Archives

Baker’s Dozen: Best Nonfiction I Read in 2018

Jan4

Old Friends by Tracy Kidder.

Unveiling Grace: The Story of How We Found Our Way out of the Mormon Church by Lynn K. Wilder.

Heaven Without Her: A Desperate Daughter’s Search for the Heart of Her Mother’s Faith by Kitty Foth-Regner.

Educated by Tara Westover. Tara Westover, either bravely or contemptibly, tells the story of her struggle to educate herself in the face of her father’s seeming mental illness and her mother’s obliviousness to the truth as well as Tara’s horrific abuse at the hands of her older brother.

The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women by Kate Moore. Female factory workers contract radiation poisoning from painting watch dials with self-luminous paint. This book tells the story of their struggle to survive and to obtain help and just compensation from the employers who knew the workers were being poisoned even as they generated large profits for the companies they served.

First Lady of the Theatre: Sarah Siddons by Molly Costain Haycraft. Ms. Siddons was “the best-known tragedienne of the 18th century.” This Messner biography tells the story of her life.

The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit by Michael Finkel.

In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom by Yeonmi Park. A harrowing story of escape from North Korea’s nationwide prison.

Sent to the River God Forgot by Jim and Janice Walton. Jim and Janice Walton translate the New Testament into the Muinane language in spite of many obstacles, both physical and cultural.

The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World by Charles C. Mann. An informative and insightful attempt to remain objective in reporting on two very different visions for saving the world: scientism versus environmentalism. Although both ways have pieces of the truth, I think there is a third way that combines the best of both worlds without their blind spots.

A Passion for the Impossible: The Life of Lilias Trotter by Miriam Huffman Rockness. A fascinating look at a fascinating woman. With the opportunity, according to her friend and mentor John Ruskin, to become a great and celebrated artist, Lilias Trotter instead chose to serve those least able to appreciate her gifts, the native people of Algeria. Did she waste her life and her talent? Read about her life and decide for yourself.

I’d Rather Be Reading: The Delights and Dilemmas of the Reading Life by Anne Bogel. Essays on the joys and trials of the reading life.

Proverbs by J. Vernon McGee. I like all of the commentaries in the Bible teaching series by Back to the Bible radio teacher, J. Vernon McGee.

Antonin Dvorak: Composer From Bohemia by Claire Lee Purdy

Sep8

Antonin Dvorak, b.September 8, 1841, d.May 1, 1904.

This biography for young adults, one of the series published by Julian Messner in 1950’s, begins with a delightful picture of composer Antonin Dvorak’s childhood in rural Bohemia (Czech Republic). The author paints a word picture of the village where Dvorak grew up, the son of a poor butcher and innkeeper father, but in a family and culture that highly valued music and dance and music-making. The story manages to incorporate a great deal of Czech history and some lovely folktales, and all in all the first third or even half of the book is a wonderful introduction to not only the composer and his music but also nineteenth century musical trends, Bohemian folk tales, the city of Prague, and the political difficulties of Bohemia under the rule of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

At about the halfway point, when as a reader I was already hooked, the narrative slowly devolved into a list of the places Dvorak went and the musical pieces he composed. Maybe the travel and the compositions were his life after he became famous. Nevertheless, I was impelled to read on because the first part was so interesting, and I quickly looked up some of Dvorak’s music on YouTube and played it as I read. Some of the most interesting tidbits that I gleaned:

1. Dvorak was achingly poor as a youth, the very picture of the impoverished artist. He had to wait eight years and pull himself up out of poverty in order to finally marry his fiancé. Eight years is a long engagement. Dvorak was 32 years old when he married his 19 year old bride. (Whoops! I guess there was more than one reason they had to wait eight years to get married. He certainly couldn’t have married her when she was eleven.)

2. Antonin and Anna Dvorak were married in 1873; by 1876 they had three children. In the spring of 1876 their eldest daughter died after a brief illness. In September their son died, and their second daughter died in October. Now, that’s a tragic story.

3. Anna and Antonin went on to have six more children, all of whom survived childhood and thrived. The oldest daughter, Otilie, became a composer like her father.

