I feel as if I just read the autobiography of someone who doesn't know her subject very well.
A lot of reviewers here have said this book is intensely I feel as if I just read the autobiography of someone who doesn't know her subject very well.
A lot of reviewers here have said this book is intensely self-involved, and it is. Which makes it that much stranger that, having read it, I still don't know some basic facts about the author. I don't know why she became a journalist. I don't know why she fell in love with Afghanistan. I don't know what being in love with anything or anyone means to her, since depth of emotion seems something she instinctively shies away from.
I will give Kim Barker's writing this much: she doesn't mind letting other people have the good lines, even at her own expense. This snippet of conversation between her interpreter and a warlord she desperately wants to interview represents the best this book has to offer:
Farouq tried to sell my case in the Pashto language. The warlord had certain questions.
"Where is she from?" Pacha Khan asked, suspiciously.
"Turkey," Farouq responded.
"Is she Muslim?"
"Yes."
"Have her pray for me."
I smiled dumbly, oblivious to the conversation and Farouq's lies.
"She can't," Farouq said, slightly revising his story. "She is a Turkish American. She only knows the prayers in English, not Arabic."
"Hmmm," Pacha Khan grunted, glaring at me. "She is a very bad Muslim."
"She is a very bad Muslim," Farouq agreed.
I continued to grin wildly, attempting to charm Pacha Khan.
"Is she scared of me?" he asked.
"What's going on? What's he saying?" I interrupted.
"He wants to know if you're scared of him," Farouq said.
"Oh no," I said. "He seems like a perfectly nice guy. Totally harmless. Very kind."
Farouq nodded and turned to Pacha Khan.
"Of course she is scared of you," Farouq translated. "You are a big and terrifying man."
I read this passage, loved it, and read the rest of the book in the hope it would give me more: more of this wit, more insight into its writer, more of an understanding of Afghanistan and America's involvement there. I got some, but not enough. I was often entertained and occasionally informed, but ultimately unsatisfied....more
When Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was arrested for the Boston Marathon bombing, my husband and I got into an argument.
"Who cares where he's from?" he said. "EverWhen Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was arrested for the Boston Marathon bombing, my husband and I got into an argument.
"Who cares where he's from?" he said. "Everyone's talking about his family being from Chechnya like that's enough to make him a terrorist in and of itself. He's an immigrant. Okay. How is his being from Chechnya any different from his being from Ireland?"
I don't know if he picked Ireland because it's a country he's heard of, because I'm Irish, or because we're both old enough to remember a time when saying you were from Ireland would lead a listener to thoughts of (and possibly questions about) the IRA. I do know that he's someone who's morally opposed to putting people in ill-fitting boxes, and he'd just come home from a long day with coworkers who had no problem with the idea that Muslim immigrant = terrorist just waitin' to happen.
"I understand what you mean," I said. "And I know everyone's being a big collective idiot about he and his brother being Muslims, and I'm sick of it, too. But there's something wrong with your example. There's something more going on than that. Being from Ireland isn't anything like being from Chechnya."
I had to wait for Masha Gessen to write The Brothers before I could figure out exactly what I meant. I felt vindicated when I got to page 60 and read this:
American society, perhaps more than some others, goes through distinct cycles, separated by shifts in the national psyche. But to a new immigrant, nothing was here before – and there is no inkling that things will be different after. There is only the mood of the present moment, and this mood becomes what America feels like. The Tsarnaevs arrived a few months after the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington had united Americans in fear.
This was the idea I'd been feeling around for that tired night in the kitchen when I'd been trying to argue with my husband and wash the dishes at the same time and had ended by doing a lousy job at both. Being an immigrant is tough no matter where you're from or how much you wanted to live in your new country. Being an immigrant from a country most Americans have only heard of in relation to the War on Terror – well, that makes you the redheaded stepchild of the immigrant family, to say the least.
That's the story Gessen tells. Bear in mind that she started work on this book practically the day Dzhokhar was arrested. I started reading it the week his death sentence was announced.
This book is not about his trial, or about how he and his brother went about bombing the marathon. It's about who was arrested for that bombing and why.
