Summer Reads
Our intrepid West Coast reviewers have some fresh volumes for you to enjoy in sun or shade.
Bill Reimer is the manager, and has been for many years, of the Regent College Bookstore, one of North America’s largest surviving theological bookstores. He attends St John’s Vancouver.
The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine
Serhii Plokhy
Basic Books, Revised 2021
The current Russo-Ukrainian conflict, while a surprise, is deeply rooted in history. The territory that we know of as Ukraine is situated historically between empires and in recent centuries was ruled variously by the Habsburgs, a Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth, and an expanding Russia. Its people are ethnically diverse with origins that echo the cultural and regional realities of the past and include the Crimean Tatars as well as Cossacks that lived in the Zaporizhzhian region. In centuries past Crimea was the centre of a major slave trade while in the 19th and early 20th centuries Ukraine was marked by horrific pogroms against the Jews. It lies within that part of Eastern and Central Europe labelled “Bloodlands” by the historian Tim Snyder to describe, first, Stalin’s requisition of food and mass starvation of millions in the 1920s and 1930s and, second, the invasion by Hitler’s Germany that saw the murder of 1 million Jews in Ukraine alone and the deaths of a total of 7 million Ukrainians. The 20th century did see a more sharply defined Ukrainian identity, most obviously with independence in 1991, even if the country remains diverse. The Russian claim that its (Russia’s) origins are grounded in Kyiv is a myth.
The eve of the recent Russian invasion ominously saw the publication of Blood Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931-1945 by the British historian Richard Ovary. While the scope of the present conflict does not rival the scale of WW II, not since then has Europe seen such a pattern of destruction and loss of life. We are living in dangerous times and are in desperate need of the presence of our Lord.
From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life
Arthur Brooks
Portfolio/Penguin, 2022
The bad news is that your professional decline is coming much sooner than you think! For entrepreneurs and inventors decline on average is already in play by age forty. For those who choose “being special” over “being happy,” addictions can take over and accompany the constant work that is part of “success.” The others in one’s life become objectified. The agony of one’s decline is linked directly to the level of one’s previous prestige. But the good news is that change is possible – the human person is remarkably resilient, often even in the face of trauma. Like the Aspen grove, with age one can grow a vast network of friends and colleagues that provide strength for the second half of life. While a “fluid intelligence” marks the younger years, the mature years bring a “crystallized intelligence” that can lead to wisdom. And often religious yearnings increase with age. Going from strength to strength requires a new set of life skills during the recognition of one’s decline; we are to bless others and continue to serve even as we show that we are vulnerable and human. If this all sounds rather Christian this is because Brooks is a committed Christian and following Paul the Apostle, he expounds strength in weakness. We are challenged to ponder death, to choose purpose versus enjoyment, and to experience and share our decline with others. What is important is summarized in seven words.
Use things.
Love people.
Worship the divine.
Written for a general audience, why not take and read and pass on this remarkable book?
A Factotum in the Book Trade: A Memoir
Marius Kociejowski
Biblioasis, 2022
Hailing from rural Ontario, the author made his way to London in 1973 and became a lifelong antiquarian bookseller as well as poet and travel writer (hence a factotum: one with diverse activities or responsibilities). One becomes a bookseller almost always by accident and such was the case with Kociejowski. Along the way he worked in a series of legendary London shops: Bertram Rota Booksellers, Maggs Brothers, for the poet and bookseller Peter Jolliffe, owner of the Ulysses Bookstore in the heart of Bloomsbury, and lastly for Peter Ellis, bookseller, now consigned to the internet. We are introduced to some of the famous such as the writer Geoffrey Hill but more often to beloved and eccentric book-loving customers as well as “collectors” who are not necessarily book readers. Factotum is a requiem for an increasingly lost world as one by one the shops of London close: “A city drained of life.” The quotes are evocative and haunting: “[W]e are about to be robbed [by the internet] of the mystery and serendipity of the old bookshop…how the cornbread crumbles.” He recalls all the fine and valuable books that he handled over the course of a long career but above all the remarkable people that he met and worked with along the way.
The Hiding Place: An Engaging Visual Journey
Corrie Ten Boom with
Elizabeth and John Sherrill
Tyndale, 2021
This 50th-anniversary edition takes one back to the original publication in 1971 and a time when the book and film captured the heart of North American evangelicalism and then beyond. It is named after the small and secret wall space in the author’s home and watchmaker shop in Haarlem, Netherlands where the author and her family succeeded in rescuing an estimated 800 Jews. Looking at the many photos of the family I was once again struck by the heroism of this rather ordinary-looking family. The fearless 84-year-old patriarch, Casper Ten Boom, who died in police custody in 1944, is surely a saint along with his four children. This is a classic Christian biography that needs to be introduced to a new generation.
