The Gospel Coalition

I think my eyes must have bugged out when I saw this week’s list of bestsellers. There are seven (count ‘em, seven!) new books on the list this week. That is the most I have ever seen. I don’t think it’s possible for me to read that many in just seven days, so I’ll hope that next week is a little more relaxed to allow me to play some catch-up.

As predicted, Levitt and Dubner’s Superfreakonomics made its appearance this week, jumping right to #2 on the list. It is, of course, the sequel to the megaselling Freakonomics which dominated the list for quite some time several years ago (and which is still hanging around the softcover list). Thankfully I received the book a couple of weeks ago so I’ve already read that one. A review will follow early next week.

I had also predicted that Malcolm Gladwell’s new book would make its appearance and, sure enough, What the Dog Saw debuted at #3. This means that Gladwell has two books in the top-8 on the hardcover list and two books in the top-8 on the softcover list. Considering he’s only ever written those 4 books, I’d say he’s a bona fide star. I’d love to see the royalty checks he must get! What the Dog Saw is a compilation of many of his columns from The New Yorker.

Coming in at #4 is Too Big To Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin (a third book I had predicted to make an appearance on the list. I’m getting good at this.). It offers “the inside story of how Wall Street and Washington fought to save the financial system–and themselves.” It is a big, big book that weighs in at over 600 pages. This book alone would make a good week’s reading, I think.

Down at #12 we’ve got Eating the Dinosaur by Church Klosterman. Though he seems to be a well-known writer, I don’t know him from Adam. A quick skim of his book, a collection of essays on pop culture, leaves me thinking that I won’t much enjoy it. We’ll see.

At #13 is this week’s only new celebrity memoir. Big Man is a life of Clarence Clemons who, I learned from the cover, plays saxophone for Bruce Springsteen. Considering that the last time I bought an listened to an album by Springsteen it was Born in the USA (1984) this does not mean a lot to me.

Next up at #14 is When Everything Changed by Gail Collins. The book presents “the amazing journey of American women from 1960 to the present.” This was my first foray into the women’s studies section of my local bookstore and I had to search long and hard to even find the section (which, in my defense, turned out to be in an illogical place).

Finally, at #15, is The Big Burn by Timothy Egan. I have read Egan’s The Worst Hard Time and really enjoyed that one, so I am hoping The Big Burn is just as good. It tells of the heroism displayed in fighting a huge forest fire in 1910–one that won public support for Theodore Roosevelt’s conservation efforts.

My week looks full. I’d best get to reading.

Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger is a hero. He has been hailed as such from coast-to-coast and from pole-to-pole. He is, as you probably know, the man who piloted Flight 1549, the ill-fated US Airways flight that departed from New York and landed moments later in the nearby Hudson River. In a remarkable feat of airmanship, Sullenberger landed an eighty-ton commercial airliner in a river so successfully that all 155 passengers and crew were able to escape largely unscathed. There were no deaths and only a handful of injuries. The story gripped the nation and Sullenberger was soon making appearances in just every major media outlet. He was a true hero.

Or that’s what everyone says. While I would never want to discount just how remarkable a pilot he must be to land a crippled jet in a river and to do so near-perfectly so that everyone survived, I wonder if this actually exalts him to hero status. When I think of a hero, I think of a person who rushes into danger, not a person who has it thrust upon him. A man who sees another person fall onto the subway tracks, who jumps down onto the tracks and holds the person down while a subway passes overhead–that is a hero. But a person flying a plane and doing a remarkable job of it, isn’t he just doing his job? So is Captain Sullenberger a hero? I am inclined to say that we have to stretch the word just a little bit to apply it to him. Judging by what he says in Highest Duty I suspect that he would be inclined to agree.

