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book reviews

Book Review: The Heart of Thoreau’s Journals

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Sorry, all you Thoreau lovers out there. I gave up o this one.

Every now and then you pick up a book, not because you necessarily are interested in it, but because you know others are and therefore you ought to be. That was the case with The Heart of Thoreau’s Journals. I bought it used some years ago and put it on the bookshelves in a guest room. That way someone might see it and say, “Oh, my, he reads Thoreau!”

Except I didn’t read it. It sat on that shelf for close to ten years until, in the spirit of dis-accumulation, I picked it up and decided to read it. Again, I thought others did, why shouldn’t I? I’ve read other journals and liked them.

Alas, this one I didn’t. Emerson described Thoreau as a brilliant, gifted writer. Famous, of course, for his time of isolation on Walden Pond. I found his journal entries to be unintelligible. Oh, they were made in proper English, but what did they say? By reading them, how was I enlightened?

Here’s an example from June 26, 1840, when Thoreau was 22 years old:

Say, Not so, and you will outcircle the philosophers.

And another from around the same time:

My friend will be as much better than myself as my aspiration is above my performance.

Nice sounding prose, and to read such a line in the midst of a narrative about the day will cause the reader to stop and ponder the meaning, thinking surely this is profound and I must think on it until I gain knowledge or enlightenment.

But I couldn’t take it. I read 25 pages of this 219 page book. I usually try to get at least 25% into a book, but I couldn’t this one. Actually, I rarely give up on a book all together, so this speaks of my inability to appreciate the obvious brilliance of the journaler.

I did take a little time to look ahead before I totally gave up. I read some of the entries from 1859, about the slavery debate then raging. I found Thoreau to be lucid and spot-on in his denunciation of slavery and support for the abolitionists. If only the rest of this excerpt from his journals was just as good, I might have finished it. I have a copy of Walden, and hope to read it someday. For now, however, I will give Henry David Thoreau a good long rest.

Two stars only, and I’m not quite sure why it’s not 1-star, except that the literati will think I’m an ignoramus if I rank it that low. Tomorrow it goes on the sale/donation pile. There are plenty of other books on the guest room shelves, and anyone who stays there will find hours of pleasurable reading.

book reviews, Christianity

Book Review: Tariri, My Story

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What happens when a headhunter is introduced to God?

Amazing man, amazing story, amazing book.

This was the subject of the book Tariri, My Story: From Jungle Killer to Christian Missionary, which Lynda and I read aloud a couple of months ago. The events of the book took place in the 1950s, when missionaries reached a section of the upper Amazon River at the border of Peru and Ecuador.

From the book’s dust jacket: The great chief Tariri was a legendary figure among the tribes along the eastern slopes of the Andes in southern Peru. The tales of his brutal killings were told with wonder even among his own people, the Shapras of the Candoshi group. A vital, colorful leader, he ruled his tribe through brute force and feared no one because of his fierce conviction that he was impregnable, inviolate.

Until two single women, workers with the Wycliffe Bible Translators group, arrived. Doris Cox and Lorrie Anderson, armed only with Bibles, pioneered the work among the Shapras and encountered the feared Tariri. He realized they were no threat to his rule, and so they were not accosted in any way, by him or others of his tribe. They went to work, joined by Rachel Saint at times. Slowly they helped Tariri understand that a way to live was possible without killing. That you could be at peace with rival tribes.

The Peruvian government had agents and officials within 50 miles of Tariri’s tribe, but had not had any influence on them. The killing continued. They—the Shapras—understood they should not harm the government men who lived and mostly remained at the edges of their territory, but beyond that Tariri was the law and the government in his territory.

Slowly, the two white women began to influence the jungle chief. Over time, he turned away from killing and embraced a life dedicated to Jesus Christ. The change wasn’t easy for him, but it happened. Killing as a way of life, a way of settling disputes, ended.

