SUGGESTED FICTION

Chloe Benjamin, The Immortalists: A Novel (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2018).

John Horne Burns, The Gallery, introduction by Paul Fussel (New York: New York Review Books Classics, 1947, 2004):

Our propaganda did everything but tell us Americans the truth: that we had most of the riches of the modern world, but very little of its soul. We were nice enough guys in our own country, most us; but when we got overseas, we couldn't resist the temptation to turn a dollar or two at the expense of people who were already down. I can speak only of Italy, for I didn't see France or Germany. But with our Hollywood ethics and our radio network reasoning we didn't take the trouble to think out the fact that the war was supposed to be against fascism--not against every man, woman and child in Italy. . . .  But then a modern war is total. Armies on the battlefield are simply a remnant from the old kind of war. In the 1944 war everyone's hand ended by being against everyone else's. Civilization was already dead, but nobody bothered to admit this to himself.

Id. at 259-260.

Petra Hammesfhar, The Lie, translated from the German by Mike Mitchell (London: Bitter Lemon Press, 2009).

Robert Harris, Munich: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2018).

Hallgrimor, Helgason, Women at 1,000 Degrees: A Novel, translated from the Icelandic by Brian FitzGibbon (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2018).

Denis Johnson, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden: Stories (New York: Random House, 2018).

William Melvin Kelley, A Different Drummer, foreword by David Bradley (New York: Anchor Books, 1969, 1989).

Hanif Kureish, The Nothing (London: Faber & Faber, 2017).

Fiona Mozley, Elmet: A Novel (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2017).

Nathaniel Rich, King Zeno: A Novel (New York: MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2018).

Leila Slimani, The Perfect Nanny: A Novel, translated from the French by Sam Taylor (New York: Penguin Books, 2018).

Madeleine Thien, Dogs at the Perimeter: A Novel (New York: Norton, 2011, 2017).

Leni Zumas, Red Clocks: A Novel (New York: Little, Brown, 2018).

A CAUTION ABOUT IDENTITY POLITICS

George Hutchinson, Facing the Abyss: American Literature and Culture in the 1940s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018): 

One striking connection between now distinct fields of inquiry is the way black, queer, and Jewish authors in particular resisted minoritizing discourse infer of universalizing one, to borrow terms form Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet. They did this because they came to believe, in an era shadowed by fascism, that all forms of minoritization and oppression interconnect and that the battle for liberation must always be fought on broader grounds than identity politics alone provides, even though oppression operates by way of particularizing identity--marking the Jew, the Negro, the homosexual for subordination or worse. The universal exists not in the abstract human being, the classical liberal subject, but as a potential emerging at the shifting crossroads of social identities--never a fixed point--and a guard against limiting chauvinism, separate idealizations, or calcifying and monumentalizing traditions that curb the reach and power of creative imagination and that support inhumanity, to use a common term. The heroes of identity politics were Hitler, Hirohito, Mussolini, and the Ku Klux Klan. They have their much-diminished avatars today.

Id. at 4. From the book jacket:

Mythological as the era of the 'good war' and the "Greatest Generation,' the 1940s are frequently misunderstood as a heroic, uncomplicated time in American history. Yet just below the surface, a sense of real, alienation, and the specter of radical evil permeated American art and literature. Writers returned home from World War II and gave form to their disorienting experiences of violence and cruelty. They confronted bigotry, existential guilt, ecological concerns, and fear about the nature and survival of the human race.

AMERICA'S SECRET WARS IN AFGHANISTAN

Steve Coll, Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan (New York: Penguin Press, 2018).

INSPECTOR MAIGRET #12

Georges Simenon, The Shadow Puppet (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by Ros Schwartz (New York: Penguin Books, 2014) ("He was in a buoyant mood. That morning, he suddenly felt as if he were playing a part in a farce. Life itself was a farce!" Id. at 93.).

