Edward Gorey

Edward Gorey was a writer/illustrator whose work is probably more well known than his name. You may recognize this image:



That's an illustration he did that was used in the introduction of the PBS "Mystery" series. I saw that a long time ago, but that was all I knew of him. Mildred is a big fan of his and has several of his books. They're rather interesting, but I think "gothic" is definitely the best way to describe them. He liked dark and random humor. Anyway, it's not my point to tell you all about him; that's something Mildred should do. I just want to say that there is a very interesting online store dedicated to him and his work and like-minded creators.

I like a lot of the things you can find on there, like this:



There are these really cool "haunted portraits" that change from one image to another. They are not those crappy holographs you see everywhere else. Check them out here. This is one example. It's really cool.

Nightmares and Dreamscapes (from the stories of Stephen King) on TNT

When you hear that any Stephen King story is being made into a tv movie, it's natural to think to yourself, "Oh god, how are they going to ruin it now?" And usually, you find that it's the same old combination of a low budget and bad director. However, if you've been watching this mini-series of one-hour episodes from the book of the same name, you know that strangely enough, they actually did a good job this time. If I'm not mistaken, every episode has had a different director and they've had different casts. And they've had a decent budget. I've been really impressed and I thought that all the episodes thus far were really good. I'd watch them again and I hope they come out with a dvd soon. So far, "The End of the Whole Mess" has been my favorite, but I think all of them have been good. Not only that, but the shows have been really faithful to the written stories. I still remember them, and a lot of the dramatic points in "The Road Virus Heads North" were recreated in the show.

Suffice it to say, I'm happy so far and that's a really strange occurence in general with King on tv. He has had some successes. I mean, the Dead Zone has been a real success, but a lot of the tv movies just sucked. "It" was passable, but "The Tommyknockers" was just ridiculously bad. I mean, it wasn't that great a book either, but still. And "The Langoliers", while having its moments disappointed me too. I can only hope that when someone decides to do The Gunslinger series, they make a commitment to doing it well. If that one goes bad, I'll have to hurt somebody.

Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market by Eric Schlosser

This is another great book by Eric Schlosser (you may remember him from Fast Food Nation). As the title says, it's about the sex industry, illegal labor, and drugs (only marijuana though). It's a lot like FFN in that it's an expose of industries you don't really know that much about besides the hype and lies that their opponents publicize about them.

His first subject is the marijuana trade. Schlosser gives a long and detailed history of the use and abuse of marijuana in this country. Most people probably don't know that at one time it (like most other drugs) was legal, and even fairly commonly used. Schlosser talks about plenty more that most people probably don't know about, like the incredible harshness of laws against people who are convicted of growing or selling it, as well as the scientific debate over the true effects of marijuana on a person's health. What may come as a shock to many is that it is widely acknowledged by scientists (even government appointed panels) that marijuana is much less dangerous a drug than alcohol, with less harmful side-effects and no evidence of life-threatening conditions caused by abuse (liver failure for alcohol vs. possible chronic bronchitis for marijuana). Despite knowing this, certain lawmakers and prominent people continue to push for harsh regulation of the drug for their own political reasons. I'll spare you the details because if you want to know more, that's what this book is for.

The second section, and the shortest, is about illegal labor, and thus illegal aliens. This is a section that really has the emotional punch. There's no way you can not sympathize with the guys he talks about; the ones who are responsible for the profits of so many farmers (and a significant chunk of California's economy) who at the same time are treated as second-class humans, and while being exploited by their employers are punished by America's laws. One of the things you might learn from this book is that these migrant laborers are nothing new; they've provided most of the muscle for farmers in the West since those states have been part of the US. The only thing that's new is that we made them illegal. While a lot of politicians and pundits talk about these people competing with native-born Americans for low-wage jobs, the truth is that those low-wage farming jobs have never been a source of income for most Americans. The only time there were a lot of native migrant farm laborers was in the Dust Bowl era. And that phenomenon ended when the that period did. Well, there is one other new thing occurring: more industrial employers are taking on illegal immigrants as laborers because they will work in illegal conditions (and if you know how far the protections of OSHA have fallen, you know that's really bad). Aside from farms, illegal immigrants are now working in meat-packing plants, the most dangerous job in America. Injuries and even death are common in those plants (a subject discussed more thoroughly in Fast Food Nation). I can almost guarantee you that after reading this book, you won't be asking why we're not doing more to keep illegals out; you'll be asking why the people who use those laborers aren't in jail.

