Clare T. Walker

Michael Palmer and the Medical Thriller

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Michael Palmer poses at his home in Swampscott, Mass., in this 2002 photo.

The world of popular fiction lost one of its best craftsman eight years ago: on Wednesday, October 30th, 2013, Michael Palmer passed away. He was one of the innovators of the thriller genre: he wrote medical thrillers — intense, fast-paced mysteries featuring a medical doctor as the Everyman hero who gets caught up in a perilous adventure.

I read many of his novels as I was preparing and writing my own variation on the genre — a veterinary medical thriller, in which the medical Everyman is a small-town animal doctor who finds herself mixed up in a corporate whistle-blowing scheme against a big, bad pharmaceutical company.

Palmer was known for being an extraordinarily generous writer, so naturally helpful and encouraging that he included his own agent’s contact info on his website and invited aspiring authors to send in their work to the agency. His website also features excellent “how-to” tips for beginning and experienced writers alike, not just in the medical thriller genre but in all types of storytelling. Unfortunately, his website has been taken off-line since his death. I, for one, would welcome the posthumous re-publication of his website articles.

He also conquered drug and alcohol dependency and became an advocate for his colleagues in medicine who faced similar struggles. Read this brief but touching tribute from a fellow medical professional, the former CEO of a large urban hospital.

Books of his that I read and enjoyed include:

Fatal

The Patient

Critical Judgment

Extreme Measures

…with thanks to Chicago-area author Joelle Charbonneau for introducing me to Palmer’s novels.

Links:

a tribute to Michael Palmer on The Big Thrill.

The Big Thrill (the website of the International Thriller Writers association.

 

The Keys of Death playlist!

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When I was writing The Keys of Death, here’s something that really helped me: a playlist.

Why? Because music is emotionally evocative, and when combined with lyrics that told the story of a character’s heart or fit the mood I was trying to convey, the writing went more smoothly and I was able to maintain the emotional through-line of the book. My Keys of Death playlist included:

  • the classic Andy Williams rendition of “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” (to get me into the yuletide spirit, since the events of the book occur at Christmastime, and it was summer when I did much of the initial draft)
  • instrumental Irish music (reels and jigs) by Altan, plus “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and “October” by U2 (to make me feel like a rebellious northern Irish youth caught between happy-go-lucky “Irishness” and the anger of The Troubles)
  • the hymns “You Raise Me Up” and “Be Still My Soul” (to express the spiritual yearning and anguish of the main characters)

Four songs in particular, though, I returned to over and over again, because each one matched up perfectly with one of the characters.

BTW, when I published the book in 2016, I put all the members of my mailing list into a virtual hat, stirred them around (virtually), and drew two lucky winners to receive those four songs from the Keys of Death playlist.

When I went to the music site to collect the four songs for the lucky winner, I found this:

 

Never! Never! NEVER!!!!!! I hate this with the burning intensity of a million white-hot suns. Okay, that's an exaggeration. But only for effect. Notice how I said, "Only for effect," and not "Only for affect." Look it up.

Never! Never! NEVER!!!!!! I hate this with the burning intensity of a million white-hot suns. Okay, that was an exaggeration, but only for effect. Note that I said “effect” and not “affect.” Look it up.

 

Excuse me a moment while I rant about one of my pet peeves: I gave the songs to the lucky winner. I did not “gift” the songs, because gift is a noun, not a verb. This verbing of nouns, and vice versa, drives me batty. For example: I did not “author” The Keys of Death. I wrote it, and I am its author. If you say a person is “gifted,” are you trying to say that the person possesses rare personal qualities or talents, or that he has just been consigned to a life of indentured servitude?

Another example: you may invite me to things, or you may send me an invitation, but please, please, puh-lease don’t send me an “invite.” Or worse, “gift” me an “invite.” Why do people do this? Why do people say, “This assertion I’m trying to make is evidenced by the following facts.” Evidenced? Since when is evidence a verb? Do you mean that your assertion is “proven by the following facts?” How about this one: “Clare Walker guested The Late Late Late Show.” You mean “Clare Walker served as guest host for The Late Late Late Show?” Or “Clare Walker substituted for the regular host of The Late Late Late Show?” Argh!

If you are okay with this crazed  use abuse of the English language, please visit Grammar Girl and get your head right. Sheesh.

Where was I?

