Favorite Books
J.I. Packer, Knowing God
First published in 1973, Packer's Knowing God has been widely regarded as a classic alongside the works of other great Christian thinkers, like Charles H. Spurgeon and C. S. Lewis. Alister McGrath comments that theology for Packer is "not merely wrestling with texts, nor yet with ideas, but with the living God."
Blaise Pascal, Pensees
After the death of French scientist/polemicist Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), his friends discovered among his papers a variety of writings on his faith. They arranged these and published them as PENSÉES ("Thoughts"), which has been considered one of the most eloquent explanations of Christianity ever written.
Henri Nouwen, Gracias: A Latin American Journal
Gracias is Nouwen's journal of a year spent in Peru and Bolivia, testing a vocation to serve God in South America. He reflects upon poverty in the developing world, and the Church's often inadequate response to it. Nouwen, 1932-1996, was a Dutch Catholic priest and divinity professor who later became a peace and civil rights activist.
David McCollough, Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge
A Los Angeles Times review describes The Great Bridge as a book "so compelling and complete as to be a literary monument...McCullough has written that sort of work which brings us to the human center of the past."
Stephen Ambrose, Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis Thomas Jefferson and the Opening of the American West
Ken Burns writes: "Stephen Ambrose is that rare breed: a historian with true passion for his subject. Here he takes one of the great, but also one of the most superficially considered, stories in American history and breathes fresh life into it. Lewis comes alive as we've never known him."
Caroline Alexander, The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antartcic Expedition
A chronicle of "one of the greatest epics of survival in the annals of exploration." Sir Ernest Shackleton, leader of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, hoped to become the first to cross the Antarctic continent. But their ship, Endurance, was trapped in the drifting pack ice, eventually to splinter, leaving the expedition stranded on floes. Alexander reveals Shackleton as "a leader who put his men first."
Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World
"When something is said to have "changed the world," it is either a technological innovation or an article of trade. The North Atlantic cod is the latter, which may come as news nowadays, when it is best known as having virtually vanished from the Grand Banks..." (from Booklist review). ,
Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of his Time
"If you've grown up at a time when orbiting satellites were taken for granted, you'd probably not find reading a book about longitude an enticing prospect. But Sobel, an award-winning former science reporter for the New York Times who writes frequently for Audubon, Discover, LIFE, and Omni magazines, has transformed what could have been a dry subject into an interesting tale of scientific discovery. It is difficult to realize that a problem that can now be solved with a couple of cheap watches and a few simple calculations at one time appeared insurmountable." (Library Journal review)