Keith Ward's "The Case for Religion": Book Review

Relying on Bronze Age verses to critique religion's essence is like analyzing astronomy through astrology, or chemistry by alchemy. So argues this Oxford professor of divinity. The paperback edition features a large heading on the cover telling how Ward confronts "Dawkins and the New Atheism." Basically, Ward protests his fellow Oxford colleague for relying on simplistic readings of scripture while ignoring theology; I found Ward somewhat stronger in challenging Dawkins rather than Dennett, but both are dispatched very hastily in a brief preface when another book might have better suited Ward to take on his opponents with the depth deserved.

To sum up, "superstitious vulgarity" too often has been assumed by scientific and secular critics as the highest (or lowest) level to which "a complex affective encounter with the being of the cosmos" might attain--not only for modern people but for our ancestors, who could have turned to the gods or God out of not fear and trembling but out of poetry, love, and understanding, however partial or half-formed. Ward presents an overview of the philosophy of religion. He considers not only familiar criticisms, but formulations by its adherents to build upon its visions for bettering humanity.

Whether genuine or a delusion, human efforts to call on a transcendental force to guide us, away from malign presences or towards benign outcomes, appear deeply enmeshed within cultures and peoples, however diverse or scattered in time and place. Instead of primitive, Ward substitutes primal as a telling adjective for the core basis upon which religions have been able to progress, and sometimes regress. He insists that the more we understand about the non-mechanical, non-rational, yet civilizing power within religion, the more we may be able "to unlock a perception of meaning and value in the cosmos, which is necessary for the realisation of full human cognitive potential." (33)

This study analyzes anthropological, political-economic, and psychological critiques; Ward's sharp on Marxist weaknesses which promote an idealized humanity while denigrating nearly all actual humans. He's pessimistic that any system basing its success on human transformation can succeed, given inherent weaknesses we share, but he reminds us how facile put-downs from liberal skeptics of religious possibilities for not reductive materialism but progressive expansion of social justice and equality may emerge from religion. He skims over a provocative assertion that liberals should not be blamed for injecting secularism into (post-?)modern biblical exegeses, when the shift towards progressive social aims can be found in post-Enlightenment trends within Christian interpretation.

Given the relative coverage afforded each topic, however, as the next section quickly takes in the major world religions, Ward's attention to so many myriad details may be limited. The short length of a book taking on so much leads to summation and asides that must speak for much more between the lines. Ward emphasizes a definition of religion open to the transcendental inherent within all times and places, and which, as Marxists found, could not be eradicated, only warped into mass idolatry and massive iconography. "Religion is a combination of a theoretical conception of reality and of claims to experience, and to participate in the power of a transcendent reality. This is a state of being which is other and greater in power than things in the world of space and time." (103)

The next section charts the cultural shift away from evidence asserted to experience examined. Reform led to critique. Pure reason gave way to free questioning of authoritative sources, scientifically and scripturally. Ward differentiates a scientific method from the "discernment" which may compel a believer to commit one's self, even if this "matter" cannot be proven empirically.

The modern skepticism we inherit leaves no room for revelation's claims, unable to be verified. "The intuitive reason of an atheist will not be identical with the intuitive reason of a Christian. One includes God as an axiom and apprehensions of the supernatural as data, where the other does not include either." (167) How to account not for divine dictation but inspiration via a divine presence? Not easy to answer, but Ward in the latter third of this study tries to figure it out.

Ward investigates Kant's endeavor to map out a more rational understanding of morality as a start. A surprising place, but Ward's past work on Kant affords a fresh examination of how truth-claims in religion can be analyzed, and how the Enlightenment set up autonomy for one's self as with others. Ward creates a Kantian model of liberalism able to examine experience yet make room for freedom.

In the concluding chapters, Ward tackles an ambitious project. He asserts an inclusive variation on John Hick's pluralist model allowing religions to claim part of a whole which may elude human understanding. Flawed as all of human religious attempts are, still, a chance to adapt the personalist Kantian encouragement of an individual and liberal approach grounded in the latest of a move from ancient-local, medieval and early-modern canonical, recent-critical, and contemporary-global phases may free the future of religious adherents to pursue a more expansionist, far less exclusionist ideal.

More than one way must be granted to seek the Eternal Divine, Ward reasons, and his reason itself makes room for what revelation might move people towards fulfilling as a kind of 'theonomy,' to use Paul Tillich's term, in sidling into an imminent realization of what now may be still obscure. Ward packs a lot into the closing vignette, seeing an Indra's Net of multifaceted ways we can view the eternal latent in the external, and calling to at least some of us internally.  He encourages a move to a convergent spirituality where everyone on this planet can find a manner in which to find their own relationship within the spaces open between the Transcendent and the physical, empirical world.

P.S. I reviewed a decade ago Ward's "God: A Guide for the Perplexed"; it appeared at Amazon US where my take on Ward's 2007 "Case" was incarnated 3-5-12. P.P.S. I append his insight into Buddhism after he cites a typical Zen master's "Yes" and "No" responses to a seeker. Ward sensibly concludes: "Perhaps 'Yo' would do, and it would be the answer to all Buddhist questions." (133)

Karen Armstrong's "The Great Transformation": Book Review

I heard here the same sympathetic tones as her "Buddha" in the Penguin Lives series, which I reviewed 3/08 on Amazon US, or her short studies of Muhammad and Islam. I wanted to compare this to Robert Wright's "The Evolution of God," Rodney Stark's "Discovering God" and Nicholas Wade's "The Faith Instinct" (all reviewed by me in 2011): they explain the hard-wired or embedded models for religious evolution from varying perspectives of economics, markets, and the sciences.

Well, Armstrong does not base her study on any model other than a history of ideas one. Not by diffusion, not by memes, not by franchises, her ambitious survey links China, India, the Middle East, and Greece by a shared shift away from ritual and top-down imposition of belief into a gentler, kinder compassion emanating from self-criticism, introspection, responsibility, and carried into action stressing social justice and practical cooperation. Certainly, this echoes our own times with their progressive bent, and such scholars as Armstrong favor this slant, aimed at a broad audience.

As in her "History of God" and her works on the Buddha and Islam, she packs a lot of learning gleaned from solid research; she tends towards popularizing and summing up scholarship for a wider readership rather than pushing her own original insights. She also leans towards generous sympathy, as in her closing section on Islam. Wright, Stark, Wade advance their own theories more than she does. We need such hefty works as these to inform us of how ancient many ideas we search out in religious traditions today have been, and how often they are suppressed or compromised given the counter-trends (Wright tends to emphasize these) towards doctrinal conformity and social control by these world-shaking religious powers, allied with political clout. Bigotry, as she closes her book elegantly reminding us, can emanate from secular as well as religious fundamentalism. Instead, we all need to look inside ourselves, do right, and share responsibility. Armstrong stresses the turning away from violence and prejudice, and she seeks Karl Jasper's "a pause for liberty," non-violence, and the Golden Rule in her study of the Axial Age, extending here to encompass ca. 900-220 BCE.

She carefully narrates an immense amount of data and stories. Her strength lies in the vignettes that enable her to loosen up on the recital of names and dates, and to allow some room to look into mentalities. For instance, the Greek new wine festival in spring turns eerie in her depiction of Anthestera; Amos finds himself overtaken, not pleasantly, by the prophecy he channels of Yahweh; Psalm 82 shows the "kenosis" or emptying that prophets embodied to advance justice and which would be revived by Paul to promote Jesus' mission; Yajnavalkya's formulation of "karma" and "atman" enhance his simple lesson to his son of salty water; Plutarch's fragment #168 of the moments before death is compared with the loss of consciousness by the ecstatics (~"stepping out"): those caught up in the Eleusinian mysteries into "entheos"--"within is a God." (187)

I found myself less taken by the Chinese entries, but Mozi's logical, moral challenge to Confucian "family ties" as insufficiently transforming for a wider society and Zhuangzi's "Way of Heaven" earn notice. Eventually, that empire learned the virtues of syncretism and inclusion. Still, after so many warlords, enforced order, massacres, and contention, the Chinese chapters did not catch fire as often; they seemed grimmer than even the Homeric interludes full of fury, half-celebrating the warrior, half-hinting at the folly of such mortal combat compared to the wonders of a treasured earthly life. India's yogins and Samkhya gain wonderful exposition, and we glimpse how the Vedic tradition blurred into a breath meditation that appears to go back to very remote Aryan times.

