Archive for the ‘Book Reviews’ Category

A Remarkable New Perspective on the Eternal Destiny of The Bride of Christ

Introduction

The following chapters present what some consider a totally new and unique cosmology. The author’s primary thesis is that the one purpose of the universe from all eternity is theproduction and preparation of an Eternal companion for the Son, called the Bride, the Lamb’s Wife.

Since she is to share the throne of the universe with her Divine Lover and Lord as a judicial equal, she must be trained, educated, and prepared for her queenly role.

Because the crown IS ONLY FOR THE CONQUEROR (rEVELATION 3:21), THE Church (later to become the Bride) must learn the art of spiritual warfare, of overcoming evil forces in preparation for her assumption of the throne following the Marriage Supper of the Lamb. To enable her to learn the technique of overcoming, God ordained the infinitely wise program of believing prayer. He did not ordain prayer primarily as a way of getting things done. It is His way of giving the Church “on-the-job” training in overcoming the forces hostile to God. This world is a laboratory in which those desitned for the throne are learning in actual practice how to overcome Satan and his hierarchy. The prayer closet is the arena which produces the overcomer.

This means that redeemed humanity outranks all other orders of crated beings in the universe. Angels are created, not generated. Redeemed humanity is both created and generated, begotten of God, bearing His “genes”, His heredity. Through the new birth a redeemed human being becomes a bona fide member of the original cosmic family, “next of kin” to the Trinity. Thus God has exalted redeemed humanity to such a sublime height that it is impossible forHim to elevate them further without breaching the Godhead. This is the basis for the divine accolate of

Psalm 8:5:”Thou hast made him but little lower than God” (ASV and Amplified).

The Church, through her resurrection and ascension with christ,m is already legally on the throne. Through the use of her weapons of prayer and faith she holds in this present throbbing moment the balance of power in world affairs. In spite of all of her lamentable weaknesses, appalling failures, and indefensible shortcomings, the church is the mightiest force for civilization and enlightened social consciousness in the world today. The only force that is contesting Satan’s total rule in human affairs is the Church of the Living God. If Satan were unopposed, if he were under no restraint generated by the Spirit-inspired prayers and holy lives of God’s people, “the pillared firmament were rottenness and earth’s base built on stubble…

‘Ye are the salt of the earth…Ye are the light of the world” (Matthew 5:13-14).

If it were not for thepurifying and preserving influence of the church on earth, the fabric of all we call civilization would totally disintegrate, decay, and disappear. The fact that the social order has been preserved from total devastation in spite of Satan’s worst, proves that at least a remnant of the Church is effectually functioning and already has entered upon her rulership in union with her living Lord. She ism, therefore, even now by virtue of the weapons of prayer and faith engaged in “on-the-job” training for her place is co-sovereign with Christ over the entire universe following Satan’s final destruction.

The Church, by virtue of her faithful use of prayer, wields the balance of power not only in world affairs but also in the salvation of individual souls. Without violating the free moral responsibiity of any individual,m the Church, by means of persistent, believing intercession, may so release the Spirit of God upon a soul that he will find it easier to yield to the Spirit’s tender wooing and be saved than to contine his rebellion.

God will not go over the Church’s head to do things in spite of her because this would abort Hisplan to b ring her to full stature as co-sovereign with the Son. He will therefore do nothing without her. To this John Wesley agrees when he says, “God does nothing but in answer to prayer.”

In order to enable the church to overcome Satan, God entered the stream of Human history in the Incarnation. As unfallen Man He overcame and destroyed Satan both legally and dynamically. All that Christ did in redemption He did for the benefit of the Church. He is

“head over all things to the church” (Ephesians 1:22)

His victory over satan is accredited to the Church. Although Christ’s triumph over Satan is full and complete, God permits him to carry on a guerrilla warfare. God could put Satan completely away, but He has chosen to use him to give the church “on-the-job” training in overcoming.

Prayer is not begging God to do something which He is loath to do. It is not overcoming reluctance in God. It is enforcing Christ’s victory over Satan. It is implementing upon earth Heaven’s decisions concerning the affairs of men. Calvery legally destroyed Satan, and canceled all of his claims. God placed the enforcement of Calvary’s victory in the hands of of the Church (Matthew 18:18 and Luke 10:17-19). He had given her “power of attorney”. She is His “deputy”. but his delegated authority is wholly inoperative apart from the prayers of a believing Church. Therefore, prayer is where the action is. Any church without a well-organized and systematic prayer program is simply operating a religious treadmill.

