Henry Kissinger (now age 92) has been a prominent international figure since I was in high school when he became Nixon’s National Security Advisor and later Secretary of State. He seemed to me to be an urbane realist then and an elder statesman now. By looking deeply at Kissinger’s early writings and the record of his actions as filled out by declassified top secret documents from previous decades, historian Greg Grandin offers a very different picture in Kissinger’s Shadow.
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I Hate “the Creative Class”
I hate “the Creative Class.”
I don’t hate creative people. I love them and find them very stimulating. I am always interested in new ideas, new ways of doing things. I am fascinated and delighted when people come up with really good solutions or show artistic talent.
What I hate is the term the Creative Class. Why?
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The Pitfalls of Praise and Criticism
“Give someone a book, they’ll read for a day. Teach someone how to write a book, they’ll experience a lifetime of paralyzing self doubt,” Lauren DeStefano tells us.
The psychological, spiritual, emotional pitfalls of writing a book are so numerous and varied it is amazing a word is ever written. And if you do finish and publish, you face a whole new set of issues instigated in equal measure by success and failure, by praise and criticism.
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How Did He Make It So Suspenseful?
Eric Larson achieves the drama and suspense of a political thriller in his book on the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915. This is a remarkable achievement because everyone knows how it ends before they start–a German U-boat sinks the ship. How was he able to do this? When I read the acknowledgments at the end of Dead Wake, I found out. He listened to his editor.
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Prophetic Lament
Throughout my life I have attended worship services in a variety of traditions, but they tended to have one thing in common–they began with praise to God and then moved to confession. This is an appropriate model to follow with much merit. When we see how holy and good God is, we see more clearly by contrast that we are not, and so we confess.
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Learning from a Presidential Biography
What might an incoming president learn from a biography of Thomas Jefferson? Much indeed.
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Unlocking the Book of Job
Here’s what many people know about the book of Job.
1. Job is on trial.
2. The book is primarily about suffering.
3. Job’s hope for a redeemer foreshadows Christ.
4. God puts Job in his place at the end of the book, telling Job that God is God and Job is decidedly not.
All of those points, however, according to John Walton and Tremper Longman are quite mistaken.
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Happy with the Process
When employees are unhappy with a decision that leaders have made, often they don’t react against the decision. Instead they complain long and loud about the process.
“All sides were not heard adequately.”
“There wasn’t enough time.”
“We didn’t know how the decision would be made.”
“Key discussions were behind closed doors.”
“The right people weren’t involved.”
“Clearly some ulterior motive was at work here.”
The Vaccine Hero
My sister died because of a vaccine . . . a vaccine she never received. On a September morning in 1952, at the age of seven, Lucy Rae Le Peau contracted polio and died that afternoon. The vaccine that would have saved her life would not be developed for another year.
It was a vaccine my grieving mother prayed for desperately, especially because her three other children, including me, were still vulnerable to the terrifying disease. Every year thousands of children across the United States were struck with it, peaking the year my sister died with over 57,000 cases, of whom 3,145 died.
Where Is Technology Going?
Kevin Kelly, guru of Wired magazine, proves himself to be a polymath who is not afraid to have an opinion or two in his book What Technology Wants. His main provocative point is that technology is developing in certain predictable ways.
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