My rating: 3 of 5 stars
About four years ago, I was acquainted with a certain “Wizard for Hire” by the name of Harry Dresden. I recall being entertained but not compelled to continue the association. However, several trusted sources promised me Mr. Dresden is of pukka character, the real deal, not prone to charlatan-esque fripperies and obfuscations. Finally circumventing my innate resistance, the second meeting between Mr. Dresden and I was arranged, and an intriguing dynamic arose. I discovered that I actually like Mr. Dresden; his foibles and peccadillos make him less a figure of mystic adumbration and more of an associate with whom to take tea and discuss the recent spate of brummagem love potions flooding the magical marketplace. His expertise and interests are varied and vast, his moral certitude and chivalrous demeanor endearing, his honor and sense of duty admirable. But perhaps his best features: he carries a large staff and makes a leather duster look good.
I recently finished Bacchus & Me, Adventures in the Wine Cellar by Jay McInerney. McInerney is perhaps most famous for his novel Bright Lights, Big City, a glamours tear through New York City in the ’80s. It was later made into a movie. The reader quickly learns that the author’s real life seems little less racy and glamorous than the characters of his masterpiece. He starts this book by introducing himself and explaining how he expanded his literary world to encompass writing about wine. From there, the book discusses everything from Robert Parker and his impact on the business of selling and drinking wine, to what he considers to be the most romantic wine in the world. (I won’t ruin it for you but I bet you can guess.) It is highly anecdotal and very entertaining. McInerney has a conversational, self effacing style that is engaging and easy to read. No matter how much he tries to play down his knowledge, contacts and obvious influence in the world of wine, his expertise in tasting and writing about wine and acclaim as a novelist must account for many of the intoxicating stories he relates.
The book is organized in sections, each one dealing with a different type or style of wine or more generally regions of countries where distinctive wine is produced. Each chapter spans just a few pages. It’s a wonderful beginner’s guide to wine: what it’s made from, who it’s made by, what makes it special and the best bottles to look for and it’s all brought to life through the marriage of information with stories of high life living.
Although the stories are riveting and romantic, what really shines through is the author’s passion and knowledge of wine. McInerney wants the reader to love wine as much as he does. He has a way of maintaining all that is romantic, mysterious and alluring about wine while striping away a lot of the pretentious ceremony that can make it intimidating and less enjoyable. There is the perfect balance of information and narrative to make the reader envy the author without writing him off as a boorish wine snob. McInerney, although clearly not just some guy at home with a ten dollar bottle of Cabernet, he makes the reader feel he would not be above inviting them to come along on one of his fantastic trips to taste wine out of a barrel with Helen Turley some time.
I thought Bacchus & Me was a fantastic read. It gave the reader just enough of everything to keep them interested and most will be more wine savvy upon completion. If one is looking for a novel or a linear account of an episode, this book is not for them. Each chapter is only thematically related to the previous one. If one is searching for an interesting book about wine, writing about wine, and drinking wine in fancy places, this book comes highly recommended.
James MacGregor Burns has written a short and thoughtful sweep of the soiled history of the Supreme Court. The soiling began immediately with George Washington and the Founding Fathers. The three branches of the Federal government sort of looked like they were equal but were not. The tricky problem of how to “check and balance” the judiciary was basically left to be worked out later. Washington packed the court with Federalists because anyone not so identified was simply not his kind of man, and that set the pattern for all the succeeding presidents brilliant as well as average as well as incompetent. Washington made the court political.
Then along came Chief Justice John Marshall, Federalist to the hilt, appointed by John Adams who saw no good in any man unless the man fully agreed with Adams. Marshall knew the Constitution and he knew what he wanted. To put his wants and the Constitution in the same holding bag he declared in Marbury v. Madison that the Supreme Court had a power the Founding Fathers had not written down, the power of judicial review. He and his fellow political appointees on the Supreme Court had the final word on what laws were constitutional and just who had what powers to govern. It was a nice piece of work that solved a serious weakness in the Constitution, but it left in place the problem of what to do with political mediocrity sitting for life on the Supreme Court.
Burns shows in Packing The Court: The Rise Of Judicial Power And The Coming Crisis Of The Supreme Court that presidents pick judges little better than racetrack betters place bets. They rarely know the quality of the person but always know their political background. They rarely know mediocrity from excellence. They appoint life-holders who become reactionary and ossified as the country changes, leaving them out of touch with new needs and realities. Most appointments to the Supreme Court should never have been made.
In the final chapter, Burns writes, “Whether in the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century or the Gilded Age at the turn of the twenty-first, the justices have most fiercely protected the rights and liberties of the minority of the powerful and the propertied. Americans cannot look to the judicial branch for leadership. They can not expect leadership from unelected and unaccountable politicians in robes.” Up to and including this point, Burns is correct, but he goes on to add the weakest pages of the book. His solution is not worth covering, but something does need to be done about our tolerance for slipshod Appellate and Supreme appointments. The big, transformational philanthropic foundations, the American Bar Association, and the media need to do a better job of explaining what is at stake, identifying excellence that goes beyond a successful legal and political career, and educating the public on who is being appointed and how the appointees are performing.
What do we know about potential Obama appointees? Of course the White House has a team vetting any number of people, but who is vetting for us, the mythic average citizen? We don’t need a constitutional amendment shuffling power around. We need public involvement in the vetting. Mediocrity and rigidity when exposed to light create a strong odor that is often intolerable even to Federally elected officials. Charles Marlin
Twenty years after the publication of his first novel, And the Ass Saw the Angel, Nick Cave brings us the final days of Bunny Munro, a salesman in search of a soul. Set adrift by his wife’s suicide and struggling to keep some sort of grasp on reality, Bunny Munro drives off in his yellow Fiat Punto, Bunny Jr. in tow. To his son, waiting patiently in the car while he peddles beauty wares and quickies to lonely housewives in the south of England, Bunny is a hero, larger than life. But Bunny himself seems to have only a dim awareness of his son’s existence, viewing his needs as a distraction from the relentless pursuit of sex, alcohol, and drugs. When his bizarre road trip shades into a final reckoning, Bunny realizes that the revenants of his world—decrepit fathers, vengeful ghosts, jealous husbands, and horned psycho-killers—lurk in the shadows, waiting to exact their toll. At turns dark and humane—and with all the mystery and enigma fans will recognize as Cave’s singular vision—The Death of Bunny Munro questions the nature of sin and redemption, and lays bare the imprints that fathers leave on their sons.
Thoughts:
“Oh, Bunny … you fucking liar …” His wife’s last words to him, and a perfect summary of this book.
Nick Cave has written a truly twisted tale that manages to make the reader squirm and cringe, maybe even get a little sick to the stomach, yet unable to put the book down throughout.
Bunny Munro is a singular-minded, deeply flawed character, and this is made quite clear to the reader from the start. I kept expecting the book to turn into a story of redemption long before it actually did simply because of how fast Bunny and his son began falling. As I read I repeatedly found myself thinking it couldn’t possibly get any worse. But, oh no, it does. The redemption portion is reserved only for the last few pages.
The manner in which Bunny and his son’s situation keeps speeding downhill is very well-paced. Events and insight are placed at just the right moments, further revealing aspects of the characters and story. As the book progresses, so does the reader’s understanding of just how disturbed the title character is. The depths of his depravity continue to reveal themselves right up to the belated climax.
A few aspects of the writing style did annoy me though. The author overuses the phrase “or something,” placing it at the end of every thought his characters have that could be construed as even remotely insightful or certain. Along with that, we have an overuse of the word “and,” used to join separate actions or thoughts, often unrelated, into big, awkward, paragraph-length sentences. These quirks were most likely meant to emphasize the lost and disorganized feeling of the characters and their state of mind, but the story does a fine job of that on it’s own. Being beaten over the head with syntax and grammar to boot just felt unnecessary.
The writing may have came off as a bit mechanical and simplistic at times, but it did little to detract from the story and its moral. Overall, The Death of Bunny Munro is quick and easy, and seriously fucked-up. If nothing else, one thing’s for sure: after reading it, you won’t be able to look at Kylie Minogue, Avril Lavigne, or Big Macs the same way ever again.
Ah, much is happening at Ilura Press folks and a whole lot of good things too, and much of it with your encouragement. As with each issue, we received some really good submissions for the forthcoming Etchings 9, Love and Something. Submissions closed on August 15, 2009, with our editors now busy sorting through some high quality work for you.
We are also working on the cover for The Crooked Floor, a fine poetry collection by Queensland poet Tim Collins. The team comprises photographer Jason Nixon, designer Damien Hashemi, actor Liam Pederson, and publishers Christopher Lappas and Sabina Hopfer. Scheduled for a November 2009 release, we (that’s the interns!) have been told the cover should be ready soon… Can’t wait to see it!
The latest good news — amongst a host of others — is the glowing review Etchings 7 Chameleons received in The Age A2 magazine today. We will soon put up the links to the online version, watch this space. Meanwhile, check out the earlier 2007 A2 review for Etchings 3 In Lieu of an Editorial.
“During the past few years, one book after another has organized itself around some nouveau-Thoreauvian conceit. This might consist of spending a month eating only food grown in an urban back yard, as in ‘Farm City’ (2009), or a year eating food produced on a gentleman’s farm, as in ‘Animal, Vegetable, Miracle’ (2007). It might involve driving across the country on used cooking oil, as in ‘Greasy Rider’ (2008), or giving up fossil fuels for goats, as in ‘Farewell, My Subaru’ (2008).
“All of these stunts can be seen as responses to the same difficulty. Owing to a combination of factors—population growth, greenhouse-gas emissions, logging, overfishing, and, as Beavan points out, sheer self-indulgence—humanity is in the process of bringing about an ecological catastrophe of unparalleled scope and significance. Yet most people are in no mood to read about how screwed up they are. It’s a bummer. If you’re the National Academy of Sciences or the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or the Pope or Al Gore, you can try to fight this with yet another multivolume report or encyclical. If not, you’d better get a gimmick.”
Writing in, of all places, The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert examines the pretensions of EnviroChic as represented by Colin Beavan’s No Impact Man in“Green Like Me”.
