Bookmarks with Terry Hutchinson

There will be additional broadcasts of my Bookmarks program on KDXU coming soon.  Stay tuned for more information.  TLH

Here is the link to Michael Burlingame’s massive 2-volume, 2000 page biography on Abraham Lincoln that is online from Knox College. 

http://www.knox.edu/academics/distinctive-programs/lincoln-studies-center/burlingame-abraham-lincoln-a-life.html

To mark the 100^th birthday of Ronald Reagan on February 6, his Presidential Library put out some new exhibits with many items not having been seen for the first time. Many conservative articles and editorials have been complaining about their perceived hijacking of Regan’s historical legacy by liberals. I have read some of the books they’re complaining about and I don’t quite see it the same way. I really appreciated Richard Reeves’ Ronald Reagan: Triumph of the Imagination even though I didn’t agree with all of it.

None of the new books out the past few weeks on Reagan are really special, including the one by his son. The best books on Reagan are still the two volume book by Stephen F. Hayward The Age of Reagan. It covers the Reagan Presidency. Its sub-titled the Conservative Counter-Revolution. The first volume came out about 9 years ago and was re-released in trade paperback when the second volume came out. The first one is sub-titled The Fall of the Old Liberal Order. It especially tells the story of the 16 years leading up to the 1980 election. In the second one, The Conservative Counter-revolution, Hayward spends 250 pages in the second volume explaining Jimmy Carter and telling the story of his Presidency. By almost any standard, Carter’s leadership was a failure. There’s a reason the 1980 election was one of the largest defeats of an incumbent President ever. Reagan wasn’t perfect, but he was a great leader who restored America to its pre-eminent position as a world power after the disastrous decade of the 1970s and Hayward tells more about how and why that happened.

The release of the condolence book from Reagan’s funeral has a powerful statement from Reagan’s greatest ally, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, that sums Reagan up better than anything else I have seen. She wrote, “Well done Thou good and faithful servant.”  Lady Thatcher is still alive and the same could be said for her.   Early on this site, I talk about There Is No Alternative by Claire Berlinski.  Check it out.  Too bad there aren’t more of Lady Thatcher and Ronald Reagan these days.  There are only pale imitations.

For centuries the Sermon on the Mount taught by Jesus has been the focus of study and emphasis for anyone reading the New Testament. In fact, its hard to say anything original on the topic, but a book from a Latter Day Saint author has done just that. Over 20 years ago, John W. Welch wrote a book called The Sermon On The Mount and the Sermon At The Temple. The book was published by the Foundation For Ancient Research and Mormon Studies. A few years later, a slightly modified edition of the book was released in paperback. In this book, Jack Welch, a BYU Law Professor, compared the Sermon on the Mount with a similar sermon given in the book of 3^rd Nephi in the Book of Mormon. That sermon is commonly referred to as the Sermon at the Temple, since the people were gathered together at a temple when the Book describes the visit of Jesus Christ to the American Continent.

In the intervening two decades, Welch has been refining his book by emphasizing the paralells between the Sermon and what we have learned about the ancient Jewish Temple in the last several decades. A couple of years ago, Ashgate Publishers, a prestigious English religious publisher, released The Sermon on the Mount In the Light of the Temple. It is the latest monograph in the Society For Old Testament Study Series. This book is fairly expensive, even the Kindle edition is $80.00. You might have to special order it, but even though the book is less than 250 pages, it is well worth the cost and the trouble. Welch argues that the Sermon on the Mount can best be understood in a Temple context. He has minimized his emphasis on the Book of Mormon (although he still talks about it in the book) but his observations in light of the ancient temple of Israel provide a context in which the people of Jesus’ time could understand and follow the Sermon on the Mount.

