The Dragonfly Effect – Review

Gordon Korman. The Dragonfly Effect. New York: Scholastic, 2015. Print.

Gordon Korman keeps cranking the books out. The Dragonfly Effect is the third book in the Hypnotists series about Jackson “Jax” Opus, a fourteen year old who has inherited hypnotic abilities. Once again, Jax has to face off Elias Mako, who has developed a hypnotic scheme for world domination.

Jax’s ability is like that of Obi-wan Kenobi in the famous line from Star Wars: “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.” Jax is one of handful of people (including Mako, alas) who can hypnotize people indirectly—through television, video camera, mirrors, the Internet.

The Dragonfly Effect opens with the Opus family in protective custody of the U. S. Army. One reason is indeed protection. At a secret wing of a remote fort, they are protected from the likes of Dr. Mako. But the Army also wants to experiment with hypnotism to see if it can be a useful weapon, perhaps getting a whole population to willingly submit without firing a shot. This top secret project was known as HoWaRD, Hypnotic Warfare Research Department.

In addition to Jax and six adults in this program, there is also Wilson DeVries, the bully who tormented Jax back when they were in school together in New York City. There is also eight year old Stanley X, an orphan who has powers that none of the others can match.

The title, of course, is a play on the term “the butterfly effect,” in which a supposedly insignificant event, like the flapping of a butterfly’s wings, have completely unpredictable and catastrophic consequences. Without giving too much away, perhaps we can say the dragonfly effect is similar, but its effect is more beneficial or at least sparing the catastrophe.

The Dragonfly Effect is an entertaining science fiction story. It is rooted in reality if we accept the “superpowers” the hypnotists have. Like the first book in the series, The Hypnotists, it does not have the humor which typifies so many of Korman’s stories. There are some funny lines, but they are mostly incidental to the tale. Still, it is a deadline thriller. As I noted in my first blog entry on a Korman book, “[h]is protagonists are fairly typical young teens who find themselves in unusual situations.” If Jax and his New York friends Tommy and Kira can’t stop Mako in time, will it truly be the end of the world?

The Daughter of Time – Review

Josephine Tey. The Daughter of Time. 1951; New York: Scribner, 1995. Print.

Fans of BBC’s Inspector Morse TV show may recall one of the later episodes in which Morse was hospitalized. While abed in the hospital, Morse began reading up about a famous murder than took place in Oxford about a hundred and fifty years earlier. From his sickbed and with the help of a librarian, a police archivist, and his loyal associate Detective Lewis, he was able to solve the mystery.

The Daughter of Time is like that. Inspector Alan Grant, the detective in a number of Tey’s mystery novels, is bored stiff in bed until he begins reading about Richard III, Shakespeare’s notorious villain king.

In all fairness to the Bard, Shakespeare based his play the chronicles by Holinshed, who was not always the most diligent researcher. Without going into great detail, The Daughter of Time gives us the impression that most of the evil deeds attributed to King Richard were made up out of whole cloth.

Like the 2010 popular novel The Harbinger, The Daughter of Time is a research paper presented in novel form. Tey does an effective job of rehabilitating Richard’s reputation from Tudor propaganda. An axiom attributed to many people says that history is written by the victors. This novel illustrates that axiom well. No one apparently would gainsay the accepted history until after the last Tudor monarch.

Here are a few tantalizing pieces of information Tey shares; there are many others. Richard had nothing to do with declaring Edward IV’s children by Elizabeth Woodville illegitimate. John Tyrrel was promoted by Henry VII and was not tried for the death of the princes in the tower until 1502, seventeen years after the supposed date of the crime. Richard III as king was generous to the leaders of both factions of the War of the Roses and was seen by many as bringing the war to an end.

Most of the surviving stories of Richard—stories which Holinshed and Thomas More relied on—came from John Morton, a strong anti-Yorkist who would become the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Daughter of Time calls him “Richard’s bitterest enemy.” (95) Indeed, the single contemporary account of Richard’s death calls it a murder, not a death in battle.

The term Morton’s Fork, the British equivalent of “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t” apparently originated with this Rev. Morton. He said that a man who appears poor is really just hoarding money and can be taxed while a man who lives extravagantly is clearly rich, so he can pay taxes, too.

Tey notes that Inspector Grant is not the first person to take a critical look at the received Richard III tradition. The first legally published was after the death of Elizabeth I, the last Tudor monarch. The most famous was author (and son of the Prime Minister) Horace Walpole.

I note that today there is a Richard III Society, and that those who are trying to rehabilitate his reputation are known as Ricardians. This year was significant for Ricardians because the bones from the king’s unmarked grave were reburied with honor in Leicester Cathedral. One note on the bones: Tey maintained that Richard was no hunchback, but he is portrayed as having one shoulder lower than the other. His bones indicated that he suffered from scoliosis—this can be transformed into a hunchback just as Henry IV’s psoriasis was transformed into leprosy with just a little exaggeration.

The Daughter of Time is a fascinating read. It is a lesson in history, even if it means going against Gandalf and John-Boy Walton as well as Shakespeare. And even if Shakespeare’s Richard III is pure fiction like Cymbeline or Titus Andronicus, it is a jolly good show.

Steel Trapp: The Challenge – Review

Ridley Pearson. Steel Trapp: The Challenge. New York: Disney, 2008. Print.

This is the first in at least three books featuring fourteen-year-old Stephen “Steel” Trapp. His name is appropriate not because he is strong, but because he has a photographic memory. In other words, he has a mind like a steel trap.

Steel is on his way to a national science fair from Chicago to Washington DC when he sees a woman on the train platform leave a briefcase and forget to pick it up. It becomes clear, though, that she does not want to pick it up, but that it is a “drop” of some kind.

