Aaron P. Bernstein/Reuters

Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX), Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, speaks at news conference announcing the passage of the 'Tax Cuts and Jobs Act' at the Capitol in Washington, Nov. 16.

Republican leaders promised tax reform would streamline things so much that 9 out of 10 Americans could file their taxes on a postcard.

It’s not that simple for David Fraser.

He has four children, four rental houses, a small business, and no idea how the tax bill will shake out for him and his family. But living in Illinois, which has high income and property taxes, he has the sense he’s not going to come out on top.

“We may finally be forced to move out of state. This hurts tremendously. I am waiting for [Congress’s] final bill before I meet with my CPA to assess the potential damage,” he says. “That being said, I still think the corporate rate cut is justified.”

From policy analysts to journalists, many have criticized President Trump’s tax bill as hurtful to middle-class Americans, and a betrayal of his populist campaign promises – particularly since tax cuts for individuals are set to expire after 2025. And indeed, that could be a liability in the next elections among a key segment of GOP voters. But polling and Monitor interviews reveal that a broad spectrum of Republicans in fact support the bill – even if it’s not great for their own bottom line.

In many cases it is a lukewarm support, not least of all because Republican leaders have done little to address the other side of the equation: government spending and the ballooning national debt.

“We are on an unsustainable path,” says Mr. Fraser. “Too many times, Republicans campaign on fiscal conservatism, but once they get into office, they find ways to spend money we do not have. I believe tax cuts will help on the revenue side, but spending must be curbed.”

Varied opinions in conservative ranks

Democrats have been largely united in their opposition to lowering taxes on corporations and wealthy Americans, but Republicans were much more divided ahead of Congress’s tax bill votes, according to a Pew Research Center survey published in September.

While 41 percent of Republicans or those who lean Republican supported lowering taxes for corporations, 32 percent supported raising them. When it came to Americans making more than $250,000, there was a similar gap: 36 percent in favor of easing their tax burden, 26 percent opposed.

Now that versions of the tax bill have passed both the House and Senate, the GOP is closing in on its first major legislative victory since Trump’s election. On Friday, congressional Republicans announced they had finalized the reconciliation between the two versions passed by both houses of Congress. More than two-thirds of Republicans say they approve of the bill, according to a recent Gallup poll.

Mark Anthony, co-host of the conservative talk radio show, Patriot and the Preacher, says most of the listeners who have called in lately are business owners and executives who are excited about the corporate tax cut “because they believe that’s going to stimulate hiring and innovation – that’s a good thing for the economy.

“What they’re not excited about … is this language coming from the other side: It’s the end of the world, it’s Armageddon, 10,000 people are going to die,” he says, the latter a reference to the dire prediction about the impact of removing the individual mandate, which requires people to have health insurance or face a tax penalty.

It’s not just Democrats who worry about the impact.

“The only thing the government does is screw the working people,” says Scott, a Trump voter from Georgia contacted by email, who asked that his last name not be published. He says he’ll do everything he can to vote Republicans out of power in 2018. “What is the next step, short of armed insurrection?”

It’s average workers like Scott who helped Trump win the election in key battleground states like Wisconsin and Ohio, and a loss of their support could bode ill for Republicans in 2018 and 2020 – especially if the president doesn’t deliver on other key election promises.

“If Donald Trump is running for reelection and basically there’s been no infrastructure built, no wall, trade deals are roughly the same, people are still getting laid off because of foreign competition and the tax bill hasn’t given them anything at all, I think a lot of the economic populists are going to look up and say … we put our faith in this guy, it didn’t work. Does somebody else seem to be offering us something different?” says Henry Olsen, coauthor of The Four Faces of the Republican Party and the Fight for the 2016 Presidential Nomination and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington.

As the House-Senate conference committee worked to finalize the legislation, some of the sticking points involved how friendly the bill would be to average households. On Friday, Republicans announced they had enlarged the child tax credit for low-income families, in response to a threatened no vote by Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who said he wanted to see working-class families benefit more from the overhaul.

