Book Reviews

Summary: A discussion of the first half of Romans and how we are to live as Christians.

Every month Christianaudio.com gives away a free MP3 audiobook.  I am trying to actually listen and review the books before the end of the month that the books are free.  I barely made it this month.

Many of these books are current, but some of them are older Christian classics. The Normal Christian Life is of the classics variety.  It was originally published in English in 1957, but was based on a series of lectures given in Europe in 1938-39.  Watchman Nee was a Chinese Christian leader that spent the last 20 years of his life in prison both for his faith and because he was a business owner during the cultural revolution.

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Summary: A book of basic discipleship.  Not apologetics or evangelism as much as teaching.

As I get older (alway a bad way to start out a review), I am continually struck by how important good discipleship is to Christianity.  And how little emphasis is put into discipling young believers not only among Evangelicals, but also among many streams of Christianity.

Basic Christianity is mostly a book of discipleship.  Because it was originally written in 1958, it is a little dated and I think Stott’s later Radical Disciple written 50 years later shows how he changed his approach over time.  The structure is in four parts, the person of Jesus (and some confirmation of Jesus’ historical reality and divine nature), our need for God, how Christ’s work changes us, and then how we should respond to God.  The structure is straightforward and clear, although dated.

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Peter Schiff accurately predicted the 2008 meltdown of the mortgage market and financial sector. Before it all hit the fan, though, he was called a doomsayer and was frequently laughed at on the mainstream financial talk shows. But he turned out to be right. The real problem, Schiff argues in this book, is that what happened in 2008 was not actually “The Crash,” but was simply the prelude to it. The dot-com bubble popped at the turn of the century; the housing bubble popped in 2008; Schiff shows persuasively that we are now in what he calls the government bubble. The “recoveries” from each of the first two bubbles were not actually true, healthy corrections in the market; instead, the Federal Reserve used easy money policies to paper over the real issues and delay (and ultimately prolong) the inevitable pain.

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Summary: A 16 year old English girl that grew up in the free society of Barbados moves to a closely controlled community of Puritans in Connecticut in 1687.

Yet once again, I thought I had read a book, and when I go to read it again, realize I had not.  This season of not buying new books has been pushing me to my library for audiobooks.   I have tons of kindle books in my library that I need to get around to reading.  But I do not have a lot of audiobooks that I have not read, especially fiction audiobooks.  So I am working through my library wishlist.

The Witch of Blackbird pond was published in 1958 and was the first of two Newberry Awards that Elizabeth George Speare won (The other was for The Bronze Bow).  Only 5 authors have received 2 Newberry Awards and no author has received more than two.  When I was growing up I read a lot of historical fiction in my middle grade years.  And since then I have read a lot more history.  I am fairly familiar with the time period.  Jonathan Edwards (although from Massachusetts) was born a few years after this book was set.

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Summary: A great reminder of what is gained and lost by stability, and what happens when we are willing to find out.

There is a great quote by CS Lewis from God in the Dock about the importance of reading old books.  He says that it is not because they are inherently better because they are old, but because they have different biases and blind spots and we get things out of them that we cannot out of modern books because those books can speak to us in ways that modern books cannot.  This book reminds me that this is generationally true as well.

I have read a lot of 20 something memoirs.  Donald Miller, Shauna Niequist, Anne Marie Miller and the many others.  There is something particularly bold (and foolish) about writing a memoir when you are only about 20 or 30 percent through your life.  There is so much more to learn and understand and experience that it is just not possible to have learned, understood or experienced when you are still in your 20s.

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