Geographica: Ancient Egypt!

King Tutankhamun's tomb was opened in 1922, and in 1977, over fifty of the 5,000 or so artifacts taken from it went on the road to dazzle the world - and nowhere did the show have a more enthusiastic audience than in America, where millions of people thronged to see these often weird and always beautiful items the teen-pharaoh had placed in his mortuary chamber with him, for his use in the afterlife. We are that young man's afterlife, and his fame lives on in our own day in a way he would probably have found quite pleasing.


Audiences marvel at the ostentatious wealth on display - so many items coated or entirely composed of gold, so many fine gems, and most of all such stunning craftsmanship - things of breathtaking beauty, preserved for mind-boggling amounts of time. This is true for all the remnants of Ancient Egypt, and it serves both to underscore the sheer ocean of time that separates the present day from their distant ages (when Herodotus saw the Great Pyramids 2000 years ago - or claimed he did - they were already over 2000 years old) and to annihilate it.

And surely no single artifact from all of Ancient Egypt produces this weird double-effect quite as strongly as does that face, the sumptuous golden face-mask of Tutankhamun that has become so iconic in the modern Western world that many people take it for granted, as much a background detail of the Ancient Egyptians as those pyramids themselves. But if you stop for a moment and really look at that face, you can almost feel the temporal certainty of the ground beneath your feet tilt a little. There's perhaps nothing in the world at once so aloof and so immediate; the eyes look like they're looking at you, the mouth looks like it's about to sneer just a little, at you; the combined affect is of an entire civilization looking right at you - or no, not a civilization but a civilization's ideal conception of itself, its dream of what it wants itself to be.

Nations often find such things in the oddest places. In England, it's the face of Winston Churchill; in America, it's the Lincoln sitting in the Lincoln Memorial. And here it's the death-ornament of a boy who didn't live long enough to become even a good pharaoh, much less a great one, an ornament that was never meant to be seen by the world at all.

Naturally, National Geographic was on hand to commemorate Tutankhamun's tour through the United States, and the short pictorial piece about it is the highlight of the March, 1977 issue.

The Reluctant God

Our book today is the 1988 young adult novel The Reluctant God by Pamela F. Service, and it amply proves Steve's Reading Rule #109: If Ancient Egypt hadn't existed, it would have been necessary for writers to invent it.

Just look at all the allures! A warm, sometimes abundant, easily-romanticized physical setting (not so easy for anybody who's actually suffered the purgatory-on-Earth that is spending any time in Egypt, but maybe everybody else), a strange and exotic people, a weird culture so like and yet so unlike our own and any forerunners of our own - and a culture obsessed with both mysticism and personal immortality: the perfect combination for fantasy writers of all kinds. Is it any wonder shambling, living-undead mummies have become such an entrenched part of our collective imagination ever since Victorian Egyptology started filling museums all over the Western world with uncannily-preserved corpses? And given the bent of the human imagination, is it any wonder that almost as long as there've been fantasy stories about dessicated, chap-fallen mummies there've been stories about various ancient Egyptians somehow regaining not just life but glorious physical youth? Their bodies are right there, placed on catafalques and treated as works of art in every major museum (an entire day can be lost in vaguely sick-feeling wonder at the specimens in Boston's Museum of Fine Arts) - it's a short step to imagine them as they were in life.

Many novels have taken that step, and I'll get to all of them in time, but I'm starting with Pamela Service's book because it's so sweet and bright and deceptively simple. It's the story of teenage Lorna Padgett, smart and socially impatient daughter of a renowned Egyptologist, and it's the story of Ameni, a handsome young prince of the 12th Dynasty ... and it's the story of how they meet and come to know each other and have adventures in present-day London and Cairo.

Mumbo-jumbo ... that's as good a word as any for the how of it. There are Egyptian priests involved, naturally, and there's a good bit of fancy-dancing about the fact that as the son of a pharaoh, Ameni is, technically, a god himself. He's entrusted by those priests with the safeguarding of two mystic urns containing the essence of Egyptian immortality. He's put into a mystically preserved hibernation so he can awaken when those urns need him in the distant future (because, as the priests very sensibly inform him, who knows if the gods will be around to protect anything, so far in the future?).

Almost all of the better ancient-Egyptian-awakens-in-present-day novels have some good rhetorical fun passing along the concept of how long four thousand years is; Ameni sleeps for four thousand years, and when he finally wakes up, the first thing he sees is pretty Lorna leaning over him, reciting his name with passable pronunciation. But before he properly wakes up, he feels the long wait of his sleeping:

His memory was of time. Time as a pure thing. Not as an empty duration between one event and another, but as a substance in itself, like an endlessly flowing river. It carried him with it, submerged in the sensation and music of its motion, never ceasing and never causing him to want or to remember anything more.

He awakens, and Lorna, thanks to her training in hieroglyphics, is the only person around who can even haltingly talk to him, and she's pretty and so is he, and this is young adult fiction, after all. When Lorna shows Ameni around her father's collection of Egyptian relics, Service has some good understated fun with the fact that Ameni can't help but think of what he's seeing as tomb-robbing. But when he comes face to face with a granite statuary head of his long-lost father, he stops. And when he confronts a statue of his twin brother (who ruled in his stead as Senusert III, he's almost overcome:

He turned at last from the time-battered head of the king to see three life-sized statues of his official successor, Senusert III. Slowly Ameni reached out a hand and touched the amulet carved into the stone of the king's chest. With his other hand, he touched its twin under his own shirt. His eyes misted, and he turned away.

The urns have survived as well, and they've been shipped to England. Ameni feels it's his duty to retrieve them, and of course Lorna wants to help, so the action of the book gets under way. But throughout the chases and adventures that follow, Service keeps her eye steadily on the extremely chaste affection (even at the happy ending, our two young people only hug) developing between the girl from England and the boy from Egypt:

They were already well into the country, and at the first sign of a tree-shielded lane, she pulled off, drove a while, and turned off the motor. Ameni was already asleep. Lorna opened her door and stepped into the quiet night. Gently she pulled his legs up onto the driver's seat and rearranged his blanket. Moments after crawling into the back seat, she was asleep as well.

The Reluctant God has a surprisingly satisfying conclusion (Ameni gives his gods a talking-to that, taken in excerpt, would do well to be memorized by every teenager in the world), and although it's necessarily slight, it's a sweet book to read and to recommend. Out of print when last I checked, of course, but copies as always available upon request!

The Death of Civilization in the Penny Press?

I worry about The New Yorker sometimes. You wouldn't think such a redoubtable old dowager would warrant worry, but I'm a bit of a redoubtable old dowager myself (despite being, as you all know, a stone cold super-hottie), and sometimes I wonder if The New Yorker's status as one of the foremost general-readership periodicals in the world doesn't make it a canary down one of the most frightening mine shafts imaginable.

