Chris Smith. The Lord of the Rings: Weapons and Warfare. New York: Harper, 2003. Print.

The Lord of the Rings: Weapons and Warfare is a picture book that would appeal to fans of The Lord of the Rings. Using photos and storyboard drawings from the film, Smith puts together a nice overview of the battles and weapons of Middle Earth.

For the Rings aficionado, the book details (or in some cases, imagines) early Middle Earth history and the evolution of warfare in and among the various kingdoms. It clearly depends on The Silmarillion and The Hobbit along with the trilogy. It also makes us appreciate the thought and imagination that went into outfitting all the various armies and factions in the films. (This was before The Hobbit films.) Each group and many individuals had distinctive weapons and armor. The book is arranged topically with plenty of pictures, but lots of text as well.

We see the armor and weapons of groups such as the Riders of Rohan, the Uruk-hai, the Nazgûl, and various groups of Elves. There are also pages devoted to individuals such as Aragorn, Saruman, Elrond, and the Balrog. In addition, we get accounts of nearly every significant battle in the known history of Middle Earth.

Looking over a lifetime as a student and a teacher, it seems like interest in Tolkien peaks in alternating decades. In the sixties his books swept through America. I noted many students reading his books in the eighties as well. The twenty-oughts, of course, had the great films. (We’ll pretend the dud from the seventies never happened.)

This may be an off-decade for Tolkien—indeed, The Lord of the Rings: Weapons and Warfare is over ten years old—but it should be fun for anyone interested in Middle Earth and the imagination that it takes to bring such a mythos to life. Many of my students over the years have enjoyed the Greek and Roman myths we read, especially Ovid, Vergil, and the Homeric Epics. Yet most films based on these stories are so-so at best. Perhaps the reason is simply that no one has put the thought into The Odyssey, for example, as the makers of The Lord of the Rings films did. Peter Jackson, would you like an idea for a new film?

Cammie McGovern. Chester and Gus. New York: Harper, 2017. Print.

Chester is a Labrador Retriever who flunked service dog school for a reason that most dogs would—he hid at loud noises. Most dog owners have dogs that hate thunderstorms. However, Chester otherwise excelled in his training so much that his trainer Penney thought she could teach him to “read” flash cards.

Meanwhile, Gus is an eight-year-old autistic boy who seems to understand what is going on around him but who does not speak and retreats from people for no apparent reason. Chester and Gus tells the story about how they were brought together and how Chester was able to serve Gus, if not as a guide dog, at least as a therapy dog.

What sets the book apart is that it is told from Chester’s point of view. This is endearing. Most of us understand that dogs are naturally pack animals and tend to be oriented toward others. So Chester aims to please Penney and then tries, often in frustration, to relate to Gus.

Besides Gus’s behavior, there are other obstacles to overcome. Chester runs away at a loud noise at a Halloween “Fright Night” event. Gus loves scary things. Penney thinks she can train Chester to “read” like Koko the Gorilla that got a lot of publicity in the eighties.

Gus’s parents try to enroll him in school with Chester to assist. Gus seems to be improving, but kids who act differently are often magnets for bullies. One teacher thinks Chester is an unnecessary distraction and is able to get the administration to send Chester home.

And always there is Gus’s behavior.

Chester and Gus is sensitive and moving. We are told that the author is the mother of an autistic child, so she is writing with acute awareness. The book could be considered late elementary or YA reading level, and is well worth sharing—especially with any family or school kids who have to share their home or classroom with an autistic child. We have already recommended it for our school library.

Matthew West. The Pirates. Boston: New Word City, 2015. E-book.

The last time I read a book that was a survey about pirates that was not a picture book or about a professional baseball team was probably in college (a LONG time ago) when I read Exquemelin. Matthew West’s The Pirates is a great, light overview of the Golden Age of Piracy (roughly 1690-1720) when most of the sailors known as pirates today flourished. (The infamous Barbary pirates were more like privateers and naval raiders. They represented their North African governments.)

Well, flourished is not exactly the right word. Many disappeared, apparently returning to less unsavory professions under assumed names or perhaps lost at sea. Others died horrible deaths at the hands of the Royal Navy or the courts. And if the testimony of Captain Kidd is to be believed, the courts were not always exactly fair.

Interestingly enough, one of West’s primary sources is none other than Daniel Defoe. He wrote a fiction book, Captain Singleton, about a pirate, but in 1724 he published a nonfiction tome entitled A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates and a sequel in 1728.

Besides being a writer and editor, Defoe was also involved in the shipping business, and interviewed many sailors and consulted court records to write his pirate books, which were very popular at the time.

