Charles Dickens. A Christmas Carol and Other Short Stories. Black, n.d.

This volume contains five shorter stories by Dickens. He called them short stories, but today we would call them novellas. Each is a little over a hundred pages.

A Christmas Carol in Prose: Being a Ghost Story of Christmas [1843]. I am reluctant to even mention this since it is a tale nearly everyone is somewhat familiar with. I had not actually read this since I was a teenager. It was a pleasure to re-read. It is extremely well composed. I really felt while reading it that there was hardly a word out of place. Our family has a tradition of some thirty years or so of watching The Muppets’ Christmas Carol, which actually follows Dickens’ script fairly closely. I think it might be worth it to read this one more frequently just to be reminded of what a good storyteller Dickens is. It follows in the tradition of Robinson Crusoe which Defoe called an allusive allegorical history. It is a story with allusions and symbols; and what a story it is!

The Chimes [1844] is subtitled A Goblin Story of Some Bells that Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In. A Christmas Carol is divided into five chapters the author calls staves, suggesting the five staves in an octave of music. So The Chimes is divided into four quarters, each suggesting a clock that chimes every quarter hour.

This is a very clever story that may be a bit hard to follow. If it were written today, it would be called magical realism. Indeed, it would be easy to imagine Gabriel Marquez or Jorge Luis Borges writing something like this. Toby (a.k.a. Trotty) has a daughter Meg who is planning to get married on New Year’s Day.

Trotty is visited by two distinguished gentlemen, Alderman Mr. Cute and Attorney Mr. Filer. Both not only look down on him for serving tripe but also predict that Meg’s marriage will be a trap for both spouses. Echoing Jaggers in Great Expectations, they announce that Meg will grow fat and ugly, her husband will be poor, and they will have too many children—lots of boys, and everyone knows boys are trouble.

They all make their way to Sir Joseph Bowley’s who has an annual feast where he treats the poor to a nice meal and some gifts. While there is an element of charity in this, we get more of a sense of condescending noblesse oblige. Meg and her husband clearly will be unable to improve their lot at all. Today we would call Bowley, Cute, and Filer elitists. Trotty is humbled to the point of embarrassment.

From then on, it is best to say that the magic takes over. Trotty hears the chimes of a nearby church and believes they are speaking to him. He climbs the bell tower and sees things. He flies off the bell tower. Nine years after he dies, we are told he committed suicide by jumping from the tower. Or did he?

Let us just say that in spite of the condescension of “those in the know,” it seems the chimes may know more and better. The Chimes is very much a life and love affirming story in its own distinctive way.

The Cricket on the Hearth: A Fairy Tale of Home [1845] reads like a play. Dickens loved the theater and supported a local theater company. He tells us, for example, that Willkie Collins’ play The Frozen Deep inspired A Tale of Two Cities. His daughter described her father when writing that she could hear him speaking in different voices as he imagined and wrote conversations.

This “fairy tale” is nearly all dialogue. Perhaps I was tired, but I felt that a cast list at the beginning might have helped me keep the characters straight better.

Instead of three chapters, this story is divided into three chirps. The cricket is a symbol in the story. There are several subplots, but they really focus on what makes a home. We have a poor employee of a toymaker and his blind daughter. Because his daughter is blind, he tells her their house and their clothes are much finer than they really are. If anyone has seen Life is Beautiful, there is a similar effect, though only from poverty, not from imprisonment.

The toymaker is an older bachelor who actually hates children. He does not like crickets much, either. He is engaged to be married to a younger woman. It does not appear to be a love match at all, but the young lady and her father think it may be for the best.

There are two older married couples that also figure in the story. Together they help us focus on what is really important. Even blind Bertha, though she cannot see, can hear better than most people, so she can “see” things that others cannot.

To some people, the ending might seem a bit contrived. It is not for nothing that Dickens likens it to a fairy tale, but there is a sense of hope and redemption as with A Christmas Carol. This could be turned into a delightful light play or screenplay.

Dickens calls The Battle of Life [1846] a Christmas story. Like all the stories in this volume, it is set in the holiday season, though A Christmas Carol is probably the only one whose distinctiveness would be lost if set at another time of year. In The Battle of Life only the last chapter (“Part the Third”) takes place in winter near Christmas.

This has echoes of The Chimes in that a young man of poor means is planning on getting married. Our main characters, though, are two sisters Grace and Marion. They are well off daughters of a doctor. Grace is at least four years older than Marion and because their mother has died, Grace acts somewhat like Marion’s mother.

Marion is engaged to Alfred. Grace encourages the liaison, saying “there is no truer heart in all the world” than Alfred. It is clear that Grace has carried a torch for Alfred for a long time. Marion sees this, too, but Alfred is a wonderful person and a good catch for either young lady.

We learn that Marion has another suitor, one perhaps less suitable. He is more interested in her than she in him. It is complicated, yes, but over the span of six years, it all works out. It is in its own way a tender story of love.

The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain [1847] is subtitled A Fancy for Christmas Time. Of all the stories in this volume, this perhaps is the most “Dickensian.” There are upper class and lower class people, many of the same types we have in other stories. But here there is a poor student who is ill and may be dying. While the student is a college level student, in some ways his case is like Little Nell. As with some of the other stories, this could be written for any time of year, but the cold winter makes any illness a little more serious.

The question is whether the man, a teacher at the school, is truly haunted by a ghost, or simply figuratively haunted by his past. It seems that something is haunting the student as well. Things do come together for all in this story.

While A Christmas Carol really does stand out, all of these stories are affirmations of life and love, and most readers should enjoy them. Because of the nearly theatrical approach, it might be worth reading them aloud. After all, back in Dickens’ day, that is what many readers did, especially to entertain one another. Yes, maybe sometimes he can be a bit maudlin, but there is a reason that Dickens is called a romantic realist. He embraces the best of both movements and tells some stirring stories. He is still worth reading today.

Gordon Korman. Jingle. Scholastic, 2016.

Still another Swindle mystery to review! Jingle is seasonal, as can be guessed from the title. A few of the Swindle mysteries got to be a bit repetitive and flat, but with this one Korman is back in his game.

