Saturday Good Reads - Nov. 18, 2023

What is it about major news media and hospitals? First it was The New York Times, saying that a Gaza Hospital had been hit by an Israeli airstrike. That was wrong on all counts. This week, it was the BBC, saying the Israeli army targeting medical staffs and Arabic speakers when it entered the large hospital compound in Gaza. Oops, a slight misquote. At least the BBC apologized within minutes; it took the Times a week.  

Years back, I discovered and fell in love with the stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer, even before he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Singer has a purpose in his stories, and that was to preserve in written form the Yiddish culture that had been destroyed by the Nazis. David Stromberg as edited and translated Singer’s stories from the war years, and he explains how the writer preserved European Jewish life through literature. 

 

If you have the opportunity to see the Elgin marbles at the British Museum, better grab it sooner rathe than later. George Osborne, the museum’s chairman, says he’s eager to “reach a Parthenon Marbles deal,” reports Martin Bailey at The Art Newspaper.

 

More Good Reads

 

News Media

 

A cautionary tale about Wikipedia censorship and the Twitter files – Becket Adams at The Spectator.

 

American Stuff

 

America’s Alarming Debt Trap – Tim Congdon at The Critic Magazine.

The Whisky Rebellion: A Distilled History of an American Crisis by Brady Crytzer – book review by Eric Sterner at American Revolutionary War Era.

 

Grant & McClellan: Why Grant Succeeded – Andrew Lucien at American Civil War & UK History.

 

Writing and Literature

 

Write Better and Faster (and Reach More People) When You Write in Public – Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach. 

 

Shakespeare’s Folio Was Stolen Many, Many Times – Alicia Andrzejewski and Carole Levin at CrimeReads. 

 

Gatsby: Grasping for Transcendence – Frank DeVito at Front Porch Republic.

 

Faith

 

Why I Am Now a Christian – Ayaan Hirsi Ali at The Free Press.

 

The Lions’ Grave – Paul Kingsnorth at The Abbey of Misrule.

 

The History of Study Bibles – Stephen Nichols at Ligonier.

 

Life and Culture

 

Paul Kingsnorth and “The Blizzard of the World” – John Murdock at Front Porch Republic.

 

The American Multimillionaire Marxists Funding Pro-Palestinian Rage – Francesca Block at The Free Press.

 

British Stuff

 

The “UK Files”: A History of the Center for Countering Digital Hate – Paul Holden at Racket News. 

 

“UK Files” Reports Show: Both Left and Right Can Be Target of Censors – Matt Taibbi at Racket News.

 

Lost in Long Forgotten London and Sights of Wonderful London – Spitalfields Life.

 

Poetry

 

My Little Poem: Beauty – Megan Willome on “Pied Beauty” by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

 

Lux Aeterna – Paul Wittenberger at Paul’s Substack.

 

The Gift – David Nevue

 Painting: Man Reading, oil on canvas (1922) by Eduard von Gebhardt (1838-1925). 

A model

After Philippians 2:1-11 

We have a model

for this humility thing.

He didn’t see himself

equal to God. Instead,

he poured himself out

to serve to the point

of death. Bow 

your knee; let

your tongue confess

who he is and what

he did. He’s the model,

the prototype, the one

to emulate, to embrace,

the one to follow and

do likewise.

 

Photograph by Jehyun Sung via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Friday Readings

 

A Sonnet Sent to Blackness – Elizabeth Melville at Kingdom Poets (D.S. Martin). 

 

Her Present Absence – Karen Harmening at Listening to Him on the loss of a child.

 

Sounds Like Paradise – poem by Roy Peterson at Society of Classical Poets.

 

Can We Tawk? – Paul Hughes at Poet and Priest.

 

A Lisbon Love Story – Tom Darin Liskey at Cultivating Oaks Pres.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Illustrated Edition -- Tweetspeak Poetry.

"Talion" by Pete Brassett

Detective Sergeant Charlotte (“Charlie”) West and her team have a case. A body’s been found at the bottom of a cliff, with no identification. But West is also almost desperate to find her boss, Detective Inspector James Munro, last seen entering his home, followed by murderer, before an explosion rocked the house. 

