Richard Munson’s splendid biography of Benjamin Franklin provides an insightful view of the statesman’s lesser known accomplishments in science.

Biography, Literature, Nonfiction

Didion and Babitz

Lili Anolik’s Didion and Babitz is a freewheeling and engaging narrative about two iconic literary rivals and their world in 1970s Los Angeles.

Crafts, Hobbies & Home, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Garden Wonderland

With its seamless integration of gardening principles with advanced design ideas, Garden Wonderland is the perfect gift for new gardeners—or anyone in need of a little inspiration.

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A luminous look at the City of Light

by bookpagedev

History

History

Winning the peace after WWII

Review by bookpagedev

by Roger Bishop

In The Conquerors, presidential historian Michael Beschloss delivers a fascinating exploration of how the Allies decided to deal with the threat posed by Germany after World War II. As he shows in the book, Franklin Delano Roosevelt fervently believed that it would not be enough to defeat the Nazis militarily. It was also imperative that the Allies lay the foundation for democracy in postwar Germany. Without that, history indicated it was likely that Germany would initiate another war in the decades ahead. Despite sharp policy difference with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin, not to mention division within his own cabinet, FDR’s broad vision prevailed. This piece of wartime statecraft, says Beschloss, was “one of America’s great 20th century international achievements.” In exploring the complexity of FDR’s leadership and demonstrating that the politician who wanted to keep his options open, who was flexible and duplicitous, was also able to win the acceptance of such positions as Germany’s unconditional surrender, Beschloss drawing on previously unseen documents from the FBI, Russia and private archives tells an absorbing story, one that’s carefully researched and compellingly written. Among FDR’s major flaws was his refusal to publicly condemn what we know as the Holocaust until 1944, although he had learned of it much earlier. Also, in what Beschloss describes as “one of the great mistakes of modern diplomacy,” neither FDR nor his negotiators raised the issue of U.S. or British access to Berlin because it might make the Russians “suspicious.” In 1945, General Dwight Eisenhower said the success of the Allied occupation of Germany could only be judged in 50 years. “If the Germans at that time have a stable, prosperous democracy, then we shall have succeeded.” This important book is a cogent reminder from the relatively recent past that it is often not enough to achieve military victory. Winning the peace is also crucially important. Roger Bishop is a Nashville bookseller and regular contributor to BookPage.

Remembering an old rivalry

by bookpagedev

History

History

Gary Kinder

Interview by Alden Mudge

by Alden Mudge

Late last year, when Gary Kinder read about some guy named James Cameron and a forthcoming movie called Titanic, he was devastated. It wasn’t just that Cameron had decided to embellish the actual story of the sinking of the Titanic by adding a romance between two star-crossed lovers, but he’d also framed his story with a tale of high-tech, modern-day treasure hunters. Cameron’s fictionalized account mirrored the true-life story Kinder had just spent the last 10 years scrupulously researching and getting down on paper. "I figured it was going to destroy everything I’d done," Kinder says.

By the time we talk in late April, Kinder seems to have accepted his agent’s assurances that the success of the movie can only add luster to Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea, Kinder’s book about the 1857 wreck and recent recovery of a ship carrying gold from the California Motherlode. Kinder has even been to see Titanic with his mother and his two daughters (who have seen it twice!) and loved it. But he’s not quite ready to trust the early praise for Ship of Gold, which likens it to such riveting accounts of peril and adventure as Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air and Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm.

In Ship of Gold, Kinder interweaves two dramatic stories. The first is the story of the S.S. Central America, a sidewheel steamer that shuttled passengers and cargo between New York and Panama, taking California-bound goldseekers on the outward journey and making the nine-day journey back to New York with those who had struck it rich in the goldfields, as well as those who had struck out. Between 1853, when it was launched, and 1857 Kinder discovered, the Central America "had carried one-third of all consigned gold to pass over the Panama Route." Not to mention the untold millions in gold dust, nuggets, coins, and bars that had "traveled aboard her in the trunks and pockets and carpetbags and money belts of her passengers."

On the fateful journey from Panama to New York in September 1857, the Central America carried its full complement of 500 passengers. Among them were newlyweds Ansel and Adeline "Addie" Easton (sister of one of the richest men in California); Judge Alonzo Monson, who was legendary for his gambling losses in the gold fields; and a disappointed young goldseeker named Oliver Manlove, who had recorded in his diary every mile of his journey west. The ship was captained by William Lewis Herndon, a legendary sailor and explorer who several years before had written a classic of 19th-century adventure, Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon, about his experiences in South America.

