A strange, spiritually infused novel by a troubled Oregonian tech representative has hit the best-seller lists, thanks to plenty of free publicity in Christian media outlets. But it may be a very un-Christian book.
Continue reading "Best-Selling Book Shows Market Power of Christian Media" »
The acclaimed science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke was difficult to categorize. That's a compliment, but it also means much important critical work remains to be done.
Continue reading "Thoughts on Arthur C. Clarke" »
The mid-century mystery and science-fiction master Fredric Brown deserves much greater recognition, and his works should be brought back into print.
Continue reading "The Case for Fredric Brown" »
Continue reading "The Light in "Dark" Fiction" »
One of the greatest difficulties in the West's confrontation with Islam in the past decade has been our failure to recognize the true nature of Islam. This is a direct consequence of our failure to recognize the true nature of our own civilization, and the great good that is inherent in it.
Continue reading "The Reality of Islam" »
Starting this evening at 9 EST and over the next four months, PBS will broadcast The Complete Jane Austen. The series runs through April 6, and will include adaptations of all of Austen's novels, plus Miss Austen Regrets (Feb. 6), a film biography detailing the never-married author's "lost loves."
The Complete Jane Austen will consist of new adaptations of Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey, Persuasion, and Sense and Sensibility, plus previously produced versions of Emma (featuring Kate Beckinsale) and Pride and Prejudice (starring Colin Firth).
Continue reading "Masterpiece Theater Does Austen" »
After the success of several tie-in novels featuring characters from the USA Network detective-comedy series Monk, written by TV mystery veteran Lee Goldberg, two more USA Network series will get the same treatment, according to an item on The Blog of the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers.
TV writer William Rabkin has agreed to write three original novels based on Psych, with the first going into print in January 2009, and Tod Goldberg will produce three books based on Burn Notice, with the first installment due out in July 2008, when the series' second season will begin on USA Network.
Continue reading "Tie-In Novels for 'Psych,' 'Burn Notice'" »
Edward D. Hoch's More Things Impossible: The Second Casebook of Dr. Sam Hawthorne (2006), reviewed by Mike Tooney
Continue reading "More Things Impossible: The Second Casebook of Dr. Sam Hawthorne: Review" »
Edward D. Hoch is one of the very greatest living mystery writers.
Of course, you've probably never heard of him.
That's primarily because nobody pays much attention to short stories these days. Hoch, born in 1930 and still writing today, works almost exclusively in the short story, and has written only a couple of novels, many years ago. He has published a short story in each issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine for the past four decades or so. He has written nearly a thousand mystery stories, and they are of astonishingly high qualitym, especially in light of the quantity he has written.
Continue reading "The Dr. Sam Hawthorne Mysteries" »
Novelist-journalist Norman Mailer has died at age 84, according to his literary executor. Malier, known for his interesting but often overly dense prose, puzzling choices of story material, combative journalism, "existential" philosophisizing, and aggressive self-assertiveness in his personal life, burst on the scene at the age of 25 in 1948 with a well-written, critically acclaimed, and popular debut novel, The Naked and the Dead.
Intelligent, wily, handsome, charismatic, and highly personable when he wanted to be, Mailer was the embodiment of the "hipster" culture that arose after World War II, in which authors such as he, Gore Vidal, Jack Kerouac, and Stanley Baldwin rebelled against the overly bureaucratized and stifling, government-dominated society that had arisen during the first half of the twentieth century and found its greatest expression during World War II, when nearly everything in American society was under control of the national government.
Continue reading "Norman Mailer and the Hipster Cataclysm" »
Mystery writer Mickey Spillane, whose hugely successful crime novels disturbed critics and infuriated left-liberals, left four unpublished novels behind when he died last year at the age of 88. This Tuesday the first of them will go on sale, published by Hard Case Crime for $6.99.
Spillane wrote the first eight chapters, out of eleven total, and his friend Max Allan Collins finished it, based on extensive notes and conversations with Spillane.
Spillane wrote more than 30 books that were published during his lifetime, and they sold more than 130 million copies.
Readers liked the clear distinctions between good and evil in the narratives, and appreciated the moral complexity of the choices detective Mike Hammer and Spillane's other protagonists had to make in working to bring criminals to justice.
