Archives

Sir Thomas Becket: A Book and a Movie

Apr14

“Thomas Becket (1118 – 29 December 1170) was Archbishop of Canterbury from 1162 to his death. He is venerated as a saint and martyr by both the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion. He engaged in conflict with Henry II of England over the rights and privileges of the Church and was assassinated by followers of the king in Canterbury Cathedral.” ~Wikipedia

Book: Time and Chance by Sharon Kay Penman.
Movie: Becket, starring Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole.


Reading the book and watching the movie made me want to re-read T.S. Eliot’s play, Murder in the Cathedral, but I haven’t gotten around to doing so.

In the movie Richard Burton’s Becket plays the hero to Peter O’Toole’s rather weak and whiny Henry II. Becket is the wiser, more compassionate, morally conflicted, but eventually winning through his weaknesses into sainthood.

In Penman’s book, Becket is more sanctimonious and unpredictable, nearly fanatical; Penman, through one of her characters, calls Becket a “chameleon” who takes on the coloring of his surroundings. Becket is not a hero in Time and Chance, but rather a man made nearly mad by power and responsibility.

I rather think that neither playwright Jean Anouilh, who wrote the play that was the source for the movie’s screenplay, nor Sharon Kay Penman, who based her portrayal on historical incidents of Becket’s inconsistencies and seeming contradictions, got Becket quite right. Anouilh makes hm out to be modern existential hero. Says Becket in the movie: “Honor is a private matter within; it’s an idea and every man has his own version of it.”

Penman makes him into a power-hungry religious fanatic who drives the worldly and pragmatic Henry near the brink of insanity. Penman’s Becket is practically suicidal, knowing that his words and actions will bring the wrath of the king to bear upon him and perhaps get him killed. But this Becket is more interested in besting Henry in their petty feud than in the health of the Church or even his own health and long life.

I prefer to think that Becket was converted at some point from worldliness and politics to the love of Christ and His Church. Maybe he just did what he thought was right and suffered the consequences.

I’d like to read Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth, which according to Wikipedia again ends with Becket’s death at the hands of Henry’s henchmen. I’ve heard good things about the 900 page tome, but it’s 900 pages and an Oprah pick. I’ll probably try it anyway. The Penman book is long, too, but worth it.

Young Adult Fiction of 2008: The Boy Who Dared by Susan Campbell Bartoletti

Oct28

Susan Campbell Bartoletti’s nonfiction study, Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler’s Shadow, won a Newbery Honor medal in 2006 for its compilation of accounts of what it was like to grow up in Hitler’s youth organization, Hitler Youth. In The Boy Who Dared Bartoletti returns to the Third Reich to tell the story of a boy who joined the Hitler Youth, but secretly and courageously resisted the Nazi regime until he was caught by the police.

The subtitle to this book is “A Novel Based on the True Story of a Hitler Youth.” The book reads like a novel in some ways. We get to hear the thoughts and fears of and imprisoned seventeen year old, Helmuth, as he reminisces about his growing up years under the growing shadow of Nazism. However, it’s obvious that the novel is constrained by the facts of the case, so to speak. From the beginning of the story, when the omniscient narrator tells us from Helmuth’s prison cell that “the executioner works on Tuesdays,” we know that that there is no happy ending in store for Helmuth Hubener, the protagonist of the novel.

Then there are various facts that lend interest to the story but that probably wouldn’t have occurred to a novelist writing a story not based on true events. For instance, Helmuth’s family is Mormon. In the author notes at the end of the book, Ms. Bartoletti says that the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints had about one thousand members living in Hamburg during the war. Another set of unlikely facts: Helmuth’s mother marries a Rottenfuhrer in Hitler’s SS, a dedicated Nazi who nevertheless adopts Helmuth and writes a letter in his support after his arrest for espionage.

I have a particular fascination with World War II stories, especially those that take place inside Nazi Germany or in Nazi-occupied territory. I think we’re all still, almost seventy years later, trying to figure out how the Holocaust and the other evils of Nazism could have happened in a “civilized” country. So I look for clues in stories of the times. The clues here are the ones you’ve heard before: the people were economically devastated. They believed Hitler would lead them to prosperity and to dignity for Germany after the ignominious defeat of World War I. When the Jews were persecuted, the bullies joined in the bullying and the good people looked away. When freedoms were taken away one by one, people said it was temporary, that these were emergency measures, that everything would be O.K. eventually.

