On the precipice

After Luke 19:11-27

On the precipice

of the crack in time,

the moment when

nothing would be

the same again,

the moment 

at the juncture

of the before

and the after,

a price was

required, a toll

to cover the before.

Eyes focused 

on the after,

they would miss

the reality

of the moment,

they would see

the wrong thing,

at least for a time,

until after the cock

crowed,

until after the curtain

tore,

until after the stone

rolled,

until after the wound

was touched.

Photograph by Cristina Gottardi via Unsplash. Used with permission.

"A Debt of Death" by Jonathan Dunsky

Private detective Adam Lapid takes most of his meals at Greta’s Café in Tel Aviv. It is 1950, and rationing – and the black market – are the order of the day. Lapid like the café food; he likes the time he can spend there, talking with Greta and playing chess against himself; and he likes the fact that other diners leave him alone. But what he loves is the coffee, the best in Tel Aviv, he believes.

Lapid had a past that stretches back to police detective days in Hungary and the Nazi concentration camps, the camps that took the lives of his wife and daughters and the camps where he almost died. He has a postwar history in Europe, when he spent time in Germany helping to hunt down and murder some of the Nazis who escaped the Allied armies. And he has a history in the Israeli war for independence in 1947-48, when he performed a particularly heroic (or foolhardy, or both) action in the Sinai that got him wounded.

Jonathan Dunsky

He’s at Greta’s one evening when a man is found dead right outside the café. Lapid knows the man, one Nathan Frankel. He knew Frankel only recently in Tel Aviv, but he knew him even more in Auschwitz. Frankel was the man who saved Lapid’s life after a particularly brutal beating with a whip by a Nazi camp guard, the beating that left permanent scars on Lapid’s back. The detective figures he owes a debt to Frankel, one that will determine Lapid to find who killed the man.

It’s a debt that will take Lapid into people involved with illegal currency exchange, black market activities, organized crime, police corruption, and personal passion. A Debt of Death is the fourth (and most recently published) Adam Lapid mystery novel by Jonathan Dunsky, and it’s an excellent entry in an already excellent series. 

The first three Adam Lapid mysteries are Ten Years Gone; The Dead Sister; and The Auschwitz Violinist. He’s also published The Favor: A Tale of Friendship and Murder; Grandma Rachel’s Ghosts; Family Ties; Tommy’s Touch: A Fantasy Love Story; and other works. He was born in Israel, served four years in the Israeli Army, lived in Europe for several years, and currently lives in Israel with his family. He has worked in various high-tech firms and operated his own search optimization business.

Dunsky works Israeli history and its criminal underbelly so well that the reader seems to walk the streets with Lapid as he searches for a killer and pays his debt. A Debt of Honor is one fine mystery read. 

Related:

My review of Ten Years Gone by Jonathan Dunsky.

My review of The Unlucky Woman by Jonathan Dunsky.

My review of The Dead Sister by Jonathan Dunsky.

My review of The Auschwitz Violinistby Jonathan Dunsky.

"Living a Life of Yes" by David Rupert

I remember about four years ago when pictures of Jordan began showing up on David Rupert’s Facebook page. The famous ruins of Petra. Mount Nebo. The Jordan side of the Dead Sea. All scenes of sites well known from the Bible but not on the usual tour of the Holy Land. 

Rupert was there because he said yes. He had made a New Year’s resolution to say yes to every opportunity God put in front of him. The first one arrived four days later – an invitation from the Kingdom of Jordan to visit and write about the Christian sites in that country. 

It was the first time he said yes, but it wasn’t the last. And now he’s written a book: Living a Life of Yes: How One Word Can Change Everything. 

David Rupert

It’s an easy, engaging read, but it’s also thought-provoking – and heart-piercing. Rupert is a writer; his 9-to-5 job (which understates the actual hours) is as a strategic communication specialist. He knows how to write well, and he knows how to write to communicate well. And in Living a Life of Yes, he makes a convincing case.

Note that saying yes doesn’t mean saying yes to everything. It’s saying yes to “everything God puts in front of you.” Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference, but Rupert gives practical, prayer-grounded advice on how to do that. When presented with that kind of opportunity, something more than “thoughts and prayers” is demanded, and he explains how to go beyond one of the tritest expressions in American culture today.

