Ray Foy's Literary Journey

The Girl Who Played with Fire is the second novel in the late Stieg Larsson's Millennium series featuring the troubled, but brilliant, Lisbeth Salander. It is a thriller driven by a murder mystery as well as the mystery of "the evil" that set Salander's life course. There are psycho bad guys, corrupt health care professionals, a genetically modified killer, a task force of well and not-so-well intentioned cops, and a band of crusading journalists. All are tossed around in a ball of plot-threads that are wide-ranging before they are tied up (or at least brought into proximity). It's all held together by Mr. Larsson's depiction of Salander's quirky character and the mystery of her early life and the threats on her current life, which will keep you reading to the end.

I have not read the first book in the series, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, but I did see the two movies made on it (the Swedish one and the American one with Daniel Craig). So I knew the story and the Salander character, but didn't appreciate what made the books popular until I read the second one. In a nutshell, Mr. Larsson's formula is creating a Holmesian mystery to be solved by a very eccentric but brilliant protagonist with the aid of a much more grounded and moral partner. It worked for Arthur Conan Doyle and it worked for Mr. Larrson.

Lisbeth Salander is probably as brilliant as Sherlock Holmes, though her deductive skills are augmented with computer hacking skills. She's a genius in mathematics that carries over into a genius for computer technology. She is an accomplished researcher but, also like Sherlock Holmes, has minimal social skills. That social lack keeps her in trouble with coworkers and ultimately sabotaged her budding relationship with her partner, Mikael Blomkvist, in the first book. She sees life in black-and-white and is unforgiving. When she perceived Blomkvist as cheating on her in the first book, she turned completely against him. Regaining trust for Salander is a slow, painful, process and it is an aching progression in The Girl Who Played with Fire. Even so, it is interesting to see how Salander and Blomkvist are able to work together from a distance on the story's mystery.

So working apart, and with different motivations, Salander and Blomkvist apply their own skills to solving the murder of two of Blomkvist's journalist friends and of Salander's sleazy guardian--murders that Salander becomes the prime suspect of. This murder mystery thread is kicked off by Salander's guardian, Nils Bjurman, scheming to get free from Salander's blackmailing of him, which she did to be free of his brutal exploitation that occurred in the first book. That thread, however, is preceded by a chapter describing Salander's time in the Caribbean solving a mini-murder mystery, having a physical relationship with a teenaged boy, and weathering a hurricane. Nothing of that situation or its characters is raised again in the rest of the book, so it may have been to show a softer side of Salander before the main plot, or it just planted seeds for the third book (which I haven't read). Anyway, it struck me as bit of misdirection.

Once the main plot is kicked off, however, it becomes another engrossing read, for the most part. It is carried along by Salander's computer hacks (which struck me as pretty accurately depicted for pre-2004 technology), Blomkvist's journalistic research (and it's interesting to see the editorial workings of Millennium magazine, at least it was to me), and the investigations of the police task force. In all this, there are a lot of characters to keep up with, especially among the police. The major ones coalesce into characters, but many remain just names. In fact, there were so many characters with small threads entwining the main cable, that I nearly lost the flow a few times. The omniscient point-of-view added to the sprawling effect, with the POV changing sometimes from sentence-to-sentence. It never got too bad, however, and it was worth sticking with it.

Part of the story involves sex-trade trafficking and the reader learns a bit about that. We see that it's mostly done by low-level gangs of low-brow criminals rather than a high-powered mafia. Prostitutes are created from impoverished young women taken, or enticed, from eastern European countries to the more advanced ones, like Sweden. That creation is done brutally and provides a key plot element. But then there are sections where Mr. Larsson describes some very open-minded sexual attitudes among his characters, including Salander. They're so open-minded they seem unreal, but it may have simply been a device to contrast attitudes between regular people and the criminals. Still, some of Mr. Larsson's characters engage in some very casual sex to the point that it didn't seem believable and it seemed out-of-character even for Salander. Of course, maybe it's that way in Sweden.