By the time he tracks down the man on the train who picked up the briefcase and the briefcase itself, Steel has attracted the attention of a couple of U.S. Marshals as well as the apparent bad guys who are using what is in the briefcase for some questionable purpose.

While on the train, he meets Kaileigh who was on her way to the science fair, but someone stole her project. Mystery, crime—it is a real pot boiler. Steel is clever in figuring out puzzles, but perhaps not really thinking ahead about the consequences of some of his actions.

Yes, Steel Trapp: The Challenge is an action-packed young adult book. Chapters average about four pages, and they keep the pace for nearly the whole book. This might attract readers who like action and might be reluctant to read other types of fiction. A photographic memory is about the closest a human being in this world can get to having a superpower, but how is that used? A little more realistic than (fill in the blank)-man comics, but it has some of the same sense of adventure and responsibility.

Perrine’s Story and Structure – Review

Perrine’s Story and Structure. Ed. Thomas R. Arp and Greg Johnson. Tenth ed. Boston: Thomson-Heinle, 2002. Print.

We do not usually review textbooks, but we read this one from cover to cover. Story and Structure is a short story anthology geared for college classes. However, a key selling point makes it worthwhile for high school teachers and, possibly, high school students as well.

There are eight chapters focusing on a specific aspect of reading fiction such as story, plot, characterization, theme, point of view, symbol, irony, and critique. Each chapter begins with key definitions and examples—these can be helpful to the student or teacher even if they are studying different works from those in this anthology. Then each chapter has three to five short stories to illustrate the theme.

These eight chapters are followed by three chapters focusing on three authors known for their short fiction: Anton Chekhov, Flannery O’Connor, and Joyce Carol Oates. Besides three stories from each author, there are some excerpts from the authors’ work about their own writing and from literary criticism on most of the stories.

These chapters are followed by a very helpful and specific chapter on how to write literary criticism. The book builds.

The books ends with about a dozen more short stories not arranged in any kind of thematic order. I counted a total of 46 stories. All but one are worth reading. There is a good variety, though they tend to be serious—the few with some humor provided needed comic relief. Even then, much of the humor was on the dark side, e.g., Flannery O’Connor or Edith Wharton.

Of the stories in the collection that were new to this reader, I got a big kick out of “Roman Fever” by Edith Wharton. The plot has several clever twists as two society ladies play a game of social one-upsmanship. Like any good story, even an ironic one, there are subtle hints which point to its outcome, but it is still a surprise ending for most readers.

Flannery O’Connor’s “A Late Encounter with the Enemy” satirizes the love affair many Southerners have with Gone with the Wind and its rose-colored look at the ante-bellum South and the Civil War. Having just read Confederates in the Attic, this story demonstrated that not everyone from Georgia ate that stuff up.

The editors include Poe and Hawthorne—often seen as the developers of the modern literary short story. Their book includes some less subtle material like O. Henry and “The Most Dangerous Game.” It goes through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries up to contemporary writers like Jhumpa Lahiri.

As a textbook, this would work very well for a short story class or short story writing class. The study material could be useful to teachers and students in a variety of situations and contexts. The stories are worth reading. If nothing else, Story and Structure gives us a sense of the kind of prose fiction that is valued in academic circles today.

Kisses from Katie – Review

Katie Davis and Beth Clark. Kisses from Katie. New York: Simon, 2011. Print.

Kisses from Katie is simple enough to summarize. In 2007, eighteen-year-old Katie Davis left her affluent Nashville suburb to volunteer at an orphanage in Uganda. There she sees that many of the children, even those whose parents are alive and caring for them, cannot afford the $20-$40 needed to enroll in school. She uses her money and the money of American acquaintances she solicited and helps over 200 youngsters go to school.

She notes how many of the poorest people there know or do little for personal health and hygiene. She begins cleaning, disinfecting, deworming, delousing, and otherwise restoring children to health. But most remarkably, she commits. This does not turn out to be a short-term mission project for Miss Davis. She adopts fourteen parentless girls. She becomes their legal mother. She is in it, as they say, for the long haul.

Much of Kisses from Katie illustrates Miss Davis’s remarkable faith. She is confident God is her heavenly father. She knows He will provide food and clothing when she is totally out of money. She knows Jesus loves her and loves the children she ministers to. She has to depend on the Holy Spirit for guidance—where to go, who share with, who or what to avoid, how to pray.

Perhaps what is most extraordinary is that Katie tells us that what she is doing is not extraordinary. Anyone who knows the Lord can do it. She even uses statistics to show that there are enough relatively prosperous Christian families in the world to adopt every orphan in the world.

Kisses from Katie is not mere testimony, though. It is motivational. God can use willing people. Between each chapter are short free-standing reflections like devotionals or diary entries. These reminded me of Ann Kiemel-Anderson’s books like I Love the Word Impossible. Katie asks what is really important in life? What can even one person do to make a difference? With God’s help, you may be surprised.

Katie reminds the reader that she is no one special. Her heavenly Father is the special one. Katie is no nun—at least not yet. She has a boyfriend in the states, but she is committed to Uganda. She has not taken a vow of poverty, but she is living a simple life among and with the people she is working for. According to her testimony, a good number of people where she is in Uganda have committed themselves to Christ through what she and her co-workers have done. The people are not swayed by slick preaching or financial promise, but they can see that she and those she works with are the real deal.

As she puts it:

I believe that the Holy Spirit lives in me and with me, and I talk to Him throughout each and every day….There are always hard moments and then moments that are harder still, but there are no droughts when we drink from a well that never runs dry. (278)

Miss Davis frequently quotes the Bible like a well-trained evangelical. At one and only one point, she mentions in passing that she is Catholic. Kisses from Katie demonstrates that Catholics can learn from their evangelical friends to read the Bible and take it seriously. But the book also shows that she has learned from the strengths of the Catholic Church as well, at least the strength of those who take it seriously.

