Henry James on Italy; Odyssey by Homer; Images and Imagination by C.S. Lewis; Political Woman: The Big Little LIfe of Jeane Kirkpatrick by Peter Collier

  I wrote this post before I left for Paris on December 10th.


I'm listening to my favorite Christmas Carols on Spotify. Feel free to listen to your favorite while reading today's post.

In two days I'll be in Paris.  Four books are piled one on top of the other on my table and I am going to write a brief paragraph on each so I can start the year with a clean slate, so to speak.



Henry James on Italy




















I love James' writing, however, his need to describe every nook and cranny of Italy can only be inspired by the fact that photography was not accessible to everyone and most people had not seen what he was describing.  Hence his attention to minutia.

He does a thorough and adequate job painting the scenery with his words and he includes more than a few jibes at John Ruskin at no extra charge.  Apparently, Ruskin also wrote of Italy and in a manner James did not approve.

What makes the book worth the money (and by that I mean the two dollars I paid for it at an Independent Book Store) are the prints of oil paintings of different scenes throughout the "Lo Stivale". (That's Italian for "the boot", a nickname because Italy is shaped like, well, you know.)


Images and Imagination by C.S. Lewis

This is a compilation by Walter Hooper of C.S. Lewis' essays and lectures on different authors and genres of literature.  The chapters I enjoyed the most were on subjects I had previously read about or authors whom I had read.

Therefore, his articles on the different Inklings such as Owen Barfield, Charles Williams and, of course J.R.R. Tolkien were interesting to read.  I also enjoyed his analysis of Robert Fitzgerald's translation of the Odyssey.  I had not read his translation but because I had just read the Odyssey, I could appreciate his comments.

My favorite was his analysis and critique of Malory's translation of the Arthurian legends.  He brings other experts in and either agrees or disagrees with their opinions and explains his point of view in a way I could understand and enjoy. 

This was not true of many of the essays because I was either unfamiliar with the writer or the work.  

 In one of his essays Lewis points out is that he thinks his was the age of the biography rather than literature which I found funny since I have been reading a lot of biographies lately.

Odyssey by Homer, translated by Samuel Butler

And speaking of the Odyssey, I found I enjoyed the story much better than the Iliad.  The Iliad was much too stagnate.  It went nowhere but stayed at the battle field with lots of poetic speeches by warriors, gods and goddesses about what sort of revenge they were going to take on each other and even more poetic descriptions of battle scenes.  I understand that I am exposing my own limitations and taste in literature and not in any way making an intelligent judgement on a timeless work.

The Odyssey, on the other hand, went places.  Odysseus just had a time and a half trying to get home.  And of course the whole sale audacity of the young men back home just eating up all of Odysseus' larder and trying to pressure his wife into marrying one of them for the purpose of taking over Odysseus' possessions primes the reader for the final showdown where our hero slaughters them all and not too soon either.

Odysseus has many adventures, mostly at the expense of his crew, none of which survive.  Life was cheap back then and the gods were not people...er...spirits...er... beings...um...gods you could turn to.  They were capricious and destroyed men at their whim.  There was no reason, either.  I cannot do justice in this brief review to describe all my thoughts on the subject of Greek Gods.  I would love to know their history and origins, not to mention the psychology behind such inventions.

I wonder if the reason I read through the Odyssey more easily than the Iliad was that the translator, Samuel Butler, chose to put it in prose rather than poem form.  My Iliad, translated by Andrew Lang was written as a poem, which the epics were.


And finally....

Political Woman:  The Big Little Life of Jeane Kirkpatrick

I am really not going to be able to do justice to this book and it is worth much more than the brief paragraph I am going to give it.  But briefly...

Jeane Kirkpatrick was a political scientist and diplomat.  Starting as a Democrat, she converted to Republicanism as the Democratic party moved farther and farther left.  In a time when women played no significant role in politics, she was appointed by Ronald Reagan to be the American U.N. Ambassador.  She also served as his political advisor.

The best part of this book is the insight it provides as to how our political parties, especially the Democratic party evolved from being a party concerned about American citizens as individuals and protecting their rights insofar as their rights were limited to opportunities in employment and education, to propagating ideology at the expense of the individual.  

She tried to understand the intellectual "perversion" of utopianism.  In her words utopianism was:

"theories ungrounded in experience (that can therefore) never be tested."

