While I am committed to reading and reviewing Christian books, I also enjoy reading a steady diet of books published for the general market. Though my interests lean toward history, I do enjoy other topics as well. Here are a few of the titles I’ve enjoyed over the past couple of months. (Note: These are all general market books, so they may include elements like profanity.)
I have long been concerned and dismayed by the precipitous rise of sports betting. Having now read Danny Funt’s Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling, I am extremely concerned and dismayed. He explains how companies like DraftKings and FanDuel springboarded from fantasy sports to gambling and how they have come to extract hundreds of billions of dollars from gamblers. Many of these gamblers are young and the great majority of them lose far more than they win. He shows that these apps are every bit as evil and unethical as the illegal backstreet gambling operations of days gone by. With more and more people involved in gambling, and especially more young people, this is a book worth reading.
The Lost Airman by Seth Meyerowitz tells a remarkable story from the life of the author’s grandfather. During the Second World War, turret-gunner Staff Sergeant Arthur Meyerowitz was shot down over Nazi-occupied France. He survived the leap from his burning plane and initially evaded enemy soldiers as they searched for him. With the help of the French Resistance and the use of his disguise as a deaf mute, he managed to survive for more than six months before finally escaping to freedom. It’s a fast-paced book that will appeal to those who are interested in general history or military history.
Canada was recently rocked by a scandal involving several of its former youth hockey stars. Rick Westhead’s We Breed Lions lays bare a terribly broken system in which young men are not only expected to misbehave, but often absolved of blame when they do. The book is hard to read at times as it looks deep into disturbing events—events and coverups that are similar to ones we’ve seen in Hollywood, Washington, and sadly, even the church. Westhead calls for a reckoning and is optimistic that it is not too late for change. I hope he is right, because no amount of entertainment is worth so high a price in ruined lives.
Just to be transparent, the title of this book has a bad word in it, but I neither want to offend you nor have your spam filter delete this email so I won’t type it out. I read Enbleepiffication because I have been intrigued by Cory Doctorow’s explanation of how the massive tech companies consistently build products we want and enjoy, then inevitably wreck them for the sake of their own profit. Eventually, they leave us with products we no longer enjoy using, but have trouble breaking away from (e.g., Facebook, X, Google search, etc.). While I could hardly be further apart from Doctorow socially or politically, he aptly describes a phenomenon we have all witnessed and all despise. Some of his potential solutions seem sound, while others seem like a socialist fantasy. Either way, his book is a fascinating read that made me long for the good old days of Internet 1.0. It also left me wondering how long it will be before AI goes the way of all these other apps and becomes barely tolerable. If you’re tech-minded and can handle a lot of uses of the “s-word,” you may benefit from reading it.
Freya India is an interesting young social commentator who writes from the perspective of the first generation who were raised entirely within a world dominated by social media. Her book GIRLS® can be read as a kind of lament for her generation. It expresses the trials that came with growing up as a subject for what was essentially a giant social and technological experiment in which girls were leveraged to bring value to the tech companies. She writes for people like me to help us understand, and writes for people like herself to express sympathy. Best of all, she calls today’s girls to break free from their apps and devices. It’s a hard read, but one that may help the next generation avoid the sorrows of the one that came before it. It’s worth pointing out that India seems to be slowly accepting some form of the Christian faith, though it’s still too soon to know what it will look like once it has settled.
Few historical characters are more evil, repulsive, or fascinating than Grigori Rasputin. Not surprisingly, then, few historical characters have been so shrouded in myth and mystery. Antony Beevor tries to separate reality from rumor in his new account of Rasputin’s life, Rasputin: The Downfall of the Romanovs. In the end, you could probably say that on one level it doesn’t really matter what was actually true about Rasputin, because it was the myth and mystery that gave him so much power, both in his time and in the historic imagination. Still, Beevor expends great effort in separating truth from lie, fact from fiction, and reality from mere gossip. He offers a fascinating and discomforting profile of a man who rightly continues to evoke horror, even a century after his death.
Often I spot a book on the list of bestsellers, read a couple of quick reviews, and then decide to give it a try on that basis. That was exactly the case with London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe. His book tells the strange tale of a young man who got in far over his head with the wrong kind of people. He eventually suffered the dire consequences of his actions, leaving his family trying to unravel a mystery. The story exposes the kind of people and situations most of us have no experience with and no knowledge of, and gladly so. I felt the book got a little wordy and “tabloidy” along the way, but it was still interesting enough, I suppose.
There are several famous Roosevelts in American history. Most people know of the two Presidents, Theodore and Franklin, but fewer know of Ted. Ted was Theodore’s son and a man who lived a life that was, well, larger than life. He fought heroically in the First World War, went on to a successful career in business, failed in his attempts to succeed his father in national politics, but served with abnormal heroism during the Second World War (in which he was the oldest man to land with the first waves of troops on D-Day). His life is told well in His Father’s Son: The Life of General Ted Roosevelt, Jr., though I wish the book had captured the man as much as it captured his actions. It’s well worth reading, but I hope it’s not the final or definitive account of an especially fascinating individual.
The Day of Battle by Rick Atkinson is the second volume in Atkinson’s magisterial Liberation Trilogy that follows the American army across the European front of the Second World War. This volume covers the war in Sicily and Italy. It is every bit as well-written as the first volume and every bit as informative. The Liberation Trilogy has quickly become one of my favorite series on the war. I managed to wait patiently and buy the volumes as they went on sale in their Kindle editions, so eventually the whole series cost me less than $12!
Speaking of that trilogy, The Guns at Last Light is the third and final volume. I really cannot say enough positive things about this series and recommend it to anyone with an interest in the Second World War. If there is one thing that I wish Atkinson had done better in the series, it would be to celebrate examples of not only military heroism but also moral heroism. He rightly tells of some of the Allied servicemen who disgraced themselves by their moral conduct, but gives few examples of those who maintained their virtue or who stood for the weak. A reader could easily get the impression that every man let go of his morals when he reached Europe, so I wish Atkinson had focused some attention on those who did not. Still, his series is pretty much a must-read for anyone with an interest in military history.
