That's some writer's block

From New York Times Book Review:

From a review of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, by Jennifer 8. Lee, on a subject close to my heart:

Intrigued by the Powerball drawing of March 30, 2005, which produced an inordinate quantity of winning lottery tickets because the lucky numbers had turned up in fortune cookies all around the country, Lee rides her obsession on a three-year, 42-state, 23-country journey during which she discovers that fortune cookies, like so much about America’s Chinese restaurants, aren’t really Chinese. They originated in 19th-century Japan and were sold in Japanese confectionery shops in San Francisco until World War II, when Japanese-Americans were interned, at which point Chinese entrepreneurs took over the business. Lee tracks down Donald Lau, who spent a decade writing fortunes for the biggest cookie manufacturer until he suffered writer’s block and had to retire in 1995.

Books on Eisenhower, Marshall and MacArthur

New York Times Book Review: By Michael Beschloss

A lifelong Army man, Eisenhower had watched Marshall and MacArthur during their differences with Roosevelt and Truman. When he entered the White House in 1953, he was probably better schooled to know both the importance and the limits of military advice than any other president of his century.

Though the story does not appear in either book, in the late 1950s, Eisenhower’s generals — especially in the Air Force — were clamoring for a huge increase in the defense budget. The Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, was declaring that his country was cranking out planes and nuclear missiles “like sausages” and would soon overtake the United States.

Knowing from secret intelligence that Khrushchev’s claims were a fraud, Eisenhower held down military spending. His fortitude opened him to charges from Senator John F. Kennedy and other politicians that he was tolerating a “missile gap” and leaving America undefended. But his decision probably meant the country was able to avoid the ruinous inflation that afflicted its economy in later years.

In case that does not persuade you of how important it is to have presidents with the wisdom and experience to know when, and when not, to take military advice, it is worth remembering that Ike Ike was the leader in 1954 who scoffed at warnings that the free world would be in peril unless we immediately went to fight in Vietnam.

Bill Clinton: Mastering the Presidency

New York Times Book Review: By Michael Crowley

But while [author Nigel] Hamilton is generally sympathetic to Bill Clinton as a well-meaning big thinker battered by manufactured scandals in “America’s infotainment coliseum,” he has far less sympathy for Hillary Clinton, whose hidden hand he identifies in most of the administration’s early failures. It was Hillary who fired the travel office staff, pushed Bill to choose Baird and Guinier, and, he writes, “unwittingly destroyed her husband’s chances of an easy launch as 42nd president” by meddling with his White House transition team. He casts her as domineering and volatile; the White House staff was “intimidated into servility by an activist first lady” determined to be a co-president. Her political tone-deafness would lead to a health care fiasco that nearly sank her husband’s administration.

Although it’s true that Hillary did the president few favors in his first term, Hamilton’s portrait deteriorates into the sort of cheap caricature one might find on Fox News, while offering virtually no testimony in her defense. Instead, he provides dubious anecdotes from sources of suspect credibility, like gossip-laden books by Gail Sheehy and the former F.B.I. agent Gary Aldrich. Only by consulting the endnotes will a reader know that a story about Hillary furiously berating Bill on the morning of his inauguration is drawn from an anonymously sourced account in Sheehy’s “Hillary’s Choice.” ...(Hillary Clinton, it’s worth noting, virtually disappears from the book once her husband’s fortunes turn, leaving readers to wonder whether she played any role in his recovery — or, if she did, whether Hamilton simply had no interest in complicating his dragon-lady portrait.)

Economics Books by Robert H. Frank

New York Times Book Review:By Daniel Gross

In his new book “Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class,” [Cornell Economics] Professor [Robert H.] Frank deftly updates the argument for our current gilded age. The rise of an overclass, he convincingly argues, is indirectly affecting the quality of life of the rest of the population — and not in a good way....

Frank urges fellow economists to look at numbers and data in relative terms, not absolute ones. ...The desire to avoid such relative deprivation drives consumption in a range of goods, especially those that Frank calls “positional goods” — things like housing and cars, in which differences in quality and size are readily visible. In buying bigger homes, faster computers and more powerful backyard grills, people are driven by the desire to be a part of a community and to keep up with the Joneses. ...

What does this societywide arms race for goods have to do with income inequality? Frank trots out sobering data. Between 1949 and 1979, the rising tide of the American economy lifted all boats more or less equally. In fact, the incomes of the bottom 80 percent grew more rapidly than the incomes of the top 1 percent, and those of the bottom 20 percent grew most rapidly of all. But since 1979, gains have flowed disproportionately to top earners. In an economy where the wealthy set the norms for consumption and people at every rung strain to maintain the consumption of those just above them, that spells trouble. In today’s arms race, the top 1 percent are armed to the teeth and everybody else is scavenging for ammunition. ...

The end result? Frank methodically presents data showing that the typical American now works more, saves less, commutes longer and borrows more to maintain what he or she views as an appropriate standard of living.

Oh, and it’s getting worse. Frank notes that “many of the forces that have been causing inequality to grow seem to be gathering steam.” Because the gains have been so lopsided — the richest 1 percent have seen their share of national income rise from 8.2 percent in 1980 to 17.4 percent in 2005 — even the merely rich are having to overextend themselves just to keep up. “As incomes continue to grow at the top and stagnate elsewhere, we will see even more of our national income devoted to luxury goods, the main effect of which will be to raise the bar that defines what counts as luxury.”

Frank’s elegant solution? A progressive consumption tax that would discourage those at the top from spending more, thus lowering the bar. ...

It's all our fault? How does that go?

The Road to Rightville - New York Times Book Review: By Stephen Metcalf

...In short, I am white, privileged, middle-aged and boring. But one thing I am not, and never will be, is a conservative. The recent essay anthology “Why I Turned Right: Leading Baby Boom Conservatives Chronicle Their Political Journeys” (Threshold Editions, $23) has given us liberals a chance to think about why, even in our calcifying stodginess, American conservatism remains a nonstarter for us, a stack of loyalty oaths we’d never be tempted to sign. ...

As reasons for choosing one political affiliation over another, this is up there with “I am as God made me.” As if to drive home the point, Starr, the deputy editor of The Weekly Standard, quotes the British poet Philip Larkin. Larkin the poet was an artist of the first rank, but Larkin the man was an infamously small-minded reactionary. He once told an interviewer, “I suppose I identify the right with certain virtues and the left with certain vices. All very unfair, no doubt.” These essays are Larkinesque, but with all the heavily qualifying sardonicism stricken out. The left is knee-jerk and borderline depraved; the right is freethinking and decent. All very fair, no doubt. Lay this down as your given and the comforting solecisms flow forth unregulated. When the left is being idealistic, it is naïve, utopian, technocratic and meddling. When the right is being idealistic, it is idealistic. ...

