More Book Suggestions

Continuing with book suggestions, I thought I'd recommend a couple that I've read this summer:

Karma and Other Stories by Rishi Reddi.  These finely wrought short stories all deal with the lives of Indian immigrant families and their American-born children, primarily in the Boston area.  But as with much excellent literature, the author uses her immersion in this particular setting to bring to the surface universal themes: and not just the familiar immigrant tension between traditional and American cultures.  In many of the stories, characters are trapped by some sort of pride (the fundamental sin, we Christians say) and can only become free by letting their pride go and, in several cases, forgiving.  The story "Lord Krishna" is the only piece of serious [CORRECTION: serious modern] fiction I know dealing with a church-and-state dispute.

The Age of Abundance by Brink Lindsey.  This history of postwar American culture and politics is full of arresting quotes and revealing statistics, and it's a very enjoyable read.  Its theme is the rippling effect on America of our sudden, unprecedented material prosperity after World War II.  (One powerful tidbit of evidence: in the mid-1950s "[t]he average teenager's income of $10.55 a week now matched the disposable income of the typical American family in the early 1940s" (emphasis in original).)   He traces prosperity's ties to lots of things that created the context in which we explore legal theory today: the 60s social revolution, the counterreaction of conservative religion, the resulting culture wars, and the overall trend in America toward libertarianism both moral and economic.  It's more a survey than a deep analysis, and Catholic thinkers will want to resist, in varying ways, the libertarian logic that the author finds inevitable (and, as an official at the Cato Institute, celebrates).  But the book organizes an awful lot of American life -- politics, religion, business, sexual mores, popular music -- into a highly readable narrative.   

Tom