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July 3, 2022

Book Review Revisited – The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

I’m reposting this review because the limited TV series starring Samuel L. Jackson just came out on Apple TV! Watch it! #emmy

Walter Mosley is best known for his prolific detective fiction. But this book is a fond, thoughtful story about a man who finds reasons to live just when he doesn’t have much time left.

Here’s my book review.

The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey isn’t a whodunit. It’s artful, introspective literary fiction about a 91-year-old man near the end of his life.

[image error][image error]Ptolemy Grey lives by himself in a shabby one-bedroom apartment in a poor neighborhood in Los Angeles. His place is stacked with the trash of a lifetime. You see, he hasn’t paid any attention to it since he woke up one morning to find his beloved last wife Sensia lying dead beside him.

When Sensia passed, he threw a tarp over everything in the bedroom and closed the door. He now sleeps on a mattress under a table in the kitchen. He rarely goes out, except when his grand-nephew Reggie walks him to the store for a few meager supplies. And he’s terrified to open the door for anyone.

The narrative is full of Ptolemy’s fretful thoughts. He has outlived almost all of his closest friends and loved ones. And early in this story, he finds that Reggie has been killed in a drive-by shooting.

Another nephew, Hilly, drops by to take him to Reggie’s wake. There Ptolemy meets Robyn, a gorgeous, slender girl who is about to turn eighteen. She decides to take care of him, becoming his last love, albeit platonic, but intense as any of the romances in his long life.

As Ptolemy says to her:  I love you and I couldn’t be here right now if it wasn’t for you taking care of me. And if you were twenty years older and I fifty years less I’d ask you to be my wife and not a soul on this earth would have ever had better.

This may well be Walter Mosley’s best book.

In 2013 actor Samuel L. Jackson said in an interview with Red Carpet News TV that he had acquired the movie rights to Ptolemy Grey. Just released in 2022! Watch it!

In Clifford’s Spiral a stroke survivor tries to piece together the fragments of his memories. Was he the victim or the perpetrator? 2020 IPA Distinguished Favorite in Literary Fiction.

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Published on July 03, 2022 09:30

June 9, 2022

Sneak Preview – My Inflatable Friend

Rollo Returns!

The Misadventures of Rollo Hemphill series of humorous novels will be reissued later this summer. Shown here is the new cover for the first title, My Inflatable Friend.

First released in 2007 – in the same year the iPhone was introduced – the beginning of Rollo’s story presents few examples of smartphone texting and social-media interactions. It just wasn’t a thing back then.

And foremost among Rollo’s transgressions was his decision to make his girlfriend Felicia jealous with a life-sized rubber doll. That device, too, was a new thing, but times have certainly changed. This one is silicone and reportedly has her own Instagram page (this from RT, so for various reasons, beware of hacks and ads for personal applicances):

Kazakh Bodybuilder’s ‘Marriage” to Doll on Hold

Here’s a snippet of My Inflatable Friend, clipped from the audiobook narrated by the irrepressible, indefatigable Stuart Appleton, who I suggest sounds like Rollo but perhaps is a more exemplary citizen:

My Inflatable Friend audiobook (Audible)

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Published on June 09, 2022 13:43

May 8, 2022

How to Lie with Charts – Comp eBook!


Kindle price ZERO today and tomorrow Sunday, May 8 and Monday, May 9 on AmazonCover for 'How to Lie with Charts (Fourth Edition)'How to Lie with Charts (Fourth Edition)by Gerald Everett JonesIn the latest edition of this time-honored textbook on data visualization, you’ll learn not only how to keep your own reports honest, but also how to spot errors – and perhaps even deliberately misleading features – in any presentation. This print-replica Kindle edition includes chapters on social-media disinformation and abuses of metadata. Available in Kindle and Trade Paperback.
Read MoreKindleAnd check out the new White-Collar Migrant Worker series of coffee-break-short how-to books on making your way in the gig economy:




 


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Published on May 08, 2022 11:24

March 25, 2022

Answers to the Big Questions – Thinking About Thinking #53

The investigator in my mystery series, Evan Wycliff, is a young Baptist minister who is beset with doubt. When he was in college, he gave up his studies in the seminary because what he learned of Christian history was far too grim. Then he took up astrophysics and found more troubling questions than answers.

Like the rest of us when we bother to fret about the state of the world, Evan wants to know:

Why is there something rather than nothing?

Why is there evil in the world?

Why do bad things happen to good people?

Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe: Greene, Brian: 9780593171721: Amazon.com: Books

I don’t have any satisfying solutions to those riddles, but I have recently read two books that offer some explanations. The first is Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe by physicist Brian Greene. Here’s a more lucid presentation of astrophysics and cosmology than I’ve yet encountered. Unfortunately from the standpoint of traditional religious teaching, Greene seems to side with the “godless universe” theorists, who hold that the dual processes of entropy and evolution, over 14 billion years of chaotic interaction, are sufficient to explain the complexity of our physical world and its dazzling life forms. Greene does stop short of attempting to explain how consciousness arises. He’s as stumped as anyone about whether a computer will ever be able to know it exists. (I’ve written more about Greene’s book here.)

The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex , Morowitz, Harold J. - Amazon.com

The most intriguing and persuasive scientific world view I’ve found so far is in Harold J. Morowitz‘s 20-year-old text The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex. Like Greene, Morowitz is a hard-headed physicist, but he seems to think there is more to the purpose of evolution than random outcomes, however complex or sophisticated. He’s in sympathy with the Jesuit theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who theorized that all evolution tends toward the Omega Point, the pinnacle of creation decreed by its Creator. The breadth of Morowitz’s analysis is amazing – he begins with quantum particles and concludes with complex brain structure – hinting that the next step in evolution is into the spiritual realm, although he offers no opinions about what intelligent beings can find there.

If you are tempted to dive into Morowitz – and if you’re curious, I encourage you to take the plunge – feel free to skim the chapters on organic molecular chemistry. That’s the author’s specialty, and there’s way too much information here for anyone without an advanced degree in his field. Nevertheless, I promise that making your way through this ambitious book will be a rewarding experience.

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Published on March 25, 2022 08:00

March 17, 2022

Mysteries of the Dead Sea Scrolls – Thinking About Thinking #52

When I saw this special issue, “The Dead Sea Scrolls: 75 Years Since Their Historic Discovery,” published by National Geographic magazine, on the newsstand, I grabbed it eagerly. I hoped I’d find new revelations based on recent scholarship, which has not received much public exposure.

I was disappointed. This issue focuses almost exclusively on the scrolls that harmonize with the traditional versions of the scriptures. The editors’ mantra must have been to appeal to the broadest possible audience – and offend no one.

But then I read buried in these pages in the brief chapter “The Non-Biblical Manuscripts: The Writings of the Qumram Sect:”

Although a quarter of the Dead Sea Scrolls are copies from the Hebrew Bible, the remainder are non-biblical religious and secular texts that appear to describe the beliefs, rules and activities of the Qumram community. Josephus claims “[the Essenes] equally preserve the books belonging to their sect,” which could refer to these documents, bolstering the identification of the Qumram sect with the Essenes.

Besides the two pages that follow this quotation, the special-issue magazine ignores three-quarters of its purported topic.

For a more insightful treatment of that missing information, see Barbara Thiering’s disruptive and controversial scholarship, most notably in Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls. I’ve commented previously on that book here.

Thiering died years ago, and since that time her scholarship has fallen into disrepute in the academic community.

Perhaps because she dared to speak truth to power?

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Published on March 17, 2022 12:04

March 11, 2022

Houellebecq’s Fascination with Schopenhauer – Thinking About Thinking #51

Here’s my book review of In the Presence of Schopenhauer by French prize-winning novelist Michel Houellebecq. In this novella-length essay, the author describes his fascination with 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.

The Frogs is a sculpture by Sergio Bustamante. Can you guess why it reminds me of this book?

Houellebecq asserts that encountering Schopenhauer’s philosophy changed his outlook on life fundamentally. The author was in his mid-twenties. It was as if he’d met a perverse, cranky old man whom he could regard as a father figure – an understanding mentor who could forgive the author for being such a curmudgeon himself.

In her preface to the paperback, critic Agathe Novak-Lechavalier describes the author’s outlook this way:

Schopenhauer opened Houellebecq’s eyes and taught him to contemplate the world as it is in itself – as entirely driven by a blind and endless ‘will to live’ which is the essence of all things, from inert matter to men, via plants and animals. In Schopenhauer, this ‘will’, foreign to the principle of reason, is the basis of the absurd and tragic character of all existence, whose sufferings are at once inevitable (because ‘all willing proceeds from need and thus from deprivation, and thus from suffering’) and devoid of any justification. It also explains the author’s legendary pessimism.