As a sales pitch, the essays in “Why I Turned Right” are mostly a dud. But they offer a tantalizing clue as to how handsomely financed “fellows” at corporate-backed think tanks (a description that fits eight of the 13 contributors) manage to connect so unfailingly with a mass audience. From the evidence of this volume, their righteous anger at liberalism is not cynical. Not at all. Conservative pundit-intellectuals have locked into a magical frequency, one that remains occult to the left, connects with a large segment of the viewing and reading public, and comes from someplace very sincere. ...academia, or more properly the staggeringly uniform and unforgiving creed of ideological correctness against which almost every one of these writers sooner or later set his face.”

Young people tend to be politically unthinking, and liberal arts professors tend to be arrested young people. But many undergraduates, encountering the towering stupidity of college radicalism, tenured and otherwise, chose to be conservative, where conservative meant deferential to the past, appropriately awed by greatness, calm, courteous, skeptical and cautious. As Talleyrand immortally put it, “Above all, no zeal.” ... For them the primal scene of revulsion at the liberal mind-set stays forever fresh. “By virtue of its one-sidedness and extremism,” Stanley Kurtz writes, “the academy serves as a key generator of our polarized political and cultural battles.”

Here we near the answer to our riddle: how privileged college graduates, while fronting for the interests of corporations and the rich, speak the language of angry populism, and with such depth of conviction. ... “If high school had been an ape colony, we would have been those antisocial unattached males lingering on the fringes, envying the dominant males with their mates.”

To be genuinely humiliated is to know how to tap into the humiliations of others. Rejecting tout court a culture of cool that prevails against him, a certain sort of person turns to campus politics. Because these conservatives were, by and large, low-status males (or the feminism-disdaining women who loved them) in high school and college, they know instinctively how to connect with the culturally dispossessed. ...

Review: Body of Work

New York Times: Abigail Zuger, M.D.

Body of Work
Meditations on Mortality From the Human Anatomy Lab. By Christine Montross.

It is not easy to write a book about the first year of medical school — not a book anyone would want to read. The usual basics covered in that year’s curriculum are so very basic (cells, molecules and electrical circuits) that students spend much of the year in the library, memorizing facts and grumbling.

Except, of course, for the long hours they spend in gross anatomy laboratory, also a staple of the first-year curriculum. There, every single complicated emotion anyone has ever enunciated about the practice of medicine roars into the open so reliably it is surprising no one has come up with Christine Montross’s idea before. Dr. Montross, a recent medical graduate, has tethered an earnest and readable reflection on the process of becoming a doctor to the methodical dissection of a human cadaver, the first of all too many professional initiation rites.

In the last few years, some of the mystery has been stripped from this particular piece of medical education, thanks to the entrepreneurs behind the traveling exhibition “Bodies” and hundreds of anonymous citizens of China. ...But there is still a world of difference between observing the results of a dissection and personally wielding the scalpel. Medical students generally spend months hunched over a single body once belonging to a generous soul whose name they never learn, but whose intimate medical history they slowly unearth. They use not the miserably fallible tools of the real doctor, but their own two hands. It is the first and the last time most doctors ever see the normal and the abnormal intertwined from head to toe, in three dimensions and shades of beige and gray. ...

And underlying it all is the eternal paradox of medicine: the doctor and the patient who are at once identical and opposite. Before the students dissect out a structure, they instinctively feel for the landmarks on their own bodies. And yet, they cannot identify too closely with their cadavers, or with their patients in years to come, or they will become paralyzed by emotion. ...

By the same token, though, who better to describe the strange terrain between doctor and patient, dissector and cadaver, us and them, than someone actually crossing that no-man’s land? In a few years, Dr. Montross will be on the other side, never to return. That is when she will realize that, as terrifying and humbling it may be to cut up a human body who reminds you of your grandmother, the experience pales beside that of trying to heal a living version, smiling and fully clothed.

Did The Times Betray Harry Potter Fans?

So maybe this is a cultural phenomenon not to be ignored, and maybe not everyone shares my high opinion of Clark Hoyt, at least when he takes on Harry Potter:
Did New York Times Blog:

“I think it’s important to remember that there was never a contract or an agreement between The Times and Rowling or her publisher.”

That does NOT give you right to be so disrespectful to Jo Rowling or her fans. I would have thought that a paper, like the New York Times, would have been able to use their common sense to realise how big this is; you’re doing nothing but embarrass yourselves. You’re proving that you’re no different from the vermin out there, trying to get their name in the headlines for selling the book early. So many papers look up the New York Times, but you’re just sinking lower and lower when you disrespect Jo Rowling and her fans. Stop trying to be the top at everything; have some compassion and sympathy; have some damn respect and patience.— Posted by Kelsi

*******************

I sent the below email to both the NYT and the Baltimore Sun,

Dear Sir or Madam,

The early publication of Michiko Kakutani’s review of ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’ provides a sad example of the state of American journalism. When a formally respected newspaper like the New York Times stoops to publishing articles that the notoriously uninhibited British press restrain themselves from publishing I can only conclude that the paper is no longer worth reading. I wish that I was a subscriber so that I had the pleasure of canceling my subscription, since I am not I will simply refrain from reading anything published in your online offering.

I hope that an apology is forthcoming to all the children of America and the world.

Serious consideration should be given to the dismissal of Michiko Kakutani, Rick Lyman, and anyone else at the Times that participated in this decision.

Not as Respectfully as before,

NormH

The Times sent me this link.

I consider Mr. Hoyt comments above as yet more evidence that the Times does not get it. In an age when newspapers are struggleing for marketshare against the internet news sources the NYT has managed to alienate a substantial number of online veiwers. The comments by Mr. Hoyt confirm to me my evaluation that the NYT is no longer worth reading. I can not consider it a source of trustworthy news if it can not be trusted with our (and their) children’s dreams. A long, long way from the New York Sun’s “Yes Virginia…”

*****************

What a disappointment to see that the NYT has stooped to the scoff-worthy level of prematurely publishing Katutani’s tasteless review to garner attention ahead of other book reviewers. After reading the review, I was reminded of another NYT article lamenting the early release of movie reviews, as film magazines and newspapers calculatingly publish their articles on Spiderman, Die Hard, and of course - the fifth Harry Potter movie - well in advance of the movies’ release dates. From that July 4th article, “…The News and The Post are blatant examples of the explosion of the old gentlemen’s agreement by which the Hollywood studios screened movies early for critics, and the critics held their reviews until opening day.”

