Friday, June 30, 2017
QUOTE OF THE DAY
On Donald Trump:
"There is no greater threat, actually, to a weak man than a powerful woman."
Elizabeth Plank, Senior Correspondent Vox Media
"There is no greater threat, actually, to a weak man than a powerful woman."
Elizabeth Plank, Senior Correspondent Vox Media
THE IDEA OF UTOPIA
Gregory Claeys, Searching for Utopia: The History of an Idea (Thames & Hudson, 2011) (From the book jacket: "This book is an illustrated history of a perennially powerful idea: the quest for the ideal society.").
Thursday, June 29, 2017
ARTHUR CECIL PIGOU
Ian Kumekawa, The First Serious Optimist: A. C. Pigou and the Birth of Welfare Economics (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2017) (Pigou was [Alfred] Marshall's student at a decisive moment, one at which Marshall was casting about for young disciples to become integrally involved in his new program. The result was that Pigou was personally plucked from the study of history and mentored by the greatest economist then working in Britain. His early connection with Marshall afforded him the imprimatur of the leader of British economists and enabled him to participate in the genesis of a new orthodoxy. Yet unlike colleagues just a few years younger, Pigou was not educated exclusively as an economist. Instead, he was one of the last--perhaps the last--important economic thinker in Britain to come up under the old system in which politics, history, and moral science mingled with economic theory. Pigou's early economics, then, were almost unique in that they bore the clear marks of two systems. Though works o abstract theory, they took history, politics, and morality very seriously. And though forged in the crucible of a new science, they were clearly imbued with and inspired by ethical impulses." Id. at 33.).
Wednesday, June 28, 2017
Tuesday, June 27, 2017
THE NEED FOR POLITICAL RESISTANCE TO THE AUTOCRACY DWELL, OBVIOUSLY, WELL BEYOND AMERICA
Arundhati Roy, The End of Imagination (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016) (From “My Seditious Heart”: “Now it’s true that my views on these matters are at variance with those of the ruling establishment. In better days, that used to be known as a critical perspective or an alternative worldview. These days in India, it’s called sedition.” Id. at 1, 2. Note, American has not quite gone off the rails completely. Not yet! Yet . . . has not Donald Trump labeled the new media “the Enemy of the People”? Weren’t judges who stayed his Muslim Ban (Do let’s call it what it is!) labelled “So-called judges”? Does he not believe (or, at least, does he not say he believes) that anyone who suggests Russian interference in the 2016 election is engaged in a witch hunt designed to undermine the legitimacy of his presidency? So, America is barely holding steady on the rails with Trump as train engineer. By the way, India’s prime minister Modi, like America’s Trump, is a ‘Twitter-lover.' And, like Trump, he is remarkably silent on Twitter when one would expect a country’s leader(s) to speak up. “In September 2015, a mob gathered outside the home of a Muslim family in Dadri, a village near Delhi, claiming that they had been eating beef (a violation of the ban on cow slaughter that had been imposed in Uttar Pradesh as well as in several other states). The family denied it. The mob refused to believe them. Mohammad Akhlaq was pulled out of his home and bludgeoned to death. . . . The meat taken from Akhlaq’s house turned out not to be beef after all. But so what?” “For days after that, the Twitter-loving prime minister said nothing. . . . “ Id. at 15. “Worship a flag? My soul is either too modern or too ancient for that. I’m not sure which. Maybe both.” Id. at 35.).
D'HOBACH'S COTERIEl
Alan Charles Kors, D'Holbach's Coterie: An Enlightenment in Paris (Princeton Legacy Library) Princeton: (Princeton U. Press, 1976) (From the Preface: "The subtitle of this work, 'An Enlightenment in Paris,' carries a double meaning. Indeed, the coterie holbachique, in its diversity, its admixture of the profound and the frivolous, its broad tolerance, and its various individual searches for ways to understand and to improve the secular world, constituted an important element, and is some ways a microcosm, of French Enlightenment." Id. at ix. "Far from being the alienated figures or outcasts that some historians had depicted as the coterie holbachique, the devotees of d'Holbach's circle, it soon became evident, with few exceptions has risen into (and in a few cases had been born into) various elites within the privileged structures of the Ancient Regime. From these heights they had served their causes. Beginning in 1789, those vantages and the riles of the men who occupied them increasingly were under assault. For the coterie holbachique the Revolution meant an end to their lace in the process of enlightenment as they conceived it." Id. at x.).
Monday, June 26, 2017
CULTURE'S RELATION TO HISTORY
Marshall Sahlins, Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2004, 2013) ("The claim is not that culture determines history, only that it organizes it." Id. at 11. "The past is not a foreign country. It is relationships among countries." Id. at 103.).
Sunday, June 25, 2017
SUGGESTED FICTION
Margaret Atwood, Hag-Seed: The Tempest Retold (London & New York: Hogarth Shakespeare, 2016) (See Emily St. John Mandel, "Brave New World," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 10/30/2016.).
Robert Coover, Huck Out West: A Novel (New York & London: Norton, 2017).
Louise Erdrich, LaRose: A Novel (New York: Harper, 2016).
Jonathan Safran Foer, Here I Am: A Novel (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016).
George Gissing, The Odd Women, with an introduction by Elaine Showalter (New York: Penguin Classics/Penguin Books, 1993).
Eytan Halaban, The Vermeer Conspiracy: A Novel (Portland, OR: InkwaterPress, 2015).
Deborah Levy, Hot Milk: A Novel (New York & London: Bloomsbury, 2016).
Immobile Mbue, Behold the Dreamers: A Novel (New York: Random House, 2016).
Robert Coover, Huck Out West: A Novel (New York & London: Norton, 2017).
Louise Erdrich, LaRose: A Novel (New York: Harper, 2016).
Jonathan Safran Foer, Here I Am: A Novel (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016).
George Gissing, The Odd Women, with an introduction by Elaine Showalter (New York: Penguin Classics/Penguin Books, 1993).
Eytan Halaban, The Vermeer Conspiracy: A Novel (Portland, OR: InkwaterPress, 2015).
Deborah Levy, Hot Milk: A Novel (New York & London: Bloomsbury, 2016).
Immobile Mbue, Behold the Dreamers: A Novel (New York: Random House, 2016).
SAINT-EXUPERY
Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Flight to Arras, translated from the French by Lewis Galantiere (New York: A Harvest Book/ Harcourt Brace, 1986) ("Historians will forget reality. They will invent thinking men, joined by mysterious fibers to an intelligible universe, possessed of sound farsighted views and pondering grave decisions according to the purest laws of Cartesian logic. There will be powers of good and power of evil. Heroes and traitors. But treason implies responsibility for something, control over something, influence upon something, knowledge of something. Treason in our time is a proof of genius. Why, I want to know, are not traitors decorated." Id. at 79-80.).
Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Letter to a Hostage, translated from the French by Cheryl Witchell (Middletown, DE: Babelcube Books, 2016).
Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Night Flight, translated from the French by Stuart Gilbert, preface by Andre Gide (New York: A Harvest Book/ Harcourt, 1932).
Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Southern Mail, translated from the French by Curtis Cate (with acknowledgment to Stuart Gilbert's translation) (New York: A Harvest Book/ Harcourt, 1984).
Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Wartime Writings, 1939-1944, translated from the French by Noah Purcell, with an introduction by Anne Morrow Lindbergh (New York: A Harvest Book/ Harcourt, 1982, 1986).
Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Wind, Sand and Stars, translated from the French by Lewis Galantiere (New York: A Harvest Book/ Harcourt, 1939, 1967).
Stacy Schiff, Saint-Exupery: A Biography (New York: Little, Brown, 1994).
Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Letter to a Hostage, translated from the French by Cheryl Witchell (Middletown, DE: Babelcube Books, 2016).
Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince, translated from the French by Katherine Woods (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1943) (I first read this book in November, 1974. It was given to me as a birthday present.).
Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Southern Mail, translated from the French by Curtis Cate (with acknowledgment to Stuart Gilbert's translation) (New York: A Harvest Book/ Harcourt, 1984).
Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Wartime Writings, 1939-1944, translated from the French by Noah Purcell, with an introduction by Anne Morrow Lindbergh (New York: A Harvest Book/ Harcourt, 1982, 1986).
Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Wind, Sand and Stars, translated from the French by Lewis Galantiere (New York: A Harvest Book/ Harcourt, 1939, 1967).
Stacy Schiff, Saint-Exupery: A Biography (New York: Little, Brown, 1994).
Friday, June 23, 2017
GERMAN LITERATURE
Nicholas Boyle, German Literature: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2008).
David E. Wellbery, Judith Ryan, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Anton Kaes, Joseph Leo Koerner, & Dorothea E. von Mucke, eds., A New History of German Literature (Harvard University Press Reference Library) (Cambridge, Massachusetts,& London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2004).
David E. Wellbery, Judith Ryan, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Anton Kaes, Joseph Leo Koerner, & Dorothea E. von Mucke, eds., A New History of German Literature (Harvard University Press Reference Library) (Cambridge, Massachusetts,& London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2004).
Thursday, June 22, 2017
Wednesday, June 21, 2017
ULYSSES GRANT
Ronald C. White, American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant (New York: Random House, 2016) ("In early 1871, Grant resolved to mount a comprehensive campaign against the Klan. In his first two years in office, sensitive to criticism of military overreach and placing his confidence in the ballot box, he had not moved against the Klan. Now he made the decision to act, even as he knew Congress was retreating form Reconstruction. Some Republicans--once strongly antislavery and supportive of Reconstruction amendments--joined with Democrats in minimizing stories of Klan violence and argues that any and all solutions should be left to the southern states. Grant believed that their terrorism had moved beyond the control of any one state and became convinced that the federal government needed to act." Id. at 521. "Grant's aggressive campaign against the Ku Klux Klan alienated many of his former Republican allies. at the 1870 Missouri Republican state convention in Jefferson City, Senator Carl Schurz bolted to preside over an alternative convention Calling themselves 'Liberal Republicans,' they nominated B. Gratz brown for governor. Promising to do away with a test oath that barred thousands of ex-Confederates form voting, Brown ended up winning a decisive victory against Government Joseph McClurg--a Radical Republican. Schurz hastened to assure Grant that what happened in Missouri was purely a local affair." Id. at 528. However, it was not a purely local affair. "The term liberalism changed definition over the course of the nineteen century and suggested a set of values quite different form what people think of as liberalism in the twenty-first century. Liberal Republicans in 1872 embraced the timeless values of individual liberty, limited government, and free trade, while at the same time focusing on what they believe were the more timely imperatives of civil service reform and general amnesty for Confederates." Id. at 531. Also see T. J. Stiles, "A Man of Moral Courage," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 10/23/2016.).
BEING BLACK IN AMERICA
Video of Police Killing of Philando Castile Is Publicly Released
By MITCH SMITH
State investigators released the dashboard video of Officer Jeronimo Yanez shooting Mr. Castile in Minnesota last year that had been shown to jurors.
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ROMANTIC SUBJECTS
Richard Holmes, This Long Pursuit: Reflections of a Romantic Biographer (New York: Pantheon Books, 2016).
Tuesday, June 20, 2017
Monday, June 19, 2017
ANNIE JACOBSEN: SECRETS, NATIONAL SECURITY, WEAPONS, TECHNOLOGY, AND WAR, WAR AND WAR
Anne Jacobsen, Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base (New York: Little, Brown, 2011) ("This book is about government projects and operations that have been hidden for decades, some for good reason, other for arguably terrible ones, and one that should never have happened at all. These operations took place in the name of national security and they all involved cutting-edge science. The last published words of Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, were 'Science is not everything. But science is very beautiful.' After reading this book, readers can decide what they think about what Oppenheimer said." "This is a book about black operations, government projects that are secret from Congress and secret from the people who make up the United States. To understand how black projects began, and how they continue to function today, one must start with the creation of the atomic bomb. The men who ran the Manhattan Project wrote the rules about black operations. The atomic bomb was the mother of all black projects and it is the parent from which all black operations have sprung." Id. at xii.).
Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America (New York: Little, Brown, 2014) ("The army's herbicidal warfare program during the Vietnam War started in August 1961 and lasted until February 1971. More than 11.4 million gallons of Agent Orange were sprayed over approximately 24 percent of South Vietnam, destroying 5 million acres of uplands and forests and 500,000 acres of food crops--an area about eh size of the state of Massachusetts. An additional 8 million gallons of other anti crop agents, code-named Agents White, Blue, Purple, Pink, and Green, were also sprayed, mostly from C-123 cargo planes. Fritz Hoffmann was one of the earliest known U.S. Army Chemical Corps scientists to research the toxic effects of dioxin--possibly in the mid 1950s but for certain in 1959--as indicated in what has become known as the Hoffmann Trip Report. This document is used in almost every legal record pertaining to litigation by U.S. military veterans against the U.S. government and chemical manufacturers for its usage of herbicides and defoliants in the Vietnam War." "It is the long-term effects of the Agent Orange program that Gabriella Hoffmann believes would have ruined her father, had he known. 'Agent Orange turned out not only to defoliate trees but to cause great harm in children, ' Gabriella Hoffmann says. 'Dad was dead by then and I remember thinking, Thank God. It would have killed him to learn that. He was a gentle man. He wouldn't hurt a fly." Id. at 388.).
Annie Jacobsen, The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top Secret Military Research Agency (New York: Little, Brown, 2015) ("The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA as it is known, is the most powerful and most productive military science agency in the world. It is also one of the most secretive and . . . the least investigated. Its mission is to create revolutions in military since and to maintain technological dominance over the rest of the world." Id at 5. "One of the first insect cyborgs was unveiled in 2009. Inside a DARPA-funded laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, Professor Michael Maharbiz and his colleagues coupled a green June beetle with a machine. The scientists implanted electrodes into the brain and wings of a 2-centimeter-long beetle and sewed a radio receiver onto its back. By remotely delivering electrical pulses to the beetle's brain, they were able to start and stop the beating of the beetle's wings, thereby steering and controlling the insect flight." "In 2014, DARPA scientists working at North Carolina State University again broke new ground, this time with the Manduca sexta moth, or goliath worm, an insect with a metamorphic life cycle that lasts forty days. During the late pupa stage, DARPA scientist Dr, Alper Bozkurt and his team surgically inserted an electrode in the dorsal thorax of the moth, between its neck and abdomen. 'The tissue develops around the implanted electrodes and secures their attachment to the insect's body over the course of a few days,' explains team member Alexander Verderber. 'The electrodes emerges as a part of the insect body in the final adult stage as a moth.' By 'taking advantage of the rebuilding of the insect's entire tissue system during metaporphic development,' says Verderber, the scientists were able to create a steerable cyborg, part insect, part machine. 'One use of the biohybrid would be for use in applications such as search and rescue operations,' Bozkurt days. DARPA scientists working on such cyborg programs invariably describe the programs as designed to help society. Certainly subjects like free will, ethics, and the consequences of manufacturing cyborgs are worthy of and ripe for discussion. Another question: What are DARPA's plans for augmenting humans with machines?" Id at 412-413.).
Annie Jacobsen, Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis (New York: Little, Brown, 2017) (See Dick Teresi, "Weird Vibrations,"NYT Book Review, Sunday, 4/30/2017.).
Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America (New York: Little, Brown, 2014) ("The army's herbicidal warfare program during the Vietnam War started in August 1961 and lasted until February 1971. More than 11.4 million gallons of Agent Orange were sprayed over approximately 24 percent of South Vietnam, destroying 5 million acres of uplands and forests and 500,000 acres of food crops--an area about eh size of the state of Massachusetts. An additional 8 million gallons of other anti crop agents, code-named Agents White, Blue, Purple, Pink, and Green, were also sprayed, mostly from C-123 cargo planes. Fritz Hoffmann was one of the earliest known U.S. Army Chemical Corps scientists to research the toxic effects of dioxin--possibly in the mid 1950s but for certain in 1959--as indicated in what has become known as the Hoffmann Trip Report. This document is used in almost every legal record pertaining to litigation by U.S. military veterans against the U.S. government and chemical manufacturers for its usage of herbicides and defoliants in the Vietnam War." "It is the long-term effects of the Agent Orange program that Gabriella Hoffmann believes would have ruined her father, had he known. 'Agent Orange turned out not only to defoliate trees but to cause great harm in children, ' Gabriella Hoffmann says. 'Dad was dead by then and I remember thinking, Thank God. It would have killed him to learn that. He was a gentle man. He wouldn't hurt a fly." Id. at 388.).
Annie Jacobsen, The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top Secret Military Research Agency (New York: Little, Brown, 2015) ("The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA as it is known, is the most powerful and most productive military science agency in the world. It is also one of the most secretive and . . . the least investigated. Its mission is to create revolutions in military since and to maintain technological dominance over the rest of the world." Id at 5. "One of the first insect cyborgs was unveiled in 2009. Inside a DARPA-funded laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, Professor Michael Maharbiz and his colleagues coupled a green June beetle with a machine. The scientists implanted electrodes into the brain and wings of a 2-centimeter-long beetle and sewed a radio receiver onto its back. By remotely delivering electrical pulses to the beetle's brain, they were able to start and stop the beating of the beetle's wings, thereby steering and controlling the insect flight." "In 2014, DARPA scientists working at North Carolina State University again broke new ground, this time with the Manduca sexta moth, or goliath worm, an insect with a metamorphic life cycle that lasts forty days. During the late pupa stage, DARPA scientist Dr, Alper Bozkurt and his team surgically inserted an electrode in the dorsal thorax of the moth, between its neck and abdomen. 'The tissue develops around the implanted electrodes and secures their attachment to the insect's body over the course of a few days,' explains team member Alexander Verderber. 'The electrodes emerges as a part of the insect body in the final adult stage as a moth.' By 'taking advantage of the rebuilding of the insect's entire tissue system during metaporphic development,' says Verderber, the scientists were able to create a steerable cyborg, part insect, part machine. 'One use of the biohybrid would be for use in applications such as search and rescue operations,' Bozkurt days. DARPA scientists working on such cyborg programs invariably describe the programs as designed to help society. Certainly subjects like free will, ethics, and the consequences of manufacturing cyborgs are worthy of and ripe for discussion. Another question: What are DARPA's plans for augmenting humans with machines?" Id at 412-413.).
Annie Jacobsen, Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis (New York: Little, Brown, 2017) (See Dick Teresi, "Weird Vibrations,"NYT Book Review, Sunday, 4/30/2017.).
Saturday, June 17, 2017
NARRATION
Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, Updated edition (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: The MIT Press, 2017).
Friday, June 16, 2017
SUGGESTED FICTION
Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes, introduction by Alison Lurie (New York: New York Review Books Classics, 1999).
Sylvia Townsend Warner, Mr. Fortune, introduction by Adam Mars-Jones (New York: New York Review Books Classics, 2001) (contain both Mr. Fortune's Maggot and its sequel The Salutation).
Sylvia Townsend Warner, Summer Will Show, introduction by Claire Harman (New York: New York Review Books Classics, 2009).
Sylvia Townsend Warner, Mr. Fortune, introduction by Adam Mars-Jones (New York: New York Review Books Classics, 2001) (contain both Mr. Fortune's Maggot and its sequel The Salutation).
Sylvia Townsend Warner, Summer Will Show, introduction by Claire Harman (New York: New York Review Books Classics, 2009).
THE HELPLESSNESS OF INDIVIDUAL MORALITY
Bernhard Schlink, Guilt About the Past (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2010) (From "The Presence of the Past": "Even if learned properly, moral courage is not the only and maybe not even the first lesson to be gleaned from the past. What the past likewise so glaringly shows is the helplessness of individual morality in the absence of institutions in which citizens are recognised and matter, institutions that they can impact by their appeals and which they can depend on to respond and support. Once parties, unions and associations churches and clubs, universities, schools and courts have been forced into line, there comes a point when the ethics opposition survive only in quixotic heroic gestures." Id. at 23, 32-33. "And the lesson form the past is that maintenance of the and other institutions is as crucial a vaccine as assertions of individual morality." Id. at 34. QUERY: In the current political climate in America, especially in light on the attacks on the integrity of the media, the integrity of the election process, the integrity of facts and truth--that is, where false-facts and post-truth are ever-present--is individual morality helpless? From "Stories About the Past": "And I remember the professor whose class I attended in my third year at law school and through whom I came to understand that studying law is more than studying articles and paragraphs; that it includes history and philosophy and is a rich intellectual universe." Id. at 117, 130. QUERY: Is this lesson lost on most of even the "best" twenty-first-century American law students?).
Wednesday, June 14, 2017
Tuesday, June 13, 2017
Monday, June 12, 2017
BOOKS, PRINT, PAPER AND MORE.
Nicholas A. Basbanes, On Paper: The Everything of Its Two-Thousand-Year History (New York: Knopf, 2013) ("Beyond paper's obvious utility as a writing surface, its invention in China during the early years of the modern era made possible the introduction of printing, with the first down devices being stamps made from carved wooden blocks, a process known today as xylography (literally, writing with wood). Not long after the Arab world learned to make paper from the Chinese in the eighteen century, the Middle East became a center of intellectual energy, with paper providing the ideal means of recording the thoughts and calculations of Islamic scholars and mathematicians, Making its first toehold in Europe by way of Spain late in the eleventh century, the process moved in the thirteenth to Italy, which became, at about the same time, the cradle of what in later years would be known as the Renaissance. From Europe it made its way to North America and the rest of the inhabited world." Id. at xi.).
