The Decalogue. Living as the People of God

SUMMARYDavid Baker presents a scholarly yet eminently readable book on the Ten Commandments. For each of the ten he discusses the background, the theology and the contemporary application. I can warmly commend this book for teaching and preaching.ZUSAMMENFASSUNGDavid Baker präsentiert ein wissenschaftliches und dennoch sehr lesbares Buch über die Zehn Gebote. Für jede der zehn Gebote thematisiert er den Hintergrund, die Theologie und die zeitgenössische Anwendung. Ich empfehle dieses Buch gerne für Unterricht und Predigt.RÉSUMÉDavid Baker a rédigé ce livre de teneur académique, et en même temps tout à fait abordable, sur les dix commandements. Pour chacun d’eux, il traite du contexte, de la théologie et propose des applications actuelles. Ce livre est à recommander chaudement pour enrichir l’enseignement et la prédication sur le Décalogue.

Anaconda

Written by Jesús Rivas, the undisputed expert on the biology of anacondas, this is the first authoritative book on the biology of the green anaconda, the world’s largest snake. Rivas describes his experiences over a quarter of a century exploring the secret life of these fantastic snakes, including their diet, movement patterns, life and tribulations, survival, behavior, and fascinating reproductive life. But more than just presenting facts about anacondas, Rivas tells his story about studying them in the field. Ultimately, his love for anacondas and his unorthodox approach give his voice a unique accent that makes this book stand out among other books of its kind. The rich photography and its storytelling approach make this an enjoyable and thoroughly readable book that can sit as comfortably on a coffee table as in the bookshelves of advanced scholars.

Karen E.H. Skinazi, Women of Valor: Orthodox Jewish Troll Fighters, Crime Writers, and Rock Stars in Contemporary Literature and Culture. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2018. 290 pp.

This lively and readable book opens the window to a rich and vibrant world of Orthodox, or religiously observant, Jewish women who keep kosher and Shabbat while holding jobs, solving crimes, confronting prejudice, and making music. Drawing on memoirs, novels, film, and a graphic novel, Karen Skinazi argues that Jewish women find opportunities for personal empowerment through religious observance, and that their actions within the tradition (and against it) offer opportunities for corrective approaches to the tradition and to its perception by outsiders. The book is structured around selected verses of “Eshet ḥayil”—“Woman of Valor” (Prov. 31:10–31)—an acrostic poem that is sung on Friday nights as part of the Shabbat observance (the term also refers to any woman who is an active public figure). For Skinazi, the initiative, authority, energy, and intelligence ascribed to the woman of valor in the poem offers a counternarrative to mainstream fictional and media depictions of religious observance. The book thus offers itself as a feminist affirmation of religious practice in the post-secular age as described by German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas and Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor....

Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem: How Religion Drove the Voyages that Led to America. By Carol Delaney. New York: Free Press, 2011. Pp. 319. Illustrations. Appendix. Bibliography. Index. $16 paper.

Carole Delaney has written a very approachable and highly readable book about Columbus for the general public, choosing to deal most thoroughly with his millenarian beliefs, ties to the Franciscan order, and the religious ideas behind his voyages. The book draws on published materials, many of them primary sources, but introduces no new archival findings. Delaney manages the sources well. The Times Literary Supplement hailed her work as one of the 100 best books of 2011.

Seyyed Hossein Nasr with Ramin Jahanbegloo, In Search of the Sacred

In Search of the Sacred, as the subtitle indicates, lets readers in on a widerangingconversation between Seyyed Hossein Nasr, one of the world’smost prolific Muslim intellectuals, and his cousin, Ramin Jahanbegloo,about Nasr’s life and thought. Terry Moore provides a fine, admirably conciseintroduction, which, like many introductions to Nasr’s thought, occasionallyborders on the hagiographic.Those who are relatively unfamiliar with Nasr’s life, let alone histhought, will learn a lot from this highly readable book and, hopefully,be inspired to read some, or more, of his prodigious oeuvre. It would beof particular interest to students of Islam, comparative religion, religiousstudies, philosophy of religion, political philosophy and theory, and traditionalstudies. Those who are familiar with Nasr’s work, meanwhile, maynot learn much that is new here, although they may gain a different perspectiveor new insights on certain aspects of Nasr’s thought. At times, itfeels as though you are sitting in the same room as Nasr and Jahanbegloo,which is certainly a treat ...

After War: The Political Economy of Exporting Democracy, by Christopher J. Coyne

This is a highly readable book that provides strong and rigorous arguments to prove a thesis that is intuitive to many but still denied by some—that the United States foreign policy of using military intervention, occupation, and reconstruction to establish liberal democracies across the world is more likely to fail than to succeed.

Sounding Out: Pauline Oliveros and Lesbian Musicality

In her insightful, well-researched and highly readable book, Sounding Out: Pauline Oliveros and Lesbian Musicality, Martha Mockus investigates the significant influence lesbian community and second wave feminism have had on Oliveros's work.

Broad views of the urban past in Europe and its extensions

Readers of English can currently refer to only two works that offer synthetic overviews of the history of European cities from the period of classical antiquity into the twentieth century. We have long had the powerfully argued and highly readable book by the architectural critic, Louis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformation, and Its Prospects (1961). Beginning with the earliest settlements in the Near East and continuing through the rise of the suburbs in the United States, Mumford's volume tells a dramatic story in which urbanity at its best (as exemplified by such communities as Athens and Amsterdam) gave way to a succession of assaults, whether in the form of Baroque planning, rampant industrialization, oversized ‘megalopolises’ or automobiles. Continuing in the vein of many earlier critics, Mumford saw the modern big city as a depressing departure from earlier norms of urban beauty and human solidarity, and his view of the future was bleak indeed. Nearly four decades later, Sir Peter Hall offered a similarly large-scale but otherwise very different view of the broad sweep of the urban past, in his Cities in Civilization: Culture, Innovation, and Urban Order (1998). He constructed his book not as a narrative but instead as clusters of case studies, in which sixteen cities appear as scenes and agents of various types of exemplary achievement. Focusing on Europe, but not restricting himself to it, Hall presented not only Athens, Florence, Paris, Vienna, London, Manchester and Berlin but also New York, San Francisco and Tokyo as ‘places that [have] ignited the sacred flame of intelligence and human imagination’ (p. 7). It is primarily for this reason that, in Hall's view, the history of great metropolises is inseparable from the history of civilization itself.

Jewish Immigrant Entrepreneurship in New York and London, 1880–1914: Enterprise and Culture. By Andrew Godley. Basingstoke, England, and New York: Palgrave, 2001. Pp. xii, 187. $60.00.

In this imaginative and readable book, Andrew Godley argues that culture matters in economics, and that some cultural traits encourage entrepreneurship, and therefore material prosperity, more than others. More specifically, he joins debates among British historians over the causes for Britain's relative economic decline around the turn of the twentieth century. He argues that British culture was in fact anti-entrepreneurial and concludes that this was likely to have had a negative impact on the country's economic fortunes. This is, therefore, really a book about Britain and its economic culture. Though it certainly has interesting insights into Jewish history as well; the author uses the Jews primarily as a “control group” in his historical “experiment.”