Naming the Elephant – Review

James W. Sire. Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept. Downers Grove IL: InterVarsity P, 2004. Print.

Dr. James Sire is probably best known for his book The Universe Next Door. That work came out in the seventies and has been updated a couple of times. Naming the Elephant spins off from that book. The Universe Next Door examines various worldviews. Naming the Elephant does not directly do that.

Instead, Naming the Elephant discusses what a worldview is. In that sense, it is more directly philosophical. Still, it is written for the layman. Sire first introduces us to the various philosophers, mostly German and Dutch, who have tried to define what a worldview is.

Of course, one’s worldview has many implications and ramifications. It becomes the way people see other people, history, ethics, nature. It becomes a foundation for our actions, our thoughts, our rationalizations.

The book’s title comes from an anecdote that many readers have probably heard in one form or another. In Sire’s version an Asian Indian boy asks his father how the world is suspended in space. The father explains that a group of animals, one on the back of the one below it, holds it up. The elephant is at the bottom of the short stack.

“What holds up the elephant?” the boy asks.

“It’s elephants all the way down,” the father replies.

I first heard or read this as an American Indian tale with the earth-bearers being “Turtles all the way down.” The concept is the same.

What is it that really holds our universe together and makes up its reality?

Sire points out that the two roots of any worldview are a question of being and knowing. Since we all exist and we all have some degree of knowledge, we all have a worldview. The late philosopher Francis Schaeffer would maintain that every person has a philosophy.

What is being or existence, and how do we account for it? What is knowledge, and how do we know what is real or true? Like The Universe Next Door, and most other philosophical works, Sire wants to direct the reader towards a worldview similar to his own. InterVarsity Press, the publisher, is a Christian publisher that specializes on ministry to university students and teachers.

Still, Sire is fair to the various perspectives he presents. One major change since he wrote the first edition of his other book is the prevalence of postmodern relativism in the culture and the similar, though not identical, embrace of Eastern religions in the West.

Like many others, Sire notes the inherent self-contradiction of the idea that there are no absolutes. (Are you absolutely sure that there are no absolutes?) He has fun with this. His college students claim that “Truth is anything I want it to be, especially with regard to ethics.” Yet they complain as much as anyone if they have received an unfair grade! (133)

Sire notes, for example:

When the various hermeneutics are turned back on themselves, they often can be shown to be self-referentially incoherent. For example, if in accord with Michel Foucault, all uses of language are plays for power, so is the language used to say so. If power is not a criterion of truth (which it isn’t), there is no reason to believe that all use of language is a play for power. (155 n.14)

He also notes that worldviews can change. Sometimes the change causes a radical change in lifestyle and perception. Other times, he says, it is “fairly painless.”

He gives a personal example of a change of the fairly painless variety. As an undergraduate, he adopted the belief advocated by one of his postmodern professors that the proper way to study the text of a work of literature is apart from the writer. Take the work at face value; the life and times of the author are irrelevant.

At the same time, he was studying the Book of Psalms in the Bible. The individual psalms often give the reader the context in which they were sung or in which they were written. This helped him understand the meaning of the psalm better. At one point he realized the two ideas were not compatible. Since his behavior clearly showed that he really did not believe the first idea, he abandoned it. He was surprised, but it was not hard to do.

The change that can take place in a religious or philosophical conversion can life-changing and radical. It may involve some pain. Naming the Elephant shares the moving story of a Chinese woman raised as an atheist in Communist China. She wrote about a mental change that took place when she discovered an appealing Taoist writer. At that point she was still able to reconcile her ideas because the People’s Republic was “Communism with a Chinese face.”

However, the belief in the Tao eventually led her to the Bible and Christianity. The King of Heaven in Daoism and Confucianism would become specifically identified as the Creator God of the Bible. (For more on this see our review of Finding God in Ancient China.) This would have a radical change on her understanding of people, ethics, government, those ideas of being and knowing, and her behavior.

At one point Sire lists what he considers seven basic questions that make up a worldview:

1. What is prime reality—the really real?
2. What is the nature of external reality, that is, the world around us?
3. What is a human being?
4. What happens to a person at death?
5. Why is it possible to know anything at all?
6. How do we know what is right and wrong?
7. What is the meaning of human history?

For any thinking adolescent or adult, it is not a matter of answering these questions. We already have. How we answer them tells us our worldview.

A Thousand Splendid Suns – Review

Khaled Hosseini. A Thousand Splendid Suns. New York: Penguin, 2007. Print.

