Book Review: The Nightingale

From time to time, I'll post mini book reviews. As a warning, I'm rarely reading the latest thing.

However, I recently finished Kristin Hannah's 'The Nightingale."

The story of sisters Isabelle and Vianne and their harrowing survival during World War II occupied France hooked me from the beginning. Their stories move through the war in parallel and sometimes intersecting ways. The war and Nazi occupation intensifies and the stakes get higher and higher.

You feel yourself turning page after page to find out how it all ends. The war tested women's courage and forced them to make heart-wrenching decisions to survive and protect their loved ones.

They were underestimated by others and even by themselves. But time and again these sisters-and many others-pushed themselves to the brink in the hopes of just staying alive. Kristin Hannah's story is powerful and heroic, but written in a stark way that leaves little about the realities of war to the imagination. Hannah's story is a sweeping epic that serves as a testament to the many unsung heroes of the resistance.

Review: "Wit's End"

I didn't read Karen Joy Fowler's book, "The Jane Austen Book Club." I'm not sure why, but I remember reading a book blurb and just feeling as if I didn't get the point. That's not to say, of course, that many others haven't read the book and enjoyed it immensely. I mean, it was on the bestseller list for a spell.

When I got a publisher's copy of her new novel, "Wit's End," I decided to give it a try.

Despite the creepy cover photo of a giant green eye peering into a tiny door (more about that later), I went into the story with an open mind because the subtitle said: "What happens when your readers steal your characters?"

And the press materials went on about her exploration of the online life of fan fiction. Cool. Seems new and provocative. A side of online life I've not yet experienced.

Except that I really for the life of me can't figure out what this book is about.

It starts out with Shaker Heights native Rima Lanisell, who has lost her mother (a long time ago, I think), her father (of a long illness) and her brother (suddenly when he crashed the car while drunk). Familial relationships were bizarre with her weirdly close relationship with her younger brother, Oliver, and her strangely distant relationship with her father, Bim, who was a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer.

She was horrified by her father's revelation of things in his columns like her first crush. One Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist once told me that after a certain age (say 12-13), permission is required to write about your children's personal mishaps. Old Bim would have done well to follow that advice.

Anyway, Rima has left all of this misery and her middle school teaching job behind to visit her godmother, Addison Early at her home, Wit's End in Santa Cruz, Calif. Addison is a mega mystery author known as A.B. Early. And the people who inhabit Wit's End are all a little bizarre and I guess serve as surrogate family for the grieving Rima.

Addison, who has her own bizarre upbringing in that her parents were actually brother and sister—a fact only revealed to her when her "father" announced he was getting married and would now be her "uncle"—holes up in her studio working on her latest Maxwell Lane novel. She's written a bunch, including one with the character of Bim Lanisell, Rima's father, in which Bim kills his wife (Rima's mom?).

Apparently that novel iced the relationship between the real Bim and Addison, who from near as I can gather became tight while reporters covering the same story. In fact, it is sort of revealed though never really explained that Addison had an unrequited crush on the much-older Bim.

Rima becomes obsessed with a fan from Holy City, home to a mid-20th century cult led by an overweight, charismatic leader named William Riker and a place where Bim and Addison first met. And there are references to what she finds on wikipedias and blog entries.

In fact, that foray into the online fan world reveals that her life (and that of her dead brother's) has been speculated on by some of A.B. Early's fans. How? Not really sure. Because fact and fiction all seem to roll together in this story.

Addison and Rima are strangers and it's hard to feel as if they ever actually bond. Rima goes on her own little adventure with a crazed fan and learns something about Addison's real father, which seems to cause the book to jump the shark at the end rather then pull the meandering narrative strings together. Why do I say this? Because at the end, the character of Maxwell Lane—Addison's star sleuth—becomes an avatar in a new Web-based story and Rima talks to him as if he were real.

Confused? Yeah, so was I. I'm not sure what story Fowler was trying to tell. But I'll never look at doll houses in quite the same way. I never had one, but my sister did—and does. Addison used them to stage the murders in miniature for her novels. Very creepy.

Writing advice from Barbara Kingsolver

"I learned to produce whether I wanted to or not. It would be easy to say oh, I have writer's block, oh, I have to wait for my muse. I don't. Chain that muse to your desk and get the job done." — Novelist Barbara Kingsolver on her job as a technical writer

Last week I finished reading her book, "The Poisonwood Bible." While I don't have the time this week or next to give it an appropriate review, I will just say that it ranks as one of the finest novels I've ever read. The first 75-100 pages are slow-moving, but it picks up after that and for the next 475 pages. A riveting portrait of women's survival, a country struggling for independence and America's subterranean presence.

Ted Gup: "Attendance is mandatory"

CWRU professor, journalist and author Ted Gup has a terrific piece in the April 11, 2008, issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education titled, "So Much for the Information Age."

He begins:

I teach a seminar called "Secrecy: Forbidden Knowledge." I recently asked my class of 16 freshmen and sophomores, many of whom had graduated in the top 10 percent of their high-school classes and had dazzling SAT scores, how many had heard the word "rendition."

Not one hand went up.

This is after four years of the word appearing on the front pages of the nation's newspapers, on network and cable news, and online. This is after years of highly publicized lawsuits, Congressional inquiries, and international controversy and condemnation. This is after the release of a Hollywood film of that title, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Meryl Streep, and Reese Witherspoon.

I was dumbstruck. Finally one hand went up, and the student sheepishly asked if rendition had anything to do with a version of a movie or a play.

I nodded charitably, then attempted to define the word in its more public context.

The timing of my reading this piece is interesting because I had just concluded a phone interview with a woman who was a native of England, but has lived in the states for 40-plus years. She was expressing her concern about the American educational system's lack of attention to civics, geography and basic world history.

Gup shares a similar concern, stating that for all its supposed connectivity, this cohort remains remarkably out of touch with the world.

In recent years I have administered a dumbed-down quiz on current events and history early in each semester to get a sense of what my students know and don't know. Initially I worried that its simplicity would insult them, but my fears were unfounded. The results have been, well, horrifying.

Nearly half of a recent class could not name a single country that bordered Israel. In an introductory journalism class, 11 of 18 students could not name what country Kabul was in, although we have been at war there for half a decade. Last fall only one in 21 students could name the U.S. secretary of defense. Given a list of four countries — China, Cuba, India, and Japan — not one of those same 21 students could identify India and Japan as democracies. Their grasp of history was little better. The question of when the Civil War was fought invited an array of responses — half a dozen were off by a decade or more. Some students thought that Islam was the principal religion of South America, that Roe v. Wade was about slavery, that 50 justices sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, that the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1975. You get the picture, and it isn't pretty.

These are college students at a prestigious university, presumably interested in pursuing journalism. And they don't know that Kabul is the capital of Afghanistan. Or that India is a democracy. Or that South America is largely Catholic continent!

Gup's point to his students is that attendance to his class is mandatory; it only works if everyone participates. The same, he says, can be said of a democracy.

High school—and probably middle school—history teachers should take the first five minutes of class weekly or even daily to have a current events quiz. Make it three to five questions, but use it as a test to see if students are reading, listening to or watching the news. Our democracy depends on an informed, engaged citizenry.

Word of the day
dunderhead: dunce; blockhead

Review: "A Remarkable Mother"

Near the end of his latest book, former President Jimmy Carter describes the toll his mother felt his presidency had taken on her family.

