Chad Walsh Reviews C.S. Lewis With a memoir by Damaris Walsh McGuire Compiled with an introduction by Joe R. Christopher. Altadena, California, The Mythopoeic Press, 1998 ISBN 1-887726-05-5, pb, 52 pp., $4.95

If C.S. Lewis was indeed 'apostle to the skeptics', as Chad Walsh once wrote of him, then Walsh was his first American disciple. The Beloit College professor's 1946 Atlantic Monthly essay thus headlined, later reprinted a year later in Reader's Digest, certainly gave many Stateside readers their initialt inkling of the writing of C.S. Lewis. Later the writer would expand the article into a book so titled, the first on Lewis. This slim book is hardly slight, nor to be slighted. Its twenty reviews, most first published in The New York Times Book Review, show a thoughtful and sympathetic reader's first response to everything from the gradual revelation of the Chronicles of Narnia to a complex appreciation of the autobiography Surprised by Joy seasoned by a friendship of a dozen years. Of special interest are two reviews of Till We Have Faces, one from The New York Herald Tribune Book Review and a more reasoned, reflective piece done later for Marquette University's journal Renascence. In the latter, reacting to the "bewilderment and frustration" this novel caused some longtime Lewis devotees, Walsh calls this Lewis' "most difficult" book and concludes by suggesting "...its quality...resembles G.K. Chesterton less and Charles Williams more than any of the author's previous work. Perhaps it is true that all religious insight, as it grows as deepens, moves toward music, liturgy, or silence. The prose writer finds the words bending and breaking with the burden they must carry. Lewis has not reached that point, but Till We Have Faces represents a far stride toward a direct perception of the love that moves the sun and the other stars." (20) While many reviews are but three paragraphs, Walsh packs a lot into them. His reviews of Narnia are informed by reading them to his four daughters as they grow. One hitherto unpublished review, a corrected typescript on Letters to an American Lady from the Wade Center at Wheaton College, adds to the value of the trove. Daughter Damaris Walsh McGuire's introduction "Memories of Joy, Jack, and Chad" is a charming memoir of her father's friendship with Lewis. Walsh, we learn, first suggested Joy Davidman write Lewis directly. In 1955, when the Walsh family visited Lewis and Joy in Oxford, Damaris writes that after a golden afternoon of charades in the Magdalen College deer park "my wise and observant mother [said] 'I smell a marriage.' She was right." (xvii) Joe R. Christopher's foreword is a lucid, succinct summary of the similarities--both poets, both deeply religious men who had rejected Christianity as boys--and the differences--Walsh was liberal and political, Lewis was neither--between the two unlikely friends. Indeed, Christopher's short critical biography of Walsh will send some readers to the challenging but rewarding task of seeking out Walsh's superb poetry, such as the stark 1970 elegy "Kent" and The Psalm of Christ, forty Lenten poems, one on each verse of Ps. 22. Quibble: the exact date of these reviews' original publication might be of interest to some Lewis analysts. But that mite of a quibble aside, this small (52 pp., four by six inches) but lively book fits easily in pocket or purse (I'm a pocket kind of guy, myself) and sheds light on Lewis, including the illumination of a little girl who saw him do a charade enacting a bullfinch. No reader of Lewis should lack it.

--reviewed by Mike Foster

(To order, send ($4.95 plus $1 S&H) payable to the Mythopoeic Society to: Joan Marie Verba, PO Box 1363, Minnetonka, MN, 55345-0363)

This work chronicles Lewis' struggle to come to terms with the death of his wife. Because it comes from his private journals, it may not seem as "polished" as some of his other writings. Personally, I appreciate the way it reveals the innerworkings of a very emotional and private man.

In contrast to many works, this book doesn't try to simplify grief, justify it, or dance around the issue with pat observations or cheery reminders. Instead, it dares to question those very tactics. Lewis allows himself to feel a broad range of emotions, including doubt and great despair. I love this quality in Lewis: he is one of the few Chrisitian writers who is brutally honest about his fears and anger. His writings allow that God is big enough to handle our toughest questions.