One of the most important presumably unintended consequences of the Sexual Revolution of the second half of the twentieth century has been the increasing dominance of male desires and a corresponding diminution of the value of women's ways of viewing sex. The opening of all doors ensures that men, who by nature tend to pursue a variety of sexual partners, will drive the agenda, and women, who are by nature better fitted for long-term partnerships, will simply have to accommodate them.
Perpetuation of the species ensures that men who spread their genetic characteristics widely will greatly affect the gene pool, and women who are able to take care of their children well—which at least in earlier times was much easier if a man was around to help—will be similarly successful. Hence there is an innate tension in relations between the sexes: there are centrifugal forces at work, but at its best human sexuality ties couples and families together.
The development of moral codes pertaining to such matters helped the species thrive. What both men and women give up in freedom they obtain in greater success in contributing children for the future.
Continue reading "The Oppressive Realities of the Sexual Revolution" »
Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling has announced that Albus Dumbledore, the headmaster of Hogwarts School in the mega-popular children's book series, was a homosexual. E! News reports:
Dumbledore was gay. . . .
"Falling in love can blind us to an extent," Rowling explained Friday in front of a packed house at New York's Carnegie Hall, where she capped off her first U.S. book tour since 2000.
Continue reading "Harry Potter's Homosexual Headmaster" »
Men read far fewer books than women today. That's a documented fact, and the gap is becoming bigger. Particularly weak is men's reading of fiction. It's pretty much women's domain these days, while men, when they do read, gravitate toward history and biography.
Why this is, nobody seems to know. Men used to read books, but today we are unusually reluctant to do so.
Continue reading "Why Johnny Doesn't Read" »
If you think it's just a coincidence that all of the myriad of problems identified by the statist politicians and "thinkers" whom our contemporary media love so well can be solved only by more government and less freedom, then you'll find Al Gore's forthcoming book very convincing, I'm sure.
Judging by his publisher's statements, The Path to Survival will show exactly what the environmental movement means in practice: bigger government, less freedom.
The book will be released as a paperback original in April 2008, and offers "a visionary blueprint for the changes we should make as a world community," according to publisher Rodale Books in a statement issued yesterday:Continue reading "Gore Drops Other Shoe" »
As promised earlier today, here is my review of Alan Reynolds's book, Income and Wealth, which appeared in the June 2007 issue of Budget and Tax News:
Income and Wealth
By Alan Reynolds
Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006
231 pages, $55.00, ISBN 0-313-33688-1
The past decade has brought a tsunami of complaints about increasing economic inequality in the United States, a "vanishing middle class," and a huge and increasing concentration of wealth among the top 1 percent of wage earners.
As Alan Reynolds points out in his superb new book Income and Wealth, those claims are false. Every one of them.
Continue reading "Debunking Economic Myths" »
In his syndicated column, William F. Buckley pays tribute today to Alan Reynolds, the Cato Institute economist who has defended free markets for nearly four decades.
Reynolds has published hundreds of articles in newspapers and magazines, notably in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Reason, National Review,and in national syndication. His devotion to facts instead of ideology has made him a huge thorn in the statists' side during his entire career.
He is also an immensely cheerful and personable gentleman. (And he once played guitar in rock star Little Richard's band. How many economists have done that?)
Recently Reynolds wrote his first full-length book, Income and Wealth, in which, in his usual way, he demolishes the great statist myths of our time. As Buckey notes:
Continue reading "The Greatness of Alan Reynolds" »
I've seen a multitude of interpretations of the Harry Potter book series, and for me the most interesting ones emphasize the ideas in the narratives, instead of arguing over the books' literary quality. (The latter seems to me a moot point.) One of the best brief summaries I've seen is Jerry Bowyer's, published today.
An excerpt:
Jo Rowling has a wonderful talent for tapping into Biblical and literary symbolism. From the very beginning, I've believed that Hogwarts is the literary representation of the Christian Church. Towered over by stone spires, filled with living icons of great men and women from the past, Hogwarts is a place where ancient books are studied to relearn great wisdom from the past. Hogwarts was founded by four great wizards over a thousand years ago who were united in the belief that their knowledge should be passed on. Like the four evangelists in early church literature, each has its own seals and symbol and its own special focus of virtue. Many of those wonderful names, such as Godric Gryffindor, Rowling revealed in a recent interview were, taken from medieval Christian saints.
