My feelings about Sarah Vowell are well documented on Minnesota Reads. Admittedly, I am a fanboy and love how she weaves history, pop culture, and humor together into books that both educate and entertain. It's been a few years since The Wordy Shipmates, and I was eager to read Unfamiliar Fishes, her new book about [...]
About: Ben Kimball
Website: http://benkimball.wordpress.com
Future integrative social worker, current MSW & MAHS student, energy healing practitioner (eclectic blend of Reiki, Healing Touch, & Therapeutic Touch along with guided imagery and spiritual tools like prayer & meditation)
If I were a better book reviewer, I would have read and reviewed Jay Weiner's This Is Not Florida: How Al Franken Won the Minnesota Senate Recount during Minnesota's latest recount between gubernatorial candidates Mark Dayton and Tom Emmer. However, Emmer conceded on December 12th after the legally mandated recount confirmed Dayton's 8,700 vote lead, [...]
Among the notable observations I have made during recent trips to Orlando, Florida, were the highway signs pointing to Celebration. Thinking this was some strange slang Floridians use for Disney World, I later learned Celebration is a community designed by Walt Disney Company as a model city of the future. This whole idea of creating [...]
Finding fiction that I like can be a great challenge for me, so I tend to research potential candidates to make the process efficient. I tend to stick with ideas that resonate somehow with my worldview. Thankfully I have a wide interest field to choose from and know what topics to avoid, such as economics, [...]
I am no expert in graphic novels. I typically read graphic novels only at the recommendation of others. Jonathan Hickman's Pax Romana came to me thanks in part to my interest in the Catholic Church. I'll fall asleep reading anything about economics, but start a discussion about Popes, transubstantiation, or sacraments and I'll fall over [...]
An American Type is a posthumous work by Henry Roth. Edited by The New Yorker magazine fiction editor Willing Davidson, An American Type is an autobiographical novel and a continuation of Roth's previous novels, a fact I failed to recognize before requesting a review copy. Set during the Great Depression, Roth's alter ego Ira is [...]
Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy’s The Ethical Slut is the practical guide for someone who wants to engage in polyamory or open relationships. Easton and Hardy provide valuable practical advice on negotiating boundaries & agreements, practicing safe sex, and the importance of obtaining consent. Many polyamorous forms are explored in this book, along with [...]
Being the only non-Minnesotan in my family, I had to take a history course in college to learn about the state I moved to some sixteen years ago. So in 2004, my second course at Augsburg College was Bill Green's Minnesota History. Green, who recently stepped down after four years serving as Minneapolis' public school [...]
Digging through the self-help and psychology sections of Half-Price Books can be a tedious affair. I have found that Shambhala Publications rarely goes wrong with a book, and Miriam Greenspan's Healing Through the Dark Emotions is a gem. There are few psychological professionals that truly embrace a holistic healing approach, and Greenspan is a leader [...]
Whenever I read psychology books, I am wary of putting in the effort only to just waste my time. For every quality data-driven and well-argued psychology book, there are possibly ten other failures that pander to the latest psychological trend. Whether they fail from poor data analysis or simply rehash known issues, junk psychology books [...]
My tolerance for junk theology and philosophy is very low. Though I have seen many quality self-help books based on sound principles, there are just as many bogus get rich quick scams disguised as self-help. One need only Google prosperity gospel or law of attraction and you'll find the foundation of junk theology and philosophy. [...]
Though Philip Pullman's The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ is not the razor blade & glue job offered by Thomas Jefferson in The Jefferson Bible, it does offer a fresh new look at the human-made Gospels that have shaped Christianity for a couple thousand years. Pullman decided to make Jesus Christ into two [...]
In the Land of Believers is the story of Gina Welch, a secular Jew who decided to go undercover as a Christian convert to figure out what makes evangelical Christians tick. She certainly picked a perfect place to conduct her amateur anthropological experiment: Jerry Falwell's Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia. She joined a [...]
In June of 2009, I reviewed Krista Tippett's Speaking of Faith and offered this criticism: “With all of the rapid motion between topics and ideas, I think Tippett herself was drowned out in the written conversation.” Unfortunately, this criticism was amplified in Tippett's new book, Einstein's God. What could have been a brilliant exposition of [...]
Admittedly, I am not the biggest Apostle Paul fan in the world, as I tend to hang out biblically in the Gospels more than the rest of the book. Though Paul's epistles are interesting in a historical sense, I believe Jesus' message and witness as revealed in the Gospels offer more spiritual and religious fruits [...]
Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget is what many would call a manifesto on the current state of the Internet. A computer scientist and supposed father of virtual reality, Lanier uses this book to air his lamentations about how how the Internet has descended into a land of anonymous trolls, something which it wasn't really [...]
Despite my personal beliefs of spiritual openness and freedom, I never forget my native religious language of Christianity. I don't let that limit me spiritually, but I also don't exclude it from my worldview. Since I read many books about spirituality from many different faiths and traditions, I constantly have to check my natural Christian [...]
The Faith Instinct
{Non-Fiction: Nicholas Wade, Religion, Richard Dawkins, Robert Wright, Sam Harris, Spirituality}
Religion evolution seems to be the latest trend in the world of intellectuals, seculars, and atheists trying to model religion into something logical. These new trendsetters, offering a softer, yet still intellectual examination of religion's roots and evolution over the ages, seem to have replaced the angry atheists led by Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. [...]
36 Arguments for the Existence of God
{Fiction: loved it, Novel, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris}
For a variety of reasons, I do not usually venture off the nonfiction path. I think the main reason is the ease to which I can find books that interest me. It is much easier for me to walk into a bookstore and go straight for a topic rather than pour through the massive fiction [...]
Deepak Chopra's 2008 book The Third Jesus is an attempt to understand three distinct manifestations of this elusive person: the historical Jesus, the theological Jesus created by the church, & the spiritual Jesus available to those that can achieve what Chopra calls a God-consciousness. Using the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible (trust me, [...]
Ben’s Top Ten Books of 2009
{Best of: Andrew Davidson, Arika Okrent, Best Books of 2009, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Joseph Campbell, Kent Nerburn, Matthew Fox, Sarah Vowell, Steve Hagen, Waziyatawin}
This year I read twenty books that earned my coveted 5-star rating. Here, in no particular order, are the ten I feel were the best of those twenty. 1. In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and The Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language: Arika Okrent [review] [...]
In the weeks leading up to the 1996 Olympic games in Atlanta, Georgia, Terry Hitchcock ran 75 consecutive marathons. Hitchcock ran from Minneapolis to Atlanta to raise awareness to the plight of children in single-parent households. A single parent because of his wife Sue's death to breast cancer, Hitchcock decided he wanted to try to [...]
As the only person in my family born and bred in Wisconsin, I have had life experiences that were not available to my Minnesota kin. For example, I have been to and enjoyed many cheese houses in my time. Family traditions of babies and toddlers sampling the local brew are commonplace in America's Dairyland. Growing [...]
Languages have been a source of personal fascination and interest since an eighth grade French course I took back in the day. I think it is simply amazing that people can look at an object like a tree and have so many different ways to say the word tree. Along with French, I have had [...]
I have waited with anticipation for Michael Norman's The Nearly Departed since Alison from the Minnesota Historical Society Press clued me in via a comment on my review of Haunted Heartland last January. The arrival of this book a couple of weeks ago pushed it to the top of my reading list. Norman, a retired [...]
\ Robert Wright?s The Evolution of God is an ambitious endeavor indeed. I?ll admit a certain level of skepticism at the onset, as anyone who claims to break down over five thousand years of God?s evolution in just over five hundred pages will have to be quite the scholar. Wright certainly has the credentials to [...]
Daniel Gardner's recently reprinted book The Science of Fear is an attempt to help people reconcile their gut and brain when it comes to being unreasonably afraid. Whether it is terrorism, economic disaster, or just a garden-variety fear of dying, Gardner's approach is to show people how their guts use fear to take control of [...]
Daniel J. Levitin's The World in Six Songs reminds me of a very important lesson I learned a long time ago, which can be summed up like this: Shut up and enjoy it. Consider a couple of examples. High school English teacher wringing any and every possible meaning out of a book like Catcher in [...]
I fancy myself as a rather successful amateur gardener. Back in the day when I had an endless backyard, I engineered a rather bountiful vegetable garden. Now as a happy townhome owner, I am now into filling my allotted 6'X6' deck with petunias, daisies, and other types of flowers, since I lack the deep ground [...]
John Calvin
{Non-Fiction: Alexandra Guarnaschelli, Alister McGrath, Andy Rooney, Philosophy, William Linder}
Going to a Lutheran college makes it impossible to graduate without a complete understanding of Martin Luther. Knowing that, I decided to embark on what now seems like a never-ending quest to understand John Calvin, since he is suggested to be an influential figure in orchestrating the Reformation. For an independent study course, I chose [...]
