January-February 2003 > The Browser

Books

Alan Dershowitz's Perfect World

“Paint a picture of your ideal world,” Debra Trione asked 50 “of the most powerful and influential leaders in America.” A Perfect World (Andrews McMeel Publishing, $16.95, paper) presents the results. It includes pictures and comment by several Harvardians, among them correspondent James Fallows ’70; chemist Dudley Herschbach, Ph.D. ’58, Jf ’59; economist Alice M. Rivlin, Ph.D. ’58; economist Lester Thurow, Ph.D. ’65; and Frankfurter professor of law Alan Dershowitz. "I guess if I had one wish for the world today—and this is going to make my mother very unhappy—it is that we become less religious," writes Dershowitz. Here are his painting and his vision of a perfect world:

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I don’t know how to draw it, but I’m thinking here of a world in which people maintain their differences but lower the walls and the barriers, a world in which people care about one another and live for this world, and not for some hereafter. A world in which people do good things because that’s the right thing to do, not because God says to do it. What this is supposed to represent is different kinds of people all being equal, being tied together at the bottom, free to be different at the top, and being limited by the circle of the planet, in life here on Earth and not in some hereafter.