Dead Tree Blog

Head and Heart: American Christianities by Garry Wills

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
This was a sophisticated history of the Christian faith in the United States, and how it has influenced culture and politics. Wills' premise is that America has had two main strains of Christianity: Enlightment (head) and evangelical (heart). They reached synthesis at key points in our history, namely to oppose slavery and fight for civil rights for African Americans and other minorities.



The early chapters are a bit of a slog -- it's hard to keep track of all the Puritan offshoots and leaders, and Wills assumes a lot of knowledge on the part of the casual reader. The book is most entertaining when Wills examines Transcendatlism, religion and the Civil War and the evangelical awakening in the early part of the 20th century.


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Labels: criticism, Gary Wills

The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
I really loved this book, until I hit the last three chapters, which is where an editor needed to have stepped in to say "Enough with the mystical properties of wild mushrooms already."



Still, this was an incredibly well-written, thoughtful citique of modern American eating habits, and the political, social and economic forces that have shaped them.


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Labels: criticism, Michael Pollan

The Shining by Stephen King

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is one of those books that I'm glad I read after seeing the film adaptation. I wouldn't have enjoyed Stanley Kubrick's movie version nearly as much had I read the book first.



Stephen King, you may know, was not too pleased with Kubrick's adaptation. For one, he thought Jack Nicholson's interpretation of the character of Jack Torrance left little doubt that he would go insane and try to murder his family. When we meet him, he seems halfway there already.



Indeed, Jack Torrance was a far more complex character in the novel, and the film by necessity dispensed with much of his backstory. Jack Torrance of the film was clearly ill-suited for domestic life, and barely cared to conceal it. The Torrance of the novel, however, was a loving father who wanted to be a good husband. Nonetheless, he was beset by demons that cost him his job, and it was out of desperation that he agreed to become the caretaker for the Overlook Hotel.



In the book, Jack Torrance struggled against insanity, but was overcome by the hotel's malignant power. This was a tragedy in the novel; in the film, it was the subject of black comedy. Torrance was merely a horror film monster that had to be evaded and destroyed. I do give the film credit, however, for providing a more chilling ending than the book. At the end of the novel, the hotel was destroyed, its evil laid to rest. But in the film, it lived to fight another day, and Jack Torrance had become part of its dark history.


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Labels: criticism, Stephen King

A Drink Before the War by Dennis Lehane

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is the first book in the Kenzie-Genarro series, but I actually read it after I read Gone Baby Gone, which I enjoyed much more than this one. Perhaps because Lehane had already introduced his characters, he wasted much less time in exposition and backstory. I found the background about Kenzie's father tiresome, and it lacked the emotional resonance that Lehane no doubt intended. The book also seemed preachy.



Nonetheless, Lehane knows how to tell a story, and this one zipped right along.


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Labels: criticism, Dennis Lehane

Duma Key by Stephen King

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
This may not have been Stephen King's best novel, but it's up there, and it's going to stick with me for a long time. Like many of King's recent works, the book is not so much terrifying as emotionally haunting; it is full of suspense and a heaping dose of the supernatural, but its power comes from its exploration of human grief and suffering.



Faithful readers will appreciate some of the nods King makes to his other books, though some are familiar to me from their film adaptations. (For example, there's a line that seems lifted almost straight from "Stand By Me" and there are refernces familar from "The Shawshank Redemption.") The evil China figurine Perse reminds me of the can toi from "The Dark Tower" series as well as "Desperation", but I'll need to spend some quality time on Wikipedia exploring those links.



Bottom line, King will fans will love this, but like Bag of Bones and Hearts in Atlantis, I'd recommend it as well to those who have never read him. He once again proves his chops as a writer of serious literature.


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Labels: criticism, Stephen King

The New York Times has had a couple of essays recently about adaptations and re-tellings of novels and classic stories, here and here.

Labels: criticism, film adaptations

In 2002, I read this review of "Out of the Flames: The Remarkable Story of a Fearless Scholar, a Fatal Heresy, and One of the Rarest Books in the World", and I was determined to read it as soon as I could. Well, there are a lot of good books out there, so I didn't get around to picking up a copy until this spring, and I finally read it this summer.

