Book Reviews

Summary: In 1944, a German rocket hit a Woolworths in South London, killing many. This novel explores what might have been if five of those children had not been killed. 

When encountering fiction, my primary method is to find authors I trust and to read their books without any investigation into the story. A couple of weeks ago, I was looking through a sale at Audible and saw that there was a new novel by Francis Spufford, an author I trust, and I purchased it without reading anything about it.

I started listening, and I was utterly lost and went back and read a little bit about the book to figure out what was going on The opening is a slow-motion description of a V2 rocket blast that killed a large number of people in a crowded Woolworth’s department store. Spufford is writing an alternative history where that rocket never launched, or it failed somehow, and the Woolworths was not destroyed. This book follows the lives of five children from about nine years old until about 70. As readers, we check into their story with short vignettes that create an image of what their life is like, but we do not spend enough time with them to get a deep understanding of them.

I have read alternative history fiction before, which doesn’t follow the typical model of alternative history, so I think Light Perpetual fails in that area. Generally, alternative history has one of two main models. Either unknown people from one time period go to another time through time travel, and either is shocked at the changes in technology and culture or use their knowledge of the future to make the lives of the past better. This story type is usually considered science fiction, and Orson Scott Card’s Pastwatch or Eric Flint’s 1632 series are good examples.

The other model of alternative history is to take some famous event or person and imagine a different reality. In this case, the story plays with the reader’s knowledge of the natural history and the author’s imagination of the alternative history. Stephen Carter’s novel The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln imagines that Lincoln survives his assassination attempt in 1865 and two years later faces impeachment. Light Perpetual does not fit either of these two models. We as readers can know something about the history and cultural changes from 1944 until the early 2000s, but that is not alternative history because nothing has changed; it is just a fictional story set in our regular history. The framing of this novel as a type of alternative history, I don’t think, really makes a lot of sense. The framing as alternative history distracts from the telling of a good story.

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Summary: Short history of Reconstruction and Jim Crow.

I am a fan of the idea of concise introductory books about big topics that give enough information and context to a subject but do not overwhelm the idea. Several publishers have books like these. For example, the Oxford Very Short Introduction series has over 300 books, including the excellent Very Short Introduction to Protestantism and the awful Very Short Introduction to the Bible or African History. In addition, Christian publishers have the Armchair Theologian series, which I think is equally mixed, on Niebuhr Brothers, John Knox, Aquinas, and John Calvin. The Drama of American History is a similar project with books that are about 100 pages.

I have previously read Eric Foner’s book on the three constitutional amendments that occurred during reconstruction and his more extended overall history of reconstruction and David Blight’s book on the historical memory of the Civil War in the 50 years after. But the movement into Jim Crow is something I have less background on. One of the problems of a short book on a subject area is that it tends to rely on the easy-to-tell story, not the nuanced, more difficult to explain aspects that tend to be less well known. The standard history of reconstruction is a “Lost Cause” narrative. Except for WEB DuBois’ work on reconstruction, the common historical narrative is that it was a failure because of northern incompetence, the poor work ethic and education of the formerly enslaved, and the corruption of carpetbaggers and scallywags. There are still some threads of the Lost Cause in this book, although it is also trying to tell a more accurate story.

The problem with a short book is that there is only so much room in a hundred pages. The book does include the problems of a lack of education for the formerly enslaved and the corruption of Grant’s administration. It also speaks of the rise of the KKK and political terrorism, the lack of political will (as well as the concern about the constitutionality of federal supervision of state perversion of justice). But in a book that primarily focuses on political history, there is a limit to exploring the issues of white superiority within both the North and South, the Democrat and the Republican/Unionist parties. For example, many Northerners favored a number of the Black Codes that stripped Black citizen’s rights, allowed for unjust arrest and re-enslavement through the penal system or through forced adoption or apprenticeship programs, and voting restrictions that also applied to both Black and poor White citizens.

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Summary: An overview of the tension between the church’s good and bad behavior throughout church history. 

