Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn. Of all the diversions of life, there is none so proper to fill up its empty spaces as the reading of useful and entertaining authors. ~Thomas Brooks
Welcome to the Saturday Review of Books at Semicolon. Here’s how it usually works. Find a book review on your blog posted sometime during the previous week. The review doesn’t have to be a formal sort of thing. You can link to your thoughts on a particular book, a few ideas inspired by reading the book, your evaluation, quotations, whatever.
Then on Friday night/Saturday, you post a link here at Semicolon in Mr. Linky to the specific post where you’ve written your book review. Don’t link to your main blog page because this kind of link makes it hard to find the book review, especially when people drop in later after you’ve added new content to your blog. In parentheses after your name, add the title of the book you’re reviewing. This addition will help people to find the reviews they’re most interested in reading.
After linking to your own reviews, you can spend as long as you want reading the reviews of other bloggers for the week and adding to your wishlist of books to read. That’s how my own TBR list has become completely unmanageable and the reason I can’t join any reading challenges. I have my own personal challenge that never ends.
Adam Shepard, the author of Scratch Beginnings: Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream, has a new book out. It’s called One Year Lived and like Scratch Beginnings it’s a memoir of a a year in the life of the author, Mr. Shepard. However, this time Mr. Shepard decided find out how the other half lives in a different way: he saved up his money and spent his 29th year traveling the world. He spent less than a year of college would have cost him (>$20,000), and he visited seventeen countries on four continents.
What did Adam Shepard do on his journey around the world? Well, according to the publisher’s blurb, he dug wells in Nicaragua, rode an elephant in Thailand, mustered cattle in Australia, and went bungee-jumping in Slovakia, among other exploits and escapades.
Even better than all of that adventure, Mr. Shepard read seventy-one books on his way around the world, including one in Spanish. Who says you can’t read and experience the world at the same time?
From the back of the book:
“I’m not angry. I don’t hate my job. I’m not annoyed with capitalism, and I’m indifferent to materialism. I’m not escaping emptiness, nor am I searching for meaning. I have great friends, a wonderful family, and fun roommates. The dude two doors down invited me over for steak or pork chops–my choice–on Sunday, and I couldn’t even tell you the first letter of his name. Sure, the producers of The Amazing Race have rejected all five of my applications to hotfoot around the world–all five!–and my girlfriend and I just parted ways, but I’ve whined all I can about the race, and the girl wasn’t The Girl anyway. All in all, my life is pretty fantastic. But I feel boxed in. Look at a map, and there we are, a pin stuck in the wall. There’s the United States, about twenty-four square inches worth, and there’s the rest of the world, seventeen hundred square inches begging to be explored. Career, wife, babies–of course I want these things; they’re on the horizon. Meanwhile, I’m a few memories short. Maybe I need a year to live a little.”
I haven’t actually read the book yet because it’s been kind of crazy-busy here in Semicolonland lately, but I’m looking forward to immersing myself in Adam Shepard’s around the world adventure. Mr. Shepard seems to have a knack for challenging himself and his readers with projects that demand a fresh outlook on life and inspire readers to try something a little crazy.
Like maybe fighting a bull in Nicaragua???
If you’re interested in a FREE copy of Adam Shepard’s book, One Year Lived, share a link to this post on your Facebook or Twitter either today or tomorrow. By special arrangement with the author, if you email me (sherry.early@gmail.com) or leave a comment here (with your email address) telling me that you have linked to this post on Facebook or Twitter, I will send you the link where you can download the book in an electronic format for free.
Mr. Shepard says: “People need to travel more, not only because it is satisfying and fun and inspires purpose and provides service to a world that needs it and sparks creativity, but because we need to open up our eyes to what is really going on out there. . . . The bottom line is this: in this increasingly global world, it is essential that more people (young Americans, especially) step foot out of their country.”
People are becoming aware of what Dr. Kermit Gosnell did to cruelly and callously murder possibly hundreds of babies in Philadelphia and what he did in providing sub-standard, dangerous, and horribly unsanitary “health care” for abortion-seeking women. If you don’t know about this doctor and his criminal actions, here are some links to help you to become informed about this unspeakable case and the the ongoing trial that is taking place now in Philadelphia:
That’s what happened for years at Dr. Gosnell’s Women’s Medical Society in Philadelphia. And here are some implications and conclusions that I draw from the horror that was Dr Gosnell and his accomplices:
1. The media–newspapers, television, and other outlets– cannot be trusted to tell the truth about abortion.
Indeed, the silence had been stunning since the Gosnell trial began back on March 18. No mention of the story at all on ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, NPR, or MSNBC, and no front-page stories in any major paper. National Review, the Weekly Standard, Breitbart.com, and Michelle Malkin, on the other hand, provided early and consistent coverage.
