Khassan Baiev is a man with all the bravery his Chechen ancestors could have wanted. Yet amazingly, growing up among the stories of Russian and later Soviet attempts to subjugate the Chechens, including his own parents' deportation to Kazakhstan after World War II, and encountering prejudice during sports competitions and medical training in different parts of the Soviet Union, did not seem to have left him bitter. He returned to Chechnya from a Moscow practice when the likelihood of a Chechen-Russian war became apparent, and rather than taking his own family and fleeing as so many did (and they can hardly be blamed for it!) he stayed in Chechnya, first in the capital city of Grozny and then in his hometown of Alkhan Kala, to provide medical care -- and not just for the Chechen wounded, either; he treated Russians, soldiers and civilians, despite risk to himself from Chechens who considered this traitorous. As he says at one point, "Speaking to the Russian doctor felt perfectly normal, yet there was something strange about it because we were supposed to be on opposing sides. However, we were really both on the side of the wounded." Though with years of fighting destroying his homeland, it is understandable that "there were times . . . when I was tempted to exchange my scalpel for a gun," Baiev stuck to his resolve to try and protect life, even though "sometimes I felt as though I was the little Dutch boy with his hand in the dyke, only I was holding back blood."

Even when peace had been declared, medical work did not stop -- disease was rampant, both from germs and from stress. Baiev speaks of his own depression amongst the ruins, and it is certainly an example of what many, many others are going through in Chechnya and other war-torn regions once there is time to think of more than daily survival. Baiev's Islamic faith, and the opportunity to visit Mecca as Muslims are supposed to do at least once in their lives, provided a lift to his mental state. (And his mentions of the differences between Chechen and Saudi Muslim practices may help Westerners remember that Islam is no more an undivided movement than Christianity.)

After fighting started again, Baiev had several narrow escapes from both Chechen and Russian fighters who felt he was serving the other side and deserved execution. Eventually he was forced to leave Chechnya and serve his country differently by telling the story of events there. (His nephew Adam had worked for some time videotaping events in Chechnya and getting the tapes out to the rest of the world, and was killed because of it.) Baiev says speaking out to foreigners allowed him to feel "I was doing something useful to Chechnya." Eventually his family was able to join him in the United States, and he chronicles the difficulty of starting over in a new place, going from being a skilled surgeon to someone who doesn't speak the language or have the certifications to be allowed to practice medicine, adapting to a new culture, and recovering from the trauma of war. His work with Ruth and Nicholas Daniloff on this book, The Oath: A Surgeon Under Fire, serves as an overview of Chechen culture and its survival despite Russian control, a window into a war many Americans couldn't find on a map, and what a single determined human can achieve in the midst of the worst carnage.

Wow. I kept saying that thoughout Melvin Konner's Unsettled: An Anthropology of the Jews. There was just so much in here I'd never heard about!

My mom brought me up Catholic (in Columbia, South Carolina, where an acquaintance once asked what religion I was and upon hearing "Catholic" responded "Well, I'm a Christian." So I have some clue about being a religious minority.) My father's mother took me to Methodist Sunday school and Baptist Vacation Bible School when I visited. So I'm fairly well-grounded in the Old Testament, but as I recorded in my 9th grade diary, ("Mr. Brown had Noah tell us about a little of Jewish history. Mostly stuff I already knew but thought of as Christian history. Weird.") I wasn't likely to think about it from a different point of view. Becoming an agnostic made me a little more interested in other people's views, and I've always been interested in cultural history and anthropology. (My beloved jokes that I'll read anything with "social history" in the title.) So I picked this off the New Books shelf at the library, thinking of it no differently than if it were a book on England or Russia or China.

But I haven't really read much on a group that has had a minority status which persisted throughout millennia and settlement around the world. I'm not sure any other group has such a status. I don't usually read books about religion, but the author tells us in the introduction how he lost his Jewish faith and identity as a teen but re-entered American Jewish culture when his children were born, a confession that assured I would not think he was trying to spread the word of God as so many Christian works are prone to do. He covered the history of the Jewish people as told in the Torah/Old Testament, and where it was or was not corroborated (and indeed was sometimes contradicted) by other sources, and then the saga of the Roman-empire era and reasons for Jewish dispersion from their homeland. This was interesting and covered details I would probably not find in general histories, but the discussion of the Diaspora and the cultures made of Jewish people living among others was the truly new part for me.

A person on Amazon has a review of this book that complains,"The most notable omission is the lack of discussion of Jewish experience outside the Middle East except for Spain, North Africa, Ethiopia, China, and Cochin." Frankly, since I knew little about the Spanish and North African Jewish communities and nothing about the others, those discussions were fascinating for me. The United States has a Jewish culture largely drawn from the Ashkenazic Jews of Germany and Eastern Europe; finding out about the other Jewish people and cultures of this world was the new part to me, and no doubt to most American readers who knew of Jewish history largely from reading general European history. Also, there is an emphasis on Jews in the New World before the larger emigrations from Europe in the late 1800s which I have never seen in a general history book; it makes me proud of my country's founders to know that George Washington, in response to a letter from the congregation of a synagogue in Newport praising his equal treatment of Jews, wrote back:

"All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the government of the United States, which gives bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection shall demean themselves as good citizens."

One wishes his views were followed by his countrymen, then and even now.

And then, of course, modern history gives us the most shameful episode in European history, the Shoah, the Holocaust. (Not that such genocides haven't been tried in other times and places, but rarely have circumstances and technology combined to give them such an immense body count.) My maternal grandmother says her maternal grandmother (my great-great-grandmother) was Jewish. If she and her Catholic husband hadn't come to America from Germany in 1883 with their children, my great-grandmother would have been in her fifties at the time when Hitler came to power, and such "half-Jews" were sent to the concentration camps as readily as those whose parents were both Jewish. Quite likely, if she had wanted to flee, by that time she would have been trapped by restrictions on Jewish immigrations that the U.S. and many other countries had enacted by the 1930s. In addition to the usual chilling stories of what happened in ghettos and concentration camps, Konner discusses the Jewish resistance, who sometimes even had to deal with anti-Semitism from non-Jewish resistance movements, and the saboteurs within the camps who managed to stage revolts that made at least two of the death camps unusable. I was also interested (and disgusted) to find that Jewish "displaced persons" after the war were under Allied policy to be sent back to their homes before the war, even if their entire towns had been destroyed by anti-Semitic locals, and that it was necessary for many who wanted to go to Israel to get there illegally.

And then there's the history Zionism and the birth of Israel, which I had read about in other sources but still had never heard some of these details (such as the British suggestion that Jews be given Uganda in Africa as a homeland). Konner does not ignore the situation of the Palestinians who were there during the decades when Jewish immigration increased and when the state of Israel was made official, though he does point out the contradictions in the policies of many of the surrounding Arab states in refusing to accept Palestinian refugees (essentially condemning them to living in refugee camps. These camps' existence perhaps helped to maintain anti-Israeli feeling in the Arab countries, but it does seem that it made the rejecting countries no better than the one the refugees left.) The book also covers the interesting relationship of Israel and American Jews, who in some ways rely on Israel for part of their Jewish identity, and the situation of semi-assimilation and a decreasing Jewish population in the U.S. because of intermarriage and people who drift away from the culture they were brought up in. His wonders about the future for Jewish people in various places are thought-provoking, whether or not they affect you personally or just as a part of humanity.

I don't read nearly as much fiction as I used to, now that I have access to libraries with non-fiction that isn't so astoundingly dated as the libraries around me in high school. But when I went on my holiday trips recently, I went through the paperback fiction shelves to find some books to bring on my travels that didn't weigh so much as hardbacks. And I found both good and bad. The stuff I didn't expect to like, I didn't pick up, of course -- the romance novels, the science-fiction movie/TV tie-ins, the techno-thrillers that my boyfriend once described as "like reading VCR manuals with dialogue." But it's not always that easy to judge. There were some really lousy mystery novels with covers that looked good enough to check out, so I didn't find out how bad they were until I was sitting in at an airport gate debating if killing time with a story this dumb was really worth it. However, I found two books I enjoyed enough that I was pleased to find both were the starts of series, and once I got home I promptly went and checked out all the books the library had from both of them. One series was traditional mystery, and the other a harder genre to label.

There are a lot of novels that might be summarized as "wacky Florida crime stories." Usually I have trouble getting into those, partially because the Miami world where most of them take place isn't very much like Tampa, where I like. An acquaintance on Everything2.com described Tampa and Jacksonville as "very much like normal U.S. cities" -- not something you can really say about the Miami or Orlando areas, or those Panhandle areas that are Florida's North but the American South. So one of the things that grabbed me about Tim Dorsey's Florida Roadkill was the fact that a lot of it took place in Tampa. (This was no surprise once I read the "About the Author" blurb, as he lived here and used to work for the Tampa Tribune.) But even for those who don't live here, this terribly funny story of several competing groups chasing around Florida after a suitcase with 5 million dollars cash in it, as well as each other, draws you in. Some of the characters are relatively normal and others are really messed-up, but some of the weirder people are easier to sympathize with than the ones you might expect to find living in any old neighborhood. On reading Hammerhead Ranch Motel, Orange Crush, Triggerfish Twist and The Stingray Shuffle, I realized that the first book hadn't really given me any clue as to which of the many characters from the first book would show up in the rest of the series; I was actually surprised as to who became the "main character" (though never the only focus of the action). Technically, Florida Roadkill, Hammerhead Ranch Motel, and The Stingray Shuffle are the ones that actually continue the same plotline about the suitcase of money; the other two are digressions featuring the same main character at a different time of life. (I haven't read the latest of Dorsey's, Cadillac Beach, because as I write it hasn't actually been released.) But all of them were crammed full of sentences and paragraphs that I just had to read aloud to whoever was within earshot because they were so amazingly hilarious to me, and it never got old the way some humor writing can get after five whole books by the same author in the same setting.

The other series I discovered starts with The Strange Files of Fremont Jones, a mystery set in 1900s San Francisco and featuring a young lady from Boston striking out on her own as a typist, across the country from the stepmother who wants to marry her off. I had also picked up one several books later in the series (it was all that was on the shelf) at the same time, Beacon Street Mourning. The Strange Files had its weak points, but not enough of them to keep me from reading the other book, and it was that one, where Caroline Fremont Jones has become an experienced private detective, which really made me go and check out the rest. It wasn't just the references in Beacon Street Mourning to events that had taken place in the intervening books, but author Dianne Day had developed the character far better in the later book. (And certainly the events mentioned in passing sounded like things that would mature a person quickly!) I haven't yet actually read the remaining books yet (Fire and Fog, The Bohemian Murders, Emperor Norton's Ghost, Death Train to Boston) but the stories that bracketed them were enough to recommend the series to me, and I think I can recommend them to others. I'm quite disappointed to find in the Amazon reviews of Beacon Street Mourning that "Doubleday no longer intends to publish series mysteries, and because of this, Fremont Jones has met an untimely end. And because of contractual matters, Day can't take the series to another publisher. So, enjoy this one, folks -- it's the last in the series. It's a real shame!" However, Day is still writing other works and I may have to pick those up.

I just got back Monday from my holiday travels, and my cupboards and refrigerator were pretty well bare. So I had a long list of things to get at the grocery store. However, the book I was reading before I went food shopping had quite an influence on my purchases -- it was Greg Critser's Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World.

My weight has been creeping upward slowly -- about 20 pounds in the past 6 years -- and though it annoyed me to no end when I could no longer button the waistbands on my rarely-worn dress clothes, I wasn't really thinking much about what I eat. Fat Land made me think of more than how I look -- about the health consequences if my weight keeps slowly growing. I knew the amount of exercise I got dropped radically once I no longer walked two and from the campus of the University where I used to teach. But I only ever thought about the number of restaurant meals I eat in financial terms; this book made me think about the contents of those meals. It also, as I said, made me read the labels in the grocery store far more carefully, looking for high-fructose corn syrup -- a sweetener and preservative which has far worse effects on the body than sucrose, the sugar you can buy in bags or packets. Soda has always been a bad habit of mine -- my dentist has even remarked on the effect it had on my teeth (a result of the acids in it, not the sweeteners). But these HFCS-sweetened drinks may be even more likely to expand my fat cells than the equivalent calories of sucrose-sweetened home-baked goods, if I'm interpreting Critser's statements correctly. One more reason to keep buying 100% fruit juice drinks, and not the bottles with the pictures of fruits on the front and "27% juice" on the back of the label.

Portion sizes, food ingredients, and lack of exercise -- these are the major issues Critser cites as causes for the increased numbers of obese Americans. He also points out how the availability of both food and exercise is influenced by economic class; how the neglect of weight control information in schools for fear of inducing anorexia and bulemia in young people is setting them up for far more common diseases such as diabetes; and even the idea that Europeans consider smaller amounts of food to be a standard portion size. The book is truly thought-provoking -- and in me it is provoked consideration of where I could manage to fit that stationary bicycle into my apartment.

