The Lawndale Library
The Lawndale Library is housed in a rented storage
unit on Elm Street, and doesn’t have a lot of space.
These are the few books available this month.
Different books will be rotated in next month. Sorry, the librarian can’t mail out books to
non-Lawndale Residents, but maybe your local librarian or bookmonger can help you.
Free Book!
Essays and Short Stories Religion Politics
Fiction General
Non-Fiction Kids' Section
A Quick Look at the History of the New Testament (or, What's with the DeVenci Code?) NEW
Is Inteligent Design Inteligent? NEW
How Science and Medcine was (Accidently?) Discovered
The Anti-Perpetual Motion Machine Society (or, What's the Deal with Evolution?)
Hitler Ate Sugar! (or, What was Hitler's Religion?)
The Reemerging Practice of Cannibalism
China: An American Funded American Nightmare
A Story of How Robin Hood Helped the Poor
A Trek Among the Lost Materializtuci Tribe
This work of humor deals with a lost tribe in South America that has been alone on top of a mesa for hundreds of years where they have made many startling scientific discoveries. After word revised April 2005.
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The Cost of Discipleship By Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The bible contains a number of apparent paradoxes and Bonhoeffer studies them in this book. The most note worthy subject is that of grace and obedience. Some take grace to mean that it matters not what one does, or does not do, and they risk religion becoming irrelevant to their daily lives. I mean, they've got grace, right? Grace may be free, but they make it cheap. Others take obedience to the extreme, and become Bible lawyers and skillfully lawyer their way into the legally required miserable minimum while passing over legally difficult to define words, like love. Bonhoeffer gives the best analysis of this seeming paradox and turns it into a wonderfully complete whole.
Orthodoxy By G. K. Chesterton
Chesterton’s books are like whirlwinds and seem to go everywhere all at once, but there are remarkable insights for those who weather the storm.
The Man Who was Thursday By G.K. Chesterton
If you thought that Orthodoxy was a whirlwind try this work of fiction. It involves a society of anarchists, and who is the biggest anarchist of all? To give anything away would be to give away too much. A must read. This work, along with the other two books listed here by him, is available for free download from the links page (try the Gutenberg link and also the G.K. Chesterton link).
The Everlasting Man By G. K. Chesterton
This book was originally a retort to H.G. Well's book The Outline of History, which was a materialist's view of history. This book is in two halves, one on the history before Christ, and the other half on Christ. This book is not a systematic apologetic and one looking for that will be disappointed; but it does offer some remarkable insights into history and religion, particularly in what we think we know about pre-history but really don't. The materialist / enlightenment view is that man evolved from nothing, and that civilizations were cruel and barbaric, and then evolved too into something finer, and if only we'll try hard we can evolve perfectly into the future. Chesterton gives this theory a hard slap upside the head, and yes it does have a lot to do with religion. C. S. Lewis said that he had been influenced by this book to discard atheism, and one can see that when reading The Pilgrim's Regress. If only there were a writer such as Chesterton alive today, he'd change the world if he didn't get burned at the stake first.
Reflections
on the Cross
Bonhoeffer was a minister in WWII Germany. Instead of fleeing from, or yielding to, the Nazis he stood against them. He was imprisoned and was ultimately executed by the Nazis at Flossenbürg prison in the last days of the war. This book is a collection of some of his essays, letters, and sermons regarding the Cross. In reading it one is struck by the letters that were written from prison while he was waiting to die. No simplistic platitudes, no watered-down fluff, and no pop psychology: these writings are pure strength from one who knew exactly what his life was ultimately for. Buy an extra copy to stick in the NPR tote bag of any drooling idiot who makes the blanket statement that Christianity was an accessory to Hitler.
This book traces Lewis’s path through the 1920’s that eventually led him from atheism to Christianity after he tried everything else and found them wanting. Dated, but still with much relevance today. My favorite work by this author. There is some Latin, Greek, etc. mixed in here and there, but it is not essential to understand it. Readers so inclined can obtain the book Finding the Landlord by K. Lindskoog which translations all of the entries not in English, in addition to various insights.
The Abolition of Man By C. S. Lewis
Postmodernists beware.
The Screwtape Letters By C. S. Lewis
Lewis’s most remarkable ability was to point out what should be obvious but isn’t.
One note regarding Lewis: The publishing industry (and the movie with Anthony Hopkins) may portray him as a merry old soul who offered quaint platitudes from a harmless religion. In reality his life was full of tragedy from childhood to old age. Far from defending Christianity simply because he grew up with it or because it was there, he defended it because his keen intellect would not allow him to believe anything else after spending nearly two decades as an atheist. His works can be tough medicine. Publishing his writings is a big business and often bits and pieces of his books are sliced and diced and repackaged with questionable—if not outright embarrassing—editing either for the glorification of the editor or to water down the message to make it more palatable for mass consumption. It is best to read his works in their original forms without modern day tampering.
