Reading
I'm going to tell you a story about a magnificent man.1 You may remember him, for he was a war hero. Starting out with racing cars, he made his big mark in World War I as a combat pilot by shooting down twenty-six enemy planes. He became known as "America's Ace of Aces," and returned home from overseas to receive scores of honors and citations, including the Congressional Medal of Honor.
When World War II broke out in Europe in 1939, this man was owner and president of Eastern Air Lines. Early in 1941 he was nearly killed in a plane crash near Atlanta, and spent a year recovering. A few months after Pearl Harbor, he was called to Washington and asked by the Secretary of War to make an inspection tour of Army Air Force stations in the South Pacific. He was also asked to convey an oral message to General Douglas MacArthur, then commander of American forces in the Pacific with headquarters in Port Moresby, New Guinea.
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After a fifteen-hour flight from Los Angeles to Hawaii, he transferred to a specially prepared B-17 "Flying Fortress" military plane that would take him to Port Moresby. Refueling stops had been arranged at Canton Island, Suva, New Caledonia, and Brisbane, Australia. The route was roundabout because the Japanese controlled certain parts of the Pacific. After several hours in the air, the crew of the Flying Fortress knew something was wrong: The pilot had failed to touch down at Canton Island. Whether due to a damaged sextant, or an incorrect reading of wind velocity, or a navigational error — the reason was never fully learned — the plane had overshot the island. After several frantic hours it lost radio contact, ran out of fuel, and ditched.
For the next several days and nights the eight survivors, including our Ace of Aces, floated in the Pacific in three tiny rubberized canvas rafts. The only food they had was four small oranges. Hour by hour their situation grew more desperate. No searchers had sighted them. The exposure to wind, heat, and cold, the salt in their wounds, the constant rocking, the excruciating pangs of hunger and thirst, and the tight quarters all combined to produce a painful, agonizing experience with no prospect of relief.
The crew's flight mechanic was John Bartek, a young private just out of training school. John was a Christian, and he carried in his breast pocket a small Gideon New Testament with Psalms. Our Ace of Aces, who had a Christian upbringing and a firm belief in God, suggested
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pulling the three rafts together and holding a prayer meeting. It became a twice-a-day ritual.
All of the men, including a couple of unbelievers, took part, each one reading a passage as the New Testament was passed around. The services ended with a hymn and someone offering prayer. These meetings were usually followed by some lengthy conversations in which the men talked frankly about their lives in relation to eternity, as people sometimes do when facing slow and almost certain death.
One afternoon as the conversation tapered off, the Ace of Aces pulled his hat over his eyes and dozed. After a few minutes he felt something land on his head. Instinctively he sensed it was a seagull. They had had nothing to eat for days, as their emergency fishing gear was useless without bait. Slowly the Ace raised his right hand until it was level with his hat brim. Then he gradually moved his hand to where he thought the bird should be. He closed his hand . . .
The Ace of Aces was Edward V. Rickenbacker, known to my generation as "Captain Eddie." I had the privilege of breakfasting with him one morning back in 1968 when he was in Minneapolis in connection with his newly published book Rickenbacker, an Autobiography. I can testify personally to the warmth of Captain Eddie's love for Jesus Christ, but what he did on that raft, and what he wrote about the experience in his autobiography, will stand as Captain Eddie's greatest testimony of his faith.
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My purpose in relating this episode in the life of a remarkable human being is to introduce you to one of the greatest joys of growing old: reading. By reading I do not refer to daily or weekly newspapers or monthly magazines, but to good books — the kind that entertain, challenge, and feed the soul. Think back and try to recall the titles of some of the books you wanted to read, but put off doing so for one reason or another (usually until you had more time). That time is yours now, and the books are still around, available in public libraries or bookstores or quite possibly on your own bookshelves. They are waiting for you to read them.
While thinking about what you will read, let me recommend to you first the greatest book of all, the Bible. It should be on the active reading list of every believer, especially those of us who won't be reading for too many more years.
