"Living," a Movie About Dying Written by Kazuo Ishiguro

Is there a better short story in the world than Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych?  If there is, I never read it.  

When my favorite living writer, Kazuo Ishiguro, wrote the screenplay for a retelling of Ivan Ilych, I very much wanted to see it. 

Sir Kazuo Ishiguro, winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature

The beginning of the movie Living was wonderful. I could not think of a better way to portray the character of a middle manager in an endless bureaucracy than the character Rodney Williams. He shuffles paperwork at the head of a circle of desks where his half-dozen minions do the same.

When that complacent middle manager confronts mortality, his attempts at actually living life are charming failures.  

At the end of the movie, after Williams dies, the movie is even more deliciously perfect, portraying how the bureaucracy swallows the souls of those who fill in the space left in the hierarchy.  

Between every beginning and end is a middle. The middle left me vaguely unhappy. Then I talked to two of the most insightful people I know and they were of opposite minds about the main character's actions in the months before his death.  

Then I was more unhappy. Could both be right? 

One says, "Yes, Williams actions make sense. He tried to live life outside his work. Then he decided to do something good in the world he knew best." 

The other, a modern stoic, says, "He was selfish and avoided involvement for all of his life. Our habits define us. He would, like Ivan Ilych, simply become more self-involved when he received the terminal diagnosis."

In the middle of the movie, Williams decides to help three women build a playground in an area wrecked by bombing in World War II. The movie is set in London in 1953. Williams takes the folder from his "Hold" basket and navigates the paper through the labyrinth of approvals necessary to get the project underway. When another bureaucrat says he will look into the matter, Williams sits in the middle of the office and says he will wait as long as necessary.  

Williams wins. The playground is built. The community loves and honors him. But the world is unchanged. Watch the movie to see how deliciously the bureaucracy reasserts its inherent inertia.

If you do watch the movie, read the novella The Death of Ivan Ilych. If I have any coherent views about the moment of death and the afterlife, I got them from this story and from The Great Divorce, a novella by C.S.Lewis. 

  

Books of 2021: Fiction

In 2021 I read fourteen books under the vast category of fiction. The oldest of the books was written in the 14th Century.  The newest were published this year.  The authors as close as my own family and as far away as Russia. The setting of one novel is more than two thousand years ago, another is in the near future.  

In an earlier post I listed the non-fiction books I read in 2021.

In another post I said that my favorite book of 2021 was a work of fiction I did not finish: The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio. But having a favorite does not mean there were any books on the list I did not like. They are so different. But The Decameron was very much in my mind in our pandemic world.

Amelia's Journey to Find Family by Lauren Auster-Gussman.

My oldest daughter Lauren wrote this about a rescue dog she adopted and cared for in the last year of her life.  It's a lovely children's book both in the sense of a nice story and that her co-author made lovely illustrations for the story.

La Veritable Histoire de Trois Cochons by Erik Blegvad. I read children's books in French to practice that lovely language. This book is a traditional and gruesome retelling of the story fo the three pigs.

The Quick and the Dead and What Dark Days Seen by Alison Joseph. I met Alison Joseph in 2018 and read three of her mystery novels. She wrote a new one this year set in the pandemic reviving her Sister Agnes character. I read the new novel and the first Sister Agnes novel this year and plan to read more of Sister Agnes in 2022.

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. I read and re-read everything Kazuo Ishiguro has written. The new novel is a chilling story of a future world in which Artificial Intelligence develops to the point that kids can have AFs, Artificial Friends. 

Untraceable by Sergei Lebedev. This very darkly funny novel imagines a Russia in which political dissidents would be poisoned by incompetent government secret agents. The attacks would be ordered by a former spy who became the President for Life of the Russian Federation and who wants the old Soviet Union back!  Crazy right?! 

Till We Have Faces Lewis by C.S. Lewis. I re-read this wonderful book for a discussion with the New York CS Lewis Society.  It is a re-telling of the Cupid and Psyche myth (which means it is also a retelling of Cinderella) from the perspective of the oldest stepsister.  The book is her complaint against the gods and her side of the story.  I read this book aloud to my daughters when they were in middle school as an example of a tough woman who becomes a great leader. The queen wears a mask her whole life as queen, so there's that connection to our world right now. The difference between appearance and reality is the best I have read in any novel.

