More books about jails without judges

Aziz Huq of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law wrote in with some suggestions for the series on fiction about jails without judges:

(a) Surprisingly, I did not see The Trial [ed note: The Trial was the first book suggested but I failed to highlight it on updated lists*] or "In the Penal Colony" on your list. The term "Kafkaesque" today is a cliche used to refer to the illogical, self-justificatory structures of bureaucratic justice, but both of Kafka's works on point are richer and stranger, almost hallucinogenic in their feel. The sense of endless, coils of bureaucracy snaring a person—whose crime, perhaps is their irrational belief in rationality or their insistence that the world treat them rationally. Consider the image in "In the Penal Colony" of punishment as writing—excepting writing on the body of the prisoner, permanently marking and shaming them. Isn't there an echo or prefiguration of the photographed humiliations and abuses from Abu Ghraib? In some ways, Kafka's metaphorical presentation of totalitarian "logic" is more powerful than the literal depictions of a totalitarian state (like the Gulag Archipelago).

(b) Plowing the Dark by Richard Powers weaves several narratives together, one of which is the tale of a Middle-Eastern hostage. Powers is typically an evocative writer, although I have not read this book.

(c) In addition to novels, readers may be interested in An Evil Cradling by Brian Keenan. This is the account of the four-plus years of being a hostage of Hezbullah in Lebanon. It's not detailed on Lebanon and its politics, but focused on aspects of the imprisonment itself. Also, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's News of a Kidnapping is an excellent account of the exercise of the total loss of emotional and physical control that comes with unlawful confinement. It is also an interesting corrective to the usually over-lush prose style by the Nobel Prize winning Colombian.

Aziz Huq is Associate Counsel in the Democracy program and in the Liberty and National Security program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. Before joining the Center, he clerked for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg during the October 2003 term of the Supreme Court of the United States. Previously, he clerked for Judge Robert D. Sack of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. Between his clerkships, Mr. Huq worked with the International Crisis Group (ICG) in Afghanistan, focusing on the constitutional drafting process. He subsequently worked with ICG in Nepal and Pakistan looking at the development of democratic and judicial institutions. He graduated summa cum laude from Columbia Law School in 2001 where he was Essay and Review Editor of the Columbia Law Review.

Click here for Aziz's interview of Peter Bergen, author of The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of al Qaeda’s Leader; and here for his discussion of Tram Nguygen’s We Are All Suspects Now, which documents how counterterrorism policies have destroyed immigrants’ lives.

Thanks to Aziz for the insights and recommendations.

*Also, just as Aziz's message arrived, so did one from Professor Neal Katyal of Georgetown Law. He too suggested that Kafka's The Trial ought to be at the top of our list. Among other publications, Professor Katyal is the author of (with Laurence Tribe), "Waging War, Deciding Guilt: Trying the Military Tribunals," Yale Law Journal (2002). Thanks to Neal for the input.

--Marshal Zeringue

Hispanic perspectives on structural racism

Professor Juan Alonzo recommends a couple of works for the continuing series on books that illuminate structural racism.

Américo Paredes, George Washington Gomez

Piri Thomas, Down These Mean Streets

Américo Paredes is generally recognized as one of the seminal Mexican American scholars of the 20th century. From the publisher of George Washington Gomez:

This first novel written in the 1930s by the dean of Mexican-American folklore charts the coming of age of a young Mexican American on the Texas-Mexico border set against the background of guerrilla warfare, banditry, land grabs, abuses by the Texas Rangers and the overpowering pressures to disappear into the American melting pot.

Piri Thomas' memoir, Down These Mean Streets, was published in 1967. In 1995, Sam Roberts, writing in the New York Times, called it one of the Ten Best Books about New York.

[T]his gritty autobiographical account of growing up in East Harlem cries out plaintively: "I'm here, and I want recognition." And a way out.

Mr. Thomas's mean streets are the ghetto and he is no dispassionate tour guide (so vivid are his accounts that the book was banned by a school district in Flushing, Queens). His itinerary includes the underside of El Barrio's rooftops and barrooms, its low life and the convicts he befriends and his fears in the prison where he served six years for armed robbery. Mr. Thomas's account may seem dated, even stereotypical. But his pain and lack of self-pity resonate in an enduring struggle for social mobility and against the siren call of quick cures. "The worlds of home and school were made up of rules laid down by adults who had forgotten the feeling of what it means to be a kid but expected a kid to remember to be an adult--something he hadn't gotten to yet," Mr. Thomas wrote. "The world of street belonged to the kid alone. There he could earn his own rights, prestige, his good-o stick of living. It was like being a knight of old, like being 10 feet tall."