"Recalling how she had first learned that I was projected to lose the 1980 election, Mama said, 'I was in the hospital with a broken hip when Jimmy came to my room and said he was going to lose. It was the day before the election, and all the news was about the anniversary of the hostages being held in Iran, and blaming it on Jimmy. I said, 'Good!' and I went back to sleep. I wanted him out—my whole family had been attacked and split wide open from Jimmy being president.' "

Bessie Lillian Gordy Carter—Miss Lillian to the world—was never bashful about expressing her feelings whether or not people wanted to hear them. But like many women of her generation, she didn't really discover her own voice (at least outwardly) until after her husband, Earl, had died. An independent spirit dressed in loose-fitting dresses and often barefoot, she also was dutifully obedient of Earl, curtailing her job as a nurse when Earl insisted she needn't work.

Miss Lillian's influence over her children and especially the former president is the subject of Carter's latest book, "A Remarkable Mother," due out in time for Mother's Day by Simon & Schuster.

Crafted from the amazing journals, diaries and letters meticulously kept by the Carter family, Jimmy Carter weaves a loving, though not always flattering, portrait of the woman who most influenced his life. If this love letter does nothing else, it illustrates to us all how important it is to capture family memories and experiences as they are happening. These writings provide such wonderful insight. Though Lillian died Oct. 30, 1983 at the age of 85, she is very much alive in his book.

While their father read to the four Carter children—Jimmy, Gloria, Ruth and Billy—when they were young, it was Miss Lillian who encouraged their reading of current events. They would have magazines and newspapers at the table for every meal except for Sunday dinner. The Carter children, having grown up on a farm, realized quickly that if you were reading, you didn't have to work.

She also engendered in them the notion of service to others. In interviews later in her life, Miss Lillian would comment that the only thing to do in Plains, Ga., was to attend church (even though her own experiences there proved otherwise). Living on a main road, during the Depression, "When Mama was home, we never turned away anyone who came to our house asking for food or a drink of water."

A lifelong, vocal Democrat, Miss Lillian and Earl Carter's votes usually cancelled each other out. Carter's father became a Libertarian more in philosophy than in name, given his disenchantment with FDR's New Deal. "For some, including my father, these were sacrilegious acts, and a totally unacceptable invasion by the federal government into the private affairs of free Americans."

While Carter would not grow up to share his father's political views, he did share his "obsession with punctuality," something that Miss Lillian, as a member of the medical profession, did not necessarily abide.

Even though she worked sporadically as a nurse, Miss Lillian was always working at something including growing pecans, which provided the family with some side income, enough to fund vacations to major cities to see her beloved baseball. More than just a grower, she was also a shrewd negotiator and was able to earn more harvesting pecans than she did in a year of nursing. "Growing pecans … was like picking up money off the ground."

Baseball was like a religion to Miss Lillian. She consider it to be "one of God's special blessings" that she and Earl were present when Jackie Robinson played his first game for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

"After our family became famous, she would call Tommy Lasorda to complain about managerial decisions he had made. When Mama died, we found a complete Dodgers uniform in her closet, even including cleats, with a love letter signed by the entire team," Carter writes.

When Earl Carter died, Miss Lillian blossomed into the a true family matriarch, what her children describe as her "two different characters." She despised McCarthy, was a strong support of Democratic candidates devoted to civil rights at home and human rights abroad, and served as priest, banker, confident and in loco parentis for a bunch of Kappa Alpha boys at Auburn University.

The Carter family was ostracized for their support of Lyndon Johnson, but Miss Lillian had high hopes in his plans to address civil rights and poverty. Not only the Carter family matriarch, Miss Lillian was also the town matriarch. She once talked a young black boy down from the water tower when he wanted to kill himself. More than that, she brokered an agreement with the sheriff to see that the boy's father didn't continue beating him, which was what drove him to the top of the tower in the first place.

Reading that age was no barrier to entry, at age 70 Miss Lillian entered the Peace Corps. Her only request was to go somewhere warm where her nursing skills could be used. She wound up in Vikhroli, India. Initially stymied in her attempts to teach the villagers about birth control, she eventually wrote a play that helped get the message across. Realizing that the clinic was horribly under-supplied, she persuaded drug companies to donate samples. With little more comfort than her Mickey Spillane crime novels, she gave to India a piece of her heart.

"I didn't dream that in this remote corner of the world, so far away from the people and material things that I had always considered so necessary, I would discover what Life is really all about, sharing yourself with others—and accepting their love for you is the most precious gift of all.

"If I had one wish for my children, it would be that each of you would dare to do the things and reach for goals in your own lives that have meaning for you as individuals, doing as much as you can for everybody, but not worrying if you don't please everyone."

She returned to Vikhroli during the first year of Carter's presidency and was greeted by 10,000 people, many of whom called her "Lilly behn" (our sister Lilly). She told them, "I was happier walking here, sometimes barefoot, than I am now coming in the president's plane."

It seems that all of her children took her advice to heart. When Billy Carter was once asked about his eccentricities, he told the interviewer that one sister rode a Harley-Davidson, one was a holy-roller preacher, his mother entered the Peace Corps at age 70 and he ran a farm and occasionally drank too much. "Which one of our family do you think is normal?" he said.

Each in their own ways, the Carter children embraced their mother's wish. Writing in a wonderfully southern storytelling fashion, Carter describes how he told his mother that he was running for president. He visited her at the house in Plains, sat down and put his feet up on the coffee table, to which she replied, "Get your dirty feet off of my table!"

"After some preliminary discussion, I told her that I had made a very important decision and wanted her to know it.

'Well, what is it, Jimmy?'

'Mama, I've decided to run for president.'

Startled, she asked, 'President of what?'

It was an hour later before she realized he was serious and she said, "I think you can do it, and I want to help." Help she did. Her diaries during the campaign show that she met with more than 500 groups of supporters and made up to five campaign stops a day. She endured endless chiding and comparisons by the press, some of whom referred to her as "Rose Kennedy without the hair dye" and someone who wore "drip-dry dresses."

Her relationship with the press was tenuous. She was skeptical but at the same time developed relationships with people like Walter Cronkite and Johnny Carson. And occasionally she would use the press to send her son messages on the campaign trail (he should "quit that stuff about never telling a lie"). During the inauguration when Carter's press secretary told everyone not to speak to the press, Miss Lillian retorted, "Jody, you can go to hell. I'll talk to whom I please."

Ironically, the matriarch and key campaigner was practically left at home when the Carter family was leaving Plains for the inauguration. Everyone thought somebody else had picked up Miss Lillian.

"I raced back to her home and found her, stony-faced and furious, sitting in her living room. Her first comment to me was, 'I've decided to stay at home and not to attend the inauguration.'

"She was soon persuaded to go with us, but she never let us forget that we had left her behind."

Miss Lillian traveled the world on behalf of her son's administration. She always gave the State Department pause, as they worried what she would say or whether she would violate diplomatic etiquette. She did on occasion, though to no great detriment. She called King Hassan of Morocco a "damn foreigner" for offering her 21 bottles of perfume. In her high heels she practically slid into the new Pope John Paul II (much to Rosalynn's chagrin and the pope's delight) and she told her son that Ireland was her favorite place and "if she could have another month there she could resolve the problem between the Catholics and the Protestants."

After her papal visit with Pope Paul VI (one of his last visitors before he died) she said if she had another lifetime to live she would be a Catholic because they didn't have a problem with a drink in the afternoon or a game of poker now and then (a game she much preferred over bridge).