The Mandrake by Niccolo Machiavelli. A very funny short play by a guy with a reputation for political advice. 

A Game of Thrones, A Feast for Crows, #4 and A Game of Thrones, A Storm of Swords, #3 by George R. R. Martin.  I watched the entire series on HBO. It was wonderful except for the ending.  The books are better.  I am currently reading book five and hoping the author lives to finish book 6!

The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht. An strange and mysterious story set vaguely in the former Yugoslavia.  A fascinating story.  

Selections from Canzonieri and Other Works by Francesco Petrarch. I started reading Petrarch to round out my reading of the Three Crowns of Florence:  Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio.  The Decameron became my book of the year. Petrarch's sonnets led me to put more poetry in my reading, although this book is the only one I finished in 2021.

Arcadia by Tom Stoppard. I had never read Stoppard. This play is full of twists and fun and playful language and is a wonderful story.  I will read more or him in 2022. 

Laurus by Eugene Vodolazkin. I love this book.  I read it in 2016 and re-read it this year.  Set in the late 1,400s in Russia and across the world. 

"Klara and the Sun" by Kazuo Ishiguro, a Review

Spoiler Alert!! 

I am going to talk about the end of the novel. If you haven’t read it, I don’t want to ruin the read for you. 

Klara and the Sun, the new novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, is sad, beautiful and haunting, as are all of his eight novels. Each of the eight novels are different in setting and characters and time period. His main character can be an English butler, a single mom in post-war Nagasaki, a teenager raised to be an organ donor, an old couple in medieval England losing their memories as they wander in search of their son, or an aging Japanese painter remembering his life after World War II. 

In Klara and the Sun, the protagonist is an “Artificial Friend” always referred to as an AF*. She is an AI (Artificial Intelligence) robot companion for a teenage girl named Josie. At the beginning of the novel, we see Klara in the store that sells AFs and other household items. She is very curious about her world, more curious than other AFs, even the new B3 AFs that have recently been added to the store’s inventory. 

We see the world through Klara’s eyes from within the store until she is purchased by Josie’s mom. Through most of the novel Josie’s health is in decline and only Klara maintains hope that Josie will get better. Klara’s hope is based on her deep and serious, almost primal, worship of the Sun. AFs were designed in a way that required solar power. Klara observed this and spoke often of “the sun’s nourishment.” Not just for herself, but for humans and animals. 

Klara believes the sun goes into the ground at night. She twice goes to a barn to address the sun on Klara’s behalf and finally make a deal with the sun to heal Josie. Then, at the worst of Josie’s decline, her bedroom is suddenly flooded with sunlight and her rapid recovery begins. But this story is Ishiguro, not Disney. 

As Josie recovers, both Klara and Josie's neighbor/boyfriend Rick become less and less important. At the end of the novel, Klara is confined in some kind of junkyard, still conscious, but no longer humanoid. Like someone who loses the use of their body, but keeps her memories, Klara can review the events of her life while she waits for the slow decline to nothing that seems to be the lifecycle of AFs. 

The story is not as wrenching as Never Let Me Go—the story of young people bred and raised to be organ donors. It is not quite as ironic as The Remains of the Day and the mountain of regrets that haunt the late life of an English butler. Nor is it quite as odd as The Buried Giant and its quest through medieval England to find a son who may or may not exist. But Klara and the Sun is thoroughly sad, especially if Klara, the AF with the truly sunny disposition, is telling her story from a junkyard. 

We get hints of rebellion against AFs and AI from the people in the city so we don’t know why Klara is in the scrapyard. As with the end of other Ishiguro novels, the protagonist is in a terrible place with little hope, but there is still life: whether it is the aging butler who knows that his world has passed away and love has passed him by, or the organ donor barely alive and one operation of from certain death, or the old couple lost in the mists of memory loss, or Klara still exploring her world with the senses she has left. 

