Achieve Anything in Just One Year by Jason Harvey

This is such a wonderful book. It reads like a calendar with an inspirational message for each day of the year. They range from inspirational messages to questions about our fears and hopes. Each day has a quote from someone of great accomplishment; J.K. Rowling, Dr. King, Franz Kafka, Woody Allen (“eighty percent of success is showing up”) and Oprah Winfrey (who else could inspire so many people?) to name a few.

Take for instance day #142. It begins with a quote from Washington Irving; great minds have purpose, others have wishes. The entry proceeds to question the reason why we wish. Are we fantasizing about things? What do we want them for? What purpose does it have? This makes sense, because if you want something, let’s say a well-paid job, then the chances are that you can accomplish it if you know exactly why you need it.

My only problem is that the book gets a wee bit repetitive after a while. Some of the entries could’ve consisted of stories about people who accomplished things. For instance, Ben & Jerry’s started out as just another ice cream parlor run by two guys with zero talent, and don’t tell me that’s not inspiring. If you want proof that success is an average person making above average effort (Colin Powell said that one) then look at Woody Allen. He made a lucrative career out of portraying himself as a talentless, ugly, awkward little guy, so damned smart that he can’t see how ignorant he is.

Now who wouldn’t be inspired by that?

Killing Jesus by Stephen Mansfield

Jesus came from the Galilee, and because of that, he was more rugged and independent than the people of Jerusalem. The Hellenized gentry and the priests (who were probably Hellenized too) didn’t like this bumpkin Rabbi from up north, nor did they like any Rabbi who had ideas of his own. But up in the north, Joshua Son of Joseph was out of reach!

Stephen Mansfield’s book is the most straightforward work on Jesus that I’ve read so far. I love the way he portrays the conflict between Jesus and the people of Jerusalem as a conflict between the simple (and often more religious) folks and the genteel urbane city people. He believes that the killing of Jesus was the work of corrupt priests, who were getting rich off of bribes, taxes, and kickbacks from the money-changers. They didn’t take kindly to Jesus showing up in the capital and chasing all the marketers out of the Temple grounds.

There are, however, some things that the author left out, and that is the origin of the Temple’s corruption. The Kohen Gadol (high priest) at the time was Ciaphas (from the Aramaic “Bar Kapha” meaning “son of a monkey”) and he was not the legitimate Kohen Gadol. The reason is that 140 years earlier, when the Macabees reconquered Jerusalem, they started tampering with the Kehunah, appointing men who had blood on their hands to oversee the Temple services. By the time Jesus was born, the Kehunah had been corrupt for years, and anyone could become a Kohen if they paid enough of a bribe. As for the Temple itself, was it the Lord’s beautiful house, or was it a monument to Herod’s megalomania? Some Jewish scholars today believe that the Temple was not holy at all. Herod was a murderer, and a murderer can’t be trusted to make anything sacred. Regardless of whether the Temple was truly sacred, or whether the Kohanim had a right to their jobs, one thing is clear. The faithful pilgrims who thronged to the Beit Hamikdash were nothing but profit.

Indeed, there was a conspiracy to kill Jesus. It wasn’t the work of Rome (why would they care?) nor the entire Jewish community. It was the work of the corrupt puppet clergy who sold out their people to the Romans. Any Rabbi will tell you that Jesus was innocent; he never claimed to be anything he wasn’t. As for Ciaphas, he had no right to question Jesus, because the Torah prohibits the Kohanim from getting involved in civil affairs, let alone sit on a court.

Today, the Temple courtyard still throngs with the faithful, who come to pray at the Western Wall (built by King Herod, no less.) Just like in the time of Jesus, there are lots of religious hucksters who offer blessings in exchange for money. There are probably money changers too. Only this time there’s no need to chase them out. The clergy aren’t getting any kickbacks.

Finding Family: My Search For Roots and the Secret of My DNA

Richard Hill’s autobiography reads like a thriller. He was born in 1940’s Michigan, adopted as an infant, and had to do some serious detective work to find his birth mother. His family and their friends only know a tad here and there, and since the adoptions in the old days were private, there was no record of his. A million leads later and he finds his half-brother, alive and well, who accepts him with no conditions. His birth mother is long dead, and it will be a while before he finds out who his father was.

Perhaps this book is a story about the USA in the 1940’s? Hill’s mother dropped out of school to marry at 16, had one child, then separated from her no-good husband. She got pregnant by another man, then left both her sons with a neighbor so she could party with low-life bums. But can you really blame her? This was 1944, and women had no rights. She got pregnant by a lousy guy (his sister calls him a “lousy brother and even worse husband”) and had no choice but to marry him. Unmarried mothers in those days were outcasts. It wasn’t like she could continue going to high school while pregnant, the principal would’ve just thrown her out. Birth control was hard to come by for an unmarried teenager (especially if you didn’t want to risk a beating by your parents) and abortions were dangerous. Maybe this woman had a right to want to go out and party like a 19 year old?

What amazes me the most is that Richard Hill traced his family without the help of the internet. In the 1980’s, his detective work had to be done by writing letters, patiently waiting for a response, visiting record offices, and chasing down people with no contact information. But the fact that the information was buried doesn’t surprise me at all. According to the author, adoptions were always private because of the stigma. Adopted kids were seen as second-rate, and the parents were afraid of their kids having that stigma (except for Joan Crawford, Loretta Young, and Josephine Baker.)

Fortunately, Hill’s discoveries don’t open huge cans of worms. Nowadays, adopted kids who go looking for their birth parents don’t often like what they find. Who wants to find out that their father is a serial killer serving 200 years for gory murders? Maybe the truth isn’t always the best thing.

Eat Healthy With the Brain Doctor’s Wife Cookbook

When I opened this book, the first thing I saw were the meatballs, and they looked great. That, in my biased opinion, follows the iron law of diets; if it doesn’t look good, taste good, smell good, nobody’s going to want to eat it and the diet won’t work!

Tana Amen’s cookbook is full of simple, healthy recipes that don’t require elaborate preparation and aren’t salty or fried. The burritos and rancheros in the breakfast menu are good, but I am not a fan of the smoothies. I’d rather have more recipes that let you retain the fiber, color, and taste of the fruit rather than something you’d drink. On the lunch menu, the seared ahi (a fish I’ve never heard of until now) and cucumber salad are tops, but I’m not sure about the coconut oil. Then again, you’re only searing the outside, so you’re not using so much oil that you’d clog your arteries.

I’ll give this cookbook high marks for sticking to the basics. She uses a lot of seafood and salts are kept low.

Shaping Language Policy in the USA

Scott Wible, a professor of English, has written a well-researched narrative on how US schools became tolerant of non-Anglophone speakers. I was not expecting any surprises, because I knew that no language other than English had ever been accepted in our public schools, at least not before the Civil Rights movement. If you came to school in the Southwest knowing only Spanish, or you were a Cajun in Louisiana who spoke Creole French, well too bad. It was “speak English or go home,” no accommodations were made. But at what point did this change? That is what Professor Wible tries to formulate.

The author goes back to the early 1970’s, when CUNY changed its entrance requirements to having only a high school diploma. Gone were the entrance exams and essays; all you needed now was to have graduated from high school. This led to a large number of freshman who could barely write. Now, instead of having scholars who were all ready to prove themselves, you have students who didn’t have a clue. Though not mentioned in the book, this was typical of New York City by the late 1960’s; industries were shutting down and with few job prospects, more working class Black youth opted for college. The problem was that students from working-class backgrounds hadn’t been prepared for college. They were prepared for more repetitive skill-based work-stenography and typing for girls, industrial trades for boys. They were not ready to read St. Thomas Aquinas! It’s a problem to this very day.

There’s a chapter in this book on how President Bush and the Defense Department wanted Arabic-speaking employees. An Israeli diplomat warned Bush that “you can’t win a war in Afghanistan unless you know the local language,” but who in the USA understands Pashtun and Urdu? Of the few Americans who speak it, how many want to join the army? Do you think an educated Pakistani-American with a good career will give it up for a US Marine salary? Not likely! Furthermore, despite Bush’s NCLB act, there’s been no increase in foreign language fluency. The average American kid only knows English, and he might not even know it well enough to go to college.