I do not think I would have picked up Bullies and Saints if I had not heard the Seminary Dropout podcast interview. Part of the ongoing discussion of those discussing the future of evangelicalism right now is the right way to use and approach history. I think that history is only helpful if it is something that we learn from in the negative sense. In other words, because there is a tendency to look at your tradition with rose-colored glasses, our bias should primarily focus on the adverse history. That isn’t to say we only look at negative history. Still, we need to prioritize negative history because stories are often told of only the good and because directly addressing the negative is how we address the log in our eye before the speck in others’ eyes. The podcast interview suggested that John Dickson was attempting to get the balance right.

Bullies and Saints is a brief overview of Christian history (2000 years in just under 300 pages cannot be too thorough.) In the 25 short chapters (mostly 8 to 12 pages each), Dickson looks at areas of Christian harm or Christian good. Neither is glossed over. The modern concepts of human rights have been largely based on the cultural understanding of the individual’s dignity that has at least some root in the Imago Dei. At the same time, as the church became more tightly involved with the state, there have been increased opportunities for the church to abuse its power. Some of that use of power was to restrain the state, pressure the state into supporting charitable causes, or encourage justice for all. But some of that power was to pressure people into becoming Christians, to change the Christian bias against war to a ‘just war’ theory, or to adopt a ‘muscular Christian’ understanding of leadership.

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Summary: Georgiana’s friend Belinda has inherited a small house. They go to inspect it while Darcy is away on “business.” Eventually, there is a murder that Georgiana has to solve. 

The Royal Spyness series has been going on for quite a while. The series is a cozy mysteries series, and it is pretty fluffy. But I have enjoyed them and mostly listened to them as audiobooks. The series’ weaknesses are still present, but I still mostly enjoy the series despite them.

Georgiana and Darcy have returned from their honeymoon. Darcy has continued his undercover work for the crown, and he is off on another trip. Since she has inherited a house, Georgiana no longer has the same money problems as she did earlier in the series. But she still is not really interested in settling down and living a conventional life of the wealthy aristocracy. Because she is bored, she agrees to go with  Belinda to Cornwall to inspect her inherited old cottage.

Belinda spent time in the area as a child and pre-teen and played with others. But her grandmother sold her house, and Belinda no longer came to visit. Several of the children she played with have grown up and become important in the community. Belinda and Georgiana stay with one couple and find a situation they have to figure out how to deal with. That becomes another situation, and Georgiana has to save Belinda.

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Summary: Memoir of one of the two remaining Freedom Riders. 

Two things can be true at one time. The era of overt legal segregation was not that long ago (my mother is two weeks younger than Ruby Bridges, and many school districts around the country did not desegregate until roughly about the time of my birth). And we are very rapidly losing those that played prominent roles in the Civil Rights Era. Charles Person is one of just two members of the original Freedom Riders that are still living. Buses are Coming’: Memoir of a Freedom Riders was published just a couple of months ago. It is yet another book that I would not have known about without a recommendation from a friend. A friend of mine was invited to go to Charles Person’s home a couple of weeks ago, and there he spent four hours talking with him and learning about his story. It was out of that meeting that I heard about Buses are Comin’.

Charles Person was born in 1942. He was the youngest of the original Freedom Riders. As a Morehouse freshman, he participated in the Atlanta Student Movement that organized the end of segregated restaurants and shopping in Atlanta. During those protests, Charles Person was arrested and spent 16 days in jail for “trespassing and disturbing the peace” while standing in line at a lunch buffet attempting to pay for a meal. As retaliation for singing freedom songs while in jail, he was moved to solitary confinement for ten of those days. In part because of the jail sentence, he fell behind with his spring classes during his freshman year; he dropped out of Morehouse that spring and applied to be part of the Congress on Racial Equality’s Freedom Ride. (Person had applied to MIT and Georgia Tech, was accepted into MIT, but could not afford to attend and was rejected because of his race from Georgia Tech during the final year of required segregation at Tech.)

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Summary: James Baldwin’s chosen biographer, his friend and sometimes secretary and translator David Leeming.

