• Rated 4 stars

“I'll confess, after the first chapter, I didn't think I was going to like this book. After all, these men seem so in love with money that I wouldn't be surprised if they had an oil portrait of Scrooge on their office wall. Actually, it would probably be a cheap reproduction, not an oil original.

But the farther I got into the book, the more practical suggestions surfaced that did more than make sense. They actually got me thinking about how I would want to live out the habits of using money wisely for the sake of my children. Because seriously, being a millionaire is not one of my life goals. I tend to have a perspective on money that leads me to try to use and save and give my money lifelong — not just wait until I'm retired to use it. And if you drink the Stanley & Danko koolaid (and love it), you may find yourself saving and saving your entire life, and then giving most of it away to avoid taxes — never really using it at all. Which is fine, I guess, just different.

Though I'd part ways with their money-grubbing hearts, I found myself greatly admiring the principles and stories that the authors shared. They're one of the reasons this book has sold so well, and has been so valuable to so many people. Here are some of the best, in a nutshell:

Affluent vs. Wealthy — There's a huge difference between making a lot of money and having a lot of money (or wealth). Many people seem to have a lot of money because they make so much. These are the people we normally think of as millionaires. But if you're affluent and you spend tons of money, you're not wealthy at all. The American lifestyle says that success is spending a lot of money. Are you going to buy into that definition of success? I'd recommend that you reconsider who it is you're trying to impress.

Prodigious Accumulators — Most millionaires are not millionaires because they were given a lot of money. They're wealthy because they lived below their means and were able to save and even invest the money they saved. It's very possible for someone to be a prodigious accumulator of wealth and have far more net worth than their neighbor who makes two or three times as much as they do. Don't even think about living beyond your means. If at all possible, live well below your means, no matter how much money you're making.

Economic Outpatient Care — Affluent parents who give a lot of money to their kids think they're helping them out. Wrong answer. In almost every case, they're actually handicapping their children from ever succeeding financially. Children who receive substantial gifts from their parents almost always adjust their lifestyles so they have to keep receiving gifts in order to stay afloat. Stanley & Danko call this Economic Outpatient Care. Don't do it. Don't give your children fish when you can teach them how to fish.

Buy Wisely — Most actual millionaires don't buy a lot of expensive things because many expensive things don't have a lot of actual value. For instance, the average millionaire has probably never bought a new car in his or her life, and definitely not a foreign luxury car. After all, cars lose a huge portion of their value in the first 2 or 3 years. So why not just wait for someone else to lose all that value, and then buy a fairly new car from them? There are exceptions, to be sure, but for the most part, why not actually think about each purchase you make and buy things that have actual value for you?

Offense & Defense — Sure, it's a fact that most millionaires end up making a lot of money. Secret: it's not the professions you'd think. Most millionaires are small business owners, in a broad range of industries that are not necessarily glamorous. The lifestyles of stereotypically "rich" professions (doctor, lawyer, etc) are so demanding that most people in these professions find it difficult to save much money at all. In other words, there are many people who make a lot of money from their job — they play good offense. But their spending habits are terrible, or at least driven by what everyone expects of them — they stink at defense. The key to being responsible with money is to play as good an offense as you can, but then to play excellent defense. And in every case, both husband and wife need to excel at playing defense.

I would strongly recommend this book to you, no matter what financial bracket you're in. These principles are vital skills to being financial responsibility, whether you're earning $20,000 a year or $800,000. And if you're not motivated enough to be a wise steward for your own good and God's glory, just think about your children. Are you really interested in damaging the way they approach life because of your example to them?”

willgray wrote this review Tuesday, August 14 2007. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 4 stars

“There are two protagonists in this novel: Leo Gursky, a sadly aging man whose only joys are trying to be noticed; and Alma, a curious young girl whose only joys are pestering her brother (Bird) and trying to set her widowed mom up with the mysterious man who has asked her to translate a book called The History of Love.

Yes, there's a book within a book. But if you're not the cerebral type, don't panic! There's as much Woody Allen here, as much Anne Tyler as there is Jorge Luis Borges. Truly, though, this is a voice of its own.

Gursky, who imagines from the reaction of the Starbucks employee that he must look like a cockroach in the brownie mix, who poses for a life drawing class, who begins to let us into the incredible history of his past — this man is a literary original. And Alma, who starts out simply curious about the woman in The History of Love that she is named after, ends up a a completely believable mess of an adolescent, stuck on herself, weirded out by her little brother, and determined to discover the secret to what certainly seems like a mystery.

