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The Weekly Wrap: August 30-September 5

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The Weekly Wrap: August 30-September 5

Remembering Wendell Berry

I wanted him to live forever. But Marce Catlett, published a year ago reminded me that Wendell Berry was a mortal, like us all. I loved all of his writing, his fiction, essays, and poetry. On Tuesday, he crossed over Jordan.

Hannah Coulter was my favorite novel. It’s the story of a woman whose husband didn’t return from war, her decision to remain on her land in Port William, and share life with a second husband. Like everything Berry wrote, it is filled with communion both with the land and one’s people.

Land and people. Wendell taught me that love and careful attention to both are central to the calling of us all. We cannot care for the world if we do not love our people and our place.

He warned us to be slow to adopt the new and only do so if it was truly better, simpler, more energy efficient, and easily repaired locally. I don’t know if he wrote about data centers but I suspect he would shake his head at the folly of sacrificing arable land at the cost of huge expenditures of energy and water to impose AI on our population while we increasingly import our food from other countries, often with questionable food safety practices.

Yet amid the folly, he took joy in the bubbling stream, the changing seasons, and conversations with other men while harvesting. Few things were so beautiful as well as useful as a good team of horses. And few things so sustaining as a midday farm meal, with family and workers gathered round.

Thankfully, he left us so much of his wisdom in his books. Meanwhile, Wendell Berry is living his final Sabbath poem.

Five Articles Worth Reading

My first article is really three of the many tributes to Wendell Berry. First, verse from Gracey Olmstead, “In Memory: Wendell Berry.” Secondly, Norman Wirzba combines personal memories of meeting Wendell Berry with reflections on Berry’ sense of people and the land in “Wendell Berry’s vision of a sacred world.” Finally, Barbara Kingsolver, whose father (also a Wendell) worked with Berry to preserve threatened Kentucky lands, summarizes Berry in “Wendell Berry’s Message to Readers: All We Need Is Here.”

Perhaps it is fitting we remember Berry on Labor Day Weekend. One way to do so is to take a deep dive into JSTOR’s archive of articles on labor in “Labor Day: A Celebration of Working in America.”

However, contrary to Berry’s vision, our modern day “tech bros” have pursued a very different vision. In a review of The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State by Jill Lepore, Gal Beckerman fantasizes about taking a time machine to confiscate the science fiction these men read (or misread), that inspired their vision of the world. The review is suggestively titled “We Are Living in the Fantasy World of 13-Year-Old Boys.”

She’s an Oxford John Donne scholar and the writer of the middle grade Impossible Creatures fantasy trilogy. Now, Katherine Rundell has published a book for adults: Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise. Amanda Ramirez interviews the author in “Voracious Appetites: PW Talks with Katherine Rundell.”

Finally, Mark Bauerlein writes in “Saved by the Norton” how the two-volume Norton anthology transformed him. It gave a structure and coherence to his studies and view of the world. He thinks these things are lacking in contemporary literary studies.

Quote of the Week

Mary Renault, who wrote historical fiction, was born on September 4, 1905. She offered this watchword for how we ought live:

“One must live as if it would be forever, and as if one might die each moment. Always both at once.”

Miscellaneous Musings

Last week, Dolly Parton. This week, Wendell Berry. I’ve remarked that it seems that I go to more funerals than weddings these days. And it seems this is the season of the passing of many heroes. Perhaps this makes one long all the more for the great reunion!

Matthew Crawford’s The World Beyond Your Head is deliberately titled. He contends our modern world has each of us living in our own autonomous mental worlds. He argues real knowing involves getting out of our heads and into the world of things and flesh and blood people. Crawford talks, as do Michael Polanyi and Esther Lightcap Meek about knowing as personal. I think this is an important message as we are tempted to immerse ourselves ever more in digital worlds.

Recently, I reviewed T.A. Gibson’s A Wayfarer’s Poems: The Invitation. As I was working on the review, I realized he authored an earlier collection, A Wayfarer’s Poems: The Mirror and made a note to get a copy, having liked its sequel so much. Yesterday, I learned the author graciously gifted me with one and gave me permission to use poems in my weekly Bob on Poetry readings. I don’t get paid for any of this, but things like this make it worth it!

