Book reviews from killswan

The Fraternity

by Diane Brady

Diane Brady's FRATERNITY is about the three or four years between 1968 and 1972 that five among twenty young black men spent in Worcester, Massachusetts . They were undergraduates of the all-male College of the Holy Cross, one of 23 institutions of higher education in the USA run by the Roman Catholic Society of Jesus, better known as "Jesuits." On April 4, 1968 Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. On that day only eight barely visible black students were enrolled at Holy Cross. *** FRATERNITY tells how King's killing propelled Holy Cross College, especially one Jesuit Priest, Reverend Father John E. Brooks, S.J., to reach out immediately and strongly to enroll more black students with leadership potential. When September 1968 rolled around, 20 black teens had been recruited, including, as a sophomore, future Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. The other 19 were freshmen. Of them ten graduated with the Holy Cross class of 1972. They included Theodore Wells, "widely considered to be one of the greatest trial lawyers of his generation" (his clients have included Scooter Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff); 1973-winning Miami Dolphins running back Edward Jenkins; and 2004 Pulitzer Prize winner Edward P. Jones (author of LOST IN THE CITY, THE KNOWN WORLD, ALL AUNT HAGAR'S CHILDREN). *** Father John Brooks, a 44 year old teacher of theology at book's beginning in April 1968, went on to become President of cash strapped Holy Cross (1970-1994), balancing 23 consecutive budgets, introducing women to the student body, adding black professors and enriching the black studies program. Author Diane Brady dedicates this, her first book, to Father Brooks who created that "Fraternity" of young black leaders of the classes of 1971 and 1972 and the man whom all of those black men acknowledge to have believed in them, mentored them and given them a chance to show the good that was within them. *** The structure of FRATERNITY is simple, clear, helpful, natural and as a memory aid. (It is not easy for an average American reader to keep a dozen or so generally unfamiliar black men's names and personalities straight.) Diane Brady begins by sketching America in the turbulent year 1968, with a half million troops in Viet-Nam, the Tet Offensive, the King assassination and with resultant race riots. She tells of Holy Cross College founded in the 1840s to be a refuge for young, mostly Irish Catholic men from anti-Catholic terror in Boston and elsewhere in Massachusetts. Ms Brady also makes clear what led Father Brooks to reach out in the teeth of faculty resistance or apathy to recruit through a network of Catholic high schools black teens with leadership potential. She carries five of those boys in some detail through their three or four years in Worcester to college graduation and finally shows us where they are today. *** FRATERNITY is not a collection of lives of saints. The boys pressed hard for privileges, including a black dormitory, a car to be provided by the college for the Black Student Union they founded, more black professors and more black content in the college's curriculum. They were lonesome for female companionship. When injustice was perceived, they walked out of the college as a body (within days Father Brooks cajoled them back). Clarence Thomas admires Brooks for treating each young black man as an individual with rights and talents, not as means to glory for the College of Holy Cross or as anything else. Said Thomas: "We weren't symbols to him. We were just kids." This is very creditable first book. On any scale I would rate it 4 1/2 stars, rounding upward to five. -OOO-

A Circle Of Sisters

by Judith Flanders

Different people will read for different reasons this uniquely conceived and structured, continuously narrated collection of biographies of several generations of the Macdonald family. I, for instance, read A CIRCLE OF SISTERS by Judith Flanders primarily for insights into Alice Kipling, nee Macdonald, mother of the Nobel Prize winning writer Rudyard Kipling. I also knew that young Rudyard and his even younger sister Trix loved and were greatly influenced and promoted socially by their Macdonald aunts, the by the increasingly successful men whom four of them married (three were important artists) and by the cousins they begot -- including Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. *** I had not realized going into A CIRCLE OF SISTERS how very original would be author Flander's structuring of her interlocking tale of several generations of a very creative family. Individuals, argues Judith Flanders, do not pop up out of nowhere. They are produced by families and live in houses. As fascinating as are the writers, painters, politicians (including one Prime Minister), equally so are the sketches of changes in household management, dining and in new clothing styles, modes of transportation, inventions and sanitary improvements that were incorporated into the daily lives of the rising middle classes of Ireland and England. *** Here are some examples bearing on living conditions and technological change: (1) In the 1840s a London inspector found homes with cellars three feet deep in human waste that had overflowed from cesspools. In 20 years cholera killed more than 30,000 people; a third cholera epidemic in 1854 killed 10,738 Londoners. (2) Most characters limned by Judith Flanders faced serious illness more than once. Thus Macdonald sister Louisa came down with smallpox; in 1864 her sister Georgiana took scarlet fever. (3) By 1878 there were electric lights (briefly) in London. But many still preferred candles or "unwholesome" gas light, with its smoke and "nauseous" smells. (4) The five sisters' mother Hannah Macdonald was a frugal Methodist minister's wife who had to move every few years with her growing brood. "Housekeeping took up and enormous amount of time. Even with the help of two servants, it was a heroic undertaking simple to keep a house clean. An average household burned a ton of coal every six weeks. ... the dirt thrown out by the fires was immense. Until the 1890s, coal rather than gas ranges were used in the kitchen for cooking, and heating water. ..." (There follows a long description of household chores involving cisterns and even pre-chemically cleaned laundry -- which "took three or four days out of every fortnight" and other examples of domestic labor.)(Ch 2). ***There may be as many as twenty such detailed passages in A CIRCLE OF SISTERS giving the ever evolving practices of private and public health, transportation by water and road, clothes making, fashion, mixing paints, and the like. I personally found this background material of enormous value.The Macdonald sisters lived in a harsher, cruder physical environment than we. A CIRCLE OF SISTERS also abounds with scores of sketches of painters, artists' models, poets, politicians and men and women about town who provided backdrop for the Kiplings and their more affluent in-laws. *** All in all A CIRCLE OF SISTERS is a very valuable book for its biographies and its vividly depicted milieux. I would not call it an easy read (the cast of characters is at times overwhelming to keep straight). But informative it unquestionably is, and very well written. -OOO-

Kim

by Rudyard; Piggott, Reginald Kipling

KIM begins in Lahore, West Punjab, in the last quarter of the 19th Century. Thirteen year old Irish orphan Kimberley O'Hara has been raised by a half-caste woman who turned his ex-sergeant father into an opium addict. Kim O'Hara is already a master of disguise. He can pass (though he does not choose to) as a young white sahib. Or a low-caste Hindu boy or a Mohammedan. He is mad for anything new and will spare all the time it takes to investigate a novelty. *** One such novelty that befalls Kim one day at the great cannon ZamZammah before the Wonder House (novelist Rudyard Kipling is a master of capitalizing words to show their importance), or native museum of Lahore. A tall Red Lama, a former abbot of a monastery in Tibet, appears, speaking good Urdu and asking Kim for directions. Kim follows the lama into the museum, run for decades by the novelist's father John Lockwood Kipling. What he overhears the monk and the curator speaking begins Kim's education for the next four years in Buddhism, the greatest novelty of his entire life. Kim becomes the lama's willing disciple (chela), begs food and lodging for him and is instructed in the Buddhist law. ***If the Lama is the greatest influence on Kim's young life, he is not the only one. A Pathan horse trader in far lands, Mahboob Ali, has had his eye for three or four years on talented, spunky young Kim. The Pathan thinks that Kim will make the greatest spy for the British Raj in India that the world has ever known. And soon he entrusts Kim with a message for Colonel Creighton in Umballa that unleashes a small army against pro-Russian rajas in the hills. And The Great Game is on for Kim. *** Kim is sent away to the best Catholic school in India, in fabled Lucknow, where he excels in mathematics and learns the surveying trade that he needs to play the Great Game. In Simla he is also trained by the mysterious dealer in antiquities, Lurgan Sahib, in mnemonic techniques. Soon Kim can take in the contents of a room or a box of jewels at a single glance. By novel's end, Kim has helped another spy, a fat Bengali Babu, foil a Russian surveyor team come down from Leh in Kashmir. We are left wondering: will Kim stay with his lama and learn the Way or follow his equally beloved Mahboob Ali into thwarting the Russians in the Great Game? *** Rudard Kipling's KIM is among a dozen or so books that this 75-year old book reviewer would want to have if stranded on a desert isle. It has adventure, comparative religions, ethnology, anthropology and the many races of India under the Raj. Kipling brings them all to life and keeps them in memory. -OOO-

The Penny Ferry

by Rick Boyer

Perhaps 90 % of everything I know about the Sacco-Vanzetti murder trials that lasted from 1920 until 1927 I learned from Rick Boyer's 1984, reissued 1990 detective thriller THE PENNY FERRY. Dental surgeon Doctor Charles Adams ("Doc") makes his second of nine appearances as an easily bored man. crimes and mysteries are a sure fire way to waken him from his daily slumber. ***** And in THE PENNY FERRY Doc, wife Mary and her brother, Lieutenant of Police Joseph Brinelli get swept up in a scheme involving Sacco and Vanzetti and evidence that will either clear them or prove them murderers. Is it the Mafia on the trail of a mysterious photograph that will give Sacco his alibi? Or is it a 92 year old WASP who masterminded the anarchists' guilty verdict and execution? ***** The hints and clues are fairly presented. The red herrings are indeed deceptive, but with care you can tell them from the real thing. ***** Doc Adams would not be Doc if he didn't find himself on the receiving end of kicks, blows, frights and general mayhem. Half thriller, half puzzle to be unraveled, THE PENNY FERRY is a memorable yarn for a rainy day. -OOO-

