Category: Books Page 13 of 19

In a moment of financial weakness a couple months ago, my wife and I bought a library cataloging program for the Mac called Delicious Library. It cost more than we should have spent, but it has provided more fun than we could have imagined.

The software has the capability of reading the UPC codes off books and DVDs and the like to create a record which can be stored offsite for insurance or other purposes. One can also enter the info by hand, which is necessary for older items, but what fun is that.

It has as well the capability of tracking books or DVDs loaned out to others, which is a decided advantage for us, far superior to the ‘write the name on a scrap of paper and drop it in the cookie jar’ method of the past.

The most fun, however, has come from the UPC misreads. Apparently while a book’s ISBN remains the same and is unique to that item, UPC codes on the other hand get re-assigned over time. So, since the program scans the UPC codes, some interesting mismatches arose. Enjoy:

Scanning Steven Pressfield’s novel of the Spartan stand at Thermopylae Gates of Fire led to His Way: An Unauthorized Biography Of Frank Sinatra by Kitty Kelly.

Colin Powell’s fascinating pre-Secretary of State years memoir My American Journey produced Interview with a Vampire. Is this trying to tell us something?

Intriguingly, my paperback version of Crime And Punishment became The Empty Land by Louis L’Amour.

And finally, Character by Gail Sheehy popped up as a result of scanning The Brothers Karamazov. There just seems something appropriate in that.

I confess. I’m hooked.

It is not often that my life intersects those of famous athletes. Living for 25 years in Bradenton, Florida did up the odds of that happening, but only incidentally, in that many do make their homes in the Sarasota/Bradenton area.

So among other lines of interest, I began Andre Agassi’s memoir Open, interested in reading about his time spent at the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy in Bradenton. Bollettieri’s academy, now IMG, has received renown over the years as the training ground for tennis greats Agassi, Jim Courier, Monica Seles, and Maria Sharapova, among others. Agassi arrived in Bradenton about the same time as I, he a 14 year old tennis phenom, and me a rookie pastor.

His recollections of the place, however, are vastly different than my own. Those who know Bradenton will immediately see what I mean from this quote:

Every day at the Bollettieri Academy starts with the stench. The surrounding hills are home to several orange-processing plants, which give off a toxic smell of burned orange peels. It’s the first thing that hits me when when I open my eyes, a reminder that this is real, I’m not back in Vegas. I’m not in my deuce-court bed, dreaming. I’ve never cared much for orange juice, but after the Bollettieri Academy, I’ll never be able to look at a gallon of Minute Maid again.

I’ll give the guy some slack due to the fact that he hated tennis and doubly hated his time at Bollettieri’s, and therefore has no fond memories of Bradenton. And I’ll factor in that he was an angry teenager at the time. But at the same time I chuckle to read in the acknowledgments that the text was meticulously fact-checked. Clearly, they missed a few.

Yes, there is an occasional, not daily, smell from the single, not several, orange processing plant, Tropicana, not Minute Maid. That smell, from the process by which orange peel is turned into feed for livestock, is endearing to some of us, as it identifies the town’s heritage and heart. But to others, it is annoying, and so I can accept Agassi’s negative recollection.

But hills? Hills? Really? Hills?

I know it is a minor and silly detail, but how can one spend more than a day in Bradenton, Florida, elevation 5 feet, where the highest landmark may be an interstate overpass, and speak of hills? One has to travel an hour or two away from Bradenton to find anything remotely resembling a hill. The predominant geography of Bradenton is flatness and water.

I trust the recollections from the rest of his life are more accurate.

When I was a child, the primary conversation held with friends each year after Christmas centered around what we got. If you are reading this, I have to consider you friends. Therefore, I imagine you asking me what I got, and I’m more than happy to share with you.

Among other items, from camping pots to caramel popcorn, the book-lover in me has ruled this a successful Christmas. The following have fallen solidly in my queue.

We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball – This is a beautiful book even if there was not a fascinating story associated with it. I told my wife that we now need a coffee table to display such a book upon! It is a book recommended to me by my administrative assistant, and dedicated to a long-time resident of Sarasota, “Buck” O’Neil.

Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War – I am told that this is one of the best novels about the Vietnam War. I don’t like reading about war, and yet it is something that defines so many of us. This book has appeared on a number of ‘best of 2010’ lists.