She has not taken a vow of poverty or chastity, but she has probably learned from examples and teaching in her church that wealth and intemperance are no virtues. She also has learned and demonstrates what it means to live in community. No, her home of thirteen daughters (she explains how one left) plus friends and helpers is not a convent, monastery, or Catholic community. Kisses from Katie is not a meditation by Thomas Merton, Henri Nouwen, or Ralph Martin. If anything, it is more realistic because we see Katie in the daily grind.

Kisses from Katie is published by Simon and Schuster under their Howard Books imprint. There are few books in this imprint because it is the evangelical Catholic imprint. By that I do not mean proselytizing for the church, but that it is both/and: both evangelical (born again and Bible-believing) and Catholic (aware of that tradition’s strengths). It is possible to learn from one another.

Confederates in the Attic – Review

Tony Horwitz. Confederates in the Attic. New York: Vintage, 1998. Print.

This may be a little different review from many I have written. I will be reflecting on the book Confederates in the Attic, but I may not be reviewing it in a thorough manner for two reasons: I left the book behind in the hotel library where I obtained and read it, and it got me thinking about things beyond the scope of the book itself.

Confederates in the Attic was a popular book when it came out about 17 years ago, and it still has much relevance. It is first of all an entertaining read.

The author explains that he grew up in Washington DC and lives in Virginia, so he was conscious of the American Civil War most of his life. However, there was more to it than that. All of his ancestors came to America after the Civil War. He recalls one from his childhood, a great-grandfather who lived to be 100. Even though this man was born after the war in Russia and came to the US about forty years after the war, his great-grandfather loved and pored over a ten-volume illustrated history of the Civil War.

Horwitz’s father also became a Civil War buff, and Horwitz himself as a preteen read up on the Civil War and even painted battle scenes on the walls of the attic of their house (hence the title). High school and beyond got him interested in other things. He became a reporter and won a Pulitzer for his work covering the First Gulf War. After numerous years working and living overseas, he settled in Northern Virginia where every few miles there is a Civil War battlefield or memorial, and his interest was rekindled.

The beginning of the renewal of his re-interest involved connecting with Civil War re-enactors. It turned out the men he met were “hard core” re-enactors, those who tolerate nothing that would be considered outside of the period including the kind of socks they wear and the buttons on their shirts. They only eat food the soldiers would have eaten, and avoid any insect repellent or medical remedy while re-enacting that was not from the period.

A significant portion of the book is devoted to these people. He begins to see their perspective and understanding of the various battles and causes. The cover photo looks like an old period tintype, but it is actually a modern photo of one of the hard core re-enactors. Few of the soldiers on either side had enough to eat; any hard core re-enactor was always concerned about gaining weight so that he would no longer look the part.

One of the most entertaining parts of Confederates in the Attic describes Horwitz accompanying the man on the book’s cover for a week long adventure driving to ten different Civil War battlefields and then living like the soldiers did for the rest of the time and sleeping overnight at seven of them. Horwitz learned that the overnight camping is forbidden, but park rangers tolerate it because of the support and public interest they generate as long as they leave nothing behind. Since our hard core re-enactors were imitating Confederates from North Carolina in Virginia, they had virtually nothing anyhow, so there was nothing to be left behind.

There are a number of other fascinating items in the book, some serious, some humorous, some surprising: the shooting of a young father of twins in Kentucky because a Confederate flag flew from his truck; an interview with a still-living widow of a man who served in the Civil War; and descriptions of various Confederate descendant organizations.

The pro-Confederate organizations often have a very distinctive interpretation of things related to the war. Horwitz’s observation of a catechism for young descendants which attributes the victory at Gettysburg to overwhelming Union numbers (actually the numbers there were pretty equal) and the Yankee’s wealth goes like this:

Actually, Gettysburg was the rare clash in which the Confederates weren’t badly outmanned. If the battle proved anything, it was that Lee could blunder and that Northerners could fight as doggedly as Southerners. Reading through the rest of the [Children of the Confederacy’s] Catechism, I began to hear echoes of defeated peoples I’d encountered overseas: Kurds, Armenians, Palestinians, Catholics in Northern Ireland. Like them, Southerners had kept fighting the war by other means. (37,38)

Horwitz is certainly not the first writer to observe the difference between the two songs which characterized the two sides, but when he heard them played one right after the other, he could not help but make the following observation:

If “Dixie” was elegiac, a nostalgic evocation of cotton fields, buckwheat cakes and gay deceivers, the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” was its antithesis: apocalyptic, ironfisted, and almost industrial in summoning God’s legions to march forth and crush iniquity. It would be a stretch to suggest that the two songs offered a tuneful synopsis of what had separated North from South—and what had fueled the North’s triumph. But hearing the songs in such close succession, I couldn’t help feeling the emotional distance between the two causes. (42,43)

Horwitz notes a few cities which have tried to attract visitors for both Civil War remembrance and for the Civil Rights movement a hundred years later. Montgomery, Alabama, was both the first capital of the Confederacy and one of the launch pads for the nonviolent movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King.

Another Rev. King, a black pastor in Salisbury, North Carolina, complained about a 1909 monument in the middle of town with an angel, a Confederate soldier, and the motto Deo vindice (with God as our defender).

