edited by Louise M. Antony
Oxford University Press ($28)

by Simon Waxman

Americans, apparently, are developing a taste for the heathen life. The American Religious Identification Survey, performed in 2001 by the City University of New York, found that only 0.9 percent of Americans described themselves as atheist or agnostic, but a 2007 poll from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found that a full 4 percent fell into that category. Such a rise in only six years ought to leave the patrons of orthodoxy wondering if they’ve got an insurrection on their hands.

In this climate of increasing disbelief a wave of atheist literature broke over the English-speaking world, with two authors, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, at its crest. Their books, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything and The God Delusion, are bestsellers. Many commentators latched onto the tone of these two books. Hitchens’s is riddled with temper-raising adjectives like “diseased,” “babyish,” “stupid,” and “awful,” and Dawkins is not beneath generalization ad absurdum as evidenced by a phrase like “the weakness of the religious mind”—inspired in the text by one believer, applied, through the stupendous alchemy of the definite article, to all.

But the profound limitation of these books lies not in their prose; indeed, both men are enviable stylists, blessed, in an entirely godless sense, with wit and rhetorical grace. Hitchens in particular possesses a vulpine sensibility that ambushes the reader with unexpected humor and elegantly veiled insults, as when he describes believers harboring apocalyptic visions in a world already threatening to warm us out of commission as “those who are not willing to wait.” Rather, the mighty HMS Hitch-kins, its sails billowing with erudition, runs aground on the very same shores as Pat Robertson’s dinghy: all of them are convinced of a transcendent truth.

Dawkins would declare that statement preposterous; Hitchens might call it flagitious. But both, nonetheless, assert that the rightness of atheism as a principle by which to understand the universe is justified outside the context of human experience. How is this so? Hitch-kins points out that religious allegiance and fervency are matters of circumstance: had Luanne of Colorado Springs been born Husniyah of Damascus, she’d likely grow up in a Sunni Muslim tradition as opposed to an evangelical protestant one. This would surely affect her beliefs come adulthood.

Atheism, however, is not put to the same test. It is assumed that belief is influenced by individual circumstance, a function of the myriad ways in which social, political, and family life shape experience. By contrast, atheism is simply universal. It out-muscles the competing truths of irreconcilable religious beliefs, emerging as the one organizing principle. Reason, which is its mechanism, stands divorced from the peculiarities of mere existence, its associated emotions, contradictions, personalities, idiosyncrasies, contingencies. Reason, in short, is not accountable to life. Hitchens and Dawkins refuse even to countenance the possibility that their views of the world, too, are the results of highly imperfect individual development, not some unassailable ideal.

What The God Delusion and God Is Not Great lack is the human adventure of unbelief—a sense of women and men struggling with their own conflicting ideas, incomplete thoughts, and fallible perceptions, to come to terms with a world so grand in its beauty and strife that it defies our ability to fathom all at once. Inevitably, that immense personal labor leaves us richer, more attuned to our own lives and maybe better equipped to live with others. Philosophers Without Gods, a rewarding, but flawed new text, offers several takes on that adventure.

Philosophers differs from the Hitch-kins model in many ways—not least the general absence of mockery, the lone outlier an essay from philosopher Daniel Dennett who is reliably obnoxious, calling himself and his friends (Dawkins included) “brights”—but most acutely through the incorporation of a section entitled “Journeys.” Here, several thinkers, including the volume’s editor, Louise Antony, lay out their individual paths to atheism.

There is Joseph Levine, who began life in the yeshiva only to find that he could not abide the chauvinism of “the chosen people” nor the injustices they have perpetrated in Israel. More fundamentally, he decided that to believe required denial of his humanity. Or consider the chapter “Overcoming Christianity,” in which Walter Sinnott-Armstrong discusses growing up devout in a closed-minded congregation in Memphis, where, we are told, there was more Christianity than there was “water in the Mississippi River.” His Christianity morphed through high school and college, where he gleefully encountered liberal evangelicals, only to find that belief could not withstand intellectual honesty.

While Levine and Sinnott-Armstrong appear to have found the culmination of their journeys in atheism, Philosophers does not leave the impression that rejecting god is the expressway to enlightenment. Daniel M. Farrell’s “Life Without God: Some Personal Costs,” a handsomely written reflection on the apparent dearth of meaning that accompanies life sans a supernatural caretaker, ends in the author’s wistful lament that he cannot eschew objective value altogether.

But the journeys are too often marred by the philosophical predilection to analyze events in exclusively intellectual terms. There’s no grappling with the emotional and psychological content of human life, the slippery guts of being. In one illustrative instance, Sinnott-Armstrong recounts trying to convert people to Christianity. He asked folks walking on the street whether they wanted to hear about Jesus. “I could hear myself as if I were a bystander listening to what I was saying,” he writes. “It sounded shallow. I had doubts and could see the problems in my arguments, but I did not tell them. I felt dirty.”

This is not exactly an arresting account—the author seems more concerned with being wrong than feeling his world change, reducing the powerful visceral reality of epiphany to a hackneyed phrase. Of course, it would not be fair to expect riveting prose from a group of academic philosophers. But the arguments against god and religion are well known. Do we really gain anything by learning which particular ones convinced this group of writers? With rare exceptions, the journeys in Philosophers are emotionally truncated. They lack the sort of characters a reader can contemplate, connect with, and inhabit. The messy parts are kept out of sight, and, as a result, so is the humanity.

