Bill Nowlin and Jim Prime. Blood Feud. Cambridge MA: Rounder, 2005. Print.

Blood Feud is one of several books on the 2004 Boston Red Sox. This one focused on the American League Championship Series (ALCS), the first time in major league baseball history that a team won four straight games in a postseason series after losing the first three. Depending on your perspective, it was either a great comeback or a great choke.

What distinguishes Blood Feud is that it goes through the whole history of the New York Yankees-Boston Red Sox feud starting in 1903 with the New York Highlanders and Boston Americans. At times it can be dry, but its details emphasize to fans of both teams what it was like, especially for Red Sox fans after 1918.

The authors call it a feud. This was not a rivalry. A rivalry is like Harvard-Yale which most years either team has a chance of winning. Before the 1999 ALCS which featured the two teams, Yogi Berra told Derek Jeter, “Don’t worry about them. They’ve been trying to beat us for 80 years.” (159) According to ESPN, Berra repeated this to Bernie Williams before game seven in 2004.

While most of the book is some what dispassionate details of the challenges faced by Boston against New York, the authors attempt to characterize the Red Sox vs. Yankees as good vs. evil. It is true that fans of most other baseball teams hate the Yankees because of their domination. The authors make a case, though, that the Yankees embody the seven deadly sins. Then, of course, they raise the existential question: Why does evil always seem to triumph? We observe this in life many times. So we observe it in baseball.

There are some interesting details amid the collection of thousands of factoids.

One of the cheapest shots ever made by the Yankees was made by their 1930s owner Col. Jacob Ruppert. The Yankees still had lien on Fenway Park—part of the 1919 sale of Babe Ruth to New York was that the Yankees would lend Red Sox owner Harry Frazee $300,000 as a mortgage on the ball park. After the Sox swept the Yankees in a series, Ruppert was so angry that he called the note in full. This was after Tom Yawkey had taken over the Boston team, so he had no difficulty writing the check.

(Blood Feud does not date this episode, but Yawkey had taken over the Sox in 1933 and Ruppert died before the 1939 season. It sounds a little freaky today that the Yankees were part owners of Fenway Park for nearly twenty years, but the book points out that the Boston Globe was owned by the New York Times at the time it was published. Fortunately, in 2013 John Henry, part owner of the Red Sox, purchased the Globe.)

There are 65 pages of time line items from 1895 (Ruth’s birth) to 2004 and helpful sidebars. While some of these are dry, they do contain some curious items. In ten years from 1940 until 1950 (including time off for World War II) Ted Williams never had two games in a row where he failed to get on base whether by walk or hit. He has the record for Consecutive Games on Base Safely, 84 in 1949, ten more than DiMaggio’s 74 when he had his record 56 straight games with a hit. In fact, in 1949 Williams reached based in all but five games the whole season.

One sidebar summarizes all fourteen of the Red Sox’s extra-inning postseason games as of 2004 (9-4-1, ties were common before night lights). Another has excerpts from the baseball and umpire rule books describing interference by baserunners and its sanctions to help us see that, as the Fox Sports broadcasters said, the umpires “got it right” concerning A-Rod’s glove slap in game six of the ALCS.

The authors’ conclusion is not unlike that of the Book of Job in the Bible. God is aware of the evil, but evil is there to test the faithful, and sooner or later (with emphasis on the later), to paraphrase a DVD from 2004, faith is rewarded.

Two features of Blood Feud are an introduction by former Red Sox pitcher Bill Lee and an afterword by former Red Sox infielder Johnny Pesky. They have two very different perspectives on the Yankees.

Lee really sounds like he hates them. Lefthander Lee’s nickname was Spaceman, and he always wore his emotions on his sleeve. Once Yankee Graig Nettles injured Lee’s shoulder in a brawl. That took him out for six weeks. Lee also played in the seventies when both franchises had teams that made it to the World Series (they both were good) and when free agency was relatively new.

Pesky, on the other hand, while acknowledging the frustration, expresses admiration for most of the Yankees. “We never saw the Yankees as enemies. It was just mutual respect, never a feud.” (281) He notes that in later times these was some animosity, especially between catchers Carlton Fisk and Thurman Munson (the seventies). Still, he admits, “You get tired of coming in second.” (282). And that is what Blood Feud is largely about. But it concludes with 2004 and because of the frustration the victory is so much sweeter.
As Emily Dickinson put it:

Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne’er succeed…

P.S. A personal postscript. Pesky here speaks very highly of Yogi Berra, and from all accounts he is a man of character in spite of his New York prejudices. I saw him play twice. He was in the 1961 All Star Game in Boston which I saw. Back then, you could get tickets the day of the game, even for an All Star Game.

