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The Presidents Club by Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy

Aug14

The Presidents Club: Inside the World’s Most Exclusive Fraternity by Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy. Recommended by Al Mohler.

Fascinating. I learned a lot about the presidents of the latter half of the twentieth century and their post-presidential lives.

I learned that both Truman and Hoover were at first rather neglected and forgotten after their respective presidencies were over, but that later presidents came to rely on them for advice and encouragement and sometimes (Hoover) help in carrying out humanitarian initiatives. According to the book, Hoover was great at organizing and carrying out post-war recovery programs to help refugees and starving people in the war zone, something he did after World War I and before he became president and after World War II, after he was president.

Johnson was a pain and a blowhard who nevertheless agonized over his role in escalating the Vietnam War. I don’t think I would have liked LBJ very much.

Nixon came across as a very complicated, arrogant, insecure, devious, and intelligent man. He knew a lot about the Russians, and thought he knew even more than he did. He advised presidents on foreign policy, towards the Soviet Union/Russia in particular, and he very much wanted to be recognized and admired for his contributions.

The authors depict Gerald Ford as a courageous man who knew that his pardon for Richard Nixon would heal the country and strengthen the presidency but knew also that it would seriously undermine his chances to serve as an elected president.

Carter was apparently a loose cannon, talented in diplomacy, but prone to go off on his own and cut his own deals without consulting the sitting president or the State Department. He practically worked miracles when he was sent on diplomatic missions to North Korea and to Haiti, but everyone back in the U.S., the president and all his advisors, was on high alert, wondering what he would do or say next.

George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton became close friends after their time as president was over, working together to raise money for disaster relief after Hurricane Katrina and after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Then, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton became friends and cooperated to raise funds for Haiti relief.

That’s the kind of stuff ex-presidents do, and the thesis of the book is that they form a sort of “club” made up of the very few people in the world who know what it’s like to deal with the pressures and responsibilities of being the president of the United States of America. They become concerned with their own legacy to some extent, but also with the guarding of the office of the presidency. So they cooperate with each other and with the president who is in office to protect the prestige and honor of the presidency, even while possibly disagreeing in fundamental ways about policy and politics.

Creation: God Did it, I Believe It

Jul29

I have had trouble, in the past, articulating what I believe about God and creation in a way that doesn’t either offend or compromise the gospel. Thanks to R.C. Sproul, one of my favorite Bible teachers, I can give it to you in a nutshell. This excerpt is from an interview Mr. Sproul did with blogger Tim Challies:

Have you ever had second thoughts about the stand that you took in favor of a six-day creation and a young earth, especially in view of all the new material on the subject that has come out since 2006?
Well, that’s kind of a complex question because when I took the stand, I took the stand on a six-day creation. I didn’t take a stand on a young earth. I don’t know how old the earth is. I didn’t know then. I still don’t.

And what do we mean by “young earth”? If you’re thinking six thousand years, I doubt that. If you’re thinking 12 billion years, I doubt that, too. All I was speaking about was the understanding of what the Scriptures teach regarding the six days of creation. And I’m not even sure it’s correct to say that I took a stand. I said that’s what my view was.

When you say you have a view, it’s one thing to say, “I think that this is the way it is.” It’s another thing to take a stand where you say: “Here I stand. I’m going to die on this mountain.” I could be wrong in my understanding of Genesis. It’s very difficult to deal with the literary genre in the opening verses of the beginning chapters of Genesis. I think there has to be some room for some flexibility on it.

I don’t know how old the earth is. I would go even further and say that I don’t know how long a day was when God created the earth in six days and rested on the seventh. I do know that God created it and said that it was good.

We’ve been reading in Genesis in our daily family Bible reading time, and I am reminded of just how poetic and rhythmic and vivid the words of of those first few verses and chapters of the Bible are:

Texas Tuesday: Goodbye to a River by John Graves

Jul24

Published in 1959, this nonfiction narrative tells the story of a November 1957 trip down a piece of the Brazos River in central Texas, just before several dams were built along the river to change its course and character forever. Hence, the title: Goodbye to a River.