Since I began this chapter with an excerpt from an autobiography, it might be well to mention some other autobiographies that make fine reading. The Bible itself contains a few fleeting passages in the Psalms, the Prophets, the Gospels, and the letters of Paul that have an autobiographical flavor, but no precise writings of this genre appear in Holy Scripture.
At the head of the list I would place the Confessions of Augustine. In 1970 I made a fresh translation from the Latin of a major portion of this classic, and it was published by Harper and Row with the title Love Song. Since then the translation has been reprinted several times and is still
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in print. Nothing in ancient or medieval literature can match the beauty and honesty of the Bishop of Hippo's own story of his early years and his conversion to Christ.
In modern times thousands of autobiographies have appeared in book form, but I have not come across many that I can enthusiastically recommend as enjoyable retirement reading. Obviously Eddie Rickenbacker's book belongs on our select list. I would also include the autobiographies of Charles G. Finney and Peter Cartwright from the nineteenth century and Helen Keller's Story of My Life and C.S. Lewis' Surprised by Joy from the twentieth. These can be recommended without reservation.
I find that many contemporary memoirs tend to be either defensive or offensive. Either the authors lean heavily toward self-exoneration and justification, they try to even old scores, or they seem determined to impress the reader (subtly, but ad nauseam) with their supposed track records of achievement. Whatever the real motive, too many yield to what the Encyclopedia Britannica calls a "purely commercial desire to capitalize on fame or position."2
One person writing a biography about another is a different genre and can be most fascinating reading for those of us who have already lived the major part of our lives. I can think of nothing more pleasant than sitting down to a volume containing the story of someone about whom I have always been curious, or better yet, someone whom I have always admired at a distance.
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There is only one stipulation: I must have confidence in the integrity of the author.
Following are some titles I do not hesitate to recommend as good reading, even though some were written many years ago, and have been superceded by more modern treatments:
The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell (1791)
Francis of Assisi by Paul Sabatier (1875)
George Muller of Bristol by Arthur T. Pierson (1899)
The Life of D.L. Moody by his son, Will R. Moody (1900)
Mary Slessor of Calabar by W.R. Livingstone (1925)
Abraham Lincoln by Carl Sandburg (6 vols., 1939)
Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther by Roland H. Bainton (1950)
Rees Howells, Intercessor by Norman P. Grubb (1953)
The Lord Protector (Oliver Cromwell) by Robert S. Paul (1955)
Florence Nightingale by Cecil Woodham-Smith (1958)
Shadow of the Almighty: the Life and Testament of Jim Elliot by Elisabeth Elliot (1958)
The Hiding Place (Corrie ten Boom) by John and Elizabeth Sherrill (1971)
Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur by Frank Houghton (1973)
George Whitefield by Arnold Dallimore (1980)
A Prophet with Honor: The Billy Graham Story by William Martin (1991)
Probably this list seems one-sided to some and hopelessly inadequate to others. My intent is not
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to evaluate the "best" books in a field, but rather to mention some splendid biographies of outstanding people for the enjoyment of older readers. Obviously due to the limits of this book, I have presented only a sampling of the literature available. I have bypassed the writings of famous biographers such as Plutarch, Lytton Strachey, Emil Ludwig, and Irving Stone as by and large not worth our time, since time is of the essence to us older folks. If you haven't already read these authors, there's little point in starting now.
In the field of classics, however, some great treats await the retired reader. I confess I didn't read Robinson Crusoe until I was seventy years old, but I found it most enjoyable. For several nights I laughed myself to sleep reading Don Quixote. If you missed Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, the Greek tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the comedies of Aristophanes, Virgil's Aeneid, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare's dramas, Milton's Paradise Lost, Pascal's Provincial Letters, Montesquieu's Spirit of Laws, Melville's Moby Dick, Tolstoy's War and Peace, or Stephen Benet's John Brown's Body, now is the time to enrich your life as never before. You have years of wonderful reading ahead of you.
Having broken the ice with these wonderful classics, I shall now attempt to introduce the older reader to the field of fiction with the kind of story that will be satisfying, intriguing, and perhaps even inspiring. Again, the list of selections
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is arbitrary and incomplete, but these books are only intended to be an introduction that will lead you into other fields according to your choices and preferences.
