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All content of this website is under copyright and subject to all laws thereof. If you are unsure how to properly cite copyrighted material, refer to your style manual or feel free to e-mail me at bookcrazed@yahoo.com. |
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What I've Wred* |
*I am adopting the spelling of a friend, whose creative genius with things mechanical lends exciting artistry to his spelling and a long-needed distinction between past and present tenses of the verb read. Thanks for that, Mac. |
| Angelou, Maya, Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now. New York: Random House, 1993. More than wit, Angelou writes with warm good humor about events of the years it took her to get where she is. One doesn't have to adopt for oneself all Angelou's life conclusions to appreciate how she came to them. While all human beings are equal, some are more equal than others, as Orwell would say, and Maya Angelou's talent is definitely in the class of more equal. Major complaint: There just wasn't enough of it. (October 1994) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Angier, Natalie, Woman: An Intimate Geography. New York: Anchor Books, 2000. Angier is a Pulitzer Prize winner and a (U.S.) National Book Award finalist. I was drawn to this title by its good reviews and the promise that I would learn more about my own biology, a subject that has consumed much of my reading time over the past ten years. I was not disappointed. I found a great deal of information that was new to me and was constantly entertained in the process. Angier discusses the differences between men and women (yes, there is more to know), interesting odds and ends (e.g., a baby reptile will develop to be male or female depending on the temperature in the environment), the nature of female aggression, the physical side effects of promiscuity, and on and on and on. Angier writes with force and wit. What a pleasure to read really fine writing while absorbing the latest biological science findings about women and our bodies. (October 2005) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Bailey, Allen, with Penelope Holt, Singing God's Work: The Inspirational Music, People and Stories of the Harlem Gospel Choir. Rye Brook, NY: York House Press, 2009. The internationally renown Harlem Gospel Choir is a popular tourist destination for many tourists from other countries. Allen Bailey, with the help of Penelope Holt, tells his story of how and why he founded the Choir. Bailey is in a position to do a lot of name dropping, and he does. Like a lot of other memoirs of this ilk, Bailey's narrative is a series of anecdotes, usually written in the typical amateur mode of "and then after that we went to the show, and then my brother came by to tell me our mother was ill, so we took a plane to New Haven." In other words, the writing is flat, though the material is rich. Bailey's memoir is not a page turner, but it is informative. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Bak Rasmussen, Ane Marie, A History of the Quaker Movement in Africa. London: British Academic Press, 1995. Much more than a meticulously documented history of the Quaker Movement in Kenya, Bak Rasmussen has given us an honest, sensitive and amazingly objective account of the conflict that frequently arises when a church experiences rapid growth, its infrastructure too immature to withstand the onslaught of new ideas that always accompany groups of new people, as well as the demands of older members whose minority voice finally becomes strong enough to make waves. Kathleen Staudt, author of the Introduction, posits what well may be considered a primary research question for a carefully crafted and executed case study: "How can we explain conflict among people who share a spiritual community?" (October 2009) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Banner, Lois W., In Full Flower: Aging Women, Power, and Sexuality. New York: Knopf, 1992. The one point that I found of particular interest was the waxing and waning of women's social and economic status with changes in sex ratio (the number of women in proportion to the number of men) and the economic effect women's control of property had on the lives of men. Women gained when their numbers were few relative to the numbers of men, and women's control of property was restricted when it interfered with young men's abilities to make their marks in the world. There is a lot of information and valuable historical perspective on aging women, power, and sexuality in Banner's 400 pages; however, she vacillated between failure to develop some important points and overdiscussion of others. Isolated sections of the book (far too few) were quite good—good writing and good information with a balanced analysis. Banner chose a worthy topic, and she is a good writer. In Full Flower would have benefited from more attention to organization of the material and a more stringent editor. (May 1995) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Barrow, John D., The Origin of the Universe. New York: Basic Books, 1994. From the Big Bang, to Hubble's Law (the farther away a star's light, the faster it is moving away from earth), to a universe that eternally adjusts to achieve balance, to Einstein's Relativity, to Friedmann's alternative universes, Penrose's singularity, to Penzias's and Wilson's background radiation, and on and on. Despite the inherent complexity of the topic, Barrow has briefly, clearly, and logically explained all the theories of the origin of our universe (at least the scientific ones). This is not easy subject matter for me, but this was not terribly difficult reading. But then, this is information that I really wanted to know, which greatly improves my comprehension. (May 2004) | Bataille, Georges (Alastair Hamilton, translator), Literature and Evil. London: Calder & Boyars, 1973. (Orig. pub. 1957 in French).
Most writers define evil in terms of actions; Bataille defines it in terms of motive. “Sadism is Evil,” he writes. “If a man kills for a material advantage his crime only really becomes a purely evil deed if he actually enjoys committing it, independently of the advantage to be obtained from it.” I winced at the Machiavellian notion that deliberately hurting others to accomplish economic gain is not evil because the pleasure comes from accomplishing the goal and not from the hurtful act itself.
 Bataille uses Wuthering Heights as the model for Evil in literature. (He always capitalizes Evil to great effect. Capitalized, it becomes bolder, stronger, more threatening. As reader, I react, unable to think of the concept in purely intellectual terms.) Emily Brontë’s dark story of a spurned lover who destroys his own life in the process of executing his revenge seems a classic tale of Good versus Evil and, quite literally, the wages of sin are death. Bataille looks beyond that, proposing that Brontë’s characters are an expression of her own rebellion against the strict Christianity of her home life—in other words, a way to morally embrace evil thoughts.
I found the text awkward, sometimes obtuse. I suspect that my problems lie in an awkward translation. This little book is a reduced-size facsimile of a nicely typed text, suggesting a bargain publishing job for a limited audience. (December 2011)
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| Bates, Ernest Sutherland (Ed.), The Bible Designed to be Read as Literature, 4th ed. London: William Heinemann Limited, n.d. [ca. 1935]. Bates made several changes to make the bible more readable. First, it is in larger print than most standard bibles and the markings for chapter and verse have been deleted. Thus, at the outset, the pages are more reader-friendly, not presented in two columns of tiny print. Additionally, though Bates has used the King James version for most books, he has chosen the "Revised Version" for Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs. Two other helpful changes have come to my attention as I've read: Much of the text about the building of temples and genealogies of various characters has been omitted, allowing a smoother and more meaningful transition from one portion of text to the next; and duplicate psalms have also been omitted. Each book is preceded with a short essay that notes authorship, placement in history, and sometimes social aspects of the period. I am finding these changes helpful, as I work my way through my first entire reading of the Old Testament. Why read it anyway? As the first book ever printed, it continues to influence literature in obvious and subtle ways alike. And the other obvious reason: When someone says, It's in the bible, I will at least have some notion of whether or not that's so, as well as the wherewithal to place it in context and make my own conclusions with regard to interpretation. (September 2007) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Bayles, David, & Ted Orland, Art and Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking. Santa Barbara, CA: Capra Press, 1993. With pearls of wisdom gleaned from the writings of such as Conrad and Hippocrates, the authors offer artists (and would-be artists) advice and encouragement to follow a calling that is too frequently thought to be more appropriately a hobby. Though the reader addressed is one who aspires to art as a profession, much of what Bayles and Orland offer is as applicable to any undertaking: "Artmaking [dentistry, plumbing, financial analysis, tree surgery] involves skills that can be learned. . . . Even talent is rarely distinguishable, over the long run, from perseverance and lots of hard work" (p. 3). Liberal doses of unpleasant reality are well balanced with insight and reassurance. Art and Fear is the sort of little book that one might keep about for an occasional dose of comfort and motivation. (November 1996) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Becks-Malorny, Ulrike.Wassily Kandinsky: 1866-1944, The Journey to Abstraction. Cologne: Benedikt-Taschen, 1994.. Photographs, color plates, and a readable text navigate the reader through Kandinsky's life as he matured into one of the most important artists of the twentieth century. Becks-Malorny offers all the biographical details one would need to see that Kandinsky was as passionately committed to his work as a theoretician and art educator as he was to his painting. The text includes an analysis of Kandinsky's theories of color and form. The large number of color plates and reproductions of his drawings help the viewer explore Kandinsky's process. (December 1996) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Beiler, Jonas, with Shawn Smucker. Think No Evil: Inside the Story of the Amish Schoolhouse Shooting...And Beyond. New York: Howard Books, 2009. The nation—and much of the world—was shocked in October 2006 when headlines screamed the news of the shooting deaths of ten little Amish girls in their one-room schoolhouse in Pennsylvania. A day later, when the news got out that the Amish parents had visited the family of the shooter to offer forgiveness and reconciliation, the shock was even greater and the news spread even farther. How could such a horrendous act of violence against innocent children be forgiven?
Jonas Beiler grew up in an Amish community. As a teenager, he chose to leave because of his incurable love of automobiles. Think No Evil is Beiler’s memoir of the shootings and the events that followed. Writer Shawn Smucker, whose mother grew up Amish, was Beiler’s professional guide in the writing. At the time of the events about which they write, both men were living in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where the shootings took place. It was more than an Amish tragedy; it was a tragedy for everyone who lived in the area.
Beiler and his brother had operated an auto parts business until his brother’s accidental death. It was this death, as well as the death of his three-year-old daughter and a crisis in his marriage, that eventually motivated Beiler to found a counseling center. His status in the community as a counselor gained him access to the crime scene when others, even the parents of dying children, were kept behind the crime scene’s yellow plastic tape.
Beiler’s story is a very personal one. He begins by describing the community where he lives as an “English” (the Amish term for non-Amish) and where many of his friends descend from families who have occupied the area for more than two hundred years—as far back as the earliest settlements, before America’s United States had come into existence. Amish farmers in the area sell their produce and crafts—exquisite quilts, beautifully fashioned furniture, home-baked goods, and more—at weekend markets, festivals, and by the roadside. Sometimes roadside stands are not attended. Buyers choose their produce and leave their payment in a box.
It is in this atmosphere of trust and diligence that the unthinkable occurred.
There is no way to describe the scene Beiler witnessed without a sense of horror—the sight of ten little girls, blood-covered and lying on the grass outside the schoolhouse, as the first two EMTs arrive and begin their work to save whom they can and urgently move on to the next when it’s too late or looks to be too hopeless. Beiler, though, tells it with compassion and quiet dignity. He does not exploit the terrible anguish of the situation, and never ventures into the seamy journalistic language of shock and terror to prey upon his reader’s emotions.
The shooter was a local man. Charlie Roberts drove the milk truck that called on Amish farms to collect their day’s production to be taken to the dairy for bottling. They knew his face. They knew he had a wife and children who lived in the area. They knew he attended a local church. Nothing about it made sense.
Beiler describes the wakes, the funerals, the Amish meetings with the Roberts family to share in their loss. He describes the tearing down of the schoolhouse where the shootings took place and the building of a new one, farther from the road, hidden safely behind trees. He tells us how things were a year later, about the picnic where he saw the five young girls who survived the shootings, how one of them who was expected to die now lives on in a wheelchair.
When he completes his telling of the tale, Beiler attempts to answer the question that everyone has been asking, “How can they forgive?” and the question that he and others asked themselves, “What can we learn to help us more gracefully carry our own burdens?”
His answers begin with a history of the Amish, their founding 500 years ago in Germany, their settlements in the New World, the forming and honing of their commitment to forgiveness and reconciliation. He tells of his own challenges—the deaths of his brother and daughter, the affair that nearly destroyed his marriage—and how they were overcome with the help of caring therapists and the practice of forgiveness.
Whether you simply want to know the inside story of the Amish schoolhouse shootings, or you want to understand more deeply the practice of forgiveness that Beiler addresses in his last two chapters, this is a fine personal memoir of an event that captured the attention of millions across the globe—not because of its senseless brutality, but because of the nearly impossible-to-believe forgiveness extended by the victims.
