Wordful Wednesday: Lost to the West
I’m certain that without the Internet I wouldn’t get as much reading in. Or at least I don’t think I’d read on quite as diverse a range of topics as I read now. I still get recommendations from friends, from bibliographies of other books I read, and from the Cursed Library New Materials RSS Feed (a good thing which prevents me from doing much of my own choosing), but it sure seems like, these days, I get a lot of recommendations from other bookish blogs.
I first saw mention of Lost to the West: The Forgotten Byzantine Empire that Rescued Western Civilization, by Lars Brownworth, over on superfastreader.com. And it certainly would’ve been nice to be a super-fast reader, because interesting and gripping as the book was, it wasn’t exactly speedy reading. And I’m not really sure why not.
I love to read both fiction and non-fiction, and my favorite topics in non-fiction are science and history (and History of Science is a particular favorite). Both history and science books are awesome because they make me feel smarter and dumber at the same time. Mostly I feel dumb that I didn’t already know more about the topic.
Everyone learns about the Byzantine Empire in school, right? I know I certainly did, though I haven’t had a world history class since (wow!) 1987 or so. Double wow there. It all goes back to the fact that I did a 3:2 transfer program to get my engineering degree. Since we future engineers were only going to be experiencing three of the normal four years of George Fox College’s offerings, the powers that be decided we shouldn’t waste time on trivialities like Western Civ and U.S. History or, for that matter, Bible 101. No, instead, we few, we lucky few, got to take upper-division electives in the humanities and Bible.
(This isn’t really a complaint here. In Bible, particularly, I loved the classes I took – Writings of John, Life of Christ, and Christian Classics were awesome. And I got my Bible 101 from LeTourneau University after I transferred.)
So I got to choose either Psychology or Sociology, had to take both Ethics and Intro to Philosophy (both of which helped me discover my love of writing), and the History class I chose was England to 1688. By the way, I enjoyed the class quite a bit.
(Looking back, I’m really glad I studied Engineering at a liberal arts school. Because Intro to Music and Survey of Art were really cool classes. Even if we engineers enjoyed adding an ‘F’, guess where, in Survey of Art. Psst…it was right before the only ‘a’ in the course title. Don’t tell my mother.)
You know what I love? When I completely hijack an otherwise well-intentioned book review to just yammer on about something in my past. Blogging is awesome.
Anyhow, I knew something about the Byzantines, because I’d had Mrs. Gaffney’s Honors World History way back twenty-three years ago (sob!), and I even read Stephen Lawhead’s Byzantium back in college, which wasn’t even fifteen years ago!
All that being said, I knew nothing about the Byzantine Empire And now I do. I know that Justinian was a pretty remarkable dude, Belisarius was an amazing military commander, the Comnenis brought things back from the brink, the Fourth Crusade was a tragedy, and being the Byzantine Emperor must’ve been a pretty cool gig, apart from the fact that the severance package usually involved being poisoned, blinded, or strangled with a bowstring.
But more than any dry facts I may have learned in reading this book, I learned to admire the Byzantines and to be thankful for what they did, preserving what became known as the Western Tradition even while being normally thought of as The East.
Because, really, what would’ve become of Western Europe without Constantinople? In short, it probably would have ceased to exist during the Dark Ages. At its most vulnerable, it probably would have been attacked by the Bulgars, or the Khans, or the Turks. But with Constantinople there, a brilliant and wealthy target, all the big guns seemed to aim there. And most of them were pushed back.
Of course, Byzantine power waxed and waned a fair bit, and some of the Emperors weren’t worth the air they breathed. But others brought them back from the brink and managed to save the remnants of Greek and Roman culture so they could be passed on later. And even the final fall of Constantinople did good for the Christian West. In their exodus from the failing empire, the population carried copies of classical works into the West (which had been Lost to the West).
In short, even though I seemed to struggle to get through it, this is a terrific book and highly worth reading. And I need to read more histories. (Heh…but I already started another.)
Next up…no idea really. I’ve started five books, and I’m pretty sure I know which three I’ll finish first, but can’t make an educated guess as to which will pull me in for a quick finish.
Theology Thursday Book Review: Feeding Your Appetites
I started reading Feeding Your Appetites, by Stephen Arterburn last year and finished it this year. And I haven’t reviewed it up till now for two reasons:
- I didn’t know how to review it without being really, really transparent
- I didn’t really feel like reviewing it
So laziness and self-consciousness. That’s about the sum of it. But then this week, Tyler shared an item on Google Reader titled “If a Fat Man Can Lead a Church…”. (You can go read it if you want to. It’s a short post with long discussion in the comments. Then you can come back and see how I think this ties in to my current book review.)
