Focus on New Book! A Christian Case Against Donald Trump by Patrick Kahnke

 

So why did I immediately follow the author's announcement with the video of another pastor? Well, think about it! God is speaking to many in these days of turmoil and confusion. Most of us know that MAGA/Donald Trump is using religion as a tool...with some of those who claim to be Christians, accepting him as if he actually was...a...christian... If he had at some point during the past 8 years showed some sign on actually becoming a follower of Jesus, don't you think we would already know that? But, even as questions were specifically asked, he dodges the question because he can't answer anything about the Bible... Like, a simple question: What is your favorite scripture... No, he couldn't say, even the shortest one ever written--"Jesus Wept." Me, I like singing the Lord's Prayer and Psalm 23, but my two favorites are: "Be Still and Know that I am God." and "I will lift up my eyes unto the hills from which cometh my strength. My hope cometh in the name of the Lord."

So why this particular video by Pastor Tim? Because he is talking about discernment as a gift of the Spirit. When he mentioned smell, I immediately remembered two different times and places where the smell was so overpowering that I had to walk out... So, with this new contact, I want to explore my gifts to verify that I am NOT using God in any way; but to share His words as given to me...

But let's go on to the new book I am reading... The title is clear. I immediately wanted to read it. What I found was the book reading as if we were talking to a pastor about our concerns, our worries, about what has happened... So far, as I told him in a recent email, I've been highlighting most of the book--it is thankfully confirming what I have come to know... God is speaking to many to let them know, to confirm that what is happening is NOT of God...

One final note: I'll be spending quite a lot of time on this book. The author has recently moved but he has given me authority to use his words as I find important to share and we will be doing an interview sometime in the future, format undecided at this time.

PROLOGUE 

A Confrontation in Church 

It was a typical Sunday morning. I wrapped up my sermon and joined the worship band to lead the congregation in a final song. When we finished I dismissed the people with a blessing, then I turned my back to the pews to set my bass guitar on its stand. When I turned around a few seconds later I jumped, startled. A man from the congregation had bounded onto the platform and stood mere inches from me. I’m an introvert even by Minnesota standards, and I covet my personal space. He was a large, athletic guy who’d recently started attending the church, and he towered over me as he held out his hand. I took it and said, “Good morning!” But he wasn’t in a “good morning” sort of mood. He gripped my hand tightly and emphasized each word. 

“Pastor,” he said, “You. Need. To shape. Up.” 

“Oh?” This is my go-to response when a person says something strange or out of character. I’ve found that a simple “Oh?” invites them to rephrase and take another run at it. But he squeezed my hand harder and pulled me closer to himself, his eyes boring into me. “You need to start preaching the truth. You need to expose what’s going on in this country — no more excuses — no more of this watered-down stuff.” He’d said things like this before, insisting I speak out about this or that cultural or political issue roiling the country. But this felt different. This felt like intimidation, plain and simple. I don’t remember all his words, but I remember his anger. He glared down at me as he spoke and held my hand hostage until he’d had his say. 

He ended with something like, “I’m giving you one more chance. You need to start telling the truth. I’ll be watching what you say.” He released my hand, and I felt the blood surge into my fingers as they pulsed back to life. He walked away. I stood silently for a moment — puzzled — trying to make sense of what had just happened. This was December 2015, a few months before I retired from pastoral ministry. Over a dozen Republican candidates were gearing up for the primaries that would eventually make Donald Trump the GOP nominee for the 2016 presidential election. But I knew little about that. I couldn’t have picked most of those candidates out of a lineup. And that’s what bothered this fellow. He wanted me to care as deeply as he did about the hot-button cultural issues these candidates were hyping as they tried to position themselves within that lineup. I couldn’t have known, back then, just how appropriate the “picking out of a line-up” metaphor would become to describe the eventual winner. 

From Conservative Activist to Apolitical Pastor

As a pastor I never talked about politics in church, and I barely followed the news. It’s not that I didn’t care. Far from it. It’s because I used to care too much. Before I entered pastoral ministry, I’d been quite active in the pro-life movement. I spoke in churches and public schools on behalf of the unborn, and I volunteered to help elect pro-life candidates. In those years, I saw the Republican party as an ally in fighting for the sanctity of human life. And coming from a conservative Republican family, the marriage between my pro-life convictions and the GOP felt like a natural fit. 

I grew up in rural Minnesota. My parents were public school teachers, farmers, and devout Catholics. In Minnesota in the 1970s, those three identities usually meant a person would vote for the Democrats. But my parents had their own ideas. They followed their convictions to the Republican party, and I followed along. I don’t want to oversell my conservative leanings as a lad. After all, I was reading Tolkien and C.S. Lewis in elementary school, not William F. Buckley. But I did have a poster of Richard Nixon on my wall in second grade, and I did wish they’d all just leave him alone about the Watergate stuff. But the abortion issue, far more than my parents’ Republican leanings, drove my early political beliefs. 

I believed at a young age that unborn babies deserved the protection of law. I saw it as an issue of justice and basic human rights long before I could have expressed it in those terms. I studied the issue in more depth during my high school years. While other kids did normal things, such as their assigned homework, I worked on developing a “consistent human life ethic” that could guide my future political involvement. And I landed on some positions regarding the sanctity of human life back then that I still hold to this day. While I’m no longer convinced the realm of law and politics will solve our divisions regarding abortion, I still believe the unborn child is a human being. I still want desperately to do my part to foster a culture of respect for human life in our nation. I also developed some other pro-life views in high school that I still hold to this day. For instance, I still oppose capital punishment — not because I think it’s unwarranted in some cases or unbiblical, but because I’m skeptical that our system of justice can be trusted to enforce it in a fair manner. And I’ve always favored, from my earliest memory, some common-sense form of what we used to call “gun control.” I grew up in an extended family of sportsmen and NRA members. I had unfettered access to a small arsenal of hunting rifles, shotguns, and pistols from the time I was old enough to enroll in a gun safety class. And I still think it’s insane that our political system can’t find a way to protect the ownership of those sorts of weapons, while banning the ones that enable an untrained teenager to hold dozens of police officers at bay. 

As you’ve undoubtedly noticed, those three issues don’t sit well together in the platforms of either of our major political parties in America. So I found it difficult, from the start, to align my consistent pro-life ethic with support for one political party over the other. Even back then, they were drawing the battle lines in ways that made little sense from my perspective. In recent years I’ve come to see that I ignored, or explained away, whole sets of additional issues that I would now place under the banner of “pro-life.” But in 1984 the anti-abortion issue carried the most weight in my thinking, so I cast my first presidential vote for Ronald Reagan, who spoke directly to that concern. And because I agreed with him on the sanctity of life I found it easier to buy the rest of the package. And by casting that first vote and participating in Reagan’s landslide victory over Minnesota’s own Walter Mondale, I solidified my personal attachment to the GOP. 

