The Clever Badger I'm not dead yet!

16Jan/124

Mini Book Review: The Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson, Translated by Reg Keeland

Well, first order of business:

I haven't died since my last post.

In August.

Of last year.

Nor was I raptured in October.  Harold Camping was wrong again.

I have, however, been a victim of a busy schedule and probably some degree of overall burnout.

Anyway, new year - new goals, which include more writing, less me (and possibly a new bike...), and a few other things that are long overdue.

Let's start with the first.

For Christmas, I found myself the owner of a new Kindle Fire.  I fully accept that the Fire is, out of the box, basically an Amazon Vending Machine.  I'm good with that.  It's got potential, and I like the form factor better than the iPad.

I'd gotten my mom the DVDs of the Swedish versions of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl who Played with Fire, and The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest.  I'd watched them last year, and Mom had been reading the books, so we ended up more or less swapping.  (NB - I haven't seen the new American version of the first film, so any comparisons I make between the books and the films will refer to the Swedish productions.)

What I'd like to do here is capture some of my thoughts on the series without spoiling too many important plot points.  Thus this won't be a full-on review but rather some loosely connected thoughts and observations.  Bear with me while I try to re-engage the writing cogs.

I suspect that most people are familiar with the basic outline of the books - Swedish investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist finds himself drawn into an increasingly complex web of conspiracies when he's asked to help investigate a decades-old mystery and makes the acquaintance of hacker Lisbeth Salander and her aforementioned tattoo.

The first thing to note is that the original Swedish title of the book - Män som hatar kvinno - translates as Men Who Hate Women.  That proves to be the thread that ties the entire series together, and indeed the thread that has defined most of Salander's life.

(Larsson witnessed a rape when he was young, and never forgave himself for failing to help the victim.  The theme of the trilogy is derived from that event.)

In telling Salander's story of victimization - initially at the hands of her father and later at the hands of nearly every authority figure she encounters - Larsson also addresses issues of gender inequality in the workplace, in government, and in the perceptions of the population as a whole.

Lisbeth's brilliant intellect and single-minded thirst for revenge is set against her tiny, doll-like physique.  Her refusal to conform to social norms is used in the second and third books to attack her in the press and in the courtroom.1

Annika, Blomkvist's sister (later Salander's lawyer) draws on similarities between her youthful behavior and Lisbeth's to point out the double standards at work. Erika Berger, Blomkvist's married lover (and a very shrewd businesswoman) finds herself under attack because of her sexual habits. Female police inspectors in the story are looked down on by their male counterparts.

An interesting thing to notice is that Blomkvist (in the books - they leave out most of this in the movies) is portrayed as quite the player.  During the course of the books, Blomkvist carries on extended affairs with:

  • Erika Berger - his married lover who he has been with off and on for 20 year or so.
  • Cecilia Vanger - a woman who he investigates in connection with a decades-old possible murder.
  • Lisbeth Salander - who seduces him during the investigation of the Vanger case, and with whom he has a fairly lengthy relationship.
  • Harriet Vanger - Cecilia's long-lost cousin.
  • Monica Figuerola - a special police investigator helping to work out the conspiracy surrounding Salander's father.

I'm not sure if Blomkvist is written this way in order to serve as an example within the story of a man who can relate to women as equals, or if he's written as a typical Swedish male and I'm simply trying to view Swedish attitudes about sex through an American lens, or if there's something else going on.  The end result is that Blomkvist is clearly not a white-hat good guy, but is instead somewhat ethically suspect.  Ordinarily, I tend to like characters with some moral ambiguity, since it makes them more interesting, but I've got an issue with this sort of thing.2

