Book Reviews

Summary: Polly, Charles, and Dr. O’Keefe travel to Venezuela by ship and meet 13-year-old Simon Renier (the main character) and his uncle, also traveling to Venezuela. 

At some point, I will have read most of L’Engle’s novels. I believe that I have twelve of her novels and six of her memoir or other non-fiction books. But I find them wildly uneven. Dragon in the Water is in the O’Keefe series but is mostly about Simon Renier, not Charles and Polly. Simon is a 13-year-old being raised by his great-aunt, who is in her late 80s. They are from a family with a long history in the Southern US, but it has been influenced by their ancestor’s work with Simon Bolivar in freeing South and Central America from Spanish rule.

One of the minor themes of the book is that Simon’s ancestor returned from South America and ended slavery on their plantation and the former slaves worked together with the family in a type of commune. While that is unlikely to have been based on any real events, L’Engle still presents Simon and his Aunt as denying any good from slavery but being against members of their family that worked with northern agents during the reconstruction era. And it appears that even if L’Engle was trying not to engage in Lost Cause thinking, she still falls into it, even as she says directly in the book that she denies Lost Cause ideology.

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Summary: A brief look at the sociology and history of Christian Nationalism in regard to how it relates to democracy.

Perry and Whitehead’s Taking America Back for God was the first book I read that was explicitly about Christian Nationalism. Samuel Perry is back with Philip Gorski with a short book that updates and takes a different approach to look at Christian Nationalism. While I think Taking America Back for God is a more comprehensive sociological look at CN, The Flag and the Cross, does a better job of giving historical context to Christian Nationalism.

This is a brief book, with only four chapters covering bout 130 pages of the main content (less than five hours of audio). The book ends with a more practical chapter on avoiding a future January 6th type of event and is more practical. But just as important are the three chapters that give context. The first chapter is about why this is “our nation, not theirs”. And then the third chapter is about how “Freedom, Violence, Order” is central to how Christian Nationalism thinks politically.

But I think my favorite was the second chapter on the history of Christian Nationalism’s influences. This chapter has two important frames for the telling of that history. One, it focuses on the early history of the US as contextual within the European centuries-long conflict, of which the American Revolution was one small part. And second, it reminds the reader that the story of Christian Nationalism today has to account for the switch from the civil religion impulse of the mainline liberal Christian tradition to the conservative Evangelical tradition. (This is not unlike the political party realignment that was happening concurrently.) The first part of the framing reminds us that we are not the central player at all points in time in global history. The second part is a reminder to those who are currently opposing Christian Nationalism from a more progressive political position that it was, in fact, the progressives or earlier generations that were more likely historically to align with Christian National rhetoric today.

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Summary: An excellent biography of a woman who is underappreciated but vitally important to the Civil Rights Movement. 

I want to mention Alissa Wilkerson’s book Salty, which finally got me to reading Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement. Salty was framed as mini-biographies of women that Wilkerson would like to have around a dinner table for the most fabulous dinner party ever. I was vaguely aware of Ella Baker but did not know the extent of her involvement in all aspects of the civil rights era.

One of the points of The Dark End of the Street was that organizers started the work of what we think of as the civil rights era in the 1930s, which were motivated by organizational movements at the turn of the 20th century, which was a response to the end of the Reconstruction Era, and so on. All movements have historical antecedents that tend to be forgotten as we tell their story. Ella Baker is a generation older than most well-known figures in the Civil Rights era. She is in the same generation as Howard Thurman and Martin Luther King Sr.

Born in 1903, Baker grew up in Norfolk, VA, until 7. In 1910, there was a white race riot in Norfolk, and Baker’s mother moved herself and the children back to her parent’s home in Littleton, NC. Her father continued to work out of Norfolk on steamships. In addition, her grandfather had died, and her mother moved home to help care for her mother and the land. Both sets of Ella Baker’s grandparents were born into slavery. Baker’s father’s parents were sharecroppers, but her mother’s parents were literate landowners. And her grandfather was a pastor as well as a farmer. Ella Baker’s parents completed high school, and her mother worked as a teacher before she was married and then again as a teacher after her husband died.

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Summary: Zora Neale Hurston, in 1927, interviewed Cudjo Lewis, then 86 years old. He was one of a group of 110 people captured and brought to the US and enslaved just before the start of the Civil War. 

Barracoon is a short manuscript, only about 100 pages, including the introduction. As an appendix, Hurston recounts some folk tales Cudjo Lewis told his children.

Barracoon is a tragic story that is worth reading, especially because it is relatively short. Cudjo Lewis was captured at 19 and brought to the US on an illegal slave ship, the Clotilda. There were many others, but this was likely the last illegal slave ship to the US, landing in 1860. He was enslaved for five years, working for a riverboat captain both on the boat and at other tasks.

