(You’ll have to excuse the rare double post between 10MillionWords and my blog. This book perfectly fit both sites)

From his earliest days, Mosab Hasson Yousef had a view of the inner workings of Hamas. The son of one its founders, from childhood he was immersed in the shadowy world of Middle Eastern terror and politics. Arrested time and again by the Shin Bet, the Israeli internal intelligence service, he eventually made the decision to become a double agent, working for Israel instead of against her. For ten years, from 1997 to 2007, he lived like this, deeply embedded within Hamas, suspected by no one, yet passing vast amounts of information to Israel. In this way he prevented assassinations, stopped suicide attacks and provided information leading to the arrests or killings of many terrorists. He was Shin Bet’s most valuable source of information about Hamas.

In 1999 he had a chance encounter with a British visitor who invited Yousef to learn about the Christian faith. Curious and intelligent, Yousef took this opportunity and was immediately struck by the difference between Jesus Christ and Mohammed, between the Christian faith and the Islam he had inherited from his fathers. In the months that followed he made a slow conversion to Christianity and was quietly baptized.

Eventually Yousef grew tired of his double life and convinced the Israelis to release him from his position with them. With some reluctence they agreed and allowed him to move to the United States where he continues to live today. Son of Hamas is the story of his life, “A gripping account of terror, betrayal, political intrigue, and unthinkable choices,” according to the rather verbose subtitle.

And it’s a good story that is told well. Yousef offers a uniquely interesting perspective on Hamas and on the political background and context in that area of the world. His story involves just enough action and intrigue to keep it interesting. At times it is almost (but not quite) unbelievable.

One thing I found interesting is that Youself reveals the Israelis not as the good guys but as the less-bad guys. He develops some level of respect for them when he sees that they are fighting for their lives against a host of nations bent on their destruction. But still he shows how they are every bit as willing as the surrounding nations to torture and kill to further their own ends. Their respect for life is not much greater than that of their enemies. So the Israelis really are not the good guys in this story.

And of course I enjoyed reading not just of Yousef’s conversion to Christianity but also the long process and the inner turmoil that got him there. It was only through much soul-searching that he was able to see Jesus Christ not just as a prophet but as the Son of God who died for the sin of the world. So often I read books like this and am disappointed to see that the author finds joy in everything but Christ. But here Yousef finds rest and joy and peace only when he submits his life to Christ.

Yousef does not want to be a hero to Christians. At the end of the book he admits his own unsuitability for that task. He is a new Christian and one who is unskilled–still a novice. And yet he is one who has now written a book about his conversion that has landed on the New York Times list of bestsellers. His testimony is powerful and I both hope and expect that God will use it to show others the light that can be theirs if they turn to Christ.

This one is well worth reading. Buy a copy and marvel at God’s grace. Marvel at how God will go to great lengths to draw his people to himself.

Verdict: Buy it and rejoice in the grace of God.

Of all the books to make their way onto the bestseller list this year, Anticancer is the one I’ve wanted to read the least. That explains why it’s been hanging around my “list of things to do” for weeks now without any noticeable progress. But finally I caught up on all my reading and I could procrastinate no longer. And the book was just as bad as I had feared; or very nearly so at any rate.

Now let me explain. It’s not that the book is devoid of any good information. Servan-Schreiber is a former cancer patient who has twice survived brain tumors, so he writes about this subject from hard personal experience. He is a doctor and researcher so he deals with the subject from the medical perspective as well. He nicely blends the scientific with the biographical and this gives him credibility on two levels. Unfortunately, he has also read too many New Age books and has spent too much time doing yoga.

Anticancer succeeds where Servan-Schreiber attempts to describe the kind of lifestyle and diet that can prevent cancer, assist in beating the disease and help recover from it. Here he shares the latest wisdom on the foods and components of food that have been found to promote good health (the usual suspects: garlic, fish, omega-3, etc, etc) and those that have been found to hinder good health (processed and synthetic sugars, trans fats, and so on). He shares good and common sense about getting sufficient amounts of exercise and avoiding undue stress. All is well and good.

Where Anticancer fails is where he deals with all of this from the mental and spiritual angles. Here we find him speaking more from personal experience than from scientific fact. He has dabbled in eastern religions and has absorbed more from them through New Age practices. And so he promotes eastern-style meditation as a necessary component to a healthy lifestyle. He also writes about the importance of embracing one’s “true self” as a crucial component to holistic good health, going so far as to say that denying one’s natural homosexuality can inhibit the body’s immune system (which is a real head-scratcher if you consider that sexually-active homosexuals are hardly known for their strong immune systems).

So I suppose we have an interesting mix of good and bad. I appreciated Servan-Schreiber’s attempts to view health as more than just a sound body or a strong immune system. Certainly a well-rounded understanding of health has to go farther than just the physical. At the same time Servan-Schreiber appears to deny the Creator, the one who gave us both body and soul and who prescribes how we are to live holistically in both the physical and the spiritual. For a book of this nature to truly minister to the Christian in times of illness, it would need to minister at both levels. So while Anticancer’s teaching on the physical dimension may be sound and well worth reading, its teaching on the spiritual level is sorely lacking and, worse, patently unbiblical.