“What’s the message here?” King said. “God dispatched an angel to ferry this brave rebel to heaven. As a Christian pastor, I got a problem with that. The notion that God was involved with one race putting down another, that’s going against the grain of a Christian nation. God ain’t with racism or anything to do with subdividing people.” (43)

This Rev. King wrote a letter publicly objecting to the monument and received hate mail and more muted reactions saying it just honored their ancestors. Horwitz quotes him:

“The way I see it,” King said, “your great-grandfather fought and died because he believed my great-grandfather should stay a slave. I’m supposed to feel all warm inside about that?” (44)

This touches on one of the main themes of Confederates in the Attic. America is “subdivided.” Slavery was resolved, but racial differences continue to fester.

While I felt almost no ideological kinship with these unreconstructed rebels, I’d come to recognize that in one sense they were right. The issues at stake in the Civil War—race in particular—remained raw and unresolved, as did the broad question the conflict posed: Would America remain one nation? In 1861 this was a regional dilemma, which it isn’t anymore. But socially and culturally, there were ample signs of separatism and disunion along class, race, ethnic and gender lines. The whole notion of a common people united by common principles—even a common language—seemed more open to question than at any period in my lifetime. (386)

There are two things, though, that this book impressed on me. These were not necessarily themes that Horwitz analyzed in detail, but I believe they reflect things going on in our society today.

First is the impact of films. Horwitz notes,”Gone With the Wind had done more to keep the Civil War alive, and to mold its memory, than any history book or event since Appomattox.” (296) In the book we meet a Scarlett O’Hara (i.e., Vivien Leigh) lookalike and people who try to find locations of settings from the book in the Georgia county where most of the novel was set. Blacks and whites reflect on it. The idea that slaves were happy on the plantation among moderns usually traces its roots to the film. (If only they would read The Narrative of Frederick Douglass!)

But there are other films in the background, too. The Connecticut-raised owner of the Ruffin Flag Company that specializes in Confederate flags and memorabilia noted that their T-shirt depicting Robert E. Lee used to be their best seller. By 1998 they were selling five times as many Nathan B. Forrest shirts. Confederates in the Attic attributes this to increasing stridency among those who identify with the rebel cause—no gentlemanly surrender as displayed by Lee. However, from my experience, a lot has to do with the popularity of the Forrest Gump film. Gump, we are told, was named after the General. I noticed that after the film came out students studying the Civil War would talk about Gen. Forrest, when, frankly, before the film few had heard much about him one way or the other.

Horwitz also notes that among blacks the baseball cap with the letter X was popular at the time. Forrest Gump came out in 1994 and Malcolm X had been released in 1992. I recall my students from the mid-nineties talking about Malcolm X and writing papers about him or his autobiography, but it has probably been fifteen years since I have read one. Horwitz quotes both blacks and whites in the South tolerating one another while agreeing to disagree by saying, “You wear your X, and I’ll wear mine.” (You wear your Confederate battle insignia, and I’ll wear my Malcolm X cap, or vice versa).

For better or worse, we get a lot of our education from Hollywood.

Perhaps the saddest part is that, with some exceptions, it appears that few students even in the South are learning much about the Civil War any more. One school principal said that it was no longer required in her state because it created too much controversy. Horwitz quotes white students who seem to believe the Gone With the Wind take on happy slaves, and black students who say that the whole war is irrelevant to them and that even Abraham Lincoln was a racist slave owner. Very disheartening, but perhaps this is still another sign of the dumbing down of American education.

My parents lived near Torrington, Connecticut. If you ever go there by coming off the main state highway, you will be greeted by one of the typical welcome signs with logos from the various civic lodge organizations. It says, “Welcome to Torrington/Birthplace of John Brown.”

One time my parents were riding with a couple, a friend of my father and his wife. His wife, unlike the others in the car, was from the South. She was raised in Alabama in the 1930s and 1940s (Scout Finch?), and had been trained there as a history teacher. She reacted very strongly to that sign, and went on a twenty-minute rant about how John Brown started the Civil War and no one should honor him. None of the others with her agreed with her interpretation, but she certainly knew facts surrounding the war and could discuss it in some detail. Now they are afraid to teach it.

I teach English, so I do not assume direct responsibility for this subject in my school’s curriculum, but some years I teach a quarter unit on Civil War Literature. After reading Confederates in the Attic, I think I may teach it every year. I don’t want my students sounding like the idiots Horwitz quotes in his book.

The Big Year – Review (Book)

Mark Obamscik. The Big Year. New York: Free Press, 2004. Print.

This is the original true story that the film The Big Year is based on. Birders got a kick out of the film. The film was done well, though fictionalized, but the book really gets into it.

A big year is the attempt of competitive birders to see how many different species of birds they can see in a year. There is no prize, just recognition by other birders. Usually there is a geographical limit, and in the United States and Canada a North American big year is a true challenge, especially if taken seriously.

By North America we mean the 49 continental United States and Canada. This is sometimes called the ABA (American Birding Association) Area. Birders will try to see how many species they can see or conclusively identify by sound if they cannot see them (think owls).

The big year in question is 1998 when three very different birders each saw and verifiably identified over 700 species of birds in a year.

Let us put that into perspective. Most birders, even widely-traveled professional ornithologists seldom see that many in a lifetime. Roger Tory Peterson, the most famous American bird specialist of the twentieth century, had seen about 660—and he wrote books and traveled extensively. I have lived virtually my entire life in three Northeastern states and have had few opportunities to travel outside that region. My life list is about 450, and that is for over 50 years. (My father was a member of the American Ornithological Union and took me birding the way some fathers take their sons fishing.)

The Big Year notes that there are only 675 birds that nest in the ABA Area—and some of those are quite rare. Not many people see 700 North American birds in a lifetime, but the three protagonists of The Big Year are all trying to do that in a year. They succeed and total number for the “winner” of the three is 745.

He saw nearly every breeding bird (I think he missed one), but then had to see seventy birds that are not normally found here! That may be the Cy Young record for birding. No one may come close to that number again.

