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.

Steven James. Story. Revell, 2006.

Readers, especially those who were around in the seventies, might recall a few books written by Calvin Miller, notably The Singer. They were popular, creative retellings of the Gospel and related stories. They were written as epic poems.

Story resonates like those. It is very creative, clever, and at the same time causing the reader to pause and consider. I already believe I will re-read this book soon. It is that good.

This is a combination of stories and poems and personal narratives that present the Gospel in a refreshing way.

One brief poem says:

i told my friend, “only children get excited over watching a butterfly.”
but then he turned to me and said,
“so does
God.” (19)

James tells stories from his own life, from things he has read, from the Bible. Some he renders in poetry. Each chapter is a kind of meditation. This book could be treated as a devotional, but it is more than that. It resembles a memoir, but it is something else.

It is a story. It is a tale told by a philosopher and storyteller, a singer of tales, if you will. And yet the story is true.

Nietzsche was partly right—not that “God is dead,” but he was. God died on Skull Hill. And for three hours on a Friday, even the sun hid its face. (157)

I had a friend who had served in Vietnam. He was one of those men described by Lan Cao and Robert Olen Butler who learned Vietnamese and really loved the Vietnamese people. He was a regular at a Vietnamese restaurant when he returned to the United States.

When he is was in Vietnam he once had a conversation with a Vietnamese fisherman. Like a majority of Vietnamese, this man was Buddhist, but since about ten percent of the population then was Christian (mostly Catholic from the French influence), he was acquainted with Christianity. The man said to him, “I do not understand Christianity. Why would a God want to become a man?”

Ah! That is the key to the Gospel!

But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness. (I Corinthians 1:23)

The Greeks were like the Buddhists, believers in multiple gods. They had stories about men like Hercules becoming gods, but why would a god want to become a weak mortal?

The answer is truly well known, if not always accepted. God is love (I John 4:8), and, because of that character trait:

God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. (John 3:16)

Steven James’ Story is ultimately God’s story. It is well worth reading. It is inspired.

Lan Cao and Harlan Margaret Van Cao. Family in Six Tones. Viking, 2020.

Family in Six Tones is prefaced with a line from T. S. Eliot, “Do I dare disturb the universe?” Lan Cao’s portion of this autobiography will disturb the universe of many Americans who lived through the sixties and seventies. Harlan’s portion may disturb contemporary readers. What a story they both have.

“Six tones” refers to the six vowel tones in the Vietnamese language. Many Asian and some Amerindian languages use tones of vowels in the pronunciation of their words. Mandarin Chinese has four tones. I have read that some Asian minority languages have as many as thirteen tones. Vietnamese has six. This is mostly Lan’s story, and that makes it her family’s story.

Lan Cao was thirteen when Saigon fell in 1975. Her family was able to leave Vietnam for the United States shortly before the end. In effect, she had known nothing but war her whole life. Her father was a high-ranking officer in the ARVN, the South Vietnamese army. One of her uncles was Viet Cong. She was surrounded by the action.

While the story focuses on Lan Cao’s upbringing and her transition to America from Vietnam, some of the most striking images are from her memories of the war. Some of the exploits of her father would impress any soldier. She lived right next to an army base and got to meet many American soldiers as well.

She shares a different side of the war. Americans tend to see it from a radically different perspective. Tim O’Brien, for example, has written some great stories and novels out of his experience in the war, but the characters are virtually all soldiers or veterans. The “peaceniks” who characterize today’s American elites have a different perspective. To Lan Cao these people at best know just a part of the story, at worst use their own point of view as a kind of self-righteousness that excludes other perspectives.

She notes the perspective of the history teachers where she went to college from 1979 to 1983:

Almost all of my teachers in the department saw Vietnam as their experience, their rite of passage, the triggers to their disillusionment, the portal to their identity and worldview. They wanted their Vietnam to be my inheritance…My teachers told me those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. But what they wanted was for me to remember their past, to ventriloquize their memories, even though I was still trying to make sense of mine. (152)

Americans were concerned about Vietnamese suffering only if they believed it was caused by America. This way the Vietnamese remained perpetual victims and Americans perpetual holders of power—power to inflict and power to save. (155)

Although Lan Cao would become a successful lawyer before she started writing books, she notes a current of racism in her story. She was first in her high school class going into her junior year. One day she got a math assignment back and noticed a friend made the same mistake on one of the problems but was given more credit. She went to the teacher after class and politely asked if there had been a mistake.

