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.

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 in his piece, begat several successful and impactful projects to address local problems and ultimately led to an increase in student engagement and excitement.  McKay then brings the conversation back full circle and wonders if the solutions to the world’s ”global” problems may ironically be found in local work.

What do you think?  Do you agree with McKay’s sentiment?  How would such a stance be received by your students, colleagues? The first 5 people to post a comment will receive a free copy of McKay’s most recent book, What’s Gotten into Us?: Staying Healthy in a Toxic World (Random House, 2011)

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, that there are deep connections among individuals that transcend specificities of geography, culture, religion or class. The problem is that, in a time of high walls and security gates, it’s getting harder for people of means to grasp the struggles of less privileged people.

Behind one such high wall, near the increasingly glamorous Mumbai airport, a sensitive girl is studying Othello in a makeshift hut by a vast sewage lake, and dreading an arranged marriage that might send her to a rural village. A convention-defying disabled woman is longing to be acknowledged as a valid human being. A smart teenaged boy named Mirchi is resisting the garbage-recycling work that is his family trade. Instead he dreams of being a waiter at a fancy hotel, sticking toothpicks into cubes of cheese. “Watch me,” he snaps at his mother one day. “I’ll have a bathroom as big as this hut!” Over the course of time, as Mirchi and the other residents of the slum apply their imaginations to overcoming corruption and injustice and making better lives for themselves, the broader contours of the market-global age are gradually revealed.

Although I’m elated when readers join me in thinking about how to build a fairer world for people, I don’t consider didactic lectures an effective way to engage people—particularly young people—in questions about fairness and justice. Nor do I think young people want mawkishly sentimental or sensationalized nonfiction. Stereotypes put them off, and they know when they’re being manipulated. What they want, in my experience, is good, concrete information from which they can work out what they think for themselves.

With a combination of extensive observation and documents-based reporting, I try to pull the reader in close to the lives and dilemmas of the poor, while unfolding a story that is powerful and honest enough to keep readers turning the pages. By the last page, I’d like to believe that some young readers will also find themselves wrestling with essential questions of our time: about how opportunity is distributed across the world; about what an individual should be willing to give up to get ahead; about the interconnections between, say, the collapse of investment banks in Manhattan and the price Mumbai waste-pickers receive for their empty plastic water bottles; about whether it is possible to be good and moral in a society that is not good and moral; and about the ultimate value of a human life.

*To request an adavnced reader’s copy of this book,: please add a comment to this post and then email rhacademic@randomhouse.com with “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” in the subject line.  Please be sure to include your full school mailing address in the body of the email.

KATHERINE BOO is a staff writer at The New Yorker and a former reporter and editor for The Washington Post. Her reporting has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize, a MacArthur “Genius” grant, and a National Magazine Award for Feature Writing. For the last decade, she has divided her time between the United States and India. This is her first book.

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, I have spent a great deal of time studying, researching, and lecturing about how important it is that we strive for full equality in our nation, no matter how difficult an achievement it may seem. I’ve been working on my new book, Reimagining Equality, that reflects my ideas about how we can begin to realize equality for women, for blacks, and, particularly, for black women. In it I look back at my ancestors, and forward, based on my
experiences and discoveries since the hearing. I hope you will enjoy the stories and ideas presented here.

I wanted to publish this new book on the twentieth anniversary of the hearing—when there will be a fresh round of media and other attention—not only to shine a bright light on the accomplishments of the past twenty years but also to examine the issues that continue to trouble me and many of you. It’s my hope that this book will help a new generation to better understand and meet the challenges of remaking our society into one that might actually reach the goal of liberty and justice for all. Thank you for your support of my work,
past and present, and all best wishes for a successful year.

ANITA HILL is a professor of social policy, law, and women’s studies at Brandeis University, where she teaches courses on Race and the Law and Gender Equality. After receiving her JD from Yale Law School in 1980, she worked as the attorney-advisor to Clarence Thomas at the U.S. Department of Education. In 1991, she testified at the Senate confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas. She gained national exposure when her allegations of sexual harassment were made public. She is the author of Speaking Truth to Power, in which she wrote about her experience as a witness in the Thomas hearings. Hill has written widely on issues of race and gender in publications such as the New York Times, Newsweek, the Boston Globe, Critical Race Feminism, and others. She has appeared on Today, 60 Minutes, Meet the Press, and Face the Nation.