For reasons that continue to baffle me, Ballentine Books decided that one of my favorite authors, Barbara Samuel, needed a new pseudonym for her new books. The reason this baffles me is that I don’t see that there is any real difference between The Lost Recipe for Happiness and the books she has already written. No Place Like Home or A Piece of Heaven, for example, which happen to be two of my favorites. They all have similar themes, even similar settings. What gives?
Anyway, on to the book …
After I finished Hot Pursuit, I started to read The Virgin Queen’s Daughter, but it just didn’t fit my mood. Neither did Linda Howard’s Burn, which I will probably send back to the library, unread, because I was so bored. Then I picked up The Lost Recipe for Happiness and fell into literary, sensory nirvana.
I loved this book. If you like Anthony Capella and Marsha Mehran, you have to try Barbara O’Neal/Samuel. And visa/versa. There is something so comforting, yet sexy about food. In this case, that food is Mexican food made New Mexico style. Everything just comes to life, even the dead. It’s all so vivid. Vital. As you read, you can just smell the chiles and taste the dark, rich chocolate. I find myself craving Mexican hot chocolate, never mind that it’s August, and Ivan’s baklava.
Just get yourself a cup of chocolate, pop in some Norah Jones or Ella Fitzgerald, and let yourself fall into the pages.
Rating: 4.25 out of 5 stars
I also have a slight problem with the cover. The least they could have done was get a dog the right color. Maybe Duke from the Bush’s Baked Beans commercials instead of a Marley look-a-like.
The only thing scarier than living on the edge is stepping off it.
Maggie Montgomery lives a life of adventure. Her job as a cinematographer takes her from one exotic locale to the next. When Maggie’s not working, she loves to rappel off cliffs or go skydiving. Nothing frightens her.
Nothing, that is, except Ivy, Texas, where a family emergency pulls her back home to a town full of bad memories, painful secrets, and people Maggie left far behind … for a reason.
Forced to stay longer than she intended, Maggie finds her family a complete mess, including the niece her sister has abandoned. Ten-year-old Riley is struggling in school and out of control at home. The only person who can really handle the pint-sized troublemaker is Conner, the local vet and Ivy’s most eligible bachelor. But Conner and Maggie keep butting heads–he’s suspicious of her and, well, she doesn’t rely on anyone but herself.
As Maggie humorously fumbles her way from one mishap to another, she realizes she’s going to need to ask for help from the one person who scares her the most.
To save one little girl–and herself–can Maggie let go of her fears and just trust God?
Published by Knopf Canada, 2009
Reviewed by Colleen McKie
As a Canadian, I am a wee bit partial to books that are not only written by Canadians, but that take place in Canada. I am also a fan of weird, quirky characters and stories. Thankfully Come, Thou tortoise, written by Canadian Jessica Grant, taking place in St. John’s, NFLD and featuring a tortoise as a main character meets all of these prerequisites.
The book centers around Audrey and her tortoise, Winnifred. The two are temporality separated when Audrey has to leave her Portland, Oregon apartment to head back to her hometown of St. John’s NFLD after her father receives a blow to the head and ends up in a coma. Unfortunately her dad succumbs to his injuries before her plane even lands. Her uncle Thoby takes off for England shortly after, leaving Audrey alone to deal with things like clearing out the house and a set of faulty Christmas lights. To cope with the situation, Audrey throws herself into solving a mystery she has stumbled across, using that as a way to avoid dealing with her father’s death.
Interspersed with Audrey’s story is that of Winnifred, who reflects on her life thus far and spends a lot of time wondering if Audrey has abandoned her. While at first the idea of reading the musings of a tortoise was a bit weird, a quarter of the way into the book, I was loving Winnifred and her unique take on things.
I also loved all of the play on words (Audrey often referred to her father as being in a “comma”) that Grant includes throughout the book. Audrey’s thoughts are often jumbled, but Grant writes them so that they appear to flow from one another. The only issue I had with the language in the book is really a technicality and an issue I have had with many other “literary” books: the avoidance of using quotation marks for dialogue. I found it very confusing and distracting at first, but once I got into the characters and the story, it became less of an issue, although I always remained aware of it.
And speaking of the story, it kept me hooked throughout and the ending, while somewhat open (which I LOVE) was a bit of a surprise for me, but in a good way.
Jessica Grant is definitely a writer to read and watch out for and for me Come, Thou Tortoise is up there with Miriam Toews The Flying Troutmans and a Complicated Kindness.
The Review of Biblical Literature is a publication of the Society of Biblical Literature (http://www.sbl-site.org).
*****
The following new reviews have been added to the Review of Biblical Literature and listed on the RBL blog (http://rblnewsletter.blogspot.com/):
Richard Bauckham, Daniel Driver, Trevor Hart, and Nathan MacDonald, eds.
A Cloud of Witnesses: The Theology of Hebrews in Its Ancient Contexts http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=7111
Reviewed by Scott Mackie
Richard H. Bell Deliver Us from Evil: Interpreting the Redemption from the Power of Satan in New Testament Theology http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=6918
Reviewed by Francis Dalrymple-Hamilton
Katharina Bracht and David S. du Toit, eds.
Die Geschichte der Daniel-Auslegung in Judentum, Christentum und Islam: Studien zur Kommentierung des Danielbuches in Literatur und Kunst http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=7181
Reviewed by Christoph Stenschke
J. Bradley Chance
Acts http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=6893
Reviewed by Kenneth D. Litwak
Mordechai Cogan
The Raging Torrent: Historical Inscriptions from Assyria and Babylonia Relating to Ancient Israel http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=6612
Reviewed by Aren Maeir
R. Alan Culpepper
Mark http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=6892
Reviewed by John Painter
Andrew Harker
Loyalty and Dissidence in Roman Egypt: The Case of the Acta Alexandrinorum http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=6613
Reviewed by Birger A. Pearson
Thomas R. Hatina, ed.
Biblical Interpretation in Early Christian Gospels: Volume 2: The Gospel of Matthew http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=6954
Reviewed by Daniel Gurtner
Mark A. House, ed.
Compact Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=6805
Reviewed by Pierre Johan Jordaan
Steven Leonard Jacobs, ed.
Maven in Blue Jeans: A Festschrift in Honor of Zev Garber http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=7045
Reviewed by William H. Krieger
Barry C. Joslin
Hebrews, Christ and the Law: The Theology of the Mosaic Law in Hebrews 7:1-10:18 http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=7026
Reviewed by David Allen
Cynthia Briggs Kittredge, Ellen Bradshaw Aitken, and Jonathan A. Draper, eds.
The Bible in the Public Square: Reading the Signs of the Times http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=6813
Reviewed by Holly E. Hearon
Michael Labahn and Bert Jan Lietaert Peerbolte, eds.
A Kind of Magic: Understanding Magic in the New Testament and Its Religious Environment http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=6553
Reviewed by Hans-Josef Klauck
Karoline M.Lewis
Rereading the “Shepherd Discourse”: Restoring the Integrity of John 9:39-10:21 http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=7179
Reviewed by Beate Kowalski
J. G. McConville
God and Earthly Power: An Old Testament Political Theology http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=7001
Reviewed by Paul Kissling
Starting Out in the Evening by Brian Morton, Crown (1997)
This thoughtful and intelligent novel presents us from three individuals at different points in their life: the first, Leonard Schiller, a 71-year-old author who, after two heart operations, knows he is close to death but is still determined to finish his last novel, even as his four previous works have gone out of print; the second, his 39-year-old daughter, Ariel, a dancer who has become an exercise instructor and is hoping to find fulfillment in becoming a parent finally; the third, Heather Wolfe, a 24-year-old graduate student looking to launch her career as a literary critic in New York and writing her thesis on the author who inspired her early pursuit of freedom. (There is a fourth character whose thoughts we enter but I won’t identify, as this individual enters the book only in the latter half.)
Morton is a master at getting into each of the character’s minds, though they’re of different generations, race, sex, and preoccupation, and he manages to make them each incredibly sympathetic even as they frustrate us and challenge our patience.
Even as the book itself weaves quotes from great artists into the fabric of the conversation on how to best live one’s life, though never in a pedantic or obtrusive manner, it constantly presents the reader with its own passages worth recording and mulling over: on pursuing a creative life, having fun, striving, and struggling. This is a book whose ideas are worth contemplating, even if the plot urges us to speed through it to find out what happens next: my favorite combination.
What if the work you create inspires lessons that you don’t necessarily intend? Is it worth creating if the product of your efforts will never be appreciated by others? What should drive us in our career: recognition, posterity, enjoyment, discipline, morals? What ought we to do if furthering our own goals means sacrificing the goals of others? At what point is it degrading to seek the approval of our mentors?
Though the word can make me queasy, it is true that this is an immensely tender book. Just don’t read it in a car or plane if that unsettles you. (five stars)
Allen Hoey, Once Upon a Time at Blanche’s (Tamarack Editions, 2009)
Naton Leslie, Emma Saves Her Life (Turning Point, 2007)
Noel Smith, The Well String (Motes Books, 2008)
What happens when a poet creates the voice of a real person, or an imagined person in a particular place and time? And what if this person is silenced by circumstance—by lack of education, leisure, safety, or the conviction that the story should be heard? The temptations are many—to condescend, caricature, misread, impose, or judge. It takes tremendous grace and humility on the poet’s part for such poems to become a gift and not an appropriation.
Four new books succeed admirably at this task. Richard Carr in Ace, Allen Hoey in Once Upon a Time at Blanche’s, Naton Leslie in Emma Saves Her Life, and Noel Smith in The Well String have steeped themselves fully in the voices of characters who have come to occupy whole books of poetry.
The poets work without self-congratulation and with respect for human wholeness. Each of these four page-turners communicates a people and a time. The focus on voice, religiously undertaken, yields results first salty, then subtly spiced. We taste not just the drama of the characters’ lives but also the exact flavor of the silences they endure.
The poems create the sense that someone has listened selflessly, with honesty and compassion. They catch the lyricism of plain speaking, the sweet turn of forgotten diction, the syncopations of other-time phrasing, the blunt and skipping rhythms of everyday speech. The poets tune us to these qualities, speed the tales, and focus attention. They have not just transcribed, but scored this music.
