Jesus Freaks by D.C. Talk

Jesus Freaks
by
d c Talk

Doubts plague Christians. That's how it ought to be. No Christian ever meets the God Jehovah or his son Jesus Christ on earth, and doubt often raises its dreary head. Faith can collapse in what the author describes as "a world of free will rather than God's Will." It's hard to stay Christian in a world with so much debate about free will. If you have God and/or Jesus in your heart, then God and/or Jesus is everywhere, but if you don't, they just don't exist. Most Christians get a little prickly about that obvious thing, but is it any wonder that a crisis of faith occurs in many?

So, the author insists, "we must be freaks."  Jesus Freaks is a book designed to accompany the author's Christian Rock music, and despite that connection, it delivers an amazing antidote to the doubt issue. It refrains from throwing facts and arguments at the skeptic and instead, focuses on faith. With engaging stories of martyrs in Christian history, Jesus Freaks presents examples of Christians who have never wavered in their belief, never given up on God even when threatened with death. If you're a Christian, you'll find this book a god-send. The most shocking tales end with actual martyrdom, accounts that bring tears to the eyes. That's where the title comes from: The book is chock-full of outstanding Jesus freaks.

The Fiery Trial by Eric Foner

The Fiery Trial
by
Eric Foner

We don't label Abe Lincoln an abolitionist even though abolishing slavery was his existential moment -- because he didn't act like John Brown. By emancipating the slaves, Lincoln became not only the country's biggest abolitionist, but also, as Eric Foner points out in The Fiery Trial, a deity. A book like this, that examines Lincoln's flawed view of African-Americans, offers a realistic and instructive view of Abe Lincoln and his Presidency.

This biography is as wide-reaching as it is fascinating. Foner creates a snapshot of America in the 1860s, and focuses on Lincoln's role in remedying the Nation's biggest blemish. It not only examines Lincoln's anti-slavery past, but also argues that the world we know after the Civil War was strongly influenced by Lincoln and other leaders who chartered separate, though undefined, paths for the country's black and white populations. Their example created troubles for generations.The state of race relations in America for the next 100 years was set in stone even while emancipation became law. The very language Lincoln and his colleagues used, that the author documents throughout the book, remained the language of race relations in America up until the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s.

The author examines Lincoln's opinion slavery and African Americans starting with his young adult years, when Abe experienced life as an indentured laborer in service to his father, right up to his second inauguration and assassination. Lincoln, the author finds, understood the injustice of slavery, but not the humanity of the slaves and not their equality as human beings until the months before the assassination. The author struggles to reconcile Lincoln's paradoxes, or indeed, the similar paradox of slavery in a free democracy. In many ways, Lincoln seems as mediocre as the people around him, not the heroic figure he became when he brought forth the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln was both a political pragmatist and a visionary, imagining a nation without slavery, the obstacle course he faced to abolish slavery, and the question the author raises frequently: The future of the newly freed slaves.

While Foner presents Lincoln to his readers as a lawyer more concerned about law and the great potential that America as a nation had yet to realize, there lurks in his account a fellow with a shrewd understanding of how badly things can go wrong in a fledgling democracy. Slavery was the biggest threat to American Democracy because it caused lawless, mob activity like lynchings and the destruction of property. Foner presents a Lincoln not as a politician using this perception as a convenient excuse for abolishing slavery but as a heart-felt conviction that America could not survive the horrible institution.

Abolitionists were disappointed with Lincoln's compromises. While the author lauds Lincoln's political maneuvering, he finds Lincoln's experience of African-Americans lacking, the kind of experience that comes from working with them. Unfortunately, Lincoln evolved from a separatist point-of-view to a more enfranchising one too late in life, and the process of evolution is slow. America had a long way to go after the Emancipation Proclamation to leave racism behind. Lincoln's death, the author argues, severed the country's transition. Had Lincoln lived, his leadership in his second term may have resulted in a healthy assimilation, both with policy-making and by his example.


The violence that happened during reconstruction sort of begs the question, was Lincoln right? Did abolishing slavery restore the rule of law? A reading of the book may convince you that Lincoln and his colleagues could have set a better example and perhaps avoided the violence of the racial conflicts that followed.

Can an abolitionist be a racist? The book suggests that Lincoln eventually judged one could not, but was assassinated before he could turn his newly discovered truth into public policy.    

Red Mist by Patricia Cornwell

Red Mist

by

Patricia Cornwell

Spoiler alert level: medium

Patricia Cornwell’s novel, Red Mist is a page-turner.

Usually, Cornwell’s detective, Kay Scarpetta, hits her stride when all the evidence is wrong and more important evidence has been overlooked, ignored or misinterpreted. Conflicts with police officers, politicians, criminal attorneys and private investigators pales in comparison.

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However, in Red Mist, Scarpetta’s conflict with her fellow investigators becomes a significant hurdle she must clear before she can solve the bigger puzzle. Her lesbian niece, Lucy, and Lucy’s lover, Manhattan attorney, Jaime Berger, pull Kay in different directions and the results are disturbing, even fatal.

Early on, Jaime hoodwinks Scarpetta into working for the Innocents Project to free a mentally retarded teenager from Death Row. Jaime of the New York District Attorney’s office, switches sides when newly discovered DNA evidence appears to exonerate mentally retarded girl, Lola, for the gruesome murder of a wealthy Savannah family. As the story begins, Scarpetta knows the State of Georgia scheduled the execution for Halloween but she has nothing to do with the case.

Jaime’s ploy to involve the Brilliant Scarpetta in Savannah eventually exposes everyone to great danger. Scarpetta's involvement angers and worries some pretty powerful bad guys. Cornwell’s scenes between Jaime and Scarpetta crackle with the conflict of a personality war: Scarpetta, who doesn’t understand why she’s being dragged into the Death Row case, imagines the craziest possibilities; and Jaime, who’s goal is like a moving target, misleads and manipulates Scarpetta repeatedly. The conflict is above average for this genre and makes Red Mist hard to put down.

Jaime has becomes something of an DNA-chasing lawyer since Scarpetta last encountered her. In addition, Lucy, a brilliant, self-made millionaire and computer genius is gyrating out of orbit because of the broken relationship with Jaime. The lovers break up when Jaime suffers symptoms of a social death because of her sexual orientation. Despite this potboiler stuff, the story stays away from cheap melodrama for the most part, though Scarpetta gropes for solutions with the existential angst of a nun.

As the main conflict comes into focus, it’s clear Scarpetta faces not one, but a horrifying collaboration of villains who want to see Lola executed, and threaten to form a bizarre triangle to thwart Scarpetta's efforts to discover the truth. Indeed, they appear to be much smarter than Scarpetta’s crew.

First, there's Kathleen Lawler, the mother of the brilliant and murderous Dawn Kincaid, who offers information to Kay of a dead associate, Jack Fielding. Dawn Kincaid and her mother alone would be a handful for an entire law enforcement agency, but Cornwell also brings in the warden of the Georgia Prison for Women, Tara Grimm, who loathes the idea of Lola escaping the lethal injection. In the swamps of coastal Georgia, something is indeed rotten. Completely miffed by Jaime’s manipulations, Scarpetta misses important clues and incidents that later have dire consequences.

In Red Mist, Cornwell treats readers to a number of locked door mysteries, impossible crimes, Terrifying suspects out of time and place, and scientific mysteries that followers of the genre will delight in. For fans of the series, Cornwell also kills off an important, recurring character.

The story’s not without flaws. The retarded girl has clearly been set up for a gruesome, complicated murder, and its unlikely the entire state of Georgia would believe any of the State's claims. And Cornwell’s villains are highly educated people with such tremendous potential, maybe too much to believe they are so completely evil. Moreover, Scarpetta and her company exhibit such super human qualities, you may wonder where their tights and capes are.

Red Mist is such a page-turner, you may be tempted to jump ahead to the ending. It’s not hard. You only need to read one word to unravel the book’s central riddle, but you’ll regret finding it.

This may be the first Scarpetta novel to get a major Hollywood actor, Angelina Jolie, to commit to playing Scarpetta. It’s tough to imagine anybody playing a character that seems so autobiographical (despite Cornwell’s declaration otherwise). Cornwell’s the best person to play Kay Scarpetta. Too bad she doesn’t act. Other actors who would work? Diane Lane or Elizabeth Banks. As for supporting characters: Jaime should be played by Selma Blair. Lucy should be played by, say, Natalie Portman. Now that's an expensive cast. Any suggestions?

