Solomon vs. Lord, by Paul Levine

I found much to like in Paul Levine’s light legal thriller, Solomon vs. Lord, first in a series. I also found elements that creeped me out. I’ll give you my reaction; judge for yourself.

Like most male readers, I don’t actually hate romance in a story. I just don’t care for stories that are only romance. I want some swords or some guns, or stuff getting blown up. If you’re going to have romance, the best kind is the Benedick and Beatrice sort (as in Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing”), where the man and the woman fight like a dog and a cat, and everyone but they can see that it’s because they have unusual sexual chemistry.

That’s what we have in Solomon vs. Lord. Steve Solomon is a talented, not-overly-ethical Miami lawyer, who at the beginning is defending a man charged with importing exotic animals illegally. Arguing for the prosecution is Victoria Lord, scion of a wealthy family that’s fallen on hard times. Her life plan calls for her to pay her dues in the DA’s office, then get a job with a respectable law firm. She’s also going to marry Bruce Bigby, a handsome and wealthy avocado grower and real estate tycoon. Continue reading Solomon vs. Lord, by Paul Levine

Jesus, My Father, the CIA, and Me, by Ian Morgan Cron

Ian Morgan Cron grew up with a deep, unsatisfied hunger for the love of his father. He tells the story of his struggle to understand and forgive in the memoir, Jesus, My Father, the CIA, and Me, A Memoir… Of Sorts. His father was, when Ian was young, an executive with a motion picture company. The family lived in Europe and hobnobbed with movie stars and political figures.

Then his father’s career crashed on the rock of his alcoholism. The family moved home to Greenwich, Connecticut, to a life of marginal poverty (sure, it wasn’t Harlem, but the contrast of their own lives with those of their wealthy neighbors just made it harder for the kids). His mother made a new career in time that gave them some financial stability, but his father’s continuing blackouts and rages left wounds Ian couldn’t deal with.

In his religious life, Ian went from an innocent, youthful love of Jesus to bitterness and atheism, when Jesus failed to give him the one thing he asked for—a sober father. He experimented with drinking, was scared by his own reaction, and settled into drugs for a while before taking up drinking again.

It was only after many years that Ian learned his father’s great secret—he’d been a CIA agent. Many spies are alcoholics and narcissists, he learned. They’re suited to the life.

Only the realization that he was himself turning into his father drove Ian to seek counseling, and finally to reconcile with God.

Ian Cron writes with a light touch and the kind of mordant humor you’re familiar with if you’ve read authors who suffered child abuse (and believe me, you have). His account of his journey back to faith is in many places touching and moving. The personal revelation that reconciles him to Christ at one point is one that some Christians may have trouble with. I’m not sure about it myself, but I generally try not to judge another Christian’s deepest confidence.

Hints in the course of the story suggest to me that Cron’s final faith road brings him closer to Tony Campolo than to James Dobson, but those hints are lightly touched on and need not spoil the story for those of us who trust the Bible more than our hearts.

Recommended, especially for Christians who come from dysfunctional homes. Or those who want to understand them better.

Emily, wherever they may find her

Amhurst College thinks they might have the second known photograph of Emily Dickinson.



Photo: Amhurst College Archives

There is, currently, only one authenticated photograph of Dickinson in existence – the well-known image of the poet as a teenager in 1847. But Amherst College believes an 1859 daguerreotype may well also be an image of the reclusive, beloved poet, by now in her mid-20s and sitting with her recently widowed friend, Kate Scott Turner. If so, it will shed new light on the poet who, by the late 1850s, was withdrawing further and further from the world.

The photograph is currently being evaluated by experts.

Tip: Neatorama.

Come and Get It, by Edna Ferber

When I read We, the Drowned, which I reviewed the other day, I was making one of my attempts to connect with the lives of my ancestors, in that case my Danish forebears.

I’ve written before in this space about my mother’s mother’s family, who lived in Hurley, Wisconsin, generally considered the wickedest town in the north. So when I learned that a novel had been written (at least in part) about Hurley (renamed “Iron Ridge”) by an estimable American novelist, I had to read that too.

