Book Reviews

Summary: A collection of literary and personal essays written in the mid 1950s by James Baldwin.

I recently went to see the documentary I am Not Your Negro. After watching that very good documentary I finally picked up Notes of a Native Son, which I purchased a while ago but I have not read.

The first section are literally and film criticism essays (Uncle Tom’s Cabin, A Native Son and Carmen Jones.) I have not read or watched any of these, although I knew the basic outline of the story of the first two. This section would likely have been much better if I was familiar with the works being talked about.

Section two and three were some of the best essays I have ever read and I want to go back and read them again.

The three essays in section two are about growing up and living in Harlem, his brother’s musical group’s ill fated trip to the South as entertainment for a political campaign and a eulogy for his father. The eulogy essay is the best essay of the book I think. Eulogies often gloss over the negatives of a person and highlight what will be missed. Baldwin’s father was not going to be missed much, although once he was gone, Baldwin was able to deal with his love for him. Baldwin’s father died on Baldwin’s 19th birthday and Baldwin left soon after to move to Paris.

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Takeaway: Class matters. The idealism of a classless society and the myth that everyone can move up the social ladder with a little hard work has never been true for the majority in the United States.

Class matters. That shouldn’t be a controversial idea, but it is. It is controversial because it flies in the face of the American myth. It is possible to point to many that have risen up from their poor roots to achieve more than those that grew up around them. But the very pointing out that you know someone that grew up poor and is now rich only serves as a reminder that it is not the story of the majority.

White Trash is a provocative book. I do not think it is a particularly untold story as the subtitle suggests, but I think it is an under-represented story. Early US immigration was primarily fueled by lower classes. Early history of government is a master class in how the powerful can manipulate government to remain in power and use that power to enrich themselves at the expense of the poor.

From the early days of America, there was an understanding of poverty as something that was “˜congenital’. Prior to Darwin, Isenberg widely quotes founding fathers and essayists using language of animal husbandry. Whether the image was of dog breeding or horse breeding, the point was that if you have a cur, it is probably because the animal was of bad stock.

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Summary: A Japanese Manga story about Viking history.

A Facebook friend runs a comicbook/graphic novel review blog. He has been doing a series of daily recommendations and I have been trying to pick up about one a month.

The Vinland Sage was very highly recommended, not only by him but by virtually everyone that I know that has read it. But it is also long, 9 collected volumes so far, each of over 400 pages. I picked this up through interlibrary loan because it is not particularly cheap or easy to find.

This is my first magna. It took a little while to switch to reading right to left (this was originally published in Japan and uses the original art with English translation.)

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Summary: A nuanced and in depth look at one of the most influential Christians of the 20th century. The best of the Bonhoeffer biographies I have read.

Charles Marsh’s Strange Glory is the third full biography of Bonhoeffer I have read in the last five years, not include three additional books on particular aspects of Bonhoeffer’s life or theology and also not including the books I have read by Bonhoeffer.

Without question, this is the best of the three full biographies I have read. Charles Marsh is an academic historian and writer. As much as I appreciated Eric Metaxas’ biography that opened up Bonhoeffer to many people unaware of his legacy, Metaxas did not have the academic skills to pull off a serious biography. Ferdinand Schlingensiepen’s biography had the academic heft, but was written originally in German, and while worth reading, the translation made it a bit clunky at times and it still a pretty obscure (and expensive) biography.

So there is space for a third new biography of Bonhoeffer. If you have read one or both of the previous biographies, Marsh brings a new look at Bonhoeffer. First, he spends more time on his childhood and particularly the strengths and weaknesses that came about because of Bonhoeffer’s privileged (and spoiled) upbringing. Second, Marsh spends a lot more time on the impact of Bonhoeffer’s time in the US and particularly the impact of the African American church to Bonhoeffer’s later theology. Third, Marsh does a better job than Schlingensiepen or Metaxas at explaining Bonhoeffer’s actual theology and the progression of that theology over time (and how it stayed the same.)