Kinder estimates that he read hundreds of contemporary accounts, interviews, diaries, and reminiscences of Central America passengers to construct an almost moment by moment account of the ship’s encounter with a hurricane off the coast of the Carolinas; the heroic efforts of passengers and crew to keep the ship afloat (for hours and hours and hours, male passengers formed a bailing line to keep the rising water away from the steam boilers); the desperate transfer of some of the women passengers in storm-tossed waters to ships that had come to assist the foundering Central America; the heartrending separation of the Eastons; the steely last moments of Captain Herndon, who went down with his ship; and the horrible days adrift of the few others who ultimately survived. It is a wrenching and thrilling account, and any writer would be proud of the power of its telling.

But, as fascinating as it is, the story of the sinking of the Central America is not Kinder’s main story. Instead, it is the search for the wreck and the recovery of its treasure that make up the bulk of Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea. And in Kinder’s hands, this story — even with all its technological and legal details about deep sea recovery efforts — is at least as riveting as his historical account of the sinking.

As Kinder tells it, after he had finished writing his previous book (a bestseller about a man who claimed to have had contact with aliens), he was looking for a project that would involve him physically. Kinder had gone to law school in Florida and learned to scuba dive there, and somehow these facts made him tegin to think about treasure hunting as a subject for his book. When he first heard about the Central America, he says, "it didn’t interest me even a little bit. I wanted something sexy. I wanted lots of jewels and gold reliquaries and the romance of the high seas in the 1600s and 1700s."

But that was before he met the team and crew of the Columbus-America Discovery Group, led by the extraordinary Tommy Thompson, whose personality dominates Ship of Gold just as it dominated the ultimately successful efforts to find the Central America and its cargo. Thompson was both the technological innovator, who could think his way through the awesome dangers and difficulties of working at great depths in the ocean, and the steely operator, who could stare down his competitors during tense encounters on the high seas and direct the Herculean efforts of a large recovery team of experts and crew members.

"The biggest problem I had in writing this book," Kinder says, "was trying to tell this story exactly as it happened without making Tommy seem too perfect. It was a very, very big problem, because everybody I talked to said Tommy was perfect. I began to wonder how to make this guy seem real."

Of course, Tommy has his defects. He exercised rigid control on the project, for example, not allowing certain crew members to even see the gold and artifacts as they were being brought to the surface. That engendered some deep anger, Kinder says.

Thompson eventually allowed Kinder unprecedented access to the project records and personnel, and Kinder has put that access to good use. His account is informative, dramatic, and even funny. It didn’t come without effort and a big dose of frustration. The book was scheduled to be published for the last three or four years, but publication had to be delayed while competitors’ lawsuits against Thompson and Columbus-America wound through the courts. Kinder used the time to rework the book. "As things turned out, it ended up being a much better manuscript," he says with characteristic grin-and-bear-it good humor.

As Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea at last arrives in bookstores all across the country this month, Gary Kinder sits in Seattle (where he runs a business teaching lawyers to write) waiting for his ship to come in.

Alden Mudge is a writer in Oakland, California, and a frequent contributor to BookPage.

Late last year, when Gary Kinder read about some guy named James Cameron and a forthcoming movie called Titanic, he was devastated. It wasn't just that Cameron had decided to embellish the actual story of the sinking of the Titanic by adding a romance between…

The Galapagos’ allure

by bookpagedev

Memoir

Memoir

Jimmy Buffett

Interview by Tom Corcoran

by Tom Corcoran

Anyone who’s observed Jimmy Buffett’s music career and heard his song lyrics knows that his main product is carefree optimism. But Jimmy has a little secret: he’s been a workaholic for 30 years. As we learn in his memoir, A Pirate Looks at Fifty, he works just as hard at having good times as he does earning them.

The book is a travelogue with flashbacks — and not the kind you might fear. Insightful and entertaining, this detailed instruction on how to live a rewarding life might well be deemed the ultimate self-help manual.

We spoke to Mr. Buffett recently, just after he’d spent several days in New Orleans, "revisiting his youth."

