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\n“i arrogantly recommend…” is a review column of unusual, overlooked, ephemeral, small press, comics, and books in translation by our friend, bibliophile, and retired ceiling tile inspector Tom Bowden, who tells us, “This platform allows me to exponentially decrease the number of views on screens by people who have no use for such things.”<\/p>\n
Tom Bowden reviews small press titles, children’s books, comics and graphic novels, giving them better representation in contemporary book culture. Most books are linked for purchase to our Bookshop.org affiliate page<\/a>, our Backroom gallery page<\/a>, or the book’s publisher. Most books are also available in store at Book Beat. You can read more arrogant recommendations online at: i arrogantly recomend…<\/a> Support Small Press! Buy local!<\/p>\n The Further Reading Library returns for its second season with a trio of probes into ephemera and esoterica collected or produced by artists and performersfrom a variety of media\u2014a library devoted to books on UFOs and the paranormal, newspaper clippings from around the world reporting improbable events, and recordings of New York City street life. Each of the uniformly designed volumes run 88 pages, with a roughly equal mix of images and text.<\/p>\n Probably still best remembered for his role as the bus driver Ralph Kramden in the 1950s TV series The Honeymooners<\/em>, the star of his own variety show in the 1960s, and Academy Award nominee for his performance in the film The Hustler<\/em>, Jackie Gleason was a household name. Less remembered is his outspoken interest in UFOs and the paranormal. Jackie Gleason: Library of the Paranormal<\/em> collects decades\u2019 worth of newspaper clippings of interviews with a Gleason eager to talk about those interests. He often references his collection of several thousand books and pamphlets on the subject and once owned a flying saucer-shaped house. How to Contact Space People<\/em>, issues of The Occult Digest<\/em>, Have You Lived Before This Life?<\/em> (by L. Ron Hubbard!), Satan Is Alive and Well on Planet Earth<\/em>, and other titles filled his shelves, many of which were donated to the University of Miami Library after his death.<\/p>\n For fans of the unusual, anomalous, and coincidental, Charles Fort is your man. An autodidact who flourished during the opening decades of the 20th century, Fort was an indefatigable reader of newspapers and scientific journals from around the world. He searched for references to and descriptions of anomalous events, often writing follow-up letters to editors and their audiences for corroborating details. Headlines that caught his attention include \u201cCaterpillars, Ants, Spiders Fall from Air in Snow Storm,\u201d \u201cFamilies Stricken by Strange Illness,\u201d \u201cHouse That Grew in a Night,\u201d \u201cSpeaks Languages She Never Heard,\u201d and \u201cTales of Frisky Monster in Lake Thrill Sandusky.\u201d<\/p>\n Looking for patterns among the phenomena, including, as Peggy Ahwesh notes in her essay accompanying this volume, \u201cmysterious disappearances, weird weather formations, objects moving via mind control, animals appearing in inappropriate places, and unidentified objects lighting up the sky,\u201d Fort suspected that an underlying force, yet to be discovered, connected these occurrences. Fascinated by the natural world, Fort found it to be an endless source of marvel. As an autodidact, he was frustrated by the limits of what could currently be explained rationally and scientifically, hoping to eventually reveal the tissue of the cosmos connecting every entity and event. He didn\u2019t. But the search itself produced an extraordinary archive of the inexplicable, and his writings\u2014such as The Book of the Damned<\/em> (1919)\u2014remain in print.<\/p>\n Tony Schwartz collected quotidian sounds with his humble Nagra reel-to-reel tape recorder during the 1950s and 60s: Songs sung by girls jumping rope, a Seder dinner, passing parades, interviews, buskers performing (including Moondog), and more. His thousands of recordings are now held by the Library of Congress.<\/p>\n Much of the text of snapshots in sound<\/strong><\/em> is given over to an index of his recordings. Under F we find three separate listings for \u201cFootsteps,\u201d a bit of fortune telling, and \u201cFragment of a Speech About Personal Computers.\u201d Under V are \u201cVoodoo\u201d and \u201cVoice Lessons for Kayla.\u201d N includes a recording on \u201cNaming Dogs\u201d and \u201cNYU Students\u2019 Questions About Sound.\u201d Eleven LPs of Schwartz\u2019s recordings were released by Smithsonian Folkways.<\/p>\n As numerous photographs in the book show, Schwartz was often an active participant in his recordings, interviewing shopkeepers, cabbies, musicians, and other people on the street who caught his attention. Schwartz felt that \u201cmost people use [tape recorders] in the way that it seems to me would be most rewarding and most enriching: to record sounds expressive of their own unique interests and involvements,\u201d much as our personal photographs do. He seemed less interested in the unknown and unknowable than he was in further exploring the known but unquestioned. The microphone opened for him a universe in a grain of sand.<\/p>\n Jackie Gleason Collection<\/a>: University of Miami Libraries<\/p>\n Charles Fort: The Book of the Damned: Strange Gods<\/a><\/p>\n Tony Schwartz: When Midcentury New York Spoke, This Sound Archivist Listened\u2014and Recorded Every Word: Smithsonian Magazine <\/a><\/p>\n Quino \/ Frank Wynne<\/strong><\/p>\n Elsewhere Editions<\/p>\n Elsewhere Editions continues its translation of Argentine cartoonist Quino\u2019s comic strip, Mafalda<\/strong>.<\/em> Syndicated daily from 1964 to 1973, Mafalda<\/strong><\/em> might strike American readers as a cross between Ernie Bushmiller\u2019s Nancy<\/em> and Charles Schulz\u2019s Peanuts<\/em>. All three strips involve elementary-school-aged children, including a feisty, outspoken girl\u2014the eponymous Mafalda and Nancy and the ever-present Lucy Van Pelt. Mafalda<\/strong><\/em> deals with a young girl and her friends Manolito, Felipe, Susanita, and Miguelito learning about the adult world around them as filtered through a child\u2019s budding sense of knowledge and reason.<\/p>\n Mafalda and her friends discuss the Cold War, Pel\u00e9, Lyndon B. Johnson, Fidel Castro, nuclear war, finance, fuel efficiency, agricultural reform, the meaning of life, human rights, equality, James Bond, Alfred Hitchcock, the Iron Curtain, space travel and John Glenn, IBM computers, advertising hype, hunger and poverty, UFOs, household expenses, reactionary politics, the Beatles, and neuroses. As a way of mediating important issues of the day, Mafalda<\/strong><\/em> is a heady experience.