My other little criticism is that there are long sections where the plot is advanced only by a lot of dialogue among characters and little action. I think Mr. Larsson took this a tad too far, but not enough for me to abandon the book. The dialogue is interesting but it is a lot of telling-not-showing, technically speaking. On the other hand, Mr. Larsson was skilled enough to get away with it, as the conversations were generally interesting. It's like listening in on professionals discussing an engrossing topic.

The story is told in four parts. Each part begins with a mathematical rule or theorem, implied as coming from a book of mathematics that Salander is reading. I supposed Mr. Larsson was making a connection from the math to the section of his story it headed. If that's the case, I'm not mathematical enough to appreciate it.

The last third of the book turns very action-oriented and leads to a thrilling and satisfying conclusion that is enhanced by Mr. Larsson making Salander a Christ-figure. It took some guts for him to make that come off well, and he did it.

The Girl Who Played with Fire is a continuation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo more than a sequel. The characters evolve, especially Lisbeth Salander, who does so in a believable and engaging way. She is already a new classic in literary characters and is the great strength of Mr. Larsson's Millennium series.

"The Wider World" my anthology of short speculative fiction is now available! I've posted a journal entry that tells you all about it, and provides links to where you can get it. Please check it out:

I'm moving into a wider world of writing and publishing that includes a new book. Here's a "heads up" journal entry:

In his Predictions for the Last Blood Moon, prophecy scholar John Hogue reviews the portents he has noted for the first three Blood Moon events, and then describes what world shifts and potentials will be unleashed by the fourth. In the process, he discusses the current hoopla surrounding the Blood Moons and contrasts the religious, dogmatic interpretation of Biblical prophecy with the scholarly, open-minded sort. That discussion contains, I think, the primary value of this short book.

Blood moons are total lunar eclipses. The "blood" designation comes from the moon being illuminated by sunlight in the red wavelength, as refracted through earth's atmosphere, at the point of totality. That is, the moon takes on a red color at the height of a total eclipse. When this happens four times in a row, each separated by six full moons and with no partial eclipses in between, it's called a tetrad.

This book's tone is Mr. Hogue's usual blend of scholarly discussion, no-holds-barred commentary, and points made with yoga-like-twisting word-play and irreverent humor. For example, in reference to a red moon eclipse, he says:

"Is she going menstrual—“ turning to blood” as some dire and unclean portent of the Lord God on the rag, reckoning a final day of judgment and doom upon mankind?"

And when discussing the tendency of people to assign dire meaning to indifferent events, he says:

"Omens are the “oh!” of men projecting alarm on innocent and natural phenomena."

Such passages provide levity to guide the reader through some heavy material.

Because the term, "blood moon," is derived from a passage in the Old Testament Book of Joel that is considered prophetic, the recent (as of this writing) tetrad has been seized upon by the fundamentalist crowd as being a sign from God that portends events leading to the Second Coming. Mr. Hogue reviews this idea in some detail in the Introduction, noting it's descent from the writings of Hal Lindsey (The Late Great Planet Earth) in the 1970s to current tomes by John Hagee, Rev Mark Blitz, and (I'm sure) many others.

Mr. Hogue dissects the narrow, "Bible-based" fundamentalist assertions (especially Hagee's) in the light of his own broader-based studies of prophecy. He points out Hagee's errors in Biblical and historical interpretation, and notes that Hagee's book (Four Blood Moons) is more about supporting dogma than about relating fact or discovering new truth.

In noting the motivations for sheer business success of Hagee and others, Mr. Hogue says:

"Their recipe for success : cook up a thick stew of hubris, hope and fears in religious pot boilers based on a watered-down broth of badly translated Greek, Aramaic and Hebrew ancient texts."

The problem with this fundamentalist, end-times stew is that the ardent partakers of it tend to direct us to a bad place (and some of them are government leaders, and they do seem to dominate the US military). As Mr. Hogue says:

"In my view, such Christian theologians along with their Jewish and Islamic counterparts all unconsciously promote a dogmatic eschatological dream that drags the Middle East, and perhaps the whole world, down into their apocalyptic nightmare without any salvation waiting at the end as anticipated reward."

