Last week I posted a review of The Death of the Grown-Up by Diana West, a book that takes a hard look at our cultural obsession with immaturity. That review garnered quite a bit of attention, so I thought it might be interesting to go into the archives and pull out a review of another book I read some time ago, one with a fair bit of overlap—Boys Adrift by Leonard Sax. It takes a look at what may well be some of the background to some of this immaturity.

Something strange is going on with boys today. My memories of boyhood revolve around the great outdoors--running through fields with hockey stick guns, climbing trees, playing any and every sport, getting sunburns, heatstroke, ticks, sprained ankles and all the other bumps and bruises guaranteed to come to an active, rambunctious boy. Though today I live in a neighborhood filled with boys, rarely do I see them out and about; rarely do I see them engaging in the activities we'd expect of them. Something has changed. So many boys are inactive and unmotivated.

The changes go deeper than just the activities of young boys. "Fully one-third of men ages 22-34 are still living at home with their parents--about a 100 percent increase in the past twenty years. Boys nationwide are increasingly dropping out of school; fewer are going to college; and for the first time in American history, women are outnumbering men at undergraduate institutions three to two." This lack of activity or lack of motivation seems to continue through life. Parents, educators and doctors are concerned.

Leonard Sax is a family physician and a research psychologist who has witnessed this change. He has seen it in a close and personal way through his busy medical practice. In his book Boys Adrift Dr. Sax offers his explanation as to why boys and men are failing in school and at home.

Where have all the grown-ups gone? It's a question that has perplexed me. Why is it that young people these days seem unwilling, or perhaps unable, to grow up? What is so attractive about youth, about perpetual adolescence, that is so attractive? My wife and I have discussed these things at length, trying to understand why so many of the young people we know (young people who are really not so young anymore) seem stuck. They are working on second or third college degrees; they are living at home with mom and dad, even into their thirties; they are looking at marriage only in their late twenties or early thirties. What is happening? When I was young I could hardly wait to pass through my teenage years so I could live life as an adult and in so doing I think I followed generations before me. What has happened since?

2010 was a good year for books. For me it was a strange year—a year in which I read less widely than I am accustomed to, but perhaps read more overall. Work on my new book had me reading a whole lot in a single direction and so much of that reading never appeared as reviews on this blog. Nevertheless, I still read many great books and thought it would be beneficial to keep with tradition and put together a list of some of my favorites.

I will offer my usual caveat in saying that these are almost certainly not the 10 best books of 2010 in any objective sense—but they are my favorites. Here they are, in no particular order:

The Shallows by Nicholas Carr - Carr picks up threads from a lot of other books and tells us what the Internet is doing to our brains. This is far more than an expansion on his infamous article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” He doesn’t write as a Luddite or as someone lost in ignorance—he writes as a computer enthusiast who has begun to wonder just what all this technology is doing to him and to us. Very few people are thinking about these things, so his book hit hard.

Son of Hamas by Mosab Hasson Yousef - This is one of two biographies to hit the bestseller lists this year that culminated in the hero of the book becoming a Christian. In this book Mosab Hasson Yousef, a son of one of the founders of Hamas, writes about life on the inside of a terrorist organization. And he writes of becoming a traitor to that cause and eventually a convert to the Christian faith. [my review]

Hero by Michael Korda - Hero is a much-anticipated biography of T.E. Lawrence, known more popularly as Lawrence of Arabia. While I found that the man himself did not interest me all that much, I couldn’t help but be drawn into his life through this superior biography. The first 100 pages were difficult going, but the book then opened wide and I found myself intrigued by this eccentric British hero.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot - This may be the most unusual book to appear on the list of my favorite books. In 1951 Henrietta Lacks, a thirty year-old African American woman, died of cervical cancer, her body ravaged by the disease. Shortly before her death, and apparently unknown to her, researcher George Gey took a biopsy of her tumor and, for the first time in history, managed to culture an immortal line of cells. This line soon became known as HeLa and since the 50s has been sold commercially and used in a remarkable variety of experiments. Rebecca Skloot compellingly tells the tale of this woman: her life, her death and her ongoing legacy.

