Category Archives: Reviews

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘The Devil’s Pleasure Palace,’ by Michael Walsh

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It is the thesis of this book that the heroic narrative is not simply our way of telling ourselves comforting fairy tales about the ultimate triumph of Good over Evil, but an implanted moral compass that guides even the least religious among us.

In a book at once learned, insightful, inspirational, and maddening, Michael Walsh, former Time Magazine associate editor and current New York Post columnist, finds a useful lens through which to examine the culture wars of our time. The conflict goes beyond religion vs. atheism, or left vs. right, he tells us in The Devil’s Pleasure Palace. It’s about stories. It’s about the basic narrative through which we view history.

This, of course, is a point of view that pleases me immensely.

All human cultures, Walsh argues, have told their stories in the basic three-act form, the “ur-Narrative” – something is lost, a battle is fought, and the lost thing (or something better) is regained.

Against this, the modern left sets its own narrative of history, based on deconstruction, adopted from the poisonous thinkers of the Frankfurt School of philosophy who fled to America from Hitler in the 1930, took up residence, accepted the freedom and plenty of the country, and immediately began to plot to bring it all down in flames. Because they believe in destroying the good, to make way for their perfect dream of the socialist society.

I appreciated Walsh’s well-informed critique of the Frankfurt School thinkers and their influence. I was less enamored of his depiction of the “ur-Narrative.” He writes frankly from a Christian (Catholic) point of view, but his depiction of Christian theology is pretty idiosyncratic. It helps to remember that he bases his view of the narrative of the Fall of Man, not actually on Genesis, but on Milton’s poem “Paradise Lost.” And even in that, he stretches the text a bit to make a non-Miltonian, semi-Catholic point.

But I still found The Devil’s Pleasure Palace immensely fascinating and informative. Walsh has hope for the future of our culture. I’m not sure I share it. But I’m glad I read the book. Recommended, with cautions.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Three Roads to the Alamo,’ by William C. Davis

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In Library and Information Science, there’s a popular concept called “faceting.” Faceting means describing a resource in more than one way, as more than one thing. The idea is that faceting makes it possible to describe an object more fully, in a way that’s more useful to more people.

William C. Davis’ Three Roads to the Alamo is a faceted historical work. Instead of a single narrative, the author takes us along with the Alamo’s three most famous defenders, Crockett, Bowie, and Travis, on their lives’ journeys, providing us not only a fuller description of each of them, but a more three-dimensional picture of America (at least the American south and southwest) during the early 19th Century.

The first subject we meet is the oldest and most famous – even in his own time – Congressman David Crockett of Tennessee. Indeed, as Davis reminds us, Crockett was the very first American media celebrity – the first American to see the newspapers and magazines create for him a separate persona, not entirely unlike him, but exaggerated and oversimplified. It must have been a bizarre life for him – in the east he dined in the finest restaurants, was feted by the rich and powerful, and spoke from the same platforms with Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. When he went home, it was to a dirt-floored cabin and a mountain of debts that never seemed to diminish. He finally solved the debt problem – to a degree – by figuring out how to monetize his celebrity. He wrote his autobiography (which I reviewed here), and it became a bestseller. Continue reading ‘Three Roads to the Alamo,’ by William C. Davis →

Poetry, Reviews

‘Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary,’ by J. R. R. Tolkien

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First of all, it should be made clear – and I wonder how anyone could be in doubt on this, but it’s possible – that J. R. R. Tolkien’s Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary is not a work of imagination meant for popular entertainment. It’s a translation of an already much-translated work, intended as a teaching aid, by a major scholar in the field. If you’re unfamiliar with Beowulf, you might want to try one of the modern verse translations, like Heaney’s, but I liked this version very much.

Personally, I prefer a prose translation. Tolkien probably knew Old English poetry better than any modern man, and here he attempts to provide some sense of the original metrical form, but he is not forced to alter the text in order to make the verse scan. Any translation is always a trade-off, especially in poetry, and for my own part I prefer some approximation of the original text.

Tolkien’s translation is a lively one. I can imagine him reading it to Lewis (and we’re told Lewis did advise him on bits of it) and then ignoring, as he always did, Lewis’ suggestions.

