Living Without God by Ronald Aronson.

I must say that I have never read an atheist self-help book prior to this. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was not insipid. Aronson has a more extensive grasp of academic philosophy, history and science, than most writers in this category. He uses all of these intellectual weapons, albeit selectively, to let his skeptical readers know (to misquote Bob Marley) that everything can be alright with the proper approach.

His optimism, while never the uncritical “happy, happy, happy” of the self-help set, is persistent, though qualified. For example, his chapter entitled “The World on Our Shoulders” discusses human suffering and social responsibility. The existence of such a chapter is the first difference one should note between Aronson and pop-psych gurus: some of the chapters are not focused inwardly on personal, self-absorbing problems. The author sees humans as part of nature and necessarily connected to the world. In tackling social issues, he relies upon empiricism and individual interpretation of what one is seeing. Aronson makes it clear that we have a choice in our behavior; nothing in outcome is pre-determined or dictated to us. Regarding national issues of racism and economic inequality, “whether or not we see clearly depends on a fundamental choice of perception: do we see ourselves as isolated, separate individuals, or instead recognize ourselves as belonging to, and depending on, a wider world…Accepting responsibility for this means first acknowledging that we all belong to a community” (Aronson, pp. 80-81). The author makes it clear that, even if one were to recognize their membership in a community and act accordingly, the road to justice is still long and victory is uncertain. Instead of the absolute confidence that we will attain equality, he concludes that we are working “toward a time when every human being achieves…full human dignity” (Aronson, p. 89).

In reading Living Without God, I had to consider what value such a book might have to a community as individualist and decentralized as ours. Atheists don’t need a catechism. Of course we do have a few rather dogmatic thinkers among our community. Some are still stuck: angry at their dads or defining themselves by their opposition to the religion in which they were raised. But by and large, we’re pretty independent. Our strength resides in choosing our own paths through life. As a result, there can be as many atheisms as there are individuals who call themselves atheists. So why read a book that lays-out one person’s personal plan? Perhaps because it is an opportunity to bounce the author’s perceptions off of your own, comparing your thoughts and strategies with those of another rational, evidence-based individual. It’s an occasion to meditate on some questions, agreeing or disagreeing as you choose, sifting through Aronson’s thoughts and yours on the topics of the chapters (gratitude for life, facing death, hope, social responsibility), finding the views and methods that fit your life. If there are important subjects that Aronson has, in your mind, failed to address, then it’s time for you to write your own book.

Aronson, Ronald. Living Without God. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2008.

American Lion by Jon Meacham.

American Lion is the product of Newsweek editor and popular author Jon Meacham. It follows Andrew Jackson’s life in a chronological fashion. However, the greatest portion of the book is focused upon the seventh president’s White House years, with short chapters on life before and after his two terms. Centering the narrative on Jackson’s political career allows the author to spend more time on issues of the period that are most important to US political history.

The book begins with a bombastic prologue concerning South Carolina’s threatened secession. Meacham presents a dramatic play for the dim-witted. “It looked like war” is the opening line, attempting to grab the reader with crass emotionalism. “Jackson pounded a table as he pondered the crisis: ‘By the God of Heaven, I will uphold the laws’” (Meacham, p. xvii). It’s Macbeth with a twang. But this is Meacham’s merchandise. He is a magazine huckster writing to entice enough public to insure a best seller. Once he has baited his hook with enough banality to lure his mediocre-brow fish, Meacham settles-in to write a capable biography. Though he never abandons the qualities of forced sentimentality and theatrical excitability which attract literate infants with shiny things, his biography is well-informed.

The author has a little used, but effective means of providing citation. Notes appear at the end of the book. They are not designated a number as is traditional. Instead, a preceding number denotes the page on which a reference may be found. This permits one to easily examine the book’s evidence page by page. It is a sensible enough method that the reviewer cannot determine whether it or the traditional means of documentation is superior. Meacham is meticulous in his offering of citation. Here we see the positive influence of his journalism background.

