Blogger Review Books

In Money, Steve Forbes provides a brief history on the development of money and monetary systems, and then spends a lot of time explaining his opinion about the recessions in the 2000s””its causes, consequences, and fixes. It should be no surprise that Forbes argues that loose money and over-regulation of the financial markets–not the opposite–are what caused our recent financial difficulties, and he traces the source of trouble to the decoupling of the dollar from a gold standard.

In the period since the Federal Reserve began meddling with the economy (1913) and the U.S. abandoned the gold standard (1973), government (and individual) debt has exploded, the purchasing power of the dollar has plummeted, and our economy has been subjected to a roller coaster ride of booms and busts, including the recent recession in the 2000s. To remedy our economic sickness and usher in an era of growth and stability, Forbes argues, we should return to a sound monetary system based on a gold standard.

Forbes spends a lot of time explaining that as a medium of exchange money has no inherent value; its purpose is to serve as a measurement of the value of other things. The government has (or should have, rather) an interest in setting and maintaining a consistent means of measuring value. Forbes writes, “œJust as we need to be sure of the number of inches in a foot””or the minutes in an hour””people in the economy must be certain that their money is an accurate measure of worth. When the value of money fluctuates, as it so often does today, it produces uncertainty in addition to unnatural and often destructive marketplace behavior””artificial booms and busts that breed malignant economic and social consequences.”

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Summary: Highly recommended book about biblical translations.

I do not have a lot of patience for bible version arguments.  But we continue to see large and divisive fights over English translations of scripture.

I think one of the biggest reasons for those arguments is the wealth of options that we have.  No other language has literally scores of options. There have been 19 new translations or major revisions of English language bibles just since 2000 (and 80 complete translations in the last century).  As far as I know, no other language has even 19 different translations.

The biggest fight in the English Bible translation world is between ‘word for word’ or literal bibles (like ESV or NASB) and ‘dynamic equivalence translations (like NIV or NLT) and paraphrase versions (like The Message).

Brunn’s primary purpose is to show that the way that the argument is usually framed is not honest to the reality of biblical translation.  One of the strengths of the book is that Brunn has been a bible translator for Wycliffe and tries to focus primarily on real examples and not just theory of translation.

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Summary: Brief introduction to the Catholic perspective on Saints (with a little bit about Angels).

Over the past couple years I have tried to read a book a month that is intentionally outside of my tradition to expand my understanding of Christianity and to better understand the perspectives of other traditions.

Scott Hahn has been the author of several of the books I have read about Catholicism.  I picked this book up from NetGalley to review and misremembered the publication date.  So it will not be out for another six weeks yet.

This is a very brief book, I read almost all of it in about 2 hours.  The first couple chapters are a brief explanation of the role of saints in Catholic theology.  This is an expansion of a similar explanation in Hahn’s Signs of Life: 40 Catholic Customs and their Biblical Origins.  But I actually think that original shorter explanation was better.

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Timothy Howard was an executive at Fannie Mae through the 90s and into the 2000s, leaving just a few years before the big crash of 2008 when the government bailed out the Government Sponsored Enterprise (GSE). This book is an incredibly detailed inside-view of the secondary mortgage market and the rise and fall of the GSEs in the modern economy.

Most people know Fannie Mae from the 2008 mortgage crisis where the government stepped in and bailed them out, but it’s been around in various forms since the New Deal. Fannie Mae does not issue loans to consumers directly; rather, they are (still) a major player in the “œsecondary mortgage market”””that is, they purchase existing loans from the banks that originally lend the money out. This is fantastic for the banks: when they sell their loan on the secondary market, they immediately earn their profit (interest), their risk disappears (since they are no longer servicing the loan and thus aren’t on the hook in case of a default), and they have their capital back to loan out again.

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There is a lot of hidden wisdom in Tolkien’s writings, seldom explicit (he hated allegory) but usually simple and always profound. His stories are famous for being “Catholic” without being religious, per se. The worlds and plots he crafted are simply soaked in his worldview; they grew out of it organically. This is a good thing.

“Hobbit Lessons” attempts to mine and condense Tolkien’s wisdom found in The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings. Unfortunately, most of the insights and lessons seemed strained, forced and trite–even banal at times. I felt like one could easily extrapolate the same ideas from many other works of fiction with little editing. Obviously, that is impossible to avoid entirely (Solomon was right that there is nothing new under the sun), but this book did so to the point where the insights hardly felt uniquely tied to the source material. In the places where the analysis and application were the strongest, I had encountered them elsewhere. Methinks publishing the book made good business sense due to the concurrent films, but I found it underwhelming.

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Summary: A jungle of confused polemics.

I’m not exactly sure who the author is trying to convince in this short book. She claims to want to argue that sex work (a broad category that covers prostitution, stripping, pornography, and anything else in the skin trade) is a perfectly legitimate moral activity. Unfortunately, most of the time she simply assumes what she’s trying to prove and then moves on to secondary arguments that simply aren’t controversial if the reader grants her premises.

Of course the solution to social discrimination and inconsistent enforcement of the laws against prostitutes would be legalization–that is, assuming sex work is truly just like any other banal activity, economic or otherwise, such as nursing nanny work, hair braiding or babysitting. She makes these comparisons often, yet there’s little content here to actually explain why sex work isn’t immoral, let alone why it shouldn’t be treated like any other economic act–apart from pragmatic soundbites unlikely to gain a hearing with any but those who already share her worldview.

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