Ragan Sutterfield on the “Social Value of Fruit Trees”

http://www.plentymag.com/blogs/notebook/2008/11/revitalizing_abandoned_lots_wi.php#more

…

Imagine what it would be like to go to a long-neglected neighborhood where fresh fruits and vegetables are all but absent and find apple, pear, peach, pecan, and walnut trees everywhere. The amount of food these trees would produce would be immense—around 5 or more bushels from one apple tree. Imagine the productive power of a once empty lot with five mature trees!

Beyond the ecological qualities of trees and the food they produce, there is also a social value that fruit trees bring. As Liberty Hyde Bailey writes in his excellent pamphlet, The Apple Tree, “Life does not seem regular and established when there is no apple-tree in the yard and about the buildings, no orchards blooming in the May and laden in the September, no baskets heaped with the crisp smooth fruits; without all of these I am a foreigner, sojourning in a strange land.” Fruit and nut trees create a certain kind of domestication. In neighborhoods that have been blighted these trees could be powerful symbols of growth and vitality.

…

Read the full article:
http://www.plentymag.com/blogs/notebook/2008/11/revitalizing_abandoned_lots_wi.php#more

The Apple Tree.
Liberty Hyde Bailey.
Pamphlet: Doulos Christou Press, 2008.
Buy now: [ Doulos Christou Books $5 ]

What does The Haywain represent? Or Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie? How about Rothko’s Red on Maroon? In the case of the Constable painting, the answer seems straightforward, and we can even visit the site of the scene he sketched (more or less). Mondrian, rejecting the distinction between abstract and representational art, himself suggested that his work represented structure. But with Rothko, talk of representation seems inappropriate.

What about scientific theories? Certainly they’re not easily comparable to a Rothko, but are they more like The Haywain or Broadway Boogie Woogie? The notion of representation has recently risen to prominence in the philosophy of science, with arguments and examples imported from the world of art.

Bas van Fraassen has played a leading role in these discussions, grappling with representation and its mechanism from the perspective of the empiricist stance he first took in his now-classic text, The Scientific Image. Densely argued, erudite and rich in examples from both art and science, his latest book expands on his John Locke Lectures, given at Oxford in 2001, to cover not just representation, but also measurement and models, structuralism and, finally, the distinction between appearance and reality.

…

Read the full review:
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=404229&c=1

Scientific Representation: Paradoxes of Perspective
Bas C. van Fraassen
Hardcover, Oxford UP, 2008
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

Many American soldiers and Marines also take with them a cultural or racial bias. It is common for Americans in combat to refer to Iraqis as “f—ing hajis.” (Among Muslims, “haji” is an honorary term for those who have made the pilgrimage to Mecca.) Iraqis sometimes are even called “camel jockeys” or “sand niggers.”
…

Read the full review:
http://www.theolog.org/blog/2008/11/on-the-shelf-collateral-damage-by-chris-hedges-and-laila-al-arian.html

Collateral Damage:
America’s War Against Iraqi Citizens
Christopher Hedges and Laila Al-Arian
Hardcover: Nation Books, 2008.
Buy Now: [ Doulos Christou Books $18 ] [ Amazon ]

Nicholas Wolterstorff is a gifted moral philosopher and among the most eminent Christian scholars in any discipline. His project in Justice: Rights and Wrongs is to ground—to “account for,” as he puts it—the language, morality, and reality of human rights and for the “deep structure of the moral order.” The book is, in some ways, a work of righteous anger—an “attempt to speak up for the wronged of the world”—but it is unfailingly warm, inviting, and humane. The exposition is unapologetically theistic, but never awkwardly apologetical. Even those who are not trained philosophers, and who might not appreciate the significance of each move executed or every distinction drawn, can appreciate his defense of “our moral subculture of rights.”

“There are,” Wolterstorff insists, “natural human rights,” and “human beings, all of them, are irreducibly precious.” This is true, but how is it true? What makes it true? Wolterstorff concludes that “it is impossible to develop a secular account of human dignity adequate for grounding human rights” and challenges his readers to confront squarely the “unsettling question”—the challenge issued by Nietzsche—that this failure raises. In the end, Wolterstorff proposes that “being loved by God” alone “gives a human being great worth.”

