Christian Mythmakers is a good overview of some of the thoughts and ideas of various Christian fantasy writers. While the chapter on John Bunyan is basically little more than a summary of Pilgrim's Progress, the rest of the book is interesting and thought provoking. The chapter on Charles Williams is a "must read" for anyone interested in or confused by Williams' work.

This book is a fascinating look at ten Christian mythmakers, that is authors who have used the power of myth to convey Christian truths in a new way. The narrative begins with John Bunyan and his seminal Pilgrim's Progress, continues through George Macdonald, G.K. Chesterton, Charles Williams, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and finishes up with Madeleine L'Engle, Walter Wangerin, Robert Siegel, and Hannah Hurnard.

Professor Hein begins with a short biography of the author, and then proceeds to explain the author's work, examining its theology and significance. I found this book to be quite fascinating, with the author giving me a look at these masterpieces of Christian literature in a way that I had never thought of before. If you are a fan of any of the authors above, then I highly recommend that you get this book!

I had the privilege of taking courses under Dr Hein in the early 90's at Wheaton. He is a very knowledgeable teacher and has great affection for the people he is writing about in this book. If you have any interest in these authors, this book is a must read. I wasn't aware that he had written this book when I came across it looking for books on George MacDonald and C.S. Lewis. As an Economics major, I somehow ended up taking four Lit. classes from Dr Hein because he is such a good instructor and passionate about his subject matter.

Chesterton lovers and lovers of poetry in the classical English forms will enjoy this collection of poems by one of the 20th century's greatest stylists, G.K. Chesterton.

After a section of juvenalia, the poems are arranged by broad subject. My only complaint with the volume is that it is not complete, and that Ignatius Press has not yet released Part 2 of the Collected Poetry.

But you will find many things in this volume in no other collection of Chesterton's poetry, including his poem about Notre Dame football. So if you enjoy Chesterton, or poetry, or both, check out this book.

G. K. Chesterton on Charles Dickens. If you love one, you are probably genetically determined to love both. So why haven't you read this book yet? What are you waiting for, a personal haunting from the ghosts of London humorists past?

Like all Chesterton's bios, this one is not so concerned with dates and influences, and not always even with its nominal subject. But Chesterton delights in Dickens, and does manage to stick to the point most of the time. And watching Chesterton go off on a philosophical tangent can be just as much fun as watching Dickens allow his plot to get hijacked by one of his own characters. He may be fuzzy on mundane facts, but he is always clear-headed and often lucid or even brilliant when it comes to human nature and ultimate truths. In the end, Chesterton finds a way through to a vantage that is worth visiting. Here are a few sample insights from the first chapter: "Dickens had all his life the faults of the little boy who is kept up too late at night." "The bores in his books are brighter than the wits in other books." "'I am a fond father,' he says, 'to every child of my fancy.' He was not only a fond father, he was an overindulgent father. . . they smash the story to pieces like so much furniture." (Chesterton pointing out that another writer gets carried away sometimes! I like that.)

This may be the best of Chesterton's biographies, and one of his best books. I did learn a few "facts" about Dickens, but mostly got to know him a lot better. If you're a newcomer to Chesterton, the talk below about him being a "fuzzy dreamer" for whom a "miss is as good as a hit" may be true in regard to biographical detail. But don't dismiss him as a thinker to be taken seriously, until you've read and thought deeply about Everlasting Man. There is an intellect incisive and sharp as any modern precision instrument.

Author, Jesus and the Religions of Man d.marshall@sun.ac.jp

To begin with, G K Chesterton loved Charles Dickens so much that he wrote several books and numerous essays about him. Both men loved what is most characteristically English. Dickens, on the one hand, created hundreds of characters who remain etched in our memory as being somehow quintessentially English. On the other, GKC was himself like a Dickens character, perhaps Mr. Dick in David Copperfield (who could not get the idea of King Charles I's severed head out of his mind).

Chesterton was probably the inventor of fuzzy logic. What he says usually makes sense, but he is notorious for being too sloppy to check up on the exactness of quotes and facts. If you are a stickler for facts, you will probably not like Chesterton. But if you are a bit of a dreamer who thinks that a near miss is as good as a direct hit, he's the man for you.

