The Gospel Coalition

I didn’t much care for tennis until I met a girl who was a member of a tennis club. Suddenly, at seventeen, I found myself drawn to the sport and was soon taking lessons (with her!) and learning to enjoy the game. She and I played until we got married and have only rarely been out on the courts since. But along the way I began to enjoy watching the professionals play. That was during Andre Agassi’s heyday and it was always fun to watch him, especially when he played his friend and arch-rival Pete Sampras. Though Sampras will go down in history as one of the game’s all-time greats, it was Agassi who was the fan favorite. His flair, his personality, his style–somehow they made him larger than life.

Agassi played until 2006 and, in life after tennis, began to write his memoirs. Released just weeks ago, Open is a look at the life of one of tennis’ most interesting figures. Like so many sports superstars, Agassi was pushed into the game by his parents and had nothing like a normal childhood. From the time he was able to walk (and even before) he was being trained as a tennis star. When he was just a child he would have to spend hour after hour, day-after-day on the courts, relentlessly pushed further and higher by his father. Already as a child he learned to hate tennis even while dedicating his life to it. At just thirteen he was sent across the country to a tennis camp which was more of a boot camp than a training academy. He rebelled, he dropped out of school, but still he learned to play the game. Over the course of his storied career he won eight Grand Slam titles and an Olympic gold medal. He took in $30 million in tour earnings and over $25 million per year in endorsement deals. He left the game rich and famous.

In Open Agassi presents himself as a reluctant celebrity, a hesitant hero. He did not seek fame but had it thrust upon him by others. He learned quickly that this fame would demand of him a brutal toll. By thirty-six he was physically destroyed, having to sleep nights on the floor and having to spend hours working on his body just to be able to stand. His career had wrecked his body and taken the first thirty-six years of his life.

Agassi shows that fame is fleeting and that it does not deliver what it promises. “I understand that there’s a tax on everything in America. Now I discover that this is the tax on success in sports–fifteen seconds of time for every fan. I can accept this, intellectually. I just wish it didn’t mean the loss of privacy with my girl.  … Fame is a force. It’s unstoppable. You shut your windows to fame and it slides under the door. I turn around one day and discover that I have dozens of famous friends, and I don’t know how I met half of them.” The same is true of victory; he pursues it relentlessly at times, yet is so often disappointed. At one point he says, “A win doesn’t feel as good as a loss feels bad, and the good feeling doesn’t last as long as the bad. Not even close.”

Agassi writes well–very well, even (or, more likely, his co-author/ghost writer does). He has chosen to write this book in the present tense–rather an unusual decision but one that works very well, especially when describing the long and grueling tennis matches. There is an urgency and pain that is communicated so well in the present tense but that might be lacking if it was written in the past. Agassi shows a sly and subtle but terrific sense of humor. His mockery of Michael Chang is friendly, I’m sure, but funny. His description of the first meeting between his father and Steffi Graff’s father is downright hilarious.

One of the most interesting aspects of the book is Agassi’s continual insistence that he hates tennis, that he despises the game and all that it has demanded of him and taken from him. He hates tennis. Yet whenever he tells anybody this they smile and say, “No you don’t.” No one is able to understand that he hates the very game he has given his life to. He is a prisoner of tennis and a slave to it. This theme carries wonderfully to the final page of the book where it receives a satisfying resolution during an at-first-friendly-then-competitive game with his wife.

If you know Agassi, you will not be surprised to learn that there is a fair amount of cussing in the book. His mouth often got him into trouble during his career and there seems to be little change here. He also spends too much time complaining about Brooke Shields to whom he was married for a short while. I always hate to hear a man complain about his wife, whether they are still married or not, and Agassi gives far too much ink to describing his apathy toward her and the ways in which she bothered him. These are unnecessary details that ought to have been left in the past.