Julio Cortez/AP

Frank Roselli stands on his front yard while letting his dog go for a walk, Friday, Nov. 3, in Bloomfield, N.J. Roselli, a widower who retired two years ago, is thinking of selling his home and moving to southern New Jersey, where he could potentially afford property taxes. Residents of states with high property taxes are among those who may take a hit under the new tax bill, since it would cap state and local tax deductions.

One family's tax tally

Trump voters Chris Fleissner, a CPA in Wisconsin, and her husband Dick, have been particularly watchful about how much they’re paying the government. One year they saved every single receipt, crunched the numbers, and calculated that between Social Security, Medicare, state income tax, federal income tax, excise tax, gasoline tax, and sales taxes, they were paying more than 48 percent of their income to the government.

When they do the numbers on Trump’s proposed tax cuts, Ms. Fleissner says, it goes something like this: They currently get a standard deduction of $12,700, plus a personal exemption of $4,050 each, for a total of close to $21,000 shielded from federal income tax. So the proposal to raise the standard deduction to $24,000 doesn’t do much for them.

“I don’t feel like we’re getting a tax break,” says Fleissner. But despite that, she still thinks overall the bill will be good for America because it’s important to cut corporate taxes – a move supporters say will make American businesses more competitive globally.

And while many decry Trump’s giving corporations a tax break that they’ll just pass on to their stockholders, retiree Mack Teasley in Abilene, Kan., notes that includes most average participants in retirement plans.

“In this day and age, any American who has a 401(k) … they are a stockholder, whether they realize it or not,” says Mr. Teasley, a retired Air Force intelligence officer and former deputy director of the Eisenhower Presidential Library who has voted Republican for 45 years.

He’s optimistic about the bill’s impact on average Americans. But when it comes to fiscal responsibility, he admits the Republicans have changed their tune to avoid becoming a minority party.

Indeed, four years ago, 7 in 10 Republicans said the budget deficit should be the top priority; today, only 37 percent hold that view, according to the 2017 American Values Survey released Dec. 5. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the tax bill would increase the deficit by $1.4 trillion.

For Travis Sawyer, a young Republican in Abilene, the national debt is such a pressing issue that he’d be willing to forgo the money he’d get from tax cuts in order to stabilize America’s finances.

“I am a fan of tax cuts…. I love being able to keep more of my own money,” says Mr. Sawyer, a financial adviser who guesstimates that he would likely get a couple thousand dollars back if Congress finalizes the tax bill. “Two thousand dollars would be great, it would make next Christmas phenomenal…. But I would have zero issues not seeing a penny of that if I knew that we were actively paying down the debt.”

Cameron Bloch/AP/File

Traffic goes around New York's Columbus Circle and its 70-foot-tall column topped by a statue of Christopher Columbus. A movement to abolish Columbus Day and replace it with Indigenous Peoples Day has new momentum, but the gesture to recognize victims of European colonialism has also prompted outrage from some Italian Americans, who say eliminating their festival of ethnic pride is culturally insensitive, too.

When Joseph Guagliardo was a street kid growing up in Red Hook in Brooklyn, the statue of Christopher Columbus at the southwest corner of Central Park in Manhattan made him swell with pride.

His grandmother, Giavanna, who arrived from Sicily near the turn of the century and, like many immigrants, Anglicized her name and went by Jenny, would take him on the subway to see the 76-foot-high memorial at the center of Columbus Circle. She’d tell him the story of how Italian immigrants, most with barely enough money to get by, scraped together enough to donate the statue to the city – a tradition he now continues with his twin teenage daughters, Isabella and Emma.

“My grandmother had three pictures hanging on a great big wall her entire life: the pope, Jesus, and Columbus,” says Mr. Guagliardo, who heads The National Council of Columbia Associations, a Brooklyn-based coalition of Italian-American civic groups from around the United States that continue to see the explorer as an icon of American resilience.

But the famous memorial, donated to the city by immigrants in 1892, the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s first voyage, has now been caught up in the nationwide controversy over the meaning of history, the purpose of public monuments, and the troubling connections many have to the country’s history of white supremacy.

