Archives

Lone Journey by Jeanette Eaton

Jan19


Lone Journey: The Life of Roger Williams by Jeanette Eaton. Illustrated by Woodi Ishmael.

Four of Jeanette Eaton’s books received the Newbery Honor (runner-up), but her books, mostly biographies for young adults, never won the Newbery Medal. Lone Journey was published in 1944, and was a Newbery Honor book in 1945.

I found the book quite fascinating in its portrait of a man who was ahead of his times in many ways. Roger Williams began life in an orthodox Church of England family, became a Puritan as a youth, and then moved on to become a separatist and a dissenter who certainly preached and believed in Christ but eschewed all churches and denominations as holding undue sway and authority over the conscience of the individual. Williams, according to the book, made a life study of government and the relationship of church and state, and he came to the conclusion that the civil authority and the church were to be wholly separate, ruling in different spheres, and that the individual conscience before God was to reign supreme in matters of religion.

Betsy-Bee just read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter for her English class, and we had a good discussion of which of God’s laws were to be enforced by the state (laws against murder and theft and others of what Williams would call “civil crimes”), which laws should be enforced by the church upon church members (laws against gossip, profanity, adultery, and other sins, perhaps?), and which laws were up to the individual before God. Or should the church become involved at all when its members sin against one another? How should the church discipline its members, if it does?

The Massachusetts Bay colony and its leaders eventually banished Roger Williams, but his exile turned out to be a blessing in disguise, even though it entailed much hardship, since he was able to found a colony in which:

“We have no law among us, whereby to punish any for only declaring by words theire mindes and understandings concerning the things and ways of God.”

In a letter to a friend, Roger Williams wrote of the colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations:

” . . . We have long drunk of the cup of as great liberties as any people that we can hear of under the whole heaven. We have not only long been free (together with a New England) from the iron yolk of wolfish bishops, and their popish ceremonies, but we have sitten quiet and dry from the streams of good spilt by that war in our native country.
We have not felt the new chains of the Presbyterian tyrants, not in this colony have we been consumed with the over-zealous fire of the (so-called) godly christian magistrates. Sir, we have not known what an exise means; we have almost forgotten what tithes are, yea or taxes either, to church or commonwealth.”

Williams was a friend to the native Americans of the colony, and he led the colony to accept both Quakers and Jews as full citizens with the rights to vote and own land. He was a preacher and a practitioner of religious liberty for all, and it is from Roger Williams and others who followed in his footsteps that we learned many of the principles that eventually went into the U.S. Constitution and became enshrined in American government and culture. This biography is somewhat fictionalized, with dialog that is obviously made up, but the events of Roger Williams’s life are faithfully chronicled, as far as I could tell.

Jeanette Eaton was a prolific biographer, and she wrote biographies of all of the following persons over the course of her career:

A Daughter of the Seine: The Life of Madame Roland (1929) (Newbery Honor 1930)
Jeanne d’Arc, the Warrior Saint (1931)
The Flame, Saint Catherine of Sienna (1931)
Young Lafayette (1932)
Betsy’s Napoleon (1936)
Leader By Destiny: George Washington, Man and Patriot (1938) (Newbery Honor 1939)
Narcissa Whitman: Pioneer of Oregon (1941)
Lone Journey: The Life of Roger Williams (1944) (Newbery Honor 1945)
David Livingstone, Foe of Darkness (1947)
That Lively Man, Ben Franklin (1948)
Buckley O’Neill of Arizona (1949)
Washington, the Nation’s First Hero (1951)
Gandhi, Fighter Without a Sword (1950) (Newbery Honor 1951)
Lee, the Gallant General (1953)
The Story of Eleanor Roosevelt (1954)
Trumpeter’s Tale: The Story of Young Louis Armstrong (1955)
America’s Own Mark Twain (1958)

Wikipedia calls Eaton a “suffragist” and a “feminist”, but judging from the subjects of her books, she also had an interest in religion and religious leaders.

Woodi Ishmael, whose woodcut illustrations, grace the pages of Ms. Eaton’s book, seems to have been a rather successful World War II era illustrator, producing numerous advertisements and drawings and paintings for the armed forces, especially the Air Force. You can look at some of his Air Force artwork here. And here’s a blog post that shows several of Mr. Ishmael’s illustrations for another Eaton bio, Narcissa Whitman.