It was well worth the wait. "Out of the Flames" is a page-turner that tells the story of Michael Servetus, a 16th-century Spanish physician and theologian whose religious writings would form the foundation of Unitarianism. They would also get him branded a heretic by John Calvin and, in 1553, burned at the stake in Calvin's Geneva.

Servetus' great sin was to reject the Holy Trinity--which he regarded as a man-made contrivance, unsupported by Scripture--and to insist that Jesus was not divine by birth but was made divine by the word of God. Even for the fathers of the Reformation, this was a bridge too far, making Servetus an enemy of Protestants and Catholics alike.

"Out of the Flames" is divided into three parts, and the first two provide an account of the life of Servetus and his relationship to Calvin who, in his jealousy and resentment, was Salieri to Servetus' Mozart. (Though unlike Salieri, Calvin's place in history has far eclipsed that of his rival.) Authors Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone also provide a concise and compelling history of the Reformation and the origins of the publishing industry, which was crucial in spreading the ideas of religious reform throughout Europe.

Servetus himself wrote and edited several books, including "Christianismi Restitutio", which ultimately led to his undoing. The book laid out Servetus' religious doctrine but veered briefly into a discussion of human anatomy, in which Servetus described what would have been a revolutionary medical discovery: He had correctly determined how the circulatory system functioned, knowledge that was lost to medical science until the British physician William Harvey, independent of Servetus, discovered it more than 60 years after Servetus' death.

Even by the standards of the 16th century, Servetus' trial was a travesty of justice. He was prosecuted under the laws of Geneva, though he was not a citizen of that city and unlike its residents had not sworn allegiance to Calvin and his church. In the ultimate act of hippocrisy, Calvin, himself a heretic in the eyes of the Catholic Church, initially had Servetus arrested by the Catholic Inquisition in France. Servetus escaped imprisonment but inexplicably stopped in Geneva on his way to Italy, and he was recognized while attending church. The Goldstones write that his execution lasted a half-hour, and that he was conscious as the flames roasted his flesh.

"Christianismi Restitutio" was chained to Servetus at the stake, and after his death, Calvin ordered every last copy found and destroyed. Three copies, however, are known to have survived, and in the final part of their book the Goldstones recount how each copy was discovered, and how it fueled interest in Servetus and his ideas in successive generations of European and American thinkers.

Here "Out of the Flames" becomes a detective story, and a well-told one at that. Nonetheless, like many fictional detective stories, the tale is convoluted at times, and I often flipped to the index to remind me which famous book collector donated which copy of Servetus' book to which great European library. Still, the book zips along, buoyed by the Goldstone's witty prose and judicious use of historical detail.

"Out of the Flames" is something of a who's who of Reformation and Enlightenment thinkers, and the Goldstones demonstrate how Servetus, either through his own writings or his influence on the Unitarian church, inspired some of the greatest minds of the past 400 years: Voltaire, Gottfried Leibniz, Joseph Priestly, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Osler, to name a few.

Servetus, despite his tragic end--perhaps because of it--is indeed an inspiration to all those who celebrate freedom of conscience, and these days, we need all the inspiration we can get. "Out of the Flames" also is a testament to the power of the written word, which, the Goldstones write, "has allowed ideas to travel from place to place, from age to age. ...The power of unleashed expression is not unique to the electronic age."

Labels: "Out of the Flames", audio books, criticism, John Calvin, Michael Servetus, the Englightenment, the Reformation, Unitarianism

WARNING: HARRY POTTER SPOILERS AHEAD

I found myself discussing the final Harry Potter book this morning with my wife on my cell phone, after reading the last chapter on the bus this morning. She had finished the book two days ago and was itching to talk about the ending. I nearly had to pull an all-nighter to get as far as I did before heading off to work today.

I was happy with the book’s ending. It would have been a bold stroke to let Harry die, but I think J.K. Rowling stayed true to her character, and to the series’ own mythology, in the manner in which Harry manages to beat Voldemort and survive--as it turns out, to go on to live a comfortable bourgeoisie life with Ginny and their three wizard children. Yes, the “Nineteen Years Later” epilogue was a bit hokey, but it could have been worse—Harry and Malfoy could have ended up as golfing buddies.