“The Amish will be the first to tell you they’re not perfect,” Beiler writes, “but they do a lot of things right. Forgiveness is one of them.” That is the story he set out to write, he tells us, “how ordinary human beings ease their own pain by forgiving those who have hurt them.” (January 2012)
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| Belenky, Mary Field, Blythe McVicker Clinchy, Nancy Rule Goldberger, & Jill Mattuck Tarule, Women's Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind. New York: Basic Books, 1986. Epistemology is the study of the manner in which people acquire knowledge. Belenky, et al. conducted 135 interviews to investigate the way women acquire and convey their knowledge of the world. They identify five epistemological categories, or "ways of knowing," intimately connected to their experiences of authority: (1) silence, in which women perceive themselves as essentially mindless and without any authority of their own; (2) received knowledge, in which women perceive themselves able to receive and reproduce knowledge from external authorities, but unable to develop knowledge; (3) subjective knowledge, in which women depend entirely on their inner knowing or intuition in the development of knowledge, spurning contributions from any outside source; (4) procedural knowledge, in which women learn and apply procedures for getting and communicating knowledge; and (5) constructed knowledge, in which women perceive themselves as "creators of knowledge, and value both subjective and objective strategies for knowing" (p. 15). The authors conclude their treatise with an examination of the effect of family interaction and educational environment on the development of the five identified epistemological positions. Generally, but not exclusively, Belenky, et al. found, as did other researchers they cite, that women approach life from a position of relationship and connection to those around them, while men tend to operate from a position of separation and autonomy. This is a very important addition to the body of work on gender differences which demonstrate that women are finding their way in a world tailored for the masculine way of being. (June 1995) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Biddle, Jennifer Loureide, Breasts, Bodies, Canvas: Central Desert Art as Experience. Sydney: UNSW Press, n.d. [ca. 2010]. Biddle begins with anecdotes about her time with Central Australia's Indigenous women. As many before her, working with indigenous populations throughout the globe, she experiences frustration while trying to educate these artists about the value of their work and how to sell it to maximum advantage. And as many before her, she slowly learns that the ways of the culture in which she immerses herself prohibits elements of what she attempts to teach as good business practice. The women use this kartiya [white woman] in their midst as a tool that allows them to honor their culture while conducting business with the Whitefellas. It reminds me of a friend who lives near a Conservative Jewish synagogue. On certain holy days, when Jews are not allowed to touch light switches and certain other modern paraphernalia, the congregation recruited him to turn on exterior lighting and other routine tasks that the modern world demands in defiance of their centuries-old practice. Biddle learned, she writes, "that the amount of money received, the price paid, is not so much the issue. Selling is." Anthropologist Biddle's text is academic, bridging two disciplines: art and anthropology. Her interest, she says is in affect: what the art does, not what it means. Having spent a short time among a small group of Indigenous women in a remote settlement, Biddle's book has a special personal meaning to me. Beyond that, I believe art historians, anthropologists, and feminists throughout the globe will find her work intensely interesting. As well, this book is a visual feast of black-and-white photographs and color plates. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Biggers, John, Ananse: The Web of Life in Africa. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1962. (2nd paperback printing, 1996). In 1957, widely respected African-American artist, John Biggers, set off with his wife, Hazel, to see the people of Africa, to set foot on the continent where his ancestors lived for many generations before they were transported to America to a life of slavery. It was a spiritual journey of sorts for Biggers. At the close of his memoir, he states: "At the beginning of our tour I had experienced the discomfort, the uneasiness that an outsider always feels. I did not know from which tribal culture my forefathers were torn; I did not possess linguistic ability for communication. I soon realized, however, that having to identify with all Africans could be an asset instead of a liability, for the future of Africa depends to a great extent on dissolving intertribal dissensions. I also realized that I was probably a composite of all West African tribes anyway, because economic and sociological pressures in America during past centuries had eliminated the many tribal factions and had solidified the Negro into a common group." Biggers was one of a select group of black educators who came together at Texas Southern University in Houston, Texas to establish a place of learning for black youth, at a time when black educators, no matter how lofty their qualifications, could only find work at black institutions. His life and his art reflect a turning point in American racist policies. The new Texas Southern University was a creation of the separate-but-equal stance of the justice system of that time, which immediately preceded the powerful civil rights movement of the 1960s and beyond. The text for Ananse, though a memoir of his trip to Africa, over and again reflects the facts of racism in his life. The thoughtful text is only 31 pages. The remainder of the book is devoted to 82 reproductions of the conte-crayon drawings that Biggers made while he was in Africa. His talent and skill are evident. The power of the drawings make me grateful that he did not choose to record his experience photographically. (April 2009) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Blackburn, Julia, Old Man Goya. London: Jonathan Cape, 2002. Blackburn has concocted an interesting combination of personal memoir and biography. Her recollections of a book of Goya's art that her artist mother owned is the bridge between the author's person memories and her biographical notes on Goya's life. In addition to the usual document searchs, she traveled to the places where Goya lived and worked. The result is that much of what she has to say about Goya, his life, and his work is written in the first person, as she reflects on what she discovers. I was drawn to this book because of having read a previous Goya biography that included his complete known oeuvre. Blackburn's effort was a slow read for me at the outset, but about half way through, I engaged totally. From that point onwards, I enormously enjoyed her artistry, her ability to paint with words. A special treat is the peek into the creative process of biographical fiction. Where facts offer only a tease of events, Blackburn invites us to imagine with her what may have quite logically happened. The combination of her present and past with the known and imagined pasts inhabited by Goya is an effective device—unique among the books I have read. The book is profusely illustrated with black and white photographs of Goya's copper plates. It's an interesting effect, yet I would rather have seen photographs of the many paintings she discusses in the course of her narrative. (July 2008) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Blume, Judy, Blubber.
London: Piccolo Books, 1981. (Orig. pub. 1974). Jill is in the fifth grade; she's a good student who talks too much and at the wrong time in class. She's working hard to break her nail-biting habit, and she deplores her younger brother's annoying habit of constantly quoting from the Guinness Book of Records. At school, she follows the lead of the class bully in repeatedly humiliating a chubby classmate, nicknaming her Blubber. Jill and her best friend, Tracy, put rotten eggs in a neighbor's mail box at Halloween because they think he's an old grouch.
Children's books are typically morality tales; that's why we know at the outset that Jill is going to triumph in her struggle with nail-biting, that she is going to develop a loving appreciation of her brother, she will realize the harm of her bullying and apologize and become friends with her besieged classmate, and that she and Tracy will discover their grouchy neighbor is a kind old man who still grieves for the loss of his beloved wife. But that's not what happens.
Maybe it's because Judy Blume's story formula imitates reality, or maybe it's because this story is reality (based on a true incident in her daughter's fifth-grade class), but the story does not unfold as the expected morality tale. Jill does free herself from her unhealthy relationship with Wendy, the class bully, but she chews off all her fingernails in the process. She and Tracy do have to make amends to their grouchy neighbor, and in the process Jill's father discovers that the neighbor really is a mean-spirited child hater. And Jill and the rest of her classmates eventually do stop harassing Linda ("Blubber"), but no one apologizes to the girl who seems always to be wearing a kick-me sign.
Blume's characters take some getting used to — a mother who sneaks cigarettes while she's trying to stop smoking, a father who yells at the top of his lungs to get obedience, and children who are allowed to use bad language at home, with the off-hand warning that they need to use good sense about using it in public. So maybe the moral in Blume's books is that something is always going wrong and something is always going right, life goes on, and we usually learn something from our mistakes. Whatever her message, children of all ages have been flocking to her books since the first one was published in 1969. (November 2009)
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| Bolen, Jean Shinoda, M.D., Crossing to Avalon. San Francisco, CA: Harper San Francisco, 1994. Three meaningful themes emerge in this account of one woman's midlife passage: the struggle for authenticity, the importance of naming experiences and sharing life stories, and the merging of masculine and feminine energies. It is empowering to read an account that implies, "This is my personal experience, and this is how I believe it reflects the experience of others." In liberating herself, Bolen seeks to liberate others, all the while encouraging women to share their thoughts and feelings, give words to their experiences so that no one need be alone. She shares the story of the disintegration of her marriage, and with surprisingly little detail manages to evoke feelings of recognition and understanding. She shares the story of her friend celebrating her menopause with separation from her husband and yielding her reproductive system to advanced cervical cancer that had invaded her lymph system, not yet knowing if she would be in the 50% who would survive for five years. There is a small cast of characters, yet without discussing menopause or hot flashes, Bolen describes a process that is common to many women at midlife. Not only is her journey one of hard-won insight, it is also a description of a real-life pilgrimage to sacred places. Her pilgrimage experience creates an archetype for menopausal women. Standing barefoot on the High Altar at Glastonbury, she experiences the merging of God and Goddess—the divine flow of masculine and feminine. A year later she looks back and knows that at that moment she was experiencing her last bleed—it was her moment of menopause. Her integration of the Grail story creates a work that should be just as meaningful to men as women, particularly the last half of the book. Powerful, comforting, loving. Each time I finish a book, I think of someone I know that would benefit from reading it. Crossing to Avalon goes on my list for "Everyone Over 40 and Nearly Everyone Else." (March 1995) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Bolen, Jean Shinoda, M.D., The Tao of Psychology: Synchronicity and the Self. New York: Harper & Row, 1982. Quantum physics has defined a basic unit of matter that makes up all things, both organic and inorganic, which is pure energy. The same unit of energy that is a part of your body today may, only days before, have been a part of a bird flying over Beijing or an Ethiopian villager. This "new" knowledge from modern physics sounds very much like the Tao--in Eastern philosophies, the "unifying principle in the universe to which everything in the world relates" (p. 3). The tao (lowercase) is the life path that is in harmony with the universe, the "path with heart" (p. xii). Jung believed that all people and all animate and inanimate objects are linked through a collective unconscious. Synchronicity, he said, was a connecting principle that manifests through "meaningful coincidences" (p. 6). Bolen proposes that synchronicity is the Tao of psychology; it relates the individual to the totality. She makes good use of anecdotes to explain Jung's layers of consciousness, the Jungian analytical tools of amplification and active imagination, and the difference between causality and synchronicity. Bolen has a gift for making clear Jungian concepts that seem obtuse or hazy in the hands of other writers. (June 1995) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Bryson, Bill, In a Sunburned Country. New York: Broadway Books, 2000. Bryson is one of the most entertaining writers in the English language. His name on a title guarantees you'll learn something you didn't know before you read it and you'll laugh out loud at many points along the way. Considering the current relationship between Australia and the United States, certain segments are historically quite interesting: "Australia was slightly more important to us in 1997 than bananas, but not nearly as important as ice cream." There are many interesting things to be said about Australia ("Of the world's ten most poisonous snakes, all are Australian. Five of its creatures—the funnel web spider, box jellyfish, blue-ringed octopus, paralysis tick, and stonefish—are the most lethal of their type in the world."), and Bryson says them well. His description of listening to a cricket match on his car radio compares well with a Sunday morning radio broadcast of a Quaker meeting. He thought the radio was broken until the teams returned from afternoon tea. In retrospect, Bryson isn't one of the most entertaining writers in the English language; he is the most entertaining writer in the English language. (March 2004) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Burbank, Luther, The Training of the Human Plant. New York: The Century Co., 1909. Taking on subjects that continue to be debated nearly a hundred years later, Burbank boldly asserts, "environment is the architect of heredity . . . acquired characters are transmitted and . . . all characters which are transmitted have been acquired." With enthusiasm, he looks forward to "the opportunity now presented in the United States for observing and, if we are wise, aiding in what I think it fair to say is the grandest opportunity ever presented of developing the finest race the world has ever known out of the vast mingling of races brought here by immigration." Burbank equates education with cloistered classrooms and little noses stuck all day in big books, thus concluding that early education impairs a child's nervous system. "No boy or girl should see the inside of a school-house until at least ten years old," he adamantly declares. And then, impatient with the notion that delinquency builds character, he scolds, "The most dangerous man in the community is the one who would pollute the stream of a child's life. Whoever was responsible for the saying that 'boys will be boys' and a young man 'must sow his wild oats' was perhaps guilty of a crime." In charmingly outdated language, he espouses viewpoints that continue to have their champions in our modern society, so much more hectic today than the ambitious, overbusy Americans whom he criticizes in his early twentieth-century world. He reminds us of universal and timeless truths that are rediscovered with each generation of parents, teachers, and psychologists: "You can never bring up a child to its best estate without love"; "Teach the child self-respect . . . No self-respecting man was ever a grafter"; "Do not be cross with the child; you cannot afford it. . . . We cannot treat a plant tenderly one day and harshly the next; they cannot stand it." (October, 1997) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Camp, Charles, American Foodways: What, When, Why and How We Eat in America. Little Rock, AR: August House, 1989. New York: The Putnam Publishing Group, 1992. The American Folklore Society established their Foodways Section in 1977. Concurrently, Charles Camp was writing his dissertation on the America Eats program of the WPA and suggested that emphasis be on food events, not the food itself. Written for the folklore professional, Camp's topic is easily accessible to the average adult reader. It is interesting to read how food structures the social life of nearly all cultures. I wouldn't recommend the book as a fun read, but I'd certainly recommend it to anyone who is involved in an academic study of food as it relates to culture. (November 1997) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Cameron, Julia, The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. New York: The Putnam Publishing Group, 1992. Cameron has created a powerful 12-week workbook program for unleashing creativity—not just for creating painting and poetry, but for becoming the conscious creators of our own lives. Many people work it alone (and often take longer than the 12 weeks Cameron lays out), but Artist's Way groups have formed throughout the world to make it a shared experience. For those who are frightened, intimidated, or simply turned off by the words "God" and "spirituality," you will be more comfortable with some other approach to feeding your creativity dragon. (April 1995) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Carr-Gregg, Michael, The Princess Bitchface Syndrome: Surviving adolescent girls. Camberwell, Victoria, Australia: Penguin, 2006.The Princess Bitchface Syndrome addresses itself to parents of teenage girls, who are their old sweet selves one moment, and demanding, emotional harpies the next. Carr-Gregg stresses the importance of setting boundaries and having rules. He provides sound advice on walking the fine line between teaching responsibility and giving away parental authority. Don't be fooled by the sensational title. This is a serious and valuable book that should be read by the parents of teenage girls in all first-world nations. "By the time girls turn 13 they look like they're ready for anything. But they're not," warns Carr-Gregg. We are reminded that the brain center where decisions are made is not entirely mature and competent until age 25. Author of a number of advice books for parents and founder of Can-Teen, a support group for teen cancer patients, child psychologist Michael Carr-Gregg is most celebrated among his peers for his work and research with teenagers with cancer. He is a popular expert guest on a number of television and radio programs. (June 2007) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Chappell, Tom, The Soul of a Business: Managing For Profit and the Common Good. New York: Bantam Books, 1993. I have purchased and given away at least three copies of this book. In 1974 Tom and Kate Chappell borrowed $5,000 to start a business creating and marketing the kind of personal care products that they wanted for themselves—additive free, chemical free, environmentally friendly. The Soul of a Business is Tom Chappell's story of how he integrated his values into his business practice and still enjoyed substantial profit. His tale is both inspiring and informative, idealistic and practical. In his own words:
My message is simple: Beliefs drive strategy. Your ethics can form the
foundation of smart analysis and clear thinking. Your personal values can
be integrated with managing for all the traditional goals of business—
making money, expanded market share, increased profits, retained
earnings, and sales growth. Not only can your personal beliefs be brought
to work, they can work for you. You can be a hard-assed competitor
and still run a business with soul.
