The Reading Year in Review

It was an excellent year “between the covers.” Book covers, that is. My total number of books ended up at 71 with several sizable challenges among them. 

The highlights (almost all of them being re-reads) included the whole of the Sherlock Holmes canon; 3 Dickens novels and a couple of Sabatini’s; The Lord of the Rings trilogy (plus The Hobbit, of course); Lewis’ space trilogy and his Chronicles of Narnia; The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich; Ben-Hur; Cripple Creek Days; Seabiscuit; The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization; a couple of Paul Tournier’s works; Malcolm Muggeridge’s Confessions of a Twentieth Century Pilgrim; 4 of Shakespeare’s history plays; Fahrenheit 451; Killer Angels; Cal Thomas’ Watchman in the Night; 10 Books That Screwed Up the World: And 5 Others That Didn't Help; and the massive collection rightfully entitled, The Ultimate Christmas Collection.

And among the books specifically planned for the first quarter or so of this year? We Will Not Be Silenced by Erwin Lutzer; David Copperfield by Charles Dickens; No Little People: Sixteen Sermons for the 20th Century by Francis Schaeffer; Witness by Whittaker Chambers; What’s So Great about Christianity by Dinesh D’Souza; 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne; Jesus Is Risen: Paul and the Early Church by David Limbaugh; Heaven by Randy Alcorn; And in the End: The Last Days of The Beatles by Ken McNab; and Cold-Case Christianity: A Homicide Detective Investigates the Claims of the Gospels by J. Warner Wallace. 

Want to join me for any of these?

Postscript: The full reading list for 2023 is below with the highest recommendations shown by 4 asterisks. 

January
*** 1) A Study in Scarlet (Arthur Conan Doyle)
*** 2) The Sign of Four (Arthur Conan Doyle)
**** 3) The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Conan Doyle)
**** 4) The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Conan Doyle)
**** 5) The Return of Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Conan Doyle)
**** 6) The Hound of the Baskervilles (Arthur Conan Doyle)
** 7) The Valley of Fear (Arthur Conan Doyle)
**** 8) His Last Bow (Arthur Conan Doyle)
*** 9) The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Conan Doyle)
*** 10) The Master of Ballantrae (Robert Louis Stevenson)
*** 11) R.U.R. (Karel Capek)
February
**** 12) Scaramouche (Rafael Sabatini)
**** 13) Henry VI Part One (William Shakespeare)
**** 14) Henry VI Part Two (William Shakespeare)
**** 15) Henry VI Part Three (William Shakespeare)
**** 16) Richard III (William Shakespeare)
March
**** 17) The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Anthony Esolen)
*** 18) The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (Washington Irving)
April
**** 19) Confessions of a Twentieth Century Pilgrim (Malcolm Muggeridge)
**** 20) The Old Curiosity Shop (Charles Dickens)
**** 21) The Hobbit (J.R.R. Tolkien)
**** 22) The Fellowship of the Ring (J.R.R. Tolkien)
**** 23) The Two Towers (J.R.R. Tolkien)
May
**** 24) The Return of the Ring (J.R.R. Tolkien)
**** 25) Holy Disorders (Edmund Crispin)
June
*** 26) Swan Song (Edmund Crispin)
*** 27) Out of the Silent Planet (C.S. Lewis)
*** 28) Perelandra (C.S. Lewis)
**** 29) That Hideous Strength (C.S. Lewis)
July
**** 30) The Seasons of Life (Paul Tournier)
**** 31) Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury)
**** 32) Submarine (Edward L. Beach)
**** 33) The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William Shirer)
August
*** 34) The Strong & the Weak (Paul Tournier)
*** 35) Gettysburg: The Confederate High Tide (Champ Clark)
**** 36) Killer Angels (Michael Shaara)
**** 37) The Stars in Their Courses (Shelby Foote)
*** 38) Watchman in the Night (Cal Thomas)
**** 39) The Snare (Rafael Sabatini)
**** 40) The Magician's Nephew (C.S. Lewis)
September & October
**** 41) The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (C.S. Lewis)
*** 42) Fire Over England (A.E.W. Mason)
**** 43) Shaken (Tim Tebow)
**** 44) Ben-Hur (General Lew Wallace)
** 45) The White Company (Arthur Conan Doyle)
**** 46) 10 Books That Screwed Up the World: And 5 Others That Didn't Help (Benjamin Wiker)
**** 47) The Horse and His Boy (C.S. Lewis)
**** 48) Prince Caspian: The Return to Narnia (C.S. Lewis)
**** 49) Nicholas Nickelby (Charles Dickens)
*** 50) The Johnstown Flood (David McCullough)
*** 51) The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (C.S. Lewis)
*** 52) The Shepherd of the Hills (Harold Bell Wright)
November
**** 53) Bleak House (Charles Dickens)
**** 54) Seabiscuit (Lauren Hillenbrand) 
** 55) The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (Joan Aiken)
** 56) The Beast In Me and Other Animals (James Thurber)
57) Cripple Creek Days (Mabel Barbee Lee) 
December

