Mr Shields: I'm a reader not a fighter

The Christian Atheist is a great book title.  I have heard a number of people recommend this book so I picked it up for my Audible.com account.  It is short, just under 6 hours on audio (256 pages in hardback).  In some ways, I was disappointed.  Especially the early chapters were more evangelism than really calling the church to live and follow God.  I guess that is not all bad.  It gets everyone to the same starting place.

There were several chapters toward the end that I thought were very good.  The chapters on Money, Worry, Prayer were essentially what I thought I was getting when I bought the book.  In one way or another Groeschel re-works a similar idea, he tells a story about himself or someone else that shows that while they claim that they are a Christian, they are not actually living like they trust that God is actually their God and capable.  Then he concludes with a similar story but where the person follows God as they should.  Then the next topic.

The Christian Atheist is simply a person that claims that God is their God, but does not trust God to care for them, or answer their prayers, or be able to change them from their sin, etc.  I think this is a book that the church really needs.  But I am also saddened that the church needs this book.  (I am not saying that I was not convicted several times about areas where I am not fully trusting God.)  This is not the meat of Christianity, this is the milk.  There is nothing here that is really beyond what should be fairly basic Christianity.  However, I know that much of Church is not ready to trust God for the basics.  How can we claim to want to change the world or reform our country, etc., if we don’t trust God to actually be God?

So I am recommending this book with some reservations.  If you have recently read, Radical by David Platt, or Crazy Love or Forgotten God by Francis Chan or Primal by Mark Batterson or Jesus Manifesto by Leonard Sweet or Divine Commodity by Skye Jethani or any of the dozen or so other similar themed books that have come out in the last two years, skip this one.  Essentially it is the same book, repackaged for a slightly different reader.  Instead, figure out how to put into practice what you have already read.  If you have not read one other the others and you feel your faith is lacking, then this is one of the better calls to live for God as we have been called to live.

Enough: Why the World’s Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty is an important book.  It is not an exciting book, but global poverty and hunger really are not exciting.  The subtitle probably should be something like: Everything has an unintended consequence.

Millions, if not billions of lives have been saved by the green revolution that started in the middle of the last century.  Science and innovation (economic, agriculture, political, etc.) have made huge changes.  The book opens with the story of the green revolution.  The green revolution started in Mexico moved to South American and Asia.  It took almost two decades for the green revolution to start moving to Africa.  Unfortunately, many of the political and social forces that helped move the science and technology of the green revolution changed from the 1960s to the 1980s.

There were significant economic theory changes in the 1980s.  The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund started tying grants and loans to economic reform.  Some of that economic reform was very much needed.  But the countries with the highest levels of poverty were forced to pay the highest price.  The unintended consequence was that government subsidies for agriculture was drastically cut, the World Bank and IMF started supporting urban infrastructure projects that did not line up with the natural economic strengths or growth areas of Africa.

Politically, the west was still playing favorites with the end of the cold war.  This meant supporting pretty bad dictatorships and non-representative governments.  But just as bad, was that poverty reduction was not among the top focuses for International Development Aid.

The 1990s were not much better.  War continued to ravage through Africa, in part because of western support of repressive governments from the previous generation.  Certainly not all blame can be placed on the West.  Africa needs to claim plenty of their own blame as well.  But the global power often made bad decisions, not so much because of bad faith, but because the west was still working out economic and political theory.  Africa became the test bed of nation building.  And again, the poorest paid the highest price.

The biggest reason, that comes up over and over again about why Africa is continually hungry is the agriculture policy of the West, especially the US.  The US spends more on agriculture aid than international development aid.  In fact, the US spends more on agriculture aid than the entire world spends on international aid.  In some years agriculture aid in the US doubles or triples world wide international aid to Africa.  At the same time, the US and the EU often force African countries into harsh economic cuts, with African support of agriculture often being a prime target.  So subsistence African farmers are prevented from receiving agriculture subsidies that have a track record in Asia and South American of encouraging agriculture growth because western governments are concerned about “unfair” trade practices.  At the same time the US, has a requirement that 100 percent of food aid be US products.  So during the 1984 and 2003 Ethiopian famines, there was grain in Ethiopia that could have been purchased and fed to the starving.  But the US flooded the market with grain aid, which destroyed the local grain economy.  Farmers were not able to sell their grain, either to local consumers or to government or non-governmental agencies and those farmers were then not able to continue farming, which made the famine worse.  As recently as this past year, pushes to get the US to purchase local grain in disaster relief settings first (up to 25% of total food aid) were defeated in congress.  The US Congressional Budget Office has estimated that purchasing up to 25% of food aid locally would save 50,000 lives a year because local food is cheaper and can be made available months earlier than US grown food.

