Christmas 1914

The First World War broke out in August of 1914. Many rushed to war almost gleefully, confident in victory for their particular side. Many thought the war would be over by Christmas. But when Christmas came the war was still young. It would last another four years and claim the lives of some 8 million soldiers before it was through.

In the midst of this bloodshed, though, a remarkable thing happened. In many places along the Western Front, particularly where the British and the Germans faced each other, unofficial Christmas truces were made in 1914. And here, for a brief few hours, the killing ceased.

Instead of firing bullets at each other, the mortal enemies sang Christmas carols to one another on Christmas Eve. German soldiers even decorated their trenches with candles and with Christmas Trees — tannebaum, they called them. On Christmas morning, soldiers from both sides met in no man’s land and exchanged what gifts they had: buttons and medals, candy and tobacco and liquor. Soldiers who had once been barbers gave free haircuts. One German soldier who had been a juggler in happier times gave a performance in no man’s land.

Here is how one German officer (Leutenant Johannes Niemann, 133rd Royal Saxon Regiment) described the truce:

“Next morning the mist was slow to clear and suddenly my orderly threw himself into my dugout to say that both the German and Scottish soldiers had come out of their trenches and were fraternising along the front. I grabbed my binoculars and looking cautiously over the parapet saw the incredible sight of our soldiers exchanging cigarettes, schnapps and chocolate with the enemy. Later a Scottish soldier appeared with a football which seemed to come from nowhere and a few minutes later a real football match got underway. The Scots marked their goal mouth with their strange caps and we did the same with ours. It was far from easy to play on the frozen ground, but we continued, keeping rigorously to the rules, despite the fact that it only lasted an hour and that we had no referee. A great many of the passes went wide, but all the amateur footballers, although they must have been very tired, played with huge enthusiasm. … The game finished with a score of three goals to two in favour of Fritz against Tommy.”

And here is how a British counterpart (Second Lieutenant Cyril Drummond, 135th Battery, Royal Field Artillery) described it:

“In the sunken road I met an officer I knew, and we walked along together so that we could look across to the German front line, which was only about seventy yards away. One of the Germans waved to us and said, ‘Come over here!’ We said, ‘You come over here if you want to talk.’ So he climbed out of his trench and came over towards us. We met and very gravely saluted each other. He was joined by more Germans, and some of the Dublin Fusiliers from our own trenches came over to join us. No German officer came out, it was only the ordinary soldiers. We talked, mainly in French, because my German was not very good and none of the Germans could speak English well. But we managed to get together all right. One of them said, ‘We don’t want to kill you and you don’t want to kill us, so why shoot?’

“They gave me some German tobacco and German cigars - they seemed to have plenty of those, and very good ones too — and they asked whether we had any jam. One of the Dublin Fusiliers got a tin of jam which had been opened, but very little taken out, and he gave it to a German who gave him two cigars for it. I lined them all up and took a photograph.”

The goodwill between enemies was only temporary. In a matter of days they were back to the grim business of trying to blow one another apart. But for a few brief hours, the influence of the Prince of Peace had been felt.

(Drawing by Bruce Bairnsfather, 1914. The above quotations, and others, are available here.)

Democrats and Generals

During the 1916 presidential campaign, Democratic incumbent Woodrow Wilson campaigned on a slogan of “He kept us out of war”, referring of course to the First World War which had engulfed Europe. Thanks in no small part to this slogan, he won re-election. A month into his second term, Wilson asked Congress to declare war on Germany.

During the 1940 presidential campaign, Democratic incumbent Franklin D. Roosevelt declared, “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars”, referring of course to the Second World War which had engulfed Europe. Fourteen months later, Roosevelt asked Congress to declare war on Japan.

During the 1964 presidential campaign, Democratic incumbent Lyndon B. Johnson declared, “We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves”, referring of course to the fighting between North and South Vietnam. In 1965 Johnson increased the number of American troops in Vietnam eight-fold (from 23,300 on December 31, 1964 to 184,300 on the same date a year later).