West tells us that there were two main areas where English pirates flourished, the Caribbean Sea and the Indian Ocean. Both places had rich convoys of merchant vessels and remote islands with little government. So Blackbeard (a.k.a. Edward Teach, né Drummond) mostly sailed the Caribbean and Carolinas, while Captain Kidd was mostly in the Indian Ocean.

Chapters are devoted to some of the main characters and their associates as well as the beginnings and lifestyles of pirates. We learn that Kidd was probably unjustly accused of piracy. He had letters from the British government authorizing his vessels as privateers against the French. However, he got some powerful politicians back home upset at him and, if we accept the record, he was tried by a kangaroo court in England. Kidd, by the way, did bury some of his treasure, but all indications are that the authorities recovered it and it went to the King’s Exchequer.

We learn how Nassau in the Bahamas was practically deserted when an ex-pirate decided to rebuild it and make a go of it as a legitimate British colony, and how he and his greatly outnumbered people managed to beat back a Spanish attack.

Besides Captain Kidd, one of the most interesting characters is Blackbeard. West tells us that “Blackbeard was a master of psychology, who consciously managed his larger than life personality to suit the peculiar conditions of his chosen profession.” (1264) It is hard to exaggerate both his physical appearance and the manner which he intimidated most people.

Far and away the most successful pirate was Bartholomew Roberts, a.k.a. Black Bart. He truly roamed the seas far and wide. He attacked ports and vessels from Newfoundland to Brazil and along both the Indian and Atlantic coasts of Africa. To put things in perspective, though, his career of piracy lasted four years. That was longer than most pirates survived the trade, but hardly a lifespan. In those four years he captured 400 vessels and looted a number of ports as well. He had had experience as a line officer in the British Navy, so he knew more about sailing and about naval warfare than most of the other men who thought the pirates’ life was for them.

In addition to these well-known names, we learn about Woodes Rogers, another former naval officer and privateer. He sailed closer to Antarctica than nearly anyone at the time and rescued Alexander Selkirk who had been marooned for four years on an island off the coast of Chile. Selkirk is widely, and probably accurately, seen as the inspiration for Robinson Crusoe.

(As an aside, while there were other marooned and shipwrecked men whom Defoe would have known about and possibly even interviewed, Robinson Crusoe the novel has one giveaway that Defoe relied on Selkirk’s story. The novel tells us that Crusoe occasionally saw penguins on his island. Of course, there are no penguins in the Caribbean where Crusoe was shipwrecked, but they are not uncommon along the shores of southern Chile where Selkirk was.)

One captain of a ship in Rogers’ South American privateering expedition was named Simon Hatley. Hatley’s ship was captured by the Spanish, and he was held by them for three years. He would later say that the difficulties with his ship began when he shot an albatross that had been following his vessel. This is told in more detail in The Road to Xanadu, but we know that Coleridge was familiar with this story and the superstition related to it.

Pirates were often treated well by local governments that appreciated their contributions to the local economy. More remote trading posts like some in the Caribbean and Africa often traded with pirates because there was no other governing or colonial body around. One such trader in what today is Guinea was a man by the name of Benjamin Gun, who became the inspiration for Stevenson’s Ben Gunn in Treasure Island.

The Pirates deals with the English pirates alone. Yes, there were Spanish and French pirates as well (L’Ollonais comes to mind immediately), but West focuses on the English ones. He notes well:

The Golden Age [of pirates] lasted barely thirty years, yet this brief flowering of villany on the high seas left a permanent mark on the Western psyche. For all their impropriety, pirates appeal to something deep in our souls. Their legacy, begun centuries ago, continues to capture our imagination with the lure of the far horizon, the promise of a different tomorrow, and, as ever, riches. (1758-1762)

The Vietnam Reader. Ed. Stewart O’Nan. New York: Doubleday, 1998. Print.

I do not review every book I read. Some because they are not worth reviewing, and some because I feel that I have nothing to add to the discussion. I have looked over and read large portions of The Vietnam Reader, but I decided that I did have a little to add to the discussion.

This is a large anthology (724 pages) that does cover the American writings related to the war pretty well. It is arranged somewhat chronologically. There are songs, poems, articles, short stories, and selections from books, both fiction and nonfiction.

While it does have an excerpt from Robin Moore’s The Green Berets, it focuses on the protest literature. The introductions to each section are well thought out and helpful. O’Nan’s observations on some of the stereotypes speak volumes. Except for discussions of the films about the war, nearly everything included was written by a veteran or journalist involved in the war.

