Category: Books Page 7 of 19

A friend has encouraged me to re-read Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (or is it Moby Dick? Apparently this is a controversy.) I’m aware that for some being ‘urged’ to read, much less RE-read Moby-Dick would bear the aroma of an enemy’s nefarious scheming. But this is a genuine friend who himself re-read the book (or maybe he ‘reread’ it?) recently and found the labor rewarding. I’m a sucker for such urgings, and so I bit. (Yes, the fishing allusion is intentional.)

What made my initial reading, perhaps forty years ago, feel tedious was Melville’s repeated walks down seemingly inconsequential pathways. There are forays into the anatomy and classification of whales (which are, we discover, fish – ‘spouting fish with horizontal tails’), and into various aspects of life onboard a whaling ship, all of which seem unrelated to the basic plot of the book – one man’s monomaniacal pursuit of revenge. The latter we get – revenge movies are all the fad (see Tarantino, Quentin) – but the slow pace at which Melville gets us there is hard for many of us to fathom. (Look! Another Nautical Reference!)

This time through, I’m thinking the problem is not with Mr. Melville but with us. Told as it is through the eyes of the novice whaler Ishmael, this is a story to be told on a back porch or at a table in a pub. The storyteller knows what he knows from first hand (first-hand?) experience, and knows that his listeners cannot begin to grasp the nature of what he saw without knowing something of the realities of his world. And so over the span of hours, perhaps days, he slowly spins his tale, revealing the depths of his heart and mind wanting us, the hearers, to sense and smell the horrors he lived through.

I find that if I accept his terms and quit looking for those pieces of ‘action’ that advance the plot toward that inevitable moment when Captain Ahab finally engages the whale in mortal combat, then I can sit back, savor the atmosphere, reflect upon its meaning, and enjoy the tale-teller as much as the tale.

Modern man, of which I am one, is impatient and perhaps that reflects the immaturity of our age. To get to the end seems to be our passion, not to embrace the wisdom of the journey. And perhaps it is this latter that I really need to learn.

So muses Melville’s Ishmael:

“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth, whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul, whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.” (Moby Dick, chapter 1)

In our own drizzly November souls, where go we when the sea is no option?

As a seventh grade English teacher in Grant County, Kentucky years ago, I would, as English teachers are prone to do, ask my students to write stories based on some prompt. The question would always come, “How many pages, Mr. Greenwald?” I was hesitant to give such limits because I wanted stories to be told and not just pages to be filled. But they needed some kind of guide, a limit to aim for, and so I would give it to them with this caution: don’t let the page limit ruin your story. I urged them that if they were to reach the bottom of the second page of a two-page assignment to not begin the third page by saying, “And then, sadly, a brick fell on his head and he died. The end.”

A good story must have a satisfying ending.

And though that is the only fault I can find with Patrick Rothfuss’s fantasy The Name of the Wind, it is a hard and disappointing one.

Though I’m not usually drawn to the fantasy genre, two of my sons and another friend insisted that this was a book I should read. One son read all 722 pages in just a few days while on a Coast Guard deployment. These are all people of good taste, and it seems, our tastes agree.

Rothfuss is a wonderful storyteller. His hero is an enjoyable character, one we are drawn to and love to cheer. He has placed him into a believable world of which he has given sufficient details that a reader can picture it with clarity. He introduces mystery and intrigue and then, at page 722, seems to have reached his pre-assigned word count and stops. Mysteries are left unsolved; story lines left hanging; conflict left unresolved.

In protest I may just need to leave his thousand page Part 2 unread and his yet to be published Part 3 on Amazon’s virtual shelf. The book would have been so good had there been a well planned and executed ending. But now, I question whether even the second book would resolve the conflict, unhang the story, and solve the mysteries. The world he created is a satisfying place to visit. But I feel like my tour bus was diverted and I was placed on the earliest flight home. I don’t like the disappointment that brings.