Chappell is not talking theory. Instead of going to Harvard Business School to learn to grow his business, he went to Harvard Divinity School to address a question that was interfering with his peace of mind: "Could I stick to my respect for humanity and nature and still make a successful company even more successful?" Chappell says he found his answers "in the writings of the great philosophers, Immanuel Kant, Jonathan Edwards, and Martin Buber."
Chappell's part-time sabbatical convinced him he could grow his soul and the soul of his business and continue to expand and grow profits. And that's what he did.
There is a sort of sad ending to this
story that's not covered in this 1993 book. In 2006, Colgate Palmolive
acquired 84 percent of Tom's of Maine at a cost of $100 million. The
Chappell's retained 16 percent. Company policies are protected under the
terms of the sale, but a glance at the labels of Tom's products currently
on store shelves reveals that product formulas have changed. The Tom's
website shows that these new ingredients are natural, despite scary names like zinc citrate trihydrate, capric triglyceride, monosodium phosphate, and propylene glycol. Not all natural products are fit to go in my mouth. Bat guano is natural, crude oil is natural, uranium is natural, and I don't want those things in my body. Everything has a natural source; it's screwing around with it that earns it the name synthetic (and not all synthetics are harmful). Note the effort that is devoted to make everything sound so natural in Tom's list of ingredients, e.g., Poloxamer 407 "Processed from natural gas and oil." I'd like to believe that the Chappell's were able to harness corporate greed with their sale documents, but I'm not wholly convinced.
Despite where Tom's of Maine is today, under the auspices of Colgate-Palmolive, Chappell's book about how his mid-life crisis (that's my label, not his) was resolved by making socially responsible business his life's work is still a good read—and good sound business advice. (October 1997)
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| Charpentier, Louis, The Mysteries of Chartres Cathedral. New York: Avon Books, 1975. Gothic architecture appeared quite suddenly, "without preamble," Charpentier writes, as he begins to unfold his theory of the mystical origins of the famous Chartres Cathedral in France.
Mysteries from the old religion mix with mysteries from the new. The cathedral is built on an ancient, pre-Christian sacred site. Each year on the summer solstice, the sun illuminates a certain flagstone in the transept. In the center of its stone floor is a labyrinth. In a grotto, beneath the church, by an ancient well, is found the Black Virgin, the statue of a woman with a child seated on her knee, that was purportedly sculpted by Druids before Jesus's birth.
No one has yet solved the mystery of how the colors of the stained glass windows were accomplished or their particular unique luminosity. "They are a product of high science," claims Charpentier, "a product of alchemy."
Charpentier proposes that the Knights Templar may have transported the Ark of the Covenant to a hiding place in Chartres Cathedral. He even suggests the possibility that a copy was made and hidden in Egypt.
When other, larger cities ran short of funds to complete their great cathedrals (there were eighty such Gothic structures under construction simultaneously, twenty of them in France), Chartres moved forward. Again, Charpentier points to the Knights Templar. They were the ones, he posits, who financed its completion.
To gain most benefit from Charpentier's theories and insights, having a friendly interest in mathematics is essential. How else can you get through many of his revelations?
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| The "Cubit of Chartres" is 0.738 meters. All measurements are made
of it and even the thickness of the octagonal pillars. . . . [0.738 is] the
hundred thousandth part of the degree of the parallel of latitude of
Chartres. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The cathedral's builders were not merely architects or master masons, according to Charpentier. Of necessity, they would have had an incredible store of scientific and mathematical knowledge. Ancient underground caverns, the great pyramids of Egypt, the Temple of Solomon, the Holy Grail, the Philosopher's Stone — they all figure in the mystery of Chartres Cathedral, writes Charpentier. (October 1999) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Child, Julia, with Alex Prud'homme, My Life in France. New York: Knopf, 2006. It all began with a new bride wanting to learn to cook and progressed to owning a share in a cooking school, writing classic cookbooks that will be in print for many years, and becoming a television celebrity. During her last years, Julia Child and her husband's grandnephew, Alex Prud'homme, met frequently to record her memories. The heart of the narrative is her first years in France, where she arrived in 1948 as a newly wed whose cooking repertoire was comprised of a bad job of boiling water. The serious home cook, who has dabbled in a variety of cuisines (and most certainly French), may reap the most enjoyment, yet her story is intensely interesting, on a personal and public level, and very well written. There were moments when I wished I had a French dictionary at my side, but those moments weren't frequent enough to spoil a good read.
Considering her age at the time of the writing, Prud'homme most certainly would have been responsible for the organization and undoubtedly did the bulk of the writing. But his contribution and his great aunt's voice are seamlessly interwoven. As I read, I could hear her warbling, high-pitched voice and was reminded of her wit from her television cooking shows.
I read the last page with a smile, shut the book, and felt as satisfied as if I had just finished making her recipe for Cream of Mushroom Soup and found it to be perfect in every respect. I got the feeling that Julia looked back on her life with that same sense of satisfaction. She doesn't apologize for her privileged background, and she doesn't complain about being a somewhat homely, well-educated, quite bright, six-foot-two-inch woman who didn't marry until she was well into her thirties and never had the children she and her husband wished for. She mentions her sadness at not being able to share a close relationship, or even a viewpoint, with her father, but she doesn't wallow in it. She incorporates names, but never drops them. She is unpretentious, natural, and disarmingly honest.
So many people look back with harrowing tales of disappointment and unhappiness; Julia gave us her joys and successes to share. I liked her before I knew anything about her life; now I like her a lot more. (February 2008)
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| Clayton, Joseph, Saint Anselm: A Critical Biography. Milwaukee: The Bruce Publishing Company, 1933. Bargain books sometimes lead me into areas I had never intended to inhabit. Such is the case of the life of Saint Anselm that I picked up in a garage sale for 50 cents—of no interest to me primarily because I had no idea who he was. How critical the biography really is, I have no way to judge, but it's a ripper of a yarn, despite its academic language and litany of dates and places. According to a quick casting of the Internet, Anselmo d'Aosta was a Benedictine monk, Archbishop of Canterbury and brilliant philosopher and theologian, best known for his "ontological argument for the existence of God." While I do not intend to make light of these accomplishments, if Father Clayton is to be believed, Anselm was all these things AND the inspiration for (and source of) the doctrine of separation of church and state. The story as it is told by Clayton would make a magnificent film, surpassing in drama Burton's and O'Toole's A Man for All Seasons. Anselm was appointed as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1093 during the reign of William II (who was determined to maintain supremacy over the Church) and continued as Archbishop into the reign of Henry I (who also was determined to maintain supremacy over the Church). According to Clayton, Anselm was old and tired and unwilling to leave his life as a thinker of deep thoughts and world-famous academic at the Abbey of Bec. The king thought him too old and wrapped up in his books to be any serious threat to his royal plans to plunder the see of Canterbury, and the Pope thought him too old and loyal to undertake anything so unseemly as defy papal authority. But Anselm, Clayton says, fooled them both. He spent his 16 years as Bishop of Canterbury fighting both kings and pope to keep the Church independent, neither the master nor servant of any monarch. Through court battles, banishments, threats and rages, Anselm bested them all, in the name of God, in the name of separation of church and state. Whether he was truly this simple, extraordinarily strong man of God or a savvy politician manipulating himself into a position of power, as some writers argue, Anselm rocks. (August 2000) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Clayton, Meg Waite, The Wednesday Sisters. New York: Ballantine, 2009. (Orig. pub. 2008). Five young mothers meet by the swings at their local park, form a writing group, and thirty-five years later they attend the funeral of one among them and remember their years of friendship and mutual support. Against the backdrop of the 1960s/1970s era of social change, Meg Waite Clayton has crafted a lovely story of female friendship and the lives of families, as some go through divorce and others struggle through the day-to-day challenges of long marriages. This is a good read, though I would not compare it to the Ya-Ya sisters as some have. At the end of my paperback copy is “A Conversation Between Meg Waite Clayton and Brenda Rickman Vantrease.” Vantrease, author of The Mercy Seller, was a member of Clayton’s real-life version of the Wednesday sisters and a continuing friend and critic, even though they are now separated by thousands of miles. As a writer who aspires to fiction, I was entranced with Clayton’s account of her many edits of her manuscript before she felt ready to offer it for publication. She reminds me that writing is work. Also at the end of this edition is a list of the books that individual members of the Wednesday Sisters labeled their “model books,” with a text by Clayton discussing each choice. I got as much pleasure reading this section as I did reading the novel. Maybe more. My reading is dominated by nonfiction. Possibly that’s why I’ve struggled so with writing fiction. Read what you want to write, they say. (November 2011) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Clinton, Bill, My Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. Before reading the first page, my view of Clinton was one of begrudging admiration for a record of improving the lives of human beings–begrudging because I viewed him as a wily, womanizing politician who never failed to indulge his personal proclivities for base pleasure (a blanket view that I have cynically and indiscriminately extended to politicians generally for most of my adult life). My reaction, after the first few pages, was that Clinton simply isn't the engaging writer that Jimmy Carter is. "Plodding but very decent" was the comment Clinton's university professor wrote on his student essay. That's a valid summary of Clinton's writing style, yet it falls short of describing the book's underlying charisma. One hundred pages into the 900 pages of text, I gave into a fascination with the complex nature of the presidency, how he came to it, and how he chose to fulfill its duties.
Having watched the two major Clinton book-tour interviews that were broadcast on Australian television, I saw that he writes the way he speaks, with an introspective sort of enthusiasm, not wanting to leave out any detail or fail to mention the names of people he feels deserve recognition. It is both name dropping and reverse name dropping, as he creates a historical record of connections.
Clinton's natural gift for politics and understanding of its rightful position of importance in the evolution of human consciousness exposed to me my own woeful lack of political grace and what losses can be suffered for failing to accept its validity in a life well lived. He offers an insider's view of politics in both its most positive and most negative manifestations, while painting a portrait, layer upon hidden layer, of a man who was born with the drive for a public life. I could not fail to be impressed with his political genius and accomplishments in the world of peace negotiations and awed by the daily parade of major and minor decisions that face a head of state.
The prodigious adversity of Clinton's eight years in the White House was the making of the man, the making of a legend, and may well be the ultimate undoing of the forces who opposed him with highly personal, self-gratifying animosity. He has emerged, in the eyes of most of the world, a personal and public success, a model of the flawed but persistent integrity of a Good Man, due in no small part to the likes of Ken Starr and others who paraded the self-indulgent lust of a middle-aged man for dreamy-eyed girls in blue dresses as a camouflage to their own coming into rut for high position and dreams of victory for their General-Bullmoose political policies. Had the path been smoother, the man may not have been so great or so good.
As a pleasure read, the book is too long, has too many names and dates, and reads a bit like an academic paper—a "plodding but very decent" one. That having been said, Clinton has done a fine job of documenting his view of history while keeping it within the reach of the average reader. It is difficult to imagine that his successful combination of historical record and view into the personal, day-to-day experience of being President of the United States could have been accomplished in fewer pages. Nonetheless, as no doubt many other readers did, I daintily skimmed the surface of much of the minutiae, knowing that I could return at some later time, consult the index, and reread key passages. Yes, an index. A glorious index!
This is not just a document for future scholars of the Clinton presidency; he offers views of all the major political figures of his time, from snapshots to mini-series. Scholars of the personal and public lives of many of the important political figures of the latter half of the twentieth century will find Clinton's observations a valuable addition to their other resources. Typical of his succinct political summaries was his statement that McClellan "thought politics was about money and power" and Fulbright "thought politics was about the power of ideas"–one among many of his personal viewpoints offered, but isn't that what all historical analyses are?
