bookpagedev

Time Lord

Review by bookpagedev

continues a recent trend of small, focused books that closely examine particular topics in history and present them in clear, well-written prose for non-specialists. Inevitably the book brings to mind such recent works as Dava Sobel’s Longitude and Tom Standage’s book on telegraphy, The Victorian Internet. Like Sobel and Standage, Clark Blaise uses his narrow focus to examine in detail an important historical event that is largely overlooked.

Time Lord is the fascinating story of how one man devised and promoted (and finally achieved) worldwide consensus on the measurement of time. It may surprise readers to learn that Standard Time, measured into official days with official time zones, was established as late as 1884, during an era marked by transoceanic ships and transcontinental trains a period in which the world grew smaller. Local variations in timekeeping were no longer acceptable. To remedy the situation, Sandford Fleming, a Canadian surveyor and engineer, worked behind the scenes to facilitate a scientific consensus, then took his battle for standardized time to political representatives. The result is recorded in the imaginary lines drawn on every globe and map to this day: 24 one-hour time zones; the International Date Line; and a consensus on the measurement of longitude and the establishment of a prime meridian at Greenwich, England a not-so-subtle, Victorian way of cementing Europe’s hegemony, even in abstractions such as time. Blaise’s style in this compelling narrative is lively and witty. Illuminating other issues raised by the changes of Sandford’s hectic era, he also provides clear and fascinating discourse on such topics as the impact of railway travel on philosophical and aesthetic debates not to mention social etiquette. The reader can’t help but wonder what Sandford Fleming would have said about our own era of jet planes, automobiles and e-mails. Such speculation helps clarify the virtues of books such as Time Lord : these narratives help us stop taking our own time for granted and make us remember that even the most overlooked aspects of our daily lives are rich with history and romance.

continues a recent trend of small, focused books that closely examine particular topics in history and present them in clear, well-written prose for non-specialists. Inevitably the book brings to mind such recent works as Dava Sobel's Longitude and Tom Standage's book on telegraphy, The Victorian…
Arts & Culture

Review

Review by bookpagedev

he Metaphysical Club, a group that discussed philosophical questions, held its first meeting in January 1872, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. One of numerous social and discussion gatherings where intellectual work was done before universities assumed that role, it disbanded after nine months. The club was not even identified by name until 1907, when one of the participants, Charles S. Peirce, the philosopher-logician who coined the term “pragmatism,” referred to it in an unpublished manuscript.

The group included two men who were to have a major impact on American thought for years to come: William James in psychology and philosophy and future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in law. The pivotal figure, though, was Chauncey Wright, a freelance thinker who wrote book reviews, whose role model was Socrates and who seemed to live for serious conversation. From their probing explorations over the years emerged an understanding about ideas and the philosophy we know as pragmatism. Their intellectual heir, John Dewey, was America’s most influential public intellectual for the first half of the 20th century.

Pragmatism, which emphasizes that ideas should never become ideologies and that skepticism and tolerance are crucial, developed out of many strands of 19th century thought. In his enlightening new book, The Metaphysical Club, New York University English professor Louis Menand, who also writes for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, follows these men whose search for a new way of looking at things in the years following the Civil War led them to question many assumptions of their culture and to find better ways to deal with the challenges of modern society. What James, Holmes, Peirce and Dewey “had in common was not a group of ideas, but a single idea an idea about ideas. They all believed that ideas are not ‘out there’ waiting to be discovered, but are tools . . . that people devise to cope with the world in which they find themselves. They believed that ideas are produced not by individuals, but by groups of individuals. . . . They believed that ideas do not develop according to some inner logic of their own, but are entirely dependent, like germs, on their human carriers and the environment. And they believed that since ideas are provisional responses to particular and unreproducible circumstances, their survival depends on their adaptability.” Menand traces the individual routes to this conclusion. Holmes, for example, was the only one of the four who fought in the Civil War. He was wounded and saw friends killed. “The lesson Holmes took from the war can be put in a sentence,” Menand writes. “It is that certitude leads to violence.” But most human beings had certitude about something. Democracy, Holmes believed, is what should keep competing conceptions from becoming violent. Holmes lived until 1934, and the chief struggle in that period was between capital and labor. The author writes, “Nearly every judicial opinion for which he became known constituted an intervention in that struggle, and his fundamental concern was almost always to permit all parties the democratic means to make their interests prevail.” James used Peirce’s term to identify his own views when he “invented pragmatism that is, he named his own philosophical views after a principle Peirce had published 20 years earlier in an article, based on his Cambridge Meta- physical Club paper, called ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’ in order to defend religious belief in what he regarded as an excessively scientific and materialistic age.” Menand’s book is part biography, part intellectual history and part demonstration of the interplay of ideas, personalities and cultural context. The author conveys all of this with a sure hand, guiding the reader through what may be unfamiliar territory. In addition, he shows how discussions long ago continue to influence our society today. For this reviewer, The Metaphysical Club was sheer pleasure.

