My Bookshelf

The Life of Pi by Yann Martel

Sat, 27 Mar 2010 04:56:31 -0500

The Life of Pi is a great book. But, which is the real story?

Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time

Wed, 3 Feb 2010 08:32:31 -0600

I really liked this book and recommend it. It reminded me of a Jon Krakauer book; the story is told in a journalistic style and has a mountaineering theme just like Into Thin Air. The story begins with Greg Mortenson’s failure to make it to the summit of K2 and his challenging and dangerous trek down the mountain, which left him for a few days in a small mountain village in Northern Pakistan. The book chronicles how Mortenson got the idea, the motivation, and the funds to begin building schools in remote and very poor regions of Pakistan in order to provide a place for all children, but especially girls, to attend school. Mortenson is a perfect example of a person with a charitable heart who is willing to take people as he finds them and work within their cultural system to help them solve their own problems and provide a brighter future for their children.

While I was reading this book, the news reported that ten Americans had been arrested for allegedly violating Haiti’s child trafficking laws by trying to transport about 30 Haitian children across the Haiti border into the Dominican Republic just a few weeks after the Haitian earth quake. The Americans claim they were sent by God to rescue these children, take them to the Dominican Republic where they intended to establish an orphanage, and then oversee the adoption (presumably by American families) of the children. There is no dispute that the Americans did not have proper authority from the Haitian government to remove these children from Haiti. Some of the children are reported to have parents still alive in Haiti. Instead of helping the children’s families, caregivers, and communities rebuild so that they could care for their own children, these Americans took the opportunity to take the children away.

Why is it that many Americans think that to help people means to take possession or control of them, that to give charity means to acquire ownership? So often Americans seem to think that the only way to help people--especially children--in impoverished areas of the world is to remove them from their communities and impose American cultural norms on them, rather than to try to understand their culture and help their community find ways, within their own culture, to help themselves solve their problems.

Mortenson’s work in Pakistan and Afganistan provides a dramatic contrast. Rather than taking the poor children from their parents so that they can be “properly” educated, American-style, Mortenson patiently learns about the unique cultures that exist in the mountain valleys of the Northern Areas of Pakistan and works within these cultures to provide a way these communities can provide education for their children, especially their daughters, within their own communities.

The book takes the reader through the years leading up to and immediately following 9/11. In so doing, it makes a powerful argument about the root causes of terrorism and how poverty and lack of education in the remote regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan have left the young people of the region susceptible to being recruited by terrorist organizations. In addition to recognizing the problem, Mortenson provides a solution: instill in the children of these regions a hope for a brighter future through education.

As I read about Mortenson’s experiences during the days, months, and years after 9/11, I was reminded of something a colleague here in Germany recently said to me (I’m paraphrasing): “You know, after 9/11, the US had the entire world’s sympathy and support. The entire world felt the pain that the US suffered on 9/11 and was ready to get behind the US in its efforts to respond to that act. But, then, the US so badly squandered this sympathy and spoiled not only the opportunity to unite the world in an effort to end terrorism globally, but actually caused the rest of the world to have negative feelings toward the US and seriously injured the US’s position in the world.” Three Cups of Tea describes this same shift of world sentiment and explains how such a sad result could have been avoided.

The Lives of Others

Fri, 8 Jan 2010 15:39:20 -0600

Here’s what I said about this movie this summer when I recommended it in this blog post: “Just watched The Lives of Others. I highly recommend it, but be ready for subtitles . . . unless you understand German. It’s set in East Germany in the 1980s, and is the story of a writer who is under surveillance by the Stasi. This film won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language film.”

I can’t say too much more about the movie without being a spoiler. But, I will repeat that it’s an excellent movie and well worth moving to the top of your Netflix queue. I’m bringing this movie back up now because Charlie’s and his friend Alyssa are in Berlin, and Alyssa reminded me of this movie by mentioning that the movie was is on her mind while she is in Berlin. When I was in Berlin this past November, this movie was on my mind too, especially since the movie spans the time before and right up to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the anniversary of which I was in Berlin to celebrate.

