Book Reviews

Summary: Camilla, now in her 60s, recounts her story to a questioning granddaughter.

A Live Coal in the Sea is a sequel to Camilla, published 45 years later. That distance in time between the two books is nearly the distance in time within the books.

Camilla was about a 15 year old growing up in New York City and coming to be aware of the tragedies of life outside of herself. A Live Coal in the Sea is about Camilla sometime in her mid to late 60s. The story catches up on the intervening years through flashback and story. Camilla’s granddaughter, Raffi, is going to college at the small school where Camilla is an astronomy professor.

After some vague and confusing disclosures by her father, Raffi comes to her Grandmother to get the whole story. This begins a long recounting of both special tragedy and the normal process of people coming together as a family, working through issues in a marriage and with children, the aging and dying of people around them and the coming to terms with the meaning of life.

At root, this is a family drama. The sins of one generation impact later generations. And while some members of a family adapt, heal and move on, others cannot and the generational cycles continue.

For me this is a mid-level L’Engle book. It doesn’t rise to the level of her Crosswick Journal insights into humanity. It isn’t as compelling as A Swiftly Tilting Planet or A Ring of Endless Night. But it also isn’t as disturbing as A House Like a Lotus or as boring as Meet The Austins.

This is not a young adult book like Camilla. It is intended as an adult book and it has adult themes. Infidelity, sexual and physical abuse of children, homosexuality, death and loss, and emotional abandonment are all present. It isn’t a particularly happy book, but it also isn’t a book that feels like it was trumped up to be overly depressing. While there is unusual tragedy in the book, the framing of the tragedy is focused on how all of our lives can be, and are, tragic in some ways. But God meets us in that tragedy because God loves us.

L’Engle isn’t writing “˜Christian Fiction’. She is writing fiction that is informed by her Christianity. Most Christian publishers would not touch this. But while I don’t think it is among her greatest book, it is a solid book.

(spoiler discussion below)

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Summary: A collection of 49 sermons that illustrate how Peterson thinks we should be formed by God.

Scripture is always the central focus of Eugene Peterson’s writing. Practice Resurrection may be about the church and spiritual development, but it is about how the book of Ephesians talks about the church and spiritual development. Run with the Horses may be about excellence, but it is framed by looking at excellence through Jeremiah the prophet. The Contemplative Pastor may be about spiritual direction and the role of the pastor, but it is largely through the lens of the beatitudes and other scripture that he looks at the pastor’s role.

As Kingfishers Catch Fire is Peterson’s book on preaching. It isn’t that lay people won’t get something out of this. I do not actively preach, but I think it was written for pastors. Non-pastors probably will read this more as a devotional book. But pastors should read this as a master class in how our preaching is about scripture first and, most of all, how scripture points to God.

The seven sections, each with seven sermons, all look at how a particular biblical author communicates God to us through scripture. The sections are labeled “Preaching in the company of Moses, David, Isaiah, Solomon, Peter, Paul, or John of Patmos. If you have read some of his other books, you can see a few of the drafts of ideas that were worked out in his books that started in his sermons. Based the illustrations and content of the sermons these stretched widely throughout his preaching career, from his early days with young children to the 50th anniversary of the church that he started.

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I am reposting this 2013 review because the Kindle Edition is on sale for $1.99.

Summary: A classic double (or is it triple) cross spy story. Originally written in 1963 this is a real spy classic.

Ever since the movie, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy came out I have wanted to read John le Carré.  But I have not known where to start.  Tinker, Tailor is in the George Smiley series of 8 books but the start of its own trilogy.

And many of the early books are not available in kindle or audiobook format that I prefer. So I picked up The Spy Who Came In From the Cold because it is the earliest of the series on audiobook, it is before Tinker Tailor and many people think it is le Carré’s best book.

I like spy books.  There is something that both meets my needs for action and fast moving plot, and also some cerebral content that is more than many action books.

le Carré is known for writing cerebral spy novels.  So while he has intrigued me, I have been a bit intimidated by the books.  Most people that don’t like them say they are too slow or to cerebral.  When I finally started this I listened to it straight through in just over a day.  (It is only 7 hours.)

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After having read 10 books of this series in the last four years I recommend it. A couple were not up to the standards of the rest of the series, but it is mostly a very good cozy mystery series. This first book is currently on sale for $1.99. The 11th book in the series comes out in August. Below is my review from 2013, very lightly edited.

Summary: Fun mystery set in the early 1930s with a down on her luck 34th from the throne Royal.

I have to admit, that being a new parent and trying to keep up with work and enjoying my new daughter and trying to get enough sleep, I have just not been interested in reading anything heavy.  I have already finished more than my goal of books for the year (which is a new record number of books), so I don’t feel pressed to read to review.

Consequently I have been reading fun books.  And this is a great example of a fun book.  Georgie is the younger sister of a Duke.  She is 34th in line for the throne in 1932.  But that does not mean things are going well for her.  She is 21, her brother has stopped giving her a living allowance.  Her father has died after losing all of the family money in American investments, her mother left her father when she was a young child and has been sleeping her way through all of the rich and famous of Europe since then.

