The Gospel Coalition

The first month of the 10MillionWords project has come to an end. There were fifteen books added to the New York Times list of bestsellers in January. So far I have reviewed ten of the fifteen, though I’ve actually read thirteen of them. While the month began quietly (since publishers tend not to release books right at the time of the holidays) it has quickly picked up with an average of three books being added each week since then.

Here are the books I read and reviewed this month.

• The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande
• All Things at Once by Mika Brzezinski
• Game Change by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin
• Committed by Elizabeth Gilbert
• When the Game Was Ours by Larry Bird and Magic Johnson
• Born to Run by Christopher McDougall
• The Book of Basketball by Bill Simmons
• Last Words by George Carlin
• The Imperial Cruise by James Bradley
• Stones Into Schools by Greg Mortenson

The five that I’ve not yet read or reviewed are:

• Anticancer by David Servan-Schreiber (not read)
• Evidence of the Afterlife by Jeffrey Long (read, review coming soon)
• Drive by Daniel Pink (read, review coming soon)
• Just Kids by Patti Smith (not read)
• A Bold, Fresh Piece of Humanity by Bill O’Reilly (read, review coming soon)

The reviews I’ve posted break down into the following categories (granting that these are rough groupings and that some books might fit into more than one category):

• Biography (4) – All Things at Once, Committed, Last Words, Stones into Schools
• Sports (3) – When the Game Was Ours, Born to Run, The Book of Basketball
• Medicine (1) – The Checklist Manifesto
• Politics (1) – Game Change
• History (1) – The Imperial Cruise

I am not the least bit surprised to see biography at the top of that list. I’m quite sure that I’ll be reading more biography than any other genre in the year to come.

Of the ten books I reviewed, I read eight of them on the Kindle and only two in hardcover (neither All Things at Once nor Game Change were available in e-book format). This is the most reading I’ve ever done on the Kindle and have to say that it’s largely been a very positive experience. Not only has it saved me a lot of money (just those eight books have likely saved me around $150) but it has also given me freedom to read when and where I’ve wanted. The Kindle has come a long way since the initial version and I’ve really become quite comfortable reading on it. Its limited note-taking and highlighting abilities mean that it still does not work very well for research books, but for reading of this kind, it functions very well.

I wish I could offer up a word count for the books I’ve read. It is much more difficult than you might think. If I can find a good way of tallying it up, I’ll be sure to let you know.

Beyond the books I read for the 10MillionWords project, I read three books for review at Challies.com: The Trellis and the Vine, A Father’s Gift and Dug Down Deep. I also read all or most of several books as research for my forthcoming book dealing with technology and read three books to offer up endorsements. So it has been a very “literary” month. Not surprisingly, I feel sometimes like my head is spinning a little bit. Nevertheless, I’ve enjoyed the vast majority of the reading I’ve done and am eagerly anticipating what February will bring.

We seem to be settling into a nice routine here, where each week a few new books are finding their way onto the list of bestsellers. This week there are three new titles.

Starting at #7, Just Kids is the memoir of Patti Smith, the “Godmother of Punk.” A member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Smith was instrumental in the early days of the punk rock movement. I know next to nothing about her, though by this time next week I suspect I’ll know a lot more than I ever cared to.

Added at the #13 spot is a book I was hoping would make its way to the list–Thomas Sowell’s Intellectuals and Society. I haven’t read enough Sowell so was looking for an excuse to read this one. I am somewhat intimidated by the combination of its size (400 pages or so) and its subject matter (intellectuals–a descriptor that most definitely does not apply to the likes of me). Yet I suspect it will be very enlightening.

And coming in at #14 is Evidence of the Afterlife by Jeffrey Long. You know from the title that I will be interested in this one. Dr. Long studies near-death experiences and uses this book to suggest that they stand as compelling evidence of the existence of an afterlife. We shall see.

Tomorrow marks the end of the first month of this 10MillionWords project. In the next day or two I will offer up some reflections on that first month.

