Wisconsin Books

I moved to Atlanta from Cincinnati and really miss the city. Laura captures the foibles and charm of the area with wit, compassion and charm. Her observations make you laugh out loud. She's never mean, but always entertaining and perceptive. This is a "must-read" for anyone from Cincinnati and anyone from everywhere else who possesses a sense of humor!

Reviewed by Y. Stephan Bulbulian

Armenian poet David Kherdian's book, "I Called It Home," is a pleasant, appreciative memory of his boyhood, growing up in the Armenian neighborhoods of Racine, Wisconsin. This assortment of delightful vignettes, warmly recant the times and characters that shaped the life of the Armenian-American literary treasure. Here are stories of curiosity and discovery in a innocent time of a nearly-forgotten past. Son of immigrant parents, while in the course of reaching maturity, amuses in life of the recreated Armenian village in diaspora. Old world traditions are adapted to meet the demands of the new land. It is an all new existence for the people forced from their ancient homeland by the prospect of annihilation the Ottoman Turkish government. In the exercise of seizing life, in and around Racine, Kherdian writes of boyhood friends and the play that "gave form to the ritual dance of childhood." He juxtaposes the influences of Armenian home-life, when Armenians lived in the ghettos, to the ability to "be able to stand-up to the corruption of the street." Kherdian writes of a common experience in the Armenian home of the past. "A common denominator of poor Armenians," the "dripping, fermenting ritual" of making madzoon ( yoghurt, a Turkish word coined by Americans). He discovers that he is "one-third madzoon, and the two-thirds doesn't matter." It is a pained and confused young man who recoils at being called a "dirty Armenian," when he knows that his living habits are cleaner than Americans. The same Americans, defeated in poverty, whose only superiority is their sheer numbers. He remembers his father whose face he sees on every street corner during a summer spent in Greece. A father, completely out of place in Racine, poorly speaking English with a thick accent. A janitor at the local tractor factory, h! is father was an intuitive cook whose every meal was a masterpiece,. As a boy, Kherdian throws himself into life around Racine "with abandon." The secret part he keeps to himself is open only to nature, and sharing the landscape. He reinforces his belief in the Armenian character, "- in it's integrity, resilience and fortitude, while saluting his parents for being able to instill "a pride (in his) heritage." The meaning of David Kherdian's life becomes a metaphor of fishermen and their line. Always the fisherman, he discovers the ultimate mystery of the Root River (racine is French for root) that runs through the city. The river and city become the extensions of all rivers and cities in his life. Racine is a place where "sailboats, rowboats, tugs, coalboats and barges" travel Lake Michigan and the rivers, find "the piers with early morning fishermen." Little by little, Kherdian transcends the discovery that "the life he was given was the life he needed and growing up was to reveal the meaning in his life." This book quietly gives thanks to the family, people and places of Racine shaped poetic life of David Kherdian. The place he called home.

Goodkin, Richard E. "In Memory of Elaine Marks: Life Writing, Writing Death". University of Wisconsin Press, 2007.

Expanding Awareness

Amos Lassen and Literary Pride

When Elaine Marks died in 2001, the world lost a powerful voice. Marks had been widely associated with and respected as an authority on French literature, women's writing the theory of feminism and Jewish studies. She was a giant among French literary critics and added an entire new dimension to the study of the written word. I remember way back when I was an undergraduate and had taken my first feminist literature course. In one of the opening lectures we were told about the French feminist literary tradition ad names that were mentioned then have since become legendary--Helene Cixious, Luce Irigary, Kristeva and Elaine Marks. Little did I know then how much these women would influence my thoughts or my life. These women held sway over intellectual, political, ethical and even sexual domains. Marks possessed a rigorous intellectual mind with which she explored many different and diverse areas of thought and helped to develop modern existential philosophy. She wrote about Colette and Simone de Beauvoir and she did so with an authority heretofore almost unknown--especially by a woman. To me she ranks right up there with the philosopher Michel Foucault as a symbol of brilliance.
In "In Memory of Elaine Marks", editor Richard Goodkin has paid her long overdue homage. He has chosen eleven essays that revolve around the central ideas of Marks's work--lesbianism, Judaism, pedagogy, women's biography, Jewish identity, memory and mourning, community, isolation and death. These essays show how Marks saw the world existentially as she explored the human experience in an attempt to try to make sense of how we live, love, die and mourn.
The book not only celebrates the life of marks and her contributions to the world, it is also a sensitive and moving way by which to remember her. For women to reach the intellectual heights that Marks and her coterie did was a new experience for the literary world and oftentimes we do not consider the role of women in the rise of modern intellectualism. Goodkin's book may very well make us look at the issue in a new way.
Marks challenged but she was also greatly loved. The volume gives us a chance to rediscover what we may have missed or even to discover it for the first time. Reading Marks for the first time for me was a haunting experience. She boldly said so much of what believed but never had the courage to say. Her penetrating intelligence and her complex ideas will always be a part of me. The one thing that Marks said is something I think about a lot and that is that the reason that we read and write is not because we want to change the world but it is to "deepen our awareness of being in the world and having to take leave of it". We all know that our time here is measured and we all want to believe that our life here has made a difference. We all want the world to be better off when we leave than it was when we entered. Elaine Marks managed to do just that and what a great goal that is for all of us.
"In Memory of Elaine Marks" is quite an expensive book at $65 but it is well worth every penny. To be able to think deeply after a good intellectual read has no price and its value is something we cannot count.

