In the middle of the night, our surrogate Adam and Eve, 7-year-old Mara and her younger brother Dann, are kidnapped from their home in the southern region of the continent called Ifrik. They are deposited at a safe house farther north where intermittent droughts and floods have made the land all but uninhabitable except by giant lizards, insects and a few hearty survivors known as “the rock people.” So begins Mara and Dann’s arduous and perilous journey ever farther north toward their Eden, the lush and clement northern coast of Ifrik. As they grow into adolescents, and then young adults, they travel through hundreds of miles of terrain dotted by various troubled civilizations.

As ever, Lessing is concerned with race and class in her (this time) parabolic Africa. For their protection, Mara and Dann’s true identities are kept from them, but they are, in fact, the only surviving members of the Mahondi royal family. The Mahondi, a race of people who once ruled the entire continent of Ifrik, are nearly extinct and openly hated by their former subjects. Mara and Dann are the sole heirs to their slain parents’ kingdom; the Alexei and Anastasia Romanovs of their time and place, saved from execution by their beneficent kidnappers and sheltered from their pursuers by a network of loyalists. In their eventual Eden, Mara and Dann form a kind of commune with their companions of various races and classes.

In a retrospective introduction to the Vintage edition of “Canopus in Argos,” Lessing commented on the tendency of reviewers and academics to dismiss science fiction and fantasy as lesser genres. The question of what constitutes “literature” has been raised again recently over Tom Wolfe’s “A
Man in Full,” which both Norman Mailer and John Updike have dismissed as unworthy of the name. Is “Mara and Dann” literature? It lacks the explicit intellectual rigor of “The Golden Notebook,” but because it will make you think about and vividly imagine some of the deeper questions of human existence, “Mara and Dann” must qualify, in some sense, as literature.

Lessing’s prose here is deceptively simple. There are no grand pronouncements, no outright disquisitions on imperialism, postcolonialism, incest (Mara and Dann struggle with their romantic attachment to each other), ecosystemic disaster, the second sex, the failure of communism or the persistence of slavery in Africa today, but they, and much more, are implied, embedded in Lessing’s spare portrait of a world in which everything and nothing about nature and culture has changed radically. If there is a theme, or aphorism, to be gleaned from Lessing’s storybook view into the distant future, it is not the familiar conviction that “This, too, shall pass,” but, after Nietzsche, the bitter conclusion that “This, too, will happen again … and again, and again.”

“First,” writes Shalit, “I want to invite conservatives to take the claims of the feminists seriously,” i.e. date rape, anorexia, low self-esteem. “As for feminists,” she continues, “I want to invite them to consider whether the cause of all this unhappiness might be something other than the patriarchy … I propose that the woes besetting the modern young woman … are all expressions of a society which has lost its respect for female modesty.”

What does Shalit mean by “modesty”? She certainly doesn’t mean that women should walk around with everything but their eyes covered in black robes, or that they should be seen and not heard. She merely wants to suggest that modesty is a kind of innocence, both physical and emotional, that exists naturally in women more than men. Preserving it means that women shouldn’t be ashamed of their romantic hopes, their desires to be courted and loved and not just banged and left. It means they should feel encouraged to keep their virginity as long as it suits them, without incurring the ridicule of their peers. It means they shouldn’t feel bad about what embarrasses them or makes them squeamish, whether it’s being forced to learn about “69″ in fourth grade, as Shalit and her classmates were, or as adults, enduring the sight of their boyfriend’s Playboy lying around the house. (In Shalit’s case, and as she quickly learned, in many of her female classmates’ cases, it meant not sharing a bathroom with men in her dorm at Williams College.)

In short, says Shalit, from date-rape to stalking to anorexia, “This culture [meaning post-sexual revolution culture] has not been kind to women,” and changing that means recognizing that women, on the whole, are less crass than men, perhaps even more fragile emotionally, sexually and physically, and that women should be proud of this and thereby inspire more honorable behavior in men.