The editor notes that these are all American writers because that is how he limited his anthology. There are no Vietnamese, Korean, Chinese, or Australian writers here. It would be appropriate for a college level class looking over the literature of the war. O’Nan put it together because there was nothing like it for a class he wanted to teach. He has done a good job.

There are numerous selections from Tim O’Brien. Songs range from Barry Sadler’s “Green Berets” to Country Joe and the Fish’s “I Feel Like I’m Fixing to Die Rag.” The selection from Bloods was very moving. A poem called “Christmas” may be one of the most effective. It is written from the point of view of a Hessian mercenary at Trenton: It makes us see the American soldiers like the Hessians of the Revolution, outsiders inserted into someone else’s war.

Except that it wasn’t. The French were interested in our War for Independence. So Russia and China were interested in Indochina, and the United States got involved as well. As Tom Lehrer would say, “Who’s next.”

I really appreciated O’Nan’s brief reviews of the main films about the war. He notes that there was a lot of stereotyping and a lot of inaccuracies in most of them. The most glaring omission is that he does not even mention The Hanoi Hilton. I recall reading back in the eighties that veterans of the war thought that film was the most realistic. However, it was spiked by the press. Hardly anyone reviewed it, so few theaters showed it. It was spiked for political reasons because it did not fit the left-wing worldview of most of the media at the time. Alas, it appears that O’Nan spiked it, too. He did not even name it in his list of “other films.”

I appreciated what he wrote about Apocalypse Now. It is visually effective and a stunning story. I have shown it to my classes, but not my American Literature classes. I show it during my British Literature classes when we study Heart of Darkness. It is truly not so much about the Vietnam War but a retelling of the Conrad novel.

The other surprising omission is anything by Robert Olen Butler. He was a veteran of the war as well, and his stuff is some of the best story telling to come out of the war. Some of his short stories are perfect tales. He was a naval supply officer who had studied the Vietnamese language, not a “grunt” like most of the authors included. His writings have been some of the few by Americans who wrote about Vietnamese as much as Americans. The only thing I can imagine is that either Butler or his publisher did not give O’Nan permission to include any of his work in the anthology.

Still, if one were using The Vietnam Reader for a class on the war, it would be easy enough to supplement it with the missing film and works by Butler. It would probably get some students interested in reading the entire books such as Bloods, Dear America, The Green Berets, or any of the O’Brien books.

This may not be as thorough a review as some other books reviewed here, but I felt I could add a few comments to the discussion. Why did all the elites hate The Hanoi Hilton so much when the veterans called it the best?

Bao Ninh. The Sorrow of War. Trans. Phan Thanh Hao. Ed. Frank Palmas. New York: Pantheon, 1993. Print.

With the exception of those by Robert Olen Butler, few of the books about the Vietnam War written by Americans say much about the Vietnamese. The Sorrow of War was written by a veteran of the North Vietnamese Army (NVA). Ninh, a Hanoi native, was in the NVA from 1969 to the war’s end in 1975. From the regiment of 500 men that he originally was assigned to, only ten men including him survived the war.

This alone reminds the reader that from the Vietnamese perspective this was a civil war. To hear about units with casualties like those, Americans have to go back their own Civil War. Ninh’s description of Hamburger Hill very closely resembles Spotsylvania Court House in the description of its casualties.

First, let me share some impressions from the novel. It is well known that military people in America at the time of Vietnam were not generally treated well. There were no parades. Men going out in public in uniform were frequently reviled, called baby killers and pigs. It was almost assumed that war veterans were PTSD wackos or strung out on drugs.

According to Ninh, surprisingly, it was not much different for NVA veterans. Like American veterans, they tended to keep to themselves and had a hard time re-integrating into society. Ninh writes of the expectation of some kind of peaceful realm governed by a benevolent ideology when the war ends, but that did not appear. Though not a major part of The Sorrow of War, we are reminded that two years after Saigon fell to the NVA, it was fighting the Khmer Rouge and the Chinese, both supposedly Communist brothers of the Hanoi regime.

Kien, the main character, represents the everyman veteran. He survives the entire war. Having just turned seventeen in 1965, he boards a troop train to take him to basic training. The train is attacked by bombers on the first day of American bombing raids. He is present in Saigon on April 30, 1975, the last day of the fighting.

Like the war episodes in arguably the best American Vietnam War novel, Going After Cacciato by Tim O’Brien, the many episodes of The Sorrow of War are presented in a disjointed manner. Each episode lasts from half a page to perhaps five or six pages at the most. There are no chapter divisions. The novel truly does progress, but not in a linear or chronological manner. Gradually, the whole picture is revealed, glimpses of the full ten years of fighting.

