Jim Baker and Bernard M. Corbett. The Most Memorable Games in Patriots History: An Oral History of a Legendary Team. New York: Bloomsbury, 2012. Print.

A great book that covers the highlights of the history of the New England (né Boston) Patriots. While it focuses on 13 games, the book has plenty of information about what was going on between the acts.

As the subtitle tells us, a good part of this book is oral history. A cast of about fifty players, managers, sports journalists, and others reminisce about the background of the Patriots and about those games. Some of the most interesting stories and perspectives come from the non-players. Patrick Sullivan, long-time Patriots general manager and son of one of the original owners, tells a lot about the origin of the team and of the American Football League in 1960.

The book goes back in time to tell of other professional football franchises in Boston. For example, I had known that the Washington Redskins had started in Boston and had moved to Washington not too long after their founding. I did not know that in 1932 they were originally called the Boston Braves, after the baseball team whose stadium they shared. When the baseball Braves did not renew the stadium contract, they changed their name to the Redskins.

People who follow the Patriots will recognize many of the contributors, story tellers, and teammates they talk about: Gino Capelletti, Babe Parilli, Houston Antwine, Mosi Tatupu, Steve Grogan, Jim Plunkett, and on through modern players–including a few story tellers from other teams. One thing I did not realize–that in 1977 the Patriots lost to the Raiders in a nail-biting playoff game thanks to a misapplied penalty call (the book says the replays were clear that the call was wrong). It puts the 2002 “Tuck Rule” Snow Bowl game versus Oakland in perspective. The mills of the gods grind slowly…

One of the 13 game the book focuses on was the 2002 game which I remember vividly. I was visiting Boston that weekend, and my wife and I realized we would have to spend the night because of the weather. (I had some friends in the suburbs, but it was not great driving weather even for a few miles). I got to see the game on TV in the motel where we were staying just outside of Boston. I seldom get to see NFL games because we do not have the luxury of cable, so I was looking forward to seeing that game–and what a game it was!

One of the men sharing his story is Mark Henderson. No, you won’t find his name on any football trading card. He was the guy who drove the tractor in the 1982 “Snowplow Game.” He cleared the spot for kicker John Smith so he could kick what proved to be the game’s only score in the 3-0 win against Miami. The book is clear to point out that it was a tractor with a brush, not an actual snowplow.

John Smith’s own story is quite interesting, too. He was a British soccer player. As he puts it, “The first game of football I ever saw, I was in. I did not even know what a down was.”

More recent players who contribute their stories include Kevin Faulk, Rodney Harrison, Willie McGinest, Troy Brown, Adam Vinatieri, and Vince Wilfork. Some of the older contributors like Mosi Tatupu have died, so clearly the reminiscences are not all from recent interviews.

The Most Memorable Games in Patriots History also has short chapters that act as statistical and historical sidebars that illuminate the specific games or periods in Patriots’ history: most yards in a game, history of tiebreaker games before 1974, last ties by a franchise, single score games, largest comebacks, most years between playoff victories, etc. etc. Some are Patriots records, but most focus on NFL and AFL records. A few bring in other professional football leagues.

This book is fun for a fan. Yes, some of the stories and a lot of the accounts of other games are about losses like that 1977 playoff game, but that is a factor in any sport. Since the NFL has a lot of parity, it does make certain teams stand out, especially in the Super Bowl era. It is a tribute to a few teams that they can be competitive for a number of years: the Cowboys and Steelers in the 70s, the 49ers in the 80s and early 90s, and perhaps the Patriots since 2001.

N.B.: I am writing this the day after the Patriots’ loss to the Ravens in the 2013 AFC Championship Game. While I do not consider myself superstitious, I have always felt that the sportscaster (and I do not recall who it was) who called the Patriots a dynasty at the end of the 2005 Super Bowl jinxed them. Although they continue to get into the playoffs nearly every year, that was the last time they won it all.

P.S. I was re-reading this in 2021. Clearly, the jinx did not last forever as the Pats have won it all three more times since I originally wrote the above—including a couple of Super Bowls where it looked like maybe their opponent (Seattle and Atlanta) may have been jinxed.

