Harry L. Katz. Mark Twain’s America. Little Brown, 2014.

Mark Twain’s America is a pleasant introduction to one of America’s most famous writers. It draws from the massive collection of the Library of Congress for pictures, illustrations, photos, books, posters, ephemera, and so on.

The approach is suggested in the book’s title. Mark Twain’s America is an effective biography of Twain, but it connects his life with things going on in the country and in the world. Indeed, the book probably devotes more ink to Roughing It than any of Twain’s other works because that book really described what was happening in the decade or so after the Civil War, especially regarding western expansion—even to Hawaii.

The book also stresses that Twain at his heart was a humorist. Indeed, it seems to take a different view from Van Wyck Brooks who perhaps read more into Twain than what Twain ever had in mind. Because Twain wrote much, kept journals, spoke publicly often, and wrote an autobiography (admittedly, the last item was not available in Brooks’ day), Katz appears free to simply let Twain speak for himself. And a lot of what he wrote and said was funny. Let’s be grateful for that. If Twain had been more serious, he would be more of a subject for esoteric literary studies, not simply a good writer who tells entertaining stories.

Yes, we get a biography of Twain that parallels what is happening in the world, but it also introduces the reader to virtually all of Twain’s works, even those that are seldom read any more. For example, it briefly mentions King Leopold’s Soliloquy. That book brought up a serious issue of Twain’s day that is no longer an issue. Still, we recommend that book for anyone who is teaching or studying Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in any detail.

The pictures are great, even nostalgic. There are many engravings like those of Currier and Ives. Photography was developed and improved during Twain’s years, so we see many interesting photos. There are programs and publicity posters, handbills, newspaper headlines, and other visuals on virtually every page. Even someone who is just looking at the pictures would get something out of it.

We are reminded that Twain went west to avoid the Civil War. He or his co-author Charles Dudley Warner invented the term The Gilded Age in their book of the same name. So we see a lot, not just about the Mississippi River, but about the expansion of the American West, and the lifestyles of the Eastern Establishment.

Strikingly, the Eastern Establishment has not changed that much except that it now includes Hollywood and the so-called Left Coast. Twain not only showed us what we were but also has some insight into where we were going. A little over a century ago we had a president who came from the Establishment yet took it on. It seems we have the same situation now.

Mark Twain’s America is a good introduction to the man and to his country.

Tom Friend. The Chicken Runs at Midnight. Zondervan, 2019.

Read this book.

Most books we review here we share so readers can make up their minds. In popular fiction, for example, we are fans of Tom Clancy, Alexander McCall Smith, and Gordon Korman. We also understand that not everyone likes technothrillers or detective stories, nor are all readers going to pick up books meant for fifth through ninth graders.

The Chicken Runs at Midnight is for everyone. The reading level is direct and clear. Anyone from sixth grade on up should have no trouble understanding it. Yes, it is about the career of a professional baseball player. But it goes well beyond that.

As I have noted in other entries, I enjoy baseball and am a fan of the Pittsburgh Pirates and Boston Red Sox. From about 1990 to 2004 one of those teams or the other seemed to bring more pain than joy. But we cannot dispense with childhood loyalty for trivial matters.

One of the more heartbreaking moments for Pirates fans was the National League Championship Series of 1992. The Pirates were leading going into the last inning of the last game (ninth inning, game seven, three outs to go), and they let it slip away. And just as the Yankees are the Evil Empire to Red Sox fans, so the winning Atlanta Braves stood for evil things in 1992 (not so much any more since Ted Turner sold the team). It hurt.

One of the men on the Pirates that year was third base coach Rich Donnelly. This is his story. It really is his life story, but one of the climactic moments happens in tandem with that sad loss. I cannot say any more.

I have to admit that I was also intrigued because the author’s last name is Friend. Bob Friend was a pitcher for the Pirates through most of the 1950s and 1960s. He started two games in the 1960 World Series which the Pirates won in a manner that to a Yankee fan might also have been tragic, except for the fact that the Yankees had been winning so many other World Series. I have tried to find out if the two men were related, but have found nothing yet.

Donnelly grew up in Steubenville, Ohio, about thirty miles from Pittsburgh and in the fifties and sixties as much a steel town as Pittsburgh was. Being a native of Pittsburgh myself, I could identify with much of Donnelly’s upbringing.

