Harlot or Hero? Liar or Lady? There are two sides to every story.

That tag line states the basic premise of this collection of tales about female villains and misunderstood molls of history. The book begins with Biblical bad girls Delilah, Jezebel and Salome, then moves on to Cleopatra, Anne Boleyn, Bloody Mary (Tudor), and my personal favorite: Countess Elisabeth Bathory, a Hungarian widow who did more than dabble in witchcraft. She killed hundreds of young women and girls so that she could bathe in their blood.

Actually, the story of Countess Bathory is a perfect example of the problem I had with this book. It’s lively and full of very human interest, but it’s also over-simplified and sensationalist, playing fast and loose with the known facts in the interest of engaging readers. In the chapters where I knew something bout the subjects, the story seemed just a tad embroidered. Here’s the Wikipedia take on “The Blood Countess”:

She has been labelled the most prolific female serial killer in history and is remembered as the “Blood Countess,” though the precise number of victims is debated. Her story results mainly from those who accused her and was apparently recorded more than 100 years after her death. It quickly became part of national folklore.
After her husband Ferenc Nádasdy’s death, she and four collaborators were accused of torturing and killing hundreds of girls, with one witness attributing to them over 650 victims, though the number for which they were convicted was 80. The purported witnesses testified to only 30-35 deaths. Supposedly due to her rank, Elizabeth herself was neither tried nor convicted, but promptly imprisoned upon her arrest in December 1610 within Csejte Castle, Upper Hungary, now in Slovakia, where she remained immured in a set of rooms until her death four years later.

And Wikipedia (not itself the most accurate source of information) later says that none of the witnesses actually said anything about the “bathing in blood” story. That tale grew up later. Although the authors discuss “context” over and over again in the cartoon summaries that follow each chapter in the book, there is very little context given in the text itself. But there is a lot of extra ahistorical information presented as fact.

Delilah is described as “young, beautiful, smart and sly” with “sexy eyelashes.” Then the authors tell us that after betraying Samson to the Philistines, “Delilah took her silver coins and left quickly.” The problem is that Judges chapter 16, the only historical source for the story of Delilah and Samson, says nothing about Delilah’s appearance or sexiness and nothing about her escape, although they could be deduced.

In the story of Jezebel, Jehu, the rebel commander gets a new line. Instead of saying “throw her down” when he orders the death of Jezebel, in Bad Girls he says, “Throw the witch queen down!” It’s much more dramatic, but not accurate according to, again, the only source for the story.

In Bad Girls, Salome is said to have danced the “dance of the seven veils.” The Bible simply says she danced. Oscar Wilde and Richard Strauss are the ones who added the “seven veils.”

Mary Tudor “hated the red-headed baby Elizabeth,” according to Stemple and Yolen. Really? Is there any evidence for this supposed hatred? One source I read indicates that Mary at least tolerated Elizabeth and taught her little sister to play the lute, that the two exchanged gifts and played cards together. Others say that Mary seemed fond of Elizabeth as they were growing up, but when Maary became queen and various Protestant plots to put Elizabeth on the throne in her place came to light, Mary understandably began to distrust her ambitious half-sister.

So, as the book continued with such infamous bad girls as Bonnie Parker, Calamity Jane, and Typhoid Mary, I was never sure exactly how factual and how fanciful the details of the stories were. In their introduction to Bad Girls, IF the authors had told us that these were their own versions of the stories of these women, what they imagined might have happened, I would have been much more comfortable with the book. It did get me interested in some of the women I had never heard of or didn’t know much about. I just think this book blurs the lines between fact and fiction too much, and the untrustworthiness of the narrative makes it of dubious value for readers who want to know what really happened.

Oh, and by the way, Bad Girls is not a graphic novel or “graphic nonfiction” despite the cover (great cover!) and the cartoon panel at the end of each bad girl story.

In this new (2013) biography of well-known the Medieval scholar and Christian apologist, C.S. Lewis, Alister McGrath states his purpose in the preface to the book: “This book aims to tell the story of the shaping and expressing of Lewis’s mind, focussing on his writings . . . exploring the complex and fascinating connections between Lewis’s external and internal worlds.” McGrath says his book will be “firmly grounded in earlier studies, yet able to go beyond them.”

Well. I did glean several tidbits of information from Mr. McGrath’s biography, information about Lewis and his work that either was new or new to me. I’ve read Surprised by Joy, Lewis’s own account of his early life and his conversion to Christianity. I’ve also read The Narnia Code by Michael Ward, Jack: A Life of C.S. Lewis by George Sayer, The Narnian by Alan Jacobs, and various other sketches, articles and most of Lewis’s writings, too. So I come to this biography with some background in the subject, although I’m certainly no C.S. Lewis scholar.

First, the (random) things I learned:

Lewis thought writing was a cure-all for depression.
“As he once advised his confidant Arthur Greeves: ‘Whenever you are fed up with life, start writing: ink is the great cure for all human ills, as I have found out long ago.'”
I tend to agree. I think better when I write down my thoughts, and I feel better afterwards, too.

