Entries associated with the tag "Books":

Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow evidently has the data and he's not afraid to use it. From his new book After the Baby Boomers: How Twenty- and Thirty-Somethings Are Shaping the Future of American Religion:

"...unless religious leaders take younger adults more seriously, the future of American religion is in doubt.... Younger adults are already less actively involved in their congregations than older adults are. Not only this, younger adults are currently less involved than younger adults were a generation ago. The demographics behind this declining involvement also do not bode well for the future. Religious involvement is influenced more by whether people are married, when they get married, whether they have children, and how many children they have than almost anything else. Religious involvement is also shaped by how committed people are to their careers and to their communities. All of these social factors have been changing."

Most of the reviews and blog commentary that I've seen is a direct reaction to this, usually from people who find it worrisome. But as a recovering sociology major, I also enjoyed Wuthnow's takedowns of popular and journalistic thinking about generations:

"...there is simply no evidence that younger adults currently have been decisively shaped by a particular historical event in the same way that the baby boomers were by the Vietnam war or by their parents waiting until after World War II to marry and have children... The other reason for being skeptical of generational language is that popular usages of it strain to draw contrasts with baby boomers, but in doing so are misleading. For instance, one reads in the popular literature that the millennial generation is supposedly defined by an interest in small fellowship groups that meet for prayer and Bible study during the week at churches or in homes. But precisely the same argument was made about baby boomers and, in fact, research has shown that baby boomers did gravitate to these groups." 

Read the whole first chapter here. Wuthnow's own data groupings pay even less respect to the "boomer" vs. Gen X rhetoric. Usually he compares people born between 1953 and 1981 ("younger adults who were between the ages of 21 and 45 in the years from about 1998 to 2002") with those born 1927-1955.

More than one blog commenting on this links to a recent David Brooks column. Not having read the book yet, I'm not sure Wuthnow would care for the association. It's also been reviewed in Christian Century .

Pick up the book for its title, stay for the nuggets inside -- I'm talking about the new anthology co-edited by the unstoppable Mike Davis, Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism. Here's Marco d'Eramo on the Mall of America:

"The mall functions as both avenue and town square. What we see here is a process that has frequently recurred during the course of modernity: a spontaneous preexisting configuration is dismantled or destroyed only to then be reconstructed artificially when the lack of what has been erased or swept away is sufficiently felt."

Or if you already knew that, here's Timothy Mitchell on a perversion of capitalism:

"A second struggling California agribusiness, Cadiz Inc., had taken over Sun World, planning to pay off its debts by transforming it from a company producing crops into a marketing business that would sell its patents and trademarks, including the flagship brand, Superior Seedless grapes, around the world. Unable to make money growing and selling grapes, the company would sell the names of grapes instead." Maybe that's how General Motors will end up.

Sara Lipton on monastery chic: "A weekend in a monastery offers a sanitized simulacrum of the Age of Faith: monks within, no starving peasants without. And values that are pure twenty-first century: freedom of choice, virtue via display, spirituality without social justice." Y'all have a nice century.

The Notebaert Nature Museum is looking for artists to present, perform, or otherwise communicate something about lawns. "What does the lawn mean to you?" writes strategic projects manager Shane DuBow. "Tyranny of the suburbs? Nostalgic recollections of the lawn-mowing business you started in your youth? A metaphor for.... what? We're open to any and all of your inspirations and we've also included some ideas we're looking to assign." Read the whole request for proposals here or here (both PDF).

If you're too literal-minded or too lazy to make their October 31 deadline, you might still enjoy peeking in the new book Lawn People: How Grass, Weeds, and Chemicals Make Us Who We Are by former midwesterner Paul Robbins, now associate professor of geography at the University of Arizona in Tucson. I haven't seen the book, but Robbins's website (scroll down) mentions a counterintuitive finding:

"This research explores the social and economic motivation of lawn owners. Initial conclusions suggest that wealthy well educated people use chemicals most frequently and that people who claim concern for the environment are disproportionately likely to use chemical inputs."

My grandfather worked security at the 1933-34 Chicago world's fair, "A Century of Progress." But until I saw Lisa Schrenk's new book Building a Century of Progress, I had no idea what a non-sinecure that was:

"The start of the extravagant closing ceremony also served as a spontaneous signal for a growing crescendo of carnivalesque hysteria to spin out of control. Hordes of fairgoers began appropriating unique mementos of the magnificent event. In the Halloween-night frenzy, people broke into many of the exhibition pavilions and walked away with furniture, light fixtures, signs, and decorative building details. Not a shred of the sixty-five pennants that lined the Avenue of Flags that day survived. Even shrubs and trees were yanked out of the ground. Guards, many of whom ended the night requiring first aid, did their best to combat the full-scale pillaging. ...Fortunately, most of the damage was to objects that were already scheduled for disposal as part of the planned demolition of the exposition." (page 254)

Schrenk teaches at Norwich University and used to be education director at the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio Foundation. In fairness, her generously illustrated book is more concerned about the Apollonian architecture than the Dionysian society surrounding it. The designers, she writes, sought to create "a distinctively American modern architecture that was clearly relevant to the times." (page 4) Most regular people, however, opted for colonial. Evidently they didn't take to heart the fair's amazing motto: "SCIENCE FINDS -- INDUSTRY APPLIES -- MAN CONFORMS."

Hear from the author yourself Thursday evening 6:30 pm at Roosevelt University ($).

True fact: I learned about the Sci-Fi Lists: Top 100 Sci-Fi Books from a librarian's newsletter, Marylaine Block's Neat New Stuff I Found on the Web This Week (actual title).

The sci-fi list, which claims to be maintained by an Australian wildlife ranger, also has top TV, films, and short fiction. Online voting is allowed, though I couldn't find any way to tell how the votes are counted, or how many votes actually separate different places on the list. So far I've been able to vote two days in a row. The books and short fiction lists actually go 200 deep.

