Last week I mentioned that over the past few months I have not been reading a lot of Christian books. But this is not to say that I have not been reading at all. Here are a few of the most noteworthy books I’ve read in that time.

Catherine the Great - This portrait of Catherine the Great may just be the culmination of Robert Massie’s writing career (he is now 82 years old). He has previously written biographies of Peter the Great, Nicholas and Alexandra, and the Romanovs, even earning a Pulitzer Prize along the way. I would not be at all surprised to see Catherine the Great merit attention and perhaps a nomination for another Pulitzer. At the very least it has been chosen as one of Amazon’s best 100 books of the year—a good place to begin.

Catherine is a fascinating character and she comes to life through Massie’s pen. If I had a concern about the book, it would be that he may dwell just a little too much on her multitudinous affairs. He has an obvious fascination with Catherine’s sexuality. Having said that, these affairs were critical to her life and her country; they even produced the heir to the Russian throne. I suppose a ruler’s affairs are always a matter of public record. Certainly she cannot be understood apart from her constant parade of lovers.

Of course there is far more to Catherine than that. She was one of those rulers who ruled well and yet poorly; who saw and sympathized with the plight of the majority of her people and yet did very little to address it. She held her nation together, and maintained her rule over it, through sheer force of will. She was brilliant and cunning and yet desperately needy and flawed and ruthless. Massie’s book is a powerful character study of a fascinating woman. I highly recommend it. It must be one of the best books of 2011.

(Yesterday I mentioned my newfound love of audio books. You could join Audible and take this as your free audio book)

Boomerang - Boomerang is a book about Michael Lewis’ “Travels in the New Third World.” Having previous authored The Blind Side, Moneyball, The Big Short and other books that sell in the millions, Lewis turns his attention to the economic plight of the whole world. He travels through Iceland, Ireland, Greece and Germany, to see how these countries have suffered by borrowing endlessly and frittering away countless trillions. At the end the joke is on America as he heads back to the U.S.A. and shows how this is where the problem began and this is where the problem will take deepest root. The book moves at a quick pace and is full of dark humor. It’s also a little bit crude at times, and especially so in Germany, so do be warned.

Here is an example of the book’s dark humor: “As it turned out, what the Greeks wanted to do, once the lights went out and they were alone in the dark with a pile of borrowed money, was to turn their government into a pinata stuffed with fantastic sums and give as many citizens as possible a whack at it.” If you read his chapter on Greece, you’ll see that this was exactly the case.

If you want to know how the world got the way it is and if you want to understand the consequences of a worldwide feeding frenzy on cheap credit, you might be interested in reading Boomerang.

It is unlikely that I am the only father who is more than a little bit intimidated at the thought of raising daughters. Terrified and overwhelmed is more like it. If I didn't have strong, Christian role models to emulate (my own parents among them), I might just despair. One of the early lessons I have learned (I'm still relatively new to this--my girls are just 9 and 5) is the value of daddy dates, which is to say, taking out my daughters and spending time alone with them.

Greg Wright is a motivational speaker and executive coach whose challenge is twice as tough as mine; he has 4 daughters. Wright is the author of a new book titled Daddy Dates: Four Daughters, One Clueless Dad, and His Quest to Win Their Hearts. The book showed up in my mailbox the other day and I just had to read it. This wasn't a tough thing to do since a) it's only 210 pages long, b) those 210 pages are quite small with a lot of them being blank, c) the book is meant to be easy-to-read and d) I know that I need help in this very subject.

What this book is not is yet another parenting book on how to lead your children from the cradle to the wedding day. The focus is narrower than that. Wright seeks to help fathers pursue the hearts of their daughters. He does this primarily by pointing to his own example; the book is a memoir of sorts in which he shares lessons--the good and bad--from 18 years of raising girls.

It's a question several of you have asked me: What happened to the book reviews? For many years I was the one reviewing all the books. Well, not all of them, but I was reviewing a lot of them. For several years I maintained a pace of at least 1 book review each week, and often times it was more than that. I made a concerted effort to keep up with the latest and greatest and to try to keep the blog readers aware of what was new and exciting (or what was truly awful and an utter waste of both paper and ink).

