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Kwame Anthony Appiah will speak at Harvard Book Store. (Greg Martin) |
SPOKEN WORD
Man of ‘Honor Code’
Major social change doesn’t happen overnight. But when people start to feel that their moral traditions — dueling, or binding girls’ feet — hurt their nation’s honor, Kwame Anthony Appiah says, they are more inclined to speed up reform.
“If you want to change people’s practices, get them to see that their current practices are the source of shame for the group,’’ said Appiah, a philosophy professor at Princeton University. “If you can do that, you can mobilize them.’’
In his new book, “The Honor Code,’’ Appiah examines the mechanisms behind moral revolutions, or relatively rapid shifts in a society’s collective morals. Concerns about Britain’s international image, he said, transformed dueling from an honorable obligation to a foolish pastime in only 30 years.
“Instead of gaining you honor, it actually lost you honor,’’ he said.
Appiah, who also writes about the abolitionist movement and a potential moral revolution against honor killing, will discuss “The Honor Code’’ at the Harvard Book Store Thursday night at 7.
‘EDO’ BLOOMS
At 54, Michael Dana Kennedy was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis, a congenital disease that typically manifests itself during childhood.“I should have died around age 10,’’ he said, noting that he had no symptoms until he developed a severe staph infection in 2001.
Knowing that his career as a clinical researcher was over — every trip to a hospital comes with the risk of another potentially deadly infection — he returned to his childhood love of history to write “The Flowers of Edo.’’ The novel is about a Japanese-American soldier assigned the potentially deadly mission of infiltrating the Imperial Japanese Army in the waning days of World War II. The mission is complicated by the fact that he and his twin went to college in Japan, where the brother remained and became a soldier.
Kennedy took the book’s title from an old Japanese proverb: “Fires and fistfights are the flowers of Edo.’’ While it originally referred to the fire-prone architecture of the rough-and-tumble fishing village that would eventually become Tokyo, Kennedy said a female firefighter revived the term to describe the flower-like explosions of Allied incendiary bombs over the Japanese capital.
“Only the Japanese could see the poetry in that,’’ he said.
Kennedy will discuss “The Flowers of Edo’’ at the Japan Society of Boston at Showa Boston Institute, 420 Pond St., Jamaica Plain, Monday at 7 p.m. Preregistration is required; visit www.thejapansocietyofboston.camp9.org for more information.
TRIALS AND ERRORS
Dermot Meagher puts a human face on the impartial figure behind the bench in “Judge Sentences,’’ essays about some of the memorable cases from his career on the Boston Municipal Court.“I saw a lot of writable stuff when I was a judge — funny situations, or crazy situations, or tragic situations, or very comedic situations,’’ said Meagher, a Worcester native.
In the late 1990s, he presided over a case in which Massachusetts General Hospital sought to commit an apparently disturbed woman who had been found on a Chelsea porch. After weeks of legal wrangling over her mental state, a Yiddish-speaking doctor determined that she was a sane, authority-wary Holocaust survivor who had been afraid to cooperate with MGH doctors.
That bizarre case inspired Meagher to start writing about his experiences in the courtroom, consciously avoiding the technical tone he said plagues books about the legal profession.
“This is kind of a much more personal, subjective look at what was going on,’’ he said.
Meagher discusses “Judge Sentences’’ at the Harvard Square Coop Thursday night at 7.
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