A dystopian thriller--Part 2

While Justin Cronin had published two critically well-received novels, The Summer Guest and Mary and O’Neil, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award, he burst onto the best-seller list in 2010 with The Passage, a blockbuster dystopian novel.

That book told of a girl named Amy who is taken to a facility in Colorado, where a government experiment goes wrong and unleashes an army of deadly creatures that soon engulf America. Amy becomes the world’s best hope for survival.

The Twelve (Ballantine, $28) is the second book of a trilogy. Like The Passage, it recounts events in the present, then jumps 100 years into the future. At the beginning of the apocalyptic catastrophe, we meet three main characters: Lila, a doctor who’s expecting a baby and becomes delusional; Kittridge, a former special-ops soldier who fights the creatures called virals; and April, a teenager trying to protect her younger brother from death and destruction. They encounter one another as they navigate their way through a dangerous landscape across Kansas, Nebraska and into Iowa.

Then the narrative jumps 100 years into the future, where Amy and others try to overcome the power of the twelve original virals or vampires who control the thousands of virals that prey on the dwindling population of survivors. How these are connected to the twelve is complicated and not entirely clear to me.

The fast-paced narrative moves from one set of characters to another, an unsettling experience that nevertheless keeps one reading, longing for everything to tie together. Cronin is adept at building suspense, though with so many characters and plots, it nearly overwhelms the reader.

Of particular note is the presence of strong female characters—not only Amy but Alicia, a fighter extraordinaire, and Sara, a mother who is captured and taken to Fort Powell, Iowa, a horrific place that is like a concentration camp, and who fights to survive and save her daughter.

Cronin has said in interviews that the idea for The Passage Trilogy came from a challenge from his 8-year-old daughter to write the story of “a girl who saves the world.” From that idea he has created a whole other world with many characters and complex narratives.

This world, much of it set in the middle of the country, from Texas up to Iowa, mostly rings true, though at one point he mentions “a grid of cornfields” (not wheatfields) in western Kansas.

Cronin teaches at Rice University, and his fondness for literature comes through often. Kittridge, holed up in Denver, reads books by Faulkner, Hemingway, Twain, Fitzgerald and Melville. Cronin writes: “There was something in the pages of these books that had the power to make him feel better about things, a life raft to cling to before the dark currents of memory washed him downstream again.”

Beyond the pleasures of a well-written thriller with characters that have some complexity, reading The Twelve makes one wonder about the popularity of such dystopian novels. Perhaps it’s a way to face our fears, even when they aren’t realistic. And there’s pleasure in seeing resolution to the struggle against such deadly threats to humanity.

A final resolution, however, will have to wait for the third and final volume in Cronin’s trilogy. I’m hooked enough to want to read it.

Movies (gasp) with female leads

Ever heard of the Bechdel test? Named after the comic-strip artist and memoirist Alison Bechdel, it assesses movies according to a three-step formula. To pass the test, a film “(1) has to have at least two [named] women in it (2) who talk to each other (3) about something besides a man.”

Although a visit to the website bechdeltest.com suggests that things have been improving recently, the test underscores the reality that most films are presented primarily with male protagonists and from a male perspective.

In an article in the New York Times (“Hollywood’s Year of Heroine Worship,” Dec. 6), film critic A.O. Scott points out that 2012 has been not only a good year for movies but “a pretty good year for female heroism.”

He names some movies with female protagonists: Snow White and the Huntsman, Brave, Hunger Games, Beasts of the Southern Wild and Zero Dark Thirty. This can be misleading, though, since the top-selling movies of the year, such as The Avengers, The Dark Knight Rises, The Amazing Spider Man and Skyfall feature mostly male heroes and are geared to a male (mostly teenage) audience.

And when we get to the Oscar race for best picture, the favorites, among whom may be Argo, Flight, Lincoln and The Master, feature male leads. An exception likely will be Zero Dark Thirty, which, though it features a female lead, is about the hunt for and killing of Osama bin Laden and thus appeals to male audiences.

While there are more Hollywood movies with female leads, these parts often resemble male leads in action films—they fight and kill their enemies.

Scott laments the loss of an earlier era, when Hollywood took “pride in its ‘woman’s pictures,’ a category that embraced many of the immortal romances and melodramas of the studio era and that made actresses like Bette Davis, Joan Crawford and Ingrid Bergman into powerful industry players as well as adored stars.”

That era also included many intelligent comedies with strong female characters. Such films are rarer today.

One place to broaden one’s exposure to female roles is in foreign films, either through Netflix or other sites. Many French films have strong female leads that aren’t under 30.

And if you look at British TV shows, you often find female leads who are older, not always strikingly beautiful and don’t look anorexic.

Beyond simply finding films with female leads, it is rewarding to find films with interesting characters. In such films, the characters develop and face complex situations beyond merely seeking revenge for some despicable act.

