and rebellion, the two connected intimately with the underlying apprehension that the Armenians were fundamentally disloyal and prepared to aid the Russians given the chance. Deportation descending into massacre was rationalized as a military necessity. The massacres were no longer simply spontaneous or local but part of an overall plan to reduce the Armenians to impotence, to make any resistance impossible, and to Islamize eastern Anatolia as much as possible, For Ottoman officers and officials state security and defense of the Muslim population made any excess in treating Christians reasonable and justified." Id. at 280. Stereotyping as a prelude to genocide: "Genocide involves not only physical destruction of a people--although that is its fundamental definition--but also its cultural annihilation. The identity of Armenians for the Ottomans was not as indelibly fixed as the identity of Jews would be in the racist imagination of the Nazis. Still, the collective stereotypes of Armenians as grasping and mercenary, subversive and disloyal, turned them into an alien and unsympathetic category that then had to be eliminated." Id. at 285. "By the end of the war 90 percent of Ottoman Armenians were gone, killed, deported to the deserts of Syria, ore refugees in the Caucasus or Middle East, The number of dead is staggering--somewhere between 600,000 and 1 million killed in the more conservative estimates--and the event shocked European and American opinion. . . .  The Armenian Genocide was a central event in the last stages of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the foundational crime that along with the ethnic cleansing and population exchanges of the Anatolian Greeks made possible the formation of the ethnonational Turkish republic." Id. at 348-349.).

Franz Werfel, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh (1934), based on the translation from the German by Geoffrey Dunlop, revised & expanded by James Reidel, with a preface by Vartan Gregorian (Boston: A Verba Mundi Book/David R. Godine, 2012) (From the back cover: "[This is the novel that] drew the world's attention to the Armenian Genocide. This is the story of how the inhabitants of several Armenian villages chose not to obey the deportation order of the Turkish government. Instead, they fortified a plateau on the slopes of Musa Dagh--Mount Moses--and repelled Turkish soldiers and military police during the summer of 1915 while holding out hope for the Allies to save them." From the text:
      "The privy councilor, back at his desk again, took another brief glance at the map on the wall. 'The Armenians perish because of their geographical position. It's the fate of the weak, the fate of the hated minority.'
      'Every man and every nation at one time or another becomes "the weak." That's why nobody should tolerate persecution, let alone extermination, as a precedent.'
      'Have you never, Herr Lepsius, asked yourself whether national minorities may not cause unnecessary trouble--whether it might be better that they should vanish?'
      Lepsius took off his glasses and polished them hard. His eyes peered and blinked wearily. Their myopic look seemed to give his whole body something courageous.
      'Her Geheimrat, are not we Germans in a minority?'
      'What do you mean by that? I don't understand?'
      'In the middle of a Europe united against us, we're a damnably imperiled minority. It only needs one bad breakthrough, An we've not chosen our geography so brilliantly either.'
      The privy councilor's face had ceased to be kindly, it looked sharp and pale. A whiff of dusty midday heat beat in through the window."
Id. at 581.).

THINKING BEYOND "THE AMORAL AND SELF-INTERESTED HOMO ECONOMICUS"

Samuel Bowles, The Moral Economy: Why Good Incentives Are No Substitute for Good Citizens (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2016) (From the book jacket: "Should we look to economic man--the amoral and self-interested Homo economicus--to tell us how people will respond to monetary rewards, punishments, and other incentives? Samuel Bowles answers with a resounding 'no.' Policies that follow from this paradigm, he shows, may 'crowd out' ethical and generous motives and thus backfire. But incentives, per se, are not really the culprit. Bowles shows that crowding out occurs when the message conveyed by economic incentives is that self-interest is expected, that the employer thinks the employees is lazy, or that the citizen cannot otherwise be trusted to contribute to the public good. Using historical and recent case studies as well as behavioral experiments, Bowles shows how well-designed incentives and other policies can crowd in the civic motives in which good governance depends.").

REINTERPRETING THE ORIGINS OF THE WAR ON POVERTY

Michael Woodsworth, Battle for Bed-Stuy: The Long War on Poverty in New York City (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2016) (From the book jacket: "Half a century after the launch of the War on Poverty, its complex origins remain obscure. Battle for Bed-Stuy reinterprets President Lyndon Johnson's much-debated crusade form the perspective of its foot soldiers in New York City, showing how 1960s antipoverty programs were rooted in a rich local tradition of grassroots activism and policy experiments.).

