Tag: Book Recommendations Page 5 of 10

Read These Books

On March 5, 2017

Recommendations from the last six months of reading:

Passages Through Pakistan: An American Girl’s Journey of Faith by Marilyn Gardner

In her introduction, Marilyn Gardner writes of visiting, as an adult, her childhood home in Pakistan:

“[My traveling companion] looked at me, measuring her words. ‘A compound like this must have made life as a child in Pakistan at least somewhat bearable,’ she said.

I stood still and stared at her in shock. Bearable? Bearable? I repeated the word to myself. I said it aloud. ‘Bearable? It was more than bearable. My childhood was extraordinary.'”

In this beautiful memoir, Gardner exquisitely captures the life of a third-culture kid. She spent her entire childhood in Pakistan, went off to boarding school 800 miles away at age 6, struggled through furloughs in America, battled to find her identity, yet looks back with wonder and awe. She brings her readers into the sorrow and joy of boarding school; she is deeply honest in her assessment of her younger self; she poignantly expresses the tension of growing up between worlds. I highly recommend this memoir to anyone who wants to better understand the TCK experience.

*half of the proceeds from this book go to help refugees

Seven Women: And the Secret of Their Greatness by Eric Metaxas

I had mixed feelings about this one. I really enjoy biographies (especially by Eric Metaxas), and I appreciated that he chose some well-known, and some lesser-known women for this book. Like his other books, it was filled with well-researched, fascinating detail. All the subjects he chose were women of faith; however, while venerating each woman, he failed to grapple with the somewhat convoluted and even disturbing aspects of some of these women’s theology. Of course, I am interested in reading the biographies of women of all beliefs, but I’m not necessarily going to endorse their theology–yet that’s what it felt like Metaxas was doing.

Most Dangerous: Daniel Ellsberg and the Secret History of the Vietnam War by Steve Sheinkin

I picked up this book because my education on the Vietnam War pretty much consisted of what I had seen in Forrest Gump. I’m a college graduate, yet this very important part of America’s history had never been covered in any class.

Wow. This book had a slow start, but once I got into it, it was riveting. By telling the story of the man who leaked the truth about the Vietnam war to the American people, Daniel Ellsberg, I learned so much about the Cold War, the four U.S. presidents involved in Vietnam, and the massive lies each of them told the American public. Of course, the climax was Watergate and Nixon’s resignation. It was eerie to read a story that parallels so much of what is happening in today’s political world.

Hotel at the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford

This was my Christmas break novel, and though it wasn’t the best I’ve read, I really enjoyed what it taught me about the Japanese internment during World War II. A delightful historical fiction novel with some substance.

Saving My Assassin by Virginia Prodan

Though this is not the best-written book, the story itself is astonishing. This memoir takes place in Romania during the Cold War, and the author describes how she first became a lawyer, then a Christian, and fought for the rights of Christians in the Communist courts. After unsuccessfully trying to shut her up, the government sent an assassin to her office. The events which lead up to this event and what happened after it are nothing less than Providential. Truly an inspiring story.

The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids by Madeline Levine

This book is a few years old now, but still just as relevant. The take away? Your kids need your relationship more than they need your stuff. They need to develop character more than they need to be the best athlete, student, or musician. Protecting them from all of life’s hard things doesn’t produce happy kids–it actually does the exact opposite. An important book for today’s parents.

We Have Not Learned Our Lesson About Adoption Corruption

By Amy Medina

On February 12, 2017

In Adoption

Sometimes I think I am a glutton for punishment.

I keep clinging onto vestiges of hope that maybe international adoption can work in developing countries. But I am drawn like a bug to a zapper when I see books like this one:

Finding Fernanda: Two mothers, one child, and a cross-border search for truth by Erin Siegal

And yes, I felt like a zapped bug. This time, I got to read 312 pages describing (in sordid detail) the stinking cesspool that was the Guatemalan adoption industry. And an industry it was, since at its height, thousands of children were exported from this tiny war-torn country every year. In fact, for several years, 1 out of every Guatemalan 100 babies were sold to America. And while thousands of American families fawned over pictures of “their” children, fixed up nurseries, and prayed desperate prayers, the millions of dollars being sent to Guatemala were being used by adoption agencies, lawyers, judges, and orphanages to manipulate, buy, or just plain kidnap children away from their mothers.

And the pit in my stomach just continues to grow.

As I’ve said over and over, I wish it wasn’t true. I so desperately want to support all international adoptions–I really do. And it would be one thing if collectively the American Adoption Community looked at Guatemala and said, Wow, we really learned our lesson. We won’t ever let that happen again. But the hardest part about all of this is that America still has not learned its lesson. It still is turning a blind eye.

