Showing posts with label Religion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Religion. Show all posts
Friday, December 2, 2011
Footloose (1984)
Cute, But, Kevin Bacon was 26 when he played a high school student, Lori Singer 27. (In the 2011 version, not much has changed: both leads are in their 20s)
Saturday, March 20, 2010
Books About Scandals
Five Best - March 20, 2010: Now it can be told: Henry E. Scott's favorite books about scandals
1. The Informant. Kurt Eichenwald. Broadway, 2000. 364.168 E
More than 5,000 book titles on Amazon include the word "scandal"—that says a lot about the theme's drawing power, but some of the best books on the subject are more subtly titled. Kurt Eichenwald's "The Informant" is a classic of corporate-scandal reportage, dissecting the 1990s price-fixing conspiracy by Archer Daniels Midland and overseas agricultural companies. The book reads like a John Grisham thriller as Eichenwald weaves the improbable story of Mark Whitacre, an ADM executive who became the FBI's secret source—and who turned out to be crooked, too. Who knew that a complex tale about an international plot to rig the prices of an animal-feed additive called lysine could be almost impossible to put down?
2. A Gospel of Shame. Frank Bruni and Elinor Burkett.
Viking, 1993. 261.832 B
"A Gospel of Shame" is a disturbing account of religious scandal. New York Times reporter Frank Bruni and magazine writer Elinor Burkett put the reader in parochial-school classrooms and vividly conjure the terror felt by children subjected to gropings and worse by the priests who were supposed to be their moral shepherds. Bruni and Burkett also document the now well-known conspiracy by the Catholic Church hierarchy to cover up the child-abuse scandals. "Shame" opens with the story of 40-year-old Frank Fitzpatrick's 1990 telephone call to Father James Porter, his childhood priest at St. Mary's Church in North Attleboro, Mass. Fitzpatrick confronts him: Why did Porter molest Fitzpatrick and other children? The priest replies: "Who knows?"—and laughs.
3. Eight Men Out. Eliot Asinof. Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1963. 796.357 A
These days, when sports reporters seem to spend as much time in courtrooms as in locker rooms, sports scandals aren't hard to find. Eliot Asinof's "Eight Men Out" is all the more entertaining for its depiction of a baseball conspiracy that occurred back when players' transgressions went largely unreported: the "Black Sox scandal" of the 1919 World Series. Asinof's exhaustively researched tale shows how the Chicago White Sox were paid by New York gangster Arnold Rothstein to throw the Series to the Cincinnati Reds. Players in on the fix included the team's star, "Shoeless" Joe Jackson. He took the bribe money, but Rothstein should have asked for a refund: Jackson hit .375 in the Series and drove in six runs. But Jackson was among the eight White Sox players banned from baseball after the conspiracy was uncovered.
4. Forgiven. Charles E. Shepard. Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989. B Bakker S
Scandal is especially delicious when it snares people who preach morality. In "Forgiven," Charles E. Shepard recounts, as the subtitle has it, "the rise and fall of Jim Bakker and the PTL ministry," building on stories that the reporter broke in the Charlotte Observer about the seamy reality of Bakker's multimillion-dollar evangelical empire. (PTL, Bakker said, stood for Praise the Lord and People That Love.) The preacher's downfall began in the mid-1980s with the revelation of his sexual encounter with a young woman in a Florida hotel room and Bakker's efforts to buy her silence. Bakker, who hosted "The PTL Club" television show with his heavily mascaraed wife, Tammy Faye, "used tears, humor, righteous anger, bruised self-pity, and gentle ministry to touch viewers in their living rooms," Shepard writes. In particular Bakker put the touch on them for fake time-shares at the PTL religious theme park in South Carolina. The scam funded Bakker's lavish living, but it also landed him in jail. This engaging true tale is stranger than Sinclair Lewis's "Elmer Gantry" fiction.
5. Investigation Hollywood. Fred Otash. Regnery, 1976.
It is hard to imagine being shocked by anything that occurs in Hollywood these days, but that wasn't always the case. In 1976 Fred Otash—billed as "scandaland's top private detective"— published a startling chronicle of the days in the 1950s when publicists worked overtime to cover up their clients' misbehavior. Perhaps Otash's most fascinating story involves a closeted gay actor and his angry wife, who is collecting evidence to sweeten the settlement she'll get when she sues for divorce. She hires Otash to secretly record her confrontation with the actor—referred to here as "Mr. Star," later revealed to be Rock Hudson— over his affairs with his agent and other men. It's a sorry business, but then the grist for most scandals usually is.
