Love Wins

Love Wins – by Rob Bell

When this book was released a few years ago, a ginormous controversy was born because of the subject matter – Universal Salvation. For those unfamiliar with the term “Universal Salvation”, it means that everyone, eventually, will make it to heaven when they die.  Mr. Bell is a Christian pastor, so these sentiments don’t ring very well for the dogmatically devout.  Everyone gets into heaven?  Everyone?  Well, what’s the point of “The Great Commission”?  Why bother evangelizing?  Sincere Christians (and, yes, most are sincere, wonderful people) take things like this pretty seriously.  Needless to say, this book ruffled quite a lot of feathers.

Maybe because Bell is so well known that this book had such a dramatic effect, because this concept isn’t entirely new.  I’m sure even the most Calvinistic of the faith have wrestled with this topic in their hearts at some point.  I know I certainly have.  See, also,  C.S. Lewis’ “The Great Divorce”.  Plus, I’ve always doubted the sincerity of anyone who claims to be a Christian that actually wants anyone to spend eternity in hell – regardless of how awful the person might be.

Sadly, though, subject matter aside, this simply isn’t that great of a book.  I’ve never heard Rob Bell preach, but he writes this book as though he’s preaching a sermon, and the structure of his prose is very distracting.

For example
When he wants to make a clear point
He’ll isolate his text like this
On separate lines
He does this throughout the entire book
And it’s incredibly annoying
incredibly annoying

I’ll say it again
It’s incredibly annoying.

In fact, it can be hard to follow his thought process at times.  At the beginning of one chapter,   he starts to tell a story about the rapper Eminem, and how the man changed (supposedly) in his faith, but I never quite understood exactly where Mr. Bell was going with the story, nor do I think he ever actually finished it.  Then, he starts off another chapter stating that, for the first few hundred years of Christianity, most of the church leaders believed in Universal Salvation, but Bell only devotes about one paragraph to this notion.  Why not more?  Why not an entire chapter?  Why did they believe it?  Why did the church change?  So I felt cheated many times throughout the book when he doesn’t expand on many of his points.

He does make some great illustrations using scripture.  Yes, there are those who yelled “he’s quoting scripture out of context!” but this is true about any book written about any faith.  I particularly enjoyed his point about God will give you heaven or hell on earth, whenever and wherever you want it.  In my own life, I see so many miserable people, who are miserable by choice.  I’ve often wondered, do they actually enjoy being miserable?  Seems quite the oxymoron.  Yet I see it all the time.  So Mr. Bell’s point is that the heaven and hell that Jesus refers to, refer to your life on earth – not necessarily the afterlife.

I’ll also give Rob Bell credit for not really claiming to “know” all the answers.  What he is essentially doing, is absorbing an awful lot of difficult questions about God and the Bible, and asking more questions.  He even humorously details when he has asked church leaders some of these exact questions, and the responses he gets. 

Example of a Question: If a loved one isn’t saved and they don’t make it to heaven, how can we possibly enjoy heaven knowing someone that we deeply loved is in hell? 
Church Leader’s Answer: Heaven will be so wonderful, you won’t feel any sorrow nor pain, so you won’t even think about people in hell. 
Well, I guess that’s a “good” answer, but it certainly doesn’t make my mortal being feel any happier. 

Another example of another Question: What is heaven really like? 
Church Leader’s Answer: It’s like one long continuous church service that goes on forever. 
Bell’s response: That sounds more like hell!     

So some good ideas for thought, but I just wish this book was written better, and a bit differently.  I’m sure there are better, more detailed books around this subject, and I will one day make my way around reading a few.  Although most Protestant churches that I’ve attended don’t believe in Universal Salvation, I have to honestly say that I hope this author is correct.  I’ll also say that if God came down from heaven and told me that Universal Salvation was, in fact, true, I wouldn’t change one thing about my life as a Christian.  I would continue to go to church and study the Bible.  I wouldn’t cheat on my taxes, be an unfaithful husband, nor slash the tires of a few ex-bosses.  

The love of God is simply too amazing for me to live my life any different. 

