Four Reviews Coming in Publishers Weekly on Monday, February 12

-- Publishers Weekly, 1/31/2007

The Only Road North: 9,000 Miles of Dirt and Dreams
Erik Mirandette. Zondervan, $12.99 paper (308p) ISBN 978-0-310-27435-3

Mirandette made headlines when he and two friends were severely injured by a terrorist bomb in Cairo, Egypt, in April of 2005. His brother, Alex, who was weeks away from his 19th birthday, died in the attack. It was a tragic end to a journey that began in Cape Town, South Africa, months earlier when three young men (a fourth joined them later) set out on the journey that would change their lives. Mirandette had felt God's insistent call while studying at the U.S. Air Force Academy; he left the U.S. to help a relief organization in Melilla, Spain, then to assist earthquake victims in Morocco. But he felt he needed to see and experience the rest of Africa, so the young men took off together. His account of their 9,000-mile motorcycle journey is riveting. They faced wild animals, hostile people, civil wars, a lack of food and several crashes along the way, but this intrepid group never wavered in their resolve to finish the trip—until a bomb ripped their worlds apart. Mirandette reveals his own religious searching, questions and qualms, yet urges readers to make the choice to "follow and believe." This is a tale of spiritual quest and huge adventure that ends in tragedy but not regret. (Apr.)

Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion
Jeffrey J. Kripal. Univ. of Chicago, $30 (512p) ISBN 978-0-226-45369-9

Most readers will probably not have heard of Esalen—but that doesn't mean they won't find its history fascinating. Esalen is a legendary sacred place, but legendary among the privileged few like Aldous Huxley, Henry Miller, and Joseph Campbell, for whom Esalen was a spiritual playground. Kripal, a professor of religious studies at Rice University, tells the story of this beautiful retreat in California's Big Sur region—its history at once sexy, salacious, intellectual, and political—with reverence and playfulness, alternating between the hushed tones of awe and the glee of partaking in Esalen's infamous sinful delights. The community itself, Kripal explains, is centered on the idea of a "religion of no religion," which provides "a kind of American Mystical Constitution" for its visitors, and "a spiritual space where almost any religious form can flourish." Kripal jumps among a wide range of historical moments, from Esalen's alleged relationship to the collapse of the Soviet Union to the idea of the disembodied erotic. Readers shouldn't be scared off by the book's heft. Kripal is an engaging storyteller, Esalen a worthy subject (a kind of Us Weekly for the discerning intellectual), and it's as easy to jump from the introduction to chapter 14 as it is to continue in order. (Apr.)

Keeping House: The Litany of Everyday Life
Margaret Kim Peterson. Jossey-Bass, $21.95 (192p) ISBN 978-0-7879-7691-0

In this deeply theological, welcome book, Peterson (Sing Me to Heaven) argues in favor of the idea—no longer fashionable—that Christian service and spiritual growth are inherent in the acts of keeping people fed, clean, housed and comfortable. Housekeeping, she says, is akin to a litany, a long public prayer to announce needs and requests. A litany is repetitive and focused on the basics: food, health, shelter. Similarly, housework is ongoing and incarnational, teaching us about Jesus' earthiness and decision to live among us; it requires perpetual tending, much like God's active sustaining of the world. "All the more is this so when our homes are not all we might wish them to be," Peterson points out."God's world is not as he wishes it to be, either." Addressing such topics as laundry, cleaning, shopping, and cooking, Peterson offers persuasive biblical interpretations and incisive theological and cultural commentary. The two chapters on food and its preparation are especially groundbreaking, with Peterson enumerating helpful criteria for how Christians in a food-obsessed culture might determine whether a particular food is worthy of eating. At times, her domestic opinions have the whiff of superiority, as when she speaks disapprovingly about microwaves and dishwashers, but these moments are far outweighed by the book's well-researched and generous approach to domesticity. (Apr.)

