MURIEL SPARK:
The Biography.
By Martin Stannard.
W.W. Norton. 627 pp. $35
THE SOURCE: “Preachers Who Are Not Believers” by Daniel C. Dennett and Linda LaScola, in Evolutionary Psychology, March 2010.
THE FLIGHT OF THE INTELLECTUALS.
By Paul Berman.
Melville House. 299 pp. $26
THE OTHER MUSLIMS:
Moderate and Secular.
Edited by Zeyno Baran.
Palgrave Macmillan. 211 pp. $30
In an Arab town, an Israeli Jew finds friendship—and its limits.
Americans, plugged in and on the move, are confiding in their pets, their computers, and their spouses. What they need is to rediscover the value of friendship.
As America debates immigration reform, it is in danger of repeating the mistakes made a century ago when the flawed foundations of today’s policies were established.
In Turkey, secularists cling to a decaying old order while pious Muslims lead the way toward modernization. But will the upstarts create a genuinely pluralist new order?
For centuries, the passionate and sometimes persecuted Irish have felt a peculiar sympathy with Europe’s self-anointed capital of sophistication.
Any effort to bring peace between Israelis and Palestinians must reckon with the fact that bitter experience has taught many Israelis to doubt that their foes want a lasting concord.