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Dr. Ellen Langer is a professor in the Psychology Department at Harvard University. Her books written for general and academic readers include Mindfulness, The Power of Mindful Learning, On Becoming An Artist, and Counterclockwise.

Dr. Langer has described her work on the illusion of control, aging, decision-making, and mindfulness theory in over 200 research articles and six academic books. Her work has led to numerous academic honors including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest of the American Psychological Association, the Distinguished Contributions of Basic Science to Applied Psychology award from the American Association of Applied & Preventive Psychology, the James McKeen Cattel Award, and the Gordon Allport Intergroup Relations Prize.

The citation for the APA distinguished contributions award reads, in part, “…her pioneering work revealed the profound effects of increasing mindful behavior…and offers new hope to millions whose problems were previously seen as unalterable and inevitable. Ellen Langer has demonstrated repeatedly how our limits are of our own making.”

Dr. Langer is a Fellow of The Sloan Foundation; The American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Society, The American Association for the Advancement of Science; Computers and Society; The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues; The Society of Experimental Social Psychologists. In addition to other honors, she has been a guest lecturer in Japan, Malaysia, Germany, and Argentina.

Included among her books are:

Langer, E. & Dweck, C. Personal Politics. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1973.

Langer, E. The Psychology of Control. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1983.

Langer, E. Mindfulness. Reading, MA: Da Capo Books, 1989. (Translated into thirteen languages.)

Alexander, C. & Langer, E. (Eds.) Higher Stages of Human Development: Perspectives on Adult Growth. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Schank, R. and Langer, E. (Eds.) Beliefs,

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psychology books

Why bother being nice?
A somewhat limited look at Western thinking on altruism

By Ann Harleman, Globe Correspondent | August 23, 2009

This slim volume by British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and British (Canadian-born) historian Barbara Taylor is an extended meditation on the question: Why should we be kind? Folded around this question is a more fundamental one: Why should - why do - we love at all? If “On Kindness’’ takes more than a hundred pages to arrive at, essentially, the answer Woody Allen offers at the end of “Annie Hall,’’ this book, like the 1977 movie, is nevertheless a fine ride.

The very different perspectives of the two authors marry happily here. Phillips’s earlier books - pithy and evocative, but often cryptic - explore various ideas not unrelated to the theme of kindness: “On Flirtation,’’ “Monogamy,’’ “On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored,’’ “The Beast in the Nursery: Curiosity and Other Appetites.’’ A lifelong practitioner of the talking cure, Phillips announces in the preface to “On Flirtation’’ his view of psychoanalysis as “of a piece with the various languages of literature - a kind of practical poetry.’’ In his earlier books, Phillips’s own prose style - a unique amalgam of the succinct and the wayward - takes on the teasing rhythm and slippery texture of the very thing he seeks to explain. The result captures but doesn’t necessarily clarify the nature of the human psyche.

“On Kindness,’’ in contrast, harnesses the beguiling energy of Phillips’s prose to Barbara Taylor’s historical perspective. Taylor is the author of “Eve and the New Jerusalem,’’ an award-winning study of 19th-century feminism, as well as a biography of Mary Wollstonecraft. “On Kindness’’ opens with a capsule history of the concept of kindness from Marcus Aurelius to Freud, touching on philosophy, literature, religion, psychology, and biology along the way. Added to this is a capsule history of the practice of kindness, with stops at the early Christian church, the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Vic

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books

A refresher course for grown-ups

August 23, 2009

As schools return to session, some of us may regret all that we have learned - and lost. “Homework for Grown-ups: Everything You Learned at School and Promptly Forgot’’ by E. Foley and B. Coates (Broadway) fills the gaps in nine subjects, ranging from math to literature, science to art. Each chapter ends with a test; answers are provided at the back of the book. You’ll find the Pythagorean theorem; the Fibonacci sequence; types of clouds, dinosaurs, and architectural styles; the Bill of Rights; and the periodic table. It’s a rather classical education - except for the lesson about how to survive a nuclear attack.