This led to what she called "rationalism" whose politica effect was:

"the determined effort to understand and shape people and societies on the basis of inadequate, oversimplified theories of human behavior...(which) encourages utopianism..Both are concerned more with the abstract than the concrete, with the possible than the probable.  Both are less concerned with people as they are than as they might be..."

Kirkpatrick moved to the Republican party after Carter made it clear to her and other moderate Democrats that they were not going to take the "kick me" sign off of America's back for the rest of the world.  Or change their or Europe's or the Middle East's anti-Israel stance.

Carter succeeded in costing America so much respect globally that he practically ensured Reagan's election.  Parallels between that election and our current one are hard to ignore. 

When Kirkpatrick later became U.N. Ambassador under Reagan she tore the "kick me" sign off America's back.  She personally contacted countries that were denouncing the U.S. during U.N. meetings and asking if they were still interested in receiving U.S. aid.

I may add that reading the nasty and even sophomoric tirades that certain third world countries gave at the U.N., not the least of which by the likes of Idi Amin, Fidel Castro and other tyrants one sees the flaws in an organization that gives equal floor to countries that point fingers at the U.S. (to standing ovations!) while their own houses are filthy.

Which leads me to one of the next books I plan on reading:  The Tyranny of Guilt by Pascal Bruckner.

Bruckner is a French philosopher and his book  argues that it is time for the West to stop self-flagellating.  But more about that in the future.

I have not done justice to any of these books but at least I got them off my chest and back on the bookshelves.

In the mean time, have a joyful, blessed season of Peace and God bless you!

The Travels of Sir John Mandeville translated by C.W.R.D. Moseley

 I found this book in a school library. It had been donated.  The school was private and didn’t mind donating the book to me.  It’s a pity this book is obsolete because it is not only interesting but offers an invaluable insight to the workings of the medieval mind.

    Sir John Mandeville wrote this book around 1356 AD.  He claims that the book is a collection of his journaling while he traveled from Europe to the Holy Land and beyond across the Middle East, India and eventually ending up in China.

     While some scoffers think his travels went no further than the nearest library, one cannot deny that his book is filled with a fast flowing narrative providing plenty of rich detail of every place he visited.  Reading Mandeville’s writing is like experiencing a viewfinder flashing its pictures quickly past your eyes. 

       A dry account it isn’t.  Suffused with the value of relics and Holy Places only a medieval Catholic could endow, one learns not only of all the places in Israel and Palestine that were important to a Christian of the Middle Ages but all the relics and miracles that give each place its value.

      Mandeville leaves the Middle East and moves on to Persia, India and China.  One can verify his veracity as far as historical leaders go.  We know that the Kahns did rule most of Asia and Russia at the time but one has to wonder about the fantastical places where he purports to meet humans who have bodies and abilities that sound as though they come straight from Greek and Roman mythology.

        Whether Sir John actually traveled as he claims or the book is a product of a vivid imagination, his writing is fluid and eloquent and it is worth noting that the likes of Christopher Columbus and Leonardo da Vinci as well as many others possessed copies of his book and relied on it for hard geographical information.

       And as the back cover says,

 Sir John’s book demands that, as well as enjoying it, we take it seriously as an indispensable aid to our underwstanding of the world picture of the late middle Ages and the Renaissance.

For more information:

http://www.romanization.com/books/mandeville/

http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext97/tosjm10.txt

http://www.worldwideschool.org/library/books/hst/biography/TheTravelsofSirJohnMandeville/toc.html

http://jonathantierney.blogspot.com/2010/06/travels-of-sir-john-mandeville.html

       

The Deer on a Bicycle: Excursions into the Writing of Humor by Pat McManus

    Patrick McManus has long been one of my favorite writers.  His style and ability are what I hope to emulate in my own writing.  To all aspiring writers’ good fortune, he has written a book guiding the rest of us into the realm of humor writing.

     The Deer on A Bicycle: Excursions into the writing of Humor has probably been the most beneficial of the entire how-to write books I’ve read so far.  Of course it helps that I’ve read most of McManus' books and so already have a great deal of respect for him.  It’s so much more convincing to receive advice from someone who’s sold millions of copies of books that I enjoy than from someone whom I’ve never heard of.

      For years McManus wrote articles for Field and Stream about camping, hunting and fishing- activities, aside from camping, that I couldn’t be less interested in.  His humor, however, had me falling out of my chair, bursting a gut.  He’s not just funny, he’s hilarious.  His can use graphic imagery in a way that plants absurd thoughts into your head that is practically unrivaled.

