Interesting books, and news items about books and periodicals, particularly with respect to political and social issues. Since May, 2016, many of my larger book reviews have been put on a hosted Wordpress site; so now this blog emphasizes previews, interviews with authors, booklets, large periodical articles, and literary business issues. Note: no one pays me for these reviews; they are not "endorsements"!
A book reading at the Connecticut Ave. bookstore for “Politics and Prose” was interrupted Saturday April 27, 2019 by a brief demonstration by
what appeared to be a small group of white nationalists, WTOP reports.
The book rails at the tribalism on the new right, with the
science denial and poor individual choices, that oddly parallels similar
tribalism on the extreme left.From
reports, the book would seem to encourage more personal intellectual
responsibility of the Jordan Peterson kind.
Marissa J. Lang has an account of the protest, with the bookstore near Comet Ping Pong, here. The "trade homeland for handouts" meme is rather striking.
Update: See also the previews of DiAngelo's book, similar ideas, April 21, 2019 and Sept. 16, 2018.
I’m getting ready to review Joshua Greene’s “Moral Tribes” on
my main Wordpress blog (recommended by Harvard undergrad vlogger John Fish),
but I’ll preview it with the Time special edition coffee table book “The Science
of Good and Evil”, edited by Edward Feiesenthal and D. W. Pine, with a lot of
leadership from Jeffrey Kluger, 96 pages.
There is an interesting chapter by Richard Jerome on whether
animals have morality. Well, capcuchin monkeys and bonobo chimps do, as do
dogs,Sand tiger sharks, however, cannibalize
their weaker siblings in the “womb” before they are born.
The first chapter, by Kluger et al, takes up some of the
well-known moral puzzles (The Sinking Lifeboat, the Crying Baby, the Runaway Trolley
and the switch problem).Subsequent
chapters look at the physiology of evil, in terms of the structure of the brain
(Bundy, Holmes, etc).There are also biographies
of Mother Teresa and Adolf Hitler (who was quite spoiled and incompetent in
practical things as a boy, rather telling). Yet there is evidence that even the worst can
eventually develop a moral compass.
There is an important chapter (p. 34) on voluntarism by Kate
Rope, “Good Deeds, Good Health, and Good Life”.There is discussion of caregiving and compassion fatigue, but there is a
general impression that relatively open (and not overly selective) volunteering
is a good thing for most people.
This morning (April 27), Smerconish (CNN) interviewed author
Anthony Mazarrelli who (along with Stephen Trzeciak and Cory Booker) authored “Compassionomics”,
published Studer Group.A lot of this is
about whether medical practitioners care, but a lot of people will survive
challenging illnesses and cancers if they know others care personally.This is a bit of a change from how things
were when I was growing up in the 50s and 60s, when less could be done.
TASSC International (the Torture Abolition Survivors and
Support Coalition) in Washington DC had an event today, which I did not attend,
with author Martine Mwanj Kalaw, of the Huffington Post, along with her legal team.
She is author of“Illegal
Among Us: A Stateless Woman’s Quest for Citizenship”, from Sunbury Press, 263
pages.It is also called “Woman Without an Identity”.
Her life story, originating with her father’s desertion and
mother’s death from AIDS in Zambia, and her lengthy period in the US as
undocumented and the assistance she received in getting citizenship, is quit intricate,
as summarized here.
The story would touch on the DACA issue today.
It would also bear on the question of what can American
citizens do on their own (legally) to help persons in her situation.
I purchased a Kindle copy and should do a detailed review
later.
Wikipedia attribution link for p.d. photo of Victoria Falls.
The Guardian, in an article by Nosheen Iqbal, gives a
previewof the book “White Fragility: Why It's so Hard for White People to Talk About Racism” by Robin DiAngelo, from the University of
Washington. The book has a foreword by Michael Eric Dyson, from Beacon Press,
192 pages.
The book is concerned with the idea of institutional power,
born of past colonialism.
She seems to believe that neutrality and the absence of
mention of race by white people is not enough. She considers racism a “white
problem”, and doesn’t consider “reverse racism” (by the radical Left today) to
be racism.
Therefore it seems morally acceptable, perhaps, to hold up
speech by people with past privilege until they step forward and will do
something specifically about their implicit collusion with this problem.
This could become quite threatening.White speech could be silenced until it will acknowledge
this problem explicitly.It could come
down even on my head, as I almost never take up race or minority group status as
such, and treat everything as an individual matter in my DADT books.
Update: May 28, 2019
There is a 2019piecein Tolerance by Anya Malley et al "What's my complicity?" that also discusses DiAngelo's book.
I see there was an earlier preview of this book Sept. 16, 2018 here.
Brittany Pettibone , author of “What Makes Us Girls”(Reason Books, 2018, 152 pages – she has a
few signed copies left)does a video“Why
Are Books Becoming so Terrible?”
She starts out by explaining how New York literary agents
work – and I had some experience with one (Mike Sullivan) in the 1990s with my
first “Do Ask Do Tell” book. Predictably,
the bias of most agents is toward the Left.
Then she migrates the specific genre of young adult fiction,
and, you guessed it, the social justice warries have invaded it like termites.
Really, there are so many sins that contradict each other.
For a white author to dare to create a black character.But, aw, to have only white heroes, to have
black or Muslim villains.You can
imagine where this heads.
Kat Rosenfeld explains all in a Vulture article“The Toxic Drama on YA Twitter”.
