Category Archives: Reviews

Non-fiction, Religion, Reviews

“Goddess Unmasked”

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Remember what they told you in college about the Mother Goddess, and how all the ancient religions worshiped her, and how modern wiccans are actually carrying on her timeless cult? Remember those eminent theologians who complained that the Christian church had covered up the essential femininity of God?

Balderdash, says Philip G. Davis, in the new book, Goddess Unmasked, reviewed here at The American Spectator Online by the always readable Hal G. P. Colebatch.

(Colebatch, by the way, is an e-mail friend of mine. He’s co-written a book for Baen Books, and allowed me to read the beginning of an unfinished mystery he’s working on. I really look forward to reading the whole thing in print someday.)

Fiction, Reviews

Review from “Darwin’s Evolutions”

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I don’t think I ever linked to Darwin Garrison’s review of West Oversea, over at Darwin’s Evolutions. Thanks for the great notice, Darwin, and I apologize for forgetting to link to it before!

Fiction, Reviews

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson

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I picked up The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, not because I was eager to read it, but because I’d run out of reading material one weekend and didn’t want to make a run to the bookstore, and it was there in the grocery store rack. I expected to hate it, as the result of an elementary chain of reasoning—it was written by a Swede. Swedes, generally, are Socialists and atheists. Therefore, anything written by a Swede is likely to offend me. When I saw that it was a mystery involving a family of industrialists, that conclusion seemed self-evident.

I stated in the Comments on Andrew Klavan’s review (he didn’t like it a lot) that I had a bet with myself that the most conservative, religious character in the book would prove to be the murderer.

I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that I was wrong. I feel morally obligated to post that for the record. Continue reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson →

Fiction, Reviews

Black Widow, by Randy Wayne Wright

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I’ve been making the mistake recently of occasionally looking at reader reviews on Amazon when I set up the links for my blog reviews. Because of one of these lamentable lapses, I see tonight that reviews of Randy Wayne White’s Black Widow are decidedly mixed—and widely polarized. Some readers loved it. Others thought it signaled the demise of the “Doc Ford” series.

List me with the people who loved it. Approaching it as a pure escapist novel, I thought it was one of the best I’ve read recently.

I was particularly impressed with the opening. It’s a platitude (and becoming a cliché) that authors (thriller authors especially) need to grab the reader at the very beginning and keep things so tense that they can’t lose him.

In a single day and night in the first few chapters of Black Widow, Doc Ford (marine biologist and occasional government black ops agent) flies to Aruba to make a blackmail payoff on behalf of his goddaughter, Shay Money, who was guilty of certain excesses on a pre-wedding Caribbean holiday with three of her friends. Shay is engaged to an extremely wealthy and influential young man, and can’t afford a scandal. Then, instead of going to bed, he takes his boat, along with his hippie friend Tomlinson, to rescue a woman whose transmission they pick up on a short wave radio, who claims that she and her family are being attacked by sharks. This ends up involving an encounter (in the water) with hammerhead sharks. Then, again before he can get to bed, he’s attacked by a man with a gun in his own house. After handling this guy, Doc gets a call telling him that Shay has been in an auto accident, and one of her friends has attempted suicide. Then, after a hospital visit, he goes to bed with a different friend of hers.

And the next day he’s scheduled for a performance evaluation session with his government employers.

That got my attention.

The blackmailers come back for more of course, and Doc makes a trip to a very exclusive Caribbean island retreat, where a voodoo cult operates a health spa and resort which is actually a blackmail factory. He teams up with a too-good-to-be-true retired English secret agent. He gets drugged, gets beat up and imprisoned, and then kicks serious butt.

It was a lot of fun. Plenty of sex, but not explicit. Not up to the Klavan or Hunter standard, but perfect summer beach reading, in my opinion. It’s still warm down in the Bahamas, even in September.

Non-fiction, Reviews

Perilous Realms, by Marjorie Burns

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Regular readers here are already aware that I’m a man of many prejudices, so it won’t surprise you to know that I approached Marjorie Burns’ Perilous Realms: Celtic and Norse in Tolkien’s Middle-earth with suspicion. I fully expect any book written by a female academic to be tailored for the Women’s Studies Department—full of anger at men and contempt for the Christian religion.

So I’m delighted to report that this book, written by a female English professor at Portland State University, was a very pleasant surprise in almost every way.

