Reviewing “Real Love in an Angry World” by Rick Bezet

Real Love in an Angry World: How to Stick to Your Convictions without Alienating People is about being a true Christ-follower and showing God’s love to a world that is full of conflict, hostility, and suspicion about Christianity (and a lot of other things). Looking to Jesus’ example, Pastor Rick Bezet discusses different specific ways Christians can relate to people in love, without judging them, while also not compromising their beliefs or condoning unbiblical behavior.

Basically, this book is about the biblical principle of “speaking truth IN LOVE.” First, it establishes that there is a universal truth, one that isn’t damaged or injured by people’s dismissing or disbelieving it. However, this truth is not a stark, judging, hateful truth. Because it cannot be hurt, it doesn’t need to go on the offensive to protect itself.

Reviewing “The Communication Book” by Mikael Krogerus and Roman Tschäppeler

In The Communication Book: 44 Ideas for Better Conversations Every Day, authors Mikael Krogerus and Roman Tschäppeler hit a sweet spot of condensing complex theories into simple chunks of easily-digestible information, both in text and infographic form translated seamlessly from their original German by Jenny Piening and Lucy Jones. Subject matter runs the gamut from Aristotelian principles of rhetoric to the FoMO phenomenon. Every chapter is preceded by a “chalkboard” style infographic that illustrates the theory, rules, or other information that is detailed in the pages following.  

Here are a few chapters I found interesting:

·        The Salami Tactic – the idea of presenting an idea or proposal in small, “bite-sized” slices rather than overwhelming your audience with a full-fledged plan and all its details.

·        The Spiral of Silence – the phenomenon that, the more one believes their opinion is the minority or unpopular, the less likely they are to voice that opinion.

·        White Lies – did you know there are different colors of lies aside from black and white? In this chapter, you learn there’s also gray and red. (But no blue. Which is good, since blue is my favorite color, and I can’t imagine blue would ever lie to me.) The difference between the four is “who the lie benefits.” A white lie, for instance, supposedly benefits the person it’s told to. (Which is a red lie, if you ask me!)

·        L’Esprit de escalier – Which is the French term describing that feeling going into a job interview feeling completely prepared for every possible tough question, tanking the interview, and then waking up in the middle of the night from an epiphany of the perfect thing you should have said.

·        The Standpoint Theory – Describes a feeling that has been growing in me of late, that the more power a person has, the more likely they think their perspective is the fair and balanced one.

That said, there are a few flaws to this book:

1)      Its easy readability is a bit deceptive. That is, I was surprised when I started reading it to find how fast I was breezing through it. As I was reading, I felt sure I was understanding everything. However, understanding and retention are two different things. In retrospect, if I were to suggest a pace of reading this, I would say to read only one chapter (a total of a couple pages) at a sitting. Otherwise, it might be better to keep on hand as a reference book rather than reading through in a linear fashion.

2)     Like so many books published after 2016, this one seems to make certain oblique allusions to political figures and events. I’m sorry, but I’m tired of tripping over these sorts of things in current publications. It’s lazy, somewhat tacky, and—the weakness of making “current” comments being its inherent transience—I don’t believe it will age well.

3)     A few times the subject matter skirts on the equally-fascinating (but perhaps tangential) topic of logic and commonly-implemented fallacies. If there was one thing I wished to see more in this book, it would have been a more detailed investigation into these, since logic (and identifying bad logic), is such a huge part of communication. (Although admittedly this is the first book by these authors that I have read, so it’s possible that they’ve already done so in a different publication.)

 A Few More Thoughts on the Subject of Communication in General

If you’re an introvert like me, you may look to “scientific research” to learn how to communicate with people. It’s not that I feel like I don’t understand what people are communicating to me, but whenever I try to reciprocate, there is often a dissatisfied feeling that I’ve fallen short. I end up walking away thinking

    “That is not what I meant at all,

    That is not it, at all.”

 ...and any conversation that ends with me feeling like J. Alfred Prufrock is not a successful one.

 The thing is, there seems to be some intermediary level of the Study of Communication that I can’t seem to grasp. "Small talk" I can do, although I dislike it inherently; it’s so disingenuous, me asking questions that I don’t care about the answers to, and answering with inanities any questions that might be placed to me. The only sort of conversation I really enjoy, and which I wish I could achieve more often, is the deeper sort of interchange of thoughts, opinions, feelings, and ideas.