In Donnelly’s case, though, his father pushed Donnelly and two brothers to be athletes. The father was strict and distant, not unlike a lot of fathers who were world War II veterans. Mr. Donnelly, though, may have been rougher than most. Today he would be considered abusive.

Donnelly himself seemed to find solace in the Catholic Church as he grew up. He married right out of college and, for example, it was a point of pride that he was a virgin on his wedding day.

Much of the book tells of his career in professional baseball. He played for different minor league teams as catcher. The catcher probably has to be more aware of what is going on than any other player, so it is a natural step to a coaching or managing position. Once when still a teenager, Donnelly prayed that he would some day be a third base coach for the Pirates, his favorite team.

In the early nineties, his prayer was answered, and he spent a few years doing precisely that. Through his minor league career he had become friends with Jim Leyland who became the manager of the Pirates during those few years of near greatness.

He would eventually follow Leyland to the Miami Marlins where he was third base coach the first year that the Marlins won the World Series in 1997.

That is the rough background. But Donnelly does not sugarcoat anything. As he got caught up in the macho culture of professional male athletes, he made some bad decisions that eventually broke up his marriage. Clearly, he was not living the life of a Christian, someone who had even once thought of becoming a priest. Unlike most people who rationalize shortcomings and sin, Donnelly is honest and direct. We can all learn from his experiences. That is especially true of those caught up in an alpha-type culture whether it is an athletic team, the brokers of Liar’s Poker, the military, politics, academia, etc.

Of course, during the baseball season, he was traveling much of the time so he was apart from his family, but he apparently does try to keep in touch with his four kids.

I once knew a man who was a career Navy chief and the son of Marine. He admitted that he had no idea how to relate to his daughter when she was growing up. That is pretty much the case with Donnelly. It is not that he was indifferent, he simply did not know how to relate to girls. Much of the story is how he comes to terms with this important relationship.

Without going into too much detail, this is more than just a book about a jock like many biographies or about a professional sports culture like Ball Four. No, this ultimately is the story of a miracle. I can say no more. Stick with it. The title is important. The chicken runs at midnight. It sounds like nonsense, like the kind of thing a random sentence generator would come up with. But it is not.

Read it to find out. You will be glad you did. You will probably get misty as you do.

Auralee Arkinsly. Before Long. Capture Books, 2019.

Before Long is cute. It is subtitled Sheer Romance of Finding a Perfect Home. Let’s just say the subtitle is meant to be an example of verbal irony.

Ernest and Esmé are a couple looking to buy their first home. Their motivation appears to be summed up in the old adage that the grass is always greener in the other fellow’s yard. So we also see them buy their second house, their third house, and so on.

Though meant for adults who are house hunting, Before Long is set up as a young reader’s picture book. It should take less than twenty minutes to read it, and readers should get a few laughs over it.

It is a cliché among Christians of all stripes that if you find a perfect church, don’t join it because then it won’t be perfect any more. Similarly, Ernest and Esmé should be told, “If you find the perfect house, don’t buy it because you will make it imperfect once you move in.”

This would make a nice gift book as a tongue in cheek housewarming gift or as a present to someone who is in the market for a new home. Not deep, not any specific things to look for when you are buying a house, just a lighthearted view of human nature, especially as it relates to habitable real estate.

Mike Maden. Tom Clancy: Enemy Contact. Putnam, 2019.

Enemy Contact continues the tale of the Iron Syndicate, the international crime organization introduced in Line of Sight. There are really two plots in the story, and unlike many Tom Clancy stories, there is no clear overlap of the plots.

First, there is CHIBI, named after the Chi Bi, the Red Cliffs (or Copper Cliffs), a famous Chinese battle recorded in the tale of the Three Kingdoms. It is possibly the bloodiest battle in the history of the world if we assume certain details about the casualties. CHIBI is the screen name for someone who has virtually unlimited access to international intelligence. CHIBI is trying to sell services to the highest bidder and demonstrates its proof of concept to representatives of governments of Iran, Russia, and China.

It is up to cybersecurity expert Gavin Biery and intelligence chief Mary Pat Foley to nail this one down. They create a very clever scenario in the final act.

Then there is plot #2.

A leading Republican senator surprises U. S. President Jack Ryan by voting against a proposed NATO base in Poland. Senator Dixon dismisses any threat from Russia. Dixon is also considering tossing her hat into the ring for the presidency to succeed Ryan when his term expires.