It's also the story of the banality of evil. To me, the most shocking part of this book is – well, how boring the brothers were before it happened. They weren't particularly intelligent or devout. Neither of them seem as if they were interested in or engaged with the world or even their own lives. If they had a reason for waking up in the morning, I couldn't tell you what it was. They just don't come across as the kind of people who could care enough about anything to do something violent.
They reminded me of a character from a novel I love, Lolly Willowes:
Laura was not in any way religious. She was not even religious enough to speculate towards irreligion.
I'm not naïve enough to think that anyone who commits a violent crime must be some wild-eyed fanatic and/or evil genius. Frankly, as a smallish middle-aged woman living in an increasingly weird city, I'm starting to wonder if all men are just one bad day and one cheap gun away from going on a killing spree. But I did expect to get some sense of why the brothers did what they did.
Maybe one of the points of this book is that there isn't any such sense to be had. Excuse me for quoting at length, but I think this is important:
Very soon, many of Tamerlan's and Jahar's friends would be telling the FBI and the media that it was impossible that the brothers were the bombers – there had been no sign. Surely, the friends would say, if the two had been plotting something so huge and horrible, they would have seemed distracted. Or emotional. Or pensive. Or somehow, clearly, not themselves. But this assumption was a misconception. The psychiatrist and political scientist Jerrold Post, who has been studying terrorists for decades, writes, "Terrorists are not depressed, severely emotionally disturbed, or crazed fanatics." Political scientist Louise Richardson, an undisputed star in the tiny academic field of terrorism studies, writes of terrorists: "Their primary shared characteristic is their normalcy, insofar as we understand the term. Psychological studies of terrorism are virtually unanimous on this point."
Nor do terrorists tend to behave out of character just before committing an act that, to them, appears perfectly rational and fully justified. One of the September 11 hijackers called his wife in Germany on the morning of the attacks to tell her he loved her; she apparently heard nothing extraordinary in his voice. Having made the decision to commit an act of terrorism, the future bomber – even a suicide bomber – develops, it would appear, a sort of two-track mind. On one track, life goes on exactly as before; on the other, he is preparing for the event that will disrupt his life or even end it. It is precisely the ordinary nature of the man and the extraordinary effect of the act about to be committed that ensure the two tracks never cross.
This passage kept coming to mind as I listened to a news report about the mother of the gunman in the recent shooting at a Tunisian beach. The woman was horrified by what her son had done, and was frantically trying to make sense of it. What had she missed? Her son – an electrical engineering student who had a girlfriend and liked soccer and break-dancing – was outstandingly ordinary.
I might have had trouble believing that before I read this book. I have no trouble believing it now.
Sadly, I think The Brothers should be required reading. The history it covers is interesting; the ideas it offers are vital....more
“Certain groups do much better in America than others – as measured by income, occupational status, test scores, and so on,” Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfel“Certain groups do much better in America than others – as measured by income, occupational status, test scores, and so on,” Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld state bluntly in the introduction to The Triple Package. Why is that? And can we even discuss why without being a bunch of racist, anti-Semitic, eugenics-loving jerks?
I hope so. I think Chua and Rubenfeld do. I don’t know if their conclusions are scientifically sound – this isn’t my field – but I don’t think their book is offensive. It’s a fast, engaging read that raises some interesting ideas and leaves the reader with a lot to think about.
I think it’s safe to say that some reviewers of Triple Package were pre-affronted. “Amy Chua has come out with another book whose basic message is the same: you suck and I am better,” says Khanh Ho at HuffPost. I read Tiger Mom, and I don’t think that’s what it said. Chua obviously isn’t suffering from any lack of self-esteem, but she pokes fun at herself frequently, and quotes her daughters making hilarious remarks at her own expense.
(How sad is it to be Jed Rubenfeld, by the way? Okay, not terribly. He’s married to a beautiful, intelligent, wealthy woman, and isn’t doing too badly himself in the looks, brains, and cash department. But let’s face it: The Triple Package is being read and reviewed as an Amy Chua title. If she’d written it alone, it would still be a bestseller. If he’d written it alone – who knows.)
Anyway. Speaking of being predisposed to despise: In her review of Triple Package, Daria Roithmayr at Slate describes Tiger Mom as “a memoir in which [Chua] extolled the virtues of harsh disciplinary ‘Chinese’ parenting.” Again, not exactly. Chua probably wouldn’t have felt the urge to write about her parenting experiences if her younger daughter hadn’t fought “Chinese parenting” to the point of making Chua question her own ideas. And “harsh” is a harsh word to use about someone who in her own book makes it clear she’s all bark.
