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Jean-­Paul Sartre
The nothingness at the heart of his philosophy.
By Clive James
Posted Thursday, March 29, 2007, at 10:45 AM ET

The following essay is adapted from Clive James' Cultural Amnesia, a re-examination of intellectuals, artists, and thinkers who helped shape the 20th century. Slate is publishing an exclusive selection of these essays, going roughly from A to Z.

The Cogito never delivers anything except what we ask it to deliver … [Click here for the full quote.]
—­Jean-­Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

Jean-­Paul Sartre
The nothingness at the heart of his philosophy.
By Clive James
Posted Thursday, March 29, 2007, at 10:45 AM ET

The following essay is adapted from Clive James' Cultural Amnesia, a re-examination of intellectuals, artists, and thinkers who helped shape the 20th century. Slate is publishing an exclusive selection of these essays, going roughly from A to Z.

The Cogito never delivers anything except what we ask it to deliver … [Click here for the full quote.]
—­Jean-­Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

Ludwig Wittgenstein
In search of the real artichoke.
By Clive James
Posted Thursday, April 12, 2007, at 12:53 PM ET

The following essay is adapted from Clive James' Cultural Amnesia, a re-examination of intellectuals, artists, and thinkers who helped shape the 20th century. Slate is publishing an exclusive selection of these essays, going roughly from A to Z.

Philosophy, as we use the word, is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert on us.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books

Ludwig Wittgenstein
In search of the real artichoke.
By Clive James
Posted Thursday, April 12, 2007, at 12:53 PM ET

The following essay is adapted from Clive James' Cultural Amnesia, a re-examination of intellectuals, artists, and thinkers who helped shape the 20th century. Slate is publishing an exclusive selection of these essays, going roughly from A to Z.

Philosophy, as we use the word, is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert on us.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books

Return of the local bookshop - in a plot hatched upstairs at a Soho pub

The independents are demonstating that their trade can flourish - even in Amazon's shadow
David Teather
Saturday April 14, 2007

Guardian
Crockatt & Powell was conceived during a bit of a drunken session at a book launch, upstairs in a Soho pub.

Matthew Crockatt and Adam Powell had worked in independent bookshops for years and decided through the fug that they could do it better themselves. The shop, with a small but literary range, opened a week before Christmas 2005 on Lower Marsh, a street of chi-chi cafes, betting shops and pawn brokers in the shadow of Waterloo station.

Return of the local bookshop - in a plot hatched upstairs at a Soho pub

The independents are demonstating that their trade can flourish - even in Amazon's shadow
David Teather
Saturday April 14, 2007

Guardian
Crockatt & Powell was conceived during a bit of a drunken session at a book launch, upstairs in a Soho pub.

Matthew Crockatt and Adam Powell had worked in independent bookshops for years and decided through the fug that they could do it better themselves. The shop, with a small but literary range, opened a week before Christmas 2005 on Lower Marsh, a street of chi-chi cafes, betting shops and pawn brokers in the shadow of Waterloo station.

Pearls Before Breakfast
Can one of the nation's great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour? Let's find out.

By Gene Weingarten
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 8, 2007; W10

HE EMERGED FROM THE METRO AT THE L'ENFANT PLAZA STATION AND POSITIONED HIMSELF AGAINST A WALL BESIDE A TRASH BASKET. By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play.

Pearls Before Breakfast
Can one of the nation's great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour? Let's find out.

By Gene Weingarten
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 8, 2007; W10

HE EMERGED FROM THE METRO AT THE L'ENFANT PLAZA STATION AND POSITIONED HIMSELF AGAINST A WALL BESIDE A TRASH BASKET. By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play.