The author can be a bit too forgiving of his subject’s personal failings. For example, Jackson campaigned for his Vice President (Van Buren) in the latter’s White House bid. At the same time, the dearest woman in his life (his niece Emily) was dying of tuberculosis. He chose political priorities over Emily because a Van Buren win would vindicate Jackson’s own presidency. Meacham rationalizes “to him the country was family too” (Meacham, p. 328). It would be more accurate describe a man who would step over the corpses of his loved ones to attain political goals, with a gentle reference to his ambition and self-involvement.

Fortunately, on important matters of Jacksonian racism and politics, Meacham is clear-sighted. Jackson owned 150 slaves (Meacham, p. 303). In office, “he denounced abolitionists’ ‘inflammatory appeals’” and “worried that anti-slavery forces were about to destroy the country” during his efforts to repress distribution of their pamphlets in the South (Meacham, p. 322). While there is always a danger that one may judge a past generation employing current values, it is not an issue in cases where a significant enlightened opposition existed. It would be arrogant to laugh at Ptolemy for believing that the Sun revolved around the Earth. Few thought differently. But during Jackson’s time, ideas repudiating both censorship and slavery were prominent. In this context, Meacham’s critique that “Jackson, who believed in the virtues of democracy and individual liberties so clearly and so forcefully for whites, was blinded by the prejudices of his age” is a fully appropriate one (Meacham, p. 303).

In addition, throughout the biography, Meacham critically examines the President’s unjust “Indian Removal” policy which forcibly relocated Native Americans and resulted in so many deaths. The author’s view is that Jackson’s position “was an exaggerated example of the prevailing white view, favoring removal at nearly any cost…he was on the extreme edge of the mainstream” (Meacham, p. 96). While “there was a significant anti-removal campaign across the country,” Jackson remained untouched by it. “There is nothing redemptive about Jackson’s Indian policy” (Meacham, p. 7).

American Lion is a conflicting mix of invented dramatic feeling and well-researched facts about the Jackson presidency. Meacham does tell a colorful “story,” with all the positive and negative permutations of that word. The writing is exciting, but may distract with sensational content. Sentences like “To rule, one had to survive, and to survive one had to fight” (Meacham, p. 7), are emotive but meaningless. Presidents don’t rule. In the context of a presidency, the word fight is a purple metaphor. Survival is not a real concern. A student of history will be required to dodge some melodrama, but this will not affect comprehension of the facts. Those who feel that excessive passages of dramatic prose are a waste of reading time will fare better with an academic biography of the seventh president.

Meacham, Jon. American Lion. Andrew Jackson in the White House. New York: Random House, 2008.

Police Violence Today. History Lessons Ignored. Inspired by Stefan Aust's Baader-Meinhof.

It is depressing to watch history repeat itself: police killing people, police acquitted or never tried for those crimes, individuals within a movement frustrated by a lack of democratic process becoming more extreme. Parallels in history are all too apparent.

On June 2, 1967 students in West Berlin were protesting the reception of the Shah of Iran by their government. Some protesters threw paint balloons which fell far short of the Shah’s motorcade; but this was as disorderly as the crowd became. After the Shah had entered the Berlin Opera House, the protesters were dispersing.

“Then the police attacked, wielding their truncheons without giving the usual warning first…demonstrators collapsed, covered with blood…Detective Sergeant Karl-Heinz Kurras...of the Political Police…thought he spotted a ringleader…the police gave chase, reached him and showered blows on him. The student hung limp in their arms and slumped slowly to the ground. Karl-Heinz Kurras was among those on the spot at this moment, holding his 7.65-mm pistol with the safety catch off. The muzzle was less than half a metre away from the demonstrator’s head, or that was how it appeared to eye-witnesses. Suddenly a shot rang out. The bullet hit the man above the right ear, entered his brain and smashed the cranium…The dead man was Benno Ohnesorg, twenty-six years old, studying Romance languages and literature, a pacifist” (Aust, pp. 26-27).

Kurras was shortly acquitted in two trials and subsequently promoted. “In January 2012, an investigation carried out by federal prosecutors and Der Spiegel magazine ruled that the shooting of Ohnesorg was not in self-defence and was certainly premeditated” (Wikipedia/Der Spiegel citation below). Police violence against protesters, check. Police murder, check. Police acquittal, check.