Juan Alonzo is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Texas A & M University. His area of concentration is 20th-century American literature and culture, with specialization in Chicano/a literature and film studies. He is interested in exploring literature and popular culture's engagement with modernity and their imbrication with globalization. His current research examines literary and cinematic representation of ethnic identities, from the turn-of-the-century to the present. He is the author of "From Derision to Desire: The Greaser in Stephen Crane's Mexican Stories and D. W. Griffith's Early Westerns," which appears in Western American Literature (2004).

For the initial post in this series, which includes Andrew Grant-Thomas' working definition of structural racism, click here. Lee Baker of Duke University nominated one novel here. Michael Dawson of the University of Chicago offered recommendations here and here, and Michael Collins of Texas A & M suggested a couple of novels and an autobiography here. For recommendations from New York Daily News columnist Errol Louis, click here.

Thanks to Juan for the suggestions.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Awakening"

Kate Chopin's The Awakening is the latest book featured in the Guardian series adapted from Jane Smiley's 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel. (Click here for earlier installments.) Smiley gets it right:

What the novel has to offer, among other things, is honesty. To the eternal question of how women are to be disposed of as both objects and agents, Kate Chopin offers an antecedent question: why is there a problem? And she also asks: what if society cannot provide the answer?

When Chopin published The Awakening in 1899 society was perhaps further from answers to those questions than we are today. (Perhaps.) I'm therefore prepared to credit the book its pathbreaking status for taking on those issues.

And yet I was underwhelmed by the novel when I read it some years ago. Smiley is correct that the plot isn't the greatest but that Chopin is much better with "the depiction of the gradual change of [the protagonist] Edna's way of seeing the world and for the sympathy [Chopin] shows her."

My greatest joy linked to The Awakening was reading Robert Stone's Children of Light (1986), one of my favorite twice-told tales. Stone's novel is about the making of a movie about The Awakening with his characters dealing with some of the same issues and themes as Chopin's. Children of Light was not as critically successful as some of Stone's other novels but it is one of my favorites, partly because I appreciate the way he takes on the Chopin story.

David Bowman called Children of Light one of the "great noir novels from the post-Chandler generations."

The Awakening and some of Chopin's short stories are available free online here.

For other posts on "twice-told tales," click here, here, and here.

--Marshal Zeringue

Anthony Shadid's favorite book about theocracy

I asked Washington Post reporter Anthony Shadid for a good novel about theocracy in the Middle East, the region where he does much of his Pulitizer Prize-winning reporting. He replied not with a novel but a very timely suggestion of nonfiction:

I don't have an idea right off for a novel, but my favorite about theocracy, or at least the authority of a religious hierarchy, is Roy Mottahedeh's Mantle of the Prophet. It's a phenomenal read--a gripping narrative laced tightly to its surroundings.

First published in 1985, Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran earned high praise from Fouad Ajami:

Six years after the Iranian revolution, we have an exquisite book on the culture of Iran, the Shiite clerical class responsible for the revolution and the madresehs, the religious seminaries from which the clerics emerged. ''The Mantle of the Prophet'' is the work of Roy Mottahedeh, a gifted scholar.... He has drawn on a massive amount of learning, but he has got the scholarly apparatus out of the way and made his book accessible to a wide audience. He writes of Iran with tenderness and affection. ''Love for its heritage informs everything I have written here,'' he says. And he is as good as his word. He discusses the ways in which the Iranians have expressed themselves, the manner in which they have escaped the tyranny of their rulers by turning to poetry and making it ''the central icon of their culture, the focus of emotion in which every speaker of Persian has felt he or she could see something essential of himself or herself.'' He illuminates the style of Persian culture that revolutionary Iran has been trying to destroy: the love of ambiguity....

At the center of ''The Mantle of the Prophet'' is a young mullah, Ali Hashemi (a pseudonym), born in the early 1940's. He is both Mr. Mottahedeh's subject and literary device. The large narrative of Iran's history is woven around the story of Ali Hashemi's life. There are two distinct voices in the book: one that recounts Ali Hashemi's life, and Mr. Mottahedeh's own, which he uses in describing Iranian history. It is through Ali Hashemi that we see Iran's mosques and bazaars, ''the two lungs of public life in Iran.'' (Click here to read more of this insightful review.)

