The Book Stacks

Hello everyone and welcome to The Book Stacks. Today I have a special guest Christian author here, Kathi Macias. She is here as part of her virtual tour. I hope you’ll join me in welcoming her to the site.

We talk a lot about being “Christian writers,” but what does that mean? What distinguishes us from any other writers? What makes us unique and readily recognizable to our readers? Finally, what qualifies us as “successful” Christian writers?

For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to write—and I did, winning writing contests and eventually moving on to newspaper work. Then, at the age of 26, I received Jesus as my Savior and decided to “write books for God.” Thankfully, God didn’t allow me to get published at that immature season of my life. Instead, He gently spoke to my heart that I would be ready to write books for Him when I was ready to write books without my name on them.

I had no idea what that meant, but approximately one decade later, when I’d done at least a little bit of maturing, I was offered my first ghostwriting project. The publisher who offered me the job said, “You’d actually be writing the book for someone else, but it won’t have your name on it.”

The light came on then, and I realized what God had been telling me years earlier. I accepted the project and, through the ensuing years, have worked on approximately 100 books for other people—all without my name on them.

Do I also have books that include my name on the cover? Absolutely. However, before God allowed me to move into that realm of publishing, He had to strip away a lot of “me” and replace that with more of Him. Moving “beyond me” in our writing—or any other aspect of our lives, for that matter—is an ongoing process, yet a necessary one if we want to wear the title of “Christian writer” with integrity and humility. It is also the requirement we must meet to be considered “successful”—maybe not so much by our fans or colleagues, but definitely by the One who has called and equipped us for this great assignment.

Kathi Macias, popular speaker and prolific author, is an Angel-award winning writer who has published twenty-one books and hundreds of articles. Whether keyboarding her latest book, keynoting a conference, or riding on the back of her husband’s Harley, Kathi “Easy Writer” Macias is a lady on a mission to communicate God’s vision. Her insightful words—filled with passion, humor and soul nourishment—refresh audiences from all walks of life. For more information or to view the music/video trailer for Kathi’s newest book, BEYOND ME: Living a You-First Life in a Me-First World, visit www.KathiMacias.com.

Buy This Book Here

Join Eliezer Sobel, author of the memoir, The 99th Monkey: A Spiritual Journalist’s Misadventures with Gurus, Messiahs, Sex, Psychedelics, and Other Consciousness-Raising Adventures (Santa Monica Press, Feb. ‘08), as he virtually tours the blogosphere in August on his first virtual book tour with Pump Up Your Book Promotion.

Eliezer is also the author of Minyan: Ten Jewish Men in a World That is Heartbroken, which was the winner of the Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel, and Wild Heart Dancing. His short story, Mordecai’s Book, won New Millennium’s First Prize for Fiction, and his articles and stories have appeared in the Village Voice, Tikkun Magazine, Quest Magazine, Yoga Journal, New Age Journal, and numerous other publications.

Sobel was the Editor-in-Chief of The New Sun magazine in the 70s and was Publisher and Editor of the Wild Heart Journal more recently. He has led intensive creativity workshops and retreats at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, the Open Center in New York City, the Lama Foundation in New Mexico, and Elat Chayyim Jewish Retreat Center in Falls Village, Connecticut. Sobel lives in Richmond, Virginia with his wife, Shari Cordon, and three cats: Squarcialupi, Peanut and Plum.

About the Book:

The 99th Monkey is the story of one man’s utter failure to get enlightened, despite over 30 years of trying. Eliezer Sobel invites readers along on what is both a hilarious and astounding journey through the spiritual, New Age and Human Potential movements of the last 35 years, providing an insider’s view that is at once eye-opening, deeply moving, and completely entertaining.