Roger Bishop is a regular contributor to BookPage.

he Metaphysical Club, a group that discussed philosophical questions, held its first meeting in January 1872, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. One of numerous social and discussion gatherings where intellectual work was done before universities assumed that role, it disbanded after nine months. The club was not…
History

Review

Review by bookpagedev

uthor Gerald Nicosia explains it, the American soldiers who fought in Vietnam lost two wars: one in Southeast Asia to gain and hold territory and one at home to gain public understanding of their life-warping experiences. The Vietnam veterans’ movement instrumental in exposing America’s duplicity during the late ’60s and early ’70s is the subject of Nicosia’s new book Home to War. The author brings a dramatist’s eye to this mammoth narrative, playing out hundreds of separate stories through the personalities of the participants. An exhaustive work (Nicosia says he interviewed 600 people for the book), Home to War offers accounts of incendiary demonstrations and loud “rap” sessions, Kafkaesque court trials and petty infighting, majestic displays of solidarity, moments of euphoria and days of despair. Not only did the vets fight to expose the war as a human catastrophe, they also struggled to convince an indifferent public and a hostile government that their wounds particularly the psychological ones were of a different sort than America was used to.

Instead of relying on the loftiness of political themes to do the work, the author uses recurring characters to endow his chronicle with a sense of direction and momentum. Overall, Nicosia strikes a pleasing balance between a vivid but fragmented oral history and a coherent narration of facts. While the veterans have scored some triumphs, Nicosia says, theirs has not been a story with a happy ending. “At the [Vietnam Veterans of America] convention in 1999,” he notes, “someone pointed out that most of the vets balding, gray- or white-haired, deeply wrinkled, with huge pot bellies or else emaciated, many walking slowly with canes looked as though they were in their 60s or 70s, when in fact they were actually 20 years younger. Premature aging has been universally observed among Vietnam veterans, and in some respects it has already been medically verified.” And these were just the visible scars.

Edward Morris writes for BookPage from Nashville.

uthor Gerald Nicosia explains it, the American soldiers who fought in Vietnam lost two wars: one in Southeast Asia to gain and hold territory and one at home to gain public understanding of their life-warping experiences. The Vietnam veterans' movement instrumental in exposing America's duplicity…
Biography

Review

Review by bookpagedev

lives have garnered more interest or received more scrutiny than Elvis Presley’s. Over 600,000 tourists visit Graceland each year, and the King continues to be one of RCA’s top record sellers. Elvis’ life and death also contain a great deal of mystery, and perhaps no part remains more mysterious than his relationship with Colonel Tom Parker. Parker managed Presley’s career, handling publicity, cutting deals and receiving commissions of 25 and later 50 percent. Although many argued that his commissions were too high and that he often failed to serve Elvis’ best interest, he remained his manager for 22 years. James L. Dickerson’s Colonel Tom Parker is a journey toward understanding the man who wielded power over Elvis and everyone else who fell into his orbit. Dickerson explores Parker’s mysterious origins and provides telling information about the early relationship between the Colonel and Elvis. Parker believed the singer’s charisma and ambition would take him far, so he slowly worked to usurp the duties of Elvis’ manager Bob Neal by ingratiating himself to Presley and his parents. Yet the Colonel’s shady deals and hard-nosed tactics were evident to many from the very beginning.

A great deal of disagreement remains over whether Parker mismanaged Elvis’ career, and many are critical of his failure to take a more proactive stance with Presley’s drug use. Colonel Tom Parker doesn’t try to defend the man from these charges. Instead, it explores his carnival background, addiction to gambling and fear of authority, providing information that clarifies why Parker behaved the way he did. Colonel Tom Parker is a brisk, enjoyable read, perfect for Elvis fans, serious or casual. Author of Goin’ Back to Memphis and Dixie Chicks, among other titles, Dickerson pulls the reader into the drama of the story. His insider knowledge of the music industry allows him to present his material in a lucid fashion. While the questions surrounding the perplexing relationship between an ex-carnival barker and a country boy who hit the big time may never be completely answered, Colonel Tom Parker leaves the reader with a provocative story and fresh insights.

