The title, The Right to Arm Bears, is almost worth the purchase price of the book. I love puns. Sue me!
The Christian, above all men, should be interested in culture. (IMHO) Why? Because culture both informs and flows from the underlying world view of man, which, for the Christian, should be Christ and Him crucified. All cultures have goals, mostly unstated, and we have ours: To glorify God.
Which obviously means that bears should be armed. Wait, no. Not quite. The title is a wonderful pun, but has very little to do with the story—except that the non-human characters are, for the most part, rather like bears—and issues of freedom (see America’s Second Amendment) are vital to the stories. But the stories are, above all, cultural stories. They have to do with what it means to be human, and how we should then live. Page after page will present parents with things to talk to their children about… and wrestle with themselves. Deep, important themes are presented in a fun, action-packed set of stories.
All this and I haven’t even told you what the book is about. Well, you have some poor slob of a human. Young, male, and virile, he gets conscripted to help the diplomatic effort on Dilbia, a planet filled with the aforementioned bear-like creatures. Which also has some evil aliens (think of Buddha after he gained some weight) who are also diplomating to promote evil and cruelty and all that jazz.
And our young man, for the most part extremely confused, has a part to play… although not the part that he thought he was supposed to play. Oh, and there’s a girl, too.
Altogether, I highly recommend this book and the rest of the series. But I recommend it as the beginning of some important discussions. Discussions that you should have in the middle of reading these books to your kids, after you have read the books yourselves and spent some serious time thinking.
An antidote both to boredom and modern thinking.
HUMANS OR HEMNOIDS:
AN UNBEARABLE CHOICE!
Planet Dilbia is in a crucial location for both humans and their adversaries, the Hemnoids. Therefore, making friends with the Dilbians and establishing a human presence there is of the utmost importance, which may be a problem, since the bearlike Dilbians stand some nine feet tall and have a high regard for physical prowess. They’re not impressed by human technology, either. A real man, er, bear doesn’t need machines to do his work for him.
But Dilbians are impressed by sharp thinking, and some have expressed a grudging admiration for the logical (and usually sneaky) mental maneuvers that the human “shorties” have used to get themselves out of desperate jams. Just maybe that old human craftiness will win over the Dilbians to the human side. If not, we lose a nexus, and the Dilbians will learn just how unbearable Hemnoids can be….
