Books

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Re-reading “The Daughter of Time” or was Richard III a murderer?

"The Princes in the Tower"

“The Princes in the Tower” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I am a re-reader.  If I like a book, particularly a mystery, I will read it again.  Josephine Tey is a writer I first read in high school when I was introduced by my mother.  I remember thinking at the time that ‘The Daughter of Time” was one of her least interesting stories.  After all, Alan Grant is in a hospital bed reading books about Richard III and sending researcher Brent Carradine to look for answers about someone who died 400 years before.  I believed in the Thomas More/William Shakespeare version of Richard.  I was probably fourteen.  But since then, I have re-read it several times and since the discovery of Richard’s bones have done so again.

It is a very carefully constructed guide to how to conduct an investigation.  Grant starts out with one of his nurses’ history books from school and moves on to more complete histories of Richard and England.  He finds out that Thomas More, although written as if he were a witness to the events surrounding the princes in the tower, was actually between 5 and 8 years old.  Grant and Carradine go to original sources for answers to the kinds of questions anyone conducting an investigation would ask.  Who benefits?  What were people saying at the time?  Where were the relevant people at the time of the alleged murders?  Who was still alive after Richard died?

There are many, like Winston Churchill, who are unconvinced by Tey.  Thomas B. Costain presented much the same evidence as Tey in his history, “The Last Plantagenets.”

Many who believe that Richard was guilty believe that Richard somehow stole the throne.  Edward IV had died, his oldest son was very young and Richard was to be Regent.  Instead, Richard learned that his brother’s marriage was, as they said, irregular.  Parliament declared a Titulus Regulus making Edward’s son ineligible for the throne and Richard became King.

There is no question that Richard had been an excellent administrator of north England, including York.  At the end of the book, Grant lays out his case.

In the matter of the presumed crime:

(a)  He did not stand to benefit; there were nine other heirs to the house of York, including three males;

(b)  There is no contemporary accusation.

(c)  The boys’ mother continued on friendly terms with him until his death, and her daughters attended Palace festivities.

(d)  He showed no fear of the other heirs of York, providing generously for their upkeep and granting all of them their royal state.

(e)  His own right to the crown was unassailable, approved by Act of Parliament and public acclamation; the boys were out of the succession and of no danger to him.

(f)  If he had been nervous about disaffection then the person to have got rid of was not the two boys, but the person who really was next in succession to him:  young Warwick.  Whom he publicly created his heir when his own son died.

And Grant’s case against Henry VII.

(a)  It was of great importance to him that the boys should not continue to live.  By repealing the Act [Titulus Regulus] acknowledging the children’s illegitimacy, he made the elder boy King of England and the youngest boy the next heir.

(b) In the Act which he brought before Parliament for the attainting of richard he accused Richard of the conventional tyranny and cruelty but made no mention of the two young Princes.  The conclusion is that at that time the two boys were alive and their whereabouts known.

(c)  The boys’ mother was deprived of her living and consigned to a nunnery eighteen months after his succession.

(d) He took immediate steps to secure the persons of all the other heirs to the crown, and kept them in close arrest until he could with the minimum of scandal get rid of them.

(e)  He had no right whatever to the throne.  Since the death of Richard, young Warwick was de jure King of England.

I can’t predict whether the discover of Richard’s bones will lead to his rehabilitation as a ruler, but Tey makes an interesting case in his favor.  If you like mysteries or history or both, I recomment “The Daughter of Time.”

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Richard the Third the last Plantagenet

Richard III was, according to Shakespeare, one of the worst villans to rule England.  On the other hand, there were many, including Josephine Tey who believed otherwise.  And now, his bones have been found and identified.

The bones as discovered.

Greyfriars car park, Leicester, where the remains of King Richard III were found

Grey Friars car park, Leicester, where the remains of King Richard III were found.

According to the BBC

A skeleton found beneath a Leicester car park has been confirmed as that of English king Richard III.

