Danny Orbach’s book, Valkyrie: German Resistance to Hitler, focuses on the people who fought The Third Reich from within, people like Georg Elser, who bombed a beer hall just after Herr Hitler left. Reviewer Tom Segev writes:

Danny Orbach believes in the myth of German resistance. He rightly admires the courage of the few who dared to put their lives at risk for the sake of their country. Nonetheless, this young Israeli historian tends to assign them an exaggerated role in the history of the Third Reich. Yes, the Nazis used concentration camps and other means of suppressing resistance and intimidating would-be opponents of the regime, but the truth is that most Germans supported Hitler until the very end of the war.

Matthew Paul Turner talks about the abusive publisher of CCM magazine and how he was assigned to solicit an apology from Amy Grant for her divorce from Gary Chapman. The end of this account amazes me, but I guess I continue to be amazed at the blindness of abusive Christians, if they can be called that.

When Dr. John Rich was at the Boston City Hospital, he assumed the young black men who frequently showed up in his emergency room were somehow responsible for their violent wounds. But when he started interviewing them, he learned that many of them were victims of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“Some had been robbed, others had talked to the wrong girl at a party or been caught in the line of fire while walking home,” reports this NPR interview with Dr. Rich and Roy Martin, Rich’s urban cultural interpreter.

Dr. Rich is working to deal with the trauma these men have experienced in order to help them truly heal.

The Kingdom of God by Martyn Lloyd-Jones is up for a give-away from Crossway.

Caleb Land reviews Douglas Wilson’s book Five Cities that Ruled the World. Wilson is a reformed pastor in Idaho who has written many books and taken many strong stands, so you will find he has many opponents.

A professor at Union University explores the lives of Tolkien, Lewis, and their friends. It’s an introductory book for those unfamiliar with these people.

With unemployment holding at a little over 10%, Sol Stern points out E. D. Hirsch’s Curriculum for Democracy. Hirsch observed that students need to have a core of knowledge in order to read well, despite being versed in reading skills. Skills alone are not the sum of learning.

Stern gives an illustration of the problem facing many American students.

My children were students at P.S. 87 on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, also known as the William Tecumseh Sherman School. Our school enjoyed a reputation as one of the city’s education jewels, and parents clamored to get their kids in. But most of the teachers and principals had trained at Columbia University’s Teachers College, a bastion of so-called progressive education, and militantly defended the progressive-ed doctrine that facts were pedagogically unimportant. I once asked my younger son and some of his classmates, all top fifth-grade students, whether they knew anything about the historical figure after whom their school was named. Not only were they clueless about the military leader who delivered the final blow that brought down America’s slave empire; they hardly knew anything about the Civil War, either. When I complained to the school’s principal, he reassured me: “Our kids don’t need to learn about the Civil War. What they are learning at P.S. 87 is how to learn about the Civil War.”

So when will they actually learn details of the Civil War? When they’re trying to relax in front of the History Channel between specials on UFOs and Nostradamus?

Book Unveils Hidden World of Sexual Slavery in America