Revolutionary Summer by Joseph J. Ellis (Vintage Books 2013). Trade Paperback. 4 stars out of 4. If you don't think American history is interesting, try reading this little book covering the major political and military developments of the Summer of 1776. It may just kickstart an interest. It is fascinating, engaging, compelling, page-turning. And it can only make you want to learn even more about John Adams (historically our most underappreciated founder--at long last in recent years getting his due, primarily thanks to Ellis and also David McCullough), George Washington (who learned a painful lesson in 1776, which he used to his advantage for the next 7 years), Thomas Jefferson (who had no idea of the importance of the Declaration as he was writing it), and the Howe brothers (whose hopes for reconciliation, and fears of repeating another pyrrhic Bunker Hill victory, kept the war from being won by Britain in one swift stroke, and allowed the Continental Army to live to fight another day). Just really great stuff. If we could get this kind of reading into our public schools, instead of the Textbook-by-Committee-Death-by-Boredom stuff we force our High Schoolers to read instead, Americans might actually appreciate their heritage.
FEBRUARY
Heretics by G.K. Chesterton. Kindle. 3 out of 4. Chesterton was C.S.Lewis's C.S. Lewis. I could read him for weeks on end and never get tired of his insights or his voice. Even though I am not particularly familiar with the works of H.G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, George Bernard Shaw, and the other Chesterton contemporaries whose works are examined here, the gist of the ideas which Chesterton is tilting against are easily recognizable to anyone who has lived through the last 40 to 50 years of American life, in which the social and cultural movements which were first aborning in Chesterton's day have arrived at their full fruition. It's fascinating to know that the seeds which brought us the sexual and moral and political revolution of the stupidest of all American epochs (that which began in the 1960s, was delayed a bit during the 1980s, and came into full fruition with the reelection of Barack Obama and the Obergefell decision), were planted so long beforehand, and to read the dangers of our era's prevailing idiot ideologies being so presciently foreseen so long before their time. This precursor to Orthodoxy is the inferior book, but it's still worth reading.
Conjugal Union: What Marriage Is and Why It Matters by Patrick Lee and Robert P. George (Cambridge University Press 2014). Kindle. 3 out of 4. It is unclear why Robert P. George felt it was necessary to co-author yet another natural law theory defense of traditional marriage, after his similar involvement on what is perhaps already the definitive text: What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense, but both books are worth reading. This is especially true for those who believe the only arguments against redefined marriage are religious in nature, as the authors present a "philosophical" argument on the basis of "reason unaided by faith" which does not "presuppose . . . any revealed source of truth." (Introduction) They do an excellent job. Understanding why marriage matters from a scriptural point of view (leave and cleave, become one flesh) but also from a logical point of view will be important for anyone seeking to withstand the new inquisitions which the "tolerant" have in store for those of us who remain committed heretics, unwilling to bend to the new orthodoxies of our day.
Pathfinder by Orson Scott Card. Audible. 4 out of 4. A reread, to remember the plot before I dive into reading the final book, which was published late last year. I enjoyed this even more this time around. Either that or I'd forgotten how much I loved it the first time. The narration on audible is so fantastic that I'm still not sure if the book is as good as I think it is, or if the voice of Stefan Rudnicki, the narrator, just made it seem far more cool than it really was. In any event, great stuff, with two interesting stories ultimately melding together perfectly.
MARCH
Ruins by Orson Scott Card. Audible. 2 out of 4. A reread, to remember the plot before reading the third (and final?) book. Somehow I thought this was a trilogy, but now it's being marketed as a series, so I don't know. I enjoyed the book better this time around. Though the whiny teenage characters are still annoying. My least favorite entry in the series, but it does have some highlights and some cool ideas.
