M.C. Beaton and R. W. Green. Death of a Green-Eyed Monster. Grand Central, 2022. A Hamish Macbeth Mystery.

This is the thirty-fifth Hamish Macbeth mystery according to my librarian spouse. (Where do you think I get many of the books I review?) We note that Marion C. Beaton died in 2019. This may be the last of the series unless her estate does what Tom Clancy’s and other estates have done.

For readers of the series, even if you do not read the novel, read the introduction. It is written by Beaton’s co-author. He tells us how he got to know her and how he ended up co-authoring this novel. The book was largely her idea, but she was failing physically and could not write. He would take her ideas, write them up into a story, and then go over what he had with her until he got it right.

The title—Death of a Green-Eyed Monster—may be a bit misleading, but the “green-eyed monster” is, of course, jealousy, courtesy of Shakespeare’s Othello. In the play, jealousy is compared to a cat that toys with the prey that it has caught. There are some jealous characters in the story, but the murder victim in this story is almost a cipher. We known little about him. He is a rough-looking out of towner from Glasgow who is killed in what appears to be a gangland execution. He might be a monster, though.

Organized crime in Lochdubh? Alas, it looks that way.

Perhaps the most intriguing part of the tale, though, is that Hamish has been assigned a new constable. Readers of the stories know that constables at Lochdubh seems to last a year or two at most. At least three of them liked Lochdubh so much that when they were going to be transferred, they quit the force and got a job locally.

This constable is different. She is gorgeous. Hamish can only compare her to Priscilla Halburton-Smythe, except that Constable Dorothy MacIver has a warmer personality. People in Lochdubh at first suspect her as an outsider, but she slowly wins the hearts of most of the townspeople. She even gets the Currie sisters on her side.

There is one character in the story who is jealous of her, namely Sonsie, Hamish’s pet cat. There is then, a jealous yellow-eyed monster, but it is not a spoiler to admit that Sonsie does not die in the novel.

Dorothy caught sight of Sonsie in the rear-view mirror, yellow eyes radiating hostility. She shot the cat a look as cold as ice, noting with satisfaction a momentary flinch. Sonsie’s heart and mind might never be won, but the wild cat needed to know there was a new big cat on the block. (21)

There is plenty of the good-natured humor that is a hallmark of these stories. Even the nonfiction introduction reminds readers that the remote areas of Sutherland in Scotland, unlike the fictional Lochdubh, rarely have murders—maybe one a year in a bad year. It really is a safe place to go on vacation.

Unfortunately, to say much more about the story might involve some spoilers, but Hamish’s life goes in a surprising direction. Besides our murder victim, there are a couple of other people visiting in the area from Glasgow who seem suspicious. Then there is the tourist from Glencoe—Glencoe, Illinois, USA, that is—who seems a little slippery, though generous with buying rounds at the hotel bar.

Sergeant Inspector Blair, now in Glasgow, gets involved because the victim is a Glaswegian possibly connected to organized crime. I do not think we have ever seen Blair as obnoxious and even evil as he is in this case. He alienates nearly everyone and, as always, has it in for Macbeth. But we learn some secrets about him that make us like him even less.

Death of a Green-Eyed Monster has an interesting epilogue. If it were a Shakespeare play, it would have been presented as a dialogue between Priscilla and Elspeth, Hamish’s former fiancées. It is kind of a coda, perhaps making us readers think that this will be the last of the Hamish Macbeth stories. Mr. Green’s introduction suggests a possibility of more, but if not, this would be an appropriate place to end the series. After all, there are thirty-four other stories out there.

Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle and Other Modern Verse. Edited by Stephen Dunning et al, Lothrop, 1967.

We do not review very many poetry books here. We do not get many to review and, frankly, some we do get we prefer not to post our reviews for various reasons. Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle and Other Modern Verse is different. It is a great collection of poems well worth reading. I recall reading it when it came out in the sixties, and I thought it was worth a re-read.

Most poems in this collection are simple and direct with imagery and, typical of much modern (as opposed to postmodern) verse, with a clever twist at the end. The editors seem to prefer poems with natural imagery such as “August from my Deck” or “African Sunrise.” But there are even a few about sports such as “The Base Stealer” or “Foul Shot.”

Some poets are well known. E.E. Cummings’ “In Just Spring” is a classic. The Robert Frost selection “A Patch of Old Snow” may be less well known but it fits well into the imagist genre with which he is associated.

Like many poetry collections, this will not take too long to read. There are only 127 pages, many with photographs, and most printed pages have a single poem. However, like all good poetry some will probably make a reader linger.

The poems reflect many emotions, but that is what good poetry does. This is a collection of good poetry—and one that is appropriate for anyone from about age eight on up. In other words, no profanity, no political rants, no porn like a lot of modern stuff that passes as poetry. I almost feel like a politician: “It’s not that I abandoned poetry; it’s that poetry abandoned me.” “How to Eat a Poem” opens the book and sets the tone. The title poem ends it, and it is an appropriate finish. The book itself is like a gift. Enjoy.

