No comments about Theodore Dreiser: An American Journey.

No comments about With the Hammer of Truth: James Thomson Callender and America's Early National Heroes.

5 comments about Clerical Error: A True Story (Handbooks of Catholic Theology).

1. This book is well worth the read. In view of the fact that it was written prior to the breaking of the current scandal, it seems almost prophetic at times. When the author gives his scathing critique of celebacy, however, he assumed that the indescretions of the clergy involved adult men and women. Even Kaiser could not imagine the depth of horrific betrayal of trust in the abuse of children that so many clergy would be capable of.

   This book is a "must read" for anyone seriously interested in reform in the Roman Catholic Church. It so speaks of its systemic abuse and misuse of power.

   One more reason for RCs to get out of our pews and take back the church.




2. From The
   History of Vatican II by James Hitchcock:

   Time magazine, which was a much more influential journal then, than it is now, was represented at the Council by a reporter whose name was Robert Blair Kaiser. He had been at one time a Jesuit. He was not a priest but he had been a Jesuit, had studied for the priesthood, and was therefore somebody who knew something. He wasn't an ignorant man who had to learn it all from scratch; he was fairly sophisticated in religious matters. But Robert Blair Kaiser's reporting was very much along the same lines as that of Xavier Rynne, the good-guy liberals versus the bad-guy conservatives. Every day there was a shootout at the O.K. Corral over some issue or other. Fortunately most of the time the good-guy liberals managed to disarm the bad-guy conservatives. They shot the guns out of their hands. But unfortunately the bad-guy conservatives kept getting more guns, and so there would be another shootout maybe a week or two later.

   As it turned out in some of the autobiographical things which he later wrote, Kaiser had a very clear agenda from the very beginning. One major part of that agenda was birth control. He had been poking around in that area and making contact with certain theologians who were privately or secretly supportive of birth control before the Council. He had made contact with certain influential Belgian and Dutch theologians. When he went to the Council he understood that there was a liberal agenda, the modernist agenda as we've called it, and he was going to use his magazine, Time magazine, to push it. And he did so, and very effectively. Unfortunately the average American Catholic, and this includes most priests and most nuns, learned what the Council was all about more from Time magazine and The New Yorker than from any other source.

   There is a massive failure of education here on the part of the Church. One would assume that given an event like the Council that the hierarchy would have put into gear a massive educational project. They would have been lining up books, they would have been training teachers, they would have been announcing schools, workshops in every parish, whatever. And they would have insured the fact that what was presented to people as the authentic teaching of the Council really was the authentic teaching of the Council. To an amazing degree this task was neglected. There was, in fact, as far as I can see, practically no systematic effort to educate Catholics as to the meaning of the Council. They were left to discern its meaning in just about any way they could. And if they were reading the New Yorker they got it from Xavier Rynne, and if they were reading Time magazine they got it from Robert Blair Kaiser. Some variation on the views of those two men appeared in most of the secular press. So not only did there persist a good deal of confusion as to what the Council was all about, but there was even a completely skewed, even false notion of what it was all about. Victories that could not be won on the floor of the Council itself, victories that could not be ratified in the Conciliar decrees, were won after the Council in terms of what people thought the Council said as opposed to what it actually said. The obligation of obedience was used over and over again to get reluctant people to go along with the Council's changes, until such time as obedience had outlasted its usefulness and then the shift was to independence and freedom.




3. I just finished reading Clerical Error after making copious notes throughout.
   
   As a sedevacantist his book validates my position held by a growing group that the vatican ii council has produced untold damage to the faith of millions of souls.
   
   By recounting the idealogy of many liberals to attempt to change the unchanging doctrines of God's Church Kaiser has unwittingly pointed out that fruits of vatican ii and the new religion (novus ordo) has decimated the true faith throughout the world and brought the full impact of satan and his minions upon the soul of the Church.
   
   I also bought the book to validate some other sources concerning Malachy Martin. I admit being duped into buying Martin books especially during my novus ordo days as a "conservative". Now I will be trashing or burning any books that I still have of his.
   
   Martin, if he did not repent before his death, will be burning in Hell along with the last 3 antipopes and another Martin (Martin Luther).
   
   This book should bring to those Catholics of good faith still trapped in the novus ordo religion that the purpose of vatican ii was to CHANGE Jesus' teaching as well as impose a new religion.
   
   The Fruits of vatican ii are evident: widespread apostasy, priests shortages, homosexuals in the seminaries. The devil couldn't be more proud of his handiwork.
   
