Alissa Wilkinson blogs about poet Donald Hall’s rich moments in his memoir, Life Work
Category Archives: Non-fiction
Get Your Political Quotient
Political scientist Tim Groseclose has a book on media bias in which he has tried to quantify and measure political leaning in politicians and voters. His book, Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind
Mr. Groseclose says he didn’t want to write just another book claiming to expose bias among reporters and broadcasters. He wanted a scientific book that proposed solutions. Among those solutions is determining your own political quotient. On his website [site defunct], you can take a 40-question quiz based on congressional roll-call votes in 2009 to see what your PQ is and how it compares to other politicians. This is not an easy quiz. The first two questions are a bit deep in the weeds, but I trudged through them to get a 7.7 PQ.
Even though this is all fairly interesting, I doubt it will change many minds. I hate thinking so cynically, but how many of us think about our civil responsibilities at all? Maybe a book like David Mamet’s The Secret Knowledge
And yet the Christian in me still holds on to the hope that even this can get better. Maybe I can’t help believing America is exceptional in this way, that all of us really can have liberty and justice.
Survival story
I finished reading the history book from Kvalavåg (one of my ancestral homes in Norway) about which I wrote the other day. Most of it is stuff that wouldn’t interest you much, but there was one amazing paragraph in the section on the German occupation during World War II (my translation follows):
One of the leaders of the 14-man German troop was Konrad Grünbaum. He was actually of Jewish origin, and came from the city of Furth. His civil occupation was metal work, and he had been an active member of the Socialist Workers’ Youth. Before the war he himself had been in Dachau concentration camp. He had been accused of illegal work and sentenced to three years’ punishment. Through an error he came to Norway in ̀́41 and was promoted. Grünbaum himself said later that he had had very good relations with the people in Kvalavåg while he was there, up until 1943. People used to call him “the Englishman” because he spoke only English with the people. Others called him “Grandfather.”
What a bizarre story. I can only imagine the terrors he must have suffered, worrying in his bed that somebody in Personnel would notice his ethnicity and denounce him. And after the war, what must he have felt, when he pondered the cosmic lottery win that saved his life when so many others perished?
"Never mind," Black Death edition
“The Plague in the Stairway,” by Norwegian artist Theodor Kittelsen
You know how they taught you in school that the Black Plague was caused by fleas carried by rats?
At least according to one scholar, this is probably a slander on fleas and rats.
“The evidence just isn’t there to support it,” said Barney Sloane, author of The Black Death in London. “We ought to be finding great heaps of dead rats in all the waterfront sites but they just aren’t there. And all the evidence I’ve looked at suggests the plague spread too fast for the traditional explanation of transmission by rats and fleas. It has to be person to person – there just isn’t time for the rats to be spreading it.”
He added: “It was certainly the Black Death but it is by no means certain what that disease was, whether in fact it was bubonic plague.”
People at the time believed it was caused by “bad air.” Maybe they were right, if it was caused by human-to-human contact.
G. K. Chesterton would have loved that.
Vapid Speech from the Highest Office
I wish I could link you to the great interview Ken Myers recorded with Elvin Lim, author of The Anti-Intellectual Presidency: The Decline of Presidential Rhetoric from George Washington to George W. Bush
“[S]uch appeals rest on reductive and oversimplified reasonings that are often false in significant ways. Persuasion based on such emotional appeals is necessarily shallow and often does not do justice to the issues at stake,” states the brief summary of the interview on the Mars Hill Audio Journal site.
Presidents have become too powerful, Lim states, due to their appeal to extra-constitutional authorities, particularly the perceived electoral mandate from the most recent election. The White House should instead discuss policy with Congress like adults, something many on both sides claim to want, but fewer actually support.
Spoils of the weekend
It was one of the most exhausting weekends I’ve had in a long time, involving considerable interaction with other human beings, always a workout for me. But nevertheless it wasn’t a bad weekend. Two things that happened, in particular, pleased me inordinately.