We meet the same six middle school characters as in the other Swindle books: Griffin, “the man with a plan”; his best friend Ben, with his service ferret; Savannah, with her “darling” Luthor the gigantic Doberman; Melissa, hacker and tech geek; Logan, the budding if self-conscious actor; and Pitch, outdoor sportswoman and rock climber.

Each of them got roped into “volunteering” as Santa’s elves for the annual Colchester Christmas Extravaganza, Cedarville’s big Christmas celebration. None are happy about this, especially when the see that Santa is being played by Crenshaw, a hulking biker of questionable personal hygiene and criminal background. None, that is, except maybe Savannah because Luthor immediately takes a liking to the outlaw Santa.

The extravaganza is put on by the Colchester family, a prominent “old money” family in town, The widowed Mr. Colchester sponsors it every year, and it is a big hit. The parents of all six kids see their roles as a special opportunity for service, and most of them have fond memories of it from when they were children. This program has been going on for over sixty years.

The primary visual focus of the Christmas display is the Star of Prague, a tenth-century stained glass globe from the Czech capital said to have been commissioned by St. Wenceslas himself. The first night there is a sudden power blackout on the Colchester property. When the lights go back on, the Star is missing.

Because of previous escapades involving things like exotic pets and rare baseball cards, Griffin and his five buddies are immediate suspects. Things get more complicated because, as always it seems, the bully Darren Vader makes life miserable for the sleuths. In this case, he is also one of the elves and manages to alienate Russell Colchester, Mr. Colchester’s grandson, against them.

Logan realizes that the daughter of the director of the regional theater company is another of the elves, but she has taken a shine to Darren as well. Logan makes a few awkward attempts to get her attention in case a part for him opens up. He gets the attention, all right, but it is all negative.

And Ben’s parents, Jewish father and Gentile mother, are dueling over decorations. One half of his house is extravagantly lit up with Christmas decorations, the other half with Hanukkah decorations, and his parents are not talking to each other. When Ben complains that his house can be spotted from outer space, there is not much hyperbole. Wait till you see what happens to his father’s dreidel-dirigible…

Griffin has a plan, as always, to try to discover the whereabouts of the Star of Prague. They get picked up by the police—twice—they have trouble with a motorcycle gang in a biker bar, and are suspected of otherwise breaking in to the Colchester property. It gets complicated, but also very funny. There are plenty of suspects, and plenty of laughs. The wild conclusion, a feature of many Gordon Korman stories, is both clever and satisfying. Jingle is a good holiday read all around.

George Gilder. Life After Google. Regnery, 2018.

I have read a few articles by George Gilder and heard him speak, but I have never read any of his books. I was under the impression that Gilder was one of the brightest men of his generation. This book does nothing to dispel that idea. This book is profound.

I had a friend who used to highlight articles he read using a yellow highlighter. He would sometimes pass a copy of an article on to me, saying that the whole article ought to be dipped in yellow ink. That is the way I felt about a few of the chapters in Life After Google.

Gilder states his thesis pretty clearly near the beginning and then proceeds to tell a number of stories to demonstrate his main idea. One paragraph that sums it up says:

Cleaving all information is the great divide between creativity and determinism, between information entropy of surprise and thermodynamic entropy of predictable decline, between stories that capture a particular truth and statistics that reveal a sterile generality, between cryptographic hashes that preserve information and mathematical blends that dissolve it, between the butterfly effect and the law of averages, between genetics and the law of large numbers, between singularities and big data—in a word, the impassible gulf between consciousness and machines. (19)

Gilder wants us to think. And there is a big difference between mere number-crunching and thinking. Back in the nineties someone came out with a book called Machines Who Think. Notice the word who. Raymond Kurzweil, for example, anticipates a point in time which he calls singularity when machines will think the same way people do. Gilder says in so many words that it ain’t gonna happen.

While Gilder writes here mostly about the blockchain and how that can make many things personal and private, his overarching thrust is something more. He notes that with the coming of Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and others, people began using the scientific method to discover things. In Newton’s case, for example, this included discovering a mathematical model that fit his gravity observations. To Newton and many who followed, nature was something for mankind to observe and make discoveries about. (See Proverbs 25:2.)

For some like Einstein that was still true in the twentieth century, but things were changing. In the nineteenth century determinism began taking over. Nature was no longer something to be discovered but something to be explained. Hegel, Marx, and Darwin stand out but there were others. In England, Malthus claimed to “scientifically” show how England would shortly be overpopulated. In the 1960’s Stanford Professor Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb claiming all kinds of human disasters by 1980 caused by overpopulation. Even though history has shown both Malthus and Ehrlich to have been mistaken, Gilder notes that Ehrlich still preaches his message of environmental disaster due to overpopulation in spite of the failure of many of his predictions.

There may be mathematical models, but as Gödel emphasized, mathematics is a human invention. It is a tool like language. Any mathematical model that tries to explain science has to be based on observations like Newton’s F=G(m₁m₂/r²). Hypotheses need to be supported by factual observations.

This, then, takes us to Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft (GAFAM). They all use algorithms for searches and recommendations. However, these algorithms do not really think. They simply make connections faster than our minds can make them. Not only are they limited but they have the potential for evil because they are deterministic. The user enters a search word and Google “determines” what you are looking for, even if it is a wacky conspiracy theory. If you complain that YouTube or Facebook is censoring you, they say, “The algorithm determined that the post did not meet the community standards.” With pornography that may be the case, but with many expressions, it is mere censorship.

I have not normally used Google for searches in about twelve years. Here is why. Towards the end of George W. Bush’s presidency in 2008 or so, I googled his name. I just wanted to get some quick information about him; I think it was just the year he was born, nothing special. Except for the Wikipedia article, all the links on the first page were weird conspiracy theories: “George W. Bush: War Criminal,” “George W. Bush and the Illuminati,” nonsense like that. That is hardly an impersonal algorithm!

As different web sites track you, they begin to make mathematical patterns. In many cases they are probably harmless, but they can be used to get personal information. The blockchain promotes privacy. One can keep records with it, not just monetary transactions as with Bitcoin but legal documents and other databases.

Gilder notes that Newton also successfully proposed the first gold-based money exchange. For the next three hundred years Western economies were relatively stable and people became confident in purchasing and investing. Since the 1970s, the world has depended on fiat money rather than a gold standard. Gilder sees Bitcoin and similar digital currencies as a correction to fiat money.

