Book Reviews

Summary: A novel about a defense contractor lobbyist and a political commentator who get together to whip up furor over China in order to justify more weapons programs. 

Christopher Buckley is one of my favorite authors.  But this is not one of my favorite of his books.

Buckley’s books follow a similar path.  Washington insiders, in a cynical, but somewhat believable way push a line that seems absurd, but much of the time you could actually see things working out in real life like they do in his books.  It is satire.  What makes Buckley one of my favorite authors is that he ridicules all sides of the political spectrum, he keeps his books funny and in the end his heroes usually see the error in their ways.

But this book is not as funny as most of his other books.  It is satire, and you can see him poking fun at lobbyists, at the defense industry, at the media.  But it is not sharp, it is not very funny and it feels phoned in.

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Summary: A brief, poetic look at the pain and redemption of growing up as a girl seeking to be cherished.

For someone that reads as much as I do, and someone that has so many books on my To Read list, I find it odd that I don’t always know why I start reading the books that I read.

Tonight I read this very short little book because I said I would (the author contacted me to ask me to review it.)  I did not have anything else I wanted to read, so I picked it up.  It was  finished in less than a hour.  And it was very good.

I am not the target audience, it is primarily written to women, especially women that feel broken.  But I appreciate the writing.  I am a nanny for my two nieces.  I love caring for these two precious girls. For all of the stress and bother and calls to ‘be a lion’ or ‘no, stand like this’, I want to be a figure that encourages and strengthens them.  Reading about women that have not been cherished and cared for helps give me encouragement to keep going.

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Takeaway: If you are thinking about joining the Catholic church this has many good questions, clarification and guidance.

I am on a project to understand more about the Catholic church.  I have two motivations around this, 1) a friend of mine recently converted and I am reading understand more about his decision and 2) I am convinced that much of the Evangelical opposition to Catholicism is rooted in ignorance of the Catholic church and not really on theology.  So I apologize to those that have no interest in Catholic theology, but I will probably read at least another half dozen books in the next couple months.

I have been paying attention to Christian Smith for a while.  He is a Sociologist specializing in Christian youth culture and maturation.  But I had not read more than a couple of articles (more about his research than by him) before I read his book Bible Made Impossible last year.  It was a massively frustrating book for me.  He points out many of the problems that Evangelicals have with the bible and its use.  In the end I think he is right that we need to read the bible with a Christological hermeneutic, but that is difficult to describe in practice.  I think he strongly hinted at his conversion in the book because coupled with the Christological hermeneutic is the need for a church voice (or authority) to regulate the reading (ie the Catholic Magisterium).

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Summary: A richly told story of early Puritans and the struggle against the New England wilderness and the missionary outreach to Native Americans.

This is my second Geraldine Brooks novel in as many months. The first book, People of the Book, supplements the known story of a real Jewish prayer books as it moves through European history. In Caleb’s Crossing, Brooks takes the small fragment of the first Native American to graduate from Harvard and creates a rich story around the known characters.

What was most interesting to me is that the entire books is written as a ‘Day Book’ or journal by a fictional woman (girl at the start of the book.) When I was in grad school I took an Early American Lay Piety class. In that class I read segments from a number of women’s journals. Many of them were recounting their sins and lives in order to prepare themselves for the possibility of death. Many of these were written just before childbirth because 1 in 5 women died in childbirth at this time.

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Summary: The conclusion of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel series.

This is a good example of a books that was given away free on kindle, I liked the books and I have read all of the rest of the series (and paid for them).  I have also encouraged others to buy and read them.  Free, done right, can be a good business model for authors.

This is a young adult series that was very uneven, but I really wanted to love.  It has two twin teens that find themselves in the midst of a magical battle, realize they have latent magical powers themselves and realize that the world they thought of as boring and dull was actually full of history and magic.

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