Martin W. Sandler. Iron Rails, Iron Men, and the Race to Link the Nation. Somerville MA: Candlewick P, 2015. Print.

Iron Rails, Iron Men presents a gripping overview of the building of the Transcontinental Railroad. There had been no construction project quite like it, and it was remarkable that it was completed at all.

The book profiles a number of leaders who had a hand in it such as Theodore Judah, who envisioned it and actually helped form the Central Pacific Railroad to save months on the China trade, and William T. Sherman, who as a junior officer in the 1850s served on one of the U.S. Army surveys to determine the best route. The project actually began in 1863 during the Civil War. President Lincoln saw this as a way to further unite the country. Till then politicians argued over whose states should get the route, but with eleven southern states out of the discussion thanks to the war, Lincoln got the support he needed.

The project began to accelerate after the war. Veterans used to following orders and living a military routine fit in well. Irish immigrants escaping famine and looking for work were eager. General Grenville Dodge had done the most to keep Union railroads intact during the war, so he was recruited to supervise the Union Pacific Railroad construction from Omaha to Utah.

There were also, famously, the Chinese on the Central Pacific Railroad (Sacramento to Utah). Leland Stanford, one of the chief officers of the CPRR, thought they would be too small, but one of the other officers Charles Crocker said, “They built the Great Wall, didn’t they?” Not only were they skilled workers, but they stayed healthy. In the Sierras most water was from dirty streams and tarns, and many men sickened. But the Chinese always heated their water or made tea before drinking it, so they avoided a lot of the illnesses contracted by the other men.

The passes and trails in the Sierras were probably the most challenging to pass a railroad through, especially chipping and blasting out a towering ledge known as Cape Horn and building the Summit Tunnel a third of a mile through solid granite. Blizzards and snow avalanches caused them to build snow shacks like covered bridges to keep the lines open and the work progressing.

Alongside both railroads went telegraph lines. When the Golden Spike was finally driven in May 1869, word went out over the wires immediately to both coasts.

Thousands of men participated in this effort. Hundreds died. Sherman, now a general, had to send out troops to protect the construction workers on the plains from Indian attacks. William Cody earned his nickname Buffalo Bill by hunting bison to feed the workers. While the railroad would bring the states together and really open up the West, it also would contribute to the disruption of the traditional lives of the Native Americans and the decimation of the bison herd.

Iron Rails, Iron Men contains an interesting epilogue. Some of the leaders of the project were honored—Dodge was elected to Congress without even campaigning and would get Dodge City, Kansas, named after him. Some of the railroad executives would get involved with the Crédit Mobilier scandal. James Strobridge, the Central Pacific construction boss, would recall in a 1917 interview the names of the nine men responsible for laying ten miles of rail in a single day. Seven were Irish. He recalled, “Nobody was crowded, nobody was hurt, nobody lost a minute.” (155)

Photographs and engravings of the project appear on every other page. In many cases, the picture is worth many words. Both railroads were alert to public relations to encourage investment. If nothing else, the pictures give a sense of the geography and construction challenges the builders of the railroad met.

Yes, it was a race, as the full title suggests. The UPRR and CPRR tried to outdo the other, but as they were getting closer, they did have to come to an agreement on where they would join. On the day he was sworn in, President Grant told the companies that they would be getting no more government support until they agreed where the tracks should connect. By the ninth of April, they had negotiated to meet at Promontory Summit, Utah. So they did. The country and even the world were never the same again.

Edward F. Langley Russell of Liverpool. The Knights of Bushido: A Short History of Japanese War Crimes. 1958; New York: Skyhorse, 2008. E-book.

A few years ago I inherited a copy of a diary kept by my father’s cousin who died in a Japanese slave labor camp during World War II. He had been a civilian construction worker on Wake Island when the war started. The island was attacked a few hours after Pearl Harbor and managed to hold off a major amphibious attack for nearly three weeks.

He was among those kept on the island until September 1942 to build an airfield and dredge a channel for the Japanese. From there he was taken to Japan where he died among the intolerable conditions of Camp Fukuoka #18 in April 1943. His diary was kept hidden and preserved by a fellow inmate who eventually returned it to his parents (my great aunt and great uncle) in the early fifties.

During the time I was editing and annotating this diary, I read many works on the War in the Pacific, especially about Wake Island and POWs. Numerous works that I read referred to The Knights of Bushido, but I never got around to reading it until just now. (Amazon had a good deal…).

There are other books documenting Japanese atrocities such as Daws’ Prisoners of the Japanese and Weller’s First to Nagasaki, yet none have as many testimonies as The Knights of Bushido. The book focuses mainly on British and Dutch prisoners including colonials from India, Australia, Canada, Indonesia, etc. Russell himself was an English Lord, a military lawyer, and investigator for both the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes tribunals.

