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What Paul Meant

8 July 2009

Despite being already in the middle of both Little, Big and Thoughts without a Thinker, I came across a copy of Garry Wills’s What Paul Meant at a used book store on Monday and started it on the BART trip home. I’ve read and enjoyed his two companion books, What Jesus Meant and What the Gospels Meant, so I was eager to complete the set. Good book, too.

So now I’m in the middle of three books. It’s a bad habit of mine and I can’t even guess how many books over the years that I’ve laid down somewhere and forgotten I was in the middle till I came across them again months later.

But What Paul Meant is a fairly short book, a little under 200 pages and about the size of a trade paperback, and I’m not far from the end, so I’ll be back to the others soon.

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Sorry, Guys, I Don’t Have Time to Read All the Periodicals I Get from My Own Country

11 May 2009

Offers in the mail today from the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books.

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The Turk

17 November 2007

At the same time I picked up the Countryman book, I also picked up a used copy of Tom Standage’s The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine. It’s a fairly light read, but very entertaining and full of interesting stuff. It seems to be a pretty complete account of everything that is known about Maelzel’s famous chess machine, from its invention (I didn’t know that Maelzel had in fact purchased it rather than built it, and that it had actually been built by someone else decades earlier — in fact, by the same man who built the mechanical orchestra for whom Beethoven wrote Wellington’s Victory) to its rather sad end gathering dust in a back corner of a Philadelphia museum, where it was destroyed in a fire in the 1850s.

I finished it last night, and reading it has caused me to want to go back and reread (yet again — I’ve probably read this book ten times) the chapters of Robertson Davies’s World of Wonders concerning the narrator’s years as a boy traveling back and forth across Canada with a third-rate carnival, working secretly inside Abdullah, an alleged automaton that does card tricks. So between Countryman and Davies I’ve spent most of the afternoon reading instead of doing something useful.

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The Mystical Way in the Fourth Gospel

17 November 2007

John is the gospel I know the least well, and part of that is that I’m repelled somehow by all the emphasis on miracles — not that the other three gospels avoid miracles completely, but the miracles are few enough and there is enough other stuff in between them that I can ignore them and concentrate on the parables and other teachings.

But a few days ago I came across a book on John, The Mystical Way in the Fourth Gospel, and it was written by William Countryman, who wrote a very good book on the morality of the Old and New Testaments with the great title of Dirt, Greed, and Sex. That book for me was one of those on-first-looking-into-Chapman’s-Homer experiences, revealing to me all sorts of connections and contexts for various parts of the Bible that I had not seen or noticed before. So I picked up the book on John on a whim — it was only four bucks in a used book store — and I’ve started it.

Probably half my books come from used book stores, and it’s kind of amazing and a little frightening to me to think back and realize the extent to which my thinking has been shaped over the decades by books that just randomly happened to be on the shelf and catch my eye in this or that used book store. Some of the books that have most seriously influenced me, I picked up on a whim because they were on the 99-cent table and looked kind of interesting. It’s a bit humbling and disturbing to wonder how different a person I might be if somebody I never knew had not decided to get rid of that old book when he or she did, or if somebody else had seen the book and decided to buy it the day before I walked into the bookstore.

Anyway, like I said, I’ve started reading the book on John, and even though I’m not very far into it, I’m surprised to already be seeing something about John that I have never noticed before, even though it seems to be right there on the surface and which shows how uncarefully I have read it before. Because while it’s true that John’s gospel is irritatingly thick with miracles, Jesus also accompanies them with a recurring commentary on how shallow a person’s faith is if miracles are the reason for it. For some reason I’ve always been so turned off by the miracles in John that I never let myself notice that the attitude Jesus is said to take toward them is one I can certainly get behind.

On the other hand, Jesus’s first miracle in John, the wedding at Cana, is always going to have special associations for me because of the breathtaking way that Robertson Davies developed it as a metaphor in What’s Bred in the Bone, which may be my favorite novel ever. So I can give John that one.

Posted in Books, Spirit | Leave a Comment »

Listening to Prozac

28 October 2007

I’ve been away at the Billy Club’s Halloween gathering this weekend; I come home today, probably calmer and more in balance. I’ve spent a fair amount of this gathering off on my own, taking walks and meditating and reading. I wrote a short poem (three quatrains) yesterday, and on Thursday night after a long meditation I had what still seems three mornings later like a very good idea for a new opera adaptation.