From encounters with enlightened beings, saints and madmen, to ingesting a powerful shamantic brew in the forests of Brazil at all-night ceremonies; from 40-days alone on a mountaintop, to 60 hours in hotel ballrooms at crash courses in consciousness; from the ashrams and gurus of India to the rebbes in Jerusalem and a ten-day Zen retreat at Auschwitz, there were very few extremes to which Sobel did not go in his life-long quest for self-realization. (”Don’t even ask about the ‘Tush Push,’ which was a partner exercise I did during a Human Sexuality Workshop. Or the very obese female therapist who sat on my head for twenty-five minutes at Esalen Institute so I could re-experience being smothered by my mother.”

Although he claims to come out at the end feeling pretty much like the same guy as when he started, and while he suggests that bookstores create a new category for his book alongside the Self-Help section to be called “No Help Whatsoever,” The 99th Monkey is actually a modern-day hero’s journey that contains its own unique blend of wisdom and insight into what it really means to be a human being.

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THE 99TH MONKEY VIRTUAL BOOK TOUR ‘08 will officially begin on August 4, 2008 and continue all month. You can visit Eliezer’s tour stops at www.virtualbooktours.wordpress.com in August!

As a special promotion for all our authors, Pump Up Your Book Promotion is giving away a FREE virtual book tour to a published author with a recent release or a $25 Amazon gift certificate to those not published who comments on our authors’ blog stops. More prizes will be announced as they come available. The winners will be announced on this blog on August 31!

Eliezer’s virtual book tour is being brought to you by Pump Up Your Book Promotion and choreographed by Dorothy Thompson.

Welcome to this week’s A Book By Any Other Name!

The game works like this: Each week I will choose a word and offer a few titles that I’ve come up with containing that word in the title. Then it’s your turn to come up with book titles containing the same word, without duplication (yes, that includes my titles.) I would also like the author, but that is just so I can find the book if I want to read it.

The current challenge: I challenge you all to reach 32 titles containing the weekly word by midnight Friday, (with no more than 10 titles commented per person and not including *my* titles in the total.)

My forfeit? For this challenge I’d like to do a little something different that will hopefully have the both of us smiling. If you all work together and reach the goal, I will send each of you who participate a post card.

Whoo-hoo right? Right! For those of you who don’t know, I live in Australia so you will be getting a postcard featuring the lovely, lovely city of Melbourne. (If you’re willing to give me your postal address, which I promise to delete as soon as I write it on the postcard.)

So if you’d like a post card, join in!

If you don’t reach the goal, we’ll try again next week. If you reach the goal, I’ll have a brand new challenge for you next Monday where you’ll get another chance.

(If you’re feeling pouty about the ten titles per person limit, why not get a friend to come and comment as well? The more, the merrier.)

The word this week is:

Beauty

I Say: Beauty : A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast by Robin McKinley

You Say…

Lindsay O’Neil has dedicated her life to helping women and their children escape from domestic abuse situations. She is a hero to many, and more than that, she is a friend. When someone decides to take up her cause by killing abusers and sending Lindsay trophies from the kill, the police get involved.

And he’s a lot closer than she thinks.

I used to say that I’m not much of a reader when it comes to crime thrillers and mysteries, but I think I’m going to have to amend that. After reading I’m Watching You, I have officially become a fan of the genre.

While I’m Watching You doesn’t take huge strides away from what’s expected in the genre, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Burton provided some twists and turns that I didn’t see coming at all. Not only that, but she goes the extra step of giving you false leads as well, which makes the overall reading experience much more satisfying.

In the past I have made the complaint that some authors try so hard to make the bad guy the person you least expect that it ends up that he or she doesn’t seem to make any sense being in that role. This book reaffirmed my faith in this genre by providing me with a killer that made complete sense.

Overall, I enjoyed the book very much. It’s everything that I could want in a book of this type plus a little bit extra that makes it distinctly Burton’s book.

I highly recommend this book. It’s not going to make you fall in love with the genre if you’re definitely not a fan, but it is a good book for the casual reader (like me) all the way to the die-hard fan. Just be warned, though, that there is a sex scene in the book. It’s well done, but if that sort of thing puts you off… Well, you have been warned.

