J. M. COETZEE, SOREN KIERKEGAARD, and JOHN COWPER POWYS

Coetzee, J .M., Summertime (New York: Viking, 2009) (“So David Truscott, who did not understand x and y, is a flourishing marketer or marketeer, while he, who had no trouble understanding x and y and much else besides, is an unemployed intellectual. What does that suggest about the workings of the world? What it seems most obviously to suggest is that the path that leads through Latin and algebra is not the path to material success. But it may suggest much more: that understanding things is a waste of time; that if you want to succeed in the world and have a happy family and a nice home and a BMW you should not try to understand things but just add up numbers or press the buttons or do whatever else it is that marketers are so richly rewarded for doing.” Id. at 14-15. “And I always beat him, or nearly always.” “The reason was simple. It wasn’t that he couldn’t argue; but he ran his life according to principles, whereas I was a pragmatist. Pragmatism always beats principles; that is just the way things are. The universe moves, the ground changes under our feet; principles are always a step behind. Principles are the stuff of comedy. Comedy is what you get when principles bump into reality.” Id. at 62-63.).

Kierkegaard, Soren, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychological Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin (Kierkegaard Writings, Vol. VIII) edited and translated by Reidar Thomte and Albert B. Anderson (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1980) ("It is indeed unethical to say that innocence must be annulled, for even if it were annulled at the moment this is uttered, ethics forbids us to forget that that it is annulled only by guilt. Therefore, if one speaks of innocence as immediacy and is logically offensive and rude enough to have let this fleeting thing vanish, or if one is esthetically sensitive about what it was and the fact that it has vanished, he is merely geistreich [clever] and forgets the point." "Just as Adam lost innocence by guilt, so every man loses it in the same way. If it was not by guilt that he lost it, then it was not innocence that he lost; and if he was not innocent before becoming guilty, he never became guilty." Id. at 35.).

Kierkegaard, Soren, Fear and Trembling; Repetition (Kierkegaard Writings, Vol. VI) edited and translated by Howard V. Hong & Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1983) ("What, then, is education? I believe it is the course the individual goes through in order to catch up with himself, and the person who will not go through this course is not much helped by being born in the most enlightened age." Fear and Trembling at 46. “[Job] affirms that he is on good terms with God; he knows he is innocent and pure in the very core of his being, where he also knows it before the Lord, yet all the world refutes him. Job’s greatness is that freedom’s passion in him is not smothered or quieted down by a wrong expression. In similar circumstances, this passion is often smothered in a person when faintheartedness and petty anxiety have allowed him to think he is suffering because of his sins, when that was not at all the case. His soul lacked the perseverance to carry through an idea when the world incessantly disagreed with him. . . .” Repetition at 207.).

Kierkegaard, Soren, The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awaking (Kierkegaard Writings, Vol. XIX) edited and translated by Howard V. Hong & Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1980) (The philistine-bourgeois mentality is spiritlessness; determinism and fatalism are despair of spirit, but spiritlessness is also despair. The philistine-bourgeois mentality lacks every qualification of spirit and is completely wrapped up in probability, within which possibility finds its small corner. . . . Bereft of imagination, as the philistine-bourgeois always is, whether alehouse keeper or prime minister, he lives within a certain trivial compendium of experiences as to how things go, what is possible, what usually happens. In this way, the philistine-bourgeois has lost his self. . . . In order for a person to become aware of his self . . . , imagination must raise him to higher than the miasma of probability, it must tear him out of this and teach him to hope and fear--or to fear and to hope--by rendering possible that which surpasses the {{quantum satis}} [sufficient amount] of any experience. But the philistine-bourgeois mentality does not have imagination, does not want to have it, abhors it. So there is no help to be had here. And if at times existence provides frightful experiences that go beyond the parrot-wisdom of routine experience, then the philistine-bourgeois mentality despairs, then it becomes apparent that it was despair; it lacks faith’s possibility of being able . . . to save a self from certain downfall.” Id. at 41.).

Powys, John Cowper, Autobiography [1934], a new edition with an introduction by J.B. Priestley (London: Macdonald, 1967) ("My enemies, and those worse than enemies, my patronizing admirers , . . . will doubtless affix many semi-scientific labels to my aberrations, have indeed probably already rushed to their psychopathic text-books to find out what I can possibly be up to, when I refer to my power of experiencing the emotions of women and girls. But the more I soak myself in the work of Shakespeare and Dostoievsky the more I recognize that both these men have the magic power of becoming women. That is the point. That is where the intelligencies of our modern critics are so dull. They do not understand what the meaning of the word 'Imagination' is." Id. at 528. "Science has not changed the human soul. Science has not changed the basic relations between the human soul and the mystery surrounding it. We are still potential magicians as long as we have faith in the power within us to create and to destroy. Social Justice is one thing. The free life of the individual soul under any system is another thing. What we do is important; but it is less important than what we feel; for it is our feeling that alone is under the control of our will. In action we may be weak and clumsy blunders, or on the other hand sometimes incompetent and sometimes competent, All this is largely beyond our control. What is not beyond our control is our feeling about it." Id. at 626. "When I contemplate the remorseless organization of our modern nations in their deliberate preparation for more frightful wars than this last one, and when I think of the blood-and-iron industrialism, which seems, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, to resemble a kind of daily war, there does seem something infinitely desirable about the passionate mystical, scholarly retirement from the world of these laborious thinks. I feel as if I could understand much better the sort of intellectual, mystical, and imaginative life that Pelagius lived, or Marcion, or even the metaphysical Duns Scotus, than I can grasp the temperamental mentality of modern 'Behaviourist.' But of course I know perfectly well that behind every human 'formula' of life--even behind these apparently purely 'scientific' attitudes--there is a will t believe." Id. at 631.).

Powys, John Cowper, A Glastonbury Romance [1932] (Woodstock: Overlook Press, 1987) (A great opening paragraph: "At the striking of noon on a certain fifth of March, there occurred within a causal radius of Brandon railway station and yet beyond the deepest pools of emptiness between the uttermost stellar systems one of those infinitesimal ripples in the creative silence of the First Cause which always occurs when an exceptional stir of heightened consciousness agitates any living organism in this astronomical universe. Something passed at that moment, a wave, a motion, a vibration, too tenuous to be called magnetic, too subliminal to be called spiritual, between the soul of a particular human being who was emerging from a third-class carriage of the twelve-nineteen train from London and the divine-diabolic soul of the First Cause of all life." Id. at 21.).

Powys, John Cowper, Maiden Castle [1936] (Woodstock & New York: The Overlook Press, 2001) ("The girl on the bed made no answer; and it was unlucky that at that second, as he lifted his head, he encountered the humiliated and offended look of Thuella's portrait of Teucer Wye. 'If you can't be a man', Mr. Wye's expression said, 'the best thing for you to do is to read Plato'." Id. at 276. "Good and evil must change,' he shouted, 'like everything else. Our art must change. A year ago I was a pacifist and a reformer. Now I'm a Communist and a person born again! All that old notion of yours, No-man, about the superior man living for contemplation--I tell we've enough of it! The poor, the working-people, have always been as I am now. What is this precious personal life you make such a fuss about compared with the great living spontaneous forces that move and stir in the crowded masses? I tell you the life of the working classes today anticipates the noblest life in the future. With what sardonic humour must a miner or a quarryman or a factory-hand today watch your poetical gentleman going for a walk with his stick and his dog and his love of nature! It's the human beings who sleep ten in a room, fighting, laughing, weeping, loving, hating, who know what Nature is! The rabbit in a trap knows what Nature is; and a man and a woman making love in the presence of their grown children, or beside themselves with hatred in the presence of three other families, know what Nature is. Oh, you poetical people with your simple life, I could curse you as Jesus cursed the Pharisees! I tell you, No-man, it costs money to live a simple life. A simple life's the luxury of the comfortable. Your benevolent poetical gentleman feeds on the poverty of others. He sucks blood like a flea, he cracks bones like a hyaena. He hates the radio, the cinema, the circus, because he can afford to hate them! I've found out this, my dears, from the little real work I've done already: that if you can't sink into the midst of a crowd, into the midst of ordinary people, loving, hating, chattering, suffering, enjoying themselves, being bad, being good, being swayed by all the natural human passions, and with no pride in themselves as superior to average humanity, and with no time to be fastidious, it's no good pretending that you've got the secret of life!'" Id. at 401-402. "Women are not less but far more polygamous than men, only it is a diffused and psychic polygamy, a polygamy that doesn't require for its satisfaction any contact of flesh with flesh; and they are, for this very reason, so protected from being exposed in these spiritual infidelities that they are often able to hide them even from themselves." Id. at 454.).

