The link below is to a book review of ‘Sinai and the Saints – Reading Old Covenant Laws for the New Covenant Community,’ by James M. Todd III.
For more visit:
https://www.9marks.org/article/book-review-sinai-and-the-saints-by-james-m-todd-iii/
The link below is to a book review of ‘The Crook in the Lot,’ by Thomas Boston.
For more visit:
https://www.9marks.org/review/book-review-the-crook-in-the-lot-by-thomas-boston/
The link below is to a book review of ‘Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa,’ by Mungo Park.
For more visit:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/03/100-best-nonfiction-books-travels-in-the-interioir-districts-of-africa-mungo-park
Arthur Britannicus by Paul Bannister
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Arthur Britannicus (Forgotten Emperor #1)
by Paul Bannister
Jyotsna G. Singh, Michigan State University
“All the world’s a stage,” Shakespeare once wrote.
In recent weeks, that Shakespearean adage has been particularly resonant, with the New York Public Theater’s production of “Julius Caesar” attracting worldwide scrutiny because of the staged likeness between Caesar and President Trump.
Extolling the play as a masterpiece about power and political violence, director Oskar Eustis persuasively defended his interpretation as a warning about “what happens when you try to preserve democracy by nondemocratic means.”
Others, however, questioned whether this production was in good taste – and denounced it for encouraging violence against President Trump, particularly the scene in which Caesar is stabbed to death. Due to the backlash, Delta Airlines and Bank of America withdrew their corporate sponsorship.
In some ways, the contention – even rancor – of these debates about the Public Theater production would have delighted, and perhaps bemused, Shakespeare. They articulate the richness and urgency of our own democratic struggles – similar to the rich political complexity reflected in Shakespeare’s text itself.
As Shakespeare wrote the play, he drew on Roman history, a popular topic in 16th-century England. But he was also commenting on the political conflicts of the era. The power struggles depicted in “Julius Caesar” mirrored ongoing concerns in England with legitimacy, tyranny and potential threats of rebellion and deposition against Queen Elizabeth I, who did not have an heir. These anxieties were also exacerbated by historical memories of the English Civil War, also called the War of the Roses, going far back as the deposition and death of Richard II.
Shakespeare’s Rome is a place of brutal struggles between democratic ideals and human ambition. The assassination of Caesar is one of the most important events in Roman history, and Shakespeare had inherited over 1,600 years of ambiguity, with little consensus over whether Caesar’s killing was justified. He incorporated these debates into his play, offering his viewers multiple perspectives on the characters. Caesar is either a heroic, benevolent ruler or tyrant; Brutus is either a patriot or assassin.
Shakespeare’s Caesar is clearly a leader and politician with power – including some vanity and propensity to flattery – but also with wide popular appeal. When he returns triumphant from wars, the conspirators fear he will become a tyrant, a “Colossus” whereby the “wide walls” of Republican Rome “encompass’d but one man.”
Yet he seems to love and trust his fellow Romans, warmly inviting Brutus and other conspirators to share wine. And we also learn he bequeaths to his people, on his death, his personal possessions: To every Roman citizen he gives “seventy-five drachmas” and “all his walks, His private arbours and new-planted orchards” for public use.
Shakespeare also gives Brutus, the leader of the assassination plot, a refined conscience throughout the play. It’s evident in the many discussions Brutus has with his fellow conspirators, and it’s summed up when he describes his motivation for killing Caesar: “If then [any] friend demand why Brutus rose against Caesar, then my answer: Not that I loved Caesar less but that I loved Rome more.”
“Julius Caesar” offers a complicated, even poignant vision at the end. It ends in civil war and the defeat of the conspirators, following their internal dissensions and accusations of betrayal. Brutus commits suicide, but Mark Antony and Octavius, Julius Caesar’s grandnephew, victorious at the end, acknowledge Brutus’s nobility and wish to bury him with honor. Toward the close of Shakespeare’s next Roman play, “Antony and Cleopatra,” we see Octavius Caesar emerge as the singular ruler of Rome. Importantly, then, the Republican, democratic ideal is defeated, both in the play and in the Western world (until the American Revolution).
Overall, this picture of a divided Rome – a mix of power politics, of stoic ideals giving way to ego – should give pause to modern audiences. From the shifting perspectives on competing ambitions we learn that all rigid value judgments of “good” and “evil” politicians can be relative – and problematic – in our contingent world.
Yet, the ideals of democracy – in Rome and in our own times – have to be constantly guarded against demagogues, who also may be idealists, of all political stripes. Productions of “Julius Caesar” have typically evoked topical political analogies. Even seemingly traditional, period productions, such as the current Royal Shakespeare Company’s version in Britain, resonate with topical relevance, enabling the audience to deduce connections to today’s political climate.