Such words will offend the fervent, fundamentalist, evangelicals and Mr. Hogue has already tussled with them on his website, but there's no getting around that. Especially if you're to address Biblical material honestly, and Predictions for the Last Blood Moon, in my opinion, does just that.

In regards to actual prophetic implications of the Blood Moons, Mr. Hogue uses his tool of astrology to evaluate them. In chapters for each Blood Moon of the tetrad, he examines them in the light of the associated positions of the sun and stars, and in the strength of astrological "windows of influence" in force at the time. What he finds are the directions in play for world events that the Blood Moons underscore. These are, in a nutshell:

1st Blood Moon: 15-Apr-2014
"Nationalistic impulses" prompt renewed violence in Ukraine between the NATO-backed Kiev government and the Russian-backed Donbass fighters.

2nd Blood Moon: 08-Oct-2014
The Syrian Civil War spills over into Iraq in the form of an "invasion" by the ISIS group. This prompts a return of American "advisers" to Iraq.

3rd Blood Moon: 04 Apr 2015
The US and Iran put together a framework for an agreement on Iran's nuclear program, and later the deal itself is brokered (on Jul 14). But the "deal" is a bad one for Iran (they get some sanctions lifted but lose most all control of their nuclear program and open an invasive door to the west). Unbiased observers think there is much beneath the surface here and Mr. Hogue's oracle seems to agree.

4th Blood Moon: 28 Sep 2015
According to Rev Hagee and company, this is the last Blood Moon before the start of the Tribulation and the event of the Rapture (Christians taken off of the earth by Jesus Christ at his Second Coming). Mr. Hogue's interpretation (based on astrology and the writings of Nostradamus) is the possibility of nuclear war between the US/NATO and Russia, with Iran being involved as a flashpoint.

I'll let you read the book to get the specific predictions for the Blood Moons, but be aware that they are not in the form of inevitable predictions as is the case with Biblical prophecies expounded on by the fundamentalists. That is, rather than "this will happen because God said it would in His Word," we have astrology and the words of seers over the ages to indicate some definite tendencies coming together with certain possible consequences--if we don't do something about them.

That may sound like hedging, but it's really not. It is, in fact, the actual result of the study of prophetic works (like parts of the Bible and the writings of Nostradamus and other seers). A skilled, honest, prophet (or psychic sensitive) can examine this material and make definite predictions and/or comment on the likely directions of nations and nature. Warnings and wisdom come from such study.

Where Mr. Hogue expounds on this in Predictions for the Last Blood Moon, is, in my opinion, the book's chief value. I don't think I've heard him talk about this view of prophecy as being NOT inevitable so much and so well as he does in this book's fourth chapter. It struck a chord with me, especially in his relating this concept to the evangelical proponents of Biblical prophecy (i.e., the Hal Lindsey vein). Because this fundamentalist culture is where I come from, I recognize the reality he is talking about and can only "amen" passages such as:

"Inevitability has been embraced by Bible prophecy watchers like John Hagee who shepherd their flock into a state of powerlessness wherein they cannot envision the future beyond being fixed and immutable. I have looked into the same scriptures, and more than this, I have compared one tradition’s take on the future with others because belief in destiny’s inevitability can only thrive if you limit your imagination or surrender it to self-puffed-up pundits playing holier than thou."

I also recognize Mr. Hogue's knowledge of the Bible as it relates to prophecy and Christian doctrine. I can appreciate the sympathy he extends to those "born again believers" when he says:

"If you find yourself every Sunday sitting in a massive, super-charged, super-churched “ pew ,” deep down hides a girl screaming mindlessly at the Beatles. Know this, that rocking and holy rolling to a shepherd Fuehrer playing religious hysteria’s “flock” star is slowly taking your intelligence under the “screaming-at-the-Beatles” spell of mass mindlessness. No true spiritual understanding is possible."

And that's very true. Been there; done that; got the T-shirt.

