King's Book Research Articles

How Stephen King writes and why: Language, immersion, emotion

AbstractMany successful novelists offer writing advice, but do they actually follow it themselves? And if so, can it truly account for the success of their novels? We dissect and examine three pieces of writing advice from Stephen King's book On Writing (2000). King counsels writers to (1) write in a simple language to aid readers' narrative immersion; (2) avoid ‐ly adverbs, especially in dialogue attribution; and (3) avoid the passive voice. We examine these three pieces of advice both theoretically, reviewing them in light of what we know about how literature affects readers from such fields as literary linguistics and evolutionary literary studies, and empirically, using a computational linguistics approach to test whether King follows his own advice and whether it can explain his success as a novelist. We find that King's advice about simple language makes sense if an author's goal is to sell books while his advice against ‐ly adverbs makes sense if the goal is instead literary recognition. For his advice against using the passive voice, we find no substantial theoretical or empirical basis.

The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies by Tiffany Lethabo King

Reviewed by: The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies by Tiffany Lethabo King Mary McNeil (bio) The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies by Tiffany Lethabo King Duke University Press, 2019 IN THE BLACK SHOALS, Tiffany Lethabo King argues that although the transatlantic slave trade and Indigenous genocide are distinct phenomena within a larger violent "conquistador-settler" project, they "can never be bracketed . . . from one another" (xi, 200–201). Leading from this argument, King theorizes Black and Indigenous radical possibilities as co-constitutive, asserting that "the most radical of Black and Indigenous projects—abolition and decolonization—exceed the horizons of freedom currently imagined by a White leftist imaginary and discourses of settler colonialism" (208). Thus, King troubles Western epistemologies by staging a "multivoiced conversation" between Black studies and Native American and Indigenous studies (xiii). In order to grapple with Western constructions of the "human" as an ontological category that excludes Blackness and Indigeneity, King grounds The Black Shoals in the works of Black studies scholars such as Frank Wilderson, Sylvia Wynter, and Hortense Spillers. The Black Shoals is also heavily informed by analytics from the subfields of Caribbean and Black Canadian studies. Of particular significance are Kamau Brathwaite's "tidalectics," Édouard Glissant's "errantry," and Katherine McKittrick's "black Atlantic livingness," which challenge colonial models of rootedness, exile, and value. Next, King stages a conversation between Black studies and Native studies in order to "trace the contours of a shared speech" of conquest (21). Finally, King critiques the limited grammars that white-dominated knowledge fields use in conceptualizing genocide and slavery. This is the theoretical foundation upon which King analyzes cultural production. King's book is anchored by the analytic of the shoal. An ever-changing space where ocean and land meet just beyond the shore, King uses the shoal as a metaphor to describe the "liminal, indeterminate, and hard to map" conceptual space where Black studies and Native studies might be able to engage with one another on their own terms (3). King also conceives of the shoal in active terms, drawing upon the use of "shoal" as a verb that describes a ship's navigation of shallow and rocky terrain near a coast. To "shoal" is to carefully navigate a space that resists definite mapping. Thus, shoaling necessitates the careful creation of new language to describe the [End Page 152] interconnectedness of Black and Indigenous experiences of conquest, genocide, and slavery. While the first two chapters of The Black Shoals primarily critique conquistador-settler epistemologies, the latter three attend to the ways in which cultural producers imagine other possibilities for Black and Native people. Chapters 1 and 2 analyze the 2015 defacing of Boston's Christopher Columbus statue with red paint and a Black Lives Matter tag; Toni Morrison, Junot Díaz, and Leslie Marmon Silko's meditations on conquest; William Gerard de Brahm's "1757 Map of the Coast of South Carolina and Parts of Georgia"; and the correspondence of enslaver Eliza Lucas Pinckney. In looking at these disparate objects, King makes three primary arguments. First, King argues that a shared grammar of conquest is most apt in conceptualizing Native genocide and Black enslavement. Second, King critiques settler-colonial studies' framing of settler-colonialism as a "land-centered" rather than "genocide-centered" project, arguing that such framing obscures settler-colonialism's inherent violence (69). Third, King asserts that while the conquistador-settler marshaled cartography as a tool through which to rationalize the "crafting and sustaining of European human life and self-actualization through Black and Indigenous death," eighteenth-century maps and correspondence reveal the limits and anxieties of "conquistador humanism" (84). In the last three chapters, King returns to de Brahm's map and attends to four new cultural objects: Julie Dash's film, Daughters of the Dust; the film's literary sequel; Tiya Miles's novel, The Cherokee Rose; and Charmaine Lurch's sculpture, Revisiting Sycorax. King employs analytics of porosity, fugitivity, fungibility, erotics, and ceremony to analyze the ways that these artists imagine other possibilities for Black and Native people. Such possibilities are rooted in a disruption of labor as the "governing frame . . . for understanding Black embodiment on plantation...

