Bernard DeVotoRezensionen

Excellent and insightful. Could have used an editor

I won this book from Goodreads so I'm sorry to say I didn't care for it. The original copyright is 1948. It seems like it would fit right in on Mad Men but it was hard to enjoy in 2010.

Excellent but Devoto does like to ramble on

America's greatest satirist takes on the not so Holy Bible and thumps it. Imagine the hymn to constipation sung on the Ark. Brilliant, laugh out loud sarcasm unleashed. Completely understandable that he left instructions for this not to be published until after his passing. The only ding is on this particular edition - no lettering on the spine and no page numbers But it was the only edition I could find readily available (I had lost a better edition years ago) and is still required reading. Highly recommended.½

Kind of different. Very bitter sarcasm about God and evils in the world. Mishmash of other writings.
I skimmed the last half.

Overly detailed look at the fur trade in the 1830's in the Oregon Territory and what made up the NW US after the Louisiana Purchase. But it did shine a light on the westering of what was to be the United states and where and when it happened. Also, and unapologetic look at the American Indians at the time. Written in the 1940's deVoto had no mind for dramatizing the plight of native people.½

Letters from the Earth collects writings from the papers Twain left after his death. It has the usual merits and flaws of that genre. On the one hand, it gives fascinating glimpses into Twain's thoughts and makes me wish that he had had just a little more time to polish some of these pieces. On the other hand, even the best of the pieces need lots of polishing. They are generally incomplete and obviously early drafts, and one or two pieces, I struggled to get through. That said, the first and last piece are a good read even in their present state and each could have been quite brilliant if fully developed.

The cover of my paperback copy of Letters from the Earth boasts "new uncensored writings by Mark Twain" with a little more significance than such labels usually hold. The contents of this volume were the very first to be edited for posthumous publication by the Twain literary estate, but Twain's daughter Clara Clemens' misgivings denied publication to the book until 1962, after the editor's own death! By then, several of the individual texts included had seen individual publication in periodicals and a book of Twain scholarship.

Although she gave as her motive the concern that the book's contents would misrepresent Twain's actual ideas as she understood them, a reader will readily infer that Clara's fear was chiefly about offending against conventional piety. Nearly half of the book consists of satires grounded in biblical mythology: the title piece (largely in the voice of the angel Satan), the "Papers of the Adam Family" thus organized and titled by editor Bernard DeVoto, and the brief "Letter to the Earth." The first of these, and apparently the most finished in Twain's own manuscript, is clearly modeled on Montesquieu's Persian Letters, in which a traveler from a distant land reports back to his own people on the bewildering and exotic features of the culture shared by the reader and the actual author of the text.

"Letters from the Earth" at one point refers to sex as "the Supreme Art. They practiced it diligently and were filled with contentment. The Deity ordered them to practice it. They obeyed, this time. But it was just as well it was not forbidden, for they would have practiced it anyhow, if a thousand Deities had forbidden it" (25). Satan supplies a sober and accurate appraisal of the Christian revelation: "... as the meek and gentle Savior he was a thousand billion times crueler than ever he was in the Old Testament--oh, incomparably more atrocious than ever he was at the very worst in those old days!" (46)

The "Papers of the Adam Family" treat antediluvian society with attention to the premise that the long lifespans of characters in Genesis--even assuming that they waited a few extra decades before parenthood--made for a society many living generations deep, and thus strangely dense and hierarchical. Several of these "translations from the Adamic" are in the voice of Eve, "the Most Illustrious, Most Powerful, Most Gracious, Most Reverend, her Grandeur, the Acting Head of the Human Race" (91-2). There is also a focus on the early tenth century as clocked from Eden, consisting mostly of thinly-veiled satire on Twain's own time, which certainly had catastrophe imminent.

A number of short pieces include a whimsical cat-focused story (where Twain in passing vaunts his own "conscience torpid through virtuous inaction," 113), a merciless criticism of the prose style of James Fenimore Cooper, a reasonably funny parody of etiquette instructions, some travelogue from England, and a few other essays.

The book concludes with its longest and strangest item. "The Great Dark" (title furnished by the editor) is a horror story that hinges on its protagonist's efforts and failures to assign reality to his actual circumstances after being subjected to a dream-world of simulation. Latter-day readers might see this piece as a precocious Matrix sort of story. (Who needs wetware and full-body VR when you have a Victorian microscope?) But of course the central conundrum goes back to Chuang Tzu and probably to the dawn of reflective thought.

4/26/22

I have read well over 1,000 books and can count on one hand the number I have abandoned without finishing. This work joins that select list.

This is a non-fiction chronicle of fur trading activity in the early 1830s. It is a bone dry, often confusing and hard to follow account of the different mountain men, trading companies and Indian tribes that interacted during the period in the Rocky Mountain region.

If a two-page, narrative account of the supplies carried by a beaver trapping company, with the 1832 cost of each item is your cup of tea, this is the book for you. If an exhaustive description of the physical movements of a trapper, with place names and geographic features, without the aid of a map, is your idea of fun, send me a message and I’ll forward you this beauty.

After 100 pages of torture and 400 left to go, I bailed.½

Nearing the end of Mark Twain's life, he wrote a series of humorous essays on Judeo-Christian theology, including [book:The Diaries of Adam and Eve|108202] and Letters from Earth, which were posthumously published. In the book Satan, who still resides with the rest of the heavenly hosts, takes a trip to Earth. This book consists of eleven letters he writes back to archangels Gabriel and Michael with his thoughts on humanity, Judeo-Christian scripture and morality. When Mark Twain wrote these essays, he was deeply in debt, had just lost his wife and one of his daughters; therefore, one can imagine that he might be despondent.

