Category Archives: Non-fiction

‘All Hands On Deck,’ by Will Sofrin

…being aloft in that storm made me appreciate all I was learning. We were on only day four of our passage, had traveled only one-tenth of the distance to our destination, and I had already seen more than I could have imagined or planned for. There was no off switch, no time-out, no opportunity to stop and take a break. That moment forever changed my understanding of how to handle adversity. The only way out was through.

Like many other people of taste, I have a great fondness for the 2003 move, Master and Commander, starring Russell Crowe. I find sailing fascinating (though I have almost no experience with it), and have enjoyed reading both the Horatio Hornblower and the Aubrey/Matchurin classic novel series. The movie was a box-office disappointment, but has acquired a well-deserved popularity in the ensuing years.

But one thing it never occurred to me to wonder about was where they got the ship that served as the HMS Surprise in the movie. Turns out it was originally called the Rose (after the historical HMS Rose of the British Navy), and had had a lackluster career as a museum ship and tourist attraction on the US East Coast. When the movie studio decided to buy it, it was docked at Newport, Rhode Island. That was where Will Sofrin, a somewhat rudderless young boat bum, joined the crew. He and a motley, coed group of sailors took the ship (which turned out to be poorly built, badly maintained, and leaky) through the Panama Canal to San Diego, surviving a hurricane, a dismasting, and various interpersonal conflicts along the way. The final result is the book, All Hands On Deck: A Modern-Day High Seas Adventure to the Far Side of the World.

I always enjoy a good sea story, and Sofrin does an excellent job telling the tale of this voyage. He works in a lot of background about how the British Navy operated in the Age of Sail, as well as more detail than most of us will probably ever need about sailing techniques and technical terms. This information will be of great benefit to fans of Patrick O’Brian’s novels.

The human drama that went on among the crew, particularly when it comes to sexual relations between members of a mixed-sex crew, sometimes offered more information than I wanted. But the story as a whole was human and relatable, and the lessons the author learned were exemplary. He also writes pretty well.

I enjoyed reading All Hands On Deck, and recommend it, especially for O’Brian fans.

How We Conceive of Conversion and Pushing Against a Classic Separation

I didn’t make any progress on The Road this week. (Perhaps I should write about it before I finish, make two posts.) I’ve been reading other books too, which is new for me. Last year, I bought a few books to challenge myself and have picked up more since then, so now I’m reading four at once sorta kinda. Saying it that way doesn’t sound right, because I’m not reading four books together. I just have books I intend to but have yet to finish.

One of those books is Karen Swallow Prior’s The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images & Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis. It describes the recent history of several ideas in Christianity, such as spiritual awakening, conversion, sentimentality, and materiality. They may not be ideas emphasized by our church traditions, but I’m sure I’ll find some challenging thoughts as I keep reading.

In talking about the concept of conversion, she notes a reader of Pride and Prejudice who remarked that Mr. Collins doesn’t appear to be a Christian at all. How could he be a minister? He could be a minister, she says, because the state church made political appointments to these positions. This was the context of the Great Awakening. She writes that evangelicals emphasize reaching the lost among those in the world or of other faiths, so there’s a bit of irony in the development of evangelicalism from a society that claimed to be Christian on the whole. How we imagine the conversion experience shapes our faith and influences how we teach others, especially children, to think about their commitment to Christ.

That’s the kind of thing Prior gets into in that book. I’ll write about it again another time.

Christian Nationalism: Hunter Baker reviews a couple books on the Christian Nationalism debate for Modern Age. “For Wolfe, the answer is to become a transgressor against the boundaries of church and state that today appear to be so firmly drawn by the liberal regime. . . . You can’t fight the something of secular progressivism with the nothing of a disarmed faith that lives in the confining pen made for it by modernity, so set forth a vision of the nation as one that is unashamed to call itself and its people Christian.”

Poetry: Five poems from Dorothy Sayers

I sit within My Father’s house, with changeless face to see
The shames and sins that turned away My Father’s face from Me;
Be not amazed for all these things, I bore them long ago
That am from everlasting God, and was and shall be so.

Humanities: The good people at The New Criterion had abandoned the annual Modern Language Association conference, saying, “we felt that, like Macbeth, we had ‘supped full with horrors’ and resolved to leave those annual exhibitions of narcissistic nullity to others.” But this year, they looked back again and found a curiosity or two.

Scripture: Luther on “the chief point of all Scripture” being the certainty of God’s promises.

Photo: Norwest Bank terra cotta detail, Owatonna, Minnesota, 1988. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

On the West Side of the Red Sea

I started reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road this week, and I’m having a hard time flipping over to the bright side of things. That’s where I’m going to lay the blame anyway.