Fires of Faith

by Eamon Duffy

FIRES OF FAITH looks deceptively "popular." Its dustjacket shows 16th century England: a massive Corpus Christi sacramental procession at bottom and above it a burning of books. Inside the book contains brilliantly reproduced portraits of the book's two heroes: Queen Mary Tudor (1516 - 1558), Cardinal Archbishop Reginal Pole (1500 - 1558). And much more, including reproductions from John Foxe's book of Protestant nearly 300 Protestant martyrs burned by Mary and Pole. *** The book, in short, looks like something any educated American would open if he or she already knows something of English and religious history and wants to find more without too much exertion. *** In fact, however, this book, subtitled CATHOLIC ENGLAND UNDER MARY TUDOR, is written by a scholar primarily for other narrow scholars of the reign of "Bloody Mary" Tudor (1153 - 1558). For over 400 years, according to author Eamon Duffy, historians have underestimated Mary. Her restoration of Roman Catholicism stopped withher death and was reversed by her half-sister Queen Elizabeth. It is remembered most for its burning of scores of religious dissenters. Mary's five years are regularly portrayed as weak on public relations, in preaching and in explaining its policies. *** Cambridge University Professor Eamon Duffy portrays himself as one of a tiny band of scholars out to tell the truth about Mary and her principal collaborator, her Plantagenet princely cousin Reginald Pole. Pole, once the darling of Henry VIII, father of Mary and Elizabeth, had lived in European exile, had convoked the Catholic reforming Council of Trent, and had become a towering figure in European Catholic life. Some of what he did during his few years working with Mary to restore Catholicism as the state religion of England, Wales and Ireland, became a model in post-Tridentine Catholic reform piety. In particular, Duffy flags Pole's dedication to creating seminaries for clergy. Also telling for Pole's success in England: the vast majority of Mary's bishops remained loyal to the Pope at Mary's death. Their predecessors had caved a generation earlier when Henry VIII proclaimed himself head of the Church of England. Duffy suggests that only her early death prevented thorough re-Catholicizing of England. *** FIRES OF FAITH cries out for a popular successor. Any future edition should have a clearly marked "executive summary." The non-scholar's eyes glaze over as execution after execution is reviewed from several different slants (were they in one or twos, or in larger numbers, etc.?) and when scores of minor players: turncoats, bishops, minor clergy, laymen, nobility are trotted briefly across the stage. I would warmly recommend this book to scholars but not so wholeheartedly to educated laymen interested in English history. -OOO-

The Illustrated Longitude

by Sobel- Dava/ Andrewes- William J H

This 1998 book combines the best features of two complementary books of 1995. Both earlier books are by expert science writers, historians of the centuries long search for a practical method for determining longitude at sea. A successful solution would prevent ships lost at sea from running aground or adding weeks to their voyages as their crews sickened and died of scurvy and other diseases. *** As I understand it, the collaborative 1998 THE ILLUSTRATED LONGITUDE repeats verbatim the unillustrated 1995 text LONGITUDE by Dava Sobel. At the same time it is enlarged by illustrations and side panels explaining those illustrations supplied by William J. H. Andrewes. Andrewes's book reported on the three days of a Longitude symposium. Its complete title: The Quest for Longitude: The Proceedings of the Longitude Symposium Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts November 4-6, 1993 [ILLUSTRATED] (Hardcover). The two authors then collaborated to produce THE ILLUSTRATED LONGITUDE: THE TRUE STORY OF A LONE GENIUS WHO SOLVED THE GREATEST SCIENTIFIC PROBLEM OF HIS TIME. *** That lone genius, hero of THE ILLUSTRATED LONGITUDE, was carpenter turned choir master turned master watch inventor John Harrison (1693 - 1776). "A story that hails a hero must also hiss at a villain -- in this case, the Reverend Nevil Maskelyne, remembered by history as 'the seaman's astronomer'(Ch. 11, p.188). So far as I can tell from the book, both Harrison and Maskelyne by the mid 1760s had come up with practical but competing methods for calculating longitude (east-west distance from a fixed point). Their methods were different. Maskelyne represented a long line of astronomers including Galileo, Brahe and others and mathematician/physicists like Isaac Newton. The scientists all worked, in very large numbers, toward a method of calculating longitude through measuring angular distances between heavenly bodies, especially the moon. They also built up over decades the accurate sky charts needed for simple sailors to do the needed calculations. Maskelyne claimed to have reduced the calculation time from four hours to 30 minutes. By contrast, John Harrison, later aided by son William, built in virtual isolation "chronometers," first large sea going clocks then much smaller watches. *** Both Harrison and Maskelyne's methods were more or less rigorously tested. There was a 10,000 pounds sterling prize at stake and both men badly wanted to win. The cards were clearly stacked, however, in favor of Maskelyne, representing University educated mathematicians and astronomers everywhere. His method was perfectly clear and easily explained to the learned. But father and son Harrison were self-taught men of humble origin. They were secretive. They did not want to share their ideas unless paid for them. Both men were, however, invited to join the prestigious Royal Society. John declined. William accepted. *** The book's portraits, maps, photos and diagrams of clocks, sky charts and such are stunning. They alone make THE ILLUSTRATED LONGITUDE an adornment for the most discriminating coffee table. And Dava Sobel's clear prose is justly praised from its first edition onward. THE ILLUSTRATED LONGITUDE is a quick stroll through late medieval and early modern mathematics, astronomy and navigation. Without knowing longitude (the magnetic compass had greatly helped master latitude centuries earlier), ship masters were sailing blind, often with disastrous results. This is a book well worth reading and losing your self in among the illustrations. -OOO-

Managing Depression With Qigong

by Frances Gaik

Feeling blue most of the time? Can't sleep? Taking lithium? Do you find plenty of time to take Western medicines to numb the pain but make no time to understand or work on and remove the causes of what's ailing you? *** Then maybe you should also make a little quality time for some non-religious Eastern holistic approaches to health. Do not, however, begin tai chi, meditation, Qigong (Chi Kung) or other non-traditional roads to health without the advice of your family doctor or specialist. For "Western medicine has the best technology and strategies for ACUTE care" (Introduction). At a minimum, please, at least open and skim through the pages of Dr Frances Gaik's new (2009) book MANAGING DEPRESSION WITH QIGONG. *** Dr (of Clinical Psychology) Gaik tells us that she has written this book "as if you were sitting in my office and we were talking about your problem and how to solve it, as I do with many of my own patients. I am going to walk you through the information and help you make change happen" (Introduction). And by golly, she does! *** Dr Gaik explains Qigong, shows how quickly -- in some forms within minutes -- it can impact depression, the blues, sleeplessness and other bodily responses to modern stress. Her bibliography (References) tempts both specialist and non-specialist readers and ranges over material as late as 2008. Frances Gaik's ample 11-page Glossary is a fascinating read from A to Z: from Acupressure, that is, through Biofeedback, Breathing Exercises, Hypnosis, Reiki, Tai Chi, Transcendental Meditation, Yin and Yang all the way through to Yoga. There are 28 pages of illustrated Qigong exercises. *** MANAGING DEPRESSION WITH QIGONG is neither the first nor the last word about supplementary treatments of depression and related ailments through alternative, holistic Eastern approaches, especially through Qigong (Chi Kung). But it is a darn good, readable, informative, practical up-to-date word. -OOO-

The German Woman

by Paul Griner

This is a novel about loyalty and its enemies during two world wars. We begin at Germany's collapsed eastern front under British occupation. German medical staffs move randomly back toward the heartland while Reds, Whites, Cossacks, Czechs and other terrorist gangs commit atrocities. Unforgettable scenes of the early months of Germany's collapse and chaos before 1933 and the Nazi regime. When governments do not do enough to protect their citizens, is married love an adequate substitute? *** Meanwhile in the USA several American screenwriters are convicted under a new treason law for creating an anti-British documentary film. One of them is first imprisoned, then forced into exile: to Britain where he resurfaces in 1944 Britain as a double agent in the pay of a thoroughly incompetent British counter-intelligence agency. By days he writes propaganda films. By nights his cover is as an air raid warden. Falling in love with a surviving racially English, married German nurse survivor of World War I, our new hero is given reasons by his government handlers to suspect she is a German spy. Can their sudden love survive the tug of war between competing German and British governments? *** The second part of this gripping novel brings to life London under attack by Hitler's last gasp secret weapons, the V-Bombs, "buzz bombs," early cruise missiles. The London populace finds this final indignity almost worse than the 1940 blitz. *** This is a novel of loyalty: to nations and to persons and the uncertain reciprocity loyalty gets in either case. Enjoy! -OOO-

