Down Among the Fundamentalists (Part 3)

I was dropped, literally, in front of the BJU Administration Building on the first day of September 1970. As I waved goodbye to my parents, I saw my little brother Lowell making faces in the back window of my dad's Galaxy 500. That is until my mom turned around and slapped him on the back of the head.

I never felt more alone in my life. I made my way back to my dorm.

My dormitory was named Bib Graves. (FYI: Bibb Graves [April 1, 1873–March 14, 1942] was a Democratic politician and the 38th Governor of Alabama. His first name was David, but he went by "Bibb," probably to remind the voters of Alabama that he was a descendant of Bill Bibb, the first governor of Alabama.) I lived in a room with four other roommates. Yes, there were five of us sharing a narrow eight by twelve nook, bunk beds on one side, a shared desk on the other, and a sink in the corner. I would not be surprised if South Carolina provided more square footage per prisoner at the Allendale Correction Institution.

For the next nine months, while I was a student, I attended mandatory church service every day, and twice on Sunday. During the week there was Chapel. On Saturday there was a morning service. On Sunday there was the regular church service, plus Sunday school, and vespers. I guess that makes three times on Sunday. (I wonder. Since it was mandatory, does it count? You know, in the Big Hereafter. Probably not.)

Say what you want about the Fundamentalists, they take their Bible seriously. And not just any translation. The preferred text of the born again, Bible believing Baptist is the King James version. I found this interesting. The KJV takes work to read. It's not an easy task to study Jeremiah, or Ezra, or even the Gospel of John for that matter. Though Fundamentalists claim to take the Bible literally, that is simply not so. There are definitely figurative passages in the Book. What they mean, I suppose, is that they believe it to be God's word and give great respect to scripture.

A true Fundamentalist would not even be political in the sense that the majority culture would understand. Sure, a fundamentalist may vote conservative, but tax policy and social reform are not his motivating force. What really concerns a Fundamentalist is his relationship with God. It's prayer, not protest.

BJU's rules were omnipresent. The claim was made that every rule on campus could be justified through scripture. Well, that hardly made the situation better. There was a strict dress code. The guys had the wear ties till noon while on campus, and always wear them when off campus. The gals wore dresses when in public view. What they wore when they were out of sight by the general public, I couldn't guess. Reading material was strictly censored. No Mad magazine. Period. And music was limited to classical, semi-classical and serious religious music. Yes, religious music had to be serious. None of that wigged out, non serious gospel music.

And you can forget about listening to Herb Alpert and the brass.

Next: Down Among the Fundamentalists (Part 4) The Good, The Bad and the Not So Hot

Down Among the Fundamentalists (Part 2)

In September 1970, Bob Jones University was in the center of a growing maelstrom. The culture was rapidly changing and adjusting itself. A flood of feminism, anti-war marches, rock and roll music and general hedonism poured from the general culture. Bob Jones University stood against these changes, anchoring itself to the Bible. At that time Bob Jones, Sr, the founder, had been dead for several years. His son, Bob Jones, Jr., was large and in charge. He was president of the place. There was also a Bob Jones III on campus. I'm not sure what his official position was at the time, but I'm fairly certain, given his several talents, nepotism was involved.

Bob Jones College was founded in Panama City, FL, in 1927 by, of course, Bob Jones. Before turning to a career in education, Bob Jones was an itinerant preacher, a contemporary of Billy Sunday. He was a kind of Billy Graham of his day (Graham attended Bob Jones University and would have been the school's superstar had not a disagreement resulted in Graham's excommunication from Fundamentalism.)

What does Bob Jones University stand for? I think the Bob Jones creed pretty much sums up the essentials.

I believe in the inspiration of the Bible (both the Old and the New Testaments);
the creation of man by the direct act of God;
the incarnation and virgin birth of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ;
His identification as the Son of God;
His vicarious atonement for the sins of mankind by the shedding of His blood on the cross;
the resurrection of His body from the tomb;
His power to save men from sin;
the new birth through the regeneration by the Holy Spirit;
and the gift of eternal life by the grace of God.

The funny thing is, I pretty much believe all of this. I did then and I do now. What I had a hard time dealing with was the harsh attitude of the place, the confining rules, the over all combativeness of the university pulpit, the lack of humility, and, the worst transgression of all, overt racism and bigotry.

Well, I guess nobody's perfect.

