The Gutfeld Monologues, by Greg Gutfeld

Greg Gutfeld's nightly appearances on Fox News Channel's The Five and his weekend show, The Greg Gutfeld show, are some of the most entertaining news commentary bits on TV today.  Gutfeld defies categories, abounds in strongly held (and strongly worded) opinions, and, most of the time, makes a whole lot of sense.  But above all that, he's hilarious to watch and listen to.

In The Gutfeld Monologues: Classic Rants from The Five, Gutfeld collects several years' worth of his monologues, splits them up topically, adds some commentary and updates, and calls it a book.  If you know Gutfeld at all, you won't be surprised by his takes on law and order, Islamic terror, Hollywood, or the environment.  It's fun to see how his opinions have aged on issues and events that were in the news during the Obama administration.  (Hint: they've aged well.)

Gutfeld's perspectives are reliably conservative, but not necessarily lockstep.  Clearly he opposed Obama and, while he was not a big fan of Trump, since the election he's been largely supportive of Trump's administration.  But what makes Gutfeld and The Gutfeld Monologues unique and fun to read is his self-deprecating humor, his random bon mots, and his silly turns of phrase.  Sometimes his jokes are a bit nonsensical, but that's his style.

A few random examples:

• "The last time I got my hands dirty was April 3, 2005.  I can't get into the actual circumstance, because it involved a bucket of voles and a chinchilla."
• "If you want to make something sexy, try to ban it.  It's why I started eating Tide Pods once everyone was saying they were bad for you."
• "Imagine if Hillary had won.  We'd have to hear from these idiots [Hollywood leftists] every single day.  Wait.  Trump won.  And we still have to hear from these idiots every single day.  That's America!"

I could go on, but you should just read the book.

Gutfeld loves to point out silliness, expose hypocrisy, and shut down idiocy on the left.  He does it all with a smile (or maybe a sneer) and with little reluctance to offend.  He doesn't take himself too seriously, which is a perfect attitude in the current climate of political absurdity.

Irontown Blues, by John Varley

John Varley writes fun sci-fi in imaginative future settings.  Irontown Blues is set a few centuries in the future on a fully developed and populated Luna, one of several planets or moons that humans live on since the Invaders took over Old Earth.

On this future Luna, Chris Bach is a private investigator who lives a fantasy of modeling himself after the PIs of 20th century novels and films.  The fact that he still has access to this material, and that even his neighborhood is modeled after 20th century earth seems remarkable, as if someone in the 21st century built an entire neighborhood modeled after some medieval European village and embraced the music, literature, dress, and culture from that period all the time. That is essentially how Bach lives.

He and his faithful dog Sherlock hang out in their office waiting for clients.  Just like in the old noir stories Chris loves, a mysterious woman comes in with an unusual request: help her track down the guy who gave her leprosy.  As it turns out, it's all a ruse, and Chris is taken back to his time on the police force, when he took part in an ill-fated raid in Irontown.

For much of the book Chris is an unwitting victim, swept about by forces he doesn't understand.  His enhanced dog, Sherlock, sometimes has more a clue than Chris does!  In fact, a large part of the book is told from Sherlock's perspective, thanks to a dog interpreter.

As Bach and Sherlock use their teamwork to find out more about their mysterious client, Varley takes us on a tour of the history and geography of the human habitations of Luna.  It's a fascinating world, a believable future for a few centuries hence.  Varley doesn't trouble himself too much with providing a scientific explanation for the intricacies of life in the future.  The storyline and characters keep Irontown Blues fun and unpredictable.


Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the complimentary electronic review copy!

Formerly Known as Food, by Kristin Lawless

Kristin Lawless's arguments in Formerly Known as Food: How the Industrial Food System is Changing Our Minds, Bodies, and Culture are alternatively obvious, shocking, and ridiculous.

First, the obvious.  Americans have become over-dependent on processed, packaged foods.  Due to convenience, cost, and economies of scale, our food supply has come to be controlled by a very small number of powerful companies, and we Americans happily eat it up.  Over the course of the last several decades, eating whole foods, close to their geographical origin and close their original form, has become more and more expensive and difficult.

Even packaged products that attest to be more healthy for us are subject to the processing, shipping, and additives that rob them of their nutritional value or make them more dangerous to us.  Lawless's description of the processing of milk made me want to avoid it, or to find a local dairy where I can get milk directly from a cow.