First, how about I discuss what Feeding Your Appetites is about? As the title suggests, it’s about the many kinds of appetites we have and how to feed them properly. The appetites discussed are:
- Appetite for Fellowship with God
- Appetite for Pleasure
- Appetite for Food
- Appetite for Sex
- Appetite for Authority and Power
- Appetite for Work
- Appetite for Companionship
- Appetite for Wisdom
The underlying philosophy can be summed up by a quote from the forward:
So I set out on a journey to understand what I had to do to get my appetites under control. Along the way I learned something amazing: every human being has an inborn desire to know God, but our personal and selfish wants get in the way. Our desire for knowledge of our Creator is taken hostage, and we find ourselves captured instead by appetites for foods, feelings, or experiences.
Of course, the appetites described in this book are not bad in themselves. In fact, Arterburn goes to great lengths to make it clear that they’re all good things, but things which can be abused as substitutes for other unfulfilled appetites, the primary one being the appetite for fellowship with God.
(To be honest, I question the very premise of the book. The idea that all humans have an innate desire for God sounds like Christianese to me. I’m not saying it’s a wrong idea, but I’m just not convinced.)
The book is directed at anyone who has one or more appetites out of control, but I didn’t really go into it looking for a self-help book. I must admit I got it to read it with a friend, and it was cheap! Cheap books good! Reading book with friend good!
And I don’t find myself to have any completely out-of-control appetites. I don’t drink. I don’t gamble. I don’t try to control people. I don’t have any particular temptation to look at pornography. Of course, I’m carrying around a few extra pounds here and there that I’d rather not carry. So my appetite for food must be at least slightly off.
One of the things that becomes clear in the book is that we tend to abuse one appetite in substitution for another, with the abused appetite bringing pleasure to cover the pain of the unfulfilled appetite. We’ve all heard of “comfort food” and “emotional eating,” I imagine.
(By the way, it was interesting reading this article about the whole Tiger Woods thing after reading this book.)
I actually didn’t intend to do a full book review here, so I’m not even going to discuss the rest of the book, except to mention that I liked the way it ended. Arterburn didn’t expect that reading a book would solve everything, counter to what a librophile like myself would probably hope. But he hoped to provide some guidance for getting started on straightening out our out-of-whack appetites.
One interesting thing I noticed in myself while reading this book was the way our struggles seem natural to us, while others’ struggles look bad and sinful. I could sit there reading, repulsed at the idea of gambling addiction or porn addiction (and even scoff at the idea of labeling it addiction), while figuring that whatever was wrong with my appetites was both pretty much normal and perfectly understandable.
And that’s where the tie-in to the “Fat Man Leading a Church” post comes in. If you look through the comments (and I admire anyone who could read all of them), you’ll find some very reasonable ones (like mine – see, me opinion good, you opinion bad), but then a whole bunch of vitriol from either the “but gays are gross” or “fat people lack self-control” sides. And quite a few puerile “sin is sin” comments (yes, I used the word “puerile” for that overused and under-thought-out statement).
Anyhow, the more polarized comments on both sides seem to stem from someone standing in judgment of somebody else’s struggles. Though I must admit that I’m standing in judgment of all those commenters, calling what they’re doing wrong. It’s wonderful being human, isn’t it?
Well, this wasn’t much of a book review. Maybe I could get a comment or two from someone else who’s read the book, filling in something else about it. Say, perhaps, someone I see several times a week? Who spotted the cheap book and ordered a couple of copies, then slipped one to me for a reasonable fee? Anybody like that out there?
Wordful Wednesday: The Lightning Thief
I think my nephew, Peter, was the first to recommend the Olympians books to me. Add to that all the positive reviews I’ve seen for them, and the new feature film version of Book 1, and I was really looking forward to reading Rick Riordan’s The Lightning Thief. I put in a Hold Request for it, but kept hoping to find it on the Best-Sellers rack. Fortunately, my Hold came through rather more quickly than I expected.
I’m more and more convinced these days that the best (or at least most entertaining) science-fiction and fantasy is getting published in the Young Adult space. The Lightning Thief is no exception, delivering a top-notch adventure and a great setup for a whole series, while eliminating the more objectionable content you might find in a for-adults book on the same topic. In fact, dealing as it does 
with Greek Mythology, there’s just a whole lot of inappropriate that a for-adults book could feature. (And here I’m thinking of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods.)