In the first part of his book , Wolterstorff presents and defends his basic thesis that the “inherent rights” of human beings—not right order, not social utility, not preference-satisfaction—are at the root of justice. His aim is to engage and displace a particular narrative—a “story of decline”—in which “the dominance in ancient and earlier medieval times of the concept of the right and the conception of justice as right order” somehow slides down to the “dominance in modern times of the concept of rights and the conception of justice as founded in natural rights.”
…

Read the full review:
http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=6337

Justice: Rights and Wrongs
Nicholas Wolterstorff
Hardcover: Princeton UP, 2008.
Buy Now: [ Amazon ]

 Alternative Gift Fair

Saturday, November 29th,

10:00AM to 4:00 PM

Lockerbie Central United Methodist Church and Earth House Collective

237 N. East St.

A 4:00 PM film showing and 5:00 PM dinner will follow the fair. The day will also include a 7:00 PM holiday concert featuring global music.

More info:

http://earthhousecollective.blogspot.com/2008/11/earth-house-hosts-alternative-gift-fair.html

Give your friends a free subscription to The Englewood Review of Books this Christmas season, and both you and your friends will be entered to win free books!We’re giving away 25 books, with the top prize valued at over $100!

Enter now:
http://www.englewoodreview.org/?page_id=139

Full details are available on the above link…
(Contest ends at Noon on Dec 31, 2008)

This past weekend at the Godspeed the Plough! conference, Ragan Sutterfield extolled the virtues of Tom Hodgkinson‘s book How to be Idle.  We’re hoping that Ragan will write a review of this book for us in the near future, but for now here’s a review from PopMatters.com:

    http://www.popmatters.com/books/reviews/h/how-to-be-idle.shtml

“It’s a well-known fact that Europeans spend fewer hours at work a week than Americans,” says the publisher’s promo copy for this book. “So it’s only befitting that one of them — the very clever, extremely engaging, and quite hilarious Hodgkinson — should have the wittiest and most useful insights into the fun and nature of loafing.” Hodgkinson, editor of British journal, The Idler, is indeed clever, engaging, hilarious, and European, and promo copy naturally needs to market its subject. However, this reductionist take on How to be Idle diminishes its capacity for creating radical shifts of thought (as well as ignoring the fact that European countries are shifting towards a more Americanized workweek).

Hidden in American compliments of European better living, such as the one penned by HarperCollins’ PR person, is a smug satisfaction that they might have idleness down pat, but we’re the ones with the money. Our capital and our (usually shaky) world power prove that our relentless work ethic is superior, despite the toll it takes on our psyches. Even our own “simplicity” movement, as embodied in magazines like Organic Style and Real Simple, is time consuming and expensive to take part in.

Thankfully, you won’t find any Real Simple-style recommendations for how to make elaborate dried flower arrangements or stenciled place cards in Hodgkinson’s book. The beauty of How to be Idle is its realism, and its lack of puritanical zeal. … ”

Read the full review:
http://www.popmatters.com/books/reviews/h/how-to-be-idle.shtml

How to Be Idle.
Tom Hodgkinson.
Paperback. Harper Perennial. 2007.
Buy now from: [ Doulos Christou Books $11 ]  [ Amazon ]

“The Prophetic Power of Poetry”

An Introduction to
Wind and Weather.
by Liberty Hyde Bailey.

By Chris Smith.

Wind and Weather.
Poems by Liberty Hyde Bailey.
Paperback. Doulos Christou Press. 2008.
Buy now from: [ Doulos Christou Books $10] 

Liberty Hyde Bailey, born in 1858, was raised on a farm in Michigan and it was farm life that would set the tone for the rest of his life.  He studied first at the Michigan Agricultural college and then under renowned biologist Asa Gray at Harvard.   From there, he maintained a long and successful academic career teaching botany and horticulture in Michigan and then later at Cornell in Ithaca, NY.  He wrote a number of significant books for academic and popular audiences on plants, agriculture, rural life and conservation.  His writings were foundational for today’s new agrarian writers, and he has been praised extensively by Wendell Berry, Gene Logsdon and others.  Bailey’s writings in botany are well-known and his essays rooted in rural philosophy are also widely recognized. However, much less is known about Liberty Hyde Bailey, the poet.  This volume, originally published in 1916, was the only collection of Bailey’s poetry that received widespread distribution.

                Most of what we know about the context out of which Bailey wrote his poetry has been provided in his essay on “Nature Poetry” in the book Outlook to Nature.  Three key virtues of nature poetry that he describes in this essay are connectedness, keen observation and clarity.  Bailey firmly believed that the nature poet must be intimately connected with his subject, and especially that his/her poems should be written outside in nature, and he strongly critiques the “bookishness” of nature poetry that originates indoors in the study.  Secondly, the true nature poem in Bailey’s estimation, arises out of keen observation of nature, guided by the knowledge of at least a little science (to provide language to frame one’s observation and to give him “point of view” – i.e., to tell him “what to look for” (OTN 38).  Lastly, Bailey argues for the clarity of the nature poem.  He explicitly rejects most poetry, citing slavery to “traditional forms of verse and line” (OTN 32) and their tendency toward “ambitious disquisitions, long periods, heavy rhetoric, labored metaphors” (OTN 29).  Instead, he hails the work of Whitman, who “has most completely freed himself from the bondage of literary form” (32).