Promising not to go to war and then breaking that promise seems to be something of a time-honored tradition among Democratic presidents. The criticism here is not so much of the eventual decision to go to war, but rather in the earlier promise not to go to war (or, in Wilson's case, the overwhelming implication not to go to war). Such promises should never have been made, for how can you know that Pearl Harbor will not be bombed? Or that your merchant ships will not be torpedoed? Who were Wilson and Roosevelt and Johnson to try their hands at fortune-telling?

The Lord's brother James touches on this human frailty in chapter four of his epistle, verses 13-15: “Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow, we shall go to such and such a city, and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit.’ Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away. Instead, you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we shall live and also do this or that.’”

So: Beware the Democratic presidential candidate who promises no war! But if we cannot trust Democratic presidents to keep us out of war—and four of the five wars America fought in the 20th century were Democratic wars—is there a class of president who does avoid war?

My father pointed out to me long ago that America has never gone to war while an ex-general has been president. And we have had no shortage of ex-generals reach the White House: George Washington, Andrew Jackson, William H. Harrison, Zachary Taylor, U.S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, Chester Arthur, Benjamin Harrison and Dwight Eisenhower.

This is less surprising than it might seem. There is a special hatred of war that only those who have sent men to their deaths can know. Writing to his brother in May 1943, Ike mentioned pacifists back home and observed, “I doubt whether any of these people, with their academic or dogmatic hatred of war, detest it as much as I do. They probably have not seen bodies rotting on the ground and smelled the stench of decaying human flesh. They have not visited a field hospital crowded with the desperately wounded.”

It is wonderfully ironic that old warriors like Eisenhower—with belligerent-sounding policies like massive retaliation and brinksmanship—do more to achieve peace than placard-bearing protesters or ivory-towered intellectuals. Or, apparently, liberal Democrats.

Climbing Out of the Pit

I just finished re-reading an Ellis Peters novel, Fallen Into The Pit. The novel is set in post-World War II England and concerns three murders which take place in the normally sleepy village of Comerford. The solution to the mystery is mostly worked out by the police sergeant's son Dominic Felse, who, frankly, is unconvincingly omniscient for a 13-year-old boy. What I found more compelling than the mystery itself was the way in which Peters (actually Edith Pargeter was her real name) deals with the tough adjustment that World War II vets must have experienced coming home. A few passages to this effect:

“The war ended, and the young men came home, and tried indignantly to fit themselves into old clothes and old habits which proved, on examination, to be both a little threadbare, and on trial to be both cripplingly small for bodies and minds mysteriously grown in absence.” (p. 3)

“…some came haunted by the things their own hand had done and their own bodies endured, growths from which no manner of amputation could divide them, ghosts for which Comerford had no room. They had been where even those nearest to them could not follow, and daily they withdrew there again from the compression and safety of lathe and field and farm, until the adjustment to sanity took place painfully at last, and the compression ceased to bound them, and was felt to be wider than the mad waste in the memory.” (p. 6)

“In time of war countries fall over themselves to make commandos and guerrillas of their young men, self-reliant killers who can slit a throat and live off a hostile countryside as simply as they once caught the morning bus to their various blameless jobs. But to reconvert these formidable creations afterwards is quite another matter. Nobody ever gave much thought to that, nobody ever does until their recoil hits the very system which made and made use of them. Men who have learned to kill as a solution for otherwise insoluble problems in wartime may the more readily revert to it as a solution for other problems as desperate in other conditions. And logically … who has the least right to judge them for it? Surely the system which taught them the art and ethics of murder to save itself has no right at all. The obvious answer would be: ‘Come on in the dock with us!’”(p. 195)

The most tortured of all of Comerford's returning veterans is Chad Wedderburn, whose service with the Yugoslavian rebels is the stuff of village legend. Chad, who is Dominic's school teacher, is very much in love with Io Hart, the daughter of Comerford's widowed tavern owner; Io “could manage the whole diverse flow of customers year in and year out without disarranging a curl of her warm brown hair, and make her father, into the bargain, do whatever she wanted. When she knew what she wanted, which wasn't always.” (p. 48)

