Book review: Not God's Type by Holly Ordway

The third book I read in 2016 was Not God's Type: An Atheist Academic Lays Down Her Arms by Holly Ordway. The author, an English professor at the time of her conversion, describes her journey to Christian faith through the witness of her fencing coach.  It has striking similarities to Rosaria Champagne Butterfield's memoir, which is unsurprising due to their shared academic settings and waystations on the road to faith.

It is also reminiscent of Something Other Than God by Jennifer Fulwiler, a book I read in 2014 also published by Ignatius Press.  If you know Ignatius Press, you'll not be surprised to note that both Fulwiler and Ordway end up professing Roman Catholics.  (This is actually the second edition of Ordway's book; the first ended with her as a Protestant and was published by Moody Press.)  I can't help but wonder why so many passionate and articulate converts end up in the Roman Catholic Church (my hypothesis: Ignatius Press is on it while evangelical publishing companies are busy publishing travelogues of heaven, reality TV tie-ins, and self-help books), but at least we have Butterfield and Susan Isaacs on this side of the Wittenburg Cathedral door.

Book review: The Silver Branch by Rosemary Sutcliff

The second book I read in 2016 is The Silver Branch, a sequel-ish to The Eagle of the Ninth, by Rosemary Sutcliff.  While it is advertised as Book Two in the Roman Britain Trilogy, it doesn't deal with the same characters as the first book but with descendants of Marcus and Cottia over a century later.

As with The Eagle of the Ninth, the book opens with a Roman soldier newly posted to Britain, but the setting is very different: instead of a Britain being steadily pacified under Rome, in this Britain, Rome is on the retreat from rebellious tribes in the north and under attack by Saxon raiders from the east.  Back in Italy, the empire has already been split between two co-emperors, and Carausius, once a soldier in Rome's army himself, has declared himself emperor of Britain; due to rebellions and attacks from outlying tribes throughout Europe, the co-emperors have no choice but to accede to his claims for the time.  It's a time period I know next to nothing about, as I don't recall ever learning any British history before William the Conqueror and the Roman history I had didn't go much beyond "All Gaul is divided into three parts" north of the Alps.

Justin is the junior surgeon sent to Britain, a place his family came from but he has never seen.  At his posting, he meets his cousin Flavius, and we the readers come to understand that both are the descendents of Marcus and Cottia.  Later on, the story takes the cousins back to the farm that Marcus promised Cottia at the end of The Eagle of the Ninth, as well as Uncle Aquila's house in Calleva; the eagle itself even makes an appearance, as does Marcus's father's emerald ring.

Despite the similar opening scenes, The Silver Branch evolves much differently from The Eagle of the Ninth, turning into a tense spy story, as the cousins work in an undercover resistance group, rescuing dissidents and waiting for the arrival of the Roman legions.  Sutcliff introduces compelling secondary characters, from the upstart Carausius to the unlikely hero Paulinus to the stiff-upper-lip Aunt Honoria.  I enjoyed this book at least as much as the first installment and look forward to reading more of Sutcliff's books.

Book review: The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

As 2015 waned, I had daily book reviews lined up through December 31st and a little less than a week left in the year.  I couldn't afford to finish another book before January 1st, so I picked up the longest book on my reading shelf.

When I was in 7th-grade English, Kory Warr did his book report on The Count of Monte Cristo.  He gave it a rave review, but everyone else in the class just thought he was nuts for reading a book over a thousand pages on purpose when it wasn't necessary.  Years later, I finally read The Count of Monte Cristo and found it one of the best novels I've ever read.  A few more years passed, and I happened to be in touch with Kory Warr again for the first time since high school.  I reminded him about his book report in Mr. Gould's class and thanked him for the recommendation I belatedly took him up on.  In reply, he suggested that I should read The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn.  Mentally, I added it to my list, but it's been out of print for some time now.  When I found a copy on the clearance rack at Half Price Books, I picked it up.

However ... I still haven't read The Gulag Archipelago.  The first book I read in 2016 was only volume one of three, despite being over 600 pages.  I now need to be on the lookout for the other two books.

Much like The Count of Monte Cristo, The Gulag Archipelago was not what I was expecting.  I was expecting something like The Hiding Place, a personal memoir of misery and privation: I was arrested, I was beaten, I was starved, I was tortured.  That's not what The Gulag Archipelago is (at least, the first volume).  Yes, Solzhenitsyn touches briefly on his own arrest and experience in prison, but the book is much more journalistic, a heavily-annotated collection of statistics and of anecdotes of multiple dissidents over a period of decades.

This first volume deals only with Soviet prisons and with the transport system which moved prisoners from camp to camp; the actual camp experience is left to the later volumes.  Solzhenitsyn compares the experience of dissidents in Soviet prisons to that of the early socialists suffered under the Tsars and finds that the system which they denounced as inhuman was immeasurably more humane than the system they put in place to crush their own enemies.

The heartbreaking insanity of the Soviet system, in which the people who actually knew how to manage the infrastructure, be it agriculture, transport, manufacturing, or what-have-you, were denounced as enemies of the people and replaced with people who had no experience or training and thus inevitably ran the sector into the ground, to the detriment of the public, is all the more frustrating because it has been repeated so many times since then, in China, Cambodia, North Korea, and many countries in Africa even today.  Then, of course, when famine or shortage resulted, the people thrust into jobs they weren't trained for were in turn denounced as "wreckers" and followed their predecessors into prison, execution, or slave labor.

Solzhenitsyn describes the trial of a certain group of engineers in charge of a factory: They were simultaneously accused of wasting the country's capital by using more expensive building materials that would extend the working life of the factory and of retarding the country's progress by not purchasing top-of-the-line equipment for said factory.  Transcripts of trials in which both prosecution and defense lawyers denounced the accused (because any defense lawyer who contradicted the prosecution's story would find himself next in the dock) reveal what a farce justice was in those days.

The translator provides notes at the end of the book in the edition I read, and I wish it had been in the beginning.  He provides definitions and explanations for some of the Russian slang which is otherwise impenetrable, but I didn't realize the resource was even there until I was well into the book.  There is also a glossary of names and another of institutions and terms.  Names and terms that were widely-known in the Cold War days when the work was first published are not included, but at this point in time, there are doubtless new readers who don't know who Krushchev was or what samizdat means; an updated glossary would be handy, but I suppose Google and Wikipedia work as well.

Galavant!

Last night, Tommy and I rang in the new year watching TV.  First, we rewatched season 1 of Galavant in preparation for the second season premiere this Sunday.  That show was made for binge-watching; I actually enjoyed it more the second time around.  The first time through, I had a hard time with the pacing and figuring out what was important.  Now that I've already seen it, I know nothing was important; it was just all fun.  On a second viewing, I can forget about plot and just enjoy the insanity.

  My favorite song is the "love theme":

My second favorite is "Secret Mission," when Galavant and Richard drunkenly carouse through the castle corridors carrying oversized pole arms hoping to quietly assassinate Kingsley while singing at the top of their lungs: "Secret, secret!  Hush, hush, hush!"

Seriously, though, the costume design on Madalena is amazing, as she goes over the course of the season from Snow White to full-on Wicked Queen.  Richard and Gareth, on the other hand, move in the other direction, from stereotypical antagonists to the sweetest things EVER who totally deserve happy endings of their own, without ever changing clothes.

Everyone should totally tune in Sunday nights this January.  The ratings were poor enough last year that the opening number/promo for season 2 openly boggles that they got a second season, but if this one ends on a cliffhanger anything like last year's, we must have a season three!