So much is only glimpsed; as with the often shadowy Greek rituals, Armstrong tells what we can puzzle out, but the dots cannot always be connected given the lack of evidence, despite the diligence of her and her scholarly colleagues. But, as with the reformation by the Deuteronomists and biblical chroniclers during the Judean kingdom's success and the Assyrian and Babylonian incursions, what we have learned lately about the truth of how the Hebrew Scriptures came to be arranged to make Moses and the Exodus "backdated" for issues six hundred-odd years later in an embattled homeland,  makes for useful reading. So does the moral of Ashoka's good intentions to build a peaceable empire, the "bhakti" yoga renewal, or rabbinic Judaism's "profound reticence" in theology and mysticism.

Armstrong does not strive for a stirring turn of phrase; she prefers a steady exposition. Still, elegant moments linger. Of the renewal in the Holiness Code by the P-writer of scripture in exile: "Babylonia could be a new Eden, where God had walked with Adam in the cool of the evening." (181) "Aristotle had no ambition to leave Plato's cave." (327). Of the Buddha's shock at "four disturbing sights" before his awakening: "Once the suffering that is an inescapable part of the human condition has broken through the customary barricades that we have erected against it, we can never see the world in the same way again. Gotama had allowed the knowledge of 'dukkha' to invade his life, and his quest could begin." (275-6) Like Socrates or Confucius, the Buddha represents for Armstrong the paradigm of the Axial Age by "enhanced humanity"--he stood for an archetype of "a place apart" separate from but at one with our world. "Suffering shatters neat, rationalistic theology." (398)

A few spot-checked references puzzled me; I often consulted end citations. For instance, I cannot tell if Armstrong translated to use in her narration excerpts of the Pali texts for Buddhist sayings or if her "version" is taken from other renderings. She refers to the "nothing" definition of God by "later monotheists" via her "History of God" book but the note offers no pagination. She sums up Platonic absolute beauty as an eternal form well, yet (at least at first mention) she gives no textual context.

However, I gained knowledge from Armstrong's careful arrangement of vast material. Four-hundred pages, as dense as they can be for a topic meriting close attention, manage to compress information into an accessible overview for the patient inquirer. It's pitched at a reader who must be willing to ponder its elevated contents as well as absorb its perspectives. While it does of course leap between four settings during each of its thematic chapters, with not much discussion of why ideas erupted when they did, as opposed to what they were, mystery remains, perhaps appropriately for this elusive topic. It's not a facile presentation, and this only confirms its appeal for a reader who's open-minded (the original meaning of "skeptic," as she defines it). (Amazon US 4-27-12)

Robert Bellah's "Religion in Human Evolution": Book Review

"Even though, as it is widely believed, morality and religion are evolutionary emergents, evolution cannot tell us which one of them to follow." (48) This "discouraging but indisputable truth," for Bellah, demonstrates the challenge of finding meaning "only in evolution" for today's scholars and thinkers. This review, in-depth as far as small space allows, looks at how Bellah's work compares to recent surveys by other scholars of the Axial Age. A life's work, for a sociologist born in 1927, remains a formidable contribution in six-hundred narrated pages and, as he acknowledges, stopping 2,000 years before our era, it's long enough. It gives prolonged attention to what Max Weber and Emile Durkheim pioneered: the study of religious aspects as they culturally evolved.

Of course, it's bolstered by what science knows now vs. when his predecessors labored to make sense out of religion's roots and branches. His opening starts slowly, as "Religion and Reality" shuffles various capabilities of how we know concepts which in turn will contribute to varieties of religious experience. It's not as compelling as I wished, but chapter two, about evolution's "metanarrative," picked up the pace.

Still, Bellah admits he's as baffled by cosmology as we are, while he tries to cover the enormous span of physical evolution in an alternately meticulous and halting manner that doesn't do as much justice to his primary concerns as they merit. He proposes that we regard ancient accounts as "true myths," and he urges respect for religion on its own terms the same as science, revamping Stephen Jay Gould's "non-overlapping magisteria" as overlapping, each sphere usefully based in not reductionist but emergent explanations, to borrow from biologists, that take on the field at its own level. Science and religion both, Bellah notes, appeal to a sense of awe when their most eloquent advocates attempt to articulate the persistent mystery at the heart of how each field of inquiry unfolds over eons.

These eons, as empathy in its "motor mimicry and emotional contagion" shows over a hundred million years of primate evolution, stretch into pre-linguistic ritual and what Bellah regards as "sacred play" in such activities. While Bellah correctly critiques in passing both Nicholas Wade's "The Faith Instinct" and Robert Wright's "The Evolution of God" (both reviewed by me in 2011), I think Bellah's analysis wanders into territory that the main narrative did not need, and that Wade offers a more cogent popularization of the pre-linguistic stages, despite the monotheistic limits of both Wade and Wright which Bellah attempts to counter with his massive analysis and compendium. I still did not find as clear an explanation of ritual play as I expected, even after a lot of research here. But I did learn how only our species can march in step or dance as one troupe...

He applies, loosely, Merlin Donald's mimetic, mythic, and theoretical stages of human culture (these augment the hybrid system we have that diverges from the episodic consciousness we share with higher mammals) to parallel his own enactive, symbolic, and conceptual religious representational types. This chapter uses three traditional societies today which offer glimpses into mythic cultures once upon a time. The Kalapalo of Brazil, the Australian Aborigine Walbiri, and the Navajo demonstrate how ritual and narrative produce meaning. Bellah seemed more confident in this chapter, as after all he draws on the Navajo, the subject of his earliest research decades ago.

Tribal egalitarianism, he posits, does impose the will of the collective on the will of each, and its intermediate position between the despotism of primates and that of archaic states gains coverage with two Polynesian entities, Tikopia and Hawai'i, where a comparatively better documented record survives of what a kingdom bent on imposing its will on a people subjected to a relentless social system under brutal control under dominant males meant, in terms of taboo, ritual, and--as with many such societies--human sacrifice. There's no romanticizing "pre-contact" Polynesia in these pages.

With the Hawaiians, we benefit from a written history of what was still oral memory via David Malo's testimony; for Mesopotamia, the records of course exist, but much about belief must be extrapolated from tablets and archeological sites. Next, Bellah contrasts the Mesopotamian "heterarchy" with the Polynesian archaic states; as for the Egyptians, we are "creatures of myth" as inescapably as they were, for after all, "we are what we remember." (228)

Archaic states, with "vertical" enforcement where the king acts in league with the gods to order the cosmos and the polity, replace the imposed solidarity of tribes. In turn, the axial age enables the "moral upstart who relies on speech, not force," appears to stay alive long enough to appeal to ethical standards and to call for reflection. Karen Armstrong's "The Great Transformation" (reviewed immediately prior to Bellah's book) reminds us of this shift towards compassion and self-analysis. Bellah favors a more academic tone than Armstrong, and the details she highlights tend to be overshadowed by the scholarly colleagues Bellah introduces and answers in his dense discussion. However, Bellah cites Karl Jaspers: "The Axial Age too ended in failure. History went on." (qtd. 282)

While Armstrong, as Rodney Stark's "Discovering God" (reviewed also in late 2011), prefers a more optimistic, if guarded, spin on the meaning of the Axial Age if we regard it as beneficial. Bellah opts for nuance. A clan of frontier Canaanites worshipped a generic, or a high, god "El" from the pantheon, but El did not seem to matter much "at the level of family piety." (qtd. 288) He and Asherah have children, including Baal and Yahweh; gradually as a jealous "god among gods" Yahweh shoves aside and then denies the other gods until only he is regarded as legitimate.

