book reviews, comics, faith, history, humor, literature, nature, poetry, politics, science

Best Books I Read in 2016

It’s hard to narrow down a year’s worth of reading to a manageable list of the cream of the crop, but I’ll try. From the books I read in 2016, here are the fifteen books I would most recommend. First are the top three essential books that I would most enthusiastically recommend to anyone. The other twelve were also great, and I recommend them heartily, too. If you want to check out last year’s list, click here. Like last year, I’m putting them in the order that I read them. Unlike last year, I’m including longer excerpts from my reviews to give a fuller recommendation. But if you’d like even more, click on the title of the book for the complete review. Now to the books!

The Top Three

Evicted (Matthew Desmond)

“an essential book. Please, please, read it. Desmond makes the convincing case that there is a serious lack of affordable housing that exacerbates, and is a root cause of, the hardships the poor face. The book follows the lives of a small number of tenants in Milwaukee and their landlords through their evictions and searches for shelter. […] If you have any interest in understanding poverty, please read this book. It is uniformly excellent. I can hardly recommend it enough.”

Kindred (Octavia Butler)

“a visceral novel about slavery in America. It’s 1976, and the narrator Dana, an African American, is somehow transported back to antebellum Maryland where she is confronted with a drowning white child. She travels back and forth, seemingly at whim, until she realizes that she is connected to the child. […] The story takes the jumps in time as a given. One of the strengths of this device is that it puts our modern sensibilities back into the past so that we can better imagine what life was like for slaves and their owners. It’s so easy for me as a white person today to think that I would have of course been an abolitionist if I had lived back then. But what if I had lived in the south where slavery was an institution interwoven into the fabric of everyday life? What if my own family had owned slaves? Would I have really held beliefs that would be to the detriment of my own welfare? It’s a tough question. The book makes us consider that it was the times that made the person. In describing the slave owner, Dana says this, “He wasn’t a monster at all. Just an ordinary man who sometimes did the monstrous things his society said were legal and proper” (134). And she describes many monstrous things that he does. It’s enough to make us weep.”

The Warmth of Other Suns (Isabel Wilkerson)

“an essential work of history. Wilkerson tells the story of the internal migration of millions of black Americans from the rural South to the urban North and West during the 20th century. Actually, she focuses her attention on three individuals as representatives of those millions. […] Throughout these three stories, Wilkerson weaves in all the appropriate context so that we as readers can see the big picture, too. It’s really a marvelous narrative history that illuminates so much of the 20th century and today. I can hardly say enough good about it. Everyone should read it.”

And all the other great ones

Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf)

“It starts with one of the famous lines of literature: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” From there, we follow Clarissa Dalloway (and other characters) through all the preparations for a party that evening at her residence. […] The narration floats and glides from character to character, in and out of minds, seamlessly transitioning from one to the next, like a butterfly flitting here and there. It can be disorienting, but it is also so fluid. We get to experience life through so many eyes and minds. It’s exquisite.”

Our List of Solutions (Carrie Oeding)

“a collection of poetry full of longing and insight and barbecues. One thing I noticed is that this collection works as a cohesive book and not merely a random selection of poems by one author. Characters and objects and themes recur throughout the book, filling out the neighborhood feel to the proceedings.”

Sula (Toni Morrison)

“a really great novel. It tells the story of two friends, Sula and Nel, who grow up in a small, segregated Ohio town. In brief chapters the story flows as the two girls share life together and then separate when Sula leaves town to live freely. Nel stays and settles down until the day Sula comes back and shakes things up again. […] I began the book worried that it would be too “literary,” which by itself is not a fault and which I often love about books. I love many difficult literary books. But I’ve found that it’s harder for me to give those kinds of books the attention and concentration required these last few years now that I have kids. I’m more easily distracted. So I loved that I could follow the story in Sula, and it was still a deep and rich book even if not as difficult as I expected. An impressive achievement.”

The Sixth Extinction (Elizabeth Kolbert)

“There have been five major extinction events in Earth’s history, and we are currently living during the sixth. Previous extinction events have been caused by catastrophes like asteroid impacts. Not so for the sixth extinction, which we are currently witnessing. Human behavior, whether greedy or careless, has caused the extinction of untold numbers of species.”

This One Summer (Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki)

“a touching graphic novel about growing up. It’s the story of Rose, a girl on the cusp of becoming a teenager. Every summer she and her parents travel to a cabin on a lake for vacation. The routines are established: swimming in the lake, bonfires on the beach, reading in her room, and playing with Windy, another girl a year or two younger whose family also comes to the lake every summer. […] The art is a real strength, too. At times cartoony, and other times more detailed and realistic, it’s in total harmony with the story.”

Inspiration and Incarnation (Peter Enns)

“I feel like it is a book that was written for me, a book that helps me make sense of the Bible and modern scholarship at a time when I’m full of questions and doubts. The main thesis of the book is that there is an incarnational analogy between the Bible and Jesus where both are fully divine and fully human. […] I would highly recommend this book to any Christian, especially anyone with an evangelical background who finds themselves asking how modern scholarship on the Old Testament can be reconciled with believing that the Bible is still God’s word.”

The Historian (Elizabeth Kostova)

“a thoroughly engrossing literary thriller. Playing with the historical Vlad the Impaler and Bram Stoker’s character Dracula, the novel follows the investigations of an unnamed narrator, her father, his mentor, and other historians as they try to unravel the mystery of what exactly happened to Dracula and where he is buried. It all starts when the narrator finds a letter in her father’s library, tucked away in a strange book. The letter starts, “My dear and unfortunate successor…” and the book is an ancient volume with totally blank pages except for a woodcut image of a dragon at the very center of the book.”

Does Jesus Really Love Me? (Jeff Chu)

“a fascinating series of snapshots of the American church and how it is currently dealing with LGBTQ issues. Chu spends a year talking to Christians–some gay, some not–all over the country to find out about their experiences. When I first heard about this book, I thought it was going to be mostly a memoir about Chu’s own life. While he does give some autobiography, almost the whole book is given over to other people’s stories. He talks to people with views and experiences all across the spectrum. What I really appreciated is that Chu allows people to talk and give their opinions, really seeing them as individuals, even when he disagrees with them. […] I think any Christian, no matter where they stand on the issue, would profit from hearing the stories of these individuals.”

Thunder & Lightning (Lauren Redniss)

“an extraordinary art book about the science and stories of weather. Melding her skills as an artist with her ability to present research in an interesting way, Redniss has created a unique and fascinating book. Chapters range from the history of lighthouses and fog off Cape Spear in Newfoundland to the shipping of ice from New England to warmer climes all over the world to forest fires in Australia and the American West to the science of weather prognostication especially as practiced by the Old Farmer’s Almanac.”

Love Medicine (Louise Erdrich)

“a beautiful novel spanning several generations of two families on and off the reservation in North Dakota. Through a series of interconnected stories that span at least 50 years, Erdrich introduces the reader to marvelous characters who remain alive long after closing the book.”

The Wordy Shipmates (Sarah Vowell)

“a terrifically fun history lesson on Puritan New England. While not a historian, Vowell has done the research in primary documents to get the story right. […] She loves America and its history, but she’s also willing to looks at its faults and how it has failed to live up to its ideals. I would highly recommend this take on the Puritans. It’s made me want to read more on them in a way no other previous encounter in a history textbook has.”

Julio’s Day (Gilbert Hernandez)

“a fascinating look at one man’s life and the life of a century in a graphic novel that is exactly 100 pages long. Julio himself lives to be 100, born in 1900 and dying in 2000. The story of the century is also there, but the focus is on Julio and his family and friends.”

I mentioned in my last set of reviews for 2016 that I don’t plan on doing my monthly roundup of mini book reviews anymore. However, I’ll still do a best books of the year feature of the books I liked and would most recommend. I’m already working on that list. I hope I find as many good ones as this year.

book reviews, comics, faith, history, nature, parenting, politics, science

Selected Book Reviews, October – December 2016

This batch of book reviews round out last year’s reading. I got behind in writing them for reasons that I can’t even recall, but it nagged at me that I hadn’t finished them. These will probably be the last set of book reviews I do in this format. In the future, I may do a deep dive into a particularly insightful or powerful book. Or I may do a roundup of a few books on one topic. I’m not entirely sure yet. But I’m not planning on doing monthly reviews anymore. However, I think I’ll still make a list of the best books I read in a given year to recommend. Speaking of which, I’ll put up a year in review of the best books I read in 2016 shortly.