4. Dvorak wrote his famous New World Symphony when he was in the New York under contract as Director of the National Academy of Music, a school that famously “enrolled poor students without charge and . . . welcomed members of the Negro race.” The New World Symphony is said to be greatly influenced by African American spirituals, work songs, and folk music that Dvorak was exposed to and admired while he was in the United States.

5. Dvorak loved birds. He composed many operas, symphonies, symphonic poems, and choral works. His favorite instrument was the viola.

6. Dvorak died in 1904. “In the dreadful years 1939-1945 Dvorak, along with Smetana and other native composers, was declared an outlaw by the Nazi conquerors. It was a crime to play his music in Bohemia. In 1941, the year of Dvorak’s centenary, his own Czech people were forbidden to play a bar of his music.”

I’m determined now to listen to more Dvorak. Any suggestions of specific pieces I should look for?

Eloquent Crusader: Ernestine Rose by Yuri Suhl

Jul31

I’ve heard of Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cody Stanton and Susan B. Anthony and even Reverend Antoinette Brown, but Ernestine Rose, Polish Jewish American crusader for women’s rights and for the abolition of slavery, was a new name in my personal pantheon of suffragettes and women’s rights pioneers. The story of her life is amazing, but rather sad in the end, because she died alone, without God, without her beloved husband of many years, and without many friends or followers about her.

“One after the other her friends were passing away—Garrison, Lucretia Mott, Wendell Phillips, editor Horace Seaver. And in her saddened state she would say to her friends, ‘It is no longer necessary for me to live. I can do nothing now. But I have lived,’ she would add thoughtfully, ‘I have lived.'”

At age sixteen, Ernestine Potowska went to a Polish court to secure the return of her inheritance money. The money had been given as dowry to a suitor to whom her rabbi father promised Ernestine’s hand in marriage. When Ernestine refused to marry the man, he refused to return her property. So Ernestine went to court, acted as her own lawyer, and won the case. It was the first time in the history of the Polish court that a sixteen year old Jewish girl brought suit before Polish judges.

Then, in 1827, when she was seventeen, Ernestine left her village and home in Poland to go to Germany. She spent a couple of years in Berlin, then to Holland, to Belgium, to Paris, and to London. She supported herself by giving language lessons and by selling “perfumed papers” (a kind of air freshener, Ernestine’s own invention). All of this traveling and supporting oneself while doing so sounds almost unbelievable; the nineteenth century was not a time when independent, self-supporting women were a commonplace thing.

In England, Ernestine met her husband, William Rose, she also became a disciple of social reformer and philanthropist, Robert Owen. The Owenites were what came to be called utopian socialists; they believed that man’s environment was to blame for all the social ills in the world and that evil could be defeated by social reforms and good education. Robert Owen was a deist who broke with orthodox Christianity and developed a belief system of his own. At some point in her journeying and her intellectual pilgrimage, Ernestine, too, became a “free thinker” and remained so until her death, as far as anyone knows. Others called her an atheist and an infidel, and she never denied, but rather appropriated, the appellations.

Ernestine and William Rose were married in England and then emigrated to New York. As an American citizen, abolitionist, and women’s rights crusader, she did do many other courageous and outrageous things:

She made an anti-slavery speech in Charleston, West Virginia and almost didn’t make it out of town safely.

In support of a bill in the New York legislature, she produced the first petition ever introduced in favor of rights for women. The petition had only five signatures on it, in spite of many weeks of hard work by Ernestine, and the bill to secure the property rights of married women failed.

She spoke at the First National Convention of Infidels, and she was a frequent attendee at the annual Thomas Paine birthday celebration, a gathering for freethinkers and atheists and social reformers.

She also gave public lectures all over New England, New York, and the rest of the Eastern seacoast on the subjects of the abolition of slavery, women’s rights, women’s suffrage, and any other subject that grabbed her attention. She spoke without notes.

She said, “It is an interesting and demonstrable fact, that all children are atheists and were religion not inculcated into their minds, they would remain so.”

And, “Do you tell me that the Bible is against our rights? Then I say that our claims do not rest upon a book written no one knows when, or by whom. Do you tell me what Paul or Peter says on the subject? Then again I reply that our claims do not rest on the opinions of any one, not even on those of Paul and Peter, . . . Books and opinions, no matter from whom they came, if they are in opposition to human rights, are nothing but dead letters.”

