Reviewed Elsewhere [Vol. 2, #32]
THE CHRISTIAN CENTURY Reviews
Rowan’s Rule: The Biography of the Archbishop of Canterbury
http://christiancentury.org/article.lasso?id=7487
The wise Anglican priest who instructed me in how to go about hearing confessions closed his lesson with some memorable words: “I’ve never thought less of someone after hearing their confession.”
If only it were generally the same for biographies. Some people’s lives have a priestly dimension. That is to say, their struggles have an elevated quality—they are struggles on behalf of us all; their example inspires far beyond the circle of people who directly identify with their circumstances. In short, when the bell tolls for them it tolls for us too—somehow even more than when it tolls for us alone. Rowan Williams is such a person. And the astonishing thing about this biography—this confession, if you like—is that Williams emerges from it with a reputation that is, if anything, more positive than it already was.
It’s a commonplace that Williams’s job is one you wouldn’t wish on your most antagonistic blogger. What is the archbishop of Canterbury for? He’s there to represent the life of faith, more specifically the historic catholic and reformed Christian faith, at the heart of the English nation; to be a figurehead guiding the Church of England, its bishops, its institutions and its people; and to be a unifying influence on the worldwide Anglican Communion. When Williams was ap pointed, there was widespread joy that here was a man who could do these three things like no one else imaginable—a person who epitomized the grace, wisdom, faith and generosity to which Anglicanism aspires. And yet his first seven years in office have seen him beleaguered by controversial events, a constant demand for him to exercise executive power, and a standoff of mutual incomprehension between his office and the secular press.
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Read the full review:
http://christiancentury.org/article.lasso?id=7487
Rowan’s Rule: The Biography of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Rupert Shortt.
Hardback: Eerdmans, 2009.
Buy now: [ ChristianBook.com ]
THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE Review of
Wrestling With Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On
New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American Cityhttp://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/28/DDUV18TS78.DTL
For those of us who care about cities and why they flourish or fade, the accepted wisdom boils down to this: Robert Moses bad, Jane Jacobs good.
Moses lives in urban lore as the ruthless New York bureaucrat who forced highways through neighborhoods with no regard for real lives in the way. Jacobs is his antithesis, the Greenwich Village everywoman who enshrined the virtues of messy vitality in her still-potent The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
Now there’s a book that shows how these mythic characters shaped each other’s work and reputations – a volume that leaves me wishing there was some way today to combine the best traits of both.
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Read the full review:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/28/DDUV18TS78.DTL
Wrestling With Moses:
How Jane Jacobs Took On New York’s Master Builder
and Transformed the American City.
Anthony Flint.
Hardback: Random House, 2009.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]
The NYT Review of The State of Jones:
The Small Southern County That Seceded From the Confederacy
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/books/review/Reynolds-t.html
The Civil War was not a simple collision of opposites. There was internal dissent on each side: Northerners who wanted to placate the South, Southerners loyal to the Union, and thousands of deserters from both armies.
In The State of Jones, Sally Jenkins, a Washington Post reporter, and John Stauffer, a Harvard historian, recreate the life and times of the bold Southern dissenter Newton Knight. An indigent farmer in Jones County, Miss., the flinty, blue-eyed Knight was conscripted into the Southern army in 1862 and soon deserted. He organized a small band of neighbors that used guerilla tactics and swamp hideouts to fend off pursuing Confederate troops. Knight’s vastly outnumbered group became a thorn in the side of the South, which was preoccupied with the invasions of Grant and Sherman.
Knight and other Jones County residents aided the North during Reconstruction. Although Knight was married to a white woman and had several children by her, he simultaneously had a long-term liaison with a former slave of his grandfather, named Rachel. At a time when most Mississippi blacks did not own land, he deeded farmland to Rachel, with whom he had a number of children who worked side by side in the fields with their white siblings.
…
Read the full review:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/books/review/Reynolds-t.html
THE STATE OF JONES:
The Small Southern County That Seceded From the Confederacy.
Sally Jenkins and John Stauffer.
Hardback: Doubleday, 2009.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]
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