I have some technical quibbles about the book, but I can’t recommend the Sermon On the Mount in the Light of the Temple highly enough. Make an effort to get one for yourself. It sheds new light on these important teachings. It also breaks new ground for the acceptance of Latter Day Saint scholars in the Biblical studies community.   On a further note, Welch mentions the temple ramifications of salt in the beginning of the sermon where Jesus asks if the salt has lost is savor.  The Hermeneia commentaries on Matt 1-7 and Mark talk about the salt in terms of its flavor, and even (to a small extent) in terms of fertilizers, but not its use in the sacrifices described in Leviticus.  Jacob Milgrom (in his 2000 page Leviticus Commentary) mentions several ritual uses for salt in ancient Judaism and also the ancient Near East.  The authors of the Matthew and Mark commentary completely overlook (or ignore) this.  Of course, the Lutheran school (publishers of the Hermeneia) are more along those lines.  Welch’s arguments are pretty original however and deserve more attention, particularly from a non-Mormon audience.

We still don’t know how the situation in Egypt is going to turn out. Critics on the right and the left don’t seem to have any solutions either. One thing I can say is that we should be looking again at the Presidency of Jimmy Carter on what not to do. A few years ago, I reviewed a book on the rescue attempt of the American hostages taken by the Iranians in the last year of Jimmy Carter’s Presidency. More than anything, that failed attempt came to signify the Carter Presidency. In the review, I asked a question.

Mark Bowden wrote a book on the hostage crisis of 1979, in which 53 American diplomatic and military support personnel were held hostage in Tehran for 444 days. The book is called Guests of the Ayatollah. Bowden has written other books, but is most famous for Black Hawk Down, the story of the debacle in Somalia which many people say emboldened Osama Bin Laden and others to feel they could attack American troops and civilians without suffering any consequences.

A couple of years ago, right after President Obama was sworn in, just off the coast of Somalia, one man was held hostage and was freed by an elite military unit, who managed to kill the hostage takers. In Bowden’s books, the bodies of dead Americans were dragged through the streets of towns in Somalia and charred American bodies were left in the Iranian desert and Jimmy Carter has been viewed as incredibly inept for the last three decades.

In Guests of the Ayatollah, Bowden’s centerpiece for the book is the training and practice for Desert One and how the mission went bad, killing eight Americans and forcing their fellow soldiers to leave their crisped bodies on the sand. Ironically, the accident happened as the mission was aborting due to mechanical failures of some of the helicopters. Bowden also describes the hostage taking itself and shows how the Ayatollah used the crisis to purge his government of its more moderate elements and set the Iranian government on the radical path its on now.

The question I had earlier was whether or not we would have been able to rescue the hostages back in 1979 with the improved military we have now. We got our answer. There are no certainties, but the military obviously learned the lessons of their past failures. Hopefully, our government will remember other failures as well and won’t hesitate to be strong if it is required.

This year we are celebrating the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, the bloodiest conflict of our nation’s history. We’ll be talking about Civil War books throughout the year. This year marks the 400^th anniversary of the King James Version of the Bible, so that’s another anniversary we’ll celebrate. We are also coming up on the 200^th anniversary of an important event in our nation’s history, but its one that hardly anyone pays much attention to.

More books have been written on the Civil War than perhaps any other topic in American history. That means the 150^th Anniversary of the War will be celebrated over the next few years with numerous new books on the topic. Next year, however, we will be celebrating the 200^th anniversary of the War of 1812, one of the least notable conflicts in our nation’s history. Thankfully, one of our most prestigious publishers, Knopf, hasn’t forgotten the War.

In the last couple of months, Knopf has released not one, but two interesting books on what has been referred to as the Second War of Independence. Actually, that title is not completely accurate. The Second American Revolution is a more accurate way to refer to the Civil War. The War of 1812 had some legitimate military and foreign policy purposes, but they really weren’t serious enough to justify putting the new nation at risk at that time. It was a more partisan conflict than we often realize.