A program of prayer without faith is powerless. The missing element that is necessary to energize prevailing prayer that binds and casts out Satan is triumphant faith. And the missing element that is necessary to energize triumphant faith is praise-perpetual, purposeful, aggressive praise. Praise is the highest form of prayer because it combines petitiion with faith. Praise is the spark plug of faith. It is the one thing needed to get faith airborne, enabling it to soar above the deadly miasma of doubt. Praise is the detergent which purifies faith and purges doubt from the heart. The secret of answered prayer is faith without doubt (mark 11:23). And the secret of faith without doubt is praise, triumphant praise, continuous praise, praise that is a way of life. This is the solution to the problem of a living faith and successful prayer.

The secret of success in overcoming Satan and qualifying for the throne is a massive program of effective prayer. The secret of effective prayer is a massive program of praise.

My Thoughts:

This text is right on time by the Holy Ghost. It will be some powerful sharing. It has surely collided with my Spirit and affirms the unwavering faith I walk in. I keep myself in praise. I keep it going constantly. I find myself praising him even amidst a crowd, I am not concerned that people hear me.

This is the radical faith and positioning God is requiring of us. As I have told the group which I teach constantly and God made me steward over more than 4 years ago now, God’s heart is on marriage for He is looking for His Bride.

Revelation 21:9And there came unto me one of the seven angels which had the seven vials full of the seven last plagues, and talked with me, saying, Come hither, I will shew thee the bride, the Lamb’s wife.

Ephesians 5:25-28 (King James Version)
25 Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it;
26 That he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word,
27 That he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish.
28 So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself.

More to come……..

Paul E. Billheimer

Serving Christ and His Sheep
Through Humility and Determination

JoAnn Early Macken. Illustrated by Susan Gaber
Candlewick
ISBN 978-0763633783
NA pages
$15.99

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Reviewed by Kristi Jemtegaard

Endpapers brushed with raindrops introduce this story of a mother and child coming in from a sudden storm to the cozy comfort of their living room. Each one of the little girl’s fearful questions (“Mama? What’s that I hear?”) is met with a comforting, low-key response (“That’s just the rumble of thunder, my dear”). Once convinced of her own safety, the child begins to fret about the animals still outside in the wind and wet. “What about chipmunks?” she asks, and mother again soothes her worries: “They snuggle together, deep in their burrows in wet, windy weather.” The graceful rhythm of these rhyming lines aptly mimics the steady patter of rain on the roof, and Susan Gaber’s textured acrylic illustrations evoke the roiling movement of the clouds, the supple motion of branches bending to the wind, and the pungent smell of rain-soaked earth.

Kristi Jemtegaard is a library manager for Arlington County, Va.

Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group

Xiaoda Xiao
Two Dollar Radio
ISBN 978-0982015131
184 pages
$15.50

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Reviewed by Donna Rifkind

Informed by the author’s experience as a prisoner in a Maoist labor camp during most of the 1970s, Xiaoda Xiao’s first English-language novel is, in his words, “a work of history in fictional form.” Xiaoda has modeled his protagonist, a young man from Shanghai named Ja Feng, on real people who survived the subhuman conditions of Chinese prison camps and then, upon their release, found themselves unable to rejoin society.

The author, who immigrated to the United States in 1989 and earned an MFA from Amherst, has drawn inspiration from Western literature, feeling more in tune with the sensibilities of Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and Kafka’s novels than with his own countrymen’s prison narratives. Like Kafka’s fiction, Xiaoda’s novel illustrates an individual’s powerlessness in the face of a pitiless bureaucracy. But he blends that familiar predicament with a more specifically Chinese tragedy, in which the same individual fails to reintegrate into a culture that is nothing if not inexorably collective.

After being wrongly accused of joining a counterrevolutionary group, Ja Feng has been sent to a labor camp and then sentenced to solitary confinement for defending the rights of another prisoner. His cell, built into the concave slope of a hillside, is three feet wide and too short to stand straight in. Every morning in the dark space, Ja Feng wakes up and wishes for madness. Jeering children throw stones into the hole where he receives his paltry food.

After Mao’s death, a rehabilitation program for prisoners begins, and Ja Feng is abruptly released. He returns to Shanghai, where life has closed up around his absence like a healed wound. His mother is dead; his fiancee, who was pregnant at the time of his incarceration, is married to someone else; his 7-year-old daughter has no idea he ever existed. He attempts to move in with his sister and her family, but he’s forced to leave when his screaming night terrors become unbearable.

What follows is a tale of wandering and failed connections, of a world in which “everything looked beautiful but lifeless.” Ja Feng flits from woman to woman and from job to job — as a plumber, construction worker, clothing salesman, architect’s assistant — without satisfaction or stability. In recurring cinematic images, he wafts through the streets among large crowds, often spying former friends and lovers from afar, but always unhappily on his own.

Xiaoda’s storytelling has plenty of antic vigor for all its grimness, fueled by an activist’s anger. “This is what is happening in China right now,” he told Publishers Weekly last October. (And that truth resounds in the case of distinguished Beijing writer Liu Xiaobo, who was sentenced on Christmas Day for promoting human rights.) “This is the real world, the real darkness that I’ve experienced.”