Powys, John Cowper, Owen Glendower: A Novel [1941] (Woodstock & New York: The Overlook Press, 2002).

Powys, John Cowper, Porius: A Novel [1951] edited by Judith Bond and Morine Krissdottir (Woodstock & New York: Overlook Duckworth, 1951, 2007).

Powys, John Cowper, Weymouth Sands: A Novel [1934] (Woodstock & New York: The Overlook Press, 1999).

Powys, John Cowper, Wolf Solent: A Novel [1929] (New York: Vintage International, 1998) ("'You needn't go on! interrupted Jason. 'Of course, I can't expect anyone to like my poetry who lives by copying out liquorish thoughts of a doting old fool. We all want to be glorified. My poetry is all I've got and I ought never to have read it to you. I ought to have known I'd only get abuse. It's this wanting to be glorified that's the mistake. A person ought to be satisfied if he can get his meals three times a day, without having to dance attendance on some silly old man or some ugly old woman!'" Id. at 363. "'Every movement we make must be bad or good,' she said: 'and we've got to make movements! We make bad movements anyhow . . . all of us . . . outrageous ones . . . like creation of the world! Isn't it better, then, to make them with our eyes open . . . to make them honestly, without any fuss . . . than just to be pushed, while we turn our heads round and pretend to be looking the other way? That's what you do, Wolf. You look the other way! . . . Why do you always try to make out that your motives are good, Wolf? They're often abominable! Just as mine are. There's only one thing required of us in this world, and that's not to be a burden . . . not to hang round people's necks! My Manley-man, whom you hate so, at any rate stands on his own feet. He give nothing for nothing. He keeps his thoughts to himself.'" Id at 460-461.).

JUST TRYING TO GET BEYOND THE PAROCHIAL AMERICAN PERSPECTIVE

Achebe, Chinua, The Education of a British-Protected Child: Essays (New York: Knopf, 2009) (From "The University and the Leadership Factor in Nigerian Politics": "But supposing an army were to recruit its elite corps not on the highest and toughest standards of soldiering but because they were the children of generals and admirals, it would have created a corrupt elite corps pampered with special favors without having the ability of storm trooper. So the real point about an elite is not whether it is necessary or not but whether it is genuine or counterfeit. This boils down to how it is recruited. And this is true of any elite system. An elite corps of scientists is indispensable to the modern state, but if its recruitment is from the children and brother-in-law of professors rather than from young scientists of the greatest talent, it would be worse than useless, because it would not only fail to produce scientific results itself but would actually inhibit such results from other quarters. A counterfeit elite, in other words, inflicts double jeopardy on society." "So the real problem posed by leadership is that recruitment. Political philosophers from Socrates and Plato to the present tie have wrestled with it. Every human society . . . has also battled with it. How do we secure the services of a good leader?" Id. at 139, 146-147.).

Euben, Roxanne L., & Muhammad Qasim Zaman, eds., Princeton Readings in Islamist Thought: Text and Contexts from Al-Banna to Bin Laden (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2009) ("This volume is intended as a broad introduction to the evolution and scope of Islamist political thought from the early twentieth century to the present. . . ." "The focus on Islamist thought inevitably tends to privilege writing over speech, ideas over particular practices. Yet this reader ultimately challenges the very opposition between 'theory' and practice' by showing the interrelation of thought and action in the lives of individual Islamists as well as in Islamist ideas and the dynamics of their political appeal. . . ." Id. at 1.).

Rogan, Eugene, The Arabs: A History (New York: Basic Books: 2009) (The book is well-reviewed in The Economist, November 12, 2009: "This is very much a traditional history, focused on the interplay of powers and the march of events. In other words, Mr Rogan’s book might more aptly have been called a modern political history of the Arabs." "It is not a particularly happy story, but it is a fascinating one, and exceedingly well told. Mr Rogan manoeuvres with skilful assurance, maintaining a steady pace through time, and keeping the wider horizon in view even as he makes use of a broad range of judiciously chosen primary sources to enrich the narrative. The more closely focused views of Arab contemporaries add not just texture and sometimes fun, but also give a deeper sense of changing Arab sensibilities.").

SOCIAL CONVENTIONS ARE ARBITRARY

Marmor, Andrei, Social Conventions: From Language to Law (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2009) (This is a interesting read, especially for those with a philosophical bent. “This is a short book, and there is no need to give it a long introduction. There are, however, two related points I need to clarify in advance. First, I take it that conventions are a species of norms; they are rules that regulate human conduct. As such, conventions pose a problem that is best cast in terms of practical reasoning. If there is anything unique about conventional norms, there must be something unique about the ways in which they figure in our practical reasons. The second assumption is precisely the idea that conventional norms are unique. In spite of the great diversity of domains in which we follow conventions, they share an essential feature, namely, their arbitrariness. To suggest that a certain norm is conventional is to suggest that in some sense it just happens to be the one we follow, that we could have followed a different norm instead, that is, without any significant loss of purpose. This arbitrary feature of conventional norms is both a challenge and the beginning of an explanation. It is a challenge to explain the practical reasons for following a rule that is, basically, arbitrary. But the arbitrary nature of conventions is also the beginning of why it matters, philosophically speaking, to determine whether a certain domain, or type of norms, is conventional or not. It matters precisely because conventionality entails a certain arbitrariness, suggesting that the way things are could have been different in a real sense. . . . More precisely, . . . the conventionality of a domain is closely tied with crucial elements of contingency, path dependency, and underdetermination by reasons, These are the features that make it philosophically interesting to determine whether a certain set of norms is conventional or not. . . .” Id. at x-xi.).

HEALTH, LAW, AND POLITICS

Blumenthal, David and James A. Morone, The Heart of Power: Health and Politics in the Oval Office (Berkeley & Los Angeles: U. of California Press, 2009) (In the end, perhaps health care simply stretches indefinitely into the future. It is, after all, the place where politics and interests meet the human condition, the issue that reflects the greatest challenges to any society: how well do we minister to our fellow humans? Seen this way, health care will always challenge the head and the soul of the vulnerable human who sits at the heart of power.” Id. at 420.).

Lord, Alexandra M., Condom Nation: The U.S. Government’s Sex Education Campaign From World War I to The Internet (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins U. Press, 2009) ("The ensuing debates over sex education have often been portrayed as debates over the issue of medicine and morality. President Ronald Reagan tackled this issue directly when he insisted that sex education 'can not be what some call "valve neutral." After all,' he asked, 'when it comes to preventing AIDS, don't medicine and morality teach the same lessons?' Reagan's question was a troubling one for public health experts. It lacked the nuanced understanding they have repeatedly demanded when teaching adolescents and even adults about sex. Medicine and morality are not, many sex educators would say, diametrically opposed--nor are they synonymous. Rather, they are two different and unrelated issues. Throughout the long history of American sex education programs, the desire to conflate these two issues or to set them up in opposition to one another has caused incalculable and often irreparable damage to both privately and federally funded sex education programs." Id. at 3 (citations omitted).)