Next Week’s Reviews

Monday: Katherine M. Douglass and Brittany M. Tausen, Love Your Neighbor

Tuesday: Clarence Jordan, Sermon on the Mount

Wednesday: Gerhard Lohfink, The Light of Faith and Reason

Thursday: Agatha Christie, The Labours of Hercules

Friday: Tim Brown, Nolan

So, that’s The Weekly Wrap for August 30-September 5.

Find past editions of The Weekly Wrap under The Weekly Wrap heading on this page.

The Weekly Wrap: August 23-29

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The Weekly Wrap: August 23-29

Personal Libraries

Build a personal library. Unless you are at the stage of deaccumulating, I would urge you to consider this. Many homes have a bookshelf or two. I’m suggesting a real library. It could be a designated room or distributed through your living spaces, as it is in our home.

This doesn’t mean keeping every book you read. Rather, think of those books each member of your household treasures. Our household has theology and history, literature and science, cookbooks and art books. One room has Ohioana and Youngstown books. When our son was living with us, the library included his books, including stories we treasured reading aloud together.

As a child, my parents books helped feed my love of reading–everything from fiction to encyclopedias. Often guests in our home would take a book to read before bed. Sometimes those books would go with them! Hospitality is not just about feeding the body, but also feeding the soul.

Books are a kind of memory palace. They remind us of where we were in life when we first read them. Some, such as favorite stories and poetry and books of devotion are friends we revisit.

I also ponder the pulping of books and the decline of reading and worse dystopian nightmares. I hope we may, in our lives and beyond, preserve what is best of what people have thought and written. So, my advice to those starting out in life: build a personal library. It will be a friend for life.

Five Articles Worth Reading

One of the reviewers I consistently read is Jennifer Szalai, with the New York Times. This week she reviews classics translator Emily Wilson’s new essay collection, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea in a review titled “For Emily Wilson, Translating the Ancients Requires a Dash of Cardi B.” That tells you something right there!

My newsfeed has been full of tributes to Dolly Parton, who passed this week. I thought “The Most Beautiful Woman” captured the many facets of Parton’s life and her cultural impact.

Those who devote themselves to the study of literature learn to engage in close reading. In “In Praise of Unclose Reading” Stephen Akey agues that there are also joys and a place for what he terms “unclose reading.”

It was many years ago, while working on a study of the theology of work that I came across josef Pieper’s Leisure, the Basis of Culture. I felt like Pieper wrote from another time or a different place, speaking into the dysfunctions of our culture. I was reminded of this by Griffin Gooch who makes the case for “Why You Should Read Josef Pieper.”

Finally, with students, teachers, and professors returning to the classroom, JSTOR ran another of its article compilations on “Back to School.” It includes articles on everything from primary sources to the mainstreaming of homeschooling, on libraries and reading lists and so much more!

Quote of the Week

Poet and essayist Rita Dove was born August 27, 1952. She offers this insight into the generous life that I really like:

“If we really want to be full and generous in spirit, we have no choice but to trust at some level.”

Miscellaneous Musings

At a time when there are a record number of challenges and banning efforts against book, I am all the more impressed with the quiet work of Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library. During her life, this put over 330 million books into the hands of children, a great boost to reading literacy efforts. And during the time when so many are fighting about vaccines, she quietly donated $1 million of her own funds to provide seed money that led to the development of Moderna’s vaccine. If I had to choose, I want to be like Dolly.

I watched the American Masters documentary, Mary Oliver: Saved By the Beauty of the World, on Tuesday. I’ve loved her poetry and was fascinated to learn that I had lived for a time in her childhood home of Maple Heights, Ohio. I was saddened to learn of the dark history of that childhood and her instinct, from the week she spent in the woods at 17, to seek out beauty and light, which shines through in her poetry, read by luminaries like Oprah Winfrey, Stephen Colbert, and her neighbor, John Waters. If you missed it, you can still stream it from this link or on many streaming platforms.

My son sent me this reel from Facebook on how the Internet Archive scans books without destroying them by removing the bindings. I don’t approve of what AI companies are doing in buying old books to train AI, but at least they could adopt this method and then donate the books.

Next Week’s Reviews

Monday: Alan Noble, To Live Well

Tuesday: The Month in Reviews: August 2026

Wednesday: Muriel Elmer, Night of the Fireflies

Thursday: Stuart Kaminsky, Murder on the Yellow Brick Road

Friday: Elizabeth Strout, Tell Me Everything

So, that’s The Weekly Wrap for August 23-29.

Find past editions of The Weekly Wrap under The Weekly Wrap heading on this page.