The most moving part of the book came when Harry looked into the memories of the recently killed Snape. It was no surprise to learn that Snape had not betrayed Dumbledore after all—I suspect most readers believed all along that this would be the case. But I didn’t expect Snape to turn out to be the true tragic hero of the “Harry Potter” series, a man redeemed from evil by his unrequited love for Harry’s mother. The description of Snape’s childhood was heart-rending (it also softened our image of Harry’s Aunt Petunia; it was sad and ironic that Snape’s mistreatment of her as a child no doubt contributed to her abuse and neglect of Harry later on), and I was touched as well by his retrained affection for Dumbledore, who became his surrogate father.

As I drew nearer the end of “The Deathly Hallows”, I couldn’t help but think of some of the works of Stephen King, namely “It” and the novella “Low Men in Yellow Coats” from “Hearts in Atlantis.” In both stories, children are thrust into battle with the forces of evil, and gradually learn that the adults in their lives are flawed, often terribly so, and that many of the truths they’ve clung to turn out to be false. This is a recurring theme in much of King’s work, in which true horror lies not in the supernatural but in the hearts of men.

Similarly, Harry Potter must repeatedly confront the fact that his heroes are not the idealized figures he imagines them to be. His father was arrogant and had a streak of cruelty that, in his mistreatment of Snape and Wormtail, contributed to his own destruction. Sirius did not entirely escape the haughtiness that was his family’s hallmark. Even the sainted Dumbledore was once a power-hungry elitist with little time for those less talented than he. The reverse was also true—Harry misjudged the complexities of the human heart in assuming Snape to be evil, and one imagines that he would always regret never having the opportunity to become the brooding wizard’s friend.

These are, of course, important lessons for children to learn, but they are easy to forget as adults. We learn something new about the people in our lives everyday, and often we continue to learn about them even after they are gone. Love is the one constant, and like Harry and the Dark Lord, we too often underestimate its incredible power.

Labels: criticism, Harry Potter, Stephen King

With the final installment in the Harry Potter series about to hit bookstores, and in the wake of the controversial "The Sopranos" finale, I've been thinking a lot about what, if anything, the creators of a popular saga owes to their audience.

Last year, Stephen King brought to a close "The Dark Tower" saga--like Harry Potter, a seven-book series--and plenty of his readers felt let down by the ending. (To me, the ending was perfect, but the final two books didn't match up to the others, particularly the first four.) King, however, has always stressed that he goes where the story takes him, and the few books that he plotted out in advance are, to him, his worst. King brought this point home in "The Dark Tower" series by creating a fictional version of himself who, in the final two books, was manipulated and directed by the characters he had created. (A gambit that many readers didn't exactly appreciate.)

Of course, no one wants a writer or artist to pander to the audience. If David Chase had ended "The Sopranos" in a hail of bullets, or with Tony led away in handcuffs, a large contigent of the show's viewers--myself included--might have been disappointed. I liked the idea that Tony was caught in a purgatory of his own design, always having to keep an eye on the door.

Still, when an audience's vision of a story veers dramatically from the artist's, the results can be ugly--as demonstrated by fan reaction to the first two "Star Wars" prequels. It wasn't just the wooden acting and leaden dialogue that doomed those two films. As one critic put it, "The Phantom Menace" was like watching C-Span in outer space. Trade Federation? Taxation policies? That's not what "Star Wars" was about. Of course, if one watches these excised scenes from the original film, you'll realize that George Lucas probably stayed relatively true to his vision for the story. One of the reasons that "Revenge of the Sith" received a warmer reception than the first two prequels was that it portrayed many of the events that were referenced in the first three films, and had much less of the additional mythology that most fans could have cared less about.

Like Lucas, King and "Sopranos" creator David Chase, J.K. Rowling is bound to disappoint some fans, regardless of whether Harry Potter gets to ride his broom off onto the sunset--or whether he goes to that great Quidditch match in the sky.

