Christopher Kerr and Carine Mardorossian. Death is But a Dream. Avery, 2020.

Most readers can see in the title of Death is But a Dream a play on the chorus of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” There also might be an echo of the famous line from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which is alluded to in this book:

We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

Over the years I have read various books about near death experiences and other works on death and dying. Death is But a Dream is different. Dr. Kerr has worked for many years as physician in a hospice. He job is ministering to the dying. Over the years he has seen a pattern in the experiences of many of his terminal patients. Many have what he calls lucid dreams or visions as they approach death.

The author does not honestly know what to make of many of these experiences. He does not try. He describes them and to a great degree leaves the interpretation to the reader. He notes that about four fifths of these experiences are positive and bring some kind of closure to the individual. He notes that in many cases the patients insist that they were not dreaming—they often use the term vision. Early in the book we see the word vision or visions in quotation marks, as if to say “the so-called visions.” By the end of the book, the punctuation marks are dropped.

Most of the book tells stories. They are moving stories from many of his hospice patients. Kerr quotes another doctor who says:

“Today healing is replaced with treating, caring is supplanted by managing, and the art of listening is taken over by technological procedures.” (22)

There is always a temptation to make medical science more mechanistic or materialistic. This concern goes back to Hippocrates and is echoed in Chaucer’s corrupt physician in The Canterbury Tales and in the persona of The Scarlet Letter‘s Roger Chillingworth. It is clear that the author struggles with this, too, but he has seen and shared enough to make it clear there is more to life than meets the eye.

These are not near death experiences (NDE) like that of Dr. Eben Alexander, but what the book calls pre-death experiences. Still, one cannot help think of Alexander’s experience, too. Both doctors came to recognize what many physicians are reluctant to admit—that the mind is not the same as the brain.

Alexander’s description as well as his medical condition during his NDE make it clear that what happened to him was something external, something apart from his own mind and body. Kerr is ambiguous. He speaks of the way the mind works as though these experiences are all internal and subjective. At the same time, he recognizes that many of these experiences sound as if someone—whether human, divine, or angelic—appeared from the outside. In some cases the patient sees people that no one else in the room can see.

The stories Kerr tells are quite moving. The bulk of the book contains these stories, and they will keep the reader reading. Many involve a departed friend or relative appearing and telling them that they will be all right. Many involve resolving or reconciling a conflict or problem that seriously affected their lives.

One of the most significant stories in that regard involved a man in his later forties who had been a drug addict since his teens. His mother had been one and still was one. He had a daughter in her twenties whom he had tender feelings for but whom he had neglected. Through some of his dreams/visions he spoke about his daughter. The hospice was able to locate her, and she was eager to see him. In the last few months of the man’s life, they were not only able to reconcile but to develop mutual respect.

We begin to see a pattern, and even the exceptions seem to prove the pattern. One woman had lucid dreams of flying. Later in her life she had come to believe in God and said that even if you had the faith the size of a mustard seed, you could fly (see Matthew 17:20). She also admitted that she did not know how to love. Gradually, they learned that she had an abusive father and a helpless mother, became a ward of the state in foster care at an early age, and as an adult was involved in abusive relationships. In effect for her, then, there was no “loved one” other than God.

The chapter on pre-death experiences of children also demonstrated something similar. One thirteen year old girl with terminal cancer saw a pet dog that had died a few years earlier, and for her it had been a member of the family all her life. She later had a conversation with her mother’s best friend who had died at the age of thirty-five when the girl was eight. They were probably the only deaths she had personally known in her short life.

Not only do these pre-death experiences prepare the patient for dying, but, as we saw with the drug addict and his daughter, they also provide healing. Some war veterans, for example, were taken back to traumatic battle experiences to find healing as they saw them from a different perspective. This reminded me of primal integration or inner healing therapies that can effectively bring psychological healing. The difference is that there is no psychiatrist or counselor leading the patient, simply the patient’s own experience and, perhaps, the hand of God.

I give the author credit for sharing the experiences largely without commentary. Many works on the subject of dying will bring in a particular interpretation, and because of the subject matter, some of those interpretations are weirder than the experiences they describe. Death is But a Dream is not like that at all. It tells the story and leaves the interpretation, if any, up to the reader.

Death is But a Dream can bring understanding an maybe some healing to those of us who are not medical professionals or who do not counsel the dying. I wish I could have read this book or something like it ten years ago. (But no, I do not think there is anything like it, certainly not for the layperson.)

My father passed away nine years ago. The last week of his life he was in hospice. The last time I saw him alive, he was telling me how he had been talking with one of his old friends. I assumed he was hallucinating because of medications. I was upset. My father had been a strong-willed, self-controlled person, and I did not want to see him not in his right mind.

I see now that maybe he was weak but still sharing a genuine experience. This meeting with his old friend, whether it was real or imagined, whether it was from an internal or external source, I suspect may have ministered some mental or spiritual healing to Dad.

So the book ministered to me, to let me know that my father was probably not out of his mind, but really preparing or being prepared for his death. Now I know. I think I can understand his story better and even achieve some closure myself.

I realize that the Bible warns against necromancy, (see Deuteronomy 18:10-11) something the polytheists of Bible times were notorious for. (Read The Aeneid, for example.) But that is specifically seeking and consulting the dead. None of the stories indicate that any of the patients were looking for dead people (or angels or pets) but that they just appeared, whether from their own imaginations or from outside.

Although I have read other books from time to time on the subject of dying and near-death experiences like Dr. Alexander’s, I never read or even heard about a study like this. This is different. Certainly I recommend it to medical professionals of all kinds to remind them of the humanity of even their most degraded patients. But I recommend it to anyone, as I would to Dr. Alexander’s book, to let us know that

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

If word gets out, this could be a bestseller.

Peter Riva. Kidnapped on Safari. Skyhorse, 2020.

Kidnapped on Safari is an entertaining story. It starts off as a simple and direct rescue story but evolves into a potential major power confrontation.

