On February 28, 2009 four men left Clearwater Pass on what was supposed to be a day-long fishing expedition. On board were two football players, Corey Smith and Marquis Cooper, along with their personal trainer Nick Schuyler and Schuyler’s friend Will Bleakley. The next day the Coast Guard reported that the boat and all on-board were missing. The day after that Schuyler was found clinging to the hull of the overturned boat; all of the other men had either drowned or had succumbed to hypothermia. An investigation into the incident showed that the boat had flipped when Cooper, an experienced boater, had tried to dislodge a stuck anchor by gunning the motor. Though the men were thrown clear, they had sent no distress signal and had not told anyone where they were going to fish. It took almost 48 hours for the Coast Guard to find them.

Not Without Hope is Nick Schuyler’s description of the incident. It is a survival story, the kind of tale we’d expect to find in condensed form in Reader’s Digest in a year or two. He describes the circumstances surrounding the fishing trip and describes in agonizing detail the deaths of his three friends including his best friend, Will Bleakley.

Let me say off the top that the book is not particularly well written. Actually, it’s downright poor at times. Here’s a sampling of the prose:

I caught my first fish and I was like, oh my God, forget this. I was so confused. Why would anybody like this? It took me almost fifteen minutes to get the damn fish up. A big amberjack. As soon as I made a little leeway, it yanked out everything I had reeled in. It fought like a shark. My back and shoulders were burning. I kind of wedged the pole between my legs and told Marquis, “I’m taking a little break.” I couldn’t imagine anyone pulling up a giant marlin or something.

Or, a short time later:

He played in thirty-four games during his career, starting eight times at tight end and catching ten passes. I think he made honorable mention at All-Big East Conference his senior year. He was clever at chop blocking. His parents, Bob and Betty, were at the games, always.

It’s not the worst prose I’ve read–not by a long shot–but it’s still pretty bad. Certainly it’s about the worst I’ve encountered on the bestseller’s list. But I suppose it may be fitting for the person who wrote the book, a self-proclaimed jock more than an intellectual, a guy who, when rescued, looked in the mirror, noticed that his body fat had obviously fallen and thought, “not bad.”

Like you, I’ve often heard it said that there are no atheists in a foxhole. The same must be true when floating helplessly in the ocean. Though the men who set out that day were varyingly religious, it seems that none of them were particularly devout. And yet no sooner had the boat flipped and the storm winds risen than the men were crying out to God individually and communally, even reciting the Lord’s Prayer together. Schuyler, who makes it clear that he had no relationship with God whatsoever, was soon begging for his life saying, “Please, God, I’ll start going to church every Sunday.” He and his friends called out to God for deliverance. Only Nick survived. And in the aftermath he writes, “I’ve gotten so many e-mails and calls and text messages saying, ‘God has a plan for you, stay strong, you may not see it now.’ I kind of see it both ways. I hope so, but why didn’t God have a plan for these guys as good as they were? Why did He choose me out of the four?” Though he pledged allegiance to God during the hours of terror, it seems that he soon forgot his promises and has moved on. Though he cried out to God for rescue while he was helpless, now he regards that same God as culpable for the accident.

Reading this book I wonder why it is that we are so drawn to stories of survival. And honestly, there a few good reasons to read this book; it has little to commend it beyond the tale of disaster and survival. It’s poorly written and contains a cast of mostly unremarkable characters. And yet it has sold well enough that it has made its mark on the list of bestsellers. Somehow this tale of terror, this “drama in real life” (to borrow a phrase from Reader’s Digest) electrifies readers and draws them in. I’m not sure why we are so drawn to such tales. Perhaps we have imagined ourselves in such situations and are interested to see how others respond in their most difficult moments. Or maybe we want to imagine that we would do so much better–that if we had been there, we would have had the strength or ingenuity to rescue ourselves or to save the lives of our friends. There is something about such stories that we find almost irresistible.

Yet as stories of survival go, this one is just okay. It’s certainly no better than average and I see little reason to recommend it.

Verdict: Read it if you just have to read a survival story.

(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.

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.

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

Ozzy Osbourne marvels at his own success. When he was a child no one (but no one!) would have predicted that of all the kids in his class, of all the kids on his street, he is the one who would go on to worldwide fame and acclaim. Of course we know now that he would go on to build himself into one of the original heavy metal stars, one of the first of a whole new breed of bad-boy rock stars who would be much-imitated and much-idolized. Both with Black Sabbath and as a solo artist, Osbourne will always have his place in the rock pantheon.

