This week has been a tragic one in the world of cinema. Both Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, and his colleague Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni passed away within hours of one another this Monday, July 30th 2007; a coincidence that is perhaps indicative of the creative and intellectual space shared by the two masters of modern moviemaking. Both filmmakers became well known for their radically innovative visual styles and insightful explorations of modern society, and both have left behind a legacy of filmmakers and fans heavily influenced by their works, evidenced by the many articles published recently to mark their passing.

The New York Times has published several fascinating retrospectives on the two directors, and Roger Ebert, who discusses Bergman's films in Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert has also posted an article on Bergman to his website. But for those interested in more in-depth study, the press has two new books: the forthcoming The Architecture of Vision: Writings and Interviews on Cinema—a collection of essays, theory, and autobiographical sketches of Michelangelo Antonioni's life and work, and the recently published The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography—a fascinating portrait of the life of the late Ingmar Bergman. One of our international partners, Amsterdam University Press, has also recently released Ingmar Bergman: A Reference Guide, which at over 1000 pages, qualifies as one of the most comprehensive references on Bergman's work available.

Archived in Commentary | Film and Media
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Pulitzer prize winning writer Russell Baker recently published an interesting review of several new books about the tenuous state of American journalism focusing on topics like Rupert Murdoch's recent takeover of the Wall Street Journal, and the growing scarcity of substantive news coverage. In the review written for the August 16 New York Review of Books, Baker cites Lance W. Bennett, Regina G. Lawrence, and Steven Livingston's When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina to argue that many modern news sources have already shown alarming signs of failure in their obligation to keep the public informed in a fair and unbiased way, especially as evidenced by the media's dealings with the current Bush administration. Baker writes:

Assignment to Washington is one of the highest prizes a newspaper has to offer, and not surprisingly the Washington press is an elite group: well-educated, well-paid, talented, at ease among the mighty, a bit smug perhaps about knowing secrets others don't, but for the most part sensitive to an obligation to keep the public informed without fear or prejudice. Yet they failed this obligation during the Bush years, the authors of When The Press Fails contend, partly because of their tendency to defer excessively to power.

Their "deference to power" was not a newly hatched product of the Bush era, according to the authors, but a habit "deeply ingrained and continually reinforced in the culture and routines of mainstream journalism." It is a habit that makes Washington journalists vulnerable to manipulation by the powerful and indifferent to dissent and protest. Dissenters and protesters are often dismissed as "mavericks," suggesting they are not to be taken too seriously.…

At its most damaging, deference to power means a readiness to tell the narrative of government as the powerful tell it. The Bush people have talked of creating their own reality. The writers of When the Press Fails refer to this Bushian "reality" as a "script" and criticize the Washington press for accepting it as reality, even when, as during the Iraq war, "that script seemed bizarrely out of line with observable events."

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Politics and Current Events | Reviews
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As creatures of finite lifespan, capable of both learning about the past and imagining the future, humans are naturally fascinated with the concept of time. Questions of the origins of the earth, the universe, and humanity have been perpetual preoccupations, eliciting some of humanity's most trenchant thought—and most heated debates. With A Natural History of Time, Pascal Richet tells the fascinating story of attempts over centuries to determine the age of the earth. Featuring such luminaries as Hesiod, Leonardo, Descartes, and Newton, A Natural History of Time marries the pleasures of history to the drama of scientific discovery, giving readers a chance to marvel at just how far our knowledge—and our planet—have come.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | History and Philosophy of Science | Press Releases
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The front page of the Sunday, July 29th edition of the New York Times book review is running an article by Harvard professor Samantha Power about several new books offering alternatives to the current combat strategies employed in Iraq. Posing the question of what can be done now that we have positioned ourselves in the middle of a difficult and prolonged conflict, Powers begins her article with a review of The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual—a book that she argues might hold the key to reversing the American military's dwindling returns in Iraq. Powers writes:

