Books & Culture articles from November 2009

Books & Culture archives from November 2009

A note to our readers.(Brief article)
November 1, 2009... BOOKS & CULTURE exists for the sake of light. Its basic premise is that the light of the gospel--Christ as "the true light which enlightens everyone" (John 1:9)--shines on every aspect of human existence. And so, with specific Christian...

Gratitude.(STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND)(Alexander McCall Smith)(Critical essay)
November 1, 2009... An interviewer asked Alexander McCall Smith how long it took to write one of his novels. McCall Smith smilingly dodged the question. Given his rate of production, the answer must be "not very long." But what does it matter? After all, Dan Brown...

Was Nietzsche pious?('Pious Nietzsche: Decadence and Dionysian Faith')(Book review)
November 1, 2009... Nietzsche again?" Nietzsche professionally studied chorus in Greek tragedy, but never heard a wail quite like this. If the question does not sound forth in choral harmony, it is certainly uttered by a multitude of voices. The phenomenon of...

School daze.('Troublemaker,' 'The Global Achievement Gap,' and 'The Street Stops Here')(Book review)
November 1, 2009... How's this for a manifesto? "Advancing parents' right to choose their children's schools while holding schools to account for their students' academic achievement are the twin turbos of education reform in twenty-first century America." Does it...

The big questions.('Education's End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life')(Book review)
November 1, 2009... "No matter where they've attended school," the reader is assured in Becoming a Master Student, the most widely used text intended to orient incoming freshmen, "liberally educated people can state what they're willing to bet their lives on." But...

Home room.
November 1, 2009... Despite homeschooling's growing popularity, almost everything we think we know about it is anecdotal or based on a nonrepresentative sample. This is due in large part to widely varying regulations among states: some mandate regular testing...

Where could we go from here? The state of U2 studies.(Critical essay)
November 1, 2009... While Greg Garrett was driving to work at Baylor University one morning in the fall of 2001, U2's song "Beautiful Day" popped up on the radio. "It was so precisely the thing I needed to hear at the moment that I actually had to pull the car over...

Bicentennial Abe.('Abraham Lincoln: A Life,' 'A. Lincoln: A Biography,' and 'Abraham Lincoln')(Book review)
November 1, 2009... In 2008, the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College received 172 submissions for its $50,000 prize for the best book on Lincoln or the Civil War. Even without such a lucrative award, the perennial deluge of Lincoln books would show little...

Recommended reading.(BOOKS & CULTURE)(Mary Clemente Davlin on Piers Plowman)
November 1, 2009... WHEN MARY CLEMENTE DAVLIN, OP, was trying to choose her dissertation topic, her then University of Wisconsin-Madison advisor, scholar Charles Muscatine, told her, "You can choose a small work that is unknown and become a world authority on it,...

Silent divas.('Diva: Defiance and Passion in Early Italian Cinema')(Book review)
November 1, 2009... Movies can elicit profound, sometimes dismaying, reflections about the reciprocal influences of religion and society, faith and culture, belief and behavior. Rarely, however, do filmgoers consider the influence of religion on the production of...

Irresistible--and troubling.('Public Enemies')(Movie review)
November 1, 2009... There are moments in Michael Mann's Public Enemies that take one's breath away. Mann is known for his ferocious closeups--the pores in the skin, the nearly invisible scar by the left eye, the whisper of facial hair on the lead actress' upper...

We few dreamers.('Another World Instead: The Early Poems of William Stafford, 1937-1947')(Book review)
November 1, 2009... On a January afternoon, the kind in California when it is equally pleasurable to sit in shade or sit in sun, forty Santa Barbara locals lounge at attention on picnic tables along the Santa Ynez River. One by one, we stand and read a favorite...

Darkness and light.('Songbook: The Selected Poems of Umberto Saba' and 'Love Lessons: Selected Poems of Alda Merini')(Book review)
November 1, 2009... Italian poets whose careers spanned a large swath of the 20th century are inevitably measured, especially in America, by a political yardstick and a poetic one. Were they Fascists in the 1930s, victims of Fascism, or somewhere in between? And...

A cold war story.
November 1, 2009... Neil Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie (1988), a Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the Vietnam War, examined that flawed American commitment by entering the world of one of our flawed heroes, the officer John Paul Vann. It is a fine book, and I...

East Germany--nature & artifact: the character of the DDR.(Deutsche Demokratische Republik)(Report)
November 1, 2009... What kind of society was the Deutsche Demokratische Republik? Mary Fulbrook in The People's State believes that the DDR was in some sense normal, whereas Arvid Nelson, writing about its approach to Nature in Cold War Ecology, and Eli Rubin,...

Two suppers at emmaus by Caravaggio.(Poem)
November 1, 2009... Two Suppers at Emmaus by Caravaggio The worm in the apple gnaws the fruit away, and the dressed fowl the men have devoured by the time Caravaggio remembers the inn-keeper and his creased wife, the finer linens and the...

Witches and the problem of evil.('Witchcraft, Violence and Democracy in South Africa')(Book review)
November 1, 2009... Kenyan Pastor Thomas Muthee sensed that nearby car accidents were caused by a witch whom he publically identified as "Mama Jane," apparently the local pastor of an African independent church. (1) Muthee reports that after another car accident...

"Honor killing".('In Honor of Fadime: Honor and Shame')(Book review)
November 1, 2009... In January 2002, Fadime Sahindal was murdered by her father. The killing might have passed with little attention, like so many crimes, except that two months earlier this 26-year-old woman of Kurdish descent bad addressed the Swedish parliament....

Thanking poem.(Poem)
November 1, 2009... --for franz Wright I'm thinking how so much so often comes of showing up, comes of being willing to arrive, regardless, as our several mute anxieties subside, and now I startle, blinking--so much so that I...

The carol of seven signs.(Poem)
November 1, 2009... Marye, maide, milde and fre, Chambre of the trinite Icrouned and ilore i. The briar in a dry land grows; Mary shall wear the bloodred rose, Her son shall wear the thorn. ii. Saint Joseph cut the cherry tree ...

Handel--another gay Anglican?(Viewpoint essay)
November 1, 2009... Was he or wasn't he? The literal answer is no; despite the monument in Westminster Abbey, he wasn't an Anglican, and the word "gay" is problematic when applied to citizens of the I8th century. That's a cop-out, of course; the fuller answer,...

Giving & getting.('Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn't Buy Presents for the Holidays')(Book review)
November 1, 2009... Remember those ear muffs you got from Aunt Elsie? You would have rather had the cash. That anecdote now has become an economic theory backed by statistical measurement. The Freakonomics craze has come to Christmas, and the lesson is that...

Powerful stories & amazing people.('The Templars: Knights of Christ,' 'A Song for Nagasaki,' and 'Dayspring: A Novel')(Book review)
November 1, 2009... THE TEMPLARS Knights of Christ Regine Pernoud [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] For centuries, historians and novelists have portrayed the Knights Templar as avaricious and power-hungry villains....