“In other words,” the philosopher might have said to the author, “don’t feel bad about being such a cynic. Michel. Because the only sense you can make of the world is what you perceive through your senses, your opinion is the only one that matters!”

In my posts, I’ve included book reviews of Houllebecq’s novels The Map and the Territory and Submission. I’ve also read Whatever and Serotonin – all before I picked up this little book of admiration for Schopenhauer.

Well, finally, this essay explains a lot. I’ve found Houllebecq’s narrative points of view – whether expressed in the first or the third person – as solipsistic – that is, hopelessly self-centered to the point of self-obsession. His plots often seem pointless. He never explains. It’s as if he has no idea why he wrote the story.

I’d say this point of view agrees not only with Schopenhauer but also with the later French existentialists Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as with some contemporary behaviorists. “The universe is empty and meaningless,” they seem to say. “Make of it what you will.”

Some say this is good news, Recently, I heard physicist Brian Cox say he thought the mission of the human race is to make meaning.

I wonder.

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Published on March 11, 2022 06:00

March 4, 2022

‘The Righteous Gemstones’ on HBO – Offensive to the Reds, Silly to the Blues? – Thinking About Thinking #50

Granted, some big-time evangelists who founded superchurches have been caught up in scandals and defrocked by the press as crass profiteers.

Notable real-world exceptions have been the Reverends Billy Graham and William Schuller, but that’s going back a couple of generations. Those preachers ministered mainly to The Greatest Generation at a time when national surveys estimated 90 percent of Americans identified themselves as Christians. These days, that survey number has dropped to around 60 percent.

Those two respected leaders have passed on, and their sons are carrying their organizations forward. Their ministries have not so far been beset by scandals, but the main plotline of The Righteous Gemstones has the widowed Dr. Eli Gemstone (John Goodman) grooming his two sons to take over his worldwide evangelist movement – including a grand strategy to co-opt small-town congregations the way big corporations buy out their fledgling competitors.

A major subplot in the series has Dr. Gemstone flashing back to fond memories of the co-ministry he conducted with his wife Aimee-Leigh Gemstone. Real-world models for the couple might have been Jim Bakker and his wife Tammy Faye Bakker (Messner). Jim was eventually sent to prison on convictions of fraud and conspiracy. (As of this writing, actress Jessica Chastain has just won the SAG Award for her leading role in The Eyes of Tammy Faye, which I haven’t yet seen but from press clippings seems laudatory overall.)

HBO may be trying to recapture the dysfunctional-family intrigues of its highly successful series Succession, which was about schemes and betrayals centering on a patriarch whose business empire resembles Rupert Murdoch’s. But while that clever family is as sophisticated as they are phony, the Gemstones come across as unscrupulous hicks who got rich leveraging the herd-like mentality and the tax-free status of megachurches.

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Published on March 04, 2022 09:00

February 25, 2022

Evan Wycliff – Practicing Minister and Amateur Sleuth – Thinking About Thinking #49

Evan Wycliff is an amateur sleuth, the main character of my mysteries Preacher Finds a Corpse, Preacher Fakes a Miracle, and Preacher Raises the Dead. Amateur sleuth is a well-established subgenre of mystery, but stories about clergymen who investigate crimes are perhaps a sub-subgenre. As a reader myself, my favorites of these are the Rabbi Ben mysteries by Marvin J. Wolf, including A Scribe Dies in Brooklyn.

Amazon.com: A Scribe Dies In Brooklyn: A Rabbi Ben Mystery (Rabbi Ben Mysteries): 9780989960021: Wolf, Marvin J.: BooksNow, putting on my writer hat, I will admit that casting an amateur sleuth in the role of investigator is one of the easier choices. If the main character were a law-enforcement official, the technical challenges for the author are much more restrictive. Those plots fall into the category of police procedural. The author must understand the protocols of criminal investigations, including crime-scene surveys and forensic analysis.

But protagonists who are amateurs needn’t follow the rules – especially because they are likely to be ignorant of them and – what’s more – they have no business poking their noses where they don’t belong.

In the Preacher novels, it isn’t Evan’s intention to do any of this. In the first book, Preacher Finds a Corpse, he happens on the body of his best friend in a cornfield. Bob Taggart is dead – apparently by suicide, which is also obvious to the cops and to the coroner. But Evan wonders – even if no one else pulled the trigger – did someone drive Bob to do it? Wouldn’t that be a sin – if not a crime?

