Uncle Tom’s Cabin

I read Harriet Beecher Stowe‘s Uncle Tom’s Cabin this week, in a free Kindle edition. I’m not sure what I expected, but the book was better than I anticipated, with wit, wonderful descriptions, action, suspense, layers of story upon story, amazing characterizations, and surprise twists. I learned some history, which I like to do while [...]

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Book review: A Special Mother Is Born

Gerard Nadal writes: This book addresses one of the burning issues of our day. With prenatal diagnostics leading to the abortions of the less-than-perfect among us, with parents who are frightened into paralysis by these diagnoses and a medical establishment increasingly surrendering to the cowardice of eugenics, over thirty mothers and three fathers of special [...]

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7 Quick Takes Friday (Updated)

1. Does anyone know which Bible translation(s) the American Founding Fathers were using? It’s my understanding that the Pilgrims used the Geneva Bible (which I’m reading on Kindle in a 1587 edition), but it occurs to me that (off the top of my head) I don’t know what the Founders were hauling with them to [...]

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Book note: Trouble Pug

(Shameless self-promotion warning) Trouble Pug is currently at #41 in Kindle Children’s ebooks > Animals > Dogs, at Amazon. It was a little higher than that earlier today. I expect it to drop through the day, unless there are fresh sales. (I’m not sure, but I think rankings get updated hourly.) But, at any rate, [...]

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“Turning Evil into Good”

Anne Morse has a nice post about the book Unbroken, and the man it is about. She also notes his autobiography, for those of you who want to know more about Louis Zamperini. One of Morse’s points in this post is that Laura Hillenbrand, the author of Unbroken, has, with this book, done a good [...]

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Book note: Whisper on the Wind, by Maureen Lang

Whisper on the Wind was offered free on Kindle, and the blurb mentioned it featured a storyline with an underground newspaper in Belgium in World War I, and I’m a history geek with a weak spot for Resistance stories, so I bit. It was also put forward as a Christian romance so I braced for [...]

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Lent, and Lent-not-Lent

I can’t remember if it was just prior to my first Lenten season as a Christian, or my second, that I listened to an online Catholic homily explaining the purposes of Lent, and shortly after went to services at a Baptist church. I have sometimes wished I had both the homily and the sermon in [...]

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Book note: Holy Subversion, by Trevin Wax

I bought Holy Subversion: Allegiance to Christ in an Age of Rivals today (Kindle edition), and am about a quarter of the way through it. So far, I’m really appreciating it – there are some healthy challenges in it, and some interesting history, too. There’s an interview with the author here. The publisher’s page on [...]

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Parental discretion advised (updated)

Parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles, you probably need to know about what the NEA and the UN are up to, what Northwestern University has been up to, and what Germany has been up to. My apologies for the content, but this is what you’re up against. This is related: You’re Teaching My Kid What?

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Reading with new eyes: or, a discourse on chivalry

Julie of Happy Catholic is now writing at Patheos. This post combines observations on faith, classic literature, and chivalry. It’s hard to beat that. And, by the way, if you think you know about the Round Table tales of Camelot, please go read the post. She points out some of what later versions have left [...]

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