Briefly Reviewed: To The Last Man by Jeff Shaara

Shaara has made his name writing well researched novels dealing with America's military history, starting with his prequel and sequels to his father's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Killer Angels. In To the Last Man, Shaara turns his attention to World War One. He has four main characters: American Raoul Lufbery who volunteered to fly planes with the French air service before American came into the war; German pilot Manfred von Richthofen better known as the Red Baron; General John Pershing, who led the American expeditionary force when the US entered the war; and Private Roscoe Temple of the US Marine Corps. All of these are real historical characters on whom Shaara clearly did his research.

The structure of the book can be a little odd. It breaks into two halves, with the first half almost exclusively dealing with the air war and the two flying ace characters. The second half deals with the last year of the land war from a primarily American perspective. As such, this is very much an American view of the war, even though we have some French characters in Lufbery's sections and of course we get a German view in the chapters dealing with the Red Baron.

The writing is competent throughout, but I didn't find myself deeply emotionally invested in the characters. I wanted to find out what happened to them, but somehow I never felt that extra bit of immediacy which makes you shrink away as the character suffers, and hope at ever turn that good things will happen to the character.

However, I didn't dislike any of the characters and this is a good, workmanlike effort bringing a little known period of American history to life. I could wish for a novel that dealt with the war more widely, rather than a strictly American view, but that would simply be a different novel.

If I could do fractions, I'd rate this 3.5 stars, but I'll round up to 4 for the historical effort put forth and the fact that the characters do seem individual and detailed even if I wasn't emotionally invested in them. They are certainly not mere placeholders or ideological pawns (in that sense I'd rate it well above Ken Follet's Fall of Giants, also dealing with WW1, which I couldn't finish.)

Something Other Than God

Late in 2006, right before election day, I wrote about how I was receiving get-out-the-vote robocalls from none other than Laura Bush and Rick Perry, and I got a comment from Jennifer F., a fellow Texan. Then it turned out that she was from Austin too, and then it turned out that we were practically neighbors.

Shortly afterward we met up at a tea shop, having read through each other's blog archives (which were much less extensive in those days), and the rest, as they say, is history.

Now, eight years later, Jennifer Fulwiler's memoir, Something Other Than God: How I Passionately Sought Happiness and Accidentally Found It, is finally in print and on shelves, and it was a pleasure to take that conversion journey with her again, hearing familiar anecdotes told in fresh ways and hearing backstory for the first time. Her blog, first titled The Reluctant Atheist, and then Et Tu Jen (which is now the popular Conversion Diary), was pivotal in her conversion, and I found it fascinating to read the blog from the other side, as it were, and see how conversations I remembered as a reader played out as part of Jen's daily life. (An example: Jen's comments on my post about suffering, written the day before we met, mirror her thoughts in Chapter 25.) Jen is a funny, honest writer, and the book is so readable and well-paced that I finished it in one sitting as the afternoon turned to evening and the living room grew so dark that I could barely see the last words. 

I'm delighted to say that Jen's husband Joe features prominently in the book, because Joe is a fantastic character in real life, but let me say how disappointed I was that my favorite Joe anecdote, the one that involved the guy in the clown suit at a bar telling him, "I didn't plan on having a throwdown tonight, but if you start something I've got your back," didn't make it through the editing process.

Just last week I met a lady who'd just entered the Church on Easter, who was telling me about her conversion story, and my immediate thought was, "I need to lend her Jen's book." I think that many people working their way through that same process of mental and spiritual realignment will start finding friends and mentors recommending this memoir for encouragement and companionship, and I think that her fellow seekers will find a good friend and a understanding guide in Jen.

Full disclosure: I make a brief cameo in the book, and since this is the first time my hair has been (justly) immortalized in print, I got it together with the book for a photo.

How Far Can We Go?

In my days as a young unmarried Catholic, I often suffered through chastity talks or had dating manuals pressed on me. The Protestant dating manuals (or, more accurately, not-dating, since apparently dating is right out in those circles, to be replaced by the nebulous concept of "courtship") were painfully earnest in their descriptions of hypothetical couples who were keeping their relationships 99.44% pure by following strict rules of behavior. Chastity talks were even more painful because you had to be there in person, squirming in your folding chair and wishing the floor would swallow you as the speaker hemmed and hawed, or, even worse, was wildly enthusiastic for Purity! There seemed to be no happy medium between  either rigid guidelines that seemed designed to minimize contact between a couple, or hazy exhortations to purity that gave one no practical guidance in the matter of a relationship rooted in reality.

After the discussion following this post about the proper level of physical interaction before marriage, Darwin ordered a book on the subject by Brett Salkeld, a fellow blogger and acquaintance. Brett and his co-author Leah Perrault know this sad scene all too well, and they have written a refreshing remedy and valuable resource, How Far Can We Go? A Catholic Guide to Sex and Dating.

Here are two famous answers to the question "How far can we go?"

• Keep both feet on the floor.

• Asking "How far can we go?" is like taking your girlfriend or boyfriend in your arms, walking to the edge of a cliff, and asking, "How close can I get to the edge?"

We had to write this book because we think both these answers are unsatisfactory. We think we can do better. The first answer is very practical, but anyone with a little imagination can get around it. In trying to set out an easy-to-follow guideline for Catholic couples, it ignores the question of Christian formation. It says that physical intimacy is only about how you act, and has no connection to the kind of person you are called to become.  

The second answer is much more dangerous. The foundation of the metaphor it uses is that sex is roughly equivalent to suicide! In other words, sex is dangerous and sinful. Any advance in physical intimacy is just getting you closer and closer to the edge of the cliff. When we give answers like this it is no wonder the world thinks the Church is down on sex! 

...One of the reasons that Christian books on sex and dating have given a misleading view about sexuality is that they ignore the essential communicative aspect of sexuality. Sexual sin is presented as crossing some vague boundary partway up an imaginary list of increasingly intimate physical acts. But, in the context of physical intimacy, sin isn't crossing an arbitrary line. Sexual sin is about using your body to lie to your partner (and probably yourself) about the nature of your relationship. There need to be one or two clear lines about what is appropriate for unmarried people, but those lines are not drawn to keep people from acts that impure in and of themselves. They are drawn to keep people from lying with the language of their bodies. This book, then, is not primarily about which acts are and are not permissible. This book is about learning to speak the truth with your body.

One thing I really appreciate here is that Salkeld and Perrault have a respect for their young audience, and don't treat the question "How far can we go?" as an attempt to find out how much whoopie one can get away with, but an honest query about what is right and appropriate at any point in a relationship. (I snickered out loud at their description of a youth group leader who answers this question from a young couple by saying, "I'll let you in on a little secret. Your relationship will do much better if, instead, you ask yourselves how pure you can be." If you haven't heard twaddle like that, you haven't been around the Authentically Catholic! youth scene much.) They emphasize from the start that their model of dating "presumes that those who use it are sincerely trying to live holy lives. If you're hoping to find loopholes so you can get away with as much as possible and still say you're following Catholic rules, this model isn't for you."

Just what is this model? It relies on honestly answering the question "How much of myself does God want me to give to this other person?"

Sex is not a shortcut to intimacy! If you want to have sex but don't want to get married, you need to look at your reason for not getting married. If it's not a very good reason [the financial demands of a big wedding being an earlier example], work through it and then get married. If it's a good reason, it's probably a good reason not to have sex. Sex speaks a profound language of the body that is both a sign and a source of the kidn of unity that married people share. If you're not ready for marriage, then you're simply not ready for the demands of a relationship that includes sex.  

If you understand our explanation of the Church's teaching on premarital sex, you should be able to follow our dating model. It works on exactly the same principle; physical gifts of self ought to reflect our self-giving in other areas of a relationship.