JAPAN, JAPANESE CULTURE, JAPANESE BUDDHISM

Yoel Hoffmann, Japanese Death Poems: Written by Zen Monks and Haiku Poets on the Verge of Death, compiled with an Introduction and commentary by Yoel Hoffmann (Rutland, VT: Tuttle Publishing, 1956) (By Enni Ben'en: "All my life I taught Zen to the people-- / Nine and seventy years. / He who sees not things as they are / Will Never know Zen." Id. at 96. By Kozan Ichikyo: "Empty-handed I entered the world / Barefoot I leave it. / My coming, my going-- / Two simple happenings / That get entangled." Id. at 108.).

Kazui Kasahara, ed., A History of Japanese Religion, translated from the Japanese by Paul McCarthy & Gaynor Sekimori (Tokyo: Kosei, Publishing 2001).

Yagyu Munenori, The Life-Giving Sword: Secret Teachings from the House of the Shogun, translated  from the Japanese with an introduction by William Scott Wilson (Boston & London: Shambhala, 2012) ("We say that this Emptiness of the mind cannot be seen, and so is nothingness. But if it moves, it does a variety of things: it grasps with the hands, steps with the feet, and accomplishes a variety of wonders. This is the movement and manifestation of this emptiness of this mind." Id. at 53.).

G. B. Sansom, Japan: A Short Cultural History (Stanford: Stanford U. Press, 1978).

Ihara Satkaku, Five Women Who Loved Love, introduction and translated from the Japanese by W. M. Theodore de Barry, with a background essay by Richard Lane, and the 17th-century illustrations by Yoshida Hambei (Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1956) (From the "Introduction": "There is here, no doubt, a defiant rejection of the traditional Buddhist view that all is dust and subject to corruption, that nothing escapes the universal law of change. But the protest bears a strong resemblance to one which had already come from within Buddhism itself, proclaiming salvation through moving faith in the Buddha Amida, whose abiding mercy and redemptive power alone could be relied upon to rescue men form the suffering of this world." Id at 15.).

Yoshiro Tamura, Japanese Buddhism: A Cultural History, translated from the Japanese by Jeffrey Hunter (Tokyo: Kosei Pubishing, 2000) ("Japan is often described as having a hybrid culture. But this does not mean that disparate cultural elements were simply embraced indiscriminately; rather, they were vigorously assimilated and skillfully made over into Japanese cultural artifacts. The same thing happened with Buddhism: It was absorbed into Japanese culture and reconstituted as Japanese Buddhism. Thus it is impossible to separate Japan's Buddhism from the nation's cultural matrix, or to explicate the one without understanding the other." Id. at 7.).

A REMINDER: GOOD AND BAD IDEAS HAVE CONSEQUENCES, GOOD AND BAD, RESPECTIVELY.

Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, Dictatorships and Double Standards: Rationalism and Reason in Politics (New York: American Enterprise Institute/Simon & Schuster, 1982) (From the "Introduction": "Ideas have consequences, bad ideas have bad consequences." "This book is about the impact of ideas on politics. The essays collected here, written over two decades, have in common a concern with freedom and unfreedom. What kinds of ideas encourage and support democracy or tyranny? How are they institutionalized? Why and how do so many liberating revolutions go wrong? Why did the American Revolution produce constitutional democracy, while its eighteenth-century counterpart bred a reign of terror? Several of the essays deal with the impact of bad ideas on our political life and institutions." Id. at 8. Though some of the essays here may seem dated, I would suggest they remain not only historically significant but also currently relevant. Some of the essays help explain how we (as a nation, as citizens, as members of political parties) got where we are today. For example, how we learned the wrong lesson from our war in Vietnam, how our efforts to disrupt autocratic governments has resulted in their replacement by anti-democratic regimes rather than democratic ones, how people (including Americans) are not very well equipped to deal with rapid social and technological change, how identity politics have weaken party affiliations and strengthen the cult of the personality and the leader ("Only I can and will fix it!," and, most important, how bad idea--and ideas detached from experience--tend to have bad consequences. "All times and places have their share of mistaken ideas and practices. Like violence and pestilence, old age and taxes, error and silliness are always with us because, while knowledge in fields like mathematics and science is cumulative, ideas about society and history [Query: And Law?] change without getting better."  "Our times seem especially hospitable to bad idea, probably because, in throwing off the shackles of tradition, we have left ourselves especially vulnerable to untried nostrums and untested theories." "Tradition, to be sure, does not filter out bestial conceptions any more than it eliminates brutal practices. Human sacrifice, slavery, inquisitions, caste systems, have all be justified and preserved by a tradition. But traditional ideas have at least the merit of being internally related to actual societies and social practices. However, in times of rapid change and mass communication [Note: This "Introduction" was written in 1982. So, keep in mind that the rapidity of change and the increase in means and speed on mass communication is significantly greater now, thirty-plus years later, in the twenty-first century.], culture can become detached from its foundation in society and character. When a disjunction develops between ideas and experience, theories about human nature and history proliferate and flourish, become objects of fashion and faith, to be changed with changing styles o, like hemlines, regardless of the evidence." Id. at 9-10.  From "Dictators and Double Standards":"Although most governments in the world are, as they always have been, autocracies of one kind or another, no idea holds greater sway in the mind of educated Americans than the belief that it is possible to democratize governments, anytime, anywhere, under any circumstances. This notion is belied by an enormous body of evidence based on the experience of dozens of countries which have attempted with more or less (usually less) success to move from autocratic to democratic government. Many of the wisest political scientists of this and previous centuries agree that democratic institutions are especially difficult to establish and maintain--because they make heavy demands on all portions of a population and because they depend on complex social, cultural, and economic conditions." Id. at 23, 30 (emphasis dded). "In his essay Representative Government, John Stuart Mill identified three fundamental conditions . . .  These are" 'One, that the people should be willing to receive it [representative government]; two, that they should be willing and able to do what is necessary for its preservation; three, that they should be willing and able to fulfill the duties and discharge the functions which it imposes on them'" Id. at 30-31 (citation omitted). QUERY: How present, strong, and stable are these three conditions in twenty-first-century America? Do the contours of the 2016 Presidential election raise serious questions regarding the state of representative democracy in America? Food for thought.).

