Book Reviews

Summary: An adopted 12-year-old boy suddenly discovers he is not who he thought he was.

Middle-grade books regularly have the concept that the main character is not who they thought they were, especially if they are orphans. This is a classic literary feature because it fits into middle-grade development. Of course, most readers will not be orphans who may secretly be important, but readers can still think about what it would mean to be someone else.

Orion Kim is 12 years old. He is handy with tools and can fix many things, but he is not very coordinated or popular. Very early in the book, he finds out that his grandmother is not his grandmother due to someone attempting to kill him and someone else defending him. Not long after, he finds out that he is not from Earth, but he is “starborn,” and he is taken away from the only home he has known (on Earth) and hides from his attacker on an alien world.

There are classic literary devices that work because they are classic. For example, middle-grade readers may already be familiar with characters attending a new special school to learn about their new powers. Or a group of characters working together to discover the things the adults around them won’t tell them. This is not to say that Orion and the Starborn is cliche; I don’t think it is. But as a nearly 50-year-old who has been reading middle-grade books for decades, I can see the literary references beneath the story.

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Summary: Using the life and work of GK Chesterton to grapple with North American Indigenous art, history, and Christianity. 

Every review of The Everlasting People is required to say how unique of a project this is. Unfortunately, I am not equipped to evaluate the project because I am not deeply familiar with either Native American history and art or GK Chesterton. I have some familiarity with both, but not enough to know if Milliner is distorting the record, only enough to be able to follow along with the argument of the book. This is one of the weaknesses of truly original conceptions. That isn’t to say I think this is distorting, only that I do not have the background to evaluate it.

I like books based on lecture series. They are often short, usually based on 3 or 4 lectures, sometimes with a response. But they are often thoughtful about unique topics and designed for a general readership.

If I had to summarize what The Everlasting People, a book that is hard to categorize, is about, I would say it is attempting to give people, generally categorized as white, tools to grapple with their personal and communal cultural history so that there can be a way to move forward in more than just guilt. White guilt, when it is limited to just guilt, does no one any good. The way forward needs to be centered on some process of restoration of relationship (personally and communally). This isn’t “forgive and forget”; this is “remember, process, and work to restore.”

Dr. Matthew Milliner is using his tools as an art historian to tell not just the story of the way that we have forgotten (intentionally) our history in the US around Native American subjugation using art, cultural icons, geography, and local history but also using the theological and cultural thinking of GK Chesterton.

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Summary: A memoir framed as a description of 40 songs. 

I am a man of a certain age. One of the first CDs I ever purchased was Rattle and Hum. I had a bootleg VHS version of the Rattle and Hum movie, and I watched it so many times it was warped. I saw the ZooTV tour during my first year in college. I was excited to see the Red Rocks venue because U2 had recorded there. (My kids like Sing 2, which has a Bono character and several U2 songs, and I keep trying to get them to listen to more U2 without much real success so far.)

I cannot fully read this apart from the nostalgia of growing up a U2 fan. I started listening to this as an audiobook because I assumed it would include clips of songs, and I like listening to memoirs in the author’s voice when that makes sense. I eventually also purchased the kindle edition because I wanted to see what additional material might be in the print version that was not in the audiobook. The audiobook and the print text were close but not entirely the same. There were several times when Bono would expand a line or add a sentence that was not in the print version, but nothing was fundamentally different. I noticed two misspelled words in the kindle book that were read correctly. But most important was that because the book is framed using songs, the print version just has a few lines of the song at the start of each chapter, and the audiobook has Bono singing at least those lines, often 1-2 minute sections of the songs. I assume they didn’t put the whole songs in for licensing reasons. 

The main thing in the print version that was not in the audiobook was Bono’s drawing and some photographs. While I looked at them all, I don’t think it was a reason to get the print version, and I think the audiobook version is the one to get if you do audiobooks. I am not a fan of Bono’s interviews on TV. He comes across as a bit too earnest and sometimes too silly. But as a narrator, he had a consistent low rumble to his voice. He read with emotion and felt like he was telling a story. One person I know thought the book felt too self-indulgent and pompous, but he read the book in print, and I think that the tone of the audiobook would have made it hard to have that impression. Much of the book was self-deprecating and making fun of himself.

