DISCLAIMER: I received this book in the mail for free to review. I wrote in the margins and dog-eared the pages. I will not be sending it back.
I’ve got a special shrine/shelf set aside as my homage to the Collected Works of Matthew Paul Turner. I now need new slot for his latest, HEAR NO EVIL (copyright 2010, Waterbrook Press), where Thew is able to capture a part of his eye-opening faith-stretching encounter with contemporary Christian music and culture.
All kidding aside (well, most kidding aside), I’ve enjoyed Matt’s writing over the years and this book continues the appreciation for me. This time we’ve been invited to join him on the journey from fundamentalist no-rock-and-roll-or-syncopated-beats-in-this-house-young-man to wow-there’s-more-out-there-than-hymnals-and-polyester. I’m a few years ahead in my own CCM learning curve, but the artists and music Matt draws from are near and dear to my heart as well. More than that, though, it was interesting to see that this book wasn’t so much about the music as it was about the cultural changes Matt lived out in discovering himself and discovering music along the way. Someone tweeted that he needed to have a HNO Mix on iTunes – a good idea I agree, but for the most part, there weren’t lots of songs pulled or named after the first few chapters. It was more of a vibe, more of an awakening going on in Young Matt, with music being both a seed and the soil for the growth he’s trying to transcribe.
I’ve always liked Matt’s turn of phrase, and have found that he’s one of the best contemporary authors for pulling completely random contextless quotes that are chock-full of meaning and snark:
“You don’t get to have crabs very often” – p30 [tweet]
“For a lot of Christians, their imaginations are liabilities, like the five senses and genitals” – p51 [tweet]
“But there was one consistent thread of grace in our lives, a trail we could follow all the way back to when our memories began: music. Music reminded us that we could trust God even when ‘his people’ failed us.” – p201
The sentiment of that last quote runs deep throughout the book, but I’m most grateful that it appears in a chapter on Amy Grant that so closely parallels my own walk through those waters (wow, this post is four years old)… it gave me yet another touchpoint to Matthew and his life growing up and discovering grace. The book as a whole works, but that chapter for me took it to another plane, and really makes it stick out in the Matthew Paul Turner catalog for me.
Most joking aside (again), if you’ve spent time reading CCM magazine or rushing to your local Christian Book & Music store each week for the latest releases or you’ve worked as a DJ at a low-powered AM radio station in mid-market Columbia, SC – then this book will feel like someone’s telling your story. Different characters, different scene locations, but the same soundtrack.
For some reason, I never thought a great deal of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? until now, more than ten years after I first read it. There was always something perplexing, even troubling, about the book as a whole. I didn’t like or understand the stuff about Mercerism, and I felt the action scenes in the book to be inferior to those in the film Blade Runner, which was famously based on this strange little book. But now, on perhaps my fourth overall reading in ten years, I’ve changed my mind.
The first thing that struck me about Androids this time was its simplicity of structure. At a little over two hundred pages, and with all the events taking place on the same day, PKD employs two main viewpoint characters and two only: Rick Deckard and J.R. Isidore. This austerity seems especially stark when compared to the book of PKD’s I mostly recently read before this: the unruly Doctor Bloodmoney. The second notable thing about Androids is the high-brow, even scholarly tone adopted herein, which sets it apart from most of this authors other books. SF critic and writer Stanislaw Lem once labelled this novel ‘a counterfeit coin,’ feeling that it paled in comparison with Ubik. I used to think I knew what Lem meant by this, but now I’m not so sure. What I see here is an enjoyable, fast-moving police thriller that economically (even effortlessly) meditates on the nature of the real in a more immediate way than in, say, the slower paced The Man in the High Castle.
In the aftermath of World War Terminus, Earth is a shambles. Most of the survivors have emigrated to the Martian colonies, and most of those who survive are ’specials’ or ‘chickenheads’ whose genetic code has been scrambled by the radiation. J.R. Isidore is one of these. I should point out here that PKD has basically exported Isidore from the earlier (but then unpublished) Confessions of a Crap Artist. There and here, he is an idiot savant with a good heart. Here he works for a Vet Clinic that specialises in repairing false animals. Strangely, and only barely logically, almost all of the Earth’s animals are extinct. Those that remain are highly sought after, status symbols in themselves. Sidney’s catalogue lists the prices and availability of all creatures great and small, many of whom are thought to be no more.