Amazon Affiliate. If you click on a book cover here to go to Amazon and buy something, I receive a very small percentage of the purchase price.

Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink

Jan17


Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital by Sheri Fink.

Warning: this book is deeply disturbing. After reading it, I became even more distrustful of doctors and of the medical profession than I was before I read the book. I also lost some confidence in the government and in the justice system (already low). I decided to buy a small generator as soon as possible if I can afford to since we live on the Gulf coast in hurricane country. I thought about end-of-life decisions and hospitals and who to depend on in an emergency. I was reminded of how thankful I am for my sister who came to Texas and spent many weeks caring for my mother last year when she had to go to the hospital and then into a rehab facility. I’m not sure anymore that it is safe to be in a hospital without a family member nearby who will spend time at the hospital with you daily—and at night.

So, Five Days at Memorial is the story of the five days after Hurricane Katrina as they were experienced at Memorial Medical Center (formerly Baptist Hospital) in New Orleans. As you might imagine, or you may have seen or heard news reports, conditions at the hospital went from bad to worse in the wake of the storm. Hospital employees, doctors, nurses, and patients who were stranded at the hospital, surrounded by flood waters and rumors of riots and violence outside, began to think that they had been abandoned. Rescue was slow to come. Information going in and out of the hospital was confused and intermittent. Patients died. The question woven throughout the book is: did they die because of Hurricane Katrina and the lack of government or corporate response to emergency conditions, or did some of the patients die because doctors and nurses gave up hope and decided to euthanize them, “put them out of their misery”?

I’ve thought about what I might do to care for myself and my family in the event of a major crisis such as a hurricane. I’ve thought about the hard end-of-life decisions that health care professionals and families have to make together and about how those decisions could be made easier and more loving and kind to all involved. I’ve thought about how doctors and nurses can sway patients and family members to make decisions that meet with the professionals’ ethics but perhaps not the family’s. And I’ve thought about journalistic ethics, and how a writer of true-life stories can show us a story as the journalist sees it, but not necessarily give full credence and weight to all sides of the story. I think Ms. Fink tried to see all of the possibilities and complications of this particular event and present them fairly, but then again, I wasn’t there.

As I said, it’s a difficult book to read. There are stories of great courage and perseverance, but there are also questions, many disturbing questions. When evacuating a hospital with a range of patients from ambulatory to critically ill with probably very little time to live, who goes first? What is the purpose of triage, and who decides which people will be given the best chance to survive? What is the ethical basis for those decisions? What is a health professional’s responsibility in a crisis? Are doctors and nurses obligated to sacrifice their own well-being, perhaps their lives, for their patients? How can hospitals be better prepared for a crisis? How much should hospitals and other public service agencies spend on preparing for a crisis that may never materialize? What is the government’s role in protecting the public and preparing for an emergency? What is the responsibility of the health care corporation that owns the hospital or nursing home? Many, many more questions, and some answers, are embedded in this very personal story about what happened in a hospital in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

I would recommend that all people involved in health care professions, especially in hospitals, read this book. You may or may not agree with the author’s conclusions, but you will be given lots of food for thought—and even prayer.

Amazon Affiliate. If you click on a book cover here to go to Amazon and buy something, I receive a very small percentage of the purchase price.

Fooling Houdini by Alex Stone

Jan13


Fooling Houdini: Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks and the Hidden Powers of the Mind by Alex Stone.

I think I heard about this book on NPR; I’ve had it on my TBR list for a while. I’m glad I finally got around to it because it definitely gave me some things to think about.

First of all, I’ll issue a disclaimer or a warning: a couple of pages in the book are about Mr. Stone’s rather uninformed opinion that Jesus was probably “a magician, and that the gospel miracles—water into wine, multiplying loaves, levitation—were stage tricks drawn from the conjuror’s repertoire.” This superficial evaluation of the miracles of Christ only lasts for a few paragraphs, thankfully, and then Mr. Stone is back to writing about what he knows: the world of legerdemain, illusion, and prestidigitation.