One book I’ve been reading — as ever keeping up with the very latest in best sellers — is Peter Kramer’s 1993 Listening to Prozac. I have been diagnosed as having a dysthymic personality myself, and I started taking an antidepressant a few years after my brain surgery, to pull myself out of a long dark funk that had developed after the surgery and that I hadn’t been able to shake, despite my recovery going well enough that I was not only working again after eight months but soon making half again as much money as I had been before the tumor. So for me, reading a book like this isn’t just a dispassionate interest in psychology (though there’s certainly that, too); it’s also seeing whether I recognize myself in any of it, and whether it has any useful or helpful insights for me.

The book is about what we can learn about personality and human behavior from watching the effects that Prozac and other antidepressants have on various people. I’ve only read a few chapters so far, but the chapter titled “Sensitivity” in particular contains a lot of stuff that is fascinating as an insight into how our brains and personalities work, and that also seems personally very relevant. The gist of the chapter is that it looks as though a lot of things we think of as personality disorders are maybe better thought of as the normal adaptive behaviors that you would expect from someone who is more sensitive than usual to the pain of loss or rejection; that if someone is experiencing a more acute pain from certain things than most people do, you can only reasonably expect them to develop different coping behaviors from others. If Event X causes a mild, brief feeling of disappointment in one person but three days of intense and crippling emotional pain in another person, it’s only to be expected that the second person will develop more extreme ways of behaving so as to avoid all risk of Event X happening at all costs, and those behaviors might look like a behavioral problem or personality disorder to someone like the first person.

An antidepressant, then, can be thought of as something that lessens that senstivity, with the result that the personality slowly changes, sort of in the way a lifelong limp would gradually disappear if a surgery removed whatever it was that was making it painful to put much weight on that foot. It’s a hypothesis than explains a lot of unusual things about how the drugs work on people.

I can see myself reflected in this chapter in a lot of ways — a number of the patients Dr. Kramer writes about remind me of myself, such as in my shyness and difficulty in approaching other people in certain situations where I fear I won’t be able to take a rejection in stride; the very long time I grieved, and very painfully, for my friend David Sherblom (Dr. Kramer writes about someone who grieved three years for a loved one, which was more or less my situation); the painful feelings of rejection I sometimes experience over things that even I can see are objectively no rejection at all. Over the decades I’ve learned to deal with these painful feelings in more useful ways, and I’m usually pretty good now at not letting the fear of the painful feelings or even the painful feelings themselves govern too much how I behave; I can do a passable imitation of a gregarious person if I need to (and I don’t have to keep it up too long!) or let myself feel emotional pain without feeling driven or controlled by it, recognizing and subverting the negative patterns of thought I can slip into in times of stress.

But it’s also true that it feels as though the effect of the antidepressant I take has been to lessen the intensity of those painful emotions, which is what the chapter is about; and over time, as I’ve grown better accustomed to being sent merely into a mild downer by things that used to send me into a tailspin, I’ve become more confident in certain kinds of situations. It may well be that that’s been because my fear of those downers has lessened as the downers themselves have lessened in intensity.

So that chapter has given me an interesting new way of looking at what goes on within myself.

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Help, I’m Being Victimized by Gay People Trying to Exist in My Universe!

27 October 2007

Google News reports 74 news articles — 74! — on J.K. Rowling’s comment that she thought of one of her characters as being gay. Many of them are disapproving or even blatantly hostile — headlines like “If Dumbledore is gay where’s the proof?”, “Leave It Alone”, “J.K. Rowling’s Big Fat Mouth”, “Harry Potter Author Plays Dumb, Acts Surprised at Reactions to Gay Character”, on and on.

Barbara Kay in Canada’s National Post wrote — under the headline “Dumbledore has been diminished”, for crying out loud –

There is something very odd though about Dumbledore being singled out from the huge cast of adult characters in the books as having any sexuality at all. Some of the characters in the books are married, many more are single. …

My emphases. In Ms. Kay’s universe, saying that a character is married to someone of the opposite sex and maybe even has children with that person does not say anything about his or her sexuality. Saying that a character had one homosexual infatuation in his remote past, though, is apparently tantamount to rubbing the readers’ noses in his soiled bedsheets. It’s “singling him out.”