Evan’s curse – or his blessing – is his curious mind. And, like good investigators, professional or not, he’s both a data-driller and a close observer. At the outset of the series, Evan gets only part-time gigs – as a guest preacher at the local Baptist church and as a skip tracer (bill collector) for the town’s car dealership.

And because he has some success finding the truth, false rumors circulate in this southern Missouri farm community that Evan is a faith healer. His growing reputation attracts people who need help – not just spiritual guidance but also resolutions to personal crises that no one else in town seems to have any interest in solving.

So – one might ask – are the Evan Wycliff mysteries Christian fiction? I’d think not – my sense of that genre is it’s intended to provide inspiration – to offer answers to questions.

In Evan’s world, there are always more questions than answers.

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Published on February 25, 2022 11:00

February 18, 2022

New Interpretations of Bible Parables – Thinking About Thinking #48

Hands folded over a bible with the text

If you’re having trouble with your religious faith, studying theology will only make matters worse. In my Evan Wycliff Mysteries series, the protagonist is a Baptist minister who often has serious doubts. For my background research, I delved into some recent Biblical scholarship, where I found some remarkable reinterpretations of the old stories.

One of these latter-day sources is Jesus and the Riddle of the Dead Sea Scrolls by Barbara Thiering. This Australian scholar applied a traditional rabbinic pesher analysis – used primarily by Hebrew scholars to find hidden meanings in the Old Testament. Thiering maintains that the New Testament gospels are full of coded messages intended to be passed among rebellious Jews who sought to hide their controversial beliefs and doctrines from conservative sects such as the Scribes and the Pharisees.

For example, Thiering asserts that the parable of turning water into wine at the wedding feast was not to be taken literally. Traditional religious practice segregated women in worship services and used water as a sacramental beverage. Jesus and his rebels advocated including women and the infirm in all ceremonies, and their sacraments used wine. The parable therefore uses powerful symbolism to emphasize a doctrinal dispute.

The cover of Jesus and the Riddle of the Dead Sea Scrolls

And – which is more miraculous – a one-time chemistry trick or changing worship practices from ancient times to this to include women?

Thiering also thinks the story of the virgin birth contains an encrypted message. In the Essene community, a betrothed couple were made to live apart until the wedding, Mary was sent to live with pious women (who were like caregiving nuns), in the “House of the Virgins.” This suggests that Mary – and not necessarily Joseph – was descended from the house of David and a member of the sect aligned with the revolutionaries Jesus would eventually lead. The story of the virgin birth is therefore coded proof of the matrilineal legitimacy of Jesus to claim the throne of David.

As you might expect, Thiering’s conclusions have been shouted down by traditional theologians. She died in 2015, so these days she’s not around to defend herself. But you can be sure there is a generation of seminarians who have her on their reading lists.

I imagine many faithful churchgoers don’t delve much into theological scholarship. That’s what ministers are supposed to do at divinity school. Sunday-school teachers must certainly study the Bible, and a source they might routinely consult would be The Wycliffe Bible Commentary, a standard text in seminaries. Not coincidentally, that book was the inspiration for fictional Evan Wycliff’s family name.

Understand, I’m not endorsing or pushing such alternative views. I do find them intriguing, even at some times appealing. But these speculations figure strongly into the plotting of the mystery series because Evan is – as he admits – both perpetually curious and a habitual doubter.

An image of the paperback version of Preacher Raises the Dead: An Evan Wycliff Mystery

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Published on February 18, 2022 11:00

February 12, 2022

Do You Love Your Own Mother This Much? Thinking About Thinking #47

A black and white painting of a mother bathing her child's feet with the text

Here’s my book review of The Rainbow Comes and Goes: A Mother and Son on Life, Love, and Loss by Anderson Cooper and Gloria Vanderbilt.

Memoir is perhaps the most frequently attempted book genre, but unless there’s a celebrity photo on the cover, these manuscripts rarely find a mainstream publisher, much less become bestsellers. But in this case, there are two smiling portraits on the cover and two famous brands – television journalist Anderson Cooper and his fashion designer mother Gloria Vanderbilt.

However, until recently anyway, the general public may not have been aware of the family relationship. For his part, Cooper has assiduously avoided the association. His mother, for her part, has been anything but shy about using and exploiting the name. Her signature jeans and fragrances have been her single most commercially successful venture, and other than lending cachet to the brand, this was a self-made fortune among several she has attained and lost. And without trading on the name Vanderbilt, Cooper has made his reputation on his own as a media phenomenon. He is today one of the most credible names in broadcasting, and not because he carried the famous name.

