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Same Kind of Different as Me: A Modern-Day Slave, an International Art Dealer, and the Unlikely W...

Ron Hall,

Denver Moore

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Jan 18, 2016 Werner rated it it was amazing

Shelves: biography, christian-life

Like some of my other most rewarding reads, this is one that "snuck up on me." I'd read and liked a review of it by a Goodreads friend some time ago, but I read and like a LOT of reviews; so I'd long since forgotten that I'd ever heard of the book when someone donated a copy to the library where I work. But I thought the call number/classification assigned to it by the Library of Congress looked dubious, and decided to read it in order to make my own judgment. It proved to be a very powerful and Like some of my other most rewarding reads, this is one that "snuck up on me." I'd read and liked a review of it by a Goodreads friend some time ago, but I read and like a LOT of reviews; so I'd long since forgotten that I'd ever heard of the book when someone donated a copy to the library where I work. But I thought the call number/classification assigned to it by the Library of Congress looked dubious, and decided to read it in order to make my own judgment. It proved to be a very powerful and meaningful reading experience, which I'm very glad to have stumbled upon, even by accident!

Authors Ron Hall and Denver Moore alternate in the telling of their life stories, beginning in childhood. Lynn Vincent's contribution was apparently to splice them together --and probably to write down Moore's oral narrative, since he is, or at least was when the book was written, illiterate. (To her credit, she didn't attempt to change his simple dialect into polished "standard" English.) Moore was apparently born in ca. 1936, Hall in the late 1940s; they didn't meet until 1998, so most of their life stories proceeded along separate tracks. The story of God's working in both of their lives after they met, however, occupies more than half of the book. These are two very disparate men, unlikely to imagine as acquaintances, let alone friends. Hall was a white Texas boy, from a working class Ft. Worth neighborhood, who used college as a ticket to a more affluent life and ultimately became a wealthy art dealer. Along the way, he'd become an evangelical Christian; but his religion hadn't radically impacted his life, and he had his share of fashionable prejudices about the homeless. Moore was from a family of black sharecroppers in Louisiana, living in a condition of virtual peonage, who stowed away on a train in his late 20s and wound up in Ft. Worth, where he spent most of the next decades of his life (except for a ten-year stint in Angola Prison, and before that some time in Los Angeles) homeless on the street. (He'd been baptized as a child, and had devout adults in his life then; but in adulthood, faith hadn't played any big role in his life.)

Although she doesn't contribute a first-person strand of her own to this memoir, however, this is also the life story of Ron's wife Deborah. The couple became Christians early in their married life, but she took her faith more seriously and let it shape her more deeply. In 1998, she felt called by God to volunteer some time at Ft. Worth's Union Gospel Mission, which ministered to the poor and homeless. She also felt that Ron should join her, which he did reluctantly. When Denver came to their attention, she felt impressed that God had an important destiny in mind for him, and that he and Ron should become friends. (That was not, at the time, very high on either man's to-do list!) What follows is a remarkable true story of what Christian readers will recognize as the marvelous working of God, which changed not only both men's lives but those of many others.

Though this is nonfiction, it reads like a novel. While they don't go into sordid detail for its own sake, neither man sanitizes his life story; they're two flawed human beings touched by God. They aren't writing to make us think that they're wonderful, but to help us recognize that God is wonderful. Along the way, they touch on some profound modern social problems: racism, poverty, exploitation, technological unemployment, homelessness. And they grapple with life's tragedies, in which the bad things that happen to good people we love make "the problem of theodicy" an inescapable part of life instead of a theological conundrum. There's also an implicit message here about Christian social responsibility. But it's first and foremost a story of the what the liberating grace of God can do in the midst of a very fallen and cursed world, when we respond to Him in faith and self-surrender.

Special appended features of the book include about two and a half pages of discussion questions about themes raised in the book, a four-page interview with the authors by the publisher ("TN" stands for Thomas Nelson), and nine pages of black-and-white photographs.

There are parts of this book that will tear your heart apart. But it's ultimately a very beautiful and luminous story, and IMO a great faith builder. I give it my highest possible recommendation! ...more

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Mar 15, 2011 Alandra rated it it was amazing

Jul 16, 2012 Emily Sears Cook added it

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