If you didn’t already know, I wrote a book. Over the course of a month, last November, I wrote an entire fiction novel. It was my first book project and my first fiction work.

Anyways, I’ve self-published it through Createspace.com and it is now available for sale. If your interested in ordering a copy, here is the link to the e-store:
http://www.createspace.com/3335807

It will be available on Amazon.com soon is available on Amazon.com, but it will always be cheaper at my direct link. If you happen to be one of the lucky ones I’ll be hanging out with in one of the next few weekends, let me know and I can bulk order a copy for you for an even cheaper price.

For those who have no clue about my book, here’s the synopsis and cover below…

Carter Owen was on top of the world. The successful owner of Nelius Incorporated, with a home in the prestigious Garden Hills, Carter and his family had little to worry about. An abandoned factory, a once famous professor, and an ancient philosophy book turns their world upside down. With their values and the world as they know it in question, the Owen family stands on the brink of doing something they never thought possible…giving up.

Okay, this is a lame book to review in comparison to the other books I’ve been reading, but it’s the book I read, so here’s the review. Playing for Pizza is one of John Grisham’s more recent books. It’s not in the mystery/law thriller category. I think he’s probably worked into his book writing deal that every once in a while he can write a book he wants to write that doesn’t fit the genre and they have to publish it. I guess you can probably do that when your John Grisham.
I used to read his books back in high school, my favorite was The Client, though I can’t remember if the move was any good or even close to the book. I remember also reading The Chamber and really not liking it. John Grisham’s books have always been easy to read, that’s why I picked up Playing for Pizza, because I needed an easy to read book. I finished it in just a couple of days.
I didn’t really like the book that much to be honest. It’s basically about a football player who ends up getting cut from his NFL team and going to play for a club team in Italy, which really do exist. There weren’t any real twist or surprises to speak of. Grisham likes football, the other off-genre book he wrote, The Bleachers, is also about football, but I liked it a lot more.
And finally, I’ve got to tell you a funny story related to John Grisham books. So, back when I had graduated from high school and was doing an internship in Chicago, I stopped by a friends house and he let me borrow a book, The Hobbit. Now, unlike many, I hadn’t read or known about The Hobbit or The Lord of The Rings series at all growing up. I didn’t know them to be famous or important literature at all. About a month after borrowing the book I realized I didn’t really like it. I didn’t like the way the plot developed, how there was this terrible situation of eminent doom and then all of the sudden some creature just flies out of the sky and saves the day, it was too random. Anyways, I brought the book back to my friend. While returning the book, another friend asked me how I liked it and I said I didn’t really. Actually, what I said was

“I don’t really like Tolkien’s writing style, it’s too random. I’d rather read an exciting John Grisham Novel.”

“You Dare Compare The Greatest Fantasy Writer of All Time to a dime-a-dozen mystery writer?! Shame On You!!”

After then being scolded for a few more minutes, I went back home, The Hobbit still in hand and finished reading it. But I still like a decent John Grisham novel now and then.

(note: Quoting might be slightly inaccurate, but it was that intense.)
(note: I don’t read the mystery thriller novels anymore, unless they don’t have redemptive violence)

Last week I read the book, The Heavenly Man: The Remarkable True Story of Chinese Christian Brother Yun. I’ve heard it recommend a handful of times as a telling story of China, modern day miracles, the persecuted church, and one man’s incredible testimony to God’s faithfulness. I found all that and more.

I want to be completely honest in this, but please don’t take offense at what I’m about to say. I really enjoyed reading this book. It was encouraging and challenging in many ways. However, I also at times, got tired of reading it. Brother Yun is constantly being beaten within an inch of his life, thrown in prison, and persecuted. I’m not saying it was okay for me to feel bored of reading about persecution, just that I did. It’s amazing to think that people have endured such intense and long lasting persecution even new.