I began the book with a one-dimensional view of an American politician (all of whom I have seen as cast in the Huey Long mold) and completed the book seeing his presidency as an expression of natural political genius and a personal struggle for a high level of integrity, played out against a backdrop of flawless humanity as manifested in a typically flawed life. I have abandoned my pride in my ineptitude as a political animal and now aspire to improve my skills in this formerly despised arena of human interaction. (March 2005)
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| Clow, Barbara Hand, Liquid Light of Sex: Understanding Your Key Life Passages. Santa Fe, NM: Bear & Company Publishing, 1991. An astrological theory of key life passages marked by (and specifically caused by) transits of Saturn, Uranus, and newly discovered Chiron to their places in our birth charts, based on work by respected British astronomer Percy Seymour. (February 1995) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Cooper, Philip, Cubism. London: Phaidon, 1995. Cubism was a phase in the development of perhaps every major artist contemporary to the periods immediately preceding and immediately following World War I. Picasso and Braque, working closely together in Paris between 1906 and 1908, are credited as the creators of this style. Cubism was the major step toward Abstractionist painting that came to dominate twentieth-century art, preceded only by Cézanne, whom Picasso credited as its inspiration. With 48 full-page color reproductions of important Cubist paintings with accompanying discussion, and an additional 36 illustrations in black and white, Cubism is a useful history and summary of Cubism and the artists who practiced it. (December 1996) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Cornell, Judith, Drawing the Light from Within: Keys to Awaken Your Creative Power. New York: Prentice Hall, 1990. Judith Cornell's well-structured course offers a satisfying combination of basics and exercises that serve to stimulate and encourage individual creativity. With a Ph.D. in art and philosophy, artist-writer-educator Cornell has combined her fields of interest in constructing an art study suitable for beginners, but with something to contribute also for those whose study of art may be more advanced. The book's exercises guide the student through the basics of composition, painting, drawing, and creating with color pencils. Cornell's aim, however, goes beyond teaching the basics of art. The structure of the exercises include meditation techniques designed to enhance creativity. Emphasis is placed on learning to use values from light to dark to create compositions that vibrate with light. (April 1995) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Cunxin, Li, Mao's Last Dancer. Camberwell, Victoria, Australia: Viking, 2003. From beginning to end, this is an engrossing read. The pace is gentle and pleasing in the opening chapters, where Cunxin relates the story of his childhood, when everything was in short supply except siblings, cousins, and familial love. Like any good nonfiction thriller, even though the outcome is already known, the suspense propels the reader rapidly from one page to the next during the telling of his detention in the Chinese Embassy in Houston. It's always a bit intriguing to peep into the life of someone who has hob-nobbed with the rich and famous, but Cunxin has much more than that to offer. Rich descriptions of Chairman Mao's China, both in the poorest sections of the remote countryside and in the relatively more affluent cities put forth a glimpse into the lives of the people who lived inside a system that has long been a mystery to Western readers. Cunxin builds a bridge between the idealists who embraced the communism that was touted as the cure for hunger, injustice, and inequality and the people on the other side of the world who viewed the great experiment as a one-dimensional threat to democracy. He has successfully revealed the humanity on both sides. (June 2008) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Curle, Adam, Tools for Transformation: A Personal Study. Stroud, UK: Hawthorn Press, 1990. Adam Curle was a Quaker mediator for thirty years, a job that paid no salary, though his no-frills travel expenses were customarily covered by the parties requesting the mediation. Tools for Transformation is memoir only to the extent that his experiences serve as examples for his message: how to live a peaceful life—as an individual, a community, a nation. In his retirement, Curle has taken up the study of Buddhism, which he has usefully employed in his outline of constructive change that can transform our world into a less violent landscape. As the back cover states, he "blends the influences of contemporary depth psychology, modern physics, Buddhism and Quaker practice." This is a fine volume for nudging along personal growth, as well as an inspiring text for group discussion. (December 2007) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Cutler, Winnifred B., Hysterectomy: Before & After. New York: Harper & Row, 1988. Cutler offers a readable, informative, and very comprehensive reference work, citing 1,000 scientific journal articles and based on the author's review of 3,000 articles that appeared in peer-reviewed journals. Cutler's work will stand up over time. As it ages, the reader may want to include more recent literature, but Cutler will find a place on the bookshelf for many years to come. (October 1994) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| De Angeli, Marguerite, Thee, Hannah! Kingswood, Surrey, England: The World's Work, 1962. (Orig. pub. New York: Doubleday, 1940). The youngest of five children in a Philadelphia Quaker family just before the American Civil War, nine-year-old Hannah is impatient with the requirements of her Quaker faith. She longs to trade in her gray velvet bonnet for a gaily decorated one, such as that worn by her best friend, Cecily. As well she longs for Cecily's hooped skirts and gaily colored dresses. Her discontent with her lot in life as a Quaker gets her in a scrape or two, until she has an experience that causes her to see her Quaker limitations in a new light. Any child who has longed to "be like the others" will relate to Hannah's situation. De Angeli is a master at her craft as a children's author. No wonder this classic children's book has been in continuous print since its first publication in 1940. Nothing about the story betrays its age; it is truly a timeless tale. Children four and over will enjoy hearing the story, and the eight-to-eleven group will take pleasure in reading it to themselves. (May 2007) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| De Hartog, Jan, The
Peaceable Kingdom: The Children of the Light 1652-1653. London: Hamish
Hamilton, 1972. This is the first of two novels fictionalizing the
early history of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). Written by
Tony Award-winning playwright and bestselling novelist Jan de Hartog, this
first volume begins the year George Fox, one of the founders of the
Society (and often called the father of Quakerism), meets Margaret Fell,
wife of the influential Judge Thomas Fell. It's all a matter of history:
George Fox convinces Margaret Fell of the virtue in his way of
interpreting the words of Jesus, and she immediately sets about walking
the walk and talking the talk. In accordance with Fox's teachings, she
makes the first steps towards erasing the social boundaries between
mistress and servant and begins her work in English prisons—educating,
clothing, and feeding imprisoned children, those imprisoned for their own
sins and those imprisoned with their debtor parents. De Hartog
humanizes these historical characters. He allows Margaret Fell (who in
real life married George Fox a few years after her husband's death) to
develop a crush on the young Fox that could endanger her marriage. His
characters have social lives, spiritual lives, political lives, and, most
convincingly, love lives. De Hartog won his Tony for The Four Poster, a play about married life, and
he was married three times, rearing two children in each of these
marriages. Perhaps that is why he does such a convincing job of describing
husband-wife interactions in a realistic way. In short, the author has
brought musty historical characters to life, enhancing their saintliness
with real-life humanity. In a Historical Note at the end of the
book, De Hartog fills in the events of the personal lives of these
characters, as they unfolded in the years following the ending of his
story, and the events during the ensuing one hundred years that led to
William Penn's founding of his Quaker colony in America. As he interprets
the facts of history, George Fox may have attracted followers with his
charismatic sermons, but it was Margaret Fell who organized them into a
religious and political movement. Without her, those early convinced to
Fox's way of thinking would have disappeared into one of the other many
groups who rebelled against the state church and the state during the
period of the English Civil War. De Hartog's decision to have Margaret
Fell as his main character and George Fox as a secondary character, who
writes a few letters and drops in on rare occasions, is quite illustrative
of this opinion. (April 2009) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Dé Ishtar, Zohl. Holding
Yawulyu: White Culture and Black Women's Law. North Melbourne:
Spinifex Press, 2005. Yawulyu is
Women's Law. It is half of the Aboriginal Tao, the rules for living a
proper life among the Indigenous peoples of Balgo, a small community in a
remote region of the Great Sandy Desert of northern Western Australia. The
other half of their Way would be, of course, Men's Law. For Indigenous
Australians, anima and animus, male and female are not two energies that
dwell in each individual, but two energies that dwell in the community,
embodied in male and female bodies. The totality of their lives is lived
in two separate and equal parallel communities, men's business and women's
business, that meet in the conjugal bed and other specified rituals of
community life. Zohl dé Ishtar lived among the Senior
Law Women of Balgo for two years. What began as a sociological research
project, complete with tape recorders, notebooks, and a laptop, became a
life-changing experience, during which dé Ishtar learned as much (if not
more) about government bureaucracies, political expediency, and human
greed as she did about the cultural life of Aboriginal women in
Australia's Red Centre. As a memoirist, dé Ishtar is a skilled
and entertaining writer, casually drawing the reader into her daily life
in a dusty, sunburned landscape. Her discoveries of self, a characteristic
of the best writers in this genre, have the texture of honest revelation.
"The biggest problem I confronted was, to my horror, my own racism," she
writes. "It hides in the propensity of many well-meaning Whites to
romanticise Indigenous culture." Most readers will be white; most readers
will recognize themselves in dé Ishtar's insights into her own hidden
bigotries. It becomes a relief to let go of romantic, manufactured guilt
over having debilitated a mythical race of spiritual masters. This does not mean
that nothing has been lost, that white civilization has no blood on its
hands, no guilty stain on its phallic towers of economic progress. What it
means is that the noble savage is just another human being like you and I.
It is our fellow being, our neighbor, our sister and brother who have been
decimated in a futile effort to satisfy the modern addiction to bigger,
better, and more. It was not genocide; it was fratricide. Dé Ishtar was
appointed as Culture Woman, taken into
confidence, and allowed to participate in ritual. Much of what she learned
will never be written or passed on at scientific meetings. In committing
to the experience, she agreed to the secrecy that was integral to some of
the traditional practices to which she was made privy. In becoming a part
of their community — eating with them, sleeping with them, singing and
dancing with them — she became a participant and a witness to their
frustrations at being unable to gain the ear of governmental agencies
whose duty it was to listen to their needs and respond. The only thing
more shocking than the history of government-sanctioned abuse was the
useless, resource-draining bureaucracy that victimized Australia's
Indigenous population, while existing only for its own benefit — making
some rich and simply affording others a government job. Holding Yawulyu, is a memoir, an important
sociological and anthropological discourse on Australian Aboriginal
women's business, a history of Kapululangu, the Women's Cultural Centre in
Balgo, an historical account of the white government's changing Aboriginal
policies, and Zohl dé Ishtar's doctoral dissertation. (March 2009) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| de Lacey, Lynda, Australia's Greatest Inventions. Wollombi, NSW, Australia: Exisle Publishing, 2007. This is one of the twelve books that comprise Exisle's Little Red Book series of essays on Australian history. The author does a fine job of condensing a large body of information into less than a hundred pages, covering everything from mechanical devices to medical research to agricultural innovation, and on and on. There are some surprises for Americans (at least for this one), such as the pick-up truck (a ute in Australia), the use of penicillin as an antibiotic drug, commercial refrigeration and the feature film, to name a few. Trivia buffs would have a ball with this. (January 2010) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Delany, Sarah L. & A. Elizabeth Delany, with Amy Hill Hearth, Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters' First 100 Years. New York: Dell, 1994. (Original work published 1993). The second half of life for Sadie and Bessie Delany may well have begun when their mother died. That was when Sadie was 67 and Bessie, 65. Now 105 and 103, the Delany sisters are alive and well and living in their home in Mount Vernon, New York. From emancipation until the 1940s, educated Negroes were in such small numbers that they were all acquainted with one another. The sisters remember meeting George Washington Carver, W. E. B. DuBois, Adam Clayton Powell (Jr. and Sr.), Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, and a continuing list of the famous and the educated among the nation's first four generations of freed Negroes. Good health has been Sadie's profession and hobby since graduating from Saint Augustine's School in Raleigh, North Carolina with a certificate to teach domestic science. Sadie eventually earned a Master's degree in Education, and Bessie became a dentist. The Delanys enjoyed everything that contributes to a good life (except wealth, which has no doubt come about as a result of the success of their book). The ten Delany children remained close throughout their lives and followed their parents' example of public service and living a dignified life. A rich spiritual life and living honestly and well seem to have contributed to the longevity of these remarkable women. (January 1995) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Department of Education, Western Australia & Edith Cowan University, Ways of Being, Ways of Talk. Perth, WA: Department of Education, Western Australia, 2002. This package contains four 15- to 20-minute videos and a 144-page book. The most valuable component is the background papers for each of the videos, which reveal a carefully researched and expertly written text on Aboriginal English, how it came into being and how it is used in contemporary Australian society. Anyone interested in linguistics, solutions to racism, the story of a people struggling to preserve their culture, imaginative and tested educational programs for multi-cultural public education, or any combination of these topics will find this package interesting, informative, and of immense practical use. To get the most from this package, I would recommend watching a video, reading its background paper, then watching it again. Whether you are a linguistic researcher, an educator, a participant in a multi-cultural community, or just an interested bystander, the text is cogent and engaging. A serious flaw is that the entire text is in 8- or 9-point, lightly leaded type against a beige background. Parts are in brown ink, which is even more difficult to read. The graphic presentation, including attractive art work, is stunning; the readability is atrocious. It is as if there was no expectation that anyone would want to read the excellent text. (January 2008) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Doress-Worters, Paula B., & Diana Laskin Siegal (Eds.), The New Ourselves, Growing Older: Women Aging with Knowledge and Power. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994. One of the series of books on women's health sponsored by the Boston Women's Health Book Collective, this is their first publication specifically targeted at older women. As has been their habit, the articles are well balanced and current, relating the latest in research and treatments. The obvious headline topics such as breast cancer, menopause, and heart disease are included, as well as more general topics, such as the excellent piece on genes and disease by Ruth Hubbard, co-author of Exploding the Gene Myth. This book and its companion, The New Our Bodies, Ourselves, are two very good places to start when looking at women's health issues. (February 1995) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Downing,Christine, Psyche's Sisters: ReImagining the Meaning of Sisterhood. San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1988. This is a pretty thorough survey of the information on female sibling relationships to be found in fairy tales, Greek myth, Sumerian and Egyptian myth, depth psychology, and contemporary and historical feminist psychology. It is liberating to read someone else's unabashedly personal search for the meaning of her relationship with her sister, not hesitating to criticize existing material based on her need to see it from the perspective of a late-life lesbian with five children and a younger sister with whom she has never had a satisfactory relationship. I, in turn, am critical of her narrow viewpoint, but applaud the prodigious effort in bringing together everything that could be found on sisterhood from sources that would yield archetypal images. It was illuminating to know that Freud was a firstborn and derived his theories from his personal process and that Adler was a secondborn and, likewise, developed his birth-order theories based on his personal experiences. I was bored throughout much of the Greek myth storytelling because it was more about talking about the stories than telling them—rather like someone telling about a movie. I never grasped the connection between sisterhood and death that Downing subscribes to and said that Freud subscribed to. The chapters on depth psychology and feminist psychology I found good reading, relying as they did on the experiences of real people, rather than archetypes. Being frozen in a very painful symbiosis with my own sister, I practiced transference during the first half of the book, knowing full well that I was reading the excuses of an elder sister. As I progressed through the pages and forgave Downing for her birth order, the information became more interesting. Downing proposed that she would show how her survey of sisterhood thought applied to the larger sisterhood of all women. She never quite succeeded in that effort, as her own very personal struggle permeated every page through the final entry. (November 1994) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Edwards, Betty, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. Los Angeles: Tarcher, 1979. "The purpose of this book is not to teach you to express yourself, but instead to provide you with the skills which will release you from stereotypic expression," declares Edwards (20). Just as Updike taught me to look at a painting and see everything in it, Edwards taught me to look at what I sought to draw. Citing research on differences in right brain and left brain function, Edwards bases her teaching method on the premise "that developing a new way of seeing by tapping the spatial functions of the right hemisphere of your brain can help you learn to draw" (2). The exercises presented are designed to train the student to process visual information through the right brain, the side that sees things as they are, rather than the left brain, where human beings store symbols for what they see. The results of working with Edwards's exercises were surprising and satisfying for me. By following the book's instructions, reasonable, realistic representations of people and objects began to emerge from my pencil. (January 1997) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Eldredge, Charles C., Georgia O'Keeffe: American and Modern. Introd. Elizabeth Glassman and Raymond B. Kelly III. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1993. For me, there can never be too many books of Georgia O'Keeffe's paintings, arguably the most important of American artists. The present offering is the catalog for an international exhibition that was shown in England, Mexico, and Japan. From her first important showing at Alfred Steiglitz's 291 Gallery in New York in 1916, O'Keeffe has been recognized as uniquely American. In 1926, French painter Brancusi said of her work, "There is no imitation of Europe here; it is a force, a liberating free force" (qtd. in Eldredge 25). Eldredge offers an interesting, readable, brief biography of the artist and a thoughtful, coherent discussion of the paintings in the exhibit, most of which are reproduced as full-page color plates. (December 1996) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Esquivel, Laura, Translated by Carol Christensen and Thomas Christensen, Like Water for Chocolate. Moorebank, NSW, Australia: Black Swan, 1993. (Original Spanish-language edition published 1989; first English translation published 1993 in Great Britain as Like Water for Hot Chocolate.) I have been a worshipful fan of the film version of this story for so long that I struggle to discuss it without reference to its celluloid counterpart. The book is a faithful reproduction of the twelve-part magazine series, "a novel in monthly installments with recipes, romances and home remedies." Captivated by their mutual consuming passion, the story's main characters, Tita and Pedro, are prevented from marrying by a family tradition that binds the youngest daughter to a life of servitude to her mother. Esquivel mixes reality and fantasy, allowing real life to express in surreal episodes. Tita's neverending grief at being separated from Pedro becomes a crocheted bedspread that trails for miles; household tensions become a whirling chicken fight that bores into the earth until the chickens disappear. And for the reader, these are credible events, as credible as the human emotions that create them. Esquivel allows her characters just enough complexity to maintain interest, but not so much as to distract the reader with worries about who is wearing the white hat. The conclusion is as satisfying as the beginning is tantalizing. And in between, the story is nothing short of foreplay. Both book and film are revels in sensuality. In an era of explicit sexuality, Esquivel has proved again that suggestion is by far the more powerful seducer. The genius of the film is revealed in its astounding ability to visually translate Esquivel's rich imagery. It won't matter if you see the movie first or read the book first. But do partake of them both—and often. (March 2005) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Fitch, Noël Riley, Anaïs: The Erotic Life of Anaïs Nin. Boston: Little Brown, 1993. A scholarly biography need not be boring, and one written of the life of Anaïs Nin cannot be. Fitch's work is creditably balanced in an attempt to sort fact from fiction in Nin's writings. Though some consider her a pathological liar, Nin considered herself simply the creator of her own life. Her Diaries, the most widely known of her writings, suffered, some believe, from her extensive editing. Though Nin claimed the editing was for the purpose of protecting the many players in her life, there is evidence that much of it was simply so that she could be remembered as she wished to be. Sculptor Isamu Noguchi was among her New York circle of friends. Writer Henry Miller, who turned to painting as his sole means of artistic expression in his later years, was her lover in youth and dear friend in age. These were only two among perhaps hundreds of important figures of her time in literature, art, and psychotherapy, whom she counted as friends and acquaintances and who give a broad appeal to a study of her life. Artists, writers, and those in the various fields of psychology and psychiatry can be informed by the way she lived her life and the people she drew into it. (March 1996) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Forsyth, Kate, Dragonclaw: Book One of The Witches of Eileanan. Sydney: Random House Australia, 1997. Forsyth's characters are well drawn and the stage is well set for a battle between good and evil in a land where the king has been tricked into banishing or executing the witches who had always been a force for good in his kingdom. Forsyth's mythical creatures are interesting and believable. I am not a fan of fantasy sci fi (though I admit my addiction to Marian Zimmer Bradley and Harry Potter), but I was nonetheless drawn into this classical tale of intrigue, deception, abusive power, and unlikely allies created by a common danger. Forsyth is, quite simply, a very good writer. Dragonclaw: Book One is not a stand-alone novel, however. The ending was as jarring as if it had ended in the middle of a sentence. In other words, it was no ending at all. I am unwilling to seek out the other books in this series (because I have so many books already waiting on my bookshelf), but I do not hesitate to recommend it to anyone who loves a good dragon tale. (February 2005) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Fry, A. Ruth, John Bellers 1654-1725: Quaker, Economist and Social Reformer. London, Toronto, Melbourne and Sydney: Cassell and Company, Ltd., 1935. Having learned that Quaker businessmen have thrived over the past four centuries, presumably because of their reputations for fairness, I was drawn to read about an early Quaker who is known as an economist and social reformer. Though Italian Jurist Cesare Bonessano de Beccaria (1738-1794) has been attributed with the idea of abolishing the death penalty, his 1764 essay was published nearly forty years after the death of John Bellers, who worked throughout his lifetime to convince the British parliament that the death penalty was inhumane and ineffective. Himself a gentleman of property and inherited wealth, Bellers believed that, rather than "level down" the wealthy, society should "level up" the poor. He worked throughout his life to institute programs that would educate the poor and give them skills to earn a decent living. Among his other ideas was "a European Senate to keep the peace." Bellers did not claim that this early description of a United Nations organization was original to him. He refers to King Henry IV, who proposed a European union in 1620. (January 2007) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| García Márquez, Gabriel, The General in His Labyrinth. London: Penguin, 1991. (Orig. pub. in Spanish, 1989; English, 1990). I didn't bother to read the back-cover blurb before I started reading, and I didn't know until I completed the book that I had just read a fictional account of the last days of Simón Bolivar, "the extraordinary general who pushed the Spanish out of South America and whose dream of independence made him a hero in five countries." This is not simply historical fiction. García Márquez studied the facts and carefully included them as he re-imagined the thoughts, conversations, and everyday events in the life of one of history's most dedicated and ambitious idealists. Bolivar's dream of a united South America was never realized. Yet, with the move towards union reflected in the European Union, that has evolved since the fall of the Soviet Union (the only country in modern times to challenge the United States's position as the world's most influential power), it is not beyond imagining that his vision might yet come true. García Márquez is a masterful writer, a painter of word pictures that bring his story to life. History or fiction, The General in His Labyrinth is reading pleasure. (January 2009) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Gassier, Pierre, Juliet Wilson, & François Lachenal, Goya: Life and Work. 1971. Pref. Enrique Lafuente Ferrari. Cologne: Benedikt Taschen, 1994. This oversized volume represents a prodigious effort, requiring years of research and the help of museums, collectors, historians, historical and literary experts, art dealers, and auctioneers from throughout the world. In its 400 pages, there are 48 color plates, 200 black-and-white reproductions, and 1,900 catalog illustrations, representing the entire known artistic output of Francisco Goya (1748-1828). Goya was a technically competent painter who emerged as a master after losing his hearing in a near-death illness at the age of 47. The authors describe him as "a 'quantic' artist: one who advances by sudden leaps rather than through the steady evolution of his artistic gifts" (10-11). Coming to artistic maturity in a Spain that celebrated mediocrity in art, "Goya had had no influence either on his period or on his immediate successors" (225). The major portion of his body of work is in drawings and etchings, which form a damning social commentary on the times in which he lived, a time of bloody wars, Napoleonic occupation, and the Spanish Inquisition. It is rare to have the opportunity to view an artist's entire works in one volume, and it is well worth the effort to carefully examine each of the small (approximately 1½"x2") catalog illustrations. (February 1997) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Gemmell, Nikki, Why You Are Australian: A Letter to My Children. Sydney: Fourth Estate, 2009. I tell the folks in my creative writing group to write the stories of their lives as if they are writing a letter to someone. That's what Nikki Gemmell does in this memoir. The title is from the fact, she says, that she chose Australian citizenship for her children rather than British, even though they were born in London. (I won't go into my questions about why they aren't dual citizens.) This is a love song to Gemmell's Australian childhood, a time of sun, surf, bare feet, and an Australia remote from the rest of Anglo civilization. This is a lovely book that my Australian daughter-in-law enjoyed very much. I was less enchanted, but it's such a quick read, I'd recommend it to anyone who hankers to get a feel for Australian home life. (April 2010) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Gibran, Kahlil, Twenty Drawings. 1919. Introd. Alice Raphael. New York: Vintage-Random House, 1974. Raphael's beautifully written introduction to this collection of twenty of Gibran's drawings offers insight and history on the spiritual in art and reflects her participation in a circle of artists who celebrated the dawning of a new century with the creation of modern art. Hers is a worthwhile addition to the drawings that could have easily stood on their own. She calls the viewer's attention to the sculptural qualities of Gibran's work: "in sculpture there are no accessories of background, no gradations of color values to attract the eye and deflect the mind from thought" (10). Rodin and Gibran were good friends at the time these drawings were executed, and many of them have the appearance of a study for sculpture. Rodin called Gibran's drawings poetry, and the viewer can but agree. The direction of the plates is inconsistent, so that one has to search the drawing for the artist's signature to make certain of the intended direction. Yet in these cases, it is clear the drawing can be viewed from two or more directions, as if viewing an abstract work where assigning any side as top seems to hold as much virtue as assigning another. In some drawings, there are pencil lines of figures, seemingly abandoned in the process of composition, and their presence only increases the depth of emotion contained in the finished drawing. Rodin's assessment is embraced by the viewer: Gibran's drawings are indeed poetry for the eyes. (November 1996) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Gillman, Harvey, Consider the Blackbird: Reflections on Spirituality and Language. London: Quaker Books, 2007. Consider the Blackbird is a masterful blend of philosophy, history, and personal memoir—both thoughtful personal story and careful academic treatise. In a very few pages, Gillman delivers a satisfying discussion of topics that have each been the subject of much larger books, including a short introduction to post-modernism, the problems in defining and redefining God, and a surprisingly fresh look at God and science. He recounts how the G word has been replaced with Spirit or Life (among others)and expands the definition of neighbor to include all humankind. With ease, Gillman moves smoothly from the personal to the universal and back again. (April 2008) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Glenmullen, Joseph, Prozac Backlash. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001. (Orig. pub. 2000). Glenmullen responds spiritedly and sometimes angrily to the popularity of Peter Kramer's Listening to Prozac, which Glenmullen describes as an endorsement of Prozac as a safe, effective treatment for mild depressive illness, as well as a helpful cure for shyness and nail biting. After carefully reading Kramer, I think that Glenmullen's judgment is a bit harsh and overstated; however, he has done a fine job of researching and presenting the serious side effects of antidepressant drugs, as well as presenting evidence of the effective use of non-drug therapies. The list of side effects is nothing to sniff at: possible neurological disorders (whole-body tics, permanent in up to fifty percent of users), withdrawal symptoms in fifty percent of users, sexual dysfunction in sixty percent of users, dependence, chemical lobotomy (destruction of nerve endings), return of symptoms while still taking the drug in thirty-four percent of users, and precipitated suicidal & violent behavior in some users. The most startling aspect of these symptoms is that they were not included in the literature given to doctors by drug companies and that most patients were never given the option of an informed decision. Glenmullen points out that some doctors will add more drugs to a patient's regimen to suppress side effects, rather than discontinuing or lowering the doseage of the offending medication. I recall my sister being given Prozac as an antidote to "teacher burnout." When she reported to her psychologist that she had been suffering delusions (people banging on her windows and walking around in her attic), she was given a prescription for a higher doseage. Instead of filling the prescription, she stopped the medication on her own and sought ways to moderate stress. Despite my own inclination to condemn use of anti-depressants, I admit that some people's lives have been saved by their use. The problem is not the use of these drugs, but the overuse of them. Drug manufacturers have misrepresented effectiveness and side effects in order to sell more drugs. Glenmullen points out how psychiatrists began to network and share experiences with one another to determine the proper use of these drugs. Long after psychiatric journals began publishing the experiences of psychiatrists and their patients, drug companies continued their denial, and family practice doctors continued to prescribe these drugs based on the information provided to them by drug manufacturers. The drugs were marketed directly to HMOs with the promise that their one-dose-fits-all safety was a way for HMOs to eliminate the need for the more expensive psychiatric treatments. The fact that just about everyone has a personal story to tell of themselves or friends or family members who have used antidepressants, testifies to the enormously widespread use of a family of drugs whose long-term effects are still not completely understood. Reader reviews of both Prozac Backlash and Listening to Prozac on Amazon.com are a littany of such experiences. (June 2003) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Goldberg, Natalie, Writing Down the Bones. Boston & London: Shambhala, 1986. I wred this for the second time as I prepared for my first experience as facilitator for a writing class. In the process, I became aware that no better guide for a new writing group exists. Her advice is timeless. At each turn of a page I was reminded why this little volume has never been out of print since its 1986 publication. With frequent reference to her experiences as a student of Zen, Goldberg writes a little about her process as a writer and a teacher of writing and a lot about creative exercises to awaken the muse. She compares the daily practice of writing to the daily practice of running, something that you do whether you feel like it or not. If you practice as Goldberg instructs, you will, over time, develop your own writing rituals. In the meantime, Goldberg's instruction and exercises will grease the wheels, clear the cogs, and seduce the imagination to yield its naked creativity. (April 2001) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Gonzalez-Crussi, F., Three Forms of Sudden Death: And Other Reflections on the Grandeur and Misery of the Body. New York: Harper & Row, 1986. This is the second collection of essays by this physician-writer that I have read. Lewis Thomas, another physician, is still my favorite essayist; yet Gonzalez-Crussi is a good writer by any measure, and equally as entertaining, insightful, and informative. In the final analysis, I suppose, both of them qualify for that sparsely populated category of brilliant writers who both write with rare elegance and contribute mightily to good thinking. The collection's title is taken from the title of one of the essays, in which we learn that the chief function of the Chief Medical Examiner is to investigate "unnatural death," which must be categorized into one of only three possibilities: suicide, homicide, or accident. We are told of a case of three vagrants found dead in the New York City subway system, each with a carbonized penis. The Medical Examiner concluded that the three, who had been drinking together, had lined up at the edge of the platform to urinate. As the salt-laden liquid hit the track, the electricity that moves the subway went upstream in the urine to obliterate three penises and electrocute their owners. Thus is the first form of sudden death, by lightning or other electrocution. The second is asphyxiation. With our breathing dependent totally on a clear windpipe, Gonzalez-Crussi reminds us, "an olive, a cherry, or a small pebble may kill us." He takes us through the dangers of choking and sleep apnea before moving on to the third form of sudden death, "unknown causes." While Three Forms of Sudden Death is a catchy title, it is not the most entertaining nor the most informative of the ten essays. We are treated to a scientific discussion of cannibalism, complete with a consideration of ritual cannibalism versus nutritional cannibalism. In another essay, he proposes a modern version of alchemy: "the transmutation of excrement into certificates of deposit." Even in jest, his philosophical reflections hold the ring of truth. I opened this volume with expectations of being as entertained with humor and medical fact as I was with his On the Nature of Things Erotic, and I was not disappointed. (December 2006) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Gonzalez-Crussi, On the Nature of Things Erotic. San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988. Gonzalez-Crussi writes beautifully and imparts knowledge with wit and charm. The list of essay titles just about says everything that needs to be said about the content: Eros Ambiguous, or the Obscure Object of Desire; On Male Jealousy; The Remedies of Love; The Divine Marquis; Some Views on Women, Past and Present; The Conditions for Seduction, According to an Old Chinese Text; Views on the Erotic; On Secrecy in Love. (June 2004) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Gordon, Elizabeth F. Walk
With Us: Triplet Boys, Their Teen Parents, & Two White Women Who
Tagged Along. Roselle, NJ: Crandall, Dostie & Douglass, 2007.