After reading my last Baldwin book, I knew I needed to read a complete biography before reading more of Baldwin’s writing. Previously, I have read three novels (Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, and If Beale Street Could Talk) and three essay collections (The Fire Next Time, Notes of a Native Son, and No Name on the Street). In addition to those, I have read three books about Baldwin that had biographical aspects but were not primarily a biography, Begin Again by Eddie Glaude, What Truth Sounds Like by Michael Eric Dyson, and James Baldwin and the 1980s by Joseph Vogel.

David Leeming was James Baldwin’s friend and his hand-chosen biographer. This biography was originally published in 1995, nine years after Baldwin’s death. Leeming first met Baldwin in Instanbul, where Leeming was a professor and Baldwin was staying with a friend trying to write. One of the constant refrains of this biography is that Baldwin needed people around him, but he couldn’t write with people around him. So there was a tension between his ability to draw people to him and his need to get away from those people so that he could write, in part because of the costs of having those people around him.

Leeming started working for Baldwin as a secretary and continued working for him in various capacities for years. The close friendship and historical memory that Leeming brings to the biography is a real strength because Leeming was actually in the room for many events of the book, including his last days. At the same time, there is always a bit of a mistrust about biographers that are too close to their subject. The concern is about how that relationship distorts their perceptions. Leeming does not seem to have a problem allowing Baldwin to be a flawed individual. Baldwin for all of his brilliance was flawed. And Leeming had access to all of Balwin’s papers, as well as many personal conversations. The intimacy of the narrative and genuine affection make for a very compelling read.

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Summary: The 15 years of friendship between Dorothy Sayers and CS Lewis, primarily via letter, helped shape and encourage them.

History is always a balance between the 30,000-foot overviews and the small, close looks at seemingly little things that allow us to understand the people, not just the large movements of history.  I routinely move back and forth between the large and small, often in waves. Right now, I am mostly at a point of wanting the smaller textured history, memoirs, and close connections with people. Dorothy and Jack is precisely a close reading of a small slice of history that is important to give context to the larger historical sweep.

A few years ago, I was trying to read a book a month by or about CS Lewis. He strongly influenced post-WWII American Christianity, and it felt important to understand Lewis to understand my Christian context better. (And Lewis is just a fascinating figure and an excellent writer.) I am far less familiar with Dorothy Sayers. I have read nine or ten of the books from her mystery series. Still, I have not read her influential essay that shaped the American Classical School movement, her apologetics, any of her plays, or her translations of Dante. I have not read a full biography of Sayers, although I have read at least five full biographies of Lewis. So, while I know of Sayers, my connection with the two does have a disparity between the backgrounds.

Gina Dalfonzo, in part, because so much of their relationship was epistolary, can quote and build the picture of their friendship from their own words. Both were established writers by the time they struck up their friendship, and they admired one another’s work, although Lewis was not a fan of the Lord Peter Wimsey mystery series. The friendship was mainly about their writing and being the type of friend who can share their work.

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Summary: A history of the White Evangelical orientation toward colorblind approaches to race in the post-Civil Rights era. 

Routinely, usually on Twitter or Facebook, but sometimes in person, I will get someone who will ask me how some particular thing is about race. Often it will be self-evident to me, but it is much less clear for the person asking. Race is often something that people resist openly acknowledging because the very nature of seeing race for those who subscribe to colorblindness is a racialized act that we should avoid.

This book feels very personal to me. I will turn 49 soon, and much of the history here, I have very close connections to. I have met several people in the book. I attended Wheaton College as an undergrad, and I attended Rock of Our Salvation Evangelical Free Church (a church that started of the wreckage of Circle Church and Clarence Hilliard leaving.) I worked for a local association within SBC and interacted with the Home Mission Board (now the North American Mission Board). I spent several years working with Mission America, the United States arm of the Lausanne Conference on World Evangelism. The Myth of Colorblind Christians gave me context, and a lot of new information, about the world that I experienced in the 1990-2000s.

