Review of Metaxas' "7 Men"

I was excited to get a paperback copy of Eric Metaxas' celebration of Christian role models 7 Men and the Secret of Their Greatness for two reasons. Regular readers of my blog know I'm a bit of a feminist, but I'm also mom to three boys and I want them to aspire to the best kind of life. Second, I enjoyed reading Metaxas' 600-page biography of German theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer two summers ago. While I highly recommend getting to know this hero of the faith and the aforementioned tome, 7 Men is far easier read, which provides a primer on Bonhoeffer as well as inspiring chapters on George Washington, British abolitionist William Wilberforce, Olympic runner Eric Liddell, baseball player Jackie Robinson, Pope John Paul II and Prison Fellowship founder Chuck Colson. In seven miniature biographies, Metaxas showcases each man's personal faith in Jesus the centerpiece and secret to their enduring influence.

For me, the first half of Washington's chapter was the hardest to read. Our nation's father struck me as an entitled social climber with a shocking lack of compassion in some early battles. But eventually, I was impressed that Metaxas could transform the "grumpy grandfather" he appears to be on the dollar bill to a valiant hero who not only fought for our country's independence, but also the subtler battle against pride in order to birth a democracy. My favorite chapters, Eric Liddell's and Jackie Robinson's stories, moved me to tears. The protagonist of the 1980s blockbuster Chariots of Fire, Metaxas aptly argues, lived a life far more amazing after his Olympic victory as a missionary in China. As the first black baseball player to enter the major league, Robinson's ability to take the brunt of racist backlash scorn and abuse, all without retaliation, struck me as truly supernatural.

Readers should know that each story is clearly filtered through the Metaxas' lens as both a Christian and unabashed fan of each of these men. Some might find that the author's insertion of himself into each chapter detracts from the stories, but I felt that each story was really inspiring enough to make up for this slight drawback.  I recommend this book to anyone looking for historic Christian role models. And I eagerly await the release of 7 Women, which is excerpted (a bio of Corrie ten Boom) at the back of this book.

*I received a copy of this book from BookLook Bloggers in exchange for my honest review.*

Review of Megan Boudreaux's "Miracle on Voodoo Mountain"

I feel like I hit the jackpot with Thomas Nelson lately. (See my review of Donald Miller's Scary Close if you haven't already.) Megan Boudreaux's Miracle on Voodoo Mountain: A Young Woman's Remarkable Story of Pushing Back the Darkness for the Children of Haiti is another book that will make it on my year's best list, and it's only March. Megan founded Respire Haiti and lives with her husband and four adopted children in the town of Gressier. This book has so many things going for it:

The cover is gorgeous
The book's beautiful, haunting cover is not just a marketing tool. The image features a tamarind tree that is symbolic of so many of the miracles that happen in Megan's story. She dreams of the tree night after night, until realizing God is calling her to uproot to Gressier, the town where she first saw the tree on a business trip. Under the same tree, she meets a raggedy little slave girl, whom she later rescues and adopts. For years before the story begins, a local Haitian pastor and his wife met weekly under this tree to pray for a Christian to come and transform the mountain, which served as a mecca for Voodoo priests. The same tree can be seen today from the school and medical clinic that now occupy the land.

It's a page-turner.
Sometimes I just try to get through a book so I can review it and shelve it. I read Boudreaux's memoir in a day and have been re-reading parts of it in the days afterwards to savor the story.

It's a true story of a real-life role model.
Similar to Kisses from Katie author Katie Davis, Megan leaves a cushy life of cute outfits and bright futures to live without running water or electricity among the destitute of earthquake ravaged, voodoo entrenched Haiti.

Megan follows God's leading with simplicity. 
I've been so moved by how the entire plot of this book hinges on Megan cultivating an awareness of God's moving and nudging and instructing in her spirit. She obeys simply again and again, and God keeps speaking to her. The result is a life full of miracles and restoration.