Billed as a thriller, much of the story is really more of a mystery. Pero Balthasar, an ex-pat American who organizes safaris in East Africa, is currently in Kenya with his top guide Mbuno. They get word that Mbuno’s nephew and adopted son named Ube has been kidnapped and possibly killed while he was on safari in neighboring Tanzania.

There are two mysteries right from the start: Who captured Ube and why? Where did they take him? He is an African bush guide. No one would hold him for ransom, not as they might with a rich Westerner.

This tale is clever and carefully detailed. It involves some careful tracking, imaginative escapes, and dangerous terrain. It is Mission Impossible on the savannah. For example, you have to know what you are doing to swim in waters frequented by elephants, hippopotamuses, and crocodiles. We are reminded that more people are killed every year by hippopotamuses than any other wild animal in Africa.

There is a twist, though.

I teach Jane Eyre nearly every year. Most romances like Jane Eyre end with the female protagonist getting married. Rochester proposes to Jane, Jane accepts, and they make plans for the wedding. But this happens in the book with about two hundred pages to go. Something has to happen to alter the expected outcome.

Kidnapped on Safari is similar.

It is not exactly a spoiler to say that Ube gets rescued, but that is only halfway through the book. Truly, then, only about a third of the book is directly about rescuing the guy kidnapped on safari. While his rescue is dangerous and carefully executed, the story really kicks into high gear after that.

Pero adds to the team that rescued Ube for an exploit that is not only more challenging but involves financial high stakes and people in high places. Why was Ube kidnapped? What does he know? Who is behind it all? The action intensifies, and the tale becomes a page-turner.

The blurb tells us that the author has spent thirty years traveling in East Africa and even produced a television show featuring animals in the wild. He clearly understands tracking, hunting (with cameras or firearms), and the tribes and people of Africa. He may also have learned some things about CIA contractors. This comes through and helps make the story realistic and fascinating.

He knows less about the American military. Bob, one of the main characters on Pero’s team, tells us he was a medic in the American Marine Corps. The Marines do not have medics. Since the Marines are part of the Navy, Navy hospital corpsmen get assigned to the Marines. From my experience, some corpsmen are proud to have served with Marine units and can identify with them, but they are Navy corpsmen. They do not call them medics, either. They are corpsmen; Marines especially often call them “doc.” By the way, corpsman is pronounced Korman.

Gordon Korman. Slacker. Scholastic P, 2016.
———. Notorious. Balzer, 2020.

I sometimes wonder if I had been a middle schooler fifteen years ago and were a Gordon Korman fan back then, would I still be reading his stuff now? I don’t know, but we have been reading him, with an occasional audio book, for a number of years and we still enjoy him. Slacker does not disappoint.

Cameron “Cam” Boxer is the slacker of the title. He has curated or cultivated that slacker lifestyle since he was young. All he wants to do is play video games. He has concentrated mostly on Rule the World and its upcoming convention with actual prize money.

Except when he is online, he is anonymous. The guidance counselors at Sycamore Middle School do not know who he is. He gets C‘s with an occasional B, so he stays out of academic trouble both at home and school. With his two friends Chuck and Pavel, he forms the Awesome Threesome, a gaming team that is hard to beat. His only problem comes in the form of a player from Toronto whose avatar in the game is called Evil McKillPeople.

Life was going along just fine for this eighth grade gamer until one day—and we have all done this—his mother tells him to do something, and he says, “Yeah,” but he is too engrossed in his video game to really know what she said. Only this time she asked him to take the lasagna out of the oven after ten minutes while the rest of his family goes out. An hour later, still battling Evil McKillPeople, he hears the fire department coming through the front door after chopping it open with an ax.

Yes, he is in big trouble. He is in danger of losing his video game console. Cam, though, is creative, even if up to this point most of his creativity has been worked out on alien planets. With the help of Pavel, who is a true hacker, he hacks on to the Sycamore Middle School web site and posts a web page for a new extracurricular club—the Positive Action Group, or P.A.G.—with Cam listed as president and contact person. That should keep his parents off his back.

It is, of course, totally fake. It is just there for his parents. The signup link takes anyone who tries it to a web page seeking donations for rain forest preservation.

At least the P.A.G. starts out fake until a few students and guidance counselor Mr. Fanshaw discover the web page. Pretty soon Cam finds out that he actually has to do something!

Cam’s attempts to avoid doing anything with this organization are quite impressive, but, as Shakespeare wrote, “Some have greatness thrust upon them.” With Mr. Fanshaw’s urging, Cam gets a group of volunteers to help clean up around a senior citizen housing complex in town. A local newspaper reporter shows up to record this when Cam, trying to hide from everyone in a stairwell, discovers one of the elderly residents unconscious. 911 whisks her off in an ambulance, Cam is a hero, and now over half the school wants to join the P.A.G.

One of the first joiners is Daphne, who is worried about a lone beaver in town named Elvis. There used to be a beaver colony in town until construction of a new mall began next to the beaver stream. The beavers all moved out except for Elvis, who was apparently too old to travel much.

Another early joiner is Freeland “the String” McBean. He is a star football player who has been sidelined until his grades improve. Then there is Xavier, the leather-jacketed hoodlum who is almost old enough to drive but still in eighth grade. After the publicity the club gets, both candidates for Student Council President join.

Cam has created a monster. A helpful monster, but a monster nevertheless.

To complicate things, the leader of the high school service organization, Friends of Fuzzy, gets bent out of shape because the middle school service group is getting all the attention. She, her boyfriend, and some others begin to sabotage the activities of the P.A.G. after Cam shrugs off their threats.

Cam has been in his own little world. In some ways he is still in it, but the outside world has imposed itself on his lifestyle. He can no longer simply slack off playing video games.

Typical of Korman, there is a lot of humor. There is a recurring joke that Cam never gets Mr. Fanshaw’s name right. When he must talk directly to him, he just says “Mr. Fan—uh, sir.” Otherwise he is Mr. Fantail, Mr. Fanboy, just about anything except Fantastic.