From The Ultimate Christmas Collection:
**** 58) Christmas story collection (Louisa May Alcott) 
*** 59) Christmas story collection (Henry van Dyke, Ellis Parker Butler, O Henry, et al)
** 60) The Nutcracker and the Mouse King (ETA Hoffmann)
*** 61) Christmas story collection (Self Lagerlof, Washington Irving,William Dean Howells, et al)
** 62) The Nutcracker & the Mouse King (E.T.A. Hoffman)
**** 63) Christmas story collection (Lucy Maud Montgomery)
*** 64) Christmas story collection (Damon Runyan, Frank Stockton, Harriet Beecher Stowe, et al)
**** 65) Christmas at Thompson Hall & Other Stories (Anthony Trollope)
*** 66) Beasley's Christmas Party (Booth Tarkington)
**** 67) The Birds' Christmas Carol & Other Stories (Kate Douglas Wiggin)
**** 68) The Silver Chair (C.S. Lewis)
**** 69) The Last Battle (C.S. Lewis)
* 70) Letter to the American Church (Eric Metaxas)
** 71) The Golden Ring (John Snyder)

Cal Thomas' A Watchman in the Night (Thus Far In My Reading)

I am very much enjoying reading Cal Thomas’ new book, A Watchman in the Night: What  I’ve Seen Over 50 Years Reporting on America. In this illuminating book, Mr. Thomas reviews (year by year since 1984) key happenings in the culture -- happenings that not only made headlines in their time, but which, in several important ways, have shaped the world into what it is today. Along the way, Thomas shares a few of the insightful comments on those happenings that come from his contemporary newspaper columns…and a lot more that come from his present evaluations. 

Cal Thomas has always been an exceptional writer and a principled, engaging, and consistently Christian man. But this book (it’s not the only one I’ve read of his) is remarkably wise and helpful to those who desire to efficiently engage the culture for good…while yet embracing the limitations of politics or any other merely human effort.

Let me give you just 4 examples from my reading so far. And, rest assured, if you could look at the many starred and underlined pages in my copy, you’d know I could give you a lot more.

From his review of the year 1987: “I interviewed Secretary of Education William Bennett who told me he believed it would take another ten years to undo the damage caused to public school students because of political meddling and social experimentation that resulted in declining test scores and underqualified teachers. Unfortunately, things have only gotten worse with even more social experimentation (now known as critical race theory and wokeness). I will repeat myself: we should stop giving them the ‘raw material’ to create new generations of secular progressives and start sending them to private schools (I favor vouchers which are now allowed in several states) and to universities that do not undermine our history, traditions, values, and faith.” (Page 29)

From his review of the year 1992: “Lyndon Johnson used to say his grandfather died at the Alamo. He later told author Doris Kearns Goodwin that his grandfather really died at the battle of San Jacinto during the fight for Texas independence from Mexico, but he called it the Alamo because more people had heard of it. The truth was that Johnson’s grandfather died in neither battle. He died in bed. Shades to come with a similar habit of lies told by Joe Biden.” (Page 70)

From his review of the year 2002: “General Electric released a TV ad touting its new 4D Ultrasound machine that showed a baby developing inside its mother. Over the song ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,’ an announcer said, ‘When you see your baby for the first time on the new GE 4D Ultrasound, it really is a miracle.’ GE may not have intended its new device to act as a powerful pro-life statement, but that’s what it became. Surveys showed that when abortion-minded women see an image of their child, they mostly choose to give birth. It is why the pro-death cult wants to exterminate them before they start looking ‘human.’” (Page 152)

From his review of the year 2003: “To Democrats, government is the only entity that can make your life better. The successful must be punished, because if initiative, hard work, and taking care of yourself catch on, people might wake up to the lies they’ve been told by the Democrat party and start taking care of themselves.” (Page 156)

Big Tech: The Left's Big Bully

“Big Tech’s monopolistic ethos is insidious. Entrepreneurs intentionally seek to found new tech companies for the sole purpose of selling out for billions of dollars to Apple, Meta, Alphabet, or Microsoft. Often they assume that their product will be eliminated simply for the purpose of removing competition.

