Word: soul
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When Keillor appeared at the Boston University bookstore last month, a long line wound through the foreign-language and dictionary sections, and each soul in it carried one or two or half a dozen copies of Lake Wobegon Days. (Half the book's royalties, says Keillor, go to Minnesota Public Radio.) The old joke about the Midwest in Boston, the Hub of the Universe, used to go "Ohio? Here we pronounce it Iowa." No more. A small woman at the head of the line, wearing an ALL THIS & BRAINS, TOO! T shirt, held her book up for Keillor to sign...
...December 1941, within a few days of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Nazis began gassing Jews and Gypsies at a camp in Chelmno, Poland. More than 150,000 died there; two survived, and both offer their soul-scarred witness in Shoah. One of them, Simon Srebnik, was a boy of 13 at the time. Returning to Chelmno, he visits townspeople who were once enchanted by his beautiful singing voice. They also remember the screams of Jews locked in the local church before being taken away. At Treblinka, site of the Nazis' most efficient gas chambers, villagers recall standing...
...which has learned to quantify everything, perhaps it might not seem strange that the soul of a killer should be sought in his posthumous neuroanatomy. In an age of scientific miracles, every field of human endeavor looks to science for the silver bullet to pierce the heart of a problem. Why not the heart of evil...
After all, for decades scientists and others have been ransacking the brain for the soul of an equally mysterious power: genius. Perhaps the most famous case is Einstein. Slices of his brain were recently pored over by a pair of California neuroscientists. More revealing of the bizarre possibilities of this kind of scientific quest is the case of Lenin. In 1925 the Soviets, applying a socialist definition of genius, entrusted his brain to a German neurologist, Oskar Vogt. The idea, explains Psychiatrist Walter Reich, was "to establish an institute in Moscow entirely devoted to the purpose of discovering the 'materialist...
...that sucker in the end zone"), it made up in enthusiasm (the play-by-play announcer: "That'll make it third and a country mile!"). During the broadcast, you could have fired a cannon down the main streets of either town and not hit a living soul...