Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster, by Adam Higginbotham

At 1:23AM Moscow time, April 26, 1986, the world’s largest and most technologically ambitious nuclear reactor - reactor number 4 at Chernobyl - went kaput. The Soviet effort to generate electricity from nuclear power materialized in 1954 with the completion of the empire’s first commercial reactor. By 1970, the Soviet Union had launched construction of the world’s largest reactor - the RBMK-type, which promised to meet burgeoning demand and demonstrate the ascendancy of Soviet nuclear technology over that of the West. But the failure of the RBM reactor at Chernobyl exposed the economic precariousness of what was thought a juggernaut. Drawing on interviews, memoirs and declassified archives, journalist Adam Higginbotham offers a comprehensive and dispassionate final word on the incident in Chernobyl. He reveals that a total core meltdown, once thought unthinkable, may have been destined to happen.

The explosion immediately entombed two operators in concrete and enveloped dozens more on site in radioactivity. Over 100 Firefighters raced to quell a landscape ablaze with the detritus of exploded fuel rods and unwittingly absorbed high doses of radiation (around 30 of whom quickly succumbed to an agonizing death brought on acute radioactive syndrome, described in horrifying detail). The neighboring town of Pripyat was blanketed in the core’s airborne aftermath. Within the plant, unbeknownst to authorities, a superheated discharge of liquified iron, sand and irradiated concrete, created by the meltdown and forced downward by the explosion, tunneled its way through the plant’s protective barrier, toward the Ukraine’s largest source. The ooze eventually congealed into a massive pock-marked blob scientists would call the “Elephant’s Foot”. 

Above the plant, a Brobdingnagian plume ejected 1500 meters into the air and bearing ominously-sounding isotopes (xenon, iodine, cesium and polonium 210), raced its way toward Scandinavia. US surveillance photos detected the cloud, but Soviet obfuscation kept its true cause a mystery. It wasn’t until a technician at a Swedish nuclear facility detected traces of radioactivity on his shoes that the rest of the world was able to make the connection between rouge particles, giant cloud and explosion, and trace them back to Chernobyl.

Failures at other Soviet power plants brought to light a number of serious design flaws and lapses in operational safety that properly addressed, would benefit the development of the RBMK reactor. However, whatever lessons to be gleaned from previous malfunctions remained buried beneath a desperate need for secrecy and program to protect the reputations of party leaders who had approved the malfunctioning plants. 

From the beginning of construction, Chernobyl’s director, Viktor Brukhanov, rarely received key components on time, and when he did, had to spend hours repairing them. The same was true of specified materials, which Brukhanov was sometimes forced to replace with something near enough that he managed to get his hands on. Higginbotham points out that such delays would come as no surprise given a Soviet supply chain whose problems “became so chronic that crops rotted in the fields…Soviet fishermen watched catches putrefy in their nets, yet the shelves of the Union’s grocery stores remained bare.” 

Looming over a broken supply chain and a push to fulfill absurd deadlines was the implied threat to Brukhanov’s party membership and liberty. The former carried his only real hope of career advancement and afforded him privileges beyond the reach of his countrymen (after the incident Brukhanov and two others were stripped of party membership and imprisoned). That he cut corners and painted a rosier-than-justified picture to authorities about the plant’s viability should coms as little surprise. 

By May 4 the fire and toxic sludge had been contained, and in December of the same year reactor 4 was encased in a monstrous 150-foot-tall sarcophagus - “a cathedral of brutalism in concrete and steel”- that bore witness to the chasm between Soviet nuclear aspiration and the realities of Soviet Communism. Today, the “radioactive garden of eden”, a 1000-mile exclusion zone where unmolested by the outside world, where flora and fauna flourish with an atomic zeal, is open to historically-minded tourists.

Although HIgginbotham is unsparing in his description of deficiencies that plagued the Soviet nuclear effort, Midnight is first and foremost a book about the catastrophe itself, and only an incidental indictment of the Soviet regime. In a narrative that at times trudges too deeply into the arcane world of nuclear science, Higginbotham casts the central planning, secrecy and cronyism endemic of the USSR as unmistakable culprits in Chernobyl’s meltdown and lets readers draw their own conclusions about the broader moral implications of Soviet Communism. Given what is acknowledged about the regime’s many horrors and incompetencies, piling on the now-dead USSR would have been easy. Higginbotham is content to detail the accident and include all material relevant to its cause. As such, Higginbotham’s stands as an exercise in both restraint and remarkable incisiveness. 