There are many notes. Some are by Christopher Tolkien, the author’s son, who is editor. Others are drawn directly from Tolkien’s own notes. Some of this material fascinated me, some seemed to me (approaching more from the historian’s than the language scholar’s perspective) pretty tall grass. It was interesting to read, for instance, that Tolkien thinks the Beowulf poem correct in crediting (in passing) the slaying of the dragon to Sigfried’s father Sigmund, rather than to Sigfried himself. The dragon-slaying fits in with Sigmund’s story, he thinks, and seems like an interpolation in the Sigfried-Brunhilde narrative.

Also in this book is a work called “The Sellic Spell,” which is Tolkien’s attempt to reconstruct how the Beowulf story might have been passed down as a folk tale, rather than as a heroic poem. He sees a separation between the “fairy tale” Beowulf and the “historical” (by which he does not mean to suggest he thinks Beowulf a real historical character) tale. Here Tolkien may be observed “reverse engineering” an imagined lost legend, something he later did in a larger, more powerful way with The Lord of the Rings.

Also appended to this book is “The Lay of Beowulf,” an attempt to reimagine story as a sort of ballad. That was pleasant to read, but the editor gives us two earlier drafts to read as well, at which point I’m afraid I lost interest in it.

I recommend Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary for people interested in the Old English poem itself. Less so for readers whose main interest is Middle Earth. I’m glad this work has come out in print, and I’m happy I read it.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘The Devil in the White City,’ by Erik Larson

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It is part of the lore of the Walker family that my immigrant great-grandfather, who was farming in Iowa at the time – although famously workaholic and tight-fisted – took time and money to attend the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. He must have been impressed, because he made it a practice to attend other world’s fairs whenever he could.

And he well might have been impressed, judging from the story told in Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City, which chronicles, for a generation which has forgotten it, the story of the Columbian Exposition. Along with a much more sordid story.

Who today knows that the construction of the Columbian Exposition involved the first use of spray paint in history? That the Pledge of Allegiance was composed for it? That the vertical file was first introduced there? That the first Ferris wheel was built for it? That Columbus Day was created in its honor? That it contained the first carnival “Midway?” That it provided the public its first taste of Juicy Fruit gum, Cracker Jacks, and Shredded Wheat? That it showcased long-distance telephone service, Edison’s moving pictures, and newfangled zippers?

The hero of the story is Daniel H. Burnham, a Chicago architect who became the chief organizer of the fair. When Chicago won the right to host it, the world scoffed. Chicago had no reputation as a cultural center, and New Yorkers (especially) laughed at the idea that such a raw, filthy, slaughterhouse town could dream of mounting an exhibition that would be anything but embarrassing compared to the previous one, which was held in Paris and stunned the world with (among other marvels) the Eiffel Tower. Continue reading ‘The Devil in the White City,’ by Erik Larson →

Reviews, Uncategorized

Two TV shows about one-armed men

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The most famous one-armed man in television history is, of course, the murderer hunted by Dr. Richard Kimball on The Fugitive. But I don’t have him in mind in this post. I never actually watched The Fugitive much.

But I have fond memories of two television series from my childhood, each of whose main characters had one arm. Why one-armed characters resonate with me, I cannot say. The reasons are probably emotionally complex and embarrassing (I had one character lose a hand in my novel Wolf Time, and another lose a whole arm in Troll Valley). But I’m delighted that YouTube has made it possible to rediscover these series, at least in part. My viewing report follows.

The Vise

The character of detective Mark Saber had an interesting evolution. According to my internet research (not always coherent), he began as a British detective working (for some reason) on the police force of a large American city on an early US TV series called Mystery Theater. He was played by Tom Conway (not to be confused with comedian Tim Conway). Tom Conway was the brother of famous movie heavy George Sanders, and spent his career in his brother’s shadow. His character dressed nattily, and (judging by the one episode I found on YouTube) fought crime more with fisticuffs than with deduction or forensics.

The show ran from 1951-1954. Then in 1955 the character was resurrected back in the old home country in a new series called The Vise. Mark Saber was now a London private investigator, and was now played by Donald Gray, a native of South Africa who lost his left arm in France in World War II. I’ve only found a couple episodes of this series on YouTube. Here’s one:

Continue reading Two TV shows about one-armed men →

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Murderer’s Daughter,’ by Jonathan Kellerman

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Tragic; could you blame a boy for going bad? You sure could. Turning the tale over and over, Grace found herself growing steely. She knew all about rejection and loss, deep wounds of the soul that required psychic excavation and cauterization, the acid wash of self-examination. Life could be a horror. No excuse.

