Jonas Jonasson. The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared. Trans. Rod Bradbury. New York: Hachette, 2009. Print.

The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared is a picaresque romp through the twentieth century. Allan Karlsson feels like a prisoner in the old folks’ home in his small Swedish town. He also may be less than enthusiastic about a birthday party organized by a nursing home director whom he does not like. Before his party begins, Allan does what the title of the book says. And thereby hangs a tale.

Allan wanders around Sweden, teaming up with a former criminal and some current ones, a farmer’s widow who keeps an elephant in her barn, and a few others. Chief Inspector Aronsson is the Javert of the story, trying to track Karlsson down and coming up with some hyperbolic conspiracy theories based in part on his apparent associates.

Unlike Les Miserables, however, when Aronson finally catches up to Karlsson and his coterie, the encounter is hilarious. Anything more would be a spoiler—and anyone who has not read the book would not understand it anyhow.

Paralleling Karlsson’s month’s-long trek through the Swedish countryside is his backstory. In 1918, when he is only thirteen, his father leaves Sweden for revolutionary Russia. His father becomes disillusioned with Communism, but his abandonment of his family has made his son Allan forswear politics for good.

Having nothing to do with politics may have helped Allan Karlsson live to be a hundred, but that does not mean he has nothing to do with politicians. Franco, Stalin, Harry Truman, Charles DeGaulle, Kim Il Sung, and many others appear in the course his long life. His life, then, is the life of the twentieth century.

Like most teens and young men, Allan likes explosions. He becomes a valued employee at a nearby nitroglycerin plan near his home until an experiment goes awry. Then he embarks on what turns out to be an around-the-world journey that covers most of the rest of his life. He is imprisoned in a mental hospital; later he would spend time in the Gulag. But eighty-five to ninety years of his life he is more or less free.

He goes to Spain during the Spanish Civil War, helping the Republicans blow up bridges until they start their purges, so then he helps Franco blow up bridges. He and Franco become friends. Indeed, because of his lack of guile, he is able to make friends will many different types of people.

One of his friends is Albert Einstein’s illegitimate younger brother. (You did not know about him did you?) Allan then gives advice on starting explosions to members of the Manhattan Project. He gets drunk with Vice-President Truman who sees him as a hero who helped end the war, even though he was citizen of a neutral nation.

Through Truman’s connections he ends up in China where he is helping Mme. Chiang Kai-Shek blow up bridges during China’s civil war, but ends up rescuing Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife whom he likes better. Mao is grateful for the rescue of his wife, and Allan participates in a stretch of the Long March.

Civil war is not really for him, so he crosses the Himalayas (not an easy task) to Iran where he is imprisoned and suspected of being a spy. His connection to Truman gets him an audience with Winston Churchill who has come to visit Iran, and so he manages to avoid the executioner.

After returning to Sweden, he is lured aboard a Russian submarine and taken to the Soviet Union. Soviet spies have heard that he was connected with the making of the atom bomb and want him to help them with their own work on one. He meets Stalin and seems to be getting along with him, but no one ever really gets along with Stalin. He and his buddy Herbert Einstein end up in a prison camp near Vladivostok.

They escape, thanks to Allan’s expertise in explosives, to North Korea where they meet Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung while the Korean War is going on. Once again they are preparing to meet a firing squad when Mao visits the Kims and Allan is reunited with his old friend, now the Premier of China.

From there he goes to Indonesia, living a pleasant life on the beach for over a decade. Fluent in many languages by this time, he then goes to Paris because Herbert’s Indonesian wife has become the country’s ambassador to France—just in time for the 1968 street riots. He ends up acting as a translator when Presidents DeGaulle and Johnson meet.

He is peripherally involved in the action in Czechoslovakia when Russia invades, and ends up helping the CIA land a high-ranking Red Army officer as a spy. The officer’s information becomes invaluable during the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks between Nixon and Brezhnev. Oh, and there is something that happens in Lithuania and something else in Djibouti.

Did you anyone realize how much one single Swedish eunuch could affect world events?

The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared is the Twentieth Century in a funny and fractured way—witnessed by someone who has lived through it all. He is apolitical, but he loves explosions. I guess that makes him political after all. The book is a hoot. One certainly could think of it as a funny Forrest Gump or a wider-ranging Brother Where Art Thou odyssey that goes around the world—with maybe some butterfly effect thrown in.