1998 was an El Niño year. Those unusual winds and currents blew and attracted an unusually large number of extralimital birds to North America. It was also the next to last year that the public was allowed to visit Attu, the westernmost Aleutian island whose bird life is Siberian and was usually good for twenty to forty Asian birds that are virtually never seen anywhere else on North American Territory.

The most competitive and “Type A” personality of the three big year seekers was Sanford “Sandy” Komito, a New Jersey contractor and salesman with a big voice and a preference for Lincoln Continentals. He is a wheeler-dealer who always negotiates with motel clerks to get a better deal.

While most people enjoy his story telling style, he had managed to rub some important people in the birding community the wrong way—usually over money. That included Larry Balch, the operator of the only tours to Attu open to the public, and Debi Shearwater (played by Anjelica Huston in the film as Annie Auklet), the foremost operator of pelagic (i.e., oceanic) bird trips on the Pacific Coast.

In the film, a character loosely based on Komito is played by Luke Wilson. While the film script makes for more conflict, it is not an especially accurate portrayal. Komito was older, semiretired, and a happily married empty nester. But Sandy does obsess about birds and does have doubts about being a thousand miles from home trying to track down an elusive owl in a cold Minnesota swamp on Christmas Eve.

Komito had done a big year once before. When he wrote about it, he said that he would have had about five more birds if he had been more selfish. Most birders are happy to show others a bird they have found or wait with others until everyone has seen it. Komito was really no different, but that admission likely gave the screenwriters license to portray his character as truly selfish and the antagonist of the film.

Then there is Greg Miller. Even though he runs marathons, he is slightly overweight and his personal trainer wife has left him just as he turned forty. He is also more than broke. Still, Kenn Kaufman’s Kingbird Highway—about how Kaufman hitchhiked around the country for a big year in the seventies—inspires him to give a big year a try. He is still working full time as a computer programmer for a government agency trying to fix all the Y2K bugs; it is truly amazing that he had the time to break 700 in less than a year. Five years later he was still paying off some of his credit cards, but it had to be worth it.

In the film, Miller is the Jack Black character. However, unlike the film where the father gives Black a hard time, Miller’s biggest fan was his father. His father was a birder, too, but serious health problems would keep him from doing much birding any more. He lives his birding vicariously through Greg during the year and also bails him out financially.

Al Levantin is the third serious contestant for the big year. He is a retired chemist turned business executive who lives in Aspen, Colorado. Of the three, he can afford to travel, but he also misses his wife when he is on the road. He gets encouragement from her. He also helps out other birders who are on the big year quest. He is the Steve Martin character in the film and his portrayal is closer to the situation and personality of the his model than the other two.

To give a sense of the book, in the film Black and Martin climb a remote snowy mountain to see a Pink-Footed Goose. (A European species that has shown up in North American maybe a dozen times). In the book that goose was scored much earlier in the year, and those geese usually do not have much to do with mountains except to fly over them.

That scene was based on a much wilder scene in the book. Miller and Levantin hire a helicopter in December to take them over 10,000 feet in the Ruby Mountains of Nevada to look for Himalayan Snowcock. Not only does this illustrate that birders are really more of a community than competitors, but also how dedicated/obsessed/crazy birders can be.

There are many other similar scenes. Obamscik makes the Spartan accommodations and severe weather of Attu and the challenge of birding from a rocking boat come alive. From Attu and the Pribilofs to Dry Tortugas and the Keys, from Ft. Huachuca to Newfoundland, The Big Year is a wild year.

The film was worth seeing, and for the most part clicked with people who are actual birders. But as so many have said of other movies, I liked the book better. Read it and compare it yourself.

Sea Fever – Review

Sam Jefferson. Sea Fever. New York: Bloomsbury, 2015. Print.

Sea Fever carries the subtitle The true adventures that inspired our greatest maritime authors, from Conrad to Masefield, Melville and Hemingway. The subtitle says it all. Sea Fever is a collection of biographical sketches of eleven novelists emphasizing each of the author’s experience with the sea.

This is a British publication, so some of the authors might be less familiar to American readers. Sea Fever does make a number of interesting revelations.

The chapters are arranged alphabetically from Childers to Stevenson. They are only incidentally about the books the authors wrote unless the work specifically reflects the author’s experience at sea.

Erskine Childers only wrote one novel, The Riddle of the Sands. He was a yachtsman, however, and his knowledge of the north coast of Europe held him in good stead with that political novel. It was published in 1903 but predicted the German threat that would lead to World War I.

Childers’ most exciting adventure in his yacht was running guns for Irish revolutionaries in 1913. Cane Brinton’s The Anatomy of Revolution notes that romantic revolutions go through predictable stages including one where in the words of a Frenchman, “the Revolution devours its children.” (The name Childers is a variation of the word children.) So Childers, an Englishman who supported Michael Collins and Irish independence, was sentenced to death in 1922 by an Irish court presumably because he was not the right kind of revolutionary.

The chapter on Joseph Conrad is perhaps the most detailed because Conrad spent nearly twenty years as a merchant sailor and sea captain. Sea Fever does a good job of describing the ships and routes that Conrad sailed. One interesting tidbit was that in 1893 the novelist of John Galsworthy and traveled as a passenger aboard the Torrens when Conrad was first mate. Jefferson especially makes a connection with Chance, “Youth,” and Heart of Darkness. And Conrad actually sailed on a vessel named the Narcissus.

Two anecdotes Sea Fever shares about James Fenimore Cooper shed some light on Cooper’s motivation to write. Cooper served as a merchant mariner and then as a midshipman in the U. S. Navy from 1806 to 1809. Besides learning sea lore, he also learned to hate the British who were busy impressing American sailors into the Royal Navy—one of whom was Cooper’s best friend whom he never saw again. That illegal kidnapping of Americans was the main cause of the War of 1812.