The problem is that I look at Nazi Germany, and I see ideas and attitudes that are very much alive here and now. No, we in the United States in 2008 are not Nazis. History does not really repeat itself; it echoes. And the echoes I hear now are disturbing. People in a time of economic crisis are looking for a saviour. Innocents are killed daily by abortion, and good people look the other way. Candidates talk about taking away freedom of speech in the name of fairness, and we are oblivious.

I didn’t mean for this to turn into a politicized review, but oh, God, remove our blind spots and have mercy on us.

The Boy Who Dared is a good reminder of what we have to lose and what can happen in a country that loses its moral compass.

Still More Booklists

Jun28

Albert Mohler touts ten recently published books at Ten for the History Books — Summer Reading [Part 1] and Ten for the History Books — Summer Reading [Part 2]. Via Kathryn Judson at Suitable for Mixed Company.

Tim Keller’s Summer Reading list: Nine nonfiction Christian books picked by Mr. Keller, then beach picks by Kathy Keller, “series picks to keep you busy at the beach (mostly secular fiction, except Lewis, Tolkien, and Chesterton, but nothing offensive).”
Of the nine non-fiction picks, I am ashamed to say I’ve only read one: Mere Christianity, a very good book by the way.

Common Grounds Online Summer Reading List, 2008–Non-Fiction. The only one of these I’ve read is the one fiction title that accidentally got onto the list: Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton.

Common Grounds Online Summer Reading List, 2008–Fiction. I’m doing a little better here in fiction territory. I’ve read Gilead and The Great Gatsby. And I’m definitely planning to read Leif Enger’s new book, So Brave, Young and Handsome.

Image Journal has a list of 100 Writers of Faith. Of the works listed, I’ve read fourteen and also read something by a few more of the authors listed.

Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan

Jun3


The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan

“We dream of the faint gurgling sound of dry soil sucking in the grateful moisture, but we wake to another day of wind and dust and hopes deferred.” —Caroline Henderson, 1934.

“We are getting deeper and deeper in dust.” The Boise City News, 1934.

“Our country has been beaten, swept, scarred, and torn by the most adverse weather conditions since June, 1932. It is bare, desolate and damaged. Our people have been buffeted about by every possible kind of misfortune. It has appeared that the hate of all nature has been poured out against us.” —John McCarty, editor of the Dalhart, Texas newspaper, The Texan, 1935.

“Three little words, achingly familiar on a Western farmer’s tongue, rule life in the dust bowl of the continent —‘if it rains.'” —Bob Geiger, AP reporter.

“If God can’t make rain in Kansas, how can the New Deal hope to succeed?” —A U.S. congressman on ambitious government plans to renew the soil and bring rain to the Dust Bowl.

An amazing true story. My grandparents and my husband’s parents lived in West Texas during these times and must have experienced some of the drought, dust storms, and hard times chronicled in Egan’s book. But I never heard them talk about anything like the stories in the book: dust so thick that people got lost and ran their cars off the road, respiratory diseases caused by the dust, dusters, clouds of dust so tall they blotted out the sun. I remember dust storms when I was growing up in San Angelo in West Texas, but nothing like the cataclysmic storms of the 1930’s.

African Food for Africans Who Are Starving?

May8

In Ethiopia in 2003, for example, widespread drought occurred in the low-lying areas of the country and the very dry northern highlands. Some 12 million to 15 million people were at risk of hunger and starvation. But in the central and southern highlands of Ethiopia, farmers were producing a bumper crop of corn and other cereals. Yet with no market for the locally produced grains, prices collapsed.

If USAID could have purchased and helped distribute some of this excess, up to 500,000 small farmers would have benefited, as well as the millions at risk of starvation. But its only option was to import surplus food grain from the U.S.”

Right now I’m reading Timothy Egan’s book about the Dust Bowl of the 1930’s in which millions of pounds of wheat, a bumper crop grown on the Great Plains in 1929 and 1930, sat in or near silos and rotted because the prices went down, and the wheat was worth less than it cost to produce. I don’t understand how this happens exactly, especially when people in the cities began to have trouble feeding their families at about the same time because of the collapse of the U.S. economy.

Eventually, under FDR, the U.S. government did purchase some of the surplus wheat and other grain crops and distribute it to the hungry during the Great Depression. But the dust storms and the lack of income for those first two years caused the farmers to go bankrupt and their land to lie fallow.

Now in this Wall Street Journal article, two food experts say that we, the U.S., are causing much the same problem as what helped to create the Great Depression in our food aid program in Africa.

The Bush administration has urged, rightly, that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) be allowed to buy food locally, particularly in Africa, instead of only American-grown food.

The U.S. government currently buys grain and other foodstuffs from American farmers for free distribution in poor countries where a disaster has occurred, or sells it in food-deficit nations to generate funds for food-security development programs. Under the law, the food must be shipped almost exclusively on American vessels.”