Tom Corcoran: In A Pirate Looks at Fifty you say that you squeeze 36 hours into every day. How did you find time to create a 400-page book?
Jimmy Buffett: I had a deadline! I’d started a novel before I got involved in the musical production of Herman Wouk’s Don’t Stop the Carnival. That was fun, but a creative sidetrack. I still owed the publisher a book. I pulled out my old journals and took a lesson from David Niven, who wrote a wonderful non-tell-all biography called The Moon Is a Balloon. It was informative, yet entertaining to the point of near-fiction in which he’d made himself a character. I decided to write about a journey during which I reflected on events in my life. A lot of it was already on paper. Plus, that deadline . . .

TC: How much of your wanderlust can we attribute to your reading?
JB: Almost all of it, from my youth up till today. I hate to mention age, but I come from an era when we weren’t consumed by technology and television. My mother insisted that her children read. To describe my scarce leisure time in today’s terms, I always default to reading. It didn’t hurt that I came from a Gulf Coast storytelling tradition. I went to the Caribbean because my grandfather sang calypso songs. Simple as that.

TC: You state in this book that you’ve tried to follow your instincts and keep your sense of humor. Creativity aside, how much of your success can you attribute to instinct and humor?
JB: Ninety percent of it. Instinct taught me 20 years ago to pace a song or a concert performance. That translates into pacing a story, pleasing a reading audience. I don’t know where I got it. It must be instinct. Humor has bailed me out of more tight situations than I can think of. If you go with your instincts and keep your humor, creativity follows. With luck, success comes, too.

TC: A Pirate Looks at Fifty demonstrates your fascination with many people, not necessarily for what they do, but how well they do it. Do you judge yourself the same way?
JB: I remember the excruciating school task of writing a three-page term paper. But, oh, that feeling when I was done! I think I drive myself for that feeling of accomplishment. Herman Wouk told me, "Write a page a day. It will add up." So I make sure to do it. Whether it’s a letter, song lyrics, part of a novel, or instructions on how to fix a kitchen sink, it’s writing. You keep your craft honed, you acquire the discipline to finish things. You turn into a self-taskmaster.

TC: Twenty years ago you were sailing the Caribbean. For the past decade you’ve been flying all kinds of aircraft, all over the hemisphere. How do you foresee your introduction to "A Pirate Looks at Sixty"?
JB: I’m inspired by people who keep on rolling, no matter their age. I’ve talked recently with Harry Belafonte and with Mose Allison, two musicians who continue to enjoy performing and life. Quitting doesn’t enter my mind. I want to keep going as I have, to travel, read, perform, write, and enjoy my family. I’ve promised myself only this: no more Laundromats, no more two-shows-a-night, and no more deadlines. I’ll work at my own pace.

Anyone who's observed Jimmy Buffett's music career and heard his song lyrics knows that his main product is carefree optimism. But Jimmy has a little secret: he's been a workaholic for 30 years. As we learn in his memoir, A Pirate Looks at Fifty, he…

Da Chen

by Alden Mudge

Animals

Animals

Peter Matthiessen

Interview by Michael Sims

by Michael Sims

"I was always writing something down," Peter Matthiessen remembers of his childhood. His voice, on the phone from his home in Sagaponack, New York, is relaxed and humorous. "I don’t know if that was the beginning or not. But even when I was a little boy, I would make strange lists — even of my phonograph records. I don’t know why."

Matthiessen was born in 1927. He wrote what he calls "bad short stories" as a teenager, for school magazines and the yearbook. At Yale he began writing more seriously, and he helped found the Paris Review only three years after graduating in 1950. In the decades since, he has published many volumes of award-winning fiction and nonfiction, ranging from the experimental novel Far Tortuga to the African meditation The Tree Where Man Was Born.

Matthiessen’s latest book, Tigers in the Snow, is a small gem of only 160 pages. It includes dramatic color photographs by biologist Maurice Hornocker, who invited Matthiessen to visit the Siberian Tiger Project and write about it. Inevitably, the book’s terrain and feline star will bring to mind Matthiessen’s 1978 National Book Award winner, The Snow Leopard. But the new book is less mystical and poetic, more journalistic and condensed. It records the plight of these magnificent animals — and the adventures of the scientists and villagers around them — in a prose as sharp and evocative as the lines of a woodcut.