Peace Kills By P.J. O’Rourke
P.J.'s latest. One of his smaller books but a good one. An interesting addition to his book Give War a Chance that came out ten years ago. Peace Kills deals with various trouble spots and incidents in the past few years. Includes his immediate post 9/11 views and an interesting chapter of P.J. in Baghdad right after it fell.
Eat the Rich By P.J. O’Rourke
Not exactly a text-book treatment of economics, but a very entertaining book. P.J. travels the world and looks at economies from the most advanced to the barely perceptible. His tales are as amusing as his conclusions are sound. If every high school student read this book instead of sitting through a semester of econ we’d be money ahead. Make that college students as well. Politicians too.
God and Man at Yale By Wm. F. Buckley, Jr.
Here it is: the book that was the intellectual catalyst behind the conservative movement in America. It was written just after Buckley graduated from Yale and asks some interesting questions: why did economics professors at a premier business school teach communism to the sons and daughters of industrialists? Why did religion scholars teach, or more accurately preach, atheism to future ministers? This was at a time when the parents sending their kids to these schools would have little to do with such theories. How did academia come to be hijacked by professional America-haters? That is a question that still needs asking, and this was the first time it was really brought to the public’s attention. Revealing in that this was before Vietnam and the whole 1960’s sleaze-fest. The 1960’s may have been the tipping point for the America-haters to make their vandalism of all that was good public, but the seeds had been sown decades earlier.
Finally!! This book desperately needed to be written to chronicle those in American public life who were, and still are in some cases, unrepentant accessories to the communist movements that slaughtered millions upon millions in the 20th century. Thank you Mona. Buy five copies, read one, put one in a time capsule for future generations, donate one to your local library, and put the other two in a safety deposit box.
The Unmaking of a Mayor By Wm. F. Buckley, Jr.
This book is mostly about politics and is a bit dated, but it has some good insight into media workings and bias that go back several decades. One will learn new words from Buckley if nothing else.
Fahrenheit 451 By Ray Bradbury
Unlike Orwell, Bradbury’s hypothesis was that censorship, tyranny, etc., would not be imposed by a government, but imposed by the people themselves. His point was that for a culture to be destroyed one didn't have to burn books, one had only to stop reading them. This book has been out for quite a while and it is startling how much of it has already come to pass, both technologically and socially. Don’t confuse this with the docuslandery in theaters, the title of which was used without Bradbury’s consent (if you’re going to commit treason against your own country in a time of war then what’s a little plagiarism?)
That Hideous Strength By C. S. Lewis
A work of fiction, the last of Lewis’s space trilogy, in which one of the main characters in the book is in charge of manipulating public opinion for a sinister institution until he has a change of heart. A most remarkable book. It would help to read the first two books in the series, but it isn’t essential to understand 98% of the story.
Witness
Chambers came from broken middle America and became a communist early in life. He went from writing about communism to doing as an underground agent. After about ten years of this he began to loose faith and departed from the underground a few years prior to WWII. He first went into hiding—fearing for his life—and then emerged back into public, eventually becoming an editor of Time magazine. Determined to undermine the Soviet penetration of the American government he went pubic about his underground days, resulting in the Alger Hiss case. Hiss was a highly placed government advisor who had provided Chambers with secret information while Chambers was part of a Soviet spy ring. When Hiss was accused of spying it turned into a liberal caus celebe, and Chambers was vilified with unbridled hate and scorn by the left.
I recently bought a copy that had been discarded by a library. A pity, as this is the sort of book that needs reading by a lot of people. Some day there will be another crisis, a depression, or a big war, and some smooth talking demagogue will have easy pickings collecting followers to his version of the promised-land among those who don’t know history and don’t know that history repeats itself.
A very enjoyable account of one astronomer’s adventure in tracking down a small accounting glitch in a computer system at Berkley that ended up catching a hacker in Germany who was spying for the Soviets. It is not a recent book, but it would nonetheless be a fun way for people to learn about computers and the internet (or at least what became today’s internet).
The Cartoon Guide to Statistics By Gonick and Smith
“New studies prove…” and “Statistics show…” but do they really? Who really understands statistics? Well, anyone can with the help of this wonderful book. But beware, J. Suckalot, esq., prefers jurors to be as dumb as a box of rocks and reading this book could get you kicked out of a Lawndale jury some day.
Fantastic adventures with science, character, and adventure all mixed in. This series of books is back in print—buy ten copies while you can. Make your local candidate for congress pledge to do what ever it takes to keep these books in print. To stop printing the tax code for a year, and to print this book instead would be a jim-dandy of a campaign pledge.
The New Adventures of the Mad Scientists’ Club By B. Brinley
More of the same.
The Big Kerplop By B. Brinley
Ditto.
The Chronicles of Narnia By C. S. Lewis
Simply amazing. Very entertaining and enlightening reading for adults too. Personally, I suggest reading them in the original order (i.e., The Magician’s Nephew should be book 7, not book 1). There is a major movie in the works, let us hope that is does the books some justice.