I also saw game seven of the 1960 World Series. My father and I had a seat in the left field bleachers. When Mazeroski hit his home run in the bottom of the ninth, I lost the ball in the white afternoon sky so I kept my eye Berra, who was playing in left field that game. When I saw him turn around and raise his head without moving, I knew the ball had gone over the scoreboard for the winning homer!

The evil empire did not always win.

Caleb Coy. An Authentic Derivative. Chistiansburg VA: Caleb Coy Guard, 2015. E-book.

My copy of An Authentic Derivative tells me this was released in August 2015, so this book is hot off the press. Except that my copy is an e-book, so I guess that makes it hot off the hard drive or something.

Imagine The Great Gatsby told by a young and self-conscious David Foster Wallace who was born after 1980. That in a nutshell describes this story. Instead of using money to impress the girl of his dreams, the Gatsby character here uses his music to do the same.

The narrator, one Neil Oberlin (kneel, over the line?), is very much a questionable character like Nick Carraway (carried away?) who nevertheless sympathizes with the hero. Bob Fey (Fay was Daisy’s maiden name) is the sleazy music promoter—the Meyer Wolfsheim—who claims at the end that he “made” Garrett “Wick” Sedgwick.

Yes, An Authentic Derivative is indeed derivative. But it is derivative the way Macbeth derives from King Saul, and The Mayor of Casterbridge derives from Macbeth, and Things Fall Apart from The Mayor of Casterbridge.

Oh, An Authentic Derivative also mentions the medieval Persian tale of Layla and Majnan. Layla and Majnan were childhood friends, but Majnan (literally “madman”) is not socially acceptable to her father. She marries a nobleman and appears content enough. Majnan attempts unsuccessfully to win her back and goes crazy.

An Authentic Derivative might initially appeal to a narrower audience than Gatsby (though Gatsby was not a terribly big seller in Fitzgerald’s lifetime). Those who would really appreciate it are those who have followed indie rock for the last twenty years or so. When I was a teen, it was called underground music. Somewhere along the line it became alternative music, then alternative rock, then alt rock, and then independent rock or indie. I get it. I was “into” the underground stuff. For example, I like Tim Buckley. An Authentic Derivative refers to Buckley, but the context is about Tim’s son Jeff.

One big difference between Nick Carraway and Neil Oberlin is that Oberlin is much more intrusive. At times it sounds like he is preaching or editorializing or at least lecturing the reader. He is also very self-conscious. He frequently says things like I am being pedantic or I am being ironic. Is he being funny?

Our Daisy character is Oberlin’s cousin Tabitha Redding-Davis. Her husband Virgil is no hulking jock like Tom Buchanan, but he is a kind of snob. His snobbery is intellectual. As Tom Buchanan cites pseudo-scientific works he has read or heard of, so Virgil constantly refers to obscure books or articles in Slate or The Huffington Post. Wick was the only guy Tab liked before Virgil, but she apparently thought he was too much of a hick. Tabitha clearly thinks Virgil is smart.

An Authentic Derivative is very good at picking up details of the current zeitgeist the way that Gatsby did for the twenties. Tabitha and Virgil eloped, and some folks in Oberlin’s family think that Tab may not actually be married. Although Neil does not know anyone who witnessed the nuptials, he reasons that they must be married because, after all, they hyphenated their names together.

A slight echo of Wallace’s Infinite Jest appears in the music of Sedgwick. It is not as hypnotic as the Infinite Jest film is, but his last two albums are critically acclaimed, and he appears on his way up. Even Virgil likes his stuff. Unlike Tom Buchanan, Virgil does not appear aware of Tab’s past relationship with Wick or his intentions towards her.

Like Jay Gatsby, Sedgwick has identity issues. The novel is set in Nashville, Music City USA and Neil’s home town, but Wick settles there from Iowa not because of the music scene but because he has learned that Tabitha lives there. He was a traditional country music fan and has been disgusted that so many country stars have “sold out” for commercial success.

Once he saw a performance by Hoyt Murdock, a country singer then in his seventies whom Wick saw as a genius. But Murdock was not singing the kind of songs that were genuinely his. Sedgwick would recall:

[T]here he was, dead, and reanimated as something else, something hijacked, something phony. The song he played was not his own, the sound was not his own, the spirit was not his own. And worse still, the crowd was swallowing it with enormous glee. (175)

No, Wick was not going to sell out. Without going into detail, Wick confronts Murdock who then becomes the Dan Cody character for Wick.