In fairness, times were different then. For a while it did seem as if the world was coming apart, hence the combativeness. And there was still, in 1970, a good chunk of the old south's culture permeating the campus. Yes, it is true. Blacks- African Americans- were not permitted to attend the school, but it wasn't like they were lining up trying to get in. What was truly obnoxious was BJU's claim that the Bible supported their racist policies.

The Bible supports no such thing.

Later, the admission policy was changed. And in 2000, Bob Jones III, then the Chancellor of the University, ended the ban against interracial dating. I saw him do this in a televised interview on a news show. Live. There was even a hint of humility eking through his facial expression. Times change.

Here at the very end of the twentieth century, Bob Jones University was about to enter it.

That September I arrived on campus, a freshly minted graduate from a suburban high school in northeast Ohio. I attended the local United Methodist Church. And I knew several hymns completely by heart.

I had no idea of what I was walking into.

Down Among the Fundamentalists (Part 1)

All my life I have been too passive. Rather than take charge, it's been far easier being a passenger. I've let things happen to me.

I let Bob Jones University happen to me.

No one controls what generation they are born into. It was my luck to be a child of the fifties also known as the Baby Boomers. Or perhaps, given our materialist bent, the Pepsi Generation is a better title. We started out as members of the peanut gallery on the Howdy Doodie Show and by the time we were eighteen we had morphed into what seemed to be a new sub-species of humanity: Homo Funditus Confusus (the totally confused man.) Some of us became long haired hippie dippy freaks with a bong in one hand and a tambourine in the other. A few of us devolved into militant Marxists out to torch every paneled basement in America. Most of us read The Catcher in the Rye and the poetry of ee cummings and through that modest intellectual achievement thought we had discovered the secret of the universe.

We weren't sure what we were supposed to do, but we knew we had to do something.

Rather than follow the well worn and tested truths of previous generations such as working hard, playing safe, keeping your nose clean, trying to make something of yourself, we, the boomers, pretty much scotched those boring ideas and centered our lives around Madison Avenue-like jingles. "Make Love Not War" was our motto. And what passed for philosophy could be written on a Peter Max poster: "You know, man, can't we just, like, love each other, you know?" Note, there's not a three syllable word in that sentence.

Is it even a complete, coherent thought?

My goose was cooked when President Lyndon Johnson, for whatever political and/or psychological reasons, brought the Vietnam War to the United States. There is some controversy about who really got us into a land war in Southeast Asia. Some blame Kennedy, some Eisenhower, some FDR. But Johnson dropped in more than half a million men (less both Bill Clinton and myself.) LBJ took the war to a level where he couldn't back out. If you are looking for the instigator in chief, look no further than LBJ.

Not wanting to go through Congress, Johnson decided to draft boys directly into the fight. Then, to placate everyone he created a system of college draft deferments. Before you could say "protest movement" college campi across the US became havens for anti-war activists.

It was all so predictable, but then overtly idiotic foreign policy is the price we pay for letting academics influence government. These inhabitants of the Ivory Tower seem to be in a perpetual state of war against common sense, their only weapons being newly minted, untested social theories and a superior demure.

Why do we still listen to these guys?

By the spring of 1970, Vietnam rattled onward. No conversation was complete unless one weighed in on the war. By then the evening news had turned against the conflict so every night it seemed there was some new outrage to chew on. I mean, Jeez Louise, it got to the point where you wanted it all to just go away so you could have a normal conversation.

And then Nixon announced incursions into Cambodia. Turns out the North Vietnamese were hiding troops and weapons just across the border knowing they would be safe from America's guns. Nixon's decision to conduct the Vietnam war as if it were a real war rather than a Marxist passion play was simple common sense. Naturally, the intellectual class was enraged. College campuses exploded.

And there were protests at Kent State. A building was burned. Governor Rhodes called in the National Guard. Shots were fired. Students were killed.

My parents watched it all from a small black and white portable television set in their kitchen. That was the moment I got flipped out of the frying pan of Fate. My parents were determined to keep me out of the fray (although sometimes my mom acted as if she wanted me to enlist which, logically, would have placed me dead center IN the fray.)

That's why they wanted me to go to Bob Jones University. They seemed to have things under control down there. It was a no nonsense institution in an era over running with nonsense.

Looking back, I know now that when they pushed Bob Jones University, I should have pushed back. But then, pushing back is not in my nature. I would rather listen to Herb Alpert than attend a Rolling Stones concert. A root beer float seemed far more enjoyable than puffing on a doobey, and as for protests... well, that's simply not my style. The closest I ever came to a war protest was following the bouncing ball on Sing Along With Mitch while his chorus sang Puff the Magic Dragon.

