Honor’s Kingdom, by Owen Parry
Honor’s Kingdom opens in the summer of 1862 in a London morgue, where a diverse group including Charles Francis Adams (son of John Quincy Adams and ambassador to the Court of St. James), his son Henry, an English Foreign Office official, a London policeman and a surgeon are gathered, along with the hero and narrator of the book, Abel Jones. Jones is a native of Wales and a veteran of the East India Company’s wars, but he’s now a major in the U.S. army and a secret agent of the American government.
He and the Adamses are there because the deceased, a Rev. Campbell (whose body was discovered in a basket of live eels), was an American. He was also (though they’re not mentioning this) another secret agent, and he had been investigating rumors that some British ship builder is building a warship for the Confederacy, in spite of the official neutrality of the government.
Ambassador Adams assigns Major Jones to find out who killed Campbell, and what it was he’d learned that got him (and two previous agents) killed.
Jones, in his methodical way, sets about an investigation which takes him from the halls of Parliament and the finest homes of West End London to the most miserable, soul-grinding slums of the city. He meets the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone, as well as a colorful variety of thieves, pimps, con men, music hall entertainers and prostitutes. Eventually his investigation extends to Glasgow, which is (amazing to tell) an even more miserable place to be poor in than London. His life is threatened by (among others) footpads, East Indian assassins and a mysterious man in a red silk mask. He chances to encounter Anthony Trollope, James McNeil Whistler, Karl Marx and William Booth along the way.
It’s jolly fun—exciting, engaging and sometimes moving. Educational, too. Continue reading Honor’s Kingdom, by Owen Parry
Screenwriter Depicts Realistic J. Austen
The screenwriter for a new British TV drama called, “Miss Austen Regrets,” wants the show to depict a realistic woman as Jane Austen. “She was lively and ferocious. Some of the comments about her neighbors make your eyes water,” writer Gwyneth Hughes said.
“The vegetable is gorgeous!”
We married off the Older Niece down in Iowa this weekend, and it was one of the better weddings I’ve attended, I think. They chose to do the whole thing low-key, low pressure.
So I had to make my own pressure.
I left too late. I should have left at 7:30 a.m. at the latest on Saturday, but I thought that if I waited till 8:00 I could drop off the package I’d promised to mail to my new publisher at the Post Office, and still have plenty of time.
Unfortunately the Post Office doesn’t open till 9:00.
So I hit the road (taking care to go around the area where they’ve closed off Highway 35 south, at Highway 62, for repair). We had snow on the ground, and a nasty west wind was shooting across my bow. Continue reading “The vegetable is gorgeous!”
New Granta
Granta, the magazine of new writing, has done something new with its website, so take a look.
Do you subscribe to any literary journals? Which ones or which ones would you subscribe to if somehow that special something made you do it–whatever that is?
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
When writers talk too much
For those of you waiting for word on my health, I got a report today. I do have an iron deficiency, for which I’ll have to take a supplement. And they’re going to schedule some charming tests in the near future to find out if I have an ulcer, or what.
Mark Steyn, in an article for MacLean’s, takes a filet knife to the “commissar” of the Canadian Human Rights commission (who is prosecuting him for hate speech), pointing out in wonderful style that she knows no more about history than she knows about liberty.
More on how not to write, below the fold: Continue reading When writers talk too much
I’m Glad You Asked
Why does Norwegian garbage trucks drive so fastly?
The drivers are afraid of being robbed!
So, one night, a torrential rain soaked northwestern Minnesota. The next morning the resulting floodwaters came up about 6 feet into most of the homes there.
More on Expelled’s Stories
In talking about Intelligent Design in the previous post, I looked up this NPR transcript from November 2005 on academic freedom for proponents of ID. Some of the same people featured in Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed are in this report. Here’s the end of it.
Ms. JESSICA YOUNG (Student, George Mason University): It does get overwhelming having it crammed down your throat every day in biology classes. I had–my animal biology professor said the same thing: `This is not a theory; this is a fact. This is–evolution is a fact.’ You know, it’s comforting to know that there are other people who question evolution.
HAGERTY: For Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education, these students with their Bibles are Exhibit A in the case against intelligent design. It has a religious agenda, she says, because it singles out the origins of life for scrutiny.
Ms. SCOTT: You know, we don’t know everything there is to know about the theory of gravitation. We don’t know everything there is to know about atomic theory. And yet nobody says that we should be presenting the strengths and weaknesses of atomic theory. People would look at you funny if you made that suggestion. But this is what happens all the time with evolution.
HAGERTY: The judge in the Dover trial is expected to rule in the next few weeks. The culture wars will rage on long after that. As for Caroline Crocker, she’s received plenty of moral support, but no one has offered her a university teaching job.
Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed (Except Maybe Aliens)
I watched Expelled: No Intellengence Allowed tonight. Kudos to The Rave in Chattanooga for playing it, though I guess they won’t get tenure now. Before I tell you about it, let me say I can see why some liberals will hate it. Not only does it argue that Darwinian Evolution has flaws, it criticizes abortion, euthanasia, eugenics, atheism, and closes with images of Ronald Reagan. That’ll boil the blood.
Expelled appears to be a solid, well argued movie. It’s premise is clearly communicated in the long trailer. I’m amazed in part by the effort the producers put into giving credible scientists deserved credibility. They spend no time arguing specific scientific findings, which would go over our heads probably. Instead they explain that Darwinian Evolution may be mostly correct, but Darwin’s theory is unclear and cloudy—to use one scientist’s words—and for a scholar to suggest Intelligent Design over random mutation as a cause for evolved life should not be unacceptable. The fact that good scientists and teachers have lost their jobs for either discussing or advocating an Intelligent Design theory argues for a clash of worldviews, not a clash over hard evidence.
Sidenote: Scientists, like journalists, want to appear objective. Some of them are; I assume most believe they are. And scientists, unlike many journalists, are highly educated, intelligent people, so when they draw a hard conclusion, they will naturally believe it is the rock solid truth. That’s why they argue about certain things as if anyone who could see all the tangible evidence clearly would draw the same conclusion they did. But piles of scientific evidence do not draw conclusions on their own; interpretation of that evidence does. And when researching the origin of species, one’s philosophy of science and origin plays a large part in one’s interpretation.
But Expelled is not content to argue against freedom in philosophy of science debates. Continue reading Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed (Except Maybe Aliens)