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.

Stephen Ambrose

Undaunted Courage came at a great time for me. I’d just spent several years in social histories and political analyses, and I was starting to get depressed by the power of critics to strip away glory. Stephen Ambrose’s account of Lewis’ and Clark’s journey may be unfashionably patriotic and heroic, but it’s awed and awe-inspiring, and I needed it.

I picked up Citizen Soldiers shortly afterwards, and was again amazed. Ambrose’s fascination with heroism led him to interview thousands of G.I.s involved in the Normandy invasion and end of World War II. He occasionally employs social or economic analyses, but always trumps these interpretations with words of the G.I.s, often expressed in as direct quotations with little obvious editing. I’m not a World War II buff, but this book almost made me one. (For what it’s worth, many of the anecdotes he recorded appear in the film Saving Private Ryan. Ambrose doesn’t, however, imply that all of these anecdotes happened to a single group of super-soldiers.)

Americans at War is another strong work, with eloquent and passionate essays on soldiers from Little Bighorn to Mai Lai. His political biases come out more strongly in this collection than in the other books, but they aren’t distracting.

With Nothing Like It In The World, my fascination faded, but it’s not Ambrose’s fault. I’ve never really cared about trains. The whole romance is lost on me. My reading a book about the transcontinental railroad by a devotee was as doomed as a deaf person’s reading a book about hand-crafting violins. I can appreciate his research and storytelling technique, but it didn’t grab me. And it left me wondering… considering the breadth of his interests (he also wrote a multi-volume biography of Eisenhower, which I haven’t read, and supposedly has time to teach college classes), how does he manage to know all of this?

The answer to that question came when I started reading another of his books on World War II, which was published after Citizen Soldiers and includes entire paragraphs copied and pasted from the previous book without so much as a self-citation. I put it aside to avoid the page-by-page deja-vu.

Ambrose deserves applause for several of his books, but he lost me as a fan when I felt that I was reading amusingly retold snippets of a committee report instead of a human voice. Lots of other famous writers, Dumas and Michener, employed huge numbers of assistants to research their books. I don’t really like Dumas and Michener either.

Elton Trueblood

In Abraham Lincoln, Trueblood really works for this thesis. It’s not an easy sell, being basically that, despite a seeming commitment to avoiding any public display of religion, Abraham Lincoln was a very religious man whose beliefs influenced his personal and public life.

I’m not a Lincoln scholar, so my opinion matters for little, but he convinced me that Lincoln was probably more religious than I’d thought.

But he didn’t show me why this matters.

Howard and Geraldine Taylor

Few books were more highly recommended to me during college than Hudson Taylor’s Spiritual Secret. I read it. Once.

It’s a combination of biography and theology of one of the first evangelical Christians to work in inland China. It’s something that should be memorable.

But I can’t remember much of it.

Carrolly Erickson

If you have a personal aversion to mentioning unpleasant subjects, it would probably be wise not to choose a complex, scandalous character as the topic of your next biography.

Great Catherine combines terrible research and a profound faith in court records and authorized biographers with an aversion to common sense. The result is a strikingly favorable and clean biography of a woman who did not earn the word “Great” through her moral success. It’s sort of like reading a Bill Clinton biography that didn’t include any mention of Monica Lewinsky, or reading a George W. Bush biography that didn’t mention pre-Iraq War intelligence reports.

Jonathan Eisen

The Age of Rock, 2, edited by Jonathan Eisen, is a collection of interviews and essays about music and musicians that should probably be compared to meat and potatoes of music literacy, as opposed to the chocolate sundae with a cherry on top that would be, say, Nick Hornby’s 31 Songs.

I’m glad it read it because it helped me appreciate Credence Clearwater Revival a little bit more. But only a little.

I also appreciate the (unintentional?) humor of waxing nostalgic about what used to be called rebel music.

Rolling Stone Interviews

The Rolling Stone Interviews, 1967-1980 gives you exactly what you think it’ll give you: random insights, bizarre personas, and a lot of trivia about Rock musicians. I like getting what I think I’m getting.

There was a bonus surprise, though: pages and pages of confirmation for my long-held suspicion that John Lennon was an egotistical boor.

Russell T. Hitt

Nate Saint was the pilot of the group of Americans who were killed by an unreached tribe in South America half a century ago. Their story was told very effectively in the book and movie Through Gates of Splendour and, I’ve heard even more effectively in the film The End of the Spear. However, for those who are so enthralled by the tale that you’d like to know more about the group’s pilot, there’s the mediocre biography, Jungle Pilot.

Elizabeth Elliot

Start with the bad: Passion and Purity was decidedly non-motivating to remain virginal before marriage. It had great intentions, but so much is in the examples, and the examples seemed comically prudish.

But what she does well, she does very well, and Elizabeth Elliot’s writings about others who loved God are among the best I’ve read.

I’m talking specifically about A Chance to Die and The Shadow of the Almighty. The first is a biography of Amy Carmichael, an early 20^th-century single woman who decided to help reach India for Christ. The second is the edited journals of her first husband, Jim Elliot, who was martyred when trying to contact a South American tribe.