Nicholas A. Basbanes, About the Author: Inside the Creative Process (Durham, NC: Fine Book Press, 2010) (From "Robert Fagles" (Interviewed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on February 19, 1997, to discuss his translation of The Odyssey): Basbanes: "How did you feel when you heard in the news recently that Amherst College, your alma mater, gave an English major a degree, summa cum laude, without ever having been required to study Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, or Spenser?" Fagles: "I have been concerned by such stories. Especially about a story involving Amherst, where I went to college. I would like to ask a sneaky question, however. Did that person not read Shakespeare? Do we know that? What I am getting at is this: I checked with some colleagues in the English department at Princeton, and Shakespeare is not required in the Princeton English department. Is Shakespeare taught? Yes. Is Shakespeare enrolled well? Very well, and enrollments are rising? Is Homer required? Not exactly. But is Homer read? Absolutely. What I am getting at is something very simple, I think. Phyllis Franklin, the executive director at the Modern Language Association, said it best: Something does not have to be required in order to be read. These things, Shakespeare, Homer, they are too good to go away. Simply because something is not required does not mean that it is not being taught in courses. These things are too large, too old, too good to go away. I sense at my own university, at least, increasing interest, not decreasing interest." "There is a decrease in the number of times such things are required, but an increase in the general interest, the level of interest they arouse. Look at the sales of The Iliad and The Odyssey, for example. That is amazing. That is the most heartening thing I can imagine, These are trade book sales. It is enormously satisfying because it means that people are reading not just for recreation but to re-create themselves in some way, that there a real hunger for something they can sink their teeth into and get some nourishment." Id. at 65, 68-69.).
Nicholas A. Basbanes, Among the Gently Mad: Strategies and Perspectives for the Book Hunter in the Twenty-First Century (New York: A John Macrae Book/Henry Holt, 2002).
Nicholas A. Basbanes, Editions and Impressions: Twenty Years on the Book Beat (Durham, NC: Fine Book Press, 2007).
Nicholas A. Basbanes, Every Book Its Reader: The Power pf the Printed Word to Stir the World (New York: HarperCollins, 2005).
Nicholas A. Basbanes, A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books (New York: Henry Holt, 1995) ("With thought, patience, and discrimination, book passion becomes the signature of a person's character. When out of control and indulged to excess, it lets loose a fury of bizarre behavior. 'The bibliophile is the master of his books, the bibliomaniac their slaves,' the German bibliographer Hanns Bohatta steadfastly maintained, though the dividing line can be too blurry to discern." Id. at 9. "In a 1966 essay prepared for a psychiatric journal, the psychoanalyst Dr. Norman S. Weiner of Philadelphia described the bibliomaniac as a person with an 'inordinate desire' for books who will 'pursue a volume in an active or seductive way; he will use intrigue and stealth; he will hazard his fortune and he will journey around the world, or even marry for gain of a voted book.' On the basis of the evidence he had gathered, Dr. Weiner suggested that bibliomania is 'a problem solving complex of activity that relieves or directly gratifies certain instinctual drives." Id. at 27.).
Nicholas A. Basbanes, Patience and Fortitude: A Roving Chronicle of Book People, Book Places, and Book Culture (New York: HarperCollins, 2001) ("Any parent who has ever taken a son or a daughter off on a tour of prospective colleges learn after a while to anticipate the introductory drill by rote. A campus visit usually includes . . . an admiring walk through the library, where an estimate of the institution's total holdings is always given, particularly among the prestigious liberal arts colleges of the Northeast . . . which pride themselves in the strength of their print collection. The idea of having a library the size of a telephone booth would not be greeted with much enthusiasm by many alumni who contribute generously to their endowments, or for that matter bright young high school graduates intent on securing the finest possible education in an excruciatingly competitive world, and access to the most appealing research materials, electronic as well as print." "For institutions that direct their energy and resources to educating undergraduates, a library of 200,000 volumes is considered a respectable collection Four hundred thousand is above average, and half a million or more is excellent. Liberal arts colleges that approach the million mark represent an elite handful, and it is no coincident that institutions reporting holdings in that area are usually esteemed among the very best in the nation. A typical example is Oberlin College, a five-star institution twenty-five miles southwest of Cleveland, Ohio, with 2,900 full-time students, 2,3000 of them undergraduates enrolled in the college of Arts and Sciences, the others in the internationally renowned Conservatory of Music. Total holdings, according to Ray English, the director of libraries, number 2 million items representing all media, including uncatalogued government documents. 'Books are very much a part of the calculus here,' he said. 'We assume that very strong local collections are essential for good undergraduate work.' By 'local,' English means books that are 'in-house and immediately available to our students and faculty.' On average, Oberlin acquires 240,00 new books a year--more than half of the total holdings considered adequate at California State University at Monterey Bay after six full years of operation--and does very little in the way of discarding." Id. at 461-462. "When Minor Myers Jr. was appointed president of Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington, Illinois, in 1989, he arrived in a mission to raise the school into the top tier of private liberal arts colleges in the United States. 'The first thing I saw when I arrived was a library with well under 200,000 books, and I started complaining immediately' . . . Id. at 472. 'Myers emphasized that he is not building up Illinois Wesleyan's infrastructure and print collection simply to achieve higher recognition among peer institutions. 'It's not just a matter of status, it's a question of teaching, research, and imagination. The things you have available at hand for students on an immediate basis are just as important as teaching or research. What I want is something gloriously useful that offers a dazzling source of information for students. Rather than wait two or three weeks for something to come in on interlibrary loan, I want a lot of real live books, and I want them here. Serendipity is the imagination factor I am talking about. It is the material you find in the stacks when you aren't prepared to find anything. This may sound increasingly quaint in this day and age, bur my idea of a college is a collection of students and faculty gathered around a great library, and here we will have a great reading room at the center of it all to make it happen." Id. at 474.).
Nicholas A. Basbanes, A Splendor of Letters: The Permanence of Books in an Impermanent World (New York: HarperCollins, 2003) ("In 1962, John Rader Platt (1918-1995), a University of Chicago physicist .... wrote an informed essay for the scholarly journal Horizon in which he speculated on the imminent arrival of a 'universal library' made possible by scientific breakthroughs, though today's reader would be perplexed to learn that the computer did not figure at all in the scenario he felt was just around the corner, nor was there any apparent movement toward the 'spoken book' championed by Guido Biago half a century earlier. 'Physicists these days are discussing a question that is going to be of interest to every literate person,' Platt began. 'How small a book can we make--and still read?'" "Platt projected the development of a microscopic process that would allow for what he called creation of a 'pinhead library' in which countless numbers of books could be stored in a minimum of space, and not just by libraries and institutions, but by individuals eager to have access to 'everything.'" [] "With the prospect of having 'all the world's literature and learning' at his fingertips, Platt had little room for romantic notions regarding the enjoyment of handling a real book, anticipating similar arguments pitting the advocates of content against the champions of artifacts that would emerge four decades down the road. 'We must remember that what is precious is not the physical "artifact" of a system of writing but the "metafacts," the human communications they contain,' Platt wrote, 'When our books change into new forms, children brought up to love the things of the mind will come to treat these forms with the same feeling or respect and familiarity and pleasure that we have had for the old ones.' To ease things along, he suggested that creation of ' complete Library of Congress within reach of every student and teacher and scientist might be comparable to the value of our great highway systems, and the initial development might be deserving of similar government support." Id. at 324-325. QUERY: But, are not America's highways, bridges, railroads, and overall infrastructure in gross disrepair and much in need of maintenance, repair, upgrade and replacement? Why would one expect the American taxpayers to have the will to maintain such a universal library when it cannot even maintain its transportation system?),
Nicholas A. Basbanes, A World of Letters: Yale University Press, 1908-2008 (New Haven London: Yale U. Press, 2008) ("In his interview with me, [Robert] Baldock [managing director of the London division of Yale University Press] touched on what he feels are the principal differences between New Haven and London. . . Baldock said that the London editors also are looking for books that tend to be more European in their scope, 'and that maybe is the big difference' between the lists. 'A lot of New Haven's books look at the U.S. experience in the world, and like every other American press, it publishes endless books on such subjects as the American Supreme Court, and things like that, which we can't sell here. Right now [2004] is an interesting time because just above the post-9/11 moment, Americans are looking at themselves and wondering why everybody dislikes them. So New Haven is producing more books about American concerns just at the time that the rest of the world is not buying them. I have great trouble telling American colleagues that this is in fact the truth. America is big and rich and important and wealthy, and yes, it can do what it likes, and in terms of book publishing, it publishes lots of books about itself. But then they are mildly surprised that the rest of the world doesn't want to buy them.'" Id. at 116-117. QUERY: Might this last comment suggest, more broadly, that America (and, by extension, Americans) may be able to do what it wants because of size and wealth, but that it does not follow that the rest of the world is going to take their clues from America (or Americans). Being the biggest, wealthiest, and most powerful (militarily), etc., does not necessarily mean that one is the leader and that others will follow. Perhaps it is time for America (and Americans) to reconsider its role in the world.).
Jonathan M. Bloom, Paper Before Print: The History and Impact of Paper in he Islamic World (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2001) ("The transfer of paper and papermaking technology from the Islamic lands to Christian Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries prepared the way for the European print revolution of the fifteenth century.Yet Gutenberg's invention might never have taken off it he and his followers had been limited to printing books on parchment. Gutenberg is thought to have printed 200 copies of his bible, 35 on parchment and 165 on paper, although only 40 copies survive altogether. Early printers used moveable type to produce editions of one hundred to two hundred, but by1500 print runs of one thousand or two thousand copies--the print run of modern scholarly titles--were not unusual. . . . All this printing required enormous quantities of paper and papermills throughout Europe struggled to meet demand." Id. at 203. Of course, one could be on the same page as, for example, Congressman Steve King. At the 2016 Republican National Convention he said, "This whole white people business, though, does get a little tired," "I'd ask you to go back through history and figure out where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you are talking about. Where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?" Oop! Where would western Europe and American be but for paper technology. Get out of the bubble.).
Paul Buckley, ed., Classic Penguin: Cover to Cover, illustrated by Matt Vee, foreword by Audrey Niffenegger, preface by Elda Rotor (New York: Penguin Books, 2016).
Christopher de Hamel, Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts (London: Allen Lane/Penguin Books, 2016).
Ben Kafka, The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork (New York: Zone Books, 2012) ("The crowds that stormed the Bastille found only seven prisoners, but over four hundred cartons of documents, stashed away in an archive that had been described, several years earlier, as 'somber, humid, and in such unsatisfactory shape that one can hardly find the papers, even though they are indicated by registers and repertories that have been kept with the greatest precision.' There were documents related to the four thousand or so prisoners who had passed through the Bastille since its archives were established in 1659 . . . " Id. at 39.).
Nicholas A. Basbanes, About the Author: Inside the Creative Process (Durham, NC: Fine Book Press, 2010) (From "Robert Fagles" (Interviewed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on February 19, 1997, to discuss his translation of The Odyssey): Basbanes: "How did you feel when you heard in the news recently that Amherst College, your alma mater, gave an English major a degree, summa cum laude, without ever having been required to study Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, or Spenser?" Fagles: "I have been concerned by such stories. Especially about a story involving Amherst, where I went to college. I would like to ask a sneaky question, however. Did that person not read Shakespeare? Do we know that? What I am getting at is this: I checked with some colleagues in the English department at Princeton, and Shakespeare is not required in the Princeton English department. Is Shakespeare taught? Yes. Is Shakespeare enrolled well? Very well, and enrollments are rising? Is Homer required? Not exactly. But is Homer read? Absolutely. What I am getting at is something very simple, I think. Phyllis Franklin, the executive director at the Modern Language Association, said it best: Something does not have to be required in order to be read. These things, Shakespeare, Homer, they are too good to go away. Simply because something is not required does not mean that it is not being taught in courses. These things are too large, too old, too good to go away. I sense at my own university, at least, increasing interest, not decreasing interest." "There is a decrease in the number of times such things are required, but an increase in the general interest, the level of interest they arouse. Look at the sales of The Iliad and The Odyssey, for example. That is amazing. That is the most heartening thing I can imagine, These are trade book sales. It is enormously satisfying because it means that people are reading not just for recreation but to re-create themselves in some way, that there a real hunger for something they can sink their teeth into and get some nourishment." Id. at 65, 68-69.).
Nicholas A. Basbanes, Among the Gently Mad: Strategies and Perspectives for the Book Hunter in the Twenty-First Century (New York: A John Macrae Book/Henry Holt, 2002).
Nicholas A. Basbanes, Editions and Impressions: Twenty Years on the Book Beat (Durham, NC: Fine Book Press, 2007).
Nicholas A. Basbanes, Every Book Its Reader: The Power pf the Printed Word to Stir the World (New York: HarperCollins, 2005).
Nicholas A. Basbanes, A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books (New York: Henry Holt, 1995) ("With thought, patience, and discrimination, book passion becomes the signature of a person's character. When out of control and indulged to excess, it lets loose a fury of bizarre behavior. 'The bibliophile is the master of his books, the bibliomaniac their slaves,' the German bibliographer Hanns Bohatta steadfastly maintained, though the dividing line can be too blurry to discern." Id. at 9. "In a 1966 essay prepared for a psychiatric journal, the psychoanalyst Dr. Norman S. Weiner of Philadelphia described the bibliomaniac as a person with an 'inordinate desire' for books who will 'pursue a volume in an active or seductive way; he will use intrigue and stealth; he will hazard his fortune and he will journey around the world, or even marry for gain of a voted book.' On the basis of the evidence he had gathered, Dr. Weiner suggested that bibliomania is 'a problem solving complex of activity that relieves or directly gratifies certain instinctual drives." Id. at 27.).
Nicholas A. Basbanes, Patience and Fortitude: A Roving Chronicle of Book People, Book Places, and Book Culture (New York: HarperCollins, 2001) ("Any parent who has ever taken a son or a daughter off on a tour of prospective colleges learn after a while to anticipate the introductory drill by rote. A campus visit usually includes . . . an admiring walk through the library, where an estimate of the institution's total holdings is always given, particularly among the prestigious liberal arts colleges of the Northeast . . . which pride themselves in the strength of their print collection. The idea of having a library the size of a telephone booth would not be greeted with much enthusiasm by many alumni who contribute generously to their endowments, or for that matter bright young high school graduates intent on securing the finest possible education in an excruciatingly competitive world, and access to the most appealing research materials, electronic as well as print." "For institutions that direct their energy and resources to educating undergraduates, a library of 200,000 volumes is considered a respectable collection Four hundred thousand is above average, and half a million or more is excellent. Liberal arts colleges that approach the million mark represent an elite handful, and it is no coincident that institutions reporting holdings in that area are usually esteemed among the very best in the nation. A typical example is Oberlin College, a five-star institution twenty-five miles southwest of Cleveland, Ohio, with 2,900 full-time students, 2,3000 of them undergraduates enrolled in the college of Arts and Sciences, the others in the internationally renowned Conservatory of Music. Total holdings, according to Ray English, the director of libraries, number 2 million items representing all media, including uncatalogued government documents. 'Books are very much a part of the calculus here,' he said. 'We assume that very strong local collections are essential for good undergraduate work.' By 'local,' English means books that are 'in-house and immediately available to our students and faculty.' On average, Oberlin acquires 240,00 new books a year--more than half of the total holdings considered adequate at California State University at Monterey Bay after six full years of operation--and does very little in the way of discarding." Id. at 461-462. "When Minor Myers Jr. was appointed president of Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington, Illinois, in 1989, he arrived in a mission to raise the school into the top tier of private liberal arts colleges in the United States. 'The first thing I saw when I arrived was a library with well under 200,000 books, and I started complaining immediately' . . . Id. at 472. 'Myers emphasized that he is not building up Illinois Wesleyan's infrastructure and print collection simply to achieve higher recognition among peer institutions. 'It's not just a matter of status, it's a question of teaching, research, and imagination. The things you have available at hand for students on an immediate basis are just as important as teaching or research. What I want is something gloriously useful that offers a dazzling source of information for students. Rather than wait two or three weeks for something to come in on interlibrary loan, I want a lot of real live books, and I want them here. Serendipity is the imagination factor I am talking about. It is the material you find in the stacks when you aren't prepared to find anything. This may sound increasingly quaint in this day and age, bur my idea of a college is a collection of students and faculty gathered around a great library, and here we will have a great reading room at the center of it all to make it happen." Id. at 474.).
Nicholas A. Basbanes, A Splendor of Letters: The Permanence of Books in an Impermanent World (New York: HarperCollins, 2003) ("In 1962, John Rader Platt (1918-1995), a University of Chicago physicist .... wrote an informed essay for the scholarly journal Horizon in which he speculated on the imminent arrival of a 'universal library' made possible by scientific breakthroughs, though today's reader would be perplexed to learn that the computer did not figure at all in the scenario he felt was just around the corner, nor was there any apparent movement toward the 'spoken book' championed by Guido Biago half a century earlier. 'Physicists these days are discussing a question that is going to be of interest to every literate person,' Platt began. 'How small a book can we make--and still read?'" "Platt projected the development of a microscopic process that would allow for what he called creation of a 'pinhead library' in which countless numbers of books could be stored in a minimum of space, and not just by libraries and institutions, but by individuals eager to have access to 'everything.'" [] "With the prospect of having 'all the world's literature and learning' at his fingertips, Platt had little room for romantic notions regarding the enjoyment of handling a real book, anticipating similar arguments pitting the advocates of content against the champions of artifacts that would emerge four decades down the road. 'We must remember that what is precious is not the physical "artifact" of a system of writing but the "metafacts," the human communications they contain,' Platt wrote, 'When our books change into new forms, children brought up to love the things of the mind will come to treat these forms with the same feeling or respect and familiarity and pleasure that we have had for the old ones.' To ease things along, he suggested that creation of ' complete Library of Congress within reach of every student and teacher and scientist might be comparable to the value of our great highway systems, and the initial development might be deserving of similar government support." Id. at 324-325. QUERY: But, are not America's highways, bridges, railroads, and overall infrastructure in gross disrepair and much in need of maintenance, repair, upgrade and replacement? Why would one expect the American taxpayers to have the will to maintain such a universal library when it cannot even maintain its transportation system?),
Nicholas A. Basbanes, A World of Letters: Yale University Press, 1908-2008 (New Haven London: Yale U. Press, 2008) ("In his interview with me, [Robert] Baldock [managing director of the London division of Yale University Press] touched on what he feels are the principal differences between New Haven and London. . . Baldock said that the London editors also are looking for books that tend to be more European in their scope, 'and that maybe is the big difference' between the lists. 'A lot of New Haven's books look at the U.S. experience in the world, and like every other American press, it publishes endless books on such subjects as the American Supreme Court, and things like that, which we can't sell here. Right now [2004] is an interesting time because just above the post-9/11 moment, Americans are looking at themselves and wondering why everybody dislikes them. So New Haven is producing more books about American concerns just at the time that the rest of the world is not buying them. I have great trouble telling American colleagues that this is in fact the truth. America is big and rich and important and wealthy, and yes, it can do what it likes, and in terms of book publishing, it publishes lots of books about itself. But then they are mildly surprised that the rest of the world doesn't want to buy them.'" Id. at 116-117. QUERY: Might this last comment suggest, more broadly, that America (and, by extension, Americans) may be able to do what it wants because of size and wealth, but that it does not follow that the rest of the world is going to take their clues from America (or Americans). Being the biggest, wealthiest, and most powerful (militarily), etc., does not necessarily mean that one is the leader and that others will follow. Perhaps it is time for America (and Americans) to reconsider its role in the world.).
Jonathan M. Bloom, Paper Before Print: The History and Impact of Paper in he Islamic World (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2001) ("The transfer of paper and papermaking technology from the Islamic lands to Christian Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries prepared the way for the European print revolution of the fifteenth century.Yet Gutenberg's invention might never have taken off it he and his followers had been limited to printing books on parchment. Gutenberg is thought to have printed 200 copies of his bible, 35 on parchment and 165 on paper, although only 40 copies survive altogether. Early printers used moveable type to produce editions of one hundred to two hundred, but by1500 print runs of one thousand or two thousand copies--the print run of modern scholarly titles--were not unusual. . . . All this printing required enormous quantities of paper and papermills throughout Europe struggled to meet demand." Id. at 203. Of course, one could be on the same page as, for example, Congressman Steve King. At the 2016 Republican National Convention he said, "This whole white people business, though, does get a little tired," "I'd ask you to go back through history and figure out where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you are talking about. Where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?" Oop! Where would western Europe and American be but for paper technology. Get out of the bubble.).
Paul Buckley, ed., Classic Penguin: Cover to Cover, illustrated by Matt Vee, foreword by Audrey Niffenegger, preface by Elda Rotor (New York: Penguin Books, 2016).
Christopher de Hamel, Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts (London: Allen Lane/Penguin Books, 2016).
Sunday, June 11, 2017
SUGGESTED READINGS FOR LAW STUDENTS, OR AT LEAST THOSE WHO SEE THE VALUE IN BEING WOKE
"'I didn't know,' he said to his brother. 'I didn't know what it was like. I thought the law--I am a lawyer, I thought I knew the power of the law. I knew nothing about it! God help me, I thought it drew its power from justice!'" Ursula K. Le Guin, Malafrena, reprinted in The Complete Orsinia: Malafrena; Stories and Songs, edited by Brian Attebery (New York: Library of America, 2016) at 1, 240.
"There are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations."--James Madison
"There are two kinds of injustice: the first is found in those who do an injury, the second in those who fail to protect another from injury when they can."--Cicero, De Off. I. vii.).
