With Liberty and Justice for Some

Glenn Greenwald. With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 2011.

Reviewed by T. Hatch

Salon.com’s blogger extraordinaire Glenn Greenwald tells the story of how we as a country have allowed a culture of elite immunity to flourish.  With Liberty and Justice for Some, he makes a rather old-fashioned argument. American political liberty rests on the assumption that the law reigns supreme. And, if the fundamental requirement of the rule of law is equality then the last forty years of American political history has made a mockery of this idea. The promise of America’s founding has been forsaken by the emergence of a two-tiered justice system.

Greenwald pinpoints the descent into the corrupt culture of elite immunity beginning with Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon. It was the Nixon pardon which became the template for justifying elite immunity. President Ford, who if you believe Seymour Hersh (and Greenwald does), was selected as Agnew’s replacement because of his willingness to protect Nixon.  It was Ford who made the impassioned plea of empathy for Nixon i.e. because he had been through so much already and because the country needed to “look forward.”  In essence this call for empathy was a disguised appeal for aristocratic privilege that was granted and used as a perniciously burgeoning precedent.

The shenanigans associated with Nixon era criminality were followed closely by successively more brazen acts.  The law-breaking that went along with the Iran-Contra scandal (its subsequent cover-up and pardons) followed by the refusal of the Clinton administration to do anything about it gave way to a crescendo of felonies and war crimes committed by members of the Bush #43 administration.

In addition to crimes disguised as policy decisions receiving immunity, membership privileges were extended to the “corporate partners” as well.  The political criminals of George W. Bush’s administration merely had to utter the word “terrorism” and the Democratic Congress swiftly and obediently complied in allowing immunity to be extended to telecom corporations which had violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) with uninhibited impunity. The telecom immunity battle was the point at which politicians and corporations perfected immunizing private sector elites.  

In keeping with tradition and violating the law himself to do so, President Obama overlooked the crimes of the Bush administration because he had “a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” (p. 54) One need not wonder what would happen to a defendant in criminal court (naturally not from the political or corporate elite) who tells the presiding judge that while dozens of people saw him shoot another down in cold blood he is “looking forward” now.  The defendant would almost certainly be joining the 1% of the adult population in the United States that are currently in jail or prison.

Then there was the late financial criminality of Wall Street run amok.  Unlike the Savings and Loan debacle of the late 1980s which resulted in the Federal government bailing out the cousin of the banking industry to the tune of $150 billion, the 2008 meltdown which occasioned a bailout at least seventy times larger, no one has been sent to jail or even charged with a crime. Greenwald quotes Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibi: “The only thing to remember is that all the ones who got us into this mess – Rubin, Summers, Goldman in general – are now being put in charge of the cleanup by a president who spent 18 months on the campaign trail pledging to end the influence of money in politics.” (p.117) Much like his former Senate colleague Charles Schumer of  New York  (a.k.a. “Senator Wall Street”) Obama was not about to turn the party over to “crazy, anti-business liberals.”

Whereas the Bush administration only threatened to prosecute whistle blowers the Obama administration, attempting to become the undisputed champion of elite immunity and privilege, has aggressively carried out these threats.  The Obama war on Wikileaks and PFC Bradley Manning is an illustration of this practice. “If you create a worldwide torture regime, illegally spy on Americans without warrants, abduct people with no legal authority, or invade and destroy another country based on false claims, then you are fully protected.  But if you expose any of these lawless actions by publishing the truth about what was done, then you are a criminal who deserves the harshest possible prosecution.” (p.262) 

Greenwald makes what can be construed as a basically conservative argument.  While he admits that there has never been anything like equality before the law (we achieved universal suffrage in this country about the same time we all bought color TV sets) he nevertheless decries the abandonment of the de jure ideal of the rule of law.  Greenwald does a solid job of recounting the “what” of history but he does not attempt to reckon with the “why” in this book. Sometimes art is short and life is long but the question of why is it that the American political class bothers less and less with a pretense of legality is of interest.

Doing my best to avoid a Marxist-smarty-pants-post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc conclusion is difficult. I think Slavoj Zizek’s contention that we are in a post-ideological epoch certainly has some validity.  Accordingly, it is not “hurray the beast ideology is at long last dead” as much as it is “we are so totally in control at this point that we don’t have to pay lip service to any nonsense about equality anymore.” A decadent political culture which allows a proud war criminal such as Dick Cheney to go on television, openly admit to his role in the crime of waterboarding while mocking the authorities who failed to lock him up, is evidence of a political system that not only tolerates but encourages open displays of obscene arrogance.

