JANUARY
Killing Jesus, by Bill O'Relly and Martin Dugard. January 6. Kindle. Three Stars (out of five).
A simple and straightforward account, counting on the inherent drama of the events to make a compelling narrative, without adding any unnecessary flourish. Worth the price primarily as a reference, with great footnotes, and helpful background explanations, especially regarding the fascinating but disturbing Roman history which had recently preceded Christ's birth. Not for younger readers.
Insurgent, by Veronica Roth. Two Stars. Audible. I read (well, listened to) the first Divergent book late last year at the advice of my younger teenage daughter, who is a fan. I liked it and found it to be tightly plotted and well paced. A little too heavy on the female adolescent romantic angst, but I guess that's where the big Hunger Games bucks are, and I'm clearly not in the target audience. What made the first book worth reading, for me, was its exploration of one of my favorite subjects: how communities are formed and maintained, based on shared values and reinforcing rituals which give meaning to the lives of the community's members, and how such communities can lose their way. I just didn't enjoy this second book in the trilogy nearly as much. It felt like the author had rushed it to print for marketing purposes rather than taking as much time as was needed to get it right, leading to a narrative mess. The big reveal at the end was pretty good though, better than anything they came up with on Lost.
Dead Mountain, by Donnie Eichar. 3.5 stars out of 5. Kindle. A fascinating and tragic true story which reads like an episode of the X-Files. What was the "unknown compelling force" (in the words of the official investigation) which, in February 1959, caused 9 Russian hikers to flee the security of their tent, and perish from hypothermia and other causes in the subzero temperatures of the remote landscape in which they were hiking? An American author investigates. His solution to the puzzle is itself highly intriguing. But it would be more credible if someone were to conduct some follow up testing. Could the right scientific monitors, installed over the course of a full winter or two, determine whether the area's topography really does sometimes result in the weather patterns and associated phenomenon the author describes? Maybe somebody someday will find out. In the meantime, there's a tragic slice of life story here which is worth reading for it's own sake to better understand life in Kruschev's Soviet Union.
In the Garden of Beasts, by Eric Larson. 3.5 stars out of 5. Trade paperback. The true story of how FDR's unlikely choice as ambassador to Germany in the 1930s, University of Chicago history professor William Dodd, slowly recognizes just how big a threat to the world Adolf Hitler really is, but is unable to convince anyone back home to do anything about it. Meanwhile, Dodd's promiscuous daughter Martha proves that stupidity in one's private life is often related to stupidity in one's politics. The tale culminates in the "night of the long knives" when Hitler liquidated the SA, and settled a few dozen other old political scores, in a 24 hour spasm of dictatorial violence, arrests and executions. An odd and unsettling book about an odd and unsettling family living through a nightmarish time.
FEBRUARY
The God Who Weeps by Terryl and Fiona Givens. 5 Stars. Kindle. There's an ethereal and esoteric quality to the writing here that is a little hard to get used to. Not your normal LDS doctrinal writing style. And certainly nothing akin to the frank and matter-of-fact plainspoken style of the best non-LDS Christian doctrinal writers, such as C.S. Lewis or G.K. Chesterton. Nevertheless, once you get used to that style, and learn to focus on what is being conveyed, there are some real treasures here. Deserves a place on that bookshelf of items I go back to again and again, for years to come.
The Triple Package by Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld. 3 Stars. Kindle. The premise of this book is that certain cultural groups (including my cultural group: Mormons) rise and achieve more in America because they possess three qualities: a belief in their superiority which is innate to their cultural or doctrinal self-perception, an inferiority complex/insecurity based on their lack of acceptance in mainstream American society, and impulse control. There's a lot to be said, pro and con, about this book, but I'm not interested enough to write a full blog entry about it. Suffice it to say that I think Mormons can be charged with having a lot of confidence, but the idea that we feel superior is a misreading of our doctrine. Yes, we believe ourselves to be essentially the same type of beings as God, but in a different stage of development. No, that doesn't mean we feel superior to others (Like C. S. Lewis, we think everyone is a God in embryo, not just ourselves). I'm comfortable with the concept of our having some insecurity, based on being outsiders in the larger culture (mocked by the secular left on Broadway, while simultaneously attacked as a cult by our "allies" in the culture wars on the religious right) and the drive to succeed which that produces. And, yes, I suppose our missions, and our abstemious lifestyle in an "if it feels good do it" world does give many of us far more impulse control than the typical early 21st Century, anything-goes, American. But I think Chua is missing a fourth ingredient which is more important than the rest: the advantages of being raised in stable low-conflict homes, by our own two biological married parents, from birth to adulthood (as so many more Mormons than the general population now experience), provides us with an advantage in a world where studies have increasingly proven just how much family structure matters, and just how disruptive it is that family structures have, for the past 50 years, lost their historic stability.