 To swap memories or suggestions, discuss alternatives and hypotheticals…actually, now that I think about it, “discuss” rather than “converse” is the real activity I enjoy. I blame college for enhancing the expectation that adulthood would be filled with such stimulation. Whenever I have encountered a conversation that discusses something that really intrigues me—literature, for example—I have almost exclusively been met with glazed-over eyes when I allow myself to be fully engrossed in it. Apparently, people are fine saying “Oh, I love to read!” but don’t want to have to prove it by talking about it.

In short, to move from my favorite poet (T.S. Eliot) to one of my favorite authors (Jane Austen, in Persuasion):

‘My idea of good company...is the company of clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company.'

'You are mistaken,' said he gently, 'that is not good company, that is the best.’

My problem, then, seems to be an inability to transition from the undesirable small talk (or, to use the technical term, “chit-chat”) to the more desirable, deeper discussion...which is where this sort of research comes into play.

In the end, The Communication Book is more about the why, such as “why do people communicate in such a way?” or “why do we interpret things according to this mindset?” rather than the how of “how do I use this information to communicate better?” or “how can I put this into practice?” While this book didn’t quite provide me with the tools to overcome this “mental block,” it did cover a vast amount of topics that I think I’ll find useful in the long run. In particular, this book seems like a great fit for learning about workplace communication.

Reviewing “Ulysses Found” by Ernle Bradford

While sorting through some of my books to donate, I found Ulysses Found. This book was one of simply gobs of volumes that I’d pulled from a book drop when our local public school was doing a purge of older works. I know that, at some point several years ago, I had read this book, but I could neither remember anything about the book nor why it was in the Donation Pile in the first place.

Ernle Bradford was a British author who happened to have a lot of experience sailing the Mediterranean. His reason for writing the book in the first place was that he seemed to “recognize” islands and coastlines, connecting his travels to the so-called mythological places in Homer’s Odyssey. From chapter to chapter, he traces the epic journey through real-life geography.  

Reviewing “A Journal of the Plague Year” by Daniel Defoe

 

This has been a rough year. I have hardly read any good books. And not for lack of trying.* If I have often thought of and felt books to be my friends, I have been cruelly betrayed many times these past several months. Old, trusted “go-to” authors have inflicted bitter disappointments such as Agatha Christie’s The Clocks and H. Rider Haggard’s The Yellow God. Even ancient writings like The Nibelungenlied made me less inclined to cradle the volume in my arms (as I am wont to do) than throw it across the room (as usually would be unthinkable!).

I have been searching for solace in reading, and haven’t found a safe haven. It’s a feeling hard to describe, but not usually quite so difficult to find. The feeling of comfort when one lays open a few pages of paper and looks at them, and somehow is transported out of one’s life and enters the existence of someone else.

But as Escapism has consistently eluded me this year, I decided that perhaps I was approaching the problem in the wrong way. I was trying to avoid reality. But books are more than an escape; they delve into reality so that we can understand our lives in a new, different, better way.  So I reversed my course completely, and read A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe. 

Reviewing "The Question that Never Goes Away" by Philip Yancey

Why?

If there is a good, all-powerful, all-knowing God, WHY do bad things happen?

In a world that often feels like it’s spinning out of control, it’s easy to ask this question. And even when life seems to be going alright, the question never quite goes away.

An American Linguist in England: Reviewing "The Prodigal Tongue" by Lynne Murphy

Lynne Murphy is a linguist from the United States who emigrated to England and teaches at the University of Sussex. In her book, The Prodigal Tongue, the humor carries a little bit more bite than Erin Moore's That's Not English! 

Almost as if the author has been given a bit of a hard time over her nationality of birth, and finally wrote a book so that when she gets corrected on word usage she just hands the critic her book.

Reviewing "Threads Around the World" by Deb Brandon

I originally put this on hold at my library on a whim, not even really looking past the title of the book and thinking it must be one of those how-to books about embroidery that I sometimes enjoy perusing. The kind of books with a lot of pictures that are easy to read through in an afternoon.