Over the next several years I married Jane, my high school girlfriend, started a family, and grew deeper in my faith. And my pro-life convictions grew, as well. But even though I was raised as a Catholic, I didn’t link my views on the sanctity of life as tightly to my faith as one might imagine. In fact I remember arguing once with some friends who said my pro-life convictions were simply a way of pushing my faith onto others. I insisted that my religious beliefs had nothing to do with my concern for human life. And whether that was entirely true or not, I believed it when I said it. I didn’t start linking my pro-life sensibilities to my faith in a conscious way until January 1989, when I attended a service at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis on pro-life Sunday. 

Pastor John Piper delivered the best biblical defense that day that I’d heard for the sanctity of human life. I started attending his church because that message resonated with me, and I eventually joined the church and began to identify as an evangelical. But I don’t blame my involvement at that church for the narrow and strident political person I became during the next few years. In fact I think the preaching I heard at Bethlehem kept me from going off the rails, and it provided a framework for the much healthier approach I developed later on. I think my time at Bethlehem prepared me, years in advance, to say “no” to Donald Trump when he arrived on the scene. 

I respected the fact that Pastor Piper cared deeply about the sanctity of life, and he spoke about it and took personal actions to lift that value in the world. But he modeled a careful approach to preaching that kept the ultimate focus on God and God’s kingdom. I took his preaching as a warning against the idolatry of placing our hope in some ideal “Christian” kingdom on this earth. He called us to live and to speak prophetically within the culture, but not so we could seize the levers of earthly power. He challenged us to live sacrificially — to faithfully display the values of another kingdom. 

I bring this up because I want people to know this sort of teaching can be done, and done well. My six years at Bethlehem gave me a model for how believers can work passionately for justice in this world without placing our hope in building an earthly kingdom through political means. But that’s not to say I was the best listener in those years. Despite the warnings I’d heard about attaching too much hope to my political involvement, I still managed to get myself deeply entrenched in what I now see as a right-wing echo chamber. During a stint as a courier driver I got in the habit of listening to people like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity on the radio. And I started getting my written news from some of the early online message boards. These sites fed me article after article from a conservative perspective, and I read nothing to counter those arguments. So by the time I entered pastoral ministry I’d become deeply committed to the conservative movement and emotionally invested in the success of the Republican party. I was giving huge amounts of emotional and intellectual energy to people who made their living stirring up my anger for profit. 

I’m ashamed to admit how much of that scene I bought into. But by God’s grace, when I became a pastor I did recognize, early on, that I had to lay down my political involvement. It’s not that I immediately saw how distorted my thinking had become. I simply realized I couldn’t serve two masters. If I brought my partisanship to the pulpit it would endanger my call to serve the flock that Jesus had entrusted to my care. The most serious alarms went off in my spirit when I found that my political views were affecting how I saw the people in my congregation. I knew this couldn’t be right. It simply had to be wrong to find myself judging the people I’d been called to serve, simply because they came to different conclusions about politics. 

So I made a conscious choice to put my political views aside. That proved to be more difficult than I thought, though. Given the deep partisan hole I’d dug for myself, I found the only way to climb out was to stop following politics altogether. So I entered what became a nearly twenty-year, self-imposed exile from the daily news cycle. And that two-decade fast from politics worked wonders in my life. It detoxified my soul from the poisons I’d been taking in for so long. By the time I retired from ministry in 2016 I’d spent years focusing on the kingdom of God without the added layer of distortions I’d been getting from conservative media. 

So it’s no surprise that when I started paying attention to politics again, I took a hard pass on Donald Trump. But other than Trump, I still voted a straight Republican ticket in 2016 — back in the before times[1]. I was only starting to dip my toes back into politics and I didn’t realize how the pro-life movement was being manipulated to keep people like myself on a team that no longer suited us. So I voted third party for president that year, rather than voting for the pro-choice candidate, Hillary Clinton. I assumed most Christians agreed with me about Trump. I was naïve, back then. That was 2016 — the last year of the before times — the year when everything changed for so many of us. In 2016 my naivete died. I’d kept it alive for fifty years — a good run by anyone’s standards. It died hard — a long, drawn-out, painful awakening. But I do still have hope — and hope is far more useful than naivete. I’ve been promised that hope doesn’t disappoint.

Some of you may realize that the background of Patrick Kahnke is similar to mine. Not in content exactly but my background was in a small Christian Church where I was active all my life and I worked at the university for 37 years. My political involvement was minimal, if almost non-existent until hearing the Donald Trump tape about grabbing women... As Kahnke said, it was a painful awakening. Perhaps if I had paid a little more attention to... no, I'm not going there... My life was in the church and then in working in an honorable profession... I had welcomed Christ into my life at age 13 and have never lost contact, even if I was the one turning away from His guidance... But let's go on to the next part; I think it is an important statement of fact...

A Caution About the Lesser of Two Evils 

Before I go further, I have to say something I’ll repeat and expand on later in the book. Please resist the urge throughout this book to reflexively go to the lesser of two evils argument, or to focus on the deficiencies of the Democratic candidate. The only reason Donald Trump is the Republican nominee again this year is because conservative Christians overwhelmingly supported him — in the primaries. Christians tell me every day that they have no choice but to vote for Trump. “You don’t expect me to vote for the Democrat, do you?” All I can say is, poll after poll shows that conservative Christians preferred Donald Trump over every other candidate — in the primaries. 

We’ve got more going on here than the lesser of two evils. If we truly don’t want candidates like Trump to represent us we have to be willing to do two things. The first is to start caring about the primary elections as much as the extremists do. And second, if they do give us an extremist candidate, we must vote against that candidate in the general election. Otherwise we perpetuate a system that only feeds more extremism. I’ve walked the talk on this issue. I don’t care for Nikki Haley — I think she’s one of the more cynical politicians in the nation, as evidenced by her entirely predictable endorsement of Donald Trump in the end. Apparently she draws the line somewhere south of being repeatedly called “Birdbrain” and hearing her husband’s military service mocked by a man who turned in a doctor’s note about bone spurs to avoid Vietnam. Even so, she’s not Donald Trump. So I walked down to my primary polling station in St. Paul this spring, asked for a Republican ballot (which, in St. Paul, is a bit like ringing a bell in front of myself and crying “Leper! Leper!”) and I voted for Nikki Haley. 

I’m not a purist — I’m not an idealogue — I’m willing to vote for imperfect candidates. But Donald Trump is not a merely “imperfect” candidate. He poses a serious threat to the nation and to the Christians who fall for his appeals. Voting for Trump is exponentially more corrosive to our conscience than voting for any other candidate on the ballot. 

Trump is not different by degree from the rest of the imperfect candidates we choose between, every time we vote. He’s different in kind. That’s why his superfans love him. Heaven help us if we let Donald Trump’s superfans set the direction for Christians in America. 

Why Christians Must Oppose Donald Trump 

The issues that drove my parishioner to confront me aren’t new. Donald Trump didn’t invent them. Trump has used those issues to capture the support of believers. He’s learned that as long as he gives us what we want on some cultural issues, we’ll work hard to keep him in power — no matter how depraved and abusive his tactics might be. 

Followers of Jesus aren’t designed for such twisted arrangements. A vote for Donald Trump is not morally neutral. It comes at a devastating cost to our inner person. For many followers of Jesus their first vote for Trump pricked against their conscience. I know this because they’ve told me. Some even felt a little dirty, like they were slipping behind the curtain into a peep show rather than a voting booth. It felt a bit humiliating, but they decided that voting against their beliefs on some cultural issues would have felt worse. Many of them watched Trump’s actions as president, though, and vowed not to make the same choice in 2020. And some followed through on that vow. 