George W. Sarris. Heaven’s Doors. Trumbull CT: GWS, 2017. Print.

Heaven’s Doors is subtitled Wider than You Ever Believed! (exclamation point in the title). The book makes an interesting case for a distinct kind of universalism. The common form of universalism as was seen in the Universalist and Unitarian-Universalist churches of the nineteenth century simply rejected the concept of hell and promoted the idea that “God loves everyone and saves everyone.” In most such cases, Jesus was not seen as divine—after all, Unitarian means “not Trinitarian”—so at best Jesus was a good teacher whose death was a tragedy and whose resurrection is a myth.

The author of Heaven’s Doors is not like that. He is a graduate of a highly-esteemed evangelical seminary. He has long been active in Christian causes. I used to hear him regularly on the local Christian radio station. One of his children served as a missionary in one of the most difficult countries on earth—difficult for both its hostility to the Gospel and its political extremism. The book’s blurb contains brief testimonies (most of them qualified) from respected Christian leaders.

The basic premise of the book is that when Jesus died on the cross, he provided a way so that eventually everyone gets saved. Sarris calls it “ultimate salvation.” In other words, people who go to hell still have a chance to repent later in the afterlife, so eventually every human being will ultimately be saved. (For a different take on this, read C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce).

One could say, then, that in this view hell is a kind of purgatory. For some hardened sinners it may take a long time, but John 3:16 does say, “God so loved the world.” That includes everyone in it.

I confess I was almost immediately made skeptical because the first few chapters try to show that the early church did not believe in an eternal hell. My reaction was “that’s what they all say” whenever someone challenges received orthodoxy: the Mormons, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Unitarians, the Adventists, the Muslims, Isaac Newton (a Bible scholar but an Arian), Hitler, etc. It always seems to be “we are doing it the way it should have been done.” Simply because there may not be too many direct references to an eternal hell in Ante-Nicene writing does not mean that it was not taught. Why does it seem that both testaments of the Bible and early church confessions speak so much of judgment?

It is possible that the author gives himself away when he lauds the early church in Alexandria, Egypt. While there were no doubt many orthodox disciples of Matthew there, it was also the home of Arius. That may be a fallacy, but it does make me wonder.

Still, Heaven’s Doors mostly uses the Bible to make its point. One major point in the book is that the Old Testament does not speak of an eternal hell. That does not seem especially persuasive. As I was reading this book, I was also reading the Psalms, and some of those Psalms are pretty rough on the enemies of God:

“Let them be confounded and troubled forever.” (Psalm 83:17)

“When the wicked spring as the grass and when all the workers of iniquity do flourish; it is they that shall be destroyed for ever.” (Psalm 92:7)

“The wicked shall see it and be grieved; he shall gnash his teeth and melt away.” (Psalm 112:11)

There are many others. Ezekiel 32 describes the heathen as going to the “nether parts” and the pit. The last verse of Isaiah says of the transgressors: “Their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched.” (Isaiah 66:24)

That verse might suggest Gehenna, the Jerusalem dump, a word used in the Gospels as a synonym for eternal hell. Heaven’s Doors takes any reference to Gehenna in the most literal sense that it simply refers to the dump. It is a disgraceful place to get rid of a dead body instead of giving it a proper burial, but there is nothing eternal about it.

The book tries to emphasize that the Greek word in the New Testament translated eternal or everlasting does not mean either of those things. The word is aion or one of its cognates, where we get the English word eon. It does sometimes mean a long period of time or an age. However, it is often understood to mean eternity as well.

According to Bauer, Arndt, and Gingrich’s A Greek Lexicon of the New Testament, even in some of the oldest classical writings like those of Plato, Demosthenes, or Hippocrates, it means eternity. Often when it is used to speak of the age to come or the afterlife, eternity is implied—that is true of both classical and Christian writings.

Vine’s An Expository Dictionary of the New Testament points out that in II Corinthians 4:18 the word eternal (aionios, the adjective form) contrasts with the temporary. This reader is not persuaded that an aion cannot be eternal.

Having said all this, Sarris does point out a difficulty for those who insist that anyone who dies without ever hearing the truth about Jesus automatically goes to hell. This problem is illustrated in “Believing in the American West” when its author writes:

And so the dilemma of the poor souls in Africa and Asia, living and dying and heading off to hell without the opportunity to hear the Christian gospel, weighed heavily on me. If God really had decided to let salvation hinge on the basis of the arbitrary facts of place of birth (a fact that He, in His omnipotence, had determined), then God seemed to be following rather questionable values Himself, showing a pretty tenuous understanding of the concept of fairness. (Limerick 511)

This reminded me of when I was a boy and a Catholic neighbor showed me a picture from her catechism of Limbo, the dark, scary border of hell full of naked, unbaptized babies floating around for eternity. It is not the babies’ fault that they were not baptized.