I have read all of Ishiguro’s novels and re-read Remains of the Day. I may re-read that again. I might also re-read Klara and the Sun to look more closely at how Ishiguro portrays misplaced faith and deep misunderstandings. The future of AI looks hopeful for the rich and privileged and bleak for everyone else. Klara and the Sun captures that perfectly. 

Here is a review of three of Ishiguro’s novels related to war and its aftermath.

Here is a contrast of Ishiguro and Mark Helprin, my favorite living authors.

Here is a look at the similarities between and army Sergeant’s Major and an English butler.

*It took me about 50 pages to get used to the AF acronym. I am an Air Force veteran so AF wants to be Air Force in my head. Also, some of my friends, including younger Army friends, use AF as an emphatic suffix: Shamrocks are lucky AF (for As Fuck). Einstein is smart AF. An Artificial friend in the Air Force would be AF AF AF!

Loving the Book is not the Same as Liking the Author

Mark Helprin, I love his books, hate his politics

 My two favorite living authors are very different men. I have read all of the novels of each man and re-read my favorite novel by each. I plan to re-read more and, of course, read anything else they write. C.S. Lewis said “Liking an author may be as involuntary and improbable as falling in love.” He also cautioned that a reader who loves an author’s work should not believe he would like the company of the author.

Kazuo Ishiguro, Noble Prize in Literature, 2017

I started reading Kazuo Ishiguro in 2014 on the recommendation of a good friend. The first novel I read by him was “Remains of the Day.” In January of this year I finished “The Unconsoled,” making my reading of Ishiguro complete. Two years ago I re-read Remains of the Day, still my favorite, although “TheBuried Giant” is a close second. The Buried Giant was published in March 2015. Two months later Ishiguro spoke at the Free Library of Philadelphia.  After hearing Ishiguro speak, I was quite convinced I would love to have a drink with him. His Nobel Prize address last year made me even more sure I would love to hang out with him if the opportunity ever presented itself. That address is moving, brilliant and sad, the common threads in everything Ishiguro writes.

In February 1983, when I was still in graduate school, I first read Mark Helprin in the New Yorker magazine.  I read the story “Jesse Honey Mountain Guide” in the last issue of the month.  The story was a chapter in his second novel “A Winter’s Tale” published the following September. I was hooked.  I read his first novel and two short story collections published to that point. In the years since I read every other novel as each published. I have re-read Winters Tale and plan to re-read Helprin’s most recent novel “Paris in the Present Tense” this year or next year. “Paris in the Present Tense” is now my favorite.

I was so taken with Jesse Honey, I wrote paper in grad school about Helprin’s precise use of exaggeration in the story, comparing to the Walter Mitty stories by James Thurber.  

Over the years I read Helprin’s editorials in the Wall Street Journal and other essays. He is a conservative, so I never imagined we could have a totally friendly conversation, but in 2015 and 2016 Helprin spoke out against Trump and seemed to be a Never-Trump conservative.  Maybe we could have a drink?

Alas, that was in 2016. After Nazis marched in Charlottesville in 2017, Helprin wrote in Trump’s defense in The Claremont Review of Books. Next month Helprin is speaking in New York. I have never heard Helprin speak, and I would like to, but I won’t be attending the event.  He is the featured guest at “Socrates in the City” an occasional gathering organized by author and total Trumpian Eric Metaxas. In 2011, Metaxas wrote a biography of a martyr to the Nazis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  Despite writing about a victim of the Nazis, Metaxas is a full-throated supporter of a man whose campaign was built on the Birther form of racism and spread to every other non-white group as soon as the campaign began.

So I won’t be paying Metaxas to hear Helprin speak. In addition to Helprin, the event is a launch party for a new Children’s book by Metaxas “Donald Drains the Swamp.” Metaxas is a very funny guy. He is one of the creators of the “Veggie Tales” series. But, sadly, in his new book he is not ironical. Metaxas really sees Trump as the savior of the western world. The irony runs the other way though: no one in Washington has ever been more corrupt than the Swamp-Creature-in-Chief. 

When I think of Veggie Tales now, I imagine Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber being thrown into a Black Car driven by the Veggie Gestapo. Bob and Larry plead that wanted to salute The Orange Fuhrer, weakly protesting, “But we don’t have arms!”

