Book Reviews

The Spy Who Came In From the Cold by John le Carre

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Takeaway: Being a spy, influencing the other side is difficult to do and prone to morally questionable decisions.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is the book that first made John le Carre’s name (or made John le Carre, a pseudonym famous.) John le Carre was a spy who became a writer. At about the same time Ian Fleming was becoming famous with James Bond, he came to prominence. In many ways, he was the anti-Bond.

Bond is known for action and individualism. George Smiley is overweight and a bit dumpy. He is an intellectual and an analyst. Carre’s books are slow and have complex plots. Fleming’s books are much shorter, are much more action based, and idealize the work of a spy.

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold is the first of le Carre’s books I have re-read. And it reminds me much how soul-deadening le Carre makes intelligence work. There is some action and understanding of the west being on the right side of the cold war. But that doesn’t mean that the west is always right in its actions. John le Carre, if he had not read Niebuhr, he at least understood the basic concepts that Niebuhr wrote about in the Irony of American History.

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An American Conscience: The Reinhold Niebuhr Story by Jeremy Sabella

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An American Conscience: The Reinhold Niebuhr Story by Jeremy SabellaSummary: A companion book to the PBS documentary on Reinhold Niebuhr.

The past couple of months I keep running across Reinhold Niebuhr. While I read him in seminary, I have not directly read anything by him for several years. But Niebuhr has come back to the world again with modern politics.

The two strong points that Niebuhr makes to our current political and theological world is that systems are always broken. No matter how good the goals or purposes of any institution or organization is, that institution or organization is still made up of sinful humans and will eventually disappoint or harm.

The second related point, that primarily comes out in his Irony of American History, is that in addition to institutions be broken, organizations with good goals will often adopt bad means to accomplish those good goals and in some ways be more dangerous than the institutions that are openly negative. With good intentions, comes the thought that people working within good institutions to cut corners or harm people because of the greater good that accomplishing those good goals will bring.

Those two points keep coming up. So I picked up An American Conscience and then watched the documentary after I finished the book. This is a brief book, not even 200 pages. But it does a good job introducing Niebuhr to readers that were likely not even born when he passed away.

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The Templars’ Last Secret by Martin Walker (Bruno Chief of Police #10)

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The Templars' Last Secret by Martin Walker (Bruno Chief of Police #10)Summary: Seemingly unrelated events all come together in rural France (yet again.)

I really like the Bruno, Chief of Police series. Bruno, the late 30s, single chief of police (and only policeman) in small town French countryside believes in food, community, restorative justice and family. In the previous nine books, we have seen him fall in and out of love, solve a number of crimes, stop a few international incidents and contribute to the building of a local community.

In The Templars’ Last Secret, Bruno is being followed by a researcher in the Department of Justice to find out why he is such a successful policeman. She says at one point, “˜you are as much a social worker as a police officer.’ That is both true and the secret to his success. He sees people as part of systems and those systems can be encouraged toward health or they can be starved of humanity.

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How to Survive the Apocalypse by Robert Jourstra and Alissa Wilkinson

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Book Review: How to Survive the Apocalypse: Zombies, Cylons, Faith, and Politics at the End of the WorldSummary: An exploration of how the stories that Movies and TV tell us teach us about what it means to be human in a secular world. (With lots of reference to Charles Taylor)

I have referenced the web magazine Christ and Pop Culture a number of times over the past couple years that I have been a subscriber. I am going to do it yet again. Alissa Wilkinson is a movie critic at Vox (formerly at Christianity Today) and a professor of English and Humanities at King’s College in New York City. She also is a member of the CAPC private Facebook group and I have learned a ton about good criticism from reading her movie reviews and other writing.

After my recent Great Course exploration of modern Philosophy I decided to pick up How to Survive the Apocalypse: Zombies, Faith and Politics at the End of the World. The title may not really describe it well, but this a perfect example of why the magazine Christ and Pop Culture exists.

Christianity can sometimes ignore the importance of stories, in spite of the fact that Jesus (and the bible) seem to have primarily taught through stories. The Great Courses lecture on modern philosophy was occationally hard to track because it did not ground the philosophy enough in experiential examples so that the listener could understand why a particular philosophical idea mattered.

Wilkinson and her co-writer Robert Joustra have grounded their discussion of philosophy in the recent TV and movie obsession with the apocalypse and dystopian stories. Long explorations of Battlestar Galactica, the Walking Dead, Mad Men, Breaking Bad and a number of other shows give context to philosophy so that the reader can understand not only the philosophy being explored but also can understand how good media criticism can give insights into the stories in a way that isn’t possible with just casual watching.

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Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson

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Aurora by Kim Stanley RobinsonSummary: A multi-generational starship is attempting to build a human colony on another world.

One of the reasons that science fiction has been historically popular is that it in general a hopeful genre. Science fiction dreams of new worlds being discovered, the expansion of humanity across the galaxy, technological progress. Or at least that has been a strong part of the world of science fiction.

