A tumultuous and revolutionary season recounted in Freedom Summer

From The Week of October 1st, 2013

As much as the religious would have us believe in the holiness of an ideal standard of conduct, an unchanging set of views and values from which one may never need to deviate, we know this is absurd. After all, such standards are informed by the times and the cultures in which they were enshrined. And the merest glance at human history, both recent and ancient, tells us that social mores change over time. What is inexcusably taboo in one culture might not even be worthy of a whisper of controversy in another. Which leads us to an inescapable conclusion. As our physical forms evolve, so too do our morals and mores, taking us on a long and winding journey to freedoms both of the flesh and the mind. This should not be feared. On the contrary, it should be embraced. For to do so is to accept that we can always be better.

But there's a deeper question here, one that cannot be so easily dispensed with. How do mores evolve? What motivates social change? Is it the introduction of foreign elements that must be grappled with, incorporated into our cultural worldviews? Or are mores changed by insurgency, an upheaval from within the culture that has woken to an injustice that must be corrected? Both may be applicable, but I cannot think of a better argument for the latter than the remarkable story of hardship and endurance laid out here by Bruce Watson.

Fully a hundred years after the Americans fought a great, transformative war to expunge their nation's original sin, slavery, life in parts of the racially divided American South had changed amazingly little. African Americans were still segregated, forced to use different washrooms and schools, restaurants and churches, distinctions imposed upon them by their white masters, men and women who had refused, since the end of the Civil War, to admit defeat. Their rage and humiliation coalesced into a movement to deny the rights of their black neighbors, not only disenfranchising them, but igniting the creation of a culture that caused the law to look the other way while the descendents of their slaves were beaten and murdered, raped and marginalized.

Tired of the indifference and the status quo, and chafing at the soulless, forced conformity of the homogeneous, 1950s white culture, a group of young, rebellious, earnest and devoted students, from schools all over the country, descended on the South, in 1964, armed with a mission to compel change upon the ignorant and the backward. With songs and leaflets, energy and passion, they helped to shield the African American community from the slings and arrows of their white peers while they organized to do what most of them hadn't done in their lifetimes, register to vote. The riots and killings that flowed from this hellish summer would change forever the way the world viewed the American South, inspiring lasting legal and social change worthy of Lincoln's memory.

From the policy arguments to the tactical disputes, from the mobilization to the execution, Freedom Summer collects the stories of these legendary rebels that helped to finally abolish this most enduring stain on the American fabric. Shaping his narrative around a number of the Summer's key figures, revealing them in all their admirable passion and headstrong determination, Mr. Watson allows his chronicle, of those few, memorable months in Mississippi, to telescope back and forth between the heatedness of the view on the ground and the more calculated coldness of the view at 20,000 feet, where politics and necessity trump individuality. In this, the reader is afforded an excellent overview of this reckoning with the old South that is as comfortable sitting in the White House, with a conflicted and annoyed Linden Johnson, as it is roaring along at 100 MPH through the Mississippi heat, with the bringers of change and those who sought to snuff them out before they could work their will.

As of this writing, we're less than a year away from the 50th anniversary of this revolutionary summer, a fact which will surely author thousands of recollections, white and black, liberal and conservative, of what happened in 1964. There will be analyses of what it meant, some arguing for everything, others countering with nothing. Freedom Summer may not have all the definitive answers to these inevitable disputes. What it does possess, though, is far more important, a knowledge of the means by which positive change can be wrought. These rebels didn't have to have a coherent message -- on the contrary, the author is quite clear about the many, ruinous disputes that convulsed the SNCC. No, all they needed was the will, and the courage, to enable, and to motivate, the criminally disenfranchised to vote. The poisonous snakes obstructing them, envenomed by their irrational hatreds and burdened by their cultural conservatism, would happily expose themselves at this provocation, slithering out into the bright lights of the national spotlight where they could be judged and found wanting.

Freedom Summer is not a perfect work. It could have spent more time on the lead up to, and the aftermath of, this critical conflagration. Moreover, Mr. Watson virtually ignores the terrible optics of white people, however good-intentioned, riding bravely to the rescue of the beleaguered and uneducated blacks. This must have created fallout, both at the time and thereafter, but these are small quibbles with what is otherwise a wonderful work that exposes, and largely celebrates, the lives of heroes of all stripes who recognized an injustice and, instead of whining about it, chose to attack it directly. Would that they were better remembered by the culture at large.