It’s true that there’s nothing terribly original about the premise. The “boy finds out he’s part of a larger world” thing has been done to death, but it’s because it works its magic on the reader. Who hasn’t wished for Jedi powers? Or to be able to play Quidditch? Or to find out they were somehow special?
I’m going to do a bit of spoilery here, so be forewarned, but I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler to say that this series posits that the Greek Pantheon is alive and well and living in New York (having followed Western Civilization to its current apex). And, as anyone who’s read much Greek Mythology knows, most of the gods of Olympus are a bunch of deadbeat dads (and moms), spawning little demigods all over the place as an outworking of their overwhelming attraction to mortal partners. After all these centuries, there’d be quite a few half-breeds walking around.
Percy Jackson is one of these demigods. I really don’t think I’m spoiling anything by revealing it. I won’t reveal which god is his parent, though I must admit I found it rather obvious. He ends up having to take on a quest to return a stolen artifact to Olympus, after receiving a bit of training at Camp Half-Blood. The quest itself is the meat of the book, reading as a romp through many of the classical Hero Myths, but set in the modern U.S.
It certainly is helpful to have a decent background in mythology (thank you, Mrs. Foster from Dimond High), though in some sense it spoils the surprise. I’m not sure but that the book could be a bit confusing without such a background, but I think the author does a decent job of explaining the various references through the mouths of his characters. (It’s helpful that Percy himself is something of a lousy student and needs a lot of prodding to remember names and events.)
The thing that really works about the book is that all the characteristics of the gods and other mythological characters are taken with just the right amount of tongue-in-cheek humor. Dionysius is a grumpy drunk who isn’t allowed to drink (think Haymitch from The Hunger Games). Hades is a worn out administrator, fed up with the population explosion the 20th century caused in his domain. Charon (runs the check-in desk in the Underworld, which is hilariously “obviously” in Los Angeles) hates his job and wants a raise.
The story is nicely self-contained, but also has threads that start forming a larger arc, which I assume will pay off in the further volumes of the series. The dread of this larger story was set up very nicely, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it plays out. I’m kind of glad my Hold Requests will take some time to come through, because otherwise I might just race through the series to the exclusion of all else. And I have other stuff to read!
Next up, hopefully, is a non-fiction title. But you’ll have to check back to find out what it is…
Wordful Wednesday: The First Rule
It’s official: I’ve added Robert Crais to my “If he writes it, I’ll read it” list. I saw his latest, The First Rule, on the Bestsellers rack at the Library and had to grab 
it, and I’m glad I did.
One thing I haven’t done yet, which I’ll probably do eventually, is to go back and read all his older works.
I’ve now read three Crais novels. The other two were The Two Minute Rule, a standalone novel about a former bank robber investigating the death of his son, and Chasing Darkness, a novel featuring Crais’s recurring private detective character, Elvis Cole.
Also featured in Chasing Darkness was Joe Pike, Cole’s partner in the detective business, a former Marine and just generally A Dude You Shouldn’t Mess With. Think Hawk from Spenser for Hire. (Ah, Avery Brooks in his prime. My first Man Crush.)
The First Rule flips the equation around, centering on Pike instead of Cole. (Evidently Crais has done this before in L.A. Requiem.)
The title of the book comes from a list of rules accepted and followed by the Russian mafia and other European Organized Crime groups, though it doesn’t become apparent, in the book, just who the rule applies to for much of the book. And that’s a good thing. It’s not so much that there’s a twist in the book, but rather that the reader (and characters) just don’t have all the information.
Early in the book, a family is brutally murdered by a home invasion crew. Frank Meyer was the man of the house. And who was Meyer to Pike? “One of my guys.” And that’s all that’s needed for Pike to need to find out who was responsible and to deal them some justice.
(Pike is not only a former Marine but also a former private military contractor. Meyer was on his team.)
But Pike isn’t as one-dimensional as you’d probably imaging. He’s not just looking for payback. He learns that the police figure Frank was into something dirty, because the home invasion crew had struck before, but only when there was a big score to make. Pike wants to clear his friend and destroy the guys who killed him.
Of course, Pike eventually calls on Elvis Cole to help out, but the book is definitely a Joe Pike story. One of the interesting things Crais does in this book is to shift perspectives in some chapters. There are several chapters from Elvis Cole’s perspective, and one from Jon Stone’s (another one of Pike’s guys). I’m not sure if this is new or something Crais typically does. Further reading should help me fill in that blank.