Oh, yes. My four favorite songs on the playlist are:

"I'm Alive" Peter Furler album: On Fire

“I’m Alive”
Peter Furler
album: On Fire

"Caught Up" Usher album: Confessions

“Caught Up”
Usher
album: Confessions

"Good To Be Alive" Jason Gray album: A Way to See in the Dark

“Good To Be Alive”
Jason Gray
album: A Way to See in the Dark

"What Faith Can Do" Kutless album: It Is Well

“What Faith Can Do”
Kutless
album: It Is Well

Can guess which song applies to which character in The Keys of Death?

Children of Bridget Jones

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photo by Clare T. Walker

 

I went to my mom’s house unannounced, as I am wont to do, and found that she was out, as she is wont to be.

No matter. Being English, like my mom, I put the kettle on for a cup of tea and went in search of a book to read while I waited for her to come home.

I picked up Helen Fielding’s 1996 novel, Bridget Jones’s Diary. Not the sort of thing I’d normally be interested in, but at the time I figured it was better than nothing.

I enjoyed Bridget’s New Year’s Resolutions and Chapter One enough to bring the book home and add it to my stack o’ books, teetering alongside the other books I was reading at the time, including P.D. James’s Children of Men (1992).

As I read on, it occurred to me that these two books, even though they differ widely in genre, style, and intended audience, actually have quite a lot in common.

Each book chronicles about one year of elapsed time: Bridget’s fictional diary begins on January 1 and ends the day after Christmas, and P.D. James also begins her book with a January 1st journal entry by the main character, Theo Faron. Both contain first person point-of-view elements (Bridget Jones more than Children of Men) Both are intensely personal, providing the reader with access to the innermost and secret thoughts of the main character.

Some major differences, of course: Fielding’s main character, Bridget, is feckless, stupid and hilariously funny. James’s main character, Theo, is thoughtful, intelligent and serious.

Bridget Jones’s Diary is a romantic comedy that ends with Bridget in a relationship with a good man instead of the insufferable twit she’d been after for the past 11 months.

Children of Men is a dystopian novel about the end of humanity…and its new beginning…amid murder, mayhem, mass euthanasia, betrayal, and hopelessness.

As I read Bridget Jones’s Diary, I laughed out loud at Bridget’s antics and at Fielding’s inimitable turn of phrase. Bridget is a comic masterpiece who describes her misadventures with hilarious honesty. She drinks too much, smokes too much, and eats too much, and constantly obsesses about how much she drinks, smokes, and eats, continually makes resolutions to improve herself, but never, ever does. She berates herself for sleeping with her boss, vows not to do it again, but does it again many times over. She vows to stop being late for work, but that very morning doesn’t get out of the house until 10:30. She is so lacking in self-knowledge that she turns a sensible meal of shepherd’s pie for a few friends into a gourmet meal for 16 that was to have concluded with Grand Marnier soufflés, but ten minutes before her guests were due to arrive she had stepped in the dinner and she still hadn’t dried her hair.

Details may vary, but is this not a description of just about everyone’s life? Including mine? The struggle with vice, bad habits, laziness, inconstancy, habitual sin. The waffling back and forth from an exalted view of ourselves that bites off more than anyone could possibly chew to wallowing in self-pity as we watch stupid YouTube videos or doom-scroll on our smartphones.

Bridget has little to live for except for those few dropped pounds on the scale, that evening at the pub with her friends, the momentary excitement and comfort of sex with someone new.

Bridget is fictional, but, I wonder: how could the Gospel of Jesus Christ reach someone like her in the real world? She knows that her life is meaningless and pathetic and she longs for something noble and sublime. Yet, I have a feeling that if she ever met a real Christian who tried to share the Gospel with her, she would smile politely while inwardly cringing, and try to extricate herself from the encounter as quickly as possible.

In Children of Men, the entire human race has become sterile. No babies have been born for 25 years. The people of this world know that they are the last of their kind and they believe that without the future promised by the presence of children in the world, life is meaningless. P.D. James constructs a terrifying dystopia around this idea and answers the question of how a society without God would contemplate its own demise. Life in such a society is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (Leviathan i. xiii. 9 by Thomas Hobbes). The aged demonstrate their hopelessness by mass suicide. The young demonstrate theirs by acting out in anger and in reckless, indiscriminate violence.