You may find Shalit’s tone too cloying, in places, but that may be less because Shalit is too earnest or too sheltered to be taken seriously (she is, in fact, a first-rate intellectual who has done her homework) and more because we are too cynical. Some of Shalit’s more jaded readers will feel tempted to hurl her book against the proverbial wall. They should resist the temptation.

In part, they’ll be annoyed for good reasons. Shalit has too much faith in her young intellect. She is long on brainpower, but short on experience. Her argument is almost too tidy to make sense in the real world. As she tells us from the start, she is the daughter of an economist “of the Chicago-school variety.” She is enamored of theorems that work, like math problems, on their own hermetic terms. As such, Shalit’s people can seem more like integers than fraught human beings. She feeds her sad girls into the modesty machine, and poof, the cured product plops out the other end. Shalit is sometimes too sure that a return to female modesty and male honor will make the world new again. But at least Shalit is offering us a course of action that we can try, which is more than we can say for the bulk of her carping peers.

But if the modesty package as a whole turns out not to be quite the new deal Shalit hopes it will be, what of lasting value can we take from “A Return to Modesty”? First, there’s the fundamental truth that men and women are not the same, but that equality of the sexes can be achieved without making women into men. Oddly enough, as Shalit points out, the most unfortunate legacy of the sexual revolution has been more misogyny. “A young woman today has basically two options open to her: to pretend she’s a man, or to be feminine in a desperate, victim-like way.”

Both alternatives are misogynist. Either way, women are still left playing by men’s rules, and they are not built for it. As Shalit insists, “the game isn’t equal … because men always win the game of vulgarity,” and physical aggression, and casual sex, and no-fault divorce, and so on. Second, by teaching this generation’s young men to be honorable, and its young women to protect themselves, we’re likely to have more immediate success in righting our socio-sexual ills. This is a distinctly conservative argument for personal responsibility: “If there could be such a thing as a ‘philosophy of modesty,’ I think it would be more an argument from internal inspiration than an argument from external authority.” In the end, governments and laws have less power over people than people have over themselves. Wendy Shalit is an original thinker who will be goosing us with her ideas for a long time to come. If, in the end, her prescription for a better society is too rosy and catch-all, it offers, nonetheless, some of the best observations anyone has made in recent years about the plight of young women.

If you know anything about McKibben’s publisher, that paradigmatic corporate behemoth Simon & Schuster, you know that “Hundred Dollar Holiday” is the kind of leaflet — at 96 pages, it can’t rightly be called a book — that their sales force positively cooed over. It’s money for nothing, fluff in a brown paper bag. It’s worldly wisdom whittled down to the size and scope of a Zagat’s for Wilmington, Del. It’s a cash grab Christmas “book” that, irony of all ironies, subtlety of all subtleties, tells you not to spend so much money on Christmas. Is this marketing cynicism at its worst and cleverest, or is this boardroom cupidity rising to new heights?

If McKibben really means what he says in “Hundred Dollar Holiday” — that the real grinches of our culture are not well-meaning, cushy ascetics like him, but “those relentless commercial forces who have spent more than a century trying to convince us that Christmas does come from a store” — then what is he doing publishing at Simon & Schuster, which, in the publishing world, at least, is surely one of the best examples of commercial force around? What’s more, Simon & Schuster stays afloat largely by how much it sells at Christmas time. It subsists on the profits it makes on insipid Christmas gift books that nobody needs, books like “Hundred Dollar Holiday.” Yet McKibben remains willfully blind to this whopping contradiction. So much so that he even makes a euphemistic sales pitch for his non-book in the very pages of the thing itself: “So you may want to loan people your copy of this book as a way of trying to enlist them in your plans for a merrier Christmas.”

Later, in a more direct attempt to justify himself, McKibben tries to preemptively answer his critics — notable among them has become Margaret Talbot, who took him to task in the New Republic a few months ago for his shallow moralizing. Talbot reminded us that by advising consumers not to spend so much on Christmas, McKibben is tinkering with economic realities he either doesn’t understand or fails to address. It sounds good to preach about the warm and fuzzy meaning of Christmas, but, as Talbot argues, spending less in December would leave a great many people out in the cold: “I would like to know … what McKibben has to say about the jobs that would be lost — starting with minimum wage retail positions — if all of the privileged Americans at whom his exhortations are directed quit throwing their money around at Christmas.” McKibben’s response? “Change in Christmas traditions will come slowly enough that most retailers will be able to adapt.” Is this McKibben the armchair economist speaking, or McKibben the happy-go-lucky social reformer? It’s hard to know which is worse. The fact is, shops would founder if they lost their December income, and the economy would likewise falter, creating greater hardship for everyone, especially the poorest of the poor.