Still, there are numerous descriptions of events in the Philippines, Taiwan, China, and Japan. The only mention of Wake Island, for example, concerns the January 1942 transport ship (Russell calls them Prison Hulks but today they are commonly called Hellships) which took the majority of Wake captives to China and the massacre of the remaining 96 civilians on the island in October 1943.

What Lord Russell details is stunning. From the time that Japan began fighting in China in 1931 until it surrendered in 1945, the pattern changed little. Civilian populations were raped and killed, often deliberately massacred to instill fear or to demonstrate Japanese racial superiority. Prisoners, whether military or civilian, were often summarily executed or retained for slave labor. They rarely had access to any medical care and were always inadequately fed and (as they say today) hydrated.

The death toll in many places was staggering. For example, of 473 prisoners on a forced march from Sandaku to Ranau, Indonesia, in February 1945, only six were still alive in June. Often at the trials, the Japanese defense was that they also were without food, water, and medical attention, but not a single Japanese or Korean soldier in attendance died during this time.

In virtually every location, prisoners were used for target and bayonet practice. Beatings were common. (My cousin’s diary says that daily beatings were the routine at Fukuoka #18). In the first six weeks of occupation of Nanjing (a.k.a. Nanking), China, over 200,000 people were killed—nearly all of them civilians including women and children. That alone is more than the number of people killed in the two atomic bombs . Yes, the atomic bombs were terrible, but the Japanese atrocities were really on a much greater scale.

The Knights of Bushido includes photographs, much testimony, and selections from many incriminating Japanese documents. Lord Russell is not being sensational. Every detail is carefully documented. I understand now why so many sources on the Pacific War refer to this book. The reader realizes, too, upon completing the book that the information contained in it just scratches the surface. Everywhere Japan conquered from the Russian border to the Nicobar Islands, from Melanesia to the home islands, their treatment of the local population and prisoners (including civilians) was cruel and ruthless.

Russell devotes a chapter to the war crimes trials. Here he points out how weak and even ridiculous most of the legal defenses were. Were nuns and children really a military threat? There was enough documentation still in existence to show that extermination was a protocol and mistreatment of civilian populations and prisoners was policy.

This review could itemize the many examples Russell gives, but it better serves the readers see for themselves. This review will conclude with three reflections.

Since the 1970s it has been considered politically incorrect if not rude to use the word Jap for Japanese. At times students at my school have acted offended when a Pacific War veteran uses the term at an assembly. After reading this, one can understand. My father was a veteran of the Pacific War. When he spoke of people or products from Japan, he always used the word Japanese. But when he spoke of the people he was fighting in the war, they were the Japs. After reading what The Knights of Bushido details about the destruction and massacres in Manila, I get it. My father never said much more than that Manila was awful. I can see why.

The term “man’s inhumanity to man” is a cliché. This review has not even mentioned the more extreme torture methods used on civilians and prisoners or the truly savage practices of some of the Japanese soldiers. I wonder to myself not only how people could do some of these things, but also how could anyone even think of them. I am reminded that the Bible tells us that there are people, “Speaking lies in hypocrisy, having their consciences seared with a hot iron.” (I Timothy 4:2) That is the only explanation. Such consciences were seared. Any sense of chivalric honor was pure hypocrisy. Lord, may it never happen to us.

Third, The Knights of Bushido shows us why there has to be a God. While hundreds of people were ultimately found guilty of war crimes, it is pretty obvious that thousands of people committed them. The human justice system is limited because people are not omnipresent nor can they read minds. Our own biases and perceived offenses get in the way as well. We have to look to God for true justice. So many things in history have caused people to say what the Bible itself says:

How long, O Lord, holy and true, doest thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth? (Revelation 6:10, cf. II Peter 3:7-9)

Perhaps, too, Americans can relate to Longfellow’s Messianic vision written during our own Civil War:

The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men!

N.B. The Knights of Bushido uses the spelling and place names common in English to the first half of the century. Since then a number of place names have changed or at least come to be spelled differently, e.g., Nanking for Nanjing, Kwantung for Liaodung, or Celebes for Sulawesi. In most cases consulting a good atlas or even a search engine can clear up any confusion.

J.R.R. Tolkien. Beren and Lúthien. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. Boston: Houghton, 2017. Print.

In the preface to Beren and Lúthien, Christopher Tolkien writes that he is now 93 years old. This will probably be the last piece of his father’s work that he will see to publication.

This tale is appropriate to share in detail with the public. It was apparently one of Tolkien’s favorites—even his tombstone refers to it. Almost as interesting as the tale itself is what Christopher Tolkien writes about his father’s work in this book.