Mr. Graves grew up along the Brazos, in Granbury, Texas or nearby as best I can tell, and his writing reflects his love for Texas, the Brazos, country living, and history. It’s also a nature-lover’s book and a chronicle of a lost way of life, the Texas of the 1800’s and early twentieth century. I enjoyed the book immensely, even though it wasn’t exactly about MY part of Texas, too far east for that. It was, nevertheless, about the kind of people that I knew when I was a kid of a girl growing up in West Texas among the fishermen and ranchers and hunters and wannabes. My daddy hunted deer during deer season and fed them out of season (I never really understood that). He also went fishin’, but he never paddled a canoe down the river.

The book and the journey it tells of are a taste of Texas and solitude and reminiscence and homely encounters with classic Texan characters, alive and dead.

“We don’t know much about solitude these days, nor do we want to. A crowded world thinks that aloneness is always loneliness, and that to seek it is perversion. Maybe so. Man is a colonial creature and owes most of his good fortune to his ability to stand his fellows’ feet on his corns and the musk of their armpits in his nostrils. Company comforts him; those around him share his dreams and bear the slings and arrows with him.” (p.83-84)

“Mankind is one thing; a man’s self is another. What that self is tangles itself knottily with what his people were, and what they came out of. Mine came out of Texas, as did I. If those were louts they were my own louts.” (p.144)

'Texas sunset' photo (c) 2004, Mike Oliver - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/“I used to be suspicious of the kind of writing where characters are smitten by correct quotations at appropriate moments. I still am, but not as much. Things do pop out clearly in your head, alone, when the upper layers of your mind are unmisted by talk with other men. Odd bits and scraps and thoughts and phrases from all your life and all your reading keep boiling up to view like grains of rice in a pot on the fire. Sometimes they even make sense . . .” (p.151)

“If it hadn’t been for Mexicans, the South Texas Anglos would never have learned how to cope right with longhorn cattle. If it hadn’t been for Texans, nobody else on the Great Plains would have learned how either.” (p.199)

“Neither a land nor a people ever starts over clean. Country is compact of all its past disasters and strokes of luck–of flood and drouth, of the caprices of glaciers and sea winds, of misuse and disuse and greed and ignorance and wisdom–and though you may doze away at the cedar and coax back the bluestem and mesquite grass and side-oats grama you’re not going to manhandle into anything entirely new. It’s limited by what it has been, by what’s happened to it. And a people . . is much the same in this as land. It inherits. Its progenitors stand behind its elbow.” (p.237)

The moral of the story, and I think it’s true, is that I carry Texas and Texans and the Texas landscape in my bones. Even though I’ve never once paddled a canoe down a Texas river or lived rough in a campsite beside the river or caught or shot my own dinner and cooked it up, I am still somehow the inheritor of something that my ancestors, many of whom did all those things and more besides, passed down to me. I’m a city girl, but the Texas wildness and independence and what sometimes turns into a lack of respect for authority and a heedless devil-may-care attitude–all that lives in me, and more besides. I am a daughter of Texas, and Goodbye to a River was a wonderful tribute to some of the places and stories that make Texas great.

For more books about rivers, see last week’s edition of Book Tag with the theme of rivers.

For more books about Texas, see my list of 55 Texas Tales or past editions of Texas Tuesday.

If you love the essays and the localism of Wendell Berry, and especially if you have some connection to Texas, I think you would enjoy Goodbye to a River.

Letters of Charles Hamilton Sorley

Jun25

Charles Hamilton Sorley was a British soldier in the first part of World War I. He had been a student in Germany before the war and had some admiration for the German spirit and Kultur. He was killed in action at the battle of Loos on October 13, 1915. His father gathered and published Sorley’s collected letters after the war. I read excerpts from that collection in The Penguin Book of First World War Prose.