      I say all that to say that if you’re someone who would like to know how to construct a funny story and hopefully sell it to a publisher or magazine, you will want to read this book.  It is not only informative but, true to form, very funny.  Reading this book was as fun as reading any of Mcmanus' other humor pieces. 

     The book is written in a question and answer format where he has one of his characters, Newton, ask a question about writing which he then answers.  Here’s an example:

    Newton:  Pat, what do you mean by “indirection” in a story? 

Pat:  I’m sorry you brought that one up, Newt.  Let’s see. Hmm.

   Well, indirection is where you don’t write about what you intend to write about but write about something else that in some way reveals what it was you actually wanted to write about.  All clear about that?  (pg. 19)

      Believe it or not, he does make clear what he means by that later in that section.  It’s one of the best writing techniques to develop.

 Here’s another example:

Newton:  What do you believe is the ultimate in a prose style, Pat?

  Pat:  It is a style in which the words vanish for the reader.  Anytime writing draws attention to itself as writing it detracts from the desired effect, which is to create an uninterrupted flow of thoughts, emotions images, ideas and information through, the mind of the reader. (pg. 66)

      This is excellent advice and is my goal as a writer. 

 McManus also shares  his own background.  He describes how he got started by selling works first to magazines and then to publishers.  He gives some  good advice on how to query and write proposals, but mostly he focuses on how to write.

     The best advice I got from his book was where he said he decided he was going to write for two hours every day.  Not think about writing or plan on writing, just write.  He found that, like magic, his writing got better and better and also easier.  After a while, the words just flowed.  Another thing he made himself do was send off everything he wrote.  Hmm. I’m not up to that yet, but I’m sure it improves the odds of getting your material published.

       He gives solid and well-needed advice about needing  thick skin and getting rejected.  It was encouraging to know that, as great a writer as he is; he still got rejected over and over again (even after his work was published in magazines!) by publishers.

      The final section of the book contains some of his funniest short stories followed by a commentary as to how he came up with the idea and developed it.

    All in all, I highly recommend this book. 

All the proceeds of this book go toward a scholarship fund for creative writing and journalism students at Eastern Washington University where McManus was a Writing Professor for twenty-three years.

 For more information:

The Storyteller-Patrick McManus

http://patrickfmcmanus.com/Bio.html

Field and Stream summer stories 2011

McManus Plays

   

     

The Chosen by Chaim Potok

 The Chosen by Chaim Potok has been on my TBR pile for a very long time and I am so glad I finally read it. I was going to wait until my son read it and have him write a review but I decided that there’s no harm in both of us writing one since it will be a while before he’ll be able to read it and write his review. And then I’m going to read this wonderful book again. I’m sure there’s a lot I didn’t catch this first time.

For the first fifteen years of our lives, Danny and I lived within five blocks of each other and neither of us knew of the other’s existence.

So states the first paragraph of the book, The Chosen, by Chaim Potok. It’s spoken by the protagonist Reuven Malter. It’s through Reuven’s eyes that we experience the story. It’s a pregnant sentence. Are Reuven and Danny going to be fast friends? Life long rivals? Ardent enemies?

At first it seems the last option is going to describe their relationship. Danny Saunders and Reuven meet during a ball game. Each is Jewish, each goes to yeshivas (Hebrew parochial schools) and that’s where the similarities end. While Reuven and his family are Orthodox Jews (for information on Orthodox Jews go here), Danny is Hasidic. (For information on Hasidic Jews go here) The ball game is more than a friendly rivalry. The Hasid are out to prove much more than their superior ball playing skills.

Burn in Hell you apikorsim! The Hasidic team shouts at Rueven and his team mates. Potok never explains what this word actually is but from the context I assume it’s some sort of term for an apostate.

Danny is as determined to prove Hasidic superiority as much as the rest of his team mates and when his turn to bat comes up he purposely slams the ball into the pitcher, Rueven’s, face. Rueven ends up in the hospital for several days.

As unlikely as it would seem, this is the start of a close and –if I may use the word again- ardent friendship. Danny and Reuven become close friends much to the consternation to the Hasidic community. The major reason for this is because Danny’s father, Rabbi Reb Saunders is the founder of their Hasidic community and Danny is expected to follow in his footsteps.