Dickens and Chesterton were among the greatest optimists of our time: Dickens because he felt that people who were good and kind were always rewarded, Chesterton because he felt that there was a God who forgave small transgressions.

So when you read the books and essays in this volume, you will not come away with any new-found knowledge about the great Victorian novelist; but you will become party to an agreeable conversation and greatly enjoy the company.

These stories by G.K. Chesterton were very enjoyable reading. Father Brown is an endearing character, and his intellect is impressive (but then again, what literary detective's isn't?). His companion Flambeau is equally enjoyable. I was disappointed with one thing: I had the impression that Father Brown was a detective in the sense that he solved crimes for the police, like Sherlock Holmes. Actually, this was only the case in a couple of the stories. Instead, he put his mind to solving mysteries that weren't necessarily crimes.

Six classic tales featuring the priest-sleuth, Father Brown. Excellent tales, they are engaging and addictive, and will leave you looking for more!

After reading The Hammer of God, one of the Father Brown stories, I found myself both perplexed and enlightened. Chesterton is one of the few short story authors I have encountered that can consolidate a global message into a short parable. In the Father Brown stories, he uses his superb wit and literary elegance to send readers through innumerable epiphanies, usually with the aid of some very potent metaphors. One quotation that I will always remember from this story is "humility is the mother of giants; one sees great things from the valley, only small things from the peak." For me, G.K. Chesterton has always been able to manipulate landscape and concrete images into a meaningful, and lucid, metaphor. The Hammer of God, in particular, is inundated with these powerful metaphors that tackle the essence of man's struggle with his outside world, and with himself. I found many of the other stories to be very stimulating, although the Hammer of God was clearly my favorite. If you seek literay merit and powerful lessons, but have neither the time nor the inclination to read a novel or anything else over one hundred pages, G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories are perfect for you.

The title is a little deceptive. In fact, this book is mostly about Chaucer and his era, 220 pages worth. Stevenson gets a fair shake at 106 pages. But Carlyle gets only 12 pages, and Tolstoy only four, and those a rather simplistic critique of his philosophy. So only buy the book if you're interested in the former two writers.

As in most of Chesterton's biographies, the story of the subject's life is of minor interest here, compared to a philosophical and artistic description of the subject's works in the context of his time and "modern times." Chesterton is interested in the writer as a thinker, as a creator, and as a moral agent. In defending Stevenson and Chaucer, he argues for his view of Christianity, poetry, love, and artistic humility. If you want his religious views in a purer form, go to the brilliant Orthodoxy or Everlasting Man. If you want a detailed narration of the lives of the writers in question, look elsewhere. And even for this style of biography, I think his book on Dickens was the best I've read. But I found his opinionated description and defense of Chaucer and his times also very interesting. And while he does not scatter brilliant sayings like rose petals at a wedding, as in his best books, (reading Everlasting Man, I wanted to copy every other sentence) a few blossoms do flutter down, like the following, which also explain Chesterton's method:

"The truly impartial historian is not he who is enthusiastic for neither side in a historical struggle. . .The truly impartial historian is he who is enthusiastic for both sides. He holds in his heart a hundred fanaticisms."

"The greatest poets of the world have a certain serenity, because they have not bothered to invent a small philosophy, but have rather inherited a large philosophy. It is, nine times out of ten, a philosophy which very great men share with very ordinary men. It is therefore not a theory which attracts attention as a theory."

Author, Jesus and the Religions of Man (July 2000)

d.marshall@sun.ac.jp

G.K. Chesterton, best known for his Father Brown detective stories, also stands out as a remarkable literary critic. He is most astute on Stevenson, his greatest influence, rightly seeing him as the first great writer to find beauty in a modern city. A must!

The obvious (and probably most common) comparison is to Joseph Conrad's "The Secret Agent." Both explore anarchy and revolution and have at their centers double agents. In many ways, though, the two works don't compare. Conrad's work is much darker; his London is infinitely bleaker and grosser than Chesterton's. Indeed, Conrad spends much more time describing his settings and creating the dark mood. Moreover, Conrad is more concerned than Chesterton with the psychological motivations underlying anarchy. These are not at all shortcomings in Chesterton's brilliant work; the two writers, each excellent in their own ways, simply focused on different things and had different goals and lessons to teach.

