Suddenly it seems that I am hearing about Asperger’s Syndrome everywhere I go. It was just a few years ago that I first heard the term as it was applied to a family member. Since then I’ve had neighbors move in, three of whom have been diagnosed with it; I’ve come across friends and family members who have witnessed its presence in their family. And I’ve seen it show up on the bestseller’s list at least three times now–Look Me in the Eye by John Robison, Born on a Blue Day by Daniel Tammet and now The Best Kind of Different by Shonda Schilling.

Asperger’s is a syndrome I know well. I have seen its social awkwardness, its lack of eye contact, its strange brilliance. In The Best Kind of Different Shonda Schilling, wife of pitching great Curt Schilling, shares how it has impacted their family through their son Grant. She lets the reader into the journey as they discover that their son suffers from it and as they seek to deal with its sometimes-harsh realities.

Let me be honest and say that in most ways The Best Kind of Different is a rather unremarkable book. It does not have the human interest of Born on a Blue Day, the story of an autistic savant; it does not have the personal flavor of Look Me in the Eye. Where the other two books tell of Asperger’s from the perspective of one who has it (and, interestingly, people with the Syndrome typically express themselves far better in writing than in speech), this one tells of it from the perspective of the mother of one who suffers from it.

And so I suppose the real value in this book will be for those whose families are adapting to a child with Asperger’s. I am sure that many mothers and fathers will be able to identify with the exasperation of the Schillings as they try to put an end to the poor behavior of their child and the sorrow they feel when they realize that the behavior was often caused by factors outside of their son’s control.

This book reinforces the lesson that I have learned repeatedly through this 10MillionWords project. Time and time again I’ve seen how a distinctly Christian worldview makes all the difference, that seeing things through a biblical lens changes everything. And as I read The Best Kind of Different I longed for Schilling to share something truly meaningful about the spiritual realities of disability. She learns to embrace her son’s disability and learns to see some of its manifestations as a blessing rather than a curse. And yet still she does not have that truly Christian perspective that would help her understand what disability is, why it exists, and how it will some day come to an end. At times she comes close, but she doesn’t ever actually get there. And in the end this leaves the book as incomplete as the author’s understanding of disability.

As I read this book I asked myself, “Would this ever have been published if it did not describe the family of a celebrity?” It is a fair question, I think, when it comes from the pen of a celebrity (or a celebrity’s wife as the case may be). I suppose it might have, but I think it is safe to say that it would not have made its way to the list of bestsellers. It isn’t a bad book by any stretch, but neither is it a particularly good one. Still, it does do a good job of describing Asperger’s and introducing the reader to an increasingly common condition. And for that I am grateful.

Verdict: Read it if you want to better understand Asperger’s Syndrome and those who suffer from it.

Jason Mattera is an up-and-comer. Only in his twenties, he has already been featured by some of the biggest Conservative names in talk radio, including Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Glenn Beck, Laura Ingraham, Roger Hedgecock, and Mike Gallagher. I suppose that list tells you all you need to know about his political leanings. Obama Zombies is his first book and it screams Malkin, Beck, Coulter as he seeks to tell “How the Liberal Machine Brainwashed My Generation.”

If you have read a book by any of those people or listened to any of their radio shows, you’ll know roughly what Mattera is going to say. There is a sense in which this is two books–one that rehashes the same old conservative arguments and one that puts them into this new context of Obamamania. Now I don’t mean to use the word rehash in a pejorative sense–many of those arguments conservatives make are good ones and ones I agree with wholeheartedly. Global warming is a lot of nonsense, but a perfect opportunity to impose all kinds of laws and regulations while gaining political points; socialized health care really could become a nightmare; capitalism offers the nation far greater hope than the Democratic ideal of wealth redistribution; seeking to put to rest the threat of Islam through around-the-campfire dialog is a dead-end. And so on. You know the planks of that platform by now.

What Mattera does that is different, and what he does well, is showing how Obama’s Presidential campaign packaged and sold all of this to a whole generation of impressionable young people, many of whom have far more enthusiasm than wisdom. He shows how the campaign turned this young generation into a group of zombies, powerful but unthinking.

Three themes stood out above the rest. The first is the power of celebrity. Obama’s campaign understood that if they were to win the election they would need to mobilize this generation and they understood in turn that in order to do so, they would need celebrities on their side. And so they enlisted the Hollywood elite to laud Obama and pour contempt upon McCain and Palin. They were very effective in this, using every available means to show that the nation’s idols were firmly on the side of Obama. Millions of young people were swept up in the momentum, falling in lockstep behind the ultimate celebrity.

