Book note: MIA: Missing in Atlanta, by Debby Giusti

Author Debby Giusti grew up as an "Army brat," and then became an Army wife, and then became an Army mom. So it's probably no surprise that the hero of her third book, MIA: Missing in Atlanta, is an Army captain home from a tour in the Middle East.

I finished reading the book yesterday. It's a page turner. It's grittier than you might expect for something labeled inspirational romance. It shows Christians walking the walk in some very tough circumstances: rescuing teen girls from pimps, helping the homeless and other poor people, and dealing with drug addicts and alcoholics, that sort of thing. It deals, in other words, with some very bad situations and subjects - but it does so with compassion and without resorting to language I don't allow under my roof, but without getting sugary.

In short, Captain Jude Walker met a young woman while stateside for leave, and they hit it off. But when he went back overseas, their correspondence became strained, and then she sends a strange warning and is heard from no more. And so, the next time he gets stateside with time to call his own he goes looking for her. The trail doesn't go at all where he expects it to - whereupon he finds out that a tour of duty in a combat zone hasn't prepared him for the mean streets of the bad parts of Atlanta. He throws in with people working at a teen shelter, who are veterans of this battleground, and things get lively from there, let us say. Except where they get deadly.

It's a fast read, with some good twists along the way, and Jude comes across as decidedly human instead of impossibly heroic. But he is definitely a warrior, and gutsy.

The book is dedicated to (among others) the soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), and "all the brave men and women in uniform who defend our nation."

Giusti is one of the bloggers at Craftie Ladies of Suspense, which is where I found out about the book.

She also has a "Looking Back" post at The Seekers, in which she shares with wannabe authors some of what she wished she'd known earlier in her writing career.

A boy's-eye view

Here's a nice, short mother-son chat, with a surprise ending. (Or not so surprising, perhaps, if you've known a few boys...)

Poem: Death at Suppertime, by Phyllis McGinley

This is a Phyllis McGinley poem I hadn't seen before: Death at Suppertime. It's about children's programming in 1948, but it's got food for thought for today, I think.

Low carbon footprint

Sometimes cartoons say things better than mere words. Like this.

hat tip: Carl, via Dr. Sanity

Book note: Mysterious Incidents at Lone Rock, by Rajendra Pillai

Believe it or not, I just read a Christian murder mystery starring a Hindu policeman. And liked it, overall.

The first part of Mysterious Incidents at Lone Rock (Heartsong Presents, 2008), I didn't think I was going to like it, but it picked up as it went, and turned into a pretty good little cozy, all in all, plus I found myself rather liking the central sleuth, Chintamoni Roy, better known as Chinni.

So, I went in search of information on whether this was perhaps the launch of a new series, all the more so because the prologue has the narrator (a Professor Richard Harrison) claiming that this case happened over thirty years ago, and that Chinni was 'a new friend at the time'.

So far, so good.

Then I find that the Heartsong mysteries are only available through their book club, which only sends out new releases (as far as I can tell), which means (as far as I know) that to get your hands on a copy of this title you're going to have to find a used book. (Like I did.)

Yargh. I dislike flash in the pan publishing. :(

Anyway, this is a cozy in the true sense. The language is clean, there isn't gore, there are some nice red herrings, there are mysteries within the mystery, and, tah dah, we even have our hero having everyone assemble on the premises for the dramatic unveiling of the solution.

Chinni is a decent and considerate man. If he unearths something that would probably cause 'disharmony,' he doesn't use it if he doesn't need to. At the same time, he doesn't flinch from asking anything he thinks needs asking. And, just to make it more fun, he thinks crime solving is much like algebra, and should be approached as such (to the occasional distress of his more conventional colleagues).

Here's hoping Chinni Roy gets another case. And a publisher that will keep the book in print for people to discover in due time.

(And - is this too much to ask? - a publisher that would make the books available sooner or later to bookstores, because, you know, bookstores have trouble finding good, clean mysteries to stock these days.)

Speaking of authentic cozies, feel free to recommend some in the comments, particularly if you know of any that have been recently published. I am so tired of bad language and worse attitudes in contemporary fiction, and I love to encourage the nice guys, both secular and Christian.

Books note: With a Little Faith, and Faith Alone: Stories of an Amazing Dog, by Jude Stringfellow

I haven't seen the books, but I'm charmed by the dog.

Ten recommended history books

Albert Mohler touts ten recently published books at Ten for the History Books -- Summer Reading [Part 1] and Ten for the History Books -- Summer Reading [Part 2].

If there's a book you think would be a good add-on to his list, please drop a note in the comments. Thanks.

Update: For background on The Forgotten Man (one of the recommended books), see The Legacy of the 1936 Election, by Amity Shlaes in the September 2007 issue of Imprimis.

If your airplane goes kaput in flight...

... how lucky is it that every passenger on board is a skydiver, with a parachute?

Here's more, from Joe Hornaday of the Greensburg Daily News (Greensburg, Indiana).

The engine was spewing thick smoke and oil so the pilot couldn't see where he was going, the instrument panel went out, the flaps failed, the plane deadsticked, and the pilot still found the runway? The plane went off the runway and flipped, but the pilot got out of the wreckage himself? Yinga. I'm impressed. (Also happy that nobody was seriously hurt. Yikes.)

Not quite clear on the concept

A neighbor came across the street to visit with my husband, who was working outside. A while later, his young son decided to join them.

'Uhm, did you look both ways before crossing the street?' my husband asked the boy when he got across.

The boy's eyes got big. 'No! I forgot!' he exclaimed, whereupon he ran across the street without looking, set up on the other side, carefully looked both ways, and came back, proud of himself for getting it right this time.

"I can see we need to work on this," his father said, once he recovered enough to talk.

Progressives versus Puritans

From the essay "Puritans and Historians" by Mark A. Noll in the book Christianity in America: A Handbook, c. 1983 William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., Grand Rapids, Michigan, published by Lion Publishing, Herts, England:

Only in the last century has "Puritan" become a synonym for joyless, repressive, and often hypocritical fanaticism. This interpretation arose during the Progressive Era of American history when so many intellectuals felt so confident about understanding the real roots of human behavior, which they deemed to be largely economic and psychological, and when they were hailing so surely the march of civilization from superstitious darkness to democratic light. The carnage of World War I, the moral crisis of the 1920s, and the economic collapse of the 1930s disabused most scholars of the idea that they were living in a new Golden Age. These shocks also created a climate in which the Puritans, who had understood something of human evil, the complexity of human existence, and the deeply engrained longing for the divine, could be studied more objectively. Yet the popular image of Puritanism created by the Progressives lingers on...

A look at two "Washington insider" books

From Tale of Two Books, by Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. (Townhall.com, June 2, 2008), which compares What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception by Scott McClellan, and War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism by Doug Feith:

A man who was not present at the wartime councils that led up to the invasion of Iraq is entitled to his views – irrespective of how they differ from those he held at the time. It is, however, altogether another matter to regard McClellan’s current depiction of the subject of the Iraq war as somehow illuminating of what went on “inside the Bush White House,” let alone as dispositive concerning whether the President deliberately misled the American people on the timing and content of his decision to launch the invasion.

The irony is that, even as she erred in this respect, Ms. Noonan recognized what really is needed: “more serious books, like Doug Feith’s.” Readers of this column will recall that Mr. Feith, the former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy and another friend and colleague, has written War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism. It is the definitive account of the considerations and deliberations that led to the liberation of Iraq and other actions taken in the wake of and in response to the September 11 attacks. An objective reader will see the case for war was thoughtfully arrived at and persuasively made, not “a fatal misstep” or “strategic blunder.”

The difference between the two ostensibly “insider” accounts could not be more stark. Where McClellan was not a participant in the decision-making he finds so objectionable, Feith was. Where McClellan fails to document any of his pronouncements, Feith documents all of his – including, notably, via a website devoted to making declassified papers and other decision-related materials readily accessible to historians and interested citizens.

[...snip...]

It is not as though Mr. Feith has been uncritical of the Bush administration. War and Decision lets the chips fall where they may, including with respect to errors made by the author himself...

Rationing freedom

From Environmentalists Pick Up Where Communists Left Off, by Charles Krauthammer (Townhall.com, May 31, 2008):

Just Monday, a British parliamentary committee proposed that every citizen be required to carry a carbon card that must be presented, under penalty of law, when buying gasoline, taking an airplane or using electricity. The card contains your yearly carbon ration to be drawn down with every purchase, every trip, every swipe.

There's no greater social power than the power to ration. And, other than rationing food, there is no greater instrument of social control than rationing energy, the currency of just about everything one does and uses in an advanced society.

Book note: Waterwalk, A Passage of Ghosts, by Steven Faulkner

James M. Kushiner recommends the true life father-son adventure Waterwalk.

From the publisher:

Tired, hungry, lost, lonely, fogbound, shipwrecked, unable to make their way in the darkness, Steven Faulkner and his teenage son Justin are having a great time. They are on an epic journey, retracing the historic 1673 route of French explorers Marquette and Joliet along the Lake Michigan shore to Green Bay, up the Fox River, then down the Wisconsin River to the mighty Mississippi. A poet with a sense of humor, Faulkner brings the majestic American heartland to life in one of the finest books ever written about a river journey. A modern travel classic in the tradition of Blue Highways, this book will appeal to anyone who has a sense of adventure.

