Reviews and Comments

Re-reading this for a book club, this was fun. I'm curious how it will be adapted to a film.

I've read many of the now non-canonical Star Wars novels, and like many, I consider Timothy Zahn's Heir to Empire trilogy the gold standard for Star Wars novels. Since the franchise was overhauled, the only novels that tempted me enough were Zahn's Thrawn trilogy that reintroduced the character of Grand Admiral Thrawn back into canon, and I thought it was okay, but they didn't make me want to read other novels from the retconned canon, and I didn't read any more for several years. Bloodlines recently came to me highly recommended, so I gave it a shot, and I liked it pretty well. It had the significant challenge of telling a compelling story against the background of the fall of the New Republic, but I think it mostly succeeded.

Balmer, a Princeton divinity professor, makes a persuasive argument that the constitutional division between faith and politics has allowed a vibrant religious environment to flourish in America, and that recent attempts by an emboldened engelical movement are a betrayal of that long-held principle. The book is relatively short and accessible, always a plus, and summarizes movements like Roger Williams' departure from Puritan Massachussetts to form Rhode Island, the founding fathers fears of state churches, the Mormonism movement in America, the Johnson Amendments to the tax code, the rise of the evangelical wing of the GOP, and finally, the current Christian nationalist movement.

This is essentially a light and accessible law review article, broken into chapters and bound in a book. It was released in 2020, and for its moment, it's pretty accurate and prescient. Witt offers two paths that the U.S. can take in public health, and 5 years later, it's rather depressing to see how rapidly we took the individual liberty-obsessed path he warned about.

I like military sci-fi, and liked the first short section quite a bit, but I disliked the characters and the plot more as the book went on. I won't be reading the rest of this series.