Keeping the Faith
By RUSSELL SHORTO

Walk into a shop to buy a newspaper or a wurst or a Game Boy in the German city of Regensburg and your server will probably welcome you with a brisk “grüss’ Gott,” shorthand for “God greet you.” It’s the local form of hello: street-corner dudes and grandmas, everyone says it. This is Bavaria, Germany’s Catholic heartland, a region that gives the lie to the popular notion that Western Europe has tossed its Christian heritage in history’s dustbin. Bavaria is as modern as you please — a center of the European telecommunications industry, the home of BMW (as in Bavarian Motor Works) — but on any special occasion you see couples wandering around looking like Hansel and Gretel, in lederhosen and dirndls. Elsewhere in Germany, Bavarian jokes serve the same function that Polish jokes used to in the United States. Bavarians will tell you they hold to tradition, religion and antique styles of speech not out of stupidity or addiction to kitsch but because they believe these things encompass what is real and true.

Keeping the Faith
By RUSSELL SHORTO

Walk into a shop to buy a newspaper or a wurst or a Game Boy in the German city of Regensburg and your server will probably welcome you with a brisk “grüss’ Gott,” shorthand for “God greet you.” It’s the local form of hello: street-corner dudes and grandmas, everyone says it. This is Bavaria, Germany’s Catholic heartland, a region that gives the lie to the popular notion that Western Europe has tossed its Christian heritage in history’s dustbin. Bavaria is as modern as you please — a center of the European telecommunications industry, the home of BMW (as in Bavarian Motor Works) — but on any special occasion you see couples wandering around looking like Hansel and Gretel, in lederhosen and dirndls. Elsewhere in Germany, Bavarian jokes serve the same function that Polish jokes used to in the United States. Bavarians will tell you they hold to tradition, religion and antique styles of speech not out of stupidity or addiction to kitsch but because they believe these things encompass what is real and true.

Muhammad on the stage
Bart van Es

Matthew Dimmock, editor
WILLIAM PERCY’S "MAHOMET AND HIS HEAVEN"
A critical edition
259pp. Ashgate. £50 (US $99.95).
978 0 754 65406 3

Mahomet and His Heaven (1601) has not fulfilled its author’s dying ambitions. In the 1640s, living a “melancholy and retired” life, drinking “nothing but ale”, William Percy made several manuscript copies of his play, apparently still hoping for a first public performance. Today, such an event is more unlikely than ever. All visual representations of the Prophet cause offence; a work whose concluding Act shows an infatuated Muhammad bending to clean the shoes of a contemptuous woman would provoke anger on an exceptional scale. As editor, Matthew Dimmock does make a brief case for the play’s ingenious plotting and “undeserved obscurity”, but he is clear in rejecting the case for any modern production. His principal interest lies in the play as a source for cultural history.

*

Muhammad on the stage
Bart van Es

Matthew Dimmock, editor
WILLIAM PERCY’S "MAHOMET AND HIS HEAVEN"
A critical edition
259pp. Ashgate. £50 (US $99.95).
978 0 754 65406 3

Mahomet and His Heaven (1601) has not fulfilled its author’s dying ambitions. In the 1640s, living a “melancholy and retired” life, drinking “nothing but ale”, William Percy made several manuscript copies of his play, apparently still hoping for a first public performance. Today, such an event is more unlikely than ever. All visual representations of the Prophet cause offence; a work whose concluding Act shows an infatuated Muhammad bending to clean the shoes of a contemptuous woman would provoke anger on an exceptional scale. As editor, Matthew Dimmock does make a brief case for the play’s ingenious plotting and “undeserved obscurity”, but he is clear in rejecting the case for any modern production. His principal interest lies in the play as a source for cultural history.

*

Academimic

By Paul Dean
Buy the book

*


Cover of

I heard Craig Raine interviewed on the radio about this book.[1] Didn’t he feel, he was asked, that his often abrasive dismissals of fellow critics (“execrable,” “stupid”) lowered the standards of academic writing? His answer was contemptuous: “Yeah, but who reads academic writing, for God’s sake?”

