The Sunday Roundup
The Guardian talks to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Somali-born author of the new memoir, "Infidel." Anne Applebaum writes about the book in the Washington Post. Hirsi Ali is also interviewed in the New York Times.More from the Times: NBCC Board member David Orr delves into the newly published "Notebooks of Robert Frost," and Blake Bailey reviews "The Way it Wasn't: From the Files of James Laughlin," which "deserves a place on the coffee table or toilet tank of any discerning littérateur."
Bailey's "A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates" was a 2003 NBCC biography finalist. Actress Kate Winslet hopes to star alongside Matt Damon in a film adaptation of Yates's 1961 novel, "Revolutionary Road," next year.NBCC member Bob Hoover likes Peder Zane's "The Top Ten," which "can work as a conversation piece, a reference book or something to read for fun."
"No one writes suicide notes like Martin Amis; one might even say that he has invented the suicide note as a literary genre," writes Balakian finalist Gideon Lewis-Kraus in his San Francisco Chronicle review of Martin Amis's "House of Meetings."
Also in the Chronicle: NBCC member Olivia Boler reviews Louise Dean's "This Human Season," a novel set in Northern Ireland in the late 1970s.
"Fun Home" author and NBCC finalist Alison Bechdel talks to Comic Book Resources while signing books at France's Angouleme Comics Festival. She says she's working on "a new memoir project. I like memoir things." Bechdel has also been posting about her European trip on her web site.
NBCC member Ed Park reviews Philip K. Dick's "unremittingly bleak" novel, "Voices from the Street."
NBCC biography finalist Julie Phillips ("James Tiptree, Jr.") likes Joan Acocella's essay collection "Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints"-- but wishes the pieces were longer. "When you open The New Yorker and see Acocella's byline, you feel as though you've found the prize in the cake," Phillips writes. "But in the context of this book you long for her to take her erudition and her observations and run with them."NBCC member John Mark Eberhart ask some "book folk" what titles they would push on national TV if they were "Oprah for a day." NBCC Board member Kevin Prufer's choice: Phillips's life of Tiptree.
NBCC finalist Bruce Bawer ("While Europe Slept") blogs about European hypocrisy and the "R word."
NBCC member Chris Watson loves NBCC fiction finalist Kiran Desai's "Inheritance of Loss." Desai, visiting India, recently told a Mumbai bookstore audience: "Writing humiliates you on a daily basis."
And The Hindu considers past NBCC finalist Elizabeth Gilbert's memoir "Eat, Pray, Love."
Labels: Roundups
posted by Jennifer Reese 11:08:00 AM
8 Comments:
I am a big believer in the NBCC's selection process, but I have never been more embarrased by a choice than I have been with Bruce Bawer's "While Europe Slept," and his blog entry points out what's so very ugly about this book -- it's hyperventalated rhetoric tips from actual critique into Islamaphobia, especially when Bawer makes this equation -- that sympathy for Islam as a whole, or practicing Muslims as a group, means one is aligning with the beliefs of a small percentage of its practicioners. I'd be curious to know how many of my fellow NBCC board members who voted for this book have been inside a Muslim household, let alone a Muslim country? Why is it that when one points out that Islam is not a fundamentally violent religion, that's it's the interpretations which have been placed upon it by some, one is immediately leading to the destruction of Europe? Bawer's sweeping, attack-like generalizations are no more helpful than calling Christian fundemanetalists fascists, and the fact that it's coming from a critic who in columns past has talked about the left's "white wash" of Islam lends makes me feel ashamed we have singled it out as a fine work of "criticism." Fine, Bawer's not a racist, but he's certainly displaying prejudice of the lowest order.
I voted for the Bawer, and since you're curious: Yes, I have traveled in a Muslim country (Turkey) where I stayed for ten days with a friend and former roommate in her "Muslim household." Does the fact that we had shared an apartment for two years before that mean that I actually LIVED in a Muslim household?
But why should I even have to say this?
I honestly did not put this link up to goad you. I don't buy into everything that Bawer says, but I found his book very persuasive based on the factual evidence he presents, and I am not embarrassed to have voted for it.
I stand corrected, but the point was not to get your passport stamps, but to note that we are all (on the criticism comittee, on this particular book) reading outside of our backgrounds, that our committee of American passport holding, mostly white, entirely non-Muslim judges is taking as fact (about a religion and culture) the word of someone who is outside that culture himself, who does not speak Arabic, and who routinely uses absolutely ridiculous rhetoric -- like dismissing urban Muslim poverty in France by saying hey, the men drive nice cars "which, like those driven by young Muslim men in every other European city I know, tend to be BMW convertibles" -- and inflamatory anecdotes -- like how he is mugged upon arriving in Amsterdam by a "dark skinned boy" -- to draw a portrait that is through only one looking glass, and a "dark" one at that.
And facts? What facts? Bawer routinely summarizes or synthesizes the jist of the most extreme practices of just some Muslims and then hitches that to a news story to give the impression that "many Muslims" do this or etc. He talks about how European cities are segregated, but then downplays the role of poverty in this demographic shift -- making these communities sound as if they are armed encampments ready to rise up and create a caliphate founded on sharia law (!): "fundamentalist Muslims were on the march. Their numbers – and power – were large and growing rapidly. And the ultimate objective of many of their leaders was far more than a ban on abortion or gay marriage."