The result of these murders, then as now, was increased radicalism and the perception that the offending officers represented a Police State rather than a Democratic Republic. On the same night of the police riot and Ohnesorg’s assassination, demonstrators met at the Berlin SDS centre. “A slim young woman with long blonde hair was weeping uncontrollably, crying, ‘This fascist state means to kill us all. We must organize resistance. Violence is the only way to answer violence” (Aust, p. 27). This once innocent, young woman was Gudrun Ensslin; a future leader in the Baader-Meinhof Group who was to commit deadly acts of terrorism in the coming years. Those who feel that this example applies only to Germany need only look to the Police Riot of the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention and the rise of the Weather Underground for comparisons.

All parties must take responsibility: police and demonstrators; past and present. Yes, the individuals of the Baader-Meinhof Group were personally responsible for becoming terrorists; for carrying-out extreme measures in response to extreme repression. Many of their fellow students continued to protest against the Shah or the Vietnam War without resorting to violence. But we must recognize that without police violence, it is unlikely that these students would have turned to hatred, thought of the state as fascistic and assumed violent tactics.

In Brooklyn, a disturbed Ismaaiyl Brinsley has already murdered NYPD officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu, claiming it as revenge for the police murders of Eric Garner and Michael Brown. This will not be the last extremist response. Demonstrators, motivated by Ferguson and other killings of non-white minorities, see that they are not being heard and are responding with increasingly radical acts. One, much milder but telling, example is the highway blockage of I-93 leading into Boston. It was peaceful, but was the impotent act of a frustrated protest movement that only served to anger commuters. No official response assuring justice for murdered African American males has resulted from this protest. As protesters continue to be unheard and injustice persists, their actions will become increasingly angry.

Authorities are acquitting murderers. More minority males are being murdered. There is a perception that the police receive special treatment when on trial for murder. The democratic process appears compromised. People see this across a political spectrum from uninvolved citizens to the demonstrators themselves. It is too reminiscent of the past.

The elected officials must now intervene, to both show the protesters (and the rest of us) that there is justice. They must enact that justice, before things go regrettably further. As exhibited by the example of western democracies during the late 1960s, failure to act will result in escalating discord. We elect the representatives of civic and national government. They hold the leash by which the police are restrained. If they do not act to restrain police violence and bring murdering officers to justice, they must be replaced. This is how a democratic republic works. Let us not repeat the errors of the 1960s.

Aust, Stefan. Baader-Meinhof. The Inside Story of the Red Army Faction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Wikipedia:  "Police Covered Up Truth Behind Infamous Student Shooting". SPIEGEL ONLINE international. 2012-01-23. Retrieved 2012-02-25.

Prague in Black and Gold by Peter Demetz

“I wish to sketch a few selected chapters of a paradoxical history in which the golden hues of proud power and creative glory, of emperors, artists and scholars, and restive people, are not untouched with the black of suffering and the victims’ silence” (Demetz, p. xii).

Above is the key sentence in Peter Demetz’s preface to Prague in Black and Gold, which explains both the title and his approach to the city’s history. Prague was a distinctly multi-ethnic mix. Though it was divided largely between Czech and German populations, Jews comprised a significant minority (peaking at 25% of the citizenry in 1705), followed by a small but prominent population of Italians.

As a professor of  Literature at Yale and former resident of Prague, Demetz is true to his word, offering “sketches” rather than extensive, methodical chronology. After a tedious but foundation-setting first chapter on the origins of the city, the author presents some colorful depictions. King Otakar, Emperor Charles IV, Jan Hus, Rudolph II, Mozart and T.G. Masaryk, are all presented in individual chapters where they overlay, influence and are influenced by a changing cultural variety residents. Prague in Black and Gold is a series of moments set in historical order. Demetz will rush through 150 years within two pages, then will lovingly describe an episode or individual for most of a chapter. The author focuses on what he thinks is significant or what interests him personally. The Polish Kings, who ruled Prague from 1471 to 1526, get a few scattered sentences over two pages, while Mozart (who only visited Prague four times) rates a chapter.

Demetz writes what he likes, adding a great number of personal impressions to his history. But what he writes is insightful and not infrequently lyrical. There is little place for the personal among our modern, clinical, more scientific schools of history. Undeniably, an impersonal, empirical approach is most often going to yield a less prejudiced, factual representation of events. But Demetz’s highly individualistic account presents an astute angle that teaches much and is rarely boring.