So, how did these marginal hill-dwelling Israelites grab so much attention? By using the tension between particularism and universality. Hostile prophets provoke Israel and Judah to repent; the kings lose clout as exclusive mediators with the divine powers. Monarchs weaken; a covenant model based on fidelity to "Yahweh alone" rallies Judah's bastion against the Assyrian empire. Yet, the twist comes as the prophets assert Assyria's also subordinate to Yahweh, who punishes Israel via that empire for infidelity. The Deuteronomists promote Moses as half-Lenin, half social-democrat, to borrow Michael Walzer's critique.  Still, Moses refused to be a king; the people make the covenant.

Bellah takes Stephen Geller's argument that the norms of the Torah supplanted priestly sacrifice as the central way the "chosen people" communicated with a just God. Yahweh internationalizes (as Stark and Wright agree), and this relationship, as a covenant, enables Jewish success even in exile. Narrative is employed to force the archaic trio of God, king, and nation into ethical freedom. We inherit a "metanarrative" that justifies moral, social, and political programs, ever since the Bible. The Muslim Umma and the Christian Church emerge from this "entering wedge" of a people defined without a monarchy, who submit to rule by divine law instead of the machinations of a secular state.

Ancient Greece features a warrior cult and in the polis a steady evolution from pre-state. I wish we knew more of Anaximander with his "boundless" apeiron preceding creation, or Xenophanes' skepticism: if horses and cattle could draw, their gods would resemble them. Bellah's presentation lacks Armstrong's knack for the telling anecdote or excerpt from a primary source--he likes citing scholars--but it's similar in scope; with Heraclitus we approach "mythospeculation," the verge of philosophy. Plato reforms the synthetic hybrid system with theory but does not replace it--Bellah cautions that this had to wait until the "emergence of Western modernity" in the 17c. (395)

Back to China, while Plato followed the Seven Sages, Confucius preceded all major Chinese thinkers. Ritual was analyzed, meritocracy grew, and nobility turned into a status that birth alone might not attain, but adherence to an elitist, elaborately implemented, top-down mandate from heaven (mixed in Mencius with populism). But, Bellah mentions (more as an aside) how universal values embed themselves in the Analects. Warfare also depended on merit in a fluctuating time, and Mozi's contributions towards "right views" of rulers and a utilitarian concern towards all are less remembered today, thanks to Confucian rivals. The Dao, in #6, 15, 28, gains welcome if brief explication for its evocations of how weak overcomes strong; oddly #53 may in its primitivism find common ground with Legalism, if a small patch.

Xunzi as a final "Warring States" moral reformer merits mention: "I once spent a whole day in si 'reflection,' but I found it of less value than a moment of xue 'learning.' I once tried standing on tiptoe and gazing into the distance, but I found I could see much farther by climbing to a high place."(qtd. 474) Bellah integrates more primary passages in discussing the Dao and Xunzi, sharpening his study.

As Bellah tells us at the end of this Chinese chapter, the problem with Greece and Israel is that we are so familiar with the latter cultures compared to Asia, that it is tempting in those two "to find what at the moment our culture wants to find." (475) This can be charged to Armstrong, Stark, Wade, and Wright, naturally, and all of us as reader-critics. He notes how all he can do is give an interpretation. At least with China, its distance from our cultural legacy forces Westerners to approach cautiously. The question persists: who rules? Is a "junzi/ gentleman" from a hereditary caste, or a moral elite?

Bellah opens the Indian chapter confessing freshman-level instead of grad-student competence.  He covers the standard Vedic formulations, and he considers India in Upanishadic times as religiously axial, but archaic in ethics, social structure, and rational discourse (as in Japan). The Buddha's breakthrough as a teacher of ethics accessible to all remains that tradition's axial contribution. Bellah quotes Steven Collins on the path demanding action, leading to nirvana, the "city without fear." Ethical universalism, in turn, sparked a similar promotion by theistic Hinduism and King Ashoka.

He comes around to serious play in the conclusion, realizing accurately it demanded more depth. He looks at renouncers as "moral upstarts" in archaic states who paved a stealthy way for social protest in the axial centuries by prophets, reformers, and teachers. Their utopias--Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Lyceum, Buddhist parables or Second Isaiah--combined political criticism and religious reform. Bellah transfers this to animal play, "flow," and "theoria" as a heightened consciousness. This last chapter, for those pressed for time, serves well as a coda and an exegesis of the major narrative's themes, especially the "relaxed fields" of play and culture which were sometimes buried in the text.

Summing up, Bellah explains how he gave the West less attention than China and India. While parts of this feel like other, shorter texts in their necessarily wide-ranging "metanarratives" from primordial soup to Brazil nuts, and while parts could have been edited (as in frequent give-and-take with his colleagues), it remains a valuable reference, for it brings into one big book the gist of such research.

He ends by warning us that we face the sixth extinction moment unfolding now, as we destroy our planet, in our deep history. He finds some hope that today's serious sociologists of religion do not elevate Christianity above all other faiths, and that in such acceptance a mature pluralism might allow us to advance in understanding on each others' own tolerant, peaceful terms. No universal category, by its very nature, after all, can free itself from its own particular emphases. He rushes past this admission, but he closes by acknowledging that theory needs to remain anchored in a cultural context, lest it "can assume a superiority that can lead to crushing mistakes." (606) (Amazon US 4-30-12)

Huston Smith's "The Big Picture": Book Review

Starting this audiobook, I heard Professor Smith's slow, hesitant delivery. He's been figuring out approaches to the big picture of how science differs from religion in detailing the big picture, and he tells his story as the preface to this comparison and contrast briefly. His immersion began when philosophy took him only so far, as a young lecturer. He narrates how--like his former student who as a street kid in Manhattan stumbled on a library copy of Plato's "Republic" to find the parable of the cave--he himself found insight in peering beyond limits of his intellectual confines, rationally grounded.

His "Cook's Tour" into Asian religions, for a two-and-a-half hour tape, is very short. Commencing a course to teach in Comparative Religions, I came to this tape curious about Smith's ability to sum up so much in so short a span. For comparisons between religions, he favors the "perennial philosophy" popularized by Aldous Huxley mid-20c, and which as an historian of religion he in turn advanced. For a short tape, I needed more. For instance, he makes the analogy of Confucianism and Daoism being based, as with ideograms of their transmission, on a concrete, ordered, and rational mindset. But surely, the Tao differs from the Analects even if both use that flexible term for the "Way"? Smith moves on, summing up the Abrahamic faiths given more to speculation, as with Hinduism and Buddhism, but again, not much nuance emerges on tape.

He seems more eager to tell of the "entheogens," the Native American peyote and mescaline-fueled excursions into the mystic that inspired his own defense of the constitutional right, as he alludes to, the native ingestion of these substances for religious ritual and spiritual insight. I would have liked to hear more about this, too, but he continues on into an assertion of the benefits for him of such boosts into the realm beyond. The second tape elaborates this as opposed to what he cites well from Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg: the more we understand the universe, the more meaningless it seems. Meaning must come from what we make of religion and the spiritual quest, logically apart from the tangible and the observed.

To counter the limits of rationalism and empiricism, Smith insists along with Aldous Huxley that we are left even with Beethoven and Shakespeare wondering "is that all there is?" He spends the time on this tape telling us his own understanding based on the fact that the universe as we observe it does not mesh, precisely, with the realm inside us and beyond our sensory limits. While I sympathize with Smith, I am left wondering, as skeptics must ask, if the realms entered by "entheogens" themselves do not merely reflect back at us our own imaginary illusions, heightened by sensory alteration by drugs or by, as many adepts traditionally prefer, meditation or physical regimens designed for such an inducement.