The Weekly Wrap: August 16-22

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The Weekly Wrap: August 16-22

Amazon and AI

This week 404 Media reported tracing a shipment of old and rare books to an Amazon facility where they were scanned to train AI and then pulped. This follows a trend of booksellers receiving large orders for old and rare books for AI training purposes, a trend many are resisting.

What disturbed me is that this was another instance of Amazon aggressively advancing AI in the publishing industry. It is already the leading source of AI-generated works, allowing those creating these works to bypass conventional publishing while creating works imitative of human authors, often derived from their works.

Basically, Amazon is public enemy number one of human authors.

I have argued previously that AI-generated works ought have no place in the world of publishing. I’ll leave it to others to argue this case elsewhere. It is robbing authors of intellectual property. It tilts the playing field when works that take a week to generate compete with works taking months or years to write. Then, it also cast aspersions on all authors, especially debut writers. It displaces market share from human authors. If allowed into bookstores, it will also displace shelf space. And now, they are destroying old books.

The only way to deal with this is the marketplace. But this means supporting human authors through other vendors, since Amazon is also a huge revenue source for authors and publishers. Otherwise, Amazon will keep blithely going its way. And it is likely that the pollution of AI-generated works will spread. And I believe we will all be the poorer.

Five Articles Worth Reading

Related to my comments above, Jennifer Szalai reviews Jill Lepore’s new The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State in “A Government for the People, but Not by People.” She explores what happens when a liberal democracy is replaced by automation and machines.

Artificial intelligence offers the prospect of instant knowledge. In “Artificial Intelligence: Ars Notoria and the Promise of Instant Knowledge” Ann Lawrence-Mathers explores an ancient magical manuscript promising instant knowledge. It was not a good thing.

Authoritarian movements proclaim the weaknesses of classic liberalism. However, “The Unexpected Persistence of John Rawls” argues for the importance of Rawls’ works for articulating strengths of the liberal tradition.

Many commentators have noted that boys and young men are in trouble in our society. Joseph E. Davis, in “Nowhere Boys,” explores the underlying reasons for this crisis. This summarizes his argument:

“The boy crisis, therefore, is not a crisis of boys, but of the absence that is at the heart of our culture of autonomy. Parents and schools offer boys a language of limitlessness and push them along a trajectory of achievement in which many can find no resonance or inspiration, no stable and meaningful goals to guide and motivate their action. Being “all you can be” rings hollow when it is unclear what is important or necessary for you to actually be.”

In terms of the tilt of the earth, we have one more month of summer in the northern hemisphere. “Six Books You’ll Want to Read Outdoors” reminds us of the unique delights of outdoor reading, at least when it isn’t oppressively hot, stormy, or rainy.

Quote of the Week

Crime writer Megan Abbott was born August 21, 1971. Whether or not we are into crime fiction, many of us have at least one thing in common with her:


“I come from a family of readers. Our house smelled of book.”

Miscellaneous Musings

Abbott’s quote suggests why so many of us like bookstores, especially second hand bookstores. They smell like home.

PBS will be running a documentary on the life of poet Mary Oliver on Tuesday August 25, 9 pm ET. From responses to posting this on social media, there are a lot of Mary Oliver lovers out there. I’m among them. I also share something in common with Mary Oliver. She was born in and grew up in Maple Heights, Ohio. I lived there from 1981 to 1990. However, we never crossed paths.

I’m reading two delightful memoirs, worlds apart in many ways. One is by Muriel Elmer, describing her child as a missionary kid including the loss of her father, boarding school nightmares, and a wondrous display of fireflies one night. The other is from fellow Youngstowner John DeMain, who recently stepped down as director of the Madison Symphony Orchestra. He recounts his heroes from summer stock entrepreneur John Kenley to Leonard Bernstein, as well as the staging of a full length Porgy and Bess, which won a Grammy award in 1975. Look for reviews soon.

Next Week’s Reviews

Monday: Marty Solomon with Reed Dent, The Gospel of Being Human

Tuesday: Carmen Joy Imes, Becoming God’s Family

Wednesday: A.J. Jacobs, The Know-It-All

Thursday: John L. DeMain, Working With My Heroes

Friday: Jeffrey A. Lockwood, The Good Quit

So, that’s The Weekly Wrap for August 16-22.

Find past editions of The Weekly Wrap under The Weekly Wrap heading on this page.