I am not a fan of highly-produced audiobooks. I think it usually distracts from the book. But in this case, the production appropriately added to the book because it was about the music. There were occasional sound effects, but they had a purpose. Bono did do some voices as he told stories, but they also felt appropriate and not like he was trying to do their voices but trying to tell a story.

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Summary: An investigation of how White women drove policy around segregation and worked to uphold it in their daily lives.

In studying history, there are always different facets to explore. As I study the history of the civil rights movement, I have tended toward big picture history and then the history of significant figures like Martin Luther King Jr, Stokley Carmichael, and Ella Baker. And then I read about less well-known figures like Charles Person and the Atlanta Five. These are worthwhile subjects to study and are important facets of understanding history. But another part of studying history is to study “the villains,” not just those we consider heroes from our vantage point. In the case of the Civil Rights Era, it is vital to study not just those who worked to end segregation but those who worked to uphold segregation. Several months ago, I read the very helpful book The Bible Told Them So about the theological defense of segregation in North Carolina. The Mothers of Massive Resistance is in that same category of history.

Massive Resistance was a term coined by Senator Harry Byrd in response to Brown v Board of Education. It was a strategy to disrupt integration through vocal and broad resistance to all aspects of integration. Massive Resistance was centered primarily around educational integration but expanded to other areas. The Mothers of Massive Resistance has a simple thesis that white supremacy (the belief in a racial hierarchy with those classified as white at the top) required active participation by white women. It traces the 50-year history of the Civil Rights Era (the 1920s-1970s) and how white women, in their more restrictive and gendered roles, were both drivers and upholders of that white supremacy.

In simple terms, this is easy to understand. White women, in gendered work and home roles, were the front line of the enforcement of the color line. Nurses classified babies into racial categories (categories that were fluid and changed over time.) Women office workers in government upheld segregated rules and identified violaters of the segregated cultural or legal norms. Teachers taught in ways that maintained racial hierarchies before and after official segregation ended, including passing on the mythology of racial hierarchy through history and cultural transmission.

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Summary: Framed as three meditations on Ecclesiastes, Smith wants us to pay attention to our presence in time as part of an embrace of our humanity. 

James KA Smith has greatly influenced me over the years. Desiring the Kingdom helped me think about how culture forms us and how we need to pay attention to cultural formation as part of spiritual formation. Imagining the Kingdom oriented me toward spiritual formation as practice, not information acquisition. You Are What You Love I have read twice and can be thought of as a popular level combination of the first two Kingdom books. Still, it also gives language to how spiritual formation works, which I find helpful in my work as a spiritual director. The Fall of Interpretation was part of several books that helped me grapple with hermeneutics and epistemology. The primary thought of our finitude as a feature of our created humanity and not solely as a result of our sin has been significant. As I have said many times before, I am not reformed. Still, if I were to be, it would be because of books like Letters to a Young Calvinist, which presents reformed thought as fundamentally oriented around covenant instead of TULIP or election. Said another way, reformed theology is about ecclesiology more than soteriology. But really, it is a book about Christian maturity. This introduction is already too long, but there are more books of Smith’s that I have read and influenced me, and I will keep reading him because his writing has so influenced me.

How to Inhabit Time is hard to describe. Like pretty much all of Smith’s books, it is oriented toward spiritual formation. It is written at a more popular level than some of his books, but also still has a lot of discussion of philosophy. It is more memoir oriented and confessional than any of his other books. (I hope that Smith will write a fuller memoir or autobiography at some point. I know quite a bit of his story from reading his books, articles, interviews, and talks, but I think there is more.)

How to Inhabit Time wants to remind the reader that time is essential. Similar to the point of Fall of Interpretation, time is a marker of our created finitude. The fourth chapter about embracing the ephemeral may not make intuitive sense, but it makes experiential sense when you realize that all things will pass away. Accepting that all things will pass away reframes how we think of time and can free us from being bound by concerns of time and legacy.

