Lisa Montanarelli writes on culture, health, sex, and politics. She is currently authoring New York City Curiosities for Globe Pequot Press and has co-written three nonfiction books, including the The First Year Hepatitis C: An Essential Guide for the Newly Diagnosed, which she revised and updated with co-author Cara Bruce in 2007. Lisa has contributed features, profiles, and reviews to California Literary Review, Colorado Review, Agence France-Presse, Art and Antiques Magazine, Publishers Weekly, Young Money, San Francisco Chronicle, and other publications. Her fiction has appeared in Susie Bright’s Best American Erotica 2004, Best American Erotica 2005, X: The Erotic Treasury, and other anthologies. She received her B.A. from Yale and her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from U.C. Berkeley. For more info, check out her LinkedIn profile.
Click here (or on the RSS feed) for Lisa’s blog posts and recent columns on YoungMoney.com. Young Money sounds Republican, but she’s a lefty.
Selected articles
“A Book of Shifting Borders,” A Review of The Lazarus Project by Aleksander Hemon for California Literary Review, February 11, 2009.
“Cry of the West – Don’t fence me in” Lisa’s review of Rebecca Solnit’s Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics, published in San Francisco Chronicle, June 24, 2007.
From the conquistador Coronado’s quest for the Seven Cities of Gold to the suburban McMansion, we immigrants — and aside from American Indians, we’re all immigrants — have sought various forms of paradise, according to Rebecca Solnit, a San Francisco writer and activist, whose River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (Viking; 2003) won a National Book Circle Award for criticism. But paradise comes from a Persian word meaning “walled garden,” and Solnit’s latest essay collection, Storming the Gates of Paradise, explores how many visions of Eden entail keeping others out — as Adam and Eve discovered when they found themselves outside with canceled passports.
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“How Islam Shaped Europe”
A review of David Levering Lewis’ God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215 in San Francisco Chronicle, February 3, 2008
David Levering Lewis, a New York University historian whose biography of W.E.B. Du Bois won two Pulitzers, writes that the French Song of Roland (circa 1040) “framed the contact between Christianity and Islam as an epic struggle that can never end until Muhammad’s legions will have been run to the ground.”
One can discern this myth in the “clash of civilizations,” coined by Bernard Lewis, perhaps the chief intellectual architect behind the Iraq war. Bernard Lewis viewed 9/11 as prelude to a final showdown in a millennial fray between the Occident and Islam. He urged the Bush administration to invade Iraq and force secular democracy on Muslim society, which he saw as anti-modern and West-hating. The Bush administration adopted Lewis as their pet Orientalist, though most scholars argued that the “clash of civilizations” overlooked the effects of present-day U.S. policy and downplayed the diversity of both Islam and the West, whose histories are more intertwined than most Americans know.
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“Spinoza Stymies ‘God’s Attorney’”
A review of Matthew Stewart’s The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World in San Francisco Chronicle, January 8, 2006
Gottfried Leibniz is remembered as a metaphysical Pollyanna, thanks to Voltaire’s caricature — the hapless Dr. Pangloss, who insists that all is for the best, even as he is afflicted with syphilis, hanged by the Holy Inquisition and dissected by surgeons. An unapologetic theocrat, Leibniz claimed that God chose the best of all possible worlds, including the best form of government: divine right monarchy. Hoping to unite the earth in a Christian republic, he approached Louis XIV with a plan for a “New Holy War” against Egypt. (The Sun King, to his credit, replied that crusades had gone out of vogue in the middle ages.)
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