East Berlin was, by far, my favorite part of Berlin--a lot of historical sites and museums are on the east side, and the revitalization of the east side that has occurred over the past 20 years is amazing to see. However, there is a controversial nostalgia building for the old East German way of life. For example, hotels and hostels that mimic life under the Stasi are popping up and catering to a youthful tourist crowd that is curious about how things were before 1989. Here is a story about one such hotel. In addition, Checkpoint Charlie has become a tourist-trap memorial to old East Germany, with so many rented Trabant cars driving around, it’s hard to cross the street without being run over by one. “The Lives of Others” provides a “reality check”: an important reminder that life in communist East Germany was not glamorous.

Dances with Wolves + FernGully = Avatar

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 14:41:21 -0600

We got to see this movie on opening day in Gemany (December 16) in 3-D in ENGLISH!! We saw it in Nürnberg, and could not help but wonder why we had not gone to see a movie in Nürnberg previously. We are seriously English-movie-deprived and were thrilled by the mere prospect of seeing an English movie on a screen bigger than a laptop’s.

It was interesting seeing the movie in Germany, since it made Americans look really bad--it targeted both American corporate greed and American military aggressiveness and pitted them against all that is good in the world. OK, well, maybe both deserve such a heavy-handed media “shot,” but still, it’s embarrassing to be an American abroad and have to acknowledge that a lot of the bad in the world is the result of American corporate greed or military aggression.

Overall, I thought the movie was just OK. It was too long for my taste--about three hours--and several distinct parts of the movie were too long, especially the fight scene at the end. It needed a much more aggressive editor. I thought the main male hero in avatar form was so clearly Matthew McConaughey, both in looks and in voice, that every time they went back to the human character, I was surprised that it wasn’t Matthew McConaughey. I thought that the character development was weak, especially the part where Sigourney Weaver’s character disliked the male hero so vehemently at the beginning and then, for no apparent reason, suddenly liked him in avatar form and then in human form after that. And, most significantly, I thought the plot was nothing spectacular and nothing surprising--especially since it so clearly was Dances with Wolves meets FernGully.

In its favor, I did think the graphic colors were very nice. I enjoyed the flamboyant plants that looked and acted like under-water plants. I thought the 3-D effects were pretty cool--even though they gave me a headache.

The best thing about the movie: it was in English!

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 12:24:02 -0600

No matter where you are from--whether it is the U.S.A. or Iran or anywhere else--there are things you miss about home when you are away from home. Reading this book while in Germany made me constantly aware of the things I miss about home, just as the author Azar Nafisi talked about the Iran she missed.

The book jacket describes the book as follows: “Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bold and inspired teacher named Azar Nafisi secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, fundamentalists seized hold of the universities, and a blind censor stifled artistic expression, the girls in Azar Nafisi’s living room risked removing their veils and immersed themselves in the worlds of Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov. In this extraordinary memoir, their stories become intertwined with the ones they are reading.”

While this is an accurate description, it is also a very superficial one. The book is really about what it is like to live with loss--loss of identity, loss of country, loss of home and family--and how one adjusts or fails to adjust to the injustice of living in an oppressive society. The author and her “girls” (as Nafisi calls the students in her at-home English literature class) are constantly struggling with issues of adjustment--whether to stay in Iran despite the dehumanizing legal and political system that dictates nearly every aspect of their lives or whether to leave their homeland for an uncertain future in another country. Either way, the Iran they had known before the revolution was lost to them.

The thing that stands out most to me, however, is that, in the end, all people just want the same things: freedom, love, and security. This book provides a very personal and moving account of several women’s own individual quests for these things.

The Reader by Bernhard Schlink

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 16:30:09 -0500

I wasn’t especially excited about reading this book. I had just finished Night and wasn’t really looking for another Holocaust book. In addition, I usually don’t get too excited about books that have been made into movies. But, the selection of English language books at our local Bayreuth bookstore was scant. There is a very small English section with a few bestsellers, such as The DaVinci Code and a couple of Harry Potter books, and some classics, many of which I have either already read or were in the box which I shipped to myself here in Germany and would be receiving any day.