Naton Leslie works from his own memory, from letters his grandmother wrote weekly, and from a scrapbook that she kept from age nine onward. He creates a dialogue between poems in Emma’s voice and poems about her. His portrait glosses over none of her toughness, her occasional self-congratulation, her impatience with the stupid, snooty, selfish, and slothful. In the especially feisty “Emma Readies for a Party,” Emma reflects on the Pennsylvania Farmers Mutual banquet, which she enjoys “except last year”:
… Some of those bitches
from the big farms brought pies
—they didn’t make them either.
Then one of them had nerve
enough to comment on my crust.
She had just had an operation
on a boil on her face, one eye
covered in a pirate patch.
Flat, she said, No flake to it.
I worked half the morning
on pies and bread and now
these fancy fannies were talking.
I wheeled around, lifted her
patch and smacked her right on
the boil. You should’ve seen
her go down. Will said later
I was a hard woman to take
anywhere. I just laughed.
Leslie’s poems build force as they accumulate from individual story to a full life. His restraint is brilliant; he never sentimentalizes, exaggerates, or embroiders—perhaps because Emma never would. Emma surprises the reader with more lyrical passages too, as in “Emma Goes to a Reunion”:
In my day we’d have met on
the family farm, but the old
Lindsay place is long gone,
like our home-place. That’s
a funny notion: My day.
It’s as though these days belong
to someone else, and I’m just
allowed in like a visitor.
Allen Hoey, too, blends narrative with flashes of lyric. He avoids idealizing his characters as he dazzles the reader with astonishingly long persona poems. In his book we soak in the voices of various regulars at Blanche’s, a bar for folks who have seen tough times and keep coming back for the solace of a beer and a shot and for the storytellers roosting there. Each story spins out, relayed to us by an alienated youngster whom the regulars tolerate and eventually accept. He is half witness, half mascot. The layered stories take us deep into the tone and time of men who have made do, hung in, and somehow pulled through. Here is the conclusion of “She Died,” one of the very few shorter poems in the collection:
…They all load up their plates and peck
like birds at the food while they
wander around the living room, into
the dining room, jibberty-jabbing about
what a shame, a godawful tragedy, she’s
so young and what a good job they done,
she looked so pretty, and I just left
and went into the kitchen and got
a bottle of whiskey from the cupboard
and a glass, ain’t no telling what a man
might do he drinks out the bottle,
and I go sit on the porch, but that’s
too close, I can still hear the voices,
like the gabbling of geese rising
and falling up the hill from the pond
near dark, so I take a chair round
the far side of the garage and sit down
and pour myself a splash of the whisky,
and the stars start to come up as my
eyes get used to the dark, and I take
another sip and look up and think,
by Jesus, someday things’ll be ok.
No matter which of Hoey’s regulars is speaking, the voice has a forward-driving urgency. Given his masterful handling of monologue, even the most bogged-down life conveys vitality. This is a rowdy book, tragic and hilarious, a down-and-dirty redemption of a book.
Noel Smith in The Well String manages the small miracle of bridging a century of voices. Her job took her to the hills of Eastern Kentucky, where her listening was complete and generous. She was able to imagine stories and conjure voices back five generations, from 1880 to today. Here is a poem from the middle of the collection, “At the Black Lung Office”:
Listen, they split the top
of these mountains clear off
like a man with his skull scalped.
Now, coal is stone and stone
the bone of earth I reckon.
Ground down clear from here to yon ridge.
You know, that grit claims your eyes,
your ears, your heart, the dust of bone,
black lungs gummed up.
I study how they robbed something they ought not.
The pure bones from the earth itself. I allow
that’s what’s destroying us.
Now, Betty went to Walmart’s and bought
our grandbaby toy earth movers. I declare
he thinks they’re the best things ever was.
Occasionally, Leslie, Hoey, and Smith burst beyond the bounds of their personae. In each book third-person poems mingle with first-person poems, as if the poets feel some side of the story can’t be covered from “inside,” or they need reflective distance. However, the tones and cadences of the characters inform the third-person narratives as well. An example is Smith’s lovely description of a fiddler in “Old Timey Flight.” He takes a song and:
Makes it shimmer like glass in the sun,
Swoops it down back up and around
Like a swallow on the wing again and again
Bringing to himself the spirit
Of Luther Strong that fine old fiddler
Back back in time this tune
Having taken off like a kite in the blue.
In Ace, Richard Carr never strays from the first person. Four scraping-by characters take turns speaking: father, mother, daughter, and grandson. Together these four unhappy wanderers create a dark, eerily harmonious, crescendoing tale of losing and seeking. The four voices are less literal, more likely to break from the actual way a character might speak, for these poems expose barely conscious longings and late-life, even last-minute realizations. Carr names what the silenced cannot say; and while his task may be made less difficult by virtue of the fact that his characters are fictional, portraying the down-and-out with respect and insight is no small feat.
In “Alley Wary,” Ace (senior) dreams of finding his lost grandson (who was aborted, but he probably doesn’t know this):
I see Little Ace fighting in the war
driving his humvee into a fight
which might never end but spread street to street
country to country and into all minds
and into the dreams of little boys certain they will die
in a fight
better that he hide himself
walk down the alley wary
step wide of the overturned dumpster and the dark door
put an end to curiosity
the rustling in a pile of trash bags and greasy boxes
a danger now
better that he hide from me.
Ace’s gritty urban portraits show openly what the other books imply: the loss of deep-rooted community is a tragedy. No matter what we may have gained when we fled the hills and farms, family and the human spirit have suffered to the bone.
All four of these books manage the delicate moral balance required in “creating” someone else’s voice. Maybe every artist owes it to the world to try this: to push down the self under the current, and listen hard to the undercurrent, the voices of others. To do this well calls for practice both in living and in writing. We need to love the people of whom we write, whose struggles compel us. That love needs to be not of the honeymoon variety, but born of long, honest, steadfast commitment. And then the voices may break their silence and ring true.
1. American Pastoral, by Philip Roth. It’s taken me this long to read my first Roth novel, which is embarrassing given how prolifically excellent he is. American Pastoral is a powerfully moving novel. The title is apt and ironic, the story of Swede Levov, a guy on the path to a perfect, idyllic, idealized American pastoral life. Naturally, it wouldn’t be a great novel if he ended up getting his dream and keeping it.
One passage that occurs after a family tragedy that’s revealed early in the book: “He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach–that it makes no sense. And when that happens the happiness is never spontaneous again. It is artificial and, even then, bought at a price of an obstinate estrangement from oneself and one’s history. The nice gentle man with his mild way of dealing with conflict and contradiction, the confident ex-athlete sensible and resourceful in any struggle with an adversary who is fair, comes up against the adversary who is not fair–the evil ineradicable from human dealings–and he is finished. He whose natural nobility was to be exactly what he seemed to be has taken in far too much suffering to be natively whole again.”
2. Predictably Irrational, by Dan Ariely. Economists love elegance and hate messiness. Much of traditional economic theory is based on the premise that, in total, individuals make economically rational decisions. A specific individual may make a poor economic decision based on emotion, but that decision is offset by a more rational person taking advantage of that inefficiency, making the net sum of economic decisions rational. This is important in economic theory because it underpins highly complex formulas used by economists. The problem, as any astute observer of human nature will tell you, is that this core, underlying assumption is wrong.
We are not, even in total, always rational. The housing bubble is example prima facie of group irrational behavior over a long period of time, but University of Chicago economist Eugene Fama, the most hardcore of the always-rational-school, doesn’t believe bubbles even exist. He presumably assumes that the three-standard-deviation movement up in housing prices followed immediately by the three-standard-deviation down in home prices was a “random walk.” If the major assumption that people are always rational is wrong, what does that mean for the economic models based on that assumption? My take is that the models are directionally right over the very long-term, but not very useful past a certain point of granularity or time-sensitive analyses.
Dan Ariely, an economist at Duke and MIT, has written a very accessible and enjoyable book on this new-ish field of behavioral economics, which tries to understand how people actually make decisions, not just how they should make decisions. Predictably Irrational is different from most of the pop-psychology books such as Sway and Influence in that it focuses specifically on economic decisions. For example, in one of his experiments, he shows that we’re irrationally, but predictably, drawn to all things free, even if it means passing up a much better deal with greater cost savings.
3. The Leopard, by Giuseppe di Lampedusa. I read this while on a trip to Italy, and I am now wholeheartedly in the read-a-novel-of-the-country-you’re-traveling-in camp. The Leopard takes place in Sicily (I was in Tuscany, but whatever) at the time of Garibaldi’s unification of Italy. The novel follows a Sicilian prince — our “leopard,” which makes for all kinds of fun feline literary puns — as he deals with the decline of the regional monarchy. It was the only novel, published posthumously, of an Italian aristocrat, and it’s too bad he never got a chance to see how well the world took to it.
4. Money Masters of Our Time, by John Train. It’s books like Money Masters that remind me just how rare it is to find good writing on finance, and it makes me that much more grateful for Roger Lowenstein and Michael Lewis. Money Masters is mediocre but readable. It’s a series of profiles on 17 renowned investors, and the style of Train’s vignettes are soft-idolatry — lots of reverence; cursory criticism. It’s a nice source of snapshot information on famous investors, but it’s not a must-read even for investing geeks.
5. The Language Instinct, by Steven Pinker. I’ve always thought the observations from pedagogical math types akin to “Humans aren’t very good at numbers” to be ridiculous. We’re not good at math? Compared to who? Birds? Ants? Baboons? What’s the baseline benchmark that we’re using to compare whether humans are “good” at numbers or not?
Steven Pinker makes me feel ridiculous for not seeing what now seems obvious. We’re hard-wired for language, not numbers. According to Pinker, the average high-school graduate has a vocabulary of around 60,000 words, if you include proper names, acronyms, non-intuitive compound phrases, etc. The vast majority of these words were absorbed through the normal course of reading, talking and interacting with human beings. Now imagine trying to remember 60,000 number combinations. Essentially impossible. This isn’t a learned trait; this is a native instinct.