The latter half of the book, “Reflections,” promises theoretical discourse, and it delivers, although several essays are redundant. The most exhilarating among them holds that many people who claim to be religious are, in fact, atheists. That essay, Georges Rey’s “Meta-atheism: Religious Avowal as Self-Deception,” contends that many theists are rational in other areas of their lives, but decline to apply to god the reason they otherwise employ reflexively. Rey does not go far enough, however. He might have pointed out that the moment a believer relies on logic and evidence to justify belief—as many, when pressed, will do—he has demonstrated that god is subordinate to reason. That is why creation “science” and evidence of supposed miracles is maddening and baffling. Real belief can make no recourse to reason. A believer who defends her faith through evidence, even faulty evidence, has no faith at all.

Though Philosophers devotes much scholarly effort to debunking god, the book’s focus is unquestionably more ethical than epistemic. It is animated by a line from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov: In a world without god, Ivan Karamazov claims, “everything is permitted.” The authors of Philosophers, as well as Hitchens and Dawkins, point to a preponderance of evidence indicating that quite the opposite is true—it is belief in god that gives so many of us license to commit evil. But atheism does not have a monopoly on ethics, nor does religion on evil. Nonviolence is critical to many varieties of religion and for every Osama Bin Laden or George W. Bush, there is a Reverend Martin Luther King or a John Woolman, the Quaker preacher who worked diligently to abolish slavery.

And what of violent atheists? The “what about Hitler and Stalin?” argument, though practically a parody of religious objections to atheism, is a case in point. Hitch-kins dismisses it as one offered in bad faith; Dawkins assures us, probably correctly, that no one has spilled blood in the name of atheism. None of the authors in Philosophers pays it much heed. But the question needs to be taken seriously because it opens onto a larger problem. Just as religious people may feel compelled to do each other harm, so might atheists, and the fact that they do so for reasons unrelated to the absence of belief does not make their violence any less tragic. The question that ought to concern us is not whether religion or atheism causes more pain. Instead, we must ask: how can we be good, god or no god?

We might look inward, as some of the contributors to the Journeys section of Philosophers have done, and try to understand ourselves. That task, undertaken with honestly and humility, will never be complete, as Marvin Belzer’s essay amply demonstrates. But its ethical outcome is obvious. To pursue that often-burdensome enterprise requires that each of us have the opportunity to follow an individual agenda. To that end, we must reject evangelical atheism as much as evangelical religion, not pit them against each other, as Hitch-kins would have it.

This may seem a radically relativistic prescription, but even a relativistic society need not abandon ethical standards, as some unimaginative absolutists suggest, or tolerate unethical behavior just because it is founded in religious conviction. We can and should punish religiously motivated violence because our legal system enshrines the law of man above the law of god. Unfortunately, politicians bent on contemporary autos-da-fé seem unconvinced of this, and, in manifest contradiction of the first amendment to the constitution, repeatedly promote and pass laws to ban—among other things—same-sex union, embryonic stem-cell research, and euthanasia. These laws derive exclusively from religious appeals, and, as Sinott-Armstrong points out, there is no basis for American law outside the secular.

Atheists (and others) would do well to remind their fellow citizens and elected representatives of this point. A rule, established on religious grounds, may be good enough for a church, but it is not good enough for a state. Even these atrocious laws, however, are not to be blamed on fundamentalist believers, but on legislators and the American citizenry who seem to have forgotten that democracy does not mean acting on the majority’s every whim at the expense of those who disagree—a misconception shared by theists and unbelievers alike.

Ultimately, while it behooves us to make our government respect the many distinct journeys to goodness, we can do little save undertake our own. Philosophers Without Gods does not always strike the mark, particularly in some authors’ unyielding, Hitch-kinsesque demands that we all be logical, intelligible creatures. But for us mere mortals humble enough to recognize the incongruities of which we are composed, the message of this book is one of inescapable importance: you don’t need god to be good.

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Matt Bai
Penguin Books ($16)

by Bob Hussey

For nearly a century, Americans have wrangled over the proper role of government. In the 1930s, Roosevelt successfully argued that government should protect citizens from the excesses of unregulated capitalism. In the ’60s Lyndon Johnson expanded government’s role to promote racial equality and provide access to health care for the elderly and poor. Since the election of 1980, the prevailing argument has centered on Ronald Reagan’s vision of limited government and lower taxes.

With the Reagan Revolution now largely discredited by the failures of the Bush administration, what new argument about government will drive American politics? New York Times Magazine reporter Matt Bai thought he spied it among the billionaires and bloggers trying to build a new progressive movement. Bai’s new book, The Argument, chronicles his attempt to understand these new progressives and the ideas that motivate them.

Shortly after the defeat of John Kerry in 2004, a group of billionaires came together to form the Democracy Alliance. Led by the likes of George Soros and Hollywood producer Norman Lear, the new group hoped to finance the creation of the same type of advocacy groups and think tanks that Conservatives have funded for decades. But their efforts quickly descended into petty squabbles concerning the structure of the Alliance and its mission. Underlying this bickering is the fact that the billionaires had no common philosophy to provide a framework for their movement.

The bloggers seem even less interested in framing a cohesive argument, bringing an almost religious fervor to their daily war of words with George W. Bush and his fellow Republicans. Bai joins Markos Moulitsis Zúniga, founder of the blog Daily Kos, and Jerome Armstrong of MyDD.com on a book tour that calls to mind Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. At each stop on their tour, Markos and Jerome are feted like royalty by the Democratic establishment, even though most of the old politicos don’t know quite what to make of the bloggers.

What becomes clear from reading The Argument is that these new progressives have no new argument to make to voters. Rather, they pledge allegiance to programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Affirmative Action—programs that represent the high points of 20th-century liberalism. Their blind adherence to these old programs makes the consideration of any new ideas heresy.