But the fun of these lists is arguing about them. Don't ask me about Orson Scott Card (whose most popular book is currently #2) or Madeleine L'Engle (#37) -- I've never been able to finish anything they wrote. I'm sorry to see that hometown hero Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife (in which the Newberry Library plays a part) just took a dive from #98 to #122. There seem to be a lot of geezers voting here, as only one of the top 100 (Dan Simmons's Ilium) was published in the current century.

Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale comes in #74, which is fine, but nowhere to be found is her equally dystopian Oryx and Crake. And, just to revert to the heart of the classical canon, of course Robert Heinlein's all over the list, and of course Stranger in a Strange Land is his top finisher at #6 -- but why is his next finisher Starship Troopers (#10), a mediocre effort compared to its rough contemporaries The Puppet Masters (#68) and The Door into Summer (#72)?

Although I loved David Marusek's Chicago-set Counting Heads, I can understand why it didn't make the top 200. But where is his brilliant, chilling "The Wedding Album" on the short fiction list? (You can find it in his new collection, Getting to Know You.) And why do formulaic Heinlein shorts make the top 200 in short fiction, while "The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag," with its charming theology, is off the list altogether? So many injustices, so little space-time...

Karen Ordahl Kupperman's The Jamestown Project is hard to put down. She's a good storyteller and doesn't waste any time getting into the story.

English colonization of North America was pretty much all private enterprise. Investors got in hoping to get rich quick like the plundering Spaniards had; they didn't, but they did waste a lot of time pestering colonists for immediate results.

The local Indians understood the English colonists better than the colonists understood them, having sheltered numerous shipwrecks and refugees in preceding years.

Jamestown was just one of dozens of attempts, most of which failed. Partly because the company allowed lots of small investors to get in, it managed to last long enough to learn the key lessons that later colonies in New England and elsewhere followed: "widespread ownership of land, control of taxation for public obligations through a representative assembly, the institution of a normal society through the inclusion of women, and development of a product that could be marketed profitably to sustain the economy."

One of the things that didn't work was putting the colony under an all-powerful Commander in Chief.

Going beyond Jamestown, I'd never quite realized just how the discovery of an inhabited New World forced people to think for themselves. It showed that tradition could be plain wrong. Of course, the biggie was that the Bible doesn't mention the New World and its inhabitants. But lesser beliefs took a whacking too, like the idea that climate had to be the same at the same latitude worldwide.

Mark Lilla, formerly of the University of Chicago and now of Columbia University, previewed his forthcoming book The Stillborn God in this weekend's New York Times magazine. (No wonder he moved away; can you imagine trying to publish something this intelligent anywhere in the Tribune?) Some of the questions he tackles: Why hasn't religion melted away like it was supposed to, and why is fanatical religion so much more attractive than the milquetoast liberal kind, and what is to be done?

"Quixote" at Shakespeare's Sister thinks he missed the point -- religion's just the hot air spewed by power-hungry politicians, Ahmadinejad, Bush, whoever.

I think Quixote missed the point, which is, why is a certain kind of religion still useful to the power-hungry? But the debate's off to a good start.

Three million people immigrated to British America (mainland and Caribbean islands) between 1600 and 1800. More than two million of them were slaves, and most of the whites were "indentured servants, redemptioners, or convicts."

That's what the numbers say. Georgetown University historian Alison Games, writing in The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800, summarizes the demographic, historical, and economic foundation of our country: "Transatlantic migration, for the population considered in its entirety, was centered around the dismal themes of enslavement, violence, and mortality."

(Google Book Search has a preview of this book, but not these pages.)

"In the United States, the percentage of schoolchildren planning to become high-status professionals is grossly disproportionate to the percentage of such jobs comprising our division of labor. As in a game of musical chairs, it is not structurally possible for everyone to remain a contender."

Reed College anthropologist Anne Lorimer spends some quality time with nonpilot visitors to the Museum of Science and Industry's exhibit of an airplane cockpit. They talk about "how they visually experienced a pilot’s workplace, and the lessons they drew from this experience." She writes about it in the current issue of Teachers College Record (it's behind a paywall, but here's a sketchy summary).

As near as I can tell, she's interested in how people rationalize their failure to win the game of professional musical chairs, and how those rationalizations help or hurt them in doing what they can do. She's working on "a book-length ethnography" of the museum, and my guess is it'll either be really great or it'll sound like, well, a TCR article urging on us "a pedagogy in which, rather than appropriating technological knowledge, one appropriates one’s own alienation from this knowledge."

Mark Oppenheimer adds to my reading list with his New York Times review of Stephen Prothero's new book Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know -- and Doesn't; the review includes this bipartisan historical smackdown: 

"Both conservatives and liberals are to blame for American religious illiteracy. Beginning with 19th-century Unitarians, liberal Christians dropped Bible learning for good deeds and progressive politics. But conservatives have also turned away from religious study. From Charles Finney in the Second Great Awakening to contemporary megachurch preachers, evangelicals have won converts by advocating enthusiastic faith at the expense of religious study. ...Conservative evangelicals, uniting in pursuit of political influence, played down old denominational differences. 'Family values' became for the right what 'justice' or 'peace' was for the left — a catchphrase that obviates the need for religious literacy." (Also available here.)

Maybe the no-nonsense giant of a farmer who taught my fifth-grade Sunday School class had a point. His curriculum eschewed both commercial texts and popsicle-stick crafts -- it was all memory work: books of the Bible, ten commandments, the works.

The other day I heard on the radio that tuition at the University of Illinois has gone up -- again -- in part because of three consecutive years of reduced state funding. Then I read this from the new book Urban Meltdown by Clive Doucet, "the first poet ever elected to Ottawa [Canada] City Council":

"North American communities have just lived through two of the most prosperous decades the planet has ever seen, but where are the new public investments which reflect those wealthy years?"