Well, quite a few people do—he has even read some himself—and they will have to go on doing so if they want real help in understanding T. S. Eliot. Raine’s book, in a series called “Lives and Legacies,” gives a biographical chronology, and adopts a chaotic approach to Eliot’s work, the continuity and development of which are obscured. There is no mention of Emily Hale, a key figure in Eliot’s life, in the chronology or the text. Raine is outraged, on behalf of the poet’s widow (to whom his book is dedicated “with love”), at any suggestion that Eliot treated his first wife, Vivienne, badly, or that his sexual orientation might have been open to question, and he wriggles uncomfortably with the indictment of Eliot as anti-Semitic. He has one central insight—indeed obsession—to offer: that the master-theme of Eliot’s work is that of “the buried life … the idea of a life not fully lived.”

Academimic

By Paul Dean
Buy the book

*


Cover of

I heard Craig Raine interviewed on the radio about this book.[1] Didn’t he feel, he was asked, that his often abrasive dismissals of fellow critics (“execrable,” “stupid”) lowered the standards of academic writing? His answer was contemptuous: “Yeah, but who reads academic writing, for God’s sake?”

Well, quite a few people do—he has even read some himself—and they will have to go on doing so if they want real help in understanding T. S. Eliot. Raine’s book, in a series called “Lives and Legacies,” gives a biographical chronology, and adopts a chaotic approach to Eliot’s work, the continuity and development of which are obscured. There is no mention of Emily Hale, a key figure in Eliot’s life, in the chronology or the text. Raine is outraged, on behalf of the poet’s widow (to whom his book is dedicated “with love”), at any suggestion that Eliot treated his first wife, Vivienne, badly, or that his sexual orientation might have been open to question, and he wriggles uncomfortably with the indictment of Eliot as anti-Semitic. He has one central insight—indeed obsession—to offer: that the master-theme of Eliot’s work is that of “the buried life … the idea of a life not fully lived.”

Is Biology Reducible to the Laws of Physics?
John Dupré

Darwinian Reductionism: Or, How to Stop Worrying and Love Molecular Biology. Alex Rosenberg. x 263 pp. University of Chicago Press, 2006. $40.

Alex Rosenberg is unusual among philosophers of biology in adhering to the view that everything occurs in accordance with universal laws, and that adequate explanations must appeal to the laws that brought about the thing explained. He also believes that everything is ultimately determined by what happens at the physical level—and that this entails that the mind is "nothing but" the brain. For an adherent of this brand of physicalism, it is fairly evident that if there are laws at "higher" levels—laws of biology, psychology or social science—they are either deductive consequences of the laws of physics or they are not true. Hence Rosenberg is committed to the classical reductionism that aims to explain phenomena at all levels by appeal to the physical.

Is Biology Reducible to the Laws of Physics?
John Dupré

Darwinian Reductionism: Or, How to Stop Worrying and Love Molecular Biology. Alex Rosenberg. x 263 pp. University of Chicago Press, 2006. $40.

Alex Rosenberg is unusual among philosophers of biology in adhering to the view that everything occurs in accordance with universal laws, and that adequate explanations must appeal to the laws that brought about the thing explained. He also believes that everything is ultimately determined by what happens at the physical level—and that this entails that the mind is "nothing but" the brain. For an adherent of this brand of physicalism, it is fairly evident that if there are laws at "higher" levels—laws of biology, psychology or social science—they are either deductive consequences of the laws of physics or they are not true. Hence Rosenberg is committed to the classical reductionism that aims to explain phenomena at all levels by appeal to the physical.

Don Quixote and The Narrative Self

Stefán Snaevarr asks, are our identities created by narratives?

Once upon a time a philosopher wrote an article called ‘Don Quixote and The Narrative Self’. He commenced by saying: In this essay, I will discuss the question of whether our selves are constituted by narratives, ie stories. Are we like Don Quixote, whose self was created by his reading of medieval romances: are we Homo quixotienses, the narrative self? Or are we rather like the protagonist of Sartre’s novel Nausea, Antonin Roquentin, whose life did not form any narrative unity? Are we in other words rather Homo roquentinenses?

