Daniel Overdorf. A Death Well Lived. Crosslink, 2020.

Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that the son of man is?” (Matthew 16:13)

It takes a little while to get into A Death Well Lived. There are a number of characters introduced and whom we follow, but it becomes clear that the story centers around one Lucius, a Roman centurion stationed in Caesarea in the Holy Land at the time of Christ.

Much of the dynamic in the story comes from the interaction between the Jewish residents of the Holy Land and their ruthless Roman rulers. Lucius himself practically kills a Jewish demonstrator in Caesarea. The man is holding a piece of bread, but it looks like a rock to Lucius. But, hey, he is only a Jew, one of many conquered peoples the Romans look down upon.

Also figuring in the story are Lucius’ common law wife Nona (Roman soldiers could not marry); Tullus and Paulla, their two children; Septimus, Lucius’ overbearing boss; Decius, Lucius’ longtime friend and fellow soldier; and Avitus, a Roman soldier with a Syrian background who has a helpful understanding of Hebrew customs. Pontius Pilate makes an appearance, and Jewish mobs in various places around Palestine are complaining and demonstrating against some of his policies.

That brings Lucius and his century (100 men) to Jerusalem. People are complaining about some of Pilate’s building projects that do not respect Jewish custom and law. More soldiers are needed to keep the peace there. Here we meet some important Jewish characters: Tobiah and Deborah, the victim of Lucius’ beating and his pregnant wife; Ephraim and Miriam, who operate a popular inn; and peripherally, the rabbi Jesus of Nazareth.

Because of the Roman perspective, the Roman-Jewish interaction, and Jesus in the background, this reader cannot help think of Ben-Hur. That is perhaps an unfair comparison, though. Ben-Hur is epic in scope. A Death Well Lived covers less than a year. While there are a couple of riots and plenty of conflict, much of the conflict in this new novel is internal. We see a gradual change in Lucius as he begins to see Jews as real people not all that different from him or anyone else.

Like Judah Ben-Hur, though, Lucius does encounter Jesus because they are both in Jerusalem during Passover. Jesus is observing the holiday and teaching his followers. Lucius is patrolling the streets to make sure that order is maintained.

Another novel that a reader might be reminded of is The Robe. The main character of that novel is a Roman soldier who wins Jesus’ robe in the dice game at the crucifixion (See Matthew 27:35, cf. Psalm 22:18). That also has much more scope than A Death Well Lived.

A Death Well Lived is not so much a sword and sandal epic as a historical novel focusing ultimately on the changes taking place in a battle-hardened Roman soldier as he witnesses the religion of the Jews and the works of Jesus of Nazareth. Perhaps more so than either of those two classic novels, this confronts the reader with a very important question: Who is Jesus? What difference does it make? Or, as Jesus Himself asked, “Who do you say that I am?” (Matthew 16:13)

Disclosure of Material: We received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher through the BookCrash book review program, which requires an honest, though not necessarily positive, review.

Randy Petersen. The Printer and the Preacher. Nelson, 2015.

We recommend The Printer and Preacher to anyone who teaches American Literature or American History. It gives us some important clues as to what even today makes the United States different from other places. The author uses two important figures from eighteenth century America to illustrate his point: Benjamin Franklin, the printer; and George Whitefield, the preacher.

Petersen makes a reasonable case that Franklin and Whitfield were the first two American celebrities. Yes, there were early colonial founders like the Winthrops, William Penn, Lord Baltimore, Roger Williams, John Smith, and so on. There were some other writers like the Mathers and Jonathan Edwards, but they and their work tended to be localized. Franklin and Whitfield were the first names widely recognized among all of the thirteen colonies.

For years I have shared with my classes what Franklin said about Whitefield in his autobiography. Franklin admired and respected him, even if he did not always agree with him. But what is written in his autobiography does not tell the full story of their relationship.

Petersen notes that their relationship was not only cordial but symbiotic. Franklin made money selling Whitfield’s sermons and reporting on his travels. Whitefield preached at evangelistic rallies in every colony from New Hampshire to Georgia. (Readers may recall that Maine was part of Massachusetts before 1818, and Florida was Spanish during most of the Colonial period.) There was probably no contemporary figure, except for the King, better known in the colonies than Whitfield. No one except for the King made the news more.

Except for, possibly, Franklin. His Poor Richard’s Almanac was a best seller, and as he began his scientific experiments and political involvement, he became more famous. Petersen reminds us, for example, it was Franklin who coined the terms positive and negative for electrical charges along with his various electrical experiments and inventions like the Franklin stove and bifocal glasses.

Whitfield also stuck up for Franklin. In the 1760s when Franklin was in London representing several colonies, he opposed the Stamp Act and was able to work out a compromise to repeal it. Many in the colonies thought he still gave up too much with the compromise, but Whitefield wrote a letter that was reprinted in many newspapers defending Franklin’s actions. Thanks largely to this letter, the controversy over Franklin’s actions blew over.

In his autobiography Franklin tells how he supported the building of a protected theater that could be used by speakers of all religions. Whitefield would use that and become a supporter. That lecture hall became the foundation of the University of Pennsylvania. Both men are included when naming its founders. Both men would correspond with each other until Whitefield’s death in 1770.

