That's right, folks—Hendrik Hertzberg's new book has one million dots in it.

Few of us have ever taken the time to sit down and seriously ruminate over a word that has become a part of our daily lexicon—one million.

Okay, so that’s two words, but still, think for a second. Have you ever seen one million of anything? Is “one-million” the sort of word(s) that leads you to drop your jaw in awestruck wonder, or do you tend to shrug it off? If you had to describe the concept of a million to someone who had never heard of the term before, could you do it?

Thankfully, our friend Hendrik Hertzberg understands 1,000,000. And thanks to his new-ish and aptly titled book One Million, we all might be able to grasp the concept a little better ourselves.

Hertzberg, who usually writes about politics for The New Yorker (and spoke at Covenant last year), has put his creative side on full display in an updated re-issue of the book (first published in 1970), which hit store shelves this fall. The book is 200 pages of madness, save for the 12-page intro that would kill as a stand-alone essay. By madness, I mean the 5,000 dots per page representing numerical digits, counting up all the way to—you guessed it—1,000,000. It’s simple, fresh, and mind-blowing.

Interspersed throughout each page, Hertzberg has placed certain numbers to correspond with the dots. For instance, at dot 359,160, you’ll learn that it had been exactly 359,160 hours since Dr. Martin Luther King was shot, as of the forty-first anniversary of the shooting on April 4, 2009. Trivial information—but it’s information nonetheless, and it provides us with a useful perspective. So it’s not all that useless, is it?

Hertzberg understands the useless/useful idea better. In his introduction, he reminds the reader (or in the case of this book, the browser) that “This book is NOT a reference work. Unlike the plastic bags your dry cleaning comes back in, this book is a toy. But it is a toy with a didactic purpose, like a chemistry set or an anatomically correct doll.”

In my opinion, this would be a great toy to get acquainted with during the holidays, by a crackling fire with your dog at your feet and a piping hot mug of your mother’s finest cocoa, which is probably made up of at least one million molecules. To get your neurons firing, here are a few wonderful, completely insignificant facts from Hertzberg’s book:

483: Americans killed during the Revolutionary War
22,000: Newspaper jobs lost in 2008
153,424: Pounds of coffee Starbucks uses in a day
349,296: Inches, the height of Mount Everest
584,164: Sunday circulation of the Houston Chronicle
728,382: Gallons of blood pumped by the average adult human heart in one year
879,440: Dollars lost every fifteen minutes by GM in 2008

Holy smokes, GM! $879,440 every fifteen minutes? That’s $58,629.33 a minute! Which, according to my calculations, is $977.16 a second! Which is exactly the same price as—well, you get the idea. As you might see, this could be the sort of book that gets your neurons going gaga. A winner for sure. If you get your hands on a copy, I guarantee that you’ll find out interesting facts about cigarettes, copper, codfish, and crows, as they fly. All valuable and worthwhile information, thanks to Mr. H.

It has often been said that we live in a culture devoid of renaissance men. Apparently no one told Trace Adkins.

A world-renowned singer whose music is both accessible and innovative, he is responsible for popular gems like “Honky-tonk Badonkadonk” and “I Left Something Turned on at Home.” But Trace isn’t merely a tremendous troubadour. He’s a one-time football player, Louisiana Tech student, and oil-rig worker. Trace Adkins is a man that failure is afraid to look in the eye (and who can blame it?).

While he’s had more success in more areas than 20 lesser mortals combined, it still seemed—however improbable—that his magnum opus had yet to be realized. Then he wrote his autobiography A Personal Stand—Observations and Opinions from a Freethinking Roughneck. Trace Adkins first hit single may have been titled “(This Aint) No Thinkin’ Thing,” but his book is very much a thinkin’ thing.

Trace Adkins is a man who has all sorts of thoughts. Sometimes when I was reading this autobiography it felt like I was sifting through a bargain bin of thoughts. Each page is rich with categorical claims and enlightening aphorisms. Trace’s writing is both weighty and humorous; in many ways he is the love-child of Ernest Hemingway and David Foster Wallace.