I’ve heard Atul Gawande referred to as “The Malcolm Gladwell of Doctors.” I suppose others have noticed what it took me all of two chapters to realize about this book–that there are clear similarities in writing style, in form, even in substance between Gawande and Gladwell. Gawande crafts his arguments much the way Gladwell does and uses references in much the same way. Overall it makes for enjoyable reading. Like Gladwell, he makes information interesting that, by rights, ought to be boring.

And reading will need to be interesting if it is to deal with as dry a subject as checklists. As with his previous books, Gawande sets this title in the field of medicine. Writing as a doctor, he describes many of the difficulties doctors face as they deal with the realities of their vocation. They see vast numbers of patients with an incredible variety of problems. The decisions they make about such patients must often be made in the blink of an eye and yet can be a matter of life and death (to borrow a pair of tired cliches).

Gawande immediately distinguishes between two categories of errors: errors of ignorance and errors of ineptitude. The medical field is doing far better, he says, in closing gaps in ignorance than gaps in ineptitude. With the challenges facing doctors, they are more likely to miss a simple step than to not know at all how they are to react. They know what to do but, because of internal issues and external pressures, may be unlikely to do things properly.

The solution is surprisingly simple. They need to rely on checklists. They need to outsource their memories, so to speak, committing them to something as simple and reliable a checklist. This list of steps will provide them with the structure they need to ensure that they have not inadvertently passed over something important. Gawande not only provides a defense of checklists, but also provides practical tips on how to craft good ones. Creating a truly effective checklist is not quite as easy as you might think.

While the book is immediately applicable to airlines and hospitals, the two industries Gawande turns to throughout the book, I had trouble thinking of how I might be able to apply it to my own life. Then again, when I mentioned this to a friend, he suggested that packing for a trip was a good use of lists. The very next day I set out on a business trip without a belt, so I suppose that may stand as a valid example. But how I would use it in my business, in my church, in most areas of my life, I just don’t know.

Nevertheless, this book is very interesting and reads very well. It’s one of those books you’ll sit down to read and realize a couple of hours later that you’ve read it in a sitting. If you are in business, if you run a business, or if you fly a plane or conduct surgeries (or both), I think you’ll want to check this one out.

Verdict: Read it if you too often find yourself too disorganized.

Let me begin with a confession. I’ve never (to my knowledge) seen or heard Mika Brzezinski on television. The cover of her book All Things at Once says that she is cohost of MSNBC’s popular Morning Joe show and I have no reason to think the book would lie. But let me be clear that I had never heard her name until I picked up her memoir. I never would have considered reading the book had it not been on the bestseller list. That’s no knock on Brzezinski (a name I have typed once and copied onto my clipboard so I don’t have to keep retyping it) but just a statement of plain fact.

Because the book is not available in Kindle format, I went looking for it in the Biography section of my local bookstore. But I didn’t actually find it until I meandered over to Self-Help. I guess it is meant to be more than a biography but also a book for women who have found themselves in Brzezinski’s shoes, wanting to be a successful mom and wife and career woman. In short, to be All Things at Once.

As memoirs go, this one was quite well-written (and as self-help books go it was probably very well-written). In 230 pages of really big print with wide margins, Brzezinski tells the story of her life, beginning with a childhood spent in and around the nation’s capital and wrapping up with her present-day career as a well-known media personality. Strangely, she passes over everything between childhood and marriage. Her story may be interesting to those who enjoy her show but, honestly, to me it was really not too compelling. If you love Brzezinski, you’ll enjoy reading her book. If not, there’s probably no good reason to put in the time and effort.

As a self-help book, All Things at Once is significantly more interesting. Here Brzezinski seeks to help other women find meaning and pursue excellence in multiple roles at once. She is honest with many of her own failings in this regard, showing that through much of her life she has been prone to focus too heavily on one thing, always at the expense of another. If she has tried to dedicate herself to motherhood, she has not been true to herself and has made a mess of career. If she went to far to the other side, dedicating herself to her career, she neglected her family. It is a tough balance, that.

