Entertainment Weekly

Ken Tucker picks pop gems to get you through the week, including Helen Mirren’s stunning final turn as Jane Tennison in ”Prime Suspect”

1. Helen Mirren in Prime Suspect: The Final Act
(PBS, Nov. 12, 9 p.m.)

Detective Superintendent Jane Tennison is back for her last case — she’s still battling sexism at the job and the bottle after hours, still making brilliant crime-scene deductions and bad decisions on the homefront. Mirren is getting a lot of acclaim for portraying royalty these days — in the movie The Queen and in HBO‘s Elizabeth I, for which she won an Emmy — but she’s never been better as the brooding Tennison.

2. Baltar gets tortured on Battlestar Gallactica
(Sci-Fi, Nov. 10, 9 p.m.)

It’s no spoiler to say that Gaius Baltar (James Callis) is brutalized by the mistress of Cylon S&M, D’Anna (Lucy Lawless), in an attempt to make him give up info about a virus that threatens the bad, bad Cylons. I know there are a lot of intelligent discussions taking place this season about Battlestar as a metaphor for current geopolitics, but I just want to yank the show back into the pop culture from whence it sprang and say what makes this show so terrific is that it never forgets its roots in pulp-sci-fi adventure and sexiness. That, and the fact that it’s immensely satisfying to see the often smug Balter, so masterfully played by the subtle Callis, get a good jolt.

3. Rabble-Rouser for Peace: The Authorized Biography of Desmond Tutu
By John Allen (Free Press, $28)

With the death last week of South African apartheid-defender P.W. Botha, this new biography of one of apartheid’s most vigorous opponents, written with the vividness of a novel, becomes all the more timely and important. Allen, a journalist who also served as director of communications for Archbishop Tutu’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, doesn’t tell Tutu’s story with the piousness of a press flack; just the opposite. Allen brings a figure of sometimes saintly proportions to human scale, revealing Tutu’s hard-nosed, pragmatic, and wily sides. Astonishing anecdotes abound, such as a moment in 1981 in Johannesburg when pro-Botha security police, assigned to maintain order, ”discussed stabbing Tutu with a sharpened bicycle spoke.” Soon after, Tutu remarked that Botha was ”just a pathetic little bully.” Would that more men of the clergy should be so outspoken.

4. ”I’ll Be Around” on Closet Freak: The Best of Cee-Lo Green the Soul Machine
(Arista/Legacy)

The chrome-domed, deceptively harsh-looking half of Gnarls Barkley puts out a best-of album full of Deep South grit, grunts, and verbal dexterity. ”I’ll Be Around,” a 2003 track, is the man’s wily take on the Spinners’ song of the same name. Collaborating with Timbaland and featuring big, elephant-size beats reminiscent of George Clinton and Parliament’s ”Trombipulation,” Cee-Lo’s ”I’ll Be Around” is surprisingly sweet and affectionate while its rhythm remains vehement: You cannot keep from wiggling to its percussive punctuation.

5. Wally’s World: The Brilliant Life and Tragic Death of Wally Wood, the World’s 2nd-Best Comic Book Artist
By Steve Starger and J. David Spurlock (Vanguard Productions, $24)

A comic-book artist who straddled commercial and underground comics for decades, drawing valiant superheroes, gory horror scenes, and salaciously naughty scenarios, Wally Wood was a real piece of work, as this brief and thorough biography attests. He drew thousands upon thousands of strikingly distinctive comics pages, was admired by R. Crumb and contributed one of the most enduring MAD magazine parodies ever, ”Superduperman.” He also drank like a fish, doubted his talent, dug porn, and committed suicide on Halloween night with a .44 revolver. He lived in the shadow of the great mainstream superhero artist of his era, Jack Kirby, but he owed more — in mind-set and his grim end — to another comics genius, Jack Cole (Plastic Man). That the great designer Chip Kidd and artist Dan Clowes did the cover for this book speaks to the esteem in which Wood was held. Welcome to Wally’s world.