All-in-all Open is a fantastic book and one of the most enjoyable biographies I’ve read in recent days. It offers a fascinating glimpse into the life of a sports star whose upbringing seems oh-so-typical. Badgered by a domineering father, forced into a sport he learned to hate (precisely because he was forced into it), having to trade a normal life for it, seeing that it brought him little true happiness, Agassi’s life ought to stand as a warning to the multitudes of parents out there who impose their dreams of superstardom upon their children.

I do not intend to cross-post between my blog and 10MillionWords, at least once the project proper kicks off. However in this case I thought I’d do so simply because Going Rogue was a good fit for my blog while also being a New York Times bestseller.

I kind of like Sarah Palin. I did, really, from the moment she burst onto the international scene as John McCain’s running mate. Of course I live in Canada so she would never have been my Vice President but still, I found in her qualities that I admired. Mostly I appreciated her common sense approach to politics and her aw shucks, hockey mom persona. It was attractive mostly by virtue of how approachable it made her, how normal she seemed. She compares very favorably in this way to the many career politicians who seem completely out-of-touch with the rest of us—men and women who have lived their whole lives in the upper tier of society and who can’t imagine life on the other side of the Forbe’s lists.

With an initial print run of 2.5 million copies, Palin’s memoir, Going Rogue is a guaranteed bestseller. It is interesting to note that it is selling faster than Hillary Clinton’s memoir did in the days after its release and only moderately slower than Bill Clinton’s. Going Rogue has dominated the Amazon sales charts and remains today at #1. Clearly I am not the only one who likes Palin and neither am I the only one who is interested in learning more about her. Not by a long shot.

This is not a memoir written by a politician in the twilight of her career, one who is reflecting on a long life in the public eye (as, for example, Ted Kennedy did very recently). Instead this is a memoir written by a woman who hopes that the best is yet to come. Because of this, the book often reads as an attempt to drum up support and to put to rest the tired old rumors and innuendo. We all know that she will be a front runner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012 (though she obviously never says anything about it in the book) and it is clear that the book is part of a carefully-crafted advance campaign. She has the difficult task of attempting to win over the American people. She needs to tread carefully, drawing in the all-important evangelical vote but without alienating herself from others. She needs to be the all-American mom but without leaving the impression that all she can be is a mom.

Palin positions herself as the anti-Obama, the anti-Democrat. Yet she also distances herself from much of the Republican party. She writes about her fiercely independent Alaskan spirit and her evangelical faith. She provides abundant examples of her leadership skills and her constant battles against corruption. She writes about the delight she finds in being both a mother and a career woman and defends her ability to do both with excellence. She does not quite seek to be all things to all men, but still she seeks to be the every-woman, or perhaps the any-woman. She portrays herself as a completely normal person who has been given remarkable opportunities. She writes often about her faith, though she is sure to mix in the occasional caveat (yes I believe in creation but don’t worry, I believe in evolution too) and the occasional “ass” or “hell” just to show that she isn’t one of those fundies. While she will discuss her faith, she says little of church or denomination or anything that might indicate that her faith is something more than personal. It is, all-in-all, a very carefully-crafted book that must have been vetted by long lines of politicos.

Along the way Palin answers many of the charges against her. She writes about Troopergate (or Tasergate depending on the side you take), about her daughter’s pregnancy, about the firing of one of her subordinates, about her infamous and ill-advised interview with Katie Couric, about the birth of her son Trig and the ridiculous assertions that he was not her son at all. The bulk of the book is given to her weeks in the international spotlight as she joined the McCain campaign trail. There are some very interesting inside looks at life in that spotlight. She tells about having press releases dealing with her family released in her name even though she had not signed off on them. She talks about the campaign completely abandoning her the very moment the election was over. She writes about the constant and vicious attacks against her that she had to defend with her own money and how she spent over a half million of her own dollars simply to head off the worst of these. We see how some people will stop at nothing (nothing!) to implicate her in something (anything!) that will discredit her. The level of corruption in the American political system is both sickening and infuriating.

