Books

Two new and very different purchases arrived in the mail today.

The first was the book, “The Sources of Catholic Dogma” by Denzinger. This is a classic resource of theology, so classic in fact that Vatican documents, including papal encyclicals reference it as a source and have done so for 150 years. It is also known by its Latin name, the “Enchiridion Symbolorum”. The book catalogs all the creeds and articles of the Catholic faith and every dogmatic definition, every magisterial decree, every papal bull, every major pronouncement of the Vatican up to 1957 when this particular edition was issued.

This is an indispensable work of theology, which should sit on the shelf next to the Bible and the Catechism. Which is why it surprises me it took so long to get one, although I do have other less authoritative, but no less valuable compendiums of Catholic doctrine, such as Ludwig Ott’s tome. So when I saw a tweet from Aquinas and More recently about having the book at a reasonable price, I decided it was time to complete my theological library.

The other purchase couldn’t be more different. It’s the Gorillapod Mobile by Joby. Joby makes a kind of articulated, grippy tripod of all shapes and sizes that attach to just about anything. The legs are made up of a series of connected spheres, each with an equator of a rubber-like grippy material. This combination allows you to place the Gorillapod in every conceivable place. Not only can you just stand it on a table, you can wrap the legs around anything whose diameter isn’t larger than the length of the legs.

This particular verison comes with an iPhone case, a screw mount for a camera (although only a point and shoot is small enough not to tip over this model), and a couple of adhesive backs for other random items. I plan to use it on my desk as an iPhone stand, but also in the summer to attach to the handle of my lawnmower as well as the baby stroller. I think I may also use it when I donate blood platelets to watch movies on my iPhone. Right now my free arm gets mighty tired holding the phone up the whole time.

The Gorillapod is very versatile and I look forward to finding many uses for it.

There you go. An eclectic duo of items whose only connection is that they both arrived at my house today.

It’s no secret I’m not a fan of President Barack Obama, his policies, or his ideology. From the campaign through Election Day to Inauguration Day and through his first year in office I’ve predicted that his administration would be a disaster for the US. I’ve also long held that despite his vaunted claims of “a new day” in politics and Hope and Change sweeping through Washington, DC, what we’d see is the same, old Democrat cronyism and liberal “gimme, gotcha” politics.

And, as sure as the rain, that’s what we got. In Culture of Corruption, Michell Malkin lays out the facts on the corruption rampant in Team Obama, among his friends and cronies in both Washington and Chicago, and even including the First Lady and his Vice President.

This isn’t 300-pages of ranting and raving, full of hatred and plain ol’ partisan dislike for the president of another party. Instead, Malkin takes us through the list of Obama cronies, all his appointees (including the record number of failed appointees), the fundraisers, the hangers-on, the cozy politicians, and the special interest groups that have his ear. Malkin has meticulously researched her subject: 300 pages of text are followed by more than 70 pages of endnotes, documenting each fact.

It’s the sheer enormity of the list of corruption and ethical failings that make Malkin’s point. Anyone one (or a few) of these instances would be unfortunate, but by the time I was halfway done with the book I couldn’t believe how much of it there was and how much of this the media had turned a blind eye to. And as I said, it’s not just partisan raving. Republicans come in for a fair share of criticism, including those who are not on the Obama team. But it’s Obama’s circle that bears the most scrutiny.

Not every item listed is a potential crime, far from it. Many could be just marked up to imprudence or even just the way business is done in Washington. But that’s just it: Malkin shows clearly through direct quotes how Obama promised the exact opposite while running for the office. He promised the most ethical administration in history. Instead, it may be the most ethically challenged. The sheer mass of page after page of insider dealing lobbyists buying influence, politicians getting sweetheart deals for buddies at taxpayer expense. It’s the worst kind of politics.  I just wish more people read books like these. I wish we could have read it before the election.

But read it now and be informed and tell your friends and family. Maybe in 2010 we can reduce this party’s stranglehold on DC, curbing their lust for power, and in 2012 we can put someone else in office who really will have the most ethical administration in history. We can always hope.

Sarah Palin’s new book, “Going Rogue: An American Life” is launching this week to a big splash with visits to Oprah and Barbara Walters. In fact, I can’t remember any political autobiographies creating such advance hoopla. Like her or not, Sarah Palin has really leapt into the American consciousness.

(I haven’t decided whether Palin would make a good president or not, but I’m going keep an open mind, read her book, and consider who else jumps into the race for 2012.)

Anyway, since Palin’s a conservative pro-life woman who commits the cardinal sin of being attractive as well, the Left must destroy her. Predictably the Associated Press offer a fact check of the book and its claims. A fact check, mind you, that required 11 reporters to come up with six claims of inaccuracy.

Yet even six is an exaggeration. Jamaes Taranto of the Wall Street Journal says two of the alleged “errors” aren’t even errors and the third is just opinion. While Palin says in her book that she didn’t “often” stay in pricey hotels as governor, the AP team finds one expensive hotel she stayed in. She didn’t claim that she never stayed in an expensive hotel.

Palin also says she was a victims’ advocate in the decades-long Exxon Valdez trial and that she was happy the final appellate rulings went in favor of the people. But the AP says she was unhappy that the punitive damages against Exxon were reduced and that it took so long for the lawsuit to be resolved. Those are not contradictory claims. The AP is the one that is wrong here.

Finally, Palin says that it’s not ambition, but altruism that led her to run for political office and then leave the Alaska governorship early, while the AP claims that “Going Rogue” has the earmarks of the typical pre-campaign manifesto of a politician preparing for a run for president. That may eventually turn out to be the case, but the AP can’t claim it as a “fact” and an “error” for Palin to claim otherwise unless they have evidence that she’s said otherwise or that they can read her mind.