Labels: "Star Wars", "The Dark Tower", "The Sopranos", criticism, Harry Potter, Stephen King

Copeland links to a site where writers discuss their favorite book-to-film adaptations. "Out of Sight" and "1984" are two of my favorites.

My opinions of film adaptations often depend on whether I've first read the book and then seen the film, or vice versa. I'm convinced that first reading "A Civil Action", which was a superb book, spoiled my appreciation for an otherwise good film. On the other hand, I loved the film "Sideways", which I saw before I read the novel upon which it is based. The film captured the spirit of the book and its characters, but it made some significant departures that were probably necessary to adapt the story from one medium to another. However, I might have quibbled with those changes had I read the book first.

Worst adaptation? For my money, "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil."

Labels: criticism, film adaptations

For some time I’ve been meaning to write about Robert Bruegmann’s “Sprawl: A Compact History”, which I read several months ago—meaning the book is not nearly as fresh in my mind as I would like. Nonetheless, it’s a topic that’s near and dear to my heart, so I’m going to take a stab at it anyway.

“Sprawl” is a primer on the history of urban development, as well as a critique of the arguments against sprawl, the amorphous term applied to the tendency of cities to expand outward in ever decreasing densities. Bruegmann’s book is meant as corrective to the overheated rhetoric of militant sprawl critics like James Howard Kunstler. Bruegmann takes on what he regards as the central myth of the anti-sprawl movement, namely that sprawl is a modern phenomenon, largely confined to the United States and driven by Americans’ heavy reliance on the automobile.

Bruegmann argues that cities as dense human settlements are historical accidents, formed because of a concentration of natural resources in specific and limited geographic regions. For thousands of years the growth of cities was checked by the presence of defensive walls, but even during ancient times, rising affluence allowed a select group of people to live beyond the city limits. The poorest people have often been confined to dense city centers, while the wealthy moved as far as the infrastructure of their day would allow. (Though Bruegmann notes that the poor have been able to flee city centers when there was land available that was deemed undesirable by their affluent counterparts.)

Almost from the start, this urban exodus prompted a backlash, which Bruegmann says to this day usually comes from two quarters: Those who previously fled the city and fear that their bucolic paradise will be spoiled by new arrivals, and those who object to sprawl on aesthetic grounds. Bruegmann thus argues, convincingly, that much of the criticism of sprawl is elitist, the result of subjective judgments made by people who scorn the choices freely made by their fellow citizens.

Bruegmann makes a good case that the automobile’s influence in promoting suburban development has been, if not exaggerated, than at least greatly misunderstood. The automobile, Bruegmann writes, was not a substitute for public transportation but rather for the private carriages that once belonged exclusively to the wealthy.

In other words, the automobile did not create a desire for private transportation but merely made it affordable for the masses. Indeed, the recent experience of Los Angeles suggests that building public transit systems does not encourage dense residential development, but that increasing densities leads to a demand for public transportation because it renders automobile use impractical.

Bruegmann also tries to rebut the article of faith among mass transit advocates that building new highways causes congestion to grow worse. Rather, this increased congestion merely reflects the pent-up demand that the new highway has unleashed. Furthermore, Bruegmann writes, if new highways are not built, people would simply move even further away from cities to escape gridlock.

It’s a compelling argument, but that’s all it is—an argument. Bruegmann doesn’t marshal empirical evidence to support his view, and he’s no better at separating cause from effect than the highway opponents he criticizes. He is also too dismissive of the effects that government policies have had in encouraging suburban development. He argues that housing policies, such as the home mortgage deduction, do not favor one type of development over another. What he ignores is that such policies underwrite the cost of sprawl, allowing it to accelerate more quickly than it might otherwise.

If sprawl is neither uniquely modern nor uniquely American, then why have European cities remained denser than their American counterparts? Bruegmann notes first of all that population densities in European cities are decreasing even as the same trend is reversing itself in the United States. But sprawl has occurred more slowly in Europe for two reasons: One, much of Europe lay in physical and economic ruin at the end of World War II, while the U.S. was unscathed and would soon undergo an economic boom. Second, European nations enacted national land-use regulations that we as Americans would regard as severe.