One area where it would be helpful for Demetz to learn from more evidenced-based historians concerns documentation. There is a fine, chapter by chapter bibliography, but no footnotes or endnotes. With such undisciplined scholarship, a good writer can carelessly and convincingly fabricate. Notes are both evidence and markers. They permit information to be verified and keep a writer from straying too far from fact. Historians who do not supply evidence and make their books a collection of impressions or free-hand writing, are merely storytellers. For example, the execution of Jan Hus is presented as a calm, poetic and dignified end to a man of great integrity. After the wood around his stake was lit, the author writes that Hus simply “began to sing aloud.” Then, “when the flames blew in his face, he only prayed silently and after a while died” (Demetz, p. 145). It is hard to imagine that any human being could maintain such serene piety, without crying-out in anguish, while the flesh was being melted from his bones. Maybe Hus was capable of displaying a behavior different from the rest of humanity; but there is no way for us to know since the event is presented without citation.

Prague in Black and Gold is a pensive, melancholy rumination by a capable writer. Demetz feels deeply and struggles concerning his subject. Much of his conflicted perspective is rooted in his own history there: his Jewish mother deported to her death by the Nazis; his life interrupted by totalitarian Communist take-over and personal exile. The “paradoxical history” of creative “golden hues” and “black suffering” in Prague is also that of the author. While the personal invades and skews the historical picture, it presents a unique and often perspicacious view that only someone who has lived the black and gold can write.

Demetz, Peter. Prague in Black and Gold. New York: Hill and Wang, 1997.

Gay New York. Gender, Urban Culture and the making of the Gay Male World 1890 - 1940 by George Chauncey

George Chauncey presents a vivid portrait of New York gay male culture in the years between 1890 and 1940. It is a rich, highly documented study that relies on evidence ranging from interviews and biographical accounts by gay men, to the less friendly testimony of police spies and citizen vigilantes attempting to contain this milieu. The result is a panorama of gay neighborhoods and meeting places that thrived during this period.

The book begins with scenes of an active 1890s “subculture of the flamboyantly effeminate ‘fairies’…who gathered at Paresis Hall and other Bowery resorts.” Many of these men are described as prostitutes directly employed by the owners, or passively encouraged because they enticed customers. While Chauncey is quick to point-out that this “was not the only gay subculture in the city,” it does begin the book on a sensationalist note (Chauncey, p. 34). It might have been more useful to progress from interviews and biographies showing private gay home life, relationships and friendships, which would have illustrated the solid foundation of gay community, but the beginning would have been less exciting.

From this unfortunate start, Chauncey progresses improvingly by depicting the attitudes of men who defined themselves positively as “queers” and “fairies.” This counters the myth that all gay men at the time had internalized the dominant culture’s negative image of them. Self-esteem existed prior to the activism of our current period. The book progresses from the Gay Nineties through the 1930s, when a number of proudly gay entertainers headlined Greenwich Village and Harlem night spots widely attended by the straight community. Chauncey does not pretend that the 1890s through the 1930s were free of harassment and prejudice. He spends a great deal of time highlighting assaults upon the gay male community during this period. But one cannot deny the evidence of a thriving public and private gay culture before World War Two.

While the elaboration of life from home to street is fascinating and opens the reader to a world presumed invisible if non-existent, Chauncey is a historian with a wider purpose. A common assumption is that US gay culture progressed, in a linear trajectory, from concealment to free expression; from oppression to acceptance. “The Whiggish notion that change is always ‘progressive’ and that gay history in particular consists of a steady movement toward freedom continues to have appeal” to the LGBT community and its optimistic allies (Chauncey, p. 9). Chauncey offers evidence that gay male culture was more visible, tolerated and permeable to outsiders between 1890 and 1930 than it was between 1945 and 1960. He claims that a “post-war reaction has tended to blind us to the relative tolerance of the pre-war years” (Chauncey, p. 9). Our lack of knowledge about this early 20^th Century flourishing oasis is largely due to the success of post-war repression.

