SYCAMORE ROW
John Grisham
I’ve always thought John Grisham’s best book was his first, A Time to Kill. Though I’ve enjoyed other books by Grisham, I don’t think he’s ever topped the character development and the small-town Mississippi environment he created in his first.
Grisham’s latest, Sycamore Row, isn’t his best, but it does return us to the same town and some of the same characters. This is a book that has many of the elements we’ve come to expect in Grisham novels – a shocking first scene, inheritance issues, unsavory characters, and larger issues related to race and the South. Though I was halfway through the book when I predicted (rightly) how the book would end, I still found it to be an enjoyable read.
THE DEVIL’S DELUSION
Atheism and Its Scientific Pretentions
David Berlinski
Recent years have seen a number of responses to the “new atheists” like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris. But most of these responses are serious in their tone and lack the bombastic nature of the new atheists’ writing style. Not this one.
Berlinski is as feisty as Hitchens, able and willing to poke holes in scientific pretentiousness with barbs, razor-sharp humor and wit. Here is an example:
“Religion’s power to console,” Richard Dawkins writes in The God Delusion, “doesn’t make it true.” Perhaps this is so, but only a man who has spent a good deal of time snoring on the down of plenty could be quite so indifferent to the consolations of religion, wherever and however they may be found.
Or consider Berlinski’s take on this statement:
“We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs,” the geneticist Richard Lewontin remarked equably in The New York Review of Books, “in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories”. Why should any discerning man or woman take the side of science, or anything else, under these circumstances? It is because, Lewontin explains, “we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.” If one is obliged to accept absurdities for fear of a Divine Foot, imagine what prodigies of effort would be required were the rest of the Divine Torso found wedged at the door and with some justifiable irritation demanding to be let in?
THE CONVICTION TO LEAD
25 Principles for Leadership that Matters
Albert Mohler
The president of Southern Seminary says true leadership starts with a purpose, not a plan. Mohler fears that too many Christians are passionate about their beliefs but lack leadership skills, while other Christians are experts at organizational philosophy but lack deeper convictions based in something other than pragmatism.
Putting believers and leaders together is the goal of this book, which is neatly divided into 25 chapters that provide insight into the convictions and skills necessary for Christian leadership. I found Mohler’s chapters on reading and writing habits to be the most fruitful for me.