For a basic introduction, for a reading group or informal course on world religions, this 2002 tape might be stimulating to spark discussion. I respect Smith for his contributions. Yet, the time is too short to give this topic the justice it demands. (Amazon US, 5-5-12)

Urú gréine, ina tí solais

Chonaic mé grian-éiclips faoi deireanach. Dhreap mé suas fána ar-ghéar ag trasna ó mo theach. Bhí luí na gréine nach beag.

Chuir mé bileog páipéir ban síos ar an talamh. Choinn mé bileog eile leis an solas. Rinne Léna poll beag leis biorán a feiceáil an radharc os cionn chomh ceamara.

Fhéach Léna, Niall agus mise dealbh bídeach ar an clar na talún. Bhí sé míon. Bhreatnaigh muid ach oiread na fríde ar páipéir thíos.

Bhí cuimhne liom go raibh ceann chomh seo thart ar dhá scór bliain ó shin. Níl ábalta a fhíos agam más rud é nach mbeidh eile ar feadh mo saol, go cinnte! Mar sin, ná raibh sé grian-éiclips eile ag imeall an áit anois ar feadh lena liomsa.

Chuala mé ní raibh eile sa cheantar chomh seo go dtí 2071. Ar ndóigh, b'fhéidir beidh mé anseo. Mar sin féin, beidh mé céad agus deich mbliana d'aois.

Solar eclipse, "in the house of the sun."

I saw an eclipse of the sun recently. I climbed up a very steep slope across from my house. It was almost sunset.

I put a sheet of white paper down on the ground. I held another sheet up to the light. Layne made a little hole with a pin to view the scene above like a camera.

Layne, Niall, and myself looked at a tiny image on the page on the ground. It was very small. We watched but a bit of it on the paper below.

I was reminded of how there was one like this that happened "two score years ago." I wasn't able to know if there will be another one during my life, certainly. That is, there may not be another solar eclipse around the place here during my lifetime.

I heard there may not be another one locally until 2071. Of course, perhaps I'll be here. All the same, I'll be one-hundred-and-ten years old.

Grianghraf le/photo by Mike Maginot, Gleann Féir i gCalifoirnea/Grass Valley, California 20ú Bealtaine/20 May, 2012.

Stephen Prothero's "The American Bible": Book Review

"Why allow John Boehner or Nancy Pelosi to dominate your book club when Jefferson, Lincoln, and King are in the room?" To arrange such a conversation, Stephen Prothero compiles our nation's "core texts" from our "de facto public canon" into an "American Talmud," offering speeches, songs, stories, and sayings to spark discussion and debate as primary "books." Following each inclusion, he chronologically arranges dissenting and affirming comments from activists, lawyers, politicians, writers, and scholars. Ten "scriptural" sections comprise this biblical inspiration, mixing at first predominantly religiously infused arguments with, as the nation evolves, more secular and diverse texts. Furthering this Boston University professor's survey of contributions to our public discussion of issues that matter, it's a logical follow-up to his 2007 study "Religious Literacy."

Professor Prothero aims "not to create a canon but to report upon one." He seeks to overcome our bipartisan antagonism and our weariness with policies, parties, and principles which seem to shift. Returning key texts that matter to our public conversation, he hopes to renew hope among Americans. In this affordable, thoughtful, and balanced collection, Prothero invites us to listen to what our fellow Americans have discussed over almost four centuries as our necessary exercise in self-government, an experiment as open-ended as any ever attempted by citizens anywhere, anytime.

The book begins, logically, with "Genesis": colonial calls that often reenacted the Exodus story. "Law" follows as constitutional traditions and Supreme Court decisions from Brown in 1954 and Roe v. Wade in 1973. "Chronicles" relate "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and "Huck Finn" excerpts on slavery neatly, while a telling absence of an intended excerpt, denied by the estate of Ayn Rand, allows "Atlas Shrugged" to enter only in its commentaries, not the original text! Surely a moral lurks in this refusal.

Songs as "Psalms" follow, and for "God Bless America," even an Indiana billboard attests to its power, alongside "This Land Is Your Land" for a sharper counterpart to jingoism and patriotic cant. "Proverbs" places aphorisms around a Talmudic pattern of surrounding voices, before "Prophets" announces "Civil Disobedience," Eisenhower's farewell address about the military-industrial complex, King's "I Have a Dream," and Malcolm X's autobiographical defense of his "demagogue" role with a predictably if astutely chosen chorus of dissenting as well as assenting voices joining in as commentary in the decades since, with our current president among poets, pacifists, and preachers.

Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address" opens "Lamentations" fittingly; Prothero prefaces this with an exegesis of how this "new gospel" elevated the Address above not only the "letter of the Constitution" but the "spirit of the Declaration of Independence." It redefined America as more revolutionary than conservative, in the professor's perspective. He then juxtaposes this with another dramatic response to war, Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and ends that section with Bill Clinton invoking in turn Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address to heal the damage of the Vietnam War.

Appropriately after this division, the book breaks into its "Gospels" with inaugural addresses by Jefferson and FDR, before a surprising entry by Ronald Reagan. Not from his presidency, but from nearly two decades earlier, when on television he endorsed Goldwater and argued against LBJ's Great Society, to set the course for the resurgence of his own career and that of the GOP. Prothero tips his hand perhaps away from the expected tilt of many in academia towards the left. Although his sympathy may hover, he does take pains to present the views of conservatives fairly in such chapters. Examining the comments appended to "The Speech," from Reagan's demythologizing biographer Lou Cannon to his memorialist Sarah Palin, the sharp voices for these polarizing texts prove lively.

After the figures of such bold presidents, "Acts" may seem anticlimactic.  Yet, the Cold War insertion of the "under God" clause into "The Pledge of Allegiance" merits extended analysis in one of the most informative segments. "Epistles" from Washington's "Farewell Address" prove relevant in terms of both the rise of the Religious Right and the controversy over "entangling alliances" as foreign policy. Lesser known one may hazard to nearly any reader than other entries: Jefferson's "Letter to the Danbury Baptists" in 1802, over the separation of church and state. At the time of this letter, a national church was prohibited by the First Amendment, but not by states. The "establishment clause," articulated here by Jefferson, became long a tenet of Democrats--at least until the past decade's return by even many liberal candidates towards espousing in public their own faith.

Faith supports the second document from King, "Letter from Birmingham Jail." No book of revelation or apocalypse concludes this compendium, although the Civil Rights Movement has its own eloquent speakers in the commentaries that follow, if oddly nearly all after the initial unrest during which King's letter was delivered. The epilogue wraps up the presentation with more on the race question, which Prothero emphasizes as the key question in all the "American Bible," as a melting pot has not endured as a model, but a fiercely partisan, multicultural, and multiethnic polity.

Prothero reminds us of competing readings we bring to this anthology's issues. Dissent erupts, even as it's channeled into conversation, as heroes rise and fall and politicians come and go. This dynamic, as this edition represents handsomely (even if the parchment-type of background for primary texts may jostle aesthetically against the brown-on-beige commentary footnoted therein), may not resolve these worthwhile wrangles Americans love to engage in, but they stand for our "shared practice" to argue the public good (I think of the ideal of the founders, a "res publica") as regularly as some go to Mass, attend sermons, or visit temples. (Amazon US 5-29-12 via a review copy; author's website)

Jonathan Green's "Murder in the High Himalaya": Book Review

Two months after a 17-year-old Tibetan nun was murdered by the Chinese police, this reporter for London's paper The Mail on Sunday followed her footsteps, and those of the 70 surviving refugees who made it across to Nepal in 2006. His coverage here sums up what became a fine account of what to my knowledge has not received attention before: the intersecting paths of mountain climbers from the West, who pay tens of thousands of dollars to scale Cho Oyu or Everest, and the desperate Tibetans attempting, under increasingly brutal conditions in their homeland and progressively more invasive surveillance by spies, technology, and soldiers, to find freedom on the other side of the Himalayas. Green writes movingly of the contrast between such climbers as famed guide Luis Benitez and the photographer Sergei Matei (who filmed some of the shootings of the refugees that his climbing party saw from a distance) and Dolma Palkyi, in exile now, the best friend of the murdered girl Kelsang Namtso.