Through 12 chapters, he explains what happened to him when he said yes; how he overcame fear and doubts; how to get ready for changing the world (because that’s the size of the opportunity); the difficulties you can face when saying yes; and real-world examples of people living a life of yes. And he has a challenge: “There’s a time to read and hear about other people, and then there’s a time to be like those other people.”

In addition to his full-time job, Rupert leads Writers on the Rock, a large writing community based in Colorado. His articles have appeared in Christianity Today, Real Living, Breakpoint, The High Calling, and other Christian and leadership publications, and he blogs at Patheos.org. He and his family live in Golden, Colorado.

So, consider Living a Life of Yes. Read it, but you need to do more than read it. 

Believe it. 

Do it.

Poets and Poems: Chris Dombrowski and "Ragged Anthem"

Reading Ragged Anthem: Poems by Chris Dombrowski evoked the strangest feeling, and I’m not exactly sure why. Whether the poems were about time, or geology, or nature, or an old (and unsolved) murder, or a boy catching a tree frog, or St. Francis of Assisi, a thought kept recurring. And it was that life is fragile, and the fragility is giving way. But this is happening in the face of a personal resiliency; an irresistible force may be meeting an immovable object, and something will change.  

This began with the very first of the 52 poems in the collection, a poem entitled “Gentle Reader.” The narrator rents a room; he plays “Unaccompanied Suite for a Stolen Violin” in his head over and over until someone next door punches the wall, and still he won’t turn the volume down. He and the wall puncher eventually have an eyeball-to-eyeball standoff the at the spyhole in the door. And after reading the poem three times I think this narrator, this poet, is fragile, things are coming unglued, and he’s in a standoff with the chaos right outside his door.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

“Perpetual Care: Stories” by James Nolan

For a native of New Orleans, reading the 16 short stories ofPerpetual Care by James Nolan is an immersion in both memory and reality. This is the city I remember, and this is the city I know, the one that is part of me for life. Even for the two stories set in San Francisco, strong New Orleans connections undergird the narrative.

Writers who know the city well, like John Kennedy Toole of The Confederacy of Dunces and Nolan, know how New Orleanians talk. What Southern accents exist in the city are imports. Natives, particularly those born and raised within the boundaries of Orleans Parish, have “the accent” – a curious mixture of French, Spanish, and African-American with added influences of Irish, Italian, and German immigrants. It sounds like Brooklyn and south St. Louis but still different from both. Nolan’s caught it exactly right in his stories.

The stories may be New Orleans-centric, but they reach beyond the city. In “The Immortalist,” a man attends the memorial service of a friend from the hippie culture youth. “Why Isn’t Everything Where It Used to Be?” concerns an older woman slipping into Alzheimer’s and takes the bus from the suburbs into the city because she knows she has to meet her mother and sisters for shopping. In “Knock Knock,” a boy slips away from potential sexual abuse. “La Vie en Rose Construction Co.” is about a courtyard repair that looks to go on indefinitely. The collection even includes a mystery story, “Open Mic,” in which a police detective investigates the disappearance of a young woman.

James Nolan

My favorite story is the title story, “Perpetual Care,” because it is so New Orleans. A woman tending to the family tomb in one of New Orleans’ “cities of the dead” is startled to hear singing come from the tomb across the walkway – and a cultural phenomenon is born, complete with food carts, the Jazz Festival, and tourist buses. It’s a laugh-out-loud story, and it’s perfectly believable in a city like New Orleans.

Nolan received a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of California (Berkeley and Santa Cruz). He’s taught writing and literature at universities in the United States, Spain, and China, and directed the Writing Institute at Loyola University in New Orleans for 12 years. His books include Drunk on Salt (2014), Flight Risk: Memoirs of a New Orleans Bad Boy

(2017), Higher Ground (2011), Jaime Gil de Biedma, Longing: Selected Poems (translation, 1993), Pablo Neruda, Stones of the Sky (translation, 2002), Perpetual Care:Stories (2008), What Moves is Not the Wind (1980),Why I Live in the Forest (1974), and You Don't Know Me: New and Selected Stories (2014). He lives in New Orleans.

The characters populating the stories of Perpetual Care are classic New Orleans people – police officers, plumbers, strippers, bartenders, men whose families pay them to stay away, a would-be writer determined to get published at any cost, the French Quarter residents ready to commit homicide if one more vampire-tour group comes by, the elderly clinging to the houses they live in because they’re anchored in the sense of place, the people who respond to chain letters. New Orleans people, yes, but people recognizable anywhere.

