From Vietnam to fantasy/adventure--it's a logical reading move, especially in chaotic times like these. When it seems that the news gets worse at every turn, it is refreshing to have the ability at last to delineate between the good guys and the bad, and to see those bad guys get a little taste of karma. And when I look over the last month or two of this blog, I see that heavy subjects have predominated, so it was probably inevitable I'd need a little vacation into fun reads.
Across the Nightingale Floor: Tales of the Otori by Lian Hearn
Across the Nightingale Floor is the first of a series of novels about the Otori, one of several warring dynasties in a land that resembles the ancient Japan of the Samurai. Takeo is a young survivor of a vicious attack on his rural village by the warlord Iida who has been persecuting the Hidden, a spiritual people whose main tenets promote peace and the ultimate value of life. Takeo is rescued by the mysterious Lord Shigeru, who convinces him that to survive he must renounce the ways of the Hidden. Takeo becomes Shigeru's ward and learns the ways of the Otori, but along the way, he also discovers the truth of his own origins. Though raised by a peace loving clan, Takeo is, in fact, the son of a famed assassin and a member of the Tribe. The Tribe is an ancient people who possess skills that far surpass those of ordinary humans.
Takeo and Shigeru's adventures lead them towards a clash with their old enemy, Iida, and Takeo's destiny begins to take shape. Unfortunately for him, it takes a shape he does not necessarily desire. Reminiscent of the Chinese films Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero, yet set in a Japan-like land, Across the Nightingale Floor is a beautifully told adventure tale. Though there are plenty of fight scenes, and danger and intrigue fill its pages, there are also lovely, dreamlike passages that make it a pleasure to read. I will certainly continue following the adventures of Takeo through the next three of books of the series. But first, I must read the prequel, Heaven's Net is Wide, which gives readers the back story for Lord Shigeru and his people, the Otori.
The City of Dreaming Books by Walter Moers
Anyone who is a book lover and a fan of Douglas Adams will have fun with The City of Dreaming Books. Okay, anyone who loves books and words and writing and wonderfully goofy drawings will have fun with it. The City of Dreaming Books is wacky and unbelievable and easily one of the most creative novels I've read in a long time. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it and was completely entertained from beginning to end. It is, simply, a great yarn.
On his deathbed, Optimus Yarnspinner's authorial godfather, Dancelot, tells Optimus that years earlier a young author sent him a manuscript for feedback and advice. To his shock, Dancelot found this manuscript so perfect, so inspired, so original, he had no doubt it was the most magnificent story ever written. Dancelot advised the young author to take his manuscript to the vast literary metropolis of Bookholm because surely there he would find a publisher worthy of this important work. For the rest of his life, Dancelot told Optimus, he regretted this advice, for he never heard from the author again. His dying wish was for Optimus to set out for Bookholm and to find the mysterious author of the manuscript.
The innocent Optimus sets out to do as his godfather has requested, and almost immediately becomes embroiled in an adventure he is certainly not prepared for. Bookholm is a mecca for book lovers and writers throughout the land of Zamonia. Its economy, culture, food, art, and architecture are all utterly devoted to and dependent upon the book trade. Even its air has that lovely odor of well loved, old library books and book dust. In this wonderland of all things literary, even the smallest elements of life are book-related. The pastries are shaped like tiny books which, when poked with a fork, ooze jelly in the shape of a bookmark. But, underlying Bookholm's remarkable surface lies a dark side that ensnares the naive Optimus and threatens not only his mission, but his very life.
There is no way I can do justice to this wonderful fantasy tale here, and I honestly don't want to reveal much more than I already have. I'll only say that this novel is loaded with great humor, unforgettable characters, and more tight spots for its adventurous protagonist than you can imagine. It was impossible to even guess what would happen next. And the illustrations! Walter Moers is a well known German cartoonist who has filled his novel with charming illustrations that enrich an already enthralling story--I found myself wishing there were even more of them. The book jacket compares Moers with Douglas Adams, Shel Silverstein, Monty Python, and J.K. Rowling, and I can see why those names would crop up when trying to nail down exactly what kind of writer Moers is, but in the end, I think there is no comparison that really nails it. The City of Dreaming Books is a singular tale written by a singular writer with an imagination that just won't quit. I can't wait to see what his other books are like.
