G. K. Chesterton Books

EXCELLENT PRODUCT. HALF WAY THROUGH BOOK 1 I REALIZE THIS AUTHOR IS NOT MY CUP OF TEA!

When we first see Father Brown, he's a clumsy, sweet little priest who drops his umbrella, and prattles to his fellow passengers.

But G.K. Chesterton soon reminds readers that appearances are deceptive, when this unassuming little Catholic priest turns out to be a master sleuth. "The Complete Father Brown" collects the first two books featuring Father Brown, and introducing readers to his unusual way of solving bizarre crimes.

The first story opens with French detective Valentin on the hunt for the great thief Flambeau, and along the way encounters a little priest who is telling people about his "silver with blue stones." Turns out that the little priest is the target of Flambeau's crime, and the priceless sapphire cross he's carrying is about to be stolen -- but Valentin discovers that Father Brown is a lot cleverer than he seems.

In the many mysteries that follow, Brown is called on to solve many mysteries -- strange beheadings, burning towers, an invisible murderer, a Christmas crime, voodoo cults, impossible blackmail, the mysterious "Mr. Glass," a lie-detector that can't overcome the faulty human, a murdered actress, murders that may be suicides, religious bigotry, and even a death curse that may be coming true.

G.K. Chesterton had a wonderful knack for creating mysteries that were actually quite simple, but seemed complicated. Sometimes, they even seemed impossible. But in each story -- most of which are standalone -- Father Brown successfully unravels the case, and shows us the startlingly simple answers.

These short stories are written casualyl and a little bit humorously (Brown outpicking a pickpocket), but Chesterton builts up a wall of bizarre clus that don't make sense until Father Brown reveals the motives. And the final touch is an exquisite, shimmering writing style ("Over the black pine-wood came flying and flashing in the moon, a naked sword"), rich in atmosphere.

Father Brown is a likable little guy, who seems very flaky and innocent at first. But under the "innocent goblin" face, he has a shrewd knowledge of human nature, rock-solid principles and some very unusual skills. And don't worry, the religious aspect is rarely brought up, such as when a murder was caused by religious bigotry -- most of the time, Father Brown merely lives his principles rather than preaching them.

"The Complete Father Brown Volume 1" is an enjoyable collection of the first two Father Brown books, and will leave mystery lovers reaching for Volume 2.

Second only to the introduction to "Path to Rome" which may be the best introduction in all of English letters (it is titled "In Praise of This Book"), I would place the dedication to Green Overcoat. Anyone who could take the book seriously after that deserves to be disappointed. Belloc parodies not just the detective novel but a whole cast of contemporary personalities. The internal reasonings of the professor are spot on and hilarious. The wealthy industrialist is the victim of a crime instead of its perpetrator but, in classic Belloc form, manages to be the villain of the piece anyway.

I usually gobble up Belloc, but this one left me with a sense of indigestion. This is intended as a satirical pastiche of a number of different detective/mystery writers from the early part of the century. I don't care for that genre. There, I've said it--just shut the door on the whole lot. I suppose if you like this sort of thing, you might find it amusing. Oh, and there are funny pictures by G. K. Chesterton. Okay, maybe this book is a bit of a lark, after all. I'm still shutting the door, though.

G K Chesterton was a man of many parts. Until now I mainly knew him as a champion of Christendom, an arch-foe of eugenics and an advocate for 'distributism', his "small is beautiful" economic alternative to Big Capitalism and Big Socialism.

Chesterton's "The Man Who Was Thursday" was my first experience with Chesterton the novelist. I wanted to like it but came away slightly disappointed. But maybe that's my fault, not his. I expected a thriller, in the mode of the Hitchcock movies I love. There are certainly thriller elements in Thursday, but it is I suspect, on reflection, as much a satire as anything else. There are also, I'm told, numerous allegorical references most of which I missed. The great 'Scientific American' mathematics correspondent Martin Gardner wrote an "Annotated Thursday", which I'm told helps illustrate Chesterton's very subtle images. I haven't read it and may have to to get a better appreciation of this undoubtedly well , finely crafted book.

Written in 1908, "Thursday" may have pioneered the modern spy novel. In some ways a century later it still seems very modern. Sure today we talk of 'terrorists', not 'dynamiters', but Chesterton's 'anarchist' baddies seem more modern than the 'reds' and 'nazis' of most 20th century spy thrillers. "Thursday" is set in the Edwardian world of Hansom Cabs and balloons, not the speeding cars and ubiquitous helicopters of modern action movies. Yet the story line seems modern. Undercover policemen disguised as anarchists. Undercover anarchists within the police. The high anarchist council itseld stacked to the rafters with undercover policemen. In the real world, fifty years on, the FBI's "Cointelpro" program, and the police penetration of the Black Panthers, seems an example of life imitating Chestertonian art.

