Book Reviews

Summary: A post WWII mystery set in Vienna. 

In general I like to know almost nothing about fiction books going into them. I picked up the audiobook during an Audible sale almost two years ago because of the comparisons between Graham Green and Shusaku Endo. Prior to picking this up I had listened to the excellent End of the Affair only because it was narrated by Colin Firth. (After picking this up original I also listened to the Comedians, which was good, but not as good.)

The Third Man is a mystery set soon after the end of the Second World War. A novelist specializing in pulp westerns is invited to Vienna to visit a old school friend and arrives just in time to attend his funeral. What appears to be an accidental death (hit by a car while crossing the street) eventually grows into something bigger.

The Third Man was originally written as a screen play and only turned into novella after the movie was completed. I have not seen the movie (or either of the movies of the End of the Affair). This feels like a screen play and I think may have been a better screen play than novel. The jumping narration was not enhanced in audiobook (although the narrator was fine, it was difficult to figure out who was narrating the story for much of the early parts of the book.) The narration alternates between the novelist and an British military detective working in Vienna.

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Summary: One of the enduring realities of racism in the United States is the persistence of housing segregation. Many believe that housing segregation today is largely a result of personal preference. But the historic role of government in creating and maintaining segregation has been largely ignored.

In the United States homeownership is one of the most significant methods of wealth creation and generational wealth transfer. Because of that, differences in rates of home ownership plays a significant role in the difference in personal wealth between racial groups and the transfer of that wealth from one generation to the next.

Discussion of race in the US often will eventually come to a question similar to, “˜slavery ended over 150 years ago and the Civil Rights era was 50 years ago, how can the aggregate differences between economic and social realities continue to be persistent.’ The Color of Law attempts to tell part of the story about how persistence of economic and social realities is at least partially dependent upon historic (and sometimes recent) role of government.

Color of Law is not an anti or pro-government book, but an attempt at an honest accounting of the role of government. Throughout the book there is a continual question of whether particular actions were the responsibility of individual actors that happened to have government positions or if the actions were part of an intentional or unintentional action of a branch or level of government as a whole.

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Summary: Trauma is varied, but that variation in how trauma occurs or its treatment, does not mean that it is not important.

The Body Keeps Score is one of those books that I don’t know how to write a post about. Trauma is a difficult subject. Everyone knows someone that has lived through trauma, if you have not yourself lived through trauma. And trauma impacts different people differently and may impact the same person differently over time.

Dr van der Kolk started his medical career working for the Veteran’s Administration with Vietnam vets. There was virtually nothing really known about trauma at the time. The concept of shell shock or similar ideas was present, but not really understood. Although as the book points out, early psychologists have understood some of the impacts of trauma for over a century. Over the past 30 or 40 years, the medical and psychological research into trauma, its cause, and treatment has significantly expanded the understanding.

The Body Keeps Score tracks the growth of that knowledge, partially through van der Kolk’s own career and research, but also through the story of many trauma survivors. This is frequently a difficult book to read because in order to discuss trauma it is necessary to discuss traumatic events. And even in the first 200 pages that established the concept and history of the understanding of trauma, the stories of war, rape, molestation, neglect, abuse, and accidents can be difficult to process as and outsider, let alone for the person that they actually happened to.

Trauma is common. The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) studies (fact sheet) I think are the easiest place for many people to think about the importance of studying and dealing with trauma. The initial big ACE study showed that a number of different traumatic events as children, when combined, are correlated with not just physical or psychological effects into adulthood, but also diverse effects in a range of areas such as life time income, potential for abusing or neglecting their own children, early death, having premature births, autoimmune diseases, drug or alcohol dependencies, and being a victim or perpetrator of violence, and more. 60 Minutes had a good 11 minute story on what treatment of ACE looks like and its importance.

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Summary: A children’s fantasy from musician Andrew Peterson.

Entirely too often I find myself with kindle books and no time to read them. So I picked up the audio book edition to actually get to the book. In this case I bought the kindle edition 7 years ago. And then I picked up the audiobook on sale just over a year ago. But I didn’t actually start the book until last week. I started with the audiobook and it didn’t click with me. (Nothing wrong with the audiobook quality.) But I picked up the kindle edition and read it in a couple days and a couple days later I am nearly finished with the second book.