Criticizing the calamities of the last six years of American foreign policy has become all too easy. And it does not itself improve our approach to combating terrorist threats that do in fact loom large—larger, in fact, because of Bush's mistakes.… Several new books take up this challenge, each addressing a different piece of the national security predicament. Together, they allow one to begin to define a new approach to counterterrorism.…

The book to begin with in looking for a revised 21st-century strategy is, unexpectedly, the landmark The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. It was released as a government document in December 2006, but owing to its enormous popularity (1.5 million downloads in the first month alone), it has now been published by a university press, with a provocative, highly readable new foreword and introduction that testify to the manual's "paradigm-shattering" content.…

And with suggestions ranging from placing greater emphasis on the protection of civilians and coordinating efforts for reconstruction and development, to phrases like "Sometimes the more force is used, the less effective it is," the Counterinsurgency Field Manual is indeed a revolutionary challenge to conventional U.S. military doctrine.

Read the foreword by John A. Nagl and an excerpt, "Paradoxes of Counterinsurgency Operations."

Archived in History | Politics and Current Events | Reviews
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We came across several new reviews of Angus McLaren's Impotence: A Cultural History floating around the ether recently, one of them on Nerve.com, a site Wikipedia describes as an "American online hipster magazine dedicated to sex, relationships and culture." The review, written by Nerve's Craig Davidson, begins with his own personal story about this dreaded affliction, and then segues into a more substantive review of the book. We figured we had to mention it here as it definitely qualifies as one of the more unconventional reviews any of our books has received lately.

Impotence was also reviewed in Canada's Edmonton Journal by freelancer Karen Virag. Her piece, though a little more conventional, delivers a favorable review of McLaren's new book:

Volumes have been published about the suppression of female sexuality. Now Angus McLaren, a University of Victoria historian, provides an extraordinarily detailed, readable, fascinating and, if you will pardon me, penetrating counterpoint on male sexuality and how it has been manipulated and exploited over the centuries by constantly morphing models of masculinity.…

McLaren set himself a delicate and difficult task—writing a scholarly yet accessible work that can be read both by the general reader and a specialist in this field. It's clear, to this reviewer at least, that he was more than up to the task.

Read an excerpt from the book, "Two Millennia of Impotence Cures."

Archived in History | Reviews
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The Los Angeles Times ran an article in Sunday's paper that briefly reviews two new books, Instructions for American Servicemen in Iraq during World War II and The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, each of which offers similar insights on the current situation in Iraq, though from two very different perspectives. Pairing the knowledge of today's military experts with the suggestions issued by the U.S. War Department to soldiers posted in Iraq during WWII, the L. A. Times David Ulin writes:

Just in time for the renewal of the war debate in Congress, the University of Chicago Press has released The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, a thick guide to strategy—military and otherwise—with forewords by Gen. David H. Petraeus and Lt. Gen. James F. Amos.…Especially interesting is a section called "Paradoxes of Counterinsurgency Operations," which tells us: "Sometimes doing nothing is the best reaction" and "Sometimes, the more force is used, the less effective it is."

In conjunction with the Field Manual, the University of Chicago Press has also put out Instructions for American Servicemen in Iraq During World War II—a historical oddity that sheds a certain unintended light upon our current woes. Among its suggestions? "Manners are important"; "Avoid offering opinions on internal politics"; and "No preaching." Most of all, "use common sense on all occasions. And remember that every American soldier is an unofficial ambassador of good will."

Read the foreword to the Field Manual by John A. Nagl and "Paradoxes of Counterinsurgency Operations".

Update: Inside Higher Ed also published a piece on Instructions for American Serviceman in Iraq titled "The Must-Have Iraq Book of 1943—and 2007?" Check their website for the complete article.

Archived in Books for the News | History
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Mary Pattillo, author of the recently published Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City, penned a fascinating op-ed piece for Sunday's Chicago Tribune on the rapidly changing face of Chicago's black urban communities. Pattillo's article begins:

"No more blacks." That was the forecast of a resident of the Oakland community when asked about the future of her South Side neighborhood.