“Germany must be crushed for her wicked and selfish aspiration to be mistress of the world but the country that, when mistress of the world, failed to set her an example of unworldliness and renunciation should take to herself half the blame of the blood expended in the crushing.”

The country that failed is Britain, of course.

“I have had a conventional education: Oxford would have corked it. But this has freed the spirit, glory be. Give me The Odyssey, and I return the New Testament to store. Physically as well as spiritually, give me the road.”

“I shall march hotly to the firing line, by turns critic, actor, hero, coward, and soldier of fortune: perhaps even for a moment Christian, humble, with ‘Thy will be done’. Then shock, combustion, the emergence of one of these: death or life: and then return to the old rigamarole.”

The Germany Mr. Sorley writes about, confident in her moral and cultural superiority, sounds a lot like the United States in the twenty-first century. The German intent was to export the strength and courage and efficiency of the Germans (Prussians) to the rest of the benighted and deprived world. And if this mission must be done militarily, then so be it. Are we caught up in the same error? Or have we learned from the First and Second World War that cultures and mores, no matter how superior, can only be exported by persuasion and propaganda, never by force?

The Summer of Katya by Trevanian

Jun21

A couple of weeks ago when we played Book Tag with the theme of Summer Setting, Summer Reading, Debbie at ExUrbanis recommended this novel, saying that is was “part mystery and part love story.” So I borrowed a copy from the library.

And it is part mystery and part love story with a bit of psychological thriller and a ghost thrown in for free. The setting is the summer of 1914, just before the outbreak of World War I in southern France, near Basque country. Our narrator is a middle-aged Basque doctor who is recalling, in 1938 on the eve of yet another war, the days of his youth before he went off to fight in the Great War.

Dr. Montjean is a faithful and trustworthy narrator, but he doesn’t really understand the events and people he chronicles. There are lots of twists and surprises here that I certainly didn’t see coming. And the dialogue and the descriptions were both quite well-written, enough so that I eschewed my usual bad habit of skimming over long narrative passages.

Trevanian, the author, lives in the French Basque mountains, so the setting should be true-to-life. The description of a traditional Basque festival, complete with dancing, drinking, fighting and semi-pagan ritual is worth the reading of all the events leading up to it. Then there’s the Freudian, early twentieth century atmosphere that makes this novel just the right medicine for a good summer read.

Code Name: Verity by Elizabeth Wein

Jun20

I have two weeks. You’ll shoot me at the end no matter what I do.

That’s what you do to enemy agents. It’s what we do to enemy agents. But I look at all the dark and twisted roads ahead and cooperation is the easy way out. Possibly the only way out for a girl caught red-handed doing dirty work like mine– and I will do anything, anything, to avoid SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer von Linden interrogating me again.

He has said that I can have as much paper as I need. All I have to do is cough up everything I can remember about the British War Effort. And I’m going to. But the story of how I came to be here starts with my friend Maddie. She is the pilot who flew me into France– an Allied Invasion of Two.

We are a sensational team.

Wow. If you like spy novels, suspense thrillers, World War II espionage, strong female characters, plot and character-driven stories, Really Good Books, read this book. I would warn that there is violence throughout, not gratuitous, but definitely too much for some people. The main character, Verity, is being “questioned” by the Gestapo for half of the novel. After that, it gets really nasty.

Yet, despite all the torture and bloodshed, this novel is really a story about a friendship between two young women. Maddie is middle class British girl who’s managed to learn to fly an airplane, almost by accident, just before World War II breaks out. And her friend, an upper class Scotswoman who grew up in a castle and was educated at finishing school and at Oxford, is a radio operator. The two girls are thrown together by the war, and the novel traces the outlines of their growing friendship and even comradeship in arms.

Code Name Verity was just what I needed after reading Palace Walk, in which all of the women were intimidated and afraid. Although Verity and Maddie are afraid, too (they spend several pages listing their top ten fears), the two young women manage to rise above their fears and perform courageous acts of heroism. Maddie’s mantra that she repeats to herself in crisis moments is, “Just fly the plane, Maddie!”

