Books Report

Now and then, I try to take a break from reading about Paul the Apostle in order to focus on (among other things) the likely collapse of the American republic. Here are the non-Pauline books to which I am currently attending. 

Over the years I’ve taken a passing interest in the perennial controversy concerning the identity of William Shakespeare and the authorship of his works; as we speak, I have the film “Anonymous” ready to watch in my Amazon queue. In SHAKESPEARE: The World as a Stage, Bill Bryson touches on that controversy (a traditionalist, he votes for the good old Bard of Avon) while illuminating the era in which Shakespeare lived (along with Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon, and Edward de Vere). Bryson’s book has the advantage of being brief, and his style, as always, is pellucid; his is by no means the last word on the subject, but for my purposes it provides a good starting point.   

In contrast, Michael Holroyd’s BERNARD SHAW is an exhaustive study (800 pages, condensed from Holroyd’s four-volume original) of the man described as “playwright, wit, socialist, polemicist, vegetarian, and irresistible charmer” and as “the scourge of Victorian values and middle-class pretensions.” I recently re-read, in my research into Saint Paul, Shaw’s lengthy preface to his play “Androcles and the Lion,” which motivated me to become reacquainted both with his work and with his life. Opening the book to a random page, I found the Shaw quote, “In politics, all facts are selected facts...to put it another way, [in politics] the very honestest [sic] man has a dishonest mind.” That observation will be good to keep in mind in the coming months. 

And so to politics: the recently published FAULT LINES is A History of the United States Since 1974, written by historians (and professors at Princeton) Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer. The authors assert that the post-WWII political consensus, tenuous to begin with, began to fracture in the Sixties: “The rebellions and discords of the 1960s,” they write, “led to widespread disillusionment and cynicism about the viability, or even the value, of national consensus and unity. As the country moved on from the tumultuous decade, national leaders rebuilt institutions that privileged division, competing views, and fragmentation.” Economic, social, cultural, and political forces since then have combined, say Kruse and Zelizer, to drive “polarization and partisanship to new depths”; and while Barack Obama tried but failed to heal the divisions, Donald Trump has deliberately exacerbated them as a way of gaining power. To call FAULT LINES “timely” is an understatement; as things currently stand, the ground may give way under our feet at any moment. 

Finally, Paul Kahn’s 2005 PUTTING LIBERALISM IN ITS PLACE (available free online at www.epdf.pub) is a thoughtful analysis of the tensions inherent in the modern liberal tradition, tensions especially revealed in recent decades under the strains of what Kahn calls “cultural pluralism” (which less sympathetic critics call “identity politics”). The primary tension is between liberalism’s universalistic aspirations—human rights for all—and its putative nonjudgmental tolerance for cultural, religious, and ethnic particularities: what does a liberal order do, or a nation founded on liberal principles, when either of those values threatens the other? Kahn’s work is usefully read alongside Kruse and Zelizer’s FAULT LINES, the former being a philosophical investigation and the latter an historical narrative, and both books calling into question the stability and durability of the American experiment, as to which we are likely to find out in the immediate future. (By the way, a quick check of the index for PUTTING LIBERALISM IN ITS PLACE reveals not even a single mention of Christopher Lasch, whose work would seem relevant to the topic. I hope the oversight was only by the indexer and not by Paul Kahn.)

 

Comments

[Jack Shifflett]

Oh, I dont actually read them. I just write a little bit about them based on their cover blurbs...

[Ann Markle]

Wish I read as much as you! Not the same books, but same quantity.👏👏❤️🏆🙂