The Closer to Truth PBS Television Series - a Review and Commentary

I've just completed viewing all 290 episodes of this long-running philosophical discussion series.  It was a four-month undertaking - watching and absorbing nearly 130 hours of video.  Having invested all that time, I now feel a need to react by way of offering a review of sorts, pointing out "the good, the bad, and the ugly", and also by way of injecting some commentary on selected elements of the content.

I started here by presenting the slick one-minute introductory and promotional video at the top of this post.  Well done, but perhaps promising more than can be delivered.  After all, the goal is no less than attempting to explore, in depth, the biggest questions of reality.  Can't get much more ambitious than that.  These are questions that the world's greatest thinkers have been pondering for nigh onto three thousand years without great concurrence (perhaps without real progress).

It's a good quality effort.  The majority of the episodes, at least, are definitely worth the time.  It's a pretty level-headed attempt, and a true passion of the series' host, who is also its executive producer, Robert Lawrence Kuhn.  He summarized his 'mission' succinctly during the series' first season (2008).  It appears at the end of the 13th and last episode of the season, an exploration of the idea or reality of God titled "Does God Make Sense?", and it was the summary statement at the end (see minute 25:15).  Speaking about how the best arguments for and against the existence of God both contain "circularities, endless regressions, dead ends."  He goes on to say:

“Many people seem certain of their beliefs. I wish I were certain. (Switching to a sing-song voice:) I may continue lurching and lapsing in my beliefs. (Changing to a firm assertive voice:) But I will never cease wondering, striving, searching. (Passionate voice) My search is what this entire series is all about—an exploration of Cosmos, Consciousness, and God. (Finally trailing into a workmanlike tone for the tag line) For me, for now, passionate uncertainty … is Closer to Truth.”

The tone and emphasis of that last sentence was of special interest to me.  His passion is obvious and laudable.  But he is no real fan of uncertainty as an intrinsic part of physical reality (e.g. the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle) or as inherent logical, philosophical, and even mathematical attributes of the realm of the abstract.

Quite the contrary. He was using the term in a very different sense as he crafted the summary of the episode such that the title would come out as the very last words spoken—something that he makes a point of finding a way to do for each and every episode.

The structure of most episodes is designed to highlight philosophical friction points--a sort of humanized version of uncertainty.  He loves to juxtapose these arguments - the more passionate the better.  That is what he means by that last sentence in the quote.  

I would hope to see him explore the far deeper philosophical concept of ‘big U’ uncertainty itself, the underlying fundamental physical superposition of contradicting descriptions of the world (like wave-particle duality), which I call 'big P Paradox'.  But no.  He always dismisses this intrinsic uncertainty - never delves into it.  His bias is one that most scientists and philosophers share, and that human curiosity craves almost like a drug.  He is still looking for the 'bedrock' underlying reality.  He uses that word frequently.  He seems blind to that alternative view of physical and abstract 'Truth' that insists that there is no such bedrock (implicitly, fundamentally, not even in principle).

So, the series sticks to the goal of pursuing ‘Truth’ through interviews and conversations with some of the best thinkers of the day.  He moves back and forth across the gulf on both sides of an issue, contrasting a diverse array of seemingly competent and coherent arguments on each side, and leaves it at that.  Think of a man standing on a bulkheaded shoreline before a raging chaotic sea, pondering its fury (that intractable gulf between the opposing positions), and yet never once appearing to consider actually jumping in to experience it - to seek to come to terms with it.

The strength of this series, and the reason I strongly recommend it to others, is the quality of the people he interviews. There are exceptions.  He countenances a few crackpots, but I won't name names.  The greatest weakness of the series comes out when Kuhn can’t help but inject his personal biases, which are most evident in the topics of Consciousness and God.  I note that quite a few of the episodes are 'funded in part by' the John Templeton Foundation, which has a distinctly spiritual, even religious emphasis, though also an exemplary organization for pursuing critical thinking and embracing the role of the scientific process.

I was drawn to the series many years ago because of the Cosmos content. From my physicalist perspective, the other two foci (Consciousness and God) seem far inferior, of far less universal importance. For me, 'Cosmos' as a topic is Universal (more-or-less by default, actually), whereas I construe Consciousness and God as human-focused particulars that lie deep inside the Universal theme and, even then, as cherry-picked Western-culture-oriented members of a much larger set of such particulars.

To be sure, there is a perspective in which a metaphysical 'Consciousness' and/or a Supreme Creator Being stand on an equal footing with the scientific investigation of the Cosmos.  One can argue, and Kuhn frequently does, that if either of these two concepts/entities is fundamental, then all else subsumes to them.  Assuming one can define it adequately, consciousness could be viewed as fundamental using the old Descartes argument: "The only thing that is demonstrably real to me is my own thought".  Everything else that I experience is filtered through that processor known as 'mind'.  And, of course, a Creator God, if demonstrated to exist (think the Junior High School girl in a hyper-intelligent civilization in some higher universe who created our universe as a simulation for a School Science Fair Project), also trumps all other explanations of reality.

I highlighted the 'if' in the last paragraph.  One must necessarily choose their 'axioms' - the precepts that they decide are 'given' rather than subject to question - in order to construct any coherent system that describes reality.  To me, Consciousness, in particular, utterly fails as a foundational axiom.  I could go with either of the other two - Our Cosmos being physical or being a hyper-advanced civilization's or mind's experimental test of some hypothesis or other (or even just a video game).  But given that Consciousness has been shown to be the highly selective, error-prone, heavily processed internal narrative that the brain generates in order to cohesively direct its collective community of trillions of living cells toward best survival outcomes, it could hardly be considered fundamental.  Many aspects of the idea of 'self' and first-person experience cannot be generalized or described objectively (e.g. what does 'red' actually look like?).  Science takes great pains to remove the individual from the 'facts' through a process of reproducible experiment.  Even the oldest eastern faith traditions recognize the problems of individual 'attachment' and 'desire' as hindrances to achieving 'Truth'.  It seems to me that Western individualism is on the wrong track, and I would argue that only an ego-centrist, dare I say a Narcissist, would consider a specialized human mental function to have a fundamental role in reality.

Yes, there is that interesting 'Measurement Problem' in quantum mechanics, which posits that some as-yet-undefinable form of 'observer' is required to entangle itself with the system before an observable's 'wave function collapses' or its information is resolved within the observer's 'universe'.  I worded that last sentence very carefully because I think the best interpretations of this process only get us closer to the primacy of 'Big P Paradox' rather than any fundamental role for Consciousness.

Appalachian Trail thru-hike memoir - Live! on Amazon

Front cover

 

Footprints in the Wilderness: A Quest to Day-Hike the Appalachian Trail both ways in One Year: Wetzel, P.J.: 9798303387881: Amazon.com: Books

Big news - nearly twelve years in the making. I've finally published the memoir of my Appalachain Trail thru-hike. The actual hike began January 1, 2012, and I've been promising to publish a book ever since.