More than a correction to promote privacy and financial stability, Gilder sees a life after Google that is not deterministic. Why do so many Silicon Valley geeks support socialism? It is deterministic. Like an algorithm, history, they think, is headed in an inevitable direction. Recent polling data in American elections prove this is not the case, as much as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube would like us to think differently.

We know that Marx asked Darwin to write an introduction to Das Capital. Darwin turned it down because he was apolitical and did not want to get into a political controversy. Marx understood that not only was evolution a challenge to religious belief, but that it was deterministic. A biologically superior mankind would continue to evolve and finally make the perfect communal society.

I am reminded of the two pills Neo had to choose between in The Matrix. With the blue pill, “the story ends.” That was deterministic, with “an end to history.” With the red pill, Neo’s choice, he is told: “Remember, all I’m offering is the truth— nothing more.” It was a risk. It was against both conformity and security in the authoritarian Matrix, but it is the truth that sets us free. (See John 8:32.)

Gilder notes that real advances in technology come from human creativity, not “from Darwinian trends in the Valley.” (115) He gives examples of other creative computer people, too. Behind many of them is Peter Thiel, who has been giving fellowships to promising teen-aged computer coders and hardware builders so that they skip college and go right into the field.

Life After Google came out in 2018, but the book also is raising one question that the current flu epidemic has been emphasizing, namely, is an expensive college education really worth it? We note also that Gilder’s web site supported the Great Barrington Declaration which questioned the heavy hand of the state in reaction to the coronavirus. (Not unsurprisingly, though supported by thousands of M.D.s, the Declaration was initially censored by Google.)

Many “politically correct” people claim to be anti-establishment, but in being p.c., they prove to be part of the establishment. Gilder here is really anti-establishment. He is not promoting conformity. He is promoting privacy and creativity. Isn’t that where mankind can really shine? More than with lockstep determinism any day!

Barry Eisenberg. Primal Calling. Vanguard, 2020.

Primal Calling is a different kind of novel. Nothing experimental—we’re not talking about James Joyce or William Conescu—this is a straightforward story that might appeal to both readers of Jane Eyre and readers of Tom Clancy. Quite a combination!

Primal Calling first and probably foremost is a story of family conflict and tension such as we find in the novels of the Brontë sisters or the plays of Tennessee Williams or Eugene O’Neill. Except even here the family conflict might be a tad milder.

Jack Davies is finishing his first year of college. He is attending a local community college though he could have gone elsewhere, but he feels he ought to remain home. He is the only child of his single mother who has a successful physical therapy practice. He and his mother have had a loving relationship.

Jack has been told that he did not really have a father. His mother, though a college student herself at the time, wanted a child and went to a sperm bank. Jack had no reason to doubt that story until he sees his original birth certificate a year ago. It names a Stewart Jacobson as his father. Jack then begins a year-long search to find this man who seems to have vanished from the face of the earth.

The only clue is that Mr. Jacobson’s address on the birth certificate is given as New England Institute of Technology, an obvious stand-in for Massachusetts Institute of Technology. M.I.T., er, N.E.I.T. has no record of a student by that name, but Jack keeps on looking.

The story begins in medias res, in the middle of the action, with college sophomore Jack being abducted for a few hours. It is a kind of kidnapping, except that he is returned to school unharmed. It really seems like he should not be looking for this man.

A young woman at N.E.I.T., actually a student herself working in the alumni office, keeps in touch with him. In her regular work, she came across a record of an unpaid dorm bill with Jacobson’s name on it. Even though there is no student or alumnus record of a person with that name, what was he then doing in a dorm?

Jack begins to wonder whether he can trust his mother or the people who abducted him and then let him go. He runs into some of them several times.

Without going into too much detail, the story then takes off in several directions. After a while, Cathy, the helpful N.E.I.T. student, becomes interested in Jack’s case. So do some agents working for an unnamed federal agency. The reader learns that it is the Defense Intelligence Agency, the DIA, though it is unclear Jack ever realizes this.

What started out as an understandable story of a child trying to learn about his birth father, becomes a story of international intrigue. In contrast to Jack’s loving upbringing and his desire to understand his mother, another family has a fissure that seems irreparable. Rafiq from Lebanon has a son who has taken up with Islamist jihadis. The son does not trust his parents. His parents’ hearts are broken.

While most of the story does take place in New Jersey, there are episodes in Germany, Arabia, and a few other American states. As Jack’s search enlarges in scope, so does the intrigue.

There are several plots going on at once. But this is not a mashup, not Texts from Jane Eyre or Jane Eyre and Vampires. This is about a kid or young man trying to discover the truth about his family and running into strange obstacles.

Most readers understand that sometimes birth parents of adopted children do not want their identities shared. There might be a scandal involved, for example. But this is a little different from that. It seems all knowledge of Stewart Jacobson has somehow been expunged. In the language of 1984, he has become an unperson.

Primal Calling is well written and quite intense. At times I did not want to put it down. At other times I had to put it down just to absorb what had just happened in the story. One curious aspect of the story is that, except perhaps for the jihadi son who has a minor role in the story, none of the characters are really bad guys. There is a lot of misunderstanding and some rough treatment, but we understand why everyone does what they do, even the terrorist. So while the family intrigue might remind us of Emily or Charlotte Brontë, the characters are more like those of their Universalist sister, Anne.

However, that does not mean that there is not a lot of conflict—both external and internal. It just means that there is potential for even weird and deceitful situations to turn out all right. The reader should enjoy the ride, whether he or she is looking for Catherine Earnshaw or Jack Ryan. Primal Calling has something for both.

Jason Lisle. The Physics of Einstein. Biblical Science Institute, 2018.

In my younger days, I picked up a couple of books on Einstein’s theory of relativity. Honestly, I found them hard to understand, so I more or less gave up on learning about it. Having said that, I realize that over the years I have picked up various bits of knowledge concerning it. For example, I understand the famous observation of Mercury during a solar eclipse which showed that light is affected by gravity.

I also recall in high school physics that we derived the E=mc² formula from a formula that involved wavelength (λ). No, I no longer remember how it was derived, but I saw that “anyone” with knowledge of basic algebra could derive the formula from the basic physics. It would take Einstein to understand its significance. After reading and faced with teaching Stoppard’s Arcadia, I gradually read more about particle physics and related things. Some of the books I read have been reviewed on these pages.