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books

Hardly black and white
Embracing complexity, new graphic novels offer fresh takes on history, fantasy, and fiction

By Carlo Wolff | July 26, 2009

David Mazzucchelli’s stunning opus is of the magnum, embracing kind, and in that sense serves as an appropriate lead-in to a sweeping roundup of Grafix Americana, including the diverse anthology “Syncopated,’’ the despairing, nurturing “A.D.,’’ and “Cla$$war,’’ a striking variation on the superhero genre.

Mazzucchelli’s wildly imaginative work spotlights Asterios Polyp, a “paper architect’’ who teaches in upstate New York but keeps an apartment in Manhattan. When that burns down, he’s adrift, winding up in a small Midwestern town to put his life back together. There are pages of standalone art, ones of art with text, and ones replete with characters such as the narcissistic Asterios, his retiring, talented wife Hana, and the “goddess’’ Ursula Major. Heady with philosophical and mythological references, “Asterios Polyp’’ vaults Mazzucchelli into the top rank of graphic artists. It’s a sweeping, provocative book that blends the richness of the traditional novel with the best modern art. Mazzucchelli’s style - effortless and so versatile that you can’t imagine “Asterios’’ in any other medium - is sweeping in every sense.

Like “The Beats,’’ a graphic history by Harvey Pekar, Paul Buhle, and others, “Syncopated’’ features numerous artists, on topics including the Tulsa Race Riots of 1921 (Nate Powell’s somber “Like Hell I Will’’), the development of a landmark psychological work (Paul Karasik’s kindly but cutting “Erik Erikson’’), the displacement of Native Americans (Dave Kiersh’s guileless, guilt-inducing “Welcome Home, Brave’’), and a history of the Dvorak keyboard (Alec Longstreth’s “Dvorak,’’ told in friendly pictures and stern text). The hammer is Greg Cook’s “What We So Quietly Saw,’’ a stark account of torture at Guantanamo in which the word “redacted’’ has the power of a scream.

“Cla$$war’’ collects and amplifies six issues of a comic-book series fitfully pub

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On Crime
The Boston Globe
Lifting a pint to the late, great Westlake
By Hallie Ephron
Globe Correspondent / July 26, 2009
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Endings are hard, and I took my time reading “Get Real,’’ knowing that it’s the last Dortmunder novel from Donald Westlake. In this one, the mellow, amiable New York City thief and his colorful buddies get sucked into doing what they do for a reality show.
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GET REAL
By Donald E. Westlake
Grand Central, 288 pp, $23.99

A PLAGUE OF SECRETS
By John Lescroart
Dutton, 432 pp, $26.95

MISSING MARK
By Julie Kramer
Doubleday, 288 pp, $25

Producer Doug Fairkeep explains that Get Real Productions (“a shiny but small bauble on a lower branch’’ of corporate behemoth Monopole) wants to tape the gang pulling off a heist. “When you’re committing a felony,’’ Dortmunder patiently explains, “the idea is you don’t want witnesses.’’ But when he hears how much money they’re going to make just for being themselves, he caves. Soon he’s seduced by the medium, too, and by the challenge of figuring out how to collect their pay while stealing Get Real blind.

Get Real doesn’t make up the story line, Fairkeep explains. That’s up to Dortmunder and his pals. Get Real takes what they do and “shape[s] it and make[s] it entertainment.’’ By the time Fairkeep realizes that Dortmunder’s caper is a lily that needs no gilding, it’s too late to turn back. What ensues is a cat-and-mouse game in which the producers try to stay one guess ahead of thieves who are intent on eating the hand that’s feeding them.

In this romp, there are laugh-out-loud descriptions, like the names of cars that gang members “find’’ and appropriate: the “Chevy Gazpacho’’ and the “GMC Mastodon hybrid.’’ If Westlake had been in automotive marketing, America

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books

Recent highlights from the Ideas blog
Sticking beauty

By Christopher Shea | July 26, 2009

A FLICKR USER named Happy Monkey has developed a new art form, “tapecraft,” that puts a contemporary gloss on the ancient Japanese art of origami. The smallish architectural forms are similarly complex: multifaceted spheroid objects covered with pyramids of various colors, for example. But the key ingredients here are scotch tape and permanent markers.