Like many of Korman’s stories, the chapters in both books here are told from different points of view. In Slacker each of the Awesome Threesome has some chapters. So do Mr. Fanshaw, Daphne, the String, the Friends of Fuzzy president, the middle school principal, and so on. A recurring question from many of them is simply—who is Cameron Boxer anyhow?

We can pretty much guarantee that you will laugh. The only question is how loud?

Notorious is different. It is fun, but not necessarily funny. Yes, Gordon Korman wrote it, and it contains some humorous parts, but is more like The Masterminds or The Hypnotists stories. It is still a young adult novel, but a drama rather than a sitcom.

Keenan Cardinal is recovering from tuberculosis which he contracted in China. At least that is when the symptoms appeared, but he may have picked up the germs in Lesotho or some other country. His mother and stepfather teach at a different international school every year.

But Keenan is no longer in Shanghai. He now lives with his father on Centerlight Island—an island on the St. Clair River north of Detroit, half in Michigan and half in Ontario. His father’s house is on the American side.

At first all Keenan can do is lie in the summer sunlight in his father’s yard. A girl his age who lives on the Canadian side named Zarabeth introduces herself one day, and they become friends—at least until school starts.

Most of the families with children live on the American side. Keenan makes friends with some of the kids in his school while Zarabeth, ZeeBee for short, has to take the ferry to school in Canada and is pretty much gone during the week. She gets upset (maybe jealous?) that Keenan is hanging out with guys who she mostly thinks are jerks, and not without reason.

Some of the kids on the island think ZeeBee is a little weird. Back in the Roaring Twenties Centerlight (Canadians spell it Centrelight) was a major stop for rum runners. Arnold Rothstein had a home here. Al capone used to visit. So did Eliot Ness. ZeeBee seems to obsess over the gangster stories because she lives in a house once owned by Machine Gun Ferguson. Rumor has it that Ferguson hid a stash of money or gold somewhere on the island.

Also, nearly everyone hated ZeeBee’s two-hundred-pound dog, part Great Dane, part Doberman, part Newfoundland, and who knows what else. A lot of the funny or wild stuff in the book relates to the almost incredible damage Barney the dog has done around the island. He is the twenty-first-century one-dog mob on Centerlight. We note that, judging from the Swindle stories, that Korman likes big dogs. Even though Slacker features no dogs, its protagonist is named Boxer.

Now Barney died before Keenan arrived, but ZeeBee suspects that her dog was deliberately done in. In that sense Notorious is like one of those murder mysteries where no one liked the victim. There are plenty of suspects for what ZeeBee calls Barney’s “murder.”

After Barney died, her parents gave ZeeBee a small cocker spaniel she calls Barney Two, but to her nothing can replace Barney One. Barney Two is what Shakespeare would call a fawning spaniel, but ZeeBee disdains him. Keenan feels sorry for the pooch.

In her pique, ZeeBee completely cuts herself off from Keenan. He feels bad and cannot understand why she avoids him. Perhaps to get her attention, perhaps just to have something to do on a small island, Keenan decides to investigate Barney’s “murder.” Did it happen? If so, how? And whodunit?

Notorious becomes a clever mystery, and it becomes clear that both Keenan and ZeeBee have gotten in over their heads.

Korman effectively projects what life on such an island is like. I had friends who lived on an island like Centerlight only accessible by ferry from a different state. Korman gets it. And at the same time he tells an entertaining tale.

We note that this is Korman’s latest (dated 2020) and published by a division of Harper. Before 2017 his books were published by Scholastic. So did Korman sign on with Harper or did Harper buy up Scholastic along with all the other companies it has taken over?

Tim Severin. The Ulysses Voyage. Dutton, 1987.

Tim Severin began his primitive-style sailing adventures with The Brendan Voyage. In that case, he proved that it was possible to sail a large, seaworthy leather curragh across the Atlantic from Ireland to North America. He made a case then that the story of Brendan the Navigator could be historical or based on historical events.

Ironically, in The Ulysses Voyage, which Severin and his crew undertook on a Mycenaean-style sailing galley, he does the opposite. Instead of sailing a vessel built in an ancient manner across the Mediterranean Sea to the traditional sites of the Odyssey, he believes that the Odyssey was a much shorter voyage, pretty much restricted to the west coast of Greece. Instead of “Tales of Brave Ulysses,” we get a summer excursion.

The obvious question becomes this: If Odysseus-Ulysses was so close to his home of Ithaca, why did it take him nine years to sail back from Troy? Severin’s answer is simple—the epic is based on a series of folk tales, perhaps with a historical framework, so look for exaggeration, repetition, and later additions. That could be.

He notes, for example, that many cultures have stories of a hero who outsmarts a monster or villain by saying his name is Nobody. The witch house in a wooded clearing like Circe’s is stock in many folk tales—think even of Hansel and Gretel. To him, the story is merely an exaggeration of Greek geography.

I cannot help comparing The Ulysses Voyage with Mauricio Obregon’s Ulysses Airborne. For the most part, Obregon takes the long voyage view with traditional sites like Malta for Calypso’s Island or Sicily for Thrinacia and the Cattle of the Sun.

Both authors confess to problems. If the island home of Aeolus was the Spanish Isla del Aire as Obregon believes, then it would have been nearly impossible to be blown to within sight of Ithaca and then back to Aeolia. Obregon hypothesizes that it must have been some Italian island that resembled Ithaca from a distance.

On the other hand, if the Phaeacians lived on Corfu and Calypso lived on an island in southern Albania, then why did Odysseus sail east for seventeen days to get from Calypso to the Phaeacians? He gives two explanations—the whole business with Calypso is magical and “a later addition to the story.”

Severin does translate some names for us, often to emphasizes his choice for the location but also to note the significance of the person or place. For example, he notes that the names of most of the Phaeacian men he meets have names translated to naval names like Pilot or Coxswain. A recent translation of the Odyssey notes this and gives the men their English job titles rather than Greek names.

