I've been tagged!

I've been book- tagged by Bunnie Diehl!

I'm not quite sure how this works, but let's see...

The initial "tag" reads thus:
Imagine that a local philanthropist is hosting an event for local high school students and has asked you to pick out five to ten books to hand out as door prizes. At least one book should be funny and at least one book should provide some history of Western Civilization and at least one book should have some regional connection. The philanthropist doesn't like foul language (but will allow some four-letter words in context, such as expressed during battle by soldiers). Otherwise things are pretty wide open. What do you pick?


Bunnie adds these requirements: 1) one book must be something you're a bit embarrassed to admit is on your favorites list, 2) all books would be suitable for adults and 3) one book changed the way you look at the world.

Bunnie, you don't know what you've done, asking me to write about books! But ok, here goes...

Funny: The Collected Writings of St. Hereticus by Robert McAfee Brown is satire. Good satire. Good, Christian satire. Good satire of Christians. Good enough to hurt sometimes. Contains a section on hymns as they would be sung if we were being honest about ourselves. A sample:

Like a beaten army
Moves the Church of God;
Brother treads on brother,
Grinds him in the sod.
We are all divided;
Not one body, we;
Some lack faith
And some lack hope
And all lack charity.
Backward, Christian soldiers;
March with doubt and fear,
With the Cross of Jesus
Bringing up the rear.

I also seem to recall a chapter on collective nouns for Christians of various types: a niggle of legalists, a stand of Lutherans, a mass of Catholics, a dunk of Baptists, etc.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. The book, not the movies or the TV series!

The next one is one whose author I don't remember. Nor is he important. What is important is that it is a product of the Harvard Lampoon staff.

Doon is the saga of the Dessert Planet Arruckus, whose surface is covered with granulated sugar. In the depths of the vast sugars there lives a race of giant pretzels, who, upon dying, decay. Their liquified remains ferment, making Arruckus the only source in the universe of that distant future of the mind-altering substance known as "beer." It collects in underground deposits known as "beer bellies," and occasionally erupt explosively in "beer blasts."

Meanwhile, a secret breeding program is being undertaken by a powerful, secretive sect of women bent upon producing a male super-being known as the Kumquat Haagen-Daaz...

I would also suggest Bored of the Rings, but it's too racy to meet the philanthropist's criteria.

Come to think of it, these books would probably meet the "embarassing" criterion as well.

Western Civ: The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town by William Allen is the true story of the Nazi takeover in "Nordheim," a fairly typical North German town in which the Church, the town leadership, and the people themselves underwent a fairly typical seduction by one of the most evil movements in history. How could the people which produced Luther and Bach and Goethe fall for Hitler? With surprising ease- and by a process often frightening in its comprehensibility.

Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther by Roland Bainton may not be the best Luther biography ever written, but it's the one which introduced me to the Reformer- or rather, helped me to further the acquaintence begun by the annual Reformation Day martyrdom we endured as grade school kids compelled to sit through the old black and white Niall McGinniss Martin Luther movie! It's also popular, engaging, and an easy read.

The Theology of Martin Luther by Paul Althaus has its flaws in its understanding of Luther, but it's a good, concise introduction to his thought.

Gettysburg by McKinley Kantor. Bunnie said that these books should be suitable for adults. She didn't say that they had to be written for them.

This one wasn't. It's a kids' book, one of a series on various events and figures from history my dad bought me when I was a youngster. It was the beginning of a lifelong fascination with the Civil War and with the Battle of Gettysburg in particular.

What impressed me most was Kantor's recounting of an incident which didn't even make it into the movie about the battle which they made a few years ago- a movie which I highly recommend, BTW. It happened about the same time as Chamberlain's charge down Little Round Top. Realistically, only one such moment could have made it into the movie, and in terms of the battle's outcome the charge of Chamberlain's Twentieth Maine was clearly it.

But between 1,500 and 2,000 Confederates were headed for a hole in the Union line about then, created when the soldiers originally stationed there were pulled out to repair the damage to the Union Left created by Sickles' blunder. General Winfield Scott Hancock saw the danger, and realized two things: first, that sufficient reinforcements were about five minutes away; and, secondly, that he didn't have five minutes.

So he approached the colonel of a nearby, shot-up regiment, the First Minnesota Volunteers, which had only 262 surviving members- and ordered them to plug the gap. He essentially chose to sacrifice the First Minnesota to buy himself those five minutes.

Every time I think about Kantor's description of what Hancock and the reinforcements found when they got back to that spot I get chills up and down my spine. The reinforcements weren't needed. Outnumbered eight to one, the First Minnesota had stopped the Confederates cold- and thrown them back!

Fifty- two of the Minnesotans were still standing. All in all, the regiment suffered 82% casualties.

