| Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense by N.T. Wright, 256 pages Brad Snyder 11 December 2006 This is the best book I have read all year. Regardless of what your spiritual background, Bishop Wright has offered a common sense approach to Christianity that will surely eclipse other similar works. | Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense (2006) by N.T. Wright, 256 pages Jonathan Misirian 20 April 2007 Wright is the Bishop of Durham in the Church of England and has that rare gift of being a top flight writer and a profound thinker. Simply Christian is his apologetic of Christianity. It is gripping, erudite, accessible, and engages the soul unlike most other apologetic books. |
Evil and the Justice of God (2006) by N.T. Wright, 176 pages Jonathan Misirian 05 May 2007 Wright shifts the focus from ‘why didn’t God do something to stop evil’ to ‘look at what God has done and is doing to help those in the face of evil.’ Wright is a profound thinker and lucid writer. He traces the biblical themes of God’s love for his people in the face of evil and presents a convincing look at how God –through the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus –provided the ultimate answer for evil. |
Paul: In Fresh Perspective (2005) by N.T. Wright, 195 pages Jonathan Misirian 29 May 2007 Wright explores the Apostle Paul, his life and world- view. His forte is found in digging into the cultural setting in which Paul wrote and re-emphasizing the Jewish cultural and thought that captivated Paul. Another excellent treatment by Wright. |
Angel City Of by Nancy Holder, 177 pages Jeff Gadd 12 June 2002 |
Angel Not Forgotten by Nancy Holder, 243 pages Jeff Gadd 14 June 2002 |
The Whole Truth by Nancy Pickard, 339 pages Mike Gadd 18 January 2002 |
Yanomamo: The Fierce People by Napoleon A. Chagnon, 214 pages Steve Gadd 27 August 2003 Another perspective-broadening volume in the Case Studies in Cultural Anthropology. The Yanomamo are a tribe living in the jungles between Brazil and Venezuela, subsisting mainly on cultivated plantains. The groups of 50 to 200 individuals are mistrustful of their neighbors and warfare is a major feature of the culture, resulting in about one in four adult males dying of violence. Interesting also for the detailed look at the inevitable process of Westernization and cultural influence from outside. |
The Democratization of American Christianity by Nathan Hatch, 304 pages James Donahue 28 August 2002 A classic text in its field. Explores how revolutionary politics changed American Protestantism into something quite unique on the world stage. Specific topics: how love for the common man spurred anti-intellectualism, anti-clericalism, and anti-denominationalism; how revivalism and the disestablishment of religion led to endless fracturing and cults of personality; the ties between Jeffersonian politics and Baptist policies. Shows that fundamentalism, charismaticism, and non-denominationalism are not new in America, but have centuries-old roots. I was surprised that many voices from the 18th century could have spoken in Cedarville last weekend. |
In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick, 278 pages Steve Gadd 25 February 2002 The tale of the Essex, a Nantucket-based whaleship that was attacked and sunk by a sperm whale, forcing its crew to sail for South America in three small boats. The inspiration for Moby-Dick. |
Kokoro and other essays by Natsume Soseki, 322 pages James Donahue 06 February 2004 A very impressive and impressionistic story about the relationship between a student without focus and his "sensai" without hope. Couldn't put it down. |
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, 471 pages Steve Gadd 09 August 2000 Wow. Action-packed, crisply written, and carefully structured, this is a big chunk of sci-fi that makes the real world seem terribly boring every time you reluctantly stop reading. |
SNOW CRASH by Neal Stephenson, 470 pages Jeff Gadd 12 March 2001 |
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, 1139 pages Steve Gadd 07 August 2003 A sprawling, thrilling opus full of WWII adventure, codebreaking, treasure hunting, and hacking. A ripping good yarn! |
The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson, 499 pages Steve Gadd 14 September 2003 Stephenson paints a rich portrait of the nanotech future. The big scheme of the story was disorganized, especially toward the end. Whose side is the Mouse Army on, anyway? |
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, 918 pages Steven Krise 13 December 2004 "How do you know they're Germans? Maybe it's Otto." "The engines sound like diesels. Huns love diesels." |
Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson, 916 pages Steve Gadd 27 March 2007 Not one to coast on the success of his early work, Stephenson weighs in with a handwritten tome set in seventeenth-century Europe. Newton, Leibniz and other historical personages are minor characters, along with ancestors of various fictional characters from Cryptonomicon. While there is plenty of interesting material, one starts to feel that the novel itself is like the enciphered letters it quotes at length, in which five lines of text are required to convey one line of content. |
Organic Church: Growing Faith Where Life Happens by Neil Cole, 237 pages Jonathan Misirian 21 August 2006 Cole presents a series of principles collected from his experience as a non-traditional church planter. Cole looks at the church as a collection of individuals, not brick and mortar; and starts churches in parking lots, coffee houses and on the beach. Well written while avoiding popular models for church growth. |
Death by Black Hole by Neil DeGrasse Tyson, 384 pages Steven Krise 02 May 2009 A series of essays from a self-proclaimed Stephen J Gould fan. Not as good as SJG, but interesting for the most part. Finishes up with a series of essays on the interplay of religion and science: "So the universe wants to kill us all. But as we have before, let's ignore that complication for the moment. Many, perhaps countless, questions hover at the front lines of science. In some cases, answer have eluded the best minds of our species for decades or even centuries. And in contemporary America, the notion that a higher intelligence is the single answer to all enigmas has been enjoying a resurgence. This present-day version of God of the gasp goes by a fresh name: "intelligent design". The term suggests that some entity, endowed with a mental capacity far greater than the human mind can muster, created or enabled all the things in the physical world that we cannot explain through scientific methods. An interesting hypothesis. But why confine ourselves to things to wondrous or intricate for us to understand, whose existence and attributes we then credit to a superintelligence? Instead, why not tally all those things whose design is so clunky, goofy, impractical, or unworkable that they reflect the absence of intelligence?" |
Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution by Neil DeGrasse Tyson, 345 pages Steven Krise 23 August 2009 If you regularly read Scientific American there's probably not much new here (I don't so there was). Regardless, though, NDT is good at telling the story of science: in this instance the story of the origin of the universe and its evolution, culminating in the origin of life on Earth. |
American Gods (2001) by Neil Gaiman, 602 pages Brad Snyder 05 December 2007 An ex-con named Shadow is enlisted to work for a man named Wednesday who turns out to be the manifestation of a pagan Norse god. Wednesday is trying to enlist the help of other pagan deities that were brought to America in the minds of millions of immigrants over thousands of years to fight the new American deities such as technology and media. Quite possibly the strangest thing I have ever read. |
Killing Bono by Neil McCormick, 358 pages Jonathan Misirian 28 January 2005 McCormick and Bono were friends in the same high school. McCormick's goal was to be in a band that changed the world. This book is an account of the failure of his dream, and the success of his friends, U2. |
Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin, 229 pages Steven Krise 19 April 2008 "There is a fundamental design in the skeleton of all animals. Frogs, bats, humans, and lizards are all just variations on a theme. That theme, to [Sir Richard] Owen, was the plan of the Creator. Shortly after Owen announced this observation in his classic monograph On the Nature of Limbs, Charles Darwin supplied an elegant explanation for it....There is a major difference between Owen's theory and that of Darwin: Darwin's theory allows us to make very precise predictions. |
Passing by Nella Larsen (1929), 122 pages Micaela Larkin 19 July 2006 By harlem renaissance's premier woman writer--- "first published in 1929, Passing is a remarkably candid exploration of racial and sexual boundaries." |
The Gold Coast by Nelson DeMille, 626 pages Mike Gadd 27 November 2002 The Great Gatsby meets The Godfather. Very entertaining read, just took awhile to get through it. |
Plum Island by Nelson DeMille, 574 pages Mike Gadd 22 September 2003 A cop recovering from gunshot wounds on Long Island becomes involved in trying to solve the murder of 2 of his friends who work on Plum Island, a bio-research facility. |
Spencerville by Nelson DeMille, 481 pages Mike Gadd 30 April 2005 I enjoyed the other 2 DeMille offerings enough to give this one a try. It wasn't too good. Too many one-diminsional characters. Not near enough dry wit to keep it worth reading. |
