Books & Culture articles from September 2010

Books & Culture archives from September 2010

Soundscapes of Our Past.(book review 'The Christian West and Its Singers: The First Thousand Years')(Book review)
September 1, 2010... What kind of history of music can you write when there's no music? Odd as it sounds, this is just the question anyone trying to give an account of music in the first thousand years of the Western church will need to ask. For us today, "music"...

Christianity in China: An irreducible complexity.(book review 'Redeemed by Fire: The Rise of Popular Christianity in Modern China')(Book review)
September 1, 2010... At a banquet in Beijing in 1995 I had an opportunity to ask the man seated next to me, a high-ranking official in the Department of Education, how many Christians he thought there were in China. "Maybe 50 million, maybe 75 million, maybe even...

Ultimate Concern.(book review 'Original Sin and Everyday Protestants: The Theology of Reinhold Niebuhr, Billy Graham, and Paul Tillich in an Age of Anxiety')(Book review)
September 1, 2010... Few historians find a way inside the heads of those human beings who do not leave behind a tidy published record. Polls lie, or oversimplify. Pop culture is only the ad man's guess. It is no easy thing to tell what the vast majority of ordinary...

Duties and Rights: Looking for help in understanding justice.(book review 'Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?')(Book review)
September 1, 2010... Michael J. Sandel is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government at Harvard University. His most recent hook, Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do, is the distillation of a popular undergraduate course he has taught at Harvard for...

The Nine-Day Queen: Lady Jane Grey and her sisters.(book review ' The Sisters Who Would Be Queen: Mary, Katherine, and Lady Jane Grey: A Tudor Tragedy')(Book review)
September 1, 2010... In 2005, a portrait of a teenage girl with a heart-shaped face, dressed in red and holding a book in her left hand, was found in southwest London. She looks warily out at the viewer with dark sharp eyes. Over her right shoulder is the faint...

Still Reckoning: A master historian's summing up of World War II.(book review ' The Legacy of the Second World War')(Book review)
September 1, 2010... When I teach a course on the history of World War II, I usually begin with a series of "Before and After" images, showing the technology available to combatants at the beginning and the end of hostilities. In 1939, for instance, the British...

Lewis, Sex, and Gender.(book review 'C.S. Lewis on the Final Frontier: Science and the Supernatural in the Space Trilogy' and 'A Sword between the Sexes? C.S. Lewis and the Gender Debates')(Book review)
September 1, 2010... Sanford Schwartz contends that C, S. Lewis' Ransom Trilogy is about "ideological warfare." Each volume in the Trilogy "examines another facet of the seemingly impassable conflict between Christian tradition and the evolutionary or...

Go Ahead and Flinch: A lost novel by Donald Westlake.(book review 'Memory')(Book review)
September 1, 2010... You've probably forgotten--you've certainly forgotten--but back in the early 1960s there was a serious American novelist who achieved some small success writing psychological dramas. His name was Donald Westlake, and the explanation for his...