Arctic Drift

Arctic Drift – Clive Cussler and Dirk Cussler

When Clive Cussler released this book, he was 77 years old.  He’s now 82, and he’s still churning out about four or five books per year.  The catch is that he co-authors all of these books with different writers now.  This leads one to speculate: Does he really have a big hand in writing these books?  Or is the co-author doing all of the work with Mr. Cussler just proofing the story?  Each one of his co-authors has a different hero and cast of characters, so it wouldn’t surprise me if this was the case.

Cussler made a name for himself, however, back in the 1970’s, with his nautical adventures featuring good ole’ Dirk Pitt.  Pitt was the original, and back then, Cussler didn’t need a co-author.  Not surprisingly, Cussler still manages to write a Dirk Pitt adventure every couple of years, however he now needs a co-author for these as well.  Again, not surprisingly, he’s chosen his son to co-author the Dirk Pitt adventures.  His son is named, get this, Dirk Cussler.

All of this is probably irrelevant to the actual story that is being reviewed here.  I enjoyed it.  I thought it was typical Dirk Pitt/Clive Cussler – we see many of the same things happen in all of these books, yet like your favorite roller coaster, it’s still a great ride.  There are some people that like his older stuff better, and they do an awful lot of whining about his current escapades, but I still enjoy them.

Being that this is the twentieth Dirk Pitt novel, it should be mentioned that there’s a small bit of linear progression throughout the books that might encourage a new reader to actually start at the beginning.  In the latter day Pitt novels (I don’t remember which book), he finally marries his Congresswoman sweetheart, and he discovers that he has a set of twin children from a romance years ago.  His children are grown up now (Summer is the girl, the boy is, yep, you guessed it – Dirk Jr.), and they have reconnected with dad.  Cussler finds good ways to interject the twins in the later books and make them relevant to the plot.  This is necessary since Dirk Sr. is now married, he can’t rescue a beautiful damsel in distress during the first few pages and make savage love to her at some point in the story anymore.

Oh, yeah.  The plot.  It seems that a rare element is discovered up in the Northwest Passage (that’s the water passage between Canada and the Arctic Circle.  You know, where it’s really cold).  This rare element actually has the power to stop global warming.  So the good guys want it to save the environment and the bad guys, of course, want it so they can sell it to the highest bidder and make millions.   Actually, the good guys need it to save the environment.  It seems like the U.S. in really bad shape these days. Gasoline is hovering at $10 a gallon! Yikes!

So just about every regular from the Pitt books is back, although with so many recurring characters, they don’t get as much page space as some of the earlier books.  The only regular that I find annoying is the “female” lifelike computer (I think her name is “Max”), that is used to uncover anything about everything, it seems, in the universe.  It’s pretty unbelievable. She would make Hal from 2001 seem like a retard.

There are a few instances in these books that I find mildly annoying, yet I take it for granted that this is just how it will always be for our heroes.  Example:  We quite frequently see Dirk and his buddy Al Giordino under water examining some sort of rare find, whether it’s a plant, sunken ship, or dead bodies from 500 years ago.  As they’re submerged thousands of feet under water, we’re always told things like: 

“Dirk and Al only had about 20 minutes left of air, but they kept going”
“They were now down to 5 minutes of air, but they kept going”
“Dirk an Al were now dangerously low on air, but they kept going”

I guess Dirk and Al feel they’re invincible or something.  Is it that difficult to go back to the ship, get more air, and go back down a second time?  It would seem to make a lot more sense, especially, when their carelessness gets them in big trouble.  All the time.  Over and over again. I don’t consider this a spoiler, because, again, it seems as though this happens so often.

At this point, the only other Cussler series I’ve read are his “NUMA Files” books, which deal with a slightly different set of characters, but the overall stories aren’t that different.  Maybe it’s my imagination, but the Dirk Pitt books seem slightly better, so you may want to choose a few of these before branching out.  Maybe it’s just my imagination, since Pitt is the original.

The Whole Truth

The Whole Truth by David Baldacci

It seems like David Baldacci writes and releases books faster than I can read them.  This book was written only six years ago (as I write this), yet it seems every time I turn around he’s released a new best seller to add to his impressive collection.  Fortunately, saturation doesn’t have to equal mediocrity, and I continue to enjoy his political thrillers.  Some more than others, yet this one seemed one of the best.

