Arab and Muslim Civil Rights and Identity: A Selection of Scholarly Writings from the Decade after 9/11

As a subscriber to American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee I receive fascinating gems of information. I look forward to reading Arab and Muslim Civil Rights and Identity: A Selection of Scholarly Writings from the Decade after 9/11

About the 100 most notable books of 2010

the New York Times 100 most notable books of 2010 list just came out today. I found some that intrigued me. I read nonfiction, mostly. My potential favs are noted below.

The links lead to book reviews at the NYT. Membership at the site is free. (Not any more. -ed) I have set up my account with the NYT so that I get no spam from them.

ALL THE DEVILS ARE HERE: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis. By Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera. (Portfolio/Penguin, $32.95.) More than offering a backward look, this account of the disaster of 2008 helps explain today’s troubling headlines and might help predict tomorrow’s

CHANGING MY MIND: Occasional Essays. By Zadie Smith. (Penguin Press, $26.95.) The quirky pleasures here are due in part to Smith’s inspired cultural references, from Simone Weil to “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

COMMON AS AIR: Revolution, Art, and Ownership. By Lewis Hyde. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) Hyde draws on the American founders for arguments against the privatization of knowledge.


CLEOPATRA: A Life. By Stacy Schiff. (Little, Brown, $29.99.) It’s dizzying to contemplate the ancient thicket of personalities and propaganda Schiff penetrates to show the Macedonian-Egyptian queen in all her ambition, audacity and formidable intelligence. I saw the author on The Daily Show. She said that Cleopatra was Greek-Macedonian, and looked semitic, if one goes by the images on her coins.

WILD CHILD: Stories. By T. Coraghessan Boyle. (Viking, $25.95.) In these tales, Boyle continues his career-long interest in man’s vexed tussles with nature

THE BOOK IN THE RENAISSANCE. By Andrew Pettegree. (Yale University, $40.)A thought-provoking revisionist history of the early years of printing.

EMPIRE OF THE SUMMER MOON: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History. By S. C. Gwynne. (Scribner, $27.50.) The story of the last and greatest chief of the tribe that once ruled the Great Plains.

FINISHING THE HAT: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) With Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes. By Stephen Sondheim. (Knopf, $39.95.) Sondheim’s analysis of his songs and those of others is both stinging and insightful.

THE HONOR CODE: How Moral Revolutions Happen. By Kwame Anthony Appiah. (Norton, $25.95.) A philosopher traces the demise of dueling and slavery among the British and of foot-binding in China, and suggests how a fourth horrific practice — honor killings in today’s Pakistan — might someday meet its end.

KOESTLER: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic. By Michael Scammell. (Random House, $35.) Scammell wants to put the complex intelligence of Koestler (“Darkness at Noon”) back on display and to explain his shifting preoccupations.

LAST CALL: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. By Daniel Okrent. (Scribner, $30.) A remarkably original account of the 14-year orgy of lawbreaking that transformed American social life.

SCORPIONS: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR’s Great Supreme Court Justices. By Noah Feldman. (Twelve, $30.) A group portrait of Felix Frankfurter, Robert Jackson, Hugo Black and William O. Douglas.

SUPREME POWER: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court. By Jeff Shesol. (Norton, $27.95.) Contention over Roosevelt’s proposal to transform the court nearly paralyzed his administration for over a year and severely damaged fragile Democratic unity.

"Wealthcare:" Reviews of two books on Ayn Rand and her impact

The current era of Democratic governance has provoked a florid response on the right, ranging from the prosaic (routine denunciations of big spending and debt) to the overheated (fears of socialism) to the lunatic (the belief that Democrats plan to put the elderly to death). Amid this cacophony of rage and dread, there has emerged one anxiety that is an actual idea, and not a mere slogan or factual misapprehension. The idea is that the United States is divided into two classes--the hard-working productive elite, and the indolent masses leeching off their labor by means of confiscatory taxes and transfer programs.