<\/p>\n Mafalda applies her skepticism to politics and questions of knowledge (to her father: \u201cNext year! Does it really exist, or is it more like democracy, where people say it\u2019s coming but it never actually arrives?\u201d Father: \u201cHonestly, Mafalda, how can next year not exist?\u201d Mafalda: \u201cHave you seen it?\u201d), and turns the same literal-minded reasoning toward eternity and cultural legacy (Mafalda, to the sun: \u201cTo think this same sun illuminated the genius of Shakespeare! . . . Jos\u00e9 de San Mart\u00edn!. . . of J. S. Bach! Illuminate me!\u201d).<\/p>\n For parents and grandparents who want the youngest generation to have a diet more substantial than cartoons with arguments over lasagna leftovers.<\/p>\n Kenji Miyazawa and Osamu Tsukasa \/ Asa Yoneda and David Boyd<\/strong><\/p>\n Elsewhere Editions<\/p>\n Perhaps better known today as a major influence on Studio Ghibli co-founders Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, Kenji Miyazawa was a storyteller whose visual and narrative prescience is suggested by comparisons with Chris Van Allsburg\u2019s The Polar Express<\/em> and Stanley Kubrick\u2019s 2001<\/em>, both of which came out several decades after Galactic<\/strong> was first published in 1934, even if his influence on Kubrick and Van Allsburg was unlikely.<\/p>\n Targeted to kids 8-12, Night on the Galactic Railroad<\/strong><\/em> is narrated from the vantage point of Giovanni, a tweenager, often in the company of his best friend, Campanella, also a tween, who take a trip to the stars on a magic train. In the meantime, there\u2019s school and care for an invalid mother for Giovanni\u2014important responsibilities that weigh on him.<\/p>\n Giovanni\u2019s father is away but due home soon, his vocation unclear. Just as Giovanni and Campanella are best friends, so were their fathers growing up. Campanella\u2019s father is a professor.<\/p>\n Both boys enjoy the sciences, and that is where the book begins, during an astronomy lecture on the Milky Way, an image Giovanni can\u2019t get out of his mind, in part because it looks like something he and Campanella saw the night before at Campanella\u2019s house.<\/p>\n That night, while obsessing over the Milky Way, Giovanni leaves his house to meet Campanella at a lantern festival. Stopping at one point to stare at the sky, he stares so intently it seems alive with movement, so he rubs his eyes to end the illusion. Once he removes his hands from his face, however, he sees he is on a train hurtling through the galaxy, with Campanella beside him.<\/p>\n As an illustrated tale for young adults, Galactic Railroad <\/strong><\/em>is both fantastic and sad as it explores imagination, facts, and ethics. Two young people set out on a trip of discovery of both the universe and themselves. The boys want to be good people, helpful young men. Alone together, they worry about their parents and what it means to leave a legacy of good deeds.<\/p>\n On the trip, Miyazawa repeatedly tries to re-create what the boys see and<\/em> their experience of seeing it. Miyazawa doesn\u2019t so much say what something is as he does how<\/em> it looks, how it is perceived, so that some of his descriptions are reminiscent of the so-called Stargate section of Stanley Kubrick\u2019s 2001: A Space Odyssey<\/em>:<\/p>\n Above one of [the boys] floated two translucent spheres, giant and startlingly bright: one yellow topaz, the other smaller and sapphire, revolving silently in the stream. The yellow moved away as the blue moved closer, until their edges touched and then overlapped in the shape of a pretty green biconvex lens that filled out until the sapphire stood fully in front of the topaz, forming a green disk with a bright yellow ring around it, then continuing smoothly across the face of the larger sphere and forming the same shape in reverse on the opposite edge, where finally they separated and the sapphire orb retreated as the topaz approached, returning to where they were before.<\/p>\n As a trip through cosmic realms that mix dream world with reality, the imaginary with the material, sometimes careening through the heavens, other times through some parallel Earth, Galactic Railroad<\/strong><\/em> may also be read as similar to Chris Van Allsburg\u2019s The Polar Express<\/em>. Both books feature extraordinary adventures among imaginary, physical, and metaphysical realms; characters who come and go; a variety of station stops; and, when the ride is over, a prod to maturity. Different motivations propel the books\u2019 actions, though. The Polar Express<\/em> explores belief, while Galactic Railroad<\/strong><\/em> explores death, sacrifice, goodness, and happiness.<\/p>\n The actual<\/em> illustrations that accompany the book, by Osamu Tsukasa, do not always directly match the accompanying text. Instead, the images are often tangential to the text or unrelated to what the text describes while remaining relevant to how the text is supposed to make a reader feel, or the ideas they suggest a reader consider. The illustrations\u2014fantastic and angular, black and white like the night sky, filled with shapes suggested by the positions of stars and by the negative space between them\u2014are framed along the margins usually with images of a train, a trestle, or telephone-pole-like creatures with legs and the cross-pieces surmounted in the center top by a face.<\/p>\n Not everybody on the train is going to the same destination, and the train makes several stops along its route. Only Giovanni and Campanella have tickets for the full ride. The penultimate stop is heaven, which the girl deboards so she and her siblings can join their mother. The boys don\u2019t believe in her particular god, leading to a brief theological spat.<\/p>\n The train departs and the boys continue being held rapt by the views. Giovanni turns to ask Campanella about the sight, but Campanella is gone. After he returns home, Giovanni discovers that Campanella fulfilled his desire to become a good, helpful young man.<\/p>\n A beautifully eerie tale that will continue to enchant and disturb readers nearly a hundred years after its first publication.<\/p>\n Yi Yang \/ Jamie Richards<\/strong><\/p>\n Fantagraphics<\/p>\n Yang Kuaikuai lives in a mountainous region of China. It\u2019s a small industrial town getting smaller, located by a forest and cut off from much of the world. Educational and employment opportunities lie elsewhere. The protagonist Kuaikuai and his best friend Li Yu are 14 years old and near the end of their time in middle school. They are behavioral opposites: Kuaikuai taciturn, Yu garrulous\u2014garrulous to the point of being oblivious to social conventions; he is impulsive, inadvertently rude, and gullible.