Category: Book review

Ten Key Books

What books influenced me most? Here is an updated list of ten that have formed my thought life, my spiritual life, my sense of aesthetics, and how I view and interact with the world.

After making the list I noticed that I read most of them before I was twenty-five. And I suppose that’s to be expected. In mid-life and beyond, I’ve largely been shaped (though hopefully not set in stone). I present these books here roughly in the order in which I read them.

Hamlet—I had a stellar high school English teacher who spent weeks taking us line by line through what he called the greatest play by the greatest author in history. Mr. Ryan opened our eyes to a feast so we could partake of a whole new world of life, ideas, emotion, and drama. Though I didn’t quite grasp it at the time, Hamlet grounded me in notions of the good, the true, and the beautiful.

Escape from Reason—Francis Schaeffer’s book taught me that ideas had consequences and that Christians could engage the world of philosophy and learning with confidence.

Mere Christianity—Lewis’s classic still stands as a landmark of clear thinking. Just the other day I was talking with someone who said we can only know for certain what is objective. Lewis’s thoughts on self-contradiction modeled for me how to respond: “But isn’t your statement about objectivity itself a subjective judgment?”

How to Read a Book—Mortimer Adler’s and Charles Van Doren’s essential guide shows us a wide variety of ways to understand and appreciate what we read. More than that, this still widely used volume taught me much about how to think.

The Lord of the Rings—Tolkien’s trilogy showed me the power of imagination. In creating a fictional world of orcs, wizards, Hobbits and Ents, he made courage, honor, faith, friendship, goodness, truth, and love believable in our world too.

Knowing God—Early in my adulthood J. I. Packer focused me on the centrality of what we were made for, of what brings true wisdom, and on what the essence of eternal life is—to know God. And there my attention remains.

Watership Down—The structure, characters, action, setting, themes and tone of this near perfect novel are so skillfully and compellingly presented that we forget we are reading a 400-page book about rabbits.

The Cross and the Prodigal—I read this in the mid-1970s, in its original Concordia edition. Kenneth Bailey so revolutionized the way I read the New Testament that I was delighted to bring it back into print at InterVarsity Press in 2005.

The Sparrow—Mary Doria Russell’s novel, set in the near future, is a thoroughly profound, readable, and gripping meditation on ultimate questions and on walking with those who suffer. The characters on this multi-year journey are not only supremely believable but are so fascinating, intelligent, mature, and likeable that I wished I could have joined them. And I did.

Jesus and the Victory of God—This tour de force by N. T. Wright still astonishes in its ability to challenge academic conventional wisdom on the one hand and the church on the other. Here is a book that unveils the cosmic, multi-dimensional achievement of Jesus.

Tired of Being Jerked Around?

Are you tired of extreme predictions of both an eco-apocalypse and a techno-utopia? You know what I mean:

Be Afraid: The world will run out of oxygen in 8 years!
Have No Fear: Renewable energy will eliminate all carbon emissions!
Be Afraid: Sea level cities will soon be inundated with water!
Have No Fear: AI will clean the world’s water supply!

Instead of being jerked around by social media and news media, wouldn’t you rather listen to someone who is knowledgeable and reasonable, who is neither optimist nor pessimist? If you want some level-headed perspective, stop following the news and start reading How the World Really Works. Vaclav Smil, professor emeritus of the University of Manitoba, has studied all this for decades, and will at once blow your mind and improve you mind.

What’s really going on with energy? In 1975 oil supplied 45% of the world’s energy. In 2019 it was 33%. (Natural gas, wind, and solar have made the difference.) But the world simply can’t go all electric because we have no way to store massive amounts of electricity—and electric jets? Not in our lifetime.

What really makes the world go round? Besides energy, four key material pillars hold up modern civilization, all of which depend on carbon fuels. At the dinner table I asked the family to make a guess. Maybe you’d like to try.

I was impressed that they came up with three of the four—steel, plastics, and concrete. We’ve seen huge increases in these—which all dependent on high levels of energy to create.