Ph. D Hal W. Lanse is here at The Book Stacks for his final day as part of his virtual book your with Read Well, Think Well. Today he is concluding his Raising Good Readers series.

Good reading skills help children become good writers. The reverse is also true. When children learn to write well they internalize the conventions of the English language. Their understanding of English can then be applied to their reading experiences.

So how does writing begin? It begins with the alphabet. Teach your child the traditional alphabet song or just have her recite the alphabet. Always treat this as a game. Reciting the alphabet should be as fun as singing a song or reciting a favorite nursery rhyme.

I recommend that you stick lower case alphabet letters in a row along one of the walls of your home. Get some Fun Tack so that you won’t damage the paint. When your child recites the alphabet, point to each of the letters so that she can make the connection between the sound and its symbol (the letter).

Be careful of one thing: Some children get confused by one part of the alphabet song. Make sure your child understands that l-m-n-o each are individual letters. Some youngsters mistakenly think “elameno” is a single letter or word. It’s a problem created by the rhythm of the song. Be especially slow and careful when pointing to those letters.

Once your child is familiar with the letters of the alphabet she can then begin to “write” simple stories describing the activities of her day. Initially, this writing will involve drawing pictures and labeling them with the first letters of simple words: “h” for house, “d” for dog, etc.

After a few weeks or a few months start placing some simple words under their initial letters, the ones you tacked to the wall. Your child can use this “word wall” to write the complete names of things mentioned in her stories.

After six months or a year you may want to add these words to your word wall: “a” “the” “he” “she” “him” “her” “we” “our” and “it”. It’s also time to pair-up the lower case letters on the wall with upper case letters. Your child can now draw stories on the top of a piece of lined paper and then turn the story into simple sentences that begin with capital letters.

After a time, practice writing stories with your child across several pages. Show her that her favorite authors do the same thing. This will help her make the connection between reading and writing.

The process described above may seem simple, but if your child has success with it you can rest assured that she’s mastered a monumental set of skills. She’ll be well on her way to being a good reader and writer.

Join Paul Kiritsis, author of the literary collection, Hermetica: Myths, Legends, Poems (iUniverse, Sept. ‘07), as he virtually tours the blogosphere in August on his first virtual book tour with Pump Up Your Book Promotion!

The son of Greek immigrants, Paul was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1979. He has completed degrees in both the behavioral sciences and professional writing and currently works for drug safety services in the inner city region. His keen interest in mythology and literature began in childhood and later sprung into a full-fledged investigation into folklore and poetics. Many of his poems have appeared in periodic anthologies.

He is the author of the books Origin: Poems from the Crack of Dawn (2006) and Hermetica: Myths, Legends, Poems (2007), the latter having won a literary award very recently. The release of his next book, a memoir of his many travels through Greece, is tentatively scheduled for late 2008. He regards travel, reading and fitness as his greatest passions.

You can visit his website at www.paulkiritsis.com.

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About the Book:

Hermetica: Myths, Legends, Poems (September, 2007) is a homeric journey into the night where the world of dreams and symbols has sculpted our mythological past.

Using the language of alchemy, astrology and magic this tome seeks to reconstruct the lost bonds between old myths contained in the oral folklore of Ancient Egypt; stories which once served as the backbone of a religion centred around Osirian ritual - the cosmic cycles of death, dismemberment and resurrection.

It also contains a sequel to the popular Middle Egyptian tale, The Story of the Shipwrecked Sailor; a visual and dramatic interpretation of the passion of Osiris; an astrological allegory of the war between the heavenly bodies and a hermetic saga between a white witch and her mirror. The accompanying collection of poetry is a homage to the alchemy of love.