Segall, Shlomi, Health, Luck, and Justice (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2010) (“What is the just distribution of health and health care? The answer this book seeks to offer is deceptively simple perhaps: Differences in health and health care are unjust if they reflect differences in brute luck.” “The invocation of luck in accounts of egalitarian justice has become increasingly salient in recent years. In fact, ‘luck egalitarian’ can be said to be the main rival to John Rawls’s dominant theory of justice. According to luck egalitarians, distributive justice requires correcting disadvantages for which individuals cannot be held responsible. In other words, the theory seeks to compensate individuals for the effects of bad luck on their lives. . . . It may be surprising, perhaps, but despite the prominence of this egalitarian theory, to date there has not been any systematic attempt to apply luck egalitarian to the study of justice in the distribution of health and health care. In fact, some critics have commented in passing that the application of luck egalitarianism to health and health care leads to counterintuitive results. That is precisely the challenge that this books seeks to meet: to offer and defend a luck egalitarian account of justice in health care and health.” Id. at 1. “Luck egalitarians, I have tried to emphasize throughout this book, are only indirectly concerned with what individuals are responsible for. Their true concern is with the factors that shape our lives and for which we are not responsible. The ambition to neutralize luck . . . has radical implications for the extent of society’s duties of justice. It allows us to say that society ought to address every disadvantage for which the individual is not responsible. That . . may lead to extensive, never before taken, action by society to address disadvantages in the sphere of health. . . .” Id. at 174. This is a very thoughtful read, one which anyone seriously interested in healthcare law cannot responsibly avoid reading.).

Stein, Mark S., Distributive Justice and Disability: Utilitarianism Against Egalitarianism (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2006) ("This book is about the contest between utilitarianism and egalitarianism. Utilitarianism, as a theory of distributive justice, tells us to help those who can most benefit, those who can gain the greatest increase in welfare. Egalitarianism theories of distributive justice tell us to help those who are in some way worse off. I advocate utilitarianism." Id. at 1. This is a worthwhile read, which is not to say that I think he gets it right.).

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

Margalit, Avishai, On Compromise and Rotten Compromises (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2010) (Read this very thoughtful book based, in part, on Margalit's Tanner lectures delived at Stanford University in 2005. "This book "is about peace and compromise." "More specially: what compromises we are not allowed to make for the sake of peace." "The short answer is: rotten compromises are not allowed, even for the sake of peace. Other compromises should be dealt with on a retail basis, one by one: they should be judged on their merits. Only rotten compromises should be ruled out on a wholesale basis. . . . The book is in pursuit of just a peace, rather than of a just peace. Peace can be justified without being just." Id. at 1 (italic in original). "The compromises discussed in the book are political compromises, rather than personal ones. The distinction is not always clear." "I see rotten political compromises as an agreement to establish or maintain an inhumane regime, a regime of cruelty and humiliation, that is, a regime that does not treat humans as humans." "Inhuman regimes erode the foundation of morality. Morality rests on treating humans as human; not treating humans as humans undermines the basic assumption of morality. I draw a distinction between morality and ethics. Morality is about how human relations should be in virtue of our being human and in virtue of nothing else." "Ethics, in contrast, is about what relations we should have with other people in virtue of some special relationships we have with them, such as family relations or friendships." Id. at 2-3 (italics in original). "The idea of political compromise is caught between two pictures of politics: politics as economics and politics as religion. Roughly speaking, in the economic picture of politics everything is subject to compromise. Compromise is not always desirable or prudent, but it is always possible. In the religious picture, there are things over which we must never compromise." Id. at 24. "[W]ars and emergencies are extreme situations from the point of view of peace. But they are not abnormal in the freak sense of the term, even if metaphorically we tend to describe them as such. Rules, moral rules included, can apply to war as well as to compromises made in times of war. The whole idea of a just-war theory, which advocates justice in the conduct of war, is that the open violence of war can be regulated and subjected to constraints. War is a different phrase in human existence from peace, but not a mode of existence that renders morality irrelevant." "Even in war we are required to treat humans with basic dignity. . . ." Id. at 132. "There is, however, a further distinction between an active partner and a passive one. We have heard reports of cases of extraordinary rendition agreements whereby the CIA kidnapped and transferred more than one hundred suspects to other countries (mainly Egypt, but also Syria, Morocco, Jordan, and Uzbekistan) for interrogation. According to those reports, 'torture by proxy' was used systematically. If true, we should regard the United States not as a silent partner in such rendition agreements, but as an active one, in spite of the fact that the infliction of torture, cruelty, and humiliation was outsourced. The instigator, the United States, and the subcontractors should both be considered an active side." Id. at 92-93.).

ABOUT WOMEN: FOUR

Brownmiller, Susan, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975) (Brownmiller's Against Our Will remains a required read. Its rhetoric, though perhaps not the argument taken as a whole, is often dishonest. A case in point is the the beginning of Chapter 3, which addresses rape in war. The chapter begins with a quotation from General George S. Patton, Jr.: "I then told him that, in spite of my most diligent efforts, there would unquestionably be some raping, and that I should like to have the details as early as possible so that the offenders could be properly hanged." Id. at 31. Read that sentence again and note the phrase, "in spite of my most diligent efforts, there would unquestionably be some raping . . . ." Then comes Brownmiller's first full paragraph. "It's funny about man's attitude toward rape in war. Unquestionably there shall be some raping. When men are men, slugging it out among themselves, conquering new land, subjugating new people, driving on toward victory, unquestionably there shall be some raping." Id. at 31 (italics in original). Read that paragraph again, and note that the two appearances of "unquestionably", and only that word, are italicized by Brownmiller for emphasis; and, note that what is unquestionable for her is not that there would be some raping, but rather that there unquestionably there "shall be" some raping. 'Would be' has dishonestly morphed into "shall be" for rhetoric purposes. Such rhetorical moves lessened a nevertheless (though not "nonetheless") important book. Then again, I recall a certain cartoon in The New Yorker. A woman and a man are sitting on a sofa, apparently watching television. The woman essentially informs the man that the reason he did not understand whatever was on the television is because he is not the targeted audience. Men (or at least certain men) don't get the message because the message is not intended for you. Against Our Will, political tract in the Second Wave of American feminism, is pitched toward (most?) women and toward (few?) men; so it is understandable that (a lot of) men and few women took issue with Brownmiller's discussion of the political history of rape. They did not get it, but then again they were meant to get it. Read, for instance, Diane Johnson's book review, "The War Between Men and Women," in the New York Review of Books, Volume 22, Number 20, December 11, 1975. It should also be noted that some of the heated rhetoric in the politics of rape got muted in the Third Wave, as the Second Wave became mothers of sons. It is a lot harder to view one's sons as potential rapists. Though one' sons must be potential rapists if all men rape. This is also one of the reasons why the politics of "date rape" is heartwrenching for mothers with sons. Moreover, there are all those sons, fathers, brothers, husbands, etc., who are serving in the military during times of war. Soldier rape in war. American soldiers rape in war. See the recent New York Times series, "Women at Arms.," especially Steven Lee Myers, "A Peril in War Zones: Sexual Abuse by Fellow G.I.’s," NYT, December 27, 2009.).

Dworkin, Andrea, Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant (New York: Basic Books, 2002) ("The worst immoralities are but one, a single sin of human nothingness and stupidity. 'Do no harm' is the counterpoint to apathy, indifference, and passive aggression; it is the fundamental moral imperative. 'Do no harm' is the opposite of immoral. One must do something and at the same time do no harm. 'Do no harm' remains the hardest ethic." Id. at 204.).