Very Short Reviews: The Sellout; The Nickel Boys; Trust Exercise

The Sellout, by Paul Betty

Outlandish, utterly outrageous and as of yet the funniest book I’ll ever read. This novel is completely deserving of its Man-Booker Prize and, if there is a a single award bestowed on all the books written over a year - an accolade to rule them all - this book deserves that, too. Beatty’s tour of black-Americans offers a glimpse of sentiments still lingering in the minds of people who experience stereotypes and those who perpetuate them.

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Trust Exercise, by Susan Choi

The takeaway isn’t so much Choi’s capacity to tell a story as it is her ability to compose sentences and paragraphs that are nothing short of brilliant. Choi’s reveals an uncanny ability for selection, every word appears perfect for the context. Her writing should exceed the expectations of even the most discriminating readers. Keep in mind, however, that the writing is the news here.

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The Nickel Boys, by Colson Whitehead

An important and necessary unveiling of another embarrassing segment of southern history. While it lacks the menace that pervaded his previous work (The Underground Railroad) - and as a result is less deserving of its National Book Award - The Nickel Boys ought to be required reading for students of history. With its liberal deployment of compact, taut sentences, it should also serve as a guide to aspiring writers.

The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics by Mark Lilla

“Donald J. Trump is president of the United States. And his surprise victory has finally energized American liberals and progressives. They are busy organizing what they call a ‘resistance’ to everything he stands for.” This is an astute little volume of immeasurable value, which at a mere 141 pages, wide-margined and readable within a day, is likely to render books over 200 pages arduous by comparison. Given its length, it is all the more incredible that Mark Lilla’s volume is packed with such wit and wisdom. If more authors modeled the length of their work after this, and emulated their judgement after his, the prognosis for the future of liberalism - and of American politics as a whole - would be much brighter indeed. 

Lilla focus is not the impeachment of president Trump, but the quest by some to secure the eradication of all forms of discrimination, in all its forms, and the rectification of injustices perpetrated against varying racial and gender groups. Lilla laments that while such efforts are noble and have deep roots in the history of America’s civil rights movement, they are ill-fated at best. Obnoxious, misguided and coercive (the list could go on) go a long way in describing the nature of identity politics. Leaders of these movements encourage social media mobs, rallies and “acting out”, publicly humiliating and threatening the livelihood of their opponents; it is well known that such “woke” warriors go out their way to make the lives of anyone with the gall to disagree with them - even their fellow progressives - a waking nightmare. Not only do they disdain engagement and persuasion, but they bear the unfortunate distinction of being wrong about the world around them, which they see as an arena of racial, gender and sexual-orientation contingents, each of which enlarges their status as victims through grievances no one but themselves can claim. They demand that society correct discrimination, whatever form it may take, to whatever extent they deem fit. To many Americans, Lilla included, identity movements appear quixotic or repulsive.

The closest historical analogue of identity movements, or identity politics (Lilla calls one concept by both names), is the civil rights movement. Lilla contrasts the aims and methods of identity politics with those MLK. Identity movements are notorious for their singleminded focus on features that only some Americans have, such as “transgendered”, “black”, or “gay”. This narrow focus is the primary cause of movement's increasing myopia and self-absorption. The civil rights movement appealed to a broad swathe of American, that is, to anyone who could see for themselves that black Americans were endowed with the all same capabilities as themselves. MLK’s movement succeeded because it “shamed America into action by consciously appealing to what we share, so that it became harder for white Americans to keep two sets of books…one for ‘Americans’ and one for ‘Negroes’.” In other words, MLK pointed to a universal ethic, shared by reasonable Americans, and in so doing, exposed the hypocrisy of those who argued otherwise. 

Liberals got into the habit of treating every issue as one of inviolable right, leaving no room for negotiation, and inevitably cast opponents as immoral monsters, rather than simply as fellow citizens with different views.

