Book Reviews – Page 124

Royal Flush by Rhys Bowen (Royal Spyness #3)

January 27, 2014 by Adam Shields

Summary: Third book in a series about a minor British royal that is also an accidental detective.

The Royal Spyness series is a fun light hearted mystery series. In the first two books, Georgie, the 34th in line to the throne in 1930s England, has found herself an accidental detective. What makes the series work, is the mix of humor, a dash of romance good character development and some mystery to move the plot along. Georgie’s family is penniless after her father gambled away most of the money and lost the rest in the stock market. Georgie has decided that it is better to try to make her own way rather than live under the rules and obligations of her sister-in-law (and henpecked brother) back in Scotland.

Making her own way in depression era London is not easy. Georgie tried to start a business of opening homes for wealthy homeowners that are coming from their country estates to their London homes, but no one comes to London in the middle of the summer and she has to find another way to make money.

Pattern of Wounds by J Mark Bertrand (Roland March #2)

January 24, 2014 by Adam Shields

Summary: A well written standard police procedural that stands out precisely because it is a Christian fiction book

Pretty soon I am going to stop saying I tend to not be a fan of mysteries. Because the books I have been enjoying the most lately are mysteries.

Pattern of Wounds is the second in a trilogy of books about a homicide detective in Houston. Roland March is a cop that has seen better days. But he feels like his work, as little as he likes it most of the time, does something.

In this book, a young woman is found floating in a pool, stabbed to death. Detective March is called and despite what everyone else says, he feels like this case has some relationship to an earlier case that he broke.

God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics by CS Lewis

January 23, 2014 by Adam Shields

Summary: Wide variety of essays, written versions of talks and letters compiled posthumously.

I have been on a Lewis kick over the last year. But I have definitely slowed down on my Lewis reading. God in the Dock was exactly what I needed to be inspired to pick more Lewis up again.

God in the Dock is a collection of 51 essays and a handful of additional letters. These are mostly on either ethics, apologetics (and really how and why of apologetics more than actual apologetics) and general theology.

With a collection like this, you can really see Lewis’ skill at speaking to his audience. A negative of this is that you see how Lewis covers similar topics with different audiences, so there is a decent amount of repetition, especially of his good one liners.

Children of the Mind by Orson Scott Card (Ender #4)

January 22, 2014 by Adam Shields

Summary: Who knows how to summarize this book?

It is no secret that I am a big fan of Orson Scott Card. I love many of his books (and hate a few as well.) After listening to the Audioplay version of Ender’s Game and then re-reading Ender’s Game as well, I decided to go back and re-read Xenocide and Children of the Mind.

It has been a couple months but I finally finished Children of the Mind. And I didn’t dislike it nearly as much as I remembered. Part of it is the lowered expectations of previous memory. But I also can catch a glimpse of what Card was trying to do.

Originally Xenocide and Children of the Mind were supposed to be one book. But Card got carried away and had to split it into two books. There are just too many ideas and too much going on in these books.

A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 by GJ Meyer

January 21, 2014 by Adam Shields

Summary: A history of an incredibly tragic and costly war.

One of the things I love about reading is learning about things that I know almost nothing about. European history is one of those areas. So I picked up A World Undone as an audiobook during a sale late last year. This is not a small book (816 pages or 28 hours in audio) and I split it in half, listening to the first half, then finishing a couple other books before returning to finish it.

A detailed history book like this is hard to review. I am not adequate to evaluate the history (although it seems to be well regarded.) There were long battle scenes that were difficult to understand (and I frequently consulted maps to see what was being talked about.) But overall, A World Undone is a very readable overview of a huge and important war. It did not take long for me to realize that much of my little knowledge of the war was wrong. So what follows is really just some thoughts that I had about the book and the war.

It is incredible to me how large the standing militaries were prior to the war and how quickly (and how large) the drafts were. Russia alone started with well over 1 million troops. Tiny little Belgium had more than 100,000 troops before anything started. At the height of the war individual battles had nearly 1 million troops on each side.

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

January 20, 2014 by Adam Shields

Summary: One of the last, maybe the last, human recounts the end of the world.