Severin’s strongest case is perhaps that Crete also has legends of caves with giant cannibals, and that could have been where the Cyclops was. Of course, most places around the world have stories of monsters and man-eaters. Many places in North America have stories of Bigfoot or Sasquatch. Even where I live in middle class, suburban, sheltered Connecticut, my students tell of dangerous cul-de-sacs where the Melonheads prey on unsuspecting passers-by. Severin’s case is not unreasonable, but what places in the world do not have similar tales?

The island of Gramvousa near Crete used to be called by a name that meant “leather bag,” which suggests the story of Aeolus as much the Spanish Island of the Breeze. We learn that Calypso’s island of Ogygia means “ancient place” and Apollonius’s Argonautica places it in the Adriatic Sea near “the other identifications of the Odyssey which cluster around north-western Greece.”

That can be tricky. Obregon, for example, claims Circe’s island is one off the coast of Italy which in Greek was known as Pithekousa, or “land of the apes.” Barbary Apes still reside on Gibraltar and were found around the northern rim of the Mediterranean in historical times, and monkeys resemble a cross between humans and other animals.

Sicily has usually been viewed as the island of Thrinacia (“three axes”) because it is triangular in shape. The Cattle of the Sun inhabited Thrinacia. That is Obregon’s view. Severin finds a small island with three small capes and identifies that as the Sun God’s pastures.

Another possible case he makes which has little to do with the Odyssey is that some Greek place names dedicated to Elijah or St. Elias were originally dedicated to the Sun, Helios in Greek. The words do sound similar. Some of us remember the father in My Big Fat Greek Wedding who “proves” that the word kimono comes from the Greek word for winter. Still, it is possible.

Severin does point out accurately that the River Acheron, which is one of the named rivers of Hades, is the name of a stream in “north-western Greece.” If nothing else, that may demonstrate the origin of the infernal river myth. Still, that location is a long distance from the “River of Ocean,” the Atlantic, where Ulysses sails to go to Hades according to Homer.

The model galley Severin and his crew sail was built for an earlier adventure, The Jason Voyage, for crossing the Black Sea to duplicate the voyage of Jason and the Argonauts in search of the Golden Fleece. But unlike that trip or The Brendan Voyage, he does not sail the length of the Mediterranean to see if it were possible to do so. Since he had already sailed the Black Sea with it, that feat sounds reasonable to complete if one were motivated to try it. Instead, he sails the boat around Greece—a leisurely trip that takes a few months. The only cool factor is that they travel in an ancient style galley.

The track of Obregon’s Ulysses Airborne is much cooler, more adventurous, even if he uses an airplane to travel. It is much easier to imagine his route taking nine years to get back to Ithaca from Troy.

Will we ever know?

If Severin is correct, then the Odyssey is simply a pastiche of folk tales attached to a return story. The Iliad and some other stories of the Trojan War appear to be at least based on historical events. If that is true of the Odyssey, then Obregon’s route makes more sense. Like Scheherazade’s Sinbad or Melville’s Ishmael, Homer’s Ulysses is the sole survivor. And Dante places Ulysses in the Eighth Circle of The Inferno with all the liars.

Feodor Dostoevsky. The House of the Dead. 1862; 1911. Edited by Ernest Rhys et al., translated by H. S. Edwards, Project Gutenberg, 25 Sept. 2011.

The House of the Dead, subtitled Prison Life in Siberia, is an earlier work of Dostoevsky. It is a fictionalized account of a noble who is sentenced to ten years of hard labor in Siberia for murdering his unfaithful wife. While it is at most semi-autobiographical, it is no doubt based on Dostoevsky’s own observations and experiences in such a prison camp.

We should note that crimes of passion such as his “are always looked upon as misfortunes, which must be treated with pity.” Later he notes that “the common people throughout Russia call crime “a misfortune” and the criminal “an unfortunate.”

In this case our author or editor has discovered the posthumous papers of one Alexander Petrovitch Goriantchikoff, “formerly a landed proprietor.” The vast bulk of the novel, then, is Alexander Petrovitch’s memoirs of his ten years in the prison camp.

While The House of the Dead does not have the same piercing insights into human nature and aspirations that Dostoevsky’s later work has, it is nevertheless pointed and fascinating to read. For obvious reasons, this reader could not help thinking of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. Of course, The Gulag Archipelago was nonfiction, but it was also a collection of stories about prisoners and prison camps in Russia.

Similarly, The House of the Dead tells stories of a variety of prisoners whom Alexander Petrovitch encounters. Some things are especially striking. For example, there was no forty-lash limit for corporal punishment such as we read about in the Bible and in other places. Punishment was generally with rods and most beatings were in increments of five hundred blows up to two thousand.

The authorities showed some mercy in that if the convict were beaten with more than five hundred blows, he could take five hundred at a time, spend some time in the infirmary to recover, and then continue with the punishment. Even before the first round of blows, prisoners would be examined by a doctor to insure that they could endure the punishment.

The novel suggests that, among Russians of all classes in the nineteenth century, it was considered acceptable and even normal to beat one’s wife. Animals that ended up in prison precincts were eventually used for food or leather even if some men treated them as pets. Although there were seldom physical altercations among the prisoners, there is a violent undercurrent throughout The House of the Dead.

Early in the story, we are told that even former prisoners were “recognized at a glance.” Solzhenitsyn would write the same thing about former zeks, prisoners under Communism. Alexander Petrovitch also notes that “there was not one man among them who admitted his iniquity.” That is often the case in prisons today.

One curious detail reminded this reader of a famous American film about prison labor. The Major, the officer in charge of the day to day operations and discipline in the prison camp, was called the man with eight eyes. This would be echoed in Cool Hand Luke‘s man with no eyes. Both epithets suggest an unnatural hardness.

