The Intensity Gap

From The New Yorker:

Dannenfelser didn’t start out pro-life: she grew up in Greenville, North Carolina, in a devout Episcopalian family that was conservative but pro-choice. In college at Duke, she was a pro-choice leader of the College Republicans. After graduating, she fell in with a crowd of Catholic intellectuals who converted her first to the pro-life cause and, eventually, to Catholicism; like many converts, she found that her new faith was stronger than her old one. (Although the S.B.A. List is strictly focussed on abortion, Dannenfelser personally believes in a “culture of life,” the Catholic teaching that also opposes contraception, euthanasia, and the death penalty.) She has a knack for shifting, almost imperceptibly, between passionate paeans to human life and dispassionate analyses of political realities, often delivered with a crooked smile. “When I was really strongly pro-choice, I didn’t go to bed thinking, Oh, my gosh, women can’t be free unless they have abortion; what am I going to do tomorrow?” she says. “Now I’m going to sleep thinking, Oh, my gosh, thirty-eight hundred children are going to die tomorrow. What am I going to do to actually save some of them?” She calls this phenomenon “the intensity gap”—a simple way of understanding why her side hasn’t lost this war, and may yet win it. (Read more.)

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The Low Road

The latest in a series of mystery novels about Scotland, The Low Road once again features the intrepid newspaper reporter John McAllister, whose approaching marriage fills him with doubts. The disappearance of his friend, the Scottish Traveller Jimmy McPhee, brings McAllister out of his quiet life in the Highlands back to his former life in crime-ridden Glasgow. Thrown into the company of Mary Ballantyne, a young and lovely journalist, McAllister finds himself struggling with feelings of new love as well as with many old demons. His atheism seems to cast a darkness and hopelessness over his entire approach to life, mirrored by the grayness and grime of the post-war Glaswegian slums. His social prejudices cause him to be wary and critical of anyone who comes from what he views as the upper class. In the meantime, he must decide whether or not to go ahead with his wedding. A man of honor, McAllister tries to take the high road of decency while surrounded by cutthroats. The graphic descriptions of violence and dirt do not make the book an advertisement for a summer holiday in Glasgow. Nevertheless, the suspense keeps the reader surprised and curious to see what will happen next. Each character comes with a unique mystery, which in itself makes The Low Road a pleasure for lovers of a good thriller.

 This review originally appeared in the November 2014 edition of the Historical Novels Review.

(*NOTE: The Low Road was sent to me by the Historical Novel Society in exchange for my honest opinion.)

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Escaping Under the Berlin Wall

From The Smithsonian:

After the wall’s construction, politically sensitive youth, people whom countless failures did not dissuade, quickly concerned themselves with devising passageways between East and West Berlin. As a university student in West Berlin, Neumann had no trouble finding groups of students who were trying to open escape routes for East Germans.

“When I build a political system from which people try to escape, then I have to think about why they want to escape,” Neumann said, explaining how so many people were drawn to the cause. “And the GDR said, it doesn’t matter a bit why they’re leaving, we’ll close down and then they’ll stay here.”

The GDR’s stubbornness and authoritarian rule, unyielding to the demands or desires of their citizens, found its most apt metaphor in the Wall and its fortifications that jutted into and split apart Berlin’s neighborhoods. “Our current president [Joachim Gauck] once said that the construction of the wall turned the residents of the GDR from citizens of the state into inmates of the state,” said Ralph Kabisch, one of the men with whom Neumann built Tunnel 57. “No other idea is as perfect to describe how the wall changed things.”

Armed with this conviction, Neumann, Kabisch and more than a dozen other men burrowed down 11 meters into the ground from a bakery close to the border, and dug a rectangular opening wide enough for one person to slither through on hands and knees parallel to the ground above. This continued under Bernauer Strasse, under the 12-meter-high wall, under a signal fence that activated an alarm when touched and under the so-called “Death Strip” – a wide no man’s land carpeted by steel spikes and overseen by floodlights and guard towers – until slowly slanting up toward the surface of the earth.

The digging took five months, and it was grueling work. The men slept in the abandoned bakery for weeks-long shifts, piling up sacks of dirt in flour sacks and occasionally rinsing off the encrusted mud from their bodies with buckets of water (“We stunk,” Neumann observes now, laughingly).  They weren’t sure where exactly they would emerge on the eastern side, and considered themselves lucky when, upon breaking ground, they found themselves inside an old outhouse behind an apartment building at Strelitzer Strasse 55. (Read more.)

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The Nazis Next Door

From NPR:

In his new book, The Nazis Next Door, Lichtblau reports that thousands of Nazis managed to settle in the United States after World War II, often with the direct assistance of American intelligence officials who saw them as potential spies and informants in the Cold War against the Soviet Union. Lichtblau says there were whole networks of spy groups around the world made up of Nazis — and they entered the U.S., one by one.

"They sort of had put in their service," Lichtblau tells Fresh Air's Dave Davies. "This was their 'reward' ... for their spy service ... coming to the United States and being able to live out their lives basically with anonymity and no scrutiny."

Most Americans knew little about the Nazis among them. And then in 1979, media reports and congressional interest finally spurred the creation of a Nazi-hunting unit with the Justice Department.
That prompted the first wave of Nazi-hunting, Lichtblau says.

"You had teams of lawyers and investigators and historians at the Justice Department who began ... looking at hundreds and hundreds of names of suspected Nazis and Nazi collaborators who were living all around the country, in Queens, in Baltimore, in Florida and Chicago," he says.