What’s the fourth? Surprisingly, ammonia—whose nitrogen content makes it key for producing fertilizer which in turn made 75-year-old predictions of mass starvation laughable. But we must not forget that lots of oil is still needed for that and for the plowing, planting, harvesting, processing, and transporting of food.

Wait. There’s more! With all the fad diets out there, how do you decide which one will give the longest life? It’s not that hard, Smil says. Look at the countries with greatest longevity and copy them. Two at the top are Japan and Spain. Since their diets are quite different, you have a choice.

What’s actually happening with globalization, with global warming, with contagious diseases? This book has so much sensible, even-handed information on all these and more.

Granted, Smil has a lot of numbers. But he does his best to make big ideas and trends very understandable. Throughout he uses everyday examples to keep us on track. For example, getting two pounds of chicken to the table requires about half a wine bottle of crude oil.  

I love books that give a big picture like Jared Diamond’s Upheaval and Hans Rosling’s Factfulness. They are so much more informative than the annoying, irrelevant, and sensationalized snippets that flood our daily news feeds. To find out what’s really going on, instead spend your time with books like How the World Really Works.

“I’d Never Do That!”

Mary Doria Russell had a problem.

She was teaching anthropology and came to stories of the massive mistakes explorers from the West sometimes made when they first encountered different people groups around the world. Often death, pillaging, and slavery resulted.

Inevitably, students would say something to the effect of, “Oh, I would never make a mistake like that. How could they have done something so stupid?” 

But Russell knew that even though it seemed simple, it wasn’t. How could she adequately explain that first contact is just much more difficult than we can imagine? That’s what motivated her to write her profound, wonderful, absorbing novel The Sparrow.

She imagines a group of intelligent, well-meaning, goodhearted, skilled people who make an effort to meet a species from another world. One reason I especially like the novel is that this is just a great group of people. If I were to go on a multiyear journey, these are absolutely the kind of people I would love to travel with. 

Despite this team having far more gifts, abilities, and experiences than her students or most of us, things go wrong—terribly wrong. Even the most benign actions like trying to improve nutrition for those they meet had disastrous effects they had difficulty anticipating.

Should we never try to help people in other cultures? Should we never try to fix things that seem wrong? That’s not my point.

Rather, when we do, we should approach such efforts with a maximum dose of humility. We need to give the benefit of the doubt to people who act in ways we find wrong or unenlightened. We need to learn as much as we can before we act.

Why? Because we just don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t adequately appreciate the finite, limitations of human knowledge or of our own perspective. Nor do we appreciate enough how our fallen, sinful nature can unconsciously skew our opinions about what is wrong with the world and how to fix it.

What can we do when we encounter people we think are strange or just wrong?

  • Remember how fun it is to learn new, surprising things.
  • Don’t automatically dismiss information or ideas that are contrary to our viewpoints.
  • Remind ourselves that we are finite and that our motives or emotions may be skewing our outlook in ways we aren’t aware of.
  • Ask those we are trying to help what they think would be the best ways we could be of assistance.
  • Remember that all of us—the people we are trying to help as well as those we disagree with—are people with God-given value and dignity.

Try to help others? By all means, and always with great humility.

The Greatest One-Term President

When Jimmy Carter died December 29, 2024, and as Joe Biden ended his term, my daughter asked me, “Who do you think was the greatest one-term president.”  

A number of candidates came to my mind. William Howard Taft and Gerald Ford were two. But I think the best answer is George Bush Sr.

The title of Jon Meacham’s book on Bush, Destiny and Power, certainly sounds like a presidential biography. But I think a better title would have been The Good President. George H. W. Bush was not only extremely effective in foreign policy and reasonably effective domestically, he was one of the truly honorable men to hold the highest office in the country.

Jon Meacham consistently emphasizes how the values Bush learned from his parents shaped his life personally and publicly—work hard, do your best, compete to win, serve others. Yes, he came from a well-to-do background that gave him many opportunities others didn’t have, but he also knew he was expected to excel on his own.

Bush volunteered to fight in World War II and flew many combat missions, including one in which he was shot down. He left the family cocoon in Connecticut to start his own business in oil. His 1964 U.S. Senate bid in Texas was overwhelmed by the Johnson landslide. But two years later he won a Congressional seat. Then came a series of challenging assignments—ambassador to the U.N., chairman of the Republican National Committee, envoy to China, director of the CIA.