“But for me it’s personal, I take it personal,” says Guagliardo. For him, the history of the monument itself recalls a time when Italians were considered an inferior, darker-skinned minority and its immigrants had to fight to become part of what they saw as the promise of America.

“My grandmother always told me that Christopher Columbus was a voyager, that he took a journey, the same way my grandparents did, on both sides. She never said he was a saint, she never said he was perfect,” he continues. “Just like him, they didn’t know where they were going, they didn’t know what they were headed toward in a new world. She thought if you push beyond your own limitations, you’ll be successful, you’ll succeed.”

The controversy over the history of Columbus’s legacy is hardly new, but after the deadly events of Charlottesville, Va., in August, when groups of white nationalists and Neo-Nazis held a “Unite the Right” rally to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee in a public park, the stakes have been raised in ways Guagliardo never imagined.

Later this month, a mayoral advisory commission will conclude a 90-day review of what Mayor Bill de Blasio called an effort to remove “all symbols of hate on city property,” and offer recommendations about the fate of the Columbus monument and other controversial memorials in the city.

'Complicated moral and historical kaleidoscope'

Yet the controversies in New York have in many ways presented a more “complicated moral and historical kaleidoscope” than the debates over Confederate monuments, some scholars suggest. The issues here have not involved celebrating defeated generals who rebelled against the United States and fought to preserve slavery – and whose memorials are currently being embraced by a visible and vocal cadre of white supremacists.

Some of the issues, in fact, put many New York Italians on the other side of the statue debate. The mayor’s advisory commission is also evaluating a statue of Theodore Roosevelt on horseback, standing in front of the city’s beloved American Museum of Natural History, just a few blocks north of Columbus Circle.

For many Italian-Americans, the nation’s rough-riding 26th president and former New York City police chief is remembered as much for his views on white supremacy, eugenics, and his casual approval of the 1891 lynchings of eight Italian-American men in New Orleans, just 1-1/2 years before the statue of Columbus was dedicated to the city of New York.

“The debates we’re having bring to light how multiple and often competing narratives exist about people and historical circumstances, and it is forcing an effort to try and reconcile these narratives,” says Robert Futrell, professor of sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

“These are big questions that go beyond an individual monument and to the question of history, stories, and how a multicultural society views itself,” he says.

'How do we weigh the good versus the bad?'

For many Americans, including many in New York’s Puerto Rican community, Columbus hardly represents American resilience. From the moment he arrived in the New World, he immediately seized six Taino natives, remarking in his log that the people here would make good servants.

He went on to be a brutal ruler, enslaving many in the local population – including selling children into sexual slavery – and resorting to massacre and mutilation to maintain control. Within 60 years of his arrival, only a few hundred of an estimated population of nearly 250,000 Tainos survived the brutality and disease brought by European colonists, historians say. The arrival of Columbus in many ways marked the death knell for the native civilizations that had flourished for millennia, inaugurating a history of genocide and destruction.  

“People, I think, are engaged with some really serious moral and ethical considerations of, how do we weigh the good versus the bad?” says Erika Doss, author of “Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America” and professor of American studies at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Ind.

“Supporters often say, 'You can’t take that down, that’s our history,’ ” she says. “In fact, this is memory, this is not history per se. So let’s talk about what we consider the values of today. Do these memories, these monuments and memorials uphold those values, support those values, or are they valueless?”

And the context of communal memory matters. Defenders of Confederate memorials in the South have denounced their removals as “the hatred being leveled against our glorious ancestors by radical leftists who seek to erase our history.”

But critics point out that the majority of the nation’s Confederate monuments were erected during two particularly tense times: the early 20th century, when states were instituting Jim Crow segregation; and the 1950s and 1960s, during the height of the civil rights movement, according to an analysis by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

“They were less about the Civil War and cultural values and more about racial intimidation,” says Professor Doss.