He pushed open the closet door half expecting to find his childhood things. Raw cold daylight fell through from the roof. Gray as his heart.

We should go, Papa. Can we go?

This year, as was last year, is going to be filled with difficult news. I’m asking myself, on which side of the Red Sea am I going stand, the west side or the east? Will I ask, “Is it because there are no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness” or say, “The LORD is my strength and my song, and he has become my salvation” (Exodus 14:11; 15:2 ESV)?

I’m on the west side today, but I can see the east bank from here.

Let’s move on.

Ukraine: “Talking with Ukraine’s own ‘Generation of Fire’ who came of age during the past decade of Russian aggression against their country reveals a keen understanding of the hand they’ve been dealt, despite moments of despair or near disillusionment.”

“We’re faced with paying for the mistakes of previous generations,” Serhiy, a 21 year-old from Chernivtsi, lamented.

From the Shadows: Gina Delfonzo reviews the paintings and stories found in Tears of Gold: Portraits of Yazidi, Rohingya, and Nigerian Women by Hannah Rose Thomas. “I am so happy. I have never held a pencil in my life before, and this is the first time I have been able to write my name and even to draw my face!”

Poem: Here’s a poem that could be plucked from a fairy tale by Marly Youmans (via The Palace at 2:00 a.m.)

Real Food: Advocates for the environment need to wake up and enjoy the bacon. “They strive to protect bees from suffering by embracing policies that will extinguish all bees; they embrace no-animal policies that in the name of animal welfare will end all livestock animals being alive—and with them, the manure upon which plant agriculture has always depended will vanish.”

Photo by Jamie Hagan on Unsplash

‘Unsure Whether We Have the Right to Talk’

From “The Interrogation” in Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. (alt link – Internet Archive)

My interrogator had used no methods on me other than sleeplessness, lies, and threats — all completely legal. Therefore, in the course of the “206” procedure, he didn’t have to shove at me — as did interrogators who had made a mess of things and wanted to play safe — a document on nondisclosure for me to sign: that I, the undersigned, under pain of criminal penalty, swore never to tell anyone about the methods used in conducting my interrogation. (No one knows, incidentally, what article of the Code this comes under.)

In several of the provincial administrations of the NKVD this measure was carried out in sequence: the typed statement on nondisclosure was shoved at a prisoner along with the verdict of the OSO. And later a similar document was shoved at prisoners being released from camp, whereby they guaranteed never to disclose to anyone the state of affairs in camp.

And so? Our habit of obedience, our bent (or broken) backbone, did not suffer us either to reject this gangster method of burying loose ends or even to be enraged by it.

We have lost the measure of freedom. We have no means of determining where it begins and where it ends. We are an Asiatic people. On and on and on they go, taking from us those endless pledges of nondisclosure — everyone not too lazy to ask for them.

By now we are even unsure whether we have the right to talk about the events of our own lives.

I worry we’re getting to this point of silencing ourselves without Soviet interrogation.

The Press: CBS has reportedly “confiscated the records of” Catherine Herridge after firing her last month. Many suspect she wasn’t toeing the narrative line (or kissing the ring of the Right Side of History).

Ukraine: The aggressive invasion of Ukraine began two years ago this week. “. . . you have to gather all your strength and keep living — it’s easy to go mad from the onslaught of emotions and experiences. Sometimes I feel like we’ve all collectively gone mad.”

Real Men: Praise for the male lead in Helprin’s The Oceans and the Stars as the type of man we need everywhere. “As a leader, for instance, Rensselaer maintains the perfect distance from his crew. Though they know they can approach him for help and advice, he does not pretend to be their buddy. Nor is he aloof or self-absorbed. Rensselaer is all about the mission at hand, preserving the lives of those under his command, and winning in battle.”

ICYMI, Lars review The Oceans and the Stars last October.

Darwin’s Sequel: Robert Shedinger has a new book about the sequel to Origin of Species, which “promised evidence for natural selection” that was not included in the original. He says Darwin just kept promising his supporters, because he would never have the material to finish the book.

Western Canon: A college attempts to replace the Great Books with those aligned with a proper ideology. “‘Attempting to read many of the works set forth as resentment’s alternative to the Canon,’ Bloom groaned, ‘I reflect that these aspirants must believe . . . that their sincere passions are already poems, requiring only a little overwriting.'” This isn’t post-modern, the writer notes. It’s as old as the iconoclasts of history.

Photo: Max Kukurudziak on Unsplash

Orwell Reviews ‘That Hideous Strength,’ and News from the Wars

George Orwell both liked and disliked C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength. In his 1945 review printed in Manchester Evening News, Orwell outlined the plot and mad scheme of the enemy, saying it was not “outrageously improbable.