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. 

Luckily, there was a free way for me to do this. Birthright Israel is a foundation that offers free ten-day tours of the country to anyone Jewish between the ages of 18 and 26. I was just about to turn 27 and my main connection to my Judaism was my love for my grandmother’s matzo ball soup, but I still qualified—barely. I decided to take the opportunity to see Israel, and then afterward I would stay on in the country and even travel into the West Bank. I was mindful that Birthright could be propagandistic and one-sided, but I had done my homework and was ready for whatever the group would try to tell me about the conflict. And anyway, I was planning to create a comic book about my trip. The more propaganda Birthright threw at me, the more material I would have for a book. Bring it on!

The idea that I could finally “understand” the conflict by going on a Birthright trip is, of course, absurd. Instead, I sunk deeper into the morass. As I traveled the country, I was able to see parts of Israel that don’t usually make it into the newspapers and to meet ordinary people who call this land of turmoil their home. At the same time, I was constantly worried I was being manipulated by my tour guides.

In the end, I didn’t flip to the “other side”; neither did I come back from Israel saying, “Yup, it’s true: they’re all monsters.” What I discovered through wrestling with the trip was that there are no easy or absolute answers when it comes to complex issues. There are very few situations in which one group is always “right” and the other is always “wrong.” The reality is that there is no finish line for understanding.

In creating this book, I tried to remain honest about my own flaws as I embarked on an almost quixotic quest for knowledge. Combining simply drawn characters with painterly backgrounds, I bring my readers into the story so that they can feel as if they are right there experiencing all the interior battles and struggles, and getting inside my character’s imagination, daydreams, and doubts. I don’t let myself off lightly; my character succumbs to hurried judgment, reactive emotions, and irrational fears. But these are traits that we all share at times, and rather than something to be ashamed of, they should be recognized as the parts of us that help us to grow.

SARAH GLIDDEN won the prestigious Ignatz Award for “Most Promising New Talent” as well as the Masie Kukoc Award for Comics Inspiration. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies. HOW TO UNDERSTAND ISRAEL IN 60 DAYS OR LESS is her first graphic novel. Born in 1980 in Boston, she now lives in Brooklyn, NY.

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 too sometimes gets associated with blue-rinses and rags-to-riches family sagas set inLiverpool.  No disrespect to Liverpool, but historical fiction goes back somewhat further.

Identifying the origins of any genre is a murky endeavour, but a flash lawyer at the Court of Genre could find elements of historical fiction in early medieval texts like The Voyage of Saint Brendan.  This eighth century Latin account mixes ‘facts’ about Brendan of Clonfert, medieval ship-building and (Icelandic?) volcanoes with trippier elaborations like psalm-singing birds and an interview with Judas Iscariot.  The problem is trying to guess whether The Voyage’s educated author and copyists believed he was recording history, or creating parables framed in the past?  The ninth-century (and onwards) Anglo-Saxon Chronicles present similar ambiguities, mixing a no-nonsense history of Britain from pre-Roman times with some more floral assertions – that King Alfred, for example, was a direct descendant of Bældæg, son of the Norse god Woden.  Okay, better do what he says, then.

By the 1300s, many surviving bestsellers are set in the past, or at least in a past: Gawain and the Green Knight and chunks of Chaucer: his Knight’s Tale (Ancient Thebes and Athens), the Man of Law’s Tale (King Ælla’s Northumbria) and the Physician’s and Second Nun’s Tale (Ancient Rome.)  But these works’ status as historical fiction is not yet beyond reasonable doubt: were these classical and chivalric tales really ‘history’ to their contemporary readers in the same way that the Crimean War is history to us?  Or were they more like tales from an ahistoric story-world, akin to the hygienic medieval villages of Ladybird’s Best-Loved Fairy-Tales?  For my money, historical fiction emerges as a sentient genre during the reign of Elizabeth I, when Shakespeare and his proto-novelist contemporaries shoplifted from sources like Holinshed’s History of England, Scotland and Ireland for backdrop, names and plots and presented these stage-worlds as the real thing.  The dramatis personae boasted characters purporting to be the real thing, interacting with (and lending reality to) other characters who were understood to be fictional.

