Book Reviews

Summary: The life and times of a 15th century healer. 

I do not often just say, go buy a book, but if you like the mix of books that I tend to review, just go and buy the book. Laurus is a modern Russian novel, wonderfully translated to English. Vodolazkin, the author, is a midevil scholar who has recreated the alien nature of the midevil Russian world wonderfully.

I really have a hard time trying to figure out how to describe Laurus. It is about an ancient Christian healer. So it is sort of Christian fiction. But it is by a Russian so it does not fit into any of the traditional modern christian novel categories. Laurus takes Christianity very seriously, but using what I can only describe as magical realism to give structure to the healing and mysticism of the Russian Orthodox Christianity that is illustrated so well here. In some ways Laurus reads more like a book of ancient Christian devotional literature as much as it read like a novel.

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Summary: A whole spy thriller reveal over dinner.

Olen Steinhauer is often compared, favorably, to John le Carré. It has been a few years since I picked up one of Steinhauer’s books, but this was on sale as an audiobook, it was relatively short and I needed a change of pace.

According to one of the reviews I read prior to purchasing it, Steinhauer was told by someone that modern spy novels are never quite as good as the old ones. And so he put that scene at the start of the book and then for nearly the whole book the action is reveal, in flashbacks or in current reality, while the two protagonists are having dinner. It was not until things were about to be revealed that I guessed correctly what was going on.

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Summary: A teen girl, born in the US, but living in Haiti since soon after her birth, returns to the US. Her mother is detained by ICE, but Fabiola continues on to live with her aunt and cousins in Detroit.

My goal of reading more fiction this year has not been going well. But it is summer, and summer is a time for Fiction. American Street was on sale as I was making plans for a six hour solo drive to the beach. I listened to all but the last 30 minutes of American Street on the way to the beach and the last 30 minutes and Believe Me on the way back.

This is a very good audiobook. Robin Miles, who I was not fond of when she narrated Binti, was excellent here. Her various accents, which felt fake in Binti, felt authentic here in part because she not only doing Haitian, but also Detroit street. The range of voices was what made the narration.

American Street is named after the street where the house that Fabiola come to live, the one where she was born. It is right on the corner of Joy and American streets, which is the reason that the house was purchased by new immigrants to the US. When her mother is detained by ICE as they go through customs in New York City (Fabiola’s mother overstayed her visa on the previous trip so that Fabiola would be born in the US), Fabiola is left to go on to Detroit and meet cousins and an aunt that she has talked to, but not met.

Fabiola’s life in Haiti, with her good English schools and her hard work, has not truly prepared her for Detroit. She is also not prepared for the realities of street life without the guidance of her mother.

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Summary: An evangelical historian approaches why so many Evangelicals voted for Trump.

I am a fan of the John Fea’s history podcast, The Way of Improvement Leads Home. I do not remember how I ran across it, but I have listened to it almost from the very beginning. Some of the ideas of Believe Me (title is from Trump’s often used phrase) trickled out over the past months. And the most recent podcast episode was directly about the book Believe Me. On Saturday, when I had a six hour drive by myself, I listened to the audiobook of Believe Me basically in one sitting.

After demonstrating that he is in fact an Evangelical, Fea starts with the common ‘81% of White Evangelicals voted for Trump’ and his wondering if 81% of his Evangelical megachurch voted for Trump the next Sunday after the election. This is not unlike many Evangelicals that I know that have been against Trump all along. They felt the election personally.

The main explanation of the Believe Me is that Evangelicals voted for Trump out of fear, a desire for a Christian nation and the power to construct it that way, and nostalgia. I think that Fea is best when he is attempting to be generous in understanding the reluctant Trump voter and his historical explanations. Fea’s other books include books about whether the United States was founded as a Christian nation, why we should study history and a history of the American Bible Society, all of which make their ways into the book at one point or another.

Fea places all three factors, fear, nostalgia, and power (Christian nationalism) in historical context, asserting that it is not just in this one instance that these three factors have come into play, but that there is a history of Evangelicals choosing these over their Christian ideals. There are places where I think that Believe Me may have been rush to print just a bit too quickly. He explains the DACA program incorrectly. He could be clearer about what the 81% number really was. The definition of what an Evangelical is I think should have been developed more clearly from a historical perspective. In many ways Evangelical, which means something pretty specific in the second half of the 20th century, is mixed up with conservative Protestantism or Fundamentalism or any Protestantism of earlier generations. I think that weakens his historical argument in a few places because some of the historical parallels he is drawing may not be quit as clear for some that want to haggle about what Evangelicalism has meant historically or today.

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Summary: A book on physical and spiritual healing, published in 1947 by a Episcopal Priest’s wife. Anges Sanford mentored and impacted many, included Dallas Willard. 

Way back in March, over three months ago I started reading The Healing Light because both the book and author were mentioned in the very good biography of Dallas Willard. The Healing Light was available and cheap so I picked it up and started reading. It has taken me three months to get through it because it is both fascinating and frustrating.

Part of what I have appreciated about it is that it is written in a different era. Published in 1947, it has been out for more than 70 years and still in print. CS Lewis’ point about reading books of different ages was not that different ages were better, but they had different blind spots and different emphases and different strengths.