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HERMETICA VIRTUAL BOOK TOUR ‘08 will officially begin on August 4 and end on August 29. You can visit Paul’s tour stops at www.virtualbooktours.wordpress.com in August to find out more about him and his book!

As a special promotion for all our authors, Pump Up Your Book Promotion is giving away a FREE virtual book tour to a published author with a recent release or a $50 Amazon gift certificate to those not published who comments on our authors’ blog stops. More prizes will be announced as they become available. The winner will be announced on our main blog at www.pumpupyourbookpromotion.wordpress.com on August 31!

Paul’s virtual book tour is being brought to you by Pump Up Your Book Promotion and choreographed by Dorothy Thompson in conjunction with Rebecca’s Reads.

Well, technically my birthday was on Sunday, but I couldn’t resist using that as the title of this post anyway. I hope you all had a wonderful weekend and are having a wonderful week.

Remember to play the Monday game for your chance to win an Aussie postcard from me.

If you would like to review a book here, please feel free to contact me using the contact me button under the site description on the right. I’m more than happy to put up guest reviews. I’m also thinking of a best book review contest, but it’s just an idea floating around in my brain at this point.

Reading:
I’m Watching You – Mary Burton
Sabriel – Garth Nix
Savage Survival – Darrell Bain
In Bad Dreams – Horror Anthology – Edited by Mark Deniz and Sharyn Lilley
Xenocide - Orson Scott Card

Going to Read:
Left to Die - Lisa Jackson
The Joy of Pregnancy - Tori Kropp
Dead Ringer – Mary Burton
Supernatural – Graham Hancock
Marwan: The Autobiography of a 9/11 Terrorist – Aram Schefrin
Neutron Star – Short story collection – Larry Niven
Firebirds – Fantasy/Sci-fi Anthology – Edited by Sharyn November
The Lab – Jack Heath
Remote Control – Jack Heath
The Foreshadowing – Marcus Sedgwick
The Jaguar Legacy – Maureen Fisher
Target: Caught in the Crosshairs of Bill and Hilary Clinton – Kathleen Willey
To Truckee’s Trail – Celia Hayes
The Redemption of Althalus – David and Leigh Eddings
The Serpent Bride – Sara Douglass
Loving the Goddess Within – Nan Hawthorne
Bad Girls Club – Judy Gregerson
Stand – Debbie Williamson
Season of Sacrifice – Tristi Pinkston
Copper Star – Suzanne Woods Fisher
Copper Fire – Suzanne Woods Fisher

Upcoming Reviews:
Prosperity - by Deborah Woehr

So what’s on your list?

Ph. D. Hal W. Lanse is joining us here at The Book Stacks for three days as part of his virtual book tour with his book Read Well, Think Well.

Reading is thinking, discussion is thinking. Both will help to train your child’s mind and prepare him for success long after the school years have ended.

Ph. D. Hal W. Lanse is joining us here at The Book Stacks for three days as part of his virtual book tour with his book Read Well, Think Well.

Today he’s telling us a little about himself and his book. I hope you’ll join me in welcoming him.

I’m a longtime reading instructor and teacher trainer. For years I’ve given workshops to teachers and parents. I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback from parents after my workshops. Parents are aware that their children will need world-class literacy skills if they are to survive in the information economy.

After my workshops, I’m often asked if I’ve written a book or if I can recommend one. I never could recommend a good book because most books on reading are filled with confusing jargon and are written in a user-unfriendly manner. (How ironic for books on literacy.)

I never could recommend anything worthwhile to parents. When I conducted workshops, I would always provide informational packets but these, by their nature, couldn’t provide the broad spectrum of ideas and activities that I’d
learned over the years. I toyed with the idea of writing a book about reading—one that parents would find accessible. Finally, I decided I was ready.

I’d published a couple of children’s books, without much success, and when I decided to move onto something new my publisher, who focuses solely on fantasy novels, recommended me to an agent. In collaboration with my agent,
Irene Goodman, I decided at long last to write my book on reading. Irene was phenomenal. For three months she worked closely with me to develop an effective proposal, which included a sample chapter and an outline.