<\/p>\n Yu sees a flyer for the school\u2019s Comet Club and coaxes Kuaikuai to come with him to the next meeting. Upperclassmen interested in alien life and UFOs have created the organization. They meet in a shabby, abandoned classroom with only a few members attending. The club leader is Qi Ming, an older boy whom Kuaikuai regards as his intellectual rival.<\/p>\n At the meeting, Qi gives Kuaikuai and Yu a map of the local mountains, indicating a point where, he implies, they will see a UFO.<\/p>\n They go to the spot during the middle of the night and instead witness two men furtively dig a pit and bury a human-sized duffel bag. The boys return the next day, police in tow, and find nothing: the pit is empty, and only trace amounts of deer\u2019s blood are found, as later analysis reveals. This is the book\u2019s turning point.<\/p>\n In the Comet Club\u2019s attempt to solve the mystery, they learn things about themselves and their parents that will alter their lives. We discover, for instance, that Kuaikuai\u2019s mother was only 16 when he was born, and not emotionally ready to be a mother. She left her husband and baby for better employment opportunities than their small town could provide. After an absence of 10 years, she returns and suggests that Kuaikuai come live with her, since he will have more educational and employment opportunities in a bigger city.<\/p>\n Li Yu\u2014the reckless, impulsive kid who frequently skips school and steals cars (we learn late in the book)\u2014lives alone with a perpetually drunken father. Qi Ming, the book\u2019s intellectual peer, lives with his grandmother (no grandfather, no mother) but receives occasional letters and checks for his education from his father who has been working in Japan for Ming\u2019s entire life. Readers will judge for themselves whether his father\u2019s sacrifice was worth it.<\/p>\n Yi Yang varies the story\u2019s visual perspective: Each panel may show the action from a different perspective, a character\u2019s body might extend beyond the panel\u2019s frame, or panels across a two-page spread may be scattered over a larger image that is the focus of the story at that point.<\/p>\n For Chinese readers, the plight of these children will have particular resonance and emotional impact. The background to these children\u2019s lives is more than geographical. During the 1990s\u2014when the events of the book occur, amid China\u2019s economic boom\u2014many parents left small towns and farms for the cities where jobs were increasingly concentrated. Because of China\u2019s hukou system, merely moving to a city does not give migrants the same access to public services as locally registered residents. For parents who brought their children with them, that could mean difficulty enrolling them in local public schools.<\/p>\n The left-behind children phenomena of the 1990s has not gone away. In some rural communities, some children are left behind without any family to care for them. Not surprisingly, many of these unsupervised kids\u2014like Li Yu\u2014get into serious trouble with the law. For Chinese readers, Comet Club <\/em>is not historical fiction.<\/p>\n What does this book have to do with UFOs? Well, like a lot of 14- and 15-year-olds, they have questions about true and false, reality and make-believe, fact and fiction, opportunity and fate. The search for answers shouldn\u2019t feel so alien.<\/p>\n Broken Frontier: \u201cTeenage U.F.O. Hunters Tackle Reality and Life’s Expectations in Yi Yang’s Fantagraphics Debut<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n M.T. Anderson<\/strong><\/p>\n Dutton<\/p>\n Stealing Saint Nick<\/strong><\/em> is M. T. Anderson\u2019s young adult nonfiction follow-up to his novel Nicked<\/strong><\/em>, about the theft over a thousand years ago of St. Nicholas\u2019s (aka Santa Claus\u2019s) bones from thier tomb in Myra, Turkey to their present location in Bari, Italy. According to Nicked<\/strong><\/em>, the theft was inspired by the desire of the city fathers of Bari to boost civic coffers by making Bari a destination for relic- and miracle-chasing pilgrims. (At the time of the theft, Nicholas\u2019s body had been interred for several centuries; no flesh remained, just bones.) In Stealing Saint Nick<\/strong><\/em>, Anderson shifts his focus from the theft of the bones to a history of the man, Nicholas, and his legacy as bishop, miracle-worker, saint, and gift-giver.<\/p>\n Why would historians bother with these stories when they\u2019re basically just made up, just folktales?<\/em> Because though they may not tell us much about the actual Nikolaos, fourth-century bishop of Myra, they tell us a lot about the people who made up the legends of his deeds. They tell us about how people conceived of ethics, morality, and heroism. They show us the different structures of belief through the centuries. That helps us understand the things we ourselves believe. We can start to ask: How do we build our heroes today? Who do we worship?<\/p>\n Anderson builds his biography of Nicholas from archaeological and historical evidence (the material record) of where Nicholas grew up and performed his works. Anderson also considers the folklore and mythology Nicholas presumably grew up hearing and messages behind those stories that may have shaped his thinking, as well as what his notions of Christianity might have been. Politics, invading armies, and the schism between Catholic and Protestant churches also affected the development of his legacy, and his transition from a gaunt 70-year-old bishop with a bad back and bashed nose into a fat man in a red suit with presents for all good secular children of the world. (The bones found in the crypt with Nicholas\u2019s name on it show physical evidence of a person who had been severely beaten and some of whose vertebrae fused in conditions of dampness and immobility\u2014evidence consistent with but not proof of what Nicholas might have suffered during his imprisonment.)<\/p>\n Born circa 260 CE into a Christian family, no central concept of \u201cThe Church\u201d had formed and practicing the new religion was illegal in many places, including where he was born. When, as a young man, he traveled to the coastal town of Myra, in Turkey, he saw a church in the open air and vowed to visit it the next day. His arrival came soon after the death of the bishop who had overseen the church. One of the church\u2019s leaders dreamt that the new bishop would appear the next morning at dawn, and his name would be Nicholas. And so it came to pass.