Perhaps the main problem is the lack of resources for educators here in the USA. Day care and preschool are notoriously lacking when compared to Europe, and that is where the children begin their education. The average six year old comes to 1^st Grade with no social skills or language skills, so teaching them to read is a double job.

Freedom From Your Inner Critic

We all know the story of the angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other. We all know of the ego-id-superego theory of Sigmund Freud. But in Dr. Jay Earley’s book Freedom From Your Inner Critic, he introduces us to another entity; the creature in us whose only goal is to criticize.

The book has solutions to low self-esteem and hypercritical self-assessment, broken down into manageable steps. He stresses getting to know the critic, and learning the critic’s goal. What does the critic want? What is it trying to protect you from? Has it accomplished anything? He further identifies seven types of inner critic, ranging from the taskmaster to the underminer.

The final chapters deal with the addiction to perfection, and the role of gender in self-criticism. At the end of the book is a glossary with the definitions of the terms used in this book.

Logic: A God-Centered Approach to the Foundation of Western Thought

Vern Sheridan Poythress has crafted a brilliant tome on how our belief in God stems from a need to understand nature. He uses as an example the story of Absalom, who led a rebellion against his father, King David of the Israelites. The question is, were Absalom's actions the result of need or greed? Was there a "clear and present" danger in his father being the king, or was Absalom tempted by the thought of ruling a nation? Logic will answer the question, because whatever Absalom was feeling, anyone else could feel in their life as well.

Another example he uses is the idea of the belief in God influencing subordination in Humans. He says that it is natural for some people to have kings who they bow to, and if they're accustomed to subordinating themselves to a God, then why not to a monarch. The question is, however, do peope have a logical need for a master? Some people (like the Bedouin of Arabia) prefer to have separate tribes, and they follow radical Islam. But do they really care that much abotu Islam? Would they accept a religious preacher who tells them they're wrong?

According to Dore Gold's book Hatred's Kingdom, the answer is probably no. If they have a logical need for independence, they're not going to hear otherwise from anyone, nto even their own clergy.

Machiavelli in the Making

If one were to sum up the tone of Machiavelli’s philosophy, it would probably come out as “practical.” The great Italian philosopher wasn’t much of an idealist by today’s standards; he promoted a philosophy of “whoever makes it work will be in charge,” and that’s often how things turn out, for better or for worse.

The author of this book, Claude Lefort, cites Machiavelli’s praise of the Borgia regime. While the Borgias were indeed corrupt and dishonest, there was no other leader stepping in to replace them. The family’s money brought them to power, but they stayed in power by being shrewd. He says the same thing about Machiavelli’s work with regard to the empires of history-Roman, Ottoman, British-that lasted for so long but eventually split. Whatever it was that kept them in power for so long eventually wore out.

In another chapter, Lefort uses Machiavelli’s discussion of Marcus Aurelius as an example of how moderation can only work “in moderation.” The emperor Aurelius was one of the “barrack emperors” who started out as generals, and was more of a moderate than his successors. But according to Machiavelli, that moderation could only be done because the army wasn’t entirely corrupt yet. As the empire got bigger, it became impossible to manage, and the emperors would be at the mercy of the military governors of the provinces. This is an early example of a philosopher promoting an “anti-expansion” philosophy.

However, Machiavelli predated the peak of the British Empire by nearly 300 years. He did not know that by 1880, Suez Canal and the advent of steamships and telegraph lines would make travel and communication easier. Thanks to these modern inventions, central powers could keep an eye on their colonies. For the British Empire, expansion was profitable for decades. I guess that’s “real politic” for you!

Doing Time For Peace

There’s a passage in here where Robert Ellsberg (son of the Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg) talks about why he joined the Catholic Worker movement. I found it humorous, because a century earlier you would never have seen left-wing activities among American catholics. The Catholic churches were, in the early 20^th century, some of the most conservative platforms in the USA. It shows you how much the USA had changed by the late 1960’s; the idea of disagreement with authority had become commonplace. But there is no guarantee that anyone would pay you any attention.

Doing Time For Peace consists of interviews with peace activists in the USA, most of them from religious groups. They all did short jail sentences for trespassing and obstruction of private and government business, over things like war industries, pollution, and businesses that can damage communities. I did wonder, after reading the story about Michele Naar-Obed, if all this was worth the effort. When you’re in a jail, you won’t have time for constructive work. Hearings can be delayed for a long time, and in the time you’re waiting for the judge to decide on how much bail you’ll have to pay, it makes more work for your lawyers.

As far as history goes, the earlier accounts are from the Vietnam era, when young people all over the USA voiced their opposition to the Vietnam War. After the Vietnam era, most of the activism concerned nuclear weapons, ecology, and by 2005 it was the war in Iraq. The 1980’s were an era when a lot of the activists were ignored, blame the Reagan administration for making Conservative outlooks popular. But in the 90’s, with draft-dodging Bill Clinton in office, and Forest Gump in the theatres, there was a renewed interest in the 60’s. All of the activists were stars again.

Today we have the Occupy Movement, which has pretty much fizzled, and the Tea Party movement, which kind of stopped itself once it made its point. Who says the right wing can’t be activists too?

Illness is a Weapon

Australian and American natives have a raw deal. Before the Europeans arrived, they were doing just fine, and now they’re stuck on reservations where you have alcoholism, family violence, teen pregnancy, and worse. In the first chapter of this book, the author discusses how white Australian nurses couldn’t treat “aboriginal” diseases, which they first saw on the reservation areas. It’s understandable that they couldn’t treat the diseases, because what kind of medical professional can handle an illness that he/she has never seen? But these were not really “aboriginal” diseases; the afflicted people had never seen them before either. They were in fact reactions to foods and lifestyles that their bodies were not accustomed to.

Eric Saethre’s book is a fine and detailed work on the dangers of the industrial diet. In the chapter Food, Meaning, and Economy, the indigenous Australians are given free food from the government, consisting of white flour and other refined foods. The result-diabetes, high blood pressure, and tooth decay. Later chapters cover excessive pill use, which isn’t good either. Many of the illnesses seen in native peoples can be avoided with the traditional diet. The problem is that the government pushes for the “civilization” and “modernization” of peoples, which is not what they need. Another reason is that it’s cheap to ship processed carbs and meats, because they don’t rot and don’t need refrigeration. Traditionally, these people hunted for meat, but with their hunting lands gone, they have no choice by to use salted ham. Until the Europeans arrived, they had no salt at all.

I am reminded of the book Looking For Lost Bird, where a Navajo woman, adopted by whites as an infant, returns to her tribe as an adult. She’s faced with a dilemma; a 13 year old boy is punching the girls on the school bus, and nobody knows what to do. So she asks the tribal elders what the arrangement was before the whites arrived, and they say “boys and girls were kept separate from each other.” She then asks what the tribe would’ve done about this boy 200 years ago, and they say “his family would’ve been told to leave if they couldn’t control him.” Well that’s exactly what the tribe did. They told his family to pack up and leave the reservation! The only way to handle the problem is to go back to the traditional form of discipline.

Even Gandhi had these issues in mind when he began his quest for Indian independence. The first thing he did was return to traditional handcrafts, foods, clothes, and exercises. Now if you look at India, they’ve thrust themselves into the “modern” world. They’ve traded traditional foods for pizza and cake, and diabetes is rampant.

Luther's Aesop by Carl Springer

Carl Springer’s book is about how Martin Luther used Aesop’s fables to promote his new form of Christianity, largely by manipulating them. In the chapter A Lutheran Fable Book, he takes the story of “The Rooster and the Pearl” and shows how Luther rewrote it, removing all of its meaning. The true meaning is that when the rooster says “someone would love to have you, but I have no use for you,” it shows how the working class prefer survival before aesthetics. But in Luther’s version the chicken represents an ignorant, vulgar man who doesn’t take the opportunity to appreciate Jesus.

I would be apt to believe everything in this book based on a historical context. Luther’s (possibly apocryphal) 99 Theses came at the time of the Renaissance, when Europeans were rediscovering Greek and Roman mythology, art, architecture, and language. An educated man, Luther would doubtless have come across ancient literature, translated from Greek, and these works obviously had a profound and lasting effect. But we also know that Luther was extremely opinionated, pig-headed, and vindictive. He thought his crowning achievement would be converting the Jews en masse to Christianity, and when they politely refused, he became a raving Anti-Semite. He was not as open-minded as the high school history textbook would lead us to believe.

