“I believe the novel is a moral form. We turn to novels in pursuit of virtue. Through the tales fashioned by thoughtful writers we discover or reaffirm what we believe to be right and good. Our eternal subject is the nature of the well-lived life. So here’s a theory of what has happened to the middle classes and the novel. A hundred years or so ago the language of idealism changed. As Christianity fractured, the imagination of those who wanted to make a better world was seized by a new idealism: socialism. In this new understanding of society the working class had virtue and was the future; the middle class had power and was the past. Bourgeois values came to be seen as vices. The middle-class consumers of art and literature gradually found themselves cast in negative terms, as exploitative, parasitic and reactionary.
By the last decades of the 20th century, as these perceptions became the orthodoxy of the educated elite, writers and artists found they faced a fork in the road.” Read the rest
Blind Pursuit, by Michael Prescott
I found Blind Pursuit by Michael Prescott a very satisfying thriller. It’s one of those out-of-print novels that has begun to show up cheap in e-book format. I’ve had some good surprises with those.
The main characters are twin sisters, Erin and Annie Reilly, one a psychologist and the other a flower shop owner, who live in Tucson. The action starts fast with Erin’s abduction in the night.
Because the author follows her in the car trunk after she is taken, I was worried I was going to have to watch her murder, and I was ready to drop the book if that happened (I have a low tolerance for the on-stage killing of women). But the kidnapper’s plans for Erin are much more complicated than a simple sex killing. His plot is almost (not quite) beneficent and admirable, and his motives are a complex tangle that gets sorted out strategically for the reader, the enlightenment increasing with the dramatic tension.
The characters intrigue, the suspense is genuine, and there’s even a nice twist at the end. Also there’s romance for the ladies.
I enjoyed Blind Pursuit, and recommend it for adult readers.
Edwards Giveaway
I wish I’d seen this sooner today. Aaron Armstrong is giving away a set of Jonathan Edwards books. Read the description, follow the entry steps, and do it all before midnight today to enter.
Sunrise
Though our readers in Hawaii may have seen a gorgeous sunrise a little earlier this morning, I offer a bit of calm in the form of several beautiful photos.
But What Is a Press Release?
Joel Pollak points out the differences between Random House’s initial press release for The Rogue and the one this week. Back then, the author “will be highly respectful of his subject’s privacy as he investigates her public activities,” like years-old family affairs. This week, “The Rogue delves deeply into Alaska’s political and business affairs and Palin’s political, personal, and family life..” I’m glad Random House isn’t publishing exposés about people who are actually in or running for office, because that would be so dull. As for McGuinniss, he should probably get a real job and read Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers’ Guide from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University
This is me, being flexible
A couple nights every week, my renter plonks himself down in front of my desktop computer in the dining room, and dominates it for a few hours around suppertime. Although he has his own computer and is on my network, he claims this old, slow Dell handles certain streaming downloads better than his does. So I have to wait, because I’m passive.
Tonight was one of those nights. It’s also bill-paying night on my schedule. And since I’m going to be gone next Thursday, I had to pay two weeks’ worth of bills. So I overcame my OCD enough to do the bills before I blogged, rather than after, as is my custom.
And this is what I blogged. Just to show you how flexible I am.
Two National Book Awards
The National Book Awards will be announced November 14, and John Ashbery and Mitchell Kaplan will receive lifetime achievement awards. Poet John Ashbery
“You meant more than life to me. I lived through
you not knowing, not knowing I was living.
I learned that you called for me. I came to where
you were living, up a stair. There was no one there.”
Mitchell Kaplan is the creator of the Miami International Book Fair, “the largest community book festival in the United States and a model for book fairs across the country,” notes the National Book Foundation.
Rot-Gut Rumor Posing as Exposé
Books like this make me worry that it isn’t what you write but who you know that gets your material published. Joe McGinniss’ book, which he hoped would be “the last best chance to put the truth about Sarah [Palin] in front of the American people in a documented, verifiable way” is full of lies, rumors, and ill-wishes. For an overview of the book, read this.
Numbering the dead
New estimates, based on U.S. Census data from 1870, strongly suggest that Civil War casualties totaled somewhere from 750-850,000, rather than the 600,000-plus figure used in history books for the last century and a half. According to this New York Times article:
The difference between the two estimates is large enough to change the way we look at the war. The new estimate suggests that more men died as a result of the Civil War than from all other American wars combined. Approximately 1 in 10 white men of military age in 1860 died from the conflict, a substantial increase from the 1 in 13 implied by the traditional estimate. The death toll is also one of our most important measures of the war’s social and economic costs. A higher death toll, for example, implies that more women were widowed and more children were orphaned as a result of the war than has long been suspected.
In other words, the war touched more lives and communities more deeply than we thought, and thus shaped the course of the ensuing decades of American history in ways we have not yet fully grasped. True, the war was terrible in either case. But just how terrible, and just how extensive its consequences, can only be known when we have a better count of the Civil War dead.
It should always be remembered that most of the casualties of the Civil War did not come from death on the battlefield, but from the inherent dangers of army life of the day. Accidents, illness, infections. “Just being in the army in 1861,” Bruce Catton said somewhere, “was more dangerous than almost anything we know about today.”
Tip: Grim’s Hall.
Turning to an entirely different matter, if you own a Kindle, you might want to check out Free Kindle Books and Tips, a weekday blog that offers books, games, and apps, usually free. I’ve found a few things worth reading there.
Is the Intellectual Life Worth Anything?
“Sometimes we hear it said that ten minutes on your knees will give you a truer, deeper, more operative knowledge of God than ten hours over your books. ‘What!’ is the appropriate response, ‘than ten hours over your books, on your knees?’ Why should you turn from God when you turn to your books, or feel that you must turn from your books in order to turn to God? If learning and devotion are as antagonistic as that, then the intellectual life is in itself accursed.” – B.B. Warfield (The Spiritual Life of Theological Students). (via Tabletalk Magazine)