And so I caved.
Bob Jones University it would be.
After all, I would be far away from home in Greenville, South Carolina.
On my own.
Sort of.
That would be cool, right?
I'd have a dorm room and roommates and communal showering.
I mean, how bad could it get?

A Natural History of Elevator Music

I have never heard elevator music while standing in an elevator. Ever. The term is a gigantic misnomer. But whether it’s called easy listening, mood music or lounge music I have a passion for the stuff.

Like most forms of modern music, elevator music has its roots in classical music. Just give a listen to the impressionistic melodies of Debussy and Ravel. Those light, soothing tonalities that you hear have a direct connection to the accessible, laid back harmonies of Henry Mancini. In a sense Debussy’s Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune is the musical grand-mère of Henry Mancini’s Pink Panther.

Well, sort of.

One of my favorite American classical composers, Leroy Anderson, wrote happy, uplifting tunes throughout the twentieth century. His “hits” include songs such as Sleigh Ride, Blue Tango, The Typewriter, Serenata, Belle of the Ball, Bugler's Holiday and Forgotten Dreams. In many ways Anderson could be considered the father of modern easy listening music, if anyone really wanted to be called such a thing.

Anyway, by the time I arrived on the scene in 1952 elevator music was in full flower. With the advent of FM radio, easy listening music became the background score for the Eisenhower administration. In short order orchestrated versions of popular music flooded the airways. Purveyors of this musical art form included such luminaries as Ray Conniff, Percy Faith, Andre Kostelanetz, “Montovani,” and the musicians of the 101 Strings to mention a few.

One of my favorite performers of this period was Fred Warring. Fred was the conductor of a choral group, the Pennsylvanians (was there ever a more humble moniker?) It seems odd today that a choir could gain national recognition without a lead vocal, but the Pennsylvanians were a product of their times. They peaked in popularity in the decade after World War II, the penultimate group effort.

Is it possible that once millions of people sat in front of their radios and listened to the Pennsylvanians vocal interpretation of the Whiffenpoof Song? Hard to believe, but it happened.

Elevator music reached its crescendo with Jackie Gleason and his Orchestra. Gleason had zero musical training. He did, however, have an idea. After watching a Clark Gable movie Gleason noticed that the love scenes were heavily scored. “If Clark Gable needs music,” Gleason figured, “the regular Joe must be desperate!”

Romantic background music for the regular Joes was the raison d’être of Gleason’s musical mission.

Using his clout as an entertainer, Gleason gathered the top jazz musicians of his day and put together his “orchestra.” His contribution to the effort was to provide the vision. In short, he would explain to the musicians what he wanted and leave it to them to figure out the musical stuff.

It must have been a winning formula because throughout the fifties and sixties Gleason produced close to three dozen albums. On the back of one album Gleason is pictured directing his musicians with what appears to be a cigarette.

Perfect.

The sixties put an end to the elevator music era. A combination of rock and roll, bosa nova and country western music rendered the form even more meaningless than it already was. Yet it was a slow death. Peter Nero attempted to breathe life into its dying body with his piano hunt-and-peck versions of the Beatles’ music. Barry Manilow tried valiantly to re-invigorate it with his over the top lyrics and big band-like orchestration. And the Tijuana Brass as well as the Carpenters performed CPR on the corpse. It was all too little, too late. By the end of the seventies elevator music lay dead on the disco dance floor.

And no one cried.

But even though it’s dead, its spirit is still with us.

You can hear the echoes of easy listening in any John Williams score.

You can hear it in every televised Handy Wipe commercial.

You can hear it in the umpteen versions of Leroy Anderson’s Sleigh Ride played endlessly during Christmas.

And what is a Phillip Glass symphony except the same three bars from Montovni’s Moon River endlessly looped?

And if you ever need to listen to Andre Kostelanetz or Percy Faith or Jackie Gleason, just go to your local Goodwill. Head to the back and look in the cardboard box hidden underneath a card table displaying chipped coffee cups. You’ll find all the albums you need, up to and including Herb Alpert’s Going Places.

You see, elevator music is not really dead.
It’s just tucked away.
Forever.

The Resurrection of Mr. Phillips

Mr. Phillips had been dead for ten years and Mrs. Phillips was chained to him by her memory. That was the crux of the situation. And while I remember her as being incredibly old, she could not have been too much older than I am now.

We see the world differently when we’re nine.

My mom was absolutely certain on the cause of Mr. Phillips demise. “Ada (Mrs. Phillips) worried the poor man to death.” It had to be true. Mom was well connected with the neighborhood gossips and knew virtually everything about everybody.