I believe, like many, Twain was trying to understand a God who would allow evil to exist and to reconcile the divinity as portrayed in the Old Testament with that in the New Testament. Regarding the day of worship, Twain states:

To forty-nine in fifty, the Sabbath Day is a dreary, dreary bore...The gladdened moment for all of them is when the preacher uplifts his hands for the benediction. You can hear the soft rustle of relief that sweeps the house, and you recognize that is its eloquent with gratitude.

Later, Twain quips regarding the inconsistency between one of the Ten Commandments and God's campaign against the Moabites through Moses:

...it was God himself who said: "Thou shalt not kill." Then it is plain that he cannot keep his own commandments.

Both C.S. Lewis and Mark Twain were atheists at one time or another. C.S. Lewis became an apologist (defender) of the Christian faith while evidently Mark Twain, even those he was buried in a Presbyterian cemetery, never renounced his atheism.

Whether you are an atheist or a Christian, there is something for all in this short novel. For example, Mark Twain's retelling of Noah and the great flood had me chuckling. If you are easily offended with someone outlining some of the inconsistencies in Holy Scripture, you might want to skip this book.

I found this book when I was looking for a copy of The Diaries of Adam and Eve, as this posthumous collection covers some similar ground. It incorporates biblical “memoirs”, other criticism, letters, and a section titled “The Damned Human Race”. I read much of the book while riding various trains, although boats might have been more appropriate.

More complete review here.

Another selection of magazine pieces. Bernard deVoto was a historian of the early American West. but he was a man of wide interests, so this anthology has many interesting moments, as he regarded the American scene for Harper's Magazine in the 1950's.½

A good deal of focussed research underlay a lively account of the year in question. It presents the activities clearly, and is a good explanation of the intellectual and social underpinnings of the massive expansion of the USA. De Voto writes well, and provides many possible epigraphs for other writers.½

Twain has the best twisted sense of humor. I absolutely love the sarcasm and cynicism. Not to mention how many authors can do both male and female characters and nail both acurately

Twain has the best twisted sense of humor. I absolutely love the sarcasm and cynicism. Not to mention how many authors can do both male and female characters and nail both acurately

That was strange.

DeVoto wrote The Easy Chair, long a monthly column in Harper's Magazine, for two decades; this is a sample. Each month's essay reflected whatever was on the author's mind, which varied widely. The selection's arranged topically; it gets pretty political--mostly conservation politics--toward the end.

'Tis an excellent read. I worked my way through it a chapter at a time, around other reading, over a couple years.

This is a logical successor to the books I read on Lewis & Clark - of which I was sufficiently enamoured to have planned a trip retracing their momentous peregrination travelling from St Louis to the Pacific at Astoria. This story wouldn't have happened without L&C who were rapidly followed by the beaver and fur trade and the inimical 'mountain men'. These men could hardly be called 'white men' as they became almost as the Indians except not really believing in their superstitions.

Most of the story happens between 1834 to 36, some in 37 and then dwindles away, as did the beavers and the mountain men, until the first settlers about a decade later.

This is a story of primitive white men, stone-age Indians, greed, violence, and grandeur.

The book was written in 1947 and I wonder if modern sensitivities would have made this a very different book.

It left an impression. I must follow Lewis and Clark. I must ...½

The version I read seemed to have a number of additional pieces at the end of Letters from the Earth. I loved Letters from the Earth, but the stuff added on in the second half was hit and miss. It's easy to see why Twain thought this work would never be published due to censorship. He pulls no punches as he takes on religion with satyrical vengeance. I really enjoyed it a lot. If you don't want your religious views challenged - no matter what they are - you probably want to shy away from this one.

Info Àtic dels llibres
Castigat per Déu, Satanàs és exiliat a la Terra. I des d’allà els escriu als seus dos amics, els arcàngels Miquel i Gabriel, descrivint la increïble raça humana, capaç de la més gran bellesa i de les traïcions més abjectes. I, sobretot, creadors d’un concepte del cel i de Déu absolutament ridícul. En efecte, qui voldria anar a un cel sense sexe, quan és el passatemps preferit dels humans?

I read this book because I was seeking inspiration in three ways: 1) I wanted to read some good religious satire to motivate further writing for my TheKnish.com website. 2) I wanted to observe some editor methods as this work was compiled in expert ways by a single resource. 3) I wanted to see if Twain himself covered ground on a sequel idea I have for one of his works. To the first point, I found exactly what I was looking for, and some idea germs have begun generating, though some of his work is almost too clever. To the second point, I found what I was seeking as well. The footnotes at the end reveal fascinating approaches to curating disjointed writings, exactly what I needed. To the third point, I am delighted to find that Twain actually abandoned the idea that I have in my head to pursue other works. I am, therefore, really excited.

The essay on Cooper's prose style (or lack there of) made me go read the Deerslayer. Twain was right on that. I also remember a story about the worlds most annoying poem or some such involving a ticket taker (Punch, Brother, Punch)

Typical Twain. Brilliance amid some blather. The opening essay was outstanding, the autobiography of Eve, was very familiar and often hilarious, and the last unfinished story was superb Sci Fi resembling Asimov's, The Fantastic Voyage.

A wonderful homage to the cocktail hour, martinis, and whiskey. A little dated, but still delightful!