And, in some cases, the CIA had scrubbed the Nazis' files, Lichtblau says.

"They actively cleansed their records," Lichtblau says. "They realized that guys who had been involved at senior levels of Nazi atrocities would not pass through immigration at the INS — and they basically removed a lot of the Nazi material from their files." (Read more.)

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Village of Secrets

Caroline Moorehead’s profound scholarship brings to light an episode of the Second World War that would have remained shrouded in the mist of legend if not for her efforts. In the mountains of eastern France, the rugged villagers of Chambon, as well as the inhabitants of the surrounding countryside, devised an ingenious network in order to hide Jewish children and others being hunted by the Gestapo. Most of the villagers and farmers belonged to various Protestant sects while others were Catholic. Their leaders saw hiding Jews as a basic human duty, not as anything heroic. In contrast to what was going on in other parts of France, where Frenchmen were collaborating with the Nazis in order to round up the Jews, most of the villagers of Chambon indeed shine forth as examples of Christian fortitude. Hiding the Jewish children did not mean merely keeping them in the attics; it meant clothing, feeding, and educating them. When the Gestapo became aware of their work, the villagers had to lead the children over the mountains into Switzerland. Many were captured, tortured and killed. Village of Secrets shows both the best and the worst of humanity.

This review originally appeared in the November 2014 edition of the Historical Novels Review.

(Village of Secrets was sent to me by the Historical Novel Society in exchange for my honest opinion.) Share

Women Explorers

From Mental Floss:

A contemporary and colleague of T.E. Lawrence (a.k.a. Lawrence of Arabia), Gertrude Bell was a writer and archaeologist who traveled all around the Middle East, Asia, and Europe. Her books gave the people of Great Britain a clear concept of the empire's outer territories and are still studied today.

An Oxford graduate who was fluent in Persian and Arabic, she met Lawrence while working in the Arab Bureau in Cairo during World War I. She's best known for her contribution to the Conference in Cairo in 1921, where the beginnings of Iraq as a nation were forged. She'd later pioneer the school of thought that relics and antiquities should be preserved in their home nations. The National Museum of Iraq was born from her efforts. (Read more.)

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Tudors Versus Stewarts

Linda Porter’s new tour de force covers ground left out of most histories of the Tudor period while not constantly rehashing well-known information. Tudors Versus Stewarts, published in the UK as Crown of Thistles, gives an in-depth look at the turbulent Stewart dynasty in the 15th and 16th centuries, and how the fluctuations of power in England influenced the Stewarts and the people of Scotland.

I learned a great deal more about the monarchs of Scotland, their dealings with the Reformation and with the Tudors, all of which build a stage for the tragic destiny of Mary Queen of Scots. The reign of Mary Stewart is placed in a fresh context in which to discover her anew. After spending time with Mary’s grandparents and great-grandparents I feel that I am finally becoming acquainted with her. One is also treated to the doings of the French court and the Empire, and Henry VIII’s endless connivances. If it was not already clear, it is now abundantly so, that having a male heir was the obsession of every monarch in Europe, to which the love of women was secondary. Porter’s research is seemingly inexhaustible for presenting intriguing new facts, along with a storyteller’s gift for a heartrending tale.

*Note: This book was sent to me by the Historical Novel Society in exchange for my honest opinion.

(This review originally appeared in the November 2014 edition of the  Historical Novels Review.) Share

The Pope's Astronomer

From Aleteia:

This week at the 46th annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division of Planetary Scientists in Tucson, Arizona, Brother Guy Consolmagno will receive one of planetary science's most prestigious awards, the Carl Sagan Medal.  The award was created in 1998 in commemoration of astronomer Carl Sagan, whose popular TV series “Cosmos” helped to generate enthusiasm for science and for space travel.  The Sagan Medal “recognizes and honors outstanding communication by an active planetary scientist to the general public, and is awarded to scientists whose efforts have significantly contributed to a public understanding of, and enthusiasm for, planetary science.”

Brother Guy is the first religious brother to receive the Sagan Medal.  The American Astronomical Society, in announcing the award last July, said that Consolmagno "occupies a unique position within our profession as a credible spokesperson for scientific honesty within the context of religious belief."

Consolmagno is one of twelve Vatican astronomers. For two decades, he has served as curator of the Vatican's extensive meteorite collection.  He's been a worldwide lecturer, and is one of four Jesuits in history to have had an asteroid named after them—4597 Consolmagno, also known to scientists as “Little Guy.”

Consolmagno has authored or co-authored several books, including his most recent "Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial" as well as "Turn Left at Orion: Hundreds of Night Sky Objects to See in a Home Telescope—And How to Find Them," "God's Mechanics: How Scientists and Engineers Make Sense of Religion," "The Heavens Proclaim: Astronomy and the Vatican," and "Brother Astronomer: Adventures of a Vatican Scientist." (Read more.)

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When Catholics Capitulate

Or even appear to capitulate. From First Things:

Creighton, like nearly all American Catholic institutions, is run by upper-middle-class Americans. They are more loyal to their class and its values than the Catholic Church, which over the last fifty years has for the most part renounced its own intellectual and moral culture. This doesn’t mean Catholic leaders lack faith. What it means is that it’s existentially painful for them to be out of sync with dominant opinion. Like all normal people, they want to avoid pain, and so they find ways to conform while pretending to be dissenters, a trick Americans perform very well. Expect more announcements that conformity to the gay liberation project doesn’t constitute “approval.” (Read more.)

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