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RELIGIONS SUBVERSION SCIENCE IN INDIA

Wendy Doniger, Against Dharma: Dissent in the Ancient Indian Sciences of Sex and Politics (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2018) (From the book jacket: "Ancient Hindu texts speaks of the three aims of human life: dharma, rather, and kama. Translated, these might be called religion, politics, and pleasure, and each is held to be an essential requirement of a full life. Balance among the three is a goal not always met, however, and dharma has historically taken precedence over the other two qualities in Hindu life. Here, historian of religion Wendy Doniger offers a spirited and close reading pf ancient Indian writings, unpacking a long but unrecognized history of opposition against dharma." "Doniger argues that scientific disciplines (shastras) have offered lively and continuous criticism of dharma, or religion, over many centuries. She chronicles the tradition of veiled subversion, uncover connections to key moments of resistance and voices of dissent throughout Indian history, and offers insights into the Indian theocracy's  subversion of science by religion today."

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THE GHOST-DANCE RELIGION

James Mooney, The Ghost-Dance Religion and Wounded Knee (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1973) (From the back cover: "Immediately following the massacre of Wounded Knee (December 29, 1890), the well-known anthropologist James Mooney, under the auspices of the Bureau of American Ethnology and the Smithsonian, investigated the incident. His interest was primarily in the Indian background to the uprising. Admitting that the Indians had bee generally overpowered by the Whites, what led the Indians to think they stood a chance against White arms? His answer was astonishing: the Ghost-Dance Religion.").

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NORMAN LEWIS

Ruth Fine, ed., Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts / Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016).

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INSPECTOR MAIGRET #11

Georges Simenon, The Two-Penny Bar (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by David Watson (New York: Penguin Books, 2014) (previously published as The Bar on the Seine) ('They're a good bunch,' James suddenly murmured, as if following his own line of thought. . . 'All of them. They have such boring lives. But what can you do about that? Everyone 's life is boring.'" Id. at 35.).

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Shields and Brooks on the White House’s revolving door, Conor Lamb’s ups...

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IN 2006, LOTT SUGGESTED BABYBOOMERS SHOULD SIT DOWN!

Eric Lott, The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual (New York: Basic Books, 2006).

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READINGS ON TIBET AND TIBETAN BUDDHISM

Ippolito Desideri, Mission to Tibet: The Extraordinary Eigtheenth-Century Account of Father Ippolito Desideri, S. J., translated from the Italian by Michael J. Sweet, edited by Leonard Zwilling (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2010).

Gen Lamrimpa, Realizing Emptiness: Madhyamka Insight Meditation, 2nd ed., translated by B. Alan Wallace edited by Ellen Posman (Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Publications, 2002).

Jeffrey Hopkins, Emptiness Yoga: The Tibetan Middle Way, edited by Joe B. Wilson (Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Publications, 2012).

Jeffrey Hopkins, Meditation on Emptiness, assistant editor Elizabeth Napper (Sommerville, Ma: Wisdom Publications, 1996).

Donald S. Lopez, Jr., & Thupten Jinpa, Dispelling the Darkness: A Jesuit's Quest for the Soul of Tibet (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2017) (From the book jacket: "Offering a fascinating glimpse into the historical encounter between Christianity and Buddhism, Dispelling the Darkness brings [Ippolito] Desideri's Tibetan writings to readers of English for the first time.").

Elizabeth Napper, Dependent-Arising: A Tibetan Buddhist Interpretation of Madhyamika Philosophy Emphasizing the Compatibility of Emptiness and Conventional Phenomena (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1989, 2003).

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Koch Brothers Threaten Rachel Maddow, Maddow Backhands The Brothers

BALTHUS

Sabine Rewald, Balthus: Cats and Girls (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2013).

INSPECTOR MAIGRET #10

Georges Simenon, The Dancer at the Gai-Moulin (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by Sian Reynolds (New York: Penguin Books, 2014) ("'What do you take me for? I'm a dancer.' 'Well, more precisely, you're a hostess. And we all know what that means. So did you leave with him?'" Id. at 63.).

Hey Joe - Acoustic Hendrix Cover - Joscho Stephan Trio

MARCH 11, 2011: EARTHQUAKE, 120-FEET-HIGH TSUNAMI, DEATH AND . . . TRYING TO COPE

Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone (New York: MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2017).