Ronnie D. Lankford, Jr., is a writer in Appomattox, Virginia.

lives have garnered more interest or received more scrutiny than Elvis Presley's. Over 600,000 tourists visit Graceland each year, and the King continues to be one of RCA's top record sellers. Elvis' life and death also contain a great deal of mystery, and perhaps no…
Business & Finance

Cents-able advice for teenagers

Review by bookpagedev

Don’t let anyone tell you that you’re too young to make money, say two new books for budding teenage millionaires. How to be a Teenage Millionaire offers the young entrepreneur advice on business ideas, start-up funding, even advertising strategies for kids whose marketable ideas can’t wait until after college. StreetWise: A Guide for Teen Investors says kids can invest the money they make. It teaches teens how to pick stocks, handle the ups and downs of the market, covers tax concerns, and even pitches Wall Street careers teenagers might want to tackle someday. For parents who worry these books will turn their kids into money-hungry land sharks, don’t sweat. While both books offer sound small business and investing advice, the real power of these books is to build money-making and spending confidence for teens who may feel they have no monetary power. Teenage Millionaire says babysitting is a surprisingly effective way to earn income and build a business. StreetWise makes age-old investing advice on compound interest sound appealing. Far from luring your teenager with the promise of glittering riches, these books teach teens to earn and save their money. After reading them, teens might be willing to share their newfound financial wisdom with the rest of the family even their parents.

Don't let anyone tell you that you're too young to make money, say two new books for budding teenage millionaires. How to be a Teenage Millionaire offers the young entrepreneur advice on business ideas, start-up funding, even advertising strategies for kids whose marketable ideas…

Biography

Review

Review by bookpagedev

We often identify authors by their most famous works and investigate no further. But a writer’s output is, of course, only the tip of the iceberg. Readers interested in delving into the life experiences that shape an author will delight in Jackie Wullschlager’s Hans Christian Andersen: The Life of a Storyteller, a scholarly, detailed biography of one of the world’s most renowned writers. Born in Odense, Denmark, on April 2, 1805, in a small cottage in the poorest part of the village, Andersen spent his life trying to escape his humble origins. He once described his uneducated parents as "full of love" but "ignorant of life and of the world." His rise to fame removed him physically from Odense and placed him in the homes and palaces of the noblemen and royalty with whom he wished to identify, but the psychological scars of his true heritage created an identity crisis that remained throughout his life.

According to Wullschlager, Andersen’s fairy tales equal self-portraits. The triumphant Ugly Duckling, the loyal Little Mermaid, the steadfast Tin Soldier the stories of these characters show Andersen’s own ability to empathize with pain, sorrow and rejection.

Andersen’s life was significantly influenced by his travels, the patronage of royalty and wealthy friends and his association with other 19th century artists. Wullschlager includes fascinating stories, rich with historical detail, of his relationship with such notables as Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, Franz Listz and the Grimm brothers. The first to write fairy tales for adults as well as for children, Andersen composed narratives that compel readers to confront their innermost thoughts and fears. Soul-searching satires of humankind’s foibles and absurdities are woven into the fabric of his tales tales that, according to Wullschlager, reveal Andersen’s own inner conflict: a battle between achieving acceptance and success and rebelling against conventional constraints. Exploring the circumstances that contributed to the literary genius of Hans Christian Andersen and tracing those influences throughout his prolific works, Wullschlager has created a fascinating psychological profile of the legendary author.

Elizabeth Davis is a former marketing director for Turner Broadcasting System.

 

We often identify authors by their most famous works and investigate no further. But a writer's output is, of course, only the tip of the iceberg. Readers interested in delving into the life experiences that shape an author will delight in Jackie Wullschlager's Hans Christian…

Memoir

Review

Review by bookpagedev

In 1965, poet and memoirist Kathleen Norris a shy, sheltered 17-year-old left her home in Hawaii and traveled several thousand miles to Bennington College in Vermont. As Norris recounts in The Virgin of Bennington, her fourth memoir, the distance between Honolulu and New England was more than geographical. Though academically rigorous, Bennington in the ’60s was a playground for wealthy, "artsy" girls, members of the various branches of the East Coast elite. "I had no idea," Norris says, ". . . that I was signing on for a crash course in the turbulent dynamics of place and culture." Overwhelmed by her peers’ hedonism affairs with professors and heavy drug use Norris retreated into herself, wrote poetry and critical essays, and earned a reputation as a prig. At 21, she was still a virgin, a complete anomaly at Bennington.