Though Predictions for the Last Blood Moon  is a short book (some 66 pages), it contains much of substance that challenges the "inevitable" view of prophecy and blind-belief systems. In examining the prophetic implications of the recent Blood Moon tetrad, it highlights the trends of current events we should be wary of. For those not satisfied with the dogma of the usual Bible prophecy "scholars," it offers alternative thoughts that can be pursued in Mr. Hogue's other works (several are listed at the book's end, with sample chapters).

And for those spiritually seeking their way through life, this book offers encouragement and suggests a tool for enlightened understanding--wake up and meditate!

My wife and I recently attended a James Taylor concert. It was a shared experience of baby-boomers that left me with some thoughts about getting older.

I haven't read Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman, but I've read a good bit about readers' disappointment with the novel. Most of that disappointment comes from Ms Lee's "recasting" of the character, Atticus Finch, from a progressive-minded lawyer in a small, racist town, to being a racist himself.

I did recently read To Kill a Mockingbird and wrote a review of it. I loved the book as much as anyone and I was also taken aback to learn about its change in the Atticus character. But on reflection, and considering that Harper Lee wrote the Watchman novel first, I wondered if the fan horror was really so justified.

Megan Behrent, writing for the Socialist Worker website, has reviewed Go Set a Watchman and addresses the Atticus-change issue and others with the most insight and fairness that I've seen so far. I think she is right on the money when she says:

While Watchman may be disappointing, it's worth remembering that it is not a sequel. It is better understood as the first draft of what would become Mockingbird. In that sense, it gives us some insight into the motivations of Mockingbird--inspired by, it would seem, Harper Lee's attempt to come to terms with the vitriolic racism of her Southern hometown.

and:

Go Set a Watchman was Harper Lee's starting point in exploring these themes--not her final word. If Atticus was transformed in the process, so, it seems, was Lee. That To Kill a Mockingbird is a far more powerful indictment of the Jim Crow South isn't just a literary question.

It seems to me that Go Set a Watchman should not have been published as a Mockingbird sequel without some major rewriting.

Behrent's review of Go Set a Watchman is here.

To Kill a Mockingbird is the Pulitzer prize winning novel by Nelle Harper Lee published in 1961. Having finally read it, finally, I see why it is a classic and I consider it to be a work of genius. It is sophisticated and nuanced in theme and in the telling, despite its down-home, small town setting. On the whole, I was say it is what The Andy Griffith Show would have been had it honestly portrayed the subject of racism in Mayberry--and if Sheriff Taylor had questioned the legal system, and if Opie had precociously questioned Sheriff Taylor, and if Aunt Bea had been black.

The story is set in the small town of Maycomb, Alabama in 1935. It is told completely from the point-of-view of eight year-old, Jean Louise Finch (also known as "Scout") who is the daughter of fifty-year old widower and lawyer, Atticus Finch.  The first half of the book is pretty much like episodic TV, with events happening to Scout, her brother Jem, and their friends against the Mayberry-like setting. But Mayberry was never like Maycomb in the open racism of its citizens. In the first half of the book, this racism is very well established by Ms Lee through liberal use of the "N-word."

...if anybody sees a white n----r around, that's the one..and next time he won't aim high, be it dog, n----r, or--

...but now he's turned out to be a n----r-lover we'll never be able to walk the streets of Maycomb again.

...but around here once you have a drop of Negro blood, that makes you all black.

And so forth. The common hatred for black people in Maycomb and the assumed attitude that black people are inferior to whites is familiar to me, having grown up in the US deep south in the 1960s. I can attest that the picture Ms Lee paints is realistic for that time. I'm sure the same attitudes exist today, but mostly underground.

It is in this setting that the story's drama unfolds when a young black man, Tom Robinson, is accused of raping a white woman. Atticus Finch is assigned by the judge to defend Robinson. Atticus is very progressively-minded in contrast to those around him and he is very aware of that. He knows that taking the case and actually trying to defend Robinson will bring problems for himself and his children. Wanting to set the right moral example for his kids, Atticus does defend Robinson to the best of his ability, and the problems he expected do arise.

