The
Nativity (1999), by Julie Vivas
Julie Vivas' version of The Nativity is a joy to read and look at. The scriptural story is accompanied by a series of watercolor illustrations that are poignant, funny, and refreshingly joyous if you have seen one too many solemn Madonnas in blue robes. Mary is enormously pregnant, perched precariously astride a donkey led by a Joseph delighted in his upcoming parenthood. The baby's birth is announced by a little head and hands peeping over the side of the page as if peering around a doorframe. The happy couple are lauded by an angel in combat boots, with slightly raggedy wings, who holds the newborn like a pleased new uncle. Every face beams with joy and wonder over large and small miracles. Keep this one on the coffee table to ward off overly commercial TV ads for electric shavers and clay sheep that grow hair.
The Thin Man (1993), by Dashiell Hammett
On the other end of the spectrum, from the homespun to the glamorous, is Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man. Although I cannot imagine this without the dashing duo of William Powell and Myrna Loy, even reading about the Christmas Eve party they host to all and sundry (mostly criminals at one time sent up the river by Nick, who have now developed a great affection for him and the quality of his liquor), and the following morning when Nick amuses himself by shooting out the balls on the Christmas tree with his new gun, can make for a memorable holiday season. And a fun mystery, to boot.
Margaret Oakes, English
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Inside Furman is published monthly during the school year by the Furman University Department of Marketing and Public Relations. For story ideas, e-mail John Roberts, editor.
Of
Spirits and Madness: An American Psychiatrist in Africa (2002),
by Paul R. Linde
Taking leave from his work in San Francisco General Hospital's emergency room, this native Minnesotan spent 1994-95 as the consulting psychiatrist in the Psychiatric Unit at Zimbabwe's Harare Central Hospital. By doing so, he immersed himself in what academics call transcultural psychiatry. Linde's patients displayed the vaguely familiar symptoms of post-partum depression, AIDS dementia, and marijuana-induced psychosis. But it fell to the experienced nursing sisters to teach him how his Shona patients and their relatives understand the roles of ancestral spirits, witches, traditional healers, and denominational prophets in generating and treating these afflictions. (Given the country's unraveling economy, the male residents and interns were often away, working second jobs to support their large extended families.) Linde tells his patients' stories, and in doing so he offers an enlightening, holistic and essentially hopeful account of people who find themselves living in desperate circumstances.
Brian Siegel, Anthropology
The
Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (1980), by Edmund Morris
I picked up this book for 50 cents at a Furman library book sale. It is a wonderful, easy-to-read narrative of the first 43 years of the life of our 26th president. Roosevelt, who began keeping a diary when he was six years old, was a man of ironies. He was an asthmatic weakling who became a first-rate boxer, a conservationist who hunted big-time game, and a saber-rattler who won the Nobel Peace Prize. Roosevelt was also a scholar (he published 39 volumes of travel, history, biography, political science and literary criticism), rancher, explorer and naturalist. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt celebrates Roosevelt's unbridled enthusiasm and zest for life. This book was published in 1980 but it deserves dusting off. By Godfrey, it's dee-lightful!
John Roberts, Marketing and PR
Sister
Revolutions: French Lightning, American Light
(1999), by Susan Dunn
Given the recent interest in the early American Republic—I’m thinking of the popularity of David McCullough’s John Adams—readers might enjoy Susan Dunn’s Sister Revolutions. In its simplest terms the book compares and contrasts the American and French Revolutions. But Dunn’s approach yields fresh insights. The American Revolution took the moderate direction it did in part because its leaders had gained political experience at the state level. Adams, Madison, and Jefferson saw politics as the art of the possible, understood the necessity for compromise, and actually embraced the notion of political conflict. For their part, the leaders of the French Revolution had been positively prevented from taking part in political life and so were more politically inept and hopelessly unrealistic. They saw politics as a path to radical change. Obsessing over national unite, Robespierre believed conflict was unpatriotic: the antidote was the guillotine. Gouverneur Morris observed that the French “have taken Genius instead of Reason for their Guide, adopted Experiment instead of Experience, and wander in the Dark because they prefer Lightning to Light.” Hence the book’s apt subtitle. The final third of the book is a bit weak. Dunn loses her sharp focus and wanders off into the vague realms of revolutionary influences on the modern world. But, as it stands, Sister Revolutions is an enjoyable, lucid, and challenging historical essay.
David S. Spear, History