The book, published in 1965, was fascinating. It was a little hard to read because of all the names and terms in Tariri’s language. His words were recorded on tape, and translated to English. The book is mostly his words, his story, with a little context provided by the missionaries who worked in the area.

I have no idea where we got this book. It likely sat on our shelves for years, waiting for us to notice it. I’m glad Lynda finally did. My intention was to not keep this, mainly because we have so many other books we’d like to get through.  But I think we will keep it. I’d love for the grandchildren to read it some day. It is definitely 5-stars. Still available at Amazon, perhaps other places.

 

book reviews, C.S. Lewis, Christianity

Book Review – Christian Reflections

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‘Twas in this book that I found the essay “Christianity and Culture”. I will need to read it another time or two to fully understand it. Meanwhile, I have completed the second of three books in this volume.

The book Timeless Writings of C.S. Lewis is actually three books in one volume. The first is The Pilgrim’s Regress, the first book he wrote after his conversion to Christianity, which I read earlier this year and reviewed.

The second is Christian Reflections. This is a compilation of Lewis’s papers, talks, and essays published in 1967, four years after his death. They were collected, edited, and published by Walter Hooper, who was Lewis’s secretary near the end of his life and became his literary executor after his death. He took on the job of organizing the mass of Lewis’s writings into collections.

This book has items composed from 1939 to 1962. The fourteen items are arranged more or less chronologically. The first is “Christianity and Literature”, a paper Lewis read to an Oxford society in the 1930s, and which was included in his first collection of essays, Rehabilitations, published in 1939. I read this in one sitting back in 2019, and found it to be a great help. I found several things to inspire my writing.

The next was “Christianity and Culture”. Published in a magazine in 1940, this essay generated a debate with several critics—a debate that played out in the pages of the magazine. This book includes Lewis’s three contributions to the discussion, the original essay and two responses to his critics. I’ve been looking for the other site of the discussion. I found one item. When I find the other, I’ll come back to this for a fuller reading. I reviewed this essay previously on the blog. I read this in both August 2019 and September 2021, though I’m not sure I finished it the first time.

After this, the essays are a mixed bag. I’m not going to give all the titles here. I read them slowly, in many sittings, in 2021 and 2022. Many of them I found hard to digest. Several I don’t remember at all. I read them, at least according to the notation in the book I did, but I couldn’t tell you what they are about. Were they too difficult for me, or did I read distractedly, without the wherewithal to comprehend what Lewis was saying? The only way to know is to read them again.

And that I shall do, though I know not when. The third book in this volume is God in the Dock, another of Hooper’s posthumous collections of Lewis essays. I’ve read a couple in this, but have yet to tackle this formidable looking document. I’m going to read something lighter before I do.

What about Christian Reflections? Is it worth reading? Is it a keeper? Yes, it is worth reading, but probably only for the dedicated Lewis reader. It is available as a separate volume, if you want to pick up a copy. As to it being a keeper, yes, for sure. Not only because I have more to read in this 3-in-one book, not only because I don’t want to break up my C.S. Lewis collection just yet (if ever), but also because I need to re-read some of these, sometime years hence. Perhaps I’ll still be posting at this blog, and will have something more to say about it.

 

book reviews, Engineering

Book Review Concluded: The Control of Nature

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The third part of John McPhee’s The Control of Nature concerned the San Gabriel Mountains east of Los Angeles. I had a difficult time identifying them on maps and aerial photographs, so this review will not be illustrated. See part 1 of this review here, and part two here.

Somewhere close to L.A., this mountain range is unusual in that it is growing, not eroding. Tectonic forces are pushing the mountains higher. Yet, the mountains are eroding in a sense in that they are sloughing off rock. In any given heavy rainfall, rocks and mud flow down from the mountains. No big deal, you say…except the growth of Los Angeles has caused subdivisions to be built up onto the mountains, right up to the point where the land gets too steep to build on. These subdivisions are what the sloughing rock and mud encounter first.

McPhee does a good job of explaining the terror that residents had when first the noise, then the detritus, hits their property. The flow goes into yards and through houses, or sometimes moves houses, and tears up and blocks streets.

