A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

I'm a sucker for redemption stories, so naturally I love the tale of Ebenezer Scrooge, the best Alma 36 story since Alma 36.  But why read A Christmas Carol when the plot is so familiar from all the different movies, plays, and other adaptations?  For the language.  What bauhaus has done to our architecture, modern writing has done to our language.  Yes, its more effective and utilitarian.  But we've lost something baroque and beautiful in the process.  Here is Dickens describing a marketplace:

"The poulterers' shops were still half open, and the fruiterers' were radiant in their glory.  There were great, round, pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoats of jolly old gentlemen, lolling at the doors, and tumbling out into the the street in their apoplectic opulence.  There were ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish Onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish Friars, and winking from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went by, and glanced demurely at the hung-up mistletoe."

Metaphor, simile, personification, chain-adjectives, alliteration ("apoplectic opulence")!  When did we stop writing like this?  When did we forget the feats our language could perform?  So sad.  So grateful we will always still have Dickens.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

In my mind, there are three great themes worth studying in American history: (1) the founding: how and why we managed to successfully obtain our independence from Britain, and then create a constitutional government of laws and not of men, when every other country founded in revolution seems to have skipped right over the "rule of law" phase and jumped right into military dictatorship; (2) the quest for racial equality, especially as exhibited in the Civil War struggle to overcome slavery, and the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s; and (3) the fight against totalitarianism: America's 20th Century victories over German National Socialism and Japanese Military Imperialism in WWII, and Soviet Communist Totalitarianism in the Cold War.  (I probably need to read Zinn, so I won't have such a triumphalist view of American history, but I think I'd rather not).

Certain books ought to be read by every American on each of these themes.  And Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is one book that ought to be read on the fight against slavery.  After all these decades, it's still an incredibly moving read.

The Social Animal by David Brooks

This book, the story of married couple Harold and Erica, is supposedly "the happiest story you've ever read."  Harold and Erica are not real people, they are fictional constructs David Brooks has created as the framing device for a book about social and psychological research, much of it truly fascinating.

Thus, we are first introduced to Harold's parents, and as they meet one another, and their attraction develops, we are told what "studies have shown" (the book's most frequent phrase) is going on beneath the surface, in the brain, the psyche, the personality, of each of Harold's parents, which causes them to react to each other the way they do.  As Harold is born and develops, we are told what various studies have shown is going on in his cognitive and character development, and how his genes and his environment are affecting that development, etc.  We meet Erica a little later in life, and follow her and Harold through adolescence, adulthood, and old-age.  Along the way, we are introduced to various personality and psychological studies and theories helping us to understand their lives.

Harold and Erica don't live in real time.  Rather, it is roughly 2010 when Harold's parents meet, 2010 when Harold and Erica go to High School, 2010 when Harold and Erica marry each other, and still 2010 when Harold dies.   Putting Harold and Erica in real history would apparently distract from the purpose of the book, which is not interested in how people's lives have been affected by the actual events of real history, living through the Korean war or the Carter-era recession, say, but is interested in how people's lives are affected by their own psychological and personality traits.

It's a little hard to figure out where Brooks is going with all this, or what larger point he is trying to make.  Apparently it's something about the need to better understand what modern science is telling us about the psyche if we want to make better political choices.  Or perhaps the need to understand the "social" nature of man in order to make better personal choices.  Despite initial headings on Brooks' "Purpose" the overall point is never made very explicit.

But that's not the real problem.  The real problem is that introductory idea that Harold and Erica's lives are "the happiest story you've ever read."  The thing is, Harold and Erica's lives don't actually seem that happy, and Brooks' insistence that we see their lives as an example of what we should strive for to live a happy life rings awfully hollow:  Harold and Erica have no children.  They belong to no church.  They seem to have no real moral code.  They (and their author) use vulgar and crude language.  Harold's high school years are promiscuous, and after their marriage Erica cheats on her husband so Brooks can talk about the psychology of shame. Although Erica becomes involved in a Presidential administration, and Harold takes up his creator's Hamiltonian political ideas, you never get the sense that either have become adherents of some larger social or political cause that gives their lives great meaning.   It is true that Harold and Erica both become extremely successful and prominent, but one never gets the feeling that their lives have been lived for some purpose beyond their own success and prominence.  For "social animals" Harold and Erica have ultimately led pretty lonely lives.  When they die, their existence doesn't seem to have meant anything for anyone but themselves.