Whatever his aim in each book, Matthiessen never distances himself from his subject matter. "One cannot speak for those who live in tiger country," he writes in Tigers, "but the vivid presence of Hu Lin, the King — merely the knowing that His Lordship is out there in the forest — brings me deep happiness. That winter afternoon in the Kunalaika, the low sunlight in the south glancing off black silhouetted ridges and shattered into frozen blades by the black trees, the ringing clarity of the great cat tracks on the snowy ice, the blood trace and stark signs of the elk’s passage — that was pure joy."

The factual Tigers in the Snow comes on the heels of the fictional Bone by Bone, which won the Southern Book Critics’ Circle Award. Bone by Bone is the final book in a critically acclaimed trilogy that began with Killing Mr. Watson in 1990 and continued with Lost Man’s River in 1997. The genesis for this massive work dates back to a single remark in the 1940s. "I was traveling up the west coast of Florida with my father in a boat, and we were off the Ten Thousand Islands — the western part of the Everglades — and he showed me on the marine chart where a river came down out of the Everglades. And he said, ‘There’s a house about three or four miles up that river, and it’s the only house in the Everglades. It belonged to a man named Watson, who was killed by his neighbors.

"That’s all he knew, but the seed was planted: a man killed by his neighbors! Why? The whole thing had a gothic and romantic ring to it. And it began working in my head. For many years, I thought it would be a thread in a very different book, having to do with the Indian Wars and the environment and so forth. But it grew and grew, and when I started writing, it was the main story."

Although published as three volumes, the story was originally written as one. When, in a recent Paris Review interview, Matthiessen mentioned that he hoped to reunite them into a single narrative, the Modern Library called immediately and offered to publish the one-volume version.

Although fiction, the Watson trilogy embodies many of the themes that drive Matthiessen’s nonfiction. "I was just very interested in the American frontier and the growth of capitalism — those enormous fortunes that were being made, more often than not, on the blood of poor people, black people, Indian people. They were the ones who paid very dearly for those great fortunes." He laughs quietly, ironically. "I wanted that aspect of our great American democracy brought out."

Matthiessen has said that the difference between writing nonfiction and writing fiction is like the difference between making a cabinet and creating a sculpture. "In nonfiction, you have that limitation, that constraint, of telling the truth. I’m just doing my job. I’m using my research, and I hope I’m shaping it properly and telling the story well, and you do the best you can with the language. In fiction, you have a rough idea what’s coming up next — sometimes you even make a little outline — but in fact you don’t know. Each day is a whole new — and for me, a very invigorating — experience.

"I used to distinguish between my fiction and nonfiction in terms of superiority or inferiority. And a friend of mine pointed out to me, ‘You know, you’re really writing about the same themes in fiction and nonfiction, but some material lends itself better to fiction or nonfiction.’ I think some of my nonfiction books, especially ones like Under the Mountain Wall and The Snow Leopard, appeal to some of the same senses as the fiction does, simply because they’re so strange. It’s the strangeness, I think, which is the common denominator. It’s like a world of the imagination, it’s so different from what you had known.

"I remember saying to George Schaller, as I started out on that snow leopard trip, ‘If I can’t get a good book out of this, I ought to be taken out and shot.’ I was thrilled by the material and the scene and the light." Obviously Matthiessen is not one to pore over the quotidian malaise of suburbia. "For me, that’s never been very interesting. I’ve always preferred sort of life on the edge — people who are desperate or cut off in some way, or loners, whatever."

Books such as The Snow Leopard and Blue Meridian have a vivid immediacy about them — rich with the textures, scents, and sounds of the outdoors — for a good reason. "When I’m in the field, when I’m working, I keep very careful notes. I wear big shirts with big breast pockets, and I carry in them two little spiral notebooks. I keep them going all day and then write up the stuff at night. I have to get it down quickly, because otherwise I may lose some of it; it’s taken down in a semi-shorthand. So when I go home, I have a sort of rough first draft."

To the suggestion that such attention to detail is part of his appeal, Matthiessen replies, "I think in any writing you’re paying attention to detail. E. M. Forster made that wonderful observation that good writing is administering a series of tiny astonishments. The astonishments aren’t things you never knew. What they are is sort of the first articulation of something you knew but you’d never seen set down in print. And you say, Ah, yes! How true."