Twenty years later--and at time with much intemperate language flowing between Tehran and Washington--it is a little odd to read Ajami's closing lines:

We have to wait for Iran to make its peace with itself and the world. But we have to make an effort too. ''The Mantle of the Prophet'' is a work of reconciliation and reflection. Rising above the current feud between Iran and the West, it speaks of gentler sentiments. And like Persian poetry that speaks in allegory, it leaves open the possibility of a world beyond one of rage and bitterness.

Anthony Shadid is a reporter for the Washington Post and the author of Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War. He has reported from throughout the Middle East for a decade, first as Cairo correspondent for The Associated Press and then for the Boston Globe, where he drew attention for reports from the West Bank and other fronts. His first book, Legacy of the Prophet, drew praise from the late Edward Said. For his work in Baghdad he has received the Overseas Press Club Award (his second), the Michael Kelly Award, and was given the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.

Michiko Kakutani wrote of Night Draws Near:

It leaves the reader with a devastating sense of the gap between the war's aims and its aftermath and the gap between the administration's rhetoric and the realities on the ground. Though much of the factual material in the book will be familiar to dedicated newspaper readers, Mr. Shadid does a fluent job of pulling all this information into a riveting narrative that is animated by his up-close and personal portraits of individual Iraqis.

Yesterday, Shadid's long feature "The Towering Dream of Dubai" appeared on the front page of the Post.

I thank him for his suggestion.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Indonesian Novelist, Dies

The Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer died on Sunday. Click here for the New York Times obituary.

Pramoedya was best known for "the Buru Quartet," the story of a young, ambitious Javanese political activist and journalist who comes of age in the waning years of Dutch colonialism. The first two volumes, This Earth of Mankind and Child of All Nations are extremely fine novels: written in a sparse but powerful style, they are a coming of age story full of love, suspense, and betrayal--all conveying the indignities of colonialism, racism and oppression.

In my view, the story starts to unravel in the third volume Footsteps, and the fourth volume is so different from (and inferior to) the other volumes that the reader might be best advised to avoid it.

Pramoedya's "Indonesiad" is a rich, beautiful story and shouldn't be missed.

--Marshal Zeringue

Philosophy and fiction: "Othello" and "Billy Budd"

A.C. Grayling, professor of philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London, has a smart review essay in the Financial Times. His subject is the Oxford University Press series of seven small volumes, each devoted to one of the Seven Deadly Sins. (To say that there are only "seven" such sins is inexact, as Simon Blackburn discusses in passing in his volume on Lust.)

In addition to Blackburn's volume, I've read Francine Prose's Gluttony and skimmed Phyllis Tickle's Greed. The latter didn't really grab me and I abandoned it; and, though I much admire the novels of hers that I've read, I didn't like Prose's Gluttony as much as Grayling does--probably because, as Prose and Grayling note, gluttony is so far from being a sin for most of us, most of the time.

The subject of this post comes from Grayling on Joseph Epstein's volume on Envy, which I plan to read very soon and not only because Epstein has been kind to the blog.

There are some nicely worked distinctions in Epstein’s absorbing account of envy, and some brilliant insights into Othello and Billy Budd. The difference between jealousy and envy, he observes, is that the former applies to what we have, the latter to what we do not have. Iago’s envy is more poisonous than Othello’s jealousy; the destructive power of John Claggart’s attitude to Billy Budd is relentless, hidden in what is apparently normal and unexceptionable: since envy’s “lodgement is in the heart and not the brain, no degree of intellect supplies a guarantee against it”. At the end, when Budd kills Claggart because he cannot speak to defend himself against Claggart’s lie, the act has the proper inevitability of tragedy. These are wonderfully telling points.

That's more insightful than--though maybe not as much fun as--what Orson Welles reportedly said to Warren Beatty: "Jealousy is the seasickness of emotions. You think you're going to die, and everyone else thinks it's funny."

If Grayling can sell Envy to me, let me join him in recommending Lust to you. Blackburn is a terrific writer, that rare philosopher who can explain his subject to the amateur. From his volume you'll learn something about art and philosophy as well as how to think like a philosopher. Moreover:

Getting [lust] right means unpiecing the various confusions that anxiety and piety have introduced into the subject. At the outset Blackburn acutely observes that the concepts of lust and excess have to disentangle: “We can no more criticise lust because it gets out of hand, than we can criticise hunger because it can lead to gluttony, or thirst because it can lead to drunkenness.”

For other posts on "philosophy and fiction" click here, here, and here.

--Marshal Zeringue

Do some Americans think like Iran's leaders?

