Other than my top 25 list of books, most of my book reviews are on a separate page of this blog because readers would be overwhelmed getting updates all the time. And it would turn this blog into a book review venue instead of the wide range of topics that I like to cover.
But sometimes I read a book that strikes me hard. It seems to rise above the rest and deserves special mention. God Is Red: The Secret Story of How Christianity Survived and Flourished in Communist China
The author, …
“When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”
Hardly the uplifting or encouraging words you might expect from a book that influenced my life. But Dietrich Boenhoeffer didn’t pull any punches when he wrote The Cost of Discipleship
The first time I heard about Bonhoeffer was in college. My narrow lens of inexperience showed as I questioned whether I could learn anything from a German Lutheran theologian. His name sounded vaguely …
C.S. Lewis is one of my all time favorite authors. This list of 25 books that influenced my life could probably include several of his writings, but that would be unimaginative. So I have chosen just one to include here as a placeholder for several others.
Of all the Lewis books, The Screwtape Letters
The letters mentioned in the title of the book are those of Screwtape, a highly placed veteran demon serving “our …
Here’s a book that almost everybody I know should read.
Henri Nouwen was brilliant, of course. He gave a talk on fundraising and somebody had the good sense to publish it as A Spirituality of Fundraising
And I think everybody should read it. Here’s why.
In his book To Sell is Human, Daniel Pink said that we are all in sales now.
I might add that we are all in fundraising now.
You don’t have to operate a non-profit organization to be in fundraising. In my mind, fundraising is encouraging people to use their wealth in a way …
Few books stand the test of time. But for over 125 years Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
The entertaining part is the easiest to understand. Books about boyhood adventures have been popular for centuries. Twain was a master storyteller with one of the sharpest pens ever to put words on paper. His stories don’t just come alive; they are alive in our hearts, minds and souls.
It’s understandable, if regrettable, that Huckleberry should also still be irritating readers. …
It was 1999 when my father gave me the book Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company
I laughed and said “sure” like a good son/employee. Dad knew I would read the book faster than he would.
Only the Paranoid Survive is one of those books you either love or consider a lightweight. It makes a lot of best ever business book lists. …
Junkyard Wisdom is 4-years old now. Topics have bounced from leadership ideas to wine reviews, from PathLight updates to family stories, and a wide range beyond all that. All of it has reflected my range of interests and ideas.
After four years of this, it’s time to again ask what you have enjoyed most. I can easily look at the data and see what posts were the most popular, but sometimes popularity isn’t the same as having an impact. A quick example: the most visited post of all time was a book review, but that’s mostly because the author promoted …
When I think about the books that influenced my life, I have to think about the books that shaped my world view. As a child of the 1950’s, it would be great if I could see the world through the two dimensional lens that we so often associate with that era.
But I can’t. In part because I was born in December of 1958, far too young to experience that decade. By the time I was old enough to reason on my own we were being fed a nightly newscast of bad news from Vietnam, protests in the streets, and …