The Weekly Wrap: August 9-15

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The Weekly Wrap: August 9-15

Reading Projects

Have you ever thought of reading through an encyclopedia, from A to Z? In 2004, A. J. Jacobs published The Know-It-All, chronicling his big project of reading through the 32 volumes of the print edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. I am reading the book, and while I haven’t gotten to the end of the book, it is apparent that he discovered that lots of factual knowledge is not the equivalent of wisdom. I liked browsing our family’s encyclopedia as a child, but reading through one? No way!

A reading project usually involves either a number of books or one very large and challenging book. For many, the ultimate challenge seems to be the reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses or Tolstoy’s War and Peace or Hugo’s Les Miserables. Frankly, I have no interest in Joyce, but Les Miserables is on my TBR. I’ve known some to take on a topic, like the biographies of the presidents or the English monarchs. Others like to read all the works of an author. One of my reading goals for this year is to read the major novels of Jane Austen.

It seems to me that one of the reasons to pursue a reading project is that you’ve found an author or topic you love and simply want to read as much on it as you can. However, there is a certain allure for some to read through a set, whether an encyclopedia, a multi-volume theology like that of Karl Barth, or The Great Books.

I have two reading projects that I hope to get to. One is to read the set of Balzac novels my grandfather collected and handed down to my mom, who loved reading them when she was young. The other is to read the three-volume Systematic Theology of Charles Hodge. I bought it from a retiring pastor forty odd years ago. So, maybe in my retirement I’ll get around to reading it.

In the end, what it comes down to is that there are so many good books to read. But we only have one life to read them. So the project is choosing those books that will mean the most to us, to read and re-read.

Five Articles Worth Reading

Do you like thrillers and mysteries? I certainly do. The New York Times just published “Readers Pick Their 100 Best Thrillers of the Century.” You’ve probably read some and might find some others that pique your interest.

Richard Russo grew up in a hardscrabble town and his books revolve around characters from these places. In “Hard-Luck Men in Hardscrabble Towns,” Mark Oppenheimer looks at the corpus of his novels as well as reviewing the latest.

Many of us from the Vietnam era read Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. Now Susan Farrell has written Vonnegut’s War: The Making of Slaughterhouse-Five looking back at Vonnegut’s World War II experiences as a P.O.W. and how they influenced the book. Here is the Publishers Weekly starred review.

Melanie Challenger has written what looks to be a fascinating book on human agency, Alive: The Hidden Intelligence of the Living World. She previews the book in “Where Does the Will To Live Come From… in Humans and Nonhumans Alike?“

“Wielding the Blue Pencil” reveals that British publishers only added editors to their staff after World War II. The article explores the reasons why publishers added editors and the relationships formed between authors and editors.

Quote of the Week

John Galsworthy explains why politicians in power don’t always advocate the same things they did when in opposition:


“There is one rule for politicians all over the world: Don’t say in Power what you say in opposition; if you do, you only have to carry out what the other fellows have found impossible.”

Miscellaneous Musings

“Jason Arday, Cambridge Scholar Who Resigned Under Scrutiny, Is Found Dead.” This story turned up in my email late yesterday. Police do not believe his death was suspicious. He was the youngest professor appointed at Cambridge but recently faced charges of plagiarism and of embellishing his resume. He resigned from Cambridge last week. Out of respect, I will not speculate, particularly because cause of death hasn’t been established and the investigations of the charges against him were ongoing at the time of his death. Very tragic.

This case also brings to mind authors rightly and wrongly accused of using AI generated text and not disclosing it. Recently, a novelist lost a $2 million dollar deal over such accusations. My son passed along this very helpful article: “You Will Be Accused of Using AI. Here Is How to Prove You Wrote It.”

Earlier this year, Daniel Kraus’ Angel Down won this year’s Pulitzer Prize. Three hundred pages. One sentence. Andrew Krivak’s Mule Boy is not that extreme but I’ve counted a single sentence covering a least four pages. Can’t say that I’m a fan of this kind of writing. Probably too much training about run-on sentences! But probably no one challenged him for using AI to write it!

Next Week’s Reviews

Monday: David Nasaw, The Wounded Generation

Tuesday: Christine Jeske, Racial Justice for the Long Haul

Wednesday: T.A. Gibson, A Wayfarer’s Poems: The Invitation

Thursday: Andrea Ferrari, The Fall and Redemption of Conscience

Friday: Andrew Krivak, Mule Boy

So, that’s The Weekly Wrap for August 9-15.