“In Iran the regime sees western literature as decadent and morally corrupting--it cannot see literature for what it is. I had not expected there would be people in America who would think along the same lines.”

--Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran and now a resident scholar at the School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C., in an interview with Edward Luce of the Financial Times. Click here to read more.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Brown Girl, Brownstones"

Professor Lee D. Baker of Duke University checked in with a suggestion for our series on fiction that illuminates the problem of structural racism:

My off the cuff recommendation would be: Brown Girl, Brownstones by Paule Marshall.

From the publisher:

Now including a new foreword by the prolific Haitian author Edwidge Danticat, Brown Girl, Brownstones, is the work of one of America’s finest contemporary black women writers. Set in Brooklyn during the Depression and World War II, it chronicles the efforts of Barbadian immigrants to surmount poverty and racism and to make their new country home. Selina Boyce, the novel’s memorable heroine, is conflicted by the opposing aspirations of her parents: her hardworking, ambitious mother longs to buy a brownstone row house while her easy-going father prefers to dream of effortless success and his native island’s lushness. Eventually, in this coming-of-age story, Selina must forge her own identity, sexuality and sense of values in her new country and reconcile group tradition with individual potential.

Paule Marshall has written five novels--Daughters; Praisesong for the Widow; The Chosen Place, The Timeless People; Brown Girl, Brownstones; and most recently The Fisher King--and has published two collections of short fiction, Soul Clap Hands and Sing and Reena and Other Stories. She is a MacArthur Fellow and past winner of the Dos Passos Prize for Literature. In 1994 she was designated a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library. Professor Marshall holds the Helen Gould Sheppard Chair of Literature and Culture in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University.

Lee D. Baker is Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology and African and African American Studies at Duke University. His publications include Life In America: Identity and Everyday Experience, ed. (2003) and From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954 (1998).

For the initial post in this series, which includes Andrew Grant-Thomas' working definition of structural racism, click here. Michael Dawson of the University of Chicago offered recommendations here and here, and Michael Collins of Texas A & M suggested a couple of novels and an autobiography here. For recommendations from New York Daily News columnist Errol Louis, click here.

Thanks to Lee for the recommendation.

--Marshal Zeringue

Do women deserve a book prize of their own?

The Orange Prize, established by Kate Mosse in 1996 and based in Great Britain, is open to any woman writing fiction in English, whatever her nationality or country of residence. It was won last year by Lionel Shriver for her powerful examination of motherhood, We Need to Talk About Kevin. Now it its 11th year, the prize bestows on the winner £30,000 and a limited edition bronze known as a "Bessie," created and donated by the artist Grizel Niven.

The shortlist for this year was just announced:
Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black
Zadie Smith, On Beauty
Ali Smith, The Accidental
Sarah Waters, The Night Watch
Carrie Tiffany, Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living

Natasha Walter, writing in the Guardian, notes that these are all first-rate novels and that two were nominated for the Man Booker prize. If these books would be competitive for the Booker (Krauss' would be ineligible because she's American), why is it necessary for women to have a prize that excludes male writers? Walter defends the prize:

given that it would be hard to find a bookseller or a critic who would discount the imaginative energy of these writers, why is there a need for this prize? Once a prize that was there to put women writers on the map becomes predictable, has it had its day?

The prize is necessary because the most prestigious prize-giving culture in Britain still often shows itself weirdly unable to recognise and reward the greatest writing, and for some reason books by women are still often the ones that lose out. When Zadie Smith's ferocious and heartfelt novel On Beauty lost out in the Booker race last year to John Banville's desiccated The Sea, it was only what one has come to expect from the Booker prize. From time to time the panel gets it right and finds a winning book that is truly a work of great imagination, but all too often it steers towards an easy consensus. The differing opinions, often refereed by an academic or politician, tend to cancel each other out, leaving the panel on the polite middle ground. What you get as a winner is a book that will be accepted by all the judges, rather than one passionately espoused by any of them.

That argument sounds reasonable enough to me.

As it happens, I read and enjoyed both the Zadie Smith and Banville books and would not have been unhappy if Smith and not Banville had won the Booker. (Had I been on the committee, I might have voted for Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go or Julian Barnes' Arthur & George).

I'm on record as being moderately pro-prize: sure, competition among artists has its downside, but these prizes mean more exposure for the writers and a nice payoff for the winner.

So what's the matter with yet another prize, even if it's only open to women who write in English? It's good for the writers and their publishers, and good for readers who might be induced to pick up a book mentioned in conjunction with the competition.

