In most cases this lower jaw—being easily unhinged by a practised artist—is disengaged and hoisted on deck for the purpose of extracting the ivory teeth, and furnishing a supply of that hard white whalebone with which the fishermen fashion all sorts of curious articles, including canes, umbrella-stocks, and handles to riding-whips. With a long, weary hoist the jaw is dragged on board, as if it were an anchor; and when the proper time comes—some few days after the other work—Queequeg, Daggoo, and Tashtego, being all […]
I taught you better than to open doors you can’t close
Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts is yet another great example of the kind of book I would have missed had I not started reading more speculative fiction and diversifying the voices in my library. That would have been a pity, because this complex, powerful novel may very well end up at the top of my 2019 favorites list. After Earth suffered an unnamed cataclysm 300 years ago, the remnants of humanity were crowded onto the spaceship Matilda and launched toward some long-forgotten destination. Humanity […]
the last of God’s children in a godless world
New Jerusalem is a non-fiction book covering the history of a militant and apocalyptic breakaway Christian sect in the early Reformation. The Melchiorites, named after their founding preacher, were early Anabaptists. A radical offshoot of Lutheranism, the Anabaptists were viewed as heretics by mainstream Catholics and suffered significant persecution. The Melchiorites sought sanctuary in the Lutheran-friendly city of a Munster. A small group of influential men put out a call for the poor to come to Munster for rebaptism as Melchiorites. More appealingly, they also promised […]
“Conflicted” would have been a more accurate title
Tara Westover’s memoir, Educated, is difficult to digest. She’s the youngest of seven children in a fundamentalist Mormon family in rural Idaho. Her father rules with the proverbial iron fist. He’s a survivalist, a millennialist, a conspiracy-theorist. He keeps his children out of school, refuses them medical care, continually places them in physical danger. Her mother resists in small ways but ultimately caves whenever the father demands her submission. One of her brothers educates himself well enough to get into BYU and encourages Tara to […]