Burns notes that many scholars have traced the Norse and Anglo-Saxon themes in The Lord of the Rings. But she is convinced that Tolkien also drew (less openly, because of the fashions of his day) on Celtic myth and folklore as well. She examines all of Tolkien’s fantastic works (not only The Hobbit and the Trilogy, but the Silmarillion and the later gathered works) and points out (quite convincingly, it seems to me as a non-expert) Celtic parallels that may be nearly as important as the Norse. (Tolkien, she explains, loved Wales but did not care for Ireland. Also, there was a general opinion that Celtic matters were in some sense effeminate, lacking the practicality and fatalism of the Viking world-view. [Reviewer’s note: When you think of it, Tolkien and Lewis were an odd pair of friends—a Catholic Englishman and a Protestant Irishman.])

Gender issues are certainly in Burns’ mind as she examines the accusation that Tolkien’s work, with its vast majority of active males and small minority of (generally) passive females, is a mark of misogyny. But she stands up for him in what I’d call a courageous way. For one thing, she thinks that Tolkien (based on the prejudice mentioned above) had the Celts in mind, and therefore a sort of vital femininity, in his portrayal of the Elves. She also makes much of the manner in which males frequently assume traditionally feminine roles in the books—cooking, nurturing, housekeeping, nursing, etc.

She also spends much time refuting the accusation that Tolkien’s characters are cardboard, either all good or all evil. She not only points to the weaknesses, frailties and near runs with temptation that the good characters display. She also notes the way Tolkien “doubles” his characters—each good character being matched with an evil one. Thus, while Gandalf clearly embodies many of the more positive characteristics of the Norse god Odin, Sauron (who, like Odin, has one eye) displays the god’s wicked traits.

Burns ends the book with a short chapter outlining three questions about the books, and giving her own answers. These answers are blessedly free of radical feminism or condescension towards Tolkien’s Christian faith. In fact, she seems to appreciate the significance of the doctrine of the Incarnation.

So I enjoyed the book very much, and recommend it.

Fiction, Reviews

Abandoned book review: Viking: Odinn’s Child, by Tim Severin

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There was a time when I made it a point of honor to finish every book of fiction I started. As I’ve aged I’ve grown more surly and impatient, and nowadays if a book bores or offends me, I toss it away. Life’s too short. I’ve got stuff I need to read.

So I’m going to do a new thing here. I’m going to post a biased review of a book to which I may not have given a fair chance.

I’d had Tim Severin’s Viking trilogy recommended to me, and I do try to keep up, to some degree, with my competition in the Viking novels field. I looked forward to the book. Severin is the author of The Brendan Voyage, an account of his own Atlantic voyage in a leather coracle, in emulation of St. Brendan, a book I read, enjoyed, and profited from.

But I got up to page 74 of Viking: Odinn’s Child and just couldn’t take it any further. There were two reasons, stylistic and ideological. I’ll start with the stylistic, so that anyone who doesn’t care about my religious views can just read this part and drop the review, as I dropped the book. Continue reading Abandoned book review: Viking: Odinn’s Child, by Tim Severin →

Non-fiction, Religion, Reviews

The End of Secularism, by Hunter Baker

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Our friend Hunter Baker’s new book, The End of Secularism, reminds me more than anything in my own experience of the work of Francis Schaeffer (though Baker criticizes Schaeffer in certain areas). It’s a dense book, heavily footnoted, presenting a lot of information in a relatively short (194 pages) format. You’ll want to keep a highlighter in hand as you read it, and if you’re like me, you’ll have to stop and contemplate what you’re reading from time to time.

Baker begins with several chapters of historical overview, tracing the history of the Christian church, then explaining how secularism as a world-view and ideology burgeoned in a world increasingly weary of religious conflict and war. Secularism—the view that religion (if tolerated at all) must be cordoned off from public life, so that even someone whose politics are formed by faith must find secular public arguments for it in order to participate in the process—was originally marketed, and continues to be marketed today, as the only rational and impartial alternative to the passions and intolerance of believers.

Baker then applies to this claim of rationality and impartiality the same kind of analysis that secularists like to use on religion. He finds secularism greatly wanting, and fatally blind to its own unexamined presuppositions. It’s strange to find postmodern thinkers presented positively in a Christian book, but Baker takes particular note of recent deconstructions of secularism by younger thinkers. These postmoderns note that secularists are not, as they imagine, impartial referees in the world of thought, but partisans holding a distinct ideology, and that their efforts to silence religious ideas in the public square are simply a new example of an elite class attempting to muzzle heretics. Baker also marshals historical facts to demonstrate that secularism has no better record of tolerance and the prevention of conflict than Christianity had. He devotes a later chapter specifically to the “legend” of the incompatibility of religion and science. In the final chapter he examines an interesting situation from recent history where politicians explicitly appealed to religion in a controversy in a southern state, and the secularists made no complaint at all—because in that case, religion was being marshaled in the service of a liberal cause.