FASCISM: IT HAS ROOTS IN AMERICA

Caroline Moorehead, A Bold and Dangerous Family: The Remarkable Story of an Italian Mother, Her Two Sons, and their Fight Against Fascism (New York: Harper, 2017):

Early in May 1921, eighteen months before the March on Rome, Mussolini had received a telegram from a group of Italians in New York, most of them members of a shooting club. 'The first Italian fascio in the United States', it said, 'today salutes the fasci of Italy!'  The 1920s and early 1930s saw a flowering of pro-Mussolini associations and newspapers among the four and a half million Italians living in the US, eager to celebrate their italianita and to praise the man they held responsible for saving from the Bolsheviks a homeland they remember with sentimental nostalgia. Many were ultra-Catholic, hostile to newcomers, ignorant about what Italy had turned into since they emigrated, and delighted to abandon, as instructed, 'barbaric dialects, worthy of Harlem negroes or the slum dwellers of London'. Italian consulates across the country acted as cover for Bocchini's men, while Italo-American businessmen and banker, who had done well in their adopted country, willingly put money into training their young to march, sing 'Giovinezza' and raise their arms in the fascist salute. In New York 'well born' Italians ladies joined a women's fascio.  

Id. at 362-363.

John Roy Carlson, Under Cover: My Four Year in the Nazi Underworld of America--The Amazing Revelation of How Axis Agents and Our Enemies Within Are Now Potting to Destroy the United States (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1943) (Yes, it can happen here? It almost did in the 1930s and 1940s.).

THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC AND DEMOCRACY ARE AT SERIOUS RISK!!

David Frum, Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic (New York: Harper, 2018) (From the book jacket: "Until the US presidential election of 2016, the global decline of democracy seemed a concern for other peoples in other lands. That complacent optimism has been upended by the political rise of Donald Trump." "The crisis is upon Americans, here and now.").

Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York: Crown, 2018) ("Are we [that is, Americans] living through the decline and fall of one of the world's oldest and most successful democracies?" Id. at 2.).

HOW DOES SECULARISM IMPACT RELIGIOUS TOLERANCE?

Saba Mahmood, Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2016) (From the back cover: "The plight of religious minorities in the Middle East is often attributed to the failure of secularism to take root in the region. Religious Difference in a Secular Age challenges this assessment by examining four cornerstones of secularism--political and civil equality, minority rights, religious freedom, and the legal separation of private and public domains. . . Saba Mahmood shows how modern secular governance has exacerbated religious tensions and inequalities rather than reduced them.")

STILL PERTINENT!

If We Must Die

Claude McKay, 1889 - 1948

If we must die—let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die—oh, let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
Oh, Kinsmen!  We must meet the common foe;
Though far outnumbered, let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

FACILITY WITH DEMOCRATIC GOVERNANCE

Jon D. Michaels, Constitutional Coup: Privatization's Threat to the American Republic (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2017):

Facility with democratic governance can't be taken for granted. Justice David Souter, for one, has written and spoken movingly about his early, hands-on experience attending honest-to-goodness New England town meetings as a child. Few of us have been as fortunate to observe real, functioning democracy in action. Instead, we have cobbled together a rudimentary understanding of civil from the brittle pages of high school textbooks, grainy YouTube clips of Schoolhouse Rock!, and the cacophony of talking heads on the Sunday morning news shows. Such limited familiarity is even on display in law schools, where otherwise quite strong students confess never having had occasion before to grapple with the basics of our system of government. This all needs to change, if not for the overall well-being of our society then at least for the instrumental realization of a legitimate administrative state that takes seriously its democratic commitment to public engagement.

Id. at 226. FOOD FOR THOUGHT! This book ought to be on every law student's bookshelve.

CREATING SOUTH AFRICA

Noel Mostert, Frontiers: The Epic of South Africa's Creation and the Tragedy of the Xhosa People (New York; Knopf, 1992).

SUGGESTED FICTION--PHILOSOPHICAL

Julia Kristeva, The Enchanted Clock: A Novel, translated from the French by Armine Kotlin Mortimer (New York: Columbia U. Press, 2015, 2017).

Ali Smith, Winter: A Novel (New York: Pantheon Books, 2017):

  July: . . . 