The subject matter of this book, what we believe we've learned about the unconscious mind in the last 30 years, was fascinating, and I had a hard time putting it down.  Some of Brooks' satirical social observations about modern life are hilarious and spot-on.  But in the end the book left me with a bad taste in my mouth.  This is not the happiest story I've ever read.  It's not even a particularly happy story at all.  And the claim that I should see it as such left me cold.

The Mysterious Benedict Society, by Trenton Lee Stewart

“Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”   C.S. Lewis

I like childrens and young adult books for the same reason I enjoy fantasy and sci-fi: they can deal with big plots, major symbols, and the deep questions of life, in a way that authors of a standard grown-up thriller or literary fiction would be embarassed to tackle.  But why read at all if you can't deal with big ideas?

The Mysterious Benedict Society lays the whimsey on a little too thick at times (a girl who always carries a bucket, another character who never sleeps, a villian who happens to be the long lost twin of the hero's mentor).  Even in children's or young adult literature, I find this annoying.  Give me a fully realized fantasy world like Hogwarts, allow some well-defined magic to exist in that world, but then make everything else as familiar and real as possible so I will want to suspend my disbelief and spend time in a place that seems real.

Nothwithstanding this one weakness, when Mysterious Benedict works, it works well, and it kept me reading to the end.  There are some important ideas here for young people and old people to learn, such as:

-there are different types of intelligence, all valuable in their own way;
-when recruiting for a secret mission to save the world, it's as important to test for moral character as for ability;
-if some person or group wants to take over society, their first step will be to manufacture a false "crisis" followed closely by taking over the media.

All true concepts, all worth knowing.

Washington, A Life, by Ron Chernow

The chief argument made by Chernow in this massive tome, is that Washington was a deeply passionate and emotional man, who learned to stoically suppress his emotions in order to be an effective leader, and who succeeded so well at that task that Americans have since come to see him, wrongfully, as rather bland.  Chernow wants us to get past that, and see Washington for the complex and interesting and passionate person that he was, instead of as a marble obelisk.  Here's some of what I learned from this book that I will remember most:

-Washington had one of the most shrewish mothers in history.  She constantly placed her needs ahead of his, for example vetoing an opportunity for a Naval career early in his life which would have prevented him from caring for her (although that veto turned out for the best, for Washington and his future country).  Despite the many successes of his storied career, there is no record of his mother having ever expressed any pride in his accomplishments.  There are, instead, numerous examples of her having constantly complained of being neglected throughout her life, even though Washington actually did much to care for her financially.  Washington's ability to suppress his emotions may have been learned at an early age in trying to put up with this nasty woman.

-Washington played a key role in the first skirmish of what became a worldwide war, known in North America as the French and Indian War. His experiences in that conflict involved so many unlikely escapes from certain death (in one instance evidenced by a coat riddled with bullet holes and a hat shot from his head, but himself unharmed) that it is easy to believe he was preserved by providence for future greatness. The snubbing he and other colonial officers received at the hands of officers from Britain gave his later desire for independence a very private and personal motive.

-Washington became rich via deaths of family members which were personally painful to him. The early deaths of his father, his older brother, his older brother's widow and orphaned child (and his future wife Martha's first husband), all helped Washington to inherit assets which caused him to become one of the richest  people on the continent, in terms of land and slaves.  Nevertheless, like so many other Virginia planters, he was constantly cash and income poor.

-Washington may have been, by the standards of the day, a kinder master than many slaveholders, refusing for example to sell slaves if it would break up a family, and recognizing and honoring slave marriages, even though this policy led to his holding more slaves than he could economically productively retain.  Nevertheless, he had a moral blind spot when it came to slavery.  He complained of slaves' unwillingness to labor effectively or productively, speaking of them as though they were salaried employees who were obligated to provide an economic return, he was apparently incapable of understanding why a slave would lack the incentive to work productively.  He was capable of ordering his slaves to work long hours outdoors on days which he described in his own journal as too bitterly cold for him to leave the home.  He would pay to recover fugitive slaves and at the end of the Revolutionary War he insisted, as part of the terms of the British surrender, that the British return slaves which had fled to British control in exchange for promises of freedom (the British, to their everlasting credit, refused his demands).  Washington did finally take steps towards morally redeeming himself, to some small extent, by writing a will which would free all of the slaves legally owned by him, upon his and his wife's death.  