You might have read the post I wrote last year called Children Are No Longer For Sale in Uganda. After Uganda’s adoption industry turned into its own cesspool, the Ugandan government finally got in control of it and passed some new laws. Perhaps the most significant of those laws is that any foreign adoptive parent needs to now foster the child in Uganda for one year before adopting.

So you can imagine my surprise when I read the following on the United States Department of State website last week:

What does this mean? It means that some American adoption agencies are trying to get around the one-year fostering law by finding Ugandan families to “proxy foster” the child….until the requirement is supposedly met and the American family can swoop in and take the child back to America.

What?

WHAT?

How clear does Uganda need to be? How spelled out do they need to make the law? It’s even written in English. You must live in Uganda for at least one year to adopt a child. Is it really that hard to understand? But hey, I guess if Madonna is able to ignore adoption residency requirements, then anyone can.

Some will say, Well, adoptive families wouldn’t be able to get away with it if it wasn’t okay. Really? Then they obviously have never lived in a developing country before. They have absolutely no idea the depth of the corruption that they are enabling, that they are contributing to, in the name of rescuing a child.

Sigh. I’ll say it again:

If you’re feeling called to adopt,choose a Hague-Convention country. Do your homework; don’t just trust your agency. Ask the hard questions. Read the country’s laws for yourself. Support adoption reform. Remember that adoption corruption is rampant and you cannot assume the best.

Please, please, America (and it really is mainly America), let’s learn this lesson.

Slavery and the Inequality We Continue to Ignore

By Amy Medina

On January 8, 2017

In Race and Diversity

It was eerie, really. I was reading about William Wilberforce’s fight to end the British slave trade, and I just couldn’t help but think that the language sounded exactly like today’s fight to end abortion.

Wilberforce was a politician who fought hard for almost 20 years in the British parliament to end the slave trade. His primary argument was in proving the humanity of slaves. And he based that argument on biblical principles.

This ticked off a lot of people. “One of [abolition’s] most dedicated opponents, Lord Melbourne, was outraged that Wilberforce dared inflict his Christian values about slavery and human equality on British society. ‘Things have come to a pretty pass,’ he famously thundered, ‘when one should permit one’s religion to invade public life.'”

Hmmm. Sounds familiar.

Wilberforce was certain that proving the equality of every kind of human life would ensure the abolition of slaves. In one impassioned speech he proclaimed, “I have already gained for the wretched Africans the recognition of their claim to the rank of human beings, and I doubt not but the Parliament of Great Britain will no longer withhold from them the rights of human nature!” But the fight was still years away from being won.

Even non-religious doctors and scientists will readily admit that an unborn child is a human life. It’s just not a person with equal rights. However, this assertion is not based on any kind of science, because no one can agree on when a fetus becomes a person other than when that fetus suddenly becomes wanted.

Think about it: The egg is not a human life. The sperm is not a human life. But when the two form an embryo, suddenly: Human Life. In fact, that Human Life can be formed in a test tube, frozen for a couple of years, and then placed in the womb of a non-biologically related woman, and yet what will happen to that embryo? In nine months it turns into a child. So if that embryo is not a Human Life, then what is?

Sometimes people accuse Christians of caring only about eliminating abortion, but not caring about the people those babies grow up to be. Of fixating on abortion and ignoring poverty, slavery, abuse, racism, and other forms of inequality. It’s a valid accusation, no doubt. Christians need to get their act together about other social injustice issues.

However–and this is a big however–I want to make the point that caring about social justice issues, but justifying abortion–well, that’s an enormous contradiction. Because if social justice is all about caring for the voiceless and the powerless….then how is it possible to ignore those human beings who are the most voiceless and powerless?

Either all people have value, or they don’t.

Either all people are equal, or they’re not.

It shouldn’t matter what they have to contribute to society, or how poor they are, or how disabled they are, how dependent they are, or how much of an inconvenience they are.

You can’t pick and choose.

In Wilberforce’s day, there was no general agreement about the equality of human beings. In fact, Wilberforce himself had a enormous part in helping western society come to that conclusion. We owe a lot to him. If it’s a no-brainer that slavery is wrong, that has a lot to do with Wilberforce. Yet much of our society is unwilling to consider how the exact same arguments apply to abortion.

Last week, WORLD magazine reported, “The Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives released its final report today, calling for an overhaul to the abortion and fetal procurement industries, including defunding Planned Parenthood and a federal 20-week abortion ban.”