But Chad thinks himself too flawed ever to marry Io; “He had suffered, whether by his own fault or the mismanagement of others, injuries to his nature which unfitted him for loving or being loved by an innocent like Io…” (p. 277) Dominic, (too) wise beyond his years, senses Chad’s self-loathing and wonders, “Was it really possible to feel yourself maimed for life, merely because you had been pushed into killing other people in a war in order to stay alive yourself? In a war, when most people thought themselves absolved for everything? But the fellow who goes the opposite way from everyone else isn't necessarily wrong.” (p. 258)

A moment of emergency forces Chad to ask Io for her counsel, and this clears the mist between them. “She did not stop to argue, but did exactly as he asked her; she had been ready to do exactly as he asked her for quite a long time, and the real trouble had been that he had never asked her.” (p. 285) At the end of the novel, the two make a quiet trip to the registry office to become man and wife. We are left to reflect that, in spite of Chad's past and self doubts, really because of them, he was in the end most fitted for loving and being loved by an innocent like Io.

I have often been drawn to fictional characters like Chad Wedderburn, men who are admired by everybody but themselves. Other examples in this motif are the whisky priest in Power and the Glory, the savage in Brave New World, and, above all, Prince Hamlet. If Peters had been a Graham Greene or an Aldous Huxley or a Will Shakespeare, she would have given Chad Wedderburn no relief short of the grave. But instead she took compassion on Chad—and, I suppose, on her readers—and showed instead how the World War II vets actually dealt with their trauma. Having seen enough of hatred, they found wives to love; having seen enough of death, they brought children into the world.

Battleships and Equality

In 1922 the United States, Britain, France, Italy and Japan signed the Five-Power Naval Limitation Treaty. The treaty was intended to limit the number of capital ships (battleships and cruisers) and the number of aircraft carriers the signatory nations could build. The treaty failed to avert a naval arms race, but it does demonstrate an interesting American trademark.

The treaty lists the delegates from the various signatory nations, complete with titles, positions and awards. For example, the French delegation is listed as:
Mr. Albert Sarraut, Deputy, Minister of the Colonies;
Mr. Jules J. Jusserand, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the United States of America, Grand Cross of the National Order of the Legion of Honour;

The Italian delgation consisted of:
The Honourable Carlo Schanzer, Senator of the Kingdom;
The Honourable Vittorio Rolandi Ricci, Senator of the Kingdom, His Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary at Washington;
The Honourable Luigi Albertini, Senator of the Kingdom;

The British delegation was especially grandiose:
The Right Honourable Arthur James Balfour, O. M., M. P., Lord President of His Privy Council;
The Right Honourable Baron Lee of Fareham, G. B. E., K. C. B., First Lord of His Admiralty;
The Right Honourable Sir Auckland Campbell Geddes, K. C. B., His Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the United States of America;

And the Japanese delegation was every bit as garish:
Baron Tomosaburo Kato, Minister for the Navy, Junii, a member of the First Class of the Imperial Order of the Grand Cordon of the Rising Sun with the Paulownia Flower;
Baron Kijuro Shidehara, His Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary at Washington, Joshii, a member of the First Class of the Imperial Order of the Rising Sun;
Mr. Masanao Hanihara, Vice Minister for Foreign Affairs, Jushii, a member of the Second Class of the Imperial Order of the Rising Sun;


In contrast to all this pomp and ostentation was the simple, egalitarian way in which the Americans were listed:
Charles Evans Hughes,
Henry Cabot Lodge,
Oscar W. Underwood,
Elihu Root,
citizens of the United States;


These men represented a country in which “all men are created equal”. We sometimes forget how distinctive America is. Thank you again, Mr. Jefferson.

Lost Among The Angels

Alice Duncan, Lost Among The Angels (2006).

I just finished a perky little detective story by Alice Duncan, entitled Lost Among The Angels. It is set in 1920s Los Angeles and details the adventures of the young Mercedes Louise Allcutt. Mercy (as she would rather be called) is all of 21 and has just come west to live with her sister and brother-in-law, after growing up very rich and even more sheltered in Boston. Mercy finds life in L.A. to be a major adjustment, as for instance when her sister insists that she bobs her hair.

“Mother and Father would disown me if I had my hair bobbed,” I said.

“Mother and Father aren’t here.”

