Fearless by Max Lucado

I read this book with relatively high expectations.  I hoped to find answers to some of my problems with fear -- the fact that fear drives me to a certain extent, and that I feel constrained by fear, especially when it comes to money.  The promise of the book is that it will teach us how to live a life without fear, and it delivers on that promise to a certain extent.  However, it falls short of being a life-changing treatise that alters my worldview completely.  The book does address specific causes of fear, including money, and the answer is always to turn to Jesus in some way.  The simple Biblical truth that this book addresses is that every fear (except the fear of God, which is another word for faith) can be lessened if we look to Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and God the Father for answers.  That truth is expressed gracefully, with style, and with compassion.  Still, I am hungering for more truth on the nature of fear.  Why does God allow us to be so ruled by fear?  The author does touch on the fact that fear sometimes plays a useful role in warning us of dangers.  But he doesn't delve deep into the psychology of fear, how rooted it is in our experience.  In a way, fear is the only appropriate response to the human condition.  Still, I wonder if that's purposeful -- that the author knows not to dwell too much on the deep-rootedness of fear, because his philosophy and advice is simple -- trust God, no matter what. 

American Rust by Philipp Meyer

American Rust starts with a killing that could be called self-defense.  The plot flows forward from this single event and remains taut until the final conclusions are reached.  The point of view bounces back and forth in stream-of-consciousness style from the two main characters, 20-year-old Isaac and 21-year-old Poe, to their family members and the police captain, Bud Harris, who is charged with cracking their case.  Isaac, a smallish, smart kid whose mother has committed suicide before the novel opens, lives with his wheelchair-bound father in southwestern Pennsylvania.  His sister, who escaped to Yale shortly after her mother's suicide, also makes an appearance about a quarter of the way through the novel.  The father's and the sister's perspectives don't add that much to the novel, but they are important in telling the story.  Poe, a former star athlete, lives with his mother, Grace, who also becomes a focus of the narration.  She becomes the wheel around which Bud Harris turns (they have an on-again, off-again relationship at the beginning of the novel).  She ultimately shifts his actions toward the unthinkable.  The setting dominates the novel -- the broken-down steel mills being reclaimed by nature, the beauty of the hills around the fictional town of Buell -- as every character takes note of the setting at various points in the novel.  There are heavy overtones of American decline -- hence the title.  The book creates many murky moral dilemmas and contains difficult, life-affirming or life-denying choices.  It earns the category of serious literature because it doesn't shy away from these painful realities.  The content of the novel is a little like John Updike's -- lots of sex, well-drawn characters who make bad decisions -- but without the comic turns.  The novel opens with quotes from two existentialist authors (Kierkegaard and Camus), so there is a little too much existential angst in the novel.  Still, the author does write a gripping tale, and I have to give him his due in drawing me in to a story that gave me plenty to chew on.