The Russian Empire was larger than the Russia of today, even larger than the Soviet Union. Besides Russians and Ukrainians, there were Poles, Kirghiz, Circassians, Cossacks, Gypsies, and a variety of other nationalities and languages in the prison. In that sense there is a kind of “everyman” quality to the story. A majority of the prisoners identify with Orthodoxy, but the Poles are Catholic, and many from the Caucasus and Central Asia are Muslim.

While there may be nothing like the dreams of Crime and Punishment or The Possessed, there are still some pointed observations about humanity.

It is acknowledged that neither convict prisons, nor the hulks, nor any system of hard labor ever cured a criminal. These forms of chastisement only punish him and reassure society against the offenses he might commit. Confinement, regulation, and excessive work have no effect but to develop with these men profound hatred, a thirst for forbidden enjoyment, and frightful recalcitrations

Again:

Man cannot exist without work, without legal, natural property. Depart from these conditions, and he becomes perverted and changed into a wild beast.

At one point fairly early in his story, Alexander Petrovitch tells of a man who was convicted of murdering his father in a cruel manner. Towards the end of the story, we are reminded of the crime and discover that many years later, after a decade in prison, he was exonerated. By that time, though, he was no different from many of the other prisoners:

The prisoner who has revolted against society, hates it, and considers himself in the right; society was wrong, not he. Has he not, moreover, undergone his punishment? Accordingly he is absolved, acquitted in his own eyes.

These camps depend on a kind of slave labor. The novel relates how the convicts looked forward to the Christmas holiday where they did not have to work for a few days and when many of them would have saved up enough money to get drunk. I could not help thinking of how Frederick Douglass wrote that slave owners were often able to keep slaves subservient by promoting a drunken celebration each year at New Year’s.

The more pious prisoners saw this time as a serious religious celebration. All prisoners took Christmas and Easter celebrations seriously, even if they got drunk, because “they are in communion with the rest of the world; that they are not altogether reprobates lost and cast off by society.”

A family gang of Circassians were found guilty of robbing the caravan of a rich Armenian merchant. It seems that throughout the region, the Armenians were seen as being rich merchants. This was apparently just as true in the Byzantine era of Digenes Akrites and in the Communist Soviet Union. It had become, and perhaps still is, a Russian stereotype.

We learn that rascal is prison slang for knife. This connects with the Raskolniki, schismatics or splitters, and the source of the name for Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Crime and Punishment.

A Jewish prisoner explains that at certain times he is supposed to mourn and weep for the loss of Jerusalem and then rejoice.

He explained to me directly that the sobs and tears were provoked by the loss of Jerusalem, and that the law ordered pious Jew to groan and strike his breast; but at the moment of his most acute grief he was suddenly to remember that a prophecy had foretold the return of the Jews to Jerusalem, and he was then to manifest overflowing joy, to sing, to laugh, and to recite his prayers with an expression of happiness in his voice and in his countenance.

If Dostoevsky were alive since 1967!

Alexander Petrovitch later reflects on the beatings that beyond five hundred blows “death is almost certain” and that such tortures are like “the Marquis de Sade and the Marchioness Brinvilliers.” As a result, “Tyranny is a habit capable of being developed, and at last become a disease.” Political science, perhaps, but it tells us something of human nature.

Here Dostoevsky echoes Astolphe de Custine’s observations on Russia. Just as Dickens saw the abuses of the French aristocracy leading to the excesses of the French Revolution in A Tale of Two Cities, so The House of the Dead may suggest how even idealists in Russia from the nineteenth century to the present become tyrants. Perhaps this is the norm for Communism wherever it appears.

Alexander Petrovitch notes that there is an insuperable gap between landowners and peasants even in prison. The educated and upper classes who claim to understand the working classes and farm workers are only deceiving themselves. He wanted to join a prison protest but was told in no uncertain terms that he was not one of them.

You may be your whole life in daily relations with the peasant, forty years you may do business with him regularly as the day comes…you may be his benefactor, all but a father to him—well, you’ll never know what is at the bottom of this man’s mind or heart. You may think you know something about him, but it is all optical illusion, nothing more.

I cannot help thinking of the student radicals in the sixties or their heirs today. They might speak of a “worker-student alliance,” but the only men who really know the workers are other workers, not the elite who think they can manipulate the masses, and are shocked when the “basket of deplorables” do not respect them.

Alexander Petrovitch goes on:

My readers may charge me with exaggeration, but I am convinced I am quite right. I don’t go on theory or book reading in this…Perhaps everybody will some day learn how well-founded I am in what I say about this.

Similarly, he writes, political prison camps do not work. Even if people subscribe to ideas that make no sense,

…when they have undergone great and constant suffering for their ideas and made great sacrifices for them, you can’t drive their notions out of their heads, and it is cruel to try it.

Alas, in so many places cruelty reigns. May such intolerance never come to my country.

I am left with one last thought. Many year ago I lived in the Detroit ghetto for a while. I recall having a conversation with an ex-convict. Like so many people, he said he would some day write his memoirs. He had seen things no one else had seen, and people needed to know about them. I doubt if he ever did write them—others have noted that everyone thinks they can write, but few are good at it. Well, Dostoevsky has seen things and written about them. Maybe for us that is enough.

N.B. Just as there are different ways to spell Dostoevsky’s name in our alphabet, so this book has gone by different titles in various translations including Buried Alive, Notes from a Dead House, and Ten Years in Siberian Prison Camp.

Michelle Griep. Twelve Days at Bleakly Manor. Shiloh Run P, 2017.

Two books this Christmas season about adventures during the twelve days of Christmas! A curious coincidence. Twelve Days at Bleakly Manor covers the twelve days of Christmas in an English manor house in 1850-1851. We are told this is first in a series called Once Upon a Dickens Christmas, so we should think of Charles Dickens. We do, but in an unexpected way.

