Lewis H. Lapham (1935–2024)

It's not easy to write a book on sex that doesn't slip into the banality of pornography one one extreme, or deadened academic sterility on the other. Between the poles is that hard to define area, what the Greeks called "Eros", and this volume perhaps goes as far as any into that territory. It's both tasteful but titillating, enlightening but enjoyable. And in a few cases deeply profound.

Some of the usual suspects are here: an excerpt from Gusatave Flaubert's Madame Bovary about a romp in a show more carriage around Paris "sealed tighter than a tomb and tossing like a ship." Edith Wharton writes one of the hottest passages this side of 1919 from Beatrice Palmato, "that strong, fiery muscle that they used, in their old joke, to call his third hand." Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch makes a dark appearance in From Venus in Furs, forever immortalized as the namesake of 'masochism'. And of course Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita has an excerpt, along with an essay by Francine Prose in retrospect, suggesting that despite the distastefulness of pedophilia, the book transcends the subject matter and leads to a greater sense of compassion.

Popular culture sources are more prevalent in this issue including the lyrics from the 1944 song "Baby, It's Cold Outside" ("I really can't stay"), which is an excellent coda to Anatole Broyard's excerpt on the awkwardness of courtship in the 1940's.The 1967 movie The Graduate makes an appearance, how good it is in print "Get away from that door. Let me out!" Another movie transcript excerpt that transfers well to reading is from 1959's North By Northwest, "What do you recommend? /The brook trout. A little "trouty", but quite good."

Classical sources are many. Lucian's Dialogues of Courtesans (150AD) describes a mother outing her daughter, describing her future horror in such classical grace, "shall I have to sleep with the ugly one's too? Of course you will dear." Lucretius in On the Nature of Things (58BC) is an angry but poetic rant against the double standard. It begins "Men are blinded by their appetites / And grant their loves ones graces they don't have". Petronius from the Satyricon (61AD) describes his illicit seduction of a friends son, but the tables soon turn, "Don't you want to do it again?". Procopius in The Secret History gives the famous account of the harlot Theodora who seduced Justinian the Great. Her epic scale libido changed history as described by William Rosen in the "What If..?" essay. The Karma Sutra excerpt on how women get rid of men is funny, and frighting when reflected on ones self.

Contemporary authors include Phillip Roth, who describes his younger adventures of self discovery, "half my waking life spent locked behind my bathroom door, firing my wad down the toilet". Junot Diaz (who recently won the Pulitzer) has a novelistic 2-page story called "Alma" (2007) about the incontinent sex life of a teenage Dominican and his girlfriend with "an ass that could drag the moon out of orbit."

Simone de Beauvoir's passage from The Second Sex (1949) is profound. If there was ever an explanation of what women (and men) really want, this would be it. These two pages really opened my eyes, it was the right thing at the right time. Although Beauvoir writes non-fiction, what she is saying is fully realized in living color in Flannery O'Conner's short story "Good Country People" (1955). The two make a perfect pair.

--Review by Stephen Balbach, via CoolReading (c) 2008 cc-by-nd show less

Just a really fun read. Full of those fun legal trivia that is bound to entertain law students, lawyers and those who dislike lawyers (in other words, the entire universe of human beings). Where else would you learn that Lincoln started to study law because he found Blackstone's Commentaries in a barrel he bought? Or that Blackstone himself only practiced law for 6 years before retiring because he felt like he "had a little something called principle"? The book is full of fun little cocktail show more tidbits like that.

Substance-wise I really enjoyed the juxtaposition of art with the works. The book is really a collection of short works. In particular, I appreciated the fact that the authors and their short biography was put at the end of the work cited. At least, speaking for myself, I have a tendency (though I try to fight it) to dismiss the work of authors I dislike too quickly. By putting the author at the end, I have often been surprised about agreeing with an author that I might have otherwise dismissed too hastily.