How is freedom born? A new film explores the question.

I see that Acton Media has a film coming out this month that looks like it addresses some important issues and provides some useful historical context. See The Birth of Freedom - A Documentary on the History of Freedom for more information, to view the trailer, or to arrange a screening. (Warning: the trailer includes images of torture and war dead and other nasty stuff. It's in context, but it might not be suitable for children.)

The official website also has a useful list of primary documents and websites, information on important people, and relevant court cases.

hat tip: Acton Institute

Update: The film is just shy of an hour long, if that makes any difference to you if you're hoping to set up a screening.

The Saturday Review of Books...

... is up and growing at Semicolon.

Which science fiction film...

... has the most realistic vision of the future of mankind? Half a hundred academic sorts studied the question, and voted for ....

Well, let Phil from Brandywine Books give you the lead-in and the link.

Biker rallying

So, last night at the opening service for the biker ministry that's in town this weekend, we alternated between singing 'praise songs' and listening to testimony. A man in back of me stood up to testify, and he said that he'd ridden a long way to get here, and he was expecting things to happen this weekend, that there was gonna be some spiritual growth going on, and "If we don't save some souls this weekend, I AM GOING TO BE REALLY TICKED."

This from a fellow who could probably pick me off the ground with his pinky finger.

Other times during the service, if he didn't think people were showing the proper spirit, he'd stand up and say so. As in, 'hey, when the guy said he wanted help handing out flyers promoting tomorrow evening's service, I think more people should have offered to help.' Whereupon he named a name or two to get things going. Whereupon a new call was put out for helpers to promote the event during 'free time'. Whereupon more people volunteered than previously...

I don't want to give the wrong impression here. The 'threats' weren't serious in the sense of anybody being in danger from this fellow if they didn't live up to his expectations (hark! do I hear someone muttering something like 'famous last words'? :). And I don' t think he was begrudging the distance he rode (more than a hundred miles). He just had a strong conviction that there are souls around here that need saving that may not understand or respond to prim and proper advances, so to speak, and we really would be failing miserably if we didn't make a proper effort. So he wasn't settling for less than a proper effort. And good for him.

I know that quite a few folks think that Christianity is only for certain types of people, or that it's the province of pantywaists (if you'll pardon my French). This man being living proof that those silly notions are wrong, I'm sure he feels especially strongly about correcting those misconceptions, not to mention helping round up those strays who (having bought into those misconceptions) don't realize how much God and his people would like to welcome them into the Body of Christ, and how much difference it can make.

Mrs. Judson flunks biker etiquette

The church I attend is hosting a three-day motorcycle ministry program aimed primarily at people living in the biker subculture. This is, in case you don't know me, not one of my areas of expertise (/understatement). But the organizers stressed that it was for more than bikers and they'd appreciate nonbikers showing up, so last night I went to the kick-off dinner and service.

At dinner, I sat across from a grey-haired biker riding herd on a bunch of teens. I'd heard that people had converged from various places in the Pacific Northwest for this event, and so I turned to the girl to my immediate right and asked her where she was from. I didn't care where she was from, you understand. It's just standard small talk, a way of getting one's bearings, of searching for common ground, and also of finding out if you're sitting next to a fellow townsman you haven't met yet, or a kid you don't recognize because you haven't seen her in a while, or somebody who has gone to great lengths (literally) to attend. It's always such a safe, not really personal, question to lead with. Right?

Wrong.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

The girl flinched and then she cowered, appealing mutely for help from her friends. I sat there utterly clueless as to what I'd done wrong.

The man riding herd on the group got the girl's attention, and said "Hey! Listen to me. When you're in town you live with us, and we live in [name withheld by me for privacy reasons], and that's your home when you're there. It's your home anytime. You're family. You know that, right?"

I don't know which of us was more relieved and grateful for his rescue, the girl or me.

I just wasn't thinking. If I had stopped to think, I like to think it would have occurred to me that a goodly percentage of the people present might not have a particular place to live. Or a place they really come from. Or family. Or that they might have disowned a place or a family. Or that for some of them it might be flat dangerous to name where they come from.

Anyway, I know better now. (And so do you.)

Blackmailing the universe

This quote is today's entry in The Business of Heaven, which is a book of daily readings of C.S. Lewis quotes. The endnotes say this comes from Great Divorce, chapter 8:

'What some people say on earth is that the final loss of one soul gives the lie to all the joy of those who are saved.'

'Ye see it does not.'

'I feel in a way that it ought to.'

'That sounds very merciful: but see what lurks behind it.'

'What?'

'The demand of the loveless and the self-imprisoned that they should be allowed to blackmail the universe: that till they consent to be happy (on their own terms) no one else shall taste joy: that theirs should be the final power; that Hell should be able to veto Heaven.'

'I don't know what I want, Sir.'

'Son, son, it must be one way or the other. Either the day must come when joy prevails and all the makers of misery are no longer able to inflict it: or else for ever and ever the makers of misery can destroy in others the happiness they reject for themselves. I know it has a grand sound to say ye'll accept no salvation which leaves even one creature in the dark outside. But watch that sophistry or ye'll make a Dog in a Manger the tyrant of the universe.'

The 'future' versus 'dancing'

Most years, I hear a 'horror story' or two from one graduation service or another. The winner so far this year is the one passed along to us from the father of a college graduate at a school where one of the commencement speakers, who was also one of the graduates, got up to speak, said he thought it was boring to listen to talk about 'your futures' and said he was going to solve that. Whereupon he danced a bit. And then spent a full hour (so we're told) talking about the importance of dance (according to him). This despite boos and threats of walk-outs.

I think using an oversized shepherd's crook to haul him off stage, like they used to do in vaudeville, might have been in order...

Back to the drawing board...

A trucker was showing off his new truck to a friend of mine the other day. It's a brand new vehicle from a well-known, well-respected company. It's made for long hauls and comes with a sleeper compartment. The guy really liked his new rig (according to my friend), but...

The trucker said that when he got it, there was only a half-length curtain inside. It gave him privacy when he was in bed, I understand, but left him exposed from the waist down when he went to change clothes.

"I ask you," the trucker is reported to have said, "when it comes to naked, which half of you matters?"

He is far too large a man to wriggle into and out of clothes while laying on the bed. He went out and got full-length curtains.

I am half tempted to write the company and ask them where they expect truckers to change clothes in the cab of this model. All in all, it seems a curious way to set things up.

To be or not to be (connected)

My husband was sick in bed the other day when the phone rang. He answered, and the next thing I knew gales of laughter were streaming from the bedroom. Every once in a while I'd hear "You have to be kidding!" or something like that. I hadn't a clue who it was, but it sounded like a buddy calling up to share some recent misadventures.

Afterwards, he told me it was an acquaintance of ours who is terminally ill. In my younger days, I would have been surprised to hear that, what with all the merriment going on, but I've found since then that some critically ill or injured people turn into some of the laughingest people on the planet. I have some lovely half-baked theories on why that is true, but I won't bother you with those today. At any rate, a dying man called and made my husband laugh so hard he could barely breathe. And if I know those two, my husband returned the favor. These guys love to swap stories, and laugh.

Later, my husband told me that there was no good news from that quarter, unless you count that he's delighted his child has finally graduated from school.

Later still, my husband told me that his buddy said he has taken to diving for the phone every time his wife goes in the shower, because she won't let him talk to people. She shoos visitors away, and jumps on the phone to cut off conversations, always fussing at her husband because 'he ought to be resting.' Right on cue, just after that, she came on the phone and demanded that they hang up, because he needed his rest.

Uhm.

OK, I know the temptation. My husband is crippled and in a lot of pain and about three years ago we had The Great Heart Failure Adventure in which I sat by his bed while he teetered between life and death. Since then, we've learned to live with oxygen tubes and that sort of jazz. I understand the perceived need to fiercely protect someone who is sick, and once or twice or thrice I've given in to it. But I can't understand making it your standard policy. Especially for someone who is thought to be on his last legs, like the man who called. If he wanted solitude, that would be one thing. But he doesn't. He craves contact with others.

I'm at a bit of a loss. I don't think it's my business to interfere in that particular instance, for the same reason I'm bothered by the wife's cutting him off like she is: in short, the man in question 'is a big boy now' and it's up to him to decide how to handle things, as far as I can see.

On the other hand, if, by chance, there is somebody in your family who is seriously ill or disabled, will you please step back and take a look at how much you're 'protecting' them, and whether it makes sense to do so to that extent? I hate it when people get buried (for all intents and purposes) before they're dead.

If it helps any, I wouldn't want to see a tally of the times I've gritted my teeth, bit my tongue, taken a walk, gone to the grocery store when I didn't need to, closed myself in my room and cried and/or prayed, changed the subject entirely, etc., when what I felt like doing was to act like a mother hen.

If it helps any, I rarely have to do that any more. Once you get yourself in a habit of letting your disabled loved one be responsible for himself, it gets easier. Or it did for me, at least. I have some lovely theories on why that's true, too...