Visitors by Orson Scott Card. Kindle. 3 out of 4. A great end to this trilogy. (If it is a trilogy; which seems likely. Although the series could go on, and not all plotlines remain completely tied down, the resolution here leaves you with a sense of conclusion.) After two books of relatively straightforward plotting, with a few minor time travel digressions to establish Card's causation-is-never-destroyed time travel rules, the author decides to really let loose and have some fun here with all the possibilities of time travel. So, in the second half of the book, Card perpetuates a panoply of perplexing plotlines: one version of Rigg on earth with one version of Ram visiting the distant past; another version of Rigg on Garden with another version of Ram visiting the various wallfolds (which includes one beautifully written, highly intriguing and philosophically weighty chapter, addressing the question of why God allows bad things to happen, in the name of agency); facemasks showing their full possibilities, both scientific and literary, in descriptions brimming with possible religious allegorical application; a baby from one timeline being plucked from any parental memory of his birth and being raised in another timeline; a big plot twist with respect to the visitors; a time travel escape from the machinations of General Citizen, culminating in multiple Riggs trying to forestall the end of the world of Garden; some new planets to go along with the newly introduced wallfolds; and the two young characters who were so annoying in the second book finally coming into their own. The only thing I really could have done without were the mice. Other than the mice, I just really enjoyed this entire book, and my only only other complaint would be it's far too short, given how much more fully all of these different plotlines could have been developed. But it's always best to leave the audience wanting more, not less (See, Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings film trilogy vs. his Hobbit film trilogy). Based on the great ending, I have to say that this is now my second favorite Orson Scott Card series, after his four original Ender novels. If only he could have pulled something like this off with the Alvin Maker books, or the Memory of Earth books, instead of letting them dissipate . . . . Oh well. My full review of the first two books in the series can be found here:
http://dadsbookreviews.blogspot.com/2011/05/pathfinder-by-orson-scott-card.html
APRIL
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (Borzoi / Alfred A. Knopf 2014) Kindle. How did the genre of post-apocalyptic survivalism, once the province of horror meisters like Stephen King or Robert R. McCammon, become so ubiquitous as to now be regularly featured in the more respectable parts of the bookstore, where books aren't classified by genre, but simply as fiction and literature, including in works clearly intended, like this novel, as highbrow literary fiction? And what does its ubiquity in our current popular culture say about us? Do we know, deep inside, that our world's current path is morally, financially, and otherwise unsustainable?
My first exposure to literary fiction was in my Senior Year of High School, as part of an honors English class in which we were all required to subscribe to the Atlantic Monthly and read the short stories which were at that time still part of its regularly featured content. I didn't really "get" literary fiction then, and I still don't fully "get it" now. "What was the point of that story exactly?" was my reaction at the time, and is still, to some extent, my reaction now. Nevertheless, I've grown to enjoy it occasionally. A well-written piece of literary fiction, like certain types of music, can linger in your mind or affect your emotions for a long time. Though capable, I am sure, of all kinds of collegiate English class symbolic decoding, such works can perhaps best be enjoyed without worrying about the point, but simply as something that affects you at some gut level and therefore has some intrinsic value that you can't really fully explain. This novel did that to me in some ways, but the effect would have been longer lasting if there had been more than two or three admirable and likable characters worth rooting for, and if the book hadn't been focused on the death of a shallow, selfish and narcissistic human being.
Letters to a Young Mormon, by Adam S. Miller (BYU Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship / Living Faith Books; 2014) Kindle. 3 out of 4. This is one man's highly personal and subjective views of the meaning of his own faith in his own life. The reader's response is likely to be equally personal and subjective. I loved the author's take (in the "letter" / chapter entitled "Work") on reliance on God's grace for salvation, and pursuing excellence and obedience for their own sake, as intrinsically valuable in and of themselves, rather than as means to another end. I also loved the letter on developing a love for the scriptures and other great works, and reading them to translate them anew for our own hearts and minds. But some of the other chapters just failed to connect, for me. One ongoing metaphor in particular didn't quite resonate with me, but perhaps I didn't understand its point. Definitely a worthwhile read. It's short enough that, even if you don't like it, there's no harm no foul.
MAY
Time Vindicates the Prophets / The World and the Prophets, by Hugh Nibley (FARMS 1954). CD and Hardcover. 3 stars out of 4. Nibley delivered this series of radio addresses in 1954 under the theme Time Vindicates the Prophets. Their text (with some footnotes to help find certain of the sources Nibley was quoting from) were later published as part of FARMS collected works of Hugh Nibley, Volume 3, under the title The World and the Prophets. They are extremely enjoyable to listen to on CD including to hear Hugh Nibley's young voice (although my copy was not in the right order, an introductory explanation of what you are about to listen to appearing at the beginning of CD 5 for some reason). They are an equally enjoyable read. This is the classic Nibley style, which, here, is primarily concerned with tracing primitive Christianity's apostate descent into a full embrace of and integration with Greek Philosophy, and comparing the original Christian teachings with the restored Gospel as understood by Joseph Smith and the Latter-day Saints. Good stuff.