Donna Rifkind is a writer who lives in Los Angeles.

Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group

WE SHALL OVERCOME: A Song That Changed the World
Stuart Stotts. Illustrated by Terrance Cummings
Clarion
ISBN 9780547182100
$18

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Reviewed by Abby McGanney Nolan

Powered by its straightforward melody and generous procession of verses, “We Shall Overcome” has covered a lot of ground. Developing out of a Southern spiritual called “I’ll Be All Right” into an international anthem of perseverance, the song has proved to be a potent unifying force for people in trying circumstances. Stuart Stotts rightly focuses on the song’s role in the civil rights movement, but he explains its earlier ties to gospel singing and the labor movement.

Stotts quotes civil rights workers on the strength they gained from singing the song in groups, often holding hands with arms crossed in front. As Sweet Honey in the Rock’s Bernice Reagon recalls, you had to move closer together to sing it this way. Another worker faced a crowd of KKK members in Mississippi: “We must have sung ‘We Shall Overcome’ for thirty minutes. … It put you in touch with a larger self that couldn’t be killed.”

The book is also visually engaging, filled with Terrance Cummings’ compelling black-white-and-red images of struggle and with period photographs that capture both the upheaval and the uplift of the times. The song’s music and lyrics and a CD featuring Pete Seeger’s influential version fill out the package, likely leading young readers to other rousing renditions.

– Abby McGanney Nolan

Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group

by Stephanie Saldana
Publisher: Doubleday
ISBN 978-0-385-522200-7
306 pages
$24.95

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Reviewed by Tara Bahrampour

In 2004, when Stephanie Saldana was 27, her boyfriend broke up with her. Saldana, a Texan and recent graduate of Harvard Divinity School who had spent much of her 20s traveling the world and avoiding emotional commitment, fell into depression and headed off to spend a year in Syria. As a Fulbright scholar in Damascus, she lived among Syrian street vendors, Armenian neighbors and Iraqi refugees, then headed to a mountain monastery where she communed with Jesus and seriously considered becoming a nun. A Christmas visit home changed her mind, and she returned to finish her year in Syria, where she emerged from depression, taught English to Muslim women, and entered into a tentative relationship with a French monk-in-training who had to decide whether to forsake his monastic vocation to be with her.

It was a transformative year for Saldana, chronicled in her memoir, “The Bread of Angels,” which describes her struggle to understand love, community and God, and overcome her own demons. Set in a time when the U.S.-led war in Iraq has cast the region into instability, the book has the ingredients to be a Middle Eastern “Eat, Pray, Love.”

Like Elizabeth Gilbert’s blockbuster memoir of post-breakup, international self-discovery, Saldana’s story is divided into secular and spiritual sections, with headings such as “The Fallen World,” “Crucifixion” and “Resurrection.” In the early sections, she is mired in thoughts about the untimely deaths and mental illness in her family, and the stunted relationships in her past, all of which has left her so depressed and fearful that the monastery seems an attractive alternative to the messiness of the world. Her male companion there is Jesus, who appears in visions: “He sometimes calls to me. As though he needs to be seen. As though he needs me to witness the leper’s hand unwithering, the paralytic rising from his bed. … I watch his hands. He is so quietly beautiful. I try to keep from thinking while I watch him: Please, don’t die.”

In a book based so heavily on the author’s spiritual and emotional transformation, she would have done well to step back sometimes and get some air — and some perspective on herself. But Saldana’s sense of her own importance is a far cry from Gilbert’s light-handed self-deprecation. Saldana compares herself at various times, and seemingly without irony, to Clark Kent, the angels cast into hell and the Virgin Mary, whose “story I have lived.” She obsesses over instances in which she has let people down — ranging from her mother to a girl she was mean to at age 7 to former lovers to an Iraqi poet she befriended for a while and then stopped visiting. Her responsibility also extends to people she has never met: “Sometimes … I see them all at once, lined up in the desert in front of me: Iraqis, American soldiers, Palestinian refugees, Israeli soldiers. I look at their faces, one after another, and then I ask myself, Stephanie, suppose you could, even for a day, make some of their sufferings disappear. Would you say no? Would you even dare?”

Thankfully this kind of talk begins to fade, along with her monastic tendencies, after she attends a family gathering and realizes that she is more unhappy than the relatives she feels guilty about not saving. That leaves her free to return to Syria and fall in love, with the culture and the monk, and the book picks up speed. She is swept up by the beauty of the Arabic language and her increasing ability to banter with shopkeepers. She studies the Quran with a female sheikh, delighting in details about Biblical characters doing things not covered in the Bible — for example that John the Baptist was kind to his parents or that Mary went off into the desert, scared and alone, after the annunciation. She vividly sketches acquaintances such as Ahmed, the Palestinian pastry seller who swings headfirst from a ceiling trapdoor to serve his customers and dreams of selling knafeh, a cheese pastry, in front of the White House. And she duly remarks on the lessons of living abroad: “I had forgotten long ago that a Palestinian refugee could also be a man hanging upside down from his shop, serving desserts so sweet that they make my teeth hurt.”