Nevertheless, when these reviewers are done rhymes-with-itching about Amy Chua, they do point out something I noticed in her first book, which is a certain obliviousness to money. Triple Package definitely discusses how well groups like Mormons, Chinese-Americans, Cuban immigrants, Nigerian immigrants, and others are doing in America; but Chua and Rubenfeld don’t point out how much cash in hand a lot of members of the groups in question arrived with in the first place. If the reviewers I mention have their facts straight, this is a critical omission.
I happen to think that Triple Package is an interesting work regardless. The anecdotes from people who’ve been loaded down with a simultaneous superiority/inferiority complex are fascinating.
My main issue with the book is this: The authors rarely question the idea that the sort of educational and material success they’re describing is worth what it takes to get. Chapter 6, “The Underside of the Triple Package,” is the shortest in the book. In spite of its title, it’s still a pretty loud cheerleader for the concept of working your butt off to get the highest test scores so you can go to the best college and get the highest-paying job – and your reward is to push your child to do exactly the same thing all over again.
Can we really look at the current state of the economy in America, and then look at how it got to be this bad, and then accept that premise without question?
Chua and Rubenfeld discuss at the end of their book how everyone can make a triple package out of whatever they happen to have lying around the house. (I may be paraphrasing slightly.) They never ask if we should want to. If part of the price of success is agreeing with the idea that you and your group are superior to all others, is it right to encourage a cultivation of that sense of superiority? Given how much racism and sexism we’re still fighting, shouldn’t we be trying to make a new path to success – and maybe redefining success? ...more
First off: I'm disappointed that Goodreads got this title, and its subtitle, flat-out wrong. It's printed correctly on the cover they show; but in casFirst off: I'm disappointed that Goodreads got this title, and its subtitle, flat-out wrong. It's printed correctly on the cover they show; but in case you can't see that, the actual title of this book is: The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented A Story Of Martyrdom. And that's important, because Candida Moss is making a strong case against popularly accepted ideas of Christian persecution, past and present. [UPDATE: GR corrected the title after I first posted this review. Thank you, watchful GR librarians!]
Moss is Catholic, and professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at the University of Notre Dame. She starts off with some anecdotes about contemporary American Christians who claim to be persecuted -- Rush Limbaugh's brother David, for instance, who published a book titled Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity. She goes on to ask a few simple questions:
"If there had never been an Age of Martyrs, would Christians automatically see themselves as engaged in a war with their critics? Would Christians still see themselves as persecuted, or would they try to understand their opponents? Would the response to violence be to fight back or to address the causes of misunderstanding? Would we be more compassionate? Would we be less self-righteous? The history of Christianity is steeped in the blood of the martyrs and set as a battle between good and evil. How would we think about ourselves if that history were not true?"
She goes on to present solid, detailed evidence for the case that claims of constant anti-Christian persecution are exaggerated at best. To be blunt: not only is the body count significantly lower than the ancient stories would lead us to believe, but the definition of persecution has to be examined.
"Just because Christians were prosecuted or executed, even unjustly, does not necessarily mean that they were persecuted. Persecution implies that a certain group is being unfairly targeted for attack and condemnation, usually because of blind hatred. We have to know, then, why Christians were being arrested and executed and whether the reasons were a part of general legal practice or whether the Christians were being singled out. As we look at episodes of 'persecution,' we need to constantly ask ourselves: Is this religious persecution or is this ancient justice?"
Moss' prose is smooth and her writing voice quite natural; she is at once scholarly, engaging, and a good read even for non-academics. She has occasional spikes of humor. When discussing ancient rumors about those scary, baby-eating, incest-committing Christians, she points out that if you want to discredit a group, you have to be willing to go all the way. "For slander to be effective it has to have some teeth -- there's no point in accusing someone of going over the speed limit."
I guess I could have kept this review shorter and more effective by simply pointing out that Sister Simone Campbell, one of those fantastic Nuns On The Bus, gave it a glowing back-cover review. If she liked it, you should read it. I don't believe in God. I do believe in nuns. ...more
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