Authors, Religion

Did Christopher Hitchens Believe in God?

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A remarkable book was released yesterday: The Faith of Christopher Hitchens: The Restless Soul of the World’s Most Notorious Atheist. Samuel James talks us through it.

September 11 may not have been have been Hitchens’s Damascus Road moment, but it did much to disarm his innate hostility to those outside his ideological family tree. By pivoting to the right on terror, Hitchens was forced to doubt the categorical identity politics that so often dominate American discourse. This doubt—this shaken faith in the inherited doctrines of the Left—created the space into which Christian friendship, and Taunton himself, entered.

http://mereorthodoxy.com/reviewing-the-faith-of-christopher-hitchens/

Douglas Wilson praises the book as well. “And as far as the eyewitness testimony goes, I can say that his account rings completely true. The man he traveled with and debated is the same man that I traveled with and debated.”

Fiction, Reviews

‘Death Among the Sunbathers,’ by E. R. Punshoh

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Death Among the Sunbathers

Not long ago I gave high praise to E.R. Punshon’s first Bobby Owen mystery, Information Received. Death Among the Sunbathers is the second book in the series, and to speak frankly I was a little disappointed in it. However, I have reason to believe the series will find its feet again in the third book.

Despite its sensationalist title, Death Among the Sunbathers isn’t a racy story featuring a lot of naked people running about. The fictional sun-worshiping organization featured here is a pretty mild one where most of the members wear something like bathing suits most of time.

In this story, a young female newspaper reporter is murdered in an engineered automobile accident, and Superintendent Mitchell, whom we know well from Information Received, is on the scene in the victim’s last moments. This motivates him to give special attention to this crime. Bobby Owen, now promoted to Detective, is in the story, but mostly off stage. He dogs the criminals unseen, until they come to fear him as an inexorable, almost superhuman Nemesis.

This approach, in my opinion, doesn’t work as well as the amusing mentor/mentee relationship established between him and Superintendent Mitchell in the first book. Without that magic, the narrative here seems theatrical and artificial.

Also I figured out the Big Surprise well before the author revealed it.

But I shall press on with the series, in hopes that balance will be restored in the next installment.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Long Ships,’ by Frans Gunnar Bengtsson

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The Long Ships

Meanwhile the fire had caught the straw on the floor, and eleven drunken or wounded men lying in it had been burned to death, so that this wedding was generally agreed to have been one of the best they had had for years in Finnveden, and one that would be long remembered.

Sometime last week it occurred to me that, although I’ve been praising the book to people most of my life, it’s actually been decades since I read Frans Gunnar Bengtsson’s The Long Ships. My old copy, printed in the 1960s, with a cover that doesn’t even appear on Amazon, is pretty much going to pieces, but it’s not terribly expensive to get a Kindle copy.

I’m happy to report that the book is as good as I remembered. Better. I still nominate it for the best Viking novel ever written – though a lot of Viking novels have been written in the last few years, and I haven’t read most of them. Nevertheless, it’s hard to imagine how anybody could do it better than this. (Pay no attention to the 1964 movie starring Richard Widmark. It’s a travesty.)

The Long Ships (Swedish title, Röde Orm), is the story of Red Orm Tostesson, younger son of a chieftain in Scania, which is part of Sweden today but was Danish back in the Viking Age. Early in the story he’s kidnapped by a Viking crew, who take him away into the Baltic and then south to Spain. There they, more or less by happenstance, “rescue” a Jewish slave from another Viking crew. He directs them to a rich city they can plunder, which eventually leads to their enslavement by the Moors, slavery in a galley, and then military service under the caliph of Cordoba. Further adventures bring them back to Denmark, into the favor of King Harald Bluetooth (the guy your wireless device was named after), and then home again. Followed by participation in Thorkel the Tall’s invasion of England, and an epic voyage into Russia in search of a hoard of gold. Continue reading ‘The Long Ships,’ by Frans Gunnar Bengtsson →

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Mississippi, Lower the Confederate Flag

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A South-Carolinian professor of history, who has many good reasons to celebrate his Confederate heritage, talks about the problems with the Confederate flag.

