Book Reviews

I have stopped doing traditional ‘best of’  lists the past couple of years. Instead, I have written about what has impacted me in different areas. Below I also give some stats on the diversity of the authors of my reading and the topics of my reading.

Confronting History

History is a significant interest of mine. It is hard to understand our current era without understanding the influences that led to our time. That history matters, whether it is large-scale societal history or smaller stories. The Myth of Colorblind Christians: Evangelicals and White Supremacy in the Civil Rights Era told the recent history of Evangelicalism and its adoption of a colorblind approach to dealing with racial issues. It is an excellent follow-up to Color of Compromise, which is a popular introduction to racial issues within the church.

Reading Evangelicals: How Christian Fiction Shaped a Culture and a Faith was a surprise. I am not a particular fan of Evangelical Christian Fiction, and I do not read much of it. But using five novels that shaped Evangelical Christian Fiction to tell the story of Evangelical publishing and give context to the recent history of Evangelicalism was very effective. I think there could have been more critique of the quality of the literature, but I came to the book fairly blind and was very pleased with how much I enjoyed it.

How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith is one of the top handful of books I read. It is a lyrical and powerfully written book. Using the power of place and personal narrative, Smith visited sites of importance to American racial history and told the story of those places in personal terms. I listened to this as an audiobook, and his narration is perfect. With the eye of a historian and a journalistic confrontation of how these places frame racial history to people today, Smith reminds the readers that history is not just in the past but is important to how we tell our story.

Reparations: A Christian Call for Repentance and Repair by Duke Kwon and Greg Thompson is directly about historical confrontation. Few topics are less popular among White Evangelicals than reparations; according to polling I have seen, between 1 and 3 percent of White Evangelicals support large scale reparations for slavery. But Kwon and Thompson make the historical and theological case for why they think that reparations are an important response to both slavery and the larger reality of racism. Also, they make the case that churches and individual Christians should attempt smaller forms of reparations not just advocate for larger governmental reparations programs.

The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together is not really history, but sociology or public policy, but I think it fits here best. The central metaphor of the book is the public swimming pool. In the 1920-40s, thousands of public swimming pools were built by local communities. As desegregation slowly occurred in the 1940s-1970s across the country, many communities chose to permanently close public swimming pools, removing a community asset that had already been paid for rather than integrating it. That metaphor shows how racism extracts a cost on the whole of society, not just racial minorities. The book highlights how many White people, especially those of lower economic status, are harmed by policies originally put in place based on racist ideology. Areas as diverse as health care, jobs, housing, voting, and education continue to be impacted by racism. It is irrational to continue to support policies that directly harm ourselves, but it continues to happen.

Other Perspectives

Shoutin’ in the Fire: An American Epistle by Dante Stewart, along with How The Word Was Passed, are the two best-written books I read this year. Both show the importance of the craft of writing. Shoutin’ in the Fire is hard to categorize. It is not quite a memoir and not quite a collection of essays, but it is an interesting mix that highlights his skill as a writer to tell his own story and how racism continues to impact the church.

Permission to Be Black: My Journey with Jay-Z and Jesus was not a book written for me. But one of the reasons I want to expand the diversity of authors I read is to overhear stories that expand my world. Primarily this is a book that confronts mental health, generational trauma, and relational health as a Black man. All of these topics are important for many groups, but I think the particularity of this book for Black men can still be helpful for others to overhear.

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Summary: A discussion of the difficulties of being a Black Christian in predominately White Christian institutional spaces. 

I met Edward Gilbreath at a Jude3 conference in August 2019, back in the pre-pandemic get together in-person era of conferences. However, I have known of him for a long time. He was a writer for Christianity Today, their first, and for many years only, Black staff person. And I previously read Gilbreath’s book on Letter from a Birmingham Jail. I also have known his father-in-law and sister-in-law for years (15-20) through work, and I think we both attended the same church for a while, although I am not sure if we were attending at the same time. That somewhat shared experience and roughly similar ages (he is about 3-4 years older than I am) mean that as I was reading Reconciliation Blues, his story of the differences of experience between Black and White Christians was even more tangible for me.