Enough is not an entirely negative story.  Told in a very narrative format, organizations like Opportunity International (a charity I have been supporting for years), political advocacy from Bread for the World and student groups like Wheaton College (my alma mater) are portrayed very positively.  I am also encouraged that there is a very positive portrayal of Christian organizations in the book.  It is certainly not a Christian book, but it frequently points to Christian organizations and the ones that are making very good decisions to help the poor.  (But there are several examples where the opposite is true as well.)

I am not going to lie.  This is not a fun book to read.  I listened to it on audiobook (about 12 hours) and it took me about a month to get through.  But I think it is worth the effort.  If we are working in the world, no matter what your political leanings, you will find evidence in Enough that support your political background and challenge your previously held beliefs about why the problems in Africa exist.  I think one of the strengths of the book is that it clearly is trying to show poverty and hunger as reality, but it is not trying to push simplistic solutions.  Simplistic solutions are part of the problem of why Africa is in the mess that it is in now.

How do I review the conclusion of a series when I have already said the first two books were among the best books that I have read this year?  Especially without giving up a bunch of spoilers?  Well frankly I don’t know, and this may not be my best review ever, but I have not posted enough here lately, so I am not going to just punt.

The first book, Hunger Games have been frequently compared to Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. And not just because of similar titles.  Both were among the best in young adult literature of their generation.  Both dealt with themes of war, cruelty to children by adults and by other children.  Both starred remarkable protagonists that were very well developed.  But in Mockingjay’s favor, Katniss was not the uber-child.  While I think that Ender’s Game is probably my all time favorite fiction book, the main negative is that Ender can do anything.

The second book, Catching Fire, was unlike many other books, other than that it was necessary to get to the third book.  I do not mean that as a slight.  I liked Catching Fire even more than Hunger Games.  It was the Empire Strikes Back.  Not so much for the revealed secrets as the depth of character development, the refocusing of  the enemy from the obvious to the deeper enemy behind the scenes.

Given that, Mockingjay had a lot to live up to.  In many ways it is quite good.  I kept thinking of a fairly unknown series (The Westmark Trilogy) by Lloyd Alexander.  Mockingjasy deals with the rebel war against The Capital.  And as a young adult book, there are very few that deal with the realities of war and the psychological damage caused by war better than The Kestral and The Beggar Queen.  I have not read the Westmark series in a long time, but I remember how vividly war and the damage it causes, especially to the young, was imprinted on me.  In many ways, I think that Mockingjay depends too heavily on psychological damage as plot device.  Even when damaged, there are repercussion for actions.  In Mockingjay, there are several times when psychological damage means there are no repercussions.

While I think that Katniss’ youth means that she probably would have been boxed out of decision making and govnermental action, it was really her own actions and immature wandering that left her out in the cold.

I think the end was a bit too neat.  It was a messy book and just because it was young adult does not require a clean ending.  I was discussing the book with my sister-in-law, who introduced me to the series in the first place, and she wondered what it would have been like if it hadn’t been constrained by young adult expectations.

All in all, I highly recommend the series.  I think it was well worth the time.  I really am glad that I read them and I think all three books will be in my top 10 fiction for the year.

Neverwhere has been on my to read list for quite a while.  I really like Neil Gaiman as an author.  My favorite book of his books is American Gods.  There really are few modern authors that get the idea of modern fantasy like Gaiman.

Neverwhere follows Richard Mayhew.  Richard is a nice London guy.  He stops to help a girl that is hurt.  What he does not realize is that the girl is not part of the ordinary world, but part of London Below.  Once he helps her, he ceases to exist in the regular London Above.  Suddenly the simple, easy world of London above is replaced by a much darker, more dangerous world of London Below.  Door, the girl he helped, is actually being hunted by two assassins that have been behind much of the disasters of the past 3000 years.  Door, with Richard and several others, must find the key to why her family has been killed, why the assassins are after her, and maybe how to get Richard back to London above.

Gaiman has lots of humor, although much of it is fairly dark.  I also really like the fact that Gaiman treats the reader as intelligent.  He has lots literary references, especially to mythology.  Gaiman doesn’t name drop these references but uses them to enhance the story.  If you do not get the reference, it is probably OK because the reference will make sense in context of the story.

