cover image A Legacy of Love: Things I Learned from My Mother

A Legacy of Love: Things I Learned from My Mother

Ruth Graham, Stacy Mattingly. Inspirio, $12.99 (128pp) ISBN 978-0-310-80439-0

Ruth Graham, the third daughter of Billy and Ruth Bell Graham, honors her famous mother in this beautifully designed book, an appropriate gift for Mother's Day. Its brief chapters focus on the theme of legacy, as Graham reflects on what her mother taught her about God, writing, morality and loving life. We see Ruth Bell Graham as a woman with a well-honed sense of humor and seemingly inexhaustible energy, whose childhood with missionary parents in China gave her a profound compassion for those in pain. Graham writes engagingly of her mother's voracious love of reading, of the cheerful and caring letters she wrote to her children when they were homesick at boarding school or college, and of the decisive way she bought the 150 acres for their home when evangelist Billy was out of town. Readers will appreciate this tender tribute to faith and motherhood, as well as the book's fly-on-the-wall glimpses into what it was like to grow up in the First Family of American evangelicalism.