George Stormont. Wigglesworth: A Man Who Walked with God. Harrison House, 1989.

I had the opportunity to meet the late author (born in 1909) about thirty years ago. He was in his early eighties and said that he was on what would probably be his last speaking trip. He chose our small New England church to have a meeting. I only recall a few things from what he told us, but he did share a few stories that are in Wigglesworth.

Smith Wigglesworth was an itinerant evangelist with a healing ministry during the first half of the twentieth century. Stormont worked with him from 1941 until he died in 1947. In the 1990s, then, when I met him or in the 1980s when he published this book, Rev. Stormont would have been one of the last people to have detailed memories of Mr. Wigglesworth.

Wigglesworth is not exactly a biography, though it has many anecdotes and biographical material. It is not specifically a teaching book, though it includes some of what Wigglesworth taught. One could call it a spiritual sketch.

Parts are truly anointed. As I turned a few pages, I was aware of the Holy Spirit moving to show me something. I have to admit that I might want to read it again—not so much for that experience, though God’s presence is very good, but just so I can perhaps really take away something more specific from the book.

Wigglesworth himself might rebuke me for writing that last sentence. He might also have been aware of God using the book, too, but he likely would have just said, “What’s wrong with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John?” That was his answer when someone asked him if he knew a good tract on divine healing (103). Good question!

Yes, there are many exciting testimonies of healing in this publication. Stormont is careful to sort out his sources to insure they are factual. Some of the occasions, of course, he witnessed himself. This, then, is a reliable testimony.

Wigglesworth was born in Wales in 1859 and spent much of his early manhood running a plumbing business. It apparently was not until the twentieth century that he began his ministry. As the subtitle suggests, from all appearances he did walk with God. Perhaps even more striking than some of the healings he witnessed was his gift of the word of knowledge (see I Corinthians 12:8 NKJV). He often spoke to people about situations in their personal lives which he could not have known. God also instructed him at times to pray in unusual ways for healing or to answer prayer.

In one church, he said, “I’ll go out and come back in. Everyone who touches me will be healed.” Sad to say, only one woman touched him, but she was healed. (82)

Wigglesworth led a relatively simple life. Stormont described him as a man of one book—the Bible. Wigglesworth did put together some teachings on faith and healing in a book titled Ever Increasing Faith. I recall selling it when I worked in a bookstore in the eighties. It is still in print as are his other two books. Even so, the proceeds from Ever Increasing Faith went to missions. Hopefully, they still do.

Wigglesworth includes description of a few times when the Holy Spirit was so strong that no one but Wigglesworth could stand. In some cases, everyone else in the room felt like they had to leave because the presence of God was more than they could handle. One minister saw this as a challenge and attempted to remain in a room while Wigglesworth prayed and ministered to the Lord.

As he [Wigglesworth] lifted up his voice, it seemed that God Himself invaded the place. Those present became deeply conscious that they were on holy ground. The power of God in its purity was like a heavy weight pressing on them.¹ One by one, the people left until only the man remained who had set himself to stay.

He hung on and hung on until at last the pressure became a compulsion, and he could stay no longer. His own testimony was that with the floodgates of his soul pouring out as a stream of tears and uncontrollable sobbing, he had to get out of the Presence or die. He added that Wigglesworth, a man who knew God as few men do, was left alone in an atmosphere that few mean could breathe. (70)

While known for his faith, Wigglesworth was intensely evangelistic. He wanted to see people redeemed. He sometimes cried thinking about people apart from God. He also had great hope for the future. He prophesied the charismatic renewal and Jesus movement of the sixties and seventies. He then said that the Lord would have even a greater movement combining the power of the Holy Spirit with the Word of God in the last days.

Some Christian believers are pessimistic about the end times. True, Jesus told us they would a time of great tribulation (see Matthew 24:21). But He also said that the gospel would be shared with every person on earth (Matthew 24:14). That would require people actively working under the power of the Holy Spirit. It will be exciting for those seeing what God does.

One of the saddest verses, also dealing with the end of the age in the Book of Revelation, says:

He who is unjust, let him be unjust still; he who is filthy, let him be filthy still; he who is righteous, let him be righteous still; he who is holy, let him be holy still. (Revelation 22:11 NKJV)

It sounds like in the lives of many people there comes or will come a point of no return. They will choose injustice or evil and will not be able to change. That, too, would have made Wigglesworth cry.

Reading about someone who lived his life close to God and aware of what the Holy Spirit is doing could inspire readers to draw closer to God as well.

Stormont notes that this is not something mystical. It is a matter of how we see things. Wigglesworth had little to do with anything that would be a distraction. He also would cite II Timothy 1:6 (KJV) and say that at times we have to “stir up” the Holy Spirit, whom all believers have access to. He also noted that Hebrews 6:12 tells us we inherit the kingdom by faith and patience.

Of course, there is a lot more. This is a relatively short book featuring sketches and short teachings. It is not too ponderous, so a reader could read it in an hour or two. Still, with the many sketches, it lends itself to a reader who could only spend a few minutes at a time. Let us pray that it can still stir up our godly gifts. Let us pray that our faith will increase as well.

¹ Interestingly, the root (kābēd) of the Hebrew word for glory (kābôd) means “heavy.” Glory is a weight. [JB]

Roger Casement. Report from His Majesty’s Consul at Boma Respecting the Administration of the Independent State of the Congo. 1904, Project Gutenberg, 29 Nov. 2015, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/50573/. Accessed 18 Feb. 2021.

———. Some Poems of Roger Casement. 1918, Ed. Gertrude Parry, Project Gutenberg, 28 Sep. 2016, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/53162/. Accessed 18 Feb. 2021.

The title of Report from His Majesty’s Consul at Boma sounds like the title of a government document, and that is exactly what it is. Those interested in some background on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness might find it helpful. This is a detailed account by a British consul on what he observed and testimonies he collected while visiting the Congo Free State (later the Belgian Congo).

The Congo was a unique instance of imperialism. It was established by treaty as a private possession of King Leopold of Belgium. Other colonial laws did not apply, and it appears from this document that licensed trading companies—there were only a few—were a law unto themselves. Consul Casement reported his observations and testimonies of native people about the abuses they were subject to by the Belgian concessionaires.

Unlike Heart of Darkness, the product that the Belgian traders were mostly interested in was rubber (caoutchouc). Traders acting on behalf of Belgian authorities demanded taxes in rubber from villages along the Congo River and some of its tributaries. If the demands were not met, people were arrested, sometimes killed, and often had their hands cut off. Casement tells us that as a result, villagers often fled to the interior or to neighboring countries to avoid these horrors. Casement himself was a consul to the neighboring French Congo who heard testimonies of refugees and visited the Congo Free State more than once and noted the depopulation.