Scott offers some examples from this year. One is Amour, which won Canne’s Palme d’Or last May, tells of a couple in their 80s. Scott writes: “Anne, who is a wife, a mother, a musician and a teacher and whose decline and death, in the company of her faithful husband, Georges, constitute as intensely particular and as grandly universal a story as you could want. Anne is completely (and painfully) human. She is more than the sum of her domestic, artistic and professional roles, even though she bears the traces, in her extraordinary face, of the various roles she has performed.”

Films can serve to show us life and introduce us to new understandings of our life in this world. Portraying that world too exclusively from a male perspective does not serve us. 

Invest in infrastructure now or pay much more later

After every natural disaster, it seems, there is talk about being better prepared for the next one. Yet little usually happens. People often move back to dangerous settings, and U.S. infrastructure continues to deteriorate.

True to form, ideas and promises emerged after Hurricane Sandy devastated much of the East Coast. In his Newsweek article “Everyday Armageddon” (Nov.26/Dec. 3, 2012), David Cay Johnston writes: “If we are to avoid the next major catastrophe—and it will come—then we have to start paying the bill now.”

Johnston notes that “America spends just 2.4 percent of its economy on infrastructure, compared with 5 percent in Europe.”

As New York and New Jersey (among other states) look at rebuilding, their governors and others are calling for a clear strategy. New York mayor Michael Bloomberg says, “You cannot build a skyscraper economy on a foundation designed for a farmhouse; it will collapse under its own weight.”

Johnston points out that if we fail to make sufficient investment in infrastructure, we can expect bursting dams after heavy rains, falling highway and railway bridges, sinkholes, massive electrical outages, more flooding, forest (and urban) fires and commutes disrupted for weeks, maybe months, as rail lines, roads and tunnels are rebuilt.

He goes on to suggest 12 projects “where investing corporate and tax dollars would not only pay off now by creating jobs and making the economy more efficient but would save lives while reducing future costs.”

Here is a summary of his 12 projects:

1. Accelerate replacement of natural gas pipelines. During Sandy, leaking gas fueled hundreds of fires.

2. Stop AT&T and Verizon from shutting down the old copper-wire telephone system, the only telecommunications that work when the electric grid goes down and cellphone-tower batteries run out of juice.

3. Demand that electric utilities replace power poles as they wear out and maintain equipment, especially changing oils in large transformers before they congeal and stick, to reduce long-term costs.

4. Increase tree trimming to prevent downed electrical lines during storms and move more lines underground to make the electric grid more reliable.

5. Promote smaller grids instead of the vast multistate grids now being developed that can throw millions of people into darkness because of one mistake or even one fallen limb.

6. Develop a 10-year plan to tear down, rebuild or strengthen every dam rated risky by the civil-engineering society.

7. Replace within a decade every large water and sewer main past its predicted life, with an emphasis on the largest pipes.

8. Place big warning signs on every highway bridge, advising motorists of when the structure should have been rebuilt or replaced and when, if ever, work is scheduled to begin.

9. Invest in riprap seawalls that extend perpendicular from the shoreline into the sea. These structures capture drifting sand and build up and maintain sand dunes and the vegetation that holds them in place.

10. Replace rail lines running through marshlands with elevated structures. This would limit commuter service disruptions after future storms.

11. Rebuild marshes and other natural barriers, like oyster reefs, that absorb the shock of storms.

12. Require detailed emergency plans by natural-gas, electric, water and telecommunications utilities as a condition of keeping their licenses.

Prevention is cost-effective and the wisest course. But the chances our short-term-thinking leaders will take such a course are slim.

The preferred story

Among the major films released this year, there may be none more overtly religious than Life of Pi, directed by Ang Lee and based on Yann Martel’s best-selling book, which won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2002.

The book and the film, which is remarkably faithful to the book, are about storytelling and about belief. In both the book and film, the adult Pi (Irrfan Khan) tells his story to a skeptical Canadian novelist (Rafe Spall). He recounts growing up in India, where his father owned a small zoo.

We learn how Pi gets his name and follow his religious pursuits as he adopts his mother’s Hinduism, then Catholicism, then Islam. His atheistic father emphasizes the importance of science and reasoning, and Pi adopts that as well. For him, the world is a vast body to be explored with curiosity and love.

Then economic troubles arrive, and Pi’s father must sell the zoo. He books his family and the animals on a cargo ship bound for Canada. A storm sinks the ship, and the teenage Pi (Suraj Sharma) alone survives among the humans. He finds refuge on a 26-foot-long lifeboat and is soon joined by a wounded Zebra, a vicious hyena, an orangutan and a 450-pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. In a short time, only Pi and the tiger remain.

Their journey together make up the greater part of the narrative, and one of the amazing accomplishments of Martel’s novel is to maintain the reader’s keen interest over such a limited scope. The miracle of the story is that the boy survives his journey across the Pacific with a Bengal tiger. The miracle of the storytelling is that the author pulls this off.