6. An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, by César Aira. I read this scenery-and-imagery-centric novella while traveling around Argentina. Again, I’m now a huge fan of reading a local novel while traveling in that country. The story is about a European landscape painter roaming through Argentina trying to capture its essence. Perfect reading for a temporarily retired American financier roaming through Argentina trying to capture its essence.
7. Create Your Own Economy, by Tyler Cowen. For the last three years, Tyler Cowen has been a part of my daily reading routine. My discovery of RSS readers and blogs have fundamentally and permanently changed the way I take in information, and it’s blogs like Tyler’s Marginal Revolution that have not just kept me more informed but also enhanced my ability to think critically. Long essays and investigative reports that one can find in The Atlantic or The New Yorker are still the best forms for communicating complex ideas and arguments, but the short-length and high-frequency format exposes readers to a much wider array of data sources and opinions.
It is highly appropriate that Tyler has written a book on this phenomenon’s impact on our lives. The “Economy” part of the book’s title is a bit of a misnomer, in the same way that calling Tyler Cowen an “economist” is technically true, but not fully accurate. Readers of MR will know that while Tyler is ostensibly an economist, his insights on human nature and culture are equally, if not more, important reasons for his wide following. Tyler’s main thesis in Create Your Own Economy is that our ability to create our own ecosystems (or economies) based on highly customized information choices (RSS reader vs. newspapers, iTunes vs. whole pre-set albums) lead to greater life satisfaction. For more on Create Your Own Economy and the personalized assembly of information, read Ben Casnocha’s review of the book in AEI’s The American. It’s got an awesome title: “RSSted Development.”
The next book to be berried is The White Tiger by Arvind Adiga. Please check the Wiki for details about Adiga. Again, I’m not going to post about the plot as it is not my job. I’m going to put down what my experience in reading the book was.
I have to admit, I picked the book up with a reasonable expectation. It’s not daily that Indian authors win the Hooker Booker Prize… well may be once every 5 years or so. So what were my initial thoughts about the story? “hmmm interesting”. Then a sudden jolt comes as the narrator describes the one main incident which completed his transformation into the White Tiger.
But frankly, the tempo just drops big time. YOU KNOW WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN! Adiga could have saved it for later and it would have beeen good. but now it just gave me a “meh!’ what the fuck” kinda feel. The overall experience in reading the story of a man who claws, knarls, chews his way to become an entrepreneur is just ok! not great.
I don’t fucking understand what’s the problem is with these writers in portraying India as a land of Shit! (quite literally) Vikas Swarup and Danny Boyle did it and now Adiga does it as well. Open your weirdo eyes dudes, India has improved by leaps and bounds and you guys are a part of that developed India. Ofcourse there is still the other part of India there, but enough stirring the old shit!
Booker? Hardly deserving! Sorry Mr. Adiga, you have not convinced me.
Paris is a city in crisis. The new government has plans to tear down all buildings of beauty and historical interest and replace them with modern monstrosities. Help is at hand though, from Madame Pamplemousse, her resourceful cat Cambembert and their young friend Madeleine.
Using Monsiuer Moutarde’s time travel machine, cunningly disguised as an espresso coffee maker, they travel back into time to collect various items to brew into a very special potion that will bring the city back to its senses. Will they get back in time, or will Paris fall into a new dark age?
The second book from Rupert Kingfisher featuring Madame Pamplemousse is just as entertaining and engaging as the first. As with Incredible Edibles, the illustrations are provided by Sue Hellard.
Whilst the target age is between 9-12, there is something in the story that will appeal to all ages. Although the book is quite short, Rupert Kingfisher manages to cover a great deal of ground, and in doing leaves behind some images that will stimulate young imaginations. I hope that we haven’t heard the last from the Time Travelling Cafe.
By now you’ve probably seen my review and maybe even a few copies in your local store. Now it’s time to officially celebrate the release (a few weeks late) here on the blog.
ONE winner will receive all of the following:
Prophecy playlist,
Visa gift card,
Prophecy bookmark,
Prophecy magnet,
signed Prophecy poster,
lip gloss,
candy,
choice of DVD between PS I Love You or Atonement
To enter, leave a comment with your email telling me why Victorian Guys are hot by September 11th (my birthday!!).
I bought the URL today: www.FeminineIntelligence.com
I will be sorting all my books, reviews and articles into the following categories and assigning one “editor expert” to each to make sure all the information is current and relevant. If you would like to join our team as an editor, please call or e-mail me.
Financial Intelligence (helping women get wealth)
Political Intelligence (helping women get into politics)
Feminine Intelligence (helping women get wise)
Life Intelligence (helping women at home and in relationships)
Career Intelligence (helping women at work and in their careers)
Girl Intelligence (helping girls be strong)
Please send me your thoughts on these categories etc etc. I’d like them to be jazzy or cathcy so get your creative juices flowing! Think WIDGETS.
I LOVED this book… and I’m not usually one for love stories. This book is about two high school kids, July and BoJo (Boswell Johnson), who drank a little too much champagne one night and ended up with a baby, getting married the next. The story follows their relationship and how it changes, good and bad. What surprised me was that the two characters both regretted what happened before they even knew July was pregnant… it was against their values to be “loose teenagers.” I thought it was really interesting their take on how high school life should be and how they should act and feel once they were married. The book also goes through the emotions of being in a relationship with someone you are not in love with yet. I know this all sounds negative, but the book turns around and the relationships between all of the characters are deliciously complex and interesting. It’s how two rational teenagers deal with the consequences of their actions, and what they gain for themselves because of it (despite the influence of their parents, friends and neighbors).
Some of you who are regulars to the blog. Have been following several blogs on Success in Ministry. Today is the final installation on “Liberating Ministry From the Success Syndrome, by R. Kent and Barbara Hughes. The picture on the blog is in fact Kent and Barbara a few years ago.
Last but certainly not least, when we speak of a successful ministry you must include the church members, parishioners, congregation or how ever you refer to those you minister to…..
The last chapter in the book is entitled “Helps”. This chapter starts out with a great story; Barbara tells the story of the wife of close pastor friend.
The wife recounts how she woke up one night to find her husband asleep on his elbows and knees at the foot of the bed. His arms were cupped before him as if he was embracing the base of a tree, and he was muttering. As she called out to him and asked what he was doing, he replied, Shhhh (he was still asleep) I am holding up a pyramid of marbles and if I move they will all fall down.
A classic pastors dream. One because of the subconcious revelation of a pressured parson. Love the illiteration. Secondly, as a pyramid of marbles is an apt metaphor for a pastor’s work.
Each marble represents a different aspect of a pastors job. The individual sins of some, the family difficulties of others, the marital problems of another, life style inconsistencies, difficulties between the members themselves, the conflicting opinions on how “church” should be done. Not even counting personalities and differences with the lay staff.
So we move on to the subject….. HELP.. oops I meant Helps… well I thought I heard the voices of pastors everywhere crying Help. Don’t think for a minute that pastors everywhere aren’t calling for help.
The first thing the Hughes remind us is, your Pastor was called to his position. Unlike most of those he shepherds, he did not choose but was chosen. He must accept God’s call and seek to bring glory to the Lord as he shepherds the flock. A colleague of Pastor Hughes once said when he was asked how he was doing,”Things could be worse, I could be doing this for a living.”
A man called by God to shepherd the Good Shepherd’s flock must NEVER consider his calling as a “job” with set hours and benefits. My husband says it this was. “I am not paid to preach. I am paid so I am able to preach. Consider this, the outcome of a Pastors teaching may be life or death…eternal life or death. We read in James 3:1 Not many of you should presume to be teachers, my brothers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly
The time demands on a Pastor are tremendous. Most Pastors spend at least 20 hours a week studying the word of God to prepare for the Sabbath Sermon. Then you take into consideration all of the meetings and events he must attend, visitation, counseling, preparing for a Wednesday night or leadership training….. 60 hours is a minimum for most.
Bruce Theilman says this about preaching: The pulpit calls those annointed to it as the sea calls its sailors; and like the sea it batters and bruises, and does not rest….To preach, to really preach is to die naked a little at a time and to know each time that you must do it again.
So now to those things you can do for your Pastor:
~~ Pray for your Pastor continually;
~~ Be an encouragement to your Pastor by living a Christ Centered life;
~~ Be a blessing to your Pastor by freeing him from being a part of EVERYTHING…
~~ Be a blessing to your Pastor by providing for he and his family… the world says pay them in line with the median income of the members of the church. The bible says take care of him. Every church has different financial abilities; however, whether you have a “wealthy” church or a “poor” church be good stewards of what THE LORD has provided.
~~There are many ways to bless your pastor and his family and help provide. Baby sit for the children so he and his wife can have some personal time, make some meals, arrange for a special offering for one time items such as braces…be creative.
~~Treat your pastor with respect, we all have a tendency to “pile on” at the end of Sunday service…. don’t. Some people think that if they provide a parsonage, that this means they can “drop” in on the pastor and his wife…don’t. The pastor wife has cleaning day, hanging out in pj’s day etc. Be considerate call ahead.
I will close with a humorous poem entitled:
The Ideal Pastor…
is always casual but never underdresed,
is warm and friendly but not too familiar ,
is humorous but not funny,
calls on all his members but is never out of the office,
is an expository preacher but always preaches on the family,
is profound but comprehensible,
condemns sin but is ALWAYS positive,
has a family of ordinary people…who never sin,
has two eyes, one brown and one blue……
Please spend some time asking yourself…..what have I done for my pastor and his family lately? If the answer is nothing…. do something about it!
It’s true. The better your skin is, the better your makeup is, which is why it is just as important to take good care of your skin. Ever since I became a freshman in high school I have been on the hunt for good skin care products, and funnily enough, the best skin care product I have found is a book. Yup. I’ve tried all sorts of cleansers, scrubs, toners, moisturizers, and masks, but the best by far has been a book.