Dixon’s husband and stepson operate an international financial business, and a number of people think her vote may have to do with their affairs. Financial analyst (and trained intelligence operative) Jack Ryan, Jr., is dispatched to Poland to find out what gives.

A Polish agent named Lilliana accompanies him and acts a translator. Ryan thinks this will be a break from spycraft and violence. He figures that it will be a time of interviewing bankers and reading spreadsheets. But this is Jack Ryan, Jr., in a Tom Clancy world—it does not take long for the action to start. Without going into too much detail, the Iron Syndicate does have its hand in things.

Enemy Contact takes us all over the world: Poland, China, Angola, Syria, Peru, Czechia, Libya, Afghanistan, and I am sure I left a few places out. It is typical Clancy fun with cogent observations about law, politics, and human nature.

This reviewer did have one quibble. Remember the T.V. show 24? There was an article in USA Today back when that show was popular that claimed that no one could survive the different injuries that Jack Bauer suffered in a twenty-four-hour period. I confess I was beginning to feel that way about Jack Ryan, Jr., this time. He gets roughed up a lot in this one. I had to willingly suspend a certain amount of disbelief to imagine him surviving as well as he did. Still, Enemy Contact is another exciting novel worth taking a look at.

Tony Horwitz. Spying on the South. Penguin, 2019.

Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic really had an impact on us. We heard that he passed away around the same time his new book came out. It has echoes of the other book because once again he traveled through parts of the United States to get a sense of people’s sentiments.

This time, however, he was not tracking what people thought of the American Civil War. He was literally traveling in the tracks a famous American from Connecticut who “spied” on the South the decade before the war began.

Frederick Law Olmsted was at loose ends through much of his early life until his late thirties when he discovered what became known as landscape architecture. Of course, he is most famous today for designing New York’s Central Park, but he and his partners also had a hand in numerous other parks and estates. But before that, he tried his hand at a number of things.

He came from a wealthy Yankee family, attended Yale, and from 1852 to 1854 traveled through the American South, reporting back in dispatches to Northern newspapers, mostly the New-York Daily Times (later the paper would shed both the hyphen and the Daily). He would eventually compile three books from his notes. They shed a lot of light on the ante-bellum South. Horwitz, then, attempted to follow Olmsted’s routes to see how things had changed, or if they had.

About forty percent of Spying on the South is about Olmsted and his adventures and what he observed. Olmsted was especially interested in how Southerners viewed slavery and abolition. Olmsted himself was a free-soil Democrat, like Hawthorne or Whitman. As he traveled it seems he became more of an abolitionist. He perrceived that slavery was not the benign institution that many rich Southerners claimed it was.

He also noted people, especially in what would become West Virginia and in the Texas Hill Country, who were really opposed to slavery. Olmsted noted that the institution was mainly supported by the wealthy. He also was convinced, as was Frederick Douglass in his autobiography, that the South would be better off economically by freeing the slaves and having everyone work for pay. With everyone working to make a living, there is more diligence and more creativity.

The other sixty percent of the book contains Horwitz’s observations on the current state of the areas he visited in 2016. He started, as did Olmsted, in Baltimore, traveled West through Maryland to West Virginia, then down the Ohio River. He toured the Cumberland River to Nashville, then the Mississippi. Olmsted, naturally, took riverboats down the rivers. Horwitz hitched a ride on a towboat pushing barges on the Ohio, but he did manage to find a replica riverboat for part of the Mississippi tour.

He then went from the Mississippi Delta region to New Orleans and through the bayou areas of Louisiana and East Texas. Like Olmsted, Horwitz spent quite a bit of time in the Texas Hill Country, then eventually went to Eagle Pass and to a few cities south of the Mexican border.

The first part of his travels seems somewhat melancholy. Much of what he describes in the rural Appalachians and the Ohio River Valley are areas that seem to have been passed over. People often work for near minimum wages. Drugs are a big problem. Traditionally Democratic, they feel the party and the federal government in general now despises them. Horwitz reminds us several times of President Obama’s characterization of those who bitterly cling to guns and religion and candidate Clinton speaking of the basket of deplorables in flyover country.

This would contrast later with the descriptions of central Texas around Houston, Austin, and San Antonio. People in these places, except for some in Austin, are equally conservative, but they are prospering. Horwitz does not think Olmsted would approve of the prosperity, though, because the growing population has not taken the natural surroundings into account the way Olmsted would have.