On its surface, "The Man Who Was Thursday" is the tale of a detective who infiltrates the inner circle of a group of anarchists and assumes a position on its board, whose seven members all bear names of days of the week. Syme, the detective, is Thursday; the mysterious, enigmatic leader is Sunday. Much of the fun of this book is in the twists and turns, so I won't give anything away. Some of the surprises (or revelation) are predictable, but many are not, and one typically builds on all the rest--keeping even the most predictable of them fresh and intriguing. At a deeper level, Chesterton explores the nature of good and evil, of fate and free will, of order and chaos, and also of faith. Indeed, Chesterton's vision of Christianity penetrates his work, sometimes explicitly (particularly the concluding chapters) and often implicitly and more symbolically. It underlies much of the book.

"Thursday" is a difficult book to understand, and the allegory is not easy to see or decipher. This is certainly a book that deserves many re-readings. On this note, Martin Gardner's introduction and notes provide a great framework for beginning to penetrate the book's deeper meanings. Moreover, his descriptions of the relevant geography and landmarks of London prove both helpful and fascinating.

This is a true masterpiece, unfortunately overlooked by far too many who have never heard of Chesterton or who don't know he wrote excellent fiction in addition to his fine Christian apologetics. Anyone stands to profit from reading "The Man Who Was Thursday." And this edition only enhances the experience.

If you have never read this book, DO IT NOW! And buy this copy. For just a little more than the paperback, you get Gardner's notes which help to shed some light on the neighborhoods of London and Chesterton's story. I was not familiar with the layout of London and his annotations gave some interesting facts and tidbits. Also, this is a hard text to tackle and Gardner's thoughts help introduce new ways to understand Chesterton's work.

Definition is impossible : The Man Who was Thursday is not quite a political bad dream, nor a metaphysical thriller, nor a cosmic joke in the form of a spy novel, but it is something of all three. What it has most of is a boys' adventure story, which might help to explain my early excitement but not so much my continuing devotion. And what a title! I will not divulge its meaning here, but I cannot resist saying that anybody who at the sight of it does not feel a faint tingle of excitement and a breath of wonder is not really a fit person to be reading the book. -Kingsley Amis, Introduction to the Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics version

G. K. Chesterton's classic novel manages to provide a thriller that starts out like a Sherlock Holmes adventure and ends like Raiders of the Lost Ark, while at the same time offering a profound contemplation of the existence of evil in the world, the role of free will in the universe, the willingness of God to allow Man to suffer, and various other vexing metaphysical questions. Both the basic story and the religious philosophy are exciting, and though generations of readers have complained that the final chapter is too difficult to follow, the Annotated version has explanatory essays by Martin Gardner and there's an excellent essay of his available online, which do a great job of explaining just what Chesterton is up to. It is very much a Christian fantasy (or "Nightmare" to use Chesterton's own subtitle) but can be read with enjoyment by anyone who loves a good adventure yarn and doesn't mind being made to think.

GRADE : A-

I know it's a "classic collection", but after reading it, I have to wonder what all the fuss is about. I mean, do all the really worthy Father Brown stories come later, and we all praise these early ones out of misplaced fondness?

First, I'm left wondering: Who was that little man? Does he have a personality? Who was that little man who likes to show up at bizarre British crime scenes and make enigmatic statements after figuring everything out in two seconds? This is one shadowy, slippery great detective. Why did Sherlock Holmes or Nero Wolfe ever work so hard to establish such memorable, multi-faceted personalities? It would seem that's a lot of bother for nothing; just be like Father Brown, the cipher, fading in and out once in a while.

Cruel to pick on the Great Detective? Then let's talk about the plots, the cases, the whodunits. A more contrived, improbable collection of rummy circumstances, somehow resulting in ultimately unexciting deaths, I have never seen. And this so-called "locked-room" classic--'The Invisible Man'--well, in the real world, wouldn't one of the four witnesses keeping an eye on the scene in question at least mention the presence of a certain person, even if they didn't actually infer hostile intentions on the part of the so-called "invisible man"? That's all I can say: I wouldn't want to spoil this dull story for you.