The closest parallel in the United States are Oregon’s urban growth boundaries, which Bruegmann examines at some length. He finds that they tend to protect what he terms “the incumbents’ club”: those who benefit from the status quo that the land-use restrictions aim to preserve. Often these are people who already own developable land within the growth boundaries or enjoy affordable housing at the time the restrictions are put into place.

While urban growth boundaries may succeed in keeping cities dense, they also encourage people to move outside the boundaries, where land is cheaper, according to Bruegmann. In that way, they may retard suburban growth but encourage growth in what we now term the exurbs.

Bruegmann is certainly correct to criticize this kind of planning. The reason Jane Jacobs objected to the urban planners of her day was that they seemed to assume that human beings behaved according to mathematical laws that were universal and predictable. In reality human communities are self-organizing systems. Bruegmann believes that government planners can do nothing to frustrate the free will of people to live wherever they choose and can afford.

That’s true. But he ignores that many people now seem to be choosing, even outside cities, to build higher-density, walkable communities that may not be the same as cities but look less and less like the suburbs many of us grew up in. Older suburbs are trying to create town centers and many now require new developments to include sidewalks.

Bruegmann assures us that American communities, after decades of expansion, are growing denser, but he doesn’t seem interested in stopping to ponder why. It may be elitist to say so, but perhaps people are discovering that some ways of living are better than others, and that perhaps an entire society can on occasion make the wrong choice.

Labels: criticism, Sprawl

I finished off "The Godfather Returns" which turned out to be very good. (Spoilers ahead.) The book was well-paced, with a strong narrative voice that was tinged with wry humor. Winegardner did a nice job fleshing out the characters with backstories that, for the most part, complimented their portrayals by Mario Puzo in the original novel, and Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola in the three films.

"The Godfather Returns" describes events that take place between the first and second films, and, briefly, between films two and three. (For those of you who have never read the original novel, the first film follows it rather closely, dispensing with a few secondary plot lines. Also, the flashback scenes from the second film come from the Puzo novel.) Winegardner is careful to avoid continuity errors--the one or two minor inconsistencies between his novel and the first film are probably owed to discripencies between the film and the original novel, which I read years ago.

I do have one or two quibbles. In "The Godfather Returns," we learn that Kay did not actually have an abortion, as she told Michael toward the end of "The Godfather, Part II", leading to their divorce. Instead, she reveals that she did have a miscarriage, as Tom Hagen had told Michael, but that she was so angry at Michael because she had to suffer through it alone that she lied to provoke him, to hurt him. This haunts Kay because she learns that her doctor has been killed in what appears to have been a botched burglary. When she confronts Michael, he all but admits that he was responsible, and then she confesses her lie. Thus, Kay's deception led to the death of an innocent man.

I'm still torn about this. The scene in the film in which Kay tells Michael she is leaving him is, I dare say, one of the most powerful ever recorded on film. The audience is as stunned as Michael to learn that Kay has betrayed him so completely. The camera is focused on Michael as Kay explains why she had the abortion, and Al Pacino does nothing but dart his eyes back and forth, opening them wider and wider, until finally, like a coiled snake, he strikes, viciously slapping Diane Keaton as Kay. It's one of the films defining moments, and I just don't know if I like to think of its context changed in any way.

Winegardner also chooses to have the book mirror several historic events. The Corleones are connected to a powerful Irish political family called the Sheas, whose patriarch was a former bootlegger who rose to respectability as the ambassador of Canada. His son, the governor of New Jersey and a war hero, is elected president. The president makes his younger brother the attorney general.

Michael, through an old friend, becomes involved with the CIA in a plot to assassinate the Cuban president (whose is never referred to by name.) There's an equivalent in the book to the famous Apalachin Meeting, which resulted in the police raid that confirmed the existence of the American mafia. And Winegardner makes Johnny Fontane, loosely based in the original novel on Frank Sinatra, even more of a doppelganger for Ol' Blue Eyes: Like Sinatra, who helped JFK's campaign only to be frozen out by the Kennedy family, Fontane is cast aside by the fictional President Shea and his father. Fontane has his own Rat Pack (though Winegardner is careful not to call it that) and references are made to him putting on large arena concerts in his later years, something Sinatra did as well.