He lost the Republican nomination to Ronald Reagan but won on the ticket as Vice President in 1980 and then 1984. He showed his calm, sure-handed demeanor during the critical hours after the assassination attempt on Reagan. But his sense of loyalty got the better of him in not more strongly opposing the Iran-Contra deal.

Meacham, while clearly admiring Bush, is not afraid to mention other mistakes. Promising no new taxes in his 1988 presidential run was doctrinaire but didn’t fit the pragmatic Bush. He was then severely criticized when he worked with a Democratic congress to bring down the deficit by cutting expenses and raising revenues.

Yet he also championed the bipartisan Americans with Disabilities Act. Though politics has always been rough and tumble, hearing how Bush worked with both parties for the common good made me almost nostalgic.

His foreign policy expertise shone in his deft and understated response to the fall of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989 as well as in putting together a large coalition of nations against Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990-91. Again, when a coup attempted to unseat Gorbachev, he skillfully played but did not overplay U.S. support of the Soviet leader.

George H. W. Bush may not have had the communication skills of Reagan or the charisma of Clinton or the intelligence of Obama, but he may have been our best president of the last fifty years.

Growing Creative

Leonardo da Vinci is best known for the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper. Yet it’s possible his achievements in science even outstripped those monumental paintings. A hundred years before Francis Bacon (the “father” of the scientific method), da Vinci pioneered key concepts in anatomy, geology, and fluid dynamics by the uncommon means of observation and experiment.

Perhaps the most extraordinary of all these was his investigation into how the human heart functioned. Remarkably, he made a glass model of a heart so he could better see how blood flowed. Some of his findings were not proven until five hundred years later. Even as late as 1960 scientists misunderstood some aspects. Only in 2014 was da Vinci conclusively shown to be correct.  

How did da Vinci manage to be hundreds of years ahead of his time in so many different areas of science? That is the story Walter Isaacson tells in his fascinating biography, Leonardo da Vinci. Isaacson’s other biographies also focus on some of the most creative minds in history—Benjamin Franklin and Steve Jobs—because Isaacson wants to know where inventiveness comes from and how to nurture it.

In his last chapter Isaacson offers a list of how we can all learn from Leonardo to be more creative. One is being collaborative. Da Vinci readily consulted with those who had expertise that he lacked, such as in anatomy and mathematics. He also cooperated, for example,  with several colleagues in developing his Vitruvian Man which famously shows the proportions of a human figure inscribed in a circle and a square.

What Isaacson does not point out is that being in an urban setting enhances the possibilities of multiple connections which is the essence of creativity. Many recent studies have shown how social proximity, networking, and openness in cities can result in expanded creativity. The more people you can interact with, the more your own mind is stimulated. Da Vinci worked almost his entire adult life in the thriving centers of Florence, Milan, and Rome.

Isaacson also highlights the role of being interdisciplinary. Da Vinci was fascinated by almost everything—optics, neuroscience, aerodynamics, paleontology, and more. Like being collaborative, having many interests (and reading widely) makes possible many more fresh connections, stimulating new insights, and unexpected questions which, again, is at the heart of creativity.

These first two, being collaborative and interdisciplinary, allowed him to develop a habit of using analogy to understand what he observed. He saw eddies in water and by analogy correctly assumed there must be similar eddies in air movement. He even went further to suppose that curling locks of hair followed some of these same patterns. He also deduced from autopsies and other observations that eddies must occur within the bloodstream as blood circulates, even though the medical assumption of his day was that blood didn’t circulate but went back and forth.

Likewise he wondered if the principles by which trees branched was analogous to that of rivers and then to how blood vessels branch in a body. He was right about it all.

And if anyone is going to remember your work, writing everything down on paper is essential. No one is going to have your Facebook posts in fifty years. Da Vinci probably filled 35,000 pages of books with his notes, doodles, observations, sketches, and lists. While only about a fifth of these survive, if he hadn’t put things down on paper, we’d have none of his insights.

