I wonder what it says about me or about Mr. WIlson’s book that I enjoyed the footnotes, which are multitudinous and entertaining, almost as much as I did the main text of the book. In fact, I found myself turning each page, reading the footnotes first, then the text to which each footnote referred, then the two facing pages in order. Some examples:

p. 101: I keep assuming that you’re someone who speaks aloud to books. If I were you, I wouldn’t do this if you’re seated next to someone in a waiting room or on an airplane. Unless you really want to freak people out and give them a good story to tell their friends. In that case, go ahead, weirdo.

p. 193: Well, for me personally, it’s not up for debate, but I’m trying to be charitable to all my less Calvinist friends.

(Footnote to a footnote: Thanks, Jared, for your Christian charity in bearing with us wishy-washy Arminocalvinists.)

So, I liked the footnotes. What else?

A lot. I read Jared Wilson’s manifesto (n. a public declaration of policy and aims) on who Jesus is, what Jesus “policy and aims” were and are, and then I started again and read it all over. I did the re-reading thing for two or maybe three reasons:

1. There’s a lot of good stuff in here. I confess that whenever I read nonfiction, unless it tells a story, I tend to skim, to look for the good parts, mostly the story parts. But Mr. Wilson has written a book that tells the story of Jesus from twelve different perspectives or roles, and I was afraid that because of my bad reading habits, I might have missed something. I did miss stuff, and I’m glad I gave myself a second chance.

2. Jared Wilson and his fellow Thinklings were some of the first bloggers I ever read, so when I heard he was having his first book published, I wanted to read it. And I wanted to make sure I read it thoroughly. I can’t claim to be an unprejudiced reviewer; Jared and I have actually met once. We’ve exchanged emails a couple of times. And I like his writing and his focus on the person of Jesus. So I was predisposed to like his book, footnotes and all. (However, no money exchanged hands in the process of my writing this review.)

3. In the end I was captivated, not by Jared’s writing or his wit, but by the person he was writing about: Jesus. I wanted to know more. I wanted to know what I had missed in my fifty plus years of doing church. I’ve been a disciple of Jesus Christ for a long time, but in reading Your Jesus Is Too Safe, I fell in love with Jesus all over again. That’s not safe, but it sure is fun and rich and Awe-ful, in the best and most archaic sense of the word.

If you think you’ve heard it all before, maybe you have. But maybe, just maybe, you should read Your Jesus Is Too Safe with an open mind and a heart prepared to reencounter the Biblical Jesus who is our Promise, our Prophet, our Forgiver, the Son of Man, our Shepherd, our Judge, our Redeemer, our King, our Sacrifice, our Provision, our Lord, and our Saviour.

“Brace yourself. Turning over tables is a messy business.”

This review is a part of Jared Wilson’s blog tour for the book Your Jesus Is Too Safe. For more reviews of the book, you can go to Jared’s blog, The Gospel-Driven Church.

Ms. McCracken writes well. And she and her husband seem to have a wonderful, mutually supportive marriage. Those are the good parts of the book.

Exact Replica is a memoir of the author’s experience with the death of her first child and the subsequent healthy birth of her second. I wanted to read it because I once had a daughter that was stillborn. However, although I grieved then and still think of my daughter, Joanna, who is now in heaven, Ms. McCracken takes grief to another level. France (the entire country) is “ruined” for her since her baby was born and died there. (What about the rest of us who manage to cope while living in the same place after losing loved ones?) I am not invalidating or disallowing her reactions and emotions; they’re hers, and she has a right to feel whatever she feels. Nevertheless, her experience wasn’t mine, and I didn’t find much to identify with in this book.

When Joanna died (she would be 15 years old now), I was very sad. I was also very ill, having lost so much blood that I needed a transfusion. I don’t remember expecting all of my friends to send cards and emails and make phone calls and rejecting them if they did not. Of course, it was nice to hear that people cared, but Ms.McCracken is “not speaking” to a close friend because said friend was three months late in sending condolences and then said the wrong thing.

Ms. McCracken’s midwife said something very stupid and insensitive at the hospital when the author was recovering from the birth of her stillborn baby. The rage that Ms. McCracken and her husband felt for this hapless and admittedly thoughtless midwife was all out of proportion; I think, amateur psychologist that I am, that they were angry about the loss of their baby and displaced that anger onto the midwife.