The Wright Brothers by David McCullough (Simon and Schuster 2015). Hardcover. 3 stars out of 4. Not my favorite McCullough book (that honor goes to John Adams, or maybe to Mornings on Horseback), but still wonderful, vintage, McCullough. Reading him is comforting the way a nice mug of hot chocolate with whip cream on top, or some Campbell's Tomato soup (made with milk, of course) and saltine crackers, is comforting. He chooses to write about people who are admirable, and to tell us why they were admirable, giving us the same uplifting feeling we get from attending a really wonderful funeral service. This type of hagiography could be boring. But somehow, in McCullough's hands, it never is. His prose takes the reader to an early 20th Century Americana that is vivid, real, and forever lost. If we learn, along the way, how two small-town autodidacts (the Wrights never went to college, but did grow up in a house full of books), and their bicycle shop employee, driven by curiosity, and an unceasing work ethic, were able to conquer the mysteries of motorized and controlled flight for the first time in human history, so much the better. The Wrights' achievement is especially remarkable considering that they spent only perhaps $3,000.00, over a remarkably short span of time (only several weeks of which each year could be taken away from operating their own business) to get the job done, while a concurrent publicly funded effort, overseen by a man with all the prestige and backing of the Smithsonian and the U.S. Government, costing over $70,000.00 in public funds, and steered by a large team of university educated engineers and scholars, resulted in a spectacular failure, during the same month, December 1903,that the Wrights' efforts made history. (And that children, plus the part where a governmental institution later, fraudulently, claimed the publicly funded airplane had been capable of flight after all, and should be given preeminence over the Wright flyer, is all you need to know about public sector versus private sector efficiency.) But the best part of this book is the vindication story. The Wrights' efforts to perfect their flying machine, during months of trial and error and construction and experiment near their home town of Dayton, after their successes at Kitty Hawk, was largely, and stupidly, ignored by the press, both local and national, and their claim to having been first in flight came under increasing skepticism, despite the ease with which an enterprising reporter or two could have authenticated it. Those travails were put behind them in a series of spectacular demonstration flights at Le Mans France, which showed the world just how much further along the Wrights were than anyone else in the business at the time, leaving no doubt among the new profession of aviation professional, that the Wrights had to have been first, to have, by the date of the Le Mans flights, already advanced so much further than the rest of the world.
JULY
Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton (1908). Kindle. 4 Stars out of 4. I'm making my way through an omnibus collection of Chesterton's works I bought for some ridiculously low price on my Kindle. I thought about skipping this one since I'd read it a couple of years ago. I'm glad I didn't. It's even more relevant today than it was just two years ago, as time is moving increasingly more swiftly in what Chesterton described as the modern assault against reason.
Chesterton, the great popular lay Christian apologist of his day, was to his era what C.S. Lewis has been to ours. (Indeed, he was Lewis's Lewis, as his writings played a role in Lewis's conversion to Christianity.) Chesterton eventually took a very specific view of what constituted Christian truth and orthodoxy: Roman Catholicism. This has prevented him from rising to the heights of popularity which Lewis achieved, with his much more approachable mere Christianity, safe even for Latter-day Saints. This is unfortunate, as a great deal, indeed most, of Chesterton's thoughts can be appreciated without the necessity of adopting a specifically Roman Catholic viewpoint.
Chesterton lived in a time period (straddling the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) in which Europeans were losing their faith in God and traditional social structures, and placing their faith, instead, in a variety of political movements promising some version of Utopia here on earth: socialism, Marxism, fascism, Fabianism, nationalism, etc. Chesterton's writings insisted that it was only in and due to the doctrines of Christianity that the West had come to enjoy its liberties, and that supplanting Christianity with one or more of these Utopian schemes would upend that liberty. The wars which these various isms engendered in the first half of the 20th Century, and the rise of totalitarian states dedicated to one or another of these ideologies were the proof of Chesterton's prophetic pudding. Nevertheless, his warnings continued to go unheeded in the post-World War world, and many of the more absurd ideas against which he battled, in their aborning and budding stages, reemerged post-war, in the 1960s, and have now come into their full fruition.