Broken Words: The Abuse of Science and Faith in American Politics by Jonathan Dudley is a careful critique of evangelicalism by someone who grew up in that world. It reads as a succinct summary of some of my own changes in thinking on these topics. Dudley’s book can be summarized well with two quotes. First, his thesis: “Evangelicalism has defined itself by weakly supported boundary markers, which are justified by a flawed understanding of biblical interpretation and maintained by suppressing those who disagree” (24). The four boundary markers dealt with in the book are abortion, homosexuality, environmentalism, and evolution. Basically the hot button topics in the culture wars. If one takes the wrong view on any of these issues, one cannot be in the evangelical club anymore. The second quote concerns the justification from the Bible part of the thesis: “Biases and prior beliefs are not something that get in the way of interpretation, something that must be brushed aside; rather, biases and prior beliefs are behind every interpretation” (108-9). Everyone approaches the Bible with prior beliefs and biases. Even the straightforward plain interpretation that we think is objective is certainly a matter of the lens we use when we read. An easy example from the book is that Christians were not all that concerned when Darwin first published his theory of evolution in 1859. It wasn’t until decades later that fundamentalists and evangelicals felt that they had to reject evolution and believe in a young earth. Christians approached the same text with different prior beliefs at different points in time and came to vastly different conclusions. Besides this major point about interpretation, Dudley also wants to make a point about the Christian use of science. He notes how Christian pro-lifers claim that science shows that a fetus is a person from the moment of conception (an argument Dudley doesn’t accept). But when it comes to other matters of science, such as the widespread scientific evidence for evolution or global warming, evangelical Christians often find themselves dismissing science. Evangelicals only like science when it seemingly agrees with their political beliefs. Dudley grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, home to several evangelical colleges and publishing houses. He attended Calvin College, then studied religion at seminary, and then began medical school, while finishing this book. I don’t have the same educational path, but I can relate to his intellectual and faith journey and some of his conclusions. I would definitely recommend this book.

squirrel-girl

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl Vol. 1: Squirrel Power by Ryan North and Erica Henderson is an incredibly fun comic book. It’s light-hearted and funny. I find it hard to decide which I like more, the writing or the artwork. North has fun with Doreen Green and her supporting cast of friends and squirrels, as well as the villains, but he gives them all a lot of heart and personality. Henderson does a great job balancing cartoony action and characters, but never exploits or sexualizes the characters, a problem all too rampant in comics. Doreen looks like the college student she is, not an unrealistic supermodel in a swimsuit trying to fight crime. She’s someone I’d want to be friends with if I had a friend who could talk to squirrels. She eats nuts and kicks butts. Even if you think you don’t like superhero comics, you might like this one. I’m really looking forward to reading more of this series.

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson is an essential work of history. Wilkerson tells the story of the internal migration of millions of black Americans from the rural South to the urban North and West during the 20^th century. Actually, she focuses her attention on three individuals as representatives of those millions. Through the story of Ida Mae we learn how tenuous was the position of sharecroppers in Mississippi, how hard the work was picking cotton and how little they got paid, if at all. So much depended on the whims of the white landowners. After Ida Mae’s husband’s cousin Joe Lee, who lived a few shacks down from them, was falsely accused of stealing turkeys and subsequently half beaten to death, Ida Mae and her family packed up and left for Milwaukee, ending up on the South Side of Chicago before long. There they face housing discrimination; all the black families moving in are forced into strict geographical boundaries, and any time they try to move into a new neighborhood, the white neighbors first try to fight their arrival, and if that failed then they all moved out. If you want to know why cities are like they are, this book is illuminating. Even the world famous gospel singer Mahalia Jackson faced housing discrimination when she bought a house in a nice neighborhood. She received death threats in the middle of the night before she moved in, and after she did, bullets shattered some of her windows. Police had to keep guard around her house for nearly a year to prevent violence. No one was immune from discrimination. Despite the hardships in the North, Ida Mae experienced some measure of true freedom. She was able to vote for the first time. The family was eventually able to buy a house, but soon after they did, the whites in the neighborhood took flight. The two other individuals the book focuses on, Dr. Robert Foster and George Starling, provide more glimpses into life in the Jim Crow South and how they tried to make a better life in L.A. and New York, respectively. Dr. Foster left a life in rural Louisiana where the highest he could have risen was to a country doctor making house calls to black families with no admitting privileges at the local hospital. He wanted fame and fortune and a good life. George Starling picked fruit in the groves of Florida, chafing at the unfair labor practices, before he headed North. He worked for the railroad on a line that traveled up and down the east coast, so he got to see the changes from North to South for decades. Throughout these three stories, Wilkerson weaves in all the appropriate context so that we as readers can see the big picture, too. It’s really a marvelous narrative history that illuminates so much of the 20^th century and today. I can hardly say enough good about it. Everyone should read it.

Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change by Elizabeth Kolbert is a short and excellent primer on climate change (I read it in a day). The book is based on a series of articles Kolbert wrote for The New Yorker magazine, where she is a staff writer, in order “to convey, as vividly as possible, the reality of global warming” (2). By traveling to locations across the globe, Kolbert tells how things are changing: glaciers are shrinking, permafrost is melting, oceans are warming and becoming more acidic, animal migrations are shifting towards the warming poles, and plants are earlier than usual. A small island community in Alaska has to move because of the rising ocean level. While telling the stories of various changes worldwide, Kolbert also explains the science to a lay audience without getting too technical. The only downside to this well written little book is that it is already a bit out of date. It was published in 2006, but since then we have had still warmer years, and the trend continues upward. Despite that one drawback, I would highly recommend it. [Note: there is a newer revised and expanded edition, so forget what I said. Read that one instead.]

The Everyday Parenting Toolkit by Alan E. Kazdin with Carlo Rotella is a very helpful book for parents. Kazdin draws on the available social science on children’s behavior and his experience working at the Yale Parenting Center to give useful guidelines for how to change problematic behavior in kids. The key is the focus on behavior. Parents, me included, want our kids to be kind and generous, resilient and motivated, and not selfish jerks. But how do these qualities get cultivated? It starts with behavior. Kazdin explains his ABC method, which is backed up by research and with examples of how it works. He describes his techniques as tools in the toolbox. They are adaptable depending on the situation; some will be used more than others. The first thing to think about when considering children’s behavior is the Antecedent of the behavior. How can parents set up the situation for the behavior they wish to see? The goal is to make the choice for the child as likely as possible. Asking in a calm voice one time helps. Giving a choice also helps. Children like to have at least a small measure of autonomy. The next consideration is the Behavior itself. Sometimes this is clear like when I want my kids to clear their places by putting their dishes into the sink after a meal or brush their teeth before bed. But often I want them to stop an irritating or dangerous behavior. It’s not very effective to merely say don’t do that. What kids need is positive reinforcement for the behavior I do want to see. In order to make that happen, I have to think of the positive opposite of undesirable behavior. This isn’t always easy to do, but it’s crucial. So for example, my 3 year old throws screaming tantrums sometimes. I can’t change the fact that he gets upset by things, but I do want him to deal with his upset feelings with a different strategy than by screaming. So I will praise him for any approximation that gets us closer to the desired behavior. This is called shaping the behavior. If he never has done the desired behavior, then we can practice a simulation so he can try to do it when he does actually get upset. The third part is the area of Consequences, which is where a lot of people want to start. For Kazdin, consequences are positive reinforcement for the desired behavior. Mostly this means praise from parents that is immediate, effusive, and specific, with some sort of affection added. Sometimes other methods can help, too, like a point chart, but praise from parents is the best reinforcer. Kazdin has a lot more to explain and tons of examples (as well as another book for the tough cases of especially defiant children), but this is the outline. Some of it is definitely counter-intuitive. But I can see that barking at my children to stop doing something rarely works and it often escalates. When I’ve been able to implement the Kazdin ABCs I’ve had much more success in changing unwanted behavior. I’d really recommend this to any and all parents.

My Beloved World by Sonia Sotomayor is a revealing and instructive memoir from one of our Supreme Court Justices. She details her life with precision and insight up until her appointment as a District Court judge in 1992; the rest of her life and career will presumably have to wait until her retirement. I was especially interested in finding out more about her life because my kids attend a Spanish immersion elementary school named after her. There are many interesting details to her early life growing up poor in a housing project in the Bronx. Her alcoholic father died when she was young, so she and her brother had to assume a lot of responsibility in their household with only their mother to raise them. Especially humanizing is her diagnosis of type 1 diabetes at age seven that she has had to manage for the rest of her life. That diagnosis led her to give up dreams of growing up and becoming a detective and instead focus on training to be a lawyer. She knew from an early age what she wanted to do in life. One of the overriding themes of her memoir is that of empathy. In a pivotal passage, Sotomayor explains how she understood the importance of empathy through two events and by reading Lord of the Flies. In the classic book, a group of boys have to fend for themselves on an island by themselves. Their survival is precarious, and they must work together in order to make it through. Sotomayor notices the same precariousness in her own life. She notices a police officer extorting a street fruit vendor for two bags of fruit. She also witnesses her own aunt making prank calls to random women, pretending that she was having affairs with their husbands. Putting it all together, she declares, “I was fifteen years old when I understood how it is that things break down: people can’t imagine someone else’s point of view” (123). Her story continues as she details how hard she worked to make it through Princeton and Yale Law School, despite “limits of class and cultural background” (171). It’s an inspiring book, and she doesn’t refrain from talking about mistakes she has made such as her brief marriage to her high school sweetheart. This is a memoir I’d recommend reading.

book reviews, comics, history, literature, politics

Book Reviews, August 2016

The batch of book reviews for August is another hodge podge of comics and American history. Much like I did for a review last year (Ari Berman’s study of the Voting Rights Act), one of the reviews is twice as long as usual in order to cover the topic of the Second Amendment more thoroughly.