In short, she was eloquent, outspoken, persevering, unbelieving, and highly influential in the women’s suffrage movement, and I enjoyed reading and marveling at the story of her life, written by fellow Jewish Pole Yuri Suhl for the series of biographies for young people published by Julian Messner publishers.

Patricia St. John, b. April 5, 1919

Apr5

I’ve been reading An Ordinary Woman’s Extraordinary Faith: The Autobiography of Patricia St. John. IT’s quite a good story, and it makes me long for a time “when life was simple back in the good old days.” She says things that would in our time be taken as evidence of dishonesty neglect, or dysfunction, and as I read, I knew that they were neither. For instance, her mother and father lived apart for many of the years of their marriage, she taking care of the children in England and he traveling the world and teaching the Bible. And Patricia St. John writes that she never heard an argument or even a cross word pass between her parents when they were together. She also writes of her childhood in which she and her siblings were allowed to explore the woods and fields near their country home, being gone all day and only coming home in time for supper and bed. She tells the story of living alone in a Muslim village in Morocco, with no telephone, no English-speaking people living nearby, and very little knowledge of the Arabic language. She fed the beggar children and told them stories about Jesus in broken Arabic. I fear we have come a long way from the 1950’s when Patricia St. Joh was a missionary in Morocco, and even farther from her childhood in 1930’s and 40’s Britain. And I’m not sure that our sophistication and dependence on technology has brought us to a better way of life or of evangelism in many ways.

While Ms. St. John was living in England (during WWII) and in Morocco, she also wrote fiction books for children, books that give a vivid picture of other lands such as Switzerland and Morocco and also a believable and simple vision of the power of the gospel to change lives and comfort the afflicted. The following titles are the ones I have in my library:

Her first book, The Tanglewood’s Secret, was written to comfort and strengthen the girls in a boarding school that Ms. St. John’s family was associated with. Ruth, the main character in the book, lives with her aunt in the English countryside, and although she begins as a rather selfish and unhappy girl, she later comes to know the Good Shepherd who cares for His sheep.

Treasures of the Snow is set in Switzerland, where Patricia and her family spent a year of her childhood. In the story a girl named Annette is filled with hatred for Lucien, the boy responsible for an injury that crippled Annette’s little brother. The bitterness and hatred in Annette’s heart poisons all of her life and her relationships until she learns to forgive.

Star of Light is the first book that Patricia St. John wrote about her mountain village in Morocco. It’s fiction, but based untrue stories of how Jesus and a missionary nurse healed and cared for a blind baby and a beggar boy.

In Rainbow Garden, Elaine is sent to live with a family in the English countryside while her mother goes to work in France. Elaine is selfish and bitter, but she experiences healing and forgiveness in her garden.

Three Go Searching was written while Ms. St. John was a missionary nurse in an Arab village. When Waffi, an Arab boy, and David, a missionary kid, find a sick servant girl and a mysterious boat, and thus begins an exciting adventure.

The Secret of the Fourth Candle, also written during the time in the Moroccan village, consists of three short stories: “The Four Candles”, “The Cloak”, and “The Guest”.

Historical fiction set during the first century, The Runaway tells the story of Philo, a Phoenician boy whose little sister Illyrica is possessed by a demon. Philo finds a way to take his sister to Jesus, the healer.

Twice Freed is the fictionalized story of Onesimus, the runaway slave who returns to his master with a letter, the Book of Philemon in the the Bible.

Patricia St. John also wrote several missionary biographies, including Until the Day Breaks: The Life and Work of Lilias Trotter, Pioneer Missionary to Muslim North Africa, a book I would like to acquire and read someday.

Alexander the Great by John Gunther

Mar23

This biography is the current book that the Facebook reading group Read All the Landmarks is reading. I finished this book just as I was listening to an interview with a well-known celebrity pastor who lost his job, platform, family and reputation because of gross sin on his part. The two stories, that of Alexander and that of the pastor, reminded me of one another. In the interview, someone quoted someone (vague enough?) to the effect that “sometimes our talents and charisma put us in places that our character is not developed enough to handle.” Alexander certainly had the talent and the attractiveness and even the courage to conquer the known world, but he couldn’t handle the temptations and the sheer magnitude of the power he attained.