For the modern reader, surrounded by so many of the wrecks of modernity on every side, the eerie prescience of Chesterton's paragraphs startle on almost every page. His messages were profound in and of themselves, but Chesterton made his thoughts soar, by writing in a distinct voice, somehow instantaneously both gruff and earthy, but also poetic; bordering on bombastic, but moderated by beauty. His ability to deploy clever, platitude-shattering paradoxes, to restore truths to the mentally lazy lemmings of his day, has never been matched. I could read him for hours for the sheer joy of his style: it's like eating the perfect bowl of tomato soup, or skiing in perfect conditions on snow with just the right amount of dusted powder on top of the firmer snow down beneath. That I agree with so much of the substance just makes it that much better.
This entire book is a classic and well worth reading. But my favorite section is perhaps Chapter VII The Eternal Revolution, in which Chesterton describes his own intellectual journey towards Christian belief. He narrates the tale of his confronting various arguments to which he has been exposed against a life of faith, attempting to reconcile them with other anti-Christian arguments which are made just as frequently but which raise an opposite objection, and finally rejecting or reconciling his thoughts to arrive at his own truth, only to find that his final reasoned viewpoint had been there all along, within the doctrines of Christ. Here for example is how he ends that chapter, with a deeply resonant passage on what I, as a Latter-day Saint, would call a discourse on covenants:
"I could never conceive or tolerate any Utopia which did not leave to me the liberty for which I chiefly care, the liberty to bind myself. Complete anarchy would not merely make it impossible to have any discipline or fidelity; it would also make it impossible to have any fun. To take an obvious instance, it would not be worthwhile to bet if a bet were not binding. The dissolution of all contracts would not only ruin morality but spoil sport. . . . [T]he perils, rewards, punishments, and fulfilments of an adventure must be real, or the adventure is only a shifting and heartless nightmare. If I bet I must be made to pay, or there is no poetry in betting. If I challenge I must be made to fight, or there is no poetry in challenging. If I vow to be faithful I must be cursed when I am unfaithful, or there is no fun in vowing. . . . And this is my last instance of the things that I should ask, and ask imperatively, of any social paradise; I should ask to be kept to my bargain, to have my oaths and engagements taken seriously; I should ask Utopia to avenge my honour on myself. All of my modern Utopian friends look at each other rather doubtfully, for their ultimate hope is the dissolution of all special ties. But again I seem to hear, like a kind of echo, an answer from beyond the world. 'You will have real obligations, and therefore real adventures when you get to my Utopia. But the hardest obligation and the steepest adventure is to get there.'"AUGUST
American Creation by Joseph J. Ellis (2007) Vintage Books 2008 Trade Paperback edition. 4 stars out of 4. As in his earlier work, Founding Brothers, Ellis does not seek, here, to exhaustively and chronologically detail the founding era, but chooses, rather, six distinct topics to address and analyze, each in its own chapter, including "The Winter" at Valley Forge, "The Argument" which brought about the creation and ratification of the Constitution, "The Conspiracy" (a chapter title which can be read in several ways) leading to the establishment of the first opposition political party in American history, and "The [Louisiana] Purchase".
The Conspiracy was, to me, the most interesting read, as I find myself increasingly fascinated by the original partisan arguments between Washington's Federalists and Jefferson's Republicans, on issues which have recurred so frequently in our subsequent politics. Nor can any one with the slightest interest in politics or history or human nature fail to be intrigued by Madison's political schizophrenia. Few men in history can claim to be the chief and most important intellectual advocate for a political position which proved as significant as Madison's push for his new nation to be given a strong and powerful central government. But to have then become the chief and most important intellectual advocate for the opposite position, the need of his new nation to have a weak and largely powerless central government, is truly astounding, especially when one considers that he largely succeeded in bringing about the changes he sought on both occasions -- before being chastened and reminded again of the perils of a weak central government, during the War of 1812, and therefore ultimately switching sides one last time, in the Nullification Crisis of 1832. If flip-flopping is a necessary political art, then Madison was a DaVinci for all times. But one thing his own life experiences can demonstrate for future generations is clear: an extremist position on either side of the Federal Government vs. States Rights question can be dangerous. If we start to hew too far in one direction, we are likely to regret it, and a course correction is in order before we fall off the road.