For identity politics, the appeal - where indeed appeals to bystanders or opponents are actually made - is to the unique experiences of a particular racial, gender, or sexual identity group, a move which by its nature insulates any claims or demands of the identity from evaluation or criticism. The result is a contradiction: "When speaking about themselves, [identity liberals] want to assert their differences and react testily to any hint that their particular experience or needs are being erased. But when they call for political action to assist their group X, the demand it from people they have defined as not-X and whose experiences cannot, they say, be compared with their own."  

Several other problems plague the identity movement. Identity is a double-edged sword, and framing issues exclusively in terms of identity is good for a group until its opponents do the same: “Those who play one race care should be prepared to be trumped by another, as we saw subtly and not so subtly in the 2016 presidential election.”

Furthermore, identity politics has adopted an all-or-nothing approach to engaging opponents. Lilla singles outs leaders, such as those of the Black Lives Matter movement (BLM), who demand that white Americans agree with them on every case BLM says constitutes racial discrimination. This, of course, says Lilla, is to set the bar for agreement far too high.  

Contemporary identity movements may not model the civil rights movements of the past, but according to Lilla, they do have their origins in an increasingly elitist Democratic party. This indictment sounds odd being launched at a movement purportedly so sensitive to the needs of the oppressed as is contemporary identity movements, but Lilla makes as strong as case as there is. 

Following the Democratic convention of 1968, Democratic party rules were rewritten. The effect was to marginalize "blue-collar unions and public officials" who represented the party's foundation, and replace them with "educated activists". For reasons omitted from Lilla's account, the rules robbed the party of people fluent in engaging both "educated liberal elites and the Democrats' voting base", in other words, those people "keeping the elites informed about the political weather outside and suggesting when to take an umbrella."

The Democratic party narrowed its base even more with its decision to use courts to achieve political ends, rather than the legislative process. Passing legislation involves "the patient work of finding out where people stand, trying to persuade them, and building a social consensus". We could add compromise, negotiation and balancing relative goods. By contrast, pushing your agenda through court is different: "all you have to do is present your case as a matter of absolute legal right, and the only people you have to persuade are the judges assigned to your case." For Lilla, the inability of identity movements to compromise, their all-or-nothing approach, and make-your-opponent-your-enemy view of the world stem in part from the once effective, but now disastrous reliance on the courts. Once again, Lilla’s observation serves readers well: liberals got into "the habit of treating every issue as one of inviolable right, leaving no room for negotiation, and inevitably cast opponents as immoral monsters, rather than simply as fellow citizens with different views." The election of Donald Trump represents for Lilla the culmination of ill-considered Democratic policy.  

The corrective to movement politics isn’t more rallies, protests or further disengagement from institutional politics. Winning elections, engagement, compromise and persuasion will secure the protections won for African-American, women and gays. Lilla declares the age of movements politics over and assures readers that, rather than more marchers, "we need more mayors. And governors, and state legislators, and members of Congress".

Comparisons of identity politics to religious fundamentalism are nothing new, so Lilla joins a large choir when he observes that identity politics stifles questions to its legitimacy and that its members employ coercion to squash dissent. Lilla's gift lies not so much in what he says so much as in how he says it. Identity politics has become characterized by “relentless speech surveillance, the protection of virgin ears, the inflation of venial sins into mortal ones, the banning of preachers of unclean ideas…”; these are oppressive elements that “have their precedents in American revivalist religion.” Such behavior indicates that "spiritual conversion, not political agreement, is the demand.”

Despite its obvious merits, the book warrants two words of criticism. Lilla’s complaint of “a shameless and massively influential right-wing media complex” sounds odd given that the same can be and is said of media on the left. Left-leaning media dominates cable news, and even if it performs worse than the Right on talk radio, left-leaning media remains the prevailing ideology on late-night comedy shows, of which there are more than a few. Given recent media scandals, it may be more fitting to direct opprobrium to shameless and massively influential media, period. 

This isn’t Lilla’s only cheap shot. He correctly contends that Republican congresses stymied Clinton and Obama’s efforts to advance agendas. But, no kidding - what else would they do? It's generally what opposition does, whatever the party. No one would contend that a Democratic congress has proved any less obdurate in acquiescing to the legislative wishes of a Republican president; nor is anyone holding their breath that it will happen in the future. 