The book also has references to other literary classics, especially Peter Pan, lots of surprises, creative details that make the characters and setting come alive, and just loads of intrigue and heart. Thank you, Hyperion, for the review copy.

Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz

Jun18

“The alleys, the houses, the palaces and mosques and the people who live among them are evoked as vividly in [Mahfouz’s] work as the streets of London were conjured up by Dickens.” ~Newsweek

I was struggling through Mr. Mahfouz’s epic novel, the first part of a trilogy set in modern Cairo, Egypt, and in the middle I read the above blurb on the cover. The comparison helped. I still didn’t like the people in the book, especially the men, nor did I ever, ever while reading this novel have any desire to visit Egypt in the twentieth century or even now. However, there is a Dickensian connection—or maybe a nineteenthe century connection since Mr. Mahfouz cites his favorite authors as “Flaubert, Balzac, Zola, Camus, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and above all Proust.” I can see a little of all of those men’s influence in the novel. Notice that Mr. Mahfouz, who “lives in Cairo with his wife and two daughters,” does not name any female authors among his influences. Therein lies a tale.

Of all the books I have ever read, this one is the most likely to turn me into a flaming feminist. The men in the novel, as in Islamic culture?, are self-centered, egotistical, hypocritical tyrants. If I had to choose between living in World War I-era Egypt, where Palace Walk takes place, and Victorian England, the home of those notorious tyrants Mr. Murdstone, Bill Sikes, and Wackford Squeers, I’d take my chances in jolly old England. At least in England I’d be able to leave the house on occasion.

The mother of the family in Palace Walk, Amina, leaves her home three or four times during the course of the novel, a time period of three or four years. She attends the weddings of her daughters, and she dares to go to a religious shrine once while her husband is out of town–with predictably disastrous consequences. Otherwise, Amina and her daughters are not allowed to even look out the window, lest they be seen by a man and become “fallen women.”

So the women in Palace Walk are firmly controlled, tyrannized, and abused by the central character of the novel (surely not the Hero), the father, al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad. This patriarch has a split personality: he is friendly, amiable, good-humored, and popular with his drinking buddies and paramours, of whom he has many, but at home he is a stern, grim, autocrat who rules his family with invective and fear. Oh, but they all love and respect him. Al-Sayyid Ahmad is a god in his own home, ruling over a collection of cloistered, intimidated women and three sons who are molding themselves in his image–when they are not cowering in his shadow.

The story also deals with the way the outside world impinges on the lives of the al-Sayyid (or al-Jawad?) family. As the novel begins it’s 1917, and the British are ruling Egypt although the occupation force seems to be mostly Australian. As World War I comes to a close, one of the sons, Fahmy, becomes involved in the anti-British independence movement. However, even when dealing with political and religious changes outside the home, the novel never loses its claustrophobic feel, always circling back to the home and the sense of imprisonment that each of the family members feels, even the men. After a while, it made me want to break out, screaming.

I’m glad to have read Palace Walk. I might, in a year or two, want to read the next book in Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy, Palace of Desire, in which novel I am told some women actually get to go to school! The main problem I had with this first novel is that I could find nothing attractive about the characters or the culture in this story, nothing with which to identify. I wanted the British “oppressors” to win and reform the country and let the women and servants out of their slavery. But none of the women in this novel would have had the spine or or imagination to take advantage of such a liberation, and the British didn’t seem to be headed in that direction anyway.

War Horse by Michael Morpurgo

Jun17

As I began reading this story, recently made into a Steven Spielberg movie by the same title, I immediately was reminded of one of my favorite horse stories, Black Beauty. Joey, the War Horse, and Black Beauty actually have a lot in common. Both horses tell their stories in first person from the point of view of an intelligent and winsome horse. Both horses have a succession of owners and riders, both good and bad. Both horses see their friends mistreated and abused, and both are themselves injured by poor handling and by the illnesses to which neglected or overworked horses are susceptible. Both horses form bonds of affection with some of their human owners, and both are rewarded with rest after a series of adventures and misadventures.

