So Many Books; So little Time

Big Girls Don’t Whine

Big Girls Don’t Whine: Getting On With The Great Life God Intends

by Jan Silvious

c. 2003

Do you find youself whining or complaining to God (and all those around you) when things don’t go your way? Do you think life and other people are being unfair? Or do you just know or live with someone like that? Perhaps you used to do those things but don’t any more?

Well, this book is for those women and all the rest of us. Jan Silivious is a wife, mother, and grandmother and also a counselor who uses scripture and personal experience to get us to laugh at the many ways in our lives that we aren’t “grown up” yet.

She tackles the basic areas of our lives where we live most–being single, being married, being a mother, being a friend, and being in the midst of a crisis. She is about heart-felt, God-led lives and not about rote, type-cast answers. She won’t tell you how to organize your day (big girls don’t need anyone to do that) or what sort of discipline or punishment to use with your kids (though she does explain the difference between a big girl spanking and a little girl hitting) and she won’t tell you to pray for every crisis to go away (big girls embrace a crisis and learn from it).

What she will do is to show us what a true Christian big girl looks like and how she acts and behaves on a daily basis.

She also includes a reader’s guide in the back that has sections for personal as well as group studies.

If the ladies in your group are ready for a new dimension to their walk both in and out of the church, this is a great book to do a study on. Warning, it will step on all our toes for all of us need to grow up or we wouldn’t be here any more. We would be complete and with God in heaven.

A Plague Upon Humanity

A Plague Upon Humanity: The Secret Genocideof Axis Japan’s Germ Warfare Operations

by Daniel Barenblatt

c. 2004

(My copy has a red border around the outside of the cover.)

(Sensitive persons may not want to read this review–this is your only warning!)

This book is not for the faint-hearted, weak of stomach, or those given to nightmares. This book is only for those hardy souls who don’t mind reading about how low humans can go when de-humanizing other humans. The Bataan Death March and The Rape of Nanking are only the beginning–okay, they weren’t the beginning, this was but since more people have heard of them….

This book deals with Biological Warfare. Started by the highly intelligent and economically favored Shiro Ishii and backed by the government right up to the Emperor of Japan, hundreds (yes, hundreds) of reseachers in biology set up research facilities in conquered Manchuria to develop and test bacteria such as bubonic plague, dysentery, cholera, typhoid, and paratyphoid on human beings. After testing these bacteria, they then vivisected the victims (alive with no anesthesia) to determine the effects of the diseases.

Following tests, these bacteria were dropped on unsuspecting villages where the atrocities continued unabated. Other atrocities included investigations in severe frostbite and human dehydration, syphillis, variations in race and age, and animal to human blood transfusions.

This is probably the most stomach-turning parts of the book unless you start to try to keep track of the dead which included not just Manchurian Chinese but any anti-Imperial Japan captives, Prisoners of War (including Americans) and random persons of certain age and sex “needed” by researchers gathered up from the surrounding villages.

But the most actual disturbing parts of the book come at the end of World War II when, in the midst of the Cold War, General Douglas MacArthur and others made a deal with these same researchers to turn over their research materials to the United States in return for complete and total immunity. These researchers went on to walk free, collect pensions, teach at Universities and hold positions in the government. There is also a discussion given on why Japan believes it need never pay war reparations to any person or group held or conquered during the 1930’s and 1940’s.

Daniel Barenblatt has gone to considerable trouble to research this time in Japan’s history. He has read countless documents including the transcripts of the only War Crimes Trial held on this subject by the Soviet Union. He has read the information made public in 1979 and 1996 and interviewed the few remaining workers at these “research facilities” (most were killed when their work was done), the daughter of Shiro Ishii, other “reseachers” and villagers, many of whom are the sole survivors of their families.

At 236 pages, this work will captivate and disturb you beyond your wildest nightmares. It is not for the faint of heart but it is a page-turner. It’s one of those books you wish you had never picked up but it’s so well written that you cannot put it down. Contains a few pictures and none are gruesome but along with the text, they are quite disturbing. This is a part of history that few know about and fewer want to admit to knowing about. It should be housed in an annex to the Holocaust Museum lest any of us forget and fall to the depths that these “researchers” fell into.

