Book Reviews – Page 104

Doctor Who: The Writer’s Tale: The Final Chapter by Russell Davies and Benjamin Cook

December 5, 2014 by All Old Users

I am a big fan of the BBC series, Doctor Who. I usually don’t get too locked into a television series but I quickly fell in love with the Doctor, especially Season 4 with David Tennant and Catherine Tate. Season 4 had everything: excitement, humor, a strong female character, compelling stories, phenomenal acting and a beautiful musical score. So imagine my joy when I discovered Russell T. Davies, Doctor Who’s Head Writer and Executive Producer, had written an inside look on the season I loved the most!

Doctor Who: The Writer’s Tale is a year-long email conversation between Davies and journalist, Benjamin Cook as Season 4 was being written and filmed. The Great Correspondence, as Davies and Cook referred to their communications, is a unique look inside the BBC series. It’s a no holds barred look into Davies life as a he plans episodes, discusses how creative and casting decisions are made, handles budget woes, deals with location and scheduling snafus and a very deep look into the writing process.

Essays on the Church by CS Lewis

December 4, 2014 by Adam Shields

Summary: Three essays about the church.

I have been working on a two month free trial of Scribd, a Kindle Unlimited and Oyster competitor that offers unlimited access to their library (a Netflix for Books) but also has 30,000 audiobooks. It is the audiobooks I am interested in. Scribe has a far better selection of audiobooks than Kindle Unlimited. And the ebooks selection at Oyster is roughly the same as Scribd’s.

I will post a review of the service in the next week or so. By that time I will have used the service for a month.

Included in the audiobooks is several short collections of CS Lewis’ essays. These are all included in the larger CS Lewis: Essay Collection and Short Pieces, which has 135 essays. That is a little too overwhelming to tackle. But these smaller collections are organized thematically and much shorter. This one on the Church is only 3 essays and 36 minutes long.

Most Read Book Reviews in November 2014

December 3, 2014 by Adam Shields

Takeaway: Someone that has found meaning in a new stream of Christianity may not be the best person to talk about the stream of Christianity that they walked away from. Over the past couple years I have been intentionally trying to read books about Catholicism and part of that has been reading several stories of … Read more

Prayers for the Stolen by Jennifer Clement

December 3, 2014 by All Old Users

“œThe best thing you can be in Mexico is an ugly girl”.

From the very first page of “œPrayers for the Stolen”, Jennifer Clement grabs the reader and does not let go. This is the story of a young Mexican girl, Ladydi Garcia Martinez, growing up in a rural mountain village of Guerrero. The men have left to seek a better life in America. The women are left behind to raise their families and contend with the daily threats of drug traffickers who control the region. The girls are either disguised as boys or made ugly in order to avoid being stolen. Mothers dig holes in the ground for their daughters to hide in at the first hint of an approaching vehicle. It’s a life of constant fear. Hiding in a hole saves Ladydi but not her friend, Paula who is snatched from her home by a drug lord and is missing for over a year.

Why We Run From God’s Love by Ed Cyzewski

November 30, 2014 by Adam Shields

Summary: Short book about the common reality of not wanting to seek after God.

This is a short little book, only 19 pages. The cheap distribution of ebooks has made shorter works possible again and I think that is a good thing. Not everything worth reading or writing needs to be 200 pages.

Ed Cyzewski, author or co-author of five other books including Coffeehouse Theology, Hazardous and Divided We Unite, has written this short book about being distant from God.

I read this over two late night feedings of HG. It feels real and present to me. We all free distant from God at times and it is good to acknowledge it. (I have spoken before about seeking out a spiritual director this year because of my own spiritual dryness.)

God’s Smuggler by Brother Andrew with John and Elizabeth Sherrill

November 30, 2014 by Adam Shields

Reposting this review from earlier this year because the kindle edition is on sale for $1.99.
Takeaway: A Classic 20th Century Missionary Biography

Christians have been writing missionary biographies for a long time. The purpose of these biographies is to raise interest in the work, to raise money for the work, to encourage Christian to evangelism and missions in their back yard and to build greater trust and devotion to God in the reader’s lives.

The first time I ran across Brother Andrew was a comic book version of God’s Smuggler originally published in the early 1970s. I think I later read the full version of the book as a teen (but I may not have).