While with Pope Paul, in advance of her trip to West Africa, the two prayed for an end to a devastating drought in that region. While Miss Lillian was in Mali a few days later, torrential rains came. All these years later, Carter says people of that region still feel the prayers of Pope Paul and Miss Lillian ended the drought.

Carter's love for his mother is rooted in all of those wonderful complexities of a mother-son relationship. Unconditional love, occasional embarrassment, exasperation, adoration, shared laughter, protectiveness and the sense that with such a person behind you, anything is possible—even becoming president.

But her love spread far beyond her family's close circle. In October 2006, the Carters visited Vikhroli, India, as part of Habitat for Humanity. They had the chance to meet with a number of villagers whom Miss Lillian had helped, including one young girl she had taught to read who was now president of a university.

Word of the day
raconteur: a person who excels in telling anecdotes

One harsh—and mistaken—critic

"Richard Wright, soon to become the bestselling author of Native Son, categorically dismissed [Zora Neale] Hurston's book: 'The sensory sweep of her novel carries no theme, no message, no thought,' he wrote."

From the article, "A Protofeminist Postcard from Haiti," by Valerie Boyd, about Hurston's book, "Their Eyes Were Watching God." Boyd wrote the biography, "Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston", published in 2003.

Recognize the name?

Prolific Cleveland writer John Ettorre earns top billing in the books section of today's Christian Science Monitor for his review of "Reagan's Disciple." Nice job, John.

Review: "The Distance Between Us"

Masha Hamilton knows firsthand the psyche of a foreign correspondent and she captures the dedication and the self-imposed isolation that exists in those who tune out their own needs and voices to tell the stories of others abroad.

In her book, "The Distance Between Us," Hamilton's main character Caddie Blair is hard and cold, yet also funny and warm. She's a guy's girl who is in the Middle East for the story—THE story of who gets the right to "piss on the ancient ground," which has long been the subject of battles large and small. There are two types of people, she says: "There are whose who leave, and those who stay."

While on a risky trip to Lebanon to interview a reclusive politician, Caddie misses the warning signs of an attack and her photographer boyfriend, who kept telling her he wanted to leave but whom she convinced to come with her on one more assignment, is fatally shot in an ambush.

Like the Palestinians and the West Bank settlers that she covers, she is filled with thoughts of revenge. She is quickly losing herself in a quest to block out all else. That is, until a strange Russian professor shows up along with a journal of photographs that her late boyfriend's parents sent from Britain.

One is feeding her need to lose herself physically and emotionally, the other is forcing her to look at what she's become. Caddie's emotions or even lack of them hurts because you know she's going to implode if she doesn't face them.

Most journalists will recognize the desire to lose yourself in your reporting. Sometimes it's out of sheer enthusiasm for a subject, other times it's an escape—from reality, from boredom. But what Hamilton shows in her journalist is that while she was busy escaping her feelings and boredom thinking she was covering the story of the death and violence of the Middle East, it becomes increasingly apparent to the reader and to Caddie that she's NOT reporting the story.

She didn't put a human face on the death and violence that marks the territory. It remained faceless, nameless, a sheer numbers game. Through some painful and traumatic moments, she learns how much she missed the things around her. And it's through the photos in her boyfriend's journal that she sees herself—and him—for the first time. He had wanted out and she blew him off.

"War strips us naked. I am horrified by what I find in me," he writes at the end of his journal. The effect on Caddie is immediate, though other events have also been building toward her recognizing the "selective deafness" she has exhibited in her work and in her life.

She knows now that the stories have to be about people, about individuals, and that's the only way to lessen "the distance between us."

Word of the day
haunting: to visit often; to have a disquieting or harmful effect on

Conversations on God and religion

Antonio Monda, a filmmaker, teacher at NYU film school and co-founder and artistic director of the literary festival Le Conversazioni, met with noted cultural figures (authors, artists, filmmakers and others) to talk about God and religion.

His book, Do You Believe? Conversations on God and Religion was published last month by Vintage Books. I read through it yesterday (it's very breezy) and found it raised some interesting points, but barely scratched the surface of the conversations.

This would have worked tremendously as an audio or visual project rather than a Q&A in print form. It would have been interesting to see Grace Paley or Saul Bellow or Martin Scorsese as they contemplated the questions and after I finished each brief conversation, I was left wanting much more.

Several themes emerged from the conversations with Paul Auster, Saul Bellow, Michael Cunningham, Nathan Englander, Jane Fonda, Richard Ford, Paula Fox, Jonathan Franzen, Spike Lee, Daniel Libeskind, David Lynch, Toni Morrison, Grace Paley, Salman Rushdie, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Martin Scorsese, Derek Walcott and Elie Wiesel.

• Whether or not they believed Christ was the son of God, nearly all agreed that he was a great thinker.

• There was a great respect for believers even when those interviewed didn't believe and for those of other faiths.

• The power of redemption has the ability to transform humans.

• Most have some semblance of a spiritual life, but maintain skepticism about codified religion and in most cases "the church."

• While some mentioned the hazards of a Godless world (Nazism, Communism), nearly all mentioned the great evil, violence and destruction done in the name of religion.

• Many were asked of religious artists whose work they valued and three mentioned Flannery O'Connor, which was more than any other artist named.

• An overwhelming refusal to declare absolutes.

Some of Monda's key questions included:

Do you believe?

What is your image of God?

What was your religious upbringing?

What will happen after death?

Comment on Dostoyevsky's phrase, "If God doesn't exist, everything is permitted."

The comment that most reflects my own spiritual journey was made by Martin Scorsese in response to Monda asking, "Do you believe in God?":

"I think that my faith in God lies in my constant searching."

America's founding more "patched and piebald" than planned

"[Historian/author Joseph] Ellis rescues his enterprise by going beyond the familiar critique of the founding to explore a point that remains underappreciated: that America was constructed to foster arguments, not to settle them." — Jon Meacham reviewing "American Creation: Triumph and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic," by Joseph J. Ellis in New York Times Sunday Book Review.

Three days, three books, three reviews

On my desk this morning are three books I've read since Monday. I'm not sure to what I should attribute my sudden surge in reading. I've learned not to question it and just run with it when it strikes. I guess with UPS dropping off upcoming titles, some of them proved too irresistible not to dive into.

"Sister Wendy on Prayer," by Sister Wendy Beckett
Harmony Books (November 6, 2007), 144 pages

If you only know of Sister Wendy Beckett from her PBS/BBC series on art, you should get to know her through this book. Writing about prayer is so difficult because it is so individual. She begins by letting readers know just what a struggle it was to write this book.


But her struggle works, particularly near the end and she finds her sea legs and writes simply and logically about prayer.

I'll admit that my interest in reading this slim volume is personal indeed. I've always felt a failure at prayer. I'm not one to sit still for an hour and allow myself to be with God. I'm always trying to multi-task my way through.

Sister Wendy writes, "It is not difficult to intellectualize about prayer. Like love, beauty and motherhood, it quickly sets our eloquence aflow. It is not difficult, but it is perfectly futile." She goes further to suggest that it can even be harmful.

Why?

Because writing, thinking, talking, reading and longing for prayer keeps us from actually praying. She challenges us to discover what it is we really want from prayer. Because the fundamental reason for prayer—and what makes it so simple—is that we want to be possessed by God.