Seems to me that Ms. Rowling’s real crime is that she is not cooperating with the desire of people like Ms. Kay to preserve their illusions that everybody normal and decent can be safely and tacitly assumed to be straight.

I love this, too:

However, as a symbol for gay activists eager to inculcate knowledge about human sexuality at the earliest possible age, Rowling’s revelation has been a marketing godsend.

That’s the most important thing about this in Ms. Kay’s mind: When Ms. Rowling says in public that she thinks a gay man could possibly be a wise and positive influence on children, she is enabling child molesters. And Ms. Rowling is supposedly the one saying inappropriate things here.

Ms. Rowling didn’t rub anyone’s nose in Dumbledore’s sexuality, she answered a direct question about how she viewed Dumbledore’s life beyond the borders of the book and she answered it honestly. She never said that she intended the reader to understand that Dumbledore is gay; in fact, she has explicitly said the exact opposite, that her intention is that the average child will see it as a friendship and only adult readers who are sensitive to it will pick up on the hints.

Everyone has the right to create their own delusion and live in it. But when you’re complaining about the mere existence of people like Ms. Rowling who don’t share your delusion, and you’re turning it into some kind of personal attack on yourself — you know, they have pills for that nowadays.

Posted in Books, Queer | Leave a Comment »

And Don’t Even Get Me Started on What Was Really Going On Between Emma Wodehouse and Harriet Smith

26 October 2007

Dave pointed me to Jeffrey Weiss in the Dallas Morning News joining the chorus of Oh no it’s not that I’m homophobic no no no it’s because I care passionately about the nature of literature that I am so very very upset about Rowling saying she thinks of one of her characters as being gay:

With the greatest of respect, I’d like to say something to Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling:

Shut up. Please.

Stop talking about what Ron will do for a living, whom Neville will marry, what kinds of creatures Hagrid will raise.

I’d have a lot more faith in Mr. Weiss’s pose of being equally upset about these other revelations as well if he’d uttered so much as a peep of protest at any of them instead of waiting for the first non-heterosexual tidbit to register his complaints. And isn’t it adorable how he blatantly expresses his hostility toward Ms. Rowling and at the same time pretends to be only doing it in jest? Thus indulging in all the intensely satisfying emotion of homophobia without having to take responsibility for its unattractiveness. Later he even writes “Jo — can I call you Jo?”, making a joke out of a display of arrogance and disrespect. A little problem with passive-aggressiveness, have we?

Then he abandons even the pose that he minded the earlier revelations:

I guess I don’t want you to stop explaining completely. I’d love to know more about what inspired some of the plot details in the books. If you want to dish about how you decided on those particular inscriptions for the headstones, how you came up with the names for the characters, or how you cleverly planned the religious underpinnings of the broad arc of the story – I am all ears.

But telling us that Dumbledore is gay, as you did last week? Why would you do that?

Maybe because it was true? Maybe because some of Ms. Rowling’s fans want to know more about what it was really like for her to write the book? And Mr. Weiss admits that he’s fascinated in all that, too — until it gets to finding out that Ms. Rowling thinks that putting one count ‘em one gay character in a series of seven character-rich and increasingly bulky books might be a valid literary choice.

You gotta love this, too:

Based on what you decided to put in the books, I can imagine that Dumbledore once had a girlfriend or that he was so emotionally crushed by guilt that he sealed himself off from romance or that he was one of those rare men for whom romance never really came up …

In other words, Mr. Weiss is angry because Ms. Rowling has not participated in the preservation of his illusion that an author he likes cannot possibly have imagined that a character he likes could be gay.

If it were really a matter of Ms. Rowling inventing a character’s gay orientation after the fact, Mr. Weiss would be free to continue thinking whatever he wanted to think. If a long-lost diary entry revealed that, say, Agatha Christie always thought of Hercule Poirot as a werewolf, or Herman Melville thought of Ahab as a hermaphrodite, you’d think, oh my god, that is really weird, and then you’d go back and skim through a few chapters to see if you’d missed anything. And you’d conclude that if that’s really what he or she thought, there really isn’t any trace of it in the book, and you’d file the fact away under Literary Curiosities and never let it affect how you thought about Death on the Nile or Moby-Dick again.

