Reader, Come Home, The Reading Brain in a Digital World
Reader, Come Home is Maryanne Wolf’s sequel to her ground breaking Proust and the Squid written a decade earlier. She admits that during the seven years she was writing the former book, the world of literacy changed, having begun a transformation into a digitally based culture (p. 6). Even she unknowingly adapted to this change […]
Proust and the Squid, The Story and Science of the Reading Brain
At the time of writing this book, Maryanne Wolf was a professor of child development at Tufts University and the director of the Center for Reading and Language Research. This highly decorated work pursues the history, development, and value of reading and includes the scientific understanding of the evolving reading brain. Wolf does not believe […]
The Good Life, Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness
In 1938 the Harvard Study of Adult Development was initiated to try to determine what made people thrive. Beginning with 724 participants, it is still ongoing and in its third generation covering over 1,300 of the descendants of the original members. The study has followed the participants from age 14 on with an amazing 84% […]
Do More Better, A Practical Guide to Productivity
Do More Better is a short book with the goal of enabling its readers to live a “calm and orderly life, sure of your responsibilities and confident in your progress” (p. 6). The key to such a life is doing good to others, and productivity aids in that cause (v. 16). Productivity is defined as […]
Climate Change, A Convenient Truth by Jim Hollingsworth
Jim Hollingsworth is a retired building contractor who has obviously devoted much time and energy to researching the issue of climate change. He does not dispute the fact that the earth is warming; as a matter of fact, it has been doing so since the last ice age about 10,000 years ago (p. 1). But […]
The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction by Alan Jacobs
The Pleasures of Reading, in short, is a pleasure – if you love to read. Alan Jacobs is a professor of English at Wheaton College, and this book obviously flows out of his passion for literature, but he takes a different approach to reading from that of many others. Where Mortimer Adler, in his classic […]
Taking America Back for God by Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry
Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry are both professors of sociology at respected American universities. This co-authored volume reflects their scholarship and painstaking research on the subject of Christian nationalism, which they claim is “the first empirical examination in the United States” (p. xi). The goal is to “thoroughly explore one factor that, as we will […]
White Fragility, Why It’s Hard For White People To Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo
White Fragility is one of the most popular books spreading the worldview of Critical Race Theory and reshaping Western thought concerning racism. DiAngelo’s thesis is that white supremacy, as well as racism, is a social constructs baked into the American culture. Very little can be done to improve the socialization of America, but perhaps a […]
Just Mercy
Just Mercy, a Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson (New York: Random House, 2015) 349 pp + xiv, paper $17.00 Shortly after graduating from Harvard Law School in 1985, Bryan Stevenson was a young black attorney who found himself quickly thrust into an American South justice system riddled with injustice. Believing that “the […]
Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America
David Horowitz is a conservative commentator and bestselling author of literature addressing primarily the radical left and rise of Marxism in America. His books, well-represented by Dark Agenda, are interesting, informative, and filled with stories, accounts and statistics that support his conservative views and expose the true agenda of those on his radar. In this […]