FROM THE WAR ON POVERTY TO THE THE WAR ON CRIME TO THE WAR ON TERROR?

Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2016) (There are several lessons implicit in the serious work on the history of criminal justice in the second half of the twentieth century ad the first two decades of the twenty-first. First, when it comes to the war on crime, there is little difference between 'conservatives' and 'liberals, especially when it comes to their willingness to treat crime along racial lines.  Two, that many of the same ideals, policies, arguments, academic finding, statistics, etc., that have been trotted out from the 1960s through the 2000s, even though found to be wrong, incomplete, racially biases, etc., are being, and will continue to be, recycled in today. That is, ideas matter, and bad ideas seem to mater a great deal because they have staying power.  Three, that the criminal justice system is really an injustice system, and all involved are either active participants in its corruptions, or are complicity and/or naive. And, four, that the war on poverty and the war on crime, both failures and mainly fought along racial lines, may provide insights on how the war on domestic terror will be a failure and lost (or, at least, not won) and fought along racial lines (e.g., Muslims, Arabs and non-Western European immigrants). Woe be us!).

Austin Reed, The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict, edited and with an introduction by Caleb Smith, foreword by David W. Blight & Robert B. Stepto (New York: Random House, 2016).

BECOMING MORE GROWNUP ABOUT FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION

Timothy Garton Ash, Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2016) (From the book jacket: "Drawing on a lifetime of writing about dictatorships and dissidents, Timothy Garner Ash argues that in this connected world that he calls cosmopolis, the way to combine freedom and diversity is to have more but also better free speech. Across all cultural divides, we must strive to agree on how we disagree. He draws on a thirteen-language global online project--freespeechdebate.com--conducted out of Oxford University and devoted to doing just that. With vivid examples . . . he proposes a framework for civilized conflict in a world where we are all  becoming neighbors." From the text: "Today's veto statements come most often in the form of claimed offense to a group identity. . . . The logic is the same: the legitimation, with negative consequences for others, of a purely subjective act of taking offence. Thus, for example, an every longer list of terms and images may be ruled off limits because they might just be offensive to someone. . . . " "There are at least two mutually reinforcing reasons for refusing to limit freedom of expression on ground of such purely subjective offensiveness. The first is a matter of, so to speak, moral psychology: Do we want to be the kind of human beings who are habitually at the ready to take offence and our children to reeducated and socialized that way? Do we wish out children to learn to be adults or our adults to be treated like children? Should our role model be the thin-skinned identity activist who is constantly crying, 'I am offended'? Or should it rather be the Mandela, Baldwin or Gandhi who says, in effect, 'although what I see written or depicted is grossly offensive, I hold it beneath my dignity to take offence. It is those who abuse me who are are demeaning themselves'. 'Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me' then becomes not a patently false description of reality by a precept for fortitude." Id. at 90-91.).

DOES THE AVERAGE AMERICAN APPRECIATE HOW MUCH LIBERTY HAS BEEN CURTAILED IN THE NAME OF WAR ON TERROR?