Midnight at the Pera Palace: The Birth of Modern Istanbul

Midnight at the Pera Palace: The Birth of Modern Istanbul

On King's <em>The Beauty of Judaism on Film</em>

On King's The Beauty of Judaism on Film David B. Levy (bio) The Beauty of Judaism on Film. By Mike King. London: Stochastic Press, 2017. 216 pp., ISBN 978-0995648029 (pb), US $14.00. Mike King's The Beauty of Judaism on Film offers a thoughtful, insightful, and sensitive contribution to film studies, Jewish studies, cultural studies, philosophy, and religious studies. It lends itself superbly as a text for a course on Judaism in film, as a film-club guide, or as an introduction for anyone seeking a better understanding of Judaism. It can serve as a first—but not last—step in a journey of appreciating, respecting, and learning about but also from the holiness of Judaism. King's thesis is that the inner drama of Judaism is represented well by the dynamics of narrative cinema. In examining a wide range of both historical and contemporary films, King demonstrates that great insight and nuanced cinematic art can be found in films representing and exploring the cultural and religious aspects of Judaism. As King phrases it in his typically articulate manner, cinema offers an opening to "new religious vistas" (190), which can be explored by the unique nature of the medium. Like an entranceway to a Borgesian mystical maze or a Kafkaesque link to the "castle world," the book sends the novice reader on an introductory journey through various worlds of Judaism. Yet King's exegesis gives the reader a glimpse not into what Mordecai Kaplan in Judaism as a Civilization called the culture of Judaism but rather into the notion of Judaism as a religion. This is not merely a sociological perspective of how Jews [End Page 116] became white folks or what Nathan Abrams describes as the normalization of the Jew as a typical American, free of the past negative stereotypes of the "Jew as thief" or the "Jew as liar." King's book fills a void that Abrams identifies in his The New Jew in Film: "It is surprising to note that to date not much work has been done on Judaism, overshadowed by a tendency to focus on the image of the Jew/ess or on the Holocaust in film."1 Although this book can be enjoyed by lay readers and academics alike, King draws from the inspiring writing of foundational scholars such as Gershom Scholem, Martin Buber, and Milton Steinberg. King uses examples from popular cinema that form the structure of the book, which is organized thematically. King recognizes the great importance of written sacred texts as sources in Judaism (3), which is part of Elliot Gertel's critique of the limits of the moving image.2 However King also argues against Michael Medved's assertion that film is inadequate to depict Judaism respectfully and factually.3 The chapters of King's book are organized into nine major, creatively conceived categories, including extended examinations of mystical Judaism, musical Judaism, Holocaust Judaism, and family Judaism. Forty films have been chosen and classified within these rubrics to illustrate the beauty of Judaism. For example, mystical film texts studied in the book include Pi (Darren Aronofsky, USA, 1998), Bee Season (Scott McGehee, David Siegel, USA, 2005), and A Stranger Among Us (Sidney Lumet, USA, 1992). Musical film texts include Yentl (Barbra Streisand, UK, USA, 1984), Fiddler on the Roof (Norman Jewison, USA, 1971), and two of the four produced film versions of The Jazz Singer (Alan Crosland, USA, 1927; and Richard Fleischer, USA, 1980). Holocaust Judaism texts include The Believer (Henry Bean, USA, 2001), The Diary of Anne Frank (George Stevens, USA, 1959), Left Luggage (Jeroen Krabbé, Netherlands, 1998), The Pawnbroker (Sidney Lumet, USA, 1964), The Quarrel (Eli Cohen, Canada, 1991), and the Devil's Arithmetic (Donna Deitch, USA, 1999). In the appendix King rates the ten best films with plot summaries to aid the reader. King's analytic sharpness shines when he describes the following three main clusters of filmmaking: (1) Hasidic Jews in New York, (2) Haredi or ultra-Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem, and (3) shtetl Jews from Eastern Europe. One film, however, is about Sephardic Jews, and another takes place in North Africa. King acknowledges that the scope of his project is limited to...

Obama, the Media, and Framing the U.S. Exit from Iraq and Afghanistan. By Erika G.King. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014. 226 pp.

Obama, the Media, and Framing the U.S. Exit from Iraq and Afghanistan. By Erika G. King. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014. 226 pp. Erika G. King's new book is a systematic effort to document the voices in the domestic public sphere pertaining to U.S. policies on Afghanistan and Iraq. It specifically focuses on the Obama administration's surge-then-exit policy (p. 74) in Afghanistan in December 2009 and its decision to withdraw U.S. combat forces from Iraq in August 2010. Although this period is anticlimactic compared to the 2001-2003 buildup, its voices illustrate equally as much about the recent state of U.S. political discourse. The book is organized into five chapters. Chapter 1 discusses the contentious discourse surrounding the surge strategy in Iraq during the administration of George W. Bush. The chapter shows how General David Petraeus came to be publicly and politically associated with the surge strategy--conveniently serving as a vehicle for Bush to ward off attacks from the Democrats regarding his actions in Iraq. Chapter 2 highlights the Obama administration's strategy in Afghanistan. Obama had faulted the Bush administration for failing to deploy troops in Afghanistan and Pakistan and thereby losing ground to al Qaeda--that is, in the real on terror. By casting the campaign in Afghanistan as a war of necessity (p. 51) and not as a of choice, Obama legitimized the need to commit troops there as part of a surge-and-exit intervention. Chapter 3 then captures the various criticisms involving these surge-and-exit strategies in mainstream U.S. media outlets. Criticisms emerged concerning the legitimacy of President Hamid Karzai; the illegitimacy and ineffectiveness of U.S. forces on the ground as violence reigned in Pakistan; and Obama's decision making, especially involving a troop level purportedly insufficient to carry out a full-scale counterinsurgency mission and an exit plan that was unclear and indefinite (or, in contrast, too clear and definite in the eyes of some). Chapter 4 shifts to Obama's framing of Iraq's situation from 2008 to 2010. It presents the administration's effort, in preparation for the withdrawal of U.S. combat forces, to account for its success and accomplishments as well as its aspirations for Iraq. Chapter 5, then, describes the voices in the domestic media that competed to define the U.S. legacy in Iraq in light of the long-term damage and the ongoing, unsettling situation there. One theme of this criticism targeted the deteriorating conditions in Iraq, evident from rising civilian casualties and insurgent attacks, as well as the lack of basic services and employment opportunities in Baghdad. Another theme pertained to the cost of the conflict to the U.S. economy, a figure likely to be above $3 trillion, attributable in part to cost overruns and outright contractor fraud as well as to U.S. soldiers, who experienced high rates of suicide and stress-induced problems during and after their deployment. It is worth noting, however, that the conflict had fallen out of the headlines by 2008, to about 1% of top news coverage during early 2010 and only about 10% around August 2010, when the withdrawal decision was announced. …