Alexander Meiklejohn, What Does America Mean? (New York: The Norton Library/W. W. Norton, 1935, 1972) ("My own definition of a democracy would be that it is a society which is carrying on an enterprise in which all its members have a genuine stake. It implies, first, that the group has something to do. It assumes, also, that the undertaking is such that all people can actively and responsibly partake in the achievement." "Now it is very clear that this definition brings us face to face with a crucial issue . . . Does it mean anything to say that America has a purpose, a commitment? Is there any sense in the statement that a nation has a common spiritual life in which all its people may share or fall to share? If not, I cannot see that either democracy or any other principle of social living has any significance. Unless in the life of a social group some dominant purpose can be found, in terms of which it can be assessed, in relation to which its manifold activities can be judged as good or bad, then planning for such a group seems to me to be nonsense. Human reason, as the critic and guide of human living, stands or falls with the answer to the question, 'What are we, as human beings, trying to do?'" Id. at 179-180.).
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited, foreword by Christopher Hitchens (New York: HarperCollins, 2004) (From Brave New World: "Then, turning to his students, 'What I'm going to tell you now,' he said, 'may sound incredible. But then, when you're not accustomed to history, most facts about the past do sound incredible.'" Id. at 39. From Brave New World Revisited, ChapterI V: "Propaganda in a Democratic Society":"There are two kinds of propaganda--rational propaganda in favor of action that is consonant with the enlightened self-interest of those who make it and those to whom it is address, and non rational propaganda that is not consonant with anybody's enlightened self-interest, but is dictated by, and appeals to, passion. [Note: For the latter, think America's dog-whistle political rhetoric, e.g., 'Mexico is sending us its murderers and rapist' . . . built the wall!'] Where the actions of individuals are concerned there are motives more exalted than enlightened self-interest, but where collective action has to be taken in the field of politics and economics, enlightened self-interest is probably the highest of effective motives. If politicians and their constituents always acted to promote their own or their country's long-range self-interest [Note: This does not mean vulgar nationalism (e.g., "America First".], this world would be an earthly paradise. As it is, they often act against their own interests, merely to gratify their least creditable passions; the world, in consequence, is a place of misery. Propaganda in favor of action that is consonant with enlightened self-interest appeals to reason by means of logical arguments based upon the best available evidence fully and honestly set forth. Propaganda in favor of action dictated by the impulses that are below self-interest offer false, garbled or incomplete evidence, avoid logical argument and seek to influence its victims by the mere repletion of catchwords, by the furious denunciation of foreign or domestic scapegoats [Note: Think here about Muslim ban and the attack on the media.], and cunningly associating the lowest passions with the highest ideals, so that atrocity come to be perpetrated in the name of God and the most cynical kind of Realpolitik is treated as a matter of religious principle and patriotic duty." Id at 264-265. QUERY: Sound familiar? Sound recent?).
Omar el Akkad, American War: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2017) (From the book jacket: "American War is a hauntingly told story of the immeasurable ruin of war--in a nation, a community, a family, an individual. It's a novel that considers what might happen if the United States were to turn its most devastating policies and weapons upon itself." See generally, Justin Cronin, "Red Versus Blue," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 4/23/2017.).
Akutagawa Ryunosuke, Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories, translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin, with an introduction by Haruki Murakami (New York: Penguin Classics/Penguin Books, 2006) (From "The Nose," January 1916: "The human heart harbors two conflicting sentiments. Everyone of course sympathizes with people who suffer misfortunes. Yet when those people manage to overcome their misfortunes, we feel a certain disappointment. We may even feel (to overstate the case somewhat) a desire to plunge them back into those misfortunes. And before we know it, we come (if only passively) to harbor some degree of hostility toward them." Id. at 20, 25.).
Elizabeth Anderson, Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We don't Talk about It), Introduction by Stephen Macedo (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2017).
Nadeem Aslam, The Golden Legend: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2017) (From the book jacket: "Here is a brave, timely, searingly beautiful novel set in contemporary Pakistan--the story of a Muslim widow and her Christian neighbors whose community is consumed by violent religious intolerance." From the text: "'It's all very well abusing women and children and those who are weaker than you,' she said.'And, yes, the Americans took away your brother, mother and Billu's legs, but it's the Pakistan military and the intelligence agencies who secretly give them permission to fly their drones above Waziristan. In return for rewards and weapons and money. Nargis and Massud's house is visited by people from the military looms every other day. Why don't you go and take the matter up with them? She took several steps towards him. 'Or are they too powerful.'" Id. at 268-269. "She was the mother of a child mutilated by the Americans, a child who was collateral damage, the daughter-in-law of a woman who was killed because she happened to be near the enemy when the hour struck. And this--here in the newspaper--was the other side: people claiming to retaliate against the West's influence and crimes, by killing Pakistanis." Id. at 270.).
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale, with a new introduction by the author, illusions by Anna Balbusso & Elena Balbusso (London:The Folio Society, 2012) (The Handmaid's Tale is one of the supplementary titles I would use were I ever to teach Law and Literature. Also see Margaret Atwood, "Handmaids Rising," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 3/19/2017.)
Bradley Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces (New York: PublicAffairs, 2013) (From the book jacket: "The last days of colonialism taught America's revolutionaries that soldiers in the streets bring conflict and tyranny. As a result, our country has generally worked to keep the military out of law enforcement. But according to investigative reporter Radley Balko, over the last several decades, America's cops have increasingly come to resemble ground troops. The consequences have been dire: The home is no longer a lace of sanctuary, the Fourth Amendment has been gutted, and lie today have been conditioned to see the citizens they serve as an other--an enemy. [] In Rise of the Warrior Cop, Balko shows how politicians' ill-considered policies and relentless declarations of war against vague enemies like crime, drugs, and terror have blurred the distinction between cop and soldier. His fascinating, frightening narrative sows how over a generation, a creeping battlefield mentality has isolated and alienated American police officers and put them on a collusion course with the values of a free society." Note: Remember Donald J. Trump saying, if the City of Chicago could not fix its murder rates, he would send federal troops. Food for thought! From the text: "'In my ten years in law enforcement on the street, I can't remember one case where a police officer shot a dog,' says Russ Jones, the former narcotics cop with the San Jose Police Department and the DEA. 'I don't understand it at all. I guess somewhere along the line a cop shot a dog under questionable circumstances and got away with it. Word got out, and now it seem like some cops are just looking for a reason to take a shot at a dog. Maybe it just comes down to that--we can get away with it, therefore we do it.'" Id. at 293. "Emily Tanner, a grad student at the University of Pittsburgh who described herself as a 'capitalist' who didn't agree with the general philosophy of the antiglobalization protesters, covered the summit, the protests, and the fallout on her blog. The most egregious police action seemed to take place on Friday evening before the summit, around the university, when police began ordering students who were in pubic spaces to disperse, despite the fact that they had broken no laws. Students who moved too slowly were arrested, as were students who were standing in front of the dormitories where they lived." "A University of Pittsburgh spokesman later said that the tactic was to break up crowds that 'had the potential of disrupting normal activities, traffic flow, egress and the like. . . . Much of the arrests last night had to do with failure to disperse when ordered." Note that no one needed to have broken any actual laws to get arrested. The potential to break a law was more than enough. That standard was essentially a license for the police to arrest anyone, anywhere in the city, at any time, for any reason." Id. at 294-295.).
Zygmunt Bauman, Retrotopia (New York: Polity, 2017) (From the backcover: "We have long since lost our faith in the idea that human beings could achieve human happiness in some future ideal state--a state that Thomas More, writing five centuries ago, tied to a topas, a fixed place, a land, an island, a sovereign state under a wise and benevolent ruler. But, while we have lost our faith in utopias of all hues, the human aspiration that made this vision so compelling has not dies. Instead it is re-emerging today as a vision focused not on the future but on the past, not on a future-to-be-created but on an abandoned and undead past that we could call retrotopia." From "Back to Tribes": "In a culture in which, as Lindy West reports in the 11 march 2016 issue of the New York Times, 'some people believe that it's worse to be called racist than to be racist', many people are likely to perceive such digitized facility as a Godsend gift. During one of the numerous crowded gatherings of enthusiastic supporters of Donald Trump, a Ms Kemper ('blazing, passionate, incredulous') confides: 'I think this country better of back to some of those values. Some of the values my parents grew up with, my grandparents grew up with'; 'Whatever was wrong, they could point it out and tell you.' By being voiced in public using no more gadgets than a mundane microphone, without beating about the bush and with face uncovered, thoughts that had been half-clandestinely honed and groom in the privacy of talking to a smart phone or touching the keyboard of a tablet, the key to endearing Mr Trump to the online-formatted nation was turned." "Mr Trump is but one specimen (albeit it one leading in spectacularity and notoriety) of the large and growing category of the 'politicians of anger', as the title of an article published by Harvard professor Dani Rodrik, in Social Europe, suggests they are. 'The conflict between hyper-globalized economy and social cohesion are real', observes the author; 'Two types of political cleavage are exacerbated in the process: an identity cleavage, revolving around nationhood, ethnicity, or religion, and an income cleavage, revolving around social class. Populists derive their appeal from one of the other of these categories . . . In both cases, there is a clear 'other' toward which anger can be directed,'; 'The appeal of populists is that give voice to the anger of the excluded.'" Id. at 49, 68-69, citations omitted.).
Patricia Bell-Scott, The Firebrand and the First Land: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice (New York: Knopf, 2016).
Erik Brynjolfsson & Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York: Norton, 2014).
Patrick J. Buchanan, Nixon's White House Wars: The Battle that Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever (New York: Crown Forum, 2017) (a perspective).
Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (New York: Knopf, 1992) (From the book jacket: "Bullock finds in both Hitler and Stalin, despite the radical difference between them, the same unshaken belief in their historic mission, overriding any regard for law, limits, or humanity and armoring them against any feeling of compassion, remorse, or guilt." From the text: "For the Nazis differed from all the other parties in making the style of their campaigning more important than the content: To borrow a later phrase, in their case it was literally true that 'the medium was the message.' Not only Hitler's speeches but also everything about the movement that dramatized politics as a mixture of theater and religion was aimed to appeal not to the rational but to the emotional faculties, those 'affective interests' against which (as Freud pointed out) students of human nature and philosophers had long recognized that logical arguments we important." Id. at 223-224. NOTE: Trump supporters took (take) him seriously, but not what he said (says). Trump detractors did, and some still do, take what he says seriously but not Trump himself. As a result, efforts at rational argument by the latter were lost on the former. "The denominational division of Germany was an important as social stratification. The Nazis attracted a large part of the churchgoing population in Protestant parts of the country; much less in the Catholic areas (including Bavaria) until after Hitler came to power and signed the Concordat with the Vatican in the summer of 1933. It was also in Protestant rather than the Catholic parts of Germany that the Nazis--with their emphasis on traditional family life, Kinder, Kirche, kuche ("Children, church, and kitchen")--in 1930 expanded their vote among women, for the first time." "The different regions of Germany showed wide variations in September 1930. The highest percentage of Nazi voters was to be found in the Protestant and agricultural districts of north and east Germany, such as Schleswig-Holstein, Pomerania and East Prussia. They also did very well in districts with a mixed economy of agriculture and small-scale industry, such as Lower Silesia-Breslau and Chemnitz-Zwickau." "The Nazi did much less well in urban, heavy-industrial, or Catholic areas . . . " Id. at 217-218.).
Erwin Chemerinsky, Closing the Court House Door: How Your Constitutional Rights Became Unenforceable (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2017) ("My goal is to explain how the Supreme Court, through a series of doctrines and decisions, has closed the federal courthouse doors to those whose rights have been violated. I want readers to see how these rulings affect real people, and ultimately all of us. My vision . . . is that federal courts should be available to all who claim a violation of their constitutional rights" Id. at x.).
Adam Cohen, Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck (New York: Penguin Books, 2016) (From the book jacket: "Buck v. Bell unfolded against the backdrop of a nation in the thrall of eugenics, which many Americans thought would uplift the human race. Congress embraced this fervor, enacting the first laws designed to prevent immigration by Italians, Jews, and other groups charged with being genetically inferior.").
Tanner Colby, Some of My Best Friends Are Black: The Strange Story of Integration in America (New York: Viking, 2012) (From the book jacket: "Tanner Colby woke up one day and realized that he didn't know any black people--is friends, former classmates, coworkers, acquaintances, just about everyone he knew and interacted with was white. And this lopsided state of affairs, as he soon discovered, was hardly unique. . . . Curious, Colby set out to learn exactly why this was. What he found was the strange story of race in post-civil rights America [Query: Does Colby understand/intend the double-meaning of "post-civil rights America"?], a world in which segregation never really died by was simply transformed. Some of My Best Friends Are Black follows for stories that show how the strict legal barriers of Jim Crow came to be replaced by social mores and economic policies that endeavored to maintain a separate and unequal status quo: keeping the races apart, fueling suspicion between them, and enhancing the wealth and status of those who continue to profit for a divided America." This is a worthy efforts by a self-admittedly sleepwalker; he is on the road to being WOKE!)
Lauren Elkin, Flaneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016) ("There are two elements of the protest: the march and the barricade. The forward movement and the resistance. A demonstration can't become a protest without the forces of order saying no to their no. Both play their part. The barricade is a symbol of revolution, but the police kettle is just another kind of barricade. The very things that stir our heart in a revolution may be co-opted by forces of order--or the other way around." Id. at 205.).
John A. Farrell, Richard Nixon: The Life (New York: Doubleday, 2017) ("America's grand strategy--to contain Soviet aggression until Europe and Japan could reemerge as great, countervailing powers--was succeeding. Indeed, the independent-minded Europeans and industrious Japanese were now presenting challenge of their own to American economic and diplomatic primacy. But the other danger that George Kennan warned about--that Americans would lose their way in the long twilight struggle--had shown itself as well." "The government that Nixon inherited was steeped in arrogance, luxuriant in sin. For more than a decade, under Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson, it has spied on its citizens, suppressed dissent, and overthrown overseas regimes. Antiwar and civil rights groups had been infiltrated, framed, bugged, and assaulted by agents of their government. The Nixon administration had embraced the tradition . . . 'The fact of the matter is that there is a little bit of the totalitarian buried somewhere way down deep, in each and every one of us,' Kennan had warned. The military-industrial combine prospered, the state flourished, and the tentacles of surveillance crept through society. 'I have destroyed him with the weapons I abhorred, and they are his,' says the spy George Smiley of a Soviet counterpart, at the climax of one of John le Carre's ad,entry Cold War novels." Id. at 421-422.).
Alvin S. Felzenberg, A Man and His Presidents: The Political Odyssey of William F. Buckley Jr. (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2017) ("On the domestic front, Buckley objected strenuously to the federal government's intruding into state and local affairs to protect the civil rights of African Americans. He and his colleagues [at the National Review] opposed the Supreme Court's unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education on the grounds that it violated both states' rights and federalism. They failed to consider whether a state or local government, in denying millions of citizens, based on race, the right to participate in the political process was itself a violation of the spirit of 'home rule' or both the letter and the spirit of the U.S. Constitution. On top of their purported constitutional objections to the decision and subsequent efforts of presidents to enforce it, they rendered considerable harm to their own movement outside of the South and among opinion leaders of all persuasions when they opined that as the more 'advance' race, whites were entitled to govern. (As will be shown in subsequent chapters, in time Buckley came to regret the stand he took in these editorials and changed his views, prompted in part by the increased violence unleashed by local citizens, often incited by race-baiting politicians he termed 'welfare populists.')." Id. at 78-79. When I was in college and graduate school, and though I disagreed with many of his conclusions, I found William F. Buckley Jr.'s articles, op-ed pieces, books and comments on Firing Line, etc., as providing much worthwhile food for thought. Given the anti-elite, anti-intellectual, not to mentioned the pro-Russia tendencies, of many republicans, it is doubtful, at least to me, that Buckley would be comfortable in the today's Republican Party. I certainly could not see him as a Trump supporter. As Buckley prodigy George Will has written (Washington Post, 5/3/2017), "It is urgent for Americans to think and speak clearly about President Trump’s inability to do either. This seems to be not a mere disinclination but a disability. It is not merely the result of intellectual sloth but of an untrained mind bereft of information and married to stratospheric self-confidence.").
Owen Fiss, Pillars of Justice: Lawyers and the Liberal Tradition (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2017) (Fiss profiles of Thurgood Marshall, William Brennan, John Doar, Burke Marshall, Harry Kalven, Eugene Rostow, Arther Leff, Catharine MacKinnon, Joseph Goldstein, Carola Nino, Robert Cover, Morton Horowitz and Aharon Barak. "This book seeks to inspire and instruct. It portrays the lives of thirteen lawyers who, through their tieless devotion to just, changed the world. These individuals have lived grandly in the law and in good part account for the course the aw has taken over the past half-century. Their careers provide a source for understanding the dynamics responsible for the progress of the law and, even more, reveal what a life devoted to justice might entail." Id. at 1.).
Frances Fitzgerald, The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017) ("This book is not a taxonomy or attempt to describe the entirety of evangelical life, but rather a history of the white evangelical movements necessary to understand the Christian right and its evangelical opponents that have emerged in recent years. It purposely omits the history of African American churches because theirs is a different story, mainly one of resistance to slavery and segregation, but also of the creation of centers for self-help and community in a hostile world. . . Only along after the success of the civil rights movement did some black churchmen begin to enter the story of the white evangelicals and their internal conflicts. What is important to stress is that the white evangelical world has always been changing, though it has retained many of the characteristics acquired during its history. In any case, no movement including the Christian right, has even been static or completely coherent. Evangelicals have had some influential leaders, but in essence their world is decentralized and difficult to lead, much less to control." Id. at 3. "Christian right leaders with a few exceptions . . . opposed Trump. James Dobson said he would never vote for a 'kingpin' of casino gambling, and several cited Trump's reported comments about his daughter's figure. 'If Ivanka weren't my daughter, perhaps I'd be dating her.' Progressive evangelicals opposed Trump notably because of his libertinism but also because of his xenophobia and bigotry. Christianity Today accused Trump of 'fear mongering and demagoguery' and 'Nietzsche-eque notions of power.' Still, the strongest criticisms of Trump came from Southern Baptist leaders . . . [Russell M]oore wrote that deporting eleven to twelve million people 'would take a government so big it would nearly be a police state.' When Trump proposed closing the United States to Muslims, Moore wrote, 'Anyone who cares one iota about religious liberty should denounce this reckless, demagogic rhetoric.' Make no mistake, he continued, 'a government that can shut down mosques just because they are mosques can shut down Bible studies just because they are Bible studies.' We cannot, he said, 'say we're for religious liberty and then be silent when we have calls for an entire group of people to be banned from the country based on their religion.' . . . Moore said Trump was running 'on a dangerous mix of populism and nationalism,' and . . . accused Trump of 'the spewing of profanities in campaign speeches, race-baiting and courting white supremacists, boasting of adulterous affairs, debauching public morality and justice." Id. at 628. Also see Alan Wolfe, "With God on Their Side," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 4/2/2017.),
James Forman, Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2017) (From the book cover: "Forman shows us that the first substantial cohort of black mayors, judges, and police chiefs took office amid a surge in crime and drug addiction. Many prominent black official . . . feared that the gains of the civil rights movement were being undermined by lawlessness--and thus embraced tough-on-crime measures, including longer sentences and aggressive police tactics. In the face of skyrocketing murder rates and the proliferation of open-air drug markets, they believed they had no choice. But the policies they adopted would have devastating consequences for residents of poor black neighborhoods.").
Barry Friedman, Unwarranted: Policing Without Permission (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2017) (From the book jacket: "Unwarranted tells the stories of ordinary people whose lives were torn apart by policing--by the methods of cops on the beat and those of the FBI and NSA. Driven by technology, policing has changed dramatically. Once, cops sought out bad guys; today, increasingly militarized forces conduct wide surveillance of all of us. Friedman captures the eerie new environment in which CCTV, location tracking, and predictive policing have made suspects of us all, while proliferating SWAT teams and increased use of force have put everyone's property and lives at risk. Policing falls particularly heavily on minority communities and the poor, but as Unwarranted makes clear, the effects of policing are much broader still. Policing is everyone's problem." Also see Khalil Gibran Muhammad, "Power and Punishment," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 4/16/2017.).
David J. Garrow, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama (New York: William Morrow/ HarperColins, 2017).
Irwin F. Gellman, The Contender: Richard Nixon: The Congress Years, 1946-1952 (New York: The Free Press, 1999).
Irwin F. Gellman, The President and the Apprentice: Eisenhower and Nixon, 1952-1961 (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2015).
Eric F. Goldman, The Crucial Decade: America, 1945-1955 (New York: Knopf, 1956) ("The volume is based on no special theories about man or about history; it contains no ringing pleas to save America. As a matter of fact, implicit throughout is the assumption that America will be saved, if she is in need of salvation, not by men with banners but by those who are able to escape the banners long enough to think. The book is a history in the most direct sense of the world--a narrative, written with a careful regard for facts, an attempt to escape partisanship or other bias, an effort to place events in the longer perspective, and the assumption that the history of man is the story of men...." Id. at vi.).
Carol Gilligan & David A. J. Richards, The Deepening Darkness: Patriarchy, Resistance, and Democracy (New York: Cambridge U. Press, 2009).
David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murderers and the Birth of the FBI (New York: Doubleday, 2017) (See Dave Eggers, "Death by Oil," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 5/14/2017.).