Bonita Gilbert. Building for War: The Epic Saga of the Civilian Contractors and Marines of Wake Island in World War II. Philadelphia: Casemate, 2012. Print.

When I was a boy, I remember my father once getting a new book that he was unusually excited about. My father was a reader and belonged to the Book of the Month Club and the Readers Digest Book Club, so we were always getting new books. But this stood out to me because he was enthusiastically awaiting the publication of this particular book. I am pretty sure he picked it up at a bookstore the day it arrived there.

The book was Wake Island Command written by Commander W. Scott Cunningham, the Commanding Officer of the Naval Air Base on Wake Island at the beginning of World War II. The story of the defense of Wake Island is inspiring. Though Cdr. Cunningham ultimately had to surrender the island, Wake Island held out against a much larger Japanese force for nearly three weeks, diverting Japanese resources needed elsewhere. Wake would rightly be called the Alamo of the Pacific.

However, my father was disappointed with the book. Cdr. Cunningham retold the story that had been recorded a number of times. He included additional information about why the Navy’s rescue force turned back when only a day’s sail from the island and why he believed he had to surrender. But there was—once again—virtually nothing about the civilians on Wake Island. There were about 500 servicemen there, mostly Marines, but there were also nearly 1200 civilian construction workers as well. Dad was hoping to find out more about the fate of the civilians there, but Wake Island Command had very little on them.

You see, my father had a first cousin who was a construction worker on Wake. That young man, Frank Miller, Jr., would eventually be taken to Japan as a prisoner where he died in a slave labor camp on the island of Kyushu. Even twenty years later, very little was written about the men taken captive by the Japanese and forced to work under appalling conditions. These were non-combatant construction workers, but the Japanese treated them even more harshly than most of the military POWs.

Finally, there is a book that tells their story. Bonita Gilbert, daughter and granddaughter of two of the men who worked on Wake Island, has done a lot to put together the story of these workers in her book Building for War.

By most estimates, Wake Island is the most solitary island in the world, six hundred miles to the nearest land (in the Marshall Islands). Gilbert gives some background to the American interest in and claims on the island. The first permanent structure there was a Pan American Airways terminal built in 1936 for the Philippine Clipper flights. It was one of the stops in this famous trans-Pacific air route from San Francisco to Manila. (The first plane to do this run was named China Clipper, but because the war had started in China in 1931, the route never actually went to China.)

The book then explains how the Navy became interested in the island’s strategic location and finally persuaded a reluctant Congress to build a base there. A consortium of contractors including Morrison-Knudsen and Bechtel were hired for construction work on a number of Pacific Islands including Wake, Midway, Johnson, Palmyra, and Oahu. This consortium became known as Contractors, Pacific Naval Air Bases, or CPNAB. We learn a lot more about the history of CPNAB and about a number of the men who ended up working on Wake Island beginning in January 1941.

Running parallel with the story of the construction work and the lives of the men and Marines on Wake Island are political details. We can see how things were leading to war, especially after General Tojo took over the Japanese government in October 1941.

Japanese planes out of the Marshall Islands, which had been given to Japan by treaty after World War I, attacked Wake Island four hours after Pearl Harbor. The attack was recorded at December 8 in the United States because both Wake and Japan are on the other side of the International Date Line from Hawaii, but to the Japanese it was the same day.

Gilbert is a good story teller. She uses many quotations from news sources, letters, and diaries to project what it was really like on this bare coral atoll–wind-blown magnolias and morning-glory vines, no palm trees. We can say now that the story of the Wake Island construction workers has been told.

The book tells a lively and sobering story, and it is told from the perspective of the construction team. While she naturally describes the fighting, she does not reinvent the wheel, so she does not go into great detail on that. Books like Cunningham’s or, especially, Facing Fearful Odds by Gregory Urwin do that in much greater detail.