When we heard about Flight 1549 in January 2009, we knew that a book could not possibly be far behind. And sure enough, less than 10 months after the events of that day, it has arrived. It is a memoir written by Sullenberger and coauthored by Jeffrey Zaslow who also coauthored the mega-selling The Last Lecture (which makes me wonder, what do you call the co-author of a memoir? “Ghost writer” does not quite seem to fit…). It is, of course, the story of Sullenberger’s life. The thing is, his life has been remarkably unremarkable. Like most of us, he has lived a very quiet and otherwise unexceptional life. But somehow this does not keep the book from extending to some 339 pages which really has to be at least 100 pages too long. As I read I could almost hear in the background the voice of an editor saying to Zaslow, “Look, statistics show that a book of 300 pages sells 27% better than a book of 200 pages. So you’ve got some work to do. Ask him if he’s ever baked a batch of muffins and write about that!” And so, for example, there is a chapter about his humanitarian efforts which include helping to train guide dogs, showing a passenger where to find his luggage and, one time at least, making a phone call on behalf of another person. There are a few chapters like this which really seem unnecessary “fluff”–things so very normal and unremarkable that they seem to be there only for the sake of taking up a few more pages. Yawn.

Notably absent in the book, at least to a Christian reader, is any mention of God. I found myself waiting for Sullenberger to eventually say something about God’s hand in the events of that day. But it never comes. I wouldn’t say this is a weak point in the book and Sullenberger is certainly under no obligation to acknowledge God as his copilot on that day. Yet this really was notable in its absence and especially so in America where such situations tend to turn so quickly to a kind of gratitude to God.

Highest Duty is at its best when it is giving a Captain’s-eye view of the events of January 15, 2009. In those moments, the book is quite riveting, especially to a person who, like me, really enjoys reading about airlines and airline disasters (kind of a morbid preoccupation, I know. Any other fans out there of the series Mayday?). But there is a lot to read before you come to this. Before that are many, many pages of rather unremarkable filler. I still enjoyed reading the book and have no great beef with it–it’s just that it does not make for the most enthralling reading.

Verdict: Wait for the paperback

I am still new at this task and am still learning how bestsellers make their way onto the list. I am beginning to see that there is a lag between the time that books hit the store shelves and when they can actually appear on the list of bestsellers. For example, this week saw the release of the long-awaited sequel to Freakonomics titled not-too-imaginatively SuperFreakonomics. I’m sure it is destined to appear on the list and yet this week it was missing. So too was Malcolm Gladwell’s What the Dog Saw. While granting that this book is not an original work like his previous books, the idea of a Gladwell book not appearing on the list is harder to believe than the idea of my book making an appearance. You heard it here first: both books will be there next week! I can’t imagine it any other way.

This week saw two new titles added to the list. Debuting at the #3 spot is Highest Duty by Chesley Sullenberger, the airline pilot who landed his Airbus on the Hudson earlier this year. You knew a book was going to follow that deed and sure enough, here it is. It is subtitled My Search for What Really Matters and is described as an “inspirational autobiography.” I am always interested in aircraft and, strangely enough, airline disasters, so this ought to prove interesting. I’ll be surprised if it is actually very inspirational, but I’m prepared to be inspired!

Coming in at #11 is America for Sale by Jerome Corsi who authored Unfit for Command, the book that was instrumental in undoing the presidential campaign of John Kerry. The book’s subtitle probably says it all: Fighting the New World Order, Surviving a Global Depression, and Preserving USA Sovereignty. I’m guessing Corsi doesn’t like Obama any more than he liked Kerry! Interestingly, the book is marked with a dagger (†) on the New York Times list indicating that some bookstores report receiving bulk orders. In other words, it may be that someone is buying the book in bulk quantities and at the retail price in order to push it onto the list of bestsellers. I have not been able to track down a copy of this book so I will add it to the list, along with last week’s Read My Pins, of bestsellers I will read as soon as I can find a copy.

