The Gospel Coalition

Last week I said that I had been given a reprieve. With only one new book added to the list of bestsellers, I finally had a chance to catch up. Well, I did quite well, even if not spectacularly so. I got through Willie Mays which was quite a long book and have nearly finished out On the Brink. Assuming that I finish that book up this afternoon, that leaves me with only Anticancer remaining on my to-do list.

It turns out that this week is part two of my reprieve. Just one new book found its way onto the list this week, and it only just managed it, squeaking on at #15. Scott Patterson’s The Quants describes “How a new breed of math whizzes conquered Wall Street and nearly destroyed it.” If I understand the premise correctly, the book tells of some of the hedge fund managers who made fantastic amounts of money in the lead-up to the economic downturn, contributing to the disaster and witnessing their own personal disasters through it. It sounds like it will be interesting enough.

I ought to be able to catch right up by the end of the week, leaving me to anticipate what might make its way onto the list next week. As usual, I have no idea what books are the obvious up-and-comers.

Though biography/memoir is the leading genre in this 10MillionWords project, few that I’ve read in this category have been traditional biographies. Most have, instead, been memoirs and often memoirs of celebrities who, honestly, will never be worthy of a full-length biography. It was nice, then, to read Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend by James Hirsch. This is a biography that is traditional in every way and, to my knowledge, the first authorized biography of Mays.

Willie Mays is, of course, a man who needs little introduction. His contribution to the game of baseball is widely known and his status as a hero of the game is forever cemented in the record books. Though his reputation has been tarnished a little bit by remaining in the game too long and by eventually being loosely linked to performance enhancing drug scandals (such as they were in the 60′s), he remains a uniquely respected player.

The book is set in roughly the same timeframe as The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a book I reviewed just last week. The stories of those two lives could hardly be more different. Mays was wildly popular in his lifetime while Lacks was utterly unknown; Mays was fantastically rich while Lacks lived in abject poverty; Mays lived a long life while Lacks died at just thirty years of age. And yet there are a few important similarities. Both dealt with the systemic racism that plagued the United States not too long ago. It is amazing to read of a bus taking the Giants from the ballpark to their hotel but taking a detour into a poor part of town, a negro district, to drop off Mays and the other African American players. Though they may have been able to share an outfield with their teammates, they were not allowed to share a hotel.

Mays was not, as some wished of him, a racial activist. He was often labelled an Uncle Tom and looked down upon for not doing more to fight for equality. And yet in his own way, he did just that. Once America’s national sport was integrated, it would not be long before the nation followed suit. After all, how could America cheer year after year for negro players and then, at the end of it all, still see them as nothing but negros? The tale is told of the son of a Klansman running onto the baseball diamond yelling, “I’m Willie Mays!” The walls were crumbling and would inevitably fall. Mays may not have marched, he may not have had the anger and passion of a Jackie Robinson, but he still played the role that was his.

One of the most notable aspects of Mays’ life was his desire to give of himself to his fans. Endearingly childlike in many ways, Mays would (quite literally) give the shirt off his back to someone in need. He was eager to please those who looked up to him. And yet through his life he was torn by the knowledge that many of these people loved him only for what he did, not for who he was. Included in this number, it seems, was his first wife with whom he had a short, turbulent and costly marriage. He wanted to trust people but learned quickly that he could not. Later in life people would ask, “Why doesn’t Willie Mays trust people? The answer is: for good reason.” As Mays said, “‘You have to assume that everyone wants something from me because of who I am.’ It is why there are only three groups that he trusts: baseball players, children, and household pets. None will ever betray him.” Even today he does not and cannot trust others; for so much of his life he was used and betrayed by his “friends.”

Mays was a strange combination of a willing and an unwilling celebrity. He enjoyed the perks of celebrity–the free cars, the acclaim, the money, the easy entrance into private places; yet he hated the loss of privacy, the demands and the criticism. He insists that he only ever wanted to play the game and, certainly, he had a passion for baseball that few others have matched. And yet he wanted more than just the game; he wanted the money and the adulation. Like most celebrities, he had to take the bad with the good. Reflecting on his life he says, rightly, that when you achieve his level of fame, “The world owns you.” He got what he wanted, but not without the world demanding its pound of flesh for all it had given him.

