Category Archives: Non-fiction

Authors, Non-fiction, Reviews

“In Defence of Harriet Shelley,” by Mark Twain

Leave a comment

Mark Twain. Photo: Library of Congress

For example, he [William Godwin] was opposed to marriage. He was not aware that his preachings from this text were but theory and wind; he supposed he was in earnest in imploring people to live together without marrying, until Shelley furnished him a working model of his scheme and a practical example to analyze, but applying the principle in his own family; the matter took a different and surprising aspect then.

A few days back I posted a link to an article on the shameful domestic behavior of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. One of our commenters, “Habakkuk 21,” pointed me to Mark Twain’s essay, In Defence of Harriet Shelley. I downloaded it for my Kindle, and it made interesting reading.

As I’ve said before, I have ambivalent feelings about Mark Twain. I yield to no one in my admiration for his gifts as a novelist and humorist. He was one of the greats, and he’s given me plenty of good laughs. I like him less as a man, and when he gets on his Skeptical hobbyhorse he irritates me. On top of that, many of my generation saw Hal Holbrook (at least on TV) doing his Mark Twain show, in which he cherrypicked Twain’s writings to give the impression that he was essentially a man of the ’70s—the 1970s—born before his time.

But in In Defence of Harriet Shelley we see another Mark Twain—the Victorian middle class gentleman, the devoted husband and father, for whom nothing could be more vile than a man who abandoned his family. I expected a little more wit in this essay than is actually to be found here. The primary tone is withering scorn. It appears that Twain had little intention of entertaining the reader in this piece. He was morally outraged, and it’s the outrage that comes through.

I like Mark Twain a little better as a man, after reading A Defence of Harriet Shelley. It’s hardly a classic of Twain’s work, but it’s kind of nice having him as an ally for a change.

Non-fiction, Reviews

The Viking Highlands: The Norse Age in the Highlands, by D. Rognvald Kelday

Leave a comment

“This then is the speculative political history of the Viking Highlands,” says author Kelday in his Introduction.

The story of the Vikings in Scotland—and in the Celtic areas of Britain and Ireland in general—has intrigued me for a long time. If D. Rognvald Kelday’s formidable book The Viking Highlands – The Norse Age in the Highlands raises awareness of that story, it will have done us a service, in spite of some flaws.

It’s true enough, as most of us know, that the Norse dispossessed many native people, robbed churches and strongholds, and took many slaves. But it’s also true (as Kelday stresses) that the places where Celtic culture and traditions survived, after the Celtic kingdom of Alba was transformed into the Anglicized kingdom of Scotland, were those parts that remained longest under Norse rule. The clans Gunn (Gunnar), McAuliffe (Olaf), McManus (Magnus), McLeod (Ljot) and McDonald (descended from Somerled, a Celto-Norse lord with a Viking name, Somerlidi) all look back to the days of the Norse jarls who ruled under something like the Scandinavian republican system.

But it’s not only Scots who’ll find material of interest here. Continue reading The Viking Highlands: The Norse Age in the Highlands, by D. Rognvald Kelday →

Fiction, Non-fiction

Courage, New Hampshire: Sons of Liberty

Leave a comment

We founded our country on liberty within the confines of law, a theme that would likely challenge many grade-school students today. It’s on full display in the second episode of Courage, New Hampshire. The show starts with a hanging. A preacher declares to the audience, “The wages is death,” and so the counterfeiter must die. For unexplained reasons, a burglar is spared a hanging and instead branded with a “B” on his forehead.

Silas Rhodes is the justice of the peace in Courage, and he’s worried that he should have brought in a preacher years ago. He lists the various crimes and vices committed over the past few years and blames himself for spending more time on building the economy than nurturing community faith. So he hires a recent graduate of Harvard, to preach for eight sermons, saying if the township doesn’t like him, they can look for a preacher themselves. No doubt they will be looking for a new preacher soon, since this one proves himself a louse as soon as we meet him.

The burglar may be the most fascinating character in this story. He confesses to having a vision while on the hanging block, seeing the devil lusting for him and Christ Jesus standing between them. Later on, he appears to be chaffing under the preacher’s Scripture-less sermon. I look forward to seeing him become a courageous patriot.

This episode smolders in tension a while and blazes up at the end. It reveals an induction ceremony for The Sons of Liberty, a secret band of patriots which I believe was launched in response to the Stamp Act in 1765. Each colony had their own society of patriots, and after the Stamp Act was repealed and the larger organization dispersed, John Adams notes, “Many Sons of Liberty groups, however, continue to remain active in local community affairs.” It will be fascinating to see how these men take up a higher law to fight against a heavy-handed British government in future episodes. The third show releases next week, May 6.

Courage, NH: Tavern Discussion

Find Courage on Facebook. Watch the shows, buy the DVDs, or contribute to the production on their website.

Non-fiction

Blue Like Jazz Movie

Leave a comment

Donald Miller’s book, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality has been praised by a variety of folks for years, and Steve Taylor has adapted it for the big screen. It opens this weekend, though not in my area. It may gain a wider release next weekend. World Magazine as a good review here. Tiffany Owens writes:

While the movie successfully explores themes of forgiveness, authenticity, and the question of God’s existence as it follows one man’s journey to find God, it struggles to offer a clear explanation of the gospel.

I’m sure Blue Like Jazz is funny, and it’s probably uncomfortable. Hopefully, it’s also rewarding. Here’s the trailer.