The works are crafty, DIY, and cheap, a popular combination in these straitened times. Happy Monkey’s Flickr page includes step-by-step instructions on how to assemble one shape from scratch, as well as video of one bit of tapecraft that’s been equipped with blinking lights.

The artist, a wordsmith as well as a tapesmith, has given some of his works serious technical names. Care to guess which one is the “rhombitruncated cuboctahedron”?

Mahler, prophet of tragedy?
“SATURATED WITH lachrymose melodies, dirgelike rhythms and the ghastly, fatal oompahs of sad waltzes,” writes the music professor David Schiff, in The Nation, “the songs and symphonies of Gustav Mahler prophetically mourn the victims of twentieth-century catastrophes the composer died too soon to witness, or perhaps even imagine.”

How can Schiff make such a bold, seemingly anachronistic claim? Because Mahler’s influence can be heard in many composers who did, in one way or another, chronicle the horrors of the century that followed 1900: Alban Berg, Dmitri Shostakovich, Benjamin Britten, Leonard Bernstein, and others.

In his lifetime, however, Mahler hardly seemed such a central figure: “French composers dismissed him as German, Germans considered him to be Viennese and the Viennese either admired or detested him for being a Jew.” (Schiff writes: “Never mind the sublime notes; it all came down to the nose.”)

He huffed, puffed, and destroyed the audacious cantilevered roof
STRAW, STICKS, OR brick? Structural stability versus ease of construction?

“The Three Little Pigs” has always been, at heart, a tale abo

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books

A memoir of noodles, neuroses

By Steve Almond, Globe Correspondent | July 25, 2009

I’ll say this for “The Ramen King and I’’: I’ve never read anything remotely like it. Andy Raskin’s memoir manages to weave together such disparate strands as romantic betrayal, Japanese cuisine, the dot.com boom, and an exhaustive personal history of Momofuku Ando, inventor of the instant noodles popularly referred to as ramen noodles. In its finest moments, the book is peculiar and riveting.

Raskin, who has a degree in computer science from Yale and a master’s in Japan studies, would seem an unlikely memoirist. But he does possess a crucial ingredient: ample neuroses. “I should not want attention or validation. I should give things another shot. I should be more organized,’’ he writes, in his self-lacerating introduction. “I should be friendlier with the guys who run the body shop. I should keep things under wraps. I should not be suffering from what the inventor of instant ramen identified - just prior to inventing instant ramen - as the Fundamental Misunderstanding of Humanity.’’

But Raskin’s real problem, as he sees it, is one of intimacy. He keeps pushing women away, or throwing them over, and eventually winds up in a 12-step-type program where his sponsor instructs him to write letters to a figure he admires. Raskin chooses Ando. He spends the rest of the book trying to orchestrate a personal audience with the entrepreneur. We can all breathe a sigh of relief that Raskin - who also has an MBA from Wharton - didn’t choose Jack Welch.

It turns out Ando is a genuine eccentric with a penchant for philosophizing and a tangled romantic history. He claims to have concentrated so hard when he was perfecting his recipe for ramen that he wound up urinating blood. (One shudders to imagine the result if he’d made a go at freeze-dried shrimp.)

In fact, the most entertaining sections of the book are those that deal with food. Raskin is an enraptured eater who will do practically anything in pursuit of the right meal. At one point,

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books food

Beach boys
Coffee table book about ocean lifeguards draws lots of looks
By Christopher Muther
Globe Staff / July 16, 2009

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Former model and now fashion photographer Matt Albiani grew up in Winchester, spending his teenage summers working poolside as a lifeguard, but all the while wishing he was performing his lifeguard duties at the beach instead. Albiani, who has shot fashion advertising for labels such as Ralph Lauren, J. Crew, Nautica, and Lilly Pulitzer, never outgrew his fascination with ocean lifeguards. Recently, he published his first book, “Lifeguard on Duty,’’ a coffee table tome filled with striking, sun-dappled, and artful images of lithe ocean lifeguards from beaches around the country. Tomorrow night he’s on Nantucket, where he photographed many of his subjects, for a book signing at Cisco Brewers from 4 to 6 p.m. CHRISTOPHER MUTHER
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Q. Speaking as someone who was never a lifeguard, and can barely swim, is there a big difference between a pool lifeguard and an ocean lifeguard?