Ninety-nine percent of this book is about modern-day magicians, mentalists, con men, card sharps, and other performers and about how they learn to do what they do. Mr. Stone, to the undoubted dismay of some of his fellow magicians, even reveals some of the secrets of the trade, but not all of them. As he tells about his journey through the world of Magic Olympics (really, there is such a thing), and Las Vegas magic shows, and monte mobs on Canal Street in NYC, psychics and telepaths, and neuroscience research, not to mention clown school, Mr. Stone describes a labyrinthine world of swamis and sages, con artists and card counters, that is “shrouded in secrecy, fueled by obsession and brilliance.”

Show me a world where real people focus their lives and talents on a consuming pursuit or passion, and I’m hooked. I’ve read books, fiction and nonfiction, that introduced me to other communities and subcultures where people spend their lives immersed in a game or a hobby or an interest or a place or even an occupation that it never would have occurred to me to even notice:

The World of Hotel Management: Hotel by Arthur Hailey.
The World of Competitive Scrabble: Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis.
The World of Horse-Racing: Seabiscuit by Laura Hillenbrand.
The World of a Super-Rich Eccentric: Empty Mansions by Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell, Jr.
The World of Competitive Rowing: The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics by Daniel James Brown.
The World of Friday Night Football: Friday Night Lights by H.G. Bissinger.
The World of Poverty in Mumbai: Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo.
The World of ICU in Hospitals: Coma by Robin Cook.
The World of Scientology: Going Clear by Lawrence Wright.
The World of a Prison Library: Running the Books by Avi Steinberg.
The World of Ethiopian Adoption: There Is No Me Without You by Melissa Greene.
The World of Chinese Food: The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: A Book Adventure through the Mysteries of Chinese Food by Jennifer 8. Lee
The World of Computer Geekdom: The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder.
The World of Fifth Grade: Among Schoolchildren by Tracy Kidder.
The World of a Mental Hospital: Gracefully Insane by Alex Beam.
The World of Mormon Polygamy: When Men Become Gods by Stephen Singular.
The World of Chocolate: Hershey by Michael D’Antonio.

I didn’t even include all of the historical “worlds” and the exotic, foreign places I’ve visited in books. Books truly can take us to so many places, times, subcultures, and worlds, and I am so thankful to be able to travel into these worlds through the books I read. I enjoyed Fooling Houdini‘s description of the world of magic and its discussions of the ethics of deception and performance and fiction and trickery. The authors draws interesting distinctions between a performance in which the magician and his audience collaborate in some conscious or subconscious way to create a fiction and puzzle that is fun for everyone involved and the deception that so-called mentalists and mind readers foist upon unsuspecting and gullible people who are looking for comfort and for something to believe in.

As I said, the book was thought-provoking. Anyone who’s at all interested in performing magic or in the techniques and practices of magic performers will find Fooling Houdini indispensable.

Amazon Affiliate. If you click on a book cover here to go to Amazon and buy something, I receive a very small percentage of the purchase price.

Blood Will Out by Walter Kirn

Jan12


Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade by Walter Kirn.

Author Walter Kirn wants his readers to know that he is a published novelist, a graduate of Princeton, and a very intelligent man. The importance of these qualifications will become clear as the story progresses.

Blood Will Out purports to tell the story of Clark Rockefeller, aka Chris C. Crowe, aka Chris Chichester, aka Charles Smith, aka Chip Smith. His real name is Christian Gerhartsreiter, a German national who came to the United States illegally in 1978, obtained citizenship by marrying and then deserting an American citizen, moved to Hollywood to become an actor, and eventually in 1985 murdered his landlady’s adopted son and possibly the victim’s wife. Mr. Gerhartsreiter then moved back to the East Coast, New York City, and became Clark Rockefeller, a rich young banker and art collector with ties to the famous family with the same surname. Clark Rockefeller married Sandy Boss, a high-paid business executive, lived on his wife’s earnings, and moved to New Hampshire. He and his wife had a child, but they eventually divorced when Sandy found out that “Clark” wasn’t who he said he was. Rockefeller/Gerhartsreiter then tried to kidnap his own daughter, got sent to jail for that, and was indicted for the 1985 murder in California. Christian Gerhartsreiter was