It may be true – as some have suggested – that the analogy between Julius Caesar and Donald Trump is a bit forced. Regardless, the production is, as one reviewer put it, “a deeply democratic offering, befitting both the Public and the public – and the times.”
As a researcher and teacher of Renaissance drama, I’ve studied Shakespeare’s role as a cultural icon across different societies, cultures and eras. It seems that no matter where (and when) his works are being performed, they provide us with a complex, poetic language for imagining and interpreting the intractable world in which we live.
During politically contentious times, it’s befitting that we turn more – rather then less – to Shakespeare.
Jyotsna G. Singh, Professor, Department of English, Michigan State University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Trisha Tucker, University of Southern California – Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
On Monday, June 26, 2017, Harry James Potter – the world’s most famous wizard – will celebrate his 20th birthday. His many fans will likely mark the occasion by rereading a favorite Harry Potter novel or rewatching one of the blockbuster films. Some may even raise a butterbeer toast in Harry’s honor at one of three Harry Potter-themed amusement parks.
But not everyone will be celebrating Harry’s big day. In fact, a vocal group of Christians – usually identified as “Bible-believing” or fundamentalist Christians – has been resistant to Harry’s charms from the start. Members of this community, who believe the Bible to be literal truth, campaigned vigorously to keep J.K. Rowling’s best-selling novels out of classrooms and libraries. They even staged public book burnings across the country, at which children and parents were invited to cast Rowling’s books into the flames. These fiery spectacles garnered widespread media coverage, sparking reactions ranging from bemusement to outrage.
What could justify the use of such drastic measures to keep these books out of the hands of young readers?
Book burnings may be relatively rare in modern America, but efforts to protect young readers from “dangerous” texts are not. Such texts, and the efforts to limit their readership, are the subject of a class I teach at the University of Southern California.
In this class, students survey a collection of books that have been challenged on moral, political and religious grounds. These include classics such as “1984” and “To Kill a Mockingbird,” as well as newer texts like “Persepolis” and “The Perks of Being a Wallflower.” The point is not to determine which challenges are “good” and which are “bad.” Instead, we seek to understand how differing beliefs about reading and subjectivity make certain texts seem dangerous and others seem safe to particular populations of readers.
Harry Potter is one of the first books we discuss.
Most readers of Rowling’s novel – including many Christian readers – interpret the characters’ tutelage in spells and potions as harmless fantasy, or as metaphors for the development of wisdom and knowledge. Similarly, they read incidents in which Harry and his friends disobey adults or make questionable choices as opportunities for characters and readers alike to learn important lessons and begin to develop their own moral and ethical codes.
For some fundamentalist Christians, however, Harry’s magical exploits pose an active danger. According to them, Hogwarts teaches the kinds of witchcraft explicitly condemned as punishable by death and damnation in the biblical books of Deuteronomy and Exodus. They believe the books must be banned – even burned – because their positive portrayal of magic is likely to attract unsuspecting children to real-world witchcraft.
Similarly, they think that when Harry disobeys his cruel Muggle guardians or flouts Dumbledore’s rules to save his friends, he actively encourages child readers to engage in lying and disobedience, which are explicitly forbidden by the Bible. As Evangelical writer Richard Abanes puts it,
“The morals and ethics in Rowling’s fantasy tales are at best unclear, and at worst, patently unbiblical.”
Why don’t Bible-believing Christians trust young readers to discern the difference between fantasy and reality? And why don’t they think children can learn positive lessons from Harry’s adventures – like the importance of standing up to injustice?
According to scholar Christine Jenkins, people who try to censor texts often hold a set of false assumptions about how reading works.
One of those assumptions is that particular literary content (like positive portrayals of witchcraft) will invariably produce particular effects (more witches in real life). Another is that reactions to a particular text are likely to be consistent across readers. In other words, if one reader finds a passage scary, funny or offensive, the assumption is that other readers invariably will do so as well.
As Jenkins points out, however, research has shown that readers’ responses are highly variable and contextual. In fact, psychologists Amie Senland and Elizabeth Vozzola have demonstrated this about readers of Harry Potter.
In their study comparing the perceptions of fundamentalist and liberal Christian readers of Harry Potter, Senland and Vozzola reveal that different reading responses are possible in even relatively homogeneous groups. On the one hand, despite adults’ fears to the contrary, few children in either group believed that the magic practiced in Harry Potter could be replicated in real life. On the other, the children disagreed about a number of things, including whether or not Dumbledore’s bending of the rules for Harry made Dumbledore harder to respect.
Senland and Vozzola’s study joins a body of scholarship that indicates that children perform complex negotiations as they read. Children’s reading experiences are informed by both their unique personal histories and their cultural contexts.
In other words, there’s no “normal” way to read Harry Potter – or any other book, for that matter.
Fundamentalist Christians aren’t the only group who have trouble trusting the capabilities of child readers.