Both books have that wonderful, rare trait of letting the readers see the subjects for themselves, instead of seeing them in a way that makes the authors look good. I haven’t found any better books on the subject of the spread of the gospel in the 20^th century.

And, I’m forever grateful to Elliot for an almost throw-away reference to G.K. Chesterton about half-way through A Chance to Die that introduced me to one of my most loveable masters.

Tom Wolfe

I’ve noticed as I’ve started writing these reviews that it’s much easier to write a critical review than something that will stir readers to pick up a good book. And it’s very difficult to express appreciation for the handful of Masters. Hence, my delay in writing about Tom Wolfe.

My introduction to Tom Wolfe came when I picked The Right Stuff off the school library shelf in sixth grade. I don’t recommend it for sixth graders. It was the biggest book I’d ever read to that point, and I read it twice that year. My second time through it, my dad asked what I thought about it, and I remember telling him I’d have to read it again when I was older because I couldn’t understand how good it was.

Unfortunately, I then got distracted for a couple decades, and only rediscovered him a year before moving to the desert.

He is unquestionably the greatest living author I’ve found, and among my top ten authors of all time.

His works seem to fall into two categories: Short and Long.

The Short Ones are essays, journalism, criticism, and short stories. Each worth reading in its own right, but likely to seem dated to readers three generations from now.

Hooking Up is probably the best place for a new reader to start with Wolfe. It’s a collection of several decades of short pieces, many of which present turns of phrase or thematic elements that he developed more fully in the Long Ones. Hooking Up can give you glimpses of what you’ll find in A Man in Full, I Am Charlotte Simmons, and even traces of Bonfire of the Vanities. It also includes a hilarious shredding of The New Yorker (a shredding that may have cost him the National Book Award for A Man in Full) and his rebuttal to attacks form Updike and Mailer.

The Painted Word takes on twentieth-century art with wit and beautiful satire. If you’re a big fan of Yoko Ono, you probably won’t like this book, but you’ll probably laugh in spite of yourself.

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is the only book I’ve read of his early publications. It actually restored my faith in journalism as a potential source of beauty and wisdom.

He’s written several other short ones, but I haven’t gotten to read them yet.

The Long Ones begin with The Right Stuff. The movie wasn’t bad, but the book is excellent! The movie leaves out the humor and satire, making it a story about heroic astronauts and pilots. The book is about humans.

I’ve found myself smiling as I wrote the short preceding paragraphs. The books are so good! And the most amazing thing is that all the ones I’ve named so far are non-fiction!

His first work of fiction, The Bonfire of the Vanities is so good that, had I written it, I would have been afraid of ever writing again. Pachelbel only got one chance to write his Canon in D, and that may be all he ever wrote for all I know, and that’s OK; he made the world better. That’s how good Bonfire is.

But then, about a decade later, he came out with A Man in Full… There is simply nothing to compare. Every one of the half-dozen interconnected storylines is intriguing, from the San Francisco refrigerated warehouse worker trying not to lust over the Vietnamese teenager next door to the Atlantan attorney who wonders if he should get a tan so he’ll look blacker. As for themes… racism, economic disparity, aging and the decline of power, growing up and the rise of power, fatherhood, fidelity…what it means to be a man. If you want to know the problems men face, the struggles every man has whether or not he’s reflective enough to admit it, read Anna Karenina and A Man in Full. Every time you’re tempted to pick up a pop-guru explanation, read one of those two again.

I like some of the other great living authors—DeLillo especially jumps to mind because of his American Life focus—but none of the others can touch Wolfe’s ear for dialog, willingness to express the humor of hubris, ability to name detail in a way that develops characters and themes, or turn of phrase: Social X-Rays, Lemon Tarts, Boys With Breasts… You’ve got to read it! And be amazed!

Since the single greatest theme of Wolfe’s work, fiction or non-fiction, was the meaning of manhood in modern America, I found myself shocked by a teenaged girl as the protagonist for his most recent Long One, I Am Charlotte Simmons.

Wolfe drew some interesting female characters in his previous books—especially Croker’s wife in A Man in Full—but the focus is always on the man.

Maybe the change of perspective is what causes I Am Charlotte Simmons to read a little more like a masterpiece of journalism than as a masterpiece of fiction.

Maybe it’s also what makes Charlotte Simmons his most cynical and hopeless work. His other novels twist characters until their worlds crash, but there’s always a spark of hope: some poetic justice has been meted, some redemption has been found (or at least presented). But Charlotte Simmons is a woman and, if there is any truth in Wolfe’s book, the feminism hasn’t really solved the social or psychological problems women face.

I have a daughter. And I hope with all my heart that Charlotte Simmons isn’t right. But Wolfe’s been so right-on about men that it’s hard not to trust his insight on this one, too.

It was a great read, and it made me feel humble and pray more.

He’s one of my masters.