Book Reviews

Beverly Kalinin has written a lyrical, reflective, and compelling narrative of grief.

My friend Andrea Cohen has written a lovely and useful book, Practicing the Art of Compassionate Listening" in which she reflects on the power of the heart: "The heart contains approximately 40,000 neural cells - the kind we used to think existed only in the brain.

An amazing book I read recently was Worshipping the Myths of World War II, written by Edward Wood, a combat veteran of World War II. Wood was an 18-year-old thrown into battle in France after D-Day in June of 1944 with virtually no military training.

It is clear almost from the beginning that Bigger Thomas is doomed, trapped in a downward spiral that will lead to arrest, prison, or death, driven by despair, frustration, poverty, and incomprehension.

Julian Barnes astounds. Just what sort of book is this, anyway? A literary biography of 19th century French novelist, radical, and intellectual impresario Gustave Flaubert? A meditation on the uses and misuses of language? A novel of obsession, denial, irritation, and underhanded connivery? A thriller complete with disguises, sleuthing, mysterious meetings, and unknowing targets?

In the decades just prior to the eruption of the American civil rights movement in the late '50s, Chester Himes was one of the most significant African-American authors -- although today he is less well known than several of his contemporaries.

In his new book, Todd Hunter, recounts the unexpected trail that took him from the Jesus People movement of the 1970s through the Vineyard community of churches to his recent appointment as an Anglican Bishop charged with the mission of planting two hundred new Episcopalian churches in the western United States in the next 20 years. Is that a wild and crazy ambition, or what?

One of the most important books I read this year was by Peggy Holman: Engaging Emergence; Turning Upheaval into Opportunity. As Peggy says in her blog, emergence is a process "through which order arises from chaos as the existing order is disrupted, differences appear, and a new coherence coalesces.

When I was eighteen years old in the spring of 1968, in a book store on the square in Racine, Wisconsin, I found a little book titled Man’s Search for Meaning, by philosopher and psychotherapist Victor Frankl. The author survived Auschwitz during the Second World War. He emerged from the death camp having lost everything that mattered to him. His beloved wife was dead, his family was dead, almost all of his friends or acquaintances were dead or dying.