Twists. Counter-twists. Counter-counter-twists. Hitchcock and the whole modern "spy" genre would seem to owe a lot to Chesterton. In some ways the 1908 "Thursday" has some parallels to the very "hip" "swinging sixties" spy spoofs. Thursday includes an elephant chase, a balloon escape and a whole dream story. In parts it's "spy/satire" reminded me of the James Coburn spoofs "Our Man Flint" and, the great, "The President's Analyst".

Chesterton does manage to sneak in, here and there, a few references relevant to his political and religious concerns. Here's one that sounds very contemporary and you could easily imagine it being quoted by Naomi Klein and other 21st century "anti-globalisation" activists.

"..The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists: they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists..."

Chesterton makes his political and religious points lightly and sparingly. They are asides, comments, not speeches. You could miss them if you weren't looking or if you didn't know what you were looking for. The story, not the sermon, ...and in 'Thursday' there are no sermons.., comes first. That would seem to be the ideal way for a novelist, or any artist, to make a political point.

For a book that's only about a hundred pages long, "The Man Who Was Thursday" is pretty packed.

G.K. Chesterton's classic novella tackles anarchy, social order, God, peace, war, religion, human nature, and a few dozen other weight concepts. And somehow he manages to mash it all together into a delightful satire, full of tongue-in-cheek commentary that is still relevant today.

As the book opens, Gabriel Symes is debating with a soapbox anarchist. The two men impress each other enough that the anarchist introduces Symes to a seven-man council of anarchists, all named after days of the week. In short order, they elect Symes their newest member -- Thursday.

But they don't know that he's also been recruited by an anti-anarchy organization. And soon Symes finds out that he's not the only person on the council who is not what he seems. There are other spies and double-agents, working for the same cause. But who -- and what -- is the jovial, powerful Mr. Sunday, the head of the organization?

Hot air balloons, elaborate disguises, duels and police chases -- Chesterton certainly knew how to keep this novel interesting. Though written almost a century ago, "The Man Who Was Thursday" still feels very fresh. That's partly because of Chesterton's cheery writing... and partly because it's such an intelligent book.

He doesn't avoid some timeless topics that make some people squirm. Humanity (good and bad), anarchy, religion and its place in human nature, and creation versus destruction all get tackled here -- disguised as a comic police investigation. And unlike most satires, it isn't dated; the topics are reflections of humanity and religion, so they're as relevant now as they were in 1908.

But the story isn't pedantic or boring; Chesterton keeps things lively by having his characters act like real people, rather than mouthpieces. From Symes to the Colonel to the mysterious Sunday himself, they all have a sort of friendly, energetic quality. "We're all spies! Come and have a drink!" one of the characters announces cheerfully near the end.

And of course, once the madcap police investigations are finished, there's still a mystery. Who is Sunday? What are his goals? And for that matter, WHAT is Sunday -- genius, force of nature, villain or god? The answer is a bit of a surprise, and as a reflection of Chesterton's beliefs, it's a delicate, intelligent piece of work.

It's also worth noting that the Digireads edition of this book is a very good one; it's about the size of a Dover Thrift book, but has relatively good paper, a flexible cover, and a tight binding that puts up with plenty of general book abuse. As inexpensive editions go, this is a good one.

"The Man Who Was Thursday" is a wacky little satire that will both amuse and educate you. Not bad for a book often subtitled "A Nightmare."

For those of us who are readers and not literati, G. K. Chesterton speaks with a clarity and sanity rare in our confused world, which has forgotten truth and knows nothing of semantics. In clear and humorous prose, these selections from his prodigious works offer a sane and easily understood alternative to the extreme negativity and obfuscation we are surrounded by. A liberal and an orthodox churchman (an inconsistency in our world today), he speaks to the common man and woman about what matters most, with the common sense which has indeed become a most uncommon virtue (with apologies to James Forrestal).