The result is that in a matter of hours a few tech companies can demolish any targeted business or ideological competitor. An upstart like Parler, a conservative free-speech alternative to Twitter, was on a trajectory in early January 2020 to sign up twenty million new users. Yet it was virtually strangled in a single weekend by the coordination of Amazon, Apple, and Alphabet. They colluded, operating with the shared idea that the tiny Twitter rival did not appropriately censor user content in the post–January 6 climate. The tweets did not suit the tastes of the left-wing Big Tech industry.

Parler went in hours from a rising conservative answer to Big Tech’s social-media monopoly to a nonentity.

 Accordingly, Alphabet kicked Parler off its Google Play Store. That exclusion made it impossible for millions of mobile-phone users to download access to the application. Apple banned Parler from its Apple App Store, even though it was already ranking as the number-one free application. Amazon cut Parler off entirely from its Amazon Web Services. As a result, Parler went in hours from a rising conservative answer to Big Tech’s social-media monopoly to a nonentity.”

(From Victor Davis Hanson's not-to-be-missed article, Silicon Valley’s Moral Bankruptcy, published last May in The New Criterion.)

My Favorite Historians

Denny,

I was wondering if you could recommend some of the best books on history that I should read.

Here was my reply:

Dear A -------,

You raise an interesting question. A key element would be the type of history you're looking for. The fellows interested in, respectively, the history of philosophy or ancient Rome or World War II are, most likely, going to be reading different historians. Thus, my favorite guys will tend to cover the areas of history I'm most interested in.

Another factor is that some of my favorite history books are not written by professional historians at all. A speech writer (Peggy Noonan) wrote my favorite history of the Reagan administration; a soldier wrote my favorite history of the American Civil War (Ulysses Grant); and my favorite histories of the U.S. space program were written, respectively, by two scientists and a novelist (Chris Kraft, Gene Kranz, and Tom Wolfe).

Another category similar to the above is the autobiography. Those can certainly be classified as history but few are penned by professional historians.

Novelists and playwrights can also serve as excellent
chroniclers of history, usually of their own times, but certain writers dip expertly into other eras and write historical fiction that is of immense value. Especially appreciated in this latter category are Dickens, Scott, Tolstoy, Dumas, Hugo, Cooper, Austen, Dostoevsky, Waugh, and the Brontes.

So, if you can keep all of these things in mind, I will mention a few "professional" historians that have made the top rank for my interests and purposes. I'm quite sure I'll leave a couple out, but here's some names I'm thinking of right now (without classifying them as to time or subject): Shelby Foote, Samuel Eliot Morison, Walter Lord, John Toland, David McCullough, Antonia Fraser, Roland Bainton, Paul Johnson, Stephen Ambrose, Bruce Catton, William Prescott, Basil Liddell Hart, Laura Hillenbrand, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Of course, there's a whole lot more to talk over than this quick list -- including your input about topics, people, periods of history you're most interested in. So, why not give me a call or zip along an e-mail telling me what day next week would be best for lunch where we can discuss it further? I'll look forward to it.

Denny

For the Next Book Brunch, It's Clarence Thomas

Here's giving you plenty of time to get ready...

The next Vital Signs Ministries Book Brunch discussion will be on Saturday, September 10 at 9 AM. And in celebration of the Roe v Wade reversal, we will honor one of the paramount heroes of the struggle by reading and discussing together Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words, edited by Michael Pack and Mark Paoletta. Let us know if you're interested.

By the way, here's a bit of what Christian Book Distributors say about the book:

“Who is Justice Clarence Thomas, in his own words? 

In the follow-up to the wildly successful documentary by the same name, Created Equal builds on dozens of hours of groundbreaking, one-on-one interviews with Thomas to share a new, expanded account of his powerful story for the first time. 

Producer Michael Pack and Mark Paoletta, a lawyer who worked alongside Thomas during his confirmation, dive deep into the Justice’s story. Drawing on a rich array of historical documents and unreleased conversations with Thomas, his wife, and those who knew him best, Created Equal is a timeless account of faith, race, power, and personal resilience.”