We learn that Tolkien started writing various stories and histories of Middle Earth from 1916 or 1917, the time he returned to England—injured and ill from the Battle of the Somme—and married. He considered The Hobbit a diversion when it came out. Still his publisher either rejected or never read eight Middle Earth stories after that until he sent them The Lord of the Rings. Finally, there was another story about Hobbits!

From his voluminous notes, it appears that Tolkien was more interested in the elves and men than he was with Hobbits. Beren and Lúthien contains the first two, but no Hobbits. There are apparently at least three different versions of the story, and in two of them Beren is human and Lúthien is an elf. Lúthien is also called Tinúviel, the name I recall from The Silmarillion or The Lord of the Rings. In the Middle Earth scheme, they would become the great grandparents of Elrond, a key character in the Trilogy, and great-great grandparents of Arwen, who would marry Aragorn.

The first version of the tale is the most complete from Tolkien’s notes. It is a prose quest, similar in style and approach to many Grimm Brothers stories. Beren falls in love with Lúthien. He nicknames her Tinúviel, which means “nightingale” in the Elven language. Her royal father does not approve of Beren. When he sees how brokenhearted his daughter becomes, he relents—at least technically. He gives Beren permission to marry Lúthien, but only if he can complete an impossible quest. He must bring him a Silmaril stone from the crown of the evil lord Morgoth.

This reminded the reader of similar quests in enchanted castles from the Grimms. Here, though, there are interesting twists. An important figure in all versions is Huan, large enchanted wolfhound who is a skilled hunter and is impervious to most weapons.

The prose version takes up approximately a third of the book. The other two thirds is divided between two partially completed poetic versions of the story taken from longer pieces that Tolken wrote. The older version with short rhymed couplets reminds the reader of an Old or Middle English style. Christopher Tolkien believes the second version from another tale written in longer couplets is better poetry. Most readers would probably agree.

Like the other Tolkien works edited by his son, such as The Silmarillion or the exhaustive History of Middle Earth, Beren and Lúthien is more of a compilation. The narrative may not “flow” the way his novels do, but the stories are well worth sharing. Because of the renown of Lúthien/Tinúviel in some of his other stories, Beren and Lúthien was an excellent way to complete the Tolkien oeuvre.

McMillan Moody. Ordained Irreverence. OBT Bookz, 2012. E-book.

With a name like McMillan Moody, this guy has to be associated with book publishing. Of course, Macmillan is a secular publisher (though it does carry titles by C. S. Lewis) and Moody is a conservative Christian publisher. Ordained Irreverence is somewhere in between.

Ellington “Elmo” Jenkins is about to graduate from a conservative seminary, perhaps not all that different from Moody Bible Institute. He has one requirement left—an internship. Through a bad date, he comes in contact with a staffer from the local megachurch and soon finds himself as an intern there.

As one can judge from the title, there is a lot of humor here. Elmo’s office is a converted broom closet. But the church has status. The senior pastor is an avid golfer and the board of elders includes a Mr. Fitzsimmons, as Elmo puts it, very old money and the wealthiest family in the area. One thing Elmo has going for him is that he played on his high school golf team, so at least he can keep up with the big boys.

This reviewer was laughing out loud in places. Like Garrison Keillor, Moody has fun with the foibles and funnybones of Christians with good taste and not a little tenderness. Moody is no Lenny Bruce.

Elmo is not really sure what his calling is. He is tone-deaf. He is no orator. He refuses to even use the word missionary because he does not want to hear a call to some forbidding foreign land. Maybe this internship will give him some direction.

Ordained Irreverence is largely composed of discrete chapters. Each chapter is a little story in itself, giving us another perspective on First Church. There are two story threads that tie the chapters together. Elmo is attracted to a young woman (only a year older than he) on the church staff. This relationship progresses awkwardly but still romantically.

He also discovers an old note from 1959 that refers to the Black Toe. He has to do some digging, but the Black Toe Enigma has baffled the church for nearly 100 years. Back in 1939 it even made the newspapers. It involves a wealthy deacon who almost died of exposure when his feet broke through the ice on a brook while hiking in the winter. He was rescued by a man who claimed to also be a member of the church, but the deacon could not remember who it was because had passed out. All he knew was that the man gave him his boots so he must have had frostbitten feet—or black toes.

So, yes, will the mystery be solved? Will he get the girl? Perhaps more important, will he still be sane after helping to chaperone a middle school all-nighter? What happens there could only happen to middle schoolers…

I confess I was attracted by the price, currently free at Amazon. Of course, Ordained Irreverence is the first of at least half a dozen books about Elmo, so this is a loss leader to get us wanting to read more. I suspect for many readers this will work. I had just read some pretty intense books, it was final exam time at school, and there were other things conspiring to make my life complicated, if not miserable. I needed some laughter. Thank you Elmo Jenkins for sharing your life with us. I suspect that I may read another when I am looking for a laugh.