But when it comes to describing her love interest, Frederic, she is so enamored that it’s hard to see the man behind the magic. “He comes off as a cross between a hermit, Lawrence of Arabia, and, well, basically every woman’s fantasy of an incredibly handsome French-speaking poet, which he also happens to be.” As the book progresses, we get a little more backstage access — Frederic singing Beatles songs, Frederic quietly struggling with his choice — but Saldana’s reverence prevents her from truly fleshing him out. She relies instead on descriptions such as “that terrible, innocent look of his, of such goodness that it could end civil wars.”

The two connect over their shared loneliness, and they fall in love through reading Quranic verses. As they compare passport stamps and wander down romantic alleyways, one gets the sense of watching two Western college students on their year abroad. There’s nothing wrong with that, but the observer is never fully in on the romance. Saldana doesn’t disclose until the last page what Frederic’s decision is, but it will not ruin the suspense to say that her time in Syria proves healing on several fronts and leaves her ready to embrace the world she once sought to flee.

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Tara Bahrampour is a staff writer for The Washington Post and author of “To See and See Again: A Life in Iran and America.” Tara can be reached at bahrampourt(at symbol)washpost.com.

Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group

by Jimmy McDonough
Viking
ISBN 978-0-670-02153-6
432 pages
$27.95

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Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley

The story of Tammy Wynette isn’t exactly tragic, at least not in the classic Greek sense, but it certainly is sad. Born Virginia Wynette Pugh in 1942 at her grandfather’s house in rural Mississippi, she died 56 years later in Nashville. She had been one of the three reigning queens of country music for years — the others being Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton — and though her star had faded considerably by the spring of 1998, she was still one of the most famous.

For all that, it’s the same old story: Neither fame nor money bought her happiness or love. She was married five times, in the course of which she had four daughters, but her marriages were variously disastrous, and she was basically an absentee mother. Her big, powerful, evocative voice was housed in a small, vulnerable body that fell victim to various aches, pains and ailments, which she attempted to ameliorate with drugs and other substances that did her far more harm than good. She could be generous and kind, but there was an essential loneliness about her that friendships and affairs, no matter how intense, never could wholly relieve. She died a deeply and irremediably unhappy person.

Her father died before her first birthday, of complications from a brain tumor. She had no memories of him, but according to Jimmy McDonough, “in ferreting through hours and hours of interviews with her, you notice one subject invariably chokes her up: the father she never knew. Many of Wynette’s closest female friends throughout her life expressed a similar opinion when it came to the lasting effect (Hollis Pugh’s) early death had: in her many relationships and marriages with older men, Wynette was searching for the father figure she never had.”

This, of course, is boilerplate pop psychology, but there’s probably a good deal of truth to it. Wynette seems to have been endlessly needy, probably more for love itself than for its physical manifestations. “I was raised to believe in marriage as a woman’s greatest fulfillment,” she said, “and I guess deep down that’s what I still believe.” So she got married at the age of 17 to a man five years older with the improbable (but certifiably country) name of Euple Byrd, with whom she had the first three of her daughters, the third of whom was born shortly before Wynette divorced Euple and steered herself toward marriage number two.

Between marriages one and two, important things happened. She was discovered by a television host in Birmingham named Country Boy Eddie, appeared on his show as often as he let her, then moved to Nashville with absolutely no prospects but high hopes and determination. It was there that she met Don Chapel, a marginal figure on the country-music scene but one who had “a recording contract and songwriting credits” and not merely recognized her talent but helped her develop it. In August 1966 she found her way to Billy Sherrill, a producer at Epic Records who was on his way to becoming a Nashville legend. He thought (correctly) that she needed a catchier name and came up with Tammy, from the character played by Debbie Reynolds in “Tammy and the Bachelor.” He said, “You look like a Tammy to me,” and that was that.

Sherrill got this almost waif-like girl into the recording studio, and the results were spectacular: “Apartment #9,” “Your Good Girl’s Gonna Go Bad,” “I Don’t Wanna Play House” — right out of the gate she scored hit after hit. “Tammy Wynette had gone from nobody to somebody in a flash,” McDonough writes. “In 1967 alone, four of her singles would go top ten, three of them to number one, and her debut album would make it to number 7. She was also voted Most Promising Female Artist by Country Song Roundup, Music City News, and Record World. Plus she’d win a Grammy for ‘I Don’t Wanna Play House.’”