Though she seeks to say that she has learned to strike a successful balance between family and career, it is difficult, based on the evidence she provides, to believe that she did so well. For example, in the aftermath of 9/11 (granting that it was a particularly excruciating time for the nation) she spent three full weeks away from her girls. If the nation needed her so badly to be reporting from the front lines, surely her girls needed her just as much in a time of such great turmoil.

One thing the book does well is highlighting just how shallow the media really is and, hence, just how shallow we are as consumers of that media. Time and again Brzezinski has to talk about her physical appearance and how an extra few pounds here and there made the difference between success and failure. Beauty is very important in the media, and to a ridiculous extent. Talent and looks both count in the business, but there are far more untalented beauties than there are plain-looking talents.

Through her efforts in self-help, Brzezinski does offer some wise advise, such as having children earlier in life rather than later in life. But to have children and then to pursue a career that exacts such a toll hardly seems fair. I guess her lessons would carry more weight if she had modeled rather than just suggested them. She wants women to be able to choose career and choose family without having to compromise on either. But it is only the very rare person who is able to do both. And not everyone has the great wealth of Brzezinski which allows her to hire a full staff of nannies to cover when she is unable to care for her family. And, of course, many would see the very hiring of a full staff of nannies to be an admission that she simply cannot do both with excellence.

Though I see it so often, I continue to marvel at just how different life looks when it is lived without God as a (or the) reference point. In this book Brzezinski is primarily answerable to herself; she has to be true to herself. She is also obliged to be true to her husband and her children. But God seems to be left out of the equation entirely. Though she is Roman Catholic by faith, never once does she tell us how faith is integral to who she is and how she lives. That void in her life is immediately apparent.

In the end, All Things at Once stands or falls on the reader’s ability to believe that Brzezinski has succeeded at all things at once. I am not persuaded that she has. I would look elsewhere to learn how to successfully balance all of life’s responsibilities.

Verdict: Read it if you’re a big fan of Mika Brzezinski.

Game Change was in the news before it was even released. Several shocking revelations (or perhaps “shocking” revelations) reverberated around Washington. John Heilemann and Mark Halperin broke the news of Harry Reid’s use of the word “negro” in relation to Obama and Reid was immediately forced to issue an apology. Bill Clinton muttered that a guy like Obama would have been serving him coffee had he been around just a few years earlier. I don’t think he apologized. But this book, telling the story of “Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime” had already made its mark and was headed to the top of the bestseller list.

Though the book deals with historical events–the 2008 Presidential elections–I have a difficult time considering it history. History is an accounting of past events and as such, relies on proof. Proof is a tricky thing, though. We tend to see proof as footnotes and citations. In some contexts proof may also be a quote attributed to a person. In either case, the value of such references is that they can be verified and validated. I can turn to the source cited and see immediately that a quote is accurate or inaccurate either in wording or sense. Or I can simply ask the person whether he did, indeed, say what was attributed to him. The history is only as good as its credibility and credibility comes through proof.

The historical accounts in the New Testament are an example of eyewitness evidence. Paul said in 1 Corinthians 15:6 that over 500 people had been witness to the resurrected Jesus with the implication that anyone could simply go and ask them if Jesus had, indeed, risen from the dead. He knew people would look for proof and he was glad to offer it.

Game Change offers no proof for any of the facts it presents. “The majority of the material in these pages was taken from more than three hundred interviews with more than two hundred people conducted between July 2008 and September 2009.” No problem, so far. Interviews provide excellent historical research. “All of our interviews–from those with junior staffers to those with the candidate themselves–were conducted on a ‘deep background’ basis, which means we agreed not to identify the subjects as sources in any way.” But here we come to a complication. The authors say that this anonymity was necessary in order to preserve a high level of candour. But a skeptic may well see it as suspiciously convenient. A historian will demand more proof. The authors say, “just trust us.” But if this is to be credible history, we are within our rights to demand more.