Theodore Roosevelt's History of the United States compiled by Daniel Ruddy. 5 stars out of 5. Trade Paperback. Man do I have conflicted feelings about Theodore Roosevelt. Love some of his political positions and hate others. But I sure do enjoy the man and his personality: His willingness to decide what he believes and stick to his guns on those beliefs no matter the criticism of others; his intellectual capacity as both a voracious reader and a writer of serious non-fiction, combined with his physically "strenuous" life, made The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris and its first follow-up, Theodore Rex, two of my favorite books of all time. This book collects excerpts from Roosevelt's writings and letters, and sticks them under various headings in chronological order, to give us a snapshot of his views on various historical figures, from the Revolutionary era until the end of World War I. It's clear his political and historical opinions were cast in iron by his coming of age during the Civil War. Anyone who did anything to strengthen this country and its government (including the presidency and the judiciary), like Washington, Hamilton, most of all Lincoln, and of course himself: GOOD. Anyone who toyed with weakening the union, or pursuing policies such as nullification that ultimately provided the doctrinal underpinnings for secession, like Jefferson, Madison (in that Post-Philadelphia phase of his life when he followed Jefferson), Gouverneur Morris: BAD. This book will at turns shock, with Roosevelt's prescience; offend, with his politically incorrect jingoism; and cause literal laughing out loud, at his bombastic patriotism. Loved it.
MARCH
David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell. 4 out of 5 stars. Hardback. I enjoyed this almost as much as Outliers, which remains my favorite Malcolm Gladwell book.
When I was growing up, my father had two favorite quotes: "Every advantage has its tax" by Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his essay, Compensation; and "[w]ithin every disadvantage lays the seed of an equivalent benefit" which, though sometimes attributed to Emerson, was actually motivational writer Napoleon Hill's riff on Emerson's first statement. David and Goliath is a book-length treatise on the truth behind these two quotes.
The Gladwell formula is by now familiar: develop a counterintutive theme, and tell lots of interesting stories about it, interspersing in each chapter one such story with research findings from the relevant field, backing up the contrarian wisdom of your premise. In this volume, Gladwell has hit upon a theme which perfectly matches both his gifts and his template, as he explores the notion of "desirable difficulty." There are hardships we wouldn't wish on our own children which can actually help a person to succeed, Gladwell argues, either (a) because of the character traits (strength, grit, determination) a person gains from overcoming such difficulties, or (b) because, lacking traditional advantages, persons suffering from such desirable difficulties have to break the rules and find ways to exploit the hidden weaknesses of traditionally strong opponents (think guerilla warfare or a scrappy basketball team's willingness, borne of nothing-to-lose desperation, to employ a full court press). As should be expected from a story-teller as gifted as Gladwell, this volume has plenty of engaging, well-told tales.
Can Gladwell be trusted? Of course not. His stories are obviously simplified, and it's fairly apparent that what's being left out is any nuance that would prevent the story from fitting into his current book's theme. And each of Gladwell's books always seem to devolve into filler in the last couple of chapters, with stories that don't seem to have anything obvious to do with his treatise, but which he stretches or twists to try to make them fit some element of his pattern. Nevertheless, it's always an enjoyable ride, and there's always a few of his stories or the research findings he presents that you find wanting to discuss with your friends and family members. (As the father of two college kids, I was especially intrigued by this book's chapter on the alleged disadvantages of an Ivy League education, as an application of the big fish small pond theory). Sign me up for Gladwell's next one. I'll keep reading.