The third part of the book deals not with the sex industry exactly, but rather the porn industry (including adult films, books, toys, etc). As Schlosser tells it, that basically boils down to one man: Ruben Sturman. If you've never heard of the name, that's not surprising. This was a man who had imaginary people as heads of companies that actually did business for him, and almost none of the money went through traceable means to him. Really, this is a story of a decades-long conflict between a businessman and government regulators. Sturman himself was no Hugh Heffner or Larry Flynt. He didn't indulge in his own product or have a promiscuous sex life. He only visited the set of one of his movies, and left because it was boring. He was eventually caught for tax evasion, but in the end I could hardly fault him for hiding his money from the government when they went after him on obscenity charges obsessively. When you hear how many times and ways they tried to prosecute him, you'll think it's ridiculous too. Along the way, you find out how he built an empire of porn from coast to coast (from Cleveland, of all places!) and how it reflected the fight between the government pornographers.

What's really funny is that although they finally caught him on tax evasion, that investigation was only started because they were trying to catch him on obscenity charges, something the federal government had been trying to do since he distributed "smut" books (stuff that's practically tame compared to the paperback romances we have on the shelf at the library). By the time they caught Sturman, Larry Flynt had won his fight over the constitutionality of porn and there were adult theaters open all over America. For a long time, they'd tried to claim that "adult bookstores" were somehow connected to the mob, but Sturman has always denied that charge and federal investigators of the mafia also rejected that idea. I think this section is interesting for the human story, but also because it details the rise and spread of pornography in America. Something that might surprise you in this section is Larry Flynt's prediction that if porn is freely available, people will stop wanting it. Sounds strange, but there are some numbers from Denmark to back that up (or some country, if I'm forgetting the right one).

That kind of parallels another argument he made about drugs. Evidently Spain and Portugal have legalized drugs and evidently are showing a decline in usage (as well as drug crime). I don't enough to say more about that.

In the end, Schlosser wraps up with his recommendations (legalize marijuana, let people have their porn, and criminilize the employers of illegal aliens, not the immigrants). The book's parts, while all reflecting illegal or shady sides of the American economy, have little in the way of a unifying theme. The introduction of the book talks as if this is more of an economic study on those segments and hands out some numbers and statistics. While these are certainly interesting and in-depth discussions of some important issues, they're really not economic studies, although he does talk about exactly how much money is represented in these industries (and it's a freakin' huge amount of money).

Schlosser is a fairly good writer, but he's more of a journalist type than Morgan Spurlock is, so you have to expect it to be quite a bit drier. While it's always enlightening and interesting, I'm not sure I'd call it entertaining exactly. This is a pretty heavy book (figuratively, that is), and I don't recommend it as casual reading if you're only going to pay half-attention to it. But I do strongly recommend taking the time to read it and appreciate it properly. At the very least, people need to know what he says about marijuana and illegal immigrants. So there it is. Read it!

"The Assassin's Gate" by George Packer

Iraq is a place of terrible sadness and terrible hope.

That at least is the lesson I take away from reading Packer's book, about the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. I found his book to be highly educational, engrossing, saddening and deeply moving. Packer does more than offer just an overview of the history of the invasion and the present occupation; rather, he attempts to get in the heads of both principle actors and ordinary people, Iraqi and American, swept up by the war and it's aftermath. In that way, he gives us a picture of Iraq, and ourselves through the lens of Iraq, that is as complete as it can be in one book.

