“A top-notch introduction to some fairly arcane material, accessible but not patronizing.” from confronting the classics
five years exploring the contradictions within the child welfare system, seeking to find out why the 500,000 kids in American foster care were “twice as likely to develop Posttraumatic Stress Disorder” as combat veterans. Following the lives of foster children, meeting their natural and foster parents, and interviewing experts, Beam developed a broad overview. Intended to be a temporary arrangement, foster care frequently fails to lead either to resolution of the biological parents’ problems and restoration of the birth family or to the children’s permanent adoption into a new home. The most common causes for failure are birth mothers’ reluctance to sign adoption papers, foster parents’ inability to manage disturbed children and abusive foster homes. Child-protection workers are poorly paid, overworked and undertrained, Beam notes. They can be charged with criminal neglect for not removing endangered children from their homes, but sometimes they remove children unnecessarily (e.g., on suspicion of a parent’s drug use or neglect). Beam attributes some of the unnecessary removal cases to racial bias, and she reports instances of biological parents reappearing on the scene when foster parents were in the process of adopting children and of teenagers, adopted by foster parents, who ran away to their birth parents. Despite such problems, the author is optimistic that progress can be made by addressing the problems of impoverished families and providing “better schools, better libraries, after-school care, neighborhood resources—anything that touches social reform touches foster care too.” An engrossing, well-researched examination of important social issues.
enjoyable erudition: our fascination with Alexander the Great, in a version created by Rome; Cleopatra, more Greek than Egyptian; and Mark Antony, a foolish drunk. Beard also decries the difficulty of translating Thucydides and Tacitus, reveals that most of Cicero’s writing was part of a single legal case and introduces us to Philogelos’ joke book from A.D. 400. (Some things are always funny.) Beard’s reviews confirm her knowledgeable professionalism as she decries the conjectures of biographers who write “careful ancient history,” hedging all their bets with weaselly phrases such as “would have,” “no doubt” and “presumably.” While we’re at it, we learn that the ancients weren’t that great; they just had good spin doctors. Remember, the winner always writes the history. A top-notch introduction to some fairly arcane material, accessible but not patronizing. (17 illustrations)
YOUR FATWA DOES NOT APPLY HERE Untold Stories from the Fight Against Muslim Fundamentalism Bennoune, Karima Norton (384 pp.) $27.95 | Aug. 26, 2013 978-0-393-08158-9
A human rights lawyer scours the global hotspots for stories of Muslim push back to fundamentalism. Fired with a sense of outrage, Bennoune (Law/Univ. of California, Davis) applies the lessons she learned from her professor and activist father, Mahfoud Bennoune—put on the “kill list” by fundamentalist extremists in Algeria in the early 1990s—in meeting the challenge of today’s fundamentalists. Muslim fundamentalism—which the author defines carefully as an extreme-right movement that achieves political aims by manipulating religion, embracing absolutism, limiting women’s rights and other human rights, denouncing secularism and advocating the imposition of narrowly defined Sharia—actually perpetuates much more violence against Muslims than against Westerners. The fallacy entertained by the Western left, such as her former employer she takes to task, Amnesty International, is that some forms of Islamic fundamentalism can be moderate or appear palatable (skillful as such groups are in “double discourse”), such as the freshly washed face of the Islamic Brotherhood. This is mostly due to the fact that the West desperately needs to believe “someone has to control those Muslims.” However, Bennoune is uncompromising in presenting tales from the trenches of the terror imposed by these ideologically driven governments: arts groups for children in Lahore, Pakistan, targeted for bombing since music was declared haram (shameful); cinemas burned in Herat, Afghanistan; women stoned in Nigeria; polygamy encouraged by Hamas and on the rise in Gaza; journalists killed for speaking out from Algeria to Pakistan. Yet the author’s account brings to light the courageous few who do stand up at the peril of losing their lives—e.g., many women
CONFRONTING THE CLASSICS Traditions, Adventures, and Innovations Beard, Mary Liveright/Norton (320 pp.) $28.95 | Sep. 9, 2013 978-0-87140-716-0
This collection by Beard (Classics/ Cambridge Univ.; The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found, 2008, etc.) provides a traditional classical education, and there’s no need to learn a dead language. Not only do the pieces illustrate the author’s extensive knowledge of all things ancient, but they could also serve as a guide to writing highly literate book reviews. Beard’s clear way of explaining times and people we may or may not have heard of makes learning not only fun, but satisfying, and her prose style is easy without being annoyingly breezy. She examines books on the decline of Latin and Greek studies and wonders why we bother reading about their decline when we really don’t care about them anyway. By definition, classics are in decline, she notes, since they’re about the art, culture, history and philosophy of the ancient world; yet, as we see in one excellent section of this book, constantly changing views and new translations keep interest alive. Among the other topics treated with 42
|
15 june 2013
|
nonfiction
|
kirkus.com
|