A good place to begin is with the English novel. Many great works in this genre have been filmed and occasionally appear on television, but as Marshall McLuhan pointed out, the "hot medium" leaves little to the imagination, while the "cool medium," such as the printed page, is a much greater adventure for the mind.
The authors you should look for lived mostly in the nineteenth century, before Lady Chatterley's Lover and the invasion of four-letter words. With nineteenth century fiction you won't have to put up with computerized percentages of sex and violence, nor will your sense of propriety be outraged by the flaunting of accepted standards of modesty and decency.
Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice makes a fine beginning. Libraries can't keep it on their shelves. It should be followed by her other novels and then by Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. Next you should be ready for Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, beside which Hollywood's artificial horror films seem like an afternoon in the park. You've heard of Charles Dickens? I suggest you read him, but not exhaustively. Choose one or two of his novels — Nicholas Nickleby, Little Dorrit, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, or Great Expectations. Hours of pleasure await you. Then for a different perspective on English society, read Thackeray's Vanity Fair, Pendennis, Esmond, or
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The Newcomes. Best of all for churchgoing folk are Anthony Trollope's Barchester novels, beginning with Barchester Towers and ending with The Last Chronicle of Barset.
The nineteenth century also produced some fine novels outside of England. Scotland, for example, gave us Sir Walter Scott's Waverly stories, James Barrie's The Little Minister, and the novels of George MacDonald, which are having quite a revival among Christian readers. France produced Victor Hugo's Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Alexandre Dumas' swashbuckling stories, The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. If you did not get around to reading Dumas in earlier years, you should do so now.
The pre-Communist Russian writers Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev provide an excellent introduction to Slavic literature. I especially recommend Dosteovsky's Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. They are two of the finest novels ever written.
What about American fiction? I would begin in the nineteenth century with Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ramona by Helen Hunt Jackson, and Ben Hur by Lew Wallace. These are genuine literary classics that helped to shape our nation. They are the kind of stories that not only will explain history but will provide the reader, whether old or young, with entertainment and edification.
With twentieth century fiction we have to be quite selective. In limiting my comments to the
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American scene, I will pass by many of the great names of fiction — Henry James, Stephen Crane, Edith Wharton, Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, Ring Lardner, William Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, James Baldwin, John Steinbeck, Vladimir Nabokov, Norman Mailer, and Truman Capote. While most of these are excellent writers, I doubt whether they have much to say to today's older readers that would make life more pleasant, more interesting, or more fruitful in the closing stretches of life's journey. Nor do I think that these authors have anything worthwhile to say about what lies beyond death. We might better spend our reading hours riding off into the sunset with Louis L'Amour or Zane Grey, rather than punish ourselves with a ghastly tale like In Cold Blood. We old boys and girls have been around a long time. We know what the world is like. We know sleaze when we see it, and we don't need contemporary authors to embellish it or explain it to us.
The reading tastes of the American public have benn corrupted almost beyond redemption by blasphemy, vulgarity, and scatology, all for the sake of increased book sales to prurient minds. There are, however, many twentieth-century American novels worth reading, such as Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind, Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October, the Savannah quartet of Eugenia Price, and the Sebastian series of
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James L. Johnson, to name only a few. Earlier in the century the Christian novels of Lloyd C. Douglas — The Magnificent Obsession, The Robe, and The Big Fisherman — inspired thousands of readers young and old, but no American has since matched his popular appeal.
The demand for detective fiction continues unabated, and no one needs my advice to read Agatha Christie. I would, therefore, limit my remarks to a reference to two British creations, G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown and Dorothy Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey, since both are written from Christian backgrounds. My two favorite Wimsey stories are Busman's Honeymoon and The Nine Tailors.
In contrast there is a wealth of devotional literature that makes wonderful reading for older people. One can start with the sermons of D.L. Moody, Charles Spurgeon, Samuel P. Jones, Joseph Parker, and T. DeWitt Talmage of the nineteenth century. The early twentieth century gave us Andrew Murray, Ole Hallesby, P.T. Forsyth, and Oswald Chambers, whose writings are hard to surpass. Amy Carmichael's poetry and prose written in India, have blessed millions of readers. More contemporary are the writings of C.S. Lewis and A.W. Tozer, which carry seeds of greatness. I will not attempt to comment on more recent devotional literature as it is quite possible that the best has not yet been written!
