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The Weekly Wrap: July 12-18

Smoke Days

As a reader, one of my delights has always been in snow days, when blizzards and cold make staying inside and reading. In our brave new climate world, snow days are increasingly infrequent. But this week delivered the new climatological replacement: the Smoke Day. In our part of the United States, if Canada is having a wildfire season and the winds are out of the northwest, the smoke, smelling like burning plastic, fills our skies. Yesterday morning, our Air Quality Index reached over 400, the worst reading our city has ever recorded. Some cities to our north reached readings of over 700, hazardous for all mammals.

Now I don’t think this is a good thing. Firstly, it is just plain dangerous. Sunlight turns the smoke into deadly things like benzene, formaldehyde, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and ozone, some of which are carcinogenic and others which just make breathing difficult. In addition PM 2.5 particulates penetrate deep into our lungs. Then there is all that carbon dioxide, added to what we humans generate. We never used to have days like this. Changing climate conditions turn Canadian forests into tinderboxes. And many Canadians are dealing with far more dire conditions than we are.

The one consolation is that like the Snow Day, about all one can do is stay indoors (hopefully in an air-conditioned spot that filters and recycles the air) and enjoy a good book. But I manage to do that most days anyway. At least I have a good excuse to not do yard work! I would rather not have the excuse of Smoke Days. But I fear it is a new normal. Stay safe friends!

Five Articles Worth Reading

Everyone’s abuzz about Christopher Nolan’s new cinematic rendering of The Odyssey. In “We’ll Help You Find Your Next Great Book. (Spoiler: It’s the ‘Odyssey.’),” A.O. Scott suggests that no matter your taste in literature, there is something in The Odyssey for you. And he uses that to introduce us to several translations of Homer’s classic.

Colson Whitehead’s Cool Machine concludes his Harlem Trilogy. David Hadju reviews it in “The Unapologetic Crime Fiction of Colson Whitehead.”

Batsheva Labowe-Stoll maintains the quest to develop artificial intelligence has often been religious in nature in “The Deep Spiritual History of AI.” For those familiar with Genesis, the efforts to develop AI have often seemed to me another Tower of Babel story.

Derek Thompson asks, “Why is the news media so interested in telling you how much the world sucks all the time? Why are so many of us obsessed with distraction and managing our attention? Why is it so hard to stop comparing ourselves to others? And why does everything in art and design seem the same these days?” In conversation with philosopher Agnes Callard, Thompson discovers one idea that links these questions, the “uni-context.” Read “A Philosopher’s One-Word Theory to Explain Why the World Feels So Weird” for the full interview.

Finally, I’ve often reflected on what an amazing intellectual Christian community the Inklings represented. Comment explores similar communities through history and around the world in “Seedbeds of Christian Humanism: A Gallery” The article links to articles devoted to 31 different communities.

Quote of the Week

This one was thought provoking. Is the search for truth a waking up from our dreams? So suggests Iris Murdoch, born July 15, 1919:

“We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.”

Miscellaneous Musings

An example of the community the Inklings and Dorothy L. Sayers enjoyed is described in a new book, The Way of Dante by Richard Hughes Gibson. It’s a marvelous study of the interactions between C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Dorothy L. Sayers around a shared love of Dante. Not only did they challenge each other’s thinking but the encouragement of Williams and Lewis gave Sayers the courage to embark on a new translation of the Divine Comedy.

As seems usual with Jane Austen, I’m on tenterhooks to see if Anne Eliot and Captain Wentworth rekindle the romance Anne ended at the persuasion of Lady Russell, who judged the Captain unworthy of the family in Persuasion. Don’t tell me. I want to see if I’ve guessed it. This is number four of the Austen novels I’ve read this year.

He’s a MacArthur Fellow, has won numerous national awards, I love his writing, and he is from the city where i live. And now, Hanif Abdurraqib adds to all this the honor of being named the 2026 ABA Indie Bookstore Ambassador! Well done!