It's full of meaningful miracles.
I've never doubted that miracles do happen today, but I'm usually skeptical of supernatural claims because they often seem to serve no other purpose than to show off and puff up. Megan experiences the gift of tongues similar to the way the disciples did in the book of Acts: after weeks of struggling to communicate and making little progress in learning Haitian Creole, she suddenly understands and is able to speak it fluently. With this gift, she is able to really start changing the lives of the poor children she lives among.

It confronts the heart with the reality of poverty and corruption.
Megan is almost never preachy in this book. When she does take time to express her views, it's to expose the corruption that well-meaning American churches often fund in the form of sham orphanages. She also thinks critically about the ethics of adopting children with living parents, as two of her daughters have a living, but estranged father.

It inspires reflection. 
Obviously, I'm moved by Megan's story and the story of Gressier. It makes my heart long to move abroad and live simply, hanging on the words of my Savior each moment. And it makes me also want to stay right where I am and hang on my Savior's words each moment.

It's an on-going story. 
There are some loose ends to this story, which on a literary level was a slight detractor. However, I see the untied story lines as opportunities to pray for real people in tenuous situations.

So, what more could you want from a book? Hopkinsville friends, you can borrow my copy, but I'm not giving it away :)

*I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publishers in exchange for an honest review.*

Reflections on Chris Seay's "A Place at the Table"

This year I decided to read Chris Seay's devotional A Place at the Table: 40 Days of Solidarity with the Poor during Lent. As I wrote last year, Lent is not something I grew up observing, and the idea is still new to me. But I love the idea of building up holidays into extended seasons of deeper, enduring reflection and prayer.

Seay's devotional contains thoughtful reflections on Moses as both a slave and as the one called to lead the Israelite's out of their life of slavery. He also includes a prayer and a brief profile of a child that lives in a village served by Compassion or Living Water. I've really, really enjoyed these little vignettes and find that some of my prayers for these children have taken on a life of their own.

As for the actual fast, Seay proposes making justice a centerpiece, based on Isaiah 58:6-7, in which God desires a fast that frees the oppressed and shares food and shelter with the hungry and homeless. Practically, Seay's recommended fast permits a nutritious but narrow diet of staple foods to help his well-off American readers to identify with the majority of earth's population, the poor. If readers sponsor a child or missionary family in a developing nation, Seay suggests they fast by eating a diet restricted to that nation's staples: beans, corn, rice and vegetables. The money saved, he proposes, can be donated to a charity readers have confidence will make a tangible contribution to helping the poor locally or abroad.

This vision of fasting is so inspiring to me. I honestly wrestled with trying this diet myself, but in the end I feared I would be overly consumed with trying to prepare "normal" meals for my three kids and husband while also trying to eat a limited diet that was not going to affect my health. I already eat a lot of veggies and limit processed foods, so I opted for cutting out desserts, added sugar and, my food idol, chocolate. This seemed like the best way to take my focus off cooking and eating (two things that definitely take up a large portion of my daydreams) and place it squarely in the realm of getting into God's heart for His many suffering children. As for giving leftover funds (there haven't been any) to the poor, I've focused on cooking meals for others and taking a leap to be more involved with my neighborhood's Challenge House.

I'd love to hear from some others on this. How do you observe Lent? How do you view fasting?

Review of "Fierce Convictions"

When I saw the gorgeous cover of Fierce Convictions, with its elegantly dressed young woman storming through an English garden I couldn't help but imagine the spurned heroine of a Jane Austen novel. The biography's subtitle, The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More: Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist, was even more enticing, promising a heroine whose life pursuits centered on scholarly achievement and humanitarian activism rather than securing a wealthy husband.

Though a prominent and prolific writer in her day, Hannah More has been largely forgotten by the 18th century history narratives of today. Karen Swallow Prior resurrects this key figure through extensive research of her letters, literary works and the words of her contemporaries, such as fellow abolitionist and famed orator William Wilberforce. Prior also emphasizes the source of More's extraordinary zeal as her Christian faith, which, surprisingly, grew deeper even as her worldly fame and success mounted. 

 Prior describes More as a "woman of contradictions and convictions" (87), and supports this with ample examples. The book begins by shining light on More's humble origins, her early aptitude for literature (including a witty poem she wrote at four) and her at times awkward and starry eyed rise to fashionable London society. The author also avails herself of the requisite romantic tragedy, devoting an early chapter to Hannah's on-again off-again engagement to a rich but waffling suitor.

