“Look left and right, and be careful.” Your mother probably said those words to you when you were learning to cross the street. Her same admonition might apply to today’s political arena.

In one of the summer’s best-sellers, Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America (ISBN 978-0-307-35348-1, $28.99), author Ann Coulter argues, as the book’s flyleaf puts it, that “liberals exhibit all the psychological characteristics of a mob — practicing groupthink, slavishly following intellectual fashions, and periodically bursting into violence.”

Often justly accused of inflammatory writing — she is not only despised by liberals, but by many mainstream Republic pundits and politicians as well, who fear being tainted by what they regard as her extremism — Coulter here follows the pattern set in her other books, mixing broad statements (“Liberals speak with the fatuous lunacy of people in the old Soviet Union, passing out awards to one another for imaginary heroism …”), statistics, and somewhat generalized history. Whether on the left or right, most political commentators these days use the same formula, mixing fact and speculation to support their own presuppositions.

Evidence of Coulter’s own prejudices — ”Liberals bad, conservatives good” — begins with the title, Demonic, and continues throughout the book. For this reason, liberals will not read the book, and conservatives will come to it agreeing ahead of time with its main points, consuming it as intellectual comfort food.

Though touted by some conservative reviewers as Coulter’s best book, Demonic will not win any awards for its literary attributes. Coulter is a better columnist than a writer of books, a sprinter rather than a long-distance runner, and this quality shows in the book. Though she does write in a lively manner, she repeats her arguments and examples, and often paints her case with too broad a brush. Her training as an attorney shows here, as it does in her other writing, in that she builds a case for her client — in this instance, conservatives — while marshalling selected facts against her liberal opponents.

Yet Demonic does bring up two points which political and cultural liberals might ponder with some gain. The first has to do with political rhetoric and violence in America. Coulter makes a convincing case that much of the political violence in the last 40 years has come from the left rather than the right of the political spectrum.

We like to think of “right-wing extremists” plotting assassinations and toting guns, but Coulter draws our attention to the fact that assassinations and mob violence, ranging from shouting down speakers on campus to breaking up political rallies, are much more a legacy of the left. One startling example which she uses comes from the Southern Poverty Law Center, regarded by most conservatives as extremely left-wing, which concluded that “Extremists within the environmental and animals rights movements have committed literally thousands of violent criminal acts in recent decades — arguably more than those from any other radical sector, left or right.”

Both liberals and conservatives might also gain from reading Coulter on revolution and mobs. We Americans are fond of the word revolution — we just celebrated our own break from Britain and a king, and like to speak of a revolution in everything from computers to the foods we eat. Yet Coulter’s two-chapter look at the French Revolution reminds all of us, particularly those who read little history, of the cost in blood of a revolution. Here Coulter writes vividly of the executions, of the bloodthirsty pomposity of the revolutionaries, of the evil that humans may do in a good cause (In one case cited by Coulter, a woman arrested in a case of mistaken identity was proven innocent, but was executed “because she was there anyway.”) Revolutions nearly always mean the blood-letting of innocent people and consequences unforeseen, two circumstances that should always temper the welcome our government and our media give to such events as “the Arab Spring.”

•••

In Liberating Liberals: A Political Synthesis of Nietzsche & Jesus, Vonnegut & Marx (Groucho, not Karl), Gandhi & Machiavelli (ISBN 978-0-557-68680-3), Bill Branyon has issued a call to liberals to become “free-thinkers” rather than doctrinaire politicos and to live with more joy in their lives.  

The spirit behind Branyon’s book is enthusiastic and joyful. He is clearly a man who enjoys laughter, and his sense of humor carries onto the pages of Liberating Liberals. The book’s chief asset is it exhortation to liberals embrace this sense of joy and spontaneity. Branyon writes:

“Our efforts will be greatly enhanced by simply becoming more loyal to our freethinking ideals, by becoming more comfortable and happy with the current facts of political and personal life, and by insulating our imaginations and goals against the constant assaults of conservatives.”

Liberating Liberals is weak in its organization, its use of language and syntax, and in explaining the very thing which it espouses — “free thinking.” In one part of the book, Branyon attacks grammar rules as a residue of “the 18th century aristocrat” and goes on to state that grammar should not be taught until late in high school. “And even then,” he adds, “if it seems to inhibit someone’s desire to write, back off.” Liberating Liberals itself, which would have benefited from editing and clearer thinking, argues against Branyon’s case here.

This same problem — unclear usage coupled with loose thinking — runs throughout the book. Branyon calls for a 20-hour work week so that human beings may become more humane, but never tells us how we are to reach that state. (He does cite Denmark as an example, extolling its vacations and cradle-to-grave socialism, but fails to mention that European economies are falling apart). He mingles Biblical quotations with lyrics from Joni Mitchell and observations from Nietzsche, but these rarely hang together in an argument for any point.

Finally, Liberating Liberals needed to clearly define certain terms: “liberal,” “conservative,” and particularly free thinker (I have yet to meet one. If indeed “free-thinkers” ever existed, I suspect they have long gone the way of raphus cucullatus). Is a Marxist a liberal? Are liberals free-thinkers? Should we really scoff at men like Franklin and Jefferson because they used “pen and quill while we use word processors and the internet?”

“As prisoners of their own fundamentalism,” Branyon writes, “conservatives are extremely learning disabled.” If that is true, and if the freethinking view as presented in Liberating Liberals is the alternative, then we may all want to go to some other school for our education.

Paris in the 1920s attracted multitudes of American writers and artists. Drawn to France by a sense of adventure, by a strong dollar, by French culture, and not least, by the fact that in France the wine and spirits flowed legally and copiously while America underwent its experiment with Prohibition, writers like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Djuna Barnes, and the young and unknown Thomas Wolfe all came to Paris in that decade. The city left a lasting mark on them, and they repaid the favor by writing of their romance with the City of Lights. “Paris was always worth it and you received return from whatever you brought to it,” Hemingway wrote in A Moveable Feast, his account of his years there. “But this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy.”