So when Ezekiel was challenged by some of the Jews over his prophecies, tells them, “You are saying God is not fair.” No, I do not presume to know how God will judge those who have not heard the Gospel, but there is precious little in the Scripture to say God is giving everyone a free pass.

How do we deal with the “God’s not fair” objection?

The first thing is simply that we need to be assured that God is fair. If anything, our interpretation is more likely not to be fair. I wrote recently of a friend who had a near death experience and was on his way to hell. He knew he deserved it, and that was that. Fortunately for him, the doctors revived him and he did eventually repent about a year later.

Jesus tells the parable of the laborers in the vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16) which does suggest that the Lord may accept last-minute conversions. Heaven’s Doors dismisses the story of the rich man and Lazarus as a parable, so it is not anything to base doctrine upon. However, nowhere does the passage in Luke 16:19-31 say this story is a parable or that this is a comparison or analogy. Jesus says directly. “There was a certain rich man…And there was a beggar named Lazarus.” (Luke 16:19-20) It sounds like Jesus is telling a true story. This really happened, and the rich man is now being tormented in flame (Luke 16:24).

I suspect we people have a part to play in all this. Romans 2:1 and some of those passages in Ezekiel suggest we will be judged at least in part by our own standards. Jesus promised that we have the ability to remit and retain sins (see John 20:23). Just as Jesus said in Matthew 12:32 that all sins against Him will be be forgiven, so we have that ability, just as Stephen forgave those who murdered him (see Acts 7:60).

There is a lot we do not know about the afterlife, and God is not revealing some of it. “The secret things belong to the Lord our God.” (Deuteronomy 29:29)

Once I was in a Bible study group that one day was discussing what happens to people when they die. Different people in the group had read different interpretations and theories involving some of the same terms that Heaven’s Doors uses, among others: Sheol, Gehenna, Tartarus, Hades, the Bosom of Abraham, Paradise, Heaven, sleep, annihilation, etc. We decided to pray to see if the Holy Spirit would shed any light on the discussion. The Lord replied that he was not going to answer the question because it would cause more division than illumination among His people.

That may have inadvertently what Heaven’s Doors has done. Most Christians, whether Protestant, Catholic, or Eastern Orthodox do subscribe to a doctrine of eternal hell. Those like the Universalists of old who did not believe in hell or the deity of Christ would no doubt feel Sarris was giving Jesus too much credit. They probably would not like the idea of a temporary hell anyway.

The word essay in its original meaning simply means “attempt.” Heaven’s Doors is an attempt to address an uncomfortable subject. While I am skeptical of the extreme “all unbaptized babies go to Limbo,” this reviewer is equally skeptical of Heavens’ Doors ultimate conclusion in spite of a noble attempt to address a thorny issue.

Arndt, William F., F. Wilbur Gingrich, and Walter Bauer. A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1957. Print.

Limerick, Patricia Nelson. “Believing in the American West.” The Dolphin Reader. Sixth ed. Ed. Douglas Hunt. Boston: Houghton, 2003: 510+. Print.

Vine, W. E. An Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words. Old Tappan NJ: Revell, 1966. Print.

Steven Ujifusa. Barons of the Sea. New York: Simon, 2018. Print.

Living in New England for much of my life, I would occasionally hear rumblings about prominent families who first made a name for themselves in the China Trade. Before the Gilded Age, before the Robber Barons, before even the Golden Spike, there was the China Trade. Barons of the Sea tells us about this.

That Americans could even trade in China before the Civil War was remarkable. China was the “middle kingdom.” It saw itself as set apart and indifferent to the rest of the world. Only two ports on the Pearl River, Canton (Guangzhou) and Hong Kong, were even open to foreign traders at the time. Macao was a Portuguese colony. That was it. The representatives of the trading firms lived in a confined area in Canton known collectively as the Factories.