When I picked up the book at my library I almost didn’t start reading it. Firstly, it was much thicker than I’d anticipated. When one expects a pinky’s-width thick book and it’s more like a thumb-and-index-finger’s-width (actual measurements may vary), it may cause one to reconsider whether the book is perhaps about something completely different than originally thought.

Reviewing "100 Dives of a Lifetime" by Carrie Miller

I confess. Sometimes I put books on hold at the library not because of their words, but because of their pictures. These are the “coffee table” books that people don’t really read, just leaf through.

Except I do read them, I promise.

I borrowed 100 Dives of a Lifetime because I figured there would be plenty of pretty pictures, and I might learn something about diving. Not that I really am interested going diving myself—I’ve done enough of that vicariously through Shark Week…besides, I’m rather claustrophobic—but because one never knows whether learning about diving will inspire writing an adventure novel, or at the very least aid a conversation with someone who does like to dive.

Reviewing "The Monuments Men" by Robert Edsel

The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History

With a title like that, how could one go wrong?

After all, it was made into a movie, right? Some editions even have George Clooney et al. on the cover with the “Now a Major Motion Picture” seal.

Of course, any book that was ever turned into a movie must be good.

Reviewing "No Beast So Fierce" by Dane Huckelbridge

When putting books on hold at my library, I often choose them on a whim. The cover, the title, even the font on the spine may induce me to put a book on hold. It’s an adventurous feeling, not really knowing much about a book before reading it.

And it makes for some odd “Why did I put this on hold, again?” reactions when the book finally comes in (often months later) and my confused expression makes the desk librarian wonder whether she gave me the right thing.

Some libraries sponsor an event called a “blind date with a book” where they cover random books with brown paper so you can’t tell anything about them (apart from the size) until you check them out and start reading.

My method is more like internet dating. I saw the book’s profile pic and name and decided I’d like to meet it in person.

No Beast So Fierce by Dane Huckelbridge was just such a book. The cover has a cool tiger photo, and the title intrigued me. I don’t think I saw the smaller words under the title (they were too small to see on the thumbnail in the library’s online catalog), so I didn’t know until I had the book in my hands that I saw the book was subtitled The Terrifying True Story of the Champawat Tiger, the Deadliest Animal in History.

Reviewing "Bog Bodies Uncovered" by Miranda Aldhouse-Green

My curiosity about bog bodies was piqued when I read Snow-Walker. As I mentioned in my review of that, there’s a section in the third book where the main characters encounter a tribe of people that live in a swamp. Although initially welcomed into this community, it soon becomes clear that the swamp people have a nefarious ulterior motive for keeping the heroes there. Sure enough, a “festival” turns into a ritual of human sacrifice, and one of the main characters is nearly killed and put into a bog. (It’s okay; he survived.)

So I went to my default place for information when I have a passing curiosity about something: Wikipedia. But Wikipedia’s page was so skimpy, I soon turned to the more robust resource of the library, and it was there that I found Bog Bodies Uncovered: Solving Europe’s Ancient Mystery. Miranda Aldhouse-Green addresses this subject so thoroughly, meticulously, and…let’s face it…gruesomely, that my curiosity was more than satisfied. I don’t think I’ll need to read anything more on the subject, thank you very much.

Reviewing "All the Gallant Men" by Donald Stratton

I listened to the audiobook version of this memoir by one of the survivors from the Arizona. In All the Gallant Men: An American Sailor’s Firsthand Account of Pearl Harbor, Donald Stratton recounts the events that led him to joining the United States Navy, what happened that day of infamy of December 7, 1941, and its aftermath. Though gruesome in parts, I was surprised at how clean the prose was (this is a sailor’s memoir we’re talking about, remember), and was refreshed by the glowing patriotism. Particularly interesting was Stratton’s account of 9/11, hearing his perspective as someone who experienced one horror and lived long enough to witness another.

Practical Christianity: Traveling on Business

The main reason I wanted to discuss William Wilberforce’s 1797 essay, A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Higher and Middle Classes was the following passage, which I found both intriguing and comforting:

Practical Christianity: A Work in Progress

Among the (many) excuses people have for not exploring Christianity, there are two that are polar opposites, yet equally effective at keeping God at arm’s length:

1.      “Christians are perfect, and I’m simply not good enough.”

