Englewood Honor Books: The Best Books of 2009.
2009
Englewood
Honor Books
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*** Best Poetry Volume ***
Leavings: Poems. These new poems enlarge the possibilities of Berry’s vision and work, always clarifying language, interweaving art and work with land and life, and describing glimpses of the Kingdom of God as it is embodied in the Kentucky hills. As Berry writes, “Hope / then to belong to your place by your own knowledge / of what it is that no other place is.” |
Pluriverse: New and Selected Poems. These collected poems span 60 years of Cardenal’s writing, considering at various turns the particularities of the Nicaraguan landscape to the complexities of quantum models of the universe. The intricacies of Cardenal’s poems always suggest the wonderful interconnectedness of the whole creation, informed by years as a poet/priest/revolutionary in his native Nicaragua. |
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Shop Class as Soulcraft: Following in the tradition of one of last year’s honor books, Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman, Crawford masterfully forms a case for the importance of manual labor. “It’s the capacity to probe the writings of Iris Murdoch or Martin Heidegger and the workings of a late-model Kawasaki liter-class sport bike that make Crawford so interesting to read.” |
*** Best Novel ***
Eve: A Novel of the First Woman. Although we admittedly don’t review a lot of fiction, we are slowly increasing the number of novels we do review. Elissa Eliott’s poignant debut novel Eve, enthralled us like no other novel this year. “Following in the footsteps of Buechner and those of writers like Flannery O’Connor, Nikos Kazantzakis and Walker Percy, Elliott creates a world of deep and twisted brokenness, and yet one that is saturated with an even deeper hope.” |
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*** Best Biography ***
Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor. Brad Gooch has offered a gem of a book in his deeply-researched biography of one of our favorite writers, Flannery O’Connor. |
Empire of Illusion: Hedges takes our present shadow politics, economics, and entertainment industries and holds them up in the light to suggest that mostly we have been captivated by illusions, stuck back in Plato’s cave. World Wrestling Entertainment, the $10 billion US porn industry, our “permanent war economy,” and “participatory fascism” are indicting critiques of the American brand of Empire, based largely on illusion, and Hedges exposes these caricatures for what they are. |
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Green Metropolis: An important revision of ‘green’ technologies and sustainability, which offers an apologetics for dense urban places as the ‘greenest’ places we have. Building on Jane Jacobs’ descriptions of population density and diversity, Owens re-narrates conversations about urban sustainability, positing New York City as “the greenest city in the United States.” |
Enough: After the economic crashes last year, 2009 offered us the opportunity to reflect on the consumerism that led us into this economic mess, and no book spoke more lucidly on the problem of consumerism in our churches than Will Samson’s Enough. |
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A Conservationist Manifesto. “A Conservationist Manifesto is a rich book and like a rich wine or rich dessert, it is meant to be savored. Sanders sees beyond the mass destruction of consumerism and prophetically calls us to the redemptive work of conserving creation and connecting deeply with our neighbors and the places in which we live.” |
*** Best Theology Book ***
Desiring The Kingdom: We are all motivated by some vision of “the kingdom,” and our desires of it largely motivate how we understand and inhabit the world; Smith describes formative rituals, practices, and liturgies from the mall to the Eucharist, showing all cultural institutions as some form of liturgy, and enlarging the language of liturgy to encompass the immanence of the kingdom of God. |
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Wendell Berry and Religion: Certainly, any book about Wendell Berry and Christianity is bound to attract our attention, but our imaginations were ignited by this book’s broad vision of the applicability of Berry’s work to Christian Social Ethics. |
God’s Economy: For the second year in a row, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove has written a book that landed on our list of best books. Few books have celebrated God’s abundant provision and our call to generosity as eloquently and as compellingly as God’s Economy. |