These quibbles aren't with Lilla’s ideology as such but with his diverging from an otherwise well-reasoned and evenly presented argument. The remarks mentioned above struck me as flippant and naive. Thoughtful readers deserve thoughtful authors, and democratic politics both deserve and is in desperate need of the honesty and clear-headedness characteristic of Lilla’s book. 

In sum, there is little in the book that those on the left should find disagreeable, even if The Once and Future Liberal counts as tough love. Centrists and readers on the right are certainly not off the hook. Both camps should recognize in Lilla’s criticisms of identity politics the rise of similar trends in their own back yards. The beauty of The Once and Future Liberal is that even though written by a liberal, for liberals, nearly everything in it applies to America as a whole. 

Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

Scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson may make up the stuff of internet memes, and Dr. Phil may be counseling's version of Judge Judy, but Steven Pinker reigns as the world's most widely read scientist. He doesn't have a television series or host a call-in radio talkshow; he has yet to become the background of a science (or hair-related) meme. Rather, his forte is writing books that non-scientists buy in droves, read, and recommend to their non-scientist friends. He's a cognitive scientist at Harvard and writes on psychology and a host of other areas, particularly history. His previous book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined marshaled copious amounts of data to demonstrate that violence has enjoyed a steady decline over time. His most recent is no less relentless in its use of data. With some 75 easy-to-digest, x/y graphs that any 8 year-old could understand, Enlightenment Now establishes that reason, science and humanism form the foundation upon which progress is built, and, that lacking this triumvirate, progress would remain an elusive treasure.

For this reviewer, Pinker makes such a powerful case that it'd be all but futile to argue with the mounds of empirical data with which Pinker presents readers. The sheer volume of data should be enough to dispirit any of Pinker's detractors. One would have to dig through all the surveys, academic studies represented in all 75 graphs to cast doubt on the idea that progress, as measured by Pinker, isn't actually happening. One could try and work around the empirical measures of progress by defining progress in terms different from those of Pinker. But what terms besides those empirical ones Pinker cites could Pinker's opponent employ? Perhaps abstract/philosophical measures that, holding history at arm's length, argue for the failure of liberalism (see, Patrick Deenan's Why Liberalism Failed); perhaps one could cite a religious/apocalyptic test of progress, one that says with certainty the end is neigh but doesn't specify the date. But to go the route of abstract or religious is to critique Pinker's argument in terms of something he doesn't care much about, and about which he doesn't use to establish his argument. 

To argue contrary to Pinker's contention, one must do so on Pinker's terms, and he happens to measure progress in terms of the following, empirically established facts that have unfolded with particular rapidity over the passed 100 years: lessened social inequality, increased safety on roads, in construction fields, and so on; broadened and increased human rights; decreased extreme poverty, greater wealth (for the overwhelming majority of the world's population); better health, greater access to health care, and improved health care; less terrorism; growth in the number of democracies; lessened pollution; better child mortality, and so on. If anyone cares to dispute Pinker's empirical claims by, say, quibbling over the data per se, or his use of data, she's likely to be crushed under the hours such a herculean task would require. No one I know of has either the time or resources necessary. Best get a team and pay them a lot of money.

Throughout his book, Pinker resists the pull of partisanship. He criticizes from the vantage point of neither left nor right, and observes and renders opinions from the lofty position of objectivity. He is unsparing in his critique of those who deny progress is happening, and with few exceptions, remains unaffected by emotional outrage and is quick to condemn the often catastrophic "solutions" such outrage motivate.

As a case in point, Pinker derides the radical (and, according to him, deluded) environmental movement as greenism, a quasi-religious, misanthropic ideology faintly resembling Nazi belief in its description of humans as vermin.  The solution for such ideology is to embrace the importance of protecting the environment while recognizing that

it's time to retire the morality play in which modern humans are a vile race of despoilers and plunderers who will hasten the apocalypse unless they undo the Industrial Revolution, renounce technology, and return to ascetic harmony with nature.

As with most of his proposals in the book, Pinker's approach to the environment is practical and even-keeled: maximize care of the environment and minimize its harm within the context of real-life political, economic and humanitarian concerns. He never strikes a strident tone and levels criticism in such a way as to mitigate the toxicity that accompanies the environmental (and nearly all) debates.

