Saturday, July 18, 2009

Scared: A Novel on the Edge of the World

By Tom Davis
Published by David C. Cook (2009)
304 pages

Finding Hope in Suffering

Hoping to salvage a few crumbs from his once award-winning career, photojournalist Stuart Daniels reluctantly takes an assignment in Swaziland, a small African country, to cover the AIDS crisis. What he discovers is suffering that, those of us living comfortably in the United States, can’t imagine.

Interspersed with Stuart’s perspective, is the viewpoint of Adanna, a recently orphaned young girl burdened with the care of her younger siblings, hoping just to survive from day to day. Tomorrow isn’t even a thought.

Adanna can teach all of us so much.

With the current state of the United States economy, we are barraged with negative stories about people losing jobs, overburdened food shelves, and homelessness. All of which are devastating to those affected. Still, in these times, the average American cannot imagine what it would be like to be truly hungry, to live from day to day wondering if you will have food to eat. We search our overfilled closets for the right outfit, while others are fortunate if they have something decent to wear at all.

In this fictional story, author Tom Davis breathes reality into the plight of people who live in places like Swaziland. The reader experiences, along with Adanna, what it feels like not to have eaten for days, to live in fear of man’s brutality. We see through Stuart’s eyes how much we have, and how just a small sacrifice on our part can help.

Like Stuart, we probably have the most to learn.

We also experience hope, and see that God has not forgotten his children. God has presented us with an awesome opportunity to reach out to those who are truly in need.

You can’t read this story and not be affected. This is a rare work of fiction that touches on all our emotions and motivates people into action. It’s a novel I will highly recommend to readers of fiction and non-fiction
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Safe At Home

By Richard Doster
Published by David C. Cook (2008)
348 pages

Painfully Honest Portrayal of Segregation in the 1950's
In the spring of 1953, Jack Hall is content being a sports columnist for a small town south of the Mason-Dixon line, thrilled to write about the town’s minor league baseball team. The town of Whitney is populated with people who would do anything for their neighbor; the idyllic place to live.
Jackie Robinson has only recently broken the color barrier in major league baseball, creating a fissure allowing more may squeeze through.

It is that fissure that rips the town of Whitney apart when a 17 year old “colored kid”, Percy Jackson, joins the minor league team.

Author Richard Doster is painfully honest in his portrayal of the people of Whitney. The helpful, kind neighbor turns into a bearer of fear and hate. Those hired to enforce the law become lawbreakers. Doster paints Jack Hall very realistically, portraying him as someone comfortable with segregation, who, over time, wrestles with his ingrained beliefs as the town fractures.

Doster makes the reader uncomfortable – and that’s a good thing – as he continuously holds a mirror to the reader’s face as if to ask: would you have responded any differently?