I have had Neverwhere on my list for quite a while.  My wife’s cousin gave me a copy several months ago.  In the meantime, I decided to watch the BBC mini-series on Netflix.  The mini-series is six 30 minute episodes.  It is very true to the book.  So I had a very good idea of the story before I read it.  I actually thought the mini-series was very good, but no movie can quite get all of the internal processing and thought down.  And obviously it will not show the intricacy of the language.

If you decide to listen to the audiobook, it is Neil Gaiman that is narrating.  I am a fan of the author narrating and he does a good job on it.

I have been in a reading rut for a few weeks. I have not been finishing much and I have not been writing much. Part of it is busyness. My wife is back teaching school, a full month now. I have a bunch of work to crank back up for my consulting job. And my nieces are not taking naps at the same time so I can get work done while they are sleeping.

But it is more than that. All the bloggers I know, especially book bloggers seem to go through slumps. Usually, I need to read more fiction when that happens, but I have just not been interested in reading at all. I started about 10 books and just could not get into them. But two I finally latched on to. Beyond The Reflection’s Edge is a free book I picked up about a month ago. I am trying to work through my To Be Read piles so I picked it up. (The second is Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman which I will review on Wednesday.)

I am impressed. I like Science Fiction but am hesitant when I read science fiction that is not put out by standard science fiction publishing houses. There is a lot of bad science fiction out there, and a lot of good authors cranking out formulaic stuff.

Bryan Davis has some good ideas.  This book is targeted as a young adult book but other than the fact that the main characters are teens, it didn’t seem that young adult to me.  In general, the story is unique.  Nathan Shepherd is a 16 year old.  He is an accomplished musician.  He runs the business side of his father’s security business.  And he has a history of international intrigue, fighting terrorists, etc.  He is a modern, musical Johnny Quest with a tutor as a partner.  I am not turned off by too perfect lead character (but I think some will be).

Within the first couple chapters he is on the run, his parents have disappeared and may be dead.  He is shipped off to a friend of his fathers and some very weird thing start happening.  Eventually we realize this is a story about parallel dimensions.  There are three earths and each of them has similar characters.  Nathan (and his parents earlier) find they can move between the worlds.

Beyond the Reflection’s Edge is a good start to a trilogy.  There are several good strong female characters, which is unusual for Young Adult science fiction.  The action is fast paced but fairly believable (for science fiction.)  It is hard to review on the total storyline because this is still very open-ended.  (I am about a third of the way through the second book now.)

But there are some weaknesses.  First, the protagonists seem to be a bit too good.  I like that this book avoids bad language and sex, but there is an extended section about a lead teen girl being disappointed in herself for wearing a low cut, sexy dress (and liking the attention).   My guess is that there is more to the story that has not been revealed, but it seems more puritanical than real.  Second, the story can jump around a bit and be a little hard to track.  But if you keep working through it, things fall into place.  Third, this book is published by Zondervan (a Christian publisher).  Obviously, I am not anti-Christian if you read the rest of my reviews.  But I think it is hard to write good Christian science fiction.  This is not in your face with its Christianity, but I am not sure how it improves the story.  In many ways, the story would be exactly the same, without the occasional prayer or scripture reference.  Maybe later books will pull things together a bit more.

Overall, I thought it was a good book.   I enjoyed it and read it fairly quickly.  I hope I enjoy the later books as much as I enjoyed the first one.

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers is a mostly gross and occasionally very interesting book.

I purchased the book in the first place because I enjoyed Mary Roach’s previous book Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex.  Roach’s writing style is unique.  She seems to just wander through thoughts as they come to her, giving research in one area and then another until you get back to the original point.  In reality, I think that she structures the books very cleanly so that they feel like narratives or ethnography, but they actually have quite a bit of research involved.  With both Bonk and Stiff, there were several times when I got bogged down in the research and studies, but the narrative and stories of the researchers (and how hard it is to do research in both areas) move the book along and give a place for the research to hang.

Stiff took me about a month to get through.  It is only about 8 hours of narrative, but frankly some of it is pretty hard to listen to.  Mostly interesting, but still hard.  The worst was the chapter on medicinal uses of cadavers (in other words, how folk medicine has used parts of dead bodies to incorporate into their medicine).  The chapter on decomposition of bodies was also pretty bad, but not nearly as stomach churning.

I bought the book because I liked the author more than the subject.  I finished the book still liking the author, but I really do not think I want to know anything else about cadavers.