From here, the book is largely arranged by topic rather than chronological order. This was probably the biggest detractor of the biography for me. I found myself having to calculate More's age with every mention of the date. This broke up the fluidity of her story and her evolving convictions for me. Often it felt like I was traveling back and forth through time rather than riding smoothly along through the protagonist's life.  Despite my difficulties with date crunching, I was still drawn into the book and inspired by this amazing woman.

Highlights for me included Prior's descriptions of More's abolitionist efforts, like her penchant for whipping out engravings of slave ships during high society dinner parties. Prior also included the full text of More's moving poem "Slavery." My favorite chapter describes More and her sister Patty tromping through the countryside to woo rich and poor alike for support in setting up a school for the rural poor. This project eventually produced dozens of schools and fueled the rise of public education. As a member and often host of the Clapham Sect meetings, More and some of the brightest male reformers worked late into the night hashing out strategies to turn the tide of public opinion away from slavery, cruelty to animals and oppression of the poor. 

Because she confessed and acted upon a spectrum of timeless moral convictions for improving the lives of "the least of these" and for reining in the excesses of the greatest, More certainly makes my cut for a modern day role model. Yet, though More was ahead of her time, Prior was careful to show that her convictions were tempered by the prevailing culture of her day. More assented to many conservative beliefs that seem backward in today's culture. Despite owing her own rags to riches story to the power and income of her pen, she didn't believe in teaching the poor to write, for fear that they would distribute their own revolutionary tracts. And though More was considered a shining example of female wit and strength, she hypocritically belittled the leadership qualities of women in general, writing in a letter to a friend that "there is perhaps no animal so much indebted to subordination for its good behavior as woman" (213). Ouch.

But I don't want to end on that note. Overall, Hannah More's story is one that needs to be read, and her extraordinary life emulated. She struck a delicate balance between living in the world but not of it, and Prior brings to life More's world and convictions in this comprehensive and interesting biography.

*Thanks to BookLook Bloggers for providing my copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.*

Reflections on "Half the Sky"

I've been reading Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn bit by bit over several months because the atrocities it exposes are so graphic and heart rending. While each chapter drew me in, it's not exactly easy reading because of the emotional investment. But I still heartily recommend it as an antidote to complacency and discontentment and ignorance. In 14 chapters, Half the Sky takes readers from impoverished villages in the Middle East to seedy red light districts in Asia to bare bones hospitals in Africa where corruption and indifference toward women lead to countless stories of culturally ingrained oppression and violence against women. Kristof and WuDunn also show the effects of female oppression on children and economies in general, driving home the point that injustices women face are not mere "women's issues" but human rights issues.

Despite the heavy content, I didn't close the book in despair. Each chapter begins with an impressively intimate portrait of a real woman in a destitute situation and ends with that same woman, against all odds, finding her footing and helping others. Most of these vignettes are also paired with a profile of an aid organization or another woman that helped her. The authors (who happen to be a Pulitzer Prize-winning power couple) encourage readers to take action, supporting grassroots efforts that effect the most bang for buck. They also urge people to travel and meet those they support to gain a fuller understanding of women's experiences worldwide.

Before I finished this book, I'd already followed the authors' lead and signed up for a Kiva.org account, where members can make micro loans to individuals on the other side of the globe.

Reflections on "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle"

Several months ago, over a potluck meal for two of quinoa, roasted root veggies and Brussels sprouts, my journalist friend had recommended Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. I was keen to crack open the novelist's memoir of the year her family spent raising, harvesting and eating foods from their 40-acre farm in Appalachia in an attempt to quell guilt about America's unethical eating habits, but my nightstand was already stacked with a pile of books. So I declined her generous offer to lend me her copy, and promised I'd check it out from the library. I'm so glad I kept my promise; this was an entertaining, illuminating, affirming, appetizing and challenging read.