Author photo by Linda Girvin.

"I was always writing something down," Peter Matthiessen remembers of his childhood. His voice, on the phone from his home in Sagaponack, New York, is relaxed and humorous. "I don't know if that was the beginning or not. But even when I was a little…

Andrew Weil, M.D.

by Sharon Kozy

Travel

Travel

Paul Theroux

Interview by Alden Mudge

by Alden Mudge

Midway through our conversation about Fresh Air Fiend, Paul Theroux reminds me that during the 15 years in which he wrote the 49 travel essays and articles collected here, he also wrote a major book on China (Riding the Iron Rooster), three additional travel books, a controversial memoir about his friendship with V.S. Naipaul (In Sir Vidia’s Shadow), and more than a handful of novels (including My Secret History, Millroy the Magician, and Kowloon Tong). Something like a dozen books in all.

"It’s not that I was writing these pieces with my left hand," Theroux says, "but I was doing other things at the same time. These pieces illuminate those books, and those books derive somewhat from the experiences recorded here. There’s a certain synchronicity in writing travel pieces and also living my life as a novelist and a travel writer."

This is disheartening. You’d expect—perhaps even hope—that there’d be a significant decline in quality in these occasional pieces, written over the years for publications as varied as Outside magazine, The New York Times, Vogue, and Vanity Fair. And, no doubt, readers will have their favorites and less favorites among them. But in each of the pieces collected in Fresh Air Fiend, the immensely satisfying interplay of observation, wit, and insight (as well as a certain disquieting undertone) that we’ve come to expect from Paul Theroux is very much in evidence.

The essays and articles themselves range through time and across five continents. In the book’s first section, called "Time Travel," Theroux reflects on memory, creativity, and turning 50 and writes about the job of the travel writer. Later, in the book’s title essay, he explains his need for solitary exercise—bicycling, kayaking, sailing—to assuage "the loneliness of the long-distance writer." He spends a solitary week in the Maine woods in wintertime. He travels down the Zambezi River, and down the Yangtze. He writes of meeting Gerard d’Aboville, who rowed across the Pacific Ocean alone in a small boat in 1993. He kayaks in the Philippines and visits Hong Kong on the eve of the hand-over to China.

By my lights, the most interesting pieces in this collection are Theroux’s essays on books of travel. His introductions to reissues of his own books are shapely vignettes from a writer’s autobiography. His essays on the books of other writers — a surprising selection that includes Henry David Thoreau’s Cape Cod, Robinson Crusoe, and Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s memoir of the 1910-1913 Antarctic expedition, The Worst Journey in the World—will add volumes to the avid reader’s ever-growing pile.

"I can’t imagine ever being on a trip and not having something to read," Theroux says. "To me that would be a disaster." And what he reads while traveling becomes part of the background of his essays and articles.

Thus, in his piece on camping in the Maine woods, he mentions rereading Madame Bovary by flashlight. On a trip to London to promote one of his books, he reads F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night. In Amsterdam he reads Henry James’s The Aspern Papers.

"In terms of selection, I take paperbacks that I happen to be reading at the time and ones that I have intended to read," Theroux says. "I’m an omnivorous reader, and if you read a lot, you always have a kind of reading program going, a sort of private scholarship. I have to know the interior of books. And I’m very interested in writers’s lives — what they’re doing at particular stages of their lives, what they’re writing. I recently realized that there were a number of Henry James stories that I hadn’t read. So I started to read all the stories that James wrote when he was around my age, from his early to his late 50s, the years he regarded as his middle years. He had a sort of nervous breakdown then. A lot of those stories are about an older, very James-like writer and a younger writer."

Guide books seem singularly lacking in Theroux’s reading program, probably because he sees a wide gulf between tourism and travel. "There really is an enormous difference between travel in its classic sense and tourism," he says. "Tourism—sightseeing—is expected to be fun. You do it in large groups, it’s very companionable, it’s comfortable, and it’s very pleasant. Travel has to do with discovery, difficulty, and inconvenience. It doesn’t always pay off. There’s a strong element of risk in travel. Time is usually not a constraint for the traveler, but every tourist is under a time constraint. The traveler doesn’t really know where he or she is going, but has a sense of discovery. Tourists know exactly what they want to see and they arrive with a lot of preconceived notions. There’s a kind of enlightenment in classic travel which has nothing to do with materialism or consumerism. By its very nature, travel is cheaper."