Dworkin, Andrea, Life and Death: Unapologetic Writings on the Continuing War Against Women (New York: Free Press, 1997) (From "Terror, Torture, and Resistance": "I want to talk about the violence against women, and you're here to talk about healing. I wish that you could raise the dead. That is what I would like to see. This is a political point. One of the reasons that the Right reaches so many women is that the Right has a transcendent god who says I will heal all your hurt and all your pain and all your wounds: 'I died for you. I will heal you.' Feminists do not have a transcendent god who can heal that way. We have ideas about fairness and justice and equality. And we have to find ways to make them real. We don't have magic. We don't have supernatural powers. And we can't keep sticking together women who have been broken into little pieces. Fighting back is as close to healing as we are going to come. It is important to understand that we will live with a fair amount of pain for most of our lives. If your priority is to live a painless life, you will not be able to help yourself or other women. What matters is to be a warrior. Having a sense of honor about political struggle is healing. Discipline is necessary. Actions against men who hurt women must be real. We need to win. We are in a war. We have not been fighting back. We need to win this war. We need a political resistance. We need it aboveground. We need it with our lawmakers, with our government officials. We need it with our professional women. We need it aboveground. We need it underground too." Id. at 115, 123-124.).

Dworkin, Andrea, Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women’s Liberation (New York: Free Press, 2000) ("Put concretely, women need land and guns or other armament or defense; or women need to organize nonviolently in great masses that grow out of small demonstrations using civil disobedience. The latter is harder than the former but gets fairer results. One needs to target individual men who commit crimes against women and institutions that objectify, demean, and hurt women; using either violence or nonviolence. Indiscriminate violence is never justified; there are always innocents." "One needs a commitment to discipline and sacrifice. One needs either equality or political and economic superiority. The former is harder than the later. One needs strong girls who grow up to be strong and fierce women. One needs a sense of what is urgent, including the huge problem of female illiteracy and poverty, both of which take children with them. One needs food, shelter, health care, and education for women as well as political rights. One needs a concrete militancy, grassroots organizations, the female practice of cooperation seen in Nazi concentration camps and Argentinean jails. One needs a nonrhetorical commitment to justice. One needs the rulership and political autonomy of women: the eventual taking over of public policy and civil power. One needs fair treatment of the male minority. One needs to revisit the principles of eighteenth-century political thinkers and philosophers with a clarity about what is missing: principles and practices that did not speak to the honor and dignity of women as citizens. Thomas Jefferson and the other U.S. founders did not give women anything: no rights; no freedom; no money; no land. Neither the American Revolution nor the French Revolution nor the Enlightenment nor the aftermath of the U.S. Civil War (in which the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteen Amendments to the U.S. Constitution were ratified) dared to hand over rights to women." "One needs rules in courts of law based on how crimes really happen--rape, for instance--and the development of rules of evidence that are fair from the point of view of the raped, not the raper. One needs rape museums to put in one place the cogency and significance of the act of rape; a story told through artifacts and stories. One needs the deep study of prostitution as a paradigm for scapegoating." "Remember that men are biologically vulnerable: they war their genitals on the outside of their bodies; it is easier for women to hurt men than for men to get inside their bodies--except that women don't want to hurt men and men do want to get inside women. One must turn this around: men must be made aware of their fragility and vulnerability--or is that what creates make aggression, precisely that awareness, never spoken?" Id. at 336-337.).

Feimster, Crystal N., Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard University Press, 2009) ("This is a history of two southern women, Rebecca Latimer Felton (1835-1930) and Ida B. Wells (186201931), and the thousands of women who joined their campaigns against rape and for women's rights in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries during the height of lynching in the American South. . . . Despite differences in their age, race, class, and status, they both, in very different contexts, took radical stances on rape and lynching. Together, their struggles against sexual violence--Wells advocated on the black women's behalf and Felton mostly fought for the protection of poor white women--brought to southern politics the concerns of women who historically had been excluded from debates about rape and protection. Although both campaigned for women's safety, they confronted the problem of lynching in completely different ways. While Wells became internationally known for her radical anti-lunching crusade, it was Felton's notorious plea to 'lynch a thousand a week' that thrust her into the national spotlight. From different sides of the color line, Felton and Wells were women's rights pioneers who negotiated and challenged the racial and sexual politics of the New South." Id. at 1. "After the [Civil] war, as white anxiety about the political, economic, and social meanings of emancipation intensified, different constituencies assembled a convergent set of racial and sexual fantasies. During the overthrow of Reconstruction, southern white men managed to flip the antebellum script of racial and sexual violence. Whereas prior to the war abolitionists had espoused a political narrative that centered on the rape of black women by white men, in the postwar years southern men articulated a political discourse that defined rape as a crime committed by black men against white women. In constructing the image of the 'black rapist,' southern white men sought to challenge black men's right as citizens while simultaneously expanding their own sexual power over both black and white women. The portrayal of black men as beastly and unable to control their sexual desires served to justify the practice of lynching, segregation laws, and disfranchisement of black men." Id. at 4-5. "By 1920 . . . Felton no longer believed that black men were the primary threat to white womanhood. Instead, she now re-embraced the view she had held in the 1880s and early 1890s, that white men represented the great danger to southern women, both black and white." Id. at 205. "Despite scholarly claims that the Civil War was a low-rape war, the fact that many women feared sexual assault and that hundreds, and possibly thousands, of women suffered rape cannot be ignored. Men and women not only wrote about sexual assault and the fear of rape in their diaries and letters, but women, black and white, free and enslaved, pressed charges against alleged rapists. At least 250 Union soldiers were court-martialed for the crime of rape." Id. at 20. This is an interesting read. For those who are puzzled over the continuing presence of race, ethnic, socio-economic class fault-lines among American feminists, the book will provide a longer historical perspective.).

Pamuk, Orhan, Other Colors: Essays and a Story (New York: Knopf, 2007) ("We all know that the longer this campaign continues, the more the U.S. Army seeks to satisfy its won nation by killing innocent people in Afghanistan and elsewhere, the more it will exacerbate the manufactured tension between East and West, thereby playing into the hands of the very terrorists it wishes to punish. It is at present morally reprehensible to suggest this savage terrorism is a response to America's world domination. But it is nevertheless important to understand why millions of people living in poor and marginalized countries that have lost even the right to shape their own histories might feel such anger against America. This is not simply that we must see their anger as justified. It is important to remember that many Third World and Islamic countries use anti-American sentiment to occlude their democratic shorting comings and shore up dictatorships. Muslim countries that are struggling to establish secular democracies are not helped in the least when America allies itself with closed societies like Saudi Arabia which claim democracy and Islam to be irreconcilable. In much the same way, the more superficial variety of anti-Americanism that one sees in Turkey allows those at the top to waste and misappropriate the money given to them by international financial bodies and to conceal the ever-growing gap between rich and poor. There are many in the United States who support the offensive unconditionally, just because they wish to demonstrate their military dominance and give the terrorists a symbolic 'lesson,' and some who discuss the likely locations of the next bombing raid cheerfully as if they were playing a video game, but they should understand that decisions taken in the heat of battle can only intensify the anger and humiliation that the millions in the world's poor Islamic countries feel against a West that sees itself as superior. It is not Islam that makes people side with the terrorists, nor is it poverty; it is the crushing humiliation felt throughout the Third World." Id. 219-220. "Nothing nurtures support for the 'Islamist' throwing nitric acid in the faces of women more than the West's refusal to understand the anger of the damned." Id. at 221.).

WAR, HISTORY, POLITICS, VIOLENCE, NATIONALISM, PATRIOTISM, AND . . . THUCYDIDES

Aid, Matthew M., The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency (New York; Bloomsbury Press, 2009) ("In the end, the fear among a number of retired NSA officers is that the agency's domestic eavesdropping program, in addition to generating much unwanted negative publicity for the agency, almost certainly diverted much-needed manpower and fiscal resources from NSA's foreign-intelligence-gathering mission to what the agency officers generally believe to have been a poorly considered and legally questionable domestic monitoring operation that apparently has produced little in the way of tangible results, despite claims to the contrary from the [Bush] White House." Id. at 299. "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king." Desiderius Erasmus).