But many others listened to their friends and spiritual leaders who rationalized Trump’s corruption and lies, and they stayed on the team. And by the second time they voted for him they could almost convince themselves that, just maybe, in some three-dimensional chess version of kingdom politics, all their misgivings and compromises might someday add up to having served God by voting for Trump. 

My fear for many Christians in America this year is that the third time will be the point that confirms their trajectory. I don’t know how followers of Jesus come back from voting for Trump a third time, after everything we’ve seen. I’m not talking about anyone’s salvation — I’m talking about the serious damage it does to our conscience to suppress what we know to be true. Donald Trump demands allegiance to a false version of reality. Jesus demands that we walk in truth — He is the Truth. 

That dual allegiance can’t coexist in a believer unless we do some serious, destructive work to divide our own mind. It's a soul-destroying practice, dividing our mind, but I get why we do it. I understand the problem — and I think we can fix it, together. The problem is that we’re operating out of a false view of the kingdom of God and a false understanding of our mission in this world. Our minds are divided because we’re trying to make sense of a broken, faithless theology. We’re doing our best to live in a way we’ve been taught, but we didn’t learn that way from Jesus.

Some wealthy and powerful political and religious leaders have gotten their wealth and power by keeping us confused about these things. As long as we remain confused about our calling in this world, Christians will continue to empower people like Donald Trump. And that’s a problem. 

The world knows that followers of Jesus are Donald Trump’s most important voting bloc. When we vote for him we confirm what the world believes about us — and more importantly, what they believe about our faith. 

We prove the tight association between Christians and a demagogue who is understandably feared and reviled by a strong majority of our neighbors. Trump claims to speak for us. And when we vote for him we tell the world that he’s right. But does he speak for you?

Can you see why I've highlighted almost everything I've read thus far? For me, this is God's giving me, personally, a confirmation that everything I've believe was correct... He's provided this book that says it is alright to question, even when my own family said I was wrong... He's confirmed that he too questions how this could have happened, while not (yet?) giving us an answer... But one thing I do know, this man is not only a Christian--he's a follower of Jesus! And He believes what Jesus died for... and it didn't include bringing religion into politics for power... I know that there are others out there who are in the same situation, not knowing whether to speak out...Read this book, I already know it will help and respond to your concerns.

God Bless

Gabby

And Don't Forget to Share...Click Below

The Saddest Book I've Ever Read - All in the Family: The Trumps and How We Got This Way by Fred C.Trump III

 

From a very early age, my grandfather had a keen appreciation for the value of hype. ...was the Trump Show Boat, a massive yacht adorned with giant TRUMP signs. Every time the loudspeaker played “The Star-Spangled Banner,” sandy men and women would stand up at their beach towels and salute, according to The New York Times, putting the Trump company firmly on the side of American patriotism.

FREDDIE’S DEAD One day in the future, my uncle Donald would shock the world by winning an important election. But let me point out that he wasn’t the first member of the Trump family to confound the experts with a stunning victory at the polls. That would be me. And I have to give at least some of the credit to my restroom hand towels. The paper kind. The ones that roll out of a boxy metal dispenser on the lavatory wall. I knew all my opponents in the race for Student Council president. They were friends of mine. That’s what happens at a small school like Kew-Forest, where I’d been with some of my classmates for the full twelve years. But that didn’t mean our race for Student Council president wasn’t highly competitive. To have a chance, I knew I’d need to reach my fellow students in unexpected ways. Something more than colorful posters in the hallway. Something more than a promise of less homework or improved lunchroom cuisine. Brand-savvy me took a low-tech approach. After school, I unlocked the big rolls of paper towels in the student bathrooms. I took the rolls home and handwrote over and over on each of them, “FRED FOR PREZ… FRED FOR PREZ… FRED FOR PREZ.” I must have written that slogan a few hundred times. Such dedication. Early in the morning, I put the rolls back in before anyone noticed they were missing. All day long, my campaign rolled out… literally. To lock in the brand for the rest of the school, I got a couple of giant poster boards and placed them on the sixteen-by-sixteen-foot wall at the entryway, right where everyone came through the door. You couldn’t miss them. FRED FOR PREZ No exclamation points. Just clean, clear, very accessible. 

Clearly, bashfulness was not a trait I was going to learn from my family or my city. Our neighbors were teachers, civil servants, salesmen, office managers, and small-business people… all white. We had Irish, Italians, Germans, Poles, a few Jews. Not any Blacks or Latinos and not too many Asians either. Not then. Over the years, racial steering would become a point of bitter controversy at some of my grandfather’s buildings and the subject of a sweeping Justice Department civil-rights complaint. The residents certainly knew what was going on. In fact, the singer Woody Guthrie, who lived in a Trump apartment in the 1950s, wrote a song called “Old Man Trump” about the discrimination he witnessed...

 “Cracklin’ Rosie” by Neil Diamond is the song that sticks in my mind. It wasn’t like we actually did anything. But there were all these people, enjoying each other’s company, having a wonderful time. I’m not saying the Gelusos were a perfect family. I’m sure there’s no such thing. They probably had their issues like anyone. But I knew this much after one night of staying there: They couldn’t have been any more different from the Trumps. I got my wish, and stayed there until my parents got back on Sunday night.

Okay, maybe my slogan lacked the universality of Donald’s “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN,” a phrase that, by the way, had also been used by Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and Hillary Clinton over the years. In any case, mine worked. When all the votes were counted, I came out on top. These people knew who I really was. They’d been with me for years. They’d seen me up close and personal, going through all kinds of stuff, good and bad. Kew-Forest hadn’t been able to tame my uncle Donald. But the people there gave me room to fly. Not too many people can say this, I know. But high school was a great time for me. It really was the culmination of all I’d been through so far, emphasizing the good parts and getting past some of the bad. Learning to navigate such a rambunctious extended family. Surviving my parents’ divorce. Being there for my mother and sister. Focusing on my father’s many good traits even as he had trouble taming his demons. 