Inspiring work... (4/5 Stars)

The devastating history of eugenics chronicled in War Against the Weak

From The Week of July 8th, 2013

Though the question of what we individually owe to our fellow man is the pressing, sociological issue of this new, global civilization, there's an equally important debate to be had. What do we owe the least fortunate among us? From the mentally ill to the physically deficient, millions of people never receive a fair shot at a successful life. Is this merely a necessary outgrowth of a democratic, capitalist system, that some of us simply will be left behind, or is this inequality a consequence of poor ethics and poor morals? Perhaps, some day, we will have answers to these questions. Perhaps one will help solve the other. But until that day, we have only our past actions to go by. And where misfits are concerned, this is decidedly grim, a truth relentlessly demonstrated in Edwin Black's thorough examination of eugenics.

A scientific movement that grew out of nineteenth-century revelations of the remarkable role evolution plays in the advancement of life on Earth, eugenics is an ethical framework that argues for the purification of the human species through proper breeding and genetic engineering. Popular in the first half of the 20th century, it was originally confined to agricultural and horticultural fields before being seized upon by scientists and philosophers as a means by which to eliminate human malformations. After all, would the world not be better if disabilities from Spina bifida to blindness could be erased from the gene pool? Imagine the benefits to society if it, and its people, could be relieved of the costs of caring for those who, because of some genetic deficiency, cannot care for themselves.

However innocent the origins of this view of humanity's future, eugenics soon took on a sinister air, made all the more obvious with hindsight. For how could the enfeebled and the disabled be trusted to remove themselves from the gene pool? Would it not be prudent for society to sterilize them as a means of assuring that such genetic mistakes would die out with them? Armed with scientific funding from powerful, turn-of-the-century trusts, an American organization set out to lobby state legislatures to pass sweeping laws that would make commonplace the forced exclusion of deficients from the gene pool. Drawing on biased, reprehensible science, the American Breeders Association became a haven for racial purists who disseminated their ugly conclusions not only throughout North America, but to a receptive Europe eager to have its white, Nordic superiority re-affirmed by sham science. Of these new, European adherents, none were as enthusiastic as the group of German scientists who would go onto play key roles in Hitler's attempted extermination of the Jewish population, participating, in the name of eugenics, the worst crime in modern history.

A lacerating account of the history of eugenics, War Against The Weak is a shattering examination of one of organized science's darkest hours. Mr. Black, who possesses a first-class mind for research, has not only assembled an authoritative account of the attempt by a small group of humans to play god over the future of an entire species; he has brought to light, with color and compassion, the many thousands of souls who suffered at their hands. For the eugenics movement was not a victimless crime. It was not simply a foolish idea rooted in a series of unfortunate misapprehensions. It was a systematic attempt to strip groups of innocent people of their basic human rights, passing judgement on them in a manner that is both abhorrent and obscene. From the American Breeders Association's first steps into the arena of public policy, through to the unimaginable Holocaust into which it eventuated, the work reveals the corporations and the actors, the governments and the bodies that sought to destroy the individual freedoms we all hold so dear.

Though the work's most obvious quality is its exceptional thoroughness -- Mr. Black presents the reader with pages and pages of sources that must have taken years to organize and compile --, its most enduring virtue is the manner in which it exposes us to an inescapable truth about the human mind, that it is unavoidably biased. Shaped by its social, cultural and economic environments, and hardened by personal experience, it favors conclusions it likes and ignores those it finds unpleasant. In this, it creates for the individual a narrowed view of the world that, while agreeable to the individual's sensibilities, is colored in the extreme. We now know, thanks to the work of both social and scientific crusaders, that the physical, intellectual and emotional differences between the races are at best negligible. And yet, seeking to find an explanation that justified their distaste for the tide of non-white, non-Nordic ethnicities flooding into their homeland, these eugenicists created pseudo science, convinced receptive governments of its voracity, and then implemented a program of social engineering criminal in its intent and tragic in its scope.

War Against the Weak has its blind spots. For all its rigor, Mr. Black's account is nonetheless a polemic against eugenics. He has no time for seemingly any argument in its favor. Given eugenics' costs, this is understandable, though, regrettable. We should be able to have a debate about what society owes the individual. We should be able to have discussions about the blessings of genetic engineering. But these are areas now profoundly poisoned by the sins of our past, certainly where the author is concerned.

