Revolutionary Suicide: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) Paperback – Deckle Edge, September 29, 2009 by Huey P. Newton (Author), Ho Che Anderson (Illustrator), Fredrika Newton (Introduction) (Penguin classics)

Black Panther Party for Self Defense co-founder Huey Newton has written an excellent autobiography, and, in the process, given us an even finer grained and more complete picture of the Black Panthers.

The first quarter of the book is devoted to Newton’s childhood and youth up to his college years. Newton lived what might be considered a typical life of the black working class. Money was always a struggle for the Newton family, but it was an intact family and one where abuse was absent, unlike the fractured and abusive childhood and youth years of many of his comrades.

The second quarter delves into the formation and emergence of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. Because Newton was co-founder of the Party with Bobby Seale, Newton plays a large role in the early days of the Black Panthers. Seale himself was imprisoned for much of this period, so Newton and his ideas dominated.

Newton and his colleagues developed a ten-point program listing its objectives and guiding beliefs. One was the exercise of the Second Amendment and called for an end of police brutality. This led to the Black Panthers organizing patrols that shadowed the police. Understandably, the police did not appreciate this attention, and one night a firefight broke out between the Black Panthers and the police. One policeman was killed and another one wounded. Newton was charged as perpetrator of both shootings.

The third quarter of the book describes Newton’s 33-month ordeal of being tried *three* times for these offenses (the first two trials ending with a deadlocked jury), and his survival of incarceration. This section of the book is the most moving as Newton writes about his trials and incarceration with pathos and intensity. The final chapters of the book deal with Newton’s release from prison and his exuberant return to his community.

The book is well written in a simple, accessible and engaging style. My only regret is that Newton concludes his autobiography with the defection of Eldridge Cleaver from the Black Panther Party. With so much more to tell of Newton’s life and the Black Panthers following this point, I wish Newton had published an updated version of this book, or written a sequel. The book ends on a sour note rather than on the triumph Newton’s acquittal represented.

Highly recommended for those interested in the history of the Black Panthers, or, more generally, those interested in Afro-American history, or, even more generally, students of American history because the Black Panthers loom so large in American history. This book obviously was a key source for Bloom’s and Martin’s excellent history of the Black Panther Party, Black Against Empire, published in 2013.

Of the Black Panther autobiographies I’ve read, this book is the best one, notwithstanding its premature ending. More than any other book, this one discusses Newton’s intellectual background for Black Panther Party activities, an important factor given Newton’s dominance over the Black Panther ideology.

Around That Time: Horst at Home in Vogue Hardcover – October 4, 2016 by Valentine Lawford (Author), Ivan Shaw (Author), Hamish Bowles (Author), Horst P. Horst (Photographer) (Harry N. Abrams)

Horst and Valentine Lawford Gave Us an Intimate Look at How 1960s Society Lived

In the 1960s and ’70s, photographer Horst and writer Valentine Lawford were the world’s preeminent aesthetic power couple, celebrating the chic lives of society’s most glorious swans and turning lifestyle journalism into a modern art form






Cecil Beaton captured this late-1940s shot of Horst standing in front of a portrait of himself by Christian Bérard.

Second acts are difficult to resist. Disgraced CEOs resurface as the leaders of respected charitable organizations, and politicians kneecapped by scandal reinvent themselves as elder statesmen. And once upon a time—1963, to be precise—a world-famous photographer whose icy celebrity portraits and dramatically lit fashion images had fallen out of favor found himself on Long Island’s East End, aiming his Rolleiflex at an unexpected subject: the interiors of a particularly plush Southampton house, where bergères that once belonged to Marie Antoinette met gilded boiseries, Aubusson carpets, and bowls of carnival-color tea roses.

That Vogue assignment—snapping the summer retreat of octogenarian Consuelo Balsan, the Vanderbilt railroad heiress and ci-devant duchess of Marlborough—put the 50-something Horst P. Horst back on top, reportsAround That Time: Horst at Home in Vogue (Abrams), a seductive new book masterminded by Ivan Shaw, Condé Nast’s corporate photography director, and Hamish Bowles, Vogue’s international editor at large.


“Horst was a classic black-and-white photographer who became a great color photographer, recording rooms as if you were actually inside them,” Shaw says, noting that the German-born lensman (who died in 1999) often positioned his camera from unusual vantage points, such as a homeowner’s favored armchair, to conjure an atmosphere of uncommon intimacy.





Ivan Shaw and Hamish Bowles’s new book about Horst and Lawford’s work for Vogue.

“Horst’s fashion work was so mannered, but his interiors have a spontaneous quality that’s almost impressionistic,” Bowles adds, “giving the most vivid, alluring, and potent sense of what that room was like.”

At Prince and Princess Moritz of Hesse’s German schloss, filmy curtains flutter in a gentle breeze. In a Billy Baldwin–decorated Georgian Revival in Washington, D.C., a dish towel sags over the flower room’s counter as if Deeda Blair, medical-research fundraiser and ambassador’s wife, had just stepped away from arranging lilies and camellias. “Nobody took photographs of interiors with as much intelligence and warmth as Horst,” Blair remembers.

Often paired with what writer and close Horst friend Amy Fine Collins calls the “brilliant, sparkling, attentive” prose of his life partner, Valentine Lawford (1911–1991), a British former diplomat, the 100-plus Vogue features the photographer shot between 1963 and 1988 were style documentaries, each starring an international personality in his or her natural habitat and with precious little interference. “Horst didn’t move a single chair or bring in extra flowers,” says Gloria Vanderbilt, whose New York City bedroom, all patchwork quilts paneling the walls and fabric scraps glued to the parquet, was immortalized in 1970. “He showed how we really lived.”







Alessandro Twombly, only child of artists Cy Twombly and Tatiana Franchetti, dons a Napoleonic getup at the family’s Rome apartment in 1966. Behind him stretches one of his father’s paintings. The gilded armchairs are Italian Empire, and the dog, Sparta, is the Twomblys’ Neapolitan mastiff.

Jude the Obscure (Wordsworth Classics)Apr 1, 1998 by Thomas Hardy Paperback (Wordsworth Editions Ltd) (IBRClassicsReview)

If I had read Anna Karenina after this book, it would have cheered me up. Hardy’s last novel, written in 1895, stirred up such harsh criticism that its author never wrote another novel, although he lived until 1928. In me, listening to the audiobook while driving a sales circuit of convenience stores in rural Illinois, it stirred up feelings of failure and disappointment in life. The character of Jude Fawley is a scholarly chap who aspires from an early age to study in the university town of Christminster (in Hardy’s fictional county of Wessex), become a clergyman, and distinguish himself in the world. His tragic disappointment, indeed his utter ruin, moved me in an especially painful way. I saw much of myself in him: three college degrees, with highest academic honors, and ordination as a pastor having led me to a 32-hour-a-week career marketing junk food and cleaning products. I have even tasted, to some extent, what it is to be a pariah. But at least I know it could be worse. I have never passed through the mangle of romantic heartbreak, much less as thoroughly as Jude does. I still have my health (more or less); I’ve already outlived him by a decade or more. And after all, I still have my faith, which is more than Jude has to sustain him at the end. I may be on my way to dying alone, like Jude, but that (God willing) is a ways off. How consoling that thought is as I grip the steering wheel, feeling that if the novel were but a little more depressing, I might aim my battered Volkswagen at a guard-rail.

There is a scene in this novel in which Jude’s child from his unhappy first marriage pulls a murder-suicide, taking with him the two children of Jude and Sue, the love of his life. Sue then miscarries their third child. Their landlord, whose meanness may have indirectly triggered the tragedy—his insistence that the lodgers move out, because he didn’t want a family with children living there—realizes that the notoriety of the case may hurt his business. So what does he do? He tries to get the number on the house changed. Somehow, this throw-away anecdote is what really clinched this book for me. In Jude the Obscure, Hardy skewers the cruelty and hypocrisy of the way society works. He shows how, even in moments when men attempt to do something about the injustice of it all, they end up merely papering over the problem so that they don’t have to see what’s amiss.