NYC poet-blogger TryBecca has a great list of ten books whose readers she won't sit next to on the train (h/t Whet). Her #9, my #1, is Giant Millipedes: The Enthusiast's Handbook.

Her commenters manage to turn the thread around and wind up discussing which books and DVDs usually get them a solo seat. Is there a Chicago version -- a title that guarantees you stretching room all the way in from Evanston, or Woodstock?

As a subscriber to the Chicago Tribune, I read a few paragraphs about the exchange of trains between North Korea and South Korea. Observing that the paragraphs came from the New York Times News Service, I clicked over there to read the full story, and wondered once again (as I turned to the funnies) why anyone pays good money for food someone else already chewed.

But if you wonder why the two Koreas are so interested in unifying -- when we all "know" that North Korea is nothing but a prison camp run by maniacs -- you'll have to leave the ever-shrinking funhouse mirror of the MSM. Try University of Chicago professor Bruce Cumings's Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History , especially the chapter about North Korea and the way in which its leaders have poured a large dose of traditional Korean corporatism, communalism, Confucianism, and isolationism into the mostly empty vessel of Marxism-Leninism.

Cumings is far from being an apologist, and his sidebars on the media's relentlessly ignorant and stupid reporting on Korea made me squirm. Until I had relatives over there, that reporting was my only source of information too.

The whole point of reading book reviews is to find the one book in a thousand that you absolutely have to read (and do), and to learn what the other 999 are about. So it's just perverse to read Steven Shapin's review in last week's New Yorker (excerpts here if that link goes away) and find that it mentions several must-reads, some more than a decade old. They're all about how we misunderstand technology when we think it's all about world-changing inventions.

Shapin's reviewing David Edgerton's The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900. "Edgerton notes that as things get older they tend to move from rich countries to poor ones, from low-maintenance to high-maintenance environments. In many African, South Asian, and Latin-American countries, used vehicles imported from North America, Western Europe, and Japan live on almost eternally, in constant contact with numerous repair shops. Maintenance doesn’t simply mean keeping those vehicles as they were; it may mean changing them in all sorts of ways—new gaskets made from old rubber, new fuses made from scrap copper wire.

"'In the innovation-centric account, most places have no history of technology,' Edgerton writes [because nobody invented the car or the microchip there]. 'In use-centered accounts, nearly everywhere does.' John Powell’s marvelous study of vast vehicle-repair shops in Ghana, The Survival of the Fitter: Lives of Some African Engineers (1995), describes a modern world in which vehicles imported from the developed world initially decay, and then something changes: 'As time goes by and the vehicle is reworked in the local system, it reaches a state of apparent equilibrium in which it seems to be maintained indefinitely. . . . It is a condition of maintenance by constant repair."'

Historian Walter Laqueur has seen the future:

"Given the shrinking of its population, it is possible that Europe, or considerable parts of it, will turn into a cultural theme park, a kind of Disneyland on a level of a certain sophistication for well-to-do visitors from China and India, something like Brugge, Venice, Versailles, Stratford-on-Avon, or Rothenburg ob der Tauber on a larger scale. Some such parks already exist; when the coal mines in the Ruhr were closed down, the Warner Brothers Movie World was opened in Dortmund. This will be a Europe of tourist guides, gondoliers, and translators: 'Ladies and gentlemen, you are visiting the scenes of a highly developed civilization that once led the world. It gave us Shakespeare, Beethoven, the welfare state, and many other fine things...' There will be excursions for every taste; even now there are trips in Berlin to the slums and the areas considered dangerous ('Kreuzberg, the most colorful district: two hours').... [But] even if Europe's decline is now irreversible, there is no reason that it should become a collapse.

"There is, however, a precondition — something that has been postponed. The debate should be about which of Europe's traditions and values can still be saved. The age of delusions is over."

Read the whole thing in the Chronicle Review; it's a foretaste of his book The Last Days of Europe: Epitaph for an Old Continent. Which of Europe's traditions and values would you like to keep alive beyond the theme parks? The architecture? Urban design? Liberté/égalité/fraternité? The literature? The university? Religious toleration? Or did you think that was already gone?

Bitch Ph.D. reads a two-year-old book, Promises I Can Keep by sociologists Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas, and it makes her think:

The poor single moms interviewed "have mainstream, even conservative ideas of what marriage should be, and they don't want to get married if they don't trust that the men will be faithful, help provide for their children, not be abusive, etc. ... The women also have mainstream, conservative ideas about the value and importance of children--so much so that they often think of abortion as irresponsible. Which is an interesting and profound realization, I think, and one that those of us who are pro-choice would do well to think very hard about. A lot of the time we argue for abortion rights as if we were doing so on behalf of poor women; we need to realize that many poor women are not themselves pro-choice, and that if we really want to advocate for them, we should start by listening to what they have to say."

(Hmm -- calling basketball stars "hos" is irresponsible, but that doesn't mean the First Amendment should be trashed. Similarly, the rights to own a gun or to choose abortion aren't qualified by the fact that they're sometimes exercised irresponsibly.)

"For the middle class and the wealthy, it makes a lot of economic sense to postpone having children. We're wrong, though, to prescribe waiting to poor women, for whom there are no economic disincentives to early childbearing. For these women, early childbirth is, at worst, neutral, and at best a positive improvement on not only their economic but also their emotional and mental well-being. We're used to thinking of what we have to teach the poor; this book does a great job of showing us what the poor have to teach us about parenting, childrearing, and looking at things from a more genuinely feminist point of view--one in which children really are a central part of life, rather than an optional choice."

Do you like this definition of feminism? Or Linda Hirshman's? 

Demographers rush in: USC's Dowell Myers sees a scenario for an optimistic future in California, according to publicity for his book Immigrants and Boomers, due out from Russell Sage May 1 (although their web site promised February).

"Long-established immigrants, who have lived in Calfornia for over a decade, show high levels of social mobility and use of English, and 50 percent of Latino immigrants become homeowners after 20 years," the book reports, which suggests to Myers that "they have the potential to pick up the slack from aging boomers over the next two decades." IOW, they'll take over the boomers' jobs and houses and ability to pay into social security.

