FINIS: SUMMER READING

1. Everyone needs to read at least one Boris Akunin murder mystery. I finished "The Death of Achilles" and am almost done with the "Turkish Gambit." Akunin brings a Georgian-Russian brilliance, complexity, and descriptiveness of late 19th century Russian culture to all that he writes. I don't know why anyone would want to read Agatha Christie after reading an Akunin mystery.

2. Andrew Sullivan, "The Conservative Soul." A freebie sent by the publisher to get me to assign for a class. If you don't know, Sullivan is a noted (notorious?) homosexual, conservative, blogger, and initial supporter of the Iraq war. I think he sounds more like a 19th century liberal than a conservative, but what interested me most was his description of Christian fundamentalists. Obviously he does not treat them gently, but I thought there was some truth in how he caricatured Christian fundamentalists. Christian fundamentalists may need to objectively evaluate the kind of image they are presenting, not just to those who are opposed to their moral teaching, but to the wider world they are trying to "save."

3. "Advice and Consent" (another freebie) by Lee Epstein and Jeffrey A. Segal, both noted law professors. The value of this book is that it puts in historical context the current confrontations regarding Supreme Court and other federal judicial appointments. Beginning with Washington, Adams, and Jefferson judicial appointments have always been used to promote political agendas, serve as ideological reinforcers, or as a reward for political allies. I think conservative Republicans saw this back in the Reagan years after finally breaking the Democrat dominance which allowed that party to alter the judicial landscape following FDR.

4. "Why the West Has Won" by Victor Davis Hanson. He examines nine major battles from ancient Greek times to the Tet offensive in 1968 in Vietnam. While I found the book needlessly repetitive and less well-written than I expected, it raises some provocative arguments for why the West has been so successful on the battlefield. The armies of "free" or "freer" peoples have advantages on the battlefield that top down managment models do not have.

5. Most sobering was "Becoming Evil" by James Waller. He looks at modern examples of genocide beginning with the Holocaust and as a social psychologist tries to analyze what makes people do terribly evil things. What does it take for a person or leader(s) to annihilate a group of people? While he does not have a particularly biblical or even religious answer, I think it is significant that he really tries to struggle with the issue of evil. I just haven't seen a lot of honest confrontation of this issue in the secular world.

6. Probably the above book meant more to me because I finished reading two books on the Holocaust which raised troubling questions. "Ordinary Men" written by Christopher R. Browning studies the men in Reserve Police Battalion 101 from Hamburg who were sent in to Poland to kill and arrest Jews for shipment to extermination camps. It examines ordinary men and why only a few men out of several hundred refused to kill Jews or sought other assignments. Also Sybille Steinbacher has a short book on the history of Auschwitz and how Germans operated the camp.