Why Italian-Americans embraced Columbus

By contrast, Italian New Yorkers focus on their collective memories at the end of the 19th century, when tens of thousands of immigrants arrived seeking a better life. Yet they were often reviled for their language, Catholic faith, and foreign traditions – which at the time did not include a reverence for Columbus.

That reverence, in fact, was part of American folklore, created in part by writers like New York’s Washington Irving, who portrayed the Italian-born voyager as a hero who rejected the old world and embraced the new. The new republic, seeking a founding mythology, went on to name cities and streets after the person who “discovered America.”

So Italian immigrants adopted Columbus as one of their own, a symbol of their own portion of the new life offered by America. He became an icon to their own connection to the New World and the voyages so many had made.

“And at the time, we were suffering under the American flag, too,” says Guagliardo. “Eight Italians were acquitted of a homicide in New Orleans, and then they were lynched!” To this day, many Italian New Yorkers maintain an enormous antipathy toward Roosevelt.

Indeed, Roosevelt was known for a whole range of things: being a soldier, being an early environmentalist, being president, being the guy who busted Wall Street trusts.

But he has also become potentially problematic, given his well-known views on Anglo-Saxon supremacy and his near proto-Nazi ideas on the need for better breeding.

“Some day we will realize that the prime duty, the inescapable duty of the good citizen of the right type is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world,” he wrote to a leading eugenics researcher in 1913, “and that we have no business to permit the perpetuation of citizens of the wrong type.”

Understanding the past on its own terms

And Roosevelt was hardly the only famous figure to hold such views, scholars note. Winston Churchill, Alexander Graham Bell, and Margaret Sanger each promoted eugenics and held racist views.

“A common fallacy in history is to attribute current beliefs and moral interpretations to historical actors,” says Mitchell Langbert, a professor at the Koppelman School of Business at Brooklyn College. “The past needs to be understood in its own terms, and the effects of admittedly brutal historical actors like Columbus are not in the immoral things that they did … but in one or two unique things they did that changed their world.”

“Roosevelt is another story, because he was one of the good guys, relatively speaking,” argues Professor Langbert, noting the progressive Republican’s 1905 speech on the state of race relations, when he warned an audience at the New York City Republican Club: “The debasement of the blacks will, in the end, carry with it the debasement of the whites.”

The commission is also considering another statue in Central Park, that of J. Marion Sims, an Alabama doctor considered one of the greatest surgeons of his day. As the so-called “father of modern gynecology,” he developed breakthrough treatments for childbirth injuries, and he founded the first hospital in New York devoted to treating women.

Yet Sims’ work was conducted on female slaves in Alabama, often without anesthesia and, by definition, without their consent.

'How far will this extend?'

If the debate has raised serious moral and ethical considerations of how New Yorkers and others weigh the good versus the bad in history, it has also raised the context of how people celebrate the good, and the message statues send about the values a society chooses to uphold. The Roosevelt statue shows the Rough Rider on horseback flanked by two attendants: a Native American man in a headdress and a bare-chested African man standing on the ground beneath him.

“These monuments, particularly the Statue to Roosevelt, directly communicate a message of superiority and inferiority along racialized lines,” said Native American artist Jackson Polys, who recently joined more than 100 scholars and artists to call for its removal. “The danger is that this message is normalized daily, not only by adults but by more than 300,000 school children per year, reproducing harmful divisions. How far will this extend to our future generations?”

It’s a process that scholars say every society has confronted as time, and memory, press on.

“Nothing’s permanent. Even though we have these bronze and marble memorials in our midst, they’re not necessarily permanent or fixed in terms of how we think about ourselves – and in America the national narrative is constantly shifting,” says Doss. “From the time of the Egyptians, Romans, and so on, in fact, memorials and monuments were constantly being removed, defaced, vandalized in order to uphold current social values.”

When the man who raped Saira asked for her hand in marriage, she was disgusted but unsurprised.

She was just 16. Her rapist expected she would keep her mouth shut if they were married, she figured. He wouldn’t be the first Malaysian to protect himself that way from prosecution.