Packer's book is divided into four different section. In the first, he talks about the run-up to the inavsion. This story we are mostly familiar with, as a result of countless news and magazine articles and interviews detailing the failure of the Bush administration to understand what they were getting us into, and plan accordingly for the consequences. But Packer takes us deeper into the motivations of those who planned the war, into the incredible insularity of President Bush and the willingness of the neo-cons in the administration to deny the complex realities of Iraq to further an airy ideal of democratization, while at the same time justifying to the public the need for invasion on national security grounds that they themselves didn't accept or were simply uninterested in. Through him we see how those in the administration deliberately avoided planning for the aftermath of Iraq, believing that to do so would weaken their case for war and that it was entirely unecessary anyway. The neo-cons sincerely, honestly believed that a relative handful of Iraqi exiles, many of whom hadn't been in Iraq in decades, could lead the democratic revolution they had in mind, install a new government in a span of months that would be friendly to America as a result of the liberation, and allow us to pull our troops out before the end of the year.

Packer glosses over the invasion, and for good reason, as many would probably agree that though the initial invasion was the turning point for everything, it's also dwarfed by what's happened since. Instead, the next section of his book takes us inside first the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance led by Jay Garner, then the Coalition Provisional Authority under L. Paul Bremer. The failure of the ORHA is well documented; after all, Garner wasn't replaced after only a few months because he was enjoying wild success. But the simple truth is that Garner and the ORHA were set up to fail. They were not tasked with doing what would be necessary in Iraq after the invasion, because nobody believed that anything other than acting as a caretaker until the exiles could come to power was necessary. The looting and chaos that followed the invasion resulted in a quick change of plans, the sacking of Garner, and the creation of the CPA. But the CPA was also hampered by the failure to plan for the post-invasion period; planning was done on the fly in Iraq and in the Washington, and the officials working for the CPA, famously insulated from the world of Iraq around them, made decisions that seemed arbitrary, or uninformed, or capricious to the Iraqi people. Pronouncements were made that were aimed to the Americans back home, but real progress on the ground was hampered by key strategic mistakes such as widespread de-Baathification at the behest of the exiles and the neo-cons, economic changes put in place by young men and women from such places as the Heritage Foundation or the AEI, and the decision to completely disband the Iraqi army, a decision made seemingly by Bremer himself without any historical justification or guiding princples.

Far removed from the Green Zone, we then see a portrait of an American captain working on the ground with the Iraqis to furhter the reconstruction. Unlike the ideologues in the CPA, or even senior commanders in Baghdad or the Pentagon, American soldiers on the ground were interested only in what worked. How should they deal with the Iraqis? How can local government be reconstituted? Where can they get the money for reconstruction projects? American soldiers faced the double task of trying to fight a burgeoning insurgency without alienating the Iraqi populace, while at the sime time scraping for funds and equipment to do things they were never trained for like build schools or hold local council elections. Nothing if not resourceful, many of our soldiers did they best they could with what they could get their hands on, even as they began to die in greater and greater numbers.

But perhaps the most engrossing part of the book is the part about the everyday Iraqis themselves. Packer talks to Sunnis and Shiites, Kurds and Turkommen, former Baathists and former resistence fighters, the religious, the secular, insurgents and members of the militias, men and women. Through it all there emerges of a portrait of an Iraq that is chaotic, violent, backwards, but yearning for change and who all seem to start out cautiously optimistic about the future, though each Iraqi he talks to seems to have a different idea of what that future should or will be. But at the same time it is moving and saddening to read about how the violence worsens with each of Packer's return trips to Iraq, and how his Iraqi colleagues and friends begin to grow more and more fearful of the future, and more fatalistic, more resigned to a future of bloodshed, fighting, and chaos as Iraq begins to tear itself between the Kurds, Sunni insurgents and jihadists, and increasingly brutal Shiite militias. As you read, it's as if you can feel the hope draining from them, and their resignation as they realize they are trapped in a land that is still defined largely by the ways in which Saddam Hussein terrorized, brutalized and divided his own people to maintain his power.

The most painful chapter to read, "Memorial Day", is the story of a father who has lost his son, a private in the U.S. Army, to the war in Iraq. It is agonizing to read not only about the father's pain, but his unending questions about the war in Iraq that he is constantly asking. In an email, he candidly and honestly puts these questions to Packer, and to himself:

October 4, 2004: What is best for America and Iraq? That is the question. A better Iraq? Is it possible? Why did we go into Iraq? What justifies our remaining? American lives have been lost, precious lives, for what? Can something be achieved that is worthy of the sacrifice? Are there things not known to anyone other than the President and his advisors? No one in the Senate or any of the "attentive" and "informed" organizations? That would justify the sacrifice? And how much more sacrifice can be justified? For us to turn Iraq over to civil war would be hard to take. I don't have the right to advocate continued involvement because of my sacrifice that would lead to more, many more. What is best for America and Iraq? What is reality on the ground in Iraq? What is possible to achieve? Can Kerry and a team of his choosing do it? It is a great leap of faith. And most of the time none of this matters to me. I want my son. My son.

