Reviews and Comments

In "The Great Divorce," C.S. Lewis creates an excellent allegory of heaven and hell for the modern day. Deceptively thin, it is a text worth reading deliberately and meditatively. The story follows a narrator in hell catching a bus that takes the denizens of hell to heaven. I love the way that Lewis describes hell - a dreary place always at twilight where people attempt to live as far as possible from each other. The people on the journey are those still wrapped up in their intellects, sins, vices, and petty foibles. The bus is open to all but very few actually make the journey to the bus stand to get there. Once in heaven, the narrator and others struggle with the hyper reality of the place. Most of the book consists of encounters witnessed by the narrator between those from hell speaking to the spirits in heaven. Those encounters give credence to the idea that hell is not locked from the outside but from the inside.

"What are We Doing Here?" by Marilynne Robinson is a collection of essays written by one of America's foremost authors and public intellectuals. Her novels Gilead, Home, and Lila are beautiful, carefully crafted classics and this collection shows the depth of her quiet erudition. The collection has all of her typical interests: University education, the Puritans, John Calvin, American Literature, American Politics and Society. Robinson is a careful thinker and, if I am honest, her prose is not the easiest thing to read. You want to go carefully through such a collection. But it is worth your time. Personally, I find her commentaries on American life moderately more interesting than her theological work but when you read such a collection, you can come to see that all of her thought is part of a seamless garment and you cannot have one aspect without all the others. Her careful theological exploration is essential to her commentary about American life and visa-versa. In this collection, I found the following chapters the strongest: "What Are We Doing Here?" "Theology for this Moment," "The American Scholar Now," "Our Public Conversation: How America Talks About Itself," and "Integrity and the Modern Intellectual Tradition." But I want to especially highlight "A Proof, A Test, An Instruction" as one of the single best retrospectives on Barack Obama and responses to the election of Donald Trump that has been written. I might have given this book a full five stars but I feel that it can get slightly repetitive and could have done with one or two fewer pieces.

Pico Iyer's "Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells" is a nice meditation on the idea of death and dying as we grow older and how Japanese culture thinks of these transitions. Mediation is the best word to describe the book, as many other reviews have done. It meanders quietly, its ideas and thoughts interweaving together. I feel that very few authors could have pulled off this type of book. It is clear that the idea for the book came up spontaneously and I do feel at times that the various strands of the book fit together but not as well as they could. I can see that all the ideas are of a theme but it lacks deeper narrative coherence. But perhaps that was not the point of the book in the first place. Since I read "The Lady and and the Monk", I have wondered about what happened next? I think most people who read that book wondered about his relationship with the Lady but also about how Iyer changed through his encounter with Kyoto. Glancing over his biography, once can see that he never really left Japan and he ended up together with the woman in "The Lady and the Monk." Autumn Light helps fill in the details of his life and I appreciate getting to meet him and his family again. One doesn't need to have read the first book in order to appreciate this one. However, it is interesting to see how the author has changed and how he has grown into his life in Japan. Recommended.

Note - I read this book a number of months ago and do not have a copy in front of me to refer to. I will update this review when I can review the text more closely.

"The Room on the Roof" by Ruskin Bond is a pretty coming of age novel that grapples with questions of identity, home, and longing. Though clearly the author's first novel, I found myself really enjoying its characters and the raw, personal voice of the novelist. The book is semi-autobiographical and captures Bond's desire to find a place for himself in the world that he had grew up in but was not meant to be a part. What makes it a strong coming-of-age novel is how it can tell that very universal story of finding the self and telling it with very specific details. And like all good children's literature, it does not shy away from violence and darker corners of life. Written when he was seventeen and living away from India for the first time, you can see the author attempting to recapture snippets and moments of his childhood. The book tells the story of Rusty, an Anglo-India boy living in Dehradun just after Indian independence. He lives a stifling existence among the dying Anglo community and longs for adventure. He makes friends in the bazaar, runs away from home, falls in love, and comes to accept that India is truly his home. I don't know if I was fully invested in the story and there were some narrative leaps that I did not find plausible. I also don't like the third person limited narrator - he goes into the mind of characters when convenient but not consistently. But the beauty of the images, especially in his descriptions of nature and the world around, more than make up for the flaws in style.

I cannot emphasis how much I loved this book. The book opened my mind to some of the deepest issues and problems in modern society and completely changed the way that I think about identity and the self. Crawford, known for his first book "Shopclass as Soulcraft" uses the modern inability to give attention as the jumping off point to explore identity formation. Very briefly, Crawford argues that one of the inheritances we have from the Enlightenment (largely thanks to Kant) is that we think of our identities as formed entirely by mental processes. This fallacy leads us down many dark roads. The main philosophical argument can be summed up as the following (only articulated in the middle of the book):

- We are encouraged to free ourselves from all authorities, including the authority of others;
- This leads us to emphasize radical self-responsibility (as a matter of politics and epistemology);
- We can only do this by locating the source of truth from our external world to our inner world - by constructing representations of life;
- To accomplish this, we must demote attention as a value as it takes us outside of the mental realm which is the center of all authority.

Once you understand it, you begin to see the web that binds us to these means of identity formation. The way out is to conceive of identity formation as a relationship between us, our environments, and the people around us. And it involves a dynamic relationship between our own creative powers and the tradition we receive.

I cannot emphasis how much I loved this book. The book opened my mind to some of the deepest issues and problems in modern society and completely changed the way that I think about identity and the self. Crawford, known for his first book "Shopclass as Soulcraft" uses the modern inability to give attention as the jumping off point to explore identity formation. Very briefly, Crawford argues that one of the inheritances we have from the Enlightenment (largely thanks to Kant) is that we think of our identities as formed entirely by mental processes. This fallacy leads us down many dark roads. The main philosophical argument can be summed up as the following (only articulated in the middle of the book):

- We are encouraged to free ourselves from all authorities, including the authority of others;
- This leads us to emphasize radical self-responsibility (as a matter of politics and epistemology);
- We can only do this by locating the source of truth from our external world to our inner world - by constructing representations of life;
- To accomplish this, we must demote attention as a value as it takes us outside of the mental realm which is the center of all authority.

Once you understand it, you begin to see the web that binds us to these means of identity formation. The way out is to conceive of identity formation as a relationship between us, our environments, and the people around us. And it involves a dynamic relationship between our own creative powers and the tradition we receive.