Whitefield was far and away the best-known itinerant evangelist of the Great Awakening. He was a personal friend of the Wesley brothers and corresponded with Jonathan Edwards. He was a native of England and traveled all over the British Isles, but he spent a lot of time in North America and died in 1770 in Newburyport, Massachusetts, where he is buried.

What distinguished him in this time period was that, though he was ordained by the Anglican Church, he did not promote a particular denomination or theology. He tried to emphasize the necessity of committing to Jesus Christ, regardless of church affiliation. That was something new and different. It would become the precursor of many evangelists and movements in America. I am reminded of a Christian men’s organization which had a song that said, “I don’t care what church you belong to, as long as at Calvary you stand.” For probably a century or so, that idea would only take root in America.

Franklin liked that about Whitefield. His autobiography tells us that by the age of thirty he had given up his deistic ideas, but he said he could never join a particular church because do so would seem divisive. Petersen does note also, though Franklin came to understand that God took an active part in history, he was unsure about Jesus’ divinity. Still he would promote religious freedom. By the time the United States’ Constitution was ratified, most Americans acknowledged the idea of religious liberty. We have both the printer and the preacher to thank for that.

Petersen also notes something else very distinctive about the American colonies. There was no established aristocracy. In England, the concept of a gentleman was someone who did not have to work for a living. He could live off rents, investments, and inheritances. While there were men who tried to live that way in America, Franklin showed there was perhaps a better and more honorable way: work hard. Even today, if America has an immigration problem, it is primarily because people want freedom and want a chance to succeed in life. Franklin in his writings and in his life showed how this was possible. While he did know how to relax, he was never idle for very long.

Plymouth, Massachusetts, bills itself as America’s Hometown. It has a good case for that title: early religious tolerance, no state church, and a representative form of government patterned after the Congregational churches. But if you were going to speak of colonial celebrities who both influenced and demonstrated directions that the English speaking colonies in North America would take, take a look at The Printer and the Preacher.

G. K. Chesterton. Eugenics and Other Evils. 1922. Amazon Digital, 2012.

G K. Chesterton is one of those writers who is frequently quoted but seldom read—except perhaps for fans of Father Brown mysteries. Eugenics and Other Evils still has a lot to say, even if contemporary readers might not know some of the politicians and journalists he refers to.

Eugenics and Other Evils still deserves to be quoted. Chesterton here is pointed and logical. It also might make the reader a bit wistful. This 1922 book ends on a positive note that the Allies defeated the Germans, the source of Nietzschean philosophy and the pseudo-science of eugenics. We in the Western world have learned our lesson.

Except, of course, that we didn’t. We had to fight a Second World War against enemies that took eugenics to an extreme unimagined by the Kaiser and his Prussian professors.

Today’s reader can easily note how much of Chesterton’s argument today applies to abortion. Abortion, at least in the West, is a holdover from the eugenics movement. While most abortions in the United States stem from male chauvinism—the father convinces the mother to abort because he wants to avoid responsibility—we know that many abortions come because the infant’s genes indicate some kind of abnormality or the mother is persuaded she cannot afford to raise it. Those were both arguments the eugenists used.

In Chesterton’s day, the discussion included the idea of government-sanctioned marriages and other techniques for reducing the number of lower class people having children. He points out that poverty does not necessarily mean bad genes, or even a lower class. Many people in England can point to nobility somewhere in their family trees. Not that that means superior genes, but simply that poverty or wealth of parents is not a way to predict the financial status of the children.

One of the ostensible reasons given in the Roe vs. Wade ruling which overturned abortion laws in our country was that abortion would reduce the number of poor people. It has not. Chesterton would say:

I know it is praised with high professions of idealism and benevolence, with silver-tongued rhetoric about motherhood and happier posterity. But that is only because evil is always flattered, as the Furies were called “The Gracious Ones.” (3)

Chesterton makes us chuckle as well. For example the term eugenics itself (“good or blessed birth or race”) is not an accurate term for an opponent to use. He simply notes that chivalrous is not the French for “horsy.” (The root of the word comes from the French cheval, which means “horse.”)

He also notes something that Orwell would develop in more detail in his essay “Politics and the English Language”:

Most Eugenists are Euphemists. I mean merely that short words startle them, while long words soothe them. And they are utterly incapable of translating one into the other…

Eugenists are as passive in their statements as they are active in their experiments. Their sentences always enter tail first, and have no subject, like animals without heads. (22)

This sounds so much like Orwell; I wonder if Chesterton influenced him. It no different today when abortion promoters speak of their work.

He notes that there is a problem any time someone proposes a reform that calls for more government:

Autocrats…are those who give us generally that every modern reform will “work” all right because they will be there to see.

The problem is that most times a law “will do as a dog does” and “obey its own nature.”

Chesterton says that because eugenics disrupts the family and raises moral questions, those who propose it are at heart anarchists. He notes that historically anarchists are rare. They are not the same as rebels—even the devil expects his followers to recognize his authority. Eugenists and their pro-abortion allies recognize no authority except a vague subjectivity. I wonder what he would say about postmodernism! We are reminded of Judges 21:25.

Unfortunately, this sense of anarchy has taken root in the West even without the extremes of death camps, forced sterilization, and government-sanctioned marriages. Chesterton notes that this could lead to a problem in sexual relations. It has. As I write, many people maintain that sex is not something someone is born with but is based on subjective feelings and behavior. Among other things, it results in a lack of self-control, something we seem to read about every day in the news.

