The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

Chabon, Michael. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. New York: Random House, 2000.
ISBN 0-679-45004-1

This novel is partly about comic books. It is more about identity, with corollary themes of family, race, nationality, sexuality, talent, profession, and self-expression.

The title characters, Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay, are cousins and creators of comic books during that medium’s golden age. They are fictional counterparts to the writers and artists who took elements from the popular arts of their day, explored the boundaries of a new medium, and created a form of storytelling. For comics fans, Chabon includes plenty of name-dropping and asides into the industry in that era. These elements don’t bog down the story, but fill in the background.

Joe escapes from Prague as a young man just at the Nazis are beginning to implement the isolation of the Jews there. By happenstance, he was born in the Ukraine and eligible for a Soviet passport. His family’s arrangements fail, and he is sent back to Prague. He enlists the help of Bernard Kornblum, an escape artist who taught Joe his art. Together, they smuggle the golem of Prague out of the country. Joe takes a long journey to New York, where he moves in with his aunt, Sam’s mother, and begins his creative partnership with his cousin.



Joe spends the rest of the book involved in escapes, with varying degrees of success. He tries to escape his survivor’s guilt, his grief, his hatred of those who killed his family, love, his own self-isolation.

Sam is a product of New York, an absent father and a caustic mother. He is a hustler, looking to escape poverty and loneliness, and later looking to escape the difficulties of his sexuality. He sees an opportunity in Joe’s artistic talent. Within a day, he persuades his boss, a seller of novelties, to publish a comic book; within a weekend, he manages to get his friends to produce one.

Joe and Sam are naturals to create a comic book superhero. They struggle to be and do things that seem out of their reach. They are like Tom Mayflower and the Escapist, the hero they created. Mayflower is a crippled kid who can only dream of being the great magician he longs to be. As the Escapist, he has the power do above and beyond what he imagined. Nothing can hold him. Through their creations, Joe and Sam engage in fictions that fulfill their own needs. Joe seeks revenge at first, and later seeks and reconciliation with his past. Sam seeks to end his loneliness, both his need for a father and a desire for a kind of love he could not safely pursue.

In the end, escapism becomes not just away to get a break from troubles, but a way of finding oneself. While Sam never becomes fully reconciled with his art, he finally gives himself the freedom to stop fearing and be himself. Joe embraces the comic book, and the escape it permits, as a way of both relieving the pressures of the world and to imaginatively deal with them.

• If your interested in this book, you may also be interested in The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril by Paul Malmont.

Second Samuel

Second Samuel.  The Holy Bible.  New King James Version.  Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982.

The prophet Samuel died before the events described in this second book named for him.  Like First Samuel, this book continues the history of the establishment of a monarchy in Israel.  In particular, it covers most of the reign of David.

The book begins with the death of Saul.  He was the king who preceded David and the father of David’s close friend Jonathan, who died in the same battle.  David mourned the loss of the king and his friend, even though he knew it cleared the way for him to take the crown.

David’s ascension to the throne was rocky even though he had been selected by God to fill the position.  The southern tribes, Judah, received David as king, but the rest of Israel was led by Saul’s son Ishbosheth.  The two were at war, which ended when Ishbosheth was killed by two of his own men.

That is only the beginnings of the intrigues that plagued David’s reign.  No doubt part of this was the instability of a new kingdom, where many people were seeking to acquire and consolidate power.

Part of this instability may have come from David himself.  At his best he was described as a man after God’s own heart.  He loved God.  He was brave and generous. He was a great military leader and a canny diplomat.  He was all too human as well.  He was lustful.  He didn’t want to face trouble, especially within his own family, which led to an insurrection led by his son Absalom.  He allowed his office to remove him from his people, his troops, and his family, and the isolation made him vulnerable.  Sometimes his temper got the better of him.

On the whole, though, David is remembered as a great king.  He consolidated his country.  He defeated foreign enemies.  He surrounded himself with faithful and capable advisers and assistants.  He especially was faithful to God; even though he slipped he returned to God, acknowledging Him and seeking His way for himself and the kingdom.

There is a lot of exciting history in this book.  Most of it is very tightly summarized.  If someone wanted to novelize this book, expanding and fictionalizing the detailed plot, they could probably produce a series of thick novels packed with enough intrigue and action to keep even a jaded reader of thrillers engaged.  For a religious book that you might think would want to polish and aggrandize the reputation of a powerful and beloved king, the Biblical historians are surprisingly frank.  They do not turn away from David’s shortcomings or the swirl of conniving in his court.

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Superimmunity by Paul Pearsall

Psychologist Paul Pearsall was an early proponent of current notions of mind-body medicine. For Pearsall, it was important to heal a person’s life even if it wasn’t possible to cure their disease. Often a disease can be the body’s way of getting a person’s attention, and letting him know a change is needed. People who make those changes can experience healing, sometimes in the form of a cure and sometime as health and happiness in the midst of disease. Pearsall described some of his ideas in Superimmunity.

In this book, Pearsall draws from Eastern medicine an organizing theme: hot and cold thinking. Hot thinkers are fast, impatient, black-or-white thinkers. They can be judgmental and prone to exaggeration, overreaction and isolation. Cold thinkers overreact to trivial things and underreact to important things. They are prone to passivity and feeling of inadequacy. They are isolated in their own way, and though often out of touch with their emotions, they often despair.

The body responds to these thinking styles. Hot reactors are always on the attack, and their immune systems attack their bodies. Heart disease is associated with hot people. Cold reactors are inactive, so their bodies may respond with excessive activity, particularly cell growth (i.e. cancer).

Pearsall does not eschew medicine. If you are facing a serious illness, the likes of heart disease or cancer, you need a lot of medical help. However, you also need to enlist the aid of your own immune system, which may be doing something counterproductive if it is very active at all. You’re immune system is closely linked to your brain, more so that was commonly thought when Pearsall was writing in the 1980s, so getting the best immune response calls for leaving hot or cold thinking for something more balanced.

“Until recently, we have behaved as if the immune system were somehow separate from us, doing its job secretly, automatically, beyond our control…. Research now tells us that our immune system functions within a supersystem of mind and body,” Paul Pearsall, Superimmunity

Superimmunity includes many tests to help you identify if you tend to be a hot or cold thinker (you can be both). From there, Pearsall offers strategies for cooling off or warming up your thinking as needed. This can mean observing your body, listening to your disease and getting in touch with your emotions in ways that can be unfamiliar to one in the throes of hot or cold reaction. This self-evaluation that reveals the underlying dysfunction, and your own exploration and imagination may uncover your path to healing.

Pearsall does not suggest that changing your thinking will always lead to a cure, though sometimes it might. Disease and mortality are part of being a human. However, you can truly live while you are alive, and in this since experience healing. Life is more than surviving, eating, drinking and breathing. It is important to live as fully as you can.

Paul Pearsall also wrote

The Beethoven Factor

The Last Self-Help Book You'll Ever Need

Toxic Success

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Change Your Brain Change Your Body by Daniel G. Amen

The Relaxation Response by Herbert Bnson with Miriam Z. Klipper

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

Timeless Healing by Herbert Benson with Marg Stark

Pearsall, Paul. Superimmunity: Master Your Emotions & Improve Your Health. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1987.