But the most intriguing chapter, at least in terms of telling a story I had never heard before, may be "The Treaty" detailing Washington's attempt to establish a lasting and honorable peace with the Creek Nation, as a template for establishing similar relations with other Native American tribes living East of the Mississippi. The plan failed miserably, even after successful negotiation and a full-scale celebration of a historic treaty, because the Federal Government was simply powerless, politically, financially, or militarily, to even begin any serious effort to enforce a treaty between the U.S. and the Creeks, against its own citizens, the surging tide of white settlers determined to establish their own manifest destiny by planting farms and homesteads in areas promised to the Creeks. Washington sought to uphold the virtuous republican principles of 1776, and the nation's honor, against the criticisms which he knew would inevitably follow if the new nation exterminated an existing native population, without any effort to afford them some degree of honor and sovereignty as the original occupants of the land. But not until Lincoln's time would a Federal Government exist that was powerful enough to force virtue upon a group of white people more interested in their own financial needs and interests than their souls.
Caesar and Christ, by Will Durant (1944) Hardcover. 4 Stars out of 4. Magnificent. My full review here: http://www.mytakesonthat.com/2015/10/best-books-caesar-and-christ-history-of.html
An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris (Alfred A. Knopf 2013) Kindle/Audible 4 Stars out of 4.
Definitely the best novel I read all year and the most entertaining and engaging book of the year. I've studied enough Jewish history to have been vaguely aware of "the Dreyfus Affair" before reading this book. I knew it involved a Jewish French army officer who was wrongfully accused of treason, and was considered a historically important example of European anti-Semitism. But I didn't know much more, and learning the details by reading this novelization of the events in question was absolutely fascinating. The story is told in the first-person, present-tense, point of view, from the standpoint of unlikely hero Captain Georges Picquart: a casual anti-Semite, a secular snob who sneers at his aging and sickly mother's Catholic faith, and a bachelor who carries on a series of affairs with both married and unmarried female friends, and resents the bourgeoisie values which might lead colleagues to take any umbrage at his doing so. Only in France could such a sleazy character turn out to be Atticus Finch.
The novel opens with Picquart's narrative of his official observation of the Dreyfus degradation ceremony, during which he is as convinced of Dreyfus's guilt as anyone, though he does have misgivings about the severity of his punishment as the sole prisoner of Devil's Island, which strikes Picquart as a bit "Dumas" (author of The Man in the Iron Mask). A few months later, Picquart takes over the military intelligence unit which spearheaded the case against Dreyfus, in which capacity he stumbles upon a terrifyingly inconvenient truth: that Dreyfus is innocent, and, more importantly, that the military hierarchy will do everything within its power to suppress that fact. Picquart refuses to let them, and what happens next, if read as fiction, might be one of the best mystery / espionage / political thriller / courtroom drama novels I'd ever read. It's been a long time since I was this riveted by a novel, and I tried mightily to avoid googling how it all ended, and what finally became of whom, as French society was ripped open by the case. But this isn't just an amazingly engaging work of fiction. The story that it tells is true, and a case study of human nature and human institutions at their best and their worst. This makes it not just an amazing book, but a great one.
SEPTEMBER
A. Lincoln by Ronald C. White, Jr. (Random House 2010) Trade Paperback. 4 Stars out of 4. Well worth the read. My full review is posted here:
http://www.mytakesonthat.com/2015/09/a-lincoln-by-ronald-c-white-jr.html
OCTOBER
The Quartet by Joseph J. Ellis. (2015) Hardcover. 2.5 stars out of 4. If you are looking for a book which tells the story of the creation of America's constitution in an engaging fashion, with a compelling, page-turning, narrative, this is not it. (Ellis's footnotes offer up two books which he finds noteworthy for their readability and narrative verve: Miracle at Philadelphia by Catherine Drinker Bowen, and Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution, by Richard Beeman). This book is more akin to watching post-game analysis on ESPN, than sitting down and watching the entire game as it unfolds. It's a wonky discursive analysis of the major players (the title's "quartet" of James Madison, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, with supporting roles by Benjamin Franklin, William Morris and Gouverneur Morris), the winning political strategies they employed at various stages to get what they wanted, and their strategic and ideological shifts at various stages of the game.
