Book Reviews

Summary: The reader may have the thoughts of the killer, but we won’t know the identity until the end.

I do not particularly like knowing the thoughts of a killer. (Which is why I hate the show Criminal Minds.) So I am not particularly happy that JK Rowling added that twist to Career of Evil. That being said, this is the best book of the series so far.

Cormoran Strike and his partner Robin are the main focus. Robin is preparing for her wedding to a man that we are not particularly supposed to like. There is a lot of back story on both Cormoran and Robin. They are really developed as characters and that suggests a continuation to the series that I look forward to.

The problem is that there is little where else for Rowling to go with the criminals. There are three viable suspects here from Cormoran’s background. And we now have a real serial killer as the bad guy. One that really enjoys death, dismemberment and many other disturbing murder cliché’s.

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Summary: Funny, warm hearted recounting of one of the best movies ever made.

Seth Simmons turned me on to this book several years ago (his review here). It was on sale a couple weeks ago and I finally picked it up.

If you have any love of the Princess Bride movie, As You Wish is well worth picking up. And by the way, if you have only watched the movie and not read the book, you are missing out.

Cary Elwes has written an excellent book. It is a light hearted book. It is full of lots of self depreciating humor. There is not any dirty laundry. And while there is lots of one actor appreciating another, the words all seem genuine. It really seems like everyone really enjoyed making the movie and really enjoyed the people they were making the movie with. Rob Reiner seems like a wonderful director to work for.

The actual narrative of the making of the movie was mixed in with discussions about the people. My favorite is the long section about Andre the Giant. Everyone really seems to have loved him. He was only 46 when he passed away. But his health was already quite bad by the time he was working on the movie. The descriptions of the amount of alcohol that he was able to put away is incredible.

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Takeaway: All of our fears about how bad the world is, are completely not unique. 

Marsden is a wide ranging and important historian. His biographies of Jonathan Edwards are excellent. He has a number of books about higher education (both histories and theory) and American Christian history. I pick up almost anything of his that I run across (as I did with his biography of Mere Christianity.

This seems to be a particularly good time to pick up The Twilight of American Enlightenment. The parallels to today and the 1950s are surprising to me. We seem to be going through another civil rights era. There is a lot of fear about the direction of the country. Fear as motivation is not only not new, but seemingly all pervasive. Marsden cites a Women’s Journal article about raising children that are too well adjusted. It is a good example of how fear can grow to include virtually everything.

The Twilight of the American Enlightenment is about how in post World War II the culture of progress looked to the expert and intellectual to chart a new common course for progress and the United States. Intellectually, the forces of post modernism were shaking the foundations of philosophy and science. Socially despite the perception of ‘Leave it to Beaver’ uniformity, race, gender, class and other groups were breaking free of cultural restrictions. That freedom to call for justice or to establish their own paths led to a failure to produce a common path forward. Essentially the thesis is that the upheavals of the 1960s were predicted by the cracks in the foundation of American cultural hegemony.

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Summary: The history and influence of Mere Christianity.

I stumbled across the audiobook of CS Lewis’ Mere Christianity: A Biography when I was looking for another book by George Marsden. I have previously read two other books from The Lives of Great Religious Books series (Letters and Papers from Prison and the Book of Common Prayer) and so I eagerly picked it up (both as a fan of Marsden’s and the series.)

The series seems to have done a good job hiring good authors, and good writers matters in a series like this. This is not a series that requires heavy historical lifting: a short section of biography about the author, the story of the writing and overview of the content, a summary of the response and objections, and the spread of the book. All three that I have read have basically been the same format. But the format works.

I have a pretty good handle on Lewis’ own biography at this point. Marsden handles that well and throws in a few tidbits that I have not previously heard, but made sense in the context of the book. The basic story of the book, I was also familiar with because it is pretty important to Lewis’ own life story.

What was more interesting to me was the response and objections to Mere Christianity. The discussion of the Catholic objections to Mere Christianity made sense once Marsden pointed them out. But I would not have been able to express them myself without his help.

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Summary: A long interview with Pope Francis and the declaration of the Year of Mercy statement.

I keep meaning to read something by Pope Francis. But I have not up until now. Or really I still have not, but this is closer. The Name of God is Mercy was on sale at audible, so I picked it up last week.

It is short, only 3 hours. Two hours of it is a transcribed interview between an Italian reporter and the Pope. The last hour is the official statement on the Year of Mercy.

The interview was interesting. The most striking thing for me was how much of the interview revolved around a discussion of sin. I do not internally connect Mercy and Sin, but Pope Francis did.

Part of this is differences in the theology of sin between Catholics and Protestants. I read George Marsden’s biography of the book Mere Christianity right after this and Marsden has a discussion about the difference between Catholic and Protestant theologies of sin that was helpful. My short, and overly simplistic explanation is that for Protestants, the importance of sin is that it separates us from God. So the real issue for Protestants is that we need forgiveness. And Protestants tend to then focus on the permanence of forgiveness.

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Summary: Tippett shares what she has learned about wisdom and life from her many interviews from her shows On Being and Speaking of Faith.

I have been a fan of Krista Tippett for at least the last 10 years. She is a good interviewer and she has a real interest in pay attention to both socially conscious issues and how religious backgrounds motivate people.

Listening to this as an audiobook, which I think is probably the best method for this particular book, it is hard not to think of it as a clip show. There are so many clips from her interviews in the book that I was a bit distracted at times from the content. (And many of them I remember from when I heard them originally on the show.) But the clips had real meaning and they did build upon one another to make her point. As a professional interviewer, conversation is what she does. It is perfectly natural that much of her learning is coming from people that she is interviewing.

