The Ernest Becker Foundation

Why It's Hard to Be Good by Al Gini (New York and London: Routledge, 2006)

Is it easy to be good, to behave decently towards our fellow human beings, and to do the right thing? Al Gini suggests it is quite difficult, for a wide variety of reasons, which make for very interesting reading. By good, he means a willingness to behave ethically, a willingness to be concerned about the rights and well-being of others, a willingness to stop thinking of ourselves as the center of the universe. That's quite a challenge, to be sure, and the book is well worth the investment. You will smile knowingly at yourself as Gini presents, with his characteristic sense of humor (he is the author, after all, of the philosophical treatise The Importance of Being Lazy!) his numerous insights on why we find it so difficult to step out of the shadow of the self. Gini's book covers a broad range of topics: Ethics, Character, Media, Leisure, and (most important for us) a concluding chapter on Death, in which Ernest Becker's analysis plays an especially important role in explaining how and why we so often choose to deceive ourselves in matters of right and wrong, good and evil.

Why War? the Cultural Logic of Iraq, the Gulf War, and Suez by Philip Smith, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005. 254pp.

After World War Two, the tensions of the Cold War kept the wartime U.S. military-industrial sector growing and fundamentally altered the nation's identity. The vast investment found outlets in the tragic Vietnam War and in the extravagant Reagan military buildup of the 1980s that supposedly provoked the Soviets' "Evil Empire" to destroy itself through overspending.