This little book is full of images and ideas that will stay with you long after you've finished it. Lewis takes feelings that you can't quite pinpoint and eloquently puts them into words. As I read the book, I kept thinking to myself "Yes, THAT'S what I feel too!" Misery does love company, and Lewis is excellent company.

As usual, Lewis is full of astute observations and points to ponder, but don't expect a bunch of clean and pretty answers. At the end, his grief is still very much a work in progress, which is definitely how it has been in my life....a journey.

Five months ago, I lost a dear friend and in that time, many have felt compelled to recommend books to me on grief. It is this one, however, that has helped my wounded heart the most. I consider C.S. Lewis one of the greatest minds and authors ever - and to hear his honesty and questioning of God in the face of great tragedy made me realize that all I was feeling was "okay" in a sense. And so I continue through the pain, comforted by the writings of this man, and learning from him as well. I would recommend this book to anyone going through the mourning process. And even if you are not, it is good to read to help identify with those who are.

Lewis shows enormous honesty and courage as he writes in this little book, a journal expressing his grief, about his faltering faith in God after the loss of his cherished wife. Despite his lifelong career as a writer of the truth of Christian faith, in this journal he expresses doubt about the very existence of a God who would wickedly deprive him of the greatest gift of his life, his wife. But as the months pass after her death, and Lewis further examines himself, he begins to appreciate the degree of personal selfishness wrapped up in his grief, and in his raging at God. As a result, towards the end of the journal he reestablishes his faith in a much more deeply rooted way. For me, this little book was a cautionary tale. It illustrated how easy it is to have a faith that is not a faith, but rather a mere deception, a contruct made of intellectual effort. When the forces that hold up the construct are taken away, such as what happened to Lewis with the loss of his wife, the intellectual faith will vanish. It is only then that real faith can take root. For faith, to be real, can depend upon nothing but the faith itself: a faith in Jesus. God does us an eternal favor when he takes from us those things we would cling to that are other than Himself.

If you wish to understand the IBUY Portal, don't count on this book to help you. I didn't like the style and structure of this book. I got the sense that this book was just another rush publication with a group of programmers getting together, assigning chapters with desired content and then got down to pulling and writing code.

WROX needs to do a better job of controlling quality and up front planning for their books. Sorry, but this book shows none of that. The design of the existing site was mostly crammed into a single chapter. A decent database diagram was not included and no UML or other diagrams were presented so we could easily understand the Object architecture. Instead, the documentation was simply a straight lift from sql server table descriptions. I found myself drawing my own diagrams as I went through the book. An architect's perspective was desparately needed in this first chapter.

I won't be buying any more WROX books if things don't improve by enforcing good technical writing standards for their publications.

I didn't much care for this book. It never really explains the how or why, it just lists code. "Now we'll add an edit button: Now we'll add a delete button: ". There's no explanation of what the code means, how the ASP pages link to the code-behind pages, etc.

I'm not sure who the target audience is. It's not technical enough for geeky types, but too technical for administrative types. I guess it's aimed at script kiddy types who want to copy code without really understanding how it works.

I bought this book because I have been thrust into the Intranet development world, and I really don't have a lot of experience building multi-functional web pages. I bought this book to really help me understand the IBuySpy portal, and I have used it to customize that package for a couple of different web sites now.

The Good:
The book is very good at explaining the various components of the IBuySpy Portal. It's a lot like a tourist map; highlighting certain pieces (while complete overlooking other aspects).

The Bad:
As others have noted, this book doesn't go deep into explaining ASP.NET, or how to use classes in the .NET architecture. It merely allows you to copy a lot of code, cross your fingers, and see something work.

The Ugly:
As with most "best-of-breed" solutions from Microsoft, stuff breaks. While this particular manual does point out why some stuff doesn't work as well as intended, it doesn't go into a lot of detail (and don't expect it to catch everything).

In Sum: Buy this book if you have a need to get an intranet up and running quickly, and want to impress your non-developer friends. Don't buy it if you're expecting to use it to learn ASP.NET.