Gilbreath attended Judson College. I attended Wheaton, not far away. Judson is denominationally affiliated with the American Baptists, and I considered going because I grew up American Baptist, many people I know went there. But by the point Gilbreath entered Judson, he was already conversant in White Evangelical because of his teen youth group experience in a White Evangelical church. The era of the experience does matter. Dante Stewart is roughly 20 years younger than Gilbreath, and their college experiences are different. Stewart was at a large state school, and his White Evangelical experience was through para-church college sports ministry. Gilbreath was at a small, predominately White college on the Evangelical edge of a Mainline denomination. But there was also a lot of experiential overlap. The experiences were similar, but I think some of the expectations were different because the era was different.

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Summary: Thoughts after reading this to my children.

I am not going to do a full review of this, but I do want to note a couple of things. I have read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone at least four times previously. But you always see a book with new eyes when you are reading it to children. I read this out loud to my 6 and 8-year-old. This was their first real contact with Harry Potter and we watched the movie after the book was finished. I do like the broader stories and I am a big fan of children’s fantasy literature. But there are problems with the books.

Rowling regularly makes fun of or demeans fat people. There is a lot of examples of words like dumb, stupid, ignorant, etc. I modified or skipped a number of them when reading. It is not that I am opposed to all language like this, there is a time and place, but most often these words are used to reduce people as less than. Part of what I try to communicate to my children is that we should not be harming people with our words and I do not want to encourage my children to see others do it.

Another thought is the concept of mixed blood and pure-blood wizards. While it is developed more in later books, it is introduced here. Rowling does condemn it, but I also think the history of these ideas should be explored if she is going to bring it up. I was just reading Stand Your Ground by Kelly Douglas Brown and she explores the history of racial/ethnic purity in the English common law system and culture and there is a lot of problems with it. In Harry Potter, I think the purity of blood is being associated with a WWII German concept but there is a much wider conversation than that.

Dr. Douglas Brown quotes Benjamin Franklin,

“Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our language or customs, any more than they can acquire our complexion?

Which leads me to add one remark: That the number of purely white people in the world is proportionally very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes are generally of what we call a swarthy complexion; as ar the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English make the principal body of white people on the face of the earth. I could wish their numbers were increased. And while we are scouring our planet, by clearing America of woods, and so making this side of our globe reflect a brighter light to the eyes of inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why should we in the sight of superior beings, darken its people? Why increase the sons of Africa, by planting them in America, where we have so far an opportunity, by excluding all black and tawneys, of increasing the lovely white and red?

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Summary: A series of essays, often biographical, formated as product or experience reviews. 

I am a fan of John Green. We are not much alike, but I have often wondered if we would get along and be friends given the chance. We both love books. He was scheduled to go to the University of Chicago Divinity School right after I graduated from the Divinity School. However, after working as a chaplain at a children’s hospital, he changed his mind about his career path and never started. We are both very earnest introverts close to the same age. We are married with two young kids close to the same age. And most other things are pretty different.

However, the Anthropocene Reviewed does seem designed particularly for me. The Anthropocene is the current geological age. And this series of essays is framed as product reviews from that current geological age. The reviews are a mix of funny, short, long, serious, random, and current event-focused. I have written thousands of reviews. I have reviewed almost every book I have read for the last 12 years, over 1500 of them. And because of those reviews, Amazon contacted me years ago to see if I would like to be one of their product reviewers. I was just outside of being one of their top 500 reviewers at one point in time. I looked, and as of today, I have just under 3000 reviews on Amazon (some written by my wife), and I am the 1075th most popular reviewer on Amazon. A reality that makes me very ambivalent about the idea of product reviews.

But as Green says early in the book, those reviews often reveal more about the author than the product. John Green is well known as a young adult author that deals with mental illness and other heavy topics. In The Anthropocene Reviewed, he is more directly opening up about his struggles with mental illness, especially anxiety and depression, than he can in fiction. And in a format that does not seem to be directly about him, John Green reveals an enormous amount about himself as he pretends to be writing about products or experiences.