C.S. Lewis not only had trouble typing accurately because of having only one joint in his thumbs, but he also chose not to type.
“This mechanical mode of writing, he believe, interfered with the creative process in that the incessant clacking of the typewriter keys dulled the writer’s appreciation of the rhythms and cadences of the English language.”
Maybe that’s why I can’t write decent poetry.

Tolkien said that he would never have finished The Lord of the Rings without C.S. Lewis’s encouragement.
“The unpayable debt I owe to [Lewis] was not ‘influence’ as it is ordinarily understood, but sheer encouragement. He was for long my only audience. Only from him did I ever get the idea that my ‘stuff’ could be more than a private hobby. But for his interest and unceasing eagerness for more I should never have brought The L. of the R. to a conclusion.”
And the world would have been much impoverished by the lack of that book and all that stemmed from it.

Lewis heavily annotated his books and may have thereby gained a depth of knowledge that most of us don’t even understand.
“Nobody who has worked through Lewis’s heavily annotated personal library can doubt the intensity or quality of his engagement with the texts he studied. . . . Lewis increasingly seems to witness to a lost age of scholarly methods, above all the mental inhabitation of primary sources, which does not appear to have survived his generation.”
Wouldn’t I love to have Lewis’s copy of one of my favorite pieces of medieval or ancient literature with his annotations to guide me and pique my interest and make me think of things I wouldn’t think of on my own? Joy.

So those are the passages I marked with sticky notes. I noticed, too, however, that Mr. McGrath and I do not agree on some basics. He is rather dismissive of Lewis’s attempts at apologetics, saying that most “critics” and “academic theologians” are able to poke holes in Lewis’s arguments quite easily. All I can say is that Lewis not only convinces me, most of the time, but he’s also influenced and convinced quite a few people who are probably much more erudite and learned than I (Chuck Colson, Peter Kreeft, John Piper, Randy Alcorn, Joseph Pearce, Anne Rice, Francis Collins, Phillip Yancey, and many, many more).

Then there are things that Mr. McGrath glosses or skips over completely. Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, G.K. Chesterton, and George Macdonald, to mention a few of the major influences on Lewis’s writing, are all mentioned only very briefly. Tolkien is, on the other hand, given center stage. Now, as I said above, I love Tolkien, but I consider that in a book about influences on C.S. Lewis’s life and thought, Tolkien is only one of the people who should be featured or emphasized.

And in another example of misplaced emphasis, McGrath writes about the Narnia books in excruciating details while speeding by the Space trilogy and The Great Divorce with indecent haste. These books constitute some of Lewis’s best writing in my estimation. The balance just feels off, but what there is there is interesting and informative.

For a more extensive and scholarly review of C.S. Lewis: A Life, see this article by Arend Smilde in The Journal of Inkling Studies.

By the way, I went with Eldest Daughter this past weekend to an academic conference on Walker Percy, the Southern author best known for his novel The Moviegoer, and my thoughts about Mr. Percy and his works became entangled with my thoughts about Lewis, to some benefit perhaps. More on Percy and Lewis and the intersection thereof in a later post.

Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian by Avi Steinberg.

I’m willing to read almost anything that focuses on books and libraries, written by a librarian, even if the setting is a prison and even if the librarian is a lapsed, formerly Orthodox Jewish, now agnostic, Harvard graduate. Mr. Steinberg is hip, cool, humble, lost, aimless, and somewhat annoying. Anyone who can afford to wander around taking crummy jobs whilst he wonders what to do with his life after graduating from HARVARD, is annoying.

Mr. Steinberg has a friend who becomes an anthropologist, studying leftover hippies somewhere in the Midwest or Colorado or something. Steinberg himself comes across as an anthropologist who is studying the tribal customs of that esoteric and mysterious tribal group, the American felons. He opens his library to pimps and prostitutes and con artists and drug dealers while pondering that age-old question, “What is the purpose of the library anyway?” To provide books, education, access to information? He is soon disabused of such a quaint notion by his prison clientele who generally use the library for more practical purposes: socialization, communication, and sometimes criminality. The criminal pursuits of these, well, criminals, shouldn’t be a complete surprise, but Mr. Steinberg seems to keep forgetting that he works inside a prison.

And, of course, there are the one or two inmates who are the exceptions that prove the rule:
Jessica, who comes to writing class to catch glimpses of her son, also incarcerated, through the window of the classroom. Her story ends tragically.
Chudney, whose ambition is to have his own cooking show called Thug Sizzle. His story also ends tragically.

I was never sure of the point of all of these stories of lost, violent, victimized, and tragic people, compiled with commentary by the narrator, who was sometimes lost, sometimes victimized, sometimes even a little bit violent in response to all of the violence around him. Maybe that was the point: all of our stories are tragic. We observe and tell each other’s tragic stories. But coming from a Harvard graduate, the moral of the story sounds a little hollow. Avi Steinberg is in prison (as a librarian) for a couple of years, but he doesn’t have to be there. He can get a real job, write a book, get a life. And eventually, by the end of the story, he does.

I first heard about this book on NPR. It’s an NPR-ish kind of book.