G. K. Chesterton is supposed to be a quaint, Edwardian period piece of a thinker, whose moralizing was brushed away with the rest of his age by the Second World War and the triumph of the century's major ideologies. Yet, if you open works like _Heretics_ or _Orthodoxy_, you find thoughts and observations that might have been written yesterday, about today's issues. Might have been, that is, if the quality of the writing weren't so high. Next time the next government-funded art atrocity hits, remember GKC's summation of artistic types: "Poets and such persons talk about the public as if it were some enormous and abnormal monster-a huge hybrid between the cow they milk and the dragon that drinks their blood." Or next time a relativist runs his different strokes argument at you, you can return with this: "The modern habit of saying, "Every man has a different philosophy; this is my philosophy and it suits me"--the habit of saying this is mere weak mindedness. A cosmic philosophy is not constructed to fit a man; a cosmic philosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos. A man can no more possess a private religion than he can possess a private sun and moon." And what more wry defense of faith has ever been penned that this: "Bowing down in blind credulity, as is my custom before mere authority and the tradition of the elders, superstitiously swallowing a story I could not test at the time by experiment of private judgement, I am firmly of the opinion that I was born on the 29 of May 1874 on Campden Hill, Kensington." As you can see, Chesterton is very quotable. This book is desirable if you love the Father Brown mysteries, and would like a sampler of his popular essays. If you are familiar with his nonfiction, you would probably want the full-length versions, available elsewhere--though the long introduction by Russell Sparkes is very good and worth having. This book would serve well as a textbook for a college course of Christian apologetics. How it would fare in the p.c. wasteland of today's academia is not known, but one thing is certain. G. K. Chesterton has a lot to say to modern readers, not least of which is that they are not as original as they think they are. _Plus ca change_...

I simply love reading the verses which Chesterton writes for his books, and this is a whole books of verses Chesterton wrote (though they are not from his other books). Lots of great ideas expressed in this collection, ranging from a ballad about war (The Ballad of St. Barbara, who is the patron saint of artillery and of those in danger of sudden death) to poems about marraige, Arthur, dragon hunting, Christmas, evils in society, the common man, history, geography, higher mathematics (he mostly makes fun of modernists), etc. Some are very serious, others very witty and facetious. All are very good. Here's a brief example of the kind of thing you'll find in the book: a poem entitled Elegy in a Country Church-Yard

The men that worked for England
They have their graves at home:
And bees and birds of England
About the cross can roam

But they that fought for England,
Following a falling star,
Alas, alas for England
They have their graves afar.

And they that rule in England,
In stately conclave met,
Alas, alas for England
They have no graves as yet

Most of Chesterton's works are not copyrighted, so you can find a lot of his poems online if you want to see some more samples. Project Gutenberg has his book of poems called The Wild Knight and Other Poems, so if you want to look at that go to http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/12037

Overall grade: A-

Several of Stanley Jaki's books follow a two-part plan : part one could be summarized into "nobody gets it" and part two into "I do." In the present case, part one is limited to the first chapter, a quick survey of the inability of Jaki's predecessors to see the importance of Chesterton's views on science, scattered as they are throughout his copious writings, let alone to deal with them in more than a few sentences. The need for the present volume being justified, Jaki then proceeds to deal with Chesterton's philosophy of science in the remaining three chapters.

Chapter two, "Antagonist of Scientism", shows us the Catholic champion battling the late nineteenth century apostles of the reduction of all knowledge to science and of all progress to scientific and technological advances : Herbert Spencer, Ernst Haeckel and H. G. Wells. Jaki admits from the start that "in no branch of [science] did [Chesterton] have a systematic training", which is probably why the present book calls him a "seer" of science, as this suggests an rather intuitive approach to the issue. Anyway, it is never the science itself that Chesterton claims to be a judge of, but the various philosophies that are pawned to the general public in its name. Moreover, he did read "all Huxley and Spencer and everything else on the subject [of popular science] available in English", which made him more than an inspired dilettante. Indeed, he had quite fascinating (and quite quotable) reflections on the subject, writing for instance in the early 1920s that "Science was supposed to bully us into being rationalists : but it is now supposed to be bullying us into being irrationalists", an observation still very much to the point today.

Chapter three, "Critic of Evolutionism", has Chesterton confront "that miscegenation of good science and very bad philosophy which is Darwinism." Contrary to Biblical literalists of the Protestant variety (mostly), Chesterton had no difficulty with the long chronologies involved in evolution theory, or with the details of the process. He was most concerned apparently with the ontological and ethical implications of "that evolutionary appearance whereby all species melt into each other", and with what might become of the malleable, manipulable man of the evolutionist creed. Here again, his insights are brilliant : "Evolution does not specially deny the existence of God ; what it does deny is the existence of man." Readers who are particularly interested in what Jaki has to say about evolution will find much here, the other sources being : "Genesis 1 Through the Ages" (which I have already reviewed); his booklets on "Intelligent Design" and "Evolution for Beginners"; "Angels, Apes and Men" chapter 2 ; "Cosmos and Creator" ch. 4 ; "The Road of Science and the Ways to God" ch. 18 ; and "The Relevance of Physics" ch. 7.