Tabitha has a friend, Kenna, whom she tries to fix up with Neil. She is the Jordan Baker character. Neil dates her a few times because it is convenient, but he does not really care for her. Indeed, there are a lot of minor characters, more than in Gatsby, and Oberlin does not appear to care for any of them, really. At one point he says, “I am being condescending”—and he is, not just at that moment, but throughout nearly the entire novel.

Neil admires Wick because Wick will not sell out. Neil admits that he has had to. He is an artist. Wick asks him to design his latest album cover—though the real reason is so that Neil can connect him with cousin Tab. Neil has to make a living so he “does work” for pretty much anyone willing to pay. Wick, on the other hand, has stayed true to his vision and perhaps true to Tabitha in his own way.

Although the self-conscious title may suggest otherwise, An Authentic Derivative is its own story just as Macbeth is its own story. Still, there are clever echoes of Gatsby in the story. In The Great Gatsby, Nick spills quite a bit of ink naming some of the tycoons, politicians, and actors and actresses who attend Gatsby’s parties. At one point in An Authentic Derivative, Neil spends three to four pages listing the names of indie bands he has seen. I recognized some of the names, but if would not be surprised if, as in Gatsby, many of them are made up. (123-126)

In Gatsby, Nick mentions a few songs by name, and the songs contribute to the meaning of the story. For example, Daisy and Gatsby sing “Ain’t We Got Fun.” The lines “Not much money/Oh but honey/Ain’t we got fun” certainly suggest that love makes people happy more than money does. Similarly, I am glad I looked up the words to the lyrics of “Rococo” by Arcade Fire when it was first mentioned. Even actually listening to the song would help. Hint, hint.

At one point, perhaps the height of pretension or self-consciousness on Neil or the author’s part, Neil wears a “Te occidere possunt…” T-shirt. That is the Latin motto of the tennis academy in Infinite Jest. Yeah, we get it.

Just as Nick Carraway one time shares his true feelings with Gatsby, so one time Neil says something “real to him [Wick] about his music.” (226) It is just about the only time in the whole novel when Neil’s voice changes. It is nearly the only time he is not being pretentious, pedantic, or too clever. Perhaps it is the only time, to use the other meaning of voice changing, that Neil sounds mature.

Still, Neil can see the “real deal” in others occasionally. He notes that as Sedgwick tells the Hoyt Murdock story, Wick loses his affected Nashville accent and takes on his native Midwestern accent. Should I mention that like Jay Gatsby, Garrett Sedgwick is not his real name?

Just as Jordan gets miffed at Nick for “throwing her over” on the telephone, so Neil and Kenna break up while texting. He later would say cynically, perhaps speaking for his generation:

No guy would ever be good enough for her because no guy could treat her as well as her iPhone. (291)

There are a lot of stark observations about the under-35 adults of today. Those perhaps do echo Gatsby, even if most of the characters in An Authentic Derivative are not motivated by wealth.

Neil and his friend Joey, for example, are looking for something to give meaning to their lives. Neil especially is looking to the arts. The only ones who seem to be happy about their choices are the Redding-Davises and Neil’s roommate Greg. Virgil is studying theology in seminary, and Greg is going to be a missionary in Asia.

Oberlin avoids this. He was brought up in church but cannot bring himself to believe in God or Jesus. He confesses to Greg that he is a solipsist. That might be a good description of his generation’s religion—”I don’t believe in God or go to church or anything, but I am spiritual.” It is not the Other, the I-Thou, but the self. The only spirit is my own spirit.

Still, perhaps there is some hope. These are not the anchorless characters in The Art of Fielding who do not even know what the questions are. (I used a line from a Tim Buckley song to describe them—am I pretentious?) People in An Authentic Derivative are still looking. God’s promise is, “If you seek me, you will find me, if you search for me with all your heart.” (Jeremiah 29:13) It is on His terms, not ours, but keep seeking.

P.S. This is a self-published work, and one that should be picked up by some publisher somewhere. However, the author states in his blog that he wanted an independent release of it so he could maintain artistic control. Like indie rock, I guess. I just posted a rant about self-publishing recently, but it was before I read this book. This appears to be very well edited except for some problems with homophones (aid/aide, chord/cord to name two). Because of the nature of the narrator’s pretensions, it is always possible that these misspellings are deliberate.