Similar concerns have invaded Hollywood, and even television
series.I have to admit, “The Good
Doctor” transcends this problem because the autistic hero surgeon of the series
becomes a better person than everyone else and has his own kind of charisma –
so the series gets beyond SJW political correctness that views disability as a
group. But think of the popular series like TheWB’s “Smallville”, about a teenage Clark Kent, which
started in 2001. Today it would be seen as too white-centered.
I didn’t pay much attention to this in the two short stories
at the end of my DADT III book (2014), but it could undermine my novel (“Angel’s
Brothers”) where the two leading characters (there are dual omniscient
observers) are gay men, one middle aged and white, the other of Latino background
but described as white (which is very common in Texas).I make the high ranking CIA official a PoC
woman, but that won’t satisfy the SJW’s.I’ll get into this again on my Wordpress blog about the progress of my
own work.
Life Magazine offers a new coffee table book about one of
our favorite companions, edited by J. I. Baker, “Cats: Companions in Life”, 96
pages, glossy, paper, heavily illustrated.
The main sections are “Feline Behavior”, “Rulers of the
House”, “The Truth about Kittens”, and “Cats v. Dogs”.
The second chapter covers ancient history 8000 years ago
when man started inventing agriculture and then having housing. Cans moved in
and helped eliminate the mice, and stayed around and domesticated themselves,
and got smaller.
The book has a comparison of the intelligence of dogs and
cats.Dogs may have more brain neurons,
but the cat cerebral cortex may have more folds and actual surface, like humans.When cats “downsized” they kept their
intelligence.
Dogs are born tribal, and cats are born as individualists –
except for lions, which are genetically similar to tigers (can cross mate) but
look different because of their social groupings (a good example or race in
wild animals). Foxes, while biologically closer to dogs, behave more like cats.
Dogs may know more words and commands, but cats may be
better at solving problems on their own, because they have to do so to hunt alone.That’s why among mammals, carnivores and omnivores
(primates) have to be smart.
When I was in a second floor apartment in Dallas with
outdoor balcony access, a cat adopted me. He would recognize the sound of my
car as I drove up.He could disappear
for a few days, and return to the right apartment to check up on me. He would
offer me mice he had caught. He definitely knew who he was as an individual,
and he knew who I was.Sometimes he
slept at the foot of the bed.If he
wanted to go outside, he would claw the pillow and mew. I had the feeling that Timmy knew a lot about
a wild world I had no concept of, and he
thought that I was supposed to go out and learn to hunt.
In the IQ test in the video, Cosmos (the Cat) beats Milo (the
dog) 5-3, but the test seemed skewed to wild solitary hunting skills that Milo
didn’t need.
The March/April issue of Foreign Affairs offers, on p. 61, a
long essay by Lars-Erik Cederman, “Blood for Soil: The Fatal Temptation of
Ethnic Politics”, link.
The writer is a professor of International Conflict Research
at ETH Zurich.
The combination of growing inequality and the hardships
imposed by helping the migrants in Europe have given rise to ethnic nationalism
in some countries, especially in eastern Europe.
Often, as with Trump in the US, it is rural whites who feel they
are being sacrificed for abstract (to them) goals like climate change.And some will look to authoritarian figures
like Orban or Erdogan to make an ethnic group for them and expropriate by force
from their enemies and make things right. Trump is not as bad as some of these
dictators in Europe.
In Poland, some politicians no go after gays as enemies of “Christian
western culture”.
The David Pakman show interviews author Denise Hearn who,
along with Jonathan Tepper, authored “The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and
the Death of Competition”, 382 pages, published by Wiley.
The title explains the book.And corporate lobbying (as opposed to grassroots speech) helps protect
the consolidation of big companies.
The irony is that in Silicon Valley, big monopolies have
championed leftist values when it comes to censorship of speech, and this has
even spread to payment processors.
Just when individualized Internet self-expression is coming
under scrutiny from various threats (FOSTA, EU Article 11/13/17, fake news and
even the left-wing idea of “stochastic terrorism”) now the book self-publishing
industry gets a smear, from a scandal involving Baltimore’s mayor Catherine Pugh
and her sale of her own self-published children’s books in her “Healthy Holly”
series.
Remember, book publishers don't have a Section 230 problem; they are responsible, but the volume of what they have to look at is manageable (unlike the case with YouTube videos) because of the "granularity" of the product.
The article points out that some famous literary figures,
like Edgar Allen Poe and Walt Whitman have been self-published, and that the
development of the Amazon Kindle (and the BN Nook) led to a book in it starting
around 2007.
But actually print-on-demand had started before 2000, and I
did my own print run (about 400) of my first “Do Ask Do Tell” book in the early
summer of 1997, relatively inexpensively, although the binding wasn’t that
good; I converted to POD in August 2000.
Not all self-publishers accept everything.Page, for example, keeps saying “if we accept
your book …” in its ads.Some smaller
outfits are more like cooperative publishers, and won’t accept material they
don’t think can sell actual copies.
I could talk about how I’ve been “hounded” about why I don’t
sell well now, and the fact is, personal accounts from non-celebrities don’t
sell forever.That was true with many
autobiographical books by those caught up in “don’t ask don’t tell” (or maybe
“do ask do tell”) for gays in the military as Clinton’s proposal struggled in
the 1990s. Sales would be good for the first year or so and stop, even though
most were from traditional publishers.
The Sun article notes that children’s literature is
especially challenging for self-publishers.
Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!
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