The taxonomic Eighteenth century severed the umbilical cord to European Romances, True Histories and bent travelogues, and delivered the earliest English novels (Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, Richardson’s Pamela and Fielding’s Tom Jones).  Hot on their heels appear some early contenders for the title of ‘First Historical Novel’.  First up are the Gothic romances, exemplified by Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764) whose past is less a historical reconstruction than a surrealist dreamscape.  Ann Radcliffe’s more ‘explained’ Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) earned so wide a readership that the Gothic romance was spoofable for Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey just four years later.  Maria Edgworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800) follows four generations of Anglo-Irish aristocrats prior to 1782, and has a strong claim to being the first modern ‘family saga’ historical novel.  With Walter Scott’s best-selling Waverley novels (from 1814), the genre was awarded a manifesto of sorts: “By fixing, then, the date of my story Sixty Years before this present 1st November, 1805, I would have my readers understand, that they will meet in the following pages neither a romance of chivalry nor a tale of modern manners; that my hero will neither have iron on his shoulders, as of yore, nor on the heels of his boots, as is the present fashion of Bond Street; and that my damsels will neither be clothed ‘in purple and in pall’, like the Lady Alice of an old ballad, nor reduced to the primitive nakedness of a modern fashionable at a rout.”  Eschewing Olde Worlde balladry, Scott promised both historical accuracy and a rattling yarn.

Never mind that Scott’s historical accuracy could be as fanciful as the clan tartans created for George IV’s visit to Edinburgh: the kilts were worn and Scott’s version of Scottish history became quasi-canonical for decades.  Fifteen years after Scott’s death, another commercially-nosed novelist published Barnaby Rudge (also sixty years after the events it describes, the 1780 Gordon Riots).  Charles Dickens’ second stab at a historical novel, A Tale of Two Cities, has sold over 200 million copies to date, making it the best-selling novel – in any genre – of all time.  Once the twentieth-century floodgates open, one is reduced to naming favourites from a broad and long procession (including the 12 Booker Prize Winners to qualify as historical novels under Scott’s sixty year rule): Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin novels, Robert Graves’ I, Claudius; George McDonald Fraser’s Flashman series; Sarah Waters, Beryl Bainbridge; Rose Tremain’s Restoration, Pat Barker, Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong, William Golding’s To the Ends of the Earth Trilogy.

Why, then, the enduring popularity of historical fiction?  One reason is that it delivers a stereo narrative: from one speaker comes the treble of the novel’s own plot whilst the other speak plays the bass of history’s plot.  A second reason is genealogical: if History is the family tree of Now, a historical novel (such as Alex Haley’s Roots) may illuminate the contemporary world in ways that straight history may not.  The novel’s Ace of Spades is subjective experience, which is a merit or demerit depending on how the card is played and who you are – Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind can be either a sublime evocation or a toxic travesty.  A third reason for the genre’s popularity is simply that whilst the needs of the human heart and body stay much the same, the societies it must live in varies dramatically between centuries and cultures, and to watch people live – people whom we might have been had we been born then – under different regimes and rules is fascinating for its own sake.

