Momma Zen: Walking the Crooked Path of Motherhood

"Eley brilliantly probes transformations in the historians' craft over the past four decades. I found A Crooked Line engrossing, insightful, and inspiring."
--Lizabeth Cohen, author of A Consumers' Republic

"A Crooked Line brilliantly captures the most significant shifts in the landscape of historical scholarship that have occurred in the last four decades. Part personal history, part insightful analysis of key methodological and theoretical historiographical tendencies since the late 1960s, always thoughtful and provocative, Eley's book shows us why history matters to him and why it should also matter to us."
--Robert Moeller, University of California, Irvine

"Part genealogy, part diagnosis, part memoir, Eley's account of the histories of social and cultural history is a tour de force."
--Antoinette Burton, Professor of History and Catherine C. and Bruce A. Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies, University of Illinois

"Eley's reflections on the changing landscape of academic history in the last forty years will interest and benefit all students of the discipline. Both a native informant and an analyst in this account, Eley combines the two roles superbly to produce one of most engaging and compelling narratives of the recent history of History."
--Dipesh Chakrabarty, author of Provincializing Europe

Using his own intellectual biography as a narrative device, Geoff Eley tracks the evolution of historical understanding in our time from social history through the so-called "cultural turn," and back again to a broad history of society.

A gifted writer, Eley carefully winnows unique experiences from the universal, and uses the interplay of the two to draw the reader toward an organic understanding of how historical thinking (particularly the work of European historians) has evolved under the influence of new ideas. His work situates history within History, and offers students, scholars, and general readers alike a richly detailed, readable guide to the enduring value of historical ideas.

Geoff Eley is Professor of History at the University of Michigan.

The Crooked World, by Steve Lyons, takes us to a world where cartoons are real. Not only real, but stuck in the same motions again and again. Nothing ever changes here, and the inhabitants don't know any better. Cats chase birds and mice because that's just the way it is. Everything works like it does in the cartoons that you and I grew up with. Until the Doctor and his companions show up. Streaky Bacon, a hunter after the Whatchamacallit (a fast-running bird) to protect his crops, accidentally ends up shooting the Doctor in the chest. As the Doctor lies bleeding, Streaky realizes that he's not going to just get up again and run away like has always happened before. This sparks a virus that spreads like wildfire throughout the Crooked World. This isn't a medical virus. Instead, it's a free will virus. All of a sudden, toons are starting to actually think about their circumstances. Why should the cat never get the mouse? Why should the villains always fail but get away to scheme another day?

Having introduced these thoughts to the residents, the Doctor, Fitz & Anji decide they should stay to help the toons through the transition. Once the toons start to think, there is no going back. The only question is: how much bloodshed and real violence will occur while they come to terms with what's happened to them? What's the secret of Spooky Manor, and why can't anyone approach it? Does it hold the secret of what created this world? Or is it just a place for "those meddling kids" to operate?

I love this book. I have not seen a book that works comedy in with a poignancy that's unequaled in any Who book I've read recently. These are just cartoons, but Lyons gives them character beyond that, making you really care about what happens to them. He balances the superficiality of the cartoon with the richness of three-dimensional characters so superbly that I have to shake my head. He is able to make points about free will even as he demonstrates the absurdity of the situation. He's even able to get jokes in there which will make you laugh hard if you're familiar with the cartoons at all (the Scooby Doo parody is spot-on, with them having to take a long, winding route to get where they have to go because the van would break down if they get anywhere near a place that's even remotely spooky).

Even as you recognize where most of the main toon characters came from (Sylvester, Tom & Jerry, the Scooby Doo gang, Elmer Fudd/Porky Pig, Scrappy Doo and other recognizable faces, all with different names of course), Lyons is able to give them their own personality, shining especially bright as they slowly start to realize that there's more to life then what they've constantly been doing for who knows how long. Boss Dogg, the sheriff, is determined that things will go back to the way they were, and everybody should just "get over" all this free thinking stuff. Especially touching, however, is Jasper. He's "Tom" from the Tom & Jerry cartoons, so he can't talk. But he's desperate to find out what he's been missing once he's able to think, and he looks to Fitz for guidance. Not being able to speak, he tries to do the only thing he can do, scratch out four little words: WHAT SHOULD I DO? He's also the first one to have to face the consequences of what free will gives them. Streaky also falls to the depths of despair over what he's done and his confusion over what to do. Some of the scenes involving him brought a tear to my eye, especially when he hits rock bottom but can't do anything about it.

The regulars are handled competently, though they act more as catalysts in this story then anything else. Fitz fall for Angel Falls (Penelope Pitstop) and tries to show her other things you can do with free will, though he finds out more (or, I guess, less) than he's looking for once he gets her to accept it. Anji hooks up with the Skeleton Crew and becomes another "meddling kid." The Doctor, however, is wonderful. He knows that they are the cause of everything and he feels nothing but compassion for these toons. He brings the entire free will issue into perspective.