(Posted to EW Online:11/03/06)

Catholic News Service

By Gunther Simmermacher

10/23/2006

Besides the pope, retired Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa is arguably the world’s most famous living Christian cleric. He was instrumental in bringing down apartheid, and then played a central role in forging a measure of reconciliation in his polarized country.

It has been the privilege of South African journalist John Allen to have been close at Archbishop Tutu’s side throughout the crucial years of his ministry, as the archbishop’s and then the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s much-respected press secretary. As an intimate aide, Allen has been privy to unique insights into Archbishop Tutu’s work and character, and so is an obvious choice to pen an “authorized biography,” as Rabble-Rouser for Peace is dubbed.

This is a blessing, for it provides this biography with nuances an outsider might not pick up, but also something of a curse because Allen’s close friendship with his subject by nature inhibits an absolutely forthright critical appraisal.

Rabble-Rouser for Peace, a contradictory yet most apt title, provides an admirable portrait of a man who has had much influence in shaping today’s South Africa.

Born in 1931 into a multiethnic Methodist family, young Desmond grew up in simple circumstances. As a youngster, he moved to Johannesburg where he came into contact with the Anglican Community of the Resurrection, an Anglo-Catholic missionary congregation.

As a student, teacher and young priest, Tutu was not inordinately engaged in politics. This changed when in 1970 he witnessed unconscionable police brutality during a protest at the black Fort Hare University, where he was a chaplain. Soon after that, he was appointed associate director of the Theological Education Fund of the World Council of Churches in London, a job that required wide travels throughout Africa.

These were a formative experience for Rev. Tutu, who began to develop a personal African theology, one that remains useful in the present dialogue on enculturation. The London stint also gave Rev. Tutu and his wife an alternative experience to apartheid, a vision of what could be in the land of their birth.

Returning to South Africa in 1975, Rev. Tutu no longer would bow to docile acceptance of apartheid’s racial order; his “prophetic vocation” began. Almost immediately, he was nominated as bishop of Johannesburg, but lost after a protracted vote. The eventual winner, Bishop Timothy Bavin, appointed him dean of the cathedral, making him the first black man to hold that position.

Allen writes without undue hyperbole: “It was not apparent at the time, but (Tutu) had begun one of the most extensive, high-pressure, prominent public ministries of any church leader of his generation.”

Within less than a year, Rev. Tutu became bishop of Lesotho. He shook up the countrywide diocese and left two years later – reluctantly and at the urging of his fellow Anglican bishops – to assume the position of secretary-general of the South African Council of Churches.

Allen’s account of how then-Bishop Tutu approached that job is instructive. At the council’s Johannesburg headquarters, he introduced staff prayer meetings, retreats and the like. His daily prayer routine remained one of disciplined devotion, including 7 a.m. Eucharist and the Angelus at noon – Hail Mary and all. For all his social concerns, he put God first.

Indeed, his social and political engagement was based on what he discerned to be the mandate of the gospel. Bishop Tutu subscribed to nonviolence in the struggle as a preferential option. By the late ’70s he and other church leaders concluded that peaceful means of fighting apartheid were still possible: by means of international economic sanctions.

In September 1984 South Africa blew up in political protest, with bloody repercussions which would lead to the declaration of successive states of emergency. A month later, Bishop Tutu was in New York when he was revealed as that year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner – a fortuitous circumstance which ensured maximal exposure for the struggle.

Becoming archbishop of Cape Town and thus primate of Anglicans in southern Africa in 1985, Archbishop Tutu unilaterally called a historic protest march against police killings in September 1989. New state President F.W. de Klerk allowed the march to go ahead, the first such concession under apartheid.

The march drew a record multiracial crowd of 35,000 “rainbow people,” as Archbishop Tutu dubbed them that day, and was replicated throughout South Africa. According to de Klerk, it helped push apartheid over the cliff.