Ken Burns is easily the cream of the crop when it comes to documentary film making (take that, Michael Moore!). The Civil War, The War, Baseball…his credentials go on and on. Each of his documentaries has been amazing in its own way. His latest film is called The National Parks and like its predecessors, it is accompanied by a coffee table book. I was rather surprised to see that book, with its $50 price tag, spring onto the list of bestsellers and remain there for a couple of weeks.

Coming in at over 400 pages and weighing about as much as a small car, The National Parks is chock full of both text and pictures. The book follows the same format as the film, offering six chapters that cover roughly the same material. Chapters average fifty or sixty pages and they are split roughly evenly between text and photographs. The text is interesting enough, describing the genesis of “America’s best idea.” The photographs are often stunning, showing some of the most amazing scenery America has to offer. My only complaint, if we can label it that, is that the paper used in the book could use a bit more gloss in order to really make those pictures pop. Nevertheless, even as they are, they provide amazing evidence of the beauty to be found in America’s parks.

What gripped me as I read the book was the beautiful simplicity of the idea behind the National Parks. In days past and in other nations, the richest people, the most powerful people, had been able to have their nature preserves, their areas of unbroken and pure land. They had been able to set aside these little bits of paradise for themselves and had been able to enforce privacy, ensuring that the commoners were kept far away. In America, though–the land of free–vast areas of land were set aside specifically for the common man. The National Parks were to be held in trust by the nation for the benefit of all Americans in all of time. The parks were an investment in the future. One needs only look to Niagara Falls to see what happens when such stunning scenery goes unprotected. There is hardly a square inch of the Falls that is not in some way defiled, in some way exploited. It is due to the efforts of those who fought for the National Parks that Yellowstone and Yosemite and the Badlands and all these other areas remain largely undefiled. America’s best idea is really in some ways her simplest. Many generations have benefited from it already and many more will continue to do so. America would not be what she is without her National Parks.

Verdict: Buy it

This week there was only one new book added to the list of bestsellers, so I get a well-earned (I think) and much-needed (my wife thinks) respite after having to read nine books over the previous two weeks. The new book was Madeleine Albright’s strangely-titled Read My Pins. This appears to be a kind of coffee table book that shares photos of the various pins she wore on her clothing during her years as a diplomat and the story behind each one of them. It’s rather an unlikely topic for a book, I suppose, and my only interest is in seeing whether she can sustain any kind of enjoyment through 170+ pages of pins. That seems a tall order. Unfortunately it may be a little while before I can find out whether or not she succeeds. The book is out of stock on Amazon and is not available locally in any book shop. I guess it must have been unexpectedly popular, selling out the first printing. I will provide a review as soon as I can track it down.

Yesterday I received a copy of SuperFreakonomics, the sequel to the mega-selling Freakonomics. Though it is not yet on the bestseller lists, I am going to go out on a limb and guess it will be there soon enough. I will post a review soon.

It is not at all surprising to see the name James Patterson on the list of bestsellers. After all, he has sold an incredible 170 million books over the years, making him one of the bestselling authors of all time. What is surprising, though, is to see Patterson’s name on the non-fiction list. To this point his bestsellers have been novels–the Alex Cross series, the Women’s Murder Club novels, and so on. And yet here he is with The Murder of King Tut, hovering near the top of the non-fiction list.

King Tut is a fascinating character, one of the few ancient kings who is widely-known today. He was a boy king, only nine years old when he became Pharaoh and just eighteen or nineteen when he died. His death has been the cause of much speculation since the discovery of his tomb in 1922. Recent research, based on what appears to be a skull fracture, has put forward the view that Tut was murdered. But Tut’s life is shrouded by the past and history is strangely silent about the events surrounding his death.