You can find iterations of this worldview and this moral judgment everywhere on the right. Consider a few samples of the rhetoric. In an op-ed piece last spring, Arthur Brooks, the president of the American Enterprise Institute, called for conservatives to wage a "culture war" over capitalism. "Social Democrats are working to create a society where the majority are net recipients of the ‘sharing economy,'  " he wrote. "Advocates of free enterprise . . . have to declare that it is a moral issue to confiscate more income from the minority simply because the government can." Brooks identified the constituency for his beliefs as "the people who were doing the important things right--and who are now watching elected politicians reward those who did the important things wrong." Senator Jim DeMint echoed this analysis when he lamented that "there are two Americas but not the kind John Edwards was talking about. It's not so much the haves and the have-nots. It's those who are paying for government and those who are getting government. "

Please read on at the site...

Between Two Worlds: Review

Between Two Worlds: Escape from Tyranny: Growing Up in the Shadow of Saddam
(2005: Gotham Books)

Zainab Salbi and Laurie Becklund

by Deborah Lake

“...a personal intimate look at the soul-crushing impact of Hussein's Iraq...Now, with her chilling memoir, the lies end.” The Washington Post

“More can be learned about Iraq from this book than from all the newscasts.” Alice Walker
“...exquisite and painful...” Ellen Chesler

Zainab Salbi lived a peaceful and privileged childhood in Baghdad. Then, her father was chosen to be Saddam's personal pilot. She explains the dramatic and drastic changes wrought upon her parents, and indeed all of Iraq, by Hussein's megalomania.

I don't want to toss in a spoiler, but let me say this. Saddam's sons were notorious rapists. They learned it at their father's knee.

Saddam also “rebuilt” the hanging gardens of Babylon. That is to say, he destroyed them, and rebuilt them with bricks bearing his name.

The Iraqis are certainly worse off under US invasion and occupation than they were under Hussein. That does not excuse the fact that Hussein was a psychopathic monster who inflicted two generations worth of horror upon his people. It was JUST FINE with the USA, as long as he was OUR psychopathic monster.

Zainab was approximately eleven years old when her Bibi was tapped to serve as Hussein's pilot. Hussein drew people into relationships against their will then used any means possible to keep them at heel. This destructive power eventually ended her parents' marriage, which seemed quite happy to her as a child.

Families were ripped asunder. Anyone suspected of having “Persian” blood was deported. It mattered not the truth of their ancestry.

“My parents had zero interest in politics....because both schools and airlines were nationalized...my parents had to join the Baath Party like most Iraqis just to hold a job. There were several levels of membership...everyone came to know the difference between getting along and being a true believer. The entry level, endorser, was the least you could get away with...Later, of course, it became clear to us all that to rise in the ranks of the Baath Party, you had to write reports on other people, in other words, become a spy.”

Zainab's co-author, Laurie Beckland, captures Zainab's guileless narration of life under Hussein, and the horrors she endured both in Iraq, and when it became clear that she was in danger, after her arrival in the USA.

After her recovery, she founded the charity Women for Women International, which is one of the smartest and sanest charities I have encountered. Not only does the organization provide direct help for women and their children in war zones, they educate men in women's rights. A pilot project in the Congo has yielded amazing results. Families now go from door to door, talking about their new happiness, now that the men know that they do not have to brutalize their wives.

I co-sponsor an Afghani woman. She has not written to me yet, but we can write a letter a month. The only constraints on correspondence occur because of the limited time of volunteer translators.

Land, Water, and the Future of the West

Crossing the Next Meridian: Land, Water, and the Future of the West by Charles F. Wilkinson

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
Charles Wilkinson is a professor of Law at the University of Colorado. I got this book from the clearance table at my law school (located in California!!!!). Shameful. Every law student should read this book, as well as anyone interested in land and water use policy and outcomes.



Professor Wilkinson, a splendid writer, tells the story of how the laws governing land and water use in the West have given rise to poor policies and poor outcomes for the health and survival of the region.