Horwitz devotes quite a bit of time describing his experiences in the Texas Hill Country. Olmsted had discovered that this was largely being settled by recent immigrants from Germany. One town, Sisterdale, caught Horwitz’s attention because it was originally settled by revolutionaries who had escaped the reaction of various European governments after the 1848 revolutions. Many were socialists—people whom Horwitz seemed to identify with.

While there was little to indicate any socialism nowadays among the people he met, many rural Texans were to Horwitz strikingly independent. They do not like anyone telling them what to do. Horwitz attempted to duplicate some of Olmsted’s travels by horse and mule. The mule experience in particular did not go especially well for Horwitz.

At one point someone kiddingly said Horwitz was a Yankee spying on the South. In a sense, that is what he was doing. Horwitz was a successful writer who himself often wrote for the New York Times. He calls himself a secular Jew and a blue-stater. He does note that the more religious people, nearly all Christians, had respect for Jews who observed their religion. In some ways this hearkens back to the America of the 1950s typified in the famous sociological treatise by Will Herberg titled Protestant, Catholic, Jew. Back then nearly every American identified with one of those three. Now, not so much, at least on the coasts.

Though Horwitz’s preferences and politics come through a lot, as he was with Confederates in the Attic, he is pretty evenhanded and mostly lets the people speak for themselves, even those he clearly disagrees with.

There was one recurring image. It seemed whenever he met someone who was left-wing or socialist, they would be listening to NPR (National Public Radio). I confess, I used to listen to NPR more than I do now. I would sometimes listen to the music, but now that Car Talk and Prairie Home Companion have departed, I have little reason to listen much nowadays. Sure, Garrison Keillor sometimes would get political, but he still loved America.

If he did not love America, Horwitz was at least fascinated with it. Most of his travels were during the 2016 elections. It seemed that most of the people he quoted supported Trump, but nearly everyone thought Clinton would win, including Horwitz. By the time he wrote the book, though, Horwitz seems to have at least accepted the fact, unlike certain opponents who started talking impeachment three days after the inauguration. Like most of the people in his book, Horwitz may have been surprised, but he does not come across as a sore loser. He was still a lover.

David O. Stewart. The Babe Ruth Deception. Kensington, 2016.

The Babe Ruth Deception tips it hat to The Great Gatsby as it tells a fictional tale concerning people peripherally involved with the life of Babe Ruth. Some are historical figures like Arnold Rothstein (whom we have taken a look at in a few places and who inspired the character of Gatsby’s shady friend Meyer Wolfsheim), Abe Attell (a champion boxer known as the Little Hebrew who would work for Rothstein), various baseball players and executives, and the Babe himself.

The novel also tips it hat to Gatsby in one of the main plot lines. The young Joshua Cook, son of former baseball player and Negro League official Speed Cook, is in love with a white debutante Violet Fraser. Violet’s father is a New York doctor and her mother is a former actress and now a film and theater producer.

The Cooks and Frasers are friends, but neither set of parents see any possible good coming from an interracial marriage in 1921. In this case, though, Violet is unmarried. She had been dating an eligible Yalie until she is injured and slightly crippled in the 1921 bombing of a Morgan bank branch in the city. This actually further complicates things because Joshua and some of his friends have been associating with some radicals like W.E.B. DuBois. Some authorities suspect these Negro anarchists were behind the bombing of the bank.

We can see, then, how this historical fiction ties in with real historical events and characters. What does this have to do with Babe Ruth?

Mrs. Fraser played a role in the filming of a movie featuring Babe Ruth, which happened to be released the year he shattered the home run record for a season. From all accounts Headin’ Home is not a great film, but the author in an afterword assures us that it is worth checking out because we see a young and fit Bambino, not the overweight and over the hill Ruth in the 1930s film clips most people are familiar with.

The film’s original backers withdrew, and it almost did not get produced until Abe Attell came up with fifty thousand dollars. This is complicated because Attell like his boss Rothstein were implicated in the fixing of the 1919 World Series. Attell was actually indicted but his case was dismissed by a Chicago judge who may have been bribed.

There had been rumors that a few players in the 1918 World Series may also have been bribed. Of course, Ruth played in that series for the Boston Red Sox against the other Chicago team, the Cubs. Now Ruth pitched back then, so he only played in two games and did well. Nobody accused him of being bribed, but one of the men who was permanently banned from baseball because of his role in the 1919 World Series, Eddie Cicotte, claimed that a few Cubs helped throw the 1918 series.

