Rev. Dr. Jeff Garrison
Haw River 1975 I pause, standing in the door of the gas station at the edge of Pittsboro, a Coke in one hand and a pack of peanuts in the other. Ripping open the peanuts with my teeth, I shake a few from the bag into my mouth, chasing it with a swig from the … Read more Haw River: a short memoir and a book review
Barry Lopez, About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory (New York: Random House/Vintage Books, 1999), 273 pages. This is a wonderful collection of essays. I listened to an abridged edition as well as read the essays. The Audible version of the book was wonderful because the late Lopez read his work. The collection (in the book … Read more About This Life
Ronald W. Hall, The Carroll County Courthouse Tragedy (2013 printing, Hillsville VA: Carroll County Historical Society,1998). 272 pages including sources and a few b&w photos. This is another book that I’ve read in order to learn about my new locale. In March 1912, there was a shooting at the Carroll County, Courthouse in Hillsville, Virginia. When all … Read more The Carroll County Courthouse Tragedy
Amy Peterson, Where Goodness Still Grows: Reclaiming Virtue in an Age of Hypocrisy (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2020), 197 pages including notes. Fifteen years ago, I read Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue by Paul Woodruff. Since then, I’ve read it several times and have spent considerable energy thinking about virtues. Perhaps this itch drew me to this book. In … Read more Where Goodness Still Grows
2020 has come to an end. It was a year that we’ll not forget. Personally, it didn’t rise up to the trauma of 2016 (when I ruptured my quad-tendon, was in the hospital with sepsis following a prostate biopsy, and dealt with a tropical storm and later Hurricane Matthew), but it was still a terrible … Read more Wrapping Up 2020 (my reading summary for the year)
Gary D. Schmidt, Orbiting Jupiter (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015), 183 pages. The family has one other boy, Jack. After getting off to a shaky start, the two become like brothers, watching out for the other. The story centers around what happened to Joseph in his past. When he was 13, he fell in love with … Read more Notes on my reading during the past month
Billy Beasley, The Girl in the River: The Grief of a Widower, The Hope of a Child (Abbeville, SC: Moonshine Publishing, 2020), 226 pages. Billy Beasley tells a great story. Several of the characters in his first novel, set in the late 1960s, reappear here. We learn what happens to them fifty years later, as they play a … Read more What I’ve been reading lately: 3 Reviews
Esau McCaulley, Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope (Downer’s Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2020), 198 pages including a discussion guide, bibliography, scriptural index and index. McCaulley provides an interesting insight into the struggles facing African American theologians today. Coming from an evangelical tradition, he quickly notes the failure of … Read more Reading as Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope
Joseph Klaits, Servants of Satan: The Age of the Witch Hunts (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1985). 212 pages including an index, notes, bibliography, and a few woodcut plates. We often think of witch hunting as something done in a pre-modern world. However, most of the witch trials and executions took place in a relatively short period … Read more Servants of Satan
John M. Barry, The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History (2004, Penguin Books, New York, 2018), 548 pages, some photos, index and notes. This is an impressive book that does more than just provide a history of the 1918 influenza pandemic. Barry provides a history of medicine especially in … Read more The Great Influenza