It is no spoiler to say that our soldier Kien wrote this typescript and then abandoned it. A neighbor found it while cleaning out his apartment after he moved on about ten years after the war. The pages were not numbered, we are told, and in disarray, perhaps like Kien’s memories. Still, the reader sees that the stories are not randomly arranged, but they emerge like chords or pages in a symphony to form a vivid whole.

Although soldiers and sailors from the countryside might call men from the city like Kien “bourgeois,” the only truly believing Communist we meet in the novel is Kien’s mother. As she adopts the Marxist ideology, she becomes more distant and eventually leaves Kien’s father. Kien cannot relate to her at all. So perhaps Communism gave birth to modern Vietnam, but ultimately socialist theory cannot relate to the ordinary citizens of the land.

One of the first sorrows of war that we see is simply that the old way of life is gone. Kien was happy in prewar Hanoi. It was a lovely, fairly sophisticated city. He had friends. He enjoyed school. Postwar Hanoi is different. It is beaten down, full of mistrust. Most of his friends are gone or so damaged by the war that he becomes more detached. He sounds like one of Hemingway’s veterans: “We were all a little detached.”

The great sorrow is, of course, the war itself. We read about so many people that Kien knows dying that like Kien we become indifferent. And Kien does his share of killing others. Some of his victims might have been appealing friends in another life.

At one point his patrol comes across a prospering farm in the countryside. The farmer and his wife treat the men hospitably, sharing coffee and a meal with them. One of Kien’s fellow soldiers says that he grew up in a similar location, but his family was impoverished. Another soldier says that is because this peasant farm they are passing through has not been turned into a commune. After the war, he suggests, it will be as poor as every other farm.

The most poignant of the sorrows is that Kien recognizes that many different people, fellow soldiers and even a female scout, gave their lives to save his. Good soldiers to “have each others’ backs,” but Kien has somehow survived. Sometimes he was smarter, but sometimes he was just luckier.

Another sorrow is the rapine. If Kien is to be believed, it seems that North Vietnamese soldiers and sailors would rape any woman they could, even if she was from the North. We begin to understand that the women were as affected and as damaged by the war as the men were.

A doomed love story weaves its way through the novel as well. Kien has to survive ten years of war before he is reunited with his “soul mate,” Phuong. Their chaste, tender, and optimistic relationship before the war is naïve and dreamlike. After the war they each have changed too much, and though they try to make a go of marriage, Phuong eventually leaves.

From the beginning Kien remembers a number of places like Hamburger Hill where many people were killed. He and his platoon mates believe such places are full of ghosts. They even burn incense and pray to placate them and ask for their help. It seems hardly the materialistic philosophy of Marxism to do that! Ah, but we recognize that the war survivors like Kien and Phuong have become ghosts themselves, spirits wandering through the streets of the cities and the bypaths of the villages of North and South alike.

William Conescu. Being Written. New York: Harper, 2008. E-book.

A few years ago a fellow Advanced Placement Test reader told me about this book. I finally had a chance to check it out. Being Written is metafiction or magical realism in the vein of Tim O’Brien, only there is no war. Instead of an army patrol, this concerns a group of oversexed millennials navigating their relationships. Though perhaps not as moving as The Art of Fielding, Being Written is clever in one respect. The main character, Daniel, tells us that he is a character in a book that someone else is writing. Whenever something is about to happen to him, he hears the scratching of a pencil on paper.

Daniel is trying to win the love of Delia, a girl whom he meets in a bar and has a one-night stand with. We begin to see that Daniel may be something of loser, but it appears that Delia’s current live-in boyfriend may be more of a loser. That young man earns a living as a homosexual prostitute. As with The Art of Fielding, I could not help thinking of Tim Buckley’s song that says:

Godless and sexless directionless loons…

Exactly two-thirds of the way through the story (67% on my Kindle) a very surprising turn of events takes place. There are no spoilers here, but maybe a hint. Daniel suddenly shouts out, “Chekhov!” He paraphrases the Russian playwright: “If a gun shows up in the first act, it has to go off by the end of the story.” (1865)

Most of the story is told from Daniel’s point of view with occasional chapters from others’: Delia; Graham, her boyfriend; Monty, a co-worker of Daniel and family friend of Delia; and Jon, the token gay. Daniel is worried that he will be a minor character in the book, maybe like J. Alfred Prufrock:

No! I am no Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt an easy tool…

No, he does not become a mere minor character, though one could argue he is a superficial character. They all are.

