Midwinter reading

The Philanthropy Roundtable last year published two good books about people helping others: Karl Zinsmeister’s What Comes Next? describes the crucial role of private philanthropy in four historical episodes: the Second Great Awakening, the Sunday School movement, Abolition, and Temperance. Learning to Be Useful by David Bass shows the importance of foundation and charitable contributions in support of career-oriented, technical education.

Other publishers came out with books about people oppressing others. Dan Jones tells the story of the 1381 Wat Tyler uprising in Summer of Blood: England’s First Revolution (Penguin, 2016). Harry Freedman’s The Murderous History of Bible Translations (Bloomsbury, 2016) has well-written and interesting stories about the Septuagint, William Tyndale, and other works and workers, but pooh-poohs Biblical inerrancy. Peter Pomerantsev’s Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (PublicAffairs, 2014) is so entertaining that we might forget about the tragedy of amorality and corruption that emerged from the 100-year-old revolution that failed.

Israel sometimes appears to have the sad choice of kill or be killed. Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn by Daniel Gordis (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2016) narrates the often-bloody rebirth that began in the 1890s: Gordis offers sympathy for Davidic Israel and understanding of its Goliath-like enemies. The New Christian Zionism, edited by Gerald McDermott (IVP, 2016), smashes the common assumption that Christian Zionism grows out of premillennial dispensationalism. It shows that Reinhold Niebuhr and others were pro-Israel without sharing that theology, and points out how Christians in Israel have fared much better than their counterparts in Muslim lands.

On this battle line, Anti-Judaism, Antisemitism, and Delegitimizing Israel, edited by Robert Wistrich (University of Nebraska Press, 2016) includes 25 generally thoughtful essays that spotlight convergent anti-Zionisms among far left and far right forces in the United States, and anti-Semitism in Poland, Turkey, Iran, and other countries. Mustafa Akyol’s The Islamic Jesus (St. Martin’s, 2017) is a Muslim’s attempt to show how the basics of Islam originated with a remnant of Arabian Jewish followers of the Messiah.

A sad but needed book about the higher education bubble, Fail U. by Charles Sykes (St. Martin’s, 2016), brings together evidence backing up the book’s subtitle: The False Promise of Higher Education. Sykes shows how liberal arts professors do very little teaching, publish valueless “research” to gain promotion, and leave students with heads full of mush. He also outlines how universities waste money and pamper students but yearn for bailouts that the populace would be foolish to give them.

Peter Jones’ The Other Worldview (Kirkdale, 2015) and Ann Voskamp’s The Broken Way (Zondervan, 2016) show how desperately we need God. They are entirely different—he in stringent prose critiques contemporary Gnosticism; she poetically critiques prideful living—but both have good content and style.

BOOKMARKS

Ernest Cline’s amusing sci-fi novel Armada (Broadway, 2015) describes how video games become reality and the best players become heroic. Amor Towles’ elegant A Gentleman in Moscow (Viking, 2016) depicts a Russian nobleman sentenced by triumphant Bolsheviks to spend all his days in the Hotel Metropol across from the Kremlin: The novel repeatedly threatens to become claustrophobic, but Towles keeps introducing new characters and plot twists.

El Paso (Liveright, 2016) by Winston Groom, most famous for writing Forrest Gump, is set a century ago and has interesting fictional characters with some real ones thrown in (as in Gump), along with occasional bad language and violence. Nathan Hill’s The Nix (Knopf, 2016), set in 1968 and recent times, is offensive at times in its language use and sexuality depiction, but it does reflect the way its characters would talk and act in real life—and it resonates with readers who have lived through the past half-century of a culture heading in the wrong direction. —M.O.