Level-headed interlocutors cannot help but appreciate Pinker’s attempt to restore sanity to debates about real problems, including those surrounding the environment, overpopulation, pollution and the like. The solutions to these problems, unfortunately, have played second fiddle to political grandstanding, indignant moralizing and the exhausting preening of those with certain knowledge and categorical remedies.

Where Pinker stumbles from his perch of objectivity is in his dismissal of religion, particularly arguments for God's existence. I studied philosophy of religion and taught it at the college level, so you can understand the standards I set on anyone opining on the subject. In most cases I dismiss those commenting, knowing that they know very little of what they speak. However, when someone goes out of their way to tackle the subject and, to do so as part of a thoroughly researched book on everything it touches, I found it difficult to cut Pinker any slack. Pinker's appraisal, much as the New Atheists' bungling of religion, would strike even atheistic philosophers as amateurish and embarrassing (I also imagine that Pinker's appraisal would puzzle an undergrad who took a philosophy of religion class or who read a single chapter in any philosophy of religion text book on arguments for God's existence). By way of exploding 2,000 years of arguments for God's existence (ah heck, let's confine it to the last 70 years), Pinker guides us toward the appendix to Rebecca Goldstein's novel, Thirty-Six Arguments for the Existence of God, as well as to Richard Dawkins' smug and moronic The God Delusion. Pinker informs the reader that both the Cosmological and Ontological arguments (there are actually Cosmological arguments and Ontological arguments) are logically invalid, and that the Argument from Design (once again, not a single argument) was long-along proven false. That a writer of Pinker's magnitude would fail to provide a single citation of the "theologians" (actually, philosophers of religion) who perpetuate these supposedly also-ran arguments and to cite a novelist and amateur philosopher as the foundation for dismissing arguments against God's existence does, in my mind, grossly belie Pinker's irrational bias against religion (or, should I say, philosophy?). Had Pinker taken his own advice, he would have consulted the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, looked up the entry on Philosophy of Religion, scrolled down to Arguments for the Existence of God and bothered to note that Richard Dawkins and Rebecca Goldstein do not offer the kinds of arguments any philosopher - theist, atheist or anything in between - take seriously. Pinker would have also noted that since the 1950's there's been plenty of literature that ought to deflate the smug attitude exuded by the New Atheists and their cadres of first and second-year philosophy students.

Aside from this last (and I agree, small) bit of nonsense, Enlightenment Now is a fantastic book well worth its weight in reading gold. It will function as tonic for undue pessimism and the foolish fixes such pessimism gives rise to.

A Distant Mirror, by Barbara Tuchman

What do the Black Plague, marauding bandits, continuous war, and staggering social inequality have in common? Besides rendering everyday existence chaotic and uncertain, they were each part and parcel of 14th century Europe, or, as Barbara Tuchman labels it, the “calamitous” 14th century. 

I began the book expecting to read in detail, descriptions of knights at war - their methods for dispatching opponents, with what weapons, in general, their lifestyle - because I didn't think of knights beyond their being warriors. As it turns out, my assumption about their being full-time warriors was correct; however, while anyone could guess what a warrior did whilst in war, what is less obvious is how they spent time whilst not warring. Because they didn't - and, of course, couldn't fight year-round - they spent much of their time idle, and as the saying goes, idle hands...

Knights were often cruel, particularly to non-knights, or those outside the class of nobles, and they were not above cheating or concocting reasons to war against other knights, when doing so would enhance their standing with the crown or enlarge their land or financial holdings. The crimes against peasants, recounted by Tuchman with near-banality, are numerous, frequent, and generally unremarkable from the perspectives of noblemen. Most of the crimes perpetrated against peasants were consequences of intra-noble warfare, or, in the case of English and France, international warfare. Whether in the form of a preemptive strike against an international opponent or revenge for a slight done by a local knight, peasants payed the price in the form of pillage and plunder, rape, the slaughter of children and the destruction farmable land. Members of this unfortunate lot, even if they avoided the calamities just mentioned, funded their own oppression in the form of heavy taxes. Arbitrary, unpredictable and onerous, taxes levied against peasants by each slice of the medieval hierarchy funded the largess of the noble class in the form of tournaments and games; a greedy and corrupt clergy; continual war against either English or French (depending on whether you were French or English), and the occasional - and almost always spectacularly bungled - Crusades.