The better entries: 'The Wrong Shape', The Sign of the Broken Sword', 'The Sins of Prince Saradine'--where I suppose the unfolding logic seems slightly less contrived than usual--and especially 'The Honour of Israel Gow', which at least had some authentic creepiness, and a solution that related to one man's idea of promises kept.

As for any wonderful spiritual signficance these stories are supposed to display...yes, I'm aware they starred a wise priest.

In recent weeks I have suffered from the rail conditions in South East England. I might have gone mad if not for this book (and a few others, of course). Each story was like getting involved in a cryptic crossword. The stories are weird, wonderful, sometimes quite horrific but always enthralling, and they keep you guessing till the end.

I had really enjoyed 'The Club of Queer Trades', and found 'Father Brown' had the same typically Chesterton style.

Father Brown reveals the dark side of human nature and revels in the unusual and fantastic. I only wish there were more stories.

Does anyone else write like this?

The 12 stories herein can of course be found in _The Complete Father Brown_, and _The Annotated Innocence of Father Brown_. This is the first Brown collection, which introduces not only Father Brown himself but Flambeau, the daring thief. Father Brown worked on Flambeau during their early confrontations, and eventually persuaded him to give up his life of crime. He became Father Brown's friend and sometime sidekick, and appears in three-quarters of the stories herein, in one capacity or another.

"The Blue Cross" - The great detective Valentin knows that Flambeau the thief has selected a little English priest as his target, since the priest has been entrusted with a valuable cross set with sapphires. But when Valentin begins tracking the priest across the city, a very odd pattern of incidents begins to emerge.

"The Secret Garden" - Father Brown is a dinner guest in Valentin's home.

"The Queer Feet" - 'The Twelve True Fishermen', meeting for their annual fish dinner at a small, exclusive restaurant, saw the usual count of waiters - but one had died hours before! Father Brown (called in earlier for the waiter's dying confession and last rites) unravels a spectacular caper.

"The Flying Stars" - Flambeau's last crime (as noted in the 1st paragraph of the story), cited as an example of his love of artistically matching settings with crimes. His confrontation with Father Brown resonates nicely with the preceding story's metaphor of Brown having him on a line like a fish.

"The Invisible Man" - Locked-room mystery. The inventor was found murdered in his flat, but witnesses say that nobody could have gone past them without being seen.

"The Honour of Israel Gow" - This story actually takes place *after* "The Wrong Shape". The Earl of Glengyle was a hermit - and after finding some very odd circumstances in the Earl's home after his death, Flambeau and Father Brown begin to fear that Satanism is involved.

"The Wrong Shape" - The writer was a bad husband and an unpleasant man, and the beautifully penned suicide note seemed almost too good to be true.

"The Sins of Prince Saradine" - Flambeau takes Father Brown along to collect on the prince's invitation, sent to him during his criminal career, to visit if he were to become respectable, since he greatly admired Flambeau's stunt of once arranging for one policeman to arrest another, when both were looking for *him*.

"The Hammer of God" - The last two Bohuns are the curate, who pursues the beauty of his church, and the colonel, who chases women. But if he managed to catch the blacksmith's wife, it may well have been the death of him.

"The Eye of Apollo" - Locked-room mystery. Father Brown came to visit Flambeau, who has taken an office in a new building. Pauline Stacey, a rich idealist in a neighbouring office, fell down the empty elevator shaft that same day - when nobody else, apparently, was in the building.

"The Sign of the Broken Sword" - Why has Father Brown taken Flambeau to every monument to the memory of the great general, finally ending here at his grave? "Where does a wise man hide a leaf? In a forest." Someone, unfortunately, once took that saying to heart.

"The Three Tools of Death" - With three weapons visible on the scene, why did the victim die by a fall from a window?

I enjoyed this book very much. The morals and lessons it teaches you are very important. It is the story of a lonely man, who because he was falsely accused of stealing and because this cost him all his relationships with people, he secluded himself in his lonely house along with all his gold that he saved up. He never spent his money because he enjoyed its company. His gold was his only companion for several years of his life. Then one day, he was robbed, and he no longer had anything worth living for.
Silas was slowly dying of misery and depression. He had no reason to live. Then one day a little girl walked into his house and into his life. Her mother died, leaving the baby girl as an orphan. So, Silas adopted her and took her into his home. She grew up a poor, hard-working girl who loved her new father Silas and vice-versa. Because of this new daughter of his, Silas changed for the better. He became more caring and devoted to someone else besides himself. He started to go to church again and changed his views on what really was important in life. And one day when his treasure was found and returned to him, he didn't even care for it. He had something even more precious than gold: someone to love and receive love from.