Not being Jewish, I found the contrasts between the two different Jewish sects to be fascinating. Potok includes much history of the origins of the Hasidic groups as well as the Jewish immigrants and how they ended up in America.

The time period is during WWII and Potok also gives us a special insight into how the war was viewed by contemporaries, specifically the Jews living in Brooklyn, and the horror that ensued as Hitler’s “final solution” became public knowledge.

As I read, for the first time in my life it hit me what people’s reaction to it all must have been. For so many years we’ve known what Hitler did, which doesn’t make it any less horrible, but I never considered the shock that people must have experienced as it first came to light. It’s almost too horrific to contemplate. I doubt anyone outside Germany imagined such a thing in their wildest dreams.

The other discovery that surprised me was the possibility that any Jew would be against a Jewish state. According to Potok, the Hasid were fervently against it. Or to be specific they were against a secular Jewish state. They believed (probably still believe) that the true Israel nation will be ushered in by the Messiah.

Who are these people? Who are these people? He shouted in Yiddish, and the words went through me like knives. “Apikorsim! Goyim! Ben Gurion and his goyim will build! When Messiah comes, we will have Ertz Yistoel, a Holy Land, not a land contaminated by Jewish goyim! (pg. 187)

We cannot wait for God. If there is an answer, we must make it ourselves….. Six million of our people have been slaughtered; he (Reuven’s father) went on quietly. It is inconceivable. It will have meaning only if we give it meaning. We cannot wait for God…(pg. 182)

Potok shows the opposing views of Hasid and Orthodox Judaism through the fathers of Danny and Reuven. Both dedicated Jews, both dedicated to studying the Talmud, but both arriving at different conclusions as to the existence and purpose of the Jewish people.

As interesting and informative as that all is, what makes this story poignant and worthy of its place in the annals of good literature, is the human dynamic. Danny and Reuven’s relationship with each other and with their fathers’.

What especially impressed me was the careful responsibility each father took to raise their sons up in they way they believed they should go. Such care, time and energy was given to this-even though each man used strikingly different methods to accomplish their goals. Do fathers like this still exist or are they merely a relic of a bygone era?

One thing that, as a Christian, particularly interested me was how much time was given to studying the Talmud. The Talmud is two thousand years of commentary by various rabbis throughout the ages given to explaining the Torah. It amazed me to see how dedicated the Jewish scholars were to studying the Talmud but no time mentioned of studying the Torah, which is the actual word of God. Why so much time to what men say about what God says rather than reading what God has to say for Himself?

The Chosen is a gripping, powerful novel that had me coming back again and again to see how Danny and Reuven’s lives were going to turn out. The suspense of each chapter propels the reader to its powerful, moving conclusion. I highly recommend this classic to everyone.

Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

The following review is written by my son, Derek.  This past year I have begun homeschooling him to get him ready for college.  One particular concern was his writing skills.  I will be periodically posting papers written by him as an exercise to help him improve these skills.  Feel free to give feedback!

  Fahrenheit 451 is a novel by Ray Bradbury that portrays a nation that has been corrupted by the Government. The message of this novel is shown through the eyes of the protagonist, Guy Montag. Montag is a firefighter in a world where firefighters don’t put out fires but burn books. (Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature at which paper burns.) After meeting a man who reads, he wakes up to the fact that everyone is being kept under control and pacified by laws the government has imposed on its people. It accomplishes this in a couple of ways. First, they outlaw books. Second they keep everything, including education on a shallow entertainment level. As a result, the people can no longer think for themselves and do whatever the government tells them.

Books have been outlawed and are burned by the firemen. This is because, according to the government, books cause people to stop and think which causes division and unhappiness in society. If someone is found with books then firemen are sent to their house. The houses, curiously enough, are fireproof which allows the firemen to burn all the books inside without damaging the building. The person found owning books is considered a threat to the happiness of society and is given the death penalty. This is administered by lethal injection through the mouth of the firemen’s dog. This “firedog” is a machine that has eight legs and always accompanies the firemen on their missions.

Everyone is constantly being entertained. Schools focus mostly on sports rather than education. There’s one room in every house that has huge TV screens built into every wall. Wherever people go they are listening to music on their headphones, paying no attention to the world around them. Because everything is seen as fun and games, no one seems to be able to value life. A group of teenagers hit and kill a young girl with their car and think nothing of it. Neither does anyone else.