Despite the eye-opening, socially progressive purpose of the author’s work, his relative exclusion of lesbians will rankle with some readers. Chauncey self-consciously explains that “the book focuses on men because the differences between gay male and lesbian history and the complexity of each made it seem virtually impossible to write a book about both that did justice to each” (Chauncey, p. 27). This justification rings a bit hollow, since lesbians and gay men lived in the same neighborhoods and frequented many of the same social spaces.

Chauncey should be congratulated on his extensive coverage of African American life. Unlike his justification for excluding lesbians, Chauncey does not argue that the differences between Caucasian and African American history “made it seem virtually impossible to write a book about both.” While many white gay clubs excluded African American men, Harlem of the early 20^th Century has a bountiful history of gay neighborhood cohesion, clubs and drag balls, which the author portrays in enthusiastic detail.

Gay New York may have its flaws and blind spots, but it is a significant adjunct to LGBT history. The myths of invisibility, isolation and self-abnegation are aptly countered by its testimony. It depicts a strong, vibrant and cohesive community that thrived for a period before being driven underground by prejudice. While the author’s coverage of post-war suppression is difficult to read, it is an important episode to face. The chronology from a more open and tolerated gay culture to one that was repressed, warns us that the forces of intolerance are persistent. We must be vigilant in order to retain recent LGBT gains.

Chauncey, George. Gay New York. Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940. New York: Basic Books, 1994.

For review of a LGBT book on anarchist support for LGBT rights during this time in US history, see:
http://greatnonfictionbooks.blogspot.com/2014/01/free-comrades-anarchism-and.html

Pissarro. His Life and Work by Ralph Shikes and Paula Harper

Most biographies of Impressionists shower the reader with scenes of innovative artists standing in French fields, peacefully painting light and color with a wide palette. Certainly, there are enough such scenes in any book about Camille Pissarro. But because of who he was, the additional dimensions of his politics and ideas would have to be examined. Pissarro was an anarchist and an atheist of Jewish extraction, as well as a leading member of his generations’ most revolutionary artistic movement.

The authors who wrote this biography are politically suited to sympathetically cover Pissarro’s radicalism. Ralph Shikes was Public Relations Director for both The National Citizen’s Political Action Committee and Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party, as well as having written for “The Nation.” He established the Shikes Fellowship for Civil Liberties & Civil Rights, at Harvard Law School.* Paula Harper was described as "one of the first art historians to bring a feminist perspective to the study of painting and sculpture"**.

For politically-minded readers, the authors do not disappoint. They suffuse their entire portrait of the artist with discussion of his anarchist and radical views. Not only do they show Pissarro actively involved with fellow anarchists (primarily through his illustrations for periodicals, political contacts and quotes of topical views), but additionally they discuss his painting in radical political terms. “Artists who painted in a non-academic, unconventional style…were attracted to anarchism’s stress on the rejection of authority and the exaltation of the individual” (Shikes & Harper, p. 226). The authors analyze Pissarro’s figures, pointing out that the people he chose to represent were “people in humble circumstances, the class to which he was consistently attracted most of his life” (Shikes & Harper, p. 30). Even when he is painting scenes of natural beauty without humans, the artist is aware of his revolutionary motives: “Pissarro…noted, ‘Proudhon says in La Justice that love of earth is linked with revolution, and consequently with the artistic ideal’” (Shikes & Harper, p. 67).

Pissarro’s anarchism and sense of social justice are closely related to his atheism. “Pissarro, a convinced atheist, felt that religious beliefs were a dangerous hindrance to social reform” (Shikes & Harper, p. 157). While the biographers mention several times that Pissarro was an atheist, they fail to explore his thoughts on the subject beyond its political implications.

Not just his politics, but also his life and times are seen through a radical lens. Shikes and Harper portray the artist’s ancestors as Marrano Jews who escaped the Spanish Inquisition, immigrated to Portugal and from there to St Thomas in the Virgin Islands. In spite of this experience of persecution, Pissarro’s family owned two slaves until slavery was abolished in 1848 (Shikes & Harper, p. 20). Later in Paris, the authors present the artist and his views against a backdrop of changing political regimes, French imperialism in Indochina, the Paris Commune and the socio-political scene of Pissarro’s subculture. Towards the end of the book, and the end of Pissarro’s life, Shikes and Harper discuss the Dreyfus Affair and resulting anti-Semitism endured by their subject from both society at large and his artistic circle. Renoir and Degas were both anti-Dreyfusards and anti-Semites, whereas Sisley and Monet sided with progressives and Pissarro on the issue (Shikes & Harper, pp. 304-309).