There are a few other interesting characters spread across the books.  One of the most interesting, in my opinion, is Alexander Zalachenko.  Zalachenko, a Russian assassin who defects to Sweden in the 1970's, is Lisbeth's father.  The Swedish authorities recognize the value of the information Zalachenko can provide, and consequently give him a long leash, turning a blind eye to his violent habits and criminal endeavors.  After the fall of the Soviet Union, Zalachenko's value diminishes, but it's far too late to rein him in.  His activities form the nucleus of the conspiracies against Salander, but it's clear that the Swedish authorities who cleaned up after him and failed to control him are at least as culpable as he is.  What makes him interesting is that he's not just evil for the sake of being evil.  His actions seem consistent within the limits of his own self-interest.  He's aware enough to manipulate others into doing what he needs to be done, he thinks through the consequences of his actions, and he needs a motivation to do things beyond simply causing problems for a hero to solve.3

Overall, I enjoyed the books.  Having already seen the movies, I knew generally what to expect, but there was enough new and expanded material to keep me interested, especially the more detailed insight into Lisbeth's character.  The nuggets of Swedish political history that are sprinkled through the books give them some grounding in actual events, which is a nice touch.  Parts can be difficult to read - the assault on Salander in the first book, and some of the graphic descriptions of crimes throughout leave little to the imagination - but such scenes are important to advancing the plot.

As a set of interconnected mysteries, the books work very well, and I highly recommend them on the strength of that alone.  If you happen to find topics of social justice and the treatment of women in different layers of society are more your thing, you'll find a good helping of those in here, too.

-Jay
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1In some ways reminiscent of the way women like Monica Lewinsky and Casey Anthony have been portrayed in the media. Guilt or innocence often seems secondary to digging up lurid personal details.

2I suppose it's worth mentioning that all of Blomkvist's liasons are consensual, and none of his partners have an expectation of long-term monogamy. Nevertheless, his characterization reminds me a bit too much of people who I know who think with their penises.

3Writing convincing villains is hard.  Too often you end up with a 2-dimensional character that exists solely for the purpose of doing bad things.  Like Darth Vader.  He was nothing but a glorified errand boy.  When George Lucas tried to give Vader some depth in the prequel trilogy, all he really succeeded in doing was establishing that Vader was a whiny, arrogant errand boy.  Or consider the typical characterization of the devil, who seems to turn up for no reason other than to function as an agent of evil.  That's a topic for another day.

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28Mar/116

New Book Time – Forged by Bart Ehrman

I just received my copy of Bart Ehrman's new book, Forged: Writing in the Name of God - Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are. This isn't going to be a full review - while I hope to have time to write one, it's more realistic for me to assume that I won't.  Instead, it's going to be a brief treatment of what Ehrman is doing when he writes books like this, and why I think his work is relevant.

Ehrman's popular books are usually very accessible, and I expect Forged to be the same.  In broad terms, it looks at issues of authorship and attribution of various books within the Bible.  Many people assume that the traditional attributions are correct, but for many reasons, most modern scholars don't believe that to be the case.

I've seen criticism directed at Ehrman for overstating the significance of the material he presents.  Such criticism often comes from individuals who end up arguing for inerrancy1 or infallibility.  Typically, though, Ehrman is clear and forthright, and caveats his criticisms appropriately.

Some critics also attempt to paint his work as the fringe research of a disgruntled ex-fundamentalist with an axe to grind, as if he's attempting to justify his shift from fundamentalism to agnosticism by nit-picking the Bible.  Rather than discrediting Ehrman, this approach simply reveals the ignorance of his critics.  The topics that he writes about, far from being Bart's wild ideas about why the Bible isn't God's word are instead distillations of the last century or so of critical Biblical scholarship.  He's not making this stuff up.  He's pulling together a vast amount of information that's already in the literature and putting it out there for non-specialists to discover.

That's important.

It's important because most people who claim to put a lot of value on the Bible have never read it cover to cover.  Or if they have, they tend to read the constituent books in relative isolation from one another.  It's fairly common during a church service or Bible study group to read from the Bible with the desire to figure out what God might be trying to say2. If you happen to find yourself in a fairly liberal church, you might be encouraged to consider this question in the context of when the particular part of the Bible you're reading was written.  There are numerous problems with this approach, but one of the biggest is that it masks the fact that the books of the Bible have numerous and often fatal contradictions with one another, and that (far from presenting a unified theology with consistent underlying messages) they present a largely incoherent jumble of orthodoxies that is more reflective of the turmoil and struggle for identity within the early Christian churches than of a transcendent divine message.