A. An ocean lifeguard is a completely different world. First of all, you’re dealing with the elements, which can be pretty dangerous. A pool is a very controlled environment. You can see to the bottom. The training involved with ocean guards is different as well. They’re real athletes. Pool guards are as well, but it’s just a different breed.

Q. Were any of the lifeguards you shot apprehensive about the project?

A. No, for the most part they were pretty easygoing about it. It’s not like I showed up at the beach with a camera. I normally would go and introduce myself, and tell them I would be back the next day. You make introductions first and get the sense if they’re interested. Most of the time they said yes. The guys were eager and accommodating.

Q. There’s a lot of guy candy in this book. Did you come across any unattractive lifeguards?

A. People ask me that a lot. There’s something about an ocean guard th

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books

Eyewitness: Pakistan

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By JOSHUA KURLANTZICK
Published: July 10, 2009

Taking office in January, Barack Obama promised a radically different vision of foreign policy from that of his predecessor. But on perhaps the most critical issue, the new king looks a lot like the old one. In Pakistan, President Obama has retained the Bush administration’s targeted drone missile attacks against suspected militants and may quietly be expanding the Central Intelligence Agency’s covert battle against jihadis along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
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Akhtar Soomro for The New York Times

Abdul Rashid Ghazi

TO LIVE OR TO PERISH FOREVER

Two Tumultuous Years in Pakistan

By Nicholas Schmidle

Illustrated. 254 pp. Henry Holt & Company. $25
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Times Topics: Pakistan
Excerpt From ‘To Live or to Perish Forever’ (Google Books)

As Nicholas Schmidle, a contributor to publications including The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic and Slate, reveals in a richly reported book based on his two years traveling across Pakistan, United States policy does not change because Pakistan, sadly, does not change. Birthed in 1947 by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the lawyer son of a rich merchant, the country remains in the grip of venal, feudal, wealthy politician-landlords like the opposition leader Nawaz Sharif and the current president, Asif Ali Zardari, for whom democracy means one vote one time, after which the victors go on to dominate indefinitely. Worse, greed and graft have led Islamabad’s ruling class to ignore large portions of the population, who remain illiterate, and their incompetent governance has opened the door to Islamists’ offering average Pakistanis promises that the first Mayor Daley would have recognized — safe and orderly streets — not through

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books

In Reagan’s Steps

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By NICK GILLESPIE
Published: July 10, 2009

Given how the last eight or so years have worked out for them in far-flung battlefields and domestic ballot boxes, you’d think that conservatives in general and Republicans in particular would be pretty gun-shy about the war rhetoric. But here’s Joe Scarborough, a former Republican Florida congressman, letting it rip in “The Last Best Hope: Restoring Conservatism and America’s Promise”: “Congressional leaders will . . . need to take a more prudent path on the environment by declaring war on foreign oil.”
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THE LAST BEST HOPE

Restoring Conservatism and America’s Promise

By Joe Scarborough

271 pp. Crown Forum Publishers. $26
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Questions for Joe Scarborough: Morning in America (June 7, 2009)
Excerpt From ‘The Last Best Hope’ (msnbc.msn.com)
The ‘Morning Joe’ Web Site

And in case you’re wondering, just saying no to such a glorious future is not an option. “Whether you are a Republican or a Democrat, a Libertarian or a Marxist, understand that it is historically inevitable that the ‘Age of Conservatism’ is coming soon,” Scarborough, the Hegelian author of “Rome Wasn’t Burnt in a Day” (2004), writes. “The winds of history provide us no other choice.”

If this book is indeed the last best hope of conservatism and America’s promise, well, it was nice knowing you. Ultimately, Scarborough offers what Barry Goldwater might have called an echo, not a choice, of a Bush-Obama status quo regarding everything from bailouts to stimulus spending to rendition policy. He unwittingly tells us that conservatives can at best stand athwart history yelling “Slow down,” but they can’t fundamentally change its direction.

