I Don't Believe In Atheists

I Don't Believe In Atheists

Hedges, Chris. I Don't Believe In Atheists. NY: Free Press, 2008.

Reviewed By T. Hatch

Chris Hedges has produced another concise volume dealing with a contemporary moral issue. Hedges who can be described as a left of center philosophical skeptic has attacked head on what he sees as the squalid utopianism of the new or “fundamentalist” atheism of Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins.

It was quite recently that this writer heard the word atheist modified with the adjective fundamentalist. That was one afternoon on NPR and the speaker was coming from a right wing perspective. Perhaps, I thought, the speaker meant any atheist who had the temerity to publish was a fundamentalist. Hedges though is quite specific in defining what he sees as atheistic fundamentalism. “The belief that rational and quantifiable disciplines such as science can be used to perfect human society is no less absurd than a belief in magic, angels and divine intervention.”(p.13)

At no point in the book does Hedges attempt to make an argument that God actually exists. He argues that “Utopian dreams are always psychotic” and the culprits on the secular side of the ledger were Descartes, Hume, Locke, Voltaire, Kant, Diderot, Rousseau, and Thomas Paine. Accordingly, Utopian violence together with industrial and bureaucratic power culminate in totalitarianism. His argument in this respect is a little too direct and the net he casts is a little large. Rousseau is no more responsible for the horrors of Auschwitz than Augustine was for the Inquisition. He specifically cites the Atlantic slave trade as an example of this kind of terror produced by these aforementioned Enlightenment dilettantes. This act of inhumanity was well under way before “the age of reason.”

It is also interesting to note that Hedges repeatedly references Reinhold Niebuhr and contemporary British philosopher John Gray to make his case. There is coherence in this but he also is fond of employing Dostoevsky and Nietzsche to make the same series of points. Talk about a couple of legendary misanthropes!

Despite these inconsistencies, the hang-ups Hedges has with the Jacobins as the first totalitarians (as a technical point and still a stretch why not Napoleon?), his notion that all ethics begin with religion, and his (or my) semantical quibbling with the terms “sin” and “evil,” on balance, it is a solid argument. Indeed Utopian fundamentalists be they religiously or secularly inspired represent the same danger. In fact they can in some instances make common cause and come up with fetching schemes such as the “war on terror.”

A more felicitous title for Hedges' book might have been “Why All Utopians are D#$*%*
B@#s (Especially Hitchens, Harris, and Dawkins).”

The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food

Jennifer 8. Lee. The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food. Twelve, 2008.

In this book, Lee explores three major things: the history of fortune cookies (they're actaully Japanese and internment had a big role in making them a Chinese restaurant favorite), the phenomenon that is Chinese-American food (as opposed to authentic Chinese food), and how Chinese-American food shapes the Chinese immigrant experience and vice versa.

Fascinating and extremely readable, Lee's journey starts with what happened when an unexpectedly large amount of people got 5 out of 6 numbers right on the Powerball lottery. It turns out they were playing fortune cookie numbers.

Lee traces Chinese restaurants around the world, sometimes following the cookies, sometimes the workers, sometimes the food. She has essays on the evolution of Chop Suey and General Tso's chicken (both very American dishes, while Kung Pao chicken is "authentic" Chinese.) She talks about the advent of delivery and the quest to find the greatest Chinese restaurant in the world. Lee delves into crimes committed on Chinese deliverymen in New York, and how most Chinese restaurants in the states are staffed from an agency under the Manhattan Bridge. She also has great examination on why Jewish people love Chinese food and the story of the Great Kosher Duck Scandal in 1989.

Some random facts from the book:

There are two Chinese restaurants for every McDonald's in the US.
Almost all fortunes are written by just two guys.
Cheap Chinese restaurants in South America are called chifa (chee-fah) which is derived from the Chinese words chi fan (chir fan) which means "to eat food"
Almost all of those little soy sauce packets are made by one company and don't have soy in them.

The writing is engaging and accessible, but well-researched. I highly recommend it, but plan on having Chinese food for dinner.

Leap Days: Chronicles of a Midlife Move

Katherine Lanpher. Leap Days: Chronicles of a Midlife Move. Boston: Springboard Press, 2006.

Submitted by R. Stuhr

Lanpher is a newspaper journalist and radio host. She was born and raised in Illinois (across the river from Iowa) and worked in Minneapolis for most of her career and in 2004 moved to NYC to co-host a new radio program with Al Franken. In this book, she writes as much or more about her childhood and career and how she came to make her move from her spacious St. Paul house, friends, and career, to a small (but lovely) Greenwich Village apartment in New York City, than she does about her actual move and transition, her work at Air America with Al Franken, or what she is doing currently. Although she has since left her radio show at Air America, she continues to live in New York City, suggesting that her transition is complete.

The Bookseller of Kabul

The Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad. Translated by Ingrid Christophersen. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.