The second theme that stands out is the power of the media. We already know this of course, but it is interesting to see how the media impacted youth, especially through celebrity “news” personalities like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. These men were little more than shills for Obama and yet their shows are, for many young people, their only access to the news. They believe what they hear from such men and allow them to shape and mold their opinions. When Stewart and Colbert showed themselves firmly in the Democratic camp, millions of youth followed along.

And the third theme is the power of youth. What Obama’s campaign realized that McCain’s did not, is that in many ways authority structures are shifting in this digital world. Many people have written today about the wisdom of crowds and the power of crowds. When they discuss such things, they are generally discussing crowds of the young and technologically-adept. These are the people who are so easily mobilized today and who are so eager to be mobilized for what they perceive as a good cause. Obama’s campaign understood this and they roused that crowd. McCain’s campaign missed badly; their attempts to communicate with that generation fell completely and pathetically short.

All of this makes Obama Zombies an interesting book and one worth reading. It explains the recent past but also helps us project ourselves into the future a little bit. We can see a glimpse of how the 2012 campaign will come together and how the Democrats will have the immediate upper hand in reaching that same generation. I really hope the Republicans are reading it so they can learn a few lessons and at least make it interesting in 2012.

Verdict: Read it for its interpretation of the past and its importance to the future

Steve Poizner is currently California’s Insurance Commissioner and also a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations. In addition, he’s a former White House Fellow, who worked for the National Security Council; a successful and wealthy entrepreneur who started two industry-changing technology companies; and a co-founder of the California Charter Schools Association. And now he is also a New York Times bestselling author. That’s quite a resume. Did I mention that he wants to be the next [Republican] Governor of California?

After making barrels full of money through the sale of his company SnapTrack (which he sold to Qualcomm for a cool billion after inventing a way of cramming a GPS unit into a cell phone) Poizner was looking for a new kind of challenge. He had conquered the business world, proving his mettle there, and had served a year at the White House, doing his bit for the nation during a tumultuous time. Having succeeded at everything else, he decided to try his hand at teaching. If he had been so successful in the business world, couldn’t he transfer that success to the classroom?

He approached a list of schools, providing his credentials and expressing his enthusiasm. Only one school replied to him–Mount Pleasant High School in San Jose. Not quite the stereotypical inner-city high school of so many popular movies, neither is it the posh and chic kind of school he would send his own child to. Eventually he was given the opportunity to teach a class for a year–a class on American government. And now he has written a book about it.

Mount Pleasant is not much of a book. I suppose at this point, after he has announced his candidacy as governor, it is easy to question Poizner’s motives. Did he really take on this challenge for the sake of the kids? Or did he have a book contract and the governor’s mansion in mind already? Perhaps those are not fair questions. I suspect I would be less likely to ask them if the book had been better or at least more interesting–if it served a purpose beyond being an advertisement for Poizner. The book even has a strangely awful cover, especially for one that lands on the list of bestsellers. Couldn’t they have tried to be at least a little bit creative? Seriously. It’s a head shot stuck beside a random picture of a random desk. The proportions are wrong, the font is cliche, the colors are boring. Maybe he had one of his students design it.

The book passes like, well, like a twelfth-grade course on American government. It has its high points but mostly it just plods along and conveys the pertinent points. This is no Dangerous Minds. It’s just the story of a guy trying to teach a mostly-unremarkable group of students. I admire him for what he did and for his attempts to teach them well. But he didn’t do anything much more than countless thousands of teachers do every day. And they don’t get book contracts for doing it. Though if they did, I hope the covers would be better.

Anyway, Mount Pleasant is not too bad, but it’s not too good either. It’s mostly just unremarkable. It’s like going to Ben & Jerry’s and walking out with vanilla. There’s nothing wrong with vanilla, but why would you choose that over the Cherry Garcia or Chunky Monkey? I guess I just can’t think of too many reasons I’d want to recommend this one.

Verdict: Read it as a tribute to the GPS in your iPhone.