An absolute must-read for anyone even mildly interested in science, justice and human nature... (5/5 Stars)

Political self-destruction in Preston's informative The Spanish Civil War

From The Week of June 24th, 2013

As much as the last few centuries have seen a significant advancement in most forms of human endeavor, we still lack a consistent, feasible strategy for properly harnessing and altruistically deploying the powers of collective action. For thousands of years, charismatic firebrands have rallied mobs with their voices and their deeds, unleashing these crowds in the name of a goal they desire to achieve. Moreover, entire communities have organized along similar lines in hopes of upending the status quo. But in both cases, the ends fail to justify the means. For the act of deploying the power of the collective, in the furtherance of a specific agenda, encourages others to do so for their own agendas. And it never takes long for these different groups to crash into one another, directly or indirectly, creating chaos in their wake. How we improve this dire outcome is beyond the scope of this review, but its consequences are not. They are vividly demonstrated in Paul Preston's excellent history of one of Spain's darker periods.

The consequence of years of political instability, ideological feuds and economic hardship, the Spanish civil War (1936-1939) was as brutal as it was swift. Pitting political leftists, supported by the legitimate government, the Soviet Union and thousands of foreign fighters drawn to their righteous cause, against right-wing nationalists, supported by fascist Italy, Nazist Germany and much of the Spanish military, it was a devastating conflict that not only claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of belligerents and civilians, it ripped apart Spanish society, plunging it into a kind of nihilistic chaos that would become all-too-familiar when the Second World War would break out only a few years later. The war, which saw towns besieged and bombed, soldiers starved and mutilated and civilians raped and murdered, annihilated the Spanish state, replacing it first with discord and then with Franco's victorious iron fist which would remained firmly wrapped around Spain's throat for more than 20 years.

But how could such a horrific conflict be allowed to unfold? Where were the moments of hesitation, of compromise, that would have kept its ravages from Spanish shores? And why was it such a rallying cry for European commoners and intellectuals? For these answers, we turn to the political turmoil that preceded the conflict, a succession of overturned governments, unchecked egos and ideological disputes that were a microcosm for a pre-WWII Europe gripped in a feverish and contentious debate between communism on the left and fascism on the right. These diametrically opposed forces, armed with proxies and adherents, ideas and weapons, were determined to impose their views upon the world, an insistence that succeeded only in tearing it apart.

This complex, factious world is brilliantly captured in The Spanish Civil War. Beginning with the fearsome politics that launched it, and concluding with the long, Francist nightmare that followed it, Mr. Preston details the thinkers and the commanders, the loyalists and the autocrats, the politics and the self-belief that characterized a dispute that would not only act as a harbinger for the wider, European war to come, but demonstrate the true cost of a heavily populated and profoundly divided continent that, seized by the legacies of imperialism and colonialism, eschewed union for nationalism, wisdom for pride. Every human flaw is on display here, taken up and spilled across 400, swiftly paced pages that never succumb to the bondage of that most notorious fetish of historical non-fiction, endless specificity. That Mr. Preston manages to capture such a rollercoaster conflict without completely losing the reader is an achievement all its own. That he does so while engendering both horror and sympathy is remarkable.

Though Mr. Preston primarily focuses on untangling the knotted rivalries that caused the conflict's breakout, the work's strongest moments are taken up with the ways this war bestirred and repulsed the European community. Mr. Preston makes us witnesses to the foolishness of British politicians like Winston Churchill who dismissed the loyalists as murdering propagandists, to the eagerness of Italian territorialists who were eager to extend their influence in Europe, and to the thoughtfulness of German Nazis who were keen to perform a

dress rehearsal of the tactics that they'd soon be deploying against the Europe they intended to conquer. Seeing all these familiar forces arrogantly jockeying for power, while readying themselves for a war from which it would take Europe 50 years to recover, is as eerie as it is sickening. But lest we lose all hope in humanity, the European idealists who came to fight in such an ugly war receive their own lengthy treatment, one in which we see both the selflessness of individuals willing to fight for something bigger than themselves and the terrible price that is paid for that selflessness.