At newsstands now is the magazine's double-sized 'Winter Fiction Issue' (it has four ... what, exactly? Short stories? Well, no - one of them is by Alice Munro, and as per the terms of the Munro Doctrine, it's both eye-bleedingly dull and 90,000 pages long; just 'stories'? Well, no ... two of the four don't bother to tell any stories; let's just say 'fictionesque writing exercises,' shall we? It has four fictionesque writing exercises instead of one), and it contains an article scary enough to make even the staunchest reader burn his Jonas Brothers CDs.

Of course I'm referring to Dana Goodyear's harrowing essay about keitai shosetsu, the cell-phone novel. In "I (heart) Novels," Goodyear traces the phenomenon, interviews several of the Japanese women who've become celebrities by ... well, again, what word to use? 'Writing' clearly won't do; 'composing' is even further off the mark; let's just say 'texting' ... by texting these titles, and even makes a valiant attempt to haul in Murasaki Shikibu. The end result is a picture of tomorrow's youth that simply couldn't be bleaker:

A government survey conducted last year concluded that eighty-two percent of those between the ages of ten and twenty-nine use cell phones, and it is hard to overstate the utter absorption of the populace in the intimate portable worlds that these phones represent. A generation is growing up using their phones to shop, surf, play video games, and watch live TV, on Web sites specially designed for the mobile phone. "It used to be you would get on the train with junior-high-school girls and it would be noisy as hell with all their chatting," Yumiko Sugiura, a journalist who writes about Japanese youth culture, told me. "Now it's very quiet - just the little tapping of thumbs."

And it's not just the reporting I worry about (although the "cell novel" clearly represents a new low even in a video-gaming world) when it comes to The New Yorker; I also worry that the analogue alternative isn't all that much better. Magazine issues seem weaker now than they did even a decade ago - culture sections have shrunk, book reviews have in many cases been eliminated, The Atlantic's new layout awkwardly apes Maxim, trendy pieces replace meaty pieces (only the TLS and National Geographic appear immune) - and surely some of that is reflected in this 'Winter Fiction Issue.'

It's not just the issue's fictionesque writing exercises, although those are pretty damn bad. There's the aforementioned grueling, gritty marathon by Alice Munro, a boring, plotless, pituitarily enlarged single paragraph by the grotesquely overrated Roberto Bolano (its last sentence sums things up rather neatly: "And we looked and looked, and the facades were clearly the facades of another time, like the sidewalks covered with parked cars that also belonged to another time, a time that was silent yet mobile (Lihn was watching it move), a terrible time that endured for no reason other than sheer inertia"), more of Colson Whitehead's extremely articulate but nevertheless flailing posturing, and most frustrating of all, a noxious concoction called "Another Manhattan" by Donald Antrim, featuring a loathsome quartet of yuppie creatures who do dumb, convoluted things for no reason. Antrim's characters spend a huge chunk of the exercise yammering on cell phones, and Antrim manages the impressive-but-annoying trick of making his account of that yammering as incredibly annoying as the real thing. His main character tries to buy a bouquet of flowers, has his credit card denied, and is so upset about this he has to be hospitalized and tranquilized. Long before "Another Manhattan" is over, you want the same for yourself. Or a double.


But like I said, it's not just the fictionesque exercises - even the cartoons, that last bastion of New Yorker excellence, seem fatefully lame. The humor of New Yorker cartoons, famously, can be elusive - whole comedy routines have been based on the allusive, effete world implied by the captions - but several of the cartoons in this issue are so poorly drawn that their inept execution actually distracts from whatever chance the caption had at getting you to smile. I'm not talking about styles of art here ... I'm talking about an artist clearly trying to draw something and doing a very, very poor job. Two policemen bending over a dead body, but before you can even read the joke, you're thinking, "Geez, what's up with the drawing? The cops look like aliens drawn by kids, and although the artist wants to show them bending forward, you can only barely tell that's what they're doing." Or Santa (I think - the rendering looks like an orangutan) outside a club, bellyaching about not being on 'the list' - but how can you laugh, when the club is called 'club,' the doorman not only has no facial expression but no face whatsoever, the wall of the club has a couple of hastily-scratched lines to suggest, I suppose, bricks, and the 'artist' can't even be bothered to draw other people in line (and can't be bothered to realize that without those other people, there's no joke in the joke)?


It's the one word I never thought I'd associate with The New Yorker: amateur.

Maybe it's just the end-of-the-year blues over at the venerable periodical (although several of these crappy cartoonists get regular work year-round), but you know an issue's in trouble when David Denby's menopausal harrumphings about movies are the best thing in it.

Classical Cats Indeed!

From the letters page of last week's TLS, a short, sharp little note from world-renowned classicist (and current Iowa City resident!) Peter Green:

Whether Noel Coward met Dirk Bogarde in 1939 or 1947, and did, or didn't make a pass at him, and whatever the truth about Bogarde's sex life (or possible lack thereof), in 1954, or so tradition has it, the Master, contemplating a poster advertising both Bogarde and Michael Redgrave in a now mercifully forgotten film entitled The Sea Shall Not Have Them, was heard to observe: "I don't see why not; everybody else has."

Hee.

Birds in the Garden - and How to Attract Them!

Our book today is Margaret McKenny's chatty, amiable little 1939 classic Birds in the Garden - and How to Attract Them, which features a Preface by Clyde Fisher from the American Museum of Natural History, several stunning color plates by Thomas S. Roberts, and best of all, page after page of Miss McKenny's enthusiastic, entirely sensible advice about the pleasures of birds in the garden.

There's a temptation, of course, to mock such books as this (a temptation P. G. Wodehouse yields to on more than one occasion, especially when the task falls to Jeeves to ghost-write a similar volume); after all, the world in 1939 had far more serious matters on its plate than various stratagems to lure birds into suburban gardens.


But the temptation should be resisted. Bird books have always been as decorous and largely benign as their subjects (with the slim and disturbing exception of T. H. White's The Goshawk), and there is a place in any world, no matter how dark, for both. Birds are like all other nonhuman animals in that they spend all day (as the famous wag once put it) going about their own business, but there are three key differences almost unique to them: they're very, very visible, they're uniformly beautiful, and large numbers of them have little or no aversion to interacting with mankind.

Miss McKenny recounts many dozens of stories about the charming insouciance of garden birds once they come to be familiar with their local humans - especially if those humans have made themselves known as sources of food. This is easy enough to confirm for yourself, even if you don't possess one of the fairly opulent private gardens that are Miss McKenny's standing assumption. A folding chair on a small porch will do - sit down, crumble up some bread on the floor around your feet, and chances are in fifteen minutes you'll have feathered company. Even as quick as a second consecutive day of this will suffice to make that hand-out expected. Leave a window open in the summer, and you'll very likely soon have birds flitting through your apartment, finding the kitchen, and looking for food:

A story told by Mr. Forbush in Birds of Massachusetts illustrates graphically how confiding birds may become and how much pleasure and entertainment may be derived from feeding them. He writes that a flock of 150 pine siskins, little striped brown birds, closely related to the goldfinches, had been fed all winter by Mr. Davis, and had grown very tame and confiding. The birds one morning were ready for breakfast long before he was awake, but there was no food in the trays. For a while the birds sat around in forlorn groups in the trees, then they began to fly into the open windows of Mr. Davis' bedroom. By this time he was awake but pretended to be still sleeping, so several of the siskins hopped on the bed and then came to his face and pulled at his hair. He still pretended to sleep, and they braced themselves and pulled still harder, and even began to tweak his nose and ears. One morning he covered his face with a cloth, leaving only a peephole, but one bird discovered the hole and tapped through it on his forehead. He then turned to the dish in which he kept the seed, and one little fellow lit on his hand and rode over on it so as to beat the others to the feast.

