Book Reviews
We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane. Kilgore Trout -Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions, Ch 1.Writing - the all-remembering skill, the mother of many arts. -Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, 460-61 A good man cannot be found
Within Flannery O'Conner's short story collection, A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories, a good man is not just difficult to find, but impossibly so. Thank God I am not Flannery O'Connor. I would not trade her ability to tell a story, and she was uncommonly good in some ways, for her brutal and dismissive view of the world. Harshness, of circumstance and character, formed her viewpoint; what is also redeeming found little place in her stories. It appears in O'Connor one can only find redemption outside of humanity, and that is dispensed grudgingly, with the great violence of the Old Testament God.
Heart out of darkness
In Joseph Conrad's classic novella, Heart of Darkness, the sailor Marlow serves as the author's version of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, compelled to tell his story of conscience to whatever audience he finds. The story he tells is indeed dark, and indeed about the heart, albeit mostly the lack thereof. Conrad takes apart the European colonial enterprise, particularly the carving-up of Africa in the nineteenth century, and strips bare all of the tales of adventure from those times and places, along with the high-flown language of imperialism which was used to mask the utter barbarity of the undertaking.
Trent: Too little, too late
Trent: What Happened at the Council, is a well-researched and well-told history of the Council of Trent, the mid-sixteenth-century Counter-Reformation centerpiece which produced the Catholic Church's response to the Protestant Reformation. This acount is carefully grounded in the complex politics of its times, placing the history of the Council in the balance- of-power tug-of-war, not just between reform movements within and without (Protestants) the Church, but among the nascent Ottoman Empire, the English Reformation, the Holy Roman Empire, the Papal States and the French monarchy.
The physical sublety of life
I recently re-read portions Erwin Schroedinger's amazing little book What is Life?, which was a post-war stimulus for a number of physicists to switch from physics to biology and look hard for a physical understanding of living organisms.
Hieronymus Bosch in L.A.
As a relatively new Angeleno, I thought it would be fun to read a detective novel that took place in Los Angeles. The Harry Bosch novels by Michael Connelly more than fit the bill. Hieronymus Bosch, is a Los Angeles police detective, and his stories take place mostly in Central, West Los Angeles and the San Fernando valley, the three areas of Los Angeles I am most familiar with.
So slender a thread
In one good hour the U.S. Constitution can be read from front to back. It is written in relatively clear language and still has the capacity to surprise.
Did Vermeer do it with mirrors?
In his book Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, painter David Hockney has suggested that Vermeer and other hyper-realistic painters like Caravaggio used optical projection techniques to assist in the production of their startlingly real paintings. This has been met with a good deal of skepticism in the art world, in particular because the means and tools for the technique are not forthcoming.
The Last Kingdom
Bernard Cornwell's The Last Kingdom series, ever growing, takes place around the reign of King Alfred the Great of England, and describes the forging of Saxon and Norse territories into the the fledgling nation of England. It is generally solid historical fiction, in that it fleshes out a historical era with care, and adds a somewhat plausible adventure story to liven up the slow turn of historical events. The main character, Uhtred of Babbenburg, like, say, Little Big Man of the Wild West, experiences and absorbs all of the main cultures of the time, providing a sturdy historical vehicle for Cornwell's tales.
Of ovules and ovaries
Flora of the Pacific Northwest is an excellent dichotomous key of indigenous regional flora. It served as one of my texts for a college class in Systematic Botany, which I feared would be deathly dull, and so proved the lectures, but the laboratory unexpectedly turned out to be a rewarding journey exploring the world without and the world within.
Halting steps to soul freedom
Os Guinness' The Global Public Square oscillates between a Utopian call for a universal human rights and a sectarian application of those rights, as if the author was of two minds, wrestling with the views of Roger Williams and James Dobson.
Candide in Maryland
The Sot-Weed Factor is a satirical tour-de-force with so much going on that I could hardly follow it all. The style is bawdy, witty, and often funny, a full-fledged imitation of a 17th century novel, complete with the full English vocabulary of the times, which by itself is a welcome challenge to parse. It has been described as a picaresque novel, and the main character is Eben Cooke, an over-educated and under-employed poet and virgin, a Candide-like character constantly bewildered by the world, swept along by events, too curious to make a decision about anything.
The capacious heart of Marilynne Robinson
Every few odd years Marilynne Robinson has produced a book of essays, notably Absence of Mind and The Death of Adam. The latest arrival is When I was a Child I Read Books: Essays. The best of Robinson shines in these latest essays: In them she lays out her vision of the American Dream, celebrating the strengths of the American way of life, marked by its liberality (individual freedom), sense of community, and generosity, each informed by a non-sectarian respect for the soul.