I also submitted the documentation of this hike to FastestKnownTime.com and it has been recognized as a record setting accomplishment--fastest known AT double (yo-yo) thru-hike. I'm very proud of that.

The book is 260 pages ALL in COLOR, with 150+ color photos and maps printed in 'premium color', so it is not cheap, but Amazon is offering it for sale at a pretty good discount as of the time of this post, so it might be a good time to order.

If you do order, and like the book, I would very much appreciate if you take the time to post a review at Amazon.

Also please pass the word (share this post) to any hiking friends and colleagues who might be interested. Thanks in advance!

A walk through the world of Brandon Sanderson

 

This quote, from Brandon Sanderson's epic fantasy "The Way of Kings" nearly perfectly connects my real world situation, as a solitary pilgrim on foot, with Sanderson's imagined epic Fantasy universe.

King Nohadon records that he walked more than a thousand miles from his presumed capital of Abamabar to the sacred city of Urithiru without companions and not revealing his identity.  He could have made the trip in an hour by 'Oathgate,' but his quest was about the journey, about getting to know the nature of his world, its people, and the land—to experience the grit and suffering of ordinary lives so that he could more wisely rule.

Nohadon was not just a great monarch; he was a sage and a pathfinder.  His published collection of forty parables, bearing the title that Sanderson chose for his novel, had survived 4,500 years through a period of recovery and reconstruction following an Armageddon-like war on the planet Roshar.  Most knowledge from the time before that apocalypse had been lost.  So Nohandon's book contained much of the surviving wisdom.

Nohadon ruled during the Age of Heralds, when Ishar, greatest among them, a human made immortal by the 'Almighty', organized the Knights Radiant to face the enemy species called Voidbringers, who call themselves the Singers.

Thing is ... the Singers are Roshar's native species.  Humans invaded here after destroying their home planet of Ashyn several thousand years before the time of Nohadon.  And of course, they then set about conquering the planet and enslaving the native population.

In the present day setting for the novel, all Singers had become subservient and nearly mute.  All except for a small band of free peoples called the Listeners, who live deep in a bleak region called the Shattered Plains.

The Listeners did not remember that humans existed.  The humans thought that all Singers had been fully subdued.  But now, after 4500 years of 'silence', the evil power of the god 'Odium' stirs again.  The Listeners are taking 'warform' and discussing re-conquering their world; and among humans, rumors are being whispered that the Knights Radiant may be returning ...

On the Shattered Plains, with a 'Highstorm' approaching, the human aristocrat warrior Dalinar Kholin faces off against Eshonai, leader of the tribe of Listeners. Work copyright by Tor.com and Michael Whalen.

"Way of Kings," published in 2010, is Brandon Sanderson's signature work, and the one for which he should be remembered.  The key to Sanderson's writing style is character point-of-view.  There is no absolute good or evil, and each character sees the world differently.  The reader is not made privy to the big picture, only what the characters know; and nobody seems to remember much or care much about the underlying mythopoeia, its magic powers, its gods, its hidden realms.  This is, for me, both a blessing and a curse.  But more about that later.

The cover art for the United States release, shown above, is a master-work in itself, from the artist Michael Whelan.  It features the geography of the Shattered Plains, and the epic meteorology—a phenomenon called the 'Highstorm' that is far beyond a simple thunderstorm.  It contains a spirit, called the Stormfather.  It both ravages the planet as it rakes across the land every few days, and restores the planet's pseudo-physical energy source, called Stormlight. 

"Way of Kings" was Sanderson's first novel in the Stormlight Archive series.  His plan is for ten books in this series and as many as 35 (possibly revised to 31 recently) set in his mythical universe called the Cosmere.  So far, he's written four Stormlight Archive books, the latest of which was just released in November 2020.

The books were recommended to me by my daughter and future son-in-law.  I just spent the last couple months reading all four.

So here's the thing.  These books average 400,000+ words apiece (close to 1300 pages).  No author can give 30+ books of that size the craftsmanship that they need.  I strongly recommend "Way of Kings" because it is Sanderson's Magnum Opus—the book he always wanted to write and the one that he spent more than a decade perfecting.  He originally finished it in 2002 before he had any books published. In that original version, his hero, Katahdin [who he misspells as 'Kaladin'], was an aspiring knight.  After he finished writing the first of Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time" books, twelfth in the overall series, which he was asked to complete posthumously, he then returned to "Way of Kings" with a new understanding of Jordan's strength in presenting a world from various character points of view, and rewrote it from scratch, giving Katahdin a far more interesting character arc [though he continues to misspell the name].

Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time" series is the epitome of an author filling pages to sell books.  Read his first couple of books in that series, and maybe Sanderson's last three, but run, don't walk, away from the ones in the middle.

But I digress.  Sanderson's second book in the Stormlight Archive series, "Words of Radiance," came out in 2014.  I found it also to be great fun.  It was the one that sold best, vaulting to a NYT bestseller almost immediately based on the reception of "Way of Kings".  But "Words of Radiance" begins to show signs of hasty writing and worse, of writing character studies using what I call 'Board Meeting' scenes to fill pages rather than advance the plot.  In the third novel, "Oathbringer" the stuff I consider filler and fluff overwhelmed the story, seriously bogging it down, and I would not recommend it.  "Rhythm of War", the fourth book, is a little better, with some action and interesting plot twists mixed in with the board meetings, and it has a decent climax; but it suffers most from the curse of 'hasty' plotting and writing.  (In the interest of keeping this post reasonably tidy, I'm not offering any supporting detail here.)  Sanderson is no longer just an author sitting at a keyboard.  He has become a novel manufacturing industry.

My recommendation, and this is advice I am now going to begin taking myself, is to seek out the one or two books that made an author famous and read only those.  They are the best because they are the stories that the author really slaved over, agonized over, took pains to perfect.  It is writing that managed to overcome the overwhelming odds against an unknown author getting published, and then to break out of the crowd even among those titles that publishers took a chance on.

Sanderson has accumulated a huge fan base who will now consume everything he writes; and to his credit, he is producing good stories with interesting characters.  And he is keeping publisher deadlines.  He's a hard worker and has that grand vision to produce perhaps the largest unified collection of works ever set in a single imagined universe.

Good on him.  But for me, as a choosy consumer, there are other brilliant talents whose stories and writing style are just as worthy if not more so; and my reading time is limited.  I've chosen not to read any more of Sanderson's works, and I've now moved on to Patrick Rothfuss's "The Name of the Wind" also on the recommendation of my daughter and her fiancée.  From there, I'll move on to seek out breakthrough Sci-Fi and Fantasy works from other new shining stars.

Rothfuss, by the way, is apparently the polar opposite of Sanderson in terms of productivity.  Published in 2007, "Name of the Wind" was envisioned as a trilogy, and the second installment was released in 2011; but his editor/publisher Betsy Wolheim is pissed.  She doesn't think he's written anything since 2014, and has not seen a word of the third book ten years on.  It seems to me that Rothfuss has been distracted by his fame, much as, I believe, George R.R. Martin is.