When it comes to the Associated Press’s “FACT CHECKs”, the reality is that they’re less about facts than they are about the further erosion of journalistic objectivity and integrity by much of the mainstream media. To wit: Where is the honest and objective “FACT CHECK” on Obama’s autobiography?

Dear Abby:

I love my wife. I really do. And one of the reasons I married her was that, in addition to being gorgeous and Catholic and open to life, she loves books. Even more than I do. And that’s a lot.

Not only does she love books, but we love the same kind of books in many cases. She likes science fiction and fantasy! Am I lucky or what?

Unfortunately, Abby, that’s where there’s a little trouble in paradise. You see, my wife, “M”, loves books so much that she devours them whole. She goes through 400-page novels in a sitting and she’s often reading three or four books at a time. Not all at once, mind you, like a female, latter-day St. Thomas Aquinas, but they’ll be scattered about the house or in the diaper bag, ready for the picking when the mood strikes. Again, this isn’t so bad in itself: She gets many books at the library or through Bookmooch, so the cost isn’t really an issue.

No, the problem is that … she reads my books while I’m still reading them! For example, say I’ve got the latest book in a multi-volume series that we both enjoy very much. Let’s pick one out of the air, like say, S.M. Stirling’s “The Sword of the Lady”. Let’s further say that the book, fifth in the series, was just released after months of anticipation following the devouring of the previous installment last year or a century ago, it seems. Now, “M” is already currently reading one non-fiction book on the art and science of keeping house and another book, a novel, for a book club she’s in, so she couldn’t start this novel that just arrived. Which was just fine with me, because I was ready for a new book to read.

However, I am not a devourer of books like she is. I savor the novel, creating an image in my mind of what the author describes, hearing the voices of the characters. I take my time with it, especially knowing it will be a long drought until the next novel in the series arrives. This drove my wife nuts. She saw the book laying about while I watched TV or puttered around the house, until finally I started seeing the book seemingly moving of its own accord, from the living room to the bedroom to the kitchen.

A mysterious second bookmark has now sprouted in the novel, stalking my bookmark through the pages of the book. Just today, the inexorable plodding of the tiny card—some defunct doctor’s appointment reminder, I think—overtook my own bookmark—a “repeat customer” card from a local Chinese restaurant with only one stamp on it.

Now “M” has become brazen about her usurpation of my reading material. I would ask if she’s seen my novel and she pulls it from beside her in her chair where she’s nursing our child. I even saw her with it laying upon her lap as I came home from work, unexpectedly early! Oh, how a man can be cuckolded by a stack of paper bound in cardboard.

Abby, I implore you. For the sake of my marriage and my sanity (… and my reading pleasure): What can I do about a wife who has no respect for my books?

Signed,
Bereft of Books in Boston

I just finished reading a new science-fiction novel by Warren Fahy called “Fragment”. They can it an eco-thriller and it’s about an isolated island in the South Pacific, thousands of miles from the closest land that has been biologically isolated from the rest of the planet for 500 million years. Thus evolution has proceeded along a very different path, one that has resulted in an ecosystem so deadly and invasive that even one creature from it could result in devastation for every other organism on the planet. Of course, some folks stumble upon this island and the rollicking ride ensues.

By the third page of this book I had a pretty good idea of how it would end. Oh, not the details, mind you, but the overall arc mainly because it follows the predictable path trod before it by Michael Crichton’s “Jurassic Park”, the “King Kong” movies, and even Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Lost World.” In fact, “Fragment” falls squarely in the family line of novels that arose after the era of the Victorian Enlightenment, in which Man thought he had had conquered nature and was now its master. Inevitably, novels like Doyle’s rejected that hubris to show that however much Man thinks he’s in charge, Nature always triumphs. Or if it doesn’t, maybe it should.

Such thinking is even more fashionable today among those who warn of humanity's dire effects on the environment, and so Fahy takes up that banner. He does so very well with an entertaining and fast-paced read that includes one big twist and lots of scientific talk. (I’m not expert enough to know whether the science is accurate, but I can say it’s not so convoluted that a layman can’t follow. Or you can skip it and still enjoy the story.)

And yet, it’s still the Nature Triumphs over Man formula. You have the deadly but shadowy reveal of the “monster,” the disastrous first encounter by our hero, the retreat and then plucky advance, the dupe who blusters and is then lost, the villain who hopes to exploit Nature and his inevitable gruesome yet poetic demise, the heroic ending. If you’ve seen Spielberg’s movie, you can track the plot points even as the details change.

That isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy the story. It’s a pageturner as you follow along the hero’s progress and wait to see what new creation emerges from his fertile imagination. If you expect a popcorn-cinema experience, a good beach novel, then you’ll be satisfied. But don’t expect any innovation of the genre as it plays out strictly by the numbers.

A couple of additional points: The novel’s protagonists are not religious. They are scientists with a penchant for seeing religion as an anthropological construct or superstition. And the one or two religious minor characters in the book are just that: superstitious and hostile to science. It’s not fatal to enjoyment of the book, but it would have been interesting to see how a faith-filled scientist—one who sees science as an aid to his faith and vice versa—would have approached this island.

And as you might expect, the character development is somewhat lacking. Most everyone plays to the stereotype: The TV producer who cares only about ratings, not one whit for the human beings she lives with, the conniving mustache-twirling villain, the blockhead soldier, the oblivious scientist who lets his fascination lead to his death, and so on. Not to mention the Skipper, Gilligan, and Marianne. (I’m only half-joking.)

You won’t read this for a discussion of the philosophy of science or a good debate over man’s place in the universe. You will read it for the fast-paced action scenes and the fascinating flora and fauna of Henders Island.