The dating model the authors set forth is firmly rooted in responsibility and free will: not a "one-size-fits-all" set of rules (because every person and every relationship is unique), but guidelines for discerning at each step of a relationship the appropriate levels of not just physical intimacy, but spiritual, intellectual, social, and emotional intimacy All of these are often bound up with one another because humans are bodies and souls -- what effects one must effect the other. One of the most common-sense statements in the book is that intimacy needs to grow gradually over time, and the authors provide examples of couples at different stages of life and relationship -- high school students, couples in college, working college graduates, and high-powered career men and women -- to show how this discernment can play out in various ways. There's a fun set of graphs that examine how all forms of intimacy progress over the course of the journey from perfect strangers to spouses. The authors aren't shy about expressing the Church's teachings against common sexual pitfalls such as pornography and masturbation, and clearly explain the reasons for these teachings. They are unequivocal on the Church's teaching against premarital sex and activities that try to mimic the effects of sex, and devote the last chapters of the book to marriage and NFP.

I absolutely recommend this book -- I really think it's one of the best resources I've encountered for an honest and balanced treatment of what it means to be a faithful Catholic moving toward marriage. For what it's worth, I find the authors' discussion of sexuality and intimacy in relationships to be very true to Darwin's and my experience of having a real and intense and Catholic unmarried relationship while trying to steer a good course between prudery and prurience. This is the book I'll give to my own children to read when they're old enough for such discussions, and I can give no higher praise than that.

UPDATE: You can hear more about Brett and Leah's approach and speaking work at their website: http://www.howfarcanwego.com

FURTHER UPDATE: Here's a video of Brett Salkeld and Leah Perrault discussing "How Far Can We Go?"

Which of these books is not like the others?

Just cleared some of the excess books off my nightstand.
Oxford Book of English Verse
Between the Woods and the Water, Patrick Leigh Fermor
A Time to Keep Silence, Patrick Leigh Fermor
Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton
The Lighthouse, P.D. James

The Lighthouse was one of the books left in our library by the Dunns, and in a compulsive reading fit I pulled it out of one of the reject boxes. I was wrong. Let me regale you with a few quotes from the cover:

"One of the most compelling books of her remarkable career... A magisterial and subtle exploration of all-too-human emotions." -- The Seattle Times

"James is at the height of her writing powers." -- The Baltimore Sun

Doubtless reviewers of books are confronted with a great deal of dreck, in comparison to which even a well-written phone book has its compensations, but I think that the good critics of the Times and the Sun are stretching it a leetle. If this is the height of James' powers, I'm mightily glad I've never read any of her lesser works. Here, a snippet:

It was only minutes before they were passing over the crinkled blue of the Bristol Channel, and almost at once Combe Island lay beneath them, as unexpectedly as if it had risen from the waves, multicoloured and as sharply defined as a coloured photograph."

Clunk.

This kind of book is why I'm glad I don't read any kind of series in which your recurring characters have to layer their own petty personal drama over the story. James, who always opts for the "telling" side of the "Show, don't tell" proscription, lobs her character and story developments with all the precision of a water balloon thrown by my three-year-old, and with as messy results. Every carefully detailed back story is as multicoloured and as sharply defined as a coloured photograph.

Those who can do, write; those who can't, write genre fiction.

Two Reviews Of Good Catholic Stuff

1. I once visited the monastery of the Norbertine Fathers in California, but I didn't get to hear them chant. Now I have, and you can too: they've just released a new album, Gregorian Chant: Requiem. I received a review copy last week, and I've listened to it several times already because the music is so peaceful and soothing. The album was recorded during a violent storm, and so the sound of pounding rain can be heard at times, underscoring the chant. Sounds about right for the Mass for the Dead.

The requiem mass is very familiar, even to people who don't know much about chant: the Sanctus and Agnus Dei are the most commonly-sung Latin settings in American parishes. The Norbertine Fathers apparently use a form of chant exclusive to their order, but I couldn't tell the difference except for a few melodic quirks in the more elaborate pieces. The monks have outgrown their old quarters, but as their current monastery is built on geologically unstable ground, they'll have to start from scratch on new land. You can see and hear the monks at prayer in this segment from NBC News.

2. The undisputed queen of Catholic bloggers, Julie Davis, has given us Happy Catholic: Glimpses of God in Everyday Life.

Julie shares her blogging philosophy in the introduction:

After my confirmation, though, I was a given a Catholic book, and that began a reading frenzy. I began seeing a pattern of truth and beauty that I never knew existed. Soon, everywhere I looked, I recognized the pattern. Books I read, movies I watched, songs I heard were reflecting bits of the Truth that was God. I realized that this reality had been there all along. I just couldn't see it before.  It made everyday things glow. I couldn't hold in my delight and began e-mailing friends with my discoveries. The e-mails turned into a blog, Happy Catholic, which reflected everything I loved about Catholic every day.

This book continues that sharing.

Julie Davis has been recognized as one of the best Catholic bloggers, and her book stays true to her sharp, easy style -- she shifts effortlessly between spiritual reflections and pop culture, drawing insight from both. Happy Catholic is a series of blog-length meditations, each kicked off by a great quote (and now I'm wanting to go find the source material for the ones I didn't recognize).  You can read it cover to cover, of course, but I enjoyed it best when I flipped it open at random and read a few meditations at a time -- much as I might go through someone's blog archives.  It's pretty compulsively readable.

I can't wait until my girls are a few years older -- Happy Catholic would be great reading for a teen trying to make sense of the shifting patterns of the world.

You can get an autographed copy here, and Julie will include one of her favorite quotes that didn't make it into the book. Here's ours:

Life: how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere. -- V.S. Pritchett

The Hunting of the Snark

A while back, I'd downloaded the free sample chapters of Bill Bryson's new book At Home: A Short History of Private Life to my Kindle app and found it quite delightful, the sort of light non-fiction brimming which the author's curiosity which is infectiously fun to read at odd moments -- yet shrunk from buying the full Kindle version because paying $10 for an ebook just rubs me the wrong way somehow. So I made my way down to the library to look for a copy. There I found that some fifty people had already done likewise and placed reservations on the book -- so rather than join the throng I picked up another of Bryson's books which happened to be in. I'd never ready anything by Bryson prior to stumbling on At Home, but the premise of The Lost Continent seemed appealing: Having lived and worked in Europe the author decides to take a road trip through small town America and write about the interesting (and odd) things he finds there.

Yet somehow the infectious curiosity which had made At Home so enjoyable to read was wholly absent here and replaced with that particularly modern mode: snark.

Now, Bryson is clearly a good writer, and he draws the reader along in an engaging way. Yet somehow the snarky tone breeds a certain frustration in a book-length work, as opposed to that child of the snark, a blog post. As the author's unremitting put downs, however creative, of everything he finds build up in chapter after chapter you want to shake the author by the shoulders and say to him, "All right, we get it. This was a lousy idea. But you're no longer a sulky kid sitting in the back of the family station wagon. You're an adult driving the car. How about if you turn around, drive to a big, cosmopolitan city, and write about something you like? Stop being professionally miserable and get a move on!"

Though really, my beef with snark is not that it's negative. It's that it's shallow. Snark, including Bryon's here, is usually of the, "Would you beeeeelieve this shit? I get into this town, which is not even a one horse town. It's a half horse town. The horse was cut in half by a semi on the main road a couple weeks ago and people haven't yet finished exclaiming, 'Would you look at that, now!' to each other and moved on to actually getting out of their chairs and moving the animal. And like all other half horse towns in Iowa, half the establishments are owned by someone named Vern. I'm not talking about Vern's Fusion Bistro or Vern's Art House Theatre, either. No, it's always Vern's Grocery. Vern's Hardware. Vern's Christian Bookstore. Vern's Tavern. So I went into Vern's Motel and asked the lady behind the counter, with her hornrimmed glasses and beehive hairdo, if there was a room available."