The book only has a couple of problems, and one of them isn't even the author's fault, instead caused by the way these books are produced. In The Book of the Still, Anji makes a lot of Scooby Doo comparisons. Yet in The Crooked World, she joins up with something that is so obviously a parody of the whole Scooby Doo concept and she acts like she's never heard of such a thing. Obviously, Lyons didn't know that the previous author was going to put Scooby references in and thus he didn't think he needed to explain it. The other fault is an ongoing joke about wrapped sticks of dynamite never going off, but it really doesn't lead anywhere.

Other than that, though, I found this book perfect. I have never laughed and teared up so much at the same time as I did with this book. Steve Lyons has written a classic Who book, one that even non-Who fans can enjoy. It is just that good.

The Doctor has had a difficult time of it, in recent books. He's blown up his home planet, lost one of his hearts, spent a hundred years in exile in England, made a new mortal enemy, and, very unsuccessfully, run a brothel. In the middle of all this, the TARDIS materializes in a world populated entirely by cartoon characters from the Warner Brothers and Hanna-Barbera universes. Or, rather, since the BBC doesn't spend a lot of copyright clearance money on these "Who" books, nifty imitations thereof. Author Steve Lyons hits all the obvious targets, and a few not-so-obvious ones, in his exploration of what would happen when British sci-fi icons interact with famous American cartoon characters.

Thing is, why does Lyons take this setup so seriously? Within 50 pages of the TARDIS's arrival, Fitz has fallen in love with Penelope Pitstop, and Porky Pig's tried to kill himself. Later, Tom goes on trial for the brutal murder of Jerry, there's a massive riot (complete with deadly anvils) and Scooby-Doo... well, nothing bad happens to Scooby-Doo. But "Crooked World" is still a whole lot more somber than you'd expect for a book with Road-Runner on the cover.

"Crooked World" is a short read (240-odd pages with really large print) and even a ponderous reader like me finished it in just two days. All the old cartoon conventions are pointed at and exploited, and everyone goes away happy, be it time-traveller or Deputy Dawg (or was that Huckleberry Hound?). Steve Lyons' "Who" books tend to be either widely satirical or overly somber. "Crooked World" blurs the lines together and, in the midst of a pretty serious run of "Who" books (that will get even more serious before the entire 2002 production run is out), provides some of the louder laughs of the year.

For many of us, the cartoons recreated and joked about in this book are pieces of fiction that we've been watching for as long as we can remember (even longer than Doctor Who in some cases!) and the familiarity with this material gives Lyons quite an advantage here. With only a few carefully constructed sentences, he can tap into literally hours worth of memories of Acme Co. anvils, mice cleverly outwitting cats and other staples of the Loony Toons and Merry Melodies universes. All the work has been done in the past, and Lyons can easily invoke the material that has already been created.

But what makes THE CROOKED WORLD so special is not merely that he's putting the Doctor Who characters into a cartoon universe (as GRIMM REALITY merely placed the regulars in the world of fairy tales), it's that he is able to bring the cartoon world closer to the real one, subverting the conventions of that genre. He holds it up to the light, not just to point out that the physics in Bug Bunny sketches is faulty, but to demonstrate the real fundamental differences. The cartoon people (made up of assorted pigs, dogs, cats, and others) are embarking upon a very clearly defined journey from two-dimensional silliness to something greater. Like observing children as they turn into adults, we can anticipate many of the trials and tribulations they will encounter, but we keep watching to see how they'll deal with these real world concepts. A lot of the success of this book comes down to the subtle cleverness of Lyons' writing skills. Indeed, there are death scenes that are as affecting as any ever seen in Doctor Who, and the characters are among the most interesting ever seen in the series. Maybe it's more emotionally powerful because we've known characters like this all of our lives, but whatever the reason, it is very involving.

I have no idea what someone would make of this if they weren't at least a little familiar with the cartoons being lovingly mocked here. Fortunately, Lyons manages to subvert a lot of the conventions of this genre, so I'd imagine that even someone who's had a cave for an address for the past fifty years would find something enjoyable here. Certainly I found much here that was unbelievably entertaining and unexpectedly touching. Rarely has death and pain been touched on so expertly in the Doctor Who books and the fact that the people dying and suffering are evolving cartoon characters just goes to demonstrate how powerful the writing is. Definitely an EDA not to be missed. (And the Scooby Doo jokes are hilarious.)