I always make it a point to visit the First Minnesota monument when I visit Gettysburg. On my last visit, I was delighted to find a paperback edition of the Kantor book in the gift shop. I bought it and re-read it. My wife read it as well. I hope you do, if you get the chance- kids' book or not.

Regional: Mike Royko's Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago. I spent a significant amount of my young adulthood as an active member of the "Independent movement" in Chicago, a group of liberal Democrats opposed to the Chicago Machine and really the only significant opposition to Da Mare and his ilk (the city's tiny Republican Party usually operated in tandem with the "Independents," at least in local politics). I was a messenger for the McCarthy campaign during the 1968 Chicago convention, and got gassed on Michigan Avenue while doing my job (there was a phone strike, and messages had to be delivered personally). Since I came from a Republican family, this only intensified my hereditary dislike of the effective but unsavory Cook County Regular Democratic Organization. I worked in lots of anti-Daley campaigns, actually winning some; one of my favorite memories was beating my own precinct captain in a legislative race one year.

Although this is a little like praising Mussolini for making the trains run on time, Daley the Elder does, I must confess, look better in retrospect. Chicago was "the City that Works" back then; while by all accounts his son, the current mayor, is actually doing a fairly decent job, nobody would claim that the city "works" anymore- at least like it did back then. Richard J., in any case, was a bigger than life figure- and one of the most fascinating politicians of the last century. He was also one of the constants of the first twenty-odd years of my life.

Altgeld's America: The Lincoln Ideal versus Changing Realities by Ray Ginger is about the reform movement in Chicago and Illinois generally which was inspired by the career of Abraham Lincoln. It's a fascinating period, featuring such figures as social worker Jane Addams, lawyer and reformer Clarence Darrow- and the man who gives the book its name: Governor John Peter Altgeld, who sacrificed his political career by pardoning three anarchist prisoners falsely convicted of complicity in the Haymarket Riot. Warned that his actions would lead to disaster for the Democratic Party, he replied that "No man has the right to allow his ambition to stand in the way of the performance of a simple act of justice." Altgeld has always been a hero of mine.

The Dry and Lawless Years by Judge John H. Lyle is an excellent and very readable first-hand account of the Capone era in Chicago, the anti-Capone crusade led by Lyle and Mayor Tony Cermak, among others (Cermak was assassinated in what some say was a failed attempt on the life of President-Elect Franklin Roosevelt; no Chicagoan believes that for a moment), and "The Big Guy's" final downfall because he didn't pay his taxes.

My dad was in the courtroom when Capone was convicted. He had vivid memories of the whole era. But I think, as a parable of original sin, the story of Capone and Chicago has universal significance. It's a kind of American "Nordheim" story.

Life-changing: The Hammer of God by Bo Giertz. Like a great many people who grew up in the Missouri Synod (actually we joined when I was ten, but I graduated from a parochial school, a synodical high school, and Concordia, River Forest), I grew up believing that I was saved by grace through faith- but only if I remembered to "repent" every single time I committed a sin. This book helped bring home to me what "grace" was about, what "faith" meant- and helped establish me once and for all as a confessional Lutheran with no time for the Pietism which surrounds even Missouri Synod Lutherans!

Embarassing: I love Stephen King's The Stand. I've read it eight or ten times. The theology isn't ideal, but there's just something about King's most popular novel which just grabs me. It helps, I suppose, that I realized suddenly some time after reading the book for the first time that the basic plot comes more or less directly from Revelation- but in a form no Fundamentalist prophesy-monger would ever have come up with.

Actually, though, I don't think the philanthropist would approve. It's pretty racy in places.

I first read the book on the bus from seminary in Dubuque to my Clinical Pastoral Education site at a state mental hospital in Connecticut. There's a singularly creepy sequence in which one of the characters is trying to find his way out of a darkened, corpse-filled Lincoln Tunnel. The tiles on the tunnel walls and the general ambience Larry Underwood beheld by the light of his Zippo were just being described when things darkened a bit. I looked up... and sure enough, I was in the Lincoln Tunnel!

Also among the books being passed out are numerous works by my favorite author, Harry Turtledove. Being both a history buff and a sci fi fan, alternate history is a natural. In particular, there's Turtledove's current ten-book series, which began with the Confederate victory at Antietam and the recognition of the Confederacy by France and England has taken us through a second Confederate victory over the North and the triumph of the Central Powers- Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the United States- over the Allies- England, France, and the Confederacy- in World War I, and into an even more bizarre version of World War II.

I love it!

Ok. My turn.

I tag Aardvark Alley, The Burr in the Burgh, and Ask the Pastor.

Comments

TKls2myhrt said…
Now this is fun! And much more productive than changing our blog names to begin with a series of A's. You've tagged great people, too. I posted my response already.
Xrysostom said…
I'm going to be on the road, meeting up w/some brother clergy, incl. the Aardvark (whither he goest, or something like that). We should be responding to the tagging in the next day or so.'

This does look like fun.