The book is a good reminder that post-slavery, there were no reparations,. For all of the complaints about it being too long ago for reparations, there was not a national effort at either reparations or transitioning the formerly enslaved to a self-sustaining life at the time either. Instead, the formerly enslaved were abused in other ways; and the Jim Crow social systems perpetuated the racial hierarchy. Cudjo and others worked to establish Africatown, a small independent black community.

Cudjo Lewis married and had six children. A daughter died as a teen from some type of sickness. A sheriff’s deputy killed one son. Then in 1902, Cudjo was hit by a train which left him with lifelong injuries and destroyed his wagon. Cudjo hired a lawyer and sued the railroad for negligence (not using whistles and signals properly), but the lawyer took the money. A second son was then killed in a train accident after his own accident. A third son disappeared, and the insinuation is that he may have either committed suicide or may have been lynched, but Cudjo did not know. Eventually, all of his children died, only one of whom had married and had children. His daughter-in-law and grandchildren lived on the family land, and eventually, the daughter-in-law remarried and continued to live in a cabin next door to Cudjo. The grandchildren are mentioned as characters in Hurston’s recounting of her meeting with Cudjo.

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Summary: A guide to understanding spiritual development and practices with a trauma-informed lens. 

As a spiritual director, I have been thinking about the role of trauma in spiritual direction. My training included a whole class on psychology and spiritual formation, primarily focused on ways to avoid moving into counseling or understanding our limits regarding addiction or other mental health issues. However, there was no training directly about the role of trauma.

My wife is a teacher and has participated in training with the Attachment and Trauma Network (ATN), a non-profit that attempts to support families, schools, and communities to become trauma-informed. The president of ATN, Janyne McConnaughey, spoke at an online conference on religious trauma last spring, and I finally got around to watching her session. That session led to watching a podcast, where I saw that Dr. McConnaughey had a book designed to help churches and church leaders become trauma-aware. My wife has read several Dr. McConnaughey’s books, so I had context for Trauma in the Pews.

Trauma in the Pews has three parts. First, there is a brief introduction to trauma and its prevalence in church settings. The second, and most extended section, interacts with Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline and addresses 12 spiritual disciplines impacted by trauma. The final section introduces how a church can become more responsive to ministering to and with those with a trauma background.

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Summary: Inspector Gamache and his wife may be on vacation for their anniversary, but murder still follows them. 

I am a big fan of the Inspector Gamache series, but I have not re-read any of the books until now. I am contributing to a series of essays in celebration of the series for the release of the 19th book, so now I have a reason to re-read. I did not pick up A Rule Against Murder for a reason other than it was the earliest book in the series available at my library. I checked out all of the early books from the library and only started purchasing the later books. About halfway through the book, I noticed that the early books in the series had been added to the Kindle Unlimited library. I think I will re-read the next book in the series and then go back and start the series from the beginning.

It has been about seven and a half years since I first read A Rule Against Murder. Most of the books I have listened to as audiobooks. And I again picked this up as an audiobook, although I finished the last hundred pages in print. Ralph Cosham was an excellent narrator for the series, but he passed away between books 10 and 11, and Robert Bathurst has narrated the books since that point.

I never really know how to write about fiction. With fiction, especially the mystery/thriller genre, there is value in not knowing much about the story before you read it. I tend to read authors I trust without knowing anything about the books. I am far enough away from the first reading that although I remembered the basic storyline, I did not remember who did it until the book revealed the killer. I am not a reader that attempts to figure out the mystery before it is revealed. An author can choose to misdirect or reveal beyond my skill, and so I tend to allow the book to unfold on its own.

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Summary: Intro to the work and context of JRR Tolkien. 

When I tend to get too ambivalent with my current reading (both interested in the topic but not wanting to pick up the book), I often turn to lecture series like the Great Courses on random subjects to either distract me or to be in conversation with whatever I am currently reading. Picking up The World of JRR Tolkien is clearly an attempt at something completely different. (And an attempt to prepare for the Amazon series coming up soon.)

The World of JRR Tolkien is shorter than most Great Courses at only ten lectures and not quite 5 hours. I listened to it in just a couple of days. I am not a Tolkien scholar, and while I did revisit the Lord of the Rings earlier this year, that was the first time I have read the books in about 20 years. And I have not previously read a biography of Tolkien or books about him. So this was mostly new material for me. I am very familiar with CS Lewis and the Inklings, so I am not entirely new, but almost nothing in this lecture series by Dimitra Fimi repetitive to what I have previously read or listened to.

The first lecture is about how Middle-earth is both medieval and modern and gives a general introduction to the series and Tolkien. The second lecture caught me off guard; it is about how Tolkien initially attempted to create a mythology for England that would draw together the country in ways not unlike what was intended for the Book of Common Prayer. That is not just audacious, but it is concerning from our 21st-century vantage point, given the ways shared memory, and a common mythology was misused with the Nazi regime and the Lost Cause mythology in the US.