The idea that our life is a story is by no means new. Thus the great bard Shakespeare said that life “...is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” (Macbeth) However, it took philosophers some time to discover the philosophical import of this view of life. It was actually a German chap called William Schapp who first gave this age-old idea a philosophical twist. He maintained that we live our lives in a host of stories, which have connection with the stories of other people in various ways; so actually, our selves are nothing but cross-sections of stories. Our identities are created by a vast web of stories, as is our relationship with reality. We understand and identify things by placing them in the stories we tell about them: just like selves, things do not really exist outside of stories. We are caught in this narrative web because we cannot exist outside of it. There is a world-wide web of stories: the world is that web.

Don Quixote and The Narrative Self

Stefán Snaevarr asks, are our identities created by narratives?

Once upon a time a philosopher wrote an article called ‘Don Quixote and The Narrative Self’. He commenced by saying: In this essay, I will discuss the question of whether our selves are constituted by narratives, ie stories. Are we like Don Quixote, whose self was created by his reading of medieval romances: are we Homo quixotienses, the narrative self? Or are we rather like the protagonist of Sartre’s novel Nausea, Antonin Roquentin, whose life did not form any narrative unity? Are we in other words rather Homo roquentinenses?

The idea that our life is a story is by no means new. Thus the great bard Shakespeare said that life “...is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” (Macbeth) However, it took philosophers some time to discover the philosophical import of this view of life. It was actually a German chap called William Schapp who first gave this age-old idea a philosophical twist. He maintained that we live our lives in a host of stories, which have connection with the stories of other people in various ways; so actually, our selves are nothing but cross-sections of stories. Our identities are created by a vast web of stories, as is our relationship with reality. We understand and identify things by placing them in the stories we tell about them: just like selves, things do not really exist outside of stories. We are caught in this narrative web because we cannot exist outside of it. There is a world-wide web of stories: the world is that web.

Polish witchhunt

By Ignacio Ramonet

The Poles call it the law of lustration, a term meaning ritual purification; the word has strong connotations of repentance and penitence in Poland, where history and Catholicism are so closely intertwined.

Under the law, which was passed last October and entered into force on 15 March this year, 700,000 Poles are required to confess any collaboration with the communists between 1945 and 1989. All senior civil servants, university professors, lawyers, headmasters and journalists born before 1972 must now confess their past sins by 15 May.

Polish witchhunt

By Ignacio Ramonet

The Poles call it the law of lustration, a term meaning ritual purification; the word has strong connotations of repentance and penitence in Poland, where history and Catholicism are so closely intertwined.

Under the law, which was passed last October and entered into force on 15 March this year, 700,000 Poles are required to confess any collaboration with the communists between 1945 and 1989. All senior civil servants, university professors, lawyers, headmasters and journalists born before 1972 must now confess their past sins by 15 May.

Natural, Equal, Universal
By GORDON S. WOOD
Skip to next paragraph
INVENTING HUMAN RIGHTS
A History.

A History.By Lynn Hunt.

Illustrated. 272 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $25.95.

According to many people in the West today, human rights trump all other claims and values, including those of custom, community and culture; everyone in the world, including every individual in strange faraway places like Darfur, has certain inalienable rights simply because he or she is a human being. As conventional as this claim has become for us, in the entire sweep of history it is quite extraordinary and of fairly recent origin. How did it come about and what has been its history? These are the questions Lynn Hunt has sought to answer in this remarkable little book. Indeed, because she covers so much ground in so few pages and with such clarity, “Inventing Human Rights” is a tour de force of compression.

Natural, Equal, Universal
By GORDON S. WOOD
Skip to next paragraph
INVENTING HUMAN RIGHTS
A History.

A History.By Lynn Hunt.

Illustrated. 272 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $25.95.