It would only be with some hesitation that I’d recommend this book. Admittedly I have not read much else in this category (and hope I never have to), but I assume there must be books out there that would offer similar wisdom on the body while leaving the spiritual angle for a true physician of the soul.

Verdict: Read it if you can find nothing better on the subject.

“Amy Elizabeth Rosenblatt Solomon, thirty-eight years old, pediatrician, wife of hand surgeon Harrison Solomon, and mother of three, collapsed on her treadmill in the downstairs playroom at home. ‘Jessie and Sammy discovered her,’ our oldest son, Carl, told us on the phone. Carl lives in Fairfax, Virginia, not far from Amy and Harris, with his wife, Wendy, and their two boys, Andrew and Ryan. Jessie had run upstairs to Harris. ‘Mommy isn’t talking,’ she said. Harris got to Amy within seconds, and tried CPR, but her heart had stopped and she could not be revived.” Her death was ruled natural, the result of a strange and asymptomatic heart condition that affects less than two thousandths of one percent of the population. Amy is memorialized in the strangely-titled Making Toast, written by her father, Roger Rosenblatt.

The book is not purely memorial, though, as it tells two stories–that of Amy’s life and that of life after Amy. After her death, Roger and his wife, Ginny, moved into her home to join in the task of caring for her children. And in Making Toast Rosenblatt weaves these two threads together, speaking of one life that has ended and many more that carry on, though only incompletely without daughter, wife, mother.

Not surprisingly in a book dealing with death, the author wrestles with questions of deity and the age old question, If there is a God, how could he allow this to happen? And if you know me, you’ll know that the answers to such questions and, perhaps even more, the grappling with such questions, is of great interest to me. I always find it fascinating to see how people fight through such questions in times of great sorrow. Sometimes they are drawn closer to God and sometimes they turn their backs on him altogether. But in either case they are never the same.

Rosenblatt waits only a few pages before telling the reader his views on God’s role in his daughter’s death. “I cursed God. In a way, believing in God made Amy’s death more, not less, comprehensible, since the God I believe in is not beneficent. He doesn’t care. A friend was visiting Jerusalem when he get the news about Amy. He kicked the Wailing Wall, and said, ‘**** you, God!’ My sentiments exactly.” That anger toward God, a God whose existence he will really not even admit, is a subtle undertone through the book. Later on, reflecting on the fact that of those born with Amy’s heart anomaly, only the smallest percentage ever die from it, he says, “To find out, definitively, that Amy’s death was one in a million or a trillion would only deepen my anger.”

And yet somehow he wants to admit a glimpse of life after death, of something that will make sense of the tragedy. “From the outset, Ginny has told me she feels Amy’s spirit around us. From time to time I have repeated that thought to the children, but I have felt Amy’s spirit only fleetingly. My anger at God remains unabated, and it may be that I do not wish to concede Him anything as good or as kind as providing the superintending presence of my daughter. I know what comfort it gives people to think of the dead as nearby. It would be nice as well to think that the dead are happier to be close to us. But, I am more likely simply to accept Lewis Thomas’s idea of an afterlife based on the principle that nothing in nature disappears, and to go no further. The only spiritual thought that has come to me is a kind of prayer to Amy that we are doing what she would have us do.”

It is sad, really, how he looks for the right things in the wrong places and ends up only more frustrated, more angry, more uncertain. There is no redemption here, no peace or meaning. No joy.

But there are still lessons to learn. And maybe the book’s greatest lesson is one the author has discovered. He realizes that, having heard from Amy’s friends and family members and everyone who knew her at one time or another, he knows his daughter in death in a way he did not know her in life. “I do not know her any better,” he says, “(I doubt that I could know her any better), but there was so much to her life that I was unaware of until now, when I speak with her friends and colleagues and learn of this sound decision or of that small gesture of thoughtfulness. … The distance of death reveals Amy’s stature to me. My daughter mattered to the histories of others.”

It is only in death that we are really known. This is why it is so much better to read biographies of the dead than of the living. Any man may make himself grand in life and any man may appear insignificant in life. But death is the great leveler. Death has a way of drawing out the truth. With death comes the passage of time and through it, a more trustworthy assessment.

For the kind of book Making Toast is, a father writing about the sudden loss of his only daughter, it is surprisingly unemotional and unengaging. Rosenblatt is a good writer, no doubt. But somehow there is a strange emotional gap between what he must really feel and what he writes. It’s not a bad book, per se, but neither is it an excellent one. Yet still it is interesting in its own way, as we are given a glimpse of a family trying to hold itself together in the face of tragedy. One might only wish they had turned to God instead of away from him through it all. Then, perhaps, they might not hold that the death was in vain.

Verdict: Read it if you want to better understand how Christ redeems death.

