We're posting
book reviews, mostly, but also Critical Pages on politics, society and
culture. If you're besotted by books, this may be the place for you. (The
navigation link is over there on the far left.) This is a new site (well,
relatively new) and we don't have a zillion pages. Not even half a zillion.
But hang around, we may amount to something someday. By the way, we're also
not finicky about how we post stuff on his home page, so fresh material
sometimes is in the lower section.
In the 1980s Chinese archaeologists exploring the southern rim of the Tarim Basin -- a vast inhospitable desert region, on
the outer edges of which are traces of the fabled Silk Road -- uncovered a
grave site at Cherchen containing several 3,500-year-old bodies. They were
far better preserved than anything ever recovered in Egypt, partially due to
the intensely dry air, but also because the graves had been cut into a salt
bed which speeded the process of desiccation. The bodies were dressed in
brightly colored garments What everyone noticed immediately was that these
bodies were clearly Caucasoid, not Chinese or Mongoloid. Moreover, the man
and one woman were well over six feet tall. Who were these people? Where had
they come from? How had they managed to live in this exceedingly daunting
environment? Check out our review by clicking on
The
Mummies of Urumchi.
Vikram Pandit, the CEO at Citigroup, was interviewed by Charlie
Rose on National Public Radio the other night
http://www.charlierose.com/
Rarely will you see a man as seemingly open and sinuously evasive as Vikram
Pandit.
A
listener to Pandit might well come away with the impression that, well, yes,
the global banking system has a problem but it’s only a problem due to a
“lack of confidence.” in the banking system. (And all this time you thought
it was something real and substantive to be worried about, like
all those sinking securities that Citibank had on their books!). As
soon as that misperception has been taken care of, fear will vanish and
confidence will return. According to Pandit, the US is handing Citigroup $20
billion in cash, above the $25 billion it's already handed over, and $300
billion in loan guarantees, because it’s a big global bank with offices in
109 countries. You see, all that money in such a big global bank will
inspire confidence in the global banking system. That's the way the CEO sees
it.
When the question of risk management came up Pandit simply asked, “How many
times have you seen triple A bonds go to zero?” But, of course, the
so-called triple A bonds that turned out to be rotten were not conventional
bonds; they were composed of mortgages that had been sliced, distributed
into layers and repackaged, then sold as “bonds.” And the CEO of Citigroup
certainly knew it, just as he knew that the bond rating companies were not
doing an honest job. If Pandit had been truthful, he would have talked about
collateralized debt obligations and the other synthetic financial
instruments his company acquired.
Mr. Pandit also added the happy information that we're always going to have
bubbles and that in the past US real estate has always gone up. Of course,
if he believes that US real estate always goes up, we have a good
explanation of why we had a real estate bubble.
When
Rose asked Pandit why we should trust the present management at Citi to get
us out of the current crises, Pandit replied that “it’s easier to get into
these things than to get out of them.” Rose then said that “unless you
acknowledge the errors made, there’s no guarantee you won’t repeat them” At
which point Pandit simply veered off and told Rose what kind of bank Citi
was gong to be – a global bank, streamlined, serving clients all over the
globe. Wonderful!
“Talk to each other, for heaven’s sake!” you want to
scream at the smothered characters in
Home,
Marilynne Robinson’s
infuriating
new novel, as they hesitantly tiptoe around the walls surrounding all the
feelings, desires, and experiences that matter to them. You can get so
annoyed with everyone that you finally don’t care whether they arrive at any
resolutions or not. This is particularly frustrating because in Home,
Robinson has taken a second look at the people and stories that made up her
glorious and popular novel of three years ago,
Gilead.
Home has none of the light that illuminates Gilead, none of
the achingly felt love, none of the brilliant humor. In Gilead Ames
is capable of seeing himself as comic, foolish, envious, jealous, and
resentful, but the characters in Home are simply earnestly doughy.
They really deserve better.
About the stock market, Chicken Little was right. The sky is falling! The financial advisors and other talking heads on TV tell us that this is a good time to buy stocks. They say there's lots of bargains out there. Sure. And if you bought a bargain last week you've already lost money. There's no place to hide! We're all going to be hit by a pieces of falling sky! All of us. And that includes Cocky Locky, Henny Penny, Turkey Lurkey, and especially Foxy Loxy. If you don't believe Chicken Little, check out the authoritative Wall Street Journal at http://online.wsj.com/public/us.