In fact, this particular phenomenon, this shared interspecies playfulness, is a continuing refrain not only in Miss McKenny's book but throughout the kinder side of man's treatment of birds. Avian life has always fascinated humans - in my opinion because the two are so much alike, with the same darting attentions, the same instantaneous inventiveness, many of the same silly priorities (fashion and home ownership, to name but two) - and Miss McKenny is quick to point out the ironic contrast involved in that:

When one thinks of the prevalent human attitude of hostility toward wild life, it seems amazing with what gentleness and kindness nearly everyone responds when one of our smaller birds shows confidence in approaching. [Forbush again] quotes the story of a farmer sitting on a snowdrift surrounded by a hundred redpolls, some of them feeding on scattered hayseed, some of them perched on his head and shoulders, and one on his knee. The farmer, one in his emotion with poet and philosopher, said that he had enjoyed himself more than at any other time he could remember.

Of course, Miss McKenny can be considerably more bloody-minded when it comes to bird-on-bird violence, as when she rhapsodizes about the sparrow hawk perhaps a trifle too enthusiastically:

This little hawk, reddish above and buffy below, with a chestnut crown on his bluish-gray head, is not much larger than a robin. Like the tree swallow, it has adapted itself to the ways of civilization and now nests quite frequently in a hollow tree on a village street, or in a birdbox in the garden. It is not only one of the most beautiful and brightly colored of the hawks, but one of the most useful. If, some morning, we hear its noisy "killee, killee" in our garden, we may know that we are sheltering the foe not only of insects but of meadow mice - those destroyers of tulip bulbs and girdlers of trees. Perhaps during the nesting season it may take an occasional song bird, but even then its prey usually is an English sparrow, which certainly we can spare without a pang.

But the real and abundant theme of Birds in the Garden is joy - the particular frequency of joy (small, illuminating, and, amazingly, innocent) that can be derived only from getting to know the birds. Even in Miss McKenny's most utilitarian passages (the book is full of useful diagrams of gardens and birdhouses, and useful lists of which birds are attracted to which plants, and in which season), that joy is right underneath the surface, waiting to burst forth, as in this account of mating practices of the common wren:

The male usually arrives first from the South. Immediately, if there is a suitable box he takes his stand upon it and from then on until the female arrives he spends his time casting his bubbles of song toward the sky to let all and sundry know about his territory. Between intervals of song he carries into the box the most impossible looking twigs, so that things will be well started when the laggard mate shows up. And when she does arrive! Such ecstasy! Showering a very cascade of notes he will throw himself skyward, only to arch downward toward the beloved one who, ignoring him, as soon as she arrives begins to throw out every stick which her mate has so laboriously dragged in.

Birds in the Garden was given a generous print-run by Grosset & Dunlap, a lifetime ago, and it's had a few reprints since then - it's not hard to find. And it's light-hearted, matter-of-fact sweetness will captivate you, like the decorative flitterings of an oriole on a picture-perfect Sunday morning. Even back in the dark days of 1939, there was still fit employment for such joy, and likely there always will be.

Steverereads: Iron Kingdom!

One of my many guilty reading pleasures is regularly re-reading things, and one of my favorite things to re-read is new books. I read them first when they come out as obscenely overpriced hardcovers, but then a year or so later, when they're issued as still-expensive trade paperbacks, I like to revisit them and see, as Mark Twain once ribbingly put it, how they've changed.

Like all good jokes, it's got a kernel of truth to it; of course the printed words don't change (although sometimes, very rarely, they do), but everything else does - everything about a book's paperback release feels different to me from its initial hardcover appearance. In the intervening months, I've more than likely followed any press the book garnered; I've probably read something else on the subject; and I've certainly grown and changed myself, as a reader and a person. Re-reading things after only a year or so is a little revelation, like looking over a diary from twelve months ago.

Longer than that, in this case, since I first wrote about Christopher Clark's graceful, pre-eminent history of Prussia, Iron Kingdom, way back in October of 2006. I loved it then, and I love it now, although having recently re-read it, I couldn't help but notice all the different things I paid attention to this time around. Back in 2006, I was most struck by Clark's portrayal of the two larger-than-life Prussians in his story, Bismarck and Frederick the Great. This time, I found myself more drawn to comparatively minor figures (not that anybody wouldn't be minor compared to those two), figures such as Karl August von Hardenberg, who spent his entire public career trying to make Prussia less, well, German:

During his ministry in Ansbach and Bayreuth, he did his best to meet security needs without undermining 'the freedom to think and to express one's opinions publicly.' His famous Riga Memorandum of 1807 stressed the value of a cooperative, rather than antagonistic, relationship between the state and public opinion, and argued that governments should not shrink from 'winning over opinion' through the use of 'good writers.' It was Chancellor Hardenberg who in 1810-11 pioneered the regular, annotated publication of new legislation, arguing that this departure from the secretive practice of earlier governments would strengthen trust in the administration.

Hardenberg also spearheaded liberal reforms aimed at easing the restrictions placed on Jews in all levels of Prussian society, and that couldn't help but arrest my attention in contrast to the other thing that I particularly noticed this time through: Clark's expert evocation of the weird relationship Hitler had with the Prussian aristocracy and nobility that encrusted the Germany he appropriated when he seized power. Here, as elsewhere in his book, Clark clears away as many misconceptions as he can:

Characterizing the relationship between the Hitler regime and the Prussian traditional and functional elites is difficult. There has to date been no systematic study of attitudes and conduct within the German regional nobilities throughout the life of the Third Reich. But one thing is clear: the conventional picture of the landed nobility haughtily withdrawing to the splendid isolation of their estates and waiting for the Nazi storm to pass is misleading. There was hardly a single East-Elbian noble family that did not have at least one party member. The ancient lineage of the Schwerins supplied no fewer than fifty-two members, the Hardenbergs twenty-seven, the Tresckows thirty, the Schulenbergs forty-one, of whom seventeen had already joined the party before 1933. Many nobles were attracted to the NSDAP because they saw an alliance with the Hitler movement as the key to securing their traditional social leadership role on new terms. But others joined because they found the party's ideology and ambiance congenial - the attitudinal gap between noble circles and the National Socialist movement was narrower than as often been supposed.

I'm relieved to say I can still whole-heartedly recommend Iron Kingdom just as I did two years ago (a significant portion of the time, re-reading dims my enthusiasm somewhat); this is sober, heavily-detailed, elegantly-constructed history of the first order, now in a solid paperback from the good people at Harvard University Press. Treat yourself to it as a holiday present!

