Albert Schweitzer

Albert Schweitzer was an amazing man: top-notch Bach organist, philosopher, doctor, and all-around good guy. I’d love to read a good account of his life sometime.

Unfortunately, Out of My Life and Thought, his memoir, is proof that a brilliant subject and brilliant author don’t necessarily add up to a brilliant book.

It was OK. It covered the basics you’d want to know about someone like him, and it covered more of his intellectual development than many biographies do about their subjects. It got me interested in the relationship of architecture and music, and renewed my interest in Bach. In fact, it made me really wish I liked organ music.

But it left me without the feeling I usually get from witnessing, or reading about, a life well lived.

Edward Simmen, ed.

North of the Rio Grande is a collection of, mostly, stream-of-conscious slice-of-life pieces by Mexican Americans, Mexicans who immigrated to the U.S., and other U.S. Spanish-speakers.

As a collection, it wasn’t really worth the read. There’s not much variation in the themes and characters, and you don’t read stream-of-conscious for the plot.

Like most anthologies, though, there’s a jewel somewhere. In this case, it was “The Somebody,” by Danny Santiago. The book didn’t sell me on norteamericano authors, but it sold me on Danny Santiago. I’m looking forward to reading more by him.

Bernard Shaw

Should someone who’s life work is helping people recover from alcohol addiction and violence accept money from alcohol and weapons manufacturers? Should society mandate education and curtail freedom of expression in the hope of increasing social equality? Should love of an individual have priority over love of a country?

They’re tough questions. Good questions.

So here’s an idea: rather than look for an answer, let’s just make fun of everyone involved with the questions. Salvation Army workers? Mock them. Alcoholics? Mock. Weapons manufacturers? Mock. Anyone who tries to do something worthwhile and doesn’t make the world perfect? Mock. Mock. Mock.

Bernard Shaw mocks well. He has the cleverness of Oscar Wilde with a lot more bitter attitude, and a worldview that makes every hero fairly despicable and every villain a clown.

When I read Major Barbara (the Salvation Army vs. Big Booze play), I was amazed by the wordplay and timing. Sure, it left me depressed, but the language was amazing.

Moved to Pygmallion next, and my amazement at his language and discouragement at its use both increased.

And then Arms and The Man, throwing in the same types of characters but with comic subjects like romance and heroism.

And I took a break.

I thought it would only last a few months. After all, I had enjoyed each book while reading it, and he had a lot of others, and I was getting into plays.

But I found other authors, including Shaw’s nemesis, Chesterton, and the break has now lasted a happy few decades.

Barbara O’Dair, ed.

What’s the word, like Afrocentric, or Eurocentric, that refers to a worldview centered on lesbians? Lesbocentric? Lesbiancentric?

If I knew that word, I would say that The Rolling Stone Women of Rock, edited by Barbara O’Dair, is the first book of that type that I read. 40 years of essays and interviews with women rockers could have been great, but why is it only the ones that hated men got ample space? You don’t have to like singers who are pretty and popular, but ignoring them in a history of 20^th-century women singers is like ignoring Lee Iacocca in a history of cars just because you value fuel-efficient transportation.

Peter Oliver

Revisionist histories are constant sources of debate. But there are revisionists, and then there are eyewitnesses who had a different point of view. Peter Oliver’s, The Origin and Progress of the American Rebellion, falls in the second category. He lived in the colonies, loved England, and hated the semi-literate thugs that tortured His Majesty’s servants, trampled His Majesty’s degrees, and ended up forming a new country.

He’s blustery, and pedantic, and self-righteous, and generally a bore. But I don’t know of many other places you’ll find better documentation that the start of the United States and the start of the kingdom of heaven didn’t coincide.

Jack Schaeffer

A student once remarked that Shakespeare’s plays were basically just a bunch of famous quotations strung together.

A similar criticism could be made of Jack Schaeffer’s Shane. How many clichés, of words characters, or metaphors, can be held in one coming of age story on the American frontier in a sodbusting family when a mysterious gunslinger dressed as a teacher but who’s a real workhorse and man’s man comes to town and turns all the women’s heads?

The big difference between Shakespeare and Schaeffer, of course, is that Shakespeare’s lines weren’t all cliches before he wrote them, and Schaeffer’s were.

But the thing is, they work. I read the book so often that by the time I was ten I could spend twenty minutes telling all the ways the movie didn’t measure up. I loved it. Sigh.

Frank Peretti

I doubt that angels have inferiority complexes, but if they do, they should read Frank Peretti’s This Present Darkness, and Piercing the Darkness. Both books give the impression that God is to the universe what Professor X is to the comics. He has the most impressive powers, and he probably can’t be beaten, but he couldn’t do it without his blade-wielding sidekicks. In this corner, God and the Angels. In that corner, Demons and the Universal New Age Big Government Conspiracy. The match of the eternity! Whee!

As pulp fiction goes, they’re no bad. As theology goes, they’re slapstick.

Prophet is a little darker, choosing to take on the favorite conservative evangelical whipping boy—abortion. The characters are a little more complex than in the previous books, and the tension builds a little better since the threats are more realistic. Still, if you don’t already see the world as Peretti does, I doubt it will change your mind.

Radhakrishnan

“Hindu apologetics.” Doesn’t something about that phrase ring not quite right?

It’s not written logically, of course, and it’s not very convincing, of course, but The Hindu View of Life is basically an attempt to frame an anti-theology into a theology.

It might be worth reading if you haven’t read anything about Hinduism and don’t have any Hindu friends and don’t feel you can learn from fiction or biography.

I won’t volunteer my Hindu friends, but I’d recommend any biography of Ghandi, Nectar in a Sieve, or many of Jhumpa Lahiri’s stories as preferable to this as an introduction to the Hindu view of life.

Lensey Namioka

I’m not a great fan of “ethnic” fiction. By “ethnic fiction,” I don’t mean fiction written by non-EuroAmerican writers or fiction about non-EuroAmerican characters, but that whole genre of fiction that’s really just disguised propaganda for colorblind peace love and understanding.

This dislike started early in me. As a child, I didn’t like any book that could be summarized, “_____ are people too,” or “we’re all the same even though we’re different.”

Those biases are why I was so pleasantly surprised by Yang the Youngest and His Terrible Ear.

It’s a story about children, for children, and it’s a good story. The title character happens to be an immigrant to the U.S., and his problems growing up are aggravated, and made more interesting, by cultural misunderstandings. But the theme is growing up, not growing up-while-being-an-immigrant; discovering who you are, not discovering who you are-as-an-immigrant.

Ninh Bao

“Sir, sir, you want postcards? Souvenirs? Look, here, The Sorrow of War, a very good book. It is illegal here, sir. But I have it. Very good book.”

Every sidewalk salesman in Hanoi had a copy. The cheap paper and poor gluing verified that the copies weren’t being distributed by a major publisher, but most were poorly translated versions of the edited edition.

Hanoi had a problem with the book. The Sorrow of War is fairly typical as war literature goes: stock characters, moral quandaries, lack of clarity regarding right and wrong, etc. It wouldn’t have been a problem if it had merely presented Americans as bad guys. The radical thing was that it portrayed Vietnamese soldiers as fallible, brutal, and cowardly as well. There are no wonderfully honorable characters in the book.

The book lives up to its title. Whether examined for its depiction of soldiers, politics, coming of age, or romance, it’s a sad book.

I’d recommend it for those interested in southeast Asian authors, but it probably won’t change your life otherwise.