But that was only a portent of things to come. At the peak of his storied rock and roll career, no one (but no one!) would have predicted that greater popularity would follow. Always a fringe success, popular in the world of hard rock but not much beyond, suddenly Osbourne was loved, laughed with and laughed at by men, women, boys and girls as they enjoyed his antics and the inner workings of his almost unbelievably bizarre family. The Osbournes is undoubtedly one of the strangest cultural phenomena this side of Survivor. Season after season, countless millions tuned in.

Osbourne’s lifelong commitment to the epitome of all it means to be a rock star is well-known. Year after year, he pursued the desires of the flesh, the allure of wine, women and song. He hoovered up unimaginable quantities of every conceivable narcotic and chased it with never-ending rivers of alcohol. He pursued endless lines of women or, as often as not, enjoyed their pursuit of him. He had all he had ever wanted when he set out to make a name for himself as a rock ‘n roller.

So here he is, on the far side of sixty, reminiscing about his life, his career as a rock star and his shorter career as a television star. There is little regret expressed here; mostly just fond memories of days gone by, though those days were given over to every kind of vice. There is no redemption since redemption would depend upon an admission of wrong. Sure he says he’s gotten off and stayed off drugs and he says he’s mostly gotten away from the booze. But that is far different than expressing true regret. Even after all these years, he’s just the same old guy. It doesn’t seem that he has learned a whole lot along the way.

If you have ever spent a few minutes watching The Osbournes you will know that Ozzy shows the effects of all of those years of partying, not to mention the effects of dyslexia and a strange Parkinsons-like chromosomal defect. In I Am Ozzy he says that he has barely ever been able to read through a book; and yet here he has managed to write one that is well-written and clear in its prose; he says his memory is shot and yet he seems to be able to recall in detail so many events that took place many years ago. Obviously the book was written by or with a ghost-writer; that will come as no surprise. But does he really remember all of these days, all of these events that happened forty years ago? Or is this just a compendium of could-be-true tales drawn from dim memories? I find it hard to believe this book could be consistently factual.

I can’t help but feel that in this book Ozzy is being presented in a very strategic, very careful way. It’s like he is a product just as much as his albums are. And really, it seems that much of his career was a show, a shell. Ozzy was known as a force for the dark side, an outright Satanist who bit the heads off bats and drove countless impressionable young people to the occult. But he never bought into any of the Satanism. It was all just a ruse, a way of making people sit up and take notice. It was all part of his mystique, his carefully-constructed persona. Satanism was just a handy prop that drew legions of fans to his side–fans who were eager to try something, anything, that would be rebellious, that would be an outright show of defiance against God, against parents, against everything.

In one telling moment he writes “Y’know, I used to get upset by people not understanding me, but I’ve made a career out of it now. I even ham it up a bit, ‘cos it’s what people expect of me.” And even in this book I think he is giving people what they expect of him. Whether it’s the honest truth or not seems beside the point. He wants to tell a good story and to entertain people. The book is entertaining in its own way, I suppose, thought the reader’s enjoyment may well be tempered by the profanity of his mouth and of his life. The book is as crass, as given over to vice, as his life has been.

Osbourne says that “whatever I do, I do to excess.” And ain’t that the truth. His life has been one of constant excess. The only thing he seems not to have found in exceeding measure is joy. As he enters his seventh decade, he offers little reason to think that he is really enjoying life, that he has found true joy and happiness. His best days are behind him and there doesn’t seem to be much ahead. He has been an idol to millions, an influence upon a whole generation. And yet the only way he has to measure his life is in things–fat bank accounts, album sales, popularity. As he revels in his years of partying, of desperately seeking life in the arms and adulation of others, you can’t help but detect the emptiness, the gaping void at the heart of it all.

Verdict: Read it if… Honestly, who am I trying to fool? I can’t think of a single good reason.

Patti Smith is the godmother of punk, punk long before it was cool to be so. Starting in the mid-seventies, she blended her beat poetry with three-chord rock and very quickly became the kind of artist that millions of others would aspire to. Her new book, Just Kids, hit the bestseller list almost as soon as it was released. A memoir of sorts, the book really traces just one aspect of her life–her relationship with the artist Robert Mapplethorpe.

Smith met Mapplethorpe on the streets of New York City when they were both just in their young twenties. They began a lifelong relationship, first as lovers and then as friends. Living the Bohemian lifestyle in New York, they traveled in the same Beatnik circles as Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendryx and many of the most prominent artists of the era. Smith’s memoir traces the early days of her relationship with Mapplethorpe when they were lovers, inseparable and much in love, to Mapplethorpe’s death in 1989 when they were just friends.