At one point, farther inland, he quotes another traveler who noted that on the Belgian side of a tributary that formed a border with Sudan, villages on the British (Sudan) side were active and flourishing. The Belgian side of the river appeared uninhabited.

One reason for Belgian rule was to put an end to the slave trade, still practiced by Arab traders in the region. Still, at one point Casement recorded three wagons full of slaves, of whom a dozen were chained and guarded by soldiers. They had been found guilty of some crimes and were being punished by working on a literal chain gang in the provincial capital. The description, though written in French, sounds like it could have come directly from Conrad—or, should I say, Charlie Marlow:

Six black men advanced in a file, toiling up the path. They walked erect and slow, balancing small baskets full of earth on their heads, and the clink kept time with their footsteps. Black rags were wound round their loins, and the short ends behind waggled to and fro like tails. I could see every rib, the joints of their limbs were like knots in a rope; each had an iron collar on his neck, and all were connected together with a chain whose bights swung between them, rhythmically clinking. (Heart of Darkness, ch. 1)

The report noted there were officers not just from Belgium but from Italy, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. One is reminded of Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. It is said “all Europe” contributed to him.

The Casement report tries to be fair. It includes testimony which suggests that at least one young man of fifteen who lost a hand at around age eight may have lost it to a wild boar rather than to the machete of a soldier. It also notes that some African tribes are semi-nomadic and that Belgian administration was effectively putting an end to cannibalism.

Still, Casement had visited many of the same places in 1887 that he would revisit in 1903. Everywhere, he was struck by the change, especially the poverty and reduced population. Many people were missing hands and otherwise had sustained injuries and loss of neighbors and relatives at the hands of the Belgian authorities.

He does note that in parts of the Eastern Congo, ivory trade made a similar impact as rubber in the West. This is what Marlow saw in Heart of Darkness. Large canoes have disappeared, and few native people gain livelihood from the river. The hard work and industry he had observed in 1887 had largely disappeared. A Belgian excuse for this was that the native people were lazy and “unaccustomed to work.” Many villages were “inhabited by only a remnant” of the former population. Sometimes he saw people running away from him because they assumed he was a Belgian.

Many similar details accumulate so that can feel oppressed. To be fair, Casement includes Belgian documents that show at least a few of the people who shot and mutilated others over rubber were tried and punished, but the conclusion of this English report was that such amends were too little and too late. Even as of 1904, Belgium was extracting far more exports (mostly rubber) than it was paying for.

When I say Belgium here, though, I mean the traders and people working for the king. This, after all, was a “free” state with no real government. Laws on bodily harm and killing as well as importing firearms were largely ignored. The British Member of Parliament overseeing the report, Lord Landsdowne, would recommend altering the treaty of Berlin which established the Congo Free State. That eventually would happen.

Because this is a collection of legal documents and testimonies, it is a little dry in places. It also helps to know French. Most French portions were translated into English, but not all. For those doing background on the conditions in the Congo at the time when Conrad was there and later when he wrote Heart of Darkness, the most accessible book to read on the subject is Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Crime of the Congo.

There are a few other reasons to check out this collection of documents. Conrad had met Casement when he was in the Congo. At the time both were young and believed that European culture would help to positively alter the character of the native people. Both would become disillusioned, if not cynical. Beginning in 1906, Casement would be deployed to South America and report on the abuses of native Putumayo people at the hands of the government of Peru.

Heart of Darkness describes Kurtz in this way:

‘…He would have been a splendid leader of an extreme party.’
‘What party?’ I asked.
‘Any party,’ answered the other. ‘He was an—an—extremist.’

In 1913 Casement would retire from the consular service and return to his homeland of Ireland. There he once again identified with the exploited subjects of an imperial power, in this case, his fellow Irishmen. He identified with the Irish Volunteers, a nationalist group more extreme than Sinn Féin. He helped smuggle guns from Germany to Irish nationalists and would eventually be hanged at the age of 51 for taking part in the Easter Rebellion of 1916.

There certainly were differences between Kurtz and Casement, but we can see how Conrad could have been inspired by Casement in various ways. Conrad would say that he “thinks, speaks well, most intelligent and very sympathetic.” Later, reflecting on his execution, Conrad would say “Already in Africa, I judged he was a man, properly speaking, of no mind at all. I don’t mean stupid. I mean that he was all emotion. By emotional force (Putumayo, Congo report, etc.) he made his way, and sheer temperament—a truly tragic figure.”¹ Not unlike Mr. Kurtz?

At one point in Heart of Darkness, we are told that Kurtz not only was well spoken but had written some effective poetry. The Russian tells Marlow:

‘…Ah! I’ll never, never meet such a man again. You ought to have heard him recite poetry—his own, too, it was, he told me. Poetry!’ He rolled his eyes at the recollection of these delights. ‘Oh, he enlarged my mind!’

It turns out that Casement wrote some poetry, too. Fifteen of his poems were compiled by his cousin Gertrude Parry, also an Irish nationalist, into Some Poems of Roger Casement. They are interesting to read. While no one would confuse his work with Yeats, some of the poems are not bad. A few tend to be didactic, but one related to the subject of Irish nationalism, “The Triumph of Hugh O’Neill,” ends with a patriotic flourish:

Our flag no longer drooping, each fold shall now reveal
And wave for God and Erin and our darling Hugh O’Neill.

I am reminded of Francis Orrery Ticknor’s “A Battle Ballad” about General J. E. Johnston at the First Battle of Bull Run, a hero of another lost cause.

There is a tender, if somewhat generic, poem of lost love:

Oh! what cares Love for a wounded breast?
Love shows his own with a broader scar:
‘Tis only those who have loved the best
Can say where the wounds of loving are.

Not surprisingly, a few poems decry some injustice. One speaks of returning the Elgin Marbles to Greece:

Give back the Elgin marbles; let them lie
Unsullied, pure beneath an Attic sky.

And perhaps with a sense of lost youth or wasted years, there is the hope of all having meaning in God’s purpose. Echoing Colossians 3:3b (KJV), he writes:

So though the sun shines not in such a blue,
Nor have the stars the meaning youth deviced,
The heavens are nigher, and a light shines through
The brightness that nor sun nor stars sufficed;
And on this lonely waste we find it true
Lost youth and love, not lost, are hid with Christ.

Maybe his poetry could enlarge one’s mind a little bit anyhow…

If for no other reason than being an inspiration of sorts for Heart of Darkness and for Irish independence, some readers might appreciate a little more of Roger Casement. These primary sources are probably the places to start.

¹ Quotations from Conrad are found at “Roger Casement.” Wikipedia, 16 Apr. 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Casement. Accessed 19 Apr. 2021.

Joel C. Rosenberg. The Last Jihad. 2002, Tyndale, 2006.