Readers of historical fiction can justifiably accuse Robert Harris of
offering up a standard menu of beastly Roman dissipation and cruelty in his
novel, Pompeii. And only readers dulled by heavy medication could
possibly credit the ridiculous romance that Harris has tossed into his plot.
We all know that Vesuvius is going to blow its lid. It’s going to bury all
those rich merchants, wily whores, corrupt officials, miserable slaves,
burly gladiators, and scratching dogs. So why did our reviewer like this
book? Mostly, she says, because the hero of the tale, Marcus Attilius, is so
wonderfully unlikely. He’s an engineer—earnest, scientific, unimaginative,
humorless, and not in great shape physically. Then too, there’s the book’s
true heroine—not the anachronistic young Corelia (whose very contemporary
form of female feistiness made me think of Shrek’s bride-to-be), but the
monumental Aqua Augusta—that elegant marvel of Roman construction—the long,
sinuous aqueduct that carries fresh water from the mountains of Campania to
all the cities around the Bay of Naples. Read
Margaret Black's
review of Pompeii here.
Will Rogers used to say, "We'll be the first nation in the world
to go to the poor house in an automobile." Of course, he was saying
that back in the 1920s and 30s, and times have changed a lot since then. But
it does look as if the automobile, or maybe we should say General Motors,
Ford and Chrysler together, will be taking us to the poor house.
The American automobile manufacturer’s slow suicide
began long ago, at least as far back as Ralph Nader’s pioneering work,
Unsafe at Any Speed. His book came out in 1965 and focused on the auto
industry’s refusal to add safety features to their cars and their reluctance
to inform consumers about design flaws. General Motors responded to the book
by paying lawyers to defend their shoddy work and private investigators to
dig up dirt on Nader. Over the years since then the auto industry has
lobbied successfully to weaken fuel efficiency standards and to rig the
rules for calculating efficiency. Their death wish was to produce bloated,
air polluting gas guzzlers. For some years now they haven't produced the
kinds of cars that US consumers want to buy. Now the auto industry is on
life-support and is asking for your help.
Tom Friedman wrote an excellent piece for the New York
Times about this. Check out his
How to Fix a Flat
If you've ever wondered what shape the universe is in you should read
Robert Osserman's dazzling little book,
Poetry
of the Universe.
It's
easy to overlook this gem, since it's hidden under a rather sickly and
misleading title, and that's a shame. Osserman, a Stanford mathematician,
leads the reader on a fascinating trip through the cosmos or, to be precise,
he provides the reader with a series of maps. The author begins with the
story of Eratosthenes, the librarian at Alexandria in the third century B.C.
who realized the earth was round and calculated its circumference.
Eratosthenes measured the angle of a noonday shadow on the summer solstice
and performed a very simple geometric calculation to arrive at his answer.
He came up with an amazingly accurate figure, the Alexandrian equivalent of
25,000 miles. With Osserman as the teacher you can do as well as
Eratosthenes, which is part of the charm of this book. There's plenty more
in this book, so check out our review.
Here's a fascinating true story about a pirate
who was also an anthropologist -- though the word wasn't current back then.
In
A
Pirate of Exquisite Mind, Diana and Michael Preston explore
Dampier’s fascinating life, which included three trips
around
the globe between 1674 and 1711 and produced a treasure trove of scientific
information (plus more than a thousand new words, including barbecue,
chopsticks). Dampier was at times a pirate and buccaneer. But at the same
time his meticulous hydrographic observations were indispensable to the
English Navy into the 1900s. Charles Darwin constantly referred to his
careful descriptions of flora and fauna. And few writers prior to the 20th
century matched Dampier’s dispassionate descriptions of newly encountered
peoples. His first book created a new kind of travel writing that made him
wildly popular with the reading public and inspired Daniel Defoe’s Robinson
Caruso and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Dampier was a pirate -- and
also a restless, curious, enormously intelligent and observant man who had
no patience with social hierarchy and no talent for human interaction, but
who was also unusually tolerant and open-minded for a man of his time.