Packer doesn't have to say it, because it's clear from the fact that he included this and other agonized emails from the father. This father who lost his child in Iraq, is asking the questions that each of us should have been asking from the beginning, should have been asking this whole time, and should be asking ourselves now. The point is not primarily the answers, though we desperately need answers of some kind. The point is in the asking, because we can never even hope to come close to the answers unless we ask these questions honestly of ourselves, without consideration for which political party it harms or benefits. It shouldn't have taken the deaths of hundreds of soldiers to begin asking the questions, and it shouldn't require the deaths of thousands more to ask them in earnest now.

The book ends with the dissolution of the CPA and the national elections at the beginning of 2005, and Packer returns largely to the Iraqis that he's come to know to end his story. We see the elections were a hopeful event to many Iraqis, however they were interpreted by both sides here at home, but also that many Iraqis faced death to vote in a country that should have been well on its way to peace, and that many other Iraqis seemed willing to place themselves in the hands of Shiite political parties that want an Islamic theocracy that has little room for the Sunnis, secular Iraqis, and former Baathists. And as we've seen in the last year and a half, there are precious few ways in which anyone could say Iraq has gotten better. More and more Iraqis die, American casualties no longer make headlines because they're so common place, and hard-line Shiite militias seemed poised to wrest control of the country to themselves. Still, Packer's book gives us valuable lessons on what has happened-on what is happening-in Iraq, lessons that we can use now, lessons that we ignore at our peril.

Pick it up.

Misquoting Jesus by Bart D. Ehrman

I was surprised when I put this book on hold at the library and it turned out to have 7 people ahead of me on the list. The vast majority of non-fiction books, especially those about studies of Christianity do not tend to have the same kind of pull that books like the "Left Behind" or "Da Vinci Code" do. I figure this is an anomaly caused by the extreme popularity of Da Vinci right now. Otherwise, a book that talks about how the New Testament is in fact subject to human error might not get such great play.

Before anyone gets excited though, let me say that this book doesn't tell you anything new. It's a well-written introduction to the area of textual criticism for the layman, and it doesn't really tackle any of the major issues of that area of study. The bulk of it is just him talking about the categories of textual errors that occur and why they occur. Well, I guess some people actually don't know that much about it, so let me give a little history.

No one on Earth (at least, that we know of) has any of the original manuscripts of any of the books of the New Testament. Nor do we have any first-generation copies (that is, original copies of those first manuscripts), nor anything that was copied within 100 years of the originals. And there are precious few copies that go back before the time of an "orthodox" church. So we have the fewest copies from the earliest period and more as time goes on (up to today, when there's practically a bible for every person on the planet). Christian scholars have known all along that there are many variations among the copies of the books we have. As Ehrman puts it, there are more variations than there are words in the New Testament.

To bring it to the point, the idea of the Protestant church is that the Bible, being the divinely inspired word of God, serves as the infallible guide for belief. The problem, of course, is that the New Testament was written and re-written by human beings. Those who claim that the King James Version (or any other) is the "right" version are basing their beliefs on flawed translations of flawed copies and flawed translations. There is no version of the Bible today that can safely be said to present the unaltered texts as they were originally written.

Ehrman details exactly how such mistakes and deliberate changes were made, why we know they were made and how we can try to reconstruct the original wording. This is not a science unique to Ehrman, nor is this some kind of fringe movement. The field of textual criticism was founded almost 500 years ago when Protestant scholars tried to show validation of their religious beliefs by working backwards to the purest form of the New Testament possible. It has become fairly advanced at this point and involves scientific methods of reconstructing the texts, as well as using established criteria to determine what the older, more original version of a text was.

