BOOKS
How to Read the Qur’an: A New
Guide, With Select Translations
by Carl W. Ernst
Using a chronological reading of the
text according to the conclusions of mod-
ern scholarship, the William R. Kenan Jr.
Distinguished Professor of religious studies
offers a nontheological approach that treats
the Qur’an as a historical text that
unfolded over time, in dialogue with its
audience, during the career of the Prophet
Muhammad. Ernst explores the history of
the text and its development in the Mec-
can and Medinan periods; the Qur’an’s
important structural features, including
symmetrical or ring composition; recent
revisionist challenges to its textual integrity;
and intertextual references in the Qur’an
that relate to earlier works, including the
Bible.
The Last Pahvant
by Barnie K. Day ’ 75
The author, a columnist and former
Virginia legislator, spent 10 years working
on this self-published historical novel about
an orphan — the last of a subtribe of the
Ute Indians — with an astonishing innate
gift for playing the piano. Raised in a
squatters’ camp on the Colorado River
during the Great Depression, she eventually is discovered by The New York Times.
The book includes the appearance of former UNC President Frank Porter Graham
(class of 1909), on a mission as a representative of President Franklin D. Roosevelt,
and takes surprising turns as the story proceeds from the arrival of the Conquistadors
in search of gold, through construction of
Boulder Dam, to the campus at Chapel
Hill and a cafe in Carrboro.
Lost Memory of Skin
by Russell Banks ’ 67
Banks’ central character, a convicted sex
offender now out of prison, homeless and
known simply as the Kid, finds himself
trapped by his bad choices — and also the
ideal subject for a professor’s research on
what happens to people like him. The
professor believes the Kid has been shaped
by the forces of a troubled society and is
capable of changing. But as their relationship develops, the professor’s own past
comes to the surface, and the Kid must
reconsider everything he has come to
believe and choose what action to take
when faced with a new kind of moral
decision.
Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero
by Chris Matthews ’ 67
“History made him, this lonely, sick
boy. His mother never loved him. History
made Jack, this little boy reading history,”
Jacqueline Kennedy said of her husband
shortly after he died. The anchor of
MSNBC’s Hardball and the NBC-syndi-cated The Chris Matthews Show (who
studied for a master’s degree at Carolina)
had his political awakening just as Kennedy
was entering the arena. He takes a new
look at Kennedy through the family into
which he was born, his friends, his war
experience and some of his initiatives as
president, based on interviews with the
people who were closest to him.
Lions of the West: Heroes and
Villains of the Westward Expansion
by Robert Morgan ’ 65
Morgan is mesmerized by the adventure
tales of the ambitious and often sordid settlement of the American West. His tale
unfolds in the stories of Thomas Jefferson
and nine of his prominent countrymen,
including Andrew Jackson, Davy Crockett
and James K. Polk (class of 1818). Complete with maps, illustrations and battle
plans, the book takes its name from an
early 19th-century stage play that one
could argue, Morgan writes, “allowed
audiences to laugh at traits and attitudes in
themselves they might otherwise have
been ashamed of: the overweening arrogance, the claims of being chosen, the
brash air of destiny.”
Nightwoods
by Charles Frazier ’ 73
“Lost in the woods. A dangerous phrase
…” the author writes about his third
book. As a kid, downhill always was the
way home. Later, when he found himself
lost in the mountains of Bolivia, “downhill
did not at all seem like the way home.”
Frazier says he intended for the heroine of
his third book, Luce, and the two mute,
trouble-making children she inherits after
their mother is brutally murdered, to be
minor characters. But he found he kept
coming back to them and their interactions with the children’s ne’er-do-well
father. Nightwoods is set, a century later, in
the same bleak rural Appalachia as Cold
Mountain.
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January/February 2012