Even as she stated the obvious, my heart soared. I told it to stop doing that. Such behavior on its part was extremely unfilial and in very bad taste.

Mercy decides to find employment, not because she needs money, but because she wants to mingle with people in order that she might find grist for the novels she yearns to write. She goes to work for Ernie Templeton, a detective who is as worldly wise as Mercy is naive. They quickly develop strong feelings for one another, a fact which Mercy is reluctant to admit to herself. At one point in the story, after she has just survived a harrowing moment of danger, Ernie affectionately embraces her. Mercy provides narration:

Personally, I didn’t mind the embrace. It showed proper managerial anxiety over the welfare of a person in his employ.

Mercy’s continual incredulity at the modern world around her, coupled with her surprising effectiveness in spite of her naivete, makes this a very fun book. Hopefully it is just the first installment in a very long series.

Zarqawi and the U.S. Senate

Much has been made of a recent report by the U.S. Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence which claims there was no link between Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq and the terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

The Senate report quotes an October 2005 CIA assessment which claims that before the war “the regime did not have a relationship, harbor, or turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi and his associates.” (Reported on page 92 of the Senate report.)

President Bush’s critics have seized upon this as evidence that the President deliberately misled the American people back in 2003 concerning the threat that Iraq posed to the United States.

The problem with this criticism, however, is that it glosses over an inconvenient truth which is spelled out in the same Senate Report: The CIA was singing a different tune in 2002.

Back in September 2002, the CIA reported: “The presence of al-Qa’ida militants on Iraqi soil poses many questions. We are uncertain to what extent Baghdad is actively complicit in this use of its territory by al-Qa’ida operatives for safehaven and transit. Given the pervasive presence of Iraq’s security apparatus , it would be difficult for al-Qa’ida to maintain an active, long-term presence in Iraq without alerting the authorities or without at least their acquiescence.” (Emphasis added.)

This too is reported in the Senate report (on page 89) and clearly indicates that before the war the CIA did think that at the very least Saddam was “turning a blind eye” to Zarqawi.

The significance of this September 2002 CIA assessment is that it exonerates Mr. Bush from the charge that he deliberately misled the American people in 2003 about the relationship between Zarqawi and Hussein. Not surprisingly, the President’s critics have failed to admit this.

Something else which is getting very little play in the national media is the possibility that the Senate committee might very well be mistaken in its assessment that there was no relationship between the two thugs. According to a recent editorial from Investor’s Business Daily, the Senate report “suggests that, at least for the Democrats, Senate intelligence is an oxymoron.”

And on Thursday, the New York Sun reported that Barham Salih, a former Iraqi deputy prime minister, contradicted the Senate report with his assertion that “Some of my friends were murdered by jihadists, by Al Qaeda-affiliated operatives who had been sheltered and assisted by Saddam’s regime.”

The Last Days of Summer

Steve Kluger, Last Days of Summer (1998)

This touching novel is set in New York in the early 1940s and tells of the friendship between Joey, a brilliant Jewish kid who is picked on because of his religion, and Charlie, the not-so-dumb third baseman for the New York Giants. I found the ending to be predictable, even inevitable, but it still brought tears to my eyes.

One interesting feature of the novel is that Kluger does not rely upon normal narrative to tell his story, but instead relates it using letters, telegrams and newspaper articles. The book reads very quickly; I devoured its 353 pages in one sitting.

Of these 353, I particularly liked page seven, because it contained the following cool words:

rotogravure - a type of printing system using a rotary press, or something printed with such a system

hartebeest - a type of large antelope native to Africa

hop-o’-my-thumb - the name of a little boy in a folk tale

The language is rough at times, but still the story is beautiful. I recommend it to anyone who believes in baseball, or heroes.

Arbeit macht frei

Elie Wiesel, Night (new translation, 2006)

Perhaps Elie Wiesel is the poet laureate of holocaust survivors. Night is, by his own admission, his most important work. To say the book is powerful is understatement.

The book is Wiesel's memoir of the holocaust, during which he was just a teenage boy. He wrote this book in Yiddish. His wife Marian — “who knows my voice and how to transmit it better than anyone else” (p. xiii) —has recently retranslated it. He uses a very simple and eloquent writing style; the beauty of his prose and the ugliness of his story are perfectly juxtaposed.

