Bookwi.se – Page 91 – A few thoughts about books, kindles and Christianity

Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

September 7, 2015 by All Old Users

Summary: “œLydia is dead. But they don’t know that yet.” As the Lee family sits down for breakfast one morning in their small Ohio town, they learn their teenage daughter is dead. Was it suicide? An accident? Or did the neighbor boy have something to do with it? Celeste Ng’s debut novel, “œEverything I Never … Read more

Young Adult Dystopian Fiction Avoids the Big Issues

September 4, 2015 by All Old Users

The young adult dystopian genre has, in recent years, reached far beyond its eponymous target audience and found fertile ground in the imaginations of adults and children alike. With the expansion of the YA genre into film, it has only become more popular. This stems from a number of factors from authors being unconstrained by … Read more

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

September 3, 2015 by All Old Users

Reposting this 2012 review because the Kindle Edition is on sale for $2.25. There is a sale of University of Chicago Press books including books by Friedman, Tocqueville, Tillich and more. There is not an announcement that I have seen, but this is the list of U of C Press books sorted by price. Summary: One of the most important books in … Read more

The Irony of American History by Reinhold Niebuhr

September 3, 2015 by Adam Shields

Cover of "The Irony of American History" — Cover of The Irony of American History

Takeaway: I wish more people read Reinhold Niebuhr. He has much to say both about politics and international relations, and also about the limits of security and state power.

The Irony of American History is oddly relevant. It was written in 1952 and based on two lectures given earlier than that. The introduction calls it the most important book on American foreign policy ever written. That is a bit too strong, but still Niebuhr understands in a way that very few do, the weaknesses of all human forms of government, while still being hopeful that government can serve the people.

Niebuhr, with proper use of irony, speaks of the issues of the 1950s in similar terms to many others in talking about the global reach of US power. It is almost funny that Niebuhr quotes US policy makers that think that the Asians should be more grateful to the US (at the time it was Korea, soon to be Vietnam) for our intervention to their affairs. But it is very similar to the way that some in the Bush administration thought we would be received in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The narrator on the audiobook is a bit pretentious sounding and I think that detracts from what Niebuhr is trying to say. But in general Niebuhr traces the thought patterns of a Jeffersonian (roughly secular) and a Puritan (certainly Christian) that both view the United States as a fundamentally separate place. The language of the Puritans is a “City on a Hill” and “called out by God for a specific purpose”. But the Jeffersonian ideals are not much different. Jefferson was secular in his reasoning, but thought that the separateness of the geography and the rightness of our political will and life also left us with a specific calling and purpose that in the end was not much different from the calling and ideals of the Puritans.

The Nature of the Beast: Chief Inspector Gamache #11 by Louise Penny

September 2, 2015 by Adam Shields

Summary: A retired Inspector Gamache continues to need to respond to the deaths around him in Three Pines.

Popular murder mystery series always have the problem of very high rates of murder around the protagonist. It is one reason that they tend to be police officers of big cities in order to give some credibility to the number of murders.

But in the Inspector Gamache series, the protagonist has retired to a town that is so small that it is not even on any map, has a dirt road to get into it and no high speed internet access. About half of the books so far have been focused on local murders and the reader just has to wonder about the character of the town. In this book we find that the village has expanded to become large enough that it has a community theater with a dedicated theater space.

My strained credibility still enjoys the series. Gamache is a great lead and there are many characters around him that are just as enagaging.

In this case a young imaginative boy who is known for his wild tales goes missing and his body is eventually found. This leads to a case that gets bigger and bigger and eventually includes international affairs and weapons deals and a serial killer as a side theme.

The Porcelain Thief: Searching the Middle Kingdom for Buried China by Huan Hsu

September 1, 2015 by All Old Users

Liu Feng Shu was a wealthy intellectual and landowner in Chinese village during the early 1900s. As Japanese invaders worked their way across China in 1938, Shu dug a hole in the family’s garden. Under the cover of darkness, the elderly man lined the walls of the hole with bamboo and shelves to house his … Read more

Lucky: How the Kingdom Comes to Unlikely People by Glenn Packiam

August 31, 2015 by Adam Shields

Takeaway: Scripture needs to be retold, so we can hear it again for the first time and be changed.