The selection is interesting, focusing on broader notions of justice and its relationship to the law. There are pieces that hold up the law as sacred, necessary for government, and others that critique the law as a tool of the powerful, the rich (and much of the surprise is how old these themes are and how many cultures these themes span). Much of the work in here is probably more akin to political philosophy than law, but to some that's a strength not a weakness. The collection includes historically interesting works, like Napoleon's letter to his brother to create a legal code, Gibbon's explanation of Justinian's legal code, Galileo's trial, or Anne Boleyn's letter asking for mercy (she was denied that mercy). There are longer essays on topics as topical as the Trump administration, and the power of the state (in particular, modern policing) or as tangental as Samuel Johnson's interest in the law. There's a particular cosmopolitain flair to the selections made. There are works from the great enlightenment thinkers like Montesquieu, to medieval Arthur legends, to Chinese legalists (Han Fei), apartheid South Africa, to Ottoman legal scholars. I enjoyed in particular the side by side comparison of Ginsburg's celebration of the role of women in the law with Al-Mawardi's stern explanation for why women should not practice law.

I do have a few general qualifications. For one the selection is clearly not made by a lawyer (this is probably a good thing). It includes little important case law, even the important ones like Brown, Marbury, or Miranda. Instead, the case law included mostly are there to serve a whimsical purpose, for example Nix v. Hedden, that held for the purposes of the Tariff Act of 1883, a tomato is a vegetable. In fact, one can tell that this is not written by a lawyer by reading the short epilogue. It notes that "the decision would seem to legally preclude" states from declaring the tomato their state fruit. Even a law student could tell you that the holding of Nix is almost certainly limited to the Tariff Act of 1883. The Supreme Court does not announce by fiat that the tomato is a vegetable for all legal purposes (let alone the federalism implications of doing that for state law), only that for the purposes of the Tariff Act of 1883, a tomato will be taxed like a vegetable. If the epilogue is supposed to be ironic and not serious, that irony is lost on this law student. It is however, a bit of a shame. The truly "great" cases are not just great only for their reasoning but typically for the beautiful language that so perfectly embodies the great principles of the law and justice. For example in first amendment law, "If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith" or "one man's vulgarity is another's lyric". Additionally, while most of the selections are still relevant today, there are a few selections that try to conceive of laws as similar to those that govern nature. Almost no one seriously thinks that the physical laws of nature are analogous to legal structures after Hume. Perhaps I'm nit-picking, I am after-all a law student first and foremost. show less

A mostly interesting collection of excerpts, anecdotes, images, and charts on the themes of work and idleness, from Egypt circa 1160 BCE to 1844 Paris and 21st c. Minnesota. The writers and artists represented include Pliny the Elder, Charles Mingus, Machiavelli, Chekhov, Rabelais, Gloria Steinem, Mark Twain, Roberta Victor, Ôyama Shirô, Olaudah Equiano, Pieter Bruegel, Miguel Rio Banco, & Doris Ulman. The range of voices, vocations, and localities reveals the multiplicity of values and show more meanings ascribed to human labor and leisure since ancient times, with something for everyone.

I also had personal reasons to be suspicious of tool collecting. Although I come from a family of insufferably handy men—men able to wire a house, rebuild a transmission, frame a wall without calling an expert or consulting a book—I am profoundly unhandy. By the traditional measures of American manhood, I am, essentially, a Frenchwoman. (Donovan Hohn, “Lost Symbols”)

Lagunitas Censored Copper Ale
Tröegs Sunshine Pils show less

"States of War" is the inaugural issue of a new quarterly journal Lapham's Quarterly edited by Lewis Lapham, former Harper's Magazine editor. Although packaged as a journal/magazine about current issues, it's really a collection of "primary sources" - roughly defined as material contemporary to the time, such as memoirs, speeches, transcripts and poems. These kinds of "readers" are not big sellers outside of academia, so the idea of a dressed up history reader in the newsstand alongside GQ show more and Time seems at first fiscally foolish and intellectually audacious. Some critics, such as Sara Irvy in The New York Times (December 31, 2007), are skeptical that dead voices applied to current events will find a popular audience, and that Lapham (now in his 70s) is associating himself with great names as a sort of self-published career epitaph. Forget the critics, he is on to something surprisingly good, Lapham's Quarterly turns out to be one of the best things I've read in years. Given the luminary contributors, perhaps it is only surprising no one did it sooner. I'll examine those authors in more detail below, but first some thoughts on the work as a whole.

