Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing -- Robert Caro

Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing by Robert A. Caro
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Caro's little volume on his working process, and glimpse into the thought process and questions that drive his work along, is helpful. It both gives hope to the aspiring writer of nonfiction, and dashes cold water into the face of romanticized picture of writing harbored by many.

For here, we see an unsparing portrayal of the thousands of hours of work spent over years of research. You can conjure up a mental image of Caro and his wife, huddled over desks at the Johnson library, turning page after page, hundreds of thousands of them, trying to catch out some tiny, revealing detail that will present a new lead of inquiry, a facet of the story that people have missed.

First, I wonder at this couple's keen minds, to discern a significant lead in the mountains of minutiae. It also strikes me that Caro has had a rare gift over these decades--a wife who was his friend, compatriot, co-researcher, and co-editor through his volumes of work. Many writers spend their careers in long seasons of utter loneliness. Mrs. Caro's companionship and expertise have kept much of that burden off of him. Many don't realize that Mrs. Caro is a skilled writer in her own right, an expert on French history. She has poured meticulous research and great craft into her writing as well; I don't know how she has done it!

There are no shortcuts presented in Caro's book. His biggest advice is a torch that he had passed down to him from a newspaper editor in the early days: turn every single page. You don't know what nuggets are there until you look. This is daunting advice--if you take it seriously, it might be enough to scare away any would-be writer who wants the prestige, but doesn't want the work. Other gems are quite helpful and encouraging. For instance, silence is the greatest weapon in the interviewer's arsenal. People hate silence, and will rush to fill it. If you ask a question, shut up and wait until the interviewee answers it in full. Caro's interview notes are filled with "SU" (Shut Up) reminders, which he would scratch down when fighting the temptation to kill the compelling silence with words of his own. Also inspiring is his insistence that nonfiction should contain the same quality of prose and rhythm as fictional works, and that if you get a deep sense of the places important to your subject, you will understand powerful psychological forces wrought by the environment itself on the subject. In this way, the environment is a major character in Caro's books that have profoundly shaped the motivations of his protagonists.

This book contains reprints of interviews written for other publications, so it's not all original for this volume. It's all invaluable insight, however, but many would say that this fact detracts from the book. Still, I value the wisdom in its pages, and the refined, gracious voice of Caro that permeates the book.

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An Irish Country Doctor -- Patrick Taylor

An Irish Country Doctor by Patrick Taylor
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

An Irish Country Doctor is an absolutely charming novel, shot through with warmth, uproarious humor, compassion, and a glimpse into a simpler time that sadly is passing away. If we can recover something of the community spirit, the value of abiding together, learning from and loving each other despite our flaws and eccentricities as portrayed in this book, there just might be hope for us after all. The book is full of sentimentality, but perhaps we should start calling it by its right name.

Wisdom.

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Review: The Boy on the Wooden Box

The Boy on the Wooden Box by Leon Leyson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

My son and I read this for his 6th grade English class. I carefully filter the books my kids read that deal with some of the ugliest parts of history, and I must say, this book is perfect for a young person who is just becoming aware of the Holocaust. The tone is gentle and not at all gratuitous in its depictions of the sufferings of the Jewish people, while at the same time managing to convey how monstrously they were treated. I really admire the author's ability to do this in a way appropriate to a young audience. The writing really draws you in, and it ends on a very positive note. I'm grateful my son was able to read this.

