Patrick French's "Tibet, Tibet": Book Review

This book combines French's clandestine and seemingly aborted (given Chinese surveillance) visit to Tibet in 1999 with a history and a context that brings into focus, more clearly and therefore more shockingly, the cultural destruction perpetrated in the name of Communism by the Chinese. The history is eye-glazing too often, but the personal encounters keep you reading regardless of too much diplomatic and biographical digression. French labors to demystify this realm, and his careful discussions span the whole variety of Tibetans caught within the grasp of a far more mighty and relentless regime, bent on obliterating what they do not contort to meet the expectations of a still-romanticized tourist trade. As he admits, no admirer of Tibet can fully abandon the romance that accompanies our visions of this land, but his book does separate what has been called the "mind's Tibet" from the considerably more broken and compromised real land and its people and its heritage.

French is too smart to gloss over the poverty that the some more well-intentioned Communists originally sought to eradicate when they overthrew the largely-feudal theocracy. He interviews an original member of such a delegation, and gives him as much a fair hearing as he does, in an unforgettably poignant scene, the account of an Amdo nomad who saw--in a single day--his land invaded and the outnumbered Tibetan warriors who rode against the People's Army's guns massacred. After one day, there was no more war, only guerrilla resistance that French shows was abandoned and left, without the US assistance promised, to be at the mercy of the Chinese. He interviews those remnants of the lower caste who cleaned the Potala, the fading few indigenous Muslims who had been there at least since the 12th century, and--over and over--those who have been broken by Chinese torture and imprisonment. His account of Tibet's fate in the Cultural Revolution and Mao's eagerness to "bombard the Headquarters" while "Maoists" marched in Paris in the same 1968 makes for grim comparison between Western naivete and Eastern pragmatism, perhaps the opposite of usual stereotypes.

He also, as a leading activist, takes on "Dalaidolatry" and how the current Dalai Lama has, perhaps unwittingly, been exploited by greedy book ghostwriters and failed to control the royalties and the rights that should have accrued. He even-handedly considers the failure of political rebellion against the Chinese and the impossibility of changing Tibet for the better without changing China, and how the latter must precede the former, perhaps in another regime change in the future. Meanwhile, his prognosis is sobering: India will not let the exile government of Tibet last long after the current Dalai's demise, French predicts. China does not deep down care what the Tibetans can do to fight back for it is ultimately so little against so great a force. Tibet remains a backwater assignment for Chinese cadres, and ironically Tibetans who have chosen to collaborate can also guardedly gain in small amounts a better life for their compatriots, given the lack of power Tibet has.

Realpolitik has given the real Tibet little hope. "The Mind's Tibet" may have occupied a higher profile outside in the West, but practically it has achieved just a little in tangible human rights or political leverage. Recent events since this book have only confirmed French's conclusions that the West is only too happy to favor Chinese trade over Tibetan aspirations. In both Asian lands, the people still suffer in the name of a regime that claims to alleviate their long-inflicted pangs.

I hope readers who reliably buy the lavishly photographed and sumptuously presented displays of Tibet's terrain and heritage and read Buddhist popularizations of doctrine will also promote this book as a necessary, if dispiriting, antidote of the Real Tibet that should counteract too much that is peddled for the Mind's Tibet. In a better world, this book would provoke outrage and foment change against the Chinese regime. In our compromised condition, still, French's message of facing the reality that Tibet may not survive the depredations of the past half-century demand more than armchair reading or contemplative reverie. (12-27-05 on Amazon US, recalled and revived.)

George Schaller's "Stones of Silence": Book Review

This naturalist accompanied Peter Matthiessen on his trek chronicled in "The Snow Leopard." What George Schaller adds to the account is much more about not only the leopard, which eludes his sight even as he tracks its traces. but the varied wild sheep and goats of high peaks and dry ravines. The Nepalese border with Tibet attracts him but so do the horned and hoofed hidden animals among the Hindu Kush, the Karakorum, the Nilgiri Hills and High Range, Chitral, and the Salt and Chiltan Ranges of the subcontinent. The scope is wider than the subtitled "journeys in the Himalaya." Six years' study results in a book that will entice both armchair travelers and those intrigued by wildlife.

While the detail of the animals studied may be more than a casual reader expects, this is not a travel account so much as the tale of an encounter with such animals, and what they convey to the one watching and waiting for them in such desolate and threatened realms.

It's often a sobering account. Free of most of the spiritual tinge of his comrade's eloquent version, Schaller prefers a stoic, more stolid perspective. He admits when at the Shey monastery where Matthiessen sought to see the snow leopard his own moment of transcendence: "There is no ultimate knowing. Beyond the facts, beyond science, is a domain of cloud, the universe of the mind, ever expanding as the universe itself." (243) Yet, this passes too, and he knows how "such reflections recur in high and lonely places."

These gain his greatest attention. Those more populated and dessicated elicit more disdain. He wearies of his fellows, and seeks solitude. "The character of a region has much to do with the character of the person describing it, for we see our own heart in a landscape." He connects his melancholy with his preference for the wild: "a wilderness becomes not just an entity but a state of imagination." (32)

He warns against romanticism, and does not forget "the violence that lurks among the peaks, and the cold." (63) In the Hindu Kush or the highlands of lower India, as well as the Himalayas, Dr. Schaller seeks out isolation. He drops down from one range too hastily, and looks "back at the lonely peaks. then at the huts and fields below where people groped their whole lives away, the raw contrast between the two filled me with sadness and anxiety." (69) He traps himself between fellowship and freedom, but he knows how he must return to humanity from that which "could never be more than a passing phase, and that other which is a part of human existence."

Conservation, this in the 1970s, impels Schaller to help jumpstart the founding of a national park in the Hunza region, which he tries to downplay but which represents his practical command of insight and organization (he shows as in his ascent to Shey later on a fierce determination) to win his cause. While the ungenerous area depresses him, he manages to make it better when he leaves it. This journey is full of such ups and downs, and it's a level-headed report of the sightings he makes as much as a chronicle of his meetings and adventures. Many cold nights in sleeping bags attest to his endurance.

The mountains may be moist or dry, but they tend to be scraped free of much vegetation, even as this may show the hand of man and not nature as the preserves shrink for habitats amidst an always-increasing population, often in sensitive political as well as environmental zones. "The mountains gave man soil, provided him with food, and stored his water, but he has taken almost everything, leaving the earth's bones bare. The snow leopard might well serve as symbol of man's commitment to the natural world." (50) I read this wondering how this predicament might have altered since. (Amazon US 3-14-2012, "pi" day.)

Martin Brauen's "Dreamworld Tibet: Western Illusion": Book Review

From Utopia via Shambha-La and Shangri-La, to Dharma-La, this visually and textually explores how Westerners conceive the Himalayan land, both its visible attractions and its "hidden" occult lore. This Swiss Tibetologist amasses hundreds of images and summarizes dozens of texts which sensationalize, warp, dramatize, or commercialize Tibetan Buddhism, along with Tibet's culture.

Professor Brauen intriguingly notes (too much in passing for me, as this merits much elaboration) how the conventional Orientalism of Edward Said gets upended, for Tibetans collude in their own presentation of the images they want the West to see. As sometime-collaborators in the mystification of their native realm, they have, Brauen mentions, directed their own starring roles, and not served as only the pawns of imperialism. For instance,  in the early 1920s natives told the British what to film and what to censor. This aided what the "British officer class in Sikkim" between 1904 and 1949 shaped as "a markedly positive view of Tibet."