Anarchy…is the loss of self-control which can return to normal. It is not anarchy when men are permitted to begin uproar, extravagance, experiment, peril. It is anarchy when people cannot end these things. (11, emphasis in original)

“The modern world is insane, not so much because it admits the abnormal as because it cannot recover the normal.” (11) As I write this, a lawsuit in my state is trying to get boys who identify as girls to not compete against girls in high school sports. The local newspaper puts “biologically male” in quotation marks whenever it uses that term, as if to say alleged or so-called biological males. Anarchy, indeed.

Just as the newspaper editors ask “what is maleness?” so Chesterton says that the anarchist will ask “what is liberty?”

It leaves the question free to disregard any liberty, in other words to take any liberties. The very thing he says is an anticipatory excuse for anything he may choose to do. (65)

When Pontius Pilate shrugged off his sentence upon Jesus of Nazareth, he said something very similar: “What is truth?” No matter, he could do what he wanted.

Chesterton notes that “The thing that really is trying to tyrannise through government is Science.” He calls Science “the creed that is really levying tithes and capturing schools.” (34)

If it means the imposition of by the police of a widely disputed theory, incapable of final proof—then our priests are not prosecuting, but our doctors are. (34)

When we have Science trying to shape politics, we not only get eugenics, we get Socialism. Neither eugenics nor Socialism “destroy inequality.” They destroy security. “The ideal of liberty is lost, and the ideal of Socialism is changed, till it is a mere excuse for the oppression of the poor.” (72)

In spite of our historical record of fighting against the National Socialists in World War II and the subsequent obvious shortcomings and problems with other socialist societies, it seems like many in the West have not recognized that Socialism does not work in the long run. And the poor suffer the most under it.

There is much more. Chesterton reminds us that the poor and disabled are as human as anyone else. That argument still stands. May our liberty stand as well.

Anne Elmer. Transported by the Lion of Judah. Elijah List, 2003.

This little book was recommended by friend. It is worth the relatively small amount of time to take to read it. The author’s focus is a series of visions she had of Jesus showing her various places around the world.

The format of Transported by the Lion of Judah reminded me of the framework of Pilgrim’s Progress. The reader may recall that John Bunyan, its author, said the story came from a dream he had while he was in prison. (Bunyan spent over twelve years in prison for his faith.)

Here the author tells us that she was laid up in the hospital with a gall bladder infection for three weeks with few visitors and a roommate who was sleeping or unconscious much of the time. On a number of occasions the Lord appeared to her since she was virtually alone most of the time.

Most of the time Jesus appeared to her as a lion, hence the title. He took her to a few places where miracles were taking place. Whenever she saw miracles, she would see spirals in the air. She said these resembled DNA—that the Lord was creating new things “out of the air” by the power of his word.

Once she was told to pray for the woman she was sharing her hospital room with. The woman told her that she saw her son with her while they were praying. At the time, her son was in another part of the country. She must have seen Jesus, too.

Shortly before the woman died, she was talking to some relatives who were not physically present. The author assumes that the woman was hallucinating. While that might have been the case, after reading Death is But a Dream, I might re-think that hypothesis. The woman may have been preparing to die and resolving some things in her heart. One of the things that that Lord was concerned about was that woman’s relationship with Him.

As mentioned before, the real focus of the visions is what the Lord showed her around the world. Besides the miracle services, she observed various other Christian meetings and gatherings as well as two gatherings of other religions.

One other striking thing in her visions was that most of the Christian believers she saw were faceless. A common emphasis about current and future revivals is that they will be nameless and faceless. The age of the Christian superstars, whether Billy Graham or Mother Teresa, is past. The few faces that had discernible features were motivated by pride. They wanted to have themselves noticed. The lion had his own way of taking care of them. They soon lost whatever position that they had.

There was a twenty-four hour a day underground church in a non-Christian country. Seekers and worshipers would enter one way and exit another.

Twice the lion roared. Once was in a church in a Buddhist-majority country where a group of believers were worshiping in what had once been a Buddhist building.

In another country, he took her to a Buddhist shrine with an enormous idol. Obviously, no one there was worshiping Jesus, but He said that He had the right to be there. Over the years Christian visitors and tourists had prayed for the people there and He would be answering their prayers. Recently, I received a prayer request asking for millions of souls from the same region. It was hard to imagine, but we see here that prayer does make a difference. It helps “break up the fallow ground” for God’s salvation to come. (See Hosea 10:12) Perhaps we should be praying for billions!

The author also noted a church, perhaps symbolically in a frozen and wintry setting, where the people were worshiping and were happy to be there. However, they were not aware of the Lord’s presence. They were enjoying one another’s company and the activity of the service, but they had not yet reached the point where they were seeking his presence. Still, Jesus was confident that they would be seeking Him later on and the church there would prosper.

There was a good deal more, but overall it gave the impression—if there were any doubt—that God knows what is going on in the world and who really has a heart after Him, to use the biblical terminology (See Acts 13:22 cf. I Samuel 13:14). It is also a reminder of how important prayer is and how important it is to cultivate a personal relationship with Jesus.