By only 29 pages into the 176-page (159-page if you don't count the bibliography) The War on the Bill of Rights and the Gathering Resistance, I was convinced that every American old enough to read should read this book. It shows how unpatriotic the so-called Patriot Act really is, making a good case that it goes against everything the founders of the United States intended in the U.S. Constitution and particularly the Bill of Rights, and gives the opinions of both current Republican and Democratic politicians on the erosion of fundamental American liberties caused by this supposed anti-terrorism measure (passed a month after September 11, 2001, when it was a rare Congressperson who dared vote against anything labeled "anti-terrorism," if they'd even had a chance to read the proposed legislation through). Nat Hentoff's tone is not anti-Republican or even anti-Bush so much as anti-John Ashcroft, the Attorney General who seems to want to return the American government's investigation tactics to those practiced by J. Edgar Hoover. Ashcroft's 2002 guidelines for the Department of Justice include such scary thought policing as "The nature of the conduct engaged in by a [terrorist] enterprise will justify the inference at the standard [for opening a criminal intelligence investigation] is satisfied, even if there are no known statements by participants that advocate or indicate planning for violence or other prohibited acts." So, he's encouraging investigation of organizations that have never advocated or planned violence, based on what -- a Oujia board? This is not fighting to preserve American freedoms; this is chipping away at them until only a shell eventually remains. Terror from outside the U.S. will be replaced by terror from the government of the U.S.

No matter what your political views, you should be aware of what government is doing and make your views known if you do not agree with it. (As Thomas Jefferson said in the quotation used at The War on the Bill of Rights' beginning, "The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive...") This book will help with anyone's awareness of what is happening; whether or not you agree with the Bush Administration's other actions, you may find something in here that bothers you.

Wow. I wasn't all that far into The Good Women of China: Hidden Voices when I started thinking that: "Wow." The author of the book, Xinran, hosted a Chinese radio program, "Words on the Night Wind," for several years, focusing on what it was like to be a woman in China. Life is likely difficult enough for any journalist in China, with the extreme care necessary not to cross Chinese Communist Party doctrime; Xinran says it is one of the professions with the lowest life expectancy in China up there with police officer and chemical engineer. But despite being hemmed around by rules, she was able to collect amazing stories of women in situations no one else wanted to talk about. Women watching their children die in buildings collapsed in an earthquake. Women who scavenge junk and live in shanties constructed of these found materials. Lesbians in a country where homosexuality is "a forbidden subject under media regulations." Women driven to madness by interrogations and mistreatment based on who their parents or grandparents were, and women who survived similar mistreatment with no external change. Parents separated from children and lovers from one another because of Communist Party decrees. University students and fashionable businesswomen who live near-Westernized lives but still deal with men who apply old-fashioned standards in sizing up a woman. Arranged marriages, child sexual abuse, religion, poverty -- it's astounding how many issues are touched on in fifteen chapters, each telling one woman's story except for the final one which focuses on women's conditions in the tiny rural village of Shouting Hill, where people live in caves in the side of the hill and women use (and re-use) leaves for sanitary napkins.

Xinran moved to England in 1997 with "the idea that I might find a way of describing the lives of Chinese women to people in the West." She and translator Esther Tyldesley have done an impressive job of that, showing both the samenesses and differences, and I think as many people as possible should hear these stories.

I was a little concerned about whether my stomach could take reading Mary Roach's Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. In fact, I probably wouldn't have checked it out on my own, despite my general love of detailed histories of things you don't normally think about. It was my boyfriend who borrowed it from the library (once the waiting list got down to him) and read aloud a few amusing bits (particularly the footnotes -- we both love authors who go off on tangents in footnotes). So once he'd finished the whole book, I picked it up, and found that it was a fascinating, fairly easy read, with only a few slightly stomach-turning passages. (Though I did abandon it temporarily when it was time to have lunch, preferring The Life and Death of Peter Sellers by Roger Lewis as companionship for my meal.) As a devoted reader of social histories of locations and medical fields, much of the historical material in Stiff was somewhat familiar; it was the current information on the many research and teaching, as well as life-saving, uses for donated bodies and the increasing number of modern ways to return the elements of a body to the environment that were new to me -- and quite interesting. I never much liked the idea of burial anyway. And the book does contain very funny remarks that somehow never seem disrespectful to the dead whose bodies are being made use of by the living. You might want to take breaks between chapters to avoid becoming a little overwhelmed, but it is definitely a book worth reading.