Mark Danner, Spiral: Trapped in the Forever War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016) (From the book jacket: "The war on terror has led to fourteen years of armed conflict, the longest war in America's history. Though al Qaeda, the jihadist groups that attacked us on September 11, 2012, has allegedly been 'decimated'--the word is President Obama's--its place has been taken by multiple jihadist and terror organizations, including the most notorious: the  Islamic State." "Spiral describes how the perpetual, ever-widening war has plunged the country into a never-ending 'state of exception .' [] Although only a tiny percentage of Americans are engaged in combat, all have seen their accustomed rights and freedoms circumscribed in the name of security. With indefinite detention, 'enhanced interrogation,' and drone warfare, ideals we once took for granted have been degraded and compromised." "Meantime the war on terror grinds on, the Caliphate expands, the Middle East drowns in civil wars, and whole populations flee and seek asylum in Europe. Because the threat is defined as boundless and unceasing, we have . . . 'let it define us as ideological crusaders caught in an endless war.' Only by casting our eyes over--and beyond--this ideology can we ever hope to escape the spiral.").

Maximilian Uriarte, The White Donkey: Terminal Lance (New York: Little, Brown, 2016) (From the back cover: "A graphic novel of war and its aftermath. The story of a United States Marine and his journey to and from Iraq. A powerful experience that will leave you change.").

Lawrence Wright, The Terror Years: From al-Qaeda to the Islamic State (New York: Knopf, 2016) (From the book jacket: "On the fifteenth anniversary of 9/11, The Terror Years is at once a unifying recollection of the roots of contemporary Middle Eastern terrorism, a study of how it has grown and metastasized, and, in the scary and moving epilogue, a cautionary tale of where terrorism might take us yet." From the text: "Terror, as a strategy, rarely succeeds, except in one respect: it creates repression on the part of the state [for example. restrictions on the domestic and constitutional liberties of Americans] or the occupying power [for example, mistakes made by the occupying U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan]. This is an expected and longed for goal of terrorists, who seek to counter the state's vast military advantage bu forcing it to overreact, generating popular support for the cause." Id. at 341.  "It's a myth that terrorism never succeeds . . . " Id. at 344. "The conflict that the Islamic State has provoked will ultimately bring about its destruction, but not without much more havoc and heartache." Id. at 348.).

ADAM SMITH'S MOTHER

Katrine Marcal, Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner?: A Story of Women and Economics, translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel (New York & London: Pegasus Books, 2016) ("The 'having it all' narrative is, at its core, a story about the broken promises of feminism. The women's movement told us we could have unencumbered full-time careers, a loving partner, well-adjusted children, time to cook dinner every night, and still some energy left to save the world in the evening after the kids went to bed. Then when these promises couldn't all be delivered, everyone blamed feminism. However, as I will argue here, this is not a failure of feminism, but a failure of economics." Id at v. "Yes, feminism needs economics, but even more than that: Economics needs feminism." Id. at viii. "We can joke about these things, or take them seriously, but one fact remains: Lehman Brothers would never have been Lehman Sisters. A world where women dominated Wall Street would have had to be so completely different from the actual world that to describe it wouldn't tell us anything about the actual world. Thousands of years of history would need to be rewritten in order to lead up to the hypothetical moment that an investment bank named Lehman Sisters could handle its over-exposure to an overheated American housing market." "The thought experiment is meaningless." You can't just switch out 'brother' for 'sisters'." Id. at 3. "This is a story about being seduced. It's about how insidiously a certain view of economics has crawled under our skin. How it has been allowed to dominate other values, not just the global economy, but in our own lives. It's about men and women and about how when we make toys real, they gain power over us." Id. at 6. I have to give a special shoutout to the beginning of one chapter's beginning: "CHAPTER SIXTEEN: In which we will see that every society suffers in line with its bullshit. . . ." "You might think it silly that the world's third-largest indoor snow park is in Dubai. On the Persian Gulf, On the 25th parallel north, The temperature outside is around forty degrees Celsius in the dry, windy summer months, In the winter it goes down to twenty-three." Id. at 179. There the invisible hand for you. Whatever (invisible) body that the invisible hand of economics is attached, it is a body with an invisible (or should I say nonexistent) brain. Which leads me back to the end of the previous chapter, Chapter Fifteen: "What we call economic theory is the formal version of dominant world view is our society. The greatest story of our time, who we are, why we are here and the reason we do what we do." Ad the person in this story, economic man? His defining characteristic is that he is not a woman." Id. at 178. In short, men, especially economic men, do really stupid shit such as (1) building snow parks period, and (2) building the world's third-largest indoor snow park in Dubai. Also, see generally, Anne Lowrey, "Division of Labor," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 6/12/2016.).