In many ways, this book was similar to Clancy’s Without Remorse, only better written. Nothing against Clancy, but he’s never had a way with dialogue. And maybe Crais is at an advantage with Pike, who is definitely of few words. But the story is also a bit deeper, not merely focusing on revenge.
(I should point out as I have before, that this is a crime novel, and as such has some naughty language and violence, frequently followed by “Jon said/did that kind of thing.” Mr. Stone is the potty mouth of the team.)
It’s not a feel-good story by any means, because when you get to the end, Frank and his family are still dead. And some of the “justice” meted out is rather harsh, though not nearly to the degree of Without Remorse.
I’ll definitely have to backtrack and read the other Joe Pike novel, because I’ve read that it really fleshes out Pike’s back-story. But first I’ll need to read more of the Cole-centric novels. Should be fun!
Well, I’ve reached the First Round Number of the Year at 10 books. Woo! Unfortunately, I’m not within striking distance of finishing anything else, so it may be late next week before I can crank out another one.
Free-For-All Friday: The 10 Big Lies About America
I try not to dwell overmuch on politics, because little good ever comes from such musings. But to put all my cards on the table, I’m fairly conservative, actually bordering on libertarian on many issues. And I listen to Dennis Prager most days, and sometimes also listen to Michael Medved.
The thing I enjoy most about Prager and Medved is that they emphasize disagreement, trying to find the best possible defenders of the other side and having smart dialogue with them. This is also the reason I have no use for the 
left-wing commentators on MSNBC. I want to hear both sides.
Well, one of the issues Medved brings up a fair bit is the way America is portrayed negatively in books, films, and television. And that’s the subject of his book, The 10 Big Lies About America: Combating Destructive Distortions About Our Nation.
Now, I’m one of those conservatives who finds whining on either side to be unpalatable. I didn’t like it when leftists trashed everything Dubya did, and I really hoped that those of us on the right would do better in dealing with Obama’s policies. But we largely don’t, as far as I can tell. I have no use for the Tea Party movement, even if I think it’s been unfairly portrayed by the media (shocker). I have no respect at all for the Birther movement, and actually think it hurts the conservative cause to support such stupidity.
Fortunately, Michael Medved isn’t a whiner, and he presents his arguments logically and passionately on these ten Big Lies:
- America Was Founded on Genocide Against Native Americans
- The United States is Uniquely Guilty for the Crime of Slavery, and Based Its Wealth on Stolen African Labor
- The Founders Intended a Secular, Not Christian, Nation
- America Has Always Been a Multicultural Society, Strengthened by Diversity
- The Power of Big Business Hurts the Country and Oppresses the People
- Government Programs Offer the Only Remedy for Economic Downturns and Poverty
- America Is an Imperialist Nation and a Constant Threat to World Peace
- The Two-Party System is Broken, and We Urgently Need a Viable Third Party
- A War on the Middle Class Means Less Comfort and Opportunity for the Average American
- America Is in the Midst of an Irreversible Moral Decline
Right up front, I have to point out that Lie #9 confused me from the get-go. Certainly no one could argue that a War on the Middle Class would be a good thing, right? But Medved argues that no such war exists, contrary to the frequent charge from the political left. I just didn’t get that from the title of the chapter.
I’m not going to dwell long on any of the topics, but I’ll say that the chapter on Lie #1 was probably the most interesting, because it explodes, among other things, the myth of the Smallpox Blankets we so often hear about.
Lie #3 was fairly fascinating, too, as the perception that the Pilgrims came here to escape religious persecution is a bit overblown. In fact, they typically sought more rigorous religious observance than was found in Europe, where the church was corrupt.
I do wish Medved had included more than one Lie told by the right, as only Lie #10 was really targeted that way.
I also wish the book had been shorter. I had a terrible time getting through it, between reading other books. But I tend to focus on one book if it’s interesting enough. And I’m afraid this one just didn’t hold my attention. (I originally checked this one out in April 2009.)
Still, I consider it worth picking up, and I might at some point pick up Medved’s new book, The 5 Big Lies About American Business.
Next up is Robert Crais’s latest, The First Rule, which I got from the Bestsellers rack at the Library
Fiction Friday: The Princess Bride
In hindsight, I probably should’ve consulted my sister first. But we hold these truths to be self-evident, that the book is always better than the movie. Or perhaps the exception proves the rule, though I’ve never understood how this could be so.
In any case, The Princess Bride is a charming film, perhaps one of the mostest charmingest ones of all time. (I just gave it to a friend as a late, late Christmas gift, due to his having never seen it.)