Virtual History by Niall Ferguson, 440 pages James Donahue 19 December 2005 Ferguson gets eminent Oxbridge historians to chip in their counterfactual speculations on key moments in British history - What if Hitler had invaded England? What if James II had succeeded against the Scots in the 17th-century? What if America had remained British? But, since these are after all serious academics, these contributions are not so much Turtle-esque alternative worlds, instead more of an examination of how contingent these key world-events actually were. Interesting material, excellent writing. (You can just tell these historians enjoyed letting their imaginations run outside the academic vein.) |
The Pity of War (1999) by Niall Ferguson, 462 pages James Donahue 23 April 2007 Polished Oxford Don examines the myths surrounding the Great War, exposing a reluctant peace-loving population, a preventable tragedy if Germany had only had been more militarist, and wartime trends that could have resulted in a Central victory and a Kaiser-dominated European Union. |
The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli, 151 pages Erik Bauer 15 January 2000 A survival guide to working in an office environment. |
Dostoievsky (1924) by Nicholas Berdyaev, 227 pages James Donahue 19 December 2006 Berdyaev was a Christian philsopher censured by the Orthodox church for his anti-erastianism and then caught up on the fringes of the Bolshevik Revolution. In 1917 he became head of philosophy at University of Moscow under the new regime, but was exiled in 1922 for his religious commitment. From Paris he became one of the most influential Christian thinkers in Europe for the 1920s and 1930s. This book contains some of his earliest lectures in the West on his favorite writer. He muses on the Russian Muse but in reality he is thinking about the revolution, for he sees in Dost's thought on freedom, faith, and evil/sensuality/power the keys to understanding why the Bolshevik regime fails the humanity it claims to serve. Dost was, to Berdyaev, a true revolutionary of the spirit, and, "in general, revolution of the spirirt opposes the spirit of revolution as revolution." An excerpt: "Christianity has always been reproved by atheistic socialis for not having made men happy and given them rest and fed them, and by preaching the religion of earthly bread socialism has attracted millions and millions of followers. But, if Christianity has not made men happy or given them rest or fed them, it is because it has not wished to violate the freedom of the human spirit, because it appeals to human freedom and awaits therefrom the fulfilling of the word of Christ. The terrible problem of liberty simply does not exist for socialis; it expects to solve and achieve the liberation of man through a materialist and planned-out organization of life; its object is to overthrow freedom and get rid of the irrational element of life in the name of happiness, sufficiency, and leisure. Men [quoting Grand Inquisitor here] 'will become free when they renounce freedom'. . . .Christianity is not to blame that namkind has not willed the accomplishment of God's Word and has betrayed it; the fault lies with man, not with the God-man." |
A History of German and Scandinavian Protestantism by Nicholas Hope, 603 pages James Donahue 01 July 2004 |
In Tasmania by Nicholas Shakespeare, 370 pages Jonathan Misirian 29 September 2006 English author Shakespeare moves to Tasmania and discovers that his ancestors were of the first to bring Western culture to this remote island. Shakespeare finds that the history of his ancestors and of the country are linked together, in ways both stunning and shocking. In Tasmania, is a beautiful portrait of the country known as ‘Van Diemen’s Land.’ |
At First Sight by Nicholas Sparks, 277 pages Micaela Larkin 26 November 2006 ND's most famous writer after Edwin O'Connor and old Ralph takes on love and pathos in the South. |
The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber by Nicholson Baker, 255 pages Steve Gadd 25 November 1998 Highly original and entertaining collection of essays on such diverse topics as movie projectors, nail clips, and an exhaustive search for arcane uses of the word 'lumber.' Really, it's much better than it sounds. |
Vox by Nicholson Baker, 165 pages Steve Gadd 28 February 2003 After reading only 50 pages of Nietzsche over a snowy four-day weekend, I decided to go looking for some lighter fare. This book is a single conversation between two witty conversationalists who discover each other on an adult chat line. Baker lends his voice, with its fine-tuned attention to detail and wry imagination, to both partners. In the end it doesn't amount to much other than soft-core, but it is a nice complement to the wonderful magazine essays on boring subjects like nail clips and library card catalogs (in the collection The Size of Thoughts). |