For anyone who wants to understand cultural differences, who wants to
understand the roots of poverty, ignorance and bigotry, Elizabeth Gordon
has given us a window into that world. She shares her acquired wisdom (and
continuing feeling of insufficiency) with palpable honesty and elegant
metaphor. She sees second graders "whirled away like leaves in a gust to
decorate the playground with their happy cries." She describes her young
charge as "caught by accident under the bell jar of her misery" and,
later, as "a nail head under the hammer of minimum wage." She is a writer
who thinks visually and paints with her pen. The blurb on the back cover of Walk
With Us and the subtitle, Triplet Boys, Their Teen Parents, & Two
White Women Who Tagged Along, did not prepare me for the world in which
Elizabeth Gordon immersed me. For nearly 50 pages, I colored my
comprehension with the hidden impression that I was reading the story of a
couple of middle-class do-gooders who were proving that homosexuals can be
as socially conscious as heterosexuals (a credit to their gender, my inner
bigot whispered), while happily bringing ghetto-living have-nots into the
illuminated world of haves. And then the raw reality of it finally
penetrated my shield of self-congratulatory liberal smugness. The gender
of two privileged whites is beside the point, though perhaps their
backgrounds are not. They represent two classic caricatures of white
society - the middle-class, well-fed American from a prosperous family and
the working-class, first-in-the-family-to-have-a-college-degree American
from a stretched-thin family plagued with alcoholism and abuse. Elizabeth and her
partner Kaki plunge themselves into a culture about which they know
nothing. This is not a simple tale. It is not the story of someone given
the gift of enough to eat or a college education and living happily ever
after. Tahija is
fifteen years old, pregnant with triplets, drifting from one relative's
home to the next while her mother completes a stay in drug rehab. Her
friends and relatives live in subsidized housing, where someone can be
evicted by having a guest who stays longer than a few days. Enter
Elizabeth and Kaki, who create a safe haven for Tahija, including a room
of her own, a nursery for the babies and a healthy, balanced diet. It is
Tahija's seventeen-year-old boyfriend, Lamarr (father of her babies), who
makes the connection through Kaki, whom he met while attending an AVP
(Alternatives to Violence Project) workshop that she was leading. In the course of
their association with the young black couple, Elizabeth and Kaki get a
first-hand appreciation of a world where people expect to spend more time
standing in queue for services than receiving services, where people
expect to be treated with bored disregard, where people expect to be
defined by what they don't have and can't do. Like most family groups
bound together by mutual need and caring, the serendipitous family of two
middle-aged white women, two black teenagers and three growing babies
explodes into pieces of hurt and misunderstanding, suffers the pain of
humility learned, then reassembles in a form more supportive of the people
they have become through the experience. Gordon quotes Hannah Arendt: "The
only power we can have over the past is forgiveness." One of the themes
that color this narrative is that long-term racism does not remain
one-sided, but bifurcates into a two-way mistrust, creating a balance that
erects a wall between human beings. These seven people lay themselves bare
to show us how this works and point us in a better direction. I had
expected a story about the difficulties of being lesbian and the problems
of cultural differences. I was blind-sided by a story of love and hope and
excruciating, debilitating racism. Elizabeth Gordon has produced a classic
work about the personal face of racism. It should be required reading in
every secondary and tertiary classroom that touches on the subject. The
website for the book is http://www.walkwithus.info (December 2007) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Greer, Germaine, The Change: Women, Aging and the Menopause. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992. No stone is left unturned. Greer found something to say about the medicalization of menopause that was not in other books. What is considered state of the art in Britain, France, Australia, and the United States is somewhat different from country to country. Drugs and treatments available in one country are unavailable in others. The pet drug in each country is one produced by a drug company headquartered in that country. The United States, of course, comes out as champion in the medicalization of menopause. Greer did not hesitate to put forth her pet theories in the midst of statistics and reports of double-blind studies. She is very much present in her writing, and the book greatly benefits. Greer believes the second half of life is about becoming spiritual, and the second half of her book is her testimonial of her midlife passage, liberally sprinkled with the testimonials from diaries and novels dating back to the 1700s. The reader experiences her passage, from the first chapters with her feminism in full view as she lambasts the medicalization of menopause to the final chapters when she describes her joy on being on the other side of fifty: "Before, I felt less on greater provocation; I lay in the arms of young men who loved me and felt less bliss than I do now. What I felt then was hope, fear, jealousy, desire, passion, a mixture of real pain, and real and fake pleasure, a mash of conflicting feelings, anything but this deep still joy. I needed my lovers too much to experience much joy in our travailed relationships. I was too much at their mercy to feel much in the way of tenderness; I can feel as much in a tiny compass now when I see a butterfly still damp and crinkled from the chrysalis taking a first flutter among the brambles." For those among us who approach our climacteric "alone," Greer makes clear that the relationship with the self can be the most joyous and satisfying of all relationships. (December 1994) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Grenville, Kate, The Secret River. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2006. (Orig. pub. 2005). Kate Grenville obviously did her historical homework in undertaking this engrossing (and gut-wrenching) yarn of a British convict who builds a new life after being transported to Australia in lieu of a death sentence. Agriculture was the chief aim of British colonialism, and more than trees had to be cleared away to make the vast Australian farms and cattle stations possible. The native population, too, had to be either "civilized" or exterminated. I don't know whether there is a literature category called novel noir, but that's how I would categorize Grenville's effort. In the end, her hero is neither hero nor villain, but falls in that vast category of Everyman, driven by a detached self-interest. Short listed for the Man Booker Prize, The Secret River is alternately exhilarating and sobering, a very fine historical novel. (January 2008) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Habel, Norman C., The Cambridge Bible Commentary on the New English Bible: The Book of Job. London: Cambridge University Press, 1975. This is my first experience with a "bible commentary." It happened to catch my eye at the library at a time when I was undertaking my first complete read-through of the Old Testament. It was quite helpful here and there. I was particularly interested in the sections that discussed the history of wisdom literature as a genre and its characteristics in various cultures at various times. If you are reading the bible for divination, letting it drop open at any spot to find your message from the universe, these sorts of study aids may be quite beside the point. But if, like me, you have undertaken to discover first hand what the bible sez (rather than what they sez it sez), footnotes, commentaries, and histories are useful. I always find it of interest to see how the various texts have evolved over the centuries and how one editor or another added passages here and there to emphasize a message or even alter it to make it more contemporary to their times (or germane to their purposes). There may be better commentaries out there; I wouldn't know. I trusted my little bit of biblical education to Cambridge's academic reputation. (May 2007) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Hall, Calvin S., A Primer of Freudian Psychology. New York: Penguin, 1979. (Original work published 1954). As would be expected, the Ego, Superego, and Id are prominent players in Professor Hall's summation of Freudian theory. A less well known facet of Freudian principles, the role of psychic energy in the development of personality, is prominently featured; Hall labels this Freud's most brilliant discovery. Though it is a slim volume, the information is dense. The entire body of Freud's work that Hall is summarizing was published in several thousand pages. To attempt to take notes is tantamount to copying by hand nearly every word in the book; to attempt to highlight the more important passages would result in the entire text colored in yellow highlighter. In short, the book itself is a well-organized, clearly presented set of notes on Freudian theory. (January 1995) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Hall, Sarah Harkey, Surviving on the Texas Frontier: Personal Recollections of Life in Nineteenth-Century Texas. Austin, TX: Eakin Press, 1996. In 1905, 48-year-old Sarah Harkey Hall set down her memories as a gift to her children. "My first recollection is of fear of Indians; sitting up at night listening to the whistle of the Comanches all around and shivering with fear and trembling," she writes. Sarah Hall was the fifth of thirteen children. She was 12 when her mother died in childbirth. Her father died from a lingering illness (cancer?) three weeks later. Though their parents left the children well off, with a well-kept, productive farm and cash in the bank, they were too young to manage properly and soon were struggling to eat. Sarah's older sisters married and moved away. Her older brother, who took responsibility for the family, had to travel to find work, leaving the young Sarah to tend her younger siblings. This is not a romantic tale of courage that conquered every obstacle. It is a tale of the brutality of life on the American frontier, where children were often orphaned and frequently left to fend for themselves, where childhood often ended before the child became a teen. San Saba, Texas had a school house, but it was in use only three months out of the year, when the traveling school master arrived. Sarah went when she could, learning more from her sheer thirst for knowledge than from instruction. The glamour of the shoot-'em-up West is shown for what it was, as Sarah loses three brothers to senseless gun fights. Sarah Harkey Hall is a better-than-average writer and her story, told without self-pity, is a page turner. (January 2010) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Heilbrun, Carolyn G., The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty. New York, Ballantine, 1997. In her youth, Heilbrun was one of those who imagined that life after seventy would be so burdened with physical and mental difficulty that life would not be worth living. Even as she entered her sixties, she continued to harbor the plan that she had set out in her twenties — to commit suicide on her seventieth birthday. In addition to the physical limitations that she anticipated in her sixties, she experienced a new joy in living, a sort of joy that had been impossible at any time in her younger years. Buying and furnishing her "own house" and discovering the pleasures of email and rediscovery of old friends through the power of the Internet were two of the things that made her change her mind about offing herself at seventy. In The Last Gift of Time, Heilbrun, now in her seventies, looks back on the unexpected delights of her seventh decade and looks forward to discovering what's in store in her seventies — and maybe beyond. Heilbrun's writing has been finely honed over her long career, and that makes the reading of her discoveries a pleasant task for readers of all ages who take pleasure in fine writing. (April 2009) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Hicks, Esther and Jerry, Ask
and It Is Given. Carlsbad, CA: Hay House, 2004. If you've read
The Secret (or seen the video by the same
name), you will find this book's message very familiar. I wouldn't
hesitate to recommend the Hicks's version instead of Byrnes's The Secret, yet I would not go so far as to say it
completely replaces the video. I find they make a good complement to one
another. That having been said, I was disappointed to read that Byrnes is
not the spiritual person she represents herself to be in her book and
video. But rather, she is simply a savvy, somewhat unethical entrepreneur,
who put together a great program at just the right time. Articles have
appeared in the press about how Byrnes told her creative partners in the
endeavor that a hand shake was as good as a contract among spiritually
aware people who shared a common vision to share a wonderful "secret" with
the world. When Byrnes's plan to disenfranchise her business partners
became evident, the Hickses pulled out, causing a second edition to be
produced, in which someone else narrates the sections previously spoken by
Esther Hicks. Hicks is quoted as saying that she wouldn't sue because it
involved too much negative energy. At least one other featured speaker
stated that the notoriety he gained from appearing was sufficient
compensation. Unfortunately, the behind-the-scenes
creative people didn't gain anything for their less-visible roles in the
production. They needed to be paid for their work, and Byrnes used the
handshake contract as a loophole for not paying them. When lawsuits were
filed (in the U.S. where she moved when she became wealthy from the
proceeds of the DVD and book), she filed counterclaims in various states
across the U.S., causing enormous expense to her former partners, who had
to hire legal teams in each of those states. Further, an article in a
Sydney newspaper stated she had done something similar to a previous
business partner, who was forced to accept an unfavorable compromise,
because she was unable to afford the necessary legal battle to get her
fair share. Now. After
having spent so many words calling attention to Rhonda Byrnes's
deficiencies of character, I want to declare that any one of the Hicks's
books is money well spent. Ask and It Is Given
clearly sets down the steps that can be taken to get what you want—in your