Soon to be available at the Free Library of Philadelphia. Check your library or local book store.

The book review heard David Harvey, professor of geography and anthropology at CUNY,  speak last night as part of the Penn Humanities Forum series of lectures. His lecture followed the same themes outlined by Hatch above, emphasizing the growing and solidifying disparity in wealth in this country and around the world. His most recent book is available at Penn Libraries. Harvey, David. The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism. Oxford [England: Oxford University Press, 2010. HB95 .H37 2010

Favorite Books and Book Review welcomes your reviews and comments about books you care about.

The Altruism of Imperialism

Jean Bricmont. Humanitarian Imperialism: Using Human Rights to Sell War. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006.

Richard Seymour. The Liberal Defence of Murder. London/New York: Verso, 2008.

Samantha Power, "A Problem From Hell:” America and the Age of Genocide. New York: Perennial Harper Collins, 2002.

Reviewed by T. Hatch

Robespierre once argued that “nobody likes armed missionaries.”  That was in the context of an argument with Brissot de Warville (and those of his ilk generally known as Girondins) who, anticipating elements of the Bush administration, advocated a preemptive attack on the royalists who had run away from the Revolution and their foreign enablers.  Further, according to Brissot, this act of liberation could only be greeted with enthusiasm by the burghers of Koblenz.  To indelicately state the obvious the people of Koblenz were much like the people of Baghdad in not greeting their “liberators” with open arms; while Brissot arguably got what he deserved George W. Bush has really good seats to Texas Rangers baseball games and a presidential library. To heighten the indignity,  history has robbed Brissot of the credit of formulating the Bush Doctrine.

Samantha Power who currently runs the Office of Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights as Senior Director of Multilateral Affairs on the staff of the National Security Council argues that it is the moral responsibility of the United States government to intervene militarily to prevent genocide.  Who could be against the prevention of a genocidal slaughter?  The problem is that this “responsibility to protect” argument transcends simply intervening to halt genocide and allows the ideological cover for a less exalted form of imperialism on the part of the world’s leading interventionist.

Power was reportedly one of the leading advocates of a humanitarian intervention in Libya inside the Obama administration.  At the time of this writing Muammar Gaddafi has been freshly killed and the era of despotism has been vanquished.  The problem is that what started as a humanitarian military intervention to save the civilians of Benghazi has “worked” to achieve regime change. This template for humanitarian imperialism is now far more likely to happen again. Just as Brissot and Bush couched their plans for conquest in humanitarian language so the Obama administration has made imperialism an altruistic activity.

In “A Problem From Hell” Power chronicles the efforts of Raphael Lemkin, who originated the term genocide, to bring the issue to the attention of the world.  The United Nations adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in December of 1948.  Springing into action the United States Senate became the ninety-eighth nation to ratify thirty-eight short years later.

One of the most endearing parts of Power’s book is the story of Senator William Proxmire’s relentless struggle to have the Genocide Convention adopted by the Senate.  Proxmire, a democrat from Wisconsin, used his one minute speech in the Senate 3,211 times to argue for the ratification of the Convention.  Finally, in 1986 that ratification occurred.

Richard Seymour, also known for his blog Lenin’s Tomb, in The Liberal Defence of Murder directly criticizes Power for paying no attention to the worst crimes of Western states e.g. Guatemala and East Timor. She also somehow forgot to include the atrocities in Indochina committed by the U.S. which were quasi-genocidal.  Seymour asserts that “The assumption that the US military will have the answer to genocidal violence wherever it is occupying cannot work without this historical forgetting.” (p. 219)

Seymour argues the process by which the U.S. government launches imperialistic wars of conquest, while at the same time comparing itself favorably to Oxfam, began with the first Gulf War in 1991. The idea that Empires can be trusted to perform good deeds out of a sense of altruism is absurd.  The Gulf War was the real beginning of the exaltation of humanitarian intervention. It is from this point that a straight line can be drawn to the logic of humanitarian intervention in Yugoslavia, which in turn laid the groundwork for the debacle in Iraq. 