Twelve Lies You Hear in Church

Twelve Lies You Hear in Church

by Tim Riter

c. 2004

I admit I was skeptical about this book when I first picked it up but I shouldn’t have been. Tim Riter hits churches and Christians right where they are comfortable starting in the Introduction. I found myself reading about a deacon candidate and a nominating committee that could have come right out of my own church and saying a loud “ouch” as my toes were crunched. Tim Riter admits that when he announced the title of this book to a pastor’s group, he got laughs and then “ONLY 12?”

Well, he hit the top twelve anyway starting with one that has been in the church as long as there has been a church–Once I’m Saved, I can do whatever I want and still go to heaven. He follows that one up with the two extremes of of our sin nature–trying to be perfect and not ever being able to be perfect. Those are followed by minimizing “small” sins and that one is followed by “one sin does us all in” followed by “compared to the guy in the next pew….”

Okay, you get the idea. This is a great book. He does much to dispel the myths that so many new Christians latch onto and hold dear until they never grow and become anything more than a new Christian. No, our one church isn’t the only one going to heaven and no, you don’t have to be that way because of your parents/grandparents/teachers/etc. God may have a grand plan for your life but He lets you make choices along the way and then He uses the choices; He doesn’t just lay out your life for you to glide through it. Christianity isn’t just for Sundays and NO, you’re not Billy Graham and neither am I. He only made one Billy and He only made one you–get with the program already.

This book doesn’t come with a study guide per se but it does have questions to think about at the end of each chapter. This is the book to read when you are comfortable with your faith so you can get your toes stepped on and grow some more. It’s also good for those looking to grow. It would probably make a great set of sermons but it might clear the church in just a couple of weeks. But if your congregation is ready to oust some lies and grow, this is a great place to start.

The Templars

The Templars: The Dramatic History of the Knights Templar, The Most Powerful Military Order of the Crusades

by Piers Paul Read

c. 1999

(The cover of my paperback copy is actually blue.)

The Templars were a military force of Knights and Kings who took the cross to Crusade in the Middle East with the goal of winning back the land for Christ and Christians. In doing so they became a military force to be reckoned with. They were men of different countries united under a single banner–the Red Cross on White–and for a single cause. And, for about 200 years, they came close to the military reclaiming of the Holy Land. They held many of the cities ruled there but, beginning with making compromises with Saladin, they never took back the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem or “reconverted” the Muslim people to Christianity.

They did, however, manage for form a legion of soldiers and their own banking system in order to acquire funds from Europe to purchase what they needed. In the end, this was their ultimate downfall–that and the Avignon Papacy. For, in the end, the King of France controlled the Pope and wanted to control the money and prestige of The Templars and unite The Templars with the Hospitallers and would stop at nothing to get it, including bringing both legal and religious attacks against The Templars. He pressured the Pope to arrest them and then had them tortured until they confessed to such crimes as denying Christ, homosexuality, and other heinous crimes against God and mankind. Whether these charges were true or not is debateable, especially in light of the court documents indicating confessions only in countries where extreme torture (in one case burning the feet until the bones fell out) was used. In countries not allowing torture, the charges were found baseless.

In the end, we can all question exactly what work for the Kingdom of God The Templars actually did since they went in with a military might and didn’t win enough converts to maintain a hold on the Holy Land. They did, however, manage to give Islam a boost when they lost the Holy Land back as the Muslims considered their religion and their god as stronger than the European Christians.

Piers Paul Read does The Templars justice in his work. He is not overly detailed but does bring the politics of the Crusades to life. If you are looking for battles and whole scale slaughter, rent or buy “A Knight’s Tale” instead for it’s not here. But if you want to know what sort of men organized and paid for the Crusades, this is a book to consider.

The Prayer of Jesus

The Prayer of Jesus

by Hank Hanegraaff

c. 2001

In ten simple, easy to read chapters Hank Hanegraaff leads the reader through The Lord’s Prayer and gives insight into how to use the prayer, not as a rote, repeated prayer, but as a model for every prayer we pray.