NB

I was reading the mystery Have His Carcase by Dorothy Sayers this week, and in a list drawn up by the sleuths for 'Things to Be Noted' and 'Things to be Done', I kept running into the initials N.B.

Since N.B. always came toward the end of each note, setting off the last thing mentioned in each section, I thought at first that it was a variation on P.S., but after a while I decided that didn't work, so I abandoned the novel and went to my primary dictionary, which informs me that NB (the periods seem to have been dropped over the years) means "note well" and is derived from the Latin nota bene.

Ooh, this could be useful. I wonder why it's not in common use?

P.S. As far as the mystery goes, Have His Carcase is rather more gruesome, complicated, and clever than I wanted. Being by Sayers, it has a great deal of wit and substance, but it is decidedly more graphic in places than you might expect from a British mystery from 1932. Overall it's pretty good, and it places it heads toward brilliant, but it has a high enough "yuck" factor to take it off my "recommend it to everybody" list. If you like codes and ciphers, though, toward the end of the book it has some rather detailed lessons in making and breaking a certain type of cipher.

And, yes, Lord Peter Wimsey fans, this is one of those books starring that hero and Miss Vane, where he knows he's in love with her, but she isn't sure what she thinks about him.

Update: Hmmm. Now that I know about NB (or N.B.), I suppose it's going to pop up all over the place, and I'll feel silly for not knowing about it already. Exhibit A: see this multi-book book review post, specifically the review for Girls Gone Mild: Young Women Reclaim Self-Respect and Find It's Not Bad to Be Good by Wendy Shalit.

Black marks on white paper (otherwise known as a poem)

From Reflections on the Psalms by C.S. Lewis:

... For what is required, on all these levels alike, is not merely knowledge but a certain insight; getting the focus right. Those who can see in each of these instances only the lower will always be plausible. One who contended that a poem was nothing but black marks on white paper would be unanswerable if he addressed an audience who couldn't read. Look at it through microscopes, analyse the printer's ink and the paper, study it (in that way) as long as you like; you will never find something over and above all the products of analysis whereof you can say "This is the poem". Those who can read, however, will continue to say the poem exists.

Living Weak

If you can't live strong, you can "live weak," and it has its rewards, says Bill Stuntz (who has occasion to know).

Hat tip: Wittingshire, which got me to Stuntz's blog with this post.

Book note: Reach for the Sky, by Paul Brickhill

I finally noticed the "more books you will enjoy" page in my copy of The Sky Beyond, and one of the touted books is Reach for the Sky by Paul Brickhill. The blurb runs:

The inspiring, magnificent story of Douglas Bader, legless fighter pilot, who led his Spitfire squadrons to victory in the Battle of Britain.

Uhm, says I, a legless fighter pilot?

What they mean, it turns out, is a man with two artificial legs, one for a leg amputated above the knee, the other for a leg amputated below the knee. Which is still pretty amazing, isn't it? At a guess. (What I know about what it takes to fly a military aircraft is not very much, folks. But I'm assuming there are reasons military pilots are notably fit.)

Checking around, I see there is a Douglas Bader Foundation in the UK, which promotes the welfare of amputees and other disabled people. I like their maxim: ‘ A disabled person who fights back is not disabled...but inspired.’

Reach for the Sky was made into a movie in 1956.

When a woman runs for office...

... I wish she'd just run for office and not pretend it's a big deal she's female, or that anybody owes her a vote because she's a woman. I see I have company in this view of things.

This reminds me of a story that made the rounds when the Star Trek series with the woman captain was just getting off the ground. The story was that the production team wanted to make a big deal of the fact that the captain was a woman, but the actress playing the captain said she assumed that by that far into the future it would be commonplace for a woman to be a captain and therefore nobody would think twice about it. And therefore it wouldn't make sense to make a big deal about it in the storylines.

I don't know if that story is true, but it's one of those 'if it's not true, it oughtta be' stories. And it's a good point. Unless we're talking about a job where it would be freakish or insane or otherwise a really bad idea to have a woman doing it, could we please stop acting like it's freakish for a woman to be under consideration for the job?

Since most people have long since outgrown getting excited by women running for office (face it, women have been getting elected for generations in America), aren't the folks making a big deal over a woman running for office embarrassing themselves?

They embarrass me. And, for the record, they don't represent me. I believe all candidates, male or female, should be judged on character, experience, track record, and proposals. Silly me.

'Happy Birthday' from a sorry father

I was over on the Death Roe site, and they had a link: "Click here to see what songs should be on every Death Roe Survivor's play list." So I clicked. And found that my computer didn't want to play them (a technical problem, my end). So I went to YouTube, and found one I wanted to check out: Happy Birthday, by Flipsyde. I'm not generally a fan of hip-hop (and this song's not exactly a ringing endorsement for chastity or the sanctity of marriage) but... Wow. Powerful stuff. Good stuff. My thanks to the artists who put it together.

From the Death Roe site:

This video debuted in April 2006 in the US after the song Happy Birthday made waves overseas hitting the charts at #4 in Germany, #3 in Sweden and was in the top 15 in Austria and Switzerland. In addition, Happy Birthday, was in the Top 10 downloads on ITUNES in Germany, Sweden & Denmark. Piper, the lead singer of Flipsyde wrote and sings this song to the baby he helped abort as a young man. Filled with introspection that only one who has truly realized the ramifications of the decision to abort, Happy Birthday should serve as a warning to young men and women seeking abortion as an answer. The reality of fatherhood lost is felt, as you hear Piper wonder out loud what his baby would look like, act like, and if the child could forgive him for what he has done.

Modern smelling salts

Just down the road, a woman is missing and presumed drowned. The radio news reports have warned people that the chances of stumbling across a corpse are pretty high just now, and also assure us that people with property along the river downriver have been notified personally. It's an awful situation, but so far nobody I've heard of has taken to running around screaming that they shouldn't be expected to deal with something like this, or that they'll never recover from the experience.

You are scratching your head over that last statement? I don't blame you. Normal people absorb news like this and deal with it at least after a fashion, normally. They search, they grieve, they make sure the lady's horses and dogs don't starve or die of thirst. They don't expect, or claim, that they'll never get over it.

Don't misunderstand me. I don't mean to give short shrift to the heartache, the grief, or the horror involved, especially for whoever winds up dealing with the remains (assuming the lady is, in fact, drowned). My heart goes out to her family, her neighbors, the search and rescue people, her friends. She was an acquaintance of ours, a bookstore customer, somebody I didn't socialize with but did chat with when our paths crossed. I am, myself, somewhat shocked and sick over the whole situation.

It probably doesn't help any that a week and a half ago we buried one of my favorite people on Earth, and that a couple days after that I found out that a very nice young man in our community is terminally ill. To make it worse, he and his very nice young wife are the very picture of devotion. But I guess that's part of my point. If you live in a community, as opposed to off in your own little world, you run into this sort of heartache all the time. Frequency doesn't make it easy. It doesn't make it seem normal. It is, truly, heartache. Tragic. Difficult. Painful. But it is, for all that, surprisingly common. And it doesn't ruin you for life. It might - perhaps should - stagger you for a bit (would you rather be heartless?), but it doesn't ruin you for life, especially if you have the decency to pitch in to help those staggered more by the calamity than yourself. (It helps to know you've done something, for one thing. And you can draw on the strength of others if you only work beside them. Etc.)

But here's the deal (I am coming to the "modern smelling salts" business, really...). In college, I remember, my friends and I read in the newspaper about someone finding the body of a woman who had been dead a few days, and we sat around claiming to each other that we'd never recover from finding a body that had been dead a few days. Never.

In hindsight, I can see we did that sort of thing rather a lot. We were never going to get over this or that or the other thing. I don't know where the grown-ups were: whether they didn't catch us at this sort of nonsense, or didn't care, or thought it was cute, or considered it harmless. Harmless, my foot. If you practice thinking of yourself as fragile, and breakable, and unable to recover from circumstances, how can you expect to become strong, and steady, and resilient - or reliable, for that matter?

We also used to sit around and feel superior to those delicate damsels of older days who reportedly swooned at the least provocation, expecting someone to fish out the smelling salts and revive them.

We should not have laughed at them, I think. I think, really, that we were more like them than we knew. And in some ways we were their inferiors. The oh-so-refined ladies did, after all, recover from their swoons. We were practicing, on the other hand, to never get over whatever had prompted us to have a case of the vapors. To never forget. To never heal completely.

The oh-so-refined ladies of yesteryear, moreover, weren't asking for more than personal attention. We had an unfortunate tendency to think the world ought to be changed to protect our fragile selves. Not that we considered ourselves fragile. I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar was a big song about then, and we could be caught, now and then, belting out I am strong, I am invincible, etc.

Who were we trying to kid, I wonder? If we had been strong, if we had been confident (never mind 'invincible'), would we have championed abortion? Affirmative action? Punishment for clubs that only admitted men? Would speech codes have even come up as a subject? Hate crime legislation was over the horizon yet; but it's the same sort of thing, isn't it?