While we obviously ought to try to eat more whole foods and fewer processed, packaged foods, the sections dealing with the chemical effects of food, food additives, herbicides and insecticides, and packaging really rocked me.  In many cases, the chemicals in foods are so common that they are changing the way our bodies respond to food.  These changes are pervasive and are passed on to the next generation.  A couple of examples: certain chemicals actually make fat cells larger, causing obesity.  (So it's not TOTALLY my fault that I'm overweight; it the chemicals in the food I eat!) 

More chillingly,

We have caused one crucially important and protective strain of bacteria normally found in the baby's gut to go extinct in the Western world.  A woman of child-bearing age who was born by C-section, fed formula, or received antibiotics at any point in her life--or if this is true of her mother or grandmother, does not have the important bacterial species B. infantis--it simply no longer exists in her body.

This points to one of her biggest issues: the decline of breastfeeding and the use of formula, the first toehold of industrial food in our lives.  Lawless explains that while our life spans are longer than previous generations due to antibiotics and vaccines, that trend will begin to reverse due to industrial food and the impact it has on our bodies.

Lawless gets into the ridiculous with her sweeping societal solutions.  Guaranteed annual income, pay for one's own domestic work, shorter work weeks and longer leave for parents, and more socialist solutions.  Her answer to the question of how this will be paid for is, "Well, we spend way more on defense than we really need to. . . ." 

I share Lawless's suspicion of "big food," and she certainly convinces me to eat more whole foods and avoid heavily processed food.  But even she has to admit that large-scale industrial agriculture has made it possible to feed our ever-growing global population.  Small-scale urban farming and food co-ops are awesome.  But are they sufficient to food millions of people in a densely populated urban area?  I'm not so sure.  And her utopian, socialist solutions sound compassionate and simple on paper, but let's ask every socialist country in the world how their socialist programs worked out?  Not so well.

The bottom line on Formerly Known as Food: take heed of Lawless's warnings about the food we eat, and make every effort to include whole foods in your diet and avoid processed foods as much as possible.  However, for large-scale solutions, she--and we--have a lot more work to do.


Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the complimentary electronic review copy!

Trump's America, by Newt Gingrich

As we learned in his book Understanding Trump, Newt Gingrich has unique access and insight to Donald Trump.  In Trump's America: The Truth About Our Nation's Great Comeback, Gingrich looks at what Trump has accomplished during his first months as president.  Gingrich talks about the anti-Trump coalition, a broad group that includes not only Democrats and all manner of leftists, but also the "never-Trumpers," Republicans who, for a variety of reasons, oppose his presidency. 

If we are relying on the mainstream media to learn about Trump and his presidency, we're in trouble.  "Because the news media is fully a part of the anti-Trump coalition, its members will not accurately report what is happening in America under Trump."  Thus, Gingrich has written Trump's America "as a resource for Americans who want the truth about the significant accomplishments President Trump has achieved in his first year-and-a-half in office."

Topic by topic, Gingrich covers a wide array of policy decisions and progress under Trump, much of which most people would never have learned in the paper or on TV news.  By securing the borders, allowing for religious expression, and placing America's priorities first in international agreements, Trump is reversing trends started under his predecessors.  The economic gains have been impressive, resulting in record-low unemployment and a record-breaking bull market.  The anti-Trump coalition wants to give credit to Obama, or dismiss the gains, but the numbers speak for themselves.

Trump's presidency is not without its challenges.  Many Trump supporters wish he would just be quiet sometimes.  I wish he would hold his tongue and choose to ignore slights rather than sling personal insults.  Gingrich writes that Trump simply reflects his New Yorker attitude and, to be honest, many Trump supporters like to see a president who refuses to sit silently while he is being attacked constantly.

The legal challenges from within the government are particularly frustrating, when many of the players have been so openly against Trump and for Hillary, both during and since the election.  The double standard of justice is enough to drive anyone crazy.  Gingrich breaks down the events leading up the special counsel investigation, showing how the bias and collusion against Trump mock any sense of justice.

I know Gingrich is hyper-partisan.  I know he is interested in building up Trump.  But he presents enough factual material here that I wonder, how can anyone objectively look at the accomplishments of Trump's administration and not be pleased for the direction of the country?  The 2018 mid-term elections are approaching fast.  Democrats are running on little besides the "I hate Trump" platform.  To talk about issues, they have to say they are for tax hikes, for open borders, for socialist economic policies.  Those issues--hopefully--can't win, so they'll just keep bashing Trump and his tweets.  Even though Democrats probably won't pick up Trump's America, I'm glad Gingrich wrote it to keep the record straight. 

Kill All Normies, by Angela Nagle

One of the themes of the 2016 presidential election was the influence of the so-called "alt-right."  The problem is that no one really knows what that means, or who was a part of it.  Unfortunately, Angela Nagle's Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right doesn't shed a lot of light.