It occurred me after I finished reading Jonathan Kellerman’s The Murderer’s Daughter that the heroine could be described as a sort of American version of Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander, main character of his “The Girl” novels, but without the annoying Marxist themes. I’m OK with that. Grace Blades is a vivid character. I generally avoid novels with female protagonists because I can’t identify with them, but I was all in for Grace from the first paragraph.

Grace Blades (isn’t that a great name?) is a genius, off the charts, and a world-renowned clinical psychologist. She is especially famous for her successful work with trauma victims. Yet oddly, her own psychological world is rather barren.

Grace was born to a neglectful, abusive home, and orphaned at an early age. After that she entered the foster care system, until she found a loving home with a couple who cared for her and nurtured her intellectual gifts. Since their deaths, Grace has kept other people at a distance, confining her sex life to occasional anonymous encounters with strangers.

But one day she opens her office door to a new patient, and sees before her a man she had a tryst with just the night before. She tries to salvage the session, but the man flees at last, hinting at family guilt and something about atonement.

Soon Grace learns that this man was not in fact a stranger at all, but a fellow witness to the most traumatic event of her life. And now Grace is in danger from the person that man feared.

Grace does not take danger passively. Her rule is to go on the offensive. And so she does.

The Murderer’s Daughter is quite unlike Kellerman’s Alex Delaware novels. Alex is well-adjusted, and has a productive relationship with the police. Grace Blades is more like Batman, a law unto herself, a genius with fighting skills who takes the law into her own hands.

Morally, I disapprove. As a reader, I loved this book. Cautions for language, sex, and violence.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Dregs of Aquarius,’ by Rick Dewhurst

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I have a strange reader’s relationship with Rick Dewhurst. My limited, personal online contact with him, as well as my reading of his work, suggests to me that he’s a good guy, a good pastor, and a good writer. Yet I’ve had trouble with his novels. I reviewed his novel Bye Bye Bertie, a satire of evangelical culture presented as a mystery story, and had difficulty seeing the point (I suppose that may mean I’m just the kind of Christian he’s lampooning). His novel The Darkest Valley, which I also reviewed, was a story of a failed ministry. It was far more accessible to me, but kind of a polar opposite of the first book – so realistic and tragic that I had a hard time dealing with it.

His new novel, The Dregs of Aquarius, falls somewhere in between. I think it’s far more successful as a novel, and has the further advantage of being hilarious in parts.

Tom Pollard, the main character, is a hippie in a small British Columbia town, (apparently) sometime in the 1970s. He has a job as a bartender, but his life centers on his circle of stoner friends, some of them American draft dodgers, with whom he regularly gets drunk and high. What seems to him a pretty idyllic existence is marred only by two things – as a result of a head injury, he has recently begun to see spiritual beings, whom he thinks of as gods, hovering in the sky. And his girlfriend Ruby, whom he cares for more than he’s willing to admit, is showing signs of being drawn back to “straight” life, and has gone home to spend time with her parents.

She didn’t really want to control me. She only wanted a real person to relate to, and I didn’t want to be one. But then why would I want to define myself or be defined. I knew that if you began to coalesce around a solid identity, there was a good chance you might be held accountable.

Tom’s adventures climax in a marathon “encounter session” (you’ll remember what those were if you’re old enough) that’s as good an example of escalating slapstick as I’ve ever encountered in a book.

I had a little trouble with the ending of the story, but not because I thought it was badly done or inappropriate. On the contrary, it’s exactly the kind of payoff you look for in a Christian novel. It just struck me as oddly… conventional in a book this eccentric.

But maybe that was the point.

It’s also a little jarring that the main characters of this funny book, Tom and Ruby, are the same people as the pastor and his wife who suffer so in The Darkest Valley. It’s a strange juxtaposition, though I suppose there may be a larger purpose.

In any case, I can recommend The Dregs of Aquarius. Not perfect, but a rare example of a Christian comic novel that works. Also a pretty good evocation of a time which (thankfully) has passed forever. Let’s hope.

Fiction, Reviews

‘What Dies in Summer,’ and ‘BlackBird,’ by Tom Wright

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I had trouble making up my mind about reviewing these two remarkable novels. I liked them, but didn’t entirely approve of them. But they didn’t offend me either. I guess I’ll just describe them and let you draw your own conclusions.

