Collected Miscellany

Attentive readers might remember that I joined Ed in setting 75 books as my goal for 2006. For most of the year I was right on track, but the start of football season, the Detroit Tigers’ trip to the World Series, and few other things knocked me off track lately. I am back up and running but still behind. As of today, I have read 59 books. Unless my math is off, 75 books in 12 months means 6.25 books a month. Through 10 months that leaves me 3.5 books short. I have to read 8 books in the next two months to meet my goal. That is daunting but still doable (I hope to make up some ground during the holidays believe it or not). If you want to see the books I have read so far, and track my progress, the list is here.

What about the peanut gallery? How many books have you read this year? Has it been a typical year, a down year, or a better than average year? What keeps you from reading? Have at it in the comments.

Those who pick up Saving God’s Green Earth are in for a delightful and easy read. Tri Robinson, founding pastor of the Vineyard Boise Church, passionately shares his journey and experience with creation care. This is a cookies-on-the-lowest-shelf kind of presentation, perfect for those who eschew or simply ignore the subject.

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I have returned from Washington but am a bit worn out. So until I get a chance to post some reviews, here are some books that have recently crossed my doorstep.

– The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice: First Journals and Poems 1937-1952 by Allen Ginsberg

From Publishers Weekly

The troubled and excitable mind of the young Beat poet is given free rein in this exhaustive and often illuminating collection of his early private writing. The text serves as an evolving portrait of both a writer and a man: from the first, self-conscious high school entries to the stylistically mature entries of the early ’50s, the degree of insight and the fluidity of prose multiplies exponentially. Throughout, Ginsberg lives up to his reputation as the most intellectually rigorous as well as the most neurotic of the Columbia gang that included Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. Luckily, his neuroses—mostly of a sexual/ romantic nature—are often expressed with lucidity and intensity. Ginsberg’s obsessive relationship with the charismatic Neal Cassady is discussed at particular length, often in a narrative, slightly fictionalized form that provides a fascinating, and significantly more interior, counterpoint to Kerouac’s On the Road. An appendix of early poems provides significant insight into Ginsberg’s developing aesthetic. As a whole, the poems are entertaining in their own right, but, like most of the journals, they can best be appreciated in reference to Ginsberg’s body of later writing.

Exile on Main St.: A Season in Hell with the Rolling Stones by Robert Greenfield

– From Booklist

Greenfield focuses on the early post-Jones era, when Jagger and Richards were esteemed songwriters, and the band was starting to make money in piles. Picking up approximately where his S.T.P.: A Journey through America with the Rolling Stones (1974) left off, he recounts happenings at Richards’ French villa, where the album Exile on Main Street was recorded in summer 1971. Jagger, having recently dumped Marianne Faithfull, was married to jet-setting Bianca, whose antipathy for Richards and cohorts was reciprocated. Richards was in the middle of a long liaison with dissolute actress, scenester, and Faithfull-friend Anita Pallenberg. The Stones had extricated themselves from manager Allen Klein and, thanks to Jagger’s banker buddy Prince Rupert Lowenstein, were about to begin self-marketing. Complicating things were Richards’, Pallenberg’s, and assorted resident playmates’ heroin addiction, which brought Corsican drug dealers, local scumbags, and sleazoid Richards factotum Spanish Tony Sanchez into the mix, so to speak. Greenfield merrily corrects Sanchez’s and others’ published misstatements and serves up such treats as Richards’ description of Jagger as several of the nicest guys one could hope to meet. Rough, raw, and ironic by turns, he lays down the facts of how heroin enslaved and immobilized the band at a time when everything seemed within its grasp. So doing, this wry depiction of a dark, decadent moment in rock history inspires a certain demented nostalgia.

– Monopoly: The World’s Most Famous Game-And How it Got that Way by Philip E. Orbanes

From Publishers Weekly

In his account of the development of “the most significant money game in history” (200 million copies sold in 60 countries since 1935), former Parker Brothers vice president Orbanes (The Monopoly Companion) sets the game against a backdrop of political and economic events spanning a century. He introduces entrepreneurs and game inventors, beginning with Elizabeth Magie, who created the Landlord’s Game in 1903 to educate people about Henry George’s idea of a “single tax” on landlords (it even had a space called “No Trespassing/Go to Jail”). Initially unpublished, it circulated among game players in handmade copies on oilcloth. In 1930, Quakers in Atlantic City added local street names—Illinois, Pennsylvania, Mediterranean—to their handmade variation, which became the source of the Monopoly game that Charles Darrow marketed in 1934. Tracing this evolution, Orbanes covers collectors, foreign editions, memorabilia, licensing, copyrights and trademarks with fascinating details: Esquire magazine’s Esky was the springboard for Monopoly’s cartoon financier, and the metal tokens were inspired by the charms from charm bracelets that Darrow’s 11-year-old niece used as game pieces. Orbanes heightens the readability by interweaving his own personal story—at Parker Brothers, which he joined in 1979, and judging Monopoly world tournaments—throughout this lively chronicle that puts the iconic game in the context of a slice of social history.