Submitted by R. Stuhr

Seierstad has been a journalist Chechnya, the Balkans, Iraq, and Afghanistan. She got to know "Sultan" and his family and asked if she could live with them to write this work. She has written it in the form of a novel and changed all of the names. Seierstad provides a lot of interesting detail about daily life for one family in Kabul, but she layers this with her own point of view. One doesn't know whether to blame the author or the translator for the condescending tone. Still, I think we need to know as much as we can about these countries that the United States has invaded and is occupying. We need to read widely just because much what we have available to us is written in a highly subjective manner and by Westerners.

Burling 1st Floor CT 1877.5 .K48 S45 2003

Martin Stuhr-Rommereim '14 recommends . . .

Monster Island: A Zombie Novel by David Wellington. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2006.
Once you start you don't want to stop reading this super-special-awsome book. It is set in New York City six weeks after a zombie epidemic. The surviving population fights for survival.

Blood Fever by Charles Higson (based on the Ian Flemming character, James Bond). New York: Hyperion, 2006. This is the second in a series of books that feature a young James Bond. He is a member of the Danger Society. Even as a youngster, Bond is clever and manages to foil Count C., who is fascinated with ancient art, in his plot to become the next emperor of Italy.

Little Brother

Little Brother

May 29th, 2008

Little Brother. by Cory Doctorow. New York: Tor Books, 2008.

Review by John Stone

Summary: A high-school senior in San Francisco happens to be near the site of a catastrophic bombing that appears to be the work of terrorists. The Department of Homeland Security arrests, interrogates, imprisons, and mistreats him and several of his friends. After most of them are released, they become underground activists for civil rights, organizing various kinds of demonstrations and protests over an ad hoc pirate network of repurposed Xboxes. Their loose-knit organization becomes powerful enough to prompt a renewed attack by the DHS, which underestimates the resourcefulness of teenagers and, in particular, their ability to use modern communications technology effectively.

The author intended this novel for “young adults,” a category that in this case seems to run from precocious eleven-year-olds to recent high-school graduates. It is set in a dystopian near future in which the consequences of Americans’ willingness to trade liberty for security pervade society. For instance, the protagonist’s high school has security cameras everywhere, running gait-recognition software in a particularly inept attempt to track the movements of students and visitors to the school. DHS officials are portrayed frankly as villains — goonish, occasionally sadistic bureaucrats.

Doctorow uses this somewhat melodramatic coming-of-age plot as a framework into which he can pack quite a bit of information about how to resist and circumvent governments’ attempts to intrude on citizens’ privacy and violate our civil rights. This is less didactic than it sounds. Doctorow establishes the protagonist from the first page as someone who comfortably inhabits a high-tech world and has spent most of his childhood figuring out ways of breaking the ridiculous rules that authorities try to impose, so instead of a lecturer’s drone we hear the voice of a teenage enthusiast explaining to his friends how to beat the system.

The full text of the book is available for free download in many formats at author’s Web site. It’s under a Creative Commons license (Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 3.0)

This review was previously published on John Stone's Web log, _The free thinker_ (http://grnl-static-01-0198.dsl.iowatelecom.net/free-thinker/). It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License, and is reprinted here, with the permission of the author, under the same license.

The Corrections

Jonathan Franzen. The Corrections. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001

By Helen Stuhr-Rommereim, Oberlin College '09

This book probably isn't news to many people. The Corrections was published quite a few years ago now, in 2001, and received a lot of attention. I, however, just recently read it for the first time. The first and most obvious fact about The Corrections is that it is fat—almost 600 pages. The novel is ambitious in scope as well as physical size. The narrative mixes timelines and perspectives, jumping from character to character and managing to make it all the way to Vilnius and a chaotic post-Soviet Lithuania. Though The Corrections reaches far across space and time, the core issues of the narrative are quite every day, dealing with one family and its members' (relatively) typical travails.

The Lamberts are a well-educated, upper middleclass family from St. Jude, Kansas, a small city that greatly resembles Franzen's own hometown of St. Louis, Missouri. The novel covers aspects of each of the three Lambert children's childhood and adolescence, but focuses on Denise, Gary, and Chip's adulthood—all in various states of crisis.

Throughout the novel, I had a sense that Franzen was trying to fully capture the spirit of the present day. He covers all the issues of the 1990s: a booming stock market, Post-Soviet nation states struggling to build a national identity and a functional economy, psychotropic drugs, and the angst of average people in a successful, ostensibly untroubled nation. Franzen succeeds, but his book was published in 2001, and everything in the United States and the world in general has come to feel much more unstable since then. The problems that at one point were burbling under the surface are now acutely visible. It is a small tragedy that this clearly great novel about life in America, a novel that seeks to capture a time so completely, was written just a little too early. It doesn't contain a vision of what was to come.

However, The Corrections is a story about family as much as it is the story of a nation. In this aspect, it is both heartbreaking and astute. I frequently found myself crying during passages about Enid's sadness, frustration, and helplessness. As a 21 year old about to finish college and facing years of difficult decision-making, the book seemed to point out how sad life can be for everyone, even when nothing monumental happens. The problems of the Lamberts are cutting because they are problems that everyone will have.

For additional reading, try Franzen's collection of essays How to be Alone, which cover similar territory to The Corrections and reveal much of Franzen's thinking about writing in general and The Corrections in particular.