-Washington's experiences in the Revolutionary War, as a largely powerless Congress was unable to properly provision his forces, made him a lifelong advocate for a strong central government.  

-Washington's return of his eight-year-old commission at the end of the Revolutionary War, instead of turning his popularity and power at that moment into a grab for civilian power, was seen in Europe as one of the most noble acts in history.  For his part, though, Washington seemed less concerned with his historic reputation than with a sincere and heartfelt desire to get back to his beloved Mount Vernon, whose constant improvement was his first love.

It was a wonderful coincidence that I was reading Ron Chernow's biography of Washington when we visited D.C., where reminders of his life are everywhere.  This is the portrait of Washington returning his commission to the Continental Congress, which hangs in the Rotunda of the Capitol.  King George III is reputed to have said, when learning that Washington intended to resign as a General and go back to his farm after the Revolution, "If he does that, he'll be the greatest man in the world."

Me and my sweetie at Mount Vernon.  Maybe Washington's love for this place was the real difference between him and Fidel Castro.

- Washington's popularity was essential to the formation of our country.  The highly controversial constitution would likely never have been enacted were it not for the assurance the country was given by his presence at the Constitutional Convention, and the knowledge that he would likely act as the Country's first executive under its aegis.  Similarly, the unity felt in the Country towards Washington allowed constitutional government to get off to an 8 year-start which established it as the status quo before the Country devolved into partisan bickering once he left office.  Had a unifying figure like Washington not been the Nation's first President, and not stayed in office for at least 8 years (six years longer than he wanted), the constitutional governmental forms may never have had a chance to take effective root.

 

- Washington was skeptical about the French Revolution, rightfully foreseeing that it would devolve into bloodshed and tyranny.  He was also skeptical about any foreign power, even one like France, which had assisted us in our Revolution, forming any long-term special friendship with America, which went beyond that nation's interests.  He was also a fierce advocate for a strong central government with a strong executive, based on his firsthand wartime experiences with the frustrations of limited government.  As a result of these positions, he found himself increasingly aligned with Hamilton's Federalists, and at odds with the Jeffersonian Republicans, whose romanticized views of the French Revolution blinded them to its excesses, and whose fear of monarchy caused them to advocate for a weaker central government and executive.  As most of the prominent Jeffersonian Republicans were Washington's fellow Virginia planters, Washington's last years found him severing ties with most of the members of his own political and geographic class, as his friendships with fellow members of the Virginia agricultural aristocracy, men with names like George Mason, Jefferson, and Madison, came to an end.

-  We are extremely lucky that a universally popular figure such as Washington existed at the beginning of our country, without whose unifying influence we might have won the war for independence only to become balkanized shortly thereafter.  We are also extremely lucky that the unifying person in question was a person of Washington's character, who showed no desire to make himself a dictator for life, as so many other successful revolutionaries, before and after him, were to do.  This is a long book and I probably wouldn't have gotten through it if I had tried to read it instead of listening to the audiobook on my iPhone while commuting in my car.  But it is a book that should be read by all Americans.

The Mistborn Trilogy, by Brandon Sanderson

Imagine that at the end of Lord of the Rings, Sauron had reclaimed the ring and taken over Middle Earth.  Now flash forward about a thousand years to a society built on Sauron's dystopian corruptions, and you have the setting, essentially, for these novels.  Then imagine that the heroes who have set out to overthrow the evil "Lord Ruler" of this dark land are not valiant warriors or immortal elves or something, but a gang of grifters for whom overthrowing the devil is just the biggest con of their lives.  That setting and that premise would make these books worth reading in and of themselves.  But Sanderson makes this all even better by giving us wonderfully lovable characters, including some presumably lead characters who he's not afraid to surprise us by killing off, and some presumably tertiary characters who he's not afraid to elevate to unexpectedly titular status.  Plot twists abound, that involve discoveries over the true history of the Lord Ruler's reign, and how that history has been officially corrupted and secretly preserved.  The fight scenes are the Matrix meets Tolkien.  Just a really wonderful and fantastic read.  Everything I would want in a fantasy series.