Actually most of us find ourselves in places of responsibility or leadership that we are just not equipped to handle. Had Alexander been wise enough and humble enough to rely on the God who makes Himself known through all creation, or had he even listened more to his old teacher, Aristotle, he might have avoided his final years of debauchery and disappointment and even his untimely death at the age of thirty-two. (He also would have done well to have laid off the liquor. If John Gunther were a temperance promoter, he could not have written a better cautionary tale about the evils of alcohol than this biography of Alexander the Great who turned into Alexander the Mad Drunkard.)

Because I was interested in gaining an alternative view of Alexander’s life and career, I pulled down another book from shelves, History of Alexander the Great by Jacob Abbot. Part of Abbott’s Makers of History series, this biography was published in 1849, about 100 years before Gunther’s Landmark history (1953). In the preface to Abbott’s book, he says the series was meant for young people between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five who wish to be educated about the great events and people of history. The Landmark history books are written for a younger audience, middle grades or ages ten to fifteen, although they can be enjoyed by those of us who are much older than that. I wondered, “How would a nineteenth century biographer see Alexander’s life in contrast to a children’s writer of the twentieth century?”

Abbott begins by saying: “The secret of Alexander’s success was his character. He possessed a certain combination of mental and personal attractions, which in every age gives to those who exhibit it a mysterious and almost unbounded ascendancy over all with their influence.” Gunther would agree that Alexander started out well and possessed a great many gifts and a certain charisma, but Gunther emphasizes that even as a young man, Alexander’s strengths were balanced by his weaknesses: “Like most creative people, he was full of contrasts. He was affectionate, generous and loyal. . . He never spared himself, he liked to do services for others, and he loved his friends. But—this is the other side—he had no control of his temper and, in later life, often went into crazy fits of debauchery. Worst of all he showed great cruelty on many occasions.”

Things I learned about Alexander, from both Abbott and Gunther:

Alexander loved Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. He had a copy of Homer’s epics, given to him by his teacher Aristotle, that he carried with him on all his campaigns. For most of those twelve years of battle and conquest, he kept his copy of Homer in a jeweled casket that he took form the Persians as part of the spoils of war.

When Alexander was only eighteen, he and his father, Phillip of Macedon, had a fight at a feast, and Alexander made fun of Phillip and called him a “drunk who cannot get across the floor without tumbling down”. Phillip was indeed drunk at the time, and Alexander was an insolent son. Father and son reconciled just before Phillip was assassinated by a man called Pausanias.

Alexander became more and more power-mad and dissolute and cruel and alcoholic as he conquered more and more territory. After he died at the age of thirty-two, his “empire” fell apart. It took a great deal of time for the various parts of his territory to recover from the disaster that was Alexander sweeping through the land.

Abbott ends his book with these words: “Alexander earned well the name and reputation of THE GREAT. He was truly great in all those powers and capacities that can elevate one man above his fellows. We cannot help applauding the extraordinary energy of his genius, though we condemn the selfish and cruel ends to which his life was devoted. He was simply a robber, but yet a robber on so vast a scale, that mankind, in contemplating his career, have generally lost sight of the wickedness of his crimes in their admiration of the enormous magnitude of the scale on which they were perpetrated.”

“Simply a robber” is not the legacy I would want to leave, no matter how “great” a robber i might be.

To learn more about the Landmark series of biographies and history books for young people, check out this podcast episode, Parts 1 and 2, of Plumfield Moms, What Are Landmark Books? Why Do They Matter?

Heaven Without Her by Kitty Foth-Regner

Feb6

Heaven Without Her: A Desperate Daughter’s Search for the Heart of Her Mother’s Faith by Kitty Foth-Regner.

I’ve had this memoir on my TBR list for quite a while, recommended to me by someone or another, but I couldn’t find it at the library. I put off buying a copy because I had some vague idea that the “her” of the title had been kidnapped or lost, and the daughter was searching for her. I just didn’t know if I was in the mood for that sort of a story.

It turns out that Heaven Without Her is a spiritual memoir, a conversion story, and I love a well-written conversion story.