Among the men—women rarely accompanied the men who sailed to stay there for years at a time—was the young Warren Delano. They would deal mostly in tea. When they were able, they would import opium from Turkey to China. (Ujifusa gives an evenhanded account of the First Opium War.) Here they learned things about sailing that they would apply to ship design. By the 1850s, clipper ships like the Flying Cloud were breaking records when speed from the East Coast to California was critical. Whoever was first with the latest crop of tea, whether to San Francisco, New York, or London, was sure to make more profit than those who came in later.

The name Delano should ring a bell. Warren Delano’s grandson through his daughter Sara would become President of the United States. But the family became well-connected in other ways. While some of the families involved in the China trade and the shipbuilding that went along with it never diversified, the Delanos did not keep all their eggs in one basket. Warren’s investments would keep the family prosperous long after the continental railroad and the steamship made the clipper ships obsolete.

What ships those clippers were! Barons of the Sea goes into some detail describing the various ways the ships were constructed. Some experiments did not work out so well. One enormous clipper caught fire shortly before its launch date. In this book we meet the sea captains, the shipbuilders, and the merchants who all contributed.

Often they were related as well. We learn about Abbot Low who financed many of the China and San Francisco voyages. His brother Charles longed for adventure and became a prominent ship captain. A sometime partner of both the Delanos and Lows was John Forbes, still a well-known name in finance. The niece of one of the financiers would be Hetty Green, herself a famous financier of the Gilded Age.

While this book is the result of much historical research, it reads like a lively novel. That is partly due to the names of some of the characters, to the adventures they experienced, and to the conflicts they endured. Many ships were lost, especially in hurricanes and around Cape Horn. Some survived shipwreck. Some made and lost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and then sometimes made the money back again.

We learn about the design of the ships. What made some ships fast did not always mean that they could carry much cargo. The ships that sailed from Turkey to China tended to be smaller to be faster and avoid notice. There seemed to be no limit to the square yards of sail used on some of the larger vessels to make them catch as much wind as they could.

We also learn about Houqua, a Chinese financier who was willing to risk social isolation at home by working with the foreign devils in the import-export business. Warren Delano considered him his true mentor, and the Delano family still owns a painted portrait of Houqua. Lest it sound exaggerated, even beggars asking them for alms addressed the foreign merchants as fanqui, foreign devils. China was very insular for such a large country. At least when I taught in China in 2000, I was normally referred to as lao wai, “honorable stranger.” (In some contexts it is seen as pejorative, but where I was I observed that addressing someone as lao was always understood as a sign of respect.)

The prosperity of the China traders may have helped contribute to their decline. As the ships got bigger or had more sails, they needed bigger crews, but it was hard to find sailors willing to go on such cruises. Many times the seamen were literally shanghaied out of taverns and brothels. Such characters did not always make great shipmates, and mutiny was often a possibility. So we read about at least one captain who was tried for murder for the treatment of a couple of the men on his ship. Let us just say that he never repented. As we used to say in the Navy and Coast Guard, the ships were wood and the men were steel, not the other way around as they are today.

The author of Barons of the Sea does sometimes resort to nautical terms which many readers may not be familiar with. He very kindly included an appendix with illustrations to show the construction and rigging of the vessels to help the reader. All in all, Barons of the Sea is a stirring treasure, and truly a testimony to how the United States grew prosperous and would become a world power after its Civil War and into the Twentieth Century.

Brandt Legg. The Last Librarian. Laughing Rain, 2015. E-book.

In science fiction, dystopian stories, and even in the Book of Revelation, a world-wide government is bad news. The Last Librarian is no different in that way. The year is 2098 and the Aylantik Coalition has ruled peacefully for over seventy years.

Before the great plague known as the Banoff that along with the concomitant wars has killed over half the people on earth, wars were inevitable. Since then, there have been nearly two generations without wars. The Aylantik Coalition has the appearance of democracy, but most people are mere pawns. There is even a new one-world language, though some people still learn English and other pre-Banoff languages.

Yes, Moore’s law is still in effect, so tiny computers can do even more. Libraries have become obsolete since everyone reads on the Field, the ubiquitous successor to the Internet. Runit Happerman is the head of the last library on earth located in Portland, formerly Oregon, now part of the Pacyfik Region. Word has come down that the Portland Library is to close and its entire book collection destroyed.

Of course, it is complicated. Already the online editions of many books and media have been bowdlerized to conform to the one world government. The Hunger Games is a nutrition text. Catching Fire is a fire safety manual. Other works have more subtle changes. Runit sees that to keep the original works, he must somehow preserve as many of the books as he can.