Larry and Bob

I will keep reading Helprin, because the things he writes, like all creations, are from, not of, the person who created them.  And 70-year-old conservatives can become cranky—at least that’s what I’ve heard. 

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Tankers vs. Non-Tankers: the never-ending discussion among armor crewmen

  

So much of the Army is competition, especially the combat arms parts of the Army where men are confined together in small armored spaces and have endless hours to “talk shit.”

When my small armored space was the turret of an M60A1Patton tank, one of the subjects that came up among us young sergeants was the question: Who is a Tanker, and who is a Non-Tanker?

Before gunnery, I was a Non-Tanker. Not only had I never qualified on Tank Table VIII (Tanker’s final exam), but I had transferred from the Air Force. A Wing Nut is not a Tanker.  So I was in the Limbo of those who simply never had been to annual gunnery.   Worse still, I enlisted in the Army in June 1975 after leaving the Air Force. Because I carried over my rank as Specialist4, I started as a gunner in 1-70^th Armor. I made sergeant in February and, partly from a shortage of sergeants, got my own tank crew right away.  Not only was I a Non-Tanker, I was the Non-Tanker in Charge of his own crew.

That first year, I fired “Distinguished” at tank gunnery at Fort Carson, Colorado, in April 1976.  Because I qualified near the top of the battalion, I was allowed to be part of the discussion of who was a Tanker and who wasn’t from that time forward, at least until 1978.

Every competitive job or sport has a group of insiders who discuss for hours, especially when drinks are involved, their equivalent of who is Tanker, and who is a Non-Tanker.  Whatever the field, the insider is competent, the outsider is in some critical way incompetent.

I have not been a Tanker since 1984, but the intense discussion came back to my mind in 2014 when I read the book, “The Remains of the Day” by Kazuo Ishiguro. The central character is a butler in one of the “Great Houses” in the time between the World Wars when the butler had a household staff ranging between a platoon and a small company.  At one point in the novel, a dozen butlers gather for drinks and have an intense discussion of what a butler is, what are the critical skills, who were and who currently are the greatest butlers, and, of course, who among those not currently in the room are mere pretenders. 

As with any clique, one’s place is never permanent. In January 1978, I took a job at Brigade headquarters and stayed there for rest of my tour.  I became a “Non-Tankin’ MotherF*#ker” immediately.  I got out at the end of 1979 and went to college. In 1982, I joined Alpha 6-68^th Armor for two years.  I made staff sergeant, became a section leader and as an active duty soldier in a reserve unit, I was back to being to being a Tanker! But in 1984, I got a job offer that would make it impossible to be a reservist, so I left the Army. Although I re-enlisted in 2007, I was in aviation and so was a Non-Tanker ever after.

In many ways, being a tanker really was, “The Best Job I Ever Had” and discussions about who was or was not a Tanker was one of the ways I knew how deep into my that job I was. 

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Neil’s Best and Worst Books of 2017: Update With Full List

  

Kazuo Ishiguro, winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature

I had a few people who read this post ask me about the rest of the list, so I am going to add the additional titles with only an occasional comment. They will be in my arbitrary categories.

The list below represents the best and the worst of the 52 books I read in 2017. Only two of the books were published this year. The majority of the authors are alive and I went to readings by two of them.  I am an obsessive reader; both in wanting to read and in trying to read everything by an author I love.  In that regard, 2017 was a wonderful year because Kazuo Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize in literature. I started reading him four years ago and in a few days will have read all of his novels and stories. The last book, The Unconsoled will be on next year’s list. All the links are to the author's page or a page about the author. I picked a book or two in each of the categories I sorted them into.  

The recommendations are brief. Each of those books I believe are worth reading for anyone interested in that kind of book. I wanted to write only enough to say, "This is great!" But the last review, the book I did not like, goes on for a thousand words. If you have not read the book, it will be dull since it refers to specific disagreements I had with the author's assertions, and I do not present his side of the argument.  Enjoy! Except the last one.

Poetry

My largest category this year by number of books was poetry at 13 books.  The best book in this category is, for me, the completely predictable choice of Inferno by Dante Alighieri.  This is my eighth time reading this first book of the Divine Comedy but the eighth different translator, this time the Lombardo translation.  It is good, but I still like the Pinsky translation best.  This time, because I was in a class studying Dante, I read aloud and listened to Roberto Benigni read all of the cantos. I never read the Italian before.  I recommend it, just for the sound.