Still, Lisle’s The Physics of Einstein explained relativity in a way that I could understand. Perhaps it is only that now I am older and have been exposed to the ideas longer. I do believe, though, that Lisle simply explains relativity in a very clear manner. The reader does need to recall high school algebra, square roots, and Cartesian geometry (the x-axis, y-axis grid). Lisle includes one formula in the appendix that has some calculus, but this is strictly optional for someone who knows calculus. The book is still understandable without that addition.

The Physics of Einstein notes that the theory of relativity could probably more clearly be called the theory of invariance. This is the idea that the speed of light in a vacuum does not vary. It is always a little over 186,000 miles per second. (The book actually has it out to four or five decimal places.)

A main theme of this book is that the theory of relativity was developed not by experimental observation, as, for example, the three Newtonian laws of motion. It was derived by looking at the mathematics of electromagnetic waves, especially light waves. Einstein showed that if the mathematics represents reality, then there are things about electromagnetic and gravitational forces that require us to look at things a little differently.

The book does a great job of illustrating and explaining such ideas as time dilation and showing how Einstein showed that time and space are connected. In our everyday lives, time appears separate from any phenomenon we observe. But we see that as objects approach the speed of light, the perception of time changes, and time itself slows down.

This is not merely because an item might be far away, say a star that is four light years away, so ostensibly its light would take four years to reach us. If that is so—and Lisle shows it is actually unproveable—then we would be seeing something from that star that happened four years ago. No, what Einstein showed is that approaching the speed of light, mass decreases and time slows down as the speed increases.

Some of this we can experience, but in very slight ways. For example, the atomic clock in Colorado loses microseconds over time compared to the atomic clock in London because the Colorado clock is about a mile higher in elevation. The tug of the earth’s gravity slightly less on the Colorado clock, so it “ticks” at a minutely slower rate. Because relativity involves such high speeds, only an atomic clock would be able to detect the difference.

The reason the theory is usually called relativity rather than invariance has to do with observations of objects or particles moving at high velocities. The speed we observe has to do with our relative speed as well. Some of this is obvious with Newtonian vectors. If I am in a car going thirty miles per hour and a car passes me in the opposite direction going at thirty, it would be going sixty miles per hour away from me.

That could mean that a light beam going in the opposite direction of another light beam would appear to a photon on that light beam is going twice the speed of light. Except nothing goes faster than c, the speed of light. So what happens? Light always travels at the same speed in the same medium—invariance.

Because space and time are actually related (people speak of the space-time continuum), then certain time concepts like simultaneity become problems. Technically, even a small movement involves a loss of mass which affects the time in which things happen in space.

We have all read that people on a spaceship approaching the speed of light would age at a significantly slower rate than people left on earth. Science fiction is full of such stories. That is what would happen. Of course, at a high rate of speed one’s mass would be reduced also. We cannot anticipate what that reduction of mass would do, but that space traveler might not survive at such high speeds.

Lisle even has a chapter entitled “How to Build a Time Machine.” At high speeds, it might be possible to make a machine that goes into the future a bit. (That might create other problems, according to Split Second). However, it would be mathematically impossible to go backwards in time. The formula would require something like dividing by zero.

We reviewed the book Starlight and Time here a while back. Starlight and Time understands the question of both time dilation and gravitational dilation. Applying that to the big bang and an expanding universe, time at the center of a small mass containing all the mass of the universe would be extremely slow. The outer fringes could be billions of years faster.

The Physics of Einstein takes a slightly different approach to the question of light from distant stars. Lisle notes that light going in a single direction could be considered instantaneous, going at an infinite speed. This is mathematically solid and, though even less intuitive than space-time, could explain why we see distant stars and perhaps even see them at the same time the events actually happen—whatever the term simultaneous may mean!

The Physics of Einstein also gets into black holes and models for those.

This book really delivers on its promise. I cannot say I get or remember it all. Nor can I say that I could teach it, but The Physics of Einstein is the most helpful introduction to relativity for the layman that this reviewer has read.

Jeff Spiess. Dying with Ease. Rowman, 2020.

Dying with Ease is subtitled A Compassionate Guide for Making End-of-Life Decisions. Compassion, like beauty, may be in the eye of the beholder, but this book is a fairly detailed book on what to expect when you or someone you are close to is dying. It is very practical.

Spiess is a hospice doctor. His job is caring for people who are probably going to die within a span measured in months at the most. His problems seem to come when people, whether the patient or someone close to the patient, have not made decisions concerning end of life matters. This especially concerns power of attorney and someone who is authorized to speak for the patient in making medical decisions.

This could be called What to Expect when You’re Dying, but that might seem to be a grim echo of a well-known book on the beginning of life, What to Expect when You’re Expecting. Still, that is what the book is.

For the most part, the author describes the experiences of different patients and their families when faced with dying. Because he mostly deals with terminally ill patients, he describes what different people do when they come to terms with the fact that they will be soon be dead.

The author tries to be careful to not make recommendations. Some people, for example, have Do No Resuscitate (DNR) orders. Others do not. He seems to prefer DNRs. He criticizes what he calls “pro-life” people who do not like DNRs. In most cases he tries to understand. But if someone really is pro-life, then they probably feel like a DNR order is giving permission to have someone be killed. One can quibble over whether it is, but it looks that way to some people.

For some reason the term pro-life is always written in scare quotes. The only other time the book uses quotation marks for words or phrases is when offering a definition. Having said that, it is probably safe to say that there is not another book like this out there, even if it is skeptical of “pro-lifers.”

Dying with Ease notes that not all hospices are the same. Some are founded with different ethical or religious beliefs. Some have certain facilities that others may lack. Some, Spiess says, use a kind of cook book approach to all patients when more flexibility is needed for individual symptoms and personal needs. Included, then, are some ideas for finding the right hospice for the patient.

The father of a friend recently died, and my friend had challenges with the hospice his father was placed in. For one thing, his father had been selected for testing a promising treatment of his cancer. He was on his way to recovery when he came down with pneumonia, and it appeared that the hospital he was sent to had written his father off in spite of the promising therapy. Between the hospital and the hospice, he had to tell them that his father did not have a DNR order—it was indeed in writing that he did not—but the staff kept saying that he did.