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Review: Called: The Crisis and Promise of Following Jesus Today

Called: The Crisis and Promise of Following Jesus Today by Mark Labberton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was truly an excellent book. The writing style was skillful, smooth and engaging. Labberton clarified many issues of "call" that have caused stumbling, anxiety and angst to many Christians, including myself in adolescence and early adulthood. There is the pervasive idea that all of us have a unique call from God--a particular niche that He wants us to find for our lives' work. But here's the catch -- it's a secret. We have to want it really bad, pray really hard, demonstrate faith and earnestness, fast...offer a bull upon the altar...find a feather from a rare bird atop a Himalayan peak...(not really). But the sense of it being a strange spirit-quest, which we may or may not complete (probably not), is the same. If we find this elusive vision, we'll be all set to marry the spouses and do the work we were divinely equipped to perform. But if we miss it, we'll fail in discovering God's best for our lives, eke out a defeated and unfulfilled life, and hope that God will find some value in the second-best path we chose. Sound familiar? Of course that all sounds ridiculous the way I hyperbolized it, but really, that's very close to the mystery we subconsciously perceive at the heart of finding God's divine and particular will for our lives. It's like searching everywhere for a burning bush in a sopping-wet rainforest in a thunderstorm. It's not likely to work.

Labberton demystifies the concept of call in a way that I hope many will find liberating. First and foremost, nearly all we need to know about our calling is found through deep fellowship with Jesus, making our home in God's Word, living in authentic Christian community, and simply cooperating with the Holy Spirit in His work to transform us in becoming more like Jesus. It's about loving God with our whole heart, and loving our neighbors, right exactly where we are, right now, right where God has planted us. This is what Labberton calls putting first things first. If we look around us, and ask what it means to incarnate Jesus' love to the real people and real situations we see, we will know God's calling upon us for today.

As we are increasingly formed to be like Jesus, and as a faithful character takes root in us, God will lead us to be passionate about and engage with people and issues that fit with who He has created us to be. But we must not rush this process. We must, like Abraham, trust that the God who invited us on this journey has the map, and an unfailing sense of direction. He will make sure we get where we are supposed to go. All we must do is follow Him today, where we are. Then we do the same thing tomorrow. Instead of a great mystery that we are supposed to deduce, our calling becomes a place we will unfailingly reach if we trust our Father to take us there.

Labberton engages in some serious talk about the crisis of following Jesus in our current situation. Many people, desperately searching for the light of God, seek it in the lives of those who profess faith, and discover in them the same confusion and compromise from which they are seeking escape. The difference is that people of "faith" are smug and self-righteous toward those honest enough to live how lost they are. No wonder so many outside the church want nothing to do with us.

What people need more than anything else today is practical wisdom that will actually make a difference in their lives and direction. They see a world, a society, and their own lives, reeling with confusion and darkness, and collectively they cry out, "FIX IT!" to anyone with a solution. They give the organized church a chance, and they get only spiritual platitudes that are completely irrelevant to the pain they are experiencing. Labberton points out that spiritual knowledge and wisdom are completely different things. If there is no action, there is no wisdom. If it doesn't work for real people with real problems, there's no wisdom that will actually help them. God is calling us to offer realistic, workable, scriptural wisdom to the world. But we are so compromised ourselves, we have none to offer. We've relativized, spiritualized, and philosophized Jesus' commands that were meant to be lived out, quite literally. We didn't want to make the sacrifice of obedience. But if we haven't actually tried out Jesus' wisdom, and discovered that it truly works, we can't help others, let alone ourselves. This has to stop. It's time for Christians to reclaim the heritage of wisdom bequeathed to us, stop living our lives a million directions at once, and start living out the practical wisdom of Jesus. Then, and only then, will we have something to offer.