So, I picked up The Reader. As I thumbed through it, I noticed that the chapters were really short, which made it convenient to read in short intervals while I was traveling. Plus, I noticed that it involved a law student observing a trial, so it interested me. And, I hadn’t seen the movie. And, it was written by a law professor.

It turned out to be good--not the greatest book of all time, but a thoughtful, provocative novel that provides a unique perspective of the horrific events of the Holocaust. The story is told from the perspective of Michael, a 15-year-old at the beginning of the book when he has a semi-long-term affair with the 30-something Hanna. After the affair ends, Michael next encounters Hanna when he is a law student observing a trial in which Hanna is being prosecuted for war crimes she committed well before her affair with Michael, when she was an SS guard first at Auschwitz and later at a smaller concentration camp near Cracow.

The book deals with issues of shame, guilt, and blame for the Holocaust--for the perpetrators themselves as well as those who simply stood by and did nothing to prevent it. The book raises the issue of how a child, who may have been very young or not even born at the time of World War II, should think about his parents’ generation’s actions or inactions during the Holocaust.

In addition, the book raises the question of how and to what extent low-level guards should be punished for acts that were undertaken pursuant to the orders of superior officers. This is the same issue the U.S. must consider today in deciding whether to prosecute the lower-level officers who violated the law by torturing terror suspects. Should only the high-level officers who ordered the illegal activity be held accountable, or should the low-level soldiers, who were acting on orders, be prosecuted for actions they knew or should have known were illegal? There are obviously significant differences between the Holocaust and the torture issues facing the United States. However, there are also similarities, and this novel provides a framework for considering these issues. The legal policy issues surrounding prosecuting underlings are discussed here.

The Reader is concise, well-written, and not overly emotional despite the romantic story line. It raises issues that are as relevant today as they were in 1965 (when the trial in The Reader took place).

Julie & Julia

Sat, 29 Aug 2009 20:39:56 -0500

I love to write (and to eat), so, naturally, I really liked this movie! I found it highly inspirational--it did NOT inspire me to cook, however. In fact, it confirmed my profound distaste for cooking and reinforced my desire to stay as far away from the preparation and clean-up of food as possible.

It did inspire me to eat (something I really don’t need any additional inspiration for) and, mostly, to blog. As a neophyte blogger, I loved watching the evolution of Julie’s blogging skills while watching the evolution of Julia’s cooking skills!

I came home from seeing the movie and found Julie Powell’s real blog, The Julie/Julia Project. I love that she had a unique theme to the blog and that she stuck to the theme. This does not mean she did not weave in the details of her life that make her such an endearing character in the movie--but she did it around the theme: “536 recipes in 365 days, one girl and a crappy outer borough kitchen.” No, I did not read every one of her blog entries--but I read enough to know that she is an imaginative blogger, a gifted writer, and a person who is persistent enough to see a wildly ambitious creative project through to the end. This comes through in the movie and it comes through in her real blog. (I didn’t read her book, but I imagine it’s along the lines of Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Love, Pray--but instead of weaving her story into a travel theme as did Elizabeth, Julie weaves her story in to a cooking theme.)

I have always thought of myself, first and foremost, as a writer and I decided to become a lawyer, at least in part, because there would be a lot of writing involved and my writing might even make a difference in the world (OK, I was in my 20s then). Becoming a lawyer-writer also fulfilled another of my other goals--it facilitated my continued eating--i.e., the legal profession didn’t seem to require its practitioners to survive that “starving artist” period that would inevitably come with another writing job, such as a novelist. (Though this seems to be changing. See here.) I figured that if I became a lawyer, I could write all I wanted and get paid at least enough to get by. This has turned out to be true.

However, as a practicing lawyer, I didn’t get to write about what I wanted to write about; I had to write about what my client needed me to write about. Sometimes my interests coincided with my clients’ needs, but not very often. This became frustrating at times, and so, academia seemed the way to go. There, I could write about anything I wanted to--well, almost anything. I could never write a law review article about the ultimate flip-flops, for example.