Not all his ideas were brilliant. Some were dead ends. But by being immensely productive, we increase the chances that something remarkable will emerge.

Sadly, his genius was hidden in those notebooks for centuries. Why? He never published and rarely finished paintings.* Therefore, only hundreds of years later did others unknowingly perform experiments and make discoveries that ended up replicating what he had done much earlier.

Why did he release so little to the public? He was a perfectionist and possibly ADHD, haphazardly following every shiny idea that flitted across his mind. He was too distracted to finish much and didn’t seem to care about sharing knowledge.

Ironically, the hyper-charged mind that so sidetracked him also made him incessantly curious about everything—which may have been his greatest strength. Did birds flap their wings faster on the downswing or the upswing? Why were fossils on top of mountains?  Why do we see objects with slightly blurred edges instead of in sharp outline?

No, we can’t all be Leonardos. But we can be more creative at home, at work, in relationships, in gardening, in cooking, in writing by making one or two of his natural impulses into our habits.

_____

*Da Vinci even kept the Mona Lisa till his death, never turning the painting over to the patron who commissioned it (and was thus never paid) because he was forever tinkering with it.

The Rarest of Leaders

When John Kennedy ran for president, I was excited. He was young, charming, and witty. And as an eight-year-old Catholic, I thought it was cool that he might become the first Catholic president. My enchantment with JFK continued into my early teen years when I read his book Profiles in Courage.

Given our day of politicians being hyper-pressurized to conform to their party (Republican or Democratic), I decided to revisit this book about eight U. S. senators from over a span of two centuries. I remembered little of it but wondered what the stories might teach about a willingness to sacrifice one’s political career for principle and the common good. And I found some of what I expected.

When Senator John Quincy Adams supported the contested trade policy of the other party’s president (that is, of Jefferson who had defeated Adams’ own father!), “Simply because he had placed national interest before party and section, the Federalists had deserted him. Yes, he thought, I did not desert them, as they charge— it is they who have deserted me” (p. 30).

But then I also found sentences I tripped over. Kennedy wrote that radical, abolitionist Republicans made Reconstruction “a black nightmare the South never could forget.” (p. 139) Well, yes, the dozen years after the Civil War were a nightmare for most whites when northern troops enforced the Fifteenth Amendment so blacks could vote as full citizens. But was Kennedy really accepting a racist white viewpoint that this period was a disaster?

Apparently so. I was then bewildered to read, “No state suffered more from carpetbag rule than Mississippi.” Kennedy said that corruption was rampant and that taxes rose by a factor of fourteen under the state government elected in Reconstruction. “Vast areas of northern Mississippi lay in ruins” (p. 147).

Yet as historian Nicholas Lemann writes, “None of this is true.”

Only in recent decades has the fuller, more accurate story become better known of the systematic campaign to deny blacks the vote in the South after Reconstruction from 1877 to the mid-twentieth century. (See, for example, of Ken Wytsma’s The Myth of Equality, pp. 55-57.) Layer upon layer of requirements were (unequally) enforced to limit who could vote, limits “not based on race” which nonetheless somehow(!) dramatically reduced black but not white voting.

Kennedy also writes positively about even the staunchest and best-known pro-slavery Senator in U.S. history—John C. Calhoun—who, Kennedy tells us, nearly made the cut in his book as one of the Senate’s most courageous.

Given that Civil Rights is one of the chief pillars of Kennedy’s presidential legacy, what is going on? Several answers are possible.

One is that Kennedy was simply a man of his time, influenced by the northern and southern white desire to not rock the boat by dredging up all the unpleasantness of the past. Another (less courageous and more cynical) answer is that this book, published in 1956, was intended to broaden southern support for the presidential candidacy of a senator from Massachusetts in 1960.  

Kennedy was a complex person, and we should not judge him one dimensionally. We should also be generous enough to recognize that people can grow and change. Profiles in Courage likewise needs to be read more than one dimensionally.

One thing we can take away is this: we still need those most rare of political leaders—those courageous enough to stand against their party and even their own constituents in order to stand for the value of every human, the common good, and doing what is moral.