"No more blacks?" I responded, worried in no small part because my research is about black gentrification.

"[A] couple of blacks" would be left, the woman then allowed. "They got money.

This simple prediction is rich with meaning. For one thing, it helps establish the players in the widespread upscaling of Chicago: The little man. The middleman. And then, The Man.

The prediction also lays out what's at stake, not just in Oakland and North Kenwood on the South Side, but in various Chicago neighborhoods. In the process of "building, breaking, rebuilding" the City of the Big Shoulders, as Chicago's poet Carl Sandburg so eloquently put it, who is going to keep the little man from being left behind? Are Chicago's shoulders big enough to serve, include and celebrate everyone?

Pattillo's article seems to leave this question open ended, but makes a point that it is the rising black middle class who must ultimately shoulder the responsibility of brokering between the lower and upper classes if the future of some of the more underprivileged members of Chicago's black urban communities is to look any brighter.

Also, social historian Arnold Hirsch (Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago 1940-1960) reviewed Pattillo's new book in the July 14 edition of the Tribune. The online version is still up on their website.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Black Studies | Chicago | History
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Last Saturday's Chicago Tribune ran a great piece on David Grene's recently published memoir Of Farming and Classics—a wonderfully original account of the author's double life as a preeminent professor of classics at the University of Chicago and hard-working, old-fashioned farmer in rural Illinois and Ireland. Staff reporter Ron Grossman writes for the Tribune's Books section:

David Grene could easily be described with the cliché "last of a breed," but he was also the first of his kind. Or, at least, the first in a long time.

In 1937 he came to the University of Chicago to teach classics and, a few years later, bought a farm near Lemont. It wasn't a hobby farm. Working the land himself, Grene disdained tractors in favor of horses, often coming to class with manure-caked boots. He later farmed in his native Ireland.

His personal style reincarnated that of the Roman aristocrats, with their love of the soil and taste for good books. Greek literature traces to Hesiod's Works and Days, with its anticipation of The Old Farmer's Almanac, a poetic tour of the agricultural year. Plantation owners in the antebellum South could often conjugate Latin verbs, but in the 20th Century, the study of ancient languages, once the centerpiece of a liberal education, precipitously declined. With Grene's death in 2002, the scholar-farmer probably entered the history books forever.

Fortunately for Clio, the Muse of history, Grene's memoirs have just been published. Of Farming & Classics delightfully recounts an era before corporate agriculture did in the family farm and pettifogging professionalism insulated the ivory tower from the larger world.

Read the rest of the article on the Tribune's website.

We also featured several excerpts from Grene's book previously on this blog:

Dublin Theatre in the 1920s and '30s
Learning Greek and Latin in Dublin Schools
Honors Classics at Trinity College

Archived in Biography | Classics | Reviews
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Last Tuesday Under the Blue Light, the official blog for the Indiana Review, published a positive review of The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing Since 1880—D. G. Myers's recent book exploring more than a century of debate over how writing should be taught and whether it can or should be taught in the classroom.

The August 2007 issue of the Scientific American contains a brief review of Dorothy Cheney and Richard Seyfarth's new book, Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind. The review takes note of the author's unique project to go beyond a study of these primate's complicated social organization to document and explore the intelligence that underlies it.

PopMatters, an energetic webzine for everything in the zeitgeist, features a nice piece on their books blog Re: Print about Angus McLaren's new book Impotence: A Cultural History. Blog contributor Jason B. Jones gives a short overview of the book followed up by an interview with the author.

Finally, John Ibson, author of Picturing Men, recently wrote an article about the taboos surrounding American male intimacy and its cultural and social norms. First published in American Sexuality magazine, it was picked up by online alternative news source AlterNet where it's been generating quite an interesting discussion.