To really understand the book, I recommend that the reader consider a true minor character in this story, one who does appear to merely swell a scene—the Broadway lady. She is a mentally disturbed lady who sings Broadway tunes in the subway station that Daniel frequents .

Alas, like many of the novels I have read coming from the author’s generation, there are some explicit and even degrading sex scenes. For that reason, this book is not for everyone.

Daniel Defoe. Robinson Crusoe: Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe with his Vision of the Angelic World. 1720; 1903; Google Books. 3 May 2017. E-book. [References are Kindle locations].

I have taught Robinson Crusoe for years. Some time ago in order to add to my knowledge of the novel, I read its sequel, The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. In the past year I discovered that Daniel Defoe actually wrote a third book by Mr. Crusoe. Robinson Crusoe: Serious Reflections is different. It is not a novel at all, but a collection of essays which Crusoe supposedly wrote reflecting on his life and experiences.

Keep in mind that Defoe made his living much of his life as an editor and wrote many essays and editorials himself. He ended up in jail at least twice because the British government did not like what he had written. The essays in Serious Reflections are similar in style and approach to those of Addison, Steele, Johnson, and other eighteenth century contemporaries. The sentences may be longer and more complex than what we normally read today, but his language and logic are easy to follow.

The preface begins by Crusoe emphatically stating that his life story “while allegorical is also historical.” If some people think that he has made it up, he reminds us that “Even the miracles of the blessed Savior of the world suffered scorn and contempt.” (63)

The first chapter may be of most interest to students of literature and of Robinson Crusoe. Here “Crusoe” reflects on solitude. While he notes things from a Christian rather than pantheistic point of view, his reflections are very similar to those that Thoreau would write in Walden about 130 years later.

Solitude, he notes, is partly a mental state. He can achieve a state of solitude similar to that on his island even in London “…if the mind be confined, if the soul be truly master of itself, all is safe…” (170) How like Thoreau! Like Thoreau he notes that “The abstaining from evil, therefore, depends not only and wholly upon limiting or confining the man’s actions, but upon the man’s limiting and confining his desires.” (198) Again, this is similar to Walden’s praise of self-control.

He notes, as many others have, that while good company is best, “no company is better than bad company.” (207) He also questions whether monastic separation is necessary. He says that when St. Paul was dealing with his “thorn in the flesh,” he did not retreat, he prayed. God’s answer, “‘My grace is sufficient for thee’—sufficient without the help of artificial mortification.” (289 cf. II Corinthians 12:7-9)

In his novel when passing through a mountain wilderness, Crusoe jokes that he was more concerned about the two-legged variety of wolf than those with four legs. So his next chapter is on honesty.

Looking back on the end of his first novel, Crusoe expresses gratitude for the people who treated him and his property with honesty after he was cut off from human society for twenty-eight years. Similarly, he helped a Brazilian friend who was in a financial pinch. Yes, we need each other.

“Crusoe” observes that the truly honest man acknowledges his mistakes, just as Crusoe did in his tales. At the same time he notes that “every man thinks himself and proclaims himself an honest man.” (452) So who truly is honest?

The author devotes quite a few pages discussing cunning and claims that the New Englander is even more cunning than the Scot. He meant that as an insult, but I have known “Yankees” who would accept such an accusation with pride.

While discussing honesty, he makes a solid case for a reform that he hoped to see in England. It came about, but Defoe was a century and a half too early. The reform? Abolishing debtors’ prisons. He even has a Bible text to support his position.

He also uses an analogy similar to the shopkeeper’s debtor story in Pilgrim’s Progress. If a man moves to a new country and lives honestly there but has outstanding debts in his old country, true honesty would compel him to pay off those debts as well.

To a truly honest man, his word is his most valuable possession. There is a lot of wisdom in these pages. Defoe notes that “virtue is its own reward.” (843) Similarly, a truly honest man also cares about the reputation of others because he is aware of “his own frailty.” (881)

The next chapter is entitled “Of the Immorality of Conversation and Vulgar Errors of Behavior.” Crusoe said that he observed a greater coarseness in England after being away from his homeland for twenty-eight years. Western morality today is not unlike that of early 18th Century England—including her American colonies—before the Great Awakening. Crusoe writes more with concern than with self-righteousness. He repeatedly acknowledges the need for God’s grace.

Going on in the vein of virtue being its own reward, he remarks that vices seldom live to an old age. As a Whig, he acknowledges that to make laws against some vices like drinking and blaspheming is “as fruitless as making a shelter against the lightning.” (1187) So many have engaged in these things that there would be as many trespasses as there are minutes in a day.