EDUCATION: PARTICIPATORY READINESS

Danielle Allen, Education and Equality, with comments by Tommie Shelby, Marcel Suarez-Orozco, Michael Rebell, & Quiara Algeria Hudes (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2016) ("The preparation of citizens through education for civic and political engagement supports the pursuit of political equality, but political equality, in turn, may well engender more egalitarian approaches to the economy. An education that prepares students for civic and political engagement brings into play the prospect of political contestation around issues of economic fairness. In other words, education can affect income inequality not merely by spreading technical skills and compressing the income distribution. It can even have an effect on income inequality by increasing a society's political competitiveness and thereby impacting, 'how technology evolves, how markets functions, and how the gains from various different economic arrangements are distributed'." Id. at 32, citing Ian Wei, Intellectual Culture in Medieval Paris (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 2012).).

THE FRAUDS OF COLORBLINDNESS IN AMERICA, or why the rise of Trumphism should not be surprising to anyone

Paula Ioanide, The Emotional Politics of Racism: How Feelings Trump Facts in an Era of Colorblindness ((Stanford: Stanford U. Press, 2015) (From the backcover: "With stop-and-frisk laws, new immigration policies, and cuts to social welfare programs, majorities in the United States have increasingly intensified forms of punishment and marginalization against Black, Latino, Arab and Muslim people in the United States, even as a majority of citizens claim to support 'colorblindness' and racial equality. With this book, Pauls Ioanide examines how emotion has prominently figured into these contemporary expressions of racial discrimination and violence, and how these widespread fears have played a central role in justifying the expansion of our military and prison system. But Ioanide also argues that within each of these cases there is opportunity for new mobilizations, for ethical witnessing: we must also popularize desires for justice and increase people's receptivity to the testimonies of the oppressed by reorganizing embodied and unconscious structures of feeling." From the text: "Emotional rewards and losses attached to contemporary expressions of gendered racism, nativism, and imperialism play an integral role in shaping the generalizable conditions of our time." Id. at 9. "The challenge we face is not that people have stopped talking about race and sexuality. Color-blind terms such as 'criminals,' 'drug dealers,' 'thugs,' 'gangsters,' 'urban underclass,' 'inner cities,' terrorists,' hijackers,' 'suicide bombers,' 'Islamic fundamentalists,' 'welfare queeens,' 'crack mothers,' 'hyperfertile mothers,' 'illegal aliens,' 'gangs,' 'drug cartels,' and 'taxpayer burdens' have become coded lingua franca used by dominant U.S. publics to talk about race, gender, sexuality, and nationality. Rather, our core challenge is that these putatively color-blind terms are used to espouse the hegemonic belief that the 'behavioral deficiences' of Black, Latino/a, Arab, and Muslim people are the primary cause of these groups' marginalization. Those who believe that Black, Latino/a, Arab, Muslim people are culturally dysfunctional often believe that the violence, discrimination, and exclusion that these groups regularly experience are either self-induced or deserved." Id. at  9-10. "The ingenuity of post-civil rights nativist groups was to cultivate anti-Mexican and anti-undocumented immigrant sentiments in color-blind and coded rather than explicitly racists ways. []But not everyone in anti-Mexican and anti0Latino/a nativist emotional economies was motivated by blatant white supremacist views. Indeed, the effectiveness of these color-blind, gendered, and racially coded discourses lay in their ability to recruit moderates, liberals, and immigrants themselves to identify and support exclusionary policies and outcomes based on their sense of economic loss and eroding natural resources, the moral righteousness of being law abiding and self-sufficient, and their heteronormative family ideals." Id. at 131-132. "Perhaps the most disheartening effect of the rising dominance of nativist fantasies, feelings, and state discourses about undocumented immigrants is the way that Latino/a. Asian, Africans, Caribbean, and other immigrants have themselves been encouraged to participate in economies of shame, stigmatization, and blame tied to criminality, welfare dependence, and illegality. To distinguish themselves as good immigrants, Latino/a, Asian, Caribbean, African, and other documented immigrants have sometimes taken hard anti-undocumented immigrant positions. Not wanting to be perceived as illegal or dependent on welfare or as taxpayer burdens, some immigrants have elected to adopt extreme stances on self-reliance, hard work, and personal responsibility. Such stances, particularly when Latino/a, Asian, African, or other immigrants of color hold them, effectively reinforce a dominant public climate that discourages immigrants to feel entitle to public goods they have helped subsidize. Although these immigrants are admirable for their self-determination and networks of familial and communal self-reliance, such 'pull yourself up by your own bootstraps' endorsements ultimately support neoliberal and conservative agendas that seek further privatization and divestment from social welfare safety nets." Id at 132-133. Connects the many dots between, among other things, NYPD's rape of  Abner Louima, the U.S. military's rape of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Clinton's embrace of the republican welfare reforms, neoliberalism's abandonment and shaming of the poor, New Orlean's and the Bush administration's abandonment of poor people of color in the aftermath of Katrina, and White America's criminalization of mainly, but not exclusively, Latino/a immigrants. This book is an important read.).