Springer deserves praise for his unbiased writing and his informative approach. He has crafted a narrative of Luther’s use of Aesop’s fables, from his days as a translator of the stories into German, all  the way to his use of the fables as parables for his religious arguments.

Learning From the Bumps in the Road

There was a chapter in this book where the educators are talking about “consistency,” and a Kenyan says “in our country there is no constant adult presence, but many adults who the kids learn from.” It’s one of many anecdotes in this book, which is essentially about the importance of diversity in education.

The four educators in this book come from diverse backgrounds and they discuss their experiences with multiethnic students. Schools are no longer homogenous (especially in metropolitan areas) and while nobody expects the teacher to know six languages, you’re going to have to be able to deal with six different habits. For instance, Janet Gonzalez-Mena talks about the issue of “greetings” in her life. Hers is the “hi, how are you” kind of greeting, very informal, while her Mexican husband’s family has more physical greetings that take longer. Kids from outside the USA may have an awkward transition to the American way of the classroom, especially if it’s radically different from how they’re treated at home. Think of the eight year old in your classroom whose lack of eye contact drives you crazy. You think it’s annoying, but where he comes from, a kid who looks adults in the face is considered rude.

Holly Elisa Bruno discusses gender, and how you deal with the parents expectancy. For instance, with all the hoopla today about transgender teens (like the much-publicized Kim Petras) you’re likely to have kids playing games that aren’t typical for their gender. So what do you do if the parent insists that restrict what their child does? If you the parent tells you that their son is not to play with dolls, do you enforce THEIR rules in YOUR classroom? Will they threaten to sue you for teaching them that gay people aren’t crazy? These are all issues that teachers will face today in the average classroom.

The teachers in this book go on to critique each other’s discussions about all the troubles you have in the classroom. I’m not referring here to the usual things, like throwing paper planes or making farting noises, because those are things that kids do if they’re bored. This book is about recognizing the social problems that can get in the way of learning. One nice piece of advice here is to be vigilant about the community, with regard to the people living there, changes in the demographic, the economics of the neighborhood, etc. I remember in my first year of teaching, the kids used to drop their garbage right on the sidewalk and the floor, and it drove me crazy. Then one day as I was walking past the public houses next door to the school, I saw the adults doing that and realized what the problem was; kids learn by example, and their parents made a bad one. I would have to start from the beginning, and teach the kids why garbage cans are good for the community.

Like they say to any new teacher, it’s all about planning. If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.

It Starts With Food by Dallas Hartwig

It Starts With Food is a radical book by nutritionist Dallas Hartwig, on how our eating habits control our lives (and vice versa.) First off, the book makes no secret of the fact that people like sweets; it’s a natural instinct, and all races enjoy them in some way or another. As an example, he writes about how you might get a sudden desire for cookies. But you’ll only desire the taste and texture and smell, not the idea of satisfying hunger. This, he says, is a craving, and it wrecks our eating habits.

Chapter 5 is all about the hormones (like insulin) that regulate the food once it’s in there. Lower levels of insulin mean that sugar ends up being stored in huge amounts, causing weight gain, among other things. It makes the body burn sugar, not the stored fat. You end up feeling hungry when you shouldn’t be, and you don’t feel like eating when you’re supposed to.

One example of this, which I bet countless parents deal with in their kids, is the breakfast problem; you wake up feeling lousy, don’t feel hungry enough for breakfast, eat something sugary (like Captain Crunch) with coffee, and by mid-morning, you’re starved. At lunch time you pig out on salty comfort food, and now you’re screwed. The Hartwigs’ advice is to stick to basic protiens and vegetables, while eliminating the processed foods. By leaving the “frankenfoods” out of the diet, you limit the sugar you’re eating, and that gives the body the chance to burn stored fats.

On a funny note, Hartwig debunks a mass-media diet myth, and that myth is the juicer. We all saw it somewhere, maybe on an infomercial, maybe a promotion at a store like Bed, Bath & Beyond (with a sexy model on the package, no doubt.) But the juicers are bad for you. They give you the liquid from the fruits and none of the fiber, so you end up satiating your taste buds, not the hunger.

Eat the foods, not the bi-products. You’ll feel full for longer.

Cure Tooth Decay

Ramiel Nagel’s book tries to prove that natural foods, and not dental checkups, prevent tooth decay. We’ve heard it all before, the theories about “caveman diets” and how traditional nomadic people have the best smiles. Well this isn’t necessarily true (even cave men lost their teeth) but there is a point to it.

Dr. Nagel uses old and new research to compare ethnic groups’ teeth. The primitive Hebrides islanders lived on shellfish and oats, and their teeth were marvelous. But the more urbane peoples of the region had cavities. The reason was simple; the more “modern” the people become, the more access they have to refined white flour, sweets, caffeine, and sweetened foods. Fruit preserves,  which (unfortunately) form a large part of the modern diet, are high in sugar. If you eat them every day, but have less milk, meat, and greens in your diet, then you throw off the nutrition balance.

The book goes further into the danger of mercury-based fillings and how to remove them, but the part on nutrition is better. I would rather have seen the book as a series, with the first part devoted strictly to the nutritional aspect of caring for teeth. But overall it’s an excellent book on how to save on the cost of dental care.

23 Legal Defenses to Foreclosure

Foreclosures are doing more damage to the USA right now than crack cocaine did in the 1980’s. I’ve seen whole neighborhoods emptied thanks to foreclosure, and the towns are bankrupt from the lack of property taxes. Most of the homeowners were duped into taking out risky loans, and the contracts were deceptively worded. But with Troy Doucet’s  23 Legal Defenses to Foreclosure, the homeowner has a fighting chance.

The book starts with basic defenses, by telling you where to look for your state’s mortgage laws. Does your city or town have laws regarding foreclosure and eviction? The book tells you how such laws can be used to your advantage. Most states are called “judicial states,” where the lender has to file a lawsuit to foreclose, evict, and sell to pay off the balance. Predatory lending isn’t a defense against having to pay, but can be a factor in your favor if you sue the lender.

One of the problems people face in foreclosure is that they aren’t familiar with all the jargon used in court, and here’s an example. Say the lender has initiated foreclosure, and they haven’t proved their standing. That’s a required proof in the suit; the lender must prove standing, which means that they are the lender and would become owners of the house in a repossession. Wells Fargo was fined in one case because they could not prove that they were the mortgage holder in the suit.

Doucet’s book is not a replacement for a lawyer, and borrowers are cautioned against going at it all alone without legal representation. But it gives practical advice, and simplifies the issues like preserving your credit score. My only fault with the book is that there aren’t any case studies. I would like to have seen some examples of foreclosure defenses in actual cases, because it would’ve helped me understand it a little better. But this isn’t a college law textbook, so I’m willing to forgive.

Exploding Middle East Myths

Though I was raised in a family of Zionists, I have no illusions about what Israel has done to the Palestinians. However, I find that the critics of Zionism rarely get their facts straight. In this book, Exploding Middle East Myths, the facts are mostly untrue or obscure, and the author is completely ignorant of facts and cases that would prove his point more sensibly.

Let’s begin with the part on Sadat. While it’s true that the great peacemaker was killed by his own soldiers, it’s not entirely correct to call it Muslims killing a Muslim. Sadat was no religious at all; he was a follower of the Ba’ath philosophy, which placed socialism above religion. Its founder, Michel Aflaq, happened to be a Christian. The soldiers who killed Sadat were Muslims, but religion had nothing to do with it. King Abdullah was killed by Arabs because he wanted peace with Israel, but the Arabs who killed him were from a rival tribe. Muslim Arabs were involved, but it wasn’t about Islam.

Another fact that author Greg Felton gets wrong is the (still believed) myth of the Khazars. He believes the unlikely story that king Bulan forcibly converted his entire tribe of Tatars to Judaism, when there is almost no record of it (except for the Kuzari, which was written centuries after the fact) and Jewish Rabbis do not go looking for converts. He says that Askenazi Jews are descended from the Khazars, and I can promise you, that is not true at all. The ancestors of the Ashkenazim lived in the Rhine Valley and were driven into Eastern Europe after the Black Death. The culture of Ashkenazi Jews is completely different from the Tatar-speaking Jews of the Black Sea coast.