In 1823 when Cooper was already in his thirties and not apparently interested in a literary career, he read Walter Scott’s The Pirate. Back then Scott was considered the world’s greatest novelist. Cooper did not like The Pirate because it was clear that Scott knew very little about sailing or life at sea. He told his wife the could write a better sea story than The Pirate.

She said, “Why don’t you?”

He wrote The Pilot, which was well received, and his new career was born.

I find it ironic that Mark Twain’s famous humorous essay “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” criticizes Cooper for being unrealistic, the same critique Cooper made toward Scott.

When writing about Hemingway, Jefferson focuses on his love for deep sea fishing, especially going after billfish in the Gulf Stream. There is a detailed description of the Pilar, Hemingway’s fishing boat. Jefferson also tells some stories of wild fishing adventures, some of them wild because Hemingway liked to drink and carried a submachine gun on the boat. Of course, there are direct tie-ins to The Old Man and the Sea.

Jack London’s life story has a lot to do with the sea. He learned sailing as an oyster pirate, robbing oyster beds in San Francisco Bay while a teen. Although Sea Fever does not mention it, that might be why London was attracted to Socialism and Communism. The oyster beds had been public, like clam beds on Cape Cod, but then some wealthy entrepreneurs bought exclusive rights from the local governments.

Sea Fever also suggests the limits of Socialism. London’s unhappy first marriage was an attempt “to prove his theory at the time that it was better to make a cold-hearted decision on finding a partner based on compatibility than forging a match based on passion…” (134) Very “scientific” or “empirical,” but it did not work any more than Socialism does. London sailed on a sealer, inspiration for The Sea Wolf. After his happier “passionate” second marriage, he ordered a yacht to follow Melville’s journeys in the South Seas.

Frederick Marryat’s story was quite salty, having fought well in the Napoleonic Wars. He never received due credit for his work because his commanding officer was very competent but also outspoken, and that never goes wells with the brass. In his lifetime he was second to Dickens in book sales in England and influenced Melville and Conrad “among others.” (148)

John Masefield’s poem “Sea Fever” may be the best lyric poem in modern English describing the person with salt water in his veins. (I like the Old English “The Seafarer” the best.) Masefield was a “Conway Boy,” training to be merchant sailor, but when he actually got a chance to sail, he was terribly seasick, so he never returned to work on board a ship, though the sea continued to appeal to him. The other thing that Masefield picked up from his experience at sea were sea chanteys. Those may form the rhythms, even subconsciously, to some of his poems.

Sea Fever devotes most of its discussion of Melville to his experiences on whaling ships in the Pacific and when he jumped ship to spend time with the natives on the island of Nuku Hiva, which he described in slightly fictionalized form in Typee. We are reminded that Typee was Melville’s first and most successful novel during his lifetime. Moby Dick would not become important until the 1920s. Sea Fever just makes a passing reference to the Essex, which seems unusual. Elsewhere we wrote that Melville met the son of a crewman of the Essex and obtained a copy his story.

Arthur Ransome’s sailing adventures are mostly around the Baltic and North Seas. He sailed the Baltic between Riga and Tallinn (Jefferson calls it Reval, its German name) a few times. One interesting curiosity, in the middle of the Gulf of Riga is the tiny island of Ruhnu (or Runo or Ronu). The inhabitants until 1944 did not speak Latvian or Estonian or even Finnish or Russian, but a medieval Swedish. This is a reminder that the name Russia comes from Rus, or the Scandinavian “rowers” who first organized the Slavic peoples on the Volga, Dnieper, and Moscow Rivers.

Sea Fever calls Tobias Smollett “the father of the nautical novel.” Smollett served in the Royal Navy in the early 1700s and took part in the disastrous siege of Cartagena, New Spain (Colombia). He left the navy with little faith in the ability of its flag officers. His Roderick Random satirizes the foibles of the navy of his time.

Robert Louis Stevenson would sail the Pacific Ocean later in his life, but his famous sea novels Treasure Island and Kidnapped were written before he had any formal experience at sea. When he did hire a yacht to cruise the South Pacific, like London, he wanted to follow in the same manner the route of Melville. Of course, he ended up residing in Samoa for the rest of his relatively brief life.

Though his personal experience may have been limited when he wrote his two sea novels, Jefferson does not imply that Stevenson showed ignorance of the sea the way that Scott’s The Pirate did. Stevenson’s family trade for several generations was building lighthouses. Robert was about the only male in the family who did not pursue that as a living. While he may not have gone on any long voyages like some of the other authors, he knew coastal sailing and from observing lighthouse construction would have been aware of the nautical life.

Sea Fever does give some solid background for some of the novels of the sea written by the men listed here. There are a few typographical errors, but nothing too major—is Yonkers really upstate New York? Was Queen Victoria really on the throne in 1806?

The Ultimate Proof of Creation – Review

Jason Lisle. The Ultimate Proof of Creation. Green Forest AR: Master Books, 2009. Print.

On the very first page of The Ultimate Proof of Creation, the author admits that “If by ‘ultimate proof’ we mean an argument that will persuade everyone, then the answer has to be no. The reason is simple: persuasion is subjective.” (11 italics in original) The author then outlines his approach and what he considers the “ultimate proof” that there is a creator God and that the Bible explains this best.

For those who are not familiar with the modern creation-evolution debate, it really began with Alfred Rehwinkel’s The Flood in 1957, followed soon by John Whitcomb and Henry Morris’s The Genesis Flood. By the 1970s, Morris’s Institute of Creation Research and a few other similar organizations were flourishing. Morris and Duane Gish were having regular debates with materialist-evolutionist professors. In most instances the creationists were convincing their audiences or at least making them realize that any evidence for evolution was far from conclusive.