I am on a self imposed book buying fast.  I am trying to work through a significant portion of my long backlog of books between now and the new year.  Divine Justice was free on Audible.com.  (It still is as of Aug 14, 2010.  You need to get the audible.com software for a blackberry.  It is a promotional book for downloading the software on your phone.  I do not know if there is also a free book with other phone software.  There is not currently a free book with with the audible software for iphone/ipad.)

I listened to the majority of this book while running errands and cleaning house on Saturday.  It is not all that long, about six hours.  I doubt I would have picked it up if it were not free.  I don’t tend to pick general fiction books, unless I get a lot of good recommendations for it.  Divine Justice, is a semi-political spy story.  An ex-CIA hitman takes out several bad guys, one of them a Senator.  The rest of the book, he is being chased.  His old team is trying to help him out without getting noticed.  And there is a side story with the protagonist hiding out in a small mining town and getting caught up with some strange local matter.  (Think the A-Team.)

The most annoying part, is that the supposed professionals, both government and the friends of the protagonist, keep explaining what is going.  The way that always seems to happen is that one person doesn’t understand why the other is doing something, so we get a detailed description of what the next step is going to be.  It is pretty clear what is going on if you have watched any movies or read any spy novels.

The production of the audiobook is mixed.  The narrator is fairly good, but it annoyingly has background music at a number of points.  There are even background “gun shots” at a couple points.  In my mind, the story is most important.  Interlude music is OK if it is occasional and if it is only used to signify changed setting or chapters.  But I don’t think music should ever be used as a soundtrack to build suspense.  Most of the time it just feels cheesy.

The best part of the story is that it is fairly short.  The ending is more than a little far fetched and the way the story lines come together seems contrived.  It would make a good beach read if you do not want something too deep.  There is some action, a short love story, and an ending where all the good guys win and the bad guys get caught or killed.  I cannot complain for a free book.  But I would be disappointed if I had paid much for it.

I am not a huge fan of apologetics.  So is is a bit odd that I picked this book to read and review.  I am not trying to be disingenuous, but rather I hoped that the focus would be on the subtitle “Living the Faith We Defend“.  But this book still started with some of the assumptions that I dislike about the general field of apologetics.  In the introduction Ravi Zacharais tries to introduce the purpose, but only succeeds in marginalizing an important part the the audience.   He asserts that we are “fashioned by God to be thinking and emotional creatues.  The emotions should follow reason, and not the other way around.”  But it is unclear to me why he would start with that assumption.  Aren’t some drawn to God because of emotional issues?  And some drawn by intellectual issues?  The correct response would seem to be to address those with emotional issues with emotional responce and those with intellettual issues with an intellectual response.  But as Zacharias points out just a few pages later, the intellectual issues may hide a deeper emotional issue or vise versa.  A complete person is made up of both emotion and intellect, it is not possible, or even desirable, to separate the two.  Christianity should encourage a view humans as complete, not broken pieces.

The second issue I have with apologetics is that most of the time it minimizes the actual issues that it brings up or does not actually present the questions fairly.  Just pages into the first chapter, Amy Orr-Ewing tries to dismiss Foucault’s isssues with knowledge and power by just asserting that if Foucault really believed his own ideas then he should have just kept quiet so he would not assert his power over anyone.  This completely misses Foucault’s point.  He was not asserting that we should not have ideas so that we do not assert power, but that the very act of having an idea is a form of power.  We as Christians believe this.  That is the root of apologetics.  We believe that the words and ideas of scripture, through the guidance of the Holy Spirit, can change people.  The ability to change someone with an idea is the very definition of power.

It continues on so that by page 10, the author has tried to show that we can find the objective historical truth of long distant events, that we can know the permanent significant idea of words and that she has solved the problems of the cannon and many gnostic gospels.  Of course I am being a bit facetious here.  But thoughtful Christian philosophers have spent entire careers dealing with just parts of one of these ideas.  Of course a book like this cannot adequately deal with all the ramifications of these ideas.  But a book like this that attempts to use “real integrity” (as it says it is doing) should admit that there really are issue to be dealt with and 10 pages is barely enough space to introduced them, let alone adequately address them.

All I have done at this point is finish the first chapter.  Each chapter is written by a different member of Ravi Zaharias International Ministries or people that have taught with them.  According to the back cover, Ravi Zacharias decided that this book needed to be written when he “was…sharing his faith with a Hindu when the man asked: “If the Christian faith is truly supernatural, why is it not more evident in the lives of so many Christians I know?” The question hit hard, and this book is an answer.  Its purpose is to equip Christians everywhere to simultaneously defend the faith and be transformed by it into people of compassion.”  I hope that is really what the rest of the book is about.