I remember laughing out loud several times in this book, and more than once felt my breath catching. I easily fell in love with Krauss's characters and their wonderful, terrible lives. Now I can't wait. To read her first novel, Man Walks Into Room. Or to see the film adaptation. Or to talk with any of you who get to read this lovely novel.”

willgray wrote this review Tuesday, August 14 2007. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 4 stars

“Chapter 1 ("The Total Money Makeover Challenge"): If this book sounds at all interesting to you, it's because you need it.
Chapter 2 ("Denial: I'm Not That Out of Shape"): I am the problem, and Dave is cool.
Chapter 3 ("Debt Myths: Debt Is (Not) a Tool"): Owing money is pretty much a bad idea. Yep, in every case, according to our new friend Dave.
Chapter 4 ("Money Myths: The (Non)Secrets of the Rich"): Nothing will solve your financial problems except for following Dave's cool plan and working hard.
Chapter 5 ("Two More Hurdles: Ignorance and Keeping Up with the Joneses"): We all have a lot to learn, so read Dave's book. A lot of people who seem rich are really not, so it's better to be rich than seem rich.
Chapter 6 ("Save $1,000 Fast: Walk Before You Run"): The first Baby Step: create an emergency fund of $1K. Oh, and make a budget. Yesterday.
Chapter 7 ("The Debt Snowball: Lose Weight Fast, Really"): Put your debts in order of size, and knock them off from smallest to largest.
Chapter 8 ("Finish the Emergency Fun: Kick Murphy Out"): Build up a larger emergency fund equal to 3-6 months of your expenses. And don't touch it.

The book also discusses retirement investing (chapter 9), college funding (chapter 10), paying off your home mortgage (chapter 11), and building wealth like crazy (chapter 12). Dave is a good motivational writer (i.e., he says the same things over and over, but they become memorable because he's also funny). His motto in this book is, "If you will live like no one else, later you can LIVE like no one else." Basically, if people think you're really weird, that's a good sign in Dave's book. If this guy starts a compound, look out. So I'm already a big fan of this book, and since Dave and I worked out a secret deal, I would love to encourage you to go out right away and buy your own copy. Okay?”

willgray wrote this review Friday, July 13 2007. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 3 stars

“It's become a classic of juvenile fiction and I think I read it because it's also one of those mythical stories. Now, don't get your knickers in a twist -- this one doesn't have any Christ-figures. But it does have some very interesting scenes that make you think, "Huh! Imagine that."

I realized after reading this book where the plots for The Truman Show, Pleasantville, The Village, Never Let Me Go and some other films/books came from. All I have to say is...Cheaters!

Here's the story: in the unnamed land characterized by Sameness (this book has more capitalized nouns in it than any other non-German, non-Emily Dickinson work I can remember), there lives a boy named Jonas. There are many weird things about Jonas's world, so many that I will not go into them now. Needless to say, weird it is. At the age of 12, when all children are given their assignment of profession, Jonas is selected as the new "Receiver" of the community. What is a Receiver, you might ask? Jonah asked, too. Fortunately, there was a very old Receiver who would train Jonas to be his replacement. Since Jonas was the new Receiver, the older one decided to be called the Giver. (enter: woman crossing the stage, carrying a card reading: "Title! Title!") And what does the Giver give, you and Jonas might ask? Well, Memories. These poor people in the land of Sameness have done away with Memories (and a lot of other things, too) -- and it is the burden (literally) of the Receiver to hold all of the memories of their land and Elsewhere, both joyful and painful, so they can help the leaders of the community to make decisions. Needless to say, Jonas being the Gen X child that he is, will not exactly stand for this sort of fascistic non-thinking sort of society. He and the Giver hatch a plan. And then...you go out and read this brief novel (a mere 180 pages in my paperback version) to find out what happens in the last 20 pages.

Has anyone else read this book? Let's just say, it's very interesting, but I'm glad other films were inspired by this. I really can't imagine this book being made successfully into a film. There would be too many plot holes, unfortunately. Listen to me....what am I, a Philistine? Shame on me, demeaning a book because it couldn't be made into a good film. Sheesh. What a clod.”

willgray wrote this review Friday, July 13 2007. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 4 stars

“Buechner's strength is his delightful combination of skill with words and skill with ideas. Few people have that combination, and fewer have it to the extent that this man does. Obviously, it will do little good for me to capture the narrative force that he builds up in his sermons, though I will admit that he has just the right touch to move me. Several chapters had me in tears.

I trust it will be OK with you if I use Buechner's own words to advertise the book -- it's better than I could do with summaries. By the way, these are not the best sentences from the book; I was too into the book to underline while I was reading. They are just the first several I found while skimming back through. I'm sure you realize that these thoughts are even more powerful in a context that builds to them and supports them. Believe me when I say that these merely hint at the truth and beauty of the book:

"When a minister reads out of the Bible, I am sure that at least nine times out of ten the people who happen to be listening at all hear not what is really being read but only what they expect to hear read" ("The Magnificent Defeat", 1-2).

