Quick reviews of books received at the Alliance office this month.
By Joseph Witt
Embrace Your Insignificance, the new book by sometimes-local writer Bob Gaulke, is subtitled Lessons learned teaching English in Japan. Gaulke taught English in Yokohama from 2005 through 2007. It is a funny book, both amusing and strange. The Otherness of Japanese culture is not an unknown theme in American pop culture, but Gaulke makes it new with everyman approach to a job at times joyful or frustrating, but always inscrutable.
Gaulke brings dry wit and a charming candor about his personal short-comings to the stories he tells, like his trip to the hair salon:
“I feed a 1,000 yen bill into the machine and receive a receipt. I sit down nest to two retirees on a bus station-esque bench. The sign says that “If you cannot speak Japanese we have the right not to serve you.” I’m up next.
Hair stylist: Welcome! %&*#%@&!
Me: Yes.
Hair stylist: &#%!$@*~!
Me: Yes.
Hair stylist: &)@%English&!)#*%$
Me: Yes.
Ten minutes later, the stylist pulls out the vacuum hose and vacuums my head. We’re done. It’s a good haircut.”
The book is available from Future Tense books, PO Box 42416, Portland, Oregon, 97242, List price is $11.00, include $1 for shipping.
Engaging the Muslim World, by historian Juan Cole, is a book-length debunking of various myths, half-truths, lies, and fantasies the author finds common in the United States. We are all rather ignorant of the ongoing controversies and struggles that shape the world-views of the many different Muslim societies around the world, and this book remedies that.
As a necessary corallary to debunking myths about Muslims, it is necessary for Professor Cole to attack many of the official claims of the Bush Administration. Alliance readers will be unsurprised to learn that there are a great many of these, and gratified to learn that Cole does a fine job of clarifying the situation, and pulls no punches in apportioning blame.
His discussion of the lies and omissions accompaning U.S. policy towards Iran is especially instructive. Here he is debunking the supposedly aggresive nature of Iranian Nuclear programs:
“In a major policy speech in June 2006, Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei called the American assertion that Iran seeks a nuclear bomb “a sheer lie.” He affirmed, “We consider using nuclear weapons against Islamic rules.” Khamenei was instancing the chivalric law of Islamic warfare, wherein jurists had forbidden the killing of innocent noncombatants such as women, children, and unarmed men...Khamenei’s conviction that nuclear weapons are contrary to Islamic principle is shared by three-fifths of Iranians. In a Spring 2008 poll, less than one-quarter of Iranians felt the two could be reconclied.”
And so on. The final chapter includes Cole’s suggestions for the new Obama administration. These, we can assume, will be mostly ignored. Jaun Cole is well-known for his blogging on the subjects he covers in this book.
The book is available in hardback for $26.95 from Palgrave Macmillan. Call them at 1 (888) 330-8477 to make a purchase.
Joseph Witt is an Alliance volunteer.
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