More recently science fiction has been more concerned with dystopian worlds. There is often still a thread of hopefulness, at least some people will survive the destruction of most of humanity. Space exploration is no longer a significant theme of science fiction. There are occasional books about exploring or creating world. But even the few that are out there are likely to be like John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series that views humanity as a bit players in galactic politics.

Aurora is the story of an enormous starship. It can travel 10% of light speed, but that means it will take approximately 150 years to reach the planet Aurora (around Tau Ceti). The ship is an ark. It contains about 2000 people and as many different climate sections and animals and plants as can be squeezed onto the ship.

The books opens as they are in the last generation before the come into their new home. The ship is continually in need of maintenance and interventions. The interventions almost always have unintended consequence. But they are making it.

And that is about as happy as the book gets. The writing is well done, but this is “˜anti-science fiction’ (as one very spoiler filled review on Amazon put it.) The main theme of the book is why space colonies will never work. And tragedy and bad luck are continually present.

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Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail by Robert Webber

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Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail by Robert WebberSummary: An update to the 1985 book from Robert Webber.

I knew of Robert Webber more than I knew anything about Robert Webber as a college and seminary student. He had been a professor at Wheaton (where I was a college student). And a professor at Northern Baptist Seminary (where my father did his DMin and my brother got his MDiv). I was aware of his work in the area of “˜Ancient Future Faith’.

But other than hearing about Webber, I am not sure that I actually reading anything by him until two years ago. I read his first book (the 1978 Common Roots) and was struck by how much it felt like many books I read that have been written in the 5 to 10 years.

A few weeks ago I picked up an updated version of his second book, Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail when it was briefly on sale. It is a very brief book. I read it in two short sittings. The first half of the book is Webber’s own story about coming to faith and then moving toward the Episcopal Church as an adult. The last half of the book are new stories about other Evangelicals also moving toward the Episcopal/Anglican church.

The new stories pay attention to the changes in the Episcopal church in the United States since the 1980s. Part of what Webber was interested in was finding a church that had a relationship to the ancient church (but he was theologically not Roman Catholic) and a church that was consciously “˜catholic’ (lower c). However, the worldwide Anglican communion has had difficulty maintaining that catholic stance, especially over the past 10-15 years.

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The Arm of the Starfish by Madeleine L’Engle (O’Keefe Family #1)

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The Arm of the Starfish by Madeleine L'Engle (O'Keefe Family #1)Summary: L’Engle’s writing style and ideas, but re-imagined as a young adult spy thriller.

My wife and children were gone for the weekend so I spent most of the weekend either doing data entry with an audiobook in the background or walking/driving around playing Pokemon Go (with an audiobook in the background). I finished four books this weekend and listened to part of a fifth.

After listening to a book on modern philosophy and then a somewhat depressing spy thriller by John le Carré and a quarter of a depressing Walker Percy book, I decided to pick up The Arm of the Starfish.

I have read several Madeleine L’Engle books this year, but mostly her lesser-known fiction or non-fiction that has been out of print and is now only available in ebook formats. I still have a couple of her young adult books that I have never read, including most of the O’Keefe family series.

The Arm of the Starfish is the first of the O’Keefe family series (Calvin and Meg from the Wrinkle in Time series are married, and the focus is primarily on Polly, their daughter.) I had some insight into the family because the main focus of this book is Adam Eddington, who is also a character (set a summer later) in the Austin Family series book A Ring of Endless Light.

Because I have read A Ring of Endless Light, I knew some of the results of the Arm of the Starfish but not the main story. The Arm of the Starfish is set as a young adult spy thriller. Adam is a young college biology major (he graduated from high school early and is only 17.) He has been encouraged to apply for a job with Dr. O’Keefe, which is on an island off the coast of Spain working with starfish and regeneration.

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The Patriarch by Martin Walker (Bruno Chief of Police #8)

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The Patriarch by Martin Walker (Bruno Chief of Police #8)Summary: Bruno is invited to the birthday party of a national hero, but when there is an accidental death, Bruno isn’t so sure.

Somehow I missed the Patriarch by Martin Walker when it came out. I was looking around for something to read, and check to see when the next Bruno Chief of Police novel comes out. I discovered that it came out in June and not only did I miss the release, but I also missed one of the previous books in the series.

It is odd that you can read a series and not notice when you miss a book. And once I finished reading The Patriarch, I am can see why I did not realize that I missed anything. This novel did not really move the story along.

In one of the previous books Bruno saved “˜The Red Countess’, an elderly woman from a historic family that was being drugged to steal her land. The Red Countess invites him to a party for the Patriarch, a national hero of the cold war, a pilot and one of the Countess’s previous relationships.

At the party, which is local and adds in yet another wealthy member of the community, Bruno observes a quiet scuffle between a granddaughter of the Patriarch and her Godfather, the best friend of one of the sons of the Patriarch. Later that day, Bruno is called in to quietly certify the death of the Godfather, who it turns out was a former spy.

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