The book’s content itself is interesting, even if it lacks credibility. The authors are equally-opportunity offenders, I think. If I had to guess, I’d say that their sympathies lie more with the Democrats than the Republicans but it may be just that my sympathies tend to lie the other way (as much as it matters to me as a Canadian) and so I am more easily offended when they write of the people I prefer. On the whole what they say serves to further the stereotypes. Hillary Clinton is an angry and controlling ego-centrist. Obama is a man of the hour, thrust upon the world stage and eager to embrace fame. McCain is an old, foul-mouthed grouch who is fighting for a last chance for his day in the spotlight. Sarah Palin is naive, emotional and pseudo-competent at best. There are few surprises here. Of course it is not all negative, but those are certainly the impressions that will last the longest. It is the negative that will prevail.

But really, because the authors offer no proof, I found myself reading without wanting to retain. I did not want to have my opinions of these people shaped by a book that is gossip as much as it is history. I want to believe the best of people (even Hillary Clinton!) and do not want to allow biased, anonymous sources to shape my perceptions. And so I read enough to understand the book, but almost with a view to forgetting it. I was probably more successful in the former than the latter. But isn’t that just the way gossip works? Once we hear it, we cannot unhear it.

Game Change was a disappointment in just about every way. While it claims to be an “ultimately definitive” account of the 2008 presidential campaign, its absolute lack of credibility ensures that this is not the case. A definitive account will need to do better than this. For now, this is little more than a National Enquirer level of history.

Verdict: Read it if you get your news from the gossip mags.

I am falling behind a little bit. I got through only three of last week’s four bestsellers by the time the new list was released. And this week’s list contains two new bestsellers. That gives me three to get through before next Friday. No problems, I hope.

Shooting straight to the top is Game Change by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. This book has already been much-discussed since it’s release a week ago. It did not take long for the media to jump all over the revelation that Harry Reid once referred to Barack Obama as a negro. That’s not the kind of press Reid was looking for. Game Change tells the behind-the-scenes story of the 2008 election campaign, looking at both the Republican and Democratic candidates. But it does so without any footnotes, references or sources beyond anonymous interviews. That’s generally not a good sign. But I will read it nonetheless (all 464 pages of it).

Showing up at thirteenth on the list is Anticancer by David Servan-Schreiber. “All of us have cancer cells in our bodies,” says the cover. “But not all of us will develop cancer.” This book has already sold over a million copies in previous editions but this new and updated version has just hit the list again.

Strangely, neither of this week’s books are available in Kindle format. Too bad, that.

At the end of her bestselling book Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert fell in love with Felipe. Four years later she returns to tell their story. Having fallen in love with this Brazilian man, Gilbert began to build a life with him. But before long the Department of Homeland Security intervened, deporting Felipe for spending too much time in the United States despite not being a citizen. The only solution, the only way to gain his citizenship, was for the two of them to marry. Yet both of them, scarred from prior divorces, had no desire at all to marry. In fact, they had both sworn off marriage, vowing to remain together, but unfettered by that age-old institution.

“…I was not convinced that I knew very much more than ever about the realities of institutionalized companionship.” says Gilbert. “I had failed at marriage and thus I was terrified of marriage, but I’m not sure this made me an expert on marriage; this only made me an expert on failure and terror, and those particular fields are already crowded with experts. Yet destiny had intervened and was demanding marriage from me, and I’d learned enough from life’s experiences to understand that destiny’s interventions can sometimes be read as invitations for us to address and even surmount our biggest fears.” Yet the reality was that if she wanted to live her life with Felipe, she would have to marry him. “Within one year—like it or not, ready or not—I had to get married. That being the case, it seemed imperative that I focus my attention on unraveling the history of monogamous Western marriage in order to better understand my inherited assumptions, the shape of my family’s narrative, and my culturally specific catalogue of anxieties.”