Woody Allen’s newest movie, “Midnight In Paris,” which is a love-song to Paris both as it is now and as it was when those Americans first discovered it, offers viewers a pleasurable take on American literature and writing. In the film, which was both written and directed by Allen, a modern-day screenwriter Gil (Owen Wilson) has gone with his fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams) and her parents for a visit to Paris. Gil, who idealizes the Paris of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, dislikes his own work and wants to finish his novel, a book in which he has little faith. Fearful that Gil may give up his lucrative position in the film industry for an impossible dream, Inez belittles his attempts at higher literature and has nothing but derision for his nostalgia.

One evening Gil becomes lost in the city while making his way back to his hotel. As the clock strikes midnight, some party-goers in an antique Peugeot pulls alongside him and invite him to come with them. As the car whisks Gil though the streets, he quickly discovers that he has somehow traveled in time back to the Roaring Twenties. He meets Zelda (Alison Pill) and Scott Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston), then Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll) and Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), who agrees to read his manuscript. Night after night, Gil returns to this lost era, meeting artists and writers ranging from T. S. Eliot to Pablo Picasso, from Man Ray to Salvador Dali, and eventually falls in love with Adriana (Marian Cotillard), Picasso’s mistress. Though Allen takes liberties with some of the characters and their lives — Hemingway, for example, did not go to Africa for a safari while living as a young man in Paris — the sheer fun and pleasure offered to lovers of literature by this movie should overcome objections by purists to such insertions.

To say more about the plot of this delightful film would spoil the ending. What can be added, however, is that “Midnight In Paris” is not only a pleasure to watch — the movie opens with a mélange of shots of modern-day Paris so beautiful and moving that the viewer may leave the theater ready to take the next flight to France — but also offers a series of meditations on art and on time. We hear from Hemingway and Stein about writing and what makes it “true and good,” as Hemingway might say; we receive quick insights into how artists like Dali and Picasso thought; and finally, we see in Gil the struggle between the philistine and the artist.

Allen also cleverly makes an important statement about the nature of time, the idea of a golden age, and the present. In the movie, Gil wants to go back to the Paris of the 1920s. Adrianna in turn fantasizes about life in La Belle Époque, the 1890s, and men like Degas and Gauguin, whom we encounter briefly, think that the Renaissance was the best time for being an artist. By the end of the movie we come to see through Gil’s eyes the dangers of such nostalgia. We begin to understand, as he does, that the age in which we live has its own compensations, its own responsibilities, its own joys and sorrows, and that both the human being and the artist must live in their own time rather than pine for the past. Though we may not realize it until the movie is over, this message is embedded in the very beginning of the movie, with those lovely scenes from today’s Paris.

•••

In Listen (ISBN 978-1-4143-2433-3, 2010, $12.99), Christian novelist Rene Gutteridge tells the story of Marlo, a town where an anonymous person suddenly begins recording intimate conversations and transcribing them onto the Internet. Though this thief of secrets posts these conversations without identifying those involved, the townspeople and those involved in their lives easily recognize their own words. These conversations soon cause an uproarious falling-out among neighbors and family members. Some incidents turn violent, and the police become involved, trying to track down the person responsible for these episodes as well as to repair the damage done by the gossip and innuendo posted online.

Gutterridge will win no awards for style or finesse in Listen — like many other books published in the Christian genre, her workaday prose is flat and unexciting — but she is a fine storyteller who raises some interesting questions: How responsible are we for the words we speak? What effect do words have on those around us? How much weight should we give to words spoken in anger or passion?

For the past several years we have seen the consequences of words and images on certain people and events. This summer alone has given us the emails of Sarah Palin, which were largely innocuous, and the crotch shots of Congressman Weiner, which revealed not only his nether regions but also a near-unbelievable stupidity. Listen is a well-timed reminder that loose speech — and in Weiner’s case, loose drawers — often has unforeseen consequences.

Listen by Rene Gutteridge. Tyndale House Publishers, 2010. 432 pages.

Father’s Day, the third Sunday of June and so falls this year on June 19, sports a peculiar history. Although first proposed as a holiday in 1908 by Grace Clayton of West Virginia, and pushed later by Sonora Smart Dodd of Spokane, Wash., with the help of the YMCA, the YWCA, and various churches, the idea was greeted with derision by many. For years it was the object of satire, in large part because people feared its commercialization along the lines of Mother’s Day. Even the punctuation of the designated day — should it be Fathers’ Day or Father’s Day? — was an object of some debate. Not until 1972 did President Richard Nixon sign the bill that officially declared Father’s Day a national holiday.

Father’s Day also offers more of a dilemma to children than its maternal counterpart. Though we may have difficulty choosing a gift for mom, the bare essentials seem to include at least flowers and a meal which she doesn’t have to prepare herself. With dads the issue is more complicated. Flowers seem a trifle goofy, even by our loose conventions, and a special meal loses some of its meaning unless Dad is the household chef. Neckties, once the fallback gift for males on such occasions, are too much of a cliché and too little worn to be an option. So what’s left to progeny wishing to honor fatherhood?

Buy books, of course.

The easiest way to give Dad something to read is by means of a gift certificate. This option allows him the pleasures of shopping a bookstore and selecting a book which he will read. If a gift certificate seems a little chilly, however, there are many books that will appeal to Dad. Nearly all bookshops set up special displays for fathers this time of year, offering buyers a wide selection of purchases designed to offer Dad some diversion.