This does not stop Patterson from suggesting how he thinks it all happened. Though this book is labeled “non-fiction” and though the cover says it is a “non-fiction thriller” this book is clearly and unapologetically a mix of fact, fiction and speculation. Patterson wraps his interpretation of events in two stories–that of Tut himself and that of Howard Carter, the man who discovered his tomb thousands of years later. Typical for Patterson, the story has mystery, murder, intrigue and a little bit of hanky panky. Where the record is silent, Patterson speaks out, creating an adaptation of history that is all his own. He occasionally seeks to lend his interpretation credibility by writing a page or two about his own research, but really, let’s be honest–this is historical fiction much more than it is a non-fiction thriller. There are thousands of titles in the bookstore written in a similar way to this one and they are all (correctly) labeled as fiction.

While I would not recommend the book as either fact or fiction, I can’t deny that it did provide an opportunity for thought. In a postmodern age, we are often confronted with the very nature of truth. What is truth? What is historical truth? Today it is not unusual to encounter books, labeled as non-fiction, where truth has either been completely fabricated or where speculation, even honest and likely-to-be-true speculation, is passed off as fact. While it is easy to understand this as merely a literary issue, one to be dealt with between an author and publisher, I believe the issues go a little deeper than that. Is truth, and in this case historical truth, fixed? Or can we speculate and do so under the banner of fact? The Murder of King Tut brings these questions to the bestseller list. Unfortunately, it’s brought them to the non-fiction list.

Verdict: Skip it

It is a rare occasion that I find it difficult to point out any redeeming features in a book–when I struggle to find a single positive to write in a review. Unfortunately Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God is one of those books–one that is so monstrously bad, so hopelessly awful, so wretchedly miserable, that it took concerted effort just to finish it. Heck, even the cover stinks–a pile of religiously-significant books hovering at a strange angle over a plain background. I tell you what: I will concede the font. The book is set in Granjon, a very nice, classical font that is very consistent with the earliest Garamond type faces. It is classy and classical but without being antique. But that is as good as the book gets.

I can save you thirty-five bucks and many hours of your life by telling you that 99% of what Armstrong has to say about God and religion she squeezes into the Introduction and the Epilogue, which together take up just 23 of the 340 pages of this book. There she spews forth what she really believes about God and those who seek to follow him. Though she writes about all faiths, she focuses almost exclusively on Christianity. The reader will learn, among other things: that nobody before modern times was foolish enough to believe that the Bible should be read as fact, as if the Creation account has any value beyond a mythological attempt to describe the world’s beginning; that the doctrine of the infallibility of Scripture was unknown until the 1870’s when Hodge and Warfield dreamed it up; that Socratic dialogue with atheists would help us understand how we can be more faithful believers in God; that truth is found not by understanding or believing, but by doing; that the purpose of religion is to discover new capacities of mind and heart; that the danger to religion and the danger to the world is not religious adherents, but fundamentalist believers–those who believe in the exclusivity of their faith and who fall into old beliefs such as the infallibility of their scriptures. And that is just a sampling of a mere 23 pages.

The rest of the book is an extended revisionist look at the history of religion in general and the Christian faith in particular. Armstrong seeks to show that the modern Christian God (I hesitate to capitalize God in the way she uses the name) is vastly different from the “unknown” God of pre-modern times. God was once mysterious and unknown, so transcendent, so other that people could not hope to really know who he is or how he acted. But then modernism had to come along and ruin a perfectly good deity by insisting that God could be known, that he even desired to be known. What the author believes we need to do, of course, is return to God as a mystery, to God as an unknowable force who combines the best of all the world religions. Along the way she pauses to offer a few words about nearly every religious leader and every philosopher who ever uttered God’s name. It is absolutely exhausting and, for simplistic old-school fundie Christians like myself, utterly exasperating. With her facts on the basics of the Christian faith so far from the truth and with her obvious bias, I actually found myself reading deliberately trying not to comprehend, not to retain, what she said. After all, having proven herself utterly untrustworthy in the basics, how could I trust her in anything else?

The Case for God, then, is in no way a case for the God of the Bible or, really, for the God of most other faiths. Rather, it is a defense of making the idea of God respectable again, even if it means radically changing what we mean by that name. It is an absolute mess and easily one of the most boring, most obnoxious books I’ve ever read.