“Kitty Foth-Regner was living the feminist dream—a successful copywriting business, the perfect live-in boyfriend, beautiful garden, and a nice house. But when her beloved developed a fatal illness, she found herself on the brink of despair with nothing but questions: Could there possibly be a God? If so, which God? And might heaven really exist?”

The book is as much a Christian apologetic as it is a memoir, but Ms. Foth-Regner’s personal story of her search for God gives shape and meaning to the academic and scientific investigation that she undertook to find out who God might be and whether He could be found in any of the major (and some minor) religions of the world. Her motivation for the search was her desire to be with her beloved Christian mother in heaven, if such a place really exists. But through that motivation, the Hound of Heaven was certainly pursuing Kitty Both-Regner “down the labyrinthine ways/Of [her] own mind; and in the mist of tears.”

The memoirist writes about the Bible and the historical and scientific reliability thereof. She includes quite a bit of information about the evolution/creation debate and presents solid evidence for both intelligent design by a Creator God and a young earth view of history. She compares the truth claims of Christianity and of other world religions, show ing that Christianity is the only belief system that has verifiable evidence supporting its dogma. Then, she goes on to tell about how she came to believe that the resurrection of Jesus Christ was a historical fact, and that the gospel, faith in God through Christ and the receiving of His grace to cover our sins, was the only way to heaven and to Truth. (That’s in chapter 20, by the way, if you want to skip to the climax. But I’d suggest you read the book straight through.)

Heaven Without Her would be a great gift for an unbelieving friend, provided that friend was somewhat open to the gospel. Kitty Foth-Regner herself says that her efforts to share the wonderful news of her new-found faith with friends and associates met mostly with polite, but definite, disinterest, sometimes outright hostility. “Amazingly, many if not most, declined. And not always politely.” “My friendships with several hyper-feminists were among the casualties of my conversion. Maybe I should have just kept my mouth shut. But I figured a friend doesn’t let a friend live without hope; a friend shares the gospel with the people she cares about.”

So, use your own judgment and the guidance of the Holy Spirit as to whether or not to give the book away to friends and neighbors, but I would say that having a copy to read yourself and another to give away if so led would be an excellent investment. It’s a book in the same category and genre with Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ, Josh McDowell’s More Than a Carpenter, and Letters from a Skeptic by Dr. Gregory Boyd. Ms. Foth-Regner has a list of books that helped her to understand and accept the Christian worldview and that she recommends to others for the same purpose. Her list is worth the price of the book itself.

Thank to the author for sending me a copy of her memoir for possible review. I plan to keep one copy for my library and purchase another for giving away.

The Great Good Thing by Andrew Klavan

Jan17

The Great Good Thing A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ by Andrew Klavan.

I dearly love a good Christian conversion story or memoir. And Andrew Klavan’s story is a good one, full of insight and self-reflection and understanding that only a man from an intellectual Jewish background, who came to faith in Christ by way of a tumultuous childhood, a writerly and journalistic sensibility and career path, and a nervous breakdown, could express and communicate.

“It reminded me of the sense I’d had then that our mortal lives were just incarnate metaphors, that we are stories being told about the living love that created us and sustains us. Maybe all of history’s beauty and bloodshed was a story not about pleasure and pain and power but about humanity’s relationship with an unseen spirit of love. We yearned for the spirit but we feared and hated it, too, because when it shone its terrible light on us, we saw ourselves as we were, broken and shameful, far from what the spirit of love had made us. Maybe all our wars and rapes and oppressions were just our attempts to extinguish that light and silence that story.”

“We are stories being told about the living love that created us.” I really like that formulation. I pray that my story is somehow glorifying the God who made me, and I trust that He will make it so.

I’m feeling a bit inadequate to actually review Mr. Klavan’s version of “Confessions”, so I’ll just link to some other reviewers who say good things about The Great Good Thing. I do recommend the book and its author.

John Wilson at Books and Culture: “The Great Good Thing tells the story of his conversion with candor, wit, and humility (no preening, no cant). It is a memoir, he emphasizes, focused on that story, not a full-fledged autobiography, but it encompasses the whole arc of his life, and especially his childhood and growing-up years before he left home at the age of seventeen.”

An Orthodox Jew Reviews Andrew Klavan’s ‘The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ’ by Avner Zarmi.