To be sure, Scarborough is the host of “Morning Joe” on MSNBC,

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books politics

What You Pay For
By VIRGINIA POSTREL
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FREE

The Future of a Radical Price

By Chris Anderson

Illustrated. 274 pp. Hyperion. $26.99

Fifteen years ago — before Google or Wikipedia or blogging or Craigs­list or podcasts or YouTube — the technology investor and pundit Esther Dyson wrote an article analyzing the business of “creative content” in a future where the Internet made distribution essentially free. “Creators will have to fight to attract attention and get paid,” she predicted. Enforcing copyrights won’t be enough, because creators “will operate in an increasingly competitive marketplace where much of the intellectual property is distributed free and suppliers explode in number. . . . The problem for owners of content is that they will be competing with free or almost-free content.”

That future is today, and it is the subject of “Free: The Future of a Radical Price,” by Chris Anderson, the editor in chief of Wired and the author of “The Long Tail.” Despite its subtitle, the book is less about the future than the present and recent past, which Anderson surveys in a cheerful, can-do voice. “People are making lots of money charging nothing,” he writes. “Not nothing for everything, but nothing for enough that we have essentially created an economy as big as a good-sized country around the price of $0.00.”

Driving the trend are the steeply declining prices of three essential technologies: computing power, digital storage and transmission capacity. Reproducing and delivering digital content — words, music, software, pictures, video — has now fulfilled the prophecy once made about electricity. It has become too cheap to meter. “Whatever it costs YouTube to stream a video today will cost half as much in a year,” Anderson writes. “The trend lines that determine the cost of doing business online all point the same way: to zero. No wonder the prices online all go the same way.”

More precisely, the marginal cost of digital products, or the cost of delivering one additional copy, is approaching

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books

Where Am I?

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By JONAH LEHRER
Published: July 10, 2009

Let’s begin with a quick geography quiz: Which city is farther west, Los Angeles or Reno? If you’re like most people, you carefully reasoned your way to the wrong answer. Because Los Angeles is on the coast, and Reno is in landlocked Nevada, you probably assumed that Los Angeles is farther west. It doesn’t matter that you’ve stared at countless maps or taken a road trip across California — the atlas that we keep in our head is reliably unreliable.
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Illustration by Lauren Simkin Berke

YOU ARE HERE

Why We Can Find Our Way to the Moon But Get Lost in the Mall

By Collin Ellard

Illustrated. 328 pp. Doubleday. $25
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Colin Ellard’s Web Site

Colin Ellard, a behavorial neuroscientist at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, probes this and other shortcomings of human spatial intelligence in his delightfully lucid book “You Are Here.” (The Canadian version of the book is titled “Where Am I?” Apparently, Americans don’t like asking for directions.) While modern life is full of tools that keep us from straying off course, from Google maps to the ­iPhone, Ellard sees the need for such contrivances as a sign that we’ve already lost our way. We’ve become hopelessly disconnected from our setting, burdened with a brain that needs a GPS satellite just to get across town.

The book begins with a highlight reel of animal navigation skills, which is just another way of showing us how far we’ve fallen. Ellard argues that the human talent for abstraction — we can easily imagine places and spaces that don’t exist — comes with a hidden cost, which is that our mental maps of the physical world have become sparser over the course of human evolution. Unlike insects, we can’t

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books

Murder Most Noir

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By HOWARD BLUM
Published: July 10, 2009

The true-crime section has increasingly become stacked with books that take a dastardly deed as the jumping-off point for some big thoughts about the national narrative. This literary ambition seems intuitively inspired by Marx’s deterministic insight that, although “men make their own history,” they make it under circumstances shaped by their times. It’s further encouraged by the examples of masterworks like “In Cold Blood” and “The Executioner’s Song,” which brilliantly use crime stories to zero in on (or rumble on about) American life. And, not least, it’s a commercial mind-set energized by the success of smart, inventive and thoughtfully constructed histories like Erik Larson’s “Devil in the White City.”
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Hollywood Boulevard in the 1930s.