The End of Secularism will challenge the Christian reader, and will raise some Christian hackles—Baker gives short shrift to those who claim that America was founded as a Christian nation, for instance. (Update: Hunter points out to me that he criticizes those who claim a secularist founding as well, which is a fair point.) But Christians should read it, for the mental exercise, and for the hope it presents that the long cultural dominance of secularism may finally be coming to the beginning of its end. Secularists should read it for an education.

Highly recommended.

Reviews

“Souls on Ice”

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Anthony Sacramone reviews the movie “Souls on Ice” at Filmwell. As he sees it, a promising concept, disappointingly delivered.

Alas, Cold Souls’s parts are greater than its whole, and sounds funnier than it is. It fails to cohere in part because the central conceit—Paul Giamatti playing Paul Giamatti—serves no great purpose. After all, Giamatti, however ill at ease and sad-sackish he may appear, is a successful and respected actor. If we are to believe that he is nevertheless experiencing a soul-shifting crisis, a deep-seated desire to, as Vanya says, “live the rest of his life in a different way,” those scenes must have been left on the cutting-room floor or on Barthes’ laptop.

Fiction, Reviews

The Brass Verdict, by Michael Connelly

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The Brass Verdict is Michael Connelly’s second novel about his new character, lawyer Mickey Haller. I wasn’t too sure whether I liked Mickey much when I read the first one, The Lincoln Lawyer, but this book definitely warmed me to him.

Mickey Haller is a defense attorney. He’s just coming off a one-year hiatus when he gets the news that an old friend, another defense lawyer named Jerry Vincent, has been murdered, and has left his stable of clients to him. One of them is a “franchise case,” a big-paycheck, high-profile case involving Walter Elliott, a Hollywood movie mogul.

There are problems with defense lawyers as heroes of stories. We all know that in the real world they’re not Perry Mason. They defend the worst people in the world, and if they’re good they get very rich off it. What makes Mickey Haller sympathetic is that he feels that moral tension, on a deep level. It probably had a lot to do with the cocaine-and-alcohol habit that destroyed his marriage, alienated his daughter, and nearly cost him his life.

On moving into Jerry’s office, Mickey finds two policeman going through the case files—illegally. He kicks them out, but oddly finds himself drawn to one of them, who turns out to be Harry Bosch, the hero of the majority of Michael Connelly’s novels. This is an excellent strategy on the author’s part, and helped me settle into the story.

Harry asks questions—who had Jerry Vincent bribed? How was the FBI involved? Mickey doesn’t know the answers. Harry doesn’t believe him. But they will still be drawn together into the double mystery of Jerry’s murder and the Elliott trial, which turn out to be linked. And the killing isn’t over.

A good story by a master storyteller. Connelly did telegraph one surprise though, at least in my case. He generally keeps politics out of his books (for which I’m eternally grateful), but here he did mention one character’s conservative affiliations. I immediately thought, “I’ll bet this character turns out to be a villain.” And behold, it was so.

Maybe Connelly’s done the same thing with liberal characters in the past, but I never noticed it. (Then again, I probably wouldn’t.)

But storytellers, be warned—we know your poker tells.

Fiction, Reviews

Frankenstein: Dead and Alive, by Dean Koontz

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If I were actually the kind of industry insider I pretend to be as an author/blogger, I would have been aware that Dean Koontz’ long-awaited final volume in his Frankenstein trilogy was coming out at last. (He delayed it, he has reported, because New Orleans, the setting of the books, had suffered enough after Hurricane Katrina, and deserved a break. I’d been very worried the story would go forever unfinished.)

Koontz dedicates Frankenstein: Dead and Alive to “the late Mr. Lewis, who long ago realized that science was being politicized….” It would appear that C. S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength was an inspiration for this book and for the whole trilogy. That gives me particular satisfaction, as I did an homage of my own in Wolf Time.

Although it’s not necessary to read the first two books before reading Dead and Alive, I would recommend it. It’s a pity there was such a long lag between books, because, in my opinion, this book works best as the capstone to the trilogy experience. Continue reading Frankenstein: Dead and Alive, by Dean Koontz →