He starts with Chapter One being the question asked by the apostles–Lord, teach us to pray. Why were they asking? What did they really want to know? Chapter Two sends us all to our Secret Place to pray and not into the open where others already have their rewards. Chapter Three points out why we pray in the first place. We are going to a Father who already knows what we need. And if He knows what we need, why pray? Because what we really need is the relationship of praying just as we need the relationship of talking with other people.

Chapter Four begins to explain the prayer with Our Father who art in Heaven, Hallowed be Thy Name. Our first thought should be to praise God and uplift His name. Chapter Five looks for the Kingdom and for God’s will to be done (not ours) no matter what. Chapter Six deals with our daily bread–what we need for the day in all aspects of life.

Chapter Seven deals with forgiveness–how we forgive others. Chapter Eight is the Armor of God that protects us from temptation. Chapter Nine is about going deep into life with God and Chapter Ten is embracing the prayer and it’s meaning as we pray in that model.

Complete with study guide in the back, it’s made to be a study into a deeper relationship with our Lord and Saviour through the model prayer He taught the twelve.

The Barbary Plague

The Barbary Plague: The Black Death in Victorian San Francisco

By Marilyn Chase

c. 2003

When Americans think of the Bubonic Plague, they mostly think of it in terms of thousands of deaths in Europe during the dark ages and the early Rennaissance but the Bubonic Plague exists today in eight main areas of the world–one of them the Southwest United States. There people sicken and, if not diagnosed quickly and properly, die just as they did in Europe.

But how did Bubonic Plague get here? And when? And what was done about it? And why is it still here?

Those are the questions Marilyn Chase, a medical reporter for The Wall Street Journal, sought to answer. In so doing, she traced the plague backwards through old San Francisco newspapers, medical records and shipping records. She looked into records of who was sent to respond to the epidemic and then traced their families down to the present day to locate letters they wrote home during that time.

She found a ship, the Australia, which docked in San Francisco Bay on New Year’s Day 1900 with infected rats on board. She found Wong Chut King, a dead man who was the first person in the United States diagnosed with Bubonic Plague. She found Dr. Joseph Kinyoun whose response was to quarantine Chinatown which set off riots and did nothing to stop the plague.

He was followed by Dr. Rupert Blue who was not considered to have the personality to deal with people who went, literally, to war with the rats over the matter of the Bubonic Plague. He trapped them, killed them, autopsied them, poisoned them, poured concrete where there was wood, demanded closed garbage cans where rubbish was tossed in the streets and watched while the fleas jumped from San Franciscan rats to Northern California Squirrels.

Dr. Rupert Blue became the hero of San Francisco for not only solving the issue of the plague there (though he did not eradicate it from the United States) but also for cutting the incidence of other disease while he was at it. He was a tireless worker with a staff and a shopping list that make many public officials swoon but in the end, what he advocated worked.

Marilyn Chase traces a disease in this country and also the people who fought it. Along the way, she encouters divorces, sick spouses, hidden bodies, disgusting sewer systems, lies about causes of death and remedies before antibiotics. And yet, this is not a gruesome book but a well-written history of something most people don’t even know still exists.

Faith in the Fog of War

Faith in the Fog of War

by Captain Chris Plekenpol

c. 2006

This is a compilation of emails that Chris sent home during his time as a tank Captain in Iraq. Travel with him through battle, victory and death as well as sitting on the side lines calling home. He doesn’t just tell you about isolated incidents in the war, he tells you what God has revealed to him about how those incidents will be with him for the rest of his life.

Captain Plekenpol hunts snipers and arrests men while watching their wives, mothers and sisters tear at their face and clothes while he is helpless to explain that the men will probably be back in a day or two. He shares how he and his men can finish each other’s sentences and speak with only a word or two and how it was revealed to him that as Christians all of us should have that relationship, not just with Christ but with each other.

This book isn’t necessarily for everyone. People do die and are disfigured and he does nothing to whitewash the war. But for those who wonder what it’s like for a Christian to command at the front lines, and what can come out of war and the relationship between war and the Bible, this book is excellent.

Captain Chris Plekenpol lives and breathes war and God’s love in every three to five page chapter. Short enough for a devotional and long enough to reach your heart and mind in just a few minutes, it’s a great read.