I am familiar with the Elijah List. It is an email record of supernatural stories from around the world. I was not aware that it has a publishing arm, but the people who put the Elijah List together have a challenging job to discern what it real. I would suggest to readers who are skeptical of the supernatural element (people in the West are culturally materialists) that they would read Transported by the Lion of Judah as they would Pilgrim’s Progress. Yes, it is a story of supernatural activity, but it is at the very least an intense teaching allegory that gives us insight into the spiritual realm. For anyone of any persuasion, it emphasizes the truth of the Scripture that

Behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has prevailed…(Revelation 5:5 NKJV)

Or, as C. S. Lewis put it, “Aslan is not a tame lion.”

Julie Klassen. The Bridge to Belle Island. Bethany House, 2019.

This book was recommended to me by someone who knows I like an entertaining mystery. However, I was reluctant at first to read it because the cover makes it look like historical chick lit. The cover has a woman in a Regency outfit with a sizeable mansion in the background. Yeah, the cover looked like Jane Austen or the Brontës, but the Bridge to Belle Island really was more like Agatha Christie. The romance comes quickly at the end like a Shakespeare play.

The murder happens almost immediately. There are clues and red herrings. Much of the action takes place on Belle Island, a small island in the Thames River. The attorney Benjamin Booker is sent there by his law firm to do a few things—investigate the murder and determine who gets trusteeship of the family inheritance.

You see, it is a senior partner of Booker’s firm who has been murdered. Not only that, but he was assigned to be trustee of the family estate of Belle Island because the two heirs were both minor females at the time of their father and uncle’s demise. Now Isabelle lives on the estate, running it well as a family business. Her niece Rose is getting married. Even though this is only about 1815, there is no legal reason why they cannot manage their inheritance themselves now.

Isabelle Wilder is in danger of becoming a spinster. She is thirty, and because of a fear of a family curse, she has not left the island for any reason in ten years. She is also a prime suspect in the murder of her “uncle” who was the trustee and is the murder victim. She says she had a dream of his murder the night it happened. Of course, she was on the island while the victim was killed miles away in London. But how could she have known the details? Maybe there is some spooky supernatural thing going on. So, yes, there is a touch of the Gothic.

We discover, as is often the case in such stories of murders, that nobody really liked Uncle Percival. There are a whole cast of characters who had reasons to see him out of the way: the two heiresses, Rose’s fiancé, the doctor suitor whom Percival turned away, another suitor whom Percival got to join the army in time to fight Napoleon, several of the employees of his law firm who did not like working for him, and then some criminals who think he had double-crossed them. We discover that even Isabelle’s maid had had some unfortunate dealing with the man. To make things more complicated, one of the employees who is a suspect dies in the same manner Percival did.

The novel provides many curious details. We learn a lot about the medicine and pharmaceuticals of the period from the local physician Dr. Grant and from Mr. Booker’s father, who is a pharmacist. Having witnessed a few floods in my lifetime and having worked for the Coast Guard, I can assure any reader that the descriptions of flooding—adding some natural hazards to the story along with the deadly humanity—are spot on.

It is no spoiler to say that the ending reminded this reader of a Shakespeare comedy. Not the mystery of the killer—the revelation will be a surprise to most readers, I suspect, though the evidence is there. The end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream has three couples getting married; the end of As You Like It has four.

The only difference is that because his were plays, Shakespeare has his couples get married together on stage. Since The Bridge to Belle Island is a novel, the author does not have to stage the drama that way, but there are three couples getting married at the end. Novels may have several subplots, after all. So, yes, there is the romance element in the tale, but the mystery and the action keep the story going. And, yes, it was not chick lit. The main character is Mr. Booker and his challenge is to solve the murder and figure out the complicated legal tangle of the Wilder estate. Well done.

Michael McAuliffe. No Truth Left to Tell. Greenleaf, 2020.

No Truth Left to Tell on the surface is a legal potboiler, but it is different from nearly all of them. The author says that the story is based on real events. But it is not the usual legal thriller about huge lawsuits or organized crime. The main character in No Truth Left to Tell is an attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department.

Adrien Rush is called in with FBI Special Agent Lee Mercer to Lynnwood, Louisiana, to investigate five cross burnings that happened one night in that town. The readers know that the local Ku Klux Klan leader wants to start a race war. While there are plenty of witnesses to the cross burnings, there is little evidence to prosecute anyone.

As is often true in cases like this, the local police get a lucky break. Without going into too much detail (I try to avoid spoilers), a relatively routine traffic stop of the Klan leader reveals a box with a Klan costume in the back seat. Frank Daniels soon admits his involvement. He does not implicate anyone else, but he is arrested and brought to trial.

There is a lot of local color. The writer, a former prosecuting attorney, knows his people well. We get some very moving backstories in the course of the tale, including a simultaneously moving and repulsive story about how Rush became interested in Civil Rights.

When I teach Jane Eyre, for example, that story seems to be playing out as a somewhat formulaic romance. Rochester proposes to Jane, Jane accepts. End of story? Well, I point out to the students that there are nearly 200 pages left in the book. Things are not all what they seem.

Ditto with No Truth Left to Tell. The court case wraps up, the jury convicts Daniels, and Adrien Rush even falls in love. But there are over a hundred pages left.

It gets complicated. To say much more would spoil it.

This becomes not only complicated, but fascinating, with many shades of gray.

We also learn some things about the victims of the five crosses. Some were predictable. The Federal Courthouse is one venue. Two others are a synagogue and a mosque. The building that houses the offices of the NAACP is another. The fifth is a house chosen randomly because it is located in a black neighborhood.