T. D. Jakes. 100 Bold Prayers. T.D. Jakes, 2020.

This collection of prayers by the popular Pentecostal Bishop T. D. Jakes has something for nearly everyone. The format is reminiscent of the best selling Prayers that Avail Much because each of the 100 Bold Prayers is based on a promise or principle from the Bible. If the Bible expresses God’s word and God’s will, then prayers that align with the what the Bible says should be in God’s will. At the very least, we can pray them without sensing that we are “asking amiss.”

Jakes has arranged 20 prayers in each of five categories: Your Spiritual Life, Health and Healing, Emotional Health, God’s Provision, and Your Relationships. Surely most people have concerns in at least one of these areas.

Jakes has the book set up like a prayer journal. On the even-numbered page is a Scripture and a prayer based on the Scripture. Facing that page is a lined page for the reader to write his or her own prayer or any notes. Some people write the date they first prayed the prayer and the date they received an answer. Some will keep praying until they get a response.

Here is a simple example from the Emotional Health section:

Do not turn me over to the desire of my foes…I remain confident in this: I will see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living. Wait for the LORD; be strong and take heart and wait for the LORD. (Psalm 27:12-14 NIV)

Lord, be my victory and cause me to triumph over adversity, Infuse me with confident expectation of seeing your goodness manifest itself in overflowing proportions. I wait for you, Lord, by focusing on what you said to me. All my hope is in You. Amen. (No. 42)

Direct, simple, and clear—one can see how the prayer developed from the Scripture.

Some appear to be more like positive confessions of faith rather than asking God for something, but the Bible tells us faith comes from hearing God’s Word (See Romans 10:17). Here is an example from Health and Healing:

Beloved, I pray that you may prosper in all things and be in health, just as your soul prospers. (3 John 1:2 NKJV)

Lord, thank you for a prosperous soul. As my mind, will, and emotions are renewed by Your Word, I’m able to live purposefully, as You’ve ordained for me. Because of Jesus, I am successful in all things, and my outer victories are rooted in the inner health and healing He’s given me. Amen. (No. 30)

These are just two samples but might give you an idea of what to expect.

For the record, I took nearly three months to go through the prayers, a few at a time. Some I could tell made a difference just by me praying them. As noted above, many were more like positive confessions, but worth acknowledging if the Word truly says those things about those who believe.

The Bible instructs us to “Pray without ceasing” (I Thessalonians 5:17). In other words, it is nearly impossible to pray too much. Rev. Jakes’ 100 Bold Prayers can certainly help us in our need and get us going to pray more and pray more biblically—aligned with the Word of God.

N.B. This book does not have page numbers but labels each prayer by a number, so that is what is represented in the parenthetical references here.

Rebecca A. Ward. The Paper Tiger Syndrome. Original Blueprint Press, 2022.

The Paper Tiger Syndrome presents ideas that could help bring about a greater mental or psychological health for some people. It is subtitled How to Liberate Yourself from the Illusion of Fear, but that subtitle is a bit misleading. First, the book goes well into other personal problems besides fear, and, second, the subtitle suggests a kind of New Age “it’s all maya-illusion,” but the book is a bit more realistic than that.

The book acknowledges that sometimes fear is real. There is an ancestral “fight or flight” (or freeze) reaction we naturally have to real threats. I recall hearing that emotions are good servants but poor masters. Our problems with fears come from our inability to overcome the emotion when it tries to master us.

Perhaps the strongest and most original point The Paper Tiger Syndrome makes is how our nervous system connects to our brain and our impulsive reactions. Many times fears and other emotions strike our nervous system and organs connected to it and never really make it to our brains or minds. Much of the book, then, consists of exercises to overcome such impulsive reactions by methods of self-control. Throughout the book, the author, a counselor, tells stories of clients who overcame various problems through analysis and exercises. The exercises are both mental and physical.

In a fight, flight, or freeze situation, the primitive brain is in charge. When you feel secure, the higher-order thinking brain is back in charge. Your goal is to regulate the nervous system to feel safe even when there’s conflict so that you can actually speak and think clearly and have an embodied response in the moment. (29)

This is no passive read. It begins with a checklist of possible sources of trauma and ongoing fear. It then challenges to reader to examine him or herself and begin a variety of exercises. Even though the book is not specifically New Age, it does use some New Age language. For example, when it speaks of developing a healthy self-image, it uses the term mantra for positive sayings one should confess.

One of two quibbles this reviewer has with the book is that while the author lists a number of positive sayings, some may not be true for certain individuals. Some expressions such as “it is not my fault” or “I am assertive” may not apply to all people or all situations. Sometimes it is our fault. Some of us are not that assertive. Still, the book notes that the tongue is a significant part of the main nervous system. Even the Bible compares the tongue to the small rudder of a large ship and exhorts us to control what we say (see James 3:2-10).

At one point the author compares her method to a twelve-step program, and there are similarities. Her “higher power,” though, is pretty vague. She is honest and up front about this, but this reviewer could not help think of Nick von Hoffman’s “American Mush God.” She refers to “Infinite Goodness,” which echoes Benjamin Franklin’s “Powerful Goodness,” which he said he meditated upon each day. So much of American self-reliance and optimism goes through Ben Franklin!