Runit and author Nelson Wright develop a desperate plan to save as many books as they can before the government agents come to shred and burn the books. The Last Librarian consciously does refer to Fahrenheit 451 a few times.

Social relations are a little like Brave New World because the powers that be use drugs to keep the populace in line. The Premier says, “The economy keeps the peace, and pharmaceuticals make the economy.” (23)

The AOI, Aylantik Office of Intelligence, spies on everyone. The Field plus miniature drones makes this easy. “Peace came at a price,” Runit believes. “Who wouldn’t give up all their privacy in exchange for peace?” (29) Uighurs? Christians? this reviewer asks rhetorically.

The Last Librarian focuses on Runit and the attempt to save 100,000 volumes from destruction. Someone with more money and power joins them with finances and equipment to get it done—maybe. But with the ubiquitous spying, who can be trusted?

This is a very entertaining story. It is also very quotable. Besides original quotations, there are many from books that Runit and Nelson are trying to save.

Since the Field provides instant access to information, there is little emphasis on secondary or higher education. In Runit’s somewhat old-fashioned mind “students were floundering.” (106) There are, however, Tree Runners, young people who like the outdoors enough to camp out and preserve an awareness of nature.

Could something like Aylantik actually happen? It is quite plausible. Read it and see for yourselves.

Edward W. Robertson. Outlaw. Amazon Digital, 2014. E-book.

Outlaw is an entertaining space opera. Jain arrives on an asteroid to conduct some kind of secret business, and she disappears.

Webber works on a pirate spaceship working out of a base near Uranus.

Webber and the crew under Capt. Gomes end up on a search with some others to find out what happened to Jain. It appears that there is a new game-changing travel technology that may have been generated by an alien race that had nearly destroyed earth completely in the past.

Outlaw is a lot of fun. There is a castle occupied by a group of hackers called the Lords of the Realm. Government? It is mostly anarchy except for some interplanetary corporations. The Uranus space station is not unlike America’s wild west.

Webber and the Lords each do their part to discover the truth about the alleged new technology. Are the aliens back? Are there human traitors willing to sell out the human race for this new breakthrough?

There are a couple of space battles that are positively cinematic. Yes, some elements are reminiscent of Star Wars, Ice Pirates, or Starship Troopers, but Robertson writes well and keeps our imaginations active.

Cedric Kanana and Benjamin Fischer. Dying in Islam, Rising in Christ. Nampa ID: Pembroke Street P, 2018. Print.

Dying in Islam, Rising in Christ tells the first-person, true story of a man who converted from Islam. We learn that Cedric’s father founded the mosque in the Rwandan town where they lived. Cedric was raised Muslim, but during the ethnic wars of the nineties in Rwanda, his father divorced his mother because she came from a different tribe. Since Cedric and two sisters were not pure Hutu, he kicked out the whole family.

His divorced mother barely survived. Cedric (Sawdiq was his Muslim name) began to live the life of a street criminal and formed a small gang. One requirement to join was to be Muslim.

Cedric until age eight had received a good education and was able to pass exams to attend a boarding school at age twelve. There he simply formed a new gang. Though the school had a Catholic affiliation, he had no intent to convert. He still wanted to please his father. He even debated Christians about their faith.

The climax of his story involves him dying and meeting three evil spirits who were sent to take him to hell. He learns that Jesus is the only one who can keep him from hell. Conversion to Christianity is not treated lightly by the Muslim community in most countries, and he is almost killed several times for his apostasy afterwards.

In Dying in Islam, Rising in Christ we learn a lot about his culture. The religion is a “folk Islam.” As long as someone confesses that Allah is the chief god and Mohammed is his prophet, that person can believe other things. So both his mother and stepmother performed traditional African witchcraft. This was not seen as contradictory because they had confessed Mohammed as prophet.

We learn how he was able to survive and even provide for his mother by selling drugs. We learn about the simple but harsh Muslim view of divorce. We also learn that the Qur’an is not exactly monotheistic—it mentions three daughters that Allah fathered. (That is the way it was interpreted where he lived.)

Unlike the West, Rwandans understand that there is a spiritual realm. When Cedric is mortally sick, the Western-trained doctor says there is no diagnosis or cure. It is “a thing of Africa.” When he dies, he knows his crimes will send him to hell until Jesus rescues him.

