Short takes
Imagine the suffering of African-Americans over centuries of slavery and racism, compounded by the slaughter, dispossession, and deracination of the American Indians, and you begin to grasp the enormity of the plight of Australia's Aborigines.
In 2004, on a rundown island off the Australian mainland that had been used until recent years as a kind of concentration camp for "reeducating" young Aborigines, a "blackfella" named Cameron Doomadgee died in a jail cell in which he'd been held after cursing at a white police officer, Chris Hurley. Lame as his explanations were for the grotesque injuries that killed Doomadgee, a harmless local drunk, Hurley was at first cleared of wrongdoing. After a riot and public outcry, however, a trial ensued, the first time a white officer was charged in the death of an Aborigine.
Australian journalist Chloe Hooper, who followed the drama for two years, presents a gripping account remarkably rich in historical exposition, human insight, and melancholy coloration. "I had wanted to know more about my country," she writes, summing up her sad sojourn among Australia's oppressed and hopeless. "Now I knew more than I wanted to."
Phil Camp has pain. He has pain the way other people have phobias or fixations, and it elicits a supreme indignation that he, an otherwise healthy man of middle years, should have to go through life feeling like a geezer.
Several years back, to finance his divorce, Phil, a sometime sportswriter, turned out a mock self-help book called "Where Can I Stow My Baggage?" and has been living off it ever since as a humor columnist. Believing that his pain must be psychosomatic, the cranky egotist turns for help to an assortment of enablers: a genial psychiatrist who isn't achieving much in the way of breakthroughs but is a good audience for Phil's quips; a mind-over-matter medical guru; and a right-wing radio blowhard who happens to be Phil's brother. Their numbers are soon augmented by a stunning psychoanalyst, the guru's daughter.
Bill Scheft, head writer for David Letterman, which tells us all we need to know about his aesthetic, plays both ends against the middle, satirizing our glib and cynical pop culture in a glib and cynical novel. Phil grows on us despite himself, though, and even wrings a weary cheer as he at last emerges from a world-record adolescence.
Arriving a bit late but not unwelcome to "the God debate" is the iconoclastic British literary critic Terry Eagleton. In the standoff between those who consider religion inimical to reason and those who do not, Eagleton throws his leftist intellectual heft unexpectedly onto the latter side of the balance.
To do so, he acknowledges, requires an understanding of religion that is at least as utopian as is religion's view of humankind's potential, for while the tenets of (largely Christian) faith are radical, preaching unstinting love and universal community, its institutions are too often claimed by the least radical among us.
He reserves his most elegantly turned scorn, however, for two of his antagonists in the debate, Richard Dawkins ("The God Delusion") and Christopher Hitchens ("God Is Not Great"), whom he torments as "Ditchkins." Eagleton accuses them, among other things, of "Evangelical atheism" and a bourgeois liberal worldview he derides as "North Oxfordism," an Oxbridge family feud from which Americans might be inclined to avert their eyes if it weren't so diverting, and if America didn't come in for its share of righteous abuse for giving both reason and religion a bad name.
Amanda Heller is a critic and editor who lives in Newton. 