And why write a historical novel?  Writers’ motives are as varied as criminals’, but I suspect that the historical novelist’s genetic code contains the geeky genes of the model-maker – there is pleasure to be had in the painstaking reconstruction of a lost world.  A second reason is banal but overlooked: a novel must be set both somewhere and ‘somewhen’, and the choice is restricted to the present, the future (after Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, though that’s another case for the Court of Genre) and the past.  A third motive is the challenge (and perverse pleasure) of tackling the pitfalls, foremost of which is research.  Filmmakers ruefully observe how every decade back in time a film is set, x million dollars gets added to production costs.  The same principle applies in novel-writing, but instead of dollars, read ‘months’.  The historical novelist must learn how the vast gamut of human needs was met in the ‘destination period’: how were rooms lit and heated?  How were meals prepared, clothes made, bodies bathed (or not), feet shod, distances covered, transgressions punished, illnesses explained, courtships conducted, contraception considered, divinities worshiped and corpses disposed of?  My allotted 1500 words could be swallowed by this list, and I would still be scratching the surface.  The more Moleskines you fill with the fruits of research, however, the more determinedly it must be hidden: lines like ‘Shall I bid Jenkins ready the Phaeton coach, or might Madam prefer the two-wheeled barouche landau?’ will kill.

And then you have to worry about language.  Unless you have an entire historical novel made out of reported speech (easier to digest Bubble-pack) the characters must open their mouths at some point, and when they do, how are they going to speak?  This is the ‘Lest versus In Case Dilemma’: the sentence-joint ‘in case’ – as in “Eat now in case we don’t have time later” –smells of Late Twentieth Century English, but a ‘correct’ translation into Smollett’s English – “Eat on the nonce, My Boy, lest no later opportunity presents itself” – smacks of phoniness and pastiche if written in 2010.  It smacks, in fact, of Blackadder, and only a masochist could stomach 500 pages.  To a degree, the historical novelist must create a sort of dialect – I call it “Bygonese” – which is inaccurate but plausible.  Like a coat of antique-effect varnish on a pine new dresser, it is both synthetic and the least-worst solution.  Commonly, shall is used more often than will; if-less conditional sentences are appear (as in “Had I but seen him, I would have shot him stone dead”); and contractions discouraged by old school headmistresses – like gonna – are avoided.  Then, once your Bygonese is perfected, anachronism is waiting to blight it.  For every obvious no-no (a feudal castle-builder complaining “Gravity is not on our side”) there are slipperier ones waiting to slip through: the editors and proofreaders of my late eighteenth century MS found a skip-load.  Some were excusable: the verb to con as in ‘swindle’ first appears in print in 1889, says the heaven-sent Etymological Online Dictionary.  Others were more embarrassing, like brinksmanship: duh, it’s a Cold War term.

Referring to the tyranny of tradition, Jessamyn West, an American Quaker novelist, wrote ‘Faithfulness to the past can be a kind of death above ground… Writing of the past is a resurrection; the past lives in your words and you are free.’  I don’t know about ‘free’ but I like West’s grave tone and her word ‘resurrection’: the historical novelist isn’t only rifling through the human narrative we call History for raw material.  Like it or not, he or she may also end up, actually rewriting the past.  History is not, after all, what really happened (no-one can know, it’s gone) but only what we believe happened.  I heard Mark Lawson on Front Row call this process ‘The Oliver Stone Phenomenon’, referring to the sizeable majority of Americans who believe Stone’s film JFK to be an accurate portrayal of a real conspiracy to kill the President (making one worry about Inglorious Basterds, where duty to historical fact is binned and Kick-Ass Jews perpetrate a Tarantino-esque revenge on Adolf Hitler.)  Perhaps this is the paradox that beats inside historical fiction’s rib-cage: the ‘historical’ half demands fidelity to the past, whilst the ‘fiction’ half requires infidelity – people must be dreamt up, their acts fabricated, and the lies of art must be told.

Or perhaps it’s just the fantastic costumes.
 

David Mitchell is the acclaimed author of the novels Black Swan Green, which was selected as one of the 10 Best Books of the Year by Time; Cloud Atlas, which was a Man Booker Prize finalist; Number9Dream, which was short-listed for the Man Booker as well as the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; and Ghostwritten, awarded the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for best book by a writer under thirty-five and short-listed for the Guardian First Book Award. He lives in Ireland.

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

that answering them became a driving passion. It seemed to me that in the days immediately after the crash, the space had opened up for a genuine conversation about money, markets, credit, and finance, about the nature of debt, about value, the relation of money and morality, about what people genuinely owe to one another. Yet somehow, this conversation never happened.