I once had a friend who used to ride with motorcycle gangs. He was in a bike crash that paralyzed him from the waist down. He said that while he was being operated on, he felt a hand grab his ankle to bring him to hell. Like Cedric, he was not scared. He knew he was going to hell, and he knew he deserved it. In his case, the doctors revived him and eventually he became a Christian, too.

Testimonies like this as well as testimonies of heaven, can help us redirect our thinking two ways: What is really important? What is really true?

Disclosure of Material: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher through the BookCrash book review program, which requires an honest, though not necessarily positive, review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s CFR Title 16, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

Carl Hiaasen. Squirm. New York: Knopf, 2018. Print.

Squirm is the latest young adult novel from Carl Hiaasen. Hiaasen also writes for adults, but I think I have read just his YA books. They are fun—second only to Gordon Korman.

Like Hiaasen’s other works, Squirm is set in Florida; at least, it begins there. Thirteen-year-old Billy Dickens lives with his mother and high school senior sister Belinda.

Their father has been way out of the picture for years. He lives in Montana, and they have not heard from him since Billy’s parents divorced nine years ago. His mother gets a generous child support check from him every month, but there is no communication.

His family moves every two years or so; as a result, Billy finds it hard to make friends and is kind of a loner. He loves to spend time outdoors, and he loves snakes, hence the book’s title. At the school in Fort Pierce where they now live he is known as Snake Boy.

When a school bully—as in Korman’s Supergifted, the bully is a Lacrosse player—starts stealing stuff from Billy’s locker, he puts a snake in the locker. End of problem. Indeed, his reputation and experience as a snake handler help him out with bully types several times.

Things really get going when Billy manages to reconnect with his father and travel to Montana. Mr. Dickens is living with his new wife, a Crow Indian who leads fishing trips in canoes, and her daughter, Summer. When they observe Billy’s way with snakes, they call him in Indian fashion Billy Big Stick.

Mr. Dickens has a very mysterious job. He is sometimes gone for a week or two at a time. His family knows that he flies sophisticated drones, but he says that his work is a secret and he cannot tell anyone what he does or where he goes.

To give more away would be to spoil it. Let us just say that Mr. Dickens’ work actually takes him to Florida where he is tracking a bad guy. Billy and Summer are able to help. There are numerous surprises and plot twists. The action seldom slows down.

At the same time, there is plenty of the good-natured humor Hiaasen is known for. For example, when his father is listening to an oldies station as they are riding in his pickup truck, Billy observes:

Oldies but goodies. It’s way better than being trapped in a moving vehicle with Belinda, which means nonstop Taylor Swift. Not even Taylor swift’s mother listens to as much Taylor Swift as my sister does. (128)

You will have fun Squirm-ing.

Owen Johnson. The Salamander. 1914; Amazon Digital Services, 2011. E-book.

Fans of F. Scott Fitzgerald and people researching his Jazz Age stories will be interested in The Salamander. A recent review here noted how a friend said that all Fitzgerald’s female characters are based on his wife Zelda.

Zelda, in turn, was influenced by The Salamander. While we are not sure if she read the book, a film version came out in 1916 which she saw multiple times and admitted that it portrayed the kind of person that she wanted to be. Scott himself would acknowledge that Owen Johnson wrote about his generation as well as anyone.

The salamander (i.e., the sylph) in this story is Doré (née Florence) Baxter. The story, witnessed from her point of view, tells of the many wealthy men she is able to string along as this Ohio girl tries to succeed in New York City. She has acted in a few plays—a producer friend sees great potential in her—but she mostly uses her beauty and charm to get what she wants (e.g., furs and jewelry) from her wealthy beaux.

It gets complicated trying to juggle relationships among approximately a dozen men. It appears that the two men she finds most attractive may make things more complicated. One older man in his forties (she is twenty-two) is a respected judge, married but no children. The other is a reckless young heir who likes to live dangerously. I wonder if the wild automobile ride he takes her on inspired Scott and Zelda’s The Cruise of the Rolling Junk.

Doré, nicknamed Dodo (a nickname Zelda would use for Scott), really is quite clever. She may be shallow, but she is no fool, and she is looking to have fun. There is tension: She is worldly enough that she bears some skepticism when it comes to love, but at the same time she understands that finding love is a desirable thing.

There is certain amount of humor and irony in The Salamander as we encounter the young movers and shakers in the New York of the early twentieth century. Among her boyfriends are a newspaper editor and a shrewd Wall Streeter. These two men see each other as rivals. The editor writes nasty articles about alleged ethical breaches of the tycoon, who in turn tries to put the editor into bankruptcy.