<\/p>\n Nicholas was eventually jailed for five years by anti-Christian Roman forces. While languishing in prison, Constantine rose to power and had a vision that he could conquer Rome under the Christian banner. After winning, he converted to Christianity and ordered all religious prisoners freed. Nicholas returned to his parish in Myra, where he continued to feed his people and resurrect the dead.<\/p>\n Rather than separating historical wheat from legendary chaff, Anderson asks what kind of evidence each\u2014history and legend\u2014can provide. A resurrected child says little that is verifiable about Nicholas, but quite a lot about people who needed Nicholas to resurrect children. Legends did not spontaneously generate from nothing. They represent what was held in importance by the storytellers and their audiences and may reveal something about the constraints of living in a particular place, under a particular regime, and a particular time. Consecutive versions over time reveal which parts of the legends remain and which are added to or modified.<\/p>\n The Venetians, who also raided Nicholas\u2019s tomb in Myra, weren\u2019t interested in Nicholas\u2019s bone scraps the Barians left behind, instead came away with the bones of two other saints while claiming<\/em> that their haul included some of Nicholas\u2019s bones. Forensic evidence suggests the unlikelihood that Venice and Bari share bones from the same skeleton. Spoiler alert!<\/p>\n Since a good deal of the material historical record is in Turkey, Christians came into frequent contact with Muslims, and other ethnic groups. It was Christians from other lands during the Crusades who both broke the amity that existed among the various groups at that time and wreaked more damage on Christian churches<\/em> than any other government or religious group ever had, Anderson reports.<\/p>\n There\u2019s plenty here to get the attention of teen readers\u2014an oozing corpse (Ho! Ho! Ho!), a dozen-breasted fertility goddess, fish oracles, weird facts, sad truths, unsolved mysteries, and (nerd alert!) fascinating footnotes. (I really am grateful to Anderson for drawing young people\u2019s attention to interesting tidbits that can be gleaned from footnotes: cool in their own right, but hard to justify granting room for in the body of the book.)<\/p>\n Stealing Saint Nick<\/strong><\/em> is an excellent work of multi-disciplinary biography that shows the full scope of influence and effect the life of one man\u2014imagined as embodying humble kindness\u2014has had on millions of people for nearly 2,000 years.<\/p>\n St. Nicholas Center<\/a> <\/p>\n credit: Sonya Sones<\/p><\/div>\n I suspect that M. T. Anderson\u2019s hobby is collecting awards, a hobby supported by writing books. Just as George Saunders notes about competition among emirs in Dubai\u2014\u201cPUT THAT STATELY PLEASURE PALACE THERE BETWEEN THOSE OTHER TWO\u201d\u2014I imagine the fireplace mantel crowding among his National Book Award Winner, Newbery Honor Medal, Boston Globe\u2014Horn Book Award Winner, Los Angeles Times Book Prize Winner, Michael L. Printz Honor Book, ALSC Notable Children\u2019s Book, YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults, YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction, and other formal recognitions of nearly a dozen of his books. He was gracious enough to answer a few of my questions about Stealing Saint Nick<\/strong>.<\/em><\/p>\n Tom E. Bowden:<\/strong> Something implicit in Stealing Saint Nick<\/strong> is that authoritative answers to questions about how and why often require access to expertise from several different areas. Rather than requiring only a single expert, some problems require multiple experts from multiple fields. These experts, in turn, contribute their piece of a puzzle they want to solve. Stealing Saint Nick<\/strong> draws on archaeology, forensics, theology, political and social history, folklore, and textual scholarship, among other fields. How did you decide which kinds of expertise you needed to consult, particularly when assessing a claim that crosses disciplinary boundaries? Did you ever encounter a point where evidence persuasive from one discipline looked less persuasive when viewed from another?<\/em><\/p>\n M.T. Anderson:<\/strong> Both of the bigger nonfiction projects I\u2019ve worked on in the course of my career\u2014this book and Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad<\/em>\u2014describe events in contexts where truth is hard to determine. In the case of Stealing Saint Nick,<\/em> the events, of course, are quite ancient and the evidence has decayed; in Symphony for the City of the Dead,<\/em> many of the first-hand accounts, though very detailed, were written down in a regime where everyone had a reason to lie. Lies saved lives. In both cases, this meant that for teen readers, it made sense to put historiography itself on display\u2014because part of the adventure of history is the detective work of trying to establish credible stories about what might have happened. As I say in the opening of Stealing Saint Nick,<\/em> when Herodotus, the \u201cfather of history,\u201d first used the word historia, it didn\u2019t mean the things that happened in the past\u2014it meant the investigation of the things that happened in the past.<\/p>\n One of the surprises in working on this book was the bewildering antipathy between the various fields I felt needed to be invoked. I was trying to find a narrative that would somehow combine three types of evidence: (1) written evidence from narratives, contracts, and expense accounts; (2) archaeological evidence of the heist from the church in Myra; and (3) the forensic evidence from the bones. But I discovered that by and large, people in these different fields did not want to play ball. I had a long correspondence with a German archaeologist who wrote a couple of articles on the Basilica of St. Nicholas in Myra. He absolutely ignored the written evidence\u2014and did not appear even to have read it\u2014because he feels, prima facie, a priori, etc, that medieval translatio accounts and hagiography are inherently formulaic and not worth the foolscap they\u2019re written on. So he refused to consider that evidence as evidence at all, despite how voluminous and detailed it is.<\/p>\n But the historian in me also felt leery of some of the times I provided a scientific explanation for a miracle. Historians, for good reasons, tend to steer away from the Scooby Doo \u201cIt was actually \u2026\u201d arguments, which tend to be both speculative and reductive. For example, it kind of drives me crazy when scholars try to hang a diagnosis on the out-of-body mystical experiences of medieval writers like Hildegard von Bingen or Juliana of Norwich. What\u2019s important is not what it might have said on a mystic\u2019s MyHealth account, if they\u2019d been examined by a specialist in the twenty-first century, but rather their own experience of transcendence and the form it took, given their context.