Ink-Stained Dreamers

As a lover of books and a lover of history, I found Adam Smyth’s The Book-Makers a delight. By zeroing in on a dozen and a half practitioners of the trade, Smyth gives us both a happy overview and fascinating stories of these often quirky individuals. My full review appears in the January-February 2025 edition of Christianity Today, which can also be found online. Here are a couple parts of the review that the editors left on the cutting room floor.

The chapter on an early bookbinder, William Wildgoose (yes, that really was his name) begins and ends with the tale of a wayward volume that was first housed in the famous Bodleian Library in Oxford, only to return unexpectedly three centuries later. In 1905 a young man comes in wanting advice on rebinding his ancient book. When the sub-librarian and assistant librarian inspect it closely—and then more closely!—they discover that this was once in the Bodleian’s collection, sold off as new printings became available. The book has been remarkably preserved through generations. And like someone who found a priceless pearl in a field, the Bodleian raises an enormous sum now equivalent to $300,000 to buy it back. The volume? Shakespeare’s First Folio, bound by William Wildgoose in 1623.

While zines go back a hundred years, Smyth features examples of the last few decades. The creators of these periodicals intentionally positioned them outside mainstream publishing in content and production values, often being photocopied and stapled. They knew that online existed, but they were committed to the tangibility, the physicality of their publications. They believed it provided a more multi-sensual experience that is not diluted by the digital.

Perhaps the author chose to highlight them for this very reason, as Smyth’s volume is in many ways a celebration of the physical book in all its dimensions.

A Beautiful, Heartbreaking Book

In A Matter of Death and Life, Irv and Marilyn Yolam offer a beautiful, heartbreaking book. In alternating chapters this husband and wife of 65 years write about Marilyn’s final months of fighting cancer. In the last half Irv alone tells his story.

Because this is very much a memoir, they give little advice on how to cope with death and sorrow. They simply relate their own experiences and reflections. For that reason, I find this much easier to read than many books on the topic. I can enter into their story, remembering my own, and grieve with them. 

Irv, being a career therapist, brings a unique double perspective as both one who suffers and one who walks alongside others. Not surprisingly, he honestly tells how hard it is sometimes to follow his own counsel. His reflections on sex, memory and its loss, and facing our own death during grief are also worthwhile.

During the course of all this, he reads some of the books he has published and finds his own past case studies illuminating. I was especially struck by “Irene” who refused to accept counsel from someone like him who had not (at that time) suffered loss. Though the two continue to meet, they hit something of a stalemate. In retrospect Irv now believes his own grieving would make him a better therapist with her even if his counsel wouldn’t change.

Though I give the book a warm recommendation, I did find two things a bit concerning. First, a couple times Irv says most of his clients moved to a healthier place after a year, maybe two. Second, he comments that those who had a good marriage are often able to move forward more quickly than those who have not. I just hope that readers who don’t fit these patterns will realize they are his generalizations. Not everyone experiences grief in these ways. And there may be nothing wrong with those who don’t.

This warm, honest, insightful book movingly intertwines two stories of facing our own death and grieving the death of a loved one.

Why the Christmas Story Bothered Me

The following is adapted from a December 2014 post in AndyUnedited.

The Christmas story always bothered me.

It never made sense. No, I’m not talking about the virgin birth. Not the angels singing to shepherds. Not the star in the sky. Not the wise men.

No, it was the part about there being no room in the inn. It never made sense. Middle Eastern hospitality is legendary. Strangers, travelers, those in need—you can count on the deeply ingrained culture of showing generosity and graciousness to those who need a meal or a warm bed.

They would never, ever turn away a pregnant woman—especially a woman who was a relative visiting her ancestral home in Bethlehem. Many close and distant relatives would have been living or visiting nearby to care for her. Turn her away? Send her to a barn? Never. It wouldn’t happen.

Then what did happen? In Luke 2:7, the Greek word traditionally translated as “inn” is better rendered as “guest room,” which is how the NIV puts it. Middle Eastern peasant homes were one large room though sometimes a guest room or “mother-in-law room” was attached. But since the guest room was already occupied, the owners of the house did the only sensible thing—they vacated the main house and gave it over to Mary and Joseph’s use.