Although she draws out what she can, she also does not go into great detail about the captivity of the workers under the Japanese, except while they were still on Wake Island. There are individual testimonies and books on POWs that do more of that. Probably the two best readable books on the overall Japanese POW experience of allied prisoners are George Weller’s First into Nagasaki and Gavan Daws’ Prisoners of the Japanese. Both books include testimonies of Wake Island civilian prisoners. Many testimonies and archived documents are available online at The Center for Research–Allied POWs under the Japanese at mansell.com.

Still, Building for War makes a major contribution to the story of the Wake workers. It does mention in passing the smaller groups of CPNAB workers captured on Guam and the Philippines (Cavite). It also presents the most accurate list of the 250 CPNAB employees who died during the war: 34 who died in the attacks on Wake, 4 who died on Wake Island in 1942 (3 executions, 1 natural causes), the 98 executed en masse on the island in 1943, and 114 who died in Japanese slave labor and POW camps.

Unlike some of the “official” records, it does include my father’s cousin. For that reason alone, but mainly for telling the story of the CPNAB workers, my father would have loved to have had a chance to read this book.

James Patterson and David Ellis. Guilty Wives. Boston: Little Brown, 2012. Print.

Hey, this is strictly junk food reading, but who does not like potato chips once in a while? Amazon offered the first twenty chapters of this page-turner (there are some 150 all told) free, and it was enough to get me interested.

Told in the first person, four American wives of American expats (one millionaire, a couple of diplomats) decide to leave their home and diplomatic station in Switzerland for a long weekend in Monte Carlo. Wives only. Girls just wanna have fun.

Our narrator is a 42 year old mother who still looks OK. The ladies have their wild night on a yacht with some men that pick them up. The next morning they wake up to find their hotel is surrounded by a SWAT team, and two men from France that they were with the night before have been murdered.

The story begins in medias res. Our narrator is trying to survive a brutal French prison along with her three other friends. From that point we learn how she got there—the wild weekend and the subsequent trial. Without giving away too much of the plot, one of the victims turns out to be a popular public figure so that the French authorities and most of the French populace are out for blood.

Much of the story is about prison survival and the extremes our narrator had to go to in order to exonerate her friends and herself. Wild plot twists, corrupt officials, sadistic prison guards, false witnesses—how can justice prevail? How can you stop reading? Why would anyone ever want to visit France after reading this book?

Ally Carter. Cross My Heart and Hope to Spy. New York: Hyperion, 2008. Print.
___. Don’t Judge a Girl by her Cover. New York: Hyperion, 2010. Print.
___. Only the Good Spy Young. New York: Hyperion, 2010. Print.
___. Out of Sight, Out of Time. New York: Hyperion, 2012. Print.

These are four out of the five current books in the Gallagher Girls series. Sorry, if I read the first one it was too long ago to discuss it. According to Amazon, there will be seven in the series altogether.

Cross Harry Potter with James Bond, make her a girl, and this is what you’ve got. It is fun if you like spy stories. There is a lot of self-referential humor here—you can probably tell that even from the titles. But like Harry Potter, and unlike Fleming’s Bond, the stories continue and are best read in order.

Cammie Morgan, our narrator, is a high schooler at the Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Girls. Instead of magicians, this school trains spies. They take courses like Nations of the World and Covert Operations (“CoveOps”). The girls have a crush on their “hot” CoveOps teacher. Cammie lives up to her name and is very good at disappearing in plain sight (Cammie/Camouflage…get it?).

In Don’t Judge a Girl by her Cover, our heroine helps her roommate, whose father is running for Vice-President of the USA, from an abduction. As James Bond fought SMERSH and Harry Potter fought Voldemort, so Cammie finds herself in an ongoing conflict with the shadowy Circle. (Think of THRUSH from the Man from UNCLE TV series).

It is complicated, but it is kind of fun. It is also pretty low on the “chick lit” stuff, so guys would get a kick out of it, too.

There has to be at least one and probably two more books in the series. Cammie in the latest book, Out of Sight, Out of Time, is a senior at the Academy, but she is still in school and there are still a lot of loose ends. Once she graduates from high school, she will probably cease to be a Young Adult attraction and will have to go completely undercover.

Manheim, Michael, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Eugene O’Neill. New York: Cambridge UP, 1998. Print.

