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What Are You Reading / Reviews - Dec 2017
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Skin Game by Jim Butcher
The Dresden Files #15
5 ★
These books continue to get better with each installment. Harry Dresden is given a job by Mab that he is unable to refuse, mainly because he's the Winter Knight. He has to join forces with archenemy Nicodemus Archleone to steal the Holy Grail from Hades' vault. Not an easy task, especially with the crew "Nick" has assembled. Most of them are enemies of Harry's. Thankfully, Harry is allowed to bring an ally of his own. One of the things I love about this series is the twists in each book. There are little scenes throughout that you just read and forget about, but at the end you find out that there was something actually going on behind the scenes. Harry's sarcasm kept me laughing and the story line was intriguing. Harry gets to meet Hades and I liked the guy. I like how the author portrayed him.
Merry and Bright by Debbie Macomber
4 ★
I enjoy a good romance book every now and then. This was a sweet quick read about Merry Knight and Jayson Bright. Two coworkers who sign up for online dating and fall in love. It does have a very familiar theme, but it was a nice story. The characters are well written and the transformation in Jayson is fun to watch. I really liked Merry's caring attitude. The only issue I had with the Kindle edition was that the computer conversations were written in the same font as the rest of the book and at times it made it hard to follow. It would have been nice if the messages were written in a different font or in italics.
Honoré de Balzac,
Eugénie Grandet
[1833] 179 pages [in French]The second novel of the Scènes de la Vie de province, Eugénie Grandet (and the two following stories) are the works I read long ago in college for my French Literature survey course, and for good reason: this is not only one of Balzac's best novels but also one of the most representative of his style. Transitional between Romanticism and Realism, the characters are essentially determined by their environment and socio-economic backgrounds, that is to say essentially types, as in realist novels, and the plot follows logically rather than depending on coincidences, but on the other hand there is also a good deal of romantic exaggeration, especially in the character of M. Grandet, and the author intrudes in a way that would have been avoided in and after Flaubert. The novel is among his best-known and I probably don't need to do more than summarize the situation -- essentially a very rich but miserly father in the provinces has a naive young daughter who falls in love with a more sophisticated but economically ruined cousin, who leaves for the Indies to seek his fortune and returns years later. The strength of the novel is in the character development and the social satire rather than in the rather obvious plot.
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The Lost City of the Monkey God – Douglas Preston – 4****
I was mesmerized by this adventure story, as Preston recounts the expedition’s efforts to find these ruins in the dense jungle, plagued by weather, poisonous snakes, and biting insects. Preston also give equal time to political discourse and environmental impact. And the medical mystery of aftereffects of their time in the jungle was equally fascinating, and horrifying.
LINK to my review
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Chocolate, Chocolate – Frances Park and Ginger Park – 3***
Subtitle: The True Story of Two Sisters, Tons of Treats, and the Little Shop That Could. It’s a charming memoir, but I found it repetitious. While I admit to self-medicating with chocolate, reading about that in chapter after chapter is less satisfying. Still, they have an interesting story to tell, and I really liked their relationship with their mother and with their customers.
LINK to my review
Artemis by Andy Weir, 5*****s
Another wonderful book by Andy Weir! This one is different than "The Martian" but it is still filled with his marvelous sense of humor that kept me laughing out loud!
It is the story of Jazz Bashara who is a smuggler on the moon -- yes, she lives on the moon. And she is quite a character! She is very smart, talented, and skilled in many areas, and it really gets her into trouble! There is lots of drama, intrigue, and action in this book. And if you read "The Martian" you know how much technical and scientific information he puts in (you can skim over the detailed lessons on welding and not miss too much!), so it is my opinion that this will make an even better movie than a book. Even though a lot of the information his includes is pretty interesting, such as
specifics on living in the moon's atmosphere as compared to the earth, the difference in the gravity there and all the things they have to do to make the moon livable. Andy Weir seems to have thought of every detail. So put on your seat belt and hang on -- it's a wild ride! :)
The Waste Lands by Stephen King, 4****s
Wow! I hadn't read Books #1 & #2 since 1989 (!), and I didn't know if I'd remember enough to know what was going on. But the lead-in to Book #3 gave enough explanations for me to figure out quite a bit so it turned out to be pretty easy get back into it. I listened to the audio book (Frank Muller did a phenomenal job!!) and the 18 hours went by in a flash. It is fast-moving and action-packed, and I'm going to try not to wait 30 more years to get on with this series! ;)
The Girl from Venice by Martin Cruz Smith
3 ★
This is the first book I have read centered around Italy and Hitler. I found it very interesting, but hard to follow. There was a large cast of extremely interesting characters plus multiple story lines. I also had a hard time understanding some of the words used since they were Italian words. Reading this on a Kindle would have been nice because you can find the definition of each. Cenzo and Giorgio are brothers who live very different life styles and do not like each other. The author did a nice job painting this picture and how the relationship got that way. It's not just a book about Hitler and his occupation of Italy. It's the story of a young Jew who saw her parents get killed and is on the run from the man who did it along with a story about brothers and the things that have come between them. There was a lot going on throughout the whole book.