But that’s not the case here. Remember: Fans all over the Internet have been speculating about Dumbledore for months because there are genuine hints in the last book. And what Mr. Weiss is upset about is that he wanted to be able to read the book without having to pick up on those hints, and now he can’t any more. Because the hints are really there, and now that they’ve been called to Mr. Weiss’s attention, he can no longer go back to not seeing them. He will never be able to read the books again without seeing that thread, and that it was there all along. Nor has Ms. Rowling left it possible for him to pretend to himself that he hasn’t seen it, or that fans arguing that Dumbledore is gay are imagining things that are not there.

The Harry Potter books were a place where he could pretend for a while that a man who isn’t attached to a woman must be that way because he once had a girlfriend or is crushed by heterosexual guilt. A romantic fantasy world where admirable men are much more likely to be asexual by nature than gay. Where he could pretend for a while that gay men don’t exist.

And now the books are not such a haven for him any more.

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Besides, Who Else Would Be That Obsessed About Wands?

23 October 2007

So J. K. Rowling made an offhanded remark during a Q-and-A session that she thought of Dumbledore as being gay, and now there’s a huge uproar of people writing crap about how wrong this is — but I’m not irate because I’m homophobic, mind you! I think gay folks are fine! Oh, no, I have perfectly rational reasons for being angry and hostile about this! It’s because I believe with heart and soul that the work must speak for itself! And there are no clues about this in the books, so it’s just my perfectly normal and non-prejudiced reaction to this blatant display of political correctness after the fact that makes me froth! at the mouth! in! this! way!

Which is all bullshit, as you can figure out in about five seconds if you imagine the lack of a fuss there would be if her offhand revelation about Dumbledore had been, say, that she’d always thought of him as having had a similar but heterosexual romantic attachment in his youth. Wait a minute, would be? In fact, J. K. Rowling has been making plenty of equally innocuous remarks about her backstory for the books in public appearances all over the place, and nobody in the press has even taken notice of it, let alone let forth with the howls of outrage we’re currently getting. But now the tidbit du jour is that one of the characters is gay, and suddenly everybody is a passionate, angry advocate of the principle that “the work must speak for itself”.

Most of the time the opiner will also make a point of saying that the Harry Potter books aren’t very well written, maybe even adding that the books would have been better if things like Dumbledore’s gayness had been more evident, just to see if we can rub a little salt into the wound we’d like to believe we’re important enough to inflict. Personally, I’m not for the life of me going to defend Ms. Rowling’s leaden prose, but if you think the work isn’t any good, what the freak do you even care whether or not it is being allowed to speak for itself? All over the country, innocent college students are being fed the most ridiculous and countertextual postmodern notions about the characters of Beowulf, Hamlet, and Humbert Humbert, for crying out loud, and not a peep out of you; but now you’re charging to the rescue of Dumbledore? Where are your priorities, man?

And a little bit of unconscious homophobia doesn’t have a thing to do with it, eh? Well, good for you.

By the way, fans have been speculating about precisely this issue, Dumbledore’s sexuality, in discussion groups around the Internet for months. Why? Because there are freaking hints about it in the books, that’s why.

This Time essay, charmingly titled Put Dumbledore Back in the Closet, is not only a typical snark-a-thon, it contains this maddening statement:

Yes, it’s nice that gays finally got a major character in the sci-fi/fantasy universe.

The author’s examples to back up this remarkably ignorant statement? There are no gay characters in Lord of the Rings and Star Wars. Well, there you go.

I guess the appearance of gay and other sorts of alternatively sexed characters since at least the 1970s in books by minor, unimportant, scarcely known science fiction writers like, oh, say, Robert A. Heinlein, Ursula K. Le Guin, Mercedes Lackey, Theodore Sturgeon, Poul Anderson, Orson Scott Card, Lois McMaster Bujold, and Samuel Delany don’t count. We’re only talking about major works of science fiction. You know, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and the Harry Potter books.

Sorry, guy, but science fiction got around to making gay characters a normal part of the human landscape well before any other literary genre, or at least among those genres that you could peruse outside an adult bookstore. Same-sex relationships were common in science fiction when they were still rare and controversial in other genres.

