2 Minute Book Reviews.

Good and bad news for some. I’m back to time-stamping my posts which means that there is going to be a flurry of activity around here over the next week or so. Plus I’m coming back from vacation and have regrouped and feel much more creative and thoughtful than I did before I left. So with that in mind . . . I offer you my 2nd time stamped post of the day.

And what better way to start it off than with a set of my book reviews that no one reads. I’m about 2 weeks behind my projected book a week for the entire year plan. But I’m at 36 of 48 (which I guess I should more appropriately title the 4 books a month plan instead of the 52 books in a year plan). I digress.

Blessed Unrest (A-)
This is a book about the growing number of organizations and people who are restless with the current options in regards to the environment, human rights, justice, sustainability, etc, etc. It’s more or less a history of how these organizations and groups have been moving under the radar for the last couple of decades, moving independently of each other, with no “mission statement” or organizing agenda, culminating in the growing changing tide for change in how view and operate in the world. Paul Hawken then spends time discussing the “blessed” roots of much of the groups and organizations. How their unrest is deeply rooted in their values, faith, and vision for the world. He doesn’t come right out and say “kingdom of God” but it’s pretty much the heart of the book. And is the historical and applicable counterpart to Brian McLaren and other’s theological foundation laying in their recent works. Well worth the time.

Plenty (A-)
This is the story of a couple (both freelance journalists) living in Canada’s Northwest who decided to only eat food within a 100 mile radius for 1 year. The only exception being when they were traveling or if someone invited them out for dinner in order to be polite. I think they ended up eating locally for something like 90% of the time. This may sound like something relatively easy to do. But then you realize they couldn’t eat any carbs (no wheat grew in their region), had very little meat, and spent most of their year living in a rather cold and crisp area. Every seasoning they used had to be local. Every ingredient. Every ounce of food. They had no salt. No butter. No bread of any kind. Starting to get the picture? It was a thrilling read. And challenging to me. It’s crazy when you start realizing how far your food has traveled. Especially when our local economies used to support a much broader and diverse food source. But because of globalization, most farms have closed and our food is shipped in from all across the States and the world. It’s definitely much harder for me to pick up bananas in the winter now. Or fish from Japan. Knowing that much of the transportation of this food leads to all kinds of pollution and waste in packaging in it’s transport. It’s extremely challenging to read. That’s all I’ll say.

What is the What (A)
If you like Dave Egger’s you’ll love this book. Although it’s much different than A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius or You Shall Know Our Velocity. It still has the same Egger-style of narrative . . . choppy, short, honest, run on sentences, skipping around. It’s basically biographical fiction. He spent time with one of the Lost Boys of Sudan (Achak Deng) and then retold his story through fiction. So part of it’s true in every detail and part of is Egger’s fiction providing depth and layers to the story. A really interesting concept that I was nervous about but worked amazingly well. This is not an easy book to read though. There were 2 times where I was close to throwing up. There were times when I had tears in my eyes. And there were times where I was so embarrassed and heavy with the suffering in this world that I struggled to continue. But it’s also amazingly hopeful and inspirational. If you haven’t read Eggers . . . this is an excellent place to start (it has little to none of his typical harsh language). And if you no little to nothing about the Lost Boys of Sudan or how we got the crisis in Darfur . . . this is a great historical, biography to get you situated.

Civil Disobedience (A+)
This could be the most important book (more like an essay with commentary) I’ve read all year outside of Walter Wink’s Powers That Be. It’s Henry David Thoreau’s seminal thoughts on non-violence and civil disobedience. The book that eventually would be the spark for Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Mandella to name but a few. It’s extremely short. But so incredibly provocative and powerful. Not only the part about non-violence being the only feasible alternative at disarming the violent and oppressive “powers that be”, but the whole thought of disobeying the powers in order to obey the higher powers, namely conscience and God. I’m not going to quit paying my taxes anytime soon (I’ve got a family and Thoreau gives me a pass) but this is an incredibly imaginative story of one man who decided to dissent rather than to blindly follow and support by way of silence.