Bonhoeffer by Eric Metaxas - This big biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer has become one of the year’s top sellers within the Christian market and for good reason. Metaxas offers “a comprehensive review of one of history’s darkest eras, along with a fascinating exploration of the familial, cultural and religious influences that formed one of the world’s greatest contemporary theologians.” It’s well-written and looks at a fascinating individual who lived in a fascinating time. That’s a recipe for success. [my review]

Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand - Of all the books I read in 2010, this is probably the one I enjoyed reading the most. I sat down with it in the morning and pretty much read straight through until bed time. It tells the story of Louis Zamperini, a man who is way larger than life. This is the second of the books on this list that rocketed onto the bestseller list and that tells the tale of a remarkable conversion to Christianity. It’s pretty much a must-read. [my review]

Other books I enjoyed:

• Willie Mays by James Hirsch
• Washed & Waiting by Wesley Hill
• Open by Andre Agassi
• Wrestling with an Angel by Greg Lucas

The book is always better than the movie, right? It seems that way to me, even with movies as good as the Lord of the Rings series. The movies were amazing, but the books were still better. It seems inevitable that Unbroken will appear on the silver screen before long (and, if the rumors are to be believed, it will star Nicholas Cage). Before it does, make sure you read the book. Unbroken is, in a word, amazing—easily one of the best books I read in 2010. It’s written by Laura Hillenbrand who also penned Seabiscuit. This new book has shot straight to #2 on the New York Times list of bestsellers just days after its release.

Unbroken tells the tale of Louie Zamperini, a character who is so much larger than life that I can’t believe I hadn’t encountered him before. Zamperini grew up in California in the 1930’s, a troublesome kid who was constantly stealing, constantly fighting, constantly getting into trouble. He was that kid, the kid who was known by the police, the kid who was every teacher’s nightmare. He was also lightning fast, eventually becoming a member of the 1936 U.S. Olympic team where he ran the 5,000 meter race and even had the opportunity to meet Adolf Hitler.

War came in 1941 and, like so many men his age, Zamperini joined up, enlisting in the United States Army Air Force. He was made bombardier in a B-24 bomber and posted to Hawaii. He took advantage of all the world had to offer, drinking and carousing with the best (or worst) of them. On May 27, 1943, while searching the ocean for a crashed plane, his own plane suffered mechanical failure and plunged into the ocean. Zamperini survived the crash along with two other members of the crew. They were adrift in the Pacific for 47 days, living off whatever rain fell from the sky and whatever food they could somehow pluck from the ocean. Though one of the men eventually succumbed to starvation, the two who remained were eventually “rescued” by the Japanese Navy, some 2,000 miles from where the plane had crashed.

Zamperini’s war was about to get far worse.

I do not generally consider myself a worrier. I am more the easy-going type--the kind who is generally carefree and and does not succumb to fear. Or so I like to think. But even then I have to admit that I can be fearful--I can give in to the temptation to worry. Even if I worry about the things I consider "big," I prove to myself that I am still a worrier at heart. And to tell the truth, I don't know of anyone who doesn't worry about something at sometime. We all tend to feel fear at one time or another; we all tend to be afraid of life, of what it brings, or of what we think it might bring in the future.

Running Scared is a book for fearful people, which is to say that it is a book for everybody. It is notable not only for its subject matter, but for its author--Edward Welch who has written, among other highly regarded titles When People Are Big and God Is Small. The book is divided into thirty chapters and Welch encourages the reader to tackle one chapter per day and to not return to the next until he has taken the time to discuss each one with another person. The chapters fall into two uneven parts, one with four and the other with twenty six chapters.

Welch begins with some initial observations, perhaps the most important of which is in the third chapter. It is here that he reveals that "fear speaks." This is to say that fear tells us about...us. It tells us about how we understand ourselves, about how we understand God and how we understand the world around. Fear is "a door to spiritual reality." "There is a close connection," Welch says, "between what we fear and what we think we need. ... Whatever you need is a mere stone's throw from what you fear." That statement is profound and well worth further consideration. It is little wonder that Welch suggests pausing often to ponder. Another point that I found worth of extra attention was this one: "Worriers live in the future." Worriers are constantly looking into the future and using their imaginations to construct their own version of what the future will look like--what it must look like based on their understanding of what has happened, what will happen, and how God works.

I always feel like a bit of a poser when I say this, but I absolutely love Handel’s Messiah. Though I appreciate small amounts of classical music (to use the term in a broad sense) I am largely a rock ‘n’ roll type. Yet there is something about Messiah that grips me. I find myself listening to it throughout the year, again and again, year after year. I’ve listened to recordings hundreds of times and make it a habit to attend a live performance every Christmas season. I can’t get enough.

I was rather excited to see a new book releasing this fall titled Handel’s Messiah: Comfort for God’s People. Written by Calvin Stapert, professor emeritus of music at Calvin College, the book serves as a guide to Handel’s great masterpiece. As the publisher says in the one-sentence pitch, “If you want to enjoy and appreciate Handel’s beloved Messiah more deeply, this informed yet accessible guide is the book to read.” I’m inclined to agree.