I first read Silas Marner when I was 18 years old, and loved every word. I started reading it again immediately after finishing it! As said in other reviews, perhaps 9th grade is indeed too early because at that age, this older language style is difficult to "get into" quickly enough to hold their interest. I found myself wrapped in this little town with its odd characters and gossip, and wished I'd lived there. The imagery is so strong and sweet I still refer to the scenery evoked by this novel when I read completely unrelated historical articles! The story itself cannot be called remarkable because it is one of the basic stories about humanity and what matters in life. Yet George Eliot surpasses all others in the telling of it. There is a reason this book is on all the reading lists -- it is a great achievement.

This is the uplifting story of Silas Marner, a 19th century English working man, who seems to be greatly wronged repeatedly by people in his community. As an elegible young man, a rival framed him out of greed as well as envy, leaving Marner wrongly accused of theft, upon which he relocates in a different locality. For some 15 years, Marner lives like a hermit, hording the money he earns as a weaver. Said to be "in with the wicked one", possessing strange magic, town folk avoid contact with the mysterious man. -- Suddenly, in short succesion, two events change the life of Master Marner forever, even restoring his faith in a Supreme Being and the good in his fellow man.

Without reveiling the surprises held by this wonderful story, I can highly recommend this book to readers of teen age and above. Written in a very high English, the writing style is that of an educated master of the language, uncommon to be written or spoken in this manner for some 100 years. Less difficult than Shakespeare, still challenging to a young person unfamiliar with countless terms and expressions that seem to be very dated.

As a teacher partial to language arts studies, I am very impressed by this book. I would recommend it for classroom use at the junior high school level or above. A masterpiece!*****

The first time I read this book, I felt almost as impatient with Chesterton's "verbosity" and "hot air" as some of the reviewers below. In regard to the bare facts of Francis' life, one comes to feel a bit as Chesterton said of the Troubadours' lovers: "The reader realises that the lady is the most beautiful being that can possibly exist, only he has occasional doubts as to whether she does exist." Moments came when I found myself thirsting for dry facts. But I think the problem is that Chesterton assumes his readers, as educated persons of his period, know the story already, and only need to be enlightened as to its meaning. One can get facts anywhere. Few can take us inside the thinking of a man like Francis. And absolutely no one I know writes with such entertaining flair, of a healing kind so different from modern books and movies that wound our souls with their pleasures.

On second reading, I find I enjoyed this episode about as much as the biography of Dickens -- which was very much. Chesterton looks at Francis, in varying cadences, from the inside, to help us think and feel as he did, then from the outside, as children of the Enlightenment, a two-perspective approach that gives us a rounded figure. Those of us who have no other knowledge of Francis may sometimes wonder how much of that figure is Francis and how much Chesterton, (who was, after all, probably the more rounded of the two). But the insights are always brilliant. And many still cut like daggers. (Or rather scalpels, to heal.) "We read that Admiral Bangs has been shot, which is the first intimation we have that he has ever been born." "The moment sex ceases to be a servant it becomes a tyrant." "All goods look better when they look like gifts." "There is only one intelligent reason why a man does not believe in miracles and that is that he does believe in materialism." Anyone who finds such digressions merely "hot air," would be best advised to keep to dry-as-dust historical commentaries, or skeptical comic books, as the case may be.

This book is not so much a biography of a single man, as an episode in Chesterton's ongoing spiritual biography of mankind. It is one in a series of what Solzhenitsyn called "knots" and Thomas Cahill calls "hinges" of history. The series continues with Chesterton's equally subjective but enlightening biographies of Chaucer, Dickens, Joan of Arc, and modern "Heretics." He gives the outline of the project in the Everlasting Man, which is one of the most brilliant and wisest books of the century.

