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Exploring Books, Life, and Writing

Category: Book review

Writer at Work

January 12, 2021 by Andy Le Peau

Robert Caro’s book on Robert Moses and four books on Lyndon Johnson are legendary for their length (a total of almost 5,000 pages) and the length between volumes (about a decade). In Working, a collection of interviews and articles, we learn something of the method in his madness. His passion is not just to inform …

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Hope Seasoned with Humility

December 8, 2020 by Andy Le Peau

In a day when so many of us think we are RIGHT while so many others are WRONG, Reinhold Niebuhr’s neglected classic, The Irony of American History, deserves wide reading. Published the year I was born (1952), in the context of a world dominated by the sharply defined conflict between democracy and communism, its clear …

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The Good News About Daniel

December 1, 2020 by Andy Le Peau

Daniel is one of the most popular and yet challenging books in the Bible. In plain language yet without oversimplifying, Tremper Longman guides us with a steady hand through its sometimes wild passages. While not a commentary, How to Read Daniel insightfully walks us through the main aspects of each chapter. Daniel is divided into …

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Reading While Black

November 17, 2020 by Andy Le Peau

We all read the Bible from our own viewpoint, from within our own culture and background. Our circumstances make us ask certain questions we wouldn’t ask otherwise. We could consider this a disadvantage. How could we know what the Bible really said when we are inevitably limited? But what if this were a blessing? What …

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Beautiful and Profound

November 9, 2020 by Andy Le Peau

Martin Schleske is a lifelong luthier (violinmaker) whose art has interwoven with his faith such that the two are one. His recent volume, The Sound of Life’s Unspeakable Beauty, is his meditation on both. When a friend gave me his book, one of the most beautiful and profound works I’ve read, he wisely suggested I …

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Becoming Drama Free

October 13, 2020 by Andy Le Peau

We’ve all seen it at work, at church, in families, or in other groups. Conflict, gossip, territoriality, defensiveness, and withdrawal. Patterns of dysfunctionality like these persist often because we just don’t have the skills to deal with them or we are afraid that confrontation will just make it worse. The Drama-Free Office considers four common …

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Seeing the Bible with New Eyes

October 6, 2020 by Andy Le Peau

I have a one-question survey that will reveal with near perfect accuracy whether or not you are an individualist. Set? Here it is: Would you readily consider allowing your parents to arrange a marriage for you? Those of us from a Western culture would never give this the slightest bit of serious consideration. But in …

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The Problem with Talking to Strangers

September 29, 2020 by Andy Le Peau

The problem with talking to strangers is that most of us think we know how to “read” people. Gestures, tone of voice, facial expressions seem self-evident. As Malcolm Gladwell reveals in his book Talking to Strangers, they are not. Both Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax met Hitler multiple times and thought him trustworthy. Why? Dozens, …

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Twelve Books I Keep Talking About

August 18, 2020 by Andy Le Peau

One measure of how much I like a book is by how much I keep talking about it. In one way or another it has captured me, provoked me, stayed with me. Here are twelve, in no particular order, that I’ve read in the last two years which I keep thinking about. As they range …

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Lovecraft Country

July 28, 2020 by Andy Le Peau

Matt Ruff’s fun supernatural novel, Lovecraft Country, is an homage to H. P. Lovecraft and his spooky, weird pulp fiction of the last century. Yet it is also an incisive critique of Lovecraft’s bigotry. Set in Chicago in 1954, the novel follows a series of exploits of an extended family and their friends as they …

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