“No mistake,” he replied. He knew exactly what he had done, and told her that he did not want any of “her kind” to be valedictorian. She did not graduate number one, but she did go to Mt. Holyoke, so she did all right, but the discrimination against her was overt and intentional in this instance.

She is honest to note that Vietnamese have their own prejudices. They look down on Cambodians and the minority people known as the Cham. Her mother’s family had nothing to do with her father for about twenty years because even though he was ethnically Vietnamese, he had lived in Laos.

Lan Cao gets reunited in America with Mai, a woman who had been a good friend when she was a girl in Vietnam. They become best friends in America, and she even moves in with the Lan and her husband after her own husband dies. Mai was originally from the North. When they revisit Vietnam in recent years, Mai speaks with a Northern accent when they go to Hanoi and other northern cities. It helps them get along better.

Considering that she came to the United States at the age of thirteen knowing virtually no English—she had studied French in school—this reader gives her a lot of credit that in five years she could get into one of the most competitive schools in the country.

Harlan Margaret Van Cao, her daughter, tells her story in alternating chapters. But most of her story until high school is about her family, particularly her mother. We begin to see that Lan Cao did have a kind of PTSD; she had developed multiple personalities to help her cope. Harlan then herself learns to cope with her mother’s occasional personality changes. That, too, is one of the family tones.

Harlan’s American father was considerably older than her mother. They had their only child together when her mother was 41. Harlan, then, experiences both the tender love her father had for her, but she also recalls him dying when she was thirteen. Her father’s family name was Van Alstyne. Her name Van Cao is a combination of the family names of both parents.

For many years the family lived in Williamsburg, Virginia. Her father was on a college faculty there. Her mother also eventually went into teaching law as well. Most of her mother’s relatives lived in Falls Church, Virginia, outside of Washington, D. C. They got together frequently, so Harlan also has a sense of the Vietnamese diaspora. Still, her mother is sometimes surprised at how independent she is even at a young age. Harlan will be American, not Vietnamese.

The family hears from the uncle who was Viet Cong. His life in Vietnam is hard. Even though he was on the winning side, he is not treated well by the government. Lan Cao tells stories of others like her uncle who were still suspected by the Communist government in spite of the side they supported.

She reads a book by another Vietnamese Communist who spent years after the war being “re-educated” in prison because “he asked too many questions.” She quotes what his testimony, The Vietnamese Gulag, says the prisoners were told by a high-ranking government official:

Ho Chi Minh may have been an evil man; Nixon may have been a great man. The Americans may have had the just cause; we may not have had the just cause. But we won and the Americans were defeated because we convinced the people that Ho Chi Minh is the great man, that Nixon is a murderer and the Americans are the invaders…The key factor is how to control people and their opinions. Only Marxism and Leninism can do that. (157, ellipsis in original)

True radicals can appreciate that. For them is it not “speaking truth to power,” it is speaking power to truth.

In spite of the horrors of war, the psychological trauma, and family tragedy, there is a sense of triumph in the life of Lan Cao. She has overcome odds. She has successfully adapted to America without completely losing her Vietnamese identity.

There is a sense, though, that Harlan’s life could be tragic as well. She chafes at the label “sexually active” even though that is what she is. She is too young at fourteen. She has some unwelcome experiences. Boys get away with sexting her.

At the same time she and her best friend are accused of being lesbians—because her high school peers are faced with sexual pressures much of the time. She complains of depression. Perhaps it is from her father’s passing or her mother’s schizophrenia, but if her life becomes a tragedy it could be because she got caught up in the oversexed “Hollywood” culture in much of America today. That also brings depression.

Where I teach high school, I note even in the last few years, kids seem to be talking more openly about things that students in the past would never have discussed except maybe among friends, and never in mixed company. At the same time, they also appear to be more uncomfortable about such things.

This may be naîvely nostalgic, but I recall an episode from The Hiding Place, the autobiography of Corrie ten Boom, a Dutch woman who survived two years in German concentration camps for hiding Jews in her house.

She tells of the time when she was nine and asked her father a question about sex. He told her to remember when they went on the train to take a vacation and he had to carry her suitcase because it was too heavy for her. Right now, he told her, an answer to that question would be more than she could carry. When she is older, they will talk about it.