I wasn’t exactly clear on what “worried to death” meant, but it sounded like Mrs. Phillips had a hand in it, which made sense to me After all, she was a witch.

And if her husband’s death was somewhat a mystery, his resurrection was positively astounding involving, as it did, numerous governmental agencies and an act of Congress. The greatest mystery of death is not the after life, but the paperwork.

That summer of ’61 my brother Allen developed a kind of a sixth sense. He had the ability to predict the weather. His accuracy was, and this is no exaggeration, miraculous. Each morning inspected the readings of his various pieces of meteorological equipment, looked intently at the sky, consulted his How And Why Wonder Book, and then announced his latest forecast over a bowl of Rice Crispies ®.

Among other things, Allen predicted a dry summer.
And dry it was.

I continued my employment as Mrs. Phillips’ all-round errand boy. I was sort of like Pepino on The Real McCoys, a smiling presence on which not much was expected. I was a salaried employee. No matter what I did, no matter how long I did it, my pay always remained the same: two shiny new quarters. I did not complain. Fifty cents wasn’t much but it kept me in Mad Magazines ® and pixie stix, the nectar of life for a young boy in the early sixties.

My relationship with Mrs. Phillips evolved during those months of servitude. Mrs. Phillips changed as well. Her facial expression slowly altered from her normal everyday hardened scowl to a softer, more sentimental hardened scowl. She also started calling me by my first name. No more did she yell, “Boy, get over here, now!” Instead she would yell, “Owen, get over here, now!”

Little things like that make a big difference.

Soon my list of duties expanded to include grocery shopping. Every Saturday I would follow Mrs. Phillips for four blocks to the corner grocery story lugging her collapsible grocery cart. Corner grocery stores have since disappeared. Gone are the narrow aisles, the creaky wooden floors, and the over priced canned goods.

And now that I think about it, we’re all better off without them.

Once, when we were in the fruits and vegetable section, I saw Mrs. Phillips secretly pop a grape in her mouth. I suppose she could have been checking for freshness, but she could also have been engaging in a bit of undetected pilfering.

That’s the thing about adults. They’ll talk all day on the Ten Commandments, but turn your back for a second and they’re stealing fruit. God found that out the hard way.

As summer progressed, I slowly made my way inside Mrs. Phillips house. When I first started, I was kept waiting in the backyard with the sunflowers. A week or so later I moved to the garage. And then I moved to the back porch. By the last week of August I was in her front room.

Mrs. Phillips was at odds with her furniture. Where Mrs. Phillips wore the same basic, drab outfit- gray dress, white socks, heavy black leather shoes- her furniture was stylish, ornate, even delicate. Everything smelled of lemon Pledge. Strangest of all, everywhere I looked there were framed portraits of Mr. Phillips.

There was a lesson here, but I was too young to recognize it. The prime motivator, the most important shaper of personality, and the single most cause of causes where human behavior is concerned can be summarized in one word: guilt.

It was about this time that Mr. Phillips literally rose from the grave. Highway construction had forced a local cemetery to exhume caskets and transport them to a new location. Although unusual, it does happen. The 1956 Interstate Highway Act demanded it.

Mrs. Phillips took the opportunity the exhumation offered and had the casket opened in order to view the corpse of her husband one last time. It was the scandal of the neighborhood. My mom harrumphed an entire afternoon over the story. My dad simply rolled his eyes mumbling something about that crazy woman.

It got me thinking, though. I was in servitude to Mrs. Phillips, but she, in turn, was enslaved by the memory of her dead husband. And she didn’t even get two shiny new quarters in the bargain.

By mid September Allen had abandoned his fascination with predicting the weather. His equipment quickly deteriorated into a pile of non-descript junk. His new passion, biology, took the form of collecting butterflies. This meant a whole new catalog of equipment and procedures: nets, killing jars and sticking pins into dead insects. To this, I could only say one word: neat! In short order we were traipsing through high weeds brandishing nets our fingers smelling of mothballs.

(It turned out that Allen never predicted anything. He merely listened to the weather forecast on the radio and parroted what he heard. I was impressed. Allen had taught himself the essential skill needed to succeed in this world- putting on a believable show also known as lying.)

Winter put an end to my work for Mrs. Phillip. When spring came I was off to a new endeavor: piano lessons. Though my mom never spoke of it directly, I suspected that I was removed from Mrs. Phillips influence because of the weirdness of viewing her deceased husband. That sounded completely unfair to me. I mean, how different was that from looking at my dad lying on the couch watching the Mike Douglas Show in his jockey shorts?

