Authors, The Press

I Trust Tantaros, Carlson

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Our blog doesn’t have a narrow topic list. We do want you to find our posts interesting, but I think Lars and I usually allow our own interests to guide the subjects of our posts and only occasionally rule something out as off-topic. This post is probably in off-topic territory. It may even be gossip, but I hope you’ll find it worthwhile.

Several weeks ago, long-time Fox News host Gretchen Carlson filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against network chairman Roger Ailes, who has since resigned. She called him a serial harasser, claimed he said many outrageous things over the years, and hindered her career because she refused him.

Granted, I don’t know Carlson personally, but I have heard her many times on the radio, occasionally on TV, and have complete faith in her. She seems to be an intelligent person who does not toe a party line but perseveres in independent thinking. She never impressed me as someone trivial or petty. When I heard of her lawsuit, I believed it on its face, because she has credibility with me. Though I’ve seen some defense of Ailes and discrediting of Carlson by other Fox News hosts, several women have also told their stories to Carlson’s lawyer.

Now we learn Andrea Tantaros is also suing Fox News executives for condoning, if not contributing to, sexual harassment, and I believe her, not because of any suspicion I have of Ailes or the people she names, but because I trust her. She impresses me as a strong, intelligent, capable woman. In the suit, she describes  at least some of the process she walked through to get grievances like this addressed within the system. Her accusations were dismissed, so as not to rock the boat.  Continue reading I Trust Tantaros, Carlson →

Non-fiction

Optimistic Dignity

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In an earlier book, Who Really Cares, [Arthur C. Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute] compiled an impressive array of data to show that contrary to the conventional wisdom conservatives tend to give more to charity than do those on the left. In his new book, The Conservative Heart: How to Build a Fairer, Happier, and More Prosperous America, he goes further, arguing that not only is the conservative heart a caring heart but that the conservative head has produced public policies that are truly compassionate because they are capable of generating jobs and opportunity that–in turning the economy around–would infuse the lives of substantial numbers of poor and struggling people with dignity by providing them the opportunity to earn success.

Fiction, Reviews

‘A Crime of Passion,’ by Scott Pratt

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A Crime of Passion

“I got the impression they’re friends, but not the kind of friends you and I have. This is Nashville, Caroline. The state capitol. The seat of power and money in the state. Friendship here means something entirely different than it means back home. I’m out of my league.”

And now at last I come to A Crime of Passion, the last book in my current reading of Scott Pratt’s Joe Dillard legal mysteries. It’s not the last book in the series to date, though. The next book is Judgment Cometh (and That Right Soon), which started me off on reading this series. But I’ve reviewed that one already.

This time around, Joe, defense lawyer from northeast Tennessee, is summoned – to his great surprise – to Nashville by a beautiful former Country music star. Her husband, a record company owner, has been accused of murdering a young female singer who was a rising star in his talent stable. Joe has been recommended to her, she says, by a friend who says he’s smart, honest, and relentless. Joe is uneasy about moving into an alien environment where he doesn’t know the power structure, but she makes him a money offer he can’t refuse.

He finds himself in a snake pit. His client is a womanizing crook. His client’s wife is a devious seductress. Everybody has their own agenda, and everybody is lying to him. The district attorney casually suggests a way he can fix the trial, for a price. A certain party is considering murdering Joe. Nobody expects him to be able to play in this league. But country boy Joe has a trick or two of his own in his repertoire.

Scott Pratt gets better and better as a novelist. I liked A Crime of Passion very much. Cautions for the usual adult stuff. Recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Blood Money,’ by Scott Pratt

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And I continue through Scott Pratt’s Joe Dillard series of legal thrillers. This one was a particular pleasure. An attractive new character has been added to the cast, and the story is almost old-fashioned in its moral purpose.

Charleston Story, the central character in Blood Money (it was originally written as a stand-alone, but author Pratt revised it to fit into the Joe Dillard series) is a young lawyer who’s had a rough life. She lost her parents young, and grew up in some poverty, living with an eccentric uncle. But she has persevered, and is now starting out as a lawyer. Joe Dillard, defense attorney, likes her (his son Joe likes her even better) and takes her on as an associate. She takes the case of an elderly man whose son is trying to get him declared incompetent. Suddenly and dramatically, “Charlie” finds herself the old man’s heir, after his unexpected death. But he hasn’t just left her his modest property. He left her an old family secret, the key to unimaginable riches. But the riches come with a curse. The old man’s greedy and ruthless son is the least of her worries.

Charlie is an appealing, spunky character, and there are a lot of thrills in her story. I thought the book’s final resolution a little predictable, but it was none the less satisfying. I had fun reading it. Mild cautions for language and adult themes.

Uncategorized

For your Spectation

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My latest essay for The American Spectator Online is here.

In fact, the real question — the actual historical anomaly — is why, after everybody else had got the question wrong from the beginning of time, the Christians suddenly figured the answer out, and abolished slavery. Nobody else did that. Not the Egyptians. Not the Chinese. Not the Aztecs or the ancient Greeks. I understand the Greek Epicureans rejected slavery, but one of the distinctions of the Epicureans is that they never tried to build a civilization.

And building a civilization is the precise nub of the historical problem.

