Red Letter Christians, by Tony Campolo

This post reflects only my views, not those of the library or of Mr. Campolo

When I was growing up, my family was active in the Catholic Church. Post-Vatican II, we had the whole liberal nine yards - folksinging Masses, youth groups, mission programs, political and civil rights activism. My family was made up of Christians who practiced Catholicism; my theological understanding was based on a vision of Matthew 25:40 (’whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me’). At some point during my teens, though, the term ‘Christian’ seemed to mutate into a different vision articulated by pasty-faced white Southern men who demonized everyone who wasn’t a pasty-faced white Southern men - or who didn’t give money to their churches and vote Republican. The idea that the faithful would be snatched up and everyone else left to fight in the ruins seemed to become the dominant theology of public life and policy. Mainstream churches seemed to back away from their social justice ministries and present inarticulate speakers to apologize for their work (Keep in mind I was in my teens, and tended to see everything as black and white). Put the word ‘evangelical’ in front of anything, and I immediately distrusted it.

Fast forward too many years. I turn on The Colbert Report, and there’s a guy presenting himself as an ‘evangelical’ plumping his book. I felt sorry for the guy, having seen Colbert subtly eviscerate many self-important hypocrites. Imagine my surprise when the guy, whose name is Tony Campolo, responded eloquently and simply to Colbert’s sallies, turning every assumption about evangelical Christians on its head. ‘Don’t hate the gays, because God loves them. Remember that to be pro-life you also have to support the living - even those that are supposed to be your enemies. The physical world around you matters to God.’ I wrote down the title of his book and ordered it as soon as possible.

In a series of thoughtful essays, Campolo lays out what it means to be a Red Letter Christian - one who looks first to the teachings of Jesus for guidance in living a meaningful spiritual life. Then he removes the electoral considerations, saying emphatically that God does not belong to any political party or support one side or the other on any issue. Sections on global, social, economic, and government dig into the complex issues that face us as Americans, as Christians, and as humans. Over and over, Campolo calls for equal treatment - for the poor, for the despised, for the ignored. He provides only one simple solution, calling on people to get past their selfishness and identity politics and put their spirituality into practice. Turns out that’s not so simple.

Although the individual sections are short, this is not a fast read. Campolo sums up difficult issues by highlighting the discrepancy between what the Bible tells us is good and what the world tells us is good. I don’t agree with every premise Campolo accepts, or believe every source he cites. What brings me up short as a reader is the need to contemplate how cynicism, high expectations, and low effort shortchange this country and faith of all kinds. Then I have to figure out what to do - or not do - with those thoughts.

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Wild Trees, by Richard Preston

What is it about coastal redwoods that would inspire people to risk their lives to be near them? For starters, this type of redwood is located in only a few areas, but those are nearly inaccessible to all but the most dedicated bushwhackers. It is impossible to see the trees in their entirety, so a combination of imagination and rigorous measurement is required to assess their true size. They support an abundance of flora and fauna (even plankton) in an unexpected place. And they are the largest living things in the world. (OK, there’s a honey mushroom fungus in Oregon that is technically bigger, but no one’s organizing trips to see it…) But what kind of oddballs, misfits, and romantics would embark on arduous trips to find and study these giant trees?

For Steve Sillett, it started as a rebellious and incredibly dumb free climb that uncovered a new world. For Michael Taylor, a childhood trip introduced him to the trees, which became first a hobby, then an obsession. Marie Antoine’s risk-taking youth evolved into a desire to study rare plants found in the canopies of these tall trees. Arborists Scott Altenhoff and Kevin Hillery took on the job of teaching ’skywalking’ to the climbers, equipping them to ascend the trees then move among the branches in a kind of ballet. These, and the other people in the tiny community of canopy scientists, learned by the seat of their climbing saddles. All of them bring a love of the trees, incredible athletic ability, and a desire to learn to their vocation.

Their experiences were not without cost. Relationships suffered, job opportunities were set aside, expensive equipment purchased by sacrificing necessities. The searchers only looked in places deemed inaccessible by logging companies, fighting through tangled bushes and poison oak in often fruitless searches. Michael Taylor’s fear of heights tortured him even as he told other climbers where to find bigger trees. The dangers inherent in climbing were amplified by inattention and possibly self-destructive impulses. These stories provide motion and drama while clearly keeping the giant trees at the center of the book.

The trees themselves? If you have ever visited Muir Woods National Monument in California, you may have seen a popular tourist attraction - the coastal redwood measuring 285 feet tall, or about the height of the United States Capitol Building. A member of this community discovered the tallest tree in the world, called Stratosphere Giant. It stands 370 feet tall (as high as a 35 story building) and is estimated to be 2,000 years old. An incredible series of drawings in the book depicts a small segment of a tree called Iluvatar, which has 220 trunks growing from its main trunk in an astonishing maze that dwarfs the humans. As both living organisms and habitats, these trees are incredibly complex, perhaps beyond our understanding.