The full article is available here.
Normally I hate revisionism, but this looks like it just might work:
Warner Bros. and Village Roadshow Pictures are teaming on "Oz," a revisionist take on the L. Frank Baum books that hatched "The Wizard of Oz." . . .
[Said writer Josh Olson,] "The appealing thing about the Baum books to me is how wildly imaginative they are. There are crazy characters from amazing places. I want this to be ‘Harry Potter’ dark, not ‘Seven’ dark." . . . "A lot of the plot is mine, but the characters are all Baum."
—from Variety
The film's prospective director, Todd McFarlane, wants it to appeal to the same audiences that enjoyed the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy. If the authors continue to respect the source material, the film could conceivably serve, as they say they intend, as an effective sequel to the original, rather than a remake. We'll see.
J. K. Rowling, author of the mega-bestselling Harry Potter books, is writing a detective novel, according to the Sunday Times of London. AP reports:
The Sunday Times newspaper quoted Ian Rankin, a fellow author and neighbor of Rowling's, as saying the creator of the "Harry Potter" books is turning to crime fiction.
"My wife spotted her writing her Edinburgh criminal detective novel," the newspaper, which was available late Saturday, quoted Rankin as telling a reporter at an Edinburgh literary festival.
A mystery series selling in the hundreds of millions, as the Harry Potter series did, would certainly be good for the genre's overall popularity—but is exceedingly unlikely. However, Rowling's ability to bring imagination and some interesting ideas to genre fiction has been fully proven, and her effort could indeed be refreshing for a form of fiction that has become rather dreary in recent years.
Our friend Mike Tooney called our attention to the following passage in William K. Everson's book The Detective in Film in which the author discusses the four 1930s Nancy Drew films produced by Warner Brothers and starring Bonita Granville as the title character. It's a good capsule description of the series:Continue reading "The 1930s Nancy Drew Films" »
Kathryn Lopez, editor of National Review Online, is one of the very best interviewers around. Her conversation with former Wall Street Journal writer-editor Amity Shlaes is a fine example of Kathryn's work. Shlaes's new book, The Forgotten Man: A History of the Great Depression, published just yesterday, "serves up the Great Depression as you’ve never known it — challenging conventional wisdom, telling a gripping story of the triumph of the American spirit and the folly of big government," as Lopez smartly describes it.
It's a fascinating interview, and one part of it is especially interesting.
Continue reading "A Classical Liberal View of the Great Depression" »
My fellow Golden Age of Detective Mysteries afficionado Mike Tooney has written an excellent review and summary of The Dead Sleep Lightly, a terrific collection of radio mystery scripts by the great detective story writer John Dickson Carr. Carr was the master of the "impossible crime," the murder that seems as if it cannot have been committed by a human being, and his narratives usually had a appeallingly creepy atmosphere and strong intimations of the preternatural.
The Dead Sleep Lightly is out of print, but copies are available in used bookstores and through online search engines. It is well worth seeking out.
With Mike's kind permission, I am reprinting his review here for your enjoyment and edification:
Continue reading "The Dead Sleep Lightly—Review" »
My essay on the Austrian economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek in the April 20 print edition of National Review (not available online) considers the essentials of classical liberalism—and finds that a crucial element of classical liberalism is the moral philosophy developed by thinkers such as Edmund Burke and Adam Smith and dervived from Christian principles.
What distinguishes classical liberalism—and modern Reaganite conservatism—from libertarianism is exactly this concern for preserving and strengthening the moral structures that make freedom possible.
Click here to read on....
Continue reading "F. A. Hayek and the Essentials of Classical Liberalism" »
Science writer Ronald Bailey has put together a very informative and insightful review of Michael Crichton's latest novel, Next, for National Review Online. Bailey points out that the depiction of science as basically scary—as is Crichton's usual approach and is the case with Next—is entirely in conflict with reality:
Frankensteinian concerns persist in the modern age because of humanity’s inborn suspicion of the new. Happily, over the past few centuries the West has established firm linkages between scientific and economic actors — launching the industrial/technological revolution that has lifted billions of people out of humanity’s natural state of abject poverty. But such transformations of economic and social institutions remain scary. Frankenstein was essentially a reactionary response to that revolution. But there are other ways to craft narratives about humanity’s growing technological prowess — telling stories that are more hopeful and liberating.