Palin inadvertently raises some interesting issues for the Christian. Predominantly, Christians will need to consider the implications of having the most powerful woman in the world be a career woman who holds such a job despite having young children. While Christians will be pleased to be able to support a woman who is strongly pro-life, pro-family and pro-constitution, they will also wrestle with the fact that she will want to lead the country even as the mother of several young children. And Christians may wonder what she really believes and how strongly she believes it. She is anxious to win over evangelicals but in the end she offers little of spiritual substance beyond what we might expect from any American politician. After all, no President has yet denied being a Christian.

Going Rogue is well-written and flows very nicely. I suspect that those who hate Sarah Palin will hate her even more by the time they read the last page, and I suspect that those who love her will love her all the more. Already the book has several hundred reviews on Amazon and, judging by the ratio of positive to negative reviews, they show the expected partisan spirit.

Having finished this book I still like Sarah Palin. In my mind I have a difficult time picturing her as President of the United States of America, but I can’t deny that it would be awfully refreshing to see her bring just a little bit of common sense to the White House. Of course 2012 is still a long, long way away and a lot can change between now and then. But still, if half of what she says about herself is true and if she does half the things she claims she would do if given the opportunity to lead, well, we may all be a little bit better for it.

Buy this one. I think you’ll enjoy it.

As I said in my last post, I have no real desire to speed-read, especially after dedicating a bit of time to learning how. But reading the book Breakthrough Rapid Reading did give me a few things to chew on. One of them was this list of three misconceptions about reading.

The first misconception is that you are supposed to read everything the same way, word by word. You feel that no matter the genre, you are supposed to read all text the same way. You start at the beginning, read through the middle, and end up at the end. This is a bad habit and a pretty dumb one under certain circumstances. Depending on your purpose for reading there may be good reason to skip through a book, to read bits here and bits there, to slow down or to speed up.

The second misconception is that if you read using a once-through, beginning-to-end approach to reading, you ought to be able to understand what you have read. Over time you have learned that this is not the case, that there are times where you need to read a certain passage or even a whole book repeatedly in order to absorb it. But this is probably something you have had to learn on your own, not something you were taught and not something you were taught to deal with. Most of us still feel a bit dumb if we are unable to understand a book or a section within a book after a single pass.

The third misconception is that after that single read you should not only understand the text but also remember what was important in it. The fact is, though, that in most cases not all text is equal and you do not need to remember everything you read. The important thing is to learn what matters and what does not. It is just as important to filter the fluff as it is to file away what really matters.

All of this means that you need to know your purpose in reading before you start. There is a difference between reading the Bible and reading the latest celebrity memoir. There is a difference between reading a historic biography of an important figure and reading that same celebrity memoir. As Kump says, “A reading method should serve whatever purpose you have for the reading material.”

When it comes to this project, I will be reading for comprehension but generally not for long-term retention. Whether I can remember the details of many of these books ten years from now is not the purpose. Instead, the purpose is to read widely and to read quickly, attempting to gather information, to coordinate that information and to draw out principles. Thus I will not be reading these books as I might read a commentary or a theological treatise. Having said that, I also will not be reading as I might read a mindless novel. I do want to understand what I read and I do want to make sure that I do have a sense of what I’ve read. Somewhere in there is the sweet spot!

I am often asked if I am a speed-reader. I am not. Nor have I ever studied speed-reading. Though I know some of the principles, it has never really interested me. Somehow, in the back of my mind or the back of my conscience, I am convinced that speed reading is a little bit less than reading. It seems to emphasize speed over comprehension, quantity over quality. I know that its proponents would disagree, but this is always how it has seemed to me. I’ve never been properly convinced that it can be otherwise.

Part of the attraction of reading is the language. I love words, I love sentences, I love the way ideas are conveyed through them. Speed-reading, by its very nature, has to bypass much of the beauty of language to get to the words and, behind them, the ideas they seek to convey. This strikes me as being akin to walking quickly through an art gallery not stopping to look at each of the works there, but only glancing at them quickly and then reading a description of them. Somehow the beauty of the medium is being lost along the way. I read quickly, but I do not read so quickly that I miss the beauty of well-crafted sentences and the use of just the right word in just the right place.