Next Week’s Reviews

Monday: Kathy Tuan-Maclean and Tara Edelschick, Moms on the Way

Tuesday: Donnie Berry, The Earth Will Be Filled

Wednesday: Ken Waters, Words That Shape Us

Thursday: Allen Levi, Theo of Golden

Friday: Jane Austen, Persuasion

So, that’s The Weekly Wrap for July 12-18.

Find past editions of The Weekly Wrap under The Weekly Wrap heading on this page.

This Tender Land, William Kent Krueger. New York: Atria, 2019.

Summary: Four orphans fleeing the Lincoln Indian Training School due to a crime of self-defense embark on a journey to and on the Mississippi to find a relative they hope will provide a home and shelter.

Albert O’Banion and his younger brother Odie were orphans sent by family to live, by special arrangement, at the Lincoln Indian Training School. For the most part it was a brutal existence under the cruel headmistress, Thelma Brickman, known as “the Black Witch” and her grifter husband, and under the brutal strappings (and worse abuse) from Vincent DiMarco, who took care of the grounds. There were glimpses of kindness from Herman Volz, who secretly ran a still with mechanically clever Albert, and from a teacher, Cora Frost. They were also close to Mose, one of the Indian students, with whom they communicated by sign because his tongue had been cut out as a child

Cora Frost had the boys do some work for her. Her daughter, Emma, who suffered “fits,” took to them and Mrs. Frost was on the point of adopting them when a tornado hit, killing her beneath the wreckage, sparing Emma, who instead joined the boys under “the Black Witch.” At this point Odie is convinced that God is the shepherd who eats his sheep one by one, the Tornado God who takes away those you love. Things come to head and lead to the narrative that fills the rest of the book. Odie discovers the truth about the disappearence of an Indian boy. It has to do with DiMarco, who in turn sets out to kill Odie, pushing him over a cliff. A projection saves him and he grabs the strap hanging at DiMarco’s waist, which had inflicted so much hurt, pulling DiMarco over the edge, to his death.

Now a murderer, he must flee. His brother Albert, Mose, and Emma join him and they become “the Four Vagabonds” on their own journey down the Mississippi, reprising Huck Finn. A canoe left at the Frost place conveys them down the Gilead, then the Minnesota River to the Mississippi. Their goal, as improbable as it is, would be to make it to St. Louis, where Albert and Odie have an Aunt Julia with a big home and heart, hoping she will take them all in.

Traveling the river, they elude the manhunt on land to find the “kidnappers” of Emma, who is traveling willingly with them. For some strange reason, the Brickmans are focused on her. The remainder of the story traces their journeys on the river and their encounters both with the worst and the best of human beings during the summer of 1932, deep in the Depression. They pass through Hoovervilles and shanty towns. They take up with a traveling revival, whose Sister Eve discerns the special gift latent in Emma’s fits. The others discover more of themselves as well, from the site of a terrible slaughter of Sioux that sends Mose on a vision quest, to Albert, who realizes his mechanical gifts, and to Odie, who discovers what he really wants, which connects to his full name, Odysseus.

In the backdrop of all of this is the vast landscape of Middle America, heartbreakingly beautiful at times. It is the place of the forced subjugation of Native Peoples, represented by Indian schools who sought “to kill the Indian to save the man within.” It’s the place of contrasts between conspicuous wealth and bereft families traveling across the land hoping for a new start, often finding hopes dashed.

Amid all this are the four, bound together to protect one another and especially Emma. Despite the tensions between Albert and Odie, the mechanic and the storyteller, Albert is committed to look out for his younger brother. There are touching scenes of nights when it was safe when Odie played harmonica and told stories under the vast starscape, encouraging them all.

William Kent Krueger has given us not only a Huck Finn story but also an odyssey, leaving us reading breathlessly to discover whether they will find the home they are looking for or will be captured by the wicked Brickmans. For Odie, it is a spiritual odyssey as well as we wonder whether he will bitterly believe to the last only in the Tornado God or find some measure of grace. This finely written work was the first of Kreuger’s I’ve read. It won’t be the last.