The Ying and Yang of Bookreviews

Ken Levine, Where the Hell Am I? Trips that I have Survived. Ebook, 2011 and Emily Griffin, Editor, A Syllable of Water: Twenty Writers of Faith Reflect on Their Art (Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2008


 Today, I’m going to give you the ying and yang of book reports. Maybe I’m just bipolar because these books have nothing in common, which is why I thought it might be fun to review them together.

Where the Hell Am I? could be described as a travelogue-sitcom, filled with one-liners.  As a former TV script writer and producer, Levine is good at one-liners.  Levine is also a sportswriter and a part-time professional baseball announcer.  His travels take him all over the United States, mostly to cities that have professional baseball teams or colleges where Levine’s children attend (and then there is Hawaii). Along the way, we get a taste of Levine’s wit and humor and ability to see the oddity of American life.  In Dallas, Levine notes that there seems to be a steakhouse or a church on every corner.  When he spots the “Holy Cow,” he assumes it could be either one or both.  Also in Texas, he didn’t find it odd that the George Bush Highway was a toll road.  At Big Sur there was a clothing optional pool, which seemed just wrong to Levine, who suggests that instead they place a “pig crossing” sign (this isn’t necessarily a politically correct book).   At the Dodger’s spring training camp, Christian chapel services were being held in the Sandy Koufax room (To understand the humor here, Koufax like Levine is Jewish.  Levine, however, doesn’t share with the reader that Koufax is Jewish, which means that those who do not know may wonder what’s so funny about a Koufax chapel).  Outside of Disneyworld, Levine spots a billboard advertising vasectomies and assumes most fathers after spending a day or three in the park might think it is a good idea.  And then there is Cincinnati, a city that a magazine touted it was an “inland San Francisco.”  Some in the city took exception, thinking that the article was saying that Cincinnati was gay.  Levine didn’t think it was wise for him to point out that they are known as the “Queen City.” 

This ebook was a joy to read.   It’s also cheap!  I read mine on a Nook, reading a couple of chapters a night before bed as a way to ensure that I went to sleep with a smile on my face if not a chuckle in my snore.  I look forward to reading his upcoming book, The Me Generation… By Me (Growing up in the ‘60s).

On the opposite side of the circle (the lighter part of the ying/yang) is A Syllable of Water.  This book is a collection of twenty essays edited by Emile Griffin that all deal with writing on faith.  All the writers are members of the Chrysostom Society, a group of writers of faith that get together once a year.  The group is a collection of interesting authors from all kind of genres.  Not all of these authors are the type you’d find in a Christian bookstore, but they are all serious about exploring life, even the ugly aspects of it, through the lens of faith.  The essays are categorized into three sections.  The first section contains seven essays that deals with the process (and discipline) of writing.  The second section contains eleven chapters dealing with various genres: creative non-fiction, the novel, short stories, memoir, playwriting, poetry, journalism, spiritual writing and two essays on translation.  The final two chapters deal with the “endings,” with an essay on revision and another on working with an editor.  A number of these authors are well known to me:  John Wilson who edits Books and Culture, Eugene Peterson who translated The Message, Richard Foster who has written a number of spiritual classics such as A Celebration of Discipline, Philip Yancey who is a journalist and author of The Jesus I Never Knew (a book that should be read by every skeptic as well as every fundamentalist), Doris Betts, who is a novelist from the great state of North Carolina and a retired professor from UNC, and John Leax, Luci Shaw and Scott Cairns who are all poets that have a spot on my bookcase. 

There are gems in almost every essay in this book, but one that I would like to share comes from the chapter in which Doris Betts discussed how she arrives at ideas for her novel, Souls Raised from the Dead.  Although it’s probably been a dozen years since I read that novel, I remember the way she described a North Carolina Highway Patrolman at the Haw River Bridge (I’ve written about kayaking the Haw River before it was turned into Jordan Lake).  In her essay, she tells about coming upon an accident in which a chicken truck had crashed at the bridge, sending chickens everywhere.  It was the face of “pure existentialist despair” on the patrolman who was trying to create order in the mayhem that caught her attention and was used by her in the book, a vision that has haunted me since I read the novel.  She goes on to say how, as she wrote the novel, she was influenced by Harold Kushner’s recent book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People (even though she didn’t hold the same theological position as Kushner).  Other writers that she dialogued with in her head as she wrote the novel, which is about the patrolman whose young daughter dies of a rare disease, include Chekhov, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Eliot and Francis Thompson (“the Hound of Heaven”).   I enjoyed learning how the story “came together” from the writer’s perspective.  One correction to Betts’ essay: she refers to Chekhov’s story “Grief,” but the story she is writing about Chekhov’s “Misery.”  (98)

There’s a lot to learn about the writing process in these pages.  Although I would highly recommend it for those wanting to write from a Christian point-of-view, I think most writers would benefit from what is said in these essays.