This book, half travelogue and half sociology, follows her as she and Felipe travel through Asia while they wait for the U.S. government to grant him permission to enter America and get married. As she travels she researches marriage, trying to get to the bottom of what it is and why it is so fundamental to humanity. Committed is, then, a book about marriage. In its own way it is pro-marriage, I suppose, though only if we grant quite a wide understanding of what marriage is.

What is most fascinating about the book is that Gilbert seeks to understand marriage without any reference to God. As Christians we believe that God is the one who created marriage, that he is the one who defined marriage (as between one man and one woman, til death do them part) and that he is the one who has made it the only legitimate context for sex and procreation. And in all things, marriage is to be a display of selfless love, of full-life commitment, a reflection of Christ’s love for his people. Thus marriage simply cannot be defined without God because marriage is all about God.

Yet Gilbert determines that marriage is a social institution and one that arises by necessity even though it tends to be far more beneficial to men than to women and even though it brings about as much unhappiness as it brings joy. She shows a complete inability to properly understand the biblical position on marriage, misinterpreting Paul and then looking at the early history of monasticism to declare that Christianity has always been anti-marriage (at least until modern times, though even then it advocates only its own interpretation of marriage). “Or consider Saint Paul himself,” she says, “who wrote in his famous letter to the Corinthians, ‘It is not good for a man to touch a woman.’ Never, ever, under any circumstances, Saint Paul believed, was it good for a man to touch a woman—not even his own wife.” Did she not read about creation where God told man to “be fruitful and multiply?” Did she not read Song of Solomon, for goodness’ sake? If it is not good for a man to touch a woman (as her simplistic interpretation claims) than that couple is in big trouble!

Gilbert rightly identifies the trouble that comes when marriage is made into an ultimate thing. “Marriage becomes hard work once you have poured the entirety of your life’s expectations for happiness into the hands of one mere person. Keeping that going is hard work.” This gets her thinking and eventually she realizes “For the first time in my life, it occurred to me that perhaps I was asking too much of love. Or, at least, perhaps I was asking too much of marriage. Perhaps I was loading a far heavier cargo of expectation onto the creaky old boat of matrimony than that strange vessel had ever been built to accommodate in the first place.” Yet, though marriage is not to be an ultimate thing, neither is it to exist only to serve our own purposes. It is possible to err in both regards. When she does advocate for marriage, she does so by saying that marriage should be delayed until people are at least 30 and until both husband and wife (or husband and husband or…) are firmly established in life and career. Thus marriage becomes much less than sacrificial, much less than selfless; instead it becomes a means to further my own ends by taking care of my need for intimacy even though I do not wish to alter my life any more than necessary. Marriage becomes all about me.

Along the way she completely separates sex and marriage. That is an interesting oversight in a book about marriage. As soon as we separate sex from marriage we have made both of them less than they ought to be. She says that “the singular fantasy of human intimacy” is this: “that one plus one will somehow, someday, equal one.” Here she speaks in biblical language of the two becoming “one flesh” and yet she does so in reference only to marriage, not to sex.

In some ways Gilbert reminds me of Donald Miller–someone who is still fussing about issues that he should have come to terms with years ago. It may be cute when a twenty-year-old wonders whether she should marry and how it will change her life–when she goes on a quest to understand marriage. But by the time she is thirty-seven she really should have come to terms with it. It’s not quite so cute anymore.

Probably the most interesting part of reading this book is to watch Gilbert feeling around in the dark, bumping, stumbling, fumbling, as she tries to get to the bottom of marriage. She grapples all around the outside of it, writing about love and sex and infatuation and commitment and parenthood–and yet she completely, utterly misses the point of it all. “We invented marriage. Couples invented marriage.” But no, they did not. Without God she cannot understand marriage precisely because marriage is all about God. The closer she gets, the further she seems.

Verdict: Read it to better understand why we cannot define marriage apart from God

As I stated in my review of The Book of Basketball, basketball is far from my favorite sport. If I were to get into the game, and if I were to find myself enjoying it at all, I would likely need a story to draw me in. While the game bores me, I tend to be genuinely interested in people. When the Game Was Ours combines the lives of two players–superstars Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. And it just so happens that, on that basis, the basis of a story of two people, I quite enjoyed this book.