The government tells the people that they are happy through entertainment. The people believe this without question. However, since the average person cannot think rationally or judge anything for themselves, everyone is rendered helpless under the government’s control. The country falls apart as the value for life, the earth’s natural beauty and intact families disappear. They are replaced with chaos, injustice, broken homes and a nuclear war but no one cares.

Except Montag. At the end of the story Montag meets an old professor who, it turns out, possesses many books that he has memorized. The story concludes with Montag and the professor traveling to an underground community that has also memorized the books. In this way, Fahrenheit 451 concludes with a glimmer of hope. Fahrenheit 451 is an excellent example of a government controlling its society by robbing it of its ability to think for themselves. It is a warning against a people putting themselves under the government’s power as they mindlessly follow the lies they are fed. Without good literature and education, people’s minds will atrophy as they only dwell on TV shows and music.

 Michael Moore's movie Farenheit 9/11 was a sad irony as it was everything Bradbury had warned against in his novel, i.e. allowing the media to think for you under the guise of "entertainment".  Bradbury fought against Moore using the title in court but unfortunately lost. -S.H.

or buy on kindle $9.99

Tyndale: The Man Who Gave God an English Voice by David Teems

If you have ever been to the sea-shore just because the waves somehow enchanted you, or if on a particular visit someone kicked sand in your boyfriend’s face (an inexcusable act) thinking him a weakling though you refused to believe it because you happened to be wearing rose-colored glasses and because of a long-suffering faith in your dearly beloved or simply because you consider him a godly man, unbeliever that he used to be, William Tyndale gave you the words to tell your story.

Following the advent of Tyndale’s English Bible, a single generation later, from 1570 to 1630 more than thirty thousand new words entered the English language. (pg. xxii in the Prologue)

David Teems has written an eloquent account of a man who can never be appreciated enough for the contribution he made to the English language and English speaking peoples when he translated the Bible from the original languages into one that everyone on the British Isle could understand.

Tyndale is broken up into four parts. Teems first expounds on the invaluable contribution Tyndale made to the English language- so much so that many historians and linguists have asserted that without Tyndale there would have been no Shakespeare. Teems lists several examples of famous quotes from the Bard which are in themselves quotes or at least words borrowed from Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament.

I must confess that I never thought about how powerful an impact it must have been to hear the Word- which a medieval person was to live their entire life around- in their own heart language. For the first time in a thousand years people were reading and hearing God speak to them in their native tongue. The experience must have torn the veil from their Savior’s face. Finally the Gospel was accessible to all and people no longer depended on The Roman Catholic church to tell them what God said.

As Luther did in Germany just a few years earlier, Tyndale revealed to the general populace that scripture made no mention of penance, purgatory, or works-based salvation. The response of the Catholic Church was predictable.

The second part of the book describes Tyndale’s years of hiding on the European continent to escape heresy charges and execution in England at the hands of the Bishops and especially of Thomas More who made it his personal obsession to bring Tyndale to the stake. Teems includes many excerpts from letters and expositions that both More and Tyndale wrote debating each other’s position. Ironically, More and Tyndale died within a year of each other both at the hands of the deranged Henry VIII.

In the conclusion, Tyndale’s betrayal and execution are described as well as his year long trial where Catholic leaders debated Tyndale as he languished in his cold, damp cell. For months they tried to bring him to see the sinfulness of his doctrines: his belief that the Bible should be in lay language for everyone to read and not only in Latin, in the hands exclusively of church leaders.

One thing I found eye-opening was the doctrine that the Catholic Church and the authority of the Pope came before Scripture. Therefore, Scripture could only be interpreted according what the Church leaders said it meant. I don’t know if the contemporary Catholic church maintains this stance or not.

The last part of the book contains a time line of Tyndale’s life and work and a glossary of words that Tyndale contributed to the English language.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book for the information it provided and the writing style in which it was written. It is comparable to reading a novel along the lines of something written by Hugo or Tolstoy. Teems inclusion of several quotes from famous authors indicate his own influence as a writer.

In conclusion, this book is important for the insight it provides on a little-known but important contributor to the most important Book in the world and I highly recommend it.

I received this book for free from Thomas Nelson publishers.