We have reviewed a few of Joel Rosenberg’s international thrillers. This was his first. It begins with an Islamic terrorist attack on the United States. In his introduction, Rosenberg writes that he had written the story before the Al-Qaeda attacks on New York and the Washington, D.C., area in 2001. After the attacks, his agent and various publishers were suddenly interested in getting his work into print.

One is tempted to compare Rosenberg to Tom Clancy, and while Clancy’s first, Hunt for Red October, published during the Reagan administration, is dated (the Soviet Union earned its place in the dustbin of history), the Clancy novel is still a good read. We can draw a similar parallel with The Last Jihad. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq plays a key role in the story. While Iraq in the first decade of the twenty-first century turned out differently, The Last Jihad still makes for a good story.

A few of the details in the story have proven to be more or less true. An afterword in the 2006 edition notes a number of successful oil and gas explorations in Israel. In the novel, the characters express confidence that these discoveries will bring Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews together. There is no sign of that happening yet, though recent diplomatic exchanges between Israel and a few Arab countries are promising.

We note that Rosenberg like some of the oil explorers he mentions were inspired by certain passages in the Hebrew Scriptures. Ezekiel 36:11 and 38:11-13 speak of a future Israel being very prosperous so that other nations will want their resources. Genesis 49:25 speaks of the blessings that lie beneath the land. Deuteronomy 33:24 speaks of a son of Jacob dipping his feet in oil, and one that I recall from many years ago, Deuteronomy 32:13 speaks of another son of Jacob getting “oil out of the flinty rock.”

All this is interesting stuff and tells us something of Rosenberg’s inspiration, but what about the story? The Last Jihad begins with an unsuccessful attempt on the life of the American president. While the president is visiting Colorado, his motorcade is ambushed by an air attack. He survives, but it becomes clear that Iraq is behind it. After all, Iraqi agents earlier had tried to assassinate ex-President George H.W. Bush on a visit to the Near East.

Before going into politics, this fictional president had been CEO of a successful investment firm. The person who appears to be the main character in the story is a young, single up-and-comer in that firm who has been asked to work for the Treasury Department. Jon Bennett also knows Stu Iverson, the current Secretary of the Treasury, who also had worked for the same firm. We see echoes of both Blackwater from the Bushes and Rose Law Firm from the Clintons.

The reader gets a shock about a third of the way through the book. These political thrillers usually follow a kind of formula. The main character will have something to do directly or as a witness to bring about the climax. But Bennett is killed. Who, then, is the main character going to be? What will happen?

It has been pointed out that the Great Wall was mostly successful in keeping hostile groups to the north out of China. The wall failed when people on the inside let the outsiders in. So it appears to be happening here. One or more people close to the president may have been giving terrorists information. Although they may not be aware of where their money is going, they may be supporting the terrorists with money, too. After all, many international corporations are set up in such a way as to be opaque to various governing authorities. We may think we are doing business with a legitimate Western oil company, for example, but the company is actually run by Communists or supporters of terrorism.

The plot is intricate, but at the same time, it moves fast. It sounds like nuclear Armageddon could be happening. It turns out that the attempt on the president is just one of several attacks on various world leaders in various countries within the same week. When some, like the attack on the president, fail in their goal, it appears Iraq is going to ramp things up. Does Iraq have weapons of mass destruction? That was a question from about eighteen years ago. We know they had nuclear reactors. What if Saddam was planning something bigger than a few assassination attempts?

If war is imminent, we cannot focus on just one person or group anyhow. Various people from various countries including diplomats, retired spies, current spies, politicians, businessmen (and women), all play their parts.

One discussion is presented like a Socratic dialogue and is worth repeating when the President and one of his cabinet members are discussing the literal nuclear option:

“How can you begin to consider incinerating several million souls with the push of a button, in the blink of an eye? We cannot become the barbarians we’ve been forced to fight. The end never justifies the means. Never. That was the lesson of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That was the lesson of Vietnam. And that was the lesson of the Soviet experience in Afghanistan. How can you—?”

“Mr. Secretary, that is absolutely not true,” the president shot back, firmly but fiercely. “That is not true. It just isn’t. The lesson of Vietnam was never fight a just war—a war against an evil empire and its proxies to enslave mankind—unless you intend to win. The lesson of Afghanistan was don’t fight a war you have no business winning. And lesson of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Mr. Secretary, was that a president must never—never—flinch from using any and all means necessary to prevent the wholesale slaughter of American citizens and our allies.”

“Sir, this is repaying evil for evil. It’s becoming the very essence of what we hope to defeat.”

“No, no, no—it’s not. It’s not. It’s stopping evil once and for all.”

“How? By using the instruments of evil, the instruments of war?”

“The instruments of war are not evil, Mr. Secretary. Not in and of themselves. Not unless they are in the hands of those who use them for evil. Preventing the slaughter of innocent Americans is not evil. It is profoundly moral and inherently just.” (208, italics in original)

There is also a great quotation that I am sure I have read elsewhere. In The Last Jihad, a top Israeli security official tells a American, “The problem with you Americans is that you don’t believe in evil” (234). Yes, Americans believe most people are trying to do the right thing. That is why we trust in the outcome of honest elections. But what if someone is simply being evil?

In the context here, there are plenty of quotations from Saddam Hussein saying he will attack and destroy Israel and America. Older readers may recall his “mother of all wars” rhetoric or current “Death to America” chants from Iran. The typical American response in such instances is that Saddam or his ilk is bluffing—he is lying, he would not actually do it. Or if he is seriously thinking of doing it, he is crazy.

“…there is a third option—Saddam Hussein is not a lunatic and, in that case, he wasn’t a liar. He was rational and calculating and evil. So he told the world what he was going to do—commit an act of evil, not an act of madness—and then he did it. It took a bunch of highly paid analysts with Harvard degrees to completely miss the simplicity of the moment.” (237)

While Saddam is no more, it does seem that a lot of highly paid “specialists” in and out of government, with or without Ivy degrees (we can’t forget Stanford and Berkeley these days of FAANG), can be awfully naïve.

So, yes, not only are there a nuclear facedown reminiscent of Fail-Safe, lots of entertaining action and suspense reminiscent of Clancy, discussions reminiscent of Socrates, but also there are many things in The Last Jihad that are meant to get the reader thinking.

Harold Holzer. The Civil War in 50 Objects. Viking, 2013.

The Civil War in 50 Objects presents the history of the American Civil War in an effective and unique way. The author shares numerous artifacts from the Civil War owned by the New-York Historical Society. This New York City establishment is old enough that the hyphen in New-York is not a misprint.

Included in the collection of about a hundred articles are works of art, letters, military orders, weapons, flags, and photographs. The book presents them so that it follows the trajectory of the war, starting with events leading up to the war. For example, it begins with two pairs of slave shackles owned the historical society followed by some works of art giving various perspectives on the life of slaves. It ends with some memorial ephemera of Abraham Lincoln and one of the two existing copies of the Thirteenth Amendment signed by Lincoln.

