FROM MY BOOKSHELF: From My Vacation, for Your New Year

Why Does E=MC2?
Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw / Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2009

The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got that Way
Bill Bryson / New York: Perennial, 1990

This column”s books have one thing in common: They provided my entertainment on a recent trip to Europe. Together they pretty well prove I am, as an irreverent member of our family calls me, a book junkie.

“Roy will read anything,” he says.

Not just anything, just anything good. These books, you”ll see, are not junk.

Coming Tomorrow

I started the trip by finishing Matt Ridley”s The Rational Optimist, a contrarian”s opinion of what”s coming tomorrow. Most prognosticators, at least those I”ve read, take a dim view of the prospects of planet earth and its human inhabitants. Conjuring up grim pictures of overpopulation, air and water pollution, food scarcity, increased militarism and warfare, violent religious extremism””need I go on?””these latter-day Jeremiahs see nothing ahead but the wrath of God (or godlessness).

That ain”t necessarily so, retorts Ridley. Though he is quite aware the pessimists get the best press and optimists are usually panned as wrongheaded or at least naïve, he casts his lot with the optimists, scant though their numbers be.

A committed evolutionist, Ridley applies that doctrine to a subject seldom treated: the evolution of the corporate human mind. Not the brain, but the mind””the accumulating grasp and creative use of knowledge. Only humans can apply their “collective brain” to problem solving and innovative enterprise. The result is that instead of running out of food, humanity has introduced the green revolution, postponing the predicted Malthusian (caused by overpopulation) famine indefinitely. And the slaves who once were responsible for productivity have been supplanted and freed by machines.

Knowledge increases exponentially, and the standard of living keeps rising. Tomorrow will definitely be better than today.

As I read, I silently cheered Ridley on. I want him to be right.

Considered Musings

I had taken coach Tony Dungy”s Uncommon: Finding Your Path to Significance along to learn more from this good man. He spoke at the 2010 North American Christian Convention in Indianapolis, the town where he had brilliantly led his Colts to the Super Bowl.

This is not an autobiography, although Dungy includes many personal anecdotes, but is instead the considered musings of a wise man. His are old-fashioned virtues; he includes warnings against drinking and drugs and sexual promiscuity and warped values, all delivered with firm kindness. He gives the lie to Leo Durocher”s famous quip, “Nice guys finish last.” Dungy is a nice guy who has finished first””again and again.

But he hasn”t always won. “I”m often introduced today as one of only three people to win a Super Bowl as a player and as a head coach,” he says. But “what they don”t always say is that there were 27 straight seasons that ended in disappointment between those two Super Bowl wins.”

Those disappointments, however, were educational: “The beauty of what I”ve learned through a life in sports . . . is that failure happens””regularly. And failure, as it turns out, is a constant in the human experience. I”ve also learned that if you”re afraid of failure, you won”t try to do very much. But if you”re going to chase meaningful dreams and do significant things, you have to be willing to come up short sometimes. I hope that you will fail less than I have, but even so, we all fail. Count on it.”

There”s also avuncular advice here on such subjects as honesty, stewardship, courage, treating a woman properly, being a good father, exercising respect for authority, living for others, valuing education, and more.

The coach speaks simply but lives deeply. You know he”s a Christian by his love.

Clear Explanation

Speaking of speaking simply . . . that is Brian Cox”s goal in Why Does E=MC2? He aims to make Albert Einstein”s famous formula understandable to non-scientists like me. He almost succeeds. This is perhaps the clearest explanation I have read of one of the 20th century”s most revolutionary developments in physics. It looks so simple: Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. I think I”m almost about to get it. I”m not there yet, but Cox has brought me a little closer.

This is my briefest review. On this subject I need to honor that old adage, “It”s better to keep silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.” That goes for writing, also. Especially for this writer when the subject is physics.

Read the book. It speaks for itself.

Corporate Leadership

Jim Collins just keeps turning out good books. He”s the man who gave us Good to Great and Built to Last, two of the best volumes on corporate leadership to appear in the last couple of decades. Now he turns his attention from success to failure. Some of the businesses he praised in the earlier books (along with many others) have failed. Disappeared. What happened? That”s his question, and his answer is worth studying.

Collins believes the corporation on the road to collapse moves through five phases (there are exceptions, but this is the rule). Here they are:

Stage One: Hubris Born of Success

Stage Two: Undisciplined Pursuit of More

Stage Three: Denial of Risk and Peril

Stage Four: Grasping for Salvation

Stage Five: Capitulation to Irrelevance or Death

From time to time I don my church-consulting hat. Usually when the call for help comes, the church is at stage four. Not too late for a turnaround, but well past the point of painless recovery. Right now, though, I”m working with some church leaders smart enough to ask for outside help before reaching stage three; their prospects for future growth and service are promising. I”m still going to recommend this book there””and elsewhere””for careful study of these five stages. They don”t want to be caught in any of them.

Communicating in English

Our destination on the trip was Germany. My German was passable a few years ago, but not now. No problem. Everywhere we went my wife and I could communicate in English. It”s been years since our language wouldn”t work for us in someone else”s country. The Mother Tongue explains the global prevalence of “English and how it got that way.”

This is not a new book; I”ve just been slow getting to it. For a lover of language, it”s a perfect traveling companion. Here you”ll travel back in time to speculate on how we humans got around to speaking in the first place, and then how English transmogrified from the ancient Indo-European into the most versatile language of all.

You”ll read chapters on pronunciation, on spelling, on the differences between good English and bad, on names””and yes, even on swearing (not all English should be spoken!).

OK, I”m an English teacher so I know my recommendation is suspect. But I”m also a preacher who believes that since we American preachers make our livings taking advantage of the English tongue, we could be more effective if we were a little more proficient with this, our profession”s most important tool.

Bryson would probably be very surprised to hear himself promoted as a teacher of preachers.

But in this volume, he is.

LeRoy Lawson, international consultant with Christian Missionary Fellowship International, is a CHRISTIAN STANDARD contributing editor and a member of Standard Publishing”s Publishing Committee. His column appears at least monthly.