Indeed, at a moment when a single atomic bomb – of a type already pronounced “obsolete” – has just blown probably three hundred thousand people to fragments, it sounds all too topical. Plenty of people in our age do entertain the monstrous dreams of power that Mr. Lewis attributes to his characters, and we are within sight of the time when such dreams will be realisable.

But he disliked the supernatural elements in it. Bringing in God and demons tips the scales, as it were, “one always knows which side is going to win.” (via Andrew Snyder on Twitter)

And one other thought:

Culture War: Daniel Strand reviews Russell Moore recent book. “Losing Our Religion would be more persuasive if—instead of affecting to be a simple piece of pastoral counseling—it straightforwardly acknowledged its own agenda. Moore has an argument to make, and he wants to advance his project and defeat his opponents. But his book frames the gospel as some pure, otherworldly abstraction that has little to do with power or politics.”

More Lewis: Joseph Pollard has three posts on Lewis’s Till We Have Faces. Here is a link to all three. “While the Narnia series positively oozes with Christian symbolism and biblical allusion, in this, his final work of fiction, Lewis effectually communicates what so many thoroughly orthodox theology textbooks tirelessly aim to do: Till We Have Faces (1956) gently coaxes the reader to come to terms with both the futility of quarreling with the Almighty, and the resplendent beauty of the thrice-holy King.”

Economic Freedom: When Howard Ahmanson “heard [author John M.] Perkins speak, he heard something like his father’s message from the 1960s: free enterprise works, and small banks help people with modest incomes get mortgages so they have better homes. In India, the free enterprise message would take five more years to sink in, but in 1989 voters threw out Congress Party socialism. The result? India in recent years has been the world’s fastest-growing major economy.”

From History’s Wars: Patrick Kurp shares a few words from letters from a Civil War soldier. “Historians attribute more than half the 618,000 Union and Confederate deaths in the war not to battlefield wounds but disease: dysentery, pneumonia, malaria, typhus, chicken pox, enteric (typhoid) fever.”

Photo: Main Street, Iowa. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Sacramone on ‘God, the Bestseller’

Over at Gene Edward Veith’s Cranach blog (which is, lamentably, paywalled), he linked today to Anthony Sacramone’s review at acton.org of Stephen Prothero’s God, the Bestseller: How One Editor Transformed American Religion a Book at a Time. (I’ll let you order it, if you like, from the review. I came to praise Sacramone, not to pick his pocket.) I had never heard of the book’s subject, Eugene Exman:

… “who ran the religion book department at Harper & Brothers and then Harper & Rowe between 1928 and 1965,” and who published some of the most recognizable names in the world of religion (and quasi religion) of that period, from Harry Emerson Fosdick and Albert Schweitzer to Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr., and Bill Wilson, co-founder of AA.

…if there’s one phrase that’s repeated mantra-like in God the Bestseller it’s “hidebound dogma” (note the modifier). The books Exman would publish at the helm of Harper and Rowe’s religion division would seek that which transcended mere doctrine, a “perennial philosophy,” as Aldous Huxley’s own bestseller would be called—a common thread that supposedly runs through all religions, tying the earthly to the heavenly, matter to the spirit.

Exman, raised a Baptist, had an intense spiritual experience, but it led him, not into the Bible or orthodoxy, but into a generalized search for spiritual truth, which he believed he could find in all faiths.

His greatest star was Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick, a hugely influential writer in his time, almost forgotten today (a fact which gives me hope for the future). I once borrowed a book on the life of St. Paul from my elementary school library. My mother noticed that Fosdick was the author, and cautioned me against it. This was wise. I did notice a tendency to downplay the supernatural.

As a short history of the American religious publishing game in the mid-20th century, and the signal role one man… played in that history, virtually transforming what passed for religion in the broader reading public’s imagination, Stephen Prothero does yeoman’s work in God the Bestseller. Anyone in the publishing trade will find this an enjoyable, if somewhat repetitive, read.

Did Anyone Ever Believe the Earth Was Flat?

In the beginning, when people lived in growing, unorganized communities of farms and villages, they may have thought the world was a shape other than spherical. Maybe they didn’t think of it at all. Why should they?

Considering how several ancient civilizations were avid astronomers, we could easily imagine they had creative ideas about the world and maybe its shape. That the Mayans or Egyptians even asked what shape the land might be is not a given. They may have asked a thousand other questions, and if they were oriented around time or the spirit world, not space or the material world, they may not have asked the question.

Dr Josho Brouwers of Bad Ancient takes up this question, saying once people began to explore the world, it became apparent we live on a globe. By the time Plato was writing, it was a common question, the assumption being in favor of a spherical planet. Aristotle proposed the Earth and all of the heavens were fixed in spheres, each inside the other.