The pictures themselves are clear, and by themselves are interesting, but the author tells as best he can the story of each. In some cases, the society has a detailed record of how it obtained the relic and the persons responsible. In other cases, the provenance may be uncertain, but we still learn about the significance of the article or articles and how they illustrate the progress of the war.

Because it is the historical society of New York City, there is a certain understandable slant. Many of the articles come from or are associated with army units or soldiers from New York. One artifact owned by the society was made famous by the Ken Burns PBS series on the Civil War—the George Templeton Strong diary. We see a photo of a page from the diary here, but Holzer cites it when describing other events as well, particularly those in New York City.

The city has an interesting if somewhat rebellious streak concerning the war. The mayor and the city were both strongly Democrat-leaning and opposed Lincoln. We see a copy of letters that Mayor Fernando Wood wrote to each of the states that had seceded by February 1861 supporting their cause, and perhaps thinking himself that New York City should secede from New York State. Reading one of the letters, it comes as no surprise that there might be riots in the city protesting the war later on.

Speaking of the riots, the society owns an original draft wheel used in the city for the draft lottery. It also owns a charred but still readable Bible from the Colored Orphan Society orphanage which was burned during the draft riot.

At the war’s end, it appears that most New Yorkers did honor the black soldiers who fought for the Union in the war. Speaking of them, Strong’s diary, for example, quotes the Song of Songs 1:5 (KJV) “I am black but comely.” The book misses this allusion and sees it as “unfortunate,” when the context taken from the Bible shows something quite different. In the Song of Songs, the King’s beautiful lover is described here, and while some people despise her because of her dark skin and hireling status, the king calls her the fairest. If anything, it appears Strong was criticizing those who thought black men would not make good soldiers.

Remarkably, the New-York Historical Society owns one of only four original copies made of Grant’s surrender terms to Lee at Appomattox, a life mask and hand casting of Abraham Lincoln, and lots of printed propaganda from both sides. Some tracts and pictures would be considered downright offensive today. Northern Copperhead and Southern fears of “miscegenation” (a word coined during the war) come through in various pamphlets, sketches, and etchings.

At the same time, we get a sense of General Grant’s leadership through not only the above mentioned terms of surrender but the various photographic and painted portraits—some of which were not even based on Grant himself. Holzer several times contrasts the patrician style of Lee with the simple and plebian style of Grant. A trap for military men as much as anyone else can be to focus on appearance rather than results.

Many other names appear, some known, some little known. Some are curiosities. There is a painting of a cavalry officer at the point of death in battle, but Holzer calls the battle was insignificant and unnecessary except that the officer’s parents were wealthy enough to commission the painting and present their son as a hero. Holzer compares him to Col. Elmer Ellsworth, considered a hero by many because he was the first Union officer killed in the war, even though he was probably killed by a civilian defending his property. Still, both men were willing to risk their lives for their country and for the cause of liberty.

There are some significant broadsides from various sources including Frederick Douglass’s appeal to allow black men to fight in the war. But all told, and in the order the tales are told, we get a fascinating overview of the war. While there is an obvious New York slant, we hear from many regions and from both sides. The title sums up the book. It is not 50 objects from the Civil War, but a history of the Civil War based on 50 stories of approximately 100 objects—fascinating, detailed, and inspiring.

Fred Waitzkin. Strange Love. Open Road, 2021.

We reviewed a Fred Waitzkin novel about two years ago. This novella is different. There is no violence to speak of. The conflict is mostly internal except for a couple of fishing adventures. Still, it it engaging and affecting.

Waitzkin keeps one narrative technique the same: It is told in the first person. Unlike Deep Water Blues, the narrator never identifies himself, though he does mention having spent some time in the Bahamas. The names of people from the Bahamas are different, though.

In many countries there is some kind of folklore or tradition about the town or city where the most beautiful women in their country come from. In China I was told more than once that the prettiest Chinese women came from Suzhou (a.k.a. Soochow). Though I cannot remember the specifics, I have heard the same about a certain place in France and another in Brazil. Here we are told that the most beautiful women in Costa Rica come from the coastal village Fragata, population c. 300.

While a bit off the beaten track, tourists do come there and provide much of the poor town’s livelihood along with fishing. There is a pattern that rich European playboys spend time there and end up returning to Europe with one of the local women as a wife. More often than not, the women return after a decade or so.

When our narrator visits Fragata for a getaway, an attractive woman of certain age named María José begins to flirt with him. But he is immediately smitten with Rachel, her niece. Rachel is a single mother in her late thirties who has somehow missed matrimony.

Our narrator is himself around sixty, and understands that his attraction may be more of a fantasy. So perhaps were other aspects of his life. Back when he was in his twenties, he had written a very successful first novel. He dined with George Plimpton and Gay Talese one night. His Random House editor had worked with Philip Roth, Ralph Ellison, and Truman Capote.

His second novel was barely reviewed—and it was not published by Random House. He plugged away for a while. He describes it in a way that spoke to this reviewer who is sitting on half a dozen book manuscripts:

For as long as I could remember, I was going to be a writer. Until I wasn’t anymore. (19).

The last book reviewed here spoke of men making a conquest with a woman. Here, Rachel is the one who has conquered our narrator. He treats her with respect. He gradually hears her story and, generally, the story of her village. It is largely a melancholy tale of people trying to make ends meet and making sense of life.

An American friend who has worked years in Central America once told me that the only pleasure the people there live for is sex. There is a sense of that in this story. Few people seem to marry, but there is sexual experimenting. But not for Rachel or our narrator. Our narrator respects her too much. As their relationship develops, she becomes tender towards him, but she draws the line. Our narrator does not mind. He is learning that love is patient.

Most of the drama comes from Rachel’s story of her family. Her mother would periodically take what money she had and fly to Nicaragua to consult a fortune teller. The fortune teller’s advice never works, but her mother continues to trust her. Back when local newspapers in my state were a vital business, we would occasionally read about how someone had been duped for thousands by a fortune teller. It is still happening. It seems Rachel’s mother never learns.

Rachel had a sister Sondra who was about six or seven years younger. Sondra was physically quite attractive. Once when Rachel was twenty-two and getting serious about an Italian visitor, Sondra seduced him. When it appears that Rachel and our narrator are becoming friendly, Sondra will try to seduce him, too. I was reminded of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” and Judy Jones from Fitzgerald’s “Winter Dreams.”

Why the title Strange Love? Part of it simply because the protagonists come from two different countries. Our narrator is almost immediately smitten but comes to love and respect Rachel more as he hears her story. She is younger than he is, but still very much an adult.