The Spanish Civil War is not a perfect work. It lingers overlong in the esoteric nature of the conflict's background. Moreover, it skims over the fallout from the war, confining it to an all-too-swift epilogue. However, these are but small imperfections on a tapestry that reveals to what tragic degrees humans invest themselves in ideas that, when empowered by collective belief, can set the masses to marching right off the cliff and into darkness. Not a read for the faint of heart... (4/5 Stars)

The long, complicated life of a remarkable individual in Nelson Mandela

From the Week of June 10, 2013

For all of civilization's advantages, for all that it creates capital, organizes industry, encourages socialization and allows for institutions that aid us all, it is not without risks. Beyond the libraries and the schools, the theatres and the shopping malls, the courts and the law-enforcers, made possible by it, civilization is fundamentally a system for concentrating power from the disparate and disordered masses and into the hands of the few who in turn put it to useful purpose. Most often, this power is applied reasonably, even constructively, but it can also be twisted, shaped into a weapon for controlling the people instead of aiding them. Sadly, we Mont' have to look very far into our history to find horrific examples of just such abuse.

When civilization goes bad, when those we trusted most turn against us and use the powers we have given them against us, what do we do? We can fight, but in a time of increasing, technological advancement, are our overwhelming numbers sufficient against a well-armed, well-drilled force of professional killers? We can disobey, speaking out and winding up in jail for our pains, but will anyone listen to us over the din of the government's demonization of our characters? We can leave, but what message does that send to those we leave behind? Worse, what does it say to those brave souls who chose to stay and fight? What is the right thing to do when faced with such a massive threat? We turn to Anthony Sampson's biography for answers.

Only eight years younger than the state of South Africa, Nelson Mandela is undoubtedly one of the most famous freedom fighters in modern history. The son of a proud, tribal lineage, he was born into a land that had been conquered and colonized by the British Empire which, along with other western European powers, had spent the preceding century laying claim to an entire continent of people and their resources. However heartless this imperialism, having itself only come in the wake of centuries of enslavement and forced relocation, it was, to some degree, a world with standards of education and faith, morals and dignity, all of which a young Mandela soaked up as a citizen of this civilizing system which promised opportunities to those willing to seize them.

Nelson Mandela's customary, colonial existence, however, came to an end in 1948 when, freed from British rule, the newly elected National Party institutionalized racism. The seeds of western superiority sewn into the fabric of South African society flowered with apartheid which not only outlawed interacial marriage, but called for the uprooting of Africans out of white neighborhoods, crowding them into ghettos in which they could safely be ignored. Forbidden from owning businesses by white colonials, the black Africans were confined to narrow lives of unemployment and servitude, a situation the young Mandela found intolerable. Rejecting his life as a lawyer, he spoke out against apartheid's cruel policies, fighting them in court and in public until his vociferousness, and his community organizing against Apartheid, finally earned him a long stint in the infamous robben Island prison where he and his fellow political prisoners would linger for decades, chained by a government that could no more understand them than recognize its own ignorance.

From jail, Nelson Mandela became an agent of change. For 27 years, he read, learned and spoke out against the government that had jailed his friends and taken him away from his family. This constant, dignified agitation bore little fruit until the 1980s when a combination of international political pressure and the rising power of Mandela's political party at home compelled the ruling party to negotiate with Mandela and the ANC, talks that would eventually lead to Mandela's freedom and the freedom of his country from decades of appalling oppression.

The biography of a most remarkable man, Nelson Mandela is an eminently readable chronicle of an extraordinary life. Mr. Sampson, a journalist present at some of the key moments in his subject's life, guides the reader through the many fazes of Mandela's existence, beginning with the young and relatively innocent lawyer and concluding with the powerful symbol of freedom in the face of tyranny. Between, he examines, at length, Mandela's long career as a political agitator, from the incidents that lead to Apartheid's banning of the ANC to the the negotiations that would end his long exile in prison. All of this is accomplished with clarity and without becoming bogged down in any one part of Mandela's long and complicated story which is itself an accomplishment.

Though the work contains numerous revelatory moments for those unversed in Nelson Mandela's story, none are more potent, or moving, than his intellectual and spiritual resistance to the many forces that sought to reduce him from a man of character to an animal of savagery. Provocations from the apartheid regime and pressures from his fellow freedom fighters sought to encourage Mandela into greater acts of violence that would discredit not only his leadership, but the legitimacy of his movement and the message it sought to convey to South Africa and the world. Above all else, it is this that makes Mandela special. For he did not fall back on spiritualism to resist the temptation to fight fire with fire. He used his mind. He read, he thought, and he formed arguments that stripped away the veneer of apartheid and exposed it for what it was, a selfish, foolish disgrace that stained the world for far too long. Mandela's capacity to rise above those who sought to break him will be an inspiration for generations of freedom fighters to come. He is one of humanity's best and most noble children.