In the Garden of the Beasts by Erik Larson

In the Garden of the Beasts
by
Erik Larson


Though Erik Larson mentions in passing the colorful Nazi pageant ("we only see it in black and white war films"), it's at the heart of his book, In the Garden of the Beasts. Larson examines the four years in Berlin from 1933, when W. E. Dodd, formerly a professor of History at University of Chicago, became the American Ambassador to Germany. The book tells Dodd's story to 1937 when America's foreign service corps, an old boy's club, ran Dodd out of town.

Larson lays out the colorful spectacle of Berlin in 1930s, with flower lined streets, exciting cars, the fast trains, terrified Jews, scheming foreign service people, alarmed media, and of course, Nazi thugs. Larson's locations are the government and embassy buildings around the famous Tiergarten, Berlin's enormous central park. This exceptional neighborhood is the setting for the Night of the Long Knives that serves as the book's penultimate, barbaric moment. The urban wonders of Berlin that Larson describes suggest that, at least in the past, Germany could behave better than it did when Dodd was ambassador.

Larson's book focuses on Dodd and his attractive adult daughter, Martha. The author's attention to a small town SS parade that features a shaved and placarded woman who took a Jew as a lover is intended to show how shocking the Nazi movement was to his ingénue, Martha, who witnessed the spectacle. Certainly, if Martha Dodd had been the ideal Joan of Arc type that Larson suggests, her reaction to Nazism and her descent into the world of spies and espionage may have been compelling. Unfortunately, Martha's story is presented as gossipy melodrama, and she and her lovers seem inconvenienced only by a world that puts out young lovers. 

Dodd ambassadorship, on the other hand, is a cautionary tale about a man who recognized Hitler's master plan, but finds his warnings to FDR are ineffective. To Dodd, the Nazi problem seemed so easily fixed in 1934. Unfortunately, America's corrupt diplomatic corps obstructed his efforts. Though Dodd warns of the growing danger Hitler represents, his peers pooh-pooh his concerns. In a sad moment, the State Department suggests Dodd should quit insulting the German government.

America after the Great War was on the rise but Americans didn't appreciate Europe's old order. During the years of Dodd's ambassadorship, Hitler set up the pieces from the Great War in order to fight it over again, and he went ahead like a man confident that he was alone on the playing field. The book's concern is Berlin. The invading Russians reduced the city to rubble in 1945. Larson includes a picture of the Tiergarten after the Russians arrived, reduced to a scorched field. Berlin is a metaphor for Europe. All the adults quit and Hitler had no qualms about destroying it.

The Various Haunts of Men

The Various Haunts of Men
By
Susan Hill
A Review

Nobody is safe in a Susan Hill novel. Her gothic stories supply answers to her desperate protagonists, but in the end, the riddles are insoluble and the horror is inexorable. So, when Hill takes up the traditional detective novel, the middle-class security blanket, is she really going to make readers warm and fuzzy?

With The Various Haunts of Men, Hill introduces CID Simon Seerailler. She yokes the CID up with a subordinate, DS Graffam in the little town of Laffeter, but the pairing is so unlike say, Elizabeth George's Inspector Thomas Lynley and Sergeant Barbara Havers, there's something amiss, most definitely. Will this arrangement actually survive the book? In fact, DS Graffam, whose only interaction with Seerailler is to occasionally update him on her work, does all the investigating, and Seerailler only steps in at the end.

Graffam, the investigating officer in a missing persons case, is new to the town and utterly lonely. She's gone through a trying divorce and pines for a new life/love. Seerailler immediately strikes her as a potential lover, but she's too frightened to hit on her superior. She stews in silence with her girlhood crush. Seerailler has lived in the village all his life. He comes from a family of medical doctors. The black sheep in the family, he makes a living at his second love, police work, but his first love is art. Graffam, with her debilitating crush, is at the center of the book, setting up an odd, tragic story. The author gives interesting accounts of the victims and a fair amount of space to her creepy killer too.

As the number of missing women increases, Graffam becomes convinced that a serial killer is at work. The first two missing women are oddballs, single for their own reasons; their eccentric lifestyles make them of little interest to the police. Only Graffam and the missing women's friends suspect foul play, and Graffam wishes she could find more evidence to raise a general alarm.

As the serial killer takes another victim, the author sets up Seerailler's professional medical family against a bevy of New Age Health gurus, alternative medicine practitioners and psychics, and entertains us with a phony séances and a district full of New Age retailers with strange products for sale. Seerailler's sister, a doctor in the area, suspects something terrible has happened to one of her patients, and unaware of Graffam's investigation, starts her own, with a head full of significant generalizations about any practice not sanctioned by the medical community.
 