Allegiant by Veronica Roth. Two stars. Audible. I usually enjoy getting out of a sci-fi/fantasy world's established locale and learning the big reveals about the backstory truth. The chapters in the fourth Wheel of Time book, for example, when Rand passes through the temple at Rhuidean and learns the true history of the Aiel, are some of my favorites in the whole series. However, this can be overdone. It's one thing to be shown tantalizing bits of the back story, which intrigue us with the knowledge that we are reading about an interesting world with a deep and resonant geography and history. It's another thing to be jerked away from the world we've come to enjoy, and told to spend the rest of our time in backstoryland, so that we no longer find the backstory all that intriguing. Think the Star Wars prequels, or trying to slog through the Silmarillion. That's the problem I had with this book, the third and final book in the series, which focuses on the true reasons why dystopian Chicago has come to exist, and is set almost entirely outside of Chicago. That outside world, however, just didn't seem very well-thought out or convincing or interesting to me, compared to the factioned dystopian world that had been established in the first book, where there was still plenty of room for more exploration.
APRIL
Brave New World Aldous Huxley. Kindle. Five Stars. Back in the 20th century, when literary dystopias were intended as social commentary, rather than useful settings for young adult romantic angst and adventure books, three titles arose as the most significant: 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and Brave New World. I'm not sure why this is the only one of the three that I've never read until now. Maybe because I thought I already knew the basic idea from a cheesy TV Movie version I remember seeing in the 80s (now available on Youtube) and so I never bothered to read it. That was a mistake. It's clear that, of the three works, this was the most prescient. The one that worked least effectively as warning, and most effectively as prophecy. Marriage abolished? On our way. Children taught to enjoy sexual promiscuity at an ever earlier age, in public schools? Check. Sexual promiscuity as a norm? Check. Sex and procreation and child-rearing and marriage all treated as sundered and independent processes having nothing whatsoever to do with each other? Check An economy based on conditioning the masses to believe they stand in constant need of new stuff? Check. Pharmacological -induced emotions in lieu of dealing with life? Check. Human beings untouched by nature, unaware of literature, and concerned only with pleasures that keep their attention through sensory overload? Check, check and double check. The scariest thing about this book, to me, is how few people would read it today and understand that it's meant to be dystopian. And how many people would read it as describing the supposed Utopia they are working to achieve.
MAY
The Golem and the Jinni Helene Wecker. Kindle. Four Stars. An enjoyable historical fantasy novel set in turn-of-the-Century New York. A good solid piece of fun entertainment with no socially redeeming value whatsoever. Just what I was in the mood for.
JUNE
The Radicalism of the American Revolution Gordon S. Wood. Audible. Five Stars. A fascinating exploration of the heirarchical and integrated society which existed in the American colonies under British monarchy, unchanged in many ways from the British society which had existed for centuries; the founding fathers' tenuous place as recently arrived aristocratic gentry within that society, who, like all novices, fully embraced the value system of that caste, especially the disinterested commitment to public service expected of those possessed of the right type of wealth; and how that world was completely upended and overturned by the Revolution. We will never have another group of men quite like the founders, in large part because what they wrought destroyed their class, its value system, and the world and assumptions that had produced them.
JULY
The Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle. Kindle. I've always strongly believed that balance is a key to life. But this book helped me to apply that principle in an entirely different way, and provided me with some new paradigms. This is a book about virtues. The virtues, according to Aristotle, must be developed as character traits by being lived and acted out, until they become habitual and thus characteristic of a virtuous person. This is sound doctrine.
But Aristotle sees the virtues in a way which is much less manichean, much less black and white, than we tend to see them. For Aristotle, each virtue is the correct median point between an excess and a deficiency. Thus, courage and cowardice are not opposites. Rather, courage should be understood as the correct reaction to the right circumstances in which it is appropriate to act out of determination rather than fear, such that courage is the proper midpoint between two extremes:
COWARDICE COURAGE RECKLESSNESS
(deficiency) (virtue) (excess)
And so it goes for a host of other values as well: prudence, moderation, justness, liberality, generosity, civic-mindedness, etc., all of them are the proper characteristic between the deficiency and the excess. I love this idea. Have you ever known someone who just seemed to have a hard time in life? A hard time staying employed, a hard time staying married, a hard time staying active in the church? For many who struggle with such problems, there is an apathy about life that seems to be the problem. A deficiency in ambition: The individual whose every conversation and facial gesutre seem to indicate: "I just can't care that much about my job, my spouse, my marriage, my church involvement, etc." But I can also think of some individuals who live their lives in such a constant state of tightly wound overzealousness that they have driven away their spouse and their employer, or driven themselves from the church, as well.