The last chapter, chapter four, presents Chesterton as a "champion of the universe", a concept which Jaki defines as "the totality of consistently interacting things" (hence his objection to the concept of "other universes" as "a contradiction in terms".) Here I had the definite impression that Chesterton was making humourous and intuitive remarks about various subjects, while Jaki was talking about something else entirely and trying to inject his well though-out metaphysics into Chesterton's witticisms. This does not mean this part of the book was uninteresting, but I fear Jaki may have tried too hard to make Chesterton into his own image.

My main problem with the book is that it does not appear to exhaust Chesterton's sayings on science, which is all the more embarrassing as Jaki claims there are not so many of them, and he is always blaming other authors for missing what he only has taken notice of. Now having read absolutely nothing by Chesterton, I am no expert on the subject. But after watching a few episodes of the excellent documentary series produced by EWTN and the Chesterton Society, I can definitely remember a few statements on science which Jaki has not bothered to include : discussions on the nature of miracles, for instance ; a statement on science being either "a tool or a toy"; or a very interesting debate with a skeptic in the duel scene from "Ball and Chain"- all of which would have been relevant.

Despite these limits, Jaki's booklet remains an interesting read, especially for those readers who are just as interested in the author as in his subject.

Covers the "debaters of the century" in fine detail. Professor Furlong's account of the Shaw/Chesterton relationship is the most extensive available. It is also, regretably, a rather dry telling. Thus, while well worth the read for its depth, it is certainly the work of an academic and not an artist.

G.K. Chesterton was happy to do some spoofery of the deductive detective genre -- his detectives seemed to depend more on the knowledge of human nature. One good example is Horne Fisher, the star character who solves bizarre little mysteries because he "knows too much... and all the wrong things."

The first story opens with a reknowned book critic stumbling across a dead man with his head bashed on. Fortunately Fisher is fishing nearby, and is able to deduce who killed the poor man, when, and cleverly figures out the best (and most theatrical) way to get results.

In each story, Horne deals with another strange mystery -- the framing of an Irish "prince" freedom fighter, the vanishing of a priceless coin, a man killed off in the Middle East, an eccentric rich man dies during an obsessive fishing trip, another vanishes during an ice skate, a bizarre dispute over an estate, and most shockingly, a statue crushing his own uncle...

Chesterton was a good mystery writer. He could spin up bizarre little crimes (murder, theft, treachery) for a variety of colourful reasons, from the political to purely psychological. "The Man Who Knew Too Much" is a good example of that, and it shows Chesterton veering into more politically-charged territory than in his other mysteries, with the Irish-English conflict, spies and impending war.

But these mysteries also have Chesterton the philosopher/theologian/thinker. He writes in colourful, poetic prose ("as if the world were steeped in wine rather than blood"), and has brief moments where Horn muses on human nature.

"Patriotism is not the first virtue. Patriotism rots into Prussianism when you pretend it is the first virtue," he remarks at one point, as an example. Through him, Chesterton gives us brief little insights into what he knows too much of -- a worldview remarkably simple, but very insightful.

"The Man Who Knew Too Much" is an odd kind of detective -- instead of the quirky detectives or deep thinkers, Horn is rather melancholy and plaintive, almost tormented by his own knowledge. This comes to a peak in the bittersweet final story, where Horne finds himself in a wretched situation, with shocking results.

"The Man Who Knew Too Much" is a solid collection of detective stories, but underlying the mysteries are Chesterton's deeper looks at human nature. Excellent reading.

The Man Who Knew Too Much is a collection of eight short mystery stories which reminded me greatly of Chesterton's Father Brown stories, except these were not quite as good. I dislike mystery stories where the main character solves the mystery with the aid of a clue that the reader did not have access too. That was one of the reasons why I really like Chesterton's Father Brown mysteries, because if you pay close enough attention and think enough, you can come to the correct conclusion yourself before the answer is announced. Unfortunately, Chesterton does not write all of these stories in that way (though a few of the eight are), and it makes them not as much fun to read, though they are still very good.

In terms of content, Chesterton does a fabulous job of bring up moral issues (for example, do we tell the public the truth about murder if it will be harmful to the public?) in these mysteries, and they really make you think. As always, Chesterton has also intersperced the stories with witty yet deep phrases which also make you think, and if you are an underliner you will find many things to underline.

In conclusion, this is a good book, but if I were you, I'd read his Father Brown stories before I read these.

Overall grade: B+

I chose this book at the bookstore and it sat on my shelf for over a year. I then read the entire book over four days. So once I was hooked, I couldn't put it down. But the beginning was difficult because there were so many characters to remember. It was also several chapters before the murder occurred. So by the time the murder happened I still didn't know who everyone was and that made it really confusing. But needless to say, I enjoyed the book. Knowing and understanding the characters was my only dislike of the book.