Despite my aversion to speed-reading, I picked up a copy of Breakthrough Rapid Reading by Peter Kump. This is a self-guided course to learn to read faster, with better comprehension and with better retention (so go the claims of the author). It goes where most similar books go–the importance of using your finger to guide your eyes when reading, the importance of attempting to stop sub-verbalizing words as you read them, the skill involved in seeing many words at each movement of the eye instead of only a single word.

Maybe I doubt my ability to really understand what the book teaches. Maybe I’m stubborn and don’t really want to speed-read. Maybe I’m convinced I’ll lose something along the way. Or maybe I just do not learn well in this kind of a format. But the more I read of this book, the less I wanted to apply the principles. The more I read, the less interested in became in ever being a speed-reader.

However, having said that, there were a few principles that I found useful and ones that I can and will apply to my own reading. I will share some of those in the near future.

I began my quest in learning to read better by turning to Harold Bloom’s How to Read and Why. I learned quickly that, like many similar books dealing with reading as an art, it depends almost wholly on poetry, novels, plays and short stories. There is no section of the book devoted to reading non-fiction–the very kind of book I will spend next year reading. Nevertheless, the author does offer a few thoughts worth pondering.

First off, here are some valuable thoughts from the book’s introduction:

There is no single way to read well, though there is a prime reason why we should read. Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found? If you are fortunate, you encounter a particular teacher who can help, yet finally you are alone, going on without further mediation. Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures. It returns you to otherness, whether in yourself or in friends, or in those who may become friends. Imaginative literature is otherness, and as such alleviates loneliness. We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect sympathies, and all the sorrows of familial and passional life.

Reading is, indeed, the refuge of the solitary and is one of the greatest pleasures solitude can afford. Though I may not have access to the great historians, the great theologians, the great minds, through their books I can meet with them and listen to them. This is true in non-fiction as it is in imaginative literature. Read the rare, sublime biography and you will know what it is to meet a person in a book. Of course in the next year for every great historian or theologian I will undoubtedly also come face-to-face with several celebrities who have very little worth saying and even less worth hearing. But the principle, at least, still stands.

I also appreciated this principle: “Do not attempt to improve your neighbor or your neighborhood by what or how you read.” Such advice is valuable, though obviously not absolute. “Self-improvement is a large enough project for your mind and spirit: there are no ethics of reading. The mind should be kept at home until its primal ignorance has been purged; premature excursions into activism have their charm, but are time-consuming, and for reading there will never be enough time.” There is often a temptation when reading to embrace a single principle and to broadcast that principle to the world. Yet sometimes it is better to avoid being premature and to instead dedicate oneself to further study and to greater comprehension.

My reading next year will involve reading widely and reading quickly. It will be done largely in solitude and will introduce me to hundreds of people, I am sure–people who exist in the pages of all those books. It is a challenge I am looking forward to.

No sooner did I post my last brave update about spending some time discussing books about reading than my computer, my precious iMac, decided to give up the ghost. In fact, I think the two were simultaneous. Just as I posted that update, my wife called to ask if I knew why the computer was not turning on (I was spending the day working from the church office). The loss of my main workstation, the one I sit in front of for at least 40 hours out of every week, did some very interesting and unexpected things to my week, not the least of which was removing my focus from 10MillionWords. For that I apologize.

What I now intend to do this week is what I had hoped to do last week. So this week I will begin to look at some of those books about reading to see what wisdom I can gain from them as I begin to turn my attention to the ridiculous amount of reading that will come with the 10MillionWords project.

You will be glad to know, I’m sure, that my iMac will soon be back. There were some warranty issues to work out, but it is now being repaired and should be back in my possession by tomorrow or Wednesday. And there was great rejoicing.