Munro is eventually found, and the body is eventually identified as a small-time hood, so small-time that no one should want to kill him. But murdered he was, and Munro and West have some unraveling to do to find the answers they’re looking for.

 

Pete Brassett

Talion is the sixth Munro & West crime novel by Scottish writer Pete Brassett. And it is a crime, heavily leavened by humor. I’d noted the humor Brassett has used before, but it moves front and center in Talion, including a few laugh-out-loud scenes. Most of the humor involves the wit of Munro, but it cuts across the story and the characters. And Munro will eventually identify the killer, with the help of a young boy who loves examining dead things, and he just might commit a crime on his own if is detective superintendent doesn’t process his retirement papers as promised.

 

Brassett, a native Scot, has published 10 novels in the Munro and West series, as well as a number of general fiction and mystery titles. 

 

The suspects in Talion are as finely drawn as the police team investigating the crime. Throw in a good story seasoned with a heavy dose of humor, and it’s a winning story.

 

Related:

 

She by Pete Brassett.

 

Avarice by Pete Brassett.

 

Duplicity by Pete Brassett.

 

Terminus by Pete Brassett.

 

Some Thursday Readings

 

Writing Will Be There When You Need It – Nathan Bransford.

 

Quietly – poem and artwork by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

Year of the Monarch: Harvesting and Planting Milkweed Seeds – Laura Boggess at Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

A nice shout-out from a reader about Dancing Priest – Bill Grandi at Living in the Shadow.

How a Troublesome Manuscript Was Saved

Hold on to those unfinished or problematic manuscripts. You never know when they’re due for a rebirth. 

You pour everything into creating a manuscript. You type “The End.” You smile and give yourself a well-deserved pat on the back. It’s done. You finished it.

 

You set it aside for a few days, and then you reread it.

 

You see a problem, but you know it can be easily fixed. You read on. Another problem, and another theoretical fix. You plow on, right to the end, and you realize what the problem is.

 

The problem is the entire manuscript. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t tell the story you want told. It doesn’t tell the story the characters want told. And you think to yourself, “All that work. All that work.” 

To continue reading, please see my post today at the ACFW blog. 

Photograph by Scott Graham via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

Book Review: Charley: The True Story of the Youngest Soldier to Die in the American Civil War by Brendan Lyons – Kevin Pawlak at Emerging Civil War. 

 

You Are the Last Line of Defense – Bari Weiss at The Free Press.

 

Israel at the Precipice Once Again – Mark Helprin at Real Clear Politics.

Poets and Poems: B.H. Fairchild and "An Ordinary Life"

I can’t imagine the grief of losing a child, and I hope I never experience it. In our minds, at least, and in our cultures, the death of a child violates the natural order of things. My grandmother never spoke much about it, nor my father, but I would hear occasional murmurs about Eloise, the daughter and sister who died at age 2 in 1915. My father would have been her little brother, so he never actually knew her. My grandmother mourned her child the rest of her life, but it was a quiet, intensely personal mourning. 

It was that kind of quiet mourning that I discovered when reading An Ordinary Life: Poems by B.H. Fairchild. He did experience the grief from loss of a child when his son Paul died at age 46 in 2017. It’s not the same as losing a young child or an infant, because now an almost full lifetime of experience and memory is packed into the death. And there’s a daughter-in-law and grandchildren to be considered.

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

Some Tuesday Readings

 

The Temple of Mithras and Vince Street Roman Wall – A London Inheritance.

 

A Headstone Dedication for John S. Taplin – Darren Rawlings at Emerging Civil War.

 

Things Worth Remembering: The Singing Will Never Be Done – Douglas Murray at The Free Press.

 

Accused of Spying: Fannie Cowper of Suffolk, Virginia – Jeff Giambrone at Emerging Civil War.

 

Firefighter Artists of the Blitz – Spitalfields Life.

"Augustine of Canterbury" by Robin Mackintosh

In 2013, we visited Canterbury, primarily to see the cathedral and the shrine of Thomas Beckett, the archbishop murdered by henchman of Henry II. There had been a mention in the our travel book of a nearby site, the Abbey of St. Augustine, and we walked a few blocks to see it. I’m glad we did. 