That’s where blogging comes in. Blogging, like journaling, is a self-absorbed, self-expressive activity. But blogging, like publishing a book or an article, is also an opportunity to get an opinion or a thought “on the record,” so to speak, to express thoughts in a public forum where other people can respond, react, and discuss. In addition, unlike academic scholarship, blogging provides an opportunity to say just a little bit about something; it does not require months of meticulous research and hundreds of footnotes, but instead it enables the writer to float an idea, to give a brief opinion, to point out an issue.

In her law review article about blogging, Professor Ann Althouse said that her motto is “to live freely in blogging.” (Now, my problem is that I can’t link this article the way I can other online sources, so I’m going to ruin my blogging-zen and give the citation in the old fashioned way: Ann Althouse, Why a Narrowly-Defined Legal Scholarship Blog is Not What I Want: An Argument in Pseudo-Blog Form, 84 Wash. U. L. Rev. 1221 (2006).)

Back to the idea of “liv[ing] freely in blogging,” I think that really sums up why I like to blog and what I liked about this movie. The character Julie Powell freed herself from all the mundane and depressing aspects of the humdrumness of daily life by blogging about her everyday life experiences all bundled into Julia Child’s recipes. (Yeah, I know “humdrumness” is not a real word.) Julia Child freed herself from the same humdrumness by taking on the French chef establishment and breaking the glass ceiling that existed at the Le Cordon Bleu, and then by writing and teaching about her experiences.

It seems to me that the message of this movie is to find your passion and live freely in it. For me, it’s writing.

Becoming Justice Blackmun by Linda Greenhouse

Sat, 29 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500

I originally posted this on February 21, 2006 on my previous blog.

Today, the Supreme Court granted cert in a case that provides a new Court with a new opportunity to prevent the Bush administration's efforts to enforce an unconstitutional abortion ban. The case represents yet another strategic attempt by the anti-choicers to wedge a crack in the foundation of Roe v. Wade.

Justice Blackmun's Roe v. Wade legacy is chronicled in "Becoming Justice Blackmun," by Linda Greenhouse. This book is a must-read for lawyers and non-lawyers alike. Anyone interested in social justice and equality should read this book. Anyone interested in the protection of women's rights must read this book.

In her book, Linda Greenhouse combines the expertise she has gained from her years covering the Supreme Court for the New York Times with her careful research of Justice Blackmun's papers to tell the story of Harry Blackmun's evolution as a justice and a person, and the story of how this evolution affected his relationships on the Court, including the decline of his lifelong friendship with Chief Justice Warren Burger.

Along with unique insights about the decision-making processes of the Supreme Court in particular cases, such as Roe v. Wade, Greenhouse provides intriguing details about the relationships among the various justices. These details are reflected in the many notes Justice Blackmun received from or sent to the other justices. Some of the notes reveal the justices' reactions to significant historical events, such as Nixon's resignation. Others are just plain funny. My favorite is Justice Scalia's note to Justice Blackmun--ideological opposites who were both sticklers for proper grammar. Justice Scalia wrote to Justice Blackmun: "I would sooner watch a rock video than use the word 'viable' in other than its proper medical sense." (This overtakes "quack, quack" as my favorite Justice Scalia quote.)

In addition, and my favorite theme of the book, Greenhouse provides a detailed chronicle of Justice Blackmun's judicial contribution to our understanding of the power of law to address (or fail to address) the social inequity pervasive in modern American society. From his authorship of Roe, to his defense of the rights recognized therein, to his moving dissents in DeShaney v. Winnebago County ("Poor Joshua!"), Callins v. Collins ("From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death."), and Beal v. Doe ("There is another world 'out there,' the existence of which the Court . . . either chooses to ignore or fears to recognize."), Justice Blackmun provided a unique voice of reasoned compassion that was missing on the Supreme Court before he joined it and has been missing since he left the Court.

Without disparaging Linda Greenhouse, whose excellent and accurate work I respect and admire, the brilliance of this book is in the heroic figure that it chronicles. Justice Blackmun clearly had a profound, positive impact on American law, not only in the cases in which he sat with the majority, but also in cases in which he filed moving dissents.