How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee by Bart D. Ehrman

Another fascinating book by Ehrman who, like me, is agnostic and was once "born again". I love his history and the facts that he garnered as a minister, clergy, educator. His realization that the stories and the God concepts do not hold together has not diminished his curiosity and his search for historical perspective. 

Religion is fascinating because we encounter it everywhere driving behavior or more likely justifying behavior. One religion demonizes the next, but in fact has no stronger claim. In fact religion is simply a belief in god that is expressed through choosing from 100s of options (including 100s within the existing primary religions).

The very Tower of Babel of conflicting views is enough to confuse any earnest believer, but it is through this morass that the author seeks to figure out how the preacher in Galilee became a god and when. Of course the search is thorough and takes us to dates, writings, and people who have disappeared from common knowledge, but in the end the answer is not certain and promises to not be certain in the future either.

Hemingway The Paris Years by Michael Reynolds

Hemingway in Paris is more than a companion to Shakespeare and Company and A Moveable Feast, it is almost the essential Hemingway book.  Reynold's amazed me with the details and the understanding that cover these years of writing that could be called the apprenticeship.  It details the difficulty of the writer in getting his voice and getting it published.

It is insightful in diagnosing writing and also the writer.  Hemingway is a mix of a good-time companion and a vicious antagonist.  He goes through friends with abandon and seldom recognizes the aid that the Lost Generation Parisians gave him.  Or rather, he used their help, and then because of his own strained sense of who he was, he turned on them.  He did not end friendships easily, he burnt them.

His wife was tremendously supportive, but the new life, like the new book will demand a new wife - lover.  It was appalling to see how Hemingway's psychosis could turn him to a brute.  It is hard to like him, but at the same time it was apparent that there was a mental condition that he could not control.  Like a contemporary - Edith Piaf - he was self destructive, but it was the people around him that would be harmed.  Like Edith, he rose from the ashes, but neither of them could really grasp what was true and worth thanking as they gave themselves to their art.

The love of war, bullfights, boxing, and drinking are all here.  As is his writing and rewriting, the help of Fitztgerald on two primary works, and the bitterness he had towards Ford Madox Ford for reasons no one could understand.

He was a prime player in the Lost Generation - Pound, Stein, Joyce, Dos Passos, Fitzgerald, MacLeish, Eliot and all the characters of the Paris scene move through the chapters.  They appear and disappear as they have been used up.

Insights into writing are liberally sprinkled in the text and a person wanting to write will do well to see what they are and how they were applied to Hemingway's work.   The text displays his short stories and then transitions to his novels which is the turning point in his career.  But through events that should have been happy, there is the demon that stalks his mind and mood and threatens to eventually overtaken Ernest - something that will take decades, but it will happen.