Book Reviews

Takeaway: Taxes, abuse of power, responsiveness to the citizenry, and corruption seem to be involved in most revolutions.

My European history is lousy. I doubt I will every have a really good handle on European history, but short books like The French Revolution: A Very Short Introduction help.

This good addition to the Very Short Introduction series. The book is just over 100 pages of real material. There are six chapters: Echoes; Why It Happened; How It Happened; What It Ended; What It Started; and Where It Stands.

In a short introduction like this, there is not room for a detailed look at the events of the revolution. A broad overview, along with cultural and historical implication is the main focus.

I had a couple of thoughts when reading. First, economics are almost always important to revolutions. But not necessarily directly. The French revolution occurred after some tax cuts and the average person was a bit better off. However overspending on the military and empire still distorted the fundamental economics.

Both the aristocracy and the church share some blame for the revolution. In both cases there were signs that their power and finances were unsustainable in the long term. Instead of voluntarily giving up power, finances and authority for the good of the country as a whole, they were ultimately reduced to a fraction of their previous state. I always think the church should understand giving up power and finances to gain cultural voice and authority. But that seems to be a hard lesson to learn, even when it is part of our faith.

I also did not realize the extent that the church was repressed in France. It went badly for everyone and in many ways it is odd to me that the Soviet Union and later China (and others) did not learn the lesson about the repression of the church and faith from the earlier French revolution.

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I am reposting this 2014 review because the Kindle Edition is on sale for $2.99
Summary: A 14 year marriage is in danger, and a magic phone to the past may be just the thing the marriage needs to be saved.

Rainbow Rowell is definitely now in my list of “˜favorite authors’. Like most I first heard about her because of her breakout book Eleanor and Park. From there I moved on to Fangirl and Attachments and now Landline. Each book impressed me more than the previous one.

I, and I think many others, still think of Rowell as a young adult author.  Although even Eleanor and Park was not originally published as a young adult book. And all of the rest of her books deal primarily with adults.

So with Landline, it feels a bit like Rowell is again trying to breaking free of her young adult label and writing a much heavier and more adult oriented novel.

Georgie McCool (yes it is her real name) is a TV script writer. Just days before Christmas, and the day before her family is scheduled to fly to Omaha to spend Christmas with her Mother in Law, her dream comes true. A Network wants to see a script for a pilot and four additional episodes for her own series.

But that means that she cannot go to Omaha with her husband (Neal) and daughters. And instead she will have to stay in LA and write with her best friend and writing partner, Seth.

When Neal decides that he is taking the girls and going to Omaha anyway, instead of staying and having Christmas with her, it creates a crisis for Georgie. She realizes that she has checked out of her marriage in many ways. That her husband has been unhappy for a while. That she has not even been taking care of her own basic needs let alone the needs of her family.

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Summary: Lord Wimsey is vacationing in an artist’s community when one of the artists, someone no one likes, is found dead. Five artists have motive and weak alibis.

I like reading book in a series in order, even if the order really does not matter particularly to the series. The Five Red Herrings is one of those book in a series that could have been placed in a different order and would not have mattered. It barely has Wimsey’s faithful servant Bunter or Scotland Yard and Inspector Parker. The new love interest introduced in the last book is not even mentioned. This could just as easily have been book three as book seven in the series.

The mystery itself is not bad, but a lot of it is in fairly minor details to try to establish whether alibis are valid or not. As a mystery, it is well presented but dull. Sayers has some real glimpses of brilliant writing, almost always as insights into people or situations, but those do not really make up for a mediocre book.

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Summary: Basic reminders that loving your neighbor includes LGBT people.

I picked up and read Loving My (LGBT) Neighbor because of Karen Swallow Prior’s review for Christianity Today. I finished it on Saturday morning, the day before I heard about the shooting in Orlando.

In many ways, this is such a basic book on being a decent human being and Christian that it is surprising that it needs to be written. But it obviously does need to be written. Glenn Stanton mostly does a very good job of presenting a conservative position on sexuality and marriage (he is on staff at Focus on the Family) while very clearly advocating a much more inclusive stance on actual friendship and love with LGBT people than what many Christians currently have.

It is clear that Stanton actually has a variety of gay friends. And he has those friends because he spends a lot of time with gay people. Part of that time is touring around with one of his gay friends debating at college campuses on the ethics of gay marriage. But it is clear from his stories and writing that he is actually trying to live out love of neighbor.