For all of its subject's glory, Nelson Mandela is a flawed work. Mr. Sampson succeeds in bringing Mandela to life, but he fails at virtually every other turn to flesh out the world around him. The key events in the struggle against Apartheid are never described in any detail. Moreover, the actors who both aided and opposed Mandela are cruelly underrepresented here. With but one or two exceptions, they are simply names who appear here only as a means of furthering Mandela's story. This is a biography of Nelson Mandela, but he was but the most important spoke in a large wheel. To have the other spokes be so marginalized does them, and the reader, a disservice.

Nonetheless, this is a most thorough document of a legend of humanity. We will all be diminished when he leaves us. For in him, we see the potential for greatness in our species: kindness and fierceness, compassion and determination, cooperativeness and leadership. That he was able to master these virtues in the face of endless provocation and temptation is a lesson to us all. He will never be forgotten. (3/5 Stars)

The wonderful, eerie and ultimately dated The Handmaid's Tale

From The Week of June 3, 2013

Of all the freedoms that human civilization has conceived, popularized and distributed throughout most of the world, those of the individual are of paramount importance. For though the powerful have always held largely unassailable positions, Olympian heights from which to judge and manipulate those less fortunate than they, the powerless have not. In times past, this uneven application of laws and privileges was justified by any number of self-serving notions such as Divine Right and Might makes Right. But thanks to both the Rule of Law and to those numerous champions of democratic freedoms, some of us now enjoy societies in which the homeless are sheltered by the same laws as the elites.

For some of us, these societies have nurtured us for the totality of our lives and the lives of everyone we know. But for others, these societies are but a dream, a fanciful theory of equality that may or may not ever come. For them, the present is defined by the rulers, for the rulers leaving the many to be merely pawns for their pleasure. This world Margaret Atwood vividly animates in her chilling, award-winning novel.

In the near future, the celebrated nation once known as the United States has given way to revolution. A dominionist organization calling themselves the Sons of Jacob, guided and inspired by the Old Testament, has orchestrated a devastating terrorist attack upon the seat of national government, wiping out most of the executive and legislative branches. Blaming the attack on Islamic terrorists, the Sons erect a military junta in the power vacuum created by the Republic's fall, a junta that proceeds to implement the Sons' particularly stringent form of Christian fundamentalism throughout what will henceforth be called the Republic of Gilead.

In the wake of these shocking developments, the rights of women and minorities begin to rapidly disappear. Jews are given a choice between conversion to Christianity or forced relocation to Israel. African Americans are reclassified as the Children of Hamm and deployed as plantation-style labor. Gay people are ordered to reconsider their sexual orientation or face lethal consequences. But for all of these dark developments, perhaps the worst plight is reserved for women who are forbidden to work, to read, and virtually to think for themselves. They are reduced to incubators for the next generation of Gileadians, with the most fortunate of them placed as wives to defenders of the state and the least exiled to work the vast, radioactive zones that occupy the outskirts of the republic.

Within this narrow, colorless world, Offred endures. A handmaid, or concubine, within the house of one of the regime's elites, she barely remembers her previous life as an American who worked, played, had friends, went out to parties. Her husband is gone and her daughter seized by the state for indoctrination. But worst is perhaps Offred's own re-education at the hands of a special segment of Gilead women who have been privileged to re-train society's women to obey, to please and, most importantly, to be fertile for their masters. Despite her many sorrows, Offred persists until her owner picks her out of the crowd of handmaid's, starting a series of events that will thrust her into an uncertain future.

As grim as it is introspective, The Handmaid's Tale is imaginative, dystopian fiction. The award-winning product of one of Canada's most famous authors, it posits a future America in the grips of a perverse fundamentalism that has seized upon America's ills as an excuse to carry out mass-slaughter and the mass-reorganization of society along patriarchal lines. In this, the work, originally published in 1985, is very much of its time. For these are concerns specific to the 1980s in which a succession of American presidents, both Republican and Democrat, had encouraged, rather than choked off, the meteoric rise of those potent strains of American teleevangelism that would, in response to the liberalization of society in the 1960s and early 1970s, eventually coalesce into the Religious Right. This, combined with the dissipation of Women's Lib, which had already begun to devolve into various and somewhat competitive waves of feminism, created fertile ground for the imagination of an author and a possible, if not probable, future.