The story that wasn't

After Luke 19:11-27

A story about stewardship,

about faithfulness,

about investment,

turned out to be a story

about

something else.

A story about coins, ten coins,

given to ten servants,

one coin to each;

three servants questioned,

three servants responded,

three different results 

tied to the character 

of the servant. 

One returns ten.

One returns five.

One returned nothing.

Coins, and character.

The focus is (usually) the one

who returned nothing, but

there’s a context, overlooked:

listeners approaching Jerusalem,

listeners expecting a kingdom,

and in the story,

the people hate the man

over them, hate the man

handing out the coins,

reject the man 

handing out the coins.

To establish the kingdom,

the king must first be

rejected.

Photograph by Pina Messina via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Saturday Good Reads

This week, I posted a book review of what I thought was to be a mystery novel and turned to be a serious literary novel – and a mystery. This was Throw Me to the Wolves by Patrick McGuiness, and it’s the story of a murder investigation in a small city in southern England. It’s also a story about the destructiveness of social media and traditional media in our era of the 24-hour news cycle, the daily newspaper implosion, and “fake news.”

A similar sub-story popped up on the BBC series Unforgotten, which recently finished airing season 3 on PBS. In this case, a gossip blogger unleashes an online tirade against a man who’s a suspect in a murder investigation, and someone decides to take justice into their own hands. The murderer turns out to be someone else.

While both the McGuiness book and the television show are set in Britain, they could just as easily been set in the United States. Think the Covington boys, who found their necks figuratively placed on the guillotines of both social media and traditional media back in January. CNN, the Washington Post, and NBC News are being sued for hundreds of millions of dollars as a result, and no one is saying they don’t deserve the lawsuits. More than 50 news organizations are on notice from the lawyers filing the suits.

But the media weren’t the only ones at fault. People went crazy on Twitter. People, including progressive, evangelical, and traditional Christians, went crazy on Facebook. Conservative publications like National Review and the boys’ own school and archdiocese jumped in, joining the orgy of virtue signaling, because that’s what it was – virtue signaling. And when the facts came out, everyone said, “Oops, sorry, never mind,” and quickly turned to other subjects. 

One would hope that the news media learned something from this, but it’s doubtful. It’s especially painful for someone like me, who was trained and graduated in journalism, worked with and respected reporters my entire working life, and then began to watch the change in news and journalism over the last 15 years. It’s not getting better. And it matters, because tens of millions of people no longer trust the news media, and with good reason.

More Good Reads

American Stuff

These Men I Feel I Know, a Little, at Ox Ford – Chris Mackowski at Emerging Civil War.

How Dodge City Became The Ultimate Wild West – Robert Dykstra and Jo Ann Manfra at The Saturday Evening Post.

Poetry

Easter Saturday – Joe Spring. 

A Sonnet for Ascension Day – Malcolm Guite at The Imaginative Conservative.

The Monk of Northwood – Greg Doles at Chasing Light.

Poems for the Time Being: Why You Should Read C.P. Cavafy – Brian Volck at Image Journal.

Incomplete thoughts – Barbara Mackenzie at Signed…BKM.

In the Ruins of Babylon: The Poetic "Genius" of John Keats – Paul Krause at The Imaginative Conservative.

Life and Culture

The Books of College Libraries Are Turning into Wallpaper – Dan Cohen at The Atlantic.

I Found My Birth Family – and It Turns Out I'd Known Them All Along – David Magee at Newsweek.

Ecce Hortus: A Dispatch from Dumb-Ass Acres – Jason Peters at Front Porch Republic.

Christ and the Circus – Andrew Wilson at Think Theology.

Longer Than – Jennie Cesario at Dappled Thoughts.

Dawn Dreaming – Eileen Knowles at The Scenic Route.

News Media

Arkansas newspaper gambles on free iPads as the future – Hannah Grabenstein at AP News.

Writing and Literature

The Immortal Four: Tolkien and the Barrovian Society – Bradley Birzer at The Imaginative Conservative.

The world of William Maxwell – Justin Cartwright at Spectator USA.

“Nineteen Eight-Four” at 70 – John Rodden at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

Back in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Football – Poem by Glen Wilson.

Drawing: Man Reading the Bible (1882) by Vincent Van Gogh.