Category: Reviews

This are some of the books I have listened to (while walking or driving) since July:

Ben McGrath, Riverman: An American Odyssey

narrated by Adam Verner (2022), 8 hours and 36 minutes. 

McGrath, a writer for the New Yorker, met Dick Conant through his neighbor. Conant was paddling the Hudson River and had tied up his canoe along his neighbor’s seawall. Learning that the odd canoeist, who paddled an cheap over-stuffed boat, was heading to Florida perked McGrath’s interest. He wrote a short piece on him for the New Yorker. He thought that was it until a few months later when he received a phone call from a wildlife officer in North Carolina. 

Conant’s canoe had been found overturned in the Albemarle Sound. They never recovered his body. The officer discovered McGrath’s phone number in the mass of stuff in the boat and called for clues as to who had lost the boat. McGrath sets off scouring the country looking for clues as to Conant’s identity and what happened to him. 

Conant didn’t look like a canoer. He wore over-all’s. Conant brought cheap canoes (often Colemans) which he overloaded. After an adventure, would sell the boat. He didn’t carry river maps or guides, but a road atlas. He had an odd way of preserving meat (hot dogs in pickle juice).   

Those he met along the way, he would tell of the woman he loved and was to whom he was faithful, a woman he met (only once and briefly, it appears) in Montana. Conant would live in Bozeman, Montana between adventures. Conant covered quite a bit of territory, paddling the Yellowstone into the Missouri and then down the Mississippi. Another time he started out new his childhood home in New York State, paddling the Allegheny into the Ohio and down the Mississippi. Essentially, Conant eked out a homeless existence on American rivers. 

McGrath’s research is amazing. He reached out to the people Conant touched over the years to paint a better portrait of this lone canoer.

Robert Ruark, The Old Man and the Boy

narrated by Norman Dietz (1957, audible 2017), 10 hours and 41 minutes. 

This collection of stories I first read as a student at Roland Grice Junior High in Wilmington,  NC. Most boys my age read this book at that time. And why not, as the author grew up in our hometown. Ruark would go on to become a well-known author writing about outdoor adventures in exotic places like Africa. But this collection of stories focuses on him and his grandparents, who lived across the river in Southport, NC in the years between the Great War and the Depression. Ruark spent a lot of time with his grandparents. From his grandfather, he learned not only outdoor skills, such as hunting and fishing, but about getting along with others and even wildlife conservation (never kill off an entire covey of quail, leave some birds for the future). 

There are a few things in the book that would be considered taboo today. Poaching turtle eggs is now a crime, but in the 1920s, no one knew better (and because there was little development on the coast, there were more turtles). Another is the Old Man’s patriarchal manner of relating to African Americans. But at least the old man insisted they be treated as humans and despised those with racist attitudes. Besides, this allowed him access to hunt quail on some of African American farms. However, most of these stories stand the test of time. This was my first time listening to the book, but I had already read it three time and may listen to it again, just for the delightful stories. The narrator does a wonderful job of bringing the book to life. 

Dominic Ziengler, Black Dragon River: A Journey Down the Amur River at the Borderlands of Empires

narrated by Steve West (2015), 14 hours and 6 minutes.

The Amur, the world’s ninth longest river, is also the most unknown rivers among the world’s great rivers. The river’s headwaters rise in Mongolia, not far from the birthplace of Genghis Khan, and flows to the Pacific, mostly along the border of Russia and China. So much is unknown about the river that for much of history, both Russia and China claimed the river’s origin. A joint Soviet and Chinese scientific expedition set out to settle the dispute. They discovered the river’s headwaters were in Mongolia. 

The author sets out to travel, as much as possible, the entire river. However, it’s not as easy as one might think. Heading out on foot, by train, boat, and car, he makes his way down the river, mostly sticking to the north (Russian) side. Because the river is an armed border, the opportunity to float it is limited. 

