Amerikkka, Amerikkka!
Volume X (2007) of the online Journal of Southern Religion is up. Its rich offerings include: a symposium on Colin Kidd's The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600-2000, with contributions by our colleague Rebecca Goetz and my friends, Edward Blum and Randal Jelks; Susan Ketchin's interview with Charles Frazier, the author of Cold Mountain; Curtis Evans's"Booker T. Washington and the Quest for an Industrialized and Civilized Religion for Black Southerners," a response to David Sehat's"The civilizing mission of Booker T. Washington," JSH, May 2007; and reviews of Michael O'Brien's Henry Adams and the Southern Question, Edward Larson's The Creation-Evolution Debate, and Wallace Best's Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago, 1915-1952.
Robert Dallek's"A Woman of Ambition, Neither Hero Nor Villain," NYT, 27 December, reviewed Elisabeth Bumiller's Condoleezza Rice: An American Life, A Biography. As Dallek noted, Bumiller isn't an aggressive writer. Her biography of Rice has an"above-the-battle tone" and doesn't"offer any decisive judgments on Ms. Rice's performance."
One passage in Dallek's review, however, tempted derision of Bumiller's book.
Ms. Bumiller says that if President Bush and Ms. Rice can produce a settlement in the Middle East between Israelis and Palestinians and an end to North Korea's nuclear program, it would give them claims on success that would significantly improve their historical reputations.
The blogosphere rarely resists temptations. So, Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns, and Money wrote:
And if I discover a way of powering cars entirely with oxygen, emitting a vapor that would result in the immediate killing of cockroaches and paralysis in the hands of every Hollywood producer about to sign a contract with Joel Schumacher and Uwe Boll, my reputation as a world-class scientist would be greatly enhanced.
Matt Yglesias replied similarly:
By the same token, if earth's yellow sun gave me the powers of a kryptonian, I'd be a super hero. If my blog had Endgadget's traffic, I'd be the most popular political blogger. If George Bush could breath underwater, he'd be a fish.