Apart from the disappointing last 100 pages or so, The Name of the Wind was a welcome companion over the past few weeks. I’m not going to quibble over the all too perfect characters. Life, as many of us know it, is all too full of insoluble nuance. Every now and then we need stories in which my good guys are good and my bad guys are bad; where all the men are strong, and all the girls good looking.

“That’s why stories appeal to us. They give us the clarity and simplicity our real lives lack.”

Stephen King’s short story The Mist suffered….

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[Editor’s note: It appears that before completing this post, Mr. Greenwald suffered a head contusion caused by a piece of falling masonry. Injuries were minor and we are assured he will return to this space soon.]

I never had any real interest in the Wright brothers until David McCullough wrote a book about them. His ability to tell a story made ME interested in what interested him. (HBO, by the way, has called him a ‘painter with words’. That may be excessive praise, but the short video they produced about him for their John Adams mini-series is worth watching.)

There are a handful of other writers of non-fiction who have the ability to make me interested in what interests them simply through the power of their storytelling.

Laura Hillenbrand

I’m persuaded that Laura Hillenbrand could compose a telephone book that would be captivating reading. Many have read Unbroken
and found it good. Ms. Hillenbrand’s other book, Seabiscuit is about a racehorse and, we think, we have no interest in racehorses. Think again.

Those who have read her books will find this article by Wil Hylton, The Unbreakable Laura Hillenbrand a wonderful read in its own right as well as a fascinating insight both into her method and why books from her are slow in coming.

Erik Larson

On the first day of a several day stay in downtown Chicago with my wife a few years ago, I bought and began to read Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City. This book remarkably combines the fascinating story of the 1898 Columbian Exposition in Chicago and the story of a serial murderer haunting the shadows of that event. The book’s subtitle tells it all: “Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America”. Reading it while in Chicago made it all the better, but wherever I would have read it Mr. Larson would have had my attention.

Other books by Larson are good, though a bit inconsistent in their ability to capture my interest. His latest, Dead Wake
, about the sinking of the luxury cruise liner Lusitania is very good.

David Mariniss

A professor of creative non-fiction at Rollins College recommended to me David Mariniss’ book Rome 1960 about the summer Olympics of 1960. Suddenly reading about Wilma Rudolph and Cassius Clay and the barefoot marathoner from Ethiopia became what I HAD to do.

William Manchester

This list would not be complete without mentioning William Manchester. His biographies of Douglas MacArthur, American Caesar and of Winston Churchill, The Last Lion are so, so good and worthy of multiple readings.

The Churchill biography illustrates the power a gifted storyteller brings to the page. Manchester was able to complete the first two volumes of this three volume work telling Churchill’s story up to WWII. Subsequent to the publication of these, Manchester suffered a debilitating stroke which left him unable to finish the third planned volume. He passed his research on to a trusted friend who completed the work. The third volume lacks in the sparkle and narrative power of the first two. The storyteller had been replaced with a reporter.

Stephen Ambrose

Ambrose was once a prolific and always captivating author on the lives of the ordinary soldier of World War II. Band of Brothers is well known both as a book and as an excellent mini-series. Citizen Soldiers is an excellent reflection on how the demands of the war elicited uncommon leadership from common men and women. And Ambrose’s account of the explorations of Lewis and Clark, Undaunted Courage
explores similar themes in a different era. All are worth reading.

Sadly, in the last year of his life, charges of plagiarism tarnished his reputation. In defense, he admitted that he did not apply all the standards of an academic publication to his work, but leaned heavily on this assertion: “I tell stories.”

That is the gift of each of these. They tell stories – and I listen.

It’s not because I’m teetering on the brink of antiquity that I’ve picked up Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End to read. Rather, I chose it because it was recommended by a medical-student-to-be and because it deals with a subject my profession brings before me with some regularity. Death comes to the archbishop, priest, and parishoner alike. And it will come to me no matter how hard I try to ignore it. Gawande reminds us with relentless detail just how mortal we are.

“…at the age of thirty the brain is a three-pound organ that barely fits inside the skull; by our seventies, gray-matter loss leaves almost an inch of spare room.”