The sole tenant of the house is a septuagenarian widow named Nettie Wynn. Her parents built the house, and she has lived there most of her life. The night of the cross burning, part of her house catches fire and she suffers a heart attack. Because it was the only dwelling, she was the only human victim present at the burnings. The other four places had no one present at night except for the night watchmen at the courthouse.

We mostly see Nettie Wynn from Rush’s perspective. He hears about her and her family not only from her own lips but also from her granddaughter, Nicole Dubose, a staffer on The New Yorker magazine. Nettie becomes for the reader one of the noblest characters in any work of fiction.

Yeah, sure, we can admire heroes of other books for their skills, their intelligence, their courage, their strength. Nettie Wynn is different. She is wise. Clearly, McAuliffe wants the reader to realize that there can be real wisdom with age. No Truth Left to Tell is worth reading not only for the intriguing legal tangle, but in order to meet Nettie Wynn.

Yes, Atticus Finch was also an honorable character, but we know that he was based on Harper Lee’s lawyer father. I am sure Nettie Wynn is based on someone or perhaps a composite of someone McAuliffe knew. The world is better place for people like her as much as it is for motivated upholders of the law like Adrien Rush. Sure, read the book for the legal thriller and the dangers posed by lawless people. Learn about the Holocaust survivor who brings some understanding to young people after the cross burns at her synagogue. But savor No Truth Left to Tell for the nobility of Nettie Wynn.

Edgar Rice Burroughs. Tarzan of the Apes. 1912. Amazon Digital Services, 2012.
———. The Return of Tarzan. 1913. Amazon Digital Services, 2012.

Somehow I missed Tarzan books when I was a boy. I did Hardy Boys and Tom Swift but missed Tarzan. These are the first two of the many Tarzan stories Burroughs wrote. They are a very good introduction to the Tarzan mythos.

I had a friend who had read many of them. I can see why. They are a lot of fun. Tarzan really is a kind of superhero. In these first two books of the series, he kills at least five lions single-handed. He does it a little different each time, too.

Even the way the books describes Tarzan’s feelings about Jane are a lot like the way a boy might feel when he first discovers that he is attracted to a certain girl.

But mostly the books are about the action. There is a new conflict in every chapter, whether it is Tarzan being raised by his defensive ape foster mother Kala or conflict with carnivorous beasts or murderous people or Russian spies. The stories are really pretty wild. Today they would probably be categorized as science fiction.

Tarzan is raised by apes in Africa that are bigger than chimps but smaller than gorillas. They have a rudimentary language, which at one point is described as the original language. There are also other ape-men that are further along the evolutionary path than Tarzan’s apes but not as far along as the humans.

From the first book, one gets the idea that Burroughs bought into the Darwinian idea that black Africans were the missing link between apes and men, but that becomes a little muddled in book two, The Return of Tarzan. Anyhow, do not look for science here.

Tarzan of the Apes is the origin story. His marooned parents die in West Africa; baby Tarzan is raised by the apes. He is very muscular and intelligent. By observing native Africans, whom he does not trust because the apes don’t, he learns about spears, knives, and bows and arrows. He even learns to read—he cannot pronounce the words but he sees books with pictures and learns that many of the letters symbolize objects. It does not explain how he learned to spell his own name, though.

Not only is there a lot of conflict, a lot of the conflict is fun. To the natives at first he is like some kind of god. To white people he is a mysterious and handsome savage. He saves the lives of numerous people. Everywhere he goes, people are in his debt for saving their lives. One of the men he saves is a French Captain D’Arnot, who is independently wealthy, so Tarzan lacks for nothing when he enters civilization.

When he is first civilized, he is kind of a curiosity not only because he was a wild jungle ape man (he is called the ape man throughout both books) but also because he could read English but spoke French. Eventually he learns English, one or two African languages, and Arabic. Indeed, one of his deadliest encounters was probably taken from the pages of the news at the time the books were written. He and some villagers defend themselves against Arab slave and ivory traders and their lackeys.

I review the books together because The Return of Tarzan is a true sequel. Tarzan of the Apes ends with some serious unresolved conflicts which are resolved, more or less, in the sequel. I thought I was just going to read one book to get a flavor for the tales, but I had to read the second one to find out what happens.

To give an idea of his adventures just in these two books, Tarzan visits numerous countries. He is apparently raised in the Congo and then goes to French West Africa with D’Arnot, then to Paris, then England, then the United States in both Baltimore and Wisconsin. He gets recruited into French espionage and goes to Morocco and saves the lives of some people there. He ends up back “home” in Africa, becomes a tribal leader there, and then discovers the hidden city of Opar—possibly equated with the Biblical Ophir (see, for example I Kings 10:11). Whew!

Tarzan is not just a solo act, either. He organizes a true guerrilla battle with his tribal allies to fight the Arab slave traders. This is something out of Heart of Darkness. It is almost certain Burroughs was familiar with some of the stories out of the Congo detailing the abuse of the Belgian colonials and the Arab slavers such as Twain’s King Leopold’s Soliloquy if not the Conrad novel.

Burroughs portrays Tarzan sympathetically. We really do care about what happens to him and to Jane and some of Tarzan’s other friends. Tarzan is a good guy. He seems to instinctively know right from wrong and true from false. The suggestion is that it is combination of nature (son of truly noble English nobility) and nurture (extreme survival and learning what is important).