As he travels, we learn of the history of the region, from the Khans to Russian eastern migration. As with the mountain men in the American West, Russia eastward expansion was first based on fur trade. Later would come mineral exploration and prisons. Also, like the American West, it includes bloody campaigns to conquer. We learn about the this as well as the conflicts between Russia and China along the river, which has raged for hundreds of years. Such conflicts are ongoing. A month after I listened to this book, China published new official map claims total ownership of an island in the Amur over the two nations fought over as recently as the 60s. 

Ziengler also informs the readers about the natural history of the river. It’s a great breeding grown for swans and other birds. The river also teams with fish. Sadly, the Siberian tigers are disappearing due to the lost of forests. The environmental issues along the river’s watershed are also covered. 

While the travelogue part of this book is lacking (because of the author’s limited access to much of the river), the book contains great stories and is packed in the history of Europe’s eastward expansion. 

Sara Seager, The Smallest Lights in the Universe

 narrated by Xe Sands (2020), 9 hours and 37 minutes. 

Seager, an astrophysicist at MIT, looks for exoplanets in distant galaxies. These are planets in the “goldilocks’ zone,” where it is not too hot and not too cold. Such places hold the possibility of life. Because they are so far away to be observed, astrophysicists have devised new techniques such as registering a small drop of light as the planet crosses in front of its sun. Her work is amazing, and she describes it in a manner that can make it more understandable. 

But this is not a science book, it’s a memoir. We also are taken into the author’s life, from her first interest in the sky as a child growing up in Canada, to the academic politics today (such as having one’s findings stolen by another scientist). We also learn about her personal life. In addition to being interested in the sky, we are taken along with her on canoe trips to remote parts of Canada with a man who would become her husband and the father of her children. Then, we are told about his illness and death from cancer. This part of the book is tragic, which came as her career as a scientist was ascending. Later, she meets a new man, at a talk given for amateur astrometry club, and they marry eventually marry. She also comes to understand her own life with Asperger’s. 

I enjoy this book, especially her insights into her scientific work. However, at times I felt the book was a too personal. I certainly enjoyed some of what she wrote about her personal life (especially, because I’m me, long canoe trips in northern Canada). But wondered if she had ended her personal struggles with her first husband’s death, leaving the reader wondering what’s next, might have made a stronger book. Instead, it seemed this was a “lived happily ever after” type of ending.  

Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey

Narrated by Matthew Waterson. (2019).  12 hours and 3 minutes.

After reading about deep space, I jumped into this book about the underworld. It’s interesting to think how we know more about space (as in the book above) than we do about what’s underground. In this book, Macfarlane sets out to explore the unknown, mostly by traveling through caves and mines and the underground network of tunnels in cities such as Paris.

Macfarlane also explores what’s just underneath our feet. Dig down and you’ll find a great world of bugs and worms along with roots and various types of soil. As he makes such pilgrimages, Macfarlane muses about our uses of the earth (burying the dead to that which is dangerous, like nuclear waste). He frequently draws on literature and mythology about the underworld. In Junior High, when I was into a Jules Verne kick, I read Journey to the Center of the Earth. However, I didn’t realize that in the 19^th Century, there was a sub-genre of exploration into the earth.  

I found this book fascinating and look forward to reading and listening to more of Macfarlane’s work. Two years ago, I read Macfarlane’s The Old Ways. He’s a British author and explorer that draws on a vast knowledge as he shares his explorations.  As in all the books above, rivers also appear in this book, they’re just underground . 

Catching up:

I finally have a construction crew working on an addition to my house. When done, there will be an additional 384 square feet walkout basement that will serve as my shop and cool storage of produce. On the main level will be another 384 square feet of living space (with a half bath for guest) that will open out to a 200 square feet deck. The top level will add another room of roughly 140 square feet. In addition, we plan to put a porch on the front of the house. So, things are a little hectic, with a lot of waiting for workers and inspections.

