The Best Books of 2001

Nonfiction

December 02, 2001

"Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution" is another invisible story from the front lines of the civil rights movement. However hateful and ugly, the perspective of the white business aristocracy that resisted, with all its power, every effort to change the class and race relations of its city is a much-neglected part of the story of the civil rights movement. Diane McWhorter uses the city of Birmingham to give us first-hand accounts of all sides that clashed in a climactic battle in 1963. As an investigative journalist, McWhorter returned to the city of her youth and, through history and personal memoir, reveals the collusion that existed between the city's business establishment, public officials such as Police Commissioner Bull Connor and the klansmen who met nonviolence with ropes, bombs and guns. A daughter of Birmingham's white elite, McWhorter was the same age as the four 10-year-old black girls killed by the bomb that blasted through the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church basement in 1963. In the same year, she witnessed the series of battles that took place after King targeted Birmingham--then considered the most segregated city in America--as the last stand against American apartheid. Powerfully written, vividly recounted, McWhorter's intimate yet magisterial narrative adds important insights to our understanding of the Ku Klux Klan and its connections with official power in the South.

\o7 Ruth Rosen\f7

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THE CHINESE

By Jasper Becker

The Free Press: 464 pp., $27.50

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Jaspar Becker is a journalist who has been writing from inside China since the mid-1980s for the Guardian, the Economist and the South China Morning Post; he is the author of one previous book, "Hungry Ghosts," the definitive account of the famine caused by Mao's Great Leap. In his new book, "The Chinese," he has transcended the obstacles and come up with an enduring portrait of modern China. Becker doesn't try to establish some new stereotype, of the sort that may soon be outdated, about what 1.3 billion people all want and think. Instead, he describes the deeper problems with which its government has failed to cope, such as migration from the countryside to cities or the lack of a social safety net. The result is a book that is the best available introduction to China for tourists, business executives and anyone else curious about the country.

\o7 Jim Mann\f7

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CONSTANTINE'S SWORD

The Church and the Jews: A History

By James Carroll

Houghton Mifflin: 756 pp., $28

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James Carroll was first inspired to write this book when he visited Auschwitz and came upon the cross which Pope John Paul II had planted in a field alongside the eastern wall of the camp during his visit in 1979. The pope had said Mass in this field for a million fellow Poles and had prayed for and to Edith Stein, a Carmelite nun whom he would later canonize as a Christian martyr, even though the Nazis had killed her for being a Jew. The pope also called Auschwitz "the Golgotha of the modern world" and expressed the hope that there would one day be a place of prayer and penance built at the camp to honor the Catholic martyrs and to atone for the murders committed there. In 1984, when Carmelite nuns responded to the pope's call and moved into the old theater beside the field, where the gas canisters had been stored, Catholics were shocked by the vehement protests of Jewish groups throughout Europe, the United States and Israel, who were appalled that the church should try to Christianize Auschwitz and claim it as a Christian tragedy. When Carroll visited Auschwitz and saw the cross for himself, his gut reaction was that it did not belong in this place. "Constantine's Sword" is his attempt to show why. The bulk of the book is concerned with the history of hatred of Jews in the Catholic Church. It is for many a tragically familiar story, but Carroll's narrative is heartfelt and eloquent. Most important, he writes as a committed Catholic. He cannot be accused of hostility to the church or of anti-Catholic bias. Carroll understands the reluctance of his fellow Catholics to own up to this terrible legacy because he has made his own painful journey to acknowledgment of his church's sins. His book could, therefore, do what the Vatican has signally failed to do: to help Catholics accept the truth, as a first step to repentance.

\o7 Karen Armstrong\f7

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THE COURTSHIP

OF SEA CREATURES

By Jean-Pierre Otte

Translated from the French

by Marjolijn De JagerGeorge

Braziller: 128 pp., $20

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