Andy Unedited
Exploring Books, Life, and Writing
They say, America’s polarized in unprecedented ways. Is that true? Consider the election held in 1800 too. Just twelve years after ratifying the Constitution, President John Adams ran for re-election against his own vice president, Thomas Jefferson. The rhetoric was superheated by hyperpartisan media, making it one of the country’s most acrimonious episodes. Jon Meacham’s …
Matt Ruff’s fun supernatural novel, Lovecraft Country, is an homage to H. P. Lovecraft and his spooky, weird pulp fiction of the last century. Yet it is also an incisive critique of Lovecraft’s bigotry. Set in Chicago in 1954, the novel follows a series of exploits of an extended family and their friends as they …
Over my forty years at InterVarsity Press I crossed paths with J. I. Packer a number of times. This soft-spoken and steady British theologian, who died this past week, became something of an accidental celebrity when his substantive book Knowing God suddenly became a best seller. When, as a newly minted InterVarsity campus staff member …
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is famous for its albatross and for “Water, water, every where,/Nor any drop to drink.” In Mariner, Malcolm Guite gives us so much more in this first-rate biography of Coleridge combined with a masterful analysis of the work’s compelling story, vivid images, and powerful poetry. In …
The great pianist Vladimir Horowitz practiced the scales every day, even in his eighties. He wanted to continually master his craft so that he would be “be in possession of the full arsenal of skills when inspiration does come.” The same is true for us. Here are two skills you can master. Don’t worry about …
I am always on the lookout for something good to read. By that I mostly mean books. I love browsing books at a library or at a bookstore or online, but that can be hit and miss. Sometimes the title or cover or back cover pulls me in, and then I am disappointed when I …
Books are better sources of information and insight than tweets or headlines. Two years ago I reviewed here The Myth of Equality, a book that gives more help and understanding than anything you will hear or read in the news today. Ken Wytsma was talking with a young man running his own landscaping firm who …
For those like me who are steeped in Western individualism, the honor-shame dynamics of the Bible are hiding in plain sight. Honor abounds in the Bible as seen in words like glory, name, blessing, praise, clean, renown, glorify, beloved. Shame words are equally plentiful—ashamed, accursed, humiliation, wretched, forgotten, reproach, despised, mocking, crushed, reviled, cursed. The …
We live in a divided society. We are divided about politics, about family values, about religion. The very fabric of our culture seems at risk of being torn apart. But there is one area of disagreement that is more intense, more divisive than any other. That is whether or not we should type one space …
For many of my generation, my world of type was proscribed by Courier, the almost universal typeface of the typewriter era. I did notice, though, in the 1960s when the Minneapolis Star and Tribune started using a san serif face for their headlines. Now that was pretty cool. Not as cool, however, as the psychedelic …