While Doré’s background is more like Jay Gatsby’s, she will remind readers of Daisy Buchanan, Gloria Patch, or Rosalind Connage. The plot is character-driven and does not have the literary quality of The Great Gatsby, but if the reader wants to see a precursor to those Fitzgerald divas and perhaps even to Zelda herself, read The Salamander.

The brief epilogue reminded this reader of Judith Jones, the femme fatale in Fitzgerald’s short story “Winter Dreams.” Not only did Scott Fitzgerald admire Owen Johnson, but Doré’s last words in the novel may well express Zelda’s own view of herself. Perhaps for that reason alone we might want to check out the work of Mr. Johnson.

P.S. For an articulate review on the connection between The Salamander and Zelda Fitzgerald see “The Salamander: Zelda Fitzgerald and the Invention of the Flapper.”

David Herzog. Glory Invasion: Walking Under an Open Heaven. Shippensburg PA: Destiny Image, 2007. E-book.

Glory Invasion is a book of Christian teaching interspersed with testimonies as examples to illustrate. It contains a brief preface by Sid Roth and another by Mahesh Chavda. Endorsement by two such figures tell this reader that this book should not be lightly dismissed.

The basic premise of teaching is very simple. Romans 10:9-10 tells us that if we acknowledge Jesus is Lord and believe God raised Him from the dead, we shall be saved. So we are told that Jesus’ disciples received the Holy Spirit when they saw Jesus after He rose from the dead. (See John 20:21-23)

It has also been typical Holiness, Pentecostal, and Charismatic teaching that Acts chapters 1 and 2 show us that beyond this the disciples would receive power to be Christ’s witnesses “when the Holy Spirit is come upon you.” (Acts 1:8) This is commonly taught in churches around the world.

Herzog notes a third step, if you will. In the fourth chapter of Acts, the disciples pray for God to manifest His glory for healings and miracles. (See Acts 4:30) So he emphasizes that most Christians need to seek and pray for God’s glory to come down so the believer can, as the subtitle suggests, “walk under an open heaven.”

Glory Invasion stresses that this is not merely a matter of God sovereignly pouring out His Spirit. So Herzog writes that “Most of us are stuck in Acts 2.”

There are testimonies and Bible teachings that support this idea. He notes the various miracles performed by Elijah and Elisha as well as the apostles. It includes a discussion of miracles from a perspective of science, perhaps slightly updating C. S. Lewis’s Miracles because we know a little more about physics than we did in Lewis’s day.

Herzog observes that so often we do not ask for things. Even for something as simple as dreams he writes, “I receive more dreams when I ask Him for them than when I don’t. Ask and you shall receive.” (569, see Matthew 7:7-8)

He states that God’s glory “only comes through intimacy with Him, a close relationship, and times of waiting on the Lord.” (642)

He pints out that Acts 4 also says that no one in the early church lacked any necessity (Acts 4:34). Providing for those in need means “sowing.”

After you have been faithful to sow sacrificially and then purposely reap what you sowed, you can enter the next dimension of reaping where you did not sow. (891)

Glory Invasion also reminds us of what Jesus says about the Holy Spirit. We know when the wind blows even when we do not see it. It is the same when the Holy Spirit is moving. (See John 3:8)

Like many evangelicals, Herzog emphasizes the importance of supporting Israel. He see the restoration of a Jewish state in the Jews’ original homeland as a fulfillment of Bible prophecy. This is in line with traditional Christian teaching that such a restoration and a large-scale conversion of Jews to Jesus followers is a sign of history’s end. (Think even of secular works like Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” or Philip Roth’s “The Conversion of the Jews.”)

There is more here. Now that we have read it, let us begin to act on it. Be not afraid. Amen.

Jasper Fforde. The Eyre Affair. New York: Viking, 2002. Print.

After reading and enjoying The Fourth Bear, I saw that Fforde had written some other novels with characters from classic tales. Since I have taught Jane Eyre for years, I decided to read The Eyre Affair.

I confess that while reading through much of the novel, I was becoming disappointed. It had many rabbit trails and seemingly useless details. While it did have numerous allusions, they did not seem to be as funny or as clever as those in The Fourth Bear.

Having said all that, and anticipating writing a lukewarm review, the last four chapters made the slog through the first thirty or so worth it. The climax was great. It was nearly original. It made me laugh. It brought tears to my eyes. Yes, reader, I enjoyed it, after all.