Most people know about the four different skin types, dry, oily, combination, and sensitive, but Dr. Baumann takes this idea many steps forward in her book Skin Type Solution. Within this book she shows that there are actually 16 different skin types, and tells you which one you are with the help of a test, much like the Myers Briggs personality test. There are four different categories: Oily/Dry, Sensitive/Resistant, Pigmented/Non-pigmented, and Wrinkled/Tight. I am a DSNT, so I went to the DSNT section of the book. Voila, step by step instructions for personal care. The real magic was how well it worked for me, not to mention the fact that I got a lot more insight into why on MUA there are so many varying reviews on a product. This book, among other things, includes a list of ingredient dos and don’ts, lists of products that work specifically with your skin type, a night and day regimen for your skin, and an example of a patient she has had with your skin type.
there is just so much wonderful stuff you can do with this book! It really helped me to understand my skin, and now that I’m using the advice from this book, my acne scars have been clearing up dramatically! Another thing that healthy skin does for me is build confidence, which is what I (and Ellen Degeneres!) think is the true purpose of makeup. Looking good is about feeling good!
I took last weekend and stayed home. And when I say stayed home…I MEAN stayed home. I had done any errands previously during the week and purposely kept my schedule open on the weekend to do nothing except relax. I don’t recall ever leaving the house.
As I thought about what I should do with my 48 hours of free time, I could feel an unspoken and understood longing emulating from my bookshelves. I casually strolled over and inhaled. I adore the smell of books. That delicious scent of a books binding, and the the way that the pages unintentionally take on the smell of their surroundings lures me close to their silhouettes every time.
I ran my fingers over each title as I read it and carefully chose the one that best danced off my tongue.
I vowed silently to myself to only rise from the couch to eat, sleep, drink, and go to the bathroom. Other than that, I wanted nothing more than to sit and curl up with my literary find. If you visit my blog frequently, you are more than aware that my love for reading and writing overpowers most everything that I do. So naturally, choosing a weekend to do nothing with would wontedly lead me to one or the other.
To read with nothing but silence around you is exhilarating. I get completely enveloped not only in the book, it’s plot, and the characters, but also in myself. I reflect on my weak areas as well as my strong points. I sometimes see myself in the characters and can’t help but wonder “what if?”
I read and read. I didn’t even turn the TV on. It was fantastic. It was magical. It was rejuvenating.
Have just finished my way through this book By Richard Coekin.
The book is really useful for thinking about how to use The Lord’s Prayer in all aspects of life, and also realising that we dont know how to pray and Jesus tells us that this is how we should pray! Therefore the prayer comes highly endorsed by the one who hears and answers our prayers!
It isn’t a very long book (which is always good) but is good for giving practical advice on how to pray throughout the day, not necessarily sitting down to pray, but always praying on the go during a busy day.
As Tim Keller quotes the book is ‘Clear, warm and practical’.
I’m not a great prayer, but this book helped me to see actually what God’s priorities are when I pray and how when I see that it will actually incorporate all my needs with it!
I just got back from one of my lunch-time jaunts to the campus library. I planned to drop off some books and then go grab lunch. On the way I thought I should pick up some marketing or packaging books to give me my first clue on opening my online jewelry store. I’ve been fooling around with a small store on Etsy, called DragonFlytiGirl. My original plan in opening the store front was to earn little money to off-set my craft hobbies. I thought I was a jewelry designer and crafter but eventually found out that my real hobby is buying books about crafting and making jewelry. I feel so virtuous, so creative while I’m reading them, I know I can make the project I’m looking at and that it will be splendid!
Once the book is closed, it starts to look a little harder to do, must get all the materials, make the measurements, sort the beads….Where’s that book again? I tell you for true, in my mind I’m Louis Comfort Tiffany; in my craft room I’m more like Dan Ackroyd’s anal retentive chef.
So there I am in the library, searching for some very practical business titles, but the stacks have a strange lure. The scent of metric tons of books is intoxicating; it makes me a little light headed. The massed titles flash past me as I prowl through the rectangular maze and every fifth book spine seems like a sudden red light. I walk through library shelves like a clown on stilts, start-stop, start-stop, bend and reach, start again. The titles flow around me and it tickles my brain and I want to sit down and read, with a case of spare glasses, until Rod Serling tells me the show is over.
Finally I find the business section, make my selections, and start winding my way back out. Of course I stop to browse the New Book section and find my eye settling on a huge, colorful photo collection. The book is titled ‘Spaced Out: Radical Environments for the Psychedelic Sixties”. The small print promises crash pads, hippie communes, infinity machines, and more.
Now I love to read when I’m eating lunch, it’s the most refreshing way to bi-sect the work day, but I don’t want to plow into something dull. I want some color, some flash, and some easy side-dish to consume along with my cheese ravioli. This book gets four out of five stars and rates The Picture Tour Read.
One point is lost for pictures of scampering hippies and the text, which focuses on LSD mind trips. I wasn’t around for hippies or LSD so I have no nostalgia for that era. However, two stars get awarded for the beautiful graphic design of the book; it’s a stunning visual experience. The other two stars go to the section on handmade housing. These homes were truly innovative, a remarkable range of dwellings built from scrap lumber, clay and mud, fabric, plastic, trees, bottles, and so much more. Some of the homes were completely impractical, yet a few were works of art, living sculpture.
I was left with no desire to strip and garden by moonlight, but I did appreciate the design freedom that sprang up and left its mark on our culture.
Title: Spaced Out: Radical Environments for the Psychedelic Sixties
Two books to highlight in this installment of Books to Buy. This is not a review post, but a quick summary designed to put good books on your radar screen.
The first is Union University president David Dockery’s new Southern Baptist Identity: An Evangelical Denomination Faces the Future (Crossway, 2009). The text is an edited collection of talks from recent Baptist Identity conferences at Union. The roster of contributors is high-wattage: Dockery, Mohler, Wills, Stetzer, George, Moore, Garrett, Akin, and Rainer among them. Together, the essays lay the groundwork for the Great Commission Resurgence, currently swelling up to a storm.
Do not make the mistake of being put off by the multi-essay nature of the book. The theme considered in the book–Southern Baptist identity, if you were sleeping earlier–manages to pull both personal and theological insight out of the authors. Several of them weave personal stories with doctrinally driven commentary (Rainer’s intro is hilarious), and the resulting style is as engaging as it is enlightening.
I highly recommend Southern Baptist Identity. I commend the stance it takes from the start, conceiving of the SBC as an “evangelical denomination.” Its contributors offer a compelling case for a new SBC, one that is flexible, generationally collaborative, theologically driven, and carried forward with the same passion and energy that have always characterized Southern Baptist efforts. It is a noteworthy text, a fun read, and an ideological foundation for the GCR, the promised success of which has many of us watching with anticipation and praying in excitement.
The second book is Greg Dutcher’s You Are the Treasure That I Seek (But There’s a Lot of Cool Stuff Out There, Lord) (Discovery House Publishers, 2009). This short, readable text, introduced by eminent theologian John Frame, attacks idolatry. Dutcher, a pastor in Fallston, Maryland, considers in the book how to keep Christ and not idols at the center of life. His Piper-like meditations reveal the foolishness of the idolatries that trap us.
The text bears out careful reading and reflection. “At the cross,” Dutcher writes, “Jesus takes our sin and idolatry and gives us His perfect standing with the Father so that we are forever beyond the reach of condemnation. The cross is literally the reversal of the idolatry syndrome.” (42) This is a pithy and moving point. We who have only treasured what is filthy and vile gain in Christ the most precious object the mind could imagine.
“I wonder,” Dutcher muses at another point, “how things might radically change in our churches if we became convinced that idolatry was our greatest problem.” (52) Sentences like this grab the reader, calling us to realize that we should not wonder when idolatry will affect us; idolatry already exists in our hearts, residing in our bodies like cancer. Our challenge is not to identify it from afar but to kill it from within by the power of Christ.
The text concludes with a number of very practical “case studies” that drive home Dutcher’s point. I commend them to you, as I do the book itself. Though the headings can get a little quirky (I didn’t always know what they meant, which works better in a less straightforward book), I found Dutcher (here’s his blog) to be a gifted and spiritually insightful writer. Pick up You Are the Treasure That I Seek, and be prepared to experience freedom from idolatry.
The Gospel and Personal Evangelism (Crossway, 2007) was written by Mark Dever, pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church. Dever’s clear agenda is to inspire his readers to evangelize more often and more faithfully, while promoting a culture of evangelism within our churches.
The book is divided into seven chapters which focus on particular aspects of evangelism. They are:
Why don’t we evangelize?
What is the Gospel?
Who should evangelize?
How should we evangelize?
What isn’t evangelism?
What should we do after we evangelize?
Why should we evangelize?
In the first chapter he walks through five reasons why we don’t evangelize and then provides 8 solutions to them. Chapter two focuses on the question of, “What is the gospel?” by give four things it is not: is not simply that we are okay, is not simply that God is love, and not simply that Jesus wants to be your friend and is not simply that we should live rightly. In chapter three he rightly concludes that all Christians should evangelize those God has placed in their lives.
Chapter four deals with the balance of honesty, urgency and joy as we share the gospel. Five reflects on what evangelism is not: imposition, personal testimony, social action and public involvement, apologetics, and results based. In chapter six, Dever explains what to do after the message has been shared. The conclusion is devoted to why we should evangelize.
One of the most helpful points of this small book is how Dever clarifies what the Gospel is and what it isn’t. The Gospel is very clearly defined as:
The good news is that the one and only God, who is holy, made us in his image to know him. But we sinned and cut ourselves off from him. In his great love, God became a man in Jesus, lived a perfect life, and died on the cross, thus fulfilling the law himself and taking on himself the punishment for the sins of all those who would ever turn and trust in him. He rose again from the dead, showing that God accepted Christ’s sacrifice and that God’s wrath against us had been exhausted. He now calls us to repent of our sins and trust in Christ alone for our forgiveness. If we repent of our sins and trust in Christ, we are born again into a new life, an eternal life with God.(p. 43)
We are all called to share the Gospel. We as members of the local church have an important role to play. Dever’s book is thoroughly biblical and extremely practical. He warns us accurately while encouraging us to get going in this all important duty as believers. We are not “salesmen” hocking our goods; rather we are constrained by the love of Christ with the greatest message ever given. We are heralds and that is all we are, but oh, what a privilege.
The Gospel and Personal Salvation may very well do for this generation what J.I. Packer’s Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God did for the past generation, and that is to provide a theological and practical guide to evangelism from within the Reformed tradition. I strongly encourage you to get Dever’s book. It is a helpful and instructive challenge in becoming more intentional in evangelism and to be more aware of the non-Christians we meet day to day.