As a non-Catholic Christian ("Protestant" would place the emphasis in the wrong place), I don't agree with Chesterton's take on the Albigensian Wars, and am more ambivalent about the Crusades than he. But he does not exactly justify the Inquisition, as the reader below implies; he admits that in later stages it was a "horrible thing that might be haunted by demons." How many modern leftists admitted that much about, say, the Russian Revolution? But I agree he may try to "understand" the sins committed by his side a little too hard.

author, Jesus and the Religions of Man (July 2000)

d.marshall@sun.ac.jp

G.K. Chesterton is one of the most interesting people who ever lived. His prodigious output and outlandish appearance have made him an unforgettable part of Western culture. But in this book, we have the eccentric Chesterton writing about the even more astounding character of St. Francis of Assisi. Chesterton goes through several interesting sketches of St. Francis' life (which are interesting by themselves) and then draws all sorts of fantastic conclusions from the episodes. I strongly recommend this book to anyone who is curious about Chesterton's writing and Francis' life.

G.K. Chesterton's "St. Francis of Assisi" is not your conventional timeline of the events in a man's life. Instead, Chesterton focuses on Francis' relationship with God and his historical context, background and impact. I first read this book a year ago and have just read it again - it's one of those books that are so rich that you discover something new each time you pick it up. If you've ever read "The Little Flowers of St. Francis" (about the events in Francis' life), this is the book to read next. It is a great aid to understanding Francis as a person and not just as "the bird bath saint". I highly recommend this book.

G.K. Chesterston displays sparkling wit and trenchant insight into human nature in this as in his other writings: the man is charming.

He is also an ignoramus of staggering proportion when it comes to basic matters concerning political economy. His criticism of the free market consists of a belief that the poor are wretchedly poor because the rich derive wealth from the poverty of the poor. Poverty exists because the rich, merely by wishing the poverty into existence, create it. Once the poor are wretchedly poor, only then will they be cowed enough to work in factories. Chesterton, with a straight face, announces that the poor who are moderately poor do not seek wages, and rich people do not seek to hire them.

He also thinks the rich could wish poverty out of being using the same magic power that they used to wish it into being, but that they selfishly refuse to use this power, because, if the poor were not wretched, the factories would find no employees, and the rich would be less rich. I am frankly baffled, in this analysis, what Chesterton thinks the factory owners do with manufactured goods once they are produced: if the rich had the power to wish wealth into being, would they not wish for wealthy customers to buy their goods? If no one buys the goods, what good are they?

Chesterton concludes his (ahem) 'analysis' by saying that the rich have unwisely 'allowed' the poor to multiply in great numbers, so that the overpopulation would increase the labor supply and drive down the height of wages: but they miscalculated in their villainy, and now they fear the numbers of the poor they way the Pharaoh feared the swelling ranks of the Hebrews. The Eugenics movement of the 1910's was a plot by the wealthy to control the numbers of the poor, who, apparently, can magically raise population rates when it suits them, but not lower them again.

He also pauses to call the rich all the usual nasty names that writers blissfully ignorant of economics call them: parasites, robbers, flint-hearted sinners, etc. Apparently wealth merely exists as a given, appearing naturally for no cause and at no cost, like manna from heaven, but the rich (somehow) with their hoodoo magic have usurped all the wealth, so the manna meant for us falls only on them. This is the economic theory of a cargo-cultist.

Chesterton's economic theory does not realize that the consumers, not the whim of the factory owner, sets the price of goods and the price of every factor of production, including the wages of labor.

His theory does not notice that the poor factory worker was mass-producing cheap goods for the poor, at prices they could afford, leading to the general rise of wealth and luxury of the nation. It is the capitalist, who invest, builds the factory, and creates the jobs. It is the capitalist who allows the poor shoeless man and the poor shoe-factory worker to make a mutually advantageous exchange.

If the rich man who built the factory were a thief, and hanged as other thieves are hanged, the victims that he robs would be the richer when he leaves off robbing them.

In reality, if the rich man does not invest, the factory is not built, and the poor man who wanted to by shoes will go unshod and the poor man working in a shoe factory will go begging.

Read this book for its lucid prose and droll paradoxes in which Chesterton finds delight: but for an understanding of how the market system works and why it works, read HUMAN ACTION by Ludwig von Mises.