Clara Chapman is bitter. Her fiancé left her at the altar and has disappeared. Somehow, he also dispossessed her brother and her of their family shipping business. Currently, she is caring for an invalid aunt whom she loves. But when her aunt dies, she will have no place to go and nothing to show.

Clara receives a mysterious invitation to an estate in the country. The invitation says that if she can spend the twelve days of Christmas at Bleakly Manor and outstay the other invitees, she will receive five hundred pounds at the end of the retreat. That would be enough likely to restore the family business and name and to insure that she will not have to join her former maid as a laborer in a factory. She is skeptical of the offer, but her aunt encourages her to go.

Twelve Days at Bleakly Manor echoes Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians (a.k.a. And Then There Were None). It turns out that an eclectic group of people have all been invited to the manor for the holidays. Each has received a promise that if she or she sticks it out for the twelve days, they will receive something that is important to them. For two or three like Clara, it is money. For others it is a promise of another kind such as a promotion or an answer to a burning question.

As in the Christie mystery, the owner of the estate and most of the help are gone, and no one knows who the owner is. Similarly, they all seem to get on one another’s nerves. No one seems to be enjoying the stay, but no one wants to leave—at least not right away. Before the twelfth day, though, most will leave for one reason or another.

There is great mystery and much conflict here, but unlike Ten Little Indians no one is murdered. That does not mean that there is no foul play. The brace on a blade of an ice skate has been filed so thin that the blade suddenly collapses and a skater breaks a leg. Clara slips on a staircase and discovers that a brass rod holding the carpet to the step has been removed.

Most of the guests are strangers to each other. There is one exception. One of the invitees turns out to be Benjamin Lane, Clara’s ex-fiancé, someone she does not care to see ever again. Not only did he leave her in the lurch, but her brother told her how he stole and ruined the family business.

Ben tells a different story. He says that on his way to the wedding, he was arrested for stealing her family’s interest in the shipping company. He was tried in secret without being able to examine any witnesses—something very unusual in English law—and then sentenced to exile. His deportation to the Australian penal colony will take place in a couple of weeks. His invitation to the Bleakly Christmas party promised exoneration and emancipation if he could endure the twelve days there.

There is a varied cast of characters, but the story focuses on Clara and Ben. Ben is trying to convince Clara that he was framed and that his story is true. Clara still finds him appealing, but can she trust him? In other words, unlike the Christie mystery, there is an element of romance. That is not surprising since Michelle Griep has written a few historical romances.

Why is this a “Dickens” mystery, other than the time and place? While the title suggests Bleak House, and there may be a connection with the convoluted legal shenanigans in that novel, this novel seems to rest more on Great Expectations. One of the guests is named Pocket, like the tutor’s family in Great Expectations. Herbert Pocket is engaged to a woman named Clara, but her father thinks Herbert is too poor for her, the same way Clara Chapman’s father saw Ben. There is some swindling by half-siblings, someone nearly dispatched by an ax-head, deportation to Australia lurking in the background, and a promise of change or redemption—some great expectations, if you will.

In other words, this story inspired Great Expectations. And, yes, if this story had actually happened, I have the relationship correct. Twelve Days at Bleakly Manor inspired Great Expectations, not the other way around.

Stephanie Barron. Jane and the Twelve Days of Christmas. Narrated by Kate Reading, Blackstone, 2014. [Audiobook].

Jane and the Twelve Days of Christmas is one in a series of mysteries in which Ms. Barron imagines Jane Austen helping to solve crimes. Austen’s curiosity, powers of observation, and understanding of human nature have made her novels perennial favorites. Though not a fan of “chick lit,” this reviewer has enjoyed several of her novels more than once. These traits help Ms. Austen discover criminal intent in these imagined tales.

Here Jane is keeping her journal during the twelve days of Christmas in 1814. The Austen family—including her curate brother’s family, her widowed mother, and single older sister Cassandra—are spending the holidays at an historic country inn and estate named The Vyne.

There they meet up with the innkeeper Mr. Chute and his family. Mr. Chute is also the local member of Parliament. Along with them are some of the members of the Gambier family. One of Jane’s sailor brothers had served under Admiral Gambier, but Jane notes that the Admiral’s wife is not respected in British society. Admiral and Lady Gambier have no children, but their niece and nephew accompany Lady Gambier to The Vyne.

The Admiral himself is in Ghent, Belgium, among those hashing out the treaty to end the War of 1812, the war with the United States. Jane’s political observations would be considered historically significant and are based on the real Austen diaries. A Mr. L’Anglois, aide to Mr. Chute and former secretary to a royalist French nobleman, is also present.

Readers familiar with English or American history understand that due to the relatively slow communications of the era, the Treaty of Ghent was agreed upon in December of 1814, but it would take time for the news to reach London and Washington to have the treaty ratified. The English and Americans would fight the famous Battle of New Orleans at the same time the novel is taking place because neither side in Louisiana knew that the treaty had been signed.

Patrons at the inn excitedly share the news that Napoleon has been captured and exiled to Elba. Readers know that that was not the end of Napoleon. He would escape, regain control of the French army, and European allies would have to fight the him again in 1815 at Waterloo. That is all in the future.

One other person attending the festivities is Raphael West, son of the famous American painter Benjamin West and himself an artist. Both Jane and Cassandra find this widower cultured and attractive. His father Benjamin would settle in England and be patronized by the King, but he had supported both the American and French revolutions until Napoleon crowned himself Emperor. Whose side, if any, was son Raphael on?

Yes, the tale fiction, but from what we know of the historical figures, it could have happened this way.

A Lieutenant Gage from Admiral Gambier arrives at the inn. He has made it there in spite of a raging snowstorm. He is carrying news of Ghent to London, but has a message for the admiral’s wife to deliver en route. It is clear to Jane that the lieutenant and the admiral’s niece Mary find each other attractive.

The next morning the lieutenant leaves to continue his mission to London in the snow. About an hour later, the inn gets word that the lieutenant was thrown from his horse and broke his neck. Jane and Mr. West go to the scene of the accident. West sketches the scene, and Jane discovers a trip wire buried in the snow. Gage’s death was no accident, and the satchel of correspondence he was carrying is missing.