After reading it, I felt that I had a beginner's grasp of the problems created by current laws. I also felt that the laws on the books will not be favorably altered in my lifetime. Our solution to that problem? Start relocalizing all of the resources we can relocalize, especially in view of the increasing costs for energy.



The serious problems for the West in terms of pollution, conservation, and poor water policy can be managed, but the solutions will come from the grassroots, not Congress or the Executive Branch.

Professor Wilkinson, a prolific author with an engaging style, has also written on Native American law and in many other related areas.


View all my reviews.

Book Review: Challenging U.S. Human Rights Violations Since 911

Challenging U.S. Human Rights Violations Since 911

Edited by Ann Fagan Ginger
NY, Prometheus Books, 2005
524 pages, $24

Order at the Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute website, www.mcli.org, or ask your bookseller to carry the book.

Want to help your city report human rights violations to the UN? This books shows you how.

Challenging US Human Rights Violations Since 911 is a shocking chronicle of rights violations that have been perpetrated by the United States, in your name, since 911. Ann Fagan Ginger catalogs these violations, but also demonstrates for us that resistance is not futile, and tells us how to resist. Challenging will challenge the reader to question deeply the real aims of the Bush administration.

Informed people know that immigrants have been detained without warrant for months and years on end, and have been beaten, tortured, and died at the hands of the representatives of the United States government for no other reason than their country of origin. They also know that these unspeakable acts violate the U. S. Constitution and the international treaties that we have ratified. Ratified treaties do not represent some vague promise to comply with the terms of the treaty. Rather, they are the highest law of the land, in equal standing with the Constitution. How do we know that? The Constitution says so, in Article 4. In theory, most Americans agree with the aims of these treaties. After all, this is what liberty really means: the ability to walk the streets without having to carry identification papers or suffer illegitimate abuse simply because of how they look, and the right to express their views.

The terrible harms visited upon immigrants may fail to move certain readers. Shame on them. That logic is akin to saying that when a bank is robbed, it was asking for it. Just as disturbing and more numerous are the many violations visited upon American citizens. A man born an American citizen was demoted from his position in the former Immigration and Naturalization Service in 2002 because he was of Lebanese extraction. When he filed a formal complaint, he was accused of having ties to terrorists. He filed suit and prevailed in court. Such denials of basic human rights and dignity are also very expensive for US taxpayers. He won a judgment of $305,000.00.

Ginger states that her explicit goal in writing this book is to mobilize shame. The mobilization of shame is a recurring phenomenon in our history, and leads to temporary improvements in conditions for the victim du jour and related groups. One need only look to recent history for examples of this mobilization. The Geneva Convention was developed in the aftermath of World War II, when the inhumane and deadly treatment of prisoners of war became public. World governments supposedly renounced genocide in the wake of the Holocaust. The House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC), headed by the infamous Republican senator Joseph McCarthy, Jr., was dismantled and its aims discredited when decent Americans discovered that the targets of the committee were not a threat to anyone. Lives were destroyed in the quest to induce fear and control political expression by unconstitutional means.

It is time to mobilize shame again. This alarming yet ultimately hopeful book, read widely, should do the job. The reader will find clear and direct prose, unburdened by jargon, full of talking points.

The nearly 300 pages of reports of violations are just one aspect of this multifaceted work. Challenging provides the text of the laws violated, copious notes, and exhaustive documentation that should wear down the wall of ignorance built by the most dedicated know-nothing.

Challenging also contains a grassroots human rights advocate toolkit. Ginger’s forty-year-long dedication to framing issues in terms of the ratified treaties as well as US Constitutional Law provides a solid legal background for communities to engage their local governments in a dialog with the highest levels of US and UN governmental bodies. The United States has an obligation under the treaties it has ratified. It must submit reports on the state of human rights as stated in the UN Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, the Convention Against Torture, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The Bush administration has issued exactly zero requests to states for these reports. However, that does not mean that we cannot report on our own initiative.

The City of Berkeley recently took matters into its own hands, at the behest of the community members, and now submits an annual report of the condition of human rights in the city to the United States and the UN. You can do it too. Challenging shows you how.