Book Review: 5 Riveting Non-fics on Shelf
It’s about time to expose these spellbinding reads.
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“If a book has one passage, one idea with the power to change a person’s life, that alone justifies reading and re-reading it and finding room for it on one’s shelves.” -Harold S. Kushner
Here are the five life-challenging non-fiction books I read so far last year until the half of this year’s 2022. Below are their ratings and here’s what I can say about each book.
1. Man’s Search for Meaning — Viktor E. Frankl
Rate: 5/5 — This book must be read by everyone and I would definitely read it again.
“He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.”
— Nietzsche
Viktor Emil Frankl was an Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, philosopher, writer and Holocaust survivor. He founded ‘logotherapy’ — a school of psychotherapy that describes a search for a life’s meaning as the central human motivational force (Britannica).
This book is filled with tragic realities about the experiences of the millions of prisoners from the World War II. The book version ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’ released on 1992 has an aboriginal edition named ‘From Death Camp to Existentialism’ which was published last 1946. This 1992 edition has three sections where-in Frankl narrated in the first section the great horrors that happened inside the concentration camps in Auschwitz. He took his time in the camp along forced labors and tortures, understanding the myriad empirical experiences of his fellow prisoners and concluded that:
“Once the meaning of suffering had been revealed to us, we refused to minimize or alleviate the camp’s tortures by ignoring them or harboring false illusions and entertaining artificial optimism. Suffering had become a task on which we did not want to turn our backs. We had realized its hidden opportunities for achievement, the opportunities which caused the poet Rilke to write, “Wie viel ist aufzuleiden!” (How much suffering there is to get through!) Rilke spoke of “getting through suffering” as others would talk of “getting through work.” There was plenty of suffering for us to get through. Therefore, it was necessary to face up to the full amount of suffering, trying to keep moments of weakness and furtive tears to a minimum. But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer. Only very few realized that.”
The second section profoundly elaborates his foundational contribution in psychotherapy which was logotherapy; while, the third section was a 1984 postscript that further elucidates the concept of ‘Tragic Optimism’, which in logotheraphy, introduced the tragic triad ‘guilt, pain, and death’. Other than his excruciating narrations about the realities in the prison camps and his scientific explanations of various qualitative events, the entire book presents a tremendous highlight about existentialism; which somehow could ring answers to our deep questions in life, especially about sufferings and meaning-making. Hence I conclude, how such an insightful and truly deep-seated book this was.
Book Editions:
From Death Camp to Existentialism (1946); The Will to Meaning (1969); Yes to Life In Spite of Everything (1946); The Doctor and the Soul (1946); Logoterapia y Analisis (1987); Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning (1997)
It concluded with one of the most religious sentences written in the twentieth Century: Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips. — Foreword
2. When Breath Becomes Air — Paul Kalanithi
Rate: 5/5 — This book must be read by everyone and I would definitely read it again.
“If I were a writer of books, I would compile a register, with a comment, of the deaths of men: he who should teach men to die would at the same time teach them to live.”
— Michel de Montaigne
Kalanithi was an epitome of excellence, profoundness, and strength — so as this masterpiece of his. The book is divided into two parts where-in the author accounts his early life studying medicine after having took a Master in English Literature. He talked countless of things one wouldn’t get tired of delving about: passion, courage, humanity and both the fear of leaving the threshold of life, yet at the same time the joy of finally declaring one has ever truly lived. He narrated his painful journey of recovering and at the second time, relapsing due and against cancer. As a physician himself, the journey is familiar and alien simultaneously.
The word hope first appeared in English about a thousand years ago, denoting some combination of confidence and desire. But what I desired — life — was not what I was confident about — death. When I talked about hope, then, did I really mean “Leave some room for unfounded desire?” No. Medical statistics not only describe numbers such as mean survival, they measure our confidence in our numbers, with tools like confidence levels, confidence intervals, and confidence bounds. So did I mean “Leave some room for a statistically improbable but still plausible outcome — a survival just above the measured 95percent confidence interval?” Is that what hope was? Could we divide the curve into existential sections, from “defeated” to “pessimistic” to “realistic” to “hopeful” to “delusional”? Weren’t the numbers just the numbers? Had we all just given in to the “hope” that every patient was above average? It occurred to me that my relationship with statistics changed as soon as I became one. — Paul Kalanithi
The persona he portrayed as a physician — a hero saving lives and at the same time, a human who’s in need of a savior and that someone who isn’t exempted of hardships in life is highly relatable. Further, his wife ended the book by writing a wonderful epilogue you wouldn’t want to miss reading.
3. The Diary of a Young Girl —Anne Frank
Rate: 5/5 — This book must be read by everyone and I would definitely read it again.
Many people think nature is beautiful, many people sleep from time to time under the starry sky, and many people in hospitals and prisons long for the day whey they’ll be free to enjoy what nature has to offer. But few are as isolated and cut off as we are from idle joys of nature, which can be shared by rich and poor alike.
