Ethical Culture Review of Books

Editorial Board:

Meredith Sue Willis and Phyllis Ehrenfeld.

Reviewers:

Marc Bernstein's essays have appeared in The New York Times, New York Newsday, and other papers. He is currently writing a biography of Algernon Black, the activist and Ethical Culture leader.

Joseph Chuman is the leader of the Ethical Culture Society of Bergen County, New Jersey and Visiting Professor of Religion at Columbia University. He has written for The New York Times, The Bergen Record and numerous magazines of opinion.

Phyllis Ehrenfeld has received the Arnold Gingrich Award in prose for the most highly evaluated fellowship from the New Jersey State Council for the Arts. She has been Editor of the American Anorexia Bulima Association for ten years. Several of her plays have been presented as staged readings in the Bergen County area.

Theresa Forsman, a native Nebraskan who has lived on the East Coast for more than 20 yars, is an editor for The Record newspaper, Hackensack, N.J. She is a member of the Ethical Culture Society of Bergen County.

Kurt Johnson is co-author of Nabokov's Blues: The Scientific Odyssey of a Literary Genius (Zoland Books 1999) and a well-known authority on butterflies. He lives in New York and works in association with the Florida State Collection of Arthropods.

Meredith Sue Willis, a member of the Essex Ethical Society, is the author of ten books, including a novel, Trespassers (Hamilton Stone Editions 1997) about the anti-war student strikes at Columbia University. Trespassers is the third in a trilogy of novels about coming of age in the nineteen sixties including Higher Ground and Only Great Changes. Other novels include In the Mountains of America and children's book Marco's Monster (ages 9-12). She is also the author of Blazing Pencils - A Guide to Writing Fiction and Essays-With Writing Notebook and Personal Fiction Writing: A Guide to Writing from Real Life for Teachers, Students, and Writers.

Robert Michael Pyle's Chasing Monarchs by Kurt Jonhson 1999

Everyone loves Monarch butterflies or, at the very least, knows what they look like or something about them. Thus, everyone should love a good book about Monarchs, and, this one certainly fills the bill. The author, Dr. Robert Michael Pyle ("Bob" to thousands of lepidopterists and conservationists) is both a renowned nature writer (Burroughs Medal for Wintergreen, 1986) and a highly trained and capable scientist (PhD, Yale University). He has also been, for decades, a leader in conservation causes.

Alfred Maund's The Big Boxcar by Meredith Sue Willis 1999
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The University of Illinois Press is doing a great service to readers with ethical and social concerns by reissuing a series of American radical novels of the mid-twentieth century. The Big Boxcar by Alfred Maund, originally published in 1957, is the ninth in the series. Maund, a Southern white man, has written three novels. This was his first, but at the time of writing, he was already an experienced labor journalist and editor as well as an active supporter of the Montgomery (Alabama) bus boycott and the Cuban Revolution.

Richard Rorty's Achieving Our Country by Marc Bernstein 1998
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Who but Richard Rorty could examine the last hundred years of the American left in 140 pages? The eminent philosopher's new book, Achieving Our Country, is so packed with ideas (and so clearly written) that no thoughtful citizen should miss it.

Julie Schor's The Overspent American by Theresa Forsman 1998
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How does buying a BMW, a Rolex, or a golf club membership affect your life and others' lives? You might say the car is safe transportation, the watch is a reliable timepiece -- one you've wanted since graduate school and that you've earned with all those late nights at the office. You might see the golf club membership as necessary for someone in your line of work, where deals are done on Saturdays at the 19th hole. Few of us come right out and admit, even to ourselves, that what we're buying is status. And few of us have calculated the true price of such status symbols.

Ann Jones' Women Who Kill by Phyllis Ehrenfeld 1996
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"Lizzie Borden took an axe, and gave her father forty whacks. Then she took another one, and gave her mother forty-one." Would the public forgive? Perhaps, but it helped if you were a lady. The most famous murderess in American history was found innocent in a court of law, in spite of both motive and evidence. Jones' detailed analysis of each of the cases she presents is as intriguing as a summary of a whodunit.

Roger Shattuck's Forbidden Knowledge by Marc Bernstein 1996
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Scientific knowledge, humanists believe, liberates us from superstition, quackery and meddling theology. A call to restrain intellectual curiosity assails humanist ideals.

George Eliot's Felix Holt: The Radical by Meredith Sue Willis 1995
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Young Harold Transome returns to England from the colonies with a self-made fortune, then scandalizes his district by running for Parliament as a Radical. In this elaborately plotted and entertaining novel first published in 1866, George Eliot contrasts the opportunism of Transome with the true radicalism of Felix Holt, who fights a lonely battle to educate the working class.

Michael Chitwood's The Weave Room by Meredith Sue Willis 1988
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The recent growth of poetry readings, performance art, and poetry slam competitions points up the fact that even today the common reader needs poetry. Poetry--like all literary art but even more intensely-- is about deep connections and multi-layered insight.

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