"Knock and it shall be opened to you." God doesn't want to trick us so prayer is the last thing we should feel discouraged about.

Throughout her book, Sister Wendy refers to a selection of paintings that for her speak of prayer. Those paintings are in the book and she describes, in her wonderfully accessible way, how those paintings describe various aspects of prayer.

Her writing is challenging in places. Do we make room for prayer in our lives? Is it a priority? Or is it something we try to fit in while doing other things (as it has traditionally been for me). But she also explains its utter simplicity. Here are a few of my favorites:

On peace:

"All too often people say, 'I was too sick to pray' or 'I was too worried to pray.' Rather we should say, 'My prayer today is of a sick and worried person.' It is you God wants to take to Himself in prayer, and if that is a you with shingles or a you with marriage problems, He is compassionate toward His child, but does not demand that the reality of life be discarded. You cannot step out of your real life with all its tensions into 'a peace.' God does not want you to. It would be a state of unreality."

On penance:

"One sometimes gets the impression that these saints were canonized because of their physical penances. Forget about love and prayer: one can deduce these, the reasoning goes, from the extremes to which they brought their bodies. Fast until you faint? You must love God. Go without sleep? Ah, what devotion! Today we are more dubious about these penitential extravaganzas. We still love them; we are deeply impressed by them. They still seem to bear their own credentials blazing bright on their foreheads, yet we have perhaps come to realize the element here of the extraordinary, the UFO, that essentially impresses us, not because it comes from God, but because it is bizarre, a seemingly spiritual version of the poltergeist. True faith is something very much deeper."

On holiness:

"To be perfect is to be complete. God is perfect in that He is completely the Godhead. There is one God and He is completely Himself. But there is not one humanity. We are all human in different ways. And, for us, perfection—to me rather an off-putting noun—can mean only becoming completely what we are meant to be. Each of us is called to an individual fulfillment that only God understands."

But enough "talk" about prayer.

"Black Olives," by Martha Tod Dudman
Simon & Schuster (February 5, 2008), 192 pages

If I remember correctly, this was one of those books I checked off on my reviewer checklist. I'm not usually one to review fiction, but the theme of middle-aged love appealed to me.

"Black Olives" is a fast read, but it's emotional and unpleasant in places. It reads more like a short story than a novel in that it involves one evening in time, albeit with glances back at a 10-year relationship.

Nine months after their painful breakup, Victoria spots her ex-boyfriend while looking at the olive bar of the Maine grocery store where they live. She's thrown into a panic because she wanted to see him again when SHE was ready. David, the boyfriend, doesn't see her because he's too busy getting his coffee beans.

In an unlikely (though who am I to say?) turn of events, she compulsively goes to his unlocked car in the parking lot and climbs into the back seat under his sweaters, rain gear and other stuff piled on the floor. She's inhaling the smell of him, when the actual him gets into the car.

She's stuck and rides with him to several more spots before he eventually arrives at his home. She gets out of the car and stays in the garage until he leaves again, which is when she walks through his home.

Throughout this episode she is visiting the places and spaces of their relationship. She's not an altogether appealing person, but neither is he. They are both divorced with children from previous marriages. At the point of the story they are also both in their 50s, he with a grandchild and she with two grown children.

He wants to marry her and she doesn't want to be tied down. They maintain separate homes and lives yet still share a decade together. There's, I suppose, is a modern relationship, but he wants more.

Most of the novel is an interior monologue and she replays the scenes of their life together. Maybe she's trying to figure out at what point things went south. And maybe she's trying to identify where she could have responded differently. There are times when the tone is downright annoying. She becomes that friend you dread who goes on and on about sour relationship. But like a train wreck, you read on because truly this could be any of us. While Victoria shows us a secure businesswoman and mother, she becomes insecure in her love life, questioning everything including whether or not she should have bought sexier panties.

That insecurity comes to her at the moment of the breakup, when she begins questioning him and herself about events in their relationship.

"And then I thought—well, if she just has brown hair, and she doesn't even have big breasts, then what's the point of it? What could she have? What could it be that would make that particular vagina, that pair of eyes, that set of lips, any better/different/sexier than the ones I've got?

[snip]

"Does she know about me?" I asked him.

"Yes," he said. But what would he have told her? Not the dear things. Not the big things. He wouldn't have told her about the time, after my operation, when I lay in the hospital bed in Bangor and he sat there all day long with his laptop and book, just being there in the room with me so that, whenever I rolled out of the fog of my opiated stupor, he was right there, with his familiar shirt on, with his laptop, sitting in the hospital chair.

You're still here, I said. I didn't know what time it was. Time had gotten all blurry and strange and stretched out by the drugs and the pain in between the drugs.

Of course, he told me, looking up. Where else would I be? he asked me. And I knew he would always be there, right there in the room with me."

It's a revelation to her that she has become what she dreaded in others. And only after that point of self-discovery can she truly begin to move on with her life.

A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini
Riverhead Books (May 2007), 367 pages


It's not the writing, though it is simple and straightforward, it's the story that moved me quickly through "A Thousand Splendid Suns." While the story happens largely in my lifetime, it seems almost from another century. The differences between my years and those of Mariam and Laila are incomparable.

That the story takes place in Afghanistan—a place where my earliest knowledge of its existence was sitting in Mr. Hatfield's sixth-grade classroom at Brantner Elementary in Cincinnati, watching as Soviet tanks invaded—is so central to the events of today and yet still so foreign makes it even more compelling.

It's a breezy read interrupted with some disturbing violence. In his first novel, "The Kite Runner," Hosseini presented some coincidences, which were frankly too hard to imagine ever happening. That's storytelling laziness. It's my primary problem with authors like Dan Brown, who drive you through a fast-paced interesting narrative only to neatly wrap up the details with a mix of uninspired and unrealistic coincidences.

There's a little of that here, but it's not nearly so offensive. In the end, this story contains more of the hope—for women and for a country—than Hossein's first book. A good story.

Kozol's "Letters" is next on my reading list

Today's Christian Science Monitor has a review of Jonathan Kozol's "Letters to a Young Teacher." The reviewer compares teachers waiting for the newest Kozol book to their students awaiting the latest installment of Harry Potter. He claims that "a battle is beginning for the soul of education." Here's a brief excerpt of the review:

Now he's making his battle cry even more explicit, urging young teachers to take a stand if they, too, see injustice in their students' lives. But his weapons of choice are peaceful ones – the teachers' own creativity and their commitment to nurturing their students' sense of delight.

In one chapter he tells about a teacher who could calm her rowdy classroom by putting her fingers to her mouth as if playing a flute; the children knew the signal and did likewise, dancing with her to an imaginary tune. Then Kozol holds a mirror up to Francesca's own classroom, recalling how excited her students were to track the status of their loose teeth on a chart she had made with categories such as "Wiggly," "Wobbly," and "Out!"

In another chapter he takes on the high-stakes testing environment. He laments the way the language of the business world has crept in, so that school mission statements treat children as products who have to be prepared to take their place in a competitive global marketplace. "Childhood does not exist to serve the national economy," he declares. "In a healthy nation, it should be the other way around."

Review: "What You Have Left"

Maybe I have this perverted need to read about other people's misery. I'm thinking that's the only reason why I would recommend reading Will Allison's What You Have Left (Free Press; June 5, 2007).

This is not an upbeat story and yet it feels very breezy. It's the kind of dark study of human nature that always pulls me in close.