It was as if we’ve forgotten how to ask big questions any more.

It was at this point I realized that with my training in history and anthropology, I was in a unique position to try to open the conversation up. Thus began a series of investigations that culminated in the writing of this book. What I discovered along the way startled even me. First of all, almost all our familiar assumptions about money history turned out to be wrong. We are used to assuming that economic life began with barter, moved on to money, and only then did we develop credit systems. In fact, what happened was precisely the opposite. Credit came first. What we’d now call “virtual money” preceded coinage by thousands of years, and human history has alternated back and forth between periods of virtual money, and periods dominated by gold and silver—which have also, invariably, been times of empire, war, and slavery. What’s more, since the dawn of recorded history, arguments over credit, debt, virtual and physical money have been at the very center of political life—the language of the Bible and other great religious texts resonates with it, untold popular uprisings have been inspired by it, and the outcome of these battles have shaped our own laws, our economic institutions, our very conceptions of freedom and morality, in ways we can no longer even see.

Reconstructing this history of debt reveals odd concepts—life debts, blood debts, flesh debts, milk debts—but also, throws all our familiar conceptions of history askew, from the real nature of the African slave trade, to the origins of Adam Smith’s free market rhetoric in Medieval Islam. Above all, it reveals we stand, today, at a precipice. There is every reason that the return to virtual money marks a major turning point in world history. But it’s only by looking at the full sweep of the past that we have any chance of understanding what that might really mean.

DAVID GRAEBER teaches anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value, Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire, and Direct Action: An Ethnography. He has written for Harper’s, The Nation, Mute, and The New Left Review. In 2006, he delivered the Malinowski Memorial Lecture at the London School of Economics, an annual talk that honors “outstanding anthropologists who have fundamentally shaped the study of culture.”

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. Excerpted in GQ and on This American Life, as well as in The Times of London, The Daily Mail (UK) and numerous other publications in the US and around the world, HALF A LIFE ended up having real valence for a great many people. I’ve received probably over a thousand emails from readers who have wanted to share their own stories: a man who blames himself because he didn’t take his mother’s threats seriously and therefore left for boarding school the day before her suicide; a number of soldiers back from Iraq and Afganistan who are dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder; people who have suffered horrible personal loss; and, of course, many car accident survivors.

Furthermore, I traveled the country with this book—even before it won the National Book Critics Circle Award for best memoir/autobiography of 2010—and at every reading I gave, someone invariably came up to me and shared a story of personal grief and guilt. At first, I didn’t know why they were opening up in this way: what did seeing one’s brother overdose have to do with my story? And why did this person want to tell me?

When I was a kid, after the accident, I felt completely alone—suffering under a crushing guilt, even though everyone said I wasn’t at fault.

The thing is, no one knows how to feel about guilt: people think if an official person—a policeman, a judge or reporter—says you weren’t at fault, it’ll be all right. What the book is about is: that’s not so. If you just accept what other people tell you to feel, it leads to your living half a life, with the other half covering something up.

The point is, it turns out almost everybody has something in their past to feel guilt and/or grief about, whether they were culpable in their life-shaping event or not. It doesn’t have to be as dramatic as mine. (I was found blameless in my accident, but that didn’t stop the lawsuits from happening.) Everyone who is worried about doing what appears to be right, rather than what is right for them.

Until I wrote HALF A LIFE, I found math personally treacherous—its A-to-B-to-C arrogance, its Boolean surety: I operated the car. The car hit the girl. A = C. I killed the girl.  Algebra makes no allowances. Or maybe it does—when it leaves the workbook and enters our flesh-and-blood world.

With this book I wrote what hurt; I looked it in the eye. And, for my readers, watching somebody work through those feelings has brought a kind of catharsis.

This is the story I would have needed to read when I was 18. I wrote it in part for the girl who died—to show how much she’s touched every part of my life—but I wrote it for that teenage me too, and for other people who feel guilt and don’t know if they should.

The lessons I learned are not glib, or very self-helpy. All the same, if one writes honestly and well about unwarranted guilt and how to overcome it, I think one can write a book that is self-helpful.