He tells us that it was very much “the mode” among the “beaux” to “set up for atheists” and to have “committed witty in the defense of it…” (1192) No, Mr. Crusoe, things have not changed that much. Bartholomew Fair in the 1600s, atheist clubs in the 1700s, and communistic judges in the 2100s. The more things change…

Defoe notes that Augustine observed that the Romans of his day were immoral because they were imitating their immoral gods. So today, people justify their actions because even their leaders do the same things. As Chaucer wrote, “If the gold rust, what shall the iron do?”

When reflecting that moral degeneracy in the Western world goes hand in hand with atheism, he observes that even polytheists and abject heathen have some fear of a Creator or Prime Mover, a fear that many people of his day lacked. Yes, Mr. Defoe, things really have not changed that much.

Serious Reflections is pretty good at asking atheists some tough questions. Towards the end of the book, he even has a dialogue between a student of the Bible and an atheist that could have come from the pen of John Bunyan. “Crusoe” claims it really happened.

There is a chapter “On the Present State of Religion in the World.” This chapter is interesting to read as an historical document. There is a dialogue between Crusoe and an old man about the necessity for the Gospel to be carried universally. That was a message in Robinson Crusoe—ex-cannibal Friday made a better Christian than many civilized Westerners—and here Defoe extends that idea.

He does propose one thing that might have partly worked 300 years ago to some degree: That Christian countries conquer pagan lands to at least destroy false gods. Doing that might get them away from the distractions of idolatry and turn to the true God. The most one can say is that it was tried in the 18th and 19th Centuries some, but a state religion is not the same as a heart religion. Still, Crusoe argues that while Christianity in a culture may not always have a saving influence, it does have a civilizing influence.

I personally bear witness to that. When I was in college, I had two conversations each with a friend in the same week. One was a born-again Christian and the other was meditating Buddhist. I was interested in what they both had to say. They each invited me to join them in meetings that happened to meet at the same time. As I reflected on the two invitations, I considered history. There was little that I could see that Buddhism had done for the people in the oriental nations that practiced it, except maybe for the monarchs and warlords. Whereas Christianity, especially since the Reformation, had transformed the West and the world. Although it would take three more years before I was born again myself, I was on the way to meeting Defoe’s God, not the idols of the East.

Other chapters include “On Listening to the Voice of Providence” and “Of the Proportion Between Christians and the Pagan.” The first presents very practical advice about “listening” to the voice of conscience. The second carries forward points made on the chapter on the state of religion.

The appendix is entitled “A Vision of the Angelic World” where Crusoe presents what he purports to be a view of angels and demons warring in the world. This is hardly sensational and seems to rest primarily on what the Bible teaches. It is a stark reminder, again, of what Thoreau wrote in Walden, that “our whole life is startlingly moral.”

At one point Defoe seems to have forgotten he is in character and speaks on himself and Crusoe as separate people. Other than that, Defoe is writing on behalf of Crusoe. Serious Reflections can help us appreciate the Crusoe novels more and even provide some commentary on them.

Florence Osmund. Regarding Anna. FlorenceOsmund.com, 2015. E-book.

I am pretty sure I had heard about Regarding Anna somewhere, and when BookBub was offering it at a discount, I decided to give it a try. This is pure escapist fun. We care about our narrator Grace Lindroth whose parents died in a weird home accident. She was their only child, and as she is going through their belongings, she discovers a number of photos and other memorabilia that seem to suggest that she was adopted — something that her parents never told her.

The Anna of the title is one Anna Vargas, a native of Mexico who settled in Chicago and herself died in unusual circumstances about half a year after Grace was born. Grace is a young private investigator, really just learning the ropes, but she had majored in law enforcement in college. Her biggest investigation, then, is her own. Yes, she does title searches and other kinds of legwork and investigates suspected marital infidelity. But will she discover her own past? Will she really want to find out what happened?

There are numerous complications. The boarding house where Anna lived and died is now owned by a cranky old lady who wants to know nothing about the home’s previous tenants. Grace shares an office with an immigration attorney of questionable ethics until he kicks her out. And one of her new clients is an orphan, just six months older than Grace who wants to find out more about her birth mother, one Rosa Lindroth — who sounds a lot like Grace’s assumed-to-be-real but possibly adoptive mother.

There are a number of other interesting characters: the handyman who was in love with Anna back in the day, the Marilyn Monroe lookalike legal assistant, and the mysterious Esmeralda, who seems to want to talk and then want to run away.

The people in the past like Grace’s parents and several of the boarders at Anna’s boarding house who are now dead also are very curious people. And then there are secret rooms in more than one house and a hidden attic that may contain secrets from the past as well. Oh yeah, there is money involved, and some people who have spent time in prison for various crimes. And the solution of the mystery itself is very clever and even original.