Ice Land

by Betsy Tobin

Dvalin, the hero of ICE LAND, a half dwarf, half god (through his swan maiden mother)rides across Iceland to visit his mentally disturbed, extremely ill sister Idun, goddess of eternal youth. He discusses Idun's condition with her husband Bragi, god of poetry. Why had Bragi left Asgard, home of the other Aesir (race of Nordic gods)? "I grew tired of life among the Aesir. There was so much deceit. So much corruption. When a race of people is universally admired, their hearts turn to stone." *** ICE LAND is about the coming disappearance of Odin, Loki, Idun, Bragi, Freya and all the other Nordic gods. We see the earliest stage of their displacement by the first Christian missionaries sent to Iceland by King Olaf of Norway. We experience the destruction of the home of the Aesir, Asgard, by the mighty volcano Hekla. It is "Goetterdaemmerung," the Twilight of the Gods. *** Powerful and magical as they are (Loki changes shapes, Freya flies, thanks to her feathered cloak given her by Odin), at bottom the gods of Iceland are just folks like everybody else, no more worthy of special attention than other races such as giants and dwarves. All races can and do interbreed. We will miss those human, all too human, Viking gods with their quarrels, jealousies and amours. But they were not destined to be more than a passing phase in the history of Germanic religion. Odin hadn't a chance against God the Father. Freya could not hold a candle to the Blessed Virgin Mary. But they were arresting while men still believed in them. *** ICE LAND is for easy bedtime reading. It is smooth, undemanding, touching lightly on important issues and topics such as plate tectonics, fate, the true religion, monogamy, loyalty, political decentralization of power, climate, agricultural and ranching practices. Great fun. Enjoy! - OOO -

Soul of the Assassin

by A. E. W. Mason

The filmed versions (1939, 1977, 2002) of the FOUR FEATHERS are all worth seeing. Each is in some ways better than the book. Ralph Richardson (1939) plays a strong Colonel Durrance. The desert and battle scenes with Beau Bridges (1977) and Heath Ledger (2002) are breathtaking. But each film is to the original novel of 1905 as a marionette version is to a human-acted KING LEAR. You have to read the book. The films are but thin icing on a many-layered cake. *** THE FOUR FEATHERS is all about the apparent cowardice displayed in 1882 of Harry Faversham, a 27-year old English soldier, on leave from his regiment based in India. Two days before he learns, during a party in his London apartment with army friends that his regiment is to be transferred to Egypt for duty in the Sudan fighting fanatical muslims, Harry had become engaged to marry beautiful 21 year old Ethne Eustace at her home in County Donegal, Ulster, Ireland. He had already been seriously considering resigning from the army to help Ethne's father rebuild the nearly ruinous family estate. Sudden unofficial knowledge of his coming assignment to Sudan accelerated his decision to resign his commission. *** Only one of the army officers at the party, Jack Durrance, was not in Harry's regiment. But he had known Ethne Eustace longer than Harry and was in love with her himself. Durrance and Faversham had been best friends at Oxford University and would remain so for life. When, the next day, Harry told Jack that he had resigned his commission, that seemed reasonable to Durrance. But the other two friends there, plus a third member of the regiment who had sent a telegram that Harry received during the party, soon pieced together that Harry had resigned only after learning that he would be sent to Sudan. To these other three friends (unlike Jack Durrance) Harry Faversham was, therefore, a rank coward who had shamed the regiment. Accordingly, they sent him three white feathers along with their name cards. The three officiers agreed, however, to keep the facts of the timing of Harry's resignation a secret. By unplanned coincidence these three feathers later reached Harry in Ireland c/o his fiancee. When she saw them fall out of the package when Harry opened it, she too learned why they had been sent. Ethne then added her own fourth feather, accusing Jack of cowardice, and breaking their engagement. *** The rest of the novel reads like a detective story answering questions upon questions: e. g., was Harry Faversham really a coward? If so, was it because his mother died young and his father, an eighth generation army General, could not grasp how his son's imagination might make him fear death or maiming in battle yet never quail under fire? Had Mrs Adair, a woman in love with Jack Durrance, deliberately led Harry to fall in love with Ethne, so that Durrance would drop into her own romantic web? Was Ethne right to accept Jack Durrance's marriage proposal the day she learned of his sun blindness on duty in the Sudan? Did almost everyone underrate Harry's courage? What led Harry Faversham to atone for his great fault by spending five years in Africa, learning native tongues on a quest to make each of the four feather givers take them back? *** A great, great novel probing cowardice, loyalty, courage, motivation, romantic love and a military code of honor. -OOO-

Laughter

by Henri L. Bergson

Readers of English have had access since 1911 to a tranlation from French reissued by Dover in 2005: LAUGHTER: AN ESSAY ON THE MEANING OF THE COMIC. Its author was French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859 - 1941), already in his 50s by 1911 and internationally renowned. *** At its core, LAUGHTER is less a doctrine than a method. Bergson's thoughts are in perpetual motion, passing through hundreds of examples, citing Shakespeare, Moliere and Immanuel Kant. Henri Bergson lays bare what makes for the humorous and the comical.We readers take away from LAUGHTER a conviction that there are reasons why something, someone or some words make us smile, chortle or guffaw. And, best of all, we ourselves can detect those reasons as well as Henri Bergson. LAUGHTER empowers us to analyze, to probe like a philosopher. *** Bergson argues that we laugh because we are sociable. We are alive. Society is alive. And we sense when something is distorting what is alive, something therefore meant to behave, gesture or talk differently. Something in an animal, in a play, in a situation, in a person's character strikes us as not quite right. *** When something is humorous, it is not acting according to its nature. We perceive a soul being weighted down by its body. A person meant to be spontaneous and elastic at all times is suddenly revealed as a puppet, a robot. Think of the naked Emperor wearing his invisible new clothes. An animal naturally flexible is seen acting like a machine. Cartoons or clown shows present men as mindlessly repetitive as machines. Through our laughter we rebuke distortion; we call men and society back to their true natures. The comic gives us glimpses of what human life is meant to be: in continuous motion, never repeating itself, up to every challenge, responding perfectly. Society should be that way, too: alive, ever evolving, never off balance. *** When we see life barnacled over by a rigid layer ofsomething mechanical that should not be there, we smile, we laugh. By our laughter we pull ourselves and others up short; we rebuke ourselves back into the sociable, alive beings we were meant to be. *** After Bergson's masterpiece, we may never see a good cartoon again without asking why it makes us smile. And we shall discover credible answers. -OOO-

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

by Mary Ann Fiery Shaffer, Annie Barrows

This novel is so cleverly constructed that it is easy to miss the fact that at its core it is a simple tale of romantic love and playing at love. English writer Juliet Ashton is in her early 30s at novel's beginning in January 1946. Three years earlier she had been engaged to marry serving officer Lieutenant Rob Dartry. She broke things off the day before the wedding. Three months later he was killed in Burma. We learn from a letter to her girlhood chum, now her publisher, the reason for the breakup: Rob thought too much of himself. The afternoon before the wedding day, Rob was busily moving his things into her flat. Juliet returned from delivering an installment of her famed Izzy Bickerstaff humorous wartime series to the printer, only to find that Rob had removed and boxed for basement storage all her books. He had replaced them on her shelves with his athletic trophies and memorabilia. End of engagement. *** Later we are misdirected for a while to think that Juliet might have a crush on ten-years older Sidney, her publisher and mentor; but no, he is revealed as an unconcealed homosexual, so known to everyone. No romance there. *** Juliet is then pursued relentlessly by a narcissistic American entrepreneur, Markham V. Reynolds. All he wants is a trophy wife and that Juliet will not be. *** Meanwhile she has made a new lot of friends on the island of Guernsey off the coast of France. In the end a little half-English, half-German orphan girl wins her maternal heart while taciturn, Charles Lamb-admiring pig farmer Dawsey Adams improbably wins over Juliet's erotic side. The book's last words are spoken to Juliet by Guernsey's most priggish female censor of female morals: "I hear you and that pig-farmer are going to regularize your connection. Praise the Lord!" *** Though I personally think the amours of Julie Ashton are what drive the novel, most critics see things differently. And I have written nothing here to spoil those other views of the plot. Beyond 90% of the yarn remains therefore for you to discover and enjoy for yourself. -OOO-

You Are How You Move

by Ged Sumner

For over a year I have been learning and performing a few selected Chi Kung physical exercises in connection with weekly instruction in tai chi. My slight but hands-on exposure to an ancient form of exercise therefore made it surprisingly easy for me to skim through once over lightly -- with a view to returning to concentrate on individual points -- Ged Sumner's YOU ARE HOW YOU MOVE: EXPERIENTIAL CHI KUNG. It also helped me that this introduction to taoist exercise forms and meditations is written in clear native English and is not some often clumsy, translation from the Chinese. Further help comes from six full-page anatomical and symbolic line drawings and 173 black and white photos of a man, several women and a little girl doing the chi kung forms. *** Ged Sumner identifies stress as the dominant health challenge of our age. And, he argues, main-stream hard workouts in fitness centers are a bad idea: stress fighting stress. There is a more excellent way: Chi Kung. This ancient Chinese form of soft, smooth exercise makes a virtue of standing still -- something Sumner says we all hate to do. YOU ARE HOW YOU MOVE also analyzes how human anatomy works and teaches us to become aware of our skeleton, especially the spine, as well as joints, sinews, the works. For those who care, the text also provides a gentle introduction to Taoist philosophy and theory of well-being behind the exercises and meditations. Chi Kung results in demonstrably good posture, relaxation, balance control and other desirable aspects of good health. -OOO-