Joey, the narrator of War Horse, is a half-thoroughbred bay horse who is trained to do farm work by his beloved first owner Albert, a teenaged farm boy. However, as World War I breaks out, Joey becomes a cavalry horse, and he is taken to France to carry an officer in the British army into battle. As wars sometimes do, the First World War brings Joey into many settings and hazards that he would never otherwise have experienced.

I thought the author got the voice just right in this story, not too intellectual; after all Joey is a horse. And still the voice was that of a clever animal capable of forming loving bonds with his human owners and keepers.

War Horse would be a wonderful introduction to World War I for the middle grade reader, and I can’t wait to see the movie now that I’ve read the book.

The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West

May25

“[S]he had forgotten that it is the first concern of love to safeguard the dignity of the beloved, so that neither God in his skies nor the boy peering through the hedge should find in all time one possibility for contempt . . .”

I’m not sure what that statement means, to guard someone else’s dignity before God and man(?), but it is interesting to think about, as is this little story by Rebecca West, her first novel, published just as the First World War was ending in 1918. In 1914, The Soldier, Captain Christopher Baldry, is a sort of a hero, returning from the war, but the book is really about the women that Captain Baldry left behind: his cousin Jenny, his wife, Kitty, and his first love, Margaret.

The Return of the Soldier is another amnesia story, but it has an atmosphere and a poignancy that some of the other stories in the genre lack. Chris Baldry comes back from the war having lost his memory of the past fifteen years. The story is narrated by Jenny, Chris’s cousin, who grew up with Chris and who lives in his house as a companion to his wife, Kitty.

There are lot of questions raised in the story and left to be answered by the reader:

Is Jenny a reliable narrator? Are the thoughts and motivations of the other characters really as Jenny describes them or are we being told a tale that is only true in part from Jenny’s perspective? And who is Jenny? Why is she there, and why is she so interested in telling this story? I tried to read the story carefully, but I was never sure about Jenny’s personality and motivations.

What kind of person is Chris? Was he really happy in his marriage and his home before the war? Would he want to return to the war and “do his duty”, or is his amnesia not only an illness but also a subconscious running away from the horrors of the battlefield?

Who really loves Chris Baldry, the soldier? I would say that the woman who sacrifices herself for him is the one who really loves him. Who is that? Well, you tell me after you’ve read the book.

I recommend that you read this one slowly and carefully, paying attention to the details of time, setting, characterization, and plot. I wonder if watching the 1982 movie version of this novel, starring Alan Bates, Julie Christie, Ian Holm, Glenda Jackson, and Ann-Margret, would help at all in answering any of the questions, at least from the perspective of the screenwriters, the director, and the actors who made the movie.

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

May15

Mr. Eugenides, Pulitzer prize-winning author of Middlesex, has given us a novel about the demise of the novel. It’s also a story that’s mostly about sex and its various permutations, but not really much about marriage, and equally about religion and its sundry incarnations, but not much about God. And I think the emphasis on sex and religion rather than on the core spiritual relationships of man and woman (marriage) and God and man (the core of religion) is an emphasis that is intended to say something about our culture and what we’ve lost in the twentieth century. Perhaps the idea is that we’ve reduced marriage to sexual attraction and sexual athletics, and we’ve reduced knowing God to going through the forms and expressions of religion and being good. Or maybe that’s just what I saw in the book.

Madeleine is an English major at Brown University in the 1980’s (Eugenides attended Brown), and as the story begins she’s about to graduate, has just broken up with her boyfriend, and has a massive hangover. The story moves back and forth in time a lot, beginning each section with a crisis moment and then going back in time to show us how the characters got to that crisis. However, this narrative technique isn’t confusing at all, and I rather liked it for some reason. Maybe it helped to hold my interest when the major characters weren’t terribly sympathetic or likable.

