Book Reviews – Page 145

Unbroken: A World War II Story Laura Hillenbrand (Andy’s Review)

December 10, 2012 by All Old Users

My brother in law was in town for Thanksgiving, and he had a copy of Unbroken with him. As soon as I saw the book cover, I wondered to myself why I had not yet read it. I had heard great things about the book. I knew that it was a story about WWII and was based in the Pacific. I knew that the author was praised for the book. That was where my knowledge of the book ended. At one point in time, it was on my must read list, but for whatever reason, I had never picked it up.

I asked my wife pick up the book for me at the library You see, we’re a homeschool family… she’s there ALL the time 🙂 I started reading it, and found it very difficult to put down.

This is Who I Am: Our Beauty in All Shapes and Sizes by Rosanne Olson

December 8, 2012 by All Old Users

Bookwi.se note: I inadvertently pulled the wrong review off of Goodreads and posted it last week. This is actually Teressa Sinnett’s review. I apologize for the mistake. I come from a conservative background, meaning; naked bodies were equated with seductive intent. This book enabled me to see that nakedness has many faces, one of which … Read more

Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance by Lois McMaster Bujold

December 4, 2012 by Adam Shields

Summary: Ivan finally gets to play lead in this long running series.

Science fiction is such a moldable setting. There are the hard science books, the space opera, the mystical fantasy books, the near term commentary and a ton more. Readers that dismiss genre fiction are really missing out. (Slate had an article about Ursula Le Guin that made this point well.)

For me, there are two types of science fiction types that I really like. One is the idea fiction. Use a science fiction setting to create a world and take it to its logical conclusion to explore various ideas about society, religion, ethic and/or philosophy.

The other type is the hero story. This is a wide group. It can include everything from Star Wars to Ender’s Game.

God’s Life in Trinity edited by Miraslov Volf

November 30, 2012 by Adam Shields

Summary: A series of 18 essays about the implications of the Trinity of a variety of areas of a theology and practice. Compiled in honor of JÃ¼rgen Moltmann’s 80th birthday.

There were two reasons I picked up this book. One, I am trying to read about the Trinity as part of my annual reading goals. Two, I am reading it because Miroslov Volf’s name is on it. I have been hearing about Volf for a while and just have not had a chance to read him.

Volf is a professor at Yale and is best known for his work in the areas of social Trinity and forgiveness (Exclusion and Embrace, The End of Memory and the less academic Free of Charge). He also has controversial book on Christian response to Islam (Allah) and a well reviewed book on Christianity and the Common Good (Public Faith).

What is interesting to me about Volf is that he is academically responding to real issues around him. Volf was born and raised in what is now Croatia. He studied in Germany under JÃ¼rgen Moltmann and eventually came to the US to teach at Fuller until moving to Yale in 1998.

Theology of the Body for Beginners by Christopher West

November 29, 2012 by Adam Shields

Summary: Very helpful, quick overview of John Paul II’s theology of the body.

I purchased this about a year ago after I read Matthew Lee Anderson’s very good Earthen Vessels: Why Our Bodies Matter to Our Faith (first review, second review). I was looking a basic introduction to John Paul II’s Theology of the Body and Christopher West has written several books on it.

The book sat on my bookshelf for a year but I read it very quickly once I picked it up. Overall I this was a good book. I highlighted and marked up the book quite a bit (and then left it with my Dad while visiting for Thanksgiving, who was also interested in reading it.)

So I don’t have the book notes. From memory, the strong points are Marriage as a divine gift, the strong idea about how celibacy fits into that sacramental view of marriage, the way that God designed the body and the ways that sin and redemption of have affected our subsequent view of body. All of that really is good, fits well within the Christian (and Evangelical) theology and I think strengthens our theology.

Many place the book was quite beautiful in its descriptions of the body, marriage, sex, and God’s love for us. I think that beauty is something that is often missing in our Evangelical descriptions of the body. We get erotic, physical, dangerous; we miss the beauty.