Danner, Mark, Stripping Bare the Body: Politics, Violence, War (New York: Nation Books, 2009) (This is a collection of some the author's thoughtful essays on political violence. "But firmness can stop armies and save lives." Id. at 327 (quoting President Clinton). "In Bosnia, of course, such 'firmness,' in the form of aerial bombardment, came from a paralyzed America only after three years of genocidal war and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. In Kosovo, the firmness came in the same form; but it did not 'stop armies,' at least not for seventy-nine days, and it is a difficult argument to make that it saved lives--or at least that it saved Kosovar lives." "American lives of course it did save. Amid the carnage of Kosovo, and the more than 1,200 dead civilians in Serbia, not a single American airman or soldier, indeed not a single member of the Western alliance, died; not one suffered injuries. And here we reach the bleak underside of President Clinton's 'moral imperative' as it was played out during those seventy-nine days of bombing. For Kosovo certainly comes as close as yet achieved to that grail which American leaders have been so long seeking: the politically cost-free war." Id. at 327-328. "'From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned. A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and it is ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened.'" Id. at 554 (quoting, George Orwell, "The Prevention of Literature," in The George Orwell Reader: Fiction, Essays and Reportage (New York: Harcourt, 1961, 371.).

Favret, Mary A., War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2009) ("I will be arguing that the generation of writers from Cowper to Coleridge--artists as celebrated as William Wordsworth and forgotten as the anonymous poets of the periodical press--helped to construct the first wartime of modernity. C.K. William's poem ["The Hearth," in C.K. Williams, The Singing (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003), 65-66.] alerts us to his overlooked history, the continuity between the way war figures in romantic writings and the way war figures today. But the wartime so constructed does not obey the enclosing actions of periodization; instead it presents a more unsettled and unsettling temporality. Shot through with expressions, imagery, and figures of speech assembled over two hundred years ago, wartime is a present experience handed down from a past uncertain of its future. We have inherited what wartime looks and sounds and feels like from this other time, which remains both strange and familiar." Id. at 4-5. "As it looks back over two centuries, War at a Distance tells how military conflict on a global scale looked and felt to a population whose armies and navies waged war for decades, but always at a distance. For those at home, the task was to find sentient ground for what often appeared a free-floating, impersonal military operation, removed from their immediate sensory perception. . . . As a wartime phenomenon, British Romanticism gives its distinctive voice to the dislocated experience that is modern wartime: the experience of war mediated, of time and times unmoored, of feeling intensified but also adrift." Id. at 9).

Kagan, Donald, The Peloponnesian War (New York: Viking, 2003) ("The defeat of Athens in the war was also a blow to the prospects for democracy in the other Greek cities. The influence of political systems on the people outside them is closely connected with their success in war. The democratic constitution of a powerful and successful Athens was a magnet and a model for others, even in the heart of the Peloponnesus Athens' loss in the war against Sparta was taken as proof of the inadequacy of its political system; Athenian failures were seized upon as democratic errors; ordinary human mistakes and misfortunes were judged to be the peculiar consequences of democracy. The Spartan victory over the democratic coalition at Mantinea in 418 was the turning point in the political development of Greece toward obligarchy rather than democracy, but the final defeat of Athens reinforced the trend." Id. at 488-489. "It is both legitimate and instructive to think of what we call the Peloponnesian War as 'the great war between Athens and Sparta,' as one scholar has designated it, because, like the European war of 1914-1918 to which the title 'the Great War' was applied by an earlier generation that knew only one, it was a tragic event, a great turning point in history, the end of an era of progress, prosperity, confidence, and hope, and the beginning of a darker time." Id. at 489-490.).

Kagan, Donald, Thucydides: The Reinvention of History (New York: Viking, 2009) ("In 1947 the American Secretary of State George C. Marshall said: 'I doubt seriously whether a man can think with full wisdom and with deep convictions regarding certain basic international issues today who has not at least reviewed in his mind the period of the Peloponnesian War and the Fall of Athens.' Ever since, Thucydides' History has had a strong and continuing influence on those who think about international relations and war." Id. at 1 (citation omitted). "Since most people live in states, and it is states that determine how they will be educated and since politics controls even the most important human faculties such as strategy, economic management, and tactics of persuasion, politics, to some degree, controls all fields of knowledge. Politics, after all, lays down what people may or must do and what they may or must not do." Id. at 231-232. "Surely the twentieth century has demonstrated the decisive importance of whether we live under a totalitarian regime or under a democracy, whether we are at war or live in peace, whether we win the wars that we wage or lose them. One need not be an Aristotelian or even an ancient Greek to understand the centrality of politics to the human condition." Id. at 232. "Herodotus deserves the title of 'the father of history,' but Thucydides was the father of political history. . . . His History raises for the first time countless questions about the development of human societies that remain very relevant today. He looks deeply into the causes of war, drawing a distinction between those openly alleged and those more fundamental but less obvious." Id. at 232.).

Keegan, John, The American Civil War: A Military History (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2009) ("What makes this poem ["Come up From the Fields, Father"] of Whitman's so heartrendering is that everything in it entirely genuine. Whitman knew what happened to boys shot in the chest; he knew how such news affected families, since he often meet them on their visits to the hospitals; he knew what terrible truths the consoling letters sent to families concealed, since he had often written such letters himself. Even though he was not a witness of battle, he knew what results battles caused, since he saw them on the hospital wars. Whitman was a great poet of the Civil War, because he understood the purpose and nature of the war, which was to inflict suffering on the American imagination. The suffering . . . was felt particularly by those not present. The whole point of the war was to hold mothers, fathers, sisters, and wives in a state of tortured apprehension, waiting for the terrible letter from the hospital that spoke of wounds and which all too often presaged the death of a dear son, husband, or father. It was a particular cruelty of the Civil War that because neither side had targets of strategic value to be attacked . . . its effect had to be directed principally, indeed for years exclusively, at the man in the field and at the emotions of those who waited at home. Torturing the apprehensions of the non-combatants was a new development in warfare, produced by the rise of an efficient postal service. Before the days of rapid and reasonably certain postal communication, soldiers could be banished to the mind's recesses after they marched away, because the nearest and dearest knew that they would receive no news of their fate until the war was over, if indeed then. The only certain news of a soldier on the campaign came by default, when he did not return home. Whitman caught at the truth in an entry in one of his notebooks, 'The expression of American personality through this war is not to be looked for in the great campaign and the battle-fights. It is to be looked for . . . in the hospitals, among the wounded." Id. at 3i8-319. Now, of course, we have television, digital video recorders the internet, and You-tube. The war is constantly there, though many, lacking immediate family members on the line, chose to ignore it for quite a while. We may not romanticize the American War in Iraq or the American War in Afghanistan, but, for the most part, we view these from too far a distance. At least as long as it is someone else's father, mother, son, daughter, husband or wife that is in harm's way. Also, see the reviews "Exporting Warfare," The Economist, October 3, 2009, and James M. McPherson, "Brutal Terrain," The NYT Book Review, Sunday, November 1, 2009.).

Packer, George, Interesting Times: Writings from a Turbulent Decade (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009) ("for most Americans, September 11 and all that it unleashed dominated the decade. This revealed, among other things, our besetting narcissism, the vice that leads us to imagine ourselves the best or the worst but at any rate the center of everything." Id. at x. From "Stop Making Sense": "Clarity and conviction are wonderful things; I wouldn't want to be told that I can never have them again. But a better test of mental health and civic responsibility just now may be whether you can endure inconsistency, hold a fact without manipulating its shape, use words that will expose the falseness of your own thoughts, and accept that you will be embarrassed tomorrow by much of what you think and say today." Id. at 22.).

Parker, Christopher S., Fighting for Democracy: Black Veterans and the Struggle Against White Supremacy in the Postwar South (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2009) ("My central argument is that black veterans' willingness to challenge white supremacy and resist Jim Crow rested to a significant extent upon their military experiences. They drew, first, on their perception that their service in the military made them full members of the political community; it merited full citizenship. Second, they drew on their military experiences, which exposed them to opportunities that bolstered their sense of agency and opened their eyes to the possibility of black-white relations in which they were considered equals. Finally, the confidence they gained from serving during wars in which they were forced to fight against the enemy in the field at the same time that they battled racism in the ranks sustained their commitment to fight white supremacy as well as their confidence to do so." Id. at 4-5.).