THE WAR OF TERROR AND THE DEGRADATION OF THE U. S. CONSTITUTION

Owen Fiss, A War Like No Other: The Constitution in a Time of Terror, edited and with a foreword by Trevor Sutton (New York & London: The New Press, 2015) (From the book jacket: "The ten chapters in this volume cover the major legal challenges posed by the War on Terror, from Guantanamo to drones, with a focus on their constitutional dimensions. The underlying theme is Fiss's concern for the offense done to the U. S Constitution by the administrative and political branches of government in the name of public safety, and the refusal of the judiciary to hold the government accountable, Fiss confronts the danger that many of the offenses will outlast the political climate that created them." "Although the legal dimensions of the War on Terror are often perceived as affecting only those accused or suspected of terrorist activities, in Fiss's view the character of American society itself is also at stake. When the Constitution is degraded in the name of national security, the rights of all those subject to the authority of the US, government are at risk." In short, America's response to terror, not the terror itself, has destabilized (and is continuing to destabilize) the the U.S. Constitution and, as a consequence, is destroying America. Americans chose safety over freedom, and got both less safety and less freedom.).

And, does anyone remember the internment of Japanese Americans?

Peter Irons, Justice at War: The Story of the Japanese American Internment Cases (New York & Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1983) (From the book jacket: "The internment of over 110,000 Japanese Americans during World War II has been called 'the greatest deprivation of civil liberties by government in this country since slavery.' How did it happen? This books shows how some of the most important individuals of their day swallowed their moral scruples and compromised basic legal principles--including suppressing evidence--as they helped formulate and implement President Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066." From the text: "The actions of both groups of lawyers raise profound questions of legal ethics and professional responsibility. Lawyers are subject to a code of ethics that requires them to 'zealously' represent the interests of their clients. In their examination of witnesses at trial, their presentation of oral testimony and documentary evidence, their framing of legal briefs, and their arguments to appellate courts, lawyers are bound by the dictates of the adversary system to represent the strongest case possible; it is the task of opposing lawyers to probe the weaknesses in these cases and to offer countering evidence and arguments." "But there are limits to the adversary system. Lawyers not only represent their clients but also function as officers of the courts, sworn to canons of fairness and justice. The same code of ethics--supported by judicial decisions--requires that lawyers present to the courts only that evidence they know tone truthful, and that they contain their briefs and arguments within the bounds of the trial records, In addition, lawyers are commanded to avoid any appeal to racial prejudice, Violation of this injunction constitutes a serious breach of legal ethics." "The wartime setting of the Japanese American cases put this code to the test." Id. at ix. And, one would think, so will America's so-called war on terror which seems to be running the risk of morphing into a war on Muslims and Arabs. Food for thought?).

FOOD FOR THOUGHT: NO ONE CHOOSES THEIR LIFE, ESPECIALLY THEIR TRAGIC LIFE.

Joanna Connors, I will Find You: A Reporter Investigates the Life of the Man Who Raped Her (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2016) ("I knew Holman was trying to make me feel better, but it didn't work. I felt hollow. What difference did it make to me if other prisoners hurt David Francis? What was the point of any of it? American prisons and jails hold 2.3 million men and women. Counting various forms of community supervision outside prison, 1 in 35 Americans was under some form of correctional supervision at the end of 2013, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics." "They serve their time, most of them keeping their heads down or looking over their shoulders, just trying to make it through the threats and fights and dull routines of daily prison life. And then after a few years we let them out. But to what? What awaits David Francis when he was paroled in 1984? His mother was dying, his father was worthless, he had not finished high school, and he had a rap-sheet that ran for pages and pages. What did anyone think he would do when he got out?" "I could't stop thinking about the utter waste of that life and all those lives, and when I visited Mansfield, another of David Francis's stops on his tour of Ohio's prisons, I said something to that effect to the warden." "'Don't feel sympathetic toward him,' the warden said, looking at me with a stern expression. 'Lot's of people have hard lives, but they don't rape and murder other people. The guys in here? They deserve to be here.'" 'Well, that was true, too. If they had not caught him after he raped me, the cops and the judges were sure he would have raped again, and possibly escalated to murder, He deserved to go back to prison." "Still, I kept thinking about what Philip said" 'I did't ask to be born. It's not my fault I was born. I still try to figure it out to this day: What did we do wrong to deserve such a tragic life?'" "In it I heard an echo of Paradise Lost, when Adam asks God" 'Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay to mould me man, did I solicit thee from darkness to promote me?'" Id. at 237-238. In short, there but for fortune go I . . . or you!).