My hair obsession that has turned into a hair acceptance also turned into a book called What Happened to the Afro? Here is some video taken in Uganda in 1996 or 1997 of a braiding session going on in Kampala. You can buy the book at: http://stores.lulu.com/kakonged.:
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Just for fun, I entered the phrase “quotes about friendship” into Google. The search engine returned 4,580,000 results – page after page of sweet, sentimental, funny phrases about friendship. In reality, friendship is often sweet, sentimental and funny…but it can also be complicated, puzzling, heartbreaking and life-altering. Try cross-stitching that on a pillow! In The Friends We Keep, Sarah Zacharias Davis examines the complex world of women’s friendships. The book, subtitled “A Woman’s Quest for the Soul of Friendship” draws on scenes from movies, books and real-life experience to explore the effects of our relationships with other women.
The Friends We Keep examines our need for friends, the roles we play within our friendships, the seasons of friendship and much more. Although the writing is somewhat clinical, the book asks meaningful questions throughout. I couldn’t help but wish other women were reading alongside me. This would be an excellent book to study as a group. Wouldn’t that be a great way to make a new friend!?
If you’ve ventured into the world of Facebook, you probably have more “friends” than you ever realized. Truthfully, many of them are probably casual acquaintances at best, aren’t they? Just this morning I realized there was one less “friend” on my list than there was yesterday. Has someone de-friended me? Agh! The Friends We Keep reminded me how fortunate I am that many years ago, long before the world wide web, my friend request was accepted [I♥my BFF].
To learn more about this book or purchase a copy, please visit
http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9781400074396 or simply click on the photo.
To WIN a copy of this book, leave a comment below! Winner will be drawn at random from all comments left between 08/14/09 and 08/24/09. Good luck!
BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE!
The 40 Minute Bible Study series from beloved Bible teacher Kay Arthur and the teaching staff of Precept Ministries tackles important issues in brief, easy-to-grasp lessons you can use personally or for small-group discussion. Each book in the series includes six 40-minute studies designed to draw you into God’s Word through basic inductive Bible study. There are 16 titles in the series, with topics ranging from fasting and forgiveness to prayer and worship. With no homework required, everyone in the group can work through the lesson together at the same time. Let these respected Bible teachers lead you in a study that will transform your thinking—and your life.
In a SEPARATE drawing from all comments left between 08/14/09 and 08/24/09, I will give away 2 of the titles in this series: Rising to the Call of Leadership and What Does the Bible Say about Sex? Don’t miss out!!
Frankie Landau-Banks has transformed into a girl over the summer. Not only did she change so much physically that more boys are noticing her, but her attitude towards her male-dominated, prep-school world has become wrathful. After growing up listening to her father and his buddies regale her with tales of outrageous things they did with their prep-school secret society, The Loyal Order of the Basset Hounds, Frankie decides that she will join this “renegade” society. To her dismay, she discovers not only are girls not allowed, but the Bassets have fallen from their glory days.
Due to her summer transformation Frankie manages to attract the attention of gorgeous senior Matthew, who happens to be a member of the secret society. Through Matthew, Frankie determines who the leader is and decides to make a little mischief to reclaim the glory that was once so prevalent on campus. Little does she know what sleeping dog she will awaken…
Frankie Landau-Banks is a terrifically accessible character for many younger girls. Always thought of last and disregarded as the “baby of the family” she asserts herself in the ways that most people only dream about. Luckily for the story, instead of everything working out to her benefit, she has to watch as her world mutates into something unrecognizable when she loses control of the monster she has created. A thoroughly enjoyable read!
Title: The Friends We Keep: A Woman’s Quest for the Soul of Friendship
Author: Sarah Zacharias Davis
Publisher’s Synopsis:
Why are women’s friendships so tricky?
During a particularly painful time in her life, Sarah Zacharias Davis learned how delightful–and wounding–women can be in friendship. She saw how some friendships end badly, others die slow deaths, and how a chance acquaintance can become that enduring friend you need.
The Friends We Keep is Sarah’s thoughtful account of her own story and the stories of other women about navigating friendship. Her revealing discoveries tackle the questions every woman asks:
• Why do we long so for women friends?
• Do we need friends like we need air or food or water?
• What causes cattiness, competition, and co-dependency in too many friendships?
• Why do some friendships last forever and others only a season?
• How do I foster friendship?
• When is it time to let a friend go, and how do I do so?
With heartfelt, intelligent writing, Sarah explores these questions and more with personal stories, cultural references and history, faith, and grace. In the process, she delivers wisdom for navigating the challenges, mysteries, and delights of friendship: why we need friendships with other women, what it means to be safe in relationship, and how to embrace what a friend has to offer, whether meager or generous.
I was eager to read this book when it arrived. Aside from the absolutely stunning cover (and like most people I do judge a book by its cover), the topic was one that fascinates me. I read a lot about friends in my on-line communities and I watch friendships around me in my day-to-day life. I’ve reflected on my friendships, those of my parents, my other friends and their friendships, and I’ve always marveled at how very different we all truly are. So, when I got the invite to review this book, I jumped at it eagerly. It was almost like a mini-course in sociology.
Ms. Davis wrote a compelling book full of real-life anecdotes both from her own experience and the experiences of others. Her observations about what makes and breaks female friendships was hard-hitting and with no holds barred. I put the book down with a renewed repugnance for gossip, searching my heart for any sign of jealousy, and with a new understanding of what so many women talk of that I have never understood.
We’ve all heard it, and I bet most of us have said it. “What is this, Jr. High?” Female relationships have often irritated me, even as a small child. The cattiness, pettiness, and drama is naturally abhorrent to me. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve gotten in the middle of that kind of garbage myself. I’m not immune, but the degree to which so many women seem to live in that kind of world… even crave it… has never made sense to me. When I’ve found myself on the other side of the curtain after the drama has ceased and the ‘play’ is over, I’ve been disgusted with myself– ashamed. It makes me want to stick to the few friends that I know don’t play those games so I don’t let myself get sucked into them. I never understood how or why some women are willing to go through that kind of ordeal repeatedly. What I consider a nuisance, they consider the worthwhile price of friendship. After reading this book, I understand it. My personality is such that I still don’t seek it, but I do understand it.
The author did an amazing job of illustrating the deep need that most women have for friendships through television and movie examples. The odd thing is, I’ve seen two or three out of about twenty possible examples. One, I barely remember, one I did enjoy and appreciated, and one was a brief reference to Little Women and while not the typical story of female friendships, it is a fine example of female relationships which of course, female friendships are.
She touched on best friends, circles of friends, life-long friends, losing friends, unlikely friendships, being betrayed by friends, cultural friendships (her story about ancient Chinese culture and friendships was amazing), and the changes that friendships endure. I love how transparent she was (funny choice of words considering she’s written a book by that name) about her own failings and successes as a friend.
To be honest, I only had one objection to the book and I think I’m probably in agreement with her at the heart of things. She wrote about confronting friends, playing the Holy Spirit, and seemed to imply that it’s really not our place to confront friends when they’re making mistakes. I might agree with that for the most part. Seriously, I really think too often we take it upon ourselves to meddle in the lives of others. It makes me think of that poem I’m always quoting and I’m sure people are sick to death of reading, The Fool’s Prayer. Those lines (yeah, the ones I usually quote… they’re the ones I need to read/hear the most)
“These clumsy feet, still in the mire,
Go crushing blossoms without end;
These hard, well-meaning hands we thrust
Among the heart-strings of a friend.
“The ill-timed truth we might have kept–
Who knows how sharp it pierced and stung?
The word we had not sense to say–
Who knows how grandly it had rung!
I think she’s right. We’re often quick to meddle in the heart-strings of our friends. We have truth that we should speak… but our timing is off. We have things we should say and don’t… I wholeheartedly agree with her on that… with one caveat. Scripture is plain. If our brother is in sin, it is not a loving or appropriate thing to ignore sin. We don’t try to convict, we don’t try to be judge and jury, but we do, because we love our sisters, point them to the Word and provide that “faithful wound” proving ourselves true friends rather than enemies. I’m afraid, however, that too often we’re much to eager to prove our faithfulness rather than grieved to be forced to do so– something else she touches on in the book.
So, you see, I do agree with her. I am just a little cautious about how she worded it, because I am excessively fond of commas and caveats (only Cathe will understand why I added commas in there, but I did it for my friend. See, I’m not entirely without heart!).
I cannot stop thinking about her section on gossip. It’s truly one of the best things I’ve ever read on the topic. No, she isn’t exhaustive or original. Nothing she says was new information that overwhelmed me with its brilliance (no offense Ms. Davis). However, somehow the way she arranged her thoughts into words managed to resonate with me in a way that nothing on the topic ever has. I see the ugliness of gossip in my own heart and life in areas I’d never seen it before tonight. It’s amazing how something you truly despise as I do gossip can still be rooted in your own heart. She showed me the weed and where it was growing in her book. I’ll always be grateful.
I want to give this book away. It’s such a great book that I want someone else to be blessed by it. I just can’t. I need to read it again. I need to read it with my Bible open and my heart laid bare before the Lord. I also need it for reference. As I said, I don’t understand the deep seated need for so many women to connect on the level that Sarah Davis discusses. This book helps me understand. That understanding helps me be a more well-rounded and compassionate person. Anyone who knows me knows that I could use all the compassion I can get. So, I’ll have to keep it here, share around the town with my friends here, and swallow the “guilt” I feel for not offering it to one you. Forgive me?
Oh yeah, buy the book. I can’t guarantee she won’t say things that don’t rattle your cage a bit, and I did have that one objection, but honestly, I think we need our cages rattled some and as I said, I think we actually agree… I just think she’s not quite as fond of caveats as I am.
Picking up where we left off, I start the major section of the work, entitled simply “Time.” Zakai places Edwards in a day divided by biblical-centric evangelicals focusing their intellectual capacities on religious experience, while the world increased in scientific and philosophical imagination. Zakai offers some explanation:
One of the main reasons for the growing privatization of religious life and experience was that during the eighteenth century the Christian theological and teleological explanation of the nature of reality had steadily declined in persuasiveness because of the attraction of scientific thought in interpreting the nature of the material world and the influence of the British school of moral sense, which developed the rationalistic idea of disinterested benevolence as the criterion for moral judgment” (135).