What Dies in Summer and Blackbird, by Tom Wright are connected novels, with the same main characters, but there’s enough separation to make them very distinct; not quite a series.

The central characters are Jim “Biscuit” Bonham, a teenager in Dallas in What Dies in Summer, and his cousin Lou Ann (“L.A.”), who comes to live with him and his grandmother. The two cousins are children of sisters who are both alcoholic, and are no longer able to live with their parents.

They’re poor, and you might almost describe them as “white trash,” except that their grandmother is a smart and good woman, determined to see that they grow up loved and well educated. They are both unusually intelligent, though Jim doesn’t believe it of himself.

Their story moves out of soap opera territory when, one day, out hunting returnable bottles, Jim and L.A. discover a murder victim – a girl their own age, raped, strangled, and left naked.

Two kids this smart can’t stay out of the investigation, and their inquiries bring them into serious danger from a surprising quarter. Continue reading ‘What Dies in Summer,’ and ‘BlackBird,’ by Tom Wright →

Fiction, Reviews

‘I, Ripper,’ by Stephen Hunter

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Stephen Hunter, after years of writing successful sniper novels, has taken a flyer with a change of genre—a historical thriller. I, Ripper is a fictional retelling of the Jack the Ripper murders which is not intended to solve the historical mystery, but to illuminate the history of modern ideas.

The story is told through the eyes of three characters. One is a young London reporter who calls himself “Jeb” (we don’t learn his true identity until late in the story). By luck he’s the first newspaper man on the scene of the initial prostitute murder in Whitechapel, and he becomes his paper’s chief man on the story. He even bestows on the murderer the nickname by which he’ll be known to history.

The other narrators are the Ripper himself, in a fictional journal in which he does not reveal his identity, and a young prostitute who describes in a series of letters how she and her fellow streetwalkers react to the killings.

Jeb wants to do more to uncover the killer, in the absence of effective work by the official police. He makes the acquaintance of a renowned linguistics scholar, who produces what today we’d call a “profile” of the killer. Armed with this profile, Jeb and the professor reduce the pool of suspects to a few men, and then one.

Then the investigation explodes in surprises and a dramatic confrontation.

I, Ripper isn’t a bad novel on its own terms. I found it difficult to read at the beginning, because the murders are described in unpleasant detail. The final working out of the story was much to my liking, however.

But I don’t think I can recommend it to our audience, unless you have a strong stomach.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Flashback,’ by Dan Simmons

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It was a spooky experience, reading this book. Not because of its inherent scariness (though there’s plenty of that), but because I started reading Flashback just about the time President Obama signed his nuclear arms deal with Iran, and finished it in the aftermath of the Chattanooga terrorist killings.

Both events resonated with this story.

In the world of Flashback (which might be compared to the world I envision at the end of my novel Death’s Doors, but more fully realized), the United States still exists, but barely. Texas has seceded, and the Nuevo Mexican Reconquista has torn away other southwestern states. Order in the US is maintained by several Japanese corporations, and American soldiers fight as mercenaries in various world conflicts, the major source of what’s left of US federal revenue. Israel no longer exists, and the Islamic Caliphate is on the march world-wide.

Most Americans don’t even care. They are addicted to a new drug called Flashback, which enables its users to experience their happiest memories in full detail.

Nick Bottom (same name as the character in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream), is a Flashback addict. He will lie, steal, and betray his friends in order to get a little more of the drug, so he can spend time again with his beloved wife.

He used to be a top detective with the Denver police department, but after his wife’s death he descended into addiction, sending his young son to live with a grandfather in Los Angeles.

Then one day he gets an offer too good to refuse. The Japanese “protector” of Denver promises to pay him well to learn who murdered his own son several years ago. At first Nick, junky that he is, tries to take the money, buy Flashback, and hide away, but these people are smarter than he is. Eventually he begins to take a real interest in the mystery. Then he discovers the puzzle is closer to home than he imagined. Then he begins to care about other people, including the son he abandoned.

Flashback is a long book, but it sucked me in. It’s splendidly crafted, with artful allusions and foreshadowings. It provides a frightening picture of the near future that’s all the more disturbing for its plausibility. And there’s a twist at the end that genuinely scared me.

Cautions are in order, mostly for language and violence. It’s a peculiarity of this book that Christianity seems hardly to exist anymore. I sometimes wondered if the Rapture had happened, but I saw no hint that author Simmons had that in mind.