book review

The Importance of Humility

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Cover for "Humility, True Greatness"

Humility:  True Greatness by C. J. Mahaney, Multnomah Books, 2005. Link is to the book’s Amazon page.

This little book packs a lot into a few pages.  We’d had it around the house for years and I’d never read it, which is a shame, as I could have benefited from it much sooner.  At first I struggled to get through it, as I found it a bit dry.  Come on, C.J.!  Tell us a few jokes, the way you do in your sermons!  (I’ve heard Mahaney speak several times when he was a guest preacher at a former church.)  As the book went on, though, I became more and more involved in it.  The best chapters come at the end.

Let me quote from chapter 9, “Encouraging Others”:

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Two for the Price of One

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Cover for Plato at the GoogleplexPlato at the Googleplex:  Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein.  New York:  Pantheon Books, 2014. Link is to the author’s website.

So . . .a 400+-page book on philosophy.  Real promising, isn’t it?  I hope I can persuade you to read it, even though parts of it are quite challenging and dense.  Sometimes you finish a book with a feeling of satisfaction:  “I made it through.”  Sometimes with almost a sigh of relief:  “So that’s what happened!”  But once in a great while, at least for me, there’s a feeling of regret:  “Now I won’t get to be in the company of these characters any more.”  And that’s how I felt about the character of Plato in this book.  Suddenly I realized, “Oh no!  I’m almost finished, and I don’t want to be.  I want to go along with Plato into more of our modern world, hearing his take on all sorts of other situations.”  I hope I can get across in this post what a charming, gracious, focused person Plato is in this book.

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