To protect residences, various governmental agencies, such as regional flood control districts, have been formed to construct and maintain catchment areas upstream of the houses. I have a difficult time envisioning this. Since the rockslides could come anywhere on the mountains, and since predicting the quantity of “rock flow” would be less of a science than predicting runoff from rainfall, for this to be effective, you would need a huge catchment basin across the entire face of the mountain range. It sounds physically impossible and financially impractical.

Yet, it is being done (as of 1989, the time the book was written, that is). Sometimes the catchments are successful, sometimes not. But officials and residents labor on, doing whatever can be done to anticipate from whence the rock will come, and catching it before it hits houses—to control nature.

In this section, as in the two previous ones, McPhee tells a compelling story, but tells it too long. Too many stories. Too many names of victims and officials. Too many occasions for the reader to zone out, as I did all too frequently. The 272 page book would have been just as informative and more compelling if it had been told in 200 pages, in my engineering opinion.

Now, the big questions: a rating and a disposition. The latter is easy. This book is not a keeper. I read it in anticipation of putting it on the donation/sale stack, and there it goes after I post this. As to a rating, I think only 3-stars, and those two stars marked off because of the length. Would a non-engineer be able to read it and glean information from and be entertained by it? Yes, absolutely, maybe even more than I was. This is a book I’m quite glad I read, but could never see myself reading again.

book reviews, Engineering

Continued: “The Control of Nature”

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The new volcano threatened to close the harbor that runs left to right in this photo. The harbor entrance used to be twice as large as it is in the photo.

In my last post, I began a review of the book The Control of Nature by John McPhee. I mentioned that the book had three parts, and that I would be doing a review in three parts. See the first part of the review here.

The second part is titled “Cooling the Lava”. This concerns a volcanic eruption in Iceland in February 1973. It’s now been over a month since I read this section (maybe closer to two months), and I don’t remember all the names involved. Basically, this was on an island named Vestmannaeyar on the south side of Iceland. It included a sizable town, an important port, and a valuable fishing fleet and the infrastructure to support this. The town was Heimaey. The volcano was a new one, coming up from nothing but the hot works below the nation’s surface. See the photo I clipped from Google Earth.

Almost from the minute the volcano appeared, the fire boats, engines, hoses, and water came out and people directed it onto the flowing lava. People in the country laughed at them. But as the lava increased, so did the hoses and water. The laughter faded away and fear came.

McPhee does a good job of explaining how mankind cannot always allow nature to have it’s way.

Many people fled Heimaey. Others came and joined the fire brigade. Slowly, the hose holders won the battle. The lava hardened at the surface and new lava, when it came, piled up higher and higher, but ceased to move forward. The harbor was saved. In fact, the harbor entrance width was cut in half, reducing wave intrusion from the sea but leaving plenty of space for ships and boats to get in and out.

McPhee does a good job of explaining what was done, how the lava behaved, and the aftermath. I especially enjoyed the later. The surface cooled enough to walk on, but stick a thermometer through the surface, and a few inches down you have temperatures that will boil water. The crust, though hard enough to walk on, is thin. This is true even years after the eruption.

My main complaint about this section of the book is the same as the first section: it was too long. McPhee went on and on. He shifted from Iceland to Hawaii, where they took the opposite tack from Iceland. They let the lava flow and hoped for the best. It was interesting to learn about the difference in approaches, but it really dragged out this section. Actually, the Hawaii part wasn’t too long. It was the Iceland portion. I don’t know what I would cut out, but something really needed to be cut.

This makes two parts of the book with the same opinion on quality. Stay tuned for the third part, and my overall conclusion. I’m not sure whether that will be on Monday, or perhaps later.

 

book reviews, Engineering, flood studies

Book Review: “The Control of Nature”

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McPhee does a good job of explaining how mankind cannot always allow nature to have it’s way.