In the early 1800’s, Wilberforce pleaded, “Sir, the nature and the circumstances of this Trade are now laid open to us. We can no longer plead ignorance, we cannot evade it, it is not an object placed before us, we cannot pass it. We may spurn it, we may kick it out of the way, but we cannot turnaside so as to avoid seeing it. For it is brought now so directly before our eyes that this House must decide, and must justify to all the world, and to their own consciences…the principles of their decision. Let not Parliament be the only body that is insensible to national justice.” (Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery by Eric Metaxas)

Behind the Beautiful Forevers

By Amy Medina

On December 11, 2016

In Book Recommendations, Poverty

To be virtuous is a luxury of the rich.

I just made that up. I’m well aware that it’s certainly not a true statement of everyone, as many rich people are evil and many poor people are virtuous. But it is much, much easier for a rich person to choose to be virtuous than it is for a poor person.

And if you don’t believe me, then you’ve probably never been poor.

To be poor in Annawadi, or in any Mumbai slum, was to be guilty of one thing or another. Abdul sometimes bought pieces of metal that scavengers had stolen. He ran a business, such as it was, without a license. Simply living in Annawadi was illegal, since the airport authority wanted squatters like himself off its land.

I read Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo about a month ago. I had planned to include it in my semi-annual list of books to recommend, and then I realized that I just can’t stop thinking about it. Even a month later. This is one of those books that changes you. You can’t be the same after reading it.

A few weeks ago, Abdul had seen a boy’s hand cut clean off when he was putting plastic into one of the shredders. The boy’s eyes had filled with tears but he hadn’t screamed. Instead he’d stood there with his blood-spurting stump, his ability to earn a living ended, and started apologizing to the owner of the plant.

If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you know that poverty is always on my mind. I am surrounded by it. I struggle daily with what to do about it. So as I read this book, even though it is about a slum in India, I felt like it was describing the lives of those on the other side of my fence.

True, a few residents trapped rats and frogs and fried them for dinner. A few ate the scrub grass at the sewage lake’s edge. And these individuals, miserable souls, thereby made an inestimable contribution to their neighbors. They gave those slumdwellers who didn’t fry rats and eat weeds, like Abdul, a felt sense of their upward mobility.

This book has inestimable worth in helping the average (rich) westerner to understand the vast complexity of poverty. How it’s not just a matter of providing seed money or sending a Christmas shoebox or paying for a good education that is going to get someone out of poverty. That ethnicity and religion and politics and most importantly, worldview, have far deeper ramifications than we realize.

In this way [Sunil] learned that policemen sometimes advised the road boys about nearby warehouses and construction sites where they might steal building materials. The cops then took a share of the proceeds.

Probably what was most valuable to me in this story was the importance of virtue in poverty alleviation. And how the poor can’t really, truly be helped until integrity is valued in a society. And how we can’t expect poor people to be virtuous until the rich are virtuous as well–starting with the government, the business owners, and the elite.

‘Out of stock today’ was the nurses’ official explanation. Plundered and resold out of supply cabinets was an unofficial one. What patients needed, families had to buy on the street and bring in.

I don’t think that my fellow Americans really understand the level of corruption that exists in the developing world, and how much it contributes to poverty. I certainly didn’t get it until I had lived outside of America for many years. And I think that this is one of the main reasons why westerners’ poverty-alleviating efforts often hurt more than they help.

In newspaper interviews, Gaikwad spoke of his search for unschooled children, and his hope of giving them the sort of education that would lift them out of poverty. His less public ambition was to divert federal money to himself.

The biggest revelation of this story comes in the epilogue. It’s the sort of thing that I thought should have been included in the prologue, because finding out the truth of how this book came to be written made me want to start over from the beginning and read it again. But since the author obviously wanted it left for the end, you’ll just have to trust me when I say that this book is incredibly powerful–and it will change your life.

The crucial things were luck and the ability to sustain two convictions: that what you were doing wasn’t all that wrong, in the scheme of things, and that you weren’t all that likely to get caught.

‘Of course it’s corrupt,’ Asha told the new secretary of the nonprofit. ‘But is it my corruption? How can anyone say I am doing the wrong…when the big people say that it’s right?’

The subtitle of this book is Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity. To be honest, I didn’t see much hope in this book. It is deeply disturbing and terribly depressing and really not redemptive. But it’s necessary, because poverty is real. Far more real and far more prevalent than those of us with manicured lawns want to admit. And if we want to be a generation of rich people who really do help the poor, then that must start by really understanding poverty.

