Books in Brief
Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History, 1585-1828 by Walter A. McDougall (HarperCollins, 656 pp., $29.95). The Pulitzer Prize-winning Walter A. McDougall has produced the first volume of a trilogy that promises to be the finest history of America in print. Reading it, one is struck by the inadequacy of previous narratives. McDougall portrays the United States as being neither conceived in Original Sin nor entirely sinless. He pays tribute to the genius of the Founding Fathers and the virtues of the revolutionary generation, but also judiciously tackles the roles of women, American Indians, blacks, the lower classes, and immigrants. In a remarkable, and wholly welcome, break with established academic norms, McDougall even cracks some jokes along the way.
In setting out to explain “who and why we are what we are,” McDougall hits on an intriguing theme. We are, it seems, the world’s most adept “hustlers”–in both senses. American English possesses 175 verbs meaning “to swindle,” but our freedom to hustle makes us “builders, doers, go-getters, dreamers, hard workers, organizers, engineers, and a people supremely generous.” We have enjoyed an unparalleled liberty to pursue our ambitions by laudable means, but the existence of human imperfection inevitably exerts a corrupting influence. The next installments of McDougall’s history should garner him more Pulitzers.
–Alexander Rose
Public Policy and Social Issues: Jewish Sources and Perspectives by Marshall J. Breger (Praeger, 296 pp., $49.95). American Jews maintain a deep commitment to compassionate social policies, believing their religious tradition obliges them to care for the disadvantaged. Unfortunately, however, many American Jews have identified liberal government social programs as the sole appropriate expression of their religious tradition. Their continuing embrace of the welfare state, for example, departs from centuries of tradition that understood the moral importance of community.
In fact, Marshall Breger argues in “Public Policy and Social Issues,” the religious principles underlying the traditional Jewish approach to public policy are inherently conservative. Consequently, “a distinctly Jewish public policy is going to seem very different from what is generally thought of as American Jewish politics.” Engaging and provocative, Breger’s essays apply Jewish teachings to some of the most debated issues in America, from abortion and welfare programs to genetic engineering and the environment. More than any other single volume, “Public Policy and Social Issues” dispels the notion that there is only a liberal “Jewish view.”
–David Dalin
With All Our Strength: The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan by Anne E. Brodsky (Routledge, 318 pp., $25). In the realm of inspiring stories, the decades-long struggle of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) must surely rank high. Founded in 1977 by a college student named Meena (who was assassinated in 1987), RAWA has sustained an underground resistance against the Soviets, the warlords, and the jihadis. Tracing the history of the association, Anne Brodsky’s book shows the activities of RAWA’s members, from secretly recording the execution of a woman by the Taliban (it ended up in the BBC documentary “Beneath the Veil”) to running schools in the post-Taliban era.
Brodsky sports impeccable left-wing credentials: Besides being a Women’s Studies professor, she’s contributed to the Chicago-based “progressive” magazine In These Times (which entitled one of her dispatches, far more pessimistically than it warranted, “Hollow Victory”). But she does her best to avoid injecting her own view into her subjects’ stories; “I did not want to write a book about a European American woman’s experience with Afghan women in Pakistan and Afghanistan,” she notes in the introduction.
She mostly succeeds, so don’t be put off by the blurbs on the cover from polemicists like Katha Pollitt and Arundhati Roy. “With All Our Strength” is a worthwhile history of women whose fight for good transcends ideology.
–John Tabin