Along with On the Brink and Too Big to Fail, The Quants is the third book on the list of bestsellers this year that has attempted to make sense of the recent economic downturn. I suspect it will not be the last. On the Brink told the story from Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s perspective while Too Big To Fail looked at it through a wide lens. Scott Patterson’s The Quants takes a different approach altogether, looking at the role played by the quants–the quantitative analysts.

When you read of hedge funds, ATQs, statistical arbitrage, credit default swaps and so many of the other terms that have very suddenly found their way into common parlance, you are speaking of the work of quants. Quantitative analysts are mathematicians or physicists or people from related disciplines who have found a role to play in the world of economics. The Times says, “Seduced by a vision of mathematical elegance underlying some of the messiest of human activities, they apply skills they once hoped to use to untangle string theory or the nervous system to making money.” Seeing the world markets as akin to the universe, a mystery to be solved, they set out to construct impossibly complex formulas and algorithms that can turn money into more money.

Yes, they can turn money into more money. But they can also turn credit into money and risk into money and pretty much everything else into money. The problem is that much of the wealth they were able to produce at the end of this process was created by borrowing billions and by increasing leverage to dangerous levels. Much of it was a very elaborate kind of fiction, a giant bubble just waiting to be deflated. Though many quants were convinced that the formulas were foolproof and that the flow of money could never dry up, the events of 2007 and 2008 proved them wrong. Suddenly the truth they thought they knew was reversed and recklessly-constructed edifices came crashing down. Hundreds of billions of dollars evaporated overnight and very nearly took world economies with them. And I am left asking, if money can vanish into thin air, did it really and truly exist in the first place? What exactly was it that these people were creating?

In this book the author writes often of the ultimate quest of the quants. The quants, more than anything else, want to discover the Truth. Truth, in their lexicon, describes the mathematical knowledge that would once and for all settle how the markets work. They want to solve the markets just as they’ve solved the Rubic’s Cube or the game of Blackjack. They pursue this Truth with abandon at times, pursuing it as one might devote oneself to a deity or, worse, a functional deity such as an addiction. Their Truth is their god.

It seems to me that at the heart of the work of the quants is the age-old combination of obsession and greed. In their world, making money is not a means to an end, but is an end in and of itself. They do not create anything beyond money and offer nothing beyond the fabrication of wealth. They are, essentially, gamblers. And throughout this book Patterson shows how many of these men turned first to gambling and only later to the ultimate poker game of Wall Street. Many of these quants are notorious gamblers still, finding the old thrill at the tables or at the trading desk.

As much as Too Big to Fail or On the Brink, The Quants shows just how close we were to a complete economic meltdown. And more than those other books, it shows how greed–unbridled greed combined with a worldview that treats life as if it is a kind of game–was at the heart of so much of it. A small handful of utterly brilliant individuals proved themselves hopelessly, utterly foolish. They gambled with their own money, they gambled with other people’s money, and they gambled with the world economy. In the end, only providence saved us from an epic disaster.

In The Quants Patterson neatly combines the biographical with the economic, tying together the stories of the quants themselves with the work they did and the economic turmoil they caused. It combines into an intriguing combination that makes the book a joy to read. Though the subject matter can at times be difficult and obscure, Patterson makes it accessible and enjoyable. I highly recommend this one.

Verdict: Read it if you are even the least bit intrigued by the subject matter.

You had to know that the ongoing economic downturn was going to generate more than its fair share of books. For years to come the events and all that led to them will be studied and analyzed, looking for patterns, looking for answers. And already we are beginning to see a steady stream of books seeking to make their mark. Too Big to Fail sought to be a definitive account, but was clearly too quick to store shelves to be that. More relevant to the long-term historical record is On the Brink, the account of Henry Paulson, Secretary of the Treasury from 2006 through to the time that President Obama moved into the White House.

Is this book business? Politics? Memoir? I hardly even know how to categorize it. Those categories all overlap as Paulson weaves together this account of the crisis as he saw it and, in his unique position, sought to overcome it.

On the Brink is less about what caused the downturn and more about what Paulson and others did to help America get through it and, in time (hopefully), recover from it. These decisions are often exhaustively detailed in day-by-day and moment-by-moment fashion. Paulson kept meticulous records of what he did, who he called and who he interacted with and here he shares those records with the world. Whether talking to his wife about their Christian Science faith or talking to politicians from nations on the other side of the world, he seeks to let the reader into his life.

This is not fast-paced reading; in fact, for most people it may well prove exhausting. Paulson does not expend a lot of effort in explaining the background of the crisis or in adapting the lexicon of his business world. Many terms will pass over the head of the average reader, I am sure (this was certainly the case with me and would have been more notable still had I not already read several books on the topic).

Yet, despite the plodding pace, it is interesting to hear Paulson’s defense of the decisions he and others had to make. It is easy for the armchair quarterbacks among us to announce what they would have done in his place, but as Paulson provides a glimpse at the decisions he was facing and the political realities he had to deal with, the black and white does turn to varying shades of gray. Though you may still rue the decisions he made, at the very least I believe you will have greater respect for the man and the grueling choices he faced.

Verdict: Read it if you just need to know what happened and why.

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.

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