Experts from the University of Leicester said DNA from the bones matched that of descendants of the monarch’s family.

Lead archaeologist Richard Buckley, from the University of Leicester, told a press conference to applause: “Beyond reasonable doubt it’s Richard.”

Richard, killed in battle in 1485, will be reinterred in Leicester Cathedral.

The Guardian detailed the careful science behind the declaration.

There were cheers when Richard Buckley, lead archaeologist on the hunt for the king’s body, finally announced that the university team was convinced “beyond reasonable doubt” that it had found the last Plantagenet king, bent by scoliosis of the spine, and twisted further to fit into a hastily dug hole in Grey Friars church, which was slightly too small to hold his body.

But by then it was clear the evidence was overwhelming, as the scientists who carried out the DNA tests, those who created the computer-imaging technology to peer on to and into the bones in raking detail, the genealogists who found a distant descendant with matching DNA, and the academics who scoured contemporary texts for accounts of the king’s death and burial, outlined their findings.

The skeleton’s injuries were consistent with accounts of Richard’s death.

Richard died at Bosworth on 22 August 1485, the last English king to fall in battle, and the researchers revealed how for the first time. There was an audible intake of breath as a slide came up showing the base of his skull sliced off by one terrible blow, believed to be from a halberd, a fearsome medieval battle weapon with a razor-sharp iron axe blade weighing about two kilos, mounted on a wooden pole, which was swung at Richard at very close range. The blade probably penetrated several centimetres into his brain and, said the human bones expert Jo Appleby, he would have been unconscious at once and dead almost as soon.

The injury appears to confirm contemporary accounts that he died in close combat in the thick of the battle and unhorsed – as in the great despairing cry Shakespeare gives him: “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!”

Another sword slash, which also went through the bone and into the brain, would also have proved fatal. But many of the other injuries were after death, suggesting a gruesome ritual on the battlefield and as the king’s body was brought back to Leicester, as he was stripped, mocked and mutilated – which would have revealed for the first time to any but his closest intimates the twisted back, a condition from an unknown cause, which began to contort his body from the age of about 10. By the time he died he would have stood inches shorter than his true height of 5′ 8″, tall for a medieval man. The bones were those of an unusually slight, delicately built man – Appleby described him as having an “almost feminine” build – which also matches contemporary descriptions.

According to the Boston Globe story

Richard III ruled England between 1483 and 1485, during the decades-long tussle over the throne known as the Wars of the Roses. His brief reign saw liberal reforms, including introduction of the right to bail and the lifting of restrictions on books and printing presses.

The discovery of Richard’s bones will not resolve the controversy surrounding him, however.  Most believe in the Shakespearean image of him as a the evil hunchbacked killer of two young princes in the Tower of London.

After I read Richard III in high school, my mother introduced me to Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time.  Her detective character, Alan Grant, takes up the case while in the hospital with the help of a young researcher who does the leg work.  The Wikipedia article about the book has a good summary of what Grant concluded and Tey believed.

The main arguments presented in the book in defence of King Richard:

  • There was no political advantage for Richard III in killing the young princes. He was legitimately made king.
  • There is no evidence that the princes were missing from the Tower when Henry VII took over.
  • Although a Bill of Attainder was brought by Henry VII against Richard it made no mention of the princes. There never was any formal accusation, much less a verdict of guilt.
  • Henry never produced the bodies of the dead princes for public mourning and a state funeral.
  • The mother of the Princes, Elizabeth Woodville, remained on good terms with Richard.
  • The Princes were more of a threat to Henry VII as the foundation of his claim to the crown was significantly more remote than theirs.

