In this raw, unedited photo, Lincoln grills while Anna Beth and Kellen load the trebuchet they got from the Renaissance fair.

I enjoy reading book reviews. Besides helping me keep up with new books, they teach the craft of writing.

A recent review by Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post offers a few lessons. The author of the book tries to connect three men around a bombing case; the reviewer asserts that one of the men had absolutely nothing to do with it. So why try to tie the three men together? Yardley writes:

Blum is hell-bent on achieving Significance. It’s not enough that the Los Angeles story is interesting on its own merits; he has to tart it up by connecting it to the rise of the movies, which “had become integrated into American life, a natural part of the national consciousness.” He’s after Relevance, too, which is why he writes, of the “terror campaign” of bombings in 1910.

There’s a principle in that: Don’t manufacture significance. An obvious point, to be sure, but it’s helpful to remember that someone will always call you on the carpet if you violate it.

The whole review is worth reading.

Something curious is happening with gas prices in my part of town.

Before the recent hurricane, gas prices had gone down to $3.26/gal. The hurricane pushed prices up to about $4.10/gal, and many stations were without gas for several weeks. Every station now has gas, and prices have dropped all week, from $3.89 on Monday to $3.19 last night.

One station, though, has been selling gas at cut rates for over a week. When gas was at $4.10, they were selling for $3.56; when gas was at $3.59, they were selling at $2.92. Of course, the cars have been lined up by the dozens, and we’ve had to wait five to fifteen minutes in traffic every day going home.

I’m not sure why the store is offering gas at prices so far below the going rate. They certainly are getting a lot of customers, but I doubt that they are that profitable. The station has run out of gas several times this week; it was out this morning. Perhaps they’re trying to get back customers that they lost during the two weeks they were out of gas, or perhaps they’re trying to put neighboring gas stations out of business.

Any ideas?

On a recent Saturday, we went apple picking with the Garlands.

In August, thanks to the kindness of a BJU faculty member who gave us some tickets, Abby, the Funks, and I visited the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina. We had a good time touring the estate, especially the gardens, and we got to see something of the Gilded Age in person. The only disappointment was the confusion on the staff’s face when we asked if we could meet Mr. Biltmore himself.

I rarely comment on politics, but these facts are worth noting. On the day President George W. Bush was inaugurated, the national debt was $5,727,776,738,304.64, or $5.7 trillion. This past Friday, the national debt was $9,727,009,619,894.34, or $9.7 trillion. In other words, in less than eight years, the national debt has increased about $4 trillion. Now, the Bush Treasury wants to buy some $700 billion dollars in bad mortgages, and it is asking Congress to raise the statutory limit on the national debt to $11.3 trillion. A trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon we’re talking about real money.

The basic principle of political science is that the state—the politeia—shapes the souls of its citzens. Is it any wonder that our debt-ridden politeia has produced a nation of debtors?

For the first time in six years, I won’t be a student this semester. Surprisingly, I haven’t felt the difference as much as I expected, perhaps because I hope to be a student next year, perhaps because my job keeps me involved in academia.

At the library, I am preparing a series of guides to a wide variety of topics. In a few days, I will have a dozen or so student workers to supervise. The number of reference questions should pick up once classes start, and some teachers may ask me to instruct their classes on how to use the reference resources.

I will be taking one class for credit, a German reading comprehension course. The class is intended to teach PhD students to read German well enough to pass their language exams, which is exactly the type of language study that I need.

In a way, I’ll be starting a new semester at church too. My Sunday school class has asked me to teach church history, beginning with the English Reformation. While I would prefer an earlier starting point, the topic is at least somewhat limited in time, topic, and geography, so it should be manageable. I have only a few weeks before the class will begin, so I have much work to do to prepare.

For a couple weeks I’ve been reading Robert D. Richardson’s William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism. It’s a lengthy book, and I’ve been fairly busy these past few weeks, but I have no excuse: the book is taking me longer to finish than I had hoped.

I sometimes have the book with me at church. This morning one of my junior church students saw it and said, “You’re still reading that book?”

Point taken.

Fortified by Anna Beth’s monkey bread, Kellen, Anna Beth, Abby, and I attended the Really Big, Really Good, Really Cheap book sale. We went to the sale together last year, so we had a plan. First, we got there when the sale opened, rather than at ten o’clock. Second, Kellen insisted that, unlike last year, he would by no means drop us off while he found a parking space. Third, we assigned ourselves to different parts of the sale: me to history, Kellen to philosophy, Anna Beth to literature and cookbooks, and Abby to children’s books and cookbooks. I had made my interests known to the rest of the part in advance, though they refused to memorize the list of Bancroft Prize winners as I’d asked.

I found some pretty good deals. Among the more notable were these:

• Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence
• Page Smith’s two-volume biography of John Adams (I gave my other copy to my dad.)
• Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower (a good narrative history, though the title is misleading since the Mayflower is dispensed with in the first fifty pages)
• Winston Churchill’s four-volume History of the English-Speaking Peoples (to complete Abby’s collection)
• Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s Age of Jackson and The Crisis of the Old Order
• John Steinbeck’s A Russian Journal, Once There Was a War, Travels with Charley in Search of America, The Winter of Our Discontent, and The Moon is Down (thanks to Abby and Anna Beth)
• Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel (so that I can find out what all the commotion is about)
• Paul Johnson’s A History of the American People
• David McCullough’s The Path Between the Seas
• William James’s The Principles of Psychology

I also got two books to give as gifts, and Abby got a children’s book, some literature, a biography of Churchill, and at least one squishy book.

There were some heartbreakers, however. I own McCullogh’s Truman in hardback, and Kellen and I gave a paperback copy to a fellow history student, but it was only with great that I left behind another copy. I also had to pass over a good paperback of The Grapes of Wrath, because I have a copy in Massachusetts (though technically it belongs to my dad). Other books abandoned for the sake of the budget were Eric Foner’s Short History of Reconstruction, Samuel Eliot Morison’s The Oxford History of the American People, and Lawrence Friedman’s A History of American Law (the last two of which I already own). I could have bought those books to give to others, but at least I can still lend them.

This evening, I experienced another first in married life: I cut Lincoln’s hair. There aren’t any pictures of the event, since no one else was there, but I don’t think he looks too bad. . . . Lincoln assures me I did a fine job. It took a long time, but Lincoln has very thick hair. We tried to use his electric beard trimmer at first, but it was too small and kept clogging. So we had to revert to the old standby: scissors. We don’t have any hair-cutting scissors, but I used a surplus pair of sewing scissors. Lincoln suggested his big office scissors, but my sewing scissors are much sharper and considerably less unwieldy.

At any rate, now Lincoln has short hair. And I didn’t completely mutilate him. :)

Here are more, long overdue wedding photos. This is a more miscellaneous collection than the last; I’ll be posting family and wedding party photos soon. Enjoy!

Last week I received my first check for writing. It’s only a minor milestone, but it’s at least a small break into publication.