Casual Vacancy by JK Rowling

November 28, 2012 by All Old Users

I started The Casual Vacancy with eyes wide open to the fact that this was no Harry Potter novel–and yet, even though I wasn’t offended by the much more adult tone (and content!) that Rowling establishes right out of the gate, I was a little surprised by it. No matter how prepared you are, it’s just weird to hear the f-bomb dropped by one of Hermione Granger’s literary cousins. What didn’t surprise me at all, though, having read and loved multiple analyses of them, was Rowling’s masterful plotting and the literary alchemy she weaves to engage the reader and drive the story. Indeed, that is what merited my 4 stars for the book.

Pagford is a small town that seems idyllic on the surface, but underneath the veneer of folksy charm the place is roiling with class warfare, sexual tension, violence, back-stabbing and duplicity. Rowling’s characters are broken, wounded, cynical, crass, self-centered, petty, and strangely sympathetic. The reader gets a first-person perspective from everyone as each maneuvers around the other, reading (and often misreading) the circumstances from a unique and limited vantage point–to hilarious but often tragic effects.

Offsite Review: Keeping the Feast

November 22, 2012 by Adam Shields

This seems like an appropriate book topic for Thanksgiving. In Keeping the Feast: Metaphors for the Meal Milton Brasher-Cunningham draws on his gifts as a writer, chef, minister and teacher to explore the meaning of “˜the meal,’ relating his reflections on food (and cooking) with the central meal of the Christian faith, Holy Communion. Brasher-Cunningham presses … Read more

Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin

November 19, 2012 by Adam Shields

Summary: A young wizard must find himself to make right a wrong he created.

Wizard of Earthsea is one of those classic books that I remember reading as a young teen. Like An Abundance of Katherines, it is a coming of age story. But unlike the other two books that I read this past week from the same era (Goldfinger and Stainless Steel Rat) it did not feel dated.

At the end of the book, Le Guin commented about the history of the book. This was the first book that a publisher had asked her to write, and she was reluctant. She had not written a book specifically for teen before this. And while she had written fantasy, the idea of fantasy as a genre was very new.

Lord of the Rings had only recently been published in the US. And the idea of young adult fantasy was just getting started. Lloyd Alexander had won the Newberry Medal for the High King the year before A Wizard of Earthsea was written.

In Le Guin’s little history she noted that she was subtlety trying to tweak the establishment. She followed the basic structure of a young adult version of a wizard, but she made him non-white. In fact all of the good characters in the book are not white. The only explicitly White main character is one that we see as a young girl and later as a young woman. And both times she betrays Ged to try and steal his power.

The Stainless Steel Rat by Harry Harrison

November 14, 2012 by Adam Shields

Summary: There is no one better the catch a crook than another crook.

When I was a kid I read a good bit. A lot of it was fairly worthless pulp science fiction. I have never been that snobbish about poorly written books. I like Twilight, Harry Potter and a host of other books that many people complain about. While I really do appreciate a well written phrase, there is more to writing in my mind than perfect writing. A story needs to be told. The reader needs to be engaged.

The Stainless Steel Rat was a series that I know I read in or around middle school. But I had absolutely no memory of the series. I noticed that the first book was available at my library on audiobook and I picked it up out of pure nostalgia.

The story is not all that original (or at least it does not feel original now). In a future world, crime has almost entirely been stopped. Those few criminals that exist are captured and ‘re-educated’.

Biblical Hermeneutics: Five Views

November 13, 2012 by Adam Shields

Summary: Five different perspectives on how we seek out meaning in scripture.

Over the past two years I have spent a fair amount of time coming to terms with how to read and understand scripture. Mostly this time has been confirming a couple of ideas. 1) The bible is not a magical answer books. 2) Christians (Evangelicals in particular) spend more time arguing about the bible than reading it (myself included.) 3) We think that everyone else ignores their cultural pre-suppositions, but that we have it right. 4) Understanding of scripture should be primarily a community, not individual activity.

Biblical Hermeneutics (how to to understand scripture) takes five authors with five different perspectives and shows how those different perspectives affect the way that we understand scripture.

The best part of the book is that they took a particular passage then used their perspective to explore how they would get meaning from the text. The book uses Matthew 2:13-15 (which is partially quoting Hosea 11:1) as their test case. This allows for both direct look at the meaning of Matt 2 and a look at how to use New Testament passages that refer to the Old Testament.