Ex Libris

Ran across this book during my morning reading, and I think it needs to go on the “Books I’d like to read” page.  The author, Gabriel Schoenfeld, posted today over at Power Line.  An excerpt:

I am a New Yorker who was in Manhattan on the morning of September 11, 2001. Like millions of others here, I saw the destruction wrought by al Qaeda firsthand, saw the dust-covered survivors trudging northward, breathed the smoke from the smoldering rubble and felt it sting my eyes. That afternoon, after the trek home to my family in Brooklyn, seven miles from ground zero, I found a layer of ash on my car. What was in the ash? Along with pulverized concrete, glass, and steel, did it contain the remains of firefighters and office workers turned to dust? That was just one of the many questions coursing through my brain on the evening of the day that war came to my city. I was again in Manhattan on March 11, 2004, the day that Islamic terrorists bombed the Madrid transit system, killing 191 people and maiming more than 1,700. And I was in Manhattan once again on July 7, 2005, when suicide bombers struck the London transit system, killing 52 and wounding hundreds. Like millions of others, I ride the New York City subways daily. So do two of my three daughters.

It was in light of this history and these circumstances, a personal history and personal circumstances in no way unique to me, that I was incensed by the publication in the New York Times of a series of stories in 2005 and 2006 compromising some of the secret counterterrorism programs that the U.S. government had initiated to avert a repetition of such terrible catastrophes. But along with outrage, I was intensely curious about the legal regime that permitted, or appeared to permit, this kind of tell-all-and-damn-the-consequences journalism. This book is an outgrowth of my impassioned curiosity.

I recall those stories, and I remember being outraged by them as well.  Necessary Secrets is officially on the “to read” list.

Martyr

Just added: Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy by Eric Metaxas.  Looks interesting; my knowledge of Bonhoeffer is, sadly, limited.  Read a review of this bio in the Wall Street Journal at lunch; here’s a portion:

Since the 1960s, some of Bonhoeffer’s admirers have seized upon a phrase from one of his letters—”religionless Christianity”—to argue that he favored social action over theology. In fact, Bonhoeffer used the phrase to suggest the kind of ritualistic and over-intellectualized faith that had failed to prevent the rise of Hitler. It was precisely religionless Christianity that he worried about. After a 1939 visit to New York’s Riverside Church, a citadel of social-gospel liberalism, he wrote that he was stunned by the “self-indulgent” and “idolatrous religion” that he saw there. “I have no doubt at all that one day the storm will blow with full force on this religious hand-out,” he wrote, “if God himself is still anywhere on the scene.”

As the storms of hatred raged in Germany, Bonhoeffer moved beyond “confession”—that is, preaching and writing—and into rebellion. By the summer of 1940, he was recruited by Adm. Wilhelm Canaris and others as a double agent for their conspiracy against Hitler, an effort that operated out of the Abwehr (Nazi military intelligence). Henceforth he would pretend allegiance to the regime and pass along to the conspirators—whose goal was Hitler’s assassination—whatever intelligence he could gather. He depended on deception for his survival.

It was a bizarre role for a religious man, and a hitherto loyal German citizen, to play. As Mr. Metaxas notes: “For a pastor to be involved in a plot whose linchpin was the assassination of the head of state during a time of war, when brothers and sons and fathers were giving their lives for their country, was unthinkable.” And yet it became thinkable for Bonhoeffer precisely because his understanding of faith required more than adhering to tidy legalisms about truth-telling and nonviolence.

So of late, I’ve been noodling around with a bunch of different books, as usual.  My primary concentration has been on Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader, which was one of my Christmas gifts, and has been a great read so far.  I’d say I’m just over 1/3 of the way in, and North Korea is as utterly screwed up as I’d imagined it to be.  Aside from which, who would have thought that a guy like Kim Il-Sung (or Kim Jong-Il, for that matter) would be able to build a cult of personality so powerful that young women would consider it an honor to strip naked and be a component of a “living bed” for said totalitarian monsters.

Yeah, that’s… just wrong.  But it apparently happens.  (I long for some nutjob apologist for the regime to come along and leave a DPRK-style denunciation of me in the comments.)

In other news, I managed to snag a relatively cheap copy of Volume III of James Montgomery Boice’s commentaries on Romans (in the hardcover to match my copies of Volumes I, II, and IV).  Thank you, Amazon Marketplace.  I also picked up a copy of RC Sproul’s 1 volume commentary on Romans, and I’m hoping to get his commentary on John ASAP.  And I’ve made a goal of reading through the Bible from cover to cover this year, and I’m doing so using my new pseudo-leatherbound copy of the NIV Stewardship Study Bible from Zondervan, which was edited by a friend of mine.  As of now, I’m just past the giving of the law in Exodus.

After some wheeling and dealing, I managed to scrape together the cash for a copy of NT Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God, which is – according to reviews – 700+ pages of glorious apologetics in defense of the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.  That should also keep me occupied for a while.