In April 1967 she married Don Chapel, a union that lasted for about a year, its end coinciding with the release of “D-I-V-O-R-C-E.” One person who liked the song (and the singer) was George Jones, one of the greatest country singers of that or any other day, a decade her senior but very much on the loose after the end of his own marriage. They married in August 1968 and divorced six-and-a-half years later, closing the books on one of the most turbulent and creatively productive marriages in American musical history. He was a drunk, and she was popping pills, but they found time to have one daughter and to record a series of spectacular duets, from the classic weepers “Take Me” and “Golden Ring” to the hilarious “(We’re Not) The Jet Set.” If there’s another husband-wife team that accomplished so much, its name escapes me, but Jones and Wynette were too hardheaded and stubborn to last as a true team, and their divorce was preordained.

Shortly after their marriage Wynette recorded the track that will be her signature for as long as she’s remembered. It’s “Stand by Your Man,” of course, its immortality secured a quarter-century later when Hillary Clinton, asked about her husband’s alleged extramarital activities, said: “I’m not sitting here, some little woman ’standing by my man’ like Tammy Wynette.” It was an astute political move, but it was also a serious misreading of both the song and Wynette’s interpretation of it. Though it expresses a fairly traditional role of male-female relationships, it also has an undercurrent suggesting that in fact the woman is stronger than the man, and one of the ways she shows this is to stand by him when he is weak — which, you might say, is exactly what Hillary Clinton was doing.

The next man Wynette stood by was a Florida real-estate developer named J. Michael Tomlin, whom she married in July 1976 on the rebound from an affair with Burt Reynolds, the actor. Marriage number four lasted 44 days and “deeply embarrassed Tammy,” but it didn’t prevent her from making a fifth mistake with George Richey, “the oddest” of the men in her life, whom she married in July 1978. They stayed married to the end of her life, though it’s hard to say why. After she married Richey, “Tammy was no longer in charge of her finances, her friends, or her life. Now came years of illness, drug addiction, and isolation.” She continued to record, but as her health declined her voice began to lose its power and tone. Little of the work she did in her last two decades has the staying power of what she did when she was young, tenacious and in command of the emotions that she brought to almost every track she recorded.

Reading about these last years is painful enough; reading about it in McDonough’s prose is excruciating. In nearly half a century of reviewing books I’ve slogged my way through some bad ones, but “Tammy Wynette: Tragic Country Queen” ranks up there among the very worst. McDonough insists on injecting himself into Wynette’s story — “I liked Don,” “this is one of the absolute looniest Tammy numbers, which is why I love it,” “There is one Tammy/Richey story that I just can’t shake” — and he just loves to show how down-home country he can be: “One thing about Billy: he did it his way. He just didn’t give a damn, and if you didn’t like it, well, let the door hit ya where the dog bit ya.”

Et cetera. This is a truly empty, cliche-littered, bubble-headed book. I read it on a long plane trip, and there were times when I wished the plane would crash, just to put me out of my misery.

Jonathan Yardley can be reached at yardleyj(at symbol)washpost.com.

Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group

THE SCIENCE OF LIBERTY: Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature
Timothy Ferris
Harper
ISBN 978 0 06 078150 7
368 pages
$26.99

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Reviewed by Curt Suplee
From our privileged vantage on the prow of the 21st century, it is clear that modern science and modern democracy have evolved in striking parallel over the past 350 years. Can that epochal concurrence really have been a mere coincidence?

Absolutely not, says Timothy Ferris in this important, timely and splendidly written book. In fact, he says, history shows exactly the opposite: “The democratic revolution was sparked — caused is perhaps not too strong a word — by the scientific revolution, and … science continues to empower political freedom today.” Why did this happen? “Science demanded liberty and demonstrated its social benefits,” he contends, “creating a symbiotic relationship in which the freer nations were better able to carry on the scientific enterprise, which in return rewarded them with knowledge, wealth and power.” Put bluntly, the tenets of science are principally responsible for today’s advanced democracies and the spread of human freedom.

This hypothesis is somewhere between ambitious and outrageous, depending on the reader’s predisposition, and the person advancing it had better be enormously credible. Fortunately, Ferris fills the bill. An academic polymath known chiefly as the author of “The Whole Shebang,” about cosmology, and other uncommonly lucid books, he is among the half-dozen foremost explicators of the physical sciences alive today. He is also a man for whom the English language is not a tool, but an instrument on which to perform with grace and precision. As a result, “The Science of Liberty” is a profound delight whether one puts it down convinced or not. Either way, contemporary civilization won’t look quite the same.

Ferris develops his argument in three stages, each with a somewhat different appeal. The first traces the tandem progress of science and society from the Renaissance to the American and French Revolutions and their aftermath, with science providing the drive: “The Enlightenment without science would have been a steamship without steam.” Ferris makes a strong case that the antiauthoritarian, self-correcting aspects of science and the scientific mindset — and especially the primacy of empirical evidence over all other means of knowing — intensely influenced the minds of our Founding Fathers and early advocates of democracy elsewhere.