What a delight to read primary sources with a common theme from all periods of history in bite-size easily digestible pieces, vetted and organized by professionals for a non-professional audience. Reading primary sources is studying history at the cellular level, most of us learn about history through more holistic but less immediate secondary sources, such as the latest history book by Simon Schama or a History Channel documentary. Primary sources are often left to the professionals or serious history obsessive to decipher, quote and explain the raw material. We also naturally feel a sense of superiority about our own "modern" times - we perceive ourselves at the height of progress, the evidence is all around from the cars we drive to the nightly theater on TV - consequently we tend to distance ourselves from past voices when it comes to problems of the day. Lapham's Quarterly succeeds in breaking through this barrier by presenting sources in non-chronological order along thematic lines - it doesn't matter when something was written, it can have universal and immortal value when it speaks to the greater truth of common human experience.

"States of War" examines the universal human experience of war. The 220 page journal is composed of three main sections: a seven-page introduction by Lapham, 174 pages of primary source excerpts, and 30-pages of four essays by contemporary historians. The heart of the journal is the middle section, the source excerpts, which is further segmented into four sections: "Calls to Arms", "Rules of Engagement", "Field Reports" and "Postmortems". I will deal with each of these separately below - each source document is anywhere from half a page to 3 pages in length, easily digestible within 5 minutes or less in most cases. Each page has at least one color picture (many full-page) and/or a boxed quote.

"Calls to Arms" is about the build-up up to war. Samples include the speech given by Pope Urban II at Clermont preaching the First Crusade; George Patton rallying his troops with an expletive-filled speech in 1944; an exchange of letters between Tsar Nicholas II and Kaiser Wilhelm II days before the start of the Great War. In total there are 24 source in this section in about 55 pages.

"Rules of Engagement" is I believe the most insightful section. The theme is how to fight war. It doesn't seem obvious at first, but in every war there are "rules" and very often warriors are faced with the contradiction of fighting to win and fighting honorably according to the precepts of the age. It is fascinating to listen in on an exchange of letters between William Sherman (Union) and John Hood (Confederate) just before Sherman decides to burn Atlanta and go on a scorched earth campaign, with Hood appealing to humanity and God. There is a devastating story of Israeli soldiers deciding what to do about a 10 year old girl who has wondered into the front lines. An excerpt from Nixon's Whitehouse Tapes as he decides if he should bomb North Vietnam and kill 100,00s of thousands of civilians, Kissinger says in effect "I don't care about the civilians, I don't the world to think of you as a butcher." Churchill musing over the use of mustard gas in WWII. In total there are 23 sources in 35 pages.

"Field Reports" are about actual combat. These are some of the most difficult documents to read because they are so violent. George Orwell describes in detail what it was like to be shot through the neck by a sniper; a Marine describes day to day life in the trenches of Peleliu, a Pacific island in WWII, where worse than the fear of death was the smell of it, and the millions of flies it produced; there is an excerpt from All Quiet on the Western Front; an excellent reconstruction of the Battle of Agincourt by modern historian John Keegan. In total there are 23 sources in 57 pages.

"Postmortem" is reflections on war. These are the most cerebral and least titillating of the bunch, a philosophically reflective quiet after the storm. Jessica Lynch tells her story to Congress, saying she was not the hero the press made her out to be. Kurt Vonnegut sees war as an addiction. Eisenhower cautions against the military industrial complex and Wilfred Owen warns "Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!" This section has 18 sources in about 40 pages.

Perhaps what makes this collection so good is its ambiguity, there are pro-war and anti-war pieces, optimistic and pessimistic pieces - war is a complex and multi-faceted part of the human experience. In summary, I can not overstate my enthusiasm for this inaugural issue - many of the sources are unforgettable and will live with me forever. Although costly for a "magazine", if the same content had been published as a book, I would have paid $30 for it - it's a bargain at $15 and will happily find a home on my bookshelf (dog-eared and marked up).

--Review by Stephen Balbach, via CoolReading (c) 2008 cc-by-nd show less