Author Thabiti Anyabwile from the Grand Cayman Islands asks what book have you looked for or wondered about but cannot find. What is the topic that needs a good book on?
National Book Awards for 2010
The National Book Foundation has announced this year’s National Book Award winners.
Friday Fight: The Axeman Cometh
The swordsman here doesn’t appear to be eager enough to fight. He’s playing half-hearted defense. I wonder if he had charged the axeman early, would the whole fight be changed by that burst of passion?
Evening In the Palace of Reason, by James R. Gaines
Evening In the Palace of Reason is a smart, engaging, well-written historical study that ought to be a lot better known than it is.
It centers on a fleeting moment, just a footnote to history. But what happened, and the story that leads up to it, illuminate three epochs of European history, and have relevance in our 21st Century as well.
The facts are easily summarized. On the evening of May 7, 1747, Johan Sebastian Bach and his son Carl presented themselves, by royal command, at the palace of King Frederick the Great of Prussia in Potsdam. Frederick, with his customary lack of courtesy, had required their immediate attendance following the old composer’s arrival by coach, after a three-day journey. He wasn’t given time to wash or change his clothes. Continue reading Evening In the Palace of Reason, by James R. Gaines
Approaching Stranger than Fiction
WASHINGTON TIMES–‘Toughest sheriff’ recruits big names for border ‘posse’
“America’s toughest sheriff,” Phoenix’s Joe Arpaio, is creating an armed “Immigration Posse” to combat illegal immigration, and Hollywood actors Steven Seagal and Lou Ferrigno, along with Dick Tracy and Wyatt Earp, have signed up.
This is real, even those last two names, who are a Chicago cop and the nephew of the real Wyatt Earp. The sheriff says he and his state are the new whipping boys of Washington bureaucrats.
I like this idea. It’s a little scary, but I don’t know how it else the problem can be contained. I want immigrants, whom I assume have the best intentions, to be treated with mercy, but I think the traffickers should be shot. They are no better than the slave traders who dehumanized and profited from unwilling immigrants to the American colonies and the southern states.
Turn Back! Dreadful Tales of Agony and Despair
Michael Drout has written the foreword to new anthology called, The Last Man Anthology: Tales of Catastrophe, Disaster and Woe. The name is drawn from Mary Shelley’s The Last Man
Multiple hooplas, plus a likely historical exaggeration
I didn’t sleep well last night (not unusual), and I expected today to be kind of lousy, as they so often are, for some inexplicable reason, when I’m half asleep all the time.
But it was a good day.
First, deep background. I spent most of last Saturday tinkering with my snowblower, because we’d gotten about 10 inches of dense, heavy snow overnight. I’d planned to do housecleaning that day, to prepare for the upcoming holidays, but clearing the driveway took priority.
I never did get the driveway cleared (fortunately mild weather since then has melted most of it off now). I’m new to snowblowing, and wasn’t aware of the arcane things you have to do to get one of those suckers running again after its summer vacation.
I finally gave up, and decided I’d take it back to Sears for service one night this week. But this was the first night I’d had clear to do that. Continue reading Multiple hooplas, plus a likely historical exaggeration
Hat tips to Veith
Gene Edward Veith, of the Cranach blog, provides today’s subject matter.
First of all, he links to this article, which tells how the Beatles, John Lennon especially, tried to make a deal to film The Lord of the Rings back in the 1960s.
According to Peter Jackson, who knows a little something about making Lord of the Rings movies, John Lennon was the Beatle most keen on LOTR back in the ’60s—and he wanted to play Gollum, while Paul McCartney would play Frodo, Ringo Starr would take on Sam and George Harrison would beard it up for Gandalf. And he approached a pre-2001 Stanley Kubrick to direct.
Fortunately, Prof. Tolkien was still alive at the time, and he put his brogan down firmly on the idea.
Prof. Veith also writes about the new NIV Bible, which (most of us weren’t aware, I’m sure) is now going to supersede both previous versions of the NIV.
…But still there remains lots of interpretations for the sake of modern readers in place of simply rendering what these non-modern texts literally say, this being part of the translating philosophy of the NIV. Here too is that tendency in American evangelicalism to cut itself off from the church of the past (eliminating “saints”?). Not to mention the presumption of correcting the Bible’s “sexist” language.
This seems like an excellent opportunity to publicly thank Dale Nelson, for his generous gift of a copy of the new The Lutheran Study Bible: English Standard Version
National Gaming Day at the Library
In this photo, Jennifer Love Hewitt is performing at the L.A. Public Library in 2003 for Sony’s announcement ceremony for the Playstation 2 game “Karaoke Revolution.” It fits with Daniel Flynn’s article on libraries drifting toward amusement centers, such as renting video games and hosting noisy National Gaming Day events. Flynn writes:
Allen Kesinger, organizer of Newport Beach Public Library’s National Gaming Day, concedes that video games are entertainment but defends their intellectual merit. “Video games have evolved and instead of being endurance tests designed to eat up quarters, they have become a medium to deliver sophisticated, emotionally charged stories. BioShock is the story of an underwater city torn apart by civil war. Heavy Rain is an intense character drama surrounding a father’s loss of his child. Silent Hill 2 is a deep, psychological thriller about a man searching for his deceased wife. Because of this strong focus on narrative, we can use video games . . . [to] attract hesitant readers.” His library’s “celebration of video games” will host a birthday party for the iconic Mario (of Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros. fame); feature a rotation of games, including Katamari Damacy and Lego Star Wars; and participate in the nationwide Super Smash Bros. tournament.
Flynn worries that libraries have rejected a vision of cultivating the life of the mind. What is the mind, after all, but a spacesaver between your ears? I mean, if you have the right opinions, who cares if you can really think about them, right? Dude, where’s my game? (via First Thoughts)
The Identity Man, by Andrew Klavan
I will stipulate to being a hopeless fanboy in regard to Andrew Klavan’s novels. But I insist that I came by my enthusiasm honestly. I didn’t discover Klavan after I’d learned he was a conservative and a Christian. I was a fan before he was either—decades ago, when he was still writing superior mysteries about the self-destructive newspaper reporter John Wells, under the pseudonym Keith Peterson. I recognized this Peterson fellow as an author who delivered gripping stories, made more compelling by his rare talent for crafting interesting, layered characters. It was a delight to discover that he had not disappeared, but was persevering under his true identity, going from strength to strength as a writer. His politics and Christian conversion made it perfect.
Klavan’s latest novel, The Identity Man