Skip to main content

A great FREE full-length real book about FREE

image

On the bookshelf this week:

Free: The Future of a Radical Price, by Chris Anderson

And let me clarify.  If you want to hold an actual book made of actual paper in your hands, you may well have to pay money for the book.  In my opinion, it’s as worthwhile as any other, but like most books, I ended up reading it for free from the library. 

But I have since downloaded the full-length unabridged audiobook version at the author’s site here (there’s also a free full-length readable online book there, so you truly can READ it for free if you want to).

imageIt’s been a great week for the bookshelf, as I also drank in this easy, fun book over Shabbos:

The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University, by Kevin Roose.

Much as I love books that simply poke fun at evangelism and extremist Christianity, this book doesn’t happen to be one.   For the most part, it’s a thoughtful behind-the-scenes glimpse of its liberal author’s semester at Jerry Falwell’s legendary fundamentalist Liberty University.

I like the fact that he seems to take his own spirituality – and his quest for understanding of Christianity – seriously, and goes as deeply into the subject matter as practicality permits (for example, he never allows himself to lose touch with a lesbian aunt and her partner, though he does avoid their phone calls for a couple of weeks here and there). 

If he went into writing the book hoping to caricature Christian youth, as has been done many times before, he emerges with a far more nuanced picture of what they believe and the deep meaning they find in their spiritual lives.

So there you are:  that’s what I’ve been reading!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

לימודי קודש/Limudei Kodesh Copywork & Activity Printables

Welcome to my Limudei Kodesh / Jewish Studies copywork and activity printables page.  As of June 2013, I am slowly but surely moving all my printables over to 4shared because Google Docs / Drive is just too flaky for me. What you’ll find here: Weekly Parsha Copywork More Parsha Activities More Chumash / Tanach Activities Yom Tov Copywork & Activities Tefillah Copywork Pirkei Avos / Pirkei Avot Jewish Preschool Resources Other printables! For General Studies printables and activities, including Hebrew-English science resources and more, click here . For Miscellaneous homeschool helps and printables, click here . If you use any of my worksheets, activities or printables, please leave a comment or email me at Jay3fer “at” gmail “dot” com, to link to your blog, to tell me what you’re doing with it, or just to say hi!  If you want to use them in a school, camp or co-op setting, please email me (remove the X’s) for rates. If you just want to say Thank You, here’s a

Hebrew/ עברית & English General Studies Printables

For Jewish Studies, including weekly parsha resources and copywork, click here . If you use any of my worksheets, activities or printables, please leave a comment or email me at Jay3fer “at” gmail “dot” com, to link to your blog, to tell me what you’re doing with it, or just to say hi!  If you want to use them in a school, camp or co-op setting, please email me (remove the X’s) for rates. If you enjoy these resources, please consider buying my weekly parsha book, The Family Torah :  the story of the Torah, written to be read aloud – or any of my other wonderful Jewish books for kids and families . English Worksheets & Printables: (For Hebrew, click here ) Science :  Plants, Animals, Human Body Math   Ambleside :  Composers, Artists History Geography Language & Literature     Science General Poems for Elemental Science .  Original Poems written by ME, because the ones that came with Elemental Science were so awful.  Three pages are included:  one page with two po

Are Jews an "underrepresented community" in children’s publishing?

I applied for a writing award yesterday. I'm not going to get it, but that's not what I wanted to share with you. Here's what I wanted to share. This box:   I stared at this box for a long, long time. And then I decided not to check it. Even though I believe people like me truly are underrepresented, we probably wouldn’t fit the definition in other people's minds. Why? Well, because we're European. Because we are white. Because as everybody knows, Jews control the media. (do we???) If anything, some people say, Jews are over -represented in publishing. And yet. Some definitions are careful not to include people like me. Like this random definition from the State of California which defines underrepresented for some very specific business purposes as: "an individual who self-identifies as Black, African American, Hispanic, Latino, Asian, Pacific Islander, Native American, Native Hawaiian, or Alaska Native, or who self-identi