With my very limited perspective on the game, I’m sure I am only vaguely aware of the critical role these two men played in basketball history. Their rivalry, perfectly timed, was instrumental in transforming the NBA into the game it is today. The ongoing struggle between these two men, star-crossed antagonists, who represented speed versus shooting, black versus white, East Coast versus West Coast, flashy versus quiet, was one for the ages. It was a rivalry so profound that even someone as ignorant as I am caught wind of it. And in this book the two men, once enemies but now fast friends, tell what it was like to be there. They describe life in the NBA during these transition years and tell of their great rivalry.

Notable in the midst of the battle were two features of the rivalry. Both men were exceedingly proud, demanding recognition and thinking nothing of mocking those who were unable to compete with them. Though Johnson was flashy and boisterous while Bird was quiet and shy, both were convinced of their own superiority and neither could stand being second in anything. Where their pride was greatest was in their relationship to one another. Each man drove the other to be better, to attain to greater heights. It is fascinating to read how they hated one another and yet depended upon one another to raise their game to the next level and the level after that. At the heart of their excellence was their bitterness.

In a book like this one, credited to Johnson, Bird and a third writer (in this case Jackie MacMullan), there is always the question of voice. Will they use the first person or third person? In this case the powers that be decided to go with the third person. Though it is probably the correct choice, ridding them of the otherwise-annoying need to say, “I (Larry)…”, it does take the men out of the story just a little bit. What I mean is that it reads more like history and less like autobiography than I might have liked. Of course Bird and Johnson remain central to the book, but somehow still remain strangely distant from it. This, in turn, raises the question of authorship and I had to wonder whether crediting the two men as authors is entirely accurate. My impression is that MacMullan interviewed the men for long periods, wove the story together, and had them sign off on it. To credit all three authors equally seems unlikely, though not atypical.

A brief aside: The Kindle version, which is the one I chose to read, had quite a few sloppy errors. I am beginning to notice these in Kindle books–typos, missing punctuation, missing line breaks, font variations, etc–and am wondering if it points to some inherent problem or limitation with the Kindle format or if it points to publishers giving insufficient attention to their electronic books. The move from paper to e-books is one of give and take and I do hope that publishers do not expect us to give up excellence in editing and formatting. That is asking too much. Publishers, please give sufficient time and attention to the e-book! It’s the future, don’t you know.

As a final note, the book contains several egregious uses of those 70′s style basketball shorts that never looked good on anyone, let alone an inordinately lanky guy like Bird. You’ve been warned.

When the Game Was Ours is okay; just okay. It’s not a bad book but neither is it an excellent one. At the very least I can say that it held my attention despite focusing on two athletes I don’t care for who played a game I dislike. I guess that says something for it.

Verdict: Read it if you’re a basketball fan or a sports nut.

It all began with a simple question: why does my foot hurt? Christopher McDougall, a writer who enjoyed running, wondered why it was that he kept getting hurt. When he ran he got hurt. It was that simple. He visited a succession of doctors who suggested cortisone and orthotics and other high-tech solutions to these injuries. “Humans are not made for running,” he would hear from these experts. “If you do it, you’ll get hurt.”

But in his travels, McDougall came across a small Mexican tribe called the Tarahumara–a tribe whose culture was, at least in part, based around running. Long distance running, that is. And very long distance running at that. They would regularly run fifty miles at a time over some of the world’s most grueling terrain in races that would begin and end in wild village-wide parties. These people could run nearly endless distances, and do so for years and years without injury. McDougall had to learn their secret. As he writes in the book’s opening pages:

In the end, I got my answer, but only after I found myself in the middle of the greatest race the world would ever see: the Ultimate Fighting Competition of footraces, an underground showdown pitting some of the best ultradistance runners of our time against the best ultrarunners of all time, in a fifty-mile race on hidden trails only Tarahumara feet had ever touched. I’d be startling to discover that the ancient saying of the Tao Te Chaing–”The best runner leaves no tracks”–wasn’t some gossamer koan, but real, concrete, how-to, training advice.