Labberton believes that we have gotten so flaccid because we have assumed such privilege and power in a Christendom, civil-religion America. We've assumed we're on top, that we have the dominant position, so all we need to do is relax and enjoy the privilege. This is what Labberton calls a "Promised Land" mindset--we have it made; the war is won. What is truly pathetic is that so many still believe this. It's astounding that so many people can continue to live in this delusion that the church is still a dominant voice in society; that we still have clout. In truth, we have been increasingly pushed to the margins for a very long time now. That isn't simply because of all those "evil, godless people" out there, by the way. We have reached a position of irrelevance, in great part, because we have made ourselves so. Labberton urges that we wake up from our "Promised Land" dream, and embrace a new mindset, based on where we are in reality. We must adopt a position of "Exile," in which we no longer arrogantly assume dominance or clout. We are, once again, but one, tiny voice in a great multitude of voices. If we wish to see others coming to find their answers in Christ, we must do so with genuine love and humility, compassion, and service. Instead of being arrogant and entitled, we must promote the new and living way Jesus proclaimed by actually living that way ourselves. It is not our job to judge or coerce anyone; it is our job to live and tell the love of Jesus, to shine our light and let others decide for themselves whether to follow that light. Instead of seeing our neighbors as evangelistic prospects, and additional parts in the ecclesiastic machinery, we see and treat them as they are -- people lovingly created in the image of God, worthy of infinite value, love and service. That is a mindset I can get behind, a posture I can adopt, a mission I can live--because it looks, to me, very much like Jesus. I hope legions of Christians wake up, as soon as possible, and have the courage to carry out these lives of loving exile and service.

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Review: The Politics of Jesus: Vicit Agnus Noster

The Politics of Jesus: Vicit Agnus Noster by John Howard Yoder
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

3 1/2 stars. The book said a great deal that makes excellent sense, and provided a lot of great insights to deepen the slightly Anabaptist leanings of my my own beliefs. However, detracting points were that he:

1) Spent entirely too much time in dialog with scholarly Biblical critics, thus wasting valuable opportunities to provide practical insights that the Christian could be living out today, and why. I suppose this is understandable, given that it was a quasi-scholarly book.

2) Went into a discursus concerning the writings of Paul that totally missed the boat in several areas too numerous to discuss here. In an effort to demonstrate that Paul and Jesus were saying the same things about practical, ethical discipleship, he missed the obvious progression of Paul's arguments in favor of reinterpreting them in ways that didn't make sense, and that do violence to canonical hermeneutics. In short, to make Paul say the "right" things (which he needn't have bothered to do; he was already doing that, if understood in proper context), he ended up attempting to make him say wrong things in other areas.

However, his work with the teachings of Jesus, and their validity as a disciple's model for concrete livability for today, were quite good in many areas. I didn't agree with all of it, but FAR more than his points concerning Paul's teachings. It was worth the read, but was also a hard and slow read, because of the dense material analyzing the work of other scholars, and the fact that I spent so much time arguing with it in my own notes.

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For My Green-Thumbed Friends...

     For those of my friends and family who find peace and refreshment by digging in the dirt: here are Nathaniel Hawthorne's thoughts on gardening.  When he and his wife were newly married, and had rented an old parsonage owned by the Emerson family, Henry David Thoreau planted a kitchen garden for a wedding gift.  Hawthorne really, really liked it...

     Not that it can be disputed, that the light toil, requisite to cultivate a moderately sized garden, imparts such zest to kitchen-vegetables as is never found in those of the market-gardener.  Childless men, if the would know something of the bliss of paternity, should plant a seed...should plant it with their own hands, and nurse it from infancy to maturity, altogether by their own care...An hour or two of morning labor, was all that it required.  But I used to visit and re-visit it, a dozen times a day, and stand in deep contemplation over my vegetable progeny, with a love that nobody could share nor conceive of, who had never taken part in the process of creation.  It was one of the most bewitching sights in the world...

     Gazing at them, I felt that, by my agency, something worth living for had been done.  A new substance as borne into the world.  They were real and tangible existences, which the mind could seize hold of and rejoice in.

--Nathaniel Hawthorne, Preface to Mosses from an Old Manse (1846)

"I recline upon the still unwithered grass, and whisper to myself: -- 'Oh, perfect day! -- Oh, beautiful world! -- Oh, beneficent God!' And it is the promise of a blissful Eternity; for our Creator would never have made such lovely days, and given us the deep hearts to enjoy them, above and beyond all thought, unless we were meant to be immortal. This sunshine is the golden pledge thereof. It beams through the gates of Paradise, and shows us glimpses far inward." 

-- Nathaniel Hawthorne

    Preface to Mosses from an Old Manse