Let's consider Paul, both because Paul is arguably the single most important figure in the New Testament behind Jesus and because Ehrman treats Paul at some length in Forged.

There are 13 books in the New Testament that are traditionally ascribed to Paul.  Of these, seven (Romans, Philippians, Galatians, Philemon, 1 & 2 Corinthians, and 1 Thessalonians) are considered by most scholars to be authentic - they were actually written by Paul.  The other six (1 & 2 Timothy, Titus, Ephesians, Colossians, and 2 Thessalonians3) are generally considered to have been written by others - that is to say, they're forgeries4 written in the name of Paul.  The reasons for this division are straightforward - the seven works that are considered authentic are consistent in their theology and their structure.  The others aren't.  If we are to consider all 13 to have been written by the same individual, then we have to explain why, in many important respects, Paul can't seem to agree with himself5. If you read these books in isolation from one another, it's very easy to miss the fact that they are poles apart on many key issues.  (To be fair, much of the linguistic structure of the Bible gets lost in translation, so people reading the Bible in English can certainly be excused for not being aware of issues in that arena.  However, the theological differences are plain to see for anyone who bothers to read closely.)

There are many reasons why the authors of these works might have written in Paul's name.  But regardless of how they justified their forgeries at the time, we have to deal with the inconsistencies they introduce now - if in one set of letters, Paul claims that males and females are equal, that marriage and sex are bad, and that Jesus is going to return soon and unannounced, and in others "Paul" claims that church leaders should be married, that women should keep quiet and stay pregnant, and that Jesus will only return after lots of signs and observable events happen, clearly both can't be correct.  And since both can't be correct, any statement of faith that tries to claim that the Bible is inerrant is simply wrong before it even gets out of the gate.

And at the heart of it, that's why Ehrman's work is important - he's pointing out why the Bible shouldn't be unquestioningly assumed to be God's Little Instruction Manual.  It's demonstrably not a coherent, clear guide to how the world works, but is rather an often disjoint, contradictory, and internally inconsistent collection of works written to address different needs and situations in times long past.  More importantly, people today are using that collection of works to justify wars, subjugation of women, and demonstrations at the funerals of dead soldiers.  People use that collection to rationalize withholding medical care from their children, to claim that natural disasters are some sort of punishment, and to assert that dinosaur fossils only look ancient because Satan made them look that way6.

I suspect the largest part of Ehrman's readership consists of people who have already rejected many of the traditional claims about the Bible.  Some small part probably consists of people who have made an a priori decision that anything that he has to say is wrong, and are merely looking for ways to discredit his conclusions.  But some people will read his material with an open mind and, even though his conclusions might make them uncomfortable, will realize that his points are valid.

That can be a difficult step to take.

-Jay

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1And inerrancy often gets phrased in terms of "inerrant in the original monographs", which is a useless term.  We don't have the original monographs -the Rylands Papyrus P52, usually dated to around 125 AD, is generally considered the earliest fragment from the New Testament - so the point is moot.  I suspect that such phrasing isn't much more than a tacit acknowledgement that the Bible as we have it now is anything but inerrant...

2There are several crucial presuppositions to this approach, but perhaps the most obvious one is that God could come up with no better way to communicate with mankind than a collection of documents cobbled together a couple of thousand years ago.

3Hebrews has, in the past, been postulated as one of Paul's epistles. Modern scholars are nearly unanimous in rejecting Pauline authorship, though.

4I'm adopting Ehrman's use of the word forgery here: the author knowingly claims to be someone else.

5Examples include the role of women, the acceptability of marriage and sex, and the nature and timing of Christ's second coming.

6During the homily today at the Catholic church I belong to, the priest made a reference to a 4+ billion-year-old Earth.  Such a reference shouldn't have raised an eyebrow, but it did, and he knew it would because he paused as soon as the words left his mouth and looked around to gauge the reaction.