That is not to say that The Paper Tiger Syndrome is exactly a self-help book. There are questions and a downloadable workbook that accompany it. The author is a counselor. While she shares her own story in some detail, she also clearly meets with others seeking help. Several times in the book she encourages people who acknowledge certain problems or traumas in their lives to seek professional help (154)

Still, she avers that “No one can heal you better than you” (54). Well, God can because He made you, and professionals can help because of their training and experience. I guess it is like the old joke, “How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb?” “One, but the light bulb has to really want to change.” Ah! The human will!

Here are some of the book’s realistic observations. Perhaps if you see yourself in some of these things, the book might be for you.

“The job of our parents—particularly fathers—is to help us feel protected and safe” (50). If our parents did not make us feel that way when we were young, there probably is a tiger that needs to be trained.

“We still have that same threat bias driving us when we’re under stress, scanning for the paper tigers in the grasslands of our imaginations” (117).

One eye-opening observation for me was this: “Resentment happens when we’ve given more of ourselves than we really wanted to give.” (151) Yes, the book is more than just about fear. Again, the author offers some help for us to deal with resentment.

She gives her readers a positive direction:

One could argue that everybody has regrets; we all wish we could have do-overs in life. But I return knowing that , even when things don’t happen the way I hope, it doesn’t diminish my life in any way. It simply means that I’ve been asked to embark on a new and unexpected adventure. (182)

You are in the world right now, doing some job out there that ultimately is intended to help others. From CEO to street sweeper, we are all doing the same job—we are here to help each other. Make your helping count. (166)

A purpose-driven life? That last one alone was worth reading this book for.

Marc Cameron. Tom Clancy: Chain of Command. Putnam, 2021.

Chain of Command is the latest in the Tom Clancy estate tales of President Jack Ryan and his associates. We have been longtime fans of Clancy, and some of the tales since Clancy himself passed away are still fun to read.

As I began Chain of Command, I confess, I was not having fun. Some of the graphic, even perhaps gratuitous, violence established the fact that the bad guys in this novel were truly evil. The only comparison I could think of was Clancy’s Without Remorse, which featured John Clark but not in a government role. I was beginning to think that maybe the Clancy franchise had finally run of out steam and was just appealing to sensationalism.

About halfway through, though, the story took a turn and some things started coming together. The story begins in Argentina where we are introduced to rogue group of mercenaries known as the Camarilla. It turns out they have been hired by a billionaire from India who is upset at America because President Ryan is promoting the passage of a law that would more closely regulate generic drugs. Most generic drugs these days come from Asia, either India or China, and sometimes the quality and efficacy are suspect.

Seemingly unrelated, the same outlaw group kills the family of a Texas survivalist execution-style. They then attack the survivalists who are in turn attacking a shopping mall nearby.

Meanwhile on the other side of the world, a medical doctor and his nurse wife who are volunteering in remote Afghanistan are kidnapped by a Chinese military unit that crosses into the country from Tajikistan.

It all comes somewhat together. We learn that the Indian pharmaceutical CEO has hired the Camarilla to kidnap the First Lady. Somehow, he believes, holding her hostage will make the President and Congress change their minds. Most of the Camarilla are military veterans, so they carry out the kidnapping with precision, but they do as though they are in a battle. I think this Clancy book has the highest body count since Sum of All Fears when terrorists blew up an NFL stadium full of spectators and players.

Citing the 25th Amendment, President Ryan temporarily turns his office over to the Vice President so as not to interfere with either the political situation or the search for his wife. And the Campus gets involved, of course, along with the FBI, CIA, the Texas Rangers, and police from San Antonio and Abilene, Texas.

There are numerous twists as the story progresses. When I was expecting a formula, something else happened. A long time ago there was a film that spoofed action-adventure movies. One of the characters complains that he is not coming with another character because he would become the movie sidekick that within fifteen minutes everyone knows is going to die. I was correct on a few of the poor schmucks, but then there were some surprises. So much so, that the story ends on what I can only call a humorous note.

In one sense this is a throwback to some of the earlier Clancy stories like The Hunt for Red October. This will appeal to the real technodude fans of Clancy. While there are quite a few technical descriptions of different devices, nearly all of them are for small arms. We learn about the latest and greatest pistols and rifles. Yes, there are also a few drones and grenades, but most of the weapons are things most people can easily tote themselves.

Malhotra, the Indian pill executive, has minor echoes of a James Bond villain. He lusts after his secretary and he has a stuffed tiger in his office. The predatory cat sets the tone. He is pretty sure can make even more money from a merger with a German pharmaceutical company. His attorneys have figured out a way to add a few minor items to the contract to make things even more favorable, and the German CEO seems like he is approaching senility and is more interested in the attractive receptionist than the legal drug deal. As the story goes on, we see that no one really has all the information.

The men of the Campus, especially John Clark and Ding Chavez realize they are not getting any younger. They need some new blood. But how do you recruit people for an organization that is not supposed to exist? And as we see a few parallels between the Campus and the Camarilla, it makes us ask the question, is there really much of a difference between these two groups of veterans? Yes, I might have been a reluctant reader towards the beginning, but soon the story swept me up anyhow. I was smiling as I read the last sentence.