Kindle store:  $8.79

For more information on David Teems and his books and worship ministry:

David Teems books on Amazon

http://www.davidteems.com/tyndale.html

David Teems website

Book Review for The Joker and The Chest by Bruce E. Murphy

 The Joker and the Chest is about a teenage boy, John Marcellus. John has an irresistible compulsion to play “pranks” on handicapped people. He doesn't know why he does it except that he gets a “thrill” doing it. After his third prank his family sends him to a boarding school where he meets up with Morgan Fairway. Morgan is the headmaster's son and they become friends.

While helping to transfer everything out of an old school building into a new one, Morgan and John come across a decrepit chest in the attic of the old building. Apparently there is a mystery surrounding this chest and Mrs. Katanski, the elderly custodian of the school, knows something about it and is anxious for the boys to stay away from this chest. Could the chest contain evidence of a murder committed years ago?

Let me stop right there and say the above two paragraphs contain ingredients for a good story. Unfortunately Mr. Murphy does not develop any of these ideas nor does he tie them together. A plausible explanation is never given to why an otherwise nice, respectful boy like John impulsively plays pranks on helpless people. I might add that Murphy's use of the word “prank” is flawed. John goes beyond pranks. What he does sadistic and cruel. Slamming a child's hand in a door is not playful, neither is taking the crutches of someone with a broken leg or knocking all the books onto the floor of a girl with a broken arm. It's mean and hateful.

After an accident where John almost dies he is finally “cured” of his need to play pranks on others but his reformation of character is rather abrupt. Murphy would have done well to delve deeper in to the psyche of John. Why does he like hurting helpless people? Why is it so out of character for him to do so? These questions are not adequately answered.

Totally unrelated to this lack of character study is the “mystery” of a chest in the attic. In the end (which isn't long in coming-the whole book is fifty-eight pages) we find out...nothing. The mystery isn't solved, the story of the murder case is never told in full and we never find out why old Mrs. Katanski is so protective of the chest.

All in all a poorly developed plot with poorly developed characters. The makings are there. Maybe Mr. Murphy could go back and flesh his story out. 

I received a complimentary copy of  this book as a member of the
Dorrance Publishing Book Review Team. Visit dorrancebookstore.com 
to learn how you can become a member of the Book Review Team.

  

If you'd like to buy this book please do so through my link.  Thanks!

Book review of The Real Kate Chopin by Lorraine Nye Eliot

This week's Literary Blog Hop question: Does the popularity of a novel predispose me to like or dislike it? Answer: The fame or popularity of a novel may motivate me to read it but I am particularly independant minded when it comes to what I like. I've never liked a book (or anything else for that matter) simply because it's fashionable to do so. I'm definitely an "upstream swimmer". Speaking of popularity, please enjoy my book review on an author who wasn't popular during her own lifetime but has since gained the fame her writing deserves.

Kate Chopin was one of the most polished writers to ever grace a page with the art of written expression. Her ability to create imagery and local color in such a way that allows the reader a delightful vicarious experience of bayous, 18th century Southern French culture and dialogue expressed by Cajun or French American tongues is in a class of its own.

She was also moral reprobate.


I admit that is not how Lorraine Nye Eliot describes Chopin. In her book The Real Kate Chopin, she uses the contemporary terms acceptable to today's modern feminist:

Kate Chopin is best known for her novel, The Awakening, the beautifully told story of a young woman's awakening to her own identity as a free and sexual being, which puts her in a tragic conflict with the expectations upon her as a woman, wife, and mother in the puritanical America of the 1890's.(From the back cover)



This theme runs throughout this thorough biography of Kate Chopin. Anyone interested in the life of this brilliant but controversial writer will enjoy reading Eliot's description of Chopin's childhood, family upbringing (strict Catholic), happy but unfortunately short-lived marriage (her husband died relatively young) and subsequent efforts to get her work published.



After the chronology of her life, the rest of the book delves primarily into Chopin's literary work, how it reveals her personal life and philosophies and how hard it was for her to get her work published. The main obstacle, according to Eliot, was that Victorian America was not ready for a woman to write about erotic, sensual subject matters. Frances Percher, a contemporary author wrote of Chopin's work:



One would fain beg the gods, in pure cowardice, for sleep unending rather than to know what an ugly, cruel, loathsome thing Passion is.....There is no fault to find with the telling of the story, there are no blemishes in its art, but it leaves one sick of human nature and so one feels-cui bono (to whose benefit)! (pg. 118)



Even Willa Cather “scolded Kate Chopin for 'devoting so exquisite and sensitive, well-governed a style to so trite and sordid a theme.'