About a year or so ago I supported a Kickstarter effort to get this series made into an animated series. That effort is still underway, but the initial trailer and first part of the series does give a good sense of the series. You can find more at the website. 

This is a middle grade oriented fantasy series. The main character is 12 and his brother and sister are both younger. His father died and he is being raised by his mother and grandfather (her father). Another family member is revealed in the book, but the loss of a parent that is common in middle grade fantasy is still here.

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Summary: An escaped slave dreams of the future while trying to survive.

Song Yet Sung is my third book by James McBride and the first book of fiction. McBride is an interesting author. He is a journalist and jazz musician by background, but has written several novels including a National Book Award winner, The Good Lord Bird.

Song Yet Sung follows a young Black slave not long before the Civil War as she escapes her owner (who wants her as his in-house sex slave) and attempts to leave Maryland for the North.

There is a hint of magical realism to this book like the more recent Underground Railroad. Liz, the protagonist, has dreams that are a result of being shot in the head, which compounded an earlier head injury. The dreams of the future give her a reputation, but the dreams are not of a wonderful future, but of a scary-to-her future. The book opens with these lines:

On a grey morning in March 1850, a colored slave named Liz Spocott dreamed of the future. And it was not pleasant.

She dreamed of Negroes driving horseless carriages on shiny rubber wheels with music booming throughout, and fat black children who smoked odd-smelling cigars and walked around with pistols in their pockets and murder in their eyes. She dreamed of Negro women appearing as flickering images in powerfully lighted boxes that could be seen in sitting rooms far distant, and colored men dressed in garish costumes like children, playing odd sporting games and bragging like drunkards-every bit of pride, decency, and morality squeezed clean out of them.

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Summary: Story can help us envision God as beautiful, good and true in ways that proposition cannot fully show.

I have read five previous books by James Bryan Smith so I was initially not going to pick this up assuming that there was not much here that I had not absorbed previously. But I found it on sale for audiobook when I was out of audiobooks and I realized that one of my reading goals for the year is to read more about beauty and three months into the year I have not read anything about beauty.

James Bryan Smith is a professor focusing on spiritual formation and is in the line of Richard Foster and Dallas Willard. Immediately after finishing this I picked up a review copy of a new biography of Dallas Willard (Becoming Dallas Willard which I am loving.)

Smith’s focus in his earlier Good and Beautiful trilogy was to help refocus our attention on God, the God who loves us, wants good for us, and forgives us. He does that in part by identifying “˜false narratives’ about God that we absorb, God as magician or angry God or judgmental God.

The slightly different focus of The Magnificent Story is to think about story as more important than analysis. Much, but not all, of the book is focused on scripture as story about God. This isn’t a book on hermeneutics, but a book on how to understand the power of story to impact the way we understand God.

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Summary: More essays to explore history, science and politics from a serious Christian.

I am a fan of Marilynne Robinson. I have read all but one of her novels, and to be honest the reason I haven’t read the last is that I don’t want to have read all of her novels. But I have read Gilead twice and the most recent, and my favorite, Lila, three times. I have also read two of her previous collections of essays. I am more mixed on her essays. I had decided not to read Robinson’s most recent until I read James KA Smith’s review in Comment. His review is such a good example of what a review is supposed to be, and such an interesting comparison between Ta’Nehisi Coates and Robinson that I picked up the audiobook the same day.

But regardless of the praise from Smith, the problems I have with Robinson’s What We Are Doing Here is still the same basic problems I have with Robinson’s other essays. She is an incredible writer. Although the essays here, which were mostly talks given over the past two years edited together into a book, have an odd sort of repetition. She literally quotes the same quotes and cites the same ideas multiple times. Individually, I think most of them are great. But put together, they are somehow less than the individual parts.

Robinson is known as a writer. But her interests mean that she is writing about things that are outside of her academic background. She is fascinated by Puritans and Jonathan Edwards and how we talk and think about science and politics. She is clearly much smarter than I am and so I love being able to listen to her musings about things that I would not have ever considered apart from her. I really do love how wide ranging of a thinker she is. At one point she is talking about another author writing outside of their main field and quips that she isn’t going to complain about that since she frequently does the same thing.

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