Last year I listened the audiobook of Margaret Atwood’s famous, and excellent, Handmaid’s Tale. Oryx and Crake is also a dystopian novel, but a very different one.

Both were narrated by a single character. Handmaid’s Tale is from a woman that is at the bottom of the power structure and trying to survive and more of a political story.

Oryx and Crake tells a story about the end of the world but it is more environmental and maybe evolutionary. But my biggest problem with the book is that I really had no idea what was going on with the book until about halfway through the book. The main character is describing a world and his experience of it, but we really don’t know who he is, what the world is or why everything so bad.

Bruno, Chief of Police: A Novel of the French Countryside by Martin Walker

January 14, 2014 by Adam Shields

Summary: A small town police chief in rural France must protect his community, in more ways than one.

Seven years ago, my wife and I went to France to visit friends that live live there. We loved France. More than the wonder of Paris, which was incredible, we enjoyed time in the relatively small town that our friends lived in. Walking to get bread in the morning with gardens and old homes and churches on nearly every corner we felt why Europe and US are very different culturally.

Bruno feels very French. He is interested in food and wine (and we hear quite a bit about that.) But he is more interested in the people of his community. This community has adopted him and he loves them.

Bruno is the police chief of a very small community in France. There has been a vicious murder, not only the first murder in recent memory, but one that exposes some of the nasty undercurrents of the community. Bruno has the job of not only solving the murder, but protecting the town from outsiders that have no interest in it.

The Maze Runner by James Dashner (Maze Runner #1)

January 11, 2014 by Adam Shields

Summary: First in a dystopian series about a group of boys trapped in a maze.

When Thomas wakes up all he can remember is his name. A group of teenage boys welcomes him to ‘the Glade’.

The Glade is a large open grassy area with high stone walls. As Thomas asks questions he comes to understand that none of the boys can remember anything before the Glade. Some have been there as long as 2 years. The glade is in the center of a massive stone maze. One that changes every night.

In the Maze the boys have created a functioning society. And while there are always difficulties, this is not The Lord of the Flies.

Our Common Prayer: A Field Guide to the Book of Common Prayer

January 9, 2014 by Adam Shields

Summary: A guide to the parts and functions of the book of common prayer service (not really to using the book itself).

Over the past several years I have been paying much more attention to the resources of higher church, especially in the areas of the liturgy. However, temperamentally and experientially I am still a clearly low church Christian.

Part of what I have been talking about with Spiritual Director has been exactly that. I have been trying to get back into the practice of fixed hour prayer. Several years ago, I was able to do that fairly regularly when my oldest niece was an infant (and I was the nanny.) But then a second niece was born and the naps were no longer overlapping and fixed hour prayer went out the window.

Even before reading Alan Jacob’s Book of Common Prayer: a Biography or reading Susan Howatch’s Church of England series, I was interested in the Book of Common Prayer as a spiritual practice.

Farewell: The Greatest Spy Story of the Twentieth Century

January 8, 2014 by Adam Shields

Reposting this review because Farewell is the Jan 8 Kindle Daily Deal and on sale for $1.99 (the audiobook is only $0.99 with purchase of the kindle book.)

Takeaway: The actual workings of spy tradecraft is as odd as the fictional ones.

Farewell is the code name of one of the most important spy stories of the 20th century. A Russian KGB agent, frustrated with his treatment by the KGB, turned over thousands of pages of documents to the French secret service (the FBI equivalent, not the CIA equivalent) and was perhaps more responsible for the fall of the Soviet Union than any other single person.

The story really is both incredible and fairly simple. Vladimir Ippolitovitch Vetrov, a talented athlete, a good student and a handsome young man is recruited to the KGB. He is trained as a foreign operative and serves two terms outside of Russia. But because of some of the problems of the KGB and some of Vetrov’s own problems he gets called back to Moscow and ends up as a technical analyst.

Frustrated by his lack of importance and the lack of respect he feels he is getting, he decides to become an informant and contact the French DST. Working with a French secret service he is first given a handler (a businessman that is close, but not a spy) and then a single agent. But it may have been the very lack of tradecraft that allows Vetrov to sneak out hugely important technical details of the Soviet infrastructure, military and spy systems.