2020: What One Writer Reads
Fundamentally, everything I do comes from writing. Hannah Arendt, the Jewish philosopher, said it well, “I write in order to think.” That is true of millions of people whether they are making a grocery list or polishing off a complex novel. I started by falling in love with words and how sentences are put together. When I became a follower of Jesus, I read the bible over and over again. Then I began to read books that I chose to read that were not assigned by any professor. Fifty years have passed, and I continue to read thirty plus books a year. I mean really read them. I read them slowly, I take notes, and I catalogue their contents for future reference in my writing. I read hundreds of articles and parts of many other books in the process of research. I must confess I now listen to another fifteen or twenty books while working out along with podcasts. The key to creativity for me is to constantly fill my brain with new ideas, even those with which I disagree. It keeps my mind flexible, growing, and young in its curiosity.
Reading, writing, teaching, and speaking for me all come from the same place. That place is the mind and God told us to start there because that is the seat of language and thought. We cannot think clearly in any way that helps us or others without language. That language must be read, thought, written, and spoken. Even Helen Keller who was blind and deaf needed language before she could learn. She learned several languages via braille. Anything I have done as a leader or pastor has been based in scripture and in the wisdom of others regarding it and about life itself.
I think of 2020 in terms of what I have learned in reading and writing. I have written over 50 weekly columns, produced forty plus podcasts, and delivered many speeches, webinars, and lectures. Below you will find my favorite books of 2020 and why.
1. Patton: A Genius for War by Carlo D’Este
I like complex characters and Patton indeed was a hard nut to crack. A wealthy Californian who lived a privileged childhood, but at a young age decided he was born to greatness. He thought his purpose was to die in battle on fields of glory. He was born and raised Episcopal but believed in reincarnation. He could and would curse among the best, but a moment later be found on his knees in prayer. He was loved by his men, he was hated, respected, and tolerated by his fellow generals. The kind of man that God created to do the world’s dirty work and then we tend to discard. Eight hundred pages, small print, worth every page.
2. Killing Crazy Horse by Bill O’Reilly & Melvin Dugard
At first, I wondered where Crazy Horse was in this book. But then I reread the subtitle, “The Merciless Indian Wars in America.” It turns out that I was treated to a very solid history of the conflict with the American government and the American Indian. It reaffirmed my belief that two things can be true at the same time. You can have horrific atrocities, and good that come from conflict. Americans can know that our country has been a great country and a bad country. Very similar to the human being, in fact, history is the story of imperfect human beings, good and evil and the drama that confronts us.
3. 1984 by George Orwell
A story of a dystopian existence incarnated in the character of Winston Smith. Utopian dreams end in a dystopian reality. Orwell warned us that utopia is literally nowhere, because the only way to control people and make them deny the reality around them is tyranny. The slogans perpetuated by Big Brother where War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength. It makes one grunt, huh? This novel has given us various cultural keepers like “Memory Hole,” and “Ministry of Information.” Without question, Orwell’s writing was the best I read all year. He pounded this out on the Isle of Man while chain smoking and bleeding from his nose and coughing up blood from his lung cancer. He was in a hurry to issue this warning before he would leave us. If you want the best description of poverty on record, please read Orwell’s Down and Out in London & Paris.
4. The Devil’s Pleasure Palace by Michael Walsh
No contest, the most eloquent book I read in 2020. Michael Walsh the former classical music critic of Time magazine, marshalled all his skills as a novelist, screenwriter, and cultural expert to unmask the Frankfurt school and its Marxist roots. He made the story of the critical theory dance like Mikhail Baryshnikov across the stage of history. Walsh contends that like Pandora’s Box, it released a horde of demons into the American psyche. The book’s title comes from Schubert’s first opera, Des Teufels Lustschloss, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace. Lucifer’s pleasure palace is the critical theory and the horror it has unleashed on the world. Here is just a sample of Walsh’s writing.
“The world sought by the Frankfurt School and its Critical Theory disciples is all an illusion, just as surely as the Teufels Lustschloss was. The corpses of the untold millions who have died in the attempts of the literally Unholy Left to find the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth, divorced from God, surely testify.”
Expect to learn about painting, literature, opera, poetry, theology and philosophy. The one book I would be most likely to reread with eagerness. But its danger is all the side roads I would take into learning more about the arts.
5. Shame by Shelby Steele
Shelby Steele, one of the great minds and courageous persons now in the academic world. Steele is a veteran of the civil rights movement, once radical enough to be interested in and to spend time with the Black Panthers in the 1970s. He committed the unpardonable sin by becoming a conservative. He really sold out when he became a fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University. Shame is a contrarian view of the entire worldview and program of the African American grievance industry. Steele, as an African American. takes the view that white guilt has been used by the industry to shame whites into providing special privileges, welfare, quotas, etc. that have made matters worse. It has increased white supremacy and black subservience in that they continue to rely on whites to help them get jobs, go to school, and get equal results rather than equality of opportunity. He goes on to demonstrate that whites don’t respect black achievement under such circumstances and African Americans know it’s not the same as well. It creates a world of false achievement. He points out that the black underclass is a product of white guilt’s attempts to make up for past sins, but have made poverty worse, and particularly the government’s rules of engagement in the welfare state have destroyed the black family. Be prepared to think.
