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AN ETHIC FOR ENEMIES

FORGIVENESS IN POLITICS

A compelling case for forgiveness—traditionally thought of as the way to heal disputes between persons—as the route to better relations between peoples. Shriver (president emeritus of Union Theological Seminary) argues that forgiveness needs to play a pivotal role in dealing with contemporary ethnic and national conflict. To forgive, for Shriver, is not to forget. Rather, he sees forgiveness as a fourfold process: acknowledgment of the wrong done; passing of moral judgment; the renunciation of vengeance; and the search for a new, empathic relationship with ``the other.'' Shriver puts his case in descriptive, pragmatic terms and from an avowedly American standpoint. In a rapid introductory sketch, beginning with the ancient Greeks and the Bible, he shows how forgiveness gradually lost its original social, or public, dimension until, with the thought of Locke and Kant, it was relegated to the realm of individual sin and private conscience. Shriver goes on to describe the complex issues of guilt and forgiveness involved in postwar US relations with Germany and Japan. We hear of Germany's gradual coming to terms with the Holocaust and WW II, exemplified by the controversy over President Reagan's visit to SS war graves at Bitburg and culminating in President WeizsÑcker's apologetic Bundestag speech. US relations with Japan are not as far along in part because of the racial dimension of that conflict, for example, in the internment of US citizens of Japanese (but not German) descent during WW II. Himself a southerner and a Democratic activist in the 1960s, Shriver then examines the role of forgiveness in American society's persistent racial conflicts. He takes us into the thought of Martin Luther King (``a greater political moralist than Thomas Jefferson''), Malcolm X, and others, and he presses the case for economic plans to right past and present evils. For anyone concerned with the continual cycles of vengeance and retaliation in our world, Shriver's book offers a well-argued vision of hope.

Pub Date: March 1, 1995

ISBN: 0-19-509105-1

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Oxford Univ.

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995

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TO THE ONE I LOVE THE BEST

EPISODES FROM THE LIFE OF LADY MENDL (ELSIE DE WOLFE)

An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.

Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955

ISBN: 0670717797

Page Count: -

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955

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IN MY PLACE

From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992

ISBN: 0-374-17563-2

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992

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