More bizarre and questionable arguments follow. According to Felton, the USA didn’t accept Jewish refugees from Germany because the Zionists prevented it. Historians would say that FDR wouldn’t let them in because it would’ve hurt the New Deal he was pushing, but why argue, Felton’s entitled to his opinions. He describes Israel as a parasite, which contradicts his own argument that the Arab armies were a mess. Every military magazine I ever read blamed Israel’s winnings on the incompetent playboy officers of the Arab armies, but once again, why try to convince this guy?

Greg Felton bills himself as a journalist, but it’s not clear if he writes for any publications other than his own. No wonder he had to self-publish this kooky conspiracy book, full of one-sided arguments and obscure, distorted “evidence.” Halfway through, I was certain he’d accuse Israel of assassinating JFK or harboring extraterrestrial invaders, but who knows? As for the accusations that he’s an anti-Semite, I say they’re true. His website is full of badly-doctored photos parodying the Rabbi who allegedly controls Canada’s foreign minister. You have to wonder, in a country that gave us great comedians, couldn’t Felton come up with better gags?

I’ll give him credit for decent writing. The book could be a lot more entertaining if he’d sensationalized it just a wee bit more.

Fragging by George Lepre

In 1969, with the Vietnam War raging, we had nowhere near the patriotic fervor of WW2. Gone were the scores of young men dropping out of college to enlist. Gone were the Black Americans begging for combat assignments. On the contrary, there was growing anti-war militancy among Black soldiers, not to mention pervasive drug use among soldiers of all races. Scores of soldiers didn’t want to be there, so it’s no wonder that so many officers were murdered with fragmentation grenades.

The best part of the book is the chapter on Australian fraggings. I doubt that the Aussie experience ein Vietnam was as bad as that of the US army, because most of the Aussies were there by choice. The Australians didn’t draft troops like the USA did, and there was no Black-White rift, so that eliminates one source of trouble. There were only 11 fraggings, and they were for the same reasons as the US ones; the soldier in question didn’t want to be there. In one case the murderer was a 20 year old soldier, twice rejected from the service, and had a juvenile criminal record. You’d have to wonder why the army let him in if he obviously couldn’t be trusted, but the answer is simple. They were desperate for men. They had to take whomever volunteered.

Fragging is essentially a book about how and why the US involvement in Vietnam couldn’t work. The soldiers didn’t want to be there, and with so many men avoiding military service, the army had to take anyone it could. What we ended up with was an army full of unmotivated malcontents, babysitting the unmotivated soldiers and lazy playboy officers of the South Vietnamese army. They result was that they were no match for the well-disciplined and motivated Vietcong.

George Lepre has written a great book on an issue that has often been ignored.  Many US officers were killed by grenades tossed into their huts, but few soldiers were caught and tried. The army investigations were incompetent, and even if the army had trained homicide detectives, it wouldn’t have worked. By the time the detectives were flown all the way from the USA, the evidence would’ve washed away and eaten by ants.

When a fragging occurred in Iraq, the offending soldier had the same reasons as the Vietnam-era troops who murdered their officers; he didn’t want to be there. But this time round, there was no sloppy investigation. The army was ready for this to happen, and he was quickly brought to justice and found guilty. The case was kept in the military courts and not the civilian ones, because this time round, there was no way the army was going to let him look like a martyr and a hero.

Seeing What Others Don't

The first story in this book reminded me of Blink by Malcom Gladwell, a book about the power of impulsive thinking. We have here several case studies, that in a similar fashion to Gladwell’s book, illustrate how common sense should normally take over. One example is Bernie Madoff, whose Ponzi scheme was discovered through a mathematical error. A financial advisor was tasked with replicating Madoff’s fund, but found that Madoff’s numbers didn’t add up. The second example is Michael Gottleib, the doctor who discovered AIDS, not by research, but by seeing a man with several rare diseases and saying “this doesn’t make sense!”

I personally didn’t care for this book very much, because there weren’t any great surprises. But I’m going to give the author credit for great writing.

The Great Deformation

In the 1980’s Reagan cut taxes, but when the money ran out, he had no choice but to raise them. He promised “less management, not more” then raised military spending. Bill Clinton, ten years later, cut military spending AND public welfare at the same time, but kept the income tax and raised when the dot-com craze ballooned. So what can we deduce from this? We learn that while they had differences (30 years apart in age, one was an old conservative and the other a young liberal) both were street smart. They know that money can’t be “created,” and they knew that choices have to be made between strong defenses and a strong surplus.

David Stockman’s book explores years of dangerous meddling with the nation’s money supply. We’re not talking about the economy here, because the government can’t tell you what to make or grow, unless you’re getting a farm subsidy. The main antagonist in this book is the Federal Reserve and the government backed loans. Government bailouts don’t make any lasting change, because when the loans dry up, what do you do? If the loans are unsecured, what is there to repossess?

Despite the Republicans’ dislike for welfare, they’re been known to give welfare checks to big businesses, in the form of overpriced defense contracts and huge loans. Obama has done nothing to stop this; strip mining, mountaintop removal, overfishing, you name it, we have it, and it’s all permitted (or even financed) by the government. You can’t blame it on free market.

The bottom line of this book is that the US government should stop loaning huge piles of dough to big businesses through the Federal Reserve. They’re loaning money that we haven’t got.

Why Battered Women Stay

The reviews on Amazon are mostly negative, for what they perceive as biased and obsolete work. I was no familiar with the authors before I saw this book, so I’m going to review it on the merits of what I’m reading.

LaViolette and Barnett break down the psychology of spousal abuse into patterns. First, there’s “patriarchy,” where the woman has a desire for an ideal marriage. They don’t leave their abusive husbands because they’re afraid of making changes. Others have been taught that men have the final say, so they don’t understand why the husband’s behavior is wrong. Lastly, some abusive husbands ingratiate themselves into the wife’s family, so when she confides in them, they don’t want to believe her.

This book has lots of case studies, which is great, but there is a lot of bias. There was no mention of women who abuse their husbands, which does happen. There was also no mention or case study of a mentally ill spouse holding the family hostage. Growing up, I knew a boy whose father made all the rules of the household, and the mother followed them because she was afraid he’d kill himself. But what if it is the wife who is the problem? Let’s say the wife is bipolar and refuses to take her meds. She gets worse, and physically attacks her husband right in front of the kids. Her husband could be embarrassed to seek help, or he might be afraid she’ll kill herself (or the kids), or at the very worst, he’s already gone looking for help and the police didn’t believe him.

This book may have been great 20 years ago, but it needs to be updated and made a lot more inclusive. It needs to deal more with mental illness, which can be the source of a lot of familial dysfunction, along with teen dating violence, wife beating in traditional societies, and perhaps same-sex couples too.

Invitation to the Life Span

Any education will say this is a great textbook; it’s fun to read and highly informative, but most of all, the illustrations are up to date. Like Christian Morality, which I reviewed earlier, the photos are from recent years and today’s college students will relate well to them. As for as the information goes, the research compares and contrasts earlier versus contemporary eras. Take for instance the section on cot death; we learn that the practice for infant sleeping changed based on learned habits. It used to be the standard practice for infants to sleep face down, but in Asia, infants were always put to sleep face up, and Asia had lower rates of cot death (or SIDS if you prefer.)

    Geography plays a part here as well, because when it comes to child development, your ethnicity and nationality play a part in what is expected of you. Worldwide, adolescents are shown to be risk-takers, but it’s mostly in boys. In fact, in all nations, risk taking increases when girls are watching. Those are observed facts, but here comes the question; do risk taking behaviors, done to impress girls, happen more in developed countries, and if so, does it happen more when boys have nothing to do?

  There is a wealth of wonderful learning in this book, so I don’t want to give too much away at this point. It is well-researched, up to date, and perfect for anyone studying social sciences, health, or education.

Shattering the Illusion: How African American Churches of Christ Moved From Segragation to Independence

Religion in the USA is different from that in Britain and Europe. For instance, in the congregations here in the USA are usually independent, and the members are free to make their own decisions. In Britain, however, there are established Churches, synagogues, and Mosques, and the Jews of Britain have a “Chief Rabbi.” The Rabbis of all the congregations report to a central authority, who has the ear of the government. As for separation of church and state, there isn’t really any. That is why the Churches of Christ were so unusual.