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 vulnerable teens I had encountered in forty years of working with at-risk kids in psych hospitals, drug rehabs, and alternative schools. With lives shaped by societal forces beyond their control—poverty, racism, physical and sexual abuse, violence, AIDS/HIV—they were often rejected by fragmented families, inadequate schools, and the communities in which they lived. Even the child welfare system, the very system charged with their care, abandoned them.

Although these young people are over- and misrepresented in the media as “superpredators,” their personal stories are underrepresented in academic literature. I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine helps fill that gap and is an excellent addition to coursework in sociology, psychology, and related scholarly studies. It goes beyond the sound bites and stereotypes that define the public’s perceptions of youthful offenders. At the same time, it brings academic theories to life and puts a face to the statistics on which many child welfare and juvenile justice policies and laws are based. Likewise, the book gives students a knowledge of cultures, lifestyles, and family dynamics that otherwise might not be readily available to them but is essential for their studies and their work in the social sciences.

When I share this book in various academic settings, students are quickly engaged by the young people’s stories . Because it is rooted in the day-to-day details of prison life and the real people entangled in that culture, students are able to move easily from the particular moments depicted in these kids’ lives to the broader social issues of poverty, family, the streets, peer pressure, and the juvenile and criminal justice systems that have such a profound effect on those lives. After reading and discussing I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine, students come away with not only a deeper understanding of sociological concepts and principles but also a greater respect for the vulnerability and resilience of these teenagers who refuse to be beaten down.

David Chura has worked with at-risk teenagers for forty years. His writing has appeared in the New York Times and multiple literary journals and anthologies, and he is a frequent lecturer and advisor on incarcer­ated youth. Visit his website Kids in the System.

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.

Henry Kissinger said it best: “You do not design a new world order as an emergency measure. But you need an emergency to bring about a new world order.” Finally, there is a global debate under way about how to redesign the way we run the world. It’s about time—and hopefully not too late. Globalization has thrust us into a chaotic era with which our leading powers and institutions only pretend they can cope. Americans believe they can lead a “multi- partner” world, Europeans think they can tame the world through “civilian power,” the Chinese try to buy the world off, most others states just want status without responsibility, and the United Nations is barely spoken of anymore.

They all need to seriously rethink how the world is run. The notion of a “G- 2” axis between the United States and China is the latest misguided incarnation of our quest for a simple global framework—yet it ignores the fact that the two powers can’t agree on currency, climate, censorship, or many other issues, and that few if any countries want to be dictated to by either the United States or China.

There is no doubt that we need a global redesign to confront this perfect storm—one that doesn’t just react to crises, but proactively prevents them. What we have right now, though, is global policy gridlock: The West demands interventions and human rights, while the East prefers sovereignty and non- interference; the North is scared of terrorism and proliferation, while the South needs food security and fair trade. Stock prices are crucial for the capital rich; commodities prices for the resource rich. Americans are suspicious of Chinese state- owned companies, while the Chinese are suspicious of American regulators. We seem as far away as ever from a new consensus.

What we have today is a worldwide perpetual no- holds- barred contest for power and legitimacy between regimes, companies, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), religious groups, and super- empowered individuals all pursuing their own interests. From economic nationalists to resource- hungry companies to religious fundamentalists, everyone is out for themselves. The best term for it: mosh pit.

Ironically, our ambition often prevents us from recognizing this reality. Because issues such as the climate and economy are “systemic” in nature, meaning they have worldwide scope and impact, we reach for grand, silver- bullet remedies such as “America must take charge” or “strengthen the United Nations.” But just as there is no one nation that can rule the world, there is no one institution that can run it, either. Some experts offer strategies to “fix” the world, but their utopian schemes for new international bureaucracies are as boring in theory as they are unworkable in practice. There are also countless appeals to “save” the world through a variety of “grand bargains.” But running the world isn’t about one- off solutions.

“Diplomacy” is the one- word answer to how to run the world—and improving our global diplomatic design holds the key to running the world better.