Now, the New York Times should be included along with The Daily News and The Post as not just a blatant but also a singular, shameful example of a newspaper exploding the muggles’ agreement by which we respect both Rowling’s and her readers’ desire to let Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows unfold its mysteries as we read it. NOT as we read some second-rate review by a critic whose Wikipedia entry is only as long as it is due to the stink she’s caused over her most recent appalling contribution to the NYTimes.

I actually took it upon myself to complete the painful task - more painful than Harry’s cheerful task of defeating Voldemort, I’d wager - of reading Katutani’s two other equally bad reviews of the previous Harry Potter books. Is Katutani incapable of writing a thoughtful and incisive book review without a self-indulgent, gleeful rambling of the book’s main plot points? Is she unable to come up with a tasteful and clever way to reveal her own musings on the book without spoiling it for the rest of us? All of her reviews sound like uninspired, elementary school book reports, as she plods her way through “and then this happens”, “and then that happens”, “oh, did i mention? this happens back there too”.

And Mr. Lyman, defending this travesty? Have you not been reading your OWN newspaper’s articles about the hype and secrecy surrounding the series, and how many fans would prefer to keep it a secret until 12:01am, July 21st? This isn’t just any book, this isn’t just any book release – this is the conclusion of ten years of imagination, mystery, and simply put – pure fun! And you’ve had a hand in trying to ruin it.

I also see that both Mr. Lyman and Mr. Hoyt have taken care to emphasize that Katutani’s review was highly positive and “praised the HP series”. Puh-lease! J. K. Rowling – and all of us HP fans – don’t need someone else to praise this book. We certainly don’t need a writer like Katutani to stamp it approved! We know the series, we know Rowling’s work, and we love it all. And because we do, we want to get it straight from the source – this Saturday!

Oh, and lastly – Ms. Katutani, please try reading your old reviews and making your later ones just a little different and, say, original? I am shocked that NYT editors find it acceptable that you mooch off your own old, crappy articles to write your new, crappier articles, but not all of us are fooled. So please take your BA in English and your Pulitzer-Prize money and go buy yourself a thesaurus:

from Katutani’s review of Order of the Phoenix: “This Harry Potter is less Prince Hal than a budding Henry V; less the callow boy in ‘’The Sword in the Stone'’ and more of the young King Arthur.”

from her review of Half-Blood Prince: “It is a novel that pulls together dozens of plot strands from previous volumes, underscoring how cleverly and carefully J. K. Rowling has assembled this giant jigsaw puzzle of an epic.”

from the latest review that has sparked my utter disdain for Katutani and the paper that sponsors her: “…and in this volume he is clearly more Henry V than Prince Hal, more King Arthur than young Wart…” - “…Ms. Rowling has fitted together the jigsaw-puzzle pieces of this long undertaking with Dickensian ingenuity and ardor”

We get it, Katutani! Harry has matured - clearly, your writing hasn’t. J. K. Rowling is a master of plot twists and suspension, a thorough thinker and an excellent writer - clearly, you are neither.

— Posted by interested reader

*********************

Hem, Hem,
Dear Death Eaters at the NY Times:
Your paper and the author of the book review deserve to be sued. Representatives clearly need to be arrested and thrown in Azkaban and tortured into a state worse than death by Dementors. Or better yet, a Cruciatus Curse should be placed upon all of those involved in the publishing of this review until you’ve come to your senses and apologized.
What was the point? Influenced by the Malfoys? Were you sniggering in your offices at the thought of gettting a scoop? You should be ashamed of yourselves.
I agree with P. Mihalick. Apologize. You were wrong. Voldemort must be your new editor.

— Posted by Dolores Umbridge

...and 300+ more, so far, with not many going the opposite way.

Spoiler alert!

New York Times:

And as you can see from my first memory of the cinema, which was also my first act of criticism, I’m not above ruining an ending for others. I’m that terrible thing, the film critic armed with spoilers who isn’t afraid to use them.

I wouldn’t dare unmask the secrets in the movie “A History of Violence” out of respect for the artistry of David Cronenberg and the integrity of his booby-trapped plot, but there isn’t a single frame of “The Number 23” I wouldn’t mock in great, guiltless detail for the simple reason that I find it extremely silly. A spoiler requires something to spoil and someone to take offense at the spoiling, and I’m confident that my readership does not include humorless scholars of the Joel Schumacher oeuvre.

To spoil or not to spoil involves larger questions about the role of the critic, the needs of the reader and the changes to both caused by the scale, speed and outlaw spirit of Web-based commentary. ...

Reviewing a marginal art film in the pages of an alternative weekly presents a specific set of problems, but the same issues arise for the book reviewer of a newspaper or an essayist for Artforum: Who is the audience and what are their expectations? How do I best convey what they need to know? Does the work of other critics modify what I can “safely” discuss? Am I writing for those who already know the work or am I attempting to cultivate a new audience? How long should a work be available to the public before the question of spoilers is irrelevant?

It’s silly to insist that the critic never spoil. In practice, spoilers can be irresponsible, motivated by laziness, vindictiveness or snark, but if the ambition to inform the reader outweighs the need to protect them, then spoilers are warranted on principle. The integrity of the critic doesn’t revolve around whether or not they’re willing to spoil, but why they chose to do so. ...

Our obsession with spoilers has a diminishing effect, reducing popular criticism to a kind of glorified consumer reporting and the audience to babies. People outraged by spoilers should avoid all reviews before going to the movies or reading the book they’ve waited so long for, because the fact is all criticism spoils, no matter how scrupulous. ...
Nathan Lee is a film critic for The Village Voice.

This is probably as close as I will come to wading into the Harry Potter affair. I haven't read the books, my kids are older and out of the house (we now discuss Supremem Court opinions...), and I don't know enough to have an informed view of the books, or the cultural phenomenon. (One feature of my aging, and perhaps my sense of finitude: I've decided to let some cultural phenomena, even large ones, float on by, without my attention.) I guess I am prepared to venture this far: It's good that lots of people are reading (one of my strong biases), and caring and talking about what they read (yet another). Sorry to be so apodictic on such matters.