The Devil in the Penny Press!

In the latest issue of Vanity Fair, there's another fantastic aviation article by the great freelancer Bill Lang (William Langewiesche, for those of you - like him - with no sense of the mellifluous pen-name), this one concerning the Boeing 737 and the Legacy private jet that collided mid-air over the Brazilian rain forest in 2006, killing all 154 people on board the passenger jet.

Lang, as I've noted here before, is one of the most compelling writers-for-hire working today, and his weird specialty area is aviation - and aviation disasters (his book Inside the Sky is well worth hunting down). You must never miss an essay of his on this subject; for whatever reason, it speaks to him and informs his most compelling pieces.

This one for Vanity Fair, "The Devil at 37,000 Feet," is a sterling example. Lang interviewed everybody involved, from the pilots and passengers on board the Legacy 600 (all of whom survived) to the Brazilian air force authorities to the Caiapo natives on the ground at the time of the crash, and he's done the melancholy task of listening carefully to the Boeing's cockpit recordings. The picture he composes from all this is likely the definitive one, and one of the best things about reading Lang's work is that he knows this, and the knowledge frees him to widen his perspective periodically throughout the piece, like this aria he indulges in while writing about the crash site deep in the jungle:

The scene was grim. One hundred and fifty-four people had died. They were innocent men, women, and children. People are insignificant blips on the scale of history, but these had not died peacefully, as one might wish. They had endured a period of absolute terror, and had been torn apart by the force of the impact.

About the natives he writes:

The Caiapos wanted to help. Their shaman was with them. The heavens had rained ruin onto their trees. They did not believe that people are insignificant blips in history. They believed that in a parallel world in the forest 154 tortured souls were crying out for tending.

Lang can only barely manage to control his scorn for stupidity whenever he encounters it (this quality informs many of his tartest, most memorable moments from his reporting on America's various Wars on Terror), but his singular grace as a writer is that he doesn't set out in any story intent of finding stupidity; he cares about his subjects right up until the moment when they convince him not to.

He's quick to note the showy benefits of the Legacy 600 (which, he writes, "by political, ethical, and environmental measures are abhorrent creations"): "a cockpit with the latest in electronics and instrumentation, including a Flight Management System computer, ultra-accurate G.P.S. receivers, strong radios, a superb autopilot, and the ultimate in on-board collision avoidance devices." In other words, this small private plane was better-equipped, in terms of technology, than any of those massive commercial airliners we read about last time.

This particular Legacy 600 also came with two pilots - Joseph Lepore and Jan Paul Paladino - about whom Lang is always scrupulously fair, despite the fact that the 2006 press almost immediately fixed the blame for the crash on them. The Devil is "lurking just out of sight," but as Lang sets the stage, it's the machinery as much as the men that might be at fault:

The cockpit was a cocoon. Lepore and Paladino were operating an inherently simple jet that had been stuffed with electronic capabilities - most of them nested, and therefore hidden from immediate view. The nest of flight information, much of it non-essential, is a development now several decades old and somewhat out of control. It is driven on the one hand by market pressures to create clean cockpit displays, and on the other hand by the technological possibilities offered to overly enthusiastic designers and engineers. The problem for pilots is the idiosyncratic architecture of the systems that are created, the need to fathom the logic that has been applied, and the reliance on manuals laced with invented terminology to which practitioners are expected to submit their minds. In principle a pilot with sufficient time and patience can figure it all out in advance, but such pilots are rare, and Lepore and Paladino were not among them.


What emerges as the central cause of the tragedy that followed is a heartrending combination of preventables: Lepore and Paladino didn't fully understand the technology of the jet they were flying but they thought they did, and Brazilian air traffic control didn't fully understand the limits of that jet's technology but they thought they did. When the Legacy's computer re-aligned its flight altitude, when the Legacy's transponder stopped transmitting, when Lepore and Paladino failed to see crucial indicators in their own cockpit, when Brazilian official Sergeant dos Santos misunderstood ... all these little might-haves begin to pile up, and it's Lang's sad task to sift through them all. He lays a large degree of blame on dos Santos, but he's searching further anyway:

... when the Legacy crossed overhead Brasilia and turned left to track the airway, the second altitude display automatically switched to 36,000 feet, the original flight plan's proposal and a conventional level for the new direction of flight. Apparently, dos Santos took this to mean that the legacy had been instructed to descend, though he was the controller in charge and had made no such request. Mysteriously, he then ignored the indicator of the Legacy's actual altitude - the transponder return, which showed the airplane still level at 37,000 feet. Against solid indications to the contrary, he believed the Legacy had descended to 36,000 feet.

Lepore and Paladino might have informed him otherwise, if they'd noticed the change or understood what it meant or perceived that it was their job to tell somebody about it, but none of that happened, and the result was the two planes whose onboard computers had them flying the same airway at the same altitude came together in the vastness of the open sky. For dramatic effect (of which he's a master), Lang draws near to that collision a couple of times and pulls away, and when he finally details it, you stop breathing while you read:

The Legacy came streaking at the Boeing about 30 to the left of the fuselage and 2 feet lower. The displacement was infinitesimal on the scale of the sky, and a measure of impressive navigational precision. The Legacy's winglet acted like a vertically held knife, slicing through the Boeing's left wing about half-way out and severing the wing's internal spar. The outboard section of the wing whipped upward, stripping skin as it went, then separated entirely, spiraling over the fuselage and demolishing much of the Boeing's tail. In the Boeing's cockpit, the sequence sounded like a car crash. Instantly the Boeing twisted out of control, corkscrewing violently to the left and pitching straight down into a rotating vertical dive. The cockpit filled with alarms - an urgent klaxon and a robotic voice insistently warning, Bank angle! Bank angle! Bank angle! as if the crew might need the advice. Back in the cabin the passengers screamed and shouted. The pilots reacted as one might expect, fighting desperately to regain control. They probably did not know what had gone wrong. They certainly never mentioned it. What is unusual is that they also did not swear. Ten seconds into the dive, one of them did cry, "Aye!," but the other urged him to stay calm. "Calma!" he said, and seconds later he said it again. If pilots must die in an airplane, all would choose to finish so well.

The technological heart of the tragedy here was in its infancy back in 1977, when a National Geographic writer could confidently call "more gadgets" the best, safest path of the future. Because it was gadgets - and the average pilot's over-reliance on them - that made this 2006 mid-air collision possible:

Until recently, head-on airplanes mistakenly assigned the same altitude and route by Air Traffic Control would almost certainly have passed some distance apart, due to the navigation slop inherent in their systems. But this is no longer true. The problem for the Legacy was that the Boeing coming at them on the same assigned flight path had equipment that was every bit as precise.