A day or two later Mary Gambier dies from an apparent drug overdose.

There is a lot going on here. Jane and Twelve Days of Christmas reminded us a little of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap with its snowed-in mansion with the addition of some fascinating historical and literary connections. Not only do we meet a member of the distinguished West family—who almost becomes a murder victim himself—but Jane is working on Emma.

There are overheard conversations, an ancient chapel, a secret passage, Christmas gifts for the children, espionage, and a Twelfth Night Lord of Misrule party. It all adds up to a delightful and entertaining mystery.

N.B. We listened to this on an audio recording. Kate Reading does a superb job of telling the story and imitating a variety of voices in several accents. We were surprised to learn she was an American. Her British accents are spot-on.

Marc Cameron. Tom Clancy: Code of Honor. Putnam, 2019.

Tom Clancy passed away six years ago, but his estate keeps producing about two novels a year, most of them enjoyable tales continuing the Jack Ryan mythos. Code of Honor most closely resembles something Clancy himself might have written.

Marc Cameron may have picked up on the Clancy style, though all the new writers have done all right on that account, but Code of Honor actually focuses on Jack Ryan, the main character in most of Clancy’s own novels.

The title is actually a play on the word code. Yes, part of the story is that President Ryan has to act honorably and respectfully in dealing with a Muslim ally and head of state. But code also refers to a new computer algorithm—an artificial intelligence (AI) program devised by two gamers. The original purpose was to develop code to create a real decision-making personalities for characters in multiplayer games that do not have a human acting behind them. This independently acting AI could act as a virus or a spy under the right circumstances.

Father Pat West, an old friend of President Ryan’s, has been working for a Catholic charity in Indonesia. Two computer programmers have secretly sold that AI code to a gaming company in Indonesia. The Chinese have gotten wind of the program’s features and have tried to steal it by fingering one of the two American programmers to Indonesian authorities. They take care of the other programmer directly.

Noonan, the programmer remaining in Indonesia, realizes what is happening and seeks out Father West for confession. Noonan is arrested for smuggling and Fr. West is arrested as well. When it is clear that Fr. West knows little or nothing about the computer code, Indonesian authorities charge him with blasphemy.

Retired Navy Admiral Peter Li, now residing in a Chicago suburb, staves off a home invasion by Chinese agents. It seems they have gotten wind of a new weapons program which the AI code may work with. Li is an old friend of John Clark—readers of Clancy novels need no introduction to this master undercover worker—so Clark and some others from Hendley Associates (a.k.a. the Campus) get involved.

Oh, yes, the Chinese have tried honey traps on a few different Americans to try to get information on these activities. They were able to co-opt Noonan and an American Senator. They tried with a couple of fighter pilots and Admiral Li with a little less success. After that, they decided to go after him directly.

Like some of the earlier Clancy plots such as The Bear and the Dragon, the reader gets to see some high level political intrigue in China. A computer-savvy General Bai seems to have the ear of the Premier, but other generals fear what is happening as a result. Without going into too much detail, the facial recognition software which China is famous for using to spy on its own citizens can also be used to work against Chinese spies. Since it appears that the goal of all Communist governments is to learn everything about everyone, what if personnel files are compromised and foreign powers learn everything about certain Chinese citizens?

Code of Honor has lots of action, cool technology, and some clever ironic twists. President Ryan has to make some tough decisions. Will the American Senator who has a visceral hatred for him do him in with the help of foreign agents? How can he help Fr. West without the President of Indonesia losing face? Is it possible for anyone to corral the AI program? Are we reaching the point where, to borrow from a nineties book title, machines that think become machines who think? Great stuff!

Charles Slack. Blue Fairways. Holt, 1999.

Blue Fairways is a nonfiction road trip story. In this case, as any reader can guess from the title, the road trip involves golf. A little over twenty years ago, thirty-five-year-old Charlie Slack left his wife and steady job for a six-month odyssey down U.S. Route 1 from the northern tip of Maine to Key West, Florida, playing golf.

He played only at public courses. The greens fees were anywhere from eight dollars to a hundred and eighty-five. He also would go to driving ranges to practice. Some days he traveled. Some days he played thirty-six holes; some days, nine. The courses included mom-and-pop public courses, par three courses, nine-hole courses, and courses designed by some of the most famous golf architects in history.

While golfers are the obvious audience for Blue Fairways, it should not be limited just to golfers. We get a sense of what the East Coast of America is like. We meet hundreds of people, most of whom are friendly and helpful. (The only caveat from this reviewer is that Slack does quote some grumpy golfers’ language, if that offends anyone.)

Slack would generally go to a golf course and look for anyone willing to complete a foursome (or a threesome or a twosome). He met many interesting people such as the French-speaking men from northern Maine who spoke little English to the family that inherited a golf course and have been doing what they can to keep in the family.

While I am not a golfer, I did caddie from the ages of eleven to thirteen, so I understand the game and the terminology. I used to watch golf tournaments on television with my father, who followed the sport. For someone not used to golf jargon, some spots may skimmed over, but this is not just about golf. It is about the people he meets and the country he sees. He tells us he chose the title of the book in homage to Blue Highways, the classic nonfiction piece by William Least Heat Moon. This birder also thought of Kingbird Highway by Kenn Kaufman.

More than that, Blue Fairways is simply great writing. Slack has an old Yankee knack for simile that I thought was nearly lost. For example, why did he choose just public courses (besides the cost)?

More important, though, is the fact that public courses, with their crabgrassed fairways and sun-baked greens, are where the vast majority of America’s twenty million golfers play out their dreams. The lush, carpeted fairways and silky greens of Augusta National or Spyglass Hill are as remote to the average golfer as a date with a movie star.