So, after having been introduced to Madeleine and the culmination of her last semester in college, we go back in time to see how she met, mated, and lost the boyfriend, Leonard Bankhead, how she came to major in English with an emphasis on the Victorian authors, and how she got the hangover. At a certain point, charismatic loner Leonard becomes the focus of the novel with his sparkling wit and intelligence, his brooding good looks, and his secret backstory that no one at Brown knows, not even Madeleine.

However, there is a third character who makes up the final point of this attempt at a modern, 21st century love triangle story, Mitchell Grammaticus. Mitchell, who’s been in love (or has he?) with Madeleine since their freshman year at Brown, is geeky, intelligent, and religious. He’s graduating with a major in Religious Studies, but he’s not sure what religion he believes in or where he’s going after college. So, he and his friend Larry decide to travel to India via Paris and Athens to see the world and wait for the economy to improve and inspiration to strike. Or maybe Mitchell is really waiting for Madeleine to realize that Leo Bankhead is a loser and that he, Mitchell, is the man she should marry.

The book is a mixture. There are some lovely and thought-provoking scenes in the novel that made it worth the investment of time, energy and slogging through (mostly sexual) sludge that it took to read the book. In one scene Mitchell encounters an evangelical Christian in the American Express office in Greece. The Christian girl witnesses to Mitchell in a rather formulaic, but sincere, way and tells him that if he accepts Christ as his Saviour, he can ask the Holy Spirit to give him the gift of tongues and he’ll be changed, completed. Mitchell tries it out, praying on the Acropolis, but nothing happens. “He was aware inside himself of an infinite sadness. . . He felt ridiculous for having tried to speak in tongues and, at the same time, disappointed for not having been able to.”

Another scene has Leonard trying to explain the experience of clinical depression to Madeleine who wants him to just try to pretend to want to be healthy.

“What’s the matter with me? What do you think? I’m depressed, Madeleine. I’m suffering from depression. . . .”
“I understand you’re depressed, Leonard. But you’re taking medication for that. Other people take medication and they’re fine.”
“So you’re saying I’m dysfunctional even for a manic-depressive.”
“I’m saying that it almost seems like you like being depressed sometimes. Like if you weren’t depressed you might not get all the attention. I’m saying that just because you’re depressed doesn’t mean you can yell at me for asking if you had a good time!”

Whatever you think about depression and its manifestations, isn’t this conversation just exactly the kind of conversation couple might have in this situation, coming at the problem from totally opposed viewpoints, trying to understand, but failing?

I’m tempted to recommend this book, in spite of all the sludge, in spite of the ending, which I hated, just because I’ve been thinking about it and mulling over the characters and their motivations and their mental pathologies all week long. I want someone to explain the entire book to me, wrap it up in a nice bow, but I don’t think this is a book that’s meant to gift-wrapped. Alternatively, I want to explain some things to Mitchell and to Madeleine and to Leonard, but I’m not sure I’d know where to start. I’m afraid I’d come across like Christian-girl-in-Greece, saying “Jesus is the answer!” in a way that sounds trite and essentially useless. Mitchell’s search for Truth, especially, is so frustrating to me as a Christian, yet so very typical of the people I see, searching but not really searching, for a god of their own imagining, instead of looking at Jesus, God in the flesh and trusting in Him.

Anyway, it’s a very contemporary un-love story that shows modern youth culture in all its befuddlement. The ending is meant to be hopeful, but it wasn’t for me because it wasn’t grounded in anything. I’d be curious to know what you thought about the book and the ending, if you’ve read The Marriage Plot.

Other reviews: Books and Culture, Caribousmom, Farm Lane Books, Bibliophile by the Sea, Book Addiction, Walk with a Book, Amy’s Book Obsession, At Home With Books.

Oh, by the way, I loved all the literary allusions and references to popular books and classics, everything from Born Again by Chuck Colson to Madeleine by Ludwig Bemelmans to The Cloud of Unknowing. All three of the protagonists of this novel are people who read, a lot, which was the main thing I actually liked about them.