"To remember the past is to see that we are here today by grace, that we have survived as a gift" ("A Room Called Remember", 63).

"By faith we understand, if we are to understand it at all, that the madness and lostness we see all around us and within us are not the last truth about the world but only the next to last truth" ("Faith", 71).

"I did not love God, God knows, because I was some sort of saint or hero. I did not love him because I suddenly saw the light (there was almost no light at all) or because I hoped by loving him to persuade him to heal the young woman I loved. I loved him because I couldn't help myself" ("Love", 102).

"If we think that the purpose of Jesus's stories is essentially to make a point as extractable as the moral at the end of a fable, then the inevitable conclusion is that once you get the point, you can throw the story itself away like the rind of an orange when you have squeezed out the juice" ("The Truth of Stories", 133).

"I believe...that what Job was really after was not God's answer, but God's presence. And of course that was what Job finally found because the way God entered the world without destroying it was to enter Job's heart even as from the depths of his heart Job cried out to him" ("Two Narrow Words", 167-8).

"If you are going to be a religious novelist, you have got to be honest not just about the times that glimmer with God's presence but also about the ones that are dark with his absence" ("Faith and Fiction", 175).

"In this dark world where you and I see so little because of our unrecognizing eyes, he, whose eye is on the sparrow, sees each one of us as the child in red" [from a brief discussion of Schindler's List] ("The Secret in the Dark", 257).

"If we forget that we are waiting, if we come to believe that the best we have found of God here in these shadows is the best there is, if we come to believe that the most God wants of us is to be religious the way we are religious in a church, then we have lost touch with the living depths of our faith" ("Waiting", 282-3).

The one problem I have with this book, and the earlier book I read, is that about 5% of the time, Buechner is unnecessarily liberal. What I mean by that is that he is so giving that, at times, he would give away the farm. The great gift he brings to the believer is a healthy distrust about one's own grasp on the universe and a respectful awe at the massive beauty of God and the gospel. But these thoughts lead him at times to treat the Bible as humanly authored, to see Christ as more essentially human that we would feel comfortable with, and to judge true Christianity as a much broader group than most of us would care to agree with. However, most of the time he gives great honor to the Bible, and to Christ as God, and to the true Christianity that is humble before God and sees salvation only in Christ. These moments, then, end up like hiccups during a great feast: inevitable, given human imperfections, but slight detractions nonetheless.

Soooo....if after all that this book still seems appealing to you, then, as an aged professor from the University of Toronto once told me, "Read it -- read it tonight!" And read it with an open heart that has already prepared itself to be unaffected by the 5% that could push an undiscerning believer into error. Because the rest of it is great stuff, and well worth your heart's pondering.”

willgray wrote this review Friday, July 13 2007. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 5 stars

“Coming from a conservative Christian background, I had heard this book trashed more times than I care to tell. One of my literature professors, whose had wife passed away suddenly, took time out of one of my graduate courses to smear the book. I even heard others reference it as an evidence that Lewis was not a true believer, or that he had fallen away from faith.

And when you read the first chapter of this book, you'll see why. Mid-chapter 2, he spits out, "If God's goodness is inconsistent with hurting us, then either God is not good or there is no God...Sometimes it is hard not to say, 'God forgive God.'"

At another point he queries:
What reason have we, except by our own desperate wishes, to believe that God is, by any standard we can conceive, 'good'? Doesn't all the prima facie evidence suggest exactly the opposite? What have we to set against it? We set Christ against it. But how if He were mistaken? Almost his last words may have a perfectly clear meaning. He had found that the Being He called Father was horribly and infinitely different from what He had supposed.


And then, in Lewis at his most Job-esque, we find the book's most famous line, "Oh God, God, why did you take such trouble to force this creature out of its shell if it is now doomed to crawl back--to be sucked back--into it?"

In short, as he comes to realize and confide to us later in the book, "If my house has collapsed at one blow, that is because it was a house of cards. The faith which 'took these things into account' was not faith but imagination." And it is here that I most understand the Lewis of this book. Perhaps the weeks of this book were the season of Lewis's conversion. Or perhaps this was merely his dark night of the soul, from which he surfaced to fresher faith. But it was an understandable season, an extended paraphrase of "Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief." After all, Joy had been an unexpected gift to him, a joyful surprise in his old age. And it becomes easy to see how Jack could struggle with Providence and Goodness when God suddenly seemed like a cackling Indian giver.