Okay, so now, lastly, I want to spend a little time examining the value of Sanderson's writing technique, using limited character points of view (POV), which, crucially, he uses to justify withholding big picture information that other characters (non-POV characters) know.  Even when he writes from the POV of his most knowledgeable characters (notably the 'worldhopper' Hoid, known as Wit on Roshar), he conveniently makes them 'insane' or deliberately enigmatic.  The reader gets manipulated like a puppet on a string.  And I deeply dislike being manipulated.  It's a control thing.  The reader discovers the world only as the author chooses to reveal it.  That's a 'DUH' kind of statement, but when I, as reader, keep getting bludgeoned by the author's obvious evasiveness, rather than feeling like the plot is flowing naturally, then I rebel.  At its best, this writing strategy as applied in the first book, "Way of Kings", feels fresh, like we are discovering the ways of the world as the characters discover them.  At its worst, in the many manifestations of politics-oriented and/or power-juggling board meetings, I feel disrespected as a reader.  I'm left hanging, with unspoken and unfathomable character relationships and motivations.  I'm confused and bewildered by an endless parade of new powers, new rules of magic, and newly revealed beings/spirits, all of which seem ad hoc, only partially explained, deliberately obfuscated, or just hinted at, until I'm left wondering whether it's worth muddling on.

I'll give one basic example - the origin story.  Sanderson's world-building is meticulous, unrivaled in its variety and detail; but the depth of his universe is far weaker than its breadth.  The underlying creation story is vague and vaguer.  The world supposedly began with a thing called Adonalsium, which could be a person, a force, or something else.  Nobody knows.  Strangely, none of the religious thinkers and scholars that Sanderson depicts have anything useful to say about it ( ... really?).  Adonalsium apparently interacts with the universe through a set of four primal commands, called Dawnshards, which must be invoked by a command ('abra-cadabra') and with intent - i.e. to accomplish a task ... like, say, the Creation.  What are these four commands?  Well, only one has even been identified.  The one called 'Change'.  There is no information in the Sanderson officially maintained encyclopedia, regarding the other three ... or rather, the information declares that they are unknown.

That world, as its inhabitants experience it, was the result of Adonalsium being attacked by a mob of mortals and shattered, using those Dawnshards, into sixteen 'Shards,' each with a portion of the original power.  Sixteen people from the mob adopted/absorbed those powers and became the first immortal 'Vessels' of the powers; and all the conflict and intrigue that Sanderson writes about can be traced back to the various plots and schemes of these Vessels and their inherent Shard powers, each of which is different.  Four of the original sixteen Shards have been killed (splintered), two have combined into a hybrid within one person, and only three (including one of the dead ones) have any relevance at all (so far) in the realm of the Stormlight Archive series.  Two others have some sway on other worlds, four others are named but without supplying anything other than the name, and two have not even been named, only hinted at in vague terms such as 'one that is hiding and just wants to survive' or one that may be related to Wisdom or Prudence.

Sanderson's stories are all about the power mongering and politics of interaction between the Shards, and the complex set of rules governing what powers their Vessels give to lesser creatures that the Shards create and manipulate, almost always for their own benefit.  The complexity is bewildering, to say the least.  It's great for the Sanderson devotee, not so much fun for a more casual reader.

Sanderson apparently does 'know' a lot more than he's revealing.  Okay, fine.  He's trying to sell books.  A three- (formerly seven-) book series called Dragonsteel, planned for far in the future, will be about the Shattering of Adonalsium, but that is not going to be released until he is finished with all ten of the Stormlight Archive books.  The next one, the fifth, is planned for a 2023 release.  By the time he gets around to writing Dragonsteel I'll be long dead.  What are the chances that he'll actually ever accomplish such a grand plan?  Honestly, I think it's a long shot.

Review of 'Now' - a proposal about time and the human soul

Now - The Physics of Time by Richard A. Muller
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Do humans have souls? Do they transcend our physical bodies? Why does Richard A. Muller spend a significant fraction of the text of this new popular level book about the physics of time discussing this?

The answer seems to simply be that the question of whether he has a soul is one that is dear to the author’s heart. I’ve tried to figure out if there is any link between this subject and the main purpose of the book but I failed.

The primary purpose of the book is to introduce a new and still speculative theory of Muller’s that our sense of ‘now’ and of our involuntary ‘motion’ along the arrow of time is a result of new time being created moment to moment. We ‘travel’ to this new time and occupy it as it is created, and the old time becomes the past. The future really does not exist, as it is not yet created.

I like the idea. It feels right to me, and Muller proposes a few thoughts about how his theory might be falsified. But it is early days—way too soon to tell whether this or alternate hypotheses might be the path to better understanding the mystical and perplexing nature of time in our reality.

Muller is an experimentalist, and he repeatedly insists that theoretical physics—manipulating equations using advanced math—is a waste of time unless the resulting theory is rooted in the physical world in such a way that it can be tested. Indeed he gets rather curmudgeonly about it in places. His belittling of 1933 Nobel Prize winner Paul Dirac is rather unbecoming and speaks more about Muller than Dirac.

Setting that aside as an anomaly, or as hasty writing and editing, I found most of Muller’s book a fascinating read. It carefully develops and clearly explains the physics relevant to our understanding of time. Einstein’s relativity is explained and the subsequent development of quantum physics and its various interpretations are explained well.

Then in Part IV of the book he goes on this strange walk-about into ‘not-physics’. I call it that because that is really his point. Things that are ‘not-physics’—not science—are real and are important.

Despite the disconnect with the rest of the book, it’s a point worth making, and I’m glad he made it, and I guess I understand why it’s in this book. If Muller had written a book devoted entirely to his untestable beliefs and perceptions (his favorite example is “what does ‘blue’ look like?”) nobody would take it seriously, and probably no publisher would even consider it. At least this way he gets his message in print.

And yes, it feels like he’s preaching here in Part IV. His main point is succinctly summarized by this quote from page 266:

“Physics itself is not a religion. It is a rigorous discipline, with strict rules about what is considered proven and unproven. But when this discipline is presumed to represent all of reality, it takes on aspects of religion. … The dogma that physics encompasses all reality has no more justification than the dogma that the Bible encompasses all truth.”

I agree. Muller argues that there is a huge body of knowledge that is not testable, but which nevertheless guides us successfully through our daily lives. (‘My boss hates chocolate’ is an example of such knowledge.) The target audience of his argument is the not inconsiderable group of physicists who ascribe to Physicalism/Reductionism—the idea that there is nothing real beyond what can be observed and characterized using science.

I guess if there is a connection between his beliefs and Physics it comes from the fact that science has proven that some things cannot be observed and characterized, even in principle. He runs with the idea that reality is not amenable to logic or experiment (for example, the delicious paradox that there is no such thing as simultaneity of an event to different observers and yet quantum fields collapse instantaneously everywhere in the observed universe, to use an example relevant to the rest of this book) and uses it to justify injecting unprovable belief systems into that void.