Cather flays Chopin...for creating characters 'who demand more romance out of life than God put into it.' Their female characters 'expect the passion of love to fill and gratify every need of life, whereas nature only intended that it should meet one of many demands.” She concluded the review with the hope that next time 'Miss Chopin will devote that flexible iridescent style of hers to a better cause.'” (pg120.)



In point of fact, I agree with both Percher and Cather on Chopin's work as much as Eliot disagrees with them. She lauds Chopin's philosophy of “freedom from societal constraints” and loathing of “preaching moralists” who “oppress others with their sense of right and wrong.” Neither Eliot nor Chopin seem to view their own writing as preachy when propagating what they believe is right and wrong.

Chopin is indeed ahead of her time in believing that women who are not happy in their marriages should be free to divorce and marry someone else or simply take on as many lovers as they so choose. She was not ahead of her time when she failed to see the repercussions of such a philosophy that has scourged our society for the last fifty years. I worked several years in public school and saw first hand the price children pay when they grow up in single family homes or, as is increasingly the case, raised by their grandparents when their parents choose to embark on the “sexual emancipation” and abandonment of their children (as Chopin's heroine Edna does in “The Awakening”). The rise in emotionally disturbed children, angry, unstable children having to raise themselves because no one else feels obligated to do so daily breaks my heart.

Furthermore, as honestly as Eliot charts Chopin's life (and she does a great job of it, quoting several excerpts of letters and diaries) she fails to see, as Chopin failed to see, that her happiest years were when she was married. After her husband died and she decided to live out the lifestyle she wrote of in her books (she had numerous lovers) she developed severe depression. Of course Eliot would blame that on societal norms, but the fact is Chopin wasn't rejected by society even if her literature was. She had many friends (and lovers) and an active social life. Nothing fettered her from doing what she wanted. Nevertheless, the happiness she enjoyed as a child inside the frame of an intact, deeply religious family as well as the joy she experienced as a married woman eluded her during her own “years of emancipation.”

Personal commentary aside, if you are a lover of Chopin's literature and want to know more about one of America's most eloquent writer's life and career, Eliot's book is an excellent resource.

I received a complimentary copy of The Real Chopin as a member of the
Dorrance Publishing Book Review Team. Visit http://store.yahoo.com/cgi-bin/clink?dorrance+7XZRvv+index.html to learn how you can become a member of the Book Review Team.

If you buy this book, please do so through my link so I can get a small percentage back, thanks!

Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand

 

Wow.

All I can say is wow.

How do you describe such a book as Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand?
Louie Zamperini was the son of Italian immigrants who moved from the east coast to the west for the sake of their son's health. Louie repaid his parents by doing his utmost to be the most dreaded hood of his neighborhood. When he wasn't getting into fights, he was stealing from the neighbors. When he was doing neither of those he was playing pranks on everyone.

This might have led Louie straight to a juvenile detention center if his older brother Pete had not stepped in. Pete determined that Louie was going to be a runner. The first section of this book details how a two bit delinquint from a small town in Cailifornia made his way to the Olympics in Germany in 1936. He was the youngest runner there. He didn't win but he knew he had another chance in 1940.

Only he didn't.

WWII broke out and Louie found himself as a bombadier on a B-24. The second section of the book gives us an exciting description of Louie's life in the Army Air Corps. This section is fascinating for its detail of life as a soldier during the war if nothing else.

But there is something else.

Louie's plane crashed in the ocean. He and two others survived on a raft for a month and a half. I could hardly read this section it was so intense. When the men weren't being scorched by the heat and starved, they were trying to avoid being shot at by strafe shooters or attacked by sharks. Louie described feeling the backs of the sharks as they swam underneath the rafts.

Two sharks about eight feet long, were placidly circling the raft....Curious, he dropped a hand into the water and laid it lightly on a passing shark, feeling its back and dorsal fin as it slid beneath him. Beautiful, he thought.....


He was kneeling there, perched over the edge of the raft, when one of the sharks that he had touched leapt from the water at terrific speed, mouth wide open, lunging straight at his head....(pg. 160, 161)

You'll have to read the book to find out how that resolves. Hee, hee.

Finally, the raft makes it to an island and the two surviving men (one died on the raft) collapse in relief on the shore.

But not for long.

The island is occupied by Japanese soldiers. This next section is the most dreadful portion of the entire book. Louie now embarks on the darkest hours of his life. I'm sure he believed that he had descended into hell.