It is perhaps ironic that for a man who wanted to be known for who he was rather than what he did, this biography focuses predominantly on what Mays did. Though there is plenty of focus on the man himself, the book ends when his career ends. The decades after his retirement are consigned together to a single Epilogue of thirty pages.

Though by no means a truly brilliant biography (it’s not quite in David McCullough territory, for example), this one is still plenty good and has a lot to commend it. It tells the story–the definitive story, I suspect–of an important and an interesting life and does so with class. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Verdict: Read it if you’re a fan of baseball or a fan of good biography.

You love him or you hate him. Like other polarizing figures (Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin come to mind) you’re probably not neutral about Bill O’Reilly. Judging by the amount of time his memoir has remained on the New York Times list of bestsellers (close to a year now), it seems that plenty of people must love the guy. The book’s intriguing title owes to an episode from O’Reilly’s childhood. He explains: “One day I blurted out some dumb remark, and Sister Lurana was on me like a panther. Her black habit blocked out all distractions as she leaned down, looked me in the eye, and uttered words I have never forgotten: ‘William, you are a bold, fresh piece of humanity.’” She was right, I guess, as millions have since discovered.

In this book, which is really not a traditional memoir, he attempts “to define why I believe what I believe by telling you how those convictions grew directly out of my life experience. This tactic is designed to keep you, the reader, entertained and amused, as you and I probably have much in common, at least in the upbringing department.” The purpose of the book, then, is to show the events from his childhood and early adulthood that shaped him into the man he is today. He seeks to show how his early years set the scene for what he believes today and why he acts as he does to defend what he believes.

Though O’Reilly reveals a fair bit of detail about his Roman Catholic background, he says much less about what he has come to believe an adult. Still, he does offer a useful summary. “My core belief…is that life is a constant struggle between good and evil. That each person has free will and must choose a side. Refusing to choose puts one in the evil category by default, because bad things will then go unchallenged.” This is quite an interesting way of looking at the world. He sees things in firm categories of black and white, right and wrong. It seems he has borrowed this dualistic world from his Catholic background. And yet he does not have a consistently Christian outlook, for the Christian faith does not demand that we choose a side. Rather, the Christian faith demands that we choose a Savior. Refusing to choose does not put one in the evil category but keeps one there, for we are all in that evil category by default.

Though I am grateful to see his use of the categories of good and evil, rare ones in a postmodern society, such categories will only be as useful as their definitions. Here is how O’Reilly defines evil: “if you knowingly hurt another human being without significant cause, like self-defense, you are committing an evil act. And if you do this as a matter of course, you are evil.” Evil, then, is something that happens only in reference to fellow human beings. It is not, as the Bible demands, first and foremost an offense against God, but an offense against another person. So while he does demand the use of the term, he tears it from its biblical moorings. We are left, of course, wondering how we determine what hurts another human being and what constitutes significant cause. At times both will be apparent; at others, the lines will be hazy. According to O’Reilly’s definition, and without referring to an extrinsic source of morality and authority, the individual must be the one who ultimately decides what constitutes evil behavior. Without reference to God, good and evil are not far removed from one another, for both are mere variants of normal human behavior.

These beliefs about good and evil shaped O’Reilly’s decision to create The O’Reilly Factor. He now uses the show as a means of defending good by exposing evil. I do not watch the show but I do wonder how successful he can be, trapped within the weakness of his own definitions.

Verdict: Read it if you’re a big fan of O’Reilly.

At last, a reprieve. This week saw the addition of just a single book to the list of bestsellers. James S. Hirsch’s biography of Willie Mays (titled, none too imaginatively Willie Mays) hit the list in the #8 spot. It’s a long book, though, so it may take much of the week to get through it’s 600+ pages. And I’m still only a quarter of the way through Hank Paulson’s book On the Brink. And I still haven’t read Anticancer. So even with this one-week reprieve I’m not sure that I’ll be able to catch up all the way. But I can give it a try.

Of note is the fact that Malcolm Gladwell’s What the Dog Saw has ended its run in the top fifteen. Also, Mitch Albom’s Have a Little Faith and Gladwell’s Outliers have both started to falter. Since both have been long-time fixtures on the list, the end of their run may introduce a little bit of instability for a while. All of which is to say that I’d better catch up while I can. Something will have to fill the eventual void when those books drop off the list.