The Pecan Man by Cassie Dandridge Selleck, 5*****s
This is a very well-told (and well-written) fictional story of a woman's part in sending a man to prison -- for something he did not do. It takes place in the south in the 1970's through 2000. Ora Lee Beckworth (57 years old at the beginning of the story) tells the history of a tangled story that happened kind of suddenly, about the decisions that were made and lies that were told at the time, and how it affected all involved over the next twenty five years.
It is a sad story and a happy story. It moves along very quickly, is not very long, and leaves the reader with a warm feeling. And the best part is Ora Lee herself! She is feisty and confident, but never lets others know how unsure of herself she is. But when she takes the bull by the horns, she really gets things done!
I had not heard of this book before and only read it because it was a "book club pick." But I'm really glad I did and highly recommend it to others! I think you'll love it :)
Mod
The Good Lord Bird – James McBride – 3.5***
McBride looks at John Brown and Harpers Ferry through the lens of a “freed” slave, Henry Shackleford (known as Onion). I’ve seen reviews that compare McBride to Mark Twain, and I guess I see that here – an adventure tale that is about a serious event / issue, but that includes room for humor.
LINK to my review
Book Concierge wrote: " The Good Lord Bird
– James McBride – 3.5***
McBride looks at John Brown and Harpers Ferry through the lens of a “freed” slave, Henry Shackleford (known ..."
Thanks for the review. I have this one on my list. Glad to see your recommendation for the audio version. That will probably be my preference!
Sigmund Freud,
Totem and Taboo
[1913; tr. 1950] 172 pagesFour essays concerning the concepts of taboo and totemism, this was published in book form about three or four months after Durkheim's book which I reviewed a year and a half ago (The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life), which also dealt with the subject of totemism. Many of my objections to that book and the methodology of making "primitive" peoples such as the Australian aborigines models for the original hunter-gatherers of prehistory could be repeated here; in fact, Freud himself says much the same thing in one or two footnotes, but then procedes to ignore the problems he himself recognized and treat "totemism" as a fact of original religion, which he then tries to explain in terms of his own psychoanalytic theories (which of course have problems of their own). What he says about the origins of taboo in the first three essays -- comparing them to the obsessions of neurotics (what we would now call OCD) and explaining them on the basis of unconcious ambivalent emotional responses is quite interesting. The most famous part of the book, however, is the last essay, where he proposes his theory of the origins of "totemism" as a whole -- his famous theory of the "primal horde" of brothers who killed the father. Even allowing for the existence of primitive totemism, which is dubious, this theory is totally bizarre, and I wonder whether even psychoanalytic disciples of Freud could ever have taken it seriously. He does somewhat hedge, saying that even if it weren't literally, historically true, it would still explain totemism as a psychic impulse, but he makes it clear he does consider it to have been true. Of couse, religion and mythology are full of ambivalent relations to fathers (best known, the Oedipus myth). The book, like Durkheim's, is probably much more important for understanding the history of early twentieth century social science than for any light it sheds on the history of religion. The next book on my list is a history of the idea of totemism from McClellan to Freud which considers them from that perspective.
Sourdough by Robin Sloan, 4****s
I enjoyed this exciting tale of -- wait for it -- baking bread! It was kind of strange and magical, but very interesting! I just wish I could have tasted some of that bread :)
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A Gentleman in Moscow – Amor Towles – 5***** and a ❤
Well this book cements Amor Towles in my list of favorite authors. I love the Count and the way he leads his life. His accommodations may be limited, and he may be confined to the hotel, but his life is certainly *not* limited. They may take his possessions, they may restrict his movements, but they cannot make his less a gentleman.
LINK to my review
All Together Dead (Sookie Stackhouse #7) by Charlaine Harris
4 ★
The books in this series move along very quickly and continue to delight the reader. This one picked up a lot toward the end and I had a hard time putting it down. Sookie goes to a vampire summit as part of the Queen's group to help her weed out the bad seeds (cause she's a telepath of course) and as a witness to the death of the Queen's husband, since everyone thinks the Queen did it. The Fellowship of the Sun group is back and they have a deadly plan. As usual, there's quite a bit of death in this book. Sookie's friend Barry, another telepath, is at the summit as well and the two get to work together. I enjoy watching Sookie grow in each book. She's becoming a stronger person and doing things for herself. I like how she's starting to stand her ground more. I'm curious to see what happens between her and Bill and her and Eric. There is so much going on between the lines.
Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson, 4****s
A very interesting history of the sinking of the Lusitania. I found out a lot about WWI which I was glad to learn.
Turtles All the Way Down by John Green, 4****s
This YA novel, through the eyes and thoughts of high school student, Aza, tries to convey to the reader how a mental illness feels in a person's head. And it's pretty scary, and difficult, but still hopeful. I have heard the author speak of his own battle with mental illness, and he says that this story mirrors his own struggles and he wanted to let others know how it feels.
Above and beyond that, though, the book includes a mystery that Aza helps to solve, along with friendship and dating issues.
I thought it was very good, and I recommend it.
Mod
Rio Grande Fall – Rudolfo Anaya – 2**
Book two in the Sonny Baca mystery series is set during the Albuquerque NM Hot Air Balloon Fiesta. I like magical realism, in general, but this series has gone too far. I wasn’t interested and all the spiritualism detracted from the plot (what little there was of it).