This brings Lang to the conclusion of his stirring piece, and I'll let him have the last word here after urging all of you never to miss a magazine article by this man. He's one of the best in the business:

I asked the Caiapos to consider that in all the sky above the forest only these two airplanes had been in flight. It was as if in a space the size of the Caiapo village - no, all the way out to the road - you had shot two arrows in opposing directions, and they had collided. What were the odds? In the past it never would have happened. Even if you had assigned them identical flight paths, the arrows would have passed some distance apart because of the inherent inaccuracies of flight. But now better feathers have been invented, and have become required equipment for the high-speed designs. As a result, the new arrows are extraordinarily accurate, which allows more of them to be shot around, but with increasing reliance on tightly-coupled systems of control. The sky is just as big as it ever was, but the margin for error has shrunk. And when the systems fail? That is what happened over the Caiapos' land. The paradox was precision. Mistakes were made, and the Devil played, and two arrows touched nose to nose.

Geographica: Airplane Safety!

Today's Geographica harks back 30 years, to an article written in the August 1977 issue by Michael E. Long with photographs by Bruce Dale. The article is called "The Air Safety Challenge," and it was written in a radically different era of aviation history than our own. In the late '70s, commercial airlines were beginning to bask in the ubiquity (and remarkable workhorse capability) of the jet engine, and newer and more sophisticated equipment was starting its slow migration from the military theater to the civil one. Many of the finer points of aerodynamics were still unknown or only sketchily known, and President Reagan had yet to fire the air traffic controllers.

The '70s saw a marked drop in fatal aircraft accidents (4 in 1976), prompting Long to echo the famous line of Christopher Reeve's Superman immediately after saving Lois Lane from a near-fatal helicopter accident, "Statistically speaking, it's still the safest way to travel" (this line played considerably better in the late '70s than it did in the early 2000's when it was uttered again - without irony - by Brandon Routh's Superman). The increase in safety stats was probably due to a combination of factors, with an emphasis on consistently rigorous pilot training and the aforementioned advances in flight technology, although as Long points out, problems persist.

The main problem in this article is wind shear, the sudden and largely unforeseeable change in wind velocity that can wreak havoc with a jet engine, causing near-instantaneous losses of lift pressure, forcing pilots to make split-second decisions that are often counter-intuitive. "I was funneling all my years of flying experience into those moments," one veteran pilot tells Long, referring to a time when his craft encountered such unheralded wind shear. Naturally, the focus of this part of the article is the crash of Eastern Flight 66 at JFK in 1975, in which 113 people were killed; wind shear was fingered as the culprit, and the National Transport Safety Bureau did a thorough examination:

As part of its investigation, the NTSB re-enacted the accident in a 727 simulator. Computers programmed the winds encountered by Flight 66. Experienced pilots "flew" numerous approaches. Their instructions: Land if possible, make a missed approach if necessary, don't crash. Of 54 approaches, only five were successful.

One of the pilots told me, "I crashed five times in six approaches. I didn't believe a wind existed that could so overwhelm an aircraft."

Long also concentrates his attention on another key factor in pilot efficiency: their ability to see where they're going. Specifically, their ability to draw "vertical guidance" from visual clues outside their craft, so they can tell how high up off the ground they are. At one point, a 747 pilot allows Long to pilot the craft to its landing, which he does with some trepidation and immediate candor:

Am I asking you to believe that I stepped right into a 747 and landed it? No. But there's something I'd like you to understand: During that approach I had no trouble keeping the aircraft lined up with the runway. But I had to keep referring to the flight director and other instruments to maintain the proper descent angle. The name of this problem is "vertical guidance."


Of course the main obstacle to something like good vertical guidance is bad visibility - visibility being a key element in an era where electronic instruments were only for in-flight maintenance and pilots still used their eyes, their hands, and their instincts to land their planes. If your visibility is poor, if you're using guideposts that aren't accurate (or aren't what you think they are, or where you think they are), you'll lay yourself open to critical error, often with only seconds to recognize and correct what you've done. Long surveys the wide world of 70s aviation and comes to a quick conclusion about what will likely solve the problems of vertical guidance: "better gadgets."

The inevitable trend is automation. Someday a jetliner will be built that will fly itself from takeoff to touchdown; pilots will merely monitor its performance.

Or, as one veteran pilot puts it:

In the flight deck of the future, we might as well put the pilots behind glass and give the flight attendants an axe, with instructions to break the glass in case of emergency.



Long ends his piece on an upbeat note, looking forward to a future in which pilots continue to be rigorously trained, a future in which air-traffic continues to be carefully controlled and monitored, and a future in which the advances of aviation technology continue to make things easier for the pilots and safer for the passengers. He couldn't have known that in only a year into that future, despite the presence of all those advances, Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 182 would collide with a private Cessna in San Diego, killing a total of 144 people, including seven on the ground ("Ma I love you" being the famous final words on the cockpit recording), although if he had known, he'd no doubt have said the technology will keep getting better, and tragic mistakes like that will someday be eliminated completely.

We'll take a look much, much further into that confident future, in the next Stevereads.

Bible Study: The Second Book of Samuel!

Our text today is from II Samuel, from the infamous lust-story of David and Bathsheba. One balmy spring evening, David is strolling on his palace roof when he spots a beautiful woman bathing. He asked around about who she was (we're not told how; either he described her address to the people he asked, or else he dragged them up to the roof and pointed) and learned that she was Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, one of the soldiers in David's own army, under the command of Joab.

David sent flunkies to fetch her, and (presumably after saying hello, although David was a randy little bugger and the Bible is silent on the point) they slept together. Bathsheba later sent word to him that she was pregnant and that she was certain the child was his. So David promptly sent for Uriah; they sat and chatted about things in general, about the conduct of the ongoing war (those pesky Ammonites again). The Bible is silent on whether or not Uriah found it strange that he should be summoned out of the blue to gossip with the king, and what David did next is even stranger: he told Uriah to go home and relax for a bit, and he sent him away with a generous portion from the royal banquet tables.

David's motivation is obvious - if Uriah wasted no time in sleeping with Bathsheba, David could then claim the child was Uriah's and nobody would be the wiser. As starstruck as he is by Bathsheba's beauty, at this point in the story he's still trying to duck having anything more to do with her or the baby.

Unfortunately, Uriah didn't go home. He slept in camp in the palace yard, and when David summoned him and asked him (his exasperation can be imagined) why he didn't go home and take it easy for a bit, Uriah's dignity was ruffled: how could he live with himself if he want home and relaxed while his commander and all their men were still in the field, under arms, waging a war?

Nothing if not persistent, David tried again the next day ... more food, more wine, more chit-chatting, followed once again by urging Uriah to go home and sleep with his wife. And again Uriah refused, once more sleeping in camp at the palace. Commentators over the centuries have wondered if perhaps there wasn't more going on here than simple martial virtue. After all, David had hardly made a secret of the fact that he fancied the man's wife - if Uriah had heard of this, is it any wonder he didn't feel like cozying up to Bathsheba, drunk or sober?

