February 1, 2012

“What Is It About Mormons?”

THE MORMON PEOPLE by Matthew Bowman

The New York Times is hosting an interesting conversation in its “Room for Debate” section entitled “What Is It About Mormons?”  At the center of the debate is the notion that while Mormons typically embody traditional American ideals, such as: cherishing family, demonstrating a dedication to hard work and thrift, and showing devotion to a higher power, many Americans remain uncomfortable with Mormonism and, by extension, the possibility of a Mormon president.

A timely new book published just last week, Matthew Bowman’s The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith, tells the history considered in the debate.  Richard Lyman Bushman, author of the definitive biography Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, praised the book as “…[A] quick, lively, and informative trip into the heart of Mormonism. All who are concerned or just curious will learn a lot about the making of modern Mormons from this book.”    

With his new book, Bowman offers us a singular, concise and accessible history of a people and a faith that will help provide much-needed background as voters and students alike consider this American faith.

Consider adding your voice to the discussion by posting a comment below.  The first five posters will receive a free copy of the new book The Mormon People.

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January 24, 2012

“Why I’m Not Preparing My Students to Compete in the Global Marketplace”

WHAT'S GOTTEN INTO US? by McKay Jenkins

by McKay Jenkins, author of What’s Gotten into Us?: Staying Healthy in a Toxic World (Random House, 2011)

In a controversial and thought-provoking Op-Ed published last week in The Chronicle Review entitled “Why I’m Not Preparing My Students to Compete in the Global Marketplace” (1/15/12) , author McKay Jenkins challenged himself and his colleagues to reconsider the prevailing notion–perhaps mantra–that educators must equip and orient all of their students to compete globally.   

While Jenkins agreed that a strong knowledge and awareness of other peoples and places in this inter-connected world is indeed important, he wonders if our focus has gone out of wack, and if one of the core puposes of a good education–that of bettering of one’s self and one’s environment–is becoming lost, unfortuntely most of all on today’s students.  He writes: “For all the talk of “globalization” as the very engine of their generation’s future prospects, my students seemed far more concerned about disappearing jobs at home, rising global temperatures, and a general anxiety about what it all meant.” 

In response to their concerns, Jenkins employed classroom exercises to get students thinking about more “local” issues.  These exercises, which he describes Continue reading →

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October 20, 2011

From Manhattan to Mumbai: Wrestling with the Issues of Our Time

BEHIND THE BEAUTIFUL FOREVERS by Katherine Boo

by Katherine Boo, author of the forthcoming Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, death, and hope in a Mumbai undercity (Random House, February 2012). 

Request an advanced reader’s copy, details below.*

As jobs and capital whip around the planet, college students will graduate into a world where economic instability and social inequality are increasing and geographic boundaries matter less and less. Unfortunately, globalization and social inequality remain two of the most over-theorized, under-reported issues of our age. My book is an intimate investigative account of how this volatile new reality affects the young people of an Indian slum called Annawadi. Like young people elsewhere, the Annawadians are trying to figure out their place in a world where temp jobs are becoming the norm, adaptability is everything, and bewildering change is the one abiding constant.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers took me three hard years to report, and one thought that sustained me was that I had a unique opportunity to show American readers that the distance between themselves and, say, a teenaged boy in Mumbai who finds an entrepreneurial niche in other people’s garbage, is not nearly as great as they might think. In the two decades I’ve spent writing about poverty and how people get out of it, I’ve come to believe, viscerally, Continue reading →

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October 12, 2011

A Message from Anita Hill

 

REIMAGINING EQUALITY by Anita Hill

by Anita HIll, author of Reimagining Equality: Stories of Gender, Race, and Finding Home (Beacon Press, 2011)

It’s hard to believe that almost two decades have passed since the dramatic Clarence Thomas Senate confirmation hearing that had such an impact on so many in our nation, including perhaps some of you. I’ve been very proud of the era of heightened awareness and concern about sexual harassment that followed that frankly grueling experience. I have had the privilege of meeting exceptional women and men in nearly every state in the country who seek nothing more than to end behavior, like sexual harassment, that keeps women from reaching their full potential. Some real good did emerge. And I wrote an autobiographical book that some of you may remember, Speaking Truth to Power, back in 1997.

For me the positive developments of the recent past are just the beginning. Starting from the premise that a fair and just society is in everyone’s best interest Continue reading →

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September 20, 2011

Israel-Palestine: A Binary Fallacy

HOW TO UNDERSTAND ISRAEL IN 60 DAYS OR LESS by Sarah Glidden

by Sarah Glidden, author of How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less (Vertigo, 2011)

When I used to think about growing as a person, I visualized my life as a sort of graph: a steadily climbing, sometimes dipping line that would crawl forward over time until a certain age when the graph would plateau into a stable flatness. The way I looked at it, one’s teens and early 20s are all about discovering who you are and what you think about the world. At some point, all my opinions, beliefs, and values would become fixed into a solid identity that I would carry with me into the future like an amber shield.

