culture since

With Amusement for All: A History of American Popular Culture since 1830
$39.95
A fascinating, comprehensive, and insightful look at fun in America, fully alive to class conflicts both large and small. I loved this book!

Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society since 1900 (Cambridge Russian Paperbacks)
$47.00
The book's story ends around 1990, when the Soviet Union collapsed. In that sense, even the last section reads as from another time. Largely, thus, the book is an account of Soviet propaganda. Describing the various media campaigns instituted by the Kremlin to mobilise public opinion. We see how in the desperate years of World War 2, that appeals to Rodina were used, as a traditional rallying point.

There is some account of independent cultural activities. Very little operating space was permitted for these by the authorities. Until the 80s and perestroika and glasnost arose.

Surprisingly, the index omits any mention of samizdat. Yet this was the hallmark of much dissident actions.

National Geographic Complete - Since 1888 Every Issue is Included for Collectors in a Handy DVD Package Like a Box Set
$69.95
Complete National Geographic Features * Digital reproduction of all 120 years of National Geographic Magazine * Highest production quality on DVD * Digital scans are high resolution for optimal viewing of images * Easy to navigate and explore content o Search by keyword, author contributor, topic o Visual geographic search o Discover content through NG-created, or user-created Read Lists o Zoom in/out of pages * Reading and search experiences significantly enhanced o Modern, graphical user interface o Explore and discover approaches to content o Geospatial browsing o Trivia Game to drive content discovery * Now Featuring Fold-Out Maps o The most popular feature of National Geographic Magazine * Bonus DVD includes video extras not available anywhere else o Best Moments of National Geographic o Photography tips o Narratives by award-winning NG photographers

Diameter of the Bomb
$24.98
When I lived in Israel during 1979, bombs on buses were already a problem. Terrorists would board a bus and exit a few stops later, leaving behind a bomb disguised as a package. Alert passengers, and I was one of them, were constantly on the look out for unattended packages. I joked back then that those bombs were one reason I took Arab buses every opportunity I could. Arab buses were also much more colorful.

More recently, the bombs have gotten smarter, perhaps because the terrorists have gotten stupider. The terrorist has become the bomb. This is a documentary about one particular blast, that on Egged Bus 32A in Jerusalem on June 18, 2002. It killed 19 people, mostly those traveling to school or work. Hamas took "responsibility" for the bombing, an odd term for a vile mass killing that included Galila Bugala, an 11-year-old Ethiopian Christian girl whose parents were about to move to New York. Nor is her killer an example of someone whose anger was `rooted' in deprivation. He was Muhamed al-Rai, an Islamic law student at An-Najah University near Nablus in the West Bank.

This documentary is built around multiple streams of consciousness. It follows those who would die in the blast, often through the eyes of their friends and family. That's no doubt emotionally satisfying, particularly if you're an Israeli Jew, but to a historian like myself, it's frustratingly unfocused. After watching, I was left feeling that I knew no more about the event than before I watched it.

Since this documentary is not the only illustration of Israel's inability to make a coherent case for what I think is its very defensible point of view in the Middle-Eastern conflict, I've begun to suspect language is shaping the arguments. Like Arabic, Hebrew likes to place ideas in parallel, "this and that and that..." Parallelism makes complex relationships, both cause and effect and subordination, hard to express. The results, even when stated in English, are assertions that seem unsupported by facts or logic. The language is also new in one sense. Modern Hebrew, which I studied while I was there, has been spoken for only a little over a century. In its modern form, has yet to come to a flowering like that English experienced during Elizabethan times. It has yet to develop a powerful voice.

The result is that Hebrew (again like Arabic) is an excellent language for expressing emotions, but not one that prepares you for winning public debates on the world stage. Up until the 1967 war, that mattered little. Israel's emotional arguments fit with a widespread feeling outside the nation that the Jews were victims and deserved those feelings. Now that the sympathies of those who don't care enough to find out what's really going on have turned toward the Palestinians, Jewish emotional arguments are being trumped by those by Palestinians.

There is one thing that Israel's Jews could do. They could read their prophets more, particularly in their schools. Isaiah, one of the greatest poets who ever lived, knew how to use Hebrew's parallelism to powerful effect. Look, for instance, at the Messianic passage in Isaiah 53:

Who has believe our message?
And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
For he grew up before Him like a tender shoot,
And like a root out of parched ground;
He had no stately form or majesty
That we should look upon him,
Nor appearance that we should be attracted to him.

Until Israel's leaders can began to speak that powerfully, the nation's message will go unheard and terrorism like this will continue to kill and maim.

-Michael W. Perry, Chesterton on War and Peace: Battling the Ideas and Movements That Led to Nazism and World War II