My Review of "Against All Grain Celebrations"

Danielle Walker's Against All Grain Celebrations is a cookbook with 125 recipes for grain-free, dairy-free, gluten-free comfort food recipes for holidays and special occasions. When people adopt a new diet for health or personal reasons, it's the parties, holidays, and events with strong food traditions they worry about most. Against All Grain provides recipes and menus for twelve special occasions, from a child's birthday party and baby shower, to a backyard barbeque, romantic Valentine's Day dinner for two, and even a Halloween party. Of course, Thanksgiving, Christmas dinner, New Year's Eve party, and Easter/Passover brunch are also covered -- along with suggestions for beverages and cocktails and the all-important desserts. Nearly every recipe is photographed, and food and party images shot on location provide beautiful and creative entertaining ideas. Delicious and easy-to-prepare dishes encourage the whole family to get into the kitchen and create lasting memories -- no matter what the occasion.

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My Review of "The Tea Planter's Wife"

Dinah Jefferies' The Tea Planter's Wife is a fun novel that vividly depicts the 1920s. Gwendolyn Hooper, her 19-year-old heroine, speaks for an empire-branded breed of gutsy young British women who left the security of England to embark on extraordinary adventures abroad. Not the back-packing, "lonely planet" travels of today, gap-year kids constantly connected with the folks back home via internet and smartphones, and usually safely and predictably back home for good inside a year. Girls like Gwen married men who made their living and fortunes out in the colonies -- or what until very recently had been colonies -- and went out to join them, standing shoulder-to shoulder with their husbands to face down hardship, danger, disease, monsoon, drought, and not least the simmering and sometimes murderous resentment of locals. That makes The Tea Planter's Wife so much more than a love story -- it's a recognition that girls like Gwen had guts, and c...

My Review of "The Air I Breathe"

Louie Giglio's The Air I Breathe: Worship as a Way of Life is a deceptively small book packed with insights. Perhaps his most important, though, will also seem his simplest: Everyone worships something or someone, because God has designed us all with the drive to worship. We only have to study how we spend our time, energy, affection and money to discover the current object of our worship. Thinking about worship in light of the book's simplest definition -- "our response to what we value most" -- is both eye-opening and thought-provoking. The Air I Breathe then proceeds to urge readers to devote their worship to God (the only One who's worthy of it) and to make worship a way of life rather than just something they do in church. Giglio's beautiful writing -- which is full of simple, yet profound statements and fresh energy -- successfully motivates readers to ponder his points. But as persuasive as his narrative is, it lacks su...

My Review of "The Prayer Wheel"

Patton Dodd, Jana Riess, and David van Biema's The Prayer Wheel: A Daily Guide to Renewing Your Faith a Rediscovered Spiritual Practice brings a long-lost diagram that can be used to structure a 28-day discipline of prayer back into the practice of modern Christian spirituality. The diagram was found in a 12th-century German book of gospels that emerged at a rare book dealer in Manhattan in 2015. They begin with a cursory explanation of the wheel's origins but are primarily interested in reviving the use of the wheel to guide and enrich prayer by tying each day to a different thematic element of scripture. In concentric rings representing sections of the Bible and through seven "contemplative paths toward God" arranged like spokes through the rings he wheel uses Christianity's "big ideas" about the Lord's Prayer, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, events in the life of Christ, and the beatitudes to form a progression of prayer. The Praye...

The Mrs. & the Minister

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