Find past editions of The Weekly Wrap under The Weekly Wrap heading on this page.

The Weekly Wrap: August 2-8

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The Weekly Wrap: August 2-8

The Neuroscience of Unread Books

The joke is that we will finish reading the books on our TBR piles in 329 years. Except that for many of us, it is no joke. I celebrated another birthday this past week. It’s also a reminder that the years I have left for reading the books on that TBR pile are ever diminishing. But the piles aren’t (notice the plural?).

Is it a kind of insanity? Maybe, but “The Neuroscience of Why You Can’t Stop Buying Books You Don’t Have Time to Read” suggests another possibility for this illogical behavior. It comes down to the human ability to take pleasure in the anticipation of future pleasurable events. The author notes that this is why planning vacations is as pleasurable as going on them.

The author summarizes it like this “The brain experts have spoken: your book-buying obsession is rooted in long evolved processes and helps spot good opportunities and add a steady drip of joy to your life.” I like that last phrase, “a steady drip of joy”! It rings true and explains why we booklovers describe buying books and reading books as two distinct pleasures.

Perhaps there is a third and a fourth. Winston Churchill urged us not to feel guilty about unread books but to “fondle” them. Between the initial pleasure and the reading, there is looking at the pile and thinking about the reading delights ahead. There is also the afterglow, as you look at books read, and recall the pleasure they gave you. And now you understand why booklovers love reading so much–it comes down to pleasure start to finish.

Just don’t break your budget, your marriage or your floor joists!

Five Articles Worth Reading

People seem to either love or hate the author of A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn. Adam Hochschild considers the controversial life of Zinn in his review of The People’s Historian by David Zirin. The review appears in The New York Times under the title “America’s Most Divisive Historian Gets a New Biography.” This is on my list.

JSTOR excels in collecting articles into incredible online posts. “The Many Lives of Libraries” is just the latest example. It features libraries, famous librarians, articles on libraries and social change, and even an op-ed from Bernie Sanders.

Then, “In Search of the Consolations of Age” by Theodore Dalrymple is an extended and poignant reflection on Malcom Arnold’s poem Growing Old. Can you tell I just celebrated a birthday?

However, it is never too late as long as we are living to take on a new reading challenge. Seth Kaplan writes of one example of this in “Why My 85-Year-Old Friend Has Devoted the Last Years of Her Life to Reading the Ancient Classics.”

Finally, if you still wonder about the arguments of left and right about reading the Great Books, ancient or modern, Nadya Williams summarizes those arguments and her own case for reading these books in “The Great Books for You and for Me.” It also just so happens that I will be reviewing her Christians Reading Classics on Monday. Let’s put it this way, when I see something written by her, I try to read it as soon as I can.

Quote of the Week

Garrison Keillor, the humorist, was born August 7, 1942. He hit the nail on the head for me when he said,

“I think the most un-American thing you can say is, ‘You can’t say that.’ “

What I particularly fear in the age we are in is self-censorship. How many good and important things have been suppressed by the threats, often implied, of the powerful?

Miscellaneous Musings

I just renewed the domain name of bobonbooks.com for another year. So, Lord willing you will have to endure me talking about books for another year!

Because I also have a dedicated email account for the blog, I have had a first hand exposure to what appear to be literary scammers, perhaps bots. People will write me about my book (often one I’ve reviewed!) or by an author with a similar website. What strikes me is how stupid and lazy these attempts are. Five minutes on my website would tell them I am not their audience. Publishers have been warning their authors about these scammers. Yet another way people too lazy to do real work try to scam the rest of us!

Finally, while on the subject of the blog, one of the things people have tried to sell me on is monetizing the blog. I have no objection to those who do so. But I feel I’ve been tremendously blessed in life and love sharing the blessing of books I’ve loved and think important. It is a joy to give with no strings attached. However, it does bother me when I come across evidence my copyrighted material is used by AI agents without my permission. This speaks to my fundamental contention that AI in the publishing world is founded on theft of intellectual property.

Next Week’s Reviews

Monday: Nadya Williams, Christians Reading Classics

Tuesday: Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman, ed. The Black Agenda

Wednesday: Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

Thursday: John B. Hatch, Oh What A Day!

Friday: Jarvis J. Williams, Paul’s Gospel in Romans

So, that’s The Weekly Wrap for August 2-8.

