Tyndale Biography

 
    The book is "Tyndale: The Man Who Gave God an English Voice" by David Teems.

     If you can have only one book on Tyndale in your library, this may be the one. The author , David Teems, shows some love for the period that Tyndale lived in. He also shows a deep interest in the Reformation and how it came to England.
    Tyndale was a contemporary of Martin Luther (Not the civil rights guy) and  Henry VIII also with Thomas More and Shakespeare.
    It was Tyndale who brought the Scriptures into England and translated the Scripture into that mother tongue. He had to do it in secret because the Roman church was so strong in those days; they controled the scripture. No one was allowed to touch it except for the priests.
    It was Tyndale who gave us the flowing pace of the scripture passages we know and love and memorize today.. And he did it from the Greek. He didn"t have any other translations to build upon. Yes, Wycliffe had a translation. But that was from the Latin text and in middle English. Tyndale gives us a modern English translation.
     Today we can look back at the translation we have. All this is welcome to Tyndale.
     The attempts Sir Thomas More, the lap dog of HenryVIII, used to discredit Tytndale are mentioned here also.
      It wasn"t easy bringing out a English translation in those days. Tydale can even be credited with bringing the reformation to England. Germany had Luther. Geneva had Calvin. But England had Tyndale.
      I recommend this book highly for an easy to read and flowing story.

Leadership

This is going back quite a while. But I have enjoyed this non-fiction book on leadership It is called Lincoln On Leadership by Donald T. Phillips.
  It is good for leadership techniques as developed by our sixteenth presdent and especially during the Civil War period, but also is a good addition to a library on Lincoiln and the Civil War period.
   Lincoln was faced with a war even if he didn't want one. He didn't have a choice. But he used the ledership abilities he had and were developed by him to keep the country going.
  It is subtitled Executive Strategies For Tough Times.  Persoanlly I enjoyed it I think you will also.

Biography Of Ethel Waters

Found a great biography by Donald Bogle, an instructor at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and the University Of Pennsylvania. It is concerning the life of Ethel Waters Heat Wave:  The Life and Career of Ethel Waters  I remembered her only as a back up singer for the Billy Graham Crusades. By that time she had put on lots of weight. But she wasn't always overweight. She was a thin singer/ actress before then. She also was featured, or maybe starred in A Cabin In The Sky . I did see that once at the library here in Santa Monica on one of their movie days. And she did act in Member Of The Wedding. 
I find this book to be a good biography. The author, also black, does not go light on the race issue of the times. Nor should he have done so. It is a matter of history. History must not be  forgotten or placed in an alternative universe, except in sci fi.