Penitence, preachers and politics 1533-47: Thomas Cranmer's influence on church teaching on penance during the Henrician Reformation

This article examines the reform of the penitential system during the reign of Henry VIII. It considers the call to reform, and analyses official statements from the Ten Articles (1536) to the King's Book (1543), which is usually regarded as a victory for traditional religion. A careful assessment of the section of the King's Book on the sacrament of penance, and of the King's Primer, reveals that in this area evangelical reformers made gains. It shows Cranmer influencing Henry's religious policy, and as such challenges George Bernard's position. The article therefore argues for the major significance of penitential reform in the English Reformation.

The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North AmericaThomasKing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America Thomas King. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.It seems an unfortunate truth that even the most insightful books dealing with the historical experiences of Native peoples rarely seem to reach the audiences that could most benefit from their insights. Works that fall into this category, fiction and nonfiction, naturally appeal to Native peoples who are eager for perspectives that challenge conventional narratives founded upon colonial mythmaking, as well as readers interested in Native American and Cultural Studies. The question that remains, however, is how to get the attention of that larger majority of potential readers whose views often seem to owe more to images made popular by Hollywood westerns or represented by sports mascots than they do with lived experience. Thus, the crux of the issue can be reduced to the matter of listening and remembering. Thomas King's latest work, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America, is one such text that has the potential to be heard and remembered due to its presentation of a comprehensive, yet accessible, primer to the issues of vital importance to Native people in the twenty-first century. In fact, as Michael Bourne has already noted in the Los Angeles Times, the wide appeal of The Inconvenient Indian is evidenced by the positive reception of the Canadian imprint (2012), which has sold over 20,000 copies.The achievement of bestseller status is a remarkable accomplishment for a non-fiction work centered on Native issues, much less one composed by a Native writer. Although King returns to the affective prose style found in his The Truth About Stories (2003), King finds little use in laying claim to the authority of that grand form of writing known as historiography, and why should he? Throughout The Inconvenient Indian, King makes quite clear that the common equation between written histories and real life experience has done little more than marginalize Native peoples as a scary unknown element that was essential to the binaries of frontier literature and Wild West shows (31), which at the same time functioned to invalidate and marginalize their own stories. The Inconvenient Indian was not written to serve as a Native counterhistory to set the record straight about North American colonialism. And King is clear on this point when he reminds readers, we should know by now that will not save us (xi). King's book covers much more than mere history, it is instead an exceptionally wise account of the relationships that Native and nonNative people have formed with the natural world and each other. This is conveyed through King's use of poignant narration, irony, and humor in which the facts he addresses are masterfully woven into a fabric of stories endowed with the capacity to inform, unify, and heal. …

From classrooms to conflict in Rwanda

This book is one of the few published works that discusses how education may not always promote peace building in post-conflict situations, such as Rwanda. In addition, it is the first book to offer a comprehensive, longitudinal analysis of education in Rwanda, an issue of continuing importance. While this is King's first book on Rwanda, she has published many articles and book chapters on Africa, and specifically Rwanda, and is a former fellow of the Africa Initiative. As the author states (p. 1), ‘Schooling plays a key role in the country's transformation. The Rwandan government is currently investing significantly in schools and placing tremendous faith in the power of education as a tool of unity and reconciliation.’ According to King, this assumption of unity and reconciliation must be examined. While other authors have looked at post-conflict education in Rwanda, analysis has focused solely on secondary education, without an examination of historical trends in the education system. Other works have examined how ethnicity and education interact, but have not focused on a specific case. Overall, King's book is a successful presentation of the ways in which the role of education in peace building is often overlooked and simply regarded as a ‘good thing’ (p. 163), without examining the ways in which education can also foster inter-ethnic conflict.

Gary Scott Pennington: Distal and Proximal Shame in a School Rampage Shooting

Abstract On January 19, 1993, Gary Scott Pennington, an impoverished 17-year-old from Grayson, Kentucky, brought his mother's .38-caliber revolver to school concealed in his backpack and, during English class, shot his teacher, with whom he had disputed a grade, and the school custodian. This case merits special attention because it was one of the earliest of what the FBI refers to as a “targeted school shooting,” and has some unusual characteristics, such as Pennington's intelligence and intellectual curiosity; the reenactment, during the crime, of details from a Stephen King book he had recently read; and the cessation of his stuttering after the crime. The case is interpreted through the use of shame theory. The concepts of distal shame and proximal shame are introduced as a means of understanding motive in school rampage shootings.