Apart from spiritual inspiration, the twentieth century has produced some books that make fine reading even in old age. I still remember the
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excitement I felt as a young man during the Great Depression when I read Richard Halliburton's The Royal Road to Romance. How I yearned to follow him and swim the Hellespont! True-to-life adventure stories, missionary stories, spy stories, space stories — the libraries are full of them, though some are better than others. Geoffrey Bull's When Iron Gates Yield, Don Richardson's Peace Child, Elisabeth Elliot's Through Gates of Splendor, and Brother Andrew's God's Smuggler make great reading in the missionary genre. For sheer adventure I can endorse Archdeacon Hudson Stuck's The Ascent of Denali, Admiral Richard Byrd's Alone, Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff, and any other book that describes in clear, honest language some significant recent achievements of the human spirit.
Drama used to be off-limits for Christians, but no longer. The reader interested in twentieth-century playwrights should begin with George Bernard Shaw, who began life in an Irish Protestant home, but soon turned on the church. Homesickness for God is one of the more engaging characteristics of this brilliant writer (he loved John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress). Among his best plays are Major Barbara (about the Salvation Army), Man and Superman, and Saint Joan. But Shaw's life work is ultimately pitiful; he thought his plays better than Shakespeare's, but they weren't. He could have been a magnificent voice for God had he chosen to give himself over to Christ.
The Green Pastures by Marc Connelly, while an
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absolutely charming drama, reflects racial views of a day that is gone forever. T.S. Eliot, Archibald MacLeish, and Paddy Chayevsky wrote interesting plays, but they leave us with little more than morbid scenes of disintegrating faith. The fact remains that the stage in the closing years of our millennium is a mere sounding board for the sin, wretchedness, confusion, and despair of contemporary life. It has little to say to older people beyond "Goodbye." Where is the dramatist who will set our faith on fire?
It is characteristic of the ageing process that we look back on our former years longingly, and this is especially true when it comes to reading tastes. One of my continuing goals is to seek to upgrade the quality of Christian literature so that it may become more enjoyable reading for everyone. (I even wrote a novel myself as part of the effort.) Pray with me that God will inspire a new generation of Christian writers to provide the world of the twenty-first century with better literature. Meanwhile we always have the past, to which we can turn with delight, as together with Alice we follow the white rabbit into her Wonderland.
Oh yes. Have you wondered what happened to Eddie Rickenbacker? We left him reaching for the seagull on his head. Well, he did actually catch the gull, and he cut it into eight pieces for the eight men on the rafts. It tasted delicious. They put the intestines on hooks and began catching mackerel and bass, and that night it
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rained. But the men's trials were far from over. They spent another fortnight on the rafts, and during that time one of their number died. Sharks carried away the fishing lines. The rafts became separated temporarily. The spirits of the men drooped. The sharks came back. A plane flew by but failed to see them. Again the rafts separated; this time permanently. Captain Eddie was alone with two unconscious men.
Late on the twenty-fourth day two U.S. Navy planes came by, flying low. They turned around and passed over again. They had spotted the raft. Soon a PT boat arrived and the Ace and his two unconscious companions were rescued. The occupants of the other rafts had already been picked up. It seems they had drifted to a point five hundred miles southwest of Canton Island. Two doctors were flown in and the rescued men were taken to a one-room hospital on a nearby island. Rickenbacker's weight had dropped from 180 to 126 pounds.
I was a seminary student when this incredible rescue took place. I vividly remember reading about it. And I remember that when Captain Eddie said goodbye to his companions, his last words to Private Bartek were, "Son, thank God for your New Testament."
Good reading!
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1. The story is based on Eddie Rickenbacker's autobiography, Rickenbacker (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967); also on my recollections of press accounts of his sea rescue and on personal conversations with Captain Eddie.
2. "Autobiography," Encyclopedia Britannica, 1953 ed., vol. 2, 783.