Archived in Books for the News
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The July 5 London Review of Books contains a great review of Angus McLaren's Impotence: A Cultural History penned by celebrity shrink Adam Phillips. Noting the significant cultural implications of McLaren's historical study of male sexual impotence Phillips writes:

Like most of the cures for impotence that Angus McLaren describes in his panoramic study, there was very little 'evidence' that they worked. And yet it was, and still is, difficult to staunch the flow of more or less magical solutions for the perennial problem. 'The market is flooded with various appliances which are guaranteed to be sure cures,' a progressive physician grumbled in 1912. 'It goes without saying that most of them are worthless frauds.' What has also gone without saying, McLaren shows, is that the untold history of impotence is a history of many things, most obviously of gender relations, but less obviously— and this is implicit in his book, rather than spelled out—of our will to believe. Impotence raises the question of what wanting to believe something is a solution to, as well as making us wonder what counts as a solution. Erection on demand is a strange cultural ideal but a persistent one, and it tells us a lot about what we want to be.

Read a special feature drawn from the book: "Two Millennia of Impotence Cures."

Archived in Biology | History | Reviews
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Lt. Colonel John A. Nagl, author of Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam and contributor to the recently published U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, was the subject of an article in Tuesday's Manhattan Mercury discussing the counterinsurgency in Iraq. The article focuses on Nagl's strategies for winning the conflict, which he claims requires a fundamentally different approach than the "conventional large scale World War II search and destroy tactics" that the U.S. military has traditionally employed. Mark Scott writes for the Mercury:

Instead [the U.S. Army] must focus on building up the government, economy and security forces of the host nation. This is essentially the approach being used by the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan with the military transition team plan, which embeds American soldiers with Iraqi and Afghan forces to train them to ultimately take over the defense of their country.

"These are long, hard, slow wars," Nagl said. "Ultimate success in Iraq very much depends on the political growth and development of the Iraqi government, which is still enormously young and faces some very severe challenges."

Recently, Nagl has been pushing a proposal for the Army to create a permanent "Army Advisor Corps," that would embed such "transition teams" full-time with Iraqi national security forces. (His proposal has recently been taken up by U.S. Senator John McCain.) Could Nagl have the key to improving what many believe to be a deteriorating situation in Iraq? To find out more get the rest of the article on the Mercury's website.

Also see Nagl's new preface to Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, his foreword to the Counterinsurgency Field Manual, and an excerpt from the Manual, "Paradoxes of Counterinsurgency."

Last Saturday Nagl was a guest speaker at Chicago's Pritzker Military Library. Head on over to their website for an audio podcast of his talk.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History | Politics and Current Events
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The News Hour with Jim Lehrer ran a fascinating piece yesterday featuring author and deep sea explorer Claire Nouvian on her new book, The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss. Nouvian joins Spencer Michels along with a panel of researchers to discuss the many new species scientists are currently discovering in the deep ocean, and the new techniques that make their discoveries possible. On the News Hour website you can listen to a RealAudio podcast of the discussion, archived video of the show, or view a images of some of the fascinating creatures featured in Nouvian's book.

Combining the latest scientific discoveries with astonishing color imagery, The Deep takes readers on a voyage into the darkest realms of the ocean. Revealing nature's oddest and most mesmerizing creatures in crystalline detail, The Deep features more than two hundred color photographs of terrifying sea monsters, living fossils, and ethereal bioluminescent creatures, some photographed here for the very first time. Accompanying these breathtaking photographs are contributions from some of the world's most respected researchers that examine the biology of deep-sea organisms, the ecology of deep-sea habitats, and the history of deep-sea exploration.

See our special website for The Deep which includes a gallery of images and an interview with the author.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biology
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Critic Edward Rothstein begins his "Connections" column in today's New York Times by mentioning Robert Wilson's recent staging of Fables de La Fontaine at the Lincoln Center Festival. Featuring a cast of masked half-human, half-animal characters, Rothstein describes the stage adaptation of La Fontaine's work as an unusual reversal of Aesop's fables: "Aesop's animals are nearly human," writes Rothstein, "La Fontaine's humans are nearly animals."