If I have any gripe with Sanderson's writing, it's that his magic systems are just a little too elaborate for my taste.  Maybe it's a generational thing, and younger readers who grew up learning elaborate rules for playing computer role playing games expect a magical system to be thought out with all this detail that I have a harder time getting into.   I enjoy it when a magic system has some internal rules and logic, especially when those rules help with the world building and advance the plot, for example as in Jordan's Wheel of Time books in which the "tainted" nature of the male half of the magical "true source" has affected the entire culture and history of his world.  I would agree that those kinds of details can be useful in creating a world which seems real.  (I've read Lord of the Rings many times in my life, and I still have no idea what kind of magic Gandalf is actually able to do). 

Many of Sanderson's rules of "Allomancy" (a magical system in which some people are born with the ability to gain special powers by ingesting certain metals) accomplish helpful plot purposes, and  make sense in ways that can be kind of fun and symbolic (the Newtonian idea that every magical act you perform has a consequence and reaction, for example).  But Sanderson's magic system soon becomes so elaborate that it can stop seeming like magic at all, and instead feels like either the science of an alternate universe, or the overly developed rules for playing a tediously complicated video game.  Nevertheless, that's just my own personal preference, coming from someone who learned to love reading Fantasy in an earlier era.  And it ultimately didn't keep me from still loving these books.

The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister

My son was recently looking at a newspaper article about all the statues being erected in Eastern Europe of Ronald Reagan, and had two questions:  What did this man do that was so great they are building statues of him in Eastern Europe, and why do my son's High School teachers all think Reagan was a terrible President?

Alas, I have no easy answer to the second question.  The political beliefs held by members of our public teachers' union are beyond my understanding.  But for the first question, you could do a lot worse than this book, which explains how Reagan, with some help from Pope John Paul II and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, took a stand that won the cold war and freed Eastern Europe from communist totalitarianism.  A great read, with a great message of how a religious people (in this case, the Catholics of Poland, finding themselves in a similar situation to the Jews of Babylon) can effect real change by resisting assimilation.

Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin

I consider Abraham Lincoln to be our final founder.  I have no patience for those far right libertarians who wish to cast him as a tyrant or who argue the Civil War was won by the wrong side.  Lincoln's success in the Civil War, his Emancipation Proclamation (as politically restrained as it was) and his subsequent advocacy on behalf of the 13th Amendment, finally ended slavery, that heinous institution which so clearly violated the most important principles of America's founding documents.  But Lincoln would have considered his own best achievement the restoration and maintenance of the Union.  That Union, in turn, proved to be the world's best friend in the next century's fight against tyranny, as it clumsily but ultimately effectively fought against and beat back Japanese Imperialism, Nazi-ism, and Communist Totalitarianism.  Thus, Lincoln, who preserved the Union that freed much of the world from slavery in the 20th Century, may truly be called the great emancipator.   That Lincoln was also brilliant and literate, having written, in the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural, two documents which are a kind of American Scripture, equal to the Declaration, is just frosting on the cake.

I have long wished someone could recommend for me a single volume biography of Lincoln that was engaging and accessible enough for a lay reader.  (Unless you were a History professor, David Herbert Donald's Lincoln was sleep inducing.)  Doris Kearns Goodwin has not only written an incredibly engaging biography of Lincoln, but, for the same price, we get the biography of other political giants of that same era: William H. Seward and Salmon P. Chase, two figures I had never even heard of before (except by way of "Seward's folly") who were, prior to Lincoln's election, more well-known than he.  Goodwin also examines, though to a lesser extent, the lives of Edwin M. Stanton and Edward Bates.  These five men (Lincoln, Seward, Chase, Stanton, and Bates), after having competed with each other for the Presidency or in other arenas, came together to form the cabinet that won the civil war.

This is simply an incredible book which every American should read.  One of my favorite books of all time.

Pathfinder, by Orson Scott Card

The thing about time travel stories is that they inevitably have plot holes that don't make any sense.  How does Harry Potter survive the dementor attack the first time, to live long enough to come back from the future and save himself?  If Doc takes Marty and his girlfriend 30 years into the future to save Marty's children, how is it that a 48 year old Marty is there in the future with children to save?  Shouldn't he and his girlfriend have skipped and jumped over the intervening thirty years in the car ride, like the dog skipped one minute when the car was demonstrated for the first time at the beginning of the first movie?  But the biggest problem of all in any time travel story is the lack of believable suspense: if you have the ability to change time, won't you just go back and fix anything that goes wrong to keep the plot from ever being forwarded?

