Here’s a provocative series title, “A Book You’ll Actually Read.” It’s a series of short theology books by Mark Driscoll, trying to make tough issues easier to understand.
Category Archives: Non-fiction
Adult-Child Differences
H.S. Key complains about Americans who need to grow up.
We want to discover our inner child. We wear shirts that say “Runs with scissors” and “Eats glue.” We sit in great big Starbucks chairs with our shoes off and our legs Indian-style, like Kindergartners on growth hormone. I can’t stand it. Those kinds of things are the subjects of this book, called The Death of the Grown-Up by Diana West.
I’m sympathetic to a point. I would love to heard someone say, “Vulgarity is to common people. That’s what they word means. We aren’t common people.” Or better, “My dad is my hero. When he bought me my first hat, I knew I was becoming a man.” But I don’t know that the hand-wringing in this book (or post for that matter) is all that it could be. As some of the commenters mention, there will always be extremists among us–weird parents with no morality. Because we hear about them doesn’t mean they represent most of us.
But all of that is beside the point. The real point is that more people should read BwB and The Art of Manliness for maturity and health. Can anyone question that?
History Being What One Makes It
Patrick Buchanan has written a historical argument on WWII. Adam Kirsh reviews it for the NY Sun, comparing it to Nicholson Baker’s “Human Smoke.”
When they look back to the 1930s, Mr. Baker’s role models are the Quakers and pacifists who believed it was better to lie down for Hitler than take up arms to fight him; Mr. Buchanan’s are the isolationists who believed that Nazi Germany was a necessary bulwark against the real menace, godless communism. But the net result of their lucubrations is the same. Both men have written books arguing that World War II, far from being “the good war” of myth, was an unnecessary folly that Britain and America should never have engaged in. And both have zeroed in on Winston Churchill as the war’s true villain — an immoral, hypocritical, bloodthirsty braggart whose fame is a hoax on posterity.
But where Mr. Baker’s book can be, and in most quarters has been, dismissed as the ignorant blundering of a novelist who wandered far out of his depth, Mr. Buchanan’s book is more dangerous.
By way of Frank Wilson, who comments on factory life.
What is this about Churchill being a villain? Here’s a bit of his argument for the war: Continue reading History Being What One Makes It
Lists, Cults, and Men
Sherry is talking about book lists again. This time she points out an article on cult books, quoting a description of the difficulty in defining a cult book. I say it’s any book which quotes from, alludes to, or can be even slightly argued to have been influenced by The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Seriously, can anyone argue with that definition?
Sherry also links to a so-called essential man’s library. Probably worth checking out should you find a spare minute. Just kidding, dudes–I mean, men. That’s a good list. I love those photos.
But speaking of cults, Sherry comments freely on When Men Become Gods by Stephen Singular, a book on Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints and the raid on Yearning for Zion Ranch.
Two Stories from Our Paris Desk
Bestselling French novelist says, “What city could be more romantic than London?” Incroyable! Mais attente, that’s not all. He also rejected the critics who don’t like his writing. Speaking of himself, he said, “Critics say that Marc Levy is an author one reads in the subway… Nothing makes me happier than being read in the subway. If I allow people to get out of the tunnel, in a small way, I’ve done my job.”
In other news, the director of the History Channel in France has a new book on how the French endured the Nazi occupation, and it isn’t flattering. Author Patrick Buisson said, “It may hurt our national pride, but the reality is that people adapted to occupation.” By adapted, he means, fornicated in many ways and, I assume, for various reasons. “The result [is] that the birth rate shot up in 1942 even though 2,000,000 men were locked up in the camps.”
I don’t post this to take cheap shots at the French. On the contrary, I wish they would repent of throwing out the Huguenots and get back to building healthy lives for the glory of God.
Naipaul’s Way of Looking and Feeling
David Laskin reviews one of Naipaul‘s books.
Naipaul calls the book “an essay in five parts,” as if to impose some sort of unity or occasion on what is essentially a collection of musings on random irritants. The early success of his fellow countryman Derek Walcott, Flaubert’s exotic prose opera “Salammbô,” Gandhi’s mysterious hold over the soul of India — these are among subjects Naipaul swirls in his imagination like an after-dinner brandy. But in the end, the laureate leaves us more muddled than intoxicated.
Christ Walks in Rwanda
Dr. Peter Holmes, co-author of Christ Walks Where Evil Reigned: Responding to the Rwandan Genocide, talks about the book’s subject.
Unlike most of the terrible slaughter in the Great Lakes regions of Central East Africa, the Rwandan genocide was between two vocational groups, people who spoke the same language and lived in the same village. The Tutsi were the herdsmen who owned the cattle, the Hutu the farmers who worked the land. Just like Cain and Abel. They developed a profoundly deep hatred and jealousy for each other that were fed by the colonial strategy of dividing the natives in order to use them to control one another.
10,000 people were slaughtered every day for 100 days. Around a half million women were infected by AIDS intentionally by men who had infected themselves for that purpose. Several hundred thousand children were maimed or left alive without parents.
One of the biggest tragedies of the Rwandan genocide was that the UN ignored it, as did the American and European governments. Much of the communication from the country was from the official government which was ruled by the Hutus who were leading the genocide.
[It] did not occur like an army sweeping through the country but was instead made up of neighbors who were Hutu or Hutu–sympathizers who were jealous of the person next to them because they had more cows, or more wealth. Jealousy, hate, and even a fear of over-population helped birth the explosive slaughter. Continue reading Christ Walks in Rwanda
Sowell Recommends
Help with understanding “economic news without freaking out“
Neglected library
If my translation software is right, these are photos of a ruined technical library in Russia. I wonder if these books could not find a use somewhere. (via Books, Inq.)
Everyone’s Favorite
A Harris poll has tried to ferret out America’s favorite book by asking 2,513 people.