What Would the Founders Think?: “Klavan’s conversion was not that of Saul on the rode to Damascus. Klavan’s journey was more like that of an archeologist who senses that there is something to unearth beneath a tell but does not know what it is. As each artifact is excavated, he begins to formulate one hypothesis after another, discarding each until the final piece is revealed. When all the parts are assembled, he has no choice but to accept the result as truth.”

Read it. Then, come back and tell me what you think.

Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance

Jun20

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance.

Former Marine and Yale Law School graduate J.D. Vance has an unconventional background for a man with such credentials: he grew up in poor, dysfunctional, hillbilly family from northern Kentucky, mostly living in the lower-class neighborhoods of Middletown, Ohio. His mother was a drug abuser who subjected him and his older sister to a series of husbands and boyfriends, who were neglectful or abusive or at best, temporarily decent. Any stability he had in his childhood came from his maternal grandparents who were fiercely supportive, even if they had issues of their own. J.D.’s grandmother is a character from the Beverly Hillbillies, without the the silly humor, with the shotgun firmly in hand, and with the addition of some salty language that wouldn’t have been appropriate in a TV sitcom. His grandfather was a taciturn man, a former alcoholic, who supported J.D. mainly by spending time with him, availability being nine-tenths of the job requirement for a substitute father-figure.

The book definitely reminded me of my family’s lower middle class background. The violence and drug abuse in Vance’s family are mostly absent from mine, but some other forms of family dysfunction are quite familiar. Divorce, alcoholism, and poor educational choices and opportunities have dogged my working class white family, too, with some members of the family being able to move past those limitations while others became mired in their own generational poverty and family dysfunction.

It’s rather funny to read a selection of the reviews on Amazon or Goodreads for this book. Lots of people from inside and outside the Appalachian culture that Vance describes laud his deep insights into and vivid depiction of hillbilly culture. Others insist that Vance doesn’t have clue what he’s talking about, that his insights apply only to his own particular family situation or that his depiction of hillbilly life in the Rust Belt town of Middletown is either too dark or too optimistic.

I thought Mr. Vance had a lot to say about how people are able to grow and change and make good choices, partly despite their family background and partly as a result of clinging to the good parts of the family heritage. Vance’s grandparents were able to leave the Hatfield/McCoy violence and bitterness of the northern Kentucky hills behind and make a better life in Middletown, not a perfect life since they brought a lot of problems (and guns) with them, but a better life. Vance’s birth father was able to find stability and a fulfilling life in his Christian faith and church community. Vance himself was able to draw from the tenacity and love of both of his grandparents to make mostly wise choices about his own life, become a marine, get an education, and eventually write Hillbilly Elegy. Some critics deride Vance’s emphasis on a strong work ethic and moral choices to bring people up out of poverty and dysfunction, but the truth is the truth. A person who works hard and makes good moral choices about important life decisions (don’t abuse drugs and alcohol, marry your sexual partner, do what you need to do to support your family financially, try to get a good education, etc.) is much more likely to graduate from lower class poverty into at least middle class stability and functionality.

The book isn’t really preachy, however. It’s likely only to offend those who have already decided that traditional morality and hard work are useless prescriptions to ameliorate or even cure generational poverty. The author himself doesn’t state or imply that it’s easy or that he didn’t benefit from some fortuitous events and help along the way, such as a full scholarship to Yale Law School. He’s honest and gives credit where credit is due, but he’s also unflinching in his assessment of the flaws and inherent deficiencies that characterized his experience of “hillbilly culture.”

Many readers and reviewers have tried to sell this book as a guide to “why people voted for Trump” or “why Trump was elected president”, especially why lower class and lower middle class white voters were inclined to be Trump supporters. I don’t think that’s the main point of the book, and I don’t really think it’s too helpful in that regard. J.D. Vance’s hillbilly family members may have supported Trump, but they weren’t his only supporters. Don’t read the book to understand Trump voters; instead, read it to understand Appalachian and Rust Belt family dynamics and social mobility and the saga of one hillbilly who lived to tell his own story.

Hero of the Empire by Candice Millard

May23

Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill by Candice Millard.

“I don’t like this fellow, but he’ll be Prime Minister of England one day.” ~Sir George White in reference to young Winston Churchill.