Fans of To Kill a Mockingbird are drawn to the engaging characters in it, especially the kids, Scout and Jem. Ms Lee shows them moving through their world, dealing with school and adults, having school-yard fights, being obsessed with their reclusive neighbor, fearing "haints" and mad dogs. This is the "episodic" part but it includes some brilliant observations on southern, small town life that underscores the uglier racism.

For example, the inadequacy of the education system that actually retards the development of precocious children. Scout's view of her first years in elementary school is:

...as I inched sluggishly along the treadmill of the Maycomb County school system, I could not help receiving the impression that I was being cheated out of something.

And the southern obsession with fundamentalist Protestant religion that tolerates only conformity (mirroring the intolerance for blacks) prompts Scout to make an observation on some church people's condemnation of a neighbor for being more concerned with caring for her garden than for Bible study:

My confidence in pulpit Gospel lessened at the vision of Miss Maudie stewing forever in various Protestant hells.

But the central conflict in the story is the Robinson trial and its anticlimax. In that telling, Ms Lee expresses an interesting lack of confidence in the impartial rule-of-law. In Atticus' summation to the jury, he extolls, eloquently, the virtue of a court system as the only place in society where men are truly equal:

...in this country our courts are the great levelers, and in our courts all men are created equal.

But he follows with a qualification:

A court is only as sound as its jury, and a jury is only is only as sound as the men who make it up.

We see later that Atticus has no confidence that the jury will do the right thing, because of the attitudes of the men who make it up. And thus is the book's indictment of US society. It's also, I think, what made it a Pulitzer winner.

But even more interesting to me, was the story's attitude towards the law in the anticlimax. I don't do spoilers, so I'll just say that this lack of confidence in the court system for finding justice is extended when some characters circumvent it to protect an innocent. There is a certain amount of judgementalness in this that might seem hypocritical, and indeed, the characters (especially Atticus) wrestle with it. But they make their choices and deciding the moral rightness of their actions is, I think, an exercise left to the reader.

To Kill a Mockingbird is a classic piece of literature greatly beloved by readers for good reason. It is beautifully written with an intimate feel for its characters and appreciation for the nuances of life, especially where big issues are concerned.

This book is Mayberry with a sharp edge.

The Historian is Elizabeth Kostova's long novel about a group of people's search to find and destroy the vampire, Dracula. This is the same Dracula who is the object of Bram Stoker's classic novel, inspired by the historic ruler of Wallachia (next door to Transylvania), resister of the Ottoman Empire, and also known as "Vlad the Impaler." In fact, Stoker's novel is part of this novel's world and is mentioned several times. Readers learn a good bit about the historical Dracula, as well as about life in the Romanian part of eastern Europe, in the course of Ms Kostova's book. The vehicle for the search for Dracula is (mostly) compellingly described scholarly research. Moments of horror punctuate the narrative and lead to a satisfying portrayal of the Impaler himself.

The numerous mentions of Bram Stoker's book in her's, shows Ms Kostova's admiration of that novel. She even borrowed from it the plot feature of a group of human allies bonding in their quest to find and destroy a great evil. Some of them even bond romantically, just as in Stoker's novel, contributing to the family relationship of the vampire hunters. Another device the book borrows from Stoker is the narrative consisting of documents written by the characters. These are made up of letters and journals and some are even noted as being inserted by a given character for the sake of providing completeness to the tale. This makes the narrative first-person accounts rotating among several of the main characters, as in Stoker's book. It is not done in a distracting way, however, and the general feel is simply of a first-person story. And that story is told in a modern format, with contemporary sensibilities, and without the "tritely romantic" or patriarchtic aspects of Stoker's book.

But the overriding theme and tone of The Historian is the sheer love of books and scholarship, especially historical scholarship. The search for Dracula is mostly carried out in libraries--public libraries and the private libraries of monasteries and of the scholar-vampire hunters. This could make for a dry narrative but it does not in The Historian, which I attribute to the storytelling ability of the author and her obvious passion for books and study. Readers of like mind will appreciate this aspect. Then Ms Kostova pairs that love of scholarship with a love of travel. The characters travel a lot through Europe and we see through them the love of new destinations and the appreciation of exotic locales, cafes, foods, coffees, and wines. This melding of literary appreciation, scholarship, and traveling is what makes The Historian most memorable for me, and it is done--for the most part--without sacrificing the storytelling or slowing the plot.