The strange love is reflected in Rachel’s family relationships. Sondra has a baby boy that she does not really want. She leaves town and Rachel takes care of him for five years. He treats Rachel as a mother until Sondra suddenly returns and take him back. Rachel runs the family cantina on a shoestring, but her mother and Sondra take most of the earnings even though they do not work there. They accuse her of keeping back money even though it is obvious that she is not.

Still, Rachel is loyal to them. She seems to bear no ill will towards Sondra; that is just the way her sister is. She goes along with what her mother tells her that the fortune teller told her to do even if they cannot afford it. Yes, that is unconditional love, too, but maybe a bit strange.

While the story is intense, we get a sense of the laid-back timelessness of this beach village. The story, though, does have a little comic relief when our narrator returns to New York City for a month. He is not writing, but he picks up his old job as an exterminator.

He shares some wild stories about his month there hunting bugs and trapping rodents. We learn that most exterminating companies are always looking for help. When his writing was not going anywhere, he started working for them, and he knew if he returned to the city, they would take him back. We meet Robert, a one of a kind exterminator who loves the job and is also a Methodist preacher with three doctorates.

Of course, our narrator cannot stay away from Fragata. The question is whether his strange love will turn into something else. The story is a bit raw and not for everyone, but it does give a sense of what life in rural Latin America may be like, and how even the more urbane people can be drawn to it. If there is a criticism of the tale, one could argue that it is an old man’s fantasy.

Waitzkin has a great sense of place. Fragata is Spanish for frigate. So Waitzkin sails away. Even though Strange Love is a different story from Waitzkin’s Deep Water Blues, there is a character that appears as a constant: the tropical sea and shore. That comes alive. The setting may draw the reader in as much as the characters do.

Charles Martin. Unwritten. Center Street, 2013.

Unwritten is a terrific book. I would recommend it to anyone above the middle school (i.e., young adult) level. I will be thinking about it for a while, I am sure.

Like Tigers in Red Weather, one should not judge this book by its cover. The cover has a couple walking on a tropical beach. All I could think of are those stereotyped personal advertisements: “Likes quiet walks on the beach.” It is not like that at all. To call it a romance is to do it a real injustice.

Our narrator calls himself Sunday. He is a complete recluse. It is clearly deliberate. He lives most of the time on an island in the Everglades. To a great degree he lives off the land. Before he was a recluse, he worked with charter fishermen, so he knows when and where to fish. His island provides him with a variety of tropical fruits.

We know, though, there is more to his story. Once in a while he drives north to Jacksonville to visit a hospital. There he secretly gives gifts to children who are in the hospital for a long term. He signs his gifts “Pirate Pete.”

The one human being he keeps in touch with, at least somewhat, is Father Steady, a priest at a Miami church. Father Steady has his own troubled backstory. He is a veteran of World War II and was a medic after the Allies had begun to re-take France. Tending the wounded and dead during the Battle of the Bulge affected him greatly. One is reminded of some of the trauma witnessed by Hemingway as an ambulance driver in World War I.

Father Steady enlists Sunday’s help one evening. He says a parishioner of his may need some help. We know she has recently gone to the father for confession. (Father Steady keeps his confessional confidential.)

This parishioner is not an ordinary person. She lives on the top floor of one of the most exclusive condos in Miami Beach. The security guards, all former military, let the father in, but Sunday has to sneak in. Father Steady has keys to her apartment. He lets himself in, and they arrive just in time to rescue the woman from a suicide attempt.

This woman is Katie Quinn, the Ice Queen, the unparalleled star of stage and screen at the time. Her recent film contracts were in the seven figure range.

Father Steady is not trying to be a matchmaker. He just knows that Sunday has lived off the grid for ten years and knows how to do it. If Katie wants or needs to do something similar, Sunday can show her.

Katie manages to stage her death and cause a Princess Diana style mourning. Sunday does not generally pay attention to the news and has never heard of Katie Quinn, but even he is struck by the media attention her death attracts. This reviewer delivered newspapers back in 1962, and I recall that for two weeks there was virtually nothing on the front page but news about the death of Marilyn Monroe. Katie was like that.

Sunday is our storyteller. Gradually we learn a little about his backstory. Why did he go off the grid? We get some hints from the name of his two boats: Gone Fiction and Jodie.

And we learn a little more about Katie, too, as her escape takes the two of them to a remote village in France where she owns some property. Sunday—like most who read his story—begins to see that Katie is out of his class, not that there is much of a hint of romance in the story. There really is not. Unwritten would probably make a great film, but no doubt the Hollywood treatment would turn it into a love story.

Instead, it is a story of redemption, and one of effective literary quality. It is told well. There is a subtle but significant use of symbols—rope is one recurring image. Another are the caves in France. The underground labyrinth, some of which is used for storing wine, suggests that both of our protagonists have to dig deep in order to get real.

And the psychology is real.

When Sunday sees the near-dead Katie and is told who she is, he realizes that, as Kipling tells us, fame is an impostor.

Man, or woman, is not made to be worshipped. We are not physically cut out for it. Life in the spotlight, or on the pedestal, at the top of the world, was a lonely, singular, desolate, soul-killing place. (42)

Since the story is told by Sunday, if anything romantic develops between Sunday and Katie, he is not telling. He is also not telling much of his story, but the reader begins to realize that he has to do so as much as Katie does.

I give credit to the author, if not to his creation Mr. Sunday, that he exercises some self-control. Self-control is such a necessity these days, and it seems so few want to use it. “Be yourself”; “Be free,” people say. But to really be free, we have to handle our impulses. It is good for us. It is better for others. We hear the broken, exploited actress tell us:

“I’m on display for all the world to see and show them this perfect image, so what…so a bunch of people can make money off their wanting to be like me. But those girls…they shouldn’t want to be me. I want to tell them all that the guys…once they’ve had you, all they want to do is brag that they did. They want to know they conquered me. But so what? What have they gained? Certainly not my heart. And more importantly, what, or what else, have they lost? Have I lost? Is there a limit? I mean, to how much we can lose?” (213, ellipses in the original)

Where are the real men who can control themselves?

We learn at some point that Sunday was an orphan and shuttled among foster homes and orphanages. Here is his metaphor for what that was like:

Being an orphan is illogical. The brain never makes sense of it. Ever. It shelves it in the “miscellaneous” file. It’s like a book with no place on the shelf, forever relegated to the cart that circles the library, never stopping to slide between two worn covers. (235)

Unwritten also tells us a little about writing and how to write, and not only by demonstrating what good writing should be like. This reminded me of the novel The Family Corleone. The edition of that Godfather prequel that I read had a great essay by Mario Puzo titled “The Making of The Godfather.” In that essay, Puzo tells us what it was like not only to write a best-selling novel, but what it was like working for publishing companies and working in Hollywood. Like Martin, Puzo expressed sympathy for actors and actresses like Miss Quinn most of whom “are badly exploited by their producers, studios, and agents and assorted hustlers.”