There are lots of ways to study scripture. But two ways have been bouncing around in my head as being particularly important for me. One is the serious academic study of a text, long or short. Investigation into what the language researchers say about it, what the cultural anthropologists know about the culture it was written in, what the comparative literature people know about other texts that might have been written in a similar time or culture, what the historians that can talk about how that passage has been read and interpreted over time, etc. I think that type of reading and study of scripture is very important. I do not do enough research into scripture like that. (The Lost World of Genesis One is one of the recent books I have read that is along those lines.)

But the second type of scripture work is illustrated quite well by this book. The author does a lot of the type of study that is part of the first type of study, but the focus is not the study, but the retelling. The author’s research is to understand the text deeply, so that she or he can tell others about the text in a way that is modern and appropriate for the culture and people that are hearing it. And even more important, to use the “Theological Imagination” (as Eugene Peterson puts it) to help those of us that have heard the scripture before rediscover it in new ways. Some Christians look down on this type of work, but it is the essential work of teaching. Teaching takes an idea and learns to communicate it in a way that is understood, and hopefully can be acted upon.

Economics of Good and Evil: The Quest for Economic Meaning from Gilgamesh to Wall Street

August 31, 2015 by All Old Users

I am reposting Seth Simmons 2013 review because the Kindle Edition is on sale (probably only today) for $1.99. There is also an earlier 2009 review by Adam Shields
This is a difficult book to classify, and thus to review. It’s not a book of economics, but rather about economics, particularly the modern focus on mathematics to the exclusion of ethics. It’s pretty abstract and philosophical. I almost gave up a number of times in the first 150 pages, as I slogged through Sedlacek picking out and commenting on the economic bread crumbs found in the most ancient of literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh, followed by Greek thought, Stoicism, historic Christianity, and the Enlightenment thought of Hume, Descartes, and Adam Smith.

Wonder by RJ Palacio

August 27, 2015 by Adam Shields

Reposting this 2013 review because the Kindle Edition is on sale for $1.99. (Wonder was one of my favorite books of 2013)

Summary: Middle grade fiction about a boy with significant facial deformity learning to live in the world and the world learning to live with him.

Wonder is a book I would not have picked up on my own. In general I like young adult (teen), but do not read a lot of middle grade fiction.

But more importantly, the description discouraged me from wanting to get started. Another book about a sick kid that changes the way people think about the world.

Yes, this was a book about a kid that changes the way people think about the world, but it was a very good one.

Ten-year-old August (Auggie) is going to school for the first time. It is 5th grade and a new middle school. August has been homeschool prior to this because of the many surgeries to try and repair his body.

The first section of the book is all narrated by August. And had it stopped there, this would have been a good book about how people can feel bad when they are mistreated. Or maybe even a good book about how a kid can overcome adversity.

What makes Wonder a great book, is the book changes narration throughout the school year. His best friend at school, the girl that first reached out to him at school, his sister, his sister’s boyfriend, his sister’s best friend, and then August again. The change in voice allows us to see that while August has facial deformities that make his life difficult, the love of his parents, his friends and other things make his life good.

The Martian: A Novel by Andy Weir

August 27, 2015 by Adam Shields

I am reposting this 2014 review because the Kindle Edition is on sale for $1.99.
Summary: An astronaut believed to be dead, gets left on Mars.

My reading this past week has shaken up my best of 2014 book lists. The Martian and Unappologetic have both earned places on the list. It was a good reading week.

The Martian is another example of why we need to encourage independent authors. Andy Weir wrote and released this himself, eventually releasing it on kindle and then having it picked up by a mainstream publisher and re-releasing it and eventually earning himself a place on the New York Times best seller list.

The story is straight forward. During a dust storm on Mars, Mark Watney and the rest of the crew attempted to evacuate Mars before their ship is tipped over in the storm. Watney gets lost in the storm, and because his suit readings show that he is dead, the rest of the crew takes off without him.