The film does, too, though not as well. There are points where it felt long, and I wanted relief from the tension. But while the book focuses on Pi’s ponderings about life and faith, Lee uses some astounding images to beguile us. At times the water’s surface is like a mirror that reflects the sky so that Pi seems to be both underwater and above the clouds. He also shows Pi’s hallucinations as he struggles with thirst, hunger and fear.

Perhaps the film’s crowning achievement is the digital magic it uses to show a tiger on a boat with a boy. It looks so real, down to the smallest detail. We even see the tiger grow thinner as the food disappears. If this film isn’t nominated for an Oscar for best special effects, something is wrong.

The novelist has come to Pi because he was told that Pi would tell him a story that would make him believe in God—a tall order that sounds anathema to skeptics.

After Pi reaches land and is recovering in a Mexican hospital, two representatives of the Korean company that owned the ship ask him why the ship sank. Pi doesn’t know but tells his story. The two men say that no one will believe that story. So Pi makes up another story that replaces the animals with people from the ship and describes how he alone came to be left.

He tells the men they can choose which story they want to use. The novelist asks him, Which story is true? Pi says, Which story do you prefer?

Life of Pi is a fable about storytelling and belief. We choose the stories we want to believe. Our faith in God is not based on fact but on belief, just as not having faith in God is based on belief, on believing a different story.

I imagine theists and non-theists will enjoy this film for different reasons. Both will enjoy the riveting story of survival and the humor that runs throughout. But non-theists may not like the lesson inherent in the story.

Either way, it’s a well-made film.

A Thanksgiving lesson

Yesterday I gave a ride to two friends from Circles of Hope, an organization I volunteer for that works to eliminate poverty one family at a time. One of the friends is my Circle leader. Both women are in poverty and working hard to get by.
Let's call them R and J. We stop in Wichita at Open Door, a ministry of the United Methodist Church. Those qualified--and they have the paperwork to prove it--receive a turkey (size based on how many are in the person's household) and a sack of groceries. Although there are many people there, it's well organized, and the process moves quickly. We're there about 20 minutes. As we drive away and head to another wonderful organization--Victory in the Valley, which offers help to poor people who have cancer (J is being treated for cancer)--J comments that because of  some good fortune, they have an extra turkey.
A few days earlier, J's daughter and R stopped at an organization in Newton, where we all live (20 miles north of Wichita), and learned they had 10 turkeys left, so the two young women took one home. This is the extra that J was referring to. The three of them, plus a few others, planned to have Thanksgiving dinner together today.
I responded to J's comment of having an extra turkey by saying, "Eat it. Leftovers are good." I'm thinking, These people are barely scraping by each month, depending on the services of churches and others who give out boxes of food each month, since their disability payments (R is also recovering from cancer) aren't nearly enough.
Then R says, without hesitation, "We'll give it (the extra turkey) to someone who doesn't have one." And she mentions someone she knows who needs one.
She said this matter-of-factly, without accusation. Still, I felt humbled, awakened to my natural tendency to just accept more for myself instead of thinking of others.
Scripture commands (or suggests, if that's more acceptable) us to be thankful at all times. This is difficult, to say the least. While I believe in this practice (and fail at it regularly), I also believe it's a good practice to have special days for offering thanks. Like today.
So let me offer these thanks:
• I'm thankful for the many organizations that give food to people in need. And the ones I witnessed yesterday do this cheerfully, without looking down on those they're serving.
• I'm thankful to be friends with people in poverty. They have so much to teach me, and they are so patient with my blindness to people's needs. They're always thankful for the help I offer, and they're always reluctant to ask for help. They are courageous and inspiring.
 • I'm thankful today for family and friends, and I pray for the many in our land who don't have people close by to share a meal with.
Happy Thanksgiving.

Women confront gender-based violence

The linked problems of sex trafficking and forced prostitution, gender-based violence and maternal mortality claim one woman every 90 seconds, according to a four-hour documentary film shown on PBS stations in October and available online at pbs.org/halfthesky. On the other hand, it is women and girls who are doing the most to change such human-rights abuses across the globe.

Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide is inspired by the book of the same name by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, who are New York Times reporters.

The film visits 10 countries and follows Kristof and celebrity activists America Ferrera, Diane Lane, Eva Mendes, Meg Ryan, Gabrielle Union and Olivia Wilde as it tells the stories of inspiring, courageous individuals.

Kristof and WuDunn, who lived in China and reported on events there, became aware that China aborted 39,000 female fetuses in one year, and no one was reporting this. Their focus on human-rights abuses against women grew from there and led to their book.

In the film, Kristof and Mendes visit Sierra Leone, a country recovering from a civil war that ended in 2002. However, the incidences of rape that increased during the war continued afterward, reinforced by a culture where shame falls on the survivor rather than the perpetrator and where laws fail to prosecute rapists.

Kristof and Mendes talk with the director of a rape crisis center, who says they’ve seen 9,000 survivors in eight years, and 26 percent of these were under 12 years old. She shows them a 3-year-old who had been raped.