I heard this story on an audiobook. William Hughes reads it fluently, with at least to my untutored ears an accurate rendition of the many Chinese and Tibetan names and places. His rendition keeps the slightly distant tone adopted by reporter Green, who strives to find out as much as he could despite a fearful tendency of the Chinese to suppress protest and squelch dissenters in the West not to mention the East. Yet, Hughes' voice and Green's style also strive to discover the conflicts beneath the initial press flurry of attention to this story.

Its comparative rarity lies in the fact it's the first time since the Dalai Lama's flight in 1959 during the Chinese conquest that documentation has existed of a murder by the communists. As Matteo Pistono has revealed in his own eloquent book, "In the Shadow of the Buddha", getting out hard evidence of atrocities from Tibet is next to impossible. Both sides engage in propaganda, and hearsay inflates the real suffering perpetrated. As Green himself is told by the Dalai Lama when he visits him in Dharamsala, the need to stay "honest" is difficult advice to follow when telling of Tibet.

Lots about Tibet is interspersed with mountaineering and Everest-variety lore, and while to me this was integrated well, it does demand close attention as the points of view shift between Benitez and climbers, historical background, and the lives of Dolma and Kelsang and their band of escapees. Green, in the penultimate section of this necessarily expansive book, delves (for me too briefly but this may be due to Chinese spin doctoring at home and abroad of pro-Tibetan voices in print and online) into how complicated the whole issue has become. What the East denounces as feudalism and the West often romanticizes in Tibet clash with the political ramifications and economic realities of a superpower determined to crush dissent and to, in the times during and after the 2008 Olympics, to squelch the truth. Small wonder, Green finds the Dalai Lama bursting out into anger as he laments how the death of Kelsang represents the true face of Chinese power, and how we in the West acquiesce as readily as did the mountaineers (who symbolize perhaps this accommodation) to favor.

Green considers, near the end of his narrative, how the Romanian photographer's choice to document the killing that suddenly erupted below the slope came from his awareness of oppression under totalitarianism, and how to him, freedom meant more than personal security or safety. Yet this same bold individual tells in the presence of his own meeting with the Dalai Lama a markedly off-color phrase to show how his photos and video "embarrassed" the Chinese! Green to his credit keeps his own objectivity, even as he naturally cheers on the choices of the Westerners who felt, finally, they had to tell the world what the majority of the climbers did not want to reveal about Kelsang's death.

Benitez, an American guide, contended with his own reputation as a driven, perhaps self-aggrandizing (to his many critics among fellow climbers, a contentious lot) Westerner, torn between the love of the mountains and his duty, reluctantly and imperfectly realized, to tell the world what he and his clients (who felt they could have done nothing and did not want to anger their Chinese upon whom they depended for permits and access and patronage by bribes) had seen. Dolma in India finds herself, along with many refugees, ironically comparing the more modern Lhasa (under relentless colonization by the incoming Han Chinese and tourism now by rail) with the backward conditions of her asylum in India, even if she is nearer the Dalai Lama whom she and her companions had longed to meet. No one here seems to have found a truly happy ending.

I cannot help but compare what I and billions heard about the Olympics against what I never heard in 2008 about this one woman's murder from afar at the Nangpa La pass. The imbalance, despite Green's commendable work, grows more and more against Tibet and on the side of a Maoist Nepal all too willing to support its watchful neighbor, the dominant and implacable China. One closes this thought-provoking, ambitious, and ethically relevant book soberly. (Amazon US 4-20-12)

Jim Reynolds' "The Open Path": Book Review

This modest, unprepossessing diary chronicles the bicycle journey of a Southern California man, who wants to become a Buddhist monk. Before he does so, he at the age of 25 travels overland, often in disguise as a Mao-era peasant, when China still permitted independent tourists in a post-Cultural Revolution, pre-Tiananmen Square, thaw. An uprising in Lhasa after he had left there forces him again to evade the officials and their unpredictable demands. this led to a crackdown on all tourists from other lands in Tibet. His 1987 account remains blessedly free of romanticism.

After all, he makes his pilgrimage as a "dukkha-" (unease, dissatisfaction are preferable to the usual translation as "suffering") based exploration of discomfort. Reynolds seeks to immerse himself in rigor and strain, to encounter harsh terrain, petty bureaucrats, and miserable room and board along the long way. He hitchhikes a lot and relies on chance meetings often. He drinks dairy tainted by Chernobyl and sold off cheaply to the Chinese, who distribute it to such as him and his hosts. He suffers from diarrhea, understandably, but as he resigns himself to what the days and nights bring under dazzling stars at dizzying heights, he appears in often good humor.

For instance, about the people he finds in Eastern Tibet and its borders: "Khampa men have it pretty good. They are in charge of drinking tea, talking politics, looking handsome, and acting macho. All this keeps them quite busy, so the women take care of the heavy labor and the hard work." (57) He teaches kids how to sing "Puff the Magic Dragon" and "Psycho Killer," both evident favorites.

His companions that he meets, originally two Swiss women and later joined by two men from Colombia and Sweden, gain little description and Reynolds himself appears rather self-effacing. Instead, he emphasizes the mundane encounters and the tedium often missing from more polished presentations. He reasons that in such honesty will be the truer rendering of what in hindsight is often glossed over in memory, and his diary grounds him as it does the reader in the often uneventful trek as well as the highlights of sightseeing.

He quotes John Lennon and Little Feat and meets hardships on his outer path with hard-earned equanimity, no doubt good practice for his subsequent career as a forest monk in Thailand along the inner path.  He learns to confront his hedonism and he readies himself for renunciation. "No one can make my load lighter. No one can walk with me. No one can tell me when I've arrived." (134)

The basic black and white photos don't do the deserts or mountains of Tibet justice, but they remind one of the faces he meets along the way. His circuit around the holy Mt. Kailas can be compared with Colin Thubron's eloquent version over two decades later, "To a Mountain in Tibet", for how rapidly even remote Tibet and the Himalayan fastnesses are changing under the modernization that at the time of Reynolds' visit--just before the region was opened up to foreign tour groups--appear not to have taken hold much, even in Lhasa. It's an unadorned tale, but of interest for its calm, direct tone. (Amazon US 5-20-12)

Jamie Zeppa's "Beyond the Sky and the Earth": Book Review

In her mid-twenties, delaying a doctoral program in English, Jamie Zeppa leaves Toronto for Bhutan early in 1989. What she finds in part confirms her fears of hardship, isolation, and loneliness, but she overcomes her fears of leeches, rats, and fleas (she counts 50-odd bites early on) and learns to love her  intrusively generous junior-high students in a Southeastern Bhutanese hamlet where she volunteers on a Canadian government program. Soon, she transfers to where she had been turned down for her first assignment before departure: the nation's first, small university, Sherubtse, closer to the central region in Kanglung of this vertiginous realm.

She'd been rejected for fears that her youth and inexperience would lead to a romantic liaison with a student there, and soon, she falls in love with one to whom she lends Garcia Marquez' novels, Tshewang. His intelligence and shyness attract her, and Zeppa writes convincingly of her struggles not to succumb, for fear of her reputation in a land where everyone knows too soon everyone else's affairs. "History" is translated in the local language as the stories that people tell.

She contrasts this network well with her Christmas holiday back in Canada, where Western individualism, privacy, and consumerism grates on her after being abroad. Bhutan's connectivity, where one realizes who purchases what, who made that, who knows whom, enchants her, but she remains honest about the drawbacks of intimate life in a kingdom where she will never fit in, and her romanticism contends against the poverty, conformity, and censorship she witnesses as the threatened monarchy cracks down on the Nepali immigrants who have settled across the open border with India and who, the kingdom fears, may overwhelm the Buddhist culture and indigenous peoples in the manner that China has conquered Tibet and that India has subdued Sikkim in the same manner.