Brauen rushes past the contributions of many, such as Jesuit missionary Ippolito Desideri, but Brauen credits him (perhaps a bit too generously--see my review of the newly edited and translated "Mission to Tibet" by Desideri and the study of his impact by Trent Pomplum, "Mission to the Roof of the World") for attempting to listen to Tibetans, learn their language, and express--if warped by his own filters--their worldview. Many Westerners continued in his path, but most followers distorted what they found--or as, with Madame Blavatsky in the later 19c, claimed to find in the mountains and caves as esoteric wisdom of "Mahatmas."

Even she, for all her exaggerations, at least gave the Christian, positivist, and Victorian era a spiritual or soulful alternative, one that the bulk of Brauen's big book covers in the past century as its construction towered. New Age, occult, Tantric, capitalist, comic, Nazi and Aryan, counterculture, alien-obsessed, pulp fiction, Hollywood, hi-tech, and quasi-mystical factions contended--more and more after the Communist  invasion--to market their versions of Tibet to an eager, credulous, wealthy, and starry-eyed audience abroad. Brauen argues how the four stages of Tibetan models evolved since medieval rumors first filtered to Europe, and he reasons that these versions of a manufactured (even if "pure") Tibet do nobody today any favors.

Nicholas Roerich (see my review of "Red Shambhala" by Andrei Znamenski) typifies the elevated approach. His idealized Buddhism is so high that, prior to any contact with real Tibet, he condemns any actual practitioners who pursue occult truths. If he meets them, and they are worthy, they are genuine; if they fail to match his subjective standards, they have not evolved enough to merit their position. Thus, the Western judge rules over actual Tibet, free from contact, often, with the actual land or people in their mundane existence.

The author patiently dismantles many varieties of outrageous claims; he concludes after paraphrasing the highs or lows of one fascist tale: "Commentary is superfluous." He traces in another "a chaos of plagiarism." He examines an elixir peddled via lamas or adepts: "credibility is faked by purported openness and qualification," so that its claims cannot be debunked. The monasteries are always remote, the caves hidden, the mystery intact despite centuries of diligent exploration by similarly swayed Westerners seeking a fountain of youth.

It's fascinating to learn how Blavatsky's invention of a "third eye" underlies Lobsang Rampa's claims a century later, and how he in turn popularized a fighting monk stereotype that propels today's B-movies and comics. He has little patience for rhapsodies of Robert Thurman (see my reviews of "Inner Revolution" and "Why the Dalai Lama Matters"; contrast Donald Lopez' "Prisoners of Shangri-La" and Patrick French's "Tibet, Tibet").

Brauen concludes with a Tibetan proverb: "From the mouth of a true friend you hear no sweet words." He champions the cause of Tibetan exiles (not those who may champion them or court the spotlight) who urge a realistic depiction of themselves and their predicament--an end to the jejune, cynical, mystic, or sinister tones in which their homeland has been incessantly transmitted worldwide. He articulates how "Dreamworld Tibet" has been built out of reveries, "longings and obsessions" over time: "escapism; sympathy triggered by the David and Goliath myth; 'kernels of truth' anchored in Tibetan culture; circumstances that the formation of stereotypes encourages (such as the impossibility of proving absurdity, biased selection of sources, and other methodical tricks); and the need of Tibetans in exile, at least the Tibetan elite in exile, to give themselves an identity that can compete with Western professed values." (247)

This handsomely edited volume deserves attention from audiences too enchanted by Himalayan fantasy. While I would have not minded this coffee-table format book, with a scholarly approach but a popular culture appeal (translated by Martin Willson--the captions adroitly sum up the key points of the matching text), to be even longer, the scope and ambition of this work may direct future critics into more detailed analyses of the topics surveyed and suggested by Professor Brauen.  His clear organization and thoughtful reflections represent his own care for his subject, and the everyday people who occupy the real Tibet. (Amazon US 2-11-12; see his daughter's memoir Across Many Mountains, which he kindly arranged for me to read, here reviewed by me on Amazon US, 5-13-14)

Matteo Pistono's "In the Shadow of the Buddha": Book Review

This Wyoming-raised environmental activist turned Tibetan advocate interweaves his own near-decade pilgrimage and political action with the story of his inspiration, Tertön Sogyal, whose two incarnations Pistono learns from today. One, Sogyal Rinpoche, has gained fame for his "Tibetan Book of Living and Dying" and his Rigpa hospice foundations and outreach from his French base. The other, Khenpo, had taught the current Dalai Lama, and was his only lama still living in Tibet. Pistono--fascinated by Tertön's story a century ago as he turns from banditry to great influence in recovering termas or "treasure teachings" to assist the Tibetans in staving off British and Chinese takeovers--now during Chinese takeover goes on a journey to four key places in Tertön's life.

Pistono, from a politically active union family, clearly knows his way around corridors of power. He intersperses his surreptitious adventures, as his spiritual quest impels him to smuggle out documentation of imprisonment and suppression by the Chinese communists of monks, nuns, and laypeople who dare to shout out support for the Dalai Lama. He learns from Ming--a policewoman caught in her own half-Chinese, half-Tibetan parentage her own ambiguous position in power--of the "conviction quota" police must achieve monthly, and how "a case is closed" by torture or murder.

His connections with Richard Gere and the International Campaign for Tibet add cachet to this account. Pistono does now and then give of a sense of moving in elevated circles not opened to most folks, but his upbringing appears to account for his ease in lobbying, as his Wyoming youth prepared him to endure long treks in cold climes. The map may be vaguely drawn and the illustrations sometimes few, perhaps to protect the identities of those he assists, but the details, connected elegantly if sometimes very subtly, tie his own venture to that of his inspiring guru a hundred years and more ago.

Pistono underplays, sensibly, how he's able to get in and out of Tibet and smuggle out hard evidence (hard to come by--see my review of Jonathan Green's "Murder in the High Himalaya") to show Congress and human rights organizations (who appear as many entities not to be able to overcome a growing Chinese manner of brushing such reports with disdain or indifference or platitudes). While this ability left me wondering, the slight elision in parts of his narrative is understandable. He adds notes for his sources and a glossary of terms and a bibliography point one to research and provide welcome help for lots of unfamiliar Tibetan names. Throughout this accessible, straightforward tale, his courage in getting out information in the soles of his shoes, straps of his backpack, or false bottom of his satchel remains admirable. You learn how difficult it is to sneak photos and reports used by the communist regime out of Tibet, and how necessary such an endeavor is if the West (or a few caring people among so many disinterested), is led to care and act. 

Early on, he gets the first of many temptations to simply meditate and study. He's as overwhelmed with the seeming near-futility of changing this sixty-year situation as most of us are; still, he listens and watches for his chances to apply the doctrines and disciplines he begins to practice.

He must alleviate suffering, and "in the shadow of the Buddha" subtly phrased here reminds me of the citation he includes from the "Dhammapada" sayings: "Speak or act with a pure mind/ And happiness will follow you/ As your shadow, unshakable." 

Of course, the "shadow" also conveys the sense of dread, as Tibet's bullied. Its natives "were asking me to plug their stifled voices" from the plateau "into an amplifier in the West for the world to hear and act upon." (38)  How can one help? The Dalai Lama is cited as advising a woman to go there, and then report what she sees. Few can do this, or know how (Pistono's facility in Tibetan appears to come quickly when he studies for his master's degree in London) but we can "bear witness" as Pistono does, by reading this account and acting on its imperative.

Pistono, as crackdowns post-2008 continue in Tibet, concludes his account "through that sacred topology where I ricocheted between inspiration and sadness, meditative sadness and anger, an inner pilgrimage was born, a pathway that continually brought me back to where the vast potential for enlightenment abides, and is always present." (217) During his account, he hesitates in accepting that his practice can lead him to enlightenment. Yet, in building a stupa to commemorate Tertön's last home, he seems to come home to reside in his own acceptance of how liberating can be a cause to pursue, freer from anger at the predicament in which his second homeland finds itself, this century.

