Thomas Education

 Six or so years ago, I taught The Kite Runner to three successive sets of tenth-graders, and marveled at the effect the novel had on me and on these adolescents.  That age is a marvelous time for a humanities teacher, as we see callous children grow out of their self-centered cocoons and flex their world-empathic feelers.  They grow into the world outside them and realize they truly have agency -- or will have agency and responsibility for human actions.  Amir, the main protagonist of Kite Runner is so identifiable with those adolescents learning to take responsibility for their callous actions.   And of course we think of Kite Runner now that Afghanistan once again plunges into Taliban rule -- we particularly worry about the fate of the Hazara (news stories already cite random executions of Hazara men).   We can only wring hands and pray that the Taliban will have to adapt and tolerate more than they did before -- but I am not optimistic. ...

Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern World by James Carroll My rating: 4 of 5 stars Fascinating comprehensive worldview, with Jesuitical logic in a broad sweep that links religion in a circular way to violence and the solution to violence. The author shows a great command of history and religion, with extensive endnotes to support or expand upon most of his claims; however, some sweeping indictments will certainly be resisted by the more fundamentalist People Of The Book (that is, the Abrahamic religions). A core symbolic thread is Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac on Mt.Moriah, the supposed site later called Jerusalem -- the author deftly cites that scene throughout the many centuries since the original event, demonstrating the human tendency to misinterpret that near-sacrifice in order to rationalize our own tendency to violence and scapegoating. I started the book in audio form, but found it unlistenable -- the author's c...

Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age by Sherry Turkle My rating: 5 of 5 stars I chose this because it precedes Empathy Diaries, which I recently read and adored. And I note that the first chapter of this book is indeed Empathy View all my reviews

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life by George Saunders My rating: 4 of 5 stars Must-read for any teacher of writing, and certainly for any would-be writer; also for any aficionado of Russian literature. This book is a distillation of the author's creative-writing class; reading it feels much like attending his class -- all that's missing is the back-and-forth of a seminar. View all my reviews

The Empathy Diaries: A Memoir by Sherry Turkle My rating: 5 of 5 stars I cannot stop talking about this book, and not just because the author is a favorite of mine, with her earlier books about the effect of technology on education and our psyches. She describes encounters with so many other famous writers and technologists -- she was Present at the Creation of our computer-saturated internet world. Note that the title is purposely plural: several personal points are interwoven into the chapters, sometimes repeating details that a "normal" book would elide. But she is a talented writer and psychologist: the very writing style is intended to affect the reader and illustrate psychological points. I did cringe at the repeated references to the Freudian incident with her stepfather (fear not, dear reader -- no outright abuse here, just psychological trauma unearthed by years of analysis, along with all-too-typical infidelity and familial...

The Road Less Traveled: The Secret Battle to End the Great War, 1916-1917 by Philip D. Zelikow My rating: 5 of 5 stars View all my reviews

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth My rating: 5 of 5 stars And the hits just keep on coming! This excellent book details an unrelenting onslaught of cyberattacks, and outlines the author's own gradual realization of the dangers of internet warfare. It is a lengthy but worthwhile read -- actually, I lost the book for a while because I did not want to read it at bedtime, for fear of nightmares or disrupted sleep! Indeed the book is changing my stance toward online security -- multi-factor authentication, definitely! As with most of us, the author first downplayed the fear tactics promoted by sellers of security packages; but after years of research she has come to wonder that more disaster has not happened yet. She briefly but baldly calls out the recent presidentical administration for wreaking havoc on US defense, by eliminating a cybersecurity department, incensing the Iranian and Chinese gover...

A Very Easy Death by Simone de Beauvoir My rating: 4 of 5 stars An insightful memoir about human responses to dying. I should read this in the original, to perhaps catch more nuances; though I expect it will be equally confusing sometimes, as the author faithfully represents the confusing conflicting feelings we have towards family -- in this case, a daughter for her mother. It was striking how universal it seemed: though it was written in 1964, the descriptions could well parallel that of the recent deaths we witnessed in our family. Even the medical treatments and descriptions sound current (I imagine the most significant difference would be the incessant electronic beeping around today's hospital beds). The emotional responses are indeed universal, though deBeauvoir's main point, reflected in the title, is that this was a -- as we say nowadays -- a First World problem. The great majority of humankind throughout history ...