Grant and his American collaborator argue that there is little evidence of resistance to Richard’s rule (ignoring Buckingham’s rebellion). They allow that there were rumours of his murdering the princes during his lifetime, but they decide that the rumours had little circulation, and attribute them to the Croyland Chronicle and to the Lord Chancellor of France, and ultimately to Tudor sympathiser John Morton. They also propose that Morton was the actual author of Thomas More‘s biography of Richard, suggesting that the incomplete manuscript found after More’s death was an unfinished copy by More of Morton’s lost original. They conclude that the princes probably remained alive throughout Richard’s reign and were later killed by Henry.

The Richard III Society which sponsored discovery and will have his bones reinterred will still have work to do to clear his name.  Where are the alleged bones of the princes and can we now do DNA on them?

Photograph of car park Darren Staples/Reuters

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Francona and the Red Sox

I finished reading Francona last week and have been listening and reading to what people are saying about it.  In case you don’t live in Boston, follow the Red Sox, or follow another baseball team, Terry Francona was the manager of the Boston Red Sox from 2004 through the 2011 season.  Quite a long time in baseball years, particularly in Red Sox years.  He managed the team to their first World Series win (2004) in 86 years breaking the infamous curse of Babe Ruth.  And then one a second Series in 2007.  I loved seeing him in the corner of the dugout chewing his tobacco which he pretended was gum or maybe is was sometimes the other way around.  And I felt terrible as the 2011 season imploded in September.  I think we all knew that Francona wouldn’t be back for 2012.

Terry in the dugout.

Terry in the dugout.

So now there is the book, Francona. by Terry and Dan Shaughnessy of the Boston Globe.  Some people don’t like it because they think it completely trashes the owners which makes me wonder if they have actually read the book.  Or maybe they are responding on behalf of the owners.  I had read some of the advanced reviews which said that he was not nice to the owners so I guess I looked for those parts in the book.  (for a nice interview with Terry by Emily Rooney, click here.)

The controversy appears to stem largely from his statement that the owners didn’t like baseball.  Taken out of context, this is a rather silly statement.  Why would you spend millions to own a team if you didn’t like the game?  But if you read the book, you learn that in Francona’s  world, where one lives and breathes baseball from a very young age, the owners are different.  They have other interests, like making money, and bring in fans.  Why else would they bring in a showman like Bobby Valentine after Terry?

There is a delicate balance between the purity of the game and the game as business.  Francona is on one side of that fine line, John Henry, Tom Werner and Larry Lucchino are on the other.  And that is the essence of the the matter.  In the end, Francona and Theo Epstein were on the wrong side from those that paid them.  I don’t think they were surprised.

I love baseball.  I like going to minor league games without all the show of the bigs to distract me.  I guess I’m like Francona in that tiny way.  If you love baseball and want an inside picture, read this book.

Red Sox pitchers and catchers report on the 12th; everyone else on the 15th.  I read that most of the pitchers have already arrived in Florida.  Bobby V. is thankfully gone.  New manager John Farrell is a baseball guy.  Maybe John Lackey will redeem himself.  Maybe we can give the young kids a chance to play and grow.  Maybe the Sox will have a winning year.  Francona is managing the Cleveland Indians and Theo is with the Cubs.  It’s spring time for baseball and anything can happen.

Photograph sportsofboston.com

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Elizabeth, Darcy and Jane

The two hundredth anniversary of my favorite book was celebrated a couple of days ago.  I re-read it at least once a year and then I get into the various spin-offs, the best of which are by Pamela Aiden and P.D. James.  I haven’t read any of the zombie ones and don’t intend to read them.  I will then watch Colin Firth go swimming.

In his happy birthday post for the New Yorker, William Deresiewicz wrote

Two hundred years. But there seemed little chance, two hundred years ago,  that many people would remember either the novel or its author by now. The draft  that she produced at twenty-one was rejected by a London publisher sight unseen.  Other disappointments followed, and after a series of personal upheavals, she  gave up writing altogether. But circumstances stabilized and hope returned, and  by the time of her death, just four years after “Pride and Prejudice” came out  (four years during which she finished “Mansfield Park,” and wrote “Emma” and “Persuasion” from scratch), her brother was willing to venture the claim that  her novels were fit to be placed “on the same shelf as the works of a D’Arblay and an Edgeworth.”