Rosier, Paul C., Serving Their Country: American Indian Politics and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge. Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2009) (An interesting read, a juxtaposition, for those interested in foreign relations and foreign relations law. "[The] tension between racial nationalism and civic nationalism and American Indians' use of patriotic rhetoric to mediate it emerged most clearly during the Cold War. But since much recent scholarship on the intersection of race and the Cold War has ignored Native Americans, the story of Indian-white relations remains segregated from the narrative of twentieth-century American history and international history. Exploring the involvement on Native Americans with the local, national, and international politics of the Cold War era, I trace the evolution of Native Americans' contemporary identities in the crucible of the Cold War, from the end of World War II to the end of the Vietnam War. . . . The heart of this book considers where the Cold war took place for Native Americans, how they conceived of its relevance to their lives, through what institutions they mediated its pressures, and how it shaped their national and ethnic identities and thus their vision of American citizenship and patriotism. In addition, I trace connections between U.S. domestic Indian policy and U.S. Cold War foreign policy and examine how the struggles of Native Americans to preserve their ancestral lands helped to shape Americans' conceptions of the Cold War at home and abroad, in particular American citizens' awareness of their new global role in constructing an empire for liberty abroad and American politicians' engagement with Third World peoples intent on securing their independence from imperial rule." Id. at 7-8. Speaking of The American War in Vietnam: "As the novelist James Baldwin wrote in 1968: 'A racist society can't but right a racist war--this is the bitter truth. The assumptions acted on at home are also acted on abroad, and every American Negro knows this, for he, after the American Indian, was the first 'Viet Cong' victim.' Vietnam was not about politics so much as it was about 'racial hatred,' as Kipp put it." Id.at at 249. And then there is The American War in Iraq: "The frontier has gone restless now. . . . We'll ride 'em [Iraqis] down like Cherokee. --Second lieutenant in Iraq, 2004." Id. at 276.).

Sheehan, Neil, A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon (New York: Random House, 2009) (See Michael Beschloss, "Missile Defense," The NYT Book Review, Sunday, October 4, 2009.).

Thompson, Nicholas, The Hawk and The Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War (New York: Henry Holt, 2009) (George Kennan to Dean Acheson: "'In international, as in private, life what counts most is not really what happens to someone but how he bears what happens to him. For this reason almost everything defends from here on out on the manner in which we Americans bear what is unquestionably a major failure and disaster to our national fortunes. If we accept it with candor, with dignity, and with resolve to absorb its lessons and to make it good by redoubled and determined effort--starting all over again, if necessary, along the pattern of Pearl Harbor--we need lose neither our self-confidence nor our allies nor our power for bargaining, eventually, with the Russians. But if we try to conceal from our people or from our allies the full measure of our misfortune, or permit ourselves to seek relief in any reactions of bluster or petulance or hysteria, we can easily find this crisis resolving itself into an irreparable deterioration of our world position--and of our confidence in ourselves.'" Id. at 126 (quoting from Robert Beisner, Dean Acheson (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 2006), at 413). George Kennan: "'There was more respect to be won by superior performance in the part of the underling than mediocre performance in the role of the king.'" Id. at 235.).

Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, Books I-II with an English translation by Charles Forster Smith (Loeb Classical Library)(Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: Harvard University Press, 1919, 1928, 2003).

Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, Books III-IV with an English translation by Charles Forster Smith (Loeb Classical Library)(Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: Harvard University Press, 1920, 1930, 2005) (Hermocrates son of Hermon: "'The city of which I represent, Siceliots, is not the weakest, nor is it suffering most in the war; but I propose to speak in the general interest, declaring the opinion which seems to me the best for Sicily as a whole. As for the miseries which war entails, why should one by expressly stating all that can be said make a long harangue in the presence of those who know? For no one is either forced to make war through ignorance of what it is, or deterred from making it by fear, if he thinks he will get some advantage from it. What really happens is this, that to one side the gains appear greater than the terrors, while the other deliberately prefers to undergo the dangers rather than submit to a temporary disadvantage; but if it should turn out that these two lines of action are both inopportune, each for the side which adopts it, them some profit may come from exhortations which advise a compromise. And so with us at the present time, if we could be persuaded of the wisdom of this course it would be to our great advantage; for each of us began the war in the first place because we desired to promote our private interests. So now let us endeavour by setting forth our conflicting claims to become reconciled with each other; and then, if we do not after all succeed in securing, each of us, what is fair and just before we part, we shall go to war again.'" Id. at 309-311.).

Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, Books V-VI with an English translation by Charles Forster Smith (Loeb Classical Library)(Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: Harvard University Press, 1921, 2006) ("But Athenagoras, who was a popular leader and at the present time most influential with the masses, came forward and addressed them as follows: * * * 'Some say that a democracy is neither wise not equitable, and that those that have property are more competent to rule the best. But I say, first, that democracy is a name for all, oligarchy for only a part; next, that while the wealthy are the best guardians of property, the wise would be the best counsellors, and the many, after hearing matters discussed, would be the best judges; and that these classes, whether severally or collectively, enjoy a like equality in a democracy. An oligarchy, on the other hand, gives the many a share of the dangers, but of the advantages it not merely claims the lion's share, but even takes and keeps it all. And this is what the powerful among you and the young men are bent upon--a thing impossible to attain in a great city.'" Id. at 251-257.).

Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, Books VII-VIII with an English translation by Charles Forster Smith (Loeb Classical Library)(Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: Harvard University Press, 1923, 1935, 2003) ("When the news reached Athens, even though the actual soldiers who had escaped from the action itself gave a clear report, they for long refused to believe that the armament could have been so utterly destroyed. When, however, they were convinced, they were angry with the orators who had taken part in promoting the expedition--as though they had not voted for it themselves--and they were also enraged at the oracle-mongers and soothsayers and whoever at that time by any practice of divination had led them to hope that they would conquer Sicily. Everything indeed on every side distressed them, and after what had happened they were beset with fear and utmost consternation. For having lost, both each man separately and as a state, many hoplites and horsemen and the flower of the youth, while they saw none like it left them, they were heavy of heart; and again, seeing no ships in the docks in sufficient numbers nor money in the treasury nor crews for the ship, they were at the moment hopeless of safety. They thought that their enemies in Sicily would sail with their fleet straight for the Peireaus, especially as they had won so great a victory, and that their foes at home, now doubly prepared in all respects, would attack them at once with all their might both by land and by sea, and that their own allies would revolt and join them. Nevertheless it was their opinion that, as far as their present circumstances permitted, they should not give up, but should both make ready a fleet, providing timber and money from whatever sources they could, and put their relations with their allies, and especially with Euboea, on a safe footing; moreover, that they should reduce the expenses of the city to an economical basis, and should select a board of elderly men who should prepare measures with reference to the present situation as there might be occasion. In the panic of the moment they were ready, as is the way o with a democracy, to observe discipline in everything. And as they had determined, so they proceeded to act; and the summer ended." Id. 191-193.).

LAST MINUTE CHRISTMAS SHOPPING? WHY BOTHER? THERE ARE BETTER ALTERNATIVES!

Waldfogel, Joel, Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn’t Buy Presents For the Holidays (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2009).

PATTY McE SENT AN EMAIL TO ME. SHE THINKS THE READINGS ON THIS BLOG ARE REAL DOWNERS. I CANNOT DISAGREE.

Doctorow, E. L., Homer & Langley: A Novel (New York: Random House, 2009) ("Or maybe it was those moon walks of our astronauts that made Langley give up painting as insufficient to his rage. Can you imagine the crassness of it, hitting golf balls on the moon? he said. And that other one, reading the Bible to the universe as he circled around out there? The entire class of blasphemies is in those two acts, he said. The one stupidly irreverent, the other stupidly presumptuous." Id. at 135.).