The first of the books is called The Civil War of 1812 and its written by Alan Taylor, whose last book, William Cooper’s Town, won both a Pulitzer and an Bancroft Prize. This book actually isn’t about the entire war, but only the conflict along the border between the U.S. and Canada. The War kicked off by the Americans invading Canada and failing to take them (something my Canadian friends continue to brag about two centuries later). That campaign was one of many disastrous land battles that almost cost us the War and did cost us the burning of Washington D.C.. Thankfully, the navy more than held its own and sent a message to the world that the United States was a force to be reckoned with. That story is told in Perilous Fight, the other Knopf book out on the War. I’ll tell you more about it soon.

This website, has a list of my books of the year in the upper right hand corner. Every year I pick three fiction and three non-fiction books. Since there are 16 years of the program, along with a special non-fiction award, there are 99 books that I really enjoyed and which I would recommend for someone going on a vacation or who’s just looking for something good to read.

I didn’t used to like short stories, always feeling that they didn’t have the necessary weight to bring about the feelings the best fiction causes me to experience, but I’ve gained a greater appreciation for them over the years. One of the biggest reasons for that was my reading a collection from Andrea Barrett that won a National Book Award. Its called Ship Fever, and I highly recommend it for book clubs who appreciate literary work. The book is available in trade paperback. While novels generally carry away the top prizes, Ship Fever managed to do so in 1996. It is a collection of seven short stories and one novella (a story of over 40,000 words).

The title novella, “Ship Fever” is the story of a young doctor serving at a quarantine center in Canada for Irish immigrants fleeing the Irish famine and how he finds himself at the center of one of history’s most tragic epidemics. Another of my favorite stories is “The Behavior of the Hawkweeds“, in which Gregor Mendel’s theories about the hybridization of plants come to have an impact on a contemporary professor of genetics. One of the most powerful examples of how fiction can take us places we don’t visit in real life is provided in “The Littoral Zone“. In that story, two marine biologists look back on their affair that changed their lives and destroyed their families. The story resonates with their feelings of guilt. Their hesitation to place blame on themselves is to prevent the natural recriminations they feel. It’s an obvious survival mechanism and I assume many people in their situation handle it the same way.

Barrett said she wanted to write these stories about the love of science and the science of love. She has succeeded. Ship Fever deserved the National Book Award, they are the best stories I have read in years and I give it four bookmarks. If you’re looking for a change of pace, this book is perfect and it will be excellent for bookclubs. .

Several years ago, I reviewed a book that gold the story of the great terror-famine that Josef Stalin unleashed upon the Soviet Union in the early 1930s. Every letter of that 300 page book represented the death of 10 people. I thought that it would be a long time until I saw something that came even close to that horrible experience. Unfortunately, there’s a recent book that describes an event that surpasses that terrible crime against humanity.

About 14 years ago on my program, I reviewed a book called Hungry Ghosts which claimed tens of millions had died in a famine caused by Mao when he restructured the Chinese economy. Although the book was quite believable, there really wasn’t much documentary evidence to support it. As it turns out, not only were the claims in Hungry Ghosts true, they were underestimated.

Frank Dikotter, a professor of Oriental History at the University of Hong Kong has spent the last several years researching the recently opened archives throughout the People’s Republic. He has written a new book that claims at least 45 million people died between 1959 through 1963 in what Chairman Mao referred to as “The Great Leap Forward”. Dikotter’s book, Mao’s Great Famine, is a must read for anyone who wants to know what really happened in China in the early days of Communism, particularly when the government began enforcing its quotas for production.  It especially points the finger of blame where it belongs, squarely at Chairman Mao Tse-Tong.

My time here is far too brief to describe the horrors and blatant stupidity wreaked upon the suffering population. Over 3 million were clubbed to death, accused of “hoarding” food that actually didn’t exist. It was the only way the local leaders could justify their failing to turnover the crops they had fudged on in their reports. The people were taken from the fields and put to work on massive dams that didn’t help anything. At the beginning, all the farm tools were melted down in order to make local steel production quotas. The list goes on. One thing Dikotter doesn’t ask (or comment on) is why this kind of thing always happens whenever the government tries to collectivize or socialize the means of production (like the killing fields of Cambodia, the terror-famine in the Ukraine under Josef Stalin which I mentioned and Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” that cost over 43 million lives. Those are questions for another time, and also why most mainstream media of the time didn’t do anything about it.  To me it seems there’s a common denominator of partisanship, but we’ll talk about it another time.