This was Queens in the early 1970s—Archie Bunker, the aftermath of the riots, the war on drugs, and a thousand ethnic punch lines. “Brown Sugar” and “Everyday People” were on the radio. Hip-hop was busting out of the Bronx from pioneers like DJ Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash. The Ramones hadn’t officially assembled yet, but Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee, and Tommy had all graduated (or not) from Forest Hills High. Things were more out in the open then. More raw. Less PC. Back then, people said all kinds of crude, thoughtless, prejudiced things. I don’t need to list them here. In one way or another, maybe everyone in Queens was a racist then. Like many things in life, it was partly a matter of situation and degree. I never heard my grandfather use the N-word. Then again, he did sometimes say schvartze, the Yiddish slur for Black people, and his tenants were uniformly white. That had to mean something, didn’t it? This was a big company. My grandfather did not review every rental application. But the message filtered down clearly from above, starting at the central office on Avenue Z and landing with the building managers and rental agents in the field: These apartments were for white people. By the light of today, it’s impossible to defend any of that, and really, why would anyone want to try? But if we are truly going to understand these family members and their attitudes, they need to be evaluated in the context of changing times. Whatever you want to say about the Trumps who came before me, you also have to say about many others around them—their city, their nation, and their world. Those are the limitations of being from anywhere. Is that an excuse? No, it isn’t. But it also can’t be ignored. No matter what else was happening, the explosive subject of race was never far behind. So instead of making sweeping generalizations or tossing labels around, let me tell you what I know and what I saw. When I was growing up, I never heard that my grandfather had attended an anti-Black rally as a young man. That never came up at the family dinner table. He never mentioned it, and no one else in the family did, if they were aware of it at all. But if you google “Fred Trump” and “race,” which I have done, you can read all about Memorial Day 1927 and a violent demonstration in Queens. “KLANSMEN RIOT IN QUEENS,” declares a report in The New York Times. “KLAN ASSAILS POLICEMEN,” a second Times headline reads. “Fist Fights in Jamaica.” “SCENE AS POLICE AND KLAN CLASH IN QUEENS PARADE,” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle announces above a dramatic photo of white-robed Klansmen with an American flag on Queens Boulevard. “Officer at left is about to swing his nightstick over the head of white-sheeted knight, whose friends rushed to assist, causing a free-for-all with two auto loads of policemen,” the caption says. According to the Times, among those who were arrested that day was one Fred C. Trump of 175-24 Devonshire Road, which the 1930 U.S. Census pinpointed as my grandfather’s home address. He’d have been twenty-one at the time. But all these years later, some important details are impossible to pin down. The Times doesn’t say if my grandfather was a member or supporter of the racist Ku Klux Klan. The Times doesn’t say if he was just a bystander or someone who was swept up in the crowd. It doesn’t say exactly what he was accused of, only that he “was discharged.” And the city police records from the incident can’t be found. Another article, in the long-forgotten Daily Star, says Fred Trump was detained “on a charge of refusing to disperse from a parade when ordered to do so,” so that might have been it.

(Fred II)It wasn’t that he might already have developed the reflex of us-versus-them. It was that a young Fred Trump, who was work-work-work-all-the-time, would ever make the effort to attend a political rally as a twenty-one-year-old. Something must have motivated him to slip away from one of his construction sites. Normally, he wasn’t public-spirited enough to bother... 

It’s surprising, isn’t it? Even people who are struggling, as my father was, can have a positive effect on those around them. My father certainly did on me. With a deep reservoir of patience, he taught me how to drive. I always felt welcome to stay with him, wherever he was living at the time. Though his pilot’s career failed to take off the way he dreamed it would, he shared his love of flying with me and delighted in watching me embrace the airborne thrills that he had. It started when we had that place out in Montauk, a long-ago casualty of the divorce. Back then, he had a Cessna 172. He taught me all about that plane. By the time I was fifteen, he was picking me up early in the morning at our apartment in Jamaica and driving me out to the airfield in Islip, Long Island, for lessons with a flight instructor he knew. The instructor put me through all my drills. He recorded everything I did in a leather-bound training log, carefully initialing each new milestone.

All of this felt profoundly important. I couldn’t imagine not doing everything possible to give my son the best opportunities, and anything I did, Lisa did that-times-ten. All of which is to say there were days that fighting with my family over money seemed like the least important thing in the world. I recognize that’s probably not the attitude to bring to a hard-fought legal battle, especially when the people on the other side had the last name Trump. I’m just describing how I felt.

One day, the instructor said to me: “Let’s fly out to Brookhaven.” Brookhaven was a decommissioned Navy base with long, broad runways. We took off. We landed. As usual, I handled some of it, and my flight instructor handled the rest. It was all going smoothly, when he said to me after the third or fourth landing: “Pull over there.” And he started to hop out. “Where are you going?” I asked him. “You’re going to solo,” he announced. That’s when it hit me. “Wait a second. Do you know I’m fifteen?” “What?” he said, incredulous. I guess he didn’t. “You’re fifteen? How did you get your medical clearance?” Actually, I knew exactly how that had happened. My dad knew a guy—the chief medical officer at the FAA, who also happened to own a horse ranch in Montauk. The FAA doctor signed something that put me in the cockpit, no more questions asked. My instructor didn’t like the sound of any of that. “Kid,” he said to me, suddenly sounding all serious and official, “let’s go back to Islip. We can’t do this now.” I was so disappointed. With those jumbo runways, Brookhaven would have been an ideal spot to solo for the first time, like learning to drive in a Walmart parking lot before the store opened for the day. And I certainly felt old enough. I’d done my drills. My father had taught me a lot. But I knew it would be only a few more months. I just needed to be patient, still not one of my greatest skills. I knew I’d be back. And I was

I had no vote on the escalator ride of June 16, 2015. No one in the family did. Donald had been talking about the need for him to jump into the race for president. But until he did it, I wasn’t totally sure that he would. Once he was in, he was in. He put on his show for America the same way he’d been putting on a show with The Apprentice for the viewers of NBC. He chose the timing. Midday on a Tuesday instead of Thursday night. He chose the locale. The lobby of Trump Tower instead of the boardroom. He chose the music. Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World” instead of the Apprentice theme song, “For the Love of Money” by The O’Jays. (Neil Young would later sue the Trump campaign to stop using his music.) He chose his costars: Melania at his side on the down-flowing escalator. His kids at the bottom, waiting for him. Oh, and he chose the extras too: loyal staffers, reporters, and some out-of-work actors who were paid fifty bucks to wave Trump signs and make a lot of noise in the lobby, plus some tourists and New Yorkers decked out in MAGA gear. All of them were there for the spectacle. I don’t think too many of them thought they were looking at the next president of the United States.

After years of prodding from the family and his friends—and maybe some soul-searching of his own—my father decided to give rehab a try. Maryanne drove him out to the Carrier Clinic in Belle Mead, New Jersey, a supportive gesture she would find many occasions to mention in the future. The place sounded nice enough, “a safe, compassionate, respectful environment, set on a beautiful, 100+ acre country setting, in the foothills of the Sourland Mountains.” I got a postcard my dad sent the day he arrived, saying he was doing great, was enjoying the countryside and was ready to take a break from the booze. The very next day, he left the residential rehab facility and never went back. They say you have to be ready. My dad would never be ready. It was heartbreaking. It was like he had just given up. There weren’t many secrets in the Trump family. Who in our family had the self-control to keep a secret? Whatever people were thinking—about each other, about anything—it just came right out in the open. “Your dad couldn’t do it,” Donald said the next time I saw him. That was true, though I’m still not sure why his younger brother felt the need to rub it in like that. Not long after that, my father and I were in the car together. I was driving him back to my grandparents’ house, where he was staying at the time. We were just talking about stuff, nothing important enough that I can even remember. But I can recall exactly where we were—on Highland Avenue and 168th Street, a short walk from the F Train station—and as long as I live, I will never forget what my father said to me that day. “You know,” he said, “you have inherited a bad gene.” A bad gene? What was he getting at? He didn’t wait for me to ask. “You have to be very careful about drinking,” he said. “Never forget that.” I was still seventeen, but I knew everything he had gone through with alcohol. How it had drowned his dreams and narrowed his horizons and how hard it had been to shake. 