There is also much in this line of thinking to recommend itself politically: It helps explain my own aversion to libertarianism and the anarchy leading inevitably to tyranny which it recommends, as well as my aversion to totalitarian social justice liberalism and the revolutionary anarchy which it invites, or any other overly doctrinaire and extremist political position. As a conservative, I find much common cause with libertarianism on certain points, except when I realize how quickly it would lead to a kind of anarchy that is always the predecessor to tyranny. The answer to too much government isn't no government, it's the right amount of government. The answer to bad laws isn't no laws, it's good laws. But finding that proper middle ground is too hard for our society. We're squaring off into all-or-nothing camps, the socialist totalitarians and the libertarian anarchists, ready for battle. Aristotle's treatise also discusses the politics of the ideal city-state government, and calls for a resistance to such extremes.
The Curmudgeon's Guide to Getting Ahead Charles Murray. Kindle. This short book, subtitled "Dos and Don'ts of Right Behavior, Tough Thinking, Clear Writing, and Living a Good Life" is full of good advice for young people. I was probably a little too old for it to do me much good though, already being stuck in my curmudgeonly ways. But I enjoyed it anyway. There's some great information here on writing. (If only someone had explained to me to "kill your darlings" 20 years ago.) The stuff on happiness, though covered in greater detail in Murray's book, Coming Apart, is essential.
OCTOBER
James Madison, A Life Reconsidered, Lynne Cheney. Hardback. 3.5 Stars, but 5 stars for the chapters on the Constitutional Convention and its aftermath. I had very strong feelings about this book, which I've written about in two separate blog entries, beginning with the blog post located here:
http://dadsbookreviews.blogspot.com/2014/10/some-thoughts-on-religious-liberty.html
NOVEMBER
Leadership and Self Deception: Getting Out of the Box The Arbinger Institute. Trade Paperback. 4.5 Stars. This was an incredible book which should be read by every single person on the planet who is in any relationship at all (as a spouse, a parent, a child, a sibling, a co-worker, an employer, an employee, a church calling holder working with others, etc.). The only reason I didn't give it a full five stars is I was a little annoyed that the last chapter turned into an advertisement for additional material that could be learned by taking an Arbinger Institute Seminar. I wish I had been given this book four years ago when I was first called to a church calling that involved counseling people who were experiencing conflict in their marriages or in their relationships with children. Really incredibly useful.
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution Bernard Bailyn. Kindle. 4 Stars. As pointed out by Gordon S. Wood, in the Introduction to his book, The Idea of America (Penguin, 2011), in the first half of the Twentieth Century, progressive historians taught that early American history was primarily to be understood in economic terms, with Charles Beard's book, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, forming the lynchpin for this point of view. This progressive view, with its economic interpretation, began to be debunked in the second half of the Twentieth Century, as historians came to better understand the political ideals which motivated the revolution, and see the legitimacy and sincerity with which those views were held, for their own sake, and not merely as cover for a fight about economic self-interest. Bailyn's Ideological Origins, which studies the political pamphlets of the revolutionary era, was the major assault on the progressive historians and their economic interpretation. It is essential and fascinating reading for anyone who wants to understand why the revolution mattered to those who fought it, and how they themselves understood their own political principles.
The Idea of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States Gordon S. Wood. Trade Paperback. 5 Stars.
There are three kinds of books about history:
(1) Historical Surveys. Surveys cover the major events of a certain era in chronological order, and I almost always find them incredibly boring, as they necessarily lack the most important sources of engagement in any piece of writing: flesh and blood protagonists. The fact that history textbooks for public schools are written in this chronological form explains everything we need to know about most Americans' lack of historical literacy or interest. If you got out of public school with any interest or curiosity about history whatsoever, it was in spite, not because, of how the subject was handled in your textbooks. Most high school students' natural sense of curiosity did not survive.