A couple months ago Christianaudio.com was giving away an MP3 of the audiobook of God’s Smuggler and I picked it up.

It is interesting that in light of my recent reading of God of the Mundane, I spent most of the book thinking about the relationship between special callings (like Brother Andrew) and the mundane calling of the majority of us Christians.

God’s Smuggler is the story of Brother Andrew, a Dutch Christian who became famous for smuggling bibles to Christians behind the Iron Curtain and into China and more recently for his work in the Muslim world. God’s Smuggler spends a lot of time making Brother Andrew seem like an average guy (barely any education, married with several children, poor background) except for the fact that he trusts God to blind the eyes of border guards so that he can sneak bibles into the eastern block.

The Three Dimensions of Reading from Alan Jacobs

November 27, 2014 by Adam Shields

Alan Jacobs recently gave a talk at Vassar College about the three dimensions of reading attention. He posted his slides and some comments to give commentary. The important insight of the lecture is that when discussing reading, it is not good enough to talk about either the attention of the reader or the differences between … Read more

Yes Please by Amy Poehler

November 26, 2014 by All Old Users

I’m a big fan of actress and comedian, Amy Poehler. I admire her ability to completely immerse herself into any character she played on SNL with fearless abandon. As Leslie Knope on the hit show “œParks and Recreation”, Poehler is fantastic in giving the audience a complex but likeable character who is brilliant, bossy, demanding, loyal, fiercely dedicated and very funny. With these thoughts in mind, I was looking forward to reading her debut book “œYes Please”.

Unfortunately, I am disappointed. Part of my reaction was unfairly assuming “œYes Please” would be very similar to Tina Fey’s “œBossypants”. Setting that expectation aside, I still couldn’t fall in love with this book. From the very beginning, Poehler frequently laments to the reader on how hard writing a book is””which gave me the impression her heart was not into this project. Poehler utters this complaint so frequently throughout, I couldn’t help but wonder if that’s why fellow SNL alum, Seth Meyers, and both of Poehler’s parents wrote pieces for this book.

Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction by Edward Craig

November 25, 2014 by Adam Shields

Summary: How out we to live? What really exists? How to we Know?

Very Short Introduction series has been pretty hit or miss, as are most short introductions. It is hard to introduce a subject that has thousands of books and thousands of professionals working in the areas.

Philosophy is one of the better ones. My background in philosophy was pretty weak. I have tended toward theology instead of philosophy and while there can be some overlap, as I am getting older I feel my lack of background more and more often as I am reading.

Craig made some good decisions in structuring the books. He focused on the three questions in the summary as three of the questions that have been a part of philosophy since the beginning and continue to be important. Then he looks at Plato, Hume and an unknown Buddhist philosopher to illustrate how those questions were handled.

Holy Ground: Walking With Jesus as a Former Catholic by Chris Castaldo

November 24, 2014 by Adam Shields

Takeaway: Someone that has found meaning in a new stream of Christianity may not be the best person to talk about the stream of Christianity that they walked away from.

Over the past couple years I have been intentionally trying to read books about Catholicism and part of that has been reading several stories of Evangelicals that have become Catholic, like Scott Hahn, Francis Beckwith, and Christian Smith. I have been less interested in stories of Catholics that have become Evangelicals but I did think I needed to read “˜the other side.’

Chris Castaldo, has a chapter in Journey of Faith, a book telling the story of people converting from one Stream of Christianity to another, so I was somewhat familiar with his story. Holy Ground, however, is not so much about Castaldo’s own story as it is a book about Catholicism for Evangelicals. And I think that is where my problem really started.

The overall approach was to explain Catholicism to Evangelicals primarily using the reasons that former Catholics became Evangelical. This is has the inherent problem of not looking at those that are happy with their Catholic faith, but looking at those that are unhappy (or in most cases just unaware of their Catholic faith because of a lack of participating in it.) Castaldo is a good example of that. While he was baptized as an infant and seems to have participated fairly frequently as a young child, once he was confirmed neither he nor the rest of his family actively participated in the church. And from my experience, this seems to be common with Catholic converts. I honestly don’t know a single person that has become Evangelical as a former Catholic if they were active. (While most Evangelical converts to Catholicism that I know of are very active in their church, theologically trained and often clergy.)