By the end of The Argument, one is left wondering whether new ideas about government have any place in the age of the perpetual campaign. When the business of governing takes a back seat to currying favor with voters or raising funds, new ideas run the risk of upsetting fragile coalitions, scaring voters, and leaving a candidate open to attack. Until the American people refocus on the hard choices and often-boring details of governing, reporters like Bai will exhaust themselves in a futile search for new arguments about how we govern ourselves.

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Carl Oglesby
Scribner ($25)

by Robert Zaller

At least since the Civil War, each American generation has forged the narrative of itself on the field of social struggle. After the Abolitionists came the Populists and the Progressives, to be followed by the Old Left of the 1930s and the New Left of the 1960s. Whether it was agrarian reform or trust-busting, the social plight of the Great Depression or the agony of Vietnam, young Americans found in the various crises of our wayward republic a challenge to renew the nation’s promise. Those who love social justice will not necessarily lie in honored graves, but, as Kenneth Rexroth said in his wonderful elegy, “For Eli Jacobsen,”

It is
Good to be brave—nothing is
Better. Food tastes better. Wine
Is more brilliant. Girls are more
Beautiful. The sky is bluer
For the brave—for the brave and
Happy comrades and for the
Lonely brave retreating warriors.

These thoughts came to me in reading Carl Oglesby’s memoir, Ravens in the Storm, because the present American generation is the first that has known no battle and will remember no song. Cycles of American radicalism have come in thirty-year waves so regularly and for so long that they seemed part of the pulse of our democracy, but no longer. The last one was due in the 1990s, but we got instead the Harding-esque era of peace and prosperity the Clintons were recently so eager to dial up again. The Iraq war brought protesters back briefly into the streets, but they vanished with the first shock of combat. These were not the Armies of the Night.

Oglesby grew up in a similarly lobotomized time, the 1950s, and the early ’60s found him employed as a tech editor for defense contractors, first at Goodyear and then at Bendix. But he was also living in liberal Ann Arbor, and trying to establish himself as a playwright. His after-hours friends introduced him to Students for a Democratic Society. Within a few months he found himself deeply immersed in the antiwar movement, and within a year—having resigned his job, alienated his South Carolina family, and taken his own family from split-level to crash pad—he was president of SDS itself.

Oglesby tells this story rather impressionistically, but it is evident that the war awoke a latent social conscience and galvanized his formidable political and organizational skills. His theatrical bent made him a compelling orator as well. A little older than most of his colleagues in the New Left, he was soon its precocious elder statesman. (The New Left did not kid when it said not to trust anyone over thirty; the only old Lefty who played any significant role in its ranks was Dave Dellinger, and he was more activist than leader.)

The war was both the life and death of SDS, and of the larger, inchoate political force to which it gave birth and which had no other name but the Movement. Oglesby himself was critical in the transformation of SDS, a mildly reformist student group at first confined to community organizing, into a self-proclaimed revolutionary vanguard whose goal was nothing less than confronting the military-industrial complex, restructuring American life, and deimperializing American foreign policy. With a bit of poetic license (including lengthy conversations reconstructed from memory), Oglesby recreates the headlong excitement of the moment, in which even the Movement’s ostensible leaders were often largely bystanders as it grew exponentially, outstripping any capacity to organize or direct its protean energies.

The Movement’s fuel was the war, complicated by feminism and by the Black Power activism that had arisen from the civil rights movement. All of this, together with a rich pharmacopeia, blended uncertainly into something called the Counterculture, the communal lifestyle that opposed itself to bourgeois mores as much as to the war. To their often aghast (and occasionally seduced) elders, the children of the ’60s seemed a generation run amok. To those children, however, it was Cold War society itself that had run off the rails, with its militarized economy, its brutal repression of Third World resistance to the capitalist order, and its gaming of nuclear confrontation.

SDS tried to maintain itself as a focal point amid the chaos, but it was torn apart by the same forces that were driving the Movement as a whole toward destruction. Oglesby’s testimony is invaluable, and at times unbearably sad. A born tactician, he understood that building bridges to a wider antiwar community, including business leaders and even oppositional forces with the government, was essential if the Movement was not to marginalize itself and succumb to its own messianic impulses. To his younger colleagues, this was retrograde liberalism, and made Oglesby personally suspect. Hadn’t he worked for defense contractors, and enjoyed a security clearance? Might he not, in fact, be a government plant? In a scene worthy of a Stalinist show trial, Oglesby found himself confronted at the SDS national meeting in Austin in 1969, and essentially purged for his deviations from ‘Marxism-Leninism.’

At that point, SDS, or at least its most radical faction, the Weathermen, was ready to take the tragic plunge into violence. There is a certain point at which paranoia becomes normative thinking, and Oglesby, reflecting on the fact that both the Weathermen and the FBI operation that infiltrated the Movement, Cointelpro, were both products of the year 1968, wonders whether they might have been “in some way connected.” He does not appear to see the irony of this conspiratorial style of thinking, which was precisely what had indicted him in Austin. Thus did the Revolution devour its young.

Oglesby seems to be a fundamentally irenic man, and he is charitable even in personal disagreement. But his judgment of SDS’ fatal turn is untempered by the years: “They produced a theater of the absurd and called it the revolution.” There is harsh truth in this, but it begs a larger strategic—and moral—question. Oglesby concedes that SDS had written off mass demonstrations as a viable antiwar tactic even before the March on the Pentagon in October 1967, and that it had come to an impasse in its efforts to confront the war. The Tet Offensive, Lyndon Johnson’s subsequent withdrawal of his presidential candidacy, and the campaign of Robert Kennedy seemed to offer some hope of movement through conventional politics, and this is the course Oglesby favored. But Kennedy’s assassination dashed these hopes, and left the Movement without a plausible alternative to violence or quietism. Either way lay defeat, a defeat so severe that it produced a forty-year conservative backlash, and a lost generation on the left.