If there could be more of a connection made between Attell or Rothstein and the Babe, it could look bad for baseball. Many baseball historians, probably most notably Ken Burns in his PBS miniseries, credit Ruth with restoring interest in baseball and saving the sport. If he were even indicted or suspected of some kind of connection with gambling and fixing games, it could mean big trouble for him and for the game.

Because the Babe worked with Mrs. Fraser on the film, the Frasers think their friend Mr. Cook may help. In the book, Speed Cook was one of the last black players to play on an integrated professional team as well as being a current Negro League executive. He knows many baseball people of both races, so they seek Cook’s help in trying to see if there is any possible scandal to be associated with Ruth. It turns out that Ruth owes Rothstein some money for a loan but Rothstein refuses to have him pay it off. It seems Rothstein has some kind of hold over Ruth that Ruth will not talk about.

Oh, and Joshua Cook decides, not unlike Jay Gatsby, that if he is going to make decent money to support Violet and impress her parents, he is going to have to go into bootlegging. This is the era of Prohibition. Without going into too much detail, Joshua’s biggest problem is not with the authorities but with rival criminal operations.

A major scene takes place outside of New York City proper at an estate with a wild party. In this case it is at Saratoga, not Long Island, and the party features gambling. There is also a automobile wreck that kills one of the main characters. Perhaps a few more echoes of Gatsby?

This is a lot of fun. We do know that Rothstein was primarily a financier. According the biography reviewed here, he probably had nothing to do with fixing the 1919 World Series directly, but he was likely the only person in the country who could have provided the money to the syndicate that did fix the games.

According to Pietrusza’s biography, he always made sure that people owed him money so he could influence them. He also made sure to take out loans from others so that people would not hurt him. (Pietrusza believes that the mob hit that killed him was a mistake.) That he or Abe Attell would try to hold something on Ruth is believable.

However, if Pietrusza is to be believed, there may be one quibble with The Babe Ruth Deception. The biography notes that Rothstein started his gambling operations when they were still legal in New York. He was able to keep them going after they were outlawed because he had a reputation of not rigging his games and many of his clients were government officials. Yes, the odds were in the house’s favor, as they are in every casino, but his gambling operations were successful precisely because people trusted them. In the novel he may be portrayed in a slightly more sleazy manner. Of course, since most of his operations were in the underworld, we will probably never know for sure.

What is the actual Babe Ruth deception? The Frasers, with some information from Speed Cook, are able to create a scenario that manages to get the Bambino extricated from the clutches of Rothstein and Attell. And they are able to make some money on the side. Readers will get a kick out of its cleverness. If only Jay Gatsby had been a little more clever…

Kenneth Boa and Robert M. Bowman. 20 Compelling Evidences that God Exists. Second ed. Cook, 2005.

This book is exactly what the title suggests. It is broken into twenty chapters, each presenting a piece of evidence that indicates the existence of the God of the Bible is real.

It assumes very little of its readers. The first few chapters discuss questions of truth and reality. That is, the idea that truth exists and is knowable from reality. This does a fairly direct job of dealing with questions of relativism and subjectivity.

Each piece of evidence gets a little more specific: We exist; the universe has a beginning; the universe is remarkably fit for life. Once the reader gets this far, he or she can begin to see where things are going. How did life originate? Is there evidence for intelligent design?

And then it gets interesting. Perhaps the most pivotal chapter is entitled “Evidence of a Fallen World.” This deals with the question of good God, why evil? But it does it in a reasonable way.

I recall in my own life, an atheist friend in college asked me if I really believed in Adam and Eve. At the time I was still searching, but I had found the Bible to be pretty reliable. I told him that I did not know for sure, but the story of the Fall sure explains a lot of things about human nature.

From there it goes on to things that most Christian are pretty familiar with in any persuasive approach: the reliability and accuracy of the Bible, fulfilled prophecies, Jesus’ life and claims, Jesus’ death and resurrection, the witnesses and martyrs, and the uniqueness of Jesus’ claims.

In my own life, what finally pushed from the position of a searcher to born again believer were the remarkable fulfilled prophecies. (In my case, a friend lent me a copy of The Late Great Planet Earth back when that book was a bestseller.)