It’s time to turn the page. Write a new chapter. Break the cycle. Pick whichever analogy you find most comforting. It’s time—long past time—to move beyond the past. It may be “the end of the world as we know it,” as the R.E.M. song goes, but I am ready for the line… “and I feel fine.” One Trump may not be able to redefine the brand that’s been breaking news for so long, but I won’t be changing my name, and I will no longer be the quiet private citizen. We have some things to be proud of in this family and so much left to do. A new generation is coming along. A promising generation. My children’s generation. Whether Maryanne was or wasn’t cruel, what Donald did or should have done, the fact that Grandpa looked down on Freddie’s high-flying dreams—those were the dramas that defined earlier decades. They don’t need to define our future. Enough, already. Let it rest. My generation and the ones that follow, we didn’t launch these hostilities. My children and their cousins, they weren’t even born yet. I appreciate whatever connections I have with my cousins. I am sure that keeping a balance of family and privacy is extremely challenging for Eric, Donnie, and Ivanka. They also know what it’s like to be responsible parents and how that becomes what you work to protect most. As a parent, we get to choose what we carry and what we bury. Over the past couple of years, I have made some changes in my life, many of them propelled by my role as a father. I have begun to face an issue I’d been avoiding, a challenge in my own life that had helped to wreck my father’s future, a challenge he had explicitly warned me about. Alcohol. I think my father was right: We really may have “a bad gene” in this family. I came to the conclusion that, like my father, I was drinking too much and I wasn’t always able to control it. In the fall of 2023, I decided I’d had enough. It wasn’t easy stopping. I thought about it for a long time. Lisa and my children had been encouraging me, sometimes quite forcefully. And I am proud to say I am sober. For all he went through, I believe my father would be proud of me. I make no vows about forever. I say what others have said who’ve preceded me down this road to recovery. I say, “One day at a time.” After almost four decades in the commercial real-estate world, I began winding down my career. I’d worked for terrific companies. Been part of some fascinating deals. Spent an awful lot of time and energy to build a nice lifestyle and support my family. All that was great. I am proud that my career reached such levels. At the same time, I was starting to reappraise what was most important to me. Did I really want to spend the next ten years making commercial real-estate deals? My focus, my passion, seemed to be shifting somewhere else, toward things that felt more gratifying and more important to me. As Grandpa told those people at the Horatio Alger gala: “You must like what you do.” That, ultimately, is the road to successful living. Wouldn’t we have all been better off if Grandpa had applied that rule without exception?

I never thought that drinking was my father’s main problem. His issues went deeper than that. There was all that stuff with his father and his middle brother and all the expectations inside the family. There was the way he was pushed into and then out of the family business. The fact that he’d never quite been able to find his own way. The drinking, I was convinced, started out as a way to suppress all that and to ease his fear and anxiety. But if you drink enough—and you’re inclined in that direction—the drinking can also become the problem all on its own. I still marvel at the courage it must have taken for him to say that to me, after the price he had already paid. “Thanks,” I told him simply. I would take his warning to heart. In the years to come, we’d have to see if I could also put it into action. There was no doubt what I’d be doing after high school. My parents expected it. My grandparents expected it. All my teachers expected it. In our senior class of twenty-nine at the Kew-Forest School, everyone was going to college. Harvard, Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins—the fat envelopes came from all kinds of fancy places. My cousin David was already off at the University of Chicago. My great buddy Michael Siegel, who’d been in my class since first grade, was bound for Amherst. As I’ve mentioned, I certainly wasn’t the scholar in my immediate family—Mary had that all sewn up—or in my 1980 graduating class. But I was definitely going to college. I applied to a bunch of schools, and Rollins College was one of the ones that accepted me. Rollins had a beautiful campus amid the palm trees and red-brick walkways of Winter Park, Florida. Olympic swimming pool. High-dive platform. A campus where you could enjoy every imaginable sport under a blazing Florida sun. To me, Rollins was the Harvard of the South. Ah, there’s nothing quite like slalom runs around alligators or hitting the wake on trick skis on Lake Virginia. I had some really good professors there, who continued to encourage my love of reading and history, watering the seeds planted so painstakingly by my great teachers at Kew-Forest. I was thrilled to be on my own in Florida and thrilled to be at Rollins. In a way, it was like going to camp on Cape Cod, except that I spent time in the library and my stay could conceivably last for years. When I didn’t make the varsity soccer team my freshman year, my dad tried to soothe my disappointment. “You’re going from a small pond to a big pond,” he told me. Even though Rollins wasn’t that big a pond, it was a whole lot larger than Kew-Forest. Once I was away at college, my dad really began to deteriorate. The alcohol wasn’t only sabotaging his life plans now—it was also robbing his health. He was sick a lot, in and out of the hospital, and not feeling so hot even when he was back at his apartment. When he felt a little better, he did small maintenance chores at some of the family apartment buildings, but as the year rolled on, that became even more sporadic. I visited him whenever I was back in Queens for a long weekend or a holiday, and my dad always seemed excited to see me. Though his energy level was just above lethargic and his face was pale, he rallied whenever I appeared. We talked about all kinds of things. What I was studying in college. How I liked Florida. Any news about my grandparents. How the weather had been. As usual, we didn’t talk a lot of sports. He certainly had no interest in sports other than fishing and boating. Every way and every day, he remained his own person. The black sheep of the family. The adamant free speaker. Not a member of anyone’s tribe. At the same time, he certainly didn’t seem inclined to change the behavior that was so obviously destructive to him. Really, what incentive did he have? His marriage was over. His children were growing into adults. What exactly did he have to get straight for? His pilot dreams were ancient history. He’d already made clear how he felt about being part of the Trump family business. A lot of this was in his mind. But in his mind, he was truly trapped with no way out. He got occasional calls from his Lehigh fraternity brothers, but when I was there, I never saw anyone from the family stopping by. I got the strong impression that their visits were few and far between. He did mention Rob, which made perfect sense to me. Donald or Maryanne must have assigned that task to him. “You go visit Freddie.” That way, the other siblings could feel like they had discharged any duty and didn’t have to feel guilty about leaving their ailing brother alone. He asked about Mary, but I don’t think they were in much contact by then. She never said to me, “I’m going to see Dad,” and he never said, “I saw Mary.” They both missed out, but I didn’t press either one of them. By the start of that summer between my first and second years at Rollins, his hospital stays were getting more frequent. I visited him at Jamaica Hospital, the well-endowed medical center that for decades had been a favorite charity of my grandparents. That’s where Donald and several other family members were born. That’s where my grandmother went whenever she needed to. Jamaica Hospital even had a Trump Pavilion for Nursing and Rehabilitation. I’d driven past it hundreds of times when I was on the Van Wyck. 