A. C. Grayling, War: An Inquiry (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2017).
Jacob S. Hacker & Paul Pierson, American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017) ("This book is about an uncomfortable truth: It takes government--a lot of government--for advanced societies to flourish." Id. at 1. "We suffice, in short, from a kind of mass historical forgetting, a distinctively 'American Amnesia.' At a time when we face serious challenges that can be addressed only through stronger, ore effective government--a strained middle class, a weakened system for generating life-improving innovation, a dangerously warming planet--we ignore what both our history and basic economic theory suggest: We need constructive and mutually beneficial tension between markets and government rather than the jealous rivalry that so many misperceive--and, in that misperception, help foster. Above all, we need a government strong and capable enough to rise above narrow private interests and carry out long-term\ courses of action on behalf of broader concerns. At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, one of the delegates noted: 'It has never been a complaint of [the Confederate Congress] that they governed overmuch. The complaint has been that they governed too little.' Today there are complaints only about our leaders governing 'overmuch.' But the truth is that although areas of government overreach certainly do exist, we have 'too little' effective government, not too much." Id. at 2-3. Keep this book in mind when taking, say, Administrative Law, or Health Law, or Banking Law, etc., and you confront arguments for deregulation, and for non regulation, and for just letting the markets do their thing.).
H. R. Haldeman, The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House, Introduction and Afterword by Stephen E. Ambrose (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1994) (From the book jacket: "Nixon, who was the biggest star of his own drama, is revealed more intimately than we have ever seen him--shrewd, complex, petty, obsessive, sensitive, manipulative, and self-absorbed.").
James T. Hamilton, Democracy's Detectives: The Economics of Investigative Journalism (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2016) (on the importance and cost of investigative journalism).
Chris Hayes, A Colony in a Nation (New York: Norton, 2017) ("There are fundamentally two ways you can experience the police in America: as the people you call when there's a problem, the nice man in uniform who pats a toddler's head and has an easy smile for the old lady as she buys her coffee. For others, the police are the people who are called on them. They are the ominous knock on the door, the sudden flashlight in the face, the barked orders. Depending on who you are, the sight of an officer can produce either a warm sense of safety and contentment or a plummeting feeling of terror." Id. at 16.).
Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer, The Farm in the Green Mountains, translated from the German by Ida H. Washington & Carol E. Washington, introduction by Elisa Albert (New York: New York Review, 1987, 2017) ("I lived with the rats long enough to have the opportunity to look them in the eyes often." "In those rat eyes I found a kind of consciousness, a knowledge of their undertakings and deeds that lifted them out of the level of vermin into that of a proper enemy." "It was once announced in a newspaper article that a scientist had finally found the bones of the orangutan from which we must all descended. Tied to that discovery was the amazing theory that, after humankind, rats or ants would take over the dominion of the world. If I accepted the idea of this dark utopia for a moment, I'd bet on the rats." Id. at 102,).
Adam Hochschild, The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin (New York: Viking, 1994) (From the book jacket: "In a section of this book excerpted in The New York Times Magazine, Hochschild visits a small Siberia town where a flooding river tore open a secret mass grave. He meet one woman whose father was buried there, and another, a friend and neighbor, who has learned that her father signed the execution orders. Hochschild visits villages deep in gulag territory, where snow lies on the ground for four months a year and where no American has been before. And, in an extraordinary journey that ends the book, he travels by helicopter to old labor camp sites in Russia's desolate, subarctic gold fields, one of the twentieth century's worst killing grounds." From the text: "In his book The Nazi Doctors, Robert Jay Lifton looks at doctors who worked in the concentration camps; one, at Treblinka, actually served as a camp commander. Like Marton, most of these men were married, and most apparently had close bonds with their families. Also like Marton, many of the Nazi doctors who survived the war went back to practicing medicine. Dr. Eduard Wirths, who set up and supervised the 'selections' system for the Auschwitz gas chambers, seemed to be remembered with particular warmth by his family. He too, had a loving daughter. To a filmmaker who came to interview her, she said, 'Can a good man do bad things?'" "The answer, according to all too many studies of those who commit atrocities, whether they be Nazis, Americans in Vietnam, or South African police, is less. If the enemy--Jews, blacks, Vietnamese, or 'enemies of the people'--is sufficiently dehumanized by the relentless did pf propaganda, if the murder or torture is sanctioned by peer pressure, by heads of state, by commands from those in authority, it is a rare person who will resist. Perhaps some people are born saints and some devils, but most of us are somewhere in between, influenced, in the end, by what the people around us are doing. It is the structure and customs and distribution of power of the society we live in that keeps the 'shark well governed.' Otherwise angels can, all too easily, be turned to sharks." "In trying to understand what allowed the Nazi physicians to let pressure from peers and superiors overcome professional ethics, Lifton speaks of the process of 'doubling.' It is an unconscious Faustian bargain, he says, a 'division of the self into two functioning wholes.' The concentration camp doctor has an 'Auschwitz self' which he needed to act as part of the death machine, and a 'prior self,' which took no responsibility for anything done at Auschwitz. 'The feeling was something like: "Anything I do on planet Auschwitz doesn't count on planet Earth."' One does not have to be a concentration camp officer to practice this doubling, Lifton points out. An army psychiatrist doubles when he certifies a soldier as fit to b sent back to a job where he can kill and be killed; a nuclear physicist who loves his wife and children doubles when he works on an atomic bomb. And, we might add, the issue does not only arise with war and weapons; a kind-hearted, churchgoing engineer doubles when he allows a new product off the assembly line without adequate safety testing. The list goes on." Id. at 220-221. Query: Do we, as private citizens, double when we endorse, explicitly or implicitly, certain public policies? For example, drone warfare killing noncombatants, including women and children? Or, a tax policy that reduces food subsidies for the poor and the elderly? Or, standing by when the government placed Japanese Americans in detention camps? Or, a climate policy that transfers health and safety costs to the next generation? Or, when we stand silent when the media is characterized as 'the enemy of the people'? That is, what does it mean to participate in evil?).
Irving Louis Horowitz, Claude Helvetius: Philosopher of Democracy and Enlightenment (New York: Paine-Whitman, 1954) (“Turning to the question of the relation between luxury and virtue, Helvetius makes the penetrating point that a lack of material wealth cannot destroy the common people’s love of virtue. A lack of money or power does not debase the oppressed; on the contrary, the possession of great wealth gained at the expense of the masses does lead to complete moral degeneracy and debasement. The court nobility in pre-revolutionary France was adequate testimony to the truth of this remark. ‘There is no such people where all are corrupted. There is no country where the order of common citizens, always depressed, and rarely oppressors, do not love and esteem virtue. Their interest leads them to it. It is not so with the order of great men. Their interest is to be unjust with impunity; it is to stifle in the hearts of men every sentiment of equity. Their interest is to be unjust with impunity; it is to stifle in the heart of men every sentiment of equity. This interest imperiously commands the great, but not the rest of the nation. The tempest agitates the surface of the sea, but its depths are always tranquil. Such are the inferior class of citizens, in almost every country.’” “Therefore, a ‘base nation’ can only signify that nation in which the people in power, the governing class, are enemies of the class governed, or at the very least, unconcerned and indifferent to the happiness of the oppressed masses. For Helvetius, it is as plain as a geometric axiom that ‘the excessive power of the great’ leads to a ‘consequent contempt in which they hold their fellow-citizens.’” Id. at 124, citations omitted. Food for thought for Donald J. Trump and the Republican Congress as they gut The Affordable Care Act, cut social services for the poor, the elderly and the working-class (e.g., meals on wheel), while providing the wealthy with significant reductions in income tax. Add to that his and their assault on women’s reproduction rights, their rape of the environment for another buck, and their complete denial and misunderstanding of climate change. Perhaps the French Revolution, not the American Revolution, is a better benchmark of where America is as a nation, as a peoples divided, in these closing years of the second decade of the twenty-first century.).
Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature (A Rebours), translated from the French by Robert Baldick, with an introduction and notes by Patrick McGuinness (New York: Penguin Classics/ Penguin Books, 2003) ("After the aristocracy of birth, it was now the turn of the aristocracy of wealth, the caliphate of the counting-house, the despotism of the Rue du Sentier, the tyranny of commerce with its narrow-minded, venal ideas, its selfish, rascally instinct." Id. at 202. "This was the vast bagnio of America transported the continent of Europe; this was the limitless, unfathomable, immeasurable scurviness of the financier and the self-made man, beaming down like a shameful sun on the idolatrous city, which groveled on its belly, chanting vile songs of praise before the impious tabernacle of the Bank." Id. at 203.).
Francois Jullien, The Book of Beginnings, translated from the French by Jody Gladding (New Haven & London: A Margellos World Republic of Letters/Yale U. Press, 2015) (From the book jacket: "How can a person from a Western culture enter a way of thinking as different as that of the Chinese? Can a person truly escape from his or her own cultural perspectives and assumptions? French philosopher Francois Jullien has throughout his career explored the distance between European and Chinese thought. In this fascinating summation of his work, he takes an original approach to the conundrum of cross-cultural understanding.").
George Kateb, Human Dignity (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2011) (From the "Preface": "The subject of human dignity is the worth of human beings or their high rank, or even their special place in nature. If we want to think about human dignity we should not remain content with a definition of the term or a short account that fails to acknowledge the idea's difficulty. The idea is difficult, even though it is rather casually used in many kinds of ceremonial or more substantial public speech, especially when such speech involves praising human rights. [] Trying to deal with one difficulty may unsettle the conclusion we thought we had reached about another. I emphasize the conceptual or theoretical difficulties in this essay, not the formidable difficulties that stand in the way of the realization of the idea in practice and institutions or in taking the idea ever more seriously where it is already partly realized, No society fully realizes the dignity of the individual, though some societies come closer than others. In their awful luck, many societies have barely the beginnings and some have none. On the other hand, to say what the dignity of the species is will depend on trying to ascertain the human difference from the heart of nature." Id. at ix.).
Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Nation Books, 2016) (From the book jacket: "Americans like to insist that we are living in a post racial, color-blind society. In fact, racist thought is alive and well; it has simply become more sophisticated and more insidious. And as . . . historian Ibram X, Kendi argues in Stamped from the Beginning, racist ideas in this country have a long and lingering history, one in which nearly every great American thinker is complicit." "In this deeply researched and fast-moving narrative, Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti-Black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American History. . . . Kendi show how and why some of our leading proslavery and pro-civil rights thinkers have challenged or helped cement racist ideas in America.").
Hari Kunzru, White Tears (New York: Knopf, 2017) ("Living things are those which resist entropy. They possess a boundary of some kind, a membrane or a skin; a metabolism; the ability to react to the world. And to make copies. To pass something on. That's all Charlie Shaw wanted, to reach forward, to obey the urge of life." Id. at 270.).
Etienne de La Boetie, The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, translated from the French by Harry Kurz, with an introduction by N, Rothbard (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2015) ("A people enslaves itself, cuts its own throat, when, having a choice between being vassals and being free men, it deserts its liberties and takes in the yoke, gives consent to its own misery, or, rather, apparently welcomes it. If it cost the people anything to recover its freedom, I should not urge action to this end, although there is nothing a human should hold more dear than the restoration of his own natural right, to change himself form a beast of burden back to a man, so to speak. I do not demand of him so much boldness; let him prefer the doubtful security of living wretchedly to the uncertain hope of living as he pleases. What then? If in order to have liberty nothing more is needed than to long for it, if only a simple act of will is necessary, is there any nation in the world that considers a single wish too high a price to pay in order to recover rights which it ought to be ready to redeem at the cost of its blood, rights such that their loss must bring all men of honor to the point of feeling life to be unendurable and death itself a deliverance." "Everyone knows that the fire from a little spark will increase and blaze ever higher as long as it finds wood to burn; yet without being quenched by water, but merely finding no more fuel to feed on, it consumes itself, dies down, and is no longer a flame. Similarly, the more tyrants pillage, the more they crave, the more they ruin and destroy; the more one yields to them, and obey them, by that much do they become mightier and more formidable, the readier to annihilate and destroy. But if not one thing is yielded to them, if, without any violence they are simply not obeyed, they become naked and undone and as nothing, just as, when the root receives no nourishment, the branch withers and dies." Id at 46-47.).
Joseph E. Lowndes, From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2008) (From the book jacket: "The role the South has played in contemporary conservatism is perhaps the most consequential political phenomenon of the second half of the twentieth century. The region's transition from Democratic stronghold to Republican base has frequently been viewed as a recent occurrence, one that largely stems from a 1960s-era backlash against left-leaning social movements. But . . . this rightward shift was not necessarily a natural response by alienated whites, but rather the result of the long-term development of an alliance between Southern segregationists and Northern conservatives, two groups who initially shared little beyond opposition go specific New Deal imperatives.").
Luke Mayville, John Adams and the Fear of American Oligarchy (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2016) (From the book jacket: "Mayville presents the first extended exploration of Adam's preoccupation with a problem that has renewed urgency today: the way in which inequality threatens to corrode democracy and empower a small elite. By revisiting Adam's political writings, Mayville draws out the statesman's fears about the dangers of oligarchy in America and his unique understanding of the political power of wealth--a surprising and largely forgotten theory that promises to illuminate today's debates about inequity and its political consequences.").
China Mieville, The City & The City (New York: Ballantine Books, 2009).
Jonathan Morduch & Rachel Schneider, The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2017) (The "American Dream" is unrealistic. We need to rethink our understanding and policies about poverty, financial stability, and safety-nets.).
Yescha Mounk, The Age of Responsibility: Luck, Choice, and the Welfare State (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2017) (From the book jacket: "Mounk shows that today's focus on individual culpability is both wrong and counterproductive: it distracts us from the larger economic forces determining aggregate outcomes, ignores what we owe our fellow citizens regardless of their choices and blinds us to other key values, such as the desire to live in a society of equals. Recognizing that even society's neediest members seek to exercise genuine agency, Mounk builds a positive conception of responsibility. Instead of punishing individuals for their past choices, he argues, public policy should and to empower them to take responsibility for themselves--and those around them.").
George Orwell, Animal Farm: A Fairy Tale, with drawings by Quentin Blake (London: The Folio Society, 1984) (Orwell's tale remains timely in this age of, what we would now call, "alternative facts" "'false facts", "fake news", populism, etc. "ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL BUT SOME ANMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS." Id. at 99.).
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, introduced by Alan Rusbridger, illustrated by Jonathan Burton (London: The Folio Society, 2014) (From the "Introduction": "In the summer of 2013 a young American computer analyst flew to Hong Kong, intent on telling the world about new methods of surveillance which could potentially keep billions of people under a form of monitoring. Edward Snowdon knew a great deal about the subject. He had used his position inside the US's two main intelligence agencies--the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA)--to amass a huge volume of evidence on how far modern technologies enabled states to spy on citizens." Id. at ix. "Judge Leon, in finding the NSA's program of data monitoring and collection almost certainly unconstitutional, noted the attempts to justify it in the name of war: 'There is the very real prospect that the program will go on for as long as America is combating terrorism, which realistically could be forever.' This is not so far from "special mental atmosphere'' created by the endless wars of Nineteen Eighty-Four." Id. at xv.).
Charles Peters, We Do Our Part: Toward a Fairer and More Equal America, foreword by Jon Meacham (New York: Random House, 2017) (From Jon Meacham's "Foreword": "The Peters 'gospel,' as his Monthly editors referred to it, is both empirically based and bighearted. In the early 1980s, defining his philosophy, Charlie wrote: 'We . . . believe in liberty and justice and a fair chance for all, in mercy for the afflicted and help for the down and out. But we no longer automatically favor unions and big government or oppose the military and big business. Indeed, in our search for solutions that work, we have come to distrust all automatic responses, liberal or conservative.'" "A voice in the wilderness, crying out for compassion and common sense: Charlie penned that plea for a more rational politics more than three decades ago." Id. at viii. FOOD FOR THOUGHT FOR WOULD-BE LAWYERS! WHY? BECAUSE THE ALTERNATIVE IS THE "I'VE-GOT-MINE PHILOSOPHY, YOU-GET-YOURS"PHILOSOPHY, WHICH REDUCES TO RABID CONSUMERISM AND BEGGAR-THY-NEIGHBOR-ISM. From the book jacket: "In a volume spanning the decades, Peters compares the flood of talented, original thinkers who flowed into the nation's capital to join FDR's administration with the tide of self-serving government staffers who left to exploit their opportunities on Wall Street and as lobbyists from the 1970s to today. During the same period, the economic divide between rich and poor grew, as we shifted from a culture of generosity to one of personal aggrandizement. With the wisdom of a prophet, Peters connects these two trends by showing how this money-fueled elitism has diminished our trust in one another and our nation--and changed Washington for the worse." "While Peters condemns the crass buckraking that afflicts our capital, and the rampant consumerism that fuels our greed, he refuses to see America's downward drift as permanent.").
Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (New York: PublicAffairs, 2014) ("The Kremlin switches message at will to its advantage, climbing inside everything: European right-wing nationalists are seduced with an anti-EU message; the Far Left is co-opted with tales of fighting US hegemony; US religious conservatives are convinced by the Kremlin's fight against homosexuality. And the result is an array of voices, working away at global audiences from different angles, producing a cumulative echo chamber of Kremlin support, all broadcast RT." "'We're minority shareholders in globalization,' I hear from Russian corporate spooks and politicians. Which . . . might mean that the best way to imagine the Kremlin's vision of itself in the world is as a 'corporate reider'Id. at 234.).
Gideon Rachman, Easternization: Asia's Rise and America's Decline from Obama to Trump and Beyond (New York: Other Press, 2016) ("The election of Donald Trump was a revolutionary moment. The implications of his presidency for international politics are profound. Ever since 1945, all American presidents have shared a commitment to an international order built around two central pillars. The first is the promotion of international trade. The second is a global security system based on U.S.-led alliances." "Trump threatens to pull down both pillars. The forty-fifth president of the United States is an avowed trade protectionist. And he is also a man who has consistently questioned the value of U.S.-led alliances, calling NATO 'obsolete' and suggestion that America's defense treaties with Japan and South Korea are bad deals for the United States." "Trump's revolutionary approach to world affairs is underpinned by a discontent with the process that this book calls 'Easternization'--a shift of power and wealth from the West to Asia. By 2014, according to the IMF, China had become the world's largest economy--ranked by purchasing power. The United States is now number two-relinquishing the top spot that it has held since the late nineteenth century. In 2009, China had also become the world's largest merchandise exporter--a position that the United States had held since the Second World War. China's rise is part of a broader shift in economic power to Asia . . . In pledging to 'Make America Great Again,' Trump implicitly promises to reverse this process of Easternization--returning America to its unrivaled position, both in terms of living standards and global power." Id. at ix-x. Note: That time has passed. The long American Century, 1898-2008, is over and dead. And, as Trump flip-flops on many of his campaign promises/rhetoric, his protectionist stance will only open wider opportunities for China in both global politics, economics and trade. Being a globalist, a free trader, and an anti-nationalist I am, obviously, anti-Trump-ism. Also see "Hemispheric Pressures" NYT Book Review, Sunday, 5/14/2017.).
Condoleezza Rice, Democracy Stories from the Long Road to Freedom (New York: Twelve, 2017) (SeeWalter Russell Mead, "Keeper of the Flame," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 5/7/2017.).
Thomas E. Ricks, Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom (New York: Penguin Press, 2017) ("In the post-9/11 era, 1984 particularly has found a new relevance, and a new generation of Western readers, because of three interlocking aspects." 'For present-day Americans, 1984's background of permanent warfare carries a chilling warning. In the book, as in American life today, the conflict is offstage, heard only as occasional rocket impacts in the distance . . . " "The second driver of the current Orwell boom is the post-9/11 rise the intelligence state. We live in a time of an intrusive, overweening state in both the East and the West. In the early 2000s, the United States government routinely killed people in nations with which it was not officially at war, such as Pakistan and Yemen using remote-controlled aircraft. Many of those killed were not even identified, except by behavior patterns that the U.S. government considered threatening . . . 'Metadata'--the manipulation of billions of bits of information in order to recognize previously unseen patterns--allows governments to quietly compile dossiers on the behavior of millions of individuals . . . " "Third, and perhaps most shocking, is the way the use of torture in 1984 foreshadows how today's state uses it in conducting an endless 'war on terror.' After 9/11, for the first time in American history, torture became official policy. (Before then it had been used occasionally but always in disregard of the law, and sometimes was prosecuted.) CIA officials have admitted that they used torture, almost daring a prosecutor to indict them--which has not happened." Id. at 255-257.).
Rosalind Rosenberg, Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray (New York: Oxford U. Press, 2017) (From the book jacket: "A mixed-race orphan, Murray grew up in segregated North Carolina, before escaping to New York, where she attended Hunter College and became a labor activist in the 1930s. When she applied to graduate school at the University of North Carolina, where her white great-great-grandfather has been a trustee, she was rejected on account of her race. Deciding to become a lawyer, she graduated first in her class at Howard Law School, only to be rejected for graduate study at Harvard University on account of her sex. Undaunted, Murray forged a singular career in the law. In the 1950s, her legal scholarship helped Thurgood Marshall challenge segregation frontally in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case. When appointed by Eleanor Roosevelt to the President's Commission on the Status of Women in 1962, she advanced the idea of Jane Crow, arguing that the same reasons used to condemn race discrimination could be used to battle gender discrimination. In 1965, she became the first African American to earn of JSD from Yale Law School and the following year persuaded Betty Friedan to found an NAACP for women, which became NOW. In the early 1970s, Murray provided Ruth Bader Ginsburg with the argument Ginsburg used to persuade the Supreme Court that the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution protects not only blacks but also women--and potentially other minority groups--from discrimination. By that time, Murray was a tenured professor at Brandeis, a position she left to become the first woman ordained a priest by the Episcopal Church in 1976." "Murray accomplished all this while struggling with issues of identity. She believed from childhood she was a male and tried unsuccessfully to persuade doctors to give her testosterone, While she would today be identified as transgender, during her lifetime no social movement existed to support this identity. She ultimately used her private feelings of being 'in-between' to publicly contend that identities are not fixed, an idea that has powered campaigns for equal rights in the United States for the past half-century.").