This is now the fifth book I’ve read dealing with the financial crisis, understandably quite a popular theme on the New York Times list of bestsellers so far this year. Five books later I am seeing certain themes repeat themselves but I still can’t say that I really understand the heart of the crisis. The financial context that led to it is so deep, so complex, that I just can’t wrap my mind around it. And I suspect that most people are in the same boat I am. Very few of us have the knowledge and expertise to really put the pieces together.

In The Big Short Michael Lewis, best known for authoring The Blind Side and Moneyball, takes a look at the crisis from a slightly different perspective. He looks at it from the perspective of those who saw the crisis coming and who shorted the market, making themselves rich in the process. As he does in Moneyball and The Blind Side, he writes about people more than events. He tells the story of the coming crisis through men like Steve Eisman, who saw the derivatives market for what it was–a whole lot of fictitious wealth that at one time or another would have implode. Both outraged and greedy, he went all-in against it.

Lewis may not come down entirely against the derivatives market in The Big Short and yet he certainly does seem to offer criticism of those who caused billions and billions of dollars to evaporate into thin air. (If money can evaporate into thin air, did it really exist in the first place?) But in doing so he seems to forget that just a few years ago he was championing these very derivatives. In a 2007 article he wrote “None of them seemed to understand that when you create a derivative you don’t add to the sum total of risk in the financial world; you merely create a means for redistributing that risk. They have no evidence that financial risk is being redistributed in ways we should all worry about. They’re just …worried. But the most striking thing about the growing derivatives markets is the stability that has come with them.” Some stability. Not surprisingly, he does not mention that he himself was once enamored by the very means that brought about the crisis. Take that as just an interesting little historical footnote.

The men who are the protagonists in this story are people who are outrageously greedy. It was not good motives that drove their action. It was not concern for their fellow man or even the desire to earn a living. Rather, it was the desire to become outrageously wealthy by risking all they had. It is like the man who found buried treasure in a field so he sold all that he had to buy it. Except that in this case he wanted to profit off misfortune and off the near downfall of a whole economic system. There is no Michael Oher here to draw you in–instead there are just greedy and grouchy Wall Street goons who, though they had foresight, had little in the way of ethics.

But then again, maybe I am being unfair. These men did nothing illegal; they just made themselves rich by betting against a market that was already teetering on the edge of collapse. Isn’t greed at the very heart of so much of what transpires on Wall Street? And weren’t these men just the few who played the game most skillfully? Maybe we shouldn’t hold their success against them. They had the foresight to, essentially, take out hundreds and hundreds of life insurance policies on companies that were already on life support and very nearly ready to flatline. That the economic system allowed them to do this just shows how bizarre and convoluted it had all become.

The Big Short is no The Blind Side. It may be an unfair comparison, I suppose, but somehow I was hoping for more interesting characters and, at the very least, more likable ones. That would have set this book apart from the many others that deal with roughly the same topic, albeit from a different perspective. As it is, there are better options out there if you want to figure out just what went wrong with America before and during the crisis. It’s not so much that there’s anything objectively wrong with The Big Short–it’s more that Lewis has written a book that has stiff and ultimately superior competition.

Verdict: Read it if you’d like a lighter take on the coming of the financial crisis

I experienced some deja vu reading Change Your Brain, Change Your Body.While the emphasis within this book was maybe a little bit different from any I’ve read before it, it appears that there is not much groundbreaking information about taking care of your body. Like Anticancer before it any other number of healthy living books, this one doesn’t go a whole lot farther than the basics. And I don’t mean to say it like it’s a bad thing.

The emphasis in this book is on the  health of the brain. The author, Daniel Amen says, rightly I suppose, that having a healthy body is only so much use if you’re not also going to have a healthy brain. He wants you to “Use Your Brain to Get and Keep the Body You Have Always Wanted,” according to the book’s subtitle. I’ll say off the top that the book isn’t as bad as it may sound based on that title. The key to a healthy body, he says, one that is in shape, energized, and youthful, is a healthy brain. If you’ve got a healthy brain, you’re well on your way to having a healthy body.

Most of the advice he dispenses is of the common sense variety. Eat your vegetables, take vitamin supplements, maintain a balanced diet, don’t eat too much junk food. You know how it goes. In return you’ll be healthier, feel healthier, sleep better, enjoy sex more, and so on. It’s the very things your mother told you all those years ago (though she probably left out the bit about sex).