If a skeptic makes it to chapter eight of 20 Compelling Evidences that God Exists, I suspect he or she will read the rest of the book. As with any such approach, one can make a position crystal clear, but it still takes an individual’s willingness or openness to a new idea or to the working of the Holy Spirit to keep going. It is like what the author of The Ultimate Proof of Creation wrote, “If…we mean an argument that will persuade everyone, then the answer has to be no. The reason is simple: persuasion is subjective.” (11) The authors do style their book 20 Compelling Evidences that God Exists, but we all resist compulsion at different times.

Still, if a person has some intellectual or mental hangups or questions about the Christian God, this book could be effective. For the believer, it is always nice to have a little refresher. I read this book on a Kindle, so I am not exactly sure how many pages it has, but it is a pretty quick read. It is also well documented, so if the reader is a real thinker, he or she can be pointed to plenty of resources to confirm what the book has said or to find out more.

P.S. Amazon says there are 317 pages in the print edition, but probably just a little over 200 are actual text. The rest is notes.

Kazuo Ishiguro. The Buried Giant. Vintage, 2016.

The Buried Giant is a fascinating story. The bulk of the tale focuses on an elderly couple in sixth century Britain, when the Celtic Britons and the Germanic Saxons were vying for authority on the island. It is very rich. It also does not hurt to know a little something about early British history and the King Arthur legend.

Prior to the unification of England into a single country by the Angle Raedwald (c. 606-613), and soon superseded by the more numerous Saxons, the territory that became England was a collection of tribal Britons and six Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Historically, we do not know much about the “real” Arthur (Arturus) who united the Britons, ruling London by A.D. 518 and dying in battle in 538.

There are, then, about two generations of warlords, called kings in Old English, from both Celts and Anglo-Saxons whom we know little about. Ishiguro imagines that life under and after Arthur is relatively peaceful until the Anglo-Saxons rise up against their Briton neighbors towards the end of the century.

Like the Arthur legends and other tales from this time period, there are ogres and monsters on the island. So when the aging Axl and Beatrice, Celts who live in a Saxon village, decide to travel over land to join their son in a different village, they are aware that besides the possibility of thieves or marauding mercenaries, there can be various creatures and enchantments to get in their way.

It is a strange adventure, not as weird as Cacciato’s flight to Paris, but magical nevertheless.

We understand that over the years Axl and Beatrice have developed a great love for each other. Indeed, they could almost be called a British Philemon and Baucis. Axl addresses her as Princess much of the time. Both Axl and Beatrice have a vague idea that some time in the past each spouse was not as faithful one way or another as he or she could be, but it is all very nebulous, and they are confident in their love now.

You see, most of Britain has come under a spell. People all over have forgotten most things that have happened to them. It is as if there is a plague of amnesia. People are aware of the plague, but there seems little they can do about it. A few old-timers say that it is caused by the monster Querig, a dragon that annoys the populace from time to time. They say that the plague will not end until Querig dies or is killed.

In their travels Axl and Beatrice meet a few people who have been trying to kill Querig: a Saxon warrior named Wistan, three orphaned children who try to feed it a poisoned goat, and the elderly Sir Gawain, nephew of King Arthur and one of the few survivors of the Round Table.

There are also untrustworthy boatmen, old families from Roman times, a strange monastery whose monks seem to be divided on a certain crucial truth, and Edwin, a Saxon from Axl and Beatrice’s village who has been exiled because he was bitten by a monster and therefore deemed to be a bearer of a curse.

On one level, it is an adventure not unlike The Hobbit, in which some unlikely people find themselves caught up in a crucial series of events. But at its core, it is something much more.

Is it necessary to forget in order to love? “For I will forgive their iniquities and will remember their sins no more.” (Jeremiah 31:34, Hebrews 8:12) That is part of God’s promise to those who trust Him.

But also we are reminded of the cliché that history is written by the winners. (Tony Horwitz notes that is not always true, e.g. The Lost Cause or Gone with the Wind, but it generally is). Sometimes our historical memory becomes selective.

Yes, we live in an age where every hero is in the process of being cut down. I confess that I am happy to see statues of Jefferson Davis torn down, but let’s not dismiss the writings of Thomas Jefferson or the vision of George Washington simply because they owned slaves. That is fallacious reasoning, a good example of poisoning the well.

Traditionally, King Arthur is a hero. What if he were really just as human as the rest of us? Not gross and uncivilized the way Mark Twain presents him in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, but simply flawed like the rest of us? Does our memory, become selective? How have people dealt with this historically?

The buried giant of the title is neither the giant fox our pilgrims encounter underground, not even the monster Querig, whom they discover in a quarry-like pit, but something else entirely, and much more significant than even The Hobbit’s Smaug. This is great stuff.