In Encounters with the Archdruid, John McPhee writes about the philosophical divide between conservationists who want to maintain pristine wilderness and land managers who say everyone should have recreational access to those wild places. The people Richard Preston writes about have made that decision for themselves. To avoid divulging locations of the trees, the climbers and scientists go to great lengths, even approaching from different directions so they don’t leave trails. For me, it is enough to know that the trees are there and that people who respect and love them are serving as their stewards - I don’t need to see them to understand their value. Long may they stand.

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The Alchemyst, by Michael Scott

I stumbled across this great Young Adult fantasy book and could not put it down. Scott, like Rick Riordan of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, takes ancient myth and folklore and puts it smack in the middle of contemporary America with an exciting and humorous result.

This story starts with 15-year-old twins Josh and Sophie Newman working at their summer jobs – Sophie in a coffee shop and Josh across the street in a bookstore owned by Nick Fleming and his wife. One day four men arrive at the bookstore and, as Josh says at the end of chapter one, “the world would never be the same.”

Turns out Nick Fleming is really six-hundred-year-old alchemyst Nicholas Flamel. He and his wife, Perenelle, have been taking an elixir for eternal life for several centuries and hiding from Dr. John Dee, a wicked former student of Flamel’s.

Dee steals from Flamel the book of Abraham the Mage, the most powerful book that has ever existed, except for a few pages that Josh grabbed at the last minute. As he exits the store, Dee also kidnaps Perenelle.

As Flamel sets off to recover the book and his wife with the twins in tow, he tells them that Dee has aligned himself with the Dark Elders who want to remake the world back as it was in the ancient past – with all humans serving as slaves – or food.

On Flamel’s side is Scatty, the warrior maiden Scathach; Hekate, the goddess with three faces; and Josh and Sophie – who may be the ones the ancient book prophesied would either save or destroy the world.

It’s a fast-paced adventure from start to finish – with a sequel on the way. Scott’s second book in The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel series, Magician, is due in June.

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A Day, a Dog, by Gabrielle Vincent

In Les Miserables, it took Victor Hugo 1400 pages and Lord knows how many words to tell his story of cruelty, suffering, endurance, and redemption. In this masterpiece of sequential art, Gabrielle Vincent accomplishes the same thing in 60 wordless pages.

A Day, a Dog tells a simple story entirely through bold charcoal sketches that are miracles of expressiveness. It is marketed as a children’s picture book, but unless your child can handle Camus, it’s probably better to wait. The first page shocks: a dog is tossed onto a lonely road from the window of a car. What follows evokes feelings of pity and horror worthy of Greek drama. The dog races after the car as it speeds away, falling farther behind until he is no more than a speck with a tail, as seen by the uncaring people who have abandoned him. In blind hope, the pooch bounds into the road after the next car to come by, causing a terrible accident. Lost amid the chaos, the dog barks, cowers, lifts his leg against a tire, and finally slinks away. His miserable day continues in an epic journey along a deserted beach and through the alleys of an ugly city until, at last, he finds a friend in a boy who seems to be abandoned, too.

There isn’t an artist alive who can match Gabrielle Vincent’s sensitive rendering of animals. In a few confident lines, she nails the lift of a dogs’s ears, the droop of his tail, the set of his back, which are exactly those of dogs we have known and loved. Vincent, who is Belgian, also created the wonderful Ernest and Celestine books, which tell the adventures of a bluff bear who is the doting guardian (or single dad?) of an adorable, emotional mouse.

I passed a copy of A Day, a Dog around the office yesterday, and there were gasps, cries of “no!” and some tears. The last page makes me think of a line from Jane and Michael Stern’s book about dog breeders, Dog Eat Dog. A man who had just adopted a puppy asked them, “Do you know the difference between a dog and a human? A dog sees his god every day.”

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Deep Dish, by Mary Kay Andrews

Mary Kay Andrews (best-selling author of Hissy Fit and Savannah Breeze) creates another fun, romantic story in Deep Dish.

In one corner is Gina Foxton, the chef for Fresh Start, a public television cooking show. She promotes using natural ingredients and making traditional Southern recipes healthier. She’s in a bind because her ex-boyfriend/producer has screwed up her sponsorship with a local grocery chain – she’ll be out of a job if another sponsor doesn’t step up.

In the other corner is Tate Moody, aka the Tatester, the cook of a hunting, fishing, cooking show on The Southern Outdoors Network called Vittles. He doesn’t understand how a show about catching and cooking off the land has such a large female following. Maybe it’s because he looks so good with his shirt off…

The Cooking Channel executives get an idea to create a televised competition for the single spot on the big network – a “Food Fight” – in which both cooks will be judged in three competitions.