Or this one, that I think many golfers can relate to. Those who cannot, think of socks or coat hangers:

I found myself buying bag after bag of replacement tees in pro shops all along the way. Strange thing about tees, they show up everywhere in a man’s stuff—his change drawer, his lint, his dirty underwear pile. But try to find one when you’re standing on the tee box with a ball in your hand and three partners waiting for you to hit.

At one point, reaching a small valley stream on a course in Maine, he writes:

When I reached the bottom a rush of cool air swept by me no higher than waist level, as though I were wading in a trout stream. The coming dusk had taken the edge off the heat, but this trough of air was too narrow and defined for that. I wondered at the source until I passed a stand of trees and found the right side of the fairway bounded by a large, freshly dug potato field. The exposed troughs were like nature’s own air conditioner. Every time the wind blew over the field, it carried with it the stored up coldness of the Maine winter. I pretended to tie my shoes and dropped to my knees to savor it.

There is much more like this. Over the years I have used a few different collections of essays to teach writing to my students. If I were putting such a collection together, I would seriously think about including a chapter or excerpt from Blue Fairways.

Francis Bacon. The Essays. 1625. Peter Pauper P, [1970].

———. Bacon’s Essays and Wisdom of the Ages. Edited by A. Spiers et al, Little Brown, 1884. Project Gutenberg, 29 Jan. 2018.

Francis Bacon (1561-1626) has the reputation of being one of the great geniuses of his day, flourishing during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I. While I have read some of his essays from time to time in different collections, I never read them through. It was well worth it.

Bacon’s collected essays, about sixty in all, cover an eclectic range of topics. Some essays resemble the Bible’s Book of Proverbs, like a collection of pithy epigrams on a specific theme. Other are more like what we think of when think of essays today. All are short, averaging about three pages.

Bacon was a true Renaissance man. Yes, he actually lived during the time period we call the Renaissance, but he was well-read and knowledgeable. There are many quotations from and allusions to the Bible, Greek and Roman classics, and history. I noted numerous examples from the reign of Henry VII, but then I learned that Bacon wrote a book on that monarch’s life.

The term essay comes from the French and literally means “an attempt” or “a try.” I am not sure that any reader today would agree with everything Bacon wrote, but he gives us all plenty of things to think about. They are worthy attempts.

Many of his observations are about human nature. Why do people behave the way they do? Why are some people bold? What are the advantages of being single? Being married?

As an American, I found his essay “Of Plantations” interesting. He outlines how he believes a colonial power should colonize territories and treat its subjects. (He uses the word plantation to mean “colony” or “settlement,” the same way his contemporary William Bradford wrote of Plymouth Plantation.) One can read that now and see that the British government pretty much operated according to Bacon’s ideas with is North American colonies. When it began doing things Bacon warned against, thirteen of Britain’s American colonies revolted. The rest is history, as they say.

His essay “Of Seditions and Troubles” is a notable political tract for today’s reader. By sedition, he means an overthrow or attempt to overthrow those in power. He says that as long as either the nobility or the common people are satisfied, there will be no change, even if one or the other dislikes the government or its leaders. However, when both the “noblesse” and the “commonality” are “discontent,” that scene is ripe for sedition.

I see this in the three attempts to remove American presidents from office in my lifetime. Currently, there is an attempt by the elites—the wealthy, academia, the media—to remove President Trump. So far, though, the “commonality,” what Senator Clinton called a “basket of deplorables,” seem to be relatively content.

The situation was reversed when Senator Clinton’s husband was impeached. The common people understood why people from Arkansas called President Clinton Slick Willie, and they were disgusted or embarrassed by his personal behavior. The elites, on the other hand, mostly stood up for him and even made a case that a politician’s personal behavior is irrelevant if he can handle his government position well. President Clinton prevailed.

The elites really hated Nixon. The press and academia never forgave him for his work in exposing Communists in the American government. (This was a few years before Senator McCarthy turned his investigation into something else.) Nixon was elected in 1968 over a divided Democrat Party and was re-elected in a landslide in 1972. However, when it became clear that he had authorized at least one actual burglary and then tried to cover it up, the “commonality” began echoing the elite about Tricky Dick. Soon after, he would resign. It took both groups to become “discontent” with the president before the position would change hands.

His essay “On Judicature” should be required reading in all law schools and courts. (Bacon was a lawyer by trade.) It begins with two Latin expressions—he then translates them for us—which suggest that even in Ancient Rome there were judges who tried to create law rather than merely rule on existing law:

Judges ought to remember that their office is jus dicere and not jus dare; to interpret the law and not to make law, or give law.

Plus ça change…

Many times Bacon is looking for balance, the happy medium. He acknowledges in his essay “On Usury” that in a perfect place nobody would lend money at interest. But he see this as a necessary evil, or great enterprises would never have had a chance to start.

I would suggest that those who do not know Latin get an edition, such as the one linked above to Project Gutenberg that has translations for the reader. My father took two years of Latin in high school. He told me that he remembered little of if but it helped him immensely with his English vocabulary and spelling.

My experience is almost the same except that I took my two years in college and had some exposure to Roman literature as well. Like my father, that has helped me with English spelling, vocabulary, and literature, but I really muddle about when reading Latin. I never kept up with it the way I kept up with the French.

There are many more lively observations and, yes, proverbs and epigrams in Bacon’s Essays. Here are some of his thoughts from his essay “Of Atheism”:

God never wrought miracle to convince atheism because his ordinary works convince it. It is true that a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion. For while the mind of man looketh upon second causes scattered, it may sometimes rest in them and go no farther; but when it beholdeth the chain of those confederate and linked together, it must needs fly to Providence and Deity.

And a little bit farther along:

The Scripture saith, The fool hath said in his heart there is no God; it is not said, The fool hath thought in his heart; so as he rather saith it by rote to himself as that he would have, than that he can thoroughly believe it or be persuaded of it. [See Psalm 14:1 and 53:1]

Very interesting. There is much more. The Essays are well worth anyone’s time.