We all know how technology has transformed the weapons of war from bows and arrows to robots and lasers, and from field armies to insurgent networks—but we often overlook how diplomacy has changed as well. More than two centuries ago, Thomas Jefferson mused, “For two years we have not heard from our ambassador in Spain; if we again do not hear from him this year, we should write him a letter.” When Lord Palmerston received the first diplomatic cable at Whitehall in the mid- nineteenth century, he proclaimed, “This is the end of diplomacy!” In the 1970s, Canadian premier Pierre Trudeau remarked that he could replace his entire foreign ministry with a subscription to The New York Times, whose correspondents presumably provided better information than embassy cables. Today’s communications technologies are doing to diplomacy what they have done to print media: demoralizing it and pushing it to the brink of extinction—while also reminding us just how important the media and diplomacy are.

Technology, capitalism, and moral agendas such as human rights have drastically multiplied the number of players in the diplomatic game. Diplomacy today takes place among anybody who’s somebody. There are about two hundred countries in the world that have relations with one another, close to one hundred thousand multinational corporations that constantly negotiate with governments and one another, and at least fifty thousand transnational NGOs that consult on international laws and treaties and intervene in conflict zones to provide assistance to regimes and peoples in need. All these actors have acquired sufficient authority—whether through money, expertise, or status—to become influential. Cyberspace today is alive with virtual diplomacy: Sweden, Brazil, and other governments have opened virtual consulates in the universe of Second Life, where former U.S. undersecretary of state for public diplomacy James Glassman held debates with Egyptian bloggers. Senator John Kerry has even proposed the creation of an ambassador for cyberspace. Now that Google and the U.S. Department of Defense’s research and development office DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) have pioneered handheld universal translation devices, everyone is a diplomat.

Traditional models of diplomacy hold only one lesson for how to manage this world: that they are themselves totally insufficient. Rather than finding common projects through which to transcend their differences, the few leading powers of the world, from America and Brazil to China and Japan, are still feeling one another out about which red lines should not be crossed in each other’s affairs. Any time we turn to them for leadership—whether at the UN Security Council or the Copenhagen climate summit—we are let down. Where governments fail, great powers come to prop them up, not to reinvent them. Where people clash, they send peacekeepers, not peacemakers. And so we accelerate into a perfect storm.

All grand global schemes miss the point that representation—democratic or otherwise—is not enough to satisfy our visceral need to be in control of our own affairs. Today, for the first time, the underrepresented and disenfranchised have access to information, communication, money, and the tools of violent revolution to demand and effect real change, not just new variations on the status quo. They will constantly pressure the system to evolve. Out-of-touch governments and international organizations are already feeling the heat from a bottom- up awakening: labor unions and coca farmers in Latin America, the Arab underclass in the Middle East, the Pashtuns of south-central Asia, Maoists and Naxalite tribal groups in India, and migrant laborers in China. International bureaucrats should expect nothing less than a technologically empowered revolt against their plans—or perhaps they will simply be ignored altogether. It would be too easy to suggest that all states must be strengthened, and that the world of strong sovereign nations should be re-created. That world never really existed. We should embrace the next one.

We are in the early phase of a new era in which each individual and collective has the ability to pursue its own ends. The information revolution has empowered individuals to claim their own authority, leading us into a world of mutuality among countless communities of various sizes. This unfolding epoch will force us to appreciate the second law of thermodynamics: the inexorability of universal entropy. Complexity is our permanent reality. The future will be about multiple sovereignties, not exclusive ones.

We must pursue an active evolution toward this more networked order. “Active” means not waiting for a more capable America, China’s adaptation to global leadership, or more blue-ribbon panels to reform the United Nations. In their own spheres of activity, governments should focus on internal stability and delivering the basics to the populations within their borders, NGOs should devote themselves singularly to empowering local communities, companies should view their employees and supply chains as their citizens and infrastructure, and religious groups should practice the Golden Rule themselves to be considered legitimate. Importantly, all of these actors should allow organic alliances to emerge to solve the problems at hand. We can admire the boundless creativity of human ingenuity all we want. Better diplomacy is how to harness it. If you can afford to buy this book, or have the technology to order it, you have no excuse to not contribute to the new mega-diplomacy.