One thing I found interesting is that the author cannot avoid discussing the body-soul connection. He seems to have no consistent spiritual framework to work from and certainly no love for the Bible. Yet he cannot deny the importance of caring for the soul as well as the body. He suggests doing this through Eastern-style meditation or through whatever rites or rituals are important to you. The suggestions he gives are far less compelling to me than the fact that he has to make them in the first place. Even the unbeliever or the person who denies God cannot deny that somehow, somewhere we are more than bodies, more than just flesh and blood. But as usual, the prescription will do nothing to to cure the ill. The solution, he suggests through his worldview, is intrinsic–look inside of yourself and you fill find peace. But the Bible tells a very different story. When we look inside we see what ails us. It is only when we look outside of ourselves that we can find what the cure for the ultimate disease.

It is well and good to have a healthy brain and a healthy body. But how much better is it to have a healthy soul? A man may gain the whole world, he may gain the brightest brain and the most beautiful body, and still lose his soul.

Verdict: Read it if it’s been too long since you read a book on healthy living

This book brought my face-to-face with a question I had been asking myself for some time: what if I come across a book that, for one reason or another, I just can’t read? What if a book is so repulsive, so horrible, that my conscience just won’t allow me to continue reading it. Can I still say, then, that I’ve read all of the New York Times bestsellers? I decided early on that I would cross the bridge when I came to it and, when I saw Chelsea, Chelsea Bang Bang hit the list of bestsellers, I assumed I would have to face it at last.

In the end, though, it was not filth that offended me as much as just sheer stupidity. The first chapter of this book is ugly–not as much graphic as just plain inappropriate, like when you try to tell a joke and it just goes bad. You realize that what you thought was funny, was actually not funny at all. After that opening chapter the book is far more childish and just plain stupid than lascivious as she looks at life and love and daughterhood and dog ownership. Chelsea Handler, whom I had known only from seeing her name on book covers, is clearly desperately immature and willing to do just about anything to gain attention. Her sense of humor, such that it is, is puerile, akin to the kind of nonsense that was so popular on that show Jackass. She likes to mock people through pranks, she likes to laugh about farting, she likes to torment and mock and belittle. It’s terribly unsophisticated and, frankly, immediately tiresome. She makes herself so obnoxious that there is very little she could do, I think, to make herself or what she says in any way desirable or lascivious.

Of all the books I’ve read this year, and I’ve read plenty, this one is easily the worst. Frankly, I can’t think of a single reason I would ever, under any circumstances, recommend it. I can’t even understand why anyone, anywhere would buy it. It’s not sexual enough to titillate, it’s not clever enough to amuse, it’s not sophisticated enough to cause reflection. It’s an utter waste of time, money, effort and atoms. It is very clearly a cash grab, Handler’s attempt to make a few more bucks before her 15 minutes of fame comes screeching to a halt. And I say that this can’t happen soon enough.

If you look at the pictures of Handler on the book cover and compare to, say, images of her being interviewed, you’ll see that the cover photos are so heavily airbrushed that Handler is very nearly unrecognizable. You can see just the barest hint of her through all the Photoshopping. And it strikes me that this offers a parallel to the book itself. Here Handler gives a very one-dimensional and obviously fake version of herself. It’s as fake as her skin in that cover shot. She has constructed a fabricated version of herself that, for one reason or another, seems to appeal to readers. Perhaps her last two books, both of which sold very well, were clever or original or offered something (anything!) to commend them. Not so with Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang. Books don’t get a whole lot worse than this one. They just plain can’t.

Verdict: Read it never, ever, ever.

It is interesting to me that when I hear of a title like Eating Animals, I pretty much know the book is going to advocate not eating animals. After all, we don’t eat animals, we eat meat; delicious, delicious meat. And lots of it, at that. The average American will consume 21,000 entire animals during the course of his life. (Do note that this does not necessarily mean 21,000 cows; those tasty little shrimp you eat by the dozen are also whole animals, at least until you bite down) Most of us pretty much assume that the meat we buy from the grocery store began its life not as a cute little animal but as a shrink-wrapped chunk of flesh neatly packaged in a styrofoam container. We prefer our food abstract since that somehow makes it so much less offensive to our urban sensibilities.

Eating Animals is an investigation into meat and, even more, into the meat industry. Here the author, Jonathan Safran Foer, follows a long line of books and documentaries (think The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Food Inc., etc) in seeing how the cute little cow becomes the blob of flesh on the grocery store shelf or the hamburger patty sizzling on the grill.