Trace, however, brings something to the table which no author of his stature ever has—guts. While some authors pussyfoot around, letting the reader “reach their own conclusions”, Trace tells it how it is. Not only does he tell it how it is, he tells you how you should think it is, which is something all these shifty literary snobs could stand to learn.

Trace’s writing may appear to drift aimlessly at the haphazard whim of his alcohol-addled brain, but this indeterminacy is merely an illusion. Underneath all the sprawling anecdotes and generalizations lies a mammoth unifying force—Trace himself. No matter where the actual prose wanders, Trace is always unmistakably there, guiding you, teaching you to be a better American. No matter how confusing or seemingly complicated the issue, Trace always has an anecdote that directly corresponds to it.

I could ramble forever about the merit’s of Trace’s penetrating book, A Personal Stand, but I think it’s much more important that you hear from the man himself.

Trace on the oil crisis: “Instead of having our energy supplies be held hostage to religious unrest in other countries, we should be poking as many holes in the ground and seabed as we can right here at home.”

On parenthood: “Raising kids is similar to breeding dogs.”

On teaching about the Civil Rights movement in school: “No disrespect to Dr. King, but leave the religion and politics to me.”

On terrorists: “They’re just chihuahuas chewing at our ankles and making our lives miserable.”

On the war on terror: “[It's] like herpes: people can live with it, but it’ll flare up from time to time.”

On the New South: “I am a proud member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.”

On the environment: “You could probably wreck an Exxon-Valdez in the ocean every week and it would not change the ecosystem…trust me, there’s a lot of blue water out there. I’ve seen it.”

Donald Miller will be speaking at Ridgedale Baptist Church this Saturday, November 21, at 7 p.m.. Tickets are $15 and will be available by calling Ridgedale Baptist at 423-499-0994 or by going online at www.ridgedalebaptist.org.

“I had determined to approach this book critically, but as I read I found myself empathizing with Miller and being affected by his writing much as I had with his previous works.”

In reviewing Donald Miller’s A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, I encountered a problem. I had determined to approach this book critically, but as I read it I found myself empathizing with Miller and being affected by his writing much as I had with his previous works. With Searching for God Knows What, Miller had thought through and espoused many of the questions I found myself struggling with five years ago, but with A Million Miles I found myself feeling for Miller, who went through many of the same growing pains I did. Now I experience being both years removed from those initial pains and still feeling the tension and results.

Part of the struggle of looking at Donald Miller’s works is that they don’t fall into the “theological” framework of “Christian books.” They are more like personal memoirs that occasionally make broader applications to the Christian life. In A Million Miles, Miller begins this particular journey while assisting writing a script for a movie based on Blue Like Jazz. The initial crisis comes as Miller realizes that the movie is about his life and his life is boring.

Miller looks into the elements of what makes a good story as he begins a process of “editing his life into a better story.” This motivation brings up perhaps a real criticism of the book—that God seems ancillary to Miller’s desire for his life to be interesting. A sense of desire to know God and glorify him is lacking. Now I’m not saying that Miller doesn’t have that desire, and in fact in one chapter Miller does talk about listening to God and letting Him direct the story, it’s just that the “metanarrative” (i.e. the gospel) isn’t explicit. In that sense there is a caution I would offer in unreservedly recommending this book. A Million Miles is really more about the “what” of experiencing a life unfolding as a story and coming to the realizations of that implication rather than the “why” and “how” of seeing what life as a type of narration by the ultimate storyteller entails.

Perhaps this is lacking because A Million Miles is a recent recollection for Miller. I know that looking back at my own stories I’ve only now begun to see the larger narrative in each. In one sense I think the genuineness of what Miller relates is that the metanarrative isn’t “forced” on these stories. Rather, I believe Miller is relating what God has shown him so far in the way He’s showed it.

