Category Archives: Non-fiction

Non-fiction, Religion, Reviews

Light: C. S. Lewis’s First and Final Short Story, by Charlie W. Starr

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If Lewis’s epistemology has a center, it is in fact, not truth, because truth is always about reality—one step removed from the thing itself.

Winged Lion Press is a small publisher concentrating on C. S. Lewis- and mythopoeic-related material. I received a free copy of Light: C. S. Lewis’s First and Final Short Story from publisher Robert Trexler.

Many, if not most, C. S. Lewis fans are familiar with a story called “The Man Born Blind,” published posthumously in 1977 by Lewis’s literary executor, Walter Hooper, in the book The Dark Tower and Other Stories.

A few years ago, a different version (and a later one, in the opinion of Charlie W. Star, author of Light) was acquired by a collector of Lewisiana. The manuscript’s provenance is cloudy, but handwriting and ink strongly indicate that it’s genuine. This story carries Lewis’s own title, “Light” (the title in Hooper’s volume was his own invention, as the version he had had none).

Of all Lewis’s writings, “Light” is probably the most enigmatic. It springs from his most profound thinking on meaning and reality, and these are deep waters indeed.

I should caution you that unless you’re a hard-core Lewis fan, you may find this book kind of hard going. The grass here is tall indeed. I couldn’t help thinking of A Canticle for Liebowitz, as Charlie Starr manages to find material for an entire (and not short) book in a four page story. But for the Inklings enthusiast, there’s much of interest here.

The story is examined from several directions, but perhaps the most fascinating are those of dating and meaning. The two are closely related, as Lewis’ friend Owen Barfield clearly remembered seeing a version of the story in the late 1920s, some time before Lewis’s conversion. But Starr argues (pretty convincingly) that this version was written around 1944. His argument is that Lewis must have nursed this story, re-writing it from time to time, over the course of his lifetime, so that it meant rather different things at the end than it did at the beginning.

Light is not for the casual reader, but I recommend it for the hard-core Lewis fan.

Authors, Non-fiction

A Documentary on Walker Percy

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Walker Percy, preview two from Winston Riley on Vimeo.

This one-hour program on author Walker Percy will be worth any booklover’s time. Image Journal notes:

Now, it would hardly be true to say that Percy’s been forgotten—two major biographies of him have been published and his books continue to sell well. But we are convinced he should be even more widely read. . . . The experts consulted are extremely well chosen, and include the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and psychiatrist Robert Coles, novelist Richard Ford (who has long cited Percy’s Moviegoer as his inspiration for becoming a writer), the late historian and novelist Shelby Foote, Paul Elie (author of The Life You Save May Be Your Own), and biographer Walter Isaacson (whose most recent book was about Steve Jobs).

Non-fiction, Reviews

Review: Groupthink Can Run Both Directions

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Nutrition news is ripe for overstatement. You might say there are fruit flies of hyperbole swarming many popular reports on select health benefits. Take this example from a site I won’t name (not naming my source would be in keeping with many health reports): “In parts of China where people eat a lot of vegetables such as garlic and onions, villagers have one-quarter as many cases of cancer as people in the rest of the country.” Perhaps that’s true, but it doesn’t mean that the health claim the writer makes in using this example is true or as strong as he says it is. There are likely many combined reasons that guard these Chinese from cancer.

In popular news, nutrition reports can be maddening. Often, the news will simplify a report too far, like saying coffee is linked to hallucinations when the report is actually inconclusive. Or a report may be accurate and the study reported on simplistic. So when I began reading Ty Bollinger’s book, Cancer: Step Outside the Box, I hoped for sound-mind descriptions of alternative cancer treatments and the health benefits of various food products. I fear, however, it has too many fruit flies.

The first thing Bollinger wants us to believe is that pharmaceutical companies and certain medical groups do not want us to heal from cancer or find its cure. They want to make money off of our disease, so they have stifled real cures like apricot seeds in favor of their money-making treatments: surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. He argues that the FDA and other agencies are pressured by lobbyists to ban nutrition and promote manufactured drugs. Some leaders are pressed to promote something regardless of clinical evidence and others are steeped in a groupthink that prevents them from questioning the promotion. Continue reading Review: Groupthink Can Run Both Directions →

Authors, Non-fiction, Reviews

“In Defence of Harriet Shelley,” by Mark Twain

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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

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“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

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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

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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?

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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

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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.)