A Review of Mitch Kruse’s “Street Smarts from Proverbs”
In the Street
I was expecting a different book out of Street Smarts from Proverbs, a tome that former car auctioneer Mitch Kruse wrote with D.J. Williams. I was thinking the book would be about conflicts with people, and how the Bible can inspire us to solve them. Well, this book isn’t necessarily about the conflicts that we may have with others (though it does touch on this from time to time). When you start your book with an account of how the boat you were piloting hit a bigger boat that your family is on, you can say that the concept of “conflict” can be taken rather liberally.
This book essentially looks at conflict under a wider umbrella term of two things that happen to inhabit the same space at the same time — whatever that can mean to you. It does so with the focus being on the Book of Proverbs, and 12 key words (or phrases) from the book that crop up from time to time between its covers. These words are righteousness, equity, justice, wise behaviour, understanding, wise communication, prudence, discretion, wise counsel, discipline, knowledge and learning. After a section at the front of the book detailing the different kinds of fools there are (as opposed to those who seek wisdom from Proverbs’ nearly 1,000 sayings), Street Smarts from Proverbs deep dives into those 12 words.
What those chapters teach, I’m not entirely sure (and I’ve read the book). The chapters are cookie-cutter and formulaic, meaning that you can read them in any order you want and the book would still make sense. Each chapter opens up with a personal story from someone the author knows, a little background on the roots of the word being studied in its original, foreign language, and then a breakdown of three or four takeaways that we can learn about the word as it relates to Proverbs. This involves some heavy lifting, and, at times, really stretching what we’re supposed to learn. How, for instance, can you really teach righteousness as a virtue? I’m still not sure.
The thing that really defeats this book is not the fact that it doesn’t seem to know what it’s going on about, it is — and I don’t want to sound unchristian — the author’s personal stories leave a lot to be desired. Whenever Kruse starts talking about himself, you know it’s usually going to lead to trouble. In fact, he relates a story where his family went to Universal Studios theme parks in both California and Florida and bought gold passes so he could butt in front of everyone else in line. There’s a point to the story, but the backstory kind of makes the author look vain and hopelessly selfish. Not really the note you want to be striking with a Christian book.
Additionally, women take the brunt fairly hard in this book. Kruse is a fundamentalist Christian of the sort who would buy his eldest daughter a purity ring, which I’m not going to judge as an action. However, this action links into the fact that the author quotes that in Genesis 3, along with the pain of childbirth, women were supposedly yoked to their man as a form of punishment. So the whole impetus of the promise ring was so that his daughter would choose wisely with the man she would marry. Which is fine, I guess, but the world view, to me, seems a bit shaky — basing the psychology of women everywhere on something that was written 3,000 years ago and probably by men asserting a patriarchal society.
The author’s wife also seems to get referenced from time to time in what appears to be an attempt at comic relief. For instance, Kruse goes to pick some poison ivy out of his garden against his wife’s cautioning that he should use gloves. Of course, he doesn’t and it becomes a kind of “Didn’t I tell you so?” moment. It makes the author seem foolish, which is probably not what he was shooting for as an emotional reaction, and it also makes his wife look like a smarty pants. So this is going a long way to say that I often found myself not liking the author and his family in the book’s stories. In a non-fiction book, that’s a lethal recipe. It was a complete zero connection.
I hate to say it — again, I don’t want to sound unchristian — but this book does smack a little bit of self-importance. Once again, this goes back to the notion of expectations. I was expecting the book to be one thing, and it turns out to be something different. I suppose that isn’t a huge sin, but I wanted to know how to defuse situations when you meet up with a certain kind of person. Instead, the book, by and large, seems to be saying, “Throw your problems at God, and He will take care of them.” That’s fine if you’re in a 12 Step program, but harder to swallow if you’ve had to deal with difficult personality types and want to know what to do about them while still honouring God.
If that’s any way of saying that I was disappointed by Street Smarts from Proverbs, then I was. Even the title doesn’t seem to make much sense. There’s not a lot here about being a rebel learning the ways of common sense, and, in fact, the book feels more book smart than street smart. I guess the title has a nice ring to it, but, again, it advertises something that it doesn’t deliver. I’m sorry that I feel a little lost with this book. The author may just well be a swell person and not the person he paints himself as being in this book, in which he comes across as being a bit foolish. Maybe the book might help others and I appreciate its suggestion to read a chapter of Proverbs a day for 31 days (Proverbs being 31 chapters long). Still, I found Street Smarts from Proverbs to be lacking. Not street enough and not smart enough, this one occupies a place in purgatory where half-formulated ideas go to flourish.
Mitch Kruse with D.J. Williams’ Street Smarts from Proverbs: How to Navigate Through Conflict to Community will be published by FaithWords on June 26, 2017.
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