I look around, and a lot of what's going on in society, in popular culture, and at the government level seems to me nothing more or less than people (generally people who have practiced modern variations on swooning until it is second nature to them) getting the vapors (right on cue, very often, it seems to me), and somebody rushing to provide them with (mostly harmful) variations on those old smelling salts, whether it be legislation, lawsuits, or optional medical procedures, or what have you. We have 'progressed', you see, from individual swoons, to group ones, whenever possible. Or at least some folks have.

The gentility is lacking, but I still think it's the same thing. Oh, this is too much for little ol' me! the lady exclaims, collapsing in a heap. And somebody rushes to the rescue, playing along, instead of (which might be more sensible, and perhaps better for everyone in the long run) saying, "Oh, for crying out loud, stop being hysterical."

The Saturday Review of Books...

... is up and growing at Semicolon.

Art thieves (of a sort)

Regarding suicide, from a Christian point of view, isn't it to some degree something like a curator taking a beautiful and priceless painting out of a museum and tossing it in the trash because he's tired of it or has come to think it's ugly (or is tired of guarding it, or of dusting it, or whatever)? In both cases, something precious and unique is destroyed. In both cases, untold numbers of people ('the public' in the one case, 'the communion of saints living and dead' in the other) are deprived of something that would have blessed them had it been left where it was supposed to be.

Disclaimer: As with all such things on this blog, if the illustration doesn't help you, please ignore it. I hardly speak for Christianity around here. I'm just a standard issue middle-aged lady with a computer and an internet connection. (And the sort of mind that pops out questions like this...)

Fashionable = ?

Does it ever surprise you how many people seem to confuse faddish with fashionable, fashionable with sophisticated, sophisticated with savvy, and savvy with more than it is?

Just asking.

Whoever heard of heat stroke in May...

... around here? Yinga. It wasn't just that yesterday was in the 90s, and seemed humid for around here, it was that it was that hot so suddenly after establishing a norm of 60s and 70s for a high.

Despite using several of my usual hot weather coping strategies, I still spent part of yesterday being flat on my back sick, simply from the heat. But by evening, I was back outside (albeit playing with the cats instead of doing yard work) and then was able to go on to normal chores and activities.

Just to add a comic note to the proceedings, last night just before I went to bed I decided to do a load of laundry, in part so I wouldn't feel the day had been quite as much of a washout. I have a washer but not a dryer. To make room for the next load, I had to unload the dried laundry from the drying rack: the dried laundry was flannel sheets. The load of laundry I put into the washer, and then hung on the drying rack, included winter weight nightgowns, a turtleneck top, and a pair of longjohns. Did I mention that the jump to high temps was mighty abrupt?

I see from the forecast that today is supposed to be horridly hot again, but that it's supposed to back off a bit in the days to come. Excuse me while I go shut windows and turn on the air conditioner...

The Saturday Review of Books...

... is up and growing at Semicolon.

Crimson River update

Crimson River Quartet has added quite a few more videos to their channel recently, including footage from the 15th Anniversary concert.

Riding/walking to school

I'm getting this second hand, but a friend of mine was talking to a teacher the other day, who said that she was so concerned about kids not getting enough exercise that she set up a program that lets kids get off the school bus at a park nearly a mile from school and walk the rest of the way in the morning, and which sets in-town kids down at central locations and lets them walk home from there instead of receiving door to door service.

I had an inkling about the releasing kids at a central location part of the plan, since several busloads of kids get set loose about two blocks from here every school day afternoon. Silly me, I thought it was a sign that the schools got smart about taxpayer money and were cutting down on wear and tear on the buses, fuel costs, and driver hours. And here the program was started to encourage kids to get some walking in every day... Or that's what I hear...

If your schools (or your family, or whatever) have come up with ways to encourage kids to get more fresh air and/or exercise, feel free to let us know about it in the comments section. Thanks.

The 20 weeks campaign

In the UK:

On 6 May Nadine Dorries MP launched the official parliamentary campaign to reduce the upper limit for abortion from 24 weeks to 20 weeks. The matter will come to the vote when the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill is debated in the Commons later this month...

Visit the 20 weeks campaign website for more information. For those of you in the UK, there's a petition to sign, if you'd like.

hat tip: Anglican Mainstream

Good news out of Mississippi

Mississippi now has one of the fastest growing economies of the 50 United States. (...We will now pause for the stunned people who fell off their chairs to rejoin us....)

One of the big reasons for this astonishing turnaround appears to be massive tort reform.

Planting delayed by cold weather

Dave Wilkins of Capital Press reports that Idaho crops are behind schedule, in large part because April's temperatures were well below normal (averaging 4 degrees below normal in the Boise area, for instance).

A special home run

Three cheers!

hat tip: David, via Kim Komando

Melanie Phillips on recent UK elections (and a green skeptic mayor)

Melanie Phillips is not happy with government in the UK. (You may file that under "Understatement".) But she does let us know that the electorate in London has pulled off a bit of a revolt. From Brown crumbles; but do the Tories get it? (Daily Mail, 5 May 2008):

Not surprisingly, the Tories are ecstatic at the local election results. And they are to be congratulated on running a smooth, disciplined and shrewdly judged campaign, not least in London where their strategy of getting out the anti-Ken vote paid dividends in the election of Boris Johnson as Mayor.

But there is a distinct risk that the Conservatives will misinterpret their great victory. Already, there are claims that it has vindicated the Cameroons’ strategy of tacking to fashionable Left-wing thinking in order to head off any charge that they are just the ’same old Tories’.

This is to misunderstand what happened in London. For Boris’s appeal was not as a representative of the new look, politically correct Conservative party. On the contrary — his appeal was to be the gloriously politically incorrect, anti-politics candidate. As one voter told canvassers: ‘I’m not voting for you Tories; I’m voting for Boris instead.’

It is the very things that get Boris into such trouble — his shambolic manner, his inability to be diplomatic, his grandstanding instinct to do anything to get a laugh — that make people adore him. Even though party minders zipped up his mouth during the campaign, his appeal is that of someone who will never be corralled by any political machine.

And Boris was running against the quintessential machine politician.

Ironically, Ken’s original appeal eight years ago lay in his image as the Labour anti-Labour candidate. A vote for him was a kick in the teeth for the out-of-touch political elite. But then Ken himself turned into a key member of that elite — and what a distasteful, corrupt and arrogant spectacle it was.

A vote for anti-politician Boris therefore does not necessarily mean a vote for the Tories. Boris himself grasped this immediately when, in his acceptance speech, he said people shouldn’t think for a minute that London was now a Tory city.

For those of you tired of global warming hysteria, take heart. From later in the same article:

The triumphant Cameroons are in danger of missing the point that what happened last week was a mighty vote against Labour rather than an endorsement of the Conservatives. Indeed, such an endorsement would make little sense since, among the issues that most cheese off the electorate, there’s precious little to choose between the parties.

There’s no more delicious example of this than global warming. For the Cameroons, green policies are their totemic proof that the party has moved with the times. But Boris is actually a green sceptic who has called environmentalism a religious phenomenon and mocked green policies as ‘pagan yammering for sacrifice’.

And on this, he is far more in tune with the public who, sceptical of global warming hysteria, are deeply unimpressed by the prospect of green taxes. Indeed, Mr Brown is reported to be about to ditch the proposed rise in fuel duty in a panicky attempt to assuage public fury. So where does that leave the Cameroon carbon crusaders?

Read the whole article here.

Making your world flat

If you get too much input from a computer monitor or TV screen, and too little from taste and smell and heft and texture, what does it do to your brain? A neurobiologist says it's not good.

Fighting for pastors’ First Amendment rights

From ADF announces new initiative to reclaim pastors’ First Amendment rights:

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — The Alliance Defense Fund announced a new initiative Friday that will challenge the tactics of groups that use the Internal Revenue Service to intimidate churches and pastors into silence on important issues of the day.

"Pastors have a right to speak about biblical values from the pulpit without fear of punishment. No one should be able to use the government to intimidate pastors into giving up their constitutional rights," said ADF Senior Legal Counsel Erik Stanley. "The government can’t demand that a church give up its right to tax-exempt status simply because the pastor exercises his First Amendment rights in the pulpit. Groups like Americans United intentionally trigger IRS investigations that will silence churches through fear, intimidation, and disinformation.

"The new initiative will equip, protect, and defend pastors who wish to exercise their First Amendment right to openly discuss the positions of political candidates and other moral and social issues from the pulpit. Participating pastors across the country will deliver a sermon along these lines in their own churches Sept. 28.

Prior to 1954, churches were free to evaluate the positions of political candidates on moral issues without fear of the Internal Revenue Service revoking their tax-exempt status. That year, then-Senator Lyndon Johnson amended the tax code to add the threat of IRS action against churches if their pastors mentioned the positions of specific candidates from the pulpit. Citing that rule, groups like AU have repeatedly threatened to report churches to the IRS if they speak out on such issues.

Many tax-exempt organizations are permitted to evaluate candidates’ positions based on the values important to those groups. Organizations which are tax-exempt but do not have the same speech restrictions the IRS places on churches include civic leagues; labor, agricultural, or horticultural associations; business leagues; chambers of commerce; real estate boards; boards of trade; professional football leagues; clubs organized for pleasure, recreation, and other nonprofit purposes; fraternal beneficiary societies; and cemeteries.