LINK to my review
The Cricket on the Hearth by Charles Dickens, 5*****s
I loved this, and it made me realize how much I have been missing Charles Dickens (since I haven't read him for awhile)! I love his wordplay, fun with language, and his sense of humor overall.
It's a very, very sweet story about couples in love that think that they are each cheating on each other, and there's a blind girl and a cricket, and then they're not cheating on each other, and they all live happily ever after....oh, sorry for the spoilers -- but it's Charles Dickens. What were you expecting?!
I don't mean to be flip about this story, but I really liked it and it put me in a good mood. I hope you have as much fun with it as I did ;)
Dear Fahrenheit 451: Love and Heartbreak in the Stacks: A Librarian's Love Letters and Breakup Notes to the Books in Her Life by Annie Spence, 4****s
This is a fun read! This librarian writes letters to books and tells them what they have meant to her in her life: some inspiring, some scary, some boring, some need to be discarded off the library shelves (they just never get checked out!)! This author's sense of humor makes this a rollicking ride with lots of recommendations and some warnings. Anyone who reads will enjoy this light-hearted but earnest book -- about books!
[By the way, according to my files on my own computer (not all my reviews came through from Shelfari to Goodreads) this is the 1000th review I've posted since I started in 2009.]Robert Alun Jones, The Secret of the Totem: Religion and Society from McLennan to Freud [2005] 347 pages
Ostensibly, this book is a history of the idea of totemism in nineteenth and early twentieth century anthropology/sociology, but in fact it's something more ambitious: totemism is just the thread that the author uses to organize a history of the rise and (in a sort of epilogue) fall of social evolutionary theory in general. The treatment is largely biographical; each chapter deals with one of the major figures: the first chapter, after a brief treatment of Henry Sumner Maine, focuses on J.F. McLennan; the second chapter on William Robertson Smith; the third chapter on James Frazer; the fourth chapter on Emile Durkheim; the fifth chapter on Sigmund Freud; and the book ends with the epilogue on the Boas school and Lévi-Strauss. The author is one of those writers, however, who cannot omit any fragment of their research, so each person who is mentioned (regardless of their importance, or whether they even wrote on totemism at all) is also given a biography, where they were born, their father's occupation, where they went to school and who their professors were -- and each of their professors then also has a biography provided, etc., so that there are three or four levels of embedded biographies, which makes it difficult to follow the basic thread of the development, and the reader is constantly dragged back and forth in time, from a book written in the 1890s to the influence of something written in the 1870s to the author's professor's book written in the 1860s to some influence in the 1840s and then back and forth until it goes back to the 1890s -- until the next digression. The end result is a very dense web which is not easy to understand. The book took me almost two weeks to finish.
As I mentioned at the beginning of my last year's review of Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, I originally intended to read certain recent books, but followed the bibliographies of those books to the bibliographies of the books they were based on and so forth, and ended up beginning with Durkheim because all of the bibliographies in a sense converged on his book. Moving forward very slowly, two weeks ago I read Freud's Totem and Taboo, which was essentially the next book in that project, and was published a few months after the Durkheim book. Hence, my interest in this book which traced the influences on those two books back to the beginnings of the nineteenth century. I found the content very interesting, even though it was not a particulary well organized or well written book. One problem is that, although it is intended as an objective study, it is in fact quite subjective: it is obvious, for example, that the author liked Robertson Smith and had no use for James Frazer, even though he says that they are both equally obsolete and arguing about the "wrong" questions. His conclusion is that evolutionary theories of culture were simply a dead end. I'm not so sure; although certainly these theorists were generalizing from inadequate and selective data, and comparing cultural practices which were derived from different socio-economic situations, and although many of their methods and assumptions were wrong, such as that modern "primitive" cultures were survivals of the original prehistoric hunter-gatherers and that all cultures went through essentially the same stages in the same order, etc., I think it may have been a mistake to banish the search for development out of anthropology altogether and limit it to a synchronic study of individual cultures. Boas himself did not go that far; he simply wanted to recognize that cultures have to be understood as functional wholes and their development understood in terms of their own conditions. At any rate, questions of origins will not go away, and banning them from academic anthropology simply results in their coming in through the back door in even more reductionist forms like sociobiology. I'll reserve judgement until I have read some of the later authors; Malinowsky and Lévi-Strauss are on my list for the coming year but if I judge by past performance I may not get very far with them.
Just as one particular note, I was interested to learn that Freud's theory of religion was influenced by his reading of Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity; I read and reviewed that last month but I hadn't made the connection to Freud.
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Love, Life And Elephants – Daphne Sheldrick – 4****
Subtitle: An African Love Story. This is a wonderful memoir that takes the reader from Sheldrick’s birth and childhood through her teen years, and first love, on to the love of her life, David Sheldrick, and the work they accomplished together. She writes in a frank and open manner, describing her missteps as openly as her triumphs.
LINK to my review
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Christmas in Harmony – Philip Gulley – 3***
If the Christmas Eve service has become a burden, why not take Dale’s suggestion of a Progressive Live Nativity Scene. What could possibly go wrong? With Dale in charge … a lot. Funny and tender, but Sam always finds the true meaning of Christmas. A lovely holiday read.