Until I read this well-researched and unbiased story, I was unfamiliar with the Churches of Christ. Apparently they were a confederation of churches with a common philosophy, and there was a branch for African American worshipper that formed after the Civil War. But even though the Churches of Christ preached respect for all regardless of race, I have to wonder if the African American branch was really another form of segregation. Was its true purpose meant to keep White members from having share with freed slaves?

Shattering the Illusion begins with the origins of the Churches of Christ in the 1800’s to its eventual desegregation by the 1970’s. It’s clear from the book that while the African American preachers like George Browser and William Franklin were heading a segregated agency within a white church, they were, in essence, already independent. The Churches of Christ weren’t integrated, and that obviously wouldn’t happen for a long time, but the preachers needed the support of the whites in order to function. It costs money to incorporate, acquire a building, pay the minister’s salary, heat and maintain the building, etc. If they could get some financial support from a functioning white church, what could it hurt?

Wes Crawford’s work analyzes an overlooked aspect of African American history. By having their own churches (as opposed to sitting in the back of a dominantly white one), they were able to worship more freely and provide greater support within their own community. The independence of their churches lead to greater self-motivation, which would become a catalyst for the Civil Rights movement.

Priest, Politician, and Collaborator: Joseph Tiso and the Making of Fascist Slovakia

After spending a childhood learning about the Holocaust, I can safely say that nothing in this book can surprise me. However, I can still wonder, and wonder I will. I wonder about the nationalists in Europe who sided with Hitler, and I wonder what they were thinking. Were they afraid of the Soviets? Did they think Hitler would respect their language and religion? Did they see their Jewish minority as a threat? When they betrayed the Jews to Hitler, was it done out of hatred, or did they consider the Jews an expendable pawn?

Joseph Tiso was one such nationalist. He was a Catholic priest in Slovakia who became the country’s president, then sided with Hitler and the final solution. It wasn’t unusual; Lithuania, Latvia, and Ukraine had a strong Nazi following, mainly because they wanted to be free of the Soviets. But the priests in Poland weren’t so quick to follow Hitler, in fact Hitler killed hundreds of them (which the Pope at the time ignored.) So the question is this; was Tiso power-hungry, or was he simply choosing which of the two foes to appease?

Ward devotes a chapter to the issue of national security in Slovakia, under the chapter Standing Up For the Truth. Tiny Slovakia in the 1930’s was weak , of that there is no doubt. There was no way they could’ve beaten Hitler’s modern, mechanized army, and Tiso clearly knew it. But the author doesn’t try to answer the question, he leaves the reader to decide. Now I have to wonder if Tiso mislead his people, because he seems to have buried the fact that the country was weak. He put great effort into centralizing the government, but little effort into any contingency or safety plans. There were no procedures in place for what they’d all do if the Germans (or Soviets) invaded. Furthermore, if the German army crossed his soil, the country would’ve been ruined. Where would the German army have camped, in farmer’s fields? If they did, how would the farmers plow them? If the German army bought food from locals, then the prices would skyrocket. Either way, there would be a food shortage.

No matter how you look at it, Tiso wasn’t terribly smart. Perhaps the point is that the central government shouldn’t be all-powerful, and that dissent is good for you? Hitler was a dictator, obviously, but in some ways Tiso was a dictator too. Maybe the book is about a big dictator and a little one. The little one sold his people out.

Universal Human Rights by Jack Donnelly

Human Rights are often confused with Civil Rights, a term used mostly in the USA. The UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights (discussed heavily in this book) are essentially about personal rights; the right to equality with your countrymen, the right not to be owned by another man, and the right not to be forcibly mutilated. Jack Donnelly, a professor at the University of Denver, writes about how Human Rights developed over hundreds of years, mainly with industrialized Europe. But one of the problems with the UDHR is that it doesn't jive with a lot of nations. If it's the norm in your country to sell the youngest daughter to pay for the oldest daughter's wedding, do you think your country is going to give a damn about "rights"? Not likely!

Universal Human Rights doesn't dance around the facts. It clearly portrays human rights as something difficult to implement and enforce. Furthermore, it discusses how human rights are based on European philosophy that traditional societies may not understand. For instance, Donnelly write about how the British government made laws regarding child laborers and factory hours, so we can see that the idea of "rights" began over a hundred years ago. But look at the issue of location; Britain wasn't a land of right, on the contrary it once had a feudal system that was based on a lack of rights. The idea of Parliament making laws of workplace safety, public health, and public education is a radical step considering how the country began. France too had laws regarding health in 1900, and keep in mind that only 120 years earlier the country was an absolute monarchy!

Is there hope? Can there be change? Perhaps, if you look at India and New Guinea as examples. India has long since given up the suti, where the widow is cremated with the husband, and New Guinea's people are no longer cannibals. India's caste system is slowly fading away, and in Europe, age-old class barriers are disappearing too.

I'll give Professor Donnelly kudos for going into the history of rights. But I would welcome some illustrations, perhaps some pictures of the people involved, and a few maps would be welcome (Human Rights have a lot to do with nationality.) Other than that, the book is wonderful. It would make a great documentary.

The De-Textbook

At last, a collection of the more “serious” gags from Cracked magazine. They’re funny, the way getting kicked in the crotch by a hyperactive six year old is funny, and it pulls no punches. The jokes here are all about history, and while not exactly shocking (I always knew Edison was an ass) they’re somewhat ironic.

The Dark Ages are shown to have been great if you were living in one of the Muslim-controlled parts of the world. While France was “plunged into anarchy,” Muslim Spain was a nation of arts and science. Now that part was left out of the Discovery Channel series, but in this day and age you can’t portray Islam as a religion of peace and stability.

Thomas Edison is treated harshly here, and rightly so, because he is not the hero he’s always shown to be. Edison, the great inventor, whom US schoolchildren are taught to fawn over (myself included), was a thief, a liar, a con man, and a thug. He had his own “patent police” who he’d send out to smash up your workshop if he thought you were ripping off his invention. I need to add here, none of the inventions were his, even the light bulb was invented by someone else, along with the movie camera, the tickertape machine, the vote recorder, etc. He bullied everyone he could into using direct current, setting back US electricity 100 years.

Never, ever, let kids read this book. It will render half the children’s books in the library obsolete. I guess the truth hurts, no?

Building Stories by Chris Ware

Building Stories

Reviewed by Ben Wolinsky

“Machines,” I said to myself, the first time I saw Chris Ware’s cartoons. They looked so mechanical I didn’t believe they were hand-drawn. That was why I could tell right away that Building Stories all about ennui (constant loneliness and solitude, if you haven’t got a dictionary.)

When Building Stories came out in the NY Times, I couldn’t tell much about the woman in his cartoons, because she was always sitting at the window looking out. With this deluxe edition, I can see that she’s missing half a leg, overweight, lonely no matter where she is. This is the kind of loneliness that gives you cabin fever, and the only reason she doesn’t have cabin fever is that she isn’t really alone. She lives on the third floor of a Chicago tenement, but doesn’t interact with the people around her at all.

The ironic thing about her story is that she feels left out, but the people around her are no better off. Her neighbors are in a bad relationship, the plumber is lonely and overweight, the previous tenant died alone in her apartment. Perhaps when you live in a city you don’t really get to know your neighbors? Then again, she doesn’t seem to know anybody in the suburb where she moves with her husband, whom she doesn’t like that much either. She marries the first guy she can, and he’s just as unattractive as she is and not much fun. He’s off on business all the time, and she’s stuck at home with their daughter. I wonder if the husband has Asperger’s Syndrome or OCD? Perhaps that explains why he feels more at home in his job than with his wife and kid. As for the kid, she’s very independent, which is a relief for the reader. If the main character is depressed and missing a leg, how would she deal with someone who’s emotionally needy? But the more independent the child becomes, the lonelier her mother feels.

Ware’s mechanical black lines are perfect for this cartoon. The human characters fit perfectly with the geometric backgrounds; it’s like they’re all cogs in a machine, and it’s all their own doing. Most of the characters in the story feel unfulfilled, but they don’t do anything to get out of it. By the time I’d read all the books in the package, I had zero sympathy for the characters.