Find past editions of The Weekly Wrap under The Weekly Wrap heading on this page.

The Weekly Wrap: July 26-August 1

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The Weekly Wrap: July 26-August 1

More AI Transgressions and Accusations

I wish we could be done with talking about AI, at least as it has to do with the world of books and publishing. But this week brought more disturbing stories. Booksellers, including antiquarian booksellers receiving requests from AI companies to purchase old books. What is driving it is that with all the AI-slop in publishing, AI companies are looking for “slop-free” books to train its AI. Also, because of some court rulings deciding that “bought books” used to train AI may fall under “fair use” rather than copyright provisions, going this route is more attractive to avoid litigation.

But what happens to the books? The bindings are cut off, the pages are scanned and then the books are pulped. I suspect this is what inspired this Yahoo News article title: “AI Book Burning? Companies Are Destroying Millions of Books to Feed Chatbots.”

Book publicist Kathleen Schmidt highlighted another problem. Writers are running into problems with “false-positive” AI scans of their works. And because AI scrapes so many of these writers, it may become increasingly difficult to distinguish human versus AI authored works. It makes me wonder if publishers might give up at some time. Schmidt’s article is so important I’ve featured it below.

Of course, this may all be small potatoes compared to the reality of AI going rogue. “OpenAI blamed a hacking event on its AI models going rogue. Here’s what to know” chronicles how AI programs “went rogue” and hacked into companies. Do I hear shades of HAL?

I don’t know how to put the genie back into the bottle. But here’s what I’d like to see. Publishers say a hard “no” to AI works. Amazon says a hard “no” and stops allowing people to upload ten “self-published” books a week to their site. All booksellers and libraries reserve their shelves for human generated works. And those who submit AI works dishonestly are banned from publishing for at least ten years. And put in place protections to prevent rare and important works from being destroyed.

Five Articles Worth Reading

“Who Is Emma M. Lion, and Why Can’t Readers Get Enough of Her?” is the title of a profile of Beth Brower. Her self-published “diaries” of Victorian Emma M. Lion have been a hit. I found this fascinating simply for the fact that it is off the beaten path of what I read.

People have argued for some time of the importance of The Bible simply for cultural literacy. In “The Bible Belongs in the Classroom,” Adam Kirsch is the latest to make this case. But I think he might be saying more than he even intends when he concludes, “But if reading snippets of the Bible in class inspires any students to keep exploring, they might well end up shocked that this is a book their teachers and parents encouraged them to read.”

Kathleen Schmidt’s article on “AI Accusations and Book Publishing” underscored for me the growing distrust of author submissions that has resulted from AI generated text and the threat this is to both aspiring and established writers.

Then one of the more fascinating reviews I came across this week was of The Disease of Boredom: From Ancient Philosophy to Modern Psychology by Josefa Ros Velasco. In “The Noonday Devil,” Valerie Stivers discusses acedia and the centuries of Christian thought about this “deadly sin.”

“Read the Novels and Forget Everything Else” explores the life of Patrick O’Brian who wrote novels, particularly the Aubrey-Maturin sea stories that were better than he was. I loved these books, both for the descriptions of sailing tall ships and for the deep relationship between Aubrey and Maturin.

Quote of the Week

Emily Brontë, born July 24, 1818 gives this blunt definition of honesty:

“Honest people don’t hide their deeds.”

Miscellaneous Musings

I’m curious whether the Odyssey will result in any long-term interest in the classics. I suspect more will come from those in the home-school and classical education movements.

I’m a good way into Ann Patchett’s Whistler. I’ve read a number of her works and have felt that as she matures, so do her characters in their outlook and choices. I wonder if others have felt this.

Finally, I’ve been wondering what I was reading in 1976. The only book which immediately comes to mind is Os Guinness In Two Minds, a fascinating book about doubt, still one of the best in my mind. He wrote so many other significant books, including The Call.

Next Week’s Reviews

Monday: The Month in Reviews: July 2026

Tuesday: Don Everts, Oscar and the Mystery of the Glowing Orbs

Wednesday: Amar D. Peterman, Becoming Neighbors

Thursday: Cherryl Hunt, Nicholas J. Moore, and Timothy J. Murray, New Testament Ethics

Friday: Ann Patchett, Whistler

So, that’s The Weekly Wrap for July 26-August 1.

Find past editions of The Weekly Wrap under The Weekly Wrap heading on this page.