Take the case of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
For decades, parents have argued that Harper Lee’s novel poses a danger to young readers, and have sought to remove it from classrooms for this reason. Some parents worry that the novel’s vulgar language and sexual content will corrupt children’s morals, while others fear that the novel’s marginalization of black characters will damage the self-image of black readers.
Despite their different ideological orientations, I believe that both of these groups of protesters – like the fundamentalists who attempt to censor Harry Potter – are driven by surprisingly similar misapprehensions about reading.
In all of these cases, the protesters presume that being exposed to a phenomenon in literature (whether witchcraft, foul language or racism) naturally leads to a reproduction of that phenomenon in life. They also believe that their individual experience of a text is correct and applicable to disparate readers.
These cases of attempted censorship show a profound distrust of child readers and their imaginations. And they ignore evidence that child readers are far more sophisticated than adults tend to credit them for.
Trisha Tucker, Assistant Professor of Writing, University of Southern California – Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Clayton Childress, University of Toronto
Last month, cultural appropriation became a big issue in the Canadian publishing and media world after the trade association magazine, Write published a special issue featuring work by Indigenous authors. The editor of the magazine, Hal Niedzviecki, wrote a glib editorial in defence of cultural appropriation.
Niedzviecki resigned after Canadian media executives irreverently pledged donations toward a “Cultural Appropriation Prize” on late-night Twitter in support of his editorial. The main thrust of the offending Twitter conversation seemed to be that white media elites and writers felt they were under threat of being censored.
The argument was framed in the high-minded rhetoric of freedom and creative license, but underneath that thin veneer, it relied on a belief in white victimization that you’d expect from fringe white nationalists rather than the top one per cent of Canadian mainstream media.
As a scholar of the book publishing industry, I can say with empirical authority that the notion of white people being under threat in publishing crumbles in the face of evidence. As I show in my new book, Under the Cover: The Creation, Production and Reception of a Novel, book publishing is the same as it ever was: it is white-dominated and it’s easier for white people to gain entry to it. Although my research on book publishing is based in the United States, as the sociologist Sarah M. Corse has shown, the U.S. and Canadian book publishing industries are deeply intertwined, and more often than not are actually the same industry.
To understand the real barriers to book publishing, the most important places to look are the points of entry themselves. In publishing, those access points are guarded by literary agents and acquisition editors. They are the gatekeepers, and across the U.S., the gatekeepers of publishing are 95 per cent white. If those gatekeepers had their own state, it would be the whitest state in the U.S. If they had their own country, it would be the whitest country in the world. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, if you wanted to throw a party with only white people in attendance, you’d invite veterinarians, farmers, mining machine operators and book publishers.
While it is hypothetically possible that those white gatekeepers could privilege racialized authors over white ones, the reverse is actually true. Regardless of their race, about 38 per cent of the 1,200 literary agents in the United States I’ve studied show an equal interest in representing “general” fiction. But when that fiction covers topics of ethnic and multicultural diversity, white agents run for the hills, with only 15 per cent willing to even take a look.
Simply put, racialized authors — who are overwhelmingly the ones writing ethnic or multicultural fiction – are the authors who face longer odds of getting published. And like people of colour across different occupations, research shows these authors respond by working harder and submitting more widely, putting more effort and sweat equity into their searches than their white counterparts. This is done in an effort to balance out the discrimination they know they will face.
Yet even in my interviews with racialized authors who could secure publishing contracts, they described a process in which their novels were ping-ponged back and forth between being “too racialized” at first, and then not racialized enough.
As a Black, southern literary writer explained to me, he had to “dumb down” his manuscript populated by Black southern characters because his editor didn’t believe “people talk that way” – the cultural specificity and accuracy of his novel was whitewashed out.
In the marketing and promotion stage, however, even after having their novels culturally denuded, racialized authors found themselves ghettoized and pigeon-holed again. One African-American novelist told me the painful story of her fears that her work of literary fiction would be pushed back into the “African American interests” section of bookstores rather than being shelved with the rest of the literary fiction.
A widely celebrated Chinese American literary novelist sardonically told a racially diverse room of her fans about a conversation with her publisher: “I told them: ‘Just promise me you won’t put any lanterns or fireworks on the cover because these are stories about people. Yes, they happen to be Chinese, but they’re stories about people.’ So as you’d expect, it has goldfish on it. The only thing I left them.”
Don’t forget these are the success stories. These are the racialized authors who make it.
Regardless of the statistically and experientially indefensible claims made by Cultural Appropriation Prize supporters, the real “race problem” in book publishing is the same as it is all over the world: white people are blessed with large and small advantages that they may not even understand. Racialized people are penalized with large and small disadvantages that they have no choice but to understand. If you don’t know where to stand on the cultural appropriation debate, just look at the numbers.
Clayton Childress, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Toronto
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
At the BookShelf 
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