A former student of mine, a Princeton grad, told me about witnessing one of the last of those debates in the early nineties. He said that John Warwick Montgomery, a Bible teacher and seminary president, had his opponent practically in tears. Lisle tells us in The Ultimate Proof of Creation that he was inspired by a recording of a debate between Christian philosopher Dr. Greg Bahnsen and atheist physiologist Dr. Gordon Stein.

By the mid-1980s the tactics of evolutionists had shifted. Word was out on college campuses not to invite those creationists because they made the evolutionists look bad. Instead, evolutionists closed ranks and began hunting heretics and using the courts to silence opposition. Scientists who did not at least pay lip service to evolution found that they were losing funding, not getting tenure, and even being fired. Courts effectively silenced teachers in public schools.

The approach of The Ultimate Proof of Creation reminded me of the approach taken in a number of works by the late Francis Schaeffer. Schaeffer was a theologian and philosopher, so his approach was ontological, asking the question, “How do we know what is real?” Lisle takes basically the same approach except that perhaps because he is a scientist, he asks, “How do we know what is empirically true?”

Lisle is an astronomer, but this book is not about astronomy or cosmology. He includes examples that evolutionists sometimes throw out as arguments, but that is not his main approach. The Ultimate Proof of Creation is a book about logic. I confess I was tentative at first, but let me explain why.

I mentioned Francis Schaeffer. Since he mostly worked with educated people from Europe and Asia—those with either no religion or an oriental religion—Schaeffer’s approach was to challenge people’s views of reality and then show why the existence of a Biblical creator made sense. As is often the case in all fields of study, his severest critics were those in his own church tradition who insisted that the only way to present God is to use the Bible. At first it appeared that Lisle was insisting on this approach, but he finally made it clear that he was not.

The next to last chapter of The Ultimate Proof of Creation shows that the “Bible first” approach was typical of Jesus because he was ministering to Jews who knew and respected the Bible. He often taught in synagogues. Lisle notes, “A Bible-first position does not necessarily mean that the Bible is chronologically first when we come to believe things.” (157 italics in original)

He compares Peter at Pentecost to Paul preaching in Athens. Peter uses the Bible extensively in his sermon (Acts 2:14-40) because he is speaking to Jews who respect the Bible enough to come to Jerusalem to celebrate Pentecost which commemorates Moses’ receiving the Ten Commandments. They would know the Bible and be interested in people teaching it.

On the other hand, when Paul first preached in Athens to polytheistic or skeptical philosopher-trained Athenians, he took a different approach. (Acts 17:15-34) He used common logic, quoted Greek poets, and spoke briefly about Jesus. If he had started citing the Bible, that would have meant little or nothing to that audience.

The ultimate proof is not a method. It is the root of all logic. Why does the scientific method work? Although Lisle does not mention this, why did the scientific method become utilized at the time of the Protestant Reformation? The scientific method (a.k.a. empiricism) works because the Bible tells us that God created things to act in a uniform manner. Lisle shows the reader that this is the only foundation of logic that will work. Even Aristotle who was a religious skeptic and a materialist understood that there had to be an ideal prime mover.

Schaeffer uses an approach based on origins of the universe: eternal existence (contradicted by entropy), something from nothing (how?), or something from an intelligent, supernatural creator (this makes sense). Lisle’s challenge is a little different. How do we know what we observe today will behave the same way if we observe it tomorrow? How do we know logic even exists? If we are just the product of a bunch of physical forces and chemical reactions, how can we even be sure that our perception of reality is accurate?

This reminded me of the quotation from Samuel Johnson, “All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it.” Ultimately, the materialist like the polytheist, indeed like everyone except the Christian and Jew, is deterministic. If everything is predetermined whether by fate, chemistry, or the dialectic, then what is the basis for language and logic?

The Ultimate Proof of Creation points out that virtually everyone behaves as if certain actions are right and others are wrong, that some ideas are intelligent and others stupid. Where do these behaviors come from? If a person says that he does not believe in absolutes, that is self-contradictory because he just made an absolute statement. The only way to explain things like morality, intelligence, and logic is to acknowledge that there is a creator.

A long time ago someone told me that the Gospel of John was written for a philosophically-trained Greek audience because it begins, “In the beginning was the Word.” (John 1:1) That statement made sense after reading The Ultimate Proof of Creation. That is the prime mover, that is the ultimate proof.

The Greeks were asking, “How do we know?” The Greeks were good at organizing mathematics, but they realized that they had make assumptions in order to begin. For arithmetic they (and we) assume 1 + 1 = 2 and go on from there. For geometry we assume the existence of points and planes. A little over a hundred years ago, mathematicians started experimenting with non-Euclidean geometry: What if a plane is something else? And also n-dimensional geometry: What if we assume mathematically there are more than 3 or 4 dimensions? Different assumptions give different results.

Lisle clearly points out that the creation-evolution question is not about the evidence but how the evidence is interpreted. The evolutionist looks at the half-life of Carbon-14 (about 5,700 years) and claims that certain artifacts or fossils are thousands of years old. The creationist looks the half-life of Carbon-14 and says that if the earth were even a million years old, no Carbon-14 could be detected anywhere.

(Do the math. If all Carbon in the earth were Carbon-14, in a million years there would only be 2-175 or approximately 1 divided by 4×1052 of the original number left. That is such a ridiculously low number as to be almost meaningless.)

It really does come down to where logic comes from. Is it a convention? How then can we agree on it?

