Poems and Prose of Gerard Manley Hopkins

Poems and Prose of Gerard Manley Hopkins by Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ, selected with an introduction and notes by W H Gardner, 217 pages

"I thought how sadly beauty of inscape was unknown and buried away from simple people and yet how near at hand it was if they had eyes to see it and it could be called out everywhere again..." 

So Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote in his journal on July 19th, 1872.  Much of his poetic - and, indeed, prose - output can be explained in these terms, lending us his eyes to see the "beauty of inscape".  Inscape is Hopkins' own term for individual distinctiveness, the shining forth of the inner nature of a thing through its external characteristics.  The inscape is created and maintained by an instress, the Power behind the form, a Power that is also a Person.  The inscape, then, is, by its beauty, a path to God, and in his poetry a beautiful creation speaks eloquently of its Creator.

Hopkins' poems were meant to be read aloud ("you must not slovenly read it with your eyes but with your ears"), so it is helpful that this volume includes the author's own preface explaining his use of rhythm.  This volume includes a good deal of his prose writing, from journal entries to sermons, which are, sadly, not as remarkable as his poetry.  His poetry alone, however, is enough to establish him among the greats.

The Killing of History

The Killing of History: How a Discipline Is Being Murdered By Literary Critics and Social Theorists by Keith Windschuttle, 281 pages

According to Keith Windschuttle, an Australian history professor, the latter half of the twentieth century saw a sustained assault on the very concept of objective history.  This attack came from many quarters, from German philosophers to French literary critics to Anglo-American scientists.  Windschuttle's objective is to defend the discipline of history against those relativists who consider the writing of history to exclusively be a function of ideology.  He explicitly places his work in the tradition of such classics as Alan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind.

Unfortunately, while Windschuttle takes the reader on an excellent tour through the various alleyways of postmodernism, he is less successful at actually defending his profession.  In particular, the book suffers from a scattershot approach, addressing historical problems involving settings as varied as the European penal system, the Aztec empire at the time of Cortez, and Hawaii at the time of Cook.  Of course, the critics he opposes have written on all of these and more, but given that the author is clearly most comfortable discussing the historiography of Australia and Oceania, it might have been better to narrow his focus.  Worse, he paints with a broad brush, lumping together various thinkers in ways that do not do justice to some of them - he is particularly unfair to Martin Heidegger and Karl Popper.

While I am sympathetic to Windschuttle's critique of postmodernism, his execution here is not equal to his ambition.  A book with a narrower focus in both historical subjects and philosophical opponents would have served his cause better.

What Makes This Book So Great

What Makes This Book So Great by Jo Walton 446 Pages

Jo Walton has collected a series of blog posts about Science Fiction books that she originally posted at Tor.com.  These posts covered a variety of books, older and newer and are among Walton's favorites.  She states that most of the books are those she rereads over and over again and her posts are not critical reviews of the books but rather similar to what we do on this blog.  In the last post of the book she says the following: 

"I am talking about books because I love books.  I am not standing on a mountain peak holding them at arm's length and issuing Olympian pronouncements about them.  I'm reading them in the bath and shouting with excitement because I have noticed something that is really really cool."  

This collection of posts is not for someone looking to find the best books of the Science Fiction genre, since many of the books that Walton talks about are not easy to find and certainly wouldn't appear on most people's lists.  However the book is great if you are looking for some new books to read.