The cover of The Rainbow Comes and Goes, showing Gloria Vanderbilt and Anderson Cooper sitting next to each other and holding hands.

The Rainbow Comes and Goes is an exchange of intimate personal correspondence conducted via email while the 92-year-old Vanderbilt stayed mostly in her luxury apartment in Manhattan and Cooper jetted around the globe covering news assignments, mostly in locales ravaged by war or natural disaster. Cooper says he took the initiative to get closer to her, and the lessons learned in the book prove the wisdom of his intentions.

One trait these two share is a dogged ability to withstand profound loss – and not just survive, but become the stronger for it. They share two huge untimely wounds. First, her third husband and Cooper’s father Wyatt Emory Cooper died of open-heart surgery at age 50. He left two young sons, Carter and Anderson. The second blow came when Carter committed suicide at age 23.

Gloria Vanderbilt is open about the intimate and sometimes sensational details of her life story. Cooper relates these to his own personal struggles, but details of his personal relationships are not included. Vanderbilt could have owned to four surnames from a succession of celebrity husbands: Pat Dechico, presumed mobster and former husband as well as rumored murderer of actress Thelma Todd; Leopold Stokowski, brilliant orchestra conductor and then crusty older man; Cooper’s father Wyatt, a small-town boy from a poor rural family who became a Hollywood screenwriter; and legendary movie director Sidney Lumet. And we also learn from this book that had she been so inclined, she could have added other names to the list – including Howard Hughes and Frank Sinatra.

Cooper says he set out on a career as a war correspondent because he wanted to see how people who had no advantages coped with sudden and profound loss. He told the story of his early career in another book, Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival.

A significant portion of Vanderbilt’s confession centered on her difficult and mostly estranged relationship with her mother, the glamorous widow Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt. Cooper’s mother summarizes the humiliating custody battle and trial as her aunt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, sued to make the child a ward of the court on the grounds that her mother was unfit. This story was widely publicized at the time and is a major episode in the daughter’s autobiography, Once Upon a Time: A True Story, and in Barbara Goldsmith’s biography, Little Gloria Happy at Last, which was made into a TV miniseries. Perhaps surprisingly, the sedate “Aunt Gert” – that’s Gertrude Vanderbilt – comes across in this account as the girl’s well-meaning benefactor and ardent protector, but never one who was demonstrative with her affections.

Little Gloria was cherished by her nanny and her maternal grandmother, but she never really knew her father. Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt, who died from his alcoholism just a year before she was born.

The main takeaway from Rainbow is clear from its stated intention to have an intimate exchange with a loved one. As the generation of Boomers must face the challenges of caring for parents whose faculties may be diminishing, here’s an example that it may not be too late to talk frankly. As Cooper explains, “I know now that it’s never too late to change the relationships you have with someone important in your life – a parent, a child, a lover, a friend. All it takes is a willingness to be honest and shed your old skin. Let go of the long-standing assumptions and slights you still cling to.”

But between the lines of The Rainbow Comes and Goes is another powerful truth, one so fundamental to the national debate. The Vanderbilts were the one-percenters of yesteryear. When Cooper’s great grandfather Cornelius Vanderbilt II split the family inheritance with his brother William in the mid-19th century, between them they controlled the largest personal fortune in the world. But by the standards of today’s multibillionaires, that money and its power have all but dissipated.

As a society, we may fear the overweening influence of the rich and powerful, but in America at least, their personal empires often don’t survive more than a few generations.

Anderson Cooper and Gloria Vanderbilt both learned how to reinvent themselves. It didn’t hurt that they were both born to comfort, but their achievements and any happiness they’ve gained have come not from their presumed advantages, but from personal resilience in the face of anguish.

Update: Gloria Vanderbilt passed away after the book was published.


Cover of Bonfire of the Vanderbilts


A hundred-year-old secret locked is in a painting. The painting’s owner, Los Angeles Museum of Art, refuses to admit I got it right. But, hey, it’s fiction, the art historians say. Why should anyone take it seriously? What, according to my decades-long research into this painting that obsessed me so, did Cornelius Vanderbilt II not want you to know? Hint: Vanderbilt and his reputed mentor, banker J. P. Morgan, were rivals in the Episcopal Church hierarchy, each claiming to be more righteous than the other.



Drop here!

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Published on February 12, 2022 08:04

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