Georgie has had enough of her current life stuck in a cold drafty castle in Scotland with her very sweet, but fairly hapless brother and her distant and condescending sister in law.  So she heads to London to make her way on her own.  But things are not that easy.  She does not really have any job skills.  And she can’t take just any job, because there is society to think of and her cousin (the Queen) will find out.  If she doesn’t figure out a way to take care of herself, she is going to be sent off to the country to be a lady in waiting for a great aunt (the last remaining daughter of Queen Victoria).  She will never find a husband (or have any fun) out there.

Things are really not going all that well when she comes home to find a dead body in her bathtub.  I assume this is homage to Dorothy Sayers’s first Lord Peter Wimsey book Whose Body? which also has a body in a bathtub as the center of the mystery.

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Summary: A brief book on the powers and limitations of the office of President.

The American Presidency is a good example of where the Very Short Introduction series by Oxford Press can be helpful. At just over 150 pages of real content, this book can be read in a long sitting and give some real background to the subject area.

When the Very Short Introduction series gets it right, the books are usually overviews with a couple of main points. When they get it wrong, the books usually focus more on the research around the subject and forget to actually introduce the subject itself. The American Presidency is one of the former.

The main focus of the book is how the office of the President relates to the rest of the US government, which requires a short introduction to all three branches. A balanced government, with no branch dominating, was an innovation when the Constitution was written. The term President is based on the idea of presiding over something. Governor would have been a more accurate idea of the type of office envisioned, but that office had a negative connotation because of the appointed Governors prior to the Revolution.

The office of the President executes the functions of the federal government. As the country has grown in both size and complexity, the size of the government has grown and the complexity of managing a workforce of about 3 million people. (The size of federal employment has varied, but it currently approximately the same as 1967 in real numbers. Although the federal government now uses significantly more contractors, which are not included in the employment figures.)

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Takeaway: Culture matters. Culture needs cultivation. Beauty is central to combating utilitarian theology.

Makoto Fujimura is a gift to the church. He is now on my must read list. I do not particularly need to be convinced of the basic argument in Culture Care, culture matters. But the framing of culture in similar terms to environmental care I think makes a lot of sense in helping the reader to understand that culture is neither static nor inherently good or bad.

Culture is cultivated and if we want a culture that reflects truth and beauty need to have Christians that understand truth and beauty creating to influence culture. Fujimura starts with the assumption that Christians should be interacting with culture and creating. He is not particularly interested in creating culture where Christian is used as an adjective (Christian music, Christian movies, etc.).

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Summary: Six short stories and introductions by Octavia Butler.

As regular readers know, I am not a fan of short stories. Most of the time the issue is that I want more from the stories, more characters, more story, more development.

The Bloodchild collection was one of the better short story collections I have read. In large part because each of the stories also included a discussion section by Butler. This gives me part of that more that I am looking for. I could see what prompted the story, or what she was trying to work on to give the short story greater context.

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Summary: Humility is the root to spiritual growth.

Humility is a hard topics. It is widely misunderstood. It is easy to have a false view of humility. And how you do accurately write about humility as a particular person? One option is to write an anonymous book about it. But that isn’t really an option now that it has been done.

I have been listening to the Persuasion Podcast with Hannah Anderson and Erin Straza (Christ and Pop Culture podcast network) pretty regularly for about a year or so. One of the reasons that I like it, is that they are unabashedly podcasting as women. They are not limiting themselves to only “˜women’s topics’, although they do talk about things that are more female oriented at times. But listening to Persuasion, as well as Pass the Mic (African American males) and Truth’s Table (African American Females) all allow me to listen into different groups that are not directly speaking to me. They are speaking as themselves and they invite people that are not like them to listen.

Listening to the audiobook of Humble Roots reminded me of the importance of listening to different voices. Hannah Anderson’s take on humility is naturally impacted by being a woman and a mother and a pastor’s wife and all of the other things that are in her background. When I think about humility there are parts of it that are just different from what Hannah Anderson has written about. And that is part of the importance of humility. Humility as a spiritual matter, reminds us that we are created creatures and not ourselves God. We have perspectives that are limited because we as creatures are limited. That doesn’t mean that we can’t understand the larger issues around concepts like humility, but it means that no matter how hard we try, we can never capture the entirety of a concept.

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Summary: Thoughts and memories of Madeleine’s early life and family as she deals with her mother’s impending death.

I have been really enjoying reading several of L’Engle’s books as they have been brought back to print. It is even better if you can pick them up cheaply. Today (not sure for how long) The Summer of the Great Grandmother is on sale for $0.99. Also on sale is the fourth in this series, Two Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage and one of her novels, The Other Side of the Sun (a dark southern thriller).

The Summer of the Great-Grandmother is about Madeleine L’Engle’s final summer with her mother. You assume from the beginning that at some point her mother will pass away (and she does.) But that is part of what is important about this book. All people will die at some point. Living in family means both birth and death happen.

The setting of this, like her other Crosswick Journals, is their summer home. It is the home that her children were born in. But now that the family lives in New York City, it is where they spend their summers. This summer, and most summers, there are four generations in the home. But unlike previous summers, Madeleine’s mothers is confused and needing constant care.

This allows for L’Engle to reflect on her early life, the death of her father when she was young, the life of he earlier ancestors and the meaning of life and family. As with the first book in this series, there is lots of wisdom in these pages.

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