(more…)

“An Amish Murder Mystery?”

A Review of
Separate from the World.
by Paul L. Gaus.

By David Neuhouser.

Separate from the World:
An Ohio Amish Mystery.
Paul L. Gaus.
Paperback. Ohio University Press. 2008.
Buy now from: [ Doulos Christou Books $10 ] [ Amazon ]

Separate from the World is the sixth in a series of mysteries set in the Amish community of Holmes County, Ohio.  The author, Paul L. Gaus teaches chemistry at the College of Wooster in Ohio, and lives near many of Ohio’s Amish communities.  He is familiar with the Amish and sympathetic with their views.

The book begins with the apparent accidental death of an Amish man and the apparent suicide of a college girl.  These seemingly unrelated events are followed by more strange occurrences.  It seems impossible that there could be any connection between all of these incidents but of course there is and Gaus cleverly leads us to the solution.  The “detective” is Michael Brandon, a professor of history at the college.  Brandon is assisted (and sometimes hindered) by his friends, the sheriff and a local minister, as well as by his wife.

At the beginning Brandon is depressed by the grading he has to do at the end of the academic year and wonders if he should give up teaching after more than thirty years.  Then the death of the girl who was one of his students does not help.  At the same time an Amish man visits him and tells him that the apparent suicide of his brother was really murder. Of course, I will not tell you much more of the clever plot. I don’t want to spoil the joy of your matching your wits with Brandon in solving the mysteries.

  (more…)

The bread-n-butter of our bookstore business is the sale of used books, and we do a fair amount of scouting around for used books each week. In this section we feature some of the interesting books that we have found in the past week. Generally, we will only have a single copy of these books, so if you want one (or more) of them, you’ll need to respond quickly.

EUDORA (WELTY): A WRITER’S LIFE.
Ann Waldron.
Hardcover.  Doubleday. 1998.
Good condition. X-library copy.  Clean pages, minimal wear.
Buy now from: [ Doulos Christou Books $8 ]

100 Poems.
Mark van Doren.
Hardcover. Hill and Wang. 1967.
Good Condition. X-library copy.  Clean pages, Moderate wear. Binding slightly loose.
Buy now from: [ Doulos Christou Books $5 ]

THE PROMISE OF TEILHARD.
Philip Hefner.
Paperback. Lippincott. 1970.
Very Good condition. Clean Pages. Minimal wear.
Buy now from: [ Doulos Christou Books $7 ]

Hive

Liberty Hyde Bailey

The building bees are humming

About the angled comb

And yellow bees are coming

With treasure laden home,

And other bees are going

To orchard and to bloom

To fetch new sweetness flowing

For ev’ry honeyed room;

Ten thousand blooms are vying

Wherever they may roam—

In hurst or fallow flying

The journey leadeth home.

(from LH Bailey Wind and Weather, orginally published 1916,
reprint from Doulos Christou Press now available, see review above).

Food Fraud and Bees
BOOKFORUM reviews two new books
on the Food Crisis

http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/015_03/2724

…

Rowan Jacobsen monitors another distressing side effect of agribusiness consolidation in Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of the Honeybee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis. Jacobsen, a US food writer who has contributed to the New York Times and Saveur, examines colony collapse disorder (CCD), which hit the United States’ beekeeping industry in 2006. The syndrome affected half of the nation’s commercial bee operations, wiping out about thirty billion bees.

The most puzzling thing about the CCD outbreak was the abundance of possible triggers. Commercial bee operations were overrun with mites and viruses, and bees were kept on the go—fed corn syrup to stay alive between gigs pollinating monocrop farms. Meanwhile, the crops we have Apis mellifera pollinating are awash in pesticides; in some cases, plants are even genetically modified to produce the chemicals themselves. What’s more, monocrop farming is not conducive to bee health—all pollen is not created equal, and some types offer greater nutritional value than others. Bees need a mixture of pollen sources to sustain their health.

…

Read the full review:  http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/015_03/2724

Swindled: The Dark History of Food Fraud.
Bee Wilson.
Hardcover: Princeton UP, 2008.
Buy now [ Doulos Christou Books $21 ] [ Amazon ]

Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of the Honey Bee
and the Coming Agricultural Crisis.
Rowen Jacobsen.
Hardcover: Bloomsbury, 2008.
Buy now [ Doulos Christou Books $20 ] [ Amazon ]

Many have lamented the meager giving of American Christians. Others have questioned the data on which this criticism was based or pointed out that American Christians give more than those in most other nations. Now we have a careful, scholarly analysis of how much—i.e., how little—American Christians give, plus a sophisticated sociological analysis of why.