Using various points of view, it's the story of Holly Greer, her father Wylie and her husband Lyle. Tragically, Wylie's wife, a NASCAR hobby driver, is killed during a water skiing accident. A bereft and drifting Wylie leaves 5-year-old Holly with his father-in-law Cal and promises that he will return soon.

He doesn't and Holly grows up on Cal's farm outside of Columbia, S.C., without her mother or father.

The story quickly shifts from Holly's early loss to her grandfather's Alzheimer's diagnosis and his decision, after watching his own father deteriorate, to take his life when the disease starts to progress.

Holly leaves college to be with Cal, who decides to spend what time he has left renovating the old farmhouse for Holly. He hires Lyle to do the work and forms a quick friendship with the contractor. In a little bit of matchmaking by Cal, Holly and Lyle fall in love.

But just when Holly thinks she's talked Cal out of taking his own life, he swallows a bunch of pills. She is left bereft and alone again and strikes out on a path of near self-destruction as she tries to track down her long-lost father. She gets very close, but Lyle and Wylie see to it that the long-awaited reunion doesn't happen—yet.

While I've not experienced loss to Holly's depths, I do recognize my own loner streak in her. And maybe that's why I turned page after page of her story.

My mother's accident happened on the day after the Fourth of July. The night before, she and my father had hosted their annual cookout, a big bash that involved a bonfire, several coolers of Schlitz, roman candles, and loud music from the eight-track player in my father's Firebird, which he parked near the lake's edge. While the grown-ups drank and danced the shag, I wandered along the moonlit bank until I found myself staring up at a neighbor's tree house. On a sagging platform that jutted out over the water, I sat watching the party, indistinct figures moving in the firelight. It had been maybe ten minutes when my mother noticed I was missing. After she checked the house, she stood at the end of the dock and called my name. There was real fear in her voice, and it sent a shiver through me. I climbed down and ran to her as fast as I could, calling out all the way, I'm coming, I'm coming.

Holly's fears of abandonment cause her to drink too much, smoke too much, drive recklessly, gamble uncontrollably, flee from the one who loves her most and all the while you can't help but feel that she's justified in some of the behavior.

The story drifts off about two-thirds into the book when it details the misery of an ordinary marriage—lack of sexual intimacy, one person working too hard, the other not as much, a mother giving her children her all while neglecting her husband, a husband who can't seem to articulate his needs beyond the sexual, a desperate night in which he comes close to sleeping with a prostitute and a pathetic attempt at two people trying to quit smoking.

It would all be so depressing were it not so ordinary.

While Holly claims to have given up on finding her father, Lyle persists and locates him via the magic of Google racing at a track in Indianapolis. Holly is moved to send him a letter thanking him for the pithy amount of financial support he had sent over the years. She writes to request back payment of child support to the tune of $28,800, which would be placed in a college savings fund for her daughter, Claire.

Wylie is thrilled to hear from her after so many years and invites her and Claire to visit.

That night, against my better judgment, I told Claire to pack a suitcase, we were going to Indianapolis.

Lyle frowned. "Don't take the bait."

"It's not bait," I said. "It's a bluff. And I'm calling it."

Only it's not a bluff or bait. Her father has a disease, brought on by a lifetime of excessive drinking and a wicked seizure, that has impaired his short-term memory. He records everything with a video camera so he doesn't forget. And he doesn't want to forget meeting his daughter and granddaughter for the first time.

The meeting is bittersweet and you can't help feeling as if Wylie is trying to make up for Holly's lost childhood by giving so much love and attention to Claire.

The title's inspiration comes early in the book when Cal recites one of his favorite Hubert Humphrey lines to Holly's eternal exasperation: "My friend, it's not what they take away from you that counts; it's what you do with what you have left."

What they have left is so little, but the story leaves you with the sense that maybe little is all they need to build something bigger—and hopefully better.

__________________________________________________

Author Will Allison will be reading from "What You Have Left" from 3-5 p.m. on Monday, June 25th at Nighttown in Cleveland Heights. His visit is sponsored by Appletree Books.

Allison has Cleveland roots, having moved here when he was a sophomore in high school. One of his early acknowledgments is to writer Mary Grimm, who is also an English professor at Case.

Review: "A Church in Search of Itself"

Catholics worldwide are looking for hope. While their belief in their faith remains strong, it's that human institution known as "the church" run by fallible human beings that remains the source of contradiction and contention.

A slave to times past, the church is in a constant one-step-forward-two-steps-back mode of operating that at best is inefficient and unresponsive and at worst is driving away the faithful.

The church nearly drove me away. But I rediscovered my faith through an immersion in its history, theology, practices and art. I am a motivated Catholic. Plenty wouldn't have bothered. As devoted as I am to my faith, I have to remind myself that my expectations for its responses and behaviors may not be met. Instead, I'm making my own way.

In a nutshell, that's what Robert Blair Kaiser, author of A Church in Search of Itself: Benedict XVI and the Battle for the Future, originally published in hardcover last March by Alfred A. Knopf and now out in paperback by Vintage Books (both divisions of Random House Inc.) is saying.

Kaiser has a dualistic view of the church that somewhat weakens his arguments. The Vatican and its cardinals are divided into those who believe the church must change and those who believe it must remain true to its tradition. I suspect, like the practices and beliefs of individual Catholics, there are scores of nuance missed in that Augustinian characterization.

There's a jarring juxtaposition between the faith of the people and the politicking of its leaders. That cardinals are political animals is abundantly made clear as the stage is set for the conclave of 2005. Some, in particular Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger now Benedict XVI, have been politicking for the job for years in ways both subtle and not so subtle and with ramifications that reverberate in this country.

Kaiser traces the modern church's collective tin ear to Vatican II and the failure to uphold the spirit and letter of Vatican II. When the institutional church fails, people walk. They don't stop to ask why, they simply walk out of the church and don't return.

What does all this politicking and positioning mean for everyday Catholics? In reality, not much. Catholics don't have the sense the pope is running our lives, says Kaiser. Pope Benedict XVI doesn't seem to mind if people walk. He's positioned himself as God's defender and if that means a smaller church (after all it's not a democracy) then he's willing to pay that price.

The Catholic church's core theological beliefs were set—and closed—in 325 C.E. at the Council of Nicea. How the church governs itself has changed because the church is run by humans. As such, it will always be in need of reform.

How much will the Vatican be willing to reform to modern times? Can it balance a love of power with Christ's message of love?

Through the stories of six individuals—representing the Catholic church in America, Europe, Latin America, Africa and Asia—Kaiser tells of the journey for the modern Catholic church. Where his sourcing seems vague in the beginning of the book, his individual stories are ripe with detail that only comes from confidence and access gained over time.

In between those chapters are theological discussions and synopses of major events surrounding the conclave. We learn about liberation theology, syncretism and enculturation. But we also see how the Vatican bristles at those words and hastens to silence those who dare to voice such concepts.

We learn just how complicated it would be to reform the priesthood. When John Paul II was asked whether he would think seriously about it, he said it reminded him of a song: "It's a long way to Tipperary," Kaiser writes.

"To map out the future of the priesthood, one first had to deal with its long, twisted past, a past that was immensely complicated by a clerical misogyny … that goes back to the fourth century," writes Kaiser.

Yes, well, we can't go there. So instead we take women out of the equation by making priests celibate and this way the church retains all property instead of it being passed on to families. Perhaps there would be value in "the wisdom of the crowds" approach to church reform. Instead the refusal to look at the situation at all results in a dying or at least decaying priesthood.