This fantasy carried over into the way I approached other topics, such as history and politics. I had been interested in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for some time but felt fatigued by it; I was itching to just figure it out and then move on. I was familiar with the “two sides” of the conflict in American discourse. Conservatives blamed the Palestinians, calling them “terrorists” and “monsters,” while liberals maintained that the Israelis were occupiers and thus the real monsters. While I had always identified more with the latter camp, there was something unsettling to me about defining a conflict as a struggle of “good vs. evil.” I wanted to truly understand the mess in the Middle East. I had read plenty on the subject, had gone to lectures, and had watched many documentaries. The only step left was to visit the country to see it with my own eyes. The finish line was in Jerusalem somewhere, and all I had to do was to get there. Continue reading →

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July 27, 2011

On Historical Fiction

THE THOUSAND AUTUMNS OF JACOB DE ZOET by David Mitchell

by David Mitchell, acclaimed author of several novels, the latest of which is The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet: A Novel (Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2011)

Around Christmas in 1994 in Nagasaki I got off at a wrong tram-stop and stumbled upon a greenish moat and cluster of warehouses from an earlier century.  This was my first encounter with Dejima, the Dutch East India Company’s furthest-flung trading ‘factory’ and its most exclusive bragging point: during the two and a half centuries of Japan’s isolation, this man-made island in Nagasaki harbour, no bigger than Trafalgar Square, was the sole point of contact with the West.  Dejima went to seed after the Japanese opened up other ports to international trade from the 1850s onwards, but a full-scale reconstruction is now underway.  (No mean feat of engineering, this – reclamation projects have pushed the shoreline hundreds of yards away.)  Back in 1994 I wasn’t a published writer, but the place crackled with fictional potential, and twelve years later I begun to reconstruct Dejima myself in a book now published as The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.  I didn’t set out to write an historical novel just for the heck of it – you’d have to be mad.  Rather, only within this genre could the book be written.  This being my first, I read a number of others to avoid reinventing wheels.  Small hope, but my reading led me to a new respect for a genre which Continue reading →

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July 13, 2011

A Debt Crisis…5,000 Years in the Making

 

DEBT by David Graeber

by David Graeber, author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Melville House, 2011)

Debt is all around us. Modern economies run on consumer debt; modern nation-states, on deficit financing; international relations turn on debt.  What’s more, for the last three years, we’ve faced a global debt crisis that’s hobbled the world economy and still threatens to send it crashing into ruins.  Yet no one ever stops to ask: how did this happen? What is debt, anyway? What does it even mean to say we “owe” someone something? How did it happen that, in almost all times and places in human history, “paying your debts” has been a synonym for morality, but money-lenders have been seen as the embodiment of evil? I first began asking myself these questions as an activist, during the “drop the debt” campaigns in the early 2000s. But it was only after the financial meltdown of September 2008

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June 2, 2011

Living Half a Life

HALF A LIFE by Darin Strauss

by Darin Strauss, author of Half a Life(Random House, 2011), Winner of the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award (Autobiography)

When I was 18, I was in a car accident: a girl swerved in front of my car, I couldn’t avoid her, and she died. I moved soon afterward, and so this crash and its aftermath made up  the secret I carried around for 18 years. Until I wrote HALF A LIFE.

40,000 die on US roads every year. And with every accident, somebody walks away feeling he’s put on the executioner’s hood. That’s one reason HALF A LIFE has resonated with so many people. But it’s not the only reason, I’ve come to realize.

When I decided to write this story—the story of me and of the girl who died that day—I don’t think I understood how universal other people would find it; I was just writing what had happened to me. But very soon, I realized this story threw huge shadows. Continue reading →

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May 24, 2011

The Complex Reality of Juveniles in Adult Prisons

I DON'T WISH NOBODY TO HAVE A LIFE LIKE MINE by David Chura

by David Chura, author of I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine: Tales of Kids in Adult Lockup(Beacon Press, 2011), Winner of the 2010 PASS Award from the National Council on Crime and Delinquency

Reynaldo is surprised that he’s made it to another birthday. With so many of his friends killed by the streets, each new year startles him. But he’s not surprised to be locked up again. He’s spent every birthday since he was twelve with kids just like him—“punks,” “gangstas,” other children of disappointment. This time he’s been thrown into the harshest world of all, adult lockup.

Reynaldo is only one of the young people readers meet in I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine: Tales of Kids in Adult Lockup. This behind-the-scenes look at kids in prison, an environment that the Verna Institute of Justice describes as “unsafe, unhealthy, unproductive, inhumane,” is a collection of sharply drawn portraits of minors serving time in an adult penitentiary.

The young men and women I met during my ten years of teaching high school in a New York county adult facility were some of the most Continue reading →

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January 13, 2011

How to Run the World

HOW TO RUN THE WORLD by Parag Khanna

by Parag Khanna, author of How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance (Random House, 2011)

The past decade—from the 9/11 terrorist attacks to the global financial meltdown—has taught us the dangers of interdependence and that outsourcing leadership is a recipe for disaster. Some now fear a breakdown of our global order, but isn’t it scarier to realize that the present order has already been broken for years? It’s the kind of moment the philosopher Karl Popper had in mind when he argued that tearing down our existing order and constructing a new one from scratch might lead to a more workable system.

How bad is it? Well, today the powers that are expected to keep the peace sell the most weapons, the banks that are supposed to encourage saving promote living beyond one’s means, and food arrives to hungry people after they’ve died. We are hurtling toward a perfect storm of energy consumption, population growth, and food and water scarcity that will spare no one, rich or poor. Our ever- growing list of crises includes financial instability, HIV/AIDS, terrorism, failed states, and more. Any one of these can magnify another, creating a downward spiral for individual nations and regions. Within just twenty years we could see proxy skirmishes escalate into major war between America and China, more weak states crumbling, conflicts over submerged oil and gas resources at sea, drought- starved refugees streaming out of central Africa, and sinking Pacific islands.

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