One of the stranger books found on one of these displays this year was Sh*t My Dad Says (ISBN 978-0-06-199270-4, $15.99). Here Justin Halpern gives us the profane paternal adages of his own father that make Pat Conroy’s Great Santini look like a sixth-grade altar boy. On Internet service, for example, Mr. Halpern comments: “I don’t want it … I understand what it does … Yes, I do. And I don’t give a sh*t if all your friends have it. All of your friends have dopey f*cking haircuts, too, but you don’t see me running to my barber.” On Bring-Your-Dad-To-School Day: “Who are all these f*cking parents who can take a day off? If I’m taking a day off, I ain’t gonna spend it sitting at some tiny desk with a bunch of eleven-year-olds.” On LEGOs: “Listen, I don’t want to stifle your creativity, but that thing you built there, it looks like a pile of sh*t.” On hair: “Do people your age know how to comb their hair? It looks like two squirrels crawled on their heads and started f*cking.”

Sh*t My Dad Says is humorous when first perused, but after 10 or 15 pages of this short book some readers may find themselves not only appalled by the profanity and sarcasm of Mr. Helpern, but thankful that they themselves never had to suffer such a father. Mr. Halpern eventually comes across here as a real jerk, emotionally stunted, a man little and bitter in spirit whose profanity and bile make him even smaller than he already is.

Readers looking for a better gift for Father’s Day might take a look at Washington: A Life (ISBN 978-1-59420-256-7, $40). Biographer Ron Chernow, author of books about the Morgan family, Alexander Hamilton, and the senior Rockefeller, gives us a fine life of the father of our country. Whether writing about Washington’s New Jersey campaign or about his problems establishing some of the parameters of the newly-created office of president, Chernow delivers the man in crisp, lively prose. His feeling for the era of Washington and the manner in which he introduces the scores of other historical figures who surround the man easily make this one of the more readable and at the same time more accurate biographies of the past year.

Like our own age, Washington’s time boiled with political scandal and struggles over rights and powers, yet Washington himself “consistently upheld such high ethical standards that he seemed larger than any other figure on the political scene.” He differed in many ways from many of the Founding Fathers: he had begun working as a teenager, deprived of the classical education given men like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams; he was a surveyor and planter rather than an attorney; he had placed himself again and again in the path of bullets and death; he truly disliked political intrigue and jockeying for political position. Critical of slavery, but caught up in an economic system which depended on such exploitation for its wealth, he ordered his slaves to be freed after his death.

Near the end of his study of Washington, Chernow shares with us one great secret of Washington’s effectiveness as a leader:

“George Washington possessed the gift of inspired simplicity, a clarity and purity of vision that never failed him Whatever petty partisan disputes swirled around him, he kept his eyes fixed on the transcendent goals that motivated his quest … History records few examples of a leader who so earnestly wanted to do the right thing, not just for himself but for his country.”

Sh*t My Dad Says by Justin Halpern. It Books, 2010. 176 pages

Nearly 50 years have passed the death of C.S. Lewis — he died of illness in 1963 on the same November day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated — yet Lewis remains a household name and a best-selling author. Although he taught at both Oxford and Cambridge, where he was a respected medieval and Renaissance scholar, he is today best known for his novels and his tomes on Christian apologetics. The release of different films based on the Chronicles of Narnia have only enlarged his audience for these stories, his space trilogy continues to attract readers, and many Christians, new and old alike, are familiar with his books on faith: The Great Divorce, Mere Christianity, Surprised By Joy, and others.

Often, however, even readers who are reasonably well-acquainted with the work of Lewis express surprise when asked about his novel Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold. Though this book, which some critics regard as the best of Lewis’ novels, lends itself to rereading, deep discussion, and numerous interpretations, many Lewis fans have never read Till We Have Faces, and many more have never heard of it.

This is regrettable, for these readers are missing a deep, rich mine of a book, a dark story scintillating with bright gems: strong characters, bold themes, a universal story. Till We Have Faces recreates the myth of Cupid and Psyche, which, as Lewis writes in a note at the end of the book, he took from Metamorphoses, or The Golden Ass, by Lucius Apuleius Pltaonicus. In the original myth as recounted by Apuleius — and there are several variations — Psyche is the mortal daughter of a powerful king. She is the most beautiful maiden in all the land. Eventually, Venus becomes jealous of Psyche and directs her son, Cupid, to punish Psyche. Cupid, however, falls in love with Psyche and takes her to his bridal chamber. Psyche, however, at the urging of her sisters, disobeys Cupid’s command not to look on him (he visits her only in the night), is apprehended, and must then wander the earth looking for her lover. After many trials, she and Cupid are finally reunited.

This myth gives readers much to ponder. Cupid is Eros, the god of sexual desire, and Psyche means soul in Greek (It also means butterfly, of which Thomas Bullfinch once wrote that “there is no illustration of the immortality of the soul so striking and beautiful as the butterfly, bursting on brilliant wings from the tomb in which it has lain … to flutter in the blaze of day and feed on the most fragrant and delicate productions of the spring.”)

In this ancient myth we see the workings of Eros on love, and yet we sympathize with Psyche as well as she reveals the sufferings which the soul must undergo to attain the deepest and fullest measure of love. The child eventually produced by the union of Cupid and Psyche is strikingly named Pleasure — not the term as we generally understand it, but pleasure meant more in the sense of pleasing. The offspring of Eros and Soul, in other words, is pleasing, right, good.

In Till We Have Faces, Lewis gives us the same general tale as Apuleius, but he deepens the characters, adds more detail to the plot, and more fully develops his own theme. In Lewis’ version, Orual, Psyche’s older sister, tells the tale of her family and the kingdom of Glome, of which her father is the king. Orual is a complicated character, rejected by her father for her ugliness, obsessively in love with her sister, a girl who by the end of the book becomes a cunning queen and a harsh judge of people. Always suffering from the loss of her sister, for which she blames on the gods, Orual has even prepared a brief against these deities for the pain they have brought to the kingdom of Glome, to her sister Psyche, and to herself.