Consequently, though The Handmaid's Tale is chilling, its anachronism robs it of some of its power. We live, now, in an age in which threats emanate from the abuse of technology, not the distortion of faith. We live in a time in which the surveillance state is the dystopian boogeyman, not dominionism which is given about as much heed as Neo-Nazism. The idea that generals and scientists, market researchers and corporate executives would get together to create a new society in which they restricted their own behavior, in the misguided belief that they were executing God's will, seems silly from the hindsight of 2013 in which the heat has gone out of the culture wars and in which the freedoms of the individual are, if not expanding, then certainly static.

That said, The Handmaid's Tale is nonetheless a forceful illustration of the immense power of totalitarianism. Re-education has managed not only to turn women upon one another, distracting them from the greater goal of overthrowing their oppressors, it has succeeded in changing their norms, in convincing them that what they enjoyed before was wrong, sinful. This kind of behavioral conditioning is not only possible -- see North Korea --, it is terrifying. Ms. Atwood most convincingly demonstrates this power in the form of Moira, Offred's coarse, boisterous and combative best friend who, instead of being hardened into an opponent of the regime, is shattered by its oppressive practices. In this, Ms. Atwood leaves no doubt of totalitarianism's power, nor its willingness to use it, a demonstration that provides the novel with its best moments.

Moreover, Ms. Atwood's decision to make Offred her heroine is brilliant. For Offred is not a hero. She is not a survivor. She's not even especially interesting, or smart, or earnest. She does not stand on rooftops, calling out for change. She is gray, a plain, colorless canvas upon which the Republic of Gilead can scrawl out their beliefs. She is painfully and tragically average, just like most of us who will read her story. She is us in less fortunate circumstances.

For readers even passingly familiar with technological and societal trends, dated and even at times humorous. But for those even mildly interested in societies that care nothing for the rights of the individual, quietly gripping. (3/5 Stars)

Racism and the harmfulness of social mores in A World Unseen

From The Week of May 27, 2013 As much as we benefit from society, that wonderful collective of traditions and mores that define localized cultures, it throws up its fair share of challenges. For while society organizes people of different faiths and ethnicities, classes and colors, into a powerful hive-mind capable of defending itself against all manner of external threats, it also imposes codes of conduct upon its participants that can benefit some at the expense of others. After all, society doesn't care about the niceties of personal liberty. It doesn't gaze hopefully into the future in order to bring to the present visionary standards of equality and deportment. Society unifies people on the back of traditions that the majority find acceptable, a reality which is far from inherently liberal. This sad truth is animated to chilling effect in Shamim Sarif's quiet, historical novel. The year is 1952 and South Africa has slid into the worst form of institutionalized racism. Its ruling political party, an all-white assemblage of British Colonials and their descendents, have not only forbidden the races to intermarry, but robbed native Africans of their land by forceably removing them to semi-autonomous districts beyond the urban havens enjoyed by whites. Though some of these restrictions have existed since western colonization, laws codifying this racism have only recently been past, empowering police and the military to execute the will of the European elites. At the same time, however, South Africa is undergoing industrialization for which it has opened its borders to Asians to come and fill its factories and run its shops as it accelerates into the First World.? Into this patchwork country are dropped two young, Indian women seized by exceedingly different circumstances. Miriam is the quiet wife of a Muslim shopkeeper who has relocated his family to South Africa in the promise of new opportunities. Confined largely to the home, unless her stern husband requires her assistance cleaning or taking inventory in the shop, Miriam is rapidly aging under familial burdens made toxic by a nearly complete absence of warmth from her husband. Her children are her only refuge, that is, until she encounters amina, an ambitious cafe-owner who not only flouts the traditional dress and deportment proscribed to women, but defies this racist state by secretly allowing Jacob, her friend and co-founder, to silently own half of their shared business. Though society and circumstance makes it almost impossible for the two women to connect, Amina persists in drawing Miriam out of her shell, offering her a future the beleaguered wife couldn't have otherwise imagined. A novel as quiet as it is moving, A World Unseen, later made into a film of the same name, is a disturbing snapshot of life in a time that has thankfully lapsed into history. With but two brief and emotional scenes, Ms. Sarif vividly captures the senselessness and hopelessness of apartheid, reviving its depravities for a 21st century audience that will largely find its practice abhorrent and shameful. This political backdrop, for all its ugliness however, provides a spectacular setting in which to root our two protagonists, Miriam and amina, both of whom represent the slow, incremental way in which change is brought to societies. They do not march in the streets. They do not organize protests and set fire to government buildings. They do not even lock arms with their fellows to force the state into revealing the hellish depths to which it is willing to sink. No, they simply resist in the most effective way, and in the only way they know how, by living their lives as they wish to, deferring to no one but themselves and to nothing but their own desires. Though superficially a love story, A World Unseen is, at root, a story about the right to choose: one's fate, one's loved ones, one's friends, and even one's mistakes. It harnesses the quintessential elements of liberty in the face of violent opposition and, through that liberty, seeks to capture the preciousness of life and the degree to which we are all lessened when that most universal gift is crushed beneath the boots of an unfeeling state operating on the principles of ignorance and selfishness. In this, it succeeds beautifully. A World Unseen has its troubled moments. It fails to give the uninitiated reader any any real sense of Apartheid's power,, much less where it came from or why it persists. Moreover, the choice to make both of the protagonists outsiders sets the reader at too far of a remove from the bone-deep wrongness of this country at this time. However, neither of these complaints are fatal to the effort and, indeed, perhaps aid some readers in experiencing what Miriam and Amina feel, visitors to an exceedingly strange land in which they've chosen to stay and live. Quietly excellent... (4/5 Stars)