In her grad school seminars, talk of cultural construction of values comes easily, but as she teaches Shakespeare at the university, she sees how her classes divide bitterly over these ethnic and religious loyalties. Underneath the respect shown her by Bhutanese schooled in obedience to authority, she suspects a complicated scenario that remains hidden from her sight. She fairly examines, as best she can as an outsider forbidden to meddle in internal issues, the Situation, as it comes to be called.

Meanwhile, this chronicle adroitly takes us along as the events occur during her teaching stints. She lands in a place quiet and still: "It is easier to picture a giant child gathering earth out of armfuls, piling up rock, pinching mud into ridges and sharp peaks, knuckling out little valleys and gorges, poking holes for water to fall through." (14) Yet this land's filled with dogs, chatter, and nosy neighbors along the paths and roads that link its inhabitants on muddy slopes beneath vast vistas. "Every sign of human settlement repeats the mantra of contentment, 'this is enough.'" (109)

Amidst intimacy and plenitude, she does not discount the human toll to preserve such a fastness between two superpowers hostile to its ancient faith and suspicious of its geopolitical position and its mineral and timber resources. She finds the division of the people into "two solitudes" sobering, and she realizes her attempt to discover an easy solution evades her and her hosts. "I love the view, but I would not want the life," she reasons later in her residence as the Situation darkens her mood. (220)

The outcome of her three-year stint I will leave you to discover. She slips into meditation easily and although her predilection to find out more about Buddhism precedes her arrival, she takes refuge, to enter into buddha-dharma, rather suddenly at least by the leisurely pace of what her narrative has revealed up to then. Zeppa tends to gloss over portions of her stay, to protect I assume her privacy and that of others (despite some adroit characterizations of her often overqualified and under-motivated colleagues at both schools imported from India). Also, the book could have used a much more detailed map and a glossary of terms. All the same, it proves a recommended interpretation which tells her tale--in a land where the roads average seventeen curves per kilometer--straightforwardly and, with a few elisions, smoothly. It does end abruptly, again for discretion perhaps, but more of a sustained fadeaway would have suited the tone better of the preceding story.

I also reviewed Francoise Pommaret's guidebook and that of Lonely Planet: what Zeppa's version offers is the necessary personal perspective, if altered inevitably from two decades ago, as the kingdom now seeks to triple visitors and make it the jet-set contrast to backpacking Nepal. Complementing Lisa Napoli's "Radio Shangri-La" (see my review 3/2011), which stays more in the now-changed capital of Thimphu nearly two decades later, Zeppa's account wanders the rural landscape and small settlements, and her careful eye for detail highlights this graceful, frank, and thoughtful depiction of her adapted home. (Amazon US 5-21-12)

Tim Johnson's "Tragedy in Crimson": Book Review

This follows the stadiums full of cheers for the Dalai Lama's righteous but perhaps quixotic cause by many Western supporters with an insistent voice of reason. As an experienced China-based journalist, sympathetic to the underdog but determined to tell the truth, Tim Johnson's well placed to hear the Mandarin side of the debate and the PRC's position as it crushes dissent in Tibet and abroad. That is, post-2008, few articles and fewer books have emerged to date chronicling the shift towards heavier suppression and heightened surveillance as Chinese bullying escalates and as the rest of the world capitulates to the economic superpower's demands for cooperation with the anti-Tibetan crackdowns.

What happens is that China lobbies in American corridors of power for a narrow view: any pro-Tibet stance legislators may adapt equates for a return to barbaric theocracy and despotic feudalism. This contradicts, of course, the Dalai Lama's reiterated position for a truly autonomous Tibetan entity, if not the desperation of a marginalized people who, as the internal exile poet Woeser laments here, find it now impossible to change their own destiny, as marginalization accelerates and the environment, ecologically and culturally, faces irreparable damage. He shows how discrimination against Tibetans continues in universities and jobs, and how as in Lhasa Han and Hui Muslim immigration weakens the native culture and their means of making a livelihood in an increasingly desacralized tourist trap. Full of brothels, many owned by government, party, or military, this symbolizes Tibet's subservience.

Johnson visits Tibet, on a tourist visa; he tells how as a blacklisted journalist, media access is denied those considered pro-Dalai Lama--a sign of the PRC's success in propaganda bent on repairing its image. Activists have their human and cyber networks hacked; academics toe the Chinese line or face funding cuts and loss of student tuition from a lucrative market of immigrants; He opens his account with a warning: "Today it is the Tibetans. Tomorrow, those harmonizing about the glorious blue skies of China could be you or me." (26) As China rises in power, the fate of the Uighurs (suspected post-9/11 as subversive, their ancient cities bulldozed into featureless flats) or Mongols (not too long ago, outnumbering the Han Chinese 5:1, they now find their language and culture fading under relentless resettlement of the Mongol homeland by the Han majority) now is that of Tibet.

As one activist laments, among those contemplating fighting back, "We are going to be wiped out in another thirty years. It is now or never, do or die." (113 qtd.) Johnson examines those who differ with the patient, non-violent, nearly invisible pace of resistance commended by the "god-king," and he explains how the eminence of the Dalai Lama overshadows that leader's encouragement that the exile government (itself well-described in its comparative modesty in half-trendy, half-slurried Dharmasala) seek democratic consensus to move alternatives forward. He also reveals how ghosted systems installed by the PRC obtained many internal documentations and communications among the pro-Tibet networks worldwide, and how the Chinese use their clout to get their way to keep "trade."

Johnson, capable of relaying the views also of the Chinese as leaders and followers, does take pains to show their perspective {contrary to what some reviewers and commentators assert at Amazon}. As a skilled reporter, his tone may not captivate as much as those who rhetorically root for the Dalai Lama, but he in a quieter fashion builds a balanced presentation, afforded by his position within China for so many years, and his own contacts there and overseas. He shows how the Chinese cleverly commented on how Obama claimed in 2009 to have learned from Lincoln's Civil War role. Surely, the Chinese lectured America's first black president, such a man must admit that the racist Confederacy could be compared to the "splittists" blamed for, as with other minority populations in today's PRC, agitating against the fatherland's benevolent wish for unity. However, it is undeniable that China funds many who speak on behalf of its own hardline policies.

Sowing discord, as with the "Shugden affair," and the diplomatic and well-financed business efforts to sway leaders abroad away from pro-Tibetan statements let alone action demonstrates how the Chinese operate. Even among Buddhists drawn in China to study in Tibet, they obey largely the dictates of their government and party rather than their spiritual mentors, and Johnson's visit to a vast complex near Serthar in remote Tibet shows this conflict, or lack of such, in intriguing detail.

This book sits on a small shelf of recent coverage; I also reviewed Jonathan Green's "Murder in the High Himalaya" (on the murder of a fleeing refugee near Nangpa Pass mentioned in passing by Johnson if unnamed by him on p. 104), Matteo Pistono's clandestine coverage "In the Shadow of the Buddha,", and Stephan Talty's conclusion,  "Escape from the Land of the Snows." Johnson's dispassionate tone, more akin to journalism than advocacy, may be less gripping than Green's conflicted mountain climbers and desperate devotees, or Pistono's dramatic eyewitness testimony, but as with Talty, Johnson provides valuable interpretations of why Tibet matters to at least a few of us.

Other chapters feature the impact of the rail line to Lhasa, the forced relocation of Tibet's herders into housing tracts, the unrest in border areas beyond the Chinese T.A.R. boundaries, the Karmapa and the Black Crown intrigue, similar complexity around the Southern California prep-school educated, pampered daughter marketed as "The Princess of Tibet," and the Dalai Lama's own articulation of his own challenging array of roles he has to play. What happens after his demise, of course, overshadows the predicament of Tibet's future. The good will conveyed by the present Dalai Lama may not survive his death, and Tibet may be relegated to the comparative neglect of Uighurs and Mongols in the attentions of the rest of the world, which already pays its situation little heed outside a few circles.