Bailey suggests an alternative approach that could be just as entertaining and more edifying, using Crichton's Jurassic Park as an example:
I have often wanted to suggest to Crichton that he could have gotten the same narrative bang for his buck if he had instead celebrated the achievement of bringing dinosaurs back to life. In my alternative plot, a kindly old paleontologist, using the miracle of biotechnology, conjures dinosaurs back into existence to delight the world’s children. Things go wrong only when a cadre of evil anti-biotechnologists led by Jeremy Rifkin break into the peaceful island zoo to kill the dinosaurs. This revised scenario would provide Crichton with all of the gunfire, gore, chase scenes, and satisfying explosions without the Luddite baggage of the original.
This plot would actually be more true to life—because there is practically no evidence that humanity rushes headlong into misusing powerful new technologies. Instead of using computerized probes for mind control, physicians implant them to control Parkinson’s disease. Instead of carelessly bringing space viruses to Earth, NASA set up elaborate containment and decontamination systems for astronauts returning from the moon. And researchers hope to use biotech to bring back to life animals driven to extinction by humanity, including the Tasmanian tiger and the woolly mammoth.
That is indeed a more accurate vision of what science really does, particularly in the hands of Westerners.
Next, as noted, is firmly in what Bailey refers to as the Luddite category, but Bailey still considers it enjoyable:
Despite its considerable narrative flaws, Next is still a compulsively readable beach book about the dawn of the biotech revolution. If your taste runs to car and helicopter chases, gunfire, explosions, sex, and entertaining demises for villains, combined with a bit of public policy, Next delivers all that and more. So squirrel away this one in your luggage when you fly to some sandy strand for your winter vacation.
You can purchase it here.
I stirred up some concerns among PKD fans with my Philip K. Dick article, which was cross-posted at The Reform Club site. Francis Poretto commented thoughtfully there, suggesting that there is no way to discern true greatness in a writer. After stating, "For my money, a great writer is one who inspires me to great emotion," Francis asks, "How shall I judge Dick, or any writer, great, even if permitted to use my criterion?"
It's a fair question, and one that I implicitly answered in my original comment on PKD. Francis correctly observes that a numerical analysis of how a particular author measures up to an individual's chosen standards is impossible. Hence, he suggests, it's silly to engage in such discussions. "I think you can see where this is going," he concludes.
I can indeed see where that is going, and I am rather surprised to see someone who is most decidedly not a philosophical relativist taking the position Francis is staking out in regard to literature. Certainly it's true that we cannot hope to judge the quality of literary works and the overall achievements of their authors by some sort of quantitative analysis, but that is absolutely not the same thing as saying that there are no qualitative differences between such works and authors. And if there are such differences, then it is most certainly useful and salutary to discuss the matter.
Francis points out the following as possible standards, but then dismisses them:
-- Widespread critical acclaim?
-- Volume of sales?
-- The length of time his works have been read?
-- His avoidance of modifiers?
-- The effulgence of his imagery?
-- Some other criterion?
The answer, as you will have already guessed, is (f), some other criterion. Or, more accurately, some other criteria.
To wit:
Most assuredly there is a certain something at the heart of all great literary works that cannot quite be identified, much less quantified. Rather like the human soul, we perceive it but cannot isolate it. However, just as the human soul is held in a body that makes identifiable and even quantifiable actions, this heart of a novel is contained in (and indeed suffuses) a book that has identifiable characteristics. These characteristics can even be usefully quantified in some cases, though I believe actual numerical quantification to be unnecessary for a valid literary analysis.
Specifically, it is possible to put individual tastes aside and discuss literature and the other arts in a rational and salubrious way.
We can observe, for example, that some books have deeper, more true, and more convincing characterizations than others. We can see that some have plots that are more interesting and diverting than others. Some have stories that are more plausible, convincing, and usefully reminiscent of reality than others. Some have descriptive passages that make the fictional world come alive more convincingly than others. Some have prose that is so beautiful and artful that it gives us distinct pleasure to contemplate. Some have moral implications that bring our human condition into greater focus and give us real insights into our position in the cosmos. And so on.