Finally David had had enough:

Next morning, David wrote a letter to Joab and sent it by Uriah. In the letter he wrote, "Station Uriah in the thick of the fight and then fall back behind him so that he may be struck down and die." Joab, then besieging the town, posted Uriah in a place where he knew there were fierce fighters. The men of the town sallied out and engaged Joab; the army suffered casualties, including some of David's bodyguard; and Uriah the Hittite was killed too.

When Joab got word of this, he sent a messenger to tell David what happened, and he prepared the messenger for a hostile reception (David by this point has something of an evil reputation for how he takes bad news), warning the man to make sure to tell David that Uriah the Hittite died in the day's fighting. And sure enough, when David hears news of the battle, the little hypocrite waxes wroth - until he's told about Uriah, at which point he almost comically calmed down and sent Joab a message saying, essentially, these things happen.

Either Bathsheba or David or both made a point of waiting out the bare minimum decent interval of mourning, and then they got married. Which might have been what they both wanted, but even so, the Bible tells us Yahweh wasn't happy about it.

It's hard to read into the story what might really have happened, although it's at least certain that at some point David changed his mind about what he wanted. At first, he made very pointed efforts to keep Uriah the Hittite alive and make him the baby's father. And when these attempts failed, David suddenly shifted his tactics and successfully got Uriah killed (and, in an especially cold little gesture worthy of King Claudius, had Uriah himself unknowingly carry the order for his own execution). What changed?

I think Bathsheba is the key. I think David was realizing two things during those days when he was trying to send Uriah home to his wife: first, that Uriah himself was a bit of a boob, and second, that David increasingly couldn't bear the thought of anybody being with Bathsheba but himself. I think the more he thought about her, the more he had to have her.

Still, he took an enormous risk. The people he asked about Bathsheba's identity, the flunkies he sent to fetch her, the palace servants he instructed to bear the royal banquet to this nobody's house, his army commander Joab, to whom he gave actual written instructions to connive at the murder of one of his own men ... right from the beginning, way too many people knew about this erotic fixation of David's, and that's surely our lesson for today: when pursuing another man's wife, discretion is everything. Without it, you run the risk of gossip, mutiny, and pissing off Yahweh.

Mentor Books!

In any ongoing feature on great series of books, a place must be made for the great Mentor Books that flourished in the 1950s and '60s in America and the UK. These books could be lost in the sea of competing scholarly texts of those more literate days, but they were built with love and care, some obviously designed to be adopted as school textbooks, others with far less chance of being adopted as anything at all.

Now, unexpected decades later, Mentor Books show up at used bookstores all the time, and two things can be noticed about them instantly:

First, these are massively sturdy books, physically. They're all mass-market paperbacks, but they were printed on high-quality hardy-white paper stock, and their binding is incredibly solid, as immovable as the binding of old-style Penguin Classics is flexible. Mentor Books were built to last as long as it would take their physical components to decay - not for a season or two (like present-day mass market paperbacks, which can hardly withstand one careful reading before cracking apart like a hopeful marriage), but for the entire life of the potential reader. Even now, in the doorstep-days of the 21st century, chances are any Mentor Book you encounter at Pete's Book Shack or The Revised Index will be in every bit as good condition as it was when its original owner bought it, to pass the time in ROTC or on the bus-ride to Woodstock.



And second, these were ambitious volumes. They wanted to teach you things, to show you things, and they very often assembled lots of first-rate talent to do so. Editors in this series were loyal (were they paid well? One doubts it, the editorial lot in life being one of the constants of the universe), and they did by and large wonderful work in volume after volume. Take, for instance, the two delightful Mentor volumes collecting eight great comedies and eight great tragedies from the whole span of Western literature and plopping them down right in front of you in two handy volumes: these were edited by, among others, the great (and greatly missed - you could have no better or funnier company on a nice slow 1970s crawl through every shelf-inch of every one of the fifteen used bookstores Harvard Square had at the time) Sylvan Barnet, in whose care you could repose all the trust in the world.


True, the sureness of the selections wobbles a bit the nearer it approaches the present day (does even the most partisan soul think Yeats' "On Baile's Strand," for instance, deserves to be on the same bill of fare as "King Lear" and "Prometheus Bound"? Or, for that matter, Machiavelli's "The Mandragola" in the same lineup as "Uncle Vanya" and "Twelfth Night"?) , but even in those cases, the juxtapositions of eras and styles makes the whole enterprise that much more exciting. And since Mentor Books were designed for maximum durability (like their company cousins, our old friends the Signet Classic Poetry Series), that was an excitement you could carry around with you everywhere.

There was excitement too in some of the more scholarly editions of Mentor Books, which could often be, in their quieter, less obtrusive way, the best such editions popularly available. Two examples will suffice: Donald Dudley's remarkably good translation of the Annals of Tacitus (accompanied by a very generous number of end-notes, many of which make fantastic reading on their own), still one of the best English translations of Tacitus available in your better-stocked used bookstores, and Horace Gregory's terrific 1958 translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, which is still, after half a century, the single best translation ever made of Ovid into English.


Both these editions are truly remarkable events, and the Gregory actually sold well for Mentor (although neither it nor any other Mentor Book could even distantly approach the sales of their single most popular book, Edith Hamilton's Mythology which, like the Pyramids, will be here long after we're all gone) - and the combination was thrilling. It still is thrilling, whenever encountered by chance at Merle's World or Hand It Over.

Most thrilling of all, naturally, are the oddities, the snatches of weird, utterly opinionated, utterly memorable prose where you least expect it. Probably my favorite example of this is contained in the (again, ambitious) volume 100 British Poets, edited and presided over by Selden Rodman. His omissions in this volume are nearly as interesting as his inclusions, but it's his final summarizing essay that provokes smiles of delight and consternation. Here's what he has to say about my dear Edmund Spenser, for instance:

Ever since The Faerie Queene's first three books were published in 1590 (and dedicated to Elizabeth lest she miss the point), Spenser has been considered a major poet. Will the verdict be reversed in our century? - or has this anthologist a blind spot? Perhaps we don't have anymore for this poet's perpetual slow motion. Hazlitt, in the Romantic heyday when Spenser's influence was huge, felt it necessary to reassure readers that even if the ponderous allegorical machinery of Spenser's pastoral epic did indeed exist, it wouldn't bite. Loaded with voluptuous sensuality, but unleavened with an iota of passion or humor, timeThe Faerie Queene is consistently dull.

All of which might be unforgivable, except who can hold a grudge against a critic who can write something as heartfelt as this, about the insufferable Shelley:

At eighteen I could not have been convinced that greater lyrics had been written than "Music when soft voices die," "When the lamp is shattered," or "The Indian Serenade." At twenty I gloried in the "difficulties" of "Epipsychidion," "The Sensitive Plant," and "The Triumph of Life." And at twenty-one (with tears in my eyes) I recited whole stanzas from "Adonais" at Keats' grave. Ten years later, I found the lyrics insipid, the intellectual poems pretentious and the elegy frigid. Today I wouldn't be quite so cavalier in dismissal of any of these poems, but discovery of the earlier political poems of Shelley (which I found unreadable in adolescence) has convinced me anew of Shelley's stature. Let anyone read these thrilling indictments of heartlessness in high office and the oncoming urban nightmare and still call Shelley (was it Arnold who did?) "an ineffectual angel beating his luminous wings in the void"!