____________________

Beyond Opinion was provided by the publisher for the purpose of review.  The book will be given away when I have finished the review.

I have been hearing nuggets about the book Drive fairly regularly since it came out last December.  Finally after yet another positive review from Tony Morgan, I picked it up.  (I know I said I was not going to buy any more books for the rest of the year and give the money to http://aHomeinHaiti.org.  I picked Drive up as an audiobook because I have already paid for 8 more books that have to be purchased before November, so it is not really buying, just using what has already been purchased.)

Drive is fascinating, although a little repetitive.  We are told over and over again, that the science of motivation is far from the business of actually motivating people.  That much of what is done in the business and non-profit world to motivate people, cash bonuses, flex time, etc. either does not work to motivate in the ways we think or actually hurts motivation.

I am interested in this, this week because I am at a training for staff of the after school program in Chicago that I consult with.  And I have been intentionally thinking about how I could use some of Pink’s insights to change motivation with the after school program.  Frankly, I have mostly come up short.  The basic idea according to Pink is to give workers autonomy to get their work done in the way they want to do it and to focus on what they, as the worker, think is important.

In the non-profit world, the financial incentives are already fairly small.  There are not a lot of bonuses.  But I do think that some of the verbal motivations, organizing around mission and releasing people, allowing people to work their own hours but hold them accountable for results, not the input (hours worked) can be done in a non-profit.   I purchased two copies, one for the after school program and one for my Mother-in-Law (a principal).  Both education and non-profits are specifically mentioned with several examples.  But mostly in negative examples.  For instance, Pink is highly critical of the pay for performance model of education that is catching steam.  He says that people that are motivated by money actually perform worse in the long term than those that are motivated by more intrinsic motivations (like mission, social cohesion, religious motivations, etc.)  While he does not spend a lot of time making positive suggestions about how to re-organize schools for better motivation, he does show why he thinks that pay for performance will actually harm motivation.

This is another fairly short book.  And it could be shorter.  But there is a useful section on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.  As you could guess, Pink is advocating for intrinsic motivation.  But he is not simply suggesting that you are either intrinsically or extrinsically motivated.  But rather, that you can develop more intrinsic motivation intentionally.  So there is a chapter that has some diagnostics to see how intrinsically motivated you are, and how to increase your intrinsic motivation.

There is also a useful section at the back on the current field of business writing.  If you have not read a lot on business organization, this section will give you great ideas on where to go next.

I do not think that Drive is great writing, although it is not by any means the worst business psychology book I have read.  But I do think that what Pink is talking about helps to explain the weaknesses of the purely rational, capitalistic financial system.  If we were purely rational and financially motivated, we would not have people devote their lives to non-profit or government causes except when they could not do anything else.

One of the significant benefits of ereaders is that anything in public domain is essentially free.  Want to read Little Women, you can read it for free.  Want to read Anna Karenina, Hunchback of Notre Dame, Tom Sawyer or a gazillion other classics.  They are pretty much all free.  If you have a kindle, Amazon has many of them in the kindle book store.  If you do not find them or they are not free, try Project Gutenberg.  Project Guenberg has the goal of digitizing all public domain books.  And then there is the Google book project, that is trying to digitize every book known to man.  But I am not going to get into that.

The Biography of Robert Murray M’Cheyne (this is the link to the actual version I read) is a biography of a Scottish pastor (1813-1843).  I was only aware of him because one of my professors in college gave out M’Cheyne’s bible reading calendar.  The plan calls for reading the New Testament and Psalms twice in a year and the Old Testament once.  It is usually four chapters, in four different books in a day (ideally it is two chapter in the morning and two in the evening and one of those sessions should be read with others.)

Classic Christian biographies like this usually provoke two reactions.  And this one was no different.  One, I often take many things about modern life and my faith for granted.  M’Cheyne was part of a group of Presbyterians that investigated missions to the Middle East and what become Israel.  (The author of this biography, Andrew Bonar was on the same trip.)  M’Cheyne’s devotion and desire to serve God was quite evident.  He was serious and what he left behind (he died when he was 29 years old) really encourages me to push harder.