Now, this is in fact fun to write. I had fun parodying it just now. Snark is fun. That's why throughout the world people dash off blog posts full of snark on their lunch break for the delectation of other people on their lunch breaks who can in turn leave snarky comments, or post lolcats, or link to it on Facebook with the universal modern question, "Have you seen this? WTF?"

But I'm not at all sure it works to write a work longer than the average blogpost in snark-ese. Especially since a book lacks a comment box in which the reader can participate by making original contributions such as "LMAO". Indeed, after the first twenty pages or so, during which I kept thinking, "But he'll get down to real writing shortly, right?" I found myself reading further mainly in order to see if someone would eventually dose out a comeuppance to the author. But thus far, no.

I don't know if I'll finish it or not, but I'm disappointed.

Review: Paul: From Tarsus to Redemption

I am not, as my more graphically astute friends and relatives can tell you, someone deeply immersed in comic books, graphic novels, or manga (the Japanese comic book genre). I've read a few classics like Maus, which every so often I find Eleanor having taken off the shelf and advise her that, "I know that's a comic book, honey, but it's actually for older people." And I've read the manga versions of some favorite anime series, such as Fullmetal Alchemist and Hikaru No Go. But if you're looking for a comic expert, I'm not your guy. Still, when we got an email asking if we'd be interesting in reviewing a manga for young teens based on the life of St. Paul, I was curious. (And, of course, there's always the lure of free books.) Though even as a kid I was always more of a prose guy than a comic reader (with the exception of having every Calvin and Hobbes and Far Side comic memorized) there were actually two Catholic comics that I had as a kid (I think a gift from one of my godparents) which I read enough times that I still have images from them bubble up in my mind when I read about the life of St. Francis or of John Paul II (the wonders of the internet: I haven't seen them in decades but herethey are.) So I'm conscious of how a well-done comic on a religious topic can be surprisingly formative even for a kid who's quite willing to read prose as well.



Paul: Tarsus to Redemption (Volume 1) is definitely written with a manga artistic influence, even sporting some Japanese characters on the front cover. Indeed, at first I flipped to the back assuming this would read back to front like traditional manga, but in this case manga is an influence, not a mimic. I'd put the art style as somewhat in between an American and a Japanese one.

The story picks up Paul as a young firebrand, the protege of a wise rabbi, but unwilling to listen to the rabbi's words of caution and peace. Paul's best friend is a converted Roman soldier, and the two of them are committed to protecting God's Truth from the perversions of the sect of the carpenter, by the sword if necessary.

We see Paul and his young firebrand friends taking it to the Christians, and in the early pages they have a violent altercation with a Christian man in front of his family which sets up the stage for regret and character conflict later in the story.

Soon enough, Paul and his droogies are tearing off towards Damascus for a bit more ultraviolence, when he's struck from his horse and hears the voice of God, thus beginning a journey of conversion and repentance.

After his conversion, we see Paul struggle with the knowledge of his own past violence, the feelings of betrayal that his firebrand friends have, the suspicion of the Christian community, and even what looks like a potential love interest.

Tarsus to Redemption works hard at making Paul's conflicts immediate and emotional, and fleshing out the story of his conversion into something that will be compelling to young readers. (I'd put the intended readership at perhaps 11-14, though our eight-year-old sat engrossed in it for some time, and I don't think it's inappropriate for young readers.)

The storytelling is a times rather telegraphic; I had a hard time reconciling the timeframe in some of the Jerusalem to Damascus and back again storyline. This is definitely not an overly talky comic, and Paul (like many a sensitive male anime character) spends his share of time staring darkly into the middle distance.

One story choice that struck me as a little surprising was the invention of an entirely fictional incident involving killing a Christian man rather than using the actual story of St. Stephen, at whose stoning Acts places Paul. That struck me as a bit of a missed opportunity in regards to helping kids reading this learn the Biblical story of Paul.

However, the story is definitely fast paced, and will keep a young reader riveted for an hour or two. The creators are planning at least two more volumes to complete the story of Paul, and are also launching a manga series about Judith.

Book Review: Valkyrie

Valkyrie, The Story of the Plot to Kill Hitler, by its Last Member is a fascinating book, though not primarily for reading about the Valkyrie plot itself. Other books have been written specifically about the plot, and I would imagine that from some of them you could find far more details about the plot itself. This book, a narrative of Philipp von Boeselager's wartime experiences as he told them to Florence Fehrenbach (herself the granddaughter of another of the Valkyrie conspirators) a year before his von Boeselager's death in 2008, is in many ways too close and personal a story to give the reader the most detailed possible understanding of the plot as a whole. So long as the reader understands this, Valkyrie is a fascinating window on the experiences of an honorable young man caught up in the Third Reich.

The son of an old Catholic family of minor nobility with a tradition of military service, Philipp credits his resistance to Nazi ideology in part to his school headmaster, Fr. Rodewyck, who had served as a German officer in the Great War before going into the Jesuits, and whom von Boeselager credits with having taught his young charges a German patriotism which was rooted in Christianity.

Philipp's nearest older brother Georg (there were nine von Boeselager children, of which Philipp was the fifth) went into the cavalry, and when it came time for Philipp to do the same in 1936, he followed his brother, in part on the advice of a relative who advised him that if he followed his first desire and entered the diplomatic service he would have to become a Nazi. Sheltered in the closed society of cavalry officer training, von Boeselager says he barely heard of Pius XI's Mit brennender Sorge and never read it, and although he and his fellow cadets where shocked at the newspaper accounts of Kristallnacht, they remained for some under the illusion that it was something "the authorities" would surely punish.

As the above demonstrates, Philipp and George were not at all political. Indeed, in many ways their reactions to the coming of war seem startlingly naive from our vantage point. Both young men are heavily focused on hunting and riding, with George in particular going going out hunting for a couple hours at dawn most mornings throughout the war. Something I found surprising reading the book was the extent of the use of cavalry in the Wehrmacht in World War II. I had known that despite their mechanized self (and public) image the German army in fact used horses much more heavily than the Allies for transport. I had not realized, however, that German cavalry were deployed in thousands both as reconnaissance and as mobile skirmishers, first on the Western Front against France, and then on the Eastern Front against the Soviet Union. As the Eastern Front bogs down in rain and mud in 1941, the cavalry troops are some of the only ones able to cover large amounts of ground quickly.

At times one finds those small moments of quiet and humanity which remind us that the soldiers on both sides of a war are much alike, especially in wanting to live to see their families again. As the French surrender is nearing in 1940, Philipp is ordered to take a village occupied by French troops. Having heard rumors that France and Germany are about to announce a cease fire, Philipp goes forward and under a while flat and talks to the French commander, who knows nothing about a cease fire but says he has been ordered to hold the village until 7:00 PM and then retreat. Philipp agrees not to move his unit forward until the French has left, in order to avoid bloodshed -- going to far as to threaten to shoot the commander of another unit who comes up and wants to attack the village before the French leave.

The Lieutenant colonel exploded with anger. But seeing the pistol pointed at him, and seeing that I looked as though I was actually prepared to shoot him, he yielded. The French battalion was saved. Everything went as planned, without a drop of blood being shed. Few people knew what had happened, and we tried to keep it quiet. But we were unable to keep the news from circulating among the staffs. The story became almost a legend -- in some versions, I actually fired. Fortunately, as the anecdote spread and became distorted, the names of the two people involved were forgotten. In any case, until the end of the war Doege and I took care to avoid each other. (p. 34)

In 1941-1942 Philipp, now serving on the Eastern Front, already found himself turning against the Nazi regime, and had become acquinted with Achim Oster and Henning von Tresckow, the officer who would be the initiator of the assassination plan which came to its tragic end in June, 1944. However, Philipp marks his decisive turning point as coming in the summer of 1942 when, having been sounded and assigned to staff duties, he is given a report by an SS officer whose unit is operating in army territory. (The SS and the regular army did not get along well, and the activities of the SS were generally restricted to areas to the rear of the army, while their actions were supposed to be limited within army territory.) Mixed in with reports of actions against groups of armed partisans, von Boeselager finds the terse but sinister entry, "Special treatment for five Gypsies." He took his concerns to Field Marshal Kluge, for whom he was serving as an aide.