Picking up this book, I didn't really want to be converted to a new way of thinking. I'm already a fair-weather fan of farmers markets; they offer tasty heirloom produce sold by familiar faces amid the colorful bustle of my small town's downtown.  But I must confess I still do the bulk of my shopping at Aldi and Kroger for expediency's sake. Limiting my cosmopolitan taste buds to a 100-mile food radius also seemed unlikely. Growing my own food seemed even less likely. I'm a city girl with brown thumbs, inadvertently and absentmindedly killing nearly every plant I buy. Add to that my aversion to food aversions. Apart from my three-month stint with gestational diabetes, I don't bite at popular restrictive diets. My dietary philosophy, if I have one at all, is to eat lots of fresh vegetables, explore ethnic cuisines and make stuff from scratch when it's not cost- or time-prohibitive. My contribution to promoting healthful eating in the deep fried South is to sneak flax seed meal into church potlucks the way Seinfeld's wife gets her kids to eat carrot puree in their mac and cheese. All that to say I've sympathized with the slow foods, local foods, organic foods movements for quite some time, but I'm not a faithful adherent.

I found in Kingsolver's memoir just the right mix of personal narrative, ethical reflection and factual sidebars to cause me to reevaluate some of my spending and eating habits. Essentially, her choice was a matter of conscience. She and her family no longer felt justified consuming gratuitous amounts of fossil fuel or support inequitable economies just to enjoy a Costa Rican banana with breakfast. Having dabbled in raising chickens and turkeys before, Kingsolver couldn't in good conscience support industrial agriculture that dooms livestock to a cramped, sunless existence, gorging on corn mixed with their own excrement until their death. Yeah. Pretty gross. I haven't been able to buy my usual Valu-Pak chicken breasts from Kroger since. And because, as Kingsolver observes, even chicken labeled as “free range” might live confined with 20,000 others as long as the building "has a doorway leading out to a tiny yard, even though that doorway remains shut for so much of the chickens’ lives, they never learn to go outside" (122) I found it hard to buy any meat after spending several minutes squinting at the packaging.

In fact, this quote from the opening chapter describes perfectly my weekly quandary at the grocery store:

"Knowing how foods grow is to know how and when to look for them; such expertise is useful for certain kinds of people, namely, the ones who eat, no matter where they live or grocery shop. Absence of that knowledge has rendered us a nation of wary label-readers, oddly uneasy in our obligate relationship with the things we eat." (10)

And here, in a nutshell, is Kingsolver's thesis:

"The best and only defense, for both growers and the consumers who care, is a commitment to more local food economies. It may not be possible to prevent the corruption of codified organic standards when they are so broadly applied." (122)

She also talks truth about our insistence on having the world's foods at our fingertips at all times and our bemoaning the higher price of organic foods:

Bizarre as it seems, we’ve accepted the tradeoff that amounts to: “Give me every vegetable in every season, even if it tastes like a cardboard picture of its former self.” 54

And:

"It’s interesting that penny-pinching is an accepted defense for toxic food habits, when frugality so rarely rules other consumer domains." 115

Beyond reminding me of my priorities, Kingsolver did something else unexpected by winning me over to the wonderment of farming. I mentioned that I'm no country girl; I'm not into farms, or allergy-inducing animal dander, or the shoe-staining rust red Southern dirt, but I seriously began picturing myself (or my sons) some day raising some chickens for eggs after reading this particularly adorable description of Kingsolver's daughter's brood of baby chicks:

"From time to time one of the babies would be overtaken by the urge for a power nap. Staggering like a drunk under the warm glow of the brooder lamp, it would shut its eyes and keel over, feet and tiny winglets sprawled out flat. More siblings keeled onto the pile, while others climbed over the fuzzy tumble in a frantic race to nowhere." (89)

And even plants become people in this poetic passage:

"This is why we do it all again every year. It’s the visible daily growth, the marvelous and unaccountable accumulation of biomass that makes for the hallelujah of a July garden. Fueled by only the stuff they drink from air and earth, the bush beans fill out their rows, the okra booms, the corn stretches eagerly toward the sky like a toddler reaching up to put on a shirt." (174) 

Other enjoyable and envy-inducing adventures included an anniversary jaunt through the farms of Tuscany where every meal is apparently the best you've ever eaten, a cheese-making workshop in New England and a series of beautiful food-centric celebrations that brought family and friends together in real community.