   There are two websites I would recommend to give a better understanding of the new religion and its antipopes:
   
   http://www.novusordowatch.org/archive.htm
   http://www.mostholyfamilymonastery.com/



4. Svengali, Rasputin, Martin. If what Mr. Kaiser says in this book is true, then it's too bad that Malachi (why does Kaiser spell it Malachy?) Martin died before INTERPOL, and whatever other law enforcement agencies should be interested, got to him.
   
   I'm not Catholic and I don't think the story in Mr. Kaiser's book is Vatican II at all. The story is about a master con-man and even a cult master of international proportions.
   
   Malachi Martin is connected so much like a spider to so many people and "things" that someone ought to do a really IN DEPTH rundown on the man. I live in a little, out-of-the-way midwestern state, I'm not Catholic, and even I know of people connected in a bizarre, almost cult-like way to Martin and perhaps a mysterious, grissly, unsolved murder or two.
   
   I don't think that Martin was incapable of it, assuming that what Mr. Kaiser says in this book is indeed "a true story."



5. I agree with the previous commentator---I could not put the book down. Tolle et lege.

No comments about Annenbergs.

1 comments about Tricks of Memory: An Autobiography.

1. A wonderful read, full of inciteful and pointed observation, many aspects of human nature commented on and recounted against the backdrop of the author's life experiences. So much of what is said can't be judged as 'new', in the sense that all we experience has been lived through by countless generations before, but what a full life against which to frame the conclusions and observations made. It's not common to judge an autobiography as a 'gripping page turner' but this is one such.

   Also an interesting historical document, dealing with key aspects of life at a time when the old empire was crumbling and vital questions were being asked of those in and around 'the establishment'.

   Highly recommended.

No comments about In the Country of the Enemy: The Civil War Reports of a Massachusetts Corporal (New Perspectives on the History of the South Series).

2 comments about Maiden Tribute: A Life of W.T. Stead.

1. This is a biography of one of the most important British journalists ever, a pioneer in social reform, a pioneer in the creation of paper news media, a truly fascinating man. Probably best known for his creation of the Review of Reviews, W. T. Stead made a singular mark in social reform -- letting himself be jailed to call attention to the trade of young girls in prostitution and to help raise the legal age of sexual consent for "maidens."
   
   He touched the lives of many beginning publishers and authors in the late nineteenth century, Grant Richards for one. He influenced the life and career of M. P. Shiel, that superb fantasist, in Shiel's early work and in his personal life in a manner that neither foresaw before Stead sank with the Titanic.
   
   Written by a certified scholar with a fine track record, twenty-four years of research in its making, this comprehensive fresh study of both Stead and his time benefits from a nice clear writing style. A handsome book, an important book, that deserves praise for Grace Eckley .. and a home in libraries, private collections, and above all -- readers!



2. This scholarly work, the culmination of 24 years' devoted study, is written with all the accuracy and gracefulness of a telephone book. What a shame, for a fascinating man with such an interesting life. It'd be nice if Eckley let him breathe.

5 comments about My Twice-Lived Life: A Memoir.

1. Some books are easy reads, some books are hard reads. What you get from a book is not necessarily a function of the difficulty of the read.

   Donald Murray gives you with his memoir an easy read, yet a rewarding feast. Counter to what he may think, his memoir is not about aging, it is about life.

   With people much younger than myself, I have read chapters of this book, and listened to chapters read to me. Treasure pieces about fear, hope, solitiude, and union with family and friends.




2. My Twice-Lived Life has long been in the making. Murray's first idea was to publish a collection of his Boston Globe columns that dealt with aging, the Depression, and World War II. His editor convinced him to look at the subject matter as a memoir, whole and of itself. Good idea.

   I've read most of Murray's Boston Globe columns. It is often amazing what he does with these 800 word personal essays. But the memoir gives him more room to explore and develop his subject matter.

   We're used to Murray writing about writing. There is a little of that woven throughout the chapters in My Twice-Lived Life. But writing isn't his primary topic here. He writes about the stuff of his life---his childhood, his parents, and World War II, in which he was a paratrooper.

   One chapter is titled "The Not-So-Good-Old School Days." I'll use this chapter with my students at Miami University who are studying to be English teachers. In direct opposition to those who deify some past golden time of schooling, Don recounts his own school days and deromantizes that myth. He speaks of teachers today, how they seek further learning in summer programs and professional development, and he writes about how he came to teaching writing.

   All those chapters were good reading, but the really courageous chapters are about aging. His wife, Minnie Mae, has had serious medical problems with Parkinson's, diabetes, and breast cancer. Don writes about these times of increasing care-taking clearly, compassionately, and unsentimentally.

   In "Fatherhood" he ends the chapter by focusing on the death of his 20 year old daughter of Reyes' Syndrome in the late 1970s. Many of us know bits of this story, because those bits have worked themselves into Don's textbooks and columns, but here we get the most complete rendering and sense-making of that story, including one poem he wrote of Lee's passing.