Book Review: The Rise of Advertising in the United States: A History of Innovation to 1960, by Edd Applegate

Edd Applegate The Rise of Advertising in the United States: A History of Innovation to 1960. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2012. 198 pp.The $557 billion global advertising industry has roots in the beginnings of the American colonial economy where pamphlets and signboards were the tactics of the day. Advertising educators in search of a book to provide students with an understand- ing of some of the better-known contributors to the development of advertising may want to open the pages of this book.The first chapter begins with a general description of the colonial economy and the Quaker, Puritan, and Anglican cultural influences on the first Great Awakening, and the advent of a more prosperous colonial economy. Applegate traces the beginnings of commerce from the late-seventeenth century to increased competition among mer- chants and the growth in the number of print shops that sparked the popularity of newspaper advertising by 1820. The chapter draws heavily on biographical sketches of Benjamin Harris, John Campbell, Benjamin Franklin, William Bradford, John Peter Zenger, James Parker, John Dunlap, and Francis Child, as well as the economic diffi- culties that magazine publishers faced.Working from Harvard University historian Ralph Hower's four stages of advertis- ing agency development, the book's second chapter describes the first stage of the newspaper agent and the rise of the next three stages of space-jobbing, space- wholesaling, and the establishment of the independent advertising agency. The first American newspaper agent, Volney B. Palmer, quickly learned that selling space was a lucrative business and was the first to use the term advertising agency as he sought clients for the 1,300 newspapers he claimed to represent. Palmer worked on a 25 per- cent commission from publishers and urged his clients to use advertising as a means to establish new markets.The chapter concludes with the story of N. W. Ayer and Son, which is considered the first U.S. advertising agency in 1868. Francis Wayland Ayer, the son of Nathan Wheeler Ayer, drew upon the work of his father and George P. Rowell. Applegate points out that one of Ayer's key contributions to advertising history was his belief that the advertising agent should represent the advertiser and not the advertiser and the publisher. It was Francis Ayer who encouraged market research to establish the impor- tance of it in decision making.Chapters three and four feature the contributions of Phineas Taylor Barnum and Lydia Pinkham to advertising history. P. T. Barnum began his career writing advertise- ments for the Bowry Amphitheater. Following his purchase of Scudders' American Museum, Barnum discovered that traditional newspaper advertisements were not suf- ficient to draw crowds and sell tickets. During a promotion for the Bearded Lady, Barnum hired a man to sue the museum for defrauding the public and the plaintiff claimed the Bearded Lady was, in fact, a man. The court case garnered just the pub- licity that Barnum wanted for the museum, and his business flourished. Perhaps best known for perfecting the publicity stunt, Barnum discovered that deception, not truth, in advertising turns a healthy profit.Influenced by Dr. John King's book The American Dispensatory as well as a home remedy from George Todd, in 1875 Lydia Pinkham with her son Daniel created Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound along with advertisements and a four-page pam- phlet that claimed the product cured women's ailments. Pinkham's advertising copy included the mainstays of modern advertising such as testimonials from women who had found a cure in the compound, as well as emotional appeals.Although highly successful into the early-1890s, compound sales began to decline in part due to a reduction in advertising expenditures by the Pinkham company and because publications like The Ladies' Home Journal discontinued patent medicine advertising (as well as news stories criticizing patent medicines as fraudulent). …

Cleland and King: project management and the systems approach

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to review Cleland and King's Systems Analysis and Project Management, first published in 1968.Design/methodology/approachThe paper takes the form of a review of the book in its historical context and with relevance to its role in establishing project management as a discipline.FindingsThe book is a classic but in retrospect it has some short‐comings. These vary from lack of critique of the material to ignoring several of the issues that research shows (and showed at the time) that managers of projects and programs need to address. Had these been covered, the discipline might have been better articulated academically and professionally (which would have been useful given that the PMBOK Guide® was being formulated in the early 1980s).Research limitations/implicationsThe systems approach that informed the book, and the whole defence‐aerospace program and project world of the second half of the twentieth century, should be critically re‐examined (for example jointly with Geels' transition theory) in terms of its relevancy to the short, medium and long‐terms challenges now confronting society and the contribution that project, program and portfolio management can make to addressing these issues.Originality/valueThe paper shows that Cleland and King's book is immensely important as an early exposition on project management and is quite original.

Robbing His Captive Shepherdess: Princess Elizabeth, John Milton, and the Memory of Charles I in the <i>Eikon Basilike</i> and <i>Eikonoklastes</i>