We sold the book and I signed the contract in June of last year. In late June my publisher asked Irene if I could finish the manuscript by September 1st. Thank heavens for summer vacation! I lived at my desk for two months. Somehow it all got done. I must have impressed the editor with the speed of my work because in November, I was asked to produce one more chapter—in two weeks. The entire experience was a satisfying but labor-intensive project.

I’m very proud of the result. I believe that Read Well, Think Well will be very useful to parents and to teachers, as well. If the book does well, I hope to write several more books for parents and some books for teens as well.

– Hal Lanse

Welcome to this week’s A Book By Any Other Name!

The game works like this: Each week I will choose a word and offer a few titles that I’ve come up with containing that word in the title. Then it’s your turn to come up with book titles containing the same word, without duplication (yes, that includes my titles.) I would also like the author, but that is just so I can find the book if I want to read it.

The current challenge: I challenge you all to reach 32 titles containing the weekly word by midnight Friday, (with no more than 10 titles commented per person and not including *my* titles in the total.)

My forfeit? For this challenge I’d like to do a little something different that will hopefully have the both of us smiling. If you all work together and reach the goal, I will send each of you who participate a post card.

Whoo-hoo right? Right! For those of you who don’t know, I live in Australia so you will be getting a postcard featuring the lovely, lovely city of Melbourne. (If you’re willing to give me your postal address, which I promise to delete as soon as I write it on the postcard.)

So if you’d like a post card, join in!

If you don’t reach the goal, we’ll try again next week. If you reach the goal, I’ll have a brand new challenge for you next Monday where you’ll get another chance.

(If you’re feeling pouty about the ten titles per person limit, why not get a friend to come and comment as well? The more, the merrier.)

The word this week is:

Work

I Say: How Fiction Works by James Wood

You Say…

He was Tiger, born of the desert winds, raised as a slave and winning his freedom by weaving a special kind of magic with a warrior’s skill. Now he was an almost legendary sword-dancer, ready to take on any challenge – if the price was right…or the woman pretty enough.

But even Del could not master all the dangers of the deadly Punja alone. And meeting Del, Tiger could not turn back from the most intriguing challenge he’d ever faced – the challenge of a magical, mysterious sword-dancer of the North…

I read Sword Dancer for the first time when I was just barely a teenager. I recently received it in a package filled with many of my other old books and was more than happy to get to know the stories and the characters once more.

Roberson presents you with a world of sand and heat in which her strong, likeable characters wander in. As Del and Tiger go about their adventures, you can’t help but like them and sympathize with their causes. Tiger makes for an excellent main character who is filled with the right amount of arrogance, caring, and sarcastic humour to keep you turning the pages.

I especially liked Roberson’s use of first person. Most of the time you forget that it’s first person until Tiger says “I”. This can be quite difficult when writing from the first person perspective because the tendency is to start most sentences with “I”.

Unlike many other books that start off a trilogy (or more), this book ties up all its loose ends while still leaving room for more books to come. I appreciated having the satisfaction of a full story as well as the promise of more books to come.

I recommend this book to fantasy lovers as well as those just getting into or feeling curious about fantasy. It doesn’t have the fantasy-heavy aspects many fantasy books do so it’s easy for the reader to enjoy.

Join Suzanne Woods Fisher, author of the historical fiction novel, Copper Fire (Vintage Inspirations, June ‘08), as she virtually tours the blogosphere in August on her first virtual book tour with Pump Up Your Book Promotion.
About the Book:

On a summer day in 1945, Louisa Gordon receives a telegram from the International Red Cross Tracing Service. Her young cousin, Elisabeth, has just been released from Dachau, a concentration camp, and Louisa is her only remaining relative.