Reading Together

Reading quality books is a very good thing.  Indeed, as almost everyone would agree, such a practice makes a person smarter, more interesting, and more appreciative.  And discussing those books with others only increases those values.  This is why Claire and I started the Notting Hill Napoleons book club way back in 1992 – a book fellowship involving Christian friends who read a classic novel every month and then get together to talk about it.  That group, by the way, is still going strong for we see how important it has been in not only stimulating us to read more, but also in sharpening our skills in literary criticism, meaningful conversation, and the application of a book’s lessons to practical life.

It was for the same reasons that Vital Signs Ministries began hosting book discussions way back in the 1990s and our current practice includes both small and large group book discussions.  The former is usually an agreement of 1-4 people to read the same book and discuss it over lunch at a coffee shop or cafe, while the latter takes the form of an evening party or Saturday morning brunch which we host at our home. Either way, we're encouraged (and made accountable) to read.

And to waste less time in more trivial pursuits.

The books we choose for these discussions cover a wide range – history, the culture wars, literature, and Christian living.  But they are all selected for the purpose of making us more informed, effective, and consistent servants of Christ’s kingdom. Want a few examples? Sure, let me list a few of the more memorable titles and authors from over the years: 

Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan; 
Heaven by Randy Alcorn; 
Judging Thomas: The Life and Times of Clarence Thomas by Ken Foskett; 
Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali; 
A Christian Manifesto by Francis Schaeffer; 
A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War by Joseph Loconte; 
Eugenics and Other Evils by G.K. Chesterton; 
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame; 
Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery by Eric Metaxas; 
The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis:
Men in Black: How the Supreme Court is Destroying America by Mark Levin; 
Check with Chip on Stem Cell Research by Chip Maxwell; 
Enemies and Allies by Joel Rosenberg; 
Heaven: Your Real Home by Joni Eareckson Tada; 
Everlasting: God’s Faithfulness to Israel by Stuart Cunliffe; 
The Rush Revere books by Rush Limbaugh; 
The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis. 
And the latest?  The Apostate by Dr. Mark Christian. 

If you are interested in joining us for these Vital Signs book discussions, please let us know.  And we will, of course, continue to promote them beforehand in our monthly letters and Vital Signs Blog.

Eugenics: Alas, the Past is Yet Present

Modern “eugenics” emerged as an application of Darwinism in the late 1800s. Social scientists believed they could “improve the human race” by encouraging the “well-bred” and healthy to procreate, while discouraging (or even, for some, forcibly preventing) the poor, the sick or just the “undesirable” from having children. 

While eugenics typically brings to mind the Nazi effort to exterminate six million Jews during the Holocaust, the idea’s intellectual development is largely American. For example, Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger openly advocated for eugenics, and actively worked to advance birth control with African American women as part of what she called the “Negro Project.”

By the way, the organization she founded is the best example in our culture of systemic or structural evil. Planned Parenthood kills black babies at a rate five times higher than children of other ethnicities...

Read the rest of this enlightening BreakPoint article (written by John Stonestreet and Maria Baer) right here. 

And then consider as one of the important "action steps" you could take the participation in Vital Signs Ministries next Book Brunch on Saturday morning, February 19th at 10 o’clock. The book under discussion that morning will be a G.K. Chesterton classic, Eugenics and Other Evils. You can find out more at this Vital Signs Blog post. 

Standard Oil and the Problems in the Middle East

From Paul Johnson's brief but excellent biography, Churchill...

"[Winston Churchill] now remodeled the Colonial Office to found a new and powerful Middle East department, which in the spring of 1921 organized a high-level conference in Cairo to refashion the areas in light of the Saudi triumph.  This was one of the highlights of Churchill’s career, and it gave him a taste for summit conferences he never lost.  It was highly productive.  Two new kingdoms were created, Iraq and Transjordan, for the two leading Hashemite princes, Emir Faisal, sharif of Mecca, and Emir Abdullah.  The role of the RAF was confirmed and a vast new base in Habbaniya in northern Iraq, still in use by the West, was created. 

This settlement lasted half a century and would have endured longer but for an unfortunate intervention by the world’s largest oil company, Standard Oil.  While Britain was using Anglo-Persian and Anglo-Dutch Shell to develop the fields in Persia, Iraq, Kuwait, and elsewhere in the Gulf, Standard formed an alliance with the Saudis to develop fields on their territory, which proved the richest of all.  American policy almost inevitably backed Standard, and so the Saudis.  

Thus the Wahhabi fundamentalists became a great power in the Middle East, immune from attack because of U.S. support and provided with colossal sums of oil royalties with which to undermine the moderates everywhere and the Hashemites in particular."

Remembering Expelled

Did you ever see Expelled? 