How she got from there to here is a long story. The public soon forgot her,  but her memory was kept alive, like Bach’s, among the cognoscenti. George Eliot  reread all six of her novels aloud with her lover George Henry Lewes before  setting sail on “Middlemarch.” Mark Twain and Charlotte Brontë hated her;  Rudyard Kipling adored her; Henry James learned more from her than he was ever  willing to admit. Virginia Woolf installed her at the head of the canon of  English women novelists (“the most perfect artist among women, the writer whose  books are immortal”). F. R. Leavis and Lionel Trilling certified her academic  prestige. Then came the movies, and feminist criticism, and more movies, and  Colin Firth, and the fan fiction, and now the ever-growing, ever-changing  multi-platform media phenomenon and global icon.

One can re-read Pride and Prejudice again and again even knowing the story by heart.  You want to tell Elizabeth to beware of Wickham and Jane not to worry Mr. Bingley will come though in the end.  And Mrs. Bennet will always be insufferable. Back when I was teaching workshops on sexual harassment, I would name my scenario characters after those in Pride and Prejudice and once or twice one of the women would catch on.

Here are Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle as Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet.  Elinor Lipman watched all the film versions for us and the Huffington Post. “I announce that the head-and-shoulders winner of Best Mr. Darcy is Colin Firth (1995 Masterpiece Theatre, 300 minutes.)”  I agree.  But back to Mr. Deresiewicz

So why do we love the novel so much? Because while Austen sacrifices  Elizabeth’s feelings, she lavishly indulges ours. Austen’s heroes usually aren’t  the wealthiest men around, or the handsomest. In many of her novels, there is  something troubling about the way that things work out. But not in “Pride and  Prejudice.” Here she gives us everything we want: the wittiest lines, the  silliest fools, the most lovable heroine, the handsomest estate. And a hero who  is not only tall and good-looking, but the richest and most wellborn man in  sight.

He’s also kind of an asshole, which makes it even better. Do women love  assholes, the way that everybody says? Well, if the novel’s epic popularity is  any proof, they seem to love to win them over, anyway. “Tolerable, but not  handsome enough to tempt me”—Darcy’s famous insult, the first time he  and Lizzy meet. That’s the real story, underneath the one about Wickham and  Bingley and Jane, the misperceptions and coincidences. Darcy wounds Elizabeth’s  sexual pride, and her victory comes—and with it, ours—when he’s made to recant  and repent. Wish fulfillment doesn’t get much wishier than that. Austen tells us  that our feelings aren’t necessarily right, but boy does she ever make the  lesson feel good.

May Pride and Prejudice be read for another two hundred years.  (And if you haven’t read the book, but just seen one of the movies, please read it – you don’t know what you are missing.)  Time to start my annual reading!

Title page from the first edition of the first...

Title page from the first edition of the first volume of Pride and Prejudice (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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Reading Dickens and other stuff

I haven’t written about books for a long time but I am always reading more than one book at a time.  So here is what I’ve been reading the last week or so.

We all know that at Christmas time there are endless versions of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” on television, but when, if ever, was the last time you actually read the book?  I was probably in my early teens when I read it last.  This year we decided to purchase a copy which I just finished reading last week.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

It is nicely illustrated by Greg Hildebrant who used as models various friends and relations.

Dickens wrote in his 1843 introduction

I have endeavoured in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it.

Their faithful Friend and Servant, C.D.

I think we should all read it and/or watch our favorite movie version at least once a year.  (Here is one persons opinion of the 10 best television and film versions.)  It can teach us something about tolerance and old fashioned Charity.