Ehrman discusses the different kinds of changes that were made, including the accidental and deliberate changes. An example of accidental change would be when a scribe copied a line over again without realizing it or miscopied a word (or miswrote the actual letters, something that happens when you're copying a language that's not native to you). He also points out some deliberate changes, those where the scribes were making a passage make more sense to themselves grammatically and theologically.

Ehrman's definitely a good writer, and I've enjoyed reading his books before, so if you're an Ehrman fan, it's definitely worth it. If you don't know anything about textual criticism, this is as decent a place to start as any. But, like I said, if you've read a dozen books that study the New Testament, you've more than likely heard everything that's said in this book. But if you're not that knowledgeable, read it!

Marvel 1602 by Neil Gaiman and Andy Kubert

Not a whole lot to say about this. I thought it was entertaining and enjoyable, but not especially good, which is surprising given that it was written by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by Andy Kubert. To paraphrase Gaiman though, it was just supposed to be something to pass the time reading. It was exactly that. Not really that involving.

The premise is essentially that due to a temporal anomaly (unfortunately that's been turned into a cliche by Star Trek), the age of heroes and mutants arises nearly 400 years early. The book doesn't include a huge cast of characters, but it does work in quite a few, including such favorites as Nick Fury (spymaster for the Queen of England), Jonathan Strange, Matt Murdoch, Charles Xavier (Carlos Javier), Scott Somerisle, Jean Grey, Otto Von Doom, the Fantastick Four (that's the correct spelling), and a few more. For the most part, they're just themselves transposed into past versions almost identical to their current forms. That's not the most imaginative use of those characters. Although nothing stands out as completely anachronistic, the historicity of the story is pretty vague and generic, much like you'd expect to see in your average syndicated show (Hercules etc.)

So it was worth reading, but definitely not worth buying (which I didn't, I borrowed it from the library). I really did expect more just because of Neil Gaiman's involvement. Not that I think he just crapped out on this one, but maybe he wasn't putting too much sweat into it (or maybe the format cramped his style). As for the art, well, I can't say I'm a huge fan of Kubert. As far as I'm concerned, he draws serviceable depictions rather than art (for the comics anyway). Not that there's really anything wrong with that, but I gave up on such bland fare as X-Men long ago. This will definitely be more interesting and entertaining if you're a real Marvel fan.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon

You may know Michael Chabon for "Wonder Boys", which was also turned into a movie starring Tobey Maguire and Michael Douglas. I liked that book, but I liked Amazing Adventures even more. Chabon is a great writer of characters. He's one of the few who can really write believable characters in believable situations and make it interesting. But of course he provides himself some fuel in the setting for this novel.

Josef Kavalier and Samuel Klayman (later Clay) are cousins who are thrown together in Cleveland of the late thirties when Josef is sent away from his home in Czeckoslovakia, fleeing the purges of the Nazis. The pair become great friends and later collaborate on a new comic book together, inventing the character of The Escapist. If you know anything about comics, you know that Cleveland of the 30s and 40s was the place to be for comics, and the parallels to the creation of Superman are obvious (Jewish creators and all).

So naturally, one of the best story elements is that Kavalier and Clay get to run around in this exciting historic time (both in the world of comics and the real world) with the backdrops of the dawn of the Golden Age of comics and the outbreak of World War II. Of course with their Jewish roots, both are of great importance to these men.

They go through many turbulent times together but they always stand by each other, and that's what's best and most human about the book. It's the story of a great friendship in great times. Chabon could have written such a story in any time, but he chose an era which isn't exactly bound up in myth and legend as is the Revolution or Civil War. Plus which, there aren't a whole lot of non-fiction books (or at least popular ones) that even talk about the beginning of the comic-book industry. So that's at least two reasons to read it.

I just like Chabon's writing, so for me there's not much need to explain why you should read this book. Just do it!