A recurrent theme in these essays is that the traveler must approach the world with humility. "If you’re arrogant, you miss a lot," Theroux says.

He adds, "You have to realize that you are just a traveler; you are not home. You need the people you meet. You need their protection. You need their good will. You can’t be presumptuous. You see all sorts of people traveling. There are some amazingly arrogant people who think that because they are American, for example, they can collect hospitality just because they come from a wonderful country that has been very generous. They are sometimes surprised that people don’t give them the respect they think they deserve. If you’re smart, you’ll be very polite, you’ll develop good manners."

According to Theroux, the travel writer—or any writer, for that matter—has the added obligation of telling the truth. His or her truth, that is, since Theroux also notes that every traveler’s journey is different.

Theroux has occasionally taken some heat for his sort of truthtelling. His essay on his friend and fellow travel-writer Bruce Chatwin (1940-1989), which is included in this volume, offended the bearers of the Chatwin flame—until corroborated by a recent biography. His book Riding the Iron Rooster was judged by some to be too harsh on China—until Tiannamen Square. His memoir about V.S. Naipaul continues to stir controversy.

"I have discovered," Theroux says, "that if you tell the truth, you are describing the future. There’s something prophetic about the truth. When you see it and describe it—without stereotypes and preconceptions, but with subtlety—a book can seem like prophecy. So I have no problem telling the truth. But I have a great problem with being untruthful. As my father used to say, ‘You can watch a thief, but you can’t watch a liar.’ "

Can it really be so simple? "It’s sometimes unbelievably difficult," Theroux says. "It’s the reason why it’s probably impossible for me to hold a job writing. I couldn’t work for a newspaper or a magazine or as a copy editor. I could be hired to write my own piece, but I can’t be hired to write someone else’s piece. Telling the truth can make you unemployable. But a writer is basically an unemployed person anyway. It’s something that you just have to live with."

Alden Mudge works for the California Council for the Humanities.

Faith-based gifts offer inspiration and hope

by bookpagedev

Religion & Spirituality

Religion & Spirituality

Faith-based gifts offer inspiration and hope

Review by bookpagedev

by Margaret Feinberg

Tis the season for finding great inspirational gifts. Whether your gift is for a family member, friend, in-law or outlaw, a wide variety of titles is available to encourage readers in their faith.

Anne Graham Lotz, daughter of famed evangelist Billy Graham, challenges readers in their personal beliefs with My Heart’s Cry: Longing For More of Jesus (W Publishing, $21.99, 272 pages, ISBN 0849917417). Author of the best-selling Just Give Me Jesus and founder of the Just Give Me Jesus weekend events for women, Lotz takes readers on a journey of desiring God. In 12 well-written chapters, she explores the various attributes of Christ. Chapter five, “More of His Dirt on My Hands,” explores the importance of service, while chapter 10, “More of His Nearness in My Loneliness,” explores God’s omnipresence.

Throughout the book, Lotz draws on her own personal experiences and challenges. She describes speaking to large gatherings of pastors and having some turn their chairs around to face away from her because they disapproved of her speaking and teaching as a woman. She explains how the rejection strengthened her faith and pushed her toward God, rather than away.

Like her father, Anne Graham Lotz has a way of making the Bible, God and the road to life-changing faith interesting, exciting and heart-gripping. This bold woman not only lives but also exudes a contagious faith in her writing.

Another member of the Graham family, Ruth Bell Graham, wife of the well-known evangelist, offers a seasonal title on the special blessings of Christmas. Like any mother, grandmother or great-grandmother, Graham knows the significance and joy the holiday brings to anyone who has watched their child on Christmas morning or has been a child nestled in the warmth of family.

In A Quiet Knowing Christmas: A Joyful Celebration of the Season (W Publishing, $19.99, 176 pages, ISBN 084991762X) Graham presents a new collection of stories, recipes and poems, interspersed with family photos and holiday craft ideas.

As simple as the Christmas story itself, as elegant as such a celebration should be, A Quiet Knowing Christmas culminates in an intimate portrait of how the Graham family honors the name of Christ.

