Reviews and Comments

A fantastic tale of Mister Rogers. I figured it would probably be a fluff piece about how we should be kind to each other and not preach religion. I was glad to learn I was wrong. Amy Hollingsworth is a preacher's wife, raised Catholic, but her husband is a Protestant (Pentacostal I think but I haven't been able to confirm that) pastor.

Mister Rogers was an ordained Presbyterian minister. His parents assumed he'd go to seminary, so he did, but was called by God to children's television and not the pulpit. He tried to the get the American Presbyterian Church to ordain him a pastor without a parish and assign him to children's television, possibly producing content for the denomination's Sunday Schools, but they did not. Eventually he did finish his studies whilst working on Mister Rogers Neighborhood, but he never did pastor a congregation.

I really appreciated how Fred Rogers was able to over the course of like three years of correspondence with Hollingsworth really show love to her and really introduce Christ to her in a way that even a Cradle Catholic Preacher's wife hadn't known.

I've heard the story of seeing people hit in the face with pies on T.V. leading Fred to feel he had to get involved to ensure such a powerful medium was used for betterment of humankind, and not such demeaningness. However I was most touched by his description of the Holy Spirit working between the T.V. and the television neighbor to comfort them and tell them exactly what they needed to hear. More than once, he described a way a viewer, kid or parent, described how when he said such-and-such on such-and-such episode and how it changed their life, yet he wouldn't remember ever having said that, and went back and verified it was never in the script, but God found a way regardless.

I highly recommend this book, particularly to believers in a time when many in The West are lost, both in and out of the Church.

I wanted to read this book for a long time. It sounds awesome, a kid born right at midnight as newly partitioned India officially is declared independent of Britian, and he eventually learns he has magic abilities that include the ability to communicate telepathically with all other kids that were born in the first hour since the country's birth.

It, however, is not good. I find nothing redeeming about this story. Nothing happens in the entire first section of the book, to the point the protagonist's wife even goes about interrupting the story asking him to get to the good part. It's kind of meta, but not in the fun way. When we got to section II it kept feeling like it was just about to get good, just enough to keep my reading. Yet, nothing ever came interesting. I read some 400 pages before I gave up on it.

If you do choose to read this for some reason I highly recommend skipping Part I.

I'm not really quite sure what I thought this book was going to be. The intorduction was really good and I think is closer to what I was expecting, more of a story/history about Yiddish in the U.S. He speaks of how most linguists harrumph at the use of Yiddish in the States as an accent to the primary language, and with most Jews now living in either the U.S. or Isreal (where Hebrew, not Yiddish, is the default tongue) Yiddish as a language is dying. But the author thinks the way it has worked its way into the general lexicon is actually great. After the intro it becomes, more-or-less, a dictionary of Yiddish words that are heard in American (what the author calls Ameridish or Yinglish) and what they mean, occasionally with a history of its use, either in the old world or the new, and often with a story, that claims to be numerous, about its use. Very dry, not that funny. Eventually I stopped reading each one and just skimmed ahead to words I've actually used or heard others use.

I have read dozens of Heinlein's books and have like most of them. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is one of his most well known works and yet I'm just reading it now. I had put it off in part because the first few pages are pretty dry so when I picked it up in the library years ago, i put it right back. Secondly some of the stuff I had heard/read of it didn't sound great, sentient computers, line marriages and the like. But it was so much more than that.

The story of the luna prison planet revolution and declaring their independence certainly used much of the language and imagery from the American revolution, including choosing the 4th of July as the date of their declaration, butt there is much more wound up. There are images from the Russian and French revolutions as well and this mid 21st century moon has more history in common with Australia than any other single Terran nation.

The fact I read this during the height of the Isreal-Palestinian war of the 2020s and the #NoKings movement probably heightened my feelings at the time that revolution was inevitable, and I needed to leave my part of the world and find where I could be part of history. Thankfully my friend talked me off that cliff. Gravity is not in our favor and we have no rocks to throw.

Like any revolution the story has both the fighters/doers and the board room antagonizes. If you are looking for an action-adventure story this might have too much of the latter for you. I loved both. Radical ideas of how to select representatives I particularly enjoyed.

That "sentient computer" was pretty much just AI that had been properly queried to plan a revolution told in 1960s computer jargon. It also was trying to get enough data to determine what was funny. Even in our protagonist thought Comrade Mike was his best friend.

I also felt that Lloyd James narration of the audio book was amazing.