Jay Winik. April 1865: The Month that Saved America. New York: Harper, 2001. Print.

Webb Garrison. Civil War Trivia and Fact Book. Nashville: Nelson, 1992. Print.

I had heard about April 1865—the book, that is—for some time. I came across a copy and picked it up. It is well worth reading.

It does pretty much focus on the major events of April 1865 which settled the American Civil War and set a rough direction for reunion. Nearly half the book deals with the events that led to the surrender of Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses Grant and the Army of the Potomac at Appomattox. The book emphasizes that if a few minor details had been different, there might not have been any surrender at this time.

We get fairly detailed back stories on both Lee and Grant, and though they were different in background and temperament, they were both men of honor. Grant had been instructed by President Lincoln to be magnanimous. Lee understood that he could have kept a guerrilla war going for years in the remote areas of the Confederacy, but it would have led to greater hostility and needless bloodshed.

Winik reminds us that most civil wars do not end in such a manner. Usually the losing side is found guilty of treason and the principals are exterminated. Any remaining guerrillas brutalize their victims. As Lenin is to have said, “The purpose of terrorism is to terrorize.”

April 1865 reminds us of the hopes that Lincoln expressed in his Second Inaugural Speech the month before: “With malice toward none and charity toward all.” It looked like that was going to be happening.

Of course, Lincoln could not see his vision fulfilled because on April 14 he was shot. Winik reminds us that the Constitution was somewhat vague on actual succession, and when William Henry Harrison died in office in 1841, there was some controversy over what should happen next. Fortunately, a precedent had been set when Tyler took over back then, so that in 1865 there was little dispute that Andrew Johnson should be the new president. (The current succession system only came about with the passage of the 25th Amendment in 1967.)

We get some interesting background on Johnson as well. He was a career politician and a true Jacksonian. That helped him get elected, but it made him unpalatable to many of the Northern elites. Still, he was the only senator from a seceding state that stuck with the Union, and he made an effective if unusual running mate for Lincoln in 1864.

Meanwhile, the other main Confederate Army in the Carolinas led by Joe Johnston was still very active. Sherman was running him down, but Jefferson Davis was telling Johnston to hold out and not surrender under any terms. Sherman offered terms similar to those Grant offered Lee, but the new administration said the terms were too generous. Finally, by the third round, Johnston surrendered. His men, too, were disarmed but allowed to return home without consequences.

Johnston and Lee were of like minds when it came to the idea of a guerrilla force. Davis was not. Indeed, Johnston had in fact directly disobeyed Davis’s instructions. But at that point Davis was on the run and there was little he could do about it.

With the surrender of the two largest Confederate armies, the other army leaders of the South would follow suit. Winik provides evidence that Nathan B. Forrest, for example, would have been willing to keep fighting, but when he saw what was happening, he did the same. No, it did not mean that North and South would hold hands and sing Kumbyah, there was still a lot of mistrust and animosity, but the United States was set in a new direction.

One story Winik recounts perhaps reveals the sense of the new direction. The large Episcopal Church in Richmond had a priest who supported the Confederacy. Blacks were members of the congregation, but they had to sit separately from the white people and could not take communion until the whites were done. After Lee’s surrender and Lincoln’s visit to Richmond, the first person to go forward for communion was black. For a noticeable time, no one else joined him. The priest looked upset but said nothing. Finally a well-known white visitor to the church went forward to join his black brother. It was Robert E. Lee. After that, there was no more segregated communion. It also demonstrated Lee’s willingness to acknowledge the new realities.

Winik points out that Lincoln very deliberately spoke of the United States as a nation. Till this time, that was not the way even most Americans saw themselves. The word nation implies a common culture and history and tradition. Most writers and speakers prior to the war would speak of the United States in the plural as “the United States are.” Since the war, we speak of it in the singular, as I did in the previous paragraph, “the United States was,” not “were.”

We get a little background of John Wilkes Booth and the members of his plot. Booth had some hope that assassinating the leaders of the government would force the Union to set the Confederate States free. Clearly that did not happen because there was still something of a national identity. It also is true that most of the South had been devastated by the war in a way that the North had not.

At times the language of April 1865 gets a bit florid. Each time Colonel George Custer is mentioned we are told about his long yellow hair. Still, that is a minor distraction.

The last chapter summarizes the book eloquently. It is one of the finest essays on the American Civil War. If the reader were just to read the last chapter, the book will have been well worth picking up.

Civil War Trivia is what it says it is. The entire book is written in catechetical or question-answer format. For “farbs” like me, it was interesting and fairly light.

