Adam Shields

I am reposting this 2010 review because the Kindle Edition is on sale for $1.99.
When you read as much as I do every once in a while you need some palate cleansing. I am a huge fan of pickled ginger, which is always served with sushi and wasabi. Pickled ginger has great taste, but when you finish you do not have an aftertaste, you just have a mildly pleasant feeling in your mouth. The two Christopher Buckley novels I have read, No Way to Tread a First Lady and Supreme Court, are the pickled ginger for my mind.

I enjoy politics. I like watching the weekend political talk shows, although I rarely have time. I often listen to Shields and Brooks podcast from PBS news and the Slate Political Gabfest podcast. My favorite NPR show is Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me, a radio equivalent of Christopher Buckley’s political satire. So when I had it up to here with memoirs and other books telling me how wonderful the authors were doing at processing what God has been telling them, I picked up some emergency Christopher Buckley. I am saving the rest of his novels for future need.

No Way to Treat A First Lady is a satirical novel about trying the first lady for killing her husband (the President).  She found him, yet again having an affair. This time the the dalliance was in the Lincoln Bedroom, while she was asleep down the hall. The next morning he is discovered dead in bed and the First Lady is suspected and tried for Presidential Assassination. Buckley does a fabulous job making a trial both boringly realistic and exciting to read about.

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Summary: Darcy has decided to take Georgie away so they can elope. But his father is accused of murder and yet again the two them must put aside their own desires out of duty.

Crowned and Dangerous is the tenth book in this cozy mystery series. Georgie is 35th in line to the throne in the late 1930s, put penniless. Darcy is the son of an Irish lord and just as penniless. The pair of them, while trying to survive, continue to solve mysteries and take care of problems for both the royal family and their friends. But they are getting a bit frustrated with propriety keeping them from getting married. So Darcy decides to whisk Georgie away to get married and worry about propriety later. As is normal in the series, a problem happens and they are prevented.

Darcy’s father is accused of murder, so Darcy goes away to support his emotionally distant and unlikable father. And because the situation looks grim, attempts to break things off with Georgie so that her (and the royal family) will not be associated with the crime. Georgie flutters around a bit before going to him.

Crowned and Dangerous corrects several of the problems that have been going on in the series for a while. Queenie, Georgie’s incompetent maid, is mostly out of the book and by the end seems to have mostly stopped being a punch line and allowed to be a real person. Georgie mostly stops worrying about Darcy’s past and whether he really loves her or not. There is not a lot of whining in the book.

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Summary: A returning missionary has to work through the problem of evil in light of the death of his whole team and what he previously understood as God’s clear direction and guidance.

I have mentioned before that I subscribe to the online magazine Christ and Pop Culture. Their private Facebook group is the best thing about Facebook right now. Marion Hill (an author and book blogger) is one of the active participants in the group and frequently talks about books he is reading. So, several books that are on my radar are directly a result of his advocacy.

The Sparrow is not a new book—it will be 20 years old next month—but I had not heard of it prior to Marion’s suggestion. The Sparrow is the story of a group of people, mostly Jesuit priests, who travel to the first new alien world discovered to understand the population and eventually evangelize it.

The story starts at the end. We know that Emilio Sandoz (one of the Jesuits who specialized in linguistics) was the only survivor of the trip. He was found by a team from a follow-up United Nations mission and sent back to Earth. Once the initial introduction to the story occurs, then we start at the beginning of Sandoz’s journey out of poverty through the priesthood. We see how God appears to have gathered together a team of people put at the right place and time to providentially be prepared to take on a first-contact mission.

Theodicy, or how a good God can permit evil, is the book’s main focus. It takes until the very end of the book to really get the story of what happened to the mission, how everyone else died, and why Sandoz was found in the status that he was found in. Sandoz, at the start of the book, is a completely broken man, physically, mentally, and spiritually. The telling of the story is in part about the care of the man who has been brutalized (in ways that are not completely unique to other missionaries in history.)

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I am reposting this very early Bookwi.se review from 2009 because the Kindle Edition is on sale for $1.99

It is hard not to compare this series of young adult fantasy books with Harry Potter.  Both Harry Potter and the Nicholas Flamel books concern magic, immortality, the epic struggle of good and evil and children that are powerful magicians, but grew up unaware of their power.

The first book, The Alchemyst (my review), barely started the series. Even at 400 pages, we only follow the two teens for two more in the first book.  The Magician is just under 500 pages and only gets us another 3 days.  But these books are not slow.  They follow two 15 year old twins that we discover in this book are, in fact, the twins of an old prophesy.

This is not a new theme for young adult books.  I think it is one of the older themes of young adult books, the discovery that you are someone that really is important.  There is a Steve Taylor song, “Hero”, that talks about a boys dream of becoming a hero.  As the boy ages in the song, the dream cracks, but does not die.  The hero is what most boys want to be (an probably most girls too.)

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Summary: A theologian and scholar walks us through CS Lewis’ Narnia.

The Narnia books, and maybe Screwtape Letters or Mere Christianity, are all that many know of CS Lewis. I am far from a Lewis scholar, but I have read over 20 books by or about Lewis over the last three or so years. I continue to gain insight into Lewis as I read different perspectives.

Rowan Williams, in his 2011 Holy Week lectures, talked about Lewis and Narnia and how both can speak to our Christian lives. This book is the result of those lectures (similar to his later book, Being Christian, that I read earlier this year and his book on Paul.)

I did not realize until I was done that this was based on a series of lectures. This did not feel like a series of lectures but like a planned book.

What I most appreciated about this book was its generous nature. Williams illustrated well what it means to read to give the author the benefit of the doubt. Especially in the chapter about Narnia’s critics, but also throughout the book, Williams wants to make sure we are not unfair to Lewis and his time or what Lewis was attempting.

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Summary: An overview of many of the sacred texts of world religions.

After my last positive experience with a Great Courses audiobook, I picked up several more when they were on sale last month.  The first of those that I have listened to is Sacred Texts of the World by Grant Hardy.

As Professor Hardy notes in the opening, this is an introduction. As someone that know a good bit about Christian scriptures, I had some quibbles with his presentation of Christian scriptures. But if I can assume that the rest of the presentations were of roughly similar quality, then I think this was probably fairly accurate.

Part of being educated about the world is being educated about the world’s religions. This is not primarily about evangelism, although I think it is a good idea to know about for evangelism reasons. Primarily this is about understanding additional context to international news.

My overwhelming feeling is how much the ‘Protestant Bias’ has effected the way we think about other world religious scriptures. As Hardy presents it, Protestant Bias comes into play because so many of the early scholars of world religions were Protestants that assumed that other world religious scriptures acted like the Christian bible (and they often do not.)

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Summary: A secret service agent wakes up in the woods outside of small town where nothing seems quite right.

The Wayward Pines trilogy hit the world a few years ago and many people I know recommended it. Last year Fox turned it into a TV show. And because I signed up for Kindle Unlimited a couple weeks ago, I decided to pick it up since the audiobook is part of the subscription. I thought I had picked up enough hints from reviews and discussion that I knew what was coming. But I was just enough wrong about the story to be surprised while thinking the big reveal was just ahead.

As I said in my review of Countdown City, reading these two books back to back has left a bit of strange taste in my mouth. For Wayward Pines, it is more about the violence than anything else. The creepiness and fear of madness that runs throughout the book totally makes sense. The flashbacks to torture in the Iraq war and in the current timeline just felt over the top. It is not that they do not fit in the story as written. It is more that I did not want to read (or listen in this case) to them. (There is enough horror in the world right now for me to want to intentionally ingest more.)

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