TBC BOOK REVIEWS 📖

I got this book recommendation from Amanda Baker. We were talking about ways of effectively sharing our faith with others when she told me about this gem.

We can be both winsome and accurate in sharing our faith, as we must be because we help people by giving them the truth.

This book gives many tactics to reach the lost or at least to be the person who “puts a pebble in their shoe” to get them started thinking about the Lord.

If anyone reads this book and wishes to discuss its tactics more, please let me know.

I have long wanted to start reading the writings of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, the formerly imprisoned Soviet dissident best remembered for saying “Live not by lies.”

His first book turns out to be probably his shortest, covering just one day in the imprisonment in Siberia of a fictional character named Ivan Denisovich Shukhov.

Shukhov works on a work gang outside of the camp, in below zero conditions for over 12 hours, yet concludes he had a pretty good day.

His bunkmate is a Baptist, imprisoned for his faith, so Christianity does make it into this novel!

I am glad I read this short work for a perspective in gratitude.

This book is about a little Japanese girl who got separated from her parents in the Philippines during World War II. She grew up in the Philippines not knowing her own name. A kind missionary named her Diamond and taught her to write her name. (Tap to see the rest)

This story reads like the most exciting fiction except it actually happened. I won’t spoil any of the amazing story by telling it here but, for those who know the Yost family, they were actually at the same church and school in Okinawa with Diamond and several of her children and grandchildren.

What is beautiful is that Diamond lived so many years in the Philippines, then in Okinawa, so the story covers life in a village on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines and also in a city in Okinawa, Japan. For those of us who have not travele…

Snow Treasure is partly fiction because so little of the story could be told at the time (if leaked to the Germans, participants or their relatives could have been killed). The children in this story are fictional but it is almost certain that Norwegian children helped smuggle millions of dollars of gold bullion out of Norway on a seaworthy vessel like a fishing vessel. The gold came to the U.S. for protection because if the Germans had confiscated it, they would have used it to fuel their war machine and kill more Norwegians.

I had forgotten the last chapter of this book which ties together the brave Norwegians and the protective U.S. in a way that is poignant and spirited and beautiful.

Yes, it is a children’s book. I read it in about three hours. But when I was homeschooling Joey, I often said you could exclusively shop just t…