Lotz and Graham aren’t the only women sharing their beliefs these days. Best-selling author and Bible teacher Beth Moore introduces readers to Christ in Jesus, The One and Only (Broadman ∧ Holman, $19.99, 340 pages, ISBN 080542489X). Moore, who has written a number of studies including Breaking Free, takes readers to the dusty roads of Palestine to study the life of Christ. The book is an adaptation of her popular video-based interactive study of the same name.

Moore explores the life of Christ as he lived it long days as a carpenter and tough days traveling and teaching. She records the details, history and culture that are so often missed in a quick reading of the Gospels.

Rather than fall into the trap of giving all the answers, Moore spends time asking some questions of her own. What did Mary experience during her pregnancy? How long was the labor? How much pressure did she feel to be the perfect mother? In the process, the life and example lived by Christ become more personal and human.

For readers who don’t have time for an in-depth study, Charles Stanley offers an easy-to-read devotional, Seeking His Face: A Daily Devotional (Thomas Nelson, $19.99, 384 pages, ISBN 0785272992). The pastor of the 15,000-member First Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, and president of In Touch Ministries offers daily reading selections that challenge, encourage and inspire.

Each devotion includes a Scripture reading, key verse, prayer and a simple story or message. Reading Stanley’s book is like listening to a sermon in 45-second snippets. Readers are challenged to resist negative thoughts and embrace others with love and offer forgiveness. The writing is simple, direct and enjoyable.

The Best Christian Writing 2002 (HarperSanFrancisco, $15.95, 352 pages, ISBN 0060094834) offers a varied collection of articles on Christian belief today. The series editor, John Wilson, works as an editor at both Christianity Today and Books ∧ Culture. From a myriad of journals and magazines, he has compiled nearly two dozen pieces. One writer wrestles with the negative byproducts of feminism in “Three Bad Ideas for Women and What to Do About Them,” while another examines the tense but treasured relationship between Judaism and Christianity in “Salvation Is from the Jews.” Other highlights include Walter Wangerin Jr.’s “One Man on a Tractor Far Away” and Philip Yancey’s “The Ample Man Who Saved My Faith.” If you’re shopping for a young preteen boy (ages 8-12) you’ll want to consider Zonderkidz’ new 2:52 Soul Gear line of products, which includes The 2:52 Boys Bible. The 2:52 designation is based on a Scripture found in the Gospel of Luke: “And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men.” Edited by best-selling author and speaker Rick Osborne, The 2:52 Boys Bible features a study system that takes boys through the Bible, highlighting people, stories and verses that show them how to grow.

Using the NIV translation, the Bible includes numerous side notes and boxes of extra information designed to engage young male readers. Cleverly titled, “Make It Stick” is a boy’s version of a journal written on sticky notes; “Get a Load of This” provides interesting and humorous facts about the Bible; and “Grossology” offers some gory facts from the Bible. The cover design (which is reminiscent of the reality television series Survivor logo) is rugged enough to convince boys it’s cool.

And finally, a beautiful new gift book reveals The Peace ∧ Power of Knowing God’s Name by Kay Arthur (WaterBrook, $17.99, 144 pages, ISBN 1578565502). The author explores the ancient meanings of the names of God found in Scripture passages and shows how they expand our understanding and knowledge of God. Co-founder of Precept Ministries International and the author of leading inductive Bible studies, Arthur writes with insight about 15 of the names given to God, including El Elyon meaning The God Most High; El Roi meaning The God Who Sees; and Jehovah-raah meaning The Lord My Shepherd. With a gorgeous cover and crisp photographs throughout, The Peace ∧ Power of Knowing God’s Name offers beautiful visual images along with its inspiring text. Margaret Feinberg is a writer based in Sitka, Alaska. She is author of God Whispers: Learning To Hear His Voice (Relevant Books).

Tis the season for finding great inspirational gifts. Whether your gift is for a family member, friend, in-law or outlaw, a wide variety of titles is available to encourage readers in their faith.

Anne Graham Lotz, daughter of famed evangelist Billy Graham, challenges…

Faith-based gifts offer inspiration and hope

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Nonfiction Politics Memoir

How to Stand Up to a Dictator

Maria Ressa

By Sarojini Seupersad

Maria Ressa’s book is a political history of the Philippines and an intimate memoir, but it’s also a warning to democracies everywhere: Authoritarianism is a threat to us all.