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Books Update: The Creation of the King James Bible
Date:
Fri, 6 Apr 2001 22:34:14 -0400
From:
The New York Times Direct
To:
medei@UOL.COM.BR
Books Update from NYTimes.com
Friday, April 6, 2001
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Where Is It Written? Right Here: The Creation of the King James Bible
1. In Sunday's Book Review: Books on the Bible's Influence
2. Also Reviewed This Week: Louise Erdrich's "The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse"
3. Featured Author: Allen Ginsberg
4. New in Stores: Han Ong's "Fixer Chao"
5. In the News: Harry Potter and the Court Battle Over Creativity
6. New on the Best-Seller List
7. In the Forums: "Anil's Ghost," by Michael Ondaatje
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1. In Sunday's Book Review: Books on the Bible's Influence
==========================================================
April 8, 2001
Where Is It Written? Right Here
The Bible in English, two writers maintain, shaped the language, politics
and culture of Britain and America.
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WIDE AS THE WATERS
The Story of the English Bible and the Revolution It Inspired.
By Benson Bobrick.
Illustrated. 379 pp. New York:
Simon & Schuster. $26.
IN THE BEGINNING
The Story of the King James Bible and How It Changed a Nation, a Language and a Culture.
By Alister McGrath.
Illustrated. 352 pp. New York:
Doubleday. $24.95.
These two books recount the history of the King James Bible
and its influence on English and American cultural life. As
reviewer Simon Winchester, the author of "The Professor and
the Madman," writes, "Benson Bobrick carefully, persuasively
and only a little ponderously argues the case that the
appearance of vernacular Bibles triggered a popular social
revolution in England and helped foster the birth of
democracy, both at home and, later, in the American colony."
Alister McGrath's "In the Beginning," Winchester writes,
"explains that the Wycliffe and Tyndale Bibles and the King
James Version (which confirmed Tyndale's majestically
intimate style) had a paramount effect on the birth and
shaping of an English language that would eventually become,
as it remains today, the world's premier tongue."
http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/04/08/reviews/010408.08winchet.html?0406bk
2. Also Reviewed This Week: Louise Erdrich's "The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse"
======================================================
Woman of the Cloth
Louise Erdrich's novel centers on the unusual priest who ministers to a
North Dakota reservation in 1912.
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THE LAST REPORT ON THE MIRACLES AT LITTLE NO HORSE
By Louise Erdrich.
361 pp. New York:
HarperCollins Publishers. $26.
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The author of "The Beet Queen," "Love Medicine" and other
books about the Ojibwe people has written a "beguiling new
novel," writes Verlyn Klinkenborg, a novelist and editorial
writer for The New York Times. The novel tells the unusual
story of how "a farm woman named Agnes DeWitt (once also a
nun, Sister Cecilia) becomes Father Damien Modeste in the
year 1912."
"Erdrich takes us farther back in time than she ever has,"
Klinkenborg writes, "so far back that she comes, in a sense,
to the edge of the reservation that has been her fictional
world. What makes it possible is the Ojibwa language, which
is both as fresh and as ancient as rain."
Related Link :
Michiko Kakutani Reviews 'The Last Report on the
Miracles at Little No Horse' (April 6, 2001)
http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/04/08/reviews/010408.08klinket.html?0406bk
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Have a Nice Life
Alan Wolfe finds that in matters of morality, Americans are surprisingly
nonjudgmental.
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MORAL FREEDOM
The Impossible Idea That
Defines the Way We Live
Now.
By Alan Wolfe.
256 pp. New York:
W. W. Norton & Company. $24.95.
-----
Reviewing this new book by Alan Wolfe, the director of the
Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston
College, Wendy Kaminer writes that he "is hardly immune to
the impulse to generalize (he is a sociologist, after all).
But he has made heroic efforts to ground his generalizations
in something more than ideology.