Such as believing that he has a soul. By ‘soul’ Muller specifically means the “I” that processes and acts upon physical inputs to the body—the ‘location’ of the mind.

Muller has a peculiar fear of Star Trek style-beaming, or cloning. He asks “would the re-assembled physical body be ‘me’”? I find this odd, given that, as he points out, our current body consists of almost no atoms that we were originally made of. I think where he went wrong is thinking that the “I” is somehow sacrosanct. I believe that I would be a different “me” if I drove to Cleveland vs. if I didn’t.

That brings up another point that Muller insists on. He is convinced that humans have ‘free will’. Personally, I think exercising my free will by choosing to drive to Cleveland tells all that needs to be told. No, seriously. Free will is not an absolute. We have choices, but we are denied most that we might imagine and many more that God might have.

Regardless, I have no true objection to Muller’s beliefs, or to his inclusion of them in this book. From my perspective, that void of logic stands at the very core of reality and defines it. The universe, via its Big Bang, has emerged from it as an island of simple objective rule-following processes, but they are not fundamental, and physicists are now finally beginning to realize that. Life emerged as an island of self-replicating, self-preserving information (DNA), but it is no more fundamental than the universe it happens to find itself in. Its massive complexity does seem amenable to effectively tapping into the ‘free will’ fountain flowing from the quantum field. The emergence of useful information out of incoherent, indifferent uncertainty is what life does best. And that achievement is worth celebrating—worth formulating any number of religious beliefs around. But outside of our safe, limited realm, in the incomprehensible chaos of the vacuum, it is Paradox that rules supreme.



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Hiking among the Amish, and curious about their culture

The Riddle of Amish Culture by Donald B. Kraybill
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I grew up in the late 50's and 60's in SE Pennsylvania at the fringes of Amish country. It was a rare sight to see an Amish horse and buggy in those days. Last week, on a beautiful autumn Sunday, driving a seven mile stretch of PA 372 southwest of Lancaster, heading to a hike of the Mason-Dixon Trail, I lost count after passing more than two dozen buggies.

It was probably visiting Sunday, not a church Sunday. I could not have reached that conclusion had I not just finished reading Donald Kraybill's comprehensive documentary about the enigmatic ways of the Amish people.

I had been away from the area for fifty years and just recently returned to help my Mom and Dad during and after my Dad's final illness. The Amish population had multiplied seven-fold in those years. With such a significant presence around me, I thought it would be worthwhile to read up on these people in order to get a quick education on 'what makes them tick'. Kraybill's book was recommended, by name, within the fictional text of 'The Atonement' by Beverly Lewis, a novel about an Amish woman with a secret past (see the review below). The book has wonderfully filled many of the gaps in my understanding. It is a comprehensive resource, and I recommend it.

What this book will not do is give you any understanding about what it feels like to be Amish, or what their day-to-day life is like. For that I believe Lewis's 'The Atonement' provided a good glimpse.  What Kraybill's book does is provide an academician's clinical, scholarly perspective on the culture and beliefs of this sect that has successfully remained separate from the American mainstream but yet has managed to integrate smoothly into the greater society whose values it largely rejects.

Kraybill's main purpose seems to be to explain how the Amish have managed to do that, how they have maintained a viable community on their own terms despite prohibiting education beyond the 8th grade, despite avoiding owning automobiles, despite prohibiting electricity in their homes, and despite becoming a major tourist attraction for the region.

In a nutshell, the Amish do change and adapt to changing times and technology. While hiking I would frequently see Amish in their farm fields pulling modern farm implements with draft horses, as many as six and eight.  The wheels on those implements are always steel, not rubber.  I could clearly hear the sound of a gasoline engine, mounted on the implement, operating the machinery.  When driving past an Amish farm there are no electric wires running from power poles on the street, but their pastures are encircled with electric fences.  Propane tanks are prominent beside the large, neat homes.  And I frequently would hear the sound of a large generator humming beside the barn.

The changes to the Amish 'Ordnung,' their strict oral code of conduct, are selective, slow to evolve, and made to balance their deeply ingrained 'Gelassenheit' (humility), their mandate to separate themselves from modern ways, and their literal interpretation of biblical canon, with the practical reality that they need to make a living.  I won't provide 'spoilers' by explaining further. Suffice it to say that Kraybill manages to very successfully 'crack the code' or solve the Riddle.

The book is a 2001 update of the original 1989 volume. It is about time for another update. Though the Amish seem to be thriving, the Lancaster settlement continues to face challenges, not the least of which is their burgeoning, indeed exploding, population. The average Amish family has six to eight children. Their population doubles with each new generation. All these new 'plain folk' need to make a living. Traditionally they were farmers, but God's not making more land, and suburban development around Lancaster is raising land values and turning farm land into housing subdivisions.

Bottom line: The fate of the Amish Culture remains uncertain. Their story is an ongoing, dynamic one, and it's fascinating. They are adapting to the twenty-first century in some surprising ways, and Kraybill provides an excellent guide to understanding these sometimes enigmatic practices. His 2001 edition remains relevant and highly informative, but for how much longer?

 

* * *

The Atonement by Beverly Lewis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Lucy Flaud is Old Order Amish from Lancaster County PA. She is single and 25, almost too old to marry, and she holds no hope of ever finding love. She harbors a deep secret so shameful that she does all she can to avoid thinking about it. What she knows is that this secret disqualifies her from ever being worthy of happiness. She has not taken communion for nearly a year. When her long time close friend Toby asks to court her, she refuses, both in person and in writing.

We learn that Lucy's shameful past involves a relationship with an 'Englisher,' a worldly outsider. That relationship is over but now she seems to be getting dangerously familiar with another outsider.

As the story unfolds we follow Lucy's frantic attempts to drown her painful memories in selfless volunteer service, yet events keep prying open her self-imposed seal on the subject of her past.

Author Beverly Lewis has written dozens of novels describing various facets of Amish life. I cannot say from personal experience whether her characters and their actions and their language are true to form but they certainly appear to reflect the self-effacing 'Gelassenheit' mindset that dominates Amish culture, their heavy emphasis on family bonds, their mistrust of the ways of the outside world, their unshakable work ethic, and their humble, abiding Christian faith. I picked up this book because I'm currently living in and hiking through the sprawling Lancaster Settlement and wanted to begin to explore the culture of these distinctive people.

Regardless of whether Lewis is faithfully depicting the culture, her story is a page-turner. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I recommend it without qualification and hope to read more of her work.

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Grandma Gatewood, new book about the AT legend



Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail by Ben Montgomery
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Where has this book been? Why hadn't some Appalachian Trail junkie not already written it? It's hard to fathom why the saga of Grandma Gatewood and her pioneering 1955 Appalachian Trail thru-hike has not been turned into a stand-alone book before now. And from my perspective as an avid hiker and an Appalachian Trail thru-hiker myself, it's a little disappointing that, when the tale finally was told, it was not by one of 'us' in the fraternity. It took an enterprising but non-hiking reporter to find and fill this gap in Appalachian Trail lore.