Sacred Desire

by Sally K. Severino, Nancy K. Morrison

SACRED DESIRE is a collaboration between two psychiatrists and grows from their scientific monographs. Underlying focus is on healthiest human living from womb to old age. The authors' thesis is that all goes well when the wee womb dweller is begotten by loving parents and immersed in love from birth. Things go badly to the extent that the pre-born is not wanted or loved. No young human can possibly survive to adulthood if someone, somewhere in her nearest environment does not love her and give her an opportunity to love them back. Parents may mistreat us. But if we are alive, there had to be a grandmother or a neighbor or a caregiver nearby who was kind to us, accepted us as we were. Love keeps us in our First Nature. Abuse drives us into a wounded, hostile Second Nature. Personal maturity and even the creation of a just, happy global order demand that we find ways to repair our wounded Second Nature and live as much of our lives as we can in caring, generous, empathetic First Nature. We are "hard-wired" for loving and being loved. The authors root our need for love in psychology, physiology and neurology. There is much talk of right brain, left brain, mirror neurons, oxytocin and their working together to point us humans toward transcendent love of a God who first loved us. There are charts showing interconnected stages of growth in both love and physiology. The book, SACRED DESIRE, includes dozens of case studies and examples: including a rabbi chaplain who bonded with a patient embarrassed to talk in her hospital gown by putting on a hospital gown himself. Most impressive to me was the lengthy treatment of Hitler's architect, Albert Speer, his slowly achieved recognition of his evil Second Nature during 20 years in Spandau Prison and his ultimate return to the primal innocence of his First Nature. This is an ambitious book aimed at several audiences, far from easy reading. Five years from now it will, I fear, probably seem crude and medieval. That is because there are so many people now researching and writing about mind-body-love connections that new hypotheses spring up almost weekly. -OOO-

The Spanish-American War and President McKinley

by Lewis L. Gould

Thanks to William McKinley in one year -- 1898 -- the USA came into possession of Hawaii, the Philippines and Guam in the Pacific and Cuba and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean. Cuba it soon gave up. The rest it kept. McKinley played a hostile Senate faction of anti-imperialists like a violin and pushed through early 1899 ratification of the Paris Treaty of Peace with Spain with one vote to spare. He greatly enlarged the powers of the Presidency. His successes in 1898 also allowed him to send troops to Peking without Congressional authority to fight the Boxers. It also paved the way to later building the Panama Canal under U.S. sole ownership. Until Professor Gould's revisionist looks at McKinley, the former Governor of Ohio had sunk to the status of a fourth-magnitude President, accused by some of genocide in the Philippines. -OOO-

Sea Tales

by James Fenimore Cooper

THE PILOT is about warfare on land and sea between the rebelling USA and mother Britain between the years of, say, 1778 and 1792. The pilot in question, though never named, is legendary John Paul (Jones), father of the American navy. He lands in northeastern England to extract valuable hostages to exchange for American revolutionaries taken at sea by the British. The success of his mission depends on his uncanny seamanship amid shoals, rocks and currents. Subplots abound. Jones meets with a former love. Other young lovers pursue their future mates against great odds. By 1792, the year of Jones's death, two wartime enemies are the best of friends on the US-Canadian frontier. This novel established a new literary genre: the sea adventure tale. ... The volume's second novel is THE RED ROVER, written five years after THE PILOT. After a very slow beginning full of intrigue in and around the harbor of Newport, Rhode Island in October 1759, young Harry Wilder and companions board the disguised pirate ship, the Red Rover, with a royal commission to identify and bring to justice its captain who uses the same name. After a long sea chase of a rich merchantman, the Red Rover captures a British frigate. In time the pirate proves himself an early patriot laboring for the freedom of the North American colonies from their British overlords. The novel abounds in mood changes, disguises, false flags for the Rover and twists and turns in the pirate chief's identities, moods and whims. At novel's end the Rover, whose real name is Heidegger, is revealed to be an American patriot, as Newport celebrates the end of the war for independence. -OOO-

Untitled Vanora Bennett

by Vanora Bennett

King of England Richard III Plantagenet, formerly Duke of Gloucester, died young. He was only 33, living from 1452 to 1485 and a usurping king for two years after the natural death of his brother King Edward IV. Vanora Bennett's very learned novel FIGURES IN SILK covers Richard's royal career from 1471 to his death 14 years later. The novel's treatment of real historical figures is accurate and based on good sources, notably Sir Thomas More. *** Two daughters of silk merchant John Lambert become mistresses of the two royal brothers Edward and Richard. The elder, Mrs Jane Shore, is a good-hearted flirt attracting several powerful men. The younger sister, Isabel (who, unlike the historical Jane, I suspect is fictional) we meet when she is 14 and about to marry a young man soon killed in battle. At the same time she first meets incognito young "Dickon," whom only much later does she recognize as the powerfulDuke of Gloucester. *** The widowed Isabel makes herself by sheer will power a creative force in pioneering efforts to create a domestic English silk industry. Her enemies are wealthy Lombards, especially Venetians. Sister Jane helps her win licenses and premises from Edward IV. And during the brief reign of Richard III ("A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!"), she holds on to her silk monopoly. *** In the process Elinor befriends the ten years younger, virtually imprisoned Princess Elizabeth of York, one of the heirs of his brother that Richard does not kill. It doesn't hurt Elinor's career that Elizabeth before novel's end marries handsome Henry Tudor who becomes Henry VII at Richard III's death. Henry VII, of course, is father of Henry VIII and grandfather of Queens Mary and Elizabeth of England and Mary Queen of Scots. *** This is a powerful historical novel true to the genre invented by Sir Walter Scott in WAVERLY. -OOO- http://www.biblio.com/books/201209673.html

The Talent Code

by Daniel Coyle

Daniel Coyle's THE TALENT CODE will dip a novice reader into the wide, deep ocean of books and academic articles on talent: what it is, how to develop it, how to teach it faster and the like. *** The author spent two years traveling to Russia, Brazil, Curacao and other talent "hot spots"to find why a few places here and there consistently produce vastly more than their fair share of talented violinists, soccer stars, little league champions, chess masters and other standouts. Using often catchy jargon (ignition for motivation, sweet spot for the next step beyond present comfort level in an activity like tennis or golf, etc.), Daniel Coyle also roots his empirical findings in theories of the brain and especially myelin. *** He finds common physiological and habit-forming denominators among talented performers from Mozart through Einstein to Brzilian hockey super star Pele. If you study any great, mature practicioner of bowling, tai chi, novel writing (e.g. the Brontes), they will, according to Coyle, have each accumulated a minimum of 10,000 hours of "deep practice." As the Link trainer taught thousands of pilots instrument flying in record time, so certain sports like soccer improve fastest when their practice space is radically reduced. Golf swings are bettered ed when each practice swing is made to last 90 seconds and every minute error is simultaneously noted and instantly corrected. *** Generally speaking, progress in any muscular activity is a matter of tiny corrections rather than grand psychic intuitions transforming amateur to professional within 24 hours. *** The book offers a large current bibliography, good illustrations and dozens of examples of talent and teaching talent from bank robbing to the reading debate between the advocates of phonics and holistic learning. *** THE TALENT CODE begins better than it ends. Coyle quickly makes the case that talent flows from disciplined, long, learned behavior rather than genetic inheritance. In one sense, however, Coyle promises more than he delivers. THE TALENT CODE is for beginning students of the mysteries of talent, not for advanced psychologists or athletic coaches. -OOO-