In addition to Psyche, two other characters play important roles in the book and in Orual’s life. The first is her tutor and good friend, the Fox, a Greek slave and an atheistic philosopher who represents rational thinking. The second is Lord Bardia, her chief military commander and close friend, who encourages her in the ways of duty, honor, and justice. Through her own selfishness, Orual eventually destroys the lives of both men, wanting them, as she wanted Psyche, completely for herself and for her own needs, rather than allowing them the small freedoms of life due to them.

By his retelling of this myth, Lewis has given us a very modern story about love, the will, the soul, and the relationship between them. He delves more powerfully than Apuleius into the central theme of the Greek myth, that Cupid, who is Love, is made for Psyche, or the soul, and that their union results in Pleasure, which is the pleasure of a soul infused with love.

Through Orual’s account of her life we also come to understand what happens when we pervert or twist love. We see the many masks of false love we wear, the facades we erect, most often unwittingly, to protect ourselves, the disguises we wear in our self-righteousness to justify our actions. Here Orual becomes our mirror. As she slowly comprehends her terrible flaws — her domination of those around her, her twisted sense of true love, her quarrels with the gods — we readers become aware of our own awful failings and misjudgments, of our own responsibility for so horribly wounding those around us, particularly those whom we profess to love most. We may even come to understand, at some level, the lesson finally learned by Orual: that we cannot meet the gods face to face till we ourselves have faces.

(Jeff Minick is a writer and teacher. He an be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)      

Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold by C.S. Lewis. Harcourt Brace & Company. 324 pages

Kind hearts, allow me to introduce Police Detective, Harry Hole. Let me warn you in advance, he is an alcoholic who manages to keep his job in the House of Pain (Oslo’s Robbery Division) by cunning and a talent for catching elusive criminals — a fact that pleases his superiors and angers many of his career-minded peers. Harry prefers to work alone and has a reputation for using “unorthodox methods.” Although acquaintances frequently describe him as “tall, sullen, blond ... and ugly.” (He maintains relationships with women that tend to be perverse, passionate and/or downright disturbing.

At the present time, the Norwegian author, Jo Nesbo, has completed a half-dozen thrillers that feature Harry Hole. As a result, Nesbo has become the most popular detective fiction writer in Europe. Due to the complexities of publishing (and translating) Norwegian fiction into English, Harry Hole’s following in America has been delayed. The first novels — The Redbreast, The Devil’s Star, The Leopard, The Redeemer and Nemesis — have become astonishingly popular throughout Europe and although they are now available on Amazon, some titles are still difficult to acquire. The advance sales demand for Nesbo’s last two books, Snowman and Phantom, have already made them bestsellers, even though they will not be released in America until May (Snowman) and June (Phantom).

Amid a lot of promotional hysteria that calls Nesbo “the new Steig Larsson” (in this reviewer’s opinion, he is much better than that) and critical essays about the “Norwegian Invasion of crime literature,” it is clear that the Harry Hole novels herald an innovative and appealing development in crime literature. But how are these novels different? Is it Harry’s unique character or Nesbo’s gift for descriptive details?

This review focuses on Nemesis simply because this is the only Harry Hole mystery that this crime fiction fan could find. (The others are on back order.)  Nemesis is third or fourth in the Harry Hole series and as a result, a new reader may feel like he has entered in the middle of a movie. There are references to events that occurred several years ago, including the unsolved murder of Harry’s lover, Ellen Gjelten — a tragedy that is partially responsible for Harry’s dark moods and alcoholism.

There are also a number of recurring regular characters: Inspector Tom Waaler, a sinister police officer who has created a kind of vigilante squad of maverick cops and who hates/fears Harry (Tom may be involved in Ellen’s death), and Rune Avarsson, an envious administrator who bitterly resents Harry’s success in solving crimes.

However, Nemesis easily stands alone since Jo Nesbo possesses a remarkable talent for sustaining suspense while developing an intricate plot filled with obscure facts about forensic medicine, astronomy, psychology, current “pop” music and cooking.

In Nemesis, Harry Hole must solve two murders: the first involves the shooting of a female bank employee, Stine Grette, during a robbery. Harry is perplexed by the fact that the murder appears unnecessary since the surveillance cameras in the bank revealed that the masked robber had acquired the money ...yet he shoots the bank employee anyway.

The second murder is a bit more personal. A former girlfriend of Harry’s, Anna Bethsen (an unstable, failed artist), invites him to dinner. During the meal, he is drugged and dumped outside Anna’s apartment. When he regains consciousness, Harry has no memory of his dinner with Anna. When he returns to Anna’s (locked) apartment, he finds her dead in what appears to be a suicide. Notifying the police with an anonymous call, Harry silently watches as an inept investigation closes, finding the cause of death to be suicide. Although Harry suspects that Anna was murdered, he also realizes if the case is reopened he will be the prime suspect.

Adding to the intricate threads of the plot, Harry finds that the burglary division has recently employed  Beate Lonn, the daughter of a murdered policeman who possesses a rare talent called “fusiform gyrus,” which means that she can recognize and recall the details of every human face she has ever seen. Beate is assigned to work with Harry. (Yes, she may have seen Tom Waaler someplace he should not have been.) In addition, Beate has a condition called “Setesdal Twitch,” which I will refrain from defining since it would definitely spoil the conclusion of Nemesis.

Gradually, Harry begins to suspect that the two murders are connected. As he delves into the history of bank robbing in Oslo, he discovers that the most successful robberies have been carried out by gypsies. In fact, the leader of Oslo’s most efficient bank robbing team, a man called Roskol, continues to plan and execute robberies from prison where he sits  each day playing chess. To complicate matters further, Harry learns that Roskol allowed himself to be convicted for a crime that he did not commit because he is doing “penance.” At this point, Harry begins to ponder the close association between vengeance and love, especially in his own life.