Supporting American or European power against aspects of global power deemed even more barbaric was irresistible for some.  The “nouveaux philosophes” i.e. Bernard Henri Levy, Andre Glucksmann, Bernard Kouchner (“Mr. Humanitarian Intervention”), and Alain Finkielkraut were galvanized by a logic of “lesser evilism.” Formerly left-wing intellectuals accommodating themselves to capitalism has led to what Seymour has labeled an “energetic depoliticization of the issues.”  Politics as thus been reduced to a disingenuous discourse of human rights.

Jean Bricmont in Humanitarian Imperialism Using Human Rights to Sell War argues that the well-meaning advocates of humanitarian intervention provide “moralistic cover for the cynicism of a Donald Rumsfeld.”  Since the West is all about “widespread indifference to criminal policies pursued with a perfectly clear conscience” (p. 57) the doctrine of the “responsibility to protect” is perfectly suited to these nefarious ends.  This is the epoch when the U.S. Navy can advertise itself as “a global force for good.”  Moralizing rhetoric combined with cynical practice has flourished remarkably in places like Afghanistan.

Bricmont maintains that ideology is the most effective form of social control in a democratic society; a free press is a brilliant propaganda tool in the service of imperialism.   So the defense of human rights serves as the righteous basis of Western imperialism in its offensive against the former socialist bloc and Third World countries escaping from the cold embrace of colonialism. He goes as far as to suggest that humanitarian interventionism has become today’s new opium.

There is a stunning hypocrisy in what liberal imperialists will defend.  Most U.S. Democrats, European Social Democrats, and Greens defend democracy domestically but call for the dictatorship role for a small group of countries on the international level (Obama being the modern version of Gladstone in this respect).  An international Herrenvolk democracy has been created; American liberal ideology has conquered the world. Because Bricmont believes that there is nothing more hopelessly utopian than the notion that there can be stability in a world under American hegemony, he proposes an organization for our time. The watchdog organization that he proposes would be called “Imperialism Watch.”  Its mission would be to denounce wars and war propaganda as well as the economic pressures and other maneuvers that make injustice thrive and prosper. 

All of this might lead us to ask a couple of relevant questions.  Was Rachel Corrie a true example of humanitarian intervention as Richard Seymour suggests? Or, when President Romney launches his first humanitarian assault to whom should he rightfully give credit?

Reading anything that you would like to share? Send us your original review to favoritebookreview @ gmail. com

Not a False Note Is Played: Peggy Ehrhart's Sweet Man Is Gone

Ehrhart, Peggy. Sweet Man Is Gone. Gale Cengage, 2008

Reviewed by Walter Giersbach

Peggy Ehrhart immerses the reader in a world of musicians, what they go thorough to get their gigs, and the tribulations of trying to get your band to the point where it pays the bills.  Never fear if you’re not an avid music fan.  Her allusions and descriptions are transparent and easy to grasp.   Ehrhart, herself a guitarist, nails this world down cold, then adds the literary challenge of an amateur sleuth wanting to solve the murder — make that two — of friends.
   
The atmosphere and ambience of Sweet Man Gone are right on, from the dingy bars of the Lower East Side to the cheap pads of the Upper West Side to the rundown flats in Hackensack.  Nostalgia flowed over me as I recalled streets I walked and places I hung out long ago.  Her plot flows seamlessly — and often dreamlike — as she drives her clunker in and out of the city, from practice studios to blues bars to crash pads.  Interestingly, there’s not a false note of irony, cynicism, or authorial disbelief in her writing.  Hers is a beautiful portrayal of a lonely woman just trying to make it while loving the blues too much.

The plot unfolds smoothly, building bit by bit as a novel of character evolves into a fast-paced crescendo of discovery.  And, like a classic whodunit, the killer isn’t revealed until the last pages.
   
Sweet Man Gone is a very refreshing antidote for those suffering an overdose on Dennis LeHane, Dashiell Hammett, James Patterson and other hardboiled crime writers.

ISBN-10: 1594146683

Available at three locations at the Free Library of Philadelphia or from your local library or bookseller. Interested in other books by Peggy Ehrhart? Check out her Web page.

Follow Walter Giersbach's own short fiction and ideas at
http://allotropiclucubrations.blogspot.com/

Reading anything that you would like to share? Send us your original review to favoritebookreview @ gmail. com

Enter the Man with No Name: Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest

Hammett, Dashiell. Red Harvest

Reviewed by Walter Giersbach

“Red Harvest,” Dashiell Hammett’s first published novel (in 1929), reveals a world of venality, mayhem and revenge that set the tone for detective novels half a century into the future.

