Blogger Review Books

Home is the center of Miranda Richmond Mouillot’s book A Fifty-Year Silence; a memoir about the author’s quest to learn what happened to her grandparents during World War II, why they separated, divorced and refused to speak to each other for over 5 decades. Mouillot grew up with very little factual information about her grandparents. She knew they escaped Nazi-occupied France and lived in refugee camps in Switzerland. Her grandmother was a psychiatrist; her grandfather a UN employee who was a translator at the Nuremberg trials. It was also family lore that one day, Mouillot’s grandmother packed up the children and left her husband without a word. The couple had never spoken to each other since.

Beyond these scant facts, the lives of these two people were a complete mystery to everyone in their family. As the author grew older and attended college, her desire to know what exactly transpired in her grandparents’ lives grew as well. Mouillot’s determination to uncover family secrets became a dominating force in her life.

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Summary: An evaluation of Billy Graham’s place in history.

I have been reluctant to read biographies of living people recently. Sometimes it just feels like we need more distance to be really able to understand  a person’s contributions, and when that person is beloved, their weaknesses as well.

So I was not planning on reading America’s Pastor. I have read Billy Graham’s own, way too long and detailed without being all that interesting autobiography(-ish), Just As I Am. And I figured that was probably enough for the next decade or so. But after two pretty positive reviews by Mark Noll and Ted Olsen and then the same day being offered a review copy, I decided to pick it up.

And I am glad I did. America’s Pastor is not a biography. There is a fairly short overview of Graham’s life at the beginning, but the rest of the book is chapters focused on different aspects of Graham’s work, image or legacy. The eight chapters are: Preacher, Icon, Southerner, Entrepreneur, Architect, Pilgrim, Pastor and Patriarch.

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The tough part about reviewing a memoir is not to critique the author’s story but to review how they told it. A memoir is an account from a real person so a different set of eyes is needed compared to reviewing fiction. Most of the reviews I have read of Andie Mitchell’s It Was Me All Along treated this work as fiction. Many amateur reviewers commented on the choices Mitchell made much as they would when reading a fictional piece. I understand how easy it is to do so but I feel that’s unfair to the author and I’ll strive to avoid the same path others have chosen in their reviews.

Andie Mitchell is the blogger for Can You Stay for Dinner.  Mitchell has chronicled her weight loss story and offers helpful advice and recipes for her online audience who are pursuing a healthier lifestyle. It Was Me All Along is a more in depth account of the obesity which has plagued Mitchell most of her life, her journey to lose well over 100 pounds and learning to develop a healthy relationship with food. Mitchell’s story is a good one. I appreciate her story is one of striving to make healthy decisions, avoiding fad diets, and using tried and true methods such as healthy portions and exercise to achieve her goals. It many ways, primarily on her blog, Mitchell is a great example of how the average person can achieve and sustain weight loss with a healthy mindset.

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Summary: We as modern Christians miss a number of nuances of scripture because we do not understand ancient Hebrew culture.

The title of this book is intriguing. I rarely accept review copies any more because I just prefer picking my own books and the prospect of a free book is not all that enticing. But I accepted a review copy of this book by the author after he emailed me.

The overall point of the book is important and I think useful. There are a number of things about scripture and the Christian faith that we miss because the bible was not written directly to us as 21st century Americans. It was written to people of a particular time and place (although that time and place varied throughout scripture). And while we can trust that the message of scripture is not completely lost to us as 21st century Christians, because of the power of the Holy Spirit, the tradition of the church and research by academics, there is real value in exploring ancient culture.

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Summary: John Michael Talbot’s memoir-ish look at how the Early Church Fathers changed his faith.

I grew up Evangelical, I went to an Evangelical College and seminary. But honestly other than a couple of songs I don’t really know anything about John Michael Talbot. I have always kind of thought of him as similar to Michael Card. They both are known for writing theologically sophisticated Christian music that I don’t really listen to. This book has made me re-think my previous uninformed opinion.

The Ancient Path is half memoir and half exploration of the early Church Fathers. I really was assuming that this would be more exploration of the church father’s writing, but the memoir parts were an unexpected help.

John Michael Talbot dropped out of school at 15 and was in a band with his brother. After an early marriage and a conversion to Christianity through the Jesus Movement, Talbot became an early CCM musician. But his marriage still fell apart. He started meeting with a Franciscan spiritual director and eventually, in large part through his studying of the Early Church Fathers Talbot converted to Catholicism and later founded a lay monastic community that invited both married and single Catholics and other Christians to live and serve in community.

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Reposting this review because the publisher has this as well as three others from the series on sale this week for $1.99. The two other books from the same series on Francis Schaeffer and BB Warfield are also on sale.
Summary: Best short introduction to Bonhoeffer’s theology I have read.

Bonhoeffer is arguably one of the most important theologians of the 20th century. It is not just his writing that has made him important, but his life and death and how his theology and Christian understanding was lived out.

I have read a number of books by and about Bonhoeffer. And I think one of the biggest problems with Bonhoeffer studies is the attempts to make Bonhoeffer reflect the author’s ideals. This was clearly a problems in the late 20th century as many liberal scholars attempted to claim Bonhoeffer as a late 20th century liberal. And over the past decade some Evangelicals have essentially done a similar thing by trying to make Bonhoeffer into a 21st Century American Evangelical.

But Stephen Nichols, while clearly writing for a primarily Evangelical audience, manages to write for an Evangelical audience while allowing Bonhoeffer to be a early 20th century German.

Bonhoeffer on the Christian Life is not a biography (although there are a number of biographical details included in the book), instead it is an introduction to Bonhoeffer’s theology and work.

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