How to Be a Hero to Your Kids by Josh McDowell & Dick Day

August 29, 2013, South Amboy, NJ.

Paperback 1991, 234 pages.

Read in preparation to lead a discussion on "how to raise your kids."  Authors (most of book was written by McDowell) talk about the 6 As of parenting: acceptance, appreciation, affection, availability, accountability, and Authority.

The End of Illness by David B. Agus, MD, with Kristen Loberg.

July 26, 2013, La Bruciata, Montepulciano, Italy.

Paperback 2011, 351 pages.

My physician brother, who hosts a radio show in Hong Kong on health, was about 70 pages into this book when he gave it to me to read.

The claims made in the beginning of the book were certainly gripping enough: a revolutionary way to look at illness and a way to maintain our health until the day we die.  To me the book was just a collection of the author’s ideas on how to be healthy, an assertion supported by the list of 10 things to do/avoid at the end of the Q&A portion of the book.

The novel assertion in my judgment is the body is a complex system, and this leads to the author’s campaign against vitamin D and other diet supplements.  On the other hand, he is very much into statins, aspirins, and flu vaccines.  The arguments against the former group are somewhat supported by what he references, but there is no equal rigor to the things he recommends (perhaps with the exception of aspirins.)

While the book doesn’t live up to the hype, it is nonetheless not a bad book to read, and the advice is generally helpful.  However, the author seems to have a typical physician’s ego when he makes all these claims about how the book is different from others.

Meanwhile, I am trying to get my MD daughter to read it and tell me what she thinks.

The Spiritual Danger of Doing Good by Peter Greer with Anna Haggard.

June 7, 2013, South Amboy, NJ.

Advanced reading copy, paperback, 179 pages.
Original hardcover publication date: August 2013.

Peter Greer is president and CEO of HOPE International.
Forward by Brian Fikkert, author of When Helping Hurts.

The Fifth Witness (A Lincoln Lawyer Novel) by Michael Connelly

February 15, 2013, Mannering Park, NSW, Australia

Paperback 2011, 421 pages.

First, the protagonist Mickey Haller is called the Lincoln Lawyer because he works out from a Lincoln town car.  Although for this case he rents an office so he can be close to the courthouse.

Lisa Trammel, whose has retained Haller in a foreclosure battle with the bank, is accused of murdering someone in the bank.  Haller initial doubts about his clients claim of innocence eventually dissipated as the case moves forward.  Despite the DNA evidence obtained by the prosecution, Haller wins his case by putting up an alternate theory that the murder is a gang-related hit.  He puts on a fifth witness who eventually pleads the fifth, thus generating reasonable doubt that gets Lisa Trammel acquitted.  At the celebration party afterwards, Haller realizes how his client actually used balloons to get the victim to look up and then murdered him.  The client is arrested again after the police discovers the buried body of her husband in her yard.

I would rate this book average.  It hangs together by-and-large, although at the end the reader is left with: so I spent hours reading this book to get to this?  To me it was a page turner, not because of the suspense, but because of the desire to get it over with.  Some of the twists and turns are quite clever, but not delivered in such a way that I would consider thrilling.

杏林茶。Dr, Tim, 阮子健, 熊書頣。

August 3, 2012, Tai Po, Hong Kong.

Paperback 2012, 192 pages.

Caught by Harlan Coben

June 29, 2012, South Amboy, NJ.

Paperback 2011, 438 pages.

I am writing this blog about a week after I finished the book, so the plots are a bit fuzzy, especially since I read most of it inside a plane (Hong Kong to Chicago), in that state of neither being awake nor asleep.

There are several different plot lines that somehow intersect with one another.  The main one, probably, is this group at Princeton University students whose prank resulted in the disfiguring of a woman.  The one who volunteered to take the blame eventually tried to get even, one result of which was framing Dan Mercer as a pedophile.  This resulted in Mercer being killed by Ed Grayson, a victim's father.  Turns out the one who committed the crime was Grayson's brother-in-law.   And, it turns out, Mercer was indeed guilty of murdering a young girl.

All the twists and resolution are in the final pages of the book.  It felt as if the author was trying frantically to tie up all the loose ends and did only a so-so job of it.  On top of that, he has a habit of taking the reader through a character's thinking process, resulting in a page of words where a sentence would do.  And in most cases the reader probably doesn't care about how the characters think.

Overall, the book is an easy read, and I would rate it average, even though I find the plot a bit convoluted, and the ending unsatisfactory.

Blasphemy by Douglas Preston

June 16, 2012, Hong Kong

Paperback 2007, 526 pages.

After the death of his wife, the brilliant scientist Hazelius goes about inventing a religion by getting the government to build a $40-billion particular collider to replicate the conditions of the big bang.  He has it rigged so that a program claiming to be God appears as the energy level is increased to the maximum.

Meanwhile, politicians, tele-evangelists, and native Americans get involved, and the end result is that Hazelius is branded the Anti-Christ, and the collider exploded.  Hazelius is burned at the stake by a mob, but the new religion ends up being established.

The author in his "Note on the Paperback Edition" claims he is not trying to put down religion, and I basically agree with him.  It is equally obvious to me, however, that he thinks science is the answer.

As a thriller, this is not a bad book.  As an argument for why science is better than religion, or an explanation of some of the metaphysical concepts associated with cosmology, the book falls short, at least for me.  One big hole I see is how the AI program passes the Turing Test if it is indeed planted by Hazelius?  The author meekly tries to explain it away by having Hazelius wonder if the program ends up being more sophisticated than he intended; and by doing so also admits there are elements outside science at work here.