Family in Six Tones ultimately is about the loss of innocence in two generations. We can blame the war for the loss in mother Lan. She has done well in spite of it, and it has not been easy. For daughter Harlan, the blame is more diffuse, but her story reminds us that we should let children be children as best as we are able. They will have plenty of time to grow up and bear their own burdens when they are big enough.

Like Corrie ten Boom’s story, there is hope and a potential for making it through all right. If the American reader is disturbed by the story of either author, that may be a sign that there is hope and things are not always the way we think we see them.

P.S. I do not usually pay attention to quotations from reviewers on a book’s cover, but one got this reader’s attention. Author Robert Olen Butler is quoted on the back cover. Butler served in Vietnam as a U. S. Navy officer. He learned the language and got to know the people in a different way than many Americans who went there. His A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain is one of the finest short story collections of the last century. Lan Cao describes regular customers at a relative’s Vietnamese market in Falls Church who are Vietnam vets who miss the country. They cannot return, but at least they can have some Vietnamese food and talk with Vietnamese people. Butler’s stories are like that. Like Lan Cao’s own story, some of his stories sensitively describe the challenges Vietnamese refugees face in their new home countries.

Steve Wilkens and Mark L. Sanford. Hidden Worldviews. Inter-Varsity, 2009.

This book was recommended by a school counselor whom I respect. I confess I chuckled to myself a bit: Wow! A book put out by Inter-Varsity Press on worldviews! This is certainly not the first! Indeed, I wondered how this would compare to the classics on the subject by James Sire, namely The Universe Next Door and Naming the Elephant.

This book takes a little different approach. The authors note eight worldviews that have all had an effect on Western culture and Western thinking today. This is not a comparative religion book, though some of the worldviews may come from religions.

But the authors do not simply explain and critique each worldview. They try to point out how each has affected our thinking. Then they challenge us: What is true about these different outlooks? Where do they fall short? What can we learn from each one—both about the world around us and about ourselves. Perhaps we may fall short, too.

As is typical today, the authors point out that most of our worldviews come from a story, a narrative that becomes a metanarrative, to use the postmodern terminology, a personal story that hangs everything together. How do we communicate? How do we act and react? There is both a subjective and objective element to how we view the world and our lives in the world. (Coleridge lives!)

Each of the eight worldviews has a chapter devoted to it. The chapter title and subtitle give us an idea of what the chapter will be about. Even by simply naming the chapters, we can probably see things from each of them that we or other people we know embrace as truth.

“Individualism: I Am the Center of the Universe.” While this sounds superficially selfish, we in the West recognize certain individual rights such as life and liberty. What can we learn from this since we are all finite individuals? When does this go too far?

“Consumerism: I Am What I Own.” While many might dismiss this, most of us have to admit that we value things and often esteem others according to their wealth, their possessions. Again, we do have needs for food and shelter, as even Thoreau admitted, but is it really true that He who dies with the most toys wins?

“Nationalism: My Nation Under God.” In many places in the world, ethnic identity is important. Most tribes and nations have stories of heroes and justifiably proud traditions. We all have a need to belong, but when does nationalism go too far?

“Moral Relativism: The Absolute Truth about Relativism and Something Like Relativism.” Much conflict in Western culture today is rooted in the question of absolutes. I recall a professor when I was in grad school saying, “There are no absolutes, even though I know that that is an absolute statement.” Even if we do not believe it or we recognize the obvious fallacy, we often act as if morals were relative or situational. But nearly all of us draw lines, too. Are we being hypocrites?

“Scientific Naturalism: Only Matter Matters.” This was an important idea when Sire was writing. Many people still believe this way. If the material world is all there is, what does that mean for us? Nowadays many people will say, “I am spiritual,” but they live and act as if everything can be explained according to physical laws.

This writer notes that the author uses the term scientific naturalism. When I was in college we used the term materialism, i.e., the material world is all there is, for example, Marx’s dialectical materialism. However, that term has come to be identified with consumerism. More recent writings use the term naturalism, but that can be confusing for those studying the arts and literature because of the naturalist movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century which meant something different.