There are many curious details here. There were at least two sets of brothers who were generals on opposing sides. The Confederacy so intently advocated states’ rights that the Governor of Georgia did not have the state militia join the war until 1864 and attempted to broker a separate peace settlement with the Union. Two future presidents served in the same Ohio regiment (Hayes and McKinley). And so on.

Civil War Trivia contains a pretty extensive index. That makes it good for keeping on hand as a reference tool. Not only are there many names, but numerous helpful and simple descriptions of weapons and supplies. As a teacher of Civil War literature, I will probably keep this on hand to refer to when either my students or I have questions.

P.S. Just a few days after posting this, I found the following essay online which details part of the Appomattox surrender and looks at the contemporary political situation in the United States: https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/06/second-civil-war-dumb-idea/

Robert Olen Butler. The Alleys of Eden. New York: Horizon, 1981. Print.

Having read most of Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam War tales and having loved most of the stories in Robert Olen Butler’s A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, I thought Butler’s Vietnam novel would be worth checking out. The Alleys of Eden is, with reservations.

As I suggested in an earlier review, Butler is one American writer who actually presents Vietnamese people as developed characters in his Vietnam War era stories. Butler was a naval supply officer in Vietnam during the war, and most of those supply officers who went to Vietnam were trained in the language first. Butler himself became more intimate with the Vietnamese and with Vietnamese expatriates in the United States because of his understanding of the language and culture.

The Alleys of Eden tells of Cliff Wilkes who has deserted his position as an officer for Army Intelligence to live with a Vietnamese woman he has fallen for. One of my all-time favorite short stories is “Fairy Tale” in Butler’s Good Scent collection mentioned above. This novel has echoes of that short story, but its characters are different, and, as they say, character is destiny.

Wilkes lives in a busy side street in Saigon for over four years until the fall of the city in April 1975. Though a student radical before he was drafted and now an army deserter, he is concerned that the North Vietnamese would simply kill him because he was an American and do the same to Lanh, his paramour, because she had been living with an American.

The couple manages to flee, Wilkes taking on an assumed identity. In his four and a half years of living among the Vietnamese and speaking their language, he feels like a man without a country. He belongs in Vietnam with his Vietnamese woman, not back in the USA. It is almost as if both he and Lanh were immigrants to a strange land, that they had been expelled from their own Eden.

Of course, Lanh is completely new to the land and among aliens. The only English she speaks is Saigon bar girl English, and all the Americans are so much bigger than she. Cliff professes his love for her, but, with his legal problems, can they make it in the New World?

The Alleys of Eden, like Butler’s short stories, has a great sensitivity and understanding (might I even say love?) of the Vietnamese people. Cliff could have stayed in Vietnam if it were not for the politics. Because he is a deserter, the American government could be after him, too. He is between two worlds.

Like Fontenot in “Fairy Tale,” Wilkes identifies more with the Vietnamese than he ever did with the American radicals he used to associate with. And Lanh’s life in Vietnam would be virtually impossible to live, even if she were to return and no one knew of her relationship with Cliff. She was an orphan and really had nothing and no one till Cliff came along.

There is one reservation with this short novel. There are many explicit sex acts in this story. It is not pornographic, but it does add a shallowness to the characters. In spite of his identification with things Vietnamese, Cliff really has little more depth than the pot-smoking “radicals” drifting in and out of the story.

Students of American Literature may recall a trend in American fiction after World War I that was known as primitivism. It had the typically bleak outlook of much of realism and naturalism but with a twist. The idea was that the most honest and best portrayals of human nature were from people who for one reason or another were outside the limits of accepted society.

Writers like Faulkner and Steinbeck were especially associated with this idea of people living in a socially “primitive” condition. Characters like the mentally challenged Benjy of Faulkner or Lennie of Steinbeck illustrate this as do the nomadic migrant workers in Of Mice and Men or the migrating Joad family, or even Quentin Compson, the Mississippi boy who finds no place to belong at Harvard. Such people fit in nowhere, but we perhaps get a sense of what really makes people special and what really motivates human beings at the core because they are not part of the social construct that surrounds them.

Cliff and Lanh live that way, too. The Alleys of Eden can be seen as a more modern primitivist work. In that case, it has a more modern point of view which at its core is much sadder. Benjy and the Joads had family. George and Lennie had friendship. Quentin Compson at least sought some transcendence in the death and resurrection of Jesus. It seems all Cliff and Lanh had was sex. To quote a popular song from the sixties: “Is that all there is?”

Nabeel Qureshi. Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus. Grand Rapids MI: Zondervan, Mar. 2016. E-book.