Donald Miller talks about the themes of the movie and the criticism he’ll probably get on his blog. He says, “I get it. Criticism is hard. And not only this, churches get criticized for stuff that happened hundreds of years ago. I’d venture to say most criticism is unfounded and ill-informed. It can also be spiteful and hateful. So, I don’t want to be lumped in with the haters.”

Thomas McKenzie does One Minutes Reviews (which usually aren’t one minute, but hey!) and he talks lightly about the movie. This puts a positive spin on it for me.

Bookselling, Non-fiction

Say That Again?

Leave a comment

Bookseller and poet Jen Campbell has made a name for herself by quoting odd and often hilarious things people say in bookshops. For example: “What books could I buy to make guests look at my bookshelf and think: ’Wow, that guy’s intelligent’?”

Now, that question makes complete sense to me. I remember a speaker, perhaps Ravi Zacharias, saying he overheard someone ask for so many feet of books. It didn’t matter what types of books really, just important looking ones to fill up a shelf behind a union leader’s desk to make him look educated when he spoke to business owners.

Fiction, Non-fiction, Reviews

Courage: New Hampshire

Leave a comment

Colony Bay Productions, an independent acting group, is taking up the story of early America with a passion some well-known commentators might think no longer exists. Lead by James Riley, a reenactor of Patrick Henry and owner of Riley’s Farm, this group is producing an ambitious DVD series called Courage, New Hampshire. It’s goal is to tell the story leading up to our independence, season by season for the remainder of the decade. They started in the winter of 1770 with the story Sarah Pine, an unmarried, young woman who gave birth to a child she claims to be by a British soldier named Bob Wheedle. The story primarily introduces the characters and the small town of Courage. No appearances from Ben Franklin or Paul Revere. The Boston Massacre occurs during the time of this story (March 5, 1770) and is the only reference given to the history of the world beyond their border.

There are two episodes available today; the third is coming in several weeks. My wife and I watched the first one, “The Travail of Sarah Pine,” and loved it. The music by Rotem Moav is perfect. I love the authentic sound of the many references to the Bible in the dialogue. Costuming and setting all look beautiful and genuine, though at one point I thought they should have aged a man’s clothing to take the straight from the catalog look away.

There is a community theater aspect to Courage. Some of the acting isn’t as polished as I’d like, because in the end, viewers want to enjoy the story and not think about the last few lines sounding off a bit. Some of the actors are fairly new or untrained in their art, but many of the cast have experience with Shakespearean plays, movies and TV, and some famous people play a part here and there, like Andrew Breitbart in episode two.

I can’t discern a political agenda in this story, unless stories about colonial America without touching on select hot spots makes a story politically incorrect. I look forward to seeing the big historical names, if they ever get out to Courage or if the story ever goes to Boston. I see that episode three has a much lesser-known figure, a black soldier named Caesar, who fought in the continental army.

You can buy a DVD or steam the episodes through their site. If you like period drama, this is worth your time. I’ll let you know what I think of other episodes when I see them. (Thank you, Ori Pomerantz, for promoting this series to me and sending me this DVD.)

Non-fiction

“A Culinary Journey Through Time”

Leave a comment

Dave Lull directed me to this web page, advertising “the first ever cookbook based on archaeological finds.” If you want to eat like a cave man, or a Viking, this would appear to be the book for you.

Will I be purchasing a copy? I don’t think so. It would require me to actually, you know, cook stuff. Not that I can’t cook when I’m cornered, but one of the consolations of bachelorhood is that nobody really expects you to cook in a serious fashion.

The picture of a Viking house in the article is pretty good, but the floor puzzles me. It looks flat and clean. To the best of my knowledge, Vikings pretty much always had dirt floors, usually covered over with rushes, which would be taken out and replaced periodically.

Non-fiction, Reviews

Canute the Great and the Rise of Danish Imperialism During the Viking Age, by L. M. Larson

3 Comments

I downloaded this book because a) it promised to be useful in my ongoing research on northern Europe in the 11th Century, for my Erling books, and b) it was cheap for my Kindle. In general I’m pleased with my purchase. It proved even more helpful than I expected, though I have one complaint.

Canute the Great and the Rise of Danish Imperialism During the Viking Age, by Laurence Marcellus Larson, was first published 100 years ago, but it remains a readable, useful, and occasionally dramatic historical account. This was a great relief to me, since I’d read a more recent biography, Cnut: England’s Viking King by Lawson, and it had been a bow-ring read. I marveled at the time, considering that here we have the saga of a real man who lived a Conan the Barbarian life, rising from exiled prince and pirate to emperor (effectively) of England and much of Scandinavia. But Lawson’s book was a dry recitation of textual citations, concentrating on tallies of Danish and English names in old charters, in order to guess how far Canute (or Cnut) favored his fellow Danes in the English government. As I recall (it’s been a while) he barely touched on Canute’s adventures outside England, while Larson revels in the saga accounts of (Saint) Olaf Haraldsson’s establishment of an independent Norwegian kingdom, in the teeth of Canute’s power.

And this raises my main complaint about the book. Lawson is completely on Olaf’s side. For men like Erling Skjalgsson, who opposed Olaf’s high-handed policies, he has only scorn. They are traitors, bought with English silver, and their cause is essentially heathenry.

If you’ve read my books, or followed what I say about Erling in this blog, you’ll know that I dissent strongly from that opinion. Erling and his allies were defending republican government. Heathenry had almost nothing to do with it. If they took silver from Canute, well, that’s what carls did in those days. Olaf gave rich gifts to his men too.

But other than that, it’s a pretty good book, and even exhibits an enlightened (especially considering the date of publication) view of Viking culture. Recommended. (As is the case with so many e-books, there are some problems with typos due to OCR errors.)