"The intimidation of churches by leftist groups using the IRS has grown to a point that ADF has no choice but to respond," said Stanley. "The number of threats being reported to ADF is growing because of the aggressive campaign to unlawfully silence the church. IRS rules don’t trump the Constitution, and the First Amendment certainly trumps the Johnson amendment.

"Pastors who want to learn more or who wish to be considered for participation in Pulpit Freedom Sunday Sept. 28 can visit www.telladf.org/church.

Green before green was hip (and lost its bearings)

Sheila Wray Gregoire writes about living 'green' without being a green fanatic. If only the fanatics would listen, I think a lot of people could be spared a whole lot of grief, up to and including needless starvation.

hat tip: SFO Mom

Traditional families taken out of children's programming

Author John R. Erickson found out the hard way that television can be hostile to the values he holds dear.

Book note: The Sky Beyond, by Sir Gordon Taylor

One of our bookstore customers asked us to find him a copy of The Sky Beyond, by Sir Gordon Taylor. It was his favorite book, he said, and he'd lost his. It took some time to find an affordable copy, this being an out of print book in short supply and high demand. Anyway, my husband finally found a copy - just as our customer found one on his own and bought it, just in time for a friend of his to sheepishly return the copy he'd borrowed and forgotten to give back.

Favorite book or no, three copies is too many, so we said not to worry, that we'd just read this one and then sell it.

Wrong. We're reading it, and will keep it. I have a fondness for tales of the early days of aviation anyway, and this one is a good read, besides. (At least it is up through Chapter 6, which is as far as I've gotten.) Taylor, an Australian, was one of the big pioneers of flight. Among other things he was instrumental in developing workable navigation systems for aircraft. He was also a keen observer of men and machines.

Here's a taste, from Chapter 3:

To carry the experiments on to the next phase I bought a de Havilland Moth twin-float seaplane. I had never flown a seaplane but had heard that the take-off was only for special beings called seaplane pilots; that only by some sort of involved technique denied to ordinary mortals could a waterborne airplane be persuaded to become successfully airborne.

Firmly believing this to be true, I made various inquiries of people who at some time or other had flown seaplanes, and with natural caution checked the advice of each expert against the others. All differed in some important respect. The only point upon which agreement was unanimous was that without this special knowledge of how to take off from the water, disaster was certain.

I was so confused by all this that I took the seaplane out on a good open stretch of water and, ignoring all conflicting advice on the subject, steadily pressed the throttle forward and went with the airplane, which I believed knew more about it than I did. It ran a reasonable distance and with light backward pressure on the control column became airborne quite smoothly and definitely. There were, I later discovered, some refinements to this procedure, to meet different sea conditions and the demands of different airplanes to them; but on the whole the thing turned out to be governed by the normal laws of behavior of a flying machine.

The operations of this seaplane had to be made to pay, to cover the economic facts of life: so I flew it to remote lakes and harbors where there were enough people to provide some traffic for passenger flights. I did the maintenance myself and, to economize on personal expenses and to live as I liked, I camped with my dog on the edge of accessible but, as far as possible, uninhabited lakes. A large Alsatian, he was the most good-tempered fellow, with traditionally good manners, but his formidable appearance was a strong deterrent to anybody with ideas of interfering with the airplane if I happened to be away fishing.

He loved the flying and, like all dogs in a car, liked to put his head out the side into the wind from the front seat, in which he traveled; but finally he would get disgusted with the force of the airstream and would just curl down in the seat and go to sleep. The only trouble I had was to teach him to jump out of the cockpit onto the plywood walkway alongside the fuselage and not to put his feet through the fabric of the wing when we came to anchor...

The Sky Beyond has a copyright date of 1963. My copy is a Ballantine Books paperback, published by arrangement with Houghton Mifflin Company, first printing August 1970. I understand that it was later published by Bantam as part of its Air and Space series. For all that, though, it's awfully hard to find a copy (and we've just taken another out of circulation). May I suggest that somebody reprint it?

Mental and emotional whiplash

I was saying goodbye to a friend at church a couple weeks ago when a man walked up and asked to be introduced to "the young lady." I had to laugh. I'm in my fifties. I'm usually mistaken for younger than that, probably because I'm a naturally joyous person and so don't have many frown marks. But I have enough wrinkles that it's purely in fun when somebody calls me a young lady. Anyway, we chatted for a while, but I finally had to excuse myself, saying that my husband was having a particularly bad day and I wanted to get home to see how things were going.

It wasn't the sort of thing that should have popped out of my mouth when I was in a hurry, because of course the new friend wondered what was up, and so I explained that my husband has MS or something like it (the doctors around here seem to have a binding resolution never to agree on a diagnosis), and whatever it is, it causes severe face pain and other problems.

"Oh! You don't want it to be MS!" the new friend exclaimed, as he launched into a story about someone in his extended family who dropped to the floor at the age of 31 and hasn't been able to move since. My new friend was puzzled how what my husband has and what his relative has could both be MS, so I tried to explain about nerve coverings and how it makes a big difference on which nerves are corroded, etc., but he wasn't having any. MS to him is a mother collapsing at age 31, and being helpless from there on out. He was exuding worry for my sake.

I assured him that our situation isn't as bad as that. We've been thrown to the mat fairly often over the past thirteen years, but we keep going. But some stretches are decidedly worse than others, and we were in a bad patch, so I needed to be off. We parted with mutual good wishes.

Well, we're still in the bad patch. But still kicking.

Like usual, I've run into just all sorts of situations that help me keep things in perspective.

Last week, for instance, I ran into a former neighbor who'd moved across the state years ago. She was standing by a car with a "Just Married" sign filling the back window. The car was behind a moving van. I popped over to say hello, to find myself being introduced to a total stranger. "Meet Carl, my new husband. We were married yesterday." (I'll say that's a new husband.) They'd swung into town to say hello and goodbye to friends and relatives, and to pick up some stuff and a cat she'd left behind when she moved away. They were off to the East Coast to live. It was a beautiful sight, two gray-haired people as happy as puppies, setting off for a new life together. But it was bittersweet, too. There isn't much chance I'll ever see her again.

A few hours after that, we got a call from relatives celebrating the birth of their first great-grandchild.

A few hours after that, I heard that a friend's newborn niece was fighting for her life, and without a miracle she was going to die. The story he got is that she seemed to have trouble getting enough oxygen, and when they went to look they found her lungs looked good on the outside but some of the lining was missing. Upon further investigation, it looked like whoever went to 'aspirate' her stuck a tube in too deep and sucked too hard and suctioned part of her lung away. At least, that's what he understood.

Go ahead. Scream if you want to. I opted for collapsing in a puddle, but I'm sure screaming is appropriate under the circumstances. Bear in mind that I got my info via a distraught friend who got it from a distraught uncle who got his info long distance from other distraught relatives, so I can't vouch for the details related above. But the bottom line is that a family was watching a newborn fighting for her life and, worse yet, it seemed to be from a botched medical procedure. Totally avoidable, in other words. God have mercy.

It made my problems seem small, I tell you.

I was still reeling from that when I went to the bank in time to see one of the tellers gushing to a customer that they'd seen the ultrasounds of her new grandbaby and "IT'S A GIRL!" The teller tossed back her head and yelled "I FINALLY GET TO CROCHET SOMETHING IN PINK!" There was dancing and jubilation all around. Now, gentlemen, don't be offended. This lady has grandsons and adores them, and would have adored the coming grandbaby if it had been another boy, but she has had nothing but grandsons (for that matter, I'm not quite sure she had anything but sons), and she quite obviously harbors a deep craving to shower girly things on a girl.

I was still basking in the glow of that much excitement about a baby not yet born when I ran into a dear, spry, cheerful old man who always acts like seeing me is the high point of his day. That he does that with practically everybody doesn't diminish the fun of it. He told me that his 90th birthday was coming up in just a few days, and he was just marveling at it. "I never expected to live this long," he said. He told me that he'd been down with pneumonia recently, and never left the house for five weeks. But, he said, neighbors brought him food and took care of things. "Yay, neighbors!" I said. "Oh," he said, "I have wonderful neighbors."

This from a man who rescued me once, by giving me a ride when I was stranded, and never thought twice about the trouble.

So, I was basking in his joy at being alive, and feeling good about living in a town where there were so many good neighbors, when I got word that the mill layoffs that have been devastating our community have been extended, and are now indefinite. And that another business had folded, and more friends are out of work.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg...

In the good news department, Spring has sprung. We're still getting the rare snow flurry, and yesterday we had a hailstorm, but between storms it's almost unbelievably refreshing and wonderful outside. I know I say that every year, but I never get used to the transition out of winter. It knocks my socks off every time.

And this weekend there was a prom in town. I'd been too busy with other stuff to know one was coming up, but I happened to be out on a grocery store run as many of them were walking downtown. The boys this year were in tuxedo mode, and the girls were going for glamorous. More to the point, most of the couples I saw were crazy happy, the boys smiling and proud, the girls radiant. They lit up the place something wonderful.