Ralph Peters. Judgment at Appomattox. Forge, 2017.

Shelby Foote apparently started a trend. Jeff and Michael Shaara may be the best known, but Ralph Peters has written a number of novels of the Civil War. Like Foote and the Shaaras, he invents a few enlisted characters, but all the officers and events are historical. There is more dialogue than Foote because Foote only quoted things the high ranking officers actually said or wrote. In Judgment at Appomattox, the dialogue keeps the story moving.

Like the Shaaras’ works, we get a sense of what many of the characters say as well as think. This is risky. For example, and this is unusual, while I liked The Killer Angels, I liked the film Gettysburg better. The film just had dialogue. The Killer Angels tried to guess what people were thinking, and I felt that Michael Shaara’s interpretation of Robert E. Lee’s religious beliefs were just a bit too unorthodox for almost anyone from the time period who was not a Unitarian.

In some ways, Judgment at Appomattox was a more literary repeat of April 1865, which also the details the fighting from Petersburg, Virginia, till Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. Of course, April 1865 is nonfiction, but both books do tell pretty much the same story with Peters providing much more embellishment.

Besides a few fictional characters like a Louisiana private named Riordan, readers observe a number of the main figures in the last two weeks of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. We see John B. Gordon, Longstreet, Pickett, Lee, his nephew Fitzhugh Lee and son Custis Lee among others. From the Union we see Grant, Sheridan, Meade, Barlow, Warren, and the Custer brothers (Tom and George A.).

We are reminded that George Armstrong Custer, after a few early mistakes, became a very adept fighter. If Peters presents a negative personality, it is Sheridan. He comes across as unlikeable, though having military savvy. Lee comes across as extremely stoical, not wanting anyone, even his son, to really know how he feels or what he thinks. Fitzhugh Lee and Pickett become poster boys for bad judgment by leaving the field for an afternoon to attend a shad bake while there is fighting going on and many of their men are starving.

Indeed, a recurring theme and image is simply that the Confederacy was running out of supplies. When a supply train on the only remaining tracks shows up at Appomattox Station, Sheridan and Custer captured the bulk of it. Unlike other retellings of Civil War battles, this is much more earthy in its description of hunger and digestive problems and the recollections that some of the men have of their wives.

The “creative nonfiction” approach works well, though. We get a sense of the action and certainly the way things appeared or might have appeared. Lincoln makes a cameo appearance as he visits the James River at the beginning of the attack on Petersburg and then goes to Richmond after it falls. Perhaps Peters’ most profound observation comes from a fictional rumination of Lincoln where we are reminded that Lincoln himself originally came from Kentucky, but from a poor family:

Pride, though, Pride, not slavery had led a haughty South to clamor for war. That was what men did not understand. The struggle had not been about black bondage, not at the start. Arguments over slavery served as the trigger, and the abolitionists had done their share to provoke friend and foe alike, but it was the pride of the South, not the Negro question, that stirred millions to violence. The war had sprouted from the planter class, whose members believed they were not only better than the Negro, but better than other whites, especially Northern “shopkeepers.” They had imported notions of aristocracy, of honor worn on the sleeve, better left behind. They valued indolence above honest work, wealth above rectitude, position above justice, and the horsewhip above the apology. The war had been made by “gentlemen” who had never chopped their own wood. (244)

Anyone who has read the Mary Chesnut diary could understand the class distinctions the Southern “aristocracy” believed in.

Just the past week, an article in The Wall Street Journal told us that it is much harder for middle class high schoolers to get admitted to elite colleges than either upper or lower class students. When I attended Harvard in the seventies, the most withering insult was to accuse someone of being bourgeois. It was worse than an insult about the ancestry of one’s mother. Back then it was simple: The upper class looked down on the middle class, and the radicals affirmed Marx’s critique of the bourgeoisie—and those two groups set the tone at Harvard back then. I guess they still do. The Journal article says that at places such as Harvard nowadays “The middle class tends to get a little bit neglected.” Back then it was just an insult one could shrug off. Now it looks like policy. Elitism seems to be dividing our country once more.

Lest the novel only blame the South, a Union soldier would complain to General Humphreys: “This was an unnecessary war. It wasn’t caused, it was manufactured. By loud mouths and traitors…How many of them came near a battlefield? Anybody see Greeley lead a charge?” (422) The North had its share of agitators, too.

We are reminded numerous times that many of the leading officers knew each other. Often they were friends before the war. Longstreet was Grant’s best man and probably knew Grant personally as well as anyone other than Grant’s wife, Julia. Peters had Longstreet meditate on his old friend:

Hadn’t they misread Grant, though? Longstreet had tried, within the conventions of Southern overconfidence, to warn his fellow generals not to dismiss Sam Grant. Yet even he, perhaps Grant’s closest friend in better days, had not foreseen the heights to which happenstance and a steady, bulldog genius would lift Sam. All he had known for certain was that no man possessed more exasperating integrity or greater reserves of stoicism—not even Robert E. Lee…he knew Grant well enough to understand that his pride hinged not on worldly success, but on a stubborn view of right and wrong. Ulysses S. Grant had been the least ambitious man Longstreet had ever encountered. Now he led vast armies subduing a continent. (275-276)

Yes, wars involve people. And Peters would have us see that these are interesting people. Some are crass, some downright evil, many under great pressure, lovers and haters, victims and oppressors, but in many ways no different from the rest of us—just caught up in circumstances that we still remember and analyze a century and a half later.

