Rebecca Reads

Sometimes I read nonfiction to get a general idea about something I don’t know anything about or a person who intrigues me. Other times I read nonfiction to learn something specific in depth; such books may be hard to read cover to cover, but they still merit a careful reading.
The Discoverers by Daniel Boorstin was [...]

In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis sets out to share what he believes the core of Christianity is. He makes it clear in the introduction that he is not sharing doctrines of a specific faith, but rather Christianity in general.
I hope no reader will suppose that “mere” Christianity is here put forward as an alternative to [...]

Rose, Where Do You Get that Red? by Kenneth Koch is written for educators, and yet it is accessible to others. Reading it as a mother shows me that reading classic poetry to my young child can be inspiring in not just their own understandings of poetry but also in their own writing. There is [...]

I let myself browse the library a few weeks ago, and I ended up coming home with a huge coffee table book of photography, Moments: The Pulitzer Prize-Winning Photographs by Hal Buell. I thought I’d browse through the award-winning photographs and then return it.
To my delight, the short summaries on the Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs were [...]

In Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dogs: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences, Kitty Burns Florey sets out to tell why diagramming sentences is so much fun and the brief history of the art of diagramming sentences. To some extent, I felt Florey’s book was more memoir and humor than it was history. Yet, [...]

In A Caldecott Celebration: Six Artists and Their Paths to the Caldecott Medal, Leonard Marcus illustrates the long road six Caldecott illustrators followed to produce to an award-winning book. This book is a combination of biography and art history as it looks at how six artists approached children’s book illustration over the last six decades.
I [...]

I was going to read Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin for the US Presidents Reading Project. But then I started to be intimidated by its 800+ pages; I’m currently reading a 700+ page book and I have been for three months. So, while I do plan on [...]

Christ and the New Covenant by Jeffrey R. Holland contains Elder Holland’s insights into the imperative role of Jesus Christ in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints by reviewing Christ’s role throughout The Book of Mormon. Some chapters had a “devotional talk” feel (and in fact were expansions of Elder’s Holland’s previously given [...]

When, in 1918, a clerk erroneously ordered twelve times the number of children’s books, Western Publishing Company may have faced ruin. Instead, the company persuaded Woolworth’s department stores to sell it, a practice unusual since children’s books were normally only sold during the holiday season.
Years later, in the 1930s, one publishing novice was inspired when [...]

Much of the life of William Shakespeare is a mystery. He carefully did not keep a diary nor send love letters to his wife. Shakespeare, the prolific writer who, in just over 50 years wrote an almost unbelievable number of remarkable poems and plays, did not leave many personal details of his life beyond public [...]