LINK to my review
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Imaginary Men – Anjali Banerjee – 1*
Lina Ray is a professional matchmaker in the San Francisco bay area who has yet to make her own match. But after blurting out news of her own (imaginary) engagement to save herself from a match to an Indian “bachelor from hell,” she has to find her prince in two months, so the family matriarch can approve the match. It’s chick-lit with a cultural nuance. A fast read. Total mind candy.
LINK to my review
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A Man Of His Own – Susan Wilson – 3***
Three people connected by one dog, this is a kind of romance novel with a twist. There’s plenty of drama with three characters who are all emotionally fragile, and yet somehow are “guided” by this remarkable animal. That synopsis sounds trite and predictable, and in a sense the book is that, but I have to say that I was entertained and engaged by the story.
LINK to my review
Revisionary by Jim C. Hines
(Magic Ex Libris #4)
5 ★
In the last book Isaac Vainio revealed to the world that magic existed. It has been a year since this announcement and we are back with Isaac, Lena, Smudge and all the others to save the world from themselves and the government. I group called Vanguard is being blamed for multiple supernatural creature attacks, but Isaac thinks there's more to it. We follow Isaac and the others through this adventure to stop the groups actions and to save Isaac's dream, New Millennium. There are some new creatures in this book and many great books are used by Isaac to assist him. The books are one of my favorite parts of this series. Many I have read and love the idea of being able to reach into the book and take something from it. My favorite from this one is his use of Jim Butcher's Dresden Files. This book also introduced me to some new books. This series has been a joy to read and I'm sad to see it end. The characters are great and the story line is intriguing. It's been an adventure that all book lovers will enjoy.
Karl Kautsky,
Der Ursprung des Christentums
[1908] 532 pages [in German, on Kindle]For Christmas this year I read a book about Jesus -- you know, the "reason for the season" and all that . . . . [insert appropriate emoticon here].
This is a classic work, usually translated into English as The Foundations of Christianity. Last month I read a similarly titled German book (though in translation) from 1841, Ludwig Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity, which was an influence on the early Marx; this book, by a leading Marxist of the generation after Marx, is a complete contrast in every way, and demonstrates the difference that Marx made, even leaving aside his economic theories and views on revolution and communism, in the way that we view and discuss history and even religion. The earlier book discusses Christianity in an abstract, philosophical and psychological way, which makes it seem as if it could have originated (in its nineteenth century Lutheran form) at any time from the stone age to the present, in any part of the world -- the preconditions are all in the nature of man as a species and the development is a kind of quasi-logical deduction. Kautsky's work, on the other hand, begins from the social, economic and historical conditions of the particular place and time that Christianity originated and developed in, showing why and in what social classes it arose and spread and why it found such a successful reception. This is one of the best works I have read on early Christianity, although I have a few reservations.
Kautsky begins with a very modern-sounding critique of attempts to explain Christianity from the character and teachings of a historical Jesus (Ch.I). He points out that, apart from obvious Christian interpolations, there are no non-Christian sources for the existence, much less the life of Jesus. He gives examples of ancient historiography, showing that all the ancient historians from Thucydides to the end of antiquity wrote history as edification or polemic, and attributed speeches to the main actors, not as some sort of transcript that somehow survived but as what these generals, statesmen, philosophers, etc. (in the opinion of the historian) would have or should have said in the given circumstances. He points out that it was very unlikely (read: impossible) that anyone recorded the sermons and prayers of Jesus and transmitted them word for word to be translated long after into another language and incorporated in the gospels. In fact, the gospels give us not the biography of the historical Jesus or his actual teachings but the views about him that were held by the Christian communities of the time that they were written (many decades after his death, at the earliest), and represent the disagreements and polemics between them. In short, any speculation about Jesus is bound to be wrong; what we can, however, get from these sources is a picture of the early church, and that is what is of real interest from a historical point of view -- not who the man Jesus was or what he said, but why and how the Christian church as a real, historically important institution spread through the world and gained the dominant position it held from the fourth century to almost the present day (the "almost" is Kautsky's optimism.)
He then (Ch. II) gives a sketch of the rise and fall of the Roman Republic and the early days of the Empire, primarily from an economic viewpoint, showing why the society of the early Empire would find the doctrines of Christianity so attractive (and points out, interestingly at such an early date, that nearly all the elements of Christianity existed separately or in various combinations in other sects and movements of the time). Next (Ch. III) he moves to Palestine, and gives a history of the Hebrew people from their beginnings to the return from exile, explaining the origins of Judaism from the economic position of the country, its trade relations and so forth, and describes the situation of Jews in the diaspora. Then he combines the two strands to give a materialist description of the history of Judea from the return to the destruction of Jerusalem, and the class relations represented by the four major parties or groupings at the time of Jesus, the Sadducees, Pharisees, Zealots and Essenes. After this background, he turns to Christianity itself (Ch. IV, sec. 1), and argues quite convincingly that the original Christian community practiced "consumer-communism" (as he defines it at more length in his other book I read this year, on the communist sects at the time of the Reformation.) This all makes up more than half the book.