“The New Age: Are We Gods or Are We God’s.” This is attempt to explain things in pantheistic terms, that everything is God. It might be rooted in Hinduism and Buddhism, but in our culture it has been Westernized. Back in the 1850s Thoreau and Emerson subscribed to this, but most people did not. Now it seems almost pervasive, especially in Hollywood.

“Postmodern Tribalism: My Tribe/My Worldview.” This seems to be tearing apart our culture right now. What party? What sexual orientation? What race do you identify with? Whose lives matter? We need to ask ourselves, what is it that we are conforming to when we identify with a particular group?

“Salvation by Therapy: Not as Good as It Gets.” About six years ago I reviewed a book that described a kind of pop religion as moralistic therapeutic deism. Be nice, behave morally. Your religion or your meditation or your therapy can help you through your problems, and there might be some kind of god or spiritual force out there somewhere. How far does therapy go? We know it can help, but is that all there is? In our Internet age, we are inundated with advice. How do we know what really works? And is efficacy or efficiency or expediency the same as truth?

Clearly, there is a lot more here. Hidden Worldviews will get the reader thinking. And isn’t that what good books, especially nonfiction books, are supposed to do?

Joel C. Rosenberg. Damascus Countdown. Tyndale, 2013.

Damascus Countdown is the third in Rosenberg’s trilogy about CIA agent David Shirazi. We have reviewed the first two. This is a solid final installment in the ongoing saga of the Twelfth Imam. A lot happens here. Even though the first two books focus on Iran, the third, while also mostly in Iran, switches focus to Syria towards the end. There is indeed a countdown near Damascus.

We meet most of the same characters as in the other two books. We did not read the books in order, but we did not miss much. Each book does stand alone, but since all three focus on the character who calls himself the Twelfth Imam, the Shiite messiah, this is probably not the volume to read first.

Muhammad Ibn Ali in the two previous books, The Twelfth Imam and The Tehran Initiative, has come on the scene, performed a few miracles, and has been declared to be the Twelfth Imam. He has also managed to unite most of the world’s Muslim majority countries under his authority. Even though the Twelfth Imam is not part of Sunni eschatology, most Sunnis recognize him as well.

Perhaps the biggest deal in uniting the Muslim nations happens in this novel. Yes, previously Saudi Arabia, home of the Muslim holy city of Mecca, recognized him. Now Pakistan will recognize him. Pakistan is neither Arab nor Shiite, but it is a nuclear power. The Twelfth Imam will have the two hundred or so nuclear missiles (the numbers vary in the novel depending on who is talking and for what purpose).

Ali has already declared that his caliphate will rule the whole world. The Great and Little Satans, America and Israel, stand in his way, but now he has the power to obliterate them.

Ali is quite clever, but also perhaps a bit paranoid, accusing loyal followers of treachery. As they said in France, revolutions devour their own children.

In the previous novel, we learned that Iran has successfully built between five and ten atom bombs and are in the process of mounting them on missiles aimed at Israel. Partly thanks to Mr. Shirazi, Israel and the United States learn where six of them are. Israel take preemptive action and destroys them. Not until Shirazi through several clever and dangerous plots learns the truth, does anyone outside of the top-secret Iranian nuclear program and the Imam’s inner circle know where they are.

There are some plot lines that continue from the first two stories. All Shiites respect the blind Shiite scholar Dr. Alireza Birjandi. He has done the most research on the Twelfth Imam and even the Imam himself respects him. However, he has a crisis of belief. Although Muhammad Ibn Ali is an effective and charismatic figure, there are a number of Shiite prophecies about the Twelfth Imam that he does not fulfill. Is he really who he says he is?

Shirazi, an American citizen but native Farsi speaker, is so deeply embedded in Iran at this point that he wonders if he will ever return home. While he is overseas, his mother dies, but he cannot come for the funeral. Many of the family friends and relatives consider him no good for that reason. To them, he works for a German telecommunications company. Certainly he could fly home from Germany for a few days. He also recognizes that he is in love with Marseille, an old family friend. We learn more about her background here.

But the countdown is in Damascus. The Imam is about to do something really big. Can the CIA or the Mossad thwart his plans? There are safe houses, disguises, covert agents from various countries, terrorist attacks, drones, fighter jets. The action does not let up.