And yet: would I think the same thing about a prize open only to men?

So much for male and female writers: click here for my take on the differences between male and female readers.

As for the Booker prize, click here for an intelligent account of a Booker prize that went to the weakest nominee on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

"It Can't Happen Here"

Amy Laura Cahn of the ACLU of Pennsylvania wrote in after checking out our list of fiction (see here and here) so far compiled in the series about life in societies that lack habeas-protected individual rights:

I had folks look over your list and the consensus is that you have a pretty extensive list. From our legal program assistant: “Just checked the list, they have all and a couple more, that I could think of; [perhaps] It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis, but it really doesn't hit this nail that close, so probably not.”

Actually, a few contemporary commentators have noticed the applicability of this 1935 novel to the contemporary era. See, for example, this article.

Here's the (reprint) publisher's synopsis:

The only one of Sinclair Lewis's later novels to match the power of Main Street, Babbitt, and Arrowsmith, It Can't Happen Here is a cautionary tale about the fragility of democracy, an alarming, eerily timeless look at how fascism could take hold in America. Written during the Great Depression when America was largely oblivious to Hitler's aggression, it juxtaposes sharp political satire with the chillingly realistic rise of a President who becomes a dictator to save the nation from welfare cheats, rampant promiscuity, crime, and a liberal press.... It Can't Happen Here remains uniquely important, a shockingly prescient novel that's as fresh and contemporary as today's news.

The New Yorker called it "Not only [Lewis's] most important book but one of the most important books ever produced in this country."

Thanks for the input from the staff at the ACLU of Pennsylvania.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Company" and habeas corpus

Law professor Tung Yin has a couple of suggestions for fiction that illustrates what's at stake in the debate over habeas corpus. One is George Orwell's 1984, which was among the novels nominated early in this series. The other:

Robert Littell's The Company, which is an immensely long (but very readable) novel about the CIA. It follows two generations of spooks who work their way up the chain of command of the CIA, and the major sections of the books track the key events in the Cold War: the Soviet invasion of Hungary, the Bay of Pigs, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and so on.

Anyway, the part of the novel that is relevant to the question you pose about the debate over habeas corpus has to do with a mole hunt within the CIA. One counter-espionage agent amasses bits of evidence pointing toward one of the main characters, Leo Krinsky, as being a Soviet mole. Krinsky is arrested, brought to the CIA headquarters, and interrogated without a lawyer, and when he professes his innocence (despite the seemingly strong circumstantial evidence against him), the counterespionage agent throws him into a literal dungeon, where the only water source is the toilet. The CIA agent is kept in there for weeks (or was it months?), enduring repeated interrogation. The whole experience is so brutal that when he's finally released, he looks like a shadow of himself, and his hair has turned white.

Considering that the novel was written before the 9/11 attacks and Guantanamo Bay, it's remarkable that Littell captured the essence of the problem of indefinite detention without access to counsel or courts via habeas corpus. If Krinsky were a Soviet mole, national security would call for his isolation so as to prevent damaging national secrets from being passed to the Soviet Union. But what if Krinsky were innocent? The point of habeas corpus is that the Executive Branch--in this novel, the CIA counterespionage agent--isn't the one to make the call as to whether to err on the side of overprotecting national security or overprotecting individual rights; it's for a neutral, third party such as the court to balance the competing concerns.

The Company has been highly--and widely--praised: click here for synopses and reviews, and click here for Otto Penzler's opinion of the novel. (His bottom line: "This is nothing less than a stunning historical document.")

To listen to Alan Cheuse's review of The Company on "All Things Considered," click here.

Professor Tung Yin joined the University of Iowa College of Law faculty in 2002. After graduating from law school, he clerked successively for the Honorable Edward Rafeedie of the United States District Court for the Central District of California, the Honorable William J. Holloway, Jr., of the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, and the Honorable J. Clifford Wallace of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He then spent three and a half years as a litigation associate with Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP in Los Angeles, focusing on employment discrimination cases and white collar criminal defense. He is teaches corporate crimes, national security law, and constitutional law, and has taught federal courts.

For access to his articles, click here.

Professor Yin also runs The Yin Blog ("Law, politics, pop culture, sports, and a touch of Iowa").

Thanks to Tung for a fine suggestion and an especially thorough explanation for his choice.

For earlier suggestions of fiction that illustrates what life is like in societies where the executive can (and must?) jail citizens without judicial review, click here.