The dawn of womens sufferage thoroughly remembered in Seneca Falls

From The Week of May 13, 2013

though the advance of human civilization can be characterized in many different ways, surely none are more appropriate than the march towards personal freedom. From the technologies that have reduced our labors to the philosophies that have opened our eyes to injustice, the last few centuries have seen a great flowering in individual liberty along with the dawn of the great experiment of multiculturalism that is the hope for a peaceful, cooperative future. But though every important indicator, from crime rates to legal rights, is pointed in the right direction, there are still many among us who resist these societal changes, clinging to the old, familiar ways at the expense of the rights of individuals to be whatever they wish to be. Call it traditionalism; call it conservatism. Its name is meaningless next to the damage it does, not just to the reputation of our societies, but to the lives of the minorities crippled by its narrowmindedness. Few works demonstrate the cost of this conservatism better than Sally McMillen's excellent and edifying history of women's suffrage.

But for the last 150 years, the history of the west has been the history of privileged white men. They were the scholars, the lawyers, the judges, and the legislators. They wrote the laws and voted in the elections. They were society. Not until the rise of Mary Wollstonecraft in the mid-eighteenth century did the wider public gain a female voice not born of royalty and even she was marginalized by man's almost complete inability to see, in the masculine, monochromatic nature of his colleagues, a devastating bias towards homogeneity. Privileged man believed himself superior to other forms of humanity. He possessed the sharper intellect that carried him through his schooling and into the work place. Woman was simply too innocent, too soft for his work. And black man, well... He belonged out in the fields, working alongside his brutish brothers.

But with the coming of the nineteenth century, this male dominated world began to crumble. As education began to proliferate through the west, society's marginalized groups began to wonder why they were excluded from society's most vital arenas. The placating words and the patronizing head-pats were no longer sufficient to keep them quiet. For though they were of a different gender, a different color, a different culture, they were still human, capable of reason, of compassion, of intellect.

In America, this inchoate movement coalesced around a handful of key figures who rebelled against the roles society proscribed for them in order to state clearly that they deserved to be equal with the white man. From Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Frederick Douglass, from Susan B. Anthony to Sojourner Truth, this movement gained voices and leaders that resulted in conventions and platforms, in rallies and protests, in newspapers and lobbying. And though their drive for freedom from the expectations of white men would not be realized for nearly 70 years, their tireless advocacy would eventually pay off in the most spectacular expansion of rights in human history, one that far eclipsed even the enlightenment of Ancient Greece. This is their struggle.

As thoroughly researched as it is wonderfully realized, Seneca Falls is a work of history worthy of the extraordinary women it chronicles. Ms. McMillen, who has written extensively on women and the American South, draws upon the writings of the key figures in both the abolitionist and women's rights movements to animate the standardbearers of a most remarkable fight for human equality. Stanton, Anthony, Mott and Stone explode off the page, their deeply divergent personalities realized in a manner that convincingly portrays not only their singular devotion to the cause, but the inevitable sparks and conflicts that arose between them over the leadership of the movement they'd all, in one way or another, given themselves to advance. Their steadfastness in the face of both internal conflicts and the appalling patronization that they suffered from the ruling class is nothing short of an enduring model of how to change the world for the better.