(Amazon US 3-11-12) Author's website.

Bás le tine i Tibéid

D'fhoghlaim mé faoi an scéal seo níos brónach sa Tiobáid. Bhí daoine dhóitear chun báis siadsan níos mó ná dhá dosean ansin. Chuir siad bás mar ní raibh mian leo chun i gcónai faoi riail na tSíne.

Léigh mé i nuachtan áitiúil ar feadh tseachtaine seo caite an aiste seo. Tá agoidí atá ag fás le déanaí ansuid. Thosaigh siad tamall ó shín ach go raibh ach bhí bás cúpla trí fhéinmharú.

Anois, tá básannaí ag meadú sa Tiobáid. Ar dtús, bhí siad ag tharla uair amháin ar feadh tamaill leis manaich agus mná rialtaí i mainistreachaí agus clochairí. Ach, bhfuil siad ag tarlú i measc daoine tuata i séasúr na gheimhridh.

Bá é 10 Márta a 53ú comóradh ar an éirí amach i gcoinne an ionróirí Síne i 1959. Méadúithe cos ar bolg le blianta beaga anuas sa Tiobáid. Tógann daoine óg níos mó éadóchasach.

Dúirt manach sine sula leagtar sé é féin ar an tine: "Tá mé a thabhairt ar shiúl mo chorp mar a thairiscint an tsolais a chase ar shiúl an dorchadas." Mas mian leat chun an fhadhb Tibéid, cuair a thabhairt air ITN.

Death by fire in Tibet.

I learned about a very sad story in Tibet. More than two dozen people have burned themselves to death there. They met death for they did not wish to live under the rule of China.

I read this past week in my local newspaper this article. Protests are growing recently over there. They started a while ago but deaths by setting one's self on fire were few.

Now, deaths are increasing in Tibet. At the start, they were happening once in a while with monks and nuns in monasteries and convents. But, they are happening among lay people this winter season.

The 10th of March was the 53rd anniversary of the uprising against the Chinese invasion in 1959. Oppression increases in recent years in Tibet. Young people are becoming more desperate.

A senior monk said before he set himself on fire: "I am giving away my body as an offering of light to chase away the darkness." If you want to help Tibet, visit ITN.

Photo/Grianghraf: McLeod Ganj, Dharamsala, India, Tibet Sun/Ghrian de Tibéid.

Neil Hegarty's "The Story of Ireland": Book Review

"Incorrigably plural" in its diverse history, Ireland has never been as isolated as its geographical position may indicate. Dr. Neil Hegarty links the island--from its prehistoric pioneers to its European financial bailout--to the wider world. International connections, from its first settlers to its increasingly multicultural population today, characterize its gene pool, its waves of invaders and immigrants, and its complex mix of political, religious, and social ingredients. These may simmer, then boil, then cool down again and again over long centuries full of contention and compromise. This energy, distilled into this well-informed study, pulses through every event listed in 330 smoothly paced pages (along with a lively introduction by foreign correspondent Fergal Keane, a timeline, footnotes, reading list, and detailed index).

Contrary to nationalist myth, the Romans traded with and tentatively explored a bit of the island they named Hibernia, "land of winter" from a mistranslation of the Greek "Ierne" for the eponymous Celtic mother goddess "Ériu". Ireland never was totally hidden from classical explorers who braved the Atlantic. "The sea remained a communications highway: indeed in a country cut with forest, highland and bog, it was sometimes easier to travel abroad than within the island itself."

This oceanic network drew a few of its residents into the Christian sphere before Patrick arrived, and Dr. Hegarty reminds us how far Irish influences spread throughout Europe. One determined "dissenter whenever necessary", irascible monk Columbanus took learning into the Alps, while Hiberno-Norse civilization, in Dr. Hegarty's emphasis, arguably strengthened by urbanization and commerce what it had first weakened, when many monastic storehouses of learning perished along with native caretakers and refugees during Viking raids. Brian Boru, conniving High King, comes across here as less heroic and more cunning in his ruthless consolidation of power, as not for the first time the Celtic Irish and their Norse rulers fought together as well as against each other amidst a host of mercenaries-- depending on who was paying whom to enlist not on behalf of a nation but a warlord.

Such allegiances tangled when the Anglo-Normans took advantage of taking over the tribal island to the west, invited by an adulterous local chieftain needing armed backup. Dermot MacMurrough, typecast as the traitor in many a legendary version of the Irish past, here does not come across as sympathetic, but his headstrong character is placed within a territorial feud familiar to viewers of a mob drama today: fractious Ireland with its petty kingdoms produces such as Dermot, with a vicious "style, rooted in a political climate that was positively Sicilian in its intensity and nastiness."

The Normans entered Ireland in 1169. These occupiers pushed aside the Hiberno-Norse and their ports fell, as the "Pale" of English control expanded inland from the island's east and southern coasts. Then "Old English" settlers succumbed to intermarriage and assimilation, so the Crown reasoned they must send more loyal invaders to anglicize the people lest the land "develop into a safe haven" for "rivals and enemies" using Ireland as a back door to sneak into England, so as to undermine or overthrow London's power. Over and over, more invaders were sent as the natives fought back, infiltrated the earlier colonists, and persisted in their anti-English opposition. Dr. Hegarty tells this intricate segment with vivid excerpts from chronicles and laws, and as throughout this book, he incorporates poems, testimony, and historical footnotes now and then taken from solid scholarship and up-to-date research.

Oliver Cromwell, another "polarizing figure" whom the native Irish learned to fear, gains thoughtful consideration. His atrocities are not excused, but his position as a Puritan bent on wiping out the Royalists in Ireland during the English Civil War places him as likely an inevitable military leader sent over to wipe out an insurgency, a general convinced of his anti-guerrilla campaign's necessity. His "ferocious ideological clarity and moral zeal" illustrate one of many case studies, over eight centuries of anti-British insurrection and cultural resistance. Catholic natives press back and are pressed back; both sides refusing to give quarter during frequent rebellions, often with Irish employed on each side.

Gradually, the indigenous language and the clan dominance weakened until by 1700, four-fifths of the land was owned by the English. Penal codes crushed Catholic freedom in a climate of "shrill paranoia and beady-eyed realism". A century before, Scots were planted in fertile but headstrong Ulster as Catholic landlords were driven off, or enticed to convert to Protestantism to keep their diminished holdings. Presbyterians, also oppressed by the Church of England, might listen with sympathy to the 1798 rebels seeking, in the aftermath of the American and French Revolutions, their own victory.

But, after another defeat, the Famine would devastate the native population. This sparked a "devotional revolution" by the Church designed to rally survivors. When Fenians sought to continue the tradition of rebellion, by the late nineteenth century, the hopes of political union with Britain had long been proven foolish. Fewer Protestants would entertain the notion of better times for an Ireland under Catholic power. As a garrison state, it had supplied--from the better-off and the poor--over forty percent of troops serving under the Crown abroad. Imperial ties again would stir fratricidal strife back home.

Politicians found themselves unable to convince Britain of Home Rule as a dominion solution for a measure of Irish self-determination. Isaac Butt, a Protestant barrister, "was intellectual, respectful, careful, uncharismatic, dour and unexciting--in short, lacking in many of the qualities that appealed in Irish political circles." As that phrasing shows, Dr. Hegarty demonstrates a command of nuance. I wondered if he'd miss an observation or qualification, but he never did. He writes for a wide audience, yet by academic training he keeps his detached, thoughtful perspective when addressing contested issues. For instance, he adds to the usual summation of Belfast's sectarian fears of a takeover by Home Rule (let alone Fenians) the progress in scientific endeavor and economic productivity achieved by Ulster's main city by the reign of Queen Victoria, as expressed through a typical Protestant refusal to countenance any "parliament in Dublin in thrall to a host of clerics."