NEIL GAIMAN ON THE IMPORTANCE OF READING FICTION

Neill Gaiman, The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction (New York: William Morrow, 2016) (From "Why Our Future Depends on Libraries, Reading and Daydreaming: The Reading Agency Lecture, 2013): "It's important for people to tell you what side they are on and why, and whether they might be biased. A declaration of member's interests, of a sort. So, I am going to be talking to you about reading. I'm going to tell you that libraries are important. I'm going to suggest that reading fiction, that reading for pleasure, is one of the most important things one can do. I'm going to make an impassioned plea for people to understand what libraries and librarians are, and to preserve both of these things." Id. at 4, 4. "We navigate the world with words, and as the world slips not the Web, we need to follow, to communicate and to comprehend what we're reading." "People who cannot understand each other cannot exchange ideas, cannot communicate, and translation programs only get you so far." "The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity." Id. at 6-7. "Literate people read fiction, and fiction has two uses. Firstly, it's a gateway drug treading, The drive to know what happens next, to want totter the page, the need to keep going, even if it's hard, because someone's in trouble and you have to know how it's all going to end . . .  [] The second thing that fiction does is to build empathy. . . .  Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals." You're also finding out something as you read that will be really important for making your way in the world, And it's this: THE WORLD DOESN'T HAVE TO BE LIKE THIS. THINGS CAN BE DIFFERENT." Id. at 6-8.).

ANATOMY OF LIMOUSINE LIBERALISM

Steve Fraser, The Limousine Liberal: How an Incendiary Image United the right and Fractured America (New York: Basic Books, 2016) (From the book jacket: "The Limousine Liberal tells an extraordinary story of why the most privileged and powerful elements of American society were indicted as subversives and reveals the reality that undergrads that myth. It goes to the heart of the great political transformation of the postwar era: the rise of the conservative right and the unmaking of the liberal consensus."  From the text: "[F]amily capitalism and racial populism did not inhabit the same political space, nor did they pursue the same objectives. Family capitalism, rooted in the proprietary pride, old-fashioned morality, and provincial customs of its patriarchs, chafed at the preeminence and political agnosticism of those faceless managerial bureaucrats running the nation's Fortune 500 and wielding so much influence over both major political parties. Yet middling sorts from the ethnic barrios of metropolitan America cared less about that than they did about how liberal elites dismissed every grievance voiced by the white working class as a form of disguised racism. No common language linked these two worlds of the discontented." "Limousine liberalism served as that bilingual translator. It is impossible to understand the perseverance and passion of right-wing populist politics in America without coming to grips with this metaphor, where it originated, how it evolved, why it persists, and where it may be taking us." Id. at 8. "Limousine liberalism surfaced as a particularly striking metaphor and epithet (if not the first one) to register the hostility of idling classes to this alarming new social reality. It is the unwanted stepchild of the political capitalism that supplanted its lassie-faire predecessor. Millions have been mobilized by it lush imagery, its self-righteousness, its manly bravado, its devotional commitment to a familial homeland writ large, and its faith in the liberationist metaphysics of the free market. They relish exposing the real and imputed hypocrisies of privileged sophisticates. But in the end, they are reacting both to the successes and the failures of what the modern capitalist order has wrought. Neither suit them yet the are ensnared in both, hence the logic behind the illogical demand that the government keep its hands off Medicare. Consumerism delights but also demoralizes. Racial prejudice lives but in shame. Shrines are erected to the patriarchal family even as it dissolves where it is most worshipped." Id. at 242-243. The book contains brief discussions, and from historical perspectives, of anti-Semisitsm, anti-immigration, America's racial caste system, etc. In short, most of the fracturing of in the twenty-first century is not new. There is also a reference to the German novelist Hans Falluda's 1930s novel, Little Man What Now? The title "was intended to capture the confusion and anxiety experienced by Germans of meager means and precarious social position caught in the maelstrom of the Great Depression and tossed to and fro by the mobilized armies of communism, socialism, and Nazism. Many such people looked only for a way of retreating into the recesses of some private safe haven. But that was hard to find. So some enlisted in movements that simultaneously voiced anger at those bigger and littler than they. They inveighed against the big shots, who always seemed to prevail and even prosper on the misery of those beneath them, but then again, made sure to keep their distance from and stigmatize the lower orders (proletarians, the unemployed, immigrant aliens), whether to better defend their own material well-being or as a compensation for their own existential insecurities, or both. This might be called the 'politics of the little man.'" Id. at 129. Query: Are Americans in the mist of little-man politics?).