I recall reading Chekhov’s short story “A Slander” years ago. In that tale, a rumor circulates that a man has been unfaithful to his wife. When the rumor gets around to the wife, she accuses her husband of being a Muslim and an Infidel.

In recent years such politically correct pieces like Huston Smith’s “The Five Pillars of Islam” would have us believe that Muslims are self-controlled respecters of women. Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns debunks that myth.

The author’s other novel, The Kite Runner, had a plot that circled around marital infidelity, racism, and homosexual rape. Hosseini’s follow-up novel, also mostly set in Kabul, Afghanistan, tells the story of two women who both become wives of the same man. Islam, of course, allows up to four wives at a time. A Thousand Splendid Suns is a harrowing story of such a marriage in contemporary Kabul.

The story begins with Mariam who lives in a shack with her mother on the outskirts of Herat. They are literal outcasts. Her mother had been a housekeeper of a prominent businessman until she became pregnant. The father does visit Mariam weekly, but he is reluctant to officially acknowledge her. As soon as she is old enough, he marries her off to a widowed shoemaker in Kabul.

Many years later, after their only son dies, her husband Rasheed marries Laila, a young and blonde native of Kabul whose parents have been killed by a random artillery shell in all the fighting. A backdrop to all the family drama is the political intrigue and civil wars in country. The story begins in 1973 shortly before the long-ruling king is ousted. After this comes Communism, the Soviet invasion, the post-Soviet factional fighting, the Taliban, and even 9-11 (though the death of Massood is more significant to the people of Afghanistan).

At first Mariam and Laila are rivals, as would likely be the case in most polygamous marriages. However, they become friends as they begin to understand how they have both suffered under Rasheed’s tyranny. Both are frequently beaten—Rasheed justifies it from a verse in the Koran. Mariam cannot understand why they both have to wear burqas and cannot go out unless accompanied by him, yet he keeps a stash of pornographic magazines in a drawer.

Hosseini is a very good story teller. We sympathize with both women. The war and the family strife eventually send them away to Pakistan where there is potential for a new life. But they cannot stay away from Kabul for very long. Even though it has been wasted by war, famine, and drought, it is their home. More than once the book quotes a Farsi poet who compares the homes of Kabul to “a thousand splendid suns.”

In spite of all the evil and division in the land, there is beauty. Here is a sense of hope. As far as I know, Hosseini identifies as a Muslim, but the imagery at the end is straight out of Christianity. The sacrifice of Mariam saves another, one who is guilty—so the sacrifice of the Son of Mariam (Mary in English) saves all who would believe in Him from their guilt. As Jesus might say, “You are not far from the Kingdom of God.” (Mark 12:34)

The Catskills – Review

Steven M. Silverman and Raphael D. Silver. The Catskills: Its History and How It Changed America. New York: Knopf, 2015. Print.

One thing immediately striking is this book’s subtitle. I always thought the Catskills was plural—the Catskill Mountains, just like the Rockies for the Rocky Mountains. Catskill Mountain (or “the Mountain”) is just one of a number of peaks in this mountain range south of Albany, north of New York City, and between the Hudson and Delaware Rivers.

The Catskills pretty much follows a historical timeline beginning with explorer Henry Hudson. The first two figures to visit the mountains and write seriously about them were truly the first two significant literary figures in American letters: Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper. Among other things we read how Rip Van Winkle brought the Catskills to the attention of a wider public and how the novels of Cooper would romanticize their wildness.

The authors make an interesting case that in spite of Mark Twain’s ostensible disdain for Cooper in his essay “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” Twain represents Cooper’s view of the West in his best works. When Huck Finn says near the end of his tale, “I reckon I got to light out for the Territories ahead of the rest because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I just can’t stand it,” (53) he is sounding just like Natty Bumppo.

The chapter on the Hudson River School—the first American artists to achieve an international reputation—inspires us not only about the Catskills but about nature in all “her various languages.” The authors detail the lives of Thomas Cole and Frederick Church, showing their romantic view of nature. Even Cole’s illustration of a tribal meeting from The Last of the Mohicans, the hundred or so human figures are not much more than dots compared to the mountains and forest surrounding them.

A fascinating chapter in The Catskills tells how naturalist John Burroughs and robber baron Jay Gould were best friends and classmates growing up in the village of Roxbury. Burroughs remained attached to the Catskills and their/its natural environment, writing thirty books on North American natural history. Gould became a New Yorker and one of the richest men in the country. Even though they lost touch as adults, the book tells us that at his death Gould’s library contained every one of Burroughs’ books, all “well thumbed.”