Robbing His Captive Shepherdess:Princess Elizabeth, John Milton, and the Memory of Charles I in the Eikon Basilike and Eikonoklastes Nicole A. Jacobs (bio) The contentious inclusion of an imprisoned princess's speech from Sir Philip Sidney's The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (1593) in the Eikon Basilike (1649) has long overshadowed the most significant contribution of a woman's voice to the "King's book." In three poignant passages of the Eikon Basilike, the purported book of Charles I's final prayers and meditations before his execution, Princess Elizabeth, Charles I's daughter, authorizes the account of her martyred father's final day. The critical neglect of Elizabeth's role in memorializing the executed king might at first seem surprising given that during Charles's life the young princess was beloved and respected by Royalists and Parliamentarians alike. After the regicide, however, Elizabeth's life and death as a Stuart princess registered varied reactions that fell along party lines. For Royalists, she became an emblem of the suffering Stuart monarchy; accordingly, they emphasized her misfortune in being held captive in a cold, remote castle by tyrants and refused permission to be reunited with her sister. They mourned Elizabeth's death of illness at Carisbrooke Castle on 8 September 1650 as a renewal of their grief for Charles. For Parliamentarians, by contrast, respecting her status as the sovereign's child would appear inconsistent with their decision to abolish the English monarchy on 7 February 1649.1 This political motivation also provides insight into John Milton's significant but previously overlooked suppression of the Lady Elizabeth passages of the Eikon in his own commissioned response in Eikonoklastes (1649).2 In the 1650s, in other words, Elizabeth's writing had a polarizing effect: Royalists used it as propaganda, whereas Milton and the Parliamentarians sought to silence her authorial voice to combat this Royalist strategy. In the Eikon Basilike, a supplementary section to the text called "A Perfect Copy of Prayers Used by His Majestie in the Time of His Sufferings Delivered to Dr. Juxon Bishop of London" contains the three Lady Elizabeth passages and a paraphrase of Pamela's prayer, "A Prayer in [End Page 227] Time of Captivitie," from Sidney's Arcadia. The first of several popular editions containing the supplementary section was printed by William Dugard on 15 March 1649.3 The first passage concerning Elizabeth, "A True Relation of the King[']s Speech to the Lady Elisabeth, and the Duke of Glo[u]cester, the Day before his Death," contains an observation of the royal family recorded by an anonymous observer.4 However, the next two passages, "Another Relation from the Lady Elisabeth[']s Own Hand" and "Another Relation from the Lady Elisabeth," are written from the princess's first-person perspective of "the last time I had the happiness to see [Charles I]" (281). In these three excerpts, the anonymous observer and Elizabeth herself firmly establish the young girl's authority as a witness to her father's grace under persecution. Although it may seem counterintuitive to view the words of a child as privileged speech, Elizabeth's age and social status actually made her uniquely equipped to move an audience sympathetic to the plight of the Stuarts and of the Episcopacy that they supported. As Michael Mascuch notes in his study of the young, seventeenth-century prophet Sarah Wight, "[T]he 'child' symbolizes not so much a body's physical immaturity as an intellectual disposition toward religious knowledge and authority."5 In the case of Elizabeth, her defense of Charles's martyrdom would bear a sincerity that accounts by Doctor Juxon or Charles's attendants might not; her words are not those of a politically motivated supporter or, from a Parliamentarian perspective, a sycophant, but rather those of a daughter determined to serve the memory of her father. What is at stake in the polemic between Eikon Basilike and Eikonoklastes is the collective memory and popular perception of Charles I and the English monarchy. Is the Eikon, as his supporters would contend, a monument to Charles and a record of his martyrdom? Or is it, as Milton claims, "madness to mistake this Book for a monument...

How Do They Do It? Crony Capitalists and Democracy Avoidance in the Middle East

The New Authoritarianism in the Middle East and North Africa. By Stephen J. King Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. 279 pp., $24.95 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-253-22146-9). Experts of the Middle East and North Africa know that Arab countries have experienced game-changing political transformations, just not very democratic ones. A generation of complex economic and institutional reforms reorganized power in many Arab states. Apart from solidifying autocracies, these reorganizations produced new kinds of illiberal politics for scholars to sort and describe. Recent labels for Middle Eastern dictatorships invigorated by some form of democratic tension or subterfuge include “stalled democracy” (Bellin 2002), “repositioned authoritarianism” (Owen 2001), “upgraded authoritarianism” (Heydemann 2007), and now, Stephen J. King's simpler (and thus more appealing) “new authoritarianism.” King's book adds to the growing literature on how Middle East rulers stay in power despite pressures to democratize. King's earlier and well-regarded study of authoritarian stability in a small Tunisian community used a wealth of field research and primary sources to show how economic liberalization increased authoritarian control, despite the expectations of neoliberal economic theory (King 2003). His latest book, based on secondary sources, expands this provocative thesis across four Arab cases: Egypt, Syria, Algeria, and Tunisia. Each state pushed market-oriented reforms and experienced political openings in recent decades that only seemed to result in less, not more, democracy. Politics in each state also has been long dominated by a single party, imparting an additional legacy and resources that King believes have vitally complemented economic privatization to ensure rulers’ continued hold on society. His study seeks to build upon the political development literature that considers single-party (as distinct from military or personalist) regimes to be the most stable form …

Review: Place, Race, and Story: Essays on the Past and Future of Historic Preservation by Ned Kaufman; Our Unprotected Heritage: Whitewashing the Destruction of Our Cultural and Natural Environment by Thomas F. King