That entirely accurate evocation of how even our most passionately held artistic beliefs can radically change over time is the perfect reason why it's such a good thing these Mentor Books are so durable and well-edited: there's a good chance, given the mutability of the human heart, that we'll always need them, when we happen to encounter them at The Back Page or The King's Browse.

JLA/Avengers!

Our book today is JLA/Avengers, the graphic novel collection of the epic four-issue collaboration between comic book giants Marvel and DC in 2003 and 2004, now finally out in a trade paperback in a bookstore near you.

For many comics fans (myself certainly included), this story line is a kind of dream come true: an elaborate and highly detailed team-up/fight between the greatest super-hero team of the Marvel universe, the Avengers, and the most iconic super-hero team of the DC universe, the Justice League - here written by a comics fan who manages to 'get' just about every one of the many characters he's writing, and drawn by a comics legend and fan favorite. The comic-reading public had been promised some variation of this collaboration at every fan convention and trade show for the last thirty years (artist George Perez slips in funny visual references to all of them in the course of this story), and here popular writer Kurt Busiek is finally given permission not only to have the core members of both teams meet, but to have them fight - with a couple of actual winners and losers (non-comic fans have to realize how very, very rare that is in the comics world).

Now that all four issues have been collected, first in a deluxe slipcased hardcover and now in a handy trade paperback, it's easier to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the story - it has plenty of both. In any mega-thingamabob like this, the organizing plot device will be a Maguffin of massive proportions, and in that JLA/Avengers doesn't disappoint: a cosmic super-baddie from the DC universe, Krona, wants to know what came before the Big Bang. He wanders through one alternate universe after another (destroying most of them in the process, as cosmic super-baddies tend to do) in search of the answer, until he gets to the Marvel universe, where the cosmic chess-player The Grandmaster tells him he knows of a being who pre-dates the Big Bang - he offers to make introductions, IF Krona can best him in a game of cosmic chess, using the super-heroes from two alternate universes as living chess pieces. Instead of immediately eviscerating The Grandmaster, Krona agrees - and so the Justice League and the Avengers are pitted against each other!


This presents Busiek with his first major problem, because he's enough of a comics aficionado to want to use only the quintessential members of both teams as his key players. For the Justice League this is comparatively easy: it's the roster even most non-comics fans will know by name - Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, Green Lantern, the Flash, Aquaman (to which add that perennial unknown, the Martian Manhunter, and Busiek's quite appropriate addition of Plastic Man). For the Avengers it's much trickier - you want a roster that has a good deal of physical power but that also represents the team at its best. Busiek picks a great central core: Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, Hank Pym, the Wasp, the Vision, the Scarlet Witch, Hawkeye, and Quicksilver.

Comics fans can spot the problem right away, at least in terms of having the two teams of chess-pieces initially square off against each other: the Justice League would mop the floor with the Avengers. The Justice League roster includes three characters with world-class super-strength, four characters who can move at super-speed, four characters who can emit energy-beams of some kind or other, five characters who possess (or can summon) some form of invulnerability ... etc. By contrast, the Avengers contingent has two characters who are entirely dependent on technology (and one who is a piece of technology), two characters with no super-powers at all, only two characters with any degree of invulnerability, and only three characters with any degree of super-strength (and only one of those, Thor, has it in comparable degree to that possessed by half the Justice League team) ... etc.

If this thing were being handicapped by Las Vegas bookies instead of written and drawn by comics fans for comics fans, the resulting fight between these two teams would take about five minutes. After those five minutes, Thor would be the only Marvel character still standing - and he'd be facing Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, and the Martian Manhunter, so he wouldn't be standing for long.

But that's never how things happen in the world of comics, and Busiek knows it (you can tell he knows it by the two absolutely priceless scenes in JLA/Avengers where he bucks against it - once by having Batman 'spend fifteen minutes beating up some loon in kevlar' offstage - i.e. the allegedly badass Punisher, and once by having Captain America handily demolish the allegedly badass Prometheus ... while uttering my single favorite line from the book, "Try fighting the Wehrmacht, mister - it teaches you FOCUS!" Hee). So the battles between the two teams in his book are more prolonged and even-sided affairs.


Of course long-time comics fans will have dreamt of some of those battles, and they'll disagree with some of Busiek's outcomes. Some of the fights he orchestrates are iconic in their own right: Batman and Captain America, for instance, are each respective company's most popular and well-known non-superpowered character, one a grim nighttime avenger of wrong, and the other a flag-wearing champion of right. How on Earth can you call a winner in such a fight? On his side, Captain America has not only the super-soldier formula coursing through his body (and making him, at least according to The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, virtually incapable of getting tired) but has years of experience fighting all kinds of opponents. And on the other hand, you have ... Batman, the least beatable of all super-heroes, powered or otherwise.

Busiek solves this particular problem cannily (he makes them so experienced they don't need to fight - they become the ones who realize both teams are being used as pawns in a bigger game), but that still leaves him with lots of others. DC's Flash is just plain and simple faster than Marvel's Quicksilver. DC's Green Lantern has access to technology (his ring) that just plain and simple outclasses the technology of Iron Man's armor. DC's dark-eyed emotionally-controlled team 'outsider' Martian Manhunter has all the powers of his Marvel equivalent, the Vision, and lots more besides. And who on the Avengers even approaches the balance for a character like Wonder Woman - as powerful as Superman and with five hundred times his fighting experience?

It's to Busiek's credit that in addition to side-stepping some of these problems by getting the two teams co-operating on the double, he also shifts his focus onto the differences in the two teams - and by extension the two universes and the two companies. At one point Aquaman comments to Superman that the heroes of the Marvel universe seem generally less powerful than those of the DC universe ("and," Aquaman points out, "their world is stacked against them"), and although this doesn't cut any mustard with Superman (he's portrayed throughout as interestingly disdainful of the Marvel heroes' inability to inspire the populace), it's a great motif running throughout the book. We're told that the Marvel Earth is smaller than the DC version, and louder, and less healthy (Superman's senses note harsher sunlight and higher blood pressure) - and this perfectly reflects the more hardscrabble, more human kind of superhero that Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko wanted to create forty years ago, specifically as a comment on DC's larger-than-life icons.

At one point when the Avengers' expert marksman Hawkeye rejoins his comrades, the Wasp warmly welcomes him with a friendly peck on the cheek, and it's a winning, natural moment - and unthinkable in DC's more Olympian cast. Busiek puts little moments like that everywhere in his sprawling cosmic epic, and they all work.


The whole book largely works, and by far the most moving moment comes when our combined heroes are faced with a choice: go on living in the fantasy-world caused by the forcible combining of their two worlds, or fight to separate those worlds and restore both their realities. In order for them to make an informed decision, The Grandmaster shows them a kaleidoscope of key moments from their respective realities - a guided tour of the very worst things that comics readers have seen happen to these characters over the last twenty years. It's a surreal moment, as long-time readers realize all they've been through with these characters ... and when it's over, our heroes do just what heroes always do: they choose to suffer for the greater good.