Interestingly, later in his life, Burroughs became friends with Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and Harvey Firestone. Once when the notorious anti-Semite Ford complained about Gould being a Jew and “a Shylock,” Burroughs corrected him: “All Jay’s people Presbyterians.” (175) Burroughs’ funeral was attended by Ford and Theodore Roosevelt, the former President at the time. At one point the Victrola record player stopped in the middle of Brahms’ “Lullaby.” One of the congregants went up and tinkered with the phonograph to get it to finish the song. It was Edison himself.

The chapter on Sojourner Truth focuses on her early life in Kingston. The family she was born into she called the Ardinburghs in her Narrative. They were the Hardenburghs, the Dutch family that was given the original land patent that covered much of the Catskills and the Hudson River Valley. We are reminded that for the first two or three decades of the nineteenth century, slavery was legal in the Northern states as well.

The chapter on the Catskill Rent Wars is perhaps the most important from a historical perspective. Much of the land in the Catskills and adjacent areas were owned by a handful of families like the Hardenburghs thanks to those seventeenth-century land patents. Even if farmers or tradesmen built their own houses and raised their own livestock, they were renters, not land owners. They could still be subject to forfeiture and complete dispossession even of their moveable property.

We often teach that the American Civil War put an end to the feudal system in North America. It was the rent strikes of the 1840s that put an end to such fiefdoms in New York State.

Nearly half the book is devoted to the Catskills as a vacation land for people from New York City. The Catskills describes in detail the various hotels and resorts erected from Ante-Bellum times until the 1950s. The authors call the period between the Civil War and World War I the Silver Age of the Catskills, as they catered to wealthy urbanites, most Protestant.

The Golden Age would be the period form the 1920s to the 1970s when the resorts became the summering grounds for New York Jews. Thanks to Vaudeville and Hollywood, they became famous as the breeding grounds for entertainers and impresarios from Moss Hart in the twenties to Jerry Seinfeld in the seventies.

One Catskill joke went, “At Grossingers, I walked out on Sammy Davis, Jr.”

The other guy would say, “Me? Harry Belafonte.”

There are chapters on the twentieth century artist colonies, the Woodstock music festival, and gangsters from the Prohibition era. We learn, for example, that Dutch Schultz’s birth name was Arthur Flegenheimer. He preferred his street handle because “It was small enough to fit in the headlines.” (265)

We are told that both Schultz and Legs Diamond (né Jack Moran) were protégés of Arnold Rothstein, the model for Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby. Schultz was gunned down in 1935, and, as he was dying in the hospital, he was deliriously rambling saying such things as, “[W]e better get those Liberty bonds out of the box and cash ’em…sure it was Danny’s mistake to buy ’em, and I think they can be traced.” (269)

That tidbit may also suggest the subject of the phone call from Detroit meant for Jay Gatsby that Nick Carraway takes after Gatsby has been shot. The man thinks he is talking to Gatsby and expresses worries about some bonds whose serial numbers have been traced. Historically, Rothstein was always suspected of having a part in what was called the Great Bond Robbery of some five million dollars of Liberty Bonds after the First World War. Schultz’s ramblings suggest he likely knew something about those bonds as well. (For more on this, see our review of Rothstein.)

As The Catskills was published in 2015, it includes some of the recent controversy over fracking, along with tales of Father Divine, ski areas, and towns which now have voting majorities from ultra-Orthodox Jewish sects.

Strangely to this reviewer, The Catskills does not even mention two of the largest tourist draws in the region: the Catskill Game Farm and its little brother Carson City. The Game Farm survived for seventy years as at least three generations of families drove to this outdoor zoo where kids could feed most of the animals and watch circus-like animal shows. Nearby was the “wild west” re-enactment park Carson City, where costumed cowboys would stage mini-rodeos and gunfights every hour.

Families that did not stay at the resorts or mountaintop hotels would still come to the Game Farm and often attend Carson City while they were at it. Just as John Burroughs wrote a lot more about the wildlife of the Catskills, perhaps some writer will some day share the story of the Game Farm.

Reflections on the 2016 Advanced Placement English Literature Reading

I learned this year that students skip the poetry question more frequently than the other two. (One other essay is based on a prose selection, and the third is based on a work that the student selects.) It has nothing to do with the topic or time period. Students skip sixteenth century poems as frequently as those by poets who are still living. Apparently some students do not have much experience or comfort with poems, even those students taking the AP test.

From reading AP essays this year, I would give some advice to would-be AP test takers. First and foremost, have a thesis that answers the question.

Ask yourself, “So what?” Why is this topic significant or important? Make sure everything in the essay directs the reader toward the thesis.