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The world is round but it's crooked
Bo Whaley
Manufacturer: B. Whaley
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

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ASIN: B00070XBMC

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Thinking Straight in a Crooked World
Gary DeMar
Manufacturer: American Vision
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

ASIN: 0915815397

Although written separately, these essays exhibit a common concern with what Berlin calls pluralism, the idea that there can be different, equally valid but mutually incompatible, conceptions of how to live. Whatever their disagreements, traditional writers on politics have implicitly assumed that there is one best way to live, whether it was in the static utopias of More and Harrington or in the dynamic dramas of Hegel and Marx. But in the 18th century, Vico and Herder embraced pluralism, thus inaugurating the historicist turn in political thought. Berlin adeptly pursues pluralism and its repercussions through history, connecting it to the decline of utopian ideas, the origins of fascism and nationalism, the rise of the discipline of cultural history, and much else.

As always, Berlin's prose is graceful and powerful, but what truly makes The Crooked Timber of Humanity exhilarating to read is the depth and power of his intellect. Berlin credits Vico with realizing that "to exercise their proper function, historians require the capacity for imaginative insight, without which the bones of the past remain dry and lifeless." It is a capacity that Berlin himself amply displays here. --Glenn Branch

"Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made."--Immanuel Kant

Isaiah Berlin was one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century--an activist of the intellect who marshaled vast erudition and eloquence in defense of the endangered values of individual liberty and moral and political pluralism. In the Crooked Timber of Humanity he exposes the links between the ideas of the past and the social and political cataclysms of our present century: between the Platonic belief in absolute Truth and the lure of authoritarianism; between the eighteenth-century reactionary ideologue Joseph de Maistre and twentieth-century fascism; between the romanticism of Schiller and Byron and the militant--and sometimes genocidal--nationalism that convulses the modern world.

"So too, it may be that no minority that has preserved its own cultural tradition or religious or racial characteristics can indefinitely tolerate the prospect of remaining a minority forever, governed by a majority with a different outlook or habits. And this may indeed account for the reaction of wounded pride, or the sense of collective injustice, which animates, for example, Zionism or its mirror-image, the movement of the Palestinian Arabs, or such `ethnic' minorities as Negroes in the United States or Irish Catholics in Ulster, the Nagas in India and the like. Certainly contemporary nationalism seldom comes in its pure, romantic form, as it did in Italy or Poland or Hungary in the early nineteenth century, but is connected far more closely with social and religious and economic grievances. . . ."

A footnote which quotes the organ of the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party for 20 July 1972 shows an awareness of the global side of the picture:

"Between national and international interests not only is there no contradiction, but, on the contrary, there is a full dialectical unity."

By implication, the index identifies the policies of the United States of America with the belief that it can foster countervailing forces

"as a barrier to unbridled chauvinism - seems about as realistic (at least so far as lands outside western Europe are concerned) as Cobden's belief that the development of free trade throughout the world would of itself ensure peace and harmonious co-operation between nations. One is also reminded of Norman Angell's apparently unanswered argument a short while before 1914 that the economic interests of modern capitalistic states alone made large-scale wars impossible."

For me the most interesting part of THE CROOKED TIMBER OF HUMANITY by Isaiah Berlin is in the middle of the book: "Joseph de Maistre and the Origins of Fascism." Written in the twentieth century, it is not surprising that this essay attempts to consider the political ideas which had previously supported an old order as the ideological foundation for the worst enemy of freedom as a realm of modern thought. The Bible serves as an easier reference for me, particularly the books of Kings, in which it is reported, "Ahab also put up a sacred pole and committed other crimes as well, provoking the anger of Yahweh, the God of Israel, more than all the kings of Israel who were his predecessors." (I Kings 16:33). Bad governments can come in many forms, but a prime example of how they operate can be found in I Kings 21:10 :

"Confront him with a couple of scoundrels who will accuse him like this, `You have cursed God and the king.' Then take him outside and stone him to death."

Joseph de Maistre is presented by Isaiah Berlin as a man who was above such suspicions. "Like Charles Maurras and T. S. Eliot, he stood for the trinity of classicism, monarchy and the church. . . . He is a Catholic reacrtionary, a scholar and an aristocrat . . ." And yet "Maistre may have spoken the language of the past, but the content of what he had to say presaged the future."