Rising fast toward the top fifteen is Lori Gottlieb’s Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough. That sounds like an intriguing title. Perhaps it will be on the list for next week.

The New York Times is understandably secretive about how they put together their list of bestsellers. All we know is that the list is based on weekly sales reports that come from a number of independent and chain bookstores across the US. Though the Times has not said so explicitly, most people assume that the list is based, at least primarily, on retail rather than wholesale figures. Therefore a book that has massive wholesale orders but few actual purchases should not become a bestseller. Fair enough.

The list of bestsellers has been changed a few times in the past, often to allow certain genres to stop dominating the list. For example, advice books now appear separate from the rest of the non-fiction bestsellers (for which I’m grateful). The editors also occasionally deliberately exclude “catalog” items that are either perennial bestsellers or that are very old but for one reason or another have made their way back onto the list (and the Bible is always excluded since otherwise it would always be #1). The list is geared toward new titles, not older ones.

Interestingly, the updated lists appears on the web a full 9 days before it appears in the print edition of the New York Times Book Review. The list that appears later today will be printed not this Sunday but the Sunday after. Such are the realities of print content versus online content.

Though many people have attempted to crack the formula that decides what books show up on the list, no one has yet mastered it. And I can admit to being completely befuddled. I often try to predict what books will appear based on the list of bestselling products at Amazon and other stores. Sometimes it is very obvious what will appear (if Malcolm Gladwell scribbles on a napkin and slaps it between two covers, people will buy it) but other times there seems to be little way of knowing in advance. I’ll let you know as the year progresses if I’m able to start figuring it out. But for now, I turn to the list every Friday prepared to be completely surprised. And generally I am.

I’ve read a lot of not-so-good books so far this year. Needless to say, I have been hoping to be surprised by an exceptional one. And just like that The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks came out of nowhere and kept me riveted from beginning to end. A great blend of history, biography, medicine and memoir, this book is unique in all the right ways.

In 1951 Henrietta Lacks, a thirty year-old African American woman, died of cervical cancer, her body ravaged by the disease. Shortly before her death, and apparently unknown to her, researcher George Gey took a biopsy of her tumor and, for the first time in history, managed to culture an immortal line of cells. This line soon became known as HeLa and since the 50′s has been sold commercially and used in a remarkable variety of experiments. These experiments have in turn led to a great number of scientific and medical breakthroughs including a vaccine for polio, in vitro fertilization and cloning. Scientists estimate that if you could lay all the HeLa cells ever grown end-to-end, they would wrap around the earth at least three times, rather remarkable when we consider that each individual cell is microscopic in size. There are a trillion times more of her cells now than there were in her body when she was alive.

The book’s cast of characters is expansive, though the primary focus is on Henrietta Lacks, her daughter Deborah, and the author, Rebecca Skloot. Driven by a desire to find out who Lacks was and how she unwittingly made such an important contribution to science and medicine, Skloot went searching for whatever legacy Lacks had left behind. She eventually found her family and worked her way into their confidence. They felt it was high time that their mother’s story was made known and so they largely cooperated with her.

Set first in Virginia and then in Baltimore, the story spans fascinating cultures, first rural African American in the Jim Crow era, then urban African American in a historically African American community in what is now Baltimore County. Skloot, a young Caucasian woman, is a classic outsider, attempting to come to grips with people who are radically different than she is.

Of particular interest are the racial implications of the story. No matter how often I read of the systemic racism that plagued the United States early in the last century, it always remains shocking. It is amazing to consider that this is not ancient history, but recent history. And even today it is interesting to get a glimpse of at least this small slice of African American culture. I hesitate to say much more than that except to say that there seems to be no Canadian equivalent. Henrietta’s family, the way they live even today, the way they talk, what they believe–it is all utterly foreign to my experience.

And of particular import are issues related to the use of human tissue in medical or scientific research. George Gey took Henrietta’s tissues without her permission and used them for research. When he proved their value, many commercial enterprises began to culture and sell them, turning vast profits. And surprisingly, very little has changed since the 1950′s. Even today your tissues, once removed from your body, may be used without your knowledge or without your permission. Have you ever stopped to think about how many bits of you may exist in labs, in freezers, in research? This seems like an area that is ripe for legislation that accounts for new realities.