All those problems are probably present in Pathfinder as well, but I enjoyed the story so much I didn't think about them. Indeed, in his afterward to this, the first book in a new young adult series, Orson Scott Card says he deliberately embraced the paradoxes of time travel, just for the fun of it.  Thus, for example, the main characters find that when they get a visit from one of themselves, from the future, with a warning to help them avoid some catastrophe, they don't actually have to make the trip for that visit themselves, in the future.  Rather, some other version of themselves did that and presumably winked out of existence or something.  This gets a little dodgy but you learn to just go with it and suspend your disbelief and enjoy the story.

And it is a really enjoyable ride, a return to form for OSC and one of his best books in a long, long time.  The best parts of this book aren't the time travel bits in any event.  Rather, the book tells two stories (a space travel/colonization story told in brief flashbacks at the beginning of each chapter, heavily driven by ideas and reminiscent of the best old-time pulp magazine short story sci-fi of Bradbury and Asimov juxtapositioned against a vaguely medieval story in the main text) and the fun is in  slowly determining how the two stories will eventually reconcile.  As the puzzle comes together, and you realize how characters in one story are related to those in the other, the plot takes on an extra dimension of satisfaction.

May 15, 2011
Highly recommended.

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Ruins
Book 2

So I just finished reading Ruins, the second book in this series, and I continued to highly enjoy the cool sci-fi ideas that drive the plot-focused story.  In this chapter, those ideas focus on what it means to be human, as Rigg's little fellowship of timeshifters and soldiers visits some of the different "Wallfolds" that were created to subdivide humanity when the planet Garden was colonized over 11,000 years ago, and learn how humanity developed and fared, or failed to do so, in the different worlds.  Are you, for example, still a human if you have joined in a symbiotic relationship with an alien parastic life form that enhances your abilities but also influences your actions?  If mice were bred to have near human intelligence, and, when acting as a group, greater than human ablity, would they have human souls?   These are all the kind of cool sci-fi questions that I used to love when I read books like this in my youth, and, like the first volume, this reminded me of some of the cool mind-altering idea-driven Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov short stories and novels I loved as a young adult.

If the book has a weakness, it lies in the clunky manner in which two of the characters, Umbo and Param, are written.  Card apparently wants us to see these characters "grow" as they seek to overcome their annoying adolescent weaknesses.  But some of their intemperate acts are so sudden and random that they aren't believable and jar the reader out of the narrative.  Card's trademark style of having his characters engage in lengthy inner dialogues also gets a little tiresome.  I wonder if this is how Orson Scott Card thinks.  Does he argue with himself all day and challenge and refine his own assumptions for hours on end, such that he thinks this is a normal way to show his characters' inner lives?  I dunno, but it occasionally devolves into tedious self-parody here.

This is a plot and idea driven story though, not a character driven one, so those issues don't prevent the book from working.  I enjoyed getting to know Rigg, Olivenko, and Loaf, the three non-annoying characters. The stuff with the expendables also continues to be fun and intriguing, as the reader can never quite figure out how self-driven these robots are.  I enjoyed the ideas and trying to figure out the same mystery the characters are dealing with, as they learn of a future destruction of the planet Garden by the people of Earth and try to find out why that happens and how it can be prevented.   If Card gives us satisfactory answers to those questions in the next and final volume, then this series will be one of the higlights of his career.  If he lets the series disspate (as he has with some of his other series), and doesn't wrap it up with a satisfactory conclusion, then it won't be.

Alexander Hamilton, by Ron Chernow

I once listened to a CLE given by a proud liberal democrat plaintiff's trial lawyer.  In the course of his highly partisan remarks, with full southern twang, he made the comment that this nation has always been divided between Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians, that all of our arguments can be traced back to Hamilton and Jefferson, and that the Hamiltonians and the Jeffersonians are arguing still today.

In this view of history, Hamilton is the original conservative Republican, favoring the moneyed interests of business and commerce, whose Federalist faction morphed into the Whigs and then, eventually, the Republicans.  Jefferson is the father of the Democratic party, whose Republican Democrats eventually became the modern Democratic party, looking out for the interests of the common man against the evils of corporate greed.

