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It does a good job of showing that God can use us even in the midst of our weaknesses and sinfulness. It is fast-moving, humorous, and helps the reader understand what missionary life, especially from the wife's perspective, is all about without using glowing descriptions.
Weaknesses:
I thought it left quite a few gaps. 3/4's of the book describes the author's preparation for service and first missionary term, and then the remaining part told about 6 more terms in a very short, abbreviated way. Time doesn't fly that fast. Also this reviewer felt uncomfortable with the author's emphasis on "feeling" God's leading and how she worked through a major depression without receiving the help of any type of counseling.
Overall, I was pleased with this book as it gives a fair representation of the trials involved in being a missionary, and how we who are missionaries are no more perfect than anyone else and must rely on God in order to serve Him. This story is an excellent example of faithfulness in the midst of difficulties. I would say it is a "must-read" for missionary wives.
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The book takes one of two approaches: to place absolute faith in markets when it comes to environmental protection, or to deny the reality of particularly intractable problems. It's interesting to note that the sub-chapter on global warming, titled "Global Warming or a Lot of Hot Air?" (deriding those who believe in global warming as "Chicken Littles") which appeared in the first edition has disappeared from the 2001 revised edition. The revised edition doesn't even list global warming or climate change in the index.
Anderson and Leal make their strongest argument where they write about "government failure" in funding the construction, by the Army Corps of Engineers and Bureau of Reclamation, of un-economic and ecologically harmful dams throughout the 20th century. This sort of pork-barrel spending wasted taxpayer money and harmed the environment and was largely unopposed, at least until Presidents Carter and Reagan (to both of their credit) began to resist, as is recounted at great length in Marc Reisner's excellent book Cadillac Desert.
In Anderson and Leal's chosen scheme of environmentalism, the most likely determiner of how natural resources would be allocated would be big multinational corporations, not unlike Enron, Global Crossing, WorldCom, etc.. We have seen how (un)wisely these corporations protect the public interest and how equally (un)wisely they protect the interests of their own shareholders. Yes, by all means, lets put the Great Lakes into a water market and allow some new "Enron" to control the trading. (See Anderson and Leal's Chapter 8, titled "Priming the Invisible Pump.") It's scary to think that the decision over whether we will have any wilderness left at all would be in such (in)capable private hands. Yet that's what the authors recommend. This book's solutions are overly simplistic and thus either wrong or incomplete. I give the book a five for readability and a one for policy, with policy weighted most heavily.
Some people might not believe its notion that the private sector will always do the right thing. And, of course, it won't. However, this book is a good guide to the growing movement to find a better way to protect the environment.
There are parts of the book where the services of a better copyeditor might have been valuable, but that's not enough to be a real problem - just stay with it when it meanders a bit, you'll get the point eventually.
Though the pace of science makes some of the material (I read the 1996 edition) a tad dated, it is still a good counterweight to the unreasonable fearmongering of sexual repressionists and the naive media. Their conscious or unconscious "disinformation" concerning the very real, but extremely limited, AIDS phenomenon has negatively influenced the thinking too many otherwise sensible folks.