Just how is is that we got to this world, where yesterday’s crazy-talk became today’s most serious ideas? Just imagine sitting down with Mayberry’s Aunt Bee and explaining same-sex marriage or transgenderism. What comes next? She sniffs your breath for whiskey fumes? Yet here we are. Carl R. Trueman maps out the road to our craziness in his book, The Rise and Triumph of [...]
The Book of Mormon continues to slice a deep divide between the people who treasure it and the people who can’t believe any smart human would fall for such a persistent hoax. Add in church members who learned the book’s stories as children, but later stumbled across challenges to its claims. Tad Callister addresses the doubters in his book, The Case for the Book [...]
You may congratulate us. After nearly 40 years of marriage, we’re finally getting ourselves bedroom furniture that matches. And the shopping experience didn’t ruin the marriage. The mister and I might have finally learned how to make the big decisions. (His style is research, research and more research. Mine is close my eyes, turn around twice and point.) I could point anywhere in the [...]
Who’s up for a solo trip to an exotic city or two? Stephanie Rosenbloom celebrates the ticket-for-one idea in her book, Alone Time, in which she visits four cities in four seasons. No husband. No girlfriends. No tour bus. It’s all to “savor” the experience, which Rosenbloom claims, can be done better without the distraction of companions. So we, the readers follow along, as [...]
If you want to be the most popular guy at happy hour, you might try what Jamie Reidy did: become a Viagra rep. We’ll get back to the little blue pills in a minute. In his memoir, Hard Sell, Jamie lands in pharmaceutical-world after his discharge from the military. In fact, working for Pfizer resembles military life more than Jamie expected. His “class” of [...]
The summer of 2020 was a season of racial repentance. Or, at least it was supposed to be. White people like myself were supposed to kneel, to post creeds about learning and trying harder and looking inward to see where our poisons lurked. Surely they were in there somewhere. I’m not sure I’ll ever get around to all that. For one thing, the fever [...]
Whatever your job is, you might be glad you don’t work the emergency room after reading Mark Brown’s Emergency!: True Stories from the Nation’s ERs. Brown collected anecdotes from a few dozen stethoscope warriors. (This book is twenty-five years old.) The readers gets to peek into this horror- and humor-filled world, where the patients arrive beaten, tossed, unresponsive, panicked, maybe in the arms of [...]
Get in on the ground floor, sister. Born in January, 1946, this is exactly what Sue Ellen Browder, author of Subverted, did. That birthdate placed her at the headwaters of the Baby Boom, handing her the all the Baby-Boom benefits. You know, the sexual revolution, feminism, abortion. It’s also the memoir of a small-town girl with big-city dreams. Browder stood at the magazine racks [...]
On Election Day 2020, I opened a new book and started reading. It was an ironic choice for that day, an account of when Americans felt bitterly towards their neighbors, angry enough burn them out of house and home. No, it wasn’t about Election Day 2016. Nope, not the Civil War, either. It was the Revolutionary War. In Liberty’s Exiles, author Maya Jasanoff gives [...]
May none of us ever hear the dreaded words, “It’s cancer.” May the closest you ever come to it is opening up Nina Riggs’ Bright Hour, a memoir of the author’s battle with breast cancer, baldness, radiation machines, and Tumor Boards. “Right before all your hair falls out, it aches,” she writes. “Like a ponytail pulled back for too long. And even after it’s [...]
