J. K. McClarren, Mexican Assignment, 1957; Funk & Wagnallis, 246 pages. The McClarrens were family friends as I grew up in Arlington. VA, and this book came out during my eighth grade. Mr. McClarren was Assistant Director of Information at the United States Department of Agriculture at the time. This may have been the year that I got all books for Christmas. I guess there has always been an issue when federal officials write and publish their own books - they can, with pre-clearance - as even CIA employees have - and Internet blogging would obviously become an issue, as I have noted elsewhere on this website.
The subject matter of this novel, however, turned out to be timely four decades later: foot-and-mouth disease (aftosa). Remember the outbreak in Europe in the pre 9/11 months of early 2001, when they made people sanitize their shoes at airports? That went away. It's been supplanted by concerns about mad cow, but especially other zoonosis like avian influenze. A recent graduate from Texas A&M must travel to Mexico, fight local customs and power politics to investigate the epidemic. Today, agricultural habits in the developing world (as in China and southeast Asia, where people live in close proximity to their animals, and in Africa, where there can be ties to HIV) are seen as an issue for the economic well-being and even population survival across the entire planet. Public health is a collectivist concept. This novel seems a propos in view of recent reports about poultry smuggling, which could spread avian flu
Edward Hughes Pruden, the long term pastor of the First Baptist Church of the City of Washington DC in the 1940s and 50s, and who oversaw the 1955 sanctuary building on 16th Street, not too far from the White House, authored Interpreters Needed (1951, Judson Press), a series of sermons. An important quote from p. 29:
"Many Americans wondered why Hitler was able to rise so rapidly to power in Germany in 1933, when presumably the nation was predominately a nation of church members. The answer is to be found in the fact that the German churches majored upon doctrinal and theological matters, while giving very meager attention to any political or sociological interest."
He often spoke about the lack of spiritual progress when there is material progress. He often criticized segregation, even in the late 1940s when I first started going to church in the older building (the new sanctuary opened on Christmas Day 1955; I was baptized with my mother in late January 1956.)
Dr. Pruden lost a son to carbon monoxide poisoning in a dorm room on a North Carolina campus around 1960.