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8Dec/107

Book Review – Mary Mae And The Gospel Truth by Sandra Dutton

(NOTE: Updated to fix a bad tag.)
What happens when a precocious ten-year-old from a conservative religious family encounters fossils in her school yard and starts asking questions?

Sandra Dutton offers a look at this situation through the eyes of Mary Mae Krebs in her book Mary Mae and the Gospel Truth.

Mary Mae and the Gospel Truth

Mary Mae and the Gospel Truth

We meet Mary Mae at a church service in Ohio, circa 1988, where she's singing with her visiting grandmother.   It seems that Mary Mae isn't content to simply accept everything she's told, and she manages to attract some attention to herself by asking uncomfortable questions about the Genesis creation stories.

"The world is six thousand years old.  You look in your Bible."

"Where?"

"Well, Genesis.  Where else?  You got the whole Creation, right there."

Soon as we get home, I get my Bible out and run my finger down every line of Genesis.  I'm looking for six thousand, whether it's in numbers or spelled out in letters.  I go through it twice.  Second time I'm reading with a flashlight in bed.  Only six I find is on the "sixth day," what God created, and in different folks' ages, like Enoch living three hundred and sixty-five  years.

I tell Mama Sunday morning I can't find no six thousand, and she says she don't have time to look, she's got too much work to do. (pg. 12)

Mary Mae's questions and her refusal to let other people think for her provide sources of tension between her and her mother, her pastor, her Sunday school teacher, and her friends.  At various points, she questions a number of issues that she spots in Genesis:

  • Light and dark existing before light sources like the sun.
  • Varying lengths of generations.
  • How all the animals could possibly have fit on the ark, and the logistics associated with their care.

The answers and explanations given to her tend to be in the vein of  "you just have to have faith" or "if the Bible says it, it must be true", but these don't deter her.  I think that's admirable, and anyone who has ever had a child respond to every answer with "why?" should be able to understand Mary Mae's persistence.

At school, Mary Mae's teacher, Miss Sizemore, is teaching her students about fossils, and the ancient age of the Earth, and how the rock layers visible where the local highways are cut through the mountains represent different geological periods.  She finds herself fascinated by the trilobite fossils that she finds in the rocks exposed by an excavation at the school yard and in other places, and she comes to realize that explanations like "God put them there to test us" just don't wash.

A large measure of my interest in this book flows from the fact that I have no life experiences to compare with Mary Mae's.  I grew up as a liberal Catholic, and (try as I might) I cannot recall any time in my school-age years where I learned something in (public) school that caused tensions at home or at church.  I was, of course, familiar with the Genesis creation stories (although it was much later before I realized there were two stories instead of just one), and the story of Noah's flood (again, the actual text suggests two versions of the story), but my Sunday school classes never tackled them in any detail (which I now consider to be a failing...).  For me, the science-vs-religion question is really a no-brainer:  we learn about the observable world by observing it, and science is the framework for making sense of those observations.

As I consider Mary Mae's conundrum, I have to cast it in terms of what I expect the people around her to say and do.  Through this preconceptual lens, Dutton's characters serve their purposes quite well - Miss Sizemore as the voice of secular science for example, or Mary Mae's mother presenting the extremely conservative religious perspective - although the only supporting character with much complexity is Granny (who really serves as an older and wiser version of Mary Mae's own conscience).  While there might be a small risk that a reader could be trapped by stereotypes, Dutton made a smart choice to avoid overdeveloping the ancillary characters beyond Mary Mae's perspective.

The book touches on a number of related topics, and Dutton exposes several important ones just enough to spark some discussion:

  • Kids in public schools being given alternative work when the curriculum conflicts with religious beliefs.
  • Parents pulling their kids out of school for homeschooling and realizing that it's not as easy as they expected.1
  • Parents of different religious backgrounds deciding how to raise their children.
  • People believing whatever their pastor happens to tell them on any given day.