So, anyway, I'm still here. I just haven't taken much time for the internet lately, as it happens.

History is driven by what?

One of my favorite college advisers was a professor of English who also taught folklore. Years after I was out of college, I drove from my town to his and had lunch with him. A couple of things have stuck with me from that lunch, most notably his contention that, historically speaking, what actually happens doesn't matter nearly so much (in general) as what people think happened, and how they react. I thought it was just the folklorist in him talking. In other words, I didn't buy it, and wanted to dismiss it. But afterwards I kept my eyes open, and my mind, too, and I finally had to agree he has a point. Some day when I have more time, maybe I'll expand on that, but for now, why don't you chew on what George Wiegel said about what drives history?

Young adults rejecting the brokenness they were raised in

From CitizenLink: 'Millennial' Generation Shows Respect for Traditional Values:

The media portray "millennials" as self-absorbed slackers. But according to a new poll, these twentysomethings show a lot of respect for traditional values.

The survey, by the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, found 94 percent respect parenthood and 84 percent have great esteem for marriage. Just a quarter said they respect Hollywood.

Ann Mack, a spokeswoman for the agency, said she was surprised by the findings.

“It could be because they are more idealistic as a generation," she said, "but it could be because they are so young and not yet jaded.”

Mark Johnson works with B2G (better2gether), a ministry of the Navigators for twentysomethings. He believes the younger generation is reacting to something.

“At least half of them that we see have come out of some kind of dysfunctional or broken home," he said. "They are wanting something more or better than what they have come from.”

Steve Watters, director of young adults at Focus on the Family, said he was encouraged by the numbers and is looking for ways to tap into that potential through Focus' Boundless ministry to twentysomethings.

“It’s something we want to encourage as much as possible," he said, "realizing that they are not going to find that kind of support from Hollywood or Madison Avenue."

Now, this article doesn't mention anything about the poll's size, or how it was conducted. For that matter, if you've read here very long you know I don't usually put much stock in polls, even large ones that are well conducted.

On the other hand, for what it's worth, I've noticed young adults putting a premium on marriage, on family, on community, on service, and, in many cases, on military service. There are a surprising number of really wonderful young people these days. You might not know it to look at them (have you had something of a tattoo epidemic in your area?!), but when you stop to talk to them, or look at what they're doing, it can be both impressive and reassuring. A lot of them seem to have thought long and hard about what's important, and are willing to make commitments.

(P.S. Speaking of 'Hollywood,' did you see this over in the annex?)

Making the internet safer for kids

See ADF Alliance Alert » Kidzui: New Internet browser for kids designed to screen out the bad stuff for info on a service that claims to help parents keep their kids away from bad sites on the internet.

Book note: The Moneyman, by Thomas B. Costain

Of late, I seem to keep stumbling across books that, when read, present me with a problem: do I review them here or not? The Moneyman by Thomas B. Costain is one of that sort. For the most part, it's very good. But it's got just enough graphic or gutter-level content that I can't recommend it without at least some reservations, particularly in this forum. But, then, this is also a place where we discuss history, and this book strikes me as a good jumping off point for learning about the Middle Ages in Europe. And it's no good trying to pretend that the Middle Ages were all sweetness and light, particularly France toward the end of the Hundred Years' War.

So, here goes: For the most part it's a good read, but there are a few places where I found out more than I wanted about torture methods, and other varieties of man's inhumanity to man, and there are some earthy comments here and there (but not very many). One of the main storylines is about providing a king with a new mistress. Another storyline involves the evolution of warfare in that time period, and it's not pretty. However, compared to quite a bit of the more recent fare flung out to us from Hollywood, big publishing houses, television, and other 'cultural leaders,' this book is civil and civilized. Given the subject matter, I think Costain was admirably restrained, in fact. Putting the objections to one side, it has some rip-roaring adventure in it, plus a few good laughs, plus wit and sense and historical insight and info. Overall, a good book. I'd advise parents to read it before deciding whether a teen under their roof should get a look at it, and ladies might want to skip it (I'm kind of glad I read it, but kind of wish I hadn't), but, overall, a good book.

"The Moneyman" is Jacques Coeur, a powerful, influential, innovative man who was born around 1395, and died in 1456. He served Charles VII of France (aka Charles the Well Served), but he also amassed a considerable fortune through trade and retailing. From what I picked up in the novel, and what I've been able to dredge up on the man since, Coeur seems to have been one of those men who can be honestly credited with helping change the course of history.

Costain is kind enough to note in his introduction which of the main characters are wholly fictitious, and where else he happily invented things for the sake of telling his story. (i.e. "... I conceived the duel as necessary to point up the absurdity and the unfairness of the chivalrous practices of the day...") He also admits to fiddling with timelines some. Still, as historical novels go, it seems to be well researched and well presented.

Spoilers follow For those of you interested in military history, Costain presents Coeur as helping bring the Hundred Years' War to an end, both by paying for a renewed French offensive out of his own purse, and by championing the use of bombards (cannon). Getting France to use cannons proved rather difficult, as he tells it, since knights reportedly considered cannons and the men who manned them as beneath contempt, in fact, worthy of extermination. Spoilers end

I notice from the Wikipedia article linked above that Coeur is also credited with helping put an end to the papal schism. That part of his life wasn't mentioned in the book, that I can recall. But, there you go, more evidence the man made a difference in his day, and is worth remembering.

The book is rich with detail, on a wide variety of subjects: clothing, customs, society, university 'experts' of the day, what passed for medicine then, how 'justice' was handed out, and more. Costain even includes turns of phrase that were common in France at the time. We have a friend who is a history teacher and he's told us that Costain is often recommended for history students. I can see why.

This book came out in 1947, and the author seems (not surprisingly, given the horrors of World War II) to have identified with Coeur's vision of a world that would somehow move past war if only merchants could get well enough established, and power could be reckoned in trade instead of warfare, and if the common man had access to enough affordable goods to reach a point he felt comfortable from a material standpoint. Costain strikes me as otherwise being an astute observer of man's capacity for ingratitude, the temptations of power, etc. (And I'll happily meet him halfway on this. Improving the lot of the common man is good in and of itself. It can also reduce strife. I just don't believe widespread material benefits can cure as much as either man seemed to hope.) In fact, despite the author's rare stabs at holding up hope that the world can move beyond war, the book taken as a whole is something of a case study in man's capacity for ingratitude, deceit, doublecrosses, cruelty, pettiness, idiocy, and self-justification.

Oh, I bet that last sentence made you want to run out and grab a copy, just right quick...

Costain himself foresaw the difficulty of his task. From the introduction, "As Valerie Maret and D'Arlay and the Comte and Comtesse de Burey are fictitious characters, it follows that the train of events in which they are depicted as playing parts has been invented to supply a note of lightness and romance in what might otherwise be a grim story."

Well, yeah. The times were rough and tough, and society favored the favored, so to speak. It was not a safe time to not be in the king's good graces. For that matter, it wasn't a safe time to be in a king's good graces. Or a king. (This begs the question: Is it ever? Answer: Probably not, but some times and places certainly seem to be more corrupt and bloody than others.)

Ending on a lighter note, from page 209 in my copy, here's a turn of phrase I have added to my 'phrases I wish I had more use for' catalog (emphasis mine):

Sensing what was coming, the Comte frowned at his companion. "Do you mean," he demanded, "that the toads of doubt are hopping in your head as to the need of carrying out the plan?"

Heh. Every once in a while doubt seems very much like that, doesn't it?

On second thought, let's end with another snippet. From page 383 in my copy:

...When Olivier de Bousse had come into the enclosure, [the prisoner] had said to himself, "That great windbag!" The doctor, in his opinion, represented the least worthy element at the University. He was pedantic and opinionated and yet at the same time servile to all forms of authority; a coddler of the great ladies who came to him for medical attention, a theorist who covered up his lack of experience and judgment with a smother of learned words. The prisoner said to himself now, "It's very clear why this toady has been brought as a witness."

No, wait, I want to share this, from page 404, in answer to a young woman's confusion over why charges had been dropped, but the prisoner wasn't being released:

"The turnkey shook his head gloomily. "It's like a fork, Mademoiselle. If they don't catch him on one prong, they will on another...

In other words, if the powers that be want to get you, they'll keep finding excuses to charge you with something. Sad to say.

I could go on for quite a while like this. I have bookmarks all through the book, at favorite passages. Costain had a knack, no question.

Are you planting vegetables this year?

If so, are you replacing most or all of your lawn with food plants? How about taking over several lawns in the neighborhood, and farming all of them? It seems to be something of a trend, according to Green Acres II: When Neighbors Become Farmers by Kelly K. Spors, Wall Street Journal, April 22, 2008. There's a video that goes along with the article.

This isn't just a hobby. Some of these suburban farmers are earning extra cash this way.

A few blocks from where I live, a family that owns a restaurant tore out part of their lawn and put it into garden a few years ago, and have grown crops there ever since. Who knew they were leading a trend?