One of my retirement projects is trying to figure out what books we actually own.  I had the idea of creating my own database and then stumbled upon LibraryThing.  It is a nifty online way to not only keep track of your books, but also to share with others.  You can post reviews, read what others think, and there are a lot of queries and statistics to play with.  Turns out to be a lot of fun in addition to being useful and easy to use.  You can also request free books in exchange for a review.  The book I reviewed for December was “Crime of Privilege” by Walter Walker.  It is a mystery which will be released soon.  Do not spend your money on this thinly disguised Kennedy family mash-up.  So far there is one other review posted and it is not good either.

Crime of Privilege: A Novel by Walter Walker

I am about half way through John Barry’s book about Roger Williams and separation of church and state.  It is fascinating history beginning in England and James’ efforts to make the Church of England more orthodox and more Catholic.

Roger Williams and the Creation of the…

Highly recommended.

And in between Barry, I am re-reading some Georgette Heyer.  Did you know there is a third book to what is called the Alastair trilogy? (“These Old Shades”, “Devil’s Cub” and “The Infamous Army”)  I’ve just ordered volume 3.  Heyer is still readable and fun.  Her stories remind me of  film comedies where people get into impossible situations but somehow all turns out right.  I have fun imagining them as movies.

It is getting cold out so pick up a book and curl up and read.

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A Conservative History Lesson

This is from yesterday’s Shouts and Murmers column by Jack Hitt blogged in the New Yorker Magazine.  I thought about posting the entire thing, but decided on trying to pick some highlights.  The interesting thing is that often Shouts and Murmers is fictionalized or even pure fiction but Hitt has included approprite citations.  Let’s start at the beginning.

1500s: The American Revolutionary War begins: “The reason we fought  the revolution in the sixteenth century was to get away from that kind of  onerous crown.”—Rick Perry

1607: First welfare state collapses: “Jamestown colony, when it was  first founded as a socialist venture, dang near failed with everybody dead and  dying in the snow.”—Dick Armey

1619-1808: Africans set sail for America in search of freedom: “Other  than Native Americans, who were here, all of us have the same story.”—Michele  Bachmann

Bet the folks at Jamestown didn’t know it was socialist venture.  I always thought they were looking for things that would make them rich.

1776: The Founding Synod signs the Declaration of Independence: “…those fifty-six brave people, most of whom, by the way, were clergymen.”—Mike  Huckabee

1787: Slavery is banned in the Constitution: “We also know that the  very founders that wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no  more in the United States.”—Michele Bachmann

1801: “Thomas Jefferson creates the Marines for the Islamic pirates  that were happening.”—Glenn Beck

And the blog helpfully includes a picture of the “Founding Synod.”

conservative-history.jpg

Illustration courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Moving on to the Civil War, I bet you didn’t know this.

1861:Civil  War breaks out over pitting “individual rights as proclaimed in the  Declaration of Independence against collective rights.”—The Weekly  Standard

More recent history doesn’t fare much better.

1916:Planned  Parenthood opens genocide clinics: “When Margaret Sanger—check my  history—started Planned Parenthood, the objective was to put these centers in  primarily black communities so they could help kill black babies before they  came into the world.”—Herman Cain

1950: Senator Joseph McCarthy saves America from Communism: “Joe  McCarthy was a great American hero.”—Representative Steve King

1963: G.O.P. clergyman delivers his famous “I have a dream” speech: “It should come as no surprise that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was a  Republican.”—Human Events blog

1964: Republicans fight for the Civil Rights Act: “We were the people  who passed the civil-rights bills back in the sixties without very much help  from our colleagues across the aisle.”—Representative Virginia Foxx

1967: Indonesia brainwashes its first Islamic terrorist spybot: “Why  didn’t anybody ever mention that that man right there was raised—spent the first  decade of his life, raised by his Muslim father—as a Muslim and was educated in  a Madrassa?”—Steve Doocy

And to the Clinton years.

1993: Hillary Clinton claims her first kill, Vincent Foster—Jerry  Falwell video

1994: Bill Clinton tops Hillary with twenty-four murders: these people  died “under other than natural circumstances.”— Representative William  Dannemeyer.