Michael Crichton. The Lost World. Ballantine, 1995.

The Lost World is the second novel Michael Crichton wrote about the reconstituted dinosaurs on the fictional island off the coast of Costa Rica. The first was Jurassic Park, where an attempt to monetize the discovery into a traveler’s destination (think the Galapagos Islands) turned into a nightmare.

The Lost World is set five years later, so the tale contains 1994 technology. Two groups of people land on the island at the same time to study the dinosaurs, but they have cross purposes. The dinosaurs have gotten wilder: Nearly all the surviving lizards after the 1989 Jurassic Park disaster are predators. The conflicts are both man vs. man and, more seriously, man vs. beasts. Crichton tells a great story. Readers will enthusiastically keep the pages turning.

There are a few interesting things woven into the story. Young readers or readers who were young once probably recall reading elementary or young adult novels where the protagonists are children who get involved in situations with adults and help solve the mystery or problem in the story.

The tradition perhaps goes back to stories like Treasure Island and Captains Courageous, and one could even make a case for David in the Bible or Telemachus in the Odyssey. Still, in the twentieth century this became a standard. The Hardy Boys solved their mysteries because they somehow always got involved with cases their father, a famous private detective, was working on. Ditto with Nancy Drew whose father was a famous defense attorney. Now thousands of YA books do something similar with their young protagonists.

Even though The Lost World is written for adults (for a chuckle, see what Crichton wrote about Jurassic Park here), kids play an important role. Two middle schoolers who have made connections with a well-known paleontologist get wind of his plans to investigate the Jurassic Park island when he realizes that some dinosaurs have lived on. Except perhaps for a smattering of profanity, this story would be appropriate for an eager YA reader.

They stow themselves away and end up on the island with a small group of adult scientists. Another generation can envy them the way my generation envied Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys for getting involved in a bunch of exciting mysteries. They both contribute to the overall expedition thanks to one’s interest in paleontology and the other’s knowledge of computers.

The Lost World makes some interesting observations about culture. The leading paleontologist notes that the velociraptors—yes, they are still there and just as dangerous as in Jurassic Park—seem to have different behaviors from what the fossil record suggests. Fossils reveal velociraptor nurseries that suggest that the adult dinosaurs fed and nurtured the young ones. On The Lost World island, however, nothing like that has developed, and it is strictly every dino for itself.

Perhaps most intriguing to this reader is that Crichton admits something that many scientists refuse to acknowledge. While Crichton apparently believes in evolution and an old earth, through his characters he notes that there are major disagreements on how evolution works. He even notes that the existence of extinction challenges the theory, and that 150 years after Darwin people disagree on the mechanism or mechanisms which cause evolution.

Indeed, in his afterword, Crichton notes over two dozen scientists whose ideas influenced the book—and these theorists often disagree with one another and present a wide variety of hypotheses. One of the characters in the novel notes that it is next to impossible for random chemicals to spontaneously combine to begin living, but that must have been what happened. He even notes that some people say that life forms came to earth from another planet, but all that does is put off the same question to another location.

One of the characters says that Homo sapiens appeared some time around 70,000 B.C., a fairly common assumption. However, another character challenges that idea because it appears that writing and record keeping only began about six to ten thousand years ago. That would indicate truly sapient humans in the way we understand mankind today. That is true whether one believes in a young earth or a big bang fifteen billion years ago.

I recall the press getting mocking a politician who said something like “in the five thousand years of recorded history.” They accused him for being an “unscientific” creationist. Even big-bangers have to acknowledge that 3,000 B.C. is roughly as far back as recorded history goes. Anything older we infer from archaeology, geology, and fossils, not historical records. Crichton gets it.

The goal of the chief protagonist in The Lost World is to observe how the “new” dinosaurs adapt to their environment and develop their own ways of doing things. From these observations, perhaps we can get some clues as to how they evolved or why they went extinct. Of course, as the lost world becomes too dangerous, we are not going to find out anything this time. All the island’s human visitors are fleeing for their lives.

I was reminded of one of the last things Crichton wrote before he died—his speech and essay entitled “Aliens Cause Global Warming.” Clearly even the title reflects something of his position. Let’s examine the science carefully, he says, before jumping to radical conclusions. The Lost World suggests the same temperate view concerning evolution.