According to many people in the West today, human rights trump all other claims and values, including those of custom, community and culture; everyone in the world, including every individual in strange faraway places like Darfur, has certain inalienable rights simply because he or she is a human being. As conventional as this claim has become for us, in the entire sweep of history it is quite extraordinary and of fairly recent origin. How did it come about and what has been its history? These are the questions Lynn Hunt has sought to answer in this remarkable little book. Indeed, because she covers so much ground in so few pages and with such clarity, “Inventing Human Rights” is a tour de force of compression.

Enforcing Human Rights
By Norman Geras
Winter 2007

Crimes Against Humanity:
A Normative Account
by Larry May
Cambridge University Press, 2005 310 pp
$25.99 paper

LARRY MAY has written a book on crimes against humanity that provides careful analysis of the core issues for anyone interested in this subject. The book is divided into four parts. In the first two, May explores the philosophical underpinnings of the concept of crimes against humanity and examines some of the most relevant norms of international law. The third and fourth parts are then concerned with issues of application. Although there is much of interest in these later sections of the book, this review focuses on the argument of its first two parts—on the philosophical case the author lays out and the normative principles central to it.

Enforcing Human Rights
By Norman Geras
Winter 2007

Crimes Against Humanity:
A Normative Account
by Larry May
Cambridge University Press, 2005 310 pp
$25.99 paper

LARRY MAY has written a book on crimes against humanity that provides careful analysis of the core issues for anyone interested in this subject. The book is divided into four parts. In the first two, May explores the philosophical underpinnings of the concept of crimes against humanity and examines some of the most relevant norms of international law. The third and fourth parts are then concerned with issues of application. Although there is much of interest in these later sections of the book, this review focuses on the argument of its first two parts—on the philosophical case the author lays out and the normative principles central to it.

n Search of Another Country:
Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution
Joseph Crespino

Book Description | Endorsements | Table of Contents

COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Published by Princeton University Press and copyrighted, © 2007, by Princeton University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher, except for reading and browsing via the World Wide Web. Users are not permitted to mount this file on any network servers. Follow links for Class Use and other Permissions. For more information, send e-mail to permissions@pupress.princeton.edu

This file is also available in Adobe Acrobat PDF format

Introduction

Everybody knows about Mississippi goddamn.
—Nina Simone

ON AUGUST 4, 1964, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents recovered the mangled bodies of three civil rights workers beneath an earthen dam near Philadelphia, Mississippi. Reports of the men’s disappearance in rural Neshoba County and the federal manhunt that ensued occupied the nation’s attention throughout Freedom Summer 1964, when hundreds of college-age volunteers flooded Mississippi to help run voter registration drives and “freedom schools.” The almost daily reports of violence and harassment over the summer revealed a white population in Mississippi that seemed dramatically out of step with the rest of the nation. In electoral terms, Mississippi’s isolation was encapsulated in its embrace of the 1964 Republican presidential nominee, Barry Goldwater. Lyndon Johnson defeated Goldwater nationally with the largest percentage of the popular vote in American presidential history. In Mississippi, however, with a voting population that remained almost exclusively white, a remarkable 87 percent of voters pulled the lever for the losing candidate.1 Never before in American histor

n Search of Another Country:
Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution
Joseph Crespino

Book Description | Endorsements | Table of Contents

COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Published by Princeton University Press and copyrighted, © 2007, by Princeton University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher, except for reading and browsing via the World Wide Web. Users are not permitted to mount this file on any network servers. Follow links for Class Use and other Permissions. For more information, send e-mail to permissions@pupress.princeton.edu