In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Skloot skillfully weaves together the story of Henrietta Lacks, the legacy of HeLa, and Skloot’s own story of researching this book. A genre-bending tale, it’s one of the best books I’ve read so far this year. Here’s to many more of the same quality in the months to come!

I don’t know of too many ethical quandaries more difficult than that of torture. For many people, torture is so distasteful, so abhorrent, that there is nothing to consider. But often the real world does not allow us to think in perfectly clear categories of black and white. Of course we would never use torture lightly or recommend it widely, but I think any of us can dream up situations where it may be advisable or even necessary. The United States has often found itself in situations where torture could protect the country and save lives. Can we then say that it would be objectively evil?

Marc Thiessen’s Courting Disaster gives away its bias in the subtitle: “How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack.” The CIA kept America safe, he says, by their willingness to use Enhanced Interrogation Techniques to pry information from captured terrorists. Despite the benefit brought about by such measures, Barack Obama immediately banned them when he became President. Thus Courting Disaster is “the story  of how dedicated men and women at the Central Intelligence Agency went head-to-head with the world’s most dangerous terrorists, got them to tell us their plans, and kept America safe for eight years; this is the story of how Barack Obama has exposed their  secrets to the enemy, unilaterally disarmed us in the face of terror, and invited the next attack.”

Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (EIT) is more than mere semantics; it is a useful way of drawing a distinction between these techniques and what we think of when we use the word torture. Thiessen is very careful to be up-front about what forms “torture” takes when used by the United States military or by the CIA and FBI. It is never a case of a brutal interrogator prying off finger nails or tearing out teeth with a rusty pair of pliers. Instead, each subject is evaluated individually and subjected to a set of techniques specifically chosen for him. The purpose of EIT is not to extract information during the act, but to convince a prisoner to give up information during a later process of debriefing. While we may be accustomed to the Jack Bauers of the world torturing people and immediately gaining information, this is not a realistic picture. Interrogation and the gaining of information are two distinct steps. And both are carried on in a deliberate, measured way that cause no significant or long-term physical harm.

The media has had much to say about waterboarding. The misinformation they have communicated is startling. In reality waterboarding is only ever the final step in EIT, the measure used if all else fails. It is not used lightly and is applied only within very specific contexts and under very clear guidelines. In fact, of the thousands of combatants captured in America’s recent conflicts, only three have been subjected to it. If you have never seen what is involved with waterboarding, be sure to head to YouTube to give it a look. There you’ll find videos of Christopher Hitchens undergoing it. And there you’ll see that, though it is obviously terrifying, it is also apparently harmless in the long term. No physical damage is done.

Thiessen carefully documents the vast amounts of critical information extracted from people who were subjected to EIT. And truly there seems to be a clear link between the use of EIT and the fact that there has not been a major terrorist strike on US soil since 9/11. Many planned attacks were disrupted by information gained by those who were subjected to enhanced interrogation. And yet President Obama has banned such techniques and, further, has freely released information that will allow terrorists to prepare themselves should such measures been allowed again in the future. Even worse, they now know that all they need to do is demand a lawyer and they will have extended to them the rights of U.S. citizens. It is near insanity.

What Courting Disaster offers is primarily a pragmatic defense of EIT. Though one chapter is given to ethical considerations, I suspect this defense will do little to convince naysayers. For such defense we must look elsewhere. And here I recommend Al Mohler’s book Culture Shift where Dr. Mohler dedicates a chapter to this thorny issue. He summarizes well my take on this: there are times in which torture, though distasteful, may be necessary; it may be the lesser of two evils, an unfortunate necessity in a sinful world. Such decisions must not be made lightly and such actions must be done in a measured fashion. But the Bible does not absolutely forbid such things.

The Bush administration’s dedication to EIT was important in that it emphasized capturing terrorists alive. Ironically, President Obama’s distaste of EIT has led to terrorists being killed rather than captured; he would prefer to kill them on the ground than to capture them alive and extract information from them. It takes tortured ethics to suggest that death is the better option.