<\/p>\n There are a couple of examples of interdisciplinary work in Stealing Saint Nick<\/em> that are worth mentioning in this context: One is the quick note that the original statue of Artemis of Ephesus<\/a> supposedly was hurled out of the sky. There is a very fun scholarly debate\u2014originally aired in an astronomy journal!\u2014about whether it\u2019s possible that the statue actually included a fragment of a meteorite. Apparently there are a few shrines around the ancient world where there are aniconic representations of gods that fell from heaven which could have been actual interstellar detritus. That was just too weird and beautiful to turn up.<\/p>\n In a more historically pertinent vein, there\u2019s the question of what it was that the Emperor Constantine the Great and his army really saw in the sky that converted him to Christianity. It stretches the bounds of historical propriety for me to cite an article suggesting an answer drawn from atmospheric science: that it might have been a sun halo (which would have appeared as Cross-like crosshairs and concentric rings, \u201ccrowns,\u201d around the sun). But that explanation actually makes sense of more evidence from different sources than any other explanation.<\/p>\n Roman Coin reverse: Constantine I ‘the Great’ Treveri, AD 317, God of Sun Globe; Sol Invictus<\/p><\/div>\n A pagan source records that around 310 CE, Constantine saw some kind of solar event that he took to be an expression of solidarity from Solis dei, Apollo, the god of the sun. Numismatic evidence shows that around that date, Constantine started to depict a crowned sun on his coins. It\u2019s likely that he started to think of himself as aligned with the sun-god around this period, and gradually came to understand that god as the single god of the Christians, with a big leap forward around the time of his victory at the Battle of Milvian Bridge. So this surmise is actually a useful gloss on the process of his conversion. It matches what we know about other early conversions of warrior-kings to Christianity. Instead of the instant plunge into the Christian faith that Christian commentators demand, this allows for a hinge period where Constantine felt that a sun-god was ensuring his victories\u2014and was pledging allegiance to that god, whoever it might be, only gradually shifting from a kind of henotheistic sun-worship to monotheistic Christianity.<\/p>\n No certainty\u2014but an interesting possibility to consider, which draws together evidence of many different kinds (meteorological, panegyric, numismatic, biographical) in one possible solution.<\/p>\n TEB:<\/strong> Stealing Saint Nick demonstrates that different modes of inquiry can converge on an answer without producing absolute certainty. How did you decide when the collective evidence justified saying \u201cthis probably happened,\u201d rather than simply \u201cwe don’t know\u201d? Did writing for younger readers make you especially conscious of distinguishing probability from certainty? (Not that adults tend to do much better.)<\/em><\/p>\n MTA:<\/strong> At a certain point, complete agnosticism becomes irritating. For example, one 20th<\/sup> C scholar who looked into the life of Nicholas announced that because there\u2019s no precisely contemporary record of his existence, or at least none that survives, we must remain forever uncertain if there even was a man of any kind named Nicholas who was Bishop of Myra. Sure, yes, but also no. This strikes me as being just cussed. It\u2019s the kind of extreme doubt that\u2019s worth mentioning in passing, just to define the real limits of knowledge, but given the kinds of evidence that collect around Nicholas in the couple of centuries after his (putative) death, it is an overwhelming statistical improbability that he never existed at all. For one thing, saying that there was a Bishop of Myra named Nicholas who was beloved, remembered, and mythologized sets a pretty low bar for credibility. In a way, it does the reader a disservice to emphasize the doubt.<\/p>\n I learned my lesson in one of the chapters of my book on Shostakovich. There is plenty of evidence that during the Siege, the composer served as a rooftop fireman, watching out for incendiary bombs on the roof of the Conservatory. There are photos, for one thing. But I felt that for the sake of historical veracity I had to cite one colleague of his who somewhat snidely and jealously claimed that the whole thing was a put-up job and Shostakovich only went on the roof one day: the day when the photos were taken. This is not a credible source. I did not need to emphasize it. In retrospect, I feel like dignifying this evidence with its own paragraph was over-scrupulous. It deflates the chapter and, once doubt is introduced, it\u2019s hard to say, \u201cBut the doubt itself is suspect \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n TEB:<\/strong> You rhetorically ask Why bother with stories that are \u201cbasically just made up,\u201d and answer that the stories tell us about the people who made them up\u2014their ideas about ethics, morality, heroism, and belief. Does that make legend a kind of historical evidence in its own right, provided we’re careful about specifying what it is evidence of?<\/em><\/p>\n MTA:<\/strong> Absolutely! That\u2019s one of the big points of the book: In Nicholas\u2019s case, we see how his figure is used to construct different images of heroism in different ages. His story marks a shift from the idea of Classical heroism\u2014that swords-and-sandals military ethos of The Iliad <\/em>and The Odyssey\u2014<\/em>to the idea of Christian martyrdom, the victim as hero. And he would continue to evolve as the society telling his story evolved, until in the 19th<\/sup> century he became the ambiguous figure of Santa Claus, at once a paragon of generosity and the patron saint of capitalist consumerism.<\/p>\n TEB:<\/strong> The physical remains attributed to Nicholas present an intriguing problem. Injuries to the bones may be consistent with stories about his imprisonment and mistreatment, but, as you emphasize, consistency isn’t proof. How difficult was it to resist making the archaeological evidence and the legends fit together more neatly than the evidence warrants? You claim that the forensic analyst of the bones in Venice was trying to be a good sport by giving the Venetians the benefit of the doubt, despite what he already knew of their provenance. Did you have moments you felt influenced by a prior disposition to a particular answer?