Tai-Chi Ch'uan : Its Effects and Practical Application

by Yearniing K. Chen

Only, I think, in fictional martial arts feature films like CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON, do people learn tai chi ch'uan simply by reading a book with illustrations and/or text. Normally, you pick a teacher. He belongs to one of four or five major "schools" of tai chi and that is what he teaches you. My teacher is of the YANG School. So is Y. K. Chen and that is what his splendid little book teaches -- all 108 moves or postures of the YANG long form. *** Chen's illustrations and texts track with my teacher at least 95%. That makes it easy for me to use the book to flesh out my face-to-face lessons. That compatibility is not something the beginner dare take for granted. For instance, I have two beautiful YANG family T'ai Chi DVDs by Terence Dunn. Dunn's performances are pleasing to watch but pair up with the way my teacher presents materials no more than 75% at best. Put it this way: if both Chen and Dunn were Christians teaching their forms of Christianity, then Chen might be Catholic and Dunn Protestant. The differences may not ultimately be crucial in the eyes of God but neither are they helpful to novices like me at this early stage. *** How do I use Y. K. Chen? *** As a reference work. Every one of the 108 moves has a name given in both Chinese and English. Thus in my last class I learned moves 78 and 79, "Snake Creeps Down" and "Golden Cock Stands on One Leg (Right)." Next week will come Move 80 "Golden Cock Stands on One Leg (Left)." Move 80 is so much like move 79 and Chen's illustration and words are so clear that I have already begun practicing it. Move 81 "Step Back and Repulse Monkey (Right and Left) begins repetition of an earlier sequence I have already learned. By looking ever ahead, I, a physically clumsy, slow learner, can lessen the time it takes me to learn the elements, which are, let me emphasize, merely the very basic ABCs of tai chi. A minor not unrelated point: my teacher expects me to pay him each month. Why not, therefore, quicken the pace with the help of Y. K. Chen and save a few dollars? *** Chen's text, in addition to the details of the 108 moves, is rich and instructive in other dimensions. Tai Chi is explained as the underpinning of more advanced and aggressive taoist martial arts. There are discussions of posture, balance, centrality of the waist, the circles contained in all tai chi movements and the contributions of tai chi to health. There are also speculations on tai chi in relation to physiology, dynamics, psychology and moral life. *** The elements and 108 movements of WANG family tai chi are learned in class, as it were, all alone, in one-on-one imitation of the teacher. Your teacher need never lay a hand on you. At a later stage, however, you practice with a partner what is called "Joint Hand Operations With Fixed Steps." I now watch my more advanced classmates do this. In a couple more weeks, I will begin to improve my 108 postures through a leisurely systematic classroom review called "Corections." After that I will join others in doing the original 108 movements in reverse, more properly as mirror images of the first time around (if left foot was forward the first go around, then in the mirror image, the right foot will be forward, etc.) My teacher will then lead me and others through joint hand operations and eventually into weapons. *** My teacher does not tell us the number of the movement as we learn it and only rarely, with a smile, refers to its Chinese name. I, however, like to know where I am. And knowing the names of moves in a sequence helps my aging brain remember "what comes next." *** Will this learning through class and through Chen's book eventually get me to the point where I can be a bit player lost in the crowd of a Jackie Chan martial arts movie? I wouldn't say no. Meanwhile Y. K. Chen's little paperback book helps me work with my teacher to improve balance and form and to understand better what I am being taught. -OOO-

This Flowing Toward Me

by Marilyn, R. S. M. Lacey

THIS FLOWING TOWARD ME is about finding God in strangers. Specifically in the kind of strangers Abraham found in the three angels passing by his tent and the stranger whom the Jew robbed on the road to Jericho found in the Good Samaritan. *** Marilyn Lacey is an American nun singled out for special honor by the Dalai Lama for her decades of work with refugees from Laos, Sudan and elsewhere. She tells their heartbreaking stories in a series of informal case studies designed to illustrate something deep and holy beyond their compelling personal tales. *** Sister Lacey defends the thesis that God, for reasons known only to Himself, likes either to present himself as a poor despised outsider or at least as likely to be found hanging out among such losers, by Divine preference. Looking for God? Then cast a glance about and see who is so dirty or poor or alcoholic that your hackles rise at the very thought of him or her touching you. Guess what? That's where God is. So open your heart to defenseless, mistreated, starving refugees and others of like ilk. *** In the autobiographic parts of THIS FLOWING TOWARD ME (a title taken from a poem by the Persian mystic RUMI), Marilyn Lacey makes it clear that she is a radical pacifist, with one exception: spiders. They scare the daylights out of her and she will kill them whenever they come near. She has only one request of God if and when she makes it to heaven: please don't turn out to have eight legs! *** An arresting image used over and over is that of a pilot light. God is not just "out there" among strangers. He is also within the souls of each of us, an inextinguishable pilot light, even in hell, if we ever need Him and call for Him. Curiously she prefers the expression Wake Flame to Pilot Light, saying that that that is what Europeans call the little contraption always burning, waiting for us to turn on our gas ovens, dryers and other appliances. My best guess is that "wake flame" is a translation into English of the Dutch "waakvlam." An instructive, helpful image. What is meant by pilot light is perfectly clear. I suggest, therefore, that in future editions she call that light of God (conscience?) simply pilot light, not the rather precious wake flame. *** The author is intelligent, well read, a student of religion and mysticism and a hands on practitioner of making refugees and other marginal men, women and children feel welcome to the extent possible. She writes clearly with little stylistic adornment. She consistently puts herself down (as a finicky eater of such things as termites, a scaredy cat regarding spiders, etc). She calls herself a very slow learner when it comes to figuring out God's plans for herself and the rest of us. But she grows on you. Yes, that she surely does. -OOO-

Last Legion

by Valerio Massimo Manfredi

Most of us, I think, have a vague notion that Britain's King Arthur is a product of the dying, perhaps recently stone cold dead (at least in Britain), Western Roman Empire. Professor Valerio Massimo Manfredi's novel THE LAST LEGION (2002) imagines how Arthur might have been the son of Romulus Augustus, the last (western) Roman Emperor. And Manfredi firmly locates the future King Arthur's coming field of operations in southern Scotland and Northern England rather than, say, the earlier more popular Cornwall. Deposed in 476 by a barbarian Gothic general Odoacer, young Romulus and his tutor Ambrosinus are exiled to Capri and guarded by Gothic warriors. A handful of legionaries loyal to the idea of non-Barbarian Rome, hastily thrown together by troubled, amnesiac Aurelianus Ambrosius Ventidius, aided by a woman warrior who is one of the founders of Venice, free both teen-age emperor and tutor and move together to Hadrian's wall on the border of today's Scotland and England. Pursued by Gothic warriors of Odoacer who had also co-opted a war band of Saxons, the emperor's few followers make contact with veterans of aa long disbanded Roman legion once stationed at Hadrian's wall. In a decisive battle at the wall, the Romans fight off the Goths and Saxons, aided by veterans of the old legion, decked out in their long obsolete armor. That legion's banner still existed and displayed a red dragon. Romulus's tutor, whom we have long known to be a British Druid, resumes his non-Roman name of Myrdin, soon corrupted by local Britons to Merlin. Romulus, now using the name Pendragon, "son of the Dragon," became King of the Britons. After marrying the Celtic Ygraine, Romulus/Pendragon became father of the future King Arthur. The entire story is narrated by Merlin. At story's end young Arthur is five years old. His name came from "Arcturus," "born under the sign of the bear." In his lonely wanderings during his captivity in the Emperor Trajan's ancient palace on Capri, young Romulus had found Julius Caesar's sword, the finest ever made. Its name would later be corrupted from a time-blurred Latin inscription on its blade (CAI.IUL.CAES.ENSIS CALIBURNUS) to Excalibur. At the end of his friends' great victory against Goths and Saxons at Mount Badon, young Romulus shouted "No more war! no more blood!" He then walked to a nearby lake, carrying Julius Caesar's mighty sword, "still dripping blood." "He hurled the sword far into the lake. Excalibur "plunged like a meteor into the heart of the moss-covered stone that rose at the center of the lake" (Ch. 37). The final words of the tale are Merlin's: "Here my story ends. Here, perhaps, a legend is born." Not a bad preparation for reading this excellent fictional evocation of the last days of the Western Roman Empire and the first days of Medieval Britain would be to watch the 2007 film derived from the novel. Styled, like its original, THE LAST LEGION, this arguably too compressed and simplified film is available in DVD. It stars Colin Firth (Aurelianus), Ben Kingsley (Ambrosinus/Merlin) and 1994 Miss Universe Aishwarya Rai as a warrior maiden serving the Eastern Roman Emperor. There is, indeed, a warrior woman in the novel, but she is Livia, a Roman survivor not an East Indian. The film is not at all bad. The novel is great. It successfully shows how the collapsing Empire might have looked to a handful of legionaries and to the post-Roman little people, mainly Celts, among whom they moved. The author is a scholar of the period and has also written a fictional trilogy on Alexander the Great. -OOO-

Thirteenth Tale

by Diane Setterfield

This novel is a literary tribute by the author to gothic and romantic novels enjoyed in her own English girlhood -- especially JAYNE EYRE. Pick any five consecutive sentences of THE THIRTEENTH TALE and you may find at most one flat, ordinary formulation. This is "poetry" or poetic prose as Heidegger saw it: "thickening" (German Dichtung). That is, ordinary words and experiences carry weight beyond what most writers make language bear. No glossary needed for this tale of Yorkshire. Just bring your heart. *** Can two depressingly dysfunctional generations of the Angelfield family finally spawn normal offspring? Must twin girls neglected by their parents remain weird for life? The novel asks why does it take Margaret Lea, an outsider biographer, whose twin had died at birth, to tell when Britain's greatest novelist, Vida Winter, is lying about her family. "Trust but verify" is Margaret's model and it helps her both unravel the Angelfields and their tragedy and come to terms with herself and her parents. *** THE THIRTEENTH TALE makes a case that the classic way to tell a tale (especially when the yarn is deliberately gothic and romantic) is always the best way: with a beginning which assumes nothing, a middle which blends the elements into fiendishly complex puzzles, enigmas and terrors, and a brief end and coda in which all is explained. Does that also sound like the best kind of detective story? *** -OOO-