40 Days and 40 Nights: Darwin, Intelligent Design, God, OxyContin, and Other Oddities on Trial in Pennsylvania
Matthew Chapman. Collins, $25.95 paper (288p) ISBN 978-0-06-117945-7

Chapman, Charles Darwin's great-great grandson and a successful Hollywood screenwriter, describes the 2005 Intelligent Design (ID) trial in Dover, Penn. The native-born Brit loves his adopted American home, but is terrified at the rise of a belligerent fundamentalism that seems to him invincibly ignorant and contemptuous of such scientific commonplaces as evolution. The 40 days and nights of the trial convince him that ID should indeed be taught in every science classroom in America: as an exercise in removing the kid gloves with which religion is treated in this country, science teachers should demolish ID before their pupils' eyes. The strength of the book is its function as an old-fashioned courtroom drama, which stays lively even as readers know how the trial will turn out. Chapman rightly describes himself as unable to "maintain animosity toward people with whom I violently disagree once I get to know them." He even checks his own agnosticism to compliment Jesuit theologian John Haught for having "the most beautiful mind in the whole trial." Chapman's exploration of the American soul finds not only cause for fear, but also much that is good and decent. The book bogs down in forays into theology, which are marked by egregious misstatements about evangelicals in general (as opposed to just in Dover), and with a side story paralleling Dover with the Scopes Monkey Trial, which feels like a clunky addendum. (Apr.)

Two Starred Reviews Coming in PW on Monday, February 12:

Praying in Color: Drawing a New Path to God
Sybil MacBeth. Paraclete, $16.95 paper (96p) ISBN 978-1-55725-512-9

Just as Julia Cameron, in The Artist's Way, showed the hardened Harvard businessman he had a creative artist lurking within, MacBeth makes it astonishingly clear that anyone with a box of colors and some paper can have a conversation with God. Frustrated by a laundry list of what she calls "prayer dilemmas," and the unfortunate situations of more than half a dozen friends and family members on her "critical prayer list," MacBeth, a math professor by trade, spent an afternoon doodling before she realized she'd in fact spent the afternoon in prayer. As she takes particular care to emphasize, this method—most effective for intercessory prayer, but adaptable for other approaches—requires absolutely no skill, merely a desire to connect with God. (Readers should therefore ignore any lingering self-doubt planted by a first grade art teacher.) Amid gentle personal anecdotes, MacBeth illustrates each step of the process, providing not just instruction but inspiration by sharing her own prayer pages as well as those of her students. She even includes a chapter on using one's computer for the process. Readers of all ages, experience and religions will find this a fresh, invigorating and even exhilarating way to spend time with themselves and their Creator. (Apr.)

Sunday: A History of the First Day from Babylonia to the Superbowl
Craig Harline. Doubleday, $26 (464p) ISBN 978-0-385-51039-4

Harline, an acclaimed historian and author of A Bishop's Tale, adopts a brilliant day-in-the-life strategy to explore the history of the Christian Sabbath in various cultures and times. Rather than attempting a sweeping and methodically exhaustive approach, Harline investigates the topic episodically, portraying, for example, a medieval English Sunday in one chapter, a decadent fin-de-siècle Parisian Sunday in another, and a 1950s American Sunday in the last and longest chapter. Along the way we also visit the earliest Roman Christians; a Dutch Reformed family in the 17th century; some battle-weary soldiers during World War I; and England again during the interwar years. Harline is a marvelous storyteller, combing the diaries, popular periodicals and letters of the various periods to bring the people and their times to life. There are some surprising revelations --until the fifth century, Sunday was a day of worship but also one of work, as early Christian leaders were anxious to distinguish it from the Jewish Sabbath. And Sunday has sometimes given rise to unlikely leisure pastimes: in Holland 400 years ago, it was the preferred day for courting; and in America today, it seems sacrosanct for professional sports. Harline's engaging and wonderfully written popular history deserves a wide readership. (Mar. 27)