Anyway, I wouldn’t recommend this book for anyone who is grieving the loss of a child; too much self indulgent wallowing in emotion, not enough help for others who are experiencing loss. It made me feel vaguely guilty for not being as devastated as the author was. Do you have a recommendation for reading for a mother (or father) who has lost a child?

You can skip pages 13-16 which give a brief account of the standard evolutionary story of the progress of mankind from hunter-gatherer to farmer in only a few million years.

The rest of the book is a praise-evoking tale of a wonderful and useful creation: the potato. Did you know that the potato “provides nearly perfect nutrition?” That Thomas Jefferson, with his love for all things Frenchified, popularized the potato in the U.S. by serving various and sundry French-derived potato dishes at the White House?

Potatoes lyonaise, by the way, are potatoes fried with onions. Yum! Germans, Frenchmen, Russians, Poles, Italians, Spaniards, Greeks, and the Swiss all have special beloved national dishes made of
potatoes.

“The potato was the most precious gift Peru gave to the world–more valuable than all the golden treasure of the Incan kings.”

This book demonstrates for children and for adults a different way to look at history. Unit study history, if you will. Meltzer asserts that “something ordinary we hardly ever notice, like this lowly vegetable, can be just as important in the life of people everywhere as wars and revolutions, or kings and presidents.”

I agree. So, hip, hip, hooray for the potato! (The book itself is out of print, but I didn’t have any trouble finding a copy at my library.)

Prolific Potato Post from the Past.

“While all of the incidents in Have You Found Her are true, certain dialogue has been reconstructed, and some of the names and personal characteristics of the individuals involved have been changed. Any resulting resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental and unintentional.”

So, Have You Found Her is Janice Erlbaum’s memoir of volunteering at the homeless shelter where she was once an inmate or a client or whatever it’s called these days. And while at the shelter, Janice meets Samantha, a troubled homeless junkie with a charismatic personality and surprising talents that amaze Janice and the rest of the therapeutic community that builds itself around Samantha to try to help her overcome her horrible past of abuse and addiction.

The story continues as Sam travels through treatment center, hospital, psych ward, hospital again, halfway house, and detox getting ever sicker even as she tries to kick her addiction and regain her health. Janice becomes more and more committed to her unofficial ward and makes promises: “I am going to be in your life from now on.” “You can call me anytime.” “One year sober, and I’ll take you to Disneyland.” And finally, because Sam’s family is completely dysfunctional and unavailable, “I’ll be your legal guardian if you’ll sign the papers.”

At that point the story takes an unexpected turn, and as an empathetic reader, I was confronted with some very difficult questions. How far does commitment take you? If you love someone, is it forever? Really? What if the person you love rejects your love? What if he or she isn’t the same person you thought she was? What if the person you committed to love is much sicker than you thought? What if you don’t know how to love someone without enabling the very behaviors that are making her ill?

I thought this story was fascinating and disturbing. And if you’ve ever met or known someone like Sam, someone who preys on the co-dependency of people who need to give, you’ll find it a gripping memoir of “one woman’s quest to save a girl’s life—and the hard truths she learns about herself along the way.”

I really want to say something more about this book, but this last part enters into spoiler territory. So if you haven’t read the book and you intend to do so, stop reading now. I knew how this story would end about halfway through the book, or maybe even sooner. I think that’s because a) the author foreshadows the ending in some of her statements about Samantha early in the book and b) I’ve lived with a compulsive liar. No Munchausen’s syndrome, but definitely I know what it is like to deal with someone who tells stories to dramatize and enlarge themselves and to gain attention. It is tempting to think that if we just hang on hard enough and love strongly enough, we can “fix” someone else, that my love is the key to another person’s recovery and health. But it’s not true. I can pray, and I believe that God uses those prayers somehow to reach into the life of the one I’m praying for. But only God through Christ and the person himself in cooperation can change a person who is mentally ill and/or spiritually emaciated.

I needed to remind myself of that tonight, and thanks to reading this book and writing this review, I just did.

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective.

Ostensibly a true-crime story of the murder of a three year old Victorian child, Saville Kent, in his own upper middle class home, Summerscale’s Mr. Whicher delves into the history of detection and detective stories, the literary influences of pioneers in the detective genre, word studies of related detective terms, and the early history Scotland Yard in particular. The author actually uses the facts of the murder of Saville Kent to explore all sorts of rabbit trails and interesting by-paths as she also explains the investigation of the murder and its aftermath.

For instance,

“The word ‘clue’ derives from ‘clew’, meaning a ball of thread or yarn. I had come to mean ‘that which points the way’ because of the Greek myth in which Theseus uses a ball of yarn, given to him by Ariadne, to find his way out of the Minotaur’s labyrinth. The writers of the mid-nineteenth century still had this image in mind when they used the word.”

Now, I knew about Theseus and the escape from the labyrinth, but I didn’t know that the word ‘clue” derived from that mythological event.

I also learned a lot about Jonathan Whicher and the early detectives of Scotland Yard. Mostly bachelors and drawn from the lower middle or lower class, these early detectives sometimes identified more closely with the criminals they were entrusted to apprehend than with the staid denizens of middle class London and the of the countryside whom they were sworn to protect. Whicher himself, one of the eight original Scotland Yard officers, was the subject of an article in DIckens’ Household Words in 1850, and according to Summerscale was something of a model, or at least an influence, for Dickens’ Bleak House, Wilkie Collins The Woman in White and The Moonstone, and Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw. Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, a popular novel of the 1860’s, was also directly influenced by the Road Hill murder, as the murder of Saville Kent came to be known. (The Woman in White and The Turn of the Screw are the only ones of these books that I’ve actually read, and I can see the influences in both.)

THe actual investigation of the Road Hill murder was a difficult case with rather unsatisfactory results: no one was actually convicted of the crime until years later when the murderer, as the result of a guilty conscience and a conversion experience, confessed. And the confession itself may have been only partially true. But the light that Summerscale sheds in her book on the origins and psychology of criminal investigation and of detective fiction is thought-provoking and revealing of a modern mindset that sees the detective and his work as a metaphor for the revelation of secrets and the desire of the public to know (and sometimes not to know) the private business of families in the interest of either justice or voyeurism.

Other readers say:

Stephen Lang: “In 1860 the middle class and seemingly ordinary Kent family were subject to intense scrutiny following the murder of their young son. Inspector Jack Whicher, one of the first police officers honoured the distinction of detective, is despatched to investigate and what followed was a case that spanned several decades. Summerscale also proves that fact is far stranger than any invented murder mystery, and superbly chronicles the events that drew the attention of Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins and even Queen Victoria.”

Educating Petunia: “One of the elements that held my interest throughout was the inclusion of excerpts and background from popular detective fiction that the case inspired. I now have small list of books I want to read right away but with an eye for connections to this story.”

Nicola at Back to Books: “Well written in an engaging voice and obviously well-researched this is a gem of a book for those interested in Victorian life. Though the book focuses on a true crime and the police procedures of the time there is a wealth of information on all aspects of life in the time period. I also went into this book not knowing anything about the murder case itself and found the revealing of the investigation and eventually the killer to be as exciting as any mystery novel.”

Secret Believers: What Happens When Muslims Believe in Christ by Brother Andrew, author of God’s Smuggler and co-author, Al Janssen. Semicolon review here.

The Case Against Adolescence by Robert Epstein. Quite thought-provoking. Recommended by MatthewLee Anderson at Mere-O.

How to Read Slowly by James Sire. I read this book in preparation for teaching a literature and worldview class to my daughter and some other students at our homeschool co-op. I found it to be quite a good introduction to how to read and evaluate literature from a Christian perspective.

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan. Semicolon review here.

Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis. Semicolon review here.

Gracefully Insane: The Rise and Fall of America’s Premier Mental Hospital by Alex Beam. Semicolon review here.

Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Isamel Beah.

The Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad. Semicolon review here.

A Royal Affair: George III and His Scandalous Siblings by Stella TIlyard. Semicolon review here.

Walking From East to West by Ravi Zacharias.

The American Patriot’s Almanac by William Bennett and John Cribb. Semicolon review here.

Christianity for Modern Pagans: Pascal’s Pensees by Peter Kreeft. I did a series of posts on this book:
Chapter 1
Chapter 2: Sinners Need Silence, and Ultimately a Saviour
Chapter 3: Gloom, Despair, and Agony on Me
Chapter 4: Animal or Angel?
Chapter 5: Vanity, Vanity, All Is Vanity
Chapter 6: Every Day in Every Way
Chapter 7: Hobgoblins or Habits
I quit there and never came back to this book, not because it wasn’t good stuff, but because I went on to other things. But I plan to finish the book, and the series of posts on it, this year.