The author's teenage daughter, Camille, offers recipes at the end of each chapter. I'm keen to try her Grated Zucchini Orzo on my kids. Kingsolver also promotes the gorgeous vegetable-rich cookbooks by Deborah Madison. (I've already checked one out from my library and have been drooling over it.) Despite the romance of laboring over luxurious slow-food cuisine, the author admitted to a less fussy approach to daily putting food on the table. She describes her go-to dishes for using up their local produce as frittatas, pastas with meat and seasonal veggies, homemade pizzas, stir-fries and Crock-Pot soups "in endless variations," which made her family's diet sound an awful lot like ours. And her assertion that "cooking is the great divide between good eating and bad" is something I often think to myself after eating a disappointing restaurant meal.

Ultimately, what most won me over to Kingsolver's raise-it-yourself mindset is her desire to make consumer choices with true, lasting positive impact on her family and society. It's planted in me a vision for my own family: Growing a garden, teaching my boys to cook and making a habit of sitting down together for home-cooked meals that enrich our community without taking away from others.

Review of "Jesus Feminist"

Over the weekend, I finished reading Sarah Bessey's Jesus Feminist: An Invitation to Revisit the Bible's View of Women: Exploring God's Radical Notion That Women Are People, Too. Let me just begin by saying it's not what you think. Despite its controversial title and sarcastic subtitle, much of Bessey's book resonated with me. Written in the popular blogger's conversational, metaphor-saturated style, Jesus Feminist is very much an invitation to those disenchanted with their church's stance on or treatment of women to join others at a "bonfire on the beach" to be bandaged up, edified and commissioned to a new, fresh calling of living fully as God intended.

For the completely uninitiated into the world of Christian feminism, the early chapters briefly probe how traditional "clobber" passages like 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 (keep your mouths shut, ladies!) and 1 Timothy 2:11-12 (no teaching men either!) should shape our theology and culture. Bessey gently suggests that Paul's apparent silencing and subordinating of women in these verses should be taken within the particular context and for the particular audience for whom the letters were written. This is an argument that I've heard articulated more effectively by Greg Boyd, Rachel Held Evans, Richard Foster and others, so I didn't feel Bessey added anything "radically" new to the conversation. But for those who aren't familiar with Christian egalitarianism or have been taught that biblical womanhood unequivocally means silently submitting, ever-yielded to the men in their lives and churches, glorifying God best and only in their proper sphere at home, Bessey's ideas might be new and might prompt some thoughtful questioning.

The Canadian author describes her own "ah-ha" moment when she realized her upbringing and her own marriage didn't match her local church's female narrative during her brief years living in Texas:

Everywhere I turned, evangelical sermons on marriage were filled with "Oh, you know women" jokes. Generally speaking, women were perceived as soft, emotional, and naturally nurturing, while men were positioned as natural leaders, hating to talk about relationships, and requiring more sex. ... There was a lot of talk in those days of the "feminization of the Church" and how guys needed to step up and be men, which apparently resembled the ideal of benevolent dictators, rather than the Son of Man. (44)

While I've definitely been exposed to books and teaching that contains elements of what Bessey described, I thankfully do not feel that level of oppression in my own church, be it smack in the middle of the Bible Belt. Instead of stirring up my inner rabble-rouser, this book allowed me to know Sarah Bessey more-- from her "happy-clappy" Jesus-loving Pentecostal upbringing to her beautiful, accidentally egalitarian marriage to her traumatic experiences in childbirth to her eye-opening trip to Haiti. And I like her. I like a lot of what she says:

About biblical womanhood:

Biblical womanhood isn't so different from biblical personhood. Biblical personhood becomes a dead list of rules when it becomes a law to keep. If we have a long list of rules-- Put others first! Be generous! Give money! Believe this! Do that!-- it's a dead religion from a glorified rule book.  