Of course, the book is somewhat over a hundred years old, and many of the specific "facts" he is trying to explain simply weren't the case; but overall he gives a good, clear explanation of the environment in which Christianity developed. With respect to the Roman history, he is certainly on the right track in seeing the decline of the Empire essentially as the result of internal economic causes, with the barbarian invasions and so forth as a result of the decline rather than its cause; some details might need to be revised, and of course he wasn't aware of the climatic changes we know about now, but I found this part very informative. (I do intend soon to read a more recent (half-century rather than century old) book on the decline of the Empire, from a similar materialist perspective, Perry Anderson's Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, which has been on my shelves since the more political days of my youth.) While, again unusually for the time, Kautsky recognizes that the Old Testament, whatever we may surmise about its original sources, was written in its present form to meet the ideological needs of the post-exile theocracy, his sketch of Hebrew history uses it much more literally than many scholars today (especially of a "minimalist" orientation) would be comfortable with. Finally, his account of the later Jewish history is based very largely on Josephus, and his account of the Essenes was written long before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. My major reservations however are not about this first half of the book.
The problem is, he then (Ch. IV, sec. 2) does just what he argued at the beginning was impossible: he tries to separate out the "genuine" early traditions in the gospels and Acts of the Apostles, to arrive a a construction of -- the historical Jesus! Granted, he does not attempt to reconstruct the religious doctrines, but he has a particular view of who Jesus was: the founder of a communist sect among the lower classes of Jerusalem, who also led an unsuccessful attempt at insurrection against the Romans and was captured and crucified. Now, this is not impossible, but it is very speculative (as he admits), and I've read too many other versions of the "historical Jesus" to be convinced: from those who essentially begin from a "synoptic" gospel view, minus the miracles (I leave out of account those who accept the miracles -- that's religion, not history -- or those who take the gospels as literally true but try to "explain" the miracles as fakes, like The Passover Plot, which is just senseless), to the various accounts from Schweizer to Chilton and the "Jesus Seminar", which variously interpret him as an apocalyptic preacher, an Essene, a renegade Pharisee, a Cynic philosopher, etc., to the extreme views that he was a Greek god or a psychedelic mushroom (at least that one was fun.) Kautsky at least has the advantage of basing his speculations on economic and historical reality, but it's still just speculation, and I would rather he had kept to his original promise of beginning with the Christian communities at the time we have evidence for.
He does return to this in Ch. IV, sec. 3-4, presenting the (still speculative, but better supported) view of the first century church as originally an entirely lower class, communist organization (in the sense of consumer-communism) organized around common meals (and in Jerusalem at least a common residence), and a mutual-support organization, with an ideology based on the idea that Jesus was the Messiah who would return again to punish the rich and reward the poor. In his view, what principally distinguished the Christians from similar Messianic sects of the times was what he calls its "internationalism", that is, that it replaced the ethnic hatred of Jews against Romans with a class hatred of poor against rich. (As I was reading this, my Facebook feed got several memes about Jesus as a long-haired anarchist etc., you've all seen them I'm sure; while we know nothing much about the real Jesus, this was certainly the view that the early church had of him and of itself.) In sec. 3 he follows this out, arguing that the class rather than ethnic basis of the Christian community allowed it initially to spread among the Jews of the diaspora, to the gentile sympathizers who accepted the Jewish monotheism and attended the synagogue without accepting the whole Mosaic law, and from there to the non-Jewish proletariat. (I should note that throughout the book, Kautsky, confusingly to those who know he is a Marxist, uses the term "proletariat" or "proletarian" in more or less its original latin sense of those without property, which would include the -- very small -- proletariat in the modern sense, i.e. wage-workers, but also semi-skilled artisans, peddlars and small-scale traders (think of a flea-market or the markets in underdeveloped countries), beggers, and others who were not actual workers in the modern sense.) He argues that outside Jerusalem, the high price of houses and the largely underground status of the communities eliminated the possibility of common residence and focused the "communist" tendency entirely on the common meals, while the influx of non-Jewish members led to other changes in the nature of the organization, which resulted in a split between Jewish and non-Jewish Christian communities. Especially after the destruction of Jerusalem the Christians began to try to distance themselves from the Jews who were largely a stateless and persecuted minority and play down their opposition to Rome (Ch. IV, sec. 4 is devoted to a discussion of the "Passion history" in the four gospels, showing how it contradicts itself and gets involved in many obvious absurdities from even a logical, let alone historical view, in trying to turn the blame for the crucifixion from the Romans onto the Jews.) At the same time, he points out, the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of its population led the diaspora Jews themselves to band together as Jews without regard to class distinctions, resulting in the collapse of the Jewish Christian communities and essentially leaving Christianity as a Hellenistic movement. He attempts to give evidence for this from the Acts of the Apostles and the letters of "Paul" to various churches, as well as some early non-scriptural sources such as the Didache and the writings of what Catholics call the Apostolic Fathers (most of which I have read, and his interpretation seems reasonable enough.)
(continued below -- I've never run out of characters before!)
With Ch. IV, sec. 5 he begins the story of the change of Christianity from this original radical proletarian organization to the "Oppression and Exploitation Machine" that was the later church. He argues that after the destruction of Jerusalem, the plausibility of any overthrow of Roman power disappeared. This change explains the turn to the anti-Jewish, pro-Roman orientation mentioned above, but more importantly, as the church became less an organization for struggle and more of a mutual support organization for its members, it required money. There were rich supporters who were attracted to the Christians by their doctrines, especially about salvation and resurrection (and Heaven and Hell after death, which now largely replaced the idea of the coming of an earthly Kingdom of God for the poor.) At first, they were not allowed as full members of the congregations unless they sold their possessions and gave the money to the poor (i.e. to the church community), but gradually it became enough to make a large donation and they could belong to the church despite still being rich. This resulted in downplaying the original class hatred. There is an interesting passage, although much earlier in the book, where Kautsky contrasts the Gospel according to Luke with the Gospel according to Matthew, showing how the class content of the former is converted into a religious-only content in the latter (the parable of Lazarus disappears completely, in the Sermon on the Mount "blessed are the poor", "blessed are they that hunger" become "blessed are the poor in spirit", "blessed are they that hunger after rightousness", and so forth.) Kautsky asssumes that this is because the Gospel according to Matthew is a few decades later, but it seems to me (I don't know what modern scholars hold about the chronology) that it could just as well represent different congregations, since the process would not have taken place at the same rate everywhere. At the same time, as the communities grew, the tasks that were originally taken on by various members as voluntary "callings" took so much time and skill that they had to be given to full-time paid officials, and the official who held the common purse and paid these salaries, the Bishop, grew correspondingly in importance. However, it was precisely the Bishop, as the one responsible for finances, who had the most interest in attracting and keeping well-to-do members, and so played the major role in the changes in the composition of the church. As time went on, the Apostles, that is to say the travelling preachers, became less important relative to the local presbyters (the origin of the word "priest") and teachers, who were paid by and eventually therefore appointed by the Bishop; and the connections between communities, which they had been the ones to keep up, were kept up through conferences of the Bishops, which also increased the powers of the Bishops over their own congregations as representatives of the common or "catholic" church. I won't go over the whole process, but this is perhaps the most interesting part of the book, how the church became bureaucratized and the hierarchy (the word literally in Greek means "rule by priests") turned it into its opposite, an institution for supporting the imperial government and the rich against the poor. The main point is that this change, the real "apostasy" of the church, was not primarily a change in religion and was not brought about consciously by some sort of conspiracy, as Protestants seem to think (although insofar as they still support the rich against the poor and obedience to "constitued" authority, for all their claims to be "reformed" or "restored" they are still on the post-apostasy side of the development), but was a natural, unavoidable (and largely unconscious) process connected with the growth of the church. The result, however, was that the church which "triumphed" under Constantine and became the dominant power in the western world was not the original proletarian church but its opposite, a church controlled by the rich and powerful. There was no "victory of Christianity" over heathen society, the church that won the victory was one with the previously heathen society it replaced.Kautsky says in one place that the proletarian struggle today cannot take the religious form it did in the days of the early church; of course he is right that it cannot succeed that way, but it seems that it can in fact take religious forms and still does. In reading his description of the early Christians, for example, I frequently found myself thinking of the Rastafarians in Jamaica. But Kautsky has a very different comparison in mind; his last section is devoted to a comparison of early Christianity to the social-democratic movement he was so personally involved with. Essentially, this last section tries to show that, although social-democracy was growing and developing a bureaucracy, this bureaucracy could not betray the workers, could not turn the movement into its opposite. I won't go over his arguments; he was proved wrong only six years later when the social-democratic leadership in nearly all countries led the proletariat into the bloodbath of World War I as followers of their "own" bourgeois governments. Kautsky, to his credit, opposed this. He also -- perhaps initially wrongly -- opposed the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, which very quickly became bureaucratized and turned into its opposite just as Christianity had centuries earlier.
[The e-book edition I read specifically says in its description on Amazon that it was "carefully proofread". Would that it had been so; it's full of typos, mostly of the kind that would not show up on spell-check, which is apparently what "careful proofreading" means today (either the typos form real, though wrong, words, or contain numbers which are ignored by spellcheck.) I have to admit that it is not the kind of gibberish that foreign language e-books so often are today, though -- perhaps the OCR program they used was actually designed for German.]
The Final Warnimg by James Patterson
(Maximum Ride #4)
4 ★
Max, Fang, Angel, Nudge, Iggy, Gazzy and Total are back trying to save the world. This time they're in Antarctica to join in the fight against global warming. You would think that being this far from civilization would be safe, but it's not. There is a bad man hunting them to sell them at auction. A very unique someone, too. This story line was a bit off for me. It really didn't seem to flow in line with the others. It was also an interesting story line. It showed the gang really learning about something important and learning how they can help. Each of them also forms a new talent in this book. Some are cool, some not as much (Gazzy!). Max and Fang continue to deny their attraction to each other as well, but it's getting harder.