A compelling review of Hillary Rodham Clinton Bios...

New York Times Book Review: By JENNIFER SENIOR

...But it’s Bernstein who ultimately makes the sharper, more lasting impression, despite the soft-focus portrait of the junior senator from New York on his cover. While he plows some of the same emotional terrain as previous Hillary biographers — notably Gail Sheehy in “Hillary’s Choice” — his book holds together as a piece of writing, and he keeps the psychobabble to a merciful minimum. He also attempts to write a genuine biography, describing and interpreting the life Hillary has led and the varieties of forces that shaped her. ...

“By the time Hillary had reached her teens,” Bernstein writes, “her father seemed defined by his mean edges — he had almost no recognizable enthusiasms or pretense to lightness as he descended into continuous bullying, ill humor, complaint and dejection.” Much has been made of Hillary’s marital stoicism over the years. It’s one of the reasons people distrust her. But it’s possible she comes by it honestly...

[Bernstein's] book suggests that it isn’t his executive-scandal bona fides that make him a qualified Hillary biographer; it’s his bona fides as a lousy husband. Like Bill Clinton, Bernstein carried on a very public affair while married to a formidable, high-profile woman (see Nora Ephron’s “Heartburn” for further details), and one of the perverse strengths of his book is his intuitive understanding — a sinner’s lament, really — of what happens to a proud woman when she’s intimately betrayed and publicly humiliated. The blockbuster news item to come out of Bernstein’s book was that Hillary contemplated running for governor of Arkansas in 1989, when she discovered her husband was thinking about abandoning his post and his family for another woman. (Here, the priceless quotation from the long-suffering Clinton aide Betsey Wright: “Bill, you’re crazy if you think everybody in this office is oblivious to the fact that you’re having an affair. You’re acting like an idiot.”) But the impulse to run for governor didn’t occur to Hillary in a vacuum. It was the clear product of years of pent-up frustrations, thwarted ambitions, sacrifice and injured pride....

Yet Hillary Rodham always knew that tying her fate to Bill Clinton was a risky proposition. It’s what gives her story the whiff of Greek tragedy (and bathos). Certainly she was smitten with him for all the reasons we know — his like-minded political vision, his charisma, his enthusiasm in the face of her own force — but she also knew he had an ungovernable tomcatting problem and a mystical attachment to Arkansas, a backwater for career women. For years, he asked her to marry him, and for years, with tons of job options before her, she wavered....

Considering these charged circumstances of risk, humiliation and sacrifice, one can see how Hillary Clinton would become only more invested in her marriage — and the choices she’d made — rather than less, especially when coupled with the stronger and more difficult aspects of her character, which Bernstein documents in unvarnished detail: perfectionism, toughness, secrecy, oversensitivity, a sanctimony born of intelligence and boomerdom and Methodist do-gooder conviction. Another woman with less at stake both emotionally and intellectually might have left, but she, teeth gnashed and head high, stuck it out. “She doesn’t look at her life as a series of crises but rather a series of battles,” an unnamed former aide tells Bernstein. Bob Boorstin, another former aide, puts it less flatteringly: “I find her to be among the most self-righteous people I’ve ever known in my life.” [So much for Boorstin!]...

The trouble is that Hillary didn’t always know how to wield power gracefully. Her tin-eared staffing decisions led to early mini-scandals like the firings at the White House travel office, and her secretive, uncompromising attitude toward health care contributed heavily to the first upending of the Democratic majority in the House in 40 years. On a retreat with Senate Democrats, she rebuffed Bill Bradley’s request for a more realistic bill, declaring the White House would “demonize” anyone who stood in its way. “That was it for me,” Bradley tells Bernstein, “in terms of Hillary Clinton.” ...

By the book’s end, this seems incontrovertibly true, as does his more damning observation that “with the notable exception of her husband’s libidinous carelessness, the most egregious errors, strategic and tactical, of the Bill Clinton presidency, particularly in its infancy, were traceable to Hillary.”...And in public office, she embodies the very quality she could never show when someone else held the reins: the ability to compromise. In her story lies a parable: Sanctimony and rigidity are the desperate weapons of the minority party. Had she embraced her inner executive from the start, she might never have become her own worst enemy....

Gerth and Van Natta do point out in their introduction that Hillary’s stubborn refusals to admit she might have made a mistake repeatedly get her into trouble. Her world seems a lot like Bushworld in this way, they shrewdly note, right down to the secretive loyal coterie of advisers. But their initial explanation for Hillary’s secrecy and defensiveness — “She feared that admitting a mistake would arm her enemies and undermine her carefully cultivated image as an extremely bright person who yearns only to do good for her fellow citizens” — never evolves into something more nuanced....From these observations, we can’t get a more enlightened sense of what kind of president Hillary might be.

Bernstein’s book gives us a better clue. She may live among loyalists, just like Bush. But you get the sense that she’d be almost the reverse of W. in 2000: polarizing at election time, but consensus-seeking once she got into office. ...

As I started to read this review, I was surprised that the NYT Book Review had not assigned it to a "bigger name." But the review, I think, is terrific: vivid and pointed, much more so than others I have seen, and than tv appearances by the various authors. The portrait of Hillary that emerges (perhaps exaggerated by my selection of excerpts) is more coherent and compelling than I have seen elsewhere. I speak as a metaphoric "spurned lover": my degree of admiration for (and perhaps identification with) Hillary during the 1992 campaign could not have been greater, nor could my initial excitement as she took on the health reform portfolio early in the Clinton Administration. It would be difficult to overstate my disappointment in the results, or in Hillary's performance since.

I also share a not inconsiderable identification with some of her failings.

Depth Psycho-Bio: King Herod on a shrink's couch

Haaretz : By Magen Broshi

'King Herod: A Persecuted Persecutor: A Case Study in Psychohistory and Psychobiography' by Aryeh Kasher, in collaboration with Eliezer Witztum (translated from the Hebrew by Karen Gold), Walter de Gruyter, 514 pages, $193

Now that the world has heard about the discovery of Herod's tomb at Herodium, it also has an extraordinary book about him to read. Authors Prof. Aryeh Kasher, a historian from Tel Aviv University, and Prof. Eliezer Witztum, a psychiatrist from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, have produced a carefully researched and up-to-date historical and psychological analysis of Herod - a man of many exploits but also a raving lunatic. A meaningful analysis of the psyche of a historical character is not always possible, but thanks to the Roman Jewish historian Josephus (one of whose sources was Nicholas of Damascus, who tutored Herod's sons and served as his adviser), we have an abundance of details that seem to be reliable. ...

