Nonfiction,  Novels

Recent Reading: 6 Books

It’s tough to recall what all I’ve read since April, when I last posted on books. I’ll begin with Hollowed Out: A Warning about America’s Next Generation, by Jeremy S. Adams. Written by a high school history teacher, this book offers plenty of keen insight into Gen Z in a discussion of general cultural health. As the subtitle indicates, the prognosis isn’t good. Adams’s portrait is of a generation that seems “hollowed out” of the aspirations that traditionally define a success path toward maturity, fulfillment, economic stability, family life and accomplishment. The picture that emerges is both troubling and deeply sad: students uninformed about and uninterested in the past, yet stridently dogmatic about its failings; uninterested in marriage or children; highly distracted; deeply involved in a celebrity culture that elevates popularity without accomplishment; and religiously uninformed and unresponsive.

Adams discusses the role of education, technology and the family in all of this, and his writing is perceptive and at times inspired, such as when he describes what the hookup culture misses out on:

What have you lost? . . . [T]he answer is: everything the great poets and philosophers have written about love; the transformative experience that has meant everything to countless hundreds of millions of devoted married couples throughout time; the cornerstone, aside from faith or the consolation of philosophy, to a life of meaning and purpose. For those who have loved with every fiber of their being, love is not one pleasure among many. It is the reason for living. It opens up the universe, makes it more amenable to our highest hopes, fills in the lacuna of our deepest desires. It makes sense of the incomprehensible.

Passages like that are where we find a glimmer of hope. At least someone still exists who can express it. (By the way, “lacuna” means “blank space.” I looked it up. You’re welcome.) Our basic human needs for love, meaning, achievement and learning don’t disappear, even when they are perpetually unsatisfied. We can hope for a revival, or a revolution, of humanity.

In fact, I read the book because it was described as offering hope. Adams looks to educational change, but I have to confess that although it’s a good book, I didn’t find it to be a hopeful one.

Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder (Carolyn Fraser): This was a reread, and the link is to my previous review. My reading this time accompanies a spontaneous return initiated by my daughter to listening through the Little House series audiobooks again during lunch. Thinking about it now, I realize these readings/listenings have supplied more of the hope I was looking for when I picked up Hollowed Out. Wilder endured an incredible amount of privation, hardship and suffering in her life, and as always happens when we revisit history and biography, it’s impossible to miss that there is nothing new under the sun. Lousy public policy, ignorance and greed, disease, poverty and loss are nothing new. Seeing the response made by the Ingalls family, and later by the Wilder family, inspires me because it shows the kind of toughness, continuous learning, and determination that keep people in the game.

Giants in the Earth (Ole Rolvaag): This too is a reread, a book my history professor had us read in college. I’ve kept it for all these years, remembering liking it, but not remembering the details. It covers the same ground as Laura Ingalls Wilder — the pioneer experience in Dakota Territory, complete with locusts, storms, poverty, and other challenges. However, this novel focuses on the experience through the eyes of three Norwegian families who settle together, and it’s based on the experience of the author and his wife’s family, translated into English. It presents a very different perspective than the Little House books, which even as they detail blizzards, illness, grasshoppers and extreme poverty and uncertainty, manage to do it through a filter of Ingalls family affection, strength, resourcefulness and even coziness despite terrible hardships.

This book, for example, gives us a glimpse of how the vastness, isolation and uncertainty of the prairie ravage the mental state of Beret, who like Caroline Ingalls loves her husband and tries to enter into his pioneering ambitions. It allows us to see as well what childbirth was like — something that occurs only offstage in the Little House books. And it offers a more unsparing realism in its examination of the role of faith, and the church, in the growing community.

I found myself thinking of Caroline Ingalls, and how she comes across increasingly as a kind of kill-joy in the Little House books as Laura grows older and identifies more and more closely with her father and his love of wilderness and westward movement. Though she is always treated respectfully, her desire to settle and live in community with others is always depicted as a brake on the family. The characters in Giants in the Earth are drawn with more depth and complexity, and as a result I found myself more sympathetic toward Ma Ingalls as she hovered in my mind as a standard of comparison with Beret. This is apparently the first book in a trilogy, but I’m not sure I could take any more. A powerful, tragic book.

Just Like That (Gary D. Schmidt): This book about Meryl Lee Kowalski threw me for a loop in the opening pages, and I almost quit reading. She loses her best friend, and the book follows her through the ensuing year as she tries to come to terms with it. I’m very glad I stuck with it, because it was thoroughly satisfying and entertaining despite the bumpy start. Gary D. Schmidt delivered another characteristically probing book that explores important issues — death and loss, crime, prejudice, war, family and privilege, to name a few — with both great depth and great wit.

The Killer Angels (Michael Shaara): Another reread from my college history class. (I’m trying to read the books my daughter is reading in history this year. Or most of them, anyway. I missed Frederick Douglass, but I’ve read him more recently.) This novel, on which the movie Gettysburg was based, is one I’ve reread several times and always love. It’s masterfully told and structured, and it introduced me to heroes like Joshua Chamberlain, colonel of the 20th Maine regiment that won the charge on Little Round Top. I’ve been working slowly through James MacPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom, a book about the Civil War that is also very good, but The Killer Angels, focusing on one battle, is in a class by itself. Highly recommended, especially in a time when our history begs for a fuller examination.

The Technological Society (Jacques Ellul): Finally read this one — almost. Just a few pages left. A vast, patient, prophetic, clear-eyed examination of the ultimately totalitarian tendencies of humanity’s love affair with technology. Ellul’s research is exhaustive — so much so that there is no way for me to do justice to the whole. But here are a few examples of matter-of-fact observations he drops into his cultural analysis (totally without context or explanation, but enough to give a taste):

No technique is possible when men are free. . . The individual must be fashioned by techniques . . . in order to wipe out the blots his personal determination introduces into the perfect design of the organization.

(138)

Henceforth it will be wrong for a man to escape this universal effort. It will be inadmissible for any part of the individual not to be integrated in the drive toward technicization. . . The individual will no longer be able, materially or spiritually, to disengage himself from society.

(139)

Even when a state is resolutely liberal and democratic, it cannot do otherwise than become totalitarian. It becomes so either directly or, as in the United States, through intermediate persons. . . Driencourt notes with surprise that “the country which boasts of being most liberal [that is, the United States] is the country in which the technique of thought direction is, by its perfection, the closest to totalitarian practices; and is the country in which people, accustomed to living in groups, are most inclined to leave it to the experts to fix lines of spiritual conduct.

(Excerpts from 284-86)

Thoroughly depressing. Published in 1954 in French, translated into English in 1964, Ellul saw the tendencies in place, and much of what he observes and predicts has come to pass. Wherever we look, we see it: the politics of vaccines, and of science in general; the regulation of speech and thought, with technology and media as the primary instruments; the overreach of the justice department; the appropriation of private property; the list goes on and on.

Freedom and truth are messy. There will be a great deal of uncontrolled diversity of opinion and lifestyle in a free country, complicated and inconclusive data in scientific research, shifting tides in political preferences. But “technique” as Ellul uses the term describes the desire to systematize and coordinate and simplify and streamline in every sphere. The natural course of things is for the most powerful to use technological means to deploy technique for the purpose of preserving and increasing power. Obviously, brazenly, this is happening before our eyes.

There have been other books revisited as well, and a good bit of reading for professional development. Looking back over this list, I’m sure I’ve left something out, and I wish I had taken the time to engage the readings more fully in writing here while they were more fresh. But for now, it’s microreviews, and even they serve the purpose of drawing out connections, comparisons, and forays into certain interests.

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