I also am reminded to how far we have come.  Both in this biography and the earlier one I read of EM Bounds detailed internal denominational fights about whether traveling evangelists were appropriate and biblical.  That is an arguement that is long gone.  In the same fashion, basic health care was fairly limited and only 150 years ago many people died of quite preventable diseases.  M’Cheyne died of Typhus.

The other reaction that I usually have to classic Christian biographies is distaste of Hagiography.  Hagiography is the study of saints and usually refers to the way that many of these biographies are openly reverential to their subject and rarely include anything that might show a negative side of the subject.  About half of this biography is direct quotes from M’Cheyne’s biography.  Some of this is quite fascinating.  But much of it is heavily edited and hard to really get a sense of what is going on.  But on the less cynical side, M’Cheyne’s devotion and sense of purpose is inspiring.

While M’Cheyne was in Israel, a revival broke out in his parish and the surrounding area.  M’Cheyne attributed the revival to prayer and the grace of God.  There is a fair amount of detail about the revival and it is clear from the biography that M’Cheyne attributed it to grace of God, but many others attributed it to M’Cheyne’s prayers.

The last section is about 10 pages written by M’Cheyne about what he had learned about the Christian life.  This was somewhat hard to read, but quite good once you worked through it.

Overall, this was not one of my favorite classic Christian biographies.  But I did not know much about M’Cheyne other than the bible reading calendar, so the extra I learned was worthwhile.  And it was free.  It is hard to beat free.

Every once in a while I need something to clense the pallet.  Wait, that is how I started my review of No Way to Treat a First Lady.  Well I am a big fan of Christopher Buckley’s humor.  Darn it.  That is how I started the review of Boomsday.  At least I read Supreme Courtship before I started this blog.

On Friday, I saw a forum post on Kindleboards asking for some comedy book recommendations.  I recommended Christopher Buckley’s book, which are not exactly comedy, but more satire.  That recommendation made me want to listen to another Christopher Buckley book.  I picked up Florence of Arabia from audible.com and by Sunday afternoon I had finished listening to the just over 8 hour book.  There are very few books that I listen to start to finish.

I enjoyed this one, but not as much as the other three.  I am not sure why.  This book was cleaner, a lot less swearing (although there still was some).  The sex was mostly just hinted at, although there were discussions of harems, so it isn’t a child’s book.

It may be that I am less close to the target of the satire in this book.  The basic story line is about Florence, a State Department employee that is tasked with starting a women’s focused Arabic TV station in order to prompt women to rebel against the strictures of their society.  It spends a lot of time showing how western governments are wrapped up in oil and the problems of the middle east.  But most of the time is really spent talking about issues of the middle east and Arab culture.  Christopher Buckley may be a conservative, but he has no problems showing the weaknesses of all sides of the political spectrum.

I still obviously enjoyed the story.  And the last 2 minutes was a welcome addendum.  But if you are starting from scratch, I would pick one of the other three that I have read so far.

The Necromancer is the fourth book in a series. So not one I would recommend jumping directly into. These are not stand alone books.  The series starts with The Alchemyst, then The Magician, then the Sorceress (links are to my reviews).

The first book I found free for kindle (it is no longer free).  The last three I have purchased.  I am a fan of a lot of Young Adult fantasy books.  In many ways I think that without the sex and language, a writer needs to be more focused.  These books do have violence and the kids are allowed to be real kids, but the language is fairly clean and there is not even the hint of sex.

This series focuses on teenage twins (a boy and a girl) that might be the fulfillment of prophesy.  They find they can do magic and get swept up in a fight among the “Elders” that might destroy our world and all of humanity.  It is pretty standard stuff, but the writing is good and there is great use of historical characters that have become immortal.  Shakespeare, Nicholas Flamel, Machiavelli, Joan of Arc and many others make large or small appearances.

I think this is the weakest of the four book so far.  It is time for one of the main characters to make some bad decisions and get swept up into the dark side of the battle.  This is the Anakin Skywalker and Edward (from Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe) moment.  It is hard to justify bad decisions sometimes and this is a case where I do not think the justification really warrants the bad decision.

This was also a book that just did not seem to move the story along.  Up until this point the books have flown by.  There were 300-400 pages but only 24 to 36 hours of time.  This time it was about a week and it felt like a week.

I would say the books are appropriate for someone as young as 12 or 13 (depending on reading level) up to about 17 (or 37, whatever).

I have not heard when the fifth book comes out (the Necromancer only came out in May).  Michael Scott’s website says that there are two more planned books coming out sometime in 2011 and 2012.