   In the last two chapters Don writes about the extended dying of a neighbor, what he learned as nurses and one doctor tended to her and touched her and helped her to let go. I wished I'd had this book to read two years ago during the time my mother slipped away gradually and inexorably.

   A friend of mine in Utah used to say of such writing, "That's it. Write about the tough stuff."

   Don Murray does that in My Twice-Lived Life. Reading it made me want to live life well, fully attuned to my senses, aware of the compassionate stories around me, learning how I might approach the coming years with courage and caring and humor.




3. I got to know Donald Murray's writing while living in Massachusetts in the mid-90s. Ever since, I've read his Boston Globe column online, and almost always forward it to people I know, from my teenage son to my father in his 80s. I keep hoping the columns will be collected in a book. In the meantime, there's this wonderful memoir. There is more wisdom in a Donald Murray column than in most of the rest of the paper put together, but it's not WISDOM, delivered from on high and meant to make you feel inadequate. He's had a mixed life - a ghastly childhood, wartime service, professional failure and success, profound grief, enduring friendships, a satisfying marriage - but the book is not just a collection of "and then I" passages. Murray conveys so well how the past is always present, how it can be seen more clearly from the distance that decades provide, and how old age is enriched by that clarity, even as one deals with the inevitable losses and physical decline. His style is conversational-seeming, but without the extraneous matter true conversation always has. The passages about being bullied in boyhood are heartbreaking because there is no anger in his account. He doesn't need to express it; the reader will be furious on his behalf. Murray is a teacher of writing, and as a writer, I find his books on the subject are well worth reading (wish I could have studied with him). Readers will learn a great deal about good writing from "My Twice-Lived Life," as well as a great deal about living.



4. Look out Mitch.....you and Tuesdays with Maury are about to be replaced. Dr. Murray delivers his book even better than he did in the classroom. As a former student of his....this book made me laugh....brought a tear to my ear and a lump to my throat. First he taught me to write. Now he teaches me about life as we all face growing older. Thank you for a great read!!



5. After reading Tuesdays With Morrie by Mitch Albom, I found myself wanting more of the same type of novel and with that I stumbled upon My Twice-Lived Life. Being in my mid-40's, my mind set has started to wander about what lies ahead. Mr. Murray has done a tremendous job capturing not only his life but thought process. It's very easy to read, as the sub title chapter are carefully arranged. His sense of humor is comforting as he puts everything into proper prospective. Anyone looking for answers about aging should read this masterpiece. I loved every page and know I'll reread this treasured novel again and again. I can't wait to give it to my mother-in-law to read.

3 comments about Move On.

1. Linda Ellerbee goes on and shows us more of her life. We learn of her friends, her life, and how these shaped her into the woman we've enjoyed for years on Overnight and telling us the real story where others just tell us what they want us to know.



2. This is nothing less than a work of genius, a beautiful story which is beautifully told. The thrilling exploits of this legendary giant of journalism are sure to enthrall everyone who reads about them. No other person, living or dead, could possibly have a more interesting story to tell, or be able to tell it in a more interesting way. Ms. Ellerbee is simply amazing, and her great talent continues to manifest itself on her wonderful news program which airs on Nickelodeon once per week, but which should be shown at least twice each day. Forget about Murrow, Cronkite, and all the rest - Ellerbee is the greatest!



3. Not as completely entertaining as Ellerbee's prior book "And So it Goes," which focused on her career in broadcast journalism, this follow-up is a collection of unrelated tales from her life - each opening a window onto a different phase of it. I prefered Ellerbee's first (and funnier) book, but two tales from this volume are brilliant enough to give it a ratings bump.

   Ellerbee's story of overcoming alcoholism at the Betty Ford Center is as real and honest as memoirs get. Entering the program with a witty cynicism (masking fragile fear), Ellerbee eventually surrenders to the therapeutic environment and is ultimately softened by it. It's just the kind of story you'd expect from an intelligent satirist who (at first) feels she's above the 12-stepping and soul searching, but finally recognizes it as the only way to heal and become whole.

   My favorite chapter, though, is the smart and funny tale of young Linda's first summer job, "We Reserve the Right to Refuse Service to You." Linda spends her summer working at a resort owned by a friend of her father. After several weeks of mingling with the other young workers - one of whom is a radical looking to unionize - Linda learns valuable life lessons and eventually "sticks it to the man," her boss. In the end, the tale (and the title) becomes a metaphor for prejudice and stereotyping. This story alone is worth the cost of the book. Buy "Move On," read this chapter, then make photocopies of the chapter for your friends... it's the kind of thing you'll want to share.

No comments about Hemingway's Italy: New Perspectives.