Kristof and Mendes talk with a 14-year-old who says she was raped by her “uncle,” who is a pastor. Others have also said he attacked them. They go with the police, who arrest the man. They talk with him, and he denies the charge.

In the end, he is released, and the girl’s father expels her and her mother from his home because she brought shame on the family.

The lesson is that rape is unfortunate but forgivable, while being raped is punishable. Less than 1 percent of the rapes reported to authorities are prosecuted.

Next, Kristof and Ryan visit Cambodia and meet the amazing Somaly, who runs an organization that rescues girls from brothels. Somaly, who speaks four languages, was taken from her village at age 10 or 11 and sold to a brothel at age 12 and brutalized. Later she escaped and now helps girls in similar  circumstances.

While the problem can feel overwhelming, she says, “everyone can do something.” The most important tool in fighting sex trafficking and other gender-based violence is education.

The film next visits Vietnam, where the organization Room to Read helps girls gain access to good education. One girl bikes 17 miles to her school.

In many poor families across the world, girls are kept at home to work, while boys are more likely to receive education beyond the fifth grade. One Vietnamese father, whose wife had died, sacrifices in order for his daughter to attend school.

The film notes that schools are often a safe haven, that education is transformative. It’s also a great investment in a community because “when you educate a girl, you educate a village.”

This documentary is both hard to watch and inspiring. It presents a huge problem long ignored by most of us, yet it offers hope. The film is definitely worth seeing. 

Should students grade teachers?

Schools and teachers have been under scrutiny, pressured to produce higher test scores among their students. Besides producing higher stress among teachers and students, results haven’t been that great.

A more recent emphasis has been on evaluating teachers, since it’s often observed that good teachers help produce the best students. But how best to evaluate teachers and find ways for them to improve?

An article in the October issue of The Atlantic describes a new approach that looks promising. In “Why Kids Should Grade Teachers,” Amanda Ripley looks at a survey being tried by school officials in a handful of cities.

The idea seems so simple and obvious, it’s a wonder it hasn’t been tried earlier: Ask students to evaluate teachers. Some teachers may cringe at first at such a suggestion, but research has shown, Ripley writes, that “if you asked kids the right questions, they could identify, with uncanny accuracy, their most—and least—effective teachers.”

This approach is much better than the reliance on test scores, as in No Child Left Behind. While “test scores can reveal when kids are not learning,” Ripley writes, “they can’t reveal why. They might make teachers relax or despair—but they can’t help teachers improve.”

The origin of this approach goes back a decade to a Harvard economist named Ronald Ferguson, who went to a small school district in Ohio to figure out why black kids did worse on tests than white kids. Eventually he gave the kids a survey that wasn’t about their entire school but about their specific classrooms. “The same group of kids answered differently from one classroom to the next,” Ripley writes, “but the differences didn’t have as much to do with race as he’d expected; in fact, black students and white students largely agreed.”

The difference was in the teachers. “In one classroom, the kids said they worked hard, paid attention and corrected their mistakes; they liked being there, and they believed that the teacher cared about them,” Ripley writes. “In the next classroom, the very same kids reported that the teacher had trouble explaining things and didn’t notice when students failed to understand a lesson.”

Some years later, after the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched a massive project to study 3,000 teachers in seven cities and learn what made effective or ineffective, Thomas Kane, a colleague of Ferguson’s, decided to include student perceptions.

The responses helped predict which classes would have the most test-score improvement at the end of the year. Ripley writes: “In math, for example, the teachers rated most highly by students delivered the equivalent of about six more months of learning than teachers with the lowest ratings.”

Students are better at evaluating teachers not because they’re smarter but because they’ve had months to form an opinion, as opposed to 30 minutes, as is the case with many evaluations. And there are more of them—dozens, as opposed to a single principal.

The surveys do not ask, Do you like your teacher? Instead, they ask what students saw. Teachers learned that what mattered most was having control over the classroom and making it a challenging place.

This evaluation is not only more effective, it’s less expensive. The shorter version of the survey, used in the Gates study, is available for public use and costs less than $5 per student to implement. Employing professionals to watch classes and give teachers feedback multiple times a year costs about $97 per student.

Ripley interviewed a high school student who took part in a survey. She said, “Everybody knows the good teachers from the ones who don’t really want to be in the job.” We just need to ask them.

Everything is connected

Maybe the best novel I’ve read this year was actually published in 2004. It’s Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. He also wrote one of my favorite novels from last year, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. So when I learned that Cloud Atlas was being made into a movie, I thought, I want to see this.

You may have seen articles about how this book seemed impossible to film. It is told in six stories, beginning in the 19^th century, then moving to 1931, then 1973, then the present (2004 in the book, 2012 in the movie), then 2144, then the far future, in a postapocalyptic time. The first half of the narrative moves in that order, telling half of each story, then goes in the opposite direction in the second half, ending in the 19^th century. It’s an intriguing setup that Mitchell pulls off, using different styles, even different genres, for each story. He also connects the stories in subtle ways as he develops overarching themes.