Telex from Cuba

by Rachel Kushner

Read Rachel Kushner's first novel TELEX FROM CUBA more for the future promise of its author than for any classic unity, coherence and emphasis in its telling. The story is lush, overweight, with too many narrative voices and too many minor characters going nowhere. *** That said, TELEX FROM CUBA brings back pre-Castro Cuba with its American-European dominated refineries, sugar plantations and U.S. Government owned nickel mining operation not far from Guantanamo. It is an historical novel as inaugurated by Sir Walter Scott's WAVERLEY. For the rise of Fidel and Raul Castro is arguably in a world-historical league with the defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie at Culloden in 1746. The book is more strikingly an American-Cuban novel of manners in the genre pioneered by Jane Austen in EMMA. But mainly it is a series of static tableaux, some likely to stay in the memory. *** There is Raul Castro, who looks and is generally held to be homosexual, though not by the American executive who attends his wedding. There is macho Fidel Castro who is not above slipping into ex Waffen SS Christian de La Maziere's tent and bed at night. *** There are Southerners who work in the tropics for big corporations, either white trash or not much better. In the States they would be nobodies. In Cuba they live in fancy mansions, have access to corporate airplanes and a private rail car and generally lord it over the local people. *** There is Papa Ernest Hemingway asking everyone, male or female, to dance Caribbean dances with him. *** My favorite passages relate to Hemingway, Saint-John Perse, Xenophon and the retreat of the 10,000 from the highlands of today's Turkey to the sea. And how soldier of fortune La Maziere processes what the obtuse Papa had missed: Perse's "treatise on violence and loss, based on Xenophon's Anabasis" (p. 199). Later when La Maziere is in the mountains of Oriente province trying to shape up the rebel army, he contrasts Cuban laziness and self-absorption with the ancient Greek mercenaries, their discipline and joy in combat for the sake of combat. *** In 1912 Sinclair Lewis had to write HIKE AND THE AEROPLANE and get it out of his system before he could do ELMER GANTRY in 1927. I can't wait to see what super-talented Rachel Kushner has in store for us next. I wonder if she might not rival O'Henry if she tried her hand at short stories. For her own view of herself read the interview at http://www.powells.com/ink/rachelkushner.html/. This interview convincingly explains why she transplanted her best character, French aristocrat La Maziere, into Batista's Cuba. *** If you read this book, you will, I suspect, be simultaneously fascinated, confused, disappointed and hoping fervently for more and better very soon from Rachel Kushner. -OOO-

Here Lies Arthur

by Philip Reeve

Arthur Reeve, along with the likes of T. S. Eliot, has just won the British librarians' annual Carnegie Medal. This is for an unforgettably good historical tale for young people called HERE LIES ARTHUR. At one of its many levels the reader holds in hand a novel about historical method. In what sense about historical method? *** The verifiable, attested history of King Arthur is close to nil. By contrast, the legend of Arthur, the once and future king of Sir Thomas Malory and Alfred Lord Tennyson, thrives and grows in thousands of crowded libraries in scores of countries. Far less of the romance of the Knights of the Table Round is rooted in history than, say, the Trojan War epics by Homer and Vergil. One new writer simply takes up one or more earlier written accounts of King Arthur, Queen Guinevere, Sir Kay, Sir Galahad and Sir Lancelot du Lac. And then he simply adds freshly imagined materials. Fantasy is piled on fantasy, not new facts on old facts.*** Thanks, however, to archeology, numismatics and related modern sciences we know more about Roman and early post Roman history of the British Isles than you might think. We know for instance that today's Bath was Roman Britain's Aquae Sulis. Novelist Philip Reeve combines his imagination with his knowledge of both British history and the Arthurian legend and makes a little known leader of a small impoverished war band choose Aquae Sulis/Bath for his royal capital. This and many other smart moves, political, dynastic, even architectural, the nominally Christian Arthur undertakes on the advice of his frankly pagan adviser, the magician Myrddin whom today we call Merlin. Myrddin wants to restore to Britain the unity, peace and prosperity the land had enjoyed for centuries until the Roman legions were withdrawn in 410 A. D. And he sees in Arthur material he can shape into a just, humane, wise King of all the Britons. *** HERE LIES ARTHUR is narrated by a female named Gwyna, ten years old when she begins her tale. Her village has just been sacked and looted by Arthur. She has swum miles down river to safety where she was plucked up by non-combatant Myrddin. Admiring Gwyna's ability to hold her breath for many minutes, Myrddin uses her in a scheme to convince potential pagan allies of Arthur that the old gods favor him. He gives her a beautiful but otherwise ordinary sword named Caliburn (today's Excalibur). She swims under water to a waiting Arthur and gives it to him in her instant new role of "the lady of the lake." *** And so it goes. By tale's end Gwyna has lived for years disguised, on and off, as a boy. An eye-witness to Arthur's death in combat, she passes herself off as Myrddin's son and personally spins 90% of the Arthurian legend, including the notion that he did not die but sleeps on a blessed western isle waiting to be summoned by Britons in their hour of greatest peril. *** An iron age Machiavelli or Karl Rove is our Myrddin. He has no illusions about Arthur, a naturally indolent, greedy, murderous, wife-beating bully boy. After he and Gwyna meet a noble boy being raised as a girl by his widowed mother to keep him from being killed in battle, Myrddin says: "The only way she'll keep that boy out of the wars is if we put an end to wars. Raise up one strong man who'll stop this petty squabbling. Bring peace back, and in that peace boys will be able to grow to manhood without learning how to butcher one another, and men of wisdom will turn their minds to greater matters, such as snails entombed in sea stones" (Ch. 14). *** Sir Walter Scott, creator of the historical novel, has probably already read HERE LIES ARTHUR and is looking forward to welcoming Philip Reeve to writers' heaven. -OOO-

Satanstoe

by James Fenimore Cooper

North America's colonial writers in English were notable in four literary genres: sermons, histories, Indian wars and Indian captivity tales. Fenimore Cooper's 1845 SATANSTOE has elements of all four. The tale is about New York colony in the early 18th century, mainly a few months in 1757-1758. Events take place just after the British defeat at Fort William Henry, the subject of Cooper's THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS. *** Sermons are a specialty of Reverend Mister Thomas Worden, a High Church Anglican priest born in England and deriving a decent inheritance from the Mother Country. Like almost all the striking characters of this novel, Dutch, English, mixed Dutch-English, Indian and French, Reverend Worden is a mixture of good and not so good. He is worldly, not very brave (he refuses to ride in a sleigh on the frozen Hudson river near Albany -- a hugely comic episode), a card player, a bit of a carouser. On the other hand his liturgies are punctiliously correct. He is willing to try to convert Indians off to the northeast of Albany. But he gives up when he decides that Christianity is too civilized for the savages at their then level of development. *** The only Indian captivity in SATANSTOE is oblique mention of the aftermath of the surrender of Fort William Henry. The French and Indian War passes from THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS to SATANSTOE with yet another English-French dustoff, this time at Fort Ticonderoga. *** Young heroes and heroines abound in this non-stop adventure tale. There is a caged lion, a terrifying breakup of the ice on the Hudson and subtle discussion of colonial New York property practices and law. The latter increasingly grow into the leit motifs of Cooper's two follow-on novels, THE CHAINBEARER and THE REDSKINS. With SATANSTOE these three novels make up Cooper's "anti-rent" novels or the Littlepage Trilogy. Young Cornelius Littlepage is the hero of SATANSTOE (name of his family's small West Chester Anglo-Dutch estate). The trilogy spans six generations of his family's efforts to create and keep a large wilderness estate in the face of growing popular American resentment of any vast private holdings. *** SATANSTOE is an important sketch of early American society, mores and economic preoccupations. -OOO-