As the competition heats up, so does the attraction between the two stars. Mix in a hair disaster, add a dash of quirky sidekicks, throw in a deserted island adventure and blend with some interesting Southern recipes and you have a delightfully diverting contemporary romance to while away the afternoon.

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The Little Lady Agency, by Hester Browne

Melissa Romney-Jones has mastered the unappreciated art of planning a party, buying the right present, and dressing well. She has used her talents to work in various jobs, but she downplays her contributions and frequently is the one to get canned when companies lay off staff. After the latest administrative job goes down the drain, Melissa meets up with her old etiquette teacher, and in her naiveté accepts a job as an escort. When a client expects more than her entertaining company for lunch, Melissa quits.

She decides to market her organizational talents for her own business, the Little Lady Agency, targeting bachelors and clueless men who need to shop, entertain, and navigate social engagements. She sometimes poses as their girlfriend or fiancée to help the guy out with nagging mother or clinging girlfriend situations – but no hanky-panky. And even though it’s all perfectly legit, she dons a blond wig and a new persona, “Honey,” when she’s working so as not to upset her highly critical (and dysfunctional) family.

The new business starts to thrive, thanks in part to one particular repeat customer, an American executive named Jonathan, who just happens to be running the company she used to work for. When she starts to fall for Jonathan, she wonders if he really likes her – or Honey?

It’s chick lit romance with a British accent and traditional homemaker roles. But where I picked up several titles and put them down again, this one grabbed my attention and kept it there — all the way to the happily ever after ending.

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The Spellman Files, by Lisa Lutz

Chick Lit meets Mystery in this clever debut by Lisa Lutz about Izzy Spellman, 28-year-old private investigator in her family’s firm, Spellman Investigations.

The story is an interesting, entertaining mix of family relationships, mystery, romance, friendships, coming of age… and I didn’t realize it was complicated until I started trying to write about it here. Lutz does a terrific job weaving the pieces together so you understand the timeline and all the different side issues without losing the sense of the story.

The main issue is that Izzy hasn’t had much success with men. And when she meets Daniel Castillo, DDS, she decides this relationship needs to stick. So she lies about what she does for a living (being a teacher seems safer than explaining about being a private investigator). When she can’t avoid it any longer, she introduces him to her parents who on the surface seem very polite to him, but she knows they’re digging for information so they can do a background check as soon as he leaves. It’s just the way they are. She decides it’s just too weird to keep working and living in the same house with her family, so she agrees to do one more job, then she’s quitting the firm and moving out.

In addition to the romantic relationship, Izzy solves a cold case about a missing teenager – a case her parents didn’t think she could solve and as she digs more into the past, a case they implore her to drop.

Then there is the rest of Izzy’s family. There’s her perfect brother David who seems to have a romantic interest in her best friend, her younger sister Rae who enjoys “recreational surveillance” regardless of the danger in following strangers around the city, and Uncle Ray who is determined to drink and gamble as much as possible.

After all the drama is over and the mystery solved, Izzy herself concludes “It could be said that the Spellmans returned to normal after that. However, there was no previous pattern of normalcy to judge it by.”

A second Spellman story is on the library shelves, Curse of the Spellmans. I hope it is as fun, fast-pasted, and quirky as the first one. Fans of Meg Cabot’s Heather Wells (Size 12 is not fat), Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum (One for the Money) or any of Jennifer Crusie’s smart-alecky heroines may enjoy these stories as well.

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Book of a Thousand Days, by Shannon Hale

Talk about bad timing. Fifteen-year-old Dashti has barely survived a rough life on the steppes of pseudo-Mongolia, but by a combination of luck, perseverance, and skill, she’s landed a plum job as a lady’s maid in the palace of Titor’s Garden. Minutes after she meets her new mistress, Lady Saren, she learns they’re about to be bricked up in a tower for seven years. Saren has just been seriously grounded for refusing the fearsome lord her father wants her to marry.

Dashti is surprisingly cheerful even as workers are bricking up the windows around her. Nothing about her hand-to-mouth existence so far prepared her for such good fortune — seven years without having to worry about starving to death! Her natural optimism and practical nature serve her well, as her traumatized mistress, wary and tearful at the best of times, is reduced nearly to catatonia by imprisonment. While Saren falls apart, she orders Dashti to impersonate her and negotiate with a rival suitor who may be able to help them escape. And Dashti, raised to obey and know her place, instead finds herself falling in love with the man who’s in love with her mistress.

Shannon Hale was inspired to write this romantic fantasy by one of the Grimms’s lesser-known fairytales, but she’s reworked it with khans and yaks and other details from medieval Asia. Hale’s version remains just enough of a fairytale to make the happy ending pretty much a given. But Dashti and Saren follow a long, adventurous road from the dark confines of their incarceration to the final legal twists and turns that will determine who lives, who dies, and who gets to marry the khan.

