Book Review - period ended 6.15.2006

Book Review/Isolation/Tyler, Anne/New Fiction/Atlantic Online/New York/NY/USA/7-Jun-06//... Tyler, who was raised among various Quaker communities and who turned eleven before she first used a telephone, understands the powerful magic of self-imposed isolation like no other writer publishing today. Digging to America succeeds on many levels—as a satire of millennial parenting, a tribute to autumn romances, and, most important, an exploration of our risible (though poignant) attempts to welcome otherness into our midst. ...

Book Review/Quaker History/Meekness/Madison, Dolley/A Perfect Union: Dolley Madison and the Creation of the American .../St. Louis Post-Dispatch/St. Louis/MO/USA/10-Jun-06//How to explain Dolley Madison's success as first lady? Not by her Quaker origins, it would seem, for her family prized meekness, femininity and passivity. ...
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Book Review/Quaker History/Penn, William/An Imperial Divergence/Wall Street Journal /New York/NY/USA/2-Jun-06//.. illuminating. Quaker William Penn (1644-1718) defended religious freedom in colonial Pennsylvania. Some were indeed circumstantial. ...

Book Review/Religious Faith/Human Rights/One Hundred Years of Corpses: Ferguson Sees 20th Century Anew/Bloomberg/New York/NY/USA/5-Jun-06//... We knew that the 20th century was violent. Yet when, as historian Niall Ferguson has done here, you check off the conflicts, count the corpses and ask what drove ``civilized'' men to kill, rape and torture one another in industrial quantities, our ``progressive'' age begins to look positively barbaric.

As the century began, Leon Trotsky, to this day a hero of the romantic left, scorned the ``Papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life.'' Adolf Hitler later agreed, writing that ``humanity is a ridiculous cosmic bacterium.'' So we have a Russian born to a Jewish family mocking religious conscience and a nihilistic Fuhrer using scientific terminology to deride the entire human race. That pretty much says it all. ...

Book Review/Retirement Living/Leder, Drew/'Model' was years in the making/Kentucky.com/Lexington/KY/USA/11-Jun-06//Over the course of a decade, the idea formed and reformed until they found the work of Drew Leder, a Jew turned Quaker who teaches at Loyola College in Maryland ...