It seems there’s an evil big spender out there that wants to start a world war.  Actually, a cold world war.  This evil guy isn’t too evil, he just wants to continue to add billions to his already obsessive wealth.  Fortunately (for him) this is much easier to accomplish with the World Wide Web, viral videos, and the ever increasing amount of yellow journalism designed to entertain rather than inform.  So there are some sinister plans being put into place to make our once arch enemy Russia look like, once again, the bad guy, so that tensions can begin anew.

We then meet a guy named Shaw.  No last name.  He was raised as an orphan, and now is unwillingly working as a heavy for the U.S. government.  Think of a bigger, bulkier, yet older James Bond with a lot of testosterone.  Apparently Shaw is being blackmailed by the government, so he has to keep doing the bidding of his boss, yet it’s obvious Shaw wants out.  Still, we get to witness Shaw at his baddest best as he takes down several terrorists, drug dealers, etc.

Then we also meet Katie James.  She’s a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, yet her brilliant career is well in her past because of this thing called alcohol.  She’s so far gone, that she’s  regulated to writing for the obituary page.  That’s basically the death of a journalist when they get those types of assignments.  Pardon the pun.

Somehow, these two paths cross, as we know they will, to provide us with our story.  Shaw and Katie become a good team.  The two of them are purely platonic (like Baldacci’s King and Maxwell), yet this is probably because of a detail within the story that I don’t want to reveal here.  Once the story is all neatly concluded, you get the feeling that Baldacci may resurrect this pair for future novels (I checked.  Yep.  There’s one more as of this writing).

Some may have a problem with the whole “Wars aren’t really real and they’re only started so countries can make a profit” line, but Baldacci keeps this thing pretty apolitical.  A good thing, keeping politics out of stories.  I wish more authors would do that.

A pretty predictable story, really, but unique enough to keep one interested.  I would put this one in the “thumbs up” column.

Joyland

Joyland by Stephen King

Looking at the cover of this book and seeing this thing advertised as a “Hard Case Crime” story, you might think that King is trying something different here.  Maybe he’s taking a break from his macabre style and tackling a Mickey Spillane pulp-like story from the 1950s.  Don’t be fooled.  This is a Stephen King story through and through.  There’s nothing here that makes this story different from 90% of what the man has written — except the weird cover.

I’ve mentioned in several other reviews of King’s work, that he isn’t really that much of a horror author, although the majority of his books do seem to contain several elements of the unexplained or the unseen.  Joyland pretty much fits this description.  Oh sure, there’s a ghost or two contained in the story, but this isn’t exactly a tale that will require you to sleep with a night light.

Devin Jones is a 21 year old college kid going to school up in the Northeast.  He sees an advert to work in an amusement park in North Carolina for a summer, and it sounds like a fun thing to do.  So Devin heads south and begins a “Carny” adventure.  There are a lot of “Carny” references in this story, but the Joyland park isn’t a sleazy carnival that travels from town to town.  No, it’s more of a respectable amusement park anchored in a small town that’s probably in a league just below a Six Flags, and barely manages to squeeze a profit each year.

And the job is fun.  Or at least Devin seems to really like it.  Part of the fascination is that he’s also trying to escape the pain of a broken heart.  You see, his girlfriend back home is slowly dumping him during these few months.  He kind of knows it all along, but he hangs on to hope until one day when he gets the fateful “Dear John” letter.  So work away at the park he does to try to forget his lost love.  There are other college kids here working over the summer as well, and many of them share a boarding house up the beach from the park.  It’s actually a pretty good gig for a young kid during the summer, and Devin manages to make a couple of lifelong pals.

The real thrill at Joyland, is that, see, there was a murder in the “fun house” ride many years ago.  They never caught the killer, and it’s said that the ghost of the murdered girl still haunts the ride.  In these kids’ spare time, they do a lot of detective work, going through old newspapers etc. trying to piece together clues that will help them answer a lot of questions.

There are a lot of other supernatural forces at work here as well.  A bit too much, really.  Maybe I’m just saying that because I think the story could have done quite well without a lot of the woo-hoo.  I don’t mind woo-hoo, it just didn’t seem that necessary here, at least not to the extreme lengths that the tale is presented.