Fun fact: The San Francisco gay and lesbian bookstore “A Different Light” gets its name from a 1978 repeat 1978 science fiction novel featuring a relationship between two men.

(One might also ask how the Time writer knows that Gandalf isn’t gay. Is there something establishing his heterosexuality in the books that I’m forgetting? Or are we just assuming that anyone not explicitly identified as gay is therefore straight, and isn’t that assumption itself unconsciously homophobic?)

I’m not saying I’m a Harry Potter fan. I’ve seen the movies so far, which I thought were charming but nothing more, but I tried reading the first book and was bored by chapter five.

I’m just getting royally irritated at the dozens of columnists raking Rowling over the coals for this, the steam rising off their printed pages even as they adopt the pose that they aren’t homophobic at all, oh no, they’re just literary purists and have been so all along. Mm-hmm.

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Second Chance

2 April 2007

I don’t know how people watch as much television as the polls say they do. There are only two shows I try to watch regularly, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, and I download them from the iTunes Store and watch them on my iPod during my commute to and from work, at least when I’m not doing something else like reading or solving puzzles or working on my laptop. That comes to only about three hours of television a week, which is apparently less than most people watch in a day, but I can’t keep up with it. I have maybe 10 unwatched episodes of The Daily Show on my iPod and maybe 25 or 30 of The Colbert Report.

Which is by way of explaining why I am always catching up with yesterday’s news these days. On the way to work today I watched a couple of episodes of The Daily Show from two weeks ago, including one with an interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski, touting his new book Second Chance. Man, this is one sharp guy. His main point is that if we can get through the next 20 months without making any more terrible moves like declaring war on Iran, the United States still has enough residual goodwill in the world that we can repair some of the damage; but if we spend the next 20 months embroiled in a war that spans Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and probably Pakistan too, then we will at last finish the job of depleting our strength to the point where we are not the most powerful nation any more.

Unfortunately the interview began with Jon Stewart making a few jokes about his name, and since we were making jokes about it back in the 1970s when he first became well known, by this time it’s just a wee bit stale. Though I was pleased to learn that the final W in Zbigniew should be pronounced F. I guess I should have figured as much since I do happen to know that you say “padder-EFF-skee” and not “padder-ROO-skee” and so on with Polish names. Yet “ZBIG-nyoo” is how I’ve always assumed it was pronounced. From now on I’ll say “ZBIG-nyeff”.

I may go back and listen again and jot down a few of the wise and funny things he said, or maybe I’ll go buy the book since presumably he says the same things there only in a more polished manner instead of off the cuff. Though I’m even more backed up on my To Be Read shelf than I am on my iPod.

Posted in Books, Current events | Leave a Comment »

Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid

12 January 2007

I read Jimmy Carter’s new book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid about a month ago. It’s a good book, a concise and clearly written summing up of the history of peace efforts in Palestine, much of it from Carter’s own point of view as an observer and participant.

Carter’s been criticized by some for not going into more detail about things, but it seems to me that the books’ conciseness is a strength, not a weakness. It seems to me that we have plenty of books and articles — including some of Carter’s own — that go into the complicated history of the region in more detail. This book, on the other hand, is a good clear overview, and reading it was a great refresher for me.

I’m particularly weak, myself, on what was happening in the Middle East or anywhere else from around mid 1998 to late 2000, because I was coping with a long, serious illness in those years, and as a result I’m always a bit foggy now on the order in which things happened during that period, whether in my life or in the world. So I found the book helpful in straightening out in my head the chronology of what happened near the end of Clinton’s presidency and the beginning of Bush’s. And there’s a lot of good information here, too, including a series of appendices containing the texts of U.N. Resolutions 242, 338, and 465, the Camp David Accords, and other relevant documents.

Carter has written about his views on the Middle East before, and he doesn’t say anything here that seemed very surprising to me. He thinks the best hope for peace in the Middle East is to continue in the direction he was working toward during his presidency. Well, big surprise, that. He thinks Israel’s current policies, which are heading in the very opposite direction, are making things worse, not better. Well, big surprise again.

