Book Reviews

Summary: How we tell stories matters to how we see the world.

Just a little over a year ago Dick Gregory passed away. Defining Moments in Black History was his last book. Dick Gregory was most well known as a comedian. His comedy albums in the 1960s and 1970s as well as his comedy tours and TV appearances made him nationally known. But Gregory was also a political activist. He ran for Chicago mayor against Richard J Daley in 1967. He was signficantly involved in the Civil Rights movement.

And as you hear throughout this book, he was at or participated in or knew personally many of the people or events that he is talking about.

I have no idea how to really talk about this book. Much of it is just standard recounting of the parts of history that are routinely ignored or white washed. But other parts are just crazy town conspiracy theories. I think that is part of what Gregory is known for. What is hard to talk about is that not all of the conspiracy theories he is talking about are simply theories. Plots against MLK by the FBI are not conspiracy theories. Cointelpro and the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment are not conspiracy theories.

And then there are the parts that may have some validity, but are unlikely. Coretta Scott King and many others believe that there was a broader conspiracy to kill Martin Luther King Jr. From what I can tell, there is circumstantial evidence, but not definitive proof that the FBI, the Memphis Police or other government agencies played a role in MLK’s assassination. But there is enough evidence for the discussion.

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Takeaway: Well-crafted stories are a joy!

The Scroll is the fifth book in the series. Discussing the book without giving away some spoilers from earlier books is impossible. So, if you have not read the earlier books, you may want to stop and read my reviews (in order) of The Six, The Oracle, The White Thread, and The Enchanted.

Part of what I like about good fiction, and this series is a great example of good fiction, is that there is more than surface-level meaning. Real ideas are being discussed. Hoyle is a Christian, but this is not being written as “Christian fiction” in the sense of pat answers and veiled presentations of the gospel. However, Tolkien wrote Christian fiction, with well-written, complex stories that present the world well but are influenced by the Christianity of the author.

The most obvious top-level idea in the book, which is likely influenced by Christianity, is the prophecy. The Six were called Alitheia. Almost as soon as they arrived, they learned of the prophecy that they were thought to be the fulfillment of. That prophecy included the marriage of Darcy (from our world) to Tellius (then Prince, now King Alitheia). As young teens, neither Tellius nor Darcy were interested in marriage or being told who they had to marry. The Christian concept of election and God’s action in the world through prophecy has a long and complicated history. But as Darcy and Tellius are around one another over a couple of books, they realize they actually love one another. They do want to get married. And even if it was foretold, they have made the choice on their own as part of who they are.

In the first book, Darcy is tricked and captured by Tselloch, the bad guy of the series. Tselloch is from a third world, not Earth or Alitheia. He is trying to control Earth and Alitheia by building gateways between the world and gaining control. Humans can give themselves over to Tselloch and become Tsellochim. After months of torture, Darcy had decided to give herself over and touch Tselloch, but was rescued at the last second. However, in the immediate seconds before rescue, she did touch Tscelloch, and that touch, normally enough for her to have become a Tsellochim instantly, has haunted her since. Most people become Tsellochim immediately, but Darcy has spent the next four books feeling effects as the touch crawls up her arm, but not fully being given over to the change.

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Summary: “A lot of people want to skip ahead to the finish line of racial harmony. Past all this unpleasantness to a place where all wounds are healed and the past is laid to rest.” (Page 140)

Race can be difficult to talk about clearly. Many Whites are reluctant to talk about race because they do not want to accidentally say something offensive. Many minorities are reluctant to talk about race because they are tired of the conversations that do not seem to actually get anywhere. In So You Want to Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo steps into the gap with a primer on race discussions.

With each new book I read, I have a tendency to say, ‘this is the best so far’. This is in part a bias toward newness. But I think it is also my tendency to see where each new book I read brings something slightly different and unique to the discussion.

So You Want to Talk About Race is very straight forward. The first chapter defines race. The second chapter talks about what racism is. The third chapter talks about why we should talk about race and the fear of doing it wrong (short version, if you want a real relationship, you have to talk about real issues.) Each of the chapters cover a fairly narrow topic and build on the previous topic. Privilege, intersectionality, police brutality, affirmative action, school to prison pipeline, the ‘N’ word, cultural appropriation, hair, microaggressions, anger, the myth of the model minority, I got called a racist, etc round out the book.

There are a lot of books on race. And very few of them would not be helpful to at least someone. One of the benefits of a wide variety of books from a wide variety of authors is that they can target particular audiences and bring different perspectives to show that there is not a single perspective on race and racism.

So You Want to Talk About Race has one of the better treatments on intersectionality. There is a lot of misunderstanding about what intersectionality is. A recent blog post I read suggested that intersectionality is a competition to see who is most oppressed, the winner gets to tell everyone else that their opinions do not matter. That, of course, is a ridiculous misunderstanding of the concept.

In an overly short form, intersectionality is the concept that different types of discrimination impact people differently and they cannot be all handled the same. For instance, a woman that experiences sexism is discriminated differently from someone that is in a wheel chair. It would do no good to tell the woman that is discriminated against because of her gender that the way to solve her problem is to have more accessible workspace with more ramps and bathrooms and a good health plan. But in addition to recognizing that there are different types of discrimination, one person may be discriminated against in multiple different ways at the same time.

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Summary: Fred Rogers was the person the person you saw on tv. 

It is surprising that it has taken 15 years since his death for an actual biography of Fred Rogers to be written. At the end of the book, the author Max King, says that the family took a good bit of convincing to participate in the biography because Mr Rogers had been resistant to a biography when he was alive. Max King convinced the family of the need for a biography, not because he wanted to be the one to write it, but because he understood the importance of a good biography to legacy of Mister Rogers. Once the family was convinced of the need, they wanted King to be the author.