--Marshal Zeringue

Structural racism: plays and short stories

When Michael Dawson kicked off the series on novels that illuminate the problem of structural racism, he hinted at some similarly insightful plays and short stories. Here's what he was talking about:

I was thinking in particular of Richard Wright's short stories (such as "Bright and Morning Star"), and among others August Wilson's and Ed Bullins' plays. There's a comedy in particular "Day of Absence" from 1965 (Douglas Turner Ward) that depicts what happens in a Southern town when all the blacks disappear for a day.

Michael Dawson is John D. MacArthur Professor of Political Science and the College at The University of Chicago.

Thanks to Michael for his extra effort and recommendations.

--Marshal Zeringue

Novels about death and illness

There is an article in today's New York Times about Philip Roth, whose new novel, Everyman, is due out in May.

Roth is 73 and in good health, but many of the novel's characters aren't so fortunate.

One paragraph in particular struck me:

Mr. Roth added that when he began thinking of novels about death and illness—not just books in which sick people die, but those that take illness as their main subject—he couldn't come up with many beyond the obvious: Mann's "Magic Mountain," Solzhenitsyn's "Cancer Ward" and Tolstoy's "Death of Ivan Ilyich."

Of course there are many more such novels yet, like Roth, I can't think of them.

Know a novel about death and illness?

--Marshal Zeringue

An update on Jane Smiley's 100 novels

An earlier post directed readers to the continuing Guardian series in which the esteemed novelist Jane Smiley attempts to "illuminate the whole concept of the novel" by sharing her view on 100 novels. (If you're too impatient to follow the series in the Guardian, grab the book: Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel.)

Read her take on the first book on her list, The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu, here.

In the second installment Smiley looks at The Saga of the People of Laxardal, a tale of 10th-century Iceland that is thought to have been written by a woman.

The third of Smiley's articles considers the work of Aphra Behn--the first woman to make a successful career as a writer in England (1640-89)--who wrote about treachery and violence as well as expressing more "feminine" feelings.

The latest installment examines Nikolai Gogol's Ukrainian saga Taras Bulba, one of the greatest books of all time, according to Ernest Hemingway. (Nabokov, usually an enthusiastic Gogolian, didn't much care for Taras Bulba, however.)

--Marshal Zeringue

More writing that addresses structural racism

Professor and poet Michael S. Collins checked in with a few recommendations for our series on fiction that exposes structural racism.

Two novels that address structural racism, albeit in very different ways, are Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and Toni Morrison's Beloved.

An autobiography worth considering is Frederick Douglass' Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.

There are many online sites that make available Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; try here or here.

Michael Collins is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Texas A & M University. His research interests include literature and economics, altruism and literature, African American and other Ethnic American literature, and poetry. His recent publications include "Between Robin Hood and Ayn Rand: High Capitalism in the 1950s" (Michigan Quarterly Review 2003) and "Six Sketches: When a Soul Breaks" (Best American Poetry 2003).

Thanks to Mike for the recommendations.

For earlier recommendations from University of Chicago political scientist Michael Dawson, click here. For recommendations from New York Daily News columnist Errol Louis, click here.

--Marshal Zeringue

The Great Idaho Novel

I asked the poet Jim Irons for his view on The Great Idaho Novel; he passed the question on to his old writing instructor from Boise State University, Tom Trusky, who shared this response:

I'd suggest two Idaho authors, classic and contemporary: Vardis Fisher for the former, Tom Spanbauer for the latter. Fisher's first novel, Toilers of the Hills, subsequent tetralogy (whose titles come from George Meredith's "Modern Love"), and then his Dark Bridwell--all six are called his "Antelope Hills novels"--are set in Eastern Idaho. They capture Idaho life and landscape there unto the 1930s.

Spanbauer's best novel is probably The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon and it draws on Idaho history and contemporary life in a town based on Atlanta, in central Idaho. However, Spanbauer's fourth and newest novel--forthcoming in May--is Now Is the Hour, and it beautifully captures life in and around Pocatello, Idaho in the 1950s-1960s.

Tom Trusky is Professor of English at Boise State University and Director of the Hemingway Western Studies Center, Idaho Center for the Book, and the Idaho Film Collection.

Thanks to Tom and Jim for the help.

--Marshal Zeringue

For The Great Kansas Novel, click here.
For The Great Alaska Novel, click here.
For The Great Texas Novel, part 2, click here.
For The Great New York (City) Novel, click here.
For The Great Florida Novel, click here.
For The Great Illinois Novel, click here.
For The Great Michigan Novel, part 1, click here; part 2, click here.
For The Great California Novel, click here.
For The Great Oregon Novel, click here.
For The Great Texas Novel, part1, click here.
For The Great Louisiana Novel, click here.