Or maybe they need additional help to do so? Myers calls for "a new social contract between the older and younger generations, based on their mutual interests and the moral responsibility of each generation to provide for children and the elderly." There are some missing links here -- if that social contract, basic to all ongoing socieities, is broken, how have the immigrants managed to do so well so far? Is this another liberal argument that X is inevitable therefore we need to subsidize it more? -- so obviously I need to read the book.

You know, "children are our future." No one ever said whose children.

(If you think largely white boomers might have trouble making a collective deal with an increasingly Latino younger generation, consider the analogous situation in Europe, where the only demographic relief in sight is largely Muslim.)

IOW, don't let the kiddies actually READ that stuff. Vonnegut may suffer the same unattractive fate as Edgar Lee Masters, who grew up downstate, became a Chicago attorney, and wrote one immortal book -- Spoon River Anthology -- for which his former neighbors excoriated him. Now their great-grandchildren have made him part of the local fall tourist package. 

This sleight-of-hand is possible because both Vonnegut and Masters spoke pleasant truths as well as unpleasant ones. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater has a moving welcome to newborns:

"Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies -- 'God damn it, you've got to be kind.'"

On the other side, in Cat's Cradle Vonnegut also quotes Masters's "Knowlt Hoheimer," and concludes with a hubristic scientific experiment freezing solid almost everyone and everything on earth. At that point the holy man Bokonon offers advice to the book's main character:

"If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who."

Which one do you think will be featured in Indianapolis? 

My former boss, Illinois Times president Fletcher "Bud" Farrar, writes an appreciation of the last Democratic governor before Rod Blagojevich: Dan Walker (1973-1977), the Montgomery Ward executive whose report on the 1968 Democratic Convention demonstrations described them as a "police riot" and who in 1972 shed his corporate togs, donned a red bandana, and walked the state on an anti-Daley platform to upset Paul Simon for the Democratic guernatorial nomination in 1972.

Southern Illinois University Press will issue Walker's memoir, The Maverick and the Machine, in May, which doesn't shy away from the story of his doing federal time after leaving office (on a charge unrelated to his tenure as governor).

Farrar reflects on the Walker administration's well-known confrontational nature and a personal trait of perhaps equal significance, which he glimpsed during a summer stint at the Southern Illinoisan newspaper in Carbondale: "Just before Walker and his walk entourage showed up to be interviewed, our publisher supplied all of us in the newsroom with red bandannas to put around our necks. Poor Dan, who had no sense of humor, couldn't figure out whether we were expressing solidarity or making fun."

A book with one of the worst titles in history, Mostly Good and Competent Men, chronicles Illinois governors up through Blago. Farrar seems to hope that history will eventually apply at least this description to Walker's term. (FWIW, probably the Walker crowd's most famous alum is now lieutenant governor of Illinois.) What do you think? And if you're old enough to remember his governorship, how did you manage to navigate the web to get here?

An hour and a half on the late train at the end of a long day is a recipe for walking insomnia -- can't get comfortable, can't sleep, can't concentrate on the day's mail, you know the drill. But the other night I got lucky, because my shoulder bag contained a fresh copy of Nothing: Something to Believe In, by Nica Lalli.

For Chicago history buffs it includes a child's-eye view of William Singer's mayoral campaign against Richard I. For religion buffs a dismayingly honest account of her various encounters with organized religion as the child of Italian and Jewish parents with no religious affiliations. For me, it did what a good book does. When I looked up, it was an hour later and my surroundings were unfamiliar. For a moment, I thought I'd read right past my stop.

Not only does Judge Richard Posner define plagiarism in his little book thereon, he explains at least one reason why the concept changes and evolves. Writers used to be supported by patrons (usually wealthy aristocrats), who would know them personally, so it didn't hurt them much if someone copied their work. Plagiarism became more of an issue once writers came to depend upon sales to a mass market. Those customers didn't know them and might well be duped into paying someone who'd simply copied their work. "Creative imitation cannot have as capacious a scope or as positive a connotation in a modern commercial society of commodified intellectual works as it did in Shakespeare's time."

Is it possible that the desire to downplay plagiarism or even define it out of existence -- which took most of the stage time at the Art Institute recently, as I report in this week's Reader -- is somehow connected with nostalgia for an earlier, less modern, less individualistic era?

I have too many books. I used to think cataloging them would help, by keeping me from traveling half an hour to a library to get a volume I had on my shelves. I tried out LibraryThing, a hybrid of catalog and social bookmarking, when it was cheap and small, but realized the cataloging process would take way too long. Sadly, I didn't join.

Now, with more than ten million books cataloged by its members, LT offers a feature called the Unsuggester, available to all. You name a book, and the unsearch engine spits out the titles that are least likely to appear in members' catalogs along with it. It's not exactly, "If you like X, you'll hate Y," but it's close. I tried a few:

A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament is least compatible with Chicago author Audrey Niffeneger's excellent SF The Time Traveler's Wife.

The Chicago Manual of Style is least compatible with Shopaholic Takes Manhattan.

William Cronon's Chicago classic Nature's Metropolis is least compatible with The Devil Wears Prada.

Richard Dawkins's controversial The God Delusion is least compatible with the young-adult Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood. 

Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell is least compatible with The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. And Sam Harris's The End of Faith is least compatible with Alanna: The First Adventure.

I'm seeing a pattern here, but it's not what I expected.