That’s harsh.

We run out of pigment in our scalp (thus re-coloring our hair). Our arteries grow hard and our teeth grow soft. The amount of light reaching the retina of a sixty-year old is 1/3 of that of a twenty-year old. And on he goes. We don’t die as much as we just wear out and run down.

I’m wearing out, and as hard as it is to be reminded of this it is good he has done so. That is, in fact, his point. The things we hide are the things with which we do not rightly deal. We ignore death. We push it aside, and sanitize it in hospitals and nursing homes. We pretend we can escape it, we act as if we can cheat it. But it comes to those we love and it comes to us. So there is wisdom in being forced to face it.

Someone once told me that I would not qualify as “old” until my children were closer to 50 than I am. That threshold is looming, as, perhaps, is “nature’s final victory” (per a surgeon Gawande quotes) And so we pray

Teach us to number our days
that we may get a heart of wisdom. (Psalm 90:12)

On Monday, October 18, 1909 witnesses gasped to see high in the sky over Paris, France, higher than the Eiffel Tower (then the tallest man-made structure on Earth) something never before seen over a major world city: an airplane. This one was a Wright brothers bi-plane piloted by a Wright friend and student, the Comte de Lambert. One witness was the American Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Edith Wharton who recorded her impressions.

It is not her impressions that interest me, nor the flight itself, as remarkable as that must have been. What interests me is that in his recent book The Wright Brothers, David McCullough refers to Ms. Wharton blandly as ‘the American writer Edith Wharton’. This may have been for McCullough nothing more than an incidental word choice. But I like to think that it arose from something deeper: from McCullough’s assessment of his vocation. He wants to be known simply as this: as a writer, a person who tells stories with words. The Presidential Medal of Freedom which McCullough was awarded calls him “…one of our nations most distinguished and honored historians…”. Though no doubt true, he is first and foremost, in his mind, simply a writer.

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I grew up in southwest Ohio, forty minutes or so from Dayton. When I was young I spent many enjoyable hours strolling through the magnificent Air Force Museum on the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Nevertheless, I had no particular interest in the sons of Dayton for whom the air force base was named. With the release of David McCullough’s book The Wright Brothers, I have become interested. A good storyteller does that. He compels one to become interested in what interests him.

The basic narrative of the brothers Wilbur and Orville was taught to most school children of my era. These two from Dayton designed and built the first ever airplane, testing and flying it, for some reason never then explained, off the sand dunes of Kitty Hawk, NC. McCullough fills in the rather monstrous gaps in that narrative.

In a 1909 interview with a New York newspaper, Wilbur, reflecting perhaps on his life, said

“A man who works for the immediate present and its immediate rewards is nothing but a fool.”

Ignoring “the immediate present and its immediate rewards”, the brothers attacked the problem of flight like none before them. Further, the design and building of a flying machine was only part of the challenge before them. They also had to learn how to pilot one, knowing that any error along the way could (and almost did) kill them. They worked obsessively, mostly in obscurity, often under great pressure, and sometimes in the face of mockery.

And yet they were not indifferent to immediate rewards. They attracted notoriety, and became acquainted with a wide span of celebrity, nobility, and royalty. But they never let their own celebrity lull them into complacency or rashness. They did not fly to impress, but to succeed. That that they did.

Living until age 77, Orville survived to see both the good and the potential for destruction their invention brought to the world. Wilbur, on the other hand, died of typhoid fever in 1912.

In all the years they had been working together Wilbur and Orville had never once flown together, so if something were to go wrong and one of them should be killed, the other would live to carry on with the work. But on this day at Huffman Prairie, where they had developed the first practical flying machine ever, the two of them, seated side by side, took off into the air with Orville at the controls.