Among the poor, there was no doubt that instability fostered ingenuity, but over time the lack of a link between effort and result could become debilitating. ‘We try so many things,’ as one Annawadi girl put it, ‘but the world doesn’t move in our favor.’

Though the gospel was nowhere to be found in this story, I kept thinking about the difference it could make. In promoting the value of human life. In valuing justice and truth. In offering forgiveness. In providing hope. And it reinforced to me the necessity of the gospel not just taking root in individual’s lives, but the importance of it transforming whole societies by becoming a worldview of influence.

‘Always I was thinking how to try to make my life nicer, more okay, and nothing got better,’ Sunil said. ‘So now I’m going to try to do it the other way. No thinking how to make anything better, just stopping my mind, then who knows? Maybe then something good could happen.’

Those of us whose lives are nicer, are better, we don’t often realize how powerful we really are. Or how responsible.

Read These Books

By Amy Medina

On September 21, 2016

In Book Recommendations

If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty by Eric Metaxas

Read this book. Wow. Read this book. At this crazy point in American history, every American needs to read this. I thought I was pretty familiar with the history of my country, but Metaxas asks important questions that I hadn’t fully considered before. What makes America unique in the history of world governments? Why has democracy worked in the States but failed in so many other countries? Why is the morality of our leaders so vital to the success of our government? Why is our increasing cynicism destroying us?

Non-Americans will also find this book interesting since it helps to explain so much about why America is the way it is, and why it’s failure would have worldwide implications. I found Metaxas’ observations to be fascinating but I didn’t necessarily agree with his conclusions. However, the topics he brings up are exactly what Americans need to be discussing right now. It would be great to read together with teenagers. This is a short and compelling book. Read it.

Between Worlds: Essays on Culture and Belonging by Marilyn Gardner

If my recent posts have been particularly nostalgic, it’s all Marilyn’s fault. I thought I didn’t really have third-culture kid (TCK) “issues,” but I found myself constantly getting a bit weepy as I read through Marilyn’s book. She speaks deeply into the heart of those of us who have spent a significant portion of our lives away from our passport country, especially to those of us who are now raising kids the same way.

Every good story has a conflict. Never being fully part of any world is
ours. That is what makes our stories and
memories rich and worth hearing. We live
between worlds, sometimes comfortable in one, sometimes in the other, but only
truly comfortable in the space between.
This is our conflict and the heart of our story.

Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel by Kate Bowler

I bought this book because I wanted to have a better understanding of the theology that so greatly influences the churches here in Tanzania. What I discovered was a better understanding of American theology as well, and of the subtle ways that the Prosperity Gospel has influenced me even though I’ve been avidly against it. This book started as a dissertation, so it is scholarly, thorough, and very well referenced, but totally fascinating. Bowler simply states the facts and allows the readers to draw their own conclusions.

The Discipline of Grace by Jerry Bridges

I was first introduced to Jerry Bridges when he came to speak at The Master’s College my junior year. Though I went to chapel three times a week during my time at TMC, his sermon is one of very few that I remember. His teaching on grace was utterly life-changing for this “good” girl. I then devoured a number of his books, and his straight-forward, biblical teaching on grace, holiness, and trusting God completely revitalized my life. Transforming Grace and Trusting God remain on my top-10 most influential books of my life. So when Bridges recently passed away, I decided that I needed to read one of his books that I hadn’t picked up before.

If you’ve never read anything by Bridges, this is a great place to start, as he draws together a number of the themes from his earlier books. I can guarantee that you will walk away with a greater fervency for Christ and a greater joy in your salvation.

If God’s blessings were dependent on our performance, they would be meager indeed. Even our best works are shot through with sin–with varying degrees of impure motives and lots of imperfect performance…..Your worst days are never so bad that you are beyond the reach of God’s grace. And your best days are never so good that you are beyond the need of God’s grace.

The Fishermen by Chigozie Obiama

I was looking for an entertaining, thought-provoking summer read, and I knew that this one was set in Nigeria, written by a Nigerian, and had won lots of awards. And it was indeed gorgeous writing, haunting, compelling, and filled with insight into Nigerian culture and thinking. But it was also deeply disturbing and fairly traumatizing. A great book that I definitely recommend, but not when you want to be entertained.

Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler

This novel, however, totally delivered. This is a re-telling of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, and it was not only totally engaging and entertaining, but also full of great story-telling, wonderful character development, and beautiful redemption. I thoroughly enjoyed it and now I’m looking for more Anne Tyler recommendations!