Brouwers writes, “This idea – that the world was spherical – became pervasive in the Hellenistic period. The work of Aristarchus of Samos [310-230 BC], the first known scholar to argue that the earth revolved around the sun instead of the other way around, assumes that the earth was round.”

There’s even a suggestion that the educated of ancient India believed the world was spherical too. So, ancient scholars worked out and believed the world was a globe and the medieval church did not oppose them. The idea that Columbus wanted to prove the world was round (and other silliness about the medieval world believing in flatness) is something pushed by people with a beef against the church.

Rejected Book Tour and Reading Dante in Ukraine

An original limerick for your weekend.

In meetings at Kensington Cross 
For lingo I searched at a loss. 
One word—marinara 
Was all I could bear, uh, 
For the spots on my shirt were all sauce.

No shirts were stained in the composition of that limerick. Now, on to the links.

Memoir: Rob Henderson has a memoir releasing next month called, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class. J.D Vance praised it for a “gripping” message. Others called it “extraordinary.” But major city bookstores don’t want to schedule tour events for him, even though he had tens of thousands of social media followers (over 137k on Twitter).

Sherlock Holmes: Getting the great detective into print was a challenge for Conan Doyle in that he hoped to publish one of the better markets. Historian Lucy Worsley, who has a new BBC series on the author’s relationship with his detective, says the first stories were rejected thrice.

The rejections scarred Arthur and made him slightly ashamed of his character, because he wanted to be a high brow writer. Nevertheless, he persevered because he was short of money, and he had a family to support, and he was also very, very hardworking, and energetic.

After Sherlock’s first two outings, both of which were lacklustre in terms of readership, his literary agent suggested a new magazine called The Strand, which was a mid-market magazine aimed at commuters, who were hustling and making a life for themselves in the busy throbbing urban world of London, in the 1890s, that Arthur struck gold.

Self-Awareness: We seem to be overly aware of ourselves, don’t we? But we aren’t yet schizophrenic. “The cult of the ironic, distanced observer, aware of his own awareness, unable to break out of his solipsistic construction of himself and his world, has displaced what is now seen to be the naive, immediate relationship with reality as it is felt. This point of view has developed its own orthodoxy, even if most of us go about our lives as though we were actually involved with things, events and people not entirely of our making.” (via Rob Henderson)

Enraptured: February 12, 2024, will be the 100th anniversary of the first public performance of George Gershwin’s Rapsody in Blue. World Radio had a segment on it earlier this month, discussing the piece and how it’s been altered in many recording.

Dante’s Inferno: Somewhere in Ukraine right now, my friend who publishes books orders printers in the bombed out city of Kharkiv to produce thousands of copies of Inferno. The trucks deliver weapons into Kharkiv. And, going back, empty, they decide to pick up thousands of copies of Dante’s Inferno.

“This is an image of war that happens as I write it: cars are bringing weapons into the besieged city that’s bombed daily, and they leave full of books.” (via The Book Haven)

Photo by Danya Gutan on Pexels.com

Had the Crew Dealt in Books They Would Have Gone Broke

An original limerick for your weekend.

A ship with a creative crew
would trade in Newport and ports new
their haphazard wares,
their slapdash and spares,
for the loan on their ship had come due.

Live within your means, readers, and stay ahead of any judicious loans you take out. And now, on with the links.

2023 Books: Bookseller and podcaster David Kern offers “eight novels published in 2023 that I’ve been handing to people because they remind me why I love novels in the first place.”

And more recommendations, this time of the spy-thriller nature from John Wilson—”more than enough regional and global conflicts to keep spies and spymasters busy and readers turning the pages.”

Writing in the Woods: The writing life can take many forms, like when a friend lets you live in a cottage on their land for a summer.

Writing about Magic: During the Renaissance, the practice of and the writing about magic produced mixed results. “Renaissance magicians were often bookish.” Sounds like Mr. Norrell.

Photo by Hector John Periquin on Unsplash

Is America in a Dark Period?

The extent of mafia money and influence within the corridors of American power in the middle of the past century is a familiar story, told in fictional form in iconic movies like The Godfather. Given the extent of these connections, it wouldn’t be surprising if the shadowy realms of the government now known to have been involved in illegal covert activities—such as COINTELPRO and the CIA’s Operation CHAOS—turned to the mafia to handle certain jobs; for one thing, they could offer the services of experienced hit men sworn to omertà. For his part, Hoover famously denied for decades that the mafia existed, whether because he owed any mob bosses favors—or simply because he preferred to stay focused on political subversives like King.

Seneca Scott, Did the FBI Kill MLK? | Compact Mag