Lessons on Earth Joy—From the Man who Spent 90 Minutes in Heaven

Don Piper was relatively unknown for even a couple of years after writing 90 Minutes in Heaven. But something must have happened, because now it seems that the longer his book sits on the shelves, the more it picks up steam. It has now sold well over a million copies and shows few signs of abating anytime soon. It is still sitting at the #2 spot in the softcover non-fiction portion of the New York Times list of bestsellers. Piper has made appearances on countless talk shows and has taken his message to millions. His message is this: heaven is real.

Billy Graham in the White House

I‘ll be honest with you—I don’t have the emotional attachment to Billy Graham I sometimes feel I’m supposed to have as a Christian and as a Baptist. I grew up in a tradition that rarely acknowledged him (or much of the outside evangelical world, for that matter) and, to be honest, I knew very little of him until relatively recently. In my younger days I knew him more for his compromises than for his strengths; for his ecumenism, by way of example, more than his evangelism. I saw him preach once at a massive Toronto crusade, but was more interested in the proceedings than in the sermon. So when I received a copy of The Preacher and the Presidents I opened it interested in the history of the book more than in the subject.

The quiet strength and outspoken faith of Tony Dungy.

Those who know the National Football League will know of Tony Dungy, the coach of the Indianapolis Colts. One of the league’s premier and most respected coaches, Dungy is a Christian and one who is outspoken about his faith. Two events in the past two years have put him in the spotlight: the death of his son in 2006 and the Colts’ Superbowl victory in 2007. Anyone who has read about Dungy or observed him on the sidelines will affirm that Quiet Strength is a perfect title for his memoir—a book that has reached as high as the top spot on the New York Times list of bestsellers, becoming the first NFL-related book to hold that honor.

Delighting in God’s sovereignty, even through affliction.

I typically post a new book review here every Tuesday morning. But because I was so excited by the book I planned on reviewing this week, I thought I would break with tradition and post this review a day early.

Polishing God’s Monuments was an unexpected surprise. A book that arrived (as do so many others) without any fanfare, I quickly skimmed the four endorsements and paused only when I saw Bruce Ware’s name and his claim that this title is “so gripping and moving and inspiring that one cannot put the book down.” Based on my respect for Bruce Ware, on the enthusiasm of his endorsement and on the track record of the publisher, Shepherd Press, I decided I should at least give the book a try. Am I ever glad I did!

A review of Brian “Head” Welch’s Bestselling Autobiography.

When he was just sixteen years old, Edward Beauclerk Maurice signed up with the Hudson’s Bay Company and was sent from his native England to an isolated trading post in the Canadian arctic as one of the Company’s Gentleman Adventurers. A million miles from nowhere, there was no communication with the outside world (beyond the very occasional, very faint radio broadcast) and a ship arrived only once each year. Maurice’s job was to trade with the Inuit people who lived nearby, accepting the furs they brought to him and in turn providing them with the goods they came to want and need: medicine, boats, gasoline, tobacco and guns. Where many of the Gentleman Adventurers took advantage of their clientele, Maurice became enamored with the Inuit lifestyle and became like one of them. They taught him how to track and hunt, to build igloos and to depend on the land to provide. He learned their language and their culture, even taking an Inuit wife.

I began reading Manhunt on the Monday morning of a long weekend. By the end of the day I had accomplished none of the chores and errands I had hoped to scratch off my list, but instead found myself 350 pages into this book. I eventually pried myself away long enough to get some sleep and then promptly finished it up the next morning. Though I am a lover of history, rarely has my attention been held as long and as rapt as with this work of non-fiction.

I have long been fascinated with Abraham Lincoln. I first encountered him during a family vacation in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Touring the battlefields and the surrounding area we came to that place where he delivered the Gettysburg Address which has rightly gone done in history as one of the greatest English literary accomplishments. A few years later we traveled to Springfield and visited the home where he lived while practicing law. It was there that we found a small book titled Abraham Lincoln: The Man and His Faith. This book traced not only Lincoln’s life but also his Christian faith. Though since his childhood he had lived a life free from serious moral blemish, it seems he did not come to trust in Christ until shortly before his death. And, in fact, it seems that his time spent touring the ravaged fields of Gettysburg served to turn his affections upward to the only One who could bring home from such devastation.

It requires a certain amount of trust to read and to enjoy a biography. Most books are easily-verified, easily fact-checked. A book discussing a particular doctrine can be easily held up to the Scripture and seen immediately to be true or false. Biographies, though, and especially those that rely on secondary sources, are much more difficult to verify and thus the reader is left having to place his trust in the biographer, believing that she is providing the true story of her subject’s life. In the case of The Most Famous Man in America, a Pulitzer prize winning biography of Henry Ward Beecher, I was never able to reach the point where I really trusted the author, Debby Applegate.

While not everyone knows the name of John Newton, everyone knows his song and at least a bit of his story. Immortalized in the words of “Amazing Grace,” the most-recorded song in history, everyone knows that John Newton was wretched and miserable until saved by a grace that forever transformed his life. Two centuries ago, fewer people knew his song, but far more knew his story. That story is told again and told afresh in Jonathan Aitken’s new biography John Newton: From Disgrace to Amazing Grace.