If so, have you watched it again lately? You should. For even though the powers that be have staged a full scale assault on the movie, an honest, common-sense appraisal of the film's content yields dramatic new understanding of science, of Darwinian evolution, of the theories of intelligent design, and the ruthless nature of political-correctness. 

 To stimulate your interest (again), here is the opening sequence.

   

Order Expelled right here...for only $5.

One of the "Fathers" of Fake News: the New York Times' Walter Duranty

“But in 1933, the watershed year, when Stalin finally achieved U.S. recognition, disquieting rumors had begun to surface. There was a growing number of reports about a famine, purported to have taken place in the grain-growing districts of the Ukraine, the Northern Caucausus, and across the nomadic cattle country of Kazakhstan: a disaster that cost the lives of millions of peasants, a calamity of incalculable dimensions. 

For later generations, as the sheer magnitude of that event began slowly to emerge, questions would arise as to why nobody knew, why the American public hadn’t been told. How did Stalin manage to conceal the greatest man-made disaster in modern history, when perhaps as many as ten million men, women, and children were allowed to die by slow starvation as a result of their refusal to conform to Stalin’s plan to collectivize agriculture?”

The answer, in a name, is Walter Duranty. And this weekend I’m re-reading S.J. Taylor’s superb, painstakingly thorough revelation of this pseudo-journalist and despicable man, Stalin's Apologist: Walter Duranty: The New York Times's Man in Moscow.

The Ugly Urge of Socialism? The Power to Destroy.

The first chapter of Malcolm Muggeridge’s Winter in Moscow, his remarkable novel about the irrationally godless and extremely cruel state of the Soviet Union in the early 1930s, begins with this quotation from the 19th Century historian Hippolyte Taine writing about the French Revolution: “From the beginning, Danton understood the final object and definitive effect of the Revolution, that is to say, the dictatorship of the violent minority.”

Muggeridge then proceeds to paint vivid pictures of the well-heeled but clueless socialists of the West who came to applaud the new order. Previously, they had only played with class warfare and spouted nihilistic slogans in the comfort of intellectual salons. But here, in the brutal Communism of the Soviet Union, here in the evolutionary stage that couldn’t help but break a few eggs in its effort to make an omelet, these socialist tourists were thrilled by Stalin’s “intoxicating power to destroy, power that like fire would scorch up his enemies and make their world a wilderness.” They swooned over government’s control over repression of the Church and tradition, speech and assembly. They embraced the “naturalness” of press censorship, price fixing, and even the “disappearance” of opposition figures.

One such woman was Mrs. Earley-Wheatsheaf, a minor British politician, one of the many privileged socialists who had fallen head over heels for the dreamy propaganda of the Soviets. She couldn’t help but admire the Communists for actualizing what her ego secretly desired. “How agreeable, she thought…if Alderman Butterfield, who had publicly called her an incompetent, sentimental busybody, could be made to disappear! How agreeable to command his disappearance! How agreeable, instead of writing and talking, to be able to act; to give orders; yes, and to destroy; to purify all the institutions of the State, and, more important, their personnel. Mrs. Earley-Wheatsheaf’s chest swelled under her brown woolen jumper; and her eyes glowed. Like Benoit, she saw as in a vision, the illimitable possibilities of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.”

Taine’s description of the French Revolution’s Danton is truly (and tragically) descriptive of the Communist Revolution as well. The final object and definitive effect of both was the dictatorship of the violent minority.

(The illustration above recalls Stalin's ordered “hit” on former friend and colleague, Leon Trotsky, who had unsuccessfully fled to Mexico to escape assassination. It’s from the Mary Evans Picture Library/Global Look Press)

Malcolm Muggeridge's Winter in Moscow is a Rare Treasure...And In More Ways Than One

Winter in Moscow is the remarkably enlightening and controversial novel written by Malcolm Muggeridge was based on his experiences in Russia during 1932 and 1933 while serving as the newspaper correspondent for the left-leaning Manchester Guardian.

Michael D. Aeschliman, in his introduction to the 1987 edition (now, like all other copies, long out of print) describes the book’s origins and impact:

“The belief in an inevitable, collective human progress grew to dominate ‘enlightened’ Western opinion more and more steadily from the time of Bacon in the 17th Century, through the propagandastic and revolutionary writing of the French philosophers and their Jacobin and socialist successors in the 18th and early 19th Centuries, as Hannah Arendt has written, it ‘became an almost universally accepted dogma.’ ‘Glory to Man in the highest!’ wrote the poet A.C. Swinburne expressing the characteristic optimism and the Utopian expectations of his era…”

As a humanist and Fabian socialist Muggeridge shared this naive idealism and, like many intellectuals of his time, looked to the Soviet Union as a key development in this movement of social progress. But his experiences in Russia tore that idealism apart and, rare among his breed, he dared to see through the irrationality, the lies, the extreme cruelty, and the utter hypocrisy of Communism. He came back telling the truth…and was quickly vilified for doing so.