Passing the Plate: Why American Christians Don’t Give Away More Money is a powerful study about the pitifully small charitable donations of the richest Christians in history. In spite of the fact that most Christian denominations support tithing (see Appendix A), only a tiny fraction of American Christians actually tithe. Christian Smith, Michael O. Emerson, and Patricia Snell set out to discover why. Using a number of the best currently available data sets plus a survey and personal interviews of their own, the authors offer the best available information on what American Christians actually give to charitable causes and then try to figure out why such rich Christians give so little.
…

Read the full review:  http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2008/006/5.11.html

Passing the Plate: Why American Christians
Don’t Give Away More Money.
Smith / Emerson / Snell.
Hardcover: Oxford UP, 2008.
Buy now  [ Amazon ]

A horrifying act stood at the center of Toni Morrison’s 1987 masterwork, “Beloved”: a runaway slave, caught in her effort to escape, cuts the throat of her baby daughter with a handsaw, determined to spare the girl the fate she herself has suffered as a slave. A similarly indelible act stands at the center of Ms. Morrison’s remarkable new novella, “A Mercy,” a small, plangent gem of a story that is, at once, a kind of prelude to “Beloved” and a variation on that earlier book’s exploration of the personal costs of slavery — a system that moves men and women and children around “like checkers” and casts a looming shadow over both parental and romantic love.

Set some 200 years before “Beloved,” “A Mercy” conjures up the beautiful, untamed, lawless world that was America in the 17th century with the same sort of lyrical, verdant prose that distinguished that earlier novel. Gone are the didactic language and schematic architecture that hobbled the author’s 1998 novel, “Paradise”; gone are the cartoonish characters that marred her 2003 novel, “Love.” Instead Ms. Morrison has rediscovered an urgent, poetic voice that enables her to move back and forth with immediacy and ease between the worlds of history and myth, between ordinary daily life and the realm of fable.

All the central characters in this story are orphans, cast off by their parents or swept away from their families by acts of God or nature or human cruelty — literal or figurative exiles susceptible to the centrifugal forces of history. There is Jacob, an Anglo-Dutch trader, whose memories of his own parentless years on the streets “stealing food and cadging gratuities for errands” have left him with a “pulse of pity for orphans and strays.” There is his wife, Rebekka, who as a girl of 16 was sent abroad to America by her father, who, happy to have one less mouth to feed, readily accepted Jacob’s offer of “ ‘reimbursement’ for clothing, expenses and a few supplies” in exchange for a “healthy, chaste wife willing to travel abroad.” And there is Florens, whose mother sees the kindness in Jacob’s heart and begs him to take her young daughter (as payment for a debt owed by their domineering owner) in the hopes that the trader will give her a better life and the possibility of a future as a free woman, not a slave.

…

Read the full review:  http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/04/books/04kaku.html?_r=1

A MERCY.
Toni Morrison.
Hardcover: Knopf, 2008.
Buy now [ Doulos Christou Books $20 ] [ Amazon ]

IMAGINING CREATION:
Is There a Moral Obligation to Care for the Environment?

 A Panel Discussion
Hosted by The American Caberet Theatre

Sunday November 9
6-9 PM

Panelists include:
Ragan Sutterfield, Scott Hutcheson, Matt Crick, and others.

Booktable by Doulos Christou Books

 More info: ImaginingCreation.org

This program is part of the Spirit & Place Festival, which runs November 1 through November 16.

Englewood Christian Church
will be hosting

IMAGINE-nation
Creativity and Collaboration in Indy Neighborhoods

Friday, November 14, 2008
5:30-8:30PM

The Indianapolis Neighborhood Resource Center (INRC) is proud to partner with the Spirit & Place Festival to offer an event, IMAGINE-Nation in Indy Neighborhoods. Photographs by local youth inspire new conversations, and a collaboration of neighbors who come together to provide better food choices for their community—these are just two stories that champion the ingenuity of community engagement. Connect with these artisans of civic life, witness how they create meaning through collaboration, and get inspired to take action in your own neighborhood.

Jim Diers, author of Neighbor Power: Building Community the Seattle Way, will talk about imagination and collective action in neighborhoods.

This is an event not to be missed! Enjoy a display of creative local action projects, savor cuisine from ethnic restaurants in the Lafayette Square neighborhood, view an exhibition of artists who have overcome significant obstacles, and hear talented local musicians.

This program is part of the Spirit & Place Festival, which runs November 1 through November 16.