A BRIGHT AND GUILTY PLACE

Murder, Corruption, and L.A.’s Scandalous Coming of Age

By Richard Rayner

Illustrated. 267 pp. Doubleday. $25
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The Book’s Web Site
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Howard Blum on the Book Review Podcast (mp3)

Richard Rayner’s appealingly titled new book, “A Bright and Guilty Place” (the phrase was originally Orson Welles’s), is the latest entry in pursuit of this prize: a crime story that not only captures the flavor of its time but also contains a more consequential, even transformative, significance. And Rayner brings some genuine goods to the task.

He’s found a cracking good murder case — a true-crime story that’s driven by several fascinating characters and that’s also engaging and suspenseful, a whodunit in which the reader is genuinely interested in the solution. The ostensible focus of his tale is the 1931 shootin

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books

Giant Step, Full Stop

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By THOMAS MALLON
Published: July 8, 2009

The story of the moon landings is an oft-told tale, but one that feels stranger with each new telling. Walter Cronkite’s prediction, that after Apollo 11 “everything else that has happened in our time is going to be an asterisk,” wound up playing out backward. In our pop-historical memory of the 1960s, Project Apollo is the footnote, an oddball offshoot from assassinations, Vietnam and Charles Manson. Since 1972, no human has traveled beyond low-Earth orbit, a situation that makes one imagine what things might be like if, after Lindbergh’s flight, the species had contentedly gone back to making do with boats and trains.
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NASA

ROCKET MEN

The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon

By Craig Nelson

Illustrated. 404 pp. Viking. $27.95

VOICES FROM THE MOON

Apollo Astronauts Describe Their Lunar Experiences

By Andrew Chaikin with Victoria Kohl

Illustrated. 201 pp. Viking Studio. $29.95
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Craig Nelson’s Web Site
Andrew Chaikin’s Web Site

Craig Nelson’s “Rocket Men” lacks the shapeliness and authority of some earlier lunar histories, but it ends up making an engaging contribution. He sensibly sets the Apollo period against “the interminable shuttle/space station era” that followed, and before that tracks the space race against the missile race that proceeded alongside it. Soviet-American competition in space may have looked like a peaceful alternative to war — a “celestial olympics” in Nelson’s nice phrasing — but the civilian-controlled NASA retained its “military DNA.” Lyndon Johnson, who earmarked the most money for the agency, confidentially pronounced it a bargain because of the yield from spy

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Absolutely, Positively Free ... if You Think You Can Afford It

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By JANET MASLIN
Published: July 5, 2009

Consider Ellen Ruppel Shell’s “Cheap,” Chris Anderson’s “Free” and the story of the one-cent Hershey’s Kiss. This story appears in both books, but the versions are different. Both come from the same source, but these two authors can’t even agree on what to call him. He is Daniel Ariely to Ms. Shell, Dan Ariely to Mr. Anderson, and the author of “Predictably Irrational” to both of them.
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Wired Magazine

Chris Anderson

CHEAP

The High Cost of Discount Culture

By Ellen Ruppel Shell

296 pages. Penguin Press. $25.95.

FREE

The Future of a Radical Price

By Chris Anderson

Illustrated. 274 pages. Hyperion. $26.99.
Related
Excerpt: 'Free: The Future of a Radical Price' [PDF]

The Long Tail (Chris Anderson's Blog)

Media Decoder Blog: Wired Editor Apologizes for Copying From Wikipedia in New Book (June 24, 2009)
Alison Shell

Ellen Ruppel Shell

Mr. Ariely did an experiment that used chocolate to dramatize the difference that a small shift in pricing could make. According to “Cheap” he offered his subjects a choice between the 1-cent Kiss and a 26-cent Ferrero Rocher hazelnut. At those prices the test subjects were divided 40 percent to 40 percent, with 20 percent opting for neither. Then the prices came down by one penny each, and 90 percent of the subjects took the free chocolate. Only 10 percent chose the higher-priced brand.