Most of the facts in the preceding paragraph I gleaned from Wikipedia. Mr. Kirn’s book includes a few of the facts, buried deep or mentioned in passing, but the majority of the book seems to be about Walter Kirn and his very strange, very conflicted friendship with the subject, Christian Gerhartsreiter. Kirn is deeply distressed over the idea that Gerhartsreiter conned him. How could a criminal like CG deceive a Princeton graduate and published author? As far as I could tell, Mr. Kirn lost the price of a few meals that Gerhartsreiter stiffed him for, a trip to New York from Montana to deliver a dog that he feels he was underpaid for, and a lot of time listening to CG’s stories and lies. Yet, Kirn says of himself and CG, late in the book after all has been revealed, “He (CG) knew a perfect victim when he saw one, and I’d sacrificed myself for him before.”

Sacrificed himself? “I was part of his audience, he thought. But in truth I was acting much of the time. He was conning me, but I was also conning him. The liar and murderer and heaven knows what else was correct about the writer: I betrayed him.” Kirn says he “betrayed” CG by writing book about him. I say Kirn betrays himself, in that the book is mainly about Walter Kirn. Maybe that’s because there had to be a book (finances? a contract?), and no one, not Kirn nor anyone else, understood what Christian Gerhartsreiter was all about, what all he did, or why he did it.

“All my questions drew the same response from him, just phrased in different ways. His evil was his prodigious, devouring appetite for other people’s vitality and time, which he consumed with words, words, words, words, words. Clark loved to talk but had nothing much to say, nothing of his own, which was surely another reason that he lied, and plagiarized lies, and recycled his old lies. He had ten thousand ways to tell you nothing. I felt like I’d heard all of them.”

The book is like CG’s lies: interesting for a while, somewhat sordid, but strangely empty and dissatisfying in the end. The topic of lies and deception is one that is much talked and written about recently, both in fiction and nonfiction. This Literature of Deception speaks to something within all of us that recognizes our own fabrications and false images and yet longs to know and trust others and to be truly known and trustworthy. I’m not sure I learned anything about how we get to a place of deceiving others and ultimately ourselves from reading this book. Nor did I gain any insight into how we break free of the lies that so easily entangle us.

There is another 2012 book about CG, The Man in the Rockefeller Suit: The Astonishing Rise and Spectacular Fall of a Serial Impostor by Mark Seal. Perhaps that book is more weighted toward fact and story and motivation and less toward amateur self-analysis. If you’re interested in knowing more about “serial imposter” Christian Gerhartsreiter, what he did and maybe even why he did it, I’d suggest you try that book first, although I’ve not read it and so can’t give a definitive recommendation.

Amazon Affiliate. If you click on a book cover here to go to Amazon and buy something, I receive a very small percentage of the purchase price.

Don’t Give Up, Don’t Give In by Louis Zamperini and David Rensin

Jan11


Don’t Give Up, Don’t Give In: Lessons from an Extraordinary Life by Louis Zamperini and David Rensin.

“I survived the war, but then I had to survive myself coming home from the war. Despite the good times and all the attention, I was under a cloud that kept growing darker. I had nightmares about killing the Bird from which I woke up shouting and swearing. My running legs were gone and I couldn’t compete anymore, which broke my heart. I wanted to strike it rich, but lost money instead. I drank and fought. I knew I was on the wrong path—but didn’t know what to do about it.” ~Louis Zamperini

If the movie Unbroken, or even what you’ve heard about the movie or the book by Laura Hillenbrand, is your only acquaintance with Louis Zamperini, then you already know that he was an amazing man with an almost unbelievable life story. What you may not know is what Paul Harvey used to call The Rest of the Story.

I would suggest that anyone who was captivated by Mr. Zamperini’s story in the movie should immediately, without delay, beg, borrow, or steal a copy of Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand. If you just aren’t a reader and can’t bring yourself to read that wonderful biography, then Don’t Give Up, Don’t Give In tells the rest of Louis Zamperini’s story in a much shorter format, 224 pages laid out in easy to read chunks or chapter of three or four pages each. If you’ve already read Unbroken, but can’t get your friends or family members to read it, give them a copy of this book. Louis Zamperini’s character, warmth, and wisdom shine through the pages here just as they did in the pages of Unbroken.