The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure, by William Goldman, is not charming, and it’s rather shocking and disappointing just how uncharming it is.
Positioned as a redaction of an earlier work by S. Morgenstern, the book has a looooong introduction, stretching to about fifty pages of tiresome descriptions of the author’s history with the book and his struggles to pass his affection for it on to his chubby son. And no, I didn’t mention chubby randomly. The fatness of his fictional son is a major topic in the introduction. Tiresome.
Of course, the entire introduction is fictional, except perhaps the parts about the filming of the movie adaptation. In my mind, though, it was a mistake to even mention the movie, because it’s actually hard to believe the screenplay and the novel were written by the same person.
Actually, I didn’t find the introduction nearly so offensive as I’m coming off here. For the first ten or fifteen pages, that is. In fact, I was actually taken in a bit by the fictional history of the book at first. Until the first few mentions of Florinese history were made. I’m not the most credulous person, so I did a quick Wikipedia search and found what I suspected: the “history” was all fiction.
And don’t get me wrong here, the fictional history thing is actually somewhat charming as far as it goes, but then it keeps going and going. And going.
Nevertheless, I slogged through the introduction, figuring that it would be a somewhat tedious setup to one of the all-time charming books. Alas, no.
I actually found the prose in this book to be strikingly similar to that of Ladies and Gentlemen: The Bible!, which if you recall was the worst book I read last year.
It’s not that the writing is bad, so much as it’s just not to my taste. Authors are not obliged to please me with their writing, so that’s fine, and others may find the writing readable. I just didn’t. It was filled with asides and parentheticals (from “Morgenstern”), in addition to Goldman’s “notes” about his abridgement, the latter of which never did anything but annoy me.
But it’s not just the writing, either. I didn’t care for the characters. Buttercup is a twit, Westley is something of a chauvinist, and Inigo is a bit full of himself and his mad sword skilz. (I can’t say anything bad about Fezzik, however.)
Vizzini was enjoyable, of course, and I can’t say there were no passages I liked in the book. In fact, I’m forced to admit that after enduring a one and a half hundred pages or so, I adjusted to the style and enjoyed some passages a bit. Who’s not going to enjoy the Battle of Wits? Or Fezzik’s fight with Westley?
(The fight which contains a modification of one of my favorite lines, after Fezzik asks the Man in Black why he wears a mask, wondering if he was burned by acid or something: “Oh, no, it’s just they’re terribly comfortable. I think everyone’ll be wearing them in the future.”)
Still and all, the little highlights don’t add up to much. The book fails by every comparison to the movie, and it’s a cryin’ shame. I’m still not sure how the screenplay could be so brilliant and the novel so inane. It’s a mystery.
A quick warning about the ending, too. It’s left somewhat ambiguous, but it’s ambiguously negative, which fits after the author’s frequent asides about how life isn’t fair. So if you were looking for the ending with the Top Kiss of All Time, you won’t find it. The Kiss is described on page 59, and it’s Buttercup and Westley’s first kiss.
Of course, I invite disagreements or commiseration from anyone else who’s read this book. Maybe I’m being too tough on it. Lob me a comment if you’re in either camp.
(Oh, I should probably also mention that this edition of The Princess Bride included the first chapter of Buttercup’s Baby, the supposed sequel. I didn’t read it. Maybe I should have, but I was just not inclined to read any more that I absolutely had to. It would’ve been seventy (!) pages I’d never have gotten back.)
Fiction Friday: Childhood’s End
Back in November when I read 2001: A Space Odyssey, my dad recommended another Arthur C. Clarke title. Dad knows his stuff.
Childhood’s End is about a lot. The more I’ve thought about it, the more layers I’ve found in the story, even though the actual plot is fairly simple.
In many ways, it’s like the new V show. Aliens show up, flash their superior technology, and offer to help humanity out. Whether the Overlords in Childhood’s 
End ever turn out to be evil, I won’t reveal.
One of the core questions in the book is actually sociological and psychological: Take away suffering and striving, and what is humanity left with? Most of us probably think it’d be great to be free of striving after our wants and needs. And on an individual basis, it’s probably true that it’d be pretty terrific.
But what if all of humanity suddenly had nothing to strive for? What would happen to science? To art? To society? (Clarke also has religion taken out of the picture, which is a popular science-fiction author’s daydream, but I have to be honest that it is necessary to the plot of the novel.)