Physics for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines – I may from this book gain only enough knowledge to make myself dangerous. But so many political and ethical questions today are based upon the claims of ‘science’ that I thought it would be helpful to have some introduction by which I could at least come to understand the terms used in the debates.

Open: An Autobiography – This is reputed to be one of the best sport memoirs ever in terms of its honesty. Agassi was one of the world’s greatest tennis players, one who hated tennis. That in itself draws me in.

Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy – I’m almost fearful of this book. Bonhoeffer was everything the subtitle says, and I’m only comfortable with the first.

Expect to see comments on some if not all of these books in the weeks… no, months… ahead!

Why would anyone read, much less recommend, a book on sin? Perhaps the following, from the introduction to Cornelius Plantinga’s accessible and enthralling book, Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be : A Breviary of Sin,
will sufficiently intrigue you that you will put this one on your reading list for 2011.

“Slippage in our consciousness of sin, like most fashionable follies, may be pleasant, but it is also devastating. Self-deception about our sin is a narcotic, a tranquilizing and disorienting suppression of our spiritual central nervous system. What’s devastating about it is that when we lack an ear for wrong notes in our lives, we cannot play right ones or even recognize them in the performances of others. Eventually we make ourselves religiously so unmusical that we miss both the exposition and the recapitulation of the main themes God plays in human life. The music of creation and the still greater music of grace whistle right through our skulls, causing no catch of breath and leaving no residue. Moral beauty begins to bore us. The idea that the human race needs a Savior sounds quaint.

“So the broader goal of this study is to renew our memory of the integrity of creation and to sharpen our eye for the beauty of grace.” (xiii)

In the early 1990s, I had the privilege of driving Dr. James Montgomery Boice, then pastor of Philadalphia’s Tenth Presbyterian Church, from Bradenton, Florida, after a speaking engagement at our church, to the train station in Tampa, where he was to catch a train (he was weary of flying) back to Philadelphia.

On that ride, Dr. Boice revealed to me that he was then beginning to read again Will and Ariel Durant’s 11-volume history The Story of Civilization. I was impressed by his desire to be well rounded and in his curiosity in all things.

So when I heard of Susan Wise Bauer’s similar but more compact four-volume history, I decided to jump in. (I have finished The History of the Ancient World and am in the middle of The History of the Medieval World.)

I’m glad that I have done so, and from the vantage point of 1400 pages in, I feel that I’m in a position of making an observation or two.

First, I’m impressed. Knowing something of how hard it is to write, and how difficult it can be to sustain one’s productive interest in a project of this magnitude over a prolonged period of time, I cannot imagine how tough it is for her to keep at this project for so long. Add to this the fact that she is not an historian, but a professor of English, I am more amazed at her ability to grasp and wrestle to the ground such massive amounts of information.

Secondly, she tells this story with as much passion and interest and personality as she can muster. The narrative is punctuated with wry observations about the myriad characters involved. She is able, for example, to see through and expose with a wink a king’s supposed ‘holy’ purpose when it is clearly a raw grab for power.

Thirdly, her purpose is incredibly noble. She is not trying to write a typical Euro-centric ‘world’ history, but a true history of the whole world, giving the stories of China and India and Japan and the Islamic states, and one imagines in the future, those of Africa and South and North America, equal coverage.

The problem I find is that the task is just so monumental that I’m sure that it is impossible to do.

Compressing such massive amounts of information into a mere four volumes of 900-1000 pages each results in a narrative that moves from one battle to another, one political play for power to another military victory, from one region to another. Sprinkled within are occasional glimpses of life, and now and again the pace slows to give the back story to contemporary events (such as the intriguing explication of the different claims of Sunni and Shia Muslims). But overall, something of the human in the story is lost.

I’m thinking that part of the problem is my own. My knowledge of, say, the ninth century, is so insipid that the parade of names and places leaves me as dazed as a first reading of the prophecy of Isaiah must to the person new to the Bible.

But I can’t help but think that the issue is bigger than that. That it is impossible when one moves further and further away and condenses an era into fewer and fewer pages to write much more than about tectonic shifts in power. Lost is the detail that makes the living of life human.

I have calculated that if one were to shrink the earth to the size of a bowling ball, that the resulting sphere would be, if possible, smoother than a bowling ball. That is, all the detail and contrast which make the earth wonderful to observe would be gone. All that would be left to describe would be surface detail. For the most part, that is how I feel in reading these books. They are well done. But the scope is too large.