While I love Messiah I have often struggled with the knowledge that I do not really understand it very well. I’ve always known that if I just knew a little bit more about this form of music, if I just understood the context a little bit more, the Baroque style, my appreciation of Messiah would necessarily grow as well. But I am not at all musical. The last time I played an instrument was in primary school and that instrument was a recorder. Any time I’ve sought to learn more, I’ve quickly gotten lost in the technicalities of the musical lexicon.

However, this book has finally helped me see Messiah more clearly. Here is how the author describes what he has sought to accomplish in his work. “The three sections of this book aim to increase understanding from three different perspectives. The first section traces three histories—the history of oratorio up to Messiah; the history of Handel up to Messiah; and the history of Messiah’s inception and reception. Although I think these histories can contribute something toward a greater understanding of the work, I tell them primarily because they reveal a series and confluence of remarkable and unlikely events that led to the making of Messiah and from there to the phenomenon that it has become.”

The issue of homosexuality is one in which the church has not done so well over the years. The majority of Christians have long held fast to the clear teaching of Scripture—that homosexuality is against God’s plan for the people he created and that homosexuality is a serious sin, one that manifests a particular hardness of heart. In all of this Christians have honored God, I am convinced. But where Christians have been less than exemplary is in a commitment to engage the very difficult issues. I am beginning to see a lot of growth here, but the fact remains—Christians tend to engage the issue of homosexuality on only a surface level. We have easy answers that, to those who demand them, are not at all satisfying.

Wesley Hill has had to engage this issue in a far more serious way. Hill is a Christian and he is gay. Now I know many will get no further than this phrase: gay Christian. Hill uses that phrase as a kind of shorthand to express that he is a Christian—an evangelical who holds to the tenets of the Chrisitan faith, but he is also a man who is homosexual in what seems to be his natural orientation or inclination. He has always been attracted to men and only men. He has remained celibate through all his life, convicted and enabled by the Holy Spirit not to act out his sexuality. But hope and pray as he might, he cannot change his inability to be attracted to women. I am not crazy about the phrase gay Christian, but will use it in this review while adding it to my growing list of things to think about in the future.

Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality is his attempt to answer some of the most difficult questions, and to answer them not in an abstract sense, but from the perpsective of someone who has labored over them and shed many tears along the way. What does it mean for gay Christians to be faithful to God while struggling with the challenge of their homosexuality? What is God’s will for believers who experience same-sex desires? How can gay Christians experience God’s favor and blessing in the midst of a struggle that for many brings a crippling sense of shame and guilt? These are the questions the church needs to be willing and equipped to answer. We have to be able to do better than “Homosexuality is wrong.” And that’s what this book is all about.

Hill maintains throughout the book that homosexuality is a result of the Fall. Never does he soften this or backpedal on it. Never does he seek to excuse his inclination to homosexuality anymore than he’d downplay any other sin. What I most appreciate about Washed and Waiting is his ability to take us inside his struggle. We all have sins we struggle with; we all have what seem to be besetting sins. Why should we read a book about those who naturally tend toward homosexuality instead of those who naturally tend toward lying or cheating or some other sin? I would answer that in two ways. In the first place, issues of sexuality and sexual identity strike very, very close to the core of a person. A person who is drawn to shoplifting does not self-identify as a thief. That is not his identity. But a person who is homosexual truly does identify that way. It is a major part of who he is. And hence it is a very difficult sin to deal with. In the second place I would say that society is feeding all of us, those who go to church and those who do not, all kinds of false messages about homosexuality and we need to be equipped to respond in a robust way—in a way that shows we truly understand the issue on more than a surface level. This isn’t about yucky sexual deeds—the “yuck factor” (a term that I believe was first coined by C. Gerald Fraser in the early 80's). It is about people made in God’s image who seem to have a part of their core identity that through the reality of sin is just plain miswired.

There are many books out there that describe Reformed theology and that invite people to become part of the Reformed tradition. However, most of these books are a product of the years before the advent of this young, restless, Reformed reality that is all the rage today. Most such books predate the New Calvinism.

New to the field, and largely distinct from the rest, is Letters to a Young Calvinist by James K.A. Smith. This is one of the few books to speak directly to this new young, restless, Reformed movement. Written in the form of letters from a mentor to a young man who is investigating Reformed theology, the book offers a winsome 125-page introduction to the tradition and to the way it works out in real life. The author says "These letters don't offer an apologetic defense of Calvinism, trying to defend it against all comers; rather, I envision the addressee of these letters as someone who has already become interested in this tradition and is looking for a guide into unfamiliar territory."