The Heidenmauer; Or, the Benedictines

by James Fenimore Cooper

Fenimore Cooper's 1832 book THE HEIDENMAUER is a novel that doesn't feel like a novel. It is more like a series of lectures gently but didactically introducing to literate worldwide readers of English a small number of themes. The dominant theme (for Americans) is what Catholics at the time of Martin Luther were like and what they were like in 1832. One theme for all readers was what Germany's Rhineland felt like to nobles and commoners, clergy and laymen, soldiers and farmers when Luther's thoughts were just beginning to make themselves heard. And Cooper also seemed to believe that his readers everywhere would benefit from dollops of political theory, history of Roman and medieval Europe, the advance across the Mediterranean of militant Islam, including the recent conquest of Rhodes, thoughts on how superstition inhibits action, why Germans hesitated to cast off Rome for uncharted religious waters of reform and other antiquarian highlights. *** The novel's main story line is easily told. In the early 1520s the village of Duerckheim on the left bank (the onetime Roman side) of the Rhine owes allegiance to a nearby Benedictine abbey led by an aristocratic, easy-going abbot. But the prosperous village of Duerckheim and nearby farmlands are coveted by Count Emich. Calculating his odds, the Count persuades villagers to join him in a surprise attack to subdue the abbey. The latter is burned to the ground, with the supposed loss of life of a couple of leading characters of the several sub-plots. Count Emich gets what he wants and is willing to pay for his new possessions the heavy fine for sacrilege exacted by the Holy Roman Empire. The Benedictines are dispersed. End of main story. *** Fenimore Cooper (1789 - 1851), already world famous for his 1826 LAST OF THE MOHICANS, served as American consul in Lyons, France from 1826 to 1833. He traveled widely in Europe and wrote much of THE HEIDENMAUER in Switzerland. I imagine him, like some others I have known, saying to himself: my vocation is to make America known to Europe and Europe to America. And I will constantly remind Americans that at its best America's culture and arts are in no way inferior to those of Europe. *** Cooper was always an observer of religions and religious practices and attitudes. Over time, beginning with his six years in Europe he paid notably more sympathetic attention to Roman Catholicism. He realized that very few of his countrymen were likely ever to meet Catholics in the flesh and held strong inherited prejudices against them. These misconceptions he tried to correct in THE HEIDENMAUER. He wrote: "In this country, Catholicism, in its limited and popular meaning, is no longer catholic, since it is in so small a minority as to have no perceptible influence on the opinions or customs of the country" (Ch. 24). *** Cooper theorized that revolutions are made by a handful of geniuses, like Luther, far, far in advance of the less brilliant masses. Somewhat clumsily he tried to imagine how varieties of Germans, lovers young and old, clergy and laity, pious and greedy mmight have slowly, slowly adjusted their Teutonic minds and practices to the Reformation. The Rhineland and the area around the old Roman town of Duerckheim, just after the fall of Rhodes in 1522, are still only lightly touched by the new thinking of Augustinian monk Martin Luther. Feudal loyalties are strained. Religious fervor is far from universal among Catholics, lay or clerical. Cooper argues that regardless of how pure the stated motive may be behind a land grab or a challenge to feudal or church authority, men are in fact largely driven by worldly ends in view, greed, self-interest, lust, power. *** THE HEIDENMAUER is a novel that doesn't feel like a novel. In some ways it is a pretty good Platonic dialog with the flavor of some of the writings of Sigmund Freud. Cooper himself draws on Aesop's fable of the once peaceful and contented frogs who grew restless and asked an amused Zeus to give them a king. First the Father of gods and of men tossed a log into the frogs' swamp to be their king. But the croakers demanded something more exciting and powerful. So Zeus gave them a second king, a stork, who at his leisure then proceeded to devour them one by one. The people of Duerckheim traded King Log (an abbot) for King Stork (Count Emich). And thus the plan of Zeus was fulfilled. -OOO-

Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish

by James Fenimore Cooper

James Fenimore Cooper wrote most of his historical novel THE WEPT OF WISH-TON-WISH in Switzerland. Published in 1829, in England it has always been called THE BORDERERS. *** Four major tableaux are presented in greater or less detail. They range from (A) roughly the English Civil Wars (1640s), (B) 1662 and the granting of a Royal Charter for Connecticut, (C) 1675 - 1676 (King Philip's War), with (D) a final brief look back from around the year 1800. A large farm, Wish-Ton-Wish ("the Whip-poor-will") is the main scene of action. It had been laboriously carved out of the wilderness, a twenty hours march from the Connecticut River, in the English colony of the same name. Wish-Ton-Wish lies in a beautiful, remote valley near the undemarcated southern boundary of Massachusetts and also "borders" hundreds of Indian tribes in all directions. *** Here lives the family and dependents of "the Puritan," Captain Mark Heathcote, a once ungodly fighting man born in Queen Elizabeth's reign. As a young man he was a carousing chum of no less than Oliver Cromwell, the future Lord Protector of England. Seeking greater tolerance for his narrow religious views, the Puritan, at Civil War's end, had migrated to Massachusetts and later to Connecticut, as far from cities and strife as he could get. *** Over some years Captain Heathcote shelters off and on an old comrade in arms named Submission, one of Cromwell's judges who had condemned to death King Charles the First. Early widowed, the Puritan raises his son Content Heathcote to hardy manhood. Before leaving the Boston area for the Connecticut wilderness, young Content had married Ruth Harding. The remainder of THE WEPT OF WISH-TON-WISH is the story of Content, Ruth and their daughter Ruth interacting with a high ranking Narragansett Indian warrior named Conanchet. *** Connecticut was long spared worries about witches and Indian turmoil which tormented Massachusetts Bay Colony. But in an isolated incident around 1663 the Puritan and his retainers capture 15 year old Conanchet who is scouting them out. They keep him with them in growing freedom for well over half a year. During that time the hunted regicide Submission covertly teaches the future chief of the Narragansetts both English and elements of Puritan Christianity. In the latter project all the family and associates of Captain Mark Heathcote also take part. In particular, Mistress Ruth Heathcote is notably kind to and trusting of the European-hating, wary teen-age Indian. During a raid on Wish-Ton-Wish to free Conanchet, his tribesman abduct both a half-wit adolescent boy and Ruth the younger. Years-long efforts by her father, Comfort, to find and ransom Ruth fail. (NOTE: Comfort makes one trip into central New York and the Finger Lakes area where James Fenimore Cooper grew up and where he set some of his LEATHERSTOCKING novels.) Her mother, Ruth Senior, grows increasingly despondent. *** Meanwhile, far, far away young Ruth grows into her late teens among the Narragansetts. Now a mighty chief, Conanchet takes her to wife under the name Narra-mattah. Conanchet falls under the spell of Chief Metacom (King Philip) who leads his Wapanoags and other Indians into a formidable multi-tribe alliance and rising in 1675-76 designed either to exterminate all the whites or to expel them from New England. Together with hundreds of followers the two chiefs Metacom and Conanchet raid a now much enlarged Wish-Ton-Wish settlement, long recovered from its burning over a decade earlier. The Indians kill over a score of the white defenders, and capture the Puritan, his son Comfort, Madame Ruth Heathcote, the old regicide Submission and a couple of others outside the community's almost impregnable blockhouse. The young sagamore/sachem Conanchet is moved by earlier dreams and memories of kind treatment by the Puritan's family to return his wife Ruth/Narra-mattah to her astonished parents. He also breaks off the raid and lets his prisoners go free. *** Not much later, Conanchet tracks Submission to his well concealed hiding place overlooking Wish-Ton-Wish and hands over his baby son to be united with his mother. Despite the shame of a pagan wedding and a half-breed grandson, Comfort Heathcote resolves to keep both daughter and grandson. He says, "The wept of my household is again with us; ... God hath returned our child!" *** Soon the great sagamore is captured by a force led by united New England Commissioners and allied Mohican and other Indians. The scrupulous Puritan Commissioners turn Conanchet over to the Indians to judge him, only forbidding torture before either death or release. Death by tomahawking is decreed. But Conanchet is first furloughed to take leave of his wife and son. Narra-mattah is present at his execution and dies of grief on the spot. Not many weeks later her mother dies as well. Her husband Comfort Heathcote lives another 50 years as a widower. *** Around 1800 a researcher into legends of early Connecticut visits the prospering but still remote village of Wish-Ton-Wish and the graveyard of the Heathcotes. In a place removed from other family members, but side by side, are two graves marked only, "The Narragansett" and "The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish." *** In my opinion, this is one of the greatest of American novels. If you can lay your hands on a good critical edition, do so. More people, I think, will read and relish THE WEPT if their text is replete with historical notes, a map of colonial Connecticut, and a detailed sketch of Wish-Ton-Wish and its buildings, especially the first blockhouse and its massive well. Before Fenimore Cooper, American literature had two notable genres: Indian captivity tales by survivors and historical-interpretative sermons (by notables like Reverend Increase Mather and his son Cotton). From these a wide-spread Puritan interpretation of the North American wilderness emerged: it was the land of Satan, allied with the heathen Indian savages to prevent the English Saints from establishing a foothold there. *** All these motifs reappear in THE WEPT OF WISH-TON-WISH. The novel is also an extended meditation on man and the environment, cross-cultural communication between alien races and the obstacles which love between an Indian man and a white woman face in bridging the cultural divide. This tragic novel easily, I think, lends itself to re-expression in the form of stage play, grand opera and a BBC mini-series along the lines of Cooper's THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS. You will not regret burrowing into THE WEPT OF WISH-TON-WISH. -OOO-

Crossing Hitler

by Benjamin Carter Hett

Benjamin Carter Hett's 2008 excellent biography of Nazi political victim and eminent young German Lawyer Hans Litten (1903 - 1938) is obscurely named CROSSING HITLER: THE MAN WHO PUT THE NAZIS ON THE WITNESS STAND. Other than its uninformative title, the only other major defect in this well documented historical study is the book's lack of a single map of Germany. The location of key cities in Hans Litten's life, e. g. Halle, Koenigsberg, Berlin should be presented there in one or more maps, as well as the various concentration camps where the young man was held for five years, ending with Dachau, where he died, ostensibly a suicide. *** Litten's fame rises steadily in Germany and Europe. But he does not yet have the popular appeal of the young Dutch Nazi victim Anne Frank. Therefore, specialists in German legal history are the most likely readers of CROSSING HITLER. Nonetheless, the man was talented, brave and multi-faceted. Some contemporaries compared him with Francis of Assisi, others with another lawyer, Saint Thomas More. *** Author Hett lays out three main stereotypes that have emerged of the man as martyr for one or other cause: Hans Litten, (1) religious, (2) political, (3) lawyers' lawyer. To his Lutheran mother Litten died for Jesus, yet Hans himself emphasized his father-derived Judaism, while venerating the Blessed Virgin Mary. Politically, he described himself as far to the left of the Communists he defended, while revealing a strong authoritarian streak. As a lawyer, he was accused in the Berlin of the Weimar Republic of badgering witnesses, yet became a hero to law associations of both East and West Germany. He also had a photographic memory and was widely and deeply read in literature and history, in spite of his busy legal career. *** CROSSING HITLER showcases 28 year old Hans Litten's 1931 examination of criminal trial witness Adolph Hitler about Nazi dedication to violence. At the time Hitler was wooing the German middle class by asserting his complete dedication to purely legal opposition to the Weimar democracy. The book gives a good feeling for the interaction in the years just before Hitler's supreme power between political street gangs, police, courts, lawyers and politicians. The book is well researched, clearly written and has a well laid-out and evaluated bibliography. -OOO-