Book note: The Oregon Trail Cookbook, edited by Leslie J. Whipple

My husband handed me a copy of The Oregon Trail Cookbook as a gift yesterday. Oh, my, I finally had to block out time in the kitchen and make something today. I started with Snickerdoodles, a type of cookie. They came out pretty good, if I do say so myself. Even more fun, when my husband came through and tasted one he exclaimed that his grandma used to make cookies just like that. Sometimes a gal gets lucky. :)

From the back cover copy:

The Oregon Trail Cookbook offers a wealth of information on the various food traditions of the Oregon Country, with a special emphasis on the contributions of the Oregon Trail pioneers who brought their rich heritage as they emigrated from all over the world to seek the "Promised Land" of Oregon. Along with an abundance of pioneer stories and recipes, prominent Northwest chefs have contributed contemporary recipes celebrating the local bounty and the 150-year anniversary of the "Great Migration" over the Oregon Trail.

Organized into food categories both familiar (breads) and unfamiliar (game), using ingredients both commonplace (cornmeal) and exotic (bear renderings and cracklings), the recipes of The Oregon Trail Cookbook will delight the palate and fascinate the mind.

The key to this book, and the real joy of it, is participation. In response to a nationwide call for recipes, descendants of pioneers have sent in their cherished family favorites, along with wonderful family legends and anecdotes of pioneer life...

A plus: many of the recipes appear to be well-suited to frugal households. I am thinking of trying the Poorman's Pecan Pie, for instance. The ingredients are brown sugar, oatmeal, corn syrup, margarine and eggs, in a pie shell. No pecans. (On the other hand, I can't imagine what would persuade me to try Fried Pig's Feet. Just isn't gonna happen short of a prolonged siege, folks. Ugh.)

The book was published in 1992, by Maverick, of Bend, Oregon.

A note: Several of the used copies for sale online have "Thunder Over the Ochoco, Pts. 1 & 2" as part of the title. This must be a database error. Certainly it's not correct.

Another way of looking at it

Mother: I'd like to sink my offspring's boat before he can get any wind in his sails, but I need help.

Abortionist: You've come to the right place. Torpedoing becalmed small craft in naturally safe harbors is what we do.

Book note: The Good Master, by Kate Seredy

I've been having a blast dipping into some old books in the "Classics to Grow On" series put out by Keepworthy Books, a division of Parents' Magazine, New York. The latest has been The Family Treasury of Children's Stories: Fun, Fables & Adventure, compiled by Pauline Rush Evans, c. 1956. One of the selections in it is the opening chapter of The Good Master by Kate Seredy.

In short, ten-year-old Jancsi has been told that his cousin Kate from the city is coming to visit their ranch on the Hungarian plains because she has had the measles and is delicate. Jancsi has no idea what the measles are or what delicate means, but he's sure that all these unknown factors add up to something wonderful, and that she will be like one of the princesses in the fairy stories his mother has told him. Instead he winds up meeting an ordinary looking little girl the railroad guard cannot hand over fast enough, she has been so much trouble.

In the introduction to this story, the editor notes that as time goes on Kate improves under the guidance of "the good master," as Jancsi's father is called. (She has a lot of room for improvement, I might say. I don't want to say more, because I don't want to spoil the surprises.)

If this opening chapter is anything to go by, it's a good read: adventurous, humorous, with details on life in rural Hungary and sharp observations about human nature. The book was originally published in 1935, and as I understand it was based on recollections from the author's childhood. Kate is still a spoiled brat where my excerpt breaks off, but Jancsi is trying to rise to the occasion. I'm looking forward to getting my hands on the book.

The author was awarded the Newbery award in 1938 for her book The White Stag.

There's a bit more (not much, but a little) on Seredy at this post at Semicolon. Sherry notes that there was a sequel to The Good Master, called The Singing Tree, which came out in 1940.

I mowed the lawn yesterday...

... for the first time this year. There's a good chance it will get snowed on this week. What a winter and spring we've had!

Our daffodils opened this week. We also got our first dandelions. The lawn is rich with wood violets in bloom. (I hated to mow over them, but now you can see the ones that are left. The tall grass hid most of them, before.) Forsythia bushes are in bloom in nearby yards. On my walks, I stopped to watch bees, and moths, and butterflies, all busy at flowers. The air is thick with birds and birdsong. The tips of the lilac bushes are bright green.

Did I mention that snow is in the forecast for a couple of days this week? Or that I'm sitting here in winter clothes, and I still feel cold?

Teens taking the lead

I went to several sessions of a Christian revival this week. Now, I agree with C.S. Lewis that it's intellectually sloppy - indeed, intellectually indefensible - to confuse "Christians" (individually or collectively, real or pseudo, good or bad) with "Christianity." (See The Screwtape Letters for some good illustrations on this. Or, I'm pretty sure Mere Christianity also covers the same ground.) But let us concede that, unfortunately, people do tend to confuse "Christians" with "Christianity," and that some revivals don't tend to increase the appeal of the faith, and some seem to have tenuous ties to it. This event, happily, wasn't one of those. There were times it was profoundly moving, thought-provoking, focusing, challenging. A revival indeed.

The one night I missed was "Youth Night," with an emphasis on teen youth. This is not because I don't like youth. I do like them. (In general.) There were, in fact, teens in attendance the other nights, behaving every bit as well as the grown-ups, and participating in ways to do credit to anyone who wanted to lay claim to a relationship. I did not attend "Youth Night" because when the pastor announced "Youth Night" he told us to go out and find the teens we knew and say just two words: "Drums. Pizza." That would get the teens in, he said; telling them that there would be drums during the service, and pizza after.

It was not the high point of the several day event for me, let's put it that way. But I had trouble putting my dismay at this approach into words. But then I ran into a post at Brandywine Books, in which Phil shared a 2001 message from Dr. Howard Hendricks, which included this:

...There's a church in our area that has a fantastic group of young people. I love them like crazy. They went to the elders of their church and asked, "Can we open the church on Wednesday mornings to pray?"

"Well, we'll have to take that under consideration."

So, after four or five meetings (typical elders), they finally decided, "No, we can't do that. We don't have anyone who's willing to open the church and take the responsibility." Even some legal aspects to it, which I'm still trying to find out what they are.

So, the kids go down the street to a restaurant operated by a pagan and say to the proprietor, "Could we meet on Wednesday mornings about 6:00 in your restaurant? Promise you we'll take good care of it, won't tear it apart."

This guy is so blown away that he says, "What do you want it for?"

They said, "We want to come and pray."

He said, "What?"

"Pray."

"Would you include me?"

"Sure."

"You got it, and furthermore, I'll provide coffee and doughnuts for you."

And one day one of the elders drops into the restaurant one Wednesday morning and sees this group of kids from his church, which shamed the church elders into opening the church; and church has never been the same since.

I think most of our youth programs are an insult to the intelligence of the kids involved. Young people today, I assure you, are not looking for entertainment, and certainly not the cheap kind they get at a church. They're looking for a challenge; and I'm having the hardest time at my age keeping up with a group of students that are stretching my faith to the breaking point, and I see an increasing number of young people who are very, very serious about their Christian life.

Well, yes. I see that, too. Thank you for sharing that, Dr. Hendricks. That's what bugged me about our call to go out and say "Drums. Pizza." to the teens around here. There's every chance indeed it would have been an insult to their intelligence, not to mention incredibly shallow on our part, unless it could have been passed off as friendly kidding. I wasn't sure I could pull it off, so I posted a flyer in a likely spot, told an adult friend about it ('Be sure and take aspirin before you go!' she called at me as I went out the door), and then I let it drop. To be fair, the rumors I heard the next day were that the preachers pulled it off just fine, and some good messages got worked in between the ear hammering and the chowing down. But, still. It seemed like we were aiming awfully low.

I was talking with a friend about this, and it hit a nerve with him. When he was in a youth group at church back in the 1960s, he and his friends had the hardest time trying to convince the church that they craved a quiet place to meet and talk and learn and just relax. They also had a hard time convincing the church to let them organize field trips to other churches.

They won on the field trips. They'd call ahead and ask permission for a flock of teens to show up at a specific service. They would show up well-groomed, well-behaved, and respectful, just to connect with some of the rest of Christendom and see for themselves what the other churches were like. That cross-church outreach gave him some of the best memories of his youth, and it also helped focus and deepen his faith, but it was something that the kids had to fight for.

Helping lead the charge these days are Brett and Alex Harris, whose book Do Hard Things: A Teenage Rebellion Against Low Expectations is now out. Catherine Claire has a five part interview with them. (I did a pre-pub notice in January.) Learn more about the authors and like-minded teens at The Rebelution.

Rudyard Kipling remembered

Roger Kimball takes a look at Kipling, poetry, civilization, literary figures and liberals in Rudyard Kipling unburdened (The New Criterion, April 2008).

hat tip: Peter Schramm

Rick Monday's great play, on video

I posted a couple of years ago about Rick Monday's great snatch of a lighter-fluid doused flag from a couple of guys with matches, but at that time I only had an audio link. Here's a well-done four-minute video covering the story. My thanks to Julie Ponzi for posting it.

hat tip: Betsy's Page

Helping hands in Hollywood and vicinity

From Big Sunday gets LA volunteering in a big way by Ellie Hidalgo (The-Tidings.com, April 18, 2008):

Big Sunday has come to mean Big Synergy. The largest citywide community service weekend in the country, Big Sunday is building meaningful community interactions across traditional ethnic, religious and social barriers.