Allen’s narrative style evokes his subject’s character: it is thoroughly entertaining, inspiring, uncomplicated and thought-provoking. An “authorized biography” by its nature cannot represent the definitive life of its subject. Rabble-Rouser, however, comes as close to attaining that quality as one might hope for.

Rabble-Rouser for Peace: The Authorized Biography of Desmond Tutu, by John Allen. Free Press (New York, 2006). 496 pp., $28.

Simmermacher is editor of South Africa’s Catholic weekly, The Southern Cross.

The Christian Century

October 17, 2006

by Lawrence Wood

Rabble-Rouser For Peace: The Authorized Biography of Desmond Tutu
by John Allen
Free Press, 496 pp., $28.00

One might have expected a tame, worshipful “authorized” biography of Tutu, but this one really captures the full man. It will probably remain definitive.

Americans have sometimes seen the campaign against South African apartheid as a reprise of their own civil rights movement. P. W. Botha and other Afrikaners with clipped accents seem to have inherited the Bull Connor role, while the impossibly heroic Nelson Mandela might have emerged from a 27-year stay in a Birmingham jail. But this particular drama had its own mercurial character, in part reflecting the complicated, very human Desmond Tutu.

No one better embodied the contradictory times. Standing all of five foot three, Bishop Tutu could whip a crowd into a frenzy, then insist on nonviolence. He was given to making intemperate remarks and offering breathtaking forgiveness all in the same speech. The title of John Allen’s biography captures the seesaw spirit of this “rabble-rouser for peace.”

Considering the challenges of the first half of his life, few would have guessed that Tutu would become such a forceful figure. He was lucky to survive childhood: born into near-poverty, sickly from birth, he contracted polio in infancy and then was badly burned. A community of Anglican monks shaped his life, and perhaps saved it—providing hospital care for more than a year as he narrowly survived tuberculosis.

Among the Anglicans, Tutu went from being an indifferent student to a promising one. Unable to afford medical school, he followed his mentor, the activist Trevor Huddleston, into the priesthood. Tutu did not feel particularly called; it just seemed an expedient thing to do. His response to the Sharpeville massacre of 1960, in which police fired on an unarmed crowd, did not suggest his later faith or politics. Being part of “a very apolitical bunch,” he felt “a kind of anger at God” at the time, but he never thought of demonstrating against the authorities.

Some questioned Tutu’s motives for becoming a priest. He developed a reputation as a spendthrift, which may have come from supporting an extended family, although he also sent his children to private schools. Other priests resented his rapid rise and considered him ambitious.

Huddleston had been right to see Tutu’s promise, however, and travels abroad raised Tutu’s political consciousness. As a student in England, he experienced such freedom and equality that apartheid could never again seem normal to him. Later, working for the Theological Education Fund of the World Council of Churches, he visited newly independent African nations and noted the pitfalls that South Africa might someday face. For example, Uganda under Idi Amin Dada had become a madhouse. Tutu’s letters from this period are remarkably prescient. He took Islam seriously and saw that Christianity had to address the continent’s appalling poverty: “How do you speak about a God who loves you, a redeemer, a saviour, when you live like an animal?” Having absorbed liberation theologians, he moved on to a specifically black theology.

In 1975, as Tutu returned to serve as dean of St. Mary’s Cathedral in Johannesburg, the Afrikaner government moved to further disenfranchise millions of blacks. Sensing that the poorest townships could explode, Tutu publicly pleaded, “Please do not provoke us into despair and hopelessness. Please for God’s sake.” Privately he wrote President John Vorster a long letter of warning:

Freedom, Sir, is indivisible. The whites of this land will not be free until all sections of our community are genuinely free… . I am writing to you, Sir, because I have a growing nightmarish fear that unless something drastic is done very soon then bloodshed and violence are going to happen in South Africa almost inevitably.

Within six weeks, the Soweto uprising began almost literally on Tutu’s doorstep.