Maistre was the son of a recently ennobled lawyer; he was considered a jurist, a diplomat, "a philosophical critic and an exceptionally brilliant writer," a negotiator, and a man of affairs. Born in 1753, Joseph de Maistre is described as "the eldest of ten children of the President of the Senate," but we might not be familiar with this Senate because he was born in the dukedom of Savoy, part of the kingdom of Sardinia. Looking for a foundation for his ideas is to seek a form of inversion:

"An action in Maistre's universe is ineffective precisely in proportion as it is directed to the achievement of day-to-day interests, and derives from calculating, utilitarian tendencies which compose the outer surface of human character; and it is effective, memorable, in tune with the universe precisely to the degree to which it springs from unexplained and unexplainable depths, and not from reason, nor from individual will . . . What is best and strongest is often violent, irrational, gratuitous, and therefore necessarily misrepresented, and made to seem absurd, only by being falsely ascribed to intelligible motives. Human action in his sense is justified only when it derives from that tendency in human beings which is directed neither to happiness nor to comfort, nor to self-assertion and self-aggrandizement, but to the fulfillment of an unfathomable divine purpose which men cannot, and should not try to, fathom - and which they deny at their peril. This may often lead to actions involving pain and slaughter, which in terms of the rules of sensible, normal, middle-class morality may well be regarded as arrogant and unjust, but which nevertheless derive from the dark unanalysable center of all authority. This is the poetry of the world, not its prose, the source of all faith and all energy, whereby alone man is free, capable of choice, of creation and destruction, superior to the causally determined, scientifically explicable, mechanical movements of matter, or of natures lower than his, ignorant of good and evil."

Lately I have been advised that I should try working on something a bit more recent than MY VIETNAM WAR JOKE BOOK, but the copyright dates listed in the front of this book, 1959, 1972, 1975, 1978, 1980, 1983, 1988, 1990, must include years in which contemporary readers would consider Vietnam a topic which had been dealt with during years in which they were in kindergarten. I feel the same way, if not more so.

If there is any theme to this anthology, it is that human societies are like "crooked timbers"; trying to bend them is unnatural and only results in disastrous consequences. The attempts to bend them--essentially experiments in social engineering--marked the 20th century, from Lenin's Russia to Hitler's Germany to Pol Pot's Cambodia. These experiments had deep roots in modern political thinking, extending back into the nineteenth century. They manifested themselves in illiberal, totalitarian regimes in the 20th century and took an untold number of lives.

But "The Crooked Timber of Humanity" is not a study in history, although it comes from the mind of a man who lived across the span of the century he was writing about. It is a history of ideas and, in particular, of the belief that the interests, motivations, and goals of people can be, and are, the same at all times and in all places. This type of philosophical monism holds to a single vision of how societies ought to be arranged; is characterized by an idealism and utopianism that are to be attained at all costs; and is found in a number of modern ideologies such as fascism and nationalism. Berlin's essays cover idealism, utopianism, Vico, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the views of de Maistre, all of which held to some form of singular, monistic political thinking.

Berlin's answer is reasonable and humane, a pluralstic point of view that holds that human desires and ends are varied, that utopianism in its many forms (Communism and fascism, to cite two) is conceptually incoherenet and unnatural to the experience of being human, and that human experience is multi-dimensional and constantly changing.

This collection of essays exhibit Berlin's pronounced clarity of thought (one of his wonderful trademarks) and illustrative prose (with all those rolling sentences). Berlin once said in an interview that, given his experience of the 20th century, all we should and can expect is a "minimally decent society," one that is free and liberal and open enough to allow human beings to realize their own ends, whatever imperfections such a society might have. The world since the Enlightenment, and in particular the world of the 20th century, has taught that anything else tends to lead to forceful and violent attempts to fashion society according to a specific ideal; as Berlin puts it in this book, to make such an omelette, many eggs have to be broken. He promotes a political philosophy at odds with this type of thinking and, in so doing, has become one of the great voices of liberty.

Of course, as incisive as Berlin was, he was not without controversy; his essay on de Maistre was not well received when it was first written, and, since his death, he has been lauded with every praise that can be heaped on a thinker. Whether or not he deserves all of that praise is a completely separate issue. "The Crooked Timber of Humanity" is a fine collection of essays on political philosophy and a fine sampling of Berlin's way of thinking.

The opening essay is a short, partly autobiographical account of how Berlin came to embrace his distinctive pluralism. It provides the clearest, most concise explanation I have seen to date of why Marxism and its ilk are wrong. His essay on de Maistre is longer than its subject deserves, but not uninteresting.

All of Berlin's essays display his encyclopedic knowledge and shrewd judgment. It is said that he was one of the fastest talkers on record; he writes with equal volubility, packing into each sentence a book's worth of history and theory. These essays are not for the neophyte or the casual reader -- the forthcoming _Power of Ideas_ (March 2000) promises to be more accessible -- nevertheless, they are virtuoso examples of the much praised but little practiced art of sympathetic critical interpretation.

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Christians in a Crooked World (Dialog)

Manufacturer: Beacon Hill Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Education | Reference | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0834112035

Christians In A Crooked World : How to Live Like Christ in a World That Lives Like the Devil

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Christians In A Crooked World : How to Live Like Christ in a World That Lives Like the Devil
Stephen M. (Editor) Miller
Manufacturer: Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000SBVBG8

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Colleagues in Solitude
PANDIT SHRIRAM SHARMA ACHARYA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000UATI58