One rather knew this about Jefferson and Franklin, but Ferris also focuses on such surprising cases as Thomas Paine (whose ideas likely “arose from exposure to science”) and George Washington (with his “sturdily empirical habit of learning from experience and a lifelong scientific curiosity”). No wonder, then, that “the founders often spoke of the new nation as an ‘experiment,’” and that the United States was conceived in science as much as in liberty.

Even when he is covering familiar ground, Ferris’ perspective is a joy, and his vivid account of the vast conceptual divide between the American Revolution’s appeal to reason and the French Revolution’s tyranny, hysteria and terror (which Ferris attributes largely to the anti-scientific, delusional, “fact-free thought” of Rousseau) is itself worth the price of admission.

The second part of the book examines the impact of science on the structure and behavior of the most advanced societies since the early 19th century. Ferris lays out the empirical economics pioneered by Adam Smith (“comparable to Newton’s dynamics or the discovery of binary computing”!) and contrasts it with the explicitly unscientific bases of communism, Nazism and other totalitarianisms. This leads him to dismiss too hastily the widespread belief that the Soviet Union and the Third Reich actually had formidable scientific capabilities, and he also wastes the (admittedly amusing) following chapter, titled “Academic Antiscience,” on the brief scholastic mania for “deconstructionism” and its spawn, with their woozy conviction that “science is culturally conditioned and politically suspect — the oppressive tool of white Western males,” a controversy of utter insignificance to anyone outside a university faculty.

But the core of this section is a hardheaded look at the notion that “Western” science has been “discredited by its association with Western imperialism and colonialism.” If so, then much of what we call progress has been illusory. Not surprisingly, Ferris easily proves that by virtually any metric — from personal wealth to life expectancy — humanity is better off thanks to science and that such blessings tend to be distributed in proportion to how much each society values personal liberty.

The final chapter — deliciously polemical, if less coherent — is titled “One World.” It finds Ferris attacking “religious and political dogmatists (who) react against science and liberalism” by suppression or outright terror. He takes on Islamic extremists, climate-change skeptics, creationists and the second Bush administration, and he ventures some remarkable assertions. One is that “atheists and agnostics are, if anything, (BEG ITAL)less(END ITAL) apt to commit serious crimes” than self-identified religious sorts. It’s more fun than a congressional pie fight.

But it does not obscure the serious central message of this volume: Ferris’ deeply humane conviction that science is the most powerfully liberating force in history and the single most dependable agent of social progress.

Curt Suplee, author of “Physics in the 20th Century” and other science books, is a contributor to The Washington Post’s Health section.

Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group

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Friends, this book seems to be highly discriminatory against Christianity.

Let us not forget the writings of Christian apologists who rightly assume that the only kind of liberty there is is that of Christian Liberty wherein we are free to decide for ourselves the direction we take in life but the end is what it is. hen I was in Seminary, I read many so-called Christian apologists who deny the power of God and the idea that there is liberty in Christ.

I challenge anyone to read this book and report back as to the chalenges it gives and how that differs from Godly liberty. You can send the report to me via this group as there is a link to my email herein.

In fact, my aim in sharing these book reports is to make us reflect on what saith the Lord? Without God, there won’t be liberty and there would not be you and me. Remember…Everything that happens in this life is because God gives us enough rope to hang ourselves then pulls us back if we repent! His way is best!

God bless you!

Rev. Joe Diaz, RN, BSN
Gounder, His Love Extended Ministries, International

Written by Gerald M. Boyd, Lawrence Hill
ISBN 978-15562928
402 pages
$26.95

Reviewed by Kim McLarin

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I knew Gerald Boyd, a little. He was assistant managing editor of the New York Times when I joined the paper’s news staff in 1993. He helped recruit me, as he did many other reporters, including many African-American ones; then he pretty much left me to sink or swim, which was also not unusual. During my years at the paper, we had only a handful of conversations, including the one when I decided to leave.

“You are making a big mistake,” he told me somberly. He might even have said, “You are making the biggest mistake of your life.” The exact wording escapes me; I dismissed it as a technique of Times management. But after reading his posthumous memoir, “My Times in Black and White,” I realize that Boyd believed what he was saying. For him, the Times was “not just a newspaper, but a public trust,” not just a job but an identity, and he could scarcely imagine a life apart from it. Which is why, when he was forced out in 2003 along with executive editor Howell Raines in the wake of the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal, the loss was so devastating.

“I was being cast out and pushed away from everything that defined me as a journalist and, in many ways, as a person,” Boyd writes. He struggled through bouts of depression, and three years after his career ended at the Times, he was dead of lung cancer, leaving a wife and young child to mourn him. Reading this memoir, I was struck again, as I was when reading his Times obituary, by the tragic, Shakespearan nature of his tale.