Unwritten does not go into as much detail about the writing experience, but it includes a brief afterword titled “Doc Snakeoil.” It reminds us of what it takes to make good writing and how important truly constructive criticism can be. The afterword itself can make reading the book worth it. Don’t skip it.

Leonard A. Cole. Chasing the Ghost. World Scientific, 2021.

Chasing the Ghost has nothing to do with Ghostbusters. It is a biography of Nobel Prize winner Fred Reines (Ray-ness) who helped discover the neutrino. The book is the man’s life story, so the actual neutrino work which made him famous happens about a third of the way through the book.

The author is a cousin of Dr. Reines. He has some personal memories plus access to much family material. Dr. Reines’ parents came from Eastern Europe at the turn of the twentieth century to avoid pogroms. Dr. Reines was enamored of science from an early age. The existence of the neutrino was hypothesized in the 1930s, but there was no way to prove its existence. When he heard about this hypothetical subatomic particle, he decided that he would be the one to discover it.

Before making that discovery in 1954, he worked on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos and witnessed the first detonation of the Atomic Bomb in 1945. One interesting detail the author notes is that contrary to popular legend, J. Robert Oppenheimer did not quote from the Bhagavad-Gita. He simply said, “It worked.” Most of the witnesses were simply in awe of the power of the bomb.

Dr. Reines would join Clyde Cowan at the Savannah River nuclear reactor in South Carolina where they devised a project that would detect the neutrino from atomic fission. Eventually, the experiment worked. The challenge was to screen out other particles that had a similar signature.

Dr. Reines would then go on to do greater experiments with neutrinos. Neutrinos are particles that travel at the speed of light and pass through matter. They appear throughout space, and some estimate that millions pass through our bodies every second. They can pass through the earth without stopping unless they strike another subatomic particle. So to detect neutrinos in nature, the challenge is to find a place where neutrinos would still be passing by but the various cosmic rays would have been stopped. So Dr. Reines would do a lot of work underground in deep mines where only neutrinos would still be on the loose.

The cover of the book shows one such deep detector created in Japan. It has thousands of electronic tubes for detection surrounded by pure water. The picture looks like a tiny rubber raft floating in a strange hall of mirrors.

One concept I had not heard of before reading this book was that of pathological technology. By that was meant a belief or plan that would be proven to be based on false information or a false premise. The example the book used was a plan by some people who worked on the Manhattan project to create a space ship that instead of being propelled by rocket fuel gases would be propelled by a series of small, controlled atomic blasts.

I have elsewhere expressed some skepticism about the existence of dark matter and of macroevolution. Are those pathological theories? Cole notes that if neutrinos can be shown to have mass, that could account for much of the mathematical variations which made astrophysicists hypothesize dark matter. If there are countless quadrillions of these all over the universe and they do have some mass, that could help solve the problem. We shall see. For the moment, a former science teacher friend tells me, “Dark matter is simply a fudge factor to make the math work.”

Dr. Reines eventually received the Nobel Prize for his discovery of the neutrino (literally, “tiny neutral thing”) in 1995. Alas, his partner Dr. Cowan had already died and Nobels only go to living people. No doubt, if he were still alive, he would have been named as well.

Chasing the Ghost provides character sketches of many famous physicists. It shows how so many of the nuclear physicists cooperated and worked together. We meet, mostly through Reines, many of them from Enrico Fermi and Wolfgang Pauli to Richard Feynman and Douglas Hofstader (author of Gödel, Escher, Bach). We meet many larger than life figures working on larger than life experiments. Still, they come across as real people.

One interesting aside was that in the 1970s there was a movement to transport Ethiopian Jews to Israel. Ethiopia had been taken over by Communists and there was a famine. Ethiopian Jews were threatened by both, but the Israeli government was unsure if it should get involved, having just gotten over a couple of recent wars. About 50,000 American Jews signed a petition to encourage Israel to take action. The organizers deliberately put Reines’ name at the top.

Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin did not know who Fred Reines was, but he recognized the family name. Isaac Jacob Reines was a famous rabbi who back in 1906 had co-written a tract supporting the Ethiopian Jews. The rabbi was Dr. Reines’ great uncle.

There might be one minor problem with the book. Because there is so much science and because so many different scientists and laboratories and schools are named, an index could have helped. I understand that biographies are usually simple stories, but there is so much to this one that readers (like me anyhow) might actually use an index.

Chasing the Ghost contributes to the layman’s understanding of subatomic particles and nuclear physics, and how people who study those things work. For that alone, the book is worth reading.

Daniel A. Kinderlehrer. Recovery from Lyme Disease. Skyhorse, 2021.

Dr. Kinderlehrer has specialized in treating Lyme Disease for most of his career. This book goes into great detail about this tick-borne illness and related diseases. Readers can learn a lot from this book. It appears the author’s hope is that physicians will read this book, but most of the presentation is accessible to any reader. The doctor’s family name means “teacher” in German. He is following the family tradition with this book.

Perhaps the strongest part of the book is the number of anecdotes from Dr. Kinderlehrer’s own patients. There are two recurring themes. The first is that most tests for Lyme Disease have numerous false negatives. If there are potential Lyme symptoms, the patient should probably take several different kinds of tests if there is a negative on the first test. The second is that Lyme Disease is often misdiagnosed. It can have a variety of symptoms and the bite of the tiny deer tick is easy to miss. He has had patients diagnosed with everything from ADHD to ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease) when the real pathology had to with Lyme Disease.

Dr. Kinderlehrer also notes that ticks that carry the Lyme bacteria often carry other infectious microbes as well. He presents Lyme Disease as an array of symptoms often caused by more than one malady. Possible co-irritants include Babesia, Rickettsia, and Mycoplasma. He enumerates many potential cures depending on the severity and symptoms. One example is hydroxychloroquine, which has made the news in the past year for lessening the symptoms of Covid-19.

I have two close friends who had or probably had Lyme Disease. One was working outdoors, saw he had a tick bite, and soon had the target-shaped rash. He went to his doctor, had a positive test, was given an antibiotic, and recovered quickly with hardly any symptoms beyond the rash.

My other friend was hospitalized for a while and was quite weak for about six months. Eventually her strength returned. Later, she read about Lyme Disease and saw a picture of the typical rash. She remembered having that rash around the time she got sick. She was never diagnosed, but she is pretty sure she had Lyme Disease. She lived two towns away from Lyme, Connecticut, the town that gave the disease its name.

Dr. Kinderlehrer notes that the target-shaped rash only appears about half the time a person is infected. This illustrates the problem with diagnosis. There can be a variety of symptoms because Lyme Disease and some of the related infections work on the endocrine system. It is not that the microbe attacks joints to give them symptoms of arthritis. Instead, the microbe affects the endocrine system which can create a hormonal imbalance that can affect any number of organs from the nerves to the kidneys, even the eyes.