A number of months ago--6 or so, perhaps--something changed. The books still show up at my house, but I find it near-impossible to find the time and the brainspace to read and evaluate as many of them. I still read, but not at near the pace I used to. Thinking about this, I think there are at least 3 causes.

The first is a matter of gluttony. When I began to read and review books, and when the blog began to gain traction, becoming a place to go for reviews of Christian books, books began to show up at my door (and later at a post office box I opened for the purpose). First they came 1 or 2 a week, then 1 or 2 a day, and often more even than that. It was easy enough to separate the good from the really bad, but this still left a lot of books--far more than I could ever hope to get through. But at first I still felt some responsibility, like if the people were sending me the books, it in some way imposed an obligation on me to read them. So I read them. A lot of them. That's not to say that I didn't enjoy myself. I had read so few Christian books before then that there was so much that was new and interesting and exciting. But I guess I overdid it a little bit. Eventually I needed to take some time to do something else. Largely I've been reading other books--some of which I'll tell you about another time. I guess my literary gluttony eventually caught up with me.

Here is another roundup of 30 Minute Reviews. These are noteworthy books that I did not have time or opportunity to read from beginning to end. Instead, I tried to spend at least 30 minutes with each--enough to get a sense of what the book is all about.

Athanasius - Simonetta Carr is building a fantastic series of biographical books for children and Athanasius now joins John Calvin, Augustine of Hippo and John Owen. Future volumes are expected to include Lady Jane Grey, John Knox and Jonathan Edwards. “A complex and fascinating character, Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, is best remembered as the Father of Orthodoxy, upholding the doctrine of the Trinity against the Arian heresy. In the newest addition to the Christian Biographies for Young Readers series, author Simonetta Carr introduces children to the life and times of this important church father who tirelessly defended the Nicene Creed, which many of us today recite as a confession of our faith.” This is a series you’ll want your children to have access to.

What Do You Think of Me? Why Do I Care? - This strangely-titled book comes from the pen of Edward Welch. I read it in manuscript form and wrote this blurb: “When we make people big, we necessarily make God small in comparison. This sin of pleasing people ahead of God, this fear of man, is the kind of sin we dress up and excuse and neglect; we have made it respectable. In What Do You Think of Me?, Ed Welch carefully, surgically, exposes people-pleasing for what it is. He lets it be ugly—all sin is ugly!—and offers a much more satisfying vision rooted in the finished work of Jesus Christ. Whether you are young or old (but maybe especially if you are young) you would do well to give this book a read.” This book is, in some ways, an extension to or expansion of Welch’s classic When People Are Big and God Is Small.

As far back as six centuries before Christ, soldiers have been taught a simple strategy: know your enemy. It was the famed Chinese general and strategist Sun Tzu who coined the phrase, and it reveals an important truth. If forced to do battle, an army gains a distinct advantage by knowing everything about who it battles. 

The call to follow Christ is a call to war. Every Christian wages a lifelong, all-out war against the world, the flesh, and the Devil. Satan was man's first adversary, and he will be his adversary to the end. Yes, Satan's reign was broken at the cross, but for the time being he still wields his power as we await Christ's return.

It is good to know your enemy. Yet there is a particular temptation that comes with knowing your enemy: you may inadvertently become like him. They say that the way to train people to identify counterfeit currency is not to have them study counterfeit money but to study the real thing. When we know what is true, what is genuine, we are equipped to quickly recognize and root out what is false.

In Living Free in Enemy Territory, a book that deals specifically with Satan, Greg Dutcher takes just that kind of approach. Instead of dwelling on the person and work of Satan, he dwells upon Scripture, upon God's source of light and truth. And in the light of Scripture, Satan looks exceedingly dark and his work outrageously horrifying.

As much as it is good to know your enemy, it is even better to know the One who can smash--who has smashed!--the head of that enemy. Dutcher does an admirable job of drawing the reader to the work of Christ, to the One who has done just that. This short book shows how to live free in enemy territory. And the way to do that is not to ignore the Enemy, but neither is it to dwell upon him. The way to live free is to bow before the One who has already conquered Satan and who now waits for the day when He will destroy him forever.