Errol Louis on "structural racism"

New York Daily News columnist Errol Louis writes in to suggest a few novels that might help us better understand structural racism:

On the question of structural racism, I would very strongly recommend Richard Wright (Black Boy or Uncle Tom’s Children, not Native Son) or anything by [James] Baldwin. All of it is “before my time,” but I found each to be worth a long shelf’s worth of sociology or history texts.

When I taught a course on black culture at the Pratt Institute in the late 1990s, my students were artists who had to take one (and only one) social science course before graduating. I always assigned Wright and would urge you to do the same. People not in the habit of reading should start with the very best.

Errol Louis was born in Harlem, raised in New Rochelle and lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn with his wife, Juanita Scarlett. He is the son of a retired NYPD inspector and formerly served as associate editor of The New York Sun. He has taught college, co-founded an inner-city community credit union, run for City Council and was once named by New York Magazine as one of 10 New Yorkers making a difference "with energy, vision and independent thinking." He holds degrees from Harvard, Yale and Brooklyn Law School.

Thanks to Errol Louis for the book recommendations.

The University of Chicago political scientist Michael Dawson helped kick off this series a few days ago. To see his first recommendation, click here; there's more coming from Professor Dawson, too, so watch this space.

--Marshal Zeringue

Update: fiction about jails without judges

Here at the site we’ve seen some very smart suggestions for stories illuminating what it’s like to live in a society where the executive can jail a citizen without getting a judge’s approval.

I started the series over what’s at stake in the debate over habeas corpus because even though legal and political circles are much engaged on the subject—see, for example, here and here and here—the popular imagination doesn’t seem much interested. Perhaps the citizenry doesn’t realize what is at risk here, so (I reasoned) maybe a parable or two can help.

Of course, the stories can work two ways. As some pundits and government officials have suggested, maybe habeas corpus isn’t a luxury America can afford given the threat of terrorism. TV viewers have seen plotlines that favor that notion in (among others) 24, Alias, and the BBC’s MI-5. So far, only one suggestion of a novel from this camp has hit the site: Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal.

Most of the other suggested fiction is about the danger of allowing the authorities to imprison individuals without explaining to a judge the reason for doing so.

Pete Anderson recommended “Franz Kafka's The Trial, which unforgettably shows how an innocent man can be unfairly persecuted by a totalitarian state.” Jeremy Dibbell came up with “Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World... both are interesting treatments of ‘what could happen’ after diving down those slippery slopes.” Darkness at Noon was the choice of two political scientists.

Jonathan Freiman of Yale Law School and the firm Wiggin and Dana recommended The Count of Monte Cristo.

Robert A. Ferguson, George Edward Woodberry Professor in Law, Literature and Criticism at Columbia Law School, recommended a story I did not previously know of: Edward Everett Hale's "The Man Without A Country." It’s great stuff—read it here or here—especially since it was written with a different purpose than the one suggested by Professor Ferguson.

Two writers of legal thrillers jumped in with novels with plots involving petitions for habeas corpus, which in this case are challenges to the constitutionality of a conviction or sentence. Scott Turow recommended his own “novel Reversible Errors [which] centers on a habeas proceeding for a man on death row, brought when another man confesses to the crime.” And Alafair Burke suggested Kermit Roosevelt's In the Shadow of the Law.

The invitation is open for suggestions of more novels that illuminate what's at stake when a polity allows--or does not allow--the executive to imprison citizens without judicial review. If you know of a good book and can explain how it fits the bill--and you make your case before May 15--you might just be the winner of a copy of Cary Federman's just-released The Body and the State: Habeas Corpus and American Jurisprudence (SUNY Press, 2006), a $65 value.

Email your suggestions to mazeringue [at] excite [dot] com.

--Marshal Zeringue

Two medieval novels from the Islamic tradition

Professor Joseph Lowry of the University of Pennsylvania generously replied to my inquiry regarding Arabic novels about life in a theocracy:

I can at least suggest two medieval philosophical novels from the Islamic tradition. Although they are not about life in a theocracy per se, they certainly both contemplate, in their various ways, life under a government that sees maintenance of a particular religious faith as a duty. Medieval Islamic government was not really a theocracy in the narrow sense, except briefly perhaps during and shortly after the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammed (d. 632).