Moore, Lorrie, A Gate at the Stairs: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2009) ("I went home and googled the n-word, opening up a sewer that went on forever." Id. at 238.).

Munro, Alice, Too Much Happiness: Stories (New York: Knopf, 2009).

Sanow, Anne, Triple Time (Pittsburgh: U. of Pittsburgh Press, 2009).

ABOUT COLLEGE EDUCATION: DATA DO MATTER

Bowen, William G., & Derek Bok, The Shape of the River: Long Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1998).

Bowen, William G., Matthew M. Chingos, & Michael S. McPherson, Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America’s Public Universities (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2009) ("[E]ducational attainment in the United States today is highly consequential. Important are both overall levels of educational attainment and disparities in educational outcomes by race/ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status (SES), and the kind of university a student attends. These outcomes and the forces that drive them are enormously important not only to prospective students and their parents, institutional decision makers, and policy makers but to all who care about both economic prospects for this country and its social fabric--which is so strongly shaped by the pronounced differences in educational levels seen in relation to how one grows up. In this study, we focus on patterns of educational attainment at public universities, which educate more than two-thirds of all full-time students seeking bachelor's degrees at four-year colleges and universities." Id. at xiii.).

Espenshade, Thomas J. & Alexandria Walton Radford, No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2009) ("In this book we address the role of elite higher education in confronting issues of inequality on U.S. college campuses. Specifically, our aim is to draw back the curtain on the selective college experience and take a close look at how race and social class are intimately intertwined with the admission process and with the academic and nonacademic sides of campus life. We ask three central questions. First, to what extent is American elite higher education involved in promoting social mobility? We know, for instance, that the economic return to a college degree is increasing and that the return to a selective college or university education is rising even faster. Therefore, mobility chances in the population are deeply affected by exactly who is profiting from the kind of education selective colleges offer." Id. at 2. "A second set of questions revolves around the use of affirmative action by selective institutions." Id. at 4. "A third issue we address relates to campus life itself. Sometimes lost between a preoccupation with admission practices on the one hand and graduation rates on the other is a concern for students themselves--who they are, what they learn both inside and outside the classroom, and generally what happens to them while they are in college. We know one thing for certain. Every selective college and university values diversity in all its many forms and has taken deliberate steps to enroll a diverse freshman class. Unlike the broader adult society, diverse racial groups of students are in close contact on campus. Students from different backgrounds sleep in the same dorms; they eat in the same dining halls; they mainly wear the same clothing styles and carry the same backpacks; and they go to class together. College officials have seen to it that racial groups are no longer separate. But does this mean they are equal? There are different ways to anticipate an answer." Id. at 5-6.).

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

"As the amount of knowledge increases, so too does the relative amount of ignorance, for each person can know only a decreasing fraction of what can be known; that knowledge, as it becomes more specialized, also tends to become more potent, more capable of being used for good or ill. . . . It is to avert a Hobbesian outcome--a war of each against each in which everyone uses the knowledge he possesses for his own advantage, and pays a terrible price for the knowledge he may lack--that societies urge those occupations that impinge on the vital concerns of human being to tie their expertise to honorableness." Walter P. Metzger, "A Spectre Is Haunting American Scholars: The Spectre of 'Professionalism,' " Educational Researcher 16(6): 10-19, at 18. In reading this passage I found myself wondering whether there is a huge disconnect between expertise and honorableness in the legal profession generally, and legal academia specifically. At the risk of being the kettle calling the skillet black, I would probably answer in the affirmative.

ABOUT WOMEN: THREE

Hunt, Lynn, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: Norton, 2007) (“As nationalism became more closely entwined with ethnicity, it fed into an increasing emphasis on biological explanations for difference. . . . Differences had to have a more solid foundation if men were to maintain their superiority to women . . . . In short, if rights were to be less than universal, equal, and natural, then reasons had to be given. As a consequence, the nineteenth century witnessed an explosion in biological explanations of difference.” Id. at 186. “Ironically, then, the very notion of human rights inadvertently opened the door to more virulent forms of sexism . . . . . In effect, the sweeping claims about natural equality of all mankind called forth equally global assertions about natural difference, producing a new kind of opponent to human rights, more powerful and sinister even than the traditionalist ones. The new forms of . . . sexism offered biological explanations for the naturalness of human difference. . . . . Women were not simply less reasonable than men because they were less educated; their biology destined them to the private, domestic life and made them entirely unsuitable for politics, business, or the professions. In these new biological doctrines, education or change in environment could never change the inherent hierarchical structures in human nature.” Id. at 187. “With the emergence of explicit arguments for the political equality of women, the biological argument for women’s inferiority shifted. Females no longer occupied a lower rung on the same biological ladder as males, making them biologically similar to males, even if inferior. Females were now increasingly case as altogether different biologically; they became the ‘opposite sex’.” Id. at 188.).

Nussbaum Martha C., Sex and Social Justice (New York & Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1999) "The essays in this volume . . . articulat[e] a distinctive conception of feminism. The feminism defended here has five salient features: It is internationalist, humanist, liberal, concerned with the social shaping of preference and desire, and, finally, concerned with sympathetic understanding. These five elements are not usually found together, and some of them are widely thought to be at odds with others. I shall argue, however, that a coherent and powerful picture emerges from their combination. Among the advantages of the combination is an opportunity to link feminist inquiry closely to the important progress that has been made during the past few decades in articulating the elements of a theory of both national and global justice." Id. at 6. "In grappling further with these issues, we should begin from the realization there is nothing per se wrong with taking money for the use of one's body. That's the way most of us live, and formal recognition of that fact through contract is usually a good thing for people, protecting their security and their employment conditions. What seems wrong is that relatively few people in the world have the option to use their body, in their work, in what Marx would call a 'truly human' manner of functioning, by which he meant (among other things) having some choices about the work to be performed, some reasonable measure of control over its conditions and outcome, and also the chance to use thought and skill rather just to function as a cog in a machine. Women in many parts of the world are especially likely to be stuck at low level of mechanical functioning, whether as agricultural laborers or as factory workers or as prostitutes. The real question to be faced is how to expand the options and opportunities such workers face, how to increase the humanity inherent in their work, and how to guarantee that workers of all sorts are treated with dignity. In the further pursuit of these questions, we need, on balance, more studies of women's credit unions and fewer studies of prostitution." Id. at 297-298.).

Nussbaum, Martha C., Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 2000) (“Women in much of the world lose out by being women.” Id. at 298. “I shall argue that international political and economic thought should be feminist, attentive (among other things) to the special problems women face because of sex in more or less every nation in the world, problems without an understanding of which general issues of poverty and development cannot be well confronted. An approach to international development should be assessed for its ability to recognize these problems and to make recommendations for their solution. I shall propose and defend one such approach, one that seems to me to do better in this area than other prominent alternatives. The approach is philosophical, and I shall try to show why we need philosophical theorizing in order to approach these problems well. It is also based on a universalist account of central human functions, closely allied to a form of political liberalism; one of my primary tasks will be to defend this type of universalism as a valuable basis from which to approach the problem of women in the developing world.” “The aim of the project as a whole is to provide the philosophical underpinning for an account of basic constitutional principles that should be respected and implemented by the governments of all nations, as a bare minimum of what respect for human dignity requires. . . . I shall argue that the best approach to this ides of a basic social minimum is provided by an approach that focuses on human capabilities, that is, what people are actually able to do and to be -- in a way informed by an intuitive idea of a life that is worthy of the dignity of the human being. I shall identify a list of central human capabilities, setting them in the context of a type of political liberalism that makes them specifically political goals and presents them in a manner free of any specific metaphysical grounding . . . . And I shall argue that the capabilities in question should be pursued for each and every person: thus I adopt a principle of each person’s capability, based on a principle of each person as end. Women have all too often been treated as the supporters of the ends of others, rather than as ends in their own rights; thus this principle has particular critical force with regard to women’s lives. Finally, my approach uses the idea of a threshold level of each capability. Beneath which it is held that truly functioning is not available to citizens; the social goal should be understood in terms of getting citizens above this capability threshold.” Id. at 5-6. Nussbaum’s list of “central human functional capabilities”: (1) life; (2) bodily health; (3) bodily integrity; (4) sense, imagination, and thought; (5) emotions; (6) practical reason; (7) affiliation; (8) other species; (9) play; and (10) control over one’s environment both political and material. Id. at 78-80.).

