Susan Neiman, Moral Clarity *** 1/2

In this Guide for Grown-Up Idealists, Neiman suggests that the modern left in the United States has ceded talk of ideals to the right.

They've seen too many frameworks abused. Rules conceived as universal values have too often been used as sugarcoated ways of forcing one people's will on another. ... The resolve not to impose your moral worldview by force often ends with the resolve to make no judgments at all.

Conservatives base their worldview on Hobbes and his raw power struggle of all against all, and liberals have largely accepted this base view of human nature as well. Neiman believes that this situation drives people to fundamentalism, because fundamentalism provides a vision of transcendence missing from everyday lives: "if our need for transcendence isn't satisfied by the right kind of ideals, we may turn to the wrong ones."

And so she recommends a return to the key Enlightenment values of happiness, reason, reverence, and hope. I was inspired by the section where she discusses these ideals, mostly because of how her tone embodied the ideals. Her portrait of Kant is quite different and more joyful than any I've seen before. Unfortunately, though, when she comes to apply her principles in contemporary scenarios, she comes across as naive and judgmental in a way she promised we would not.

Josiah Thompson, Gumshoe ** 1/2

Josiah Thompson was a forty-something philosophy professor when he had a midlife crisis of sorts and decided to become a detective. Gumshoe is his account of learning the trade.

I read this (now out-of-print) book back when it was published in the late 1980s. I held onto it for its descriptions of real-life detective work: surveillance, custody disputes, serving subpoenas, and so on. The stories from his early day especially made it easy to imagine doing these activities myself.

I didn't remember how awkward Thompson's writing is. One particularly annoying tic is a confusing treatment of time. An example from near the end:

Before Dick arrived, [Asha] sat on the floor making chapatis for the Indian meal Neva and Ruth had prepared. Nancy and I tried to help but ended up getting in the way. Asha circled the table, chattering nonstop as she doled out chapatis, while the rest of us worked on the curry and sauces, washed down by the champagne Dick brought. Then she handed a jar of chutney to Dick.

Dick's arrival is in the future for the first two sentences, in the past for the last two. In his attempts to start stories in medias res he frequently stutters back in time two or three levels. He's in a restaurant talking to a woman... who his partner introduced to him in the office three days before... to discuss something that happened a month before that. It's confusing.

The aspect I liked the first time I read the book –– the mundane details of detective work –– was less compelling now due to the passage of time. If I were to become a detective today, or write a story about a regular guy doing detective-y things, I wouldn't need to think about whether I should stop watching a suspect's apartment long enough to find a public pay phone.

Robert Coover, The Brunist Day of Wrath ** 1/2

Coover published this sequel to The Origin of the Brunists near fifty years after the first book, although it takes place just five years later. It shares some of the original's strengths –– especially Coover's talent for pulling together multiple perspectives and narrative threads –– but it is waaaaaay too long (1100 pages) and the characters and incidents drift too far into satirical hyperbole.