Book Reviews

Summary: A historical fiction book about Marie de France, a nun and author in the late 12th century.

To say that we don’t know much about Marie de France is an understatement. There are four writings that are probably from her, but other than that, there is basically no documentation. Even her name is only taken from one of her writings that is basically, I am Marie and I was born in France. Contextually it is assumed that she was born in France but spent most of her life in England as a nun. She was highly educated and there is speculation that she is the half sister of King Henry II, but that is in part trying to make sense of how she was educated.

Matrix is the third historical fiction book about medieval nuns I have read recently. The first two were Illuminations: A Novel of Hildegard von Bingen by Mary Sharratt and Revelations: A Novel by Mary Sharratt about Margery Kempe. But both of those were about women that there was much more historical data. Margery Kempe wrote what is probably the first autobiography of a woman in English. And Hildegard had much more contemporary writing and writing about her. And even so the fiction part of the historical fiction required a lot of creative imagination to create a readable story. But with Matrix the historical is almost nonexistent and it is all fiction because even what we know about Marie de France is mostly speculative.

One of the potential problem of historical fiction is writing the main character as a modern person who happens to be more advanced socially or culturally than those around them. In some cases that may be historically accurate because there was an “advance” that the person was responsible for innovating. But generally, most people are people “of their time” in the sense that they were culturally similar to those around them. I am not completely new to the era. Beth Allison Barr is a historian of the era and included good discussion of the role of women in that era as part of her evidence about how the modern gender role discussion is a modern invention. And a lot of discussion about mysticism is about the medieval era. So I have some context of women in the mediaeval era, although I am far from an expert.

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Summary: An exploration of how the United States slowly became a country where additional people were increasingly more likely to be “born equal.”

Born Free is the third of Akhil Reed Amar’s books which I have read. (The Bill of Rights Primer: A Citizen’s Guidebook by Akhil Reed Amar and Les Adams and America’s Constitution: A Biography). Both of those books are  long and as he said on Advisory Opinions when he was asked about the length of Born Equal, he said, well it was shorter than some of my previous books.

Born Equal is worth reading even if it is quite long. It is the second of a trilogy about the Constitution. I have not read the first, The Words That Made Us: America’s Constitutional Conversation, 1760-1840, but I will get to it before the third comes out. I think it should be compared to Mark Noll’s trilogy about the use of the bible in American public life. Noll’s has published two of the three, In the Beginning Was the Word: The Bible in American Public Life, 1492-1783 and America’s Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization, 1794-1911. Noll’s book about the roughly same period was about 150 pages longer than Amar’s already long 753 page tome.

Part of why I compare them is that both are trying to contextualize their subject to a modern reader. Noll is trying to show how central the bible was rhetorically to public life. But Noll is also pointing out how much the view and use of the bible was shaped by people molding the bible to fit their point, not allowing scripture to shape them. I do not know if Amar is religious, but he is known for being a progressive originalist. While most legal originalists are ideologically conservative, Amar regularly points out that originalism is not about political conservatism but about paying attention to the words.

The theme that runs through Born Equal was that Abraham Lincoln was the foremost originalist legal theorist of his age and that after the founding generation passed away, and their children passed away, there needed to be a recovery of a legal theory of how to view the American governmental system. Amar contends that Lincoln had an originalist theory that took seriously the words of the constitution as the basis of the meaning and limitations and role of the government.

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Takeaway: I forgot how much I enjoyed the Scalzi/Wheaton author/narrator combo. 

I first read John Scalzi because of Old Man’s War, a book that reimagined Robert Heinlein’s book Starship Troopers. That was a pretty standard sci-fi book that started a series that kept the main sci-fi conventions in place. It uses war and violence to critique war and violence. (Starship Troopers was originally published in 1959, after the Korean War and at the start of US involvement in Vietnam.) Heinlein is known now for his sexism and his embrace of eugenics and his rejection of traditional sexual morality in his books, so I have a hard time recommending Heinlein, even though I read a ton of him as a teen. But I do recommend Scalzi because he has learned from the classic scifi tropes and plays with them, but spins them on their head.

This is evident in Scalzi’s rewriting of H. Beam Piper novel Little Fuzzy. When that Scalzi’s Fuzzy Nation came out, the audiobook of Little Fuzzy was included with the purchase of Fuzzy Nation so that the reader could understand the book that Scalzi was reinterpreting. The longer I have read Scalzi, the more I appreciate the role of humor in his writing. It is not that I don’t like the traditional serious scifi like Old Man’s War series, but I think the humor is what draws me back to him. Scalzi’s first book was Agent to the Stars, a book about a Hollywood agent that is hired by aliens to coordinate the revelation of their species to humans. The premise was great and it was a good example of Scalzi taking his one central idea and allowing it to be the center of a book. In the case of Agent to the Stars, the aliens only communicate through smell and humans find the smells repulsive. But the aliens realize that they need a PR person to help them win over humans and what better PR person could be found than a Hollywood agent.

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Summary: A history of how the concept of ethics (or moral philosophy) has been developed over time in western culture.

In my long term reading project about discernment, I have been gradually moving toward reading about ethics. I do not think that discernment is primarily about ethical action, but at some point, when you think about discernment the idea of what “is right” has to come up.

A couple of years ago, early in this project, I read Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, which tried to show that virtue and ethics were actually a cultural good and not simply a repressive feature of an older society. After Virtue was originally published in 1981 and I initially assumed that Short History of Ethics was a later book, but it was first published 15 years earlier. It is not a part of the Very Short Introduction series (as I assumed), but written as an introductory textbook for a college level philosophy/ethics class. While it is understandable, it is assumes a working familiarity of philosophy and its history. And as I have said many times before, philosophy is not a strong suit of mine, but I could follow the basic thread.

I picked up A Short History of Ethics as an audiobook because it was on sale, but that was not a great format. As with many book, audio helps me finish, but it is a hard format for deep reading because it is harder to re-read sections to understand the better. This audiobook was even worse because the narrator was Scottish with a strong accent. I have been reluctant to pick this edition up on previous sales because the narrator had awful reviews. I did get used to the narration, but if there were any other option, I would recommend you pick another option.

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Summary: Tenar (from Tombs) had a life after she left the Tombs. 

I was a teen in the late 80s and early 1990s and I thought of Earthsea as a trilogy. I didn’t know that there was a fourth book until I reread the series as an adult. There was more than 20 years between the publication dates of The Farthest Shore and Tehanu. So unlike the first three books of the series, this is just my second reading of the book.

In the second book we are introduced to Tenar as a priestess of unknown Gods. Ged comes to retrieve an amulet that will reunite the kingdom and allow for a king to regain the throne again. But as he does that, he finds Tenar, a young teen girl who alone was allowed to serve these unknown God in the tombs. Together they help one another escape. Their ages are never discussed, but I think Tenar would have been about 14-16 years old when she meets Ged. And we know this is sometimes after the end of the first book, so Ged is in his mid 20s. There is never any question that she will not follow him after the escape, because the life of a mage is one of a wandering hermit and marriage was out of the question for wizards, even if there had not been an age gap.

Eventually Tenar settles on Gant, Ged’s home island with Ged’s first teacher. Tenar has skills for magic, but she wants a normal life. And because she is a woman, she cannot go to study magic at Roke, which is only for men. (The short story collection Tales of Earthsea, explore why mages have become only male and what has been lost from magic because the mages have rejected women’s magic.) So Tenar marries a farmer nearby and raises a family and lives a “normal” life. Eventually her children grow up and move away. And then her husband dies and she is alone at the farm with some tenants and she has to find her way again.

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Summary: Reflections on what Baldwin can teach us. 

I have been leading a zoom book group for about five years now. It started out of a Be the Bridge group at my church. Most of the people have changed, but we still meet about 35-40 Thursday a year doing about 4 books a year with good breaks between books. The group is mostly reading book by Christians about racial issues. The Gospel According to James Baldwin was our most recent book and honestly one of the best discussion books we have had in the last couple of years. People who didn’t often talk much found things to talk about here.

Most of the time, we read books that I have already read. I don’t choose every books, but generally I give about 5 suggestions of books I think are worth reading as a group and the group chooses what they are most interested in. I was a bit surprised when the group chose The Gospel According to James Baldwin because that was outside of our normal history, bible study, sociology types of books. (White Flight, The Anti-Greed Gospel by Malcolm Foley, If God Still Breathes, Why Can’t I?: Black Lives Matter and Biblical Authority, Brown Faces, White Spaces: Confronting Systemic Racism to Bring Healing and Restoration are some recent books we have read.)

I had not read The Gospel According to James Baldwin yet and if I had, I am not sure I would have recommended it. That isn’t because it is a bad book, but I would have thought it was too literary, too dependent on knowing Baldwin and too much of a stretch for the group to see someone who didn’t identify as a Christian have something to teach us as Christians. At the first session I found out that none of the group had previously read James Baldwin and only two or three had seen I am Not Your Negro documentary. (I own the documentary, watched it at least four times and read at least eight of Baldwin’s books as well as David Leeming‘s biography and several others books that draw heavily on Baldwin like Coates, Clint Smith, Eddie Glaude and Dante Stewart.) Again, had I known the lack of familiarity I would have overruled the group and not let the book be chosen.

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Summary: An exploration of what it means to seek racial reconciliation. 

Christ Over Culture is a good book for the right reader. I have gone back and forth about writing about this book. Generally I write about almost all of the books I read for more than 15 years now. But I am always conflicted about writing about books of people that I know. And I both know Dan Crain fairly well and I have read multiple drafts of this book from early stages until just before the final draft to the publisher. So I am not objective or distant from the book. I am going to have two different threads to this post. A more positive one and then a bit more critical. I am not really critical about the book as much as I am wary of a good book in the hands of a bad reader.

First the positive, Christ Over Culture is a sincere and earnest book about what it means to seek after both racial reconciliation as a Christian and to honestly grapple with what it means to be part of a society that has historically embraced racial hierarchy; both parts of that matter. If we could wave a magic wand and be in a society that hasn’t embraced and fostered racial hierarchy, then the honest grappling with racial reconciliation as a Christian would be something very different. But we are in a society that has actively embraced racial hierarchy, and not just any racial hierarchy, but overt white superiority over all others. There are many other books that have explored the history, The Bible Told Them So is a good book about Christians that called for embracing white supremacy, in those terms. I think many have not really understood the extent to which our history has been shaped by distortions of Christianity to justify cultural preferences. Mark Noll’s series about the public use of scripture in the United States, especially America’s Book or Emerson and Bracey’s The Religion of Whiteness tells some of that story from different perspectives.

Dan Crain isn’t ignoring that history or those problems, but no single book can do everything, so he is primarily addressing the white Christian who is seeking to transform culture in light of their understanding of the gospel that calls them to respond to injustice. We have an unjust world in regard to the social construction of race, so what do we do now? His response is to take us on a journey to see how Christ is over all cultures, and how the gospel challenges and encourages us no matter where we are in history or what culture we have been raised in.

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Summary: A thematic look at the prophets, particularly looking at how those prophets can speak to today.

I have mentioned before that I participate in a couple of book groups. The Tears of Things was read with a book group that I participate in through Ignatius House, a Jesuit retreat center near me. That group meets on Tuesday mornings at 10:15 and in part because of the time, it is made up of mostly retired age people. I have participated in it for about 3 years now. I am the youngest, and this book was the only male in the group. There are about 20-25 people in the group with about 15-18 that are there on any given week. Most of the group are Catholic or Episcopal, but there are a few others. The group is a mix of people. Several are spiritual directors, there is a retired pastor, a former Catholic high school religion teacher and a number who are lifelong Christians but have no formal theological education. It is particularly that mix of background that I value, even though on the face of it, women in their mid 60s to early 80s do not seem very diverse.

Richard Rohr is a particular favorite of the group. This is likely the fourth or fifth book of Rohr’s that has been read by the group since it started and the second since I started three years ago. I have a mixed relationship with Rohr. I think he stirs things up in mostly helpful ways. His Center for Contemplation and Action is like my intent on being a spiritual director. He talks about why he founded it in this book and I resonate with trying to tie activism to spiritual depth and contemplation. But on the negative side, I think he can be vague and obtuse and my history is that Rohr’s non-dualistic thinking, in the wrong hands, often ends up being a cover for pietism or inactive moderation. It is unfair of me to get irritated with Rohr for the bad reading of Rohr, but that bad reading I think does have a relationship to his vague writing style.

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Summary: The previous case continues to unfold

I am a long term fan of the series. Most of the books I have read more than once. But starting at about the eighth book there has been a shift from a mystery series to a thriller series. There are some books in the last dozen that have had more mystery elements than thriller elements, but most of those books have shifted from mysteries where Gamache and those around him follow clues and psychologically gain an understanding of the perpetrator, to thriller elements where the point is unfolding tension. Along with that thriller element, a natrual shift has been to make Gamache more and more of a traditional hero.

Part of what I loved is that the early books portrayed Gamache is using his brain, his love of others, the empathy he gained from his own tragic history and his experience with previous cases to solve crimes. But a lot of the recent stories have been focused on action hero tropes, luck, or the willingness of Gamache to bend the rules to stop others who have no regard for the rules. I am glad for series like this to grapple with the moral complexities of any job. And police work has plenty of moral complexities. And this series has grappled with the ways that bending rules because you think you are in the right can lead to bending rules because the rules are getting in your way. One of the things that gets tedious in John le Carré’s books is that there are often no characters that are actually doing the right thing for the right reasons. It is all about power. There may be some realitiy to that, but it doesn’t make for very compelling reading.

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