Batman: Contagion by various writers (including Doug Moench, Chuck Dixon, Dennis O’Neil, Alan Grant, and even a short chapter by Garth Ennis) and artists (including Kelley Jones and Mike Wieringo, among others) is a crossover event comic that under-delivers on a promising premise. What if an ebola-like virus struck Gotham? How would Batman save the city? If any peril merited the mind of the world’s greatest detective, this would be it. Unfortunately, it mostly involves our heroes punching bad guys while numerous civilians we’ve never met before succumb to the deadly virus. As a big crossover event, it means Batman gets help from Robin, Catwoman, Azrael, Oracle, Nightwing, and Huntress in order to save the city. Though one of the heroes contracts the virus, we as readers never doubt the cure will arrive in time. The whole exercise feels nothing like a real outbreak of a deadly pathogen. The artwork is mostly pedestrian or outright bad, with the exception of Kelley Jones’s exaggerated dark and brooding version of Batman. The original comics came out in 1996, a year after Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone and the film Outbreak. If you want an interesting story about ebola, try one of those.

The Second Amendment: A Biography by Michael Waldman is an important book that looks at two important things regarding the Constitution. First, it is a history of how the Second Amendment has been interpreted. Second, and perhaps more importantly, it wrestles with how to interpret the Constitution today, showing how the theory of originalism does not work as a coherent theory of interpretation. So first the history of the amendment. The Second Amendment is notoriously difficult to interpret because it has such a strange grammatical structure: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Waldman starts with a lesson about colonial America and the history of militias versus standing armies. It is this context that informs the writing of the Second Amendment. During the Constitutional Convention, there was no debate about an individual right to “private gun ownership” or that it needed to be protected in a bill of rights. Later, during the House debate on the Bill of Rights, “None mentioned a private right to bear arms for self-defense, hunting, or for any purpose other than joining a militia” (55-6). In the literature of the time, especially political writings and those of the founders, almost every use of the phrase “bear arms” had a military context. It was the duty of every adult male in the community to join the militia and bring his own gun when training or when mustered for duty. The courts of the early era mostly all understood the right espoused in the Second Amendment as a collective right so that there could be a local militia. Waldman then proceeds to give a history of the NRA, showing how it evolved from a marksmanship and recreational organization to the militant lobbying group it has become today. In 1958, their Washington headquarters had the sign, “FIREARMS SAFETY EDUCATION, MARKSMANSHIP TRAINING, SHOOTING FOR RECREATION.” By contrast, their new headquarters in the 1990s had an edited version of the Second Amendment which omitted the first half about militias. The key moment in between these two mottoes happened in the late 70s when new leadership ousted the old in what was called the “Revolt at Cincinnati,” and the group became much more political. This change in the NRA coincided with a new interpretation of the Second Amendment. From 1888 to 1960, “every single [law review] article concluded the Second Amendment did not guarantee an individual right” (97). In the next 20 years, however, articles were evenly split, 27 apiece, for an individual right, but 60% of those for an individual right “were written by lawyers who had been directly employed by or represented the NRA or other gun rights organizations” (98). It should also be pointed out that law review articles are not peer reviewed. These articles cited each other and found tenuous arguments and often misunderstood or taken out of context quotes to bolster their claims. The NRA itself is not above trying to misconstrue the founders when it suits their purpose. For instance, a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to George Washington contained the quote “One loves to possess arms, though they hope never to have occasion for them.” From context, it is clear that Jefferson is not speaking of firearms at all, but rather is asking for some letters back so that he can prepare rebuttals in his capacity as Secretary of State (See the quote at the link for the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action site and this explanation of the Jefferson letter). This sea change in interpretation of the amendment culminated in the 2008 Supreme Court decision District of Columbia v. Heller which finally established a federal individual right to own a gun. Two years later, in McDonald v. Chicago, the right was incorporated to the states, thus overturning Chicago’s handgun restrictions. The late Antonin Scalia, a firm believer in originalism when it comes to interpreting the Constitution, wrote the Heller majority opinion. This is notable because the decision picks and chooses from the original context of the writing of the amendment, avoiding much of the history and context of the colonial militias. Then, later it moderates somewhat by mentioning a list of exceptions to the absolute individual right to a gun (i.e. rights of felons and the mentally ill, carrying firearms into schools and government buildings, and allowing for conditions and qualifications for commercial sales), none of which have an originalist explanation. They are clearly in the opinion in order to secure the swing vote so that it could pass 5-4. The decision is not in the least conservative, either, as it overturns over 200 years of precedent. It is the very definition of an activist judiciary to find a new “true” meaning of the amendment that the courts had never before found. This inquiry into the change in interpretation of the Second Amendment thus serves as a good case study for why originalism does not work as an interpretive framework for the Constitution. The first question is whose intention counts when trying to figure out what part of the Constitution means? Do we side with those drafting the document (they certainly didn’t all agree; that’s why they debated it), or the new Congress, or the ratifiers in the states? Perhaps more to the point, a theory that rests on finding an original meaning (if one can be found) does not keep pace with social progress. How could the founders, smart as they were, consider the principles that would shape our current more technological, globally connected, era? Each generation reads and interprets the document differently, applying it to the contemporary dilemmas. Waldman has done a superb job explaining the history of a thorny debate. I highly recommend anyone interested in the Second Amendment to read it.

The Wicked and the Divine Vol. 1: The Faust Act by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie is a promising start to a comics series. It begins with a solid premise: every 90 years, gods return to earth as popular icons, but it doesn’t last. They die within two years. Much like any pantheon, the gods fight amongst themselves, while being adored and misunderstood by humans. This particular go-around, the gods are popstars. The series plays with notions of celebrity and fandom in interesting and playful ways. It’s still early, but I’d recommend giving it a try. [After reading Vol. 2: Fandemonium, I would definitely recommend the series.]

The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell is a terrifically fun history lesson on Puritan New England. While not a historian, Vowell has done the research in primary documents to get the story right. She focuses on the Massachusetts Bay Colony rather than the earlier Plymouth of Mayflower fame. The Bay Colony features interesting figures like John Winthrop, John Cotton, Roger Williams, and Anne Hutchinson. She gives the necessary background for why the Puritans were leaving England in the first place, leading to Winthrop’s sermon “A Model of Christian Charity.” The sermon is famous for calling the Massachusetts colony “a city on a hill,” an example for the world, but also the same watchfulness was a warning to live up to their ideals. The colony had famous religious freedom battles where first Roger Williams and later Anne Hutchinson were banished. Williams sets up the colony in Rhode Island known for its religious tolerance, which paves the way for the First Amendment’s protections more than a century later. But it’s not all religious squabbles in the early colony, there are also skirmishes with, and the slaughter of the Native population (after smallpox had already ravaged them). Particularly horrifying is the description of the Mystic Fort Massacre. A group of allied colonists and Narragansett and Mohegan warriors surrounded the Pequot fort and set fire to their homes, shooting anyone who tried to escape the walls. I was deeply disturbed to find that the destruction of the Natives was immediate and unrelenting. For the past few years, ever since I knew I would be living in South Dakota, I’ve been reading and learning about the decimation of the people who lived on the Plains. But that’s not where it started. It goes back to every first encounter with Europeans, including the Puritans of New England. While that is certainly a hugely depressing point in the book, much of the rest of it is made fun by Vowell’s sharp wit and humor. As a side note, I would point out that Vowell makes no secret that she is politically liberal, but that she is also a patriot (an earlier book of hers is called The Partly Cloudy Patriot, an apt self description). She spends time comparing the Puritan conception of what “a city on a hill” meant to them to how Reagan repurposed it during his presidency. She loves America and its history, but she’s also willing to looks at its faults and how it has failed to live up to its ideals. I would highly recommend this take on the Puritans. It’s made me want to read more on them in a way no other previous encounter in a history textbook has.