Though Ms. McMillen's ability to capture the movement in all its trials and tribulations is first rate, she also earns plaudits for not shying away from the warts on the characters of the towering figures that propelled the women's rights movement. Elizabeth Stanton's resentful racism is revealed here in shocking detail, so much so that it should put to bed any criticisms of the opinions Abraham Lincoln held at the time. Moreover, the personal disputes that saw the women's rights movement unhelpfully fracture into two rival organizations are also extensively covered, causing the chronicle to be as much a work about the difficulties of minority movements as it is the women's movement itself. For it possessed its absolutists and its collaborators, its fiery speakers and its quiet workers, figures who clashed with one another as often as they did with those set against them.

This is outstanding work that has personality and flow, rivalry and diligence, rage and triumph. It devastates and informs. We can ask for nothing else from a work of history. (5/5 Stars)

An American Insurrection honors a forgotten moment in battle for civil rights

From The Week of January 14, 2013
Historical firsts are never easy and rarely peaceful. For as much as we may wish otherwise, humans resist change, some to such a degree that violence and hatred results from change being forced upon them by an evolving world. And yet nothing can ever stay as it was, and nor should it. For the progress of humanity is a march out of the darkness of ignorance and into the light of respect and understanding for all creeds, all genders, all races and all lifestyles. It is a march towards universal acceptance that rests on but one enduring principle, that the individual is free to decide how he ought to live so long as his choices do not harm others. This is our destiny. And yet arriving at such an obvious truth is, sadly, for some, cause for apocalypse. This lesson is decisively driven home in Mr. Doyle's shattering chronicle of racial integration in 1960s america.

With one of its most landmark decisions, the supreme Court of the United States, in 1954, ordered that all schools in America freely integrate their classes with no eye to racial bias. This ruling, a critical catalyst for the battles for civil rights that would characterize the next twenty years of American life, was accepted, with varying degrees of trepidation, in a majority of this sprawling country except for one notable and predictable exception, the American South where this repugnant decree came as just the latest federal insult in a long line of slights from a national government whose authority they only reluctantly acknowledged. This cynicism, the legacy of the South's defeat in the Civil War, was alive and well a hundred years after that great schism, so much so that the governor of Mississippi felt bold enough to not only resist the Supreme Court's decision but to oppose it with such rhetorical force that violence was inevitable.

For several years, Mississippi, along with other Southern States, refused to integrate, a provocative show of insubordination to the state that culminated in September of 1962 when James Meredith, a veteran of the integrated US military compelled, through the pursuit of the law, the federal government to enforce the Supreme Court decision and allow him to attend the university of Mississippi which, up until then, had cynically and despicably refused to admit Mr. Meredith onto their campus. With support from the governor, the school continued its stubborn resistance despite the Kennedy administrations orders otherwise, compelling Mr. Meredith to be escorted onto campus by US marshals, a provocative show of force that ignited a riot between federalist forces attempting to enforce the law, and a mixture of students, Clansmen and other radical elements who wanted no part of a black man in their white world. Besieged on all sides, the marshals witnessed Mississippi violently resist, over the next 48 hours, the will of the federal government, nearly triggering a second civil war and obligating President Kennedy to deploy, for the first time in a hundred years, combat veterans on American soil.

Though not without flaws, An American Insurrection is a spellbinding recount of a now nearly forgotten flashpoint in American history. Eclipsed by both the Cuban Missile Crisis, which followed it by three weeks, and by the broader struggle for civil rights, which centered on the efforts of Martin Luther King, the riot on the Oxford campus of the University of Mississippi was arguably the most important moment in US race relations since emancipation. For as Mr. Doyle describes in vivid detail, James Meredith orchestrated a campaign against the federal government to compel it to enforce the laws of the land's highest court. And in doing so, he forced the government to commit to racial integration with a rigor and a vigilance that no other prior government had ever exhibited. In this way, Mr. Meredith laid the cornerstones for the march to equality that would eventually culminated in a black president being elected to office 46 years later.

Mr. Doyle divides his chronicle evenly between the lead-up to the riot and to a moment-by-moment deconstruction of the violence which is all the more shocking for it having been neglected by history. The sheer audacity and narrow mindedness of the men and women who resisted Mr. Meredith's admission lends Mr. Doyle's prose an incendiary force that nearly makes the work combustible. An American Insurrection's only drawback is a half-hearted portrait of Mr. Meredith himself who Mr. Doyle clearly did not personally interview. This would have been a welcome addition to a work which is fundamentally about one man's struggle to compel change on the unchanging. That it was omitted here makes James Meredith even more of a mystery than he already is.

First-rate work that inspires as much as it dismays... (4/5 Stars)