Now it felt different. My father was there in a battle for his life. But that didn’t mean my father had lost his spirit. He never did. Even at the lowest point, some part of that spirit still shone. When he wasn’t in the hospital, he was often staying at my grandparents’ house. Not in his childhood bedroom. In the attic. Where Mary and I used to stay sometimes as kids when we spent the night. There were a couple of twin beds up there that looked like army cots. To me, this felt like the low point. I visited him several times, but I’m not sure how many of my relatives climbed the stairs to look in on him. As far as I knew, the only other person who stayed in the attic was the housekeeper. Until my dad. He didn’t complain about it. Not to me, at least. But here he was, a grown man, living on and off in his parents’ house—and he didn’t even get one of the bedrooms. It was a big, fancy mansion, but these were not fancy accommodations, though later on as he deteriorated, he did move for a little while into Rob’s old room. To me, the scene did not feel right. And soon, he was back in the hospital. That’s where he was the next time I went to see him, which was January 1981. After we caught up, he handed me a bank withdrawal slip, already filled out. “Go to Chase,” he said. “Get this amount of money. I want you to buy a Polaroid camera.” I was thinking, Great, a camera… I could sure use one of those during the three weeks I’ll spend overseas as part of my second semester. I went to the bank like he asked me to. I found a store that sold Polaroid cameras. I chose one of the nicer models and brought it back to the hospital. My father seemed like he’d been waiting for me. “Okay,” he said, “there’s a young girl down the hall. She has cancer. I don’t think she’s going to last much longer. And she wants a camera. The nurse will show you her room. Give the camera to the girl.” Wow. Here I was, thinking, Oh, boy, I’ll be taking this camera with me to Europe. But my father’s gesture was so moving, I didn’t mind that he had a different plan. This was even better. Beneath all the pain and torment, yes, that indomitable spirit still shone. That told you everything you needed to know about Fred Trump Jr. 