Much has been written about the Pilgrims and their first few years in America, but as Nathaniel Philbrick explains in his book Mayflower a lot of what we have been taught is false. Philbrick does an excellent job chronicling the first sixty years of the Pilgrims’ settlement in America.

The book briefly covers the Pilgrims’ persecution in England and how many of them escaped to Holland to avoid further persecution – and why they choose to leave Holland for America. It then details the torturous sea voyage on the Mayflower and their first hesitant steps in the New World. The bulk of the book covers the first few years of the Plymouth Colony and their relations with each other and the Indians. The book generally builds up for the last part – King Philip’s War – and how it affected race relations from then on in New England.

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Some book reviews and articles for your perusal:

– Nice take-down of Andrew Sullivan by by Chris Roach over at AFF’s Brainwash: Andrew Sullivan: Defining Conservatism Down. You should read the whole thing, but here is a taste:

Sullivan’s confusion about secularism and the First Amendment leads to his hair-brained assaults on so-called Christianists. It’s true, some Evangelical Christians may be crude in their beliefs, not quite well read in the Constitution, ridiculously messianic in their treatment of Israel, and inclined towards other types of radicalism. But they are not the Taliban; their aims are chiefly defensive. Sullivan’s attacks on radical “Christianists” miss something important about cause and effect: right-wing Christians’ views are a reaction to an assault on their way of life by liberal political radicals, which is exacerbated by their disempowerment by Sullivan’s beloved judiciary. Their reaction is healthy and normal and predictable. But Sullivan and his ideological brethren only see hate in this defensive posture. Any normal person in any other era in history, whose mind is not warped by liberalism, would see this defensiveness and radicalization as a natural reaction to radical change imposed from hostile forces.

– Interesting portrait of Sam Harris, the author of Letter to a Christian Nation, in the Washington post: Atheist Evangelist. The article seems to make it clear that Harris’ project is unlikely to be successful:

Which gets us to another problem with Harris’s work often cited by critics: He can preach only to those who have left the choir. As a critique of faith, “You people are nuts” isn’t likely to change a lot of minds. There is the broader question, too, of whether religious moderates really are enablers for extremists. Maybe moderates are a bulwark against fanatics. If this is really a war of ideas, it is probably not a war between no religion (which is what Harris would like) and extremism. It’s a war between moderation and extremism, which is a war one needs moderates to fight.

“You’re not going to convert everyone to atheism,” says Harvey, the retired Stanford professor. “Secular humanists like Harris ought to be concerned with allies, to win fights on questions like the separation of church and state. But Harris isn’t concerned about the political implications of his arguments, because he thinks that anything supernatural is evil.”

– Allen C. Guelzo has a fascinating discussion of the left in his review of The Intellectuals and the Flag by Todd Gitlin. Public Indecency:

Points for honesty, Todd, but no cigar. In the end, Gitlin took down his flag. It was too much, he explains, to see the Patriot Act dispose of civil liberties (although I am not sure how many Black Marias Gitlin has counted rolling through Manhattan), too much to see a “lazy ne’er-do-well, this duty-shirking know-nothing who deceived and hustled his way to power” in the Oval Office, too much to see “a supine media” bending over backwards to accommodate “apocalyptic Christians and anti-tax fanatics” (and what bubble must Gitlin live in, that he imagines “the media” to be even slightly accommodating to “apocalyptic Christians”). We now know how much automatic revulsion is actually required before Gitlin junks the “common good,” and it doesn’t seem to be much.

Can there be a decent Left? Walzer thought this would only happen (a) if the Left stopped turning the world into a cheap economic melodrama and went back to the 18th-century basics of “secular enlightenment, human rights, and democratic government,” (b) if it stopped regarding “good bourgeois values… like temperance, moderation, and cleanliness” as the enemy of “radical politics or incisive social criticism,” and (c) if it would, for once, treat other Americans as fellow citizens (“We can be as critical as we like, but these are people whose fate we share”). It is a hopeful sign that 9/11 could shake Todd Gitlin free to consider these possibilities seriously. But it is not encouraging that even such a catastrophe could only shake Gitlin free for a little while.

Here are some literary links that have found their way to me in the last few days. I offer them here in case you missed them.

– Unbridled Books is continuing their Unbridled Aloud feature. This episode features:

Carolyn Turgeon, author of the about-to-be-released first novel Rain Village, (Pub Date Nov. 1st), a magical and enchanting debut about a young girl who dreams of becoming a circus performer. RAIN VILLAGE has the honors of being both a November Book Sense Pick and a Pulpwood Queens Book Club Selection.

– Robert Birnbaum has another interview over at the Morning News. This time he talks to the Nigerian novelist CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE about “her new book and the Biafran War, being African in America, and the distorted picture of Africa created by the media.”

– Seem almost silly to link to them at this point, but there were some interesting reviews in the NYTRB this weekend:
* Jim Holt on Richard Dawkins’ latest attempt to kill off God .
* David Brooks on Andrew Sullivan’s latest incoherent ramblings book.
* Henry Alford on the appropriately titled last book in the Lemony Snicket series.
* Colson Whitehead on The Echo Maker by Richard Powers

Quotes from some of these reviews below.

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