Somewhere, a family this morning is sitting down to a breakfast of waffles and sausage, perhaps celebrating the return of a son or daughter from military service or mourning the loss of a family patriarch. Elsewhere, a young man is plotting the means of telling his girl of his undying love and desire to marry her. And still elsewhere, a child is going to sleep hungry, struggling with his family to find the food to eat in an impoverished land.

All over this drama goes on and has gone on, but none of it is visible to the writer of a general history. And the further we are removed from these stories, the more sterile a history MUST become. When one pulls back further and further, one is left with little but battles and wars and usurpations and power struggles. And no matter how well that history is written – and this one is written well – the end result can be tedious.

Perhaps I’m not James Montgomery Boice after all.

I don’t know enough to make this statement, but I’ll make it anyway, the first of several inflated claims to follow:

When the baby boom generation was young, we wrote and filmed tales about the young. The novel The Catcher in the Rye and the movie Rebel without a Cause come to mind. Now that that generation has aged, we seem to be thinking a great deal more about, well, aging and the Terminal Event. The movies Something’s Gotta Give and Solitary Man come to mind, as do the recent and well celebrated novels Gilead,  Olive Kitteridge, and this recent Pulitzer winner, Tinkers. Our generation may not be invincible after all.

Tinkers, like every work mentioned above, focuses upon a life in relationship with those around it. The central life here is that of one George Crosby, a teacher, guidance counselor, and through the end of his life, a successful ‘horologist’ – an expert in the workings and repair of old clocks. We are introduced to George on his death bed, as he variously hallucinates and remembers, and drifts in and out of connection with those who have gathered to be present with him as he dies, those whom he can no longer recognize.

The story is told with soul and depth and poetic art. We enter a dying man’s hallucinations and experience an epileptic seizure first hand. And we watch George Crosby’s minister grandfather go slowly insane. This is a dying man with a troubled and unhappy past. With similarities to Olive and to Gilead, this is the telling of the tale of lives lived and looked back upon. The characters all are non-heroic, such heroism as there is being nothing more than the ability to survive in this broken and unhappy world. I am left with a series of impressions, of poetic images, many of which feel real, but at the same time sober and disquieting.

To say more would require a re-read and further reflection, and even then I’m not sure I would be able to put my finger on the point of it all, if there is one. One character in Tinkers is technically a ‘tinker’ (“…a person who travels from place to place mending metal utensils as a way of making a living.”) and another ‘tinkers’ with clocks. At some level, though, I get the impression that included among this group of ‘tinkerers’ may actually be the creator, who is doing a damn poor job of getting his world to run properly.

There is an obscurity here that makes the reading slow rolling, and keeps me, for all the beautifully phrased run-on sentences, from wanting to return. I’m loathe to be critical beyond that. However, let me digress a moment.

I believe in the authority of aesthetic elders. I believe that we should bow before the breadth of knowledge and depth of insight of those who really KNOW a thing before we presume to pronounce a judgment on it. I must leave, for example, the judgment between ‘good’ jazz and ‘bad’ jazz to others, and yet at the same time accept on the authority of those who know music that jazz itself is something worth listening to and knowing.

So in this spirit I do defer to my literary elders, those who guided the author, Paul Harding, through the writing workshops and measured his work against others on the Pulitzer committee. I accept their judgment that this is a very good book.

But still, I protest when a non-linear narrative forces me, the reader, to become a detective patching together a meaningful story out of seemingly random flashbacks, hallucinations, recollections, and quotes from an 18th century book on horology. This style may be good, but I’m not a fan.

The trend toward the elimination of quotation marks and the inconsistent and often changing point of view makes the reading a more difficult and less enjoyable task. Why, I wonder, would an author want to make his reader work harder, unless, as I gathered from a Cormac McCarthy interview with Oprah Winfrey, such authors assume that if we are too stupid to figure it out we ought to just stick to Go, Dog. Go!
.

Okay. I’m over-reacting.

But I am puzzled by the intentionally obscure considered as art. I sometimes wonder if there is an arrogance infiltrating the literary elite which excludes plebeians like me.

Upon reflection, the book has grown in my favor. But slowly. I know that good art is often characterized by a certain measure of ambiguity allowing understanding at multiple depths. So perhaps – no promises – perhaps I’ll return to Tinkers some day, and puzzle again over what makes it tick.