As I read these chapters of Louie's life as a POW and how he was mercilessly tormented by the Japanese guards I couldn't help but think of a children's book that is in school libraries. It's titled, One Thousand Paper Cranes. It's a story about a Japanese girl who develops Leukemia as a result of the Atomic bomb radiation from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It's a very sad and touching story and also a very effective piece of propaganda calculated to make Americans feel that we were wrong to bomb Japan in WWII.

Well, I suggest all those people who have had their emotions manipulated by that book read Unbroken. You won't feel responsible for anyone in Japan getting cancer due to an act by America that effectively ended a war that had already left millions dead.

In its rampage over the east, Japan had brought atrocity and death on a scale that staggers the imagination.. Japan held some 132,000 POWs...of those, nearly 36,000 died, more than one in every four. More than 37% of American POWs died. By comparison only 1 percent held by Nazis and Italians died.


In accordance with the kill-all order, the Japanese massacred all 5,000 Korean captives on Tinian, all of the POWs on Ballale, Wake and Tarawa... they were evidently about to murder all the other POWs and civilian internees in their custody when the atomic bomb brought their empire crashing down. (pg. 314, 315)

Then the aftermath.

Hillenbrand, in the penultimate section of her book, writes in heart-rending detail the challenges the POWs faced in learning how to live a normal life back home after being treated like an animal for four years.

Well, it doesn't happen. No one goes back to normal. Normal is gone.

Louie deals with it by drinking heavily and being abusive. He falls in love and gets married but that doesn't make his nightmares go away.

But that's not the end of the story.

The last part of this book is, to me, the most powerful and most moving. I don't want to give it away, but once again, God shows how his transforming love changes despair to hope, hatred to love, and the desire for vengeance into the ability to forgive.

I highly recommend this book and NO publisher gave it to me for my honest review. I bought it myself and I recommend you do too.



For more reviews on WWII:
The Navajo Code Talkers
The Secret Holocaust Diaries
On Hitler's Mountain and In My Hands
The Whisperers




Post Script:  I wrote this blog before the terrible disaster occurred in Japan this last week.  Let's keep the Japanese in our prayers as they deal with this horrible catastrophe.

Review of Defiant Joy The Remarkable Life and Impact of G.K. Chesterton

When I chose to review Defiant Joy The Remarkable Life and Impact of G.K. Chesterton by Kevin Belmonte for BookSneeze (for an honest review) I did so because I thought I would be getting a biography of GK Chesterton. In this I was mistaken. It is not a biography but rather a study of his works and the subsequent influence and impact on the literary world, reading audience, and contemporary authors.


After a brief discourse on Chesterton's childhood, education and conversion to Christianity, Belmonte goes on to describe some of the major works that Chesterton produced. There are twenty-five chapters and each chapter discusses at length different books Chesterton wrote. Belmonte quotes extensively contemporary critics and biographers as well as Chesterton himself. These quotes and excerpts from Chesterton's literary repertoire wet one's appetite and leave one desiring to go buy the complete work. In fact, after reading this book, if I had enough money I'd like to go out and buy everything Chesterton wrote. One book I'd like to get is the biography that Maisie Ward wrote a few years after Chesterton's death. Belmonte gets a lot of his information for Defiant Joy from her. Hopefully her biography includes a little more of GKC's personal life and goes into more detail concerning his conversion to Christianity, something Defiant Joy definitely lacks.

There is, however, much information about Chesterton's dissertations on other famous writers and figures such as St. Francis, Thomas Aquinas, Austen, Kipling, Stevenson, and especially Dickens. It's was interesting to find out that it was Chesterton that actually saved one of today's most famous Victorian writers from obscurity through his essays and books on Charles Dickens.

Another valuable contribution is the inclusion of essays by both Chesterton and others who explain some of Chesterton's more difficult to understand works, such as The Man Who Was Thursday. I found those passages to be particularly enlightening.

Belmonte includes humorous debates between Chesterton and contemporary atheists. I would say a battle of the wits except Chesterton seems capable of making the most scathing arguments against Christianity seem ridiculous.

In conclusion, I found Defiant Joy to be well-researched with an extensive bibliography. If you like Chesterton or are curious to know more about this under-appreciated literary titan who is considered instrumental in leading the likes of C.S. Lewis to Christianity yet was able to maintain a life long friendship with the atheist, George Bernard Shaw, this is a good book to start with.