But though they might contrast in this respect, both Aesop and Fontaine's fables seem to agree on the undeniable similarities between human and animal. And in his forthcoming book The Human Animal in Western Art and Science Martin Kemp demonstrates how this blending of the animal with the human is, and has been, a recurring theme throughout western culture. Citing Kemp's book, Rothstein's article goes on highlight just how pervasive such depictions of the human-animal really are:

We name sports teams after rams or bulls and automobiles after cougars or jaguars. Our language speaks of crocodile tears and fish eyes.…Babies' rooms, filled with stuffed bears, lions and lambs, are like plush pastoral Edens before the Fall… For adults fables bring the animals and the humans even closer together, with discomforting or startling results, ranging from the grimness of Art Spiegelman's comic-book Maus to the romance of the film March of the Penguins.

But what is the point of these preoccupations? In a book to be published in September by the University of Chicago Press, The Human Animal in Western Art and Science, Martin Kemp, who teaches art history at Oxford University, shows just how powerful the theme is, and how essential it is to Western traditions of art and science.The animal is used to reveal the human, the human to reveal the animal.

The animal world, he points out, may have provided the first model for understanding the complexities of the human one.

Read Rothstein's article on the Times website or find out more about Kemp's fascinating new book set to for release this October.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | History and Philosophy of Science
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Chris Gondek, producer and host of the Invisible Hand Podcast interviewed Ward Farnsworth, author of the recently released The Legal Analyst: A Toolkit for Thinking about the Law, a book that discusses some of the interesting ideas behind our laws that law students think they will encounter in law school, but don't.

We recently noted the debut of the blog No Caption Needed, written by John Louis Lucaites and Robert Hariman, authors of the book with the same name. Lucaites also blogs on BAGnewsNotes, "a progressive blog dedicated to the political picture, and the discussion and analysis of news images." A recent post by Lucaites, "The Billary Problem," was picked up by Reuters. Lucaites considers the question: "What do we do with Bill in pictures with Hillary?"

Rayyan Al-Shawaf reviewed Fuad I. Khuri's posthumous memoir, An Invitation to Laughter: A Lebanese Anthropologist in the Arab World last Sunday in the St. Petersburg Times.

Archived in Books for the News
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Lieutenant Colonel John A. Nagl, author of Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam, will speak this coming Saturday, July 14, at 10:00 am at the Pritzker Military Library in downtown Chicago. According to the library's website "Nagl, recently returned from Iraq and now commanding a battalion, will share his observations, experiences and thoughts while discussing the recently updated Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife." (You can read Nagl's new preface to the book online.) See the Library's website for more details about the event.

Invariably, armies are accused of preparing to fight the previous war. In Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, Lieutenant Colonel John A. Nagl—a veteran of both Operation Desert Storm and the current conflict in Iraq—considers the now-crucial question of how armies adapt to changing circumstances during the course of conflicts for which they are initially unprepared. Through the use of archival sources and interviews with participants in both engagements, Nagl compares the development of counterinsurgency doctrine and practice in the Malayan Emergency from 1948 to 1960 with what developed in the Vietnam War from 1950 to 1975.

Nagl also contributed a foreword to our edition of the The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual as well as a foreword to our republication of Instructions for American Servicemen in Iraq during World War II.

Archived in Author Events | History | Politics and Current Events
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Caitlin Zaloom, author of Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London, was featured yesterday on Chicago Public Radio's Eight Forty-Eight to discuss the merger of the Chicago Board of Trade with the Chicago Mercantile Exchange—a deal that many think is likely to secure Chicago's place as one of the world's most important centers for global derivatives trading. In her interview Zaloom goes beyond the numbers to discuss how the merger, and the revolution in the culture of trading it promises, will affect the world's financial markets and shape everyday life in the new global economy.

Listen to the archived audio on the Eight Forty-Eight website.

Read an excerpt from Zaloom's book.

Archived in Anthropology | Books for the News | Chicago | Economics | Sociology
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Prolific literary blogger Marshall Zeringue recently devoted several postings to two fresh voices in Chicago's Phoenix Poets Series: Peter Campion, author of Other People, and Peg Boyers, author of the recently published Honey with Tobacco.