The book affirms that “it’s all connected.” According to the author, probably the biggest problem in modern medicine is that specialists in certain body parts or functions have little to do with one another.

But the very idea that we are not an interconnected whole is misguided.

The endocrine system discharges hormones that regulate specific cellular functions. The immune system releases cytokines that talk to immune cells and engineer inflammation. And the nervous system dispatches neuropeptides that talk to other nerve cells. But all these systems are in continuous dialogue. There are receptors for each of the neuropeptides on every cell in our bodies. Cytokines talk to nerve cells and endocrine glands. Neuropeptides talk to immune cells. Hormones regulate all of the above.…

[T]he GI tract makes its own hormones that not only regulate digestion but also talk to the brain, giving a whole new meaning to “gut emotions.”

In fact, the GI tract not only makes hormones, it also has more nerve cells than the spinal cord and more immune cells than the rest of the body combined. Meanwhile, other organs like the heart also send out messenger molecules. You get the point. The fact it—we are a vast informational network in which our cells are in continuous dialogue. And the reductionist attitude we have used to understand human function has limited our appreciation of the human condition. (143)

As the Psalmist said three thousand years ago: “I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” (Psalm 139:14)

The author begins his book describing what he calls the Lyme Wars. He and a number of other doctors who have been focusing on Lyme patients advocate multiple tests when warranted and multiple treatments. Others have taken what he sees as a much more simplistic view—Lyme test followed by antibiotic. Yes, that works for some like my friend. What about those who have Chronic Fatigue, ADHD, or even depression, but those things were brought on by Lyme Disease?

While Lyme Disease is most common in the Northeast United States and around the Great Lakes, it has appeared in all fifty states. Dr. Kinderlehrer currently practices in Colorado, though he began in Massachusetts. He still gets many cases from the Rocky Mountains.

It seems to this lay reader that general practitioners and neurologists should take a look at this book. Chances are you may have some patients who have come down with Lyme Disease even though the symptoms may indicate something else. People who have the illness or who have friends or family with it may discover some treatments worth trying out.

The book has helpful charts and lists. These appear to meant more for doctors, but readers can certainly understand them. These include symptoms, treatments, tests, and many resources. I am including a link to the one he recommends the most: Advanced Topics in Lyme Disease by Joseph Burrascano in case a reader happened on this review looking for help with Lyme Disease.

Recovery from Lyme Disease, as the title suggests, gives the reader a lot of hope. Even severe cases can turn around. It may take time. It may often include treating more than one disease. It may include a diet change It may include a few unpleasant tests. However, with a reliable diagnosis, there can be life after Lyme.

Becky Cooper. We Keep the Dead Close. Grand Central, 2020.

We Keep the Dead Close tells about a nearly fifty-year-old crime that was finally solved and how the author got wrapped up in the story. Whatever else, Cooper is a story teller. She keeps the suspense. She has commentaries from time to time, but they never seem like mere asides. She also does a very good job of getting a sense of the zeitgeist, especially in academia.

The crime was the rape and murder of a twenty-four-year-old graduate student at Harvard in her apartment near Harvard Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts, in January of 1969. She had graduated from Radcliffe in 1967 and was accepted into the graduate program in archaeology. Lest it sound confusing, at the time archaeology was part of of the anthropology department.

The movement to make most colleges co-ed was beginning to take off. By 1975 Harvard would absorb Radcliffe as many single-sex colleges went co-educational at this time. This can be seen as an offshoot of either the sexual revolution or the women’s movement or both. Cooper notes a tension, though. As the popular song went, “something’s lost and something’s gained.”

Interviewing Radcliffe alumnae from the time period, there was a sense that they had failed: “We cared more about money than about art and history and human rights” (129). She notes that “…the merger of Radcliffe into Harvard was as much a submersion of a vital institution as it was a landmark of women’s equality” (129).

With our murder victim, Jane Britton, this was combined with the sexual revolution. She was an early adopter of that, and that had its own problems. Cooper would have no problem understanding them as she shares some of her own ups and downs in relationships:

In Jane’s version of empowerment, she did not need a man to feel complete, but she could still long to be loved. It was a fragile stance that put independence at odds with itself. (117)

We get a sense of the somewhat misapplied initial investigation into Jane’s murder. There were a few bruises but no sign of struggle in her apartment where she was murdered. Did she know her killer? On the other hand, her windows were open. That means someone could enter through the fire escape. Speaking from experience, opening windows in winter was not unusual in Harvard-owned buildings because the steam heat could make the rooms stifling.

We get a sense of gradual revelation. Cooper first hears of Jane’s murder as a kind of rumor or urban legend. There was a woman grad student in the sixties when the school had virtually no female professors. She apparently had an affair with a professor. When she wanted more, she was murdered. The professor was still there many years later. There was even a file passed around among female anthropology students to this day as a warning.

Cooper herself would graduate from Harvard and eventually work for the New Yorker. As she wondered about this murder, she gathered details, and it became an obsession.

One reason why anthropology students thought her murder was an inside job, so to speak, is that her body was found with material that looked like red ochre powder spilled on it. That has been a common product in ancient burial sites on every continent. It sounded as if it were done by someone who knew archaeology and was making a statement.

A few months later another young woman in another part of Cambridge was killed in a similar manner, but no red ochre. Was this related?

Much of the book takes us through the lives and events concerning the four prime suspects. The first, the professor. Dr. Karl Lamberg-Karlovsky would learn shortly after Jane’s death that he had been given tenure. She had worked with him on a dig in Iran (this was ten years before the Ayatollahs took over). There were rumors of sexual harassments, but in those days no woman would complain. When police interviewed him and asked if he had ever had an affair with Miss Britton, he said he was happily married to an attractive woman. Why go out for hamburger when you can have steak at home?

There were a couple of grad students who knew her who would become suspects later. Jane was outgoing, and some young men may have thought she was flirting when she was just being friendly. A few years later one such young man was on a Native American archaeological survey in remote Newfoundland when his female co-worker disappeared. He was the only witness. Had he murdered her? Had he done it because he had gotten away with murdering Jane a few years before?

Then there was another grad student in archaeology who seemed to be socially awkward. Jane tried to be friendly to him, too. A few years later, he would come out as gay. A few years later his younger roommate would die under mysterious circumstances. Had he murdered him? Could he have done the same to Jane?

There was a serial killer who lived in Cambridge at the time. He was a career criminal. He was released a few times on the Massachusetts prisoner furlough program which came to national attention when Governor Michael Dukakis ran for president in 1988. Every time he was released, he raped or killed another woman.

Then there was another man, an ex-boyfriend that no one seemed to like. It appears that he may have abused Jane when they dated as undergraduates. People who knew the two of them suspected him. However, he seemed to have a perfect alibi. He was in Peru at the time of the murder.