They also recommended what they called a black box medication. It was a medication that occasionally worked but had side effects that were often fatal. Now Dr. Spiess tells us there is no such thing as a euthanasia pill, but when my friend told a nurse about the medication, she called it the kill pill. That is my friend’s experience. I am sure he is not making it up.

Still, Dying with Ease can certainly be helpful to health care workers and maybe some people facing their own death or the death of someone close. The author notes that even though we all die, many people (he says Americans, but I suspect other nationalities are similar) try to avoid even thinking about it. What he hopes to do with the book is to have people come to terms with the fact that we all die. The title is perhaps suggestive of euthanasia, which he discusses because it is legal in some jurisdictions, but what he is referring to in the title is not physical ease, but mental peace and some stability for those left behind. If we recognize that we all will die, then the question becomes how will we prepare to die?

Certainly this includes such things as wills, living wills, medical orders. But it likely also includes making peace with people and forgiving people, if necessary. It may include discussing what to be done with your body: donate to science, burial, cremation, composting, for example. Are there any things you would like or not like in a memorial service? For example, my own mother hated wakes. She asked when she died that there not be a wake or an open casket. That was something our family understood, and it was easy enough to comply with.

He notes five things that most of us will say or should say in some way as we are aware of death approaching: “Forgive me,” “I forgive you,” “Thank you,” “I love you,” “Good-bye.”

Perhaps the most effective parts are those that discuss the question of fairness about death and what it is like to die. Many people when faced with a terminal illness resist the idea because it does not seem fair. They are too young. Life has been too hard. Whatever. Basing his presentation on the Book of Ecclesiastes, Spiess helpfully notes how we can begin to deal with the question of fairness, whether for ourselves or another.

There is a chapter titled “What Does It Feel Like to Die?” Again, he deals not with the physical issues. After all, some die after months or years of struggling with a disease. Others die peacefully in their sleep. What does it feel like mentally?

He takes another hint from Ecclesiastes in examining what it might feel like to be dying. He suggests the reader do an exercise. It would be unfair to the author to describe the exercise here except to say that it is simple and eye-opening, and perhaps loosely based on the last chapter of Ecclesiastes. Little by little, usually, we let go of things in life, until finally there is nothing left. I would recommend this book for that chapter alone.

As many others have reminded us since time began and as already mentioned, Spiess reminds us numerous times that everyone dies. Our youth-centered culture seems to be in denial about this, but it is so. As Pascal said, “As men have been unable to cure death, misery, ignorance, they have bethought themselves to ignore them, so as to be happy.” Memento mori.

Unlike Death is But a Dream, or Proof of Heaven—both written by doctors—or Becoming Starlight or Great Cloud of Witnesses Speak, there are no accounts of near death, pre-death, or life after death experiences. The book takes into account what people with different beliefs might do in preparing for death or what kind of memorial they want, but this book strictly is about what one might do in this present, material world.

Spiess also emphasizes something for those of us who are alive and well and who do not at the moment have a terminal friend or loved one. He asks as simple question: What will your legacy be? By this he means more than willing your property to your heirs. How will you be remembered? That includes people remembering how you died.

In one succinct quotation Spiess sums up what has become his perspective. After all, he is a doctor. He has promised to do no harm. But he works with people who are dying. (He does tell of three people who outlived their “terminal” diagnosis, but these instances are quite rare.) It is simply this: “Dying is not a problem to be solved; it is a mystery to be experienced” (116).

While Dying with Ease will likely be read mostly by medical personnel, it can be used as well by patients, their loved ones, and their advocates to look a little closer at the mundane and mortal side of the mystery.

Spencer Quinn. Of Mutts and Men. Forge, 2020.

Of Mutts and Men is the latest in the Chet and Bernie stories. As always, these mysteries are told from the point of view of Chet the dog. So yes, Chet is impulsive, easily distracted, and very loyal. His senses of hearing and smell are far beyond those of humans. Indeed, a careful reader may note some things Chet sniffs that will ultimately point to the identities of the criminals.

Bernie Little, a private detective in western Arizona, not too far from California or Mexico, has been contacted by famous hydrologist Wendell Nero. Readers know that Chet worries because Bernie worries so much about the aquifer where they live. Nero wants to meet with Bernie to discuss a situation and likely hire him.

Bernie goes to meet Nero at his construction trailer at the desert’s edge, but he discovers his dead body, with his throat slit ear to ear. He calls the local sheriff, a very competent one he has worked with before. Instead a rather lazy and inept deputy shows up because the sheriff is in the hospital probably dying of cancer.

Chet and Bernie find enough clues to take them to Florian Machado, who confesses to having stolen a phone and laptop from Nero, which he fenced, but insists he did not kill him. However, his public defender lawyer—surprisingly from a big-name white shoe law firm—persuades him to cop a plea to avoid first degree murder with the possibility of execution. Deputy Beasley considers the case closed, but things do not add up for Bernie.

Bernie ends up getting hired by Nero’s three ex-wives to find out more, especially why anyone would want him dead. Bernie and Chet investigate both the underworld and the upper classes to solve this mystery.

Machado tells Bernie that he stole Nero’s laptop and cell phone and fenced them to an individual Bernie knows well. Butchie Dykstra’s mother tells Bernie that Butchie is fishing at a lake in the mountains. Chet actually tracks Butchie down, but he has been murdered, too, and in the same manner—by someone slitting his throat. Since Machado is in jail, this also suggests there is more going on. Clearly, Machado did not kill Butchie.

Bernie and Chet also get into the land of the elite. Not only do they visit that white shoe law firm, but they come in contact with investors from the Veritan endowment. Veritan is apparently a stand-in for Harvard, whose motto is Veritas, and it is described as a rival to Yale. Besides, Bernie once played them in baseball when he was at West Point.

Bernie and Chet even make a trip over the border into Mexico. And why do the grapes at a vineyard in the desert near where Nero was working taste so juicy?

And there are always the ups and downs of Bernie’s relationships with women. But even sometimes when they are down, they are up. Read it to see what we mean.

A lot of characters, many venues, and, as always, Chet’s inimitable narrative style come together. We were concerned because the last Chet and Bernie story seemed out of character, we wondered if Spencer Quinn had jumped the shark. He has not, we are happy to say.