Of history’s many vicious spectacles, few
match in sheer beastliness the 13th -century Albigensian Crusade, in which
Pope Innocent III incited a group of impoverished nobles from northern
France to extirpate the Cathar heresy that flourished along the
Mediterranean coast, especially in the region, now part of France, called
Languedoc. With
stupefying
brutality, this crew of greedy armored thugs, led by Simon de Montfort,
annihilated not only the heretics, but the independence and culture of a
land once famed for its troubadours and gracious songs of courtly love.
“While beyond the Loire and the Rhine noblemen were still stirred by epics
about the viscera dripping from Charlemagne’s sword,” says Stephen O’Shea in
his immensely readable tale,
The Perfect
Heresy, “their counterparts in the sunny south were learning to
count the ways. The ethos of amorous longing so much at odds with the mix of
rapine and piety that passed for normal behavior everywhere else, gave a
different cast to Languedoc’s life of the mind.”
How to understand the financial mess we're
in, or, watch the movie It's a Wonderful Life,
starring Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson as Jimmy Stewart.
I knew we were in trouble when Bear Stearns imploded, Lehman
Brothers
went bankrupt, AIG collapsed, Merrill Lynch got swallowed up and, in a wink,
Washington Mutual and Wachovia got gulped down, too. Yes, we were in a
financial crises. And it was equally clear that most of us didn’t understand
what was happening. Most understood the headlines all right, but the story
further down the page was baffling. But I didn’t know how desperately
ignorant we were until I heard talking heads on TV tell viewers the best way
to understand the crises was to watch the old movie, It’s a Wonderful
Life. If our best understanding of the mess we’re in comes from that
sappy film, then we’re running blindly toward the abyss.
Read the rest of this sharp, informative article and
you'll be the most knowledgeable kid on the block when it comes to the
global financial meltdown. It's easy. Just click on
Understanding the Financial Mess
Stamp out starving authors! Buy their books! Patronize your
local book store and they'll love you forever. If you don't have a local
book shop, or if Borders or Barnes & Noble frighten you, then try an online
book store. Like, well, Amazon
A
few more insistent phrases we’ll be happy never to hear again. Ever.
First off, let's do away with the phrase perfect
storm. Sure it's
tempting to say Oh, it's a perfect storm!
whenever two or three bad things come together to produce a really truly
very bad situation, but let's not make it even worse by uttering that
overworked phrase yet again.
And while we're at it, we can throw away
between a rock and a hard place. Yup, we've heard that one too many
times and it gives us a headache.
Wall Street and Main Street. We’d like
never to see them again in the same sentence. Or the same paragraph. Or, for
that matter, on the same damn page.
Meltdown. Banks are in a meltdown.
International lending institutions are in a meltdown. Your retirement funds
are in a meltdown. Meltdown? You mean like what happens when the rate of
fission in a nuclear power plant become too fast the the rods overheat and
the core becomes so hot it melts down to China or explodes? Let’s dump meltdown, and while we’re at it we can forget
toxic securities, too.
(If you have a few phrases you'd like never to hear
again, send them in and we'll add them to our list.)
At this point on the page we suggest you stop looking at your
computer screen and look instead at the refreshing world outside.
Of course, this being damp and drizzly fall, the scene outside may not be so
refreshing. In fact, it can be quite dispiriting. For those who think a photo of it will serve as well as an actual
peek, we provide the view above these lines. Meanwhile, we'll hunt for a
different photo for those urbanites who are so estranged from nature that
they prefer a drizzly city street scene.
Jack Slack on Robin Hood and other scary
concepts
Every so often somebody suggests that we revise the tax
code so that a person who makes considerably more money than
the
rest of us pays a higher percentage in taxes. But whenever that’s proposed,
a chorus of conservatives cries out, “No, no! That’s redistribution of
wealth! The government has no right to take money from us rich folks and
give it to those poor people.!”
First of all, no one has suggested that the tax man, the secretary of the
treasury, the president or anybody else should play Robin Hood.
It's not about the re-distribution of wealth. That's an old, tired
Republican claim. It's about the distribution of the burden. A just society
attempts to distribute the burden of paying its expenses as equitably as
possible. The progressive tax system was created based on the fairness of
burden, not the percentage of wealth.