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Summary: Polly, Charles, and Dr. O’Keefe travel to Venezuela by ship and meet 13-year-old Simon Renier (the main character) and his uncle, also traveling to Venezuela. 

At some point, I will have read most of L’Engle’s novels. I believe that I have twelve of her novels and six of her memoir or other non-fiction books. But I find them wildly uneven. Dragon in the Water is in the O’Keefe series but is mostly about Simon Renier, not Charles and Polly. Simon is a 13-year-old being raised by his great-aunt, who is in her late 80s. They are from a family with a long history in the Southern US, but it has been influenced by their ancestor’s work with Simon Bolivar in freeing South and Central America from Spanish rule.

One of the minor themes of the book is that Simon’s ancestor returned from South America and ended slavery on their plantation and the former slaves worked together with the family in a type of commune. While that is unlikely to have been based on any real events, L’Engle still presents Simon and his Aunt as denying any good from slavery but being against members of their family that worked with northern agents during the reconstruction era. And it appears that even if L’Engle was trying not to engage in Lost Cause thinking, she still falls into it, even as she says directly in the book that she denies Lost Cause ideology.

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Summary: A brief look at the sociology and history of Christian Nationalism in regard to how it relates to democracy.

Perry and Whitehead’s Taking America Back for God was the first book I read that was explicitly about Christian Nationalism. Samuel Perry is back with Philip Gorski with a short book that updates and takes a different approach to look at Christian Nationalism. While I think Taking America Back for God is a more comprehensive sociological look at CN, The Flag and the Cross, does a better job of giving historical context to Christian Nationalism.

This is a brief book, with only four chapters covering bout 130 pages of the main content (less than five hours of audio). The book ends with a more practical chapter on avoiding a future January 6th type of event and is more practical. But just as important are the three chapters that give context. The first chapter is about why this is “our nation, not theirs”. And then the third chapter is about how “Freedom, Violence, Order” is central to how Christian Nationalism thinks politically.

But I think my favorite was the second chapter on the history of Christian Nationalism’s influences. This chapter has two important frames for the telling of that history. One, it focuses on the early history of the US as contextual within the European centuries-long conflict, of which the American Revolution was one small part. And second, it reminds the reader that the story of Christian Nationalism today has to account for the switch from the civil religion impulse of the mainline liberal Christian tradition to the conservative Evangelical tradition. (This is not unlike the political party realignment that was happening concurrently.) The first part of the framing reminds us that we are not the central player at all points in time in global history. The second part is a reminder to those who are currently opposing Christian Nationalism from a more progressive political position that it was, in fact, the progressives or earlier generations that were more likely historically to align with Christian National rhetoric today.

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Summary: An excellent biography of a woman who is underappreciated but vitally important to the Civil Rights Movement. 

I want to mention Alissa Wilkerson’s book Salty, which finally got me to reading Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement. Salty was framed as mini-biographies of women that Wilkerson would like to have around a dinner table for the most fabulous dinner party ever. I was vaguely aware of Ella Baker but did not know the extent of her involvement in all aspects of the civil rights era.

One of the points of The Dark End of the Street was that organizers started the work of what we think of as the civil rights era in the 1930s, which were motivated by organizational movements at the turn of the 20th century, which was a response to the end of the Reconstruction Era, and so on. All movements have historical antecedents that tend to be forgotten as we tell their story. Ella Baker is a generation older than most well-known figures in the Civil Rights era. She is in the same generation as Howard Thurman and Martin Luther King Sr.

Born in 1903, Baker grew up in Norfolk, VA, until 7. In 1910, there was a white race riot in Norfolk, and Baker’s mother moved herself and the children back to her parent’s home in Littleton, NC. Her father continued to work out of Norfolk on steamships. In addition, her grandfather had died, and her mother moved home to help care for her mother and the land. Both sets of Ella Baker’s grandparents were born into slavery. Baker’s father’s parents were sharecroppers, but her mother’s parents were literate landowners. And her grandfather was a pastor as well as a farmer. Ella Baker’s parents completed high school, and her mother worked as a teacher before she was married and then again as a teacher after her husband died.

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