Jude is brought up by a crusty old aunt in a village in Wessex, where he is devoted to a local schoolmaster named Phillotson. When the latter moves away to be closer to the Oxford-like town of Christminster, Jude begins to dream of following in Phillotson’s footsteps. He builds such a fantasy life around the university town that it shapes his entire destiny—well, that and a youthful indiscretion with a slatternly female named Arabella Donn. Though slow to abandon his dream of studying at Christminster, even after separating from his wife, Jude submits to the vicissitudes of being a stonemason, and thinks about entering the ministry via licentiate. Even this dream, however, is not strong enough to bear up against the temptation of his forbidden love of his pretty cousin Sue Bridehead, who ends up marrying (of all people) Schoolmaster Phillotson. Unlawful passion, bigamy, divorce, cohabitation, fear of marriage, and loss of faith in Christianity are only a few of the irregularities that bring scandal, disorder, and ruin to all four of these unhappy lovers. And when, at last, both original married couples are (air quotes) reconciled (end air quotes), the point is finally driven home that what is right in light of the letter of the law may, in the court of human experience, prove to be wrong.

I am not convinced that Hardy’s critiques of Christianity and marriage are altogether just and reasonable. But I recognize truth in the unreasoning hearts of Sue and Jude, in their anguish and hopelessness, in their anxiety and grief. In a similar way, I can see redeeming features in Arabella, selfishly as she behaves from beginning to end; and repulsive characteristics in Phillotson, in spite of his conscientious and even at times self-sacrificing kindness to Sue. The book has a lot of earthy characters in it, and indeed it sometimes made me laugh. But the weight that I felt bearing down on me more and more as its ending approached was very like a disgust with the world and with the perversity of life. As for Hardy’s career as a novelist, it’s a shame that he ended it so soon. Scandalous though his moral outlook may be, and dangerous the likely results of the social upheaval this book seems to demand, he here proves himself to be one of the great creators of complex characters with emotionally devastating problems. Simply put, he moves the reader powerfully. Not all of his books affect one quite as painfully as this book does; but their effect is strong and memorable. Fiction’s loss was poetry’s gain. And all is, if not right with the world, more richly and poignantly wrong now that this book is in it.

Borders: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) 1st Edition by Alexander C. Diener and, Joshua Hagen (Oxford University Press)

Compelling and accessible, this Very Short Introduction challenges the perception of borders as passive lines on a map, revealing them instead to be integral forces in the economic, social, political, and environmental processes that shape our lives. Highlighting the historical development and continued relevance of borders, Alexander Diener and Joshua Hagen offer a powerful counterpoint to the idea of an imminent borderless world, underscoring the impact borders have on a range of issues, such as economic development, inter- and intra-state conflict, global terrorism, migration, nationalism, international law, environmental sustainability, and natural resource management. Diener and Hagen demonstrate how and why borders have been, are currently, and will undoubtedly remain hot topics across the social sciences and in the global headlines for years to come. This compact volume will appeal to a broad, interdisciplinary audience of scholars and students, including geographers, political scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, international relations and law experts, as well as lay readers interested in understanding current events.

Whilst the opening chapter presents a reasonable account of the history of borders, the descriptions and explanations of borders in more recent periods is a biased consolidation heavy on historical revisionism. As a former student and researcher in academic geography at a time when the emerging paradigm was toward a objective quantitative methodology I am appalled at this reversion to the anecdotal and the ideological pandering in this book. I am well aware that it is at best a compilation for the general reader and reflects the attitudes of its authors. For a work on borders it is light on maps and diagrams but far too heavy on politics and policies and neologisms such as "bordering". Despite defining borders fairly in terms of flows and filters there is no attempt to illustrate or quantify such parameters. Beware of any discipline that appends "studies" to its title (as in border studies). It is the strategy of opportunism.

The Female Detective (British Library Crime Classics) Paperback – August 2, 2016 by Andrew Forrester (Poisoned Pen Press )

The Female Detective is the first novel in British fiction to feature a professional female detective. Written by Andrew Forrester, it was originally published in 1864. The protagonist is Miss Gladden, or 'G' as she is also known - the precursor to Miss Marple, Mma Ramotswe and Lisbeth Salander.


Miss Gladden's deductive methods and energetic approach anticipate those of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, and she can be seen as beginning a powerful tradition of female detectives in these seven short stories. 'G' uses similar methods to her male counterparts – she enters scenes of crime incognito, tracking down killers while trying to conceal her own tracks and her identity from others.


'G', the first female detective, does much physical detective work, examining crime scenes, looking for clues and employing all manner of skill, subterfuge, observation and charm solve crimes. Like Holmes, 'G' regards the regular constabulary with disdain. For all the intrigue and interest of the stories, little is ever revealed about 'G' herself, and her personal circumstances remain a mystery throughout. But it is her ability to apply her considerable energy and intelligence to solve crimes that is her greatest appeal, and the reappearance of the original lady detective will be welcomed by fans of crime fiction.

Harpoon: Inside the Covert War Against Terrorism’s Money Masters by Nitsana Darshan-Leitner and Samuel M. Katz Hachette Books, 352 pp., $27

Early in his long and eventful career, an ambitious Israeli intelligence officer named Meir Dagan recognized a core fallacy in our understanding of terrorism. Yes, $150 worth of hardware, fabric, and cheap explosives can transform a human being into an IED. But, as the authors of Harpoon: Inside the Covert War Against Terrorism’s Money Masters, the latest addition to the Alexandrian library of books on Israeli intelligence, tell us, any suicide bomber is just the “final link in a long supply chain of men, machines and infrastructure that cost tens of thousands of dollars.” Terrorism is not cheap. It is a costly endeavour, especially for substate organizations without recourse to legitimate funding and dependable revenue streams. Find a way of taking terrorists’ money, the logic would seem to dictate, and you may have a way of shutting them down.

Working on that assumption, Dagan, who eventually became one of Mossad’s longest-serving directors, introduced a “follow the money” ethos into the high-stakes world of Israeli counterterrorism during the Second Intifada. He was assisted by a handful of visionary intelligence and special operations officers as well as one of Harpoon’s authors, Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, an Israeli lawyer specializing in advocacy on behalf of the victims of terrorism. Working closely with U.S. authorities, Dagan created a multidisciplinary team—code-named Tziltzal, or Harpoon—whose sole purpose was to find creative ways of denying funding to the terrorist groups routinely unleashing carnage on the streets of Israel. How they did this makes for lively, suspenseful reading.

Early on, the Harpoon team dangled a Latin American front company with a seemingly rock-solid investment portfolio in front of a prominent PLO financier. Encouraged by initial profits, the PLO and its chairman, Yasser Arafat, sank more and more money into the enterprise. Inevitably, and with more than a little help from Harpoon, the company, its assets, and its infrastructure vanished overnight, taking an estimated $100 million in PLO funds with it.

Mark Bradford: Tomorrow Is Another Day Hardcover – June 27, 2017 by Christopher Bedford (Author, Editor, Contributor),‎ Katy Siegel (Author, Editor),‎ Peter Hudson (Author),‎ Anita Hill (Author),‎ Sarah Lewis (Author),‎ Zadie Smith (Author),‎ James Baldwin (Author),‎ W.E.B. DuBois (Author),‎ Mark Bradford (Artist).(GREGORY R. MILLER & CO.) (IBRArtBooks)

America’s representative at the 2017 Venice Biennale, Bradford has radically renewed abstract art


Mark Bradford’s exhibition for the US Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale, titled Tomorrow Is Another Day, is born out of the artist’s longtime commitment to the inherently social nature of the material world. For Bradford, abstraction is not opposed to content; it embodies it. Finding materials for his paintings in the hair salon, Home Depot and the streets of Los Angeles, Bradford renews the traditions of abstract painting, demonstrating that freedom from socially prescribed representation is profoundly meaningful in the hands of a black artist.