If the fertility crisis James creates in her fictional future were ever to come true in the real world, I have no doubt that secular human society would deteriorate in much the way it does in her book, because in some ways her dystopia is already here. Euthanasia of the aged is practiced regularly in the Netherlands and they are contemplating it in rapidly aging Japan. In some countries the number of abortions exceeds the number of live births. The terminally-ill and severely brain-damaged are put to death every day in this country, although mostly without the furor surrounding the 2005 death-by-starvation of Terry Schiavo. In many parts of the world, violent lawlessness is commonplace and on the rise.

I think—I hope–people of faith would handle news of the end of the world differently, just as I hope people of faith are able to find meaning in everyday life the way Bridget Jones is not.

My pastor is fond of saying, “Live every day as if it were your last, because one of these days you’re going to be right.” One of the reasons I’m profoundly un-interested in “end-times” predictions, doomsdays, reported appearances of the anti-Christ, and so on, is because the timing of the world’s ending doesn’t really matter: each one of us is already hurtling toward our own personal apocalypse (from the Greek word meaning “to reveal,” “to unveil”). True, we must always be ready, for we “know not the day nor the hour,” and we must learn to read “the signs of the times.” But fretting about the end of the world does little more than distract us from the real work of living well now.

We can take nothing with us, yet…

Gladiator (2000, DreamWorks and Universal Pictures, dir. by Ridley Scott)

 

 

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book review: Watership Down by Richard Adams – my favorite book

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Watership Down (1972 by Richard Adams) was my favorite FAVorite FAVORITE childhood book!! I read it when I was in 5th grade. The cover and title confused me: I thought it was going to be a Navy-type book, about a ship sinking or something, and didn’t get why there was a rabbit on the cover. (I didn’t know that a “down” is a hill.)

Nevertheless, I gave it a try and was blown away. That paperback copy literally fell apart from use. I have since owned a few different editions, my current one being a very nice hardcover.

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The book is a straight up children’s adventure story — with talking rabbits, yes, but they are real rabbits, not cartoon rabbits. They do rabbity things and think rabbity thoughts. As a child I appreciated it on this level. As an adult, I realized with delight that Adams had also woven fascinating political and social commentary into the story. Not only that, but as a feat of fantasy world-building and culture-creation, this book excels. Absolutely a wonderful book!

All the world will be your enemy, Prince of a Thousand enemies. And when they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you; digger, listener, runner, Prince with the swift warning. Be cunning, and full of tricks, and your people will never be destroyed.

The setting of Watership Down is a real place:

  • Sandleford, near Newbury, is in the county of Berkshire
  • Watership Down is in Hampshire (just south of Berkshire)
  • Laverstoke and Whitchurch are also in Hampshire. The River Test runs through these towns.
  • The four-county area of Berkshire, Hampshire, Oxfordshire, and Wiltshire is home to the North Wessex Downs Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB). It includes numerous downs, including our Watership, and many of the famous chalk horses carved into the hills of the English countryside.

This map of the England pinpoints the location of West Berkshire. Just south of it is Hampshire, which is home to the coastal cities of Portsmouth and Southampton. It makes sense that a lost seagull might find his way into the story!

Screen Shot 2016-02-23 at 12.10.40 PM

Here’s a short video showing scenes from the real-life locations that inspired the book, including the beech hanger, Nuthanger Farm, and that famous hill, Watership Down.

Ironically, as of the date of this news clip (Mar. 2012), a site near Sandleford, the opening location of the book, was slated for development.

Richard Adams and illustrator Aldo Galli were featured at the Whitchurch Arts Show in November, 2012. Adams died in 2016, on Christmas Eve, at the age of 96.

bottom_of_watership_down-1

Watership Down, in the distance

To buy the book, click the bunny!

“Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows” — a review of The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis

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The Great Divorce sketchnote

Sketch note by Clare T. Walker. Copyright 2014

The phrase “bus ride from hell” no doubt conjures up bad memories of trips to and from school on the big yellow bus, or perhaps visions of a cross-country journey you would rather forget. But in his 1946 book The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis really means a bus ride from Hell. The book begins with the narrator boarding a bus in the mean streets of the netherworld and taking a trip that will determine his eternal destiny.

After the narrator boards the bus, it takes off into the sky. Before it reaches its destination, the narrator has endured the sob stories of two fellow passengers and witnessed an all-out brawl on board.