The simple but heartfelt language and strong characters reminded me of Karen Cushman’s historical novels (The Midwife’s Apprentice, Matilda Bone), and this is similarly aimed at older kids and younger teens. I listened to the audiobook, one of Bruce Coville’s Full Cast Audio productions, in which every character is voiced by a different actor. Dashti’s folk songs play a significant part in the story and it was an added bonus to hear them given melody.

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Black Ships, by Jo Graham

The story of Troy, with all its sequels and prequels and spinoffs, is my favorite soap opera, from the songs of Homer to that dreadful movie with Brad Pitt. So I was glad to see this debut historical novel, which retells the story of the Aeneid from a woman’s point of view and with just a bit of a supernatural twist.

Gull, the narrator, is the daughter of a war rape, born into slavery after the women of Troy (called Wilusa in the novel) have been taken away by the victorious Greeks. Apprenticed to a prophetess at the age of seven, Gull’s first portentous vision is of black ships and a burning city.

The ships, of course, turn out to be Aeneas’s ragtag, fugitive fleet carrying all that is left of Troy and wandering about the Mediterranean to ransom its last survivors. Grief and survivor’s guilt dog their travels, as does the villainous Neoptolemos, son of Achilles. From pirate cities to mercenary service in Egypt, Gull serves as Aeneas’s seer and advisor. Set apart from the others by their responsibilities, they understand one another well: Aeneas rebelling against his destiny to lead, and Gull suffering loneliness in her goddess’s service. As her predecessor told her, she will never have a husband or know a home, but she finds something close to it with Aeneas’s longtime friend Xandros.

And together, they found Rome.

Gull’s visions of the future and connection with the divine are the only supernatural twist to this rather solemn novel. Graham takes us out of the mythological realm of Homer and Virgil and settles her story as best she can into a historical timeline. Instead of Dido, familiar to readers of Virgil and devotees of baroque opera, we get the delightfully deranged Basetamon, princess of Egypt. Historical notes at the end of the book explain it all for those of us who do not carry a reliable Age of Bronze timeline in our heads.

The best thing Graham adds to the story is a sweeping, self-conscious sense of historic change, of old worlds breaking apart and empires vanishing into oblivion. Recommended for enthusiasts of Mary Renault or those like me who enjoy reading a new take on an old, old story.

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Farewell, William W. Warner

A couple of memories from my childhood: going to the shore of the Chesapeake at Virginia Beach and seeing crabbers breaking yellow egg casings from the backs of the females’ backs, tossing the eggs back in the water and throwing the crabs into water boiling over an open fire. (Even at 10 years old, I thought to myself, ‘isn’t killing the egg-bearing female kind of dumb?’) Then, accompanying my best friend on his 12-foot boat, armed with string, chicken necks, and nets. Playing a neck along the bottom of the inlets near our home, feeling the tug of a crab and ever so slowly lifting it from the water. Watching the brilliant blue rise through the murky water, seeing it tenaciously clutch the meat, and easing it into the boat only to have the great beast attack and pinch me until my hand bled.

William W. Warner wrote Beautiful Swimmers about the time I was spending my summer days leaning over gunwales or piers looking for blue crabs. He created a detailed and vivid examination of the blue crab’s lifecycle and temperament, writing so clearly that he won the Pulitzer Prize for the book. After assessing the crab’s place in the water, he turned to the people and places that relied on the blue crab for their livelihood. The hardworking watermen of the Chesapeake, the now-abandoned canning plants, the town that gave money to the watermen (then took it back in bawdy entertainment) are all faithfully recorded in this evocative book.

Even at that time, though, Beautiful Swimmers (the title coming from the crab’s Latin name Callinectes sapidus, which actually means ‘beautiful tasty swimmer’) had an elegiac quality to it. Crab harvests were steadily declining, watermen and their families were moving away to find jobs with steady pay, and the now-famous Tangier Island was already capitalizing on its seafaring history to attract tourists. Warner gave an even-handed account of the specie’s decline, citing government failures, chemical runoff from agriculture and development, and the working methods of the watermen themselves as probable reasons for the dropping harvests.

Warner could have been reading recent headlines: Bay habitats making too-slow recoveries, Maryland and Virginia’s governors announcing immediate reduction of female blue crab harvests, watermen frantically lobbying for their way of living, legislators complaining but allocating no money to address the problems. The water quality of the Chesapeake Bay is declining even as development along its shores skyrockets. Industry, agriculture, and construction successfully obtain regulatory exemptions, and individual citizens pollute by accident or intention.

Those signs point to Warner’s book becoming the historic record of an extinct species and a lost way of life. Fortunately, it is a beautiful portrait, and future readers will thank him if that indeed becomes the case. One can only hope that current readers will be moved enough by his writing to take action at the local, state, and federal level and save this incredible species.