Osmund does not take us quite into the Chicago rackets, but we get a taste of Chicago in 1964 and 1943 as young Grace learns a lot — yes, about her past, but also about the PI business, and about other people. Why do we do the things we do anyhow?

Stephanie Powell Watts. No One Is Coming to Save Us. New York: Harper, 2017. Print.

I picked this recent release up because a pre-publication review said there were conscious connections with The Great Gatsby, a novel that I often teach. It does that, but in a more subtle way. It is not a retelling of the story like An Authentic Derivative, nor is it rooted in the Gatsby mythos like The Double Bind. This is a tale about the poorer rural South, not the sporty South of Daisy Fay Buchanan and Jordan Baker.

The lives of most of the characters are sad—not tragic, just pathetic. All but one are blacks who got off to a poor start because of segregation, but that was long enough ago that many of the people only know about it because of what the old people remember. If there is any external factor affecting them, it is the gradual silencing of the furniture factories in the area.

Still, we readers sense that they have no one to blame but themselves. Drink and drugs tempt most of them. Each character has extramarital relations. About halfway through the book it was beginning to feel as if Peyton Place had relocated to the town of Pinewood in the North Carolina Piedmont.

Ava learns that not only has her husband Harry been cheating on her, but his white girlfriend has had a son by him—and Ava cannot keep a pregnancy for more than eight weeks. But Ava had been sleeping around before she got married and may be having a fling with J.J. Ferguson. Ava’s mother Sylvia knows that her own husband Don has a mistress that is over a decade younger than his daughter. But Sylvia had been the mistress of an older married man herself, and Ava suspects her of having an affair with an old friend Jimmy Martin.

There are a number of other similar things thrown in. I was just saying to myself, Why can’t anyone keep their pants on?

In spite of those things, Watts writes well and finds some tenderness in all the characters. Sylvia and Don live apart but seem to enjoy the occasions they get together. Henry is a loser, but he wants to do right by both Ava and his son. Ava does have a college education and a good job at the local Wells Fargo. (This book is very recent; we are reminded that it used to be a Wachovia).

Into all of this comes J.J. Ferguson, or as he prefers to be called now, Jay. Jay had a crush on Ava when they were in high school. His family were complete down-and-outers. Both he and his sister moved away a long time ago to start new lives. Jay has returned to Pinewood after twenty years and built a mansion in the hills that looks over the town. From his porch he can see the green roof of Ava’s house. He tells Sylvia that he can recapture the past. Yeah, he’s a Gatsby.

Although J.J. is on everyone’s minds at different times—a poor hometown boy who has struck it rich—he only appears in perhaps five or ten percent of the story. The book is really about Sylvia and Ava.

J.J. does offer Ava a way out, but ultimately she won’t take his proposal any more than Daisy ended up with Gatsby. (And we really have no idea how J.J. made his money. At least Fitzgerald drops a few hints about Gatsby’s “bond business.”)

Watts writes well. Even when the characters are doing something stupid, and usually they are, we understand their motives and rationalizations. Chapter 36 is a curiosity. It is two pages describing the closing of Simmy’s, a greasy burger joint that used to be segregated and finally closes fifty years after integration. Simmy’s perhaps symbolizes the fate of the town of Pinewood, but the curious thing about the chapter is that it is the only part of the novel (364 pages) that is written in the first person. Who is this speaking?

The book does end on an upbeat note. Ava makes a decision that seems somewhat noble and is acting conscientiously concerning it. This Jay, unlike Mr. Gatsby, does not die, though he still inhabits a dream world. If there is a message in No One Is Coming to Save Us, it is the stereotypical feminist one: Women do not need men. Though Bernard Tanner makes a case that the “son of God” Gatsby is a Christ figure, J.J. in Pinewood is not going to save anyone.

Yes, we can blame most of the men in this tale for being losers or being unfaithful, but the women are not that different. How wonderful if the men could love the women (Ephesians 5:25) and the women respect the men (Ephesians 5:22 MESSAGE)! I think I read somewhere that that was God’s plan. But what if, as the title tells us, you really believe there is no savior? Watts would echo that old country song: “Even a bad love is better than no love.”

John Nielsen. Condor: To the Brink and Back. New York: Harper, 2009. E-book.

I have only visited the State of California twice in my life. The first time I drove there in 1976. I was a birder, but knew little about birds outside of the Northeast. I had with me a copy of the Zim and Robbins guidebook. It was not as good as the Peterson’s, but it had birds all across North America, not just the East like Peterson. I also brought a copy of Carl Koford’s book The California Condor, on the outside chance that I might see one of those monstrous rarities.

