Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Sunday January 23, 2011
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THREE BOOKS ABOUT THE COMING APOPCALYPSE
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Reviewed by Stephen Lowman
A belief exists that when the Mayan calendar ends in 2012, the world will end along with it. But doomsday soothsayers don't have to wait until next year to see signs of our ultimate destruction. This month alone, flocks of birds fell out of the sky, and Snooki from "Jersey Shore" published a novel! Obviously you need these three new books to prepare you for the impending destruction of the human race:
1. "A IS FOR ARMAGEDDON,"  by Richard Horne (Harper; paperback, $19.99) From nuclear weapons to the super-massive black hole at the center of our galaxy, oodles of things have the potential to snuff us out. Richard Horne's droll cataloging of all the ways we can be done in is accompanied by rich, whimsical illustrations.
He also tells you what you should look for if, for example, you suspect that hostile aliens are on the way ("Lights in the sky. Anyone trying to fit in but failing miserably.") and how we should prepare for the end-date predicted by the Mayan calendar: Dec. 21, 2012 ("bring Christmas forward by a week").
2. "APOCALYPSE IN ISLAM," by Jean-Pierre Filiu, translated from the French by M.B. DeBevoise (Univ. of California, $29.95) This scholarly work, originally published two years ago in France, explores the role of apocalyptic beliefs in Islam and argues there has been a resurgence in end-of-the-world thinking in the past several decades. While the overwhelming majority of Muslims pay no attention to these ominous prophecies, Filiu says that in the minds of Islam's most impassioned believers the apocalyptic movement has provided a justification for attacks against the West.
3. "ARMAGEDDON SCIENCE: The Science of Mass Destruction," By Brian Clegg (St. Martin's, $25.99) "However much scientists care, we can never be absolutely certain that science won't end the world," writes physicist Brian Clegg, "nor can we be sure that it won't cause so much damage that human life in the future becomes much worse." "Armageddon Science" is sure to appeal to readers who believe the end has been brought nigh by such developments as the rise of artificial intelligence and the atom-smashing going on at the Large Hadron Collider. The less alarmist among us will look at all of this and say carpe diem.
Stephen Lowman can be reached at lowmans(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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GEORGE W. BUSH AND THE REDEMPTIVE DREAM: A Psychological Portrait
Dan P. McAdams
Oxford Univ.
ISBN 978-0199752089
274 pages
$29.95
Reviewed by Steven F. Hayward
The remarkable combination of character, ambition and political skill seen in the men who reach the presidency clearly deserves serious psychological analysis. While ideology and historical circumstance are primary to evaluation, the psychological aspects of, say, Lincoln's depression or Reagan's willful optimism or Franklin Roosevelt's polio should not be overlooked. The hazard of psychoanalyzing presidents, however, is that it can lapse into crude reductionism, overemphasizing subrational or irrational causes and thereby trivializing more obvious traits and political ideas. Too often psychological approaches become one-dimensional devices for critics to use as another partisan tool.
George W. Bush is an irresistible subject for such psychological profiling, given his family's political and private history and his embrace as an adult of religious faith, sobriety and responsibility. It is almost impossible not to speculate about how Bush's relationship with his father affected his decisions. His penchant for bestowing nicknames, his certitude, his seeming equanimity under the pressures of the post-9/11 world, and his self-conscious Texas swagger -- traits that make him notably different from his father and brother Jeb -- all support plausible theories. Bush will be a cottage industry for psychologists for years to come.
Dan P. McAdams, professor of psychology at Northwestern University, offers one of the first comprehensive psychological profiles of Bush in "George W. Bush and the Redemptive Dream." To his credit, McAdams tries not to prejudge Bush, and he avoids making moral or political judgments about the president's major decisions. McAdams will further disappoint the Bush-haters in his measured rejection of several pop-psych themes, such as that Bush was in thrall to an Oedipal rivalry (though he does think a desire to avenge his father in Iraq was a factor). But in the end, McAdams' framework sinks into a mire of professional jargon that tells us more about contemporary theory than about the former president.
McAdams' thesis is that "a perfect psychological storm of traits" determined Bush's decision to launch the Iraq invasion.
"Of course," McAdams allows, "the decision was also informed by many factors that were not themselves psychological. Political, economic, and world-historical factors all played important roles." But these traditional political factors would not have been enough, he thinks, to start the war in the absence of Bush's powerful psychological makeup. Unfortunately, McAdams makes a weak case for downplaying traditional political factors in favor of psychology, and most readers will be left with the impression that he attributes every political decision to psychological factors. To calibrate accurately the role of psychology versus "traditional political factors" in the large decisions of presidents and prime ministers might require the combined insights of Tocqueville and Freud. But in this case, a simple thought experiment may suffice: If you think that John McCain, had he been in the White House then, would also have decided to invade Iraq, you will not find McAdams' analysis persuasive.
The key traits McAdams divines in Bush include some obvious ones, such as his extreme extroversion; the effects of the death of his younger sister in childhood; his transfiguration of Midland, Tex., into a new Eden; and, above all, his narrative of redemption involving his sudden sobriety and conversion to fervent Christian faith. McAdams argues that Bush sought to impose his own redemptive narrative on the entire world through his "freedom agenda" and the war on terrorism.
The book suffers from banality ("Shakespeare was surely right when he said that all the world's a stage and each of us a player") and repetitiveness, especially of the theme that Bush suffers from "low openness to experience." I lost count of the instances of this phrase, but it is the touchstone of McAdams' ultimate denigration of Bush. The phrase is a synonym for Bush's stubbornness, and McAdams understands it in its formal clinical dimensions, which allows him to escape confronting the potential ideological sources of Bush's hardheadedness, or rendering judgment about whether Bush's stubbornness was right or wrong. But is this trait peculiar to Bush? Has there ever been a successful non-stubborn president? To be sure, stubbornness served some presidents poorly (Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter), while it served others well (Harry Truman, Ronald Reagan). Psychological analysis cannot tell us whether stubbornness is an asset or a liability in a president. For that we need to turn to old-fashioned historical and character analysis.
Steven F. Hayward is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of "The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counter Revolution, 1980-1989."
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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