Authors, Fiction

Tolkien Styled His Dwarfs After Jews

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In 1971, Tolkien said it was obvious that his dwarfs represented the Jewish people. In a letter, he said, “I do think of the ‘Dwarves’ like Jews: at once native and alien in their habitations, speaking the languages of the country, but with an accent due to their own private tongue.”


via GIPHY

Among the members of Gandalf’s group (known as the “Fellowship of the Ring”) are a dwarf named Gimli and an elf named Legolas. Dwarfs and elves, Tolkien informs us, had never gotten along. When Gimli and Legolas first meet, each blames this historical ill will on the other’s people. Gandalf, in turn, calls for a truce. “I beg you two, Legolas and Gimli, at least to be friends, and to help me,” he says. “I need you both.” Coaxed by Gandalf, the two ultimately become the best of friends, fighting side by side and risking their lives to defeat the Dark Lord and his evil legions. This dwarf-elf alliance may well be a paradigm of a Jewish-Christian friendship. Interestingly, as Saks and others have noted, Tolkien’s correspondence during World War II reveals that he himself fell into an unplanned interfaith friendship.

Rabbi Meir Soloveichik offers his reaction to this revelation. (via Prufrock News)

Uncategorized

Elegy for a tree

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[If you’ve been trying to access Brandywine Books, or waiting for updates, we apologize. We suffered a malicious denial of service attack. The problem has been addressed, at least for now.

This piece was meant to be posted Thursday evening. lw]

The most impressive thing about my property is now gone. Fortunately I’m not talking about my house.

I had a great big tree, a pine or some kind of fir, at the back of my lot, in a space between my garage, my neighbor’s fence, and my retaining wall. It was very tall and wide. It was even older than I am. My neighbor on the downhill side told me the previous owner had planted it just after World War II, when he got back from the service.

Unfortunately, it had utility lines running through it, and that same neighbor asked me, as a personal favor, to get it taken out. So I found a guy who’d do it for a reasonable price, and his crew finally made it here late this morning, and set to work with chain saws, climbing gear, and a chipper.

It took them several hours, but they finally left some time after 5:00 p.m. I didn’t actually realize they were gone. I thought they’d knock on the door and give me a bill when they’d finished, but they just made like a tree and leaved (the owner called later to make arrangements for me to pay him. Trusting fellow). I stepped out onto the back porch, and nobody was there. Except there was a pile of mulch about the size of a Volkswagen piled in my uphill neighbors’ driveway.

I had a moment of panic there, but the neighbors, when I went over to inquire, told me they’d asked the tree guys to leave it for them. Free mulch for their gardening endeavors. Blocking their garage, at the moment.

So my great tree’s story is told. It is gone like the summers of my youth, leaving a lonesome place against the sky (points for anyone who can identify that reference).

Bookselling, Publishing

Jonathan Edwards Wanted Nice, Expensive Editions

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Jonathan Yeager tells Thomas Kidd about the great puritan preacher’s desires for the appearance of his work in print. No doubt, he would have loved today’s world of easy publishing.

Edwards was a meticulous author, and wanted his books to look a certain way. He was not the best judge on how his books should be printed, if the purpose was for them to sell well. Edwards wanted his books to have wide margins, generous line spacing, and to be printed on fine paper, with good type, and priced affordably. The model for Edwards was his book Misrepresentations Corrected, published in 1752. Ironically, Misrepresentations Corrected was his worst-selling book! A key reason, I believe, was that it was not economically printed. If a printer allows the use of wide margins and generous line spacing, it follows that it would require more pages, and therefore would be more costly.

Edwards vocalized his disgust with the way that his book Religious Affections was published in 1746, probably because it was concisely printed, with tightly cropped margins and line spacing. Despite his complaints, the printer for this book feared that he had not printed enough copies to meet public demand. In an advertisement at the end of the book, the Boston printer Samuel Kneeland remarked that some 1,300 subscriptions had been taken for Religious Affections, at a time when a colonial author would have rejoiced if 500 copies of a book sold.

Reviews

Reviews: ‘Gisli’s Saga:’ Book and movie

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Outlaw: The Saga of Gisli

I’d been meaning to check out the 1981 Icelandic film, Outlaw: The Saga of Gisli, for some time. Not a great film by any means, it has genuine pleasures and rewards for the saga enthusiast.

Gisli Sursson’s Saga is one of the best sagas, and offers interesting distinctions when compared to others. It’s a tragedy of fate, like all good sagas, but in this case the legal and ethical rules by which the Norsemen lived create unintended (and insoluble) problems for a decent man. If your blood brother and your kinsman get into a fight, whom do you support?

Gisli has sworn blood brotherhood with his friend Vesteinn. But Vesteinn is murdered by Gisli’s brother-in-law. Gisli feels obligated to avenge him, thus keeping his honor (as he sees it) but turning almost the whole world against him. He is outlawed, which in Iceland meant that any man could kill him without penalty, and no one was permitted to assist him.

There are a few people who help him, though, notably his faithful wife. And with their help he manages to survive as an outlaw — without fleeing the country – longer than any other man, except one (Grettir, who also has a saga). Continue reading Reviews: ‘Gisli’s Saga:’ Book and movie →