Choosing Joy, by Helen Berger

Helen Berger spent the last years of her marriage to Ady Berger caring for him as he lived with Alzheimer's and its effects.  In Choosing Joy: Alzheimer's: A Book of Hope, she recounts her experiences and offers a sympathetic voice of comfort, hope, and advice.

The theme that stood out the most to me is the Berger's love and affection for each other.  Helen never wavered in her commitment to Ady, and Ady never ceased showing his affection for her, writing her daily notes, always acting as a gentleman when they were out.  The disease did not lessen his sweet, loving nature.  In her case, even with the changing nature of their relationship, she writes "my love for Ady during those six years not only did not diminish, it actually grew."

Helen's commitment to Ady included not giving up on his ability to grow and fight the effects of the disease.  She considered it her mission "to do everything in my power to slow the process of decline and give my husband the greatest fulness of life."  Over the years, she saw a "shocking but indisputable improvement in Ady's memory and functioning."  Even in the waning months of Ady's life, she saw improvements in his cognition.  Her experience, in some ways, contradicts the medical literature on Alzheimer's, but she testifies that due to "constant mental stimulation, love, appreciation, and a nurturing, conflict-free, calm environment" Ady was able to achieve a level of regeneration.

Besides talking about her own experiences and her relationship with Ady, Helen has practical advice for caregivers.  She clearly is not a medical professional, and doesn't claim to be, but her insights on diet, exercise, and lifestyle are worthy of consideration.  She also has insights on selecting and managing caregivers and home health aids, navigating doctor visits and emergency care, and planning the logistics of day-to-day life.

Helen and Ady may have had a charmed relationship, and they clearly have financial means that many families don't.  But no matter what your circumstances or relationship, Helen offers a perspective that caregivers will find worth reading.  If a loved one or family member is living with Alzheimer's, Choosing Joy is worth your time.


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

Kingdom of the Wicked: Book One -- Rules, by Helen Dale

What if the Industrial Revolution had occurred centuries earlier, in Ancient Rome?  For one thing, the history of Christianity would look much different.  Helen Dale fleshes out this intellectual exercise in Kingdom of the Wicked: Book One--Rules.  In her world, we find the Roman Empire enjoying a level of technological sophistication roughly similar to our own late-20th or early 21st century timeline.  As in our own history, the Romans occupy Judaea, a backwards backwater.  Due to their religious traditions and relative poverty, the Jewish people lag far behind the Romans, technologically and economically. 

Dale's focus is primarily on the legal case against the charismatic teacher Yeshua ben Yusuf (Jesus, son of Joseph, in case you missed it), after he and his followers cause a ruckus in the Temple courts.  The Roman lawyer Linnaeus, despite his nationality, is somewhat sympathetic to Yeshua's case. Blending the familiar historical account with the technology of Dale's world, I enjoyed, for example, the lawyer's reconstruction of the events of that day via reviewing the CCTV footage.  It's fun to imagine what our modern Christian faith would be like if we had some footage from the events of Jesus' life!

Besides Jesus, we meet Caiaphas and Pilate, in their familiar roles.  In fact, their sons are pals.  Yehuda (Judas) is a leader in the revolutionary anti-Roman occupation group.  A very young Saul makes some cameo appearances.  Mary Magdalena is a former news anchor.  Jesus's disciples and other characters familiar to readers of the Gospels appear throughout.

Despite the biblical source material, this is not a Christian book.  It's roughly parallel to the Gospels, but doesn't present the Gospel.  It's a secular retelling that spends much more time depicting the Roman pagan lifestyle, particularly their sexual mores, than Jewish moral traditions, and focusses on the legal machinations of the Roman rule.  (Content notice: the sex is quite suggestive and pervasive, but not explicit.  The language is definitely crude; it would easily earn an R-rating from the MPAA.) 

On one level, I was a little bit in awe of the intellectual exercise that writing this book must have been for Dale.  Like any good alternative history, she constructs a believably intricate alternative reality; much more than simply adding a layer of anachronistic technology on biblical history, she has re-imagined centuries of human history and projected it onto this particular era.  Given this historical effort, I felt bad being disappointed and maybe a little bored by the story.  It sags under its own wait, with little pay off.  My delight in the possibilities of the setting quickly dimmed as I found myself skimming more and more through the book.