He relies partly on a poll sponsored by The New York Times
Magazine in the year 2000 that focused on people's views
about morality and self-fulfillment. In addition, he
conducted in-depth interviews with people in eight niche
communities, including a small town in Iowa, a prosperous
Ohio suburb, an African-American neighborhood in Hartford, a
gay district in San Francisco, a depressed factory town in
Massachusetts and a wealthy enclave in Silicon Valley. In
Kaminer's view, "Wolfe presents an engaging array of voices
musing about honesty, professional and familial loyalty,
politics, forgiveness, punishment and the virtue of
self-discipline."
http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/04/08/reviews/010408.08kaminet.html?0406bk
Related Link:
Also on the Web 'The Final Freedom, an essay for The New York Times
Magazine,' by Alan Wolfe (adapted from "Moral Freedom,"
March 18, 2001)
http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/04/08/specials/wolfe-final.html?0406bk
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April 8, 2001
Talking Irish
Seamus Heaney's poems dwell both on his origins and on endings.
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ELECTRIC LIGHT
By Seamus Heaney.
98 pp. New York:
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $20.
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The new book of poems by Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney is
"the consciously late work of a master poet meditating on
the origins and inevitable ending of his life and art,"
writes reviewer Langdon Hammer, who teaches English at Yale
University and is writing a biography of James Merrill.
"Like most of Heaney's books, it is a compendium of poetic
genres: eclogue, elegy, epigram, joke, yarn, meditation,
ecstatic lyric, after-dinner speech and more -- all subtly
tuned to diverse vocal registers in an array of verse forms
fitted to various occasions, showing again Heaney's will
(and ability) to speak of many kinds of experience to many
kinds of reader. At the same time, the 62-year-old poet's
awareness of his aging, which he turns away from in memory
and looks past in poems about death, gives the collection
special coherence and poignance."
http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/04/08/reviews/010408.08hammert.html?0406bk
Related Links:
Featured Author: Seamus Heaney
First Chapter: 'Electric Light'
Audio Seamus Heaney Reads 'Keeping Going,' 'The Strand' and Others (September 18, 1996)
Featured Author: Seamus Heaney
This retrospective includes collected reviews of Heaney's
books and an audio recording of a live reading by Heaney
from 1996.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/02/27/specials/heaney.html?0406bk
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Revolution Rocks
Thoughts of Mexico's first postmodern guerrilla commander.
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OUR WORD IS OUR WEAPON
Selected Writings.
By Subcomandante Marcos.
Edited by Juana Ponce de León.
Illustrated. 456 pp. New York
-----
By the middle of New Year's Day, 1994, the
small guerrilla force that had appeared the
night before in San Cristóbal de las Casas, the
old colonial capital of the Mexican state of Chiapas,
was already slipping back into the forested hills
beyond the city. The fighting -- just skirmishes, really
-- would last barely another week. But even as the
rebels seemed to vanish into the Lacandón rain forest,
Mexicans everywhere were being called to arms by the
Zapatista Army of National Liberation.
But seven years after the uprising, Marcos's ear for the political culture remains sharp. By
his own account, he has spent some 17 years among the Mayan peasants of the Lacandón
rain forest, yet he often sounds more anchored in Coyoacán, the laid-back, liberal heart of
Mexico City. He seems quite comfortable at a round-table discussion with Zack de la Rocha,
formerly of the rock band Rage Against the Machine, and someone identified only as a
comrade ''from the Punk Anarchy collective.'' He does not hesitate to write Mumia
Abu-Jamal, or to fire off a letter on his behalf to the governor of Pennsylvania.
The moment of truth is probably near. With the election last year of the first opposition
government since the Mexican Revolution, the Zapatistas' longstanding demands for Indian
autonomy have found a new champion in President Vicente Fox, who has already pulled
back some of the army troops in Chiapas as a gesture of good will. If Fox can overcome the
resistance of some legislators from his own party and those from the long-governing
Institutional Revolutionary Party, the next question may be whether it is time for Marcos to
finally take off his mask.