For those of you wondering why the book comes in a heavy box, let me say this; it’s not a book, but several books plus a newspaper, a game board, a book, a magazine, a strip, and a ribbon. I thought it was like opening up a Milton Bradley board game, and by the time I reached the bottom of the box and found the fold-out board, I knew I was right. The series Building Stories is essentially a board game; the drawings are like game illustrations, and the story jumps from past to present and back the way you move your game piece when you lose a point.

I can relate to Building Stories. I live in a big pre-war apartment building in a city. I don’t know my neighbors, and they don’t know theirs. It can feel isolating sometimes. I see the same faces at the community board meetings, but I’ve never been friends with any of them. City people can be rather solitary. You can live in a city like this without ever interacting with the people around you. Everyone to their own devices, they say.

Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights

The myriad of tales in the Arabian Nights are brought to life in this wonderful book. It’s a brilliant collection of tales from Arabia, India, and Persia dating back thousands of years, sand though it was banned in some states for naughty scenes, it’s still a fantastic tale.

When you look at the stories in the Arabian Nights, you can tell that some of them could not have come from Arabia. The ones where the protagonist is a woman could not have come from there, because talking about women in Saudi Arabia is a big no-no. In the Quran, you don’t have all of the “damsel in distress” stories that you do here. But in Persian mythology, you do. In fact the stories with female characters are more likely to have come from Iran than anywhere else. Look at it this way; in Iran and Muslim India, female musicians were a common sight, but in Arabia, no. In fact in some parts of Arabia, music is considered haram.

The stories about the Jinn are both funny and terrifying; the Jinn can be good or evil, but they can also be imprisoned in bottles, leading to shocking discoveries when they are released. Then you have the magic talismans, magic potions, and lots of wacky mythical creatures. Some say that the Giant Roc bird of the Sinbad stories is based on a giant ostrich that lived in Madagascar and became extinct in the 1400’s. Arab sailors took the eggs and used them to store water, and that probably led to the bird’s demise.

The bottom line is this; the Arabian Nights stories are from all over the Muslim world, but they show us that Muslim countries aren’t all the same. Some are stricter than others, and some have customs that date back to long before Islam.

Before the Door of God: An Anthology of Devotional Poetry

This is a wonderful book about religious poetry, all the way from the Book of Psalms to the 21^st Century. Starting with the Psalms, it tells the story of how the creator inspired brilliant prose for thousands of years. If you look at the Psalms (or Tehilim in Hebrew) then you will see that not all of them are devotional. Some of them simply praise the beauty of life, others are pleas for a life of happiness. In the book of Genesis, when Jacob makes one last plea to be saved from Esau, he doesn’t mention God in the plea, he just says “save me here and now.” In the book of Jonah, despite the prayer he says towards the end, it seems more of a cautionary tale than something sacred. Unlike the earlier books of the bible, it makes a monstrous beast a greater part of the story. As Before the Door of God progresses, you will see that the theologians who wrote these words were more interested in life than in religion.

One of the greatest things about this book is that it makes the scriptures interesting.  Compare the Song of Songs to Amazing Grace by John Newton; both are essentially very mellow, calm, and balanced in mood. Now compare them to the first five books of the Bible; they’re a dream compared to the wrath and fire of those books! Genesis, Exodus, and so on are full of divine wrath, punishment, and fury. In every chapter the creator terrorizes someone as a dire punishment or warning of some kind. But then once you reach the book of Chronicles, which has the Psalms, Song of Songs, and the book of Jonah, everyone is at peace. This probably inspired John Newton and other English Christians whose works are renowned.

I would however, have liked to see some more scholarly research into the origin of these writing. The Song of Songs has been attributed to Solomon, but linguists have proven that it was written much later, long after Solomon was dead. I would’ve liked to learn more about why it was written at the time, and what inspired it. As with later devotional poems, I would’ve likewise be interested in how the time and place influenced the writing. If Amazing Grace was written by a Cleric who was inspired by the Evangelical church, then how come the Evangelicals were gaining more ground in England at this time?

Though some more historical background information would be welcome, this book is of definite value for bible study.

First World Problems

The author takes a job at the Cold Stone ice cream chain, which I last sickened myself with back in 2009. I could never understand what the whole fuss was about, because the ice cream has the consistency of melted rubber. My theory is that the only reason for the existence of Cold Stone is that it’s Cold Stone. There’s nothing about the place that makes it any better than Hagen Daz, Ben & Jerries, or Steves (or Carvel, if there are any left.) But people love the place or it wouldn’t be open anymore. It’s junk, but so what? Americans have been eating bad food for a long time.

Ben Nesvig write First World Problems to try and prove that processed foods are a problem. Okay, that’s not rocket science, we saw that ten years ago in Supersize Me. But the way he writes it is funnier. He writes a list of complaints (one page each) where he bitches that:

1. The Cold Stone guy doesn’t sing while he works, leading the customers to think he isn’t overjoyed to work there, and the advertisement convinces you that it’s “friendly.”

2. The ethnic restaurant chef wasn’t really from that ethnic group, making it an unauthentic eating experience, and you had your heart set on something “authentic.” Keep in mind, however, that in the country where the food originated, the people can’t afford to eat a meal like that (nobody in Japan can afford to eat a two-pound Kobe steak!)

3. Waiters pressure you to eat quick and leave so they can cram in more customers, when all the while you’re thinking “the purpose of me going into a restaurant is so that I can eat leisurely.”

4. We’re so bloody dependent on our laptops, that we have to take them into Starbucks too, and now you can’t go to the bathroom for fear (correctly) that it will get stolen (especially in NYC)

5. You made (and ate) your own lunch to save on money and calories, but now you can’t turn down an offer to join Dilbert for lunch at Friendly’s (that would be rude.) When you get there, they beguile you with a menu item you can’t refuse, and you end up feeling stuffed.

 

I can really relate to this sometimes, because I’ve been in bakeries where they sell $4 french breads the size of skis and no foot-longs. All the while I want to scream “jeez, I don’t have $4 and I don’t need that much bread!” I’ve been dragged out to dinner with a relative or acquaintance who I don’t really like, and I end up feeling stuffed, sick, and out $15.

 

But I would have like to see a solution to these problems. Nesvig could make a hilarious tome about how to avoid all these things, and I bet it could become reality TV. Just think, do you know anyone that said “the wedding is a BYOB affair” and insisted on having no bridesmaids (so she wouldn’t have to pay for the dresses)? Or how about the cash-strapped parent who says “Christmas is a month away, and you’re each going to be given $20, that’s it!”

Baptist Theology: A Four Century Study

Baptist Christianity is very popular in the USA. I always believed it’s because the churches are independent of each other, and here in the USA, we like that sort of thing. Back in England, the churches were all part of the “Church of England” where the king or queen was head of the church. Now just try telling that to an American, and the king or queen will end up face down in the baptismal pool!

Just kidding, Baptist theology doesn’t encourage that kind of defensiveness or persecution. It’s a centuries-old system of thought, and it began in England by theologians who desired independence from established religion. This wonderful book by James Leo Garrett tells the story of how those philosophers developed their own way of thought, starting with men like John Bunyan. These men did not believe in an over-organized doctrine, where you memorize prayers and recite them like parrots. It had to come from sincere belief.

When Baptist theology came to the Americas, it caught on quickly through the same philosophy. America was a place where people developed independently, and likewise they wanted to find God in their own way. Every church was on its own to raise funds, find the minister, conduct the services, etc. There was no Church of England to fund you with royal money.

Religion in the USA is different from that of other countries. In Britain, not only is there a Church of England, but there is a similar one for Jewish people too! The country has a Chief Rabbi, who the Queen contacts whenever she has anything to say to the Jewish community. Independent Jewish congregations, especially the Reform or Conservative ones, are derided and the Queen doesn’t recognize them.

What The Yankees Did To Us: Sherman's Bombardment and Wrecking of Atlanta

Not only did Sherman’s leave the South a smoldering ruin, but he ruined the North too! The South now had zero purchasing power, so the North would have a hard time selling their goods down there. It cost an already cash-strapped Congress too much money and with the South ruined, there would be no businesses and no tax revenue after the war. By the time Sherman reached Georgia, the South was already starving from food shortages, so he could easily have marched around it. I’ve always suspected that the previously unsuccessful general was trying to get attention. He failed in his chance to lead a big army like Grant did, so why not show his prowess by shelling a town? He made a big display for himself, and it got him attention. The Northern press, hungry for good stories, printed everything he said.