As a chronic producer and consumer of book reviews and a nonacademic, I'm rightly a target of historian Jeffrey Herf's recent call at Open University for more reviews of scholarly books of general interest:

"We know that a large number of very fine, well written, deeply researched and important works are being published in this country to the sound of deafening silence. We know that most of the vast non-specialist audience of university graduates in the United States hasn't a clue about what is going on in history, political science, sociology, economics, philosophy, literary criticism, art history, the natural sciences, and a host of other smaller academic disciplines. Indeed, despite much talk about interdisciplinary work, we know that within the academy, most scholars have only the foggiest notion of what is going on in other disciplines. We know that for the overwhelming number of college graduates in the United States, the last serious work of scholarship in the humanities and social sciences that many of them will ever read will probably be the last required text in the last semester of their senior year in college. Many of our students tell us how much they enjoyed reading various works we assign in our classes. How are they expected to continue to read such works if none are brought to their attention?"

Gawker makes fun of the idea at length, Eugene David briefly. Eric Rauchway has some interesting tangential thoughts. But hands down the most sensible response is from Ross Douthat at the American Scene:

"We live in an age that's glutted with books, and I'm very well aware of how depressing it is to watch thousands of well-written and worthy volumes -- one's own included -- appear over the course of the year and vanish without a trace. But this is a problem created by abundance (of would-be writers and publishers willing to take a chance on them), by specialization (the plethora of academic books that are extremely important, but only in extremely narrow fields), and by the mass market, which makes it harder for niche efforts to get traction in a world of Dan Browns. And as a result, it certainly can't be solved by founding a book review that tackles an extra thousand or so books a year, since the only people with the time and interest to read those reviews are already up to their ears in good books they meant to read but can't find the time for."

Still, the commentariat disappoints me. Nobody's thought of a way to pay for this mammoth hypothetical periodical. Nobody mentions that for most of us most of the time, a good book review is a substitute for reading the book. Worst of all, everyone's so busy pontificating they don't give examples (except in mockery). So here are three wonderful books I'm now in the middle of that it took me a long time to find, with hat tips to those who put me on to them (don't ask me why they're wonderful unless you have a free afternoon):

America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (2005) by Mark Noll of Wheaton College (via Christian Century).

Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History (2005) by Bruce Cumings of the University of Chicago (via Sam).

A Gathering of Rivers: Indians, Metis, and Mining in the Western Great Lakes, 1737–1832 (2000) by Lucy Eldersveld Murphy of Ohio State University at Newark and the Newberry Library (via another book I'm trying to review). 

Readers of this week's Reader already know I'm not nearly as enthusiastic about sociologist Eric Klinenberg's new book Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America's Media as is, say, Rick Kaempfer at Beachwood Reporter.

Reasonable people can disagree about exactly how bad Big Media is, compared to earlier forms of venality and neglect. In their very different ways, Jack Shafer at Slate and Michael Schudson at the Columbia Journalism Review raise some tough questions about Klinenberg's thesis. But it's hard for me to excuse Klinenberg's distortion of the facts.

"There's not a shred of evidence in favor of deregulation," he told me in an interview. That would come as a surprise to the federal Third Circuit Court of Appeals, which in 2004 OK'd a key part of the FCC's deregulatory program. The court wrote that the agency's decision to allow newspaper and broadcast cross-ownership "is justified under [the law] and is supported by record evidence." Among other things, the court relied on a report from the Project for Excellence in Journalism, showing that cross-ownership can improve the quantity and quality of TV coverage. This certainly isn't the last word on fostering competition -- when was the last scoop by the Tribune's WGN? -- but the issue isn't open-and-shut.

Klinenberg wrote about the decision but left this part out. He portrayed it as a victory for the critics of Big Media and FCC deregulation (page 273). The court did say the FCC did a poor job of deciding when to deregulate -- a hilariously bad job by Klinenberg's account -- and sent the case back to the federal district court for further consideration.

You can read or download the court's decision here (PDF of 213 pages; the relevant parts are pages 15, 48-54, and 85). Even if I were onboard Klinenberg's cause, I wouldn't like the way he deals with evidence. Nobody -- certainly no movement seeking credibility and change -- is well served by simple cheerleading when the facts are mixed.

Sarah Vine tackles Pierre Baynard's new book Comment Parler des Livres que l’on n’a pas Lus (How to Talk About Books That You Haven’t Read) at TimesOnline: "Obviously I haven’t read Mr. Baynard’s book; but it is in the spirit of his oeuvre that I shall proceed to write about it anyway." (Hat tip to Arts & Letters Daily.)

Anyone who's had a longtime professional relationship with a particular editor (or favored author) will appreciate the mental models on the shoulders of Kieran Healy at Crooked Timber: "Henry remarks that 'my mental model of Tyler [Cowen] often sit[s] on my shoulder while I blog, making polite and well reasoned libertarian criticisms of my arguments.'" The jokes are better if you read the same blogs Healy does.

The Heartland Institute has been promoting Fred Singer and Dennis Avery's new book Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Years, so I took a look. The book isn't just wrong -- it's systematically dishonest.

Singer and Avery keep starting to argue the science, then switch to contending that fears about global warming are exaggerated and that proposed remedies will be counterproductive. By page three they're hyperventilating: "Will people give up the scientific and technological advances that have added thirty years to life expectancies all over the globe in the last century?" (Later they call their adversaries scaremongers.)

At first that seemed like an odd stylistic quirk, but it's actually a feature. Their implicit logic -- never stated outright for obvious reasons -- is that if activists exaggerate storm and flood fears, or slap their prefabricated solutions (solar! conservation! organic farming!) onto this problem, then there must be no problem after all. The logic is laughable, but it allows the authors to blur the distinction between sensation-mongering activists and professional climate scientists. (That's worse than being mistaken. Mistakes can be corrected through open debate; sliming the process by which we do that is far more dangerous.)

The book's explicit claim is that because there's a 1,500-year climate cycle (apparently based on solar variation), no other climate change is going on. Again, the conclusion doesn't follow, and the initial premise is dubious.

Most of the book consists of throwing mud at the findings of peer-reviewed climate science and seeing what sticks. The mud is of low quality, but since this is a blog and not a book, I'll limit myself to four examples.