I was present at the discussion between Bach-Zelewski and Kluge. They talked first about the guerrillas: how to limit their range, how to eliminate them from the countryside, and especially how to secure the vital connections with Germany. A discreet reminder on my part, once the technical presentation was complete, caused Kluge rather abruptly to ask the SS officer, "Oh, by the way, I was about to forget: What do you mean in your report by 'special treatment'? You apparently gave 'special treatment' t five Gypsies."

"Those? We shot them!"

"What do you mean, shot them?! Following a trial before a military tribunal?"

"No, of course not! All the Jews and Gypsies we pick up are liquidated -- shot!"

The marshal and I were both taken aback. I felt the kind of internal dislocation and devastation that leads to panic. Obviously, we sensed that something was wrong. Kluge could not have been unaware that crimes, major crimes, had been committed in areas under his authority. Still, we had attributed them to the uncontrolled excesses of the SS. But here was Bach-Zelewski stating a doctrine of extermination as though it were perfectly natural. What we had taken for terrible blunders were, in reality, part of a coherent, premeditated plan.
...
Kluge was not a man to temporize. He immediately called General Franz Halder of the Army General Staff. Leaving aside pointless humanitarian and legal arguments, Kluge tried to prove the inanity of this enterprise, which stiffened resistance instead of breaking it. The only positive result of his energetic complains was that we no longer heard about Bach-Zelewski. Perhaps he simply stopped reporting his barbaric acts.

This incident changed my view of the war. I was disgusted and afraid. I had already had occasion to wonder about the meaning of this conflict, its strategic pertinence, and the Fuhrer's tactics. Through friends in my division's reserve battalion who had been sent t Stargard shortly after the invasion of Poland, I had heard rumors about the crimes committed byt eh SS in the conquered areas. We were surprised not so much by the rumors -- there were so many young men without morals in the SS units -- as by the perpetrators' complete impunity. We told ourselves that this could not go on for long; we considered these atrocities, which were probably but never proven, to be isolated events.

Henceforth, I had the proof of the abomination before my eyes.... (p79-81)

von Boeselager confided his new disgust with the regime to Tresckow, who proved to have turned to the resistance as a result of hearing about a much larger SS atrocity. Tresckow was now the center of one of several groups of mid and high ranking German officers who were disillusioned with the war, disgusted with the Nazis, and seeking some way to end the Fuhrer's life and the war. Philipp and George both found themselves in this circle, many of whom were from an aristocratic background and also practicing Christians.

It is difficult to describe a man's faith without descending into hagiographical platitudes. Henning von Tresckow was inhabited by an ardent piety that he was not afraid to express. For Christmas 1942, the general command of the Wehrmacht had forbidden any celebration. Nazi officers had been assigned to see to the observance of this injunction. Thus, it was more surprising when Tresckow came silently forward among his men, flanked by Georg Schulze-Buttger and Hans-Ulrich von Oertzen. The operations officer read the Christmas gospel just as he would have done amid his own family. I had informed Kluge of what Tresckow was going to do; thus the marshal had come to the junior officers' mess solely to provide cover for his subordinate. It was a true Christian Christmas, to the joy of the overwhelming majority. (p. 97)

In the spring of 1943 Tresckow's group, now including both Georg and Philipp von Boeselager made three attempts on Hitler's life, but all three were either called off at the last minute, or failed. A plan for several officers to shoot the Fuhrer at close range as he toured the mess hall was canceled because Himmler, originally traveling with Hitler, left, and the conspirators feared a civil war if Hitler was killed but Himmler survived. On another occasion, a crate full of explosives (prepared by Philipp) was smuggled into the cargo hold of Hitler's airplane, but failed to detonate at altitude.

In the fall of 1943, Georg and Philipp were both wounded, and spent much of the winter in and out of hospital. Conditions on the Eastern Front were deteriorating, and by the time the actual assassination attempt (with Stauffenberg's valise full of explosives which injured but did not kill Hitler) is made, the military situation is on the point of collapse. George and Philipp's cavalry units are sent rushing towards Berlin to help provide military backing to the coup planned to follow the assassination, and then have to turn and rush back towards the front lines (luckily masked by the chaos of the Russian advance) when word comes that Hitler was not killed in the attempt.

In the glum silence punctuated by the clip-clop of the horses' hooves, I had plenty of time for reflection. I was obsessed by one question; was it still really necessary to carry out this assassination? Stauffenberg had asked the same question of Tresckow a few days before the attempt. Why should one risk one's life, and especially that of dozens of other people, when the military situation suggested that in a few months the dictatorship would be over? Tresckow responded forthrightly, as usual: "The assassination has to take place, whatever the cost. Even if it doesn't succeed, we have to try. Now it is no longer the object of the assassination that matters, but rather to show the whole world, and history, that the German resistance movement dared to gamble everything, even at the risk of its own life. All the rest, in the end, is merely secondary." (p. 159-160)

A great many of the conspirators did pay with their lives for that place in history. Stauffenberg was executed by firing squad. A number of other conspirators were hanged. Tresckow and Field Marshal Kluge both took their own lives before the SS could do it for them. Georg was killed in action. The most unusual and fascinating fate of the one of the conspirators is as follows:

On August 17th, 1944, Fabian von Schlabrendorff was arrested. Tortured at length by the Gestapo, he did not give us away.... Under torture, his legal training came out. He raised procedural issues, and during a hearing he objected to the illegality of the treatment meted out to prisoners. Two of his ribs had been broken in interrogation; he created turmoil in the courtroom by displaying his injury. The prosecution was taken aback, and the trail had to be suspended. Then Schlabrendorff had a real stroke of luck: the courthouse was bombed, and his judicial dossier was lost in the ruins, along with the presiding judge, the infamous Roland Freisler, who had been carrying it. Asked afterward why he had been arrested and then interned, he replied that he was accused of "illegally slaughtering cattle." He was put in a concentration camp and then transferred, along with General Franz Halder and former French prime minister Leon Blum, to South Tyrol. After being freed by American troops, he returned to civilian life and resumed his work as a jurist; in 1967 he was appointed to the German constitutional court. He died in 1980. (p. 170-171)

However, somehow, word of Philipp's involvement in the plot never got out. He made it his business for the rest of the war to keep his cavalrymen out of action as much as possible and bring them home alive.

As a first person narrative, Valkyrie provides a unique glimpse into the experiences of a group of men who tried to follow the dictates of their honor and their faith in one of the most chaotic and horrific periods in the last century. It's a fairly quick read, and definitely a worthwhile one for those with an interest in the period.

Interview with Alphonse Creator Matthew Lickona

I posted a while back about the publication of Alphonse, a graphic novel written by Matthew Lickona and drawn by Chris Gugliotti. I've since had a chance to read Alphonse, Issue One and enjoyed it. It's an off-beat and dark story, but a very evocative one. Alphonse's mother is a serious druggie -- long in denial about the fact she is pregnant. When she shows up at a women's health clinic, 34 weeks pregnant, she insists that she can't go through with the pregnancy, and a doctor agrees to provide an abortion and hysterectomy. However, Alphonse is not your ordinary, helpless child of 34 weeks gestation. He is, through fate or the harsh mix of chemicals his mother's habits have exposed him to, aware of her thoughts and his danger, and also unusually coordinated for his size and age.