As I read this book I was impressed by the care the CIA takes when it applies EIT to captives. And I was surprised to see how wrong the media has been in their descriptions of what they call torture–how they have slandered those who had been given task of using such techniques. The book gave me an understanding of EIT that was far more valuable than what I had before. And it has given me confidence that torture (at least defined in this way) sometimes can be ethical when used with care. I am increasingly confident that a Christian worldview can account for Enhanced Interrogation Techniques. Read the book and I suspect you’ll feel the same.

Verdict: Read it to better understand this thorny ethical issue.

Note: I’ve made a couple of minor edits to the post to better phrase my position

Stories of implosion are almost as popular as stories of explosion. We love to read of the regular guy who becomes the hero (see I Am Ozzy); and we love to hear of how the former hero loses his luster (see The Politician). In Staying True Jenny Sanford tells about the rise and fall of her estranged husband, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford. Sanford was a rising star in the Republican Party, one who spent three terms in Congress and two in the Governor’s mansion. But his star fell when news came to light of his extra-marital affair with an Argentinian woman. And now his wife tells the strange and sad tale of the meltdown of a marriage.

If there is a theme in the book, a theme behind all the words, it is Sanford’s attempts to understand what went wrong. She seems to be constantly wondering, constantly asking, where did I lose him? Where did things go wrong? Should I have seen this coming? Those are inevitable questions, I think, that any woman will ask herself when she has been scorned and rejected, traded in for a newer, younger model. And as always, it is easy for the reader to look from the outside in and to see how things began to crumble and to wonder how it was that she could have been so blind for so long. But from real life we know that it is far more difficult in the moment, with all of the complexities of life.

Despite such reflections, Jenny often comes across as just a little bit less than genuine. While she uses a lot of ink to describe her husband’s faults and foibles (which, truly, are legion) she says very little about how she may have contributed to the meltdown of the marriage. This is not to defend her husband in his sin but just to say that she seems very willing to play the victim card. She portrays herself as a good and noble and pious woman who gave her life to her husband, her children, her country, only to be betrayed. And yet that is so rarely the way it really is. It is rarely so straightforward. Even acknowledging just a few of her own faults would have made her so much more human, so much more genuine. It would have given us so much more to learn about how a marriage really comes unglued from the outside in.

Whenever I read a book dealing with something as important as marriage, I am struck anew by the difference between a Christian worldview and a non-Christian worldview. Sanford often writes about her faith, but gives little evidence that she has a truly biblical worldview, a truly Bible-centered way of understanding the world. Raised Roman Catholic, she has held to the faith of her childhood but seems to have added elements of evangelicalism along with elements of the New Age. Her Christian thinking is at times Christianesque, but rarely distinctly Christian. And it shows as she talks about family, about marriage, about faith.

The book calls me to find joy in what God has given me and to keep my eyes focused on him, through all joy and pain, all success and failure. It calls me to be particularly cautious when it comes to success. It seems that Mark Sanford fell into the age-old trap of believing his own press. So many people told him of his own importance, that he began to believe it all. As his wife writes, “But now, the media, the hated media, was lavishing positive attention on him, and he found it irresistible. He was the man of the moment, the stalwart hero who was standing on principle and refusing to accept money from the federal government. In all ways, he was a man who stood apart from the quotidian world. He was lauded, celebrated for his constant seeking of new ideas, new horizons, and, unbeknownst to me, new sensations. Was it so much of a stretch then for him to think that if he worked hard enough at it, he might beat this aging thing too?” And so the story goes, time and time again. Mark Sanford loved to be loved and soon felt it was his right to pursue happiness in any way he saw fit. As any honest celebrity will tell you, success can very quickly beget entitlement. And entitlement, in turn, begets all kind of sin.

A sad story, as it must be when telling of the destruction of a marriage that ought to have been “til death do us part,” Staying True is sad also because of the lack of resolution, the lack of good answers. How I wish the author had been able to come to true, gospel-centered resolution where, even if she could not save her marriage, she could have taken comfort in the cross of Christ. She could have cast herself upon the one who will always stay true to her. Instead it seems that her primary concern has become staying true to herself. That may provide comfort for a time, but it can never fully satisfy.

Verdict: Read it if you’re ever tempted to vote for Mark Sanford

Tastes come and go, rise and wane. For today, at least, it seems that animal stories are all the rage. We probably have Marley and his amazing success to blame. So it is not surprising that, just a month into this project, I’ve come across the story of an animal. This time it is the story of Oscar, a cat with a strange gift.