But Saira would not comply. The Muslim schoolgirl took her case to court, and her attacker was sentenced to eight years in jail.

“There might be pressures from the outside, but this is where you have to be strong,” says Saira, not her real name, about resisting the unlikely marriage proposal. Today, she’s a confident 19-year-old, working at a full-time job.

If underage marriage were outlawed, say girls’ rights activists, there would be no risk that teen rape victims could be silenced by forced loyalty to their new husbands.

But as conservative strands of Islamic opinion gain influence in multi-ethnic, multi-religious Malaysia, child advocates are finding it an uphill battle to make marriage a matter for adults only.

Courts, but not necessarily justice

Lobbyists pressuring the government to criminalize child marriage “were getting quite a lot of momentum” at one stage, says Tham Hui Ying, vice president of Malaysia’s Association of Women Lawyers. “But suddenly it became a hot button issue. It’s religious,” so politicians are “not going to push to outright ban child marriage,” she says.

Malaysia operates a dual legal system. Civil law sets the minimum age of marriage at 18. But under Islamic law, which applies to the Muslim majority on family and morality issues, girls may marry as young as 12 with approval from a Sharia court. 

Underage marriage cuts across ethnic and religious lines. About 1,000 Muslim teens get married every year, according to government figures. Fewer than half that number of underage non-Muslims wed, needing the consent of their state’s Chief Minister.

Nobody knows how many rapists avoid jail through marriage; rapes and out-of-court settlements often go unreported. But two court cases have galvanized efforts to outlaw child marriage altogether.

In 2013, a Sharia court in the eastern state of Sabah granted a 40-year-old restaurant manager permission to marry a 12-year-old girl he had raped. A civil court dropped the rape case when the man later said he was going to marry his victim.

That decision flew in the face of Malaysian law, which does not allow rapists to escape prosecution by marriage. But it illustrated how far courts – influenced by customary law or cultural habits – sometimes disregard the law of the land.

It also showed how difficult it can be for prosecutors to mount a successful case against a rapist without their key witness. If an underage victim has married her aggressor, she may well feel duty-bound to protect her husband.

Alarmed by the ruling, which triggered international headlines and public outrage the Sabah Women’s Action Resources Group (SAWO) led calls to the Attorney General to proceed with the criminal case. Eventually it went to trial. In 2014 the rapist, still married to his child bride, was sentenced to 12 years in jail.

“We wanted this case to set a precedent for other cases in the future,” says SAWO’s president, Winnie Yee, in a telephone interview.

It did not do so, though. Last year a court in the eastern state of Sarawak again ignored the law, dismissing charges against a man accused of raping a 14-year-old girl after defense lawyers announced the pair had married.

Following pressure from rights groups, a retrial was ordered. But when the girl was called to testify she refused to give evidence and asked for the case to be withdrawn.

A shifting religious landscape

Ms. Yee had hoped the conviction SAWO helped secure in Sabah would give impetus to her campaign for a ban on child marriage, but “there haven’t been any massive changes,” she says. “We are a bit disappointed.  We need public awareness and a huge outcry.”

That has yet to materialize at a time when religious sentiment is on the rise and when parents are anxious to prevent pre-marital sexual relations and pregnancies.

 “Muslim conservatism is permeating our society right now,” says Shareena Sheriff, a program manager at Sisters in Islam, a women’s group urging law reform on child marriage. And that is making child marriage a religious issue rather than a rights issue.

Malay Muslims form the majority of Malaysia’s 30 million citizens, but the nation is also home to sizable ethnic Chinese and Indian communities, who are mostly Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist.

The tone of increasing Islamic conservatism is divisive, some Malaysians fear. In September, a launderette in southern Malaysia was rebuked by the state’s Sultan for its “Muslim-only” policy. The same month organizers cancelled a craft beer festival in Kuala Lumpur after protests by Islamists.

The trend has been noticeable since the government introduced Islamization policies in the 1980s, and is increasingly influenced by hardline theologies from the Middle East.

Not all Muslims support child marriage. The influential National Fatwa Council has declared the practice harmful, for example.