The most insincere part of this book is the bit which blames the dialogue-police for the violence which has occured. I am not defending murder of Jews by Muslims, or the freedom of radical clerics to encourage followers to violence -- I think both are hideous and wrong and should be punished accordingly -- but I also believe when a cultural critic tells us that it is "political correctness that had gotten Europe into its current mess, and only by repudiating political correctness did Europe stand a chance of averting what seemed, increasingly, to be its fate," that we are dealing with a very unsubtle argument about a problem that has much deeper roots than the author's own move to Amsterdam.
"reading outside of our backgrounds..."
That's an ad hominem as to the author and other members of the board. One does not have to be a muslim to criticize Islam. After all, wouldn't the most critical comments come from outsiders?
My background - as having lived abroad and spent considerable time in muslim countries, having married a Persian muslim, and obtained my degree in ancient near east religions - should give me plenty of "authenticity" to level criticisms of Islam. But alas, I'm a white christian American, and thus, according to Mr. Freeman's logic, I'm an Islamophobic bigot with no grounds to criticize Islam!
You should judge books based on their literary merit and style, not based on their conclusions and conformity with your own world-view.
... Why is it that when one points out that Islam is not a fundamentally violent religion, that's it's the interpretations which have been placed upon it by some, one is immediately leading to the destruction of Europe?...
Pray tell John how did you ever come to that conclusion? Certainly 1350 years of jihad would dispel that myth for all but the persistent dhimmi. Oh I get it, verses like 9.5 or 9.29 are verses of tolerance and respect.
Typical denial by liberals who cannot conceive a cult with a billion followers could have global domination and enslavement of nonbelievers as its crux for existence. Just can't be. So the liberals say.
Islam is a cult, it worships a madman, prophecies come at opportune times to extricate the madman from difficult positions, victimization is the rule, and followers who step out of line or wish to leave are killed. Is that benevolent or malevolent? And who are we to judge, after all we are no better than them, right?
Stop drinking the koolaid John. There is no islamophobia, just reality and those who want to deny it and live in their multicultural fantasy where all cultures are as bad as the next.
Such arguments regarding whether Islam is the problem should have been settled years ago, and the discussion of what to do about Muslims in dar al harb and halting further Muslim immigration to dar al harb should be the hot issue of today. How does a person like John explain what is happening in Europe, the transformation to Eurabia in a mere 50 years, our lifetimes. And yet John keeps on coming back and saying "I don't know...." Maybe you have only been around bad Muslims who ignore the 'bad stuff' in Islam. They are into the superficial rituals. They don't really care about all that imperialism, but that is not what a good Muslim wants.
If you are too lazy to look up 9.5 , here it is -"And when the sacred months are passed, kill those who join other gods with God wherever ye shall find them; and seize them, besiege them, and lay wait for them with every kind of ambush: but if they shall convert, and observe prayer, and pay the obligatory alms, then let them go their way, for God is Gracious, Merciful." The Koran is jam packed with hate verses like this and the Hadiths are worse.
No one wants to read the Quran , it's a rambling repetitive mess, out of order, and goes on and on about hell, how willy nilly Allah is, and how the Muslims can rest once they have killed off all the nonbelievers, and the world is for Islam and Islam alone. Amber Pawlik gives one of best summaries of the Quran you can read. You can manage 20 pages I am sure. http://www.amberpawlik.com/IslamonTrial.htm
Of course, this is nothing new. John Adams summed up Islam (Muhammedanism) quite succinctly -
President John Quincy Adams had this to say about Islam and Muhammed in 1830:
…he [Muhammad] declared undistinguishing and exterminating war, as a part of his religion, against all the rest of mankind…The precept of the Koran is, perpetual war against all who deny, that Mahomet is the prophet of God…the faithful follower of the prophet, may submit to the imperious necessities of defeat: but the command to propagate the Moslem creed by the sword is always obligatory, when it can be made effective. The commands of the prophet may be performed alike, by fraud, or by force.
And Adams captured the essential condition imposed upon the non-Muslim dhimmi “tributaries” subjugated by jihad, with this laconic statement:
The vanquished may purchase their lives, by the payment of tribute.
So we get two liberal obligatories meant to stymie speech: "You haven't been there so your comments are irrelavent." and "You must be an Islamophobe." The juvenile intellectual nature of these arguments indicate the wasteland of philosophic reasoning and logic which infects the humanities occupations of the west.
Mr. John Freeman; perhaps this link might provide you with some insight into the reason for the so-called islamophobia.
http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/
Mr. Freeman:
(1)phobia n. an irrational fear or dread
(2)phobia n. dread, aversion, revulsion, repulsion, DISLIKE, antipathy. . .
Based on the link above it should be easily determined that Islam, as practiced and encouraged by its most ambitious leaders is hardly a peaceful religion. The site linked above only identifies relatively recent 'peace actions' by Islam. These incidents indicate that it is not irrational to have a dread of, or revulsion toward, Islam.
(1) The New American Webster Handy College Dictionary [ISBN 0-451-18166-2]
(2) The New American Roget's College Thesaurus [ISBN 0-451-20716-5]
These may not be the latest and greatest references and are probably well below your impeccable standards but as far as I know they are not false.
Wow, Muslims and the Quran sure sound horrible! I am sure glad I live in a Christian nation where I'm told what's right and what's wrong and who my enemies are. You sure can't find that sort of hatred and violence in the Bible!
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home