Political Books

Having attended Bates College with Peter Gomes, let me say that he was a most unforgettable undergraduate. Pudgy, short, and bespectacled even then, his mien oozed gravitas and occasionally pomposity. He loved to speak before crowds and, babyfaced though he was, somehow got away with making stentorian pronouncements. You'd guess this was the kid who'd get beat up at recess, and maybe he did, but in college, he was highly popular, affable and jovial.

Many thousands who never knew Rev. Gomes have become fans since his publication of The Good Book a dozen years ago, some filling the pews at Harvard's Memorial Church where this Afro-American American Baptist has preached for the past 34 years. His latest book, The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus -- What's So Good About the Good News?, asks "Why does the church insist upon making Jesus the object of its attention rather than heeding his message?

Most churchgoers already know the answer -- because it's more comfortable to simply admire, even worship, Jesus than it is to heed his message, which is "arise and follow me." It is one thing for Jesus's disciples to give up a few lambs and a hut to become a Jesus roadie; it's another for a comfortable corporate vice president to abandon his Lexus, sailboat, and country club membership and, besides, who's going to pay the Princeton tuition?

So thousands of pastors have entered into a winking understanding with affluent parishoners, that they can buy out of their responsiblity for Christian activism by fattening their contributions to the collection plate. Might we call them virtual Christians?

Rev. Gomes describes his years at Harvard as trapped between two encampments: "those who believe too little," the secular humanists who tolerate religion as long as it doesn't "frighten the horses;" and "those who believe too much," the Army of Christ, "prepared to defend the faithful against the threats of the classroom and the academic culture."

In admiring terms, Gomes discusses the writings of cultural theologian Paul Tillich and quotes from his famous "You Are Accepted" sermon: "You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted. If that happens to us, we experience grace."

In spite of Christians' continually falling short of the mandates of Jesus's gospel, Gomes' ultimate take is a hopeful one: "....it is our joyful task to accept what God has proposed for us, a future in which promise and fulfillment meet. To that end we live and work and pray, and that is good news for those who dare to hear it."

"Not only do we make astonishingly simple mistakes every day," writes MIT behavioral economist Dan Ariely in Predictably Irrational -- The Hidden Forces that Shape our Decisions , "but we make the same types of mistakes.....We consistently overpay, underestimate, and procrastinate. We fail to understand the profound effects of our emotions on what we want, and we overvalue what we already own. Yet these misguided behaviors are neither random nor senseless. They're systematic and predictable -- making us predictably irrational."

If you read and enjoyed The Long Tail or Freakonomics, this entertaining and insightful book may be for you. Ariely examines such head-scratchers as: Why our neighbor's home renovation makes us so unhappy? Why recalling the Ten Commandments reduces our tendency to lie? When dining out, why are we likely to forgo ordering a dish that we really want if somebody at our table orders it first? Why women at Mardi Gras are willing to show their breasts just to get some worthless beads?

Each chapter of Ariely's book examines such forces as emotions, relativity and social norms that influence human behavior and shows the power each has over our actions. But his book is prescriptive as well: From drinking coffee to losing weight, from buying a car to choosing a romantic partner, he describes how to "break through these systematic patterns of thought to make better decisions."

Well before the current recession began, tens of millions of Americans were feeling economic insecurity. The Bush administration's response to the problem has been such ad hoc gimmicks as tax breaks and individual savings accounts, which Yale political scientist Jacob S. Hacker likens to "throwing a lead weight to a drowning man, on the assumption that now he will really have an incentive to swim."

The shift of economic risk onto the backs of the little guy has been driven, Hacker writes in The Great Risk Shift -- The New Economic Insecurity and the Decline of the American Dream, by the "personal responsibility" crusade, creating an "ownership society," in which Americans have only the illusion of choice. His solutions are three:

GET MAD and fight back now rather than accepting current conditions fatalistically.

GET WISE by helping create new tools to patch our own safety nets,  such as improved private insurance, better public information and creation of indicators to help people evaluate the risk involved in making important purchases or entering a particular line of work.

GET EVEN by supporting policies that shift liability from individuals to business, starting with healthcare, "the epicenter of economic insecurity for millions of hardworking Americans."