J. E. Solinski. A Matter of Control. Bloomington IN: Westbow, 2015. Print.

Do not be put off by the cover art or awkward title, A Matter of Control is a decent young adult novel.

Very simply, the author tells the story of five different people who all have a connection to Montgomery High School on Detroit’s West Side. Nowadays, Detroit is probably the bleakest city in America. Still there are thousands of people trying to make a decent go of it. We meet some of those people and their families.

Reba is a freshman from a poor but hard-working black family. When she was in elementary school, she taught her parents to read. Now she is eager to take her place in high school, especially its acting classes and drama program.

Travis is two years ahead of Reba and accompanies her and her younger siblings to school every day. He is not sweet on Reba or anything like that. He just likes the family and does not want anything to happen to them. He is one of the leaders in a gang and wants to keep Reba’s family out of trouble. Travis’s mother is a drug-addicted prostitute. He knows his life has not offered him much, but also is smart enough to realize that gang life is a dead end.

Alex is a star football player for the high school. He is a white boy in a school that is eighty percent black. He is accepted by everyone, though, because of his athletic skills until he starts missing practice for tutoring sessions. He is sixteen but never learned to read. The coach and his English teacher know his secret, but his shame makes him unwilling to let anyone know the real reason why he is skipping practice.

Mrs. Richards is the English teacher of all three of these students and is trying to help them all. Reba is a natural actress. Travis writes well, and Mrs. Richards arranges an internship for him at a city newspaper. She also makes arrangements for Alex’s tutoring.

Mrs. Richards’ only child Danny is a freshman at nearby Wayne State University. We soon realize that Danny has started using drugs, and Travis is his dealer.

In this scenario everyone has secrets. As long as they keep the secrets, they feel like they are in control—except that things are going wrong for all of them precisely because they are hiding something.

Most young adult readers would likely relate to one of more of the characters in the book. It is definitely worth reading. It might appeal to reluctant readers because of its subject matter. (I think of the appeal of S. E. Hinton, for example.)

I lived for a while many years ago in the Detroit ghetto on the East Side. The book is authentic to its setting, though it is not culturally specific to Detroit, so it could apply to many other school situations as well. In that sense, it is a bit different from Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon, which is so specific that it could only take place in Detroit. Still A Matter of Control is the real deal.

David Garrison. A Wind in the House of Islam. Monument CO: Wigtake, 2014. Print.

I have a friend who has devoted his life to Latin American economics. He worked for an international financial NGO in Central America, then for an investment firm specializing in Latin American customers, then for a large bank in its Latin American investments department, and now for his own investment firm that specializes in Latin American securities. Back in the eighties he told me that the most significant change he is seeing in Latin America is the growth of evangelical churches. He noted that the news would never report it, but that region of the world is no longer the Roman Catholic stronghold it once was.

A Wind in the House of Islam gives the same impression about nations that for over a millennium were considered strongholds of Islam and impossible for Christian missionaries (of any type, Protestant or Catholic) to reach. At this point the numbers or percentages are not very high in the Muslim world, but it is not unlike what was happening in Latin America in the 1920s. It is a beginning.

A Wind in the House of Islam defines a movement of God as one resulting in at least 1,000 baptisms or the establishment of at least 100 churches. The total number of converts in Islamic countries may be somewhere between two and seven million. While that is a small percentage of the 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, it is having an effect. Muslims are turning to Christ.

Garrison notes that until the late nineteenth century there had never been such a movement. In the nineteenth century there were two. In the twentieth century after 1965 there were eleven more. Between 2000 and 2014 there have been an additional 69 such movements. This is where the title comes from: There is some kind of wind blowing through the Muslim world the likes of which it has never seen.

Probably the biggest concern for the author and the researchers working with him was security. In many places in the Islamic world, even talking to a foreigner is suspicious activity.

Interestingly, A Wind in the House of Islam shares the four ways Muslims say that they convert Christians and others to Islam: (1) Money and material enticements, (2) Encourage Muslim girls to marry Christians, (3) Promise them a job in Saudi Arabia or the Emirates, and (4) Buy their home and property and move them out. I have a friend whose widowed father converted through item number two. He was not a Christian but practiced an oriental religion.

While some of these movements have been initiated by outsiders, most began with people within the Muslim culture. Indeed, in many cases it was imams or other respected leaders in the Muslim community who began to follow Jesus. In most cases, they have not adopted Western trappings of religion but have kept as many forms of teaching and prayer that they can without going against direct Biblical instruction.

Why is this happening?