Ned Kaufman Place, Race, and Story: Essays on the Past and Future of Historic Preservation . New York: Routledge, 2009, xi + 421 pp., 50 b/w illus. $39.95, ISBN 9780415965408 Thomas F. King Our Unprotected Heritage: Whitewashing the Destruction of Our Cultural and Natural Environment . Walnut Creek, Calif.: Left Coast Press, 2009, 200 pp., no illus. $24.95 (paper), ISBN 1598743813 Place, Race, and Story presents essays on historic preservation's past and future that are intellectually provocative, culturally incisive, and politically astute. At its core this book challenges the twentieth-century alliance, or confusion, between the practices of architectural history and historic preservation. That alliance often tended to define historic preservation as a curatorial pursuit, committed to preserving a three-dimensional encyclopedia of the objects of historians’ desire, aesthetically and stylistically considered. This framing of historic preservation drastically narrowed its social and cultural possibilities. Ned Kaufman points the way toward a more relevant, expansive, and vital historic preservation movement; a movement committed to social equity, steeped in ethnography and politics and guided less by the imperatives of architectural history practice and more by sensitivity to the human values manifested in everyday attachments to place. Some historic preservation practitioners have used the criteria and models of architectural history to insulate their work from social claims of various stakeholders and communities. Kaufman argues, “It is hard to understand how separating heritage from society's most pressing concerns can enhance the cause of conservation.” He challenges the tendency of many not-for-profit preservation organizations that allocate “resources to protect a historic site admired by architectural historians” (9) while making no effort to discover and help protect sites that are meaningful to a much broader array of neighborhood and community groups. Kaufman does not stand alone. Retiring in 2010 as president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Richard Moe reflected on the field; he wrote, “Historic preservation has evolved into something much more than just saving historic buildings. Today it is about people and the places that they care about—where they live, work, shop, worship, and celebrate. We need historic places to help ground us in our past, but also in our future, as …

Newman and the Alexandrian Fathers: Shaping Doctrine in Nineteenth-Century England, by Benjamin John King

Benjamin King's book is the second in a new Oxford series ‘Changing Paradigms in Historical and Systematic Theology’. Edited by Sarah Coakley (University of Cambridge) and Richard Cross (University of Notre Dame), the series is intended to re-examine the ‘methods, hermeneutics, geographical boundaries, or chronological caesuras’ that have traditionally shaped theological scholarship. Each volume will focus on a single ‘period or key figure whose significance’, in the editors’ view, is now ‘ripe for reconsideration’. Given this intent, one might wonder why Coakley and Cross chose to commission a volume on John Henry Newman, who has been so widely studied that there may seem to be nothing left to ‘reconsider’. King does, however, have something to offer. First, he goes beyond Newman's most famous doctrinal studies—the Essay on Development and Grammar of Assent—to examine works written throughout his career, from The Arians of the Fourth Century (1833) to his revised translation of the Select Treatises of St Athanasius (1881). He also proposes a threefold chronology as an alternative to the traditional division of Newman's career into ‘Anglican’ and ‘Catholic’ phases. In the first phase, King suggests, Newman adhered to a ‘twofold system of doctrine’: the fixed, essential teachings of ‘Apostolical Tradition’ and the more flexible, secondary ideas embodied in what he called ‘Prophetical Tradition’ (p. 33). In the early 1840s, this dichotomy was replaced by the notion of ‘doctrinal development’, which held that ‘Apostolical Tradition’ was itself dynamic, as later generations of teachers led the Church into a ‘growing awareness of already present truth’ (p. 51). Yet another shift occurred roughly two decades later, as Newman began to work from a ‘scientific’ rather than a ‘historical’ perspective, employing the vocabulary and techniques of scholasticism to construct a well-defined ‘system’ of Christian thought (p. 62).

Albert Camus by Adele King

^^JII^^^^^^^J^^^j^^^BImhb^ì^^^^^^^m^^^mmm mmmmmmEmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm Featured Reviews Adele King. Albert Camus. London. Haus. 2010. 165 pages, ill. £7.99 / $14.95. ISBN 978-1-906598-40-2 Adele King's briefnew biography, Albert Camus,joins a growingnumber ofbooks publishedon or about Camus in the past few years. The biographyis partof Haus Publishing 's Modern Libraryof Biography series. Althoughthereis relatively little new informationregarding Camus, King's book is a wonderful addition to the growing ranks of commentaryon the Nobel Prizewinningauthor . In 2OOOCarroll & Graf published the English translation of AlbertCamus: A Life,by Olivier Todd. Althoughthe English translation was severely cut, Todd's biography can be considered the official biography of Camus to date. For those of us who have read Todd's biography,King offers a much-neededrefresher course on Camus's life and work. For those who maybe lookingfora biography on Camus, King'sbook is a wonderfully manageable place to begin. In fact,King's biographyproves to be an insightful companion to any simultaneousreadingofCamus. Camus offers the reader a wealthofinformation ina relatively short time. King includes photographs , breakout descriptions of certainkey people in Camus's life adjacentto thetext, as well as notes and a very useful index. But perhaps the most usefulaspect of her biography,apartfromthenarrative itself,is the extensivereading list she supplies at theend ofherbook. She gives thereader a samplingof primary and secondarysourcesthat are an invaluableresourceforthose EL x^d^^^^H J^ THF MODERN LIBRARYOF BIOGRAPHY interestedin reading and researchingCamus . The biographeralways runsthe riskofeither exaltingordamninghis orhersubject. It'ssometimes tooeasy tobecomecaughtup inthelifeofthe subject,and thisin turnrendersthe necessary objectivityfor a biography difficult. King's takeon Camus is admirablyobjective.Yet she also verysubtlyinjectsherown views on Camus fromtime to time.Perhaps the strongestmomentcomes when she probes thecriticism thatCamus has historically come under regardinghis treatment ofArabsin his fiction .King,quite rightly, argues that Camus's fictionin factrises above the criticism of scholarslike Conor Cruise O'Brien and Edward Said withoutreallymentioning them;and she does thiswithoutbelittling that criticism. Attheend ofherbook she states, "Camus the Algerian who lost his countryseems increasingly sympatheticand a forerunnerof many displaced by decolonization and independencemovements." The readerimmediately picksup on her designationofCamus as "theAlgerian ,"a factthatis all too oftenlost on morethana fewscholars. Adele King's Albert Camus should be on the shelf of every home and college library.She provides herreaderwitha knowledgeable yetneutralvoice and an easy, jargon-free prose thatcaptures the essence of Camus withouttheleast bitofpretension. Andrew Martino Southern NewHampshire University Robert Zaretsky.Albert Camus: Elements of a Life.Ithaca, New York.Cornell UniversityPress. 2010. x + 181 pages. $24.95. isbn 978-0-8014-4805-8 Like most public figures,authors go in and out of fashion. This is especially trueforauthorswho are also philosophicallyand/or politically engaged. Albert Camus has been somethingof a lightningrod forseveral decades and is certainly one of those authorswho has gone in and out of fashion.Thankfully, Camus and his work seem to be enjoyinga criticalresurgence. RobertZaretsky'sAlbert Camus: Elementsof a Life is part biography and part criticalcommentary. It is a beautifully written,carefully researched, and thoroughly engaging snapshot of four defining moments in Camus's life. Yet Zaretskyhimselfstates,"This book is neither a fullbiographynorscholarly commentary.It is an essay in whichI tracetheways these'familiar ideas' weave throughCamus's life."Ofcourse,thereaderis totake theseclaims at littlemorethanface value. Zaretsky's"essay" is a superb supplementto any serious (and not so serious) study of Camus's life and work. Drawing from four critical momentsin Camus's life,Zaretsky surveysthemind ofan authorwho was troubled by his own fame, 741WorldLiterature Today ...