Saturday, November 29, 2008
Monday, November 24, 2008
Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson
Disclaimer: When I started this blog, my goal was to focus only on books I enjoy because my purpose is to offer a service to readers who are looking for good books to read. This post will be different--because I am about to completely pan this novel--but I think it is in the best interests of readers to steer them away from spending as many hours of their lives reading this tome as I did.
Why did I read it then? Tree of Smoke definitely did not pass the Nancy Pearl 50 pages test, the philosophy that a book is not worth my time if it has not grabbed me by page 50. However, this is a book club selection, and with it comes an obligation to read the book. I stick it out for book club books out of loyalty for my book club friends, but also because (1) I need evidence to support my opinion that a book was not a good one, and (2) if, by chance, the other participants did like the book, then I'll know enough about the book to allow them to try to sway my opinion.
So...here goes. Tree of Smoke takes place during the Vietnam War and, as far as I can tell from its 614 pages, Denis Johnson's chief thematic concerns in the novel involve the blurring of reality experienced by soldiers in war, their loss of conscience, and the inability of some of the participants and witnesses of the horrors of war to recover the selves they once were. These themes are important and valid concerns of a war novel, there is no doubt about that. The problem with this particular novel is that the plot is so convoluted, so non-linear, that it is extremely difficult for a reader to become immersed enough to really care about these themes. It took a lot of heavy thinking on my part to even make a statement as to what the book's themes were.
My problem with Tree of Smoke is not its non-linear structure--plenty of novelists successfully employ such a structure, Milan Kundera's Immortality comes to mind--my problem with this novel is that there is no central core of meaning on which the choppy style of the novel rests. There is nothing holding it together. The "tree of smoke" that provides Johnson his title is code for a counter-intelligence mission concocted by a rogue CIA officer, and even the operatives conducting the tree of smoke don't understand it. I'll allow that perhaps my own failure to understand the tree of smoke mission points to a readerly weakness on my part, but last time I checked, a writer's responsibility is to clear issues like this up for readers--particularly if it involves the central issue of the novel.
Sometimes a novel with a questionable plot structure can be saved by its characters, but, again, Tree of Smoke falls short. There are many characters in this novel, and though four or five appear to be the central cohort of "main" characters, Johnson spends an inordinate amount of time on minor characters, too, so that the reader loses track of who is crucial to the plot and who isn't. For example, early in the novel, CIA agent Skip Sands--who appears to be the protagonist--is sent to a rural village in the Philippines to check out a priest who has "gone native" and who appears to be running guns. Well and good, it's a device that sets up some parts of the plot later, but Johnson spends almost 30 pages in the delusional life of this Father Carignan, only to kill him off and never mention him again. The happens over and over again in the novel. The reader invests time in trying to place these minor characters in the convoluted plot because Johnson has spent pages and pages developing them, and then they disappear completely from the novel or appear again only briefly.
The five key characters in Tree of Smoke are Skip Sands; his uncle, the Colonel; Kathy Jones, a Canadian missionary and nurse; and brothers Bill and James Houston. Skip, the Colonel, and Kathy are inter-connected enough that their stories, which are often vague, help carry the plot, but the Houston brothers might as well populate their own, separate novel. Their story is so tenuously related to the others' that all the pages related to the Houstons could be excised from the novel with no damage done to any other part of the story. Perhaps it is telling that many of the reviewers of the novel, who were surprisingly positive in their reviews, specifically pointed to the Houston brothers as the most compelling characters in the novel, even though Skip Sands is presumably the protagonist.
I have to disagree with reviewers who found the Houston brothers compelling. In fact, none of the characters are particularly likable, and while that's not a prerequisite for a good novel, I found none of them compelling either, which is a prerequisite. Compelling characters evolve in some manner throughout the novel. Sometimes they even de-volve, depending upon the point of the story, but there is some change in them that provokes the reader's interest in seeing what will happen to them, whether the reader likes them or not. Compelling characters reveal their psychology as they are developed throughout a novel. As I read Tree of Smoke, I saw glimpses of what Johnson's goals with the characters' inner lives and evolution might be, but they never came to fruition.