The life was slipping out of him. His biggest dreams had crashed and burned. He had every reason to feel bitter and disappointed and mad. And yet… and yet… he still had the deep-down instinct to care for someone else—the underdog, as he would say. There was no point at which he couldn’t take the time to be kind to another person. There was so much love and passion inside him. Despite it all, he was just a good, good guy. September 27, 1981. A couple of weeks into my sophomore year at Rollins. The phone rang in the common room of my dorm. It was 6:15 in the morning. “Trump!” a bleary voice called out. “It’s for you.” Mena Bonnewitz was my mom’s first cousin and my “surrogate mother” while I was at Rollins. She and her husband, Van, lived in Orlando, about twenty minutes from campus. I had known them and their kids all my life. They were a great Catholic family. When I came down to Florida for college, they kept a friendly eye on me. They often had me to their house for Sunday dinner. They tried to stay in touch. Still, this was unusual. They didn’t normally call at 6:15 a.m. “Hi, Fred. It’s Mena. There’s an art exhibition going on at Rollins this morning. Sheila and I are going to go over there. Can we stop by?” “Okay,” I said. “Sure.” Something was strange about all this. I hit the shower, took an aspirin, and drowned my eyes with eye drops. I didn’t overthink what was going on. I’d long since learned not to go looking for trouble. If trouble had my name on it, it would surely find me soon enough. Standing in the door of my dorm room, that’s where Mena and her daughter broke the news. “Fred,” Mena said right away, “your dad passed away last night.” Instead of telling me over the telephone, I guess my mom had asked her cousin to do it in person. If I needed an embrace or a shoulder or anything in that moment, Mom had made sure I’d be taken care of. I heard her words without really processing them. I just kind of let the message sink in. I took a hard breath and gritted my teeth. I wasn’t rattled exactly. I was numb. Okay, I thought, at least I won’t have to go to an art exhibit. After the time I’d spent with my father that year, I can’t say the news was a big surprise. Standing there in the door of my dorm room, all I really knew was that I had lost my father and my life would never be quite the same again. “We have a reservation on a flight for you. I know you’ll want to get up there.” I did. I wasn’t looking forward to anything that was about to happen, but I couldn’t imagine not being there. And then there was this: The flight from Orlando to JFK was on a TWA Boeing 707, the exact aircraft my dad had trained on. He loved the 707 and knew every inch of it, from its swept-wing design to its Pratt & Whitney JT3C turbojet engines to its six-abreast seating in economy. I spent the whole two hours and forty minutes thinking how sad it was that my father wasn’t in the cockpit. What might have been.

~~~

Writing this book was probably the hardest thing that Fred C. Trump III had ever done. Yet he did it so very wonderfully. This is a man I admire for a number of reasons; I think I would enjoy meeting him. In fact, I would enjoy meeting his sister, Mary, as well (see her book in the right column). From a personality standpoint, I am more like Mary, as displayed in her book and as well as Fred described her... We have both been hurt by family decisions and find it hard to do anything but withdraw... Fred, on the other hand, has continued to strive to maintain a relationship with his living family, looking toward the future. His grace surely has been given to him by God...

Or perhaps because of his love for his father and for his own family. One thing is clear. Fred Trump III loves and cares for people deeply. He has seen the worst of them and still strives to look to the future, whatever that might be.

In that respect alone, I highly recommend you read this surprisingly open and honest autobiography. Some of you may have seen him on the news... such as this one: There are others as well

"I don't know...he doesn't recognize you...maybe you should let him Die!!!!!"

Frankly, just having that one quote would be enough to clarify just how different the republican candidate, again, for president is from most of us, who find this "one statement" repulsive. Believe me, there are other similar quotes, especially when Fred and his sister were cut out of the will even though his father had been named in the original one (which meant that on his death, his heirs would inherit).

I'd like to center, instead, on Fred's family life. His father loved to be outside and never wanted to work in the family business. Fred, II, chose early in his life to become a pilot and spent his time preparing for and getting his license. Readers will discover how "Family" felt about his decision.

About the same as how they treated his wife, both before and after they were married. Fred II soon was driven into an alcoholic life from which he ultimately died in his early 40s. They had two children: Fred III and Mary.

Without going into details, these two individuals finally were forced to go to court to sue for their rightful share of their grandfather's will. They never got what that should have been. It got worse when their grandmother became involved...

Somehow, perhaps because they had already been somewhat excluded from Family, Fred III became close to his grandmother and many of his cousins. He would ride his bike over when very few people were home and enjoy a growing closeness. Fred III shares about his career decisions, and rejoicing as his family grew to three children... Readers will come to know him as a loving husband and father, recognizing the flaws of Family, but never to the extent that it proved detrimental to his family.

That occurred when their third child began to have spasms shortly after birth. Many doctors had to be involved, striving to determine exactly what the issue was. They never did. But they were able to determine enough to start treating him and take their son, William, home. Given the unknown prognosis, a full-time nurse had to be with him to prevent/help if he began spasms again. Fred and his wife could not handle everything that needed to be done, including the care of their two other children.

Yet, readers are left with the feeling of joy--that William felt and gave to the family. After all that was happening, William loved interacting with others. He was open, friendly and loving... this is a lovely and heartwarming part of the book that should not be missed... Because, no matter who your Family is, all individuals need love and also need to share love... This just may be the most important book you will read in your life...

Not because of the politics of it all...

But because of the story of a loving family who fully succeeded and flourished to ensure they continue moving forward in life, helping William, and others like him, to love and be loved. Probably one of the most inspirational stories I've known...

That's why the contrast of their need to fight with Family is so stark--so bleak--and yet, so fierce! A remarkable story that MUST BE READ!

GABixlerReviews

It turns out William and I share a deep love for music. He has a collection of stuffed animals and musical cards that play classic rock songs, his own big fuzzy album collection. From Bob Marley’s “One Love” to Peter Gabriel’s “Road to Joy,” neither one of us ever tires of our music therapy. William spends many of his waking hours in a wheelchair he can’t move by himself. He stretches and stands with assistance, and it’s crucial that he does. Like all of us, he needs daily exercise to keep his arms and legs strong. He needs his muscle memory, and staying in motion helps with that. But it takes a small team, all synced together, to pull it off. He loves taking rides on his adaptive bicycle and hanging out in his lounge chair. He loves swimming. He’d be in a pool every day if he could. We’ve figured out how to rig a special life vest with noodles so he can navigate on his own, with one of us in the water beside him. He loves that weightless buoyancy and knowing he can go wherever he wants to. The way my father and I loved to fly, William loves to swim. We often “fly him through the pool.” The water makes him feel like he can do anything. Did I mention something that William inherited from our family? No, not my adamant opinions. It’s his heart-melting blue eyes. Those eyes are vitally important. They are a big part of how we communicate. Whether it’s a cry for help or him saying, “I’m okay, Dad” or the whole world of possibilities in between, I can read my son’s eyes, and he can read ours. I wished that I’d been able to explain that to Donald, when he said William didn’t recognize me. William’s tells are subtle, but they are there. Though I often greet him with, “Hey, bud-bud, how was your day?,” there is no, “It was okay, Dad,” and off to the fridge. I still ask the question, but I’ve learned to pause and, in that moment, listen differently. I look for the signs from a nonverbal boy—his face, his posture, his expressions, his eyes. I’ve learned to “speak” that language too. William operates through gestures, expressions, and assistive technology. Though he doesn’t have the motor skills for an iPad, tech is more and more a part of his daily independence. Voice-output and eye-gaze devices. Switch access that can turn on a blender or play a game, a book, or a song. All this tech is arriving rapidly. Almost nothing for William comes without effort and assistance. He had to learn how to bite and chew. For William, all food still needs to be blended or finely chopped and balanced on a spoon, a spoon he cannot hold himself. The taste-and-swallow process is dependent on caregivers. We take the victories as they come. When William could eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, we were ecstatic. When he could sit and enjoy a chopped-and-prepared Thanksgiving meal specifically for him, our whole family was thrilled. We’re always asking, “Did William get enough to eat?… Did he get to the toilet?… Is his jacket warm enough?” This goes on forever. He can’t tell us when something is broken, whether it’s his bone or his heart. We are the chief investigators of all things William, and it’s made us incredibly intuitive. Lisa calls this intuition her blessing and her curse. It means she sometimes feels like she’s interrogating the very people who are responsible for his care 24/7. Trust is precious, and it is slowly earned. Trust can also be lost in an instant. Instead of focusing on his disabilities, we try to focus on what William can do, constantly encouraging and nurturing his abilities and loving him with all our might.

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2015 Pulitzer Prize Recipient for Literature Novel by Anthony Doerr--All the Light We Cannot See--Banned! In My Home State!

In August 1944 the historic walled city of Saint-Malo, the brightest jewel of the Emerald Coast of Brittany, France, was almost totally destroyed by fire…. Of the 865 buildings within the walls, only 182 remained standing and all were damaged to some degree.           —Philip Beck 

It would not have been possible for us to take power or to use it in the ways we have without the radio.       —Joseph Goebbels Zero  7 August 1944

When we try to erase our history by banning books, by declaring that they are "woke" or just because your political party tells you to, there is something seriously wrong, in my opinion. For me, it didn't take this book or the thousands of others I've read, to know what early Americans did to the Indigenous people who occupied most of America from early times... It didn't take this book for me to know what happened during WWII and how people were being treated by the Nazi Regime... Nor does it take any of the recent books I've read about what has happened in America that has led to a divide so deeply created through political power and subterfuge... What a book does for me is to allow me to either reaffirm what I have seen or studied... Or, to read of different opinions that may help me better understand my neighbors...

As an aside, this book has a long playlist, so I'm inserting as I can...I was somewhat surprised that many of the songs that have remained popular actually were written prior to WWII! Actually, the playlist was longer; however, when I start to search for the songs that were being used, there was a warning...noting that these were German historical marches and had nothing to do with Nazis... I decided not to use them given that the book indeed talked about Hitler's call to war... If interested, they are available on YouTube under German's WWII videos.

If you enjoy historical novels, this book is a must-read. Perhaps you have already read it or know about the movie (several videos provided here for information...) Whether or not I later see the movie, I am thankful that I read the book first. There is so much in this book that needs to be considered--to remember. My guess is that the magic cannot possibly be demonstrated in a movie... And, it appears that the relationship between the two teens might be emphasized in the movie. Indeed, I was shocked, after reading the book description and videos, that their meeting did not take place until very late in the book! My anticipation had been stoked so much so that I kept waiting for that meeting!

I wasn't necessarily disappointed that the emphasis was on these two people, but I believe the hype was misleading. On the other hand, readers will be immediately caught up in what happened when the Germans (BTW I am of German descent on both sides of my parents.) It was important for me to read this particular book. I have read many about the Holocaust, and at least one set in Poland. Having this book set in France gave me new information that I may not have ever known. You see, my father worked in the mines and was killed before I was born. My mother was left a widow with four children...

It was in France, in the Walled citadel of Saint Malo, that this book was set. And, why was it taken over? Because there was a mine there and soon the residents of the town were being forced to work in that mine while being treated cruelly and with little food. Certainly the book brought me an awareness that if my family had not come to America, my father might have been in one of the mines in Europe that were being confiscated by Hitler in order to control the world that he planned to conquer! 

Tuesday after Tuesday she fails. She leads her father on six-block detours that leave her angry and frustrated and farther from home than when they started. But in the winter of her eighth year, to Marie-Laure’s surprise, she begins to get it right. She runs her fingers over the model in their kitchen, counting miniature benches, trees, lampposts, doorways. Every day some new detail emerges—each storm drain, park bench, and hydrant in the model has its counterpart in the real world. Marie-Laure brings her father closer to home before making a mistake. Four blocks three blocks two. And one snowy Tuesday in March, when he walks her to yet another new spot, very close to the banks of the Seine, spins her around three

times, and says, “Take us home,” she realizes that, for the first time since they began this exercise, dread has not come trundling up from her gut. Instead she squats on her heels on the sidewalk. The faintly metallic smell of the falling snow surrounds her. Calm yourself. Listen. Cars splash along streets, and snowmelt drums through runnels; she can hear snowflakes tick and patter through the trees. She can smell the cedars in the Jardin des Plantes a quarter mile away. Here the Metro hurtles beneath the sidewalk: that’s the Quai Saint-Bernard. Here the sky opens up, and she hears the clacking of branches: that’s the narrow stripe of gardens behind the Gallery of Paleontology. This, she realizes, must be the corner of the quay and rue Cuvier. Six blocks, forty buildings, ten tiny trees in a square. This street intersects this street intersects this street. One centimeter at a time. Her father stirs the keys in his pockets. Ahead loom the tall, grand houses that flank the gardens, reflecting sound. She says, “We go left.” They start up the length of the rue Cuvier. A trio of airborne ducks threads toward them, flapping their wings in synchrony, making for the Seine, and as the birds rush overhead, she imagines she can feel the light settling over their wings, striking each individual feather. Left on rue Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Right on rue Daubenton. Three storm drains four storm drains five. Approaching on the left will be the open ironwork fence of the Jardin des Plantes, its thin spars like the bars of a great birdcage. Across from her now: the bakery, the butcher, the delicatessen. “Safe to cross, Papa?” “It is.” Right. Then straight. They walk up their street now, she is sure of it. One step behind her, her father tilts his head up and gives the sky a huge smile. Marie-Laure knows this even though her back is to him, even though he says nothing, even though she is blind—Papa’s thick hair is wet from the snow and standing in a dozen angles off his head, and his scarf is draped asymmetrically over his shoulders, and he’s beaming up at the falling snow. They are halfway up the rue des Patriarches. They are outside their building. Marie-Laure finds the trunk of the chestnut tree that grows past her fourth-floor window, its bark beneath her fingers. Old friend. In another half second her father’s hands are in her armpits, swinging her up, and Marie-Laure smiles, and he laughs a pure, contagious laugh, one she will try to remember all her life, father and daughter turning in circles on the sidewalk in front of their apartment house, laughing together while snow sifts through the branches above.