There are far too many tension-ridden episodes in Nemesis to discuss in this review. However, among the most riveting are Harry’s “unofficial” trip to an unpleasant little town in Brazil to find a mysterious gypsy who may (or may not) be Roskol’s brother. Also, shortly after Anna’s death, Harry begins receiving taunting emails from someone who knows all about his dinner with Anna as well as a disconcerting amount of personal information about Harry. A further complication develops when Harry’s arch-enemy, Tom Waaler, develops an interest in Beate and decides to seduce her (while “Purple Rain” plays in the background). At the same time, Waaler devises a “foolproof” plot to destroy Harry. The plot becomes a complex series of boxes within boxes within boxes.

Perhaps what is most interesting about Nemesis, is Nebo’s ability to capture the lives and personalities of his characters through dialogue that blends discussions about suicide  (Albert Camus), American movies (“The Shining”, “BayWatch” (David Hasslehoff), the Horse-head Nebula, and Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War.” In fact, the discussions of music, abnormal psychology and a wealth of tantalizing knowledge definitely serve to make this Harry Hole thriller “a thinking man’s (or woman’s) murder mystery.” I guess I’m hooked.

Nemesis by Jo Nesbo. HarperColllins, 2010. 474 pages.

So ends Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, his memoir of his years as a young writer in Paris. This book contains the best of Hemingway: his prose style, crisp and clear as a glass of fine chardonnay; his reporter’s eye for detail; his talent for dialogue and for character. A Moveable Feast also gives us the worst of Hemingway as a person: his habit of kicking in the face those whom he had passed up on the ladder of success, writers such as Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and his penchant for blaming his own personal follies on the actions of others.

One striking feature of A Moveable Feast is Hemingway’s remaining affection of his first wife, Hadley. She shared his life in those early years in Paris, and for the rest of his days Hemingway remained in love with her. After his betrayal of her, he writes that “when I saw my wife again standing by the tracks as the train came in  … I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her.”

Paula McLain’s novel, The Paris Wife (ISBN 978-0-345-52130-9, 2011, $25) tells the story of Hemingway’s Paris years from Hadley’s viewpoint. She begins her book with an account of Hadley’s first meeting with Hemingway in 1920, gives us Hadley’s background — she was sickly as a child, became a caretaker for her family, and found in Hemingway a release from her stifling home — and then moves us along with the newly-married Hemingways to Paris and the excitement of those years. Through Hadley’s eyes, we meet writers like Ezra Pound (“Over in the shadowy corner of the studio, Ernest was literally crouched at Pound’s feet while the older man lectured, waving a teapot around as he talked”) and Gertrude Stein (her eyes were “the deepest and most opaque shade of brown, critical and accepting, curious and amused”). Through Hadley, McLain shows us the squalor of the apartment in which they lived when they first came to Paris, gives us the conversations of the artists and writers in the boulevard cafes, and imparts a sense of the magic which Hemingway and others found then in Paris.

McLain also gives us a different view of Hemingway than many of his biographers, nearly all of whom are male. Here we take in Hemingway through a woman’s eyes, and though the book is fictional, we acquire a different image of Papa than that found in the many books written about him. McLain captures the difficulties of being close to Hemingway every day, his mood swings, the intensity he brought to his writing, the demands he placed on his marriage, his growing love for Pauline Pfeiffer, who was wealthier and younger than Hadley, and would eventually take Hemingway away from her. When Hadley finds herself pregnant, Hemingway responds like a truculent child, and though he eventually becomes as good a father in the book as he was in real life, McLain’s Hadley lets us understand how deeply his initial negative reaction to her pregnancy hurt their marriage and her love for him.

The Paris Wife has its weaknesses. Though McLain ably captures the Paris of the twenties, and gives us fine sketches of people like Pound and Fitzgerald, she somehow fails to give us an adequate portrait of Hadley herself. Though she herself tells us the story, Hadley as narrator seems thinly drawn somehow, two-dimensional, all surface and no depth. By the end of the book, we are left wondering what Hemingway saw in this flighty, shallow woman. Here the incident of Hemingway’s stolen manuscripts might serve as an example. On a train from Paris to Lausanne to meet Hemingway, Hadley had stolen from her a valise containing most of Hemingway’s stories. This incident was a terrible catastrophe for the real-life Hemingway and his wife: there were no copies, and the loss was temporarily devastating to the young couple. Yet in The Paris Wife, the incident is covered in four pages, and we have little sense that Hadley feels much remorse over the stolen manuscripts. While Hemingway goes back to Paris to search their apartment for the stories, as he did in real life, the Hadley of The Paris Wife seems under whelmed by the disaster. After Hemingway leaves, a friend, journalist Lincoln Steffens, takes Hadley in hand. “Steffens took me to dinner and tried to calm my nerves, but even with several whiskeys in me, I jangled.” She “jangled”: that is the complete description of Hadley’s emotional state during her husband’s desperate search for his lost writings.

McLain makes a mistake, too, of writing as if her readers already know the facts of Hemingway’s life, and more importantly, his philosophy. Though she is undoubtedly correct — most people who pick up this book will do so from an interest in Hemingway — her assumptions weaken her writing, with the reader left to fill in what she has left out. At the end of the book, for example, when Hadley is an old woman, she reports that “I couldn’t pretend to be surprised by Ernest’s death. I’d heard from various friends about the sanatorium in Rochester and the terrible shock treatments. Death was always there for him, sometimes only barely balanced out.” Balanced out by what? McLain doesn’t tell us. Indeed, Hadley’s emotional reaction to her first husband’s death seems as flat and cold as yesterday’s headlines.