The second volume of Simone Schwarz-Bart's history of black women focuses on black women during slavery in the Americas. As lavishly illustrated as the first volume which focused on ancient African queens, "Heroines of the Slavery Era" profiles the lives of fourteen remarkable African and African-American women who managed to rise above the degradations of slavery to place themselves in the history books for all time. Besides the already familiar figures of Phyllis Wheatley, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman, we also learn about Aqualtune, a Congolese princess enslaved in Brazil; Anastasia, who became the patron saint of Brazil's black people; Solitude, a heroine and martyr of the 1802 slave rebellion on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, and many more. We hear the haunting voices of the slaves themselves and what they endured. The breathtaking illustrations throughout this book are taken from paintings and photographs in the historical archives. Volume II of "In Praise of Black Women" continues the standard of excellence set in the first book. It's a book to be read and treasured by all women everywhere.

Patty Loew takes a novel approach in this book and uses Native American sources to tell Native American history! Oral history, treaty minutes, recorded speeches by Native American leaders, and other Native sources are used over the traditional "white" sources that make up the majority of Native American history. The book reads extremely well and is intensely interesting. Each chapter tells the story of a Wisconsin Indian nation from the point of view of that nation. This is an enjoyable book to read for anyone interested in Native American history. Moreover, it is an invaluable addition to scholarship and a (hopefully) trend-setting example of using Native sources to tell Native history.

AWESOME - it doesn't get much better. Excellent photos and text. This is the ONE book that you must own if interested in United States Indian Peace medals.

One of the most striking aspects of "Inextricably Bonded's" many worthy accomplishments is Brenner's persuasive dismissal of the notion that the internal post-Zionist critique of Israel's writers and historians is truly a new ideological or even "subversive" development. She achieves this by paying close heed to many early articulations of disapproval of institutional Zionism's varied roles in dispossessing the indigenous Arabs of land and society (among them Yosef Eliahu Chelouche, a founder of Tel Aviv, and the philosophers Ahad Ha'Am and Martin Buber). In light of increasingly shrill debates over this term (Zionists of the right predictably label the 1990s generation of "post-Zionist" historians and cultural critics as Jewish self-haters or worse), Brenner sensibly declares that the Zionist movement always encompassed a tradition of intense self-interrogation and moral argument. She also masterfully analyzes the receptions of canonical works by generations of Israeli scholars as well as the wider public. But what really stands as most innovative in her approach are her elegant comparative studies of the fiction of three Arab-Israeli writers, Emile Habiby ("The Pessoptimist"), Atallah Mansour ("In a New Light"), and Anton Shammas ("Arabesques") all of whom have written in Hebrew or published their works for Israeli readers in translation, alongside canonical works of several Israeli Jewish writers, including David Grossman, Amos Oz, and A.B. Yehoshua-all familiar writers in Europe and North America.

Throughout, Brenner produces highly original readings, masterfully demonstrating the peculiarly entwined nature of the realms of psychology and politics in the Israeli forum of art and politics. Subsequently, the author understands Israeli identity as having defined itself against a repressed Jewish Other, or history, as well as through its discriminatory practices vis-à-vis external and internal Arabs. As counter-narrative, Brenner cogently argues, the cumulative impact of the writings of Arabs and Jews in Israel, in spite of their disparate sociopolitical perspectives, effectively "restores the visibility of the Arabs in the `empty' land and calls into question the unequivocal Zionist claim to the land...by contrast, the story of the suffering that the triumphant Jews inflicted on the defenseless, defeated Arab population invokes the history of Jewish persecution and victimization in the Diaspora. Against the doctrine of exclusion, the literary representations reassert in the Israeli consciousness the denied histories of the Palestinian Arab and the Diaspora Jew."

