By Steve Rhodes
Publication: New York Times
Cover:: “Say What You Will,” a review of Anthony Lewis’s Freedom For The Thought That We Hate.
“[A] heroic account of how courageous judges in the 20th century created the modern First Amendment by prohibiting the government from banning offensive speech, except to prevent a threat of serious and imminent harm,” Jeffrey Rosen writes.
“Still, the most surprising and provocative occasions are those when Lewis himself departs from civil libertarian free speech orthodoxy.”
Indeed. The restrictions to speech favored by Lewis and his faith in the judiciary is simply naive.
Other Reviews & News of Note: How could you not be interested in a book titled Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up. As long as there’s not much math.
The book is authored by John Allen Paulos, of A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper fame, which means it’s probably pretty readable. And reviewer Jim Holt’s opening is also irresistible:
“A physicist, a biologist and a mathematician walk into a bar. Bartender says, ‘Any of you believe in God?’ Which of the three is most likely to say yes? Answer: the mathematician. Mathematicians believe in God at a rate two and a half times that of biologists . . . [and] most mathematicians believe in heaven.”
Paulos, however, finds the proofs devised by mathematicians, Holt writes, “a load of tripe.”
“Paulos dismisses theology as a ‘verbal magic show’ and the argument from design as a ‘creationist Ponzi scheme.'”
Still, Holt finds Paulos’s book to be lacking at times in serious thought, and hastily written.
Just like religion itself.
*
Publication: New York Review of Books
Cover: I don’t know, I read it online.
Reviews & News of Note: “When it comes to covering the war in Iraq, McClatchy Newspapers has always done things a bit differently,” Michael Massing writes. “The third-largest newspaper company in the US, it owns thirty-one daily papers, including The Miami Herald, The Sacramento Bee, The Kansas City Star, and The Charlotte Observer. (It became the owner of some of these papers after buying Knight Ridder newspapers in 2006.) McClatchy has a large bureau in Washington, but without a paper either in the capital or in New York, it operates outside the glare of the nation’s political and media elite, and this has freed it to follow its own path.
“In the months leading up to the Iraq war, when most news organizations were dutifully relaying the Bush administration’s claims about the threat posed by Iraq, Knight Ridder/McClatchy ran several stories questioning their accuracy. Since the invasion, the company has run a lean but resourceful operation in Baghdad. All three of its bureau chiefs have been young Arab-American women with some fluency in Arabic. At home in the cultures of both the West and the Middle East, they have been adept at interpreting each to the other.
“From the start, the McClatchy bureau has made a special point of reporting on the lives of ordinary Iraqis and on the impact the war has had on them. To help it do so, it has relied heavily on its Iraqi staff. It currently has five Iraqi members – former teachers, doctors, and office managers who, joining the staff as translators and ‘fixers,’ have received on-the-job training as reporters. In this, McClatchy is not unique. As the danger to Western reporters in Iraq has mounted, US news organizations have turned to local reporters and stringers to help gather the news. (The work is even more dangerous for them than it is for Westerners; according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, of the 124 journalists who have been killed since the start of the Iraq war, 102 have been Iraqis.)
“McClatchy, though, has gone a step further. About a year ago, it set up a blog exclusively for contributions from its Iraqi staff. Inside Iraq, it’s called, and several times a week the Iraqi staff members post on it about their experiences and impressions (the blog can be found at washingtonbureau.typepad.com/iraq). ‘It’s an opportunity for Iraqis to talk directly to an American audience,’ says Leila Fadel, the current bureau chief, whose father is from Lebanon and whose mother is from Michigan, who grew up in Saudi Arabia, and who is all of twenty-six years old.
“As such, the blog fills a major gap in the coverage.”
Imagine that.
*
Publication: Tribune
Cover: “Clouds Over Kansas.” Nothing like a field of wheat to draw the reader in.
Other Reviews & News of Note: You should know better by now.
*
Publication: Sun-Times
Cover: The Sun-Times doesn’t really have a book review anymore, and I accidentally tossed the Showcase section, where book reviews now appear, in the trash with all the ad supplements on Sunday. I went online to see what I missed and found I hadn’t missed anything at all.
*
CHARTS
1. Stephen Colbert
2. Glenn Beck
3. Steve Martin
4. Tom Brokaw
5. Eric Clapton
6. Tony Dungy
7. A dog named Sprite
8. A black Lab
9. Caroline Kennedy
10. Alan Greenspan
Posted on January 14, 2008