And by the way, under the Trump administration, he says, you'll be saying Merry Christmas again when you go shopping, believe me. Merry Christmas. They've been downplaying that little beautiful phrase. You're going to be saying Merry Christmas again, folks.
   In the middle of summer it's winter, White Christmas. God help us, every one.  Art is nature.

Id. at 322. From the book jacket: "Smith's shapeshifting novel casts a warm, wise, merry and uncompromising eye over a post-truth era in a story rooted in history and memory and with a taproot deep in the evergreens, art and love."

Karl Ove Knausgaard, Winter, illustrated by Lars Lerin, translated from the Norwegian by Ingvild Burkey (New York: Penguin Press, 2017).

INSPECTOR MAIGRET #9

Georges Simenon, A Man's Head (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by David Coward (New York: Penguin Books, 2014) ("'It's something that's happened to other murderers. Most of them have felt the need to confide in somebody, even if it was only some tart they's pick up.'" Id. at 160.).

THE STONING OF SORAYA M

Freidourne Sohebjam, The Stoning of Soraya M: A Story of Injustice in Iran, translated from the French by Richard Weaver (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1990, 2011).

DVD: Cyrus Nowraster (director), The Stoning of Soraya M (Liongate, 2010).

 Having read the book, I finally got around to viewing the film based on the book. Both are highly recommended. Not to take anything away from the seriousness of the #MeToo movement, there are degrees of evil and the stoning of women is well beyond the pale of moral decency. Over the twenty-five years preceding the publication of the book, over 1,500 women were stoned to death in Iran.,

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ELIZABETH HARDWICK

Elizabeth Hardwick, The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick, selected and with an introduction by Darryl Pinckney (New York: New York Review Books Classics, 2017).

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JAPAN

Carol Gluck, Japan's Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1985) (From the book jacket: "The ideology of imperial Japan (1890-1945) is associated first with Japan's rapid modernization in the nineteenth century and then with its catastrophe defeat in World War II. The way in which this ideology evolved is the subject of this book. Carol Gluck argues that the process of formulating new civic values and communicating them to the people was far more haphazard and inconsistent than is usually assumed." "To express her theoretical conception of 'ideology-in-process,' the author immerses the reader in the talk and thought of late Meiji times, recreating the diversity of ideological discourse experienced by Japanese of the period. She concludes that such elements of imperial orthodoxy as the divine emperor or the mystical national polity may have been less important than the 'denaturing of politics' or the belief in progress and success in explaining the course of twentieth-century Japanese history.).

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SOUTHEAST ASIA

According to WikepedIa:

" Southeast Asia or Southeastern Asia is a subregion of Asia, consisting of the countries that are geographically south of China, east of India, west of New Guinea and north of Australia.^[1] The region lies near the intersection of geological plates, with heavy seismic and volcanic activity. Southeast Asia consists of two geographic regions:

1. Mainland Southeast Asia, also known historically as Indochina, comprising Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar (Burma), and (West) Malaysia.
2. Maritime Southeast Asia, also known historically as the East Indies comprising Indonesia, (East) Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, East Timor, Brunei, Christmas Island, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and Cocos (Keeling) Islands."

Le Ly Hayslip & Jay Wurts, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places: A Vietnamese Woman's Journey from War to Peace (New York: Doubleday, 1989).

Nguyen Du, The Tale of Kieu: A Bilingual Edition of Truyen Kieu, translated from the Vietnamese and Annotated by Huynh Sanh Thang, with a Historical Essay by Alexander B. Woodside (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 1983) ("Western readers who are curious about Vietnam and the Vietnamese may well gain more real wisdom from cultivating a discriminating appreciation of this one poem than they will from reading the entire library of scholarly and journalistic writings upon modern Vietnam which has accumulated in the West in the past two decades." Id. at xi. "When she had heard Kieu's tale, the nun grew faint, teetering between plain pity and dire dread: 'The Buddha's gate is open wide to all. But things I can't foresee are what I dread. I'd sorely grieve if something struck you here. Plan far ahead and flee--you's be unwise to sit and wait till waters reach your feet.'" Id. at 107.).