This age saw a major conflict between reason and revelation, the former taking precedent and the latter being dethroned from its former glory. As a helpful summary, Zakai states, “The disenchantment of the world led therefore to the reenchantment of the soul, or the heart, as the main locus of religious life and experience” (136). It is here where Zakai slowly turns his attention to the Holy Grail of Edwards studies – what Edwards meant when he claimed that he was planning a great theological work in an entirely new method, “thrown into the form of a history.” Zakai notes,
His philosophy of history in turn was based upon the notion of God’s work of redemption, a mode of historical thought according to which God continuously unveils his redemptive power and activity in time and history through the close connection between the effusions of the Spirit and the emergence of revivals and awakenings” (139).
Zakai ties this task with Edwards reenchantment of reality, pulling God’s sovereignty down to the life of an atom and upholding all of reality within his own consciousness. While Edwards’ day was pushing ahead on the linear path of “enlightenment,” Edwards sees a cyclical and teleological machine of God’s bidding unfolding his decrees in his theatre of glory. Zakai claims, “Edwards’s redemptive mode of historical thought, however, endowed history with sacred meaning by defining revival as the locus of history and awakening as the main agent in the historical process. Furthermore, understanding progress within history in terms of conversion and awakening, he defined history as a span of time in which the drama of salvation and redemption is played out before the end of the world” (161).
Zakai places Edwards’ historical analysis in the register of an “ecclesial history,” or a “general history of the Christian church.” As a definition of Ecclesial history, he suggests, “Eccleisastical history is sacred history, for it concerns the divine dispensation of God and his revelatory redemptive acts, or more precisely, the whole of Christ’s divine economy of salvation and redemption on earth” (164). The historic economy of salvation is constitutive of ecclesiastical history as the story of salvation, redemption, and importantly for Edwards, damnation (in my mind at least). In comparison with other ecclesiastical theologians, Edwards reimagined this historical mode of thought around the events of revival and awakening:
To him the true mark of sacred, ecclesiastical history was not the social and political event but the religious revival, whereby the Spirit of God transformed the human condition. Edwards’s theology of history was thus based not on alienation from the world but on reconciliation with it through revivials and awakenings, leading to its true transformation into the kingdom of God” (180-181).
It is here where Zakai makes an interesting note in light of my addition of damnation to Edwards’ repetoire. He states, “In other words, he [Edwards] identified God’s work of redemption with the whole span of history. As he came to believe, there is no history without redemption, no redemption without history” (186). In my mind, Edwards orients everyting around redemption, true enough (including creation interestingly enough). But redemption itself is oriented around God’s self-glorifying through creation, which includes both redemption and damnation. It could be that Zakai makes this point further on, but I have yet to see this central aspect of Edwards’ thought shine through. Again, later in the volume, Zakai seems to make the same mistake: “Hence, time and history should be defined by the theme of a series of effusions of the Spirit and its historical manifestations in the shape of a succession of revivals and awakenings stretching from creation to the end of the world” (236). Edwards’ great treatise was to be composed of three parallel spheres: Heaven, Earth and Hell. Zakai seems to remove the Hell portion from Edwards’ thought, which, at face value is fine for a study dealing with redemption itself, but not for a study dealing with history. The history of Hell was, for Edwards, central to God’s self-glorification.
I first read about “Swimming” in the July/August Poets and Writers magazine. Nicola Keegan was featured in the magazine’s “First-Fiction Annual.” I read the opening paragraphs there and was intrigued by the voice of the character Philomena (a.ka. Pip). This was a good thing, as the whole of “Swimming” seems to take place within Pip’s head. But more on that later.
“Swimming” chronicles Pip’s rise as a swimming superstar– over the course of the book she makes it to three Olympics and pulls in an unprecedented number of golds. Of course with a title like “Swimming,” one assumes that there’s probably a double meaning there, and yes, there is. Pip is barely treading water when it comes to navigating difficult family situations and the emotional aspects of her own life. She’s clearly headed for a breakdown at some point, and that is some of what makes this book hard to put down. I wanted to keep reading, to learn how it was all going to work out. Or not work out.
I was absolutely taken in by Pip’s story … for the first half or maybe even two-thirds of the book. Keegan gives Pip a strong, often sarcastic voice. The opening pages are from Pip’s perspective … as a baby. An unusual choice, narration-wise, but it worked for me. I found Pip’s voice, particularly until she hit late adolescence, funny, endearing, sharp and full of the reactions a young person might have to the situations she was dealing with. I tend to have a soft spot for coming of age novels, and maybe if this one had ended with Pip reaching 20, or even 22, I think I might have enjoyed it more as a whole. Alas, it continues through Pip’s late 20s, and I was definitely slogging through the last few years. That last third of the book feels more like a psychological analysis of Pip than a novel. The other characters fall away until they exist only in flashbacks and ruminations in Pip’s head. I wanted desperately to get out of there. It was a little claustrophobic.
I enjoyed the writing more in the first half of the book, too. It was funnier (possibly out of necessity) and maybe the prose was sharper. Keegan’s style, of superlong, list-like sentences punctuated by the occasional short phrase, was endearing at first, but the long listy sentences began to grate on me toward the end. The present tense also began to wear on me, and I think causes problems for Keegan toward the end when Pip does a lot of flashing back (or maybe forward? Sometimes it’s not clear.)
The dialogue in this book seems as though it, too, emanates from Pip’s brain (it’s in italics, not quotes) and I had trouble sometimes determining if conversations were real or not. The story’s clarity begins to slip toward the end of the book as Pip retreats further into her own head. I’m not sure if this was Keegan’s plan or not, but following what was happening and understanding when and where things were taking place became more and more difficult the further I got into this book.
I did wonder throughout whether Pip was meant to be a completely unreliable narrator, but in the end I decided that was not the case. Pip is saavy enough to know that she is not processing her emotions and that she often behaves badly, and she comments on these issues in chapter after chapter.
Keegan does masterfully create the life of an Olympic swimmer here, with descriptions of training, teammates, injuries, diet, etc. (All from Pip’s perspective, of course.) Keegan says in the P&W interview that she read “every single swimmer’s bio ever written, every book on swim mechanics, swim theory and swim philosophy.” It shows. In a good way.
The claustrophobic last third of the book (which lacks much actual plot, really) is what stops me from heartily recommending this one. But in general it’s an endearing, fast read, and a good one for anyone looking to get lost in one strong voice.
“Swimming” is Keegan’s first novel, and it took her five years to write it. In the P&W interview, she says it was accepted for publication “three days after it was presented,” which I found frustratingly unclear and perhaps a PRish answer to the question. I was heartened by reading about her, though, as here she is, publishing her first novel at age 44. There is hope for those of us who are no longer 25, is what I thought when I read that.
A final comment: This novel was poorly proofread. (Was it proofread? I mean, spelling errors, missing punctuation, spacing errors, apostrophes in the wrong places, etc., etc. I read this one via Kindle for iPhone, and it made me wonder, do e-ditions of books go out earlier than other editions and thus get less editing? I hope not! I’d be curious to know if the same errors are in the print versions.
I just finished reading “The Angel’s Game” by Carlos Ruiz Zafón.
The story takes place in 1920s Barcelona. The protagonist, David Martin, is born into poverty. He is recognized for his literary talent and with the aid of a patron, Pedro Vidal, quickly becomes become a crime reporter and then a hugely successful pulp novelist. David longs to leave the world of pulp novels for more meaningful literary pursuits and accepts a commission to write a story that leads him into danger.
The pace of the story is quick and I had a difficult time putting the story down. My one complaint is that is does not come with a “nice, neat ending.” I tend to prefer that all the loose ends be tied up. Read “The Angel’s Game” and let me know what you think. Have you read it already? Then please leave a comment and give me your rating!
Book Details: Published by Doubleday, 544 pages, ISBN-10: 0385528701, ISBN-13: 978-0385528702
Specific to the “Environment and Social Theory” module (available as an option for 2nd and 3rd years), this book is not an overall essential, but is key to this unit. It covers both our historical ideas and interactions with the environment, to modern day environmental issues and politics surrounding the environment (discussing both general right/left wing ideas and more radical grassroots movements). Although it is a more specific book, it does incorporate some key modern social thinkers seen throughout the course, such as Beck and his “risk society thesis”, and Giddens’ theories of the impact of globalisation on the environment. It is both an interesting and thought provoking read, and covers almost all of the topics and set reading within the unit. The emphasis on environmental politics and issues such as climate change are increasingly relevant. Overall, the book is well set out into easily readable sections, without any “dumbing down”. It provides a great basis for a clear understanding of the key issues within the unit, and has a useful list of further reading and resources which are useful when it comes to essays and exams.
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This book can be found in the Geography Library, classmark: N3 BAR.
I did a short post about it a few weeks back but have now finally got round to finishing it and I would recommend it so very highly to anyone.
Lloyd-Jones seems to have such a brilliant way of applying the principles of writings in the Epistles to our Christian lives and our pursuit of Joy in the Lord. I found that as I read each passage it was so applicable to me and it is jam-packed with practical ways of how to apply the teachings.
I have been very challenged by much of what Lloyd-Jones talked of and I feel better equipped and prepared as a follower of Jesus to face trials and hardships when they arise. Not only just in these times but also just how in my life to seek Jesus more and find that as I do that I will find Him to be so much more satisfying than anything the world can offer.
I sincerely hope that you will read this book and share a similar experience, and please let me know if you have done or do!
Thoughts after reading Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov
I have read The Idiot, and I have read Crime and Punishment. Those books I read ages ago, when I was still young, but The Brothers Karamazov remained on my “to read” list for years before I finally picked it up this summer. The book just seemed too long, too dark (a parricide?!, even the cover art seemed dreary and depressing), too male (weren’t there any sisters in this book?), and too Christian (questions concerning old church doctrines couldn’t hold any interest to me). I left my copy of the book with my parents in the U.S. when I moved back to Europe after my clerkship. At some point, I asked my mom to send me the book, but she couldn’t find it. When we came back to visit, I looked through my old stuff for it, but I didn’t have any better luck than my mom. The book seemed to have disappeared. I forgot about it for a time. There were other things to read.