Page 36: "CO2 has been a lagging indicator [in the last three ice ages and subsequent warmings], its concentrations rising about eight hundred years after the temperatures warm ... additional evidence that CO2 is not the forcing agent in recent global climate changes." Singer and Avery quote a 2003 article (PDF) published in the peer-reviewed journal Science to this effect. But they don't mention that the warming episodes in question lasted about 5,000 years! So the fact that CO2 didn't start the warming doesn't mean it had no role in the (much larger) warming that followed. It's as if they were arguing that gravity doesn't exist because someone pushed  a car that was sitting still at the top of the hill. Technical details here from a coauthor of the original paper. (For the record, honest disputants fully lay out the other side's arguments before attacking them and don't cherry-pick them to create a false impression.)

Page 132: "Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas ... have demonstrated" that there was a worldwide medieval warm period warmer than today, so there's no problem now. Again, the conclusion doesn't follow from the premise, and the premise is questionable -- in fact, it has been questioned by several climate scientists, writing in Eos (behind a paywall, summary here if you scroll down to "Myth #2"). The climate scientists had serious criticisms: Soon and Baliunas counted as "warm" any place that appeared to be wetter OR drier OR warmer than it was in the 20th century; they took evidence scattered over a 500-year period (800-1300) as signifying a global change; and they compared their results to the 20th-century average, when the relevant comparison should be to the last part of the 20th century. CAVEAT: I haven't read the article or the criticism. My point is that when Singer and Avery present Soon and Baliunas as having "demonstrated" something -- and then fail to mention, much less address, professional criticisms of their work -- they're deceiving their readers, not engaging in reasoned dialogue.

Page 39: Antarctica is cooling. Another case of cherry-picking and twisting a peer-reviewed publication, well answered by its author Peter Doran (previously blogged here).

Page 11: Satellite temperature records show little warming; surface records show more because of the urban heat island effect. Temperature records must be corrected for all kinds of biases; this particular discrepancy has been accounted for, and when it is, the result is a rising temperature record that can be explained only by climate models that include human CO2 pollution. Details here. Singer and Avery cite a 2004 paper Singer coauthored that analyzes temperatures from only 1979 to 1996 -- allowing them to avoid dealing with inconvenient warming data from the last decade.  Full-scale demolition of that paper here, if you need further evidence that Singer, Avery, and their backers -- including Chicago's own don't-think tank, the Heartland Institute -- aren't serious participants in the discussion of these issues.

BTW, over the years I haven't hesitated to call bullshit on environmentalists when appropriate, such as Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb. His persistent refusal to acknowledge that he was wrong is intellectually corrupt in much the same way Singer and Avery's book is.

Juan Cole calls attention to the unusually concerted effort to defame Jimmy Carter and discredit his book Palestine Peace Not Apartheid. While Carter has been criticized for going too far, Cole contends that "the conditions under which Palestinians beyond the green line under Israeli occupation live are actually much worse than what most black South Africans suffered under Apartheid."

I haven't read the book and probably won't -- untangling the nonsense involved when religious people kill one another over land God deeded away two or three times is just too taxing.

But someone has to deal with it, and this level of animus against someone who merely calls for the U.S. to take an evenhanded approach in the Middle East makes me suspect that Carter -- for my money the closest thing to a decent president we've had in my lifetime -- may well be telling uncomfortable truths, just as he was when he urged that we conserve energy in the late 70s and got laughed at for his pains.

Amitabh Pal at the Progressive has another take on the controversy, with links to Carter's critics as well as his own critique of the book. An update on the ongoing controversy from Joshua Holland at Alternet.

English architect Elizabeth Burton has just coauthored a fine book (Inclusive Urban Design: Streets for Life) on designing spaces and neighborhoods to accommodate all ages and abilities. Near the end she notes that she didn't learn that approach in school:

"I trained as an architect in the 1980s. Then, as now, we were taught to be creative and original.... The worst reason we could give for designing the way we had was that it was 'what people liked.' Buildings were viewed as pieces of sculpture rather than environments accommodating people."

Her book is based primarily on interviews and taking walks with old people around their neighborhoods. Why did she reject her training? "People can generally choose whether or not to view works of art such as paintings and sculptures, and it does not really matter if they hate them. But we are creating homes, buildings, neighbourhoods and town centres people have to live and work in." 

Scott Jaschik at Inside Higher Ed interviews Cornell profs Stephen J. Ceci (developmental psychology) and Wendy M. Williams (human development), coeditors of Why Aren't More Women in Science?: Top Researchers Debate the Evidence. The background, of course, is the controversy over Harvard president Larry Summers's suggestion that biology might play some part in women's underrepresentation in science.

Ceci and Williams: "For us, the worrisome aspect of the debate was not so much its substance as its tone. Defenders of Summer's remarks were vilified and dismissed. This does not serve the purpose of science -- it led to muzzling of the scholarly debate, with one side effectively silenced by the other. When we first sent out invitations to contribute essays to our book, we were saddened by the stories of some scholars who felt that they could not contribute because their views were scorned, and had resulted in personal attacks against them on their campuses.  If you read between the lines of several of the essays, you will detect this theme even among those who did contribute essays."

BTW, the editors' own position is nuanced. They write, "The story is complex and not apt to be reducible to single factors."

Hot off the presses at the University of Pennsylvania is what might be a Midwestern blockbuster, The Sound the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign English prof Robert Dale Parker has edited the writings of Bamewawagezhikaquay, AKA Jane Johnston, AKA Mrs. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft.

She's "the first known American Indian literary writer," says Parker in a U of I press release, comparable to "Anne Bradstreet, the first known American poet, or Phillis Wheatley, the first well-known African-American poet." I haven't seen the book, let alone read it, but those are standards that might be hard to live up to.

As the early midwestern history geeks among us struggle to reach their reference books, yes, she was married to that Schoolcraft, the famous Indian agent and early ethnographer. In fact, Jane's writings, translations, and transcriptions are apparently one of the reasons her husband became famous--he used her material and offered "only enough credit as he needed to bolster the supposed authenticity of his own work," says Parker. Schoolcraft's work in turn was used by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his much more famous epic poem "Hiawatha."

