Category Archives: Non-Fiction

This is the first book I have read by Doris Wynbeek Rikkers. I had no idea of her writing style when I received this book, so it was an adventure for me.

In this book, Ms, Rikkers explores how the Holy Spirit worked in times past. She does this by way of Bible stories which are put into modern and paraphrased tellings. The stories are not difficult to follow and the work of the Spirit is well-related to what happened.

She then takes that example and gives a potential example of how the Holy Spirit will work similarly today in the lives of Christians.

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This is the first book I have read by Tony Evans. To be honest, though I’ve been a Christian for many decades, I generally shy away from reading Christian books. This is because I’ve found the theology in many to be very different from what I understand from my own reading. This is especially true of Christian fiction but that isn’t applicable in this case.

“Warfare” is one of the few books that I’ve come across where I agreed with every word. It’s easy to do as it is all based directly upon the Word without unusual twisting or manipulation to fit what the author is trying to say.

Simply put, Mr. Evans is giving Christians a talking to from lessons straight from God.

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In this book, “The Case for Miracles” author Lee Strobel takes a look at miracles. Are they the work of God, the creator? Or are they merely coincidences, spontaneous remissions, fleeting moments of seeming recovery, or even worse, the work of charlatans.

Mr. Strobel’s investigation is what one would expect from a good and hard-hitting journalist. While he is now a Christian, he once was a committed atheist and skeptic. Because of that and his experience of years as a journalist, the tone and style of the book is uncommitted and leaves the reader to decide for themselves.

For me, the evidence was overwhelming. As I read through Mr. Stroble’s interview with noted skeptic, Dr. Michael Shermer, I noted that the Dr. Shermer’s viewpoint was favorably portrayed and explained well. If you were on the fence and stopped reading after that first chapter, you would walk away without a belief in miracles.

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This begins as the story of a man, Charles James, who starts out from humble beginnings and ends up making millions. He has had an abusive childhood and, thankfully, seems to have spared the curse of becoming abusive in his turn. Charles, for all that he seems to have everything, has come to realize that he is really empty and has nothing of true value.

The “author” of the book has traveled Route 66 looking for inspiration for his next novel. At the end of the journey, when he realizes that he has not found what he was looking and expecting to find, he comes across a dusty and dirty hiker who looks vaguely familiar. When he realizes who the hiker is (Charles), they agree that the author will possibly be given the rights to tell the hiker’s story. This book is the first in those tales. As the story is told by way of a look backward through the pages of Charles’ journal, it is more autobiographical than biographical in nature.

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There was something about the title of this book, “Goliath Must Fall” that grabbed my attention as a book I must read. I questioned the word “must”, after all, Goliath did fall, but why “must” he?

I began the book with my own opinion of who my Goliath was and what needed to be done to make him fall. After Louie’s explanation of who and what are giants are made of, I realized that I was wrong.

The Goliath that I thought was my own turned out to be a symptom of many other giants that have been holding sway in my life. Fear, anger, control and even comfort have their hold on me. It took reading this book, with Louie’s examples of situations for me to be able to see my giants with new eyes. His explanation that David was Jesus and me also showed me who had slain my giants at the cross, that my thoughts and actions were what were still propping them up and that it was past time for me to finally let them fall.

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“The Great Detective” is an interesting book. It has elements of a scholarly study on the character of Sherlock Holmes but is not wholly that. It delves into the various trendiness of the detective through the ages, from the very first parodies and remakes which began a short time after the publishing of the short story form began in “The Strand Magazine” to the present versions of the BBC’s “Sherlock”, the US series “Elementary” and even the Robert Downing Jr. movies.

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“Headstrong: 52 Women Who Changed Science – and the World” was a very interesting and information book to read. I found myself wishing that the biographies contained a tad more information – maybe at the expense of less individuals covered or by increasing the book size.

I have two daughters who have recently received their degrees in STEM fields (one is a mathematical scientist and the other is a mechanical engineer), so the idea of the struggle these 52 women went through in getting started was a bit of an eye-opener for me. I can say that neither of my daughters have difficulty getting into their fields of study and have been able to find meaningful employment, so a tremendous amount of change has occurred in the last 100 years. This is, no doubt, to the great work done by these and other women.

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“In Montmartre Picasso, Matisse, and the Birth of Modernist Art” was an interesting read for someone like me, who took an art history class in school but who did not have a solid grounding in history of the actual artists (Picasso and Matisse) not much knowledge about the Modernist Art movement.

The book reads almost like a novel, giving very intimate details about the title individuals but also many of their contemporaries. It explained how their art was influenced by one another and by the current events of their day (a huge impact was made by the rapid development of photography and cinema which bothered Picasso greatly.)

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