To many then and later, it seemed their way of saying they had accomplished all they had set out to do and so at last saw no reason to postpone any longer enjoying together the thill of flight.” (page 253)

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The quality of a story is often found in what is withheld. A good writer does not obscure his story under a weight of detail but keeps his focus and lets the story unfold. I would like to know more about why the brothers were so fastidious about not working on Sunday, and others might want to know greater details about their legal battles. If we all got our wishes, the book would double in size and be half as interesting.

David McCullough’s degree from Yale is in English literature. Whether he qualifies as a historian, I’ll leave to others to decide. Clearly, he is a writer, one for whom I continue to be grateful.

[Footnote point of regional pride: Why does North Carolina gets the cool ‘First in Flight’ license plates? All they provided was isolation, sand, and a prevailing wind for the boys from Ohio to ply their magic!]

I joked recently that I’ve done irreparable damage to any chance of ever becoming a celebrity pastor by, well, just being me. There never has been any danger of my being swept up on the celebrity circuit and I’m okay with that. Thoughts about celebrity and its place in the Christian world have been on my mind for some time and were brought to the forefront recently by my reading of the concise, readable, and helpful biography of George Whitefield by Thomas Kidd, George Whitefield: America’s Spiritual Founding Father.

George Whitefield was an influential figure in the Evangelical Awakening of the mid-18th Century, a powerful preacher, and probably the most famous person in America and England during the time of his prominence. Think Bono. With a powdered wig. Kidd tells Whitefield’s story with care and insight.

A trap that can plague biographies of Christian heroes is that the authors can so fawn over their subject that weaknesses disappear. A corresponding and opposite trap is that authors can so labor to avoid the first that they will hide their genuine admiration for their subject and in so doing downplay aspects of their subject that makes him or her admirable. Kidd clearly admires Whitefield and believes his contribution to evangelical Christianity as well as American history is a story needing to be told. At the same time, he does not hesitate to expose Whitefield’s disappointingly pragmatic take on slavery and his insensitive and neglectful treatment of his wife. Some may think that these faults so color Whitefield’s legacy that we should be wary of praising him, and I tend in that direction. Kidd is wise enough to not pass that judgment. No saint comes without vice. I get that.

Whitefield, born just over 300 years ago, as 1715 dawned, was converted to evangelical Christianity as a young man and was early captured with a passion to preach to the conversion of others. He was ordained in the Anglican church but never filled a traditional clerical role. Driven to preach an evangelistic message he sought the crowds where they might be found, and more often than not they were found outside in massive gatherings both in the England of his birth and on seven trips across the Atlantic, in the colonies of the Americas. Through such labor he became the most famous man in the English world of the time.

That is, he was a celebrity. Word would spread that he would be preaching at a certain location at a certain time, and before long, sometimes as many as 20,000 or more people would gather to hear him. Then, as now, I suspect that caused the ordinary parish preacher to wonder what he would need to do to live up to the expectations that the passing celebrity would leave in his wake.

Kidd wants us to be aware of Whitefield’s impact upon the American character and the movement that would two centuries hence be known as evangelicalism. As a pastor and a Christian I want to know what was going on in Whitefield’s heart. Whitefield left a series of published journals, but these were edited by him prior to publication. What would I excise from my journals were I to edit them for publication? It would depend upon the image that I wanted to present, and I wonder to what effect such editing colors what we know of Whitefield. The specter of celebrity creates a filter behind which no doubt some hide.

Celebrity is often the price that those who are called to lead in the church must pay. My ministry has been shaped by men who would be labeled celebrity but whose celebrity has arisen from gifts which God has used to give leadership to the broader church. Those celebrated for their leadership deserve to be heard. Those who promote themselves in order to be celebrated do not. And rarely, I suppose, can we tell the difference.

George Whitefield is a strong biography and I am grateful for it and commend it highly. That I come away from it with a lower regard for its subject than I probably should is more a reflection of my own bias toward local church ministry and away from the mass public ministry of the celebrity. That will continue, of course, until I become one. I think I might be waiting a while.

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Note: special thanks to my son Seth for any alleged Photoshop work which might appear in this post.