Beware of lists of rhetorical devices or figures of speech in the essay. From the AP perspective, the main reason that you ought to learn common literary terms and figures of speech is for the multiple choice questions. We were told there are typically five to seven multiple-choice questions that have specific literary terms that students ought to know.

The purpose of the essay is to make a discovery or get the reader thinking. That fact that a passage has a simile in line 4, alliteration in line 15, and an overall ironic tone is probably already obvious to the reader. They are, after all, teachers and professors trained in the subject!

What you need to do is make a discovery. If you note those three things, for example, then ask how do that simile, alliteration, or irony help answer the question being asked. That is what is important. If the simile does not help you support your thesis, do not do anything with it. The reader is not going to be too impressed that you know what a simile is.

What will impress the reader is showing how the simile itself points to an ironic tone, the alliteration suggests a sound given by a two-faced person, and the irony is a clue to understanding the question asked and a life lesson the author is trying to get across!

Take a look at sample essays. AP Central posts some every year. We were told by the College Board that the average (mean) for each essay in last year’s English Literature AP test was around 4.1 or 4.2. Look at the sample 4 and 5 essays. If you are an AP student, you should be able to handle those and see how they are done.

Then check out some sample 6s and 7s. Again, you can get them from AP Central, from your teacher, or from AP review books. What do you need to do to raise or sustain your writing at that level? Look at the question, the thesis, and the way the examples support the thesis.

Then, when you have the courage, check out the 8s and 9s. If necessary, ask your teacher about them. What makes them superior? What theses do they have? How do they handle evidence? What discovery do they make?

Always remember this: The AP English Literature test is made for students who read. If you read a lot of good writing, you are going to be more likely to write well. Avoid the lists, and get to the heart of the matter. Be sure to include some poetry in your reading so you don’t feel obliged to skip the poetry questions.

Beware of telling us that the writer uses, utilizes, or employs something. That includes cognates like the nouns use, utilization, and employment. Remember, too, that usage means something that does not normally apply to writing unless you are noting something about the grammar! Hey, sometimes you have to use those words. I just did. But if you start off by saying something like “the author uses” and then follow it with your list of two or three things, you probably already have the reader saying to himself or herself, “This sounds like another three or four.”

Ask yourself, “So what?” And read, read, read.

Notes from our 2014 AP Reading Experience

Notes from our 2015 AP Reading Experience

Click here to get to the AP Central web page which has previous test questions, scoring guidelines, and sample scored essays posted

Click here for a set of essay scoring guidelines (from 2015)

Lady Susan – Review

Jane Austen. Lady Susan. 1794?; Amazon Digital Service, 16 May 2012. Ebook.

According to the fount of all knowledge, Wikipedia, Lady Susan was written by Jane Austen when she was about eighteen years old and not published until 1871, long after she had died in 1817. The short novel is really very well done—its only weakness is the manner in which its conclusion was written. I will explain. Otherwise, it is fun to read and well under a hundred pages in printed form.

Lady Susan Vernon is quite different from any of Jane Austen’s heroines. She is really more like Vanity Fair‘s Becky Sharp. Lady Susan is calculating, manipulative, selfish, and probably more intelligent than any of the upper class people she associates with.

Widowed, she is carrying on an adulterous affair but manages to deftly cover things up. She is able to persuade nearly anyone who listens that she has been unfairly accused.

Similar to some other upper class women of any era, her daughter is an annoyance and a burden, but in the course of the story, we find out that Frederica is not only older than Lady Susan would like to admit but really quite sweet. The one thing about this story that is like the older Jane Austen is that Frederica does end up marrying the nice young man she deserves. Still, Lady Susan continues to get away with her behavior. She is no fool.

The story is told in epistolary form, that is, through a series of letters. In them we see how the siblings and in-laws of the late Lord Vernon do not really trust Lady Susan. We see how Reginald de Soucy becomes smitten and then repelled by Lady Susan. And we see how Lady Susan reveals herself in the letters back and forth between her and her best friend Alicia Johnson.

The weakness which I alluded to earlier is that the conclusion to the novel is a mere wrap-up. No more letters. It is an epilogue which includes the climax. It is as if young Miss Austen simply lost interest or energy; or, more likely, the people she had been entertaining were about to depart. Either way, she summarizes the ending. Because of that, Lady Susan is not the developed work that Emma or Pride and Prejudice are, but Lady Susan (the lady, not the story) is quite a character!

I read this after having seen the recent film Love and Friendship which is based on Lady Susan. (Austen did write another early short piece she called Love and Freindship [sic], but that is a different story.)