A huge question in my New Testament study is why so many of the common people recognized Jesus as their promised Messiah. At the beginning of His ministry, John the Baptist asked him, “Art thou he that should come,?” That raises the question about where Jesus really was predicted in the Old Testament and what the people thought He would be. That’s an interesting subject which several recent books have attempted to answer.

Although Jesus Christ made enemies of the political and religious powers of his day, masses of people adored him. In fact, they recognized him as the messiah who had been promised and they expected Him to lead them to freedom from the Romans, just as Moses had from the Egyptians. What is was that caused the people to recognize Jesus in that way is something that is still being studied extensively.

A fairly recent book on the topic that is very helpful is called The One Who Is to Come by Joseph A Fitzmyer. Fitzmyer is a Jesuit Priest, who taught Biblical Studies for years at the Catholic University. He’s also the author of several books, of which the most important are four volumes of the Anchor Bible. Any one of them would be a lifetime of work. Here Fitzmyer provides a short book that’s available for a very reasonable price from Eerdmans and which explores the use of the term “messiah” from ancient Judaism until the time of early Christianity. The book is very well-written and shouldn’t be over the head of the careful reader. Some people panic a bit when they see some Hebrew or some Greek in a book about the scriptures. Fitzmyer uses those very judiciously. Their main benefit is to demonstrate how they’re used in the scriptures and the reader becomes able to easily identify the Greek and Hebrew words for “anointed one”. Fitzmyer also brings in other writings from the period that aren’t in the scriptures themselves.

With this project, Fitzmyer demonstrates that Jesus was a lot more than his opponents thought. He also shows how the various writers deal with the idea of Jesus as the Messiah in different ways in the New Testament. This is a fairly short book, but it has a powerful message. The One Who Is To Come answers John’s question when he met Jesus and will enhance anyone’s study of both the Old and the New Testament, especially when they are looking to identify Jesus Christ and His mission.

There’s an old saying that you can’t judge a book by its cover. Having said that, today’s book has a cover that is not only distinctive, but it glows in the dark. In addition to that interesting feature, its also one of the most intriguing books I’ve come across in a long time. Today’s book is incredibly original and unique. Its called Radioactive and its written and illustrated by Lauren Redniss. Radioactive tells the story of Marie and Pierre Curie from the early 1900s. Marie Curie won not one, but two Nobel Prizes! Not only was she the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, but she is the first person ever to win two (there have been three others). She won for Physics in 1903 and Chemistry in 1911.

Radioactive tells of Marie’s meeting and falling in love with her first husband, Pierre when he was 35 and she was just 24. The couple won the Physics Prize together for their research which led to the discovery of two new elements of the Periodic Table, radium and polonium. They also found that radioactivity was an atomic property, setting the table for all that was to come in the 20^th Century.

Pierre died in a freak accident in 1906 and Marie was heartbroken. Four years later, she took up with a married physicist, Paul Langevin. Their romance was exposed 100 years ago when she was announced as winning her second Nobel Prize and there was a scandal!

What really makes this book unique is the art-style that Redniss has chosen. Most of the pages are done in a cameraless photographic technique, where the paper is treated with a light-sensitive chemical and then exposed to light. This turns the paper kind of a dark blue. The covers glow in the dark and the entire package is symbolic of the subject. There’s information about modern nuclear incidents and accidents to demonstrate how dangerous this technology is. The art isn’t for everyone and the book is aimed at adults.

Radioactive generates a feeling and mood about the life and research of a brilliant woman and her family. Near the end of the book, Marie’s daughter, Irene and her husband won a Nobel Prize for Physics in the 1930s by introducing artificial radioactivity. Our modern world would be far different without the sacrifices and efforts of these people. Lauren Redniss has caught the essence of the people and their science in this book.