I found this novel so frustrating that I stopped midway through and searched out reviews of the novel in national publications, something I normally avoid until after I have finished a book. I needed some confirmation of my opinions...was I nuts to so dislike a book that appeared so well thought of? Was I missing something here? After all, Tree of Smoke won the National Book Award in 2007, so there is clearly something to this novel. All of the reviews I read, except for one, were highly positive--so maybe it is just me--but I found some of the comments in the reviews telling (italics are mine):
"This is a novel drunk on the power of language, which is a critic’s way of saying that it’s self-indulgent, madly so. Johnson turns the throttle all the way up, churning through his plot with abandon and enjoying himself way too much to care about who or what gets left behind." Chris Barsanti
"Ethics of literary criticism aside, the real triumph of Tree of Smoke is simply that Johnson manages to comment in a new way on a subject that, by 2007, had been done to death. Who knew that we needed another story about the Vietnam War? Denis Johnson, apparently." Biblioklept
"There may be no smoke without fire but in this case you can't see the wood for the tree of smoke, or something....People and events loom out of the dense narrative foliage and then disappear. The writing can appear humdrum. Stuck in a quagmire of incantatory banality, the dialogue seems to be contributing nothing except its own capacity to keep on coming. But . . .
"Whatever else might be said about my talents as a reader, my ability to quit is undisputed. I can give up on any book - and I never for a moment considered abandoning this one, even when it seemed to be going nowhere. Even though the story had disappeared like a path overrun by vegetation, the novel retained its uniquely slippery kind of traction....
"Johnson is all over the place and he is an artist of strange diligence. It is as if his skewed relationship to the sentence - not really knowing what one is and yet knowing exactly what to do with it - operates, here, at the level of structure. Tree of Smoke is as excessive and messy as Moby Dick. Anything further removed from the tucked-up, hospital corners school of British fiction is hard to imagine. It's a big, dirty, unmade bed of a book and, once you settle in you're in no hurry to get out." Geof Dyer
These are the kinds of comments made in reviews of Tree of Smoke...and these reviewers are praising it. It's baffling to me, frankly. Maybe this kind of novel is something to celebrate when an established, hermit-like writer who has won past accolades comes out of seclusion to write a grandiose book about the Vietnam War, but I can't imagine a debut novel of this style from an unknown writer ever making its way off the slush pile on an over worked editor's desk.
Why did I read it then? Tree of Smoke definitely did not pass the Nancy Pearl 50 pages test, the philosophy that a book is not worth my time if it has not grabbed me by page 50. However, this is a book club selection, and with it comes an obligation to read the book. I stick it out for book club books out of loyalty for my book club friends, but also because (1) I need evidence to support my opinion that a book was not a good one, and (2) if, by chance, the other participants did like the book, then I'll know enough about the book to allow them to try to sway my opinion.
So...here goes. Tree of Smoke takes place during the Vietnam War and, as far as I can tell from its 614 pages, Denis Johnson's chief thematic concerns in the novel involve the blurring of reality experienced by soldiers in war, their loss of conscience, and the inability of some of the participants and witnesses of the horrors of war to recover the selves they once were. These themes are important and valid concerns of a war novel, there is no doubt about that. The problem with this particular novel is that the plot is so convoluted, so non-linear, that it is extremely difficult for a reader to become immersed enough to really care about these themes. It took a lot of heavy thinking on my part to even make a statement as to what the book's themes were.
My problem with Tree of Smoke is not its non-linear structure--plenty of novelists successfully employ such a structure, Milan Kundera's Immortality comes to mind--my problem with this novel is that there is no central core of meaning on which the choppy style of the novel rests. There is nothing holding it together. The "tree of smoke" that provides Johnson his title is code for a counter-intelligence mission concocted by a rogue CIA officer, and even the operatives conducting the tree of smoke don't understand it. I'll allow that perhaps my own failure to understand the tree of smoke mission points to a readerly weakness on my part, but last time I checked, a writer's responsibility is to clear issues like this up for readers--particularly if it involves the central issue of the novel.
Sometimes a novel with a questionable plot structure can be saved by its characters, but, again, Tree of Smoke falls short. There are many characters in this novel, and though four or five appear to be the central cohort of "main" characters, Johnson spends an inordinate amount of time on minor characters, too, so that the reader loses track of who is crucial to the plot and who isn't. For example, early in the novel, CIA agent Skip Sands--who appears to be the protagonist--is sent to a rural village in the Philippines to check out a priest who has "gone native" and who appears to be running guns. Well and good, it's a device that sets up some parts of the plot later, but Johnson spends almost 30 pages in the delusional life of this Father Carignan, only to kill him off and never mention him again. The happens over and over again in the novel. The reader invests time in trying to place these minor characters in the convoluted plot because Johnson has spent pages and pages developing them, and then they disappear completely from the novel or appear again only briefly.