Last year, Sen. Christopher Dodd published Letters from Nuremberg, his account of his father's experience as a prosecutor at the Nazi war crimes trials. Judge Norbert Ehrenfreund's passionate new book, The Nuremberg Legacy -- How the Nazi War Crimes Trials Changed the Court of History, is a worthy companion to that volume, examining in depth not primarily the trials themselves but the foundation stones they laid for such modern fields of endeavor as race relations, big business, medical practice and contemporary war crimes trials.

The author, a correspondent for Stars and Stripes during the coverage of the Nuremberg trials, served 30 years as a California Superior Court judge. As the young reporter sitting in the press gallery only feet away from such Nazi legends as Hermann Goering and Rudolf Hess, he reflected to himself: "....this cultured nation, so rich in music, literature, and science -- land of Beethoven, Bach and Brahms, birthplace of Goethe and Schiller -- how could it have produced leaders so barbaric?"

And yet, in spite of the unspeakable atrocities visited largely on Jews, the Allies maintained their unshakable goal, "to conduct a full and fair hearing of the Nazi leaders." Ehrenfreund credits Robert H. Jackson, U.S. Supreme Court justice turned prosecutor, with persuading the Allies to give the Nazi defendants "a trial instilled with due process and justice." The author says the experience of covering the trial led him to change the direction of his life to become a trial lawyer and later a judge.

One trial Ehrenfreund covered involved German industrialist Alfred Krupp, prosecuted for crimes against humanity, including the use of slave labor. The precedent that case established, that corporations may not violate human rights while doing business in foreign countries headed by repressive governments, the author says governs ongoing trials against such American corporations as Exxon, Mobil and Coca-Cola.

The judge describes other legacies of the Nuremberg trials: "From the poor villagers of Burma who are denied human rights to a charged courtroom in Baghdad where Saddam Hussein was brought to justice; from the hallowed chambers of the United States Supreme Court to a black man on trial in Mississippi; from the executives of big business to any doctor in America who contemplates research; from United Nations headquarters to the tiny nation of Rwanda; Wherever men and women seek justice in their courts, Nuremberg looms large."

"You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free." (John 8:32). Quite obviously, Jesus didn't have to deal with the internet. For the rest of us mortals who do, the glut of information and misinformation that is public currency often makes it nearly impossible to deduce the truth, writes Farhad Manjoo, who manages Machinist, a daily news blog at Salon.com. His new book is True Enough -- Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society.

It used to be that a course in critical thinking was sufficient for a reasonably intelligent person to sift fact from fiction, but no longer. And this dilemma, Manjoo argues, has serious implications for democratic societies, devaluing what Harvard's Robert Putnam called "social capital" a decade ago in his book, Bowling Alone.

Social capital is the totality of our social interactions with one another. If life experience teaches us to trust our pharmacist or a particular news commentator, we can move through life more quickly and determinedly, accepting their judgment on certain issues rather than having to search out other opinions. But a combination of increased corruption (or at least, reported corruption), greed, and conflicting representations of the truth means that many folks are ceasing to trust anyone outside their family circle. And the increasingly skillful manipulation of information makes it hard to know "what it is" rather than simply "what it means."

Manjoo tells of a political scientist named Edward Banfield, who spent nine months in a town in Southern Italy to live among the peasants, to study why they were mired in failure while similar villagers in Northern Italy were succeeding nicely. His conclusion was that the townspeople had a woeful lack of trust for one another, to the point that they'd confide in no one and refuse to work together in any project for the common good.

One arresting statistic Manjoo reports is from a study in which Americans were asked, "Do you believe that most people can be trusted or can't you be too careful in dealing with people?" In 1960, 60 per cent reported that they trust most people, a number that plummeted to 32 per cent by 2006.

But, you know, the author doesn't attriibute that study. Maybe he has an axe to grind. And his name, Manjoo, sounds kinda foreign to me, don't you think? I don't know what to believe anymore. Think I'll just stop reading books.

As of this writing, hundreds -- maybe thousands -- of Americans are standing at airline ticket gates to fly to overseas destinations, subjecting themselves to hefty price increases because of dollar devaluation. Ask them if they've ever visited Yellowstone Park, and most shake their heads "no." Take their names and send them a copy of Indians in Yellowstone National Park -- Revised Edition, not simply because of the historical role of Indians in the Park but because of its collective wonders.