1998: Actually, the Clinton murders number forty people: “There was  talk that this would be another body to add to the list of forty bodies or  something that were associated with the Clinton Administration.”—Linda  Tripp.

1998: Update: Clinton murders eighty people: “In recent months, a list  of more than 80 deaths associated directly or indirectly with Clinton has been  the buzz of the new media.”—Joseph Farah

And finally to things I know you didn’t know that President Obama can add to his list of accomplishments.

2011: Arabic is declared America’s second language: “Some of our  state’s educational administrators joined the feds in seeking to mandate Arabic  classes for Texas children.”—Chuck Norris

2011: Obama outlaws fishing: people “can’t go fishing anymore because  of Obama.”—Rush Limbaugh

2011: Obama provides health insurance for dogs: “In the health care  bill, we’re now offering insurance for dogs.”—Glenn Beck

All I can say it is a good thing that the President included health care for dogs because Seamus could have probably used it.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/shouts/2012/09/a-conservative-history-of-the-united-states.html#ixzz271B7Vxj5

 

 

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Understanding Health Care Reform

Health Care reform is coming before the Supreme Court soon and in an effort to really understand what it is all about I picked up a copy of Jonathan Gruber‘s book “Health Care Reform”

Health Care Reform: What It Is, Why It's Necessary, How It Works

It is a nifty graphic novel which does an excellent job of explaining why we need health care reformm what the reform will do and when, and how is will help reduce the deficit.  This last is the most complicated and I’m not sure I got it all in a single reading.

Gruber uses several characters in differing circumstances to illustrate the law’s impact.  On the whole, very nicely done and highly recommended if you want to understand what the Affordable Health Care Act is all about.  Gruber is an economist who worked first with Mitt Romney on reform in Massachusetts and then with President Obama and his team.

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P.D. James and Jane Austen

I need to explain that I re-read Pride and Prejudice at least once a year.  I loved the early PBS version of the book, but that has been replaced now by the Colin Frith version which I own on DVD.  I’ve also dipped into some of the sequels and expansions (most are horrible) to feed by habit.  

P.D. James is one of my favorite writers.  I have read all of her mysteries. One of my favorites is An Unsuitable Job for a Woman which introduced the young Cordelia Gray.  Adam Dalgleish her primary detective is not only a police inspector, but also a published poet.  Her books are literate and the mysteries complex and interesting.  So when I saw that James had written a kind of sequel to Pride and Prejudice I ordered a copy immediately.  And I was not disappointed.

Death Comes to Pemberley

With her usual elegance, James tells brings us to the Darcy estate six years after Elizabeth Bennet married her Mr. Darcy.  They now have 2 children and Elizabeth has clearly taken hold as mistress of Pemberley.  All the other characters make their appearance including George Wickham who is still a wild neer do well and his wife, Elizabeth’s sister Lydia is still tends to hysteria.  They are at the heart of the mystery.

Liesal Schillinger in her review last week in the New York Times book review writes

James clearly understands that many readers feel as close an attachment to Austen’s characters as they do to their own relatives and friends. So she cannily begins by furnishing answers to the natural question: “Where are they now?”

How right it feels to learn, as James informs us, that Bingley and Jane moved away from Netherfield soon after their marriage, wanting to put distance between them and the ever-querulous Mrs. Bennet at Longbourn. What a delight to read that tone-deaf, humorless Mary Bennet has married a “thin, melancholy” rector, “given to preaching sermons of inordinate length and complicated theology.” How apt that the evil seducer George Wickham, after marrying Lizzy’s frivolous sister Lydia, worked as a secretary for the foppish baronet Sir Walter Elliot (a character from Austen’s novel “Persuasion”) until Lydia’s “open flirtation” with the baronet and Wickham’s simpering attempts to ingratiate himself with his employer’s daughter met “finally with disgust.” And what a treat to see Bingley’s snobbish sisters, Mrs. Hurst and Miss Bingley, get their comeuppance — and Harriet Smith (of “Emma”) her reward.