This is an excellent resource for focused discussions on Eugene O’Neill. It is a collection of 16 articles about America’s foremost playwright. The articles are arranged somewhat chronologically, so they begin with an overview and a discussion of writers who influenced him–notably Strindberg and Ibsen. It then goes from his early plays to his posthumous plays. Like some rock and film stars, death was a career move for O’Neill. The book ends with some thematic essays and detailed bibliographical information.

For the more casual reader, probably the most helpful chapter is “O’Neill on Screen” by Kurt Eisen. Here is a list of most of the productions and recordings made for film and television. As anyone who recalls drama shows from the 50s and 60s like Playhouse 90 or even The Twilight Zone, or anyone who is a fan of BBC and PBS miniseries, Eisen notes that television is often a more suitable medium for a play than a film because a television studio has many of same effects and limitations that a stage does.

The chapter outlining the various stage productions of his plays is not only of historical interest, but might contain ideas for someone directing or producing one of O’Neill’s plays (or, for that matter, other plays with similar themes like many of Tennessee Williams). Somehow, they omitted the 1968 production of A Touch of the Poet by the Lincoln-Sudbury Players…

A few of the focused scholarly pieces are on topics like O’Neill’s treatment of women, blacks, and Irish. O’Neill was one of the first theater people to insist that actors playing black parts were actually African-Americans, rather than “serious” white actors in dark makeup. “A Tale of Possessors Possessed” by Donald Gallup outlines what we know of the scope of O’Neill’s projected family cycle of nine plays based on the history of an American family from the 18th through 20th century. Only one play, A Touch of the Poet, was completed, and a rough draft of More Stately Mansions was preserved. Few people have access to the papers Gallup had access to, so this information would be hard to find elsewhere.

Not all essays are complimentary. Matthew Wikander’s “O’Neill and the Cult of Sincerity” criticizes O’Neill for being shallow and melodramatic. O’Neill might not disagree with the accusation of melodrama in some of his works, but he bled when he wrote. His characters often wore masks, literally in some plays, figuratively in all. Most in O’Neill’s audience would probably understand there was a depth behind the mask. Most audiences are able to pick that up.

For someone doing research on O’Neill, there is an extensive bibliography and notes at the end of each chapter. The last chapter is a detailed, referenced discussion of O’Neill criticism.

There are two chapters devoted mostly to A Long Day’s Journey into Night, generally considered O’Neill’s best work and considered by many (including most of the contributors to The Cambridge Companion to Eugene O’Neill) the best piece of American drama ever. These chapters are well worth it for the appreciation of this beautiful work. Even the demanding T. S. Eliot said, “Long Day’s Journey into Night seems to me one of the most moving plays I have ever seen.” (204) I have never seen it, but I was nearly moved to tears just by reading it a few years ago. To paraphrase Martin Luther, I would think that anyone who was not moved by it should place his hand inside his shirt and check his heart to see if he is still alive.

Virginia Woolf. A Room of One’s Own. 1928. Project Gutenberg Australia. 2007. Web. 30 Oct. 2012.

This was recommended to me by a female colleague a few years ago. I have loved Woolf’s fiction since I read Flush in high school and had a good teacher teach To the Lighthouse in college. A Room of One’s Own is different. It is certainly interesting from a historical perspective, but the Western world has changed so much in the 85 years since she wrote it, that is seems almost medieval.

Much of the first part of this long essay (or collection of related essays) is the most dated. Here Woolf cites writings by numerous men–mostly academics–that show that women are fascinating but that men are far superior to them. It is impossible to imagine any male in an academic situation today writing something like that except possibly in jest. The president of Harvard had to resign for merely wondering why fewer women than men were attracted to math and science majors.

The title of the book comes from Woolf’s observation that there have been few serious women writers in English, and virtually none before the nineteenth century. Since writing seldom pays—Charles Dickens or Tom Clancy today are exceptions—a writer needs an independent source of income and a place away from others where she can write: a room of one’s own. Through most of history, women have had neither of these things.

Woolf also points out that in much poetry and fiction women are treated with great respect: “a person of the utmost importance, very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, and some even greater.” Then she adds, “But this is woman in fiction.”