The Boer War earns in-depth treatment to show the inconsistencies of such reformists as Michael Davitt. Despite all his sympathy for Australian aborigines and the Maori, Davitt remained silent when considering the plight of the native Africans as he and many Irish nationalists propagandized and supported the Boers against the Crown. Of course, many more Irish signed up to fight the Boers. Even if an "international consciousness" by modern times defined Irishness as Catholic and anti-British, many families relied on the payments sent home by soldiers to those who endured in poor, limited, and overpopulated conditions. Out of such discrimination and division, the last century's record of Irish fighting Irish begins its long litany of casualties and conflicted loyalties.

Nationalist Irish politics tore itself apart when allied to rebellion. However, after the doomed Rising of 1916, this glorified alliance was judged by enough bitter and beaten-down citizens as a desperate if timely necessity. By then, "Sinn Féin" republicans had convinced enough sympathizers that the Crown would never grant independence peacefully to what the imperial occupiers and a pro-British minority feared as an credulous, resentful, and nearby island that opened a "back door" to "Rome rule."

While these rebels claimed in rhetoric their socialist ideals and non-sectarian policies for all Irish, in practice, the majority of the divided island that resulted turned in on itself by censorship, repression, and moral panics designed to make it more Gaelic and more Catholic, as liberals fought to be heard in an increasingly conservative Free State. Still, facile portrayals of independent Ireland as cut off from European and certainly American culture are denied.

Dr. Hegarty reminds readers how dependent on wider currents of trade, ideas, and influences the Republic of Ireland has been. He examines the economy within the subsidized counties remaining, after yet another protracted conflict, under the Crown. At least, this Derry-born observer adds, in Ulster the "prevailing political uncertainty and civic abnormality kept house prices low and living conditions high" during the Troubles of the past decades.

Finally, the boom and bust of the past twenty years earns Dr. Hegarty's hope that a "sturdier civic culture" may be created to replace the "short-term, patronage and clientist politics" that led to the disfigurement of much of the Irish countryside with unplanned development, and a bubble where Dublin's real estate inflated into the world's most expensive. In a history illustrating the importance of global ties for the Irish, its links to a European economy facing unprecedented challenges by its own unity serve as a cautionary tale, to be careful what a vulnerable, secularizing, and newly affluent nation wishes for. As he concludes,"old pieties, myths and habits of deference are dissolving." What replaces these certainties, he insists, will be decided upon by the diverse people of Ireland themselves.

(Featured at New York Journal of Books 3-13-12)

Clarkson & Crawford's "Feast and Famine": Book Review

This accessible, but academically grounded survey covers four centuries of patterns in eating and drinking. Although alcohol and potatoes receive their expected due, Leslie A. Clarkson and E. Margaret Crawford remind us, by careful documentation, that indulgence in both is often exaggerated in the dietary record as opposed to popular assumptions. The potato came in slowly, only after 1750 becoming the staple for poorer people that led, a century later, to the most devastating of a series of famines.

The authors note how a third of the Irish (who in turn as largely agricultural workers supplied two-thirds of Irish production for export more than home use of many foodstuffs) relied on the spud at its height. Claims of a dozen pounds-plus of potatoes feeding a man, or pounds of stirabout, appear inflated, however, as the writers show when analyzing workhouse records of the 19c. Post-Famine, fewer potatoes were found on the everyday table.

Before the Great Famine, the lowest-third of the Irish population turned to potatoes for primary sustenance, while the other ranks became, as with the English, more varied in diet thanks to imperial trade. Not only sugar and tea but meat and milk could be found often. Brandy, sugar, coffee, rice, fruit and vegetables might be found along with wheaten bread, for example.

After the Famine, Irish patterns for all returned to the norm--which was not a state of prolonged deprivation at meals. Clarkson and Crawford show that Ireland lacked a "famine-prone history." Rather, the scholars counter that most of the time, everyone was "nutritionally well provided for." (280)

This may surprise some raised on patriotic accounts of mass hunger and endless poverty. But the authors remind readers how a normal pattern for a peasant might be one year of loss in seven of plenty; this cycle would be seen as wonderful by comparison long ago, whereas for us, it'd be seen as dreadful.

The writers contrast food as what we eat; nutrition is not so chronicled by many in the past, but it takes in pleasure, satisfaction, and rewards from food, often less noted in the historical charts. On average, this study finds our ancestors provided for decently, even if as all people back then, they died off earlier on average due to poorer medical and sanitary systems.

Most of the time, the gentry in Ireland and their peers in London tended not to notice the approach of famine and want. If it did not weaken their rent rolls. it did not impinge as much on their routine as later inquirers might have assumed.

Full of charts and sprinkled with some wry hints of exasperation with misinformed claims for native diet and impact on Irish sensibilities from contemporary observers as well as recent historians,  "Feast and Famine: Food and Nutrition in Ireland 1500-1920" gathers a couple decades of research arrayed in a readable, informative style. As one coming to this topic curious but with no background in food history, I welcomed its contributions in clear language and thoughtful analysis. (Amazon US 3-1-12)

Ian Mortimer's "The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England": Book Review

"It is not unusual to wake up in the middle of the night to the barking of dogs, the snoring of travelers in your chamber, and the unmistakable sounds of someone urinating or drunkenly vomiting from the stairs or gallery down into the yard." This sounds like a scene from a frathouse comedy, but it's Ian Mortimer conjuring up a stay at an inn, six hundred years ago.

"If an unchanging diet of boiled bacon, rye bread, and peas does not appeal, then consider yourself lucky not to be stuck in a house in which the bacon has not gone rancid, the flour has been eaten by rats, and the peas have become damp and rotted." So goes the summation of faring in the winter, when few tasty items can be imported or preserved. Mortimer, as in compelling chapters on the hazards of sea voyages, the predicament of hazarding roads, or making one's mucky way through darkened alleys, makes the smells and scenes come alive vividly. He gleans the best of what chroniclers and accountants have compiled, and as a trained medieval historian, he incorporates sources with diligence and an eye for the telling, vivid detail. He translates scholarship into a lively narrative.

With my own doctorate in medieval literature, I came to this curious how it'd inform me. I confess it taught me a lot. While the initial conceit of a Rough Guide for one transported back in time is not as sustained after a brisk start as I'd expected. No maps makes a lamentable lack, and while period illustrations are chosen well, they are in two middle color inserts. The publisher could have included maps and more b/w illustrations and charts; this would have improved the value. Still, while the chapters may veer about in tone and topic, the compilation of so much information and data rendered into richly described word pictures carries its own charm and its own compelling interest for those of us who are armchair visitors to the time of Chaucer, Piers Plowman, and the Black Plague.

There's fresh insight, as when Mortimer explains the Catch-22 of rape, pregnancy, and orgasm as (mis-)understood when applying Galen's ancient conceptions of the female sexual response to medieval legal interpretation and application, or when Mortimer accounts for why it was a good idea for any man never to leave one's house unarmed. He re-creates the rawness of the era, and how elusive were its refinements for many, although in a far less crowded landscape, perhaps even the poor could take in more beauty and certainly more quiet, as market towns held but a few thousand.

Movingly and compellingly, the few pages given over to the plague make the strongest impression. Mortimer asks us to imagine a child kissed to sleep one night, and then the next coughing up blood. The suddenness of death comes across vividly. He estimates about half of those living between 1330 and 1400 died of the plagues that ravaged England in waves, not only the Black Plague mid-century.