Subcomandante Marcos's 'Our Word Is Our Weapon: Selected Writings'
April 8, 2001
Related Link:
First Chapter: 'Our Word Is Our Weapon'
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April 8, 2001
3. Featured Author: Allen Ginsberg
==================================
First Thought, Best Thought
These interviews with Allen Ginsberg remind us that he was a master of
improvisation.
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SPONTANEOUS MIND
Selected Interviews, 1958-1996.
By Allen Ginsberg. Edited by David
Carter.
603 pp. New York:
HarperCollins Publishers. $40.
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Related Links:
Audio Reading: Allen Ginsberg at the 92nd Street Y (Febr. 28, 1977)
Featured Author: Allen Ginsberg
Slide Show: Allen Ginsberg (8 photos)
Click here to listen to Allen Ginsberg reading at the 92nd Street Y (Febr. 28, 1977)
Slide Show: Allen Ginsberg (8 photos)
Allen Ginsberg died in 1997, but his "uniquely frank and
vivid voice seems to sound again in its deftly edited pages"
of interviews conducted over 40 years, writes
William Deresiewicz, who teaches English at Yale University.
"Yet if anyone knew the difference between printed text and
living speech, it was the poet who made immediacy the
foundation of his art. Ginsberg talking is like Charlie
Parker taking his saxophone out for a spin at the far
reaches of harmony and rhythm; reading him is the mental
equivalent of being driven at top speed down a winding
mountain road."
Deresiewicz concludes that "the stereotype of Ginsberg as a
semiliterate primitive leaves one unprepared for his
erudition and intellectual brilliance."
http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/04/08/reviews/010408.08deresit.html?0406bk
Featured Author: Allen Ginsberg
This retrospective includes reviews of Ginsberg's books of
poetry, journals and essays, articles about Ginsberg, a
slide show and a tape of a live reading by Ginsberg from
1977.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/04/08/specials/ginsberg.html?0406bk
Audio: Allen Ginsberg at the 92nd Street Y (Feb. 28, 1977)
http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/04/08/specials/ginsberg.html#audio?0406bk
=====
4. New in Stores: Han Ong's "Fixer Chao"
========================================
In her New York Times Review of Han Ong's first novel, about
a fake feng shui master who hustles New York's elite, Janet
Maslin wrote that the book tells "a spiteful story, leavened
by the cleverness of the author's satirical swipes."
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/05/arts/05MASL.html?0406bk
5. In the News: Harry Potter and the Court Battle Over Creativity
======================================================
A growing parade of aggrieved writers and artists have
helped turn intellectual property litigation into a
burgeoning cottage industry.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/01/business/01BOOK.html?0406bk
For a digest of this week's book news, visit:
http://www.nytimes.com/books/yr/mo/day/daily/index.html?0406bk
6. New on the Best-Seller List
==============================
Hardcover Fiction
#13) "The Triumph of Katie Byrne," by Barbara Taylor
Bradford
A struggling New York actress is haunted by a vicious crime.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/yr/mo/day/bsp/index.html?0406bk
A note on our best-seller policy: The Times on the Web
publishes the New York Times best-seller lists a week in
advance of the printed Sunday Book Review. The best-seller
lists published this week on the Web will appear in the
print edition dated April 15 and are based on sales through
last weekend.
7. In the Forums: "Anil's Ghost," by Michael Ondaatje
=====================================================
The Reading Group has begun its discussion of the April
book, "Anil's Ghost," Michael Ondaatje's novel about a
human-rights worker searching for the truth amid the carnage
of the Sri Lankan civil war. The group has been discussing
how Ondaatje creates and then defies expectations about the
genre of his novel: "I was not surprised when Ondaatje just
kind of dropped the mystery and moved to a more mystical
sphere," wrote one reader, "I just couldn't expect a typical
forensic thriller from this kind of author."
http://www.nytimes.com/books/forums/index.html?0406bk