The Kings of Big Spring, by Bryan Mealer

Growing up in Corpus Christi, I was tangentially aware of the booms and busts of the Texas oil business.  No one in my family worked in that industry, but I remember my friend's dad talking about gauging the local economy by the flares coming from the refineries along the ship channel.  One popular restaurant had a special that was priced according to the daily cost of a barrel of oil.  My summer job as a construction helper building an offshore oil platform taught me a lot about the lives of these hard-working men (and a few women).

Bryan Mealer's family rode the waves of the booms and bust more than most.  His book The Kings of Big Spring: God, Oil, and One Family's Search for the American Dream chronicles several generations of his ancestor's.  Like many families, his left Georgia at the end of the 19th century to come find new opportunities in Texas.  They moved from place to place, but the West Texas town of Big Spring becomes the focus of the book and of the family's fortunes.

The many stories of Mealer's family are mildly interesting.  There is a lot of hard work and rags to riches here.  But to someone who's not related to these people, I thought, "That's nice but I don't really care about what happens to them."  Mealer ties his family's story to the stories of some more significant figures, particularly his father's partnership with Grady Cunningham, who married Raymond Tollett's daughter.  Tollett had led Big Spring's Cosden Oil through tremendous growth.  Grady longed to live up to his father-in-law's reputation as a community leader, and, of course, as a high-rolling oil man.

Mealer weaves these personal stories together against the backdrop of a history of the oil business in Texas.  For interested Texas buffs, people involved in the oil business, and people in Mealer's family or who know his family, this is a great read.  But for anyone else, in spite of Mealer's excellent writing, it barely rises to the level of compelling.  I certainly didn't hate the book, but finished with a take-it-or-leave-it shrug.

Don't Blame the Mud, by Marty Machowski, illustrated by Craig McIntosh

At some point, we all must take accountability for our own sin.  Marty Machowski's story Don't Blame the Mud illustrates this step of maturity in a simple way.  With illustrations by Craig McIntosh, Machowski tells the story of Max, who, despite his mother's warnings to keep his school uniform clean, choosing to walk home on the path by the creek rather than on the road.  After a few close calls, Max falls, soiling his school clothes, just like Mom said.

Feeling an urgent need to cover up the consequences of his disobedience, he sneaks to his room and sheds his dirty clothes, leaving a trail of mud.  He then lies to his parents about how he got dirty: "It's not my fault that I slipped and fell. . . . It's the mud's fault.  It wasn't me."  When his parents confront him with the obvious, he feels a deep sense of conviction, and his parents take the opportunity to teach him about sin, repentance, and God's plan for forgiveness.

Machowski includes tips to help parents talk to their children about the gospel.  It's a simple story, but with a profound purpose: turning children's hearts away from sin and toward Jesus.  The lesson holds for believers of all ages.  Just as Max strayed closer and closer to the mud, so do we place ourselves in proximity to sin.  It's a message we should never stop hearing and a lesson we all need to hear and pass along to our children and other younger Christians.


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

Life Inside the Bubble, by Dan Bongino

I like Dan Bongino and enjoy his appearances as a commentator on various Fox News programs, as a guest host on Mark Levin's and Sean Hannity's radio shows, and other outlets.  In Life Inside the Bubble: Why a Top-Ranked Secret Service Agent Walked Away from It All, Bongino writes about his formative years, his twelve-year career in the Secret Service, and the perspectives he developed over that time, leading to a run for the U.S. Senate.

Most of the book is Bongino's own story.  He started his career in law enforcement as a police officer in New York City, where he grew up.  Shortly he was accepted in the Secret Service where, ultimately, he led advance teams for presidential trips.  It is interesting to read about what goes on behind the scenes in the Secret Service, and inspiring to read about a kid from humble circumstances ending up in the Oval Office during historically significant events.  But if you're looking for real revelations and inside scoops, there's not a lot here. 