<\/em><\/p>\n MTA:<\/strong> The evidence of the Venetian heist, both documentary and forensic, is incredibly shaky. The weird thing is that the forensic examiner, Luigi Martino, swallowed the Venetian story so readily. Keep in mind: in the later Middle Ages, a skull somehow appeared, added to the Nicholas fragments held in Venice. Despite the fact there was another skull in Bari. That doesn\u2019t speak well for the purity of that cache of relics. When Martino looked at the whitened fragments in the coffer, he found a way to convince himself that they were shards of the pelvis and ribcage that had been crushed during the earlier Barese heist. He is clearly relieved he has reached this conclusion. He claims that he was led to this understanding by returning to the Venetian account (the Anonymous Monk of Lido). But that account, as I made clear, is absolutely insistent that these were not <\/em>from the same sarcophagus as the Barese bone fragments. The whole Venetian pride in their heist rests on that fact. It\u2019s somewhat incomprehensible how Martino found confirmation there.<\/p>\n When I asked Father Gerardo Cioffari, the monk currently tasked with overseeing the shrine of Nicholas in Bari, about the Martino evidence, he winced and said, \u201cUnfortunately, he was a believer.\u201d<\/p>\n TEB:<\/strong> Some of the most memorable material in the book\u2014the mass production of sacred ooze, butchered children, fertility goddesses, and war\u2014is also material likely to engage younger readers. When writing nonfiction for young adults, how do you distinguish between the strange detail that’s merely irresistible and the strange detail that can also carry part of the historical argument?<\/em><\/p>\n MTA:<\/strong> It\u2019s always great when something of historical importance hangs on a bizarre incident\u2014like Constantine and his army seeing a giant cross appear in the sky, which leads, eventually, to the conversion of the whole Eastern Roman Empire and the spread of Christianity. But there\u2019s also frankly some utility in weird stories for their own sake. Not only do they sometimes have the force of fable or metaphor\u2014they\u2019re just delightful. And they may well fix historical moments in your mind. For example, in the broadest terms, it is not important that King Henry I of England died of eating a surfeit of eels. But it does help me, when I encounter more pertinent stories about King Henry I, to be able to say, \u201cOh. The surfeit of eels guy.\u201d<\/p>\n Sometimes it makes sense to tell the story, but also to mention it is probably not true. I did that in my picture book biography of Handel. The story that the King of England spontaneously rose to his feet during the \u201cAlleluia\u201d Chorus, forcing everyone in the theater to rise with him\u2014for which reason we still rise during that piece\u2014it\u2019s almost certainly not true. But as one of the most memorable stories about one of the most famous pieces of human music, it\u2019s worth telling anyway, with a proviso.<\/p>\n TEB:<\/strong> The footnotes repeatedly lead readers toward fascinating material that doesn’t quite belong in the main narrative. Did that end an editorial dispute about what stayed in the book, or what is just you, the enthusiast about the material who knows you couldn\u2019t justify it in the book, but boy if you only knew! Were you consciously trying to teach younger readers something about how to read nonfiction\u2014that the apparatus surrounding the narrative can be part of the intellectual adventure rather than something to skip?<\/em><\/p>\n MTA:<\/strong> There was no editorial dispute! My editor, Andrew Karre, was very gung-ho about the endnotes. In fact, he was the one who suggested that we underline a few of them with those manicules in the margins. I included lengthy footnotes in both this book and in the Shostakovich book because there is so much that can be contested. (Many-breasted Artemis \u2026 Are those actually breasts?) I felt that for more serious, probably adult, readers, I had to include a paper trail suggesting my thought process. But I also wanted to show younger readers how knowledge is produced, how flimsy some of it is, and how knowledge also expands and leads to other knowledge. The \u201crabbit hole\u201d is not just an online phenomenon. Look at anything for long enough, and it proliferates into a world of unexpected connection. That is absolutely part of the adventure of reading\u2014and I hope this book will encourage young readers to make their own surprising discoveries about their own obscure interests in years to come!<\/p>\n Jon Fosse \/ Damion Searls<\/strong><\/p>\n Transit Books<\/p>\n The plot of Vaim Hotel<\/strong> <\/em>is simple: A man checks into a hotel, works there for a year, then falls into the ocean from a fishing boat, body never recovered. Questions of who he was, why he was there, what he hoped to accomplish are never answered and may be beside the point.<\/p>\n As with many of Fosse\u2019s other novels, the unnamed narrator (aka The Guest) is psychologically unstable, varying in his narration from lucidity to utter uncertainty. Unlike other novels by Fosse\u2014such as Melancholy I<\/em> and Melancholy II<\/em> about Norwegian painter Lars Hertervig, who suffered from hallucinations and other psychological problems\u2014the psychological state of Vaim<\/strong>\u2019<\/em>s narrator is less extreme. But, like Fosse\u2019s more recent A Shining<\/em>, Vaim Hotel<\/strong><\/em> is both more implicitly spiritual than his earlier works and ambiguous about the nature of that spirituality.<\/p>\n The story begins when the Guest\u2014the nameless narrator, a man at loose ends\u2014checks into a hotel during the off-season in a small town called Vaim located along a fjord. His interior monologue is presented as an unbroken string of comma splices, with line divisions provided only for the dialogue he reports. His story ends with a single full stop. The last few pages are given over to Brita\u2019s terse account of his stay and disappearance.<\/p>\n As the Guest walks to the Vaim Hotel, a few people greet him to say that he looks familiar to them, but they can\u2019t recall from where. He too thinks of an unspecified time in his past when he was in the news\u2014for reasons that feel withheld from the reader\u2014but he assumes it was so long ago and in a different part of the country that nobody would likely remember anymore.