Fortunately Ben Montgomery was up to the task. Despite starting as an 'outsider' with no demonstrated attachment to the Appalachian Trail or to the hiker culture that bonds all of us who have lived the experience, Mr. Montgomery did his homework. As a result this book is a first rate documentary.

What Montgomery lacked in hiking experience he made up for with his well-honed skills as a Pulitzer Prize nominated reporter. He sought out Emma Gatewood's surviving children, gained access to her hand-written journals and accounts of her hike. He dug into the fascinating, gripping story of the pre-trail life of this remarkable woman. And he went to the trail and walked in her footsteps--at least enough to begin to understand: He climbed Katahdin, and he even visited Mt. Oglethorpe, which was the southern terminus of the trail in 1955 when 67 year old Emma Gatewood undertook her historic walk.

Were I to have written this book, it would have been tempting to take the facts and extrapolate--to try to get into Emma Gatewood's mind as she experienced her hike, to empathize more with her love of nature, of solitude, of the pure joy of being free of her extraordinary 'real-life' burdens -- the daily grind of raising eleven children and dealing with an abusive husband. The book I would have written would have been infused with much more emotional immediacy. But Ben Montgomery scrupulously avoided taking this route. It's the reporter's instinct, I'm sure, and I have to praise him for taking this course. He stuck to the facts -- presumably closely paraphrasing Ms. Gatewood's written journal and resisting all temptation to embellish or read between the lines. As a result, I find myself trusting the story completely. There's no whiff of 'historical fiction' here.

Grandma Gatewood in her eighties, reproduced from 'Hiking the Appalachian Trail', James R. Hare, ed., 1975

Did Emma Gatewood 'Save the Appalachian Trail' as the subtitle claims? This is my greatest complaint about the book. I think that claim is hyperbole. I think it's there to sell books. Montgomery briefly makes his case near the end of the book with a peculiar 'straw man' sort of argument. He points to the claims that Ed Garvey, and his highly successful, widely read 'Appalachian Hiker: Adventure of a Lifetime' was the turning point in public awareness of the trail. Then he uses a weak, cherry-picked statistic to knock down this straw man.

In my opinion no one individual 'saved the trail', and Montgomery presents no evidence that the trail even needed saving. True, it had fallen into relative neglect and disrepair during WWII when people had more important things to expend their energy doing. But it was the organic evolution of American culture after the war--the same mindset that popularized Frodo Baggins's epic hike to destroy the Ring of Power--that made the AT what it is today. Naturally the early thru-hikers played an especially prominent role. The title of 'savior of the trail' surely could be more appropriately bestowed on Earl Shaffer or Gene Espy, whose hikes preceded Emma Gatewood's by seven years and four years respectively, and who were both very active supporters and proponents of the trail after their hikes.

Hyberbole aside, Emma Gatewood is a memorable character - destined to be a larger-than-life legend if she isn't already. And she deserves it for multiple reasons. She was sixty-seven years old when she accomplished her feat. She did something no female of any age had done before. She has a compelling, even heart-wrenching personal background, and she undertook her hike with a sort of back-to-nature minimalism that is reminiscent of an ascetic monk on a holy pilgrimage - ultra-cheap, ultra-simple gear, no maps, spending just $200 during the 146 day trek.

Thank you, Ben Montgomery, for telling this story, for bringing it to the public at large in the most professional manner possible. If 'Wild' was worth making into a movie, then surely the story of Emma 'Grandma' Gatewood is too. And I'll be first in line at the theater on opening day.

Meanwhile I highly recommend the book.



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Reinventing the Novel: Thoughts on Publishing in the 21st Century

(Updated September 2023)

When the 'Novel' isn't novel any more ...

... where do we turn for the bright ideas that can reinvigorate this fading art form?  The surprising answer: to the very technology that's destroying it.  And no, I'm not talking about AI - just the opposite - the exploitation of real human intelligence--that of the author.

Nor am I talking about eBooks here.  I'm talking a complete revolution in the way we think about publishing.  It's a revolution that has already begun, though the battle lines and alliances are shifting so rapidly that it seems almost impossible to imagine the final outcome.  But that's what I'm here to attempt to do.

Books are quaint old things--nothing but bulky lumps of stained wood fiber that lost their revolutionary status half a millennium ago once the world embraced Guttenberg's movable type.  Yet they live on.  Honestly, sometimes it amazes me that the simple paper book has outlived the vinyl record and the floppy disc as staples in the average person's household.  The latter two are information devices with roughly similar storage density as books but with far better interconnectivity, yet they are museum pieces today.  What's the deal?  Books don't connect with anything but the reader's mind.  To call any book 'novel' in this digital age is, to say the least, a stretch.

The term has become an oxymoron.  The word 'novel' comes from the Latin 'novellus', diminutive of 'novus', meaning 'new'.  A novel is literally 'a little something new'.  My obsolete ten-pound door-stop known as Webster's Third New International Dictionary, unabridged, 1986, defines the noun 'novel' as "an invented prose narrative ..."

Invented ... an invented work of prose narrative.  An author has a 'light bulb moment' and proceeds to turn it into an epic tale, as George R.R. Martin did when the idea of a set of siblings adopting wild dire-wolf pups became his mega-successful 'Game of Thrones' franchise.

Thomas Edison, I think, gets the credit for connecting invention and light bulbs in our cultural vernacular.  And ironically it was another Edison invention--the phonograph--that began the novel's slow decline as an art form.

Before there were books, the "invented prose narrative" was the exclusive purview of the storyteller.  What Johannes Gutenberg did for the written word, Edison did for the spoken.  Suddenly the oral storyteller was back in business.  Cold, impersonal black-and-white print now had an equally distributable competitor with value added: voice inflection, sound effects, even musical accompaniment.

If "video killed the radio star," then radio surely killed the novel, no?  If audio was the first nail in the novel's coffin, then today's cheap, ubiquitous, digital multi-media must certainly have cremated the novel and scattered its ashes to the four winds.

Not exactly.  Here's the case for the defense--exhibit A:  Long before Gutenberg, books had already proven their potential for supplemental content.  Cloistered monks devoted their lives to creating heavily illuminated volumes--visual works of art of highest caliber, complete with multi-color illustrations.

"But," the dour prosecutor raises a pointed finger and remonstrates, "illustrations cannot properly be considered 'narrative', and certainly not 'prose'."

"Sir," the defense calmly responds, "Have you heard of the 'graphic novel'?"

We'll leave the little courtroom dramatization hanging there, with that last parry as a rhetorical question -- 'question as answer'.  Even before the digital revolution, professional critics such as our prosecutor were already forging coffin nails and holding wakes: "The Death of the Novel !!!" they proclaimed. These pundits played at parsing definitions (such as the definition of "narrative"), setting up straw-man criteria for judging what is and is not a novel so they could create a sensational 'headline' and sell an article to a broadsheet.  Even today that practice continues - see this recent high-brow essay by Will Self.