Since reading the book, though, I’ve been engaged in a few arguments, on the WELL and elsewhere, that all seem to go something like this:

Other Person: Oh, I know all about Carter’s book. It’s terrible. It’s riddled with omissions and factual errors. I can’t believe you were naive enough to read it.
Me: What do you think he has omitted?
Other Person: He never mentions that Yasir Arafat did such-and-such a thing in 1970-something.
Me: Actually, he specifically mentions that incident on page so-and-so.
Other Person: Well, he never mentions that Egypt and Syria did such-and-such a thing in 1980-whatever.
Me: That’s on page so-and-so.
Other Person: Well, he never mentions the bombing of such-and-such in 1990-something.
Me: No, he specifically refers to that on page so-and-so.
Other Person: But he doesn’t point out that all those things justify Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians today.
Me: But that’s not an omission and it’s not a factual error. It’s a difference of opinion. He just doesn’t think those things justify Israel’s actions.
Other Person: There’s no point in talking with you about it. Go back and read the book more carefully and you’ll see.

One thing that makes this book very readable and very moving is that much of what Carter writes comes out of his own experiences and observations in the Middle East, so that we see Israel up close and through his eyes. Throughout a 1973 trip, for example, he writes that “we found the country to be surprisingly relaxed and saw only a handful of people in uniform, mostly directing traffic at the busier intersections. Also, there seemed to be an easy relationship among the different kinds of people we met, including Jews and Arabs.”

But on a trip he took after leaving the White House, he saw a much changed Israel. He recounts the many complaints he heard about the oppressive Israeli treatment of Palestinians, and even Israel’s seizing of foreign aid meant to go to the Palestinians. Carter writes that he found these reports disturbing and hard to believe, but when he asked Israeli authorities about them, the officials freely admitted to these actions, saying to Carter that “…some of the confiscated funds might have been diverted to finance acts of Arab terrorism …. some USAID funds appropriated by the U.S. Congress even for benevolent projects were kept by the Israeli government when necessary to prevent misspending ….”

Carter writes next about a briefing he later received on Israel’s policies in the occupied territories.

“With maps and charts, he explained that the Israelis acquired Palestinian lands in a number of different ways: by direct purchase; through seizure “for security purposes for the duration of the occupation”; by claiming state control of areas formerly held by the Jordanian government; by “taking” under some carefully selected Arabic customs or ancient laws; and by claiming as state land all that was not cultivated or specifically registered as owned by a Palestinian family. Since lack of cultivation or use for farming is one of the criteria for claiming state land, it became official policy in 1983 to prohibit, under penalty of imprisonment, any grazing or the planting of trees or crops in these areas by Palestinians. Large areas taken for “security” reasons became civilian settlements.

Maybe the most painful chapter is Carter’s account of the building of the wall that snakes through the West Bank segregating Israelis from Palestinians.

The wall ravages many places along its devious route that are important to Christians. In addition to enclosing Bethlehem in one of its most notable intrusions, an especially heartbreaking division is on the southern slope of the Mount of Olives, a favorite place for Jesus and his disciples, and very near Bethany, where they often visited Mary, Martha, and their brother, Lazarus. There is a church named for one of the sisters, Santa Marta Monastery, where Israel’s thirty-foot concrete wall cuts through the property. The house of worship is now on the Jerusalem side, and its parishioners are separated from it because they cannot get permits to enter Jerusalem.

I’ve read where Carter has been chastised for allegedly putting all the blame for the situation on Israel, but this doesn’t seem accurate to me. Carter has plenty of criticism both for the Israeli leaders who confiscate Palestinian land and for the Palestinians who take part in violence against Israel, or who applaud it, and for the maze of impossible preconditions that leaders on both sides put on any peace talks, guaranteeing that talks won’t and can’t happen.

But I think Carter’s primary goal in this book is actually to put pressure on the United States, whose participation, he says, is necessary to renewing peace talks but which has all but abandoned any effort to do so. It seems to me that what he really wanted to do with this book is not to put all the blame on Israel, but to show that there is plenty of wrong being done on both sides of the conflict, and that a powerful, trusted third party is needed to act as an honest broker to break through the impasse. If more of the American people know and understand what’s going on in the occupied territories, that the situation is less one-sided than our current administration and news media present it, and that if we could bring peace to Palestine we would be going a long way toward bringing peace to the whole Middle East — including Iraq — then perhaps we in the United States can create enough pressure on our leaders to take more active and sensible steps toward peace.

Posted in Books, Current events | Leave a Comment »

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