Years later, after we moved to the suburbs, I learned the final chapter in the story of Mrs. Phillips (My mom had remained in contact with the neighborhood gossips long after we moved away.) It turned out that Mrs. Phillips got herself a boyfriend and, if that wasn’t incredible enough, he actually married her!

My mom announced the coda of the story with a sense of triumph. As fate would have it, Mrs. Phillips did not marry the ideal man. He was something of a rogue. “He took her for everything,” she said smiling. “He took her for everything she had.”

The vicissitudes of Divine Justice is well beyond the ken of human understanding.

The Witch of Maple Street

When I was in the fourth grade my older brother Allen decided to give up his serious work in detonating small explosives and take up the study of meteorology. This seemed like an odd career move to me. Perhaps he originally thought meteorology was the study of meteors and was too proud to admit he made a mistake. Or maybe he really was interested in predicting the weather. For all the years I’ve known him I’ve never been able to figure him out.

Soon Allen’s room filled up with weather equipment: weather vanes, barometers, thermometers and wind cups. Some of the stuff we picked up from around the house. Other items Allen sent away for. We even made a trek to the shabby Army Surplus store on Main Street. We didn’t find anything there, but it did give us an excuse to rummage through the piles of blankets, mess kits and canteens.

We smelled like moth balls for almost a week.

Once assembled, the equipment needed to be set up outside. Since Allen’s room overlooked the garage that seemed like the logical place. It wasn’t long until I was going EVA on the slanted garage roof festooned with equipment while desperately trying to balance myself. As project manager, Allen remained inside by the window overlooking the assembly.

It was then that I saw her: the witch of Maple Street. Actually, I didn’t see all of here, just her sun hat bobbing up and down among her sunflowers. Her name was Mrs. Phillips and she was our next-door neighbor. I only knew a few things about her. I knew she lived alone. I knew she pretty much stayed in her house. And I knew her husband was dead.

No adult seemed to know the exact cause of his death, but every kid in the neighborhood had it figured out. Mrs. Phillips had devoured him. That’s what happens to you if you are foolish enough to marry a witch.

It wasn’t long until Allen, frustrated with my natural ineptness, joined me on the roof. His focus was securing and proper placement of the equipment. There was weather to predict after all. To his growing annoyance my attention was not on the science of meteorology, but on the simple joy of being on the garage roof. How cool was that? I was on equal footing the backyard sycamore tree!

Then the magic shattered. A voice shot up from below: “You, boy.” I looked down. It was Mrs. Phillips standing in the middle of my backyard calling to me.

The witch of Maple Street was in the middle of my backyard calling to me!

I looked at Allen. He was on his knees pounding the weather vane into the shingles. He acted like he heard nothing.

“You, boy,” growled Mrs. Phillips. “Come down here.”

What could I do? An adult had commanded me to do something. I had to obey. It was like a rule or something. I climbed back in through the window and went out to the backyard where the witch was waiting for me.

“Come with me,” she said. We walked to her garden where she gave me a bucket and a pair of big yellow gloves. “I can’t bend down like I used to. I need you to pull those weeds. Do you see them?”

I looked. “Yeah,” I said tentatively.

“Pull out the weeds and put them in the bucket,” she said, and then she disappeared into her house.

There was nothing preventing me from just walking away. But I lived in a world where adults were always granted unquestionable authority. I had been commanded to “weed” so therefore I must weed. It was the grim logic of the day. To do otherwise risked grave unknowable consequences.

It took me a half hour to fill the bucket. When Mrs. Phillips returned she gave me a glass of lemonade. I drank while she inspected the bucket.

“How did you do this?”

“What?”

She pulled a dandelion weed out of the bucket. “How did you pull the dandelion out, root and all?”

I showed her. My method was not to use the gloves. My hands were small allowing me to get a sure grip on the base of the weed. One quick snap and up came the dandelion, root and all.

Mrs. Phillips looked at me then looked at the dandelion. She nodded her head then reached into her apron and pulled out two quarters. “Come back tomorrow.”

I officially had a job. Given my needs at the time, it was a relatively well paid position. True, I was working for a witch doing menial labor. And the job itself was hardly rewarding. But I figured as long as I didn’t marry her I would probably be okay.

And then I found out what happened to Mr. Phillips and how he rose from the grave.