In the first issue we see his escape from the abortion clinic, and his rescue by a pro-life protester who takes him home and begins to nurse him through the withdrawal which removal from his mother's chemical habits causes. A man of action despite standing under twenty inches tall, Alphonse seems poised to bring about changes in the intersecting lives of a number of characters.

Alphonse is not a political cartoon or simple message book. It is a gritty fantasy told in a macabrely inventive visual style -- using a fantastic situation to explore a topic which is often considered radioactive in our society. Abortion is a topic which many seek to pigeonhole quietly by declaring a "tragedy". Alphonse seeks to be the Macbeth to this tragedy -- bloody, bold and resolute.

Author Matthew Lickona agreed to answer a set of questions for me in order to provide you with this interview.

Q: How did the idea for Alphonse come to you, and what can you tell us about where the story is going?

A: My inspiration for Alphonse actually came from another comic character: Gary Cangemi’s Umbert the Unborn. I think I first encountered him in The National Catholic Register. Cangemi had created Umbert to manifest the personhood of the fetus, and to that end, he had endowed the little guy with reason, will, and a pretty thorough understanding of the outside world. In particular, Umbert knew about legalized abortion.

Umbert was (and remains) a cheerful fellow. But he got me to thinking: what if it were true? What if there really was a sentient fetus, suspended upside down in the dark, barely able to move, completely dependent on its mother for sustenance and care, and constantly aware of the fact that, at any moment, it could be killed? That if Mom made the fateful choice, there was nothing - not even the law - standing between it and violent death? Month after month in the dark, wondering when the axe might fall. What would that experience be like? What would it do to a person? >Alphonse was born out of that question.

Where is the story going? Well, by the end of issue one, Alphonse has survived the attempt on his life, and the fallout from his escaping the abortion clinic is just beginning to ensue. Issue two is largely about that fallout, and the ways that the various characters deal with it. We get a little more insight into the cause and nature of Alphonse's character and condition, and the wheels are set in motion that will eventually bring about the climax in issue five.

Q: Did the comic book genre seem to come naturally from the subject matter? I've got to admit, I'm not normally a comic book reader (nor a comic strip reader since Calvin & Hobbes and The Far Side left the funny pages) but as I read the first issue of Alphonse I couldn't really picture it as just prose.

A: Yes. Comic books land on the storytelling continuum somewhere between prose and movies, and I think that in Alphonse's case, that's a good thing.

I mean, you could make a movie out of the story, but it would have to be animated - I think a CGI preemie scurrying around the screen amid live actors would be just too darned creepy. It would overwhelm the story, and just freaking people out is not my goal. Animation provides a level of abstraction from reality that would render Alphonse a little more tolerable, I think.

But comic books, which abstract the images from motion, provide an even further remove, and my hope is that such abstraction serves to dampen the horror to the point where the story can come through clearly.

As for prose, I suppose I could have written things out, but it would have been a lot harder to keep from getting too heavy-handed. (I'm sure some people think the comic is heavy-handed as it is.) Take, for example, the montage on page four. I think that by the time I finished describing Mom's doodle of the monster sperm attacking the fleeing egg, the nightmare image of the abortion machine, the ominous and demanding abortion protestors, and the way they serve to chain Mom to this baby that terrifies her, the reader's eyes would be glazing over, and the hope for an engaged conversation between author and reader would be lost. In comic form, the whole thing can be taken in pretty quickly - Alphonse's connection to his mother's drug-fueled dreams is established, and we can move along without belaboring the point.

HOWEVER, these reasons are, to some extent, justifications after the fact. The truth is, my older brother collected comics when he was a teenager, and I read every issue he bought, many of them more than once. I found some of the stories - Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli's BATMAN: YEAR ONE, for example - deeply affecting and memorable, and that may be part of the reason why I never placed comics among the things of childhood that one ought to put away. Suffice it to say that when Alphonse first came to me, he came to me as an illustration. Maybe that's because he was inspired by Umbert. Maybe it's because I have been privy to so much back-and-forth about the use of graphic images in the abortion debate. Or maybe it's just because I like comics.

Q: Given the subject matter, I'm curious whether your illustrator is someone with a Catholic or pro-life background. What did he think of the project when you introduced it to him?

A: You know, I'm hesitant to speak for my artist on this one. But I will say that he wasn't interested in doing a piece of propaganda - which was good, because I wasn't, either. I'm pretty sure he signed on because he read the script and thought it was a good story.

Q: Any particular illustration stylistic influences? Two things really struck me, though they may be totally my own thinking: The cover looks like a horror-show version of the cover of Angel in the Waters (which I read to my kids a bunch of times when we were expecting our youngest) and Alphonse's hat, overalls and scalpel look in some of the pictures you've posted reminds me Boondocks.

A: Angel in the Waters - ha! That's awesome, in a sort of scary way. I actually approached Ben Hatke, who illustrated Angel in the Waters, about this project way back before I found Chris (needless to say, it didn't work out). But no - Hatke's book was not a source. Chris sent me a lineup of six cover possibilities, and we went with this one for a number of reasons, some of them having to do with the starkness of the image, and the way it presented Alphonse as an isolated figure (even as he is connected to Mom via the umbilical cord). Ultimately, I think it came down to drama and simplicity.

As for the overalls and hat image - that was just my first rendering of Alphonse, for better or for worse. I don't think Chris ever saw it. I get what you're saying about Boondocks, but it wasn't a direct inspiration. I first fell in love with Chris's work because some of the stuff on his website reminded me of Bill Sienkiewicz, one of my very favorite comic book artists - though Chris's style is obviously very much his own. I gave Chris descriptions and characteristics, and he took it from there.

Q: What's the reaction to the book been? Has it been covered at all by secular comics sites?

A: Reaction has been varied, and it's come mostly from other Catholics. Some have understood the project right off and thought it worthwhile, others have expressed concern that the central premise will prove too radioactive, that it will prevent the story from getting through. Some, I think, have simply found it puzzling. Plenty of folks have simply kept silent, and I won't venture to guess at why.

I am just now beginning the push to secular comics sites. The comics market is extremely crowded, and I think for a project like this - self published, and dealing with a difficult subject - to attract any notice, it's going to have to have something of an established fanbase. Most of the media people I know are involved with the Catholic press, so I've started there in my effort to build support and find an audience. Also, it seemed to me that a story like this might be dear to the Catholic heart - particularly if that Catholic heart was fond of the grotesque scenarios found in Flannery O'Connor. I don't want to preach to the choir here - I don't want to preach, period - but I thought maybe the choir would find it worth singing about.

Q: Though I don't want to overplay the evangelization aspect of this (who was it who said, "If you want to send a message, use Western Union"?) but what do you want people to come away from Alphonse with -- but as a Catholic and as an author more generally?

A: My fondest hope is that this is a story that will linger in the reader's mind after he or she has finished it and walked away.

I could say that I'd like it to give readers an enlarged sense of the world, but that's awfully hifalutin.

I could say that I'd like it to give readers on both sides a better sense of the opposition - and if the characters are actually characters, as opposed to cardboard cutouts; if the story really is a story, as opposed to propaganda, then it's certainly possible it will have that effect. But that's more of a byproduct. It's not why I'm doing this.

So I'll stick with the lingering.

Q: This is partly a charitably funded project. How is it going so far and what do you still need to make Alphonse happen?

A: Well, issue one was funded mostly by donations from friends, family, and a couple of surprising sources, so that much has been a success. Issue two is, as of now, about $1300 away from being funded. Overall, I need about $17,000 to finish the project. The story really works best if you can take it in from start to finish all at once, so I keep hoping for a rich patron to come along and help me turn it into a single graphic novel. But barring that, I'll keep begging and scraping to get the issues out one at a time. I'm not picky. With any luck, the issues will start to catch on, and I can use the proceeds to help fund what remains.