At first blush, there may be something to this view.  Certainly, Hamilton, with his belief that banking, money, and commercial business endeavors should be promoted to allow the nation to prosper, his trust that free trade would allow for social mobility, and his advocacy of  a strong military, sounds like a modern conservative Republican.  Jefferson's unwillingness to fund the military, leaving the nation badly vulnerable when the War of 1812 commenced, makes him sound like a modern Democrat.  Jefferson's adoration of the French Revolution, and his unwillingness to criticize the barbarity of the Terror, and his failure to foresee (as Federalists like Adams, Washington, and Hamilton, all did) that the French Revolution was likely to lead to a dictatorship, make him sound remarkably like a 20th Century leftist, cheerleading for Marxism and an apologist for its murderous tyrants.  (Arguments over the meaning of the French Revolution are with us still.  It was conservative Margaret Thatcher who refused to send congratulations to the French on the 200th Anniversary of their revolution, noting that it led to nothing better than "a pile of headless corpses with a dictator standing on top."  And there seem to be some definite similarities between the ideology of Rousseau and the Jacobins and modern Marxists.)

But the idea that a direct line can be drawn from Hamilton and Jefferson to modern political identities can only be taken so far.  Hamilton believed in a strong and independent judiciary, a stronger Federal government and correspondingly weaker State governments, all positions that are dissonant with modern conservatism.  Jefferson distrusted the unchecked power of the independent judiciary, making him sound like a modern conservative.  And no modern Democrat would ever warn, as Jefferson did, that what the government can do for you is in direct proportion to what it can do to you.  There's a lot of history between us and the founders, and the political beliefs of many of their largest personalities now sit cross-wise to modern political concerns.

The ideological battle between Jefferson and Hamilton is at the heart of Ron Chernow's incredible page turner of a book.  But Chernow isn't concerned with demonstrating which man was the father of which modern political ideas.  Rather, Chernow argues that Hamilton is the more important figure because he turned out to be right about the future of America.  We are living, Chernow demonstrates, in Hamilton's vision of a future America, not in Jefferson's.  For better or worse, we are not a nation of  farmers, as Jefferson had hoped.  We are instead a socially mobile nation of businessmen and tradesmen, dependent on banking and commerce, with a strong military, a strong Federal government, a strong and independent judiciary, and a government which has abolished slavery, as Hamilton fervently hoped it would.  We are still, as we were then, the kind of nation where a man like Hamilton, though of obscure and illegitimate background, can become successful on pure merit and relentless drive.  We are no longer a nation with the kind of caste system that Jefferson enjoyed in the agrarian and slave-holding South, while accusing the self-made Hamilton of favoring an aristocracy.  We have maintained strong ties with the English speaking peoples of the world, including Britain, and that relationship has been far more important to our history than our relationship with France.  In all of this, we are much more of a Hamiltonian nation than a Jeffersonian one, whatever our personal politics.

Hamilton had a knack for making enemies, including among one-time friends and collaborators, and his early demise in a duel with Aaron Burr gave others the chance to downplay his significance to American history.  This biography goes a long way toward rectifying that, and demonstrating the key role Hamilton played in the formation of our Constitution, and in many of the social and political values that, today, make America America.  

A must read.

True Grit

In a preface to one of his editions of Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury bemoaned the tendency of schoolbook anthology editors to "shorten" stories by censoring all the interesting authorial asides.  This is a crime, said Bradbury, because, "let's face it, digression is the soul of wit.  Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet and what stays is dry bones.  Laurence Sterne said it once: 'Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine of reading!'"

I loved the book True Grit.  I'd like to see one of the films that has been based on it, but I doubt either one can capture the best part of the book, which is the digressions.

Like To Kill a Mockingbird, True Grit is narrated by an adult female, looking back on events of her childhood.  The comedy in True Grit is all in the narrator's asides.  A never-married, wealthy, irascible, curmudgeon (incontestably the character with the most grit), she is far more exorcised over her modern political and religious and social opinions, than by anything happening in her harrowing memoir of travelling with a Federal Marshall, Rooster Cogburn, and a vain Texas Ranger, to find and capture the man who killed her father.  Just an incredible book.

Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand

"Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man’s soul in his body long past the point at which the body should have surrendered it." Unbroken, Laura Hillenbrand