Messenger by Lois Lowry, 4****s
I really enjoyed this Book #3 of The Giver series. It's fast to read but always interesting and fast-paced. It keeps the reader guessing too. I am immediately starting the fourth and final book "Son." I must see how this one ends :)
Michelle Cliff,
Abeng
[1984] 166 pagesMichelle Cliff is best known for her first novel, No Telephone to Heaven, which is one of the next books on my reading list, for the Goodreads group which is reading Jamaican literature this year. Abeng is a prequel to that novel, taking the protagonist, Clare Savage, a light-skinned, "middle-class" Jamaican girl, back to her adolescence at twelve years old. I will admit that it is an easy and enjoyable read, with mostly good likeable characters and good themes, as Clare discovers the discrimination against darker-skinned Jamaicans, women, and gays. Unfortunately, those themes are very explicitly presented, and rather than the themes seeming to come naturally from the story, the story seems obviously written to illustrate the themes -- the author usually begins by describing the problem, then shows the character discovering it, then tells us how she felt about it, and there are essentially no episodes which are not directly related to one or more of these themes. (There is also some material about the colonial history of Jamaica, presented in historical vignettes about her ancestors in the same way as in Margaret Cezaire-Thompson's A True History of Paradise, which the modern characters are explicitly described as not knowing about. Cliff's novel is the earlier of the two.) Together with the age of the main character and the simplicity of the writing style (largely in fragmentary sentences), that didacticism gives the novel the feeling essentially of a book at the border of Middle Grade to early Young Adult fiction. There is some frank discussion of sexual topics, but that only reinforces the impression -- mainly, these are straightforward explanations of the physical changes of puberty and what to expect when you start having periods, which would be of interest mainly to girls at the age of the protagonist, who are at the beginning of puberty and curious about these questions. I would have given this a better rating if it had been marketed for this age group, but neither the book itself, the description on Amazon, or the library catalog record gives any indication of this -- it seems to be presented as a literary novel for adults, and as such it simply does not have sufficient complexity or subtlety. Perhaps because it is a prequel, the real ending is followed with a somewhat disconnected new beginning with a new character, Miss Beatrice -- I got the feeling this was supposed to suggest Pip and Miss Haversham (Great Expectations is referred to earlier in the book) -- and the novel just sort of comes to an end with Clare in a new situation which is not really developed, probably to meet up with the beginning of the earlier book.
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Queen of the Air – Dean Jensen – 4****
Subtitle: A True Story of Love & Tragedy at the Circus. This is a love story, a tragedy to rival Shakespeare, a history of early twentieth century America, and a thrilling adventure. Lillian Leitzel and Alfredo Codona were the biggest stars in the early twentieth century Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. I was completed engaged and enthralled by their story.
LINK to my review
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Mr Miracle – Debbie Macomber – 2**
Book ten in the Angels Everywhere (a.k.a Angelic Intervention) series. Harry Mills is on his first assignment on earth and he rather smugly believes he’s got it all covered. But he didn’t quite count on human emotions. It’s a cheesy Christmas romance, and the plot is what you’d expect from that genre. It’s not great literature, but it’s perfect for the season.
LINK to my review
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Hillbilly Elegy – J.D. Vance – 4****
Subtitle: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. Vance is a former Marine, a graduate of Ohio State and Yale Law School. But getting to his current place in life was a struggle, given his family upbringing. He is brutally honest looking at his life and at the culture of the working poor. He reviews government policies, and offers insight into how the working poor, themselves, might take steps to give the next generation a fighting chance. This memoir is both brutally honest, and movingly tender.
LINK to my review
The Black Tulip by Alexander Dumas, 4****s
I very much enjoyed this tale of drama around the development, growth, theft, and recovery of the Black Tulip in Holland of the 1670's. Throw in some romance and suspense, fear, hatred, and forgiveness, and add in a prison and a couple of mentions of the guillotine, and you have Dumas' formula for a very exciting and tantalizing story. Read it -- It's fun!!
Honoré de Balzac,
Le Curé de Tours. Pierrette
364 pages [in French]These two short novels are also re-reads; I read them decades ago for my French survey course in college. Together with the next novel I am reading by Balzac, La Rabouilleuse, they make up a subgroup of the Scènes de la Vie de province, Les Célibataires, which deals unsympathetically with unmarried people. Both appeared under various earlier titles before being published under their present titles in the complete collection of La Comédie humaine. They are among the best known of his shorter books, perhaps because they are better constructed than many of his novels are. Although I'm counting them separately I read them bound together in the Classiques Garnier edition with notes and variants, etc.