Off we go to “Free,” playing fast and loose with different facts and telling the story in somewhat zingier fashion. “Note: behavioral economists have limited budgets and limited time,” writes Mr. Anderson, the editor of Wired magazine and author of “The Long Tail.” “So a lot of their experiments involve a

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books consumer

Separation anxiety
A traveling professor chronicles the church-state divide, with results that prove both comedic and unsettling
The author believes the inclusion of the phrase “under God’’ makes the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional. The author believes the inclusion of the phrase “under God’’ makes the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional. (Chris Clark/The Grand Rapids Press via Associated Press)
By Joe Rosenbloom
July 5, 2009

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Jay Wexler, a law professor at Boston University, lectures on church-state issues of sufficient constitutional weight to reach the US Supreme Court. During a sabbatical, he sets out to parlay his lecture notes into a book that even people who would rather drink hemlock than read Supreme Court opinions might enjoy.
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HOLY HULLABALOOS: A Road Trip to the Battlegrounds of the Church/State Wars
By Jay Wexler
Beacon, 251 pp., paperback, $20

If the project sounds problematic, with great yawn-inducing potential, Wexler pulls it off stunningly in “Holy Hullabaloos: A Road Trip to the Battlegrounds of the Church/State Wars.’’ To augment his lecture notes, he embarks on a series of road trips to places “where landmark church/state cases had started.’’

He travels about the country, interviewing people who are linked to a dozen or so of the landmark cases. He calls on worshipers at the CloudWater Zendo Buddhist temple in Cleveland (the city instituted a school-voucher program that the Supreme Court upheld in 2002). He interviews the chaplain of the US Senate (the object of several futile court challenges to the prayer that opens its sessions). And so on.

The tour-guide device might have bombed in a lesser writer’s hands. It works for Wexler because of his gift for filtering arcane legal sludge into clear explanations, his keen eye for detail, and his self-mocking, zanily irreverent sensibility.

Between the comic moments, Wexler critiques how the Supreme Court has defined the sep

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Inner Gulag
By DENNIS LEHANE
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THE SECRET SPEECH

By Tom Rob Smith

407 pp. Grand Central Publishing. $24.99

Tom Rob Smith’s second novel, “The Secret Speech,” is set in 1956 as the Soviet Union takes its first baby steps toward de-Stalinization. Midway through the book, prisoners in a Siberian gulag riot and overthrow their captors. The camp commander, Sinyavsky, who has been driven mad by his sins, is ordered to climb 13 steps to what was once his office. At each step, any of the former prisoners can recite one of the commander’s crimes. If he is found guilty, he mounts another step; should he reach the top, he will be executed. Racked by guilt though he may be, Sinyavsky deems absurd the entire notion of karmic justice in post-Stalinist Russia. He reminds his would-be executioners that while he is guilty of terrible crimes, in recent years he has often acted as their benefactor, helping their families financially, improving medical care and increasing food rations. He asks them:

“If you can take a step up, can you not also take a step down? If you can do wrong can you not also do good? Can I not try and put right the wrongs that I have done?”

To which the men reply, “No second chance.”

“The Secret Speech” considers the thorny question of second chances for people who may not have deserved a first. The title refers to a speech given by Nikita Khrushchev, ostensibly behind closed doors, in the shaky dawn of his regime. It’s meant to usher in a new era of benevolence from a government previously defined by genocidal proclivities and purges. But two factions — the state-sponsored torturers and murderers on one side, and criminal gangs, known as the vory, on the other — have no interest in either delivering or receiving a mea culpa. For the criminals, it’s far too little. For the representatives of the state, “it has nothing to do with whether or not Stalin went too far. He did. Of course he did. But we cannot change the past. And our authority is based on the past.”

Once the secret speec

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American Macho

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By BEVERLY GAGE
Published: June 12, 2009

On March 11, 2003, about a week ­before President George W. Bush began bombing Iraq, the cultural historian Jackson Lears published an Op-Ed article in The New York Times pleading for sanity. He sensed that it was already too late, and suggested that war opponents might be “fingering a rabbit’s foot from time to time.” As a historian, however, Lears couldn’t help asking when the “regenerative” impulse to seek national glory through war first took root. The result is “Rebirth of a Nation,” a fascinating cultural history that locates the origins of Bush-era belligerence in the anxieties and modernizing impulses of the late 19th century.
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Edward Van Altena/Library of Congress (From “Rebirth of a Nation”)

Theodore Roosevelt in Africa, 1909.