Determined to go to war-torn Germany to retrieve her cousin, Louisa is also on a mission to discover the whereabouts of Friedrich Mueller, a Nazi sympathizer who fled Copper Springs, Arizona. What Louisa never expected was to meet the man she had once loved. And now hated.

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COPPER FIRE VIRTUAL BOOK TOUR ‘08 will officially begin on August 4, 2008 and continue all month. You can visit Suzanne’s tour stops at www.virtualbooktours.wordpress.com in August to find out more about her and her book!

As a special promotion for all our authors, Pump Up Your Book Promotion is giving away a FREE virtual book tour to a published author with a recent release or a $25 Amazon gift certificate to those not published who comments on our authors’ blog stops. More prizes will be announced as they come available. The winners will be announced on this blog on August 31!

Her tour schedule is as follows:

5/08/08 - The Writer’s Life - http://www.thewriterslife.blogspot.com/
6/08/08 - Just Me - http://jenerahealy.blogspot.com/2008/07/copper-fire-by-suzanne-woods-fisher.html
7/08/08 - The Book Stacks - http://www.thebookstacks.com
8/08/08 - Book Excerpts from Bestselling Authors - http://bookexcerpts.wordpress.com
11/08/08 - The Book Connection - http://www.thebookconnectionccm.blogspot.com/
12/08/08 - Mama Bear Reads - http://bookwormsballroom.blogspot.com/
13/08/08 - The Book Tiger - http://www.thebooktiger.co.uk/
14/08/08 - Michy’s Book Reviews - http://michys-book-reviews.blogspot.com/
15/08/08 - Fiction Scribe - http://www.fictionscribe.com
18/08/08 - Amateur de Livre - www.amateurdelivre.wordpress.com
18/08/08 - Tristi Pinkston - http://www.tristipinkston.blogspot.com
19/08/08 - Tristi Pinkston - http://www.tristipinkston.blogspot.com
19/08/08 - Paperback Writer - http://rebecca2007.wordpress.com/
20/08/08 - Reading Outside the Box - http://readingoutsidethebox.blogspot.com
21/08/08 - The Plot - http://theplotline.wordpress.com
22/08/08 - The Plot - http://theplotline.wordpress.com
25/08/08 - Book Foolery - http://bookfoolery.blogspot.com/
26/08/08 - In the Pages - http://inthepages.blogspot.com
27/08/08 - The Writers Well - http://www.writerswell.org
28/08/08 - Historical Novel Reviews - http://historicalnovelreview.blogspot.com/
29/08/08 - The Book Stacks - http://www.thebookstacks.com

Suzanne’s virtual book tour is being brought to you by Pump Up Your Book Promotion.

The 99th Monkey: A Spiritual Journalist’s Misadventures with Gurus, Messiahs, Sex, Psychedelics and Other Consciousness-Raising Experiments
(http://www.the99thmonkey.com)

In tenth grade I took a book out of the library entitled How To Develop a Million-Dollar Personality. Little did I know that it was the beginning of what would become a 30-year obsession to fix whatever I thought was wrong with me. Perhaps a little Prozac might have saved me a few decades, but it didn’t exist back then, so off I went, embarking on a great quest for answers, for “the truth,” for enlightenment. I went looking for God in all the wrong places and some of the right ones in a somewhat desperate attempt to simply feel better about my very existence here on this rather crazy planet. Years later one of my teachers would declare that “Nobody told any of us we were being born into the lunatic asylum of the universe,” and that to try to be sane in an insane world was perhaps the craziest idea of all!

In any event, I became a human guinea pig for every New Age, human potential and spiritual program I could find that promised deliverance from the personal prison I felt trapped in. I met virtually every major guru and teacher alive today, as well as people claiming to be the “avatar” or messiah of our age. I attended countless intensive consciousness workshops, extended silent meditation retreats, spent months in India, lived at ashrams and monasteries, experimented with ancient spiritual techniques and outlandish new ones. I often went to great extremes in my search, far off the beaten track, from spending 40 days alone in a mountaintop hut with no water or electricity, to taking exotic shamanic potions in the jungles of Brazil during all-night ceremonies; from submitting myself to a Moonie indoctrination camp in the woods of Northern California to doing a ten-day Zen retreat on the grounds of Auschwitz.