Nonetheless, there are readers who always enjoy reading about the life of Papa. For them, The Paris Wife should provide some diverting entertainment.

The Paris Wife by Paula McLain. Ballantine Books, 2011. 336 pages

For Christians, Easter is a moveable feast day — this year the celebration fell about as late in the spring as it possibly can — which sparks consideration of the resurrection of Christ and all that this resurrection means for them. Many congregations hold sunrise services. The Moravians of Winston-Salem are famous for sending brass bands throughout the city during the early hours of Easter Sunday to greet this special day with music. Catholics light vigil fires outside their churches on Saturday evening and end Holy Week with a service that begins in darkness and explodes into light. Easter is the time of year when many churches welcome new members, when the fullness of the possibility of resurrection is contemplated by believers.

Like Christmas, Easter can make those who are not Christians more acutely aware of their inability or unwillingness to believe in such a personal god. Passing by churches filled with parishioners or worshippers standing in a meadow at sunrise, these non-believers may experience many reactions: scorn, indifference, a desire to believe but without the faith to do so. Atheists, whose numbers in America have grown in recent years, righteously declare that God doesn’t exist, but many more who lack faith in God travel under the uncertain banner of agnosticism.

In Spiritual Envy: An Agnostic’s Quest (ISBN 978-1-57731-912-2, $22.95), English professor and public radio host Michael Krasny has produced a wise and gentle look at agnosticism and religious faith. In our loud, cacophonous time, this age in which it too frequently seems that those who scream the loudest, who throw off the most crass insults, who gleefully and ignorantly deliver ad hominem attacks, Michael Krasny may seem in his call for tolerance like the Biblical voice crying in the wilderness. His restraint in terms of criticizing religious faith — coupled with his own examination of his inability to believe in an immanent god — makes this small book worthwhile reading for believers and non-believers alike.

What is best about Spiritual Envy is its mix of philosophy, faith, literature, and personal example. Krasny is more interested in exploring belief and disbelief, why some people believe and why others find belief an impossibility, than he is in winning arguments or slicing up those who disagree with him. He argues in the broad manner of a good “liberal humanist,” bringing in literary figures from Ian Fleming to Flannery O’Connor, philosophers from Augustine to Peter Singer, psychiatrists from John Mack to Ian Stevenson, poets and songwriters from Dylan Thomas to Jim Croce.

Krasny also displays the mind of a liberal thinker — here I intend the old definition, the meaning associated with a liberal education, rather than the politics currently linked to the word — in trying to understand those whose religious faith acts as the grounding wire for life. He does indeed envy Christians, Jews, Muslims, and other believers, and writes that he has frequently longed for their ability to find a personal god in the universe. He also speaks well and with understanding of those who do believe in that sort of god and who can’t figure out why their neighbors have so much trouble finding that faith. In fact, the only group for which he reserves a good store of scorn is for those nonbelievers who “view those who have religious zeal as evil or simple-minded.”

In our time, when a few religious fanatics and a few more atheists and secular-minded folk gain most of our attention by finger-pointing, by trying to limit free speech with the barbed wire of political correctness or religious zeal, and in a few cases, by killing those regarded as enemies, the odds are likely that Michael Krasny’s Spiritual Envy will be little read or heeded. We have grown unaccustomed to calls for real tolerance, to nuance in arguments, to what Krasny calls “the power of asking the right, or most reasonable and compelling, questions….”

Many among us no longer seek to ask such questions, or any questions, of those with whom we disagree, preferring to paste our opponents over with labels and bumper-stickers. In losing all sense of proportion — and as is often the case, all sense of humor as well — a large number of Americans have bought into the argument that the political truly is the personal, that the atheist must axiomatically despise the believer, and vice versa, with little regard for their human personhood. Those whose beliefs differ from our own are no longer living, breathing fellow beings, but caricatures to be avoided, gagged, or driven from our midst.

This failure is unfortunate. Such rude judgment makes objects of our neighbors, stripping them of their humanity. Worse, and on a grander scale, it leads to the creation of armed camps, of us versus them, of labeling other Americans as our enemies simply because their vision of life and death is different than our own.

Near the end of his book, Krasny writes:

“I have been emphasizing a code of respect for others and for what they do or do not believe. It boils down to recognizing that what people believe, or how they worship or act or don’t act on their belief or nonbelief, is, as my Dad would have jauntily put it, their own damn business as long as they do no harm.”

Where’s Dad when you need him?

Spiritual Envy: An Agnostic’s Quest by Michael Krasny. New World Library, 2010.  264 pages.

In A Ticket to the Circus: A Memoir (978-1-4000-6794-7, $26), Norris Church Mailer gives an account of her marriage to Norman Mailer. Originally from Arkansas, and formerly married with one child, Norris met Mailer when she was in her mid-20s and Mailer was in his 50s, a writer at his prime who was nearly twice her age. They fell in love in a single night, and after Mailer had acquired a divorce from his fifth wife, were married and remained together, through good times and bad, for nearly 33 years.

A Ticket to the Circus offers fine insights into Mailer’s home life, into his thoughts and emotions, and into the New York society in which he thrived. Whether Mailer’s reputation will diminish with the passage of time remains to be seen, but we nevertheless come away from these pages impressed by his dedication to his writing — even in his later years he frequently carried a notebook for recording his impressions of the world around him, and he was of the school that believed writers should write each day no matter what sort of accidents befell them (at one point, when Mailer nearly lost his thumb and his life by cutting himself in a shower stall, he was still at his work desk the next day).

Here, too, we meet the Norman Mailer who so often captured headlines for various wild exploits and statements, and find that he was much the same in his private life. He really was a man of great energy and zest — Norris writes that he instigated arguments sometimes to see, with a novelist’s eye, where the argument might lead and what the consequences might be — who “came alive at the table much like he did onstage, and for years we were invited everywhere just for the entertainment value.”

