BooksFaith is a Verb: On the Home Front with Habitat for Humanity and the Campaign to Rebuild America (and the World)
The working title for this book was "Talk is Cheap," because journalism and book writing, after volunteering with Habitat, seemed rather pointless. And yet I still had to write about the organization...if only to try and infect others with what "build" regulars call "Habititis." The book is both a history of Habitat -- it was founded ten years before Jimmy Carter became involved, and its roots lie in a pacifist, integrationist, socialist Christian farm in south Georgia -- and the story of my own involvement and gradual "conversion." Put it this way: while Habitat didn't create in me a belief in God, it definitely restored my faith in people. Anarchy and Elegance:
Confessions of a Journalist at Yale Law School My agent sold the manuscript to the Little, Brown editor by saying "It's like going to law school without going to class!" I still blanch at that characterization: I've always thought of the book as a head-on, heads-up "expose" of a far-too-powerful, far-too-mysterious professional culture. Sometimes, when asked to sum up the book, I say "It's about how students are seduced into 'thinking like lawyers,' and why that's bad." Roadster: How (and Especially Why)
a Mechanical Novice Built a Sports Car from a Kit Patrick McGoohan, in the 1960's telvision series "The Prisoner," is trapped in a faux-utopia called "The Village" from which he tries, vainly, to escape. In every episode he nearly succeeds, for Number Six -- McGoohan became famous as "Secret Agent Man," about whom Johnny Rivers sang "They've given you a number, and taken away your name" -- is a man of, well, parts: back home in England he drove a Lotus Seven, a car he built with his own hands. "Roadster" describes how a "Prisoner" fan built his own Seven, a physical, intellectual, and self-defining journey that touches on subjects as disparate as Henry Ford (a firm believer in failure), Simone Weil (a Catholic mystic who once worked in a Renault factory), and Thorstein Veblen (who knew how appearances could deceive). Monkey Island: A Novel (in progress)
Cam Dall is the custodian of a zoo in Playa d'Oro, a California resort town. He loves his work; so much, in fact, that he lives on Monkey Island, where he befriends a band of gibbons. Cam gradually learns they're smarter than they let on...and that he may be able to achieve at the zoo what he couldn't in his former, high-power life in environmentalism, politics, and the media. The book's hero, it turns out, is in self-imposed exile, but discovers that his island is not a prison but a springboard from which he can both atone for past mistakes and find a lasting peace. |
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