Another question involves the idea of a mind in the cosmos, but I can’t write much about it without giving away the core mystery in the book. (Of course, as a Christian, there’s no question to me of their being a Mind in the cosmos.)
As I said, this isn’t a complicated story. There aren’t plots and subplots, but the narrative shifts through different eras of humanity’s interaction with the Overlords. And each time, the reader sees more of who and what the Overlords are, and I found myself sympathizing with them and even feeling sorry for them. But again, I can’t reveal too much without completely spoiling the book.
I really admired how Clarke didn’t leave any plot points dangling. One character, in particular, leaves the narrative for a good portion of the book, and I had no idea how he would be important again in the story. But he was. And there was an odd section showing how the humans of The Golden Age entertained themselves, involving, of all things, a Ouija Board. I had no idea how the scene could possibly be significant to the story. But it was.
I’d love to see a film adaptation of this book, but I think it would be a strange movie. Because I’m not sure how the climax of the book would look. In fact, when I think about it, 2001 has some strikingly similar concepts in it. Hmm. I’ll have to google it.
Not sure what’s next up. I have a mop-up non-fiction from last year to finish, and I just started The Princess Bride.
WordfuI Wednesday: I See Rude People
Sometimes it just comes down to the title. I subscribe to the Washington County Libraries New Materials RSS feed, so I see everything that’s added to the library catalog. A good title catches my eye, and I’m generally quick to request the book, even if just for a thumb-through.
(This is how I came across one of my favorite books of 2007, What a Way to Go, which I otherwise would never have sought out.)
Amy Alkon’s I See Rude People: One Woman’s Battle to Beat Some Manners into Impolite Society is a Good Title pickup. It’s a hilarious and surprisingly profound series of chapters detailing her outrageous, yet brave, efforts to take back some ground in the 
battle to improve society.
(BTW, I was attracted to the title, not the subtitle. I’m not sure I’ve ever read anything with the phrase “One Woman’s Battle” in it before. But I’m secure in my manhood, so everything’s cool.)
The book is essentially a humorous call to action. Alkon wants more people to stand up to rudeness in everyday life. She takes on a range of subjects, from bad customer service at banks or law enforcement agencies, to obnoxious cell phone abusers, to the problem of under-parented children (directing her ire at the adults in the equation).
In addition to titling the book well, she also managed to come up with some great chapter titles, including “The Mobile Savage” and “It’s Only Free for Telemarketers to Call You Because You Have Yet to Invoice Them.”
I actually wonder if I would’ve had the guts to post a negative review of this book, because if there’s anything I learned while reading it, it’s that Amy Alkon is scary, and she would find me, as she found the guy who stole her car (after the police were essentially useless in the matter).
Fortunately, I thought it was terrific fun to read, and I very much admire her spunk and her willingness to put herself out there because someone has to.
But the really cool thing about the book is that the subjects are not only funny, but Alkon manages to bring some science to bear on the issues. For instance, she explains why a cell phone conversation is more distracting to use than a loud discussion between two people. (Hearing only half the conversation causes our brains to try to fill in the other half, making it harder to ignore.)
The key takeaway from the book is that most people enable other people’s rudeness by doing nothing. It’s very much like tipping well for poor service. You feel good for tipping well, but you haven’t improved the restaurant’s service, so someone else will suffer through it after you.
(Oh, and another takeaway is that people don’t like to be rebuked, and they’ll act like you’re the jerk.)
In each chapter, there’s a problem Alkon is confronted with, and then an inspiring tale of how she extracted her pound of flesh (like invoicing the telemarketers). There’s something viscerally satisfying about knowing the perpetrators of discourtesy get what’s coming to them, even if most of us don’t want to be the one doing the confronting.
It reminds me of the time my sister and I were flying between Anchorage and Portland (excuse me if I can’t remember which direction), on a Red-Eye flight (read: the one where you’d rather be in bed), and some punk a few rows back was blasting, and I do not jest, Color Me Badd, on a boom-box. And yes, this dates me a bit, but I will point out that the Sony Discman had been invented, so the boom-box was almost anachronistic even then.
Repeated attempts by other passengers to shut him up hadn’t worked, and no one apparently knew the Vulcan Neck Pinch maneuver so wonderfully employed in a similar situation in Star Trek IV, so the torture continued. The cabin crew got involved, right down to the Captain coming back and warning him that it was a federal offense to disobey the flight crew. The jerk was not impressed.
He was somewhat more impressed when the FBI cuffed him at the gate. It was a beautiful thing.
