World - Bucknell University

This issue’s book review presses readers into a dialogue that
crisscrosses cultures and themes to form a vision for a world
transformed by September 11.
16 BUCKNELL WORLD • September 2006
Books for a Post-
September 11 World
CLAUDIA EBELING
Two seminal Bucknell authors, F. David Martin,
professor emeritus of philosophy, and Philip Roth ’54, unflinchingly
address the problem of death in books that are as eloquent
and profound as they are readable. “Looking directly at death,”
Martin says, in Facing Death: Theme and Variations (Bucknell
University Press), “may be much more
difficult than looking directly at the sun.”
Once he debated death without a shiver.
Things have changed. “Now that I am
old, the sometime is anytime and soon
and quite believable. Even in the most
joyful moments, the dread of death
permeates.”
For a scholar who spent his career
eclipsing his own views in order to explicate
others’, this is revealing
stuff. “Dying is the
most personal event in our
lives; no one can accomplish
it for us. Although we
can witness our dying, we
cannot witness our death.”
But Martin embraces the
gifts death bequeaths. He visits
everyone from Plato
to Louis Armstrong for inspiration.
In the gravity of
mortality, he locates irony,
warmth, joy, reconciliation,
and humor.
Roth articulates the theme
through fiction in Everyman
(Houghton Mifflin). That his
protagonist dies during surgery is the beginning and the
end of the story. As the mourners disperse after a
respectful graveside service, Roth observes, “That was
the end. No special point had been made. Did they say
what they had to say? No, they didn’t, and of course
they did.” He then turns to the man’s life to see what
that means. Therein crouches the suspense.
This ordinary man was a son, brother, threetime
husband, father, ad guy, attempted studio artist,
Jersey native, Manhattan local, and post–September 11
retirement colony refugee. He connects and disconnects
with mortality, beginning with a few mystifying
encounters that escalate to concrete losses of friends
and family in late age. Through the busy crowd of
choices he has made for better or worse, the question
rises, will he engage death on his terms? What are those
terms anyway?
Dateline: Middle East Will order ever come
to the Middle East? Alumni reporting from the front
have surprising answers.
Matthew Bogdanos ’80 was enjoying a high-profile
career in the Manhattan District Attorney’s office when
the planes hit the World Trade Center. After leading his
family out of their nearby, ash-ridden apartment, the
Marine Reservist knew what he had to do. He signed up
for Afghanistan, where he earned a Bronze Star and
ended up in Iraq as Baghdad fell. When news surfaced