Michael Scott, Ancient Worlds: A Global History of Antiquity (New York: Basic Books, 2016) ("This book . . . has sought to explore the gathering connectivity of the ancient world through the lens of three crucial moments and three particular themes. We have seen how political, military and religious innovation, re-articulation and engagement shaped individual communities from the Mediterranean to China and thereby affected the nature and development of the ancient world as a whole. We have explored how the developments of these crucial eras were made possible by what had come before, as well as thanks to the societal forces and powerful individuals of the time; and we have examined how many of the outcomes of these critical moments laid the foundations for the way our world still works--and for debates that we continue to have--in this day and age." Id. at 353. "We have seen how, across ancient worlds, both great myths and histories . . . were rearticulated and re-presented over time--and how such narratives, from very different societies, often have common themes and narratives. . . . The myths of our modern globalised age are most famously made by the movies--a global business long dominated by the Hollywood-based industry of the USA. But the march of globalisation has meant that Hollywood has steadily become as dependent on overseas markets as on its own large body of domestic customers. China is now the second-biggest importer of Hollywood films, and Hollywood has, naturally, adapted by trying to tailor its output towards the tastes of Chinese viewers (as have, for example, many of the world;s luxury-goods makers). But we shouldn't be surprised that China now hankers to generate global blockbuster movies of its own; or that it should look to the histories of ancient worlds to find potential cinematic stories with a 'global' appeal." Id. at 348. QUERY: Does Donald Trump even understand today's globalization, and America's increasingly dependent role, etc.? Does "America First" make sense in a highly dependent global economy?).
Jessica Shattuck, The Women in the Castle: A Novel (New York: William Morrow, 2017) ("'It is our duty,' Connie said. 'If we don't work actively to defeat Hitler, it will only get worse. This man--this zealot who calls himself our leader--will ruin everything we have achieved as a united nation.' He continued, 'If we don't begin to mobilize like-minded people against him, if we don't begin to actively enlist our contacts abroad--the English, the Americans, the French--he will draw us into a war, and worse. If you listen to the things this man says--if you really listen, and read--it's all there in that hideous book of his, Mein Kampf' his 'struggle' is to turn us all into animals! Read it, really read it, know thine enemies--his vision is medieval! Worse than medieval, anarchic! That life is nothing more than a fight for resources to be waged between races--this 'Master Race' he likes to speak of and the racial profiles he has devised--these are that tools he will use to divide and conquer.'" Id. at 12. QUERY: Are not all 'nationalist' little Hitlers, more or less?).
Ganesh Sitaraman, The Counterinsurgent's Constitution: Law in the Age of Small Wars (New York & Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 2013) ("Constitutional designers should attempt to address and neutralize local grievances, thereby depriving insurgency networks of discontented potential recruits. The most evident forms of local grievance relate to human rights and divided societies. During the 1950s, for example, Sir Gerald Templer took measures toward social and political equality for all groups in Malaya. Addressing the grievance--a history of the Chinese not having political and social rights--reduced the number of disaffected Chinese and thus the number of possible recruited to the insurgency. The problem of divided societies is evident in Iraq. The Shia, Sunni, and Kurds all had local grievances. The Shia had experienced a history of repression and lack of political control despite being a majority of the population. The Sunni, having held power for so long were now anxious about the future. And the Kurds who have experienced persecution were unwilling to cede relative autonomy to a majoritarian Arab state. Neutralizing these grievances by finding a way for the three groups to coexist was, and remains, a central challenge. Constitutional mechanisms such as federalism, concurrent majorities, minority vetoes, partition, and secession are but a few of the possible solutions." Id at 232-233. QUERY/COMMENT: Were one to reread this book and think how the arguments could be retooled and apply to domestic or internal law to deal with "alleged" or "perceived" internal enemies (e.g., illegal immigrants, racial minorities, the poor, criminals, political opposition), then one might sense how Sitaramen's book and Hayes's book (see above), especially the latter's discussion of militarized policing, may well provide insights into the other. Are not the war on crime, the war on poverty, the war on drugs, the war on minorities, war on illegal immigration, and on and on, domestic counterinsurgencies? Americans are in a constant state of small internal wars. Americans are not merely a divided people, they are a people at war with each other. And the law is their central weapon.).
Richard Slotkin, Lost Battalions: The Great War and the Crisis of American Nationality (New York: A John Macrae Book/Henry Holt, 2005) ("The story of the Lost Battalion and the Harlem Hell Fighters is worth recovering, if only as an act of historical justice to their veterans. But it is also worth recovering for the sake of justice itself: it is one of those stories that reminds us just how difficult it has been for America to live up to the promises of liberty and justice for all that were made at the nation's birth--just how resistant Americans as a people have been to the moral demands of the democracy they profess." Id. at 10. "At the heart of the American idea of civil equality us the assumption that the individual is entitled, self-evidently and by nature, to dignity and respect. It is this entitlement that compels his fellow citizens, his government, and the laws of the nation to treat his suits, petitions, appeals for justice with due seriousness. But slavery had created, and Jim Crow had perpetuated, the identification of citizen-dignity with racial 'Whitenss.' The concept was embedded in the American idiom. When a midwestern draftee wanted to characterize the good treatment he and his buddies were receiving, he told an interviewer for the magazine Outlook, 'the people Atlanta treat us white.' When Theodore Roosevelt wanted to express his contempt for Germany's barbaric war making, he remarked that he had met the Kaiser before the war, 'when he was a white man.' That 'niggers' could be routinely ridiculed was something most White Americans took for granted, a self-evident fact, and each new act of ridicule reinforced the assumption that everything about Negroes, including their pretension to civil equality and human dignity, was inherently laughable." Id. at 112-113. "The core of the Jim Crow system was the belief expressed by Senator Williams of Mississippi in his response to the Chicago riot: 'Not only is good thicker than water, but race is greater than law.' The case for migration restriction would be made by mustering scientific proof that Jews and other 'new immigrants' belonged to races that were nearly as different form White Americans as Negroes." "By the end of 1919 there was a broad consensus in favor of immigration restriction, though there remained differences about the kind, stringency, and duration of a restrictive policy. In 1920 Congress passed emergency legislation easing the rules for deportation of undesirables and limiting immigration for a three-year period. The House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization then began work on a long-term solution. The case of immigration restriction had, in a sense, already been made before the Johnson committee began its work. The committee's task was to harden this drift of thought into a clear set of ideological principles, which would support the immediate demand for immigration restriction and (over the longer term) educate the public mind to accept a more stringent segregation regime for 'hyphenates' who were already here. The committee recognized that a radical restriction of immigration ran counter to the nation's legal and political traditions, to the symbol of the melting pot, and the myth of a nation built by frontiersmen. Its argument was that the racial character of the new immigrants made them parasites rather than pioneers: they are a 'beaten folk' with 'twisted . . . mentality' and perverted ideas. . . . They have no desire to form and build. They will exist on what has been prepared for them by a better people.'" Id. at 453-454. QUERY: Does this not remind one of Donald Trump's agenda?: Trump's travel/Muslim ban; his proposed border wall with Mexico; his characterization of Mexico as sending its murderers and rapists; his threat to send federal troops to fight inner city (which means black) crime; his attorney general's threat to cut off funds to sanctuary cities and local police departments that do not help in immigration and deportation efforts, the characterization that immigrants are a net cost to taxpayers, etc. Trump did not create American racial and xenophobic prejudices and inner demons; he merely identified and, then, capitalized upon them. That is what reactionary populists do. These prejudices and inner demons are a central part of who we are as a nation, as a peoples. "Central to,' but not essential to who we are. I want to believe we--both individually and collectively--can overcome these demons.).
Geoffrey R. Stone, Sex and the Constitution: Sex, Religion, and Law from America's Origins to the Twenty-First Century (New York: Liveright, 2017) ("The Declaration of Independence was a document of the Enlightenment. It was not a Puritan, Calvinist, Methodist, Baptist, Episcopalian, Catholic, or Evangelical Christian statement. It was, rather, a statement that deeply and intentionally invoked the language of American deism. It is a document of its own time, and it speaks eloquently to what of that time believed." Id. at 98-99. "Did the Framers intend the United States to be 'a Christian nation'? Clearly, they did not." Id. at 106. "The Second Great Awakening triggered a nationwide campaign to transform American law and politics through the lens of evangelical Christianity. Indeed, it was in this era that the claim that the United States is a 'Christian nation' first took root." Id. at 132. "An essential goal of the Second Great Awakening was 'to make America the world's greatest example' of a Christian nation. Over the next forty years, the Second Great Awakening affected politics, culture, education, relations between the sexes, attitudes about sex, and perhaps most fundamentally, social and political norms about the proper relation between religion and government in a free and democratic society--questions that divide our nation to this day." Id. at 134. Also see Michael Kinsley, "Naked Justice" NYT Book Review, Sunday, 4/2/2017.).
William Strauss & Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy- What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny (New York: Broadway Books, 1997) (The book argues that history is cyclical, neither chaotic nor linear. Then it asserts that each cycle consists of four turnings, and that America is, at the present time, in the "Fourth Turning". "The Fourth Turning is a Crisis, a decisive era of secular upheaval, when the values regime propels the replacement of the old civic order with a new one." Id. at 3. Given that Steve Bannon has (or had?) the ear of one D. J. Trump and, more important, is believed to be a subscriber to a "Fourth Turning" stage in America, perhaps this book is worth a read to get insights into both the former and the latter. Personally, I think history is cyclical. However, I doubt the authors have captured it correctly. Anyway, i do agree that some sort of 'winter is coming again.' "Not long ago, America was more than the sum of its parts. Now, it is less. Around World War II, we were proud as a people but modest as individuals. Fewer than two people in ten said yes when asked asked, Are you a very important person? Today, more than six in ten say yes. Where we once thought ourselves collectively strong, we now regard ourselves as individually entitled." "Yet even while we exalt our own personal growth, we realize that millions of self-actualized persons don't add up to an actualized society. Popular trust in virtually every American institution--from businesses and governments to churches and newspapers--keep falling to new lows. Public debts soar, the middle class shrinks, welfare dependencies deepens, and cultural arguments worsen by the year. [Note: This was written before America became "post-fact', 'fake-news', 'post-post-racial', and elected the uninspiring Hillary Clinton president but got Donald J "as in jackass" Trump instead.] We now have the highest incarceration rate and the lowest eligible-voter participation rate of any major democracy. Statistics inform us that many adverse trends (crime, divorce, abortion, scholastic aptitudes) may have bottomed out, but we're not reassured." Id. at 1-2. Again, I think Strauss and Howe do not get it right; however, they present an interesting point of view and a warning worth taking note.).
William Strauss & Neil Howe, Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069 (New York: Harper Perennial/William Morrow, 1991) ("[A] startling pattern emerges: a recurring cycle of four distinct types of peer personalities, arriving in the same repeating sequence." Id. at 33. "Looking back over American history, we find a correspondence between recurring patterns in generational constellations and recurring types of historical events. Id, at 33."History does not guarantee good endings. The American saga is replete with good and bad acts committed by generations no less than by individuals. Out national liturgy reminds us how ancestor generations provided helpful endowments that made progress possible, from the clearing of land to the building of infrastructure, from the waging of wars against tyrants to the writing of great literature. Yet ancestral generations have also, at times, inflicted terrible harms on their heirs--from instituting slavery to exterminating Indian tribes, from exploiting child labor to accumulating massive public debts. A lesson of the cycle is that each generational type specializes in its own unique brand of positive and negative endowments. Each of today's generations . . . have its own special way of help or hurting the future. Each, collectively, has choices to make that will determine what sort of world its heirs will someday inherit, ad how those heirs will remember its legacy, " Id. at 39-40.).
Neil Howe & William Strauss, Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation, cartoons by R. J. Matson (New York: Vintage Books, 2000) (Seventeen years after its publication and seeing where the millennials (and the country as a whole) are now, I think Strauss and Howe got this one (that is, their forecast) wrong . . . at least, so far. Among other things, they could not have predicted September 11, 2001, the Great Recession of 2008, and Donald Trump in 2016. All of which, for obvious reasons, impacted severely and negatively how Millennials had/have to deal with the world.).
John Stubbs, John Donne: The Reformed Soul: A Biography (New York: Norton, 2006) ("Donne set a more practical example for those who have to make the society they inherit work. He dealt intelligently with the formidable expectations pressed on his . . . , adapting to his time instead of refusing to yield. It is important to avoid twentieth-century parallels in thinking about his political choices. Becoming a Protestant in the 1590s was not like joining the Nazi party in the 1930s: the Protestant regime Donne served was no more repressive towards dissidents than the Roman Catholic regime he would have worked for had the English Reformation even defeated. He did not choose between a threatened system supporting liberty and one imposing tyranny: such a choice did not exist. Instead he questioned whether the idea for which Roman Catholics were persecuted were really worth dying for, and whether they might in fact be erroneous; and he found that parents and priests were wrongfully exhorting their children to harm themselves needlessly. [] For Donne [Sir Thomas] More's actions were honorable in themselves, but not practical as a code of conduct for others to follow. One of the central realization of Donne's life was that it was wrong and silly to will oneself towards martyrdom. To set oneself apart, to try being an island, was also a great mistake. It was impossible to resign from mankind or from the historical position of humanity. So Donne lived instead by continual metamorphosis, transforming himself to meet his circumstances. In the end, he put himself in a position to voice moderation." Id. at 446-447.).
John Stubbs, Jonathan Swift: The Reluctant Rebel (New York: Norton, 2016) ("Swift's work raises a bowman's two fingers to all those in authority who treat people as vassals or livestock. Few travelers in life will be able to halt an oppressive government in its tracks; but all, Swift's writing demonstrates, have a right to view the conditions of existence alternatively, critically, satirically; to identify their misfortunes and describe them more acutely. His career skeptically highlighted the very moderate and indeed altogether inadequate expectations a moral person might have of life in this world. But simultaneously he proved the existence of other liberties of speech than more complaining or roaring: a liberty of chiding, deriding, cajoling, bridling, impersonating, inventing, building up and laying bare; a liberty of making the powerful seem less so. By the end of his life he was championing more than exclusively defined rights that allowed a Protestant of English descent to escape 'slavery'." Id. at 638-639. "Still, it took a lot to make him turn on England, the kingdom he always claimed as his rightful home. Much as he relished the fray, Swift would always deny that he had turned renegade. The degenerates who had taken over government, Parliament, the Crown--it was they who had left him no option but resistance. This was Swift's line of argument; and this, as well he knew, was the reasoning of a rebel, however reluctant." Id. at 639. See also James McNamara, "Swift Beyond Satire," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 2/26/2017.).
"There are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations."--James Madison
"There are two kinds of injustice: the first is found in those who do an injury, the second in those who fail to protect another from injury when they can."--Cicero, De Off. I. vii.).
Alexander Meiklejohn, What Does America Mean? (New York: The Norton Library/W. W. Norton, 1935, 1972) ("My own definition of a democracy would be that it is a society which is carrying on an enterprise in which all its members have a genuine stake. It implies, first, that the group has something to do. It assumes, also, that the undertaking is such that all people can actively and responsibly partake in the achievement." "Now it is very clear that this definition brings us face to face with a crucial issue . . . Does it mean anything to say that America has a purpose, a commitment? Is there any sense in the statement that a nation has a common spiritual life in which all its people may share or fall to share? If not, I cannot see that either democracy or any other principle of social living has any significance. Unless in the life of a social group some dominant purpose can be found, in terms of which it can be assessed, in relation to which its manifold activities can be judged as good or bad, then planning for such a group seems to me to be nonsense. Human reason, as the critic and guide of human living, stands or falls with the answer to the question, 'What are we, as human beings, trying to do?'" Id. at 179-180.).
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited, foreword by Christopher Hitchens (New York: HarperCollins, 2004) (From Brave New World: "Then, turning to his students, 'What I'm going to tell you now,' he said, 'may sound incredible. But then, when you're not accustomed to history, most facts about the past do sound incredible.'" Id. at 39. From Brave New World Revisited, ChapterI V: "Propaganda in a Democratic Society":"There are two kinds of propaganda--rational propaganda in favor of action that is consonant with the enlightened self-interest of those who make it and those to whom it is address, and non rational propaganda that is not consonant with anybody's enlightened self-interest, but is dictated by, and appeals to, passion. [Note: For the latter, think America's dog-whistle political rhetoric, e.g., 'Mexico is sending us its murderers and rapist' . . . built the wall!'] Where the actions of individuals are concerned there are motives more exalted than enlightened self-interest, but where collective action has to be taken in the field of politics and economics, enlightened self-interest is probably the highest of effective motives. If politicians and their constituents always acted to promote their own or their country's long-range self-interest [Note: This does not mean vulgar nationalism (e.g., "America First".], this world would be an earthly paradise. As it is, they often act against their own interests, merely to gratify their least creditable passions; the world, in consequence, is a place of misery. Propaganda in favor of action that is consonant with enlightened self-interest appeals to reason by means of logical arguments based upon the best available evidence fully and honestly set forth. Propaganda in favor of action dictated by the impulses that are below self-interest offer false, garbled or incomplete evidence, avoid logical argument and seek to influence its victims by the mere repletion of catchwords, by the furious denunciation of foreign or domestic scapegoats [Note: Think here about Muslim ban and the attack on the media.], and cunningly associating the lowest passions with the highest ideals, so that atrocity come to be perpetrated in the name of God and the most cynical kind of Realpolitik is treated as a matter of religious principle and patriotic duty." Id at 264-265. QUERY: Sound familiar? Sound recent?).
Omar el Akkad, American War: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2017) (From the book jacket: "American War is a hauntingly told story of the immeasurable ruin of war--in a nation, a community, a family, an individual. It's a novel that considers what might happen if the United States were to turn its most devastating policies and weapons upon itself." See generally, Justin Cronin, "Red Versus Blue," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 4/23/2017.).
Akutagawa Ryunosuke, Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories, translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin, with an introduction by Haruki Murakami (New York: Penguin Classics/Penguin Books, 2006) (From "The Nose," January 1916: "The human heart harbors two conflicting sentiments. Everyone of course sympathizes with people who suffer misfortunes. Yet when those people manage to overcome their misfortunes, we feel a certain disappointment. We may even feel (to overstate the case somewhat) a desire to plunge them back into those misfortunes. And before we know it, we come (if only passively) to harbor some degree of hostility toward them." Id. at 20, 25.).
Elizabeth Anderson, Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We don't Talk about It), Introduction by Stephen Macedo (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2017).
Nadeem Aslam, The Golden Legend: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2017) (From the book jacket: "Here is a brave, timely, searingly beautiful novel set in contemporary Pakistan--the story of a Muslim widow and her Christian neighbors whose community is consumed by violent religious intolerance." From the text: "'It's all very well abusing women and children and those who are weaker than you,' she said.'And, yes, the Americans took away your brother, mother and Billu's legs, but it's the Pakistan military and the intelligence agencies who secretly give them permission to fly their drones above Waziristan. In return for rewards and weapons and money. Nargis and Massud's house is visited by people from the military looms every other day. Why don't you go and take the matter up with them? She took several steps towards him. 'Or are they too powerful.'" Id. at 268-269. "She was the mother of a child mutilated by the Americans, a child who was collateral damage, the daughter-in-law of a woman who was killed because she happened to be near the enemy when the hour struck. And this--here in the newspaper--was the other side: people claiming to retaliate against the West's influence and crimes, by killing Pakistanis." Id. at 270.).
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale, with a new introduction by the author, illusions by Anna Balbusso & Elena Balbusso (London:The Folio Society, 2012) (The Handmaid's Tale is one of the supplementary titles I would use were I ever to teach Law and Literature. Also see Margaret Atwood, "Handmaids Rising," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 3/19/2017.)
Bradley Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces (New York: PublicAffairs, 2013) (From the book jacket: "The last days of colonialism taught America's revolutionaries that soldiers in the streets bring conflict and tyranny. As a result, our country has generally worked to keep the military out of law enforcement. But according to investigative reporter Radley Balko, over the last several decades, America's cops have increasingly come to resemble ground troops. The consequences have been dire: The home is no longer a lace of sanctuary, the Fourth Amendment has been gutted, and lie today have been conditioned to see the citizens they serve as an other--an enemy. [] In Rise of the Warrior Cop, Balko shows how politicians' ill-considered policies and relentless declarations of war against vague enemies like crime, drugs, and terror have blurred the distinction between cop and soldier. His fascinating, frightening narrative sows how over a generation, a creeping battlefield mentality has isolated and alienated American police officers and put them on a collusion course with the values of a free society." Note: Remember Donald J. Trump saying, if the City of Chicago could not fix its murder rates, he would send federal troops. Food for thought! From the text: "'In my ten years in law enforcement on the street, I can't remember one case where a police officer shot a dog,' says Russ Jones, the former narcotics cop with the San Jose Police Department and the DEA. 'I don't understand it at all. I guess somewhere along the line a cop shot a dog under questionable circumstances and got away with it. Word got out, and now it seem like some cops are just looking for a reason to take a shot at a dog. Maybe it just comes down to that--we can get away with it, therefore we do it.'" Id. at 293. "Emily Tanner, a grad student at the University of Pittsburgh who described herself as a 'capitalist' who didn't agree with the general philosophy of the antiglobalization protesters, covered the summit, the protests, and the fallout on her blog. The most egregious police action seemed to take place on Friday evening before the summit, around the university, when police began ordering students who were in pubic spaces to disperse, despite the fact that they had broken no laws. Students who moved too slowly were arrested, as were students who were standing in front of the dormitories where they lived." "A University of Pittsburgh spokesman later said that the tactic was to break up crowds that 'had the potential of disrupting normal activities, traffic flow, egress and the like. . . . Much of the arrests last night had to do with failure to disperse when ordered." Note that no one needed to have broken any actual laws to get arrested. The potential to break a law was more than enough. That standard was essentially a license for the police to arrest anyone, anywhere in the city, at any time, for any reason." Id. at 294-295.).