—Mr. Scott's "Shocking True Story: The Rise and Fall of Confidential, America's Scandalous Scandal Magazine" was recently published by Pantheon.
1. The Informant. Kurt Eichenwald. Broadway, 2000. 364.168 E
More than 5,000 book titles on Amazon include the word "scandal"—that says a lot about the theme's drawing power, but some of the best books on the subject are more subtly titled. Kurt Eichenwald's "The Informant" is a classic of corporate-scandal reportage, dissecting the 1990s price-fixing conspiracy by Archer Daniels Midland and overseas agricultural companies. The book reads like a John Grisham thriller as Eichenwald weaves the improbable story of Mark Whitacre, an ADM executive who became the FBI's secret source—and who turned out to be crooked, too. Who knew that a complex tale about an international plot to rig the prices of an animal-feed additive called lysine could be almost impossible to put down?
2. A Gospel of Shame. Frank Bruni and Elinor Burkett.
Viking, 1993. 261.832 B
"A Gospel of Shame" is a disturbing account of religious scandal. New York Times reporter Frank Bruni and magazine writer Elinor Burkett put the reader in parochial-school classrooms and vividly conjure the terror felt by children subjected to gropings and worse by the priests who were supposed to be their moral shepherds. Bruni and Burkett also document the now well-known conspiracy by the Catholic Church hierarchy to cover up the child-abuse scandals. "Shame" opens with the story of 40-year-old Frank Fitzpatrick's 1990 telephone call to Father James Porter, his childhood priest at St. Mary's Church in North Attleboro, Mass. Fitzpatrick confronts him: Why did Porter molest Fitzpatrick and other children? The priest replies: "Who knows?"—and laughs.
3. Eight Men Out. Eliot Asinof. Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1963. 796.357 A
These days, when sports reporters seem to spend as much time in courtrooms as in locker rooms, sports scandals aren't hard to find. Eliot Asinof's "Eight Men Out" is all the more entertaining for its depiction of a baseball conspiracy that occurred back when players' transgressions went largely unreported: the "Black Sox scandal" of the 1919 World Series. Asinof's exhaustively researched tale shows how the Chicago White Sox were paid by New York gangster Arnold Rothstein to throw the Series to the Cincinnati Reds. Players in on the fix included the team's star, "Shoeless" Joe Jackson. He took the bribe money, but Rothstein should have asked for a refund: Jackson hit .375 in the Series and drove in six runs. But Jackson was among the eight White Sox players banned from baseball after the conspiracy was uncovered.
4. Forgiven. Charles E. Shepard. Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989. B Bakker S
Scandal is especially delicious when it snares people who preach morality. In "Forgiven," Charles E. Shepard recounts, as the subtitle has it, "the rise and fall of Jim Bakker and the PTL ministry," building on stories that the reporter broke in the Charlotte Observer about the seamy reality of Bakker's multimillion-dollar evangelical empire. (PTL, Bakker said, stood for Praise the Lord and People That Love.) The preacher's downfall began in the mid-1980s with the revelation of his sexual encounter with a young woman in a Florida hotel room and Bakker's efforts to buy her silence. Bakker, who hosted "The PTL Club" television show with his heavily mascaraed wife, Tammy Faye, "used tears, humor, righteous anger, bruised self-pity, and gentle ministry to touch viewers in their living rooms," Shepard writes. In particular Bakker put the touch on them for fake time-shares at the PTL religious theme park in South Carolina. The scam funded Bakker's lavish living, but it also landed him in jail. This engaging true tale is stranger than Sinclair Lewis's "Elmer Gantry" fiction.
5. Investigation Hollywood. Fred Otash. Regnery, 1976.
It is hard to imagine being shocked by anything that occurs in Hollywood these days, but that wasn't always the case. In 1976 Fred Otash—billed as "scandaland's top private detective"— published a startling chronicle of the days in the 1950s when publicists worked overtime to cover up their clients' misbehavior. Perhaps Otash's most fascinating story involves a closeted gay actor and his angry wife, who is collecting evidence to sweeten the settlement she'll get when she sues for divorce. She hires Otash to secretly record her confrontation with the actor—referred to here as "Mr. Star," later revealed to be Rock Hudson— over his affairs with his agent and other men. It's a sorry business, but then the grist for most scandals usually is.