The aspect of this book that I did not know to expect was its Romance, its apostrophes to love's darkness and absence. Perhaps I have simply not read enough in this vein, but the work that his words kept echoing in my mind was Sri Lankan novelist Michael Ondaatje's novel of love and loss, The English Patient. Or perhaps Graham Greene's novel of love and loss and bitterness, The End of the Affair.

Lewis describes the fear and sudden emptiness of revisiting their favorite places, concluding, "Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything." He examines their conversations, seeking for clues of her belief or their love or her continuing presence. He praises her beauties and the rapacity of her mind and heart. But time and again, he finds himself describing his own suffering in her absence. "Did you ever know, dear, how much you took away with you when you left? You have stripped me even of my past, even of the things we never shared." But then he corrects himself at other times: "What sort of lover am I to think so much about my affliction and so much less about hers?"

Jack begins to see that his "love for H. was of much the same quality as [his] faith in God. Whether there was anything but imagination in the faith, or anything but egoism in the love, God knows. I don't." He struggles through the process of remembering her, and lacking her and one day, suddenly finds that at the very moment when he mourned her least, he remembered her best.

This short book shows conversion perhaps even clearer than does the nostalgic Surprised by Joy. Ironically, the subtitle of this much later work could be Surprised by God in the Lack of Joy. In four brief chapters he surfaces from dark bitterness and pointed accusations to honest, humble meditations on heaven and praise. Or should I rather say that he is surfaced? At the book's close, he still sees God as the One who turned off the lights in preparation for his dark night. But he comes through a process not dissimilar to Evie's in V for Vendetta, coming to know his torturer as loving. "God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality," he concludes. "He knew it already. It was I who didn't."

The last half of the book is filled with as much confession and tears as anything else. Pain, yes. There is still the pain. In his earlier despair, he had turned to his contemporary Eliot for words: "Reality, looked at steadily, is unbearable." Late in his grief he turns to him once again, only this time the despair has matured into hopeful patience: "Two widely different convictions press more and more upon my mind. One is that the Eternal Vet is even more inexorable and the possible operations even more painful than our severest imaginings can forbode. But the other, that 'all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.'"

Ultimately, the Otherness of God and Joy and Jack's own grief becomes a source of humility and true self-knowledge. "I need Christ, not something that resembles Him," he realizes. "I want H., not something that is like her. A really good photograph might become in the end a snare, a horror, an obstacle." It is this need that Lewis comes to feel more acutely, that he, unstated, comes to see as the gift:

My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of His presence? The Incarnation is the supreme example; it leaves all previous ideas of the Messiah in ruins. And most are 'offended' by the iconoclasm; and blessed are those who are not.”

willgray wrote this review Friday, July 13 2007. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 3 stars

“Overall, this is a book worth reading. John Piper's books always are. And this one is a little briefer than most of his at under 200 pages. It's written for a broad audience, so it's also easy to read. And it's got great broad strokes.

For instance, its theme is pretty clear. It happens to be the title of the book, even though it's a negative. The positive side of the coin can be found in the titles of his chapters: "My Search for a Single Passion to Live By", "Breakthrough--the Beauty of Christ, My Joy', "Boasting Only in the Cross, The Blazing Center of the Glory of God", "Living to Prove He is More Precious than Life", and so on.

I think the book is worth reading just for the first chapter (in which Piper gives his spiritual heritage) and chapter 8 ("Making Much of Christ from 8-5").

Not to be picky, but to give you a fair review: one of the reasons this book took me a few weeks to read is that after a great opening, it loses steam. The first section reads a little like Surprised by Joy. Then the book changes gears and a few chapters in, Piper seems to be spinning his wheels. An interesting, but distracting factor is that he 1) seems to be going over the same ideas again and again and that he 2) includes long rabbit-trails from other authors' books.

And those rabbit-trails are interesting and valuable. Don't get me wrong. When you resurface into Chapter 8, one of the more interesting in the book because of its practicality, you feel like you've got a little history with Piper's ideas. It's just that you did have to spend a little while submerged in the middle of the book.

But please don't let that turn you off to the book. There are other Christian books, far more famous, that spin their wheels the entire time. Or take one thought and keep rehashing it in different reincarnations. Even when Piper revisits an idea as if it were the first time, he often leaves you with a new sentence that contains a powerful kernel of thought. In many ways, this book is a summary of all of Piper's previous books. It also has some new ideas you'll like: "chronological snobbery", the "avoidance ethic", 6 ways to make much of Christ in an 8-5 job.”

willgray wrote this review Friday, July 13 2007. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 5 stars

“This is one of the finest novels I have ever read. And more and more, it's not feeling strange to compliment the art of people who have not yet turned 30. Alison and I were talking about this last night with Brannon (during a night of spontaneous togetherness): it is much more common these days f