The Myth of Colorblind Christians has six main chapters. The first chapter grounds the book in the Civil Rights era history and rise of modern (Billy Graham style) evangelicalism. The primary orientation of White Evangelicals toward race was either support of segregation (either overtly as God-ordained, or more subtly, as not causing offense and submitting to the cultural mores) or to oppose segregation but to do so through individual conversion and regeneration. The Evangelical orientation toward evangelism and conversion meant that Billy Graham and others did want to evangelize African Americans, and there was some effort in attracting Black Christians that would agree with them about racial problems being primarily spiritual problems. (It’s a sin problem, not a skin problem). Billy Graham went as far as to preach against the March on Washington during his Los Angeles crusade that was happening at the same time. “I am convinced that some extremists are going too far too fast,” he declared. “Forced integration will never work.” The racial crisis would “not be settled in the streets but it could be settled in the hearts of man” (p35). Despite Graham’s concerns about the March on Washington, “King articulated the ur-text of colorblind America” in his I Have a Dream speech.

Although there were Black Evangelicals, like Howard Jones, the first Black evangelist with the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, the relationship was more as a ‘Black sidekick’ than a full partner. Jones was asked to spend much of his time preaching in Africa, and even when he specifically asked, he was occasionally denied access to evangelistic rallies in the US. In 1965, Billy Graham had an evangelistic rally in Montogmery in direct response to the protest in Selma. Graham told Jones, “I am not sure that it would be wise for you to come to Mongomery just now” (p47). Graham was concerned about a Black evangelist on the stage raising tensions.

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Summary: Exploration of modern Evangelical history and culture through the discussion of five novels. 

I am a Christian fiction skeptic. It is not that I don’t think there are good Christian fiction novels, but experience suggests that those Christian novels that are good, are likely not being published, or not being published by Christian publishers. But I know I have a bias. When I first heard of the concept of Reading Evangelicals, I was hopeful for a guide that might help me be less cynical about an area of the Christian world that I had almost entirely stopped reading ten years or so ago.

Daniel Sillman is very ambitious with Reading Evangelicals. He uses these five books, Love Comes Softly, This Present Darkness, Left Behind, The Shunning, and The Shack, to provide not just an exploration of the novels but of Evangelicalism. The meaning of Evangelicalism is hotly debated. There have been dozens of books debating the meaning and value of the term over the past ten years. Broadly, there are three main ways that Evangelical is defined. One way is a theological definition like the National Association of Evangelicals version or Bebbington’s Quadrangle. The main objection to these is that this is not how many people use the term. The second way that Evangelical is used is as a political identity that roughly means conservative, White republican who cares about abortion, gay marriage, and who was likely to have voted for Trump twice. The objection to this usage is that there is a significant subgroup that does not fall into this category, either because roughly 1/3 of theological Evangelicals in the US are non-White, or that even those that are White, approximately 20-25% do not identify through political means or regularly vote democrat. In addition, this is a very US-centric definition, and many self-identified Evangelicals (using the political definition) rarely, if ever, attend church. The third primary definition of Evangelical is as a consumer definition. This is primarily the definition that Kristen Du Mez uses in Jesus and John Wayne. Even though it isn’t the primary definition here, a significant thread of Reading Evangelicals is about the rise and fall of the Christian books store and publishing industry, contributing to the consumeristic definition of Evangelical.

Love Comes Softly was the first novel that could be called a Christian Romance novel. It was published in 1979 at the start of the growth of local Christian books stores. It was one of the first novels written directly for an Evangelical audience and published by Evangelical presses. I read Love Comes Softly early. Probably as a pre-teen or early teen. As one of the quotes from the book said, I read it because my mom owned them all, and the church library stocked them. There were not a lot of Christian novels that I had access to in the mid-1980s. While Stillman does read the novels closely and discuss themes and the books themselves, the context is to the novels is what I find most helpful. Janet Oke was responding to a turn toward not just explicit sex but sexualized violence in the secular romance novel market in the late 1970s. A common trope at the time was that the protagonist would be kidnapped and/or raped, often more than once, and then she would eventually fall in love with her rapist. Before Love Comes Softly, Christian publishers almost entirely published non-fiction, often academic-leaning books targeted toward pastors and bibles. The rise of local Christian books stores needed products to sell, and novels filled a niche. In addition, the rise of the local Christian book store was necessarily ecumenical in orientation. Many Christian publishers were denominationally rooted, and they needed ways to sell outside of their narrow constituencies without alienating them. Love Comes Softly was a successful proof of concept that Christians would buy novels and that fiction could sell.

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