But after four years of college life, Norris succumbed; she developed a crush on a married professor a man who, she discovered years later, had engaged in countless affairs with students and doggedly pursued him. Her quest took her to New York, where she through the professor’s connections landed a dream job as the assistant to Betty Kray, then-director of the Academy of American Poets. When the affair fizzled, Norris was crushed; but the failed romance became, in a way, a windfall. For it drew Norris closer to Kray by all accounts an extraordinary woman, friend to every major mid-century poet and inventor of any number of innovative arts and education programs (as well as a talented writer herself, evidenced by the letters included in Norris’ book). Kray tutored Norris in everything from fashion to revision techniques to social etiquette and introduced her to James Wright, Diane Wakoski, Galway Kinnell, Richard Howard and a number of other poets. The book is filled with Norris’ appreciative remembrances of these luminaries who taught her, in essence, how to be a poet. "Even in casual conversation they often imparted great wisdom on the joys and demands of the writing life," Norris says. Populated with some of the 20th century’s most compelling writers, 0679455086 is a lively, jumbled tale full of literary history. Norris, author of the best-selling Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, has written a fascinating coming-of-age story.

Joanna Smith Rakoff is the book editor for Shout magazine.

 

In 1965, poet and memoirist Kathleen Norris a shy, sheltered 17-year-old left her home in Hawaii and traveled several thousand miles to Bennington College in Vermont. As Norris recounts in The Virgin of Bennington, her fourth memoir, the distance between Honolulu and New England was…

Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Review

Review by bookpagedev

ne of the most remarkable things about the latest entry in John Lescroart’s series of legal thrillers featuring San Francisco attorney Dismas Hardy is the utter freshness of the material. Through a half dozen outings (The 13th Juror, The Mercy Rule), Lescroart has managed to keep his regular characters three-dimensional and consistently interesting. In The Hearing, the characters that have populated Lescroart’s previous novels find new intrigue in the political and social worlds of San Francisco.

When a prominent black San Francisco attorney is found murdered, the key suspect is a homeless heroin addict found at the scene holding the gun and her jewelry. Because it is an election year, the politically ambitious and ruthless District Attorney Sharron Pratt decides to press for the death penalty to reverse her soft-on-crime image. The suspect’s brother is a close friend of Lescroart’s suave Irish lawyer, and against his better judgment, Dismas Hardy is persuaded to take the case.

As he digs into the evidence, trying to find a way to spare his client’s life, Hardy finds the case has strange ties to other political and legal goings-on in the city. An almost incestuous relationship between business, the prosecutor’s office and the murder victim has Hardy wondering, in spite of damning physical evidence, if his client actually had anything to do with the murder. The cop on the case, the black Jewish detective Abe Glitsky, who has reasons of his own for seeing the killer receive ultimate justice, also begins to have doubts about the guilt of the accused. Together, he and Hardy try to unravel the truth from a thicket of corruption and venality. Lescroart’s story is enriched by a careful rendering of the city that gives his legal thrillers a special flair. Even with a sharply disapproving portrait of corruption in city politics, Lescroart’s love of San Francisco comes through on every page.

With plenty of legal twists and turns, The Hearing will be an irresistible read for Lescroart’s legion of fans and all those who appreciate a well-crafted courtroom drama.

Michael Grollman is a freelance writer in New Jersey.

ne of the most remarkable things about the latest entry in John Lescroart's series of legal thrillers featuring San Francisco attorney Dismas Hardy is the utter freshness of the material. Through a half dozen outings (The 13th Juror, The Mercy Rule), Lescroart has managed to…
Fiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

he heart of Africa and the human heart blend seamlessly in this deftly crafted first novel by Nicholas Hershenow, published under Putnam’s new fiction imprint. The team of Greg Michalson and Frederick Ramey, whose Midas touch tapped first-rate new talent like William Gay, Patricia Henley and Susan Vreeland for MacMurray ∧ Beck publishers, now bring their expertise to BlueHen Books, a forum dedicated to putting gifted new writers into print. The Road Builder is a propitious beginning, a warm and wise epic novel that circles the globe to uncover the truths that lie closest to home.