Jarhead by Anthony Swofford

I hardly know what to say about this book. It's real, but it shows a surreal version of reality. It's the kind of real "I was a grunt on the ground" kind of writing that militarists usually love, but also a very poetic and poignant look at what being a Marine is. Swofford is obviously not your typical jarhead. I've known a few, and they tend not to be the most intellectual of men. Not that they're not smart. But being smart and being invested in knowledge and learning are two different things, and it fundamentally colors the way people view the world. Swofford was evidently too intellectual for his own good. I can understand why he joined the military, because many of us do for much worse reasons than he did, but still, it seems like it was the wrong place for him. And yet that is a fortunate mistake for all us readers of the book (and later watchers of the movie), because it meant there was someone there who could write the story in a very personal way. A lot of memoirs come out of wars, but it's usually figures like Colin Powell and Norman Schwartzkopf who write them. You rarely get a grunts-eye view of the world.

On the one hand, this is a man's personal experience of being a Marine, but on the other hand it's the chronicle of the last traditional war America fought, our glorious triumph in the desert that erased some of the stigma of Vietnam. But like I said, it's a surreal reality. From a rain of oil in the desert to a game of football in 115 degree heat played in full NBC uniforms, you get to see firsthand the ridiculousness and the seriousness of the military. Swofford pulls no punches in his depiction of Marines and Marine life. For example, it is rather striking when he discusses getting r&r in the barracks the Saudis built to house foreign armies fighting on their soil. And when he's sitting in a circle of charred corpses, imagining what they might have said shortly before they died, it's difficult to glorify war. Justify it maybe, but glorify it not a bit. And yet his point was not that the soldiers are wrong or bad in some way, but that they are human. They were fine soldiers. STA was his unit, a semi-elite group of sniper-scouts. These were damn good soldiers and he talks about some of the training they ran through. Unlike the movie shows, they did go through some action, but they never did really fight.

You do get to hear quite a bit about the other soldiers in the book that you don't in the movie. They tend to be interesting people, although the guy who was portrayed as a jerk in the movie really was an idiot. But still worth hearing about. It made it all the more real.

I like the way Anthony Swofford writes. It's both easy to understand and artistic. The book isn't full of military jargon, and when he does use technical terms, he explains them first. I think any casual reader would understand what he's talking about just fine since it doesn't especially rely on prior knowledge of the military. Naturally having more knowledge of the first Gulf War will provide you with a deeper understanding of the events in the book, but it's not necessary just to comprehend what's going on.

Unlike the movie, the book follows Swofford after he leaves the Marines and before he publishes his book. I don't know if he was trying to make any kind of point at all, but it just seems like most of those men (teenagers, in some cases) were only in the Marines because they didn't know where else to go. And when they got out, they still didn't know. The question of identity is really the most basic issue raised by Swofford, but he has no answers. He almost sounds pessimistic about ever moving beyond that time in the desert, but it's more like resignation. Perhaps for him, writing the book was an effort to move past it, but he was also showing that it might not be possible. He discusses his father, a Vietnam war veteran, and it's pretty clear that some part of him was always stuck there. For Swofford it may be the same, and for all those other Marines who were there in that unreal reality.

If you don't like military books but you want to learn about soldiers and what they're like, this one might be for you. It's very well written and won't lose the average civilian. If you do like military books and you only want to hear about troop movements, deployments, weapon systems and the usual subjects of militaria, this one might not be for you. It's rather more focused on the human aspects of war. But I say that's what makes it a good book, so I recommend it.

The Crisis of Islam by Bernard Lewis

Either Lewis is making up a ton of stuff, or this is an incredibly scholarly and insightful analysis of the situation in the Muslim world today. Admittedly, given my paucity of knowledge on the history of such, it would be very difficult for me to catch any mistakes or bad interpretations on Lewis' part, but I really don't think it's a worry. Lewis is admirably non-judgmental of either the Islamic world or the West (as the dichotomy is phrased) in his book.

As for the bare facts about this book, it's a very short overview of how the Muslim world got to be the way it is today, in the broadest strokes of history. More important is what it is like today, as well as its historic conflict with Christendom, and later The West. But the best aspect of this book is not that it gives such history, which is easily available elsewhere, but his explanations of why parties on both sides view each other as they do. He examines the flawed assumption people in the Muslim world have of Westerners, as well as the flawed assumptions Westerners have of Muslims.

He brings up many instances of mutual misunderstanding, as in the Western interpretation of "Fatwah" to mean a death sentence including a bounty. The literal translation is something like "judgement", meaning only a ruling by a Mufti on a point of law. Also, in more general terms, he talks about how Muslims think we view them, and how this mostly does not match the way Westerners and Americans in particular actually do view them.