Their destination is a grassy plain on the summit of a high cliff. When the passengers disembark, they discover that they are all nearly transparent, like ghosts. Soon, however, a large crowd of “real” people—solid people—comes to meet them. The narrator witnesses a few encounters between ghosts and solid people before meeting his “own” solid person, a man named George Macdonald, named by Lewis after the 19th-century Scottish author of the same name. Macdonald serves as the narrator’s guide to the afterlife, similar to the way Virgil guided Dante in The Divine Comedy.

One of the things I love about C.S. Lewis is his uncanny understanding of human nature, especially the ways we deceive ourselves and rationalize our bad behavior, everything from run-of-the-mill pettiness, to desire to control others, to attachment to comforts and addictions, even to the murderous impulses that lead to the worst atrocities in human history. They’re all there, on that plateau, being given the opportunity to choose their fate once and for all. The solid people are glorified human beings sent from Heaven to counsel the ghosts and help them shed the things that are keeping them from God. Some of the ghosts, under the gentle encouragement of their solid guides, do indeed make the choice to surrender to God, at which point they transform into glorified beings themselves. Some of the ghosts refuse God’s love, continue in their stubborn self-will and eventually return to Hell by their own choice. As Lewis says, “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘thy will be done.” All that are in Hell, choose it.”

Lewis’s masterpiece “theological fantasy” is a quick read (my paperback edition is only 128 pages long) but sobering: it’s hard not to see oneself in the self-absorbed Poet, or the Bishop who knew it all but rejected God, or the Woman With a Martyr Complex who wanted her deceased husband to leave Heaven so she could continue to “fix” him in Hell, or the Devoted Mother whose love for her son became a dismal obsession.

Like all Lewis’s books, this one could change your life. Highly recommended.

* * *

For more information on C.S. Lewis:

Lewis’s most well-known works include The Chronicles of Narnia, a trilogy of science fiction novels (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength), and several works of popular Christian apologetics (Mere Christianity, The Abolition of Man, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce).

C.S. Lewis

C.S. Lewis (1898-1963)

For more information on George Macdonald: the George Macdonald Wikipedia entry, The Golden Key website, and a biography of him on The Literature Network. Macdonald’s most well-known works include Phantastes (1858), The Princess and the Goblin (1872), and Lilith (1895). This edition of Lilith includes an introduction by C.S. Lewis.

George Macdonald

George Macdonald (1824-1905)

 

“There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God say, in the end, ‘thy will be done.’ All that are in Hell, choose it.” (C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce)

 

 

From Radical Hatred to Radical Love

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A review of the autobiography of Joseph Pearce

On December 12, 1985, a twenty-four year-old radical white supremacist named Joe Pearce stood in the dock at London’s Old Bailey and was convicted of violating the British Race Relations Act. He was sentenced to twelve months in prison. Four years later, on March 19, 1989, this same Joseph Pearce was received into the Catholic Church. As a professional race-baiter, Joe Pearce was known for his provocative articles and hateful speeches. Now, as a Catholic public figure, Joseph Pearce is known for his “literary biographies,” and has written about Chesterton, Tolkien, Belloc, Shakespeare, and, Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Race With the Devil (2013, St. Benedict Press) is Joseph Pearce’s own account of how this incredible transformation took place.

Pearce likens his early childhood in rural England to Tolkien’s Shire: innocent, idyllic, peaceful. But due to the negative influence of the adults in his life, by the time he was fifteen years old racial politics had completely dominated his life. He lied about his age to join the National Front (the leading white supremacist organization in Britain) and by seventeen he was working for them full-time. He stirred up hatred between white and black youths, incited riots, and distributed racist literature at football stadiums. He scaled up his pro-British fanaticism by participating in demonstrations in Northern Ireland and joining the anti-Catholic Orange Order.

What eventually landed him in jail was his editorship of The Bulldog, the official newspaper of the National Front. In 1981 and again in 1985, Pearce was charged with “publishing material likely to incite racial hatred,” which in Britain is characterized as a “hate crime.” His first stint in prison merely annealed his white, Anglocentric bigotry. But his second incarceration was different, because by that time he had discovered authors who challenged his racist worldview, including Solzhenitsyn, Belloc, and, most importantly, G. K. Chesterton, in whose writing he found “the light of sanctity shining forth in the darkness.”