In the end, Mary Mae and her family come to a compromise position that, from the perspective of a ten-year-old is probably sufficient.  In many real-life situations similar to Mary Mae's, some sort of compromise may be the best anyone can hope for, and I think Dutton realizes that.

But it's also a little troubling, in my view, for a couple of reasons.

The first has to do with the audience of the book.  A few obvious candidates are:

  • Kids who are in the same situation as Mary Mae - they're learning things at school that contradict what they've been taught at home or in church, and they're trying to figure out a way to reconcile these views.
  • Parents of such kids who are trying to deal with challenges to their belief system.
  • Pastors/clergy or teachers of such kids who are looking for ways to help the kids work through the issues.

The compromise position that the book takes means that a lot of parents (who want their kids to believe the same way as they do) and clergy (whose livelihood depends on people believing certain things) won't find the book useful - they may want books that reinforce their beliefs.  The kids who are in situations most like Mary Mae's are also likely to be kids from families and churches with very conservative religious beliefs for whom compromises simply aren't acceptable.

Teachers of such kids may be justifiably reluctant to suggest that children challenge the beliefs of their parents.  Teachers that do so may well find themselves looking for work.

That leaves the kids themselves, and I'm honestly not sure how many kids would find this book on their own.  That's a shame, because a clever child reading about Mary Mae's journey could come away much  better prepared to engage with their parents about questions of belief.

There is one other audience for the book, and I think it's probably a large one (though difficult to count):  close friends or relatives of families with Mary Maes who might find themselves involved in the situation.

So, in effect, Dutton's compromise solution to the problem at hand might have the unintended consequence of keeping the book out of the hands of many of the people who would benefit the most from it.  I think that's just a reflection of the nature of the subject and not any fault of hers.

The other reason I find the compromise troubling is that I don't think that it is a stable equilibrium.  This is beyond the scope of the book, but I think it's relevant to mention.

We leave Mary Mae at a point where she's been told that there are some gaps in the Biblical narratives, and science can step in to fill those gaps.  If her interests never went beyond trilobite fossils, that might be sufficient.  But is that likely?  I'm not at all sure that it is.

At some point, she'd learn some world history and find out that Egypt had a well-documented culture and civilization that continued moving right along during the time when, according to the Bible, the world was under water and Noah's family was all that was left of humanity.  She might learn of solid evidence of human habitation in the Americas dating back well over 11,000 years - older than the Earth by some Biblical reckoning.

Maintaining a claim of Biblical truth vis-a-vis science and history becomes an increasingly untenable goal, unless "science" and "history" are redefined to bend around the Bible.

At the end of the day, Dutton has put together a sensitive, gentle story that validates the message that it's OK for kids to ask questions and look outside of the beliefs they've been raised in.  That's the first step of many.  I would hope that the book can find its way into the hands of families facing circumstances like Mary Mae's, and that it might help nurture the spark of curiosity that all children seem to have.

-Jay

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1I am of two minds about homeschooling.  I can see how, if it's done properly, it could be rewarding for both parents and children, but I've seen far more instances of it being done poorly than of it being done well.  That's all I'll say about it now.  It's a topic for another time, perhaps.

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13Nov/103

Disclosure and Some Background

I'm working on a book review right now that's a bit of a departure from the sort of things that I usually read.  I'll refrain from too many details just yet, but just to keep everything above-board, the author contacted me about writing a review and provided a review copy of the book  on the strength of some previous posts of mine.

With that out of the way, I'll provide some background.

The book in question is about a fundamentalist Christian1 girl trying to sort out her love of science (specifically her interest in evolution) and her religious background.

This is a topic of personal significance to me for several reasons, but the one I'll focus on here is that nobody ever approaches the evolution/creationism issue from the perspective of the kids.

Pretty much every forum or blog out there that routinely covers the topic deals with it from an adult perspective.  When kids enter into the discussion at all, it's most often (these days) in the context of discussion about the Dover trial or of creationist school board candidates and textbook selections in Texas2, or somehow in connection with Ken Ham's Creation Museum.