It is for this reason that Rick Deckard and his wife Iran have an electric sheep on their balcony. The electric sheep is far cheaper than a real one, but Rick Deckard longs for the real thing. In the first chapter, we learn that that won’t be possible unless two things happen. One, he will need to retire a vast number of ‘andys’ (Blade Runner’s replicants), and Two, another bounty hunter, Dave Holden, will need to be out of the way. Both of these things come to pass in chapter two, which helps to cast a little light onto the economical (but very effective) plotting at work in this novel.
What follows for the bulk of the narrative is Rick Deckard’s work day, a day in which he must try to do the unthinkable and ‘retire’ all six remaining Nexus 6 andys. A few of the scenes, such as the one where Deckard interviews Rachel Rosen and identifies her as an andy, are familiar from Blade Runner, but others, including perhaps the best in the whole novel, were omitted from the film. The scene I refer to is one where Deckard is arrested and taken to a fake police station, complete with a fake police chief but, crucially, a human officer who isn’t in on the plot. That officer, Phil Resch, comes to question his own humanity when pressured. Nowhere in PKD’s novels does he express the ‘What is Human?’ question as succintly as he does here.
It’s not all quite as good as this, however. It’s difficult not to read Androids alongside Blade Runner, as much as I try. The showdown between Deckard and Roy Baty is extremely anticlimatic and short-lived here. More interesting is the scene prior to this when the androids trap the spider J.R. has found and begin to snip its legs off. J.R. gets upset and flushes the spider down the sink, before Mercer appears and gives him a new spider (or is it the same one?) I say ‘appears’ because that’s exactly what Mercer, an old man climbing up a hill in some hazily-defined simulation, does. Is Mercer God? If so, why is he trying to help Deckard (as he does when Pris is about to set upon him) and why is he being denounced as a fraud by Buster Friendly and his Friendly Friends? PKD has no answer here. Ultimately, he’s less concerned with the thriller aspect than the philosophical implications, and that becomes all too apparent here at the plot’s crescendo.
And then it ends. By the final pages, Deckard seems to have sunk into some existensial gloom from which he might never recover. His brand new goat has been thrown off of the balcony (by Rachel Rosen, for reasons unknown), he’s indebted to the goat dealer and he’s not far off being a murderer, in his own mind at least. Forlorn, he flies in his hovercar up to the Oregon border where he finds a toad. Thinking it’s his lucky day, he takes it home to Iran only to discover that the toad is a fake. And that’s the real end of the novel. But what does it all mean? Maybe I do know what Lem was on about after all in terms of Androids being a counterfeit coin. There’s a sense of PKD, for want of a better term, ‘faking it’ here (although what ‘it’ is isn’t clear). Where Ubik seems genuinely mystical, Androids, in the end, is just a tired dead-end. There would be more along these lines from PKD in the years between this novel and his next book of real worth, A Scanner Darkly.
I took my time reading this book because I really didn’t want to miss out on anything written in it. First of all, a monotheist or an atheist does not write this book, it is written by a polytheist so we share a worldview. And someone who always presents an interesting point of view no matter what subject he is writing about as is evident from his blog “The Archdruid Report” writes it. Also I’m reading it at a time when I am trying to pinpoint what exactly are my beliefs about deity. Needless to say it was a big help.
This book is not something that you should read only once. I think that the more you learn about your belief on deity the more you will go back to it. This is a book that is challenging the pagan community to start thinking of themselves as a RELIGIOUS movement rather than just a movement. It is a really intelligent argument for polytheism.
From the very beginning Greer tells us that his is using Traditional Polytheist as the comparison point to classical monotheism, which I believe is a good thing considering all the diverse types of polytheism that we do have. He reviews all the different arguments for and against theism and then he uses the principles of theology to explain the polytheistic worldview. He talks about pagan worship (yes he uses this word which a lot of pagans think of as dirty), pagan spirituality, pagan ethics, and much, much more.
John Greer’s knowledge of ceremonial magic, Wicca, and Druidry really helps him in writing this book. It is a must have in every pagan library in my opinion.
Horse soldiers : the extraordinary story of a band of U.S. soldiers who rode to victory in Afghanistan New York : Scribner, 2009 Doug Stanton Afghan War, 2001- , Cavalry operations, American Hardcover. 1st ed. and printing. xvi, 393 p., [8] p. of plates : ill., map ; 24 cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. 383-393). Clean, tight and strong binding with clean dust jacket. No highlighting, underlining or marginalia in text. VG/VG
From the New York Times-bestselling author of In Harm’s Way comes a true-life story of American soldiers overcoming great odds to achieve a stunning military victory.
Horse Soldiers is the dramatic account of a small band of Special Forces soldiers who secretly entered Afghanistan following 9/11 and rode to war on horses against the Taliban. Outnumbered forty to one, they pursued the enemy across mountainous terrain and, after a series of intense battles, captured the city of Mazar-i-Sharif, which was strategically essential if they were to defeat the Taliban.