After Dante, the next best was Nativity Poems by Joseph Brodsky. An émigré communist Jew writing on the theme of the incarnation was not just a one-time crazy idea, Brodsky returned to the theme of nativity throughout his career. A lovely collection.

The rest of the poetry list:
I also read Brodsky's Selected Poems and two other volumes titled Selected Poems by Vladimir Nabokov and Boris Pasternak.
Staying with Russians, I read Veronezh Notebooks by Osip Mandelstam and a collection titled Four of Us with poems by Mandelstam, Pasternak, Anna Akmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva.

The Bad-Tempered Man a comedy by Menander

How We Must Have Looked to the Stars by Alysia Nicole Harris

Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics by C.S. Lewis
Some Ether by Nick Flynn, which is a memoir in poems

Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver

In Flanders Field poems about World War I by several poets.

Fiction

The best of eleven works of fiction I read was Identity by Milan Kundera, or The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which I read a week later.  I had never read Kundera so seeing the world through the eyes of his obsessive, alienated characters was lovely.  These two books also represent two phases of his life. Unbearable Lightness was written when he lived in Prague in what is now the Czech Republic. Identity was written in Paris after he left the Eastern Bloc for the west. I was in Prague and Paris this summer so the two books helped bring back these two lovely cities in my mind. 

Also wonderful: Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak. If you only saw the movie, read the book. It is so beautifully told and the poetry in the novel was so good, I next read a volume of Pasternak’s poems.

In addition to Identity,  I read two other books originally written in French:
The Lover by Marguerite Duras
Femme Fatale by Guy de Maupassant
And two books in French
D'Artagnan by Alexandre Dumas, an abridged version for middle/high school
Il Etait Une Fois three Once Upon a Time stories
Two novels about the Vietnam War by Tim O'Brien:
If I Die in a Combat Zone
The Things They Carried

I read a funny book titled Greek and Roman Comedy by Shawn O'Bryhim

Another Russian novel The Day of the Oprichnik by Vladimir Sorokin, a book that is dark and funny and violent and so entertaining.

Finally How I Learned to Drive a play by Paula Vogel.  A strange and compelling play. I could not put it down.

Memoir

I read eight memoirs this year, but the one that spread into my soul and will not let go is Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi.  I read this book a couple of months before visiting Auschwitz and seven other concentration camps and Holocaust memorials. When a book conjures a nightmare, no two readers will have exactly the same terror.  In my case, the most vivid and painful of all the stories was the man who had earned the Iron Cross for gallantry under fire in World War I and thought his bravery proved his patriotism.  Even though he earned the equivalent of the American Congressional Medal of Honor, he was a Jew; he went to the gas chamber.  Since Trump’s election, I have had several people tell me that I have nothing to worry about because I am a veteran.  But the men who marched in Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us” would kill any Jew, veteran or not. 

I also read three memoirs by Nick Flynn.  The best was a short collection of poems called Some Ether. The other two by Flynn were Another Bullshit Night in Suck City and Reenactments a memoir about making a movie about the other memoir.  I listened to Flynn speak and met him after his reading.  He is about my age and grew up near where I grew up. It is funny he is a memoir writer.  His books and presence reminded me of being beaten up by Irish kids when I was in grade school. 

Gamelife by Michael Clune
The Folded Clock by Heidi Julavits
Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed
Why I am so Clever a funny little book by Friedrich Nietzsche
My Fellow Prisoners by Mikhail Khodorkovsky. This last one is a prison memoir in character sketches of fellow prisoners written by the first billionaire Putin jailed, way back in 2003. He got 10 years.

History

Six Days of War by Michael Oren topped the short list of four history books I read this year. It is the story of the stunning victory of Israel over Egypt, Jordan and Syria in that order. Israel was outnumbered 100 to 1 and beat three bordering Arab nations in sequence in roughly two days each.  The book shows how the blindness of arrogance can lead armies with overwhelming numbers in men and equipment to ignominious defeat.  If you wonder how a small army can defeat a huge one, this book shows every step in how Egypt took every advantage they possessed and threw it away. It also shows how reluctant allies can be almost as bad as enemies.  Syria especially held back in a way that assured the defeat of Egypt and Jordan. 