The African journey of Will and Kate Haslin begins in America with a lark, a harmless smuggling foray into Mexico to unofficially export a little jewelry and a few blankets. The joy ride turns into a kidnapping with a not-unwilling victim, progresses into a marriage that begins as a motel-registry subterfuge, and results in a meeting with the man who will put an indelible stamp on the young couple’s life Kate’s enigmatic Uncle Pers. A shadowy character on his deathbed, an old man whose life experience is as varied as it is mysterious, Pers is writing his memoirs and claims to have lost his memory of time spent in Central Africa. Pers sends Will and Kate on a mission to the village of Ngemba, ostensibly to reclaim that lost part of his past. “You have no story of your own; I’ll give you mine,” is Pers’ irresistible offer. The story that unfolds delves into the dangerous secret of Pers’ past while layer after layer of history, myth and culture envelop the young American couple as they come to terms with their own relationship and their relationship to the exotic world of the African savanna.

This is a contemporary story that weds the past to the present, bringing together romance without sentimentality, social issues without preaching, and above all, a rare gift for storytelling and characterization. Although the book is a debut, it displays the virtuosity of an experienced hand. Having worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in Zaire, author Nicholas Hershenow puts the authority of personal experience into this richly detailed novel, but the spark that makes it memorable is his talent for bringing the sights and sounds and the very hearts of his characters to life.

Mary Garrett reads and writes in Middle Tennessee.

he heart of Africa and the human heart blend seamlessly in this deftly crafted first novel by Nicholas Hershenow, published under Putnam's new fiction imprint. The team of Greg Michalson and Frederick Ramey, whose Midas touch tapped first-rate new talent like William Gay, Patricia Henley…
Fiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

sands through the hourglass If ol’ Fred Nietzsche were around to review Simon Mawer’s The Gospel of Judas, he’d probably say with a nod to fellow philosopher Yogi Berra “See? What’d I tell you? It’s eternal recurrence all over again!” I don’t mean to poke fun at Mawer’s excellent novel, but merely to indicate that Nietzsche’s notion of “eternal recurrence,” as commonly conceived, can profitably be used to view it. There may be other ways, but the book has about it a lot of what Nietzsche called the “eternal hourglass of existence” that is continually being “turned over and over and you with it, a mere grain of dust.” Further, in The Gospel of Judas, time is not linear, like the idea of time that has come down to us from Aristotle through Judeo-Christian teaching, but circular and cyclical, like Nietzsche’s time. The novel shifts fluidly back and forth from World War II to the present day, and it definitely has much to do with Christianity.

Leo Newman is a Roman Catholic priest, British but living in Rome. A renowned scholar of biblical-era texts, he is summoned to Jerusalem to decipher a recently found scroll that appears to have been written by Judas Iscariot, the betrayer of Christ. Leo quickly senses that the scroll is genuine and literally devastating to Christianity.

At this time Leo, who is apparently 50-ish, embarks on his first sexual affair. The woman, named Madeleine, is Catholic and the wife of a British diplomat. She is one element in the “potent sense of womanhood” that informs Leo’s life. Indeed, the novel gives off a muted sensation of must more than that, of the ancient fear that women are not only sexual predators but the very occasion for sin.

A leitmotif of repetition and reflection accompanies the time/eternal recurrence theme. The Leo-Madeleine affair reflects the affair that the priest’s mother, Gretchen, also a Catholic and the wife of a (German) diplomat, has with an Italian Jew named Francesco during World War II.

This leitmotif, in turn, is entwined with the book’s and Leo’s obsession with word origins and names. For instance, Yerushalem (Jerusalem), the author tells us, is not from shalom, the Hebrew for peace, but from the Canaanite god, Shalem.

While these explanations are a treat to come across, they amount to more than mere intellectualizing. Leo’s working life is one of words “Had he always feared that as soon as he teased at the words that made up his faith, the whole fabric would unravel?” and, as he tells Madeleine at one of their first meetings, “In this business you always start with the name. Names always had meanings.” Darn right they did, and do. Madeleine is a form of Magdalene, Mary Magdalene, the reformed and repentant whore of the New Testament. So is Magda, an artist and whore with whom Leo later shares an apartment.

A priest of Christ who takes up with two women named for the woman who, aside from Mary, is most associated with Christ. As Leo works at translating the scroll, one of them, Madeleine, stands figuratively at his shoulder, just as “her namesake had been there at the discovery of the opened tomb.” All of this would be mere symbol-dropping and parading of knowledge if the author did not make it so much of a piece. Tightly constructed is not the right term; try seamless. Mawer, author of Mendel’s Dwarf and several other novels, has produced tightly woven, brilliantly matching narrative threads that make up a splendid cloth. And for good measure, the scroll mystery adds a nice thriller element.