Brigham Young anthropology professor Joel Janetski examines such matters as when the first humans visited what we now know as the Park, what happened to them, how the Nez Perce escaped U.S. troops in the Park in 1877, and how Indians first perceived the Park's geysers and hot springs.

As one whose son worked as a chef in Yellowstone Park for seven years, I can recommend it for reasons that may not occur to many of us. Following a massive forest fire in the Park, I was astounded to find fallen trees by the thousand lying like random matchsticks in the forest. It made sense only when I realized that it reflected nature's own rhythms and that manmade instincts to tidy it up were, at best, artificial.

In the tongue-in-cheek prologue to They Knew They Were Right -- The Rise of the Neocons, journalist Jacob Heilbrun describes George W. Bush running a victory lap through foreign capitals in early 2009, as he celebrates the end of the most popular two-term presidency in modern times. Bush basks in the glow of the Iraqi invasion of 2003, which secured all WMDs, ousted Saddam Hussein, and installed, to mass public acclaim, a democratic regime in Iraq as the model for democracy throughout the Middle East.

No, you haven't lost your mind. This is the scenario, Heilbrun writes, that the neoconservatives envisioned when they helped elect Bush 43 president in 2000. This hardy and secretive band, some of them former liberals, were poised for an era of political power, only to watch it unravel like a ball of cheap string. Who were these would-be leaders, asks Heilbrunn. Where did they come from? And why did they fail?

As Heilbrun, a senior editor at The National Interest, tells it, neoconservatism has its roots in the 1930s when followers of Trotsky and Stalin diverged and continued to battle during the Cold War years. The faction that became the neocons made a home in the interventionist wing of the Democratic Party, eventually deserting it for Ronald Reagan and the Republicans, "combining the agenda of 'family values' with a crusading foreign policy."

The neocons wandered in the wilderness during the Bush 41 and Clinton years but grasped the reins of power through Bush 43. They seized 9/11 as an opportunity to entrench themselves. One cannot understand the neocons, Heilbrun argues, without  tracing their route through the Holocaust and the assimilation of Jews into American culture and politics. They won't die with George W. Bush, Heilbrun believes: "....like Old Testament prophets they thrive on adversity."

This is a book that sanitation worker Ed Norton, Ralph Cramden's wisecracking sidekick, would love. Part of Norton's appeal on The Honeymooners was that he seemed to glorify in this subterranean world that the rest of us considered weird at the least. For American University literature professor David L. Pike in Metropolis on the Styx -- The Underworlds of Modern Urban Culture, 1800-2001, the underground world seems to have been a fascination since boyhood, when he explored his capacious, dirt-floored Kentucky basement, inhabited by daddy longlegs and other vermin. "...it inhabited a netherworld of its own," he writes. "It terrifies me to this day."

Pike writes that his study is devoted to "the myriad and overlapping ways in which the nineteenth century used, conceived, and imagined its underground spaces, and to the myriad and overlapping ways in which those uses, conceptions, and imaginings remain with us today, influencing the very different spaces that characterize the twenty-first century."

Pike visits London and Paris, in trying to get a fix on the underground pulse in the modern metropolis, and explores the role of literature in framing public conceptions of the world below. He walks his readers through a history of subterranean "threshold spaces: the arcades, arches, and other public spaces that brought classes, sexes and races together in new and unforeseen ways, culminating in the horror of trench warfare in the First World War and palliated through the fantastic space of the movie palaces of the 1920s and '30s."

"Throughout the history of Western political thought," writes political scientist Michael J. Thompson in The Politics of Inequality -- A Political History of the Idea of Economic Inequality in America, "injunctions against unequal divisions of property, wealth, and power can be found, from the scrolls of ancient Greece to the political philosophy of the mid-twentieth century." Yet in recent decades, as the gap between rich and poor seems to be ever-widening, "economic inequality seems to have lost its place at the center of the debate about democratic life."