Chess Story by Stefan Zweig My rating: 3 of 5 stars View all my reviews     Is it a short story (quite short, leading to a single conclusion) or a novella (develops two or three characters). I think of this writing as mittelEuropa: the characters behave in a very polite old-world fashion, and worry about the behavior and place in society. The psychological detail is Kafkaesque, as it seems designed to be at once boring and yet build suspense.  I can readily imagine this being read aloud some evening around the fireplace, gradually building the suspense.  And I could not help wondering about the writer's own frame of mind, as this was his last work before suicide. The three protagonists -- beside the "objective" professorial narrator -- are described as sharply distinct emotional and intellectual people, each engaged in their own attempt t...

Money for Nothing: The Scientists, Fraudsters, and Corrupt Politicians Who Reinvented Money, Panicked a Nation, and Made the World Rich by Thomas Levenson My rating: 5 of 5 stars View all my reviews   What a great story! A romp through English history around 1700, showcasing several disparate characters (yes, all Great White Men) who unwittingly wove together the financial strands that built the Empire upon which the sun never set. In Econ101 I had learned of the first economic bubbles--tulipmania, and the South Sea bubble. The first was based on a product (tulip bulbs); the second, on trading promises. This book treats not of tulips, but of the imaginative development of the tradable stock certificate. Isaac Newton was so much more than a gravity and calculus inventor. What a fertile time for new thinking was 1700! Each chapter of this book describes a different character and his eventual influence on modern thinking. Mo...

Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning by Timothy Snyder My rating: 5 of 5 stars View all my reviews   What a stimulating book, an excellent text for a college history or political science course. Better yet, something for high school students to discuss briefly, then read later in university so they can readily see their own thinking mature. Timothy Snyder's work can be gainfully read by a popular audience for some basic general conclusions about history; yet the same work, on closer reading, yields deeper insight and fodder for discussion about the very meaning of human political organization and the development of civilization -- what separates us from the beasts, from tribal warfare, from that Hobbesian life nasty, brutish, and short? He reminds us how quickly we can slide back into that nasty, brutish, and short existence. The author notes, with devastating clarity, the relative peace enjoyed by citizens,...

 When staunch adherents of an exclusive philosophy get confronted with the reality of their false predictions, they undergo some similar reactions.    The recent collapse of the elaborate bizarre theories of the Qanon conspiracy network produced a rude awakening (as reported by News Literacy here ) in its followers -- the conspiracy theories adapted to continuing real-life rebuttals, until the final blow on January 20th.  To the end, they believed their putative savior would swoop in and make the radical change to society that they dreamed of. I saw a similar response firsthand in 2011 -- May 22nd, to be precise.  A close family friend (children's classmates) was an adherent of Harold Camping Family Radio, and was sure that the Judgement Day would occur on May 21st.  This had caused a rift in that family, though he maintained close relations with wife and sons.  On May 22nd, he checked himself into the nearby hospital, in a great depression, telli...

The Fall of Language in the Age of English by Minae Mizumura My rating: 3 of 5 stars After reading Mizumura's "A True Novel", I wanted to read this treatise. I taught in Japan, I studied the language, and retain a vivid interest in the culture. These two works certainly incorporate a Japanese sensibility, and make me yearn to read them in the original, to catch the nuances and the allegorical representations, as well as the class/gender distinctions built into word choice and verb endings. This treatise is a great conversation started for a linguistics class, as Mizumura includes not only a reasonable history of Japanese educational/literary policy, but is not shy about presenting her definite opinions about the dumbing down of modern society -- of course we should retain the beauteous complex elitist literary system that requires years of study to even ...

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami My rating: 3 of 5 stars A rather bizarre alternate-world fantasy novel of particularly Japanese sensibility. I was curious at several points about the Japanese-language original version of the Japanese names and foreign loan-words used in the text, as they would have more significance to an original reader -- the translators explained some of the significance of the unusual characters' names. And those characters were indeed unusual and memorable, so precisely described at length (this is a long book). The chapters are episodic and specific to each main character in turn, such that this could well have been serialized, a la Dickens! I raise the language/translation points because I am also reading Mizumura's The Fall of Language in the Age of English. Does she consider Murakami to be great modern Japanese literature, I wonder? I think ...