So happy new year to all; I’ll keep you posted as I make progress.

Someone buy me one.

• The Federalist By Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison: Essential.  Just essential.  And yes, I need it in hardcover.  It’s that important.
• The Life of George Washington By John Marshall, Third Chief Justice of the United States: Seriously, this one should be hardcover too.
• The History of the American Revolution By David Ramsay: The first American national history written by an American revolutionary and printed on American soil.  Awesome.
• History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution By Mercy Otis Warren: OK, paperback is fine on this one.  But seriously, a two volume history of the Revolution written by an anti-federalist woman?  Sounds interesting.

Will wishes everyone a fine and happy thanksgiving!

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Bonus Audio!

I’m a very fine Turkey:

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The Turkey is a Funny Bird:

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And a Christmas Preview:

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I’m currently reading Big Story: How the American Press and Television Reported and Interpreted the Crisis of Tet 1966 in Vietnam and Washington.  It’s an interesting read, but I’m finding that I’m pretty uninformed about the ins and outs of Vietnam in general.  The thesis of Big Story is that press portrayals of the Tet offensive by the communists portrayed the battle as a disaster for the Americans, and the negative image portrayed by the press led to massive political repercussions in the US, and ultimately, probably the eventual collapse of the war effort in Vietnam.  In reading, I’m finding that I really know very little about the history and geography of the war, so I set about looking for a decent account of the conflict with some current perspective.

Here’s what I found: A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and the Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam. A review:

A Better War by Lewis Sorley

There was a moment when the United States had the Vietnam War wrapped up, writes military historian Lewis Sorley (biographer of two Vietnam-era U.S. Army generals, Creighton Abrams and Harold Johnson). “The fighting wasn’t over, but the war was won,” he says in this convention-shaking book. “This achievement can probably best be dated in late 1970.” South Vietnam was ready to carry on the battle without American ground troops and only logistical and financial support. Sorley says that replacing General Westmoreland with Abrams in 1968 was the key. “The tactics changed within fifteen minutes of Abrams’s taking command,” remarked one officer. Abrams switched the war aims from destruction to control; he was less interested in counting enemy body bags than in securing South Vietnam’s villages.A Better War is unique among histories of the Vietnam War in that it focuses on the second half of the conflict, roughly from Abrams’s arrival to the fall of Saigon in 1975. Other volumes, such as Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam and Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie, tend to give short shrift to this period. Sorley shows how the often-overlooked Abrams strategy nearly succeeded–indeed, Sorley says it did succeed, at least until political leadership in the United States let victory slip away. Sorley cites other problems, too, such as low morale among troops in the field, plus the harmful effects of drug abuse, racial disharmony, and poor discipline. In the end, the mighty willpower of Abrams and diplomatic allies Ellsworth Bunker and William Colby was not enough. But, with its strong case that they came pretty close to winning, A Better War is sure to spark controversy. –John J. Miller

…has been updated.  I mean, just in case you’ve been thinking that you’d like to pick something up for me.

Trying to add to the Christmas list.  Thinking these might be cool:

• Magnetic Arrow Bookends
• Rosetta Stone Bookends

Hi all, and welcome to yet another blog.  Not that I really need another new blog, or that I even have anything particularly interesting to say.  As with all of my blogging and tweeting endeavours, this is more for my benefit than anyone elses.

For lack of a better explanation, Ex Libris is going to be my attempt to glean something from my reading.  Over the last year or so, I’ve been digging into a lot of books, often many at once.  And while I’ve enjoyed the process of doing so, I’ve developed a tendency to bite off a bit more than I can chew – in that I have multiple books going at once.  I’m almost positive that I have at least 20 books started, many of which cycle in and out of my range of interest over a period of many months.  The result of this, of course, is that my concentration is divided and I tend to forget where I was when I pick up the book again next time.

I generally catch on pretty quickly once I get back into the flow of a book that I’ve put aside for a while, but I have to admit that reading multiple books at once doesn’t necessarily lend itself to a careful and deep treatment of each text.  So part of what I hope to accomplish here is to note, for myself, passages that catch my interest and perhaps peel back the layers a bit and explore why they grab my imagination.

We’ll see how this goes.  There’s a lot of books covering a pretty wide range of subjects.  For instance, tonight I read a chapter from Roland Hill’s biography of Lord Acton, and then picked up Human Acton by Ludwig von Mises and plowed through a portion.  I’ve also been moving through Lester DeKoster’s Liberation Theology: The Church’s Future Shock and (of course) U2 by U2, among others.  Like I said, a pretty wide range of subjects.  It remains to be seen exactly how well I’ll do at reflecting and writing about all of the books I’m reading, or if I’ll do it at all.  But I suppose it might just be worth the effort.  Again, we’ll see.

So – here goes.  Wish me luck.