As to the subtitle, he really left the Secret Service so he could be home with his family more.  That's admirable and worthy, of course, but the tone of the title makes it sound like he left over some big scandal or something.  When he reentered private life, he took on the not-so-private task of running for the U.S. Senate.  He won the Republican nomination, but in heavily Democratic Maryland, he fell short of the win.

If you like Bongino, or if you're interested in the Secret Service career track, you'll certainly enjoy the book.  But in the end Life Inside the Bubble is a pretty pedestrian memoir of a decent guy who has had an interesting career.

Muzzled, by Juan Williams

I like Juan Williams a lot, based on his role on Fox News's "The Five."  As the oldest member of that show, and the token liberal, he carries the persona of the cranky old leftist, fending off Jesse Watters and Greg Gutfeld as they pepper him with barbs (in a friendly way--usually) and respond to Williams's defense of his liberal views.  In Muzzled: The Assault on Honest Debate, Williams tells the story of how he ended up as a full-timer at Fox News and bemoans the lack of balance virtually anywhere in American media.

The impetus of the book, and much of its content, involves Williams's firing from NPR.  In the days after 9/11, he made a comment that he would be "worried" if a group of men in "Muslim garb" were on a flight with him.  For this comment, NPR fired him.  Fox News, on which he was a regular commentator, gave him a full-time gig as the resident liberal.

If you have suspected that NPR has a definite leftward slant (it seems obvious, but they try to present themselves as centrist or unbiased), Williams's account will convince you.  While Fox is regularly dismissed as non-serious, biased news coverage, the reality is that outlets like NPR and others militantly exclude points of view that don't fit their agendas.

Muzzled was published in 2011, so it doesn't touch on the 2016 election or the Trump administration.  Besides his own firing controversy, he covers several policy positions, presenting his mostly predictable liberal positions.  Even though I disagree with Williams on most policy issues, I appreciate the reasonableness with which he discusses policy, in the book and on TV.  These discussions are pretty standard, but the account of the NPR debacle is worth the time to read the book.  We could use more voices like Williams's in public discourse.

Under the Banner of Heaven, by John Krakauer

Author Jon Krakauer has a good sense of relating the human experience, as he writes about summiting Everest, living in the wild, rape in a college town, or military service.  In Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, Krakauer examines the case of the murder of a young mother and her baby, and the fringe Mormon group that inspired it.

Krakauer gives us a history lesson on Mormonism, with a focus on the fundamentalist, polygamist sects that have spun on the main branch.  As long as I can remember, I have considered Mormonism to be a non-Christian offshoot from orthodox Christianity, with too many fundamental theological aberrations for them to be considered Christian.  Krakauer points out some of these aberrations (although he himself doesn't claim faith one way or another), but more importantly, he describes the questionable historical foundations on which Mormons base their faith.

However, he does a disservice to Mormon history by focussing on fringe groups that have split from "official" church teaching.  I would expect practicing Mormons not only to be upset by his narrow characterization but by his tendency to lump fundamentalist Mormons together with mainstream Mormons.  This led me to consider what parts of my own tradition's history could be represented (or misrepresented) as problematic.  What fringe groups or independent congregations could be described that would embarrass me or that I would call heretical?  To take a glaring example, for much of my life I have been a Baptist, but I in no way identify with the radical Westboro Baptist Church (few Baptists do).  More broadly, sociopaths and criminals regularly justify their actions in the name of religion, but in almost every case, actual adherents to those religions disavow those bad actors.

Krakauer tends to present the bad actors in this book as representative of the fundamentalist sects to which they belong, leaving the reader with the impression that the polygamy, incest, autocracy, and, ultimately, murderous acts, are typical of Mormonism, and that mainstream Mormonism has simply found ways to keep it covered up, both in their history and in contemporary life.  I remain no less convinced that Mormonism is a cult, but I don't believe Krakauer has given them a fair shake in Under the Banner of Heaven.

This was an interesting book to read, even with its anti-Mormon tendencies.  Hopping back and forth between Mormonism's beginnings to current events, and between mainstream Mormonism and many of its offshoots, the story tends to become fractured.  Krakauer used some shocking events as a springboard to paint a biased, unflattering picture of Mormonism.