This all seemed, well, a bit lazy to me. It's as though Winegardner cribbed from a history book about the 1950s and '60s, merely changing the names. And while the original novel and the films drew upon real events and people--Hyman Roth is Meyer Lansky, Michael's business deals in Cuba are wrecked by the revolution--"The Godfather" was never meant to be an authentic portrayal of the Mafia.

Yet somehow it all worked, in large part because Winegardner never neglected his characters. As distracting as his attention to historic details could be, Winegardner did an admirable job weaving them into the world of the Corleones, and demonstrating how they helped to propel Michael Corleone down his dark and lonely path. Winegardner remains true to the message at the heart of "The Godfather" saga: What does it profit a man tif he gains the whole world, and loses his soul?

Labels: Al Pacino, criticism, Diane Keaton, Francis Ford Coppola, Mario Puzo, Mark Winegardner, The Godfather, The Godfather Returns, the Mafia

Recently I completed John Dos Passo’s “USA” trilogy, which I received as a gift last year in a single volume. Together, the three novels represent a compelling character sketch of the United States during the first three decades of the 20th century, when America was awakening to its growing power and reveling in its seemingly endless prosperity. Dos Passos advances his episodic narrative through several meticulously drawn characters that span the gamut of Jazz Age archetypes: the flapper, the revolutionary, the industrialist, the speculator, etc. Dos Passos uses his characters’ intertwined lives to explore America’s dark side—its racial and economic inequalities; its sexual hypocrisies and double-standards; and its imperialistic ambitions. The books are rounded out with pointed biographical sketches of real-life figures from the era, and Dos Passos uses the “Newsreel” and often confusing “Camera Eye” sections to enhance the books’ historic perspective.

Labels: criticism, John Dos Passos

Recently I finished reading "Underboss", the late Peter Maas' biography of mob turncoat Sammy "The Bull" Gravano. Like Nicolas Pileggi in "Wiseguy", Mass largely told his story in his subject's own words. Neither Maas nor Gravano exactly tried to whitewash Gravano's crimes--after all, he had made a pretty full confession to federal agents and in federal court--but Maas couldn't seem to avoid some sympathy for his, er, protagonist. After Gravano made his decision to testify against John Gotti, Maas devoted space to describing the praise Gravano received from the FBI agents and the federal prosecutor who worked with him, as well as from the federal judge who sentenced him to a mere five years in prison.

Gravano did make himself out to be an old-school gangster, the last of a dying breed who took seriously the blood oath that was administered to him when he was formally inducted into the Gambino crime family. He nonetheless violated two of the mafia's most important rules with little apparent hesitation--he helped to orchestrate the unsanctioned murder of a boss, Paul Castellano, and of course he testified against Gotti and dozens of other mob figures. Maas doesn't condemn Gravano, but then again, he doesn't need to. Gravano's crimes speak for themselves.

Labels: criticism, Nicolas Pileggi, Peter Maas, the Mafia

The most recent book that I’ve finished reading was “The Dain Curse” by Dashiell Hammett. It was just OK. A good detective story needs a good detective as the lead character, and Hammett’s Continental Op is definitely an interesting fellow. Nonetheless, I found that the plot contained too many contrived twists and turns, and I was able to guess who the villain was far too early for my tastes.

It’s worth noting that I’m not a huge fan of crime fiction, but if I see something interesting at a used bookstore or laying on a bargain book table, I’ll pick it up. I've dabbled in Elmore Leonard and James Ellroy. I read “The Black Echo” after reading a profile of Michael Connelly in a magazine; the same article prompted me to read “The Long Goodbye” because Connelly cited it as a big influence on his own work. Both Harry Bosch and Philip Marlow are strong enough characters to make me want to read more of their exploits.

In the world of true crime, my good friend and former co-worker Dave Copeland is hard at work on a book called "Blood & Volume", and you can read an excerpt here.

Labels: crime fiction, criticism, Dashiell Hammett, Elmore Leonard, Michael Connelly, noir, Raymond Chandler