Archive for: September, 2011

Digital Narratives. And the Narrative of Romance Readers as Early E-Adopters.

Sep 29 2011 Published by under Uncategorized

I’ve just come home from a panel at my university on the topic of digital narratives. I thought I would share a bit of it.

The first speaker, a New Media professor, listed five areas of change: new forms of authorship, new relations between author and readers, new methods of publication, new forms of interaction, and new forms of communication and thinking.

She shared different kinds of digital narratives with the audience. Most of the links (as well as the rest of the talk) are collected here. One narrative, Ruben and Lullaby, is an app that is a sort of game where shaking or stroking the screen makes the trajectory of the relationship change. Here is a short video of someone playing it. Another one that looks really interesting is Trauma, a game in which a young woman wakes up in hospital having survived a car crash that killed both her parents. The player acts as a psychologist, and explores four dreams built from photographs mixed with strange, unreal seeming images.

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Review: Tempted by His Target, by Jill Sorenson

Sep 23 2011 Published by under Reviews

Tempted by His Target* is a new Harlequin Romantic Suspense by Jill Sorenson, her seventh if I counted correctly. I do not usually read romantic suspense, but after a few heavy emotional reads, with a lot of internal conflict, I wanted something actiony, with a dreamy, sunny locale, and this fit the bill.

Isabel Sanborn was a rich and out of control party girl who fled L.A. after she woke up one morning next to the dead body of a Mexican drug lord’s son. Assuming she would be blamed for his death, she fled to Oaxaca, and she’s been on the run for two years when undercover U.S. Marshal Brandon Knox tracks her down. He poses as a clueless tourist, but soon he has to save her from Carranza’s thugs in a back alley, and they flee for their lives.

Their journey takes them by car, motorcycle, and on foot through Mexico, to Guatemala, and then back to the U.S. Instantly attracted to one another, they are both keeping secrets: Isabel what really happened that night before she fled the U.S., and Brandon his real occupation and reason for being with her. Theirs is is the kind of love that would have happened fast and easy had they met at a cocktail party in the states. It’s the circumstances that keep them from developing their attraction.

Spending nights in hotel rooms and days traveling together ratchets up the sexual tension. It occurred to me as I was reading Tempted by His Target that one of the problems with romantic suspense — the need to build a sexual relationship while in mortal crisis — can actually be a strength. Brandon and Isabel are constantly interrupted, either by their own self-control (Brandon is ethically bound not to have a fling with his target, and for Isabel, now is not exactly the best time to get involved) or by the events related to their flight, so the sexual tension just builds and builds.

It must be said, Sorenson knows how to bring the steamy. The love scenes were extremely intense. I was happy with how the author handled one encounter in which certain chances are taken. Failure to use protection is extremely common, because human beings tend not to think about what seem like distant risks when immediate gratification is at hand. But how it happens in this book, and the way the characters handle it, is very believable and very well done.

The opening scene of Tempted by his Target takes place on a beach (both Isabel and Brandon are surfers) and I wasn’t thrilled, because I don’t find descriptions of water very exciting. But when they head into town and on their journey — which includes a sweet interlude on a vacant farm and a violent episode among some abandoned ruins — the setting really works with the story to heighten both the romance and the suspense. My favorite suspense scene involves Isabel’s attempt to flee by blending in the crowds during Day of the Dead celebrations. Isabel is half Venezuelan and fluent in Spanish. Although not Mexican (and it’s clear that the locals would know this) the difference between Isabel’s easy way of relating to her surroundings and Brandon’s more complex one is significant to their characters.

Some other reviewers have complained that Brandon holds on to his secret for much longer than he should have, and doesn’t give good grovel, and I can see that, although it did not bother me. I really liked his character: a good man with a weakness for Isabel which is at times self-serving. The one sour note for me was the discovery that he had in his backpack a magazine with a sexy picture of Isabel (she did some modeling prior to becoming a fugitive) dressed a la Britney Spears in the “Baby One More Time” video. It wasn’t so much that she was dressed as a school girl (Although that doesn’t help. Brandon himself notes it’s kind of sleazy for him to be turned on by it.), but that it gave me the impression as a reader that he took an inappropriately lascivious interest in her prior to the assignment, which is more problematic than sort of accidentally falling in love at first sight. Still, I really liked Brandon, not least for his sensitive side. He’s very in touch with his emotions, not just during the love scenes, but even after fights: he seems to really be affected when he has to take on an attacker.

Isabel is a very likable character, too, despite the fact that she makes some questionable decisions. Heading into Mexico to escape a Mexican drug lord is probably the most bizarre, but the author finesses that in terms of her general instability and substance dependency, admixed with post traumatic panic. But there are a few choices in the book that had me scratching my head a bit (like why she wasn’t more suspicious of Brandon’s desire to stick with her, for one. Why would a happy go lucky American tourist want to hang with a girl who is followed by bullets everywhere she goes?). The Isabel in Tempted by His Target is so different from the wild child she was in L.A. that I almost wished for a prologue just to force me to believe she could really have been that girl once. But overall, as a character, she’s smart and funny and strong and vulnerable, and her complicated back story has as much power as possible given that it most of it occurs off the page.

I’m not normally a romantic suspense reader, but I really liked this book. I absolutely believed in the love between Isabel and Brandon, and for a romance reader, that’s what it’s all about.

*I received Tempted by His Target free from the publisher in exchange for writing a review. I came to know of its availability on Net Galley because I follow the author on Twitter, and she has written a guest post here at Read React Review. In the interest of complete disclosure, I should add that I would also kill for her hair.

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The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Leo Tolstoy

Sep 21 2011 Published by under Academia

We’re reading Tolstoy’s 1886 novella, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, in class this week. We’ve been reading several arguments in favor of ethical criticism, from Martha Nussbaum, Wayne Booth, John Gardner, etc., and we’ve read excerpts from Tolstoy’s own theory of art which requires ethical criticism. The idea is that we’ll read Ilyich the way ethical critics want us to read fiction, and we’ll also look for Tolstoy’s own aesthetic in the text.

I never tire of teaching this novella, in part because students seem to embrace it. The plot — what there is of it — is quite simple: the book opens with the funeral of Ivan Ilyich, a high court judge in Tsarist St. Petersburg, Russia. The immediate concerns of his colleagues and family are self-serving and superficial: promotions, pensions, and what the most minimal duties of propriety require. In Chapter 2, we are told that “Ivan Ilyich’s life had been the most simple and most ordinary and therefore the most terrible.” He had lived “pleasantly and properly”, goofing off a bit as a youth, attending law school, getting married, having kids, rising up the ranks, socializing appropriately, and basically doing what the respectable people of his class are expected to do. After a nice promotion, he relocates and purchases a new home, only to fall off a stepladder while trying to show the upholsterer how he wants curtains hung. He bruises his side, and never really recovers. The rest of the novella follows Ilyich’s deterioration and death from his own point of view.

There are many avenues into teaching and working with this novella. Bioethicists often use it to educate clinicians about the patient’s experience of serious illness. Ilyich’s doctors seem to give up on him (once cure is impossible, what is their role?), and his family behaves as if he has brought his illness upon himself. In the face of what is clearly his imminent death, his household continues to behave as if nothing much has changed.

What tormented Ivan Ilyich the most was the deception, the lie, which for some reason they all accepted, that he was not dying but was simply ill, and that he need only keep quiet and undergo a treatment and then something very good would result.

The awful, terrible act of his dying was, he could see, reduced by those about him to the level of a casual, unpleasant, and almost indecorous incident (as if someone entered a drawing-room diffusing an unpleasant odour)… He saw that no one felt for him, because no one even wished to grasp his position.

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Review: The Portrait, by Megan Chance

Sep 19 2011 Published by under Reviews

The Portrait* (Dell, 1995) is a historical romance set in New York City, in Fall of 1855. It begins with mousy, quiet Imogene Carter being brought by her godfather, Thomas Gosney, to the studio/school of famous painter Jonas Whitaker. Gosney happens to be Whitaker’s most influential patron, so the artist cannot refuse the pressure to take on Imogene, a wealthy young woman from Nashville who has had little formal training, most of it in drawing at her finishing school. Imogene’s motives are not clear at first. She seems deeply interested in and attracted to art. Yet her feelings about her own ability and her own identity as an aspiring artist are so bound up with survivor’s guilt over the death of her vivacious and artistically gifted older sister, and her attempt to win her withholding father’s approval, that it’s hard to figure out who Imogene is at first. It seems even she is not sure.

One thing is clear: Imogene is determined to stay in Jonas’s class, and he is equally determined to get rid of her. Jonas sizes her up in an instant, thinking, “He’d seen her kind before, the cossetted, easily dismissed ladies of society — women who played at watercolors and drew pretty little houses in the country.” Deciding he would enjoy “destroying her with a word,” he tries various forms of intimidation, some of it sexual, none of which works.

At first Imogene refuses to give in because she doesn’t want to disappoint her father yet again. But quickly her attraction to Jonas gives her a more compelling reason to stay. Whitaker is terrifying, “stalking the room like a restless cat” and “firing out criticisms with the lethal force of a canon.” Descriptions of Jonas resonate as a kind of “old school” or contemporary Harlequin Presents hero, a guy dripping with arrogance, sarcasm, derision, bitterness, cynicism, insults, and, at times, outright anger. But Imogene bears it all stoically. She endures, vowing, “He would not break her. He would not.”

During a particularly tense lesson, Imogene dislodges the canvas, and Jonas lunges for it gracelessly. In that moment, Imogen realizes he has a false hand, and “that his false hand was the most real thing about him, and that it somehow kept him human. She thought suddenly, We’re not that different. He was no more perfect than she was.” She has the sudden realization that “He could not make her leave, and she would not go. The thought made her smile.” Imogene is never going to be a great artist, but as their relationship mellows slightly and they become attracted to one another, she is getting something from Jonas that she values more: intense interest, making her feel “vibrant and alive and passionate” for the first time in her life.

It turns out there is a madness behind Jonas’ method, literally: he suffers from what today we would call bipolar disorder. Through the course of the novel, which takes us from mania to depression and back to a kind of moderate middle ground, Jonas has pretty much all of the symptoms of the disorder as listed on this NIH webpage. Although I think it was more common in the genre in the mid-1990s for heroes sleep with other women well after meeting the heroine, in The Portrait, Jonas’s desperate need for sex comes across not just as rakish behavior but another manifestation of the impulsivity common among those with bipolar disorder (in the manic phase). Same for his lack of emotional control and grandiose thoughts. With regard to his drug (opium) and alcohol use, as Chance writes in her author’s note, the “treatments” for “madness” in the nineteenth century were nonexistent: inpatient clinics, which Jonas has experienced and lives in terror of, or self-medication with drugs or alcohol.

The Portrait is a very, very intense book. There is no humor or levity. It is a close psychological study of a hero with bipolar disorder who fears both connection and abandonment, and of a heroine who comes into her own by being needed, being found necessary by a brilliant, fascinating, attractive man. Imogene has to reframe her attitude towards her family, seeing her sister and father for who they are (were), and she has to carve out an identity very different from what either of them would have found satisfying. Imogene’s personal triumph comes not from her own artistry, but in serving as a model and muse for Jonas (and, at times, the other students).

It was not easy for me to separate my own personal tastes and biases from my assessment of Imogene and Jonas’ relationship. Jonas is not just a little moody. He suffers badly, to the point of having delusions and suicidal thoughts (his missing hand is the result of one of those depressive episodes). In one of his manic phases, he drags Imogene to a fancy restaurant in the city and behaves in a way that I could easily add to Tumperkin’s list of Excruciating moments in romance. Jonas is very sick, and, in that scene, everyone knows it: he is the object of fear, derision, and pity. It’s not a good look for a romance hero, but I applaud Chance’s commitment to portraying a severe, untreated form of the disease in an authentic manner, something that requires her to give the hero traits and experiences which the average romance reader (or maybe just me) might find unattractive.

I felt pessimistic about Imogene’s and Jonas’s chances for a happy life as I read The Portrait. Yet, in the cool hour, as I write this review, I ask myself: why do I feel that the chances are better when it’s a marriage between a duke and an orphan, or an earl and a former courtesan, or an alcoholic hero? They really have no better (or worse) chance of success, and to single out bipolar disorder makes no sense. On the other hand, Imogene has chosen a difficult path. She’ll have to endure the rages, the inappropriate behavior, the hiding in a dark room for days or weeks, and the rest of it. Imogene has a wonderful, calming effect on Jonas, though, “a serenity that called to him through his torment, a promise of redemption” and she doesn’t see this role as a chore at all. Quite the opposite: “He didn’t frighten her. He never had. He filled her with a sense of promise, of potential, and the only frightening thing about that was the thought that she might not fulfill it.”

Still, I found it hard to be thrilled for Imogene, not because Jonas is mentally ill, but because she seems to have nothing for herself but the male gaze (and some super sex, it must be noted). Jonas’ constant references to her as his work of art were unsettling, and I had to struggle to put them behind me as his attitude changed and he saw more to her. I’m so used to historicals now where the heroine has something else going on, either a career or a significant volunteer sideline saving London’s poor or somesuch, that I forgot what it was like to read a heroine who just wants to be loved and to love in return. And Jonas needs someone who is willing to put everything aside to care for him. “Let me keep you safe,” Imogene tells him, and the reader knows this is at once her life’s work, her happiness, and her coming into her own.

I haven’t even mentioned the wonderful writing, the way Chance is able to integrate Jonas’ creativity into their relationship and into his illness and into his character. He doesn’t just see Imogene as beautiful, he sees her as Beauty, as “his creation”. But when he drags her into Delmonico’s, hair loose and paint in her dress, risking both their reputations, the reader is encouraged to consider the line between “love is blind” and outright psychosis (and in general, the line — or connection — between madness and creativity. Imogene refers to his madness as “the price for genius.”).

It was a treat to read a historical romance set in the New York art world. A key theme is Jonas’s rejection of the respectable world as it has rejected him, especially the “upper classes.” His desire to introduce Imogene to the demimonde, the world outside of respectability, takes them all over the city, to salons and rooftops. The chapters while Jonas is in his “manic”, high energy, magnetic, charming, “touched with fire” mode are breathtaking reads, as he tries to convey to Imogene his expansive, optimistic worldview:

“Broaden your mind,” he said. “See the whole of it, the complexity. Knowing the world is understanding what you see. Apply that to art and you have all of life before you, all of God.”

The Portrait is an unusual, well-written, fascinating romance. I didn’t get lost in it the way I have with some others, but the food for thought it provided more than made up for it.

*On the author website, The Portrait and Chance’s other romance novels are not listed under “Books”, but rather, under “Other Works.” I read this book on my Kindle (ebook price at Amazon is $5.99. Be aware there is an irritating tendency to replace “I”s with “1″s in the e-text.)

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A Different Kind of Narrative: Abortion and the Violinist

Sep 12 2011 Published by under Academia

It’s not too often that the central argument of a contemporary philosopher gets its own Wikipedia page, but that’s how famous is the pro-choice argument of MIT philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson, in her 1971 essay A Defense of Abortion.

I teach a unit on abortion in my contemporary moral problems course, for which I have steady (actually, kind of overwhelming) enrollments, thanks in large part to the requirement that every student at my university take a course in ethics.

Thomson, writing a couple of years before the passage of Roe v. Wade, decides to challenge the assumption that IF the fetus is a person from conception, then it follows automatically that abortions are (in most, if not all, cases) morally wrong. Instead of just making her case directly, she uses a thought experiment, and argues by analogy:

It sounds plausible. But now let me ask you to imagine this. You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist’s circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. The director of the hospital now tells you, “Look, we’re sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you–we would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the violinist is now plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it’s only for nine months. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.”

Is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation? No doubt it would be very nice of you if you did, a great kindness. But do you have to accede to it? What if it were not nine months, but nine years? Or longer still? What if the director of the hospital says. “Tough luck. I agree. but now you’ve got to stay in bed, with the violinist plugged into you, for the rest of your life. Because remember this. All persons have a right to life, and violinists are persons. Granted you have a right to decide what happens in and to your body, but a person’s right to life outweighs your right to decide what happens in and to your body. So you cannot ever be unplugged from him.” I imagine you would regard this as outrageous, which suggests that something really is wrong with that plausible-sounding argument I mentioned a moment ago.

It’s interesting that students often embrace the message (or invitation to think) presented by Omelas, and understand quite well that Le Guin is talking, not about some other peoples, but about us, the readers. Yet, many students, perhaps the majority (in my experience), whether pro- or anti-choice, have serious reservations about Thomson’s argument.

In contrast to the skilled worldbuilding and writing of Le Guin, Thomson’s “story” is presented briefly and schematically. It’s unrealistic in more ways that one could count. The title of the article (“A Defense of Abortion”) and introductory material place the reader immediately in mind of what to expect, and so s/he is often resistant to suddenly thinking about violinists. And arguments by analogy are, by their very nature, irritating. This is because (a) they feel like they are taking you off track (why are we talking about violinists?), and (b) when well done, they often reveal an inconsistency in our own thinking.

There are questions we don’t ask in this class, about why it’s a violinist, why it’s the society of music lovers, why it’s a “he”, why it’s a medical setting, how the metaphor-within-a-metaphor of “unplugging” functions, etc. I don’t encourage those questions in this class, because I am doing moral philosophy, and I read the analogy in a very specific way. But I might well ask them in Ethics and Fiction. So the context is affecting me, as well.

Thomson’s article has inspired loads of commentary, maybe more than any other philosophical article published in the second half of the twentieth century. What she proves — even what she is trying to prove — is still a subject of major debate. But Thomson definitely pushes on the tension between a set of claims that folks who are opposed to abortion often accept: (1) that abortion is impermissible b/c the fetus has a right to life which the pregnant woman must protect, and (2) we don’t have significant obligations to strangers. In general, the article forces us to ask how much work the “right to life” is really doing in pro-life arguments. It also forces us to consider how impoverished our moral vocabulary would be if it were restricted to rights talk. And in doing so, it paves the way for our next readings, from the perspective of virtue theory and feminist ethics.

It’s worth asking about philosophers’ frequent use of thought experiments, most of which are violent or bloody. Should these be read, not as logical arguments, but as constructed narrative? And what would that tell us?

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Ursula Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas

Sep 09 2011 Published by under Ethics

I assigned Ursula Le Guin’s short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” in my undergraduate Ethics and Fiction course this week. It was first published in 1973 in a science fiction anthology, but it is best known from Le Guin’s The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1975), as well as the dozens of other books and textbooks in which it has been anthologized.

We’re in the section of the course where we’re thinking of one specific way fiction can help us in our task as moral philosophers: by illustrating philosophical ideas in a way that takes hold. I started teaching this story a decade ago, in a regular ethics course, and that’s exactly how I used it. To explain, I’ll say something about the story:

It’s short, even for a short story. The unnamed and undescribed narrator introduces Omelas (a word Le Guin says came to her as she saw a road sign for Salem, Oregon) in utopian terms:

With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city Omelas, bright-towered by the sea.

Le Guin describes Omelas (and specifically its Festival of Summer) in a way that invokes a kind of innocent past. She describes a festival, a procession, music. But this is not exactly the Macy’s Day Parade. Music is not recorded, but gong, tambourine, flute. Children are not hunched over plastic or electronic toys, but “naked in the bright air, with mud-stained feet and ankles.” Even the horses “wore no gear at all but a halter without bit.” Le Guin knows that Omelas sounds “like a city in a fairy tale”, but warns us not to assume the people, just because they don’t have lots of laws, a police force, or cars, are simple:

Yet I repeat that these were not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. There were not less complex than us.

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There is Only One Story

Sep 07 2011 Published by under Ethics

 

I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened and inspired us, so that we live in a Pearl White serial of continuing thought and wonder. Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence. Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last, and this despite any changes we may impose on field and river and mountain, on economy and manners. There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill? (East of Eden, John Steinbeck)

Nina Rosenstand uses this quote, or part of it, to make her case for ethical criticism in her essay, “Stories and Morals”, which my students and I are working through this week. Rosenstand is the author of a popular textbook, The Moral of the Story, which uses narrative (from fiction, film, Tv, etc.) to teach ethics.

Rosenstand claims that being story tellers and story listeners defines the human condition. She suggests that stories bring order to our unpredictable lives, help us make sense of the world and our place in it, serve as a cultural glue (and cultural challenge), and help us connect with others.

According to Rosenstand, “it’s hard to come up with a good story that doesn’t somehow emphasize choice between good and evil, altruism and self-sacrifice, the hard path versus the easy.” Each story teaches us that we are not merely pawns, but choosers, and that we bear responsibility for those choices. They don’t need to offer a specific “moral”: it is enough that they serve as “moral laboratories”, throwing out ideas to see how they play.

She gives a lot of examples, mostly drawn from science fiction (Gattaca, Brave New World, etc.) to support the claim that stories can “put meat on the bones” of dry theoretical arguments, helping us to see the human beings behind the statistical probabilities. Repeating what has become lore in bioethics, she says that Huxley’s book actually led to the moratorium on human reproductive cloning. I have my serious doubts about that (I actually think, if anything, it is the “paratext” of Huxley, not the Huxley itself), but I get the point.

The relationship of stories to moral philosophy emphasized in the text is of handmaiden to lady. I think it’s true that many philosophers use narratives in this way, i.e. to teach philosophy, or to illustrate (not make) a philosophical point. But I also think those uses don’t begin to capture the complexity of the relationship, so I’m glad we are reading some other takes later in the term.

The next article, “The Absence of Stories: Filling the Void in Ethics”, by Marianne Jennings, a finance professor who has taught and written in business ethics, follows along the same lines, this time with a focus on how the teaching of stories can make business students better people, but not merely by learning ethical theory. Rather, students have to apply the theory to stories. (As a method of making people ethically better, the teaching of ethics is remarkably ineffective, but I digress.)

Jennings says that her business students rarely recall the definition of psychological egoism, or deontology, but they can usually recall at least one story she used in her class. As someone who teaches ethics, I have no doubt of that.

 

One example of the kind of “story” Jennings is talking about is actually a true story, “The Parable of the Sadhu”, by Bowen H. MCoy, published in 1997 in the Harvard Business Review (just Google it to find a copy). In this story, McCoy, an investment banker, is attempting a Nepal summit he has failed to reach once before. On his way up, his party comes across a religious pilgrim who is inappropriately dressed and suffering from altitude sickness. The only way to be sure the “sadhu” (as he is called in the text) survives is to escort him back to the base camp, but no one in McCoy’s party wants to do that, because it would mean giving up the summit (due to impending storms, etc.). So they do what they can short of abandoning their goal: they (and by “they”, I mean the Sherpas, of course) walk him back below the snow line, the give him some clothing, try to show him where the base camp is, and basically hope for the best. McCoy never knows what became of the pilgrim. McCoy asks, “Our goal was accomplished, but at what cost?” He then applies the lessons of the experience to corporate ethics (mainly insights about group dynamics).

I actually find the parable somewhat distasteful, given the context of who is telling it and who it is about, and my distaste is something I will bring up with my students tomorrow. I think “the sadhu” deserved his own paper, without becoming fodder for a lesson in American management. I would like to know more about sadhus. For example, McCoy says the pilgrim had no shoes on and few clothes. Was that part of his religious tradition? Without investigating this question, the American reader is led to think the guy is an idiot.  I would also want to investigate McCoy’s claim that it was no use taking the injured man down to the village because “they would not help him” either. Really? How does McCoy know? And what kinds of questions does McCoy’s self-referential perspective foreclose about other ethical issues — and here there are so many — surrounding privileged tourists’ uses of the people and natural resources of Nepal in order to have their “once in a lifetime” experiences?

In sum, while I like what Jennings has to say in broad terms, I think we need to be very careful about thinking stories are the equivalent of a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down. At least in the context of a college course on ethics, we need to look very closely at what this “medicine” is, who made it, and for what purpose, before swallowing it whole.

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Review: The Devil in Winter, by Lisa Kleypas

Sep 05 2011 Published by under Reviews

After reading a tough memoir, I needed a comfort re-read, and I chose The Devil in Winter, the third of four Wallflowers novels by Lisa Kleypas. The devil of the title is Sebastian, Lord St. Vincent, known to readers of the series as the handsome (blond haired blue-eyed) rake who kidnapped the heroine of the previous book in a disastrous bid to acquire a moneyed wife. Sebastian is selfish, unscrupulous, cynical, vain, and predatory. Evangeline Jenner, a meek redhead who likes to try to blend in so no one notices her stuttering, is about to inherit a fortune from her father, the dying owner of a popular London gambling hell. Her shyness has made her a failure on the “marriage mart.” Rather than being forced by her foster family into marriage with her hapless cousin (and, she suspects, conveniently offed when she comes into her inheritance), Evie decides to run away to Sebastian’s home, and propose to him. She recognizes that St. Vincent would be a faithless, inattentive husband, but since Evie is not in love with him, she figures it will be alright: at least he can protect her from her abusive relations.

Sebastian, recognizing a gift horse when it is stammering in his living room in the middle of the night, accepts Evie’s proposal, including her condition that they sleep together only on the wedding night:

“Lovely,” he murmured. “I rarely like to bed a woman more than once. A crashing bore, after the novelty is gone. Besides, I would never be so bourgeois as to lust after my own wife. It implies that one hasn’t the means to keep a mistress. Of course, there is the issue of providing me with an heir … but as long as you’re discreet, I don’t expect I’ll give a damn whose child it is.”

The first chapters of TDIW are perhaps my favorite. There’s a lot of exposition, but right away it’s clear that these are two well-matched, strong willed characters, and that their story will be an exciting one.

Almost immediately, Sebastian and Evie establish a repartee that is a delight to read. The tone of their conversation could easily be transposed to contemporary romance:

“I w-want to be away from London,” she replied, “before my relations find me.”

“Is there any reason for them to suspect you’ve come to me?”

“Oh n-no,” she said. “No one would ever believe I could be so demented.”

Had she not already been somewhat light-headed, his brilliant grin would have made her so. “It’s a good thing my vanity is so well-developed. Otherwise you’d have demolished it by now.”

“I’m certain you already have many women to f-fortify your vanity. You don’t need one more.”

“I always need one more, darling. That’s my problem.”

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