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#8–These Truths: Heartlands Best Reads of 2019
Jill LePore’s These Truths: A History of the United States came out in 2018 but I got to it this year and was glad I did. The audacity of a one-volume history covering a 500+ year arc of the American story, especially when that story has become so contested and fragmented, was a thing to behold. →
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#9 – Out of Darkness, Shining Light: Heartlands Best Reads of 2019
As we continue the countdown of best reads of 2019, we come to Out of Darkness, Shining Light by the Zimbabwean author Petina Gappah. It’s a vivid imagining of the company that escorted the body of Dr. David Livingstone, the famed explorer and missionary, back to the coast following his death in central Africa. Gappah’s novel →
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It’s Time for the Heartlands Best Reads of 2019! #10 – Uncommon Prayer
This is the 3rd year for the highly-anticipated Heartlands Best Reads list. If you want to check out previous years you can look here (2018) and here (2017). How does a book make the Heartlands list? Well, the main limiting factor is that Alex Joyner has to read it during the year. It’s been another →
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Love And Fire Children: Kevin Wilson’s Nothing to See Here
I don’t know why it’s the late spring of 1995 when Nothing to See Here begins. Perhaps it’s because it’s a time blessedly free of cell phones and texting and the narrative complications they introduce. Maybe it’s because politics had a few more norms such that a main character who is a senator could imagine →
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An Antidote to Gutless Prayer: Dreaming Like Jesus with Rebekah Simon-Peter
The wonderfully-named Rebekah Simon-Peter looks around at mainline Protestantism, including The United Methodist Church of which she is a part, and sees some problems. It’s not just that the church is competing for attention in a post-Christian world with Sunday morning soccer practices. It’s not even the eight maladies she lists that include shrinking numbers, →
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Into the Woods in Elmet
You might expect that there’d be a little bit of Beowulf in a book by a medieval studies scholar in York, England. Fiona Mozley’s debut novel adds some Heathcliff, too, for a touch of Yorkshire Moors gothic. But even if you can spot the forbears in Elmet, you probably won’t suspect what you’re getting in →
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Long Loves in a Small Coastal Town: A Review of In West Mills
De’Shawn Charles Winslow’s debut novel begins with an arresting scene. Pratt Shepherd is in the middle of a fight with his free-spirited girlfriend in a small, coastal North Carolina town on the eve of World War 2. However, Azalea ‘Knot’ Centre, a sometime teacher at the local school for African-American children, is nobody’s possession. When →
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Who’s Going to Make the Case for America? (I Mean, Along with Jill Lepore)
Late in her brief but thought-provoking new book, historian Jill Lepore gets down to why she would write something titled This America: The Case for the Nation: “In American history, liberals have failed, time and again, to defeat illiberalism except by making appeals to national aims and ends…Writing national history creates plenty of problems. But →
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Why Mister Rogers Still Matters: Shea Tuttle on the Man and His Faith
The scene Shea Tuttle describes in the introduction of her great new book is so familiar that it could be any one of us as a child. Curled up on a couch wrapped in a holey Afghan watching a television show alone. And then the magic as a performer reaches through that screen and across →
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The Not-So-Calm Before the Storm: Jesmyn Ward’s Katrina Story
Katrina doesn’t arrive until Salvage the Bones is almost over, but the hurricane has always been coming. She broods over the whole of Jesmyn Ward’s epic 2011 novel, even when the only one who seems to know she’s on the way is Esch’s Daddy, whose preparations seem excessive to his four children living with him →
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