It used to be popular to declare "chivalry is dead" when someone failed to extend the politeness of, say, opening a door. After reading this book, however, I was glad that chivalry is, if not dead, at least waning. I don't promote the abandonment of politeness (holding open a door, helping someone across the street, and shaking hands are very good things); I mean, rather, that chivalry as it was lived out in medieval Europe by knights and the noble class is better off dead. What I mean is that it if chivalry ever helped people attain the Good, maybe when it was first adopted, it was nevertheless so corrupt by the dawn of 15th century that people would have been well-advised to abandon it - as many writers of that period were already doing.

About chivalry's self-destruction, Tuchman writes:

Chivalry was not aware of its decadence, or if it was, clung ever more passionately to outward forms and brilliant rites to convince itself that the fiction was still the reality. Outside observers, however, had grown increasingly critical as the fiction grew increasingly implausible. It was now fifty years since the start of the war with England, and fifty years of damaging war could not fail to diminish the prestige of a warrior class that could neither win nor make peace but only pile further injury and misery upon the people.

If you're dreaming of a knight in shinning armor, don't.

To read of the Black Plague (or, Black Death) was as terrifying as it was gross. For those of you who don't know, the Plague was responsible for the death of around one-third of Europe's population. In some parts of Europe, higher. It began somewhere in Asia, perhaps the southeast part, spread to the Middle East and eastern Europe via land and arrived in Italy aboard merchant ships. Rats were not the primary culprit of the plague's spread. That honor belonged to fleas that attached themselves to rats. Eventually the plague became both blood-born and air-born, each as lethal as the other. I'll spare you the details of the grissly deaths that awaited the infected, but suffice it say that upon contraction, death was swift, in some cases, in as little as a week. There was no known cure. Tuchman's description of attempts to quell outbreaks and the measures taken to the heal the sick underscores the chaos sowed by the Plague. Socially, it wrought the same, if not greater, measure of upheaval brought about by perpetual feuds between knights, nobles and brigands. There was wide-spread speculation that the end of the world was at hand. 

Although the 14th century produced a few notable saints, the clergy was for the most part corrupt, rapacious for money, land, and prestige, and, by any standard, spectacularly proud. 

Tuchman could have adopted an indignant tone, to judge the medievals according to standards of morality and statesmanship that prevail in the 20th century. Thankfully, she judges medievals on terms set by themselves (charity, devotion to God and love of humankind were, if it can be believed, espoused ideals), and we are reminded throughout, by the record of gross misbehavior, that every segment of society during the medieval ear suffered from a crippling inability to live up to its own standards. 

At over 700 pages, Tuchman's book represents a feat of reading most will shy away from. Then again, few would do better than The Distant Mirror for a comprehensive, highly-readable treatment of the time and place. The Distant Mirror brims with wit and wisdom, and in more than a few sections, is difficult to put down. Other, longer sections are filled with too many names for those uninitiated in medieval history to sort through or remember (but, thankfully, these are few). Perhaps a shorter, more consise treatment is available. Until I find one, this will gladly do.

Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead

Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad depicts the brutality of American slavery in a relentless, sometimes difficult to stomach, reproach of the peculiar institution. Whispers of uplift run throughout, however, as Whitehead balances the despondency of slavery with the indomitability of his heroine, Cora. The author has already received acclaim for this work - both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize for fiction - and the quality, tone, and singularity of the novel makes one wonder whether this work will be viewed by posterity as the standard for its kind.

The slave narrative is nothing new, of course, and Toni’s Morrison’s Beloved, comes readily to (my) mind (I can’t comment on 12 Years a Slave because I haven’t seen it). In the movie version of Morrison’s work, slavery is more or less a setting, and the characters in it aren’t battling slavery or particularly plagued by it; audiences are more or less aware of slavery as they would the rainy weather of a film made in the Pacific North West: it affects everybody but doesn’t demean and debase them in an overt way. Whether intended or not, Whitehead treats of slavery a way in which other authors treat characters. He depicts it as so depraved and caustic - eroding the worlds and characters of slave, freeman, master, slave-catcher, and abolitionist - that it appears as an uncredited antagonist, reminiscent of Sauron from The Lord of the Rings), a god-like and unseen villain who saps hero’s strength, and whose defeat is inconceivable. 