Sociologist Dean Hoge of the Catholic University of America told a Boston College conference on priesthood in 2005 that making celibacy optional would raise seminary enrollments 400 percent, says Kaiser.

But the church equates holiness with sexlessness, thanks in large part to St. Augustine's equation: sex=pleasure=women=evil. If celibacy becomes optional, "every pillar of Catholic teaching could be called into question."

Rather than hit the hard stuff head on, the Vatican uses one of the most effective weapons in its arsenal—silence. Its refusal to address the issues of voluntary celibacy, married priests or female priests speaks volumes.

Aloysius Pieris is Asia's leading liberation theologian and though he has been called before the Vatican on many occasions, he does not worry about the inquiries. "We have a great advantage here in Asia, because we work in languages that the men in the Holy Office do not understand."

We could all learn something from Pieris. Meaningful reform in the Catholic Church will not happen unless a groundswell of individual Catholics asks for change. We are not a group willing to question the authority of the church. While many of us have advanced degrees and knowledge is many subjects, we retain a second-grade education in our faith. We lack the maturity of faith and the basic education of the history of the church to understand that WE can ask for change.

Maybe that's a language the Vatican doesn't understand. But we have to start somewhere. Read through this book and then work on your own education. If you don't think it's important then I leave you with this excerpt from Kaiser's Epilogue:

"Since 2000, six American bishops have resigned, five of them for aberrations of a sexual nature that became public and one after he was charged (and later convicted) with leaving the scene of a fatal hit-and-run auto incident, a felony. In none of these cases did the pope intervene. He didn't have to. Local public opinion told the misbehaving bishops what to do.

A bishop who behaves himself, however, and remembers to pay a visit to Rome every five years with an envelope of cash for the pope can exercise a rule that is close to absolute, hardly diminished by his diocesan finance council, whose members he appoints and whose advice he need not follow, or by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, an organization he supports with annual contributions but whose resolutions he can, according to canon law, safely ignore.

If any wonder why the American Church is in such a parlous condition, they must, therefore, lay the blame on the bishops who have enjoyed such extraordinary control—and the pastors who support them. Some bishops say canon law blocks various initiatives recommended by the forces of reform, which quiets some reformers but should not, since canon law itself says a bishop need not follow those rules that in his judgment are overridden by his people's needs. If he insists on following the letter of Church law, one can only conclude that he is using it as an excuse to stave off cries for reform out of a simple, perverse desire to maintain his absolute power."

Impassioned plea to save newspaper book sections

Scott Freeman writes passionately in today's "Insider High Ed" about the need to preserve book coverage in daily newspapers.

I am writing this as a member of the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC), and am mainly addressing people who belong to the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) and the Association of American University Presses (AAUP).

On behalf of my colleagues, I am making a plea to you for solidarity. We are in trouble. We need your help.

Over the past several years, the economics of daily newspapers have become much more complicated and many paper owners have felt that their profit margins weren’t large enough. Coverage of books has been one of the easiest things to cut. And the cuts have tended to come early and often. They have taken the form of various measures, including shrinking the space available for reviews and interviews; reductions of freelance budgets; and the increased use of syndicated material. Most book pages have always had very small staffs. Now it is rare that more than one editor handles the reviews full-time, and in many cases the entire section has been closed down.

Such cuts are usually explained as a matter of economic necessity – the decisions framed in terms of meeting the perceived interests of the public. But the reduction or elimination of book coverage has occurred even in cities where readers clearly want and expect it.

While he is hopeful that some other forms of media will pick up the book reviewing slack, he's not waiting and is advocating action now.

This week and throughout May, the National Book Critics Circle will be trying to raise some public recognition of where things now stand – and to create some pressure to reverse the trend towards downsizing and elimination. We have about 700 members. Not all of us are editors or reviewers for newspapers. But we do see the book pages at newspapers as part of the cultural ecology, so to speak. Halting their destruction seems like a necessary thing.

What can you do? I asked John Freeman, the outgoing president of NBCC, who responded by naming some very specific actions that would be helpful.

(1) Sign the petition to reinstate the book-section editor at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

(2) Write to your local newspaper’s publisher to express support for its book coverage. And if your paper doesn’t have such a section, ask why not. “It always baffles me,” as Freeman says, “why university towns like New Haven, Durham, Champagne-Urbana and Iowa City have virtually no book pages in their papers.”

(3) Talk to your local independent bookseller. Local literary scenes are often undercut by the power of superstores and the reliance of newspapers on “wire” copy about books (that is, material issued by syndication). Smaller bookshops are rallying points for opposition to these trends.

(4) Review books for your local paper. This requires developing a voice that may sound rather different from the one you might use when reviewing books for a professional journal. An easygoing style doesn’t always come easily. But it can be enjoyable to acquire and to practice, and newspaper ink has addictive properties.(“The more the academy engages with the public through reviews,” Freeman told me, “the better chance we have of connecting tradition with culture, and judging new works of art accordingly.”) And if you already review, consider becoming a member of NBCC.

(5) Whether or not you join NBCC, please make its blog Critical Mass part of your Web-browsing routine. Over the past year, it has become the “blog of record” for literary and publishing news. And insofar as book-folk have a rallying point in dealing with the changes at newspapers, Critical Mass is it. Freeman says it will have updates on efforts to challenge cuts at The Raleigh News & Observer, The Minneapolis Star Tribune, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The L.A. Times.

Here in Cleveland, it's a good idea to send a note of support to The Plain Dealer Publisher and book editor Karen Long. Karen is an incredibly intelligent writer and editor whose books selections and pages are one of the few true enjoyments of the Sunday PD.

As for me, I'll continue to review here from time to time. In the past week, I've received three selections from publishers that I've chosen to keep for review:

"Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America 1789-1989" by Michael Beschloss (Simon & Schuster / May 8, 2007)

"A Church in Search of Itself: Benedict XVI and the Battle for the Future" by Robert Blair Kaiser (Vintage Books / April 10, 2007)

"Floor Sample: A Creative Memoir," by Julia Cameron (Tarcher/Penguin / April 19 2007)

"Isaac's Storm" is a real page-turner!

Just finished reading a real page-turner by Erik Larson. Isaac's Storm is a riveting account of the great hurricane of 1900 that ravaged Galveston Island, Texas.

I'm a great admirer of Larson's research and reporting process and found this book to be filled with rich detail and personal accounts that place the reader right in the storm's path. Read my review of Devil in the White City also by Larson.

In this earlier book, Larson's main character is Isaac Cline, the weather bureau station chief in Galveston, whose job it was to predict such a storm. The Weather Bureau of the time was coming off of scandal and needed to prove its credibility with the public. However, it chose to do so by downplaying predictions to the detriment and death of more than 6,000 Galveston residents.

In the days and hours before the storm hits, the people of Galveston are excited by the prospect of the storm. Instead of turning on The Weather Channel as we would today, they head to the beach to see for themselves, at first completely unfazed by the ominous surf and sky. But then the water creeps up ever closer, ever deeper and soon it becomes a wind-driven tempest driving people to seek shelter in convents and orphanages and homes near the beach.

There's such a tension to the story that I felt myself clenching my teeth as I sped along. This is not a book to be savored slowly. It's meant to be devoured in one sitting. And its not just about a storm, it's about people's reaction (of all ages) to storms. It's a very human story.

But it's also about power.