Perhaps the most moving parts to contemporary reader is her realistic observation that simply most people do not care about literary art. Both Flaubert and Keats, she observes, faced indifference which frustrated them. The problem was compounded in Woolf’s day for women who have to face “not indifference but hostility.” A writer—you?

Woolf also believes that prose fiction is easier to write than drama or poetry. Jane Austen, who apparently did not have a room of her own, could be interrupted while writing prose fiction and not completely lose her train of thought.

One of the other observations that Woolf makes is also quite dated. She writes that since the publishing business is made up of nearly all men, women do not have much of a chance of being accepted as writers. Drawing room romances, she says, are not as important as books on war.

How times have changed! Now most editors, especially those who first see proposals and typescripts are women. Women are the gatekeepers. A recent books for teachers listing books for middle and high schoolers by topic has a brief listing on World War II. There is not a single book about a battle, a general or other soldier, or any political leader of the whole war. A boy or man would say there was nothing about the war at all. The only books listed are a few books about Hiroshima written from the point of view of civilians and a novel about an American girl who fell in love with a German soldier who was a POW in the United States. (The Holocaust was a separate entry). It is almost as if fighting did not exist in the war; that Pearl Harbor, D-Day, North Africa, Stalingrad, Guadalcanal, or any of that ever happened. It is as if Americans decided to test their new bomb on a helpless Japanese city and kidnapped a young German and brought him to America! As a former boy, I’d ask where are the cool books about World War II, whether fiction like The Guns of Navarone or Run Silent, Run Deep or nonfiction like Commando Extraordinary or The Longest Day?

Woolf would be more than satisfied at the way women have taken over the publishing business. Not to mention that no academic who wanted to keep his job would write a word about male-female differences, let alone male superiority!

No, Virginia, times have changed. Women write more fiction than men do now. I am not sure, Virginia, whether you would be terribly impressed with the romances, “chick lit,” or even the self-absorbed “liberated” writings of Jong or Gilbert. Descriptions of subjective, ephemeral emotional rot are no less dry than descriptions of battles. Yes, women have lost their fascination. They are definitely more than equal to men today. Frankly, I would take Rosalind or Desdemona over any one of the sisters of the traveling pants. But what do I know? I’m just a guy.

She says that writers like Kipling are “to a woman incomprehensible.” Could be, but if more young men read Captains Courageous, boys would not be such wimps, and women would admire them more. Ironically she quotes a true male chauvinist of her day who writes “that when children cease to be altogether desirable, women cease to be altogether necessary.” To most men in the Western world that Aristotelian statement is sad and extreme. But today we frequently hear the opposite, that men are valued only as sperm donors (ask Neil Young). Men have become nearly as unnecessary as the children our liberated women abort.

O brave new world, Mrs. Woolf, that has such women in it!

Carl Hoffman. The Lunatic Express. New York: Broadway, 2010. Print.

How do you write exotic tales about the world in modern times? Purchas’ Pilgrimage, Melville’s Typee, even Burton’s or Lawrence’s adventures in Arabia could not be duplicated today. National Geographic has been published for over a century and even has its own cable TV network.

The answer is simple: Do something different and dangerous. In this case Carl Hoffman decides to travel on notoriously risky public transportation around the world: Cuban and Afghan air lines, boats on the Upper Amazon, crammed trains in India and Africa, unlicensed ferries in Bangladesh and Indonesia. Adventures all. In most cases he makes friends with natives who travel in groups and accept him as they look out for him. So we learn about Brazilian teenagers, organized crime in Mumbai, and anarchy in Africa.

These conveyances are dangerous because in order to make money and still be affordable to the common people of those countries they have to take risks. Travel quickly. Overload. Remove extra items that might make things safer or more comfortable. Ignore the stink from the bathrooms or the roaches that come out at night. Ironically, the only conveyance that breaks down beyond immediate repair on his round-the-world journey is the Greyhound bus forty miles from his own home.