To make sure we’re all using the same dictionary, here are two words whose
meaning we should agree on. A “progressive” tax rate rises, or progresses,
as your taxable income rises, and it shrinks as your taxable income
declines. On the other hand, a “regressive” tax rate is one that remains the
same (its rate is “flat”), no matter whether your taxable income rises or
falls.
A flat or regressive tax is inherently unfair to the lower wage earners.
Somebody making a million bucks a year can pay a twenty percent tax and the
$200,000 it costs him is an inconvenience, but it won't effect his food
bill. However, a twenty percent tax on a man making fifty thousand is
$10,000 and that will effect how much he can spend at the grocery store and
whether or not he can save enough for his kid’s education. Hence, that’ s
not sharing equitably the burden of paying for government services.
Read the rest of Jack Slack's brief but incisive piece on taxes and the
American ideal of fair play. You might be surprised to learn whatever
happened to the minimum wage. Just click on
Robin
Hood and Other Scary Concepts
For a lot of Americans Georgia is one of the United
States and that's
that.
But anyone who has come across CriticalPages and read down this far knows
that Georgia is also a country by the Black Sea. Georgia, you recall, became
an independent country when the old USSR fell apart. But there were sections
of Georgia where the population, or much of it, felt a closer kinship to
old Russia than to the new Georgia, and that's where the trouble began.
Russia recently recognized parts of Georgia as independent countries and
appears ready to embrace or maybe swallow them whole. A lot is going on in
Georgia, and to sort it out you'll want to read Jack Slack's no-nonsense
straight-forward piece, so click on
The Russians Are Coming? (That's a Russian flag up there to the
right. The top stripe is white, and it sort of fades into the white web
page. Sorry about that.)
It's hard to believe that Andrew Hacker's book, Money: Who Has
How
Much and Why, came out over a decade ago. It's remarkably
current
today. America is not only the richest nation of its kind; it’s also the one
with the greatest inequality in the distribution of those riches. Hacker's
book is a compact and lucid account of the ways our society apportions its
riches. To see the review, click on
Money.
Visitors to CriticalPages are not the sort who read
only one kind of book. On the contrary, they apparently have
limitless curiosity about all kinds of writing.. In the photo above we have
a heap of books which have nothing in common —
except, of course, that each has its own unique interest. For a brief
description of each one, click
here.
Other Founding Father’s have their portraits on United States coins or
bills, but not John Adams. This country’s romance with Thomas Jefferson
has
almost blinded us to Adams’s great role in transforming thirteen British
colonies into a unified nation. But John Adams is back. In 2001 David
McCullough’s brilliant, dramatic biography of Adams won six awards, and
earlier this year Tom Hank’s production company translated the book into a popular
seven-part series on HBO. John and Abigail wrote over a thousand letters to
each other; check out our review of
My
Dearest Friend, a nicely edited volume that contains 289 from
the body of their lifelong correspondence. The letters are about everything
under the sun – political events and political personalities, of course, but
also more mundane matters, such as the crops on the family farm, the
six-weeks stay in Boston where Abigail and her family go through their
smallpox vaccination, the endless wrangling in the Continental Congress, and
Philadelphia’s bad beer. The letters are a great way to get to know this
remarkable couple
Consider the quill pen and the laser as writing
tools. Our review of the selected letters of John and Abigail
Adams
got us thinking. If you came across a two-hundred-year-old letter
you'd be
able to read it. All you'd need is light and your own eyes. But what about
today's email? What about other digital documents? If you archive documents
on a CD, how long will the CD last? Assuming you store the CD carefully and
leave it alone, maybe 20 or 25 years before it deteriorates. No one knows
for sure, because although there are ways of faking the passage of time in a
laboratory, the actual passage of time may produce different results.
Click here to
continue
We've posted our review of the new translation
of
War and Peace.
By Leo Tolstoy. Yes, we're really truly urging you to read 1,200 pages,
because War and Peace is absolutely one of the greatest works of
fiction ever, and yes, we're strongly recommending you read the new
translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky, because this couple
are simply
terrific at their job.
As for the novel itself — well, what can we say?
It's simply one of the best novels ever written.