I'll tell you what I think of people who parse definitions for a living.  For one thing, they're not novelists.  They do the opposite of inventing prose, they eviscerate it.  In addition to the light bulb and the phonograph, the 19th century saw the invention of the term 'scientist' (in 1834), whereupon the art of parsing all aspects of reality went rampant and even acquired its own name: reductionism.

This was the dawn of the 'age of the expert' - an apparently short lived era in which a 'credential' in a narrow field of specialty was required to express a worthy opinion, and during which the generalist/naturalist (the Renaissance man) lost favor.  I argue that we have, thankfully for the field of the "invented prose narrative", entered the 'post-expert era': a term I first heard used by Amy Luers just this year (June 2014).



Screen shot from Google.com, showing the relative frequency of use of the word 'Expert' over time.

Cheap, ubiquitous, real-time digital multi-media has democratized public discourse.  The emergence of sophisticated AI tools such as ChatGPT have made textual information nearly worthless as a stand-alone product.  The expert's perspective is drowned and marginalized beneath the din.  And the same chaos threatens the extinction of the novel by engulfing it in creative alternatives.

That is, unless the Novel can become novel once again.  Unless the "invented prose narrative" can be re-invented.

The medieval monks cloistered in their cells with pen and parchment pointed the way to comic books and graphic novels.  Journeyman actors and actresses take night work recording audio-books.  High-profile screen-writers/directors turn novels into blockbuster movies and television series.  Cross-pollination is good.

So here is my idealized seven-part 21st-century publishing plan for my epic fantasy/sci-fi novel 'Eden's Womb':

1. Small installments.  Instead of starting by doing any sort of static 'publishing' of a 'book', the author releases the novel a chapter at a time and adds value from there.

2. Free.  The reader can partake of valuable content completely free.  Readers will not even be distracted by advertisements on the page.  Purely free, no strings.  This is part of a 'loss-leader' or 'market seeding' strategy applied in an unprecedented direction.  See item 5 below.

3. Multi-media.  The blog posts will include not only text but illustrations, videos, links to external content, to an index and to appendix and glossary pages.  Among the videos could be the author reading from the manuscript and/or offering commentary.

4. Interactive.  Each installment will be dynamic--changing to add new content.  Fans can contribute artwork, videos and written commentary, including questions, critiques, and suggestions for improvement.  There will be contests and giveaways and other promotions.  Courses could be created and taught, covering topics from world building to individual characters to plot analysis.  The author goes on speaking tours, appearing live at book signings, gets on podcasts, approaches media providers of all kinds about interviews.  Here is where the human element will always out-compete the growing competition from AI.

5. Subscription based:  As demand develops, further installments or advance views may be made available first through subscription on a 'members only' section of the web site.  Note that major software publishing has converted from packaged CDs to monthly subscription.  

6. Branded.  'Eden's Womb' will not just be the title of a novel.  It will be a brand.  The paperback book will be one of a suite of products, and not the first one.  As/when demand develops, other merchandise will be produced--t-shirts, decals, action figures, etc. etc.  Sale of the rights to a movie producer is, of course, a significant part of this.

7. Entrepreneurial.  A successful novel becomes an ongoing enterprise.  But if less successful, the modest start-up (a domain name and web site, social media presence, etc.) need not cost the author a penny.

Now, here's the reality check.  The above seven steps comprise an occupation, a business, a 'brand name'.  It involves a lot of hard work and a lot of common sense that goes far beyond skills at writing prose.  Typically, start-up businesses like this fail 80% of the time.  There are plenty of entrepreneurs out there eager to 'help' you market and promote your work for a fee, or to help you to learn to do so yourself through courses and coaching.  The opportunities to throw money at the problem are boundless and any you use need to be carefully evaluated beforehand.

So ... why has the print book remained a (barely, and admittedly fading) commercially viable commodity while the vinyl disc has dwindled?  Why do we remain so enamored with the old-fashioned printed word--so nostalgically loyal to a half-millennium-old technology?  My short answer is that there's something very fundamental about symbolic expression that defines us as civilized humans.  Symbols have 'magic' - a real-world sort of magic that is emergent, entirely different from the impact of spoken words, and shrouded in the mystery of human consciousness.

Will the magic last?  Will the print book survive to see the 22nd century?  With the seven-part strategy that I've outlined above, an author can hedge bets while still embracing the newest developments.  Novel becomes hyper-novel.  Seems like a fun idea to play with.  It's an experiment--an epic adventure in its own right.  And I welcome you to come along for the ride.

Cracking the code of the 'Game of Thrones'

In what key is the 'Song of Ice and Fire' composed?  No minor key, that's for certain.

I've just finished a six week 'total immersion' experience, reading all five available books in George R.R. Martin's famous fantasy novel series, 'A Song of Ice and Fire'.

This was an epic adventure, and I'm not just talking about the plot.  It was quite a feat of reading.  We're talking about plowing through five volumes--roughly 1000 pages each--in 42 days.  I estimate that I read 40,000 words a day.

And now that I've 'finished' - meaning only that I've caught up to the present (the series has two more books yet to be released) - I'm here to report some of my reactions to what I read as well as some insights into the man behind this truly epic project.

What I write here is not exactly a book review, but it's not exactly not a book review either.  Specifically, it's a list of seven subjective, sometimes off-beat observations.  Let's call it "Seven Keys to the Seven Kingdoms": a look into the dungeons and secret passages in the hidden, unexpected underbelly beneath the castle--the untold 'story behind the story'.

There's a lot of buzz about author George R.R. Martin right now, coming in conjunction with the October 28th 2014 release of his Christmas-gift-worthy coffee-table-book, The World of Ice and Fire: The Untold History of Westeros and The Game of Thrones.  Martin has given several new interviews, both in print and on TV.  Here's a link to a fine fifteen-minute interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos broadcast late last week.

The headline of the ABC interview provides the first of the unexpected keys:

1.  George R.R. Martin had his first 'fifteen minutes of fame' long before he started writing 'Game of Thrones'.  He made his first TV appearance in 1987, four years before he even conceived of the 'Song of Ice and Fire' novels.  It happened as a result of his position as one of four screen-writers of the short-lived TV series 'Beauty and the Beast'.  He made a cameo appearance sitting in a restaurant chomping a cheeseburger while reading one of his own books.

In the Stephanopoulos interview, Martin says that it took eight takes to get the scene right--that meant eight big chomps on a soggy, luke-warm, microwaved cheeseburger.

The larger take-away point from this:  George R.R. Martin did not just burst on the scene out of nowhere.  He had been writing and publishing novels since the early 1970's and when his career in fiction stalled, he became a reasonably successful Hollywood screen writer.  Then in 1991 he had the germ of inspiration for the 'Ice and Fire' novels ... and that leads to the next interesting observation ...