But the rise of a more austere form of Islam is strengthening religious arguments that defend child marriage, analysts say. And when the ruling party is courting the conservative Muslim vote ahead of elections expected in 2018, the government has little appetite to promote anti-child marriage legislation.

Though Tuan Ibrahim Tuan Man, the deputy president of Malaysia’s biggest Islamist party, insists that marriage does not absolve a rapist of his crime, he does not oppose child marriage on principle.

“The big question is not age, but responsibility,” says Mr. Tuan Ibrahim, whose party is expected to be a kingmaker at the next elections. “In the context of Islam, they (under 18-year-olds) can be married.”

Campaigners calling for a ban on child marriage know that legislation alone won’t be enough to end the practice, deeply ingrained in religious and cultural beliefs, but insist that it’s a good starting point.

The government argues that cultural norms would override any legislation, says Melissa Akhir, a senior advocacy officer at the Penang-based Women’s Centre for Change. “But we think the law must lead the way on rights.”

Outside the monumental former royal palace that looms over the main square of Bucharest, mourners have been laying flowers for days in tribute to a long-deposed and exiled king whom few of them ever knew.

Rows of candles flicker in the cold, and long lines snake around the building. Crowds are waiting hours to pay their respects to King Michael I of Romania, one of the last two surviving World War II European heads of state.

He died Dec. 5 at age 96, some 70 years after being forced to abdicate by the country’s Communist government, reportedly at gunpoint, and then sent into exile.

Even from Britain and Switzerland, where he spent much of his life working, among other things, as a stockbroker, chicken farmer, and commercial pilot, the former monarch commanded widespread respect among ordinary Romanians. His death has prompted nostalgic comparisons with the nation’s present-day political leaders.

“You can’t compare our current political leaders with him,” says Livia Amzar, a middle-aged engineer, as she lays flowers outside the palace where the former king, whose body was flown from Switzerland this week, is lying in state until his funeral on Saturday. That is expected to be a grandiose affair attended by politicians and royalty from across Europe and beyond.

“Maybe a few have thoughts for the country and the people, but not many,” complains Ms. Amzar. King Michael “was a man of great dignity and respect,” she adds. “Romania would be a better place if he had become king again in 1990” after the fall of Communism.

Vadim Ghirda/AP

People pay their last respects to the late Romanian King Michael at the former royal palace in Bucharest. Despite his long exile after the Communist take-over of Romania, Michael retained much popular sympathy and respect. He will be buried on Saturday.

'A moment of dignity'

Michael’s passing comes at a time of considerable political turmoil in Romania, which joined the European Union in 2007. Despite being the fastest-growing economy in Europe, the country has seen escalating confrontations between the government and people.

In February, upwards of half a million demonstrators took to the streets to protest government moves to weaken anti-corruption efforts. Politicians quickly backed down, but subsequent efforts to amend judicial legislation have brought tens of thousands back out in anger.

Against that background, mourning for the former king provides “a moment of dignity in a confusing and noisy political world,” says Radu Magdin, a political consultant. “Romania is okay from a lot of points right now, but we have all these legislative changes and protests. Having this monarch whose main messages were ones of loyalty, principles, it’s such a huge contrast, irrespective of the generations.”

Michael actually ruled Romania twice: as a child between 1927 and 1930, and then again between 1940 and 1947. In 1944, as a 22 year-old, he played a key role in a coup that removed Romania’s pro-Nazi leadership and led to the country switching sides towards the end of World War II.

Three years later Michael was forced to abdicate by the country’s Soviet-backed regime, and went into exile. He would not be allowed back until 1992, more than two years after a bloody revolution brought Communist rule to an end.

Even then he was treated with caution by the politicians of the day, who were wary of his potential influence on society. Not until 1997 was his Romanian citizenship restored; he never moved back to the country.

Despite his lengthy absence, and little enthusiasm for restoring the monarchy, Michael remained popular in Romania over the years.