The bone-weary American soldiers were welcomed as liberators, and overjoyed Afghans thronged the streets. Then the action took a wholly unexpected turn. During a surrender of six hundred Taliban troops, the Horse Soldiers were ambushed. Dangerously outnumbered, they fought for their lives in the city’s immense fortress, Qala-i-Janghi, or the House of War. At risk were the military gains of the entire campaign: if the soldiers perished or were captured, the effort to defeat the Taliban might be doomed.
As the Americans struggled to hold the fortress, they faced some of the most intense urban warfare of our time. But until now the full story of the Horse Soldiers has never been told. Doug Stanton received unprecedented cooperation from the U.S. Army’s Special Forces soldiers and Special Operations helicopter pilots, as well as access to voluminous after-battle reports. In addition, he interviewed more than one hundred participants and walked every inch of the climactic battleground.
This exciting story is filled with unforgettable characters: brave Special Forces soldiers, tough CIA operatives, cunning Afghan warlords, anxious stateside soldiers’ wives who do not know where their husbands have gone, and humble Afghan boys spying on the Taliban.
Deeply researched and beautifully written, Stanton’s account of America’s quest to liberate an oppressed people touches the mythic. The Horse Soldiers combined ancient strategies of cavalry warfare with twenty-first-century aerial bombardment technology to perform a seemingly impossible feat. Moreover, their careful effort to win the hearts of local townspeople and avoid civilian casualties proved a valuable lesson for America’s ongoing efforts in Afghanistan.
Horse Soldiers is a big-hearted and thrilling read, with an epic story that reaches not just across the cold mountains of Afghanistan but into the homes of small-town America, and confirms Doug Stanton as one of our country’s preeminent storytellers.
Come experience the world of Tibet through the simple, yet charming tales told in Tibetan Tales from the Top of the World by Naomi C. Rose.
This delightful collection includes three ancient tales that offer simple wisdom and show us how to live in peace and kindness. In “Prince Jampa’s Surprise”, children read of Prince Jampa, a brave young man who has been misled about the Varasi by years and years of stories telling of their bloodthirsty ways. Thinking the Varasi are out to destroy his people, Prince Jampa leads a war party into battle, only to discover that things might not be as they seem.
“Sonam and the Stolen Cow” shares the the story of Sonam, a young nun who is falsely accused of stealing a cow. Treated poorly by her accusers, when Sonam sees a chance to escape, she runs off. Very hungry, she meets up with a monkey in the woods, who reminds her of a time her cousin was falsely accused for something she did, which leads her on a path to finally make things right.
The last story in this collection is “Tashi’s Gold”. Tashi is a lazy worker, who spends much of his time napping. When he overhears two men talking about the magical lake loaded with gold, Tashi decides to go to the lake. If he were rich, he wouldn’t need to work on the farm anymore. He meets with the guardian of the lake, who tells him that riches never come from gold, but the greedy Tashi takes some anyway. But Tashi and his family soon discover the meaning behind the guardian’s words.
Each of these tales is told in a lyrical, flowing prose that draws the reader in. The author has studied Tibetan culture and wisdom since 1994, and her knowledge and passion to share this wisdom is evident right from the very beginning. Rose also provided the stunning illustrations for this book, making Tibetan Tales from the Top of the World a beautiful piece of work. The stories are told in English and Tibetan. There is a Preface from actor Richard Gere and the Dalai Lama provides the Foreword. Rose’s previous book, Tibetan Tales for Little Buddhas, won a Nautilus Book Award. It will not surprise me if Tibetan Tales from the Top of the World garners her more accolades.
A truly inspirational reading experience awaits you and your child in Tibetan Tales from the Top of the World!
You can find a trailer for this book at the author’s website.
The Pint Man: A Novel
by Steve Rushin
Doubleday, February 2009 $24.95 259 pages
Reading The Pint Man is an invitation into Rodney Poole’s thoughts. 34, unemployed and aimless, Rodney spends most evenings at Boyle’s, his local, as he drinks one pint after another “of Guinness, with its clerical collar of foam,” filling out crossword puzzles, and having meandering, trivia laden conversations with the bar’s other patrons, in the dim cave of Boyle’s, an Irish pub in Manhattan. I have a feeling I’ve been in this bar. Or somewhere enough like it to wonder whether The Pint Man is too New York to be read anywhere else. It’s a meandering, poetic sprawl of a novel, littered with odd facts and side notes.