A Continental Detective Agency Op is summoned from California to “Poisonville,” Mont. by aged newspaper owner and banker Elihu Willsson. Elihu’s criminal enterprise of imported thugs threatens to turn on him. The aged banker gives the Op enough of information to let our nameless narrator work his way through a host of evil-doers: Bill Quint, an affable old IWW member; corrupt police chief Noonan; greedy Dinah Brand, who has scandalous information on everyone; jealous bank clerk Robert Albury; hoodlum Max “Whisper” Thaler; and other evil-doers who run the town and its rackets. The first question is “Who killed Elihu’s son?”

The Op sets about pitting the factions against each other, saying, “Plans are all right sometimes. And sometimes just stirring things up is all right.” This “stir-it-up novel” is filled with offhanded shootings, explosions, and murder by ice pick. The carnage is colorfully expressed in passages where the Op says, “We bumped over dead Hank O'Meara's legs and headed for home” and “Be still while I get up or I'll make an opening in your head for brains to leak in.”

Don’t expect plausibility, but do look for the snappy dialogue, strong characters (especially in the Op), and writing style that moves fast. Time magazine included “Red Harvest” in its list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1922 to 2005. Literary critic Andre Gide also called the novel “the last word in atrocity, cynicism and horror.”

Hammett’s “Red Harvest” has given us a sub-genre of the crime/adventure/detective novel that might be termed “the man with no name.” “Red Harvest” can lay claim to being the successor to the classic Western — not the Sherlock Holmes “whodunit.” The novel’s amazing power and plotting led movie director Akira Kurosawa to create “Yojimbo,” focusing on a freelance samurai who confronts town’s warring factions. Look for thematic vestiges of Hammett’s novel also in Sergio Leone’s “spaghetti Westerns” with Clint Eastwood and in John Sturges’s “The Magnificent Seven.” “Red Harvest” is the novel that started an epic genre.

See your library or favorite book seller for Red Harvest and other books by Dashiell Hammett

Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia

Nathans, Ben. Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

Although I cannot do justice to University of Pennsylvania professor Benjamin Nathans's book Beyond the Pale, I will nonetheless attempt to briefly describe it. Essentially, Nathans describes the Jewish community that left the restricted area of the Russian Pale and went to St. Petersburg. Part of this story is the changing circumstances of Jews in Russia. The Jewish population expanded considerably at the time of Catherine the Great after she annexed Poland and other Baltic countries, which were home to much of Europe's Jewish population. This annexation led to official concern for the integration of Jews into Russian life. Nathans makes the point that this concern was not unique to the Jewish minority population in Russia--integration was always an imperial goal, but it was more overt and much more pronounced. Education and conscription seemed to be avenues to integration. Russia's draconian conscription policy of 25 years of service took many young Jews away from their families. At the end of the 25 year period, if you were still alive, you could move out of the Pale and into St. Petersburg. Special privileges to leave the restricted Jewish area (as large as the country of France) were also given to certain artisans, professionals, and to students. But Imperial Russia was never satisfied with the results of their policies over a hundred years of trying: quotas were tightened, loosened, and tightened again. Officials could not decide, for instance, if the Jews were a bad influence on Russians--turning them away from Christianity and toward Nihilism, or if Russians were a bad influence on the Jews--turning them into revolutionaries. In addition, popular and official beliefs were that the Jewish migrants to St. Petersburg were viewed as too successful; they were taking all the places in the professions; they had more babies than Russians; and they were invading the schools. Nathans looks at census documents, the shift of primary languages among the Jewish population and other details of acculturation; he explores the verifiable and mythological stories of the various ways some of the population attempted to circumvent the quotas and restrictions; compares Russia's policy toward its Jewish population with the policies of Europe. In many ways, Russia lagged far behind Europe both in its policies and its modernization. But it also has the sad legacy of anticipating the virulent anti-semitism that spread through Europe as the century turned. As with any excellent book, Nathans, by describing a particular opens the readers eyes to other similar instances perhaps closer to home, teaching a broader lesson in history. Nathan shows how Russia, though seeking to acculturate its Jewish population, could not resist continuing to single them out through laws of quotas and restrictions, thereby, creating a clearly defined "other," ripe for scape-goating and vilification. 

Find this book at a library near you.

