Book Reviews

Reposting the review because the Audiobook is the Audible Daily Deal for Dec 3 – $5.95

Takeaway: The history of cancer is a good proxy for the history of medicine.

The Emperor of All Maladies deserves all of the praise (and the Pulitzer) it has received.

Like most really good popular non-fiction books, it understands the necessary balance between the presenting facts and telling stories.

Almost every times I started to get slightly bored by the science or history, the author told a story.  But the stories never took over the book, they only supplemented the history or science.

What I found most interesting about the book was how often cancer was a part of technical innovation that affected others areas.  Medicine was improved because of surgery to removed cancer.  Cancer clinical trials were the root of a lot of changes in mathematics, social science research and insurance modeling.  Human trials and medical ethics were expanded and changed and re-evaluated throughout medical history in large part because of cancer research.

Read more

Summary: A near retirement age Ender has to deal with another attempt at Xenocide, this time against two alien species and all of Ender’s family may die in the process.

I always warn people when I talk about my love of Ender’s Game that the rest of the series is very different from the first book.

Ender’s Game is young adult book  But Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide and Children of the Mind are not.  They are fairly serious adult oriented science fiction book that are as much about the ideas as the story line.

Which is I think the point of the xkcd comic about Xenocide being a lesser book.

After re-reading Ender’s Game I wanted to read more of the series again.  I skipped Speaker for the Dead, because I have read it nearly as many times as Ender’s Game.

Xenocide picks up right after Speaker for the Dead, or at least a spaceship ride after Speaker for the Dead.  That one ride ends up being 30 years for Ender and the world he is on and only a few weeks for Milo (Ender’s step son).

The central government has sent ships to destroy the world that Ender is on. That world is home to the first new species discovered since the Formics.  And unknown to anyone else, it is the new home to the Formics as well.

Read more

Summary: The Trinity is not just one of our theological points, it is essential to the entire Christian faith.

My year of reading about the Trinity has been mostly disappointing.  I have not read nearly as much as I wanted, but I have been disappointed in almost everything I have read.  The only book I have really liked was a fairly academic (and expensive) book on the development of Trinitarian Thought before 400 AD.

But Michael Reeves new book Delighting in the Trinity: an Introduction to the Christian Faith was different.  First, it took the historic development of the Trinitarian theology seriously (it was not only looking at post-reformation thought like a lot of Evangelically focused books are.)

Read more

Summary: A useful book to work through Hermeneutical issues (biblical interpretation) in modern culture, and worth reading as a book on parenting.

One of the things I am most thankful for is the fact that I was able to be a full-time nanny for my two nieces over a five-year period.  From about eight weeks after the birth of the oldest, until they both started preschool last year, I saw them almost every day, and most of the time I loved being a nanny.

Part of my thankfulness is because I am not going into parenting blind.  My wife has been a teacher for 17 years and is better at classroom management than pretty much anyone I know. Part of her job as an Academic Coach is to mentor other teachers and help them work through both their own professional development and to problem-solve with particular children who have not been identified as special education but are not being reached with standard approaches.

I feel we are fairly well prepared to parent our new daughter.

I have been aware of William Webb’s books for a while, but just have not ever gotten around to them.  They fit in with my focus on hermeneutics a couple of years ago, but I think I found out about them after I was getting a bit tired of the subject. Re-reading Mark Noll’s The Civil War as Theological Crisis and thinking through issues of culture and race as a Christian pushed these books back up to the front of my list. William Webb is probably better known for his earlier book Slaves, Women & Homosexuals: Exploring the Hermeneutics of Cultural Analysis. (later review) I am sure I will read that eventually, but Corporal Punishment in the Bible is both intended to be a more popular-level treatment, and it is focused on parenting which I have been thinking a lot about lately.

William Webb is interested in something that is called a Redemptive-Movement Hermeneutic. In simple terms, Webb suggests that God speaks down to us as humans, accepts where we are, and speaks to us there. Over time (both in scripture and in culture), there is a progressive movement that refines God’s instructions to us and points in a progressive understanding of revelation and obedience. The idea of this is pretty uncomfortable for many Christians, especially Evangelicals who like to think of God as unchanging. But Webb is not suggesting that God is changing, but that the way God speaks to us changes as our culture changes.

Read more

Takeaway: Society has a responsibility for its own maintenance.

Unlike most of the rest of the world, I did not read Fahrenheit 451 in high school.  (I didn’t read most books that people seem to have read in high school.)

The story is set in the near future (written in 1953, but still feels near future.)  Guy Montag is a fireman.  In a world where all the homes are fireproof, it is firemen’s jobs to set fires, not put them out.  When people are found to have illegal books, it is the firemen’s job to burn the houses including the books after the people have been arrested.

After Guy meets and begins a friendship with 17 year old free thinking Clarisse, he starts questioning his life. Eventually he steals some of the books he is supposed to be burning and reads them.  He starts questioning society and why no one reads or remembers.  (Part of the subtext is that there is always noise and video and pictures so that people no longer want to read.)

Read more