Oscar lives in Steere House in Providence, Rhode Island. Steere House is a nursing home with a large ward for patients with dementia. Oscar is one of several animals who lives in the home, providing comfort and companionship to the residents. But Oscar is unique in that he seems to always be present when a patient is in the final hours of life. Author David Dosa, a geriatrician who works at the home, plays the role of the guy who is ambivalent toward animals, but ready to be convinced. Much of the book proceeds through a long series of interviews with family members of former patients, asking them about their experience with Oscar. Time and time again he hears that Oscar was there when a person passed away.

And that’s about it. Dosa writes in narrative fashion with lots of detailed conversations. Seeing as many of these conversations were utterly inconsequential and seeing as they happened several years ago, it’s quite clear that these bits of dialog are “could-be-true” more than hard fact. The dialog is often stilted, neither realistic nor high in literary quality. It is a flaw, though not a fatal one.

More interesting and more consequential than Dosa’s musings about a cat (I’m no fan of felines or most other pets, for that) are his descriptions of end-of-life care. Culturally, we have a lot of thinking to do about caring for those who are near-death, and especially so as our population ages. So often today we leave people almost indefinitely suspended between life and death, purposelessly staving off the inevitable. Dosa sees this struggle every day. Though he does little to suggest a better way forward, he does provide many useful case studies where we see the issues up close and personal.

Also useful are his descriptions of men and women suffering from dementia. As he describes such people he humanizes them, giving a face to what is often abstract. Many of the stories are heartbreaking (such as the man who entered his wife’s room to celebrate their anniversary, only to have her scream and slap him, having forgotten who he was; the man walked away and never returned). Having dealt with Alzheimer’s in my own family, I can attest to its devastating effects. The benefit I found in this book was in thinking about people like my grandfather who was, at the time of his death, just a shadow of the man he had been in life.

As for the cat, well, who knows? Dosa proposes that he may smell something that warns him of the onset of death. Maybe, perversely, he enjoys this scent and goes to curl up with the dying patients for his own satisfaction more than their comfort. Either way, Oscar is no more than a rather uninteresting character in an largely unremarkable book. I see little to recommend it.

Verdict: Read it if you really, really like cats (or geriatricians).

The new list of bestsellers is out, and there are four new titles on it. It’s interesting to see how some books remain there week after week, only descending the list very slowly (see Have a Little Faith and Outliers). Others come and go in a flash, climbing quickly and falling off every bit as quickly (see Intellectuals and Society and Anticancer).

Once again I’ve been unable to catch up. I got through three-and-a-half books this week, leaving me one-and-a-half behind (though, to be fair, I should finish up one of them tonight, meaning that as Friday comes to an end, I’ll be only one book behind). I don’t like my chances of reading all four of these titles this week, especially since two of them are quite substantial. So I’ll be hoping again for a quiet week on the list come next Friday. It would be nice to be all caught up.

Here are the new additions to my reading list. I’m glad to see that all of them are available on Kindle, saving me a pretty good chunk of change.

Shooting straight up to the #3 spot is another book about the great financial meltdown–Henry Paulson’s On the Brink. This is a pretty big book (almost 500 pages) and is likely to be a tough go. I suspect there will be a lot of overlap with Too Big To Fail.

Entering the list at #5 is Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Another big book, this one sounds unique. “Race, poverty and science intertwine in the story of the woman whose cancer cells were cultured without her permission in 1951 and have supported a mountain of research undertaken since then.”

At #8 is Staying True by Jenny Sanford, estranged wife of South Carolina’s Governor Mark Sanford. “In this candid and compelling memoir, the first lady of South Carolina reveals the private ordeal behind her very public betrayal—and offers inspiration for anyone struggling to keep faith during life’s most trying times.”

And at #12 is Making Rounds with Oscar by David Dosa. Oscar is a cat who comforts dying patients in a nursing home. That seems a strange premise, but not altogether unexpected in this day when pet stories are all the rage (thanks for nothing Marley!).

I guess we can’t accuse the Times of building a list that is without variety! One memoir, one biography, one book that combines economics and politics and one that is about death, dying and felines. It’s going to be an interesting week.