But Aeschliman points out that Muggeridge didn’t just lose a philosophy, he also gained a fervent new belief. He finally believed in something real. “That ‘something’ was the reality of evil...and the willing collaboration with it by legions of adulatory liberal and socialist intellectuals was something that would never cease to astonish and appall him, and would never cease to inspire his pen to some of the sharpest, most powerful moral satire ever written in our language.”

Now I must tell you that Winter in Moscow is a very hard book to get hold of. I discovered one of only a handful of copies that are available through the interlibrary loan program and, when it came it was in really delicate condition. But I treated the book with great care and the content of the book with even greater care, respect, and appreciation. I would suggest that with all the loose talk going around about socialism nowadays, making the effort to find a copy (don’t worry about buying one -- the cheapest copy I could find through the internet was over $100 -- is still well worth the effort.

Bookin’ Along in the New Year

Due to the winter weather which has precluded outdoor activities (especially my walking & praying routines) AND a trip to the March for Life in Washington D.C. which created a lot of hours on planes and in hotel rooms (including being stranded in Chicago for a day), I have done a bit more reading than normal in these 6 weeks since my last book roundup here.

There have been a few clunkers in that bunch of 19 books read since January 1 — books that I gave only 1 or 2 Stars. And there have been several 3 Star books that I enjoyed, found of value, and which, in certain circumstances, I would recommend.

But it’s the 4 Star books that I would recommend most heartily, books of excellence and high significance. Here’s the specific breakdown according to genre with the titles in bold showing books that were, in fact, re-reads for me.

Fiction:
* The Lone Star Ranger (Zane Grey) - 1 Stars
* The Mysterious Island (Jules Verne) - 4 Stars
* Kim (Rudyard Kipling) - 2 Stars
* The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond (G.K. Chesterton) - 3 Stars
* The People of the Mist (H. Rider Haggard) - 2 Stars
* Journey to the Center of the Earth (Jules Verne) - 1 Star

Historical Fiction:
* Fair Stood the Wind for France (H.E. Bates) - 3 Stars
* Valley Forge: George Washington and the Crucible of Victory (Newt Gingrich, William R. Forstchen, Albert S. Hanser) - 4 Stars
* The Cornet of Horse: A Tale of Marlborough’s Wars (G.A. Henty) - 3 Stars
* August 1914 (Alexander Solzhenitsyn) - 4 Stars

History: 
* The Wright Brothers (David McCulloch) - 4 Stars
* Dodge City: Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and the Wickedest Town in the American West  (Tom Clavin) - 3 Stars
* True Detective Stories from the Archives of the Pinkertons (Cleveland Moffet) - 2 Stars
* Lonely Vigil: Coastwatchers of the Solomons (Walter Lord) - 4 Stars

Drama:
* Once in a Lifetime (George S. Kaufman & Moss Hart) - 3 Stars
* You Can’t Take It With You (George S. Kaufman & Moss Hart) - 4 Stars
* The Man Who Came to Dinner (George S. Kaufman & Moss Hart) - 3 Stars

Culture & Politics:
* Ship of Fools (Tucker Carlson) - 4 Stars

Theology & the Christian Life:
* Life Is Mostly Edges: A Memoir (Calvin Miller) - 3 Stars
* Death in the City (Francis Schaeffer) - 4 Stars

Muggeridge on Abortion, Socialism, and the Great Liberal Death Wish

Speaking at Hillsdale College in 1979, the astute cultural critic Malcom Muggeridge (converted late in life to Christianity) spoke about the barbarism of abortion (which he ironically called the “humane holocaust”) as well as the post-Christian culture which allowed, even encouraged it. (By the way, the speech, in its entirety can be found by using the link at the bottom of this post.)