2.  'The Song of Ice and Fire' sold before even two percent of it was written.  This proved to be a bad idea, in my opinion.  Though he never intended to do so, Martin played 'bait and switch' with his eager publisher.  Here's more detail:  After writing just the first 100 pages of the first novel and a two page general summary of the rest of the plot, Martin sent his agent out to seek a publisher.  The result: four different major publishing houses bid on it.  He had a contract and a commitment, but hardly any actual written manuscript.  He naively told his chosen publisher that he might take a year to get out the first book.  Three years later (1995) he finally delivered the first volume, 'Game of Thrones'.  And twenty-five years later we're still waiting on the sixth and seventh volumes ('The Winds of Winter' and 'A Dream of Spring').  This leads to another unexpected point ...

3.  After 1.85 million words, nothing is resolved.  For God's sake, the Christian Bible only took 783,137 words (KJV) to tell a pretty epic story in its entirety.  Yet after more than twice that length, Martin still leaves a dozen or more plot lines hanging at the end of the fifth book.  This is the result of his decision to follow the points of view of so many different primary characters.  The result ...

4.  You can't tell the players without a scorecard.  The scope and ambition of this saga is unprecedented, as far as I know, in the entire history of alternate-world fiction.  By Martin's rough count, he has written roughly 1000 characters into the story, all of which have back-story and entanglements with the main characters and with each other.  Each of the five volumes published thus far has an extended appendix--an organized list of the characters and their relationships.  These are EIGHTY PAGE rosters, consisting of nothing but lists of names.

I chose to read the books without referring to those lists.  If I didn't remember who somebody was (which happened often), I just assumed they weren't important enough to matter.  That made some of the multi-page stretches of political scheming rather tedious if not downright boring but ... surprise ... it didn't cause me to lose the important threads of the plot.

My take-away reaction: Martin could have written a 'normal' sized novel with far fewer characters on the page and, in my opinion, it would have been tighter, cleaner, crisper, with better pace.  Would I use the word 'bloated' to describe the product as written?  Would I do that?  Nahhhhh.  The readers adore Martin's attention to detail and the depth of the story as it is.  The avid fans love being immersed in all the political nuances and intricacies.  That these books continue to increase in popularity with every new release tells all that needs to be told.  There will be an honored place in the history of literature for this work.

One wonders whether some future author will try to outdo this feat.  Just imagine ... !  Imagine an appendix the size of the New York City phone book.

For Martin, the characters and their entanglements matter more than anything.  He once said that his ultimate aim in writing was to explore the internal conflicts that define the human condition, and he described that as the only reason to read any literature, regardless of genre.  So ...

5.  The fantasy elements were (practically) afterthoughts.  Yes, Martin's prime inspiration came from his dual-middle-initial counterpart J.R.R. Tolkien, but this little tidbit intrigued me:  At one point during the writing, Martin was not going to include dragons.  It took the prompting of a writer friend, Phyllis Eisenstein (to whom he dedicated the third book) to change his mind:  "George, it's a fantasy - you've got to put in the dragons."

Martin himself has said that early in the process he was considering it as just a pseudo-historical-fiction story modeled after the War of the Roses - what I'd call a medieval soap opera.  And in my opinion 90% of the final product remains that--not Fantasy but historical-style fiction.  The themes of family and power far outweigh the impact of magic and supernatural elements.  Even Tolkien's influence on Martin largely comes from the quirky post-climax ending of the Lord of the Rings trilogy - the tale of the 'Scouring of the Shire' where gritty, uncomfortable reality trumped the simple good-wins-out-over-evil paradigm of the primary plot.  Martin likes to keep his readers uncomfortable (in suspense) regarding the fate of their 'favorite' characters.  And this preference goes back to some of his earliest writing experiences ...

6.  The key word is not Ice, not Fire, but Blood.  Martin relates that as part of a high school essay assignment he rewrote the last scene of Edgar Allen Poe's 'The Pit and the Pendulum' to create a hideous bloody ending where the victim is slashed by the pendulum and dies in a pool of blood.  Subsequently the rats come and eat out his eyes as the body festers.  Sound familiar?  His teacher praised his originality, and that positive reinforcement, coming as it did during those vulnerable formative years, has stuck with him to this day.

In my review of the first volume, which appears elsewhere on this blog, I noted that Martin manages to include a bloody element in virtually every scene.  One of the things that I did as I read, beginning with the second book, was to circle every occurrence of the word 'blood'.  On average it shows up at least once per page.  It seems almost an obsession with him.

Martin has stated that he wants his novels to have the 'gritty feel of historical fiction', and he succeeds at that. Uncomfortable cruelty is a common theme throughout the books, with characters who seem critical to the story being brutalized, maimed, and/or just plain killed off.  Furthermore, almost every significant character has some fatal flaw that, if it doesn't actually kill them, leads to bad decisions with major negative consequences.  And underlying all that real 'grit' is the ubiquitous greasy slime of blood.

The unexpected, often brutally sudden twists in plot come so often that - well - you begin to expect them.  But let us hope that one particular unexpected twist does not happen ...

7.  The mortality issue.  There are three epic fantasy authors who have projects of seven books length or more who were born within 1 1/2 months of one another in the fall of 1948:  George R.R. Martin, Robert Jordan (whose endorsement helped 'Game of Thrones' become a success), and me (audacious, aren't I?).  We're no longer young.  We're on Medicare--we are officially senior citizens.  I'm doing okay--I exercise regularly, have a Body Fat percentage around fifteen, and seem to have good genes.  Both my father and mother remain alive and in decent health in their 92nd years of life.  Martin, on the other hand, is 100 pounds overweight.   And Robert Jordan did not survive long enough to go on Medicare.  He passed away in 2007, leaving his epic 'Wheel of Time' series unfinished.  On his blog, back in 2009, George R.R. Martin wrote:

"After all, as some of you like to point out in your emails, I am sixty years old and fat, and you don't want me to 'pull a Robert Jordan' on you and deny you your book. Okay, I've got the message. You don't want me doing anything except A Song of Ice and Fire. Ever. (Well, maybe it's okay if I take a leak once in a while?)"

Just so long as you're not leaking blood, George.  Live long and prosper.

Hiking Moloka'i

Mokapu Island and Moloka'i's rugged north shore as seen from the Kalaupapa peninsula

Moloka'i (pronounced MO-lo-kah'-ee with a glottal stop--shut off all air output through your throat-- between the last two syllables) is one of the least visited and one of the most purely Hawaiian of the Hawai'i Island Chain.  I spent a week here in 1986 and several more days in 2009.  The memories are indelible.  And the best of them were experienced on foot, in places automobiles can't go.