On his blog Writers Read Zeringue invites Campion to discuss some of the books he's currently reading, offering a great chance to listen in on the literary insights of a pro. Zeringue also takes the time to link to Campion's work in Slate magazine where Campion has been reprinted as well as made audio recordings of several of his poems from Other People.

Zeringue also features Peg Boyers discussing her recent book, Honey with Tobacco, on The Page 69 Test—another blog authored and administrated by Zeringue in which he asks an author to quote and briefly discuss whatever text can be found on page 69 of their book (though he does bend the rules a bit for Boyers, whose book weighs in at a short but sweet 64 pages).

You can find out more about Other People and Honey with Tobacco as well as read more excerpts on the UCP website.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Poetry
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Photographs by Paul D'Amato are currently on exhibit at the Stephen Daiter Gallery. The show includes some of the work that we published in Barrio: Photographs from Chicago's Pilsen and Little Village, as well as photographs from a more recent project on Lake Street.

In Barrio, D'Amato made the narratives of daily life in Pilsen and Little Village manifest in photographs of children at play, teenagers out in the night, graffiti, families in their homes, gangs in the alleys, weddings, and more. His photos are beautifully composed and startling—visual narratives that are surreal and dreamlike, haunting and mythic.

The Stephen Daiter Gallery is at 311 West Superior Street in Chicago. The showing continues through July 28. Also, visit Paul D'Amato's website.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Events | Chicago
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An Associated Press piece written by their Iraq editor, Brian Murphy, was picked up yesterday by the Olympian in Olympia, Washington. It's a nifty little story about how we came to publish Instructions for American Servicemen in Iraq during World War II.

Publishing is often all about accident and serendipity and Instructions illustrates that in spades. A booklet printed for American soldiers is found sixty-four years later at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University and so brought back into print—the same words, utterly altered by different circumstances.

George Packer also takes note of the book on his blog, Interesting Times, on the New Yorker website.

Archived in Books for the News | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by DB at 01:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article in the July 6 issue on the recent activities of Edward Castronova in furthering the study of online gaming and virtual worlds. Two years ago we published his book, Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games.

Castronova has been working on several new projects at Indiana University. One is the construction of the online space Arden, a virtual world that draws upon Shakespeare's works. Castronova "sees Arden as the first virtual environment among many at Indiana that will serve as a 'petri dish' for large-scale social-science experiments.… Experiments could involve testing basic economic principles, setting up different political systems, communist or capitalist, and comparing how the communities evolve, or doing an ethnographic study that contrasts people from different parts of the world." A test experiment will take place in August.

Another project is "an unusual academic conference that tries to replicate the enthusiasm and hubbub that people experience playing competitive online games." Ludium II, the second conference in the series, was held last month. Participants used the role-playing technique of online games to create a set of public policies for virtual worlds. "The group came up with ten policies for virtual worlds that they decided to send to Congressional and presidential candidates in the 2008 elections."

Learn more about the worlds of Edward Castronova at his blog, Terranova.

Also read our interview with the Castronova.

Archived in Books for the News | Economics | Education
Posted by DB at 01:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Garrett P. Kiely has been named as the new Director of the University of Chicago Press. The news was released yesterday by the Office of the Provost.

Kiely is an academic publishing veteran and currently President of Palgrave Macmillan (formerly St. Martin's Press Scholarly & Reference Division). He will begin his duties as director at Chicago on September 1. At Palgrave, Kiely previously served as both Sales and Marketing Director, and as Vice President of the Scholarly and Reference Division.

Kiely succeeds Paula Barker Duffy, who led the Press since 2000. Chris Heiser, Deputy Director of the Press, will serve as Interim Director, beginning July 1.

Archived in UCP News
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An essay by David Shulman, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the author of Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine.