I say, "for the most part," because I think Ms Kostova does carry the travels, library searches, misdirections and dead-ends a bit too far before she reaches her finale. I think she could have cut a lot of that and reduced the length of her book by about one third without any loss to the story. It would have made the book's good parts even stronger. That burdensome excess cost the book a star in my rating.

Still, the good parts showed that love of scholarship that was so second-nature to the characters and it comes out in some neat ways. Like when a mother, after a long separation from her daughter, meets the girl and offers her a high complement:

She looked at me for a moment, her head to one side. "You are a historian," she said after a moment. It wasn't a question.

In a romantic moment, when the character, Paul, is observing his love interest, his desire is stimulated by the inclusion of a book in the scene:

...I liked the way she lay sprawled across our hotel bed in Perpignan, flipping through a history of French architecture that I'd bought in Paris.

And he had already read the book! But the characters are not just total book-nerds. They take action when they need to, wielding guns, knives, stakes, and garlic against the undead. And at times, they look up and notice beauty in the physical world, especially when its an embodiment of descriptions in ancient manuscripts. For example, Paul and Helen are blown away when they visit the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul for the first time. The sheer beauty of its architecture inspired a desire in Paul to live more fully in the wider world, outside of books:

Looking back at that moment, I understood that I had lived in books so long...that I had become compressed by them internally. Suddenly, in this echoing house of Byzantium--one of the wonders of history--my spirit leaped out of its confines. I knew in that instant that, whatever happened, I could never go back to my old constraints. I wanted to follow life upward...

So we follow these library-loving scholars in their search for Dracula through three-fourths of the book before we encounter the five hundred year-old vampire. By that time, we've learned enough of the historic Vlad to get a feel for the kind of person he was, and then the presentation of him as a character complements that knowledge very well. He is presented with all the arrogance and psychopathy of the ruler-impaler, and yet he is also another scholar:

Perhaps you do not know that I was something of a scholar. This seems not widely known...I became an historian in order to preserve my own history forever...I am a scholar at heart, as well as a warrior, and these books have kept me company through my long years.

Even Dracula's relating of how he became a vampire through his search for the means of achieving immortality, included the vehicle of a book:

But recently I met a man, a merchant who has traveled to a monastery in the West. He said there is a place in Gaul, the oldest church in their part of the world, where some of the Latin monks have outwitted death by secret means. He offered to sell me their secrets, which he has inscribed in a book.

Appropriate. The Historian is a really neat work of fiction that is on my list of favorites because of its unapologetic  love of books and learning, coupled with a stimulating vision of one of history's monsters brought to undead life. If you are a lover of books and appreciate the intellectual stimulation of searching for the resolution of mysteries in the historical record, then you'll find hanging on through The Historian's 700+ pages a rewarding experience.

I believe the Greek referendum last Sunday (Jul 05) was a watershed moment for our times. Not for what it accomplished, but for the battlelines in the War of the Damned that it revealed. It presages what will follow. I had to make a journal entry about it.

Can we still embark on journeys of enlightenment, or pilgrimages, in this age of ecological destruction? I wrestle with that question in my journal.

The way is open now for the democracy-killing TPP. See my new journal entry.

It seems a trend these days that commentaries and essays about current world events quote the prophecies of the Hopi. They do so with good reason and this behooves the serious seeker to look into who these people are and what they have to say. The Essential Hopi Prophecies by John Hogue is a very good place to begin that inquiry.

