Book Reviews

Summary: Helping children from difficult backgrounds succeed, is more about creating the right environments for them to be successful than it is teaching them success strategies.

My paying job is to manage data for an after school program that works in low income areas and targets low performing students at low performing school. I am always interested in the latest theories and practices that seem to be successful. But I have been working at this job for nearly 15 years. And my wife has been a teacher for even longer. I have seen trends come and go. Solutions are never fast or simple because the problems have been long in coming and are infinitely complex.

Paul Tough is a journalist, a writer for the New York Times and a contributor to This American Life. This is his second book on this theme (the first was How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character). This is a very short book, 145 pages, less than 4 hours of audio. And in that short number of pages there are still 23 chapters. Tough opens by charting out why children from difficult backgrounds have difficulty in school and life. Adversity, stress, trauma, neglect, low attachment and other adversities all impact development. Some of these can literally change DNA, but all impact development of young children, which has a very long term impact on future development.

Helping Children Succeed is more than diagnosing the problem, Tough also attempts to chart out some of the failed solutions and some of the potential viable solutions. There is no pretense that solving problems of education is easy. But because of differences of demographics, population trends and birth rates, the majority of children in schools are now poor, minority or from other difficult to educate subgroups.

Where I think Tough is right is that character issues, internal motivation and ‘grit’ is more important in the long term than base intelligence. The question is how to develop the internal, and often precognitive, skills that allow kids to do the hard work that is necessary to overcome their educational difficulties.

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Summary: A slightly neurotic psychiatrist faces the end of the world after inventing a device that can read the state of a person’s soul.

Walker Percy is one of those 20th century Catholic novelists that intrigue me. Percy, Graham Greene, Flannery O’Connor, Endo and several others were not writing ‘Christian fiction’. They were writing literary fiction that was influenced by their faith, usually quite overtly. They became prophets in a way that I am not sure is quite possible today.

Alan Jacobs’ long essay at Haper’s on the loss of the Christian Public Intellectual is somewhat similar to my thoughts here. It is not that there are not prominent literary figures that are Christians (Marilynne Robinson being the first on everyone’s lips.) But I am not sure that there is a similar prophetic voice, and I am not sure that the culture of the 1950-70s that produced these famous Catholic voices wasn’t a particular culture that was conversant enough about Christian themes, while not necessarily being Christian. But it is also always problematic comparing historical authors to current because the remembered historical authors are always greater than the whole of current authors that have not been winnowed by time.

Love in the Ruins is about Dr Tom More. Written in 1971, it envisions a near future USA that has devolved into a segmented culture with no real government. Small city states of conservatives (Knotheads) or liberals operate without any opposition. Several groups live outside of society, including the hippy communes and the Black radicals that are opposing a more extreme Jim Crow (near slavery) style oppression.

Tom More is a widower. His wife left him to find herself after their daughter died. And then his wife died with her universalist guru. Tom is now a brilliant alcoholic womanizing doctor. He is a sometimes  psych resident of the large teaching hospital. But mostly he is living by himself, minded by his nurse, pursuing local girls and trying to figure out his Ontological Lapseometer. The Lapseometer reads the state of the soul and toward the middle of the book he figures out how to turn the reading device into one that can adjust the mental imbalances of the individual, Angelism/Beastialism ratio among other types of imbalances.

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I am reposting this 2013 review because the Kindle Edition is on sale for $1.99. Also his recent book, Dangerous Passions, Deadly Sins: Learning from the Psychology of Ancient Monks is free if you subscribe to Kindle Unlimited.
Takeaway: Spiritual Growth is not a quick fix.  It is a journey without end.

One of my favorite classes at Wheaton College was Systematic Theology with Dennis Okholm.  I think I learned more about theology in that class than I did in all of my theology classes at University of Chicago Divinity School combined.

So when I saw that Okholm’s book was on sale for kindle (2 weeks ago), I picked it up and read almost all of it in a single sitting, that probably goes against the theme of the book.

Monk Habits for Everyday People is a very readable and interesting look at how Protestants (and more particularly Evangelicals that are often most interesting in evangelism and salvation) can learn from Benedictines about how to live as Christians.  This is an ongoing theme for me this year.  Not intentionally, but I think it is something that God is doing in me. As Okholm says near the beginning of the book:

We have become consumers of religion rather than cultivators of a spiritual life; we have spawned an entire industry of Christian kitsch and bookstores full of spiritual junk food that leaves us sated and flabby. As if we believed the infomercial that promises great abs if we just buy the right piece of equipment for $39.95, we think that the secret to being a spiritually fit Christian can be had by finding some secret technique or buying the most recent hot-selling inspirational devotional. Maturity in the Christian life does not come in these ways. The life of the disciple is like that of the athlete who prepares for and runs a marathon. We can have the snazziest running garb, assemble a library full of training schedules and tips, and watch Chariots of Fire each day every day for a year, but while all of these things might help, they will not be a substitute for the unspectacular training and diet that we must engage in if we are going to become mature Christians, “œperfect and complete, lacking in nothing” (Jas. 1:4). It’s that way with anything in life””being a concert pianist, a skilled sculptor, or an insightful historian.

And this soon after that, “What Benedictines have to offer Protestants in this quest is the lived reminder that the Christian community’s ultimate function is to shape individuals who, as disciples of Christ, are being formed into his image.”

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Summary: More inter galactic political intrigue and death defying heroics.

Old Man’s War was a great book. It was a nice update to Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. I never did read the third and fourth books of the series (which I should). Scalzi rebooted the series with Human Division and continues it with The End of All Things.