After the Civil War, the Confederate battle flag took on new meanings on the Southern landscape. It became thoroughly identified with a movement known as the Lost Cause, which sought to memorialize and preserve a collective Southern memory celebrating the Confederacy. However, as African-Americans were entering into civic spaces, running for office and voting in large numbers during Reconstruction and into the 1880s, they began to represent to Southern whites many of the great changes affecting the Southern landscape — chief among them a threat to Southern white political power. The Confederate flag began to be used publicly as a symbol that represented a return to “white rule.” Further, the Mississippi Constitution of 1890 became a legal tool to help whites regain political control through massive disenfranchisement of African-Americans. Through literacy clauses, poll taxes and interpretation clauses, African-Americans were almost entirely removed from the voting process in Mississippi until the mid-1960s. In the midst of this, attacks on African-Americans in the form of lynchings and violent intimidation attempted to keep African-Americans from political activity or challenging a new system of white control.

He recommends the state of Mississippi put this symbol behind them. “Mississippi can be a beacon to the rest of the world that love, selflessness, repentance and reconciliation can reign.”

Bookselling

“If I don’t earn it, I can’t pay it.”

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This bookstore owner doesn’t make even the minimum wage in order to help keep her unique Nautical-centric store afloat. The California minimum wage laws and San Diego’s wage proposals are sinking her. When will California learn that ideas have consequences.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Information Received,’ by E. R. Punshon

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It’s a good day when I discover a mystery writer who a) I like, b) has a lot of books available, and c) comes cheap in Kindle format. And so I present to you, for the first time at Brandywine Books, the classic English detective novelist E. R. Punshon.

Punshon was admired by no less a figure than Dorothy Sayers, who saw his work as a positive development, helping to move the English mystery beyond the confines of the cozy “puzzle” story. Judging by Information Received, his first Bobby Owen mystery, she was correct. There’s a little more of real life here, and some fair psychology.

Constable Bobby Owen is a young London policeman, walking a beat. He actually attended Oxford, but his grades were lackluster, and so he sort of drifted into being a “bobby,” though he’s found the work pretty tedious thus far.

That all changes one day when he’s standing across the street from the home of a City magnate, Sir Christopher Clarke. Sir Christopher has been found shot to death, and Bobby gets just a glimpse of a man running away from the scene, though he can’t catch him.

Among the detectives who come in to look over the scene is Superintendent Mitchell, who takes a liking to the bright young policeman and allows him to help with the investigation. The motive seems unclear, the suspects seem to have little to gain, and means and opportunity are hard to sort out. But they work at it doggedly and in the end all his revealed.

The “fair psychology” I praised in this book does not apply to the murder itself, or the suspects, who are pretty melodramatic and not highly believable. But the relationship between Bobby and Supt. Mitchell is fascinating to follow. The older man guides Bobby, helps him sharpen his thinking, and exploits his talents, but all with a bemused and dryly playful air. He’s happy to give the young chap a career break, but he expects some entertainment along the way in the form of teasing him and testing his limits.

I enjoyed Information Received very much, and recommend it. I’d never heard of Punshon before I bought this book, but I’ve already bought the second work in the series.

Reviews

Netflix review: ‘The Heavy Water War’

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Photo credit: Robert Holand Dreier

In 1965 a film was made in Britain about the WWII Norwegian Resistance sabotage of the German heavy water project at Rjukan, Norway. It was called Heroes of Telemark, it starred Kirk Douglas, and it was essentially an upbeat and rather frivolous production. Norwegians complained that, in the movie, Kirk personally achieved in about two weeks what it took a whole unit of real saboteurs two years to do.

The 2015 Norwegian/Danish/English production, The Heavy Water War, available for streaming on Netflix, hews closer to the facts. It is artistically superior and far darker.

We follow the main character, Leif Tronstad (Espen Klouman Høiner; in this production, unlike the Douglas movie, the characters go under their real names, except for several fictionalized characters), a Norwegian scientist who escapes to England and joins the British-trained saboteur company there. Leif becomes their leader and gets emotionally involved with British intelligence officer Julie Smith (Anna Freil; a fictional character), but not so far as to actually commit adultery (they’re both married). We follow Leif and his company through the disastrous initial glider operation meant to destroy the Rjukan plant. Then follows the famous raid, where they succeed in blowing up the equipment, housed in the cellar of the factory. And after that, the hard decision to blow up the passenger ferry carrying the remaining heavy water out of the country, at the cost of civilian lives.