The film is very well done. It was perhaps superior in one important aspect other than fleshing out the ending better. Since the Lady Susan book is a collection of letters, there is a minimum amount of dialogue. However, the dialogue in the film is quite clever and captures the personalities of the book’s main characters quite well.

One slight difference is that in Lady Susan the Johnsons are English, and Mrs. Alicia Johnson worries that her husband wants to move back to the country away from the London social scene. In the film, the Johnsons are American Tories who left Connecticut after the Revolution, and Mrs. Johnson is afraid that her husband’s work will take him back to America. There are a couple of lines about the horrors of Connecticut which got a lot of laughs in the theater where I saw it—in Connecticut!

See How They Run – Review

Ally Carter. See How They Run. New York: Scholastic, 2016. Print.

See How They Run is part two in the Embassy Row series. This is going to be at least a trilogy. If it imitates the author’s Gallagher Girl series, expect five or six volumes. Be patient.

See How They Run continues the adventures of Grace Blakely, granddaughter to the American ambassador to Adria. This appears to follow more closely the formula of the Gallagher Girls stories except that it is slightly more believable. This episode is an improvement over the first in the series, All Fall Down.

In this episode, Grace’s brother Jamie is visiting. He is on semester break from West Point. Grace and most of her acquaintances we have met in part one join her brother and his army friend, another cadet, at an outdoor party. Spence, Jamie’s friend, gets in a fight with Alexei, Jamie and Grace’s Russian friend. The next day Spence’s body is found with a broken neck. Alexei is immediately blamed as multiple cell phone videos of the fight at the party are posted on the Internet.

Much of the story this time involves the group of friends trying to prove Alexei’s innocence. In doing so, of course, they get involved in both international intrigue and Adrian politics. This is a better paced and overall more effective novel than the first. There are two things that help its execution: (1) We have a lot of the background history of Adria and its capital Valancia as well as of the various embassy brats from part one, so we do not have to re-hash those things; (2) Grace is beginning to deal with her past and happy to have her brother around, so she is learning to get along better with others. She is becoming a more sympathetic character.

Although both books so far get their titles from nursery rhymes, there does not appear to be much of a connection between the rhymes and the novels. In fact, in See How They Run there is an Adrian kids’ song that is repeated throughout the story because it is set during a two week festival similar to the French Bastille Day when the people of Adria celebrate the overthrow of the royal family that ruled in the 1700s—although the actual celebration sounds more like Guy Fawkes’ Day with bonfires, masks, costumes, and general mayhem. The song is sung during the celebration but has a connection with the drama at Embassy Row.

Do NOT spoil the book and read the last page until you have read it all. The last page nearly wrecks the book. I have written in the past that even though the lead characters are female in Ally Carter’s books, guys would probably like them because of the suspense and adventure. That is true of See How They Run until the last page. I suspect that boys reading it will come to the last page and groan, “Is it chick lit after all?”

We – Review

Yevgeny Zamyatin. We. Trans. Natasha Randall. 1923; New York: Modern Library, 2006. Print.

I have seen We billed as the original dystopian novel. As best I can tell, it is. E. M. Forster’s short story “The Machine Stops” was published in 1909, but this is the first novel with such a theme.

Orwell wrote a review of We in 1946 while he was working on 1984. He would later suggest, probably correctly, that Aldous Huxley had read We before writing Brave New World.

I recommend this edition of the book. Not only is it a lively translation, but the Foreword by Bruce Sterling and the translator’s Introduction are very helpful.

Prior to We, futuristic novels about planned societies and socialist utopias were propaganda novels like House’s Philip Dru: Administrator, Bellamy’s Looking Backward, or even Jack London’s The Iron Heel. They all imagined a happy, peaceful future with superior minds and governments in charge. We was one of the first to suggest that such a society might operate as a well-oiled machine might, but true humanity would be stifled.

Zamyatin (spelled various ways in the Roman alphabet) had been a relatively early adopter of Russian Communism. He was imprisoned and exiled to the provinces in 1905. He sneaked back and was exiled again in 1911.

He went to England where, among other things, he studied the socialist writings of H. G. Wells. He returned to Russia to join the revolution, but it seemed that Lenin did not like him any more than the Tsar had. He was arrested in 1919 and 1922 in spite of his friendship with Maxim Gorky. He was allowed to leave the U.S.S.R. in 1931 and settled in France where he died in 1937. He wrote some short stories, but We is his only novel.