Why is Congress opposing this change in policy? Why not buy food there for distribution there and use our own grain surpluses here? Or sell the grain “surpluses” to the highest bidder since there seems to be a food shortage that I keep reading about? Is there something I’m not seeing?

A Royal Affair by Stella Tillyard

Jan14

I had no idea that at the same time, or just before, George III was dealing with his rebellious American “children,” he was also in the throes of despair over his siblings’ rebellion and scandalous behavior. As the eldest brother and the king, George III felt responsible for his younger siblings’ behavior just as he considered himself a father figure for the American colonists. He was ultimately disappointed in all of his surrogate children as well as some of his own fifteen children, including the Prince of Wales, later George IV.

The next younger brother in George III’s family, his brother Edward, was a rake and a womanizer, but since he died young, he was unable to do too much damage to the royal family’s reputation. The other siblings made up for his short life and lack of opportunity.

George’s eldest sister, Augusta, married the Prince of Brunswick who proceeded to ignore her and patronize his mistresses instead. She became, understandably, bitter and made her brother George miserable with all her complaining letters.

George’s younger sister Caroline Mathilde, also given away in a diplomatic marriage to the crown prince of Denmark, found her husband to be uninterested, uninteresting, and quite insane. She didn’t just complain; she had an affair with her husband’s doctor and took over the country with her lover’s help and in her husband’s name. King Frederick was content to just sign on the dotted line anything his loving wife and her paramour prepared, and for a while the three of them had a satisfying menage a trois. Eventually, Caroline’s political enemies took charge of the mad king and broke up the party. George had to clean up his sister’s mess by rescuing her from a court that had turned against her. Soap opera material.

Two of George’s brothers contracted secret marriages to less-than-desirable women without their kingly brother’s permission. This disregard for his royal prerogatives made George III quite miffed, and he refused to speak to the wives or receive them at court . . . ever. Even worse, prior to his marriage one of the brothers, Henry, the Duke of Cumberland, had a very public affair with a married woman, was sued by the husband, and ended up owing quite a settlement to the husband of his mistress.

If you’re interested in court gossip and intrigue that’s only a couple of hundred years old, George’s scandalous siblings should quench your appetite. George is the only one of the royals in the book who comes out with a decent reputation and an intact marriage. And he’s the one the writers of the Declaration of Independence called “A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, . . . unfit to be the ruler of a free People.”

Oh, well, maybe they didn’t know much about the “character” of the rest of the royal family.

(By the way, the big guy on the cover is George himself, but I don’t know why the cover designer cut off part of his head. Do you like the way book cover artists and designers tend to do that these days, crop off body parts including heads? Is it a statement or a symbol of some kind? I think it’s sort of weird.)

Other bloggers’ reviews:

John Sandoe: “Stella Tillyard tells this astonishing tale with bravura and energy. But there is a problem with the book, which is that the story of Caroline Mathilde and Struense utterly overshadows the others.”

History Maven: “Interesting read for those interested in the period. Well written, and makes me realize I don’t know my Danish history. Goody! New topic!”

Historical Fiction of Ancient Times Project: Greece

Jan2

These are some of the books I’d like to find and read as a part of my Ancient History Through Fiction Project:
Maia of Thebes by Ann Turner. (1463 BC)

Winged Girl of Knossos by Erik Berry, pseud. (Allena Best) (Appleton) Ms. Bird at Fuse #8 gives this book a wonderful review in an Under the Radar post from last August.

The Windswept City: A Novel of the Trojan War by Henry Treece.

Inside the Walls of Troy: a Novel of The Women Who Lived The Trojan War by Clenence McLaren.

Goddess of Yesterday by Caroline Cooney.

The Moon Riders by Theresa Tomlinson. (c.1100 B.C.) Amazons in Ancient Greece.

The Voyage of the Snake Lady by Theresa Tomlinson. Sequel to The Moon Riders.

Deeper Song by Patricia Pfitsch.

I don’t really know much about any of these books, except the time period (c. 1500-900 BC) and the place (Greece or among Greeks). If you’ve read any of them and have comments or if you have other suggestions of children’s or young adult historical fiction for this time period set in Greece, please leave me a note.

I’ll be reading as many of these as I can find, and I’ll let you know how I like them.

