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Reviewed by Jamie Michele for Readers' Favorite
In Curt Canfield’s The Errors of Mankind, retired Marine Will Barnes sets out to trace his mother’s German ancestry and discovers Johann Knoske, a ninety-one-year-old relative who once served in the Waffen-SS. Their meetings draw Will beyond family genealogy as he begins testing Johann’s account of Germany and war against his own understanding of Vietnam and the United States. Other residents soon bring lives marked by the Holocaust and American racial history into the discussions, widening Will’s inquiry into the stories societies tell about themselves. His wife Cynthia watches his fascination intensify as Will starts reconsidering the beliefs that have directed his own life. Structured around recurring cycles of mankind’s errors, the novel follows his search through centuries of thought toward a larger question about whether humanity can ever learn from what it has done.
Curt Canfield’s The Errors of Mankind is a really well executed Christian literary novel, and I love the scale of Canfield’s vision. He sees history as cyclical, with one age inheriting the assumptions of another, then brings that sweeping idea into Will’s own spiritual reckoning. The book’s cycle structure is perfectly suited to that ambition, with “The Way of Pride” framing his continuing conversations through scripture that places human conduct inside a larger moral pattern. Canfield is also excellent at letting philosophy enter Will’s thinking as something lived. When Will returns to Howard Zinn’s writing and remembers Socrates on the unexamined life, the reading pushes him toward questions of inherited belief and judgment. Readers seeking intelligent, faith-driven literary fiction with a sweeping philosophical vision will adore The Errors of Mankind.