Lewis does an admirable job of dispelling myths each side holds about the other, and he does it in a way that leaves no room for argument. Although this is a short book, it's well worth it. However, I did have a couple of problems with the writing of the book. Lewis used a lot of Arabic terms, and I find remembering words in a foreign language awfully difficult. He might say it once and come back to it a few pages later (or not at all), and I wouldn't be able to remember what he was referring to. Plus which, the density of the writing made it extremely difficult to quickly process the loads and loads of info he was handing out!

But overall, it's a really good book, and if you want to know not only what Muslims think about us but why, this is the book for you. I realize at this point that my review doesn't explain why the title is what it is, and in short that's because it's difficult to define exactly what crisis he's talking about. It's not merely "fundamentalists" vs. modernists, dictatorships, and what have you, but that there are a lot of problems in the Islamic world, some caused by the Western world, but many caused by their own failure to establish stable governments based on Islam. And since I don't understand the issue much better than that, I'm going to leave it there. So anyway, if you have room in your schedule for a short non-fiction book about Islam, take a chance and read this one.

The Evolution-Creation Struggle by Michael Ruse

Despite the title of this book, Ruse doesn't actually discuss much of the interactions between Evolutionists and Creationists, much less the over-arching "struggle" that he names. What this book is mostly comprised of is the history of the study of evolution and its connection to Christian liberals called "progressivists". That is, what Ruse is mostly discussing is an ideology of "evolutionism", which is the blending of the science of evolution to support non-scientific (and mostly Christian) ideas of "progress". By progress, he means the idea that everything in the world is building to some better state in an absolute sense. That is, humans are better than ducks because we are higher on the evolutionary ladder, which ladder is meant to lead us all to some state of perfection. This movement is evidently synonymous with the post-millenialist movement of the mid to late 1800s, when optimism among American Christians was very high and before the newer Protestant churches came to prominence.

The book is really mostly a criticism of some modern scientists who carry on these progressivist ideas. He quotes some, notably Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene), in order to castigate them for promoting a "secular religion" called evolutionism. This is the version of proggresivism which depends on evolutionary science without any explicitly Christian connections. Although he provides a quite thorough historical background for this idea, I'm not entirely sure he's up to date. Dawkins, after all, is a central figure of the 70s. Stephen Jay Gould turned explicitly anti-progressivist (although Ruse still accuses him of some ideological thinking), and was probably the most popular evolutionist of the last quarter century.

I'm sure Gould gets more name recognition than Dawkins, but even if that wasn't true, I never encountered this "evolutionism" in any of my studies in anthropology. Most anthropologists are very careful to keep any non-scientific bias out of their work, so Ruse's claim that these ideas were still popular kind of stumped me. Obviously they were much more popular at one time, especially when European and American "scientists" were trying to prove such things as the superiority of whites over blacks (or any other color) and when fascist Germany was implementing a eugenics plan to keep the purity of the Aryan race from degrading.

Obviously there was a severe backlash to that kind of thinking, and Ruse says that as Americans turned more pessimistic, the premillenialist movement chose evolution as its target. Not necessarily because they didn't believe in the mechanics of evolution though. It's hard to quantify such things, but the majority of the movement may not even have been biblical literalists, but simply those who didn't believe in progressivism. As Ruse says, it's common to find that premillenialsts are literalists, but it's not a truism that one is the other.

Therefore, the struggle, as defined, isn't even necessarily between creationists and evolutionists, it's between progressivists and anti-progressivists. Now, creationists are definitely anti-progressivist, and adamantly opposed to the actual mechanics of evolution. Ruse, although he doesn't say so to the very end, in no way supportive of these folks despite his own anti-progressivist views. He is very much an evolutionist, and his purpose in writing this book was to examine how to approach the debate without adopting the ideals of evolutionism. He feels that evolution is on a much stronger ground when stripped of any implications for human values or morals, but that when it has religious implications (as in the case of evolution falsifying the Genesis account of creation), the evolutinist must be prepared to do battle on the same ground and not merely dismiss the two issues as being separate. In other words, if creationists want to put forth an argument for literal creation, the evolutionist must be prepared to fight back on the same terms and be strongly grounded in their knowledge of evolution.