Not surprisingly, what Foer discovers is shocking, disgusting and degrading. While there is some validity in drawing a distinction between factory farms and family farms, it’s an increasingly meaningless one for the vast majority of our meat, especially if we frequent fast food joints, comes from factory farms. The unfortunate animals who are bred and raised on such farms live in conditions that is utterly appalling. While granting that they are “mere” animals, not distant human ancestors, but life forms designed by God to serve humans, it is nevertheless hard to justify the conditions in which they spend their short lives and, as often as not, the way in which they end their lives. And yet this is the cost of cheap meat. Either we pay or they pay. North Americans want to consume vast amounts of protein and want to pay little for it; factory farms are the only viable solution to this conundrum. Capitalism pretty much dictates it.

Says Foer, “Those factory farmers calculate how close to death they can keep the animals without killing them. That’s the business model. How quickly can they be made to grow, how tightly can they be packed, how much or little can they eat, how sick can they get without dying.” As humans we are commanded by God to have dominion over the earth and all it contains, but to do so as stewards. It is tough for me to see factory farms as any kind of faithful stewardship. To produce all the cheap meat we need, we’ve torn animals from any kind of natural life and turned them into commodities no different than inert ones like coal or lumber. “For thousands of years, farmers took their cues from natural processes. Factory farming considers nature an obstacle to be overcome.” So we fiddle with genetics to create chickens that have lots of high-quality white meat, but which have spindly legs that are easily broken. We feed them food they would never consume in a natural environment and cram them full of antibiotics to ward off the diseases brought about by close confinement. At the end we don’t much care that they live a miserable existence from cradle to grave egg to frying pan. If they’re cheap and tasty we’re content not to ask questions. Somehow this doesn’t seem quite right.

What I like about Eating Animals is that it avoids the PETA-insanity all too common among vegetarians and their evil cousins vegans (seriously, I can understand not eating meat, but life without dairy is unimaginable to me). Foer goes out of his way to sympathize with omnivores and to express his own regard for the tastier of God’s creatures. And while he is now vegetarian (did I just ruin the ending for you?) he came to that decision not by ideology as much as by what he considers necessity. He reminds me a bit of Bart Ehrman who has turned from God but regrets having no one to pray to; Foer has turned from meat but regrets not eating turkey on Thanksgiving. That’s the kind of vegetarian I can identify with.

To this point my #1 takeaway from all of the reading I’ve done as part of this project is this simple lesson: worldview makes all the difference. When we ignore the Bible we can no longer begin our thinking from a consistent dominion perspective. Foer writes well, but he writes from the perspective of an evolutionist (even if a practicing Jewish one). So he does not and cannot state with confidence that God gives us permission to eat meat. The Christian’s conscience should be clear in regards to eating animals; it’s how they become food that is more troublesome to me.

And yet I don’t quite know what to do about it. As I read this book I felt guilty when reading about the conditions of the animals on their factory farms. I felt positively sick reading about the conditions in many of those slaughterhouses. And then I ate a ham and egg sandwich. It was delicious.

Verdict: Read it to spur your thinking about what you eat

Note: In many of the reviews I write I don’t bother mentioning the use of profanity. When you read a book by Ozzy Osbourne you pretty much know what you’re going to get. But I feel like I should mention that when discussing feces Foer prefers the use of a four-letter equivalent. And because there’s so much of that, um, manure in, on and around our meat, well, the word comes up quite often.

Of all the made-for-TV celebrities, I’m not sure that there are many stranger than Duane “Dog” Chapman. He’s a study in opposites: a tough guy who cries, a foul-mouthed dude who quotes Scripture, a family man who has had twelve children by at least five wives. His show, Dog the Bounty Hunter, has developed a strong following, making Chapman a rather unlikely and unusual celebrity.

In 2007 Chapman released his memoir, You Can Run But You Can’t Hide, a book that shot straight onto the New York Times list of bestsellers and sent him on a nationwide book tour. And here, just two years later, is Where Mercy Is Shown, Mercy Is Given, a second memoir. That seems odd unless you know what has been going on in Dog’s world.