McDougall’s quest to understand how some people can spend their lives running without injury while others suffer cruelly from only a short jog, though the ultimate point of the book, is interspersed with the build-up to this epic fifty-mile trail race. He introduces a bizarre and often-hilarious cast of characters and brings them all to Mexico with him. There they set out to see if these highly-trained athletes who had given themselves to ultradistance running would be able to compete with the Tarahumara, who are the furthest thing in the world from professional athletes.

Along the way McDougall offers many facts and reflections dealing with human physiology and evolution. While humans have gotten a bad rap as runners (compare them to most other mammals and they will look pretty pathetic in comparison) this is largely because they have been compared only in terms of speed. What humans have that most animals do not is endurance. McDougall comes to believe that humans evolved as running creatures, capable of running down prey not with sheer speed but with a long game of endurance and attrition. The application to all of this is that running is at the very heart of what it means to be human. Humans evolved as running creatures and now, as the book’s title suggests, are born to run.

As one who believes that God created humans as we are, without having us first evolve from some other kind of life form, I have to dismiss McDougall’s science in this regard. Yet the book was not without its important takeaways. Most interesting was what he showed about running shoes (both through anecdotal evidence and statistical evidence)–that there seems to be a direct correlation between the technology of a running shoe (and hence its price) and the incidence of injury. More expensive shoes tend to lead to more injuries. Which is to say that God made us with feet (and not shoes) for a good reason. When we wear shoes we reduce the ability of our feet to move and to mold themselves to whatever surface we happen to be moving across. This makes good sense, does it not?

As he reaches the book’s conclusions, McDougall undoubtedly overstates his case, going almost as far as to suggest that if we all just ran (in bare feet or, at the very least, really cheap shoes) we’d all be happier and healthier and the world would be a better place. In this way running has become his religion with the Tarahumara as his deities and the world’s best ultradistance runners a slightly lesser pantheon. Running seems to have become an idol. Idols typically are good things that are made ultimate things (to echo Tim Keller) and here we see McDougall falling into that age-old trap. A good thing has become ultimate and undue homage has been given to it.

Nevertheless, Born to Run is an interesting book and one that succeeds on most levels. While the science is suspect and while the author’s breathless adulation for his sport sometimes reaches celestial heights (and while there are occasional uses of rough language), the book still proves an enjoyable read and one that offers plenty of good food for thought. Those discussions of human physiology, though couched in the language of naturalism, pointed me to a Creator, a craftsman, whose works inspire fear and awe.

Verdict: Read it if you’re a runner (or want to be).

It was an unexpectedly busy week on the bestseller lists. I was rather shocked to see that there were four(!) new titles added this week. That’s going to leave me with a lot of reading to do!

Debuting right at the top of the list is Committed by Elizabeth Gilbert who previously authored Eat, Pray, Love, a book that was on the list for a long, long time (though I didn’t ever read it). It’s interesting how often authors whose books appear on the list have been there in the past. It must be a lot easier to make it the second or third time. That makes good sense, I suppose.

Showing up at number three is the interestingly-titled The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande. The one-sentence summary from the Times is: “Following checklists makes surgery safer and other activities more efficient, a doctor argues.” That doesn’t sound like it’s going to keep me turning pages all night. We’ll see.

At number nine is Drive by Daniel H. Pink. “What really motivates people is the quest for autonomy, mastery and purpose, not external rewards.” I would imagine there will be some interesting spiritual implications in that book. We will see.

And at number fourteen is Mika Brzezinski’s All Things at Once. “How the MSNBC newswoman combines being a wife, mother and journalist.” Just between you and me, I haven’t even heard of her before. I guess I’ll get to meet her in the pages of her book.

And that’s enough chatting. I’d better get reading.