When I think of my friend Paul Willis I think of a person with a gentle soul. But at the same time I think of a person with a wise soul, a man of depth and thoughtfulness. Unassuming, quiet, even a bit shy, Paul is the kind of person you want to have a private conversation with. If you ever do, you’ll be thankful.
Since most of my readers will never have the chance to meet Paul, I have the next best option. He has recently published Say This Prayer into the Past
When I was growing up one of my favorite Biblical stories was David and Goliath. Okay, so it didn’t work out so well for Goliath or the Philistines. But it’s a story a kid can understand and appreciate. And the message was clear: David was an underdog who overcame a giant enemy through his faith and trust in God. Right?
Well, maybe. Renowned author and thinker Malcolm Gladwell has come out with the new book David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants
Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune
Best of all, it’s all true. This could easily read as a work of fiction, but it is not.
The focus of the book is Huguette Clark, the heiress of a Gilded Age fortune made in the copper mines of the American West. Her childhood memories …
One of my favorite books of 2011 was Lost in Shangri La by Mitchell Zuckoff. A true story of adventure, heroics, World War II legends and remote jungle tribes, the book holds the reader from the first page to the last.
Now Zuckoff has written a new book about a forgotten World War II rescue on Greenland. Plane wrecks, adventure, heroics, and remote locations are all here, just like his first book. But instead of jungle tribes, the setting calls for the fiercest cold and most uninhabitable climate on the planet. Frozen in Time: An Epic Story of Survival …
So here we are, nineteen months after my first post in the series on 25 books that influenced my life. I’ve described a wide range of books, from comics to textbooks, from classic novels to business books. Now it’s time for the top book on my list.
A lot of people expect the number one book to be the Bible. But at the very beginning, I said the Bible was not part of the list. Truth is, the Bible is a series of books, letters, songs and poetry. Besides, it’s such an obvious answer and I tend to dislike predictability.…
I met Alan Smyth about 20 years ago when we both attended a church in Fremont, California. He was the local Young Life Director and clearly a guy with great talent. Over the years we’ve both moved and the relationship has ebbed and flowed as they all do, but we’ve remained in touch.
A year or so ago he asked me about a post I’d written on parenting. Turns out he was working on a book about fathers and daughters. We swapped a few emails, and ultimately I wrote a few small things for his blog and his upcoming book.…
If you read this blog you know how much I enjoy wine. You probably also realize from my book reviews how much I love history. And yes, I’ve read lots of history books about wine.
But nothing quite like Wine and War: The French, the Nazis, and the Battle for France’s Greatest Treasure
The book looks at how farmers made do without many the resources necessary for a vineyard, from copper sulfite to tractors (or even horses, which were often …
If you know me well and looked through my 25 most influential books, it would be fairly obvious which author is missing from the list.
J.R.R. Tolkien.
I was in junior high school when somebody gave me a paperback edition of The Hobbit
Now obviously I don’t need to retell the storyline of these books. If you haven’t read them you’ve almost certainly seen the movies. And I don’t need to restate the power of these books or their …