Every chapter begins with a news report about a disaster aboard one of those buses, trains, planes, or ferries he uses. But by traveling this way he meets the ordinary citizens of the land. One Bangladesh ferry has a first class section he stumbles onto. It is full of Europeans and Americans who are clean and eating good food. He envies them, but, nearly a year into his travels, he cannot identify with them any more. He has been on the Lunatic Express, as he calls it, too long.

There are some stark contrasts–Mumbai where the population density is over 17,000 per square mile to the Mongolian steppe where it is one for every two square miles; the heat of Africa, India, or Indonesia crammed on trains or boars to the crystal cold of the Trans-Siberian Railroad (technically safe and not really part of the Lunatic Express). But the biggest contrast for him is the sense of place that most of the people he meets have. Though they may have worked in Dubai for years, they still send most of what they earn to a small Indonesian island. They are from a village, a tribe, a neighborhood. They have family, extended family, neighbors, and folks from their hometown that are like family. They belong. And for brief times Hoffman belongs to them.

But then he moves on. What started out as an adventure becomes a kind of nostalgia in the literal sense–“a looking back sickness.” Where does this lone traveler surrounded by masses everywhere fit in? Even, what does it mean to be a father, a spouse, a son. He quotes E. M. Forster, admitting it is a cliche: “Only connect.” Yet, how does he connect?

Postscript. One personal note. Hoffman’s description of such public conveyances is not unlike my experience on a 20 hour trip on the Chinese railroad in the year 2000. People tried out their English on me, the “men’s room” was the doorway at the back of the car, and though it was hard to sleep, I knew I was safe and never alone. Interestingly, Hoffman’s experience on a Chinese train a mere nine years later was different. He was just another foreigner who could not speak the language, and the Chinese he saw were more conscious of sex (four inch heels and European tailored clothes) than I saw even in Shanghai and Beijing less than a decade earlier. If what Hoffman describes is generally true in China today, then perhaps I might become nostalgic, too: nostalgic for a more innocent time when the Chinese saw self-control as a virtue and overt interest in sex a sign of weakness.

Helen Nicolay. The Boys’ Life of Abraham Lincoln. 1906. Gutenberg.org. 21 Sep. 2008. E-book.

I owned a copy of this book when I was a child. I recall reading it, but I cannot say I remembered much specific about it. The copy I owned was the original edition, first published in 1906 but reprinted a number of times in subsequent years. It had been in the family for a long time. I think originally it had belonged either to my grandfather or to a great uncle. I noticed the book’s listing on Gutenberg.org recently and a combination of nostalgia and interest in the Civil War moved me to download it to my e-book reader.

I actually did recall that the book does devote most of its text to Lincoln’s life before he was president. It is primarily a character study with many quotations from Mr. Lincoln, some famous, some less so. The author was the daughter of a man who worked for Lincoln, so she has quotations and stories from many people who knew him.

One quotation I liked: “[I]f in your judgment, you cannot be an honest lawyer, resolve to be honest without being a lawyer. Choose some other occupation rather than…consent to be a knave.” Even in the 1830s lawyers had a certain reputation.

Although the book focuses more on Lincoln’s life than the Civil War, it does describe his role in the war. One of the more pointed quotations from the war describes Lincoln’s frustration at General McClellan’s reluctance to fight. When asked what the Army of the Potomac was, Lincoln replied, “It is McClellan’s bodyguard.”

One of the strongest points of the book is the way it details the differences between Lincoln and Douglas. Indeed, many of the same principles, if not the same issue, are still with us today. It showed how Lincoln was willing to give up his own ambition for principle and for the good of the country. In the 1858 senatorial debates, Lincoln asked Douglas whether citizens of a territory could vote to prohibit slavery before the territory became a state. If Douglas said, “No,” he would please the Southern Democrats, but would deny his own beliefs on states’ rights and lose support of many Northern “free soil” Democrats. If he said, “Yes,” he would lose any national support from the South. Lincoln’s aides warned him that if he asked this question, Douglas would answer, “Yes,” and that would guarantee Douglas would get the senate seat. Lincoln replied presciently that if Douglas answers, “Yes,” he would never be elected president, and that was far more important if slavery were ever to be abolished.