“I want to say something about all this, showing how this humane holocaust, this dreadful slaughter that began with 50 million babies last year, will undoubtedly be extended to the senile old and the mentally afflicted and mongoloid children, and so on, because of the large amount of money that maintaining them costs. It is all the more ironical when one thinks about the holocaust western audiences, and the German population in particular, have been shuddering over, as it has been presented on their TV and cinema screens. Note this compassionate or humane holocaust, if, as I fear, it gains momentum, will quite put that other in the shade. And, as I shall try to explain, what is even more ironical, the actual considerations that led to the German holocaust were not, as is commonly suggested, due to Nazi terrorism, but were based upon the sort of legislation that advocates of euthanasia, or ‘mercy killing’ in this country and in western Europe, are trying to get enacted. It's not true that the German holocaust was simply a war crime, as it was judged to be at Nuremberg. In point of fact, it was based upon a perfectly coherent, legally enacted decree approved and operated by the German medical profession before the Nazis took over power. In other words, from the point of view of the Guinness Book of Records you can say that in our mad world it takes about thirty years to transform a war crime into a compassionate act…”

Now I want to try to get to grips with this strange state of affairs. Let's look again at the humane holocaust. What happened in Germany was that long before the Nazis got into power, a great propaganda was undertaken to sterilize people who were considered to be useless or a liability to society, and after that to introduce what they called ‘mercy killing.’ This happened long before the Nazis set up their extermination camps at Auschwitz and elsewhere, and was based upon the highest humanitarian considerations.

You see what I'm getting at? On a basis of liberal-humanism, there is no creature in the universe greater than man, and the future of the human race rests only with human beings themselves, which leads infallibly to some sort of suicidal situation. It's to me quite clear that that is so, the evidence is on every hand. The efforts that men make to bring about their own happiness, their own ease of life, their own self-indulgence, will in due course produce the opposite, leading me to the absolutely inescapable conclusion that human beings cannot live and operate in this world without some concept of a being greater than themselves, and of a purpose which transcends their own egotistic or greedy desires. Once you eliminate the notion of a God, a creator, once you eliminate the notion that the creator has a purpose for us, and that life consists essentially in fulfilling that purpose, then you are bound, as Pascal points out, to induce the megalomania of which we've seen so many manifestations in our time - in the crazy dictators, as in the lunacies of people who are rich, or who consider themselves to be important or celebrated in the western world. Alternatively, human beings relapse into mere carnality, into being animals.

I see this process going on irresistibly, of which the holocaust is only just one example. If you envisage men as being only men, you are bound to see human society, not in Christian terms as a family, but as a factory-farm in which the only consideration that matters is the well-being of the livestock and the prosperity or productivity of the enterprise. That's where you land yourself. And it is in that situation that western man is increasingly finding himself.”

(Malcolm Muggeridge, “The Great Liberal Death Wish,” Imprimis, May 1979, published by Hillsdale College)

Klavan on Conservative Creativity

A few days ago, I finished (on my Kindle) Andrew Klavan’s brief but excellent and provocative book, A Crisis in the Arts: Why the Left Owns the Culture and How Conservatives can Begin to Take it Back. 

I highly recommend it. Klavan, himself a best-selling fiction writer, eloquently explains how politics and social policy is “downstream” of culture and that conservatives cannot hope for political success or social change if they continue to cede the arts to the far left as has been done for the last several decades.

 Instead Klavan writes...

We need to fight back. 

For those conservatives with artistic talent and ambition, this is a spectacular moment to take to the barricades. Big Media is tottering under the assault of new technologies. With electronic publishing and social media, books can be self-published and self-promoted. With the new video cameras, professional-looking films can be produced on the cheap and distributed online. YouTube, iTunes, smart phones, tablets, blogs -- all provide opportunities for new kinds of work and new ways for that work to be dispensed.  

To take advantage of this moment, conservatives have to come to grips with a situation that they naturally find uncomfortable: yet, to wit, we are now at the counter-culture. When it comes to the arts, radical leftists are The Man. We need to act like the rebels we now are and stop trying to win the favor of the big studios and publishers and mainstream reviewers. We need to make stuff. Good stuff. And get it out to the audience anyway we can…

The arts, even at their least, are one of humanity’s most noble enterprises. They have been hijacked by adherence of the low-end depressive ideology. They have been hijacked by the adherents of a low and oppressive. We should take them back.

"Like a Set of Beggars" -- Revolutionary War Veterans Disrespected by Congress

My generation remembers (with great shame) how American soldiers returning from brave and sacrificial service to their country in the Vietnam War met with despicably unjust and ungrateful attitudes from liberal politicians and a snobbish minority of the public.