The mystery keeps you reading. A great twist at the end is worthwhile. Setting her story in a cathedral town might be closer to Hill's gothic novels. It recalls RM James stories, where black, moody monsters live in every nook and cranny. Through Simon Seerailler, Hill manages to bring the quirks and nuances of the little village to light, although the pursuit of a maniacal killer whose gruesome acts appall the community are unquestionably part of the police procedural genre.

The Lady of the Rivers vy Philippa Gregory

The Lady of the Rivers

by

Philippa Gregory

What is most enjoyable about Philippa Gregory’s The Lady of the Rivers is the rich British History she brings to life. This novel’s compelling history-as-fiction approach summons forth the imagined adventures of Lady Rivers, the Dowager-Duchess of Bedford, the noble Luxembourg Princess Jacquetta, married at 15 to Duke of Bedford, the brother of Henry the IV and acting King of England during the childhood years of the rightful Heir, or perhaps “Error,” Henry V. Though some have blamed Gregory in the past for historical inaccuracies, average readers are not likely to notice, and Gregory’s telling is full of entertaining surprises. Her background as a PhD in History and Women’s studies is apparent throughout.

This is the first book of her Cousins War Series, but according to Wiki, it is not the first published book in the series; I believe it is the third. Anyway, it is the first in the chronology. The cover is an excellent pre-Raphaelite style of painting, depicting Jacquetta, as a beautiful nubile woman.

The novel is set at the end of France and England's 100 Years War and the beginning of the War of the Roses, the domestic spat about who should rightfully sit on the throne, the Lancaster or the decedents of York.

It begins with the imprisonment of Joan of Arc. The Joan story is so bleak and Gregory does such a good job of relating it in the early pages it sets the tone for the rest of this page-turner. Joan is removed from chains in Luxembourg by Jacquetta's maternal aunt, and the crazy French peasant girl wiles away her time becoming insane with thoughts of her captors, confessing to heresy and debating the value of martyrdom. Jacquetta is there to witness it all, and we get to share it.

Finally, as Joan is burning at the stake, and Jacquetta and her family, who are loyal to the British Governor running British controlled France, stand and watch the martyr burn. At this point, Jacquetta relates what the women present are thinking as they watch their hero, even if they can't admit as much out loud, burn to death. "This is what happens to any woman who challenges men," Jacquetta thinks, sharing silently for all conscious women at the execution.

The reasons Jacquetta had such an interesting story to relate has a much to do with British royalty and the maneuvering of the royals in court as it did the movement of troops in the French and the English countryside.  The book is a compelling dramatization of the career of the Duchess of Bedford, her steadfast and strong character playing a major role in the governance of England during the War of the Roses, in the face of stupid, ugly men and women.

Betrayal by Gregg Olsen

    

Betrayal -- an Empty Coffin Novel
by
Gregg Olsen

What I wanted when I picked up Betrayal, was a page-turning thriller, and I got that, along with a few horrifying adolescent voices that left me a little uncomfortable. This book works for YA kids who like a realistic mysteries with authentic evil.

It is a compelling read. We pick up on the continuing adventures of Hay-Tay, Hayley and Taylor Ryan, the identical twin Nancy Drew Club-like detectives featured in Olsen’s Empty Coffin Series. The crime in this book is the murder of a high school foreign exchange student, Olivia Grant, a native of Great Britain. Naturally, the kids must reach up into the mature world of adults when their joint ESP powers goes off like a Spidey sense, compelling them to nose around the investigation. Olivia Grant is the girl depicted on the book’s cover. She’s murdered in the home -- in the very bedroom -- of Brianna Connors, one of the haughtiest rich kids in Port Gamble. It shocks everyone when Brianna blows off the murder of her friend as "You don't even know how gross it was, but if you really want me to tell you..."

Like in most mysteries, the police are incompetent, and that leaves the Hay-Tay twins up against a pretty powerful antagonist. Though the identity of the killer is not completely known until the end, the killer’s presence is felt throughout the book, in many instances in the visions the twins share with each other and the readers. That’s probably why we keep turning the pages.

Of course, the book is part of a series, and in the series we find most of the causality that remains a mystery still, even as the book ends. Why the twins become so passionately involves usually involves a personal story arc that spans the entire series. Though the law of physics eventually brings the criminal to justice in the end of this installment, the continuing mystery for the Ryan twins will keep readers looking for the next book.