The title of Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus sums up what this book is about. The author is an American medical doctor. His parents were from Pakistan, so he was raised Muslim. His father had a career in the U. S. Navy, so from the perspective of a military brat living in various places around the world, his family’s religion was the one constant in his life. He fondly remembers the time they spent in the United Kingdom where they would get together with thousands of Muslims at an annual convention.

His father took Islam seriously and had a decent library on the subject. His mother taught him and his sister and made them memorize the Quran. That the author became a follower of Jesus, we understand, was not an instant decision but took years to accomplish.

Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus tells us many things about the religion that the author was raised in. Of course Muslims consider Muhammad a prophet and the Quran the only reliable scripture. Many things about his culture that he associated with Islam are typically Asian, not just Islamic. Then he tells how his faith was challenged by the Christian faith of a friend who belonged to the same college debating society as Qureshi.

Qureshi was told time and again growing up that the Christian Bible had been corrupted over time. Muhammad came to set things right, and the Quran in Arabic alone is God’s reliable revelation.

When Qureshi was challenged on this belief by his Christian friend, Qureshi asked his father and different Muslim leaders about this, and they all said the same thing. They were referring to various translations of the Bible like the King James or New International Versions, not the Bible in its original languages.

To make a long story short, Qureshi discovers that there are in existence parts of the New Testament in manuscript one generation from their writers. That there are over five thousand manuscripts containing parts of the New Testament, not to mention thousands of other ancient and medieval writings that quote Scripture. While the manuscripts vary some, most of the variations are spelling differences, and none of the differences affect any Christian doctrine. The book goes into far more detail, but that is a brief summary.

Meanwhile, there is no evidence that any part of the Quran even existed until two and a half centuries after Muhammad lived. When people started putting it together, it was based on what had been handed down orally to different men who then took another couple hundred years to even decide whether something was genuinely from Muhammad and whether it was inspired by Allah or a Satanic verse.

I recall reading some time ago (I think it was in the seventies or eighties) that some archaeologists discovered a collection of old Arabic writings from the time period when these Muslim scholars were trying to figure out what was genuinely Quranic. A few contemporary Islamic scholars were interested and began publishing articles in some scholarly journals analyzing these works. Two of the men were killed by radical Muslims who thought even looking into the origins of the Quran was wrong. No more research has been done since on these manuscripts. Compare that to all the work done on the Dead Sea Scrolls!

Interestingly, Qureshi arranged for a dialog between a Christian scholar and a respected imam that he knew. He described the dialog in some detail. It went well with respectful discussion until someone asked the imam about how he accounted for the reliability of the Quran in its present form, knowing what we do about its origins. The imam simply said he believed in Allah and that Muhammad is his prophet and walked away.

Imagine yourself like Qureshi who is sincerely seeking to understand the truth when that is the only answer this scholar can give.

Qureshi notes that the culture he was brought up in was typically Asian, not Western. Even Islamic Asians do not have a strong concept of sin. Sin is not necessarily wrong. Shame is. That is like the Chinese, Japanese, and other non-Islamic Asian cultures. Qureshi has some humorous stories illustrating this, and they help us understand some of the cultural differences that may be manifest in the name of religion. As I write this, the news is telling of a number of preteen girls killed by a Muslim suicide bomber outside a concert in England. To any Westerner—Christian, Jewish, atheist, whatever—that is wrong, sinful. To a non-Westerner, as long as there is no shame, it is probably OK.

Qureshi notes that authority is important in both an Islamic and Eastern context. He accepted many beliefs such as the one about the corruption of the Bible simply because people in authority had said so. It is very difficult to even challenge authority according to their way of thinking and doing. That probably even explains why the imam walked out of the dialog. Western Christians need to understand that as well.

Qureshi was attending an American college. He eventually would become a medical doctor. Here he became friends with the student debater mentioned above. They ended up rooming together and sharing their religious beliefs. They were friends and agreed to disagree about their differences. Keep in mind that this takes place in the United States, so there is neither political nor academic pressure promoting either religion.

One very important thing Qureshi tells us goes not just for Muslims but for anyone a Christian may be trying to present the Gospel to:

If had said that I didn’t want to know if Christianity was true, David [his friend] would not have pursued our conversation any further. He had long before realized that people who wanted to avoid the truth usually succeeded. (2239)

There is a lot more to the story. A few details are worth mentioning here.

Qureshi was raised as an Ahmadi Mulsim, a sect that began in British India when Pakistan was part of that country. In parts of Pakistan the Taliban will try to kill Ahmadis. The conflicts between Shiite and Sunni Muslims in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen are part of today’s news. However, Qureshi notes that the sects are not all that different. The large mosque his family attended in Virginia, for example, was a Sunni mosque, but it had leaders who were Shiite and Sufi, and men like his Ahmadi father were respected as well. There are differences, yes, but their faith in Muhammad and the Quran unites them.