But it wasn’t the first time that such selfish and shallow irresponsibility had been shown to American soldiers. Joseph J. Ellis, writing in The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-9 (page 60) describes the response of a majority of low-minded politicians to veterans of the Revolutionary War.

“Congress eventually voted to provide full pay for five years for officers in lieu of half pay for life, but doing so was a purely rhetorical exercise, since there was no money in the federal coffers to pay anyone. Even that meaningless commitment generated widespread criticism, especially in New England, where returning officers were greeted with newspaper editorials describing them as blood-beaked vultures feeding at the public trough.

At least in retrospect, the dissolution of the Continental Army in the spring of 1783 was one of the most poignant scenes in American history, as the men had stayed the course and won the war were ushered off without pay, with paper pensions and only grudging recognition of their service. Washington could only weep: “To be disbanded… like a set of beggars, needy, distressed, and without prospect…will drive every man of Honor and Sensibility to the extreme Horrors of Despair.’”

When Did the Nation Actually Begin?

When did the grand American experiment actually begin?

Joseph J. Ellis answers, “It also helped that all four of them [George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay] had served in the Continental Army or the Continental (then Confederation) Congress, which meant they had experienced the war for independence from a higher perch than most of their contemporaries. They were accustomed, as Hamilton put it, to ‘think continentally’ at a time when the allegiances and perspectives of most Americans were confined within local and state borders. Indeed, the very term ‘American Revolution’ implies a national ethos that in fact did not exist in the population at large.

Perhaps the best way to understand the term ‘American Revolution’ is to realize that it describes a two-tiered political process. The first American Revolution achieved independence. It was a mere, or perhaps not so mere, colonial rebellion. It also created a series of mini-republics in the former colonies, now states, but it did so in ways that were inherently incompatible with any national political agenda.

The second American Revolution modified the republican framework existent in the states in order to create a nation-size republic. The overly succinct way to put it is that the American Revolution did not become a full-fledged revolution until it became more expansively American. Or even more succinctly, the first phase of the American revolution was about rejection of political power; the second phase was about controlling it.” (Joseph J. Ellis, The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-9; page xvi)

I am really enjoying this read.

"Socialism in Practice" Requires Force

“It was perfectly clear, too, that if socialism was to stem the crisis and remake the world, socialism involved a violent struggle to get and keep political power. At some point, socialism would have to consolidate its power by force…This was not theory or statistics. This was socialism in practice. This was how it worked.

I quickly passed on to Lenin’s State and Revolution and the ABC of Communism (its three authors were all shot during the Great Purge). Here was no dodging of the problem of getting and keeping power. Here was the simple statement that terror and dictatorship are justified to defend the socialist revolution…Terror is an instrument of socialist policy.” (Whitaker Chambers, Witness, 1952, pages 194-195)

Whittaker Chambers on the Communist Vision

“The revolutionary heart of Communism is not the theatrical appeal: ‘Workers of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains. You have a world to gain.’ It is a simple statement of Karl Marx, further simplified for handy use: ‘Philosophers have explained the world; it is necessary to change the world.’ Communists are bound together by no secret oath. The tie that binds them across the frontiers of nations, across barriers of language and differences of class and education, in defiance of religion, morality, honor, the weaknesses of the body and the irresolutions of the mind, even unto death, is a simple conviction: It is necessary to change the world…

It is not new. It is, in fact, man’s second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: ‘Ye shall be as gods.’ It is the great alternative faith of mankind. Like all great faiths, its force derives from a simple vision. Other ages have had great visions. They have always been different versions of the same vision: the vision of God and man’s relationship to God. The Communist vision is the vision of Man without God. It is the vision of man’s mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world.” (Whittaker Chambers in the Foreword in the Form of a Letter to My Children of his classic work of 1952, Witness.)

(The accompanying photo is of the famous sculpture in Moscow created for the Soviet Union's World's Fair in 1956, Worker and Collective Farm Woman.)

Doctor Zhivago Revisited

“This year marks the 60th anniversary of the publication of Boris Pasternak’s famous novel, Doctor Zhivago. Problems with Russian censorship meant it was first published by the Italian publisher, Feltrinelli; the English translation followed in 1958, which was the year I first encountered it, aged twelve. This was the year that Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, an event given an ominous dimension when he was forced by the Russian authorities to either renounce the prize or be exiled. Pasternak, for whom to live outside his homeland would have been unthinkable, chose the first option. Expelled from the Writers Union, he died, disgraced, in 1960...”

Read the rest of Francis Phillips' Mercator article, Doctor Zhivago at 60: A Spiritual Masterpiece right here.