In addition, yesterday I had a laser procedure done on my left eye where I have a leaking blood vessel.  It didn’t hurt. However, it felt like I was forced to watch a dozen nuclear explosions, the bright light exploding in my eye. The good news is that they only dilated my left eye, so I still had one good eye with which to drive home. 

In this blog, I’m still trying to catch up with recent books I’ve read or listened to. I listened to the Horwitz book in March when I traveled to the beach. This month I listened to the Foote book and read the Morris biography.  All three books have ties to the Deep South.

Larry L. King, In Search of Willie Morris:
The Mercurial Life of a Legendary Writer and Editor

 (New York: Public Affairs, 2006), 353 pages with index and bibliography with 8 plates of b&w photos. 

I was introduced to Willie Morris in the late 90s when I read North Toward Home. As a southerner who was then living in Utah, the idea of the South no longer being my home resonated with me. (And like Morris, I eventually returned). I later watch the wonderful movie version of his book, My Dog Skip. Several years later I stumbled upon Taps, a book published after Morris’ death. Taps, which draws on his memories as a high school student playing his trumpet for military funerals during the Korean War, also says a lot about how we treat the dead as well as the racial tensions in the American South during the Jim Crow era. I recently read a reference to King’s biography of Morris and decided to check it out.

Larry L. King (the writer, not the TV host, author of the comic play, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas) was a good friend of Willie Morris. However, like most friendships, theirs had rocky roads including several years of estrangement after King had an affair with a woman with whom Morris had been seeing. In some ways, their closeness makes this a more difficult biography as you can see King’s obvious bias toward a man he admired. However, this also allows King to have a more intimate portrait of Morris. King doesn’t just rely on his own memory, but checked out his stories with many others who were close to Morris, including his son, ex-wife, widow, and friends. In places he offers competing insights, his as well as those from others. 

This book doesn’t provide much detail into Morris’ younger life in Mississippi, which I found disappointing as Morris mined his childhood for many of his stories. He focuses more on Morris as a student at the University of Texas. He also writes more about his time ss a Rhodes Scholar in Oxford, something that Morris only briefly mentions in his books. 

Willie Morris was the youngest editor ever in the long history of Harper’s Magazine, taking over the helm at 32 years of age.  From this point, King begins a much more detailed examination of Morris’ life. He established a staff of talented writers which included King. Those writing for the magazine that I read include William Styron, Norman Mailer, and David Halberstam. I’ve reviewed three of Halberstam’s books in the last few years: The Fifties, October 1964, Summer of ’49. 

After a battle with the magazine owner, Morris was forced out as editor. All the big-name writers he assembled at the magazine refused to write again for at Harpers. Others, including his friend Truman Capote, joined the boycott. According to King, at publishing of this book 35 years later, they’d all kept their promise. Afterwards, Morris received all kind of offers, but ignored them. He also received a letter of condolence from a young attorney in Arkansas, who Morris had met when the future politician left for Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. Morris would meet him again, on his return. This was Bill Clinton. As President, he would write a piece read at Morris’ funeral.  

After Harpers, King focuses on Morris’ difficulty focusing, amplified by the divorce from his first wife, Celia. It was also a time when people were realizing that Morris was drinking too much. For this next period, Morris mostly lived on Long Island.

I was amazed by how Morris not only gave a voice to those young writers at Harpers, but to other talented writers. Later, after he returned to the South and was a visiting writer at the University of Mississippi, he encouraged and helped a law school student by the name of John Grisham publish his first book. He also helped Larry Brown (I’ve read a few of his books) and Winston Groom (who wrote Forest Gump). Morris became a close friend of Jim Jones, who had completed two of a trilogy on World War II. The first two books were Here to Eternity, and Thin Red Line. When Jones’ died, Morris took over and completed his third volume, Whistle. Both of Morris’ wives were authors and involved in the publishing business.

