Collected Miscellany

As a native Michigander (despite living in Ohio currently) I have always been interested in stories centered in that fine state (Elmore Leonard’s Mr. Paradise and Henry Kisor’s Season’s Revenge are two recent examples). Following up on this theme, I recently picked up a copy of Steve Hamilton’s award winning (1999 Edgar Award) debut novel A Cold Day in Paradise. Mystery fans might already be familiar with the Alex McKnight Mystery series that followed. Oddly enough, I bought the book at a bargain book store unaware of the series but lucked out in getting the author’s debut.

Like Season’s Revenge, this book involves the murder of a wealthy figure in a small town in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan but the similarities are only superficial. Cold Day in Paradise is more a hardboiled detective story where Season’s Revenge is procedural and sociological. Where Season’s Revenge has a sense of romance and an almost thoughtful tone, Cold Day in Paradise is cynical and foreboding. While I found the characters less than sympathetic, the story line was intriguing and the plot twists kept me in suspense right until the end. McKnight as a lead character didn’t grab me but the mystery was very well done.

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Growing up in Paris in the first decades of the twentieth century were two contented children from whose household all toys and dolls had been banned. It had been their mother’s intent to nurture their intellectual skills, and the gambit had obviously worked. The older child, Andre Weil, born in 1906, was solving the most advanced mathematical problems by the time he was nine; by the age of twelve he had taught himself classical Greek and Sanskrit and become an accomplished violinist. his sister, Simone, three years his junior, a strikingly beautiful girl with dark, limpid eyes, was reading the evening paper aloud to her family when she was five, and wold master Greek and several modern languages in her early teens. the siblings often communicated with each other in spontaneously rhymed couplets, or in ancient Greek.

— From the Penguin Lives volume on Simone Weil by Francine Du Plessix Gray

My childhood consisted mostly of riding my bike, climbing trees, playing sports and other physical activities. My brothers and I communicated mostly through spontaneous outbreaks of physical violence. In my defense, I was a voracious reader. My parents had a rule that allowed only 10 hours of TV a week. One hour during the week and 3 hours a day on the weekend (this was mostly to allow for football games). In order to be able to watch TV, however, we were required to read a book a month alternating fiction and non. The rule soon became moot for me as I read a great deal more than a book a month. My step-brother was not so inclined. I still remember seeing him at the end of each month furiously reading so he could watch TV. No foreign languages were spoken, however, and we never read the paper.

Via Romenesko by way of Maud, we learn that Sam Tanenhaus has been named editor of the New York Times Book Review. I am not the high brow literary type, but it seems a good thing to me (of course I may be biased in that I actually exchanged emails with him once – about this slate article, my response here). Tanenhaus is obviously intelligent and is at least willing to explore conservative people and ideas – see his acclaimed biography of Whitaker Chambers. What that will mean for the future is unclear. One thing that is disappointing, however, is that his work on a biography of William F. Buckley will be put on hold. I was really looking forward to read his take on WFB. I guess we will have to be satisfied with the autobiogrpahy coming out this summer.

This Guardian article on Stephen Unwin has brought the subject of his book, The Probability of God : A Simple Calculation That Proves the Ultimate Truth, out into the Blogosphere.

What I find so interesting/infuriating is how no one seems to have read the actual book but feels compelled to dismiss it outright. The author is a nuclear physicist after all, perhaps he thought about some possible objections to his idea and addressed them in the book? Maybe if you read the book you could actually judge the ideas and arguments fairly? What a concept!

In case you are interested I read the book and interviewed the author.

Great thinkers are always the ones that make us think harder for ourselves, not thinkers who do our thinking for us.

— Victor Reppert, C.S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea.

Interesting Op-Ed from David Brooks in the New York Times today. Brooks contrasts what he sees as the dogmatism of Mel Gibson’s The Passion with the narcissism of much of today’s culture. Specifically he criticizes Mitch Albom’s recent The Five People You Meet in Heaven:

In Albom’s book, God, to the extent that he exists there, is sort of a genial Dr. Phil. When you go to his heaven, friends and helpers come and tell you how innately wonderful you are. They help you reach closure. In this heaven, God and his glory are not the center of attention. It’s all about you. Here, sins are not washed away. Instead, hurt is washed away. The language of good and evil is replaced by the language of trauma and recovery. There is no vice and virtue, no moral framework to locate the individual within the cosmic infinity of the universe. Instead there are just the right emotions — Do you feel good about yourself? — buttressed by an endless string of vague bromides about how special each person is, and how much we are all mystically connected in the flowing river of life.

While I haven’t read Albom, I must say I am on Brooks’ side. Despite all the talk of valuing diversity, the cultural arbiters of American life fear the true believer. Much of mainstream culture prefers spirituality as therapy; they reject religion with hard edges and clear lines as offensive and divisive. As Brooks notes, this is the real danger:

Reading “The Five People You Meet in Heaven” is a sad experience because it conjures up a mass of people who, like its hero, feel lonely and unimportant. But instead of offering them the rich moral framework of organized religion or rigorous philosophy, instead of reminding them of the tough-minded exemplars of the Bible and history, books like Albom’s throw the seekers remorselessly back upon themselves . . . Americans in the 21st century are more likely to be divorced from any sense of a creedal order, ignorant of the moral traditions that have come down to us through the ages and detached from the sense that we all owe obligations to a higher authority.

Call me a reactionary if you will, but I think a great many of our social ills can be traced to this disconnect from authority and tradition.