Ellis, whose books I normally thoroughly enjoy, makes several missteps here: He begins with a pedantic critique of the Gettysburg Address. He then references various debunked historical theories without sufficient explanation of the same to make the references worthwhile (if I hadn't read elsewhere about the progressive economics-based view of American history which held sway throughout academia in the first half of the 20th century, I'm not sure I would have understood the first thing Ellis was talking about when he briefly discoursed on the same). The book includes a controversial argument about the original point of the Second Amendment which, if supportable, deserved far more support than Ellis bothered to provide (apparently wanting us to take his reasoning on faith, and to answer for ourselves the numerous questions and objections which immediately come to mind in learning his theory). Finally, the book ends with a dubious attempt to turn a 19th-Century Jefferson quote into a critique of the 20th Century legal judicial doctrine of originalism (never mind that Jefferson was in France during the entire relevant time period, and, therefore having nothing to do with the Constitution's creation, should probably not be given the final word; or that the quote had nothing to do with the subject to which Ellis applies it; or that the whole point of originalism is to place some restraint on the arbitrary and potentially despotic powers which an overly powerful and overly activist judiciary might discover for themselves, and that Jefferson very much shared the modern conservative skepticism towards an activist and overly powerful judiciary).
For all of that, I am still glad I read the book, and I learned a number of things that I hadn't known or fully appreciated before, about the historical lay of the land through which the founders did their work. I had previously vaguely understood the weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation, but not to the degree explored here, and I hadn't realized how unimportant that body was treated by even its own members, unable to even form a quorum to ratify the treaty that ended the Revolutionary War, because no one was bothering to attend. And Ellis is especially helpful to understanding Madison's shifting arguments and strategies at various stages of the story, from the time he spearheaded the Philadelphia conference until he finished his fight for the Bill of Rights. Madison came to understand that what he thought of as Philadelphia failures were in fact a Godsend, as the document would never have been ratified by the States had it achieved the type of clearly sovereign national government he was originally hoping for, which would have made the States largely irrelevant. This allowed Madison to play up the dual sovereignty of both State and Federal governments, in their respective spheres, in his post-Philadelphia writings, and in his debate victory over Patrick Henry and Henry's fellow Anti-Federalists at the Virginia ratification convention, which, in turn, convinced Madison of the need to create a Bill of Rights during the first Congress, in order to forestall any initiative towards a second convention designed to undo the work of the first.
NOVEMBER
Thinking Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2011) Trade Paperback. 3 Stars out of 4. Human beings are linguistic and intuitive. But they could make better choices if their decisions were more quantitative and analytical. That they have lousy intuition for numbers makes the situation that much worse. Now let me give you 4,327 examples. This is no doubt a great and an important book. But given its major premise I must ironically use quantitative reasoning to explain its main flaw: There are too many chapters. Give me 7 paradigm shifting concepts and spend enough time on each of them that I thoroughly understand them, and I might just alter my entire worldview. You might affect my entire way of life. But give me page after page after page of paradigm shifting concept piling up upon paradigm shifting concept, and I'll drown in the numbers, and not remember anything that seemed so fascinating the first time through. Kahneman has every right to be proud of his life's work. But that didn't mean he needed to share so much of it. A bit of editing and some quantitative easing would have made all the difference. As it stands: a great reference, something to go back to again and again, but only if you can remember what you were looking for, which is less likely than it would be had the book been chopped down a bit. Still, a book that everyone should read.
What's Wrong With the World G.K. Chesterton. Kindle. 3 Stars out of 4. Things I could do all day long, for weeks, if I only had the means: Snow-ski at Park City when the snow is just right; Hike through the alps with a friend and a camera; Read G.K. Chesterton. The main thing that is wrong with the world is that too few people read G.K. Chesterton 100 years ago and therefore we have fallen into virtually every trap he so presciently foretold.
DECEMBER
The Restitution of Man: C.S. Lewis and the Case Against Scientism Michael D. Aeschliman. Paperback. 4 stars out of 4. 80 pages of pure unadulterated truth about the false ideologies which currently plague the world. Almost as great as the book which inspired it, C.S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man.
A Study in Scarlet Arthur Conan Doyle Audible. 2 stars out of 4. Sir Conan Doyle's first Sherlock Holmes adventure is two books: a detective story introducing one of the most successful genre characters in the history of pop culture, full of character touches which show just how faithful the Benedict Cumberbatch BBC version of these stories really are; and a lurid tale of Mormons, Danites, and Avenging Angels, oh my, fueled by Yellow Journalism's sensationalist takes on Mormon polygamy. If we survived this kind of 19th Century misrepresentation, hopefully "The Book of Mormon" musical won't pose too much of a danger.
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