Before the Fall by Noah Hawley is a decent, if not great, thriller. I picked up the novel because Hawley is the showrunner for the TV series Fargo, which has had two great seasons so far. I enjoyed the book, but I expected more. The story revolves around a plane crash, what led up to it, and its aftermath. The mystery is the unfolding of how the plane came down on the short flight from Martha’s Vineyard to New York. Hawley spends time with each of the characters on the private jet, the pilots, flight attendant, the banker and his wife, the cable news executive and his family, and an artist. My main problem with the novel is that there are a couple of villains in the book and, despite his attempt to humanize them, they come across as flat characters to me. In fact, the more I thought about them afterwards, the less I liked the book overall, even though I had enjoyed reading it. This shortcoming left a sour taste and is seriously affecting my feelings for the book. The book wrestles with the idea of our constant bombardment of infotainment from cable news and the need for narratives to fit every news story whether we have the all the facts or not. It would be even more interesting if the novel itself didn’t fall prey to its own narratives that forced the villainous characters to fit certain roles. I have to say I ended up disappointed with this book and wouldn’t recommend it.

book reviews, comics, history, literature, nature, science

Book Reviews, June 2016

June was a good month of reading. I read four fantastic and varied books. I’d recommend all of them highly! Check them out!

thunder and lightning image

Thunder & Lightning: Weather Past, Present, Future by Lauren Redniss is an extraordinary art book about the science and stories of weather. Melding her skills as an artist with her ability to present research in an interesting way, Redniss has created a unique and fascinating book. Chapters range from the history of lighthouses and fog off Cape Spear in Newfoundland to the shipping of ice from New England to warmer climes all over the world to forest fires in Australia and the American West to the science of weather prognostication especially as practiced by the Old Farmer’s Almanac. Redniss does it all: she created her own font for the text. The prints that accompanied the stories and interviews were made either by copper plate photogravure or photopolymer process. The art is impressive and draws attention before even reading the words. It’s hard to categorize a book as beautiful and interesting as this one. It’s not merely a science book, though it is that, too. In the chapter on wind, there’s the story of Diana Nyad, an endurance swimmer attempting to swim from Cuba to Florida but needing a period with little wind so the waves wouldn’t be too large. Interspersed in her story are pages with types of winds or mythology and an interlude on the attempt to introduce wind at Mecca during the hajj when millions of Muslims gather for pilgrimage because the site has been so built up to accommodate all of the visitors and cuts off the natural flow of wind. It’s a one of a kind book. I’d highly recommend it.

Kindred by Octavia E. Butler is a visceral novel about slavery in America. It’s 1976, and the narrator Dana, an African American, is somehow transported back to antebellum Maryland where she is confronted with a drowning white child. She travels back and forth, seemingly at whim, until she realizes that she is connected to the child. It’s dangerous for her when she is in 1800s, even though she is herself not a slave, she has no rights that anyone needs to uphold. Her education and knowledge of history is a two-edged sword: sometimes she can use it to her advantage and other times it makes the whites of the time, and the slaves too, fearful of her. While it is a science fiction story because of the time travel element, it doesn’t focus on the particulars of how it is happening. The story takes the jumps in time as a given. One of the strengths of this device is that it puts our modern sensibilities back into the past so that we can better imagine what life was like for slaves and their owners. It’s so easy for me as a white person today to think that I would have of course been an abolitionist if I had lived back then. But what if I had lived in the south where slavery was an institution interwoven into the fabric of everyday life? What if my own family had owned slaves? Would I have really held beliefs that would be to the detriment of my own welfare? It’s a tough question. The book makes us consider that it was the times that made the person. In describing the slave owner, Dana says this, “He wasn’t a monster at all. Just an ordinary man who sometimes did the monstrous things his society said were legal and proper” (134). And she describes many monstrous things that he does. It’s enough to make us weep. It’s an extremely powerful book and I highly recommend it.

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The Sandman: Overture, written by Neil Gaiman with art by J.H. Williams III, is a lovely prequel to an essential comics story. First, let me say, that prequels are tricky and often doomed to fail. When a story begins in the middle of events, it can be difficult to go back and tell the earlier backstory in a compelling way. But Gaiman has done it beautifully. When the original Sandman story began, he is imprisoned by a secret society for 72 years after being weakened by some adventure. Overture tells the story of that adventure when Morpheus (the embodiment of Dream) travels across the universe in order to save it from destruction that he himself inadvertently caused. Throughout the story, Gaiman weaves elements and characters from the original story in new and interesting ways that add to the mythos instead of merely explaining origins or anything mundane as that. I was enjoying the story for the first few issues, happy to be back in the world of Sandman, but I wasn’t astounded either. But upon finishing it, I can say that Gaiman sticks the landing and elevates the entire story, making it a truly worthy prequel. Though it takes place chronologically before the main Sandman story, I think it still best to read it afterwards. This was a deluxe edition, so it included a lot of supplementary material in the back. Remarkably, I found it pretty illuminating, at least more than I usually do with material like this. The artist, colorist, and letterer all explain their craft and artistic decision making process in a way that helped me understand better the collaborative process of making a comic. J.H. Williams III’s artwork in particular is gorgeous and makes the book stunning. If you like Sandman, definitely check this out. If you haven’t read the original ten collected volumes of Sandman, get on it!

Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich is a beautiful novel spanning several generations of two families on and off the reservation in North Dakota. Through a series of interconnected stories that span at least 50 years, Erdrich introduces the reader to marvelous characters who remain alive long after closing the book. A few of the stories are told by a third person narrator, but most of them are narrated by the characters themselves, so we get to see how they see events, often the same events from multiple perspectives. It’s a wonderful way to show the intricate nature of perspective. One of the voices is Lipsha Morrissey, a young boy taken in by the Kashpaws, possibly his relatives, though the mystery of his ancestry is one that he tries to untangle. His is a humorous and earnest voice. He describes another woman who his grandfather had a love affair with: “There was this one time that Lulu Lamartine’s little blue tweety bird, a paraclete, I guess you’d call it, flown up inside her dress and got lost within there” (243). The unwitting joke is that instead of naming the bird he has used the Greek word for advocate, usually meaning the Holy Spirit in Christian theology. Earlier in his story, he had described his grandmother’s memory as “like them video games that don’t forget your score. One reason she remembers so many details about the trouble I gave her in early life is so she can flash back her total when she needs to” (240). Lipsha is only one of the many fully realized people that we empathize with and come to understand. Many others love, grieve, connive, cope, and live. It’s a world of characters that Erdrich returned to for a number of other books, but this is the first. In fact, it’s her first novel, which is amazing. It’s such a great book. I read the 1993 expanded edition, which includes more stories than either the 1984 original or the more recent 2009 revision. But it’s hard to see how one can go wrong with any version of the book (one of the stories taken out of the 2009 version appears in the backmatter, so it isn’t wholly lost).

book reviews, comics, faith, literature, politics, psychology

Book Reviews, May 2016

In May I read two great books on serious questions about America today that I would recommend heartily, one on what it means to be gay and Christian in America, and the other on poverty and the crisis of affordable housing in this country. There are two reviews for comic books, too, but only one of them is worth your time.

Does Jesus Really Love Me?: A Gay Christian’s Pilgrimage in Search of God in America by Jeff Chu is a fascinating series of snapshots of the American church and how it is currently dealing with LGBTQ issues. Chu spends a year talking to Christians–some gay, some not–all over the country to find out about their experiences. When I first heard about this book, I thought it was going to be mostly a memoir about Chu’s own life. While he does give some autobiography, almost the whole book is given over to other people’s stories. He talks to people with views and experiences all across the spectrum. What I really appreciated is that Chu allows people to talk and give their opinions, really seeing them as individuals, even when he disagrees with them. He would then tell his own thoughts, but it was clear who thought what. He even managed to do this when talking to Fred Phelps, the late pastor of Westboro Baptist Church, in a tense conversation (the book was published in 2013, a year before Phelps’s death). Chu also spends time with those who have lost faith because of the way the church treated them, and with people in ex-gay ministries like Exodus International, and with gay Christians trying to remain celibate, and with those who have reconciled their sexuality with their faith. He talks to some who are well known like Ted Haggard, the disgraced pastor, Jennifer Knapp, the one-time star in Contemporary Christian Music, and Justin Lee, the founder of the Gay Christian Network. But he mostly talks with everyday ordinary people who are trying to figure out their faith and sexuality. A recurring element throughout the book is the ongoing story of a young man who is struggling to come out to his conservative family. It all adds up to a very powerful book. I think any Christian, no matter where they stand on the issue, would profit from hearing the stories of these individuals.

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Ocean/Orbiter: The Deluxe Edition, written by Warren Ellis with art by Chris Sprouse and Colleen Doran, is a collection of two stories about human space flight. Though unrelated, both stories are science fiction about technologies beyond what we currently have. In Ocean, a global research team attempts to figure out what is below the ice on Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, before a technology corporation (a thinly veiled Microsoft stand in; their operating system is called Doors instead of Windows). The answer threatens the fate of humanity. The second story involves a space shuttle that disappeared for ten years and then suddenly returns to Earth modified by unknown forces. Again, the answers to what happened to the shuttle affect the fate of humanity. The concepts behind both stories are interesting to a point, but they were very idea focused and not invested nearly as much in character. I don’t regret reading the book, but I don’t feel compelled to recommend it to anyone unless they’re craving mysterious space adventure light reading.