Yes, we cannot always quantify such things, but we certainly can make comparisons and discuss what is most worthy of our time and energy. And the point of my post was that a good many of the writings of Philip K. Dick are much more worthy of our time and attention than those of most mainstream American literary artisans of the twentieth century.
So let us indeed feel free to discuss the quality of authors' works, singly and in toto. We should always recognize that there is much room for disagreement, awareness of ambiguity, and differing assessments of how various works measure up to the ideal characteristics of literature, and that individuals can hold different rankings of importance among the various aspects of literary excellence, but that it is nonetheless both possible and necessary to discuss these works objectively and with a sincere search for truth at the heart of the matter.
It's official: Philip K. Dick is a great writer, according to the Library of America. As the Galley Cat at Media Bistro reports:
Buried at the tail end of Mark Sarvas's interview with Jonathan Lethem comes news of one project on the novelist's plate: "I'm helping preside over the utter and irreversible canonization of one of my (formerly outsider) heroes, Philip K. Dick: I'm writing endnotes for The Library of America, which is doing a volume of four of his novels from the sixties, which I also helped select."
I suppose that if Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and H. P. Lovecraft are great writers, then Dick is too. But in my view, this event is most important as further evidence of how poor the mainstream American novel was during the previous century. Solid but unspectactular and fairly uninsightful genre authors (though this last limitation does not apply to Dick) are touted as among the best the nation had to offer, and this is true because the mainstream novelists were so often confused, self-important, and wrongheaded.
A good many of Philip K. Dick's books and stories are well worth reading, but he really worked largely on frankly pulp material. His great contribution was to convey interesting, provocative, and important ideas in a pulp context, but that is like making a really fast production automobile. It's fast, but it can't run with the custom jobbies.
Dick stands out as an author because the "custom cars" of his time were so shabby.
PKD's prose was usually serviceable at best, although better than, say, Theodore Drieser's glop. But whereas Dreiser's characterizations could be immensely powerful and the conflicts highly real and dramatic, Dick's characters are usually unable to sustain much interest, and the stories depend almost entirely on their ideas and interesting plot angles. Some of those concepts and ideas are so good that his writings have gained a strong foothold in the culture through film adaptations. For that reason, he's certainly one of the more important American writers of the second half of the twentieth century.
Philip K. Dick was indeed a great pulp writer, if there can be such a thing, and a very good writer within his limits. I'll call hiim a very good writer overall when at his best. And his elevation to Library of America status points out once again that genre literature, despite its limitations, was where it was at in American literature during the past century.
Ellery Queen is the American mystery.
Who?, you ask.
Ellery Queen.
Still doesn't ring a bell?
The first line of this article is from the great mystery and sci-fi author and critic Anthony Boucher, and it is absolutely true. Yet Ellery Queen, whose heyday was the 1930s and '40 but wrote until the early 1970s, is all but forgotten today.
He was one of the greatest American mystery writers, creating maddengly complex puzzles that were fully explained in the end. His books were read by millions, and his character was adapted for the movies (poorly), TV (brilliantly in the case of the 1970s TV show Ellery Queen, produced by Columbo creators Richard Levinson and William Link), and radio (also brilliantly).
But as I noted in my National Review article on the 70th anniversary of the publication of Queen's first novel, The Roman Hat Mystery, that anniversary passed by with little fanfare and no prominent reprints of Queen's novels, as did the 75th anniversary last year.
Queen is well worth bringing back, however, and an interesting article from Queen's diamond anniversary year on one of the best Ellery Queen websites suggests how this might be done, pointing out the impressive popularity Ellery Queen's works still enjoy in Japan, China, Taiwan, Germany, and elsewhere.
I know this popularity well, as people from both China and Japan asked me for permission to translate my NR article on Queen when it appeared (which of course I granted).
The authors of the article, Kurt Sercu and Dale C. Andrews, suggest some very good ideas: one, that an enterprising publisher reprint the best five or six Queens in high-quality paperback editions with the original maps, introductions, casts of characters, and the like, and two, that a publisher work with the Queen rights holders to license a series of new novels featuring the main characters from the classic series.