This file is also available in Adobe Acrobat PDF format

Introduction

Everybody knows about Mississippi goddamn.
—Nina Simone

ON AUGUST 4, 1964, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents recovered the mangled bodies of three civil rights workers beneath an earthen dam near Philadelphia, Mississippi. Reports of the men’s disappearance in rural Neshoba County and the federal manhunt that ensued occupied the nation’s attention throughout Freedom Summer 1964, when hundreds of college-age volunteers flooded Mississippi to help run voter registration drives and “freedom schools.” The almost daily reports of violence and harassment over the summer revealed a white population in Mississippi that seemed dramatically out of step with the rest of the nation. In electoral terms, Mississippi’s isolation was encapsulated in its embrace of the 1964 Republican presidential nominee, Barry Goldwater. Lyndon Johnson defeated Goldwater nationally with the largest percentage of the popular vote in American presidential history. In Mississippi, however, with a voting population that remained almost exclusively white, a remarkable 87 percent of voters pulled the lever for the losing candidate.1 Never before in American history had one state

Britain delivers damning verdict on Blair's 10 years

Exclusive poll: public says PM has failed to improve country
Gaby Hinsliff, political editor
Sunday April 8, 2007

Observer
A remarkable picture of the way Tony Blair has lost the faith of British voters over his 10 years in power is revealed today by a comprehensive study of public attitudes towards the Prime Minister.

As Blair prepares to leave office, the poll of more than 2,000 adults shows that people believe the country is a more dangerous, less happy, less pleasant place to live. There was a negative response to nearly all of more than 40 questions the public was asked about trust in politics, how they felt about their own lives and whether public services had got better.

Despite some independent evidence that services have improved and the economy has performed well compared with other industrialised nations, the poll shows how damning the public's verdict is on Blair and his government.

Britain delivers damning verdict on Blair's 10 years

Exclusive poll: public says PM has failed to improve country
Gaby Hinsliff, political editor
Sunday April 8, 2007

Observer
A remarkable picture of the way Tony Blair has lost the faith of British voters over his 10 years in power is revealed today by a comprehensive study of public attitudes towards the Prime Minister.

As Blair prepares to leave office, the poll of more than 2,000 adults shows that people believe the country is a more dangerous, less happy, less pleasant place to live. There was a negative response to nearly all of more than 40 questions the public was asked about trust in politics, how they felt about their own lives and whether public services had got better.

Despite some independent evidence that services have improved and the economy has performed well compared with other industrialised nations, the poll shows how damning the public's verdict is on Blair and his government.

Ian McEwan: I hang on to hope in a tide of fear
In our perilously changing world, where should we seek salvation? In science, declares Ian McEwan, who talks to Boyd Tonkin about his new novel, On Chesil Beach
Published: 06 April 2007

If you stroll along the "infinite shingle" of Chesil Beach in Dorset, as Ian McEwan did while composing his new novel, you will find that millennia of tides and winds have "graded the size of pebbles" along its 18-mile length, "with the bigger stones at the eastern end". The writer went to check this out, and felt - as he weighed the pebbles in his palms - that it was true.

Ian McEwan: I hang on to hope in a tide of fear
In our perilously changing world, where should we seek salvation? In science, declares Ian McEwan, who talks to Boyd Tonkin about his new novel, On Chesil Beach
Published: 06 April 2007

If you stroll along the "infinite shingle" of Chesil Beach in Dorset, as Ian McEwan did while composing his new novel, you will find that millennia of tides and winds have "graded the size of pebbles" along its 18-mile length, "with the bigger stones at the eastern end". The writer went to check this out, and felt - as he weighed the pebbles in his palms - that it was true.

Friends on the Street

John Cotter



William T. Vollmann
Poor People
Ecco, 2007, $29.95 (hardcover)
313 pages, ISBN: 978-0-06-087882-5

William T. Vollmann’s new exploration, Poor People, is not a cracking whodunit. We learn almost nothing we didn’t know about why there are so many hurting souls in our world. The indirect causes, on the other hand, are everywhere, and are well explained, from bad government to big corporations to stupid prejudice. This we have long suspected to be true. What we didn’t know, however, are the individual stories Vollmann teases out and grapples with: local histories, faces. I hadn’t, before picking up the book, heard of the dire situation in western Kazakhstan, and I believe I am are better (and worse, no doubt) for knowing it. I have not walked the streets in a Colombia barrio—I probably never will—but I have to think I’ll be the better for Vollmann’s report.