New Online Short Fiction by Walter Giersbach, No. 2

and if one newly published short story isn't enough good news--two certainly is great news:

I'm happy to see that a new short short story--"Big Biz @ the Mall"-- is up at The Corner Club Press.  The editor said two days after I submitted it, "You knew we were going to accept this." Well, no I didn't.

   I bounced a draft copy off an 18-year-old to get her thoughts. "Any typos or misspellings?" I asked. "No," she replied, "well, maybe one word's misspelled."  (You know who you are, young lady, but I won't embarrass you or anything.) 

   How about you?  You can find it in Issue IV, pp. 50-51 at http://www.thecornerclubpress.com/uploads/6/0/5/3/6053731/the_corner_club_press_issue_4.pdf, and read it between subway stops, while waiting for the barkeep to bring your beer, or during your first bathroom break at work.

--Walt

Note from the blogger: You not only get the fast paced short story by author Giersbach, you get the entire 116 page anthology from Corner Club Press. Not to be missed! Many thanks Walter. Open Access and Digital Humanities all wrapped up into one.

Recommended Short Fiction from Walter Giersbach, No. 1

Grinnell alumnus and east coast resident Walter Giersbach, one of the Favorite Book Reviews favorite book reviewers, writes:

And now a I'm happy that after much waiting my "Fish Stories and the Mermaid" has been  posted at Bewildering Stories (at http://www.bewilderingstories.com/issue439/fish_stories.html).

As animals and humans crowd each other out of their habitats, we know they adapt, but in what curious ways?  Now if I can only learn to hold my breath under water.

Enjoy!

--Walt

http://allotropiclucubrations.blogspot.com/

The Cyclist

Berberian, Viken. The Cyclist: A Novel. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002.

I know almost nothing about Berberian as a writer. According to Amazon.com he writes for newspapers, The New York Times, Le Monde, The Financial Times, and others. He has a second novel out, Das Kapital: A Novel of Love and Money Markets, 2007.  When I say that Berberian is a poet, I do not know whether or not he writes poetry, but his use of language in The Cyclist shows a love and mastery of language that one associates with the careful precise use of poets. Berberian's protagonist is a young man who, the reader learns only towards the end of the novel, was recruited into a terrorist organization (the Academy) following a major bomb explosion of his natal village market square. His target is to be the Summerland Hotel on the beaches of Lebanon. It is clear that this act of revenge is to be carried out regardless of the loss of innocent lives, beleaguered citizens of a battle scarred country.

In preparation for this attack, the protagonist trains to take part in a bicycle race, eventually to veer off from the pack, and to take the bomb to the hotel where he will activate it to kill the maximum number of people. Having sustained great injuries as a result of his training, the novel opens with the cyclist in a hospital bed, unable to blink, unable to eat, unable to move, unable to speak because of a cycling accident. Through careful attention from medical experts and familial and Academy members, one of whom he is a childhood friend Ghaemi who he is very much in love with, the cyclist makes complete recovery.

The novel is written in a sort of stream of consciousness. The reader is unclear what is going on, because the narrator is also only partially informed and aware of what is happening. We have no idea whether Ghaemi loves him or is acting as a loyal member of the Academy. We do not know the sincerity of the leader Sadji who travels, buys clothes at the most expensive boutiques, and, in the name of deception and fact finding, spends time recreating with the higher levels of society. We do know that neither Ghaemi nor Sadji intend to risk their lives to carry out their prime initiative. Neither do we know whether they have had something to do with the accident that put the cyclist in the hospital, whether anything they say can believed beyond its power to manipulate the protagonist.

The cyclist is a lover of food and this figures as prominently in his thoughts as love and desire for Ghaemi. Once out of the hospital, the cyclist follows the path set out for him by the Academy. The reader begins to see the events that have brought him to the point of carrying out mass murder, but the logic of an action that harms the same people who are being avenged  is never apparent. There is no logic, only passion, and seductive power. As the cyclist inadvertently meets, face to face, people who will be victims of his action, the juice man who saved his life after the first accident, a cellist who escapes one terrorist act only to unwittingly be confronted by his, the cyclist's own grasp of the logic of his action begins to crumble.

Berberian, through his narrator, illustrates the richness of a culture eviscerated by wars and American hegemony through the succulent elements of its cuisine and culinary practices. As the protagonist prepares himself for his bloody task, he calms himself through the repetition of instructions and concepts, the importance of bicycle helmets, the baby that is his bomb and the baby that could be his and Ghaemi's true child, the listing of dishes and their ingredients.