Julie Lane Gay is a writer and editor who lives in Vancouver. She and her husband, Craig, attends St John’s, Vancouver where they also teach catechism.
The Great Passion
James Runcie
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022
In 1727, thirteen-year-old soprano Stefan Silbermann is shipped off to the choir school of St. Thomas Church in Leipzig to get over the death of his mother and to further his musical talent. Life at the school is rife with bullies, but the school’s cantor, Johann Sebastian Bach, notices Stefan’s ability and amidst the misery, Stefan begins to have hope.
Historical novels about music and its makers are not my usual fare, but the life of Bach, at home and church, in The Great Passion–and the exceptional art that arises out of the mundane and the suffering in his life–is as interesting as it is poignant. To glimpse Bach’s determination to compose a Good Friday oratorio (now known as St. Matthew’s Passion), combining music and the Matthew 26 and 27 crucifixion narrative into something “as shocking and unpredictable as grief itself,” is to witness the remarkable. Music is so much more than notes and chords. Bach explains to Stefan, “We start with an invitation to mourn, to share in the drama rather than simply listen to it. We help the congregation understand the inevitability of loss and sorrow. Other people raise their questions in books and sermons. We answer them in music.”
Author James Runcie is a renowned British crime novelist and BBC filmmaker (he directed a documentary on Bach); he is also the son of the late Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie. He wrote The Great Passion because he wanted to explore “how one particular piece of music became such a consummate work of art, faith, compassion and understanding.” What is unique about this story is how multi-faceted the exploration becomes–how Bach’s pupil, wife, children and friends contributed to the process, how they all were part of creating St. Matthew’s Passion, and how Bach, and God, nurtured their contributions.
The Secular Creed: Engaging Five Contemporary Claims
Rebecca McLaughlin
The Gospel Coalition, 2021
“Black Lives Matter,” “Love is Love,” and “Kindness is Everything,” are but a few of the creeds of our time and while most of us agree with these words, many Christians also hesitate. There’s a “Yes… but…” niggling in us. We intuitively sense that these creeds aren’t deep enough, and that while slogans are strategically short for rapid communication, they often carry enormous backpacks.
Literary scholar and apologist Rebecca McLaughlin also values these words, but in her short volume, she unpacks five contemporary slogans (including the three above) and offers a theologically-grounded response to each of them. She knows her Scripture and sticks close to it.
Unlike some responses to slogans, one of the strengths of Secular Creeds is that McLaughlin pushes back at what is not Christ-honouring with humility. She writes, “Christians must repent of the ways in which our embrace of cultural stereotypes has made some people feel as if they don’t belong in their own skin…. we must speak the truth with tenderness and not let our sin take the wheel.”
For the hesitating or the puzzling, McLaughlin offers an excellent place to begin.
Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution’s Creativity and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction
David George Haskell
Viking, 2022
The natural world of birds, flowers, trees, oceans and mountains has been an incredible boon in the last two years, but when a neighbour asked if I was enjoying the high-pitched bell of the Golden-crowned Kinglet outside my back door, I had to admit that I hadn’t noticed the bird (did I even know what it looked like?), or its trill.
I had to think – what noises did I hear?
David George Haskell’s Sounds Wild and Broken is the near-perfect antidote to my omission, exploring the science of our third sense (sight and touch are first on most lists) and the vast range of sounds that insects, fish, birds, wind, sea, musical instruments and human voices offer. As a trained biologist and a keen naturalist, he traces sounds’ origins, history, biology and physiology with fascination and enthusiasm; he’s as poetic as he is enthusiastic. Sounds Wild and Broken is a travelogue through sound.
Searching for whales just off the coast of Vancouver Island, Haskell writes, “Mixed with the staccato of the whales’ clicks are whistles and high squeaks, sounds that undulate, dart, inflect up and spiral down. These whistles are the sounds of whale conviviality, given most often when the animals are socializing at close range…. Shared lingo–the distinctive tonal quality and patterns of whistles and pulses–marks affiliation with a group of mothers and grandmothers.”
Tagging along in the Amazon of Ecuador, Haskell experiences how animals’ alarm calls don’t just signal danger to their mates, they signal and protect vastly different species. In the Colorado Rocky Mountains, he beholds the pitch of birds’ songs changing as they rise in the soaring height of the native conifers.
But travelogues are often subtle exhortations, and Haskell pulls his reader to the places where humans have been slow to listen, quick to make noise and, like me with the local trills, hasty to ignore. Silences in the natural world are starting to tell us as much as the sounds; Haskell wants us to hear that too. TAP