They are both beautifully translated by Professor [Lenn] Goodman of Vanderbilt University and have excellent introductions and notes and will be immediately appealing--I hope--to non-specialists. I am reading them with my Islamic philosophy class this semester.

These are:

Ibn Tufayl's Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, tr. Lenn Goodman (Los Angeles: gee tee bee press)

The Case of the Animals vs. Man before the King of the Jinn, tr. Lenn Goodman (Los Angeles, gee tee bee press)

There is an article in the Guardian about Ibn Tufayl's Hayy Ibn Yaqzan that should be well worth your time; click here to read it, and here are the opening paragraphs to tickle your interest:

There is a tale for our troubled times about a man on a desert island, who keeps goats, builds a shelter and finally discovers footprints in the sand. But it is not called Robinson Crusoe. It was written by a wise old Muslim from Andalusia and is the third most translated text from Arabic after the Koran and the Arabian Nights.

It is called Hayy ibn Yaqzan or "Alive, Son of Awake", and it was a sensation among intellectuals in Daniel Defoe's day. As has happened before during times of tension between Islam and the west, it is again emerging from the shadows and that is a matter for celebration, whether in New York or Baghdad.

The Case of the Animals vs. Man before the King of the Jinn is the subject of a graduate seminar in Arabic at UCLA this spring. As the course listing summarizes it:

an allegorical story in which the animals complain to the just king of the jinn about the cruel treatment meted out to them by human beings. The debate--a satire on Men and Animals--in addition to theological disputes reflects fascinating psychological and ecological themes. In the course of the debate, the animals refute man’s claim of superiority over them by denouncing the rampant injustice and immorality of human society. The fable is a good example of [the author] Ikhwan’s socio-political criticism of Islamic society couched in animal characters without offending the sensibilities of their readers.

Both books sound fascinating to me.

Joseph Lowry is Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Penn. His recent publications include: Law and Education in Medieval Islam: Studies in Memory of George Makdisi, eds. J. Lowry, D. Stewart and S. Toorawa. Cambridge: E. J. W. Gibb Memorial Trust, 2005; "The Legal Hermeneutics of al-Shafi‘i and Ibn Qutayba: A Reconsideration," Islamic Law and Society 11:1 (2004); "Ritual Purity," Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an, v. 4 (Leiden: Brill, in progress); "Histories and Polyphonies: Deep Structures inal-Tayyib Salih’s Mawsim al-hijra ila al-shamal," Edebiyât 12 (2001); co-author, Interpreting the Self: Autobiography in the Arabic Literary Tradition, D. Reynolds, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

Thanks to Joe Lowry for the stimulating suggestions.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Man Who Cried I Am"

University of Chicago professor Michael Dawson helps advance and refine our search for fiction that might illuminate the understanding of "structural racism."

Mosley's work sorta works, although it's better at showing inter-personal racism backed by state and other forms of power. Maybe John A. Williams’ novels (The Man Who Cried I Am, etc). If you're willing to include plays and short stories it opens up the field quite a bit.

Although I would prefer novels, I am willing to consider other fiction--whatever helps advance our understanding. 

The Man Who Cried I Am, Williams' third (or fourth) novel, was published in 1967 to wide acclaim. Twenty years later he told an interviewer that readers were shocked by the novel's description of a plan for a final solution to the ''Negro problem.''

What I wrote then reflected what I saw happening in the 60's--that the problems and violence of those years were being blamed on America's black people. There was general feeling that blacks were superfluous, that if there were no blacks, there'd be no troubles.

Before retiring in the early 1990s, Williams was a professor of English and journalism at Rutgers University in Newark, and had written more than 20 books.

In 1981 Gabriel Motola, professor of English literature at the City University, told the New York Times:

John is in the same class as Kurt Vonnegut, John Cheever and Arthur Miller, those who deal with the social issues and how they affect the individual, the social issues that tend to restrict people from moving up the economic and social ladders and restrict their very basic freedoms. John is one of the few writers of today who is worth paying attention to....

Michael Dawson, one of the nation’s leading experts on race and politics, is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Black Visions: The Roots of Contemporary African-American Political Ideologies and Behind the Mule: Race and Class in African-American Politics. He also is the author of numerous articles on African-American political behavior and race and American politics.

William Julius Wilson called Black Visions "the most comprehensive and definitive study of African-American political thought ever published."

Thanks to Michael Dawson for the suggestion and input.

For previous entries on this theme, see Andrew Grant-Thomas raises an issue, "Arthur & George", and Walter Mosley.

--Marshal Zeringue