Words becoming flesh

Treadmill books that make the past come alive | Marvin Olasky

Christmas celebrates the Word becoming Flesh, but writers who want readers to understand both past and present have a need for their words also to become flesh: They need to make names and dates come alive for their readers. That's particularly the case when historians and journalists want to make our hearts as well as our minds aware of the ravages of sin: Human interest holds our attention.

In This Immoral Trade: Slavery in the 21st Century (Monarch, 2006), Caroline Cox and John Marks give the human stories and specific detail behind what might otherwise seem like a statistic too immense to grasp: "At least 27 million men, women and children are slaves today."

This Immoral Trade has moving stories about what's becoming known—slavery in Sudan and Uganda—and also what's largely unreported: the sex slaves, forced porters, and child soldiers of Burma. A section on the history of Islamic slavery is particularly salient because so little has been written about it; as Bernard Lewis stated, "The documentation for a study of Islamic slavery is almost endless; its exploration has barely begun."