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The One Trick Rip-Off + Deep Cuts by Paul Pope is a grab bag of early formative comics by an extremely talented artist. Pope’s art is full of action and expressive characters both heavily influenced by Japanese manga. The art is not a rip-off, though, but a blend of styles that becomes something new and uniquely his. The title story fits nicely in the crime genre, but with a bit of a supernatural twist. Rival gangs such as the Paid-in-Spades and the Do Nothings compete in the city, but individuals in the One Tricks gang each have a special ability to control others with their speech (much like Kilgrave in Jessica Jones). The protagonist of the story is Tubby, a member of the One Tricks, and his girlfriend Vim. They plan a heist of their own gang’s stash so they can get out of the city, but naturally it all goes wrong as these things tend to do. The other stories in the collection range from poems put into comics to a short story about an eating contest to a pair of wordless stories about chance encounters. A particular standout is a short piece about a young woman waiting for her artist boyfriend to pick her up after work late at night. He says he’ll be right there, but then gets caught up in his work again and arrives later than he said, leading to her having to fend off sexual violence from strangers while she waits and waits. It does a good job of perspective taking since most everything else in the collection is about young males and their viewpoint. Overall, it’s a good read for those who like crime fiction or good art.

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond is an essential book. Please, please, read it (Read an excerpt here). Desmond makes the convincing case that there is a serious lack of affordable housing that exacerbates, and is a root cause of, the hardships the poor face. The book follows the lives of a small number of tenants in Milwaukee and their landlords through their evictions and searches for shelter. We meet Arleen and her two boys Jori and Jafaris (all the names have been changed) who get evicted at Christmas time after spending money on a funeral for Arleen’s sister instead of rent. We meet Scott, a nurse who lost his license after he suffered a back injury and got hooked on painkillers and can’t keep up with rent because of his addiction. We meet Lamar, a man with no legs, who tried to make up for back rent by helping paint the upstairs apartment, all to no avail after the house burned down later. Their stories are gripping and heartbreaking. And we meet their landlords Tobin and Sherrena, the former the owner of a rundown trailer park and the latter an enterprising owner of many dilapidated yet lucrative properties in the city leading her to proclaim that “the ‘hood is good.” For the most part, their stories are presented in a straightforward manner based on first hand observations and recordings Desmond took while spending time with the people. Occasionally he would add a beautiful description that made it more novelistic: “[she would] sit on a windowsill and light a cigarette, its smoke coming alive in the breeze like a raging spirit that had only seconds to live” (289). When appropriate during the narratives, Desmond explains aspects of the housing crisis in cities like Milwaukee, but he leaves most of the research, his own and others’, in the 60 pages of endnotes (which are worth reading, too). For example, “For many landlords, it was cheaper to deal with the expense of eviction than to maintain their properties” (75), and that over a period of two years, half of renters in Milwaukee “experienced a serious and lasting housing problem” (76). Problems with housing ripple outwards, too, leading to health and psychological problems. For instance, if the tenants at a property called 911 too frequently (3 times per month) the police could cite the landlord for a nuisance violation. Landlords would likely evict renters who called 911 too much, thus leading to an incentive for renters not to call, which is of course a problem if there are genuine reasons like domestic abuse to get police involved. Milwaukee recently changed the nuisance law to make an exception for abuse, but the incentives not to call remain for most situations. So many poor people live in substandard housing in bad situations, but then they don’t even receive the help that they are entitled to because the programs are underfunded. Sixty seven percent of poor people who rent received absolutely nothing from the federal government for housing assistance in 2013. It’s shameful. At the end, Desmond offers two solutions that could begin to ameliorate the sad state of affairs in housing. The first is to guarantee legal representation for those in eviction court, just like is done for criminal defendants. Without a proper defense, most renters lose in court against their landlords, if they even show up to court at all. But more fundamentally, housing should be a basic right for everyone. One way to accomplish this would be to give everyone under a certain income a universal housing voucher that guarantees that no more than 30% of their income goes towards housing costs. Such a program would not be cheap, but is certainly achievable if it were made a priority. For example, the cost of the mortgage interest deduction to the federal government alone would be able to pay for the program. For a country that calls itself a Christian nation, our priorities are certainly skewed. If you have any interest in understanding poverty, please read this book. It is uniformly excellent. I can hardly recommend it enough.

book reviews, comics, history, literature, nature, science

Book Reviews, April 2016

I bought a stack of books at the annual library sale and got started on reading some of them in April. I couldn’t help rereading an old favorite in the hopes that I would find it just as enthralling again. (Spoiler alert: I did.) I also read another funny science book by Mary Roach and a more serious picture book of extinct species. To round out the month, I read a superhero origin story and a Newbery Honor winning kids’ classic.

Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife by Mary Roach is a funny and interesting book on what happens after we die. Years ago I read and enjoyed her first book Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, but I hesitated in reading the follow-up on the afterlife because I wasn’t all that interested in the topic, or at least what I had assumed would be her take on it. I needn’t have worried. Roach makes almost anything interesting with her lively and humorous writing. I rediscovered her last year when I read her book on the digestive system, and I then decided that I would happily read any of her books. I especially liked the early chapter on souls and the hunt for them in the body. I also learned about the dubious study that supposedly found that the soul weighs 21 grams. There were many other good bits: the hunt for reincarnated souls, testing the effectiveness of mediums, and the search for ghosts. One particular story involved a farmer, with the help of his father’s ghost, finding a new will that changed the entire family’s inheritance. I won’t give away what Roach’s investigation into the matter finds. Overall it was a very enjoyable read, but I would probably recommend one of Roach’s other books first.

The Shadow Hero, written by Gene Luen Yang and illustrated by Sonny Liew, is a fun origin story about a mysterious and short-lived Golden Age superhero named the Green Turtle. As explained in an afterword, the original Green Turtle only lasted five issues in 1944. He fought in China against the Japanese, but curiously it wasn’t ever known if he himself was Chinese or not (rumor was that his creator Chu Hing wanted him to be Chinese). His face was never shown; he was mostly drawn from the back or when he was in profile or was facing the reader, he had his face covered in some way (i.e. with his arm or obscured by another character). In fact, the publisher had him colored a garish pink, possibly to accentuate his Caucasian skin as a Chinese superhero might not sell. Another recurring element to those stories was that Green Turtle was always on the verge of telling Burma Boy, his sidekick, his secret origins, but never gets around to it as he is always interrupted. So in steps Yang, 70 years later, to write an origin for Green Turtle, possibly the first Asian American superhero. The story takes place in Chinatown in a stand in for the Bay area, where gangs thrive. Young Hank helps his father tend the grocery store while his mother wishes better things for all of them. After she is saved by a superhero, she pushes Hank to become a superhero, too, even though he doesn’t have superpowers. It’s a fun tale about identity and heritage that plays on many of the conventions of the superhero origin. A brief warning for younger readers: the story includes stereotyped language about Asian Americans to place it into historical context. It doesn’t condone the language, but rather shows how the stereotypes are wrong. If you like superhero origin stories, definitely check this one out.

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova is a thoroughly engrossing literary thriller. Playing with the historical Vlad the Impaler and Bram Stoker’s character Dracula, the novel follows the investigations of an unnamed narrator, her father, his mentor, and other historians as they try to unravel the mystery of what exactly happened to Dracula and where he is buried. It all starts when the narrator finds a letter in her father’s library, tucked away in a strange book. The letter starts, “My dear and unfortunate successor…” and the book is an ancient volume with totally blank pages except for a woodcut image of a dragon at the very center of the book. I think I loved this book because much of the action takes place in libraries as the characters conduct research with old documents and letters. Much of the story is related in letters, an obvious homage to Bram Stoker’s famous novel. It’s not a particularly deep novel, and the characters are not fully formed, but for a suspenseful thriller, I can hardly imagine a more successful novel. I read the book over ten years ago when it first came out and I really liked it then. I forgot much of the action since then, so I picked it up again hoping to have a similar experience. Part of me worried it wouldn’t hold up. I needn’t have fretted. I loved it all over again.

A Gap in Nature: Discovering the World’s Extinct Animals with text by Tim Flannery and illustrations by Peter Schouten is a sobering look at the effects of humanity on the animal kingdom. The book includes 103 species (mammal, bird, or reptile) that have gone extinct since the year 1500, most of them in the past 150 years. Peter Schouten’s illustrations are beautiful and naturalistic. I was reminded of the Audubon calendars we had in our house growing up. It was rather haunting to see animal after animal that is gone forever. Some of the species are familiar, even famous for their extinction: the gigantic moas of New Zealand, the Dodo of Mauritius, the Great Auk in the North Atlantic, the Passenger Pigeon of North America, and the Thylacine (aka the Tasmanian Tiger). I didn’t know about Steller’s Sea Cow, a gigantic relative of dugongs and manatees. It was the largest mammal (besides whales) to live in modern times, at up to 30 feet long and weighing approximately 10 tons. They were all hunted until there were none left by 1768. The text by Tim Flannery, an introduction and commentary on each species to accompany the artwork, is informative on what was known about each species and its demise. Sometimes a bird would be hunted for food by humans. Such was the fate of the Rail (a kind of bird) on Wake Island during World War II—during hostilities between the Japanese and American forces, the Japanese soldiers faced starvation and ate the birds to survive. More often the reason for extinction was the introduction of some other invasive species that disrupted the life cycle. Black rats might eat the eggs, for example, of some other island bird. The rats came to shore from aboard the ships that explored the South Pacific and other faraway once diverse habitats. Sometimes people destroyed the habitat for these animals, usually for agricultural reasons. Flannery also notes that a few species went extinct when naturalists gathered the last few remaining specimens for natural history museums. Our knowledge of the species came at the expense of their extinction, a truly bittersweet result. This book is a good complement to Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction, showing example after example of humanity’s devastation of the natural world.