As of now, 39 backers have pledged $3,283 towards the $4,600 cost of getting Alphonse Issue Two produced. There is just over a week left to the fund drive. To contribute and track progress visit the Kickstarter page for Alphonse here. You can purchase copies of Alphonse for $2.99/ea plus shipping from IndyPlanet.

Book Review: Empires of Trust (Part II)

[Empires of Trust, review Part I]

Review of: Empires of Trust: How Rome Built--and America Is Building--a New World

My apologies for taking so long to get back with a second part to this review. In the first installment, I covered the history of Rome's early expansion, and how its commitment to establishing a safe horizon of allies, and defending those allies against any aggression, led the city of Rome to effectively rule all of Italy. From southern Italy, Rome was drawn into Sicily, which in turn made it a threat to Carthage and drew those two superpowers of the third century BC into a series of wars that would end with the total destruction of Carthage as a world power.

With the power of Carthage effectively neutralized after the end of the Second Punic War in 201 BC, Rome immediately became an attractive ally for states throughout the world which sought a superpower ally. That same year, ambassadors from Pergamum and Rhodes arrived in Rome seeking aide against two of the major Hellenistic kings who had recently made an alliance, Philip V of Macedon and Antiochus III of the Seleucid Empire (based in modern Syria). Since the time of Alexander the Great (125 years before) the Eastern Mediterranean had been dominated by several large and incredibly wealthy Hellenistic kingdoms. The more ancient Greek city states were in the main still free, but were no match for the military power of the Hellenistic kingdoms ruled by Macedonian dynasties if they should exert themselves to conquer them.

The Romans admired Greek learning and culture, and also admired their ideals of freedom. However, it was next to impossible to argue that the Macedonians and Seleucids presented any danger at all to Rome, and there was controversy in the Roman senate as to whether agreeing to help the Greeks would be legal, given the requirements in Roman Law that only defensive wars be fought. The case for a "defensive" war against the Hellenistic kingdoms was pretty tenuous, but those who idealized the freedom of ancient city states such as Athens won out, and Rome's legions landed in Greece where they handily defeated Philip in 200-197, driving Macedonian forces out of Greece.

Having expelled him from Greece, the Romans left Philip in power in Macedonia, and in 196 issued a proclamation at the Isthmian Games declaring all the Greek city states (including those that had fought with Macedon against Rome) to be politically independent and free of any tributary obligations to Rome.

Book Review: Empires of Trust (Part I)

It may seem like overkill to write a multi-part book review, but historian Thomas F. Madden's new Empires of Trust: How Rome Built--and America Is Building--a New World explores a thesis I've been interested in for some time, which has significant implications for our country's foreign policy and the wider question of what our country is and what its place in the world ought to be.

The US has been often accused, of late, of being an empire. Madden effectively accepts that this is the case, but argues that this is not necessarily a bad thing at all. Among his first projects is to lay out three different types of empire: empires of conquest, empires of commerce, and empires of trust.

An empire of conquest is one spread by military power, in which the conquering power rules over and extracts tribute from the conquered. Classic examples would include the empires of the Assyrians, Persians, Mongols, Turks, Alexander's Hellenistic empire, Napoleon's empire and to an extent the Third Reich, Imperial Japan and Soviet Union. Empires of conquest are spread by war, and conquered territory is ruled either by local puppet rulers or by a transplanted military elite from the conquering power.

An empire of commerce is interested only in securing enough of a political foothold in its dominions to carry on trade, and is less concerned over political control or tribute. Examples would include the British and Dutch empires; in the ancient world the Pheonicians and Athenians; and later, medieval Venice. Empires of commerce are typified by a network of far-flung colonies directly controlled by the home country, at locations which are strategic for exploiting natural resources or trading with regional powers. They are less focused on conquering large swathes of territority than with controlling enough of a foothold (and enforcing enough stability in the surrounding area) to carry on their commerce.

The book, however, is primarily concerned with a third type of empire, the empire of trust, of which Madden gives only two examples: Rome and the United States. The term "empire of trust" itself requires some unpacking. Madden explains:

By that I mean that they were not only trusted by friends and foes alike with a responsible use of power, but that their empire itself came about as a direct result of that trust. Many people have an image of the Romans as lords of a brutal Empire of Conquest, built by marching legions crushing all opposition to them. That is wrong. As numerous scholarly histories of Roman expansion have made clear, the image of the Romans as brutal conquerors does not reflect the actual dynamics at work at all. The simple fact is that the Romans acquired their empire slowly and with great reluctance. As the Roman historian Ernst Badian once remarked, conquest is history's norm and requires no explanation. "What does call for an explanation, when it appears in history, is that relatively high level of sophistication that rejects opportunities for the expansion of power." It was actually that rejection that made the Romans seem trustworthy to others, that formed the basis of their Empire of Trust. The Romans did not want an empire, which is precisely why they got one.
Empires of Trust, (page 5) [emphasis in original]

"Trust" and "empire" are not two words usually heard together, and Madden's interpretation runs contrary to most popular perceptions of the Roman Empire, so most of the first few chapters are spend on a review of Roman culture and history, and how Rome became a world power. In this project, Madden relies heavily on Roman primary sources: Livy, Polybius, Dio Cassius, Appian, Cicero, Josephus, Tacitus, etc.

Among the cultural values identified as leading to Rome's empire of trust are listed its strong (indeed, literally religious) emphasis on the household as the essential social building block, an ideal of small farmer citizen-statesman, a strong emphasis on martial skill and duty, a suspicion of kingship and absolute rule, and a basic isolationism combined with a fierce desire to secure the horizon in order to keep the homeland safe from invasion -- something which became a near obsession for Rome after the Gauls sacked it in 390BC, and their care resulted in Rome not being entered by a foreign army again for 800 years, until 410AD.

In the wake of the Gaulic invasion of 390BC, Rome was the greatest military power in central Italy (the Etruscans, who a century or two before had dominated over Rome, never really recovered from the attack). However, the Rome of 390BC was little more than a large-is city state. In an effort to provide security against future attacks, the Romans formed tight alliances with the city states surrounding them. There was much strife between neighboring city states in the wake of the Gaulic invasion, and as Rome established or re-established treaties with the surrounding city states in Latium (central Italy), it defended it's allies in a series of local wars. The end result was a Latin League of city states, tied together by all their individual treaties with Rome, and thus prevented from falling into war with each other since Rome would protect any ally that was attacked.

This Latin League fielded a strong enough joint military force that it repelled subsequent Gaulic attacks, but Rome's obvious power over the confederation (although it was theoretically composed of equal states) resulted in a rebellion/civil war in 340BC. Rome won this war with the Latin League, but rather than anexing the conquered cities it re-accepted them as allies with independant local government, though in the process Rome developed a sliding scale of alliances which bound different allies to Rome with varying levels of political unity.

The closest Latin towns would receive Roman citizenship, with full voting rights and the right to run for Roman offices. Although they maintained local state governments, the big decisions for the region were made in Rome. Others, particularly non-Latin allies, were given citizenship without voting rights. They, too, supported the common military and allowed Rome to deal with matters of warfare and foreign affairs, but they retained more local autonomy. The lowest rung were "equal allies" who were not citizens, but could do business with Romans, although not with others without Rome's approval.
(page 75)

With the rebellion of the Latin League behind it, Rome resumed it's policy of forming alliances at the frontiers, and then defending those new allies in any wars. With Rome's military prowess established, city states on the edge of its sphere of influence began to seek out Rome as an ally, thus drawing Rome into more quarrels. In 343BC, Capua formed an alliance with Rome in order to get aid against the Samnite hill peoples. In 327BC, the Greek city (Greeks had established colonies throughout southern Italy and Sicily in the centuries prior) of Neapolis (modern Naples) was in a state of civil war. One faction brought in a Samnite garrison to support them, the other sought an alliance with Rome, which the Senate granted, expelling the Samnite garrison and adding Neapolis to the growing list of Roman allies.