First of all, I got this link from my friend and sparring partner, Ragnar. They’re going to do The Long Ships as a movie again. In fact, they’re going to do two movies and a TV miniseries. They’re going to do it in Sweden, and if the Swedes are to be believed (always, ahem, a gamble), they’re going to do it right this time. Continue reading Spoils of the weekend
Christian Smith's Straw Men
Professor at the University of Notre Dame Christian Smith has written a book criticizing an evangelical view of the Bible. The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture
Kevin DeYoung reviews The Bible Made Impossible:
For starters, the book is littered with straw men. Smith frequently attacks ideas that none of the mainstream institutions, documents, or persons he criticizes holds. He opposes mechanical dictation theory, admitting that “most” thoughtful evangelicals do not hold to it (81). I can’t help but wonder which thoughtful evangelicals do? He chides biblicists for things I’ve never seen anyone do, like worshiping the Bible (124) and thinking that fellowship with God comes through paper and ink (119)…. Likewise, he mocks the logic of biblicism for being equally certain about the divinity of Jesus as it is about the ethics of biblical dating (137). But who actually espouses any of this? These are simply cheap shots…. He frequently attacks the notion that the Bible is completely clear, but then in the end he says the Bible is perfectly clear when it comes to the important stuff of the gospel (132).
Having not read this book, I’m sure Prof. Smith makes some good points in it, but it appears from DeYoung’s review that he loses those points in the middle of a lot of partisan propaganda, by which I mean he is defending his team against other teams with whom he agrees essentially. Read all of DeYoung’s review, and you’ll see what I mean.
The Steel Bonnets, by George MacDonald Fraser
There is said to have been a tradition among the Borderers that when a male child was christened his right hand should be excluded from the ceremony, so that in time of feud he would be better equipped to strike “unhallowed” blows upon his family’s enemies.
At the end of the 2001 Common Reader edition of George MacDonald Fraser’s 1971 book The Steel Bonnets: The Story of the Anglo-Scottish Border Reivers
I think his instincts were good. Although The Steel Bonnets seems to me (a fairly uninformed reader in that area of history) a masterful work on a challenging subject, I also found it hard to follow, and wished it no longer than it was. If I had Scottish roots I might feel differently. A lot of people, I’m told, are very keen on this book, which is not surprising when you note how many of the names that show up again and again in the accounts of the Border feuds are familiar today—especially in America. At the beginning of the book, Fraser muses on Richard Nixon’s inauguration ceremony, in which you found a Johnstone (Lyndon Baines Johnson), a Graham (Billy) and a Nixon together on the platform. Nor does he fail to note that the first man on the moon was an Armstrong, a scion of perhaps the greatest Reiver family of them all. Continue reading The Steel Bonnets, by George MacDonald Fraser
The English Traveler
Christopher Taylor reviews To a Mountain in Tibet
The Omniscient Will Not Remember
Last week, I listened to an audiobook of The Next Story: Life and Faith after the Digital Explosion. Author Tim Challies’ notes that many things we do online are recorded: our search requests, transactions, social network connections, and more. Each will be in its own database, but with the expansive overlapping of our social networks with other websites, that’s changing. Increasingly, what we do online is not only recorded, but tied to our social profiles so that even casual friends can know a good bit about us.
This raises a natural question. Would any of us be embarrassed by the revelation of our online actions: our comments, searches, browsing, how much we do or when? I’ll say upfront that I would be, and I try to lead a fairly transparent online life.
Challies makes the obvious contrast between these databases and the Christian life. Our Heavenly Father has given followers of Christ Jesus the righteousness of Christ, and in doing so, he has removed our transgressions from us as far as the east is from the west (Psalm 103:13)
“I, I am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins.” Isaiah 43:25 ESV
The God who knows everything from the beginning to the end makes a conscious decision to reject the memory of our cancelled sins. What profound mercy. Psalm 103 says he remembers our frailty and has compassion on us like a father loves his children. He refuses to recount for us a long list of sins, because that list has been ruined. But he scored those sins in Christ’s own body and nailed them with him to the cross, like the horrible painting of Lucas Cranach the Elder shows.
What mercy.