The Ash Garden

Description

Emiko Amai is six years old in August 1945 when the Hiroshima bomb burns away half of her face. To Anton, a young German physicist involved in the Manhattan Project, that same bomb represents the pinnacle of scientific elegance. And for his Austrian wife Sophie, a Jewish refugee, it marks the start of an irreparable fissure in their new marriage.

Fifty years later, seemingly far removed from the day that defined their lives, Emiko visits Anton and Sophie, and in Dennis Bock’s powerfully imagined narrative, their histories converge.

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The unprecedented impact, ideology, and geographic scope of the Second World War continue to attract new novelists who hammer the history out a little thinner each time, highlighting lesser-known massacres or sifting through minor characters to discover a representative but undiscovered guide. Dennis Bock's poignant book The Ash Garden personalizes the epic bombing of Hiroshima through Anton Böll, a German émigré physicist, and Emiko, a Japanese victim of the bomb. Bombmaker and bombed, they balance this incisive, symmetrical novel and its sustained inquiry into remorse and forgiveness.

One of 25 Hiroshima Maidens relocated from post-war Japan to America for corrective plastic surgery, Emiko remains in the U.S. as a student, then as a filmmaker. The novel is at its best with her, from the heavy losses that surround her recovery in Japan to the awkwardness of immigrating to the nation that is both her tormentor and her savior. Meanwhile, Anton, her opposite number, doesn't just return home from war, he returns having irrevocably changed war. Stubbornly proud of his work and estranged from his isolated, ailing wife, Anton offers no home to remorse, and his conflicted legacy takes a lifetime to heal. Heal it does, though, just as Anton and Emiko meet and begin to discuss their roles in the bombing. The climax may be too much for readers impatient with a Dickensian full-cast ending: like those of John Irving, Bock's symmetries are delightful to discover at the halfway point but disappointingly conspicuous by the novel's close. --Darryl Whetter

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Understanding the Big Picture of the Bible: A Guide to Reading the Bible Well

Description

This book puts clear, readable Bible study aids at your fingertips. It contains thirteen substantial essays from some of today’s best evangelical scholars that introduce the big-picture storyline of the Bible, the theology of the Old and New Testaments, how to read the different sections of Scripture, and what happened between the testaments. These essays by such authors as C. John Collins, Thomas Schreiner, Vern Poythress, and Darrell Bock form the third volume in a series drawn from the ESV Study Bible, making these helpful overviews available in a stand-alone format.

In addition to essays on each genre of the Bible, the book addresses the general Greco-Roman world and specific Jewish groups at the time of the New Testament. To aid in putting Bible passages in context, it also includes timelines of the Old and New Testaments and intertestamental events. Understanding the Big Picture of the Bible is a helpful tool for any readers who want to get more out of their Bible reading.

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The Communist's Daughter (Vintage Contemporaries)

Description

The Communist's Daughter is a sweeping novel of love and betrayal spanning the trenches of the Great War to the horrors of Spain and China.

Norman Bethune was a visionary whose dedication touched millions. Rebelling in childhood against his father's religion, he finds a calling himself, saving lives on the battlefield. In Republican Spain he fulfills his idealism, yet before long politics destroy his romance and drive him to seek refuge in China. Here, in service to a man eventually known as Mao Zedong, Bethune begins this account of his life and his cherished beliefs for the only person who still makes a future seem possible: the daughter he has never seen.

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Do Historical Matters Matter to Faith?: A Critical Appraisal of Modern and Postmodern Approaches to Scripture

Description

Is historical accuracy an indispensable part of the Bible’s storyline, or is Scripture only concerned with theological truths? As progressive evangelicals threaten to reduce the Bible’s jurisdiction by undermining its historical claims, every Christian who cares about the integrity of Scripture must be prepared to answer this question.

Do Historical Matters Matter to Faith? offers a firm defense of Scripture’s legitimacy and the theological implications of modern and postmodern approaches that teach otherwise. In this timely and timeless collection of essays, scholars from diverse areas of expertise lend strong arguments in support of the doctrine of inerrancy. Contributors explore how the specific challenges of history, authenticity, and authority are answered in the text of the Old and New Testaments as well as how the Bible is corroborated by philosophy and archaeology.

With contributions from respected scholars—including Allan Millard, Craig Blomberg, Graham Cole, Michael Haykin, Robert Yarbrough, and Darrell Bock—Do Historical Matters Matter to Faith? arms Christians with fresh insight, arguments, and language with which to defend Scripture’s historical accuracy against a culture and academy skeptical of those claims.

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Olympia : A Novel

Description

This is an exploration of family ties. Through Peter's eyes we are told the story of his family, from the Bavarian war-damaged uncles who are trapped in the past to the Olympians striving to evolve into something new for the future.

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Olympia tells the story of three generations quietly grappling with the emotional fallout of war. There are the grandparents, Lottie and Rudolph, who met while competing in the 1936 Berlin Olympics; their son and his wife, who emigrated from Germany after World War II; and the grandchildren--Peter, who narrates, and his sister Ruby, both Canadian-born children of the '70s. Into this portrait Bock skillfully splices imaginary outtakes from Leni Riefenstahl's film of the 1936 Olympics, The Olympiad. The result is a layered album of family stories and a moving meditation on the intersection of memory, identity, and the past.

Early on we discover that this family is Lutheran, not Jewish--and that Bock is tackling the uneasy question of what it means to be German in this century. He avoids generalizations about guilt or complicity in the war, aiming for something more delicate, more murky. "It seemed that everyone my parents knew back then had escaped to this country from that dark place ... after the war had ended," Peter explains. "But it took me until that summer to find out that there were things I hadn't been told, that there were secrets in my house."

Bock focuses with understated precision on the private moments of victory and defeat that make up the subjective history of a family: Ruby's fight against leukemia and her dream to succeed as an Olympic gymnast; a failed reunion between Peter's mother and the brother she hasn't seen since the end of the war; the deaths of the grandparents; a father and son's shared obsession with storms. Elliptical, nuanced, affirming, and sad, Olympia is a masterful examination of how a family embodies and survives its legacy. --Svenja Soldovieri

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le docteur rouge

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