This is an amazing conversion story. Joseph Pearce was truly a hard case, someone whose entry into the Catholic Church you would never dare predict. But Pearce takes the trouble to weave into his story the small things that, with hindsight, make his conversion appear inevitable: his voracious appetite for books that led him to Chesterton and other Christian authors, his experiences of beauty in rural England and elsewhere that “baptized his imagination,” and small acts of kindness from strangers that struck him as remarkable even in the midst of his angry young man period. His inside look at radical movements is fascinating, as is the discussion of the books that formed him, for good and for ill.

A highly recommended and encouraging story of the power of God’s grace to change lives.

To purchase this inspiring story of transformation, click here.

This review is adapted from a similar piece that originally appeared in The National Catholic Register on 11/23/13: https://www.ncregister.com/news/radical-conversion-from-racial-hatred-to-rational-love

review of Productivity for Creative People by Mark McGuinness

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Productivity for Creative People: How to Get Creative Work Done in an “Always On” World by Mark McGuinness
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I am an independent author of fiction and non-fiction, and I found this book extremely helpful in learning how to find balance. The author, Mark McGuinness, is a successful creative professional (he’s a published poet) who also coaches artists to help them reach their creative dreams and achieve their business goals

Chapter 3 (“Reduce Overload”) was the most practical and actionable section for me. In this chapter, Mark encourages you to organize all your various tasks into four types:

  1. On-going work (repeating stuff and stuff you do every day. Admin-type stuff usually ends up in this category),
  2. Special events (one-time things that need a lot of preparation ahead of time),
  3. Backlogs (stuff you’re behind on), and
  4. Asset creation (the creative work — stuff that stays done).

I would venture to guess that many creatives are overloaded with 1 and 2 stuff, frustrated that the amount of 3 stuff keeps increasing, and even more frustrated that hardly any 4 stuff is getting done. That’s definitely where I was when I read the book, and Mark’s advice on this helped me a lot!

Bonus: the rest of the book is excellent, too! Thanks, Mark! Well done!

Prepare Yourself for a Shock

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A review of Peter Kreeft’s Jesus-Shock

Peter Kreeft is a professor of philosophy at Boston College who has written, at last count, 80 books. But don’t let that scare you. Dr. Kreeft’s books are all readable, entertaining, and life-changing. I’ve been reading his work since I was a young college student, and he helped me learn the basics of the Catholic Faith, how to explain the faith to others, and how to live a moral life. His books are refreshing and imaginative: one of them, Socrates Meets Jesus, was written as a dialogue between a bunch of Harvard philosophers and the ancient Greek philosopher come-back-to-life, and was recently adapted into a stage play. You just never know what Professor Kreeft is going to come up with next.

One of his best books is Jesus-Shock, published in 2008.

He starts with this provocative question:

“Why is Jesus the most controversial and the most embarrassing name in the world? No one is embarrassed if you talk about Buddha, or Muhammad, or Moses…[but] why are almost all educated, non-fundamentalist Christians embarrassed to talk about Jesus to non-Christians, and why are almost all non-Christians embarrassed to hear such talk? If you’re not sure my assumption is true, test it, in any secular company or mixed company, especially educated company. The name will fall with a thud, and produce sudden silence and embarrassment. You not only hear the embarrassment, you can feel it. The temperature drops. Or rises. It never stays the same.”

Professor Kreeft then provides a series of illuminating self-tests (I was shocked to discover how worldly I really am…), identifies the two biggest problems in the world today (they both begin with the letter “B”), and leads a fascinating walk through the New Testament to demonstrate that Jesus has been causing shock, indignation and embarrassment since 30 A.D.

In the fourth part of the book, Kreeft answers his first provocative question: why Jesus embarrasses people. (Hint: The answer to that question is in the tabernacle or adoration chapel of any Catholic Church.) Finally, he offers practical advice in a section titled “What Do We Do Now?”

This book changed my interior life. I thought I was a prayerful person who loved God and who knew the Catholic faith pretty well, but after only a few pages I realized I had become complacent, comfortable, and bored. With Professor Kreeft, there’s definitely truth in advertising: the first real shock of my life was when I had a powerful encounter with Jesus at the age of seventeen. Jesus-Shock gave me the second one: a fresh encounter with Our Lord and who He really is. The book is available for FREE at www.DynamicCatholic.com (You pay a few dollars for shipping.)

Professor Kreeft has an excellent website (www.peterkreeft.com), where you can read excerpts from his writings and listen to audio of his talks, and order his books.

book review: Jesus, the Master Psychologist by Ray Guarendi

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My latest review for the National Catholic Register is up!