Now, I should probably point out that Amy Alkon is not afraid to use, as Mr. Spock would put it, “colorful metaphors,” and she makes no apology for it. I wasn’t greatly offended by this, but just thought I’d throw it out there that I’m not giving the book an across-the-board recommendation.
The concluding chapter talks about the merits of being nice, one of which is a positive impact on our happiness. It’s all very Happiness is a Serious Problem. There’s also a good bit about how our acting kindly has an influence on others around us. But it also works the other way, and we’re letting the Rudes win!
Finally, I must conclude with the money quote from the chapter about cell phone use. And this one’s for my dad:
One shouldn’t use a cell phone anywhere one wouldn’t feel perfectly comfortable passing a big, loud cloud of gas.
So my old roommate would have carte blanche to talk on his cell anywhere, any time.
Next up is Childhood’s End, by Arthur C. Clarke. Also for my dad.
Theology Thursday Book Review: The Creed
I’m singing in church this weekend, and I was also asked to lead the reading of The Apostles’ Creed for one of the services, and so you just know what my reaction was going to be, don’t you?
Okay, so my initial reaction was, “No, thanks.” Nervous as I can get about singing into a microphone, it’s ten times worse to speak into one. However, the service I’ll be speaking in is a small one, and the atmosphere is very family, so I’m going to stretch myself a bit.
My next reaction was, “I’ve got a book about that!” The Creed: What You Believe and Why, by Michael Bauman, is a concise 
treatment of The Apostles’ Creed, explaining each point and adding in testimonials from Christians about what the Creed means to them. I picked it up for a buck from CBD. Mmm…dollar books.
One would hope that most pew-dwellers would already know what each line means, rather than just reciting the Creed without understanding, but then a book such as this would be unnecessary.
Having grown up in a decidedly non-liturgical church (Assemblies of God), I didn’t grow up knowing any Creed other than Petra’s. (Which I still think is an awesome song.) But after taking a Church History course in college, and doing quite a bit of self-study on the topic, I’m now reasonably familiar with the various Creeds.
There are a couple of points I disagree with the author on, but that’s hardly surprising given my tendency to disagree with everyone on something. The first disagreement comes in the Introduction:
A well-written creed marks out the truths that the Bible reveals and requires for salvation.
I’m not one to put knowledge tests on salvation, given that the Disciples were apparently saved before knowing much more than “Jesus is Lord and Christ.” Yes, we have more knowledge today, and so we have more responsibility to shepherd that knowledge, but imperfect belief in Christ is still belief in Christ. Errors can be corrected after conversion.
The other issue is Bauman’s treatment of “He descended into hell,” in which he makes the common mistake of not recognizing that “hell” is a bad translation of “Hades,” which is better understood as The Grave, or the place of the dead, and not a place of punishment. The idea that Christ suffered the tortures of Hell is interesting, to say the least, but I’m not aware of any Biblical case that can be built for it.
One other minor thing was that Bauman recycles the very common idea that God the Father turned away from Christ when he was on the cross. I’ve written before that the idea makes sense but isn’t explicitly taught in Scripture and shouldn’t be taught so dogmatically.
Other than that, though, The Creed is a nice, short work of basic apologetics, and it would be very useful as a resource for new converts or those just wanting to brush up on the particulars of their Faith.
But, of course, I was looking for something I could use, man! And I found it. Actually, several things. First, Bauman mentions the legend of the origin of the Creed. The legend says that the Twelve all collaborated on it (after Pentecost, so including Matthias rather than Bad Judas), with each of them contributing one statement to it. A cool idea, to be sure, but not provable.
The next thing is the fact that The Creed is personal. Even though it’s often spoken communally, it’s phrased “I believe,” not “we believe.”
And finally, Bauman emphasizes that there are two sides to faith. The first is the mere intellectual assent, stating things like “I believe this.” The other side is the trust aspect of faith, where we say, “I believe in Jesus.”
It’s the difference between knowing facts about God and knowing God. It’s the difference between saying, “I know what I believe,” and saying with Paul, “I know whom I have believed.” It’s certainly useful to know what you believe about God, but it’s only a stepping stone on the way to knowing Him.
So now I guess I’m ready-ish for Sunday.
Wordful Wednesday: The Lost Symbol
I never consciously set out to read everything Dan Brown wrote, honestly. Back in 2004, I became aware of the Da Vinci Code phenomenon and decided to give it a look. First, I read Angels and Demons, which I enjoyed rather a lot, even though I had to suppress laughter once or twice when Brown’s writing exceeded my ability to suspend disbelief. (But he got big points from me for using the “pretend to drown/suffocate when being throttled/drowned” thing I always figure main characters should use.)