Garrison gives a number of reasons. One is simply that more Christians are praying. God answers prayer. Another is that until the 1940s through the 1960s much of the Muslim world was ruled by Western nations. Muslims in whatever land they were saw their rulers as interlopers and even illegitimate. Now they have had one or two generations of self-rule. They can no longer blame any problems or predicaments on outsiders. In a few places such as the Central Asian republics that used to be part of the Soviet Union, people remember the kindness of Christians who lived among them.

One of the great ironies is that people are coming to Christ because there is a movement among Islam to translate the Koran into indigenous languages. The Muslim tradition is to memorize the Koran in Arabic, but that has little meaning for most people. Even for those who are native Arabic speakers the language has changed to much since the seventh century. It would be like an English speaker reciting Anglo-Saxon or an Italian reciting Latin.

When they find out what the Koran really says two things can happen. One is that they begin to question some of the ideas the book presents. One that repeatedly has made skeptics of Muslims is what it says about multiple wives because they know that Muhammad did not follow his own instructions. Another is what the Koran says about Jesus. Indeed, much of what the Koran says about Jesus is what Christians believe about Him.

The Koran says Jesus is in heaven with God (Allah). Muslims recognize that no one can say for sure that Muhammad is there. Indeed one ritual prayer for many Muslims is that Allah would save Muhammad’s soul. The Koran says that Jesus will return in the last days to judge the earth. Jesus is called by twenty-three honorable titles including savior and Rahallah, the Spirit of Allah. The Koran mentions Jesus nearly a hundred times and Muhammad only four.

Muslims themselves have begun to wonder more about Jesus. If the Koran says all these things about Jesus, perhaps Jesus is a greater prophet than Muhammad. Often they begin to pray about this, and the Lord answers. When they can, they may try to get a hold of a Christian New Testament or Bible to learn more about Jesus.

Some have been turned off by radicalization that has taken place in Islam. Many places Islam was part of the culture but the land was either secularized or Islam was connected with folk religion. (That is the way President Obama explained his experience with Islam growing up in Indonesia.) In many places they cannot protest openly, but the intolerance, the treatment of women, the killing of other Muslims all have caused some Muslims to question their beliefs.

One documented change among Muslims who become Christian is the change in the way they treat women. In most places the women still wear head coverings and dress so they fit in culturally, but the men learn that they are supposed to love their wives. One Bible study leader told of when a dozen men who were recent converts got together for the first time to study the Bible. The first question they asked was what the Bible said about beating your wife. That alone resulted in a big change. (The Koran sanctions it; compare with Ephesians 5:28-29.)

It is also remarkable the number of Muslims who have had dreams about Jesus or other images or characters from the Bible. This often seems to be a sovereign work of God, perhaps in answer to prayers of Christians. I heard a testimony of one person who worked in a country that bordered on a closed Muslim land. Once they were told very clearly from the Holy Spirit that they were to bring a truckload of Bibles to that neighboring country. They made it past the border but were not sure where to go. They came across a tribal group whose leader told them that he was told in a dream that a truck would come bearing a book that would tell them about God.

A Wind in the House of Islam breaks up the Muslim world into nine “rooms” in the “House” of Islam. (The term House of Islam comes from an early Muslim jurist who said the world was divided into the House of Islam and the House of War.) This is wise, as each culture is different with different styles of Islam and different histories. A Wind in the House of Islam notes that there are changes taking place in each of the rooms.

One chapter is devoted to each of the nine rooms. The rooms are North Africa, West Africa, East Africa, the Arab World, Turkestan (Turkey and Central Asia), the Persian World, Western South Asia, Eastern South Asia, and Indo-Malaysia. Each chapter is exciting and encourages the reader to see what God is doing in these lands.

There can be serious consequences. Some of the people who were interviewed in the course of this study have been killed. The author and researchers he worked with were careful not to use their real names and not even name the country in some cases, but they were identified at some point as being Christians. One woman interviewed is still alive but was married off by her father to a strict Muslim family, so she is not even allowed to leave her house.

These people have counted the cost. Most have known what it was like to be submitted to a god. Now they are submitted to a God who loves them.

In the seventies there was a song that went “I’m not religious, I just love the Lord.” Many followers of Jesus in the Muslim world have a similar perspective. Often they do not consider themselves Christians because that word has cultural connotations. The name Boko Haram, for example, means something like Western education is forbidden or the West is sin. So one follower of Jesus in a Muslim land speaks for many by saying, “I do not want to be a Christian. I just want to follow Jesus.” (118)

You can’t say it much better than that.

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?

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.

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. 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.

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.