One of the points that I both appreciate about Tippett and slightly concerns me is that she views part of what she is doing and gaining insight into ‘spiritual technologies’. This term, ‘spiritual technologies’, I think is helpful but also significantly problematic. On the one hand, I get the point that we can learn these spiritual technologies across faith lines and it is a helpful way to think about cross religious dialogue. And I think it sort of fits with James KA Smith and others view of spiritual practices.

But spiritual technologies as a descriptor seems reductionist. Her point of talking about becoming wise is that we often are valuing the wrong things, which leads us to place emphasis in the wrong areas of life. By using the word technology, there is a problem with viewing spiritual practices and ideas as primarily about gaining mastery over the spiritual. I wish she had used another term, like the traditional ‘spiritual practices’ or ‘pathway’ or similar term that was focused less on mastery and tool building and more on internal development and process. We do not become wise, we work on the process of becoming wise. Wisdom is not something we confirm on ourselves. It is something that others confirm about us.

But I do appreciate the focus on wisdom. I think we should value wisdom. And many of the people she is interviewing genuinely appear to have gained real wisdom and understanding about life. The interview subjects are not necessarily powerful or well known (although many have some real influence). She confronts the importance of struggle in achieving wisdom. Her background as journalist and diplomat in Eastern Europe before and during the fall of the Berlin Wall give real insight into how struggle works. And how something that no one really predicts, can suddenly just happen.

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Takeaway: History is complicated. 

In my continuing quest to understand European history, I picked this up on sale from Audible a while back.

It is the first of a trilogy of books on the history of England. It is a fascinating mix of standard famous men (mostly kings) history with a fair amount of explanation about the living conditions of the standard inhabitant.

England was conquered early and many times. It is the mix of a variety of cultures. There is some very interesting linguistic history mixed in here especially around place names and political offices. It was not until near the end of this history that a king of England actually was a native english speaker (Henry IV around 1300).

Early England was violent and it had more than several despotic rulers that believed that God gave them their rule, so they needed to take advantage of everyone they could. And there were more than a few sincerely devoted kings as well, but life was not always much better for the people.

Demographics were interesting too. England under Roman rule was probably as high as 4 million people. After several rounds of invasion, the 1086 population was estimated to be down to around 2 million. But then grew to around 5 to 6 million by 1300 with a fairly stable government and economy. The Black death several times between 1348 and 1400 until the population was down to about 2.5 million. It wasn’t until around 1600 that the population grew to about 4 million. Smaller plagues and wars continued to happen, but there was not another significant population loss until (not in in this history) the 19th century started a significant migration.

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Summary: 19 Years after the setting of the final defeat of Voldemort, an older Harry Potter and the gang, and their children face a new challenge. 

If you are a Harry Potter fan and have not heard about the new book, you have been probably hiding on a desert island somewhere. There have been lots of reviews floating around and I am not going to write some great one that changes people’s perspective on the book.

I thought it was a solid effort, with clearly evident input from other writers. It is written in a play format (since it is a play.) That is easy enough to get used to. Maybe it was just me getting used to the idea of a new story, but as the play went on, it seemed to find a more traditional Harry Potter voice.

But there was a hint of fan-fiction feel to it. That is not all bad. Fan-fiction can be good. But there is usually just a hint of ‘not quite’ to the story. I can very much see why some have compared it to Rainbow Rowell’s book Carry On. Carry On is a fake fan fiction book that Rowell actually wrote but was initially just part of one of her character’s stories. It is about a fictional series that was clearly influenced by Harry Potter. It feels like the Cursed Child was influenced by a fake fan fiction book that was inspired by the actual Harry Potter and that is a bit odd.

The story primarily concerns Albus (Harry and Ginny Potter’s son) and his best friend Scorpius Malfoy. Albus is in Slytherin and does not get along with his father. When a forbidden time turner is recovered by Harry (head of magical law enforcement), Albus convinces Scorpius to help him steal it and go back and save Cedric.

That is already quite a bit of spoilers. This book has more action by the adults than most of the Harry Potter books. But that makes sense because it is a play and because the readers are really wanting to know what happened to the beloved characters more than their children.

I liked it more at the end than I did at the beginning. And I think I like it more a couple days after I finished it, than I did immediately after I finished. So maybe it is nostalgia that is clouding my brain, but I do think it is worth reading. I am just not sure it is worth running out to purchase. There will be lots of copies in used book stores in the next couple months. There are already 3683 reviews on Amazon and 33% of them are 1 and 2 stars. It really isn’t that bad.

I have one real complaint, but it is spoiler-ish. So stop reading if you don’t want to get any spoilers.

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I am reposting this 2010 review because the Kindle Edition is on sale for $1.99.
When you read as much as I do every once in a while you need some palate cleansing. I am a huge fan of pickled ginger, which is always served with sushi and wasabi. Pickled ginger has great taste, but when you finish you do not have an aftertaste, you just have a mildly pleasant feeling in your mouth. The two Christopher Buckley novels I have read, No Way to Tread a First Lady and Supreme Court, are the pickled ginger for my mind.

I enjoy politics. I like watching the weekend political talk shows, although I rarely have time. I often listen to Shields and Brooks podcast from PBS news and the Slate Political Gabfest podcast. My favorite NPR show is Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me, a radio equivalent of Christopher Buckley’s political satire. So when I had it up to here with memoirs and other books telling me how wonderful the authors were doing at processing what God has been telling them, I picked up some emergency Christopher Buckley. I am saving the rest of his novels for future need.

No Way to Treat A First Lady is a satirical novel about trying the first lady for killing her husband (the President).  She found him, yet again having an affair. This time the the dalliance was in the Lincoln Bedroom, while she was asleep down the hall. The next morning he is discovered dead in bed and the First Lady is suspected and tried for Presidential Assassination. Buckley does a fabulous job making a trial both boringly realistic and exciting to read about.

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