While this trilogy is nothing like the Left Behind series (and better told in this reviewer’s mind), the author makes use of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish end times prophecies. This is a novel and a work of fiction, not a theological treatise (Rosenberg has tried that), but these things are in the background, perhaps having a hand in the events. See, for example, Isaiah 17:1 or Jeremiah 49:24-27. It’s like Clancy, Ludlum, or Brad Thor, but with a prophetic twist.

John Bishop. Act of Revenge. Mantid Press, 2020.

John Bishop has recently come out with the third book in his Doc Brady series. Here Houston orthopedic surgeon Jim Bob Brady finds himself caught up in another mystery. In this case, it does not have anything to do with his own medical practice.

While on vacation skiing in Aspen (hey, this guy is a doctor), he literally runs into another M.D. from Houston, Texas, plastic surgeon Lou Edwards. The two men’s wives become friends. Dr. Brady accompanies Dr. Edwards one morning to observe his practice. We get an interesting insight into the science of plastic surgery. We also understand that Edwards is quite skilled at his work. Dr. Edwards confides to Brady that he is having serious financial problems.

Back in the eighties and early nineties, he provided silicone breast implants for many women. Now in 1997, people have discovered that these implants sometimes have unwanted and devastating side effects. Along with other plastic surgeons in the country who did such work, he is being sued by many of his former patients. In fact, he operated on his own wife, and now she has lupus, which may be a side effect from the silicone.

To make matters worse, his malpractice insurance has not been renewed. He will probably have to declare bankruptcy. It turns out that the insurance company has insured many plastic surgeons in Texas and has decided to let go of all of them. The doctors decide to picket outside the headquarters of the company, also in Houston.

Doctors picketing make the news. Dr. Edwards is filmed on television threatening Paul Thompson, the president of the insurance company. That same morning Thompson is murdered. Guess who the prime suspect is? So what does Dr. Edwards do? He goes into hiding. Not even Mrs. Edwards knows where he is.

Oh, Thompson lived in the top floor penthouse in the same condos where the Bradys live. Dr. Brady finds himself once again in the middle of a mess. He wants to help his friend and his wife’s friend. As is true in many mystery stories, our victim is not an especially likeable fellow, though it looks like the insurance cancellations were strictly business.

While Bishop still tells his story in a leisurely manner—we can easily imagine his Texas drawl—Act of Revenge has fewer lulls in the action than the first two books. There is a lot going on. Yes, our first person narrator Dr. Brady still describes some of the meals they have and how beautiful his wife is, but he is mostly too busy.

One interesting addition is that now Brady is a deputy. Because Brady helped the police in the two previous crimes, when Chief Lombardo and his daughter Detective Beeson see he lives near the victim and is a friend of the suspect, they deputize him to help on this case.

There are a number of curiosities. As Brady goes over Edwards’ billing records, he notes that he regularly gives a ten percent refund to patients who pay cash. In fact, he once gave Paul Thompson a face lift with that discount. The Edwards’ only child is a model. They say she lives in California but has been working in Paris. It appears that she wants little or nothing to do with them. Mrs. Edwards does not know how to reach her to tell her of her father’s plight.

The three people who work for Dr. Edwards speak very highly of him, but something does not seem quite right.

And the murder itself is hard to explain. Dr. Edwards’ car (ID’d by make, model, and license plate) was in the condo parking garage at the time of the murder. No one entered or left the building during that time except someone using Thompson’s key pass—needed to get into the garage and the elevator to the apartment. Thompson was killed around 8:30 a.m. and apparently had not yet gone out at all since he woke up.

Was there more going on between Edwards and Thompson than merely a disgruntled client and former patient? Why was Edwards hiding out? Where was he hiding out? Why did his daughter seem indifferent to both her father’s problem and her mother’s illness? How does any of this make sense?

Another good yarn from Bishop, and the most lively of the three Doc Brady mysteries so far.

Mitch Glaser. God’s Plan and Purposes for the Jewish People. Chosen People, 2019.

This short book summarizes four significant items in God’s plan for the Jews according to the Bible. Each is well supported and appears to borne out in history.

First, basing his argument on prophecies from Genesis, Exodus, and Deuteronomy, Glaser observes that God promised that the offspring of Abraham through Isaac would be set apart by Him. The people would illustrate God’s purpose and testify of Him to the rest of the world. Indeed, the survival of the Jewish people and their influence in spite of their history should be a sign that there is something different about them.