The Egypt Game by Zilpha Keatley Snyder is another classic of kids’ lit that I managed to miss when I was growing up. I thought maybe I had read it because I have some vague memory of a book I randomly picked up at the library that had to do with kids and some Egyptian mystery, but then I forgot the title and could never find the book again when I went to look for it. I don’t think it was the same book, but regardless, The Egypt Game is a good book for elementary age kids to read. It has a lot to say about friendships, imagination, and figuring out how to deal with disappointment. The initial main characters are April and Melanie. April has recently moved in with her grandmother, who herself has recently moved into a new two bedroom apartment so she would have enough room for April and herself. Melanie lives one floor down from April, and they become friends because of a shared interest in Egyptian history. They start to imagine that they themselves are living in ancient Egypt with its gods and ceremonies, priests/priestesses and pharaohs. The game is a secret they play in a fenced storage lot behind a junk shop, but they eventually end up inviting others to join them. I’m looking forward to the day my kids are old enough to read it so I can talk to them about their own Egypt games.

book reviews, comics, faith, history, literature

Book Reviews, March 2016

The book reviews for this month are another varied bunch–a historical mystery, some short stories about a party, a coming of age graphic novel, and a book about the Bible. The last one goes longer than usual since I had a lot to say about it as it relates to my recent wrestling with modern scholarship on the Bible.

The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey (pen name of Elizabeth Mackintosh) is an intriguing mystery from British history. The Scotland Yard detective Alan Grant is laid up in the hospital with a broken leg and bored out of his mind. Friends visit him and bring him books to read, but it isn’t until he becomes fascinated with a portrait of Richard III that he engages his deductive skills. He wonders what really happened to the Princes in the Tower, Richard’s two nephews who most everyone believes that Richard himself had killed in order to secure the throne. Grant has trouble reconciling the awful crime with the face of the man in the portrait, so he sets out to figure out the mystery of what happened to the two boys once and for all. It’s a fascinating historical whodunit (and often funny), tracing various historical sources with a detective’s eye for evidence and motive. I especially liked how it emphasized mythmaking in the historical record and how those myths can come about. I was able to follow the historical characters and events, but I have some familiarity because of the many British literature courses I’ve taken. I now wish I had paid even more attention to the history bits in those classes. My only complaint is that the front cover of the book had the blurb: “One of the best mysteries of all time,” which raised my expectations too high. I enjoyed it plenty, but it probably never could have lived up to that statement.

Mrs. Dalloway’s Party by Virginia Woolf is a collection of stories that serve as a good companion to her classic novel Mrs. Dalloway. From the introduction to the book we learn that the stories were written at the same time as or just after the writing of the novel, the latter of which was especially unusual for Woolf. She usually moved on to something different when she completed a novel. But she was interested in what she called in her writing diary “party consciousness,” that something about the gathering together of so many people under one roof that was both more artificial and more real than everyday life. In the course of seven stories we encounter a guest whose speech would fill a book and others who stand on the fringes hardly able to utter a syllable. There are misunderstandings and miscommunications as social opposites are introduced to one another. One woman worries the entire night about having worn the wrong dress that is not the current fashion. She had thought to wear something unique, but instead ruminated on the decision the entire party. Another man thought that he was so above the other party goers and their frivolity that he could barely deign to converse with anyone, and when he did it was with only the utmost condescension. I thoroughly enjoyed this slim book, but I have to say that it works best as a companion to the novel.

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This One Summer, written by Mariko Tamaki and illustrated by Jillian Tamaki, is a touching graphic novel about growing up. It’s the story of Rose, a girl on the cusp of becoming a teenager. Every summer she and her parents travel to a cabin on a lake for vacation. The routines are established: swimming in the lake, bonfires on the beach, reading in her room, and playing with Windy, another girl a year or two younger whose family also comes to the lake every summer. Rose and Windy are like most kids: they want to grow up. They talk about their soon to be developing breasts. They go to the tiny convenience store to buy candy and rent classic horror movies, which they watch to feel older. The 18 year old guys who clerk at the store don’t care that they aren’t old enough to be renting R-rated movies. Those guys are fascinating to the girls, but the girls can hardly put into words how they make them feel. The guys have their own drama with the young women their own age in town, which Rose and Windy watch as well, trying to figure out what is going on. And in her own cabin, Rose’s parents are having conflicts that she thinks she gets, but like most everything else, she misunderstands what’s really going on. It’s a beautiful story. The art is a real strength, too. At times cartoony, and other times more detailed and realistic, it’s in total harmony with the story. I would definitely recommend this book.

Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament by Peter Enns is an essential book. I feel like it is a book that was written for me, a book that helps me make sense of the Bible and modern scholarship at a time when I’m full of questions and doubts. The main thesis of the book is that there is an incarnational analogy between the Bible and Jesus where both are fully divine and fully human. In three main sections, Enns looks at supposed problems in the Old Testament that his incarnational analogy help resolve. The first is the matter of the close parallels of material from the Old Testament with Ancient Near Eastern literature. For example, the epic of Gilgamesh has a flood story that possibly predates the account in Genesis. The law code of Hammurabi of Babylon has laws that are similarly worded to laws in Exodus. Enns points out that the Bible is part of the cultural context in which it was given, meaning that the law codes should be similar and it should have similar myths concerning origins (myth here meaning a story to explain who we are and where we come from, not that it is made up). The second section deals with the diversity of the Old Testament. By diversity, he means that there are multiple voices speaking, sometimes in tension. For instance, in Proverbs sometimes the wisdom that is expressed in one verse contradicts what one finds in another verse (e.g. Proverbs 26:4,5 “Do not answer a fool..” vs. “Answer a fool…”). It turns out that the wisdom of Proverbs is situational. Another example that is even more forceful is the difference of the historical account in Chronicles with the similar accounts in Samuel and Kings. The account in Samuel and Kings emphasizes the centrality of worship, and the kings are evaluated on their ability to centralize worship in the temple (i.e. get rid of the high places and Baal and Asherah worship). The texts were likely written during the exile in order to explain why they were in exile. It was because they didn’t follow God and get rid of idol worship that they were handed over to foreign powers. But in Chronicles, which in the Jewish Bible is placed at the very end after all of the prophets and not directly after Kings, the point is to explain how they can be God’s people after the exile. It is from the point of view of those who returned back to the land and began again with Ezra and Nehemiah. Chronicles emphasizes the unity of the people and elevates the stature of figures like David and Solomon making them into heroes (much like American history often elevates the Founding Fathers, glossing over their failures). I first encountered this multi-voiced history of Kings and Chronicles in Josh Way’s excellent podcast on the Bible (click here to listen or read the transcript). Enns points out that diversity in Scripture is to be expected because God is speaking to different situations throughout Israel’s history, accommodating himself to wherever they find themselves at that point. The third section concerns the use of the Old Testament in the New Testament. The gospel writers and Paul use the Old Testament verses in ways that we wouldn’t normally consider proper if we heard them used in the pulpit on a Sunday. They seem to wrench things out of context at times in order to make their own point. One example includes Matthew’s insistence that Jesus going to Egypt with his parents to avoid Herod is a fulfillment of prophecy in Hosea. But the context of the passage in Hosea is looking backwards to Israel being delivered from Egypt, not a forward looking prophecy about the future messiah. Matthew appears to be quoting out of context. But he is merely using similar methods that were used at that time, the Second Temple period. The writers in the New Testament are showing how passages in the Old Testament point towards Jesus, even if they are not direct prophecies. Enns introduces the word christotelic, in that the history of Israel in the Old Testament is leading towards and is fulfilled in Christ. My version of the book (the second edition) had a helpful postscript that reiterated his points and dealt with some of the reactions and arguments that his book elicited when it was first published ten years ago. I would highly recommend this book to any Christian, especially anyone with an evangelical background who finds themselves asking how modern scholarship on the Old Testament can be reconciled with believing that the Bible is still God’s word.

book reviews, comics, history, literature, science

Book Reviews, February 2016

February’s reviews start off with three (!) comic books of varying quality. I read lots of comics, mostly from the library, but I don’t always review them. One reason is that because of the serial nature of much of comics storytelling, I don’t want to comment on and/or recommend a volume that is in the middle of a story. But I’ve decided to try reviewing more of the comics that I read so that anyone interested in the medium can possibly find something new to read. Or maybe I’ll make something sound so good I’ll convince someone to try their very first comic. It’s worth a shot. But it’s not all comics this month. There’s also a novel by a Nobel prize winning author and science writing from a New Yorker staff writer.