The five key characters in Tree of Smoke are Skip Sands; his uncle, the Colonel; Kathy Jones, a Canadian missionary and nurse; and brothers Bill and James Houston. Skip, the Colonel, and Kathy are inter-connected enough that their stories, which are often vague, help carry the plot, but the Houston brothers might as well populate their own, separate novel. Their story is so tenuously related to the others' that all the pages related to the Houstons could be excised from the novel with no damage done to any other part of the story. Perhaps it is telling that many of the reviewers of the novel, who were surprisingly positive in their reviews, specifically pointed to the Houston brothers as the most compelling characters in the novel, even though Skip Sands is presumably the protagonist.
I have to disagree with reviewers who found the Houston brothers compelling. In fact, none of the characters are particularly likable, and while that's not a prerequisite for a good novel, I found none of them compelling either, which is a prerequisite. Compelling characters evolve in some manner throughout the novel. Sometimes they even de-volve, depending upon the point of the story, but there is some change in them that provokes the reader's interest in seeing what will happen to them, whether the reader likes them or not. Compelling characters reveal their psychology as they are developed throughout a novel. As I read Tree of Smoke, I saw glimpses of what Johnson's goals with the characters' inner lives and evolution might be, but they never came to fruition.
I found this novel so frustrating that I stopped midway through and searched out reviews of the novel in national publications, something I normally avoid until after I have finished a book. I needed some confirmation of my opinions...was I nuts to so dislike a book that appeared so well thought of? Was I missing something here? After all, Tree of Smoke won the National Book Award in 2007, so there is clearly something to this novel. All of the reviews I read, except for one, were highly positive--so maybe it is just me--but I found some of the comments in the reviews telling (italics are mine):
"This is a novel drunk on the power of language, which is a critic’s way of saying that it’s self-indulgent, madly so. Johnson turns the throttle all the way up, churning through his plot with abandon and enjoying himself way too much to care about who or what gets left behind." Chris Barsanti
"Ethics of literary criticism aside, the real triumph of Tree of Smoke is simply that Johnson manages to comment in a new way on a subject that, by 2007, had been done to death. Who knew that we needed another story about the Vietnam War? Denis Johnson, apparently." Biblioklept
"There may be no smoke without fire but in this case you can't see the wood for the tree of smoke, or something....People and events loom out of the dense narrative foliage and then disappear. The writing can appear humdrum. Stuck in a quagmire of incantatory banality, the dialogue seems to be contributing nothing except its own capacity to keep on coming. But . . .
"Whatever else might be said about my talents as a reader, my ability to quit is undisputed. I can give up on any book - and I never for a moment considered abandoning this one, even when it seemed to be going nowhere. Even though the story had disappeared like a path overrun by vegetation, the novel retained its uniquely slippery kind of traction....
"Johnson is all over the place and he is an artist of strange diligence. It is as if his skewed relationship to the sentence - not really knowing what one is and yet knowing exactly what to do with it - operates, here, at the level of structure. Tree of Smoke is as excessive and messy as Moby Dick. Anything further removed from the tucked-up, hospital corners school of British fiction is hard to imagine. It's a big, dirty, unmade bed of a book and, once you settle in you're in no hurry to get out." Geof Dyer
These are the kinds of comments made in reviews of Tree of Smoke...and these reviewers are praising it. It's baffling to me, frankly. Maybe this kind of novel is something to celebrate when an established, hermit-like writer who has won past accolades comes out of seclusion to write a grandiose book about the Vietnam War, but I can't imagine a debut novel of this style from an unknown writer ever making its way off the slush pile on an over worked editor's desk.
Monday, November 17, 2008
The Ghost at the Table by Suzanne Berne
Here's a surprise just in time for Thanksgiving: a novel about family dysfunction! When I picked up The Ghost at the Table, I thought I'd give it a try despite the general over abundance of family dysfunction literature, especially when it concerns the holidays. What got me over my initial reluctance to read it is that the protagonist, Cynthia Fiske, is a writer who has been enticed to fly home to her sister's house for Thanksgiving because of its proximity to Hartford, Connecticut, where she must travel to research her latest book on Mark Twain's daughters. I'm always a sucker for novels about writers.