In seven chapters written in readable, engaging prose, Mr. Hogue gives us an overview of the Hopi as a pueblos-dwelling indigenous people, living in the "Four Corners" region of the US southwest. In their millennia of living there, they produced a folklore that contains stories of three previous "worlds" (which I take to be instances of world civilizations) that reached their zeniths of development and then perished. It also contains predictions concerning the destruction of the fourth world (our world) followed by the birth of a fifth. This coming death-rebirth for humanity is known by the Hopi as "The Great Purification."

These predictions for The Great Purification are the main concern of The Essential Hopi Prophecies and Mr. Hogue expounds upon them with skills gleaned from long experience at interpreting prophecy. For instance, he draws from his knowledge of Nostradamus and Mattias Stormberger to make a compelling case for the Hopi predicting a nuclear-powered World War III. But even without interpretation, what I find remarkable about these prophecies is their relatively unambiguous language. For example, a Gourd of Ashes along with: "The white brother will bring the symbol of the Sun, which makes a great explosion shaking the Earth," sounds a lot like a nuclear explosion. And then descriptions of the Sun, the Swastika and the Red, are readily seen as an allusion to the World War II conflict between the West and Japan, Nazi Germany, and Communist Russia.

Interpreting such images, Mr. Hogue is able to present a list of signs that the Hopi say will precede the Great Purification. These include atomic bomb drops, World War II, the telegraph (mass communications), trains (rapid transportation), cobwebs in the sky (indicating air travel), and even the obtaining of rocks from the moon and human residence in a "teepee in the sky" (the "international" space station). There are other signs that Mr. Hogue deals with at some length, like the blue star that "Falls with a great crash." This one is not as straightforward as others and so Mr. Hogue gives us some leading speculations as to its meaning.

Another sign is "a great red power wearing a red cloak will come by a road in the air from the east." This has been interpreted, apparently by the Hopi themselves, as an influx of Buddhist thought from red-robed practitioners into western countries (and even the American southwest). Mr. Hogue makes a good case for this being indicative of the Tibetan diaspora from Chinese oppression. He also makes an interesting case for the prophecy alluding to the followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (an Indian mystic also called Osho) who built a commune in Oregon (Mr. Hogue has some personal experience with that bit of history).

Other topics touched on in the book include a discussion of the Hopi "Prophecy Rock" that expresses male-female potentials in a sense that reminds me of similar thought in Daniel Quinn and Riane Eisler's works. Then there's a section on fulfilled Native American prophecies, centering on the coming of the white man. And there's a discussion on various messianic traditions in the folklore of indigenous American peoples. Such traditions that touch on, and even arguably transcend, classic western thought, belie Hollywood images of "savage Indians," though Mr. Hogue's essay on the Thanksgiving Day holiday (Chapter 4) might indicate they were not so much "savage" as "pissed off."

As you can see, there's a lot of ground covered in this little book. Even so, it's not an exhaustive text, but is rather a launching pad that can take the seeker down a number of enlightening paths. A lot of the material is based on previous works by Mr. Hogue and he refers to those via links in the text of this ebook. They are good paths to follow in your studies along with Book of the Hopi by Frank Waters, which Mr. Hogue quotes.

We live in a time of converging calamities bearing towards a near-future that even nonreligious people see as apocalyptic. People seem to sense this even as they deny it with actions that say "tomorrow will be like today." The fear that tomorrow may actually be different, even much worse, prompts us to look for some sane direction through the anticipated storm. So we turn to what seers have written through the ages, looking for clues to help. Among that literature, the Hopi prophecies stand out as especially deserving of our attention. The Essential Hopi Prophecies will point you to them.

I have reread HG Wells' "War of the Worlds" and was struck by its application to our times. See my journal entry:

Wild is author Cheryl Strayed's memoir about her three-month long hike up the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) in 1995. Only 26 years old at the time, she walked the trail alone. Though she had done a good bit of camping in her youth, she was not a backpacker. Her motivation was the classic seeker's quest for self-discovery and insight after her world had been shattered by the death of her mother some four years prior. They had been very close and their relationship was so much her life's security that when she lost it, she couldn't function in a normal life. Her brother, sister, stepfather, and she drifted apart without her mother to bind them. She couldn't function as a wife either, and she eventually divorced. She was lost and desperate for an answer; not so much an answer to "why?" her life fell apart, as "how?" to put it back together. That she would seek it through a eleven hundred mile trek was prompted by her serendipitous discovery of a PCT hiker's guide in a sporting goods store.