Lana and Andy Wachowski, who directed the Matrix films, and Tom Tykwer, who directed Run, Lola, Run, wrote and directed the film Cloud Atlas. Rather than tell the stories the way Mitchell did, they divided up the entire narrative into many scenes and moved back and forth among the six stories.

I’ve read some pretty negative reviews of the film, which I saw yesterday, so I went in without high expectations. But I liked it. I thought the editing throughout was excellent and at times ingenious. There were some miscues, and the Wachowskis (I’m guessing; I don’t know who directed which parts) are too in love with futuristic chase scenes, but overall I thought it was good.

A group of excellent actors play multiple roles, often in elaborate makeup (probably an Oscar nomination here): Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving, Susan Sarandon and Hugh Grant being the best known.

The movie makes the themes more overt than does the book. One overarching theme is that everything is connected (I realize that's a cliché), and the film shows how the actions of individuals, often against repressive systems, reverberate through time. It also plays up superficial connections, such as a birthmark that appears on a character in each story.

The book and film help us think about the sweep of human history, the constant struggle for not only survival but meaning. They ask, What does it mean to be human? Is there some life beyond death? Do our lives recur through history?

I don’t know how well a viewer of the film who has not read the book will be able to follow the story (stories). Even if it is confusing, though, the overall effect of the film is powerful. Having read the book and knowing the basic narrative, I could focus on the film’s images, the acting, the emotional impact.

It may not be my favorite film of 2012 (there are still many films to see), but it’s a contender.

A scientist's experience of heaven

While many see compatibilities between science and religion, many others see conflict. An Oct. 15 article in Newsweek, “My Proof of Heaven” by Eben Alexander, tries to bridge that conflict in a dramatic way.

Alexander is a neurosurgeon who has taught at Harvard Medical School and other universities. He tells of an experience he had four years ago when he awoke with an intense headache. “Within hours,” he writes, “my entire cortex—the part of the brain that controls thought and emotion and that in essence makes us human—had shut down.” Doctors at the local hospital determined that he had contracted a rare bacterial meningitis that had penetrated his cerebrospinal fluid, and the bacteria were eating his brain.

For seven days he lay in a deep coma, and his higher-order brain functions were totally offline. Then, as his doctors weighed whether or not to discontinue treatment, his eyes popped open.

Alexander writes about his experience as a scientist because he knows how stories like his sound to skeptics. He notes that while he considered himself a Christian before this happened, it was “more in name than in actual belief.”

But his experience changed that. He writes: “There is no scientific explanation for the fact that while my body lay in coma, my mind—my conscious, inner self—was alive and well.” He describes “a larger dimension of the universe: a dimension I’d never dreamed existed and which the old, precoma me would have been more than happy to explain was a simple impossibility.”

Alexander is not the first to describe such an experience, but he is one of the few who does so as a scientist, and a neurosurgeon at that. And, as far as he knows, no one before him ever traveled to this dimension “(a) while their cortex was completely shut down, and (b) while their body was under minute medical observation.”

This is important because the chief arguments against near-death experiences “suggest that these experiences are the results of minimal, transient or partial malfunctioning of the cortex.”

His cortex wasn’t malfunctioning; it wasn’t even functioning. “According to current medical understanding of the brain and mind,” Alexander writes, “there is absolutely no way that I could have experienced even a dim and limited consciousness during my time in the coma, much less the hyper-vivid and completely coherent odyssey I underwent.”

He goes on to describe his experience, with frequent disclaimers about language not being able to adequately capture what happened.

The message that “went through [him] like a wind” had three parts. He summarizes them thus:

“You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever.”

“You have nothing to fear.”

“There is nothing you can do wrong.”

Regardless of Alexander’s science credentials, most nonbelievers, I imagine, will simply deny the truthfulness of his experience, believing (yes, having faith) that some nondivine explanation will eventually emerge.

Many Christians, I imagine, will also deny his message because it’s too inclusive. It lets people off the hook. It doesn’t punish evildoers.

Alexander writes that the universe he experienced in his coma is “the same one that both Einstein and Jesus were speaking of in their (very) different ways.”

I’ve read (and heard) other accounts like Alexander’s, and each time I feel encouraged. But I also know it comes down belief. While science feeds our knowledge, what we decide about the universe and our place in it comes down to faith.

An exemplary peacemaker

Two years ago, in August 2010, 10 aid workers were found killed—execution style—in a remote pass in Afghanistan. One of those killed was Dan Terry, who for almost 40 years had navigated not only the roads but the various factions of that land, forging peace and reconciliation between sworn enemies and helping bring medical care, food and education to many isolated villages.

I’ve just read the galleys of a book due to be published in a few weeks with the bold title: Making Friends Among the Taliban. It comes from Herald Press and is written by Jonathan P. Larson, a friend of Terry’s who has penned a well-told account of this remarkable man.

Larson eschews straight chronology and uses multiple stories to show how Terry overcame barriers and exemplified loving one’s enemies. While we tend to demonize the Taliban (and even more with the recent shooting of Malala Yousafzai), Terry made friends with many of them.

He made a point of drinking tea with shuras (elders’ councils) in the villages he visited and listening to their concerns. He did not try to ramrod his ideas for how to improve the lives of Afghans but let them initiate how to help themselves.

One Afghan called him “more Muslim than Muslims” because of his self-sacrificial service to others. Others affectionately called him Pagal (crazy), which referred to his often fearless faith and weird behavior that helped break down barriers. He was held captive and made friends with his captor. He often intervened in tense situations, using humor to dissolve conflict.

Larson makes clear that Terry had his foibles, and his colleagues in the International Assistance Mission did not always agree with his methods or his failure to follow protocol. His prophetic tendencies often grated on those trying to administer aid.

After Terry died, messages of condolence came from the governments of Afghanistan and the United States and from faith groups abroad. But more tellingly, at his funeral, a “silent throng of drivers and mechanics, welders and farmers, laborers and cleaners, shopkeepers, sweepers and launderers … came in wordless, eloquent testimony.”

He preached peace by living it. He said, “In the end, we are all knotted into the same carpet.” And he showed that “all” included enemies, like the Taliban, as well as friends.

The massacre was denounced by the local Taliban and was likely done by a group funded from sources outside Afghanistan, though Larson leaves that question unanswered. While his death seems so unjust and wasteful, Terry’s story, as told here, is a powerful witness. It’s one worth reading.

An Ojibwe storyteller

Louise Erdrich has created an oeuvre that is unique in American fiction. She combines excellent prose with captivating storytelling while unveiling a community much neglected, that of Native Americans. While other good writers address this diverse group, she has done so now with 14 novels, along with short stories, poetry, nonfiction and children’s books.

While her novels are primarily stories, they also provide information and greater understanding of Native people. The Round House, her latest, is no exception. Set primarily in 1988, it tells the story of the rape of an Ojibwe woman, Geraldine Coutts, and what follows.

Set in a North Dakotan community where Erdrich set her 2008 novel, The Plague of Doves, the story is told by Geraldine’s 13-year-old son, Joe, some 20 years later.

Geraldine is a lawyer, and Bazil, her husband and Joe’s father, is a judge. An important element in the story is “the tangle of laws that hinder prosecution of rape on many reservations,” as Erdrich writes in an Afterword. There she mentions a 2009 report by Amnesty International that included these statistics: “1 in 3 Native women will be raped in her lifetime (and that figure is certainly higher as Native women often do not report rape); 86 percent of rapes and sexual assaults upon Native women are perpetrated by non-Native men; few are prosecuted.”

Geraldine is traumatized and reluctant to give any details about the attack. Bazil wants to know just where it happened, because if didn’t happen on reservation land, the rapist cannot be prosecuted.

Meanwhile, Joe is anxious to find his mother’s attacker. He and his three friends search the area near the Round House, a sacred space and a place of worship for the Ojibwe that sits near the border of the reservation. He uncovers details about his mother’s attack but also learns secrets about the tribe’s history.

Erdrich grounds her story in a time and place and includes details about Indian life: “the only way you can tell an Indian is an Indian is to look at that person’s history.” One character says, “You go to your doodem first. … Find the ajijaak,” noting that Joe’s father and grandfather were ceremoniously taken into the crane clan, or Ajijaak. And the crane was Joe’s “doodemag,” his luck.

Later, the narrator explains that “an Ojibwe person’s clan meant everything at one time and no one didn’t have a clan, thus you knew your place in the world and your relationship to all other beings.”

At times, this kind of detail feels intrusive, as if imparting an anthropology lesson that interrupts the story. Yet it also feels needed. Even if this borders on being didactic, it’s good to learn such details.

Erdrich also shows her poetic skills, as in this passage: “Through some refraction of brilliance the wings arched up from the slender body. Then the feathers took fire so the creature was consumed by light.”

Much of the novel is taken up with Joe and his friends’ exploits as rambunctious boys. They encounter danger and learn surprising things about the local priest. The book is a coming-of-age story as well as a mystery. And while the suspense eventually builds and comes to a riveting end, the narrative meanders too much along the way.

Although The Round House is not among Erdrich’s best, it is one more piece of a remarkable body of work that deserves reading. She is one of our literature’s treasures.

Racism in hiding

Mennonite Church USA, like other Christian denominations, is committed to becoming an anti­racist church. One of the things that makes that difficult is that racism, like many systems and like the “powers” described in the New Testament, is pernicious and likes to remain hidden from our awareness. Part of becoming antiracist is keeping our awareness of racism alive.

The opposite of that awareness is denial, and such denial runs rampant in our society. We like to pretend we aren’t as racist as we may be. A recent article in The Atlantic (September) helps call us to task.

In “Fear of a Black President,” Ta-Nehisi Coates, a senior editor at the magazine, writes that as our first black president, Barack Obama has avoided mention of race almost entirely. He goes on: “In having to be ‘twice as good’ and ‘half as black,’ Obama reveals the false promise and double standard of integration.”

