Reviewed Elsewhere [Vol. 2, #1]
Bill McKibben Reviews The Big Necessity:
The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters
http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2009/janfeb/1.19.html
This remarkable volume is in certain ways the story of euphemism, and the damage euphemism can do. We are, almost universally, at least a little disgusted by defecation and urination, and so our impulse is to turn away, to ignore the huge problems created when, several times a day, six billion of us sh-t and pee. Solving those problems—both at the level of the village, and of the globe—will require, Rose George says, fighting the urge to look the other way.
Here, for instance, is how Dr. Kar proceeds when he visits a Bangladeshi hamlet where there are, as in so much of the world, no working toilets—a village where people sh-t in the field. He asks residents to take him on a walk through their town. “It is important to stop in areas of open defecation and spend quite a bit of time there asking questions and making other calculations while inhaling the unpleasant smell and taking in the unpleasant sight of large-scale open defecation. If people try to move you on, insist on staying there despite their embarrassment. Experiencing the disgusting sight and smell in a new way, accompanied by a visitor, is a key factor which triggers mobilization.”
Kar then sits the village down and gets them to calculate how much sh-t they’re producing a day—person by person, family by family. They then try to figure out where it goes—”into their bathing ponds and rivers, and from there onto their clothes, their plates and cups, their hands and mouths.” Eventually the villagers calculated that they were eating 10 grams a day apiece of fecal matter. And after that—after that they were far more open to the idea of building a good latrine and using it.
Read the full review:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2009/janfeb/1.19.html
The Big Necessity:
The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters
Rose George
Hardcover: Metropolitan Books, 2008
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A review of Flesh Made Word: Saints’ Stories and the Western Imagination.http://catholicbooksreview.org/2008/kleinberg.htm
Systematicians, ethicists, and historians of theology have long pondered the role of saints in the spiritual and intellectual life of the Christian community. In Flesh Made Word, Aviad Kleinberg offers a sociological perspective on hagiography that is at once provocative and challenging. He discovers in the stories of the saints from early Christianity to the later Middle Ages sources complexly formative of the Christian religious experience.
Central to Kleinberg’s project is his definition of charisma, not as an objective attribute possessed by the saint, but rather as a “disposition on the part of a particular group to attribute exceptional qualities, generally a relationship with God, to one of its members” (8). The designation of someone as charismatic is the result of a process of negotiation between the saint and the community in which the saint receives authority from the community in exchange for sharing the spiritual powers that flow from her special relationship with the divine. Kleinberg contends that while the saint’s example is a vital source of communicative religious experience, and is valued as such throughout the church, her liminal status between the human and divine also threatens the church’s power and self-understanding. Thus the saint’s story belongs to the church and yet exercises authority beyond the control of the institution’s elites. These narratives form part of a social dynamic that reinvigorates and reinterprets the Christian experience for each generation of believers.
Kleinberg’s exploration of saints’ narratives begins with the martyrs of the early church and progresses through asceticism into the late medieval period. Rather than a timeline of the genre’s development, his descriptive history offers insight into the sociological complexities in which these stories were created and received. For instance, martyrdom narratives in the early church are connected with the response of the first disciples to the death of Christ; Christianity’s emergence from Judaism and encounter with pagan nature cults; the contributions of popular piety and theological orthodoxy to developing soteriologies; and the political and cultural influence of the Roman Empire. By examining diverse aspects of the historical situation of these stories, Kleinberg prepares his readers to find in the saints’ narratives multiple messages that are as pluriform and contradictory as their historical contexts.
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Read the full review:
http://catholicbooksreview.org/2008/kleinberg.htm
Flesh Made Word: Saints’ Stories and the Western Imagination.
Aviad Kleinberg.
Hardcover: Belknap Press, 2008.
Buy now: [ Doulos Christou Books $24 ] [ Amazon ]
The NY TIMES Review of LOSING EVERYTHING by David Lozell Martin
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/31/books/31garn.html
The novelist David Lozell Martin’s achy-breaky new memoir, “Losing Everything,” was written before Lehman Brothers, before WaMu and before television viewers had memorized every contour of Hank Paulson’s shaved head — before, that is, the American economy collapsed and so many lives began spinning on patches of black ice.
But Mr. Martin’s plain-spoken account of what it’s like to be stripped of everything — his spouse, his writing career, his farm, his money, his health, his dignity and eventually his sanity — may mean a lot to some people who are struggling right now. It’s a bruising survival story.
“Losing Everything” is not a tidy, perfectly stitched account of depression or a crackup, like William Styron’s “Darkness Visible” or Andrew Solomon’s “Noonday Demon.” Mr. Martin is not that kind of writer. He’s a blue-collar guy with a rowdy side, and his expletive-filled prose arrives at your door as if dressed in scuffed boots and Carhartts, ready to clean out your liquor cabinet and crank up the stereo.
Those boots will leave mud on your floor. He is not as gifted a writer as Harry Crews or Larry Brown or Stephen King, but his stuff will put you in mind of all three writers. He keeps you wincing and turning the pages in a way that some finer writers do not.
…
Read the full review:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/31/books/31garn.html
LOSING EVERYTHING
David Lozell Martin
Hardcover. Simon and Schuster, 2008.
Buy now: [ Doulos Christou Books $19 ] [ Amazon ]
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