Mailer loved to throw his own parties as well, and was well known for those given in his Manhattan apartment, which, according to Norris, “could comfortably hold about 50 people, but I know there were times when we had 200 or more.” Through her descriptions of these parties and the many glitterati who attended them, she imparts to us a sense both of their excitement and of the somewhat inbred society that was literary Manhattan at the time.

At one point, for example, she describes being seated for dinner next to Sam Walton, the owner of Wal-Mart, whose stores were just beginning their expansion into the enormous conglomerate of the early 21st century. They both enjoyed a laugh at the provincial nature of the New Yorker:

“I told him of talking to the headmaster of a private school for fifteen minutes about my work as an art teacher, the problems of education and whatever, until finally the headmaster asked me where I’d taught, and I’d said “Arkansas.” “They have art in Arkansas?” He’d been incredulous. Sam laughed.”

Norris is guileless in her writing about Mailer and about herself, which adds to its honesty but at times makes her seem like a bubble-headed model (she was, in fact, a professional model). Once, asked by Ethel Kennedy whether she would “be with him if he weren’t Norman Mailer,” she thinks to herself that Norman would not have been with her had she weighed 300 pounds or “had looked like Groucho Marx.” True enough, but she approached the question from an odd angle, and seems unable to confront the idea that Mailer just might have been attracted her because she was a model who was half his age, a circumstance that might explain the attraction of many an older man with prestige and money.

In another passage, writing of her precocious son (are there any children living among these people who aren’t precocious?) drawing pictures of German soldiers with insignia on their uniforms, Norris adds off-handedly that “I always believed he had been either a German soldier or a Jew in the last war; sometimes he had nightmares about things he would or should never have known about.”

Despite these somewhat silly outbursts, or indeed, perhaps because of them, A Ticket to the Circus is worth a quick read. It gives us a portrait of the writer and of the pond in which he swam, and tells as well the story of an ambitious girl from the South who by her own lights made a success of herself.

•••

Stephen Hunter, creator of the legendary sniper Bob Lee Swagger, has written yet another novel about this aging hero. In Dead Zero (ISBN 978-1-4391-3856-6, $26), Swagger is once again summoned from his Idaho ranch to rescue the federal government. This time a sniper is on the loose who has the apparent intention of assassinating an Afghan warlord named Zarzi, a murderous villain who has suddenly become a valuable asset to the efforts of the United States in that region.

Despite its hokey ending — the conclusion seems about as likely as permanent peace in the Middle East — Dead Zero will appeal to long-time fans of Swagger and to all other readers who enjoy strong suspense novels. Hunter’s careful research into his subject — the weapons and tactics of the sniper, Afghan politics and warfare, and our domestic agencies which fight terrorism — is as always impressive, and his storytelling abilities will keep the reader turning the pages.

A Ticket to the Circus: A Memoir by Norris Church Mailer. Random House, 2010. 416 pages

Some The Smoky Mountain News readers may remember a review here several seasons ago of Bill Walker’s Skywalker: Close Encounters on the Appalachian Trail. In that book we met the appropriately named Walker narrating his adventures while hiking the Appalachian Trail. His descriptions of his fellow trailblazers and their various idiosyncrasies made his account a delight for both experienced hikers and general readers.

In Skywalker: Highs and Lows on the Pacific Crest Trail (ISBN 9781453862230), Walker ventures to the other side of the continent tackle the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT), which as he notes in his book “is extraordinary. The diversity of its geology is unequaled by any other footpath in the world.”

Walker goes on to make his case for this bold statement by taking us along with him on his hike and showing us that the PCT, which runs from the Mexican to the Canadian border, runs the gamut from desert to mountains with elevations exceeding 14,000 feet, from the High Sierra, which is frequently blanketed with snow, to the delights of Yosemite National Park, Lake Tahoe, and the ski resorts of Squaw Valley. Because of its twists and turns – the distance covered in a straight line on a map is just over 1,000 miles – the PCT is nonetheless nearly 500 miles longer than the Appalachian Trail, coming in at 2,663.5 miles.

In addition to giving us an account of this terrain and the challenges it presents, Walker recounts his own personal trials. His very height, for example, often worked against him. An extraordinarily tall man – Walker is 6’11” and appears a giant alongside his fellow hikers in the book’s photographs – he points out that the average height of a Boston Marathon winner is just over 5’7”. He then determines that the average hiker of average height would use about 5,000 calories daily, whereas his own caloric demands ran to nearly 7,000 calories daily. On any given five-day trek, then, Walker found that he could carry only about half the food needed to give him the necessary calories. Not only did he lose a great amount of weight during his walk, but he became so emaciated that he feared being unable to finish the trail. In one photograph, he bares his chest and has the look of a man on a starvation strike.

As in his Appalachian account, Walker also gives us many fine thumbnail sketches of his fellow hikers. One of my favorites was his portrait of “Pretty Boy Joe” – all the hikers have nicknames, or are given them by Walker to protect their identity in the book – a 22-year-old graduate of the University of California. “With his long, lean physique,” writes Walker, “straight gaze, and manner of speaking in the soft, unhurried cadences of the West, he even reminded me of a younger Clint Eastwood.” Though the son of a wealthy California realtor, Pretty Boy Joe often dumpster dives for food when off the trail and would have been, Walker contends, a kindred soul with pioneers like Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone.

Though Skywalker: Highs and Lows on the Pacific Crest Trail may seem an odd book to review in a paper devoted to the Smoky Mountains, Walker’s love for his subject and the exuberance of his descriptions make this book a worthy addition to any hiker’s library.

