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Tepper, chief investment officer at Prevatt Capital, writes movingly of his youth as a son of missionaries living in Madrid in the 1980s. His father, seemingly destined for a career in business, had left Harvard after seeing heaven and hell in a vision while under the influence of LSD. While the family was living in Spain, the author's father devised a plan to bring drug addicts to Jesus by deploying his sons (Jonathan, David, Peter, and Timmy) to meet them and bring them home—a strategy that met resistance from his wife's parents, who thought him insane, and the missions organization for which the Teppers worked.
To the surprise of all parties, the plan proved successful. Betel, the organization Tepper's parents founded, in time became one of the largest drug rehabilitation networks in the world. Growing up, however, Tepper privately questioned the wisdom of his parents' choices. An intelligent child raised on classic literature, he witnessed firsthand how first heroin addiction and then the burgeoning AIDS pandemic ravaged Madrid's lower class. The injustice of the suffering he witnessed daily provoked unwelcome doubts about the existence and goodness of the God to which his parents had devoted their lives. Even as a boy, Tepper often wondered if there was an afterlife.
At the same time, he witnessed the power of the Gospel to transform the formerly drug-addicted. Notably, a man named Raul, once homeless and suicidal, now spoke movingly and with great sincerity to crowds of addicts about God's call to lead a holy life. "The most beautiful story anyone can tell," he said, "is the story of your own life. What do you want to tell with your life?" As with so many of the former addicts readers meet in the narrative, Raul contracted HIV from shared needles. One of the more heartbreaking moments in the book is the admission by the author's father that everyone in Betel had shared needles, and thus they had all likely been exposed to the virus. In the course of the book, young Jonathan witnesses death after death.
And then death claims one of his own. During a trip to America in the summer of 1991, the author's father agreed to let David, who'd just gotten his license the month before, drive the minivan. David crashed the car, and Timmy, the youngest, was killed instantly. Timmy's loss was devastating for the family, placing a great strain on the parents' marriage. Jonathan sought comfort in the writings of C. S. Lewis, who had written some less-than-pious reflections after the death of his beloved wife. Lewis' intellectual honesty contrasted jarringly with his father's assurances. "He trafficked in euphemism," Jonathan writes. But "Timothy died. He was dead. And he was never coming back."
Yet this is, ultimately, a story of hope, and—wonderfully, unexpectedly—of the power of books to direct the course of a person's life. The author was raised on the classics—Lewis, Tolkien, Bunyan, Dante, St. Augustine—and his father, who imbibed a love of learning from the Judaism in which he was raised, instilled in him a devotion to the intellectual life—not for vanity or riches, but for its own sake. "If we had books," Jonathan writes, "we could teach ourselves anything. The world was ours if we could read." This is the book's greatest lesson, powerfully embodied in the author's ultimate success against all odds, a success that makes the final pages read like a latter-day David Copperfield. In an age of declining curiosity and shrinking intellects, Tepper shows us a better way. It's rare to read a book that merits comparison with Alcott, Dickens, and Defoe, but he has done it. This book deserves a place on the shelf alongside those classics. It's one of the year's best books.
RECOMMENDED by the US Review