He also goes on to criticize any "scientific" creationism such as Intelligent Design, which is a thinly veiled attempt to give creationism some scientific or factual footing, but which in the end appeals to the miraculous for explanation.

As for the history of creationism, he gives a tiny piece of it. Obviously creationism has a much longer history than the science of evolution, since science itself is a relatively modern concept. He mostly talks about it as the "funadementalist" response of the 20th century, and only as it impacts evolution.

It was a short book, and like "Divided by God", mostly useful for the history it gives of evolutionary thought and notable scientists in the field. I'm not sure I agree that "evolutionism" is really that much of a problem in the field, because I've never yet seen an example. But it's a short book and an easy read, so at least for the history it's worth it.

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

I'm going to cheat a little and throw in the Amazon.com review here, because I need some fuel to get started on this one.

Joining the rich literature of runaways, Kafka On The Shore follows the solitary, self-disciplined schoolboy Kafka Tamura as he hops a bus from Tokyo to the randomly chosen town of Takamatsu, reminding himself at each step that he has to be "the world's toughest fifteen-year-old." He finds a secluded private library in which to spend his days--continuing his impressive self-education--and is befriended by a transgendered clerk and the mysteriously remote head librarian, Miss Saeki, whom he fantasizes may be his long-lost mother. Meanwhile, in a second, wilder narrative spiral, an elderly Tokyo man named Nakata veers from his calm routine by murdering a stranger. An unforgettable character, beautifully delineated by Murakami, Nakata can speak with cats but cannot read or write, nor explain the forces drawing him toward Takamatsu and the other characters.

To say that the fantastic elements of Kafka On The Shore are complicated and never fully resolved is not to suggest that the novel fails. Although it may not live up to Murakami's masterful The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Nakata and Kafka's fates keep the reader enthralled to the final pages, and few will complain about the loose threads at the end. --Regina Marler

Ok, I will complain about the loose threads at the end. I thought the story worked wonderfully taken literally, and he'd just kept it in the realm of the literal instead of the metaphorical, this would have been a great fantasy novel. As it was, it was a very good book simply because Murakami hooks you with the powerful characters in this story. Not powerful as in "they are strong", but in the sense that they all have a powerful presence. Murakami makes characters so real they seem to want to lift off the pages, and this despite, or perhaps because of, their strange quirks. No one is exactly what they seem. Even the trucker becomes more through contact with the old man.

The story was still intriguing, and I was so painfully disappointed when, in the end, there wasn't really any resolution. Was Colonel Sanders (yes, the Colonel Sanders) banished for good? What was the nature of the stone? What is the relationship between the boy and the librarian? And what did happen to Nakata when he was a boy?

But I guess to Murakami, he didn't see the answering of these questions as the purpose of the story, but rather the asking as the purpose of the characters. I tend to get really frustrated with books like that, because I just really want a resolution. But let my diatribe not fool you. I loved this book. It's always hard to tell with a translated version exactly what the author meant and wrote. But in any case, his story is about characters and about themes. Kafka and Nakata are the two poles around which the story revolves, and they somehow revolve around each other. Again, it's never exactly clear how or why. But if you love character stories (and in my opinion, character stories are some of the best in fiction, such as Look Homeward, Angel), then you will love this book.

This is another one of those books I can only describe as "dreamlike", and that's really not inappropriate, given that in this world dreams and reality blended together so often and so seamlessly. Events in dreams even provide impetus for events in reality, so it's certainly not safe to categorize all the dream events as metaphorical. Some weird stuff certainly does happen in this book, and that's part of what makes the story so entertaining. As the review says, Nakata can speak with cats...for real. It's not metaphorical; he really can talk to cats. They even tell him worthwhile information. Strange stuff.

Despite the confusing ending, Murakami draws you to it as inexorably as a moth to flame with his powerful narrative. You desire to keep on following and following the characters because they're so captivating, and of course to find out what happens in the end.

This isn't necessarily the easiest book to read, but it makes it all the more rewarding. So Nathan's recommendation is: read it!