Though Brenner always adds unprecedented insight to the broad ethical and political questions raised by the presence of the Other, a fascinating secondary issue, that of the peculiar nature of canon-formation often surfaces as a crucial dynamic. For instance, many readers (aware that Rushdie, Kundera, Solzhenitsyn, and others achieved their international fame as dissident writers at the cost of total repudiation at home), will be struck by the fact that Yehoshua, Oz, and Grossman, while deviating sharply from accepted political lines and cultural myths, nevertheless "gained canonical legitimacy from the cultural establishment that was founded upon the ideological orientation they defied." Without straying from her primary focus, Brenner skillfully addresses the ways that writers themselves (as well as their most sympathetic critics) often employ rhetorical strategies of a shared national identity to mitigate the effects of their radical writings in otherwise undermining the most precious myths of the Zionist revolution. Brenner raises uncomfortable questions about whether the literary work's dissenting messages about justice and displacement, once its author achieves canonical status, is ultimately neutered of its political potency.

Her answers are at times partial and at best uneasy but always thought-provoking. A further reason that this study will prove so eminently useful for scholars and teachers alike is that nearly all of the works discussed are readily available in English translation. "Inextricably Bonded" strongly warrants our appreciation and attention as one of the most innovative studies of modern Hebrew literary criticism, especially for its forceful demonstration that the identity politics of both Israeli Arab and Israeli Jewish writers together produce a dynamically "bi-ethnic" rather than a narrowly "national" body of literature. What Brenner so brilliantly reveals throughout this adroit analysis is that over the years the fraught realm of Arab and Israeli identity politics has provided art with a highly charged source of imaginative inspiration. Most importantly, literature clearly does matter in the "real world," for as she comes to affirm, however fragile the hope: "The readiness to tell one's story and to listen to the story of the other signifies mutual recognition, which alleviates fear. Attention to the story of the other signals the ability to transform the knot of violence into a dialogic interaction." To Brenner's lasting credit, the intertwined identities and destinies eloquently addressed in "Inextricably Bonded" go a very long way toward powerfully affirming the moral urgency of that claim.

Margery Forester describes Michael Collins in the words of another writer as "that most formidable of all men of action, the practical visionary". This biography, which was probably the most highly regarded until Tim Pat Coogan's momumental work, is still in my view one of the most readable and the one that perhaps catches the essence of its subject best, as the opening quotation indicates. In this work Forester presents all the usual facts about Collins--his youth, his rise to prominence after the 1916 rising, his intelligence, his intensity, his personal courage, his love of country and comrade, his wit and warmth--but manages to add touches that bring out even more vividly the real character of this extraordinary man. Thus, her descriptions of his interaction with children, whom he loved and who loved him; his identification with the ordinary people of Ireland and his affinity for old people; his iron self-control in matters of personal indulgence; his refusal to disguise himself during the time he was the most wanted man in the British Empire; his often-brusque manner with women, which both affronted and intrigued them; his changes of mood "as spectacular and unpredictable as the play of the Northern Lights"; and his ability to inspire trust, love, and loyalty in the many people who worked for and with him. This is a vivid biography of a young man who was both realist and idealist and who led his country to its first taste of real freedom in 700 years.

Writer Jane Schapiro achieves the seemingly impossible -- Inside a Class Action is a NON-FICTION legal thriller!

Schapiro provides a unique; "behind the scenes" look at the now-famous 1996 lawsuit filed against Swiss banks on behalf of Holocaust survivors. She provides amazing insight into a story that exploded onto the front pages, packed Congressional and Court hearings, and forever changed how the world views the Holocaust.

Schapiro deftly guides the reader through all phases of this litigation, from early discussions to court hearings, private negotiations, and the ultimate settlement. Schapiro did her homework -- having conducted extensive interviews with politicians, attorneys (on both sides), historians, researchers and survivors, as well as having scoured archival documents, court and congressional transcripts, and reviewing reams of news coverage. She relays the good, the bad and the ugly -- providing an unvarnished look at legal infighting, political feuds, and clashing egos.

Schapiro's special access to lead attorney Michael Hausfeld allows her to follow his legal "dream team" as it strips off the cloak of Swiss wartime neutrality and exposes a country and its bankers as economic allies of the Third Reich. Schapiro follows Hausfeld's decisionmaking as the case develops, and addresses important questions: What made Hausfeld take on such a case - pro bono no less? What professional and personal compromises did he make? Why did he choose to settle, rather than going to court? And was this truly a case about justice -- or money? Or both? Inside a Class Action powerfully demonstrates that justice is elusive.

This is one of the most well written, informative and exciting books I have ever read. I highly recommend it.

This book really helped me. I have never been to Madison, and I even know how it was like to be there. But this book really was a helper on the planning of my trip. It explores the good and bad side of the city, including festivities, museums, shopping and maps.