Genrally, Muslims view dreams as being more significant than most Westerners do. We have heard and read of Muslims coming to Christ after having dreams about Him. So the Lord used dreams to speak to Qureshi. He shared one especially unusual dream he had with his mother. She looked up the interpretation of the dream in a book by the Muslim Ibn Sirin on dreams. That dream was pointing Qureshi to Christianity—even as he and his mother relied on Muslim interpreter of dreams.

One personal observation—at one point Qureshi’s friend David introduces him and his father to Gary Habermas, a professor at Liberty University. The meeting was arranged to discuss the crucifixion of Jesus because Muslims teach that Jesus was crucified but did not die. At this meeting Qureshi’s father says something about the Shroud of Turin. While this account does not say they discussed the relic at all, Habermas says “there is a lot of good reason” to think that the Shroud is the genuine burial cloth of Jesus.

That was interesting to this reviewer. Back in the early eighties I reviewed a book co-authored by Dr. Habermas called Verdict on the Shroud. In that book Habermas expressed doubts about its authenticity. So even this professor has apparently changed his beliefs about something he even wrote about after taking a closer look at the evidence. Should we all be so humble…

Chris Smith. The Lord of the Rings: Weapons and Warfare. New York: Harper, 2003. Print.

The Lord of the Rings: Weapons and Warfare is a picture book that would appeal to fans of The Lord of the Rings. Using photos and storyboard drawings from the film, Smith puts together a nice overview of the battles and weapons of Middle Earth.

For the Rings aficionado, the book details (or in some cases, imagines) early Middle Earth history and the evolution of warfare in and among the various kingdoms. It clearly depends on The Silmarillion and The Hobbit along with the trilogy. It also makes us appreciate the thought and imagination that went into outfitting all the various armies and factions in the films. (This was before The Hobbit films.) Each group and many individuals had distinctive weapons and armor. The book is arranged topically with plenty of pictures, but lots of text as well.

We see the armor and weapons of groups such as the Riders of Rohan, the Uruk-hai, the Nazgûl, and various groups of Elves. There are also pages devoted to individuals such as Aragorn, Saruman, Elrond, and the Balrog. In addition, we get accounts of nearly every significant battle in the known history of Middle Earth.

Looking over a lifetime as a student and a teacher, it seems like interest in Tolkien peaks in alternating decades. In the sixties his books swept through America. I noted many students reading his books in the eighties as well. The twenty-oughts, of course, had the great films. (We’ll pretend the dud from the seventies never happened.)

This may be an off-decade for Tolkien—indeed, The Lord of the Rings: Weapons and Warfare is over ten years old—but it should be fun for anyone interested in Middle Earth and the imagination that it takes to bring such a mythos to life. Many of my students over the years have enjoyed the Greek and Roman myths we read, especially Ovid, Vergil, and the Homeric Epics. Yet most films based on these stories are so-so at best. Perhaps the reason is simply that no one has put the thought into The Odyssey, for example, as the makers of The Lord of the Rings films did. Peter Jackson, would you like an idea for a new film?

Cammie McGovern. Chester and Gus. New York: Harper, 2017. Print.

Chester is a Labrador Retriever who flunked service dog school for a reason that most dogs would—he hid at loud noises. Most dog owners have dogs that hate thunderstorms. However, Chester otherwise excelled in his training so much that his trainer Penney thought she could teach him to “read” flash cards.

Meanwhile, Gus is an eight-year-old autistic boy who seems to understand what is going on around him but who does not speak and retreats from people for no apparent reason. Chester and Gus tells the story about how they were brought together and how Chester was able to serve Gus, if not as a guide dog, at least as a therapy dog.

What sets the book apart is that it is told from Chester’s point of view. This is endearing. Most of us understand that dogs are naturally pack animals and tend to be oriented toward others. So Chester aims to please Penney and then tries, often in frustration, to relate to Gus.

Besides Gus’s behavior, there are other obstacles to overcome. Chester runs away at a loud noise at a Halloween “Fright Night” event. Gus loves scary things. Penney thinks she can train Chester to “read” like Koko the Gorilla that got a lot of publicity in the eighties.

Gus’s parents try to enroll him in school with Chester to assist. Gus seems to be improving, but kids who act differently are often magnets for bullies. One teacher thinks Chester is an unnecessary distraction and is able to get the administration to send Chester home.

And always there is Gus’s behavior.

Chester and Gus is sensitive and moving. We are told that the author is the mother of an autistic child, so she is writing with acute awareness. The book could be considered late elementary or YA reading level, and is well worth sharing—especially with any family or school kids who have to share their home or classroom with an autistic child. We have already recommended it for our school library.

Matthew West. The Pirates. Boston: New Word City, 2015. E-book.

