Review: One Of the Few: A Marine Fighter Pilot's Reconnaissance of the Christian Worldview

One Of the Few by Jason B. Ladd
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Before I went to bible school, my book shelves consisted mainly of military history and military biographies. Fast forward 5 years or so, they are now dwarfed with theological titles. I still relish reading about the exciting accounts of men at war, and looked forward to reviewing this title.

As a seminary student, I recognise Ladd's mammoth effort to read, digest and cite from a large variety of sources to substantiate his thesis - from the military experience of himself and others, from pop culture, from Christian theologians, from secular thinkers. Ladd's retelling of military accounts/situations were intense, it rekindled my love of reading about men at war and gave me quite an adrenaline rush.

I initially wanted to flag out the rarity of Scripture in the book, but as I reflected, I think that is not a big issue as Ladd's purpose was probably apologetics and therefore his primary audience (which would not be the bible scholar types) probably would prefer extra-biblical accounts to substantiate the logical arguments put forth. And as the most helpful review on amazon points out, as the beginning of each chapter, Ladd's juxtaposition of quotations of a non-Christian against Scripture is a masterpiece.

I was however rather irritated at being left hanging about the outcome of Arnold the helicopter pilot in the prologue. This was an unwelcome distraction - I found that I was more interested in finding out what happened to Arnold - and the pages in between were standing in my way. When I finally got to the epilogue, I was disappointed at the short conclusion; I guess I was hoping to enjoy digesting what had happened after having waited 250 pages to find out the outcome!

Here are some suggestions for improvement.

Stylistically, I felt that the numerous short chapters were a challenge as a reader. Perhaps similar chapters could be consolidated into larger ones to eventually end up with about 10-15 chapters. Readers take a mental break with the end of a chapter and the beginning of another; I found it exhausting to do so about 30 times and struggled to maintain interest after about 20 chapters.

Formatting wise, the margins are far too wide; adjusting them to the usual one inch could save quite a bit of paper and perhaps even make the book a more compact size. Because the book had no illustrations, it felt like a wall of text. Fiverr.com would be a great source to include an inexpensive illustration for example at the beginning of each chapter.

I received this book from the author for the purposes of providing an unbiased review. All views are my own.

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