One for Sorrow

by John Lister-Kaye

John Lister-Kaye's 1994 novel, ONE FOR SORROW: is it a murder mystery? Yes, among four or five other literary genres as well. For we sense from the first that something terribly bad had happened during "the brief apologetic summer" of 1989. We are about to learn what happened and why. *** In both northern England and northeastern Scotland people have long foretold the future with the help of either a venerable crow or magpie counting augury, a rhyme which begins, "One for sorrow, one for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy ..." Admittedly, our first magpies, three of them, did not augur ill. They popped up in England, on the 800 years old estate of Lord Gerry Denby. Instinctively, "Gerry threw his left hand in the air, holding three fingers aloft as he had been taught by his grandfather, to make the superstition hold good." That superstition, "three for a girl," in the magpie counting rhyme, simply foresaw some girl playing an undefined role in the Lord's future. She turns out to be 19 year old Shiona Duncan. Her father Andrew is Lord Denby's shepherd on his 45,000 acre Arvendish Estate in northern Scotland. Soon we have also met all four Duncans as well As Shiona's boy friend and friend of her Highlands environment, naturalist Rob Pearce, the novel's hero. Rob is bitterly opposed by the novel's undisguised villain, wildlife-hating (or at least vermin-hating) Jimmy Forbes, Lord Gerry's long time game keeper at Arvendish. Rob found proof that Jimmy had poisoned two golden eagles. As a result, Jimmy had been fined and lost his powerful position with Lord Denby with all its opportunities for poaching and theft. *** There are plenty of crows to count both upon, above and around the large Highlands estate of Lord Gerry but very few magpies. Therefore our advance knowledge that sighting just one lonely magpie means "sorrow" tips us off to the significance of the following passage at the end of Chapter 25: "Just then a bird flew out of the alders and crossed the river ahead of them, uttering a raucous, rattling laugh. The sound was alien; that of an intruder who didn't belong there, its black and white plumage vulgar and shocking. 'Look at that!' said Shiona. 'I've not seen a magpie in the glen before.'" No murder has yet occurred, but we now know it will not be long in coming -- for sighting a solitary magpie portends sorrow. *** ONE FOR SORROW is a rare detective story in reverse: clues show up first, murder later. Does that make this novel a tragedy rather than a murder mystery? Whatever else ONE FOR SORROW may be, it is also argumentative, rhetorical. It makes a steady drumbeat case for keeping impoverished ordinary Scots (as distinct from wealthy absentee owners of hunting estates) on the land, their land. In the final analysis, the Highlands belong to their own small-scale yeoman, shepherds and fisher folk. *** After Bonnie Prince Charlie Stuart's defeat by the Hanoverians in the 1746 battle of Culloden, the Highlands clan system with its paternalistic protection of the little people was systematically destroyed by government. Next "the clearances" without mercy drove many thousands of farmers and shepherds off their lands away to the alien south or to New World Colonies. The clearances were also undertaken in order to favor sheep, deer and grouse while destroying the land for native trees and birds of prey. Of late government subsidies had, however, also begun to reward fast-growing commercial plantations of non-native trees. ONE FOR SORROW is filled with debates on how to keep the tiny Highland remnant of true Scots on what is left of their land. *** There is something in this fascinating book for every reader -- much more by far than I have sketched. -OOO-

The Craft of Theology

by Avery Robert Dulles

An author's family fascinates me. In this case the author is Jesuit Cardinal Avery Dulles, Roman Catholic theologian, grandson of a Presbyterian minister and nephew of the fifth CIA Director of Central Intelligence (and its first civilian head), Allen Welsh Dulles. Book titles also fascinate me, especially when one seems to echo another. In 1963 legendary spymaster Allen Dulles published THE CRAFT OF INTELLIGENCE (ISBN 1-59228-297-0). Three decades later, nephew Avery published THE CRAFT OF THEOLOGY in 1992, added to in 1995. Is there a connection? I really don't know -- yet. *** Both are fine books. Both make a case for the transparency and "learnableness" of one's professional craft: intelligence, theology. Avery Dulles's message is not complex in outline, though it is dense in detail. For a century and a half before the Second Vatican Council (1962 - 1965) the way Roman Catholic theology was officially done was called "Scholastic," essentially the way of the High Middle Ages, and especially of Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225 - 1249). Rooted in the thought categories of Aristotle and the pre-printing press ways of medieval university classrooms, the Scholastic method was to state a general principle (e.g. "there is no salvation outside the church"), give a "state of the question" including the history of the principle's coming to be and opinions pro and con of its truth. The lecturer or writer would then defend the principle against all attacks and move on to conclusions rigidly deducible from the principle. If there were six interpretations of a principle, in Scholasticism only one would be right. Once the teacher proved his point, the other views had to be false. *** By contrast, Avery Dulles in THE CRAFT OF INTELLIGENCE argues that propositions and principles are indeed important. But they are best grasped through "models." And if there are six good models, then we must use them all simultaneously and not reject five of them altogether simply because we prefer one above the rest. Dulles had taken a similar approach in his book MODELS OF THE CHURCH (1974, ISBN-10: 0385133685). *** Dulles goes on to generalize this method and contrast it with the Scholastic way which it has rapidly replaced. Avery Dulles notes that many post-Vatican II Catholic theologians have rushed wildly off in all directions at once, applying various models with abandon. The craft of theology is in danger, he argues, of becoming unmoored. He makes a case for his own favored approach: creating as he goes a theology of communication. By this he means stressing the ways God chooses to communicate with his creatures and they with him. Not just through Scripture and ritual but through the natural world all around us. It is full of clues that God invites us to solve. -OOO-

A Testimonial to Grace and Reflections on a Theological Journey

by Avery Robert Dulles

This review is about Cardinal Avery Dulles and his 1946, 1996 book, A TESTIMONIAL TO GRACE AND REFLECTIONS ON A THEOLOGICAL JOURNEY ISBN 10: 1556129041, ISBN 13: 9781556129049. *** Ten years ago my wife and I first read the now 90 year old American Cardinal, when we led adult education discussions in our parish community of Avery Dulles's best known work, MODELS OF THE CHURCH. Years went by until, throughout 2008, I immersed myself in Father Leonard Feeney, SJ and his "Boston Heresy Case" of 1948. This research soon led me to rediscover Cardinal Dulles, who, be it noted, is the son of Eisenhower's "brinksmanship" Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. For Avery Dulles (1918 - ), in early 1941 as a recent Harvard University graduate and convert to Roman Catholicism, co-founded the Saint Benedict Center in Cambridge, MA which later became Father Feeney's launching pad for noisily and publicly reminding (not entirely unsuccessfully -- witness the growing body today of ultra-conservative Latin Mass Catholics)the people of Boston that all Catholics had been taught for centuries as dogma that "extra ecclesiam nulla salus": i. e., "outside the church there is no salvation." *** A naval officer in World War II, Avery Dulles spent time just after World War II working briefly but intensely and co-operatively with Father Feeney and associates before Dulles went off to a Jesuit novitiate. He always admired the radical priest, who would be excommunicated (not for heresy but for disobedience) by Pope Pius XII in 1953. Avery Dulles even wrote a powerful, appreciative eulogy of Feeney on his death in 1978, for years reconciled to Rome without having to retract a word of his narrow doctrine of no salvation for Protestants, unbaptized Jews, pagans and other non-Catholics. Dulles writes of Feeney and Saint Benedict Center in his 1946 spiritual memoir, reissued and updated in 1996 as A TESTIMONIAL TO GRACE AND REFLECTIONS ON A THEOLOGICAL JOURNEY." *** For a brilliant, famous man and Roman Catholic cardinal, theologian Dulles is modest and unpretentious in both his voluminous writings and in his self-presentation in A TESTIMONIAL TO GRACE. Deeper, I believe, than his modesty are Dulles's serenity and balance. He can love and honor a radical Roman Catholic schismatic like Leonard Feeney, present his views fairly and without passion and then politely disagree. Watch this style at work in A TESTIMONIAL TO GRACE as Protestant Dulles absorbs and synthesizes the world views of his Professors at Harvard, and of his much later partners in Lutheran-Catholic ecumenical give and take. Like Aristotle, Dulles is serene. Like another of his masters, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Dulles learns from everyone: from orthodox and heterodox, from conservative and liberal. These qualities cannot be missed in the warm, almost conversational pages of a now 90 year old Prince of the Church. He is now retired, feeble, but still keeping abreast of this world and trying his best to make his master, Jesus of Nazareth, speak to today's secular society in the contemporary language that it speaks and, Dulles argues, has every right to expect to be spoken to in. -OOO-