We takes place in the distant future where the world is ruled by the One State whose leader, the Benefactor, has been unanimously elected for each of the last 48 years. The story is told by D-503—the people are ciphers, literally—who is a scientist working on the Integral, a space ship whose ultimate goal is to bring the One State ideology to the rest of the universe, “to make your life as divinely rational and exact as ours.” (61)

What is most striking about We is not the plot but narrative technique. Zamyatin was applying avant-garde art techniques to writing. It reads more like a contemporary postmodern piece out of Eastern Europe than something written nearly a century ago.

Each chapter presents itself as a short, hastily written diary entry of D-503. He discovers a lost humanity in his mind: He falls in love; he begins having dreams; he discovers a band of uncivilized people in the wilderness not unlike the Indian reservation of John the Savage in Brave New World. What he has been taught about humanity and happiness has been turned on its ear. How can he know what is really true?

D-503 is a mathematician, so there are many mathematical references. He describes faces and objects in nature as geometric figures. Since emotions are no longer accepted in the culture, he uses colors and shapes when he is trying to express an emotion. His chapters have keywords as though he were putting together a math text. If We draws from any previous work of literature, it is probably closer to Euclid’s Elements than anything.

Zamyatin clearly kept up with the science of his day, hinting at space travel as hypothesized by Einstein. Still, the telephones still have dials, and how much more could D-503 had rapturously meditated on shapes if he had known about fractals!

We is the grandfather of the dystopian novels. It is a challenge to read—but a delight as well.

As Lenin envisioned, children are immediately taken up by the state. We implies that a woman who has a child is then killed to insure that no emotional connection is maintained. “Pure reason,” as Kant would say. The One State culture admires Taylor and Ford who promoted efficiency. Thoreau wrote in “On Civil Disobedience” that the state is an expedient. Socialism turns his critique on its ear and claims a totally planned society is superior because it is the most expedient.

“Our poets don’t soar in the empyrean any more; they came down to earth; they keep step with us…” (61)

Here is something the United States Supreme Court should take to heart. The court seems to be granting “rights” because it can, it is supreme after all. But is that what the true meaning of a right is? This dystopian definition sounds a lot like the Court’s definition in recent years:

Even the most adult of the Ancients knew: the source of a right is power, a right is a function of power [rex lex anyone?]. Take two trays of a weighing scale: put a gram on one, and on the other, put a ton. On the one side is the “I,” on the other is the “WE,” the one state. Isn’t that clear? Assuming that “I” has the same “rights” compared to the State is exactly the same thing as assuming a gram can counterbalance a ton.(103)

Pure Hume or Hegel! Definitely not Locke or Jefferson!

The reader can recognize some of the above as elements of Brave New World. But the temptations of the subversive I-330 are precursors to those of Winston’s girlfriend Julia in 1984. And the ending? Well, you will have to see for yourselves.

We is well worth reading! When we take a look at the world today, it is probably closer to We than any of the other novels be they utopian or dystopian. As Pogo said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Masterminds: Criminal Destiny – Review

Gordon Korman. Masterminds: Criminal Destiny. New York: Harper, 2016. Print.

This is part two of Gordon Korman’s Masterminds series. While it could be read on its own, Criminal Minds is meant to be read in order. The title suggests the main psychological conflict.

Four young teens have escaped the treacly-nice pseudo-Utopia of Serenity. They discovered that they were cloned from four different notorious criminals. The question is simple—are they genetically programmed to be bad or does it depend on their upbringing? As they say, Nature or Nurture? (The humorous answer is simply, “Either way, it’s your parents’ fault!”)

In this volume of the story, the question is somewhat moot. Technically, they are runaways. Yes, they are the subjects of a cruel science experiment, but to escape they have to steal cars and do other things to evade the Purple People Eaters—a.k.a. the Serenity Security Force.

Gordon Korman’s humorous adventure stories often involve break-ins or break-outs. Most of his Swindle stories had one or the other or both: break into the store of a crooked sports card dealer, break out of a cabin in the woods while being held hostage.

A lot of Korman’s humor comes from fish out of water situations his characters find themselves in such as Born to Rock or the hilarious Gifted. Here is one example.

Remember that our four escapees have been misled so much about the real world that they really do not know a lot about how things work or how they are perceived. For example, the Serenity school taught them that the Boston Tea Party was a literal British tea time where American and English officials cordially negotiated American independence.

When the kids get to a big city, they discover that cloning humans is illegal worldwide. So Amber walks up to a policeman and tells him that she and three of her friends are clones that have recently escaped from a cloning experiment in the New Mexico desert. The next thing she knows, she is being taken in for psychiatric observation.

What does that mean? Another breakout , of course!