Verdict: Skip it.

I did not ever read Tuesdays With Morrie, a book that has been described as “The bestselling memoir of all time.” I find that claim a little difficult to believe, but I suppose that the eleven million copies in print may prove it correct. From the pen of that author, Mitch Albom, now comes Have a Little Faith, a book that shot straight to the top of the New York Times list of bestsellers within days of its release. Like its predecessor, this book is probably best-termed a memoir, a book that describes the impact of a pair of clergymen on the life of the author.

The book begins with a request. An eighty-two year-old rabbi from Albom’s hometown asks if he will deliver his eulogy. This leads Albom on a quest to learn enough about the man that he can deliver an effective eulogy. This draws him back to a consideration of the Jewish faith he had walked away from as a young adult. At the same time, near his new home in Detroit, he encounters a pastor who, despite a past in which he was a drug dealer and convict, is leading a ministry that serves the poor and destitute. The book alternates between these two worlds, between these two faiths and Albom’s attempts to get to know both of the men.

Have a Little Faith is a well-written and interesting book that has already been widely praised. The endorsements on the book’s cover range from Bob Dole to Bishop T.D. Jakes; from Rabbi Harold Kushner to Tony Dungy. The book reflects the diversity of the endorsers, seeking to emphasize what unites these faiths and all others. It is a defense of the kind of faith that is so popular today–a type of religious belief that de-emphasizes distinctives and plays up the importance of unity. It is a book about religion, about faith in general, more than it is a book about the Christian faith. Unfortunately but undoubtedly, it is a book that could easily comfort a person in a faith that excludes Jesus Christ. And in that way it is a book that misrepresents the Bible, for the Scriptures will not allow for such a faith. The Bible demands exclusivity, it demands that we understand that Jesus Christ is the only way to the Father.

So I guess the irony in Have a Little Faith is that the unity Albom purports to find between all faiths is a unity that comes at the expense of at least one of those faiths. It is a unity that cannot be sustained or supported by one who holds fast to the Bible. This is a book that makes for a quick and enjoyable read, but in its moral, its great theme, it falls tragically flat. It tickles the ear of those who read it, but does not strike straight to the great truths of the Christian faith.

Verdict: Skip It

It has been a couple of years since Richard Dawkins’ last major work, The God Delusion. That book was a long-time fixture on the bestseller lists and served to establish Dawkins as the foremost spokesman for the New Atheists. Dawkins has long had two related emphases in his writing and speaking: the non-existence of God and the evidence in nature that evolution is responsible for all that exists. Where The God Delusion emphasized the former, his latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth, emphasizes the latter. It is primarily a counter-attack to advocates of Intelligent Design, and represents Dawkins’ attempt to provide natural evidence for evolution. He says simply, “Evolution is a fact, and this book will demonstrate it.”

It will not surprise you to hear that I was not convinced by Dawkins’ evidences for evolution. I will not provide a rebuttal of those evidences here since I know that others who are more qualified than I am will do just that. Instead, in just a few paragraphs, let me share a few of my thoughts on this book and what I consider its more prominent flaws.

Overall, there is a thread of arrogance in many of Dawkins’ arguments. On the one hand Dawkins wants to show how science continues to make vast and important discoveries; he wants to show that science is living and always advancing, disproving old theses in favor of new ones. On the other hand he wants to act as if all we know about evolution we know for certain. So when we see that the retina in the human eye has the appearance of being installed backwards, we can therefore state with certainty that this is the case and that it is the result of a mutation that was overcome by fortuitous adaptations in the human brain. In other words, the human eye is a mistake. But how are we to know that an advance in science, two years from now, will not show that this is no accident but is just that way it has to be—or, to borrow from the world of software, that it is a feature instead of a bug. He relies on science to prove what is absolutely true or false, never pointing out how often science has been wrong in the past and how often a new advance overshadows or disproves an old one. The history of science gives me little confidence that, in the end, he will be proven correct even with an issue as simple as the human eye.