Much of the treatment of slavery is so poignant because Whitehead has done his homework. Serious, academic treatments of slavery abound in bookstores, so one needn’t attend college to experience readable, award-winning testaments of slavery’s depravity. Rough Crossings and Slavery by Another Name, are only two among many accounts non-academics will find palpable. From my experience, history books, even the ones just mentioned, lucidly written as they are, take audiences to brink of feeling the weight of slavery must have had on its victims. Novels, by their very nature, get readers closer to the texture of characters’ lived experience, thrust, not up to the point of feeling what others felt, but allowing readers to actually feel what it must have been like. Whitehead’s narrative is both novel and history. The reliance upon historical research and breathtaking readability make for a riveting depiction of slavery, every bit worth its Pulitzer and National Book Award.

Given its accuracy, the book is bound to appall. Whitehead spares little by way of depicting slavery’s horrors, in a graphic, visceral and unrelenting manner. Its brutality, the spread of its tentacles; the corruption of the soul of slaveowners; the racism it cultivated inside both blacks and whites, are all on full, heartbreaking display. This reader found them difficult to bear, particularly the horror that awaited runaway slaves, carted back to their masters. The Underground Railroad exposes the peculiar institution, in all its life-draining capacity, in such a way as to appall, as it appalled during its day; and, Whitehead provides the closest we will come to entering the world of slavery for the black American, in all its humiliation, hopelessness and resignation.

On a side note: while reading, I recalled Eddie Murphy, in his stand-up, Delirious, making fun of a hypothetical, modern black man scoffing at the idea of being himself enslaved ("I wish I was a slave, I'd f*ck somebody up!") and, by extension, heaping ridicule on his enslaved ancestors. But once the whip cracks, Murphy points out, all bets are off. At the heart of the enslaved, as depicted by Whitehead, is the a resignation that the best one can hope for is to survive into the afterlife with as few rapes, beatings and mutilations as possible. There are other outcomes, but the risk of absconding to the north on the rumored underground railroad, being caught and brought back to face one's master, includes a violent and dehumanizing demise.

This is a fantastic work, but, like another account of egregious depravity, Åsne Seierstad’s, One of Us, it is at times nearly impossible to read. Several aspects of slave-life, as depicted by Whitehead, are either revolting or severely depressing. One in particular is that for slave women, rape is so common - be it at the hands of masters, master’s underlings, or fellow-slaves - that it approaches mundanity. Forced concubinage is a not a matter of whether, but of when and how long. The unwanted sexual advances slave women (in some many cases, children) must not only endure, but almost embrace, are plainly stated, as if to underscore their commonality. 

The Underground Railroad is a human tale written about the sufferings of blacks, not a tale about which only blacks can relate; nor is it a tale about which only those-who-believe-they-would-have been-abolitionists can relate. The characters are so real, and the depth of their suffering so visceral, that no one with a sliver of a conscience could, if it were in her power, remain unmoved to provide all emotional and material aid at her disposal to alleviate the horrors of slavery, or denounce it today.

On a final note, Whitehead’s work stands as a condemnation of the trivialization of American slavery, which is no less regrettable than the trivialization of the systematic annihilation or degradation of any human being.  Slavery in America is trivialized, or at least forgotten, than in the debate over the South's legitimacy as a Conferderation independent of the North, that is, independent of America. The other side of the coin of state’s rights and nostalgia for the Confederacy is the enslavement and at times, wholesale slaughter of life - a fact about which many a state’s rights proponent seem oddly aloof. Also, some authors subordinate slavery to a backdrop of a more important story, when slavery is so haunting and debased as to deserve a starring role, albeit as a villain. 

Underground Railroad is a must-read worthy of its achievements.