Cynthia and her sister Frances are "close" as long as they maintain a long distance kinship. Cynthia has lived on the West Coast for years and rarely returns to Connecticut to see family, though Frances annually invites her to spend the holidays in her bucolic New England home. Frances's storybook life makes the more free wheeling Cynthia feel claustrophobic, while Frances finds Cynthia's single life of career and friends lacking in depth. This year, despite her strong inclinations to resist, Cynthia is manipulated into returning home for the holidays because of the unexpected re-entry into Frances's life of their estranged father, who has just suffered a stroke during divorce proceedings from his young wife.
This basic outline of the plot does little to push this novel out of the "oh, no, here's another book on bad family relationships" category, but fortunately Berne adds a few twists to make her novel an interesting and refreshingly different take on an old theme. There is a mystery at the heart of this family's dysfunction: what really happened on the night of their invalid mother's death 25 years before, and why did their father marry a relative stranger suddenly afterwards? Another prominent element of the novel is the research Cynthia does for her children's books on the unknown siblings of famous historical figures. Cynthia's current book, on Mark Twain's daughters, has many parallels in it to the relationships among her own family members.
All families have a collective memory that is screened through each person's own perspective on the past, but these two sisters have drastically different memories not only of their mother and the circumstances of her death, but on almost every other element of their shared childhood as well. Frances seems almost obsessively determined to sugarcoat everything, and Cynthia seems just as compulsive about refusing to see their past as anything but traumatic. Whose version of the past is the correct one? Which side is the reader going to choose as the more trustworthy?
It didn't take long for me to get wrapped up in this novel. Berne successfully takes a situation that could be the same old tale of Thanksgiving gone awry and turns it into something new and intriguing. As Margot Livesey puts it, "...Berne creates characters and situations which are simultaneously deeply familiar and wonderfully strange. The result is a remarkably suspenseful novel, beautifully written and psychologically acute."
Cynthia and her sister Frances are "close" as long as they maintain a long distance kinship. Cynthia has lived on the West Coast for years and rarely returns to Connecticut to see family, though Frances annually invites her to spend the holidays in her bucolic New England home. Frances's storybook life makes the more free wheeling Cynthia feel claustrophobic, while Frances finds Cynthia's single life of career and friends lacking in depth. This year, despite her strong inclinations to resist, Cynthia is manipulated into returning home for the holidays because of the unexpected re-entry into Frances's life of their estranged father, who has just suffered a stroke during divorce proceedings from his young wife.
This basic outline of the plot does little to push this novel out of the "oh, no, here's another book on bad family relationships" category, but fortunately Berne adds a few twists to make her novel an interesting and refreshingly different take on an old theme. There is a mystery at the heart of this family's dysfunction: what really happened on the night of their invalid mother's death 25 years before, and why did their father marry a relative stranger suddenly afterwards? Another prominent element of the novel is the research Cynthia does for her children's books on the unknown siblings of famous historical figures. Cynthia's current book, on Mark Twain's daughters, has many parallels in it to the relationships among her own family members.
All families have a collective memory that is screened through each person's own perspective on the past, but these two sisters have drastically different memories not only of their mother and the circumstances of her death, but on almost every other element of their shared childhood as well. Frances seems almost obsessively determined to sugarcoat everything, and Cynthia seems just as compulsive about refusing to see their past as anything but traumatic. Whose version of the past is the correct one? Which side is the reader going to choose as the more trustworthy?
It didn't take long for me to get wrapped up in this novel. Berne successfully takes a situation that could be the same old tale of Thanksgiving gone awry and turns it into something new and intriguing. As Margot Livesey puts it, "...Berne creates characters and situations which are simultaneously deeply familiar and wonderfully strange. The result is a remarkably suspenseful novel, beautifully written and psychologically acute."
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Being Catholic Now: Prominent Americans Talk About Change in the Church and the Quest for Meaning by Kerry Kennedy
Being Catholic Now by Kerry Kennedy can be considered a niche book because it concerns one particular religious tradition, but it can also be of interest to general readers who may not be Catholic but who may have questions about the doctrines of the Church or of people who are Catholic. Kennedy's book represents the wide ranging views of 37 public figures, from Bill O'Reilly to Bill Maher (polar opposites in every regard), on the institution of the Church, the role of religion in their lives--or why they no longer subscribe to it--and their thoughts about the Church's future.