The chapter on law shows another strength. It's the clearest description I have found in a popular account of medieval legislation, justice, and how the laws were enforced or broken in the absence of a permanent police force, reliant more on tithe-men called to gather miscreants to bring to sheriffs, and the local pressures and corruption that ensued when justice was carried out in a place where few could go unnoticed. Mortimer stresses the unpredictability of life and death well throughout. The author sustains respect for those six hundred years ago, and reminds us how they were not as different from our own uneasy, uncertain selves as we may imagine. He lets us know what they saw, did, and, to a limited degree given the century's extant data and literacy, wrote and thought.

This closes with a poignant summary of the little left to us from what stories people told. John Gower, the Gawain poet, Piers Plowman, and especially Chaucer gain brief but adroit notice. Rightly, Mortimer concludes by urging us back to read Chaucer, and not only chronicles and roll-books but literature enlivens the contexts Mortimer presents to us efficiently and affectionately. (Amazon US 3-8-12)

Rodney Stark's "Discovering God": Book Review

This sociologist of religion favors "divine accommodation" as his model: "God's revelations are always limited to the current capacity of humans to comprehend"--sometimes "baby talk" is needed, as Moses found out when encountering God, or when Jesus spoke down to his disciples in parables. (6) He dismisses those (see my review of Robert Wright's 2009 "The Evolution of God") who endorse a reductive materialistic--cultural, biological, or psychological--explanation for religious invention and elaboration. He minimizes naturism, animism, ghost theory, and totemism proposed by early anthropologists as rationalizations. He downplays class antagonisms and replaces them with doctrinal disputes. He favors a "universal revelation" by the divine power, given from humanity's dawn.

This book differs from his colleagues' works, which tend to marshal neo-atheist and skeptical arguments against divine inspiration as a traceable presence in the history of religions. While many scholars may disagree with his dismissal of their studies, he advances just as many scholarly works in defense of his proposition. The text tends to move quickly, and while accessible for a general audience, it deserves attention for his nuances and his qualifiers.

Stark surveys the progression from Stone Age to early states in the Middle East and the Americas to Rome efficiently. He marshals evidence that rituals and sacrifices to High Gods pleased prehistoric peoples, ushering in polytheists geared for a temple-oriented, sometimes despotically commanded, polity. This imposition of belief with power diversified into a market-niche strategy geared to a very diverse Roman imperial clientele.

Godless religions, Stark cautions, don't last long outside intellectual or monastic elites. Buddhism, Taoism, and Jainism soon incorporated older folk gods and elements aimed to please lay followers unable to be comforted by abstractions. While India's definitive faiths downgraded earthly existence and worldly attachments, the ancient Chinese blended folk religion with new beliefs. These appealed to everyday people, as Stark reminds readers, and explain why religions tend to multiply gods and rituals rather than remain stark and committed to perhaps a founder's more detached vision of austerity.

In turn, sects rise when the "high tension" of a bold new faith eases, and a purer or more radical version's needed to spark renewal among the laity, and against a complacent priesthood bent on traditional orthodoxy. The "Yahweh-only" faction in Israel demonstrates the force imposed by a minority, who in exile cast off less fervent colleagues to return to their homeland intent on eliminating polytheism, paganism, and tolerance. While Stark accepts that the Exodus happened at least among a small band of Hebrews, he aligns with mainstream theologians (if not congregants in many pews) who accept how many indigenous peoples allied with the Hebrew hardcore to forge a Jewish identity connecting Yahweh to the rise of Judea and Israel, until a tribal god became a national icon, and then not an international deity but a universal Lord demanding fealty.

Common people need assurances brought by easily placated temple deities, whom families can supplicate and feel blessed by. The ancient city-states and emerging nations knew this, while congregations, in Stark's revisionist view, often threatened a nervous Roman power. Before Christians emerged, followers of Isis, Bacchus, and the Jews already in Rome found themselves persecuted and executed by Romans, who suspected upstart religious groups which signaled subversion. Intensity in belief generates "fear and retaliation from less demanding religious organizations and from governments that favor them." (155)

Stark's best points remind us how families comprise the initial circle of those who trust the new founder of a religion, whether based on revelation or inspiration. It expands by tested social bonds, and then market niches which over time not only retain early adopters but attract converts. "Religious capital" invested by a believer may weaken over time, and a new version of the faith may win him or her to convert, but usually this is more likely when "cultural continuity" smooths the transition between, say, Judaism and Christianity, at least long enough to establish it widely so Gentiles can then join as it expands its franchise.

Similarly, pagans warmed better to a variety of the Good News emphasizing classical concepts or symbols. However, Stark argues that from the start, an historically plausible Jesus was "explicitly acknowledged as divine." He rejects any notions of a New Testament not grounded in reality traceable to eyewitnesses, and he denies any gradual shift from Jewish preacher followed by messianic Jews to Pauline redeemer of Gentiles.

This appeal, all the same, built on Jewish diasporic networks, which already had weaker allegiances to orthodox practices, while incorporating not sudden or mass conversions but social alliances which brought in committed members gradually, thus ensuring a devoted band of Christians. This weakened as soon as it became the state religion, and Stark argues how the seeds of the demise of European Christianity were planted as far back as the later Roman empire, when hereditary benefices encouraged family control. This fits into his model of how state religions stagnate, when cults become organizations. He contrasts this with recent growth of Christianity when state sponsorship's lacking; he wonders if a Muslim Europe and a Christian China might be the case a century from now, as fervent believers spread their faiths apart from state control or historical tradition in these lands. (335)

Islam's rise for Stark comes not from any material longing but a spiritual wish to transform trade networks into religious ones paralleling political paths to power. Muhammad emerges as a prophet ready to take advantage of this regional orientation, as a founder of the Arab State. Stark revises the ameliorative or apologetic versions of the Prophet's life, and includes his episodes of caravan robbing, score-settling by murder, and the massacre of the Jews who resisted his control of Medina. As often in history, religious zeal matters less than fear of non-conformity by religious enforcers, as determined as are tyrants and god-kings.

Unifying Arabia, Islam was able to command wider territory with small but disciplined armies. Conversions ("market penetration" to 50%) took two to three centuries, as they did across the Roman Empire for Christians. Neither faith was particularly tolerant once it gained control. Sects proliferated once more, too. As for Islam's demands, so for Allah: submission is required. He's less approachable than the Jewish or Christian God--incomprehensible and inaccessible.

Stark concludes that the Axial Age introduced the concept of ethical behavior rewarding one in the afterlife, or next life, as salvation for those freed from sin. Sin provides an effective social control, cheaper than policing! As statelets and empires emerged from clans and cities, people began to adapt a (Stark thinks diffusion is possible) notion that they were always if invisibly watched, and their secret as well as visible actions would be judged.

Stark reasons a discovery of God through consistent and gradually more sophisticated revelations at this formative period. He posits an "inspired core" from High Gods (regressing to polytheism) to the ancient Hebrews and Christians-- if God exists. In his too-compressed closing paragraphs, he accepts the Christian search for an intelligent designer (based on Alfred North Whitehead's surprising thesis) as the logical force that impelled theologians and scientists to progress towards a discovery of God. (Amazon US 12-13-11)

Robert Wright's "The Evolution of God": Book Review

Applying zero-sum theory to how religion matured as natural selection highlighted altruistic or selfish mechanisms, this surveys the growth of monotheism. Wright's evolutionary background assures that belief in an external power or set of forces remains speculative, not proving existence of such a presence, but explaining how a process parallel to the mysteries in electrons might account for why religion progresses towards tolerance or remains committed to belligerence. It popularizes how how we're wired explains we we're primed to believe, and why getting along with those around us accounts for why we invented religion.

"Religion, having come from the brain of people, is bound to bear the marks of our species, for better and worse." (32) Wright begins with hunter-gatherers, where the imperative to sustain morality need not have a deity's rewards or punishments come into the situation. Yet, the natural tendency to attribute spirits (as experienced in dreams) to the dead and then to build a system of explaining why right and wrong behaviors emerge from good and bad actions accounts for the start of what will become more organized as small clans of 30-50 people begin to trade and clash with neighbors, and as tribes form chiefdoms and nations begin.