Zygmunt Bauman, Retrotopia (New York: Polity, 2017) (From the backcover: "We have long since lost our faith in the idea that human beings could achieve human happiness in some future ideal state--a state that Thomas More, writing five centuries ago, tied to a topas, a fixed place, a land, an island, a sovereign state under a wise and benevolent ruler. But, while we have lost our faith in utopias of all hues, the human aspiration that made this vision so compelling has not dies. Instead it is re-emerging today as a vision focused not on the future but on the past, not on a future-to-be-created but on an abandoned and undead past that we could call retrotopia." From "Back to Tribes": "In a culture in which, as Lindy West reports in the 11 march 2016 issue of the New York Times, 'some people believe that it's worse to be called racist than to be racist', many people are likely to perceive such digitized facility as a Godsend gift. During one of the numerous crowded gatherings of enthusiastic supporters of Donald Trump, a Ms Kemper ('blazing, passionate, incredulous') confides: 'I think this country better of back to some of those values. Some of the values my parents grew up with, my grandparents grew up with'; 'Whatever was wrong, they could point it out and tell you.' By being voiced in public using no more gadgets than a mundane microphone, without beating about the bush and with face uncovered, thoughts that had been half-clandestinely honed and groom in the privacy of talking to a smart phone or touching the keyboard of a tablet, the key to endearing Mr Trump to the online-formatted nation was turned." "Mr Trump is but one specimen (albeit it one leading in spectacularity and notoriety) of the large and growing category of the 'politicians of anger', as the title of an article published by Harvard professor Dani Rodrik, in Social Europe, suggests they are. 'The conflict between hyper-globalized economy and social cohesion are real', observes the author; 'Two types of political cleavage are exacerbated in the process: an identity cleavage, revolving around nationhood, ethnicity, or religion, and an income cleavage, revolving around social class. Populists derive their appeal from one of the other of these categories . . . In both cases, there is a clear 'other' toward which anger can be directed,'; 'The appeal of populists is that give voice to the anger of the excluded.'" Id. at 49, 68-69, citations omitted.).
Patricia Bell-Scott, The Firebrand and the First Land: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice (New York: Knopf, 2016).
Erik Brynjolfsson & Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York: Norton, 2014).
Patrick J. Buchanan, Nixon's White House Wars: The Battle that Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever (New York: Crown Forum, 2017) (a perspective).
Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (New York: Knopf, 1992) (From the book jacket: "Bullock finds in both Hitler and Stalin, despite the radical difference between them, the same unshaken belief in their historic mission, overriding any regard for law, limits, or humanity and armoring them against any feeling of compassion, remorse, or guilt." From the text: "For the Nazis differed from all the other parties in making the style of their campaigning more important than the content: To borrow a later phrase, in their case it was literally true that 'the medium was the message.' Not only Hitler's speeches but also everything about the movement that dramatized politics as a mixture of theater and religion was aimed to appeal not to the rational but to the emotional faculties, those 'affective interests' against which (as Freud pointed out) students of human nature and philosophers had long recognized that logical arguments we important." Id. at 223-224. NOTE: Trump supporters took (take) him seriously, but not what he said (says). Trump detractors did, and some still do, take what he says seriously but not Trump himself. As a result, efforts at rational argument by the latter were lost on the former. "The denominational division of Germany was an important as social stratification. The Nazis attracted a large part of the churchgoing population in Protestant parts of the country; much less in the Catholic areas (including Bavaria) until after Hitler came to power and signed the Concordat with the Vatican in the summer of 1933. It was also in Protestant rather than the Catholic parts of Germany that the Nazis--with their emphasis on traditional family life, Kinder, Kirche, kuche ("Children, church, and kitchen")--in 1930 expanded their vote among women, for the first time." "The different regions of Germany showed wide variations in September 1930. The highest percentage of Nazi voters was to be found in the Protestant and agricultural districts of north and east Germany, such as Schleswig-Holstein, Pomerania and East Prussia. They also did very well in districts with a mixed economy of agriculture and small-scale industry, such as Lower Silesia-Breslau and Chemnitz-Zwickau." "The Nazi did much less well in urban, heavy-industrial, or Catholic areas . . . " Id. at 217-218.).
Erwin Chemerinsky, Closing the Court House Door: How Your Constitutional Rights Became Unenforceable (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2017) ("My goal is to explain how the Supreme Court, through a series of doctrines and decisions, has closed the federal courthouse doors to those whose rights have been violated. I want readers to see how these rulings affect real people, and ultimately all of us. My vision . . . is that federal courts should be available to all who claim a violation of their constitutional rights" Id. at x.).
Adam Cohen, Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck (New York: Penguin Books, 2016) (From the book jacket: "Buck v. Bell unfolded against the backdrop of a nation in the thrall of eugenics, which many Americans thought would uplift the human race. Congress embraced this fervor, enacting the first laws designed to prevent immigration by Italians, Jews, and other groups charged with being genetically inferior.").
Tanner Colby, Some of My Best Friends Are Black: The Strange Story of Integration in America (New York: Viking, 2012) (From the book jacket: "Tanner Colby woke up one day and realized that he didn't know any black people--is friends, former classmates, coworkers, acquaintances, just about everyone he knew and interacted with was white. And this lopsided state of affairs, as he soon discovered, was hardly unique. . . . Curious, Colby set out to learn exactly why this was. What he found was the strange story of race in post-civil rights America [Query: Does Colby understand/intend the double-meaning of "post-civil rights America"?], a world in which segregation never really died by was simply transformed. Some of My Best Friends Are Black follows for stories that show how the strict legal barriers of Jim Crow came to be replaced by social mores and economic policies that endeavored to maintain a separate and unequal status quo: keeping the races apart, fueling suspicion between them, and enhancing the wealth and status of those who continue to profit for a divided America." This is a worthy efforts by a self-admittedly sleepwalker; he is on the road to being WOKE!)
Lauren Elkin, Flaneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016) ("There are two elements of the protest: the march and the barricade. The forward movement and the resistance. A demonstration can't become a protest without the forces of order saying no to their no. Both play their part. The barricade is a symbol of revolution, but the police kettle is just another kind of barricade. The very things that stir our heart in a revolution may be co-opted by forces of order--or the other way around." Id. at 205.).
John A. Farrell, Richard Nixon: The Life (New York: Doubleday, 2017) ("America's grand strategy--to contain Soviet aggression until Europe and Japan could reemerge as great, countervailing powers--was succeeding. Indeed, the independent-minded Europeans and industrious Japanese were now presenting challenge of their own to American economic and diplomatic primacy. But the other danger that George Kennan warned about--that Americans would lose their way in the long twilight struggle--had shown itself as well." "The government that Nixon inherited was steeped in arrogance, luxuriant in sin. For more than a decade, under Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson, it has spied on its citizens, suppressed dissent, and overthrown overseas regimes. Antiwar and civil rights groups had been infiltrated, framed, bugged, and assaulted by agents of their government. The Nixon administration had embraced the tradition . . . 'The fact of the matter is that there is a little bit of the totalitarian buried somewhere way down deep, in each and every one of us,' Kennan had warned. The military-industrial combine prospered, the state flourished, and the tentacles of surveillance crept through society. 'I have destroyed him with the weapons I abhorred, and they are his,' says the spy George Smiley of a Soviet counterpart, at the climax of one of John le Carre's ad,entry Cold War novels." Id. at 421-422.).
Alvin S. Felzenberg, A Man and His Presidents: The Political Odyssey of William F. Buckley Jr. (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2017) ("On the domestic front, Buckley objected strenuously to the federal government's intruding into state and local affairs to protect the civil rights of African Americans. He and his colleagues [at the National Review] opposed the Supreme Court's unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education on the grounds that it violated both states' rights and federalism. They failed to consider whether a state or local government, in denying millions of citizens, based on race, the right to participate in the political process was itself a violation of the spirit of 'home rule' or both the letter and the spirit of the U.S. Constitution. On top of their purported constitutional objections to the decision and subsequent efforts of presidents to enforce it, they rendered considerable harm to their own movement outside of the South and among opinion leaders of all persuasions when they opined that as the more 'advance' race, whites were entitled to govern. (As will be shown in subsequent chapters, in time Buckley came to regret the stand he took in these editorials and changed his views, prompted in part by the increased violence unleashed by local citizens, often incited by race-baiting politicians he termed 'welfare populists.')." Id. at 78-79. When I was in college and graduate school, and though I disagreed with many of his conclusions, I found William F. Buckley Jr.'s articles, op-ed pieces, books and comments on Firing Line, etc., as providing much worthwhile food for thought. Given the anti-elite, anti-intellectual, not to mentioned the pro-Russia tendencies, of many republicans, it is doubtful, at least to me, that Buckley would be comfortable in the today's Republican Party. I certainly could not see him as a Trump supporter. As Buckley prodigy George Will has written (Washington Post, 5/3/2017), "It is urgent for Americans to think and speak clearly about President Trump’s inability to do either. This seems to be not a mere disinclination but a disability. It is not merely the result of intellectual sloth but of an untrained mind bereft of information and married to stratospheric self-confidence.").
Owen Fiss, Pillars of Justice: Lawyers and the Liberal Tradition (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2017) (Fiss profiles of Thurgood Marshall, William Brennan, John Doar, Burke Marshall, Harry Kalven, Eugene Rostow, Arther Leff, Catharine MacKinnon, Joseph Goldstein, Carola Nino, Robert Cover, Morton Horowitz and Aharon Barak. "This book seeks to inspire and instruct. It portrays the lives of thirteen lawyers who, through their tieless devotion to just, changed the world. These individuals have lived grandly in the law and in good part account for the course the aw has taken over the past half-century. Their careers provide a source for understanding the dynamics responsible for the progress of the law and, even more, reveal what a life devoted to justice might entail." Id. at 1.).
Frances Fitzgerald, The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017) ("This book is not a taxonomy or attempt to describe the entirety of evangelical life, but rather a history of the white evangelical movements necessary to understand the Christian right and its evangelical opponents that have emerged in recent years. It purposely omits the history of African American churches because theirs is a different story, mainly one of resistance to slavery and segregation, but also of the creation of centers for self-help and community in a hostile world. . . Only along after the success of the civil rights movement did some black churchmen begin to enter the story of the white evangelicals and their internal conflicts. What is important to stress is that the white evangelical world has always been changing, though it has retained many of the characteristics acquired during its history. In any case, no movement including the Christian right, has even been static or completely coherent. Evangelicals have had some influential leaders, but in essence their world is decentralized and difficult to lead, much less to control." Id. at 3. "Christian right leaders with a few exceptions . . . opposed Trump. James Dobson said he would never vote for a 'kingpin' of casino gambling, and several cited Trump's reported comments about his daughter's figure. 'If Ivanka weren't my daughter, perhaps I'd be dating her.' Progressive evangelicals opposed Trump notably because of his libertinism but also because of his xenophobia and bigotry. Christianity Today accused Trump of 'fear mongering and demagoguery' and 'Nietzsche-eque notions of power.' Still, the strongest criticisms of Trump came from Southern Baptist leaders . . . [Russell M]oore wrote that deporting eleven to twelve million people 'would take a government so big it would nearly be a police state.' When Trump proposed closing the United States to Muslims, Moore wrote, 'Anyone who cares one iota about religious liberty should denounce this reckless, demagogic rhetoric.' Make no mistake, he continued, 'a government that can shut down mosques just because they are mosques can shut down Bible studies just because they are Bible studies.' We cannot, he said, 'say we're for religious liberty and then be silent when we have calls for an entire group of people to be banned from the country based on their religion.' . . . Moore said Trump was running 'on a dangerous mix of populism and nationalism,' and . . . accused Trump of 'the spewing of profanities in campaign speeches, race-baiting and courting white supremacists, boasting of adulterous affairs, debauching public morality and justice." Id. at 628. Also see Alan Wolfe, "With God on Their Side," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 4/2/2017.),
James Forman, Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2017) (From the book cover: "Forman shows us that the first substantial cohort of black mayors, judges, and police chiefs took office amid a surge in crime and drug addiction. Many prominent black official . . . feared that the gains of the civil rights movement were being undermined by lawlessness--and thus embraced tough-on-crime measures, including longer sentences and aggressive police tactics. In the face of skyrocketing murder rates and the proliferation of open-air drug markets, they believed they had no choice. But the policies they adopted would have devastating consequences for residents of poor black neighborhoods.").
Barry Friedman, Unwarranted: Policing Without Permission (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2017) (From the book jacket: "Unwarranted tells the stories of ordinary people whose lives were torn apart by policing--by the methods of cops on the beat and those of the FBI and NSA. Driven by technology, policing has changed dramatically. Once, cops sought out bad guys; today, increasingly militarized forces conduct wide surveillance of all of us. Friedman captures the eerie new environment in which CCTV, location tracking, and predictive policing have made suspects of us all, while proliferating SWAT teams and increased use of force have put everyone's property and lives at risk. Policing falls particularly heavily on minority communities and the poor, but as Unwarranted makes clear, the effects of policing are much broader still. Policing is everyone's problem." Also see Khalil Gibran Muhammad, "Power and Punishment," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 4/16/2017.).
David J. Garrow, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama (New York: William Morrow/ HarperColins, 2017).
Irwin F. Gellman, The Contender: Richard Nixon: The Congress Years, 1946-1952 (New York: The Free Press, 1999).
Irwin F. Gellman, The President and the Apprentice: Eisenhower and Nixon, 1952-1961 (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2015).
Eric F. Goldman, The Crucial Decade: America, 1945-1955 (New York: Knopf, 1956) ("The volume is based on no special theories about man or about history; it contains no ringing pleas to save America. As a matter of fact, implicit throughout is the assumption that America will be saved, if she is in need of salvation, not by men with banners but by those who are able to escape the banners long enough to think. The book is a history in the most direct sense of the world--a narrative, written with a careful regard for facts, an attempt to escape partisanship or other bias, an effort to place events in the longer perspective, and the assumption that the history of man is the story of men...." Id. at vi.).
Carol Gilligan & David A. J. Richards, The Deepening Darkness: Patriarchy, Resistance, and Democracy (New York: Cambridge U. Press, 2009).
David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murderers and the Birth of the FBI (New York: Doubleday, 2017) (See Dave Eggers, "Death by Oil," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 5/14/2017.).
A. C. Grayling, War: An Inquiry (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2017).
Jacob S. Hacker & Paul Pierson, American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017) ("This book is about an uncomfortable truth: It takes government--a lot of government--for advanced societies to flourish." Id. at 1. "We suffice, in short, from a kind of mass historical forgetting, a distinctively 'American Amnesia.' At a time when we face serious challenges that can be addressed only through stronger, ore effective government--a strained middle class, a weakened system for generating life-improving innovation, a dangerously warming planet--we ignore what both our history and basic economic theory suggest: We need constructive and mutually beneficial tension between markets and government rather than the jealous rivalry that so many misperceive--and, in that misperception, help foster. Above all, we need a government strong and capable enough to rise above narrow private interests and carry out long-term\ courses of action on behalf of broader concerns. At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, one of the delegates noted: 'It has never been a complaint of [the Confederate Congress] that they governed overmuch. The complaint has been that they governed too little.' Today there are complaints only about our leaders governing 'overmuch.' But the truth is that although areas of government overreach certainly do exist, we have 'too little' effective government, not too much." Id. at 2-3. Keep this book in mind when taking, say, Administrative Law, or Health Law, or Banking Law, etc., and you confront arguments for deregulation, and for non regulation, and for just letting the markets do their thing.).
H. R. Haldeman, The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House, Introduction and Afterword by Stephen E. Ambrose (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1994) (From the book jacket: "Nixon, who was the biggest star of his own drama, is revealed more intimately than we have ever seen him--shrewd, complex, petty, obsessive, sensitive, manipulative, and self-absorbed.").
James T. Hamilton, Democracy's Detectives: The Economics of Investigative Journalism (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2016) (on the importance and cost of investigative journalism).
Chris Hayes, A Colony in a Nation (New York: Norton, 2017) ("There are fundamentally two ways you can experience the police in America: as the people you call when there's a problem, the nice man in uniform who pats a toddler's head and has an easy smile for the old lady as she buys her coffee. For others, the police are the people who are called on them. They are the ominous knock on the door, the sudden flashlight in the face, the barked orders. Depending on who you are, the sight of an officer can produce either a warm sense of safety and contentment or a plummeting feeling of terror." Id. at 16.).
Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer, The Farm in the Green Mountains, translated from the German by Ida H. Washington & Carol E. Washington, introduction by Elisa Albert (New York: New York Review, 1987, 2017) ("I lived with the rats long enough to have the opportunity to look them in the eyes often." "In those rat eyes I found a kind of consciousness, a knowledge of their undertakings and deeds that lifted them out of the level of vermin into that of a proper enemy." "It was once announced in a newspaper article that a scientist had finally found the bones of the orangutan from which we must all descended. Tied to that discovery was the amazing theory that, after humankind, rats or ants would take over the dominion of the world. If I accepted the idea of this dark utopia for a moment, I'd bet on the rats." Id. at 102,).
Adam Hochschild, The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin (New York: Viking, 1994) (From the book jacket: "In a section of this book excerpted in The New York Times Magazine, Hochschild visits a small Siberia town where a flooding river tore open a secret mass grave. He meet one woman whose father was buried there, and another, a friend and neighbor, who has learned that her father signed the execution orders. Hochschild visits villages deep in gulag territory, where snow lies on the ground for four months a year and where no American has been before. And, in an extraordinary journey that ends the book, he travels by helicopter to old labor camp sites in Russia's desolate, subarctic gold fields, one of the twentieth century's worst killing grounds." From the text: "In his book The Nazi Doctors, Robert Jay Lifton looks at doctors who worked in the concentration camps; one, at Treblinka, actually served as a camp commander. Like Marton, most of these men were married, and most apparently had close bonds with their families. Also like Marton, many of the Nazi doctors who survived the war went back to practicing medicine. Dr. Eduard Wirths, who set up and supervised the 'selections' system for the Auschwitz gas chambers, seemed to be remembered with particular warmth by his family. He too, had a loving daughter. To a filmmaker who came to interview her, she said, 'Can a good man do bad things?'" "The answer, according to all too many studies of those who commit atrocities, whether they be Nazis, Americans in Vietnam, or South African police, is less. If the enemy--Jews, blacks, Vietnamese, or 'enemies of the people'--is sufficiently dehumanized by the relentless did pf propaganda, if the murder or torture is sanctioned by peer pressure, by heads of state, by commands from those in authority, it is a rare person who will resist. Perhaps some people are born saints and some devils, but most of us are somewhere in between, influenced, in the end, by what the people around us are doing. It is the structure and customs and distribution of power of the society we live in that keeps the 'shark well governed.' Otherwise angels can, all too easily, be turned to sharks." "In trying to understand what allowed the Nazi physicians to let pressure from peers and superiors overcome professional ethics, Lifton speaks of the process of 'doubling.' It is an unconscious Faustian bargain, he says, a 'division of the self into two functioning wholes.' The concentration camp doctor has an 'Auschwitz self' which he needed to act as part of the death machine, and a 'prior self,' which took no responsibility for anything done at Auschwitz. 'The feeling was something like: "Anything I do on planet Auschwitz doesn't count on planet Earth."' One does not have to be a concentration camp officer to practice this doubling, Lifton points out. An army psychiatrist doubles when he certifies a soldier as fit to b sent back to a job where he can kill and be killed; a nuclear physicist who loves his wife and children doubles when he works on an atomic bomb. And, we might add, the issue does not only arise with war and weapons; a kind-hearted, churchgoing engineer doubles when he allows a new product off the assembly line without adequate safety testing. The list goes on." Id. at 220-221. Query: Do we, as private citizens, double when we endorse, explicitly or implicitly, certain public policies? For example, drone warfare killing noncombatants, including women and children? Or, a tax policy that reduces food subsidies for the poor and the elderly? Or, standing by when the government placed Japanese Americans in detention camps? Or, a climate policy that transfers health and safety costs to the next generation? Or, when we stand silent when the media is characterized as 'the enemy of the people'? That is, what does it mean to participate in evil?).
