Books about Inklings from Amazon.com

Writing before, during and just after World War I, G. K. Chesterton describes what has gone wrong with Germany and warns that, if Germany is not forced to reform, that war will be followed by another and more horrible war. In these 111 articles, Chesterton criticizes militarism and debates the paths to peace being advocated by pacifists and internationalists. He also harshly criticizes a then-fashionable form of racism that would later be adopted by Nazism, making him one of Hitler's first foes. These articles are extensively commented and footnoted to explain the context in which Chesterton wrote. In the back are appendices with articles on war and peace by Thomas Acquinas, Winston Churchill, Norman Angell, Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, Mahatma Gandhi, and H. G. Wells.
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In the second decade of the twentieth century, an idea became all too fashionable among those who feel it is their right to set social trends. Wealthy families took it on as a pet cause, generously bankrolling its research The New York Times praised it as a wonderful "new science." Scientists, such as the brilliant plant biologist, Luther Burbank, praised it unashamedly. Educators as prominent as Charles Elliot, President of Harvard University, promoted it as a solution to social ills. America's public schools did their part. In the 1920s, almost three-fourths of high school social science textbooks taught its principles. Not to be outdone, judges and physicians called for those principles to be enshrined into law. Congress agree, passing the 1924 immigration law to exclude from American shores the people of Eastern and Southern Europe that the idea branded as inferior. In 1927, the U. S. Supreme Court joined the chorus, ruling by a lopsided vote of 8 to 1 that the sterilization of unwilling men and women was constitutional.

That idea was eugenics and in the English-speaking world it had virtually no critics among the "chattering classes." When he wrote this book, Chesterton stood virtually alone against the intellectual world of his day. Yet to his eternal credit, he showed no sign of being intimidated by the prestige of his foes. On the contrary, he thunders against eugenics, ranking it one of the great evils of modern society. And, in perhaps one of the most chillingly accurate prophecies of the century, he warns that the ideas that eugenics had unleashed were likely to bear bitter fruit in another nation. That nation was Germany, the "very land of scientific culture from which the ideal of a Superman had come." In fact, the very group that Nazism tried to exterminate, Eastern European Jews, and the group it targeted for later extermination, the Slavs, were two of those whose biological unfitness eugenists sought so eagerly to confirm.

What are sometimes called the "excesses" of Nazism drove the open advocacy of eugenics underground. But there's little evidence that the elements of society who once trumpeted the idea have changed their mind. Dr. Alan Guttmacher provides a good example. The fact that he had been Vice-President of the American Eugenics Association was no hindrance to his assuming the Presidency of Planned Parenthood­World Population in 1962. And his seedy past did not keep Congress from providing millions of dollars in federal funds to Planned Parenthood. Nor did it stop the Supreme Court from carrying out the central item in Dr. Guttmacher's political agenda‹legalized abortion. Many of those who now admit that eugenics was evil have trouble explaining why so few of its advocates were every exposed and why so many are still honored.

As the title suggests, eugenics is not the only evil that Chesterton blasts. Socialism gets some brilliantly worded broadsides and Chesterton, in complete fairness, does not spare capitalism. He also attacks the scientifically justified regimentation that others call the "health police." The same rationalizations that justified eugenics, he notes, can also be used to deprive a working man of his beer or any man of his pipe. Although it was first published in 1922, there's a startling relevance to what Chesterton had to say about mettlesome bureaucrats who deprive life of its little pleasures and freedoms. His tale about an unfortunate man fired because "his old cherry-briar" "might set the water-works on fire" is priceless.

That tale illustrates Chesterton's brilliant use of humor, a knack his foes were quick to realize. In their review of his book, Birth Control News griped, "His tendency is reactionary, and as he succeeds in making most people laugh, his influence in the wrong direction is considerable. Eugenics Review was even blunter. "The only interest in this book," they said, "is pathological. It is a revelation of the ineptitude to which ignorance and blind prejudice may reduce an intelligent man."

History has been far kinder to Chesterton than to his critics. It's now generally agree that eugenics was born of evolution and the "ignorance and blind prejudice" of social elites. But never forget that Chesterton was the first to say so, condemning what many of his peers praised.

The completely new edition of Chesterton's classic includes almost fifty pages from the writings of Chesterton's opponents. They illustrate just how accurate his attacks on eugenists were. For researchers, it also includes a detailed, 13-page index..
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C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien were members of a writing group known as the Inklings, a group that also included novelist Charles Williams, historian Warren Lewis, and philosopher Owen Barfield. In this groundbreaking book, Diana Glyer invites readers into the heart of their meetings, showing how encouragement, criticism, and collaboration changed The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, and dozens of other important works. While this book is a must for those who read Lewis or Tolkien, it will also appeal to those who are interested in the writing process, small-group interaction, the nature of creativity, and the various ways that artists challenge, correct, and encourage one another as they work together in community..
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Both Tolkien and C.S. Lewis are literary superstars, known around the world as the creators of Middle-earth and Narnia. But few of their readers and fans know about the important and complex friendship between Tolkien and his fellow Oxford academic C.S. Lewis. Without the persistent encouragement of his friend, Tolkien would never have completed The Lord of the Rings. This great tale, along with the connected matter of The Silmarillion, would have remained merely a private hobby. Likewise, all of Lewis' fiction, after the two met at Oxford University in 1926, bears the mark of Tolkien's influence, whether in names he used or in the creation of convincing fantasy worlds.

They quickly discovered their affinity--a love of language and the imagination, a wide reading in northern myth and fairy tale, a desire to write stories themselves in both poetry and prose. The quality of their literary friendship invites comparisons with those of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Cowper and John Newton, and G.K. Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc. Both Tolkien and Lewis were central figures in the informal Oxford literary circle, the Inklings.

This book explores their lives, unfolding the extraordinary story of their complex friendship that lasted, with its ups and downs, until Lewis's death in 1963. Despite their differences--differences of temperament, spiritual emphasis, and view of their storytelling art--what united them was much stronger, a shared vision that continues to inspire their millions of readers throughout the world..
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Deep within every person is an unspoken creed--ultimately revealing a God who, try as we might, is impossible to avoid. Open your eyes to that which is written on your heart..
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Philosophers list "What is man?" and "What is the purpose of life on this earth?" as two of the most important questions that must be asked by everyone in the quest to become a complete human being. Mere Humanity digs into the treasured writings of Chesterton, Lewis, and Tolkien for the answers..
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On April 29, 1945, elements of the U.S. Seventh Army¹s 42nd and 45th divisions reached Dachau, a small town on the outskirts of Munich, Germany There they discovered over 30,000 men and women imprisoned in conditions so inhumane that over 200 of them died each day from starvation and disease. One soldier, coming upon a room filled with corpses ready to be burned, commented that it looked "like a maniac's woodpile."

What they saw so shocked those battle-hardened soldiers that in less that a month they had published an official report describing the concentration camp, detailing how it was run, giving the personal experiences of its inmates, and telling how it was liberated. Almost impossible to find outside a few research libraries, that report is now a book with all the original text and photos, plus a detailed index, valuable additional commentary, and sketches made by a combat artist who visited the camp the day after its liberation. This book provides an invaluable early record of Nazism's unspeakable crimes..
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