Collected Miscellany

Patrick McManus is a well known outdoors-man, writer and columnist. He is famous for his laugh inducing accounts of life in the great outdoors for magazines like Outdoor Life and Field and Stream. And his collections of columns have been New York Times bestsellers.

I only know about Patrick F. McManus, however, through word of mouth. I haven’t read any of his work, but my wife and in-laws are all big fans. Having lived in the Northwoods they find his style of writing familiar and highly entertaining. So when I got a copy of The Blight Way, the first book in a new mystery series, I grabbed it away from my wife and started reading.

I am glad I did. The Blight Way is a funny, fast paced small town mystery. It is set in Blight County Idaho, hence the title, and features Sheriff Bo Tully. The Tully family have been sheriffs in Blight County for decades. Now being sheriff in Blight usually involves breaking up bar room brawls and feuds between neighbors and doesn’t require a great deal of sophistication or familiarity with the niceties of the law. And that is just fine with the Tully’s. But when a stranger in a fancy pinstripe suite is found dead on a barbed wire fence, the town’s gossip mill is working overtime and Tully knows he has a challenge on his hands.

Bo puts everything he’s got into getting to the bottom of it, which includes “Lurch” the crime scene expert; Dave the self-proclaimed Indian tracker and owner of Dave’s House of Fry; Susan Parker the attractive new medical examiner; and Bo’s seventy year old father, and former sheriff, Pap. After checking out the crime scene the team realizes that someone set up a high powered ambush, but things didn’t go quite as planned. It doesn’t take too long for Bo and Pap to figure out that this isn’t your normal Blight County crime. Problem is the townspeople don’t seem real eager to talk and clues are scarce.

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Interesting Slate piece on famous/infamous New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani. Ben Yagoda argues that the problem with Kakutani isn’t that she is too harsh but that she is boring:

[T]he sour-grapes sniping from spurned authors should not obscure the fact that Kakutani is a profoundly uninteresting critic. Her main weakness is her evaluation fixation. This may seem an odd complaint—the job is called critic, after all—but in fact, whether a work is good or bad is just one of the many things to be said about it, and usually far from the most important or compelling. Great critics’ bad calls are retrospectively forgiven or ignored: Pauline Kael is still read with pleasure even though no one still agrees (if anyone ever did) that Last Tango in Paris and Nashville are the cinematic equivalents of “The Rite of Spring” and Anna Karenina. Kakutani doesn’t offer the stylistic flair, the wit, or the insight one gets from Kael and other first-rate critics; for her, the verdict is the only thing. One has the sense of her deciding roughly at Page 2 whether or not a book is worthy; reading the rest of it to gather evidence for her case; spending some quality time with the Thesaurus; and then taking a large blunt hammer and pounding the message home.

What say you? Is Kakutani too harsh or just not interesting? What do you look for in a book critic?

Interesting Slate piece on famous/infamous New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani. Ben Yagoda argues that the problem with Kakutani isn’t that she is too harsh but that she is boring:

[T]he sour-grapes sniping from spurned authors should not obscure the fact that Kakutani is a profoundly uninteresting critic. Her main weakness is her evaluation fixation. This may seem an odd complaint—the job is called critic, after all—but in fact, whether a work is good or bad is just one of the many things to be said about it, and usually far from the most important or compelling. Great critics’ bad calls are retrospectively forgiven or ignored: Pauline Kael is still read with pleasure even though no one still agrees (if anyone ever did) that Last Tango in Paris and Nashville are the cinematic equivalents of “The Rite of Spring” and Anna Karenina. Kakutani doesn’t offer the stylistic flair, the wit, or the insight one gets from Kael and other first-rate critics; for her, the verdict is the only thing. One has the sense of her deciding roughly at Page 2 whether or not a book is worthy; reading the rest of it to gather evidence for her case; spending some quality time with the Thesaurus; and then taking a large blunt hammer and pounding the message home.

What say you? Is Kakutani too harsh or just not interesting? What do you look for in a book critic?

I usually like to read a book in its entirety before I review it. In fact, until very recently I was hard pressed to not finish a book once I started reading it. I don’t like loose ends and I guess part of my personality wants to check something off the list and so feels uncomfortable with a half-read book.