Recently I saw on my campus a group of students behind a small sign that read ‘SDS’. Could these be the first of the new ravens? For surely we are in a storm.

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George Fredrickson
Harvard University Press ($19.95)

by Spencer Dew

The cottage industry of books on Abraham Lincoln represents both a process of national hagiography and the impulse to deconstruct the myth of Honest Abe, the Great Emancipator. George Fredrickson, pioneer of the comparative method of historical study, aims in this slim book for a middle ground between those who hold to a vision of Lincoln as a saintly anti-slavery advocate (albeit one who bided his time, waiting for the perfect political moment to champion emancipation) and those who argue that Lincoln was, as many of his statements seem to indicate, a racist. Fredrickson, who died this February at the age of 73, offers a close reading not only of Lincoln’s speeches, letters, voting record, and personal, off-record moments, but also of the wider cultural contexts in which he lived, from poverty in the slave state of Kentucky (a poverty blamed on the economics of slavery, which Lincoln felt made small farming impossible for non-wealthy whites) to success as a lawyer in the “free” (but virtually black-free, due to various legal measures designed to keep free blacks out) state of Illinois and, ultimately, to leader of a fracturing Union in D.C. Fredrickson’s most useful skill for this study, however, is his nuanced understanding of “racism” itself, the subject to which he devoted his entire career, as represented in such pioneering works as White Supremacy (1981), which traced parallel ideologies and systems of legal discrimination in South Africa and the United States, and Racism: A Short Introduction (2002), which presented a richly textured view of racialist theory and racism via examination of Nazi practice, apartheid, and Jim Crow.

Racism, Fredrickson argues in Big Enough to be Inconsistent, is “an imprecise umbrella term.” Indeed, there are “a spectrum of attitudes that might legitimately be labeled ‘racist,’ ranging from genocidal hatred of ‘the other’ to mere conformity to the practices of a racially stratified society.” Locating Lincoln along this spectrum, Fredrickson argues that, prior to 1860 at least, he was at once “genuinely antislavery” and “a white supremacist. . . of a relatively passive or reactive kind,” though Fredrickson goes on to consider whether or not Lincoln’s views on race might have changed during the war years.

The perennial problem for historical study of individuals, especially such a consummate politician as Lincoln, is that the line between sincerity and strategic dissembling in speeches and letters can never be fully drawn. Lincoln surely pandered to the public in his words and, moreover, compromised certain personal beliefs and desires for the overriding priority of national stability in a time of crisis. The value of Fredrickson’s study, however, goes beyond that of adding nuance to understandings of Lincoln. This book, through its engagement with the complicated tensions around race at the time of the Civil War, also offers a valuable insight into the continuing history of racism and the racial divide in American today. The legacy of slavery and segregation still characterizes our society, occasionally dominating headlines but far more frequently remaining a ubiquitous subtext in private conversations and national discourse. The noble goal of Fredrickson’s career was bringing such tension, and its ugly, tangled history, to the surface, so that we, his readers, can continue to repair our divided house. Fredrick Douglas, as early as 1876, observed that there were two ways to view Lincoln when it came to issues of race, and Fredrickson evokes these words as if to apply them to the nation as a whole. On the one hand, we are “tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent,” too slow and too blind to the continuing cancerous of racism and all its subtle manifestations. Yet we are also, as a nation, “swift, zealous, radical, and determined,” and it is to this optimism for harmony and reconciliation that Fredrickson’s important body of work testifies.

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Norman Mailer
New York Review Books ($14.95)

by C. Natale Peditto

Reading the fortieth anniversary reissue of Norman Mailer’s Miami and the Siege of Chicago, we recognize a writer at the peak of his literary and journalistic talents. This was a period in Mailer’s career that included the remarkably wrought Armies of the Night, which earned both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize; both books remain to this day preeminent, although unorthodox, examples of the New Journalism style. What Mailer accomplished in these titles was to put himself, the author, in direct relationship to the events he was reporting—a third-person observer and simultaneous participant dedicated to revealing the public psyche while unraveling his own tangled motivations and ideology. In Armies of the Night, as the novelist and historian, he writes in measured prose with acuity and strength; in Miami and the Siege of Chicago, as “the reporter,” he is caught up in the pathos of the event.

The 1968 conventions occurred during a historically momentous year of protests and demonstrations, nationally and internationally. In the United States, Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination precipitated riots in over sixty cities around the country; that same month students took over Columbia University campus, and in June, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. Politically, the Vietnam War augured defeat for the Democrats under President Johnson’s leadership. The Republicans, meeting in Miami Beach, all but staked their future on Richard Nixon—the “new Nixon,” that is, in reference to whom Mailer commented, “America is the land which worships the Great Comeback”; yet in Machiavellian terms he also noted “there had never been anyone in American life so resolutely phony as Richard Nixon, nor anyone so transcendentally successful by such means.” Despite hopeless attempts by the liberal wing of the party to nominate Governor Rockefeller as a way of reclaiming the American electorate, the conservatives prevailed and subsequently claimed the future of the Republican Party. It was the predicable outcome of a lackluster and very conventional convention. Other than the Nixonettes, appareled in their boater hats and modestly clean-cut, down-home outfits, cheerleading, “Nixon’s the one!” (a catch-all phrase that would return to haunt Nixon during the Watergate scandal), much of the convention today is absent from popular memory.