ABOUT WOMEN: TWO

Knapp, Caroline, Appetites: Why Women Want (New York: Counterpoint, 2003) (“By all accounts, I should feel free and entitled on the appetite front as anyone. . . . And yet by the age of twenty-one, I’d found myself whittled down to skeletal form, my whole being oriented toward the denial of appetite. And at forty-two, my current age, I can still find myself lingering at the periphery of desire, peering through those doors from what often feels like a great distance, not always certain whether it’s okay to march on in.” “That story, with its implicit conflict between the internal and external worlds, is in essence the story of appetite. It’s about the anxiety that crops up alongside new, untested freedoms, and the guilt that’s aroused when a woman tests old and deeply entrenched rules about gender and femininity. It’s about the collision between self and culture, female desire unleashed in a world that’s still deeply ambivalent about female power and that manages to whet appetite and shame it in equal measure. It’s about the difficulty a woman may have feeling connected to her own body and her own desires in an increasingly visual and commercial world, a place where the female form is so mercilessly externalized and where conceptions of female desire are so narrowly framed. It it’s about the durability of traditional psychic and social structure, about how the seeds of self-denial are still planted and encouraged in girls, about how forty years of legal and social change have not yet nurtured a truly alternative hybrid, one that would flower into feelings of agency and initiative, into the conviction that one’s appetites are good and valid and deserve to be satisfied in healthy and reasonable ways.” Id. at 19-20.).

Knapp, Caroline, Drinking: A Love Story (New York: The Dial Press, 1996) (“Of course, the problem with self-transformation is that after a while, you don’t know which version of yourself to believe in, which one is true. I was the hardened, cynical version of me when I was with James and Elaine, and I was the connected, intimate version of me when I was with Sam, and I was the genteel, sophisticated version of me when I was with my relatives, and honestly, after a while I didn’t know which was which, where one began or ended, whether the versions existed authentically within me or whether they needed outside people and circumstances to kick them into gear. For years my therapist said to me, ‘Sit with the feelings. What happens when you just sit still, by yourself? What happens when you just sit with the feelings?’ I suppose he was trying to get at those very questions: What kind of person was I, really? What was I afraid of, angry about? Who was I when I didn’t have other people to cue into? I couldn’t answer, of course, because I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t sit still for ten minutes without a drink. Without the anesthesia; I really couldn’t. Id. at 69-70.).

Knapp, Caroline, Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs (New York: The Dial Press, 1998) (The author and this book came up during a recent dinner conversation, so I obtained a used copy. Upon receiving the book, I thumbed through it and came across the following penciled-in on the inside back cover: “Out in the world with her I have found a path to others. At home with her, I have found a away to be alone without the ache.” And below that: “Dogs are children that do not grow up.”).

ABOUT WOMEN: ONE

Collins, Gail, America’s Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines (New York: William Morrow, 2003) (“The history of American women is all about leaving home—crossing oceans and continents, or getting jobs and living on their own. Some of our national heroines were defined by the fact that they never nested--they were peripatetic crusaders like Susan B. Anthony, Clara Barton. Sojourner Truth, Dorothea Dix. The center of our story is the tension between the yearning to create a home and the urge to get out of it.” Id. at xiii. "Giving women the right to vote did not have unanticipated consequences like Prohibition. In fact, the shock for suffragists was that it hardly seemed to have any consequences at all. Most women appeared to vote the way their husbands, brothers, and fathers did--not necessarily because they felt obliged to follow the men's lead, but because they shared the same loyalties to class, ethnic group, and region. . . . In 1920, when American women went to the polls across the nation for the first time, they made up an estimated one-third of the voters. Mainly, they voted for Warren Harding, who turned out to be one of the worst presidents in American history. He had stuffed his platform with female-friendly promises like equal pay for equal work, and end to child labor, and more women appointees to government positions. But his attraction was probably the same for both sexes--the promise of a return to 'normalcy' after the war and the turmoil that followed it." Id. at 338-339.).


Collins, Gail, When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women From 1969 to the Present (New York & Boston: Little, Brown, 2009) (“Cowboy action series were the best-loved TV entertainment on 1960. Eleven of the top twenty-five shows were Westerns, and they underlined the rule that women did not have adventures, except the ones that involved getting kidnapped or caught in a natural disaster. ‘Women used to be the big stars, but these days it’s men,’ said Michael Landon, one of the leads in Bonanza, the long-running story of an all-male family living on a huge Nevada ranch after the Civil War. Perhaps to emphasize their heterosexuality, the Cartwright men had plenty of romances. But the scriptwriters killed their girlfriends off at an extraordinarily speedy clip. The family patriarch, Ben, had been widowed three times, and his three sons all repeatedly got married or engaged, only to quickly lose their mates to the grim reaper. A rather typical episode began with Joe (Landon) happily dancing with a new fiancée. Before the first commercial, the poor girl was murdered on her way home from the hoedown.” Id. at 14-15. “The effect of the civil rights movement was crucial for women, because their fight was unique. It was, as the sociologist Alice Rossi said, the only instance in which people being discriminated against lived in much more intimate association with the ‘enemy’ than with other members of their own group. Women’s interests were bound up with those of their fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons in every aspect of their lives. It was difficult for them to mount the kind of clear-cut fight that racial or ethnic minorities were able to make against an establishment that had discriminated against them. That was probably why the women’s movement always tended to ride on the wake of other fights for justice.” Id. at 104. “On a more positive note, [Palin] won over many voters who had tended in the past to be hostile to the whole concept of a woman in the White House. She had a special affinity with younger working-class men. They liked the way she talked about hunting and hockey, and introduced her husband as first dude. They say here as one of their own, rather than as an outsider parachuting in to tell them how to behave. Younger men with no college education were the people who had always been threatened by women in the workplace and often the one most resistant to any idea of being bossed by a woman anywhere. In a somewhat roundabout way, Palin made many of them converts to a new way of thinking. ‘They bear us children, they risk their lives to give us birth, so maybe it’s time we let a woman lead us,’ a former truck driver told a reporter during a Palin rally in North Carolina.” Id. at 391-392.).

HERTA MULLER

Muller, Herta The Appointment (1997) translated from the German by Michael Hulse and Philip Boehm (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001).

Muller, Herta, The Land of Green Plums (1993) translated from the German by Michael Hofmann (Evanston: Northwestern U. Press, 1998) ("When we don't speak, said Edgar, we become unbearable, and when we do, we make fools of ourselves." Id. at 242.).

Muller, Herta, Nadirs (1998) translated from the German by Sieglinde Lug (Lincoln: Bison Books/ U. of Nebraska Press, 1999).

Muller, Herta, The Passport (1986) translated from the German by Martin Chalmers ( London: Serpent’s Tail, 2009).

YES!

Goodall, Amanda H., Socrates in the Boardroom: Why Research Universities Should Be Led by Top Scholars (Princeton & London: Princeton U. Press, 2009) (“This is a book about leadership of experts. My focus is on heads of universities—although not exclusively so. I ask the question: does it matter to the performance of a research university if the president has been a highly cited scholar? Then, using evidence, I attempt to answer it. My conclusion is that better scholars make better leaders.” Id. at xiii. “'CEO is a command-and-control sort of position. I do not really see myself as a CEO. Rather, I like to think of myself as a managing partner. The senior partners are the faculty, and they are the lifeblood of an institution.'” Id. at 124 (Quoting Patrick Harker, former dean of Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, now President of the University of Delaware.)).