Approximately 30 years ago, the head of our company gave me (as he did to others) a copy of the book The Control of Nature by John McPhee. I’m sure he thought that this would be a good book for civil engineers to read. Well, it took me a while to get to it, but I finally did, reading it over the summer. The reading ran a little longer than it probably should have. 288 pages long, I think it took me close to a month to read in ten page sittings.

The book is in three sections, each dealing with a case where man has battled what the natural world is doing in a place where man doesn’t want change to happen to his built environment. The first is where the Mississippi River, in its meanderings upstream of Baton Rouge, it trying to spill out into the Atchafalaya River, which is known as a distributary.

This illustration from Wikipedia shows what’s going on between the Mississippi and the Atchafalaya.

This is flat country. The river flows slowly, but it has a lot of water in it. Some of that water escapes from the Mississippi River watershed into the Atchafalaya River watershed. This has been going on for a long time (as in centuries), but is slowly accelerating. If nature had its way, just about all of the Mississippi would have, by now, been re-routed into the Atchafalaya. The Lower Mississippi will have ceased to be a major river, and New Orleans and Baton Rouge would have become untenable as major ports.

We can’t let that happen the Corps of Engineers decided over 60 years ago. So they built control structures. The first one worked, but wasn’t enough. So they built another, and another. Then the floods came, and everyone involved held their breath to see what would happen. The structures held. The “father of rivers” stayed in its banks. The control structures let water through, but just enough to keep the Atchafalaya flowing as it’s supposed to.

McPhee goes into great detail about how this all came about, how it is being maintained, and what the (then, around 1988) future was likely to hold. The structures had held up for a couple of major floods, though sustained wear and tear. What would happen in the future.

The area where the control structure are. They appear to still be working.

It occurred to me that if these structures were still standing I ought to be able to find them on Google Earth. Sure enough, there they are, though added to since McPhee wrote about them. They now include a hydroelectric structure on one overflow channel. The next photo, from closer in shows water flowing in the channels. The Corps couldn’t completely shut off the Atchafalaya, so the structures were built not to hold back the flow completely, but to allow just the right amount through.

The main control structure closer up.

This part of the book is fascinating. McPhee talked about the history of the rivers and the structures, but also about the present, that is the end of the 1980s present. He interviewed people who operated and maintained the structures. He interviewed those who lived nearby and how all of this affected them. And he interviewed those who were planning for the future.

In fact, those interviews give rise to my main criticism of the book. Sure, they were interesting, but they were too many and too long. They made into 90 pages what could have easily been told in 60 with no loss of interest, at least for me. And, as I go through this review, you’ll find that’s my complaint throughout.

But, I’m going to split this review up into three parts and won’t give my overall conclusion or rating until the end of the third part. I will say that, as an engineer whose career was mainly about the flow of water (sometimes sewage) through pipes and channels, this part of the book was fascinating to me. I also think non-engineers will find the book of interest. In fact, perhaps those many interviews will provide much enjoyment to those not so caught up in the engineering of the project.

Stay tuned for parts 2 and 3, coming at some point.

book reviews, poetry

Book Review: Wallace Stevens’ Poetry

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I gave up on this book, something I hate to do. I couldn’t understand his poetry.

At some point, I bought a copy of The Palm at the End of the Mind, a collection of Wallace Stevens’ poems. Although it is said to be “selected poems”, it seems to be fairly complete. My paperback copy is 404 pages.

The editor is Holly Stevens, his daughter. She wrote in the Preface, “The poems included in this selection have been chosen to represent my father not only at his best but also in the full range of his imagination. They have been arranged in chronological order, determined from manuscript evidence, correspondence, or date of publication.” Although these are selected, it seems like a complete collection to me.

I’ve known about Wallace Stevens for some time but had read little of his poetry. He has some poems in anthologies that I have leafed through, but if I read any of his, they didn’t make much of an impression on me. Until this collection, that is. I bought this, I suppose, to try to have a more “rounded out” collection of poets’ works. Stevens lived from 1879 to 1955, so was a poet of the 21st Century. I assumed that would make him essentially a free verse poet, that assumption being informed by snippets about him that I had read in magazines or short bios.

