Book Reviews

Summary: First in a trilogy of autobiographical graphic novels on Civil Rights leader John Lewis.

I have mentioned before that I subscribe to Christ and Pop Culture Magazine. The primary illustrator there (he also works with Christianity Today and other organizations) has an comic book review site. Because of his advocacy for comics and graphics novels I have picked up several well reviewed graphic novels. This week will be graphic novel week at Bookwi.se.

March has been on my radar for a while, but I picked it up on Friday because it was (and is as of posting) for $4 on Kindle. I read it in a sitting and immediately purchased the whole trilogy on paper to give to a friend.

John Lewis was a Civil Rights leader, chairman of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Council, one of the original Freedom Riders, one of the organizers of the 1963 March on Washington and more. In 1986 he was elected to Congress and continues to serve as Georgia 5th Congressional District Representative.

March book one tells the early history of John Lewis growing up, going to college, meeting Martin Luther King Jr and the Nashville Lunch counter sit in. I am a fan of Nate Powell‘s art (most of the graphic novels I read this week were by Nate Powell). But some of the lettering gets a little bit small in the paperback version (or it needs to be enlarged to read on kindle.) With that one minor complaint, this is an excellent book and I will soon finish reading the next two books in the trilogy.

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I am reposting this 2009 review because The Good Book is on sale for $.99 for the Kindle Edition and audiobook is $3.99 with purchase of the Kindle Edition.

Summary: A non-practicing Jew reads the Old Testament and blogs his way through it.

The Good Book was interesting, maybe the last chapter the most interesting of all. The author is Jewish, although not really practicing. So when he starts reading the Hebrew Bible (or the Christian Old Testament) it is not in the same way that many others would read it.

Plotz is a friend of the text, he doesn’t deconstruct it or tear it apart. Instead he reads it, mostly as a person with very little history with the text. He is amazed, delighted and horrified by it.

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Summary: Thor has lost his hammer again and Magnus Chase and his friends have to find it before the giants know it is gone and decide to invade.

Rick Riordan and his Percy Jackson books exploded onto the middle grade book scene in 2005. And he has been churning out books since then. By my count, The Hammer of Thor is his 22nd novel since 2005 (he had 7 novels before that). As I said last year in my review of the first book in this series, I loved the initial Percy Jackson series. The follow up heroes of Olympus series declined as it went on. I did not like the first of the Kane Chronicle and did not read further. But with Magnus Chase was back to good again.

The Hammer of Thor follows soon after the end of the first book. Magnus Chase died early in the first book. He is now in Valhalla, a Norse afterlife for heroes that die saving others. He can come and go from there as he wants to. Being the son of Frey, a Norse god of healing, Magnus has some healing powers (similar to the way that Percy Jackson as a son of Neptune has powers over water).

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Summary: Ms Marvel is actually starting to grow into her role as a super hero. But fame doesn’t give her more time or energy to devote to what is important in life.

I am having problems finding time to write reviews, let alone actually read the books. I picked up the latest Ms Marvel collection, Super Famous, because the whole series is on sale for $3.99 each right now. Saturday night while I waiting to make sure my son was going to fall asleep before rejoining the rest of my family at my mother in law’s cabin I quickly read through the 100 pages of comics that are in the collection.

I like comics, but as much as I find the art interesting and love seeing the way that the comic method allows for a different type of story telling than just straight text, I still mostly read comics for the story.

In Super Famous, Ms Marvel is now a part of the Avengers (her work with them is mostly off screen). She is still in high school. She still has over protective parents (she is a second generation Pakistani Muslim immigrant, which is such an important thread to what makes this series so good.) She still is trying to figure out how to deal with the ramifications of her power and the weight of responsibility that comes with them.

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Summary: Stepping out of retirement, former Chief Inspector Gamache, has agreed to take over Surete (Quebec police) academy. 

A Great Reckoning is not a novel that you want to pickup if you are new to the series.  You could read it and I think enjoy it. But there is a lot of assumed back story. Gamache and his wife are retired in the small village of Three Pines. But Gamache still feels to pull to continue to root out the corruption inside the police force from the previous several books.

I really like this series and this is one of the best books in the series. It is not without its faults. The corruption angle I think has been problematic from the start. It is too big and too small at the same time. There is a timeline issue with one of the big reveals that just doesn’t make sense to me (the age of one of the characters and the secret relationship to Gamache’s history doesn’t really work.) But if you set aside the questionable reality of the police corruption and personal vendetta angles and just read them as a story, it rolls out nicely.

Gamache feels like the only way to solve the problem of the academy is to fire most of the bad teachers, but keep the one he thinks is the ringleader and then bring back the privately disgraced, but not incarcerated, former head of the Surete as one of the staff. He hopes he can use them to root one another’s corruption while keeping them under control.

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Summary: A groups of alcoholics is the subject of a reality TV show.

Eve Tushnet is a writer that I have been wanting to read more from. I have read a number of blog posts and articles by her. In addition to this novel, she has a memoir that I have been wanting to read for a while. Several authors that I ‘know’ have recommended the novel. And because it was recommended as funny, and only $3.99, I picked it up.

I am not sure that funny is how I would describe it. Alcoholism and recovery are not inherently funny subjects, at least to me. I did a college internship with a drug and alcohol rehab program (primarily focused on recently homeless.) While I only worked as a counselor for a few months with the internship, I volunteered there for years and lived on site in exchange for working as night security for a couple years before I was married in grad school.

Amends presents a fairly realistic view of addiction and recovery. The reality TV program is being put together by an addict herself. The ‘talent’ is chosen for diversity and interest. So there is a gay man, a teen hockey star, a homeless Christian African immigrant, well known playwright, a woman who identifies as a wolf, etc.

These are all brilliant characters. Their conversations are occasionally over the head of the TV audience. The reality TV angle, similar to Christopher Beha’s Arts and Entertainment and Beauty Queens by Libba Bray, both irritated me and provided some needed context to the novel. I really do not like most reality tv. The exploitive nature of it, especially with something like addiction, is acknowledged by the book but also still wrapped up in the novel.

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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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