Reader’s Diary

Nick Redfern

In 2001 the author and two friends spent six weeks in a camper traveling the English countryside seeking out strange creatures like the “Man Monkey of Ranton”. There was much drinking, which contributes to the comic tone of the book. There are some good stories here, and some laughs, but few people will be convinced by the author’s theory that cryptids - including giant worms under RAF bases - are creatures from another dimension that feed on human fear.

Matthew Polly

Matthew Polly was a grade school bully magnet 98-pound weakling. Full of self doubts, he decided to study kung fu and and kick boxing at the legendary Shaolin Monastery in 1992 and 1993. Whatever the faults he sought to fix by going there, dilettantism wasn’t one of them: the tough training he underwent in China was the real thing. His account of those years is funny, self-deprecating, and vivid; it includes lively and usually affectionate word portraits of the monks and his fellow students it 1990’s China.

It’s too bad the book isn’t more current, but the final section on Polly’s 2003 return to Shaolin and the changes he saw there adds a poignant close

Regarding the phrase “iron crotch” in the subtitle: male readers should be sitting when they read that part of the book.

Bill Kauffman

This is a disjointed but heartfelt appreciation of the local and regional that have been lost and to the defenders of human-scale lives and institutions. Among Kauffman’s “reactionary radicals” are Eugene McCarthy, Dorothy Day, and Wendell Berry.

Kauffman’s description of McCarthy as “…a constitutional liberal shaped by the isolationist Upper Midwest and Catholic Social thought” comes pretty close to describing my position, one that’s at right angles to today’s one dimensional American political spectrum. He continues, “…boy, doesn’t that port look mighty attractive in the current storm.” I have to agree; sadly, Minnesota now gives us clowns like Ventura and Franken.

Edwin O’Connor

A story about an alcoholic priest set among Irish-Americans in an Eastern city could easily be full of stereotypes; the Pulitzer Prize novel (1962) “Edge of Sadness” isn’t. It’s an excellent novel of the pre-Vatican II Church in America with vivid characters.

Tony Hendra

This is a painfully honest, courageously personal memoir about the author’s religious development, a development guided by a remarkable Benedictine monk, the “Father Joe” of the title. It’s something of a “Seven Storey Mountain” for our time. Its minor themes on the Benedictine tradition and the shallowness of modernity are as interesting as Hendra’s story, while Fr. Joe himself - the book’s main but understated subject - is inspiring.

Robert J. Sawyer

What if space aliens arrived, and what if they believed in God? This is the question that Robert J. Sawyer addresses in “Calculating God”. The narrator is a Toronto paleontologist who forms a friendship with one of the aliens which in turn leads to some interesting discussions about a non-Christian version of “intelligent design“. The book has elements of “A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” and “Rendezvous With Rama”, but is marred by a disappointing “2001″-style ending (though Sawyer at least explains his story’s conclusion).