We also learn in this volume that Spencer Quinn is not the author’s real name. There is always more to learn.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The Idiot. 1869; 1915. Translated by Eva Martin, Produced by Martin Adamson et al., Project Gutenberg, 13 May 2017.

Dostoyevsky is probably my favorite novelist. The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, and The Possessed are three of the best novels ever written. Notes from Underground, White Nights, and other works by him are not bad either. I was a little put off when I started reading The Idiot. It did not seem up to his usual effect at first.

Unlike most of the works mentioned, the story begins with much less intensity. There is more of a narrative detachment than what we are used to with Dostoyevsky. I felt like I was reading something by Chekhov—who is also very good, but not in the way of Dostoyevsky.

Indeed, it reminded me a lot of Chekhov’s The Duel. There are a multiplicity of characters who are somewhat similar to one another. They are all either minor aristocracy or upper middle class Russians. There is an element of social climbing with all of them. Many of them are young. Much of the plot revolves around who will end up marrying whom—and why. Is it for love, for status, for social acceptance, for pleasing the parents?

Into this Petersburg society arrives the Prince Lef Nicolaievitch Muishkin, a.k.a. the idiot. There are two important features of this young man of twenty-six. One, he is a prince, the last of his family line, but his family has long ago lost its lands and fortune. All he has, then, is his title. Second, he has led a very sheltered life and is relatively naïve. This makes him incredibly honest. He is hard to dislike for that reason. He seems to have something good to say about everyone.

He is sometimes called an idiot because of his naïveté. He has a history of epilepsy. That is the reason he grew up apart from any society. The last four years he has been at a sanitarium in Switzerland receiving treatment for his affliction. In fact, in the novel, which covers about a year, he only has one seizure, and that is at a time when he has been unduly and unjustly distressed. The Swiss treatments have helped.

To appreciate the story, then, we have to consider a couple of traditions. First, there is the tradition of the “royal disease.” Julius Caesar was epileptic. That certainly did not stop him from rising to the top of Roman government. Shakespeare’s Macbeth has an apparent fit of madness. Lady Macbeth explains it away as a seizure, but, after all, he is a king, so, if anything, epilepsy is a sign of royalty. The epilepsy no doubt keeps the Prince from reaching his full potential though some would argue his honesty and goodness indicate he has a personal character that most people do not even try to attain. In that sense, he is royal also.

Second, in Russia there is the tradition of the village idiot. In that context the idiot was usually someone who was mentally retarded in some way but seen to be a kind of simple prophet. He would be tolerated and mocked, but occasionally he would say something that people took seriously. Parallels in literature might be Pip the cabin boy in Moby-Dick or the Fool in King Lear.

Still, the Prince is what Twain would call straightforward. He is a fool only because of his lack of worldliness. One might even be tempted to call him a Christ figure, except that Jesus of Nazareth was not naïve. Christ’s biographer asserts, “He himself knew what was in man” (John 2:25).

Having introduced our main character, much of the story resembles Chekhov because there is lots of dialogue. Most of what happens occurs in social settings, either a visit or a party of some kind. This reviewer would recommend the reader getting a list of characters such as this one. I had a little trouble distinguishing between two men who were both generals and often simply referred to as “the general.” There are two generals? Is this one Epanchin or Ivolgin?

In broad strokes, the Prince falls in love with two women. One, Nastasia Philipovna is a true beauty. She was orphaned but raised by a wealthy aristocrat Totski who takes her as his mistress when she is old enough. Even though she is beautiful and cultured, because she has been a “kept woman,” she is at best on the fringes of society. The Prince’s attraction to her comes more from compassion for her situation than any physical desire.

The other is Aglaia, the youngest of three daughters of General Epanchin. The General’s wife is a distant relative of the Prince who recalls seeing him once when he was a boy. They are the last two members of the once prominent Muishkin family. Aglaia is also quite attractive and would be considered strong and independent by the standards of her day.

On one very basic level, we can say that The Idiot has elements of a romance. In this case, though, it is the male protagonist who is faced with a choice. Perhaps because of his simplicity and honesty, the Prince does not even see this as a choice. He really seems to like everyone, even some men who lie to him and try to take advantage of him. Why can’t he be friends with both?

When he first arrives from Switzerland, he is penniless (kopekless?), and he does depend on the kindness of others, especially his cousin Lizaveta, Mrs. Epanchin. Soon, however, he learns that he has inherited a million rubles from a rich family friend. Now he is both titled and wealthy. This does not change his character at all, even though others will change in the way they treat him.

The Prince may be an “idiot” but he is a thinker. At one point he seems to be speaking for Dostoyevsky himself, who faced a firing squad only to be reprieved right before the men were to fire on him:

Doubtless there may be men who have been sentenced, who have suffered this mental anguish for a while and then have been reprieved; perhaps such men may have been able to relate their feelings afterwards. Our Lord Christ spoke of this anguish and dread. No! no! no! No man should be treated so, no man, no man! (326)

Elsewhere, Hippolyte, a youth of eighteen dying of tuberculosis says:

…they may consider me a madman, or a schoolboy, or, more likely, a man condemned to die, who thought it only natural to conclude that all men, excepting himself, esteem life far too lightly, live it far too carelessly and lazily, and are, therefore, one and all, unworthy of it. (6225)

Isn’t there truth to that? Why does the commonplace play Our Town continue to cause its audiences to weep? As Garrison Keillor says, “Thank you, Dear God, for this good life and forgive us if we do not love it enough.” (125)

Totski resembles Svidrigailov from Crime and Punishment. Both men treat defenseless women and grils abominably. Svidrigailov’s “excuse” comes down to “God made me this way.” Don’t blame him, blame God. Totksi makes himself sound cultured and au courant:

At that time Dumas-fils’ beautiful work, La Dame aux Camélias—a novel which I consider imperishable—had just come into fashion. In the provinces all the ladies were in raptures over it, those who had read it, at least. Camellias were all the fashion. Everyone inquired for them, everybody wanted them; and a grand lot of camellias are to be got in a country town—as you all know—and two balls to provide for! (2361)

In other words, a lovely and popular novel romanticizes an affair with a courtesan. Everyone loved the story. I am living it out. What’s wrong with that?