Reaching the flag-draped coffin on display in the ornate former throne room after a three-hour wait, Adrian Stefan, 31, puts his right hand on his heart and bows his head.

The end of an epoch

“My grandparents and great grandparents lived through those times and they taught me,” he says. “Michael was the last symbol of a proud Romania. We came to witness the end of an epoch.”

Michael’s passing also likely signals the end of the Romanian royal family’s relevance. His children have little public standing; his eldest daughter, Princess Margareta, has already said she will not use the title of Queen, but rather Custodian of the Crown, out of respect for the fact that Romania is a republic.

Saturday’s funeral will not only be the last important royal funeral here, but also “probably the most grandiose funeral in Romanian history,” says Theodor Paleologu, a historian and former diplomat, waiting in the long line of mourners with his son.

“This turnout shows the deep affection for the king, but also the consciousness that a very important chapter in Romanian history is coming to an end,” he adds.

For many, Michael’s passing also feels like a moment lost, highlighting what is lacking in today’s Romania.

“We missed the chance in the 1990’s to involve the king more in our social life,” says Dan Pontus, a worker in the cement industry who flew to Bucharest from his home in the country’s northwest to visit the palace before the former king’s funeral.

“The king was educated like a king, raised like a king,” he says admiringly. “Those leading our country today are just commoners with little understanding of this world.”

Prince Valiant Volumes 1-3 By Hal Foster Fantagraphics Books 336 pp. No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters By Ursula K. Le Guin Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 240 pp.

The sheer, staggering variety of the book world in 2017 presents endless bookish possibilities for gift-giving – very much including the time-honored tradition of gift-giving to yourself. The year saw a blast of biographies of American presidents, a blast of top-notch fiction, and a blast of books commemorating the centenary of the Russian revolutions. But there were hundreds of outstanding titles in other genres, books ranging from dancing memoirs to dystopian vegan food guides – plenty to satisfy virtually any kind of reader. Here are five exemplary picks from that abundance:

Inside Animal Hearts and Minds: Bears That Count, Goats That Surf, and Other True Stories of Animal Intelligence and Emotion by Belinda Recio: In this new book by veteran nature writer Belinda Recio, the once-narrow parameters of animal cognition and empathy are blown open; the Lockean conception of nonhuman animals as unthinking biological machines withers as Recio recounts in wonderfully anecdotal prose some of the latest scientific findings, from grieving birds to laughing rats to dozens of other species exhibiting traits humans once reserved for themselves. It all makes for consistently eye-opening reading. 

Shahnameh: The Epic of Persian Kings by Abolqasem Ferdowsi, translated by Ahmad Sadri, illustrated by Hamid Rahmanian: From Liveright comes this gorgeously illustrated slipcased translation of the great Persian epic, the most innovative and inviting translation ever made into English. Translator Ahmad Sadri has taken considerable liberties with the traditional arrangement of the "Shahnameh"'s endless tales of heroes, monsters, and the supernatural (and he's chosen prose instead of verse), but everywhere his aim is to make this treasure trove of a work less intimidating, to make its wonders more immediately accessible to non-scholars. These efforts, combined with the physical beauty of the edition, make it a must-have for all enthusiasts of great world literature.

Prince Valiant vol. 1-3  by Hal Foster: Fantagraphics collects their stunning full-sized and painstakingly remastered reprints of one of the greatest newspaper comic strips of all time, Hal Foster's run on "Prince Valiant," into this boxed set of three volumes covering the strip from its inception in 1937 to 1942. The set fleshes out the strips themselves with a huge amount of supplementary material, from sketches to essays on setting, style, and the heyday of the funny pages that have now all but vanished from the American newspaper scene. In the six years reprinted in these volumes, readers watch as Foster quickly grows into his medium and starts taking the kinds of artistic chances no comics draftsman had tried before – and there's the boisterous adventure of it all along the way. 