In “Hundred Dollar Holiday,” McKibben is selling us a ruse of rectitude, not the real thing. Consider his ultimate justification for not spending money at Christmas: “Perhaps you’re simply squirreling [your unspent Christmas money] away in the bank — which is precisely what economists are always telling us we need to do in order to boost productivity and reverse our lagging savings rate.” Ah, so perhaps that $100 isn’t being saved for a holier Christmas Day at the homeless shelter (as McKibben suggested it might be earlier in the book), but for a happier rainy day back at the family ranch. Maybe McKibben’s book should have been called “Putting the ‘No’ Back in Noel: How to Stiff Your Relatives at Christmas and Convince Them You’re a Better Person for it.” Do yourself and the economy a big favor this Christmas. Take a leaf from McKibben’s jeremiad, and don’t buy his book.

A rabbi’s son who would later convert to Protestantism, Klemperer fought for Germany in World War I. After the war, in 1920, he became a professor of Romance languages and literature at Dresden Technical University, but was dismissed in 1935 for being a Jew. Because he had converted to Protestantism and was married to a woman who was considered an “Aryan” — and because he had served on the front lines in WWI — Klemperer was treated marginally better than others classified as Jews “by law” or “by descent.” In fact, it was this strange confluence of factors that forced Klemperer to endure the indignities of “living without rights” as a Jew in Hitler’s Germany while at the same time allowing him narrowly to escape being sent to a concentration camp.

He walked the streets of Dresden with a strange kind of relative immunity, but he also walked them as a Jew and, most importantly, as a man equipped with discerning eyes, ears and intellect. His diary is filled with harrowing details: Klemperer notices a swastika printed on a child’s toy ball as early as 1934; he tells of a rabbi “with his beard alight” being chased around the market fountain by a mob on New Year’s Day, 1939; and he writes of his “unsuspecting tomcat,” whom he will be forced to poison when he and his wife are evicted from their house — they are forbidden to have pets because they are, as a couple, considered Jewish. Aside from dutifully recording these small but telling instances of mounting terror, which in themselves are so affecting, Klemperer struggles, as a scholar, to make sense of the Zeitgeist they express, as well as the anger and depression they engender in him.

“If one day the situation were reversed and the fate of the vanquished lay in my hands, then I would let all the ordinary folk go and even some of the leaders, who might perhaps after all have had honorable intentions and not known what they were doing. But I would have all the intellectuals strung up, and the professors three feet higher than the rest; they would be left hanging from the lampposts for as long as was compatible with hygiene … The sadistic machine simply rolls over us … We continue in this simultaneously crushing and stupefying chaos, the empty and breathless busyness, this absolute uncertainty.”

When Klemperer spends eight days in a local jail for failing to “black out” a window one night, he passes the time thinking even more deeply and existentially about human nature and human life. His terse observations are stunningly beautiful: “We know nothing at all except what we have experienced ourselves. Pity is such a shabby thing … I had arrived at awareness of my cell again, at the feeling of being in a cage … the torment of the four paces in a state of semi-stupefaction began again. They were accompanied by a single line of poetry, which I constantly repeated: ‘The feeling of his nullity pierces him.’”

One hesitates a long time before applying the hackneyed words “required reading” to a book, especially a book like “I Will Bear Witness,” which most readers will find difficult to attempt. Yet what other words can one choose for a book that is, as Hegel might have said, the embodied spirit of history itself, or, better yet, history self-consciously writing itself? The act of reading Klemperer’s diary is also a continuation of that process, an act of history-making all its own, for, as Klemperer wrote: “Historical development takes more time than an individual human being has.”