The couple would not be alone either. When it came time for the baby to be born, Joseph would wait outside while women in the community would come and assist Mary. Luke didn’t mention the community because his readers would have known that without having to be told.

Then what in the world was a manger (a feed box for animals that Luke mentions) doing inside the house?

The single, main room of such a house typically had two parts: a smaller ground floor level and a larger level raised a couple feet for cooking, eating, and sleeping. Peasants would bring their animals into the lower level of the house at night for two reasons—to keep the animals safe from thieves and to provide warmth for the family sleeping on the upper level when it was cold.

Cut into the floor of the upper level where it meets the lower level was (wait for it) a manger. A place for hay to feed the animals.*

Some years ago I was describing this to a friend, and her eyes got huge. “That’s the kind of house I grew up in!” Her family had been missionaries among peasants in Syria. You can still find such homes there today.

Yes, Jesus was not born in a palace, but neither was he born alone in a barn. He was born in a common home of the people, a home that was opened up to him through a delightful demonstration of hospitality. When we welcome into our lives both family and strangers, the needy and the self-assured, we are living the Christmas story.

For the Christmas story is not one of “no room in the inn.” Rather it is one of wondrous welcome and generosity.

—

Image credit: Ambroz from Pixabay.

*See Kenneth E. Bailey, “The Story of Jesus Birth: Luke 2:1-20” in Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2008), pp. 25-37.

A Flawed, Swaggering Book

I love big, bold books that offer a sweeping view of history. Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel is a stellar example. Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind is not.

Harari does cover (as promised) the last 70,000 years of human history from the first proto-homo sapiens to the possibilities of future human genetic and bionic engineering. Yet his swaggering, blustering style (while entertaining) blocks the light he might otherwise shed on a variety of important topics.

His overall structure has merit. He begins with what he calls the cognitive revolution of perhaps 40,000 years ago. Sapiens expanded their inventions, art, and language far beyond any other animal. This allowed for cooperation that made up for deficiencies in size, strength, and speed.

The next major shift was the agricultural revolution of about 12,000 years ago which allowed sapiens to shift from roving hunter-gatherers to settled farmers. Harari’s controversial view is a thoroughly negative take on what most see as the foundation of cities and civilizations. He claims it was a poor trade in nutrition, safety, happiness, and justice.

The third transformation is the scientific revolution of 500 years ago. While most civilizations were previously based on received knowledge from the past, science celebrated ignorance which could motivate the search for knowledge. Europeans became supremely curious about the world, went exploring, and promptly conquered those who were not interested in new ideas, new tools, new weapons, or new discoveries.

Many reviewers have noted his slapdash treatments. The Guardian points out, for example, that his interpretation of the 1827 battle of Navarino in the war for Greek independence is wildly distorted, as even Wikipedia will attest. Marcus Paul also says, “He gives the (imagined) example of a thirteenth-century peasant asking a priest about spiders and being rebuffed because such knowledge was not in the Bible. It’s hard to know where to begin in saying how wrong a concept this is.” Instead, monks, friars, and abbeys “were central to the learning of the universities.”

The biggest problem in the book is introduced early, in chapter 2. According to Harari, every idea is a fiction, a social construct—nations, corporations, gods, values. None exist except in our imaginations. Ok, but . . .

On what basis, then, does he later claim that the slaughter of billions of domesticated animals since the advent of industrial agriculture may be the greatest crime in history? According to his own way of thinking, crimes (notions of justice) must also be fictions. After all, we (including Harari) only make up such rules. They don’t actually exist. But we use them to punish people, justify conquest, or write books claiming we are the ones who can offer an objective, dispassionate view when everyone else is wallowing in subjectivity.

Harari’s problem is that by his reckoning neither the subjective (which he denigrates) nor the objective (a perspective he subjectively values) exist since both are ideas. His own assumptions undo his many, overconfident historical, scientific, and moral judgments. All his self-assured pronouncements about religion, politics, and ethics must themselves be fictions. They become just as imaginary as his own supposed objectivity.

Sapiens has value. But it is so difficult separating the wheat from the chaff that it’s probably not worth the time.