~~~

We meet Werner and his sister as they listen to the radio... Werner has found an old one that was not working and he had figured out how to fix it... Soon he was learning more and more, self-taught, as people heard of his ability to fix things that were electronic... As I am writing, I realize, for the first time, that the Frenchman that was broadcasting could be the very man that was related to Marie-Laure and to whose home they went when they were forced to leave their home... As I said, the book is long and so much can be discovered about that awful time period--war!

Werner and Jutta find the Frenchman’s broadcasts again and again. Always around bedtime, always midway through some increasingly familiar script. Today let’s consider the whirling machinery, children, that must engage inside your head for you to scratch your eyebrow… They hear a program about sea creatures, another about the North Pole. Jutta likes one on magnets. Werner’s favorite is one about light: eclipses and sundials, auroras and wavelengths. What do we call visible light? We call it color. But the electromagnetic spectrum runs to zero in one direction and infinity in the other, so really, children, mathematically, all of light is invisible. Werner likes to crouch in his dormer and imagine radio waves like mile-long harp strings, bending and vibrating over Zollverein, flying through forests, through cities, through walls. At midnight he and Jutta prowl the ionosphere, searching for that lavish, penetrating voice. When they find it, Werner feels as if he has been launched into a different existence, a secret place where great discoveries are possible, where an orphan from a coal town can solve some vital mystery hidden in the physical world. He and his sister mimic the Frenchman’s experiments; they make speedboats out of matchsticks and magnets out of sewing needles. “Why doesn’t he say where he is, Werner?” “Maybe because he doesn’t want us to know?” “He sounds rich. And lonely. I bet he does these broadcasts from a huge mansion, big as this whole colony, a house with a thousand rooms and a thousand servants.” Werner smiles. “Could be.” The voice, the piano again. Perhaps it’s Werner’s imagination, but each time he hears one of the programs, the quality seems to degrade a bit more, the sound growing fainter: as though the Frenchman broadcasts from a ship that is slowly traveling farther away. As the weeks pass, with Jutta asleep beside him, Werner looks out into the night sky, and restlessness surges through him. Life: it’s happening beyond the mills, beyond the gates. Out there people chase questions of great importance. He imagines himself as a tall white-coated engineer striding into a laboratory: cauldrons steam, machinery rumbles, complex charts paper the walls. He carries a lantern up a winding staircase to a starlit observatory and looks through the eyepiece of a great telescope, its mouth pointed into the black.

~~~

Fortunately for Warner, his expertise was soon recognized so that instead of, when he was older, going to the front lines somewhere, he was sent to a school and then on, using his skills with radios to move around in search of illegal (as defined by Hitler) transmissions that were being used by, for instance, those in the small town of Saint Malo...

I am not sure how much actual research supported this novel, but I was totally captured by the people living there and what they did when confronted with German soldiers who immediately took over the Mayor's residence. For he and the town residents, in one way or another displayed only disdain for what they were being forced to do. Yes, there was murder of local people. I prefer not to use kill as it is normally used as being done in war... To me that is illogical. When one man decides to begin a war and uses every means to do so, including people who were forced to support those efforts or die...then when one or more dies. It is Murder...

The book moves back and forth between the lives of the teen girl and boy. The girl had become blind and lived with her father, but when they had to leave their home, they hoped to find peace with a relative. By the time they got there, it was already too late. The Germans had taken over Saint Malo. Soon after Marie-Laure and her father arrived, her father was called back and nobody knew whether he had been killed or was captured and held, possibly tortured.

A deadly subplot was the fact that Hitler had assigned one man to supervise the taking of all riches found in conquered areas so that they could create one big magnificent facility to display the booty of their conquests! And we follow this man in his travels as he carries out his orders, but, in doing so, became very ill and he became obsessed in finding one particular jewel that was said that anybody who owned it could not die. His search was intense and, finally, he had made his way to the location where Marie-Laure was staying... There we find the one scene in the entire book where Marie-Laure meets Werner... And she was not alone...

I was fascinated with the father's skillful attention to his daughter's new disability and his creating a small scale version of his entire town (and later) another where they had moved, to allow his daughter to become self-sufficient. And, he brought his daughter to his workplace, the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, where he was the lockmaster for the entire building. There is no reference that any part of the book was based upon actual facts, except of course the war itself. 

When we allow ourselves to enter into the lives of those who are affected by war, hopefully we become more sympathetic and empathetic... If we are not permitted (by banning such books) to learn, we deny ourselves and our children the chance to learn about the lives of those outside of our personal environment and garner a certain level of respect for those who lived through these terrible hardships...

We learned, for instance, that the owner of the home in Saint Malo in which Marie-Laure now lived, was her great-uncle Etienne who now refuses to leave his home, based upon his having been near his brother when he was murdered during the war, probably WWI... Yet, as Marie-Laure changes the daily routine, little by little, he begins to improve and ultimately leaves his home for the first time. At that time, his housekeeper had become involved in small ways of fighting back, making the soldiers in their town aware that they were not welcomed there... When his housekeeper dies, and Marie-Laure was unable to go out for food, he took that first step... BTW, he was also the man who was running the radio sending out messages... fed to him from his housekeeper and her group of local women!

In many ways, the book is heartbreaking, yet, readers will find, as I did, that we become invested in the lives of those who are silently fighting against the Germans, while knowing that they would be executed if they were discovered... While the actions taken against the Jewish people were horrific, a different type of torture was used against those living in Saint Malo! No actions taken by oppressors can be accepted.

Given what is happening in Ukraine and Israel/Gaza, now may be the perfect time for you to read this book. It awakens your heart and mind to what we all must fight to end and prevent!

GABixlerReviews

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