(I am posting this as a review of Dutcher’s book, though it was originally written as the Foreword to that book)

It had not been deliberately planned that Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs would release just days after Jobs died. Not really. Jobs had known for many years that he could not keep his cancer at bay forever and he had specifically asked Isaacson to be his biographer. The book was completed, the publication date set, and then Jobs’ condition worsened and he died. And so it happened that a biography—a real biography, not a quick-to-the-presses tabloid pseud-biography—arrived on store shelves so quickly after the death of its subject.

Over the past several years Isaacson had been given almost unfettered access into Jobs’ life and world. He recorded close to 40 interviews and spoke extensively with family, friends and enemies. This led to a biography that goes deep into the world of its subject and unearths the good, the bad, the shocking and the inspiring. It is an utterly fascinating biography—easily one of the most interesting I’ve read. That may owe, at least in part, to the fact that Jobs impacted my own life through the devices he created—many of which I use every day (and one of which I am using as I type these words). What is undeniable, whether you use Apple products or not, is that Jobs was a fascinating character who had a profound effect on the world in which he lived. Whether his legacy is judged to be good or bad, he certainly left a legacy that has touched the entire world.

I do not intend to write a review of this biography as much as I would like to make a couple of observations about it.

Let’s get one thing out of the way up-front—the thing that has been the subject of thousands of articles and blog posts in the week since the biography was released. Steve Jobs was not a nice person. In fact, he was often downright horrible, bearing lifelong grudges, throwing tantrums and berating the people who worked for him and with him. He seemed to have a binary view of the world where some things were wonderful and other things were horrible; there was little space between. He despised the mediocre or even the merely good. He used his keen intuition about other people to find and then exploit their vulnerabilities in a way that maximized the hurt he could inflict upon them. He was a brutal boss and a brutal man. He was the kind of man who would praise his own parents for adopting him and then pretty much abandon his own daughter.

While examples of his temper and tantrums have been widely discussed and dissected, I think a lot of people have missed the root of it all. Jobs was a lifelong student of Eastern religion and Zen Buddhism in particular. Along the way he became convinced that he was an enlightened being, that he existed on a higher plane than most people. From this exalted position he was able to see and to judge; he had the right to. He was able to stand, if not in the place of God, at least in the place of a judge. He felt that it was his right to speak the truth—the truth as he understood it—to others. After all, he was enlightened and they were not. His arrogance knew no bounds.

Here is another roundup of 30 Minute Reviews. These are noteworthy books that I did not have time or opportunity to read from beginning to end. Instead, I tried to spend at least 30 minutes with each--enough to get a sense of what the book is all about.

At the Throne of Grace - At the Throne of Grace is a book of the pastoral prayers of John MacArthur. Here is what the publisher says: “For more than 40 years, John MacArthur has steadfastly committed himself to the careful and faithful teaching of God's Word. A key outgrowth of his study of Scripture is the profoundly God-centered prayers that precede his sermons. John's prayers are the offerings of a heart that is fully committed to honoring God, proclaiming and obeying His Word, and calling others to do the same. In this book, prayers and Scripture readings from across his years of ministry have been brought together to stir Christians toward more meaningful and edifying communion with God.” These are powerful prayers, chosen by his children, arranged topically, and printed for all of us to enjoy. We’ve all known MacArthur as a preacher; this gives us an opportunity to see him in his role as a pastor who prays.

A Life of Gospel Peace - We have waited a long time for a fresh biography of Jeremiah Burroughs and at last it has come courtesy of Phillip Simpson and Reformation Heritage Books. Here is a short endorsement I penned for it: “A man whose books are known and treasured almost four centuries after his death is a man worth getting to know. Phillip Simpson has done the church a great service in penning this long-overdue account of the life and impact of Jeremiah Burroughs. I am glad to commend it to you.” 

Evangelicalism has a strange obsession with the Amish. The Amish are the theme of countless novels and they also appear in cookbooks, books of moralisms, books on the virtues of the simple life, and on and on. They are held up as models of cultural and theological simplicity, people who can point us to better days. The problem, of course, at least as it pertains to theology, is that this is simply not a true representation.

Ira Wagler grew up Amish, spending his childhood in both Canadian and American communities. He recently released a memoir that has made its way onto the bestseller lists. Growing Up Amish (a title that pretty much says it all) records his memories from childhood all the way to his mid-twenties when he eventually broke free of his family and community. 

Wagler is truly a gifted writer which makes this memoir beautifully crafted and wonderfully poignant. He draws the reader into his world as he grapples with his identity, as he leaves the community and returns, leaves and returns again, and as he tries to understand who or what he can be if he forsakes his Amish identity. His experience of truly being converted is the turning point of his life—perhaps an unexpected climax for a man raised in such a moral and religious atmosphere.

Here is a particularly poignant scene where Ira’s youngest brother walks away from his family and his Amish tradition once and for all:

Finally Nathan emerged from his bedroom and walked up to Dad, who was sitting in the living room. "I'm leaving," he said shortly, abruptly. Dad looked up at him, uncomprehending. Then it slowly dawned on him what Nathan had just told him. "What? No, you should not do that," he said, his face darkening into a serious frown. Nathan just grunted and walked out, duffel bag in hand, and shut the door behind him. Dad rose from his chair and followed him to the door. He stood there, looking out, unsure of what to say or what to do. And then Nathan approached Mom, working outside the washhouse. From a distance, I watched. I could not hear the words he spoke to her. Her face, at first turned up to him in a smile, suddenly collapsed in sorrow and fear. No, no. She mouthed the words. Spoke them. I drifted nearer. Then Nathan turned and walked away from her. Down the gravel drive, the long half mile to the road. He had gone only a hundred feet or so when she began to call his name, beside herself with horror. Fear. And love.

Even now, many years later, Wagler seems occasionally trapped between revulsion and admiration as he reflects on all the years he lived among the Amish. 

I recently received a copy of In Light of Eternity, Mack Tomlinson’s new biography of Leonard Ravenhill. My interest in Ravenhill was directed primarily toward two areas of his life and ministry: preaching and prayer. And of these two, prayer was the one I wanted to learn about most. What little I did know of Ravenhill told me that he was a great man of prayer, not only in what he taught about prayer, but in what he modeled. I was not at all disappointed.

The book contains an entire chapter on prayer, showing Ravenhill’s dedication to private and corporate prayer. Tomlinson sets the context: “He especially deplored the weakness of the praying of most local churches. He felt the strongest meeting of the church should be the church prayer meeting, but said that it was generally the weakest, if it even existed at all.” In his lifetime Ravenhill saw the daily or weekly prayer meeting disappearing from most local churches. This grieved him because he “directly connected the effectiveness of true ministry with the prayer life of the church.”

He often exhorted pastors to commit to prayer.

Oh, my ministering brethren! Much of our praying is but giving God advice. Our praying is discolored with ambition, either for ourselves or for our denomination. Perish the thought! Our goal must be God alone. It is His honor that is defiled, His blessed Son who is ignored, His laws broken, His name profaned, His book forgotten, His house made a circus of social efforts.

He went on to challenge the church in the way it trained pastors and in the way it would lead prayer:

Here is a list of books I have received over the past few weeks, but have been unable to read in full. Instead, I have given each of them at least 30 minutes and tried to get as much of a feel for the book as possible in that time.

Note to Self by Joe Thorn - This is a book dedicated to modeling the discipline of preaching the gospel to yourself. Joe Thorn has written a series of notes to himself—48 of them in total—to remind himself of the gospel and to remind himself how to live as if it is true and as if it has done a work of transformation in his life. It is quite a unique book and it beautifull suits the format. He divides the notes into 3 categories: The Gospel and God, The Gospel and Others and The Gospel and You. The letters have titles like “God Does Not Answer to You,” “Be Humble in Your Theology,” “Honor Your Parents,” “Don’t Be a Fan Boy” and “Suffer Well.” In every case, Thorn simply seeks to bring the gospel to bear on a particular area of life. With each letter just a couple of pages in length, it’s a good book to read at a pace of one chapter per day.

The Dragon’s Tooth by N.D. Wilson - I sat down with the family to read N.D. Wilson’s latest novel, The Dragon’s Tooth. After reading one chapter I saw that my daughters (aged 8 and 5) were not interested and that my son (aged 11) was too interested to wait for me to read it with him. So we abandoned the read-aloud project and my son went ahead and devoured the book in a day. Nick says it is, “Very, very, very good. A bit confusing at times. They definitely need to write another one.” We will take that as high praise. And, of course, this is only part 1 of the “Ashtown Burials” series, so his wish for a sequel will be granted. I’d recommend all of Wilson’s novels.