Spring for books
Martin Marty laments the moment when you realize you are not going to read all the books you hoped and planned to read—and you will have to depend on what others are saying about books you will not get around to reading.
The shelf where I place books I intend to read is so full it makes me nervous just to look at it. And then along comes a book that makes you put aside what you are reading. The book that did that recently for me is Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand. It is the compelling story of Louie Zamperini, an Olympic distance runner and bombardier on an Army Air Corps bomber who was shot down over the Pacific in 1943. He survived months on a raft and then endured a series of hellish POW camps. In postwar Los Angeles, he became depressed and took to drink but found redemption—and learned forgiveness—after attending a Billy Graham revival. Unbroken wreaked havoc on my Lenten reading.
Long before I began to work for the Christian Century I relied on it to help me decide which books to buy on my limited budget. On the basis of this spring books issue, I will be picking up Walter Brueggemann's Disruptive Grace, Richard Crouter's book on Reinhold Niebuhr and probably Terry Eagleton's Why Marx Was Right. (I found his Reason, Faith, and Revolution to be engaging and funny but so overstated that I became irritated.)