I began the year reading the book Band of Brothers by Stephen Ambrose. The book is the basis of the HBO series of the same name, which is my favorite video production on war. The book is good, but there is nothing better than the HBO series.
Lenin's Tomb by David Remnick. The last days of the Soviet Empire.
Histories by Herodotus, Book V partly in Greek, partly in English.

Politics

I was going to highlight On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder as my top politics book for 2017.  But I am going to re-read it in 2018 along with The Prince by Machiavelli.  Both books in their own way are handbooks on how politics really works. Machiavelli advises the prospective leader on how to take and keep power, Snyder tells the rest of us what to do when a tyrant is taking control. If Robert Mueller is fired in 2018, Snyder will be the top of my list next year, assuming ordinary citizens are allowed free use of the Internet. 

With Snyder pushed to next year, I will turn to American Vertigo, one of two books I read this year by Bernard-Henri Levy, French Philosopher who travels the most dangerous corners of the world writing and producing movies about cultures in conflict.  He has written about Libya, Syria and much of the Arab world with insight and empathy rare in any writer, but all the more in Jew born in the rubble of France after World War II.  In American Vertigo Levy reprises the journey of Alexis de Tocqueville took in 1831. Tocqueville planned to write about prisons in America, which he did, but then wrote arguably one of the top political works ever, one still quoted by Americans of every political affiliation.  Levy begins in Rikers and winds across our continent to Alcatraz and loops back through the South.  It really is a delightful view of America, by a visitor clearly delighted with America.

I read another book by Levy, which is the best book in my last category.

How to Cure a Fanatic by Amos Oz
Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit

Science

This year I read some of the best science books I have read in years, maybe ever! The Gene: An Intimate Story by Siddhartha Mukherjee wove together the entire history of the gene with Mukherjee’s family history and the cultures he inhabits.  Improbable Destinies by Jonathan Losos gave me the clearest explanation of the interaction between natural selection and chance. I also read Mating in Captivity by Esther Perel which is a social science or psychology book.

But by far the best was Sapiens by Yuval Noah Hariri.  The last time I was this delighted with a history of science book was Guns, Germs and Steel the Pulitzer Prize winning book by Jared Diamond.  Sapiens recounts the full history of the rise of Homo Sapiens from somewhere in Africa to literal world domination. The early bloodthirsty success of our species is fascinating.  Unlike other human species, we could cooperate in groups as large as 500 to trap and slaughter large species. We wiped out mastodons, saber-tooth tigers and many other large species across the globe and in a bit of multitasking, wiped out Neanderthals and every other humanoid species.  After explaining our proficiency in communication and killing, Hariri contends our hunter-gatherer life was much better than the lives most sapiens lived after the rise of agriculture 10,000 years ago. When agriculture arose, a few benefitted, but many had shorter, more brutal lives of servitude and disease.  From there he takes us right to the present with the rise of culture and shows why tribalism persists.  I am reading this book again next year.

Faith

My last category is Faith.  For someone like me with a believer’s turn of mind, every book has a faith dimension of some sort. The Divine Comedy is a poem, but is also a map of the Catholic view of the universe, physically and spiritually. Every memoir implies life has meaning and value and significance. 

The book explicitly on faith that moved me the most was The Genius of Judaism by Bernard-Henri Levy. This book looks at the history of the Jewish people and Israel through the lens of the Book of Jonah.  Levy shows us Judaism and his view of the Jewish world by his interactions with “Nineveh” in the form of modern-day enemies of Jews and Israel.  One modern Nineveh he visits is Lviv, Ukraine.  I knew my trip last summer was to visit Holocaust sites would center on Auschwitz, but this book led me to pair Lviv with Auschwitz as two sad extremes of the Holocaust.  Auschwitz is the most industrial site of slaughter, Lviv is the most personal.  At Auschwitz, the Nazis built a place of extermination. In Lviv they simply allowed the local population to act out their own anti-Semitism.  Lviv was the most personal of the sites of Holocaust slaughter.  Neighbors killed neighbors and dumped their bodies in ditches.  Levy went to Lviv to make peace with this site of unbridled hate.  He seems to have succeeded.  I did not.  Ukraine tried to kill my grandparents. Ukraine remains a cauldron of anti-Semitism. 