But there are actually three main threads in the narrative. We follow the manager of the heavy water plant (another fictionalized character) as he self-justifies his collaboration, and his troubled wife, who diverts her fears by mothering the daughter of her house maid. We also follow scientist Werner Heisenberg in Germany, singlemindedly focused on the scientific aspects of the atomic bomb project, refusing to think in moral categories. Each of these characters is treated as a full, complex human being. The viewer is left to make judgments.

My complaints are few. I wish the actors had looked more like the people they portray. The producers made the decision to suggest strongly that the explosion of the ferry was probably unnecessary (this, I believe, is a matter of dispute among historians).

The Heavy Water War is challenging, and sometimes tragic, but definitely worth watching. Recommended, for grownups.

Authors, Fiction

New James Thurber Story Published

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A mock Western written by an eighteen-year-old James Thurber was found in an archive and has been unleashed on the world in the Strand magazine.

“This was the first time Thurber tried his hand at penning a satirical story in the wild west, which features a gun-slinging bartender, a couple of wild bullies, and a very odd sheriff,” said Andrew Gulli of the Strand.

That sheriff in “How Law and Order Came to Aramie” is like a pre-incarnation of Thurber’s Walter Mitty.

Gulli said the story “uses every single western cliche and, in Thurber style, turns them all into something very funny.”

Thurber009

Fiction, Religion

Selling You On Marketing, Calling It Faith

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Alissa Wilkinson has good words criticizing Christian movies, like the one that came out last weekend.

God’s Not Dead encourages its audience to participate in the film’s “challenge,” an equivalent to those chain letters that claimed if you didn’t forward the email to 10 people something terrible would happen to you. Many complied. “Are YOU up for the challenge?” asks the Facebook page. “Text ‘God’s Not Dead’ to 10 friends RIGHT NOW! Then leave a comment below!” The image that accompanies the challenge includes this quotation from the movie’s cheeriest Christian character, Pastor Dave: “So your acceptance of this challenge, if you decide the [sic] accept it, may be the only meaningful exposure to God & Jesus they’ll ever have.” . . .

Ultimately, what the increasingly profitable “faith film” industry machine wants to do is sell me an idea of what “taking a stand” for Jesus looks like. That involves buying a ticket, sharing a Facebook meme, going to a concert, and texting a bastardization of a late 19th-century philosophical proclamation about the bleak condition into which we humans have painted ourselves to 10 people RIGHT NOW.

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A Rosee outlook for Vikings in America

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Viking house at L'Anse Aux Meadows, Newfoundland, photo by Lars Walker
My photo of a reconstructed Viking house at L’Anse Aux Meadows, Newfoundland.

It’s been some time since I did my public duty by updating our erudite audience on the latest news from the world of Viking studies.

This story has been making the rounds lately, and to be honest it’s got my ears standing up. Archaeologists have used satellite imagery to identify a site in southwest Newfoundland that looks very much like a Viking Age Norse settlement.

“I am absolutely thrilled,” says Parcak. “Typically in archaeology, you only ever get to write a footnote in the history books, but what we seem to have at Point Rosee may be the beginning of an entirely new chapter.

“This new site could unravel more secrets about the Vikings, whether they were the first Europeans to ‘occupy’ briefly in North America, and reveal that the Vikings dared to explore much further into the New World than we ever thought.”

It’s too early to know for sure yet, of course. When the Ingstad group excavated the one known Viking site in North America, L’Anse Aux Meadows, Newfoundland, it took quite a lot of digging before they found something indisputably Norse – a ring-headed bronze pin, used for fastening a cloak. There’s a difference between finding a sod building, however much it might resemble the houses in Greenland, and finding something that couldn’t possibly have been left by Native Americans or English or Portuguese fishermen. That’s what they’ll be looking for now.

A lot of us have been waiting for something like this for some time. Prof. Helge Ingstad, having discovered his Vinland site in the 1960s, planted his metaphorical flag there and declared, “This is Vinland. This is all of Vinland there ever was. There’s no point for looking for any more traces of the Norse on this continent.” Everyone respects Ingstad immensely, and almost nobody agrees with that contention anymore. Ingstad thought that many of the saga descriptions, especially those speaking of grapes, were just folklore accretions to the story, because grapes have never grown at that latitude. Nowadays we take those descriptions more seriously – especially since butternuts were found in the excavations. Butternuts have also never grown at that latitude, but they do grow where grapes grow. This new site, further south along the Saint Lawrence Seaway, leads in the direction most scholars have been thinking of.

So this is exciting. We’ll be watching for more news.

Book Reviews, Creative Culture