Naturally, many of the reviews of this book focus on the statements by participants who are critical of the Church or are negative about some Church doctrine--such is the nature of creating a header for a review--but what I found most powerful were the positive statements that most of the interviewees made about their Catholic upbringing or of their respect for the social justice doctrines of the Church or their optimism about the future of the Church. There's no denying that many of the people featured in Kennedy's book have major disagreements with the political stances of the Church, but even so, these disagreements are not enough to cause them to turn their backs on the Church which is central to their own faith. And Kennedy made sure to include Catholics in this book who are happy to meet the Catholic Church where it is and who have no disagreements with it at all.
Some Catholic reviewers have called the book anti-Catholic, especially because it also includes the views of people, like Gabriel Byrne, Bill Maher, and Frank McCourt, who have left the church and are unsparing in their condemnation of the institution itself. Including these viewpoints in the book does not make the whole conversation anti-Catholic; instead, it makes it a truly thoughtful book that does not shy away from the hard realities that come with organized religion. What is striking, if a reader thoughtfully considered all of the statements in the book, is that despite the differences of opinion, there is a surprising amount of commonality among the participants when they discuss the value of a spiritual life and the social justice works the Catholic church does around the world.
According to the Boston Globe, when spokeswoman for the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, Sister Mary Ann Walsh, heard of the book and the diverse voices represented in it, she said: "A lot of Catholics are having lovers' quarrels with the church....It's an institution they love very much, and they care for, and when there's a disagreement, it can become a passionate disagreement, because they care so much....I find that comforting, that people will sit and argue the points, rather than think it isn't worth discussing. There's more hope if people have an honest intellectual struggle with what the church teaches - that's been the history of the church, that people have struggled to understand our teaching better."
Kennedy's book is one that focuses on that struggle for understanding. In any institution, religious or otherwise, there are many voices, opinions, values, conflicts, and the Catholic church is no exception. This book opens up a conversation that crosses the boundaries that different factions set up to close off their opinions from one another. It's one thing to preach to the choir; it's wholly another to mix up the voices and try to find some harmony among them.
Naturally, many of the reviews of this book focus on the statements by participants who are critical of the Church or are negative about some Church doctrine--such is the nature of creating a header for a review--but what I found most powerful were the positive statements that most of the interviewees made about their Catholic upbringing or of their respect for the social justice doctrines of the Church or their optimism about the future of the Church. There's no denying that many of the people featured in Kennedy's book have major disagreements with the political stances of the Church, but even so, these disagreements are not enough to cause them to turn their backs on the Church which is central to their own faith. And Kennedy made sure to include Catholics in this book who are happy to meet the Catholic Church where it is and who have no disagreements with it at all.
Some Catholic reviewers have called the book anti-Catholic, especially because it also includes the views of people, like Gabriel Byrne, Bill Maher, and Frank McCourt, who have left the church and are unsparing in their condemnation of the institution itself. Including these viewpoints in the book does not make the whole conversation anti-Catholic; instead, it makes it a truly thoughtful book that does not shy away from the hard realities that come with organized religion. What is striking, if a reader thoughtfully considered all of the statements in the book, is that despite the differences of opinion, there is a surprising amount of commonality among the participants when they discuss the value of a spiritual life and the social justice works the Catholic church does around the world.
According to the Boston Globe, when spokeswoman for the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, Sister Mary Ann Walsh, heard of the book and the diverse voices represented in it, she said: "A lot of Catholics are having lovers' quarrels with the church....It's an institution they love very much, and they care for, and when there's a disagreement, it can become a passionate disagreement, because they care so much....I find that comforting, that people will sit and argue the points, rather than think it isn't worth discussing. There's more hope if people have an honest intellectual struggle with what the church teaches - that's been the history of the church, that people have struggled to understand our teaching better."
Kennedy's book is one that focuses on that struggle for understanding. In any institution, religious or otherwise, there are many voices, opinions, values, conflicts, and the Catholic church is no exception. This book opens up a conversation that crosses the boundaries that different factions set up to close off their opinions from one another. It's one thing to preach to the choir; it's wholly another to mix up the voices and try to find some harmony among them.
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
The Great American Story
Better than any fiction is the real story of Election Night 2008. Anyone who did not watch both of these speeches last night should make sure to do so. Both Senator McCain and President Elect Obama showed the class and grace of true leaders.
President Elect Obama's Acceptance Speech:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/11/04/video.transcript/index.html
Senator John McCain's Concession Speech:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/11/04/video.transcript/index.html
President Elect Obama's Acceptance Speech:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/11/04/video.transcript/index.html
Senator John McCain's Concession Speech:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/11/04/video.transcript/index.html
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