As the novel reaches its conclusion, the cyclist attempts to explain how he has come so far beyond his passion for the tastes of his native cuisine to the task of an out of scale revenge. He tells his readers or listeners or imagined audience, "I suppose one can be philosophical and ask as I do every day why some of us return home safely after a morning of shopping at the fish market, sifting through rows of mollusk and marlin, while others become the target of a mugging, a beating, even a bombing. For years I have wrestled to find the answer. But what is the point of procrastination? The road to terrorism does not begin with boredom." (170).

It is clear as the narration progresses, that the protagonist does not want to die, and his determination to carry out the plan becomes rattled when, the night before he is to carry out the bombing, he is told by Sadji that the plan has changed and they want him to explode the bomb in effect, as a suicide, "deliver the baby straight from your bosom" (162).

The rest I leave for you to discover.

I didn't realize until after I had read the novel that it was written in 2002. Since I just bought it in a small bookstore (Bindlestiff between 44th and 45th on Baltimore Avenue in West Philadelphia), I just assumed it was new. I was already amazed with the intricate beauty of Berberian's writing on such a subject...giving the reader so much to think about and weigh, but my amazement is magnified thinking of the task of writing this so soon after the 9/11 event--provoking both sympathy and judgment in the reader.

Find this novel at a library near you.

The End of the West: The Once and Future Europe

Marquand, David. The End of the West: The Once and Future Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.

Marquand's examination of the European Union focuses on aspects of nationalism, ethnicity, regionalism, federalism, borders, and unity. As Marquand describes it, the European Union was and is a grand plan to mitigate the hegemony of Napoleons, Hitlers, and Stalins; to prevent the imperial designs and desires of individuals and nations. Marquand contends that the idea that pureness of blood or specific ethnicities should determine national boundaries is a relatively recent event in history, predating Hitler to be sure, but brought to its most complete manifestation by his Nazi regime. The European Union sought to do away with this way of thinking once and for all through diminishing the importance of borders through the unification of economies, monetary units, laws, and policies. Marquand shows that as national borders have faded in some respects, internal ethnic lines have become more indelibly drawn. In fact, as the European Union embraces countries farther afield geographically, economically, and perhaps ideologically from the initial core countries, unity may be an ever more difficult goal to reach. (Positive manifestations of this can be seen in the United Kingdom, where Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland have achieved governing bodies independent of England, while staying within the UK).

Marquand discusses the difficulties with gaining popular acceptance of the EU constitution, the quandries related to the admittance of former Soviet Satellites, and only briefly at Turkey's efforts to join (A brand new book is out on Turkey and the European Union-look for a brief look at this book in a future blog entry).

A supporter of the union, Marquand asserts that it has accomplished more than anyone could possibly have expected as it came into formation. He considers the concept of East and West, dating from the time of the ancient Greeks, and points out the folly of Western rhetoric failing to recognize the foundational contributions of cultures beyond the imagined geographical West. As many of these non-Western nations rise to prominence in world affairs, Marquand writes that, [W]e shall have to recognize that the familiar "Western" narrative of global history . . .is a parochial distortion of a far more complex truth....[W]e shall have to accept that the "West" will never again call the shots in global politics: that there is no longer a "West" to call them" (177). Yet he sees hope in a functional European federation--and that creating such an entity is Europe's greatest challenge.

Find this book in a library near you.

Interdisciplinary Conversations

Strober, Myra. Interdisciplinary Conversations: Challenging Habits of Mind. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011.

An excellent discussion of how scholars work and communicate in the different disciplines and the difficulty of communicating across disciplines because of learned habits of mind. Strober, after conducting a case study of a selection of funded interdisciplinary study groups at three different universities, makes recommendations on how such groups can be conducted so as to have productive outcomes. She specifically recommends that participants lay aside the learned habit of approaching new concepts from the perspective of doubting and work from a perspective of first believing and then questioning. She writes that "synthesizing ideas from disparate disciplines is unfamiliar and uncomfortable. But it is in that discomfort that the seeds of creativity lie, and if the group can continue to play the believing game--not insisting on certainty, closure, or judgments--participantsmay ultimately move to new truths and imaginative solutions" (165). It is about listening with an open mind, trying on ideas, doing away with certainty about any single approach, method, or idea as the only possible scholarly path.