Additional Summer Reading
June 7, 2007, 11:46 am
Posted by Margaret O'Brien Steinfels
Commonweal offers summer reading suggestions in its June 15 issue. I’d like to add a book to that list, Cullen Murphy’s Are We Rome? (Houghton Mifflin). Subtitled: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America. As usual with Murphy, a lot of nuance, wit, and real knowledge (about the Roman Empire and the American one). The comparisons he makes are complex and fascinating; he does not overplay the metaphor–yet it is sobering. All who love Prince Valiant will find much to appreciate here.
On this, the 40th anniversary of the 6-Day War, get a reasonable Palestinian perspective of the history of and current situation in the Holyland:
Once Upon A Country: A Palestinian Life, by Sari Husseibeh, the current President of Al-Quds University, the only Arab university in Jerusalem.
The question is whether there is a “reasonable” Palestinian perspective on anything that deals with Israel. 60 years of history suggests there is not. After all, if Jerusalem were a Palestinian city it is extremely unlikely that a Jewish university would be allowed there.
I know, Robert: Uris’ “Exodus” was the gospel truth and any other points of view are just plain hogwash.
Read the book before you pass judgement on what is being said therein.
The following words are not my own–they are from a review on Amazon.com for the book–but I think they are a necessary counterpoint to the recommendation for the book made here:
In order for there to be a true, long lasting peace each side to the Israeli-Arab dispute must recognize, understand, and appreciate that the other side has a reasonable and sincerely held position. Even if you don’t agree with that position you can live with a compromise based on that type of mutual recognition that the other side believes that they are justified. If you feel that the Israelis are just a bunch of thieves that have robbed you of your land without any arguably valid claim, then any compromise will last only until you have the ability to correct the injustice of the thieves having a state of their own.
Unfortunately this book does not represent such an acceptance. For example the wailing wall, the surviving remnant of the Jewish second temple is not a place where Jews worshipped before Islam even existed, rather it is most likely the wall of a fortress built for Roman legions” . As a result the efforts by Jews in 1929 to blow a Shofar at the wall is characterized by the author as being an outrageous demand on this holy Muslim site. It would indeed be an outrageus demand if one assumes as the author does that there never was a Jewish Temple at the site (although even then I don’t think it would justify the subsequent riots in which over a hundred Jews were slaughtered by Arab mobs). Only in the context of the wailing wall being Judaism’s most holy cite could an Arab possibly be willing to compromise on the issue of religiuos observances at the wailing wall.
The author refuses to acknowledge other facts that would, if accepted as facts by the Arab world, allow for compromise. As pointed out in a recent review by Karsh, time and again we hear of the rootless “Russian Jewish upstarts streaming into the country” to dispossess its indigenous population. Readers of “Once Upon a Country” will never know of the countless Zionist attempts at reconciliation, or the real opportunities for statehood offered to the Palestinians in the decades preceding the 1948 war. Instead, they are treated to an uninterrupted story of the victimization and abuse of the hapless Palestinians by the heartless Zionists who in public spoke peace but in private “spelled out their [expulsive] plans.”
Books of this type that deny any facts that justify or even humanize Israel can only fan the flames of hate.
Note: the reference to the wailing wall being a Roman fortress is certainly Husseibeh’s (there is a quotation mark missing from where the quote begins)
Prince Valiant? Apparently he is one of the immortals. I had assumed he was long dead.
If Prince Valiant is dead, he is not long dead! Cullen Murphy among his many credits wrote the story for the comic strip, inheriting it from his father, John Cullen Murhy. I have assumed that his impressive accounts of Roman walls, history, military, etc., is drawn from research for Prince Valiant.
In any case, Are We Rome?, draws not on the strip! but on that knowledge.
And it was Are We Rome? that I recommended Mr. Reid. Anyone who cites an Amazon review and hasn’t read the book should be banned from civilized discussion–and would certainly get an F in HS English.
And anyone who doesn’t read the full thread of her own posting should get an F- … I was not the one who first mentioned a book other than “Are We Rome.” That was Jimmy Mac’s doing when he chose the anniversary of the 6 Day War to promote a piece of Palestinian propaganda. As for citing an Amazon review, I made it clear where the information was from–I simply did not wish to leave unrebutted a recommendation for a book that others clearly see as anti-Israeli. As for the so-called “civilized discussion,” Commonweal posters seem to prefer preaching to the choir and hearing nothing back but amens. They genuinely seem miffed when anyone who doesn’t agree with them offers a comment–as if an univited guest has sat down at their dinner table. If that’s the case, simply shut off the response system on the website.
Robert, if you are so convinced of the rightness of your point of view, by all means, do not read the book I recommended. I certainly wouldn’t want to confuse you with facts that others bring forth.
My intention was to recommend a bit of summer reading, not engage in polemics around the current abominable state of life in Israel, the Gaza and the West Bank.
Can someone else please also recommend some summer reading? Skip the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and People’s Padre by Emmett McLaughlin, if you please.
(The last one certainly gives away my age!)
Jimmy Mac–
None of these is new, but each is a book that grows on me with rereading and is on my summer reading list:
“Death Comes for the Archbishop” by Willa Cather
Revisiting Cather’s prose is always a pleasure, and remarkably for a non-Catholic, she beautifully captures the joy and loneliness of missionary life in the mid-1850′s.