Boyd grew up poor and struggling in St. Louis, raised by his grandmother after his mother died in childbirth and his father abandoned the family. By senior year of high school, he had found his calling: to become a journalist, with the dream of working for the New York Times. He outlines his radical student days at the University of Missouri, his start at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and his leap to the Times. Once he’d landed at the paper of his dreams, he rose steadily through the ranks to become, in 1993, the paper’s first African-American assistant managing editor.

As the first black person on the masthead, Boyd had an inside look at what was once and may still be (though in a greatly diminished field) the nation’s most powerful newspaper. Anyone who perceives the Times as a gentlemanly meritocracy might not want to peek at the sausage-making on display here. Influence is amassed, careers advanced and decisions made, in ways that sometimes feel more High School Musical than Great Gray Lady. Even before the Blair mess, the Times newsroom comes across as riven by political maneuvering, grudge-nursing and territory-marking. The dominant stories are shaped as much by who bullies whom in the news meetings as by the news itself. Few people were happy, writes Boyd. Even the stars. “Instead they hung in a state of perpetual neurosis as they struggled to remain on top. In doing so they cultivated an environment of fear, distrust and agendas. The twin goals: protecting one’s turf and watching one’s back.”

The book’s emotional weight falls squarely on the 2003 scandal that brought down Boyd and Raines and left the Times scrambling to repair its credibility with readers and to staunch the wounds from an ugly newsroom revolt. Boyd’s side of the story is that, although he made some mistakes regarding Blair, he did not shield the young reporter from scrutiny. The only thing they had in common, Boyd writes, was race — and it was the reason for his downfall: “The erroneous, anonymous reports declaring me Jayson Blair’s mentor would have never stuck had one of us been white.”

If the fate of a tragic hero is often triggered by some defect in his character, what was Boyd’s flaw? Ambition? Arrogance? Both are a near-requirement of a Times editor. His critics would say it was an overzealous devotion to diversity, to putting race before quality, as they argue he did during the Blair controversy. This Boyd passionately disputes.

Perhaps Boyd’s real tragic flaw was being imperfect in a role that demanded perfection: first black fill-in-the-blank. Anyone who’s ever done it knows how impossible the journey is: You are supposed to be commanding but not threatening, accomplished but humble, superhuman but not holier-than-thou. You’re supposed to break barriers you pretend don’t exist and be all things to all people, but not too much to any one group in particular. Meaning, of course, your own.

Boyd seems to have believed that, in addition to race, it was excessive love and loyalty that caused his fall — loyalty to Raines, to the Times, to believing “perhaps naively, that part of the answer to racial misunderstandings was something as simple as honesty.” Naive is a word Boyd uses often when discussing race at the Times. Earlier in his career he was shocked and hurt at the level of racial animosity in the newsroom, shocked to be named in a black editor’s discrimination suit, shocked at how a white reporter saw him as, first and foremost, an intimidating and “intense-looking black man.”

A skeptic — or just a good reporter — might find it hard to accept that a man who climbed as high at the politically driven Times could be as guileless as Boyd portrays himself. But this memoir is not meant as a deep character study. Had Boyd lived and gained more distance, he might have written a more self-probing book. This is a reclamation project, and as such it largely succeeds. Othello’s real tragic flaw was not jealously but misplaced trust.

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Kim McLarin is a novelist and writer-in-residence at Emerson College in Boston.

Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group

THE GIRL WITH GLASS FEET
Ali Shaw
Henry Holt
ISBN 978-0805091144
287 pages
$24

Reviewed by Elizabeth Hand, whose novel “Illyria” will be published this spring.

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Americans force-fed Disney candyfloss from childhood forget how dark fairy tales can be. Blood streams from the toes of would-be brides who try to cram their feet into Cinderella’s glass slipper. Snow White’s stepmother is forced to dance in red-hot iron shoes until she dies. Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid trades her finned tail for human feet and thereafter feels as though she walks on razor-sharp blades.

And what’s with all the feet? The Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg has traced myriad examples of mutilated feet across centuries and cultures, from ancient Greece to ancient China. He believes the motif represents an archetype of what he calls “mythical and ritualistic lameness.” The British novelist Ali Shaw has created a memorable addition to this fabulist pantheon in his gorgeous first novel, “The Girl With Glass Feet,” a book reminiscent of such classic fantasies as Hope Mirrlees’ “Lud-in-the-Mist” and Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast sequence.

Like those novels, Shaw’s is set in an imaginary place that evokes both our mundane world and a far stranger one that exists, half-hidden, within its familiar woods and shops and chicken coops. St. Hauda’s Land is an archipelago just 30 miles from the mainland (what mainland is never made clear), a chain of craggy, shadow-haunted islands whose cultural isolation and former dependence upon the sea — and, now, tourism — evoke places like the Faroe Islands, Iceland and the Outer Hebrides.

Eons ago, a volcanic eruption created St. Hauda’s Land, where “in nooks and crannies uncatalogued transmogrifications took place.” There are legends of a being whose glance turns other creatures dead-white. A ghostly light takes on the features of dead loved ones, to beguile and then blind travelers, leaving them to die in the wilderness. And as a skewed island man named Henry Fuwa tells young Ida Maclaird, “Would you believe … there are glass bodies here, hidden in the bog water?”

Ida, a tourist to St. Hauda’s Land, does not believe Fuwa, despite the fact that he has shared with her another of the archipelago’s wonders: a creature she takes to be an insect, until she picks it up. “It had butterfly wings, like flakes of patterned wax,” Shaw writes. “Under the wings it had a hairy body with tiny horns. … It had an ox’s head, no bigger than her thumbnail, with a pink muzzle drawn into a grimace. A white splodge between its nostrils. The impossible detail of a scar on its bottom lip. There was warmth and a heartbeat in its body like that of a newly hatched chick.”

Only when Ida returns home to the mainland does she make another bizarre, less benign discovery: a sliver of crystal embedded in her foot. Her failed attempts to remove it cause excruciating pain; as the days pass, she realizes that the crystalline growth is extending, through her toes to her ankle.

Desperate for a cure, she returns to the island in search of Fuwa. There she is glimpsed in the woods by a photographer named Midas Crook. Ida falls in love with Midas, but he is more transfixed by the mystery of her glass feet, which he secretly photographs — he is enthralled by contact sheets but repelled by human contact. Over the course of this eerie, bewitching novel, the mixture of love and grief and the imminence of death become as memorable as Ida’s mysterious, dreadful transformation and Midas’ more achingly human one.

Shaw acknowledges the influence of writers like Andersen, Kafka and Borges (Shaw’s menagerie of perfectly detailed, marvelous creatures could have stepped from the pages of “The Book of Imaginary Beings”). But it’s Andersen’s melancholy tales, steeped in loss and a brooding sense of fatedness, that shimmer around the edges of “The Girl With Glass Feet.” Every character in this novel yearns for a love that seems just out of reach: Midas’ unhappy parents; Henry Fuwa; Carl Maulsen, who loved Ida’s mother; Emiliana, the island woman who might have a cure for Ida’s illness; Ida herself — all of them are bound by threads of betrayal and desire and hope, until Fate cuts those threads, calmly and without remorse.

Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group

Washington Post Book Reviews

SAVAGE LANDS
Clare Clark
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN 978-0151014736
384 pages
$25

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Reviewed by Sybil Steinberg, who was the forecasts editor of Publishers Weekly.

Following her acclaimed “The Great Stink” and “The Nature of Monsters,” British historical novelist Clare Clark returns with a powerful third novel, set in the early 1700s in the struggling French colony of Louisiana. Clark’s descriptions of the land — brutally hot, swampy, fetid with stagnant, mosquito-breeding water, unprotected from devastating spring floods and autumn hurricanes — provide a richly atmospheric backdrop for the intertwined lives of three settlers who are newcomers to this unwelcoming terrain.

Sent from France in 1704 as part of a group of “casket girls” committed to marry the soldiers and shopkeepers in the nascent colony, Elisabeth Savaret, a bookish and outspoken young woman, is immediately smitten with Jean-Claude Babelon. Theirs is a passionate marriage, interrupted by Jean-Claude’s frequent expeditions to nearby Indian tribes friendly to the French. He distributes gifts and muskets, secures food for the colony and tries to ensure that each tribe will not succumb to the blandishments of the English, who are also wooing these small and numerous Indian nations. Elisabeth, absorbed in her misery as she miscarries, only gradually realizes that Jean-Claude is ruthless in his pursuit of wealth and all too willing to compromise his principles by engaging in gun-(running and slave-trading.

Meanwhile, Auguste Guichard, a 12-year-old boy forced by the colony’s commandant to remain with a tribe of “savages” to learn their habits, develops an ear for the tongues of many tribal nations. When he returns to the settlement as a young man, he cherishes his friendship with Jean-Claude but also falls in love with Elisabeth, despite the difference in their ages. This never-acknowledged triangle and its complications eventually provoke tragic acts of betrayal.

Clark keeps her plot fresh and compelling by immersing us in the primitive conditions these colonists endure. Starvation when the crops fail, fear of attack by natives and frequent epidemics are constant challenges. The “savages” themselves acquire personality in Clark’s poetic descriptions of their body decorations — wild with tattoos — and their rituals, tortures, dances and social behavior.

Equally potent as the encompassing sense of place, the moral complexities that influence these characters infuse “Savage Lands” with emotional resonance. Clark’s commitment to historical color is matched by the dramatic arc of an engrossing story.

Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group