Month: July 2002

Chaim Potok passed away today. Jewish American literature has suffered a great loss.
Here’s an excerpt from The Chosen and a sampler of his works from the Philadelphia Inquirer.



Where have I been? Why didn’t I notice this book before?
I was doing research at the library today for a syllabus I’m designing and stumbled on a description of The Poet Game, by Salar Abdoh. The novel is about the 1993 bombing of the WTC, and about the Iranian man who is sent to infiltrate the Muslim radicals who are responsible. It dates from a couple of years ago (2000), but I’m surprised that it hasn’t gotten more write ups after what happened last year. It’s unusual to have a “terrorist thriller” written by an Iranian, but I’ll have to check it out before forming an opinion… Here’s a piece on the author and the book:

“Everyone with ears, eyes and a television has a September 11 story to tell but Salar Abdoh — a teacher at City University in New York — has one that’s better than most. Forget TV: ears and eyes were all he needed when, a little after 9am on that morning, he heard an explosion near where he was teaching an English class. Very near, in fact.
‘I was almost at the foot of the World Trade Centre when it happened and for a second I thought I was going to bite the dust. But I wasn’t afraid, I was fascinated by this ball of flame coming towards me. People were saying this and that, that an aeroplane had hit the building, but right away I knew what had happened.’
Abdoh knew because a year earlier he had published The Poet Game, a spy novel set in New York in the aftermath of the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing.”

Books: The man who was waiting for September 11



From corporate sponsorships of school programs, it was only a short step to their involvement in textbooks. Here is an interesting article in today’s Christian Science Monitor:

“What if a junior-high school textbook wrongly stated that John Marshall was the United States’ first Supreme Court Chief Justice, instead of John Jay? Or that the Louisiana Purchase occurred in 1804, not 1803? No one would fault textbook publishers for fixing factual errors like these found in recent textbooks. But, when it comes to “fixing” harder to define social or political biases, what happens when publishers eager to make a sale are willing to edit content that special-interest groups object to — or even submit their books to those groups for input prior to publication?
The practice of self censorship is increasingly apparent here in Texas, where battles over textbook content are epic. (…)
The lobbying roster of 70 speakers [at the public hearings over 2003 social studies texts] included Hispanic college students and the NAACP wanting more minorities and women represented in textbooks, Christian groups seeking more conservative interpretations of issues, and social-studies teachers arguing against such tinkering. (…) Conservatives over the years have battled such things as a photo of a woman carrying a briefcase, the theory of evolution, and “overkill of emphasis on cruelty to slaves.””

Texas wrangles over bias in school textbooks



The Old Man and the Haircut
“A hair salon owner crediting his own redone hairstyle as giving him an edge has won Key West’s 2002 Ernest Hemingway Look-Alike contest among 154 white-bearded men claiming resemblance to the U.S. writer.”
Overstatement of the evening? “New York City policeman Dennis Sullivan, in his pitch for the title, said, “It would lift the spirits of every New Yorker.”
Hair salon owner wins Hemingway contest. Link via Moby Lives