Book Reviews

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…

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…

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…

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….

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…

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…

“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…

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…