Wiesel means to haunt you, and he succeeds. He writes of a tramp in town, dismissed as a madman, who accurately warned of what was to come; of a hysterical lady in the cattle car, dismissed as a madwoman, who had premonitions of all-consuming flames; of his last glimpse of his mother and sister, as they were herded to their deaths at Birkenau the first night; of the sign over the gate at Auschwitz, Arbeit macht frei (“Work makes you free”); of his silence, even relief, the night his father was beaten to death in Buchenwald.



Wiesel felt called to write this memoir in order to make people remember what happened. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. The volume closes with his acceptance speech, in which he spoke of the sinfulness of remaining aloof:

“We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must — at that moment — become the center of the universe.” (p. 118-119)

“As long as one dissident is in prison, our freedom will not be true. As long as one child is hungry, our life will be filled with anguish and shame. What all these victims need above all is to know when their voices are stifled we shall lend them ours, that while their freedom depends on ours, the quality of our freedom depends on theirs.” (p. 120)

In one sense, work did make Wiesel free. Because he was given work as a laborer, the Germans never got around to murdering him. The day came when an American tank rattled its way to the gates of Buchenwald, and he was finally free.

But not really free. Not free from the memories. Not free from the sorrow. Not free from the duty of making the world remember.

Something To Eat

Mark 5.39-43 (ESV)
And when he had entered, he said to them, “Why are you making a commotion and weeping? The child is not dead but sleeping.”

And they laughed at him. But he put them all outside and took the child's father and mother and those who were with him and went in where the child was.

Taking her by the hand he said to her, “Talitha cumi,” which means, “Little girl, I say to you, arise.”

And immediately the girl got up and began walking (for she was twelve years of age), and they were immediately overcome with amazement.

And he strictly charged them that no one should know this, and told them to give her something to eat.

* * *

There are many things we can learn from this beautiful story. Jesus went to the house of Jairus (Luke gives us the man’s name) during a time of mourning. Lesson: “weep with those who weep” (Romans 12.15).

The crowd laughed at Jesus — the crowd still laughs at him — but this did not, does not deter him from the business of turning death into life. Lesson: Do not be deterred from doing good by the scorn of others.

Christ immediately raised the girl from the dead. Lesson: We can comfort in knowing that Jesus is stronger than death, that in fact he raised himself from the grave as he promised when he said, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (John 2.19).

Notice, however, the understated closing to the story: he “told them to give her something to eat.” Jesus had already gone further than anyone else could have — he performed a miracle — but now he goes even further, a third mile. His concern for this little girl existed not only at the great life-or-death level, but also at a more mundane and very human level: Is she hungry?

Food was an integral part of Christ’s ministry and I believe this is a neglected theme of the gospels. He fed five thousand famished men on one occasion, four thousand on another (“I do not want to send them away hungry,” he had said in Matthew 15.32, “for they might faint on the way”). He once allowed his hungry disciples to pick grain to eat on a Sabbath and defended them from the accusations of the Pharisees afterward. After his resurrection, he even cooked breakfast for Peter and some of the other disciples.

Moreover, he was always accepting invitations to eat — and using such occasions as opportunities to teach. It is almost startling to note just how often Jesus was found eating with people: at the home of Simon the Pharisee (Luke 7); at the home of Mary and Martha (Luke 10); at the home of a prominent Pharisee (Luke 14); at the home of Simon the Leper (Mark 14); with his disciples the night of his betrayal (Luke 22); with two disciples he met on the Emmaus Road (Luke 24). In fact, food was such a central feature of his ministry that he was unfairly accused of being a glutton. (Luke 7.34)

Sometimes we seem to think that we can win people to the Lord simply by overwhelming them with doctrinal soundness. But this was not Christ’s method: He supplied them with loaves and fishes, in addition to doctrinal soundness. It has been said that people don’t care how much we know until they know how much we care. There are few better places to show how much we care than around a dinner table.

(Painting by Dinah Roe Kendall)

Justice is a terrible thing...