Overall, the book left me wondering about my identity as a Jew. The book helped me to decide that I could reconnect with the Jewish part of me in a positive and growing way, a process that began last spring and is still going on as the New Year begins. 

From the well of hope that Levy opened for me, I will now turn to the dry, barren waste of Rod Dreher’s book The Benedict Option.  

When you want to say the nation is going to Hell, you first need a villain. Then you need to say how that villain is going to ruin everyone’s lives. The central theme of The Benedict Option is Dreher predicting the end of Christian culture in America through gay rights and the gay agenda. Dreher is sure that Christian hegemony in America is over. The only option is to withdraw from life in corrupt America into intentional communities of those committed to real goodness. 

The first question I have is, ‘Why will the gay agenda ruin our nation after it flourished with a long history of slavery, Jim Crow and betrayal of Native Americans?’ Is a nation really blessed by slavery and genocide and cursed by gay marriage?

America perpetrated the worst slavery in the history of the world on Africans. They were kidnapped and brought here in chains to be slaves until death for generation after generation. America had slavery with no hope of buying oneself out or getting free. The center of that slavery was the New Orleans slave market.

Dreher grew up in Louisiana and returned there to withdraw from life in big cities.  He is in a state and a region with a horrible history of slavery, followed by 100 years of apartheid called Jim Crow. What could be worse than men who would buy and sell human beings, fight a war to keep their slaves, and then oppress their victims openly for a century after losing the war?

Every confederate battle flag represents unrepentant racism, slavery and murder.  And yet, Dreher says, it is gay rights that will kill Christian faith in a way that Pride, Murder, Rape and Greed could not. Dreher says at the end of the book historians will wonder how a 3% minority killed a great nation like ours.

If America can perpetuate slavery longer than every civilized nation, break uncountable treaties, slaughter Native-Americans, allow Jim Crow laws in the south for a century, and then put a racist sexual predator in the White House with the support of 81% of "Christian" America, can the Gay agenda really trump everything else we have done? Dreher has his enemy.

Dreher begins the book saying he was led to the idea of withdrawal from culture by thinking of his son’s future from the moment he was born.  The book has many instances of Dreher and other Christian parents making what he calls sacrifices for their children.  Dreher writes as if parenting were the central Christian ministry.  As a father of six, I would say parenting is one of the central delights and urges and vanities of the Human Condition.  Can any parent really say that spending their time and money toward the success of their children is a sacrifice?  Does working toward the success of my own children make me the equal of Mother Teresa caring for the poorest outcasts in a Calcutta gutter?  No, it doesn’t. My bright, successful, funny children are a delight, they are not a ministry.  And they in no way set me apart from the world.

I heard many idiots in focus groups and on the news say one proof that Trump was obviously a good guy because he is a good father whose children love him.  Saddam Hussein loved Uday and Qusay. The worst Roman emperors were the beloved, spoiled children of previous emperors.  Trump is, by his own words a racist who is willing to grab other people’s children by the pussy. Parenting does not excuse pandering.

Dreher should know well that nothing ties a person to the world like having children.  No actual Benedictine has kids.  The withdrawal from the world with kids that Dreher posits is not a new monastic movement, but a gated community with spiritual decorations on the iron fence. 

Compared to, say, Coptic Christians in Cairo and other believers facing danger and death, the Benedict Option like a military video game, allowing the out-of-shape, pale player to pretend he is a combat soldier while in the comfort of mom’s basement away from the blood and bullets of battle.

I would have called it the book the Benedict Fiction.

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A category I did not list was language. I don't expect these books to jump on anyone's 2018 list.

Language Learning

Между Нами a Russian textbook.
English Grammar for Students of Russian by Edwina Cruise (no relation to Tom Cruise)
Introduction to Greek by C.W. Shelmerdine

That's the Whole List! 

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