Just Published—Mark Twain
Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Ron Chernow has written a 1,200-page biography of the famous novelist, satirist, essayist, and humorist who built his famed literary career by using the pen name Mark Twain. Chernow’s Mark Twain was published Monday, two day ago, in hardcover by Penguin Press. Mark Twain lived in Hannibal, Missouri, on the Mississippi River.
My book about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, entitled Palestine Is Coming: The Revival of Ancient Philistia, (269 pp.) was published in 1990 as my third book. It was published by Hannibal Books, a small press in Hannibal, Missouri, a place I’ve never been to. The city’s claim to fame is that Mark Twain, whose real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910), was for some time its resident, mostly before he achieved such fame. William Faulkner dubbed Clemens “the greatest humorist the United States has produced.” Indeed, Clemens was every bit a magnetizing and complex fellow as those fictional characters he created and wrote about in novels. And he even looked the part, as the photo of him on the book’s front cover shows.
Hannibal, Missouri
The city of Hannibal, Missouri, is located on the western side of the great Mississippi River, and the city of East Hannibal is opposite it on the eastern side of the Mississippi River. Because of that, Mark Twain is best known for his first two novels that became wildly popular—The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Hucklberry Finn (CA and UK in 1884; US in 1885). How so? Both books are about two, youthful, teenage boys who were close friends while growing up in that area of the Mississippi River.
Although Clemens gained his inspiration from Hannibal’s Mississippi River life to write his two most famous novels, he did not live in Hannibal most of his life. He lived there from age 4 to 17, in 1839 to 1853. When he became quite the celebrity, he and his family moved to Hartford, Connecticut. However, they traveled the world over quite a bit. He was much in demand as a public speaker. Clemens was a notoriously risky and thus poor investor who lost fortunes in the stock market. He married a wealthy lady and lived a luxurious life, yet they did not possess much financial stability.
General Hannibal and his Army Crossed the Alps
The city of Hannibal, Missouri, was named after the famous General Hannibal Barca of Carthage. In 248 BC, he led his 70,000 soldiers, accompanied with 37 elephants, in crossing the mountainous Alps on their way to invading Italy and attacking the Roman Republic in what became the Second Punic War. That hazardous negotiation of the Alps, in which half of Hannibal’s forces died, is considered one of the greatest feats of ancient military history. (Actually, the city of Hannibal was named after its nearby Hannibal Creek, which is now renamed Bear Creek.)
Conclusion
As for my Hannibal Book, Palestine Is Coming, it represents the opposite of everything about Mark Twain and his novels. That is, it is a serious effort to solve the intractable Israeli-Palestine conflict based my interpretation of several texts in end times biblical prophecies. The book was published 35 years ago. I believe it continues to become more relevant than it has ever been. Donald Trump says the “mother of all deals” would be to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But his proposal to create a Riviera on the Gaza Mediterranean is surely a non-starter. I think things are progressing to what I predict in my book, which I believe is not really my prediction but God’s, and I merely have recognized it.
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