Like all good modern authors, Mawer lets us make of it what we will. “Was it here,” Leo wonders as he pores over the papyrus, “that the history of Christianity would finally come to an end?” The weight of the book’s evidence would seem to point to one answer yes.

However, also like all good modern authors, Mawer’s true concern is not the cosmic and infinite, but the immediate and human. The priest of Christ, not Christ, animates this book.

In the final pages we learn that toward the end of the war Gretchen has taken the name “Mrs. Newman” names, after all, always had meanings and that Leo, the child with which she is pregnant, is “a kind of resurrection.” He is also, you will discover, a kind of eternal recurrence.

Roger K. Miller is a freelance writer in Wisconsin.

sands through the hourglass If ol' Fred Nietzsche were around to review Simon Mawer's The Gospel of Judas, he'd probably say with a nod to fellow philosopher Yogi Berra "See? What'd I tell you? It's eternal recurrence all over again!" I don't mean to poke…
Fiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

ike sands through the hourglass If ol’ Fred Nietzsche were around to review Simon Mawer’s The Gospel of Judas, he’d probably say with a nod to fellow philosopher Yogi Berra “See? What’d I tell you? It’s eternal recurrence all over again!” I don’t mean to poke fun at Mawer’s excellent novel, but merely to indicate that Nietzsche’s notion of “eternal recurrence,” as commonly conceived, can profitably be used to view it. There may be other ways, but the book has about it a lot of what Nietzsche called the “eternal hourglass of existence” that is continually being “turned over and over and you with it, a mere grain of dust.” Further, in The Gospel of Judas, time is not linear, like the idea of time that has come down to us from Aristotle through Judeo-Christian teaching, but circular and cyclical, like Nietzsche’s time. The novel shifts fluidly back and forth from World War II to the present day, and it definitely has much to do with Christianity.

Leo Newman is a Roman Catholic priest, British but living in Rome. A renowned scholar of biblical-era texts, he is summoned to Jerusalem to decipher a recently found scroll that appears to have been written by Judas Iscariot, the betrayer of Christ. Leo quickly senses that the scroll is genuine and literally devastating to Christianity.

At this time Leo, who is apparently 50-ish, embarks on his first sexual affair. The woman, named Madeleine, is Catholic and the wife of a British diplomat. She is one element in the “potent sense of womanhood” that informs Leo’s life. Indeed, the novel gives off a muted sensation of must more than that, of the ancient fear that women are not only sexual predators but the very occasion for sin.

A leitmotif of repetition and reflection accompanies the time/eternal recurrence theme. The Leo-Madeleine affair reflects the affair that the priest’s mother, Gretchen, also a Catholic and the wife of a (German) diplomat, has with an Italian Jew named Francesco during World War II.

This leitmotif, in turn, is entwined with the book’s and Leo’s obsession with word origins and names. For instance, Yerushalem (Jerusalem), the author tells us, is not from shalom, the Hebrew for peace, but from the Canaanite god, Shalem.

While these explanations are a treat to come across, they amount to more than mere intellectualizing. Leo’s working life is one of words “Had he always feared that as soon as he teased at the words that made up his faith, the whole fabric would unravel?” and, as he tells Madeleine at one of their first meetings, “In this business you always start with the name. Names always had meanings.” Darn right they did, and do. Madeleine is a form of Magdalene, Mary Magdalene, the reformed and repentant whore of the New Testament. So is Magda, an artist and whore with whom Leo later shares an apartment.

A priest of Christ who takes up with two women named for the woman who, aside from Mary, is most associated with Christ. As Leo works at translating the scroll, one of them, Madeleine, stands figuratively at his shoulder, just as “her namesake had been there at the discovery of the opened tomb.” All of this would be mere symbol-dropping and parading of knowledge if the author did not make it so much of a piece. Tightly constructed is not the right term; try seamless. Mawer, author of Mendel’s Dwarf and several other novels, has produced tightly woven, brilliantly matching narrative threads that make up a splendid cloth. And for good measure, the scroll mystery adds a nice thriller element.

Like all good modern authors, Mawer lets us make of it what we will. “Was it here,” Leo wonders as he pores over the papyrus, “that the history of Christianity would finally come to an end?” The weight of the book’s evidence would seem to point to one answer yes.

However, also like all good modern authors, Mawer’s true concern is not the cosmic and infinite, but the immediate and human. The priest of Christ, not Christ, animates this book.

In the final pages we learn that toward the end of the war Gretchen has taken the name “Mrs. Newman” names, after all, always had meanings and that Leo, the child with which she is pregnant, is “a kind of resurrection.” He is also, you will discover, a kind of eternal recurrence.