These are both excellent ideas, and I encourage you to read the article and contact your favorite publishers with the request that they follow up on these suggestions. And if you have not yet read any Ellery Queen books, please head to your local used book store or online sources and pick up Calamity Town, The Adventures of Ellery Queen, The New Adventures of Ellery Queen, The Egyptian Cross Mystery, The Greek Coffin Mystery, The Chinese Orange Mystery, Halfway House, The Finishing Stroke, Cat of Many Tails, Ten Days' Wonder, The Player on the Other Side, and any others that strike your fancy. These are fine novels that should reach a much larger audience.
For a further introduction to Ellery Queen, see my National Review article here.
The one thing most certain to destroy a work of genre fiction is for the author to try to "transcend the genre."
You've heard of this many times, I'm sure, from the opposing point of view, as critics praise some author for transcending the genre in which they're working and thereby producing "a real novel."
That is hogwash.
The result of such endeavors is typically a poor example of both genre fiction and mainstream fiction. I won't name names here, but much of what has received the most critical praise in the mystery field qualifies strongly for this dubious distinction.
Read a few of the most recent Edgar Award winners if you want to be fully versed in the infamous results of authors thinking themselves superior to their audiences.
On this point Helen Szamuely has written a good book review for the website of the Social Affairs Unit in Great Britain. Noting the drab results produced by many writers trying to write "real novels" in the mystery genre, Szamuely writes:
I blame the critics, starting with Julian Symons and his seminal Bloody Murder. As the author of a number of extremely interesting detective novels himself Symons ought to have known better. But he and his many successors have been advocating the theory that the best detective story writers ought to go beyond the genre and write "real" novels. Symons, for example, who always prefers thrillers to detective stories, despite his own achievements, repeatedly shakes his head over someone like Ngaio Marsh failing to transcend the genre.
Transcending the genre is all very well but a good detective story is considerably more difficult to write than a sloppily constructed and written "real" novel. In fact, all that happens is that we get a romance with a little detection thrown in instead of a detective story, not a work of literature.
Szamuely is absolutely right to point to Symons and his Bloody Murder as a great offender in this matter. Symons and the American critic Otto Penzler have probably most powerfully and influentially represented the idea that the best kind of mystery novel is not a mystery at all and really not much of a novel, either .
Their intentions were and are good, I am sure, but their ideas are simply wrong.
Symons, Penzler, and their vast host of slavish followers praise what they call crime stories, which are narratives in which a crime is (perhaps) committed and the minds of the various characters are analyzed from a psychological point of view.
Hence, they are often not really narratives at all and hence not really novels at all.
The opposing point of view is that a novel is first and foremost a story, and that a mystery novel is first and foremost a story with a criminal mystery at the center.
This point should seem obvious to those uninitiated in the occult practices of modern literary criticism. It is obvious because it is true. As George Orwell noted, there are some things that are so silly that only an intellectual could believe them.
The notion that a novel without a real story at the center is the best kind of novel is precisely the kind of idiotic notion only an intellectual could believe.
For more on what a real mystery novel is like, read this.
CBS Home Video has announced that volume two of season one of Perry Mason, the popular 1950s-'60s TV series based on the character created by Erle Stanley Gardner will go on sale on November 21.
The five-disc set will include the last twenty episodes of the first season. Volume 1 included the first 19 episodes.
That is all the information about the new DVD set available at this time. For information on the Perry Mason Season 1, Volume 1 DVD, click here.
For more on Perry Mason and author Gardner, see my Weekly Standard article on "The Case of the Bestselling Author" here. For more information on the Season 1 Volume 1 DVD and an important addition to my Weekly Standard article, see this Karnick on Culture post.
Here's the cover art for the DVD edition:
John Wilson of Books and Culture has an excellent article on the socialist American author Upton Sinclair in today's edition of National Review Online.
Sinclair is best-known, of course, for his 1906 novel The Jungle which brought public attention to the unpleasant working conditions in the nation's meat-packing industry.
Wilson's article includes some things I hadn't known or had forgotten, such as Sinclair's authorship of three series of novels centered on adventure. Wilson provides a balanced view of the author and even includes a suitable moral to Sinclair's story:
Unwieldy and imperfect as our democracy may be, Sinclair’s life testifies to the genius and robustness of the American polis. And impervious to irony as he often seemed, I suspect that Sinclair himself came to recognize his good fortune: to live and work for 90 years in a country that honored its principled critics instead of shooting them.