Review: The Martian Chronicles

The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
My rating: 4 of 5 stars



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Review: Unreconciled: Family, Truth, and Indigenous Resistance

Unreconciled: Family, Truth, and Indigenous Resistance by Jesse Wente
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've been meaning to get to this book for some months, but keep getting pulled away. In this book, Jesse Wente offers his story of being an Indigenous youth and adult living in Toronto in the 70s onward. In telling his story, Jesse Wente not only connects with the ambiguities and confusions of being an Urban Indigenous person, but also with the racism that underlies Canadian society. He also gives an insight into media and its attitudes to Indigenous issues and people, through is experiences with the CBC and TIFF. The result is a challenging read (for a middle age white guy like me), but a rewarding one.

What I appreciate about Jesse Wente's writing is his honesty and humour which pervade his writing. His discussion about his struggles with his identity, especially because he lived removed from his family's community, is nuanced and expresses the ambiguities of the move to the cities that many Indigenous people have made. His struggles to promote Indigenous voices in media are familiar to someone living through the 1990s and 2000s, but are painful, especially in retrospect. Wente's point is that Canadian society has to face up to the truth not only of what it has done, but what it is doing in respect to Indigenous peoples, and this book contributes to that challenge.

I recommend this book heartily for those who are trying to understand the experience of Indigenous peoples in Canada. Jesse Wente is both poignant and funny, sometimes at the same time, and this is a really good read.

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Review: Red Storm Rising

Red Storm Rising by Tom Clancy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is an old favourite which I keep going back to every, say, five to ten years. It is a peculiar book for a peculiar time- the late 1980s in the last years of the Cold War. The best way to describe it is that it was one of those books which sought to give a picture of a war with the Soviet Union which didn't end in nuclear annihilation, as many of us feared at the time. Ultimately, it's basic premises were that the Soviet Union was, despite its military power, economically and socially near collapse (which, actually wasn't far from the truth as we found out after 1989), but also that, when faced with the prospect of nuclear escalation, cooler heads would act to prevent it. In a sense, that also proved true, even if it ignored the disastrous consequences if they didn't.

Without giving too many spoilers, the destruction of one of the Soviet Union's major refineries by Islamic terrorists leads the leadership of the Politburo to plot an invasion of Western Europe as a prelude to an invasion of the Middle East. The result is Clancy's vision of how a conflict between NATO and the Warsaw Pact would go, which is messy. You can see Clancy is trying to suggest that more combat readiness is needed in NATO, but also that, ultimately, he thinks they can, with enough investment, hold their own. He really likes getting into the nitty gritty of both intelligence gathering and the military hardware, and generally is pretty hawkish. The climax brings the story to the brink of nuclear war, which is avoided only in something of deus ex machina political coup in Moscow. The lesson is that a good defence (with lots of defense spending) means a good deterrent.

Despite the two-by-four across the head political messaging about defense spending, this is still a good book. Clancy, whatever his political thoughts, is a compelling story teller and this is an intriguing story of man at war. There's surprise, sudden reversals, courage and even something of a love story (Clancy doesn't do love stories too much, he likes his military toys too much). It still holds up as a story, even long after the politicals have changed.

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Review: Unreconciled: Family, Truth, and Indigenous Resistance

Unreconciled: Family, Truth, and Indigenous Resistance by Jesse Wente
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've been meaning to get to this book for some months, but keep getting pulled away. In this book, Jesse Wente offers his story of being an Indigenous youth and adult living in Toronto in the 70s onward. In telling his story, Jesse Wente not only connects with the ambiguities and confusions of being an Urban Indigenous person, but also with the racism that underlies Canadian society. He also gives an insight into media and its attitudes to Indigenous issues and people, through is experiences with the CBC and TIFF. The result is a challenging read (for a middle age white guy like me), but a rewarding one.

What I appreciate about Jesse Wente's writing is his honesty and humour which pervade his writing. His discussion about his struggles with his identity, especially because he lived removed from his family's community, is nuanced and expresses the ambiguities of the move to the cities that many Indigenous people have made. His struggles to promote Indigenous voices in media are familiar to someone living through the 1990s and 2000s, but are painful, especially in retrospect. Wente's point is that Canadian society has to face up to the truth not only of what it has done, but what it is doing in respect to Indigenous peoples, and this book contributes to that challenge.

I recommend this book heartily for those who are trying to understand the experience of Indigenous peoples in Canada. Jesse Wente is both poignant and funny, sometimes at the same time, and this is a really good read.

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Review: All Christians Are Monks: The Monastery, the Parish and the Renewal of the Church

All Christians Are Monks: The Monastery, the Parish and the Renewal of the Church by George Guiver
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book was suggested to me in a short course on Benedictine spirituality as part of the Diocese of Toronto's Seasons of Spiritual Renewal, which focused on how Benedictine spirituality can feed the spirituality of clergy and lay people alike. Guiver's book, as you might imagine, fits in well with this objective.

In All Christians Are Monks, Guiver consider the development of monasticism and what it is like as a way of life and contrasts it with parish life. As an Anglican monk, he makes explicit connections to the Benedictine influence on the origins of Anglicanism, especially in the formulation and development of the Book of Common Prayer. He also considers with what makes the parish different and unique. He, understandably, tends to prefer the monastery to the parish, which he seems to feel has a different mission. But he offers useful insights into what parishes can learn from monastics.