Again, JLA/Avengers mostly works, and reading it again after a lapse of years allowed me to pick out not only more of the delectable little character moments Busiek includes but also more of the fantastic, fanatical, insanely detailed penciling work of George Perez, who manages, in the course of four issues (and all at once on the cover of the fourth), to draw just about every major and minor character in the entire history of both Marvel and DC. Virtuosity like that becomes almost scary, but in a good way.

And at the end, of course, the door is left open for other such epic adventures! To which I have an obvious suggestion but one nevertheless I'd love to see: the full cast of Golden Age characters from each company, fighting and then teaming up against Hitler, the Red Skull, Per Degaton, and whatever other baddies come to mind. JSA/Invaders! Who's with me?

Great Caesar's Ghost in the Penny Press!

A large part of the joy that comes from seeing a trained academic excel at book-reviewing comes from how antithetical those two endeavors are. Yes, in their purest forms, both are trying to teach people something, but given the necessary brevity of even the longest periodical piece, pedagogical aspirations must be narrow. And given the length and cost of school terms, academics expect to get more than one shot at getting their teaching done.

Not so the book reviewer! He has just those 2000 words (if that - so rarely more!) to cover a field, synopsize a book, and make a point about the two ... is it any wonder so many of them fail so miserably? And even those few who manage to succeed - can we really expect that in addition to everything else, they'll also be fun to read? It seems cruel.

So all hail the mighty Mary Beard, who manages to be both a genuine Oxford scholar of the Classics and one Hell of a good book reviewer! In the latest New York Review of Books, she takes a look at three recent books on our old enemy Gaius Julius Caesar, and even for those of you who haven't read the books in question, it's a safe bet Beard's piece makes better reading than any of them (I have read all three, and it does).

And as in so many families, it's the middle child who gets it the worst: the second of her three subjects, Philip Freeman's Julius Caesar, takes it on the teeth for any number of mistakes it's not wise to make in the presence of a Classics don. Beard sums up the choices open to prospective Caesar biographers:

"Caesar: good or bad?" is the question only just under the surface here. Modern commentators might express a similar dilemma somewhat differently. Where on the political spectrum between John F. Kennedy (who is part of the inspiration for Steven Saylor's Caesar, in his detective novels set in ancient Rome) and Robert Mugabe does Caesar most plausibly belong?

Having so elegantly set the terms, she then starts in on Freeman:

Where Freeman must resort to speculation, he tends to be liberal with his cliches (years "dawn," tribesmen are "fearless" or "fiercely independent," blood flows in "torrents"). And he is often inaccurate with the background details, large and small. I know of no evidence, for example, that Romans stored their boots and shoes in the vestibulum (entrance hall) of their houses, or that the pool of water regularly found in the atrium was intended as a fish pond.

But it's when Freeman refers to Caesar as a "boy from the slums of Rome who had fought his way to the top of the political ladder" that he draws Beard's sharpest ire:

This is preposterous. You might possibly tell some such story about Caesar's contemporary Cicero, who really was a "new man" on the Roman political scene - though even he had a comfortable background among the country gentry, rather than among the festering slums. No successful Roman politician in the first century BCE was poor, least of all those who championed the cause of the disadvantaged in the city. Caesar's career, and his rise to power, only make sense if you see him as a man endowed with all the hereditary prestige and advantages of old money. Smart and snobbish Julii, Caesar and his father (who had himself, after all, reached the praetorship, the second-highest office in Rome, after the consulship) would be appalled at Freeman's picture of their lowly background.

Nothing quite so bracing, is there, as a purely British-style 'This is preposterous'!

The same NYRB issue had lots and lots of other good stuff in it, though nothing quite so good as this (although the subject matter may bias me!) ... we'll have to cover more of it, in the days to come!

Bible Study: The Book of Nehemiah!

Our text today is from the Book of Nehemiah:

When evening shadows fell on the gates of Jerusalem before the Sabbath, I ordered the doors to be shut and not opened until the Sabbath was over. I stationed some of my own men at the gates so that no load could be brought in on the Sabbath day. Once or twice the merchants and sellers of all kinds of goods spent the night outside Jerusalem. But I warned them and said, "Why do you spend the night by the wall? If you do this again, I will lay hands on you." From that time on they no longer came on the Sabbath. Then I commanded the Levites to purify themselves and go and guard the gates in order to keep the Sabbath day holy.

Remember me for this also, O my God, and show mercy to me according to your great love.

Nehemiah tells his own story in the book (aside from a couple of lines that refer to him in the third person and may therefore have migrated into this text from elsewhere, unless the whole thing is by somebody else whose authorial control slipped in those lines), the story of being at the court of the Persian king Artaxerxes in the years after the destruction of the Great Temple at Jerusalem and the exile of the surviving Jews.

Artaxerxes notices that Nehemiah is unhappy and asks him why. Nehemiah tells him: he'd like to go to Jerusalem and rebuild the city and the city walls, since great chunks of both lay now in burned ruins. Nehemiah assures us that it was God Who put this idea in his head, but it sure doesn't seem that way - this is a guy who seems very likely to get things done all by himself (and besides, in the Old Testament, God's idea of gently persuading Artaxerxes would have been to fill him to overflowing with live maggots, not get Nehemiah to propose some urban renewal). Nehemiah likewise credits God with Artaxerxes' answer, which is a resounding 'yes.' The king authorizes the rebuilding and shields Nehemiah not only with letters of instruction to the local satraps and governors but also with an armed detachment.

The aforementioned governors don't like any measures that help the Jews, and so they grumble and threaten violence. And in a typical motif of the Old Testament, even the Jews' alleged benefactor grows disillusioned with the Chosen People - the above quote is just one among many in which Nehemiah wonders if the squawking, covetous, mercantile behavior of the people he invites back into the rebuilt city makes them unworthy of all the bother he's gone to. And the quote demonstrates another thing about Nehemiah, as we've said: he was entirely capable of getting the results he wanted all by himself. His invocations of God come across as pro forma ass-covering.

And the message of it all? Well, the Book of Nehemiah comes at the very end of the Jewish history parts of the Old Testament, when the shot and incident of the earlier books has died away almost completely, leaving nothing much more than standard ancient history. So it's possible God simply stopped caring about any of this human stuff in which he once took such a drastic and bombastic interest. He doesn't talk to Nehemiah at all, not even a terse 'good job.' And a few centuries after Nehemiah, when the Roman Vespasian, his two sons Titus and Domitian, and their right-hand-general Trajanus all sacked Jerusalem and burned the Great Temple, God didn't lift a pinky to stop it.

Still, even though he's seconded by no smiting or plaguing, Nehemiah has at least royal backing to get his various projects done. And those projects do get done - a lot more quickly and unambiguously than most Old Testament projects in which God is heavily involved. If there is a falling off, maybe it's mutually beneficial.