•••

Kenneth Slawenski’s J.D. Salinger: A Life (ISBN 978-1-4000-6951-4, $27) attracted a good deal of criticism for its lack of personal detail regarding Salinger’s reclusive years and for what some reviewers called a fawning attitude.

Such negative criticism of Salinger: A Life is unfortunate, for there is gold to be mined in these pages for all those who love the work of the author of Catcher in the Rye, Franny and Zooey, and the other stories published before the author, tormented by publicity and on a spiritual quest, went into hiding. To chide Slawenski for loving Salinger’s books is ridiculous: what sort of biographer would want to write 400 pages about an author whom he disliked?

Slawenski carefully works his way through Salinger’s stories, and fans will take delight in his insights and his careful critiques. In addition, he goes to great lengths to examine Salinger’s spiritual development over the years, his increasing association of the spiritual with the act of writing, and his obsessive need for the private life (Salinger’s own daughter was unaware of her father’s occupation until she went to school, where an amused teacher told her that her father was a famous author).

Nor will readers be disappointed by Slawenski’s personal history of Salinger. He has done great service here showing us the depth of the effect of World War II on the young writer, and gives us blow-by-blow accounts of Salinger’s battles with the public, publishers, and copy-cat authors. Doubtless he does leave out some of Salinger’s mean-spirited behavior toward his wives and children, but a good bit of this side of the story is gossip and another good bit has already found documentation elsewhere. Given the penchant in our society for finding “dirt” on our celebrities, it is a relief in many ways to read the biography of an author in which the biographer seems as interested in his subject’s work as in a body count of the women bedded or the friends and lovers mistreated.

Though heroin and cocaine are dangerous and illegal, both drugs carry with them a cachet, the dark romance of, say, the doomed hard-rock singer or the wild film star. Alcoholics — unless you happen to live with one — are still regarded by our culture as either tragic figures or lovable clowns. Even cigarette smokers, hounded from the work place and restaurants, shoved into the cold streets, penalized with taxes higher than those once levied by the English on our forefathers, may still occasionally appear in the public eye as mysterious and cool, Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, or as tormented, like Sandra Bullock in “Twenty-eight Days.”

Fat people, however, receive no such ancillary laurels, no tarnished crowns. They are simply fat, and those around them regard them with a mixture of repugnance, aversion, disgust and horror. They eat too much, they drink too much, they exercise too little. They are quite literally shaped by their gluttony, and our pity usually extends no further than “There but for the grace of God and dietetic caution go I.”

That this pity is so limited is itself a pity. Few of us watching an obese man wheel about in a mobilized shopping cart in Wal-Mart or a woman the size of a freezer trying to keep up with her 3-year-old rarely put ourselves into that person’s shoes — or oversized sweat pants. We make jokes instead, offer insults like the one in the previous sentence, and wonder why someone grown so gargantuan would continue to eat bags of oily salted chips and drink vats of cola or beer.

In other words, we rarely try, as we might with the drug addict — poor tortured devil! — or the alcoholic — poor demon-driven sot! — to understand fat people, much less sympathize with them. The ignorant, gluttonous sods have eaten themselves into a hillock of flesh, and if they really disliked their shape and physical health, then they would take up a dietary spade — in some cases, a dietary bulldozer — and reduce the sides of that hill.

In Designated Fat Girl (978-0-7627-5962-0, $16.95), North Carolina author Jennifer Joyner tells us what it’s like to be fat, how it feels when you can’t help your child off the slide at McDonald’s because you’re too big to get up the ladder, how you look at yourself in the mirror each day and weep, how you go day after day wondering how your husband can love you. And not only does Joyner tell us how awful she felt about the weight she carried, she also demonstrates how she put on this weight, the double meals ordered at the windows of fast-food restaurants, the binges on pepperoni pizza and Coke, the times that she would “take a loaf of bread, a jar of pasta sauce, and a tub of butter, and over the course of an afternoon, I would eat all of it.”

In addition, Joyner shares the awful side-effects of obesity: the inability to tie her shoes, to take the Christmas decorations to the attic, to keep herself physically clean, to properly care for her husband and children. If we read attentively Joyner’s account of her life and her struggles with over-eating and with a poor diet, we begin to perceive what we may have missed in our judgments of the overweight. We understand that our fellow human beings don’t like being fat, that indeed they despise their condition, that they may have tried numerous times and ways, as did Joyner, to break their emotional dependence on food. Rather than revulsion, by the time we finish Designated Fat Girl we may even begin to feel a real pity for those who cannot break themselves of overeating, who look to food as solace in a hard, revved-up world of expectations and demands.

Jennifer Joyner finally defeated her food problem — she once weight 336 pounds — by undergoing gastric bypass surgery. Readers who experience her account of this surgery and who have perhaps felt that such an operation provided an easy way to knock off unwanted pounds in bowling ball numbers will quickly find their preconceptions disabused. Joyner suffered severe health problems from her surgery, including a partially collapsed lung and a reliance on prescription pain medication, and she continues to struggle with vitamin deficiency, as do all patients of such an operation, necessitating a dependence on various supplements.

Despite her conclusion that she would not encourage others to undergo gastric surgery — there was, Joyner says, too much pain and too many complications from her own surgery — she nonetheless does encourage those with the same problem to consider it as an option after having weighed its risks. Joyner herself does lose a massive amount of weight, and emerges from her struggles with both food and depression with a renewed sense of self-worth and an appreciation of “all my many blessings: a wonderful marriage, two great, healthy kids, and finally, some happiness.”

Designated Fat Girl is an honest book which will give strength to those who struggle against weight and overeating. To those who have long wondered why some people just can’t stop eating, it offers a unique portrait that should arouse a sense of compassion and understanding.

Designated Fat Girl by Jennifer Joyner. skirt!, 2010. 264 pages