Author Cooper would actually leave the New Yorker and go back to Harvard as a dormitory advisor in the dorm where she once lived as an undergrad. She audited a class given by Lamberg-Karlovksy and learned a lot about the anthropology department there. This reviewer had taken a class given by Irven DeVore, one of the professors she interviewed, and I did recognize Lamberg-Karlovksy’s name.

He would come to illustrate how a person could succeed not only in archaeology but in academia in general. In 1969 he had achieved a certain amount of fame by discovering the site of an ancient city in Iran. He believed it was a city that had been founded by Alexander the Great and since lost to history.

When evidence surfaced that it was another city, he had no problem accepting the evidence. He was no fool. But to him archaeology was a story. The story that went with the discovery made it interesting. Cooper even joined an archaeological dig in Bulgaria for a summer just so she could get a sense of what such a venture would be like. She noted that Jane’s notebooks, like those of some other students, mostly just presented the facts. Dr. Lamberg-Karlovsky and others would turn them into stories.

I was starting to believe there were two kinds of archaeologists: the scholars like Jim Humphries and Richard Meadow [both friends of Jane], who were meticulous and bound by data, and, as I had seen sitting in his class, the story tellers like Karl. I was starting to believe that the story tellers always won. (147)

That certainly seems true in academia. Two of the best teachers that I had at Harvard were exceptional story tellers. Both Nobel-winner George Wald and Pulitzer-winner Walter Jackson Bate gave some lectures in which the lecture hall overflowed. People who were not enrolled in their classes had heard that certain lectures were so good, they had to come to watch them.

I personally suspect that is one reason why evolution caught on. Even though there is little evidence that evolutionary or uniformitarian changes have occurred, and even some evidence for a young earth, evolution is such a fascinating story that people want to believe it. I have quoted Dr. Wald elsewhere what he said about it.

Dr. DeVore was also a good story teller. One reason I took his class on primate behavior was that I had devoured Robert Ardrey’s The Territorial Imperative and African Genesis. Those books were also great stories that connected primate and human behavior because they had a common evolutionary ancestor. DeVore’s class, though, may have been where I began to be an evolution skeptic. There I was told that Ardrey had it all wrong. But weren’t both DeVore and Ardrey presenting scientific evidence? How could they dispute each other since they were both talking about science?

Anyway, Cooper quotes another anthropology professor who told her, “The best story? That is the truth. Whether or not it actually happened” (147).

Cooper expresses frustration at using the Freedom of Information Act to get any information on Jane Britton’s case even though it was over forty years old and some of the suspects had died. She had an acquaintance who had been a reporter in Miami and had come to Boston to teach journalism. He could not believe how hard it was to get FOIA records in Massachusetts compared to Florida. His observation sounds like a conservative’s comparison of red states to blue states:

In Florida, the default position is that government belongs to the public[…]Here in Massachusetts, I got the sense that the burden is exactly the opposite. (216, brackets and ellipsis in the original)

We also read about how the Cambridge police seemed to browbeat anyone who knew Jane. Her neighbor and fellow anthropology student Jill, who found her body, tells us “I almost told them, ‘Yeah, I killed her.’ Anything to make them stop.” (237) Some of this reminded me of She’s So Cold where two boys were interrogated for over twenty-four hours until they confessed to a crime they could not have committed.

Throughout the story, Cooper wants us to see the challenges that women face in academia and other prestige jobs. Presumably, things have changed some, but she notes:

If Iva [a friend of Jane’s she interviews] was right and Jane’s story functioned as a kind of cautionary tale, then it was perhaps less about the literal truth of what happened to Jane than it was an allegory of the dangers that faced women in academia. (199)

Later, she tells us of her reaction to some events of 2018: “…the #MeToo movement felt like 1969 had come crashing fully and completely into the present day” (379).

This might be a slight spoiler, but the crime was solved recently because of updates to DNA matching technology. Ironically, in a conversation Cooper had with Dr. Lamberg-Karlovsky, he told her of how DNA studies have completely changed the way some scholars view human migration. They do not match at all what the archaeological evidence had been showing. As he put it, it must be true, but it does not make much sense.

So that is with other stories as well, even things we have witnessed and tell ourselves. Cooper concludes, “There are no true stories; there are only facts, and the stories we tell each other about those facts” (426).

Radical Humility. Edited by Rebecca Modrak and Jamie Vander Broek. Belt, 2021.

Radical Humility is a collection of essays purported to be on the subject of humility. Considering that a few are written by journalists and the rest by academics, it is no surprise that a majority of the writers find the subject distasteful. Academics can be among the proudest people on the planet. The next book reviewed here has some examples.

There are a couple of essays, notably “Loving Knowledge Together” and “Education is a Space to Change the World,” that speak of Socrates. Both tell us that when the Oracle said Socrates was the wisest man, he responded that his wisdom was simply admitting that he did not know very much. That is a good place to start.

Alas, most of the essays barely touch on the subject of humility or present it in a negative light. Two essays suggested that white people could not be humble. We could at the very least say that the essays used hyperbole, at the worst they showed racial prejudice themselves. What about the millions of mixed race marriages in our country alone? Lest I come across as a hypocrite, I do note that even where I went to college some of the professors were indeed humble men and women.

The honest author of “Journalism in an Era of Likes, Follows, and Shares” admits she is not crazy about most of the concepts of humility. Still, she acknowledges one near synonym of humility does describe good journalism: unobtrusiveness. The idea that journalism is balanced and objective seems to have disappeared from my local daily, so it was refreshing to at least read of the possibility of some kind of ideal reporting. A Platonic ideal? Alas, then the writer confesses she is not singing “some wistful ode to the past.” Some of her examples are not exactly free from bias, to put it mildly.

There are some helpful reflections on not coming across as a know-it-all and a few on learning from mistakes. “Epic Failures in 3-D Printing” has some clever pictures and cartoons. The reality about most of what we do ought to keep all of us humble. I am reminded of something George MacDonald wrote, which actually sounds a lot like Socrates: “But indeed the business of the universe is to make such a fool of you that you will know yourself for one, and so begin to be wise!” An important element of humility is an acknowledgment of truth.

There is a political tone in many of the essays. The academics and progressives authoring the majority of the selections in here seem annoyed if not offended by the concept of humility. This takes on one of two approaches: Either the old Garfield cartoon caption, “It’s hard to be humble when you’re as great as I am,” or simply putting the chip on the shoulder and saying, “Try and make me humble!” It is almost as if the book should have been called Radicals vs. Humility.

Benjamin Franklin in his Autobiography said that to be humble he had to “Imitate Jesus and Socrates.” Three essays in this book to show us some things about Socrates. For getting insight into real and radical humility, though, take another look at Gentle and Lowly. Like Socrates, Jesus is the real deal.