One of the very specific items in the U.S. Constitution from its beginning is the requirement to enumerate the population every ten years.  The decennial census is a big undertaking, made even more challenging this year by the Coronavirus pandemic. Fortunately they had already planned to get most of the information by online questionnaires (which I already filled out), so they can more easily limit human contact and virus transmission. An interesting side effect of the constitution’s simple wording -- that makes no mention of citizenship or national origin in the count -- is that we must reach out to residents in their own language.  They have determined that there are twelve languages with at least 60,000 households that do not speak English well enough to complete the survey; so they translate all the questionnaires into those twelve languages.  Further, there are 59 languages with at least 2000 households (that do not speak English well enough to understand the pr...

In God's Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire, by Robert Hoyland. (2015)   This book brings some objectivity to the typical sweeping claims about the explosive Islamic expansion in the 7th and 8th centuries.  Ironically, in demystifying the implied claims that the Qur'an was the primary driver of the conquest, the author removes the rationale for the title of his book.  According to the preponderance of the various contemporary sources, and the latest historical evidence, the conquests were mostly Islamic, and mostly Arab; but a substantial proportion was neither Islamic nor Arab.  The original conquerors from Arabia were not innocent shepherds suddenly motivated by the will of Allah; rather, they were nomads with a long fighting tradition, and had long served (and trained) in other armies. His more radical conclusions are couched in careful language: for example, the Qur'an itself makes little mention of iconography, and mostly ...

One of my two phones today reflected a timezone change, as it is set to West European Summer Time, which falls back one hour on Sunday the 27th.    However, we are in Morocco, not Western Europe.  Reportedly, last year Morocco decided to spring ahead one hour in the summer, and stay that way (except for the Holy Month of Ramadan, but that's a different story!).  So, during summertime we follow West European Summer Time; but in the fall, we are on West African Time ?  or is it Central European Time?  Which name would our tourism & marketing department prefer to use?   There were rumors that Morocco would suddenly decide to fall back again, as had happened a few years ago -- but evidently not.  Son Excellence Le Roi is apparently opting for stability.  I agree, stability is better, where clocks are concerned.  The E.U. has declared that every member nation should decide on its single timezone by next year.  I'm sure that'...

Today, October 22nd, is the first day of serious rainfall in Rabat since May.  It stifles our outdoor activity a bit, but is a welcome cleaner of streets and sidewalks.  Americans do not realize the important cleaning function of regular rainfall.   While I was working in the Fulbright Commission’s library last week, they brought in a book recently published by one of their alumni, about ceramics in Morocco.  Then separately I get an invitation to attend his book talk at the American Legation in Tangier. We attend the book talk on Thursday evening (yes, we bought his expensive book), in the stunningly beautiful rambling old Legation building, and I urge Barbara to walk to the other side of the Medina to a notable café -- googlemaps can lead us through the Medina, surely. Narrower and narrower alleys, with stray cats and young men standing warily, then a group of young men in the alley ahead arguing loudly...we beat a hasty retreat to our hotel by the t...

During my years teaching English literature and composition in high school, I focused on showing students the impact of stories, of literature, of words well-crafted.  Frankly I was trying to stimulate their interest in a subject often seen as boring or difficult, particularly when compared to the social and personal changes they are navigating as adolescents.  Some literature, some writing, has a strong effect on us all. So this teacher enjoyed reading the recent op-ed piece by the head of the Wri ting Center at Harvard. " learning to write matters because some day they may have something to say that really matters"

As we prepare for teaching classes and seminars, and for conversations with local representatives, we are mindful of our somewhat liminal position: though we are supervised by the embassy, we are not direct employees.  Though strict security constraints may not apply, we are still clearly representatives of the U.S.  Though we may express our personal views, in our professional realm we encourage conversation and discussion, not conflict.  As invited guests in Morocco, we honor our hosts' sensitivities while bringing our ideas to the table.  In our orientation sessions we reviewed a few topics that are particularly delicate in Morocco though they may be regular fuel for classroom discussion in the U.S.:  the position of the King and the royal family; the role of Islam as the established religion of the state; the role of the police and the F.A.R. (royal armed forces), and local laws, particularly those regarding social mores such as reproductive rights and gende...