6. The Color of Compromise by Jemar Tisby & Film Series
In contrast to Steele’s Shame, there is the “shame on you church” book and series by a much younger African American, Jemar Tisby. I found the book and film series very well done, gripping, moving, and historically accurate regarding events. The church really did the bad things Tisby recounted; they were part of the larger cultural problem, philosophy, and slave industry. There is no substitute for staring the sin of our nation right in the eye, admitting it, and for the nation to repent of its sin. I am thankful that Tisby has done this fine work. I am, however, not in agreement with the recommended solutions or even several of the conclusions. I have mentioned these differences in my weekly columns over the past year. In brief, America has confessed their societal sin, has repented, and has spent billions of dollars on repairing the damage done to African Americans. Racism is illegal in the United States, now it is a matter of the heart. What once was systemic is now spiritual, it is systemic only in people’s hearts and minds. The answer is not more national programs, but for people to seek God’s guidance and mind. Regardless of where you are in this process, I would recommend taking this book and film series on board and asking God what he wants from you.
7. Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt
Adolf Eichmann was a Colonel in the Nazi SS during World War II. He will go down in infamy for being the bureaucrat who designed the complex transportation system needed to shuttle six million Jews to their systematic executions. He escaped capture after the war and settled in Argentina with his family. He worked in an automobile factory as a foreman under the name Ricardo Klement. He was found and illegally kidnapped by Israeli Mossad agents in May of 1960. He was secretly transported to Jerusalem for trial. Hannah Arendt, a German born Jewish philosopher, living in New York City was sent by the New Yorker Magazine to Jerusalem to cover Eichmann’s trial.
Arendt’s articles and subsequent book were controversial and some never forgave her for what the Jewish community considered a betrayal. She said two things that were highlights, the first was that a case could be made that Eichmann should not have been tried by the Jews under Jewish law when Eichmann was a German and his actions were in accordance with German law during Hitler’s time. She seemed to advise the defendant’s lawyers on how to argue the case in favor of Eichmann. The second, and much more offensive to every reader, was what she called the banality of evil. She pointed out that Eichmann was an ordinary, banal type figure and was no more evil than the next person given the context of his crimes. This is quite an uncomfortable and unpopular belief since most want the Eichmanns and the Hitlers of the world to be different from us and evil in a special way. She simply pointed out that Eichmann never killed anyone with his own hands, could not stand the sight of blood, and was not personally an anti-Semite. As you probably could guess, this created quite a furor and remains to this day a source of passionate argument among intellectuals. Hannah Arendt was and remains a great thinker, writer, and puzzling figure.
8. The Club by Leo Damrosch
This was one of those rare books I looked forward to reading every night and was sad when it ended. The Club was an informal gathering of great minds and men during England’s 1700s. This constellation of talent contributed to the culture in which we all live today - Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Edmund Burke, Edward Gibbon, and Adam Smith. The greatest British critic, biographer, philosopher, historian, and economist of all time. The group would meet in a London pub, most memorably at the Turk’s Head Tavern. They would talk, laugh, drink, eat, and argue until late into the night at their weekly meetings. I always find learning about the men and their lives, their friendships, their petty disagreements, passions and problems provide entertaining and helpful insight and understanding into their work. If you are a lover of England and its history, then hours of pleasure are before you.
9. Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neal Postman
I read this classic when it first came out in the 1980s. I reread it this year and it is even more relevant today than then. He essentially says that new and serious political and social debate would come to us in the form of entertainment that would amuse us. There are so many great insights, I would love to hear Postman’s comments today, unfortunately he is now deceased. Some of Postman’s 1980s comments are memorable. “The A-Team and Cheers are no threat to our public health,” he wrote. “60 Minutes and Eyewitness News, and Sesame Street are.” And I might add “Happy Days” and the glorification of the “Fonzie” did great damage to America’s moral character. Henry Winkler by the way, seems to be a very fine person, much better than the Fonz.
10. Future Church by Will Mancini & Cory Hartman
I don’t read too many church books these days. They tend to bore me and, frankly, I’m not that interested in details of how to get things done anymore. This book was an exception. I was anything but bored, I was fully engaged as I read the entire book carefully and noted many highlights. I think Mancini and Hartmann have broken some new ground with regard to making disciples which has become the accepted priority in new church verbiage in the last five years. The book is filled with interesting analogies, windows and illustrations, and graphs and charts that help the reader make it through to the end. There was a sense of drama in that I kept reading because I wanted to know the bottom line, the book became valuable to me. People only keep reading something because they are paid to by someone or must do so to receive a grade or degree. The only other time a person keeps reading is they consider the information valuable.
I thought the Upper Room/Lower Room image was a great way to house the basic concepts they were presenting. In particular, their insights about how vision and the why driving the church and not the Lower Room issues like attendance, finance, programs, personalities, and performance. They acknowledged the importance of Lower Room realities and the value they have, and at the same time kept returning the reader to the Upper Room where the things that really matter are found. The bottom line as I read it was the same question I asked in my works written during the 1980s, “What is the church’s product? What are we producing and deploying onto the field of life where we live, work, and play?”