REBIRTH OF A NATION

The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920

By Jackson Lears

Illustrated. 418 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $27.99
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Lears describes his bookas a “synthetic reinterpretation” of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, an effort to dislodge classics like Richard Hofstadter’s “Age of Reform”(1955) and Robert Wiebe’s “Search for Order, 1877-1920”(1967). It’s an ambitious project; both books, despite legions of critics, have shown remarkable staying power. Fortunately, Lears is well qualified for the task. One of the deans of American cultural history (as well as a professor at Rutgers University), Lears has spent decades writing about turn-of-the-20th-century debates over consumerism, modernity, religion and market capitalism. With “Rebirth of a Nation,” he expands his vision to include politics, war and the presidency as well.

The book’s title — a play on D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film “The Birth

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books

Henry Ford's folly
Marveling at the industrialist's dream of growing a Midwestern-style manufacturing center in the Amazon

By David M. Shribman | June 14, 2009

FORDLANDIA:
The Rise and Fall of Henry
Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City
By Greg Grandin
Metropolitan, 416 pp., illustrated, $27.50

Of all the struggles of will and power in the years leading to America's hegemony after World War II, the least well-known may be the battle between Henry Ford and the Amazon that began in 1928. So much was at stake - the prospect of new sources of rubber, essential for the new industrialization and later for the war effort; the reputation of one of America's most romantic and most practical men; and the notion that the American way of life, with its accompanying pastimes, architecture, and values, was transferable to venues far away and cultures far different.

Ford's is a great success story, the tale of how a man and a dream transformed ways of life, work, and leisure for a nation at the very moment it was poised for greatness. He built cars, a consumer culture, and a style of living, and in doing so may have been the most influential man, or the most American figure, of his time and place. But he couldn't plant a Michigan farm town in the middle of the Amazon; he couldn't wrestle rubber out of Brazil; and he couldn't make Latin America an outpost of Americanism.

"Fordlandia" is the story of one of the great industrialist's signal failures, and it is a story of his signature vision and values. As such, it is a chronicle of arrogance and broken dreams, which is not exactly how we think of Ford and, perhaps more poignant, not the way he regarded himself. But Greg Grandin, who teaches Latin American history at New York University, tells a gripping story of high hopes and deep failure, a saga that in some ways is a morality tale for the American century, when scores of efforts to plant our values and harvest foreign dollars brought disappointment, sometimes even despair.

Grandin calls Ford's adventure in the Amazon his "easy-

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More than just a job
White and blue-collar conversations about why work matters
Many workers, such as these in a Belgium biscuit factory, find ways to cope psychologically with modern-day jobs. Many workers, such as these in a Belgium biscuit factory, find ways to cope psychologically with modern-day jobs. (Richard Baker, from The Book)
By Glenn C. Altschuler
June 14, 2009

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THE PLEASURES AND SORROWS OF WORK
By Alain de Botton
Pantheon, 326 pp., illustrated, $26
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THE PLEASURES AND SORROWS OF WORK

By Alain de Botton

Pantheon, 326 pp., illustrated, $26

Driving aimlessly in the Mojave Desert, Alain de Botton, author of "How Proust Can Change Your Life" and "The Architecture of Happiness," stumbled across an airport, with a hangar, two Cessnas, and a landing strip. At the far end of the runway, cordoned off by barbed wire, planes from every continent sat unattended. A few had lost their noses; others had no undercarriages. Asking an attendant for permission to take a closer look, de Botton explained that his "desire to investigate these semi-ruined objects, though personal in nature, nevertheless fits into a long Western tradition of preoccupation with the remnants of collapsing civilisations." The attendant suggested that he leave before he got his backside filled with lead.

In the post-industrial age, de Botton believes, most of us know next to nothing about the products, brand new and broken down, that surround us. And so, in "The Pleasure and Sorrows of Work," he swims "upstream in order to observe the forgotten odysseys of crates, to witness the secret life of warehouses." His aim is "to mitigate the deadening, uniquely modern sense of dislocation between the things we so heedlessly consume in the run of our daily lives and their unknown origins and creators."

Exquisitely written - and enhanced by Richard Baker's photos - the book is at once a richly detailed account of tuna fishing, cookie-maki

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