2.      “Christians are hypocrites. They pretend to be all goody-goody, but turn out to be just as bad as the rest of us.”

While William Wilberforce’s A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Higher and Middle Classes is an essay aimed at exposing the hypocrisy mentioned in point 2, he does manage to address these two claims: 

Practical Christianity: Rational Affection

One thing that struck me while reading William Wilberforce’s A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Higher and Middle Classes was how logical, almost scientific, his language and arguments were. He uses a lot of logical analogies to illustrate his points. He points to astronomy and the natural world, and even mentions Isaac Newton at one point. He also references historical, political, and international events to trace a pattern of human nature and behavior, thus laying a groundwork for his theses. 

He uses a phrase that I thought was interesting “rational affection.” We don’t often think of affection—an emotion—as “rational.” We don’t expect to be able to logically figure out who we’ll fall in love with, or to explain with a pros-con spreadsheet why you are friends with a specific person. Yet when it comes to our love of God, Wilberforce treats it as a rational act. Our loving God is not on our own initiative—we’re not doing Him any favors. Rather, our loving God is a natural, logical reaction of gratitude for Christ’s salvation, of appreciation of all the blessings He gives us, of acknowledging who God is, and of awe in how great and truly different He is from us. 

Practical Christianity: The Trap of Good Deeds

In his essay, A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Higher and Middle Classes, William Wilberforce explains that one trap for “nominal Christians” (and even those believers that are otherwise strong in their faith) is the problem of works. True righteousness has nothing to do with what we have done, and everything to do with what Christ has already done. “But they rather conceive of Christianity as opening the door of mercy,” but once a Christian has stepped through that door the rest is “up to them.” 

Practical Christianity: The Purpose of Imagination

The things we care about are often the things in the closest proximity. William Wilberforce uses the example of feeling more keenly the tragedy of an accident on the street just outside, than the tragedy of thousands of people being slaughtered on the other side of the world.

And the things that are in closest proximity to us do not even have to be real. Our imaginations allow us to feel more emotion for the characters in the book we’re reading than for real incidents going on farther away. In fact, because these characters in a sense live inside us, they are in the closest proximity anything could be…and therefore might be more powerful than things going on in our own homes. 

Practical Christianity: Ignorance Is No Excuse

William Wilberforce’s 1797 essay, A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Higher and Middle Classes, confronts the lukewarm attitudes of religion in his culture. It really resonated with me, more than two hundred years later, because there are so many parallels or foreshadowings of present-day culture.

One thing that is constant throughout history—thus putting my life on an equal footing with Wilberforce’s—is the presence of sin. Sin is often simply defined as “evil” or “wickedness” or “doing bad things,” but I would argue that sin’s scope is a little wider than your stereotypical “bad” things like criminal acts, but extends to anything that is against God.

Practical Christianity: William Wilberforce’s Thesis

In the upcoming entries I plan to discuss some of these “nuggets of wisdom” I found in William Wilberforce’s A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Higher and Middle Classes.  But first it might be helpful to know the purpose of this essay.

“The main object which he has in view is, not to convince the Sceptic, or to answer the arguments of persons who avowedly oppose the fundamental doctrines of our Religion; but to point out he scanty and erroneous system of the bulk of those who belong to the class of orthodox Christians, and to contrast their defective scheme with a representation of what the author apprehends to be real Christianity.”

The point of this book was for Wilberforce to expose the shallow religious façade that had become so prevalent in Britain at the time. Times have changed drastically since then, and while I can’t speak to the state of British religious views personally, from my observations in America we’ve drifted even farther from Christianity in its truest sense. 

Practical Christianity: Introduction

Awhile back I slogged through a very long and very dense essay titled A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Higher and Middle Classes. For brevity’s sake (and to belay carpal tunnel syndrome) I will nickname it Practical Christianity. Published in 1797, this essay was written by William Wilberforce, whom I had best known beforehand as being an instrumental player in abolishing the slave trade in Britain.

This work is in public domain and so I downloaded a free version on my Kindle. I read it during my breaks at work, which hindered me from reading it very fast, and in the end I think that was a good thing because this is one book that one cannot simply breeze through.