Rodney’s a wordsmith, a pun and trivia collector, a crossword puzzle fiend. Shy, and deeply averse to change or conflict, he likes the ritual of an after-work pint, even though he’s at the loose ends of being downsized from a job he never liked. His best friend, Keith, is getting married, which nudges Rodney to wonder what he should be doing about moving forward. That thought, like the entire novel, has more of a tentative, wandering dreaminess than any real heft.
Reading this is like sitting in Boyle’s with Rodney, drinking pints poured by Armen the Barman, and having a far-flung ramble of a conversation: the kind of conversation that only happens in bars, preferably late at night and well lubricated by Guinness. I feel like I’ve met Rodney, at a pub quiz somewhere. There were some passages where I wondered if I’d dated Rodney… or at least the author’s inspiration for him. What keeps Rodney’s aimlessness from being annoying is his bibliophile’s appetite for punctuating the narrative with goofy facts and musings. Quoting Benjamin Franklin “Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy” one minute, and odd advertising slogans the next- Rodney’s cluttered mind is endearing, at least to a fellow Guinness drinking trivia hound.
Even the emergence of a love interest, in the person of career girl Mairead, feels tentative and muted. Rodney is a man of comforts and rituals, who is more accustomed to the risks of having a pun fall flat or his odd sense of humor misunderstood, than a man of any grand passions. That said, I love the unfolding of his and Mairead’s relationship- from a first date, to a few nights talking in bars, to a good wander through The Strand bookstore. The sweet, chaste shyness and banter is a very welcome relief from the usual rom-com trope where Boy Meets Girl, Sparks Fly and they wind up in bed at top speed. Diverting from the expected romantic cliches forces you to slow down and pay attention.
I wound up getting this from the Star-Ledger, not to review officially in print, but because Debbie the office manager at the editorial department sent it over with a note “This made me think of you.” Maybe what I liked was the recognition of such a strong sense of New York, and a trivia-obsessed mind certain of literary quotes but uncertain of the big details of being a grownup. Or maybe what I liked was the language and metaphor itself- sensory and thick about everything from a pint of Guinness to a walk in New York in August to a fetid bar men’s room, calling for the reader to pause, and really pay attention.
God Against the Gods begins at the very beginning of monotheism, not with Judaism but with the Sun God Aton. Not a lot of people know that monotheism began with an Egyptian Pharaoh, called Akhenaton, who decided that everyone should just worship one god which was Aton, the Sun god. Kirsch then moves on to Judaism and Christianity and along the way we learn many new and perhaps to some surprising things like the fact that martyrdom began with the Jews, and that the monotheistic condemnation of polytheism doesn’t come from the practices and rituals of these groups but from the fact that they worship more than one god and not the ONE TRUE GOD. Stripped to the basics what rituals pagans did/do is not so different from what the monotheists do.
The book is divided into two sections.
Book one is all about the God that failed and it has four chapters. Chapter one discusses Akhenaton and his monotheistic experiment and why it failed, chapter two discusses what pagans do and how that is similar to what monotheists do. It also takes about why the monotheists condemn the polytheists. Chapter three talks about the Jews and how they invented and reinvented themselves and how they dealt with other Jews whom they felt were not pious enough, as well as how the Roman empire dealt with them. Chapter four discusses how Christianity came to be and the things it went through with Rome before the time of Constantine.
Book two is all about the war of the God against the Gods and it has seven chapters. Chapter five discusses how Constantine was born and how his rise to power came about and how his name became linked to Christianity, causing it to rise to power with him. Chapter six talks about how after Constantine’s victory over his father – in – law, he and the emperor of the east repealed the Great Persecution law against the Christians. This however, didn’t make the Christians go out and spread the word, instead they now were persecuting each other. The chapter ended with the Christians bringing their case to Constantine. Chapter seven recounts the life of Constantine after he became emperor and what he did and didn’t do for Christianity and ends with his death. At the end of the chapter the author tells us that Constantine died with paganism still the religion of Rome but that he set in motion a Christian revolution that his sons late took up. Chapters eight and nine go on to describe what happened after Constantine’s death with his sons taking over and how Julian (the last pagan emperor) come to the throne. Chapter ten talks about the eighteen months of Julian’s reign and how he tried to turn back the clock in favor of paganism. In the Epilogue the author brings us to the present day.
The book also has at the end a time line of the events discussed in the book and a list of the historical figures discussed in it.
The book was a short order look at the interaction between polytheism and monotheism and mostly that of Judaism and Christianity. It showed just how each began and how much they took from polytheism, and why they fought it once you take away the propaganda. At times it was a little boring but it was overall a good read.