— Anne Frank, (an entry from June 13, 1944)
This is the Definitive Edition of the Diary of Anne Frank (Book C). The first edition was the raw manuscript and Edition B was a version edited by Otto Frank (the author’s father). Reading a diary isn’t new to me as I wrote diaries and weekly journals since my early age. I completely get absorbed by the feels of reading diary entries from a thirteen-year old girl, except that I am living in this modern epoch, whilst Anne was barely surviving the damage brought to her by the World War II and the Holocaust.
Reading her entries every day was as refreshing and riveting as the fact that a thirteen-year-old got drenched by numerous fancy, deep, and painful narrations in this account. The diary that lengths two years is worth-reading and worth delving especially if you are into historical non-fiction as well, and if the details of Anne’s spectacular journey interest you. Her entire diary entries once proved to me that the freedom I have now as a person should be protected and treasured. For I can be on a hide-out too inside a secret annex like Anne and the Frank family; I could draft countless journal entries too, but it is the liberation to live and live life meaningfully that I differed from her and that this beautiful Anne lacked in her life.
Ps: Anne’s diary was named ‘Kitty’.
Why are millions spent on the war each day, while not a penny is available for science, artists or the poor? Why do people have to starve when mountains of food are rotting away in other parts of the world? Oh, why are people so crazy? I don’t believe the war is simply the work of politicians and capitalists. Oh no, the common man is every bit as guilty; otherwise, people and nations would have rebelled long ago! There’s a destructive urge in people, the urge to rage, murder and kill. And until all of humanity, without exception, undergoes a metamorphosis, wars will continue to be waged, and everything that has been carefully built up, cultivated and grown will be cut down and destroyed, only to start allover again! — Anne Frank (p.256)
DISCLAIMER
The rest of the two books are Christian-related. Thank you for reading this far, I appreciate it! It would be nice if you would drop your riveting non-fic reads too and if you consider on reading any of the books on this book review, I shall wish you, ‘Happy Reading!”
4. Irresistible Revolution —Shane Claiborne
Rate: 5/5 — This book must be read by everyone and I would definitely read it again.
Christianity often has offered a little to the world, other than the hope that things will be better in heaven. The Scriptures say that the entire creation groans for liberation, and the echoes of that groaning can be heard in everything.
— Jim Wallis
I love this book and it’s author Shane. As how the front-page reviews put it: Shane Claiborne is a living experiment — evangelical zeal mixed with grassroots of activism; passion for Jesus mixed with prison time for feeding the poor. The book is a rant for love, aimed at cowards seeking courage (Aiden Enns).
This book definitely bombs tall walls of the popular Gospel modern Christians ought to live in the century. I love how personal, powerful, and experiential every printed page this book contains. This is one of the reads that slapped straight to me although I’m but reading the third flip yet — it’s book dedication goes:
Dedicated to all the hypocrites, cowards, and fools… like me. May we find the Way, the Truth, and the Life in a world of shortcuts, deception, and death.
I rated it 5/5 for the reason that, I haven’t found any non-fiction book like it yet that disturbs and deeply stirs the uncomfortable reality in me, in life, and in Christianity. Reading this is like losing what I once hold true and saving what I found new yet truer.
Our world is desperately in need of imagination, for we have spent so much creativity devising ways of destroying our enemies that some folks don’t even think it’s possible (much less practical) to love them.12 We have placed such idolatrous faith in our ability to protect ourselves that we call it more courageous to die killing than to die loving. The faith we have in the market and in the imagination we employ to acquire wealth has so far surpassed our ingenuity to share that we cannot help but wonder if the contemporary gospel remains good news to the poor whose bellies scream out to God. — Shane Claiborne, (p.286)
5. Jesus Freaks — Toby McKeehan, Michael Tait and Kevin Max
Rate: 5/5 — This book must be read by everyone and I would definitely read it again.
In the largest sense of the word, a revolutionary changes his country or culture; but in a smaller sense, what changes the individual from a bystander to a revolutionary?
This book entails the compilation of the different experiences and narratives of the Christian martyrs who fought for the Light, Freedom, and Truth in the circles and guilds of Christianity dating from the earliest existence of the belief up until the modern times. I could only weep, challenged, and be more transformed reading the stories in this book. This is the book two and I couldn’t be more excited to find and read the book one.
Overall, this book summarized the essence of being a revolutionary — a revolutionary for truth and justice that would set the world upside-down — if; only if, we know of such.
People may call themselves revolutionaries, but they don’t realize that without God they change nothing. All they do is perpetuate a world of hatred and strife. One dictator replaces another; one system of corruption and exploitation replaces another system; one set of devils is replaced by another set of devils. Things can go on this way for hundred of years at a time. They go on, that is, until someone is willing to stand up and yet God involved. Then things really begin to change. hatred is replaced by forgiveness; strife is replaced by brotherly love and a helping hand; oppression is replaced by freedom; and evil men to fear are replaced by God-fearing men to follow. In the wake of a godly revolution, the world is set upside right again.
If ever you’ve already encountered such books mentioned here, I would say, you’re on the right track. Go, open, and read it! It’ll be worth your time and effort, threading back what Kushner has to say about transforming reads:
“If a book has one passage, one idea with the power to change a person’s life, that alone justifies reading and re-reading it and finding room for it on one’s shelves.”
-Harold S. Kushner
Thank you for reading and do leave your reading lists on the comments.