As Johnson titles a telling chapter, "Hollywood vs. Wal-Mart," it appears that we Westerners "might adore the Dalai Lama, but many love their high-paying jobs and their cheap Chinese-made products more." (289) For all the proclamations passed in the world's legislators and fundraising dinners acclaiming the Dalai Lama, China blocked in 2009 his attempt for a South African visa to attend a gathering of Nobel Peace laureates.

In closing, this sobering book merits attention; I came across it only by chance. If its comparatively modest profile is indicative of the reception of his necessary call for more action and less talk about Tibet's crisis, perhaps this promotion of its message will be one small step forward. It's well documented and carefully end-noted. A telling indicator of the gravity of its contents is that many names must remain anonymous, given the mortal threats many of his informants live under. (Amazon US 5-11-12)

Lonely Planet's "Bhutan": Book Review

Compared to Francoise Pommaret's Odyssey guide, Lonely Planet under the team of Bradley Mayhew, Lindsay Brown, and Anirban Mahapatra for its fourth ed. (2011) looks far more user-friendly. Charts in blue and white leap out, icons direct, sidebars beckon, and the data are chosen for practicality. For instance, Pommaret generally tells what medication to bring; LP tells you specifics in far more detail for what with one limited hospital in a challenging terrain and high altitude can be a daunting journey.

Contrasting, while far fewer color photos entice (a few in the front compared to many in Pommaret), the small size (a half-inch off her guide's size) and compression of information for the day-to-day trekker more than the armchair traveller I confess to being (and at the rise to U.S. $250 per diem from $200 will likely remain indefinitely) do not offer as much a visual feel for the place. Lacking photos and excerpts from past explorers of this Himalayan kingdom, the traveler will not gain from the pages as much of a cultural introduction as the Odyssey travel guide provides in more leisurely narrative fashion. Yet about 40% of this LP guide is given over to non-itinerary information, so it can balance the necessary facts with nature, religion, history, do's and don'ts, and a short glossary of terms, as you'd expect in such a guidebook from a familiar and reliable publishing firm.

I'd opt for both books to take on my imaginary visit, Pommaret to read up on in my lodgings before seeing the sights and LP to take along on the excursions as it's packed with prices, phone numbers, hours places are open (not often perhaps off the main road), and the type of rapidly retrievable data needed on the go. It sounds as if the "low volume, high value" motto leads one to expect that this cultural heartland and wildlife reserve (35% of the land is protected) is less unpopulated than its small native populace may make it seem, oddly, given the limits that its few highways and places to stay in such dramatic settings have to as it were channel visitors into a east-central-west pattern of movement, unless treks take the hardier off the highways, themselves sounding harrowing despite their lovely vistas. This is a less polished and rougher realm to navigate, part of its charm, after all.

These treks, 25 of which are government approved, are emphasized along with mountain bike trails. A chapter details some treks, and the tilt of some of the contents shows an expectation that many visitors will welcome the chance to get outdoors. Of course, festivals held at the many temples, filled with art and color, will invite many visitors to another form of elevation, and these are described too.

There's useful summaries of where to stay and eat, naturally. As Bhutan requires a guide (why that per diem tariff is fixed), there's perhaps more give-and-take with a personal guide than on a tour, but both options are presented along with many itineraries fixed into how long one will stay. I finished this still curious about how the guides work with one to plan, or if plans are best made in advance, given what I imagine can be unpredictable challenges with weather, arranging transport, and finding suitable accommodation. "Booking Your Trek" is generally written, when it might have been more focused. It seems that group tours are common and nudge aside individual travelers, reading a bit between the lines, so this guidebook may be more essential than one may imagine if elsewhere. Despite an inevitable generality in this essential, mandatory planning section, certainly nobody visiting this realm could leave without this guide in their backpack. (Amazon US 5-11-12)

Francoise Pommaret's "Bhutan": Book Review

This new edition features what has made this Odyssey guide so popular; it's the first written on this Himalayan kingdom (originally in 1990). Translated by Elisabeth Booz and Howard Solversen from the French, it carries in its tone a slightly old-fashioned feel which enhances the eye the Tibetologist and resident Francoise Pommaret brings to her adopted home. Her photographs, along with those credited to Yoshiro Imaeda and Lionel Fournier, enhance the value of this as a cultural guide, interspersing tidbits from past explorers and short topical essays on culture, religion, language, medicine, and other nuances.

The main text gives a general overview (compared to Lonely Planet's details as in what medicines to take--a few words here vs. lots of specifics there), the lay of the land, religion and the concomitant frequent festivals, and history. Then, the center portion starts where the visitor will arrive, the Paro Valley and Thimphu, and takes one around there and then to central valleys and eastern realms. A short trekking section follows, and glossaries conclude this compact (if a half-inch or so thicker than Lonely Planet) introduction. Here, with some verve (also best found in her section on landing near Paro and then visiting the streets of the capital), Dr. Pommaret's text comes alive. The author states it's "less a catalogue of addresses" than an introduction to the culture, to be fair to any reader contemplating its purchase. Still, I wish it had more than one map for a place the size of Switzerland. All the same, the illustrations and elaborations of customs and backgrounds provide their own value. Lots of temples to see, crafts to buy, and hills to climb: that's the gist of the contents.

Like the "Blue Guides" for other countries, which nod more to cultural landmarks and historical context rather than the phones and websites and opening and closing hours of where to eat and where to shop, this Odyssey guide features a companion akin to a travel guide in person. One who's able to point out the significance of the sights, and to alert one's eye to what might not be seen or missed or misinterpreted otherwise. One advantage it possesses over Lonely Planet is more photographs; one disadvantage is the less-user friendly organization, as it's more a narrative than a rapidly accessible itinerary arranged by days, charts, icons to be taken in at a glance. Similar information is here, but it's nestled deeper.

I am (to date, alas, and with fees jumping from U.S. $200 to $250 per diem in 2012) an armchair traveller, but I found this a helpful companion after reviewing recently Barbara Crossette's 1995 account centered in Bhutan on the vanishing Buddhist kingdoms surrounding it, "So Close to Heaven." She speaks at length of the dogs barking, and I note ear plugs are recommended. I am not sure given altitude and winding roads how rapidly visitors acclimate to the terrain, but it seems enough must, as visitors increase along with the guide fees seeking wisely to limit access and protect cultural change. Still, as Lisa Napoli's "Radio Shangri-La" notes (see my review 3/2011), change must come, even to this remote destination.

Therefore, books such as Dr. Pommaret's are necessary to show visitors, at a distance in fantasy or up close in reality, the nature of the place so far away, and protected from intrusion for so long. She's a sympathetic observer of its qualities, and although her very presence and this guide represent the inevitability of change, it's best to have such shifts controlled by those who can mediate between the influx of visitors and the wishes of the Bhutanese to handle change. (Amazon US 5-11-12)

An tae is blasta--go dtí seo

Chuir mé an tae is blasta. Bheul, bím ag insint agaibh anois ar an laghad. Go dtí seo, sílím go mbeadh is fearr liom é.

Cheannaigh mé blasannái samplaí go leor ó Upton Tea Imports faoi deireanach. Ní raibh mé a iarraidh malaí tae ar bith níos mó. Ina theannta sin, bhí mé ag lorg ar an idirlíon.

Is maith liom beagnach gach cíneal a mhéid ó Upton. Nuair a chuirtear mé mo ordú dara, ghlac mé an deis. Rinne mé rogha. Chuir mé mala rialta ó tae de hAssam go raibh ainmithe Eastát Numalighur TGFOP1.