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Summary: A nuanced and detailed biography of a woman that has primarily been reduced to a single act.

I have read Jeanne Theoharis’ books out of order. Her more recent book, A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History, has many themes hinted at in The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks but more fully fleshed out in the second book. Both books are well worth reading, although there is some overlap. There is a running joke among Civil Rights historians that quite often, the history of the civil rights moment is presented as that one day the Supreme Court announced the end of school segregation, and then the next day Rosa Parks sat down. A day later, MLK stood up to give his I Have a Dream Speech. Then the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 were passed, and MLK was assassinated. The real history of the Civil Rights Movement is much more complicated and much longer.

In some ways, it is hard to categorize the boundaries of the movement because, as with all history, events influence other events. Both The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks and At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape and Resistance-a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power emphasize that by 1955, Rosa Parks had been participating or leading on civil rights issues for nearly 20 years. The December 1, 1955 events may not have been explicitly planned as an NAACP action, but it was not a random event that did not have a larger context. Several events had to work together. Rosa Parks tended to avoid James Blake’s bus because she had had run-ins with the bus driver before. Other events around the country like the lynching of Emmett Till, the Interstate Commerce Commission’s ruling banning “separate but equal” regarding interstate bus travel, and Rosa Parks’ recent participation in the Highlander Folk School training all likely had some effect. In the end, Rosa Parks refused to get up from her seat. City policy should have meant that she did not have to move because no other seats were available. Instead, the bus driver called the police, and she was arrested. Because this is such an essential part of Rosa Parks’ legacy,  the event and the bus boycott are significant parts of the biography. But the biography also clarifies that Rosa Parks was far more important than just her single act, even if that act is what she is known for.

The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks and many other books about less well-known figures of the Civil Rights movement show the considerable cost that everyday people suffered. Money is not everything, but it is one illustration. According to tax records, it took ten years for the couple to recover their income from before the bus boycott, and they were not a wealthy family. At the low point, their income was cut by 80%. Even so, during this time, they were forced to move to Detroit to escape the harassment and job discrimination once the boycott was completed. Rosa Parks spent nearly two years working as a receptionist at the Hampton Institute in Virginia (a historically black college) away from her husband and mother because it was the only job she could find (and the Hampton Institute did not provide housing for the whole family). It was not until a year after the newly elected congressman John Conyers hired her as a congressional staffer in 1965 that their income reached above the pre-1956 income.

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Summary: A good overview of the Old Testament, not just the content of the Old Testament, but interpretative methods, ancient culture, and ways scholarship interacts with ancient texts.

I am a fan of Great Courses and “Very Short Introduction to” books. But one of the most common weaknesses is that in a brief survey, the book/lectures can be primarily about the academic study of the subject, not the subject itself. For example, in The Bible: A Very Short Introduction by John Riches spends very little time introducing the content of the bible and instead spends almost all of his time on the academic study of how it was written or compiled into the canon or how it is studied. All of those things are helpful in the proper context. But in a brief survey, I think the primary focus should be an overview of the content.

I have wanted to read a book by Amy-Jill Levine. She is a well-known author and writer. She is Jewish but is known partly for her Jewish presentations to Christian audiences. She takes the spiritual reality of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible seriously. Still, she is an academic presenting in a way that primarily focuses on what can be known naturally (in the sense of non-spiritual). And this is what most of the negative reviews on Audible are about. For example, she says that at this point, there is no archeological evidence that David was a real person and that she tends to think that he was an archetypal figure. That does not mean that there never will be archeological evidence of David. But I think Christians must grapple with the reality of how modernism has impacted our faith. Modernism wanted to dismiss not just the possibility of supernatural actions of God but dismiss anything that could not be proven naturally. And those Christians that reacted against modernism accepted many of the same premises, but in the other direction, trying to prove through modern scholarship that all of the supernatural events actually happened and the bible was only historical in a modern understanding of that idea.

One of the strengths of this presentation is that in the process of giving an overview of the content of the Old Testament, Levine illustrates different models of understanding and studying ancient texts. She uses the Historical-Critical method and brings comparative stories from other cultures. She spends a lot of time on genre and points out how the author’s intention (at least what we can reconstruct of intention) should play into how we understand a text today. She introduces the idea of etiological myth, a story that explains how something came to be. One example of this is the story of Lott and his two daughters; the children born to Lott and his daughters are Moab and Ammon, the names of two of the people groups around Israel. And a story about how those people groups were derived from incest and drunkness seems like it very well may be an example that was intended to be an etiological myth (an explanation of how something came to be) and not an example of modern history.

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