Adam Shields

Summary: The irony from the title is that Hunter believes that we cannot really change the world.

When I first started using Lendle, I did not realize that when you ask to borrow a kindle book, you are asking for that book right now. That ended up giving me a few books to borrow when I didn’t have time to read them. But in this case it gave me a copy of To Change the World nearly two years after I requested it. (If you are a patron on Lendle you can hold a place in line but then wait until you are read to read the book.)

So I ended up with To Change the World in the middle of my beach vacation. To Change The World is not what I was looking for. Most of the summer I have been reading only fiction, and fairly light fiction at that.

To Change the World is a serious book by sociologist James Davidson Hunter. He is the author probably most well known for his book 1991 book Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. To Change The World is three long essays about the nature of ‘World Changing’.

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Summary: The Queen takes a larger role in the final book of this trilogy.

It is unfortunate that this series is out of print and not yet on kindle It does not make sense to me why publishers are either not working faster on moving out of print books into ebooks, releasing books to authors to turn into ebooks, or authors claiming back their out of print books and turning them into ebooks on their own.

There are some books that are not good enough to re-release. But many books released in the 60s to 90s are good enough. I know the real reasons are often complicated (capital, not wanting to cannibalize current sales, technical know-how). But as someone that has formated three books for kindle for friends, it is not that hard. I think most books could be converted and formatted for less than $2000. Because of copyright, many will need new covers, which can cost just as much. But this is way less than actually writing a new book.

Open Road is an ebook publisher that has focused on taking older released by well known authors that are out of print and moving them to ebooks (and maybe new print editions.)

None of that has anything to do with The Beggar Queen other than the fact that this is a very good young adult series that is out of print. The paperbacks are easily available used and some new copies of the 2002 edition are still available.

In this book, Queen Augusta has spent two years trying to work out a new government. Her ‘counselors’ (Theo, Justin and Florian) have been working on a constitution but there is a number of road blocks. Augusta (or Mickle as we know her) is working to find a way to break the impacts.

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Summary: A classic biography of St Francis from one of the great Christian authors of the 20th century.

GK Chesterton’s biography of St Francis is one of the classic biographies of St Francis and Chesterton attributed his work on this book to his eventual conversion to Catholicism.  Both of which were good reasons to read (listen) to this book.

I have started paying attention to the audiobook discounts when you first purchase kindle books.  So I picked this book up at the beginning of July when I had some promotional credits at Audible.  I might have been better served by reading the kindle version instead of listening to the audio version. Chesterton is not the easiest author to read.  He has a lot of asides and his fairly conversational writing style takes some getting used to.  That and he is brilliant.

Chesterton’s biography of St Francis is not a traditional biography.  Instead it is partially a biography and partially an exploration of the state of the Catholic church at the time of Francis and how Francis changed the Catholic church during his time and after. So if you are looking for a traditional biography, you will probably be disappointed by this book.  It has biographical details, but not many of them.

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