The Chicago convention, on the other hand, evokes remarkable images in the historical consciousness of the nation. Mailer’s reporting from within the confining space of the Chicago Amphitheatre and on the streets and in the bars of the city, as well as from the safety of his hotel room in the Hilton, high above the crowds, is always salient. His analyses and insights tend to revolve around a dominant conceit: “Politics is property” (105), attributed to the liberal New York columnist and delegate Murray Kempton. Mailer makes the metaphor his own, even before crediting its source, harshly critiquing the idealistic supporters of Eugene McCarthy who opposed the corrupt but time-tested political pragmatics that involved “sensuous worlds of corruption, promiscuity, fingers in the take, political alliances forged by fires of booze, and that sense of property (my italics) which is the fundament of all political relations.”

Politics as property is a compelling trope that Mailer uses to maximum effect throughout the Chicago section of the book. McCarthy’s people in their liberal suburban, anti-hippy “clean for Gene” appearance depressed Mailer; Bobby Kennedy was the author’s choice candidate, noting the Kennedys’ “magical” appeal and encouraged by Bobby’s political coming-of-age, “his admixture of idealism plus willingness to traffic with demons, ogres, and overlords of corruption.”

Further references to political property are abundant in Mailer’s analysis; the hierarchy of the political machine dictates “the meanest ward-heeler in the cheapest block of Chicago has his piece.” Mailer is Machiavellian in his discursive style if not in the philosophy of his political prescriptions: “A politician picks and chooses among moral properties”; “politics as concrete negotiable power”; “the true political animal is cautious”; and finally, “the last property of political property is ego.” From a literary point of view, Mailer manages to exhaust his operative conceit.

Mailer indulges in rampart hyperbole, yet his version of events is much more factual when he’s reporting on what transpires on the convention floor and in the delegate caucuses, or when describing the great assembly of anti-war demonstrators in the parks and on the streets of Chicago, which at one point he joins as a speaker. Mayor Richard Daley was the powerful overseer of the main action, from the seating arrangements and control of media and delegate access to the convention hall, to directing orders to the police department to attack the demonstrators. According to Mailer, Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s constituency, of which Daley was a part, consisted of the Mafia and the trade unions at its base. Mailer tells us, “The Mafia loved Humphrey.” While the doves and left wing of the party were confined to the rear bleachers, Daley was down front, holding the floor for the preordained nominee, along with a crew of “hecklers, fixers, flunkies and musclemen. . . . guys with eyes like drills.” But despite Daley’s forceful control, Mailer could assert that it was “the wildest Democratic convention in decades.”

Which brings us to the bloody five-day battle in the streets of Chicago that the nation witnessed on their TV sets. For Mailer, it was a reflection of what was occurring on the convention floor—the older established order in direct conflict with the New Left tilt of the Democratic party, represented in the streets by the young activists of SDS and the Yippies, dedicated to poetry, street theatre and the satiric nomination of a pig for President. Mailer describes the Socialist faction as ideological and confrontational, while injecting a note of ridicule in his view of the Yippies who shunned power for a “politics of ecstasy,” but not without some admiration for their Dionysian music and “tribal unity.” Allen Ginsberg’s great voice of poetry, hoping to appease the beast of violence with a group Om-chant, as Mailer sadly reports, was raw and strained by the tear gas that pervaded the city.

Mailer claims not to be a revolutionary despite his established alliances with the protesters and the persuasive draw of their cause. Confessing a certain closet conservatism, he fears losing his livelihood and life style if the hippy revolution prevails. As a reporter he is off-duty at critical moments, self-consciously arguing his own duplicity behind a drink, and then has to rely on dispatches from various news sources, which he quotes at length, to describe the scenes at the barricades. He can easily envision a final scenario of martial law as the police and National Guard assert their dominance and the call for law and order invades the majority of Americans’ perception of the events. What survives the failure of people power is a crude existential cynicism, Mailer urging “let patriotism and the fix cohabit” and suggesting the idealists depart and leave the pickings to the political gang.

What Americans witnessed that August week in 1968 climaxed on the convention floor as Senator Abe Ribicoff took the podium to nominate George McGovern, the other peace candidate who would return in four years as the Party’s nominee. Ribicoff pointed to “Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago,” confronting Mayor Daley’s shameful abuse of power by alluding to the Nazi Party. Seated down front, Daley rose to his feet along with his goons and shouted to the patrician senator to go fuck himself.

Conventions today are well-scripted and organized down to the smallest detail, the party “brand” set before the public as part of a mass media marketing campaign. Spontaneous demonstrations seem to be a part of the political past. We purposefully demean the “old school” politics that Daley represented as unfair and dirty—indicating an unhygienic and unhealthy mix of cigarettes and booze, cigar-smoking little cheeses pulling strings in the back rooms and making deals with the machine bosses, out of the spotlight of the media. Yet these were the dirty details that intrigued Mailer. Significantly, he opened his report on the Democratic convention with one of the most graphically vivid and visceral descriptions of the Chicago slaughterhouses—an extended description that rivals Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. The way he evokes the smell of death in the air of Chicago that late August is alone worth the price of the read.

The penultimate chapter of Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Mailer’s gossiping with the journalists at the bar as they pronounce their cynical assessments about the future of American politics, is a last call for the author to self-reflect among the petty Mafia in the cocktail lounge, regarding organized crime as the alternative to the military-industrial corporations (“if one had to choose between the Maf running America and the military-industrial complex, where was one to choose?”) and expressions of bad faith when faced with the writer’s bitter task of completing his assignment. These are the final notes of Chicago’s brutal night song, a confrontation with the local police that almost puts Mailer in their clutches for a beating or arrest, or both. Mailer’s parting shot, “we will be fighting for forty years,” is prescient enough and ample reason to take him at his word.