Sure enough, that’s what I discovered as I read in this volume.  Almost everything in it is free verse. I’ve made no bones about it that I don’t understand free verse and can’t appreciate it. Thus, it’s no surprise that I didn’t like what I was reading in this book. The first poem seemed pretty good, however, and I read on. Alas, for me it was all downhill from there. I had great difficulty finding enjoyment in most of the other poems.

Heck, I didn’t understand most of them. They seemed to be a series of unrelated and disconnected images. I just skimmed through the book to find an example of this. Virtually every poem has those types of images and language, but I think I won’t quote them here.

So, I gave up with Mr. Stevens’ book. I hate to do that with any book. Before I did I got to page 100, 1/4th of the way through the book, so that I could say I gave it an honest trial.

And, as you can suspect, the book is not a keeper. I hate to break up my poetry collection, but with this one I start the process.

book reviews, Christianity

Book Review: Witness

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An excellent book about a man who suffered horrendously at the hands of the Soviet communists.

When you are a buyer of used books, you sometimes wonder where you got this or that book, how long you’ve had it, and why you bought it. So it is with the book Witness: An Autobiography by Josyp Terelya with Michael H. Brown. Terelya was a prisoner in the USSR in the 1960s-80s because of his Christian faith.

The reason I wonder why we bought the book is because Terelya is Ukrainian Catholic, which is attached to the Roman Catholic Church. As a Protestant, I’m not anti-Catholic, but I don’t usually read Catholic books. I suspect we bought this at a thrift store, based on the price marking.

However, it is an excellent book. Terelya was born to Communist parents in Ukraine during World War 2. In fact, they were leading communists and very much in favor of Ukraine being part of the Soviet Union. Terelya was influence by his grandparents and others, and became a devout Catholic, much to his parents’ dismay. The USSR suppressed religion, especially any religions that competed with the Russian Orthodox Church.

When Terelya became an adult, he did not hide his religious observances, and was soon put in prison for it. He escaped. He was captured and his sentence increased. Put in a more secure prison, he escaped again. He was beaten, spent much time in solitary confinement, Food rations were inadequate. He developed health problems. The guards also tried to break him psychologically, with frequent interrogations and beatings. As a consequence of his long imprisonment, he developed chronic health problems.

Through this, Terelya survived. He found ways to share his faith and prepare printed materials. Once when he was released for a couple of years, he married and fathered his first child. In later years, two more children were added to the family.

A portion of the book deals with “appearances” of Mary, the mother of Jesus, over a several week period in a small Ukranian village in 1987. Terelya was out of prison by then and took part in observing the visions. He went into considerable detail about these.

My wife and I read the book aloud in the evenings, taking about a month to complete it (with a few interruptions). I’m glad we did. It was unexpectedly timely due to the current war in Ukraine, and it told us a piece of history we had no idea of. Learning new things while being entertained is a good thing.

The book, published in 1991, is likely out of print. But it is worth the read if you can find it. I give it 4-stars, it losing one star due to what I consider an overabundance of placenames without providing a map to give at least a basic idea where places were. Alas, the book is not a keeper. We are going to give it away to a Catholic relative, and hope they, in turn, pass it on to someone who will enjoy it.

book reviews, C.S. Lewis, Christianity

Book Review: “C.S. Lewis: His Life & Thought”

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If you don’t know much about C.S. Lewis but would like to, this book is a good place to start.

When we traveled to Meade Kansas for an event at my wife’s home church, we discovered the library there had a sidewalk sale of surplus books going on. Naturally we had to go to it and look for bargains. I bought two books. One of them was C.S. Lewis: His Life & Thought by Terry Glaspey. I read this in about eight sittings in June.