There was a cockiness at the turn of the 20th century that lead powerful and learned men to believe they could control Mother Nature. We read about their arrogance and ineptitude and pettiness that resulted in death for so many. But overarching the entire narrative is the central character, the storm.

Larson writes of this living, breathing force, feeding off the warm water of the Gulf of Mexico and the startling low pressure system. And all the while it continues lumbering across the great uninterrupted expanse of water gaining strength and velocity to hit Galveston dead on.

"The bureau's forecasters believed the sudden easing of wind and the attendant change in direction meant the center of the storm had passed over or near Key West, and saw this as confirmation of their belief that the storm would soon be traveling up the Atlantic coastline. Once again, they tailored fact to suit their expectations. They knew just enough to believe they had nothing to fear.

But the storm did not go north.

The bureau had missed the true meaning of the wind shift at Key West. Here was an area of calm immediately adjacent to a zone of gale-force wind, in a storm that had just crossed the great mass of Cuba without losing any of its size or energy or its ability to produce biblical volumes of rain. No one knew it at the time, but the conditions at Key West provided the clearest evidence yet that the storm's architecture was changing … Where the inrushing and outpushing forced balanced, the winds began to form a circle, a gigantic carousel over the ocean.

This storm was about to open its eye."

It's hard to read such an account without seeing giant warning flashes to Hurricane Katrina. He describes Galveston as sitting in a bowl and the competing surf from the Bay and from the Gulf were overwhelming the sides of the bowl. The people, creatures and property within were like Cheerios in milk.

I was interested in learning more about Galveston today and stumbled up this site dedicated to the storm.

They didn't yet have the name that we hear so often in hurricane reporting today—storm surge. But it was clear that the city's construction left little protection from the rising swells. I read here in a conversation with Larson that the city did try to add infrastructure to lessen the impact of the damaging and deadly storm surge:

But the storm did compel the city to build a seawall, and it showed meteorologists for the first time that a hurricane's greatest threat to land comes from the storm surge it raises in the sea. What it should have taught is that nothing is certain, not ever.

What struck me, particularly after I just finished interviewing and writing a profile of New Orleans Times-Picayune Editor Jim Amoss, was Larson's pre-Katrina response to what Galveston has done to prepare itself for another hurricane.

"After the storm, it built a seawall, but meteorologists fear the wall may have made Galveston complacent. Most of the city's new housing is rising on land beyond the wall's protection, adjacent to little signs marking an evacuation route. I was fascinated to learn that despite satellites and hurricane-hunting aircraft and computer models, no hurricane expert thinks the days of monstrously deadly hurricanes have passed forever. Like seismologists, they believe a Big One is long overdue, and they rank Galveston as one of the most likely targets. They envision a great storm that does something unexpected -- accelerates suddenly, veers, or undergoes the kind of explosive deepening that marked the hurricane of 1900 -- and catches the city's 60,000 residents before they have a chance to evacuate or, perhaps worse, in midevacuation. Technology has produced the illusion that it has so defanged hurricanes that they'll never surprise us again. But no one who has spent any time studying hurricanes would agree."

(Bold is mine.)

A highly recommended read!

The seasonal nature of writing

Instead of reviewing "Finding Water: The Art of Perseverance" by Julia Cameron I decided to share the nugget I found most helpful. But first, a little background.

Cameron's book, which she writes while battling the fringes of depression and the ever constant battle to maintain sobriety (after more than two decades of recovery), can at times be a downer. She's writing to the co-dependent in all of us, linking some similarities between the alcoholic mindset and the creative personality, cautioning us to stick to routine (which she repeats throughout).

I understand the great benefit routine plays into maintaining sobriety. I've seen it work in action and know how instrumental it can be. Likewise, I do believe that professional writers also need to adhere to some kind of routine that keeps them productive (think: Just do it) and keeps them from sinking into the angst and drama that inhibits good writing. (I am prone to just such destructive spells.)

But I'm also a believer that good writers also leave a little room for serendipity and so would caution against creating such a rigid schedule as she advises. I have, however, taken up her idea of Morning Pages, where I awake early and write a few pages in my journal. It's a practice I used to have when my kids were little. It's nice to pick up again and I have a bunch of new journals my sister gave me for Christmas in which to begin.

Back to the useful nugget of Cameron's book. In the chapter, "Uncovering a Sense of Perspective" she writes, "You are asked to imagine yourself larger and more surefooted than you may feel yourself to be."

"When we are incubating something creatively, we, too, follow a cycle of seasons. We begin locked in winter, when we look and feel devoid of ideas, although the ideas are there for us, simply dormant. Our wintry hearts lurch toward spring and suddenly an idea puts out a hopeful bud … As surely as the seasons turn, our brightly budded ideas must now ripen and mature … Now come the long days of labor. We must work to bring forth the fruit of what we have envisioned."

If you're a professional writer, you're probably scratching your head about being "devoid of ideas." My problem is that I have too many ideas that are not sharply focused or that I'm unsure how to explore or transform into paying work. Stay with me. Cameron continues and here's where I found myself in her writing.

"Some of us remain locked in winter, unable to go forward because we doubt the strength of our ideas. Others make it to spring, shooting forward with rapid growth but unable to bring things to fulfillment, unable to put in the heavy labor necessary to cultivate our crop. Still others, myself included here, bring work all the way to completion but lack the resolution and bravado necessary to sell the work that we have done. A critical failure of nerve at the last moment causes us to doubt the worthiness of the projects we have birthed. Novels go into desk drawers. Plays languish on shelves. The pumpkin rots on the vine." (Bold is mine.)

Of course, the answer is perseverance, pushing forward when we lack the courage, "imagining yourself more surefooted than you may feel yourself to be." Because creativity happens when we operate just outside of our comfort zone.

Cameron's advice when we have been rejected is not to ask, "Why me?" but to instead ask, "What's next?" I think I'll try that in 2007. How about you? What will you do differently this year?

What the Middle Ages gave us

The Middle Ages implies something less-than, that in-between time connecting the violence of the Dark Ages and the enlightenment of the Renaissance. A time when not much happened and all was quiet.

But as author Thomas Cahill writes in Mysteries of the Middle Ages: The Rise of Feminism, Science, and Art from the Cults of Catholic Europe, it was a time of great movements. It was the Middle Ages that brought us Thomas Aquinas, Hildegard of Bingen, Dante, Geoffrey Chaucer, St. Francis of Assisi, Eleanor of Aquitaine and Catherine of Sienna.

In a beautifully designed book with stunning color photographs and maps by Nan A. Talese, Cahill has done a remarkable though cursory job of demonstrating how the Catholicism of the Middle Ages laid the groundwork for western civilization. This is the time when Romans became Italians, when the Virgin Mary inspired construction of a great Cathedral, when St. Francis inspired faith in action, Thomas Aquinas inspired faith in reason and Giotto di Bondone inspired faith through realistic art.

It took me a while to get through the book if only because I lacked the time to read it. But once some free time opened up it is a breezy read, pulling together seemingly unconnected events to give readers a picture of how faith (specifically Catholicism) combined with reason to create our world.

Cahill, who is at work on another in his series "Hinges of History" has amassed a great deal of knowledge presented here as history for the layman. In his quest to popularize the time period, he sometimes resorts to popular culture analogies that jar the reader out of medieval reverie -- at one point comparing the dialogue in Hildegard of Bingen's letters to an episode of "Desperate Housewives." ("Take that, bitch.") Fortunately, those annoyances are kept to a minimum.