—Mr. Scott's "Shocking True Story: The Rise and Fall of Confidential, America's Scandalous Scandal Magazine" was recently published by Pantheon.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
“faith lies at the heart of holy war”
Apropos of the book Holy Warriors (one of the two reviewed in the article quoted in the post below this one), I found another review in the NY Times, by Eric Ormsby.
llustration by Stephen Savage
HOLY WARRIORS
A Modern History of the Crusades
By Jonathan Phillips
Illustrated. 434 pp. Random House. $30
Excerpt: ‘Holy Warriors’
March 14, 2010
Butchers and Saints
By ERIC ORMSBY
The villains of history seem relatively easy to understand; however awful their deeds, their motives remain recognizable. But the good guys, those their contemporaries saw as heroes or saints, often puzzle and appall. They did the cruelest things for the loftiest of motives; they sang hymns as they waded through blood. Nowhere, perhaps, is this contradiction more apparent than in the history of the Crusades. When the victorious knights of the First Crusade finally stood in Jerusalem, on July 15, 1099, they were, in the words of the chronicler William of Tyre, “dripping with blood from head to foot.” They had massacred the populace. But in the same breath, William praised the “pious devotion . . . with which the pilgrims drew near to the holy places, the exultation of heart and happiness of spirit with which they kissed the memorials of the Lord’s sojourn on earth.”
It’s tempting to dismiss the crusaders’ piety as sheer hypocrisy. In fact, their faith was as pure as their savagery. As Jonathan Phillips observes in his excellent new history — in case we needed reminding at this late date — “faith lies at the heart of holy war.” For some, of course, this will be proof that something irremediably lethal lies at the heart of all religious belief. But the same fervor that led to horrific butchery, on both the Christian and the Muslim sides, also inspired extraordinary efforts of self-sacrifice, of genuine heroism and even, at rare moments, of simple human kindness. Phillips, professor of crusading history at the University of London, doesn’t try to reconcile these extremes; he presents them in all their baffling disparity. This approach gives a cool, almost documentary power to his narrative.
professor of crusading history.
At the same time, “Holy Warriors” is what Phillips calls a “character driven” account. The book is alive with extravagantly varied figures, from popes both dithering and decisive to vociferous abbots and conniving kings; saints rub shoulders with “flea pickers.” If Richard the Lion-Hearted and Saladin dominate the account, perhaps unavoidably, there are also vivid cameos of such lesser-known personalities as the formidable Queen Melisende of Jerusalem and her rebellious sister Alice of Antioch. Heraclius, the patriarch of Jerusalem, is glimpsed in an embarrassing moment when a brazen messenger announces to the assembled high court where he sits in session that his mistress, Pasque, has just given birth to a daughter.
Oops.
Phillips is especially good portraying 12th-century Muslim personalities — from Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, a preacher of jihad, whose fiery exhortations sound alarmingly familiar, to the refined Usama ibn Munqidh, poet and man of letters, and the grumpy but astute Ibn Jubayr, a sharp-eyed traveler through Crusader territories. “Holy Warriors” brings these otherwise exotic figures thumpingly back to life. About the assimilation of the Franks, many of whom chose to settle in the Holy Land, Usama could write, “He who was born a stranger is now as one born here; he who was born an alien has become a native.” The battle lines were sharply drawn, the campaigns were pitiless, each side had contempt for the others’ beliefs; and yet, somehow, on the margins of hostility, a grudging accommodation, if not friendship, sometimes developed.
Phillips concentrates on the seven “official” crusades, from 1095 to the final disastrous campaigns of Louis IX (St. Louis) of France in 1248-54 and 1270, but he also describes the fiasco of the so-called Children’s Crusade as well as the horrifying Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars of southwest France. As he notes, “holy war” was as often as not waged against coreligionists: Catholics against Cathars, Sunnis against Shiites. In the rigid, polarized mentality of the holy warrior, any deviation can signify a dangerous otherness. This is the best recent history of the Crusades; it is also an astute depiction of a frightening cast of mind.
Eric Ormsby’s new collection of essays, “Fine Incisions,” will be published next fall.