The last time I read a book that was a survey about pirates that was not a picture book or about a professional baseball team was probably in college (a LONG time ago) when I read Exquemelin. Matthew West’s The Pirates is a great, light overview of the Golden Age of Piracy (roughly 1690-1720) when most of the sailors known as pirates today flourished. (The infamous Barbary pirates were more like privateers and naval raiders. They represented their North African governments.)

Well, flourished is not exactly the right word. Many disappeared, apparently returning to less unsavory professions under assumed names or perhaps lost at sea. Others died horrible deaths at the hands of the Royal Navy or the courts. And if the testimony of Captain Kidd is to be believed, the courts were not always exactly fair.

Interestingly enough, one of West’s primary sources is none other than Daniel Defoe. He wrote a fiction book, Captain Singleton, about a pirate, but in 1724 he published a nonfiction tome entitled A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates and a sequel in 1728.

Besides being a writer and editor, Defoe was also involved in the shipping business, and interviewed many sailors and consulted court records to write his pirate books, which were very popular at the time.

West tells us that there were two main areas where English pirates flourished, the Caribbean Sea and the Indian Ocean. Both places had rich convoys of merchant vessels and remote islands with little government. So Blackbeard (a.k.a. Edward Teach, né Drummond) mostly sailed the Caribbean and Carolinas, while Captain Kidd was mostly in the Indian Ocean.

Chapters are devoted to some of the main characters and their associates as well as the beginnings and lifestyles of pirates. We learn that Kidd was probably unjustly accused of piracy. He had letters from the British government authorizing his vessels as privateers against the French. However, he got some powerful politicians back home upset at him and, if we accept the record, he was tried by a kangaroo court in England. Kidd, by the way, did bury some of his treasure, but all indications are that the authorities recovered it and it went to the King’s Exchequer.

We learn how Nassau in the Bahamas was practically deserted when an ex-pirate decided to rebuild it and make a go of it as a legitimate British colony, and how he and his greatly outnumbered people managed to beat back a Spanish attack.

Besides Captain Kidd, one of the most interesting characters is Blackbeard. West tells us that “Blackbeard was a master of psychology, who consciously managed his larger than life personality to suit the peculiar conditions of his chosen profession.” (1264) It is hard to exaggerate both his physical appearance and the manner which he intimidated most people.

Far and away the most successful pirate was Bartholomew Roberts, a.k.a. Black Bart. He truly roamed the seas far and wide. He attacked ports and vessels from Newfoundland to Brazil and along both the Indian and Atlantic coasts of Africa. To put things in perspective, though, his career of piracy lasted four years. That was longer than most pirates survived the trade, but hardly a lifespan. In those four years he captured 400 vessels and looted a number of ports as well. He had had experience as a line officer in the British Navy, so he knew more about sailing and about naval warfare than most of the other men who thought the pirates’ life was for them.

In addition to these well-known names, we learn about Woodes Rogers, another former naval officer and privateer. He sailed closer to Antarctica than nearly anyone at the time and rescued Alexander Selkirk who had been marooned for four years on an island off the coast of Chile. Selkirk is widely, and probably accurately, seen as the inspiration for Robinson Crusoe.

(As an aside, while there were other marooned and shipwrecked men whom Defoe would have known about and possibly even interviewed, Robinson Crusoe the novel has one giveaway that Defoe relied on Selkirk’s story. The novel tells us that Crusoe occasionally saw penguins on his island. Of course, there are no penguins in the Caribbean where Crusoe was shipwrecked, but they are not uncommon along the shores of southern Chile where Selkirk was.)

One captain of a ship in Rogers’ South American privateering expedition was named Simon Hatley. Hatley’s ship was captured by the Spanish, and he was held by them for three years. He would later say that the difficulties with his ship began when he shot an albatross that had been following his vessel. This is told in more detail in The Road to Xanadu, but we know that Coleridge was familiar with this story and the superstition related to it.

Pirates were often treated well by local governments that appreciated their contributions to the local economy. More remote trading posts like some in the Caribbean and Africa often traded with pirates because there was no other governing or colonial body around. One such trader in what today is Guinea was a man by the name of Benjamin Gun, who became the inspiration for Stevenson’s Ben Gunn in Treasure Island.

The Pirates deals with the English pirates alone. Yes, there were Spanish and French pirates as well (L’Ollonais comes to mind immediately), but West focuses on the English ones. He notes well:

The Golden Age [of pirates] lasted barely thirty years, yet this brief flowering of villany on the high seas left a permanent mark on the Western psyche. For all their impropriety, pirates appeal to something deep in our souls. Their legacy, begun centuries ago, continues to capture our imagination with the lure of the far horizon, the promise of a different tomorrow, and, as ever, riches. (1758-1762)