Paul, simply
In What Paul Meant, Garry Wills translates the authentic Pauline letters himself, and combines a careful translation of the koiné Greek with modern scholarship to suggest that Paul, who is the modern intellectual's favorite whipping boy as the man who distorted Jesus' message, is in fact a faithful interpreter of the Jesus of the Gospels.
The burden of combat
O'Brien's Vietnam combat experience and facility as a writer helped to illuminate the pervasive fear he and other combat veterans experienced, and the resulting distortions it had on their behavior. I found it difficult and compelling reading. It is a set of related vignettes, short-story-like, that explore the short bursts of violence and the long periods between fighting that weighed upon the soldiers of this combat infantry platoon. The loss of a comrade produced deep and long-lasting emotional effects for these men, including fantasies inspired by perhaps mis-placed guilt: 'If I only had done this, my comrade would still be alive.'
The Origins of Modern Science
Herbert Butterfield, in his book The Origins of Modern Science, tells the story of the development of modern science by focusing on the ideational changes in what is now referred to as science from the late Middle Ages until the advent of the French Revolution, with primary emphasis on the development of the modern understanding of motion. This is a brilliant choice, as it was the development of a robust physical and mathematical model of motion that allowed Newton to unite terrestrial and astronomical physics into a universal set of physical laws describing mechanics.
Nightmares in L.A.
I decided to read one of James Ellroy's gritty L.A. noir detective novels. His Black Dahlia and L.A. Confidential were both made into films, the latter a very good one. Unfortunately, The Big Nowhere turned out to be not just gritty, but pornographically cruel and soulless.
The origins of modern society
Ernst Troeltsch was a fin de siècle Protestant theologian who wrote Protestantism and Progress: A Historical Study of Protestantism and the Modern World. This work, along with his friend Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, both written just before World War I, are reasoned historical treatments of the influence of Protestantism on the perceived and potential progress of Western society. They provide effective contrast to the often simplistic and one-sided efforts by Protestant Evangelicals to do the same, such as Francis Schaeffer's How Should We Then Live?
The heart of the orchard
This is a well-structured novel of grief and solitude and of the damage of indifferent manipulation and violence, balanced against the friendship and care that can heal. The author depicts the inner life of people who are mostly isolated, via the point of view of an orchardist, as lonely, sometimes peaceful, and sometimes self-delusional or unaware.
My favorite inquisitor
Since all other than orthodox is heretical by definition, it is thereby 'Bad Religion.' Ross, a practicing Catholic, argues that Christianity is a highly paradoxical religion whose orthodox views provide a necessary and hard won synthetic narrative providing the one true way. The argument is not very compelling, particularly as it contains the usual demagogic description of American society as corrupted, long in decline, whose only salvation is embracing his orthodoxy. (Yawn ... the ancient clarion call of the entrenched and the reactionary.)
Convivencia is a state of mind
Geraldine Brook's historical novel, People of the Book, tells the fascinating and uplifting story of how people of different faiths created and protected a Jewish book of worship known as the Sarajevo Haggadah for over five hundred years, a period marked by much religious conflict.
I, Benvenuto Cellini
Benvenuto Cellini was a master Florentine goldsmith and sculptor who lived and worked during the time of the High Italian Renaissance, and was also, by his lights, tougher and craftier than anyone around him, could take on many men with a sword and live to tell the tale, was a great lover, and so on. His is the most ebullient autobiography I have read, and so wonderful, and so full of life!
Humbled again by particle physics
This is a history of the development of the Standard Model of particle physics, circa 1986. It is well regarded by physicists for its sociological treatment, as well as its attempt to record the false starts and uncertainty that accompany leading edge science; certainly the personalities and their various collaborations and squabbles are vividly rendered. As to the science, it is particularly good in providing a pithy description of how a unified theory of electromagnetic, strong and weak forces gives rise to our description of the early events of the Big Bang theory.
The ghost of Schaeffer past
By the time Charles Colson got out of prison in the mid-70's, having been convicted for acts of political skullduggery during the Watergate scandal, he had converted to Evangelical Christianity. How Now Shall We Live was his best-seller, an homage to Francis Schaeffer's view of Western history. Schaeffer was a presuppositional millennialist who in the 1970's left the quiet life of a Christian intellectual to help lead the evangelicals to the heights of political activism we see today in the U.S.