This book is well worth reading, especially for those who are trying to live out an admittedly modified Benedictine inspired spirituality in the world. He provides much to think about, especially in considering how to bring those insights into parish life.

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Review: The Life of St. Benedict by Gregory the Great: Translation and Commentary

The Life of St. Benedict by Gregory the Great: Translation and Commentary by Terrence G. Kardong OSB
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I picked up this book over the summer, mostly because I didn't have an edition of the Life of St. Benedict, which seemed odd, given my interest in Benedictine spirituality. Kardong's edition is a good one, with an informative commentary and a readable translation. Kardong gives a good sense of context and structure of the Life, which is really helpful when reading it.

Ancient and mediaeval hagiography can be something of an acquired taste, given the predominance of miracles and wonders which can put off more skeptical modern readers, whose tastes may lie more towards biography and personality. Yet, the aims of these hagiographies are different- focusing on establishing their subject's spiritual power as reflecting God's power. This life is very much in that tradition, focusing especially on Benedict's miracles. Yet, there is much that is human which comes out. Benedict, for all of the efforts to depict him as the spiritual master, has moments of very real humanity- in his reaction to the community which tried to poison him, his interactions with his sister, Scholastica, who summoned a storm to keep him from leaving overnight and his lovely vision of the world towards the end of his life. I can't say that our reading of Benedict is as well rounded as a modern biographer would prefer (this is ancient hagiography, after all), but I think we see the person as well as the saint.

This biography is an excellent one for those interested in the saints and especially in Benedictine spirituality and history and is well worth reading.

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Review: The Life of St. Benedict by Gregory the Great: Translation and Commentary

The Life of St. Benedict by Gregory the Great: Translation and Commentary by Terrence G. Kardong OSB
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I picked up this book over the summer, mostly because I didn't have an edition of the Life of St. Benedict, which seemed odd, given my interest in Benedictine spirituality. Kardong's edition is a good one, with an informative commentary and a readable translation. Kardong gives a good sense of context and structure of the Life, which is really helpful when reading it.

Ancient and mediaeval hagiography can be something of an acquired taste, given the predominance of miracles and wonders which can put off more skeptical modern readers, whose tastes may lie more towards biography and personality. Yet, the aims of these hagiographies are different- focusing on establishing their subject's spiritual power as reflecting God's power. This life is very much in that tradition, focusing especially on Benedict's miracles. Yet, there is much that is human which comes out. Benedict, for all of the efforts to depict him as the spiritual master, has moments of very real humanity- in his reaction to the community which tried to poison him, his interactions with his sister, Scholastica, who summoned a storm to keep him from leaving overnight and his lovely vision of the world towards the end of his life. I can't say that our reading of Benedict is as well rounded as a modern biographer would prefer (this is ancient hagiography, after all), but I think we see the person as well as the saint.

This biography is an excellent one for those interested in the saints and especially in Benedictine spirituality and history and is well worth reading.

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Review: The Night Watchman

The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book was a recommendation from an English teacher colleague, which I followed up on. The novel is set on the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota in the 1950s at time when the federal government was trying to eliminate both reserves and Indian status. The story follows several characters including the titular character, Thomas Wazhashk, who combines the role as a member of the reserve council and work as a night watchman at the jewel bearing plant on the reserve. The central over-arching conflict is the fight that Thomas must wage to preserve the reservation which, ultimately, includes a trip to Washington D.C., to defend the reservations status. But this novel also has several sub-plots including members of Thomas' family and others on the reservation. Those can be complex to follow, but the characters are fascinating.

The novel itself is based upon the letters of Erdrich's grandfather, who spearheaded the resistance to dispossession in the 1950s. The story reflects the resiliance and resistance of these communities at at time when assimilation was the policy of many lawmakers in both the US and Canada. The novel gives a vivid sense of the time and is well worth rading.

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Review: The Heart of Perfection: How the Saints Taught Me to Trade My Dream of Perfect for God's

The Heart of Perfection: How the Saints Taught Me to Trade My Dream of Perfect for God's by Colleen Carroll Campbell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I ran into this book, scanning the options in Google Books, which touches on my interest in the Christian saints and how they can connect to how to live today. Roman Catholics tend to do this well because of their attention to saints in their spirituality and Campbell does it better than most. This book, as the title would suggest, focuses primarily on perfection and what various saint's lives have to say about that. The book weaves in Campbell's life and the lives of several saints and a few not saints.

What I liked about this book is not only the interweaving of the author's life and struggles with perfectionism, but also the empathy that she writes with when she writes about the various saints and not saints. She doesn't try to hid their flaws- in fact, the flaws created by perfectionism is part of what Campbell is talking about. She doesn't hesitate to talk about how perfectionism appears in religious life as judgement and harshness, but also looks to see what saints do to move away from all that. She provides a very human look at perfectionism, not shrinking from the darker sides, but also looking towards how our faith ultimately helps us rely on God, not our own perfection.

This is a worthy reflection on the guidance that the saints can give through their examples, both good and bad.

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