2016 LOOKS A LOT LIKE 1966: SEGREGATED HOUSING AND A LAW AND ORDER AGENDA

Randall B. Woods, Prisoners of Hope: Lydon B. Johnson, the Great Society, and the Limits of Liberalism (New York: Basic Books, 2016) ("In August [1966], Martin Luther King's lieutenants in Chicago sent racially mixed teams into two all-white residential sections, Gage Park-Chicago lawn, a mostly Lithuanian, Polish, and German area on the Southwest Side, and Belmont Cragin, a Northwest-Side colony of Poles and Italians. In both 'tests,' real estate agents offered to sell to whites, but not to blacks. Thereupon, King personally led protest marches into the two neighborhoods. In Belmont Cragin, a howling mob that eventually reached fifty-four thousand, waved rebel flags, sported Nazi insignia, and pelted the marchers with rocks and beer bottles. In Gage Park, a white mob taunted and assaulted marchers to the time of a ditty entitled 'Alabama Trooper': 
          I wish I were an Alabama trooper,
          That is what I would truly like to be;
          I wish I were an Alabama trooper
         'Cause then I could kill the niggers legally.
Bruised and battered, King commented, 'I think on the whole, I've never seen as much hate and hostility before, and I've been on a lot of marches." By october, Congress had made a it clear that it would not pass a civil rights bill with a fair housing section in it. LBJ and his advisers decided that it was better to have no bill at all than one without housing. The White House let it be known that it was giving up--but only for the moment. It would be back again after the midterm elections, however they might turn out. Meanwhile, Congress busied itself with the white backlash. The House Un-American Activities Committee announced plans to investigate 'subversive elements' that were no doubt responsible for the riots. The Judiciary Committee began hearing on a stack of eighty separate antiriot bills." Id. at 277. Please note, those "subversive elements" were mainly civil rights groups, not the white anti-civil rights groups. And Congress began pursuing a law and order agenda, ignoring a fair housing issue. Fifty years later, in 2016, residential housing remains highly segregated Donald Trump, the Republican Party's presidential candidate, claims himself to be "the law and order candidate." The more things change, the more things remain the same.).

ON AMERICANS' [SELF-]CONTEMPT

Sebastian Junger, TRIBE: On Homecoming and Belonging (New York: Twelve, 2016) ("I know what coming back to America from a war zone is like because I've done it so many times. First there is a kind of shock at the level of comfort and affluence that we enjoy, but that is followed by the dismal realization that we live in a society that is basically at war with itself. People speak with incredible contempt about--depending on their views--the rich, the poor, the educated, the foreign-born, the president, or the entire US government. It's a level of contempt that is usually reserved for enemies in wartime, except that now it's applied to our fellow citizens. Unlike criticism, contempt is particularly toxic because it assumes a moral superiority in the speaker. Contempt is often directed at people who have been excluded from a group or declared unworthy of its benefits. Contempt is often used by governments to provide rhetorical cover for torture or abuse. Contempt is one of four behaviors that, statistically, can predict divorce in married couples. People who speak with contempt for one another will probably not remain united for long." Id. at 125-126.).

THE ETHICAL REALM OF OUR RELATIONSHIP TO OTHERS.

Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2016) ("Rather than think of 'our' relationship to others as a thin one existing in a moral realm, influenced by religious codes, I think of this relationship as existing in an ethical realm where people can struggle to remember others through secular acts of inclusion, conversation, recognition, and hope. The remoteness of these strangers and distant others is not only a function of geography. . . . Sometimes we detest our neighbors and feel more affinity for those far away, as in the case with some Americans' attitudes toward Mexico and, say, England. Those who feel such affinity believe it to be natural, even though it is actually learned. The naturalness arises from our having forgotten how we came by this affinity whereby some Americans think that they share more culturally with the English than the Mexicans. In contrast to psychic intimacy, physical proximity is not a guarantee of creating feeling of nearness and dearness. Americans did not enslave those who lived far from them, but instead enslaved those who lived with them or next door to them, including their lovers and illegitimate offspring. Men denied the vote to their wives and daughters and constricted their lives. Today, of course, slavery and the denial of political franchise to vast populations no longer seem to exist as realistic options. But there is nothing 'natural' about this current state of fragile, partial reconciliation around race and gender relations. Bitter political struggle led Americans to this point. This struggle included a multitude of intimate gestures and relationships between people who chose to learn about and live with others, even to love them. The moral demand to treat our fellow human beings as we wish to be treated becomes, through political effort, the ethics of seeing them as part of our 'natural' community, sharers of our national identity." Id at 59-60.).