Ann Patchett. The Dutch House. Harper 2019.

We had read Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder years ago. It was a clever and fascinating tale. Recently, we had an opportunity to read The Dutch House, her latest novel. Very different in setting and drama from the Amazonian State of Wonder, The Dutch House has its own fascinating story, even if the setting is not so exotic.

The Dutch House itself is almost a character in the story. It comes to represent the fortunes of the Conroy family. Our narrator is Danny Conroy the son of the family who grows up in this stately near-mansion in suburban Philadelphia. The tale tells much of the life story of Danny and his sister Maeve, who is eight years older.

They are raised by their father and two loyal housekeepers. A third one Danny barely remembers as she was dismissed when he was fairly young. His mother left the family for India when Danny was about three years old. He does not remember her at all. What little he knows about her he mostly learns from his sister.

Things get complicated when Danny is a teen and his father remarries. Andrea has two younger daughters from her first marriage. After four years of marriage, Mr. Conroy dies and leaves everything except an educational trust fund to Andrea. Danny and Maeve get virtually nothing. Not only that, they are kicked out of the house. Maeve is already working and Danny is in college. At least he could continue with school on the trust fund.

Mr. Conroy had become successful in real estate. Growing up, Danny learned from him. He went with his father one Saturday a month to collect rent from tenants until he went away to boarding school. In summers, he worked for his father learning all kinds of maintenance and how to work with various contractors.

Both siblings have virtually nothing to do with Andrea or her daughters after that. Maeve has a plan, though. Danny is at Columbia. Have him take pre-med. That way the trust fund will have to pay for years of medical school. At least that will be money that Andrea can’t get her greedy hands on.

Through all this, Maeve and Danny occasionally drive back to their old neighborhood and park across the street from the Dutch House. They reminisce and otherwise catch up on news. To them it becomes a kind of symbol of their lost family life with their disappearing mother and dead father. It also reminds all of us that life is not always just.

Although Danny graduates with an M.D. and completes his residency, all while he is med school, he is buying property in New York. As an undergrad, he heard that Columbia was looking to expand. He bought two parking lots near the school and then sold them two years later at a significant profit when Columbia finally raised the money to buy the land. He was on his way in his father’s footsteps as a successful real estate entrepreneur.

He gets married, has two kids, keeps in touch with Maeve, and also keeps in touch off and on with the three women who served at the Dutch House when he was growing up. It sounds almost mundane, but Patchett tells the story in such a way that we think of other things. Always in the background is the Dutch House—so called because a family with a Dutch name built the house and lived there before the Conroys. The portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Van Hoebeek (“who bake”) continue to hang on the wall there even after Andrea moves in.

To tell more would be giving away surprises. This tale, though, reminded this reviewer of many things. Some are tales of an inheritance which I do not feel at liberty to share. Others, though, are literary. The Tin Drum is narrated by a boy who is fluent in language and remembers things from the moment of his birth. There is a pseudoscientific name for this condition. It really is impossible, but we get caught up in the story, so we make that Coleridgean willing suspension of disbelief—same here but for a different reason.

Doctor Zhivago has a curious character, the doctor’s half-brother Yevgraf. He is a relatively minor character in this Russian epic, but he shows up at surprising times. It seems more lucky than anything else, but he is a kind of deus ex machina because of his authority in the NKVD. There are some surprises like Yevgraf in this tale.

I am also reminded of Long Days’ Journey into Night. As Danny begins to piece together the story of his mother from what his sister and the three housekeepers recall, we are reminded of Mary Tyone, the mother in the O’Neill classic. Like Mary and James Tyrone, Mrs. Conroy was a novice in a nunnery when Mr. Conroy wooed her during World War II. She did not go to India like some baby boomers to find a guru (see Pirsig). She went there to help the poor like Mother Theresa.

Both Mrs. Conroys have strong but very different reactions to the Dutch House. For Mrs. Conroy #1, it is too elegant; it hardly befits someone who considered taking a vow of poverty to serve the underprivileged. For Andrea, it is what makes Mr. Conroy attractive. She will do what she can to hang onto it.

The readers? As they get caught up in the story, they, too, will also want to find out what happens in the Dutch House and its tale of not quite ordinary people.

Mark Rubinstein. Assassin’s Lullaby. Thunder Lake, 2022.

Assassin’s Lullaby has echoes of the novels of Daniel Silva. There is a difference, though. In Silva’s tales, Gabriel Allon is an Israeli spymaster. In Assassin’s Lullaby, Eli Dagan is a former Israeli spy. He did not get burned, but apparently got burned out.

So how does he make a living now? He is a paid assassin, a hit man. Instead of killing terrorists, now he kills bad guys for other bad guys. From his experience in Mossad, he has learned to be very careful. He mostly uses the Dark Web for communication. He has a modern Dial M for Murder program. No one ever sees him, but they pay him to offshore banks when he has completed a job.

The author is a psychiatrist, and he does a great job of presenting Eli’s point of view. No, Eli is not proud of his work, but he could no longer stand being in Israel. It had too many painful memories. All he really knew how to do was be an assassin-spy. He knew how to disappear. He had many aliases—in fact, at one point things get a little confusing because we are told he has just abandoned one alias, but then he uses it a few pages later.

For most the story, though, he is simply Aiden. People are not even sure what nationality he is. Irish maybe? His mother was American, so he learned American English as well as Hebrew, German, and Yiddish growing up. He was hired by Mossad because he had great language acquisition skills. He wanted to join Mossad because his family had been blown up in a terrorist attack on a passenger bus in Tel Aviv, and he was looking for justice.

Now, though, he has done something a little different. A Russian mobster in New York City has contacted him. He wants him to do two jobs. If he completes the first, he will get the second. However, Eli agrees to meet him in person. For the first time since he has been doing contract killing, a client knows what he looks like.

The job is a complicated one. Anton Gorlov wants him to take out a competing Russian mob boss. His victim is heavily guarded and has been arrested by the authorities, so he can only travel a few blocks in Brooklyn and is usually under surveillance. Normally Gorlov would let him be, but he is afraid that he will testify against Gorlov to get a lighter sentence.

The second job is very different, and it will have a few surprise twists. Gorlov’s former money manager recently “committed suicide” by defenestration. Gorlov is afraid that before he died, he may have made copies of his accounting that would implicate Gorlov and his “team” in a number of crimes. This associate only had one living relative, a newly-immigrated sister who may have a flash drive or some other record of these transactions. All Eli/Aiden has to do is get the flash drive, probably by befriending this Irina.

Eli is no tyro here. He understands that if Irina gets caught up in this, she will probably be killed or else kidnapped to be a prostitute in some Near Eastern or Eastern European country. This is complicated. He knows he needs to get the information, be it on a flash drive or whatever. But he also realizes that this sister is probably completely innocent of her brother’s business and has no idea of the danger she is in. What can he do to keep her safe?

We also learn that while Eli is skilled at surveillance and espionage, he also has an informal team of friends who he knows can help him. He never stays in a place longer than six months, so he has a real estate connection who is helpful and knows of some safe houses. He also has a connection with a skilled forger and with a medical doctor who believes in what the Mossad does. All of these people figure in the story.

The tale is therefore brutally realistic. In fact, it is even told in the present tense, so we get a sense of what Eli is thinking at all times. We occasionally learn what others like Gorlov and Irina are thinking from what they say to others.

We get a sense of why, for example, Gorlov went into the rackets. He is a Ukrainian Jew who used to get beat up in the streets of Odessa. He learned to fight back and formed a little gang while he was still a teenager. It grew from there. His mother survived Babi Yar, so he was brought up with the idea that world is a hostile environment, and only the strong survive.

When Eli meets Irina, he falls for her. Yes, she is a beauty. He compares her to Anna Kournikova or Melania Trump. But she also has a lot of pain in her past. She seems to understand him better than most women he has met. What can he do to help her?

The Assassin’s Lullaby is very well paced. The plotting by the gangsters, by Eli, and, of course, by extension the author is very clever. There a few unexpected twists. Even the epilogue, which at first just seems like a wrap-up, itself has a couple of neat surprises. This is psychologically engaging but also very entertaining. You may think you are being lulled from time to time, but, after all, the lullaby of an assassin is meant to relax the victim.

As suggested from the title, this is violent and may not be for everyone, but the violence is neither excessive nor gratuitous. Like Final Witness, it seems like Russian killers have no soul.

Eric Metaxas. Is Atheism Dead? Salem, 2021.

Author Eric Metaxas has become known as a Christian intellectual. Is Atheism Dead? is meant as a challenge, as Schleiermacher would have it, to the “cultured despisers” of religion. Metaxas reminds us of the 1966 Time magazine cover that asked, “Is God dead?” Metaxas thinks it is time to re-orient that kind of thinking.

There are already a number of scientific and historical specialties raising the question of atheism’s demise. Metaxas brings them together. In broad terms, he first looks at science since we often hear that belief in God is “unscientific.” Then he takes a look at some recent archaeology. Finally, he looks at the philosophical problems and consequences of atheism.

Is Atheism Dead? first brings into play the anthropic principle, or argument from complexity. When I was a child, science books for kids such as the Golden Big Books of Science and Natural History were still teaching that most cells in most organisms were basically the same. They were all made of some goop called protoplasm that shifted its shape to make different organisms. Even in college, our professor told us that while we have learned that cells and organic chemicals are much more complex and interdependent, they still could “evolve” into complicated organisms given enough time.

We have learned that things are much more complicated than even what I was taught fifty years ago. It is not just the fine tuning of cells in an organism or organelles in cells or chemicals in organelles, it the whole idea of life itself. Back in the 1970s, Carl Sagan said that there were only two conditions necessary for life. Now most scientists admit that there are hundreds of conditions necessary—everything from the universal gravity constant and the type of galaxy to the force that hold nuclei together. Even slight deviations of such constants and circumstances would preclude life of any kind. The odds of all these things coming together are truly astronomical.

As suggested earlier, none of the arguments here are new, but Metaxas brings many different sources together. And he is a gentleman about it. He notes that cultural atheism is a Western phenomenon, so he is aware that most attacks and criticisms on religion specifically target Christianity and Judaism. (Just this week, the New York Times had a weird op-ed about Passover to explain why the writer left his Jewish faith.) Nearly a third of Is Atheism Dead? concerns archaeological discoveries in the Near East.

Metaxas does what Josh McDowell did in his original Evidence that Demands a Verdict by bringing together archaeological finds that support the Biblical narrative. While not as exhaustive as McDowell was, Metaxas notes relatively new discoveries that show that Biblical narratives are based on history. He touches on classics like the Merneptah Stele but also new findings such as one that points to the Gabbatha, where Jesus was tried before Pilate, (see John 19:13) as well as historical references to Pilate himself.

After presenting strong evidence for a creator/designer of the universe and then for the Bible as a historical work, Metaxas deals directly with the question at hand: Has atheism died? While he ends up focusing on the so-called Four Horsemen—Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris—he notes the dramatic changes that took place in three of the Twentieth Century’s most famous philosophers. While none became “born again Christians,” Sartre, Camus, and Anthony Flew all became theists. Sartre and Flew’s changes are well documented, Camus’ less so.

Metaxas also notes the abiding faith of many of the pioneers of science and the scientific method. He makes a case, as we have on some of these pages, that the scientific method implies an orderly creation and the so-called Scientific Revolution paralleled the Reformation. He also does a pretty thorough job of debunking the “founding myth” of modern atheism, the supposed conflict between Galileo and the beliefs of the Church.

Metaxas points out, as other have, that the so-called New Atheists seem to be more emotional and less rational. They throw out multiple accusations with little evidence and often confuse different religious beliefs. Still, the strongest argument of Metaxas against atheism is simply that atheism has not been good for people. In the Twentieth Century, atheistic Fascist and Communist regimes were responsible for the deaths of at least 150 million people, excluding victims of wars they may have caused. We think of Germany, China, the Soviet Union, Cambodia, North Korea. All are totalitarian (see previous review) and do not tolerate even a suspicion of opposition to their views. From the French Revolution on, official atheism’s record has been cruel and, frankly, evil.

Even the total number of victims of the Roman and Spanish Inquisitions were less than a thousand—Metaxas does not trivialize this but notes that the scale of atheism’s brutality is far greater.

No wonder, Metaxas would say. If there is no God, then there is no accountability for our actions. Not only that, but people are nothing exceptional, merely another cosmic accident of no intrinsic value. Where do the senses of virtue and justice come from? The atheist would say, they are merely power plays. What is your meaningless life worth? Camus would write in The Myth of Sisyphus that life was absurd and the only logical act was suicide. Camus would later see that this was untenable, that there was something more. Shortly before he died, he even inquired about getting baptized. Hitler, Mao, Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, the Kims would say that the only “something more” was more power.

Metaxas did not say it, but his conclusion reminds me of Danton’s observation during the Reign of Terror that the Revolution devours its own children. In all the Fascist and Communist regimes, even many of the regime supporters and party members were killed off by those in authority. Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago wrote of people who willingly submitted to execution because they thought it would help the party. Perhaps atheism is dying because it is killing itself.

A note to more orthodox readers: Metaxas assumes certain things about or for his audience. For the sake of his argument from design, he assumed a conventional Big Bang about 14 billion years ago without considering time-gravity and expansion anomalies and many other old-earth problems. For example, instead of a saying a worldwide flood caused mass extinctions, he credits an ancient asteroid.

He affirms the Biblical dating of the Exodus at around 1500 B.C., which archaeology confirms, but says Abraham lived around 1700 B.C. which certainly does not account for the four hundred years of servitude in Egypt before the Exodus. In spite of the apparent contradictions of his uniformitarian understanding, he still points out the even greater contradictions and word games with the concept of abiogenesis, life from non-life. It seems that modern atheism is taking people in the opposite direction, non-life from life.

A Personal Postscript. I knew I was going to like this book when I first opened it up. It is dedicated to the memory of John Rankin and Thomas Howard. I never knew Tom Howard, but I knew people who knew and studied under him. I was always impressed with their sense of Christianity and culture. I knew John Rankin personally for about thirty years until his passing last year. He was a real scholar activist on the front lines of the culture wars. His approach to truth was profound, and his courage was admirable. I miss him and his work. I pray his written work will live on and grow in influence.

A General Postscript. Is Atheism Dead? also quotes from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1983 Templeton Address:

But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”

Rod Dreher. Live Not by Lies. Sentinel, 2020.

I have mentioned before that I had a friend who used yellow highlighter to highlight clever sayings and important ideas in books and articles he would read and share. Sometimes he would say that the article or book should just be dipped into a bucket of yellow ink. Live Not by Lies is like that.