In describing the lost emptiness she was feeling after her mother's death in the time before her hike, she says:

It took me years to take my place among the ten thousand things again...I would suffer. I would suffer. I would want things to be different than they were. The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods. It took me four years, seven months, and three days to do it. I didn't know where I was going until I got there.

In short, she decided to look for the way out of her emotional wilderness by navigating a real one. By living the metaphor, and then writing about it, Ms Strayed takes her place among those pilgrims of sacred journeys such as the Santiago de Compostela Camino, who share their insights with us; and she does so with considerable writing skills.

Wild is written as creative nonfiction and so reads like a novel with a first-person point-of-view. The prose is solid, intelligent, honest, and a delight to read. Ms Strayed's "story" construction is also solid and balanced so well between narrative, flashbacks, and insightful exposition that the reader is as engrossed as with any mystery or thriller. I think that's owing to the author's writing abilities and her literary passion. She says:

Of all the things I'd done in my life, of all the versions of myself I'd lived out, there was one that had never changed: I was a writer.

She certainly is and that could make a reader wonder as to how much of this story is fictionalized. I suspect, not much, and probably much less than Paulo Coelho's The Pilgrimage. But truth is not always revealed in a simple recitation of facts. More is to be found in the experiencer's interpretation and that is the value of this book. It is engrossing because the author is dealing with problems and emotions that are common to most of us, and so it's easy to relate to the hints at answers she finds. She gives us those hints in many beautiful passages that show the metaphor in the things she saw on her journey. Such as:

This was once a wasteland of lava and pumice and ash. This was once an empty bowl that took hundreds of years to fill. But hard as I tried, I couldn't see them in my mind's eye. Not the mountain or the wasteland or the empty bowl. They simply were not there anymore. There was only the stillness and silence of that water: what a mountain and a wasteland and an empty bowl turned into after the healing began.

When you get to that passage, you can easily see that she is talking about herself as much as she is describing Crater Lake.

But Wild is not just a book of beautiful prose and spiritual insights, it is a memoir that deals with the get-down grittiness of life. Ms Strayed is brutally honest in relating her life for that time period. She speaks forthrightly of her flirtations with heroin and her seeking solace in sexual encounters. Those were other wildernesses she had to find her way out of, and I expect many of her readers will relate. That she did find her way out, and came to terms with herself, is expressed in another insightful passage:

What if I forgave myself? I thought. What if I forgave myself even though I'd done something I shouldn't have?...What if I was sorry, but if I could go back in time I wouldn't do anything differently than I had done?...What if heroin taught me something? What if 'yes' was the right answer instead of 'no?' What if what made me do all those things everyone thought I shouldn't have done was what also had got me here? What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?

Wild strikes me as a seeker's attempt to reach the bones of meaning in life as she has had to deal with it. In such a work, you won't find definitive answers or endorsements of anybody's dogmas. But in looking at the collective of such works, you'll find a literature that is spiritually infused. And that spirit is simply asking the question: "What the Hell is this all about?" If there is an answer, it is a dynamic one, found in the continual asking of the question.

And so by the time you've read the last page of Wild, you won't find a statement of "the answer" that Ms Strayed found on her journey; no final "moral of the story" that you can print out and frame and hang on the wall. You will find a lot of statements throughout the book that could help you find your own way (and many are worth framing). In the end, Ms Strayed didn't so much find an answer, as she found a place--in the world and in her heart--where she could dwell with a sense of absolution. That was her salvation found on the Pacific Crest Trail. Such is the value of pilgrimages.

Rereading The War of the Worlds and the impending passage of the Fast Track bill to get the TPP sped through Congress, brought some ideas together for me. See my journal entry:

Thinking again about hope in a dark place and the bubble we live in. Also a link to my review of "Predictions 2015-2016." New journal entry: