Book Reviews – Page 102

The Hardest Peace: Expecting Grace in the Midst of Life’s Hard by Kara Tippetts

January 12, 2015 by All Old Users

Bookwi.se Note: The Kindle edition is currently on sale for $2.99.
Author, blogger, wife and mother Kara Tippets has written “œThe Hardest Peace: Expecting Grace in the Midst of Life’s Hard” charting her spiritual journey from her childhood, to her early days of marriage and motherhood, and to the present as she fights her multiple battles with cancer.

I must tell you I find this review very difficult to write. Kara’s story is most likely not going to have a happy ending, in human terms. It’s hard to not be affected by Kara’s reality, especially reading her blog “œMundane Faithfulness“ or seeing the updates on her Facebook page; but I so desperately appreciate her allowing other people to be a part of her journey. She’s living honestly and beautifully.

Kara writes openly about her reality without oversharing. She consistently points her readers to God’s promises and discusses her daily, sometimes moment by moment struggle to grab on to God’s grace in the midst of pain. Kara and her husband, Josh, have a goal of walking through this journey as “œbroken but not bitter”. One by one, Kara gently dismantles the beliefs many of us actively and subtly believe. We are not promised long lives, pain free existences, or trouble free days. But we are promised something better.

Simply Good News: Why the Gospel Is News and What Makes It Good by NT Wright

January 9, 2015 by Adam Shields

Summary: “The one true God has now taken charge of the world, in and through Jesus and his death and resurrection.”

NT Wright is an author that many are excited about and many are frustrated by. There is good reason for both. NT Wright is a serious scholar and he has helped reinvigorate serious scholarship about the New Testament that is focused on orthodox Christianity.

The main theological frustration, especially for a particular group of Reformed, is that he has focused on Paul and interpreted Paul as not being primarily focused on Jesus’ Penal Substitution. He has not ignored Penal Substitution, or said it is not a real part of Christianity, but he has said the focus of Paul is not on Jesus’ penal substitution, but on Jesus as King and restorer.

That major focus on Wright’s work is front and center in Simply Good News. Wright does fairly well writing either to an academic audience (as his 1700 pages opus on Paul) or a popular audience. Simply Good News (like Simply Jesus, Simply Christian and Surprised by Hope) is popularly focused and has few footnotes or academic references. And it is one of Wright’s shortest books.

NT Wright is in one way imminently readable. He tells stories and builds a case that can be followed. But in another ways Wright is almost always frustrating because he usually seems to complicate even small matters. Nothing by Wright is unrelated to the whole story because the nature of Wright’s project pulls together parts of the Christian story which some minimize or over simplify.

Wright cannot talk about the Good News without talking about Jesus and his project (obviously) or the broader concept of covenant (which Jesus is coming to fulfil), or the work of the church (doing our part in reconciling the world to Christ), or the end times (which should drive our understanding of what our reconciliation should be focused on), or the history of Israel (to which Jesus came as Messiah) or a whole host of other issues that are interrelated and connected. Anyone that has read Wright before always feels the repetition that is necessarily a part of Wright’s method of presenting the story.

Love Is Stronger Than Death by Peter Kreeft

January 8, 2015 by All Old Users

“”¦life is either totally meaningful or totally meaningless, depending on what death is. Therefore we had better try to find out what death it.” So begins Peter Kreeft in a book that is basically him thinking methodically through the concept of death. He argues that death plays a number of roles to us:

Death as Enemy: it takes, destroys, unmakes.

Death as Stranger: we pretend it doesn’t exist, but ignore it at our peril. Or we attempt to reconcile ourselves collectively to the inevitable.

Death as Friend: “Death is necessary for life as silence is necessary for speech” (45). It frames our lives and gives it finitude, a start and end point. It challenges us to define ourselves within the hard lines it draws. “The realization of our mortality now jolts us into a new appreciation of the now” (45).

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Meditations on Psalms edited by Edwin Robertson

January 7, 2015 by Adam Shields

Summary: A collection of sermons, letters, devotional writing, etc on the psalms with helpful biographical introductions.

When I wrote the review of Martin Marty’s Biography of Letters and Papers from Prison I said I needed to read more Bonhoeffer directly and rely less on the secondary sources. Edwin Robinson has a helpful halfway point between primary and secondary works. He has edited together a book of Bonhoeffer’s reflections on the Psalms. Most of these are directly sermons or devotional writing of one sort or another. Rarely is a section longer than 15 minutes (I listened to this on audio semi-devotionally for about two weeks).

Most of it is fairly traditional Christian material. That is not to dismiss it. But to instead say, Bonhoeffer was first a pastor. No matter what else he did, his vocation was pastor. So this collection is primarily pastoral. There are clearly difficult sections here where Bonheoffer is struggling against the weight of the German state and Hitler’s power and God’s role in it (especially in private letters). But still primarily he was pointing to the power of Christ to transform and using the wide variety of emotions that are contained within the Psalms as prayers and reflections as the church has always used them for thousands of years.

Stuff You Should Know About Stuff by Tripp and Tyler

January 6, 2015 by Adam Shields

Summary: A bunch of random thoughts about various things.

I love Tripp and Tyler’s videos, especially the Christian Tingle and Conference Call in Real Life. So while I did not exactly pre-order their book, I did pick it up when it was on sale last week.

Tripp and Tyler are great at simple humor, the straight forward dry Seinfeld type of humor. But after reading this book, I think that it is best delivered on video or in person.

I like funny books, but I still expect funny books to tell a story. So I really liked Bossypants because it was a memoir and had a point.

I thought Jim Gaffigan’s Dad is Fat was decent and had some good moments, but it still felt more like a string of jokes than a real coherent book. And with Gaffigan’s second book about food, it was even worse.

The Good News About Marriage: Debunking Discouraging Myths about Marriage and Divorce by Shaunti Feldhahn

January 5, 2015 by Adam Shields

Summary: Despite what you might have heard, marriage is actually doing pretty well these days.

One of the reasons I like to read good social science is that much of the world is actually doing pretty well. Of course, we would like things to be better than they are, but stories about the world doing pretty well don’t sell well. So we tend to hear about how bad the world is.

If you want a Christian perspective about how the world is doing I would first commend Bradley Wright’s Upside, which generally looks at a variety of different ways of measuring the world, happiness, economics, health, etc.

Shaunti Feldhahn, who became well know because of her For Men Only and For Women Only books has stayed on the same general theme and instead of focusing on what men and women need to know about their spouse, is writing this book to encourage people more generally about marriage.

Her main point is that Christians in particular have been emphasizing the problems of marriage in order to uphold its importance. But in doing so, we are likely discouraging couple from either getting married, or if married, communicating that marriage is primarily hard work.

Instead Feldhahn starts with the divorce rate and shows why what we all think we know is wrong. The rate of divorce has never been 50% or higher in the general population and it has been decreasing steadily since the high point of around 1980. She estimates that first marriages have less than 30 percent chance of getting a divorce. And later marriages, and more highly educated couples have even lower rates of divorce.

Storm Front (The Dresden Files, Book 1) by Jim Butcher

January 4, 2015 by Adam Shields

Reposting this 2010 review because the Kindle Edition is on sale for $1.99.

Cover of "Storm Front (The Dresden Files,... — Cover of Storm Front (The Dresden Files, Book 1)

Takeaway: A fun modern fantasy (that was the basis for the short lived tv show.)

After I moved to Georgia, and before I started being a nanny for my nieces I used to have a lot of TV running in the background when I was doing data entry. Previously I had not had the benefit of either Tivo or cable, now I had both. I watched all of Angel and Buffy the Vampire Slayer over the span of a couple months. (I had not seen any of either previously.)

One other short lived show that I enjoyed was The Dresden Files (Hulu link if you are interested). I knew that it was based on a series of novels by Jim Butcher, but I have not gotten around to reading any of them before now.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

January 4, 2015 by Adam Shields

Reposting this 2014 review because the Kindle Edition is on sale for $1.99 Summary: An excellent human interest, medical history, social commentary, practical ethics book with a story. I cannot count how many people have suggested that I should read the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. And after years of recommendations I finally picked up the … Read more

2014 Bookwi.se Year in Review

January 2, 2015 by Adam Shields

Last night I read my post on my 2014 plans for Bookwi.se. I am not sure I accomplished any of them except for posting less. I posted a full 1/3 less posts in 2014 than 2013. And I still probably posted too much with 917 posts. But the good news is that my traffic is basically the same (down just a couple percentage points) with 1/3 less posts (and that does not include the increase in RSS and email subscriptions.)

And I am pleased that my book reviews are getting more traffic as a percent of the total traffic. I know I could read different books that would drive more traffic. New books, especially books of authors that will help drive traffic to my reviews, get a ton more traffic than reading older books. But I want to make decisions on my book reading based on interest, importance and quality, not traffic.

I know that you as a reader probably don’t care, but this year was financially better as well. I was able to have advertisers all year long and only rarely had an unfilled advertising spot. My Amazon referral income is stable even with less posts about free and/or sale kindle books. And I was able to give a token $5 a review to all the contributors.

This is still not a money making project. With advertising and referral income (before expenses) I am averaging just under $2 a post. But I doing something I enjoy and I hope readers get some benefit from it.

Below are the most read reviews of the year.

Discovering Your Heart with the Flag Page Test by Mark Gungor

This is a 2011 post that has good search traffic and is constantly read. I find it odd that this has been leaps and bounds my most read book review. But I will take it.

Sex, Mom and God by Frank Schaeffer

This is another book that has consistent search traffic, but less suitable searches. The book is good but most searchers are not actually looking for a review of the book. The book itself is a good memoir about Frank Schaeffer and his relationship to his mom and how that altered some of the ways he thought about sex. Some he thought were good and some he has turned away from as he aged.

Unbroken: A Movie Review

This is the second newest post on the list. It is not a book review but a movie review. I was able to go to an advance screening and while I think the movie was technically well done, I think it missed the essential message of grace and forgiveness that was at the heart of the popularity of the book.

What Wives Wish their Husbands Knew about Sex: A Guide for Christian Men

I reposted this book earlier in the year because it was briefly free on kindle, but most of the traffic is from pinterest. I get a good bit of pinterest traffic, but as you will see below, it is mostly for the young adult book reviews. This book is by four counselors and psychologists and I think mostly pretty good. There is an occational “˜Christians can have mind blowing sex’ problem, but most of the book is really good.

Bookwi.se Favorite Books 2014 (Non-Fiction)

December 31, 2014 by Adam Shields

It always feels much harder to pick my favorite non-fiction books. I feel like I read a lot more non-fiction than fiction, but this year it was 73 fiction and 80 non-fiction, so very close. The difference is that non-fiction is primarily about ideas. So when I review non-fiction and talk about non-fiction I tend … Read more