War and Peace
is an extraordinary book, the pinnacle of Tolstoy’s writing, however much he
came to hate it in his later life. He realizes all his characters through
dead-on accuracy of detail, such as old countess Rostov accepting the gift
of a miniature of her beloved dead husband indifferently “because she did
not feel like weeping now.” At the same time he orchestrates an enormous
cast of characters in a complicated dance of authentic life that takes your
breath away.
The photograph, upper right, shows not only the recent English translation
of War and Peace, but also a rare two-volume edition published in the Soviet
Union in the midst of World War II. Despite the fact that the novel centers
on those upper class Russians whom the Soviets condemned to death, the state
recognized Tolstoy's novel as a great, crucially important icon of
Russian culture and went to the trouble and expense of printing these
volumes on scarce wartime paper.
Interested in food?
We've posted a review of Michael Pollan's important book,
In Defense of
Food. The author offers great advice about eating and at the
same time he’s wonderfully entertaining to read Some of his best recommendations have to do
with how we need to start eating—in meals, at tables, with others, talking,
eating slowly enough to taste the food and enjoy the company. It’s hardly
surprising that in aid of meaningful eating, he suggests that we should
cook, and if we can, we should grow a garden, however small. It’s truly
heartening to read such simple, sane, and enthusiastic reflections on how we
can return food to its proper role in culture, enjoyment, and health On our list of reviews
you'll also find a double review of Michael Pollan's
The Omnivore's
Dilemma and Steve Ettinger's
Twinkie,
Deconstructed. Each is unique, but both are engaging and
interesting and filled with information about what we don't know we're
eating these days. We gave the short version of Ettinger's title. The full
version is
Twinkie, Deconstructed: My Journey to Discover How the Ingredients Found
in Processed Foods are Grown, Mined (Yes, Mined), and Manipulated into What
American Eats. We live in a world that is increasingly hungry and,
indeed, millions are malnourished and thousands are on the verge of
starvation or are starving even now. You might be interested in a book that
came out a few yeats ago,
Hungry
Planet: What the World Eats by Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio. A
more-than-coffee-table book that explores in lively text and sumptuous
photography the food consumed each week by thirty families around the
globe--from the suburbs of Australia to refugee camps in Chad, from the
icecap of Arctic Greenland to bullet-pocked Sarajevo.
it's a good bet
you can find a list of our reviews by clicking on the Book Reviews button up
there on the left, or the other one at the bottom of this page. One of our
reviews is about Karen Armstrong's
The Bible: A Biography
Armstrong does just what the title asserts, she tells the life story (to
date) of that collection of writings which came to be called the Old and the
New Testament. Not content with simply outlining the production and
collation of the diverse works that make up the Bible, she carries the story
forward to the present day, sketching how the Bible was read, regarded,
used, and interpreted through the Middle Ages, past the Enlightenment, into
the present day. Our author fears for the life of her subject, fears that
the Bible is in danger of becoming a dead letter or “a toxic arsenal that
fuels hatred and sterile polemic.” She seeks “the development of a more
compassionate hermeneutics,” one that “could provide an important
counter-narrative in our discordant world.” One can say only amen to that.
And if you're in a fictional treatment of things
Christian, you might want to read our review of
Gilead, the
fictional memoir by an elderly Christian minister who must come to grips with
how an individual is to live rightly, especially since we are faced with the
fact that when we die, we leave "the forgetful world behind us to trample,
and mar and misplace everything we ever cared for."
We're
critics, but we're only human so we have a Critical Page
devoted to. love and the history of sexuality and, well, the confusion that
goes with it.
It's hard to believe, but the subject of sexuality didn't exist until the
nineteenth century. True, people began to write love letters and other
erotic fictions shortly after they invented writing, but that's not serious
stuff. The serious stuff didn't begin to appear until the late nineteenth
century and when it did arrive it was bad news. One of the best-remembered
volumes from that period is Baron Richard von Krafft-Ebing's
Psychopathia Sexualis . Because of its wide-ranging depictions of what
Krafft-Ebing and other well-behaved Europeans regarded as pathological
sexual behavior, the book became a furtive best seller. To get to that page click
on Love, Sex, and the History of Sexuality
Stamp out starving authors! Buy their books! Patronize your
local book store and they'll love you forever. If you don't have a local
book shop, or if Borders or Barnes & Noble frighten you, then try an online
book store. Like, well, Amazon