Dawkins holds up the invariability of DNA code across all living creatures as evidence of shared ancestry (since the genetic code is shared across all living things—it is what is written in the code, not the code itself, that distinguishes one creature from another). But when I look at the same thing, I see that it points in the opposite direction. I see it, quite obviously, as evidence of a common artist. If I look at two paintings and see that they bear a great degree of similarity to one another, that they feature similar scenes and a similar brand of realism or abstraction, I do not assume that one painting evolved from the other or that together they evolved from a common ancestor; instead, I assume that they have come from the hand, the brush, of the same artist. I can grant that there is a sense in which man is related to ape and aardvark—we share a common designer. The fact that my DNA resembles that of any other living creature simply reinforces this fact. Believing in Creation does not demand that we suppose God did not reuse any parts or that every creature has to be entirely different from every other creature. One who believes in God as Creator can affirm that he is the designer and that he based all living things on common elements.

One thing I noted often in the pages of The Greatest Show on Earth is that it is often difficult to know where fact ends and speculation begins. When Dawkins says that a kind of beetle has, over evolutionary time, evolved to resemble the ant it preys upon, do we know this is the case, or is Dawkins simply filling in what he considers a logical hole? Can he prove that this beetle began looking like something other than it is now using the same scientific rigor he demands of Creationists? Or is this just speculation? In this book he rarely distinguishes between the two. Needless to say, this leads to a fair bit of potential confusion.

There is a deep and obvious irony in Dawkins’ constant use of words of agency. In his worldview there is, at least in nature and in the universe, no planning, no design, no invention, no creation, no purpose. Everything has come to be through a long process of chance. Yet throughout the book he constantly softens this harsh reality by borrowing the words of agency and purpose. Why? Could it be that the world just too hard to contemplate without injecting some kind of higher purpose into it? But there is more. Very often he turns to examples or metaphors to explain what he is trying to communicate and, again, almost invariably these examples depend on some kind of agency. So, for example, he will discuss how there came to be so many varied breeds of dog, each descended from the wolf. This may be an evidence of evolution, but if so, it evidences a designer who made the decisions about which breed would have long legs and which would have short ones, which would have big ears and which would have small ones. It was human agency that shaped each of these breeds of dog! How can this then stand as an example of the agent-less, impersonal forces of nature? Again and again he falls into this trap.

All this caused me to reflect on how cold, how stark the world would be without some kind of agency. A scientist can conjure up in his mind ways of describing the world without God, but he has a lot more trouble explaining it. Design seems to scream for a designer, elegance for agency. Even Dawkins cannot deny that the world gives the appearance of design; so his task is to prove that the most obvious explanation is not the correct one. I would challenge Dawkins in his future books not to use this cop out, not to say photosynthesis was “invented” by bacteria more than a million years ago. This is an unfair condescension that perhaps just proves that he cannot maintain his line of reasoning with any kind of consistency. Always he denies a designer, yet so often he perhaps-inadvertently invokes one.

In this book I see the importance of what we can call worldview—the way each of us understands the world, the way each of us interprets all of life. Dawkins’ worldview demands that there is no God and that everything came to be without the assistance or oversight of a designer. Not surprisingly, then, everywhere he looks he sees evidence to support his presuppositions, just as a Creationist looks to Creation and sees evidence of God. If I go out hunting for bigfoot, convinced of his existence, I will inevitably find evidence to support my theory. I will find vague footprints and half-eaten meals, each of which will prove to me that I am hot on bigfoot’s trail. My presuppositions shape my conclusions. So this book shows me again that it is impossible, or near-impossible, to overcome our worldviews.