HOLY WARRIORS
A Modern History of the Crusades
By Jonathan Phillips
Illustrated. 434 pp. Random House. $30
Excerpt: ‘Holy Warriors’
March 14, 2010
Butchers and Saints
By ERIC ORMSBY
The villains of history seem relatively easy to understand; however awful their deeds, their motives remain recognizable. But the good guys, those their contemporaries saw as heroes or saints, often puzzle and appall. They did the cruelest things for the loftiest of motives; they sang hymns as they waded through blood. Nowhere, perhaps, is this contradiction more apparent than in the history of the Crusades. When the victorious knights of the First Crusade finally stood in Jerusalem, on July 15, 1099, they were, in the words of the chronicler William of Tyre, “dripping with blood from head to foot.” They had massacred the populace. But in the same breath, William praised the “pious devotion . . . with which the pilgrims drew near to the holy places, the exultation of heart and happiness of spirit with which they kissed the memorials of the Lord’s sojourn on earth.”
It’s tempting to dismiss the crusaders’ piety as sheer hypocrisy. In fact, their faith was as pure as their savagery. As Jonathan Phillips observes in his excellent new history — in case we needed reminding at this late date — “faith lies at the heart of holy war.” For some, of course, this will be proof that something irremediably lethal lies at the heart of all religious belief. But the same fervor that led to horrific butchery, on both the Christian and the Muslim sides, also inspired extraordinary efforts of self-sacrifice, of genuine heroism and even, at rare moments, of simple human kindness. Phillips, professor of crusading history at the University of London, doesn’t try to reconcile these extremes; he presents them in all their baffling disparity. This approach gives a cool, almost documentary power to his narrative.
professor of crusading history.
At the same time, “Holy Warriors” is what Phillips calls a “character driven” account. The book is alive with extravagantly varied figures, from popes both dithering and decisive to vociferous abbots and conniving kings; saints rub shoulders with “flea pickers.” If Richard the Lion-Hearted and Saladin dominate the account, perhaps unavoidably, there are also vivid cameos of such lesser-known personalities as the formidable Queen Melisende of Jerusalem and her rebellious sister Alice of Antioch. Heraclius, the patriarch of Jerusalem, is glimpsed in an embarrassing moment when a brazen messenger announces to the assembled high court where he sits in session that his mistress, Pasque, has just given birth to a daughter.
Oops.
Phillips is especially good portraying 12th-century Muslim personalities — from Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, a preacher of jihad, whose fiery exhortations sound alarmingly familiar, to the refined Usama ibn Munqidh, poet and man of letters, and the grumpy but astute Ibn Jubayr, a sharp-eyed traveler through Crusader territories. “Holy Warriors” brings these otherwise exotic figures thumpingly back to life. About the assimilation of the Franks, many of whom chose to settle in the Holy Land, Usama could write, “He who was born a stranger is now as one born here; he who was born an alien has become a native.” The battle lines were sharply drawn, the campaigns were pitiless, each side had contempt for the others’ beliefs; and yet, somehow, on the margins of hostility, a grudging accommodation, if not friendship, sometimes developed.
Phillips concentrates on the seven “official” crusades, from 1095 to the final disastrous campaigns of Louis IX (St. Louis) of France in 1248-54 and 1270, but he also describes the fiasco of the so-called Children’s Crusade as well as the horrifying Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars of southwest France. As he notes, “holy war” was as often as not waged against coreligionists: Catholics against Cathars, Sunnis against Shiites. In the rigid, polarized mentality of the holy warrior, any deviation can signify a dangerous otherness. This is the best recent history of the Crusades; it is also an astute depiction of a frightening cast of mind.
Eric Ormsby’s new collection of essays, “Fine Incisions,” will be published next fall.
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Arranged
Really just a wonderful film. A review on IMDb.com puts it this way: centers on the friendship between an Orthodox Jewish woman and a Muslim woman who meet as first-year teachers at a public school in Brooklyn. Over the course of the year they learn they share much in common - not least of which is that they are both going through the process of arranged marriages.
The acting is really good, feeling genuine. The film is less than perfectly polished, as, indeed, is everything about the film, which makes for a grand film. It has something of real-life feel to it, not so much a polished look and feel as a feel of realism. A powerful message of tolerance, of doubt, of independence, of prejudice, of enlightenment, of tolerance. Magnificent.
The acting is really good, feeling genuine. The film is less than perfectly polished, as, indeed, is everything about the film, which makes for a grand film. It has something of real-life feel to it, not so much a polished look and feel as a feel of realism. A powerful message of tolerance, of doubt, of independence, of prejudice, of enlightenment, of tolerance. Magnificent.
| Zoe Lister Jones | ... | Rochel Meshenberg |
| Francis Benhamou | ... | Nasira Khaldi |
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