I've never had as much positive feedback from a book I've recommended to friends and family as I have with this one. I've told a few people I was reading it and how much I was enjoying it and the result has been overwhelming. People come up to me at church and show me their copies or tell me how many days they let their life go to pot because they couldn't put it down. My family members are all reading it. Everybody seems to love this book. And why not? It reads like a novel, but one which would be deemed too lacking in credibility if it were fiction. For athletes, it's an amazing story of what long distance track and field was like when runners were some of the biggest names in sports, before the 4 minute mile had been broken, when collegians would intentionally spike a competitor to keep him out of a race, and when the voyage to the Olympic Games was more fun than being there. For aviation buffs, it's a story of what it was like to fly the planes America might have rushed into production a little too quickly to really ensure they were all airworthy. For WWII historians, it details what it was like to be sitting in a POW Camp in Japan (where 37% of American soldiers would perish, as opposed to only 1% held prisoner in Germany), under unspeakable conditions, but take hope in the realization of how well the war must be going by the sheer number of Flying Fortresses which began to sail unimpeded across the Japanese skies. For people of faith, it contains one of the most dramatic Christian conversion and turnaround stories committed to print since Saul was waylaid on the road to Damascus, as the book's hero recovers from what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder, and remembers a promise he made in the middle of the Pacific, to turn his life over to God.

This book has so many natural readers, it will likely become more than just a bestseller, but a phenomenon, and an inevitable movie, with the name Louis Zamperini becoming a household name. And deservedly so. I want all of my children to read it. They need to know this history, and this man's story.

The Adventure of English, by Melvyn Bragg

I remember once on my mission being flummoxed while trying to explain, in German, the concept of understanding something spiritually, rather than intellectually.  I was teaching the school teacher of the St. Gallen Gemeinde's Bishop's daughter, in the Bishop's home, near Appenzell.  Bishop Edwin Koch understood the linguistic difficulty I was having and explained to me that, in German, the word I was using ("geistig" if I remember correctly) could refer to both spiritual and mental processes, such that my word choice was obscuring the very distinction I was trying to draw.  He helped me out of my perplexity with some wording which I no longer remember, but which I do remember feeling, at the time, lost something in translation.  It was one of many moments during my time in Switzerland when I realized how important it is, while speaking a foreign language, to try to think in that language, using its own idioms and expressions, without mentally translating back and forth into my native English.  Because the truth of the matter is, when getting beyond communicating rudimentary facts, and when talking about more ethereal concepts or feelings, something is almost always lost in translation.  I always know, for example, when I hear a lawyer demand from a translator an "exact, word-for-word, translation" of deposition or trial testimony, that the lawyer only speaks one language.  There is no such thing as an exact translation from one language to another of any very interesting concept, and some languages are better at conveying certain ideas than others.  (Oh how I miss the German "doch" or swiss-German "mohl".  There's just no pithy English word that accomplishes the same thing.  And "namely" will never do justice to "und zwar". )

The English language is an amalgamation of so many other tongues that its spelling will forever be senseless.  But what it loses in phonetics it gains in richness of expression.  English has so many "near synonyms" taken from different languages over its history, that it allows for a precision in connotation and nuance that I doubt any other language can match.  The Adventure of English, by Melvyn Bragg, tells the story of how this came to be.

A book about the history of the English language had better, first and foremost, be really well written. Its prose ought to exemplify the many stylistic variations the language allows, with memorable similes, metaphors, and turns-of-phrase jumping off the page. This book definitely succeeds. ("The English language by now was a thickly plaited rope, a rope of many strands, still wrapped around the Old English centre, still embellished with Norse, lushly fattened and lustred with French . . . .")  

The chief linguistic tool used by the author is personification, as should be expected in a book subtitled "the biography of a language." Thus, the story of the Norman invaders' impact on the language is told from the point of view, not just of a people, but of a language, which resisted obliteration, while at the same time hungrily consuming new words. The story of martyred protestant reformers and their attempts to translate the Bible into English is told from the point of view, not only of those reformers, but of the language itself trying to assault the citadel of faith (and Latin) which violently fought back but ultimately embraced the invader and left both faith and the invading language richer for the outcome:

"It is impossible to over-praise the quality of Tyndale's writing. It's rhythmical beauty, its simplicity of phrase, its crystal clarity have penetrated deep into the bedrock of English today wherever it is spoken. Tyndale's words and phrases influenced between sixty and eighty percent of the King James Bible of 1611 and in that second life his words and phrases circle the globe."

"English at last had God on its side. the language was authorised by the Almighty Himself."

English has become such a global language today (see another good book on this subject, Globish by Robert McCrumb) that it may start to fragment, like ancient Indo-european, into new languages around the globe. Such new splinter languages would share the common root of a language which is itself made up of many different sources, all contributing to a language which, while phonetically non-sensible, is otherwise, in my opinion (reinforced by this hagiographic "biography") the greatest instrument of communication ever known.