I’ve subscribed to Voice of the Martyr‘s magazine for a number of years. For the past couple years in Nashville I was just getting emails, and I honestly wasn’t reading them, but fortunately a good friend at church was always making efforts to remind others of the persecution going on in the world and encouraging us to pray. This book was another challenge to “Remember those in chains as if you yourselves where in chains.”

I’m going to make an effort to read, remember and pray for my brothers and sisters in chains for the Gospel.

I’m back at it, with another book review, which is still on track with a book a week, though I started lagging behind recently. This book comes recommended by my friend, Neeraj.

The book I read, The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less by Barry Schwartz is all about the paradox that the freedom of having more choices seems to make us less happy. I really enjoyed this book and its insights. He basically divides people into two main categories when it comes to making choices: Maximizers and Satisficers. Maximizers want to find the best option no matter what it takes, Satisficers are willing to settle for less then the best. Though, you might think it’s better to be a Maximizer, the reality is that with so many choices available you can never really be sure you’ve found the ‘best’ option and thus maximizer’s lead a life of constant choice seeking, regret at not making the right choice, comparing choices and more. Being a Satisficers allows people to not be captivated by choices but simply chose and continue about their lives focused on the more important things.

An example of this in my own life is when it comes to groceries. I shop at three different places: Cub, Aldi, and Hampden Park Coop. For ethical reasons there are certain things I buy only at the coop, for financial reasons there are things I generally buy only at Aldi, but then there is a wide range of things in between. I constantly agonize over where to purchase certain items, whether the price difference justifies going organic, and the possible ramifications of the options. And this is quite constant. So, as it relates to certain food items, I tend to be a maximizer, which when you think about it, is sort of ridiculous. The time I’ve spent thinking through the items and options, the mental anguish that’s taken toll at being unhappy with the choice I made and so forth is certainly not worth the small, almost insignificant price differences between many of the products. Now, you might have different areas that you ‘maximize’ in and sometimes that’s okay, but often it leaves us much less happy then we’d otherwise be.

If you just google the book title you’ll find some good summaries and thoughts on the book, so I won’t do too much summarizing here, but for my benefit and yours here are the areas I thought where interesting:

• We Spend Too Much Time Choosing– though we’ve always acknowledge that community and relationships are what makes us happy, in our consumer culture we are spending more and more time shopping, but at stores and online, looking for the best deals.
• Opportunity Cost Makes Us Regret– I’ve mentioned opportunity cost before, but it’s negative effect is that when we make a choice, even if we are happy with it, we will inevitably regret the missed opportunities of what we could have done with that same money. (i.e. a vacation at the beach, while regretting not being in the mountains)
• Social Comparison in a Global Society Leaves Us Longing– We constantly compare ourselves socially to others, and in small circles that’s usually okay as we’ll likely interact with people at similar socio-economic levels, but with internet, TV and advertising we are left constantly longing to be like that person whose richer than us.

There are a lot more tidbits and the studies he references are so interesting. I could write more but I’ll just leave you with some links and videos below. Next week I’ll try and write more about what I’m going to try and do with this new found knowledge.

20 minute summary at TED Conference (watch either this one or the next one, probably not both)

One Hour summary at Google

Interesting thoughts and summaries on the book:

Wikipedia
The Simple Dollar

I read The Other Side of the River this week. It was a really good book, recommended by my friend Jennie. It’s written by Alex Kotlowitz the author of There Are No Children Here, which I read in 2003 before serving in Atlanta with AmeriCorps. Both of the books where excellent.

I’m not sure exactly how to review The Other Side of the River since it’s basically a story. It’s Non-fiction, regarding a real life incident and it follows interviews and research done by the author. Here’s the back cover synopsis:

Separated by the St. Joseph River, St. Joseph and Benton Harbor are two Michigan towns that are geographically close, yet in every sense worlds apart. St. Joseph is a prosperous lakeshore community, 95 percent white, while Benton Harbor is impoverished and 92 percent black. When the body of Eric McGinnis, a black teenage boy from Benton Harbor, is found in the river, relations between the two communities grow increasingly strained as long-held misperceptions and attitudes surface. As family, friends, and the police struggle to find out how McGinnis died. Alex Kotlowitz uncovers layers of both evidence and opinion, and demonstrates that in many ways, the truth is shaped by which side of the river you call home.

What I thought about long and hard while reading and after finishing was who I might recommend a book like this to. Reading the Afterword of the book, it was really encouraging to see that through the telling of this story and the different perspectives, the people (real life people) seemed to recognize the division there was between the towns and have begun making slow steps toward understanding. But, I wonder if this book, those who are affected and challenged by it (both readers and those personally involved in that town), are mostly those who were already open to the questions and challenges that the book raises.

What I mean is, those who find that this book and others like it challenge their stereotypes and open their eyes to the racism that exist in their society and even in their own lives, are those who are already open and willing to have those things challenged. For those who aren’t open to the challenges, I wonder if a book like this simply reinforces their stereotypes because they ignore the parts that would challenge them and focus their attention and memory on the parts that reinforce the stereotypes they already believe. The jury is still out on that one.

This book takes place in the 90’s, it is not decades old. The attitudes of the people, the racial divisions, the misunderstandings, these are not new occurrences or even all that rare in the United States. When we live, continually isolated geographically from people who are culturally different from us, there is an extremely high probability we will misunderstand each other.

I just finished reading a book, The God of Intimacy and Action, by Tony Campolo and Mary Albert Darling. It was recommended, via an article Joshua Case posted a few weeks ago. I’ll be brief in my review of this one.

The book discussed both issues of justice (Action) and that of Christian Mysticism (Intimacy). The goal of the book, I think, was to offer a collaborative discussion regarding spiritual disciplines that often seem mutually exclusive, at least in personal examples. Those who are socially active are often spiritually lacking, and those who are spiritually intimate at times lack any real action expressing that spirit. The book combined the insight of Darling and Campolo to offer an option for both groups.

I found the Mystic stuff, which is mostly forms of prayer, to be interesting. It’s nothing bizarre or new agey, in fact it’s centuries old. The stories of the faith of different heroes of the faith, St. Francis, Ignatius of Loyola, Catherine of Siena and others are really encouraging. Reading the book made me recognize that my prayer life is seriously lacking and that these more formulated guides to praying might be of some help and encouragement to me. The three types of prayer are called: Centering prayer, Lectio Divina, and The Prayer of Examen.

I just finished Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman. I really enjoyed this book, and I’ve been waiting about 7 years to read it. Truth.

The summer after I graduated high school, I attended DC/LA, a big youth event in Washington DC (And in Los Angeles). Besides getting my jaw stuck open for the first time, I went to hear an incredible speaker named Bart Campolo who talked about Mission Year and said ‘groovy’ a lot. I really enjoyed his talk and one of the books he mentioned was Jesus and the Disinherited. Since that time I’ve tried putting the book on hold through numerous Inter Library Loans and never managed to get it and sit down and read it until now. Turns out a new neighbor did Mission Year and this was required reading, so I borrowed his book.

The book is only about 100 pages so I’d definitely recommend you pick it up yourself. Thurman wrote it in 1949, well before the Civil Rights Movement, in a country boiling with racial tension. His book seeks to address what Christianity and Jesus in particular have to say to the ‘man with his back against the wall.’ It’s a brilliant little book. The reality is Jesus’ primary audience were a group of people with their backs against the wall, they were the disinherited. Unfortunately, the assumption in the church then and today seems to be that Christianity is more of a guide for what to do to the disinherited, rather then acknowledging them as the main audience of the gospel.

My suggestion would be that you read the book, I’m sure I’ll extrapolate more, but for now I’ll just leave you with some of my favorite quotes:

Why is it that Christianity seems impotent to deal radically, and therefore effectively, with the issues of discrimination and injustice on the basis of race, religion and national origin? Is this impotency due to a betrayal of the genius of the religion, or is it due to a basic weakness in the religion itself? (preface)

It is the sin of pride and arrogance that has tended to vitiate the missionary impulse and to make of it an instrument of self-righteousness on the one hand and racial superiority on the other. p. 12-13

A man’s conviction that he is God’s child automatically tends to shift the basis of his relationship with all his fellows. He recognizes at once that to fear a man, whatever may be that man’s power over him, is a basic denial of the integrity of his very life. It lifts that mere man to a place of pre-eminence that belongs to God and to God alone. He who fears is literally delivered to destruction. To the child of God, a scale of values becomes available by which men are measured and their true significance determined. Even the threat of violence, with the possibility of death that it carries, is recognized for what it is–merely the threat of violence with a death potential. Such a man recognizes that death cannot possibly be the worst thing in the world. There are some things that are worse than death. To deny one’s own integrity of personality in the presence of the human challenge is one of those things. ‘Be not afraid of them that kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do,’ says Jesus.” p. 52-53

One last part that struck me was how he made clear how radical the story of the Roman captain coming to Jesus to ask for help was. Roman’s regarded themselves as superior, that was the system that was set up, so when he comes to Jesus to ask for help he’s broken some major cultural and societal walls that were in place:

The fact that he had come to Jesus was in itself evidence to warrant the conclusion that he had put aside the pride of race and status which would have caused him to regard himself as superior to Jesus… The Roman was confronted with an insistence that made it impossible for him to remain a Roman, or even a captain. He had to take his place alongside all the rest of humanity and mingle his desires with the longing of all the desperate people of all the ages. When this happened, it was possible at once for him to scale with Jesus any height of understanding, fellowship, and love. The final barrier between the strong and the weak, between ruler and ruled, disappeared.

(thanks for already typing the quotes, just a google search away)

I read the book White Man’s Grave by Richard Dooling. It is a fiction book that was recommended in the previous book I read, Serving With Eyes Wide Open. This will be a brief book review because it’s fiction and hard to explain without giving away too much about the setting.

The setting of the book is Sierra Leone where Michael Killigan, a PeaceCorps member has gone missing. The Point of View of the book is from the perspective of Michael’s friend who goes trekking out into the bush of Sierra Leone to try and find his friend, and also from the perspective of Killigan’s Dad, a wealthy hot-shot lawyer working his connections from the United States to try and find his son.

The book does a really good job of teaching you about the culture and perspective of the native people in the bush of Sierra Leone (though Dooling notes at the end that it is still a work of fiction, based on anthropological studies and his own experience living in the country). I won’t explain the twists, but I will say that it does an excellent job of raising some interesting critiques of our ‘American’ culture.

It’s a family weekend, so I’m going to end this here, but if your interested in a decent fiction book, White Man’s Grave is worth the read.

This past week I read the book, Serving With Eyes Wide Open, by David A. Livermore. I had picked up this book at the suggestion of some people I attend church with in Nashville. We had been having a discussion about what ‘missions’ looked like for the church and about the decision to take a short term trip to Brazil. I got in a little bit of trouble for it, mainly because I was asking questions about the decisions. The suggestion was for me to read this book to get a better understanding of some of the thought process and decisions behind going. I in turn suggested they read the book, Revolution in World Missions. Unfortunately, I’ve finished the book, but no one seems interested in dialogging with me about it. Oh well, on with the review.

The book is split up into three parts. First we get a broad global perspective, then we focus on short term missions as they are currently done, then it discusses CQ (like IQ) or Cultural Intelligence and how to go about doing cross-cultural ministry properly.

I really like the information presented in the book. The first section regarding a global perspective is a glimpse into the harsh realities of the world we live in. Everything from the stories and statistics of global poverty to the impact of globalization. It was poignant and accurate.

The second section discussed the shortcomings of our current short term missions. This section was excellent. It raised important questions and provided some tough realities about the ignorance and naivety many short-termer’s bring when they travel abroad. It talked about the underlying motivations of adventure concealed in the guise of altruistic motives in our trips. I might post some quotes and further discussion later in the week.

The third section is a suggestion of how to do Short-term missions intelligently. It was valuable information. The kind of things you’d probably learn in a sociology class regarding culture. It is the type of information that is helpful for everyone, whether you ever leave the country or stay right where you are. We constantly are encountering people from different backgrounds and cultures and it would do us well to be conscience of our cultural assumptions.

Overall, I felt like this was a good book. However, I don’t feel like the third section regarding how to do short term missions effectively, in any way negates the concerns brought up in section two of the book. The reality is we spend far too much on short term missions as a international church, it is often ineffective, often motivated by much more then pure motives to help others and spread the gospel, and often is a complete waste of valuable resources that could be used to further the kingdom through the people who have the desire and the skills, but simply lack the financial resources (native missionaries).

This is a good book for us as individuals in a multicultural society to read, it does not, however, serve as a certification to then embark on short term missions without seriously considering the purposes, motivations, impact, and other possibilities within the body of Christ.

Seeing as Saturday’s don’t usually get much viewership (which is good, you should be out enjoying the weekend), I figured I’d use it as a time to catch up on a little homework. As a current full-time parent, I’ve tried to find ways to keep myself motivated toward certain goals, one of which is reading about a book a week in 2008. So far I’m right on track. What I’d like to do here is resort back to my middle school days and provide a brief book report on each of the books I read. These will by no means be exhaustive, but I will try to have some sort of consistency to them. I’ll give a brief synopsis of the book (I’ll try to avoid spoilers), I’ll give my thoughts on the book, include a quotes I found interesting, and anything else I think is worth mentioning. Hope it proves useful to you. Today, I’m going to report on Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut.

I choose this book for a couple reasons. One, Vonnegut passed away this past year and based on the number of people I know that where aware and mentioned his passing, I recognized he had an impact on a number of influential people in my life and I wanted to read some of what he’s written. Secondly, my brother considers Vonnegut one of his favorite authors, and Keane is also serving as my ‘professor’ for my book reading ‘class’ this year (basically he’s just helping me stay on track with my reading and book reports). Third, it was the only book on my list that was at the library I was at last week.

I enjoyed Slaughterhouse Five, but I did find it a bit bizarre. The writing style is pretty chaotic, no plot-line, or at least an extremely unpredictable one (which if you’ve read it might sound ironic since he tells you in the intro how the book will start and end). It basically tells the story of Billy Pilgrim a war veteran who, I think, has experienced some post traumatic stress disorder. The truth is, I’m not really sure what’s happened to him. The book involves him jumping back and forth throughout his life, time traveling of sorts, including a trip to some alien planet.

The quotes about the book on the front and back cover say two things I was confused by. One, they call the book a great ‘anti-war’ book. I can kind of see that in the way the war and scenes from the war are described, but I don’t see how it’s consider so ‘great’ in that category. Secondly, they call the book funny and humorous. I can see where you might find some of the things in the book funny, but given the condition the character Billy is in that seems to be creating these funny scenarios, I found it more pitiful then it was funny.

The one scene I did find extremely intriguing is when he watches a movie about the war in reverse. Basically he watches a destroyed city, wrecked planes, etc. as they get rebuilt, bullets and bombs are sucked out and back into the planes and then dismantled and put back into the earth ‘where no one can find them.’ I thought it was an interesting commentary on what are approach to war might look like if we finally recognized it for the disastrous effects it has on society.

I’d certainly recommend this book on the sole basis of it being one of the notable literary works of our time. I think I would have enjoyed it more had I read it in school with a smart English teacher who could help explain some of the deeper themes I know are there I just didn’t pick up on.