Mark Twain’s autobiography, which he forbid to be published for 100 years after his death, will be released in three books UC-Berkley. The first will come in November.
Category Archives: Non-fiction
Creativity Is of the Mind
Interview on Acting White
Blogger and scholar Stuart Buck has a book on American education coming out this month. Acting White: The Ironic Legacy of Desegregation
Rod Dreher of BeliefNet has a three part interview with Stuart starting here, continuing here, and concluding here (these links will help when the navigation on BeliefNet is challenging). I will review Acting White for BwB later this month.
Secular Praise in 'End of Secularism' Interview
Hunter Baker gives the full details behind his interview with Harvard Political Review. “Somewhat to my chagrin,” he says, “it is primarily about how great secularism is with a couple of statements by me and Herb London, president of the Hudson Institute, suggesting the self-congratulation is not warranted.”
Free Book on BadLanguage.net
Matthew Stibbe is giving away his ebook on his website, BadLanguage.net. No, it isn’t about that. It’s called 30 Days to Better Business Writing.
Your Jesus Is Too Safe, by Jared Wilson
Jared Wilson is, among other things, a pastor, a writer, and a participant at one of our favorite blogs, The Thinklings. Phil has already reviewed his recent book, Your Jesus is Too Safe, but I’d like to say a few things about it too.
I picked it up without great anticipation, assuming from the title that it would probably be lots of things I already knew, plus a guilt trip on a deeper Christian life which would only depress me. But I read it with great interest (almost the same as if it had been a novel), and benefited it from it. Continue reading Your Jesus Is Too Safe, by Jared Wilson
Dostoevsky interviews Dickens
This from Dale Nelson, of Mayville State University:
According to Michael Slater’s Charles Dickens: A Life Defined by Writing (2009, p. 502), Dostoevsky talked with Dickens in London at the office of All the Year Round in summer 1862. Dostoevsky wrote about the meeting to Stepan Dimitriyevich Yanovsky in a letter dated 18 July 1878, so 16 years after the event. The letter was translated by Stephanie Harvey in Dickens’s Villains: A Confession and a Suggestion, published in The Dickensian vol. 98 (2002): 233-5.
The Dostoevsky passage, as quoted by Slater:
—He told me that all the good simple people in his novels, Little Nell, even the holy simpletons like Barnaby Rudge [!?], are what he wanted to have been, and his villains were what he was (or rather, what he found in himself), his cruelty, his attacks of causeless enmity towards those who were helpless and looked to him for comfort, his shrinking from those whom he ought to love, being used up in what he wrote. There were two people in him, he told me: one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite. From the one who feels the opposite I make my evil characters, from the one who feels as a man ought to feel I try to live my life. Only two people? I asked.—
I would be happier if Dostoevsky had written the letter right after the interview. I figure, though, that, at the least, these two did actually meet. That seems wonderful.
Update: The story of the Dostoevsky-Dickens meeting is a hoax. See the Comments for more details.
Delivery attempt failed
Jaime Escalante died last week. He was the outstanding algebra teacher portrayed by Edward James Olmos in the movie “Stand and Deliver.”
Ever wonder why you don’t hear about his program anymore, anywhere?
Andrew Klavan provides the answer at his blog, recommending the book, The War Against Hope.
The History of Sugar
Elizabeth Abbott has the interesting and ugly history of sugar in a new book.
The opiate of intellectuals
Mark Tooley at Front Page Magazine reviews Between Faith and Compromise by Momchil Metodiev, a new book about Communist infiltration in the World Council of Churches in the 1970s and ’80s.
But a new book by a Bulgarian author reveals that the KGB and its Bulgarian intelligence affiliate exploited the Bulgarian Orthodox Church for direct influence on the WCC and the Conference of European Churches. In “Between Faith and Compromise,” Bulgarian historian Momchil Metodiev chronicles how the Soviets and their Bulgarian proxies employed the Bulgarian Orthodox and WCC to promote Soviet strategic goals globally.
You kids aren’t old enough to remember this, but back in those days (and back in the ’60s, in my own experience), we brainless Fundamentalists were screaming from the rooftops that the WCC was shot through with Communists. Smarter, more sophisticated churchmen laughed at our ignorance and bigotry.
Of course, we were completely right.
And of course, we will never get credit for it.