Ní raibh sampláil mé a sula é, ach is brea liom é go laithreach. Tosaigh sé leis blas géar agus trom ach taithneamhach freisin.  Tá tae dubh go bhfuil leideannái fíon agus fíonchaoraí triomaithe air.

Mar sin féin, d'fhoghlaim mé nuair ag filleadh ar ais an suíomh ar an ghréasán nach bhfuil ar níos mó ar díol ar chor ar bith.  B'fhéidir, is féidir liom a fáil mala eile riamh fómhar seo chugainn san India. Dá bhrí sin, beidh mé ag ól é leis eolas 'milis agus searbh'.

The tastiest tea--so far.

I found the tastiest tea. Well, I'm telling you all--as of now. So far, I think it may be my favorite.

I bought lots of various samples from Upton Tea Imports recently. I didn't want any tea bags any more. Furthermore, I searched online.

I like nearly all types from Upton. When I was placing my second order, I took a chance. I made a choice. I got a big bag of Assam that was called Numalighur Estate TGFOP1.

I had not sampled it before, but I loved it immediately. It started with a sharp and bold taste but also pleasant. The black tea has hints of wine and dried grapes ("raisins").

All the same, I found when I returned to the site on the web that there isn't any more for sale at all. Perhaps, I will be able to get another bag after the next harvest in India. As a result, I will drink it with "bittersweet" knowledge.

Photo/Grianghraf

Pico Iyer's "Sun After Dark": Book Review

Compared to its predecessor "The Global Soul," I found this 2004 essay collection stronger in part. Although some of the pieces precede "Global" in their original publication in magazines, Iyer chooses wisely to gather them into as the title foreshadows a dimmer look at "flights into the foreign." The relentless jet travel returns, as defining Iyer; one essay here is all about jet lag, how one eats six lunches in one day.

Not that this has happened to me, but he charts one jaunt that took him thirty-three hours, from Santa Barbara to Oman, and he draws on certainly a far wider range of experiences than most of his readers, I reckon. "Since then, like many of us, I've run into the Tibetan leader everywhere I go--at Harvard, in New York, in the hills of Malibu, in Japan"--this from an essay on the Dalai Lama after Iyer tells of his own father meeting the DL when Iyer was three back in Oxford. Of course, we read Iyer for his wider perspective, but as in "Global" (see my 5/12 review) one cannot shake his air of entitlement that accompanies his evocations.

Neither can he, in part. The post-9/11 mood of many of these fifteen inclusions does force Iyer to confront the poverty and pain within those whom he meets. One strong essay, "On the Ropebridge," contrasts the wish-fulfilling image (as it were) of wondrous Tibet he brings as a Westerner to that land; another surveys the begging children in the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge at Angkor as Iyer must compare their fate as skeletons, or as parasites, on the tourism that is seen to revive a shattered Cambodia. These sorts of Hobson-Jobson choices (a term he explains in a smart section on Hinglish, or how Indians adapt and alter English a half-century after independence) speckle these pages.

These essays, admittedly, do vary in quality. After a strong start with the first two (your reactions may differ, and I write as one less enchanted with the famous, rich or otherwise, than Iyer, despite my sympathies for the Tibetan cause), the rest offer ups and downs, and some merit more skimming than immersion. Iyer's talent may, I suspect, get rushed along by deadlines and compress itself by word counts for the magazines to which he contributes if "often in very different form" the originals that are the core of the essays anthologized. Like many essayists or travel writers, the uneven results do betray a sense that it's another two or three years, so it's another collection.

I suppose the "Open Road" book (see my 9/08 review) which a decade later followed the article on the Dalai Lama included some of the material here as the 1998 "Making Kindness Stand to Reason"; still, this affectionate portrait shows the subject with a real rapport alongside Iyer. So does the one before it from the same year, an elegant study ("A Gathering Around a Perplexity") of the willfully gnomic Leonard Cohen at his Mt. Baldy Zen retreat in Southern California. "Where else should he be, where else could he be, than in a military-style ritualized training that allows him to put Old Testament words to a country-and-western beat and write songs that sound like first-person laments written by God?" (31)

Many are shorter, more like vignettes, on Angkor or La Paz, Ethiopia or Bali, Easter Island or Haiti. These help balance the profiles and the reviews of W. G. Sebald and Kazuo Ishigawa; I can see why he reads Ryszard Kapuściński--Iyer appears to channel his style in some shorter entries, for better or worse. There's not many surprises here; that consistency may ground Iyer or it may make him mundane, for all his globalized enthusiasms. He tells us what he sees, but remains often possessed of considerable sangfroid, even if he convincingly reports the oddity of so much jet-lag from his Japanese home and his long flights to Santa Barbara to see his mother, so often these days.

The one piece that throws me as it did him is the end of his Bolivian stint, when he visits, along with other tourists, a prison--arranged it seems by the inmates who call the shots. Here, I found as with Graham Greene or Kapuściński the jolt of the sudden lapse from civility to brutality. You don't know, for once, what happens next, and Iyer in the telling improves on his experience by not telling us the whole story, but by editing, as if a dramatic film recreating the event, to heighten the unease he feels. Along with that sustained passage into the unpredictable, the more familiar encounters with Cohen and Dalai Lama essays were my favorites, and the jet-lag and Tibetan accounts runners-up. Iyer, by focusing less on his elevation above so many of his compatriots, in his best journalism manages to remind us of what he has in common, as do we, with the diverse peoples he keeps finding and the conversations and reflections he manages to record, relate, and revamp. (Amazon US 5-5-12)

Pico Iyer's "The Global Soul": Book Review

I liked Pico Iyer's debut collection of essays "Video Nights in Kathmandu" and his recent "The Open Road" on the Dalai Lama (the latter reviewed 10/08). A friend of mine leaving the U.S. to live in Ireland over a decade ago recommended this exploration of globalism from Iyer's perspective. I found it predictable, better read perhaps in its original version as magazine form rather than as seven essays.

The reason is, as a passing phrase such as Iyer claiming to be "middle-class" despite coming from an academic family in tony Santa Barbara who sent him to boarding school and then Cambridge, or his "whenever I attend an Olympics" about his reporting on many of these events, betrays his privilege. That alone cannot justify a critique of what he conveys in his journalism, but it does repeat a note of what he finds in Toronto as "rootless cosmopolitanism" and this note sounds on nearly every page, until it dulls the senses. 

He works hard to evoke his settings: the house on fire and amid flood atop a Santa Barbara hilltop; the hideous LAX where an Ethiopian arrives to find herself surrounded by her former enemies, the Tigreans, in a city where nothing matches the movies seen abroad of the palm tree celebrity paradise; his friend in Hong Kong who roams the world as, of course, a management consultant; Toronto's similar megapolis of new arrivals and "visible minorities" in a "postmodern Commonwealth"; Atlanta's Coca-Cola sponsored Olympics amidst a sprawl that's the "urban equivalent to bottled water"; London as seen through his semi-deracinated perspective; and finally a graceful depiction of his home in the Japanese locale of Nara.

Not to say moments emerge of insight or wit. "One curiosity of being a foreigner everywhere is that one finds oneself discerning Edens where the locals see only Purgatory." So he sums up Toronto (159), although naturally this could be anywhere he visits. I wish he'd tightened, as Toronto compared and contrasted with Los Angeles begs for an extended treatment, the connections between essays. The one on Toronto and the one on Atlanta drag on endlessly, when a revised version of these articles might have looked at all three, cut many of the vignettes and conversations, and focused on the best examples from the dozens that stuff each chapter.

That way, his identification as "full-time citizen of nowhere" might have sharpened, as the closing chapter shows best, when a customs officer as he comes back to Japan grills him: "What prompted me to bring antihistamines into a peace-loving island?" (277) Lighter, more streamlined, moments such as these in more abundance might have lightened the load of an ambitious but ultimately predictable array of observations on the global soul. (5-3-12 to Amazon US)