I liked his anthropologically derived examples of what might echo these earlier stages in religion: a shark attack might be rationalized if one was a Polynesian thief. Eskimo shamans convinced women that they could be cured of sin if they slept with shamans. "Every religion, to survive elementary logical scrutiny," must develop "its explanatory loopholes." (66) Faith allowed justification for cooperating with the gods and priests and status quo; human unhappiness or the arrival evil came about when the gods and their representatives were opposed. Wright explains how this system was first analyzed. Functionalists who favor religion as leading to altruism and cooperation contended early on in anthropology with quasi-"Marxists" who found religion's "opiate" as another power play to enforce guilt, oppression, and hierarchy. (133)

He leans towards another tendency: using foreign and domestic policy as models for how, as in early Judaism, the tolerance of Canaanite-derived polytheism might be more or less acceptable for the indigenous Hebrews depending on how Judea and Israel were getting along with Assyria or Egypt at the time. This Abrahamic orientation, of a jealous and aggressive God besting His rivals, means that Judaism, and later Christianity and Islam, could argue that those within a faith were protected and empowered against their rival unbelievers, heretics, and pagans, depending on who was fighting whom and who was allied with whom.

He considers how Philo of Alexandria and Buddhist ideas of a force moving within history as well as free of it might be paralleled with the Logos advanced by Greeks and then the Gospel of John. (233) Wright's elaboration can be more mystical than logical, but Wright speculates how this Logos through Christ became a "divinely sponsored illusion." (302) That is, as religion evolved, this divine force became more apparent--not that it exists per se, but it may, as he suggests later on, be akin to how an electron is seen and not seen.

Wright's version of Christianity reminds us how Jesus was a Jew preaching to Jews a harsher message of messianic imminence and apocalyptic predictions than Paul, who marketed a more internationalized figure of a redemptive savior for a more inclusive, faith-based, mutually supportive communal model tailored for a diverse Roman system of traders and buyers. Early Christians first used Jewish diasporic networks to firm up their brand appeal before going global. As with Bill Gates, Paul the Apostle was able to "borrow" what worked from earlier and competing systems to respond to what his customers wanted from religion. (246; compare the rational theory model applied by Rodney Stark in "Discovering God" recently reviewed by me.)

These computer analogies cleverly keep the argument intriguing, even though at many points, Wright's dogged return to non-zero-sum and zero-sum theory and very close readings of  Hebrew biblical scholarship slow the pace. By contrast he skims over the Hagarism argument of Patricia Crone and Michael Cook when it comes to analyzing how Jewish alliances might have been far more present in very early Islam than Koranic sources let on. Wright's presentation of Islam is peppier, however, and he invites us to consider how "modern" its message was by comparison, as it had the advantage of building on Judaism, Christianity, and Arab paganism which were familiar, as was Allah, to his first audiences, preparing them for another push of an aggressively argued bold "new" faith across the deserts and seas.

Could these three Religions of the Book have found a less angry path? The alternative of King Ashoka in India who converted to Buddhism after war but who then promoted peace and mutual understanding between faiths is raised briefly. Wright judges that gradually religion under monotheism has eased up on intolerance, as international amity trumps national or tribal animosity, but it's a very guarded judgement. Technology of munitions and of computers enables a sinister threat to spread along with fundamentalism.

In conclusion, Wright sums up religious parallels or open-ended encounters with science. This opens up what could have been another long book, but its conclusion deserves quoting. "Religion arose out of a hodgepodge of genetically based material mechanisms designed by natural selection for thoroughly mundane purposes." (482) Whether you agree or disagree with this statement, this book's worth studying.
(Amazon US 12-12-11; author's website for book)

J.C.A. Gaskin's "The Quest for Eternity": Book Review

Do we define God by faith or logic? Miracles or belief? Reason or inspiration? Open-minded yet skeptical, balanced while probing, this philosopher tackles the Big(gest) Question. In 180 pages, intricately argued, J.C.A. Gaskin examines the familiar, and scholarly, cases for and against God. It's an extremely slow book to read, in the best sense: it packs reason and reflection into every sentence.

Gaskin starts by defining the concept in a way agreeable to the major monotheistic faiths: "There exists one God who is creator and sustainer of all things; who is omnipotent, omniscient and eternal; who is an agent able to act everywhere without a body, and who is morally concerned with mankind." (24)

He continues as he begins chapter two--grappling with "initial obstructions," with sly wit as well as insight. "One of the ways which the devout believer may seek to insulate his belief from criticism is by adapting a fideistic attitude: 'The certainty of my faith comes by the grace of God alone, not from dubious evidence and uncertain chains of reasoning.' One of the ways in which the atheist may do most harm to religion is by agreeing with him." (25)

After fideism and Freudian attempts to analyze faith are examined, and causes are distinguished from beliefs, chapter three looks into four "public arguments" affirming belief in God. The cosmological and regress arguments are shown to be "a priori"; two versions of arguments by design from an intelligent orderer and an adaptation of means to ends by a designer are "a posteriori." Anselm's ontological proof's examined, and many more, in light of Aquinas, Darwin, Kant, Hume, and Leibniz. This is daunting territory, but Gaskin guides us.

Gaskin's at his sharpest when inquiring into divine omniscience and "timelessness" as attributes that defy logic or probability. While (I before reading this) always figured God by definition could write his own rules, Professor Gaskin insists that our human conceptions of God need to align with how God works within our world and limits, not by simply transcending or overruling our own laws. This segues later in chapter six into a deft look at claims for God's existence by way of supposed miracles, as "violation or coincidence concepts."

Chapter four peers into "private illuminations" that people have, claiming God speaks or manifests himself to one in an interior fashion, which by definition lacks "public" exhibition. The "numinous" gains thoughtful consideration, and the longing many have of awe or wonder or terror at the contemplation of the all-powerful or eternal elicits a moving corroboration that anyone might agree with, no matter their own predilections, in an eloquent passage from Gaskin.

He remains cautious, by profession. The next chapter moves into "external skepticism" as an argument against God. If God is beyond easy comprehension after thousands of years of human efforts, "that is exactly what one would expect if the world were in fact the creation of an intelligence which intended to leave us to our own judgements, and free of the crushing and distorting knowledge that he was in fact as we suppose him to be." (116-7)

Logical positivism earns Gaskin's scorn as a way to devalue statements of belief; the coherence of a totally powerful God outside space and time while dominating every aspect of it makes my head spin, as Gaskin patiently dismantles some of the claims that hold God to our rules while allowing him a free pass at the same time. How God can overrule the rules by which his universe works and by which he exacts fidelity and obedience from his human subjects, Gaskin suggests, wearies rational puzzlers. How can God have it both ways, as we conceive him? Gaskin alludes to Milton's Satan: "More succinctly, either Satan has a chance, or God is unjust, or the believer is 'in wandering mazes lost'. The agnostic may well feel tempted to let him stay lost." (136)

Atheism has its own limits, he concludes after another chapter. Not that this strengthens theism, but without some appeal as religion impels to look to "moral eternities" to hammer home the ethical imperatives, secular morality may lack the added punch that religion's gained to compel modern people to take problems of global destruction seriously, when every moral lapse and slight sometimes seems to be inflated to a human rights violation in an era where all appeal to human courts alone for redress of wrongs and for restitution. Also, a coldly existential or utilitarian outlook may leave us with less comfort than that enjoyed by a believer.