David Rensin, who had already worked with Mr. Zamperini on his autobiography Devil at My Heels, met with Zamperini again for about six months to complete this book because Louis said he still had stories he wanted to tell. The stories in the book, which was completed two days before Mr. Zamperini died on July 2, 2014, continue to illuminate the life of this man who not only was a hero, but also a very broken and vengeful man after his return from prison camp. In Unbroken Laura Hillenbrand tells what it was that made Louis Zamperini whole again, in her words. In this book Mr. Zamperini gets to tell us about his recovery in his own words.

“I had nothing left to lose.
That admission itself was the beginning of my recovery. I’d always known that I’d come home from the war with a problem, but I had never been willing to ask for help—from anyone.
But now I had, and my whole body and spirit felt different. Wonderful. Calm. Free.”

Amazon Affiliate. If you click on a book cover here to go to Amazon and buy something, I receive a very small percentage of the purchase price.

Empty Mansions by Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell, Jr.

Jan9


Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune by Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell, Jr.

Many things about this book are odd, beginning with the co-authors. One of the authors is the subject’s second cousin, or some such relation. He must have been involved in some way, at least as a witness to Huguette’s mental state, in the controversy that broke out after Huguette’s death about her will and the disposition of her fortune. Yet, he is a co-author of this book that purports to be an objective view of the many controversies surrounding Huguette’s life and death. (The introduction notes that Mr. Newell was not in line to inherit any of Huguette Clark’s fortune.)

Then, there’s Huguette Clark herself. Born in 1906, Huguette Clark lived for 105 years. She was heiress to a fortune made by her father W.A. Clark in copper mining, railroads and other enterprises. Ms. Clark, married only briefly and soon divorced, became a recluse as an adult and spent her final twenty years living in a hospital in New York City, not because she was ill but because she felt safe there. She gave her day nurse, Hadassah Peri, millions of dollars in cash and gifts while she was still alive and left the same nurse millions in her will. She spent most of her adult life painting, taking photographs, playing with dolls, and designing dollhouses. She liked to watch cartoons, analyzing them frame by frame, particularly The Smurfs, The Flintstones, and The Jetsons. She kept two uninhabited mansions that she never visited, one in California and another in Connecticut, in mint condition with millions of dollars paid to caretakers and taxes over the years. She was, in her own words, “a little peculiar.”

Despite the copious research that certainly informed this book about a reclusive heiress and her family background, the authors are unable to answer the question that most interested me: why was Huguette Clark so reclusive and almost afraid of new people and strangers and yet so generous to certain particular people in her life? She gave millions of dollars to her day nurse, and yet she was unwilling to give her phone number to her cousin. Nevertheless, even though I din’t really understand Huguette Clark much better after I read the entire book about her life, it was still thought-provoking to to try. What does great inherited wealth do to a person’s psyche? Is it different if you inherited the money than it would be if you earned it? Was Huguette simply a fragile, anxiety-ridden person who figured out the best strategy for handling her fears and insecurities?

I also wanted to know at the end of the book what happened to Ms. Clark’s money? The dispute over Huguette Clark’s will had not been settled at the time of the publication of Empty Mansions. Wikipedia to the rescue:

On September 24, 2013, the will was finally settled with the majority of the distant relatives receiving a total of $34 million. The nurse received nothing, and agreed to return $5 million of the earlier $31 million gifts to her and her family. The bulk of the substantial remainder went to the arts, including the gift of her estate in Santa Barbara to a new foundation, called the Bellosguardo Foundation.

Was she happy with her dolls and cartoons and empty mansions? Or was she as empty as her houses, with the dolls and dollhouse projects only a distraction from the emptiness of her life? I rather think the latter, but only God can judge a life. I’m certainly not sure after reading this true story that being a millionaire is all it’s cracked up to be.

Amazon Affiliate. If you click on a book cover here to go to Amazon and buy something, I receive a very small percentage of the purchase price.

12 2015 Books I’m Looking Forward to Reading

Jan1

As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust: A Flavia de Luce Novel by Alan Bradley. Flavia just gets better and better. Publication date: January 6, 2015.

Own Your Life: Living with Deep Intention, Bold Faith, and Generous Love by Sally Clarkson. Publication date: January 8, 2015.

