Ilona Tak Tak itibaren Shindoli, Karnataka, Hindistan
The end sucked. Actually, it was so incredibly against-the-rules, I burst into annoyed laughter. Inconceivable! No, no, no, Robin, no. She should have stuck with her first retelling of Beauty & the Beast. Supposedly this was supposed to be more mature. It could have been good, but instead it was sloppy. VERY SLOPPY. I suppose her editor felt they couldn't say much since Robin is such a veteran, and it shows. Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy. Like this review. The one redeeming quality is the fun way she anthropomorphizes plants. Very witty.
"When Marya Hornbacher published her first book, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia, she did not yet know the reason for her all-but-shattered young life. At age twenty-four, Hornbacher was diagnosed with Type 1 rapid-cycle bipolar, the most severe form of bipolar disease there is." A first-person look into the mind of a bipolar. The descriptions of mania and of the difficulties of trying to connect with friends and family as she copes with an ever changing schedule of drugs will change th way you think and feel about mental illness. Riveting.
This is Marcus Borg and N. T. Wright's exchange via book. It is useful if you want to understand where many Evangelical Americans see the historical Jesus debate stands right now. I think, mostly, this book misses the point, however, in light of Bultmann's stuff on the meaning of faith. I would recommend Bultmann's Kerygma and Myth instead of this if one, in my opinion, wants to really understand the issues of the historical Jesus in a way that involves honesty without intellectual suicide. Although N. T. Wright's work as a historian is useful for biblical hermeneutics, I don't think it can, as he seems to think, be the foundation for all biblical hermeneutics as such. I agree with Schleiermacher at this point: theology is a function of use by the church, it is nothing in and of itself. I think this is the real import between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith: the church is not interested in the man, they are interested in the Christ. Whereas the former is a historical entity, the latter is a religious entity and an icon of religious devotion. The latter, too, is what we find in the gospels. Of course, Marcus Borg discusses this view quite a bit in this book, I don't think that his philosophical position is very useful. He seems to miss the point, in light of Wittgenstein, of what it means to engage with religious language. I say this because Borg does not take himself to be giving over a religious account of the historical Jesus but wants to make philosophical arguments at certain points (especially on the distinction between resuscitation and resurrection--where, properly understood, this is a biological argument). Anyway, I would not recommend this book.
A fun read, a bit hard to follow without an outback dictionary. There are plenty of sorties started in these pages that would be fun to track down, but they ran together a bit here and with so many names, a different adventure every half year, well the start of the book wasn't much different than the middle or the end. Did get to learn how to run down a buffalo and skin a croc ;)