This guide appeared in 1984, so Marx gains a bit of attention, if briefly, for its attempt at a model of a "secular salvation." This aspect near the end of this compressed book merited more elaboration, as did the existentialist p-o-v. The sociological ramifications, for instance, of religion regarding its utility don't earn attention. However, for a short book, this packs considerable heft.

Overall, this is recommended, but with a reservation: this "outline of the philosophy of religion" looks far more closely at proofs for and arguments against God's existence, and not much at the wider issues concerning monotheistic religions. Islam's barely touched on, Judaism not much, and Christianity more in general fashion. (I found Donald A. Wells' 1962 study "God, Man, and the Thinker" more comprehensive, but less chatty: it's around 500 pages compared to Gaskin's compact, if challenging, primer.) 

For Gaskin, Marxism ignores "cosmic questions," as does a postmodern "godless" Christianity as invented by some theologians. Still, secular morality suffices, Gaskin argues if with a bit of regret. While it lacks the ability to address the longings embedded in us who wonder for more "potentialities" harnessing "ultimate creative good against destructive evil" in an almost mythic sense (he brings in Tolkien well here), it must be enough for skeptics and atheists, who by definition may never be metaphysically satisfied. (170)

He wraps it up with a summation of the coherence or incoherence of our definitions of what we understand to be God. He elaborates a metaphorical "Garden" for belief and "Desert" for atheists as alternative scenarios. Both are reasonable, both possible, both supported by "some evidence." (175) What's the "ultimate reality of the world" as it "actually is"? Which model do we prefer for "human purposes"?

Theism is "coherent," but in philosophical terms, a "weakly reasonable belief" with a "weak probability of truth" (178) given the lack of strong evidence. Yet, for "the generality of the world," Gaskin hesitantly concludes, "most of the surviving influences of theism are better than most of the consequences of atheism." (179; his italics) If "man does not live by bread alone," the central "insight" of religion, than maybe an Epicurean "acceptance" works best, "that the world is as it is, and is all there is; but the hope of other worlds somehow lingers."

The nuance of this study makes it a worthwhile companion. I was surprised by his closing argument, but in reflection, it fits the subtle and dogged nature of this thought-provoking examination of one of our most enduring questions. As a philosopher (and gardener and teller of ghost stories), he's a patient tutor. (Amazon US 1-6-12)

Donald Wells' "God, Man and the Thinker": Book Review

Slow going, but worth the mental exertion, this 1962 survey of philosophical approaches to religion is not theology. That is, it isn't normative, so it doesn't set standards for belief to defend from the presumption God exists. Instead, this analyzes the systems set up upon belief. It delineates the pro-con arguments for religion, God, and dogma, and then it judges their merits. Rather than trying to prove what faith asserts as beyond reason, it uses reason to investigate faith claims as far as logic can, before reaching a logically logical impasse or barrier.

This distinction bedevils many scholars and seekers. Wells diligently, for 500 pages, shows what fifty years ago could be published by a mainstream (and not university) press, Random House, as a challenging study for an audience able to handle "nisus, tychism, apodictic" as words not summoning up my red squiggles as I type them, and to know what "Capua" stood for metaphorically. As for me, I had to look up all four words, but overall, Wells' careful examination rewards the reader, who, if like me, will take awhile to progress through its vast chapters. This is not a drawback of Wells' book, but it is an indication of its rigor.

I read this after J.C.A. Gaskin's considerably peppier and compact 1984 "The Quest for Eternity" (see my review). Much as I admired Gaskin's primer, its minor shortcoming was that it concentrated more on proofs for and against the existence of God and less on the wider philosophical examination of religious truth-claims in historical and contemporary settings. These, Professor Wells emphasizes, cannot by reason be ultimately tested, for resting by definition on faith, they elude "evidential proofs." (101) For instance, St. Thomas Aquinas claims, as Wells shows, that God's existence is not a theological but a philosophical problem; theologians by nature already assert there's a God. (Gaskin is also good on this aspect; Wells sometimes gets impatient with his predecessors and deniers both, so testiness lurks herein. This tone of dismissal is a slight letdown in this otherwise valuable compendium.)

Most people who don't believe, Wells reasons, aren't going to be convinced of God by such philosophical proofs; however, science may dissuade those whose lack of faith is deepened by rational analysis of religious textual or dogmatic claims that can be falsified from ancient sources which tend to be lacking in accuracy. Metaphorically, as St. Augustine argued, Scripture can be interpreted when facts clash with its assertions, but for fundamentalist Protestants, as Wells sees it, they are trapped in claiming the inerrancy of Scripture even as each believer can lay claim to his or her reading of the text as true. Rapidly, this leads to endless fission in the Protestant realm, without the controlling force of Catholic interpretation imposed from above. This was written while Vatican II was convened, so a slight shift may or may not have happened since, but this observation appears accurate for the time of this book, and most times over the past five centuries.

Wells deals with much material, and he can be wry at times despite his academic demeanor. He concludes about Christian boasts that it alone is the best religion by reminding readers that folks tend to show preferences for their conventional religion based far more on where they are raised than by "any claims of cognitive or normative superiority for any religion." He adds that if there was a superior religion, it'd have to have "super-empirical" evidence to back up its factual existence! "So far, the shrewdest way in which the claim to uniqueness has been defended has been to appeal to intuitive insights or divine revelations. These, however, suffer from being inexplicable, incommunicable, and, from the perspective of an independent observer, indefensible." (282)

Overall, this is not an easy book to navigate, but effort pays off. Philosophy of religion is defined and contrasted with science and philosophy itself in part one; religion is defined in a variety of ways--belief, feeling, and ethics--before being "nominally defined" and its origins probed into in part two; the idea of God or gods takes up part four; arguments for the existence of God comprise part five.

Problems of Religious Knowledge serve as part six, as applied to truth-claims. Natural evil, immortality; knowledge of religion as faith vs. reason comprise parts seven-nine. From here it gets a bit easier, and after 150 pages or so, issues like psychic claims and scriptural manufacture enliven this treatment. Inerrant Scripture, fixed vs. evolving religions, fundamentalism, and modernism take up parts ten-thirteen. Humanism, psychology, the church and state over the centuries, and finally science cover the remaining parts through seventeen, with a few study questions appended, leaving me to wonder if Wells' college students half a century ago could handle such daunting material! (Amazon US 1-19-12)

Michael Molloy's "Experiencing the World's Religions": Review

Most "reviews" (of this textbook on Amazon) remarked briefly on its delivery, condition, or the student's course. A couple criticized doctrinal points, and a few praised its tone and scope. I've been assigned (note the verb--we profs don't always have a choice!) this text to teach a Comparative Religions course, so I've prepared by studying it cover to cover.
"Understanding Religions" opens, then indigenous varieties, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism & Sikhism, Daoism & Confucianism, and Shintoism. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam follow. Alternative religions and "The Modern Search" wrap it up.

Michael Molloy's updated this all for its fifth ed. He takes his task seriously, but he adds insight and verve. That is, he integrates personal encounters into the beginning of his chapters as well as within them, keeping the pace snappier than a chronological structure (each religious tradition's evolution) and geographical one (first ancients everywhere, then Asian, then Middle Eastern, then Western, New Age, earth-based, alternative, and "new religious movements") might portend. His own Hawaiian orientation allows him to use this logical East-West portal as a place for contemplating the island's indigenous and syncretic faiths and outlooks, and his Californian upbringing enriches this with another fitting place from which to scan the varieties of belief and ritual and outlook.

I kept an eye out for how contemporary scholarship, often not matching the mindset of many believers in the pew or temple, entered his treatment of issues. For instance, the lack of evidence for the Exodus, the writing down of sutras long after the death of the historical Buddha, the composition of the Qur'an, and the lag between the ministry of Jesus and the recording of the Gospels are common topics of discussion in seminars but not always within congregations. Molloy manages to address these within his chapters, while not overemphasizing controversial subjects or diminishing the outlooks adopted by everyday folks. He also adds endnotes where some intricate issues are expanded.