The War That Saved my Life by Kimberley Brubaker Bradley. Middle grade historical fiction about child evacuees from London during World War II by an author I’ve enjoyed in the past. Gotta try it out. Publication date: January 8, 2015.

The Allure of Gentleness: Defending the Faith in the Manner of Jesus by Dallas Willard. Publication date: February 10, 2015.

The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro. The author’s first novel in nearly ten years, and I’m game to check it out. Publication date: March 3, 2015.

Completely Clementine by Sara Pennypacker. Publication date: Also March 3, 2015.

The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot: The True Story of the Tyrant Who Created North Korea and the Young Lieutenant Who Stole His Way to Freedom by Blaine Harden. I’m particularly interested in North Korea ever since the Sony hack, actually even before that. I just read Escape from Camp 14 by this same author. Publication date: March 17, 2015.

The Penderwicks In Spring by Jeanne Birdsall. Oh, the Penderwicks, almost as good as the Marches or the Melendys! Publication date: March 24, 2015.

Black Dove, White Raven by Elizabeth Wein. Ms. Wein wrote Code Name Verity and Rose. I’m looking forward to reading her next book, which involves women pilots and World War II—but it’s set in Ethiopia! How could it not be good? Publication date: March 31, 2015.

The Revelation of Louisa May by Michaela MacColl. I enjoyed Ms. MacColl’s other lady author mystery stories: Always Emily and Nobody’s Secret. I like Louisa May Alcott. So I would imagine this novel featuring Ms. Alcott as the protagonist will be a treat. Publication date: April 14, 2015.

The Worst Class Trip Ever by Dave Barry. It’s Dave Barry. If any adult humor writer could pull off the move to middle grade fiction, it’s Dave Barry, right? Publication date: May 5, 2015.

Lion Heart (Scarlet, Book Three) by AC Gaughen. Conclusion to these books about a lady thief named Scarlet who captures the heart of Robin Hood in medieval England. Publication date: May 19, 2015.

Amazon Affiliate. If you click on a book cover or a title here to go to Amazon and buy something, I receive a very small percentage of the purchase price.

12 Nonfiction Books I’m Definitely Going to Read in 2015

Dec30


I’m hoping to make the first six months of 2015 a time of focusing on nonfiction reading. I am in the mood to read lots of nonfiction, as a contrast to my Cybils middle grade fantasy feast, and I have lots of nonfiction books on my TBR list. These are twelve that I already have on hand, or I’ve already requested at the library.

Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks: fifty years of mysteries in the making by John Curran.

Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith by Kathleen Norris.

Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology by Eric Brende.

Escape from Camp 14: one man’s remarkable odyssey from North Korea to freedom in the West by Blaine Harden. READ, January 2015.

The First Clash: the miraculous Greek victory at Marathon and its impact on Western civilization by James Lacey.

Fooling Houdini: magicians, mentalists, math geeks, and the hidden powers of the mind by Alex Stone. READ, January 2015.

Words in a French Life: Lessons in Love and Language from the South of France by Karen Espinasse.

Nothing to Envy: ordinary lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick. READ, January 2015.

Talking Hands: what sign language reveals about the mind by Margalit Fox.

Five Days at Memorial: life and death in a storm-ravaged hospital by Sheri Fink. READ, January 2015.

Empty Mansions: the mysterious life of Huguette Clark and the spending of a great American fortune by Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell, Jr. READ, January 2015.

Becoming Dickens: the invention of a novelist by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst.

These books all feed into my fascinations with languages, other cultures, history, mystery, magic, and technology’s effect on our lives and thoughts. I’m looking forward to reading them.

Amazon Affiliate. If you click on a book cover or a title here to go to Amazon and buy something, I receive a very small percentage of the purchase price.

11 Favorite Nonfiction Books I Read in 2014

Dec29

I read over 200 books in 2014. Of those, if I counted right, only twenty-two were nonfiction. So, when I say the “11 best” or 11 favorite”, I’m including half of the nonfiction books I read this past year. The first two on the list were my favorites; the rest are in no particular order.

The Last Lion 2: Winston Spencer Churchill Alone, 1932-40 by William Manchester. I love Winston Churchill. I would have been afraid or at least disinclined to work for him or to eat at his dinner table; he did not suffer fools gladly and did not treat even his employees and friends with great consideration for their comfort. But reading about him is a delight.

Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus: A Devout Muslim Encounters Christianity by Nabeel Qureshi. Good Christian apologetics, good story.

The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics by Daniel James Brown.

Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal by Ben MacIntyre.

The Book Whisperer: Awakening the Inner Reader in Every Child by Donalyn Miller.

Blue Marble: How a Photograph Revealed Earth’s Fragile Beauty by Don Nardo. The story of the iconic picture of earth from space taken by the astronauts of Apollo 17.

The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History by Robert M. Edsel. Skip or skim the boring parts, but most of this one is a fascinating look at the rescue of art treasures from Nazi theft and from Allied ignorance.

Rich in Love: When God Rescues Messy People by Irene Garcia. People and relationships are messy, and Ms. Garcia doesn’t pretend that all of the stories of her many foster children and adopted children turn out well. Some are still struggling with bad choices and bad beginnings. But this was ultimately a hope-filled book about the way God uses imperfect, messed-up people to sow His grace into the world.

The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson. Kind of grisly, but fascinating in its detail about a vision of progress and light alongside a serial killer’s vision of deceit and murder.

Everybody Paints! The Lives and Art of the Wyeth Family by Susan Goldman Rubin. Interesting family, interesting book, written for children but it tells as much as I wanted to know.

One Summer: America, 1927 by Bill Bryson. I just finished this one a few days before Christmas. I laughed, I gasped, I read passages out loud to my unappreciative family. In short, I was captivated by reliving the summer of 1927.

Amazon Affiliate. If you click on a book cover here to go to Amazon and buy something, I receive a very small percentage of the purchase price.

One Summer: America, 1927 by Bill Bryson

Dec23

During the extended summer of 1927 (May through the end of September):

On May 21, 1927, Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic in The Spirit of St Louis and became the most famous man on the planet.

Babe Ruth hit sixty home runs, a season record that stood until Roger Maris hit 61 home runs in 1961.

Lou Gehrig hit 47 home runs, more than any other player had ever hit in a season, apart from Babe Ruth.

Zane Grey and Edgar Rice Burroughs were the most popular American authors, and perhaps the most prolific.

Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly sat on top of a flagpole in New Jersey for 12 days and nights, a new record.

Al Capone enjoyed his last summer of profiting from crime and Prohibition in Chicago.

The Jazz Singer with Al Jolson, the first “talking picture”, was filmed.

Television was created, and radio came of age.

President Coolidge vacationed in South Dakota and announced that he did not choose to run for president again in 1928.

Sacco and Vanzetti were executed for crimes they may or may not have committed.

Work began on Mount Rushmore.

It rained a lot, and the Mississippi River flooded as it never had before. (River Rising by Athol Dickson is a wonderful historical fiction novel set during and after the Mississippi River flood of 1927.)

A madman in Michigan blew up a schoolhouse and killed forty-four people in the worst slaughter of children in American history. (School violence is not new.)

Henry Ford stopped making the Model T, but promised a new “Model” soon.

All these events and trends and more are chronicled in Bill Bryson’s One Summer: America, 1927. The book may have begun as a book about Charles Lindbergh or alternatively about Babe Ruth, since those two celebrities figure large in the story. But perhaps as Mr. Bryson did his research, he found much more of interest to write about in that summer of 1927.

I looked at my archives and found that lots of other things were going on in 1927:
Betty Macdonald and her husband were trying to make a go of a chicken farm near Chimacum, Washington.

L.M. Montgomery published the last of her Emily book, Emily’s Quest.

James Weldon Johnson published God’s Trombones, a book of excellent poetry, product of the Harlem Renaissance.

The first Hardy Boys book was published.

Continued civil war and unrest rent Ireland.

Socialist tried to overthrow the government in Austria.

In December, Duke Ellington opened at The Cotton Club.

Anyway, if you’re interested in narrative nonfiction about the events and personalities of 1927, I can highly recommend Bill Bryson’s hefty tome. It’s not exactly light reading, but it is written with a light touch—and a sense of humor.

Amazon Affiliate. If you click on a book cover here to go to Amazon and buy something, I receive a very small percentage of the purchase price.