Dr. Ray Guarendi is a Catholic father of 10 children, a practicing clinical psychologist, and a popular author and media host. He’s known to EWTN audiences for his down-to-earth, “actionable” advice, especially for parents. However, his latest book is a pivot into general psychology, emotional well-being and relationships, drawing upon wisdom from the mouth of our Lord Jesus himself.

Lots of good stuff in here, especially some admonitions against falling for every pop psychology trend:

…in some Gospel teachings, “Jesus is two millennia ahead of what psychology is only now coming to understand.” For example, Our Lord’s exhortation to simply do one’s duty and then regard oneself as no more than an “unworthy servant” (Luke 7:10) controverts the pop-psychology doctrine of “self-esteem.” Modern psychologists are starting to realize that too much emphasis on self-esteem (and, if I may extrapolate a little, its corollary, “self-care,” as secular culture understands it) has created a tendency toward unhealthy self-absorption.

Dr. Ray is a great resource for parents of all faiths!

To read the entire review, click here.

To buy the book, click here.

“In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit”

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A review of Dome Karukoski’s 2019 biopic, Tolkien

“In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit.” So begins J.R.R. Tolkien’s masterpiece of heroic fantasy, The Hobbit, first published in 1937 and continuing with the epic story of the Ring of Power in The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Was Professor Tolkien referring in some way to himself? Perhaps. As a soldier serving in the British army during World War I, he spent a lot of time underground in the trenches, and it is well-known that his experiences in the Battle of the Somme inspired some of the bleakly iconic settings of Middle-Earth: the Dead Marshes and Mordor, especially. And his early childhood in the English countryside no doubt inspired The Shire, the idyllic homeland of the hobbits.

These inspirations of Tolkien’s imagination are amply and beautifully depicted in the 2019 biopic Tolkien, directed by Dome Karukoski and starring Nicholas Hoult and Lily Collins.

The film begins with the Tolkien family in England, shortly before young Ronald (as J.R.R. is called) and his brother lose their mother to diabetes. Under the watchful guardianship of a priest who had been a close family friend, the Tolkien boys grow up in the home of a kindly woman who takes in orphans. There, Ronald meets Edith Bratt, with whom he becomes romantically attached, and in school he meets fellow students with whom he becomes close friends. His romance with Edith, his career as a student at Oxford University, and his “fellowship” with his pals from school all come to a screeching halt with the onset of the Great War, and young Tolkien’s creative, romantic soul is stretched to the breaking point.

In my opinion, the filmmakers made a major creative misstep: it seemed like they couldn’t decide what story they were trying to tell. Is Tolkien a coming-of-age war story? Is it a buddy movie? Is it a romance? The answer is that it tries to be all three and triply misses the mark. Tolkien’s military career was not very exciting: he became so ill with “trench fever” that he had to be sent home and the connections between Tolkien’s boyhood friendships and the fellowship depicted in his Legendarium seemed a bit forced. By contrast, his early life as an orphan and his on-again off-again relationship with Edith are the stuff that Dickensian melodramas and heart-string tugging romances are made of. This is what I think the filmmakers should have concentrated on.

I was also disappointed but not surprised by the dismissive and subtly negative treatment of Tolkien’s devout Catholic faith.

Still, as a huge devotee of all things Tolkien, I really enjoyed the movie. It was fun to catch glimpses of Middle-earth in sketches tacked to his bedroom wall and see his imagination come to life through clever animation, especially in the battlefield scenes.

The film’s niche appeal and sub-optimal creative choices led to its disappointing and brief theatrical run this past summer, but it has recently been released on DVD and would make a great addition to any fan’s video library.

Additional resources:

Tolkien DVD

Clare and her daughter Hannah discuss the movie on their podcast, Splanchnics: (Season 1, Episode 1)

The Hobbit Special commemorative edition, featuring a reproduction of the First Edition cover, which was painted by Tolkien himself.

The Lord of the Rings 3-volume boxed set with iconic illustrations by Alan Lee.

A Hobbit, A Wardrobe, and A Great War by Joseph Laconte. A fascinating literary biography about how World War I shaped the lives, fortunes, and futures of two of the greatest British authors, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.

The Fellowship: the Literary Lives of the Inklings by Carol Zaleski and Philip Zaleski. This one is not just about Tolkien and Lewis–tons of interesting stuff about the other members of “the Inklings,” the informal Oxford University literary club of which of Tolkien and Lewis were the principal members.

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