When our hearts, minds and souls are deep within the reality of living loved, we discover most of those "rules" from Sunday school are simply our new characteristics and our family traits. They are the fruit born of a meaningful life-changing relationship-- they are the flowers of life in the Vine. And there are many expressions and ways to live out love, joy, peace, kindness, patience, gentleness, faithfulness, self-control, and goodness--as men, as women, as wives, as husbands, as mothers, as fathers, as friends, as disciples. Marriage and motherhood are not the only way to biblical womanhood... (98)

And this:

We are not biblical women because we achieve status as a stay-at-home mother and home-cook every meal. We are not men of God because we alone make the "hard decisions" and exclusively provide for our families, let alone because together we live our some version of the Greco-Roman household code. We are not living biblically by stuffing our true gifts and callings and passions into worn-out cliches, turning scriptural encouragement and invitations into new rules.
Our work in this life grows from the tree of his great love for us, birthed out of a growing and real relationship with Love itself. The organic blossoming of the fruit of the Spirit is only because of our life in the Vine. Whether we turn to the right or to the left, our ears will hear a voice behind, saying "This is the way; walk in it." (100-101)

On God's "Father-Mother heart" (And I love, love this):

... my Abba gave me a glimpse--just a glimpse-- of his great unconditional love for us through my love for my own tines. After that, I could not see him the same anymore. He wasn't in the fire or in the hurricane or in the earthquake; he was in the still, small voice--the creaking of my rocking chair in the wee hours of the morning, and the daily practices even in the never-forgotten lines from the old praise chorus "As the deer panteth for the water, so my soul longeth after thee" on my lips, sleeping milk-drunk babies, one after another, in my arms. He was in the sacred every-day of my life, redeeming it all, teaching me to pray, filling me with joy in my weakness, teaching me to rely on him. Here, I learned how I am more than my daily work, and yet he kept showing up in the mundane. (113)

On women's ministry:

You have a great women's ministry when there is room for everyone. You have a great women's ministry when you have detoxed from the world's views and unattainable standards for women and begun to celebrate the everyday women of valor, sitting next to you, and when you encourage, affirm, and welcome the diversity of women-- their lives, their voices, their experiences-- to the community.
You have a great women's ministry when your women are ministering -- to the world, to the church, to one another -- pouring out freely the grace they have received, however God has gifted them, including cooking and crafts, strategy and leadership.
There is not one way to be a woman; there is not one way to do women's ministry. There is only loving and serving God, doing life together in the full expression of our unique selves. Make room for them all and give glory to God." (132-133)

On the Kingdom of God:

As we follow Christ in the counsel of the Holy Spirit, resting in the love of our Abba, we no longer fear-- ... this fearless love allows the mission of God to infuse our smallest seed lives, growing through to our families, our communities, our culture, our government--tendrils twining

That's just a taste of what got me scribbling in the margins. I've always loved the idea of the Body of Christ, with each member knit together in life, functioning and expressing the Head. Much of what Bessey writes seems rooted in this biblical principle.

The short of it:
Overall, Jesus Feminist argues gently that women should be allowed to teach, lead and work in their marriages, their churches and other spheres of influence. Marriages and all relationships within and outside of the church work best and glorify God the most when all members are allowed and encouraged to use their unique gifts, which, contrary to some patriarchal views, might look like a woman "leading the charge" as the breadwinner of her household, as the CEO of a company or as the lead pastor of a church. But it doesn't have to look that way. It could also simply be women taking the lead to serve where they see needs. And it absolutely does look this way in many, many churches across the full range of the patriarchal/egalitarian spectrum.

My take-away:
Bessey's oft-repeated metaphor of coming outside to join others at the beach-beacon bonfires, I now see is not as a call to eschew socially conservative churches or to shirk a love-and-respect-complimentarian-style marriage. No, her message is much less controversial. Bessey is advocating that all women (and men) seek God earnestly and obey His still small voice. That we initiate justice and Christian community through servanthood in the places where injustice runs rampant-- be it the lonely corridors of a state-subsidized nursing home or the slums of Haiti, the local shelter for battered women or the well-greased machine of child-trafficking in Asia. That we be led by God's stirring in our spirit and use our unique, God-given gifts to act upon those motions. And that we are commissioned to initiate genuine community with other women, to together take a step toward our true Head and submit to Him our eyes, ears, hands and feet. We are called together to identify with Christ and His unifying mission.