Within his Buddhism chapter I found the pithiest yet most diverse discussion of the possible meanings for the mantra "Om mani padme hum" yet, ones more advanced textbooks had not summed up so well. His Christianity chapter notes well how the Gospels differ in depicting Jesus by a process analogous to four portraits rather than identical photographs as it were. He cites another image given for the Qur'an, its suras stacked like leaves falling, the earliest layers first and then later ones on top of them. Such comparisons show the care with which Molloy's arranged his material.

Boldfaced terms are glossed after each chapter, and a handsome timeline graces the flyleaves. Films, music, websites, questions for study, and suggested reading append each chapter. It's not a fatal flaw, but I found his reading lists often bafflingly eclectic or way too narrow or offbeat. This may attest to his wide-ranging attention to quirkier approaches into what makes a faith or a ritual "tick." You never know what source may spark one's own interest.

Overall, as the "further reading" choices don't detract from the success of this ambitious, 560-page work, I'd give it a favorable rating. Another reviewer remarked on the text's lack of alternative religious coverage. Within the limits of two chapters of a vast survey, I'd counter that Molloy examines enough material to give a sense--if not a full treatment of--newer religions, sects, and emerging eclectic or humanist approaches. He discusses the dark side of religious suppression; the damage done by intolerance; the treatment of dissenters, women, and minorities; and the possibilities of multicultural and inter-religious progress. He encourages a critical position that places one within the perspective of each religious variety, enhanced by arts and culture.

Molloy ends this edition wonderfully with a conversation he had with friends, in which Einstein's perspective about miracles, God, and belief offers a profound reflection on the great matters this text in six-hundred pages addresses. Its photos, sidebars, and diversions may encourage respect and reflection, no matter what belief or lack of belief or combinations thereof its readers hold. (Amazon US 12-16-11, to counter lots of misspelled twenty-word blather posted by students complaining or praising their textbook's delivery, price, condition, professor, or seller, not the contents of the volume itself.)

Gaeilge: ag spreagadh nó ag fáil bháis?

Chonaic mé seo nuair ag lorg ar an líne. Ní mheas mé go raibh ró-dhrúisiúil. Ach, b'fhéidir duine eile go mbeadh n-aontaíonn.

Sílim go feadfaidh is cuma é. Ar ndóigh, níl moran cainteoirí dúchais anois. Tá beagnach gach duine againn foghlaimeoirí.

Mar sin, ní mór duinn a spreagadh a úsáid "ár theanga féin"! Níl easca a labhair as Gaeilge amháin in Éirinn féin. Iarr Manchán Magan a dhéanamh seo go cruinn go díreach dhá uair sa 2007 agus 2008 ansin.

Léigh agallamh leis Antoine Ó Flatharta tamall ó shin. Rúgadh agus tógadh i gConamara Thuas, pléadh an drámadóir faoi "an cheist teanga." Dúirt sé a lig "ag fáil bháis leis dínit" a dteanga féin.

Ar an taobh eile, bíonn duine eigin ag dul Gaeilge ina scoileannaí agus na cathrachaí i bhfeabhas ag timpeall muid ar fud a domhain agus in an tir ducháis. Ma fheiceann daoine ógra an 'póstaer inchonspóide', fiafaidh siadsan faoi é. Gan amhras, baois na hóige go treoraigh go gaois don aois!

Irish: delighting or dying?

I saw this when searching online. I don't reckon it was too lusty. But, perhaps other people might not agree.               

I think that it doesn't matter. Of course, there's not many native speakers now. There's few but learners among every one of us.      

Therefore, there's a need for us to enjoy 'our own tongue'! It's not easy to converse in only Irish in Ireland itself. Manchán Magan tried this precisely so twice in 2007 and 2008 there.

I read an interview with Antoine Ó Flatharta a while ago. Born and raised in South Conamara, the playwright discussed "the language question."  He said to let his own language "die with dignity."

On the other hand, some people are changing Irish in schools and in cities for the better all around us across the globe and in the native land. If young folks see the 'controversial poster', they may themselves ask about it. Without a doubt, the folly of youth may lead to the wisdom of elders!

Póstaer Inchonspóide/ Questionable Poster
Very loose translation: "It's possible to use your own tongue. Can you do it? Start using your own tongue! Speak Irish."

Mary Lou & Robert J. Heiss' "The Story of Tea": Book Review

Like the tango and ta-chi, tea brewing is practiced but never perfected. So the authors opine. They combine a "cultural history" with "drinking guide," though much more of the former than the latter in regards to particular varietals. The Heisses have sold tea since 1974, and this narrative shines with their travel accounts to Asia on the tea trail. Not only China and India, but descriptions of Taiwan, Sri Lanka, and Nepal gain color and verve when these regions enter their survey. Types are told of, and the many varietals of yellow, pu-erh, and white teas add comprehensive coverage along with the venerable black, green, and oolong categories.

This six-tea strategy affords the Heiss's book more expansion, and part of the inherent interest in reading this handsomely designed, large-format volume is its attention to sidebars with highlights from their visits, and notes on tea culture and particular sights or events associated with tea's globalized impacts. This is a fit companion for those who liked Beatrice Hohenegger's historical account (see my review) of Eastern heritage, Western trends, and ethical and ecological concerns, "Liquid Jade," as the Heisses explore similar terrain, if much more the Asian cultural legacy than the European continuity and transformation of tea. Still, both books research the fair trade, organic, and moral considerations well, and compliment each other.

Similarly, John Blofeld's assured if more reflective "The Chinese Art of Tea" (see my review) makes a suitable match, although writing two decades later, the Heisses possess the advantage of up-to-date chapters on places such as Vietnam, Korea, Indonesia, and African nations where the manufacture of tea has boomed recently, or is trying to make a comeback after political unrest or war has interfered with progress. As skilled observers and merchants, they pay attention to the ups and downs of tea quality in various lands, and remind us of tea's variability as in wine, depending on "terroir" and year and climate and happenstance.

The health benefits of tea are less trumpeted due to recent and conflicting reports about antioxidents and catechins and often inflated, apparently, claims made. The authors reason it's better for now to take tea as a "tonic" and not regard it as a "curative." If any side effects boost health, all the better.

Naturally, CTC is downgraded and orthodox methods boosted, as this book means to inform you about the quality an affordable--if not dirt-cheap in nearly the literal sense of the term for "dust" and many teabags--loose-leaf tea offers. Tea-balls, we find, are discouraged, and a list of providers in cities and online steers consumers to better outlets for wiser purchases. The authors make a convincing case for buying better tea that promotes worker and ecological sustainability, and which ensures the hard work of its humble producers finds moral and financial recompense in a market that keeps pushing down prices even as consumers in the West begin to demand, here and there, more attention to how tea is made morally and not only as a bargain.

It's readable, leisurely in parts if somewhat uneven. Overall, an efficiently presented overview and in-depth guide, depending on the topic. One chapter's too-brief an encyclopedia with photos of cups filled with thirty-two or so brews and a list of their qualities. One problem is that the ratings used for Ceylon and India teas, with their strings of letters appended, get a chart, but not real elaboration. They are included in the sampler chapter under black teas, but this is not enough to show how they differ, and how they taste different.

While I wanted much more of the encyclopedia's sampler of a few types, I understand a subsequent book "The Tea Enthusiast's Handbook") by the couple has appeared, so this may answer my expectation for more choices. (However, I am unsure if this newer handbook boils down what's elaborated here, or refines or builds on it; at two-hundred pages it's half the length, much smaller than this elegant, cookbook-sized reference work.) [Posted at Amazon US 2-10-12]