“Winston has spent the best years of his life composing his impromptu speeches.” ~ F.E. Smith.

“Winston is like a strong wire that, stretched, always springs back. He prospers under attack, enmity and disparagement . . . He lives on excitement.The more he scents frustration the more he has to fight for; the greater the obstacles, the greater the triumph.” ~John Black Atkins.

“I said to myself, ‘Toujours de l’audace!'” (Always more audacity). ~ Winston Churchill.

Audacious indeed, Churchill, like Teddy Roosevelt, the subject of another of Candice Millard’s narrative nonfiction histories, would have been a difficult man to befriend or to live with or to be married to. Although I have great deal of respect for both Churchill and Roosevelt, I like the distance that history and books give me. I suspect a close encounter with either man would have left me speechless or even angry or completely dumbfounded. Churchill may have gained some perspective and selflessness as he aged, but as a youth he seems to have been supremely self-centered and cocky.

But he was definitely a leader, even in his twenties during the Boer War in South Africa. Supposedly sent to the war zone as a journalist, Churchill almost immediately became entangled in combat, trying to find opportunities for heroism and acclaim. He did audacious and reckless things, and he got away without getting himself killed in the process. And he got the acclaim he wanted after he escaped from a Boer prisoner of war camp, almost by accident, but sustained by sheer persistence and “good luck”.

“The practice [of prayer] was comforting and the reasoning led nowhere. I therefore acted in accordance with my feelings without troubling to square such conduct with the conclusions of thought.” ~Winston Churchill, from South Africa during the Boer War.

According to the author, Churchill didn’t have much faith in God or religion or Christianity in particular, but when he was at the worst, darkest hour of his harrowing escape across South Africa, he could think of nothing to do except pray. It’s a sort of a foxhole religious awakening, and one doesn’t get the sense that Churchill took much spiritual growth or humility with him into the rest of his escape and subsequent life. But in the depths of the darkness of the 1930’s when no one would listen to him as he trumpeted the dangers of Nazism or in the darkest hours of World War II when none of the countries of the world were really standing alongside Britain against Hitler, maybe he remembered to pray, remembered that God was the one who rescued him during his South Africa escape journey. No one really knows. (I don’t believe in luck.)

After his escape from the Boers, Churchill could have sat on his laurels and drunk copious amounts of champagne, a drink of which he was extremely fond. However, he returned to to South Africa to fight and write about the war. After the Boer War was over, Churchill published two memoirs of the war, London to Ladysmith via Pretoria and Ian Hamilton’s March. His heroism and notoriety gained him a seat in Parliament, and the rest, as they say, is history.

This article gives a good overview of Churchill’s relationship and attitude to Christianity and God.
And here’s an interview at Bible Gateway with the joint authors of a book called God and Churchill.

Other books by Candice Millard:
Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President.
River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey.

Rocks in his Head by Carol Otis Hurst

Feb27

I’ve seen this picture book biography recommended on several lists of “living books”, particularly living science books, and I agree that it’s a beautiful and inspiring story. The author’s father, who is never actually named in the text, was a collector of rocks. But more than a collector, he was a student and archivist who carefully curated and labeled his collection of rocks from all over the country.

Since Ms. Hurst’s father and his family were living through the Great Depression, her father’s day job was minding his gas station. When the gas station went broke, he took other jobs to support his family. Because he had never been to college or formally studied geology, most people thought Carol Hurst’s father’s passion for rocks was simply an amusing hobby. However, he eventually met someone who appreciated the informal study he had done and the depth of knowledge he had acquired.

Rocks in his Head is the kind of story our children need. They need to see that if they pursue an interest with persistence and passion, they can become experts. And they can do that whether or not this interest or passion becomes their job. I have an adult daughter who is teaching herself Polish because she is interested in all things Polish at the moment. I have a son who is becoming a talented and expert musician, in his spare time. I am an amateur, part-time librarian. So far, none of my children has “rocks in his head”, but if that were to be someone’s passion, I would encourage them to study and collect and learn with all the resources available to them. Because our economy is generally much better than that of the time during the Great Depression when Ms. Hurst’s father was living, we have much greater opportunities to both make a living for our families and pursue our own interests. Encourage your children and yourself to take advantage of every opportunity.