The fact that Americans elected a black president is often cited as evidence that we have moved beyond race as a factor in our politics. But that notion is shown to be false.

This does not mean that opposing policies of the Obama administration signifies racism. Racism is a much subtler system.

Coates points to an irony of the United States: “For most of American history, our political system was premised on two conflicting facts—one, an oft-stated love of democracy; the other, an undemocratic white supremacy inscribed at every level of government.”

Coates shows this irony in the events around the death of Trayvon Martin last February. As soon as Obama addressed the parents and said, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” the case moved from a kind of national mourning to what Coates calls “racialized political fodder,” and he gives numerous examples.

Historically, Coates writes, African Americans have been limited to protest and agitation in addressing the disconnect between democracy and white supremacy. Now, when Obama pledged to “get to the bottom of what happened” in the Martin case, he was not appealing to federal power—he was employing it. “The power was black,” Coates writes, “and, in certain quarters, was received as such.”

“Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred,” Coates writes. “It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others.” He notes several studies that have shown the role of race in voting patterns and in opposition to and support for health-care reform. After Obama’s election, the rhetoric of fear became much more prevalent. Signs at Tea Party rallies read, “Obama plans white slavery,” and one congressman complained that Obama “favors the black person.”

The double standard of having to be twice as good “haunts and constrains the Obama presidency, warning him away from candor about America’s sordid birthmark.” Coates points out that in the first two years as president, “Obama talked less about race than any other Democratic president since 1961.”

The myth of “twice as good,” writes Coates, “holds that African Americans—enslaved, tortured, raped, discriminated against and subjected to the most lethal homegrown terrorist movement in American history—feel no anger toward their tormentors.”

Coates makes clear he does not agree with all of Obama’s views. He particularly abhors his embrace of a secretive drone policy. His point is about the pernicious presence of racism in our politics. “Race is not simply a portion of the Obama story,” he writes. “It is the lens through which many Americans view all his politics.”

The problem goes beyond politics and affects—infects—every area of society. Love, not fear, should guide us.

Prejudice and religious ignorance

Mennonites are used to being misunderstood, both in negative and positive ways. We often hear others ask about horse and buggies or plain black clothing when they hear we are Mennonites.

On the other hand, some people laud Mennonites for being committed to peace and justice, not realizing the great diversity in our ranks on those subjects.

We all carry prejudices. We prejudge others, make assumptions about them, often out of ignorance about those people and what they may believe.

Much of our media betrays great ignorance about religion—not just Mennonites but many religious groups. And if you spend much time on the blogosphere, you encounter great ignorance as people spout views that are at times hateful, certainly prejudiced and that show ignorance about the groups they are putting down in order to advance their own views.

One of the groups most commonly misunderstood are Muslims, whose numbers are growing rapidly in the United States. And worldwide Islam is the second largest religion.

Nevertheless, it is treated as monolithic and homogenous. As religion scholar Philip Jenkins writes, “Arguably, over the span of its development, Islam worldwide is quite as diverse as Christianity.”

One of the stereotypes about Islam is that it is Arab, yet, Jenkins writes, “Of the world’s eight largest Muslim countries, only one—Egypt—is Arab in language and culture, and it would not be too far off the mark to see Islam as a religion of South and Southeast Asia.”

A recent book, Woman, Man and God in Modern Islam by Theodore Friend (Eerdmans, 2012, $35), is an excellent source for getting to know modern Islam.

Friend, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and an award-winning historian, traveled across Asia and the Middle East in order to understand firsthand the life situations of women in Indonesia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Turkey. The book relates hundreds of encounters and conversations with people he met along the way.

Friend writes that the reader will find “respect for Islam conjoined with faith in women and in their creative and productive potential.”

Meanwhile the media regularly report bombings by Islamicists but ignore peaceful overtures by Muslims, such as “A Commond Word” in 2007.

Ignorance of religion has enormous consequences, whether it’s a white supremacist killing Sikhs or U.S. soldiers burning copies of the Qur’an or the U.S. invasion of Iraq helping overturn half a century of women’s right to be treated as equal citizens in Iraq.

And with the recent rioting over the anti-Islam video reveals religious ignorance going many directions. 

Religious ignorance extends beyond Islam. Every day some media reinforce views of religious groups that are simplistic and fail to build understanding.

One media source that helps counter this practice is Religion News Service. For example, the weekly report dated Sept. 5 included an article on Mormons okaying Coke and Pepsi, one on Seventh-day Adventists arguing about female clergy, a Q&A with Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf of the “Ground Zero mosque,” one on Jews in New Orleans, a Q&A with David Niose, president of the American Humanist Association, and one on the trial of Amish bishop Samuel Mullet Sr., whose followers forcibly cut the beards of Amish men.