Shaping Piety Through Catechetical Structures: The Importance of Order

This paper explores how the order in which the Creed, Lord's Prayer and Decalogue are placed in a catechism shapes the way the authors intend to inculcate piety. First, the reason for the order of three chief parts in the catechisms by Augustine of Hippo is studied. Then, three catechisms from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which place these chief parts of the catechism in different orders, are compared, namely Dietrich Kolde's A Fruitful Mirror, Luther's Small Catechism and in Henrician England, The King's Book. It is shown that each of the composers of these catechisms was deliberate in the order they set out the material before them, with a view to shaping the piety of the people in a particular way.

The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative (review)

Reviewed by: The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative Lindsay M. Christopher Thomas King . The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. 172 pp. Cloth, $24.95; paper, $18.95 CDN. In novelist Thomas King's new book, The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative, the greatest point of intrigue turns out to be his greatest challenge to readers. He simply writes: "The truth about stories is that that's all we are" (2). For Native and non-Native, academic and general readers, this unassuming sentence resonates throughout the Cherokee/Canadian émigré's narrative. It is difficult to disagree with such a reasonable statement, and, as King steadily winds the stories [End Page 235] of his narrative, one begins to nod along, relishing the repetition of the story of the earth that begins each chapter and the gentle yet empowering directive at the close: "But don't say in the years to come that you would have lived your life differently if only you had heard this story. You've heard it now" (29). In King's book, first delivered as the 2003 CBC Massey lecture, there are plenty of stories to listen to, to repeat, to remember, and to forget. King's challenges to North American colonial narratives enable readers to begin to tell a new story about Native people and their relationship to this history. King's shrewd perspective and biting humor permit readers to reassess the stories that make up a uniquely North American experience, which spans his own personal and familial past and that of influential cultural figures such as photographer Edward Curtis and author Louis Owens while weaving in creation stories and animal tales. The stories King tells encompass his own search for a Native identity in a continent that relishes the idea of its imperial creation, "the Indian," and does not easily make room for living, breathing, present Native Americans. With this in mind, King delivers a sustained warning to his readers to "be careful with the stories you tell. And you have to watch out for the stories that you are told" because stories can be "wondrous" and "destructive" things (10). As King points out, in the face of a Western capitalist system that cares not for the principles of cooperation and balance found in Native stories, preferring instead the opposition and hierarchy found in Christian myths, it is all too easy to be lulled by the complacency of North American individualism and to ignore or forget the stories that make us who we are. Herein lies the predicament of the text. King does not provide instruction as to which stories can and cannot be told, which are sacred and which are destructive, leaving readers to decide for themselves. By retelling a variety of Native stories with no such direction, intertribal differences in storytelling are downplayed against a revisionist but still hegemonic cultural and political history of North America. In one sense, King's flattening of intertribal similarities and differences resembles Robert Warrior's definition of Pan-Indianism, that "which seeks to blend and homogenize Native cultures" (The People and the Word, 107). In effect, King's silence about the power and importance of certain narratives over others in particular communities sanctions generalizations about Native storytelling and Native people. For instance, King provides readers with two creation stories, one tribally unspecific ("Native") and one Christian. In the first he arbitrarily names the Woman Who Fell from the Sky "Charm" in an effort to call attention to the ease with which readers accept a storyteller's power to name, on the one hand, and the common privileging of written narratives over oral narratives, on the other. While well aware of the power dynamics between Native and Christian stories (he points out how easy it is to forget the former story in the "thunder" of the latter), King does not take the same liberties with the Christian [End Page 236] creation myth—the god is God. King's fast and loose play with naming in the case of the "Native" creation story does little to challenge established assumptions about Native and Christian, oral and written stories. Instead, he allows the...