My life was so unusual that friends were constantly suggesting I write a book about it, so with The 99th Monkey, I finally did. The title comes from a phenomenon that has been called “The “100th Monkey,” which states that once a “critical mass” of people adopt a particular idea or practice, it reaches what today is often called a “tipping point,” causing a paradigm shift to occur in the entire culture. So once enough people bought iPods, for example, at a certain point they were suddenly everywhere, and now even new cars come with mp3 inputs.

There has been a lot of talk over the years, particularly in New Age circles, of a shift that is presumably imminent on the planet Earth, some sort of “Golden Era of Peace” that will finally deliver us from the hell realm we are collectively living in at the present time. But the belief is that this will only happen once enough of us wake up and stop merely living our lives for ourselves as individual egos and begin living from a higher, connected, global identity.

So my title is tongue-in-cheek: in order to reach the 100th monkey, obviously, you first need to get the 99th guy on board, which is me, and I have such a long history of resisting enlightenment and change, that basically I am gumming up the works for the whole planet! The book is the long history of what amounts to my utter failure to get enlightened. Fortunately, it’s quite a funny and entertaining story, but unlike most spiritual memoirs where the author claims to find a magic answer that makes everything better (and then appears on Oprah to talk about it and become very wealthy!), my book makes no such promise to change the reader’s life. In fact, I tried to convince the bookstores that they should create a new section for my book, alongside Self-Help, to be called No Help Whatsoever!

But my story is no mere lightweight romp through the spiritual supermarket. It chronicles the real struggles of an ordinary human being to get at “the marrow of life,” as Thoreau said before he went into the woods. And while I can’t promise anybody an instant cure or enlightenment, from the feedback I have received, The 99th Monkey does seem to make readers both laugh and cry, be spiritually provoked and challenged in their thinking and beliefs, and at times deeply moved. Thank you.

Buy This Book

Hello everyone!

Today I am welcoming non-fiction author B. Jay Gladwell to the site. He is here to talk a little about his book What’s Wrong With Mormons? which he is currently on virtual tour for.

I asked him to talk a bit about why he wrote the book and what his hopes for it are…

This book was written as my attempt to answer the simple question: “What’s wrong with Mormons?”

For instance, last year (2007) a member of the Church was running for the Republican nomination for president. There were endless articles about that candidate and nearly each one, in one way or another, brought up the concern of “Mormons as Christians.” This concern was most prevalent among evangelical Christians.

One such article spoke about a recent survey that showed many of these evangelicals were drawn to this candidate’s values but repelled by his Mormon faith. Can you see the irony in that statement? Isn’t that like saying, “I like apple pie, but I am repulsed by apples”? How can one accept the teachings of Jesus Christ but reject the Savior?

Think about it. How many times have you read or heard how people really admire Mormons for their family values, yet their teachings are abhorrent. Mormons are held in high regard on account of their work ethic, but the Prophet Joseph Smith was a scoundrel. Mormons are respected for their moral points of view on chastity, honesty, abstinence from alcohol, tobacco, and drugs, yet their doctrines are of the devil. Mormons are appreciated for their humanitarian contributions and the goods and services provided in the wake of natural catastrophes around the world; nevertheless, they aren’t Christians. Where has there ever been a greater contradiction of thought?

My hopes for this book are that those who read What’s Wrong With Mormons? will come away with an accurate understanding as to what it is Mormons truly believe, rather than having non-Mormons go to other non-Mormons in an effort to figure out what is it Mormons believe. The reader will learn the truth about what Mormons believe from a practicing Mormon—a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Buy This Book Here