It is pretty evident that Burroughs wants the reader to understand that civilized people can be just as brutish and savage as wild animals and tribal people. There are some real villains here, especially the Russian spy Rokoff. If we are reminded of a leopard or gorilla that Tarzan faced earlier, it is no coincidence.

Christopher Kerr and Carine Mardorossian. Death is But a Dream. Avery, 2020.

Most readers can see in the title of Death is But a Dream a play on the chorus of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” There also might be an echo of the famous line from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which is alluded to in this book:

We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

Over the years I have read various books about near death experiences and other works on death and dying. Death is But a Dream is different. Dr. Kerr has worked for many years as physician in a hospice. He job is ministering to the dying. Over the years he has seen a pattern in the experiences of many of his terminal patients. Many have what he calls lucid dreams or visions as they approach death.

The author does not honestly know what to make of many of these experiences. He does not try. He describes them and to a great degree leaves the interpretation to the reader. He notes that about four fifths of these experiences are positive and bring some kind of closure to the individual. He notes that in many cases the patients insist that they were not dreaming—they often use the term vision. Early in the book we see the word vision or visions in quotation marks, as if to say “the so-called visions.” By the end of the book, the punctuation marks are dropped.

Most of the book tells stories. They are moving stories from many of his hospice patients. Kerr quotes another doctor who says:

“Today healing is replaced with treating, caring is supplanted by managing, and the art of listening is taken over by technological procedures.” (22)

There is always a temptation to make medical science more mechanistic or materialistic. This concern goes back to Hippocrates and is echoed in Chaucer’s corrupt physician in The Canterbury Tales and in the persona of The Scarlet Letter‘s Roger Chillingworth. It is clear that the author struggles with this, too, but he has seen and shared enough to make it clear there is more to life than meets the eye.

These are not near death experiences (NDE) like that of Dr. Eben Alexander, but what the book calls pre-death experiences. Still, one cannot help think of Alexander’s experience, too. Both doctors came to recognize what many physicians are reluctant to admit—that the mind is not the same as the brain.

Alexander’s description as well as his medical condition during his NDE make it clear that what happened to him was something external, something apart from his own mind and body. Kerr is ambiguous. He speaks of the way the mind works as though these experiences are all internal and subjective. At the same time, he recognizes that many of these experiences sound as if someone—whether human, divine, or angelic—appeared from the outside. In some cases the patient sees people that no one else in the room can see.

The stories Kerr tells are quite moving. The bulk of the book contains these stories, and they will keep the reader reading. Many involve a departed friend or relative appearing and telling them that they will be all right. Many involve resolving or reconciling a conflict or problem that seriously affected their lives.

One of the most significant stories in that regard involved a man in his later forties who had been a drug addict since his teens. His mother had been one and still was one. He had a daughter in her twenties whom he had tender feelings for but whom he had neglected. Through some of his dreams/visions he spoke about his daughter. The hospice was able to locate her, and she was eager to see him. In the last few months of the man’s life, they were not only able to reconcile but to develop mutual respect.

We begin to see a pattern, and even the exceptions seem to prove the pattern. One woman had lucid dreams of flying. Later in her life she had come to believe in God and said that even if you had the faith the size of a mustard seed, you could fly (see Matthew 17:20). She also admitted that she did not know how to love. Gradually, they learned that she had an abusive father and a helpless mother, became a ward of the state in foster care at an early age, and as an adult was involved in abusive relationships. In effect for her, then, there was no “loved one” other than God.

The chapter on pre-death experiences of children also demonstrated something similar. One thirteen year old girl with terminal cancer saw a pet dog that had died a few years earlier, and for her it had been a member of the family all her life. She later had a conversation with her mother’s best friend who had died at the age of thirty-five when the girl was eight. They were probably the only deaths she had personally known in her short life.

Not only do these pre-death experiences prepare the patient for dying, but, as we saw with the drug addict and his daughter, they also provide healing. Some war veterans, for example, were taken back to traumatic battle experiences to find healing as they saw them from a different perspective. This reminded me of primal integration or inner healing therapies that can effectively bring psychological healing. The difference is that there is no psychiatrist or counselor leading the patient, simply the patient’s own experience and, perhaps, the hand of God.

I give the author credit for sharing the experiences largely without commentary. Many works on the subject of dying will bring in a particular interpretation, and because of the subject matter, some of those interpretations are weirder than the experiences they describe. Death is But a Dream is not like that at all. It tells the story and leaves the interpretation, if any, up to the reader.

Death is But a Dream can bring understanding an maybe some healing to those of us who are not medical professionals or who do not counsel the dying. I wish I could have read this book or something like it ten years ago. (But no, I do not think there is anything like it, certainly not for the layperson.)

My father passed away nine years ago. The last week of his life he was in hospice. The last time I saw him alive, he was telling me how he had been talking with one of his old friends. I assumed he was hallucinating because of medications. I was upset. My father had been a strong-willed, self-controlled person, and I did not want to see him not in his right mind.

I see now that maybe he was weak but still sharing a genuine experience. This meeting with his old friend, whether it was real or imagined, whether it was from an internal or external source, I suspect may have ministered some mental or spiritual healing to Dad.