Later I ran across Professor Dreyfus’s webcasts of his course on Existentialism in Literature and Film at the University of California, Berkeley. The course featured selections from Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and somewhat to my surprise, Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Now, I was really curious. I got another copy of the book and decided to read it this summer.
The book turned out to be a treat to read – every bit the literary masterpiece it was billed to be. I finished reading, satisfied that I’d learned something and happy that the book had been well worth my time. But almost as soon as I’d returned the book to the bookshelf, a funny thing happened: I suddenly found myself moved to tears after seeing an author ridiculed by posts on social news sites. A separate blog post can be found about the incident here. It was as a result of this incident that I ended up picking the book up again and began musing over the unsolved problems as set forth in Professor Dreyfus’s lectures.
In The Grand Inquistor, a story contained within The Brothers Karamazov, a Spanish Cardinal explains that the church was founded upon miracle, mystery and authority. Dostoevsky took it upon himself to explain the significance of these three things in terms of human experience. In a previous post, I blogged about Dostoevsky’s conception of authority. In this post, I will discuss miracles and mysteries.
Mysteries
After my realization with respect to Dostoevsky’s treatment of authority, I went back to Professor Dreyfus’s lectures to see what the remaining open issues were. Although Professor Dreyfus had found the places in the book where Dostoevsky had “existentialized” different doctrines like baptism and confession, he wondered what was meant by the use of the word “mystery” in The Grand Inquisitor. I thought back to my Catholic upbringing, and it seemed to me that I remembered hearing the word “mystery” used with respect to receiving communion. The anointing of the sick also crossed my mind as something that had been explained as a “mystery.” I looked those up on Wikipedia and the Catholic encyclopedia, but found that I was thinking of the seven sacraments.
I asked my husband, who was baptised in the Orthodox church, if he knew anything about Orthodox “mysteries.” He is not religious, and couldn’t remember much either, but looked up taina, the Romanian word for mystery, on the Romanian language version of Wikipedia. He found that the word taina, or mystery, was synonymous with sacramente, or sacraments. Evidently, the Greek word “mysterion” is translated in Latin as “sacramentum.” I also looked up “mystery” on Wikipedia, which confirmed that the word is used in the Eastern Orthodox tradition to refer to what are known as the sacraments in the Western tradition. The seven sacred mysteries (sacraments) are: baptism, chrismation (confirmation), holy communion, confession, holy orders, matrimony, and unction (the anointing of the sick, or “last rites”).
Because many of the individual mysteries were explained throughout Professor Dreyfus’s lectures, this is primarily only of organizational interest. However, what follows is a few notes on each.
Baptism was explained as a positive, loving childhood memory.
Chrismation appears to be closely connected to baptism, but it relates primarily to the sign of the cross preformed over someone to “seal the initiate with the gifts of the Holy Spirit,” an act that was preformed by the doctor Herzenstube over Dmitry as a child.
Dostoevsky allowed a “last supper” for Dmitry when he feasted in the town of Mokroye the night before he was arrested. Holy Communion is taken to commemorate the last supper, which gives me to wonder whether Dmitry’s first feast was the “last supper” and the second feast a communion in commemoration of the first. The other possibility is that communion is represented by, for example, the Elder Zosima sitting down and drinking tea with his former servant. In the description of this meeting, Elder Zosima notes that “between us a great act of human unity had taken place.” Later he recalls:
´What do you want us to do?´that said, ’sit our servants down on the sofa and bring them cups of tea?´ And then I said to them in answer: `Well, why not, if at least only on occasion?´Then they all laughed. Their question was a frivolous one, and my reply unclear, but I think that it contained a certain amount of truth.
-Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, From the Discourses of the Elder Zosima
The importance of confession was illustrated by the Elder Zosima’s story of the mysterious stranger.
Ordination was shown by, for example, the Elder Zosima’s dying brother Markel instructing the Elder as a child, in the twilight hour, to “go now and play and live for me!” Another example was Alyosha’s mother dedicating him to the icon, also in the twilight hour.
No marriages took place in the book, so perhaps Dostoevsky intended to show the importance of this sacrament in his intended follow-up work. My guess is that it has something to do with Professor Dreyfus’s insight that each character in the book seems to have an “existential double.”
The anointing of the sick was described in detail by Alyosha’s tending to the sick child Ilyusha. In these scenes, Dostoevsky describes the process of reconciliation, forgiveness, and a kind of coming to terms with one’s past deeds. I don’t remember any part of the book in which anyone was anointed with oil or perfume, but I wasn’t reading the book looking for such an incident either. There was an interesting scene in which the dog Zhuchka licked Ilyusha “all over one side of his face,”which makes me wonder whether Dostoevsky might have been making a little bit of fun of the tradition of anointing the sick with oil, but that’s highly speculative.
One last note about the mysteries: in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, the primary mystery is the incarnation of God. The sacraments receive their importance in relation to this, as a means by which man can become reunited with God.
Miracles
Dostoevsky’s treatment of miracles may be one of the most interesting and thought-provoking aspects of the book. In his lectures, Professor Dreyfus explains how Dostoevsky de-mystifies one of the most mystical parts of Christianity. The task was a difficult one: Dostoevsky had to show how a miracle could both be rare and extraordinary – not something that happens every day – and yet, also something that would not contravene the laws of physics and chemistry. To do this, Dostoevsky seizes upon the transformative power of agape love. What struck me most however, was not the transformation itself – not the content of the miracle – but the mechanism (or perhaps “vehicle” is a better word) for the miracle.
While reading the book, I was struck by this passage during the scene which led to the salvation of both Alyosha and Gushenka:
. . . he might have fathomed that for both there had coincided all the elements necessary to shake their souls in the way that this infrequently occurs in life.
-Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, The Onion
“Aha!,” I thought, “there’s an example of a meaningful coincidence!” Another meaningful coincidence was protrayed later in the book, when Ivan runs into the singing bum. Miracles, it seems for Dostoevesky, are mirrored by the work of the devil. While Alyosha is protrayed as being saved by the occurrence of a meaningful coincidence followed by a vision in a dream, Ivan seems to be doomed via the same mechanism: a meaningful coincidence followed by a vision, although in his case it is not clear whether the vision was a dream or a delusion.
I was found Dostoyevsky’s use of meaninful coincidence in particular quite fascinating. A meaningful coincidence can be defined as a random event or string of events that are in no way causually connected, but that nonetheless appear subjectively meaningful to the observer. Interest in the same phenomenon had years earlier introduced me to the psychology of Carl Jung, who had formulated a concept he called synchronicity to account for it. Jung published a short book on synchronicity in collaboration with the physist Wolfgang Pauli. However, the book is no longer available with Pauli’s essay, and because I had difficulties locating either a copy of Pauli’s contribution or the Pauli-Jung letters, I ended up reading a book by a Swedish PhD student, Suzaane Gieser, who had written her doctoral thesis on the relationship between the two giants. It is also worth mentioning that, according to Jung in his book on synchronicity, the concept had also been explored in an essay by the German philosopher Author Schopenhaur, but I have also been unable to locate that particular essay.
Unfortunately, much of Jung’s essay on synchronicty now seems quite dated, primarily due to his forays into experiments regarding telepathy and psychokinesis. On the other hand, his attempts to find scientific verification of the phenomenon does not strike me as any stranger than, for example, something like the Global Consciousness Project at Princeton, which is based on the hypothesis that “human intention can reduce natural entropy and create greater coherence within a random series of events.” This was essentially the same thing that Jung was attempting to show.
It seems to me however, that a better line of inquiry into the phenomenon of the meaningful coincidence might be through memetics, a modern theory concerning cultural information transfer. This is because the probability of, for example, hearing or seeing of a certain word or concept should be the same both before and after any partiuclar individual learns about that concept. Memetics shows that this is not always the case, as certain words and concepts seem to appear with greater frequency in society at different times. Thus, memetics seems to provide a way for distinguishing the phenomenon from cognitive biases such as the recency effect or the confirmation bias.
The picture of cultural diffusion painted by memetics also seems relevant to Dostoevsky’s conception of the spread of agape love. As Professor Dreyfus pointed out, his idea appears to be that pioneering or originating spirits (e.g., Markel in the book) are destroyed by radical revalations because they do not yet have the vocabulary and meand to effectively communicate and share their vision. In an intermediate stage, the revelation becomes institutionalized, and supported by an isolated community of individuals sharing the same beliefs (e.g., Zosima in the monastary). The last stage occurs when it is spread among the general public (e.g., Alyosha’s role). I can’t help but to relate these three stages to a more general conception of the diffusion of ideas, and think of Cantor, Boltzman and Nietzsche, each of the same generation, and all driven mad by radical new ideas undermining the quest for certainty in each of their respective fields: physics, math, and philosophy.
Finally, according to Littlewood’s law, the laws of probability guarantee each person about one miracle per month. Of course, Littlewood does not use meaningful coincidence in his definition of miracle, but merely defines a miracle as an exceptional event occurring at a frequency of about one out of a million other events. Because he then defines “event”as things occurring every second, he concludes that exceptional events, or miracles, must be commonplace. That leads me to wonder: are meaningful coincidences also too commonplace to count as miracles? After all, even my waiting to read the Brothers Karamazov for so long, running across the Dreyfus lectures after I had become an attorney and was tuned into issues concerning authority, and finally, seeing the cruel posts on Reddit and Digg mocking an author . . . these events were a string of coincidences that turned out to be meaningful, to be sure, but could this be called a miracle?
My answer is no, becuase I think Dostoevsky intended to limit his definition of miracle by requiring the coincidence to (1) have a very profound significance in the life of the individual, one capable of pushing him over the edge towards faith, or, in the case of the devil’s work, damnation, and (2) be linked to a dream or vision. On the other hand, it is also possible that Dostoevsky was trying to distinguish minor and major (mediate and non-mediated) miracles by using a two-fold notion, but I think the former is more probable.