Pick up any history of the Roman Republic and there is one phrase that you will find over and over again: "They appealed to Rome for aid." Those six words explain the central dynamic by which the Romans expanded. A people would get into trouble. They would appeal to Rome for aid. The Romans would agree, gaining a new ally, but also a new war into the bargain.
(page 78)

In 285-275BC, Rome's alliance with the small city of Thurii in southern Italy drew them into conflict with the major Greek city of Tarentum, further south in the boot of Italy, when the Tarentines assaulted and sacked Thurii. The Tarentines employed the famous Greek general Pyrrhus, who landed with a professional army of 25,000 men and twenty war elephants. Pyrrhus won several incredibly costly victories (giving us the phrase "Pyrrhic victory") but was eventually beaten and driven from Italy by Rome and her Latin allies. This show of force soon brought all of southern Italy into alliance with Rome, but that in turn made Sicily Rome's next doorstep, and drew Rome into the ongoing war between the north African kingdom of Carthage and the Greeks inhabiting Sicily.

It should start to become obvious the sorts of similarities which Madden sees to the experiences of the United States in the 20th and 21st centuries. Take, for instance, one recent series of events. In 1990, Iraq invades Kuwait, a minor American ally (but one with a major natural resource) who in turn applied to the US for assistance, along with neighbors such as Saudi Arabia. The US leads a large coalition (which in fact consisted mainly of US troops) in liberating Kuwait, and in return is given garrisons in both Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Iraq continues to flout the treaty that ended the war, and the American presence in the region is used as a pretext for terrorist attacks against the US by Al Qaeda, which is under the protection of the Taliban government of Afghanistan. The US invades both Afghanistan and Iraq (again with the help of a number of allies, though their numerical contribution is small) and attempts to turn them into independent allied governments. However, this in turn increases tensions with/in the neighboring countries of Iran and Pakistan, with the danger that the US and Iran may be drawn into a war, or that the US-ally government of Pakistan will be overthrown by an anti-US faction, resulting in war there.

As with the Romans, territory is not being conquered and then ruled by the empire of trust itself, but once a major power gains a reputation for being willing to go to war to protect allies while leaving them essentially independent, there comes to be a draw on the power which pulls its security horizon out further and further until it either meets its match or -- as in the case of the US by 1990AD and of Rome by 150BC -- becomes the world's sole superpower. In this process, what eventually creates the "pull" which drives expansion of the empire is the trust that it will defend its allies against all external threats while allowing them to retain their autonomy in all things other than hurting the empire or other allies. This, combined with a track record for turning former enemies into allies, provided every reason to work with Rome, and few reasons to fight against it.

Clearly the Romans did believe that defeated enemies should be treated with respect and dignity. More than that, as we shall see, the Romans, like Americans, were famous for making friends out of enemies, rebuilding and restoring them after militarily defeating them. As the Roman statesman Cicero once noted, "By defending our allies our people have gained the whole world." [De re publica, 3.25] Empires of Trust,(page 11)

[Two more installments of this review to come.]

Book Review: The Death of a Pope

Out today from Ignatius Press is The Death of a Pope, a new novel by Piers Paul Read, a mainstream novelist (his survival novel Alive about a rugby team whose plane crashes in the Andes topped the New York Times bestseller list when it came out 25 years ago, and was later made into a film) who has also written both fiction and nonfiction on Catholic themes. He wrote a popular history of the templars a few years back, and On the Third Day, a thriller about the discovery in modern Israel of a crucified skeleton that some allege to be proof that Christ did not rise from the dead.

I had not read any of Read's previous books, but when Ignatius emailed me and offered me a review copy, the premise of the novel sounded interesting and I could not resist the lure of a free book. However, I did not initially expect much of it, my idea of modern "Catholic thrillers" having been formed by the likes of Pierced By A Sword, whose prose style treads that delicate line between incompetent and downright laughable.

However, I need not have feared. Read's prose is deft and indeed literary, though the modern device of using present tense narrative to convey immediacy is not necessarily my cup of tea. Those inclined to literary snobbery will not find themselves holding their noses as they read this novel by any stretch. The less pretentious reader will enjoy the fast-paced plot, which whisks him from a terrorist trial in London, to the refugee camps of Uganda, the chemistry labs of Cairo and at last to the 2005 papal conclave.

Juan Uriarte is an former Jesuit, who left the priesthood 20 years before in order to join the FMLN guerrilla army and fight the El Salvadoran government. Now he works for Misericordia International, a Catholic charitable organization which among its other work is helping to provide medical aide to refugees in Sudan and Uganda. We first meet him, however, in a British court, where he stands accused of having contacted members of the Basque ETA and the IRA with an eye to purchasing sarin nerve gas. The Crown alleges that he was doing this with an eye towards some terrorist attack. Uriarte claims that he never intended to use it against other humans, but rather against the horses and camels of the Sudanese militias who are slaughtering the refugees his organization is trying to help.

The ex-priest manages to escape conviction because the jury does not consider it beyond a reasonable doubt that he had terrorist intent, and so begins an increasingly fast paced search for the truth about Uriarte's intentions, as the Polish-English Mi5 agent who originally brought him in and a female reporter who finds herself attracted to Uriarte's passion for those suffering in the world both seek to understand what is really going on. Along the way we meet the reporter's uncle, a traditionalist English priest with friends in Rome; and a papabile Dutch cardinal whose one great fear is that his brief and unsuccessful pass at a fellow seminarian will be revealed to a media already ravening after the clergy abuse scandals that had rocked the US and Europe.

This is clearly an insider view of Catholicism, not the sort of outsider sensationalism so often found in movies and thrillers. Read's characters have the strengths and weaknesses of their types. Though I'd certainly take Read as being more on the traditional (or at least orthodox) side of the spectrum, his traditional Catholics are not saints, nor his progressive Catholics devils.

One of the things I found both interesting and realistic about the book is that while the thriller plot itself is brought to a close, and disaster averted, none of the characters actually have a fully accurate understanding of what's going on. They successfully uncover and thwart the plot despite some basic misunderstandings in their theories.

The Death of a Pope is an enjoyable and fast-paced read. If you're looking for a fun summer read, with a Catholic backdrop, you could do far worse. For my own part, I think I'll be looking up a few of Read's other novels.

Historical Delusion

I just finished reading Norman Cantor's Alexander the Great: Journey to the End of the Earth. It's a short biography of Alexander (under 200 pages) which is hardly intended to compete with the massive volumes by Green, Fox and others written over the last sixty years. It is, however, written in the erudite yet playful and accessible style which made Cantor's textbooks on Ancient and Medieval history some of the most downright enjoyable college level textbooks I ever encountered. (His classic The Medieval World has apparently been replaced by The Civilization of the Middle Ages which I haven't read, but I remember the former fondly and would certainly give the latter a try.)

The book on Alexander was apparently the last that Cantor wrote before he died and was published posthumously. Unfortunately, it is marred by one glaring mistake in the first couple pages: it refers to the wars between the classical Greeks and the Persian Empire as the "Peloponnesian War", when the Peloponnesian war was in fact the war between the Athenians and Spartans several decades later. One could wish that his estate had treated the draft to a proofread by another academic rather than simply sending it off to be printed.

Besides this one lapse, which put me off on rather the wrong foot with the book, it's an enjoyable and accessible read. I'd certainly recommend it for an interested high school student, or any interested adult with little background and little time but wanting to get a feel for Alexander and Hellenistic civilization.