Practical jokes stand out in the books I’ve read by Morris. King shares many more such jokes, including taking William Styron on a night stroll through the Yazoo cemetery. There, upon a grave, Styron found a copy of his novel, Lie Down in Darkness. Inside the cover was a note from the one buried in the grave, that read, “To William Styron. Come lie down in darkness with us. It is not as bad as it has been made out.” At an Ole Miss home football game in Hemingway Stadium, Morris delighted telling two French journalists how the school wanted to honor Faulkner, but he refused. So, the name went to Hemingway, implying it was named for the author. The truth was that the stadium had been named for a former dean. King found himself at the blunt of some of these jokes, including many prank phone calls. It became so frequent that when Nelson Rockefeller called King to offer him a speechwriting job, he assumed it was Morris and said some inappropriate things. 

When Morris was asked about the truthfulness of his stories in his book, Good Old Boy, he said they were all true. Then he quoted Mark Twain, “sometimes you have to lie to tell the truth.”

But with the jokes come sadness and Morris had a melancholy streak. Imagine your son’s dog (and later a friend’s dog) dying after being hit by a car while in your care. It happened to Morris. Or having to endure lectures about your drinking from your mother who (it was later discovered) had her own alcoholism issues. Morris’ relationship with his mother was so difficult he seldom went home without taking a friend. And then there are the critics who could be brutal. Yet, as King points out, while Morris often hurt those close to him, he probably hurt himself most.

The last decade of Morris’ life was one of his most productive. He had married JoAnne Prichard, who stabilized his life. He became more focused. But sadly, that ended in 1999, when he died of a heart attack. His beautiful book, Taps, which he had worked on for thirty years came out after his death. 

Willie Morris was a fascinating man. He had faults, but we all do. But I found it amazing how well connected he was with the literary world of the era. Now I am wanting to read more of his works. If you’re interested in his life or in the writing life, I recommend this biography. 

Shelby Foote, Jordan County

(1954, Audible, 2004: 10 hours and 5 minutes. Narrated by Tom Parker 

I have read some of Foote’s Civil War accounts, but this is the first time reading (or listening) to his fiction. The setting for this novel is a fictional county in the Mississippi Delta, between Memphis and Vicksburg. Through a series of stories, the author creates a portrait of the country stretching back over 200 years. Each vignette is more like a short story or novella, with the location being the main connection. In an interesting twist, the first story is set in 1950, five years after the Second World War. Each story thereafter moves back in time. The second, about a blues musician who is executed for killing a man involved with his lover, was set in the 1930s. There is a story about old plantation homes being burned during the Civil War, in which the infirmed owner had fought with Andrew Jackson at New Orleans in the War of 1812. Then came the stories of those same homes being built and slaves hauled into the region, after the discovery of the cotton gin made cotton valuable. Then we learn of those who settled this country, as the local natives were being pushed out. The last story is set before this land would become a part of the United States, as Christianity was being brought to the native people. 

I found reading these stories chronologically backwards interesting. It was kind of like peeling an onion to get back to the roots of the land. In this case, it shows the connection to the land. I need to read more of Foote’s writings. If this is any indication of his fiction, he is a much more accessible writer than his friend, William Faulkner. 

Tony Horwitz, Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide 

(2019, 17 hours and 11 minutes). Narrated by Mark Deakins and Tony Horowitz.

Long before I started blogging, while living in Utah, I made a cross country flight. A friend had given me a book, Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic. I never laughed so much on an airplane. I kept trying to mute myself and about bit through my cheeks, but the book was so funny. Everyone around me wanted the name of the book. I’m sure many of them went out an brought a copy! 