For an artistically sensitive, apolitical reader, this book would not be the best of choices unless that person were seeking to expand her horizons. By the same token, Pissarro's life itself would not be an enjoyable topic for any apolitical reader. But those who are art-focused, and political from any perspective, will find a great deal to activate their thinking in this book.

Shikes, Ralph E. & Harper, Paula. Pissarro. His Life and Work. New York: Horizon Press, 1980.

*"Ralph E. Shikes Is Dead at 79; Publisher, Editor and Art Writer." The New York Times. The New York Times, 31 Mar. 1992. (Web. 10 Oct. 2014).

**Grady, Denise. "Paula Hays Harper, Art Historian, Is Dead at 81." The New York Times. The New York Times, 25 June 2012. (Web. 10 Oct. 2014).

The Great Influenza by John M Barry.

John M. Barry is an impressive individual. His ability to self-educate while writing books has led to appointments on various policy boards as an expert advisor. The publication of Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, resulted in Barry’s appointment to The Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority East and The Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority. The work that this review focuses upon, The Great Influenza, led to his work on the federal government’s Infectious Disease Board of Experts. Without any background in medicine, public policy or geoscience, this is quite a set of achievements.

The Great Influenza demonstrates that Barry’s gifts are not limited to learning alone, but include an ability to impart that learning in an engaging manner. It is a highly informative, exploration of the struggle to defeat a pandemic by the best minds in US medical science. The book begins by examining the progress in medical science up until the point of the pandemic’s beginnings, then introduces “the warriors” who fought it.  Barry’s insightful portraits of the scientists involved serve to acquaint the reader with brilliant and high-achieving individuals in whose quest one becomes involved. This is followed by a useful explanation of influenza’s pathophysiology. Subsequent chapters comprise an interspersion of scientific investigation and experiences of communities during the epidemic’s progress.

Unfortunately, there is an overriding ethnocentrism to the book. Despite the worldwide effects of the 1918 pandemic, Barry only sparsely covers research efforts in Europe. While it is undoubtedly true that many in European medical science were consumed by the war effort, there were still independent researchers exploring a cure for influenza. Also, Barry’s portraits of communities devastated by and responding to the epidemic are almost entirely US examples. The rest of the world suffered as well. This ethnocentrism even taints the author’s representation of theory. Barry states “epidemiological evidence suggests that a new influenza virus originated in Haskell County Kansas” (Barry, p. 92), without mentioning that this is only one of many possible scenarios. In fact, the most recent theories indicate that the disease originated in China (Vergano, p. 1). If the book were entitled Influenza in the United States, it could be considered comprehensive. But that is not the case.

In service to engaging his reader, the author sometimes goes over the top to elicit emotion. “An infection is an act of violence; it is an invasion, a rape” (Barry, p. 107). This is not responsible history or science reporting. But this emotionalism is occasional. Barry generally captures the drama without losing the thread of history. He writes absorbingly and presents the information capably. Writing ability cannot be underestimated. If a historian cannot keep the attention of their reader, the information she wishes to convey will be lost to all but the most intrepid student.

The Great Influenza concludes with a discussion of contemporary influenza scares and epidemics. Ever the policy board expert, Barry emphasizes the importance of governments and media being honest with the public. He talks about how efforts to prevent panic, by hiding the seriousness of the 1918 occurrence, caused people to mistrust government and media when the true extent of the crisis was revealed to them. Government and media could no longer communicate with a suspicious public, hampering collective efforts to contain the spread. Through his extensive study and subsequent national positions, Barry is uniquely positioned to offer useful approaches to combat future epidemics.

Barry, John M. The Great Influenza. New York: Penguin Group Inc., 2009.

Vergano, Dan. "1918 Flu Pandemic That Killed 50 Million Originated in China, Historians Say." National Geographic. National Geographic Society, 23 Jan. 2014. Web. 28 Sept. 2014.