In my momentary loss of faith after reading the first few pages, however, I went and looked up the Amazon reviews of the book. These were rather mixed. Many faulted it for not being a long and scholarly biography -- which strikes me as unsurprising given the book's diminutive size. One, however, was very much a hoot. The reader loved the book, but in great part because he thought it underlined how much greater a leader Alexander the Great was than George Bush:

Alexander, like Achilles, Caesar, King Arthur, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, embodies the spirit of the times and the people of their eras. Alexander and Achilles were heroic; Caesar and Arthur were innovators; Lincoln and Churchill gave words to enhance the decency of great nations.

Lincoln, to cite an example, did not invent democracy in America. However, when he defined democracy as government "of the people, by the people, for the people", he greatly sharpened and enhanced already existing attitudes. Alexander did the same in his time; he did not invent war, but he set an ideal seldom matched and thus established the warrior ideal for much of the Mediterannean. King Arthur does the same with his round table; Churchill gives credit to the British people for stopping Hitler.

Now, consider George Bush with his Texas swagger and flight suit while strutting across the deck of an aircraft carrier to announce "Mission Accomplished" as if he were a warrior. Alexander, in contrast to the coddled and well-protected life of Bush, survived numerous serious wounds acquired while leading his troops from the front. Whether it's Bush or Clinton or Reagan, there's a vast difference between Alexander and the perspiration and spin of today's leaders. As Canton aptly shows, it's why "the Great" title is retired.

Intended or not, there are numerous subtle parallels between ancient and modern events in the Near and Middle Easts. Alexander was successful because he responded immediately and brilliantly to local events rather than try to rule from afar; instead of being an ideologue, he worshiped every God he met along the route of his conquests.

Because he was handicapped by "faulty intelligence," when he reached Afghanistan and India he realized it was time to listen to his troops, then "cut and run". Why? To quote Cantor, "One of the old soldiers, a man named Coenis . . . . gave the speech of his life, ending with these words: 'Sir, if there is one thing above all others a successful man should know, it is when to stop'. Instead of trying to stay the course, Cantor says "Alexander sulked for two days but then tried to find a way to make this defeat appear to be a victory."

Cantor offers an intriguing psychological assessment of Alexander; not only was he "the supreme exemplar of that old pagan world" but he also knew how to sulk and then accept the will of his troops. Perhaps that is why there are no modern Alexanders; today we tend to look at his heroism, courage, strength and vision but overlook his ability to sulk.

Now, past question, Alexander was a leader of far greater stature and import to the history of civilization that President Bush. Don't question that for a moment. But that hardly means one would want to live in Alexander's empire or want modern politicians to emulate him. Alexander was, as Cantor amply shows, a man of great abilities, but also a more than borderline psychopath by any modern standard. Even Napoleon, another great leader in whose historical or geographic proximity I have no desire to be, would have been a far preferable leader to actually live under than Alexander.

Indeed, one of the things that interested me very much in Cantor's final chapter was his discussion of how Alexander was a quintessentially pagan figure -- and how the myth of Alexander was modified in the medieval period in order to adapt him to Christian heroic models. Which, in turn, makes me rather curious to dig up some time Fox's Pagans and Christians, which Cantor cites with approval.

Book Review: The History of Our World Beyond the Wave

I re-read a book last week, one which deserves to be rather better known that it is. The History of Our World Beyond the Wave is a fantasy of sorts, and a first novel, by R. E. Klein. Though it was, as I recall, very well reviewed when it came out in 1998, it was not, so far as I can tell, a commercial success. Perhaps that's not surprising for something as blessedly unclassifiable as this book.

The History is a fantasy of sorts, based on a situation which many might consider science fictional: In the first chapter a giant wave wipes out civilization across the entire globe, and leaves much of the earth under water. What follows, however, is not what those used to genre SF or F would expect at all. What Klein is attempting is perhaps best conveyed by the following set of excepts:

I looked up from my beer.
"What happened to the world?"
He reached into a deck drawer and withdrew a massive briar pipe and a worn leather pouch. Courteously offering me another pipe from the drawer, which I courteously refused, he spoke while he filled his pipe, tamping the tobacco as if punctuating his sentences.
"What happened? Why the ocean reared up on its hind legs as it was bound to do. So much was locked in reserve, frozen north and south in colossal refrigerators. Maybe it was an earthquake. maybe this old planet shifted on its axis. Maybe the whole blessed continent just sank. Does it really matter?"
"Matter, I said. "All the people--"
"Yes, many must have died, as we will sooner or later."
"Civilization?" I asked.
"It wasn't really civil, was it? Do you miss it?"
I made a movement as to speak, but he continued.
"Things don't last." He brought his cane down on the wooden floor. "Everything ends. We've had our Bach, our Socrates, our Saint Francis. They did their part to keep us sane and wholesome. Do you miss your childhood?"
I took another sip of beer.
...
He paused to relight his pipe. "Have you noticed that time is aberrant?"
"I tried to estimate the days since the Wave. I couldn't do it," I said.
He shook his head. "At first I marked a calendar, till the action seemed so futile that the threw the silly thing away." He swallowed a large mouthful and wiped his lips. "Things rarely operate in isolation. We have experienced catastrophic physical change; be prepared for metaphysical change. Your silver raft mate is an instance of what I mean -- or your head crabs. Anticipate more of the same. Expect to see sights stranger than you've imagined."
...
"I've read a lot of encounters with the so-called supernatural," I said. "No one takes them seriously."
"No," he said, "no one takes them seriously. The world is full of foreshadowings, of adumbrations and premonitions, of ghostly haunts and visitations -- but no one takes them seriously. They're all pressed down, veneered, overlaid by the lightbulbs and broad paved highways and wires that talk and tell people that existence is the accumulation of artificial lights and concrete highways and wires tingling with electricity. And people believe and feel safe and live sterile lives and lose the ability to think beyond man-made trash. But a big wave comes and washes away all the paved roads and shatters the lightbulbs, and the wires are silent, and the people are drowned. And the veneer dissolves like paste, and all the ghostly underpinnings rise to the surface, and you can't dispel them with bright lights, because you haven't got any; and you can't outrun them on your highways, because the highways are under water; and you can't talk them away with copper wires, because the electricity is gone.
"Soon you realize that the old-fashioned eerie beliefs are the real things, and all our boastful contrivances so much rubbish, and that you and everyone else have been hiding behind them, not so much because of the ghouls and the ghosts and the whole entourage of the twilight, but because you have been most terribly afraid of God.
"Hear me, that precious wave of ours has scoured this planet to the lithosphere, rinsing away all the drift and drabble and nasty little headachy things that drive men mad. No more income tax, inflation, and nagging uncertainties. No more lawyers, social workers and corporate executives. Hereafter people will live in a big way."

And it is this metaphysical change that the book is about. As survivors of the great wave congregate and begin to build a new society, and as the hero of the tale (a former English professor named Paul Sant) travels the strange world left behind by the wave, what we find is much more an examination of what we are, and how we got here, than any sort of realistic portrayal of a post disaster world. Those expecting a more realistic treatment will be about as disappointed as someone expecting C. S. Lewis' space trilogy to describe what it would really be like to travel to other planets.

The book is relatively short, and the plot itself is fairly simply, more episodic than linear. The literary style is a delight to read, and the book is packed with fascinating and at times disturbing images: A bear glimpsed at night wrestling with a giant squid on the seashore, legions of crabs whose photoluminescant shells look like human skulls marching up from the sea, strange and fierce amphibians named Gugs, a lemur who becomes a man to bring cynicism back to society, and a floating yellow Volkswagen which contains something utterly terrifying.

I highly recommend it.