In Confederates in the Attic, a Yankee explores Civil War reenactments in the American South. In his new book, he returns South just before the 2016 election, and traces the second journey William Laws Olmstead made into the American South in the decade before the Civil War. Olmstead had been a farmer. Before he became famous as a landscape designer, he struggled as a journalist. He made two trips into the South to learn about the differences in agriculture. He travelled under the name, Yeoman, drawing on his farming past. In his first journey, which took him down along the Atlantic seaboard, he began to question slavery. When he took his second journey, which went down the Mississippi and across Louisiana to Texas and on into Northern Mexico, slavery haunted him. While Olmstead books were not well received in the United States, they were well-received in Britain. Some think his books on the South may have helped keep Britain from joining the Confederacy during the war. To read my review of a recent biography of Olmstead, click here.

In this book, Horwitz sets out to travel as closely to Olmstead’s path as possible. He takes the train South to Washington and then west. When he gets into the navigable waters on the other side of the divide, where Olmstead took a steamboat, he arranged transient on a tug pushing coal barges. This allows him to learn about the life of the deckhands as well as exploring the use of coal and how its link to global warming. Then he cuts across country through Kentucky and part of Tennessee before joining a riverboat for his travels down the Mississippi to New Orleans. Along the way, he sees plantations and reflects on what Olmstead might have seen and how the plantation life is portrayed today (somewhat whitewashed from the harshness of antebellum South.  He then travels by car across Louisiana and into Texas and barely into Mexico (where he discovered it was much safer for Olmstead than it is today. 

In addition to interesting travels, Horwitz draws out the most unique people and events along the way. His retelling of being at a monster truck mud rally is classic. But he also tells the stories of folks he meets in dive bars and tourist attractions, from the Creation Museum to the Alamo. He even finds some cowboys to take him out riding a few nights with pack animals as Olmstead had travelled, which creates more humorous stories. Horwitz can make most any adventure funny, which is why I have enjoyed the books I’ve read by him. 

But there is also a serious side to this book. Traveling in the lead up to the 2016 election in some of the more conservative parts of the country, Horwitz wonders if America will face a similar divide as it did when Olmstead made his journey in the 1850s. Like Olmstead, he attempts to set the historical record straight, which challenges some the myths of the Old Southwest. While Horwitz befriends all kinds of people along the way, and seems to get along with them, I’m sure if many of those he met read his book, they would not like the bite in his humor. In this way, Horowitz is like Olmstead, they both spied on the South.

I wasn’t going to post this week. I’ve been busy. A contractor is preparing to add a large addition to our house and I’ve been trying to get the garden in, and I’ve done volunteer work, and I have all kind of other excuses. Then, today, I learned of the death of Timothy Keller. After a long battle with pancreatic cancer, our last enemy death finally claimed him this morning. In recent days, knowing this time was short, Keller (and his son) sent out tweets telling of his struggles and his hope to soon be with his Savior.

I first became familiar with the ministry of Timothy Keller while on a month Sabbatical for Preachers interested in how literature can inform our preaching led by Neil Plantinga at Calvin Theological Seminary in the summer of 2003. In discussing Franz Kafka’s writings, he played a sermon that was in a serious Keller preached on the hopeless many feel in today’s world. In these sermons, in addition to scripture, Keller depended upon Kafka’s The Trial. I was impressed and had never imagined using Kafka in the pulpit.

While I never met Keller, I heard him speak once. Even though we are from different Presbyterian denominations, I once worshipped at the church he founded, Redeemer Presbyterian in New York City. But it was summer, and he wasn’t preaching. I’ve read six of his books. In addition to the two below, which I first reviewed in another blog, I have read and have on my shelves The Reason for God, The Meaning of Marriage, Generous Justice: How God’s Grace Makes Us Just, and Centered Church: Doing Balanced Gospel-Centered Ministry in Your City. I may not have always agreed with him, but I learned a lot from him. His arguments were always compiling and his gracefulness came through in his writing as well as in his speaking.

May Timothy Keller rest in peace.

Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope that Matters

(New York: Dutton, 2009), 210 pages

Idolatry is not just a failure to obey God, it is a setting of the whole heart on something beside God. (171)

Idolatry is prevalent in our world, our communities, our churches, and our individual lives. As Keller points out over and over, idols are not necessarily bad things. In fact, they are seldom bad. They are generally good things (family, sex, money, success, and even religion), but when we look to them to “satisfy our deepest needs and hopes,” they fail us. They become a counterfeit god. (xvii, 103). I found this to be a powerful and challenging book. It was published following the 2008 financial melt-down, written by a pastor whose church on Manhattan draws many of the investment bankers that were at the forefront of the crisis.

Using Biblical stories as illustrations, Keller attempts to expose the idolatry of our lives. For idolatry of the family, he draws on the story of Abraham and how the old man pinned his hope for a legacy on Isaac, essentially making his son into an idol. For sex, he explores the story of Jacob’s courtship with Rachel and Leah. For money and greed, he looks at the call of Zacchaeus. For success, he looks at Naaman, the leper, who question Elijah’s method of healing. For success, he looks at Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of clay feet. His examination of how “correct religion” can become an idol leads him into the story of Jonah. And finally, he looks at how we need to replace our idols with God by exploring Jacob’s wrestling.

There are two levels to our idolatry according to Keller. We all have surface idols that mask our deeper idols. These surface idols are mostly good things, but they become idols because we place our ultimate trust in them as we strive to satisfy our deeper longings for power, approval, comfort or control. (64) We can fight against the surface idols, but new ones will pop up unless we address our deeper needs, which can only be handled by replacing such idols with a total trust in God.

Keller confronts our worship of success. He even challenges how some place total trust in “the free market.” “The gods of moralistic religion,” he proposes,” favors the successful.” It could be argued that such folks are attempting to earn their salvation. But the God of the Bible comes down to earth to accomplish our salvation and give us grace. (44) Later in the book he writes that the “Biblical story of salvation assaults our worship of success at every point.” (94) He challenges Adam Smith’s theory of capitalism for “deifying” the invisible hand of the market which, “when given free reign, automatically drives behavior toward that which is most beneficial for society, apart from any God or moral code.” He ponders, in light of the financial crisis, if the same dissatisfaction that occurred with socialism a generation earlier might also occur with capitalism. (105-106)

Keller also challenges our political and philosophical ideals, especially those that we place above our faith in God. Straddling the political fence and refusing to place himself on the right or left, as a Republican or Democrat, he observes that a fallout of us making idols out of our philosophy/politics may be the reason why when on group loses and election there is often an extreme reaction.

“When either party wins an election, a certain percentage of the losing side talks openly about leaving the country. They become agitated and fearful for the future. They have put the kind of hope in their political leaders that once was reserved for God and the work of the gospel. When their political leaders are out of power, they experience a death. They believe that if their polices and people are not in power, everything will fall apart. They refuse to admit how much agreement they actually have with the other party, and instead focus on the points of disagreement. The points of contention overshadow everything else, and a poisonous environment is created. (99)

The author closes with an Epilogue where he discusses the discerning and replacing our idols. To discern our idols, Keller suggests we contemplate where our imagination goes when we’re daydreaming, where we spend our money, or where we really place our hope and salvation instead of where we profess to place it, or where we find our uncontrolled emotions unleashed. (167-9) To handle our idols, we have to do more than repent, they have to be replaced with God. I found this last part of the book to be the weakest, with just a few pages of suggestions, drawing heavily from the opening of Colossians 3. He calls for us to rejoice and repent together and to practice the spiritual disciplines as a way to invite God to replace our idolatrous desires. His final comment is an admission that this is not a onetime program, but a lifelong quest for as soon as we think we’re got our idols removed, we’ll discover deeper places within our psyche to clean out.

This book has given me much to think about. We can all benefit from what he says about the difficult to discern our own greed (52) and on how we worship success and our political ideals. Only one did I get excited about a “theological error,” and I feel pretty certain it was more from carelessness in language than in what Keller actually believes. On page 162, Keller speaks of when our “Lord appeared as a man” on Calvary, which sounds to me a lot like the Docetism heresy. Docetism held that Jesus’ humanity was an illusion. However, Keller concludes the sentence saying that Jesus “because truly weak to save us,” which sounds as if Jesus’ humanity wasn’t just an illusion. 