Second, mostly through promises given in Genesis, the purpose of the Jewish people was to live in the land of Israel. Even today, there have been more United Nations resolutions about Israel than any other country. It seems striking that such a small piece of real estate, relatively speaking, would even get such attention. This also perhaps points to the idea that the God of history is somehow behind this.

Third, Glaser writes that God has promised a king. He would rebuke the Israelites through Samuel for wanting a king like the other nations. God was supposed to be their king. But at the same time, he promised David that a descendant of his would rule forever. Jesus is both God and a descendant of David…hmm.

Fourth, the Jewish people were to have a mission. They were to be a “kingdom of priests” for the whole world, testifying of God and interceding on behalf of the world. We do read about a few people who did this, notably Solomon early in his reign and Jonah, though he was reluctant. One could argue that this really did not come to pass in any strong way until the coming of Jesus of Nazareth. His followers, at first almost exclusively Jews, began to tell non-Jews of their God and His Messiah.

Glaser then makes some interesting observations about how he sees the future of the Jewish people. It appears to be his hope that Jews will finally see themselves not simply as separated but as “missionaries” pointing the world to the God of the Bible.

God’s Plan and Purposes for the Jewish People is a short book, but it is packed with a lot of food for thought and, for those inclined, for prayer.

Jules Verne. Le Tour du Monde en Quatre-Vingts Jours [Around the World in Eighty Days]. 1873; Ebooks Libres et Gratuits, 18 March 2004.

It was time to get back into a little light French reading, so I chose another Jules Verne classic, Around the World in Eighty Days. This book is a lot of fun. Although there are serious moments in the story, the tone is much lighter than 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. There is no revenge, a very small amount of science fiction, and there are echoes, perhaps intentional, of some other French classics.

Very simply, the unemotional and very proper Englishman Phileas Fogg bets some members of his club twenty thousand pounds that he can circumnavigate the world in eighty days. This is in 1872. Along with his life savings and a newly hired French servant, Passepartout (literally “goes everywhere”), he begins his adventure. One similarity between this book and 20,000 Leagues is that both Arronax in that novel and Fogg in this one embark with a valet.

This is fun. We get some interesting experiences in the Red Sea after going through the newly constructed Suez Canal. The two men have some real challenges as they take an overland route through India. The railroad ends at a certain point in the interior of the subcontinent, so they end up hiring an elephant. This means even more adventures, including the entry of Mrs. Aouda, a British-educated, aristocratic young widow. As she joins the other two on the adventures, this reader could not help thinking of Haydée, the companion of the Count of the Monte Cristo.

Her story is sort of hard to believe but it makes for some real excitement. They sail from India to Hong Kong to Yokohama with adventures in each place. Passepartout provides some comic relief as he gets connected with a troupe of Japanese acrobats. We can tell that Mrs. Aouda appreciates Fogg, but he is so stereotypically British, stiff upper lip and all that, that we never know much of what he thinks of other people, only how to get around the world to win the bet.

They cross the United States mostly by train from San Francisco to New York. This is just a few years after the Golden Spike. They have problems with attacking Indians, a blizzard, and stampeding bison. We see Fogg going out of his way to help certain people in distress, even though these side adventures steer him away from his goal.

While crossing America, the one perhaps sci-fi element is a land sailboat, or more precisely, a sailsleigh. Clever. The final leg to Liverpool from New York gets desperate as well, but using the last of his savings, Fogg figures a way to get rerouted to try to win his bet.

If there are hints of The Count of Monte Cristo in Around the World in Eighty Days, there is a more direct comparison with Les Miserables. No, there are no revolutions. Fogg is an Englishman, after all. But a London police inspector named Fix is convinced that Fogg obtained his money by robbing a bank. Fix is the Javert of the novel, following Fogg until he can get authorization from London to arrest him. Fogg does not understand his real intention, so he helps him just as he helps others. Fix, though, manages always to rationalize away Fogg’s kindnesses as mere signs of what a “coquin” (all-around bad guy) Fogg really is.

While having a very different tone and very different kind of ending from 20,000 Leagues, the story is entertaining and satisfying in its own way. Readers should have fun with it.

One note. Although I have never seen it, I do recall seeing posters and clips from the 1956 film version of the story. They always include a hot air balloon. There are no hot air balloons in the novel.