The major disappointment, however, is in lack of depth. The history geek longs for more depth and detail in the events only touched upon by the author. For example, he only touches briefly on the love affair between Abelard—who first posited that Christ didn't die to pay for human sin but as an act of "supreme generosity and identification with the human condition," and that the Jews had no idea that Jesus was God and so could not be accused of deicide, a position that would take the Vatican eight centuries (and Vatican II) to come around to sharing—and Heloise, a woman he loved as much for her mind as for her body. It was a modern love and the reader yearns to learn more about the couple.

During medieval times, philosophers such as Abelard did not marry, believing that all energy must be spent on philosophy or teaching.Unfortunately, the nasty Bernard of Clairvaux—he of the "faith believes; it does not dispute" way of thinking—tormented Abelard and eventually poisoned those closest to him. Abelard was castrated in his bed after news of his secret marriage to Heloise began to spread.

In the end, Abelard was broken physically and spiritually at the hands of the Catholic Church.

Fortunately, Cahill has compiled a very readable notes section of the book that describes the works he consulted during research. It's a road map for anyone interested in learning more about this period or about any of the characters.

Throughout the book, the struggle between faith and reason shifts and evolves at times with one gaining the upper hand over the other. But all along that tension impacts everything from science and the development of modern universities to art and even the impact on modern filmmaking.

If there's an overall theme to Cahill's book it is that which is similar to Dante's "Divine Comedy"—that power in the hands of the church can become a vile thing.

"(Boniface) was one of the vilest men ever to sit on the throne of Saint Peter, a cleric wholly concerned with his own power and aggrandizement, who took to parading about in the costume of an emperor ('I'm pope! I'm Caesar!' he shouted) and who remodeled the papal crown into the novelty of the triple tiara, symbolic of his vaunted authority as high priest, king (of the Papal States) and emperor over the emperor."

He warns of a similar problem in today's church, that its leaders should divest themselves of robes and trappings of wealth if it is to regain influence particularly in the U.S. Though his view of Catholicism is usually kept in check, he lets his disgust show at the end of the book.

"Dante bewailed the selling of church offices, describing this practice as 'Christ [being] bought and sold the whole day long' in the Rome of Pope Boniface VIII. That was, however, a far less depraved situation than the current one, where, as Dante would be forced to conclude, the twelve-year-old Christ, who conversed with doctors of the law in the Temple of Jerusalem (in Luke 2:41-52), is made to give blow jobs and rammed up the ass the whole day long by the doctors of the law of the New Jerusalem, while the high priests of the Temple stand guard at the entrances, lest any uninitiated outsides should discover what is going on. However shocking these words may sound to some ears, there can be no doubt that this is what clerical dissemblers have done to the Jesus they claim to care so much about. For 'whatever you have done to the least of these … you have done to me.' (Matthew 25:40)."

Harsh words, indeed, but perhaps a view shared privately by many others who struggle to put reason to such acts against the faithful. Despite his ending diatribe against the modern church, Cahill's work is a worthy effort and introduction to a time that should be heeded more closely.

What all of these characters of the Middle Ages—some celebrated, some tolerated and some persecuted—demonstrate is that the shaping of the western world was done not by the popes and bishops, but at the grassroots level, by writers, artists, scientists, philosophers, musicians, builders and theologians.

Mysteries of the Middle Ages: The Rise of Feminism, Science, and Art from the Cults of Catholic Europe(368 pages), published by Nan A. Talese (Oct. 24, 2006)

Add this to my book list

About 10 years ago, I picked up "A Marriage of True Minds: An Intimate Portrait of Leonard and Virginia Woolf" at a library book sale. It was a fascinated glimpse into one of the literary world's most collaborative and tragic partnerships. The tenderness of Leonard Woolf toward his fragile wife was wrenching. And the sacrfices he made emotionally and physically to that relationship were astounding. Around the same time, I had also picked up Leon Edel's "Bloomsbury: A House of Lions," and so dove headfirst into reading about that era and the prolific work produced by its members.

This review in Sunday's New York Times Book Review jostled that interest about the quiet, sensible member of the Bloomsbury bunch. From the review about Victoria Glendinning's "Leonard Woolf: A Biography":

His life was, in some ways, willfully ordinary: even on the day of Virginia’s disappearance, he “entered in his diary the cumulative mileage of his car, plus the mileage for that day,” and on the afternoon of her cremation, he went to have his hair cut. And yet, as Glendinning notes, the page of his diary on March 28, 1941, “is obscured by a brownish-yellow stain which has been rubbed or wiped. It could be tea or coffee or tears. The smudge is unique in all his years of neat diary-keeping.” In recording these small traces, Victoria Glendinning has given us the measure — noble, engaged and quietly passionate — of the man.

Devil of a good story

I’m late to this book, but I found the two interwoven tales in Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City so compellingly crafted that it read more like a novel than a work of painstakingly researched nonfiction.

Seemed a fitting glimpse into the collective psyche of Chicago, a city not wholly unlike Cleveland in its Midwestern sensibility. Larson’s story begins aboard the R.M.S. Olympic, part of the White Star Line, on April 14, 1912. Daniel Burnham, an architect and the man behind the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, is reminiscing about the feat that was the World’s Fair.

Larson spins the yarn from Chicago’s rally and fight with Easterners to get the fair in the first place, the trials of pulling the White City together with some of the greatest minds in architecture in such a short period of time, the need to out-Eiffel the Eiffel Tower of the Paris World Exposition a few years earlier and the push to attract bigger numbers of attendees.

Interspersed throughout is a parallel and riveting tale about a charmingly mad doctor who seduced and later killed probably hundreds of young women who had come to Chicago seeking excitement of the Fair and the big city. How he managed to avoid detection by police for so long, and how he managed to build his “castle” of doom (complete with gas chamber and kiln) without any construction workers knowing what he was doing was ghastly. And that he made money from off his victims not only through insurance fraud, but also by selling their cadavers or parts of their bodies to medical schools for research compounds his macabre nature.

That the two worlds collided at the same time seems both expected and unnatural. For a while one wonders why the two stories are juxtaposed. While the two main characters—Burnham and Dr. H.H. Holmes—never cross paths, their worlds do collide at Jackson Park.

The details of both stories are rich—we see how Holmes spun his evil through a complex network of lies, charm, blue-eyed seduction and hubris through the careful archiving of letters, newspaper accounts, police accounts and even Holmes’ own prison memoir.

And we wonder at the extraordinary will and effort that brought about the World’s Fair and its lasting achievements. What a joy it must have been to research and write this book.

New stuff at the fair:
Shredded Wheat
Cracker Jack
The Ferris Wheel
The Midway

Notables who spoke:
Jane Addams
Woodrow Wilson
Clarence Darrow
Susan B. Anthony
Frederick Douglas
Samuel Gompers

Enjoyed performances by:
Harry Houdini
Scott Joplin
Buffalo Bill Cody

Others influenced by the fair or events surrounding the fair:
Frank Lloyd Wright
Elias Disney, father of Walt
L. Frank Baum

Long-term effects:
City Beautiful movement (Cleveland, San Francisco, Fort World, Atlantic City, St. Louis)
Creation of The Mall in Washington, D.C.
Columbus Day (Oct. 12) as a federal holiday
Chicago’s Miracle Mile and ribbon of lakefront parks
New York’s Flat Iron Building