Miller’s overarching point in the book is also that God personally moves us in our personal stories. Seeing God work transforming our character with the end of transformation in mind is conveyed as somewhat radical and unsettling. Claiming that pain and suffering are critical to a good story should bring a real pause to knee-jerk critics. Even Miller’s somewhat dystopian conclusion, that in a part of our stories we won’t find fulfillment in this life, can either be viewed negatively or seen in light of Romans 8:23-25.

I’ve come to view Donald Miller’s writing as a generational phenomenon. A Million Miles in a Thousand Years confirms this in being a genuine coming-of-age book. Miller relates the realities of growing up, taking responsibility before God of your own life, and deciding to live for more than your comfort. As with other Miller books, though, I would be cautious recommending it to a new or immature believer. This is a story about a Christian going through the painful process of maturity. Also, the book presupposes a lot of “background” theology about God and Christian living. Even to a more mature believer I would recommend reading John Piper’s book Don’t Waste Your Life or DeYoung’s book Just Do Something at the same time as this one.

Part of Miller’s great ability as a writer is to communicate experiences as they are experienced. It can be dangerous to take a story and draw a life theology from it. You wouldn’t build your theology from what your friend thinks God is doing in his life, but you certainly would love to hear that story and try to learn what you can. Miller invites us to hear a part of his story and tells it beautifully, and I believe he hopes that we learn something about God for ourselves in the process.

Tom Wolfe probably wouldn’t have stuck out at a frat party.

Tom Wolfe’s latest novel has been around for five years, but his book is so relevant to the situation of any student that it bears reviewing and re-reading. Wolfe is most famous for novels like The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, and Bonfire of the Vanities. Charlotte Simmons reads as a 700 page muckrake of the university system, a careful exposition delivered entirely via the grotesque and tragic commentary of its frat boys, basketball players, aspiring intellectuals, faculty, and Charlotte herself.

I had a hard time picturing a 74-year-old Mr. Wolfe wearing his trademark white suite to a frat party and carefully observing the finer points of grinding. However, he uses Charlotte, a gifted but naïve freshman from a strictly moral Appalachian town, and her shocked observations to capture the relentlessly sex-charged atmosphere of the fictional Dupont University, based most closely on Duke.

Expecting a place where students are finally attuned to the “Life of the Mind,” Charlotte encounters the salacious features of an entirely different education: beer funnels, “sexiling,’’ the quite literal illiteracy of star athletes, and the carefully exclusive social hierarchy for which sex is both a doorway and a mark of distinction. Wolfe’s style is objective enough not to be an outright condemnation, however; it is his ability to describe precisely what goes on that deprives Charlotte’s observations of anything enticing. In fact, they have a horrific scientific clarity to them. The long, agonizing chronicle of Charlotte losing her virginity to a frat boy ubermench is perfect in its gory dissection, and a clear murder of any romance the reader could hope to scrounge.

You might argue we get enough of the above –contractually and otherwise—as it is without reading Charlotte Simmons. And you’re right, which is why Wolfe’s greatest achievement in this novel (for us anyway) comes at the end of the book, the culmination of an interesting kind of determinism he has developed along the way. He prefaces the novel with a selection from a fictional study that one of the Nobel-winning professors of Dupont has written about the inevitable conformity of any animal to whatever society it is subsumed into.

For Charlotte, with her inherited yet isolating morals, the pressure of Dupont proves too great. Back home, her academic drive was a mark of distinction. At Dupont, she has to find something else. On the last page, as she’s sitting, watching her basketball Division I Champion boyfriend, the peak of Dupont’s social hierarchy, her conscience asks: “Wasn’t it Charlotte Simmons who wanted a life of the mind? Or was what she wanted all along to be considered special and to be admired for that in itself, no matter how she achieved it?”
Wolfe’s fundamental question here is one of identity, and if any person is capable of retaining what defines them, and what ought to define them, in the face of their social context, be it religion, vocation, or college.