<\/p>\n The Guest has no reason for choosing Vaim; he tells us that just the day before leaving, he bought the used car he drives into town (and eventually loses the keys to along with his wallet). He arrives with only two suitcases\u2014the only items he\u2019s kept from his former life, whatever that was. Apart from clothes, he\u2019s also brought photographs of his ex-wife, still in their frames. When he looks out his hotel window, he thinks\u2014he\u2019s unsure\u2014he sees a woman on the second floor of the dilapidated house across the street looking directly at him\u2014a woman who reminds him of somebody he\u2019d rather forget, for reasons he never reflects on but instead quickly turns his thoughts away from.<\/p>\n During his stay, the Guest interacts with Brita (the Hotel Owner), the Vaim General Store owner (the Shopkeeper), and a garrulous drunken fisherman at the Vaim Restaurant, identified only as the Sailor. Brita is brash and rude but ultimately friendly in her imposing way. The Shopkeeper is helpful but insistent, short of demanding, that the Guest make certain purchases while in town (including a fishing kit whose ownership Brita will contest). Between the two, their very desire to help seems itself an act of hostility. Many of the Guest\u2019s exchanges with Brita and the Shopkeeper are comically bizarre, but I don\u2019t recall any form of comedy in other work by Fosse I\u2019ve read, so I\u2019m left wondering whether Fosse intends Vaim Hotel<\/strong><\/em> to be read as a comedy, at least partly.<\/p>\n Inane situations make for what seems intended as comedy: Brita frequently invades the Guest\u2019s hotel room, with and without his permission, and on one occasion he returns to catch her red-handed, opening and rifling through his suitcases. Conversations end with each character merely staring at the other, neither leaving to end the meeting, each waiting for the other to make the first move. The Shopkeeper charges the Guest for goods the Shopkeeper is sure the Guest will need and use, the Guest\u2019s consent assumed and with good cheer.<\/p>\n If Fosse is trying to break new ground, then Vaim Hotel<\/strong> <\/em>doesn\u2019t quite succeed. Tensions created during bizarre interactions never resolve themselves; instead, they are sustained by a weird anxiety that makes the Guest\u2014and his readers\u2014uncomfortable. But the narrative is already so ambiguous that the comedy further knots rather than untangles its uncertainties: The Guest often tells us that he himself is unsure of whether the actions of others he reports are inappropriate or whether his mood makes him exaggerate. Pushy as Brita is, we occasionally have reason to see matters from her side.<\/p>\n The Guest describes his stay at the hotel in the past tense. Whether he relates his account to us at the end of the stay, before his disappearance, or if he gives it after his disappearance remains ambiguous, perhaps unknowable.<\/p>\n The novel\u2019s ending suggests that a type of loop is in effect in Vaim, not in the nature of a Twilight Zone episode or a science fiction story of a glitch in time. Instead, Vaim evokes\u2014at least in me\u2014a sense that the town is a purgatorial way station for the spiritually lost. Had the Guest led an aimless, purposeless life? Was his disappearance from the fishing boat the fall of a drunk or the dive of a suicide?<\/p>\n At the end, Brita tells us that the next guest to her hotel looked familiar.<\/p>\n Fosse’s Nobel lecture: A Silent Language<\/a> (free download).<\/p>\n Voltaire \/ Donald M. Frame<\/strong><\/p>\n Warbler Classics<\/p>\n Purporting to be a collection of anecdotes by a wise Babylonian philosopher named Zadig, a follower of Zoroastrianism, each chapter of this eponymous novel offers lessons in hypocrisy, duplicity, ignorance, and wisdom retailed in Voltaire\u2019s characteristically sly and ironic prose.<\/p>\n Zadig\u2019s episodic observations serve as a set of secular parables. Rather than show how the varieties of bad behaviors offend God, Voltaire shows how observation and reason can easily resolve disputes, lies, and misinformation. Since truth displeases the wicked and much as it glorifies the honest, Zadig\u2019s ability to unknot problems is not always appreciated. Ultimately, appreciation of truth depends on the propensity for it by those in power.<\/p>\n In his powers of ratiocination Zadig is Sherlock Holmes avant la lettre<\/em>: When a Queen loses a dog and the King a horse, he is able to describe each animal\u2019s physical features (the dog is lame, for instance, and the horse\u2019s tail is three-and-a-half feet long) while also honestly declaring he has never seen the animals\u2014only their imprints from where they have walked. Another case involves questioning alleged witnesses to a murder that lead to a man\u2019s imprisonment. After quizzing each man separately about the time of day the murder occurred, he determines that both men were lying from what he knows about astronomy.<\/p>\n Zadig\u2014the name derives from the Hebrew tzadik<\/em> for \u201cwise man\u201d\u2014demonstrates that truth, honesty, and consistency are rewarded or punished as unpredictably as vice. As he observes about himself to his servant,<\/p>\n Everything up to now has turned out in a very strange way for me. I was condemned to a fine for seeing a bitch pass by; I was almost impaled over a griffin; I was sent to execution because I had written verses in praise of the King; I was on the point of being strangled because the Queen had yellow ribbons; and here I am a slave with you because a brute beat his mistress.<\/p>\n The interplay of everybody\u2019s exercise of free will determines whether goodness or evil, truth or falsehood, ultimately triumphs.<\/p>\n Stewart Home<\/strong><\/p>\n Pluto Press<\/p>\n The mystic origins of what we Americans call yoga trace back not to obscure figures in dim grottos contorting themselves into odd postures, but to the more quotidian scenes behind the tent flaps of a circus where acrobats perform.<\/p>\n As Stewart Home says in his introduction to Fascist Yoga<\/strong>, \u201cIn this book, I focus on the Anglo-American roots of modern postural practice, and in particular the fascistic and conspiratorial turns the ideologies associated with this type of yoga have taken over the past century.\u201d<\/p>\n By tracing the introduction of a postural practice labeled \u201cyoga\u201d by its teachers, Home shows that many teachers\u2019 self-professed qualifications were lies issued in the name of marketing exercise regimes sold as antique exotica, full of ancient truths. Rather than critiquing the postural practices qua<\/em> postural practices, Home examines the ideological roots upon which the various self-styled gurus were basing their claims.<\/p>\n In tracing the development of yoga in the U.S. over the past 100 years or so, Home turns up a host of negative results as the same unreliable sources and uncorroborated claims are recycled from book to book by and about yoga practices and practitioners. Home states that<\/p>\n modern yoga can be considered, at least partly, a twentieth-century confabulation with some orientalist fairy dust sprinkled on top, in a desperate attempt to justify the frequently made claim that it can be traced back thousands of years to the Indus Valley.