Without going into too much detail, it is suggested that another person of questionable character is inspired by Madame Bovary.

There are some types we still see with us today. Lebedeff, who acts as a friend to the Prince but only to take advantage of him, sees himself as a scholar of Bible prophecy, trying to apply current events to the Book of Revelation:

Now for fifteen years at least I have studied the Apocalypse, and she agrees with me in thinking that the present is the epoch represented by the third horse, the black one whose rider holds a measure in his hand. It seems to me that everything is ruled by measure in our century; all men are clamouring for their rights; ‘a measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny.’ But, added to this, men desire freedom of mind and body, a pure heart, a healthy life, and all God’s good gifts. Now by pleading their rights alone, they will never attain all this, so the white horse, with his rider Death, comes next, and is followed by Hell. (3111)

One political rant sounds a lot like it could have been spoken in contemporary America:

I have often noticed that our Liberals never allow other people to have an opinion of their own, and immediately answer their opponents with abuse, if they do not have recourse to arguments of a still more unpleasant nature. (4609)

He will go on:

Russian liberalism is not an attack upon the existing order of things, but an attack upon the very essence of things themselves—indeed, on the things themselves; not an attack on the Russian order of things, but on Russia itself. My Russian liberal goes so far as to reject Russia; that is, he hates and strikes his own mother. Every misfortune and mishap of the mother-country fills him with mirth, and even with ecstasy. He hates the national customs, Russian history, and everything. If he has a justification, it is that he does not know what he is doing, and believes that his hatred of Russia is the grandest and most profitable kind of liberalism. (You will often find a liberal who is applauded and esteemed by his fellows, but who is in reality the dreariest, blindest, dullest of conservatives, and is not aware of the fact.) This hatred for Russia has been mistaken by some of our ‘Russian liberals’ for sincere love of their country, and they boast that they see better than their neighbours what real love of one’s country should consist in. But of late they have grown, more candid and are ashamed of the expression ‘love of country,’ and have annihilated the very spirit of the words as something injurious and petty and undignified. (5194-5199)

Simply substitute Russia and Russian for America and American, and a lot people would nod in assent right now. Patriotism is so deplorably bourgeois!

Prince Muishkin himself has one rant. But like the village idiot, no one really listens even though he is prophesying truly about Russia. It is not as politically detailed as similar observations in The Possessed, but it does reflect Russian culture. Indeed, he notes that the atheist is found primarily in the upper classes. When found among the “masses of people” it is “out of fanaticism.” (8067)

This fanaticism, which in the political context the Prince relates to socialism, opposes religion. He does see things as a Russian Orthodox believer, but the truth he speaks is broader.

Why, Socialism is the progeny of Romanism and of the Romanistic spirit. It and its brother Atheism proceed from Despair in opposition to Catholicism. It seeks to replace in itself the moral power of religion, in order to appease the spiritual thirst of parched humanity and save it; not by Christ, but by force. ‘Don’t dare to believe in God, don’t dare to possess any individuality, any property! Fraternité ou la Mort;¹ two million heads. ‘By their works ye shall know them’—we are told. (8675)

There is a lot more. Like Dostoyevsky’s other great novels, the end is dynamic. It is worth wading through some of the dialogue and social pettiness to reach it. I am not going to give any of it away. As its end approaches, the novel reveals the big picture.

Let me leave the reader with one more thought on The Idiot. The Prince, the “idiot,” is like Roderick Usher in Poe’s famous tale “The Fall of the House of Usher.” No, Lev Muishkin is not crazy, but on the symbolic level the two chracters are similar. Both represent the passing of the aristocracy. At one time, nobility cared for their country or their domains and protected the people and supported the arts.

Both Roderick and Lev are the last of their line. Poe’s story suggests that their time is past. A republic like America represents the future of mankind. Dostoyevsky suggests that the Russian aristocracy’s time is up also. They are more petty. An honest and sensitive prince like Muishkin is a throwback as well as an idiot. The question is, what will replace them? The ruthless military people and the ambitious businesspeople and the fanatical socialists all have major flaws. The prince seems to understand this. What can work? Can you pass him off as a moron, or is he really speaking as a prophet? Read The Idiot and see what he says.

N.B. References, except for from the Keillor book, are Kindle locations, not page numbers. Note also that Russian names are often transliterated differently by different translators. We are using the spellings from the translation we read by Eva Martin.

Note
¹ Brotherhood or death!

Work Cited
Keillor, Garrison. “State Fair.” Leaving Home. Penguin, 1989.

Paul H. Chapman. The Norse Discovery of America. One Candle P, 1981.

in 1841 the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow published a poem titled “The Skeleton in Armor.” It was a fictional narrative poem about a viking who had sailed from the Baltic Sea to Rhode Island before dying in what today is New Bedford, Massachusetts. It was based on what many American knew back then—that the Norse had explored North America during the Middle Ages.

Longfellow’s poem was inspired by the discovery of skeleton in viking armor that had been unearthed in New Bedford and the common knowledge that a stone tower in Newport, Rhode Island, predated any traceable European settlement there and was built in the Norse style.

The Norse Discovery of America does not mention the New Bedford skeleton; fire destroyed it a few years after Longfellow wrote his poem. However, it does discuss the Newport tower. Indeed, the tower shows up on a map made by Mercator in 1569, over sixty years before the first European settlers would come to Rhode Island in modern times.

The Norse Discovery of America presents a pretty thorough examination of various Icelandic sagas that detail the Norse exploration and settlement of Greenland and lands to the west. Like Ulysses Airborne or The Brendan Voyage, the author takes the sailing directions and descriptions in the sagas literally and makes a pretty good case for where Leif Ericsson and others sailed to the shores of Newfoundland and the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

The sagas tell of a total of five voyages by descendants of Eric the Red to the west of Greenland. Here we learn something about all of them. We also learn of other earlier accounts of Norsemen either sailing west or being blown off course and ending up in America.

Perhaps the most intriguing of these is the story of Gudlief Gudlaugson, an Icelandic merchant blown off course while returning home from Dublin, Ireland, in 1029. They find a “good harbor” in this western land where most of the people were speaking Irish. Their elder was a tall old man with white hair who spoke Norse.