The future of global governance is not as simple as talking about the “BRIC” countries. Instead, it is a bricolage of movements, governance arrangements, networks, soft law codes, and other systems at the local, regional, and global level. Some experts are skeptical that a world of connected but self- governing communities of various sizes—and many more transcending space altogether—can be more than the sum of their parts. But we don’t have to be skeptics to apply skepticism to evaluate what works in diplomacy today. Witness how central mechanisms have ceased to be useful proxies for human progress, and how it progresses nonetheless: The WTO is stalled, but global trade carries on by traders and merchants at the top and bottom of the global economic food chain; the Copenhagen process did nothing for the climate, but clean- tech companies forge ahead with innovation undeterred; the UN Security Council may never be reformed, but regional organizations are picking up the slack. Each of those local experiments holds greater promise than banal global org charts. Compliance with weak treaties is not a measure of our collective evolution; increasing participation in the actions that produce global solidarity is.

If a new global social contract is to emerge, it will be as a result of the communities of the world—whether nations, corporations, or faiths—sharing knowledge and cooperating, but also learning to respect one another’s power and values. As they practice megadiplomacy, they leverage each other’s resources and hold one another accountable. In a world in which every player has a role in global policy, the only principle that can reliably guide us is pragmatism: learning from experience and applying its lessons. The dot- gov, dot- com, and dot- org worlds are converging toward such pragmatism. How will we know when we have succeeded? By lives saved and improved, crises averted, and networks built. This networked world need not be a tribal one. Webs of interdependence among diverse enclaves are the logical extension of globalization, not a break from it. The local to the local is still global.

Interdependence is one of the buzzwords of our age, but it is an observation, not a strategy. Perpetual resilience, not stiff governance, is the strategy that nations, economies, and communities must pursue irrespective of their degree of interdependence with the rest of the world. A world changing so quickly needs to be run in real time, and even anticipate the future. It has to be made up not of rigid states, but rather of networks of resilient systems. Resilience is about local stability rather than centralized dependence, a diversity of approaches rather than reliance on any one solution, flexibility of institutions to change as the tasks shift, and transparent collaboration to build trust and generate maximum resources. Resilience means Africans don’t have to wait for the United Nations to approve military interventions or for the World Bank to provide them loans; it means Europeans and Australians don’t wait for the United States to sign climate treaties before turning global warming into a commercial opportunity; and it means emerging markets don’t wait for G- 20 meetings to launch stimulus packages or issue local- currency bonds. Resilience is how the local thrives amid the global.

We need risk management systems more than we need—or will ever have—powerful global institutions. Our goal should be an autopoietic world: self- regulating and re- creating. We must be vigilant, recognizing the fact that contagions can spread rapidly in networks, so we must code an operating template that builds immunities after failure and learns with each cycle of reproduction. Think of it like a world of wikis that everyone can access and navigate, and if one link breaks, there are alternative paths. If you poke a spiderweb, it doesn’t fall apart.

A hybrid, diffuse, public- private world is not flawless, and is certainly far more complex than our existing order, but it is an improvement rather than a step backward. If the diverse groups populating the world can feel that they have a direct or indirect say in global policies, the next phase of diplomacy will be better than the last. It is said that the pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity and the optimist sees opportunity in every difficulty. Winston Churchill was a pragmatist. He said, “I’m an optimist—it doesn’t seem of much use to be anything else.”

Parag Khanna directs the Global Governance Initiative in the American Strategy Program of the New America Foundation. Author of the previous international bestseller The Second World, he was picked as one of Esquire’s Most Influential People of the Twenty-first Century and featured on Wired’s Smart List. He has been a fellow at the Brookings Institution and researched at the Council on Foreign Relations. During 2007, he was a senior geopolitical adviser to U.S. Special Operations Command. He has written for major global publications such as The New York Times and Financial Times and appears regularly on CNN, BBC, and other television media around the world. He has traveled in nearly one hundred countries and has been named a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum.