October 10, 2001

The Market System: What It Is, How It Works, and What to Make of It. By Charles E. Lindblom. Yale University Press, 304 pp., $26.00.

Development as Freedom. By Amartya Sen. Knopf, 382 pp., $29.95; paperback, $15.00.

So common are visitations in reports of near-death experiences (NDEs) that I, for one, do not expect to die alone. As I say this I dread the eye-rollers and scoffers who will label me as an eccentric if not an outright nut. And I can’t altogether blame them, since accounts of these experiences can make for some mighty strange (and not overly literate) reading, filled as they are with buoyancy and tunnels and light and spirit guides that may include telepathic pets.

Controversy about the role of the Vatican and Pope Pius XII during the Holocaust has raged ever since Rolf Hochhuth’s play The Deputy was first performed in 1965, but the debate has intensified in recent years. Since 1965 the Vatican has published 11 volumes of selected archival material from the Nazi era—but these volumes omitted some relevant documents. Last fall, a commission of six historians (three Catholics and three Jews) concluded their examination of these books with a detailed and well-grounded plea for scholarly access to the rest of the Vatican archives.

Americans are still trying to grasp what happened on September 11, and we don’t yet know how to talk about what comes next. “War” was one of the first things we called it, inspired by images of burning buildings and memories of Pearl Harbor. This would not be a metaphorical war on drugs, crime or poverty, but the real thing: a military response to aggression, pursued for an extended time, ending in victory over the aggressor. Then there was another image, invoked by President Bush, which came from another part of our past.

Daytona Beach—it’s the home of NASCAR, Spring Break, Bike Week, and the self-proclaimed “most famous beach in the world.” The city has an interesting mix of natives with deep southern roots and northerners, many from New York City, who have come to the sun, sand and surf for retirement, or who came early because they did not want to wait for retirement. It is a mix that has nurtured a “live and let live” philosophy of community life.

As part of a campaign to stop one of the world’s longest wars, peace coordinator Telar Deng begins and ends peace conferences by sacrificing a white bull. The Sudanese traditional ritual was recently included in the seventh such conference brokered by Deng and the New Sudan Council of Churches (NSCC).