I finished this book in the wee hours of Saturday, and then eagerly discussed it with my husband, Joe, as he rinsed and loaded the dishwasher (to give you a little hint of where we're at on the complimentarian-egalitarian spectrum). As I pondered what Abba's still small voice was whispering to me, I felt renewed encouragement to pursue a little wish-dream of mine: to lead a parenting study/prayer group with other moms. It begins this Tuesday, and, bolstered on Bessey's stirring prose, I'm so excited to light my own little bonfire.

Peggielene Bartels: A modern-day servant king

This week I checked out the kindle version of "King Peggy: An American Secretary, Her Royal Destiny, and the Inspiring Story of How She Changed an African Village."

King Peggy and her co-author Eleanor Herman

I devoured this book via the Kindle app on my phone -- mostly at midnight while nursing baby Ollie-- in about three days. It's an easy read and an engaging tale of an unassuming naturalized American who works tirelessly as a secretary in the Ghanaian Ambassador's office. Peggy has few friends and spends her evenings "not watching the news" as she eats her take out meals on the couch. Because it keeps her from dwelling on past heartbreak and unfulfilled dreams, the long hours and tedium don't bother Peggy. Then one day she gets a phone call that gives her a chance to shake up her monotonous life and redeem her destiny. The voice on the other line is a distant cousin, with news that her mother's brother, the king of the small fishing village of Otuam, has "gone into the village to cure himself" for good and that she has been chosen as the late king's successor.

Peggy's seemingly insurmountable struggle to bring clean water, education and financial stability to her hometown -- all on a shoestring secretary's salary and in the grinning faces of her corrupt elder council-- is a huge feat that inspires and empowers. Her story, reported in the news before this book was published, had in fact empowered churches and individuals to contribute to Peggy's many causes.

I love that the protagonist of this story had such pure motives despite being elevated to the level of royalty. She took on the post not to be somebody, but to do something, even to the ruination of her perfect credit and the complete draining of her bank account. She wanted to make changes that would do the most good for the most people- such as installing new public bore holes to provide the town with fresh water.

The book also provides a window into African life, which I knew very little about. People in Peggy's part of Ghana are content to wile away the hot hours in conversation, eat a diet of fish and fresh vegetables, and do hard physical labor well into their 70s and 80s. It made me long for a little bit of slow paced simplicity that characterizes her fishing town. Peggy's observations on the Ghanaian and American cultures were insightful-- especially her musing about Americans' obsession with electronic devices rendering us isolated and unable to communicate with each other. (Oh the irony as I read and am reviewing this book on my iPhone) Also eye-opening was the book's portrayal of Ghanaian family culture: close knit, loyal and peace-seeking. However, the extent of the corrupt and chauvinistic culture revealed throughout the story made me glad to be in America after all.

As an Evangelical Christian, I was keenly interested in the book's portrayal of Peggy's blended religion. The locals (and at times Peggy) blend animism with ancestor worship and Christianity in their daily life.  For example, Peggy often prays to God and to Jesus, but she's also in the habit of praying to her beloved late mother, often asking her to put in a good word to Jesus for her. In order to curry favor with the ancestors, Peggy pours libations on her condo's floor with enough regularity that the wood stain begins to seep up and stain her light colored carpet. To be honest, some of her superstitious beliefs and inspiring yet spooky encounters with the spirit world made me squirm a little. But overall, I came away feeling that Peggy is a good role model for anyone who wants to love people like Christ does-- with actions, sacrifice and humility. She is a king who uses her position to be the chief servant of Otuam.

In addition to being uplifting and thought provoking, the book is also laugh out loud hilarious. I was tickled by Peggy's inner monologues, her rehearsed rebuffs to the elders' shenanigans and her imagined dialogues with the painted chickens running around the village. The book is replete with colorful imagery that put me right in the story.

If you're looking for a page-turner about a real person who has done, and is still doing, big things, I highly recommend "King Peggy."