Churchill

Sep2

Clementine to Winston when he was at the front during WW I:

Only you must not become too famous or you won’t have time for these pastoral joys! You will have to promise me that in future however full of work & ideas you are you will keep out of every day an hour & every week a day & every year 6 weeks for the small things of Life. Things like painting . . . playing grizzly bear, sitting on the grass with me & generally Leisure with a big L . . . ” From Clementine Churchill by Mary Soames (Clementine and Winston’s daughter)

Happy Labor Day, but do save time for Leisure with a big L.

A Place in the Sun by Jill Rubalcaba

Jul5

Setting: Thirteenth century B.C., Egypt under the rule of Pharoah Ramses II, New Kingdom, 19th Dynasty.

Main Character: Senmut, the nine year old son of the sculptor, Yuf.

Themes: hardship, suffering, luck, perseverance.

This seventy-five page historical novel is short but full of pain and suspense. Senmut is only nine years old (I kept reminding myself of his age throughout the story) when he is sentenced to hard labor in the gold mines of Nubia for a “crime” that was essentially an accident. It’s unfair and horrible, and I think that although the reading level of the book is fourth or fifth grade, the content is pitched at young adult readers.

I got a picture of ancient Egypt as a place that might be nice to visit, if I could successfully avoid breaking any of the many superstitious taboos that ruled the lives of the Egyptians, but it wouldn’t be a “place in the sun” that I’d want to call home. Senmut survives his ordeal and becomes something more than a slave in ther gold mines, but his escape and his success are really due to luck, or the favor of the gods, more than anything else.

I think this one would be a great choice to go with our ancient history study to show students that ancient Egypt wasn’t all Pharoahs and pyramids, that lots of common people suffered and died under the rule of some dictatorial rulers who thought they were gods and yet were afraid of the gods whose images they both worshipped and emulated.

Shadow Hawk by Andre Norton

Jul2

Setting: Ancient Egypt, mainly in and around Thebes, c.1590 B.C. during the reigns of Pharoah Sekenenre III and his son Pharoah Kamose. Also near the end of the Hyksos occupation of Lower Egypt.

Main Character: Rahotep, younger son of Ptahhotep, viceroy of Nubia. Through his mother’s lineage, Rahotep is entitled to be called Nomarch (Duke) of the Hawk, but his duchy is overrun and has been for some time by the Hyksos invaders.

Themes: war, obedience to authority, rebellion, freedom. (Even if you don’t care for Ms. Norton’s science fiction/fantasy works, which are full of “witchy” worlds and themes, you may very well enjoy this book, which is straight historical fiction, good versus evil, morally impeccable.)

Minor Details that I noticed:
There are a lot of battles and descriptions of battles. Boys might enjoy that aspect of the book more than girls.

Rahotep is a hero. He’s the younger brother, forced to flee from his older brother who is out to get him. So, he’s the underdog who makes good at Pharoah’s court. That sort of plot and protagonist still works for me.

Very minor as far as the story is concerned, but I noticed how much respect and worship the Egyptians accorded their Pharoahs who were thought to be gods, sons of Re, the Sun God. We would be ashamed, and misunderstood, if those ancient Egyptians saw what little respect we Christians sometimes give to the God of the Universe and his Son, Jesus.

. . . by custom he did not raise his eyes to the man on the improvised throne. . . .

Rahotep went down on his knees. ‘Life! Health! Prosperity! May the Son of Re live forever! I am one unworthy of his notice! Let the Son of Re know that this one is less than the dust on his sandals . . .’

Rahotep advanced to put his lip to the Pharoah’s sandal strap.”

Author: Andre Norton is mainly famous for her science fiction titles, but she also wrote historical fiction. Shadow Hawk was published in 1960.

During those early days, agents were really unknown. So, when I was ready to submit my first novel, I got an alphabetized list of publishers and sent it to the first name on the list, and they accepted it.”

Can you authors believe that kind of sucess?

I was children’s librarian at the Cleveland Public Library for over twenty years, from 1930-1951. Each month the librarians would receive a book to review. If there was some objection to the book, and we still wanted it, we would have an opportunity to defend it. I remember getting The Hobbit and nobody had heard of Tolkien, so I had to argue for it like mad.”

I always say that I read and loved Tolkien before Tolkien was cool, but I don’t have as good a story as Ms. Norton.

A lot of children’s stories these days, while being well written, are downbeat. They have no hope, and the protagonist is someone that you wouldn’t like, and they are no better off at the end of the story than they were at the beginning. This is a new format, and it’s getting in to stories in the Science Fiction and Fantasy fields.”

Ah, someone else is concerned with that pesky “sense of hope” again. I must say that I agree with Ms. Norton and decry the loss of hope in children’s books.

Quotations are from a 1996 interview here at Ms. Norton’s excellent website. Andre Norton died in 2005.