Come and Get It is one of Edna Ferber’s big American books. In novels like Showboat, So Big, and Cimarron, she attempted to capture the essence of her own country as expressed in the life of various regions. Come and Get It is her northern novel. It’s worth reading, though it hasn’t kept as well as its early fans hoped it would (it was even made into a movie with Edward Arnold, Walter Brennan, Joel McCrae, and Frances Farmer, but judging by the clips I’ve seen they made major alterations). Continue reading Come and Get It, by Edna Ferber

Netflix review: “Foyle’s War”

Since the Foyle’s War mystery series has been broadcast in this country on PBS, all of you probably enjoyed it long before I did. But in case I’m not the last person in America to catch this excellent program, I’ll give my own viewer’s response here.

Detective Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle (splendidly underplayed by Michael Kitchen) is chief detective in Hastings, England, during World War II. A sort of running joke in the series is that he desperately wants to do something “more important” for the war effort, but again and again is denied the chance, sometimes because there’s a case he feels he needs to see through to the end, and sometimes because his stubborn integrity makes him enemies in high places. Later on, when the war is winding down, he just wants to retire, but keeps getting pulled back in.

Foyle is a smallish, unprepossessing man, but steely in his character. He’s the kind of superior officer who can flay a subordinate alive without raising his voice. Nevertheless he’s very popular with his underlings, and has a sly, dry, sense of humor.

He is assisted in his inquiries by two regular supporting characters—Samantha “Sam” Stuart, his military driver (played by an actress actually named Honeysuckle Weeks, who’s not conventionally pretty but is nevertheless entirely adorable), and Detective Sergeant Paul Milner (Anthony Howell), an early war casualty with an artificial leg. Together they investigate at least one murder each episode, often connected to war profiteering, espionage, and military secrets. Foyle isn’t always able to arrest the sometimes well-protected culprits, but he does all he can and never gives up under any pressure less than direct orders. In such cases, he never leaves the stage without laying out the moral case. Continue reading Netflix review: “Foyle’s War”

Mythical Maps


Caricature Map of Europe 1914 by ~Keithwormwood on deviantART

The artist of this map says it’s “a political caricature map depicting different nations in the alternate world history of the book Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld.” I’ve begun to believe that most of the really good books out there are the ones with maps in the front, and these are just the type of maps I’m talking about.

We, the Drowned, by Carsten Jensen


We said goodbye to our mothers. They’d been around all our lives, but we’d never properly seen them. They’d been bent over washing tubs or cooking pots, their faces red and swollen from heat and steam, holding everything together while our fathers were away at sea, and nodding off every night in the kitchen chair, with a darning needle in hand. It was their endurance and exhaustion we knew, rather than them. And we never asked them for anything because we didn’t want to bother them.

That was how we showed our love. With silence.

…Our mother sticks a knife in our heart when we say goodbye on the wharf. And we stick a knife in hers when we go. And that’s how we’re connected: through the hurt we inflict on one another.

I really didn’t have much choice about buying Danish author Carsten Jensen’s We, the Drowned. I’ve been telling you how much I like sea stories, and this is a sea epic. One quarter of my ancestors were Danes, and this is the story of a small maritime village on a Danish island, not all that far from where my people came from (though mine were farmers, as far as I know. My sailing ancestors were Norwegian. Close enough).

We, the Drowned is a long book, and strange. It starts out in an almost whimsical faction, telling us of Lauritz Madsen of the town of Marstal, who started a war with Germany singlehanded, and was blown up over the mainsail, saw St. Peter’s backside, and landed on his feet back on deck to tell the tale.

But that’s pretty much the end of the whimsy. Author Jensen quickly falls into the fatalistic tone so common in Scandinavian literature. Things get grim, and they stay grim by and large. There are fantastical, magical realism elements to the book, but they mostly follow sailors’ superstitions—visions and omens and objects carrying bad luck. Continue reading We, the Drowned, by Carsten Jensen