(2) Biographies. These are the most engaging and accessible way to learn about history. A well written biography can tell a great story about an interesting character influencing and being influenced by fascinating events and personalities. It was through biography that my own interest in American history was rekindled many years after academic textbooks had almost completely killed it off.
(3) Finally, there are books of Historical Analysis, which, when done well, and when approached with sufficient background knowledge in hand, are the most rewarding of all. These are the books which try to explain the political and/or economic and/or religious and/or geographical and/or military and/or cultural basis for why things happened the way they did. Books that have a theory. Books which prove that history is NOT just one darn thing after another, let alone bunk. Books that prove history is important and help us realize that the choices we are making right now matter, and will continue to matter, for a long time to come, for good or ill.
On the subject of the early American republic, Gordon S. Wood probably writes this third type of history as well as anyone, alive or dead. (Joseph J. Ellis, who writes for a less scholarly audience, has a style which is more fun, interesting and engaging, and whose views I sympathize with more often than I do with some of Wood's, would be a close second. But Wood offers deep insights, and if you can make the effort, the payoff is worth it.) The Idea of America is a collection of some of Wood's short pieces of academic prose, presented over the course of his career as articles for scholarly journals or speeches in various academic forums, each updated for this collection, with notes after each chapter on Woods' current feelings on the issues he covers. Woods is a little more sympathetic towards Jeffersonian Republicanism, and a little more hostile towards Hamiltonian Federalism, than I am. And he appreciates the radical deism of Jefferson and Paine that I find slightly horrifying. But he doesn't hit you over the head with his sympathies, so those are minor quibbles. On subject after subject (American historiography as covered in his introduction; the influence of the Roman Republic on the founders' ideology; whether the founders were paranoid conspiracy theorists and if so whether we should care; the British origins and the political ideology of the constitution; the rise of self-interested political factions; the development of "rights" in American legal theory), Woods offers nuanced, non-ideologically driven, clear-cut insights. He has no interest in mining the founders for ideological ammunition in any modern political controversies. Rather, his interest lies in helping us to understand the Founders' long-vanished, and, to us, largely incomprehensible, world, and how that world influenced, and was influenced by, the founders' political viewpoints. This is a book that helps a reader understand the way the founders saw themselves and their struggles in their own time. If you were to only read one book on early American history in your entire lifetime, you could do much worse than selecting this volume.
The Giver Lois Lowry. Audible. 3 stars. This is a beautiful evocative story, full of religious symbolism. I would have liked it more though if the plot had been more detailed, if better explanations had been provided for how they blocked color and sunlight etc., and if the ending had been less ambiguous. I am a big fan of Tolkien's distinction between allegory and applicability. Allegory works best, in my opinion, when it's something you can find for yourself as an applicable symbolic meaning, available as one reading of a story, which story though stands on its own two feet and works on its own, even if you never feel the need to see or look for any greater meaning.
This book doesn't pass that test. The fantasy elements are never adequately explained, and the ending is obviously contrived to remain open to myriad interpretations. The author intends us to think of the book as a fable, not a novel which works as a good story in its own right. Still, for what it is, it's well done. And it's always fascinating to me how often some variation of this same story comes up in sci-fi and fantasy: the world without opposition or agency, controlled by higher powers for the protection and sheltering of its citizens, ala Satan's plan in the Pearl of Great Price, or modern day Sweden. You can see it in A Wrinkle in Time, the film version of I Robot, the first episode of Star Trek Voyager, just to name a few examples I can remember off the top of my head. Perhaps it keeps recurring because it reminds us of something.
DECEMBER
How Will You Measure Your Life Clayton M. Christensen. Kindle. 4 Stars. A wonderful little book my son Scott recommended to me. Like the Curmudgeon's Guide, by Murray, this book is written for people younger than me. But I loved it anyway, as I subscribe to the philosophy that tomorrow is always another day and we are never too old to learn. Christensen uses business case studies from his Harvard college course and applies them to personal settings: charting goals for a meaningful life, effective parenting and marital relations, integrity. A great read.
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