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Reposting this 2013 review because the Kindle version is on sale for $1.99. If you like to start at the beginning of a series, this is the first of the George Smiley novels.

Summary: John Le Carré’s first novel and the introduction to George Smiley.

I really hate reading books out of order.  When I decided to read a Le Carré novel, Call for the Dead was not available as an audiobook or kindle book.  But with the publicity from the Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy movie, many of Le Carré’s novels are coming back into print or moving to digital formats.

Over Christmas I picked up the first two novels in the series from an Audible.com sale.  I knew going in that the reputation of these books is that while they are interesting back story to George Smiley, they are not Le Carré’s best work.  He originally wrote them while working as a real spy and it was only after his third novel, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, took off that Le Carré became a full time author.

This is the third of Le Carré’s novels that I have read.  In the series I started with the third book, which only has George Smiley as a marginal character.  Then I read Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which brings Smiley back to the center stage (and re-sets the timeline from the first two books making Smiley about 10 years younger).

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Summary: A 26 year old newlywed African American woman from 1976 somehow gets sent back in time to save the life of a young Maryland plantation owners son, in 1815.

A bit over a year ago I picked up Octavia Butler’s book Fledgling more by mistake than anything else. I knew the late Octavia Butler was a well known science fiction author, but I had not read anything she had written.

Fledgling, her last book, was about vampires, but was far different from either the young adult Twilight books, the Anne Rice books, or the traditional Bram Stoker book.

I was reluctant to pick up Kindred because of the subject matter.  An African American woman gets sent back in time to Antebellum South. I expected a depressing or superficial book. Instead I found one of the best fiction books I have read this year.

I am a bit allergic to nostalgia, wishing to be back at some mythical point in history is great, for those that were privileged at that point in time.

Dana, both a woman and African American, was not privileged to in 1815 or the later points where she goes back. It is this voice, of the African American and female, that Butler is known for. But what could be a simplistic (slavery was bad) book was a nuanced look at how culture affect the person.

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Summary: An African teen in the future leaves her (traditional) home to attend a university on another planet.

A couple of days ago, I was describing Octavia Butler as the only female African American science fiction author that I could think of. The next day, I received an email from Amazon about a book they thought I would like. I tend to ignore most of those emails, but I opened this one. I read a few reviews and picked up Binti. (Binti won both Hugo and Nebula awards for best novella in 2015.)

Binti is a 96-page novella. It was cheap, and I was looking for something quick and different. Once I was on Goodreads, I saw that a couple of friends had read and liked Binti. And Friday evening, John Green (author of The Fault in Our Stars) tweeted about reading the follow-up book, Binti: Home.

Binti is the name of the main character. She is a 16-year-old who has been accepted (and given full scholarships) to Oomza University, the best university in the galaxy. Binti’s family is from a traditional African village. While they trade with outsiders (her father is a skilled craftsman), they do not leave. Binti decides to accept the offer to study at Oomza University. She leaves without telling her family.

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Summary: Thoughts from an elder as he reflects on his life, the church and the world.

I have read just about everything that John Perkins has written. So I pre-ordered Dream with Me months ago on kindle and picked up the audiobook as well. I have followed John Perkins’ work since I first became aware of the Christian Community Development Association in 1991 and attended their annual meeting in 1992.

Since then I have attended two or three additional annual meetings and read widely books that have been written by others associated with CCDA. I wrote my Masters thesis for my Masters in Social Service Administration on the different ways that Christian Churches and their church based non-profit arms related to one another using three Chicago based CCDA member organizations as examples.

If you do not know the name John Perkins or anything about CCDA, this probably isn’t the first book I would recommend. I would suggest starting with Perkins’ earlier memoir Let Justice Roll Down or Stephen Berk’s now out of print biography on Perkins, A Time to Heal, both give a much larger context to Perkins’ work and thoughts and would help you to understand why we should listen to Perkins in the first place.

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