Friends on the Street

John Cotter



William T. Vollmann
Poor People
Ecco, 2007, $29.95 (hardcover)
313 pages, ISBN: 978-0-06-087882-5

William T. Vollmann’s new exploration, Poor People, is not a cracking whodunit. We learn almost nothing we didn’t know about why there are so many hurting souls in our world. The indirect causes, on the other hand, are everywhere, and are well explained, from bad government to big corporations to stupid prejudice. This we have long suspected to be true. What we didn’t know, however, are the individual stories Vollmann teases out and grapples with: local histories, faces. I hadn’t, before picking up the book, heard of the dire situation in western Kazakhstan, and I believe I am are better (and worse, no doubt) for knowing it. I have not walked the streets in a Colombia barrio—I probably never will—but I have to think I’ll be the better for Vollmann’s report.

The evolution of sex roles
Anthropologists are looking at how prehistoric tasks were divided, perhaps indicating the moment when we became truly human.
By Faye Flam
Inquirer Staff Writer
Views of a female figurine in ivory. Such European figures, some anthropologists say, give a fuller view of prehistoric society than does the image of the mammoth hunter.
OLGA SOFFER
Views of a female figurine in ivory. Such European figures, some anthropologists say, give a fuller view of prehistoric society than does the image of the mammoth hunter.
» More photos
Could it be that Neanderthal females achieved an equality that is rare even by today's standards?

Some anthropologists make a case that our extinct female cousins hunted alongside the males during an epoch when our own ancestral women were gathering plants and doing other (essential) work. They argue that the appearance of gender roles was critical to humans' eventual domination of the globe - and that the importance of the women of the Pleistocene period has been vastly understated.

The evolution of sex roles
Anthropologists are looking at how prehistoric tasks were divided, perhaps indicating the moment when we became truly human.
By Faye Flam
Inquirer Staff Writer
Views of a female figurine in ivory. Such European figures, some anthropologists say, give a fuller view of prehistoric society than does the image of the mammoth hunter.
OLGA SOFFER
Views of a female figurine in ivory. Such European figures, some anthropologists say, give a fuller view of prehistoric society than does the image of the mammoth hunter.
» More photos
Could it be that Neanderthal females achieved an equality that is rare even by today's standards?

Some anthropologists make a case that our extinct female cousins hunted alongside the males during an epoch when our own ancestral women were gathering plants and doing other (essential) work. They argue that the appearance of gender roles was critical to humans' eventual domination of the globe - and that the importance of the women of the Pleistocene period has been vastly understated.

What He said
A. E. Harvey

::nobreak::

Richard Bauckham
JESUS AND THE EYEWITNESSES
The Gospels as eyewitness testimony
538pp. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. $32.
978 0 80283162 0

The Synoptic Gospels – Matthew, Mark and Luke – present a conundrum that is probably unique in the annals of literary research. On the one hand they display similarities which are sometimes so close that it has been thought impossible they should have occurred had not the author of one had access to at least one of the others (and the reigning but not the only possible hypothesis is that Matthew and Luke both made use of Mark). On the other hand they have diff

What He said
A. E. Harvey

::nobreak::

Richard Bauckham
JESUS AND THE EYEWITNESSES
The Gospels as eyewitness testimony
538pp. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. $32.
978 0 80283162 0

The Synoptic Gospels – Matthew, Mark and Luke – present a conundrum that is probably unique in the annals of literary research. On the one hand they display similarities which are sometimes so close that it has been thought impossible they should have occurred had not the author of one had access to at least one of the others (and the reigning but not the only possible hypothesis is that Matthew and Luke both made use of Mark). On the other hand they have diff