Much of The Ultimate Proof of Creation is really a textbook on logic. It has helpful pictures and examples. As any logic textbook, it spends a lot of time with fallacies. Let me give one example as this is a key fallacy I pointed out years ago in a review of The Beak of the Finch. Lisle calls it the fallacy of equivocation, where the meaning of a word changes in the course of an argument. His example: “Practice makes perfect. Doctors practice medicine. Therefore, doctors must be perfect.”

The Beak of the Finch and many other treatises on evolution including Darwin’s Origin of Species shift the meaning of the word evolution itself. Yes, those Gouldian finches on the Galapagos Islands will change slightly over the years according to the geography of the specific island and whether the years are wet or dry. (El Niño originates here.) But over time the beaks of the finches change back and forth, and if the birds find a consistently filled bird feeder, they lose all distinctiveness.

Yes, they evolve in the sense that they have small changes over time depending on conditions so they survive better. But they remain the same kind of finch and will even revert to the original type. In other words, they do not evolve into another species any more than dog breeders or pigeon fanciers can change their dogs or pigeons into something else. They may change slightly, “evolve” in that sense, but they do not evolve in the Darwinian sense into another species.

The Ultimate Proof of Creation is a very good book on logic. At the same time, it challenges many human assumptions. The book can be useful in many ways outside the creation-evolution discussion. For example, why does the American Declaration of Independence speak of “self-evident” truths? Why are those things true and self-evident? Why does their existence also necessarily point to a creator (“nature’s God”)?

At some point American college professors and American judges are going to have to quit acting stupid and get back to first things. And that word translated “word” in John 1:1 in the Bible is the Greek word logos. That is not only the root word of our word logic, but it could just as easily be translated “logic” itself. In the beginning was the logic…

In most cases when people argue that Christianity is illogical, if they use their own logic to prove it, all they are doing is arguing in circles.

This book may be worth taking another look at. I hope to use it when I teach logic to my students next year.

Death Coming Up the Hill – Review

Chris Crowe. Death Coming Up the Hill. New York: Houghton, 2014. Print.

The publisher bills Death Coming Up the Hill as a young adult (YA) novel. Through the 1950s it would have been considered a poem, a long narrative poem or short epic like Evangeline or John Brown’s Body. But in today’s publishing world, big poems don’t sell, so Death Coming Up the Hill is called a novel.

Frankly, it does read like a novel. However, it is written in a kind of haiku form. Now, in “real” haiku, each three line poem stands on its own. In Death Coming Up the Hill the haiku form is there for syllable count only. Lines are enjambed—they run onto the next line and even the next stanza. So yes, read out loud, it is prose, not poetry. And also unlike haiku, the 976 stanzas tell a story.

The novel is set in 1968 and 1969 when the cultural changes that began in “the sixties” really took hold in the United States. The novel did bring back some memories. In June 1968 a presidential candidate, Sen Robert Kennedy, was killed by a radical Muslim. Cities were trying to heal after the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., when riots broke out. The plot is political.

As I write this, I remember the Tom Lehrer joke back then that because Robert Kennedy was a senator from New York that Massachusetts was the only state with three senators.

In the novel, Ashe Douglas is the seventeen year old only child of an unhappy marriage. Back in 1951, his parents had to get married. They did it out of duty, social expectations, and for the sake of their baby. His father is a stereotype. He comes across as a “dumb jock.” He is the patriot. He laughs when he hears a joke about Rev. King’s death.

Mrs. Douglas is the flower child. She was somewhat active in the Civil Rights movement and has become very active in the antiwar movement. The Douglas family symbolizes the country itself, divided. Both sides have a sense of duty to the country, but the question as the year goes on is can they abide each other?

Author Chris Crowe is a college professor, so he mostly takes the “politically correct” stand on Vietnam: Doves good, Hawks bad. Ashe does respect his father for what he did in the past—as a famous college athlete and for marrying his mother. But he sides with his mother, his history teacher, and his new girlfriend Angela on the Vietnam issue. (Boy, do I remember the radical history teachers I had in high school in the sixties!)

The novel hints that the United States was winning the war in 1968 but the news reports were negative. It illustrates Ho Chi Minh’s view that the war would be won or lost not in Vietnam but in the streets of America.

Although Ashe has found a very sweet girlfriend, there is a melancholy tone. Angela’s brother is MIA in Vietnam. Ashe’s parents are splitting up, finally, because his mother is pregnant and not by Mr. Douglas. This then completes the sixties retrospective by bringing in the so-called sexual revolution.

Here, I give the author credit. He is less p.c. here. Yes, we are meant to sympathize with the peace-loving Mrs. Douglas, but sexual immorality tears families apart. That is especially true if the family relationships are fragile to begin with.

I do not want to give too much of the short novel away, but the father of Ashe’s new sibling does not show up until near the end and then disappears. In the novel there is a reason for his disappearance, but today we see the sad fruits of the sexual revolution—fathers disappear. Young men do not take responsibility to the point where nearly half the births in our country are to single women. Where are the real men?

Let us just say that Ashe does what he can or thinks he can to “man up.”

The author explains why he chose the form of storytelling that he did. Haiku counts syllables. There are seventeen syllables in a haiku poem. The number seventeen appears throughout the story. Death Coming Up the Hill has exactly 976 stanzas or 16,592 syllables. 16,592 is the number of American men killed or MIA in Vietnam in 1968. One syllable for each dead American. The afterword, which might be worth reading as a foreword, explains this as well as some of the other things connected with the number seventeen.

Is the haiku thing a gimmick or a tour de force? I am not sure. It is clever. Death Coming Up the Hill is a reminder that the 1960s were divisive. Perhaps the United States was not as divided as in the 1860s, but it is sad what has happened in the country as a result: political correctness, family breakdown, utopian ideologies, and a loss of security that may be statistically imaginary but at times seems very real.

Book Reviews and Observations on the English Language