This book shows that Dawkins is still angry, still shocked that anyone could be so hopelessly confused as to believe in God and to doubt naturalistic evolution. In fact, he refers to such people as “history-deniers,” people who see the evidence, spit on it, and turn instead to their comfortable old deities. “No reputable scientist disputes it,” he says, but of course he would use circular logic to define a reputable scientist. He would never admit that a scientist could be reputable and deny evolution. Here we have the same old Dawkins. Sure he tries a new approach, but ultimately it is more of the same.

Is there value in reading The Greatest Show on Earth?. I am inclined to think that there is, at least for some people. I find it useful to read books written from an opposing viewpoint since they provide a very natural “check” for me. They help me wrestle with not only what I believe but how I express what I believe. This book gave me a lot to think about in that regard. And, though Dawkins insisted that the unbiased reader will close the book convinced of the validity of evolution, this was not the case for me. Then again, does the unbiased reader even exist? We’ve already shown that Dawkins is far from unbiased himself.

Verdict: Wait for the paperback

After a two-year battle with pancretic cancer Patrick Swayze died exactly two weeks before the release of his memoir The Time of My Life. Interestingly, Ted Kennedy died of a similar disease at nearly the same time and also just weeks before the release of his memoir. I suppose this is notable only because both of their books ended up on the New York Times list of bestsellers and, hence, on my reading list. The Time of My Life, co-written with Swayze’s life Lisa Niemi, is a well-written, fast-paced memoir that, at just less than 250 pages is just about the right size for a quick read.

Perhaps the most notable thing about Swayze’s life was that he remained married to his wife for thirty-four years. Married when he was twenty three and she nineteen, they remained together from obscurity to the peak of fame. She was still at his side when he died. Though they endured times of pain and separation, they remained married and, as far as I know, faithful to one another. Needless to say, this cuts against the grain of Hollywood and its widespread serial monogamy. Swayze and Niemi are among the few who managed to stay together for better and worse.

Though this is mostly a “vanilla” memoir of a life known mostly for roles in film rather than any great or enduring endeavors, there was one aspect of the book that stood out to me–Swayze’s attempts to describe what it is like to be as famous as he was at the height of his fame. “It’s hard to describe exactly what it feels like to be thrust into this kind of fame, but ‘whirlwind’ comes pretty close. Everything about you is just spinning. You try to touch it, to get a grasp on it, but it just spins faster and faster. If I had found myself in the middle of something like this when I was younger, when I first came to Hollywood, it probably would have destroyed me. In many ways, dealing with fame is the purest form of dealing with your demons.” He goes on to state that “the easiest way to destroy people is to give them exactly what they want. You might not realize it at the time, but the struggle to achieve something is, in many ways, much more satisfying than actually getting it. The very act of striving is what keeps you alive, and it keeps you grounded. But then, when the thing you’ve been fighting for is suddenly in your grasp, it’s all too easy to look around and say–is that all there is?”

“Is that all there is?” That is an interesting question from a man who very suddenly found himself achieving exactly what he had set out to achieve. He had found international fame, he was the sexiest man in the world, he was the envy of every man in America. And yet he had to wonder, “is that all there is?” Celebrities who are honest about their fame will often voice a similar question. Having given themselves to the pursuit of fame and having been thrilled by the pursuit, they are often robbed of the satisfaction they were convinced it would all bring. Those who have read the Bible and absorbed what it teaches will not be the least bit surprised.

In most ways The Time of My Life is just another celebrity memoir, right down to the seemingly-inevitable struggles with addiction (in this case, addiction to alcohol). It is not without its highlights, but on the whole it mainly describes the life of a man who was known for being known. He was gifted in many ways and had endless opportunities extended to him. He wrestled with issues of faith and found himself drawn mostly into the stream of contemporary Western-influenced Buddhism. But his greatest accomplishment, the one he will be remembered for, is likely to be Dirty Dancing. And in the end, that does not seem to be much of a legacy.

Verdict: Skip it