“Silence” by Shusaku Endo
Sometimes called “Japan’s Graham Greene,” Endo tells a deceptively simple but very haunting story of faith, apostasy, and inculturation during the persecution of Christians in 17th century Japan.
“The Screwtape Letters” by C.S. Lewis
“Reverse theology” at its best. Always something new to learn with each reading, and it always takes me a while to orient myself as to who Screwtape is talking about when he says “Our Father.”
And I almost forgot. A new book. There are some in the Collier household anxiously awaiting the last of the Harry Potter books.
If summer reading = light, fun, with just enough thought to keep one engaged (Death Comes for the Archbishop sets a rather higher standard), I recommend the following:
The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde (outstanding alternate reality set in Britain, includes the Baconians, people who go door to door trying to convince people that Francis Bacon wrote the plays of Shakespeare)
Any mystery novel by Tony Hillerman or Sara Paretsky (stick with the V.I. Warshawski books)
Any sci fi book by Frank Herbert (Dune, etc.) or Douglas Adams (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy)
Less fun, but still worth it..
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg (set in 18th Century Scotland)
If you have never read them, the Sherlock Holmes cases by Arthur Conan Doyle.
On the nonfiction front:
Nonviolent Soldier of Islam by Eknath Easwaran (the story of Badshah Khan, got 70,000 Pashtun = really tough Muslims in Afghanistan and Pakistan, to form a group of Muslim “soldiers” committed to nonviolence…He was inspired by Gandhi, but I think a case can be made that his success enablel Gandhi to succeed)
The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don’t Think for Themselves by Curtis White (listening to NPR doesn’t make you as smart as you might think)
Finally, not much fun at all, but really moving… There Are No Children Here by Alex Kotlowitz (Two kids growing up in the now demolished Henry Horner Homes in Chicago, I have never been more disappointed that a book was over, and rarely more moved).
Notice, I listed no books on Christology or the historical Jesus. Happy summer reading!
I can also recommend almost anything by Colm Toibin. I have just finished his collection of short stories entitled “Mothers & Sons” and found it to be almost as good as “The Blackwater Lightship.”
I am not sure that research for Prince Valiant makes one expert in in the history of the Roman Empire or prepares one to compare the Roman Empire with what might be called the American Empire.
As for “Summer Reading”, I read all year round,
Ah Joe, the talk is about working people not retirees like you and me.
I stumbled on a most intriguing new novel knowing nothing about the author except that Mailer wrote that he writes not only like an angel but an intelligent angel.
The book is Be Near Me by Andrew O’Hagan. I am half way through this book, told in the first person, about a Scottish Catholic priest who is trying to find himself while being challenged by his dying housekeeper and befriended by a male youth and his girlfriend.
Intriguing with pedophilia ramifications.
Has anyone read it? Stay tuned.
Twenty years ago Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind became a best-seller despite its high culture lenses. The topic was American nihilism which Bloom described as “nihilism without the abyss.”
Saul Bellow’s portrait of Bloom in his last novel, Ravelstein, reminds us of just how striking a character Bloom was and how unlikely a prospect for conservative hagiography he seemed to those who were his familiars.
Not surprisingly in a Bellow novel there are many acute observations. One I liked:
“Luckily – or perhaps not too luckily – this is cornucopia-time, an era of abundance in all civilized nations. Never, on the material side, have huge populations been better protected from hunger and sickness. And this partial release from the struggle for survival makes people naïve. By this I mean their wishful fantasies are unchecked.”
I finished the novel “Be Near Me.” It is written in the first person and is about a priest who is assigned as a pastor in Scotland to a parish of working class people who resents the learning and background of the new priest, especially since he studied in the hated England.
Basically the story revolves around the priest’s housekeeper and a 15 year old boy who is an opposite of his youthful lover who died in a car accident in the turbulent sixties. The pastor seems to seek in the new youth what was wiped out with his idealistic 60′s lover.
The housekeeper challenges the pastor while sharing her disappointments and ideals. During one long partying night the pastor allows the youth to come to his rectory and during the use of drugs he kisses the youngster but is rebuffedd. After the youth’s depressed and unemployed father finds out, the priest is charged with abuse of a minor amid jeering of pedophilia and irresponsibility. Eventually the priest is found guilty and given 120 days of community service.
The pastor’s mother, who bankrolls the pastor’s lifestyle, is an important part of the story also. The author gives us pertinent information about the father., also.
for some reason I found this story very strange. In all the pedophilia cases I have seen there never seemed to be a story this innocent except for Cavanaugh of New York who is still awaiting the results of his trial conducted outside New York.
Notable also is how the author portrays the priest as deserving sympathy. Not the norm when it comes to this subject.
The priest does not fit the criteria for a true pedophile as this is the only time this happened.
Though the story is marvelously told, I wonder how believable it is.
“Falling Man” by Don Delillo.
P.S. to Joe P.
any mystery by Linda Fairstein, since so many Catholics have so little insight into sex crimes and their impact
I’m late to this party, so I’m not sure who’s still reading this thread, but I just finished Pete Dexter’s ‘Deadwood,’ a mostly good historical novel. (Dexter won the National Book Award for ‘Paris Trout,’ which I haven’t read.) The first 2/3 are quite well done, but the last third or so falters, and feels rushed. Still, I have a slight obsession with the early history of Deadwood, so you should probably discount for that.