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Summary: In 1944, a German rocket hit a Woolworths in South London, killing many. This novel explores what might have been if five of those children had not been killed. 

When encountering fiction, my primary method is to find authors I trust and to read their books without any investigation into the story. A couple of weeks ago, I was looking through a sale at Audible and saw that there was a new novel by Francis Spufford, an author I trust, and I purchased it without reading anything about it.

I started listening, and I was utterly lost and went back and read a little bit about the book to figure out what was going on The opening is a slow-motion description of a V2 rocket blast that killed a large number of people in a crowded Woolworth’s department store. Spufford is writing an alternative history where that rocket never launched, or it failed somehow, and the Woolworths was not destroyed. This book follows the lives of five children from about nine years old until about 70. As readers, we check into their story with short vignettes that create an image of what their life is like, but we do not spend enough time with them to get a deep understanding of them.

I have read alternative history fiction before, which doesn’t follow the typical model of alternative history, so I think Light Perpetual fails in that area. Generally, alternative history has one of two main models. Either unknown people from one time period go to another time through time travel, and either is shocked at the changes in technology and culture or use their knowledge of the future to make the lives of the past better. This story type is usually considered science fiction, and Orson Scott Card’s Pastwatch or Eric Flint’s 1632 series are good examples.

The other model of alternative history is to take some famous event or person and imagine a different reality. In this case, the story plays with the reader’s knowledge of the natural history and the author’s imagination of the alternative history. Stephen Carter’s novel The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln imagines that Lincoln survives his assassination attempt in 1865 and two years later faces impeachment. Light Perpetual does not fit either of these two models. We as readers can know something about the history and cultural changes from 1944 until the early 2000s, but that is not alternative history because nothing has changed; it is just a fictional story set in our regular history. The framing of this novel as a type of alternative history, I don’t think, really makes a lot of sense. The framing as alternative history distracts from the telling of a good story.

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Summary: Short history of Reconstruction and Jim Crow.

I am a fan of the idea of concise introductory books about big topics that give enough information and context to a subject but do not overwhelm the idea. Several publishers have books like these. For example, the Oxford Very Short Introduction series has over 300 books, including the excellent Very Short Introduction to Protestantism and the awful Very Short Introduction to the Bible or African History. In addition, Christian publishers have the Armchair Theologian series, which I think is equally mixed, on Niebuhr Brothers, John Knox, Aquinas, and John Calvin. The Drama of American History is a similar project with books that are about 100 pages.

I have previously read Eric Foner’s book on the three constitutional amendments that occurred during reconstruction and his more extended overall history of reconstruction and David Blight’s book on the historical memory of the Civil War in the 50 years after. But the movement into Jim Crow is something I have less background on. One of the problems of a short book on a subject area is that it tends to rely on the easy-to-tell story, not the nuanced, more difficult to explain aspects that tend to be less well known. The standard history of reconstruction is a “Lost Cause” narrative. Except for WEB DuBois’ work on reconstruction, the common historical narrative is that it was a failure because of northern incompetence, the poor work ethic and education of the formerly enslaved, and the corruption of carpetbaggers and scallywags. There are still some threads of the Lost Cause in this book, although it is also trying to tell a more accurate story.

The problem with a short book is that there is only so much room in a hundred pages. The book does include the problems of a lack of education for the formerly enslaved and the corruption of Grant’s administration. It also speaks of the rise of the KKK and political terrorism, the lack of political will (as well as the concern about the constitutionality of federal supervision of state perversion of justice). But in a book that primarily focuses on political history, there is a limit to exploring the issues of white superiority within both the North and South, the Democrat and the Republican/Unionist parties. For example, many Northerners favored a number of the Black Codes that stripped Black citizen’s rights, allowed for unjust arrest and re-enslavement through the penal system or through forced adoption or apprenticeship programs, and voting restrictions that also applied to both Black and poor White citizens.