In 2006 Dog was arrested by U.S. Marshalls and very nearly deported to Mexico to face some old kidnapping charges. Near the end of 2007, just as that situation was being resolved in his favor, his son released to the National Enquirer a tape in which Chapman repeatedly used the word “nigger.” The outcry was deafening and resulted in the immediate suspension of production of Dog the Bounty Hunter. Chapman made all of the right apologies and even went on a kind of Apology Tour. After it all, when his penance was complete, the show resumed production and continues in production today. Where Mercy Is Shown, Mercy Is Given is based around these two episodes. It covers each of them in some detail with occasional intermissions to discuss hunting down a particularly noteworthy criminal. It is, then, an update to the last book and one that gives an adoring audience a further glimpse into the life of their hero.

If you’ve ever seen Dog the Bounty Hunter you’ve undoubtedly noticed that Dog considers himself a Christian, always pausing to pray before a big hunt and often rebuking criminals with words from the Bible. That faith factors significantly in this book. It is full of phrases like this, supposed explanations from Scripture that come with not a shred of understanding of the text’s true meaning: “In the Bible, there’s a verse in Hebrews that says ‘God will give you the shaking that comes on your spirit when things are not right internally.’” Of course in that case I can’t even imagine what text he is referring to. I’ve read and studied Hebrews and I’m quite confident stating that such a verse does not exist, especially when this is the way it manifests itself in a life: “For the first time in years, I was able to catch my breath because I felt I no longer had to worry about my lawyers. In finally felt that I had three lawyers working for me, and that was a good feeling–really good.” In aftermath of the “n-word” controversy Dog says this: “The Bible says ‘the unsaved watch us all the time.’ They’re judging everything we say, do, and whether or not we will live up to the standards they’ve set for us. I have tried to live by my convictions, my morals and values. If you are willing to sacrifice yourself for what you believe in, God will be there, and so I finally had my answer and knew what I had to do.”

This strange brand of mysticism mixed with Christianity pervades the book. He claims to often hear from God, directly and verbally, receiving instructions on what to do, what to say, how to act and react. When he is not quoting (or misquoting) the Bible, Chapman is quoting his hero Tony Robbins. Somehow he misses the contradictory messages of Robbins’ New Age, self-help mysticism and the Bible’s message of faith alone. In this way Where Mercy Is Shown, Mercy Is Given stands as an example of the kind of spirituality that so often passes for Christianity. It is a buffet line kind of faith, one that takes a little bit of this, adds a dash of that, and combines them all into a strangely muddled whole that may seem satisfying but which has no internal cohesion. It is ultimately a religion that places self in the center and moves God to the periphery. How could it be otherwise when we ourselves stand as the arbiters of what is true and what is not? There is no external standard to look to, no outside authority. Dog has tried to live by his convictions, his morals and his values. But how are we to know whether these are also God’s convictions, morals and values?

One quick aside. When Chapman discusses the fallout from his use of the “n-word” he talks about the role of the smarmy Hollywood spin doctors. There he reveals an interesting fact: that as soon as the news broke, he was told to head to rehab. Never mind that he needed no rehab (exactly what kind of rehab would help in this situation?). When a celebrity makes a major gaffe or is caught in a particularly egregious sin (think Tiger Woods, Mel Gibson, etc) the first thing they do is head to rehab. Chapman reveals that this is usually not because they seriously believe they need any rehab but, rather, because the public is then quick to forgive them. As soon as we see that there is a therapeutic answer to their problem we assume that there is also a therapeutic reason for it. And then we are quick to forgive and forget and that celebrity can exit rehab and move on with his life. After all, it’s not really his fault. It’s all a big scam. I think we already know this, but it is interesting to hear it from the mouth of just that kind of celebrity (and, to his credit, one who refused to play that particular game).

Dog is fantastically entertaining; there is no doubt about that. There is something comical about watching him bash down doors with nothing but a can of mace in his hand; something funny about him treasuring his bounty hunter badge as if it is a sign of any true authority; something bizarre about the whole nature of his business in which he bails people out and then makes himself rich and famous by capturing them again. As we Canadians are so fond of saying, “Only in America…”

Verdict: Read it if you just can’t get enough of the Dog. But if that’s the case, honestly, you may need to find a hobby or get out more often or something!

My family used to watch that old show Unsolved Mysteries. I always hated it. Though I couldn’t deny there was a bit of an attraction in learning about these strange mysteries no one has ever been able to solve, I was always frustrated by that very reality–that we couldn’t solve them. There were no answers in the show, only questions. Big questions, interesting questions, questions I really wanted answers to, but questions that remained a mystery. This is one reason I dislike conspiracy theories. Sure it is interesting to speculate on what realities hide behind what we assume is true, but in most cases we will never know otherwise. And I find that supremely frustrating.