Author Stephen Davis has written this extensive book on Sherman’s campaign, with liberal use of eyewitness accounts. Blow by blow, the book tells of how it began with a siege, continued with weeks of shelling, and ended with the army tearing down the remains. The author blames part of it on the Confederate army being called away from the city, and that allowed Sherman to attack. But as for the burning, he blames it on a lack of manpower to fight the fires. I’ll give the author credit for that, but he also described in detail how the occupying Union troops dismantled the remaining houses to build their own shanties and fuel cooking fires. Confederate troops came back to find their houses stripped to the foundations.

The North may have won and the South obviously lost. But in some ways, both sides lost. The main cities in the South had all burned, and for years afterwards, both white and black people were poor. Ruined whites took out their anger on newly freed slaves, so the blacks ended up losing too. The only way for white planters to prosper was to keep blacks enslaved through the sharecropping system (or prison farms.) Things have turned out the same way with Iraq since 2003, when the US invaded and occupied the country. Although it’s thousands of miles away, it’s created trouble for the USA in that it we have a huge war debt (which led to the devaluation of bonds), and Iraq has no purchasing power (no market for US products.) As for safety and security, well forget it, because Iraq is a security risk for the whole world (military spending rises.) Bringing war to the civilians, or “total war,” as some call it, leaves the winning side in a financial mess.

Some people just never learn.

Blood in the Hills: A History of Violence in Appalachia

Long before the Ten Commandments, there was something called the Noahide Laws, or the Seven Laws of the Sons of Noah. Aside from the obvious ones, like don’t steal, worship idols, or mouth off to your mom & dad, it also says set up courts to hear disputes. Now the reason for the last one is simple; without courts, we’d have no choice but to seek revenge for every slight.

Blood in the Hills is essentially about how a man’s life wasn’t worth much in the Appalachians, and that law was based on revenge. The first few chapters are all about mass murders by Cherokee Indians, brigands, and paramilitaries in this lawless region. Next comes a chapter on how the slaves were abused, then free Black people were targeted, then the hostility extended to newcomers, strikers, vacation homeowners etc. Life was cheap.

All stereotypes aside, the Appalachians, like the Deep South, don’t have a good reputation; mean spirited gun-toting natives, few jobs, lousy schools, alcoholism, drug addiction, and promiscuity. Despite the bucolic features, there’s widespread pollution from the mines. The TV special Hidden America: Children of the Mountains shows that there’s still alcoholism, but now there’s prescription pill addiction too. The kids are hungry, and despite the vast empty lands, nobody’s growing any food. This region seems devoid of motivation, and as Thomas Sowell points out in Black Rednecks and White Liberals, there’s a dislike for people that try to improve things.

It wasn’t just the hill towns that were violent; the city of Roanoke had riots over a Black suspect in a crime. Mobs of White man tried to storm the jail and lynch him, and they didn’t care about the lawmen or state militiamen guarding the jail. They had no tolerance for the law at all, and their motivation for wanting to kill the suspect had little to do with fear, and more to do with “he’s encroaching on our turf.”

Some of the material in the book was covered in All God’s Children by Fox Butterfield. In that book, the author claims that Black-on-Black killings are a habit learned from Southern Whites, who learned it from their Scottish ancestors. I learned about southern killing culture back in college, when a professor showed us photos of lynchings. Many of these photos were printed as souvenir postcards; there were people crowding around, kids eating ices, and all the while a dead body was hanging from a tree. The professor compared  it to drive-by shootings, where kids shoot each other over insults. In the south, the word “no” was an insult, and all insults had to be avenged.

Killing someone? That was like stepping on a cockroach. There was no value placed on a man’s life.

The Voice of Rolling Thunder

John Pope (or Rolling Thunder as he called himself) was a Native American medicine man, whom I hadn’t heard of until I saw this book. A quick internet checks says this guy was world famous, and from what I read in this book and on the web, he would’ve been a nothing if he hadn’t been fawned over by rock stars. The book is good, lots of wisdom and philosophy, but it falls short because most of it comes from second-hand accounts, not Rolling Thunder’s own words. Still, I’m going to concentrate on the positive.

Rolling Thunder claimed that his duty was to preserve harmony. But one day (according to Gary Sandman) there was a disagreement with some feminists. They complained “why do the women prepare breakfast while the men do the farming, building, and taking care of animals?” Now what did the Native American women have to say? They were happy with it! In Rolling Thunder’s words, “these women are not happy that our women do not agree.”

But wait, all was not lost, RT was a teacher of harmony, so he took them into the woods for a “real life” lesson, which went as follows:

Our ways were here long before anyone else came along, and we never had jails or nursing homes. The men make the decisions but the women can veto them. Yet the women know that if they stall the work, we will all suffer.

The feminists still wouldn’t budge. So he explained their tradition regarding menstruation:

The woman goes into a teepee by herself for three days, to do as she pleases. No cooking, cleaning, or preparing food for men. That’s three days of vacation.

The feminists’ response: she’s isolated from her children for three days!

Harmony is at the root of this book. These feminists had come to Rolling Thunder’s commune out of their own free will, yet they were resistant to learning. The tradition was all that kept the people going, and the idea that you mustn’t stall the work can be compared to the 2013 government shutdown; when both sides wouldn’t budge, paychecks couldn’t go out, and Federal land had to be closed. Reminds you a little of the Zax from Dr. Seuss’ story, only the Zax didn’t block traffic for a month!

There’s a funny part where he goes to Marin college to do a lecture, and there’s lots of drumming, chanting, weird tee shirts, and Rolling Thunder goes on stage, and what does he do? He farts. He just lets out a big fart. The students don’t laugh, they all sit there solemnly, respecting this guru and waiting for him to drop the bomb and tell them the great significance of that huge fart. But no, he doesn’t say. Finally, fed up, they say “what was that fart meant to show?” and he replied “there isn’t any, if you hold it in too long you’ll get sick.”

He lectured in Cologne, Germany, in the 1980’s, and criticized the German inquisitions against witches. He criticized the Puritans for killing people and burning books on Sundays, whipping children for kissing, branding Quakers for heresy. He said “I’m not a Christian, but I have greater respect for your teacher than your ancestors.”

Rolling Thunder (or John Pope, I don’t know what it said on his ID card) wasn’t without controversy. His background wasn’t clear, so nobody was sure what tribe he was from. He claimed to be Cherokee when other said he was Shoshone. He was widely criticized for cashing in on the hippy fascination with traditional philosophies, and other Native American groups thought he was creating a mockery of it. The same thing happened in the 60’s, when the American and British became fascinated with Indian philosophy. Somehow I doubt Hindu traditionalists were pleased with the way the Maharishi became a guru to the Beatles, the same way most Jewish Americans find the Kabbalah craze annoying. In Thailand there are Buddhist monks who perform magic tricks for tourists and tell them it’s holy. They’re not popular with the other monks, I promise.

I have some criticisms of my own for this book. First, it’s epistolary, with each chapter written by someone who knew Rolling Thunder. I would prefer to read his own words, and learn a little more about his background. Did anything happen to him in his youth that would influence his later outlook? Was he brought up in the traditional way, or was he educated in the White man’s schools? Perhaps Rolling Thunder was trying to make himself appear mysterious.

To sum up, I’ll say this; if a Native American youth murdered someone, he wasn’t punished for being bad, but exiled as a danger to the people. He was sent to live on his own. They had no jails and they didn’t execute or flog people. It makes you think.

Misquoting Jesus by Edward Andrews

This book is a reaction to Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman, which makes Jesus out to be a fictional character. But Edward Andrews sets out to prove Ehrman wrong by going for the original text of the bible; not Latin, but Greek! He debunks all of Ehrman’s alleged “evidence” regarding Jesus’ origins, and some of it is rather amusing.

One of the claims by Ehrman is that because there are so few physical copies of the Gospels from before 350 A.D., the story of Jesus is some kind of invention. But Andrews claims otherwise; if Christians were persecuted before Constantine took up the religion, wouldn’t they have had to do their writing in secret? Wouldn’t it have been hard to copy the texts without being seen? Several early Gospels, like that of St. Thomas, were found buried in Egypt. The early Christians probably had to hide whatever books they had, and there must be hundreds, or even thousands, buried somewhere in the Middle East. Once Constantine ended all the persecutions, the Christians could now have as many texts as they liked.