While the adult-side discussions of evolution and creationism (and the broader discussions of science, religion, and whether or not they can coexist) are certainly important, even crucial, it's all too easy to forget that on the other side of the court cases and the school board elections and the museum exhibits are tens or hundreds of thousands (or more)  of kids who are directly impacted by the outcomes of those events.  In the U.S., most of those children will be from religious backgrounds that are at best ambivalent towards evolution and at worst outright hostile to the concept3.

Some of these kids may respond to material about evolution by simply ignoring it, or learning enough to pass a test, or challenging it with what they may believe are strong, well-reasoned objections that they read in a book or on a website somewhere4, but some of them will start to engage with the material, and that engagement will lead to some questions that may well fly headlong into the face of religious doctrine and foundational beliefs.

This is a difficult enough situation for adults to work through, and it's easy to suppose that it's much harder for kids, since the parents and family members that they would normally go to for answers might not be receptive to discussing the subject - few topics are more capable of dividing people than religious disagreements - but it's a situation that I suspect is more common than people might think, particularly as increasingly unfettered access to the internet means that more children will be exposed to different points of view than they have been in the past.

So, all that being said, I was intrigued by the opportunity to review a book that deals with the evolution/creationism issue from the perspective of a child trying to sort things out.  It should be interesting.

-Jay

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1Still wishing there was a word that was equally descriptive but less pejoratively loaded...

2Why Texas, you ask? It seems that Texas is a huge influence on textbook publishers because of the number of students in the state. Texas buys a lot of textbooks. Textbook publishers want to sell textbooks to Texas. Therefore curriculum decisions in Texas can influence the textbooks that are used in many other states.

3I'm operating on the assumption that parents teach their kids according to their own beliefs, and based on the numbers shown here.

4When I was active on some of the E/C forums, it wasn't uncommon to see the same arguments pop up nearly word-for-word in many different threads. Once you're familiar with them, it's even possible to tell where they originally came from.

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20Jun/103

Book Review – The Poisoner’s Handbook by Deborah Blum

A few weeks ago, a copy of The Poisoner's Handbook by Deborah Blum ended up in my grubby little paws.

Blum, who describes herself as a lapsed chemist, has put together a fascinating book that is equal parts crime drama, chemistry lesson, and history book.

Blum follows the development of forensics as a legitimate discipline in New York City during the Prohibition Era by Charles Morris and Andrew Gettler.

Much of the work of Morris and Gettler involved developing new or more reliable techniques to detect the numerous poisons that tended to turn up in people of the era.  Apart from the various adulterants in Prohibition booze (kerosene, mercury, and Lysol were known to turn up, and as Prohibition dragged on, the Government actively developed new formulas to ensure that industrial alcohol couldn't be used to make booze), such delightful poisons such as cyanides, carbon monoxide, radium, and thallium were used to put spouses, lovers, business associates, and random people into the ground.   An interesting observation that I hadn't made before but should have is that a lot of poisons are deadly because they chemically resemble things that are supposed to be in our bodies but are more reactive.  This allows the poisons to interfere with normal physiological processes - for example carbon monoxide binds to hemoglobin in the blood more tightly than oxygen - with predictably deadly results.

Blum's research into the details of each substance allows her to give detailed descriptions of the effects of each poison, and her blunt narration of the techniques necessary to isolate those poisons from cadavers would make for interesting dinner conversation (apparently the first step is often to mince brain tissue into a paste...).

Her account of the political obstacles Norris and Gettler had to deal with just to obtain and maintain funding for their department make it seem all the more remarkable that they were able to accomplish the groundbreaking work that they did.  Norris used many of his personal resources to provision and operate his laboratory.

To give much more detail would be to ruin the fun of the book.  I highly recommend The Poisoner's Handbook to anyone with an interest in medical detective work or in the details of early 20th Century American history.  For those who might want a rating, I give this book five skulls and crossbones out of five.

-Jay

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