So the book ministered to me, to let me know that my father was probably not out of his mind, but really preparing or being prepared for his death. Now I know. I think I can understand his story better and even achieve some closure myself.

I realize that the Bible warns against necromancy, (see Deuteronomy 18:10-11) something the polytheists of Bible times were notorious for. (Read The Aeneid, for example.) But that is specifically seeking and consulting the dead. None of the stories indicate that any of the patients were looking for dead people (or angels or pets) but that they just appeared, whether from their own imaginations or from outside.

Although I have read other books from time to time on the subject of dying and near-death experiences like Dr. Alexander’s, I never read or even heard about a study like this. This is different. Certainly I recommend it to medical professionals of all kinds to remind them of the humanity of even their most degraded patients. But I recommend it to anyone, as I would to Dr. Alexander’s book, to let us know that

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

If word gets out, this could be a bestseller.

Peter Riva. Kidnapped on Safari. Skyhorse, 2020.

Kidnapped on Safari is an entertaining story. It starts off as a simple and direct rescue story but evolves into a potential major power confrontation.

Billed as a thriller, much of the story is really more of a mystery. Pero Balthasar, an ex-pat American who organizes safaris in East Africa, is currently in Kenya with his top guide Mbuno. They get word that Mbuno’s nephew and adopted son named Ube has been kidnapped and possibly killed while he was on safari in neighboring Tanzania.

There are two mysteries right from the start: Who captured Ube and why? Where did they take him? He is an African bush guide. No one would hold him for ransom, not as they might with a rich Westerner.

This tale is clever and carefully detailed. It involves some careful tracking, imaginative escapes, and dangerous terrain. It is Mission Impossible on the savannah. For example, you have to know what you are doing to swim in waters frequented by elephants, hippopotamuses, and crocodiles. We are reminded that more people are killed every year by hippopotamuses than any other wild animal in Africa.

There is a twist, though.

I teach Jane Eyre nearly every year. Most romances like Jane Eyre end with the female protagonist getting married. Rochester proposes to Jane, Jane accepts, and they make plans for the wedding. But this happens in the book with about two hundred pages to go. Something has to happen to alter the expected outcome.

Kidnapped on Safari is similar.

It is not exactly a spoiler to say that Ube gets rescued, but that is only halfway through the book. Truly, then, only about a third of the book is directly about rescuing the guy kidnapped on safari. While his rescue is dangerous and carefully executed, the story really kicks into high gear after that.

Pero adds to the team that rescued Ube for an exploit that is not only more challenging but involves financial high stakes and people in high places. Why was Ube kidnapped? What does he know? Who is behind it all? The action intensifies, and the tale becomes a page-turner.

The blurb tells us that the author has spent thirty years traveling in East Africa and even produced a television show featuring animals in the wild. He clearly understands tracking, hunting (with cameras or firearms), and the tribes and people of Africa. He may also have learned some things about CIA contractors. This comes through and helps make the story realistic and fascinating.

He knows less about the American military. Bob, one of the main characters on Pero’s team, tells us he was a medic in the American Marine Corps. The Marines do not have medics. Since the Marines are part of the Navy, Navy hospital corpsmen get assigned to the Marines. From my experience, some corpsmen are proud to have served with Marine units and can identify with them, but they are Navy corpsmen. They do not call them medics, either. They are corpsmen; Marines especially often call them “doc.” By the way, corpsman is pronounced Korman.

Gordon Korman. Slacker. Scholastic P, 2016.
———. Notorious. Balzer, 2020.

I sometimes wonder if I had been a middle schooler fifteen years ago and were a Gordon Korman fan back then, would I still be reading his stuff now? I don’t know, but we have been reading him, with an occasional audio book, for a number of years and we still enjoy him. Slacker does not disappoint.

Cameron “Cam” Boxer is the slacker of the title. He has curated or cultivated that slacker lifestyle since he was young. All he wants to do is play video games. He has concentrated mostly on Rule the World and its upcoming convention with actual prize money.

Except when he is online, he is anonymous. The guidance counselors at Sycamore Middle School do not know who he is. He gets C‘s with an occasional B, so he stays out of academic trouble both at home and school. With his two friends Chuck and Pavel, he forms the Awesome Threesome, a gaming team that is hard to beat. His only problem comes in the form of a player from Toronto whose avatar in the game is called Evil McKillPeople.

Life was going along just fine for this eighth grade gamer until one day—and we have all done this—his mother tells him to do something, and he says, “Yeah,” but he is too engrossed in his video game to really know what she said. Only this time she asked him to take the lasagna out of the oven after ten minutes while the rest of his family goes out. An hour later, still battling Evil McKillPeople, he hears the fire department coming through the front door after chopping it open with an ax.

Yes, he is in big trouble. He is in danger of losing his video game console. Cam, though, is creative, even if up to this point most of his creativity has been worked out on alien planets. With the help of Pavel, who is a true hacker, he hacks on to the Sycamore Middle School web site and posts a web page for a new extracurricular club—the Positive Action Group, or P.A.G.—with Cam listed as president and contact person. That should keep his parents off his back.

It is, of course, totally fake. It is just there for his parents. The signup link takes anyone who tries it to a web page seeking donations for rain forest preservation.

At least the P.A.G. starts out fake until a few students and guidance counselor Mr. Fanshaw discover the web page. Pretty soon Cam finds out that he actually has to do something!

