Sherri is sharing Three Cups of Tea with Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. She comes away with good thoughts.
Category Archives: Non-fiction
Viking Norway update
I recently received word that there is now an American website where you can order Viking Norway, which I reviewed here.
Fair warning for those with weak hearts: The price is steep.
The webmaster tells me you can get a lower price if you go for economy shipping.
They’re still seeking an American co-publisher who could help produce a less expensive domestic edition.
Update: I note that I didn’t actually provide the link to the new Sagabok site. I have remedied that omission.
Review: Viking Norway, by Torgrim Titlestad
I wouldn’t ordinarily review a book that can’t be purchased in this country (though you can get it through this web site, if you’re willing to pay the freight and can pick your way through the Norwegian), but I think this book is genuinely important in its field—and not merely because it has a picture of one of my novels on page 296.
Viking Norway, by Torgrim Titlestad (Professor of History at the University of Stavanger) is important because, to the best of my knowledge, it’s the first English-language book aimed at presenting to a popular audience some “new” theories about Norway and the Viking Age that are being debated in Scandinavia today.
The book attempts to refute two views that have been standard up till now, and offers a new theory about Viking Age Norwegian politics. Continue reading Review: Viking Norway, by Torgrim Titlestad
Madame Guillotine
Delancey’s Place has an excerpt today about olden France and a certain deadly icon:
Guillotin’s motive was to introduce a more humanitarian form of capital punishment, and his success in that was evident from the very first use of the guillotine when “the crowds, accustomed to bloody bouts with the ax and sword, thundered in disappointment, ‘Bring back the block!’ ” Yet almost immediately, guillotine executions became Paris’s favorite form of entertainment, with families bringing picnic lunches and reveling in the carnival atmosphere that surrounded them.
The guillotine was used until the 1950s, and in a public execution in 1939 of a hated German criminal, the crowd acted as if they were at a coronation festival or maybe a rock concert. “[E]legant ladies, avid for souvenirs, rushed to dip their handkerchiefs in the blood” of the man whom they had just watched lose his head. This comes from Stanley Karnow’s Paris in the Fifties.
Finding Atlantis, by David King
People always seem surprised to discover that institutions of higher learning tend to be raging battlegrounds of clashing egos on an epic scale.
The common stereotype of the professor is of a vague, mild-mannered oldster in an incorrectly buttoned sweater, blinking vaguely as he searches for the glasses that sit perched atop his forehead. In fact, scholars tend to be people who have all their lives been the smartest people in the room, suddenly thrust together into a single institution with a bunch of other people who’ve also always been the smartest people in the room, and resenting it. Add to this the fact that really smart people tend to grow up too busy with their interior worlds to bother with mundane exercises of basic interpersonal skills, and you’ve got the ingredients of gunpowder.
Finding Atlantis: A True Story of Genius, Madness, and an Extraordinary Quest for a Lost World tells the story of a man of extraordinary intellect and achievement who grew so enamored of his revolutionary theories that he failed in humility, university politics, and the judgment of posterity.
Olof Rudbeck (1630-1702) was a Swede, the son of Gustavus Adolphus’ personal chaplain. As a young medical student he dissected a calf, in order to discover the source of a milky substance he saw in the carcass. The result was the discovery of the lymphatic system (although there is controversy as to who identified it first), and Rudbeck became a scientific celebrity. Appointed to the University of Uppsala, he oversaw the construction of a large dissection theater and a botanical garden (botany was another of his specialties). He was also much admired as a musician and singer. Continue reading Finding Atlantis, by David King
Sniffing Pastry Makes You Nicer
A book claims to have researched the details into the moods we have while smelling good and bad aromas. Prep for the smell test.
Ho, Ho, That’s a Good One
Author Jim Holt talks about the subject of his book, Stop Me If You’ve Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes.
It’s an Expedition
Author Rich Wagner tells Christian men “if you allow your heart to be captured by career and church, you put your kid’s spiritual lives at risk.” He argues that the answer to life is not balancing family, career, and church. It’s about limiting career and church in order to lead the family whole-heartedly.
Three Sides Better Than One
The Jolly Blogger reviews J.P. Moreland’s The Kingdom Triangle, which he calls well worth reading. The triangle consists of “the recovery of the life of the Christian mind, the renovation of the soul and the restoration of the spirit’s power.” Here’s an excerpt:
Side two of the kingdom triangle is the renovation of the soul and I think Moreland offers one of the best and most incisive diagnoses of the illness that plagues our souls that I have seen anywhere. He describes this as the empty self, or the false self, and it has four characteristics.
- The empty self is inordinately individualistic.
- The empty self is infantile.
- The empty self is narcissistic.
- The empty self is passive.
He goes on to describe the antidote as a recovery of the art of Christian self-denial. This dovetails nicely with John Calvin’s contention that the summary of the Christian life is to be found in self denial.
So I am enthusiastic about Moreland’s diagnosis, but I diverge from him on the cure. Basically the cure for the empty self, and the practice of the renovation of the soul, is to be found in what I would call the practices of the Christian mystics, with an emphasis on the cultivation of the inner life.
Solzhenitsyn’s First Circle in English
Next year, Harper Perennial will be publishing the first unabridged edition of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle in English.