The Eyre Affair is set in an alternate Great Britain of 1985. Wales has been independent since the middle of the nineteenth century. Its nominal ruler is Owain Glyndwr VII (Owen Glendower to Shakespeare fans). In the twentieth century, a dictator by the name of Ulyanov (Lenin’s actual family name) has turned it into the People’s Republic of Wales.

This has complicated relations with England because the Crimean War is still going on 131 years later. Like the Medieval Hundred Years’ War, there is not always fighting going on, but hostilities between Britain and Russia persist.

If Wales has become an Iron Curtain country, England represents crony capitalism at its worst. The Goliath Corporation is really the shadow government. If Goliath does not support it, it does not get done. Goliath has its hand in most businesses and even has its own security forces that often tell government forces what to do.

Protagonist and narrator Thursday Next is a member of British Special Operations, SpecOps, or just SO. There are thirty divisions of SpecOps, with a hierarchy beginning at SO-1 (the top) down to SO-30. SO-20 and below are classified. Thursday works in SO-27, the Literary Detective Division, LiteraTec for short.

LiteraTecs track down literary crimes such as bogus manuscripts and changes to literary works. An ongoing investigation involves the authorship of the Shakespeare plays. Here we meet Baconians, Marlovians, and Oxonians. Fforde’s “solution” to the problem is straight out of Heinlein—or maybe Mark Twain. (Some folks take Twain too seriously, missing the point that his essay supporting Francis Bacon as the author of the plays is a satire.)

This can become serious, though, because in this version of England, time travel is possible. Thursday’s father is SO-12 or ChronoGuard. He appears for minutes at a time as he travels in the past and future to insure that history is not altered too much. Even though missions of SO-20 and below are classified, Miss Next knows what SO-12 does because of her father and his lifestyle.

Some of the problems, then, that LiteraTecs investigate involve people who have traveled in the past to alter works of literature.

A bigger problem is that it is possible for people to travel into works of literature directly and affect them. Next has an aunt who gets trapped for a while in the Lake Country by a field of daffodils with a flirtatious William Wordsworth.

The nemesis of LiteraTec is Acheron Hades, a person with unexplained superpowers. Even his name suggests evil. He has stolen the original manuscript of Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit from a museum. This is serious, because if he alters the original, then the stories in all editions change as well. Hades does not like the book. He has already deleted one character from it, and is thinking of deleting Mr. Chuzzlewit himself if his demands are not met.

Not only do LiteraTecs get involved, but so do agents of the Goliath Corporation including a guy by the name of Jack Schitt, who lives up to his name. Goliath does not like Hades, but they are not too fond of SO-27, either.

One reason that the book rambles for a long while is that the author had to set up his alternate world.

Although Jane Eyre is hinted at early when Next discovers a handkerchief with the initials EFR (Edward de Fairfax Rochester), the real Jane Eyre action does not begin until about two thirds or three quarters of the way through the novel.

Without going into too much detail, the novel Jane Eyre in this world has the same first person narrative that we know until Jane leaves Rochester after the wedding is canceled. In this alternate world, Jane marries St. John Rivers and accompanies him to India.

Thursday’s Uncle Mycroft Next has come up with a more efficient way of traveling into texts that Hades wants to use for his own nefarious purposes and that the Goliath people want to exploit to make money. Mycroft’s method involves bookworms.

Oh, and a Japanese tour guide has found a portal that takes her to Millcote and Thornfield so she leads tours to these places. She assiduously avoids Jane Eyre herself so that she does not appear in her narratives.

Fforde has been compared to Douglas Adams. With the time travel and literary investigations, The Eyre Affair seems to have been inspired by Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. Indeed one plot complication in the novel is solved in a manner similar to the way Dirk Gently solves the mystery of the visitor from Porlock in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.”

Even though at that point I said to myself, That’s just like Douglas Adams, that was also around the time the story started getting good. It all comes together in the end.

Obviously, it helps to have read some Shakespeare and Charlotte Bronte. There is one hilarious scene of an audience participation version of Richard III. If anyone has ever attended a Sound of Music singalong or some version of the Rocky Horror Show, this is like those things.

Yes, the slog has lighter moments to keep the reader going, and occasionally when a literary figure or fictional character appears in the real world [air quotes], it is a reminder that The Eyre Affair is ultimately worth the time.

Reader, she married him [grin].