Today this book would be considered a Young Adult book (grades 5 or 6 through 8 or 9). It was called The Boys’ Life because Lincoln was seen by the author and publisher as a male role model. That is still true today, but it surely would have a different title if published today. Girls would find it just as informative and inspiring.

Mark Cahill. One Thing You Can’t Do in Heaven. 5th ed. Rockwall TX: Biblical Discipleship Pub., 2011. Print

So what is the one thing you can’t do in Heaven? Tell others about Jesus. If you are in Heaven, you already know about Him.

So this is a very practical and entertaining book to encourage Christian believers to tell others about Jesus. Chapter titles suggest the book’s approach: “Winning, Winning, Winning,” “Excuses, Excuses,” and “If They’re Breathing, They Need Jesus.”

Cahill argues that telling others about Jesus is a “win-win-win” situation. If they accept Jesus, that is a win. If you give them something they are going to seriously think about, that is a win. Even if they reject your message, that is a win, too because the Bible says you are blessed (see Luke 6:22,23) because they rejected Jesus, too.

Cahill is an experienced evangelist. Stories of his personal experiences of telling others about Jesus comprise a significant part of the book. Most of his stories are not about formal preaching situations, but rather encounters with people in public places like malls, restaurants, and airplanes.

One interesting note for the general reader is that Cahill played on the Auburn University basketball team with future NBA star Charles Barkley. He shares some of his experiences with Barkley, Barkley’s family, and other NBA players. He shares potentially tragic conversation he had with one of them, a man who had a remarkably vivid vision of Hell. In his own words, it was not a dream but the most real thing he had ever seen.

Cahill asked him, “[D]o you know what it takes to get to Heaven?”

The man answered, “Committing my heart and my life to Jesus Christ.”

When Cahill asked him if he were ready to do that, he replied, “No…I like the things of the world more than the things of God.”

Then Cahill asked him, “Do you realize that you will have no excuse when you stand in front of God on Judgment Day?”

He replied, “Yes, I know.”

Sobering.

(Note: If you are skeptical of this experience, ask God to show you the truth about this. If God is real, and you are serious, you can expect an answer in a way that you will understand.)

Cahill emphasizes that sharing Christ with others is like doing many other things, the more you practice, the better you get at it. If you want to learn about doing this or getting better at it, check out One Thing You Can’t Do in Heaven.

Ford Madox Ford. The Good Soldier. 1915. Gutenberg.org. 26 Nov. 2011. E-book.

I bit. The author of the book I recently read and reviewed, How to Read Literature Like a Professor, spoke so highly of The Good Soldier that I had to read it.

Was it worth it? Yes. Very clever and pointed symbolism. Like Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise and Keable’s Simon, Called Peter (a book mentioned in The Great Gatsby), it deals in part with the social interactions of Mainline Protestantism and Catholicism a century ago.

Imagine a Henry James novel written in the first person. The narrator admits he rambles. He seems to spend a lot of time telling us what others told him, yet the reader can ask, “How much of this is hearsay? Why isn’t he more directly involved?”

The protective, behavior-oriented approach of the traditional Catholic Church perhaps keeps people from sin, but it also does their thinking for them. They have “mental health problems.” The Protestants were freer, but more inclined to get trapped into sins they cannot get away with. They are the people with “heart trouble.”

The narration is clever. The narrator tells us pretty early in the book that two of the main characters will die. Much of the novel describes the events that lead to that inevitable outcome. Yet, there is a real twist, a perhaps unforeseen surprise at the end as well.

The narrator is a decent storyteller, but he comes across as a real loser. He is the lone survivor in the story, but he is the person who has done virtually nothing. At first we believe he is a man of action, but he ends up more paralyzed than even the fictional Miles Coverdale, the wimpy narrator of Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance.

Things happen. Psychology is analyzed. Things take time. Ford does echo of Henry James, with his social psychodrama and upper classes, but The Good Soldier has enough symbolism and universal themes that it makes one also think of another James, James Joyce, and some of his Dubliners stories, which also include recurring tales of Protestant-Catholic contrasts and symbols of paralysis.