The biggest breakout is yet to come. That will involve one of the criminal master minds whom one of the kids is cloned from. There will be no spoilers here!

Criminal Minds is wild and entertaining. One could argue that the novel is not only raising a question about nature vs. nurture but also questions about just government and even just war. The characters themselves are all twelve and thirteen, right around the age that most of us discover that the world can be a pretty unfair and unforgiving place.

All Fall Down – Review

Ally Carter. All Fall Down. New York: Scholastic, 2015. Print. An Embassy Row Novel.

All Fall Down is the first in what looks like will be another Young Adult series by Gallagher Girls author Ally Carter. This resembles the books in that first series because All Fall Down also involves international intrigue. Only, this time instead of straight espionage like the Gallagher Girls who attended a school for spies, this novel is set in an embassy.

Sixteen year old Grace (I do not believe her last name is given) witnessed her mother’s death three years ago. She saw the man whom she is certain killed her mother. However, everyone tells her that her mother died when a fire burned her antique shop down. Grace spent nearly a year under mental observation complete with drugs and cuffs because she insisted she saw her mother die at the hands of a man with a distinctive scar on his face.

When her Army major father gets sent into a battle zone, she is sent to the American Embassy in the nation of Adria (think Croatia or Slovenia) where her grandfather has been the American ambassador for twenty-five years. This is where her mother grew up and, because she was an Army brat, the closest place she has to a home. The problem is that her grandfather and others at the embassy treat her like damaged goods. “I am not crazy,” she says to virtually everyone she talks to.

When she discovers the man with the scar in Adria and overhears him talking about an assassination, she gets very scared. This story is a teen thriller and keeps the pages turning.

Grace is not necessarily a terribly likeable character, but we do understand her paranoia. She is still recovering from watching her mother die the way she did, especially when no one believes her. The story is told in the first person, so we do understand what Grace is thinking, and we certainly can sympathize with her situation.

She does make some friends on the Adria Embassy Row including Rosie, a tiny German ex-gymnast; Noah, son of a Brazilian soccer star and an Israeli diplomat; Megan, another girl who has lived at the American Embassy most of her life; and Alexi, a Russian friend of her older brother who is at West Point. Together they do have an array of skills and contacts, but Grace’s defensive personality tends to push everyone away.

The conflict is not just due to the mystery and the accusations about Grace, but also those teen interpersonal conflicts aggravated by serious trauma. Like Cold Fury, this is not teen chick lit. It is an easy thriller on a number of levels. Not only is there the sinister man with the scar, but catacombs from Roman times and strange happenings at the abandoned Iranian Embassy. There is a lot going on.

One warning, like Carter’s Gallagher Girls books, it is clear that Grace’s story is meant to continue. I am sure a part two is in the works. Indeed it is already labeled as An Embassy Row Novel. While one of the main mysteries is solved, there are a lot of dangling loose ends. I suspect that it may take a few volumes to tie them all up.

An Underground History of American Education – Review

John Taylor Gatto. An Underground History of American Education. Rev. Ed. Michael H. Keehn, 2003. E-book.

I had a friend who would share articles he copied with others. Many times he would highlight passages with a yellow highlighter. Occasionally he’d say, “This one is so good, I just wanted to dip the whole page in a bucket of yellow ink.” An Underground History of American Education is a book that ought to be soaked in yellow highlighter ink. This is one powerful book.

Gatto’s thesis, which he exhaustively documents, is that American education in the twentieth century has accomplished precisely what people a hundred years ago were hoping to accomplish. Yes, that includes a dumbing-down and increasing dependency. Here is Woodrow Wilson:

We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks. (1280) [All references are Kindle locations, not page numbers].

The author was for many years a middle school teacher in Harlem. He was recognized twice as a teacher of the year for New York City and once for the whole State of New York. He eventually resigned out of frustration. His resignation letter was published in The Wall Street Journal. As much as he would do things to improve his students’ abilities, the powers that be would ultimately thwart his plans and ideas. Why? he would ask. His conclusion was that the problem was systemic.

He began researching the origins of the modern public school system, starting with Horace Mann and focusing on the first four or five decades of the Twentieth Century. Things were pretty much in place by World War II and have not changed that much since.

Interestingly, part of his thesis is reminiscent of complaints we are hearing during the 2016 election cycle. Big business and big government have scratched each other’s backs for so long, and the ordinary citizen loses his rights and is forgotten. A National Education Association (NEA) director said government and business together would “accomplish by education what dictators in Europe are seeking to do by compulsion and force.” (1325) This was not a complaint. This was an announcement made by the NEA in 1933 about what it hoped to do.