Then, I read The Da Vinci Code, intending it to be an exercise in apologetics. And true to my expectations, I found plenty to object to. But I also enjoyed the book.
I subsequently read Deception Point, which I enjoyed, in spite of being able to predict all of its twists.
Then I made the mistake of reading Digital Fortress, which I found insulting and actually fairly boring. Perhaps more on the insulting thing later.
The bottom line is that I’m not a huge fan of Dan Brown’s work, but I keep 
reading him.
I’ll admit that I set out expecting to, or perhaps determined to (if I’m being honest) really hate The Lost Symbol. And I can’t say that I found it to be a really good book. However, if I’m being fair, it’s not the worst thing I’ve read. And I don’t expect it to be on my list of Bad Books of 2010.
Because, darn it, I kept turning the pages. Much as I tried to not care what was behind that canvas that the characters initially thought was a stone wall, I wanted to know what was behind that canvas!!!!
The book features the same lead character as Angels and Da Vinci. Namely, Dan Brown, also known as Robert Langdon. It wasn’t so blatant in the first two books that Langdon=Brown, but it’s totally there in this one. (Ooh, and apropos of the current pop-culture Zeitgeist, such a character is often termed an Author Avatar.)
For those who don’t know, Robert Langdon is a Harvard Professor of Symbology, which means he can find wild conspiracies nearly anywhere. In The Lost Symbol, Langdon is once again called upon to decode things that no one else could. But this time, it’s in the United States!
In fact, it’s essentially National Treasure, only without much of the fun.
Langdon is tricked into finding a Super Sekrit Masonic Symbolic Thingamajig and deciphering it. To save his friend’s life, of course. And there are twists and turns, and bad guys seem like good guys, and good guys seem like bad guys, and things aren’t what they appear, blah, blah, blah, yada yada yada. (But the Lobster Bisque was good.)
It’s not that the book was boring or anything, but I didn’t find it all that gripping. And it’s definitely too long, packing about three hundred pages worth of action into a svelte five hundred pages or so.
And I know I’ve said that I like short chapters, but Mr. Brown went a bit overboard, with his typical chapter including about five pages. And normally shifting subplots at every division.
And now we come to the one thing that really hurts Brown’s writing: He doesn’t expect much of his readers.
In the first place, most of his twists are about as unpredictable as a fastball on a 3-0 count. (See how I expect my reader to decipher the baseball analogy?) In the second place, his writing is unusually redundant.
For instance, there's a point in the book in which a character receives a text from her brother's phone, the phone which we know to be in the possession of the Bad Guy. It has its desired effect, and we're able to infer the thrust of the message from conversations Katherine has with the Bad Guy (who she believes to be a Good Guy). However, Mr. Brown apparently wasn't satisfied that we'd understand the origins or contents of the message, so he explicitly states that the Bad Guy sent it.
And then he shows us the message in its entirety.
Again, we already knew everything about the message. And the same kind of thing happens again at least once. It reminded me of the climax of Digital Fortress, where the fate of the free world rested on scientists figuring out the basic difference between Uranium 238 and 235. The reader might not have known it, and Brown didn’t expect them to know it, but the scientists would’ve known it probably a few seconds before I did, which was about five seconds. You might guess I found it rather insulting. (BTW, the answer is “three.”)
The climax of The Lost Symbol comes around a ways from the actual end of the book, after Langdon makes a strange and somewhat cowardly decision, and after the Bad Guy commits a rather grievously stupid error.
That’s as close as I’ll come to revealing the plot of the book, just in case anyone else decides to read it. I will say that it’s basically a long apologia for Freemasonry and Unitarianism.
And of course, it’s not really a Dan Brown book unless there’s some misuse of Scripture. The most glaring was his ridiculous insistence that when Jesus said “The Kingdom of God is within you,” He was making some sort of pantheistic, New Age point about the divine spark in all life. Brother. A much better translation, as agreed upon by anyone who knows anything (read: people other than Dan Brown), is “The Kingdom of God is in your midst.” Meaning it’s arrived.
And that’s not the only erroneous claim Brown, through his characters, makes about Christianity and Christ. But I won’t dwell.
Will I pick up Brown’s next book? I suppose I will. Somebody’s got to do it.
I’ve got a couple of books in the works right now, and I may review one of them tomorrow, as it’s a Theology book and therefore can be reviewed on Thursday. The other is one my dad recommended, and I should finish it later this week or early next week.