Above all, James will delight Austen’s devoted fans by showing Darcy and Lizzy to be (if anything) more in love and better matched than anyone might have hoped, six years into their marriage.

If you love Austen and you love James or you love one or the other, I think you will love this book.

(Illustration by Skip Sterling)

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Summer Reading

I was away for a few days last week and did what I always do in Vermont: hike a little and read and relax a lot.  There are several books in my sister’s library I re-read once a year:  Understood Betsy by Dorothy Canfield Fisher and Gone-Away Lake by Elizabeth Enright.

Understood Betsy

This is the story of a little orphan girl around 1900 who has to leave the home of her aunt in an unspecified mid-western city and move to near Putney, Vermont.  She learns self-sufficiency, kindness and, most of all, what it takes to be happy.  My sister’s hardback is so old, it was published when Dorothy Canfield has not yet added the Fisher.  It was published in 1917.  The book is like the Little House Books by Laura Ingalls Wilder in the way in which they talk about how to do things like churn butter and make applesauce.  And of course, it is about Vermont.

Gone-Away Lake is also a children’s book.  First published in 1957, it tells the story of young, almost teens who discover an abandoned resort on a lake that became a swamp after a dam was built.  They discover a brother and sister fallen on hard times who moved back to where they had once spent summers.  They have adventures and keep the discovery a secret as long as they can from their parents.  It is a book about accepting differences couched in a summer vacation story.  There is a sequal, Return to Gone-Away in which one of the abandoned houses is purchased and restored by one of the families. 

Elizabeth Enright

Elizabeth Enright won a Newberry Honor award for Gone-Away Lake.

My other favorite thing to do is to poke around a wonderful used bookstore in Brattleboro, Brattleboro Books.  (They, like all bookstores, need a little press.) This year the treasure I unearthed by Dorothy Gilman’s The Tightrope Walker.  I had not thought about it or read it in many years, but the minute I spotted the book, it all came back to me.  It is the story of a young woman who solves a mystery and discovers herself. (Is there a theme to these books?)

The heroine finds a note in a hurdy-gurdy and follows a trail to uncover a the secret of the note writer’s murder.  It is an old-fashioned follow the clues where ever they lead mystery with some romance thrown in.   Gilman wrote the tightrope walker in 1979 in between writing her better known Mrs. Pollifax spy stories.

So now you know what I read on my summer vacation. 

 

 

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The facts against what people “know”

I’ve written several posts about this subject including the recent “Misinformation and the disappearance of the moderate Republican” and the earlier “Keeping the Faith”.   Both discussed the uphill if not futile effort to fight misinformation with facts and the impact this has on democracy.

I have been reading Angels and Ages:  A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life by Adam Gopnik.  It has been my train book for the last month or so.  Fascinating book and lots to think about.  Coming home today, I came across this quote on page 186:

Science – scientific reasoning – seems to me an instrument that will lag far, far behind.  For look here, the earth has been thought to be flat.  It was true, so it still is today, for instance, between Paris and Asnieres.  Which however does not prevent science from proving that the earth is principally round. Which no one contradicts nowadays.

But notwithstanding this they persist nowadays in believing that life is flat and runs from birth to death.  However, life too is probably round, and very superior in expanse and capacity to the hemisphere we know at present.

                                               Vincent van Gogh, June 1888

“Science – Scientific reasoning – seems to me an instrument that will lag far, far behind.”  We still have people who believe the earth is flat, just as we have those that still believe that President Obama was not born in the United States and is a Muslim.  Just a people still believe that the health care reform bill will lead to death panels for Grandma.

My point is that difficulty is using facts to persuade is not a new phenomena.  Van Gogh, an artist not a scientist or philosopher or politician recognized this.  I don’t know if this cheers me up or depresses me even more.