Review: Peace at Any Price

PEACE AT ANY PRICE How the World Failed Kosovo Iain King and Whit Mason Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. 328pp. US$27.95, cloth (978-0-8014-4539-2).The United Nations interim administration mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) recently entered its ninth and possibly final year as the primary governing authority in Kosovo. Since June 1999, the UN administration has overseen economic, social and political development in the disputed territory, and sought to promote a transformation of the former zone of conflict into a peaceful and multi-ethnic society. Iain King's and Whit Mason's book assesses the performance of the international community in achieving this aim, and presents a comprehensive, illuminating, and often scathing account of the UN's efforts to date.Both authors have close connections to Kosovo, each having held senior political roles within UNMIK, and their insider experience informs the text throughout and adds credibility to their account. From the title of the book onwards, it is clear that this is not a defence of UNMIK, but rather a critique. The authors charge the UN administration, and the international community behind it, with many failings-failing to understand the nature of the conflict between Kosovo Serbs and Albanians, failing to identify the correct solutions, and ultimately failing to fulfil its aim of transforming Kosovo into a multi-ethnic, law-abiding democracy. In particular, the authors allege that UNMIK lost an opportunity to change Kosovo's political culture by neglecting the available levers of soft power, especially in the spheres of education and the media. UNMIK, the authors allege, not only failed to transform and it never even properly tried.Most of this compact but thorough book is taken up with a review of the administration of Kosovo, structured both chronologically and thematically. The four central chapters deal with four separate phases in the administration from 1999 to 2006. Each examines progress in a range of areas, including law and order, security, political developments, hearts and minds, and the economy. The authors locate the roots of many of the ongoing problems in contemporary Kosovo in the first phase of administration, between June 1999 and October 2000. During this period, international authorities displayed a reluctance to clamp down on hardliners, and in particular on the Kosovo Albanian nationalists that reacted to the withdrawal of Serb troops from the territory by initiating a prolonged campaign of revenge violence on the minority Serb community within Kosovo. Much of this revenge violence went unpunished due to international preferences for stability rather than justice, and the low conviction rates contributed to a sense of impunity that the authors suggest was never eradicated in subsequent years. Furthermore, the departure of large sections of the Serb community at the time served to set back the project of a multi-ethnic Kosovo. The second consolidation phase entailed a shift from humanitarian concerns to political development, and included Kosovo's first elections under UNMIK, as well as the establishment of new institutions of self-government. But it was also a period in which many of the physical challenges had been overcome, and the political challenges that remained required changes in local behaviour that UNMIK was unable to achieve. This gave way to a third phase of confrontation and stagnation, where the gap between expectations and the reality on the ground led to local frustration with the international mission. Despite a range of UNMIK initiatives, there was little progress towards resolving Kosovo's political status due to continued divisions within the international community. The dire state of the economy further fuelled local dissatisfaction. This stage culminated in the infamous March riots of 2004, when Albanians turned on Serbs and the international authorities were unable to assert control during two days of violence and looting that left 19 dead, hundreds of Serb homes burnt, and thousands of Serbs displaced. …

A history of organic farming: Transitions from Sir Albert Howard's War in the Soil to USDA National Organic Program

The organic farming concept developed in the period prior to 1940 and was pioneered by Sir Albert Howard (1873–1947). Howard, born and educated in England, directed agricultural research centers in India (1905–1931) before permanently returning to England. His years of agricultural research experiences and observations gradually evolved into a philosophy and concept of organic farming that he espoused in several books. Howard's thinking on soil fertility and the need to effectively recycle waste materials, including sewage sludge, onto farmland was reinforced by F.H. King's book,Farmers of Forty Centuries. Howard developed a system of composting that became widely adopted. Howard's concept of soil fertility centered on building soil humus with an emphasis on how soil life was connected to the health of crops, livestock, and mankind. Howard argued that crop and animal health was a birthright and that the correct method of dealing with a pathogen was not to destroy the pathogen but to see what could be learned from it or to ‘make use of it for tuning up agricultural practice’. The system of agriculture advocated by Howard was coined ‘organic’ by Walter Northbourne to refer to a system ‘having a complex but necessary interrelationship of parts, similar to that in living things’. Lady Eve Balfour compared organic and non-organic farming and helped to popularize organic farming with the publication ofThe Living Soil. Jerome Rodale, a publisher and an early convert to organic farming, was instrumental in the diffusion and popularization of organic concepts in the US. Both Howard and Rodale saw organic and non-organic agriculture as a conflict between two different visions of what agriculture should become as they engaged in a war of words with the agricultural establishment. A productive dialogue failed to occur between the organic community and traditional agricultural scientists for several decades. Organic agriculture gained significant recognition and attention in 1980, marked by the USDA publicationReport and Recommendations on Organic Farming. The passage of the Federal Organic Foods Production Act in 1990 began the era of accommodation for organic farming in the USA, followed by another milestone with official labeling as USDA Certified Organic in 2002. Organic agriculture will likely continue to evolve in response to ongoing social, environmental, and philosophical concerns of the organic movement.