Roger K. Miller is a freelance writer in Wisconsin.

ike sands through the hourglass If ol' Fred Nietzsche were around to review Simon Mawer's The Gospel of Judas, he'd probably say with a nod to fellow philosopher Yogi Berra "See? What'd I tell you? It's eternal recurrence all over again!" I don't mean to…
Fiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Pulitzer Prize-winner herself, Anne Tyler is a champion of holy losers, if not outright fools. Many of her novels (this is her 15th) read like blow-by-blow rundowns of extended family reunions at which all parties seem determined to present their worst or at best, most eccentric behavior. Rebecca (“Beck”) Davitch, the accidental matriarch at the hub of this Baltimore clan, finds herself at 53 with a grown brood three mildly squabblesome stepdaughters and their extended households, along with her own daughter, now on her third husband-and-child combo and a resident 99-year-old uncle-in-law, plus an in-home party business to run out of a grand, if deteriorating brownstone, the Open Arms. Beck’s problem, oddly, is not overextension, but a gap at the core: the one thing achingly missing from her life is her husband, Joe, who died only a few years after sweeping her into this maelstrom. Her midlife crisis, when it comes, is one of identity slippage. She’s perfectly clear or thinks she is on who she was at 21, when Joe mistook her for a “natural-born celebrator,” thus typecasting her into the role she has occupied for the past three decades. But who is she now? Has she inadvertently strayed from her “true real life,” the one she was meant to have? We all wonder from time to time about the road not taken. In Beck’s case, a seemingly portentous dream about the son she might have had with Will Allenby, her childhood-unto-college sweetheart, prompts her to look him up to often awkward, sometimes hilarious effect. A carefully staged meeting with his resentful teenage daughter is a modern classic. Beck’s family is far more accepting of this potential rekindling: indeed, her mother, an old-fashioned passive-aggressive whose every innocuous comment bears a barbed reproach, is outright ecstatic. Will Beck find the lost segments of her younger self by reconnecting with this phantasm from her past? The reader will quickly form a fervid opinion as to whether she should. Meanwhile, Tyler’s latest entertainingly refutes Tolstoy’s dictum that happy families are all alike.

Sandy MacDonald is incubating a family compound on the island of Nantucket in Massachusetts.

Pulitzer Prize-winner herself, Anne Tyler is a champion of holy losers, if not outright fools. Many of her novels (this is her 15th) read like blow-by-blow rundowns of extended family reunions at which all parties seem determined to present their worst or at best, most…
Business & Finance

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Just your type: behavior on the job We’re each wired differently that much is for sure. Scientific knowledge about the “nature” part of our personalities is continually improving, while psychological inquiries into the “nurture” side are ever deepening. Nobody has mapped the human soul, as has happened with the human genome, but it’s not for lack of trying.

Given the outpouring of ink in recent years on the varieties of human intelligence (such as Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence and Howard Gardner’s Intelligence Reframed), it’s no surprise that business authors would seek to apply this evolving science to the workplace. This month, we look at four recently released books that delve into the connections between personality type and business performance.

The Character of Organizations: Using Personality Type in Organization Development (Davies-Black, $18.95, ISBN 0891061495), by William Bridges, is an updated edition of a title that gained critical acclaim upon its initial appearance a decade ago. Bridges looks at businesses as organisms, with their own personal histories and inherited characteristics. He argues convincingly that a company’s character is much more than the sum of its employees’ personalities, and he offers guidance in understanding how different types of organizations think, feel, perceive, and behave. Applied properly, his analysis may be able to steer a firm away from patterns of action that are self-defeating and toward actions that better suit its strengths.

As I read through Bridges’s 16 types of organizational personalities (modeled on the individual personality types of the widely used Myers-Briggs personality assessments), a Rorschach effect sets in. I see one of my former employers in the profile of an ENFJ corporation (a type in which extroverted, intuitive, feeling, and judging behaviors predominate), and then I see it again in the quite different profile of an ISTJ company (introverted, sensing, thinking, and judging). I find another ex-employer in four different personality-type ink blots. Accurately defining one’s true type is hard in Bridges’ system (as it is in the Myers-Briggs system), but the very act of trying to figure out which profile fits best can improve self-knowledge.