Tutu faced a difficult balancing act: voicing black discontent while leading a largely white parish. Alternately charming and challenging them, he appealed to their Afrikaner heritage, recalling that their forebears had endured British concentration camps. Somewhat to the bewilderment of other black leaders, he patiently courted Vorster’s successor, P. W. Botha, explaining that even Moses continued to reason with Pharaoh. But white liberals grew nervous when Tutu called for a boycott of South African products.

What scared whites most about Tutu was that he would not renounce armed struggle. The use of violence was, of course, a desperate measure—but blacks, he said, were desperate. Tutu professed himself “flabbergasted at how most of the Western world turned pacifist all of a sudden. The same Western world lauded to the skies the underground resistance movements during the last world war.”

The farther Tutu waded into the fight, the braver he became, especially after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984. (From what Allen has learned, the Nobel committee selected Tutu because he was “less controversial” than some other South African candidates. State broadcasters thought otherwise and gave his award little mention.) Believing victory against apartheid to be inevitable, he also spoke against black violence—even threatening to leave the country should it get out of hand.

Tutu’s nature at times might have seemed contradictory, but Allen says,

Tutu the ebullient extrovert and Tutu the meditative priest who needed six or seven hours a day in silence were two sides of the same coin. One could not exist without the other; in particular, his extraordinary capacity to communicate with warmth, compassion, and humor depended on the regeneration of personal resources, which in turn depended on the iron self-discipline of his prayers.

Perhaps. Compared to, say, Mandela, Tutu was anything but disciplined. “If the Russians were to come to South Africa today then most blacks who reject communism as atheistic and materialistic would welcome them as saviours,” he declared. After standing up to Botha in a shouting match, he admitted, “I don’t know whether that is how Jesus would have handled it. But at that moment I didn’t actually quite mind how Jesus would have handled it. I was going to handle it my way.” He flatly called Ronald Reagan a racist, and fired this off for good measure: “I am quite angry. I think the West, for my part, can go to hell.”

Such bluster made it possible for people to miss that he was right about so many things—disinvestment, for example. Even if disinvestment threw blacks out of work, Tutu argued, at least they would be suffering “with a purpose.” And disinvestment did succeed, causing the value of the Rand to plunge and pressuring the government toward reform. Operating by intuition rather than calculation, Tutu knew when it was safe to press an advantage. Never were his instincts better than in September 1989, when F. W. de Klerk took office. Without consulting other leaders or obtaining legal permission, Tutu called for a march. Thirty thousand people filled the streets of Cape Town, and peaceful protests broke out all over the country. That was the turning point: within months, Mandela was freed from prison, and apartheid was beginning to crumble.

Allen was Tutu’s media secretary and has known the archbishop for 30 years. One might have expected a tame, worshipful “authorized” biography of South Africa’s black Anglican archbishop (now emeritus), but this one really captures a full man. Heavily researched and benefiting from Allen’s long experience as a journalist, it will probably remain definitive.

The book’s most fascinating chapters tell of Tutu’s work with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to which Allen was an eyewitness. Believing that apartheid had damaged whites as well as blacks, Tutu put the nation on a very Christian path toward repentance, restitution and forgiveness. “There is no future without forgiveness,” he insisted. Some proud figures, such as Botha and de Klerk, did not want forgiveness, and others, such as Winnie Mandela, offered only slender apologies. But Tutu’s commission went a long way toward reestablishing ubuntu-botho, or humaneness, in South Africa.

Tutu has not shied away from other contentious issues. Allen notes Tutu’s support for homosexuals, AIDS patients and Palestinians—all victims of apartheid, he says.

Allen tells one of the great chapters in our faith, one that we may not have fully appreciated until now. An unlikely prophet, Desmond Tutu brought the Christian gospel into a real world of slums, pass laws, detentions and deferred hopes. He merits the highest praise anyone can give a mere human being: he made the gospel come alive.

Lawrence Wood is pastor of the United Methodist Church in Fremont, Michigan.