This elder asked Gudlief if he knew a certain Kjartan of Froda and his mother Thurid. He gave Gudlief a sword and ring for them and told him that it would be dangerous for himself to return.

Gudlief returned to Iceland and delivered the articles and there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that they had come from Bjorn Asbrandson who more than 30 years before had been a frequent visitor to the home of Thorodd and his wife Thurid of Froda. (65)

Chapman notes numerous other references in Norse writings about visits to the New World. He also notes that the well-documented Norse settlement at L’Anse Aux Meadows, Newfoundland, does not correspond to any location for which we have sailing directions. Carbon dating of relics there suggests of the materials there may be from as early as A.D. 610 (640±30) and probably no later than 1150 (1080±80).

Chapman notes that Brendan the Navigator likely explored North America earlier, and that some of the Norse writings speak of a West Ireland or Greater Ireland to the west of Greenland. While that is the subject of another study, it does seem that the Irish at one point had settlements in North America such as the one Gudlief Gudlaugson encountered.

Chapman is pretty careful about not taking things too far. His case is well documented. He was a navigator for the Army Air Corps in World War II and flew between Newfoundland and Greenland. He knows the area he writes about. While he thinks the runic Kensington Stone found in Minnesota in 1898 is likely genuine, he only mentions it in passing to say, “The author recommends that it now be reexamined” (113).

Ericsson and others referred to the land to the west as Vinland. Norse records tell us that is was “discovered by many” (63). He notes also that no Native American group used bows and arrows until around A.D. 800, after Europeans like Brendan were known to have visited the Americas.

What about Vinland? Virtually every record describes wild grapes growing there. That is how it got its name. Newfoundland is too cold for grapes now. We can recall that grapes for wine grew in England in the early Middle Ages, but as the climate cooled in the late Medieval “Little Ice Age,” they died out. Newfoundland is at about the same latitude and parts are warmed by warm currents. Probably the same thing happened to grapes there as happened in England.

Yes, there are some unanswered questions and some things that we may never know. But there is a preponderance of both physical and documentary evidence that the Norse visited North America on numerous occasions, and until the climate changed, they continued to do business with Europeans as well as native settlements there.

Documentation includes Icelandic sagas, but also Norwegian, German, and Vatican sources. The photos, maps, and charts in The Norse Discovery of America contribute to the account as well. This is a pretty thorough work.

Austin Ruse. Fake Science. Regnery, 2017.

Read Fake Science as a companion to Inconvenient Facts, Gaia’s Limits, and The Arts of Truth but covering more topics. Just this week an article in the Wall Street Journal complained about the politicization of science, especially in academic circles. Fake Science details how much of the “received science” is really a certain political orthodoxy and has little to do with the real world or the scientific method.

The three books mentioned above deal with questions of global warming and overpopulation and how the “received science” on these topics is overblown, if not downright deceptive. Fake Science also takes on those two subjects along with a chapter on each of the following: skewed polling data, transgender claims, homosexuality, abortion, the sexual revolution, divorce, food regulation, poverty programs, and pollution.

The chapters dealing with the consequences of the so-called sexual revolution are the most revealing. Actual statistics belie many claims that are touted by promoters of the revolution. For example, although there are claims that children raised by homosexual couples are no different from those raised by heterosexual couples, studies have shown this is not the case. Long term studies have been stymied because there are very few homosexual couples, especially the males, that have had sustained relationships. Anecdotally, the female couple that brought about the first American court case legalizing same sex marriage have divorced, and one of the women said that she was pressured into the whole thing.

Similarly, we know now that the Roe vs. Wade case was based on false testimony. The “Roe” in Roe vs. Wade was not raped. The “Doe” in Doe vs. Bolton never wanted an abortion. She sought a lawyer to get custody of her children, but her lawyer was seeking someone to build a test case on abortion. Both women would become pro-life advocates.

A pattern emerges. These causes are all radical. They promote centralized authority at the expense of the individual and the family. They have significantly altered jurisprudence and behavior worldwide. (The United Nations is one of the biggest advocates of various means of controlling population and so-called global warming.) Ruse suggests that these things are more of a power play than anything else.

In some cases the power play is scary. In others, especially in the correlation between depression and sexual activity, the power play is tragic. California recently enacted a law legalizing sodomy between adult men and children as young as fourteen—as long the act is “consensual” and the ages are no more than ten years apart. And we wonder why California is burning up! The epicenter of California’s 1994 Northridge Earthquake was at a movie studio that specialized in pornography. Are we getting more messages now?

There is a lot to read here. Today’s newspaper noted that Americans under 35 generally believe in global warming. They were often taught it in school as gospel truth. Those who are older are more skeptical. Many of us are old enough when the fearmongers were worried about global cooling! We have also seen that so many of Al Gore’s “scientific” predictions have not come true. Unfortunately, when we are faced with a real challenge such as the coronavirus, people become skeptical because they have heard scary stuff from “science” that proved to be false.

Fake Science’s title also suggests a secondary theme. People say they advocate these different behavior changes because of what science says, in many cases forcing others to go along with them even if the behavior is against their consciences. Here the author examines the studies and claims. In many cases the media simply latch onto one study when there are numerous studies that together form a different perspective.

Karl Marx claimed his theories were “empirical.” When I first read The Communist Manifesto in eighth grade, I had to look up that word.¹ It is simply a synonym for inductive, that is, using the scientific method. Now, the scientific method tells us that if we repeat an experiment we should get similar results, and after making multiple observations, we can draw a conclusion.

A problem noted in many sources, including Fake Science, is that a lot of published results in scientific journals and papers cannot be duplicated.

Ironically, now that we have had over a century and a half of observing Communism, one would think that intelligent people using empiricism would avoid it. It clearly does not work and makes a country miserable, with the side result of murdering and brainwashing millions. Why does it still have appeal? Power.

Fake science is attempting the same kind of thing in the Western world. We should learn to say, “Show me the study!” Let’s try to get in touch with reality. Readers may not agree with everything in Fake Science, but we guarantee that it should get them reassessing their view of things going on in the world.

Note
¹ I should note that while I attended an academically rigorous public junior high and high school, it was a very left-wing education. I read The Communist Manifesto three times in those years but never once studied the founding of the United States. I cannot imagine what they are pushing now.