“Christianity is a hard calling because we are not only called to love others but to go further and love those who hate us. And if we are called to love those who hate us, we are certainly called to love those who disagree with us. And love is not conditional; you do this for me and I’ll do this for you.”

There were a few places where I think Stanton missed the mark. In a section where he was attempting to show the diversity of the LGBT movement by talking about different groups within the movement I think he over generalized a couple times in much the same way he was asking the reader not to generalize. But in context of the full book, if every Christian loved LGBT people as Stanton is illustrating, there would be far less problems.

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I am reposting my 2014 review because the Kindle Edition is on sale for $2.99.
Summary: A flu-like virus (Haden’s Virus) leaves millions without the ability to move. With the assistance of robots and human “˜integrators’, Haden’s sufferers can move around and interact and lead somewhat normal lives. But never with their own bodies.

I am a big fan of John Scalzi. And Lock In lived up to the very high level of promotion that Audible gave it.  Audible made the unusual choice of producing two different editions of the book.  One narrated by Wil Wheaton and one narrated by Amber Benson. If you pre-ordered one of the editions, you would get the other for free.

Scalzi is a talented writer. He has moved around in various subsets of the sci-fi genre, from Military Science Fiction to near term Alien encounters, to rewrites of classic sci-fi.  Lock In is more of a police procedural (or FBI to be more accurate) that happens to have a near term sci-fi setting.

The Hadden’s syndrome has forced the FBI set up a department to deal with crimes that might involve the Hadden’s sufferer using the body of either their robot or a human integrators. Chris Shane (a Hadden’s syndrome sufferer) is a new member of this FBI department.

Shane happens to be the poster child for Hadden’s, literally.  Shane’s father is sort of a cross between Michael Jordan and Donald Trump. A former basketball star, turned billionaire real estate mogel, he was an early proponent of government intervention in Hadden’s and trotted out Chris (in a robot body) throughout childhood.

As an adult, Chris is trying to find his own way in the world.

While this is primarily a mystery/thriller, Scalzi uses the book to bring up a number of issues around medical ethics, medical testing, the role of government and business corruption. None of those issues are really settled, but I think the raising of the issues is done well and in context of the story and not as propaganda.

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Takeaway: Expressive Worship and Formative Worship, while both valid, have different purposes.

It is good to re-read books. I can not remember where I read it, but I remember a discussion about the difference in reading habits of people a couple hundred years ago. The short version is that books used to be very expensive. So you would read and re-read a book several times because you only had a few options of what books to read.

Today books are cheap. I routinely pick up books for a couple dollars or even free. So we tend to read a book once and move on to the next idea. I have put a goal on myself to re-read at least one book a month. I rarely re-read books quite that often, but almost every time I re-read a book I am reminded about the importance of re-reading. Maybe others are more careful readers than I am. But I almost always find significant ideas that I either missed on the first reading or I have forgotten.

The most important idea from You are What You Love that I missed on the first reading is the clear understanding of the difference between what Smith calls Expressive and Formative worship. For Smith, expressive worship, the predominate focus of modern evangelicals, is about the importance of bringing praise to God. Smith does not say it is wrong to expressively worship. But he is not sure that expressive worship should be our primary focus and this is for several reasons. 1) Expressive worship is focused on what we do for God instead of what God has done. 2) Because of our age of authenticity, the temptation for expressive worship is to always seek out the new and innovative because repeated expressive worship feels less authentic.  3) Because of point one, the only real place for the congregation to participate in expressive worship is the music portion of worship. So expressive worship ends up minimizing the full range of worship in a service.

Instead Smith believes that we should approach worship as primarily formative. Formative worship is focused on what the activity of worship does to us. Music reminds us of themes of worship, creeds reminds us of the historical and catholic character of Christianity, the eucharist reminds us of the sacrifice of Christ and the power of the Spirit to act in us on a daily basis, the word reminds us of the message of the gospel.

I think that I have been so shaped in my evangelical formation on the importance of expressive worship that I have missed Smith’s distinction between expressive and formative worship in the first reading.

The main focus of the book is that we are shaped by habits that occur in the pre-cognitive portion of our brain. Things that we do without really thinking of them. So we should strive after creating habits that help us move in the direction that we want to go as Christians.

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