Pierette [1839] is dedicated to Anna de Hanska, the fourteen-year-old daughter of Balzac's mistress Mme. de Hanska (whom he later married), and he describes it essentially as (to use the modern phrase) his first Young Adult novel. I doubt very much that anyone today would consider it as written (or even suitable) for young readers. The main plot is very simple; Pierrette Lorraine, a poor Breton girl, eleven years old and an orphan, is taken in by her rich cousins, the Rogons. Retired merchants from Paris who have returned to their native city of Provins, M. Rogon (Jérome-Denis, but the name is only mentioned once) is an incurably stupid old bachelor, and his sister, Sylvie, is an ugly old maid with a bitter, spiteful personality. Pierette is mistreated and used as a domestic servant, and becomes very ill. Her boyfriend, Joseph Brigaut, an apprentice joiner (the first actual working-class character I've met with in Balzac) follows her from Brittany and attempts to rescue her (the novel begins with him singing under her window, and is told mainly as one long flashback until it reaches this point again near the end.) Two chapters give the family history of the Lorraines and the Rogons -- as often in Balzac, there has been chicanery with regard to inheritances -- and then most of the book deals with the mounting mental and physical abuse of Pierrette. This is combined with a satire of the liberal opposition in Provins, in the persons of the lawyer Vinet and the retired Colonel Gouraud, who manipulate the vanity of the Rogons to establish a liberal "power base" in the city. Balzac attacks them from the wrong side as usual, but the portrait is probably not much exaggerated -- the liberals of the time were not even republicans, but constitutional monarchists, the people who came to power in 1830 (the novel is set in 1827) under the "bourgeois-king" Louis Philippe and whose corruption led to the Revolution of 1848. The book ends with a lawsuit and a cynical description of the successful later careers of all the villains of the novel.
Le Curé de Tours [1832] is one of Balzac's most cynical works; it makes a good complement to Pierrette, since that novel shows the corruption of the more or less anticlerical liberals, and this novel shows the corruption of the church and aristocratic party. The basic situation is trivial; a priest (l'abbé Troubert) intrigues with his landlady (Mlle. Gamard) to evict another priest (l'abbé Birotteau) from his appartment and steal his furniture. As in Pierrette, there is a lawsuit and the book ends with the villains triumphant.
Son by Lois Lowry, 4****s
I am so glad I finished this series! I really liked The Giver and thought I liked it enough to let it stand alone. However, after reading the next three books, I'm so glad to see how it ended! The next stories, which seem at first to have no connection to The Giver, finally come together and all is explained. And they are all so quick and easy to read. I would especially recommend this series to Middle School age kids, but I really think anyone/everyone can enjoy this series, and also learn from it :)
The Gleaner,
Geography and History of Jamaica: For use in Primary and Secondary Schools
[Twenty-first edition, revised in 1973] 98 pagesI've been reading Jamaican literature this year for a Goodreads group, and many of the books talk about how education in Jamaica ignored Jamaican history for British history, so when I found this little book while unpacking boxes in my garage I thought it would be interesting to read. Despite "exercises" at the end of each chapter, there is no way this could actually be a high school (let alone grade school) textbook; the first half, the "geography", is basically an almanac of statistics about economics and a list of cities and their principle products, the second half is a chronological list of events with dates and one or two sentences about each one. The print is tiny, and there are full page advertisements ("Jamaican children prefer Lannaman's sweets"). What struck me most in the first part was learning that Jamaica went from a primarily agricultural country in 1950 to an economy based on strip mining (bauxite, first exported in 1952, by 1970 made up 67% of the country's total exports) and tourism, with the traditional products such as sugar, coffee, coconuts and bananas a distant third. The second part was a random mixture of important and trivial events, with slave rebellions and major city-destroying earthquakes and hurricanes alternating with the dedication of statues and the weddings of government officials -- and there was a good deal about the kings, queen, princes and princesses of England after all.
One thing that I found very unexpected in a book written more than a decade after Independence was the treatment of slavery -- apparently the slaves were well treated but occasionally decided to rise up for no other reason than to "murder every white inhabitant they could get their hands on." These "outrages" were frequent but fortunately they were suppressed and the "ringleaders" firmly dealt with. Later on, every labor or pro-democracy demonstration was taken over by "hooligan elements". Yet later in the event-list, without missing a beat, these same "ringleaders" are treated as National Heroes of Jamaica and we hear about their statues being erected and places named for them. ("Daddy" Sharpe however is not mentioned although I think one of the rebellions listed is the one he led.)
One of the funniest sections is called "How Jamaica is Governed". I will quote: "Jamaica, as an independent country . . . is governed entirely by Jamaicans, without interference from anyone outside . . . The system of government is called "democratic" because the government is elected by the people themselves every five years. . ." Then the details: the Queen [of England] appoints the Governor-General, who appoints the Senate, which chooses the President; the Governor-General also appoints a Prime Minister and a Cabinet which is "the principal instrument of policy-making." This isn't called "democratic", it's called "neocolonialism".
And this went through twenty-one editions (up to 1973)!
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Born a Crime – Trevor Noah – 4****
Trevor Noah had a white Swiss German father, and a black Xhosa mother, at a time when such a relationship was punishable by up to five years in prison. This is his memoir of growing up under Apartheid and the years as it was being dismantled in South Africa. Honest and interesting.
LINK to my review
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The Winter Garden Mystery – Carola Dunn – 3***
Book number two in the Daisy Dalrymple series has our heroine traveling to Occles Hall to research her latest article for Town and Country on England’s country manor houses. Lady Valeria is none too pleased at this intrusion, and even less so when Daisy finds a body buried in the winter garden. A satisfying cozy mystery with an intrepid heroine, set in 1920s England.
LINK to my review
Paging All Bookworms!
Books mentioned in this topic
Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (other topics)The Winter Garden Mystery (other topics)
Son (other topics)
The Black Tulip (other topics)
Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (other topics)
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