Mark Bradford: Tomorrow Is Another Day is not only a catalog for Bradford’s pavilion project; it is a different kind of book, a substantial publication that blends the biographical with the historical and political. Essays from outside the art world—by Anita Hill, Peter James Hudson, W.E.B. Du Bois and Zadie Smith—narrate a series of interwoven stories about Reconstruction, civil rights and the vulnerable body in urban space, fleshed out with vivid archival photographs and documents. The book also includes significant new texts from curator Katy Siegel and art historian Sarah Lewis, as well as a revealing interview with Bradford, offering a new understanding of the work of one of today’s most influential contemporary artists.


Mark Bradford was born in 1961 in Los Angeles, where he lives and works. Best known for his large-scale abstract paintings that examine the class-, race- and gender-based economies that structure urban society in the United States, Bradford’s richly layered and collaged canvases represent a connection to the social world through materials. Bradford uses fragments of found posters, billboards, newsprint and custom-printed paper to simultaneously engage with and advance the formal traditions of abstract painting.

Civilisations: How Do We Look / The Eye of Faith Hardcover – March 1, 2018 by Professor Mary Beard (Profile)

Islamic calligraphy and whistling statues – we’ve come a long way from the Kenneth Clark’s patrician worldview. There’s one particular photograph that sums up Kenneth Clark’sCivilisation, the 1969 BBC cultural history series that assumed the male, patrician gaze is the only one that matters. The image, a publicity still for the programme, shows Clark in leafy summertime Paris, posed against the backdrop of Notre Dame. He is wearing a sports jacket and tie, and between elegant fingers he dangles a lit cigarette in a holder. Here’s the odd thing, though. Clark is standing with his back to the cathedral, gazing in the opposite direction. It’s as if he has seen enough, and is occupied instead with running those flying buttresses through his mental database before deciding their proper place in the league table of Civilisation’s greatest hits. Above the Parthenon’s columns but below the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling? Clark squints into the middle distance and ponders.

Mary Beard includes this photograph in her new book as a way of marking the distance travelled over the last 50 years from a concept of “Civilisation” as a matter of connoisseurship, available only to those with Clark’s storehouse of knowledge and natty way with a fag. Beard is one of three presenters of the BBC’s new Civilisations, a reworking and opening-up of the original 1969 series, and this book is an accompaniment to the two episodes that she will present out of the total nine.

Singing kings … The colossi of Memnon in Luxor Photograph: Khaled Desouki/AFP/Getty Images

On the evidence of the photographs in the book, Beard won’t be squinting at art objects from a distance, let alone turning her back on them. Instead she is pictured clambering over hot, dusty stones in an attempt to get their full measure. We are clearly a long way from the 4th arrondissement too. Whereas Clark didn’t stray beyond Europe (he missed out Spain completely, perhaps because its elements of Moorish culture made it worryingly suspect), Beard travels from Mexico to China, in search of the kind of ancient artefacts that her predecessor would have unhesitatingly assigned to civilisation’s shadow side.

What Clark would have found barbaric about the terracotta army of Shaanxi province or the Olmec statuary of ancient Mexico is that these objects have no designated maker, no individual signature. Beard, by contrast, remains unfazed and argues that the significance of any historical artefact lies not so much in who made it as what others made of it. In one excellent section she tells the story of the singing statue of Memnon, a 65ft-high colossus from the age of the pharaohs. In November AD130, Hadrian, the fidgety Roman emperor, arrived in Thebes to behold the ancient giant who was said to have the power of song. On some mornings Memnon could be heard to wheeze tunelessly – the result either of desert wind sighing through a crack in the stone or else generations of naughty boys hiding round the back with an old lyre string. But on the first morning of the imperial visit either the wind or the boys were on strike, since no noise emerged. Only on subsequent days did the ancient king deign to sing, if not sweetly, then at least loudly enough to make himself heard above the tourist chatter.

We know all this because a member of the emperor’s entourage, Julia Balbilla, wrote a poem on the subject. Not any old poem, either, but one designed to be chiselled by a compliant craftsman on to the “skin” of the statue. Balbilla’s lumpy lines were far from being Memnon’s first bit of arty graffiti – his left leg was already a veritable scribble of tributes left by ancient visitors. What makes this account so Beard-ian is the way it insists on paying more attention to the statue’s scratchy afterlife than the moment of its making, which anyway remains lost in deep time. Meaning is always an ongoing process for Beard, concerned not so much with making as making-over.

Of course there are downsides to this way of doing things. Beard can’t give us a seamless chronology in the way that Clark did: he saw civilisation as an artistic relay race undertaken by one famous man passing the baton on to the genius just in front of him. Beard, by contrast, skips about the centuries and the globe in pursuit of thematic patterns, unfussed by yawning gaps in her timeline. This alone demonstrates how today’s readers and viewers are comfortable consuming a narrative that 50 years ago would have struck their grandparents as hopelessly hiccupy.

Less happy perhaps is the way that Beard’s book is abruptly divided at its midpoint into two sections, each corresponding to one of the episodes that she will present on television. The first half is concerned with making art out of the human form, while the second deals with the place of art in religious faith. Still, Beard works hard to show the continuities across the gutter of her book. A fine section on the “crying” Madonna of Macarena in Seville not only leads into an exploration of the tension between inspiration and idolatry in Christian art, but also nods back to that earlier “living” statue, the frog-throated Memnon.

In the second part a standout section sees Beard upending that stale old assumption about Islam being an artless religion. To prove her point she takes us into the Blue Mosque in Istanbul and points out that, while there may be no images of human or divine forms, joyous streams of holy writ dance along the ceramic walls and ceiling. So exquisite is this monumental calligraphy, with its repeating visual rhymes and rhythms, that at some point the script ceases to be text and becomes instead its own picture. This effect is even more striking given that the majority of visitors to the mosque will historically have had neither the laser-sharp vision nor the literacy in Arabic to make out the meaning of the words suspended hundreds of feet above their heads. What we are looking at on the walls of the Blue Mosque is nothing less than the divine in visual form.

It is this ability to read closely in the interstices of culture that makes Beard such an invigorating guide. A case in point: she introduces us to the Edwardian artist Christiana Herringham, who travelled to Hyderabad to record the fading Buddhist paintings on the cave walls at Ajanta before they finally succumbed to age and bat guano. On her return to Britain she produced a lavish book containing exquisite reproductions of the best images, all worked up from her meticulous tracings. Exquisite but fallacious. For what Lady Herringham had imagined she had seen on the cave walls was the Indian equivalent of Renaissance religious art, and she set about filling in its gaps and ambiguities accordingly, using colours and shapes and narratives that would have made no sense to the original pilgrims.

Yet Beard makes it clear that Herringham was no cultural colonialist. She understood the religious significance of the art she was trying to save and, once home, was racked with guilt that she might have disturbed a holy shrine. What’s more, given her great support for suffrage and her founding of the National Art Collections Fund, which still saves paintings for the nation today, in another kind of historical narrative she would be held up to us as a heroine, a proto-modern on the side of the angels. The way Beard presents Herringham’s story – alive to its muddled intentions and unintended appropriations – is a reminder once again that we get closer to the material past when we consider all the human souls, not just the artists, aristocrats and men of genius, who had a hand in its making.

The Planets: Photographs from the Archives of NASA Hardcover – November 7, 2017 by Nirmala Nataraj (Author),‎ NASA (Photographer),‎ Bill Nye (Preface)

It's easy to get jaded by images of our solar system, especially when NASA probes like Cassini make it look so routine. A new book called The Planets, written and curated by Nirmala Nataraj with a forward by Bill Nye and featuring hundreds of stunning NASA images, should cure you of your cynicism. As Nye puts it, we haven't exactly been doing this for a long time. "You are looking at images with a clarity and sharpness that our ancestors probably couldn't even imagine, let alone capture," he said.