The author points to "the great reaction against the welfare state" in the late 20th century as a signal event, which led to a concept of the interplay between economy and society very different than was originally conceived. If we fail to correct this imbalance, Thompson argues, America risks losing the political foundation upon which our republic was built.

In his study, the William Paterson University scholar traces the historical development of American political thinkers about economic inequality and then explains how leaders rationalize the present economic inequality through examining changing political ideas and values. "By the end of the twentieth century," he says, "liberalism becomes co-opted by capitalism, and republican themes of the past fade into the background."

While two of the most gifted presidential candidates ever to seek the Democratic nomination battle down to the wire, it might be instructive to read the papers of the Democratic Party's first president, Thomas Jefferson. Through the use of thin but durable pages and condensed but readable print, the Library of America has managed to combine several of Jefferson's most significant writings together with his autobiography into one volume, entitled Thomas Jefferson: Writings: Autobiography / Notes on the State of Virginia.

This handsome volume, which comes with a built-in silk bookmark, includes Jefferson's Summary View of the Rights of British America and Notes on the State of Virginia. Included as well are his published Public Papers, Addresses, Messages and Replies, a section of Miscellany and selected Letters. Those still hungering for Jeffersonalia at the end of this volume might consider Princeton University Press's multi-volume collection of the Jefferson letters.

A profound irony of America's Cold War years, writes author Michael S. Sherry in Gay Artists in Modern American Culture -- An Imagined Conspiracy, was that while such widely-appealing celebrities as Montgomery Clift and Rock Hudson were promoted as all-American heroes to counter the appeal of communism, the fact that they were gay potentially exposed them to rampant homophobia at home.

In his new book, the Northwestern University historian profiles such cultural icons as Edward Albee, Aaron Copland, Tennessee Williams and Samuel Barber and analyzes the tension "between the nation's simultaneous dependence on and fear of the cultural influence of gay artists." An outcropping of such tension was the notion of an international homosexual conspiracy, dubbed a "homintern" by anti-gay observers, that threatened to take over American culture.

The fact that FDR named James Farley U.S. Postmaster General, not a position associated with deep public policy planning, has led some to conclude that the Roosevelt adviser was simply a political boss being paid off for loyal service. In fact, as University of Liverpool historian Daniel Scroop writes in Mr. Democrat -- Jim Farley, The New Deal, & The Making of Modern American Politics, Farley was a major force in crafting a new Democratic political majority that would endure until the Reagan years, through helping secure his candidate's election and re-elections.

Some political operatives have compared Farley with now-departed Bush svengali Karl Rove, but Scroop says that comparison dramatically underestimates Jim Farley. While Rove undoubtedly was the architect of one razor-thin Bush victory and another narrow one, Farley engineered campaigns that claimed 42 states for FDR in 1932 and 46 in 1936.

Scroop's work profiles Farley's rise through the New York State Democratic party in the 1920s,  his presidential campaigning and service as Democratic national chairman, and challenges Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.'s argument that "Farley was an anachronistic figure who was entirely oblivious to the changes happening around him." Finally, he details the fateful split between FDR and Farley during the president's second term, giving a revisionist take on the reasons therefor.

No American foreign policy planner -- not Republican nor Democrat, liberal nor conservative -- escapes the wrath of the man who headed the nation's Osama bin Laden tracking unit from 1996 to 1999. Painting with a broad brush in Marching Toward Hell -- America and Islam After Iraq, Michael Scheuer excoriates the conduct of our foreign policy objectives over the past 35 years, from "a path that has seen the lethal nuisance originally presented by Sunni militants transformed into an existential threat that is poised to strike at the core of our social and civil institutions in a way that could change our collective lifestyle for many decades, perhaps forever."

Could we have seen the threat coming? Without a doubt, Scheuer maintains. For two decades prior to 9/11, policy makers clung to the notion that threats to our security came from nation states rather than transnational entities, such as al Qaeda. Accordingly, they ignored the activity of terrorist training camps around the world even though they were well aware of  them.

That this tendentious work is intense is an understatement. In his zeal to induce America to pull back from entangling alliances in this new age, Scheuer floats such over-the-top notions as mining our borders with Canada and Mexico to keep others out. But he makes some astute observations such as labeling the Cold War, mutually-assured destruction era as a time of Pax Atomica.