This presents a problem, however, when you want to review an encyclopedia. Call me crazy but I am not going to read nine hundred and some pages of entries like a novel. The reason for all of the postulating is the recent release of American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia by ISI Books. I wanted to note the release of this great resource but I obviously haven’t read anything but a small fraction of its copious entries.

Here is a brief description of the volume:

American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia is the first comprehensive reference volume to cover what is surely the most influential political and intellectual movement of the last half century. More than a decade in the making and more than half a million words in length, this informative and entertaining encyclopedia contains substantive entries of up to two thousand words on those persons, events, organizations, and concepts of major importance to postwar American conservatism.

Its contributors include iconic patriarchs of the conservative and libertarian movements, including Russell Kirk, M. E. Bradford, Gerhart Niemeyer, Stephen J. Tonsor, Peter Stanlis, and Murray Rothbard; celebrated scholars such as George H. Nash, Peter Augustine Lawler, Allan Carlson, Daniel J. Mahoney, Wilfred McClay, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, George W. Carey, and Paul Gottfried; well-known authors, including George Weigel, Lee Edwards, Richard Brookhiser, and Gregory Wolfe; and influential movement activists and leaders such as M. Stanton Evans, Morton Blackwell, Leonard Liggio, and Llewellyn Rockwell.

Ranging from abortion to Zoll, Donald Atwell, and written from viewpoints as various as those which have informed the postwar conservative movement itself, the encyclopedia’s more than 600 entries will orient readers of all kinds to the people and ideas that have given shape to contemporary American conservatism. This long-awaited volume is not to be missed.

I have to agree with that last sentiment. If you have any interest in American Conservatism you will want to check out this work. I for one I am excited to have it on my shelf. I consider myself a student of the movement and look forward to many years of dipping into this volume to refresh my memory about key figures and organizations as well as discovering things I didn’t know about the “persons, events, organizations, and concepts” that have made an impact on American Conservatism.

The editors of this important volume are worth mentioning as well:
– Jeremy Beer is the editor in chief at ISI Books. His essays and reviews have appeared in First Things, Catholic Social Science Review, Touchstone, and the New Pantagruel.

– Bruce Frohnen is Associate Professor of Law at Ave Maria School of Law and the author of Virtue and the Promise of Conservatism and The New Communitarians and the Crisis of Modern Liberalism

– Jeffrey O. Nelson is Vice President, Publications at ISI, founding publisher of ISI Books, co-editor of Remembered Past, editor of Henry Regnery’s Perfect Sowing: Reflections of a Bookman, and Russell Kirk’s Redeeming the Time.

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Landon Snow and the Shadows of Malus Quidam is the second book in a series of Christian fantasy adventures by R.K. Mortenson published by Barbour Publishing. In the first book, Landon snow and the Auctor’s Riddle, the title character discovers a magical world while visiting his grandparents in Bottom Up, Minnesota. Through his adventure in this other world Landon is forced to think about what brings meaning and purpose to life. He learns that the “auctor” or author/creator of the universe is the source of meaning and that He has a plan for Landon.

In this second book Landon is heading back to Bottom Up during President’s Day Weekend. The day of the trip he is distracted wondering if he will again find an entrance to the magical world and see his friends. With all of this bottled up inside of him, when his sister Holly teases him about a girl at school he blurts out his secret. Holly is skeptical to say the least, but agrees to give Landon the chance to prove her wrong.

Sure enough, both Landon and his sister end up traveling through the tunnel that leads to Bottom Up’s famous library. Once in Wonderwood, like her brother before her, Holly is caught under the spell of Ludo and the great coin. But that isn’t the worst part, weird creepy shadows are taking over Wonderwood under the power of Malus Quidam. Landon must work with his friends Vates, Tardy Hardy, and Melech to save his sister and Wonderwood itself.

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Marshal Zeringue over at the Campaign for the American Reader blog recently sent word of an interesting post. Here is the intro:

“Who is Osama bin Laden?” is no longer an interesting question.

Where is Osama bin Laden, and why is he still alive? Now that’s an interesting two-part question.

When was Osama’s first appearance in a work of fiction? Not a very interesting question, but it’s the sort of thing that’s easier to find out in the Internet Age than it was not that long ago.

Marshal goes on to offer what he thinks is the answer to that question. As I said, interesting. Check out the whole site.