Death at Nuremberg  by W. E. B. Griffin & William E. Butterworth IV: Under the “guilty pleasure” heading of thriller fiction (in case you're not quite up to the new Solzhenitsyn translation currently out at almost 700 pages from Notre Dame, for instance), there's this new novel by William E. Butterworth IV (in cooperation with the indefatigable W.E.B. Griffin) in the “Clandestine Operations” series, in which our hero, special agent James Cronley, is assigned to protect the chief US prosecutor at the notorious Nuremberg Trials from a possible kidnap attempt, all the while hunting down – and fending off – the Nazi underground movement still very active in the city. Our authors absolutely fill the narrative with action, snappy dialogue, and painlessly-added historical setting – and as a result, as with all “Clandestine Operations” novels, the pages fly by. 

No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters by Ursula Le Guin: The more you re-read this collection of blog posts by science fiction Grandmaster Le Guin, the more you're convinced of Oliver Wendell Holmes's quip that for the true thinker, nothing is trivial. Here Le Guin, who is nearing 90 and has written dozens of books (including a handful of the greatest classics of science fiction and fantasy, some of which were recently collected in a lovely 2-volume Library of America boxed set), adapts to the telegraphic and aphoristic world of blogging as though she were born to it. She offers pithy observations on a hundred subjects, from the dignities (and otherwise) of aging in America to the cultural ubiquity of lazy, language-dulling obscenities to the pleasures of living with an old cat she's known since it was a kitten. All of it is delivered in the core-drilling, clear, thoughtful language of somebody who's been crafting English for more than half a century – but the entries on the craft of writing itself are, perhaps predictably, the best things in the book.

Reuters

A man arranges bread at the shop of a bakery in Tunis, Tunisia, Dec. 1.

This fall marked the 25th anniversary of a famous lecture by Samuel Huntington. The late Harvard University professor predicted that world events would revolve around a “clash” of cultures and religions, or “civilizations,” rather than ideas. His view still holds some sway. China, the biggest player in East Asia’s culture, along with Russia, the biggest in the Orthodox world, are indeed vying for influence with the Christian West, which fears meddling by both giants. Meanwhile, the Islamic world is challenging all.

The problem with this theory and its bold categories – other than distilling trends down to a phrase like “clash of civilizations” – is that there are too many exceptions. And ideas still do matter, as they did during the cold war. With new technologies, ideas travel more easily across borders. Distinct cultures, such as those in Africa and Latin America, are evolving faster than ever.

The theory has even provoked some “cultures,” such as in China, to claim they now offer ideas with universal value that are not peculiar to a particular people.

The many exceptions to Huntington’s theory offer the most compelling counterpoint.

Ukraine, long part of the Orthodox Christian culture, has moved far out of Russia’s orbit and toward Europe ever since a 2014 revolution. Taiwan’s flourishing democracy since the 1990s defies the notion that a Sinic culture prefers autocrats. The rise to power of a Hindu nationalist party in India has pushed that “culture” to open itself to the world like never before and to align with other democracies.

In Islamic countries, the big exception is Tunisia. The North African country was not only the spark for a wave of anti-dictator protests in 2011 called the Arab Spring – which overthrew the notion of Arab passivity to freedom and equality – but it is now a model to those same Arab countries in sustaining a new democracy.

Tunisia’s Islamist party, Ennahda, after an initial popularity in elections, has wisely conceded the need for secular rule. Women now have more rights. Past atrocities are being exposed. People are even more demanding of an end to corruption.

On Dec. 17, Tunisia will celebrate the seventh anniversary of its uprising against a dictator. The mood may be somber, however, as the country has yet to solve high youth unemployment and other economic woes. Tunisia has been a source of thousands of Islamic State fighters.

But such practical problems should not diminish Tunisia’s shift in identity since 2011, or its defiance against being pegged as a set “culture” clashing inevitably with other cultures.

According to Rached Ghannouchi, the intellectual leader of the Islamist party, Tunisia’s democracy has succeeded so far by building partnerships across cultural and political divides, abandoning ideas that would exclude others by their categories.

In other words, the more countries can reduce clashes within their societies through respectful, peaceful means, the less likely the world at large will be seen simply as a clash of separate civilizations.