There are three primary issue that I think are negatives and significant ones. First, there is an attempt to scientifically analyze prayer and healing. There is some aspect of that that is appropriate. But it felt very dated and a dead end because prayer is not scientific. It is using a tool of analysis that is inappropriate to the task it is being used for. The type of approach to prayer as science is summed up in the quote, “Some day we will understand the scientific principles that underlie the miracle-working powers of God, and we will accept His intervention as simply and naturally as we do the radio.”

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Summary: The best book I have read so far explaining issues of racism to White people.

If you are are a regular reader of Bookwi.se, you cannot have missed the fact that I have been reading a lot about racism, history around race and related materials over the past several years. It has not been one thing, it has been a huge number of things together that have really forced me to pay attention to both my own racist blindspots and the broader issues of culture, racism, and history. But there are really two distinct parts of the racial world that I keep running up against. One part is the hurt and history of racial minorities in the US. I have read histories about slavery and reconstruction, Jim Crow, Civil Rights Era, and contemporary racial problems. There is frankly, no end to learning about a previously unknown problems in historical or contemporary treatment of racial minorities.

The second part I think is more subtle, but also quite important, the understanding of what it is that a White person should be doing in light of the significant history of injustice that continues to be perpetrated today. I have read two books in this area that I think are both helpful, White Awake and Raising White Kids. Both I very much think are worth reading, but both are slightly different than White Fragility. Robin DiAngelo has a PhD in multicultural education and specialized in Whiteness Studies and coined the term White Fragility in 2011. Her best known book previous to this one (which I have not read) is What Does It Mean to Be White: Developing a White Racial Identity. While she has been a full time professor and still is a part time lecturer, her main job is as a consultant to business, non-profit and governmental groups in areas of race and communications.

I cracked open a paperback review copy of White Fragility (which hate reading, so I tend to never pick up) because I was interested and screen shot the fifth page to a private facebook groups I participate in. The main quote from that page that struck me was:

“This book is intended for us, for white progressives who so often””despite our conscious intentions””make life so difficult for people of color. I believe that white progressives cause the most daily damage to people of color. I define a white progressive as any white person who thinks he or she is not racist, or is less racist, or in the “œchoir,” or already “œgets it.” White progressives can be the most difficult for people of color because, to the degree that we think we have arrived, we will put our energy into making sure that others see us as having arrived. None of our energy will go into what we need to be doing for the rest of our lives: engaging in ongoing self-awareness, continuing education, relationship building, and actual antiracist practice. White progressives do indeed uphold and perpetrate racism, but our defensiveness and certitude make it virtually impossible to explain to us how we do so.”

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Summary: A 14 year old boy tries to escape his destiny. 

One of my reading goals this year is to read all of Flannery O’Connor fiction, which is completely possible because there are only two novels and two short story collections. The Violent Bear It Away is the second novel. On the whole I liked it more than Wise Blood, but I am not completely sure why. My most clear impression of the book is that I have missed a lot of it because I am sure I have not understood some of the references and subtler meanings. It will be going on the “˜to read again’ pile.

Tarwater, a 14 year old boy, who has been raised by his great uncle after his mother died in a car accident, is suddenly alone in the world. After his great uncle dies, he leaves his cabin in the woods and goes to town with his secular Uncle Rayber and his son Bishop.

One of the Goodreads reviews I read commented that none of the characters are likable, but I disagree with that assessment. It is hard to like the characters, but I did not dislike any of them. Instead, it was easy to see the hurt in all of the characters. I could not think of the surly 14 year old, or Rayber, who had been abandoned by his wife with a disabled (probably Downs Syndrome) boy, without having sympathy for their hurt. They make bad decisions and harm one another, but the harm is harm borne by trauma and from generational sin.

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Summary: Roughly based on an actual meeting between Robert F Kennedy and a number of African Americans including James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Jerome Smith, Harry Belafonte and others, Dyson explores what it means to bring truth about race in America.

This is the fourth book I have read by Michael Eric Dyson in just over a year. Dyson is a cultural critic, essayist, theologian, and professor. What Truth Sounds Like is a follow up from his earlier Tears We Cannot Stop. That earlier book was a direct theological argument toward White Christians about the importance of racial justice.

What Truth Sounds Like is a different approach roughly based on an actual meeting with Robert Kennedy in 1963 that was arranged by James Baldwin. James Baldwin was asked to pull together a group of African Americans, not political leaders, but others that would truthfully talk to Kennedy about the Black experience. Kennedy wanted to share his urban political program, but Kennedy was unprepared for the truth telling that went on in that room. He initially left frustrated but later understood, at least in part, that the frustration shared that day was honest and necessary for Kennedy to hear.

Dyson uses the meeting as a jumping off point to express how politicians, artists, intellectuals, celebrities, and activists have historically, and today, shared the truths of the world. Dyson is not making an explicitly Christian claim here as he does in some of his other books. But the claim is no less honest or important.

One note that is important to the reading of What Truth Sounds Like. Dyson, as is common among many minorities that write and speak about race, uses the word Whiteness or White in two broad ways. Occasionally Dyson is merely being descriptive about the skin color of a person. But more often Dyson is using the words White or Whiteness as a descriptor of the cultural understanding of Whites as superior to people of other racial groups, not completely unlike the concept of White Supremacy. White readers often hear minority writers and speakers complaining about Whiteness and understand them to be complaining about White people as individuals or a group. But what people that use White or Whiteness in this way are actually decrying, is a cultural understanding that physically or psychologically or socially harms non-White people because they are valued as either less than or “˜other’.

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