Irving Louis Horowitz, Claude Helvetius: Philosopher of Democracy and Enlightenment (New York: Paine-Whitman, 1954) (“Turning to the question of the relation between luxury and virtue, Helvetius makes the penetrating point that a lack of material wealth cannot destroy the common people’s love of virtue. A lack of money or power does not debase the oppressed; on the contrary, the possession of great wealth gained at the expense of the masses does lead to complete moral degeneracy and debasement. The court nobility in pre-revolutionary France was adequate testimony to the truth of this remark. ‘There is no such people where all are corrupted. There is no country where the order of common citizens, always depressed, and rarely oppressors, do not love and esteem virtue. Their interest leads them to it. It is not so with the order of great men. Their interest is to be unjust with impunity; it is to stifle in the hearts of men every sentiment of equity. Their interest is to be unjust with impunity; it is to stifle in the heart of men every sentiment of equity. This interest imperiously commands the great, but not the rest of the nation. The tempest agitates the surface of the sea, but its depths are always tranquil. Such are the inferior class of citizens, in almost every country.’” “Therefore, a ‘base nation’ can only signify that nation in which the people in power, the governing class, are enemies of the class governed, or at the very least, unconcerned and indifferent to the happiness of the oppressed masses. For Helvetius, it is as plain as a geometric axiom that ‘the excessive power of the great’ leads to a ‘consequent contempt in which they hold their fellow-citizens.’” Id. at 124, citations omitted. Food for thought for Donald J. Trump and the Republican Congress as they gut The Affordable Care Act, cut social services for the poor, the elderly and the working-class (e.g., meals on wheel), while providing the wealthy with significant reductions in income tax. Add to that his and their assault on women’s reproduction rights, their rape of the environment for another buck, and their complete denial and misunderstanding of climate change. Perhaps the French Revolution, not the American Revolution, is a better benchmark of where America is as a nation, as a peoples divided, in these closing years of the second decade of the twenty-first century.).
Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature (A Rebours), translated from the French by Robert Baldick, with an introduction and notes by Patrick McGuinness (New York: Penguin Classics/ Penguin Books, 2003) ("After the aristocracy of birth, it was now the turn of the aristocracy of wealth, the caliphate of the counting-house, the despotism of the Rue du Sentier, the tyranny of commerce with its narrow-minded, venal ideas, its selfish, rascally instinct." Id. at 202. "This was the vast bagnio of America transported the continent of Europe; this was the limitless, unfathomable, immeasurable scurviness of the financier and the self-made man, beaming down like a shameful sun on the idolatrous city, which groveled on its belly, chanting vile songs of praise before the impious tabernacle of the Bank." Id. at 203.).
Francois Jullien, The Book of Beginnings, translated from the French by Jody Gladding (New Haven & London: A Margellos World Republic of Letters/Yale U. Press, 2015) (From the book jacket: "How can a person from a Western culture enter a way of thinking as different as that of the Chinese? Can a person truly escape from his or her own cultural perspectives and assumptions? French philosopher Francois Jullien has throughout his career explored the distance between European and Chinese thought. In this fascinating summation of his work, he takes an original approach to the conundrum of cross-cultural understanding.").
George Kateb, Human Dignity (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2011) (From the "Preface": "The subject of human dignity is the worth of human beings or their high rank, or even their special place in nature. If we want to think about human dignity we should not remain content with a definition of the term or a short account that fails to acknowledge the idea's difficulty. The idea is difficult, even though it is rather casually used in many kinds of ceremonial or more substantial public speech, especially when such speech involves praising human rights. [] Trying to deal with one difficulty may unsettle the conclusion we thought we had reached about another. I emphasize the conceptual or theoretical difficulties in this essay, not the formidable difficulties that stand in the way of the realization of the idea in practice and institutions or in taking the idea ever more seriously where it is already partly realized, No society fully realizes the dignity of the individual, though some societies come closer than others. In their awful luck, many societies have barely the beginnings and some have none. On the other hand, to say what the dignity of the species is will depend on trying to ascertain the human difference from the heart of nature." Id. at ix.).
Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Nation Books, 2016) (From the book jacket: "Americans like to insist that we are living in a post racial, color-blind society. In fact, racist thought is alive and well; it has simply become more sophisticated and more insidious. And as . . . historian Ibram X, Kendi argues in Stamped from the Beginning, racist ideas in this country have a long and lingering history, one in which nearly every great American thinker is complicit." "In this deeply researched and fast-moving narrative, Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti-Black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American History. . . . Kendi show how and why some of our leading proslavery and pro-civil rights thinkers have challenged or helped cement racist ideas in America.").
Hari Kunzru, White Tears (New York: Knopf, 2017) ("Living things are those which resist entropy. They possess a boundary of some kind, a membrane or a skin; a metabolism; the ability to react to the world. And to make copies. To pass something on. That's all Charlie Shaw wanted, to reach forward, to obey the urge of life." Id. at 270.).
Etienne de La Boetie, The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, translated from the French by Harry Kurz, with an introduction by N, Rothbard (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2015) ("A people enslaves itself, cuts its own throat, when, having a choice between being vassals and being free men, it deserts its liberties and takes in the yoke, gives consent to its own misery, or, rather, apparently welcomes it. If it cost the people anything to recover its freedom, I should not urge action to this end, although there is nothing a human should hold more dear than the restoration of his own natural right, to change himself form a beast of burden back to a man, so to speak. I do not demand of him so much boldness; let him prefer the doubtful security of living wretchedly to the uncertain hope of living as he pleases. What then? If in order to have liberty nothing more is needed than to long for it, if only a simple act of will is necessary, is there any nation in the world that considers a single wish too high a price to pay in order to recover rights which it ought to be ready to redeem at the cost of its blood, rights such that their loss must bring all men of honor to the point of feeling life to be unendurable and death itself a deliverance." "Everyone knows that the fire from a little spark will increase and blaze ever higher as long as it finds wood to burn; yet without being quenched by water, but merely finding no more fuel to feed on, it consumes itself, dies down, and is no longer a flame. Similarly, the more tyrants pillage, the more they crave, the more they ruin and destroy; the more one yields to them, and obey them, by that much do they become mightier and more formidable, the readier to annihilate and destroy. But if not one thing is yielded to them, if, without any violence they are simply not obeyed, they become naked and undone and as nothing, just as, when the root receives no nourishment, the branch withers and dies." Id at 46-47.).
Joseph E. Lowndes, From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2008) (From the book jacket: "The role the South has played in contemporary conservatism is perhaps the most consequential political phenomenon of the second half of the twentieth century. The region's transition from Democratic stronghold to Republican base has frequently been viewed as a recent occurrence, one that largely stems from a 1960s-era backlash against left-leaning social movements. But . . . this rightward shift was not necessarily a natural response by alienated whites, but rather the result of the long-term development of an alliance between Southern segregationists and Northern conservatives, two groups who initially shared little beyond opposition go specific New Deal imperatives.").
Luke Mayville, John Adams and the Fear of American Oligarchy (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2016) (From the book jacket: "Mayville presents the first extended exploration of Adam's preoccupation with a problem that has renewed urgency today: the way in which inequality threatens to corrode democracy and empower a small elite. By revisiting Adam's political writings, Mayville draws out the statesman's fears about the dangers of oligarchy in America and his unique understanding of the political power of wealth--a surprising and largely forgotten theory that promises to illuminate today's debates about inequity and its political consequences.").
China Mieville, The City & The City (New York: Ballantine Books, 2009).
Jonathan Morduch & Rachel Schneider, The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2017) (The "American Dream" is unrealistic. We need to rethink our understanding and policies about poverty, financial stability, and safety-nets.).
Yescha Mounk, The Age of Responsibility: Luck, Choice, and the Welfare State (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2017) (From the book jacket: "Mounk shows that today's focus on individual culpability is both wrong and counterproductive: it distracts us from the larger economic forces determining aggregate outcomes, ignores what we owe our fellow citizens regardless of their choices and blinds us to other key values, such as the desire to live in a society of equals. Recognizing that even society's neediest members seek to exercise genuine agency, Mounk builds a positive conception of responsibility. Instead of punishing individuals for their past choices, he argues, public policy should and to empower them to take responsibility for themselves--and those around them.").
George Orwell, Animal Farm: A Fairy Tale, with drawings by Quentin Blake (London: The Folio Society, 1984) (Orwell's tale remains timely in this age of, what we would now call, "alternative facts" "'false facts", "fake news", populism, etc. "ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL BUT SOME ANMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS." Id. at 99.).
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, introduced by Alan Rusbridger, illustrated by Jonathan Burton (London: The Folio Society, 2014) (From the "Introduction": "In the summer of 2013 a young American computer analyst flew to Hong Kong, intent on telling the world about new methods of surveillance which could potentially keep billions of people under a form of monitoring. Edward Snowdon knew a great deal about the subject. He had used his position inside the US's two main intelligence agencies--the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA)--to amass a huge volume of evidence on how far modern technologies enabled states to spy on citizens." Id. at ix. "Judge Leon, in finding the NSA's program of data monitoring and collection almost certainly unconstitutional, noted the attempts to justify it in the name of war: 'There is the very real prospect that the program will go on for as long as America is combating terrorism, which realistically could be forever.' This is not so far from "special mental atmosphere'' created by the endless wars of Nineteen Eighty-Four." Id. at xv.).
Charles Peters, We Do Our Part: Toward a Fairer and More Equal America, foreword by Jon Meacham (New York: Random House, 2017) (From Jon Meacham's "Foreword": "The Peters 'gospel,' as his Monthly editors referred to it, is both empirically based and bighearted. In the early 1980s, defining his philosophy, Charlie wrote: 'We . . . believe in liberty and justice and a fair chance for all, in mercy for the afflicted and help for the down and out. But we no longer automatically favor unions and big government or oppose the military and big business. Indeed, in our search for solutions that work, we have come to distrust all automatic responses, liberal or conservative.'" "A voice in the wilderness, crying out for compassion and common sense: Charlie penned that plea for a more rational politics more than three decades ago." Id. at viii. FOOD FOR THOUGHT FOR WOULD-BE LAWYERS! WHY? BECAUSE THE ALTERNATIVE IS THE "I'VE-GOT-MINE PHILOSOPHY, YOU-GET-YOURS"PHILOSOPHY, WHICH REDUCES TO RABID CONSUMERISM AND BEGGAR-THY-NEIGHBOR-ISM. From the book jacket: "In a volume spanning the decades, Peters compares the flood of talented, original thinkers who flowed into the nation's capital to join FDR's administration with the tide of self-serving government staffers who left to exploit their opportunities on Wall Street and as lobbyists from the 1970s to today. During the same period, the economic divide between rich and poor grew, as we shifted from a culture of generosity to one of personal aggrandizement. With the wisdom of a prophet, Peters connects these two trends by showing how this money-fueled elitism has diminished our trust in one another and our nation--and changed Washington for the worse." "While Peters condemns the crass buckraking that afflicts our capital, and the rampant consumerism that fuels our greed, he refuses to see America's downward drift as permanent.").
Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (New York: PublicAffairs, 2014) ("The Kremlin switches message at will to its advantage, climbing inside everything: European right-wing nationalists are seduced with an anti-EU message; the Far Left is co-opted with tales of fighting US hegemony; US religious conservatives are convinced by the Kremlin's fight against homosexuality. And the result is an array of voices, working away at global audiences from different angles, producing a cumulative echo chamber of Kremlin support, all broadcast RT." "'We're minority shareholders in globalization,' I hear from Russian corporate spooks and politicians. Which . . . might mean that the best way to imagine the Kremlin's vision of itself in the world is as a 'corporate reider'Id. at 234.).
Gideon Rachman, Easternization: Asia's Rise and America's Decline from Obama to Trump and Beyond (New York: Other Press, 2016) ("The election of Donald Trump was a revolutionary moment. The implications of his presidency for international politics are profound. Ever since 1945, all American presidents have shared a commitment to an international order built around two central pillars. The first is the promotion of international trade. The second is a global security system based on U.S.-led alliances." "Trump threatens to pull down both pillars. The forty-fifth president of the United States is an avowed trade protectionist. And he is also a man who has consistently questioned the value of U.S.-led alliances, calling NATO 'obsolete' and suggestion that America's defense treaties with Japan and South Korea are bad deals for the United States." "Trump's revolutionary approach to world affairs is underpinned by a discontent with the process that this book calls 'Easternization'--a shift of power and wealth from the West to Asia. By 2014, according to the IMF, China had become the world's largest economy--ranked by purchasing power. The United States is now number two-relinquishing the top spot that it has held since the late nineteenth century. In 2009, China had also become the world's largest merchandise exporter--a position that the United States had held since the Second World War. China's rise is part of a broader shift in economic power to Asia . . . In pledging to 'Make America Great Again,' Trump implicitly promises to reverse this process of Easternization--returning America to its unrivaled position, both in terms of living standards and global power." Id. at ix-x. Note: That time has passed. The long American Century, 1898-2008, is over and dead. And, as Trump flip-flops on many of his campaign promises/rhetoric, his protectionist stance will only open wider opportunities for China in both global politics, economics and trade. Being a globalist, a free trader, and an anti-nationalist I am, obviously, anti-Trump-ism. Also see "Hemispheric Pressures" NYT Book Review, Sunday, 5/14/2017.).
Condoleezza Rice, Democracy Stories from the Long Road to Freedom (New York: Twelve, 2017) (SeeWalter Russell Mead, "Keeper of the Flame," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 5/7/2017.).
Thomas E. Ricks, Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom (New York: Penguin Press, 2017) ("In the post-9/11 era, 1984 particularly has found a new relevance, and a new generation of Western readers, because of three interlocking aspects." 'For present-day Americans, 1984's background of permanent warfare carries a chilling warning. In the book, as in American life today, the conflict is offstage, heard only as occasional rocket impacts in the distance . . . " "The second driver of the current Orwell boom is the post-9/11 rise the intelligence state. We live in a time of an intrusive, overweening state in both the East and the West. In the early 2000s, the United States government routinely killed people in nations with which it was not officially at war, such as Pakistan and Yemen using remote-controlled aircraft. Many of those killed were not even identified, except by behavior patterns that the U.S. government considered threatening . . . 'Metadata'--the manipulation of billions of bits of information in order to recognize previously unseen patterns--allows governments to quietly compile dossiers on the behavior of millions of individuals . . . " "Third, and perhaps most shocking, is the way the use of torture in 1984 foreshadows how today's state uses it in conducting an endless 'war on terror.' After 9/11, for the first time in American history, torture became official policy. (Before then it had been used occasionally but always in disregard of the law, and sometimes was prosecuted.) CIA officials have admitted that they used torture, almost daring a prosecutor to indict them--which has not happened." Id. at 255-257.).
Rosalind Rosenberg, Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray (New York: Oxford U. Press, 2017) (From the book jacket: "A mixed-race orphan, Murray grew up in segregated North Carolina, before escaping to New York, where she attended Hunter College and became a labor activist in the 1930s. When she applied to graduate school at the University of North Carolina, where her white great-great-grandfather has been a trustee, she was rejected on account of her race. Deciding to become a lawyer, she graduated first in her class at Howard Law School, only to be rejected for graduate study at Harvard University on account of her sex. Undaunted, Murray forged a singular career in the law. In the 1950s, her legal scholarship helped Thurgood Marshall challenge segregation frontally in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case. When appointed by Eleanor Roosevelt to the President's Commission on the Status of Women in 1962, she advanced the idea of Jane Crow, arguing that the same reasons used to condemn race discrimination could be used to battle gender discrimination. In 1965, she became the first African American to earn of JSD from Yale Law School and the following year persuaded Betty Friedan to found an NAACP for women, which became NOW. In the early 1970s, Murray provided Ruth Bader Ginsburg with the argument Ginsburg used to persuade the Supreme Court that the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution protects not only blacks but also women--and potentially other minority groups--from discrimination. By that time, Murray was a tenured professor at Brandeis, a position she left to become the first woman ordained a priest by the Episcopal Church in 1976." "Murray accomplished all this while struggling with issues of identity. She believed from childhood she was a male and tried unsuccessfully to persuade doctors to give her testosterone, While she would today be identified as transgender, during her lifetime no social movement existed to support this identity. She ultimately used her private feelings of being 'in-between' to publicly contend that identities are not fixed, an idea that has powered campaigns for equal rights in the United States for the past half-century.").
Michael Scott, Ancient Worlds: A Global History of Antiquity (New York: Basic Books, 2016) ("This book . . . has sought to explore the gathering connectivity of the ancient world through the lens of three crucial moments and three particular themes. We have seen how political, military and religious innovation, re-articulation and engagement shaped individual communities from the Mediterranean to China and thereby affected the nature and development of the ancient world as a whole. We have explored how the developments of these crucial eras were made possible by what had come before, as well as thanks to the societal forces and powerful individuals of the time; and we have examined how many of the outcomes of these critical moments laid the foundations for the way our world still works--and for debates that we continue to have--in this day and age." Id. at 353. "We have seen how, across ancient worlds, both great myths and histories . . . were rearticulated and re-presented over time--and how such narratives, from very different societies, often have common themes and narratives. . . . The myths of our modern globalised age are most famously made by the movies--a global business long dominated by the Hollywood-based industry of the USA. But the march of globalisation has meant that Hollywood has steadily become as dependent on overseas markets as on its own large body of domestic customers. China is now the second-biggest importer of Hollywood films, and Hollywood has, naturally, adapted by trying to tailor its output towards the tastes of Chinese viewers (as have, for example, many of the world;s luxury-goods makers). But we shouldn't be surprised that China now hankers to generate global blockbuster movies of its own; or that it should look to the histories of ancient worlds to find potential cinematic stories with a 'global' appeal." Id. at 348. QUERY: Does Donald Trump even understand today's globalization, and America's increasingly dependent role, etc.? Does "America First" make sense in a highly dependent global economy?).
Jessica Shattuck, The Women in the Castle: A Novel (New York: William Morrow, 2017) ("'It is our duty,' Connie said. 'If we don't work actively to defeat Hitler, it will only get worse. This man--this zealot who calls himself our leader--will ruin everything we have achieved as a united nation.' He continued, 'If we don't begin to mobilize like-minded people against him, if we don't begin to actively enlist our contacts abroad--the English, the Americans, the French--he will draw us into a war, and worse. If you listen to the things this man says--if you really listen, and read--it's all there in that hideous book of his, Mein Kampf' his 'struggle' is to turn us all into animals! Read it, really read it, know thine enemies--his vision is medieval! Worse than medieval, anarchic! That life is nothing more than a fight for resources to be waged between races--this 'Master Race' he likes to speak of and the racial profiles he has devised--these are that tools he will use to divide and conquer.'" Id. at 12. QUERY: Are not all 'nationalist' little Hitlers, more or less?).
Ganesh Sitaraman, The Counterinsurgent's Constitution: Law in the Age of Small Wars (New York & Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 2013) ("Constitutional designers should attempt to address and neutralize local grievances, thereby depriving insurgency networks of discontented potential recruits. The most evident forms of local grievance relate to human rights and divided societies. During the 1950s, for example, Sir Gerald Templer took measures toward social and political equality for all groups in Malaya. Addressing the grievance--a history of the Chinese not having political and social rights--reduced the number of disaffected Chinese and thus the number of possible recruited to the insurgency. The problem of divided societies is evident in Iraq. The Shia, Sunni, and Kurds all had local grievances. The Shia had experienced a history of repression and lack of political control despite being a majority of the population. The Sunni, having held power for so long were now anxious about the future. And the Kurds who have experienced persecution were unwilling to cede relative autonomy to a majoritarian Arab state. Neutralizing these grievances by finding a way for the three groups to coexist was, and remains, a central challenge. Constitutional mechanisms such as federalism, concurrent majorities, minority vetoes, partition, and secession are but a few of the possible solutions." Id at 232-233. QUERY/COMMENT: Were one to reread this book and think how the arguments could be retooled and apply to domestic or internal law to deal with "alleged" or "perceived" internal enemies (e.g., illegal immigrants, racial minorities, the poor, criminals, political opposition), then one might sense how Sitaramen's book and Hayes's book (see above), especially the latter's discussion of militarized policing, may well provide insights into the other. Are not the war on crime, the war on poverty, the war on drugs, the war on minorities, war on illegal immigration, and on and on, domestic counterinsurgencies? Americans are in a constant state of small internal wars. Americans are not merely a divided people, they are a people at war with each other. And the law is their central weapon.).