Originally the idea started out as Mitzvah Day at Temple Israel in Hollywood -- a day to engage in good deeds for others. From several hundred volunteers working on 19 projects, the effort now entails more than 50,000 people volunteering for 309 projects throughout Southern California.

"We've gone from community service to community building," said David Levinson, director, who has maintained his relaxed demeanor and no limits spirit despite the project's unprecedented growth. "Big Sunday expands to fill people's talents. We have projects for whatever people's passions are."

This year's May 3-4 Big Sunday weekend --- the 10th annual event --- offers projects like planting a garden at a school, feeding the hungry at a local food bank, and visiting the elderly at a retirement home.

"We have volunteers who are homeless people, and we have volunteers who are movie stars," said Levinson, a writer for television, film, theater and advertising. His wife and three children also join in the effort. "Everyone helps, especially spouses," he quipped.

Full article here.

The-Tidings.com (aka Tidings Online) is a Catholic weekly serving Southern California, which I found through this post at Alliance Alert.

Intelligent introductions (and those that aren't)

In Touchstone Magazine - Mere Comments: I Confess, Anthony Esolen writes:

...The old presumption regarding literature was that, like the music that Plato recommends in his imaginary Republic, it was meant to form a young person's soul. Yesterday I read a nineteenth century introduction to Hawthorne's The Marble Faun, and was struck by how similar it was, in aesthetic intelligence, to the comments by the savvy users on the movie database, and how very different it was from anything you'll find in a modern introduction. I read it and knew no more about Hawthorne's politics than when I began -- but I was alerted to all kinds of canny ways in which Hawthorne's potent imagination would challenge me. In other words, The Marble Faun was introduced to me as a great book, whose greatness in part was due to its intelligent structure and deft dialogue, and in part due to the attention it gives to truths greater or broader than the temporary concerns of the day. To read the typical introduction to a literary work nowadays is to wonder why anyone would ever struggle through the archaisms of Shakespeare, when the payoff at the end is not exaltation, or even a tear, but a political bumper sticker.

Read his whole post.

I almost never read an introduction before reading a modern book. I've had one too many of them that was rife with spoilers, for one thing. And for another, like he says later in the post, for too many of them "a sense of beauty is not part of [their] repertoire". Or, if it is, they sure aren't trotting it out for the work at hand.

Language fun

English is one of those languages that has some pronunciation traps. Can you get through the whole list without a stumble? I didn't.

Hospital history, etc.

See Pennsylvania Hospital History: Stories - Nation's First Hospital for an overview of the founding of the first hospital in the American colonies. And, yes, of course Benjamin Franklin was in on it. It was in Philadelphia, for one thing. And he was big on civic improvement, for another. (via 21st Century Reformation, via link hopping...)

Only semi-related: There's an email that's been making the rounds (for years and years, but I heard it read from a pulpit just recently), about a little girl who had been turned away from an overcrowded Sunday School at Temple Baptist Church in Philadelphia, who died with 57 cents saved up to help build a bigger church so more children could go to Sunday School, and how this small gift prompted more, and also was received as payment for land worth thousands. Snopes says that the story contains a kernel of truth, but overall ranks a "false" ranking. They use as their source a chapter from Russell H. Conwell's book Acres of Diamonds. Conwell is the pastor mentioned in the email account.

For the text of a December 1, 1912, sermon by Russell H. Conwell that provides the story, please see "THE HISTORY OF FIFTY-SEVEN CENTS". My thanks to the library at Temple University for making this original source available. (The same sermon is at the Grace Baptist Church of Blue Bell website, I find, after further digging.) At first glance, I think the sermon corresponds more closely with the tale making the rounds of email shotgunners, than the excerpts from the book used by Snopes. But there are still significant differences.

Both sermon links in the preceding paragraph have a picture of Hattie May Wiatt, who undoubtedly had an influence on people on the heels of her death in 1886. The details are in dispute, admittedly, but she was repeatedly held up as a good example, and the Wiatt Mite Society was named in her honor, and went on to do good deeds in her name. And, in our day, her legend has even been used as inspiration on the BBC (BBC Radio Leicester Thought for the Day, © John Denney 15 September 2005). Not a bad legacy, all in all, I'd say.

And, speaking of history and legacy, Conwell's sermon of 1912 has quite a bit of historical reference in it. For instance (ed. note: a few typos fixed):

Who are the really great of this world? Who are the mighty? Is it the king, the emperor, the president, the famous, estimated by the kingdom of heaven and on the books of God? How little we know. Our nation has given credit to Washington, to Jefferson, to Lafayette, to the great Pitt of England, to the great generals and writers, and to great financiers like Morris, but there is one person hardly ever mentioned in our history who had so much influence in our affairs that as a nation we ought to have her picture in every public hall and in every school; yet because she was a young woman she seems to have been lost to the sight of the world. That was the Princess Elizabeth, sister of Louis XVI, of France. That little woman who was a treasure of feminine loveliness, with a heart as pure and bright as any that ever beat in the breast of woman; she who lived in the aristocracy of that time, but who plead for the starving, common people and protested again against Marie Antoinette's use of the public money as she did at Versailles, and spent her life in charity and loving kindness. She laid the foundation for the victory of this nation. Those who read history know that we could not have hoped for freedom if Rochambeau had not come to this country, if the French had not indorsed us, and if the French had not fought England on the waters and lands of Europe while we were trying to fight our battles here. If it had not been for Yorktown and its surrender we could never have hoped to obtain our freedom from what was then the tyrannous king of England. Who sent Rochambeau, who used the influence that brought his coming about? In some of the correspondence of Benjamin Franklin, who represented us at the Court of France, we find that the princess, a lovely young woman, was well acquainted with him and liked to talk with him upon philosophy and upon American ideas. She served as a "go-between" with Franklin and the queen, who used her influence with the king...

Friday fun stuff

This is pure silliness, but they do it so well. :)

YouTube - "Oh Happy Day" By The Cathedrals

Fair warning: It's somewhat contagious. Don't blame me if people go around the house singing bits of it after they watch. You have been warned...

Update: Same group: more good, clean silliness, also a bit contagious...

P.S. If, by any chance, you're busting your brain trying to figure out why the guy on the far right of the quartet seems so familiar, it's Ernie Haase, in pre-Signature Sound days....

Favorite picture books

A Circle of Quiet lists some of the favorite books for preschoolers around their house.

And (via Liberty and Lily, and a link hop or two) here's a fun video of a two year old girl "reading" a favorite book. And doing a very fine job of it, I might add. (Does it amaze you how much a two year old can memorize, and then dramatize? It does me.)

Michael Yon update on Iraq

From Let's 'Surge' Some More - WSJ.com by Michael Yon (Wall Street Journal, April 11, 2008):

It is said that generals always fight the last war. But when David Petraeus came to town it was senators – on both sides of the aisle – who battled over the Iraq war of 2004-2006. That war has little in common with the war we are fighting today.

I may well have spent more time embedded with combat units in Iraq than any other journalist alive. I have seen this war – and our part in it – at its brutal worst. And I say the transformation over the last 14 months is little short of miraculous.

Let him explain why he thinks so.

hat tip: Bookworm Room

Expectations and divisions

From On patience: the West vs. Islamicist totalitarianism (neo-neocon, April 11, 2008):

Our post-9/11 unity was fleeting, if not totally illusory. We are now bitterly divided on how to fight the war against Islamicist totalitarianism.

We are divided on whether there is such a war. We are divided on who our most important enemies in that war might be. We are even divided on whether we truly have what we might call enemies, or whether a nice friendly dialogue might not be enough to make us all get along better.

But on reading this article by Clfford D. May in National Review entitled “100 Years of War?”—a reference to Barack Obama’s distortion of John McCain’s remark that we might need to keep troops in Iraq for that long a time, similar to what we’re already doing in Germany and South Korea—it occurred to me that there is another division, and that this division might actually be the heart of the matter.

This split may have begun to occur as early as 9/11 itself, shortly after the towers fell. It has to do with the perception of how long we should expect this fight to take. The division is between those who always assumed it would be long and arduous, and those who did not.

Read the whole thing. It's a thoughtful piece, backed by some history.

I count myself in the "assumed it would be long and arduous" camp.

Lost. Not lost. Who knows?

A fair number of people who wander into our town are horribly lost, having relied on ill-advised navigational systems instead of standard road maps and signs, not to mention hunches (i.e. I thought about an hour or two ago that something didn't seem right...).

It seems to be an international problem:

Had another episode of fun with the GPS. Firstly the poor thing didn't know about the new stretches of the A1M. "You're driving through ploughed fields !', it kept saying.

Then as I left the A1M at about 3pm it said just 140 miles to go. I thought "What ?!"

As I pulled up outside the Magowans' house it still thought I had over a hundred miles to cover, but that I had reached my "Via point"..

I will take more care in programming it today for the short journey to Darlington.

Which I know is NOT FAR AWAY.

It pays to not let the GPS take over your brain...