Then there’s another reason Andrews gives for the lack of antique texts. When Paul preached to the Hebrews, Galatians, Corinthians, and Romans, he would have done so orally. Books had to be hand-written, so Paul wasn’t going to stand in the street and hand out pamphlets! He wouldn’t have published a book and gone on a book tour either. He was lucky to get parchment or papyrus to write his works, and lucky that the book survived his death.

According to Andrews, the lack of primary sources on Jesus isn’t because he never existed. It’s because his followers were persecuted and had to make their writings a clandestine operation.

The Dance of the Wounded Souls: A Cosmic Perspective of Codependence and the Human Condition

Robert Burney is a substance abuse recovery therapist (non-clinical)and this book is about changing the habits that lead to addiction. He offers practical advice on breaking these habits by facing the things that lead to them. Firstly, he states that you can’t find love without accepting that certain things make you angry. Secondly, you can’t find happiness without confronting the things that make you miserable. Third, repressed emotions drive us to rage.

Repressed emotions are written of at length in this book. They drive us to become workaholics, or become obsessed with our bodies, and no good ever comes of that. It’s something we’re taught through bad mentoring by poor role models. He compares to coming-of-age rituals in traditional society to the ones in the modern world as an example. Among aboriginal people, there are ceremonies to mark the beginning of menstruation, because that marks the girl as being biologically mature. In the USA, we have junior high school, where the kids learn bad habits and bad body image. The kids have nothing to do with themselves, so they end up getting in fights, shoplifting, and joining gangs.

Addiction isn’t something that you can just stop. You need to recognize that your lifestyle and living environment may be the underlying cause, and for that, you need to be willing to change them.

Mediums, Monks, and Amulets

Dr. Pattana Kitiarsa is an anthropologist who spent some time as a Buddhist monk in Thailand. Before I go any further, I’d better let you know that this is not some hippy story, where the westerner goes looking for “spiritual enlightenment.” Kitiarsa was no stranger to Thailand, and life in a monastery is not a vacation; on the contrary, it’s very austere and disciplined. You get one meal a day (which is why the monks are so thin) and every morning, the monks march in a line at the village to beg for food. The “earnings” from the begging are shared communally. If there are no donations, and nobody comes to the temple to donate food, then nobody eats.

Dr. Kitiarsa makes it very clear at the beginning that religion, especially Thai Buddhism, can be an opportunity for fraud. Magic is frowned upon in the monasteries, but the monks have to resort to doing tricks to attract donations, without which they can’t recruit new members. In India and Thailand a lot of the gurus are just after the westerners’ money (or looking to have sex with gullible white women) and while the “apt pupils” find enlightenment, the guru is driving a Mercedes (bought with their money.)

He does give one positive example of a magician-monk named Achan Somsak. He’d trained as a teacher, worked as a grocer, and after being ordained as a monk, chose to live by himself in the forest. Fortune-telling is part of his philosophy, but it doesn’t involve magic tricks or any of the stuff that the Indian Fakirs are famous for (like sticking pins through their faces) or cooking tea on peoples’ heads.

The monks and gurus often clash with the government, for multiple reasons. First, there are many who engage in fraud, bilking naïve tourists of their money while suckering them with fortune-telling and silly trinkets that allegedly have magic power. Secondly,

I recommend this book for anyone studying Buddhism, or how it pertains to life in Thailand.

That's The Joint: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader

Though you’d view it with surprise, there was a time when rap lyrics weren’t about murder, wife beatings, gold rings, or revenge. There was also a time when graffiti wasn’t meant to be hateful vandalism. When it all began, it was about brightening a city that was a dreary, grimy, smoggy mess. The graffiti may have been an eyesore to most, but without it, the NYC subway cars were already filthy. It’s not like the city ever bothered to clean them.

That’s the Joint portrays hip-hop as a tree growing out of garbage and rubble. Everything to do with hip-hop and graffiti spread by word of mouth, not by the press or radio (these were the pre-internet days of course.) In Jeff Chang’s essay Zulus on a Time Bomb: Hip Hop Meets Rockers Downtown he portrays graffiti as having been obscure until Henry Chalfant began photographing it. Chalfant was a classically trained sculptor, by the way, who became fascinated by subway car murals, and his photos brought it mainstream. Of course you then had the big businesses try to cash in on it, and then Mayor Kotch put greater effort into power-washing the paint off the cars, so the graffiti craze quickly ended.

This book has neither illustrations nor photos, so it comes off more as a serious study of history than anything else. There weren’t any real surprises in the book, and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing either; I watched the VH1 documentary NY77: The Coolest Year in Hell, which also tells the story of hip-hop’s origins. When it began in the late 1970’s New York City, it was more about cheap amusement than fighting. In fact hip-hop shows were a refuge from crime and violence. The equipment was bargain-basement stuff, and the performers and DJ’s didn’t prance around in gold chains. Similarly, with punk rock (also gaining ground at the time) the “fashions” were thrift-store rejects. In the documentary The Filth and the Fury, John Lydon recounts how the leather jacket emblem of punk rock was based on a misconception:

None of us could afford fifty quid for a leather jacket, not in UK in 1978. None of us had that kind of money. He must’ve stolen his, and then you see him in the papers in his leather jacket, and all of a sudden, you have all these kids wearing them.

However, I did not agree with much of what Michael Eric Dyson says in Cover Your Eyes as I Describe a Scene So Violent. He blames the NRA for perpetuating the US gun culture, and blames violence in the “Ghetto” on smaller and smaller living spaces. But this isn’t true for several reasons; first off, the NRA neither advertises nor lobbies towards black men, and secondly, in the most violent neighborhoods there is no shortage of housing. The South Bronx and Jamaica in NYC, South Side of Chicago, Compton in LA, and the worst parts of Detroit are teeming with massive housing projects and/or empty buildings. In the controversial All God’s Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence, the author Fox Butterfield has a different approach, no guns involved. He blames black-on-black killing as a low-class southern habit. He claims that in the Old South, there was a culture of revenge; the word no was an insult, and all insults had to be avenged (just like in Naples, Italy and in Albania, and often in Latin America.) The “you disrespect me, I’ll pop you one,” phenomena didn’t originate in Africa.

That’s the Joint makes up for what it lacks in illustrations with some great writing by top notch writers. Even when some of these writers are wrong, it still makes you think. Hip-hop is controversial, as it was 30 years ago, and will still be controversial in later years. I remember back in 1991, my parents were watching The Beatles movie Magical Mystery Tour and said “their lyrics were smart, this rap garbage won’t last.” Well it’s been 23 years, and rap sure did last. I’m going use this book when I teach US history to high school students from now on. In the past decade there’s been a mania for all the music and fashions of the early 1980’s, which none of the aficionados are old enough to remember. It would be wonderful for them to learn where it all originated.

The Second Vatican Council

Pope Paul VI created new Cardinals in 20 nations, including Africa, the Balkans, and Eastern Europe. Holy relics were returned to Eastern Orthodox churches, and greater dialogue was opened between the church and the Marxists and Freemasons. Birth control pills were approved by the Pope, and a Czech Bishop, recently freed from a Communist prison, referred to the burning at the stake of Jan Huss as an obstacle to religious liberty. Earlier in 1960, Kruschev had stated that he wanted peaceful coexistence with the Catholic Church. Under Pope John, it would be a relatively peaceful time, but that would soon change. 

The 1960’s were a difficult decade, and the Papacy wasn’t blind to it. The world had changed, and the once powerful church was not what it had been. Poland, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia were in the hands of Communist governments that controlled the church, not the other way around. In the USA, young Catholics were leaving the church to seek out their own path, and in Europe, the churches were no longer politically sacrosanct. Even in Montreal, with a larger than average population of faithful, the church’s hold on social welfare would soon change.

Roberto De Mattei should be given credit for his unbiased writing. His book consists of good, solid reporting of events, no bias to be found anywhere. My only problem with the book is the huge number of names that are dropped in. Those not familiar with all the people involved may be slightly confused by it. I would also have welcomed a timeline at the beginning, so that all the events can be seen in chronological order.