A common concept about evolution that actually began with Darwin writing about the Galapagos Islands is that evolution within a species that hypothetically brings forth new species is more likely to take place in an isolated population. Masses bring uniformity. One of the characters then makes a cautionary observation which in 1994 was prescient. Now we are beginning to see how entities like Facebook, WeChat, Baidu, and Google promote groupthink. He says:

In ten thousand years humans have gone from hunting to farming to cities to cyberspace. Behavior is screaming forward, and it might be nonadaptive. Nobody knows. Although personally, I think cyberspace means the end of our species….

Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an island and they’ll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent and evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behavior. We innovate new behavior to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it becomes impossible. Thirty people, and nothing happens. That’s the effect of mass media—it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps [sic] diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there’s a McDonald’s on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there’s less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity—our most necessary resource? That’s disappearing faster than trees. But we haven’t figured that out, so now we’re planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it’ll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity….

And believe me it’ll be fast. If you map complex systems on a fitness landscape, you find the behavior can move so fast that fitness can drop precipitously. It doesn’t require asteroids or diseases or anything else. It’s just behavior that suddenly emerges and turns out to be fatal to the creatures that do it. (339-340)

The Lost World is more than just entertainment. It raises serious questions, and not just about genetic engineering. Are we up to the challenge?

Kevin Myers and John C. Maxwell. Home Run. Bookish, 2014. Audio CD.

Home Run is subtitled Learn God’s Game Plan for Life and Leadership. This is a very practical teaching series focused on how to develop your life calling God’s way. It teaches mostly by examples from the authors’ lives. Mr. Maxwell mentored Mr. Myers, and both men share in different chapters.

The book gets its title because it emphasizes that there are four steps to truly “scoring” in life. Just as a batter begins at home plate and tries to touch first, second, and third base on the way to home plate to score in Baseball, so the Christ follower needs to take certain steps in a specific order to succeed in God’s Kingdom.

Very simply, home plate is the beginning, that is, faith in God through Jesus. To begin God’s game plan, we must have a faith relationship with him.

First base is personal character. Unless we develop a Spirit-led, Bible-based character, we will not have particular success doing things God’s way.

Second base is our relationship with others. We really cannot go forward in life without good relationships with other people. And, of course, our relationships with others will not develop well without that character that engenders trust in other people. Something I learned in the military and most leaders learn through experience is that we need other people—and, hopefully, they can depend on us.

Third base is our profession, or our calling in life. The problem with many people, Myers and Maxwell note, is that they often try to run from home plate to third base. In baseball, a person who does this is called out. Confusing this priority causes messes in the long run. We note that too many people try to succeed in whatever business they are in without first developing their character or without developing relationships properly. The hard working man who falls out of touch with his wife and children has become a stereotype.

When our character and relationships are reasonably settled, then God will help us develop our faith in whatever calling we are in.

Hopefully, towards the end of our lives, we can look back and be relatively satisfied with our progress if we consider these things in their proper places.

Like Pilgrim’s Progress, there are many Scripture references and examples, and this book in whatever form it takes can be a real life-changer. As with Pilgrim’s Progress, too, we understand that nobody is perfect. Myers and Maxwell learn much from their mistakes. But isn’t that how we often learn? Don’t we all want to focus on what is most important?

In the past, I have given Bob Buess’s book Favor: The Road to Success as a high school graduation gift. That is still a great book. But for some people, especially those who are hard-driven, Home Run may be just the kind of teaching needed to get a sense of God’s direction in life.

P.S. Both authors are preachers, so they have an alliterative device to remember the four steps in their order:
(H) Connect, (1) Character, (2) Community, and (3) Competence, back to (H) Connect. With a Home Run, we are able to get others to connect with us and with God.

P.P.S. One well-known teaching with Myers used is the concept of the triangle with God at the apex and husband and wife at the other two angles. As each spouse (or for that matter, friend or partner or parent or child in other relationships) gets closer to God, they also move closer to one another. It works an improvement even if only one of the two is moving closer to God. The attached illustration from the book is shown with Mr. Myers (Kevin) and his wife Marcia.

I learned this about 25 years ago from a man who mentored my wife and me. It did give me hope and a goal. It made a difference in the way I looked at my marriage, but also how I did my job. Note that if the apex of the triangle is a right triangle, the distance between the two people becomes shorter even if only one of them is trying to get closer to God. Not that I always get things right, but that Jesus’ promise of “Seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you” (Matthew 6:33) really does work.