Jane herself was born in Sault Ste. Marie in 1800, the daughter of a Scotch-Irish trader and an Ojibwe woman whose father was a celebrated Ojibwe chief. It doesn't sound like her life in the middle ground between two cultures was very happy. Maybe now she'll get the credit she was due all along. 

Forty-six years ago a housewife who'd barely graduated from high school hurled an intellectual grenade into the dark heart of modernist city planning, Robert Moses's New York City. Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities remains readable today, more so perhaps than its contemporary blockbusters, Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.

Alice Sparberg Alexiou's new biography can't match Jacobs's own knife-sharp prose, but it does put Jacobs's books in the context of a consistently rebellious life. Jacobs reminds me of another "undereducated" contrarian, George Orwell. Ideological jackals will be fighting for a long time over both authors' work. Jacobs's insistence on spontaneous order -- the city, she said, cannot be a work of art -- makes her sound libertarian, but she told off a reporter who tried to put antigovernment cant into her mouth.

What sticks in my mind is her takedown of onetime ally and later critic Lewis Mumford: "Maybe if he'd lived at a different time," she said long after his death and shortly before her own, "he would have understood that women didn't necessarily aspire to be patronized. He believed that women were a sort of a ladies' auxiliary of the human race."

Books about religion and science get an intelligent reviewer in Thomas Dixon in the (London) Times Literary Supplement. He's impressed by the restraint shown by would-be combatants Todd Tremlin of Central Michigan University (Minds and Gods: The Cognitive Foundations of Religion) and J. Wentzel Van Huyssteen of Princeton (Alone in the World? Human Uniqueness in Science and Theology).

Tremlin makes the cognitive-science case that human beings have "an almost irresistible natural tendency, embodied in every single human brain in much the same way, to explain natural phenomena as the results of deliberate actions by thinking, feeling, supernatural agents." In other words we're programmed to see gods where there aren't any.

Van Huyssteen, a professor of theology and science, uses some of the same scientific theories to say that "the 'image of God' should be thought of as something that emerges in flesh-and-blood human beings during the course of their evolution." In other words, perhaps our programming is there to help us to see an actual god.

Dixon is pleased that both authors are less dogmatic than I just made them sound: "Both authors resist the temptation to make hasty inferences from their observations about the naturalness of religious beliefs to a conclusion about either the truth or the falsity of those beliefs. The implication, but not the explicit conclusion, of Tremlin’s reductionist account is that religious beliefs can be not only explained, but effectively explained away by cognitive science. Van Huyssteen tends towards the opposite view – that the naturalness of religious beliefs argues, if anything, in favour of their plausibility and rationality. Of course most of us assume that all our beliefs – the true ones as well as the false ones – are, among other things, products of an evolved brain. The fact that many writers about science and religion no longer assume that such an observation is a knock-down argument either for or against religious faith is surely a sign of progress in the field of science and religion."

My summary: We've evolved lots of natural tendencies — to reason and to rape, to do astronomy and to do astrology. Nothing follows about the value or truth of those tendencies. That has to be judged on logic and evidence, not origins.

Is it really progress to have grasped that the genetic fallacy STILL is a fallacy? Good grief.

Slog takes a look at the afterlife, version 2.0: "Relatives of the fantastically named Hyman Victor connected his tombstone via satellite to his real immortal resting place -- several Internet sites with information about his life and family."

Sure you want to write a blank check for the Olympics? Ask London about 2012. Lynne Kiesling of Northwestern University, writing at Knowledge Problem, has Friedmanesque thoughts about why Chicago should fear 2016.

Fred Clark at Slacktivist reads the Left Behind books so we don't have to, complete with their "weird disconnect . . .   absence of consequences, [and]  . . .  apathy and incuriosity toward the victims of the story."

The last and best 2006 election maps: from Hodas & Associates via Rich Miller, maps of Illinois, Cook County, and suburban races. From Mark Newman via the Swamp, cartograms of congressional races nationwide, with districts sized by population rather than land area.

Strange Maps knows that, in DVD world, Guyana, South Africa, and Japan are in the same place.

Jimmy Carter makes what would be called a gaffe if he were running for office (IOW, he states the obvious but unsayable truth): "There's no open debate in this country if it involves any criticism of the policies of the Israeli government, even though many people in Israel debate and condemn some of the policies of the right wing governments under Sharon and Netanyahu and others." The question is, why?

You have no idea how big Africa is. Strange Maps does, though. 

The hype: Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years, by professional denialists Fred Singer and Denis Avery. The facts: from computational ocean chemist David Archer of the University of Chicago, who attended a lunch talk Avery gave last week that was sponsored by the Heartland Institute. The gist, from Archer's post at RealClimate: "Most past climate changes, like the glacial interglacial cycle, can be explained based on changes in solar heating and greenhouse gases, but the warming in the last few decades can only be explained as a result of human-released greenhouse gases. Avery was very careful to crop his temperature plots at 1985, rather than show the data to 2005."

Sam Smith does not mourn for Milton Friedman: "We have paid a terrible price for this corruption of our culture by the new robber barons egged on by Friedman and his ilk. We so accept their foul standards that we don't even discuss or debate them. We have become prisoners of their lie." Read the whole thing.

Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon has a rhetorical question for those who can't abide public breast feeding: "What is your fucking problem? Do you like fussy babies disturbing the peace with their crying? There’s a lot of things that a baby stuck to a tit might be, but what she’s definitely not is a crying baby."

The U.S. should give up its veto power in the UN Security Council and accept the jurisdiction of the World Court and the International Criminal Court. We should spend more on domestic social programs than on the military, and favor humanitarian foreign aid over strategic or military aid. 