Smith leads the young recipient of these letters into the tradition in a systematic way. He begins with words of welcome, expressing the way that Reformed theology leads us to seek out and discover deep wells of the Scripture. For example, "I think it is one of the hallmarks of the Reformed tradition that it has a long history of encouraging curiosity about creation. Unlike some of the places you and I have been, which really discourage questioning in order to get people to toe the party line, the Reformed tradition has long encourages a kind of holy intellectual riskiness."

He warns of one of the most perilous sins of the Reformed: "Now is as good a time as any to warn you about one of the foremost temptations that accompanies Reformed theology: pride. And the worst kind of pride: religious pride (one of Screwtape's letters speaks quite eloquently about this). This is an infection that often quickly contaminates those who discover the Reformed tradition, and it can be deadly: a kind of West Nile virus."

Smith suggests that the best one-word summary of Reformed theology is grace. He speaks of grace going "all the way down," by which he means that grace infuses every part of Reformed theology. And, indeed, Reformed theology is a theology of grace--grace in every part. He says (rightly!) that Reformed theology is not all about election and predestination; they are components of the theology but they are not all there is to it. "I often feel that Reformed theology is ill served by a myopic focus on these things, as legitimate as they are." And he emphasizes that Reformed theology is inherently unfinished. "It seems to me very un-Reformed to prop up Reformed theology as a timeless ideal, a consummated achievement, when one of the Reformers' mantras was semper reformanda—always reforming. You shouldn't expect a lifetime of pursuing the truth to result in constant entrenchment into what you thought when you were twenty."

Home. I love home. I love my home and I love the very idea, the concept, of home. God is good to give us home, to give us a place where we can just be, a place where we can center our lives. Think about your home, think about how good it is to have a place of your own, a place where you have your stuff and your people and where you live your life, and you’ll realize what a calling it was for Christ to have no home, to have no place to call his own.

We look at home today, we look at private life, and tend to assume that things have always been as they are now. And yet this is not the case. The home and the private life have developed over time, slowly evolving into what they are today and slowly evolving toward what they will be tomorrow. Home and private life are the twin subjects of Bill Bryson’s new book: At Home: A Short History of Private Life.

Bryson recently purchased an old Norfolk Church of England rectory as his home and it provides the starting point for his investigations. “Looking around my house, I was startled and somewhat appalled to realize how little I knew about the domestic world around me. Sitting at the kitchen table one afternoon, playing idly with the salt and pepper shakers, it occurred to me that I had absolutely no idea why, out of all the spices in the world, we have such an abiding attachment to these two. Why not pepper and cardamom, or salt and cinnamon? And why do forks have four tines and not three or five?” Those mundane observations and the questions they generated got him started in his quest to understand home. And somehow he makes home, the most mundane place in our lives, utterly fascinating.

“If you had to summarize it in a sentence, you could say that the history of private life is a history of getting comfortable slowly.” Do you enjoy your home and all its comforts? That’s because we humans have been working tirelessly for all these millennia to make home a place of comfort. Slowly, slowly we have gotten to the point we are at today.

Stephen Hawkings’ The Grand Design has shot straight to the top of the New York Times list of bestsellers. The book is his atheistic answer to questions like these ones: Why is there a universe—why is there something rather than nothing? Why do we exist? Why are the laws of nature what they are? Did the universe need a designer and creator? Edgar Andrews was kind enough to allow me to post his review of the book. Andrews is author of Who Made God?: Searching for a Theory of Everything, Emeritus Professor of Materials at the University of London and an international expert on the science of large molecules. Which is to say that he is well-suited to write a review of a book like this one. Here is what he says about The Grand Design:

Cosmologist Stephen Hawking sold over nine million copies of his book A Brief History of Time. Now, 22 years later, he has co-authored The Grand Design which immediately hit the No.1 spot in the New York Times best-seller list. But the sequel is so inferior to the prequel in intellectual quality that a reviewer in The Times Saturday Review (London, 11 September 2010) writes: 'It reads like a stretched magazine article … there is too much padding and too much recycling of long-stale material… I doubt whether The Grand Design would have been published if Hawking's name were not on the cover'.

So why is the new book a runaway best-seller? Because it claims that science makes God redundant. Let's take a closer look at the claims advanced in The Grand Design.