Age 65 is perhaps an appropriate vantage point to look back and view one's radical youth, but alas, Susan Stern overdosed at age 33 in 1976, shortly after completing With the Weathermen -- The Personal Journal of a Revolutionary Woman, Susan Stern, her memoir of the Weathermen. To call this offshoot of Students for a Democratic Society radical is a gross understatement: they "advocated the overthrow of the government and capitalism, and toward that end, carried out a campaign of bombings, jailbreaks, and riots throughout the United States."

Only a decade earlier, Stern had been a shy, married grad student but soon describes herself as "a go-go dancing, street fighting 'macho mama.'" Her woman's perspective of the sexual mores of the Weathermen is instructive. Like other radical organizations of the time, male domination masquerading as freedom often held sway as female members found themselves involved in "sometimes enforced orgies" during their quest for women's rights.

In the midst of America's obesity binge, it's hard to imagine that dozens of Americans once volunteered to be starved for a good purpose. Towards the end of World War II, during which the Nazis had imprisoned, abused and executed millions of people, it became apparent that postwar recovery would require rehabilitation of starved masses.

Thirty-six conscientious objectors agreed to be "systematically starved," according to author Todd Tucker in The Great Starvation Experiment -- Ancel Keys and the Men Who Starved for Science, so scientist Ancel Keys could conduct studies on them at the University of Minnesota. Their willingness to endure severe privation voluntarily recaptures "a time when staunch idealism and a deep willingness to sacrifice trumped even basic human needs."

I grew up in a New England household whose guiding adage was, "Use it up, wear it out. Make do, or do without." Yet traveling on a parallel track and strengthening all the time was the doctrine of planned obsolescence, that it's OK, even desirable, for manufactured goods to be thrown away before they break. The legacy of that century-old notion,according to independent scholar Giles Slade in Made to Break -- Technology and Obsolescence in America, is that some 90 per cent of the 315 million still-usable personal computers discarded in North America in 2004 were trashed and that 100 million cell phones were tossed in 2005.

By the early 1920s, more than half the automobiles manufactured in America were Henry Ford's Model Ts, which he said customers "could have in any color, as long as it was black." Alfred P. Sloan's General Motors broke Ford's stranglehold by introducing annual styling changes, introducing the notion that a car was a reflection of its owner. As one's wealth increased, one could reflect burgeoning prosperity with a larger, more luxurious model.

Slade walks us through how planned obsolescence weathered the Depression and war years, its effect on radio and TV, and the advent of transistors and computer chips. Finally, he turns to what one reviewer calls "the veritable mushroom cloud of electronic waste threatening our planet" and what to do about it.

The nation's capital is always awash in political and legal turmoil but never so much so as in the past four decades. From the Kennedy assassination to Watergate, from the Keating 5 to Monica Lewinsky, it's been an ideal place to work if you're a journalist and a highly profitable place to work if you're a lawyer. And no attorney has been closer to the action than Robert S. Bennett.

Bennett organizes In The Ring -- The Trials of a Washington Lawyer as he would a lawsuit he's trying.  He marshals his facts tightly, recognizing that readers -- like jurors -- are prone to lose interest easily. He stirs in a dash of self-deprecation, just to show his humanity, but not enough to challenge the notion that he's the best in town. And he's at his best when reproducing spell-binding cross examinations of expert witnesses, usually destroying them with surgical precision rather than by bloody bludgeoning. Any veteran trial lawyer will tell you, over a couple of Wild Turkeys, that he's made tactical errors that have lost him cases in his time, but this book is for the ages, so don't expect Bob Bennett to let his hair down quite that far.

Bennett recounts his Brooklyn boyhood as an amateur boxer, his legal tutelage under FDR adviser Tommy (the Cork) Corcoran ("the smartest man I ever met"), and his defense of such figures as former Secretaries of Defense Clark Clifford and Caspar Weinberger, Cincinnati Reds owner Marge Schott, the Keating 5, and President Bill Clinton. He prides himself that his clients have come from both sides of the aisle. And while many have led dysfunctional lives, Bennett remains married to the love of his life, Ellen, who has borne him three adored daughters.