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Name: Graham Garner
Affiliation: Britain YM
These are a few books we stock that Friends haven’t seemed to notice yet!
The Body in Pain
Neither the title nor cover picture on this book give much idea about what it is about. Elaine Scarry looks at how impossible it is to use words to describe pain from one person to another and uses this as a basis to look at war and violence from unexpected and illuminating directions. She looks at how clever, even unconscious, our use of words can defuse the absolute horror of weapons and what they do to peoples bodies, at how ordinary people can become torturers, at how wars are won or lost by writing the pain they inflict on people’s bodies ¦and this is only the first few chapters. It really does make you think again about many of the fundamental ideas about nonviolence.
John MacMurray: A biography
John MacMurray is a philosopher much better known in Europe than America. His experiences in the WW1 turned him into a Christian pacifist and eventually a Quaker. He was well known for his BBC radio lectures on Philosophy that both tried to make it accessible and relevant to the broader population and to incorporate feeling and action into pure reason to humanize philosophy, which is a more revolutionary idea than you might think. Tony Blair said he was a great influence on him - make of that what you will. This is an authoritative biography and sheds much light on his thought.
US and Them: A history of Intolerance in America
I'm constantly amazed as I learn more American history that not only is there so much to be proud of, but there is so much that America needs to hang its head in shame about and say “mea culpa,” Fort Jefferson the early version of Guantanamo, the Philippines, and such. Here is a large illustrated book from the director of the Southern Poverty Law Center that looks at many examples of intolerance. It starts with Mary Dyer, and covers slavery, native Americans, the Irish amongst many others and ends with Brooklyn in the 1990s. A useful resource for schools and meetings.
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