Conservative, liberal, or in-between, please do not depend on one or two sources that agree with your point of view for all of your news and opinions. First of all, reporters are just as fallible as the rest of us. They have their own blind spots, and sometimes they actually make choices that are just wrong, such as the choice not to cover this trial in all its horror and with all of its disturbing implications. If I only listen to or read conservative news sources, I am just as likely to miss important issues and news and viewpoints that will inform my decisions and add information to back up or negate my opinions. If you only listen to or read the mainstream media, you are only getting a slanted, and partial picture of the range of opinion and news that is making our world.
But especially, do not continue to trust the mainstream media to tell you the truth about abortion. Many journalists will continue to try to use the Jedi mind trick and tell you to “move along, there’s nothing to see here.” You and I have a responsibility to know what evils are being perpetrated in our own communities in the name of “choice” and “women’s rights.” If you have turned your head and pretended not to know that abortion is the gruesome and unjustified killing of a human being, then the Gosnell case is a wake-up call.
2. A person’s a person no matter how small. The 20-30 week old babies that Dr. Gosnell killed by snipping their spinal cords with scissors had exactly the same humanity as the baby boy in the video embedded below:
Abortion advocates and supporters of a “woman’s right to choose” must face the question: why did baby Samuel get the care he needed to live while hundreds of babies at Gosnell’s clinic, thousands around the nation, are instead being burned with saline, injected with poison, or “snipped” after being born alive? What makes a person a person? Is it really logical or morally defensible to say that a baby, inside the womb or outside, only becomes a person deserving of life, liberty and medical care when the mother says, “I choose you to be a real person”?
Abortion advocates in reference to the Gosnell case are saying essentially that what Dr. Gosnell did would have been perfectly fine if only he had done it in cleaner surroundings. This logic is untenable and unpardonable. A baby who is three inches inside the birth canal or three days less than the legal age for being protected from an abortion is no less a person than Baby Samuel or any other wanted baby located inside the mother’s womb.
3. We have no idea how many facilities like Gosnell’s are still operating in the United States.
In an egregious example of twisted and backwards logic, abortion advocates are arguing that too much regulation of abortion clinics caused women to seek abortions from Dr. Gosnell, and so therefore abortion clinics in general should receive less regulation and less scrutiny instead of more. They say that women “are forced” to go to doctors like Gosnell because of the lack of availability of cheap, safe abortions elsewhere.
There were and still are multiple abortion clinics and hospitals that do abortions in Philadelphia. Gosnell’s practice went on for over twenty years, without inspections for most of that time, while abortion was legal and available in Philadelphia. Gosnell’s horrors didn’t happen because abortion was over-regulated or because abortion clinics were held to high medical standards. And most of what Gosnell did should not happen to babies or women anywhere, no matter how sanitary the facility is where the “snipping” takes place.
I found these articles in a cursory Google search:
There are many more examples. And I could not find anything that told me which states have regulations in place for abortion clinics or how often those standards are upheld if they have been enacted into law. I did find this page at the National Abortion Federation website in which we are told that “abortion is very safe” and “abortion is already regulated.” NAF opposes what they call TRAP laws because they “discourage health care providers from offering abortion care and can make provision very burdensome and/or expensive for smaller providers.”
Would that someone had “discouraged” Dr. Gosnell a long time ago.
About the first book in this fantasy series by N.D. Wilson, I wrote: The Dragon’s Tooth by N.D. Wilson. Too much action and it moved way too fast for me. I think there was a sub-text that I just didn’t get, and I think Mr. Wilson is too smart for my Very Little Brain.
Reading the second book in the series helped my little brain a little bit, but I really should just wait until all of the (three?) books in the Ashtown Burials series are out and then I could read them all together. I’m pretty sure my little brain would thank me for not asking it to remember a book I read over a year ago and put it together with a book that I’m reading now that demands a lot of thought and remembering on its own merits.
Anyway, The Dragon’s Tooth is “the only object in the world capable of killing the long-lived transmortals, and Phoenix (the bad guy) has been tracking them down one-by-one, and murdering them.” Cyrus and Antigone Smith had the dragon’s tooth in the first book, but they lost it to the bad guys, and now almost everyone is mad at them. Transmortal Gilgamesh is especially angry, and he and his fellow transmortals have come to Ashtown to demand that the Order of Brendan offer protection or justice or something. So Antigone and Cyrus end up on the run from the Order, from Gilgamesh, from Phoenix, and from other evil characters who are out to destroy everything and take over the world.
If that paragraph doesn’t explain what the Ashtown Burial books are all about (and it doesn’t), then maybe this book trailer will help.
For what it’s worth, I like the books, but I think I’ll like them better when the series is complete.
The shortlists and the judges for the INSPY Awards have been announced, and I am honored and pleased to be one of the judges for the category of Literature for Young People.
Here are the shortlists. The links are to my reviews of three of the books on the shortlists. I have a lot of reading to do if I want to read all of the shortlisted books —and I do (except for romance, which doesn’t interest me a a genre).
General Fiction
• Into the Free by Julie Cantrell
• Promise Me This by Cathy Gohlke
• The First Gardener by Denise Hildreth Jones
• The Messenger by Siri Mitchell
• Stardust by Carla Stewart
Romance
• To Whisper Her Name by Tamera Alexander
• Against the Tide by Elizabeth Camden
• Love’s Reckoning by Laura Frantz
• Breath of Dawn by Kristen Heitzmann
• My Stubborn Heart by Becky Wade
Mystery/Thriller
• Gone to Ground by Brandilyn Collins
• A Plain Death by Amanda Flower
• Placebo by Steven James
• Trinity: Military War Dog by Ronie Kendig
• Proof by Jordyn Redwood
• Caught by Margaret Patterson Haddix
• The 13th Tribe by Robert Liparulo
• Freeheads by Kerry Nietz
• Soul’s Gate by James L. Rubart
• Daystar by Kathy Tyers
Because I am a judge I feel I must say that the reviews I linked to are my own opinions and should not be taken as any indication of what books will win the INSPY Awards.
Rachel just got hit with a triple whammy: her fiance is cheating on her, her parents have been keeping a big (BAD) secret from her, and her best friend and Christian mentor has a drug problem. So, Rachel goes off the rails, leaves her faith, and moves to Chicago.
To my discredit, I am normally impatient with characters and even real people who “lose their faith.” Like what, you misplaced your lifelong, deep-seated commitment to the God of the Universe who was so committed to his love for you that he became a man and died for you, kind of like you sometimes misplace your car keys? Did you spend any time looking for that “faith” you so conveniently mislaid? Did you ask any questions? Pray? Wrestle with God like Jacob did?
I know, I know. I’m unsympathetic. I blame it partly on the terminology. One doesn’t really lose faith. You decide, for whatever reason, to leave it behind, to repudiate it. And in Alison Strobel’s Reinventing Rachel, the title character does exactly that: her faith wasn’t working out the way she thought it should, so she leaves it behind to try out a new, God-free life of pleasing herself and avoiding annoying Christians. God didn’t keep his end of the bargain that Rachel thought she made with Him: she’d behave, and He would make everything work out right. Instead, Rachel decides she’ll have to work out her own life without God’s help or intervention.
At first, after Rachel moves to Chicago to live with her old friend Daphne, things do work out pretty well, without church and without God. Daphne is a free spirit and lots of fun. Rachel finds a job right away. And she even gets a new boyfriend who’s handsome, attentive, and willing to take it slow and easy. However, when you leave one idol, Christian legalism and bargain mentality, behind, you’re likely to pick up another idol before long because we human beings were made to worship someone or something. Rachel finds comfort and sustenance in some not-so-unusual places, and then she finds that the idols she’s chosen are just as fallible and entrapping as the “Christianity” she left behind. By God’s grace, she also meets few people who show her what true commitment to Christ really looks like.
So, the conclusion is that Rachel didn’t really lose her faith in Christ; she never had faith in Christ’s grace in the first place. She was trusting in her Christian checklist to keep her on God’s good side, and when life came at her with a whole lot of hard stuff, Rachel’s make-a-list of rules didn’t begin to answer the questions or provide the strength she needed.
Ms. Strobel is a good writer, particularly in the area of character development. I wouldn’t mind checking out others of her novels, which I suppose is the reason I managed to snag a free copy of Reinventing Rachel for my Kindle when it was being offered as a “special deal.” It’s full price now, but I recommend it as worth the money or the time it takes to hunt down a library copy. (I’m not a fan of the half-a-face picture on the cover, but ignore that and read the story.)
WARNING: The following quotes and observations are disturbing, grotesque, horrific, and any other really bad adjective you want to use to describe mass murder and the ignorance and hard-hearted elective apathy that allowed it and continues to ignore the pain of women and children. If you are an adult American, you should read about the Kermit Gosnell murder trial and the awful acts that are alleged to have taken place at Mr. Gosnell’s “clinic” in Philadelphia.
JD Mullane: Gosnell, 72, is charged with killing seven born-alive babies and causing the death of Karnamaya Mongar, 41, an immigrant from Nepal who had sought an abortion at his West Philadelphia clinic. The clinic was busy, doing brisk cash business.
Trevin Wax: “The Gosnell case involves gruesome details about living, viable babies having their spinal cords “snipped†outside the womb.”
Kirsten Powers: “Regardless of such quibbles, about whether Gosnell was killing the infants one second after they left the womb instead of partially inside or completely inside the womb — as in a routine late-term abortion — is merely a matter of geography. That one is murder and the other is a legal procedure is morally irreconcilable.”
Conor Friedersdorf: “It is also a story about a place where, according to the grand jury, women were sent to give birth into toilets; where a doctor casually spread gonorrhea and chlamydiae to unsuspecting women through the reuse of cheap, disposable instruments; an office where a 15-year-old administered anesthesia; an office where former workers admit to playing games when giving patients powerful narcotics; an office where white women were attended to by a doctor and black women were pawned off on clueless untrained staffers.”
Mark Steyn: “This is a remarkable moment in American life: A man is killing actual living, gurgling, bouncing babies on an industrial scale – and it barely makes the papers.”
Andrew McCarthy: “Stephen Massof, one of Kermit Gosnell’s fellow butchers,. . . described for the jury the chamber of horrors that was the ‘Women’s Medical Society’ on Lancaster Avenue. There, scores of babies — perhaps hundreds of them — were willfully mutilated after being born alive.”
Finally, this video is called 3801 Lancaster:
“He was respected. This was not a back-alley operation.”
“He was running a . . . late-term abortion clinic.”
I know this is mostly a book blog, but just as I would have been morally culpable to have lived in Hitler’s Germany and to have been silent as Jews were being rounded up and killed, I cannot be silent when we as a nation continue to murder our own children. The killing of newborn and pre-born babies happens every day in abortion “clinics” around the nation. Some of them are just cleaner and more law-abiding, a bit more “humane”, than Gosnell’s torture chamber.
Pray for the women, the people who worked at that abortion mill, Dr. Gosnell, the journalists who covered the story and those who ignored it, and for all of us. May this horror be a turning point that will touch hearts and change minds and bring us to repentance.
“Remember, it is not hasty reading, but serious meditating upon holy and heavenly truths, that makes them prove sweet and profitable to the soul. It is not the bee’s touching of the flower that gathers honey, but her abiding for a time upon the flower that draws out the sweet. It is not he that reads most, but he that meditates most, that will prove the choicest, sweetest, wisest, and strongest Christian.†~Thomas Brooks
Welcome to the Saturday Review of Books at Semicolon. Here’s how it usually works. Find a book review on your blog posted sometime during the previous week. The review doesn’t have to be a formal sort of thing. You can link to your thoughts on a particular book, a few ideas inspired by reading the book, your evaluation, quotations, whatever.
Then on Friday night/Saturday, you post a link here at Semicolon in Mr. Linky to the specific post where you’ve written your book review. Don’t link to your main blog page because this kind of link makes it hard to find the book review, especially when people drop in later after you’ve added new content to your blog. In parentheses after your name, add the title of the book you’re reviewing. This addition will help people to find the reviews they’re most interested in reading.
After linking to your own reviews, you can spend as long as you want reading the reviews of other bloggers for the week and adding to your wishlist of books to read. That’s how my own TBR list has become completely unmanageable and the reason I can’t join any reading challenges. I have my own personal challenge that never ends.
This thriller is book with a moral, but it didn’t feel preachy to me, just real. Three teens–Cooper, Hiro, and Gordy—witness a robbery and attempted murder. Because Cooper and his family are threatened by the robbers and because they have reason to believe that at least one of the robbers might be a bad cop, the three decide on a”code of silence.” They won’t tell anyone about what they saw: not their parents, not their teachers, not their other friends, and not the police.
The rest of the story show the outworking and results of this decision. Although the moral of the story is “tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”, it’s never presented as an easy option. The truth is that it’s not always easy to tell the truth. And our motives for many of our decisions are often mixed at best. If I lie to protect myself and others, is it mostly for myself or the others? If I tell one lie, will it become easier and easier to tell more lies? Why do people lie, and how hard is it to disentangle oneself from a web of lies? What do lies told to others do to the trust between the friends who share in the deception?
Hiro is a little too hard on Cooper sometimes throughout the book. She rails at him over and over to end the code of silence before it destroys their friendship and puts them in the very danger they’re trying to avoid. But she agreed to the code in the first place, and she can end it anytime. Instead, she blames Cooper and tries to make him feel totally responsible for the trio’s joint decision. That aspect of the relationships in the novel felt wrong to me, somehow.
But overall, Code of Silence was an exciting middle grade novel that asked all the right questions—and gave some solid answers.
Children’s and Young Adult Fiction: There You’ll Find Me by Jenny B. Jones. The Drowned Vault by N.D. Wilson. Sequel to The Dragon’s Tooth in the Ashtown Burials series. Code of Silence by Tim Shoemaker. Things I Can’t Forget by Miranda Kenneally. Ten drama/romance. Here’s my review at Breakpoint: Youth Reads. The Hero’s Guide to Storming the Castle by Christopher Healy. I read an ARC of this hilarious sequel to The Hero’s Guide to Saving Your Kingdom. This second book is even more fun than the first. Look for my review closer to the publication date in late April.
