The Year of Living Constitutionally

The Year of Living Constitutionally

A. J. Jacobs

Crown Publishing Group. 295 pp.

Fun romp through the Constitution. With all the hilarity, though, comes some quite thoughtful proposals. Among them:

1) Replace the president with a committee of three or more;

2) term limits for Supreme Court justices;

3) find creative ways to celebrate voting;

4) regulate those who would regulate our regulatory agencies.

Lots more "food" for thought here. I tip my hat Jacobs for making the U. S. Constitution fun again.

Hitler's Furies

Hitler's Furies

Wendy Lower

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 270 pp.

I'll be direct. This was a tough read. Just when I thought I had learned all there was to learn about atrocities committed by Nazis during WWII, along comes historian Wendy Lower to uncover and to document crimes committed by German women. And these weren't your everyday garden variety crimes. These were crimes so awful that that even now I cannot bring myself to repeat them. 

Why? That's always the question that comes to my mind whenever I read of these accounts? Or, rather, how could seemingly normal people commit such terrible deeds? Studies of perpetrator motivation, Lower writes, "explain that those who incite acts of hate are seeking to rid themselves and the world around them of its unsettling, messy ambiguities and complexity." Perpetrators, she goes on to say, "often see themselves as enlightened, as holders of a greater truth, superior to their foes, above reproach and accountability, struggling to break free of a world of dichotomies."

Well, all I can say is God save us from such people, for I have no doubt that they remain among us.