The Fermata by Nicholson Baker, 303 pages Steve Gadd 13 March 2003 The dust jacket spells it out: "Arno Strine likes to stop time and take women's clothes off. He is hard at work on his autobiography." Perhaps you have wondered what you would do if you could stop time and move around the frozen world. Baker answers the question, assuming the time-stopper is a friendly, lonely man with raging hormones. The titillating conversation that worked in Vox just doesn't come off when the character is actually misbehaving and not just fantasizing about it. Baker seems to realize this and frames the explicit scenes in recordings, fictions within the fiction, and an entire chapter written with conditional verbs. Except for the overindulgence in puns, the writing is still good. It just reads too much like a test to see how much the author could get away with in a Random House book. |
Vox by Nicholson Baker, 165 pages Steve Gadd 16 March 2006 Somehow this book came home with me when I picked up The Mezzanine at the library, and I read through it in two sittings. |
The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker, 135 pages Steve Gadd 19 March 2006 A guy goes up an escalator. Brilliant. |
A Box of Matches by Nicholson Baker, 192 pages Steve Gadd 27 September 2006 As long as I'm calling myself a fan, I may as well read the rest of this guy's canon. This book is a collection of thoughts captured over several weeks while the narrator got up before dawn to build a fire. No real plot, no chronology, just trademark close observation of everyday banality -- the way his toes automatically rise in the shower in the presense of falling soap, his duck's defensive maneuvers against the house cat, the amazing longevitiy of one ant which outlived all its comrades in an ant farm, the "negative thump" of a paper match pulled from its book. |
Checkpoint by Nicholson Baker, 115 pages Steve Gadd 30 September 2006 A pretty weak effort that managed to get the author in hot water with the Secret Service but otherwise doesn't have much going for it. |
Vox by Nicholson Baker, 165 pages Steve Gadd 07 March 2009 The rare book that lives up to the blurbs inside the cover. A receipt tucked inside indicates that it was purchased at the Virgin Megastore San Francisco on March 25, 1999. |
Christianity and Revolutionary Europe (1750-1830) by Nigel Aston, 348 pages James Donahue 12 August 2003 This volume is one of a series entitled "New Approaches to European History." I'm not sure why an approach which takes the overwhelming influence of Christian thought, practice, and conviction seriously is "new." Yet the book does just that for the French Revolutionary period. An excellent study, even if a bit dry and text-bookish. |
Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol, 417 pages Steve Gadd 24 January 1998 Fragmented, but a classic. Jointly read with some school friends, I couldn't find a copy and had to download, print, and bind the text from the Online Books page. |
Myself & I by Norma Johnston, 210 pages Micaela Larkin 07 May 2007 |
After All (1951) by Norman Angell, 355 pages James Donahue 05 September 2006 Angell was an original and combative thinker about international relations and peace between the wars. Quite a life, written with a colorful eye: cowboying in California as a youth, running the largest English-language paper in Paris, advocacy for the League of Nations, buying a farm/island in the English Channel. But the tone of the book ruins much of it -- it is too much of a temptation for an idiosyncratic liberal who has never held power to spend too much time flaunting an "I told you so." |
In The Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made by Norman Cantor, 245 pages Jennifer Dear 22 August 2002 An interesting and somewhat entertaining look at the Middle Ages and the plague. However, surprisingly biased against the Church. |
The Last Knight: The Twilight of the Middle Ages and the Birth of the Modern Era (2004) by Norman F. Cantor, 250 pages Jonathan Misirian 11 June 2007 Cantor’s brilliance lies in his passion for this time period. The retired Yale professor writes with a fluidity and mastery of the subject, that reading his work requires little effort of the reader. Cantor uses John of Gaunt as his foil to explain the transitional period of 14th century England. Most fascinating was Cantor’s discussion of historiography in the final chapter. |
Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man by Norman Mailer, 370 pages Steve Gadd 13 January 1999 Sometimes flattering, sometimes not, an engaging bio of the often profligate young artist. |
The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer, 559 pages Tony Pisarenkov 27 April 2008 The mother of all war novels. Well worth the considerable effort. |