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Summary: An overview of the tension between the church’s good and bad behavior throughout church history. 

I do not think I would have picked up Bullies and Saints if I had not heard the Seminary Dropout podcast interview. Part of the ongoing discussion of those discussing the future of evangelicalism right now is the right way to use and approach history. I think that history is only helpful if it is something that we learn from in the negative sense. In other words, because there is a tendency to look at your tradition with rose-colored glasses, our bias should primarily focus on the adverse history. That isn’t to say we only look at negative history. Still, we need to prioritize negative history because stories are often told of only the good and because directly addressing the negative is how we address the log in our eye before the speck in others’ eyes. The podcast interview suggested that John Dickson was attempting to get the balance right.

Bullies and Saints is a brief overview of Christian history (2000 years in just under 300 pages cannot be too thorough.) In the 25 short chapters (mostly 8 to 12 pages each), Dickson looks at areas of Christian harm or Christian good. Neither is glossed over. The modern concepts of human rights have been largely based on the cultural understanding of the individual’s dignity that has at least some root in the Imago Dei. At the same time, as the church became more tightly involved with the state, there have been increased opportunities for the church to abuse its power. Some of that use of power was to restrain the state, pressure the state into supporting charitable causes, or encourage justice for all. But some of that power was to pressure people into becoming Christians, to change the Christian bias against war to a ‘just war’ theory, or to adopt a ‘muscular Christian’ understanding of leadership.

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Summary: Georgiana’s friend Belinda has inherited a small house. They go to inspect it while Darcy is away on “business.” Eventually, there is a murder that Georgiana has to solve. 

The Royal Spyness series has been going on for quite a while. The series is a cozy mysteries series, and it is pretty fluffy. But I have enjoyed them and mostly listened to them as audiobooks. The series’ weaknesses are still present, but I still mostly enjoy the series despite them.

Georgiana and Darcy have returned from their honeymoon. Darcy has continued his undercover work for the crown, and he is off on another trip. Since she has inherited a house, Georgiana no longer has the same money problems as she did earlier in the series. But she still is not really interested in settling down and living a conventional life of the wealthy aristocracy. Because she is bored, she agrees to go with  Belinda to Cornwall to inspect her inherited old cottage.

Belinda spent time in the area as a child and pre-teen and played with others. But her grandmother sold her house, and Belinda no longer came to visit. Several of the children she played with have grown up and become important in the community. Belinda and Georgiana stay with one couple and find a situation they have to figure out how to deal with. That becomes another situation, and Georgiana has to save Belinda.

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Summary: Memoir of one of the two remaining Freedom Riders. 

Two things can be true at one time. The era of overt legal segregation was not that long ago (my mother is two weeks younger than Ruby Bridges, and many school districts around the country did not desegregate until roughly about the time of my birth). And we are very rapidly losing those that played prominent roles in the Civil Rights Era. Charles Person is one of just two members of the original Freedom Riders that are still living. Buses are Coming’: Memoir of a Freedom Riders was published just a couple of months ago. It is yet another book that I would not have known about without a recommendation from a friend. A friend of mine was invited to go to Charles Person’s home a couple of weeks ago, and there he spent four hours talking with him and learning about his story. It was out of that meeting that I heard about Buses are Comin’.

Charles Person was born in 1942. He was the youngest of the original Freedom Riders. As a Morehouse freshman, he participated in the Atlanta Student Movement that organized the end of segregated restaurants and shopping in Atlanta. During those protests, Charles Person was arrested and spent 16 days in jail for “trespassing and disturbing the peace” while standing in line at a lunch buffet attempting to pay for a meal. As retaliation for singing freedom songs while in jail, he was moved to solitary confinement for ten of those days. In part because of the jail sentence, he fell behind with his spring classes during his freshman year; he dropped out of Morehouse that spring and applied to be part of the Congress on Racial Equality’s Freedom Ride. (Person had applied to MIT and Georgia Tech, was accepted into MIT, but could not afford to attend and was rejected because of his race from Georgia Tech during the final year of required segregation at Tech.)

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