I recommend this book and am grateful to Mr. Keller and Dutton Publishing for providing extensive notes and a detailed bibliograhy. 

An Essay and Review of The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith 

(New York: Dutton, 2008), 139 pages.

There are two kinds of sinners, as Timothy Keller explores in this book. One kind of sinner is rather obvious. They live only for themselves, breaking God’s laws and perhaps even the laws of the land. Such sinners are represented by the younger son in Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son, who after wishing his father’s death so he can inherit his portion of the estate, is given his inheritance and runs off to a foreign country.

We have a love/hate relationship with the younger boy. In God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse, James Weldon Johnson captures the flavor of American-American preachers early in the 20th Century. Many of these preachers could not read and write, but the way they told stories were poetic. In a sermon on the Prodigal Son, the preacher paints a vivid picture of the young wayward son with his daddy’s inheritance burning a hole in his pocket…

And the young man went with his new-found friend,
And brought himself some brand new clothes,
And he spent his days in the drinking dens,
Swallowing the fires of hell.
And he spent his nights in the gambling dens,
Throwing dice with the devil for his soul.
And he met up with the women of Babylon.
Oh, the women of Babylon!
Dressed in yellow and purple and scarlet,
Loaded with rings and earrings and bracelets,
Their lips like a honeycomb dripping with honey,
Perfumed and sweet-smelling like a jasmine flower;
And the jasmine smell of the Babylon women
Got in his nostril and went to his head,
And he wasted his substance in riotous living,
In the evening, in the black and dark of night,
With the sweet-sinning women of Babylon.

Why is it that we are fascinated with the younger son? Certainly we’re glad that he’s redeemable, but we also relish in the visions of his sinful past. If truth be told, we’re a little jealous of his freedom. Over time, the parable has even been named for him. He’s the prodigal, the one who lavishly spends his inheritance. And we forget about that this is a parable of two sons.

Timothy Keller reminds over and over again that there are two ways to be separated from God. Yes, we can be like the younger son and live wildly. This is the popular view of a sinner and many of us have been down that road. But we can also be the dutiful son and do what’s expected of us, but deep down despise the father for whom we work. Sometimes even free-spirited younger sons can become zealous older brothers. The sins of the older son are not so evident. Such sins live in the heart where they fester and boil and eventually boil over in anger and rage. Keller makes the point that churches are filled with “older sons,” those who look down on their younger brother’s sinful ways. But these “older sons” don’t enjoy the father’s company any more than the “younger sons” who want to strike out for the territories, sowing their oats along the way. Older sons are those who give religion a bad name and make the church seem harsh and judgmental. Because of their hard hearts, they don’t get to enjoy the banquet the father throws for the return of the younger son. Instead, they sulk in anger, showing the condition of their hearts.

Prodigal means reckless extravagant, having spent everything. Keller suggests that the true prodigal in the story is the Father in the story, who represents God. God goes to great distances to restore the lost son, that even though the son has already cost him a fortune, he spends it again to reclaim the boy. Redemption is not cheap, as the older boy discovers, for he feels the father is stealing from what belongs to him in order to redeem the younger boy. He’s not gratiful at all. Keller is writing, not to call the wayward younger son home, but to remind those who have never left, the older brother, not to be so self-righteous and to look down on others. This book calls those in the church to task, asking that we not be so judgmental. It’s also a book that confirms one of the main critiques made against the church, that it is a place of hypocrites. Certainly, if our hearts are like the older brother, such a critique is justified. We should take the critique as a warning for in the story, it is the younger son, not the older boy, that experiences salvation.

This is a good, easy to read, book. It can easily be read in a sitting. I recommend it.