Burling 3rd Floor PS3556.R352 C67 2001

How to Be Alone. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002
Burling 3rd Floor PS3556.R352 H69 2002

I'll Sleep When I'm Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon

Crystal Zevon. I'll Sleep When I'm Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon
New York: Ecco, 2007

Reviewed by T. Hatch

I once heard Garrison Keillor say that the desire to meet a favorite author was like wishing to meet a butcher because one enjoys a particular cut of steak. After reading I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, Mr. Keillor's quip has gained an heightened veracity for me.

Warren Zevon was a songwriter known for pop ditties such as “Excitable Boy,” “Lawyers, Guns, and Money,” “Poor Poor Pitiful Me”, and “Werewolves of London” to name just a few;he was the undisputed king of song noir. As a creator of rock n' roll songs (especially lyrics) he was brilliant. As a human being he was a narcissistic failure.

Zevon's ex-wife Crystal cleverly lets this story reveal itself. The book is a chronologically arranged series of witness statements and journal entries that serve as both oral history and narrative. From Zevon's contact with Igor Stravinsky in adolescence until his death in September 2003 he is obsessed with the self-indulgence of sex, drugs, and rock n' roll as a vehicle to celebrity with all its vapid trappings.

As someone who inadvertently performed a cover of “Excitable Boy” the day of Zevon's death and prior to that had purchased his music in record, cassette tape, and compact disc form since the late 1970s I would that I might have averted my gaze as the butcher cased the sausage.

Rebecca Stuhr is reading and listening ...

Farooka Gauhari. An Afghan Woman's Odyssey. Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1996. Gauhari's life changed after her husband was abducted during the Coup of 1978. Written before 2001 and the U.S. invasions, this book is less politicized than many recent first person accounts.

Burling 1st Floor DS 371.2 .G379 2004

For enjoyable late night reading ... Barbara Pym. No Fond Return of Love. New York: Dutton, 1982. If you haven't read Barbara Pym, you are in for a real treat. With a strong sense of humor and irony, her heroines battle their way through a world that perceives them as unfortunate and neglected. I have been reading Pym's books since I graduated from college and stumbled upon them in a local ( and most likely long gone) book store near where I was working in San Francisco.

Burling 3rd Floor PR6066.Y58 N6 1982

If you need something to keep you company while you study or work, try the sound track to the movie Babel. This is one of my favorite with music by composers from Ryuichi Sakamoto, Jaques Morelenbaum, Everton Nelson, and Gustavo Santaolalla, as well as contemporary popular music from Mexico, Japan, and the United States (including Earth, Wind, and Fire!).

Grinnell College Libraries have the film on DVD

Listen Rm DVD

B1136

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Edward Gibbon. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (New York: Modern Library,
circa 1940s [1787]) 3 Volumes

Reviewed by T. Hatch

In this epic metanarrative Gibbon caustically laments that virtue and veracity are not destined to triumph over the lethal combination of “pious fraud and credulity.” Instilling the proper enthusiasm for eloquence, arms, and a reverence for the civil law is, at best, a fleeting endeavor. The love of public virtue (we might call it patriotism these days) is easily subverted. Externally, subversion is perpetrated by those ubiquitous barbarians who lack the perspicacity to appreciate urban living, the arts, and a philosophical outlook on life that is rooted in rational intellectual inquiry. Internally, the “credulous multitude” is subject to myriad diversions and are especially susceptible to spectacle and various forms of ocular amusement. Clearly, engaging in licentious and dissolute mirth-making is no way to run an empire!

As a pragmatic and philosophical atheist Gibbon's abuse of Christianity is a salient feature of this magisterial narrative. It was the Christian's “inflexible obstinacy” and what he saw as their contempt towards mankind (“odio humani generis convicti”) that rankled Gibbon. In its last days the Roman empire was propagating the rule of the Caesars and the Christian gospels; what the Romans had won by the masculine force of arms the Church maintained through a series of effeminate frauds.

The glaring irony of an atheist being on the shortlist of the world's greatest ecclesiastical historians is not lost on this writer. Gibbon's sophistication is evident in his easy contentment and the recompense of the philosopher's smile balanced against the multitude's fanatic veneration of those objects which promised eternal life in paradise. As is evidenced by the early chapters of volume iii, when the Saracen Prophet is extensively abused, Gibbon was an egalitarian when it came to reviling what he saw as superstitious religious practices.

As a master of felicitous locution Gibbon's description of the final siege of Constantinople is magnificent.

The religious merit of subduing the city of the Caesars attracted from
Asia a crowd of volunteers, who aspired to the crown of martyrdom;
their military ardour was inflamed by the promise of rich spoils and
beautiful females; and the sultan's ambition was consecrated by the
presence and prediction of Seid Bechar, a descendant of of the pro-
phet, who arrived in camp, on a mule, with a venerable train of five
hundred disciples.(p.682 vol. iii)

With all due respect to Samuel P. Huntington (who is not fit to sharpen Gibbon's pencils) this is an authentic clash of the civilizations!

Burling has several editions of this work: Burling 1st floor DG311 .G5 1960; Burling 1st floor AC1 .G72; Burling 1st floor DG311 .G5 1960b; and for viewing in our Special Collections DG311 .G42 1787