health, your relationships, and your bank account. (December 2008) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Hicks, Esther and Jerry, Sara and the Foreverness of Friends of a Feather. San Antonio, TX: Abraham-Hicks Publications, 1995. One day after school, young Sara takes her favorite route home through a wooded area. She spots a very large owl and nearly leaps from her skin when it speaks to her. She names her new friend Solomon, and he becomes her teacher and adviser in her attempts to learn how to use the Law of Attraction (the same thing as the Power of Positive Thinking upgraded to a natural law). Sara learns how to think differently about mischievous brothers, school bullies, and other challenges that keep her from seeing her life more positively. This story-telling approach, intended for children, is a very good vehicle for understanding the concept that you draw to yourself what you think about. This device is equally effective for adults. I found its straightforward, simple illustrations contained a depth of understanding that the more cerebral adult texts had not achieved. I recommend the Hicks's Sara series to adults for their own reading, not in place of the adult texts but in addition to them. Each satisfies a different level of understanding. The Hickses have written many books, all aimed at reinforcing the lessons of the Law of Attraction. It's not a difficult concept to understand, but it is difficult to integrate this new way of thinking. Read them all, as you progressively become more accustomed to thinking in positive terms. (April 2010) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Høeg, Peter (trans. Barbara Haveland), The Woman & the Ape. London: Harvill Press, 1996. (Orig. pub. in Danish, Copenhagen: Munksgaard/Rosinante, 1996). Wow! Think Yann Martel's Life of Pi, Shepherd Mead's The Great Ball of Wax, and Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child and its sequel, Ben, In His World, then throw in a dash of Planet of the Apes. Reminiscent of many of Doris Lessing's stories, where she begins in this world, then moves skillfully and imperceptibly into the twilight world of speculative fiction, Høeg convincingly grounded me in a mundane present (albeit it a very privileged one) before easing me, in rapid succession, from poor-little-rich-girl-trapped-in-her-bed-of-roses to thriller to science fiction teetering on the edge of speculative fiction. With only a few pages to go, the plot satisfyingly resolves and fades into the sunset with a pleasantly tentative happily-ever-after. The roller coaster has slowed before coming to a complete stop, yet I shut the book still breathless and slightly titillated from the ride. Høeg has created characters that are just three dimensional enough to get by. This is not a criticism. Madelene, Erasmus, Adam and all the rest are types, maybe archetypes; the story seems to demand that to maintain a grip on the reader's emotions and to create a foil for its inherent humor. With this busy, rich plot, Høeg still manages luxurious, descriptive passages of London's cityscape and pithy comment on politics and the general silliness of human beings. The latter is somewhat the point of his tale. This would make a great romp of a film. (March 2008) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Hosseini, Khaled, The Kite Runner. London, New York and Berlin: Bloomsbury, 2007. (Orig. pub. 2003). Hosseini tells his tale in the first person, and from the beginning, I accepted it as memoir, though I knew it to be a novel. It's not that I have any reason to believe it is autobiographical, but rather that the narration is so real, so poignant, so painful. I wanted the protagonist, Amir, to be a better person than he was—a more courageous child, a more courageous adult, the sort of person that everyone believed his father to be. Less than half-way through the reading, I had to know what Amir would do, who he would become. I finished the book that night by reading through the night, dropping the finished book on my nightstand at five in the morning. I turned the reading of this engrossing and emotionally gripping story into as painful an event as the very life of Amir and his best friend, Hassan. The story may not be autobiography, but it is clear that Hosseini is writing from experience of his homeland, Afghanistan, a country that he knew as a child and that he watched destroyed as an adult. As well as a morality tale, The Kite Runner is an anthropological treatise, a first-hand account of what it is to lose the country you love and try to remake your life in a foreign land, what it is like when no one knows (or cares) who you were back there where you were somebody, what it is like to see your once-rich-and-powerful relatives now pump gas in service stations or work as clerks on the night shift in convenience stores. There is a lot to learn from this story, and in the learning you open yourself to be emotionally marked, as are the thousands upon thousands of immigrants who reach America or England or Germany or Australia as refugees stripped of their past and dumped into an unknown, fragile future. (January 2009) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Hurston, Zora Neale, Their Eyes Were Watching God. New York: HarperCollins, 2000. (Orig. pub. 1937) Janie grew up with Nanny, her grandmother, in a little house in the backyard of the white folks that Nanny worked for. She was born there, too, but her mother, Nanny’s daughter, was gone long before she had memory. She didn’t know who her daddy was and mostly didn’t wonder about these people who left her behind as if she was nothing. She played with Mrs. Washburn’s four grandchildren, never feeling there was any difference between them and her, between Nanny and Mrs. Washburn. She was six years old before she knew she was colored. And that’s how she was all her life, not really seeing that she was anything different or special, no better nor worse than anyone else—just Janie with dreams of being loved.
Published in 1937, Zora Neale Hurston’s classic, Their Eyes Were Watching God, is about Janie’s dream and the life she led waiting for it to happen. Hurston’s characters are her contemporaries— people she met along the way, people she interviewed about the Great Okeechobee Hurricane that took the lives of nearly 3,000 people, a third of them black migrant workers, maybe even members of her own family.
Hurston’s monumental talent for drawing vivid portraits with the mud and clay of her well-chosen words may be unmatched in American literature. But it’s not just people she creates so well; her landscapes, too, are mud real. Her sun and moon and stars shine in your eyes, and her night air kisses your face. You are there.
Her writing is poetry. Like Janie, it pretends to simplicity, but (like Janie) it’s no such thing. Hurston’s morning sun makes “a red foolishness,” and you want to run outdoors quickly to see the glory of those “red daggers” before it sets out for the day’s business “dressed all in white.” And you will remember your adolescent awakenings as Janie, “through pollinated air,” sees “a glorious being coming up the road”—shiftless Johnny Taylor, “beglamored” by the “golden dust of pollen” in the eyes of a girl living the spring of her sixteenth year. So maybe your adolescence wasn’t like that, but seduced by Hurston’s rich language, you will remember it that way.
If she were to write that each day the store’s porch filled up with people swapping stories, it would be a sketch. Hurston delivers the painting, thick with color and texture: “Every morning the world flung itself over and exposed the town to the sun. . . . When the people sat around on the porch and passed around the pictures of their thoughts for the others to look at and see, it was nice. The fact that the thought pictures were always crayon enlargements of life made it even nicer to listen to.”
Zora Neale Hurston’s claim that she wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God in seven weeks while on a research trip to Haiti is believable. First, because why would she make that up? And second, it has none of the earmarks of a crafted work. It indeed seems sprung whole from her head, like Athena from the head of Zeus . . . then wrapped in her pericardium.
Many people complain of the difficulty of reading dialect. Hurston’s unique way of writing dialect makes it a bit easier. Not easy, just a bit easier. If you want it to be even easier, read it out loud. Such words shouldn’t be kept in the dark of silence anyway. (December 2011)
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| Johnson, Fred K., Right Hemisphere Stroke: A Victim Reflects on
Rehabilitative Medicine. Detroit. MI: Wayne State University Press,
1990. Right Hemisphere Stroke is an amazing
surprise. Johnson has approached his topic with humor, intelligence, and
good writing skills. The result is a sometimes-funny, always-informative,
and touching memoir about the stroke he suffered when he was 38 years old.
I read it to get some specific information about strokes. I didn't find
the information for which I was searching, but happily read on, learning
answers to questions I hadn't thought to ask. For instance, I found out
stroke victims often suffer personality change. Johnson was lucky; his
personality shifted from someone who cared little for others to a kinder,
more affable person. This was only one of the benefits for his family. His
wife now has a more considerate, attentive lover: "I could not plop over
Judy in the traditional missionary manner; I had to entice her to come to
me. Our sex now had a good deal of give and take rather than a one-sided
domination." Of equal interest is how Johnson
learned to function as a part of a hospital environment that seemed
designed more to fulfill job descriptions than to meet patient needs. Yes,
it would seem that meeting patient needs is the essential framework of
medical workers' job descriptions, but there arises a perverse difference
between the medical establishment's perception of the patients' needs and
the needs perceived by the patients themselves. The doctors, nurses,
therapists and diverse hospital staff are focused on getting the patient
as close to recovery as possible (or, as Johnson found out, as close as
they can get before the insurance runs out). Johnson learned to navigate
the system both honestly and superficially, as the occasion demanded. In
one instance, he observed that patients who were perceived as "religious"
or "a family man" got more compassionate treatment, and so he put a framed
photo of his son on his dresser top alongside a Gideon bible. Having the
time to study his surroundings, he was thus able to construct ways to
maximize the benefits of his hospitalization. Sometimes, this was as
simple (yet excruciatingly difficult) as putting up with an unpleasant
roommate in order to be labeled "a good patient." The unexplainable
continues to fascinate me and pique my curiosity about the brain. I have
an abiding interest in the spiritual episodes experienced during and after
stroke by many sufferers, a topic Johnson touches upon lightly and with
apology to "scientific" minds. The power of emotional memory is another of
my interests, and in this regard, Johnson offers his ever-so-interesting
version of anniversary disease: Each year on the anniversary of his
stroke, he suffers transient ischemic attacks (TIAs). Johnson begins by
saying "there are only two kinds of strokes, those that kill you and those
that don't" and ends by quoting his wife's words of comfort to their son
who longed for a happy ending: "We have yet to live our ending." (April
2005) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Johnston, George, My
Brother Jack. London & Glasgow: Collins Fontana, 1967 (Orig.
pub. 1964). The story begins at the closing of World War I and ends at
the culmination of World War II. The years in between furnish the backdrop
against which two Australian working-class brothers grow into adolescence,
young manhood, and the early years of maturity that are marked by
marriage, children, and ageing parents. Though masterfully drawn as
authentic Australian characters in an authentic Australian landscape,
Dave, Jack, their parents, and their wives are true to archetypes that
exist in every human culture. After a childhood of games, fights, and
mischief, Jack wholeheartedly romps through his hormonally driven
skirt-chasing phase, then leaps into adulthood, brashly taking on the
mantle of manhood, which means patriotic service to his country,
responsibility to his family, and creation of the next generation of human
beings. Jack is Everyman. Dave occupies a sort of
middle-management fringe that nature can afford because Jack is tending
his never-ending job so well. Dave is pushed from behind by civilization's
need for progress and pulled forward by Jack, who needs him to be better
than he is. Each of them is driven by eternal forces, Jack the man of
action and Dave the man whose decisions are almost always non-decisions
that move him inexorably forward without feeling responsibility for where
he's been or where he's going. The tale is told in the first person by
Dave, with such incredible self-scrutiny and painful insight into the
foibles and weaknesses of a clever, gifted writer that the reader feels
compelled to accept it as a true autobiography. But it most likely isn't,
at least not in its entirety. The gift of a novel is that the writer can
tell the entire, bald truth and hide behind the fiction of it. A secondary
benefit that feeds the novelist's creative soul is that events can be
changed that didn't turn out right in real life or maybe seemed too
mundane to be worthy of printed expression. Life is stranger than fiction,
and fiction is more honest. Johnston is a superb writer, and My Brother Jack is on my Top Ten List of Things
That Make Me Glad I Trekked to Australia—right up there with the magpie's
morning song, the stark white bark of giant gum trees, fine red-orange
sand, the haunting sound of the didjeridoo, and the aura of people who
have been here so long that they are inseparable from the earth. On the back cover
of my fragile, yellowing 1971 paperback copy is an excerpt from a review
published in the London Illustrated News in
which the reviewer concludes, "I truly believe this to be one of the
greatest books written this century." Well said. (March 2008) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| K., K. K., The Quaker Bonnet: A
Child Story. London: Headley Brothers, [1915]. When her
brothers, Bob and Harry, come down with Scarlet Fever, Edna and her five
other siblings are sent away to live with various relatives until the
period of danger has passed. Edna is sent to Aunt Deborah, her great aunt
who lives in London. Aunt Deborah's infrequent visits to Edna's rural home
has left the lasting impression of a severe, brittle, and disapproving
woman, quick to criticize Edna's mother for her relaxed attitude towards
her children's upbringing. Making a lasting impression, too, on all the
children, is Aunt Deborah's gray silk bonnet, the sort worn by
old-fashioned Quakers back in the time when all Quaker ladies wore gray
and all Quaker men wore black. The children don't like the bonnet because
people turn and star when Aunt Deborah walks with them in their village.