Dorothy Sayers and Jill Paton Walsh, Thrones, Dominations (1998)

I have lately been in a reading mood. After reading three novels I was less than impressed with — The Company of Strangers by Robert Wilson, And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie, The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown — I turned to this book. Sayers is one of my favorite authors (her Nine Tailors is marvelous) and I was not disappointed with Thrones, Dominations.

One interesting aspect to this novel is that Sayers left the work unfinished; Jill Paton Walsh completed it, and quite recently too (1998 was the publishing date). I could not tell where Sayers’ prose ended and Walsh’s began.

The novel concerns two deaths, the first an accidental killing because of a misunderstanding, the second a deliberate murder. The hero of the novel is the amateur detective Lord Peter Wimsey, who has recently married Harriet Vane. (The fact that Harriet is herself a mystery writer allows Sayers and Walsh to have some fun discussing the art of writing detective fiction.)

The best parts of the novel are the conversations between the two highly intelligent newlyweds. Sometimes the banter back and forth strains credibility, especially when Harriet mentions that away from Peter she is “just sitting in the centre, like the fixed foot of the compasses, and doing a little sublunary leaning and hearkening” — which (Peter realizes instantly) is an allusion to John Donne’s “Valediction Forbidding Mourning”. He replies with his own allusion to the same poem. (p. 168)

But even though the conversations between Peter and Harriet may be full of obscure references to John Donne and other esoteric allusions, the discussions are often touching. At one point, Harriet asks Peter if it is right to bring a child into the world. The times are perilous; Hitler has just remilitarized the Rhineland. Peter’s reply contains hope and vulnerability. “There’s what we can do for any child of ours,” he says, “and there's what no one can do for any child at all.” (p. 302)

At another point in the book Harriet and Peter discuss Peter’s detective work. Harriet assures him that she thinks it is a very “serious” and important undertaking. She also expects that it is tied to his war-time service (during the First World War) but can’t quite see the connection. “When you have seen people die,” he replies, “when you have seen at what abominable and appalling cost the peace and safety of England was secured, and then you see the peace squalidly broken, you see killing that has been perpetrated for vile and selfish motives...” Now she sees the connection and he adds: “Justice is a terrible thing, but injustice is worse.” (p. 131)

In a day when Al Qaeda terrorists crash people-laden planes into crowded buildings and Hezbollah terrorists fire rocket into Israel, this is something to remember. I enjoyed reading Thrones, Dominions.

Fridays with Red

Bob Edwards, Fridays with Red: A Radio Friendship (1993)

Every Friday morning for 12 years (from 1981 to 1992) National Public Radio’s Bob Edwards would speak with former Dodgers’ announcer Red Barber in a four-minute segment which quickly became the most popular segment of NPR’s Morning Edition. Not only would Barber talk about sports headlines of the day, he would also reminisce about his days as the announcer for the Reds, Dodgers (with whom he gained national prominence) and Yankees, and discuss just about anything that popped into his head — he was particularly fond of discussing his garden, his cats and the Psalms. After Barber's death in 1992, Edwards wrote this little book, memorializing their friendship.

For a brief taste of Barber’s perspective on life, consider this exchange in November 1991 after Florida State lost to Miami in football...

Bob: Are hearts still heavy in Tallahassee this week?
Red: Well, I’ll tell you something. I was around the Ohio State-Notre Dame game in 1935, and the Bobby Thomson home run, and the Mickey Owen dropped third strike and the Chicago Bears’ 73-0 win over the Redskins. And I saw the FSU-Miami one-point game, and you know what happened the next morning?
Bob: What?
Red: The sun rose right on time. (p. 131)

Though Edwards admits that Barber was not always easy to work with, the younger man (nicknamed “Colonel Bob” by Red) clearly idolized his elder. In a eulogy which Edwards prepared for NPR, he noted that Barber “taught us respect for the listener, respect for the language and respect for the truth.” (p. 219)

The book is a must-read for anyone interested in sports journalism. Edwards’ prose is fun to read (especially the humorous little digs he takes at fellow NPR announcers), but near the end it reaches a height of poignant eloquence. “Red Barber’s ashes now are part of the Florida soil,” he writes. “His body couldn't last, but there's not another thing about him that has to die.” (p. 231)