On both visits I hiked the rambling undeveloped beaches of Kephui Beach and Papohaku Beach Park on the western end of the island, with views of Oahu just across the Kaiwi Channel:

Looking SW from Kephui Beach at sunset

 

Kephui Beach, looking N to the three lonely coconut palms

 

 

Sunset over Oahu, seen from Kephui Beach, western Moloka'i

And on both visits I walked the famous mule trail, which switches back and forth down a 1500 foot cliff to the inaccessible Leper Colony, home of the recently Sainted Father Damien, on the Kalaupapa Peninsula.  The trail starts at Pala'au State Park, famous for its sacred phallic rock, a place of pilgrimage for barren women, accessible via a quarter mile foot-only trail ...

... as well as the overlook to the Kalaupapa Peninsula and Awahua Beach:

The 2.9 mile trail does indeed descend the precipitous cliff you see in the foreground above and then follows alongside Awahua Beach, ending at the leper colony at Kalaupapa, the town in the forefront of the peninsula.  Here's a helicopter shot of the steep part of the trail taken from a post card followed by my own shot of the route of the trail, taken from the harbor area:

Most people travel this trail by mule, but I've done it four times now on foot -- twice down and twice up.

At the bottom, both times, I joined a tour of the leper colony where Father Damien served and ministered to the ill, eventually catching the disease himself and perishing.  He was canonized on October 11, 2009, just a month after these photos were taken:



Father Damien's grave beside St. Philomena Church in Kalawao

Panorama of Moloka'i's north shore with Okala Island at center

Father Damien mosaic beside St. Francis Church, Kalaupapa

Pristine Awahua Beach at the bottom of the 2.9 mile trail, accessible only by foot or mule

 

I won't extend this post into the other sights and cultural experiences on Moloka'i beyond pointing out my hands-down most authentic Island dining experience - If you stop at only one restaurant on Moloka'i, make it the Kualapu'u Cookhouse - a quaint little spot out in the country where locals gather for music every weekday evening, where the food is Island style with heaping portions, and the service is as laid back as you could hope for:

One of the books I found most helpful to understanding the natural beauty of Molokai was this one, chock full of color photos on every page, written by Ph.D. biological researchers who have scoured the island end to end.  My review is below:

Majestic Molokai: A Nature Lover's Guide by Cameron Kepler
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a coffee table book in the guise of an ordinary trade paperback. It is full of color photos on every page and text written by scientists who have spent a great deal of time doing wildlife surveys on Molokai and other Pacific Islands. They cover the Island end to end, with heavy emphasis on nature, though the culture and people are also featured. It's a fine insider's look at this most Hawaiian of the Hawaiian Islands.

I have spent nearly two weeks on Molokai on two separate trips twenty years apart, and bought this book on the first of these trips. My first hand experience dovetails with the experiences portrayed by the authors in pictures and text. Although the book is dated (nearly a quarter century old now), and therefore does not discuss some of the more recent issues such as the Molokai Ranch water rights and wind farm issues. But as a guide to the island's enduring culture and natural beauty, it's pretty much timeless. If you're thinking of visiting 'The Friendly Isle', especially if you're going to do some exploring, I'd recommend you pick up this book to help with your planning.

View all my reviews

Commuters - a delicious new novel by Patrick S. Lafferty

Patrick S. Lafferty has written a first class novel. Were I to categorize it—and that is not my strong suit—I’d call it a Suspense-Thriller-Murder Mystery, or perhaps an Occult Thriller that skims the fringes of both Historical Fiction and Fantasy. But those are only labels. What matters is that this is an engaging, pulse-quickening read from start to finish.

The only difference between ‘Commuters’ and some of the New York Times best sellers that I’ve read recently is that this imaginative, meticulously crafted story is better.

The plot lines of most novels, including the best sellers, have weaknesses that trigger my very sensitive “BS” alarm—that response in me that says ‘not plausible’ or ‘far too contrived.’ ‘Commuters’ triggered this alarm in only one respect: there were too many coincidences. But in response to this, Lafferty has an ‘out’: things are not all what they seem—supernatural forces are at work here. Regardless, for me stories such as these should not be trying to emulate the messy real world. Rather, they ought to strive to heighten reality, thus practicing the time-honored storyteller's art.

I can easily picture ‘Commuters’ becoming a Hollywood blockbuster. As the theater lights dim and the curtain rises, an opening prologue depicts a scene in a king's court from the year 1106 in the southern Iberian Peninsula. It is a ceremony of human sacrifice in the inner sanctum of the aging swart-skinned Sultan of Morocco, Yusuf ibn Tashfin and presided over by his fair skinned sorceress wife Zainab ben Ishaq al-Nafzawiyya. As Yusuf plunges a dagger into the victim’s heart, Zainab invokes the jinn, and these Islamic spirit-entities made of smokeless fire bestow immortality on the aged monarch—a covenant that must be renewed yearly with further human sacrifice.

As the credits finish rolling, the scene shifts to a deteriorating suburban center-town intersection where affluent Mitchell Treadwell, driving by in his BMW, notices his teenage son standing at the busy corner. They meet nearby at the curb and exchange a few inconsequential words. We hear Davis promising to be home in just a few minutes. The camera pans back as Mitchell drives away, then it follows Davis as he pulls his car keys from his pocket and walks into a dark alley, beyond which is a parking lot. A smaller man approaches. Words are exchanged. The man is soliciting sex. Davis refuses and continues toward his car. There is a scuffle, a blunt instrument slams against Davis’ temple and the screen goes dark.

This is how I imagine a screenplay writer might re-envision the opening of the story for big screen appeal. The written word requires a different tack, and it is not until 1/3 of the way through the book that the occult element begins to surface. Instead the book begins with this simple yet captivating sentence:

“Twenty-eight years ago Mitchell Treadwell witnessed his first murder. In just a few hours he’d witness his last.”

What follows is the well-crafted and suspenseful action that surrounds and interweaves Davis’ abduction with several recent murders and a tension-filled fender-bender at an urban intersection. We are introduced to the players and the stage. Key characters, richly realized by the author, are Mitchell Treadwell, his police-woman sister-in-law Connie Wysczyzewski, Jenkins, her jerk of a partner, two city detectives named Brown and Watts who are working on three dozen cold-case homicides that they suspect may all be related, a ghetto king-pin named Willie Spence, an old African-American community pillar who everyone calls ‘Uncle Max,’ and a peculiar obsessive suburban ‘road warrior’ named Andy Walker, whose prime goal in life seems to be nothing more than to be a flawless driver during his twice daily 50-minute commute to and from a mundane job across town.

During these introductory scenes we are almost left wondering who the central protagonist is going to be. But it soon becomes starkly clear. The affluent and respected businessman, Mitchell Treadwell, has a secret life. Here’s another quote, words spoken to Treadwell by Connie:

“Sometimes you scare me, Mitch. Greek mythology. Serial killers. You know way too much about way too many things. Way too many creepy things.”

What follows is a heart-pumping page turner of the first magnitude as Mitchell seeks to learn the fate of his son—a fate that he may have inadvertently caused. I have not recently read a book that kept my attention more riveted as the deftly crafted plot unfolds and the unexpected entanglements reveal themselves. Highly recommended. Tell your friends.