Books & Culture articles from July 2003

Books & Culture archives from July 2003

Correction.
July 1, 2003... Typos are always an excrescence, and we strive mightily to avoid them while never, it seems, entirely succeeding. Typos in a poem arc particularly grievous. The last line of Laurance Wieder's rendering of Psalm 90 ("The Work," May/June, p. 5]...

Pictures and words.(Long Time Coming: A Photographic Portrait of America, 1935-1943)(Book Review)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2003... The Archive of America Michael Le is an unconventional historian best known for his haunting book, Wisconsin Death Trip (1973), a collection of photographs, newspaper clippings, and other scraps of words, centered on the town of Black...

Before left behind: it's not easy to say something new about the end of the world.(Left Behind)(Book Review)
July 1, 2003... Would you know how to discern these signs, there are myriads of books upon the market today which will help you. --Sydney Watson, Scarlet and Purple Exactly at eleven, someone emerged from the vesby and passed up the rostrum stairs....

The Cossacks' IIiad: Gogol and the making of Russian literature.
July 1, 2003... Take the wild history of the Cossacks in the Ukraine. Add the birth of nationalism and the drawing in of the principalities around Moscow to form a modern country. Include Eastern Orthodoxy's long struggle against the Catholic Poles and the...

Mercy: a murderous saint's life.(Saint Julian)(Book Review)
July 1, 2003... Walter Wangerin's Saint Julian defies easy categorization. Neither novel nor traditional saint's tale nor romance, it combines elements of all three. Whatever else we call the story, it is, in one reader's words, "an act of literary...

Thomas the unbeliever.(The Book Against God )(Book Review)
July 1, 2003... James Wood has established himself as one of the most influential critics in the English-speaking world. His first book, The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature on Belief (1999), included an account of his upbringing in a strongly evangelical...

Defenders of the faith.(Humble Apologetics)(The Resurrection of God Incarnate)(Book Review)
July 1, 2003... Not long ago, Christian apologists faced an uphill battle against well-entrenched philosophies of unbelief. Natural theology was deemed long dead, having been slain by the swords of Hume and Kant. Arguments fur God's existence were at best...

Impersonations.(English Disease)(Book Review)
July 1, 2003... Imagine that you're a chronically unhappy Jewish man, the grandson of Holocaust victims, married to a Gentile woman who both enchants and confounds you. When an obnoxious colleague invites you to take a "dour pilgrimage" with him to...

"Baptism in blood": the Civil War and the creation of an American civil religion. (Civil War).
July 1, 2003... It is a truism of American history that the Civil War stands as the American phenomenon, an event of transcendent significance. If the current list of books, movies, and roundtables is any indication, that won't change anytime soon. At some...

Getting it half-right: what's worth celebrating in Gods and Generals--and what's not. (Civil War).(Movie Review)
July 1, 2003... Ron Maxwell's Gods and Generals is a film with much to praise and much to bemoan. On the religious beliefs and practices of leading figures in the American Civil War, it is the best popular movie ever made. By contrast, on what these beliefs...

When thou goest out to battle: the religious world of Civil War soldiers. (Civil War).(Book Review)
July 1, 2003... Although the Civil War has been one of the most widely researched subjects in American history, scholars have largely overlooked one of the principal forces that inspired and sustained the soldiers on both sides: their religious faith....

"The wisest radical of them all". (Civil War).(Abraham Lincoln and Civil War America )(Book Review)
July 1, 2003... Few historical figures can rival Abraham Lincoln's constant ability to prompt interesting and first-rate scholarship. The paucity of the record for his early life, his enigmatic personality and lifelong reluctance to reveal himself even to...

Telling Lincoln. (Civil War).(Book Review)
July 1, 2003... Nearly a decade ago, in the inaugural issue of Books & CULTURE, Mark Noll surveyed the seemingly endless proliferation of Abraham Lincoln studies. One factoid will suffice. In 1950, at least 500 persons were earning their living from...

How the War Might have ended: a conversation with historian Jay Winik. (Civil War).(Jay Winik's April 1865: The Month That Saved America)(Interview)
July 1, 2003... Jay Winik is a senior scholar of history and public policy at the University of Maryland's School of Public Affairs. His April 1865: The Month That Saved America was already a bestseller when news photos shortly after 9/11 showed President...

Changing the script: a week before the battle of Antietam, a Union corporal found a sheet of paper wrapped around three cigars, lying in the grass. His discovery altered the course of the war. (Civil War).
July 1, 2003... As the dispirited Army of the Potomac moved north from Washington, D.C. in early September 1862, few who marched in its ranks or served in the government on whose behalf it fought were confident it could accomplish the mission before it....

Going back to Uncle Tom's Cabin. (Civil War).(Uncle Tom's Cabin)(Book Review)
July 1, 2003... According to Abraham Lincoln, it was the book that started the Civil War. Queen Victoria wept while reading it. Tolstoy included it among the greatest achievements of the human mind. Even the usually acerbic Mark Twain praised it as "a drama...

Still writing the Civil War: do we know this country too well? (Civil War).(Wolf Pit)(Book Review)
July 1, 2003... Marly Youmans writes novels like a poet, leaping through her story using images as stepping stones. She has a wonderful way with words, rendering wolves that "trickle away between trees like silvery water," or pebbles tossed in a well...

Planet Dixie: land of "happy slaves" and "gracious masters". (Civil War).(Book Review)
July 1, 2003... David Goldfield, who holds an endowed chair in history at the University of North Carolina, says in the opening sentences of his new book that he lives "in a tolerable yet sometimes intolerable place. Its sensual climate lures the...

Original sin: slavery and the biblical "curse of Ham". (Civil War).(Noah's Curse)(Book Review)
July 1, 2003... In Noah's Curse, Stephen Haynes provides an in-depth look at how the oft-cited biblical "curse of Ham" or "curse of Canaan" was used in the American South to defend the enslavement of people of African descent. That Scripture was used in this...

Free to do what? Emancipation reconsidered. (Civil War).
July 1, 2003... The 19th century was the great age of emancipations. The Enlightenment's hostility to the old intellectual and political verities, followed by the revolutionary export of that hostility by the French Revolution and Napoleon, made emancipation...

A journalist in Babylon.( Standing for Christ in a Modem Babylon)(Book Review)
July 1, 2003... In a widely noticed op-ed piece last March, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof admitted that "nearly all of us in the news business are completely out of touch with a group that includes 46 percent of Americans": self-described...

The movies go to war.
July 1, 2003... When Tears of the Sun opened in theaters in early March, just a few weeks before American and British troops began their invasion of Iraq, director Antoine Fuqua insisted his film had nothing to do with the impending conflict in the Middle...

The land: who owns the holy land?(The Land: Place as Gift, Promise and Challenge in Biblical Faith)(Book Review)
July 1, 2003... With this article we continue our series on Israel, Palestine, and the biblical understanding of "the land." The first installment in the series, Gerald McDermott's "The Land: Evangelicals and Israel," appeared in the March/April 2003 issue....

"Getting older younger": marketing to teens and tweens.(Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers)(Book Review)
July 1, 2003... When you write a book badmouthing marketing and proceed to market it, you expose yourself to charges of hypocrisy: In Branded: The Baying and Selling of Teenagers, Alissa Quart capitalizes on publishing's recent penchant for anti-corporate...

Christian practices and cultural critique.(Book Review)
July 1, 2003... "This book offers one of the most robust defenses of the public, the communal, the shared that I've ever read. It is a powerful riposte to the privatizing creed .of our age, and it makes painfully clear how much of our contemporary life is...