There are many sources for learning about others and their beliefs before we make judgments about them. Jesus’ warning about judging others (Matthew 7:1) is pertinent. Let's take time to understand others' religious beliefs before we make judgments about them.

A troubled genius

Last Sunday, the Wichita Eagle published my review of Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story by D.T. Max (Viking, 2012, $27.95, 356 pages). I hesitate to place it here, but I do for a couple of reasons. First, some of you may be, as I say in the first paragraph of my review, "serious readers of contemporary American fiction." Second, as I mention in the last paragraph, Wallace struggled to find "some truth behind the banalities of daily life." While Wallace was particularly religious, though he did delve into Buddhism and Catholicism, his struggle is similar to a spirituality in the present tense, i.e., seeking to live in each moment with an awareness of God's presence. Wallace, at least, strove for awareness, which is a worthy struggle. Anyway, here's the review:

Serious readers of contemporary American fiction at least know about David Foster Wallace, a wunderkind whose massive novel “Infinite Jest” had a great effect on literature. Now, just four years after his death from suicide at age 46, we have the first biography of this remarkable writer.

D.T. Max, a New Yorker writer who worked with the cooperation of Wallace’s family and friends, distills a large amount of research, including access to Wallace’s notes and many of his letters. Max also displays his careful reading of the writer’s published works, including his three novels, three short story collections and many nonfiction essays.

Wallace grew up in Champaign-Urbana, Ill., then went to Amherst, where he excelled in his studies, focusing on philosophy and literature, winning many academic awards. He also struggled with depression and had to leave school at times.

During one stay at the psychiatric unit of a hospital, “the doctors likely considered the possibility that he suffered from bipolar disorder, manic depression.” But they ended up putting him on Nardil, which instead treats atypical depression. He would stay on this drug until a year before he died.

A recognized genius (he received a MacArthur grant), Wallace incorporated huge amounts of information and created new approaches to storytelling. His head teemed with thoughts too numerous to communicate. For an epigraph to the book, Max uses a quote from Wallace’s story “Good Old Neon”: “What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.”

We learn how much of Wallace’s own experience he used in his fiction. In a footnote, Max quotes Wallace’s sister, Amy: “We [the Wallace family] quietly agreed that his nonfiction was fanciful and his fiction was what you had to look out for.”

Max traces Wallace’s writing from his first book, “The Broom of the System,” written as his senior thesis at Amherst and widely acclaimed, to his last, the posthumous “The Pale King,” which he left unfinished at his death. He shows how Wallace changed through the years, growing from “Broom,” a postmodern novel heavily influenced by Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, through his first story collection, “The Girl with Curious Hair,” which critiques such metafictionists as John Barth, to “Infinite Jest,” which marked a major change from using irony to pointing toward a more positive outcome.

Partly through his own experience of addiction, Wallace had come to see America as “a nation of addicts, unable to see that what looked like love freely given was really need neurotically and chronically unsatisfied.” However, rather than simply describe that addiction, Wallace said in an interview, the writer’s job was to give “CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness.” Wallace noted that “American writers were still content to describe an ironic culture when they should be showing the way out.”

Max, who gives much attention to Wallace’s best-known work, writes, “In ‘Infinite Jest,’ Wallace was proposing to wash Pynchonian excess in the chilling waters of DeLillo’s prose and then heat it up again in Dostoevsky’s redemptive fire.” He goes on: “The book is at once a meditation on the pain of adolescence, the pleasures of intoxication, the perils of addiction, the price of isolation, and the precariousness of sanity.”

With the publication of that book in 1996, Wallace became a celebrity, and the attention was excruciating to one who so resisted crowds and prized his privacy. By then he had taken a job at Illinois State University that allowed him to teach part-time and write the rest of the time.

After nearly a decade there, he accepted an invitation from Pomona College in California, to write and teach one course per semester. There, following many failed relationships with women, he met Karen Green, an artist, whom he later married.

Meanwhile, he published two collections of short stories, “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men” and “Oblivion,” plus numerous nonfiction pieces, many collected in two books, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” and “Consider the Lobster.”

But he agonized to make progress on “The Pale King,” the novel he was writing about the IRS. Always a perfectionist, he felt stuck trying to figure out the right approach to the work.

At the same time, he was happy with Green and decided to go off Nardil in 2007. Doctors tried different combinations of antidepressants and even electroconvulsive therapy, but on Sept. 12, 2008, Wallace hung himself at home.

Max has charted not only the life of this extraordinary writer but his influence on literature. One of his more influential works actually came from a graduation address Wallace gave at Kenyon College in 2005. In a speech against egoism and egotism, he encouraged students to practice awareness, to open themselves, even in line at the supermarket, “to a moment of the most supernal beauty—‘on fire with the same force that lit the stars—compassion, love, the subsurface unity of all things.’ ”

Someone taped the speech and wrote it out online. It went viral and later was published in a short book. The speech summed up, in a way, the arc of Wallace’s writing, seeking some truth behind the banalities of daily life. And his honest struggle seemed to resonate with many readers. It still does.