The War on Drugs and Mass Incarceration
Michelle Alexander's book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is an important and tightly argued treatise on the mass incarceration of black and brown people in the United States since the acceleration of the War on Drugs in the mid-1980's. Most of the incarcerations have been for low level possession, and have disproportionately affected minorities: According to federal figures, blacks and whites use drugs at a roughly equal rate in percentage terms, yet black men 12 times likelier to be jailed for drugs than white ones.
Hearts and minds
During his years as a Republican political operative, Charles Colson prominently displayed an old Marine Corp saying in his home: 'When you’ve got ’em by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.' Colson described those years and the hard crash that followed in his book Born Again as a mid-life autobiography precipitated by a mid-life crisis. After his role as a self-described 'hatchet man' for Nixon White House was slowly exposed during the Watergate scandal, he converted to Evangelical Christianity, and after being convicted of obstruction of justice, he spent some time in prison.
How should we then live?
Part 4 of 4 of this review of Francis Schaeffer’s How Should We Then Live: The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture suggests an alternative answer to the question regarding how we should then live, and attempts to answer the original question posed in part 1: How did this book influence U.S. Evangelical Christians to become more politically active?
Absolutely relative
Part 3 of 4 of this review of Francis Schaeffer's How Should We Then Live examines the author's claims that Christian ethics are the only absolute standard for society.
Christianity good, secularism bad
Part 2 of 4 of this review of Francis Schaeffer's How Should We Then Live examines the author's historical approach, and evaluates his comparison of Christendom and secular society.
The good old days of Christendom
In his book How Should We Then Live: The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture, what did Francis Schaeffer have to say that influenced so many Evangelicals to become more politically active? Part 1 of 4 of this review summarizes the author's primary theses, then assesses the impact of critical historical events that were minimized or left out of the author’s analysis of Western Civilization.
Nothing is something
"Diddly squat is as close to squat as makes no nevermind." (page 124)
This is a superb and far-ranging essay on the apparently mundane zero. While it might be expected to be predominantly mathematical, it is much more, an erudite and masterly exposition that touches many disciplines without slighting its mathematical roots. It has an exponential arc.
Jefferson’s legacy
Joseph Ellis provides us with an ambitious analysis of the compartmentalized mind of Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson was extraordinarily adept at saying and writing, apparently believing, and doing things that were paradoxical and often diametrically opposed to each other. Ellis suggests that this helps to explain his enduring following by just about every political persuasion in the United States, and even abroad: Anyone can find in Jefferson something that supports one's ideology, especially if they studiously ignore, in perfect Jeffersonian fashion, the things Jefferson said or did that would negate their ideology.
Reasoning with Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine was perhaps the most persuasive of those proponents of revolution in the American Colonies of Great Britain, and well after his influential pamphlet Common Sense he continued to write about 'revolting' things (tongue well in cheek) in the following period of the French Revolution. His pamphlet Age of Reason is a fiercely argued defense of freedom of religion, an argument against organized religion and an argument for deism, written between 1794 and 1797 from Revolutionary France.
There but for the grace of God goes … Ayn Rand?
I have been sometimes surprised by which ideologies have chosen to embrace Ayn Rand and for what reasons, wondering how she influenced anyone beyond selfish teens and the wealthy. I was particularly surprised to see signs of evangelical Christians embracing Atlas Shrugged, since on first inspection, it would seem a gargantuan stretch between the ideas of Rand, an avowed atheist who openly mocked the religious and the poor, and the ideas of Jesus, who emphasized a caring life centered around selflessness to focus on God and the afterlife he promised. It would seem impossible for evangelicals to follow Ayn Rand; how did this come about?Sleepwalking amid new ideas
Arthur Koestler's book Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe is an ambitious attempt to describe the development of Western cosmology and astronomy from the Greeks to Newton, with particular focus on Copernicus, Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo. Koestler did not see science as a linear and unbroken line of rational progression; instead he viewed the course of the history of ideas as somnambulant: Many ideas were stumbled upon by men with goals and mindsets alien to the very ideas they uncovered.
Slavery was the First Cause of the Civil War
It has always been for me somewhat of a puzzle as to why many in the South up to today insist on the idea that slavery was not a primary cause of our Civil War, but that states rights, economic warfare, etc. or anything but slavery were the deep and the proximate cause of that war. Charles Dew, born and raised in the South, writes this monograph on that very subject. He comes at the subject by researching the various documents created and speeches made by the politicians and government officials of Southern states prior to the start of the Civil War for the purpose of justifying, insisting upon, and finally enacting the secession of the various states from the Union.