Richard Slotkin, Lost Battalions: The Great War and the Crisis of American Nationality (New York: A John Macrae Book/Henry Holt, 2005) ("The story of the Lost Battalion and the Harlem Hell Fighters is worth recovering, if only as an act of historical justice to their veterans. But it is also worth recovering for the sake of justice itself: it is one of those stories that reminds us just how difficult it has been for America to live up to the promises of liberty and justice for all that were made at the nation's birth--just how resistant Americans as a people have been to the moral demands of the democracy they profess." Id. at 10. "At the heart of the American idea of civil equality us the assumption that the individual is entitled, self-evidently and by nature, to dignity and respect. It is this entitlement that compels his fellow citizens, his government, and the laws of the nation to treat his suits, petitions, appeals for justice with due seriousness. But slavery had created, and Jim Crow had perpetuated, the identification of citizen-dignity with racial 'Whitenss.' The concept was embedded in the American idiom. When a midwestern draftee wanted to characterize the good treatment he and his buddies were receiving, he told an interviewer for the magazine Outlook, 'the people Atlanta treat us white.' When Theodore Roosevelt wanted to express his contempt for Germany's barbaric war making, he remarked that he had met the Kaiser before the war, 'when he was a white man.' That 'niggers' could be routinely ridiculed was something most White Americans took for granted, a self-evident fact, and each new act of ridicule reinforced the assumption that everything about Negroes, including their pretension to civil equality and human dignity, was inherently laughable." Id. at 112-113. "The core of the Jim Crow system was the belief expressed by Senator Williams of Mississippi in his response to the Chicago riot: 'Not only is good thicker than water, but race is greater than law.' The case for migration restriction would be made by mustering scientific proof that Jews and other 'new immigrants' belonged to races that were nearly as different form White Americans as Negroes." "By the end of 1919 there was a broad consensus in favor of immigration restriction, though there remained differences about the kind, stringency, and duration of a restrictive policy. In 1920 Congress passed emergency legislation easing the rules for deportation of undesirables and limiting immigration for a three-year period. The House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization then began work on a long-term solution. The case of immigration restriction had, in a sense, already been made before the Johnson committee began its work. The committee's task was to harden this drift of thought into a clear set of ideological principles, which would support the immediate demand for immigration restriction and (over the longer term) educate the public mind to accept a more stringent segregation regime for 'hyphenates' who were already here. The committee recognized that a radical restriction of immigration ran counter to the nation's legal and political traditions, to the symbol of the melting pot, and the myth of a nation built by frontiersmen. Its argument was that the racial character of the new immigrants made them parasites rather than pioneers: they are a 'beaten folk' with 'twisted . . . mentality' and perverted ideas. . . . They have no desire to form and build. They will exist on what has been prepared for them by a better people.'" Id. at 453-454. QUERY: Does this not remind one of Donald Trump's agenda?: Trump's travel/Muslim ban; his proposed border wall with Mexico; his characterization of Mexico as sending its murderers and rapists; his threat to send federal troops to fight inner city (which means black) crime; his attorney general's threat to cut off funds to sanctuary cities and local police departments that do not help in immigration and deportation efforts, the characterization that immigrants are a net cost to taxpayers, etc. Trump did not create American racial and xenophobic prejudices and inner demons; he merely identified and, then, capitalized upon them. That is what reactionary populists do. These prejudices and inner demons are a central part of who we are as a nation, as a peoples. "Central to,' but not essential to who we are. I want to believe we--both individually and collectively--can overcome these demons.).
Geoffrey R. Stone, Sex and the Constitution: Sex, Religion, and Law from America's Origins to the Twenty-First Century (New York: Liveright, 2017) ("The Declaration of Independence was a document of the Enlightenment. It was not a Puritan, Calvinist, Methodist, Baptist, Episcopalian, Catholic, or Evangelical Christian statement. It was, rather, a statement that deeply and intentionally invoked the language of American deism. It is a document of its own time, and it speaks eloquently to what of that time believed." Id. at 98-99. "Did the Framers intend the United States to be 'a Christian nation'? Clearly, they did not." Id. at 106. "The Second Great Awakening triggered a nationwide campaign to transform American law and politics through the lens of evangelical Christianity. Indeed, it was in this era that the claim that the United States is a 'Christian nation' first took root." Id. at 132. "An essential goal of the Second Great Awakening was 'to make America the world's greatest example' of a Christian nation. Over the next forty years, the Second Great Awakening affected politics, culture, education, relations between the sexes, attitudes about sex, and perhaps most fundamentally, social and political norms about the proper relation between religion and government in a free and democratic society--questions that divide our nation to this day." Id. at 134. Also see Michael Kinsley, "Naked Justice" NYT Book Review, Sunday, 4/2/2017.).
William Strauss & Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy- What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny (New York: Broadway Books, 1997) (The book argues that history is cyclical, neither chaotic nor linear. Then it asserts that each cycle consists of four turnings, and that America is, at the present time, in the "Fourth Turning". "The Fourth Turning is a Crisis, a decisive era of secular upheaval, when the values regime propels the replacement of the old civic order with a new one." Id. at 3. Given that Steve Bannon has (or had?) the ear of one D. J. Trump and, more important, is believed to be a subscriber to a "Fourth Turning" stage in America, perhaps this book is worth a read to get insights into both the former and the latter. Personally, I think history is cyclical. However, I doubt the authors have captured it correctly. Anyway, i do agree that some sort of 'winter is coming again.' "Not long ago, America was more than the sum of its parts. Now, it is less. Around World War II, we were proud as a people but modest as individuals. Fewer than two people in ten said yes when asked asked, Are you a very important person? Today, more than six in ten say yes. Where we once thought ourselves collectively strong, we now regard ourselves as individually entitled." "Yet even while we exalt our own personal growth, we realize that millions of self-actualized persons don't add up to an actualized society. Popular trust in virtually every American institution--from businesses and governments to churches and newspapers--keep falling to new lows. Public debts soar, the middle class shrinks, welfare dependencies deepens, and cultural arguments worsen by the year. [Note: This was written before America became "post-fact', 'fake-news', 'post-post-racial', and elected the uninspiring Hillary Clinton president but got Donald J "as in jackass" Trump instead.] We now have the highest incarceration rate and the lowest eligible-voter participation rate of any major democracy. Statistics inform us that many adverse trends (crime, divorce, abortion, scholastic aptitudes) may have bottomed out, but we're not reassured." Id. at 1-2. Again, I think Strauss and Howe do not get it right; however, they present an interesting point of view and a warning worth taking note.).
William Strauss & Neil Howe, Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069 (New York: Harper Perennial/William Morrow, 1991) ("[A] startling pattern emerges: a recurring cycle of four distinct types of peer personalities, arriving in the same repeating sequence." Id. at 33. "Looking back over American history, we find a correspondence between recurring patterns in generational constellations and recurring types of historical events. Id, at 33."History does not guarantee good endings. The American saga is replete with good and bad acts committed by generations no less than by individuals. Out national liturgy reminds us how ancestor generations provided helpful endowments that made progress possible, from the clearing of land to the building of infrastructure, from the waging of wars against tyrants to the writing of great literature. Yet ancestral generations have also, at times, inflicted terrible harms on their heirs--from instituting slavery to exterminating Indian tribes, from exploiting child labor to accumulating massive public debts. A lesson of the cycle is that each generational type specializes in its own unique brand of positive and negative endowments. Each of today's generations . . . have its own special way of help or hurting the future. Each, collectively, has choices to make that will determine what sort of world its heirs will someday inherit, ad how those heirs will remember its legacy, " Id. at 39-40.).
Neil Howe & William Strauss, Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation, cartoons by R. J. Matson (New York: Vintage Books, 2000) (Seventeen years after its publication and seeing where the millennials (and the country as a whole) are now, I think Strauss and Howe got this one (that is, their forecast) wrong . . . at least, so far. Among other things, they could not have predicted September 11, 2001, the Great Recession of 2008, and Donald Trump in 2016. All of which, for obvious reasons, impacted severely and negatively how Millennials had/have to deal with the world.).
John Stubbs, John Donne: The Reformed Soul: A Biography (New York: Norton, 2006) ("Donne set a more practical example for those who have to make the society they inherit work. He dealt intelligently with the formidable expectations pressed on his . . . , adapting to his time instead of refusing to yield. It is important to avoid twentieth-century parallels in thinking about his political choices. Becoming a Protestant in the 1590s was not like joining the Nazi party in the 1930s: the Protestant regime Donne served was no more repressive towards dissidents than the Roman Catholic regime he would have worked for had the English Reformation even defeated. He did not choose between a threatened system supporting liberty and one imposing tyranny: such a choice did not exist. Instead he questioned whether the idea for which Roman Catholics were persecuted were really worth dying for, and whether they might in fact be erroneous; and he found that parents and priests were wrongfully exhorting their children to harm themselves needlessly. [] For Donne [Sir Thomas] More's actions were honorable in themselves, but not practical as a code of conduct for others to follow. One of the central realization of Donne's life was that it was wrong and silly to will oneself towards martyrdom. To set oneself apart, to try being an island, was also a great mistake. It was impossible to resign from mankind or from the historical position of humanity. So Donne lived instead by continual metamorphosis, transforming himself to meet his circumstances. In the end, he put himself in a position to voice moderation." Id. at 446-447.).
John Stubbs, Jonathan Swift: The Reluctant Rebel (New York: Norton, 2016) ("Swift's work raises a bowman's two fingers to all those in authority who treat people as vassals or livestock. Few travelers in life will be able to halt an oppressive government in its tracks; but all, Swift's writing demonstrates, have a right to view the conditions of existence alternatively, critically, satirically; to identify their misfortunes and describe them more acutely. His career skeptically highlighted the very moderate and indeed altogether inadequate expectations a moral person might have of life in this world. But simultaneously he proved the existence of other liberties of speech than more complaining or roaring: a liberty of chiding, deriding, cajoling, bridling, impersonating, inventing, building up and laying bare; a liberty of making the powerful seem less so. By the end of his life he was championing more than exclusively defined rights that allowed a Protestant of English descent to escape 'slavery'." Id. at 638-639. "Still, it took a lot to make him turn on England, the kingdom he always claimed as his rightful home. Much as he relished the fray, Swift would always deny that he had turned renegade. The degenerates who had taken over government, Parliament, the Crown--it was they who had left him no option but resistance. This was Swift's line of argument; and this, as well he knew, was the reasoning of a rebel, however reluctant." Id. at 639. See also James McNamara, "Swift Beyond Satire," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 2/26/2017.).
John Stubbs, Reprobates: The Cavaliers of the English Civil War (New York: Norton, 2011) (From the book jacket: "In Reprobates, . . . John Stubbs finds his new subject in England's turbulent decades of the mid-seventeenth century. With conflict between the monarchy and Parliament threatening to explode, a group of courtiers and army officer known as the Cavaliers emerged to defend the king. They were jeeringly labeled 'Cavaliers'--then a term of a gallant or a rogue--by their opponents on the streets of London. Their movement was soon memorials by poets such as Robert Herrick, whose poem 'To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time'--which begins, 'Gather ye rosebuds while ye may'--later became a carpe diem anthem for their lost cause. Often imagined as elegant gentlemen, chivalrous and dandified, the Cavaliers were also originally to be found in the form of the gambler and poet Sir John Suckling or his syphilitic friend William Davenant." From the text: "The cavaliers, a heterogeneous and shifting body even in their heyday, were split for good by the political crisis of the late 1680s, and the 'Glorious Revolution' that ensued. Their instinct was to support Charles's brother--who with Buckingham was in a strong sense the leader of their party. But James's insistence on supporting the Catholic interest drove his high Anglican supporters away from his papist and more permissive Protestant following. The replacement of James with William of Orange sealed the victory of Parliament. The heirs of some of the cavaliers remained to play their part in the new political settlement. Others scattered to join the Jacobite romance of the rebellion and regret." Id. at 465-466.).
Geoffrey Treasure, The Huguenots (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2013) (From the book jacket: "Following the Reformation, a growing number of radical Protestants came together to live and worship in Catholic France. The Huguenots survived persecution and armed conflict to win freedom of worship, civil rights and unique status as a protected minority. In 1685, following renewed persecution, the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes abolished their remaining rights. Choosing faith over home, over 200,000 Huguenots fled across Europe and further afield. [] Treasure describes the Huguenots' disciplined community, inspiring in faith and courage, and rich in achievement, and illuminates their place within Protestantism and European history. Viewing their exodus as a crucial turning point for Europe, he points to the immense significance of the Huguenot story, particularly for the exiles' native lands." From the text: "If they had not been sure that they were right to hold on to their beliefs, that their church, attenuated as it had become, was a true church; if the had not had the will and courage to be, even the most privileged of them, a people apart, then our story would indeed have ended on a note of regret. Rather, I suggest that the reader will find impressive, even inspiring, the record of these men and women of faith. From the elation of early days, followed by the stern tests of persecution and civil war; to the conditional rights enjoyed under the regime of the Edict; to the renewal of persecution and its shocking climax; to the creation of the church of the Desert, the mindset is constant. Huguenots were not afraid to be stranger in their own country. Faith was all." Id. at 387. Note: I don't think such faith need be religious. I think it is about believing in something greater than oneself.).
Timothy B. Tyson, The Blood of Emmett Till (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017) ("If the past is irrevocably gone, and we cannot somehow conjure it back and see it with the omniscient eyes of God, we can nevertheless follow wherever the fragments of evidence lead us and try to understand what they tell us. [] What matters most is what we have done and will do with what we do know. We must look at the fact squarely, not to flounder in a bitter nostalgia of pain but to redeem a democratic promise rooted in the living ingredients of our own history. The bloody and unjust arc of history will not bend upward if we merely pretend that history did not happen here. We cannot transcend our past without confronting it." Id. at 202-203.).
Deepak Unnikrishnan, Temporary People: A Novel (Brooklyn: Restless Books, 2017) (See Shaj Mathew, "Unwelcome Guest," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 3/26/2017.).
Louis S. Warren, God's Red Son:The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America (New York: Basic Books, 2017) ("In the end, the Ghost Dance offered believers, not an immediate and violent rejection of American governance, but an intense spiritual and emotional experience that facilitated their accommodation to American dominance in many areas of Indian life while simultaneously allowing them to seek out health and prosperity on Indian terms. The Ghost Dance, in other words, helped many believers accept conquest while strengthening their resolve to resist assimilation." Id. at 144-145.).
Joan C. Williams, White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2017).
Vanessa S. Williamson, Read My Lips: Why Americans Are Proud to Pay Taxes (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2017) ("The percentage of Americans who deny that taxpaying is a civic duty is approximately equivalent to the percentage of Americans who report believing that there is a chance that Elvis Presley is still alive (7 percent) or that the moon landing was faked (6 percent). Id. at 29.).
Lidia Yuknavith, The Book of Joan: A Novel (New York: Harper, 2017) ("We are what happens when the seemingly unthinkable celebrity rises to power. Our existence makes my eyes hurt. People are forever thinking that the unthinkable can't happen. If it doesn't exist in thought, then it can't exist in life. And then, in the blink of an eye, in a moment of danger, a figure who takes power from our weak desires and failures emerges like a rib from sand. Jean de Men. Some strange combination of a military dictator and a spiritual charlatan, A war-hungry mountebank. How stupidly we believe in our petty evolutions. Yet another case of something shiny that entertained us and then devoured us. We consume and become exactly whatt we create. In all times." Id. at 14.).
Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How good People Turn Evil (New York: Random House, 2007) (From the book jacket: "What makes good people do bad things? How can moral people be seduced to act immorally? Where is the line separating good from evil. and who is in danger of crossing it?" Zimbardo "explains how--and the myriad reasons why--we are all susceptible to the lure of 'the dark side.' Drawing on examples from history a well as his own trailblazing research, Zimbardo detail how situational forces and group dynamics can work in concert to make monsters out of decent men and women." "This is a book that dares to hold a mirror up to mankind, showing us that we might not be who we think we are. While forcing us to reexamine what we are capable of doing when caught up in the crucible of behavioral dynamics. We are capable of resisting evil, he argues, and can even teach ourselves to act heroically." From the textt: "Heroism can be defined as having four key features: (a) it must be engaged in voluntarily; (b) it must involve a risk or potential sacrifice, such as the threat of death, an immediate threat to physical integrity, a long-term threat to health, or the potential for serious degradation of one's quality of life; (c) it must be conducted in service to one or more other people or the community as a whole; and (d) it must be with our secondary, extrinsic gain anticipated at the time of the act." "Heroism in service of a noble idea is usually not as dramatic ass physical-risk heroism. However, physical-risk heroism is often the result of a snap decision, a moment of action. Further, physical-risk heroism usually involves a probability, not the certainty, of serious injury or death, The individual performing the act is generally removed from the situation after a short period of time. On the other hand, it might be argued that some forms of civil heroism are more heroic than physical-risk forms of heroism. People such as Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Dr. Albert Schweitzer willingly and knowingly submitted to the trials of heroic civil activity day after day for much of their adult lives. In this sense the risk associated with physical-risk heroism is better termed peril, while the risk involved in civil heroism is considered sacrifice." Id. at 466, I am thinking that America is very much in need of some civil heroism, that is, some sacrifice of the self for the good of the nation's peoples as whole. "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country." Then again, we are in 2017, not 1963; we are no longer citizens, but rather consumers, brands, drones, and such.).
Geoffrey Treasure, The Huguenots (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2013) (From the book jacket: "Following the Reformation, a growing number of radical Protestants came together to live and worship in Catholic France. The Huguenots survived persecution and armed conflict to win freedom of worship, civil rights and unique status as a protected minority. In 1685, following renewed persecution, the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes abolished their remaining rights. Choosing faith over home, over 200,000 Huguenots fled across Europe and further afield. [] Treasure describes the Huguenots' disciplined community, inspiring in faith and courage, and rich in achievement, and illuminates their place within Protestantism and European history. Viewing their exodus as a crucial turning point for Europe, he points to the immense significance of the Huguenot story, particularly for the exiles' native lands." From the text: "If they had not been sure that they were right to hold on to their beliefs, that their church, attenuated as it had become, was a true church; if the had not had the will and courage to be, even the most privileged of them, a people apart, then our story would indeed have ended on a note of regret. Rather, I suggest that the reader will find impressive, even inspiring, the record of these men and women of faith. From the elation of early days, followed by the stern tests of persecution and civil war; to the conditional rights enjoyed under the regime of the Edict; to the renewal of persecution and its shocking climax; to the creation of the church of the Desert, the mindset is constant. Huguenots were not afraid to be stranger in their own country. Faith was all." Id. at 387. Note: I don't think such faith need be religious. I think it is about believing in something greater than oneself.).
Timothy B. Tyson, The Blood of Emmett Till (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017) ("If the past is irrevocably gone, and we cannot somehow conjure it back and see it with the omniscient eyes of God, we can nevertheless follow wherever the fragments of evidence lead us and try to understand what they tell us. [] What matters most is what we have done and will do with what we do know. We must look at the fact squarely, not to flounder in a bitter nostalgia of pain but to redeem a democratic promise rooted in the living ingredients of our own history. The bloody and unjust arc of history will not bend upward if we merely pretend that history did not happen here. We cannot transcend our past without confronting it." Id. at 202-203.).
Deepak Unnikrishnan, Temporary People: A Novel (Brooklyn: Restless Books, 2017) (See Shaj Mathew, "Unwelcome Guest," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 3/26/2017.).
Louis S. Warren, God's Red Son:The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America (New York: Basic Books, 2017) ("In the end, the Ghost Dance offered believers, not an immediate and violent rejection of American governance, but an intense spiritual and emotional experience that facilitated their accommodation to American dominance in many areas of Indian life while simultaneously allowing them to seek out health and prosperity on Indian terms. The Ghost Dance, in other words, helped many believers accept conquest while strengthening their resolve to resist assimilation." Id. at 144-145.).
Joan C. Williams, White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2017).
Vanessa S. Williamson, Read My Lips: Why Americans Are Proud to Pay Taxes (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2017) ("The percentage of Americans who deny that taxpaying is a civic duty is approximately equivalent to the percentage of Americans who report believing that there is a chance that Elvis Presley is still alive (7 percent) or that the moon landing was faked (6 percent). Id. at 29.).
Lidia Yuknavith, The Book of Joan: A Novel (New York: Harper, 2017) ("We are what happens when the seemingly unthinkable celebrity rises to power. Our existence makes my eyes hurt. People are forever thinking that the unthinkable can't happen. If it doesn't exist in thought, then it can't exist in life. And then, in the blink of an eye, in a moment of danger, a figure who takes power from our weak desires and failures emerges like a rib from sand. Jean de Men. Some strange combination of a military dictator and a spiritual charlatan, A war-hungry mountebank. How stupidly we believe in our petty evolutions. Yet another case of something shiny that entertained us and then devoured us. We consume and become exactly whatt we create. In all times." Id. at 14.).
Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How good People Turn Evil (New York: Random House, 2007) (From the book jacket: "What makes good people do bad things? How can moral people be seduced to act immorally? Where is the line separating good from evil. and who is in danger of crossing it?" Zimbardo "explains how--and the myriad reasons why--we are all susceptible to the lure of 'the dark side.' Drawing on examples from history a well as his own trailblazing research, Zimbardo detail how situational forces and group dynamics can work in concert to make monsters out of decent men and women." "This is a book that dares to hold a mirror up to mankind, showing us that we might not be who we think we are. While forcing us to reexamine what we are capable of doing when caught up in the crucible of behavioral dynamics. We are capable of resisting evil, he argues, and can even teach ourselves to act heroically." From the textt: "Heroism can be defined as having four key features: (a) it must be engaged in voluntarily; (b) it must involve a risk or potential sacrifice, such as the threat of death, an immediate threat to physical integrity, a long-term threat to health, or the potential for serious degradation of one's quality of life; (c) it must be conducted in service to one or more other people or the community as a whole; and (d) it must be with our secondary, extrinsic gain anticipated at the time of the act." "Heroism in service of a noble idea is usually not as dramatic ass physical-risk heroism. However, physical-risk heroism is often the result of a snap decision, a moment of action. Further, physical-risk heroism usually involves a probability, not the certainty, of serious injury or death, The individual performing the act is generally removed from the situation after a short period of time. On the other hand, it might be argued that some forms of civil heroism are more heroic than physical-risk forms of heroism. People such as Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Dr. Albert Schweitzer willingly and knowingly submitted to the trials of heroic civil activity day after day for much of their adult lives. In this sense the risk associated with physical-risk heroism is better termed peril, while the risk involved in civil heroism is considered sacrifice." Id. at 466, I am thinking that America is very much in need of some civil heroism, that is, some sacrifice of the self for the good of the nation's peoples as whole. "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country." Then again, we are in 2017, not 1963; we are no longer citizens, but rather consumers, brands, drones, and such.).
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