It’s hard to get a bad book by or about C.S. Lewis. The eminent scholar and Christian apologist has had a major influence in the world and in my life. I try to always be reading a book of his or about him. This is the third or fourth I’ve read this year, and I’m reading in the second volume of his collected letters currently.

This book is in two sections. The first is a summary of his life, in short chapters covering brief periods or episodes. This is less than a biography, more of a series of vignettes.

The second half covers Lewis’s beliefs, again in short chapters, about various Christian doctrines and practices. These include quotes from Lewis’s writings as well as commentary by Glaspey. This section is well done, well worth reading.

The book includes a third section: C.S. Lewis: His Legacy. This is only ten pages long. Like the first two sections, it is also well done.

The entire book reads as a summary of Lewis’s life and beliefs, and a good part of his works. If you are looking for an introduction to C.S. Lewis, this would be a good book to start with.

book reviews

Book Review: Boswell’s “Life of Samuel Johnson”

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This isn’t the version I read. Mine was hardback, printed in 1946, with some good illustrations, both b&w and color.

It seems that whatever British author I read in the 1800s and 1900s, reference is always made to The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell. Obviously, this is an important book. As a result, some years ago, I picked up a used copy somewhere and put in in the reading pile.  Sometime in May, I was looking for a book to read, preferably a book that I would read and then get rid of. I saw this on my closet bookshelf. The 631 pages sort of turned me off, but I thought, why not?

It took me over a month to read this. Wikipedia says “It has often been described as the greatest biography ever written.” Would it prove so?

I had often heard of Johnson. Carlyle and McCauley wrote essays about him, or about this biography. C.S. Lewis frequently made references to him, or at least to this book, in his letters. Johnson was a writer. His most famous work was an English dictionary. I’m not sure if it was the first one published, but for sure it was an early and influential one. He also published The Rambler for three years, followed by The Adventurer.

Johnson’s works span essays, pamphlets, periodicals, sermons, poetry, biographies, criticism, the dictionary, and a novella. Sounds like he had the same writing malady that I do, Genre Focus Disorder.

Boswell had befriended Johnson, who willingly accepted the younger man into his circle of friends. Boswell kept a journal that included summaries of their conversations, recorded shortly after they had taken place. After Johnson’s death in 1784 at age 75, Boswell got to work on the biography. Published in 1791, it took England by storm. Boswell worked in many of those conversations. He also quoted extensively from his and Johnson’s correspondence, as well as of letters between Johnson and others. That resulted in a work that was varied in contents and made this biography much different than biographies published to that date.

Since then, this book has come under criticism for being less than a true portrait of Johnson. Boswell himself came in for criticism. McCauley said he was:

“Servile and impertinent, shallow and pedantic, a bigot and a sot, bloated with family pride, and eternally blustering about the dignity of a born gentleman, yet stooping to be a talebearer, an eavesdropper, a common butt in the taverns of London[;] … such was this man, and such he was content and proud to be”.

Of course, knowing how opinionated McCauley could be, I would not accept this assessment at face value. Thomas Carlyle also wrote about Johnson and this biography, one of Carlyle’s works I haven’t read yet, but will soon.

So I have now read this book. I’m glad I did so. Am I enlightened? Do I agree it is “the greatest biography ever written”? Is it a keeper.

Yes, I am enlightened, or perhaps I should say educated, about Johnson’s life. I had heard of him, but really didn’t know anything about him except his era and his general works. Now, I am more enlightened about the man, his life, and his works. I don’t know that I would classify this as the greatest biography ever written by modern standards. But, then again, I don’t know that I would hold any bio I’ve read head and shoulders above others. Biography is great and I enjoy reading them. This is a good one, but, in my opinion, not “the greatest”.

And, it is NOT a keeper. Now that I’ve written this post, out to the donation/sale shelf in the garage it will go. I just took a load of books and other stuff to a thrift store on Wednesday, so Johnson and Boswell might sit there awhile, gathering dust. Perhaps I’ll have a visitor to the house who will want this, and I will gladly give it to him or her.