Live Not by Lies gets its title from an esssay by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, arguably the greatest writer of the Twentieth Century. It is a miracle that any of Solzhenitsyn’s work ever saw the light of day, but once One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was authorized by the Soviet government, he had an audience. Eventually, that same government would send him into exile, only because by then he had become too prominent to kill.

Solzhenitsyn wrote his article “Live Not by Lies” to his fellow Russians as he departed his homeland. In it he emphasizes that totalitarian governments survive because they force people to either believe or at least stay silent about lies. The way for the individual to survive is to hold on to the truth, and share it when able.

Dreher’s book Live Not by Lies is written for Americans and other Westerners who have been witnessing Political Correctness and now the Cancel Culture. In the nineties P.C. was merely one voice among a number. Twenty-five years later it has morphed into an industrial censorship that is itself totalitarian in nature. We read, for example, that a majority of college students do not talk about certain subjects because they know they would be accused of some kind of egregious fault. Ironically, often the accusation lodged against them is intolerance, yet they are “de-platformed” if not flunked for expressing a legitimate opinion.

Dreher takes a realistic approach. First, importantly, he defines his terms. Totalitarian is not the same as dictatorship or monarchy. A dictatorship may be a tyrannical rule, but if people are careful not to criticize the dictator too much, they can get along. Yes, Saddam Hussein was a tyrant. He won his election eleven million to zero. But he tolerated different religions and different Muslim and non-Muslim sects. He was like Burke’s Turkish Sultan, “who governs with a loose reign that he govern at all.”

A totalitarian system requires conformity, especially conformity in belief. Of course, the two totalitarian movements from the Twentieth Century were Fascism and Communism. It was not enough that one believed in nationalism or in redistribution, one had to believe and act a certain way all the time. Any deviation was, to use Orwell’s term, thought-crime.

So Dreher interviews people who managed to survive under Communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe without compromising their beliefs. Some were killed. Many were imprisoned, but Dreher shows us what they did. While he does mention a few people like Corrie ten Boom who were activists against the Nazis, he focuses on Communism because that lasted a lot longer and its thinking has influenced multiple generations.

While Live Not by Lies was written specifically for Christians, it notes that the “underground” or “resistance” or “samizdat” or whatever you wanted to call it was not limited to those believers. Czech dissidents often were secular or atheists, but they had much humanity in common with Christian believers. In Poland and Slovakia, they were mostly Catholic since that was the dominant religion in those countries.

They commonly met in small groups, often beginning with the family. Communism has always tried to replace the family with government. Parents learned to speak the truth to their children to counter the propaganda and lies they were taught in school. Such parents or their adult children would join with others who had similar outlooks on truth and freedom.

One Polish priest, for example, was willing to share his beliefs with anyone. He knew that at least one priest he worked with was a government informer, but he believed it was right to share the truth with him. That priest would become a martyr and has been beatified by the Catholic Church. Others were more careful and suspicious.

One building in Slovakia that housed some dissidents had a very carefully hidden printing press which was never discovered. Many others copied down notes and words of the Bible and other forbidden books to read and pass along. One Slovak family said their favorite was the work of Tolkien. They said they could relate to the tales because they knew Mordor was real.

Dreher is not optimistic about the West. He sees too much conformity. People who believe in a variety of things are no longer tolerated. They have been silenced. In America, it is not yet the government doing this, but publishers, academia, social media all seem to conform to a kind of elitism which believes more government and more sexual immorality are good for people. He sees a “capitalist conformity.”

The Western future may not be like the Soviet Union. Indeed, while he does quote from Orwell, he sees Huxley’s Brave New World as a closer model than 1984. In the Soviet style or under Big Brother, people accepted lies to avoid torture and death. Under Mustapha Mond, people accepted lies and a caste system for comfort, including “pneumatic” sex and interactive movies. That seems to be our direction.

Dreher mostly illustrates from example. Here is what people did under great oppression. One former Soviet prison guard tells how he was haunted most of his life when he and his fellow officials lined up thirty Orthodox priests and asked them one by one if they believed in God. Each said he did and each was immediately shot in the head. He can still see all the bloody faces. Those men did not live by a lie. Yes, they were killed, but their Savior told them “the truth shall set you free.” (John 8:32) If they submitted to the lie, they would not be free.

Dreher also authored a very different book reviewed earlier on these pages, How Dante Can Save Your Life. Live Not by Lies sounds political. In many ways, so was The Divine Comedy with all its political and ecclesiastical types in all three regions of the afterlife. The Divine Comedy gave the author hope when he was going through a kind of identity crisis.

Live Not by Lies, though serious and even ominous, can give its readers hope. Not that they will survive comfortably or unscathed, but that they can learn the love of God and the love of truth through the Gift of Suffering (Dreher uses this as a chapter title). As the Lord Jesus Himself said:

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when they revile and persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for My sake. Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven, so so they persecuted the prophets who were before you. (Matthew 5:10-12)

Amen.

N.B.: For the original “Live Not by Lies” by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, see https://www.solzhenitsyncenter.org/live-not-by-lies. His list of commitments to truth sound very applicable to today’s Western world, let alone contemproary, post-Soviet Russia.