Recently I was approached by a woman who was reading, or attempting to do so, Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead for a book discussion group. The group had chosen the book upon my recommendation, so her considerable frustration with the book was focused on me.

“Tell me why it is you are making me read Gilead.”

“I’m not making you read it.”

“I know. But you must have some reason for recommending it, something we’re supposed to see in it. But I’m just not seeing it.”

Her conclusion was that she was simply too stupid to ‘get’ it which, obvious to all who know her, is by no means the case. I suggested she stop reading something she doesn’t enjoy, but she is of that stock that will plow to the end of the row no matter how many stones lie in the path.

I have yet to hear whether she has completed it. But the conversation raised a good question. Why would I recommend this book? Since I was nearing the end of my own (second!) reading, I was in a place to consider it.

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Gilead is the name of a small town in Iowa, the home of the Reverend John Ames, the elderly pastor of the local Congregational church, a church served previously by his father and his grandfather. Though in his 70s, Rev. Ames has a seven year-old son, his only child. He knows that his time with his son will be brief and not like that of other fathers. He sets out, therefore, to write a letter to convey something of his heart and history to a son with whom his time will be short. The book is this letter.

This father’s desire is to say to his son what needs saying. He wants to give him not only a sense of his history, but some direction for his future. He recounts stories, and sometimes personal or theological reflections on those stories. Through it, Rev. Ames wishes to honor and bless his son and leave him an enduring legacy.

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Great books invite multiple visits yielding fresh treasures with each visit. Gilead does not disappoint.

My first reading impressed me with wonder at the care and sensitivity with which the author, a lay female, had drawn the character of her protagonist, a male pastor. [I commented on that first reading here.] She sketches him with insight and care neither magnifying his weaknesses nor obscuring his sins. In John Ames, we see reflected the best that can be said for those whose desire it is to care for the souls of others while trying to make sense of his own. In him I see those many I’ve been privileged to know and observe, pastors rarely noticed by the world they faithfully serve.

When the spotlight normally falls on pastors, it is because of their exceptional gifts or prodigious foolishness. The ordinary faithful and flawed pastor (of which there are many) goes largely unnoticed. To find a pastor so sympathetically and accurately portrayed in a novel so widely acclaimed is a wonder which alone makes reading the book worthwhile. It gives honor to countless men and women who quietly and faithfully serve Christ in such undramatic but substantive ways.

My second reading, however, has pushed the impressions of the first to the side. Larger themes, noticed but unconsidered in the first reading, have emerged. The book brims with reflections on fathers and sons and the relationship between them. How do older generations bless the younger? Or, as it may sometimes be, curse them? How do younger generations genuinely honor the older? How can the powerful impact of the generations be navigated so as to possibly maximize blessing? Good art raises and rarely answers questions. Fiction creates a parallel world by which we can measure our own.

The book also addresses the struggle between belief and doubt. Faith is never taken for granted or shown to be an easy thing. Doubt wells up with differing levels of intensity in different characters. Are some of us meant to believe and others meant not to believe? Do we freely choose belief and unbelief? Pastor Ames wrestles with his faith mightily and is troubled by the doubts of others, particularly his friend’s son Jack. In Jack, he sees an inverse reflection of himself, and it troubles him.

Fathers, sons, faith, doubt, and through it all grace. Grace displayed, lived out, and, sometimes, rejected.

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Huckleberry Finn introduces the novel titled after him by threatening to shoot anyone trying to find a plot in the book. Those attempting to find a plot in Gilead might wish to shoot the author. The plot is revealed in a non-linear fashion. A story is told of a life well-lived, intersecting and impacting the lives of others in a profound way. There is conflict; there is climax; there is resolution. It develops slowly and erratically and is meant to be savored, not devoured. First one, and then another character is illuminated, as then, in their reflection, are we. And that is good.

Or it can be.

I’m glad that my friend is diligent and will finish the book. I hope she grows as fond of the Reverend John Ames, and of his creator, as I have. I hope she thanks me for ‘making’ her read it.