The pictures were chosen not just to make your jaw drop, but chronicle some of NASA's more notable findings. So, alongside recent photos of Saturn and its moons like Titan and Enceladus, it includes the first ever photo of Earth taken from the moon's perspective, snapped by the Lunar Orbiter 1. On top of the eight planets, there are also shots of the Sun, Kuiper Belt objects, ex-planet Pluto and its moon, Charon.

Nye provides a brisk history of how the solar system was formed, starting with the sun itself and moving on to the inner rocky planets, the "Jovian" gas giants and finally the outer Kuiper Belt objects. He also gives readers some advise on how to peruse the book. "Are we alone out here in the cosmos, suspended on the arm of the Milky Way?" Nye asks. "To find your own answer to these universal questions, save the best for last and look at our Earth from space as astronauts do. It will change you."

Those words are brought to colorful life by the images from NASA's archives, including Mercury's Caloris Basin (above), multi-hued jet streams emanating on Saturn's hexagon, Pluto's heart-shaped Sputnik Planam, Jupiter's atmosphere and recent images of Saturn's rings and moons from Cassini. Many of the images are taken with ultraviolet and infrared cameras, and include false color to enhance storm systems, mineral deposits and other features.

Sure, you can find all these images on NASA and other websites, but there's something about seeing them collected together in a high-quality printed book ($40 in hardcover from Chronicle Books). It's a great way to take a tour of our beautiful but mostly inhospitable solar system, and a reminder not to screw up our own Goldilocks planet.

The Architecture of Herod, the Great Builder by Ehud Netzer, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, , 443 pp. $195 (hardback)

Herod the Great is widely recognized as the greatest builder of ancient times in the Land of Israel. The remains of structures he erected form a major portion of the architectural landscape at the turn of the era. Their size and grandeur still evoke awe after 2,000 years. Indeed, these remains eternalize Herod as the builder non pareil.

Archaeologist and architect Ehud Netzer here summarizes and interprets the numerous building projects Herod undertook in the Land of Israel throughout his reign (37–4 B.C.E.).

Herod erected a variety of buildings serving a wide range of functions. His ambitions as builder knew no bounds. He overcame every natural, economic and political obstacle. When difficulties arose, he found creative solutions. His buildings served his political aims, as well as his personal ambitions.

Herod founded new cities like Caesarea Maritima, where he constructed a unique deep-water harbor, as well as a pagan temple and various large public buildings.

Ehud Netzer was a member of BAR’s editorial advisory board for 30 years and frequently wrote for the magazine. In commemoration of his scholarship, we’ve made all of his publications in the BAS Library available for free. Click here to read a collection of works by the illustrious scholar, including the posthumously published “In Search of Herod’s Tomb.”

In Jerusalem he built a new temple for his Jewish subjects within a compound unparalleled in size and splendor. Nothing like it has been found in the entire Roman Empire.

He supplied an abundance of water to a series of fortresses in the Judean Desert, such as Masada and Herodion (also called Herodium). In this way these fortresses could be transformed into grand palaces.

Herod was also the first to construct traditional Roman public entertainment facilities in the Land of Israel. According to Josephus, Herod built a theater and amphitheater/hippodrome in Jerusalem in honor of Caesar, which offended Jewish sensitivities. However, the remains of these buildings have never been found to date, despite the more than 150 years of intensive archaeological research that have been conducted in Jerusalem and its vicinity and the huge dimensions of the structures Josephus describes. Did they in fact exist? Perhaps we just haven’t found them, or maybe they never existed. The decorations on the structures were no doubt adapted to make them acceptable to his Jewish subjects. We know that Herod avoided the representation of all human and animal figures even in the closed and private parts of his palaces.

Herod knew how to enjoy his wealth and position, and he did not stint on decorating the buildings he erected. To decorate his numerous palaces, he brought talented artisans from abroad to create mosaics and frescos using expensive imported materials but without transgressing the Second Commandment.

The Israel Museum’s new exhibit Herod the Great—The King’s Final Journey guides visitors through the Herodian world and the end of the illustrious king’s life, as brought to light by the late archaeologist Ehud Netzer. Read the article “Herod the Great—The King’s Final Journey” by Suzanne F. Singer as it appears in the March/April 2013 issue of BAR, and take a look at additional web-exclusive highlights from the exhibit in the Bible History Daily slideshow.

Herod also introduced numerous architectural innovations and construction techniques in the Land of Israel: for example, the domes inside the Double Gate to the Temple Mount. He adapted the mikveh (a Jewish ritual bath) for use as the frigidarium in the Roman-style bathhouses in his many palaces.

He introduced an innovative combination of palace and fortress. Several of these, like the Antonia in Jerusalem and at Herodion in the Judean Desert about 2 miles south of Bethlehem, have (or had) one tower higher and stronger than the others. Herod’s fortification innovations were precursors of patterns in the military architecture of subsequent generations.

In assessing Herod’s construction projects, Netzer enjoys the advantage of having personally uncovered many of these sites, giving him an intimate familiarity with the subject. He has published numerous excavation reports and other research papers dealing with a variety of aspects of the Herod’s construction in the Land of Israel.

In Part I of this book, Netzer summarizes the history of each site and its Herodian building remains. Part II comprises synthetic chapters dealing with important aspects of Herodian architecture. At the end of the book are appendices by Netzer, Orit Peleg, Silvia Rozenberg and Rina Talgam dealing with architectural elements and decorations in Herodian buildings.

Netzer deserves our congratulations for this gargantuan effort, bringing together all of these studies in a single volume in clear and instructive language.

Like other books of this kind, this one expresses the author’s own views. And of course a reviewer may question and even differ.

For example, Netzer divides Herod’s buildings at Masada into three chronologically distinct building phases. According to him, the casemate wall surrounding the site was constructed only in the third construction phase (c. 15 B.C.E.). This means that for a lengthy period, including the years following the second building phase in which most of the buildings, including the Northern Palace and the storerooms, were constructed, the site was without a defensive wall! I wonder. This conclusion seems to run counter to the view that Masada (as well as Herod’s other fortresses) were erected early in his reign (Table 1, p. 303) in order to fortify and safeguard his control over the country. In the dense line of desert fortresses, Masada played a special role, intended as the last refuge for Herod and his family, as Netzer recognizes (p. 40). Would it not have been surrounded by a wall? On the other hand, it is true that the complex of royal buildings and administrative facilities at Lower Herodion was not surrounded by a wall. There is no question about this. A wall of course would have provided security to the king and his entourage.

Netzer reconstructs the Antonia fortress, located at the northwestern corner of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, as projecting into the Temple Mount temenos (platform). This view is not supported, however, either by written sources or by the present appearance of the rock cliff at this point, which is cut at a right angle with straight sides where the western and northern walls of the Temple Mount meet. Netzer’s explanation—that the rock projection was straightened during the Umayyad period by the builders of the mosques—appears forced and unfounded.

A few technical observations: All of the plans in the book are drawn with full black lines, rather than using dotted lines for reconstructed walls. Thus, it is not possible to tell which parts of the structures were found intact and which are restorations. Some of the buildings at Masada were found with full plans; in contrast, structures on the Temple Mount (the Antonia and the Temple) are entirely hypothetical reconstructions based on literary sources. How is the reader unfamiliar with the material to tell the difference when the lines in the drawings are solid black and the captions of all of the plans indicate “reconstructed”?

A book this important should also have better quality pictures. Color photographs, particularly of the mosaic floors and the frescoes, would have enabled the reader to appreciate the full power and grandeur of Herodian architecture. A glossary would also have been useful to readers unfamiliar with the technical architectural terms used throughout the book.

As is well known, archaeological research is a never-ending affair. New discoveries are constantly surprising us. This is certainly true of Herod’s building enterprises. Several years ago, for example, a Herodian temple was discovered at Omrit near Banias.a Netzer also discusses his longstanding effort to locate Herod’s tomb based on Josephus’ description of the elaborate funeral and burial at Herodion. Indeed, since the publication of this book, Netzer appears to have found the mausoleum at Herodion where Herod was laid to rest. Exposure of the remains of this structure are only beginning, and we look forward to following it both in print and on site.

Anti-Doping: Policy and Governance. Barrie Houlihan and Mike McNamee (eds). Routledge.

The world of sport is facing a serious crisis, deepened by a spate of recent controversies such as match-fixing, doping and the abuse of positions in sport organisations for illicit personal gain. Just in the last couple of months we have seen major scandals, including the arrest of high-ranking FIFA officials, the revelation of a state-sponsored doping scheme of Russian athletes and the discovery of unethical practices by sports professionals (including an apparently rigged judging system in boxing at the Rio Olympics). These pose serious challenges to the governance of sport, domestically and internationally. In addition to public debate about an overhaul of the regulation and governance of sport, scholars have had their say.

This two-part review focuses on two books written on the subjects of integrity in sports and anti-doping policies: following his preceding review of The Edge, here Slobodan Tomic reviews Anti-Doping: Policy and Governance, edited by Barrie Houlihan and Mike McNamee, as part of the scholarship contributing to the conversation on ongoing and future challenges to the governance of sport.






Several years after the publication of a 2011 special issue of the International Journal of Sport Policy and Politics, Barrie Houlihan and Mike McNamee have turned its content into an edited book on anti-doping policies. Despite some passage of time, the relevance of its topic has not diminished but has rather increased with the outbreak of major doping scandals (a Russian state-sponsored doping scheme; controversy surrounding Therapeutic Use Exemptions and the case of British cycling Team Sky; meldonium doping by Maria Sharapova; and many others) that have swept the sporting world in the meantime.


Under the book’s umbrella theme of anti-doping policy, the chapters feature diverse topics, disciplinary approaches and styles. The first seven chapters are authored by scholars from the field of law and social sciences, while the later three chapters are produced by anti-doping practitioners – one representative of international anti-doping regulator, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), one member of the UK Anti-Doping Agency (UKAD) and one representative of the International Tennis Federation (ITF).


The varying issues that the scholars’ contributions address can be grouped under three main concerns: the pre-doping stage and the processes that affect athletes’ decisions to take prohibited substances; detection efforts by anti-doping authorities; and issues related to the post-detection stage. Some of these are approached as legal issues, others as ethical, social or regulatory.

In Chapter Five, Kate Kirby, Aidan Moran and Suzanne Guerin deal with the question of why athletes decide to dope. Based on their surveys of five doping ‘confessors’, the authors look at internal factors (consideration and justification; psychology and personality; and personal circumstances), external ones (pressure; ease of access; sources of influence within sport; and sources of influence outside sport) as well as deterrents (an example of an internal deterrent being moral prohibition and of an external, the severity of sanctions). One finding is that athletes, especially younger ones, face ‘career junctions’ at which they decide to dope due to various concerns – to get or remain selected, to keep up with the competition or to gain an ‘edge’. These junctions come after important ‘triggering’ events, usually coinciding with an athlete’s crisis.


This set of surveys indicates that ‘environmental’ factors are important. The role of fellow teammates, coaches, medical personnel and others can be decisive in encouraging or discouraging the decision to take prohibited substances. Deterrent factors, such as the toughness of sanctions, are also important in precluding doping consumption. Based on these findings, the following can be derived as potentially effective anti-doping tools: (1) encouraging tip-offs and whistle-blowers; (2) ‘getting tough’ on traffickers of prohibited substances; and (3) potentially criminalising involvement in doping. Interestingly, for those already doping, intrinsic motives can be crucial ‘inhibitors’: morality and the feel of guilt can be important factors that lead athletes to cease doping. Although it is based on a small sample of five athletes, this chapter offers useful insights into why breaches of anti-doping standards occur.


The ‘whereabouts rule’ – the cornerstone for the implementation of the World Anti-Doping Code – has drawn controversy among athletes. According to this, athletes must be available for an hour each day for possible testing, and must in advance provide information on their whereabouts. In Chapter Three, Verner Moller discusses why this rule and the accompanying question of proportionality are problematic. Should anti-doping authorities strive to maximise the prospect of catching a doped athlete at any cost, including infringements of the athlete’s privacy, putting them under continuous stress and dehumanising them, such as through thorough search and surveillance? Drawing on classical texts by Michel Foucault and George Orwell, Moller discusses practical and moral issues. Arguing against a ‘Big Brother’ approach, he warns that going too far in athletes’ surveillance can lead to the internalisation and ‘normalisation’ of externally imposed practices. Moller’s piece is not only an important reminder of why the whereabouts rule is ethically questionable, but also highlights how its implementation can negatively affect performance, distorting the fairness of the competition.


Ethical issues are not only present in the actions of athletes and those designing and implementing anti-doping measures; they arise in the work of athletes’ doctors too. How to act when the obligatory confidentiality rule – imposed by the law and the medical profession’s ethics – is confronted with the knowledge that the client athlete is doping? In Chapter Four, Richard Griffith, Mike McNamee and Nicola Phillips discuss the legal and theoretical arguments for and against disclosing data about the client’s health. Exceptions to the confidentiality rule/practice, argue the authors, can hypothetically include the following: (1) disclosure in public interest; (2) disclosure in the interests of justice; (3) disclosure for the public good; (4) disclosure to protect a third party; and (5) disclosure to prevent crime. While the authors do not take a position, they point to a practical weakness – the lack of definition in official documents. They therefore call for more precise guidelines as regards the tension between the World Anti-Doping Code (focused on countering doping behaviour and illicit practices) and professional codes (which protect athletes’ interests), lest arbitrary decisions about the best ethical approach be left to doctors.


Discovering and punishing doping athletes can involve legal issues, as witnessed by the oft-cited Meca-Medina ruling. This concerns two swimmers who were punished by the international swimming federation (FINA) after being caught with prohibited substances. Following the failure of their appeal to the Court for Arbitration in Sport, they turned to the European Union – first the European Commission (EC) and thereafter the Court of Justice (CoJ) – claiming that their economic freedoms and working rights had been breached. In Chapter Two, Craig Callery and David McArdle discuss the legal repercussions following the rulings: while the swimmers’ arguments were dismissed, the economic versus sporting considerations were left to a future ‘case by case approach’. By looking at issues surrounding clashing principles that are internationally recognised (in this case, the autonomous right of an organisation to set and enforce its ‘club’ rules versus guaranteed economic freedoms and rights), this chapter sets anti-doping as an international regime within a broader legal debate.


There are several common aspects that permeate the last three chapter contributions: descriptions of the role and priorities of organisations in tackling corruption; education activities as part of anti-doping efforts; inter-institutional collaboration in suppressing doping; and key challenges to anti-doping. All argue that education and preventive activities play a central role. For Lea Cleret (WADA), for instance, there is a significant place for experimental learning theory and social science research in advancing the understanding of athletes’ behaviour as well as tackling doping practices. The practitioners also underline the importance of collaboration with international and domestic law enforcement authorities. Some of the tools identified at the time of publication include the creation of a hotline as well as biological passports for athletes (Amanda Butt, UKAD, Chapter Eight). While detecting doping athletes remains an important part of anti-doping policy, there is agreement across these practitioner contributions that a fruitful strategic approach would include increased targeting of traffickers as well as dealing with the people surrounding the athletes (medical staff, coaches and so on).


As is usually the case with edited volumes, the style and topics of the chapters are diverse, which impacts on the book’s consistency. Despite the lack of a single focus, this volume will likely provide important introductory lessons and stimulate future research endeavours in the field of (anti-)doping as it points to major issues across the different phases of the regulatory process. The book may not be aimed at a wider readership, but it will provide scholars and anti-doping professionals with a fuller picture of some key issues surrounding the phenomenon of anti-doping regulation.

Neoliberalism: The Key Concepts. Matthew Eagleton-Pierce. Routledge. 2016.

While ‘neoliberalism’ has become a commonplace term to describe the structures of the contemporary world, how easy is it to define such a large and evolving concept? In Neoliberalism: The Key Concepts, Matthew Eagleton-Pierce proposes that it can best be understood through an exploration of key related words, offering 44 short essays examining such terms as ‘class’, ‘finance’ and ‘market’. Barton Edgerton recommends this pleasurable, engaging and interesting read as a welcome addition to any reference book shelf as I show the importance of language to any critical engagement with neoliberalism.

Today it is difficult to imagine that there is any US columnist whose work would lead to a conference of leading intellectuals with the purpose of creating a new philosophical paradigm. In 1937, Walter Lippmann wrote a now obscure book entitled The Good Society. By trade, Lippman was a journalist who helped found The New Republic, a liberal and progressive US magazine, and authored a popular newspaper column. At the time, The Good Society was not obscure at all. Its main thesis was that liberalism had lost its way and that a return to a ‘proper liberalism’ was necessary to save society from totalitarian impulses. Such a thesis was provocative enough that French philosopher Louis Rougier convened the Colloque Walter Lippmann. Here, leading intellectuals would come together to create a new liberalism to overcome the disastrous laissez-faireism blamed for the Great Depression, while also eschewing the consequences of collectivism. It was in this setting, with Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises in attendance, that Alexander Rustow coined the term ‘neoliberalism’.


In the time since, ‘neoliberalism’ has grown from being a gleam in the eye of a handful of intellectuals to, arguably, the ruling ideology of the globalised world. Along the way, its meaning and importance has weaved a winding path. It now rests as a concept seemingly too large to define. In Neoliberalism: The Key Concepts, Matthew Eagleton-Pierce deals with this difficulty by not defining it at all. Rather, through 44 short essays, he attempts to uncover an understanding of ‘neoliberalism’ through related terms. Each of these entries are focused on a single concept – ranging from ‘class’, ‘finance’, ‘global’, ‘market’ to ‘state’, among others – and are interesting in their own right. Collectively, they weave together a rich tapestry, which, from a distance, allows an image of ‘neoliberalism’ to emerge. In this, neoliberalism is a pervasive ideology, often sitting in the shadows, that nonetheless creates the structures that seem to define the content of our daily economic interactions.


At the outset, Eagleton-Pierce makes the three aims of the book clear. First, he hopes to give the reader a better understanding of the concepts in the 44 entries. Second, individually and collectively, the entries are intended as a work of synthesis. The author does this by bringing to bear insights from a wide variety of academic fields and combining both empirical and normative concepts. Finally, Eagleton-Pierce intends for the reader to consider the relationship between power and language. Neoliberalism has its own terms and conceptual superstructure. By looking at them systemically, he argues, we can better understand, and critically engage with, neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism is self-consciously modelled after Raymond Williams’s Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. As such, the book reads like a well-crafted appendix or annotations for a larger text. Most entries start with an etymology. Many of these are surprising and rather interesting. For example, ‘emerging market’ has its roots not in an academic discipline, but in marketing. The phrase was coined by a former World Bank official who had difficulty selling a ‘Third World Equity Fund’ to investors. An ‘Emerging Markets Growth Fund’ was evidently more positive and invigorating. Others, like ‘risk’, are less straightforward. Originating in the Latin ‘rescum’, meaning ‘that which cuts’, the concept travelled to English through the French ‘risque’ after a stop in Italian as ‘risco’, denoting danger. Now risks are something to be managed, not because they are dangers to be avoided, but rather because they offer potential opportunities to be taken advantage of. While ‘rescum’ was originally a nautical term, it is now used extensively in financial services, giving this shift in meaning a long arc. However, other concepts change at a much faster pace, and many of the entries in Neoliberalism point this out.


The etymologies are insightful in and of themselves, but they serve a different, and perhaps primary, purpose. Most of the origin stories show how the meanings of these key terms have changed over time. ‘Private’, for example, has its roots in ‘depravation’, but took on its current meaning as conceptions of individualism began to take hold. With ‘property’ appended, the phrase began to acquire ‘totemic status’. This helps to establish how the words we use to denote important neoliberal concepts are malleable, contingent and could be otherwise. ‘Private’ leads to ‘privatization’, and this move allows Eagleton-Pierce to approach one of the more contentious aspects of neoliberal policymaking: the privatisation of state enterprises. However, due to the constraints of the short entry format, he is only able to identify common points of disagreement – such as empirical disputes about the fiscal and administrative benefits of privatisation, claims that it enhances competition and its impact on labour relations. Many other entries are similar. In ‘governance’, for example, the reader is taken from political power to a crisis in the legitimacy of corporate enterprise and the development of ‘corporate governance’ through to the softer implications of ‘global governance’ compared to ‘global government’.


For the most part, the entries are fun and engaging. The reader is encouraged to thumb from one to another, cross-referencing the serendipitous connections that arise. This experience of discovery through browsing can seem rare in the digital world, and it is refreshing. The breadth of work that goes into the project ensures that the reader has exposure to a wide variety of influences. The result is a book that not only introduces the reader to key concepts in neoliberalism but shows how they could be otherwise, creating a critical engagement with both the individual entries and the main subject.


Although the book is intended for an audience that ranges from interested undergraduates to research professionals, it is difficult to imagine that a novice would be able to grasp the complexity of views that underlie each entry. Perhaps much of this difficulty can be attributed to the format of 44 separate entries. While focusing the reader on each concept, it is difficult for the author to explain the larger thematic debates present across chapters. While these may be obvious to the professional academic, it could be challenging for the uninitiated. It makes one wonder if a traditional book format is a right medium for such a project. Perhaps there is a reason that dictionaries, thesauruses and the like have thrived in digital formats where links between and among concepts can be accessed at the touch of a button.


That said, Neoliberalism is a pleasure in its own right. Each of the entries is well connected to the concept of neoliberalism and there are no obvious omissions. It will make a welcome addition to a reference book shelf and can be enjoyed end to end or through browsing from entry to entry, letting serendipity arise.

The Routledge Companion to Mobile Media. Gerard Goggin and Larissa Hjorth (eds.).(Routledge) . April 2014.

Comprising 47 chapters, The Routledge Companion to Mobile Media, edited by Gerard Goggin and Larissa Hjorth, is an important resource on mobile media. I found that   that this book’s value lies in its diversity; some chapters interrogate methodological approaches to the subject, and others demonstrate these approaches in action. The constant developments in mobile media make it an exciting field of scholarship, and this book exploits these exciting energies.  

Mobile communication, data privacy, and “selfies” have all beenmaking the news recently. Look at any headlines, in fact, and you are likely to see something concerning mobile devices; you may well even be looking at them on your smartphone or tablet. Since their introduction in the late 1970s, mobile devices have reached an extraordinary level of development, achieving market penetration in the 1990s, and saturation today, with their promises of mobility, ubiquity, and instantaneity.

Topics including social media, mobile Web, media convergence, the media-“reality” interface, among many others, have been addressed across the humanities and social sciences. Several edited collections offer broad pathways into the field, for instance Mobile Technologies: From Telecommunications to Media edited by Goggin and Hjorth (2009), The Mobile Media Reader edited by Arceneaux and Kavoori (2012), Studying Mobile Media: Cultural Technologies, Mobile Communication, and the iPhone edited by Hjorth, Burgess and Richardson (2012), and Mobile Media Practices, Presence and Politics: The Challenge of Being Seamlessly Mobile edited by Hjorth and Cumiskey (2013). The strengths of these works lie in the diversity of approaches and breadth of scholarship.

The Routledge Companion to Mobile Media, edited by Gerard Goggin and Larissa Hjorth(Australia-based researchers who are pioneers in the field), is another important resource on mobile media. As the authors point out, scholarship on the topic has been dispersed across publications and disciplines; this book aims to bring the scholarship together and to be an authoritative reference work. Through seven sections and forty-seven chapters, it presents a wide range of approaches to mobile media. The editors point to the universal and global scope of the book:

While its global impact is undeniable, in each location we see how the mobile phone shapes, and is shaped by, the everyday. In other words, as global as the mobile phone is, it is also local upon every level. Far from even in its uptake, the mobile phone reflects and amplifies existing inequalities while also providing new avenues for expression and agency. (p. 1)

To reflect the uneven nature of mobile media, the book’s contributions adopt a variety of methodologies and approaches to the subject matter.

Leopoldina Fortunati’s contribution (“Understanding the Role of Mobile Media in Society: Models and Theories”) gives a good sense of what is at stake in studying mobile media. Mobile media are at the centre of technological innovation: “their heterogeneity across platforms, content, and media makes them challenging to study and define” and Fortunati finds “there is a need to systematize studies to date” (p. 21). This chapter focuses on the mobile phone as the most representative device of mobile media. It maps the ways the mobile phone has been understood, shows the limits to these understandings, and suggests new models of understanding.

Fortunati proposes a new model to overcome the limitations of various theories on the power relations between mobile technology and society, which works in two ways: it introduces the categories of space and time, and thus makes it possible to contextualise media in a particular context, and it conceptualises mobile media as cultural objects that interact not simply with society as a whole, but with producers and users of technological artifacts. The chapter’s success lies in its discussion of the implications of the theories presented. These are theories with broad relevance to anyone studying mobile media, regardless of their disciplinary association. Fortunati is self-assured in her criticisms of prevalent models of technology and her suggestions for future research.Fortunati outlines four main ways in which mobile media have been understood: as technological artifacts designed for information and communication, as relational objects that act in power relationships with humans and human society, as technologies defined by their uses, and as socio-technical systems that elaborate a generalist notion of how technology and society interrelate. She favours the latter framework because it does not look at specific technological devices, but focuses on “the complexity of general situations” (p. 23). This is an appropriate framework due to integration and convergence among various mobile technologies: we use several devices in everyday life, together, and sometimes all at once.

Many of the contributions work through the kinds of suggestions Fortunati makes. Kyoung-hwa Yonnie Kim’s chapter (“Genealogy of Mobile Creativity: A Media Archaeological Approach to Literary Practice in Japan”) adopts something similar to the technology-society-user-producer model. It also demonstrates the geographically specific case-study form that many of the contributions take. Kim analyses Japanese mobile media within the specific framework of Media Archaeology, a subfield of Media Studies that is attracting much interest at the moment.

Kim argues that cultural forms of creativity, such as keitai shôsetsu (“mobile phone novel”) and hagaki bungaku (“postcard literature”), should be understood not in a linear new/old form of development, but as complex cyclical forms. In this light, such mobile media forms share structural similarities with email, literature, and photojournalism, and do not offer categorically new or “fresh” experiences. Combining ethnographic field research and close scrutiny of her sources, Kim arrives at satisfying conclusions. Participatory forms of culture attributed to digital media can be seen in these earlier media in a “grassroots” form. This contribution demonstrates a productive way to conceptualise mobile media, enabling them to be related to a range of media technologies “despite the chronological gap and difference in social backgrounds” (p. 222). However, it is too brief to go into as much detail as I would have liked; something that is observable in many of the book’s chapters.

As a whole, this book’s value lies in its diversity. Its chapters are brief but suggestive. Some interrogate methodological approaches to the subject, and others demonstrate these approaches in action. It is not comprehensive, but that would be impossible due to the nature of its object of study. In this shifting landscape, I’m not sure “definitive” is a term able to be used. The constant developments in mobile media make it an exciting field of scholarship, and this book exploits these exciting energies.

The German-Jewish Cookbook: Recipes and History of a Cuisine (HBI Series on Jewish Women) Hardcover – September 5, 2017 by Gabrielle Rossmer Gropman (Author),‎ Sonya Gropman (Author),‎ Nach Waxman (Contributor) (Brandeis University Press) (IBRCookBooks)

Mother-daughter duo  Gabrielle Rossmer Gropman and Sonya Gropman are spearheading a disappearing culinary tradition's modern revival. Bonus: their new book's sweet Hanukkah krokerle recipe

This Hanukkah, after the menorah has been lit and the last potato pancake finished, why not substitute some krokerle cookies for dessert instead of sufganiyot?

The spiced chocolate krokerle, with roasted hazelnuts and a lemon glaze, are a Hanukkah tradition that existed in Germany for centuries before the Jewish community was decimated in World War II.

Earlier this year, to spread awareness of German Jewry’s fast-disappearing culinary heritage, mother-and-daughter authors Gabrielle Rossmer Gropman and Sonya Gropman published “The German-Jewish Cookbook: Recipes & History of a Cuisine” through the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute as part of the HBI Series on Jewish Women.

“We are the first, the only cookbook in existence, on this type of food and this culture,” Gropman said.

The book is the culmination of a nine-year process whose inspiration comes from the authors’ German roots. Rossmer Gropman’s parents fled their native Germany with their year-old daughter in 1939. Their new home — the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York — became a haven for German-Jewish immigrants escaping Hitler and bringing their traditions to the US.

“My German grandparents were unique,” Gropman said of her mother’s parents. “Not everybody was familiar [with their cuisine]. Most people were not. It came into focus that my mother and I should do a project [on] a cuisine that is very different from Eastern European Jewish food.”

As Rossmer Gropman explained, “German-Jewish cooking is German food with a Jewish twist based upon kosher rules, [with] traditions developed based upon the cuisine of Germany, and the ingredients in Germany that were available.”


Gabrielle Rossmer Gropman as a child with her grandparents, Emma and Sigmund, in Washington Heights, New York. (Courtesy)

German Jews adapted their homeland’s pork dishes to include beef or veal instead. When German recipes called for lard, Jews substituted goose fat.

The book even includes a twist on sauerkraut — “krautsalat,” which Rossmer Gropman describes as a “much fresher” alternative. The recipewon an award from the Food52 website.

There are also recipes for Shabbat and holidays, including gruenkern soup, a relatively rare example of similarities between German-Jewish and Eastern European Jewish food.

Gruenkern soup is similar to kasha. However, in contrast to kasha, which is made from buckwheat groats — a staple that grew in Eastern Europe but not Germany — gruenkern is a kind of wheat kernel that Germans have eaten for millennia.

Readers will find, as well, a ceremonial bread called either “berches” or “barches” — depending on the region of Germany — that in some ways resembles challah. It is braided, with an egg wash on top, and sprinkled with poppy seeds.

But, Gropman said, “the dough is different, water-based, no egg. Challah is usually sort of yellow and fluffy, like a brioche. [Berches] is much whiter, with a different texture,” often with mashed potatoes in the dough.

Potatoes are an ingredient that is “Jewish and German at the same time,” she said. They appear in quite a few of the book’s recipes, including potato dumplings.

Apple cake with yeast dough from ‘The German-Jewish Cookbook: Recipes & History of a Cuisine.’ (Courtesy)

“It is a favorite dish,” Rossmer Gropman said. “It’s only potato and salt, no other ingredients. Boiled, they take some skill… You hold them together, they don’t fall apart. It’s kind of wonderful.”

Save room for dessert — including a cake that German Jews made from Italian prune plums during the three weeks when they were in season each fall.

“Everyone’s grandmother made plum cake,” Rossmer Gropman recalled. “A lot of people kept the recipe in their lives. It’s definitely one of my favorite things. We make it with a butter dough.”

German Jews celebrated children’s birthdays with another type of cake: Igel, which is shaped like a hedgehog, with almonds as the quills.

“It’s fantastic looking and tasting,” Gropman said. “It’s coffee-flavored, with a butter cream… It’s adorable. My great-grandmother made it for my mother on her birthday. Even a few years ago, my mother made it for me.”
Nearly lost traditions

These cherished traditions were nearly lost with the rise of Hitler.

“I would say that perhaps in the whole of Germany, there were over 500,000 to 600,000 Jews, about one percent of the population, before the war,” Rossmer Gropman said. “By 1942, there were maybe 15,000 left, hiding mainly in Berlin… The community was decimated, destroyed.”

Rossmer Gropman said that about 150,000 to 160,000 German Jews escaped to New York from 1933 to 1939. The US was “very difficult to get into,” she noted. An American citizen had to pledge, in an affidavit, that an immigrant would not become a ward of the government. This was a way of “keeping many people out,” she said. “Many more were killed who would have come.”

‘The German-Jewish Cookbook: Recipes & History of a Cuisine,’ by Gabrielle Rossmer Gropman and Sonya Gropman. (Courtesy)

Rossmer Gropman said her parents “knew, when they got married in 1936, that they would leave.”

She was born in Bamberg, where her father was the second-generation owner of a small factory that made men’s shirts.

“It was clearly impossible for Jews to live in Germany anymore,” she said. “Jews were being excluded from the professions. They could not use public transportation. It kept getting worse and worse all the time.”

On November 9, 1938, the Kristallnacht pogroms wrought death and destruction across Germany. Her father was arrested and held at the Dachau concentration camp for six weeks. When he was released, his paperwork was in place for departure. He left with his wife and the infant Rossmer Gropman in March 1939.

Rossmer Gropman’s grandparents on her mother’s side also escaped from where they were living in Munich and joined the family in New York. But her father’s parents could not get out, and were killed by the Nazis in 1942. Other members of the family were lost in the Holocaust as well.


“It’s very sad,” she said.
Cultural revival

Many of the German Jews who escaped were able to revive their culture in Washington Heights.

“It was the largest German-Jewish [community] anywhere in the world,” Gropman noted.

Located in northern Manhattan, the neighborhood had its own newspaper, “Aufbau” (“Build”), an internationally recognized publication whose columnists included Eleanor Roosevelt. And, Rossmer Gropman said, there were many support organizations that “helped people figure out how to live in America.”

Gropman said that when her mother was growing up, the foods she ate were likely “almost exactly the same as if she had not left Germany. She ate very ‘old world’ foods until high school and college.”

Sonya Gropman, left, and Gabrielle Rossmer Gropman, authors of ‘The German-Jewish Cookbook: Recipes & History of a Cuisine.’ (Courtesy)

The German Jews of Washington Heights benefited from “all these shops that catered to them,” Gropman explained. “It was a time when people would cook more and eat in their home, not get takeout in restaurants. Food traditions were really maintained.”

But these links became tenuous. Rossmer Gropman recalled reading — or trying to read — her grandmother’s handwritten cookbook. She could understand its headlines and recipe titles, but the body of the text was more difficult. As she began thinking about it more over time, her desire to reconnect with it increased.

Her daughter was also becoming aware of the uniqueness of their family’s culinary heritage — and its risk of disappearing. She approached Rossmer Gropman with the idea to do a cookbook together.

“At first, she said no,” Gropman recalled. “Eventually, she said yes.”

“I was very intimidated,” Rossmer Gropman said. “I saw the project as huge. I had other things in my life. Sonya had other things in her life… [But it was] something we were uniquely able to do, needed to do.”

They researched German-Jewish cuisine at academic centers such as the Leo Baeck Institute in New York City, “the main organization related to German-Jewish culture,” Gropman said.

A photo from ‘The German-Jewish Cookbook: Recipes & History of a Cuisine.’ (Courtesy Gabrielle Rossmer Gropman and Sonya Gropman)

They read 19th-century American cookbooks and prewar German-Jewish cookbooks. And they interviewed people who shared insights on late-19th century, pre-WWI Germany.

The authors are also professional artists, and they incorporated a visual dimension to the book. Gropman photographed recipes, and they launched a Kickstarter campaign to hire an illustrator and food stylist.

“We’re very happy with how it turned out,” Gropman said.

The authors have recently been making holiday recipes as a family. On Thanksgiving, they cooked and baked several dishes together — old favorites and a new recipe.

“It’s a fine balance between individual egos, cooperation, and sharing of skills, labor, and creative decisions,” they wrote The Times of Israel in an email.

“Of course, when Sonya was a child, it was more of a watching/observing and teaching situation. She absorbed much of Gaby’s technique and rhythm of cooking by watching her mom in the kitchen. Naturally, when we are making old family favorites, we feel that other members of our family are with us in the kitchen — a grandmother, grandfather, or uncle, for example,” they wrote.

From ‘The German-Jewish Cookbook: Recipes & History of a Cuisine.’ (Courtesy)

Similarly, Gropman said, the cookbook is “about preserving, about documenting — or not exactly documenting, but about sharing. In only two and a half months, a lot of different types of people have been drawn and interested. Of course people who are German-Jewish. Also people who are Jewish from another background that is not German. And German people, Americans with German associations, people [for whom it has] multiple importances.”

She noted that “a lot of old-fashioned German recipes” are no longer common in Germany today.

“I think there are a lot of points of influence for the book, the topic of the book,” she said.
RECIPE: Spiced Chocolate Hazelnut Cookies (Krokerle)

Makes 45-65 cookies

This is a chocolate spice cookie with yummy roasted hazelnuts that is iced with a sweet-tart lemon glaze. The recipe comes to us from Herta Bloch, though her daughter Marion has always been the one in their family to bake them, traditionally as a Hanukkah treat. As the recipe does not contain dairy, krokerle are pareve (neither meat nor dairy) — and also naturally low in fat. The size of these cookies is variable — you may choose to form them with a teaspoon for smaller cookies, or a tablespoon for larger ones.



Krokerle, or chocolate hazelnut cookies, usually eaten around Hanukkah. (Courtesy Gabrielle Rossmer Gropman and Sonya Gropman)

For the cookies:
8 ounces hazelnuts
4 large eggs
1 ½ cups sugar
2¾ cups all-purpose flour
1½ teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon ground clove, cinnamon, or nutmeg, or a combination
¼ cup Dutch-process cocoa
2 ounces brandy, or whiskey

For the lemon glaze:
1½ cups confectioner’s sugar, sifted
1½ tablespoons fresh lemon juice

1) Preheat oven to 350°F. Spread the hazelnuts on a baking sheet and toast in the oven for about 10 minutes, or until you start to smell them. Be careful not to let them burn. Immediately remove from oven and spread on a clean kitchen towel. Wrap the four corners of the towel over the top and let sit for a few minutes — the steam will help loosen the nut skins. Roll the nuts around in the towel — most of the nuts will be skinless. Set aside.

2) Whisk eggs and sugar together until light and foamy.

3) In a separate bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder, clove, and cocoa. Stir dry ingredients into the egg/sugar mixture. Add the liquor and the nuts and mix to combine.

4) Drop by teaspoonfuls or tablespoonfuls onto greased, or parchment lined, baking sheets, 2” apart.

5) Bake in preheated 350°F oven 10-15 minutes, or until lightly browned. Remove from oven and place on a rack to cool.

6) While the cookies are baking, make the glaze: combine the confectioner’s sugar and lemon juice in a small bowl and stir until smooth. Add a drop of water if the glaze is too thick.

7) While the cookies are still warm, drizzle each one with a small spoonful of glaze. Let cool.