Douglas

Allen Bloom's THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND is monumentally important, especially in regard to its central assertion that the surface American education's first principle has for some time now been: "To avoid discrimination [particularly in regard to class, culture, race, and religion or lack thereof], one must be indescriminate in all. The one exception, and the thing to be hated, is the man who asserts otherwise." I am always just utterly amazed at how absolutely relativistic (parodox intended) 99% of my college students have become in their judgements (or rather lack of them) regarding lit and art. I push them to extremes. They will proclaim (as though programmed to say so--and Bloom says they are) that Brittney Spears "music" is every bit as good as Mozart's "for the person who hears it that way." I actually ask them if a pile of dog dung on a paper plate is as much art as Michalangelo's David, and you would not believe how many will, without a twitch, say that it is "if someone thinks it is," as though putting forth an opinion in regard to any obvious difference in quality will lead directly to the acceptance of Hitler's race policies--or, at least, they don't want to be viewed as having any "dangerous" opinions, whether or not they really have them. And this is Bloom's brilliant argument--"absolute freedom" (everything is equally good) has supplanted real freedom (the ability to say the truth or even think it). In another class, in which we study different models of morality, many students will assert with an absolute straight face (get ready!) that baby-torturing, if accepted by a given cultural as moral, would be a moral activity to take part in. What can one even say to such things?!--but Bloom saw this type of non-thinking and warned of the extremes to which it could, and would be taken.

I was a bit suspicious of a biography of Van Gogh's life that would only cover seven and a half hours of normally read text, wondering if anything truly in depth could be accomplished in such a relatively short book--and I was right to wonder. The folksy, often poetic language is interesting and gives a peculiar and often pleasing flavor to the text, but much is glossed over--and while Meier-Graefe gets all the big milestones right (his relationship with Theo, the ear, the shooting, and all the junior high school student already knows), he just gets some things wrong. Anyone who could speak of Vincent's late adolescence as "sailing along" or "happy at home with his parents" must never have encountered any facts about the uptight critical father who thought his son a mad fool, the harping mother whose constant refrain rang "why can't you be more like Theo?!" or the crazily intense antics of a young man who just about drove everyone around him nuts with his endless fiery neediness and often with careless thoughtlessness. I expected more here and would recommend a more in-depth biography of the great artist.

as I thought I would be, having read Grandin's early work. A good deal of this is just common sense, and at times so obvious that she seems to be writing for children. After having developed a taste for much more involved neurological writing (Sacks, Pinker, Ramachandran), Grandin's sweeping references to brain areas leave me filling in the blanks for her ("amygdala," it's called "the amygdala"). I was just left wanting more from this work.

That being said, as someone who is around horses every day, working with my own horse every morning at a boarding farm and seeing other people with their horses, I have to say that it seems to me that a good many people don't have the first notion about four-legged beings, their needs, emotions or welfare. The greater part of them whip their horses into a frenzy ("lunging") so as to exhaust the horse enough to get on (that is, if they can ever catch the poor beast), put him through a once a week, once a fortnight, or even once a month routine of sudden stress, only to put him back, with no reward or word of praise until they abruptly get the desire to ride again, never bothering to build a relationship. (I call these the "lawnmower people," those who treat their horses like machines of pleasure, to be used as they wish and then put it back in the "garage" until the machine is needed again.) Then there are the perhaps even worse "show people," more concerned with blue ribbons than horses--the horses, or rather, their physical torments tell the tale immediately: coats in the deadly heat of summer ("so they don't get dirty") and the braided tails disabled from their normal use in swatting flies... In short, even though what Grandin writes here is "mostly common sense," I see unlimited stupidity everywhere in the horse world, and I can barely keep from laughing out loud when someone asks, "why does your horse come right to you? how can you lead your horse around at liberty (without a rope)? how can you ride your horse bridleless like that? why doesn't your horse spook?..." and so on. They want the magic button to push: there is no magic button...their is only daily work and care and recognition of a four-legged's emotions and feelings, rewarding and praising and treating the horse...well, like you would treat a person...that you actually loved.

Alas, even as simple as Grandin keeps it here, I doubt the lawnmower people would get it.

book about forms of life that exist outside the terms of what has come to be the "standard model" of heat, pressure and PH circumstances of survival. Toomey's work here is informative but presented in a way that is easily accessible to the layman, often entertaining, always engaging stuff to make us see deeper into life and its incredible durability.

of how a miracle of modern medicine made an age in which something like scarlet fever, bronchitis or a deep cut could prove fatal into a curious and quaint bit of past, a fuzzy far-away time that most children today could barely conceive of--and, from a medical point of view, thank God they cannot.

to Aitken's biography of John Newton. Much of the material in Newton's little autobiography is used in Aitken's expansive book, but it is interesting to read the "eight letters" telling Newton's story all in a piece. Newton's life runs the gamut from vile slave boat captain to deeply religious follower of Christianity and author of "Amazing Grace," probably the best known of Christian hymns. His humility and honesty concerning his youthful misdeeds is refreshing and allows the reader to see the true power of religion for deep change in someone who approaches it with the true desire to be a better man.

as Tozer rhapsodizes about the qualities of the divine. Some of the material here has appeared in other volumes--either that, or Tozer had a tendency to use a lot of the same examples and metaphors repeatedly--but most of it is worth hearing again. The one flaw in Tozer is that sometimes he can fall into circular logic, especially when he appeals to the intellect to understand the limits of the intellect in comprehending the attributes of God.

as Tozer rhapsodizes about the qualities of the divine. Some of the material here has appeared in other volumes--either that, or Tozer had a tendency to use a lot of the same examples and metaphors repeatedly--but most of it is worth hearing again. The one flaw in Tozer is that sometimes he can fall into circular logic, especially when he appeals to the intellect to understand the limits of the intellect in comprehending the attributes of God.

is that, like Bonhoeffer, he took what he did very seriously and wrote passionately about the Christian life, not as a "presto-chango-once-saved-always-saved-say-the-magic-words-and-win-heaven" affair, but rather as an ongoing struggle toward goodness and rightness and justice--in short, a living of life in such a fashion that goodness was wrought in the physical world, in which the self and ego were sacrificed for simplicity and charity toward all people, in which others were thought of before oneself, and God, eternal rightness and goodness, above all. It is a message that forever needs to be heard and heeded if the true Christian life is to live on at all.

is to those for whom the divine has become a playground of church socials, sing-a-longs and comforting, warm and fuzzy little sermons about Ruth and Naomi, for those who have long left behind the deeper and harder seekings after goodness, truth and justice in its purest and most challenging form. Tozer's message is one that always needs to be heard and heeded.

like Burpo's "Heaven Is For Real" or Sabom's "Light & Death," don't bother with Tozer. Tozer's overriding theme in everything that he wrote was that a relationship with the divine is not about public show, heavenly reward, fear of damnation, or any other shallow thing that drives most people into a meaningless little building for a meaningless little sermon for an hour a week; it is about a deep down desire for the divine because the divine is good, and the person who desires the divine desires good and responds to the call of goodness, the call of the divine, out of that seeking for goodness. In short, Tozer tells Christianity like it really is.