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Takeaway: Culture is the result of a wide variety of influences.

Thomas Sowell is an economist.  I have read three of his economics book (Basic Economics, Applied Economics and Economics Facts and Fallacies). These books, while clearly from a conservative approach to economics were focused on education and not propaganda.  I would recommend any of the three books to help you understand how economics works.  (Basic Economics is an intro to economics, Applied Economics focuses on national level and Facts and Fallacies is more focused on countering bad economic thinking at many levels).

Conquests and Cultures is the third book in a series of historical exploration of culture.  (Race and Culture and Migration and Culture are the first two). These are historical looks at culture using Sowell’s common tools of economic and broad level research.

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Bookwi.se Note: Vikki Huisman wrote this review for her church blog but agreed to let Bookwi.se repost it here. 

You shouldn’t wait to get this book.

Seriously.

Youth experts, Chapman and Powell completed a 6-year research project, “œThe College Transition Project”. Based on their research, they concluded that between 40-50% of youth group kids stick with their faith in college. If you have two children, the odds are only one of them will stick with their faith after college.

Sticky Faith contains a lot of research and data at the beginning of the book and I must be honest, the statistics are unnerving. I was ready to toss the book aside and never finish it because it seemed so depressing. But I’m glad I didn’t.

Powell and Clark tell us that there is no magic formula or quick fix to guarantee that your kids will have a faith that lasts. This book is not a 10 step program to turn your child into Billy Graham by Monday. Just as there are many different types of people, there are many avenues you can choose to pursue in your home to point your child in the right direction.

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Summary: Classic Science Fiction look at what it means to be sentient.

Several weeks ago I had never heard of H Beam Piper or his book Little Fuzzy.  Instead I was looking for books by John Scalzi.  Scalzi is a contemporary Science Fiction author and over the past several months I have read two of his books (both narrated by Will Wheaton).

I picked up Fuzzy Nation, which happens to be a retelling of H Beam Piper’s classic Little Fuzzy.

The audiobook of Fuzzy Nation included both the new and the original.  I have already reviewed the new, so this is the review of the original.

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Summary: Art is fundamental to the way that we express the truth of Christianity.

I am late to the Francis Schaeffer party. This book is more than 30 years old. And it is only the second book by Schaeffer I have read.

But I think it is as readable (and important) today as it was when it was written. I was talking with my wife a couple days before I started reading this about the differences that technology has made to the arts. We were talking about how tools made it so that anyone could edit movies or take pictures.

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If you are just joining in, I am slowly working through several books on Catholic theology and practice.  Catholic Matters was recommended by a friend and is a very good next step for me.

Richard John Neuhaus is on of the better known Catholic writers in the United States.  He is a priest in New York and a convert from the Lutheran stream of Christianity at the age of 54.  Most Evangelicals will know him as the editor of the Institute on Religion and Public Life’s publication First Things.  Neuhaus passed away in 2009.

Neuhaus was a great believer in ecumenical activity (the idea behind The Institute on Religion and Public Life and his earlier Institute on Religion and Democracy).  He along with Charles Colson were the prime drivers behind the Evangelicals and Catholics Together statements that provided a significant part of the discussion material from Mark Noll’s Is The Reformation Over (reviewed earlier).

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Takeaway: Life that is all good, is not life.  Real life is bittersweet.

About two years ago I received a promotional copy of Bittersweet and Cold Tangerines from Catalyst.  I kept them for a while, but eventually gave them away unread.

Last month I picked up the audiobook of Bittersweet on a whim.  My earlier estimate that it was primarily written with women in mind was not completely off.  There is a lot of discussion about having babies, miscarriage, friendship among women, cooking meals, being a mom and mentor.

But this is not a book just for women.  I have read many books intended just for women and this one speaks about being a woman because Shauna Niequist is a woman.

Bittersweet is one of those collections of essays/memoirs/thoughts on life books that is beautifully written.  She knows how to put words together to evoke the images and feelings she wants.  I am not a push over and I rarely tear up at movies and even less at books.  But there were a couple of times that I was very close.

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Summary: A very special boy can see the paths of everything that has ever lived.  And he is not just any boy.  But he does not know that yet.

Orson Scott Card is both blessed and cursed with being able to write books about very gifted children better than anyone I know.  It is a blessing because with few exceptions his books are very good.

The negative is that his stories are reminiscent of each other, even when they have different settings and genres.  Pathfinder is more fantasy (at least in the first book) than science fiction or dystopian.  There are two storylines that do not quite merge in this book.  I assume that we will learn more in future books.

What I think is happening is that a colony ship from Earth (the first one) had something unexpected happen when they tried to move through a fold in space.  Instead of jumping something odd happened. We really do not know for sure what happened through most of the book.

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Summary: A super spy saves the United States from a really bad terrorist.

Spy novels, with very few exceptions, have the same basic story line.  There are bad guys (modern spy novels it is usually either China or Islamic terrorists, old spy novels it is the Soviet Union or other Eastern Block countries).

The spy does a lot of bad things, but he (and it is usually he) feels bad about them, wants to quit but has to keep doing the spy things to keep the world safe because no one else can do the job as well as he can.

There are twists.  One of the good guys is actually a bad guy, one of the bad guys is actually a good guy, or something like that.

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