These two books are short story collections that tell the story in snippets from a variety of perspectives. That is not my favorite method. But Scalzi is a good writer and in spite of the fact that I am not a fan of short stories. These are well done. They give the idea of some of the wide ranging fiction of George RR Martin or Neal Stevenson without the 900 pages of text.

Most of the time I write reviews soon after I finish a book, but it has been nearly 2 weeks since I actually finished The End of All Things. And while I know the story and can remember the major arc, it is a fairly forgettable. The problem with the story story collection idea is that it usually lacks the character development as it bounces around. And while several of the characters have been in several other books (Harry throughout), I just don’t really love any of them.

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Summary: The reader may have the thoughts of the killer, but we won’t know the identity until the end.

I do not particularly like knowing the thoughts of a killer. (Which is why I hate the show Criminal Minds.) So I am not particularly happy that JK Rowling added that twist to Career of Evil. That being said, this is the best book of the series so far.

Cormoran Strike and his partner Robin are the main focus. Robin is preparing for her wedding to a man that we are not particularly supposed to like. There is a lot of back story on both Cormoran and Robin. They are really developed as characters and that suggests a continuation to the series that I look forward to.

The problem is that there is little where else for Rowling to go with the criminals. There are three viable suspects here from Cormoran’s background. And we now have a real serial killer as the bad guy. One that really enjoys death, dismemberment and many other disturbing murder cliché’s.

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Summary: Funny, warm hearted recounting of one of the best movies ever made.

Seth Simmons turned me on to this book several years ago (his review here). It was on sale a couple weeks ago and I finally picked it up.

If you have any love of the Princess Bride movie, As You Wish is well worth picking up. And by the way, if you have only watched the movie and not read the book, you are missing out.

Cary Elwes has written an excellent book. It is a light hearted book. It is full of lots of self depreciating humor. There is not any dirty laundry. And while there is lots of one actor appreciating another, the words all seem genuine. It really seems like everyone really enjoyed making the movie and really enjoyed the people they were making the movie with. Rob Reiner seems like a wonderful director to work for.

The actual narrative of the making of the movie was mixed in with discussions about the people. My favorite is the long section about Andre the Giant. Everyone really seems to have loved him. He was only 46 when he passed away. But his health was already quite bad by the time he was working on the movie. The descriptions of the amount of alcohol that he was able to put away is incredible.

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Takeaway: All of our fears about how bad the world is, are completely not unique. 

Marsden is a wide ranging and important historian. His biographies of Jonathan Edwards are excellent. He has a number of books about higher education (both histories and theory) and American Christian history. I pick up almost anything of his that I run across (as I did with his biography of Mere Christianity.

This seems to be a particularly good time to pick up The Twilight of American Enlightenment. The parallels to today and the 1950s are surprising to me. We seem to be going through another civil rights era. There is a lot of fear about the direction of the country. Fear as motivation is not only not new, but seemingly all pervasive. Marsden cites a Women’s Journal article about raising children that are too well adjusted. It is a good example of how fear can grow to include virtually everything.

The Twilight of the American Enlightenment is about how in post World War II the culture of progress looked to the expert and intellectual to chart a new common course for progress and the United States. Intellectually, the forces of post modernism were shaking the foundations of philosophy and science. Socially despite the perception of ‘Leave it to Beaver’ uniformity, race, gender, class and other groups were breaking free of cultural restrictions. That freedom to call for justice or to establish their own paths led to a failure to produce a common path forward. Essentially the thesis is that the upheavals of the 1960s were predicted by the cracks in the foundation of American cultural hegemony.

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Summary: The history and influence of Mere Christianity.

I stumbled across the audiobook of CS Lewis’ Mere Christianity: A Biography when I was looking for another book by George Marsden. I have previously read two other books from The Lives of Great Religious Books series (Letters and Papers from Prison and the Book of Common Prayer) and so I eagerly picked it up (both as a fan of Marsden’s and the series.)

The series seems to have done a good job hiring good authors, and good writers matters in a series like this. This is not a series that requires heavy historical lifting: a short section of biography about the author, the story of the writing and overview of the content, a summary of the response and objections, and the spread of the book. All three that I have read have basically been the same format. But the format works.

I have a pretty good handle on Lewis’ own biography at this point. Marsden handles that well and throws in a few tidbits that I have not previously heard, but made sense in the context of the book. The basic story of the book, I was also familiar with because it is pretty important to Lewis’ own life story.

What was more interesting to me was the response and objections to Mere Christianity. The discussion of the Catholic objections to Mere Christianity made sense once Marsden pointed them out. But I would not have been able to express them myself without his help.

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Summary: A long interview with Pope Francis and the declaration of the Year of Mercy statement.

I keep meaning to read something by Pope Francis. But I have not up until now. Or really I still have not, but this is closer. The Name of God is Mercy was on sale at audible, so I picked it up last week.

It is short, only 3 hours. Two hours of it is a transcribed interview between an Italian reporter and the Pope. The last hour is the official statement on the Year of Mercy.

The interview was interesting. The most striking thing for me was how much of the interview revolved around a discussion of sin. I do not internally connect Mercy and Sin, but Pope Francis did.

Part of this is differences in the theology of sin between Catholics and Protestants. I read George Marsden’s biography of the book Mere Christianity right after this and Marsden has a discussion about the difference between Catholic and Protestant theologies of sin that was helpful. My short, and overly simplistic explanation is that for Protestants, the importance of sin is that it separates us from God. So the real issue for Protestants is that we need forgiveness. And Protestants tend to then focus on the permanence of forgiveness.

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