The Good Neighbor is Max King’s first book. he was a journalist for 30 years culminating in being the editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer from 1990 to 1998. Then he became the President of the Heinz Endowments, which helped to fund of the Mr Rogers programming. When he retired from the Heinz Endowments in 2008 he was asked to lead The Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children’s Media at St Vincent College where he is still a fellow. From his position at the Fred Rogers Center he was able to see the importance of Mister Rogers legacy and be in a position to write with access to both documentary evidence and people that were around Fred Rogers.

The Good Neighbor was released on the same day that the documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor was released to DVD/Blu-ray home sales. I did not see the documentary in the theater, but I have now watched it three times since the digital release. Max King is one of the figures that was interviewed on the documentary. These two projects, along with the Tom Hanks feature film on Mister Rogers that is scheduled for release in 2019, coincide with the 50th anniversary of the start of Mister Rogers Neighborhood.

The Good Neighbor is traditional in biographical form. It traces Fred Rogers’ family history, his childhood, teen and college years and early TV career in a fairly straight line. Once the Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood starts its main production the straight line narrative breaks down and never really fully comes back together. As I was reading I kept thinking about Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. In a somewhat similar way to Steve Jobs, Fred Rogers was so completely identified with his work that it is virtually impossible for a biographer to write without long discussions of that work. The Steve Jobs biography discussed the company and the products, the Good Neighbor discusses not just the production of the show and the structure of what became his non-profit production company, but also his work in childhood development, puppetry, the rise of PBS and many other topics that were informed by Fred Rogers but were more than just biography.

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Takeaway: I have no idea.

One of my reading projects this year has been to read all of Flannery O’Connor’s fiction this year. I have previously read A Good Man is Hard to Find, but I will probably re-read it again. But I have no idea what to think about O’Connor now that I have finished all of her fiction.

She is a skilled writer. It is easy to see that she is writing not just for a surface meaning, but for the re-readings as well. There is depth there that many writers cannot pull off.

But there is also a twistedness that is hard to take. It is not just that many of these stories end in ironic tragedy, but that there is an intentional turning everything upside down. There is much to appreciate about the upside-down nature of the stories. A woman farmer that complains about a stray bull is, of course, gored by the bull. I saw that coming a mile away. But the path to the inevitable end seems to matter. And the upside-down nature of the stories I believe is representative of her understanding of Christianity.

Part of what I do not know how to process is what much of this means. As I was reading around after finishing, one blogger called the title story one of the most anti-racist short story ever written (which does seem to be more than a little hyperbolic), while many others concentrate on her refusal to meet James Baldwin when he was in Millegeville or her antipathy to the civil rights movements or her racist jokes that were not uncommon in her letters.

It just feels much more complicated than the either/or. Alice Walker, probably best known for her novel Color Purple has a chapter on O’Connor in her collection of essays, In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens. For about a year, Alice Walker, when she was 8 and O’Connor would have been 28, lived just a few miles from O’Connor’s farm and remembers passing it, although she did not know anything about O’Connor at the time. In 1974, Walker and her mother went to visit their old home, a falling down shack in the middle of a pasture, and then the O’Connor farm.

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Summary: A mix of “˜read this instead of that’ guide to Great Books, with half of the time devoted to great book outside of the cannon.

I am a fan of the concept of Great Courses, lectures from good lecturers about interesting subjects. These are similar to repackaged college lectures, not TEDTalks. Most of the ones I have liked best are subjects that I have some familiarity with, but not too much. I have been somewhat reluctant to do the literature lectures because I either have read the books and I am not sure I want to read more, or because I haven’t read the books and felt like I would miss too much.

I very much appreciated How to Read Literature Like a Professor, which was more about how to think about reading and how literature works. Skeptics Guide to Great Books was not really like that. I had two literature courses in college, but only two and I always feel like I am missing something in my process of reading, especially when I am reading the great books.

The Skeptics’ Guide to the Great Books was not really what I was looking for, but it was helpful in its own way. It gave me introductions to 7 books that I was unlikely to have picked up on my own. These were all books that were suggested as “˜read this instead of that’. The focus of these was lesser known great books that did much the same thing as other great books, but were shorter and/or more approachable.

The second half of the course was on books that are outside of the cannon of great books because of their genre, but are still worth reading. Of these last five, I have read three was was broadly familiar with the content of the remaining two. In many ways the discussion of the books that I was familiar with was more enjoyable than the discussion of the books I did not know. Part of it might have been the subject matter. Hearing about how Le Carré “˜The Spy Who Came in from the Cold or PD James’ Cover Her Face changed the face of spy and detective novels gave me context outside of those novels for why what was in the novels matters.

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Summary: A father’s lament after his son’s death.

There is no way I can really “˜review’ a book about a father’s lament for his son’s death in a rock climbing accident. This is one of those classic books that people give someone that has just experience a death.

Americans in general and I think Evangelicals in particular do not grieve and lament well. Part of what Wolterstorff talks about how the bad advice or bad theological wisdom that people give to grieving people, like, “˜they are in a better place now’ or “˜God called them back home.’ I very much appreciated Wolterstorff calling BS on that type of false piety. Death is an evil that in part Christ’s coming is here to overcome.

I do not think that we can really prepare for the future tragedies in our life. But I do think that we should read about and listen to grief. Whether it is the lament over the death of a spouse like CS Lewis’ A Grief Observed, or the death of a child like Lament for a Son or the combination of multiple griefs in Still by Lauren Winner, grief is particular but has some elements that are shared.

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