If you think that way, you probably think you're in the minority. Actually, the people are with you, but the foreign-policy decision makers often are not. So says The Foreign Policy Disconnect: What Americans Want from Our Leaders but Don't Get, by Northwestern University political scientist Benjamin I. Page and Chicago Council on Foreign Relations president Marshall M. Bouton. The book is based on 30 years of polling and finds that public opinion on foreign policy is surprisingly consistent and coherent, not just a random collection of contradictory or lightly held opinions.

Americans are not as stereotyped as those positions might suggest, though: we're also much more concerned about protecting domestic jobs, controlling illegal immigration, and stopping the drug trade than are most top policy-makers.

Why is there such a big disconnect in a democracy?  That might be a good jumping-off point for discussion when Page appears at Borders in Evanston tomorrow night, November 15, at 7:30.

If you can't make it, you can download Jerome McDonnell's November 6 WBEZ interview with Page here.  Not much blogging on this, but former U. of C. political scientist Daniel Drezner -- who claims to have read the whole thing -- calls the book "good" and says if you like it you'll probably like America Against The World by Kohut and Stokes too.

Meanwhile, FYI here are 20 possible goals for US foreign policy, as the public ranked them in the 2002 survey (Page and Bouton call this the most important table in the book):

Combating international terrorism -- 91% say it's very important

Preventing the spread of nuclear weapons -- 90%

Protecting the jobs of American workers -- 85%

Stopping the flow of illegal drugs into the United States -- 81%

Securing adequate supplies of energy -- 75%

Controlling and reducing illegal immigration -- 70%

Maintaining superior military power worldwide -- 68%

Improving the global environment -- 66%

Combating world hunger -- 61%

Strengthening the United Nations -- 57%

Defending our allies' security -- 57%

Safeguarding against global financial instability -- 54%

Reducing our trade deficit with foreign countries -- 51%

Protecting the interests of American business abroad -- 49%

Promoting and defending human rights in other countries -- 47%

Strengthening international law and institutions -- 43%

Protecting weaker nations against foreign aggression -- 41%

Promoting market economies abroad --36%

Helping to bring a democratic form of government to other nations -- 34%

Helping to improve the standard of living of less developed nations -- 30%

These days we find the Indiana Dunes beautiful, refreshing, and maybe even "the earthly locus of a vision incorporating peace, oneness with nature, and brotherhood," as historians J. Ronald and Joan Gibb Engel put it.  But less than a century ago many saw them as sandy wastes unfit for anything except  steel mills. Artist and conservationist Frank Dudley (1868-1957), who painted landscapes of dunes almost exclusively for four decades, is now joining the roster of those, including Jens Jensen, who changed things around.

More than 200 of Dudley's works are on display through November 30 at the Brauer Museum of Art at Valparaiso University, and the exhibition's catalog is now a lavishly illustrated large-format book, The Indiana Dunes Revealed: The Art of Frank V. Dudley. (The book includes a biography of Dudley by the Illinois Institute of Technology's James R. Dabbert; a condensed version with images appeared in the American Art Review (PDF) last summer.)

Dudley's story is replete with paradoxes. Just as the creation of the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore 40 years ago was sparked by Illinois U.S. Senator Paul Douglas, this book is being published by the University of Illinois.  Dudley's conservationism is now seen as a progressive cause. But from today's standpoint he fails to be a consistently progressive prophet: he stubbornly opposed modern art and idealized generic Indians in private and public performances. The outdoor "masques" and "pageants" that inspired him now seem overdone.

Much as Abraham Lincoln was an ambitious lawyer and canny politician as well as the savior of the union, Dudley was both an ardent lover of the dunes and an artist who found them an ideal niche in which to earn a living.  Writes Chicago art historian Wendy Greenhouse:

"For artists of Dudley's generation . . . the rise of both landscape painting and Impressionism were closely tied to the emergence of familiar, Midwestern subjects," and the realization that "their own home landscape -- authentic if humble -- could be the vehicle for genuine artistic expression. . . . The same qualities, in turn, promised to appeal to local buyers. . . . As modernism made increasing inroads on the Chicago art scene in the early 1920s, Dudley found unfailing support among the aesthetically conservative, civic-minded Chicagoans represented by such groups."

Near the end of his life Dudley was an advisor to the new Save the Dunes Council, which continues to watch over the "sacred sands."

"I had seen too many people on drugs -- their personalities hardly recognizable, their voices slurred, their eyes glazed. I resented drugs. Drugs concealed who people were. I didn't want drugs concealing what my crops were. And what are farm chemicals but drugs by a different name?" 

That's the beginning of Farmer John's Cookbook: The Real Dirt on Vegetables: Seasonal Recipes and Stories from a Community Supported Farm, by Boone County's walking collection of ironies, biodynamic farmer John Peterson.  Its generous format encompasses more than 200 recipes (organized by vegetable and season) in more than 300 pages, and it's one of the few cookbooks you can enjoy reading when you're not hungry.

Which is good, because Peterson himself acknowledges being more interested in the stories, the reflections, and the connections between the soil and your dinner plate than in the recipes themselves. It was a team effort, and it's by turns personal, mystical, and practical. Slick-paper photos of his community-supported farm, Angelic Organics, are scattered among the rough workaday pages with identification charts and tips and recipes for everything from asparagus to winter squash.

Ideally you'd view the Farmer John movie or check out the Reader's 1994 (May 13) and 2006 (January 20) coverage first, so as to know where this guy is coming from. He's a farmer and an artist; a steadfast local whose neighbors almost ran him out of town; a Midwestern original who revitalizes himself with periodic visits to Mexico; and a businessman who believes, with Rudolf Steiner, that "the root primarily nourishes the head particularly; the middle of the plant, stem and leaves, primarily nourishes the chest particularly; and fruit nourishes the lower body."

OK, well, maybe you don't need to know. The proof is in the eating.

Or the reading. He's got an autobiography (I Didn't Kill Anyone Up Here) and a book of short stories (Glitter & Grease) in the works too.