If you know anything of the life of Robert Mapplethorpe, you’ll know that he was openly and proudly homosexual. But he did not actually become homosexual until his early twenties, a couple of years after he met Smith. And even then he seemed to be conflicted, desiring first both and then neither. But eventually he came to terms with his homosexuality, a fact that was soon reflected in his art, much of which was highly-erotic and homosexual in nature. He began to document through photography much of the ugly underside of the homosexual lifestyle. But he and Smith remained fast friends, continuing to live together and continuing to support one another year after year. As Mapplethorpe became a sought-after photographer and as Smith became a highly-regarded musician, their paths continued to cross and their friendship remained. It remained until 1989 when Mapplethorpe’s lifestyle caught up with him and he died of complications arising from AIDS.

I found Just Kids a profoundly depressing book. I saw Smith and Mapplethorpe fall further and further into their sin, finding delight in the occult, getting more involved in drugs, and Robert increasingly giving himself over to homosexuality. They saw friend after friend fall prey to the Bohemian life they had chosen, succumbing to drugs and disease. Any happiness they found was fleeting, any joy directed only to the immediate gratification of their most self-centered desires. They both wanted to find fame and though both found it, it seems that it just drove happiness and purpose farther and farther away.

It is interesting to note that both grew up in religious households, Smith as the daughter of Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mapplethorpe as the son of faithful Roman Catholics. And yet both hated God, mocking him through their art and turning instead to what was Satanic, attributing their success more to Darkness than to Light. And not surprisingly, their life and their work reflects that darkness. The wages of sin is death, the Bible tells us. And the stench of death is all over the lives of both Smith and Mapplethorpe. It’s all over this book.

Verdict: Read it if you’re stuck on a desert island and this is the only book that washes ashore with you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I love to read a biography in which an old man, in the waning days of his life, reflects on the lessons he has learned in the seven or eight decades given to him. There is something inspiring about hearing a man reminisce about the past and pass along the wisdom of the years. I hate to read a biography in which an old man, in the waning days of his life, describes a life given over only to his own pleasure. Unfortunately, Last Words, George Carlin’s posthumously-published autobiography, falls squarely into the latter category.

Carlin was, of course, a stand-up comedian, for decades one of the most famous comics and one who is regarded as among the America’s greatest. He filled concert halls, was a regular guest on the most popular television shows, recorded bestselling albums and taped live performances that continue to air today. His name was known around the world and he made himself a wealthy man. By some standards this made him a singularly successful individual.

Yet this is a story of an utterly wasted life. Carlin shows himself to be utterly self-focused, self-centered, self-obsessed. Shaped by his Irish Roman Catholic heritage, he turned quickly against the faith of his childhood and gave himself up to whatever pleasures the world could offer. The decades, the years of his greatest successes, were full of hard living that included a crushing drug addiction, alcoholism and the inevitable physical effects of both. Even when he fell in love he lived life for no higher power or purpose than himself and his own success. He was away from home so much that his wife filled the emptiness with alcohol, and still he did not lessen his workload; he and his wife did drugs and fought viciously in front of their young daughter who soon got into drugs as well, even sharing with her parents; even when his wife was diagnosed with terminal cancer, he stayed on the road, ending up far away when she slipped into unconsciousness and died.

Not surprisingly, by the end of his life Carlin had succumbed to despair. “I no longer identify with my species. I haven’t for a long time. I identify more with carbon atoms. I don’t feel comfortable or safe on this planet. From the standpoint of my work and peace of mind, the safest thing, the thing that gives me most comfort, is to identify with the atoms and the stars and simply contemplate the folly of my fellow species members. I can divorce myself from the pain of it all. Once, if I identified with individuals I felt pain; if I identified with groups I saw people who repelled me. So now I identify with no one. I have no passion anymore for any of them, victims or perpetrators, Right or Left, women or men.”

In the end, Carlin did not live long enough to finish his memoirs. Someone had to piece together his notes, fill in the relevant details, and send them out to the publisher. He died in 2008 at the age of 71. He went to stand before the God he denied, the God he despised (funny, isn’t it, how you can so despise someone you insist does not exist), the God he made a career out of mocking and belittling.

Some memoirs are written for fans only while others transcend only the most loyal audience. Last Words is definitely for fans only. Profane, loud, over-the-top, this book is an apt reflection of the man himself. A man who was driven by the desire to shock others, this book gives him the last laugh, one last chance to make his audience gasp at his own profanity, his own baseness. But somehow, when read in the context of his life, the jokes no longer seem so funny.

Verdict: Buy it if you’d like to learn how to waste a life.