Not so Jesse Ventura. Former professional wrestler, former Governor of Minnesota, and now professional conspiracy theorist (for TruTV’s Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura), he loves them. And he sees them everywhere. American Conspiracies is his attempt to bring to light some of the most prominent conspiracies in American political history.

Now it’s a strange truism that when you go looking for conspiracies, you tend to find them. After all, life is rarely entirely free from gray areas. Always there are strange shades of gray between what is evident and what is hidden. And it is alluring to think about that space between, to wonder what might have happened in them. I have heard of the term pareidolia in this context. It refers to “a type of illusion or misperception involving a vague or obscure stimulus being perceived as something clear and distinct.” Go looking for those conspiracies and before long you will inevitably find evidence to back them up. And this is exactly what we see in American Conspiracies.

Ventura begins with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, saying that it is likely that there were more people involved in the plot than just the few who were rounded up. He points to conspiracy as well in the fact that most children learn only about John Wilkes Booth and not the other conspirators. This is quite a stretch for a conspiracy; some history books may simplify by pointing only to Booth but I don’t know of anyone who would suggest that the few people punished for the crime were the only ones involved.

After rather a weak start with Lincoln, Ventura turns to FDR (an attempted coup to overthrow him and establish a fascist nation), JFK (the CIA did it), Malcolm X (the CIA and the mob did it), Martin Luther King, Jr. (the mob, the military and some crazy right wingers did it), RFK (CIA again), Watergate (the CIA set him up–they’ve been busy), the Jonestown Massacre (you guessed it–the CIA again). You get the idea. The CIA is also running drugs, shipping them to the US in the bodies of dead soldiers. The Republicans stole the elections in 2000 and 2004 and came exceedingly close to doing so again in 2008. And, of course, 9/11 was either an inside job or a massive cover-up in which the Bush Administration either knew about the plan or allowed it to proceed to further their own ends. The buildings were dropped not by the planes but by carefully-placed and precision-timed explosions. You’ve heard it all before.

As is always the case with such theories, Ventura offers evidence that often seems compelling. But of course evidence is always compelling when it is presented in isolation. He makes his case for each of these and often the evidence seems to be there. But walk away for a few minutes, think it through, and you’ll quickly see that the conspiracies are often more muddled than the truth.

I’m not so naive as to think that the world as we see it through the mouth of the government and through the lens of the media is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Clearly there is a lot that we, the ordinary, unremarkable people who comprise 99.99% of the population, don’t know and never will know. I know that Satan rules this world and that there are power structures and power struggles that happen far beyond what we see and experience. There is no doubt in my mind that the world is not always what it appears to be. And yet neither am I convinced that reality according to Ventura is any closer to the truth.

Ventura has always been an entertainer. In his heyday he traveled the world tearing the town apart and entertaining millions. His job was to create a story that was pseudo-believable but entirely entertaining. He was good at it then and he is good at it still. Here he rehashes conspiracies that have been debated for years or decades. He introduces little that is new; little that has any measure of credibility. It’s conspiratorial, it’s hard to believe, but at least it’s plenty entertaining.

Verdict: Read it if you love yourself a conspiracy theory.

Lift is a tiny book, so just to be different, I’ll give it a tiny review.

Written as a letter from a mother to her two children, Lift clearly coasts onto the bestseller list on the success of author Kelly Corrigan’s previous title The Middle Places. Lift is not a bad book; rather, it’s just mostly unremarkable. Sure there is a certain sweetness to it as an adoring mother writes to her little girls. But if it is meant to be tender and sweet, then why does she at one point indulge in a streak of ugly, harsh profanity? And if it is written to be pro-family, then why does she include a lengthy section defending homosexual marriage? And if she really wants her daughters to love their parents, why does she subtly belittle her husband so often?

So truly it’s not that Lift is an objectively bad book. It’s more that I just don’t quite understand the point of it. I can see that her daughters will someday treasure it; and I can see that it will make a nice family heirloom. But I don’t quite understand why the rest of us have been invited to read it with them.

The book has poignant moments; moments that any parent can identify with. But those are their moments, not ours. I think they would have been better off if left that way.

Verdict: Read it if you loved The Middle Places