I should also mention that the story is told in first person, but happened around 40 years ago.  Devin, now in his sixties, is an author of stories for several random magazine periodicals, so he’s telling us a tale of his youth that, obviously, has stayed with him very solidly.  For better or worse.

I enjoyed the book, although it wasn’t one of King’s truly memorable tales.  My guess is that, one year from now, I will have probably forgotten most of the details.  I thought the ending tied up all of the pieces a bit too neatly and too quickly.  This is a rare instance where I felt that Stephen King should have made a story longer as opposed to trimming it several hundred pages.  Had he did that, though, he may not have been able to release it in this “Hard Case” paperback format, which seems to be one of his main intentions for some silly reason.

Behind the Scenes at a Museum

Behind the Scenes at a Museum  by Kate Atkinson

How is it possible that a book can be so incredibly depressing, yet so hilarious at the same time?  How is it that a book that really can’t even really claim to have a plot be so enthralling and engulfing?  Kate Atkinson is fast becoming one of my favorite authors after having read this, only my second book (“When Will There Be Good News” - first) of hers.  I found many similarities between the two and, whereas I can see the style may not appeal to everyone, I thought it incredibly refreshing, original and unique.

This book is essentially the story of Ruby Lennox, “told” in first person, from the exact moment of her conception in 1951.  She immediately takes note of her new world, learning about her future surroundings with awe, innocence, and a bit of apprehension.  She feels apprehension for a very good reason.  As soon as we see her new family, we know the poor girl is in trouble as soon as her drunken father nakedly rolls off her annoyed mother.  As mom and dad (Bunty and George) start the next day, you can see that this couple - and their family of two girls, is a long long way from “Father Knows Best”.  There’s no love at all in this house, and Dad sleeps around a lot in addition to his frequent drinking binges. On the outside, the family does do a good job appearing normal in 1950’s England, as they live above a pet shop that provides the family their income.  Money wise, they seem to be o.k., but oh, what a miserable family.

When Ruby is born and grows up (the chapters in the book jump around a few years at a time), the family, fortunately, doesn’t realize just how miserable they are.  How can you call yourself miserable when you’ve only known misery your whole life?  So they plod along as best they can.  If this book sounds too depressing to pick up, well, that’s part of the irony that makes this book so good.  The author has a way of injecting odd bits of humor and every turn, to where you can’t help laughing at these poor sods.

This book isn’t just about Ruby and her immediate family.  Oh no.  There are tons of aunts, uncles, cousins, in-laws, grandparents,  neighbors, etc. that will make your head spin.  It’s very easy to get lost with all of these individuals coming and going between the pages. A diagram of a family tree at the beginning of the book would have been quite helpful.  Fortunately, the extended family members don’t play too large of a role within the Lennox clan, so you don’t feel as though you’ve missed that much when you confuse “Ted” with “Tom”, etc.

In fact, the book almost spends as much focus on Bunty (Ruby’s mom) as Ruby herself.  There are several flashbacks of Bunty, herself, when she was young, and we even go back a prior generation as well.  We see lots of premature death, a wicked step mother, two world wars (many relatives killed), and a couple of diseases.  It seems as though Ruby’s mom, and her mom before her, were raised in similar tumultuous surroundings, so it’s not really much of a surprise when the cycle simply begins anew for Ruby and her siblings.

So we follow Ruby all the way until she is a middle aged adult.  Sadly, we never arrive at any sort of happy destination, nor do we see any changes for any future generations, but I still found the book a joy to read overall.  As mentioned, there were a tad too many relations and characters, but perhaps this was done purposely to add to the chaos of these individuals warped lives.  I’ll also point out that there are “hints” early in the book about a very dramatic event in Ruby’s childhood that is never described in much detail - and once the event has passed, your left scratching your head thinking you may have missed something.  The “event” is revealed much later in the story, and I must say that it was a bit unnecessary.  The whole episode probably could have been left out of the book without detracting at all from the story.

If you’re looking for a deliberate tale with a steadfast purpose within a story, this book probably isn’t for you.  However, if you enjoy having a first-hand glimpse of the comings and goings of a warped family (think reality t.v.), then I bet you would enjoy this one.