Gatto goes into great detail that this planning was understood to be “scientific.” As he puts it, “The entire academic community here and abroad had been Darwinized and Galtonized by this time [1930] and to this contingent [the NEA] school seemed an instrument for managing evolutionary destiny.” (1431) This included “selective breeding” and outright racism like Darwin’s Descent of Man. We are reminded this was not only a time of eugenics, but even forced sterilization, upheld by the Supreme Court in 1927.

I recall being told by David Bradshaw, Oxford don and expert on Aldous Huxley, that Brave New World was not originally meant as a dystopia, but to give an idea of what a planned society might look like. Like many intellectuals in the 1930s, Huxley was an advocate of central planning and at the time was sympathetic to both Germany and the Soviet Union. (In fairness to Huxley, he would change, as we know both from the 1946 introduction he wrote for Brave New World as well as his 1958 Brave New World Revisited.)

One quotation from Arnold Gesell, who as early as 1909 was calling for schools to advance racial purity, was so blatantly racist that he would have been kicked off the Yale faculty if he were still there today. Yet many schools still use his techniques for screening and tracking students. Gatto puts it this way:

What gradually began to emerge form this was a Darwinian caste-based American version of institutional schooling remote-controlled at long distance, administered through a growing army of hired hands, layered into intricate pedagogical hierarchies on the old Roman principle of divide and conquer. (1500,1501)

Even since 1960, the number of elected local school boards had shrunk from over 40,000 to about 15,000 in 1998. (1688) He notes that in 1991 the New York City school system had more school administrators than the entire continent of Europe. (9037) In most places today, parents have little input or connection to their children’s education.

By 1944, a repudiation of Jefferson’s idea that mankind had natural rights was resonating in every corner of academic life. Any professor who expected free money from foundations, corporations, or government agencies had to play the scientific management string on his lute. (1506)

By 1996 Time magazine would editorialize that democracy was outmoded: “The modern world is too complex to allow the man or woman in the street to interfere in its management.” (1512)

Despite the century-long harangue that school was the cure for unevenly spread wealth, exactly the reverse occurred—wealth was 250 percent more concentrated at century’s end than at its beginning…it’s as if government schooling made people dumber, not brighter; made families weaker, not stronger; ruined formal religion with its hard-sell exclusion of God; set the class structure in stone by dividing children into classes and setting them against one another; and has been midwife to an alarming concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a fraction of the national community. (1522-28)

Gatto is an English teacher, and what he shares about literature, it sounds like he was exciting in the classroom. “I always knew school books and real books were different. Most kids do.” (1535) “Real books demand that people actively participate by asking their own questions. Books that show you best questions to ask aren’t just stupid, they hurt the mind under the guise of helping it.” (1570)

Preach it, brother!

There is so much more. This book helped me understand things that have happened in my teaching experience. Now, all except for one year, I taught in private schools, so the students were generally treated with more respect than Gatto’s Harlem experience. Still, nearly everyone had to go through some teacher education program, and some teachers and administrators and most education professors have partaken of the elitist Kool-Aid to some degree.

An Underground History of American Education is not a conspiracy theory text. The author cites hundreds of sources. Yes, including Woodrow Wilson, John Dewey, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, and many others. He lets the founders of the system speak for themselves. The one problem with the book is that the author often does not give the references. Many times when he does, they are only partial. I recognized a few because I had read them before and knew his attribution was correct. That is a technical problem that will turn off some readers.

Gatto suggests that teachers who really motivate their students and get their students to advance are going against the grain. They may have to be subversive—in a word, the true underground. Indeed, among other recommendations that he makes, he encourages parents to try home schooling. His last chapter is worth reading to get an idea of what can work. Social engineers are not going to like it, but do we want a Brave New World or a one that respects life, liberty, and property?

I cannot help making a connection between An Underground History of American Education and C. S. Lewis’s lectures which became known as The Abolition of Man. Lewis was expressing a philosopher’s concern that many materialistic ideas rooted in speculative teachers like Nietzsche, Hegel, Marx, Darwin, Carnegie, and others would result in the abolition of man. He did not mean an extinction of the human race; he meant people with no feelings or moral awareness—an awareness, for example, that they are made in the image of God, that hey have consciences, and that God has put eternity in their hearts. (See Ecclesiastes 3:11) Lewis was speaking philosophically and from history. Read Gatto and see how it is being done, how the powers that be are turning mankind into mere automata and how mankind is coming to be abolished.

Book Reviews and Observations on the English Language