Batgirl Volume 1: Batgirl of Burnside, written by Cameron Stewart and Brenden Fletcher and illustrated by Babs Tarr, is a smart, fresh take on an old character. This volume collects individual comics #35-40 of the series, but it begins a new start for Batgirl with a new creative team and a new outlook for the character. Batgirl is Barbara Gordon, the daughter of Jim Gordon of the Gotham City Police Department, but she hasn’t always been Batgirl. She was the original, but after the Joker shot her in the classic Killing Joke storyline, she became a paraplegic and became Oracle, a whiz at computers who provided assistance to other superheroes such as Batman and Black Canary. Others took up the mantle of Batgirl in the meantime. When DC Comics relaunched all of their comics a few years ago in an event called New 52, they decided to have Barbara the beneficiary of an experimental surgery that restored her ability to walk, a controversial decision because many found Oracle to be an inspirational hero with a disability. This latest version of the character is starting over at college in Burnside, a borough of Gotham. She is still a super genius with computers, which comes in handy against the villains she faces who use social media and celebrity to further their aims. I appreciated that with this incarnation, the creators revamped her costume into something practical. All too often, women superheroes have had costumes that were about the male gaze and not about the character herself. This Barbara wears a leather coat instead of spandex and boots instead of heels in a chic DIY look. Though not wowed, I enjoyed this new beginning, and I’ll probably read the next installment from the library when it arrives.

Magneto Volume 1: Infamous, written by Cullen Bunn and illustrated by Gabriel Hernandez Walta and Javier Fernandez, is the beginning of a chilling and brilliant anti-hero story. If you’ve read X-Men comics or seen the films, you know that Magneto is a Holocaust survivor: this collection includes a flashback to the Warsaw ghetto. He’s determined to prevent another genocide, the extinction of mutants. This version of Magneto is very much like the one at the beginning of X-Men: First Class. Instead of killing former Nazis, though, he is working alone to take out threats to mutant-kind. In the tradition of other anti-heroes, Magneto’s actions repulse the reader, but still his motivations are understandable and ultimately we end up sympathizing with him. Volume 1 collects the first six issues of the story, and I’m looking forward to continuing.

Black Science Volume 1: How to Fall Forever, written by Rick Remender with artists Matteo Scalera and Dean White, is a pulpy sci-fi comic that unfortunately falls into the traps of its forebears. It’s published by Image Comics, which is home to a host of creator-owned comics series that are inventive and interesting (such as Saga and Wytches). The premise is solid: it’s an adventure story featuring a device that allows travel to alternate timelines within what the story calls the Eververse (basically all of the infinite possible universes). The cast of characters include the team of inventors who built the device, the two children of the team leader, the financial backer of the project and his partner, and a security guard. After an accident, the group gets stuck jumping from place to place, unstuck in time, with no apparent way to get back. I thought it could be fun, and it sometimes is. But I was extremely bothered by the portrayal of Native Americans in one of the alternate worlds. In that particular world, the indigenous people of North America are visited by some other group of spacetime travelers and they gain use of the device. They use it to find superior technology with which they first fight back against white invaders first defensively and then offensively as a sort of inverse Manifest Destiny. I get that Remender wanted to show the evil of the device. But it’s an alternate reality so he could have made the Native American tribes superior in the first place without outside help (the device works as a deus ex machina). Besides this, the portrayal of the tribes is that they are barbaric in spite of their advanced technology. In their first appearance, they are massacring German soldiers, who appear to be in World War I uniforms and defending trenches. In their next appearance, an indigenous soldier is vividly scalping an enemy soldier. The stereotype has been set, and unfortunately the characterization never gets much better even as we get to know one. The team leader sustains an injury so they need the help of a shaman to heal him, so they kidnap one. He effectively joins the group. Why he bothers to help them and go along after they have left his timeline is not made clear. Nearly every other character has clear backstory and motivation, but his reasoning is mysterious. Eventually in volume 2 of the series we do discover the backstory of his world that I already described, and we learn that he has a family; in fact, he is a grandfather, but it’s not much to humanize him. He’s still paper thin as a character; he’s mostly used as someone who has powerful technology to heal and to fight, not as a person. All in all, it’s an extremely disappointing portrayal of Native Americans. It could have been interesting and forceful (i.e. a world where Native Americans came out on top has potential as a premise), but the execution was abysmal. It played into all of the worst tendencies of the pulp tradition from which it came by playing to stereotypes. If you enjoy swashbuckling fantasy or sci-fi, look elsewhere. Black Science isn’t worth your time.

Sula by Toni Morrison is a really great novel. It tells the story of two friends, Sula and Nel, who grow up in a small, segregated Ohio town. In brief chapters the story flows as the two girls share life together and then separate when Sula leaves town to live freely. Nel stays and settles down until the day Sula comes back and shakes things up again. I’ve kept this incomplete summary rather vague so as not to give away any particular details for anyone who hates spoilers. I was pleasantly surprised at how straight forward and easy the narration was to read. I began the book worried that it would be too “literary,” which by itself is not a fault and which I often love about books. I love many difficult literary books. But I’ve found that it’s harder for me to give those kinds of books the attention and concentration required these last few years now that I have kids. I’m more easily distracted. So I loved that I could follow the story in Sula, and it was still a deep and rich book even if not as difficult as I expected. An impressive achievement. I’d highly recommend this novel. Now for a little anecdote. I was reading this at the dentist, and one of the assistants/hygienists asked me what I was reading. I told her the title and then said that it was by Toni Morrison. She stared at me blankly. I was momentarily surprised that she wouldn’t have heard of the Nobel Prize winning author, but then I began to think why would she necessarily know Morrison? Would she know the names of other famous authors who have won the Nobel like Alice Munro and Saul Bellow? Why would I assume people outside of my set of friends would know who these people are? Half of all American adults read four or fewer books in a year.

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert is a sobering look at the effects humans are having on life on this planet. There have been five major extinction events in Earth’s history, and we are currently living during the sixth. Previous extinction events have been caused by catastrophes like asteroid impacts. Not so for the sixth extinction, which we are currently witnessing. Human behavior, whether greedy or careless, has caused the extinction of untold numbers of species. In chapter after chapter, Kolbert details how species or larger groups have gone extinct or been threatened because of humans. The megafauna (such as mastodons, mammoths, and sabretooth cats) died out soon after contact with humans, possibly from overhunting. Large land animals to this day do poorly when in close proximity to humans because they reproduce so slowly and cannot make up for any population losses. Other chapters deal with the killing off of auks (similar to a penguin) or the Sumatran rhinoceros, which is not yet extinct but barely holding on (in fact, the rhino Suci who is highlighted in book died at the Cincinnati Zoo soon after the book came out). Still other chapters deal with how humans have made such an impact on different species. Habitat destruction, especially in diverse environments like rainforests, has led to untold numbers of extinctions of insects and larger animals in the foodchain. Ocean acidification, caused by global warming, is killing off corals and the many species which rely on coral reefs to survive. Humans also transplant species around the globe, sometimes unwittingly, which can cause all sorts of unintended consequences. The book opens with the fungus that is killing off many frogs and other amphibians. All sorts of invasive species are able to thrive in new environments when they have no natural predators. They disrupt their new ecosystem, outcompeting and/or killing the native species they encounter. The final pages offer up the possibilities of all of the mayhem humans have caused: either we will also succumb to the vast disruptions we have wrought to the planet or we will through our ingenuity overcome the looming disaster. It’s a bleak picture. Despite how depressing it can be, I still would highly recommend this book. Kolbert is a fantastic writer (the book won a Pulitzer Prize), and it’s important to think through the implications of human interaction with nature.

book reviews, comics, criminal justice, faith, history, literature, medicine, poetry, politics, science

Best Books I Read in 2015

I read a lot of great books in 2015, and I would recommend many of them to interested readers. But I thought it might be helpful to narrow it down to a smaller list of titles for a year end wrap up. So here are the five books I would most recommend to anyone, followed by ten more that were also great (and I feel bad leaving off books I liked by Anne Lamott, Patrick Hicks, Marilynne Robinson, and Brian Turner, among others—it was a good year of reading). I’ve put them in the order that I read them with a brief quote from my original reviews (and a link to the review if you want to see more). First, the top five.

Complications (Atul Gawande)

“a phenomenal book of medical stories and explorations of the human experience at a most vulnerable time. The book’s greatest strength is its stories.”