Next:
The Resurrection of Mr. Phillips

My Favorite Books (non-fiction)

It’s Saturday morning and I’ve just finished the novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark. I found the book thoughtful, puzzling, contradictory and refreshing. I’m still mulling it over which means it is everything I want in a novel. The book was published in 1962, made into a play five years later and then into an award winning film. As recently as last week I had neither read the book, nor watched the play, nor rented the movie.

I am way behind the times.

I connect books in my mind. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie falls into a category dominated by Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, Plath’s The Bell Jar, and Knowles’s Separate Peace. They are books where teenagers question the world around them. I suppose these novels appeal to me because some part of myself will always be a wide eyed thirteen year old.

The reason I decided to read Prime is that it was referred to in another book I am reading: How Fiction Works, by James Woods. Yes, I also read books about books.

That’s the thing about reading. It’s not static. My reading tastes change as I change. When I was an adolescent it was all spaceships and dinosaurs which evolved into Hammett's world of hard boiled detectives which transformed into historical novels which changed into non-fiction and a plethora of other subjects. Yes, a whole, complete plethora.

Everything, it turns out, is linked with everything else.

Below is an (always) incomplete list of some of my favorite non-fiction works.

Stillness at Appomattox by Bruce Catton
One of the most harrowing books I have read on the Civil War. It concerns itself with the war’s final year, basically when Grant took control of the Union Army and, from the South’s perspective, the Civil War stopped being fun. The scope, range and tragedy of the war is laid out brilliantly. If you read this and want more, Catton’s trilogy on the Civil War is also remarkable.

Reflections on a Ravage Century by Robert Conquest
By any measure, the twentieth century was a bloody mess. Conquest examines what he considers the root cause of the horror: blind adherence to ideology. The combined madness of Stalin, Hitler and Mao ended the lives of over one hundred million people. This mind blowing tsunami of death is examined by Conquest not only as a historic fact, but as a horrifying portent for the next century.

The Uses of the Past by Herbert J. Muller
The title is out of print and the book I have is a hardbound 1952 edition. I purchased it for a buck at a used bookstore. I love this book. It is a study of past societies along with an intelligent analysis of current history. This book is reminiscent of Toynbee’s Study of History.

Man’s Search for Meaning by Victory Frankl
I admit it: the title is politically incorrect. It should be re-titled Everybody’s Search for Meaning (which has a kind of Sesame Street ring to it.) But gender sensitivity aside, Frankl’s insight is that there is only one true human freedom, and that is the freedom to choose one’s attitude about a given situation. The first half of the books is the author’s first hand account of life in a Nazi death camp. The second half explains his psychotherapeutic method.

The Algiers Motel Incident by John Hersey
Yes, this is the same John Hersey that wrote A Bell for Adano and Hiroshima. This time he records the events at the Algiers Motel the night of Detroit’s race riot during the summer of 1968. Shots are reported to have come from the motel, police arrive, and three men are shot. What happened and how it occurred are Heresy’s concern. The book is written in a matter of fact style and is an example of what investigative journalism should look like.

The Making of a President 1968 by T.H. White
The classic, of course, is White’s Making of a President 1960. My favorite is the book White wrote on the 1968 campaign. This one includes many of the seminal events of the 60’s (assassinations, riots, George Wallace, Vietnam, the Chicago Democratic Convention) culminating with the election of Richard Nixon. White ended up writing a total of four books covering Presidential elections and, incredibly, three of them involved Nixon as a candidate. White also wrote a pretty good Watergate book, Breach of Faith.

Life on a Little Known Planet by Howard Evans
“Is the fly more a more intricate machine than he appears, or are we less clever than we suppose…?” Howard Evans will tell us in this wonderful book on insect life. Evans is both a distinguished biologist and an accomplished writer. If you have any interest in biology and insects, you will love this book.

How Should We Then Live?: The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture by Francis Schaeffer
Bible scholar Schaeffer looks at Western Civilization and presents a cogent analysis of the changes taking place in the late twentieth century. He opens up the treasure chest of western culture including philosophy, poetry, novels, and films, and declares them to also be the property of Bible believing Christians. Always interesting, Francis Schaefer is never pugnacious yet anxious and ready to debate his beliefs. The television series on which the book is based is definitely worth a look.

The Human Zoo by Desmond Morris
The book The Naked Ape made Morris famous, but I like his follow up work better. The Human Zoo is a sociological study of human behavior. Morris is audacious, thought provoking, frustrating and fascinating. My paperback edition of the book eventually fell apart in my hands from over reading.