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Zander Brietzke
University of Alabama Press ($39.95)

by Justin Maxwell

This strong critical work by Columbia University Professor Zander Brietzke comprehensively and concretely parses out the idiomatic values of drama and film to show the former’s continued relevance in modern culture, while honoring the latter. Brietzke’s prose conveys his complex ideas in an articulate, accessible format; he offers intellectual depth without the linguistic miasma that often clouds academic writing. Starting with a solid premise that “the best theater is theatrical; the best film is cinematic. By that, I simply mean that a theatrical event is suited for the theater and should be seen upon a stage,” Brietzke goes on to build a worthwhile argument about the fundamental differences between the nature of the two mediums. He usefully elucidates the differences between “simultaneity” and “sequence,” noting that events on stage happen simultaneously as the audience sees things all at once, and their eyes are drawn around the stage or left free to roam, whereas film takes place in sequence, literally one frame after another, edited together to create a controlled series of images. Brietzke’s points about simultaneity and sequence lead him to explore a larger idea of spectacle, which he claims fills the whole dramatic space in a way that film can’t. This idea of spectacle replaces, for Brietzke, much of the nebulous language that has been used in an attempt to validate drama and differentiate it from celluloid. As he says, “it is very difficult to know what ‘chemistry,’ ‘magic,’ and ‘special quality’ are, and yet the theater world is filled with such empty medieval rhetoric.”

The fundamental argument of the text is hearty reading, and takes up the first two chapters of the book. Beyond these chapters the emphasis changes from offering a well-reasoned (albeit abstract) thesis to exploring concrete manifestations of the three aforementioned ideas. Each of Brietzke’s subsequent ten chapters takes on a different playwright whose stage work also exists on film. The writing is lively and thorough: each chapter uses different internal structures, sometimes ranging over an author’s oeuvre, such as the chapter on August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson, sometimes focusing on a single work, such as the chapter on Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. This keeps the book from plodding along or becoming dryly formulaic. Unfortunately, because Brietzke is pointing out different manifestations of the same core concepts, once he’s convinced the reader of their veracity whatever else comes after that point makes the book feel excessive. This tautological approach is perhaps a necessary evil, since the author can’t know where any given reader might be won over. Consequently, American Drama in the Age of Film is a valuable and insightful book but one that some readers may not need to read in its entirety, despite its accessibility.

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Peter Thomson
Oxford University Press ($29.95)

by Eliza Murphy

“Yikes!” is evidently an insufficient response to discovering that the deepest lake in the world, known also to be the purest, is undergoing alarming biochemical shifts in response to human activities. Perhaps “Bloody Hell” will suffice. This is Siberia after all, the nether regions of Russia, and Lake Baikal—home to miniature, pollution filtering shrimp (epischura), the world’s only fresh water seal (the nerpa), and the hardy people who live on its shores—is under siege.

Author Peter Thomson invited his younger brother to join him on a journey half way around the world to see this ecological wonder. As hard as Thomson tries to portray the lake as a miraculous entity capable of healing from a variety of assaults, the verdict is still out on its ability to absorb warming temperatures in a climate so cold that the locals take pride in their skillful adaptation to the frigidity. Some believe that the way to solve any assaults to the lake, the most obvious culprit being the paper mill with its toxic effluents, will be through economic development. Never mind the high concentrations of industrial pollutants stowing away in the blubber of the nerpas, who dine on the epischura that gobble up PCBs, dioxin, and any number of waste products generated by transforming trees into paper products.

Thomson, a veteran environmental journalist, admits that he wants “to believe that this remote place is different,” that “Baikal might somehow manage to elude the corrosive influence of civilization.” Seeking one place on earth imbued with that vanishing essence, hope, he leaves Boston an idealist, attempting to sublimate the “cold-eyed realist” he confesses that he is. Along the way he encounters all sorts of people, iconic architecture, a frustrating bureaucratic machine, some desultory meals, at least one exquisite meal, and dreary landscapes that the realist in him cannot help but describe in detail. Such details might threaten the narrative if Thomson weren’t willing to acknowledge the anxiety this trip provoked in him.

Hope arose for Thomson in the form of his guide, Andrei, who although initially aloof, softens one night and divulges his vision of a trail similar to the Appalachian Trail. Exposed to travelers attempting to leave behind as small a footprint as possible, Andrei absorbs and passes on valuable ways to do so. The exchange takes root in Thomson, who returns on another trip to help build that trail, a gesture significant both for the ground level engagement with an enigmatic location as well as the completion of a personal odyssey for the author.

A skilled science writer, Thomson shares the perplexing and not altogether uplifting news of the lake’s health, presenting an even-handed portrayal of a natural wonder that is as imperiled as every other place on earth. Unafraid to share the tediousness and vexation, beauty and hideousness that travel sometimes entails, he recounts not only the vast physical terrain he traversed, but also intimate personal details that echo the scale of the geography he and his kid brother covered via planes, trains, and a cargo ship across the Pacific. The result is a strong book that is as much about the sacredness we carry with us as it is about a “sacred sea.”

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Robert D. Romanyshyn
Spring Journal Books ($24.95)

by Joel Weishaus

In a 2005 interview with Dolores E. Brien, Robert Romanyshyn said: “As a phenomenologist, I start with the notion that soul reveals and conceals itself in and through the landscapes of experience we build individually and collectively. A person says whom he or she is, for example, in the clothes that are worn, in the books that are read, in the ways in which the house is furnished and made into some kind of home.” He goes on to explain that “the same is true on a collective level… a fourteenth century Gothic church sets in stone the psychological spirit of the age in a way which is radically different from a Renaissance church.”

This phenomenologist is also a post-Jungian, that cabal of therapists and scholars whose work extends C.G. Jung’s psychology into everyday life, facing the Gods with the audacity to address them as symptoms of the psyche’s metabolism, and casting Jung’s insights into this century’s aporia. Romanyshyn’s vision is also philosophical, leading him to where words slip away from their referent. “Green!,” he exclaims, is “a word that is an insult to the richness that surrounds me.” However his is not a deconstructive critique, nor an anthropocentric one. He asserts, rather, that the production of meaning is like an alchemical process that raises one’s awareness to “an internal imperative that is more about the work than it is about me.”

A Core Faculty Member in Clinical Psychology and Depth Psychotherapy at Pacifica Graduate Institute, Romanyshyn has written a pedagogy with much larger applications in The Wounded Researcher. Anyone who reads more than a few pages of this book is by default someone interested in doing “re-search,” as Romanyshyn describes “the unfinished business in the soul of the work, the unsaid weight of history in the work that waits to be said.” Artists, for example, are familiar with the call to create a work “beyond reason,” a call from one’s soul, to contribute to the world something that has never existed before.

The Wounded Researcher is also a book of grieving, a word that made a place for itself in Romanyshyn’s vocabulary after the sudden death of his first wife, to whom he had been married for 25 years. In a dream he had a few days after her death, a longer version of which can be found in his 1999 book, The Soul in Grief: Love, Death, and Transformation, he is at a party at a friend’s house where he sees his wife flowing through a room of guests “as if not weighted down by gravity.” Awake, he writes, “This is her place, and in it I seem to have become invisible, as if I were the one who has died.” Gravity, gravitas, grieving, elegiac mourning, “a sweetly bitter quality that comes from yearning for something that, while never attained, is always with us.”

It is better not to do research methodologically, which Romanyshyn claims has been holding psychology, for one, hostage, but with a poetics; this “does not mean that research is poetry,” but that a researcher is attuned to “the gap between conscious and unconscious, which is bridged by the symbol as the expression of the transcendent function.” This gap, the mundus imaginalis, the imaginal region mapped by the French philosopher and scholar of Sufism and Iranian Shi’ism, Henri Corbin, is “intermediate between sense and intellect and that mediates between them.”

Meaning is born where we are unbalanced. Here the abyss opens, and “to descend into that abyss requires a different way of seeing and knowing.” An imaginal approach to research also includes “former ways of knowing,” such as alchemy, astrology, and I-Ching. It seems to me that the spirit of this work is more European than American, more life-affirming than wealth-gathering, more Eros than Logos; mysterious rather than pragmatic, it dissolves fundamentalism into a Cloud of Unknowing.

Some of the most lyrical moments in The Wounded Researcher are found in Romanyshyn’s generous quotations from and discussion of the problems his students had finding a path into their dissertations. For example, an Iranian student, Kiyanoosh Shamlu, wanted to explore the work of the 12th-century Iranian intellectual Sohrevardi, and how “an ancient Islamic tradition and the modern Western one of Jungian psychology converge and diverge in their understanding and treatment of imagination and its relation to the imaginal world.”

During the initial stages of his work, Kiyanoosh had a series of significant dreams. In the first, “he is in a very dark forest, where he is running away from an old man who is chasing him.” In the second, “he finds himself on the top of a mountain with a book that has no writing in it.” In the third, “he is riding in the sky on the back of an enormous bird while looking down on a green landscape that has no discernable figures or objects.” Kiyanoosh could make no sense of these dreams, until he came across them in Sohrevardi’s “descriptions of the soul’s spiritual journeys of descent from and return to the imaginal world.”

Kiyanoosh went on to explore “an unacknowledged metaphysics,” in which “the imaginal world is not so much an underworld as the epiphany of an other world, which. . . Jung himself was struggling to understand.” Romanyshyn goes on to say that Kiyannoosh’s experience indicates that dreams “may know more about the work than the conscious researcher does.” It is not so much that Romanyshyn opens new territory by suggesting this, but in the context of the book it becomes the long-nosed pliers in the toolbox of the researcher who has soul in mind.

This toolbox also includes elegiac writing, where “a researcher dwells among the ruins because he or she knows that it is in the ruins that the living spirit of the work waits to be remembered.” It is a style of writing that “resurrects the dead and transforms them, as well as our relationship to them.” Also discussed at length is what Romanyshyn calls “alchemical hermeneutics,” a process that “keeps stirring the work so that what would become coagulated dissolves.” There is also “creative repetition,” which is “like falling in love again with the work, coming under its spell, being claimed again by it. Creative repetition is a return to the romance of the beginning.”

Nowhere is the romance of the beginning more lovingly handled than in his discussion of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Romanyshyn suggests that this myth “is the archetypal background for how research becomes psychological,” as it is “about this process of losing and finding, about this work of transformation in which the other becomes a psychological reality, a matter of soul.” The part of the myth that most intrigues him—and that has also cast its spell over many other writers, from Virgil and Ovid to Rainer Maria Rilke—is when Orpheus travels to Hades to retrieve his wife, Eurydice. There he is granted his wish, but only if he doesn’t look back (an echo between Greek and Hebrew mythologies). As in so much mythology, of course, he violates this proviso. “Orpheus had to look back, “ writes Romanyshyn, “because the underworld is Eurydice’s place, and being there, not only is she freed from being Orpheus’s possession, she is also freed into herself.”

In his poem, “Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes,” Rilke dwells on this pivotal moment:

She was already loosened like long hair,
given out like fallen rain,
shared out like a hundredfold supply.

She was already root.

This calls to mind Denise Levertov’s poem, “A Tree Telling of Orpheus”:

Then as he sang
it was no longer sounds only that made the music:
he spoke, and as no tree listens I listened, and language
came into my roots
out of the earth,
into my bark
out of the air,
into the pores of my greenest shoots
gently as dew
and there was no word he sang but I knew its meaning.

When we love into our roots there is no turning back, though there can a turning away—as when, in Rilke’s poem, Eurydice’s guide, “Hermes says, ‘with sorrow in his voice: He has turned around—,’ Rilke says, ‘she could not understand, and softly answered / Who?’”

“Who! Just this one word,” Romanyshyn writes, “which the poet italicizes! We are meant to notice something here, some fundamental change not only in Eurydice but also between her and Orpheus.” In other words, this change in direction is possible only when one in the couple lets go, as in Romanyshyn’s dream of his departed wife, to whom he had become invisible. In that dream, if he had tried to speak to her, had said to her, “Don’t you remember me, your husband?” I think she would have replied, “Who?”

Adding the dimension of dreams, along with “metaphoric sensibility,” “creative repetition,” “alchemical hermeneutics,” and many other techniques that are valuable to the process of research in every discipline, this seminal book is also a primer for a deeper understanding of what it means to be human.

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Alexandra Fuller
Penguin ($23.95)

by Kevin Carollo

“There is a magic place . . . ”
—TV ad for Wyoming tourism

Alexandra Fuller’s third nonfiction work tells the story of a young man who grew up, lived, and suddenly died on the oil patch in western Wyoming. The British-born, Rhodesian/Zimbabwean-raised author of the fine memoirs Don’t Let’s Go To the Dogs Tonight and Scribbling the Cat has outdone herself with The Legend of Colton H. Bryant, a heartbreaking narrative about the American families who give their lives to feed our addiction to oil. There are great high plains winds and the lilt of Rocky Mountain English to go with the great greed, love, and loss in this Wild West tale, and even knowing what’s going to happen in the end cannot keep a cowboy from crying through the final pages. This is both a harsh American Western and a vital work of world literature, and it should win every major award out there.

Written by a self-proclaimed “liberal redneck” (Fuller currently lives in Wyoming), Legend embodies all the contradictions of a frontier narrative. For example, even people from Wyoming do not exactly settle down there, but travel to where the oil is. Oil, on the other hand, remains the one constant, a 24-7 reality in a West that has grown considerably less wild since drilling began: “the endlessness of the plains’ open abundance is an illusion. Nearly all the plains are already swallowed up, paved over, plowed under, flattened, hardened, drilled. You can drive across what’s left of what is wild in an afternoon or less.”

Unlike the recent film There Will Be Blood, which seems rather invested in humanizing the Devil in the shape of an enterprising oil baron (played, of course, by the impossible-to-dislike Daniel Day Lewis), Fuller is interested in telling the humble story of the Bryant family, who have built an honest life around the shady vagaries of oil production for generations. They are soft-spoken, good folk who deserve more than donuts and some cant about the importance of safety on the job.

As a period piece, There Will Be Blood also implies that the precarious nature of drilling belongs to the preceding century, when crude oil was extracted by cruder technology. The reality is much starker: Colton is one of at least eighty-nine people who died in the Interior West between 2000 and 2006 (thirty-five in Montana alone).* The railing that might have saved Colton’s life would have cost the drilling company Patterson-UTI Energy all of two thousand dollars. Instead, they were fined seven thousand dollars for his death in 2006—the same year parent company Ultra Petroleum boasted revenues of $592.7 million. It hurts to do the math, but the bottom line is clear. Safety on the patch means one thing and one thing only: the security of big oil’s profits regardless of the human costs.

The June 2008 issue of National Geographic takes a different approach by equating intensified oil production in Western Siberia with modernity. Environmental and structural problems are glossed over in order to justify the short-term benefits of the region’s explosive “cash crop.” People around the world appear to agree: we cannot not exploit the questionable boon of black gold. Incidentally, Wyoming is the home state of the term “Gillette syndrome,” a term coined by psychologist ElDean Kohrs to explain the consequences of an energy boomtown, which “experiences an increase in crime, drug use, alcoholism, violence, and cost of living, and a decrease in just about everything good except, arguably, money.” The Legend of Colton H. Bryant does not indict the hard laborers who take pride in their work, nor does it exculpate the modern-day robber barons that own the means of production and ultimately care very little about maintaining a high quality of life for their workers.

Fuller clearly wanted to write a different kind of nonfiction work than her first two, and she has succeeded beyond our wildest, most American dreams. Nevertheless, readers will recognize her intense reckoning with the recent past from Don’t Let’s and Scribbling in this book, which doesn’t feature her at all. As with her first two books, Legend does not offer us some kind of impossible reconciliation or absolution, but rather something readers might not expect: a profound identification with the Bryant family, and, yes, a hopeful sort of pride in perhaps one day becoming American like them.

That said, the old saw ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’ goes double for The Legend of Colton H. Bryant, which depicts a cowboy, lasso in hand and back to the camera, amidst a blur of horses. Maybe this will sell more books, just as the Wyoming tourist board must evoke a sanitized version of the Wild West to encourage visitors to its magical state. There are some horses in Legend, to be sure, as well as rodeos and Mountain Dew, but without an oil rig looming in the background, one wonders what the book designers were thinking. Inside, however, one finds a gut-wrenchingly beautiful narrative that will make both Upton Sinclair and John Steinbeck turn over in their graves—this time with immense pride.

*Drilling has not become safer the last couple of years in the Interior West. On May 15, 2008, a Montana man fell to his death working on the western North Dakota oil patch, the eleventh such death in ten years. Owned by Cyclone Drilling of Gillette, Wyoming, this particular rig pumps out the crude for the Houston-based Murex. This most recent tragedy highlights the national scope of oil interests in the region, as well as intimates the national response necessary to force oil companies to move beyond what Fuller describes as “safety, safety, safety, have a doughnut. Safety, safety, safety, now go out there and get as much gas out of the ground as quickly as you can.”

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