Herod was not only the greatest builder in the history of Eretz Israel, but one of the greatest builders in human history. He holds at least three architectural world records...Herod was shrewd and clever, but also a cruel tyrant with no moral compunctions to speak of. His success depended largely on the support of the emperor, Augustus, who valued Herod's unwavering loyalty with good reason (although he reportedly said it was "better to be Herod's pig than his son"). That peace reigned in his day was also a major factor. ...

That Herod was mentally ill has long been recognized by historians, but no one has ever made an exact diagnosis. A king who murders three of his sons, his beloved Hasmonean wife, Mariamne (whose death sent him into a deep depression), and countless other members of his close circle, is obviously not in his right mind. ...

From adolescence Herod showed signs of paranoia, exhibited in pathological suspiciousness. He trusted no one (apart from his quarrelsome sister) and had delusions that people were plotting against him. He suffered from extreme mood swings that became progressively worse over the years. His paranoia increased, too: Not only did he execute his bodyguards, servants and courtiers, but also his three sons (the last one five days before his own death), his brother-in-law, his mother-in-law and his adored wife. Some of his victims were cruelly tortured before their deaths, testifying to sadistic tendencies. No wonder the people, and presumably many of his close associates, feared and hated him. ...

Readers have the right to ask if there is any justification for a new book. The answer is a resounding yes: Kasher and Witztum break new ground with psychohistorical and psychobiographical analyses that explain many of Herod's actions. Moreover, over the past 50 years our knowledge has been enriched by close examination of the writings of Josephus and many archaeological findings. During this time, large-scale digs were carried out all over the country, from Masada and the Banias to Jericho and Caesarea, which have added greatly to our understanding.

The Names We Choose or Ignore

New York Times:

“We have to decide what our civic values are,” Professor Greene said by phone from the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, where he is chairman of the Department of Education Reform. “To decide what they are, we have to talk about them, and it’s inevitable that people will disagree about what those values are or should be.”

“If we try to avoid that conflict, we are avoiding deliberating about what values we wish to convey,” he said. As a result, “we may fail to teach any desirable values at all.”...

After examining records in seven states — New Jersey being the closest to New York — the professor found that schools are increasingly being named not for people but rather for animals, lakes, hills and other features of nature. The trend in those states is so pronounced that Professor Greene is confident it is a nationwide phenomenon.

Historical figures have taken it on the chin, especially American presidents. ...Of course, one could say that some presidents richly earn the low regard in which they are held. But Professor Greene’s larger point is that cities express communal values by naming schools, bridges or roads after people. When they settle on a name like Owl Creek, which was what Jefferson Elementary School in Fayetteville morphed into last year, they are essentially saying nothing.

Local officials often find it safer to stick with mesas and cactuses. That way, they avert potentially messy conflicts...But it is a cop-out, he suggests.

“Even naming schools after seriously flawed people can be instructional because we at least learn about those failings,” ...“In general, we prefer to honor people who are worthy of emulation,” he said. “But even if we learn of unsavory aspects of people’s lives, we can also learn from their mistakes.” ...

Fair enough. Still, one can understand why some cities find comfort in a natural object like a mesa. Unlike many politicians and other public figures, mesas are mostly on the level.

Hard to imagine tis book review might have any local relevance to Madison, WI.

Flower Children

New York Times: By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Coming-of-age literature is filled with characters who experience themselves as outsiders — as loners, nerds, misunderstood artists or uncool, uptight geeks. In her keenly observed novel “Flower Children,” Maxine Swann depicts four children who worry that their hippie parents’ unconventional lifestyle has put them outside the mainstream of ordinary life.

Their parents’ laissez-faire approach to raising children... all make Lu, Maeve, Tuck and Clyde yearn to fit in. At school, they’re surprised at first by all the rules but quickly embrace them:

“They learn not to swear. They get prizes for obedience, for following the rules down to the last detail. They’re delighted by these rules, these arbitrary lines that regulate behavior and mark off forbidden things.”...

[Author Maxine Swann] captures the incongruities of the 1970s counterculture as seen from the point of view of a young child, the shifting attitudes the narrator and her three siblings take toward the adult world as they slip-slide from childhood into adolescence, and the incalculable ways in which the passage of time colorizes the past....

Michael Sandel's "The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering "

New York Times Book Review: By William Saletan

...That’s the way ethicists talk: things are good or bad, human or inhuman. The book’s subtitle encapsulates this project: “Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering.” But genetic engineering is too big for ethics. It changes human nature, and with it, our notions of good and bad. It even changes our notions of perfection. The problem with perfection in the age of self-transformation isn’t that it’s bad. The problem is that it’s incoherent. ...

Opponents of eugenic technologies usually complain that they’re unsafe, coercive, exploitative, nontherapeutic or unavailable to the poor. Sandel rebuts these objections, pointing out that they’re selectively applied and can be technically resolved. His deeper worry is that some kinds of enhancement violate the norms embedded in human practices. ...

To defend the old ways against the new, Sandel needs something deeper: a common foundation for the various norms in sports, arts and parenting. He thinks he has found it in the idea of giftedness. ...

Why should we accept our lot as a gift? Because the loss of such reverence would change our moral landscape. “If genetic engineering enabled us to override the results of the genetic lottery,” Sandel worries, we might lose “our capacity to see ourselves as sharing a common fate.” Moreover, “if bioengineering made the myth of the ‘self-made man’ come true, it would be difficult to view our talents as gifts for which we are indebted rather than achievements for which we are responsible.”...

But Sandel’s egalitarian fatalism already feels a bit 20th-century. The older half of me shares his dismay that some parents feel blamed for carrying babies with Down syndrome to term. But my younger half cringes at his flight from the “burden of decision” and “explosion of responsibility” that come with our expanding genetic power. Given a choice between a world of fate and blamelessness and a world of freedom and responsibility, I’ll take the latter. Such a world may be, as Sandel says, too daunting for the humans of today. But not for the humans of tomorrow.

Sandel is a very bright guy, and I am sympathetic to his project to bring "left communitarian" norms into bioethics. My guess is that most professional bioethicists, of more liberal/libertarian and/or utilitarian stripes and primary commitments to the value of individual autonomy, will be impatient with and unpersuaded by an effort of this type. I look forward to the book.

Very sobering thoughts on Africa

New York Times Book Review: By NIALL FERGUSON

[Paul] Collier’s [The Bottom Billion] is a better book than either Sachs’s or Easterly’s for two reasons. First, its analysis of the causes of poverty is more convincing. Second, its remedies are more plausible.

[A former World Bank economist like Easterly, Collier shares his onetime colleague’s aversion to what he calls the “headless heart” syndrome — meaning the tendency of people in rich countries to approach Africa’s problems with more emotion than empirical evidence. It was Collier who pointed out that nearly two-fifths of Africa’s private wealth is held abroad, much of it in Swiss bank accounts.]

There are, he suggests, four traps into which really poor countries tend to fall. The first is civil war. Nearly three-quarters of the people in the bottom billion, Collier points out, have recently been through, or are still in the midst of, a civil war. Such wars usually drag on for years and have economically disastrous consequences....Civil war, it turns out, has nothing much to do with the legacy of colonialism, or income inequality, or the political repression of minorities. Three things turn out to increase the risk of conflict: a relatively high proportion of young, uneducated men; an imbalance between ethnic groups, with one tending to outnumber the rest; and a supply of natural resources like diamonds or oil, which simultaneously encourages and helps to finance rebellion. ...

Yet this is a minor handicap compared with Trap No. 4: bad governance. Collier has no time for those who still seek to blame Africa’s problems on European imperialists. As he puts it bluntly: “President Robert Mugabe must take responsibility for the economic collapse in Zimbabwe since 1998, culminating in inflation of over 1,000 percent a year.” ...

If these four things are the main causes of extreme poverty in Africa and elsewhere, what can the rich countries do? ... Nor, Collier argues, can we rely on our standard remedies of aid or trade, without significant modifications. As a general rule, aid tends to retard the growth of the labor-intensive export industries that are a poor country’s most effective engine of growth. And much aid gets diverted into military spending. As for emergency relief, all too often it arrives in the wrong quantity at the wrong time, flooding into postconflict zones when no adequate channels exist to allocate it.

Trade, too, is not a sufficient answer. The problem is that Asia has eaten Africa’s lunch when it comes to exploiting low wage costs. Once manufacturing activity started to relocate to Asia, African economies simply got left behind. ...

This, however, is not the most heretical of Collier’s prescriptions. Reflecting on the tendency of postconflict countries to lapse back into civil war, he argues trenchantly for occasional foreign interventions in failed states. What postconflict countries need, he says, is 10 years of peace enforced by an external military force. If that means infringing national sovereignty, so be it. ...

In the end, he pins more hope on the growth of international law than on global policing. Perhaps the best help we can offer the bottom billion, he suggests, comes in the form of laws and charters: laws requiring Western banks to report deposits by kleptocrats, for example, or charters to regulate the exploitation of natural resources, to uphold media freedom and to prevent fiscal fraud. We may not be able to force corrupt governments to sign such conventions. But simply by creating them we give reformers in Africa some extra leverage.

Very grim. Alternatives? Is Jeffrey Sachs convincing (or fairly portrayed in this full review)?

Pope to Neusner: Go Girl!

Haaretz :

In his new book, 'Jesus of Nazareth,' the pope devotes no fewer than 18 pages to a deep theological discussion that he has carried on with Neusner. The headline of an article about the book in the Catholic News Service says it all: 'After saints, most-quoted author in pope?s new book is a U.S. rabbi.'

This is no small thing. Judeo-Christian dialogues in which the head of the Catholic Church takes part personally are rare indeed. In fact, since the Middle Ages, when the Church, for its own reasons, organized theological debates - known as disputations - between Christian and Jewish clergy (the identity of the winning side was, of course, known in advance), no such public, theological exchange has taken place between Judaism and Christianity. ...

The roots of the theological dialogue between the American rabbi-professor and the German cardinal lie in a provocative book Neusner published in 1993, bearing the presumptuous title "A Rabbi Talks with Jesus." In that book, Neusner imagines himself present among the crowd that gathered at Capernaum, above the Sea of Galilee, to listen to the charismatic Nazarene. He then proceeds to pick apart Jesus? teachings there, and find holes in them from the viewpoint of a practicing Jew.

Neusner says that his goal in that book was to explain why, if he had been present at the Sermon on the Mount, "I would not have become a follower of Jesus." The reason is that the criterion Jesus himself lays down - "Think not that I have come to destroy the law, or the prophets. I have come not to destroy but to fulfill" (Matthew 5:17) - according to which the sermon he delivers on the mount gives him a status equal to that of Moses, is in contradiction to the Torah, Neusner explains.

He argues that Jesus contradicts his own declaration, and of course the Torah, by forgoing the sanctity of the Sabbath and placing himself above the commandment to honor one's parents. Beyond this, Neusner views Jesus? formulation (invoked insistently in the Sermon on the Mount), "You have heard that it was said [in the Torah] ... But I say unto you ..." as the most grievous sin of all: Jesus puts himself above the Torah and, it follows, above God. ...

Newsner says that if he had succeeded in the mission of that book, Christians would have adopted Judaism. "That won't happen overnight, but it will happen at the End of Days," Neusner says, with a faint smile in the corner of his mouth. "The Torah says that if one treats it as a criterion for truth - as Christianity and Islam do - Judaism is bound to triumph."...

Ratzinger, it turns out, was deeply impressed by what Neusner had to say, and not in the least offended by the frontal attack on the founder of Christianity. On the contrary: After reading the manuscript of "A Rabbi Talks with Jesus," he sent Neusner his compliments, which were used to publicize the book. "He wrote that it was the best book written within the framework of the Judeo-Christian dialogue in the past 10 years and he recommended it to his students when he taught at the Vatican. That was very generous of him," Neusner notes. At the same time, he adds, the impact at the time of his book - which was translated into Russian, German, Swedish, Italian and Polish - is nothing like what it is now, after it has been so extensively quoted by the pope in his new work.

Like Neusner, Pope Benedict XVI also has no fear of confrontation.... In his new book, the pope terms Neusner "a great Jewish scholar" and adds that the rabbi's arguments aided him in his personal search for the answers embedded in the Scriptures. Neusner, according to the pope, is conducting the theological dialogue "with profound respect for the Christian faith."

Reading Judas, by Pagels and King

New York Times Book Review: By STEPHEN PROTHERO

One of the genuine puzzles of early Christianity, and of much subsequent Christian history, concerns who is to blame for Jesus’ death. The Gospels make it plain that it was God’s plan, and that Jesus carried out this divine plan in order to save human beings from the wages of sin. And yet Judas and the Jews (to whom the word “Judas” is etymologically linked) are blamed for setting this divine plan in motion. As Pagels and King note, there is something amiss here. How can Judas be branded evil for carrying out God’s plan? Is his infamous kiss, depicted on the dust jacket of “Reading Judas,” really a betrayal if God had the crucifixion in mind from before Jesus’ birth?

Pagels and King do an excellent job explaining why, according to the author of this renegade gospel, mainstream Christianity has gotten it so wrong for so long. ...

On the perennial question of death and the afterlife, Pagels and King explain that whereas other early Christians affimed the doctrine of bodily resurrection, the Christians to whom this gospel is addressed believed in the immortal spirit. Here the body is suspect. Jesus is not reborn in the flesh but simply appears. The eternal life he offers is lived in the spirit alone, and it is won more through Jesus’ teachings than through his sacrifice on the cross. ...

[Thomas] Jefferson['s] Bible, as this anti-supernatural Scripture is called, concludes abruptly, as Jesus is being laid in the tomb, without a hint of the Resurrection. The Gospel of Judas ends even more abruptly — before Jesus begins his trek to Calvary. Like Jefferson’s Bible, it scoffs at the notion that God would sacrifice his son to atone for the world’s sins. It too depicts Jesus as a teacher rather than a savior...

Pagels and King massage the multicultural sensibilities of their readers by opining that the Gospel of Judas represents a “sharp, dissenting voice” against the “single, static, universal system of beliefs” of official Christianity. Preaching to the “spiritual but not religious” choir, they tell us that, like other noncanonical texts they have championed elsewhere, this gospel aims to “encourage believers to seek God within themselves, with no mention of churches, much less of clergy.”...

The Gospel of Judas denounces this cult of the martyr as “hideous folly” and calls for religion “to renounce violence as God’s will and purpose for humanity.” In the process it offers a prophetic “no,” according to Pagels and King, to “our world of polarized religious violence.”

Any critique of martyrdom will sound plausible in light of 9/11... But the particular combination offered here — the paean to diversity, the suspicion of organized religion, the denunciation of violence in the name of peace — sounds too suspiciously close to contemporary multicultural pieties to be taken as ancient gospel.

The Years of Extermination by Saul Friedländer

New York Times Book Review: By RICHARD J. EVANS

... “The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945” is no ordinary academic book. True, [author Saul] Friedländer seems to have read virtually every printed source and secondary work on his vast subject in English, German and French. His judgments are scrupulous and levelheaded. And he treats the historical controversies that have raged around so many of the topics he covers with untiring fair-mindedness. He writes without a trace of polemic or of facile retrospective moralizing. The book meticulously satisfies every requirement of professional historical writing.

What raises “The Years of Extermination” to the level of literature, however, is the skilled interweaving of individual testimony with the broader depiction of events. Friedländer never lets the reader forget the human and personal meanings of the historical processes he is describing. By and large, he avoids the sometimes unreliable testimony of memoirs for the greater immediacy of contemporary diaries and letters, though he also makes good use of witness statements at postwar trials. The result is an account of unparalleled vividness and power that reads like a novel. ...

Friedländer is critical of the recent, voluminous literature, mainly by a younger generation of German historians, that attempts to depict the extermination program as the outcome of coldly rational processes of decision-making by administrators, “experts” and officials in the German-occupied areas of Eastern Europe, who decided that the Jews would have to be killed so that the limited food supplies available in the area could go to the Germans, or to make room for German settlers or Germans left homeless by Allied bombing raids. ...

The diaries and letters cited in the book show graphically how even as the prospective Jewish victims began to fear the worst, they continued to hope for the best; only a small minority found their way into hiding or resistance. As for the mass of non-Jewish citizens in Germany and other parts of Europe, indifference was the commonest reaction. Police and other state officials in most occupied countries cooperated willingly in the roundups and deportations; in some parts of Europe, notably Poland, Romania and Croatia, native anti-Semitism made its own brutal contribution to the genocide. ...

In a celebrated exchange with the German historian Martin Broszat many years ago, Friedländer argued that, faced with such events, no historian could or should remain neutral. Born in Prague into a Jewish family in 1932, Friedländer grew up in hiding in France during the war, and his personal history gives him an unusually strong identification with his subject. Broszat, who had spent much of his career compiling or overseeing expert witness reports in German war crimes prosecutions and had a vested interest in preserving the appearance of neutrality, disagreed.

The practical consequences of Friedländer’s stance are apparent: the personal testimonies of Hitler’s Jewish victims create an overwhelming impression of suffering and cast a lurid light on the policies and actions of the Nazis and their helpers. The downside of this is that the experiences of the perpetrators are presented perhaps less fully than they might have been. Their testimony is generally used to describe the conditions they created rather than (with the obvious exception of Hitler himself) to chart their personal beliefs, motives or impressions. The attitudes and behavior of the German people also remain unexplained...

... [A]s a good deal of recent work has shown, the Third Reich’s genocidal policies toward the Jews have to be understood as part of a larger policy aimed at the ethnic reshaping of Europe. Comparisons with these other victims would have made it evident that the Jews occupied a special place in the exterminatory mentality of the Nazis; they were perceived not as a regional obstacle but as a global threat, not as inferior beings like insects but as powerful enemies, whose very existence anywhere was a terrible danger to the future of the German race.

Still, to have broadened the focus too much would have made this already very lengthy and complex book almost unmanageable. Friedländer succeeds in binding together the many different strands of his story with a sure touch. He has written a masterpiece that will endure.

WOW.

Tom Segev's 1967

New York Times Book Review: By Ethan Bronner

The Israelis quickly named the June 1967 event the Six-Day War to echo biblical creation. Like many historical watersheds, its origins and consequences have been intensely analyzed and debated, especially in recent weeks as its 40th anniversary was marked. Mr. Segev illuminates his two jokes with more than 600 pages of social history. His argument, in the end, is this: Anxiety, much of it Holocaust related, was so overpowering that Israel went to war against saber-rattling Egypt and Syria when diplomacy might have sufficed, and the rout of its neighbors caused such irrational exultation in Israel that it foolishly became an occupier, a role that continues to drag it and the region down.

Mr. Segev is part of the new historians of Israel, as they are known, who have challenged what they consider their country’s founding myths, largely with newly released or uncovered archival material. Young (and not-so-young) societies tell heroic stories of themselves, and Israel’s new historians seek to reshape those stories, not only to make them more accurate, but also to help Israelis see themselves as outsiders do and thereby find a way to compromise.

If you are weak and noble and your enemy strong and evil, there is little to discuss. But if it turns out you are more powerful and your neighbor weaker than you had understood, and your actions less high-minded than you believed, you may rethink your next move. ...

“1967” is a fascinating and devastating portrait of a society filled with self-doubt, then suddenly with power and messianic fervor. Missing from the compelling and damning narrative are the Arabs, with their own considerable delusions and failures. It is quite right that the Israeli occupation has been cruel and counterproductive, greatly delaying the chances of peaceful coexistence. It is less clear, however, how the Middle East would have turned out if Israel had restrained itself in 1967. In a region devoid of good government, economic development and individual opportunity, militant Islam could have built its army of the faithful even without Israeli occupation.

Star Search

New York Times Book Review: By RACHEL DONADIO (June 24, 2007)

Over three evenings last month, several dozen writers gathered in the airy sanctuary of Hebrew Union College for a bizarre rite of passage: the Jewish book tour casting call. In a combination of “The Gong Show” and speed-dating, they each had two minutes to pitch their books to the Jewish Book Network, 100 cultural programmers from Jewish community centers, or J.C.C.’s, synagogues and libraries nationwide. An M.C. ruthlessly held up a sign when one minute was up and cheerily announced “on deck” to prepare the next speaker....

With its wild shifts in tone and quality, the annual conference offered a chaotic cross-section of American Jewish life — and of the current state of publishing. Holocaust memoirs vied for time with cookbooks and diet books, books on how to pray and why not to pray, books on motorcycles, punk rock and drug addiction, first novels and graphic novels, nonfiction reportage and novels with soft-porn covers.

But this big game of “Will this play in Peoria?” serves an important purpose. While publishers have scaled back dramatically on book tours, the Jewish Book Network has picked up some of the slack over the past decade, organizing and underwriting multicity gigs. ...

The auditions and centralized tours were the brainchild of Carolyn Starman Hessel, who has become a formidable power in the publishing industry in her 13 years as the director of the Jewish Book Council, which runs the Jewish Book Network. Not only does Hessel persuade authors to “fly from Minneapolis to Houston to Miami in a day and a half,” as the novelist Dara Horn put it, but her tours have also helped kick-start the careers of promising young novelists including Nathan Englander, Myla Goldberg, Nicole Krauss and Jonathan Safran Foer. ...

In addition to doing a tour arranged by his publisher, Nathan Englander was sent by the network on a tour of 30 cities in 28 days to promote his 1999 story collection, “For the Relief of Unbearable Urges.” He said he had two favorite audience questions from the “Hessel tour.” “One woman in Toronto asked if she could relieve my unbearable urges,” he said. “She was young and I was young, but nonetheless, I gave the wrong answer at the time.” Then there was an older woman at a Jewish book fair in Florida. “I was onstage and I said, ‘Yes, ma’am?’ And she said, ‘Why didn’t you shave?’ Why didn’t you shave is such a clear, excellent question.”

Hitchens vs Hitchens on Atheism, and More

From The Daily Mail: By PETER HITCHENS

Am I my brother’s reviewer? A word of explanation is needed here. Some of you may know that I have a brother, Christopher, who disagrees with me about almost everything.

Some of those who read his books and articles also know that I exist, though they often dislike me if so. But in general we inhabit separate worlds – in more ways than one.

He is of the Left, lives in the United States and recently became an American citizen. I am of the Right and, after some years in Russia and America, live in the heart of England. Occasionally we clash in public. ...

Despite the occasional temptation, I have never reviewed any of his books until today. But now, in God Is Not Great, he has written about religion itself, attacking it as a stupid delusion.

This case, I feel, needs an answer. Most of the British elite will applaud, since they see religion as an embarrassing and (worse) unfashionable form of mania.

And I am no less qualified to defend God than Christopher is to attack him, neither of us being experts on the subject. ...

Christopher is an atheist. I am a believer. He once said in public: "The real difference between Peter and myself is the belief in the supernatural.

"I’m a materialist and he attributes his presence here to a divine plan. I can’t stand anyone who believes in God, who invokes the divinity or who is a person of faith."

I don’t feel the same way. I like atheists and enjoy their company, because they agree with me that religion is important.

I liked and enjoyed this book, and recommend it to anybody who is interested in the subject. Like everything Christopher writes, it is often elegant, frequently witty and never stupid or boring.

I also think it is wrong, mostly in the way that it blames faith for so many bad things and gives it no credit for any of the good it may have done.

I think it misunderstands religious people and their aims and desires. And I think it asserts a number of things as true and obvious that are nothing of the sort. ...

Many decades have passed since I fancied the story of Adam and Eve was literal truth, if I ever did. Rather more recently I have realised the great warning against human arrogance that is contained in it, the serpent’s silky promise that if we reject the supposedly foolish, trivial restrictions imposed on us by an interfering, jealous nuisance of a God, then we shall be liberated.

As the serpent promises: "Ye shall be as gods." These may be the most important words in the whole Bible.

Take the enticing satanic advice, and you arrive, quite quickly, at revolutionary terror, at the invention of the atom bomb, at the torture chamber and the building of concentration camps for those unteachable morons who do not share your vision of a just world.

And also you arrive at the idea, embraced by Christopher, that by invading Iraq, you can make the world a better place.

I hesitated about mentioning this. Was it unfair, a jab below the belt? No....

We are in the process – encouraged by Christopher – of abolishing religion, and so of abolishing conscience, too.

It is one of his favourite jibes that a world ruled by faith is like North Korea, a place where all is known and all is ordered.

On the contrary, North Korea is the precise opposite of a land governed by conscience.

It is a country governed by men who do not believe in God or conscience, where nobody can be trusted to make his own choices, and where the State decides for the people what is right and what is wrong.

And it is the ultimate destination of atheist thought.

If you do not worship God, you end up worshipping power, whether it is Kim Jong Il, Leon Trotsky or the military might of George W. Bush. In which case, God help you.

I'm not at all sure I follow that last twist of the argument, but this fraternal debate involving lively minds and pens is most engaging.