Koford laid out, as of 1953 when the book was published, where the Condor might be seen in California, including some pretty reliable spots. I spent a few days with a great uncle in Santa Barbara, next headed for San Francisco. However, I took an inland route hoping perhaps to spot a Condor while it was still possible to see one in the wild.

As I was poking along a highway somewhere near Cuyama and New Cuyama, I saw bird soaring in the distance over the coastal range to the west. I watched it with my binoculars in the distance for about 45 minutes. I think it flapped its wings once the whole time. “Praise the Lord,” I said to myself. It was a Condor. I had seen one free-flying in the wild before its extinction.

Nielsen’s Condor tells us that a lot has happened since then. The birds are not extinct, Indeed, there are a lot more individuals alive now than in 1976 (200 or more compared to fewer than 30). The story of their decline and survival is what Nielsen shares.

The bird with a ten-foot wingspan, the largest land bird in North America, was a holdover from an earlier era when mastodons, giant bears, and ground sloths roamed North America. There were even larger condors then and possibly even pterosaurs. Observers noted in the nineteenth century that the Condors often fed on whale carcasses. They were scavengers, but their size meant they had been more abundant when larger animal carcasses were also more abundant.

Nielsen notes that the Condor’s population problems started when the first humans settled in North America. They hunted many of the large mammals to extinction. They also often killed Condors. Indians prized their feathers and skins. Cattle ranchers and sheep herders would blame them for killing their livestock. By the beginning of the twentieth century a bird that had once ranged from New York to Florida and British Columbia to Baja California now was confined to two mountain ranges in one state and the plains between.

Nielsen tells the story of how a number of different organizations and government agencies worked together to preserve the bird. There were rivalries and some strong disagreements. Some believed they were best left alone, they just needed protected land. Others spoke of captive breeding programs—though the book does not mention them, such programs seemed to be working for other threatened and endangered species of birds like the Whooping Crane, Peregrine, and Trumpeter Swan. The book does name the Peregrine Fund as one of the non-profits that supported the captive breeding program.

Eventually things got so bad that by 1987 the last of the wild Condors had been captured and sent to one of two locations affiliated with the Los Angeles and San Diego Zoos. Nearly 200 of these extra-large vultures were hatched in captivity. In 1996 some were released in the Grand Canyon area, an area where there was fairly recent fossil evidence that they had once lived and bred. By 2001 some were released in their more recent California range.

Mistakes were made, but it appears the Condor breeders have learned from their mistakes. There are dramatic and humorous stories about those observing Condors or looking for their eggs. They mostly nest in caves in cliffs, so to get close, one has to be an agile rock climber and at least an amateur spelunker. There is a whole chapter devoted to Carl Koford, the author of the book that I brought with me on my cross-country trip.

The main problem for Condors today appears to be lead poisoning. The birds eat carcasses that have been shot and not claimed or, perhaps, killed and used for target practice. It does appear, though, they have a fighting chance. In my home state lead shot is now largely regulated, and steel shot is required in most cases.

Even though they are scavengers, they are fighters. too. Like other birds of prey, they are rough with their little ones. Besides man, their main enemies are Ravens which try to eat their eggs and Golden Eagles which sometimes try to attack them. Patient field observers have detailed struggles between Condors and Eagles which seem to go down to the wire.

Another interesting character besides Koford is Sanford “Sandy” Wilbur, a naturalist with the Fish and Wildlife Service. He was a born-again Christian who saw preserving the Condor as a calling from God. I note him because this belies the idea that was propagated in the 1970s that Christians do not care for the environment because they are too heavenly-minded. I had an acquaintance who had been on the board of National Audubon who himself was a born-again Christian. I asked him about that observation which I read in their magazine. He shook his head with a sad smile: “The campus radicals have taken over.”

Nielsen also notes the role that the Condor plays in the folklore of some of the native California tribes. According to the Wyot tribe of Humboldt County, Condor and his sister survived a world-wide flood in a basket and then begot the human race. The Mono tribe of Madera County said that it was the Condor himself who caused a world-wide flood. It does seem that stories about a world-wide flood are truly world wide!

It is possible now to see California Condors in California and Arizona, maybe Utah, too. Every one of them now has a satellite transmitter so people can keep track of them. According to American Birding Association rules they are not yet “countable.” Introduced or re-introduced species have to have survived in a location for twenty-five years to count them. That means that if you see one near the Grand Canyon in 2021 or in California in 2026, they can be counted once again.

May they live long and prosper.