The abbey is a ruin, destroyed during the dissolution of the churches by Henry VIII (Thomas Cromwell, he of Wolf Hallfame, directed the destruction). But walking around the ruins, listening to the audio tour, you get a good idea of what the site would have been like in its prime. A question we had was, who was St. Augustine? It clearly wasn’t the saint and theologian who died in Hippo in North Africa in 430 A.D. As it turns out, not a whole lot is known about the missionary sent by Pope Gregory the Great in 596 to the Anglo-Saxon kingdom led by King Aethelbehrt and Queen Bertha (she was a Christian; the king was not). 

 

The mission was highly successful; Augustine eventually became the first Archbishop of Canterbury.

 

Augustine of Canterbury by Robin Mackintosh aims to answer that question, at least as fully as it can be answered. The fact is that we don’t know much of the man’s early life, until he appears in the church records and accounts in Rome. Mackintosh also goes further. He discusses the context of Augustine’s mission, based on recent historical, archaeological, and sociological studies. He looks at Augustine’s leadership and what it might imply for the church in the 21^st century. And he challenges the negative interpretation of the mission, which started with the Venerable Bede himself.

 

Mackintosh was in a good position to write this story. He’s the director of Licensed Ministries and Warden of Readers in the Diocese of Canterbury and an honorary cathedral canon. He’s also spent considerable time in research; the book is only 192 pages (including notes, bibliography, and index) but it is packed with historical context of Rome, southern and northern France, and England in the late sixth century. When he describes, for example, what Augustine and his companions would have seen in Aix-en-Provence on their journey, the reader feels he’s right there in the moment, seeing what Augustine saw.

 

We travel with the mission from Rome to southern France, with a return when more letters from the pope are needed; then he returns through France and finally southeastern England. With Augustine, we navigate the sets of royal politics through numerous kingdoms. If we don’t know much about Augustine’s personality, we can see some of it reflected in the people along the way he had to deal with.

 

Robin Mackintosh

Eventually we land in England, wait for the official welcome by the king and queen to be organized, and then begin the mission. The king becomes a Christian (the critical conversion), and soon the mission is working its way through the people. Christianity had been introduced to Britain during Roman times, but the Romans had left a hundred years before and the church, had found itself (along with native Britons) pushed to margins of Wales and northern England by the Anglo-Saxon invasions. 

 

Augustine of Canterbury was published in 2013; I’d read a similar approach to a subject with Annie Whitehead’s 2018 Mercia: The Rise and Fall of a Kingdom, in which a small kingdom in north central England left almost no historical record of its own. Researching the context can tell us much even when we have little direct evidence from the subject of the study. 

 

Top photograph: Ruins of the Abbey of St. Augustine, Canterbury, via Wikimedia Commons.

Some Monday Readings

 

Pundits: “Ignorance” Makes Americans Give “Wrong” Answers to Economic Confidence Poll – Matt Taibbi at Racket News.

 

I Once Thought British Jews Were Special. Not Anymore – Tanya Gold at The Free Press.

 

Fundamentally Religious and Catholic: A review of Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography by Holly Ordway – Adam Schwartz at Kirk Center.

 

Many People at Once: The Role of Literary Translators – Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review.

 

November Poem a Day 2023, Week 2 – Kelly Belmomte at Al Nine.

Complete my job

After Philippians 2:1-11 

If there is any truth

at all here, any comfort,

any affection or

sympathy, anything

at all, complete my job

by having the same,

the same love,

the same accord,

the same mind. It’s

not about me or you;

it’s about others.

Set ambitions aside,

abandon selfishness,

all who are gathered

here. Humble yourself

to count others

more significant than

you are.

 

Photograph by Toa Heftiba via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Sunday Readings

 

These things – artwork by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

Single Men with Many Sons: How to Be a Spiritual Father – Scott Hubbard at Desiring God. 

 

Mountain Solitaire: Letter from America, Part 1 – Paul Kingsnorth at The Abbey of Misrule. 

 

On Armistice Sunday – Spitalfields Life.

 

London 11-11-2023 – poem by Susan Jarvis Bryant at Society of Classical Poets.