The New Jim Crow (Michelle Alexander)

“a devastating critique of American society. Alexander argues, persuasively I feel, that upon the end of Jim Crow segregation in the 1960s, instead of ushering in a time of equal opportunity, America erected a new racial caste system based on mass incarceration (via the War on Drugs) with devastating effect on African Americans. Her argument is a complex one, requiring diving into history, law, and social science research.”

Get in Trouble (Kelly Link)

a book so good I reviewed it twice!

“It hit the right tone between reality and fantasy that got under my skin so I didn’t know what to believe.” (blog review)

“It’s this quality of the fantastic, when in the best hands like Link’s, that helps the reader to get out of the ordinary world and see something different, all while shedding light on some part of the ordinary that we often overlook. Plus, it’s fun.” (Rock &Sling review)

Hiroshima (John Hersey)

“And though this is a survival story, we see death everywhere. It’s important to reckon with this, look at the death and destruction square in the face. As an American, this is my legacy: America is the only country to have used atomic weapons.”

Just Mercy (Bryan Stevenson)

“a flat-out incredible book. Through the stories of prisoners young and old, innocent and guilty, whom he has represented as an attorney through the Equal Justice Initiative, Stevenson shows the many ways that the U.S. criminal justice system is flawed and often leads to unjust outcomes.”

And the runners-up

Gulp (Mary Roach)

“the perfect bathroom book, and I mean that in the best way possible. The book is fascinating and funny, and the subject matter is often fecal.”

We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Shirley Jackson)

“The book is satisfying but not overlong, and still I wished I could spend more time with these delightfully eccentric sisters. I’d recommend this novel to anyone who likes a slightly twisted and dark story.”

God and the Gay Christian (Matthew Vines)

“Vines presents a well-organized and detailed argument that the church should affirm LGBT individuals and marriage between same sex partners that is monogamous and committed. And it fulfills the promise of its subtitle: it is a biblical argument.”

Carver: A Life in Poems (Marilyn Nelson)

“In many ways, I thought it read better than a traditional biography would have.”

Searching for Sunday (Rachel Held Evans)

“a mix of memoir and a meditation on church. The book is structured around the seven sacraments (baptism, confession, holy orders, communion, confirmation, anointing of the sick, and marriage), which helps hold the fragmentary nature of the chapters together.”

Between the World and Me (Ta-Nehisi Coates)

“Coates’s writing is an inspiration for me. He is a writer that I admire for many reasons: love of language, curiosity of self and the world, and deep humility.”

Neurotribes (Steve Silberman)

“a comprehensive and important history of autism […] it gives a multi-faceted perspective to an often misunderstood condition”

Davita’s Harp (Chaim Potok)

“another beautiful and moving novel by this author. Like the others I’ve read, it’s a coming of age story about a young, smart, Jewish kid; unlike the others I’ve read, this one is about a girl, and that makes all the difference.”

Killing and Dying (Adrian Tomine)

“is an impressive short story collection in comics. I would put it next to any collection of stories in prose out this year and be confident it would hold its own, it’s that good.”

March, Book One (John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell)

“This is one instance where I think the medium of comics is especially effective at conveying the power of the story while also helping the reader see the larger context. The scenes of violence are particularly potent to help the reader see both the resistance the protesters faced and the way the strategy of nonviolence worked in the face of violent resistance.”

I hope 2016 brings at least as many good books my way!

book reviews, comics, history, literature

Book Reviews, December 2015

This is my final installment of book reviews for the year, soon to be followed with a year end wrap up of the best books I read in 2015. Watch this space! In the meantime, listen to this song from Hamilton, the musical about the founding generation of America, as you read a relevant book review (the first one, anyway).

Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation by Joseph J. Ellis is a look at six episodes of the early days of the American Republic. One advantage of the episodic structure is that it allows Ellis to advance the thesis he mentions in the last chapter, namely that “all seamless historical narratives are latter-day constructions” (216). In fact, “Nothing was clear, inevitable, or even comprehensible” to those who have been designated Founding Fathers. Ellis prefers the designation “brothers,” presumably because while the various players came together on certain matters, there was an inherent “messiness” to the founding of a new country, and they fought each other on many issues, even the very meaning of the revolution. In telling the story of the duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, or the composition of Washington’s Farewell Address, or the correspondence of friends and rivals John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, Ellis highlights the conflicting ideas that animated the early tenuous years of the country. There was nothing that they could all agree on, except perhaps the need for freedom from Britain. But the nature of freedom was certainly something that they still disagreed on. In the chapter called “The Silence,” Benjamin Franklin in 1790 lent his support to ending the slave trade, even though the Constitution had provisions that it would not be ended for at least the first 20 years after ratification. The congress hotly debated whether they should even discuss the matter since it was supposedly already a settled question in the Constitution. But how could the same ideals of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration live together with the enslavement of large portions of the population? The congress managed to put off the question for decades, leading to compromises as the country expanded until it all came to war in 1861. I’d recommend this book to anyone interested in the American Revolution and the early days of the country (or who likes the musical Hamilton).

Killing and Dying: Six Stories by Adrian Tomine is an impressive short story collection in comics. I would put it next to any collection of stories in prose out this year and be confident it would hold its own, it’s that good. Tomine explores the themes of identity and unrealistic dreams. The title story tells of a father’s love and grief, and his difficulty with being supportive of his daughter’s desire to do stand-up comedy. It’s a haunting story of perceptions: who is dying and who is killing keep changing throughout. The collection leads off with a farcical tale of a misunderstood artist who dreams of a new artform called “hortisculpture,” a combination of plants and sculpture that is as ugly as its portmanteau namesake. Tomine plays with the presentation, telling the story in four panel chunks as if it were a newspaper comic, complete with full-page Sunday installments on schedule. The format and the subject matter let him poke fun of himself for the self-seriousness of an artist. Two of the shorter pieces, “Translated, from the Japanese” and “Intruders,” are very meditative and text-based. The former never even shows its characters, instead showing the settings as we read a letter from a mother to her son about a transitional moment in their lives. The latter narrates the inner monologue of a soldier on leave coming to terms with his past, but this time using a nine panel grid to tell the story. It’s a fantastic collection of stories; every one stuck with me.

March: Book One, written by John Lewis and Andrew Aydin, and illustrated by Nate Powell, is the powerful first part of a trilogy of comics based on Lewis’s life and the civil rights movement. The story concerns Lewis’s early days in rural Alabama and his start in the civil rights movement in Nashville while he was in college. He was involved with the nonviolent sit-ins at the downtown stores in Nashville that protested segregation. All of this narrative is framed by the contemporary Lewis reminiscing about his past while he gets ready to attend the inauguration of Barack Obama in January of 2009. This is one instance where I think the medium of comics is especially effective at conveying the power of the story while also helping the reader see the larger context. The scenes of violence are particularly potent to help the reader see both the resistance the protesters faced and the way the strategy of nonviolence worked in the face of violent resistance. By being able to see faces and settings, the story came alive in the same way that a documentary would, but there wasn’t footage of many of the scenes he was telling. I would highly recommend this to anyone wanting to learn about the civil rights movement. One word of caution: the book does not shy away from the harsh language used against African Americans. The n-word is used multiple times, so use discretion if giving the comic to a younger reader.

File Under: 13 Suspicious Incidents by Lemony Snicket (the pen name of Daniel Handler) and illustrated by Seth is a fun collection of mysteries in the kids’ series All the Wrong Questions. Snicket is also the author of the previous A Series of Unfortunate Events, and this one features a similar humorous style of writing, full of wordplay and literary references. All the Wrong Questions is narrated by the young Snicket who is trying to solve a mystery in the spooky town of Stain’d-by-the-Sea, but File Under departs from the larger mystery to have Snicket solve some smaller conundrums that he stumbles upon or that are brought to him. Many of the familiar denizens of the town including Jake Hix, the Bellerophon brothers, Moxie Mallahan, and his clueless chaperone S. Theodora Markson, as well as many others, make appearances in the various suspicious incidents. The answers or conclusions to the mysteries are provided at the end of the book much the same as they would in an Encyclopedia Brown or similar mystery book, and the clues aren’t so difficult that a young reader couldn’t figure out the solutions to at least some of them (confession: I only figured out a handful myself). Snicket’s style is educational as it entertains. The characters provide useful definitions of difficult words throughout the stories, such as inane (“pointless and dull”) and preternaturally (“extra”), and phrases like “shadow of its former self” (“not as good as it used to be”) and “well-bred” (“doesn’t mean anything at all, but which some people use to make themselves feel better than others”). The literary references were also fun, especially for an English major like me. In one story alone, “Twelve or Thirteen,” there were mentions of a stolen portrait of Gary Dorian, an Ethan Frome Festival sled race, and hidden within the list of sledders the name of the poet William Carlos Williams. This is a good kids’ book and series, one that even an adult can enjoy.

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So little of what one is threads itself through the eye of empty space

Category Archives: comics