<\/p>\n Rather than the Indus Valley, Home shows, modern postural yoga probably began in the U.S. as a circus act.<\/p>\n Around the turn of the 20th<\/sup> century, the American Pierre Bernard claimed he received yogic training from a figure named Sylvais Hamati, whose own origins remain obscure\u2014assuming that he wasn\u2019t, in fact, an invention of Bernard\u2019s, for few of Bernard\u2019s claims regarding his own life can be corroborated. It was apparently Bernard who introduced the idea, as early as 1906, that \u201cyoga and tantra were claimed as Aryan\u2014that is, white\u2014pursuits,\u201d and that \u201cthe Hindu caste system was created to preserve racial purity in India and those of high caste were . . . Aryan.\u201d<\/p>\n One person influenced by Bernard\u2019s works, including and especially their racist tropes, was a man named Hamish McLaurin, an avowed Aryanist. Picking up on and developing the fascist strains into spiritualism, racism, and exercise promulgated by Bernard were Aleister Crowley and Yogi Ramacharaka (AKA William Walker Atkinson). Ramacharaka\u2019s books on yoga, in turn, shaped and supported the views of Ezra Pound, who, in turn, influenced a bookstore owner named John Kasper of Nashville, a suspect in assorted school and synagogue bombings. Through this series of associations, Home shows that the rivers of occultism, physical culture, racial mythology, and extreme politics share points of toxic confluence that seep into popular culture, where repetition can come to pass for corroboration.<\/p>\n Shifting his focus from the U.S. to Italy during the interwar years, Home notes that the Italian novelist and political provocateur, Gabriele D\u2019Annunzio, an early proponent of fascism, had a friend in his circle named Guido Keller. Keller formed an organization called YOGA, whose members were \u201cfascinated by orientalised versions of mysticism\u201d that replaced racism with nationalism as the point of superiority, and all of whom were fascist by inclination.<\/p>\n During this same period in Britain, two military figures, Majors J. F. C. Fuller and Francis Yeats-Brown (a disciple of Pierre Bernard), claimed to have received yoga training in India, but remained coy as to under whose tutelage. Fuller is the man whose theories of mechanized warfare helped anticipate and influence the armored tactics later associated with blitzkrieg.<\/p>\n Yes, \u201cyoga\u201d infiltrated Nazi ideology and its own bizarre cosmology via a German Indologist and religious studies writer, Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, not the least because of its alleged ties to Aryan racial supremacy.<\/p>\n Even the world-renowned religious scholar Mircea Eliade embraced fascism and yoga\u2014in fact, yoga was the subject of Eliade\u2019s 1933 PhD thesis, which eventually became the book Yoga: Immortality and Freedom<\/em>, where he presents a spurious history of Aryans. Eliade is the more disturbing presence in this genealogy, blurring the division between crank and credentialed. His book\u2019s index cites Julius Evola (1898-1974), an influential fascist theorist, five times and Hauer 15 times. (Eliade was also a friend of Evola, who eventually came to present himself as a fascist yogi and wrote a book called The Yoga of Power.<\/em>) Apparently, Eliade\u2019s book is still being recommended as essential by the mainstream Yoga Journal<\/em>.<\/p>\n The contemporary lineage of yoga devotees inspired by fascist ideology includes some performers in the British neo-folk scene, certain New Age figures, and QAnon. These more recent developments in how yoga is marketed to the public package the postural practice with dubious claims about food and diet, longevity, astral projection and other hooey, accompanied with unverified and unverifiable \u201ccase studies\u201d to illustrate the admonitions and proscriptions.<\/p>\n Spanx-wearing, Whole Foods shoppers, take note! To be clear, Home does not attack the performance of yogic postures. He targets only those people who supplement the practice of various stretches with bogus, misleading, and dead-wrong claims about what may be physically and spiritually achieved merely by bending, twisting, and stretching arms, legs, and torsos.<\/p>\n What Home\u2019s genealogy of yogic presentation illustrates is how a group of traits\u2014repetition, false authority, racial mythology, exoticism, and credential laundering\u2014can help dubious claims gain mainstream acceptance. Especially as regards the health benefits touted by charlatans, these false notions can lead to health-care consequences when demonstrably effective remedies are doubted as contrary to ancient wisdom. False yogis benefit from the fact that many people prefer dogma over uncertainty, and so they can assert claims without evidence\u2014or even contrary to evidence\u2014knowing they will be financially rewarded for telling people what they want to hear, even if it kills them.<\/p>\n
\nThe Further Reading Library<\/h1>\n
Jackie Gleason: Library of the Paranormal
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/01_JackieGleason.jpg\")
<\/a><\/h2>\nCharles Fort: Research
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/02_ChasFort.webp\")
<\/a><\/h2>\nTony Schwartz: snapshots in sound<\/a>
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/03_TonySchwartz.webp\")
<\/h2>\n
\nMafalda<\/strong>
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/04_Mafalda.jpg\")
<\/a><\/h2>\n
\nNight on the Galactic Railroad<\/strong>
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/05_Galactic-copy.jpg\")
<\/a><\/h2>\n
\nComet Club<\/strong><\/a>
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/06_Comet-Club.jpg\")
<\/h2>\n
\nM.T. Anderson: review and interview<\/h1>\n
Stealing Saint Nick<\/strong><\/a>
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/07_Santa-copy.jpg\")
<\/h2>\nInterview with M. T. Anderson<\/strong><\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/MT-Anderson_credit-Sonya-Sones.jpeg\")
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/coin1-copy.jpg\")
\nVaim Hotel<\/strong><\/a>
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/08_Vaim.jpeg\")
<\/h2>\n
\nZadig; or, Destiny: An Oriental Tale
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/09_Zadig.jpg\")
<\/strong><\/a><\/h2>\n
\nFascist Yoga: Grifters, Occultists, White Supremacists and the New Order in Wellness<\/strong>
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/10_Yoga-copy.jpg\")
<\/a><\/h2>\n