Part of the problem is that Nagle and others assign labels that the people or groups themselves explicitly reject.  Milo, the Proud Boys, and others do not embrace the racist, white supremacist perspectives of many on the alt-right.  Further, she seems to attribute to the alt-right outsized credit and influence.

Nevertheless, the alt-right was a part of the conversation in 2016, and Nagle does a decent job of introducing them and reflecting on their methods and influence.  Her discussion brings up the larger question of the use of social media to bring attention to people and issues.  Unfortunately, this power is used more often for ill than good.  Sure, there are feel-good stories that go viral, but when the digital mob goes after someone in a public shaming, there's no turning back.  The internet, she writes, "became a panopticon, in which the many lived in fear of observation from the eagle eye of an offended organizer of public shaming."

That's where Kill All Normies is most instructive, as a warning against the abuses of the power of social media and the internet.  Curiously, the power of the so-called alt-right has waned since the election, probably because more mainstream sources pay less attention, and when they do, the rest of the world sees the alt-right for the fringe element that it is.  The recent "Unite the Right" rally in D.C. drew only a couple dozen participants, whose numbers were dwarfed by people opposing them.  Nagle's book is a record of a relatively insignificant blip in America's political history.


Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the complimentary electronic review copy!

Not My Idea, by Anastasia Higginbotham

A little white girl sees a news story about a white cop killing an unarmed black man.  This raises all sorts of questions for her--and her mom.  Should she turn away and ignore this, or have a conversation about race?  Not My Idea: A Book about Whiteness, written and illustrated Anastasia Higginbotham, tells this little girl's story of a growing awareness of race and racism.  We don't see color?  She says, "I do see color!  I see yours, mine, and everybody's!  You can't hide what's right in front of me."

Mom points out subtle ways that racism is all around: the scrutiny black kids get at the store, when white gets get little scrutiny.  The white people who lock their car doors when the see a black kid on the street.  At the library she reads about the ways white people have systemically denied black people economic opportunity, education, and residential choices.  She also learned about brave people--black and white--who have spoken out and created change.

Higginbothan paints a bleak picture.  This book has no pictures of our black president, and no hint that many black people are very successful today.  She writes, "Racism is still happening.  It keeps changing and keeps being the same."  The book is stuck in the middle of the civil rights era, or maybe even before.

And boy, does she lay on the white guilt.  In her "contract binding you to whiteness" she says you get: "stolen land, stolen riches, special favors," and whiteness gets "to mess endlessly with the lives of your friends, neighbors, loved ones, and all fellow humans of color."  What a bleak picture of race relations.  It makes me wonder if Higginbotham, who is white, is ever around other actual black people, or if she only gets her information about race relations on the news coverage of the Ferguson riots.

I'm not so naive to think that racism has completely disappeared, or that it will ever be purged from the hearts of men and women.  But the vision of Not My Idea seems stuck in about 1950.  Maybe her own white guilt is preventing her from getting out and seeing the wider world.


Thanks to Edelweiss and the publisher for the complimentary electronic review copy!

Disruptive Witness, by Alan Noble

Modern life is distracting and shallow.  That goes without saying.  But how should a Christian respond in the modern environment of social media?  How can a connected life reflect Christian discipleship?  Alan Noble has a few things to say about these issues in Disruptive Witness: Speaking Truth in a Distracted Age. 

A few things stand out as I reflect on the book.  First and foremost, Noble argues against a trivialization of faith.  This hit home to me as I think about my Facebook feed and the posts of my friends, both believers and non-believers.  It's easy for faith, as expressed through social media, to be seen as merely on choice among many, a lifestyle category.  You follow a particular style of music, sci-fi comics, political activism.  Well, I follow Jesus, as you can see from this meme I just posted. . . . Talk about robbing the gospel of its distinctiveness and immediacy.  But in many cases, that's exactly what happens.  Our connection to Jesus seems superficial, like our connection to a sports team.

Noble writes about the "double movement," which he describes as "the practice of first acknowledging goodness, beauty, and blessing wherever we encounter them in life, and then turning that goodness outward to glorify God and loving our neighbor."  A life online can only hint at this double movement.  While we can express our identity in Christ online to a limited extent, to glorify God and love our neighbor, we must log off Facebook and put down our smart phones.

Noble is not anti-technology or anti-social media, but he wants Christians to be reflective regarding how technologies impact the practice of our faith.  The more distracted we are, and the more the world around us becomes secular, it's worth taking some time to reflect on our own practices and connection to God and each other.


Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the complimentary electronic review copy!