Cam’s attempts to avoid doing anything with this organization are quite impressive, but, as Shakespeare wrote, “Some have greatness thrust upon them.” With Mr. Fanshaw’s urging, Cam gets a group of volunteers to help clean up around a senior citizen housing complex in town. A local newspaper reporter shows up to record this when Cam, trying to hide from everyone in a stairwell, discovers one of the elderly residents unconscious. 911 whisks her off in an ambulance, Cam is a hero, and now over half the school wants to join the P.A.G.

One of the first joiners is Daphne, who is worried about a lone beaver in town named Elvis. There used to be a beaver colony in town until construction of a new mall began next to the beaver stream. The beavers all moved out except for Elvis, who was apparently too old to travel much.

Another early joiner is Freeland “the String” McBean. He is a star football player who has been sidelined until his grades improve. Then there is Xavier, the leather-jacketed hoodlum who is almost old enough to drive but still in eighth grade. After the publicity the club gets, both candidates for Student Council President join.

Cam has created a monster. A helpful monster, but a monster nevertheless.

To complicate things, the leader of the high school service organization, Friends of Fuzzy, gets bent out of shape because the middle school service group is getting all the attention. She, her boyfriend, and some others begin to sabotage the activities of the P.A.G. after Cam shrugs off their threats.

Cam has been in his own little world. In some ways he is still in it, but the outside world has imposed itself on his lifestyle. He can no longer simply slack off playing video games.

Typical of Korman, there is a lot of humor. There is a recurring joke that Cam never gets Mr. Fanshaw’s name right. When he must talk directly to him, he just says “Mr. Fan—uh, sir.” Otherwise he is Mr. Fantail, Mr. Fanboy, just about anything except Fantastic.

Like many of Korman’s stories, the chapters in both books here are told from different points of view. In Slacker each of the Awesome Threesome has some chapters. So do Mr. Fanshaw, Daphne, the String, the Friends of Fuzzy president, the middle school principal, and so on. A recurring question from many of them is simply—who is Cameron Boxer anyhow?

We can pretty much guarantee that you will laugh. The only question is how loud?

Notorious is different. It is fun, but not necessarily funny. Yes, Gordon Korman wrote it, and it contains some humorous parts, but is more like The Masterminds or The Hypnotists stories. It is still a young adult novel, but a drama rather than a sitcom.

Keenan Cardinal is recovering from tuberculosis which he contracted in China. At least that is when the symptoms appeared, but he may have picked up the germs in Lesotho or some other country. His mother and stepfather teach at a different international school every year.

But Keenan is no longer in Shanghai. He now lives with his father on Centerlight Island—an island on the St. Clair River north of Detroit, half in Michigan and half in Ontario. His father’s house is on the American side.

At first all Keenan can do is lie in the summer sunlight in his father’s yard. A girl his age who lives on the Canadian side named Zarabeth introduces herself one day, and they become friends—at least until school starts.

Most of the families with children live on the American side. Keenan makes friends with some of the kids in his school while Zarabeth, ZeeBee for short, has to take the ferry to school in Canada and is pretty much gone during the week. She gets upset (maybe jealous?) that Keenan is hanging out with guys who she mostly thinks are jerks, and not without reason.

Some of the kids on the island think ZeeBee is a little weird. Back in the Roaring Twenties Centerlight (Canadians spell it Centrelight) was a major stop for rum runners. Arnold Rothstein had a home here. Al capone used to visit. So did Eliot Ness. ZeeBee seems to obsess over the gangster stories because she lives in a house once owned by Machine Gun Ferguson. Rumor has it that Ferguson hid a stash of money or gold somewhere on the island.

Also, nearly everyone hated ZeeBee’s two-hundred-pound dog, part Great Dane, part Doberman, part Newfoundland, and who knows what else. A lot of the funny or wild stuff in the book relates to the almost incredible damage Barney the dog has done around the island. He is the twenty-first-century one-dog mob on Centerlight. We note that, judging from the Swindle stories, that Korman likes big dogs. Even though Slacker features no dogs, its protagonist is named Boxer.

Now Barney died before Keenan arrived, but ZeeBee suspects that her dog was deliberately done in. In that sense Notorious is like one of those murder mysteries where no one liked the victim. There are plenty of suspects for what ZeeBee calls Barney’s “murder.”

After Barney died, her parents gave ZeeBee a small cocker spaniel she calls Barney Two, but to her nothing can replace Barney One. Barney Two is what Shakespeare would call a fawning spaniel, but ZeeBee disdains him. Keenan feels sorry for the pooch.

In her pique, ZeeBee completely cuts herself off from Keenan. He feels bad and cannot understand why she avoids him. Perhaps to get her attention, perhaps just to have something to do on a small island, Keenan decides to investigate Barney’s “murder.” Did it happen? If so, how? And whodunit?

Notorious becomes a clever mystery, and it becomes clear that both Keenan and ZeeBee have gotten in over their heads.

Korman effectively projects what life on such an island is like. I had friends who lived on an island like Centerlight only accessible by ferry from a different state. Korman gets it. And at the same time he tells an entertaining tale.

We note that this is Korman’s latest (dated 2020) and published by a division of Harper. Before 2017 his books were published by Scholastic. So did Korman sign on with Harper or did Harper buy up Scholastic along with all the other companies it has taken over?