Because the 10MillionWords project is not yet officially underway (it begins for real on January 1, 2010), I am not going to read all of the bestsellers that hit the list through the rest of 2009 (though I will undoubtedly read some of them). And that is a good thing as this week saw four new books hit the list, including two that are very sizable and that really do not interest me. I had already decided that I would dedicate this week and next to reading books about reading. I have put together a list of titles that deal with the skill of reading, the art of writing, the craft of reviewing. I’ve also found a book that discusses rapid reading, a skill I may need to rely on as I attempt to make my way through the long list of bestsellers next year.

So stay tuned this week and next as I read these books and offer some reflections on them.

Too Big To Fail is a really big book. It contains over 500 pages of material that, as it tells “the inside story of how Wall Street and Washington fought to save the financial system–and themselves” can be quite dense. Written by New York Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin as a popular-level, blow-by-blow account of quite a short and defined period of history, the book has been positioned as a kind of financial and political thriller (not words we typically put together).

This book is long and exhaustive and focuses almost entirely on the big banks and insurance companies that were at the center of the maelstrom. It follows Lehman Brothers from success to bankruptcy and shows just how close many of the other companies came to falling apart. It some cases they were days or even hours away from collapse when they received sudden assistance, usually in the form of government bailouts. It is amazing to learn just how close to the edge they came. And it is an interesting exercise to ponder what might have happened had they been allowed to follow Lehman into bankruptcy and disgrace.

What this book does not do in any great detail is look to the underlying causes of the economic crisis. For good or for ill, Too Big to Fail rarely makes any kind of moral judgment about the overwhelming greed that was part of the system, from individuals who bought homes they could never afford to the bankers who raked in profits of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars a year as reward for convincing them that they ought to buy the homes anyway. This crisis was not simply brought about by a slow but steady downturn in the global economy; it was not brought about by extrinsic and uncontrollable factors. More than anything, it was brought about by untempered greed. In this regard, Thomas Sowell’s The Housing Boom and Bust provides very useful background reading. A much shorter book, it deals well with many of the underlying causes and provides important context that is only alluded to here. The Bible tells us that “the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil” and recent events have proven this to be true. It was the love of wealth and the social status it brings that came very close to bringing the nation to its knees. And, as the economy continues to sputter, the ramifications are still being felt.

It will not be long before many books are released, each seeking to provide the definitive account of the economic meltdown. This crisis will be studied by economists for years and will continue to fascinate the rest of us as well. To be the first exhaustive account requires speed. There are a few clues within Too Big To Fail that it was written quickly and with a strict deadline. Primarily, this shows up in a few sloppy editing mistakes–missed punctuation, a period in the middle of a sentence, occasional typos and the like. There are almost always errors like this within a book, especially one of this size. But in the case of Too Big To Fail I do wonder if the sloppy editing may just point to sloppy research. If the book was prepared in a great hurry, is it possible that the research was also completed quickly and without great care and the usual level of fact-checking? I hope this is not the case, but I did wonder on occasion.

Too Big to Fail, while unlikely to remain the definitive account of the crisis, is the first to the store shelves and is worth reading. Though narrowly focused, it provides endless interesting details about the behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing that led to the massive government bailouts and, prior to that, the dawning realization that the whole economic system was on the verge of collapse. Sorkin’s sources, whom he will not name, were well-positioned to watch all of this unfold and their accounts form the heart of the book.

A dense but readable account of the behind-the-scenes battles, Too Big to Fail makes for interesting reading to anyone with an interest in economics. Those who have little interest in such things may wish to wait for the paperback or to wait for a condensed account. In either case, I’d recommend Sowell’s book as a very good alternative.

Verdict: Wait for the Paperback

Just two weeks after The National Parks hit the bestseller list, here comes The Big Burn, a book that contains a lot of overlap in both setting and characters. Where The National Parks provided a history of “America’s best idea,” The Big Burn tells the story of the greatest fire in American history–a fire that devastated some of those national forests that were the subject of the other book. Authored by Timothy Egan (whose last effort The Worst Hard Time received a National Book Award), the book is the kind of fast-paced, popular-level history that sells so well today.