Israeli peace activists don’t expect to be popular. Although by all accounts most Israelis do want peace and would accept any reasonable compromise, they normally react with bitter scorn and hatred for anyone who seems to cross the lines. Organizations like mine, Ta’ayush—“Jewish-Arab Partnership,” one of the most effective of the peace groups operating at the grassroots level in the occupied territories—are viewed as naïve at best, treasonous at worst. Last month’s events in Gaza confirmed everyone’s worst prejudices. “You want to make peace with them?” my neighbors asked me in supercilious tones. “Can’t you see that they’re all violent thugs? Why are you helping them?”

So this is not such a good time to try to persuade people to join me in trying to save the homes of the Palestinian shepherds and farmers of Susya, for example. It’s a long story. Susya is situated in the hills to the south of the city of Hebron on the West Bank. The Palestinians who lived there have been forcibly evicted from their homes and their land in order to make room for the large Israeli settlement that is also called Susya. Despite repeated violent expulsions at the hands of Israeli soldiers and settlers, these few Palestinian families have clung to a small hilltop, where they have put up some 15 tents and ramshackle huts. The state wants to destroy these last vestiges of their existence there, and the Israeli Supreme Court has recently upheld the demolition orders issued against these buildings—on purely technical and bureaucratic grounds. Palestinians in the occupied territories almost never receive permits to build, and the applications of the Susya shepherds had no real chance from the beginning. A terrible injustice is about to be inflicted, one more among so many: if we cannot find a way to stop the bulldozers, Palestinian Susya, home to innocent civilians who want only to herd their goats and till their fields, will be extinguished forever, within a few days.

So on the West Bank, these days, it is business as usual. Susya is only one small point on the map. In general, Israel continues its policy of grabbing more and more land, of fencing off Palestinian villages into tiny, discontinuous ghettos, of expanding Jewish settlements, and of “encouraging” Palestinian residents to leave by depriving them of access to markets, minimal social and medical services, and ordinary human rights. On the Israeli right, voices such as Benjamin Netanyahu’s are using the example of Gaza to rationalize this cruel policy: Israel must, says Netanyahu, maintain total control over the West Bank in order to prevent a Hamas victory there as well. Clearly, Israeli colonization of the territory and brute coercion of its inhabitants are the primary mechanisms of government policy.

And yet if ever there was a moment when Israel and the Palestinian center needed one another and could forge an alliance, that moment is now. Moderate Palestinians—the old Fatah elite and its more modern counterparts—are terrified of being overrun by a fundamentalist Hamas. In the villages all over the West Bank, local Palestinian leaders want peace—along the lines of the Saudi plan, or the Geneva document, or the Clinton bridging proposal that followed on the Camp David summit in 2000, that is, the peace of partition into two states. They are more than ready for a historic compromise, and they are willing to pay the price. Ta’ayush activists who work in the villages, who have established close relations with the village councils and activist-politicians, know this for a fact. But does official Israel have the imagination, the political will, and the courage to go beyond the familiar default of cynicism and to move toward peace?

Read an excerpt from Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Politics and Current Events
Posted by DB at 11:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The current issue of the Atlantic Monthly is running a great review of Jeffrey Kripal's new book Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion. The review begins by describing Esalen as "equally a phenomenon and an institute" responsible for fostering many of the revolutionary ideas of the 1960s counterculture and playing host to its most notable figures—people like Kerouac, Leary, and Ginsberg, just to name a few. The review goes on to praise Kripal's new book for managing a rather lucid investigation of this counter-cultural hothouse, despite his psychedelic subject matter:

Kripal, a religious-studies professor at Rice University, examines Esalen's extraordinary history and evocatively describes the breech birth of Murphy and Price's [Esalen's founder's] brain child. His real achievement though is effortlessly synthesizing a dizzying array of dissonant phenomena (Cold War espionage, ecstatic religiosity) incongruous pairings (Darwinism, Tantric Sex), and otherwise schizy ephemera (psychedelic drugs, spaceflight) into a cogent, satisfyingly complete narrative. The he reconciles all this while barely batting an eye is remarkable; that he does so while writing with such élan is nothing short of wondrous.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in History | Philosophy | Religion | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)