Bridges includes in his book an “Organizational Character Index” that business teams can use to evaluate the character of their companies and, by implication, determine what kinds of people will fit best within a given corporate culture. The author is at pains to stress that his index should not be used as a screening tool by employers, stressing that there are no “good” or “bad” personality types just different types that are more well-suited, or less well-suited, to be part of a certain type of team. Just as a career counselor can help an individual focus on jobs he or she is good at, The Character of Organizations can help a company hone strategies that make the most of its strengths.

Conversely, another new book tries to help workers avoid being harmed by their own personality defects and, one must admit, we’ve each got a few of those. Maximum Success: Changing the 12 Behavior Patterns that Keep You from Getting Ahead (Doubleday, $24.95, ISBN 0385498497), by James Waldroop and Timothy Butler, is a thoughtful and useful compendium of things not to do and ways not to be, while you’re on the job.

Maximum Success is the consummate self-help guide for talented people who keep running into the same problems over and over, in different jobs. There are employees who never feel quite good enough to deserve the jobs they have. There are workers for whom no job is ever good enough. There are those who try to do too much at once, those who avoid conflict at any cost, those who can’t get along with the boss, and those who feel they have lost track of their career paths. The authors, who head up the Harvard Business School’s MBA career development office, have seen it all.

The downside of perusing a book like this is that it often brings on moments of rueful recognition. Playing the “peacemaker” or the “bulldozer,” exhibiting a “reactive stance toward authority” or “emotional tone-deafness” these are workplace behaviors that emerge out of a person’s deepest psychological being. Confronting them means confronting a piece of yourself. Like Bridges, Waldroop and Butler go out of their way not to be judgmental about such habits. But, again like Bridges, they draw on a body of psychological literature stretching back to Karl Jung as they offer constructive suggestions for recognizing these tendencies and avoiding the career ruin they can cause.

The human resource manager’s role as group psychologist is the subject of Making Change Happen One Person at a Time: Assessing Change Capacity Within Your Organization, by Charles H. Bishop, Jr. (AMACOM, $27.95, ISBN 0814405282). Bishop lays out the characteristics of four different personality types, classified by how they react to change. Making Change Happen is a precise, step-by-step guide to determining who within a company will be most likely to succeed during and after the implementation of a change initiative.

Here, too, part of the lesson is that there’s not a one-size-fits-all personality template that produces ideal employees. A company with too many of Bishop’s “A-players” or “active responders” the Alpha Males of the corporate world who embrace change, pinpoint opportunities and learn from mistakes will face leadership and succession problems because there’s not room enough at the top for everyone. On the other hand, Bishop is tellingly sparse with suggested roles for “D-players” who resist change: From the HR man’s perspective, the main point is to make sure these misfits don’t get in the way. And now for something completely different but once again related to psychological typecasting. Power Money Fame Sex: A User’s Guide, by Gretchen Craft Rubin (Pocket, $25.95, ISBN 0671041282), is an archly written guide to making a complete creep of oneself. Take Rubin’s advice to heart, and you can become any organization’s worst nightmare: a talented tyrant, a “user.” Like the other featured authors, Rubin is scrupulously non-judgmental. And her work is not exactly satire. It’s something that bites deeper an exposŽ of a certain type of person that lives among us.

Naturally, it begins with a personality assessment quiz. Presuming you are a “striver” and do crave power, the quiz is intended to determine whether you seek direct or indirect power. Power, Rubin notes trenchantly, will get you a lot further in life than merit. She then spells out how to use people to get power, money, fame, and sex, and then how to use power, money, fame, and sex to get more power, money, fame, and sex.

Advice like “Never let your effort show” and “Traffic only in the right products, places and pastimes” could have come straight out of J.P. Donleavy’s sadly out-of-print gonzo manners manual, The Unexpurgated Code. A discussion of “useful defects and harmful virtues” turns everything your scoutmaster tried to teach you on its head. Here as elsewhere, Rubin raises questions that cut through the book’s veil of irony for instance: “Did Richard Nixon become president despite his insecurity and mistrust, or at least partly because of those traits?” If it all sounds unsavory, and these postmodern perversions of the idea of manners strike you as something not quite cricket, then you can at least have the satisfaction of knowing how others are trying to manipulate you. Rubin is not an advocate for this sort of behavior, after all. She’s just pointing out how it works. And I know a few people who would study a book like this carefully, doing their best to follow it to the letter.

Journalist and entrepreneur E. Thomas Wood is working with author John Egerton on a book about Nashville.

Just your type: behavior on the job We're each wired differently that much is for sure. Scientific knowledge about the "nature" part of our personalities is continually improving, while psychological inquiries into the "nurture" side are ever deepening. Nobody has mapped the human soul, as…

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