In August of 1910, a massive windstorm moved through the national forests of Washington, Idaho and Montana. Small blazes that had been sparked by lightning or by passing trains were soon whipped into raging infernos. Near the end of a long and dry summer, the forests were primed for a fire. Within days, thousands and then hundreds of thousands of acres of prime forest were consumed. In the path of the fire lay towns, mountain outposts that had been carved out of the rough wilderness. In the path of the fire were only the smallest number of forest rangers, men who were tasked with fighting fires and protecting the people from them. These men assembled a ragtag army of men and boys to battle the blaze but no one had ever seen a fire quite like this one. No fire in memory had moved so quickly and with such powerful force, outpacing even the fastest runner and raining hot coals miles ahead of the flame. The fire was completely out of control and all that was left was for the men to protect their own lives and those of the settlers in the area.

Egan tells the story of this blaze, centering the story around Teddy Roosevelt, the man responsible for the growing emphasis on conservation, and around Roosevelt’s good friend and chief forester Gifford Pinchot. These men provide the political and ideological backdrop for the heroes of the story–those who raced into the wilderness to try to save both the forest and human lives. It is a fascinating little slice of history, a bit of mostly-forgotten Americana. Egan, with his talent as a writer and his dedication as a researcher, is the perfect historian to tell the story. He does so very well, focusing as much on interesting characters as on the historical events. This is history brought to life.

I know this is a study about culture and worldview, but I can’t think of anything profound to say about either one of those topics. This is good history, but not a whole lot more than that, I think. Not, of course, that there is anything wrong with that.

Verdict: Buy it

Malcolm Gladwell is a phenomenon. He has written four books and, at this moment, all of them are on the New York Times list of bestsellers, two in hardcover and two in softcover. Add them all up and you find that his books have spent 420 combined weeks on the list. That is, frankly, almost unbelievable. His most recent title is What the Dog Saw and it is quite a bit different from the other three. Where The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers dealt with a single theme and carried it from cover-to-cover, What the Dog Saw is a round-up of some of the best of the articles he has written for The New Yorker. It is about twice the length of his prior books but very much the same in the style of writing and in what makes Gladwell both so popular and so distinctive–his way of taking two or more topics that seem completely disconnected and then building a bridge between them.

The book has a little bit of internal structure in the way it has been divided into three parts. The first part focuses on minor geniuses, not world-changers like Winston Churchill but figures like Ron Popeil who has made a lesser mark but a mark nonetheless. The second part looks at theories, of ways of organizing experience. Here we are challenged about how to think about homelessness or a disaster like that of the space shuttle Challenger. The final part comments on predictions and our ability to make judgments about people–their intelligence, their talent, their future.

Having finished What the Dog Saw, I’ve now read all of Gladwell’s books. I think I would rate this one at the back of the pack. It’s not that there is anything inherently wrong with it, but more that Gladwell seems to be at his best when writing at greater length, when going into greater detail. Also, 400 pages of his writing, hopping as he does from topic-to-topic, proves to be just a little bit too much, at least to this reader. I enjoyed the book thoroughly, but found it just a little bit too long by the end. I might recommend reading it in smaller portions rather than straight-through as I did.

One thing about Gladwell’s writing came into clear focus as I read chapter after chapter, article after article. It is his reliance on statistics and studies, often ones that are rather insignificant. Very often he relies on rather niche studies or psychological experiments to carry along his arguments. And often I wonder if these studies are significant enough that they should be used in such a way. I do believe there is value to be found in studies and statistics, but the fact is that if we look hard enough we can find something, somewhere that will help prove what we are trying to say. While Gladwell does have a team of fact-checkers following along behind him, I still do wonder at just how valuable all these experiments and studies and statistics really are.

For Gladwell fans, there is really no question: add this to your collection. For those who have never read any of his works, this might be a good introduction. Then again, I would probably be more inclined to hand someone The Tipping Point which is, I’m convinced, a better book.

Verdict: Wait for the paperback