The Next Christendom, by Philip Jenkins

*The following book review was written sometime around 2003, in Long Beach, CA.*

In his The Next Christendom, Peter Jenkins offers a fascinating look at the rapid expansion of contemporary Christianity.  In describing what he calls, Southern Christianity, Jenkins dispels stereotypes about the make-up of Christians and methodically details Christianity’s growth in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.  A common misunderstanding among Northern Americans and Western Europeans is that Christianity belongs solely to middle-class whites.  Christianity, explains, is anything but; it is increasingly the religion of the poor and non-white, a fact made poignant by the inroads the faith has made among India’s class of Untouchables.  Jenkins also rejects the idea that Christianity among the poor is the ideological sibling of liberation theology, whose focus on God’s preference for the poor and oppressed and his siding with them in class struggle makes liberation theology both its most winsome and most repellent feature. While Christianity claims the allegiance of countless poor Latin-Americans and Africans, these people are less likely to see Christianity as an ideology to support social revolution than as a religion addressing spiritual needs and offering hope for the future.  And, although strands of liberation theology exist, particularly that found in Latin American, southern Christianity is strikingly more conservative than its northern counterpart, a fact most apparent at the intersection of social issues and conservative values. For instance, homosexuality is openly disdained; and, the emphasis on gender equality in the U.S. and Europe is viewed with slight unease as a northern export.  In spite of the Surprisingly to some may be that , the conservative leanings of southern Christians do not exclude women from leadership roles, since many females in Africa and Latin America remain at the center of several successful Christian movements.  

Midway through the book, Jenkins has revealed that Christianity is a global movement - both in the color of its membership, and in their vastness. Thus, the new Christianity has moved south of the equator and exploded, as if the soil of the northern hemisphere proved too stubborn and unresponsive; in its new, more fertile environment, the once-beleaguered faith has taken root in China, India, and Nigeria, each doing its part to increase the number of Christian adherents with every newborn. The result of today’s growth, Jenkins drily informs us, is that by 2050, only one Christian out of five will be non-Latino and white. 

It should be noted that Jenkins employs the loosest definition of ‘Christian’, one which encompasses Evangelicals, Roman Catholics, Pentecostals, and what some would consider fringe groups such as Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witness, and Christian groups with more than a little sprinkling of indigenous influence.  Nevertheless, the number of even a subgroup of Jenkins ‘Christians’ is considerable; besides, Evangelicals may be the only group that sees Jenkins’ use of Christianity as a set back.   

Jenkins does more in his book than reveal Christianity’s growth; he predicts that its rise in the southern hemisphere is likely to provoke religious wars, similar in intensity to those of medieval Europe.  As Christianity and Islam expand, often side by side and, as they compete for converts, confrontation appears inevitable. Several countries in Africa and Asia - Sudan and Indonesia, to name a few - have already blurred the boundaries separating politics and religion, and imposed specifically Christian or Muslim laws.

Frequent role reversals in who evangelizes whom is only one of the ironies generated by the ascendancy of southern Christianity.  Southern Christians have and will continue to make significant missionary inroads into the increasingly secular United States and already secular Western Europe.  The Brazilian based Igreja Universal do Reino (Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, or, IURD) and the Nigerian-based Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG) are part of a growing trend on part of the churches in the south to establish mission enterprises in U.S. and European cities.  

 Another irony - “white soldiers following Black and Brown generals” - highlights the movement of clergy, particularly those in Anglican and Episcopalian Churches, to receive ordination from southern Christians. By now, several U.S. bishops have been granted ordination from African and Southeast Asian archbishops. Since an archbishop in either denomination is free to ordain whomever he pleases in his province, newly minted U.S. bishops are bishops of provinces outside the U.S., which makes these clergy expatriate American missionaries to America. Jenkins says this trend stems from the mounting sense of isolation felt by conservatives within American and European denominations - felt most intensely in new gender roles and changing mores on homosexuality - and that this isolation is assuaged by powerful overseas friends.  Thus, the allure of southern Christianity to “White soldiers” lies not only in its rapid growth but in its theological conservatism.  

All in all, Jenkin’s work is part statistical research, part vision of things to come.  One finds objectively derived numbers and the solid methodology expected of a religious studies professional; one also encounters an interesting projection of what all that data means for the future of Christianity.  This book is a must-read for missionaries and students of religion seeking to better understand the complexity and the ever-increasing diversity of Christianity.