This is a charming story about a six-year-old country girl who enters the
unwelcoming world of a well-to-do urban spinster. Edna learns that
the Quaker bonnet, in the eyes of London society, identifies her great
aunt with all the good works and good reputation of generations of
Quakers. Even Queen Victoria from her carriage gives a nod in recognition
as she passes the gray-clad woman walking in the park with her great
niece. As she learns to respect and admire the bonnet, and what it
represents, her child's forthrightness and penetrating questions cause
Aunt Deborah to question if her own behavior is worthy of the reputation
she wears on her head. The writer, who claims her authorship
only with the mysterious initials K. K. K., tells the story as something
that happened in that time "thirty years ago" when things were not so
modern. There is no publication date, but the single illustration opposite
the title page bears the date 1914, suggesting the setting is London of
about 1885. Since the time period would likely have been within the living
memory of the author, descriptions of dress, manners, and the London
landscape offer a first-hand view of the period. Edna's favorite place in
the city is a high-end toy shop, and there are child-enticing descriptions
of expensive toys of the era. Notable is the aunt's position in society as
a Quaker woman of means. Aunt Deborah educates Edna about the wealthy
Quaker version of simplicity: a few very expensive gray silk gowns that
are expected to prove their sensibility by lasting a very long time. The message is not
embedded in Edna's discoveries, but in Aunt Deborah's. The young reader is
reminded that they must establish themselves with their own worthy
behavior, not slide through life on the reputation that precedes them by
the position into which they were born. There is just enough conflict and
surprise here to counter the predictable happy-ever-after ending. It
appears to have been written with the 11-to-14-year-old reader in mind,
certainly more appealing to girls than boys. A word of caution: There are a few
references to some of the children's favorite dolls being "sailor boys and
niggers"—a not-so-appealing, but certainly telling, artifact of the times.
(April 2009) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Kallir, Otto, Grandma
Moses. New York: Abrams, 1975. Anna Mary Robertson Moses, dubbed
Grandma Moses by the New York Herald Tribune in
its review of her first show at Kallir's gallery, is the best-known of
America's self-taught artists. Art collector Louis Caldor saw Moses's
paintings for the first time at Easter, 1938, in the window at the Woman's
Exchange in Thomas's Drugstore in Hoosick Falls, New York. From that
moment, he worked to gain recognition for her work. He succeeded in
getting three of her pieces accepted for a show at the Museum of Modern
Art in 1939 and in attracting the attention of gallery owner Otto Kallir,
who gave her a one-person show in 1940 in his new New York gallery. This
volume benefits from Kallir's first-hand acquaintance with Moses and her
work. It is through his efforts that we have access to a catalog of 1,600
works created over a 30-year period. Kallir makes an important point about
American self-taught artists: In contrast to Europe, no art schools
had existed in America until well into the nineteenth century.
People who painted had to find their own technical and artistic means
of expression. (p. 65) The paintings Moses began creating in her late seventies "when housework became too strenuous for her" (p. 19) are the body of work that is known, but, like many other self-taught artists, she had been creating art since childhood. We are fortunate that she lived past the one hundred one mark, allowing her to share with the future a vast body of work embodying her memories of rural life in the eastern United States. (February 1997) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Kandinsky, Wassily, Concerning the Spiritual in Art. 1914. Trans. M.T.H. Sadler. Pref. Richard Stratton. New York: Dover, 1977. Kandinsky spent a lifetime painting in search of the spiritual. His body of work was his philosophical opus, provoked initially by the prodigious philosophical works of Madame Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society, in which she introduced the Western world--and Kandinsky--to Eastern philosophies. Kandinsky believed that art had a duty to be spiritual in nature, an expression of "inner need," as he came to call it. He called "art for art's sake" a "vain squandering of artistic power" (3). Concerning the Spiritual in Art was both his call to artists to meet their obligation to humanity and his attempt to define and explain color and form in its relation to expressing the message of the soul. (October 1996) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Keyes, Ken Jr., The Hundredth Monkey. St. Mary, KY: Vision Books, 1981. Keyes recounts the observations of monkey behavior that resulted in the "hundredth monkey" theory of awareness and encourages readers to concentrate their awareness on the need to eliminate nuclear weapons. The first half of the book is about the statistics of harm caused by nuclear weapons and nuclear power; the second half is an appeal for people to consciously change their attitudes to bring about universal disarmament and eventually world peace. This is a fine book—simple in format, powerful in content—that appeals both to one's reason and emotions. (January 2008) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Klee, Paul, On Modern Art. 1924. Trans. Paul Findlay 1947. Introd. Herbert Read. London: Faber and Faber, 1966. Paul Klee was Kandinsky's neighbor during the years they both taught at the Bauhaus. They shared more than the basement that connected their duplex apartments; they shared a belief in art as a spiritual pursuit. This slim volume is the text of a lecture Klee delivered in 1924 on the occasion of the opening of a museum exhibit of modern art. It is both an educational lecture on color and form and an explanation of modern art that largely escapes being a defense. Klee's discourse is not simply an historical piece. It is as valid today as it was when he delivered it seventy-two years ago. (November 1996) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Knight, Stephen, The Selling of the Australian Mind: From First Fleet to Third Mercedes. Port Melbourne, Victoria, Australia: William Heinemann, 1990. These 14 essays are Stephen Knight's salute to his adopted homeland, a peek into parts of the Australian culture that can't be found in guide books or popular films. Knight had been in Australia for 27 years when these pieces were published, and they reflect his very personal view of Australia and his experience of discovering the hidden corners of a culture that only appeared to be the same as that of the Britain of his earlier years. A professor of English in one of Australia's tertiary educational institutions, Knight is a fine writer and a fine wit. The back cover describes his work as "brisk and pithy," and that it is. With irony, angst, and even affection, Knight tells us of the perpetual need to renovate found among young urban professionals in Sydney and Melbourne, the politics of dinner parties, Australians and their restaurants, and much more about Australian urban life. It would take more than 14 stories to expose the unique qualities of Australian culture, but Stephen Knight has contributed to my education, telling of that part of Australia that has nothing to do with sport, the beach, the Opera House or the great Outback. As important as those things are to Australian life, they simply aren't all of it. (December 2008) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Kramer, Peter D., Listening to Prozac. New York: Penguin, 1997. New ed. with Afterword. (Orig. pub. 1994). Prior to reading Kramer's now-classic ruminations on Prozac and its sibling drugs, I read Joseph Glenmullen's Prozac Backlash, a damning response to Kramer's work. Glenmullen is convincing and well documented (and speaks to my own prejudices); therefore, I was prepared to despise Kramer. I didn't. And I don't. Granted, Kramer does not spend much time on the undesirable side effects of Prozac and other antidepressant drugs, but it's almost beside the point, since his emphasis tends towards philosophical and ethical efficacy, rather than medical efficacy. Kramer does not pretend to be doing anything other than laying bare some very challenging questions. He prescribed Prozac as an antidepressant and discovered that it was altering personalities—not in the far more negative way that was later found in cases of uncharacteristic violence, but in ways that patients perceived as positive. Formerly shy people were far more outgoing. Kramer raises an important question: Is it ethical to withhold a treatment for painful shyness when the physician has no reason to diagnose depression? Dozens of (to me) frightening facts are reported; for instance, for the past fifty years it has been commonplace to make a diagnosis after observing drug side effects. In other words, now that we know that Prozac can cure shyness in some people, shyness is now a diagnosis that needs a cure. Particularly interesting and insightful is Kramer's observation that certain personality characteristics are valued (or de-valued) in various cultural scenarios, which change over time as well as from one group to another. Speaking of his client who overcame shyness as a side effect of her anti-depressant medication, he writes, "If we see Tess's transformation as a victory, it's because of a change in mores, because we value the assertive woman and shake our heads over the long-suffering self-sacrificer. Perhaps medication now risks playing a role that psychotherapy was accused of playing in the past: it allows a person to achieve happiness through conformity to contemporary norms." Kramer also cited a quite intriguing series of monkey studies, where researchers found that the Alpha male (tribal leader) had higher levels of serotonin than other males in the tribe. Also, when an Alpha male was defeated in a challenge to his leadership, his serotonin levels took an immediate dive. The researchers arbitrarily gave serotonin to male monkeys to see if it influenced the balance of power in the tribe. They found that, if the Alpha male had been removed, the serotonin-enhanced monkey quickly became the new leader. However, in the presence of a reigning Alpha male, the serotonin-enhanced monkey was unable to rise further than first lieutenant. Citing study after study of various components of brain chemistry, Kramer brings me to question the whole notion of personality as being an integral characteristic of the individual human being. More and more I become confused about how much of me is me and how much is a chemical soup that controls my emotions and behaviors. Glenmullen's book is the most constructive, in terms of revealing effective treatments for depression, yet I still recommend Kramer for his thoughtful evaluation of the possibilities represented by these drugs and his unabashed admission of the philosophical issues and ethical questions involved. (June 2004) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Kundera, Milan, The Art of the Novel. New York: Perennial Classics, 2003. Rev. ed. This is a compendium of seven pieces that Kundera states "were written, published, or spoken before an audience between 1979 and 1985." "The sole raison d'être of a novel, he quotes Hermann Broch, "is to discover what only the novel can discover. Just having completed the first draft of my first completed novel (my drawers are lined with half-finished attempts), I eagerly read in anticipation of discovering the rules of writing The Great Novel. Not surprisingly, the rules are vague and sketchy. One of Kundera's favorite rule-breaking devices is something I am fond of — the rabbit trail, a blatant detour from the action of the story so that the author can indulge an itch to explore some political or psychological or spiritual thought that came to mind while a character is brushing his teeth or walking to work or making love. Kundera does not just discuss his own work and what motivates him, but delves also into comparative literature commentary. He looks at Cervantes, Flaubert, Rabelais, Sterne, and Diderot, among others. Kundera's mini course in the history and structure of the novel is engrossing, illuminating and thought-provoking — worth reading a few more times. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Lee, John R., M.D., Natural Progesterone: The Multiple Roles of a Remarkable Hormone. Sebastopol, CA: BLL Publishing, 1993. Lee offers a clear explanation of the workings of a woman's endocrine system, particularly as it relates to menstrual cycles, the climacteric, and pregnancy. There are a number of gems of information here: food and herb sources of progesterone, progesterone as a builder of bone (while estrogen simply slows loss), how the artificial progesterone used in the United States is made from natural progesterone, and more. While natural progesterone has no side effects and has been well researched, it is no longer in vogue. Why? It's not patentable! Drug companies buy natural progesterone (primarily made from Mexican wild yam) and alter it to form a patentable drug. This synthetic form, called progestin, has numerous side effects and is thought to negate the healthy heart effect of estrogen. Since drug companies are the primary sponsors for seminars, which give doctors the continuing education credits required to keep their licenses, most doctors are never even aware that the natural progesterone that was beginning to be valued in the 1960s disappeared from the scene as drug companies altered it to gain profitable patents. Lee also discusses healthy lifestyle and supplements as an important part of a healthy midlife for women. Lee is an entertaining writer, as well as offering a thorough and well-documented discussion of the value of progesterone in balancing the hormonal systems of hysterectomized and midlife women. So add an over-the-counter progesterone skin cream to your shopping list and give your bones a treat. (April 1994) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Lessing, Doris, Briefing for a Descent into Hell. New York: Vintage Books, 1981. (Orig. pub. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971). This is another of Lessing's surrealist commentaries on society and, in particular, mental illness. Even though mental illness is a favorite topic that appears in most of her novels, I think this is the only one that explores the dust in the corners of a single psychotic episode. This was not easy reading for me. I could not remain interested in the long meanderings through the landscape of the disturbed mind. If it had not been for a few brief verbatims from physician's notes early in the book, I would not have had a curiosity sturdy enough to plow through ten or twelve pages each night. Towards the end, each time the protagonist wandered the tunnels of his illusions, I read only every other paragraph. About halfway through, my interest was finally piqued, and I began to care about the characters and wanted to know how their lives turned out beyond The End. Having now read some ten plus of Lessing's novels, plus two volumes of her autobiography, I wonder about her descriptions of the human mind lost in a world of delusion and illusion. She had an apparently long affair with a married psychiatrist in London and explored her own psyche in psychotherapy. I wonder about the extent of her personal experience and the borrowed experiences from her associations. (December 2005) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Lessing, Doris, Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1994. The writing in Lessing's autobiographies is not so different from the writing in her fiction. Her attention to detail in both the emotional lives of her characters, as well as in their physical environments, is here. It becomes evident that the five novels in her Children of Violence series is heavily autobiographical. Deserting her husband and children to become a social activist, marrying a German refugee to save him from an African concentration camp, having another child (almost as something to do with her time) are all fleshed out here, so near (but not identical) to the experiences of her fictional character, Martha. The novels, however, project into the future, predicting what could happen in a thoughtless society that does not mend its ways. I often see Lessing as being blind to her own motives, but that does not mean that she is kind to herself. Like her "feminist" masterpiece, The Golden Notebook, which she claims was never about feminism, perhaps her memoirs are exactly what she says they are, and not what the reader imagines them to be. Lessing's autobiographies are as engrossing as her fiction. (October 1999) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Lessing, Doris, The Fifth
Child. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988. Lessing's Harriet is a
young woman of principle who has maintained her virginity to age 25. Her
ease in accomplishing this astonishing feat, in a society that assigns no
value to chastity, is not due to unattractiveness, prodigious moral fiber,
or even great physical struggle. Without using the trite phrase, "waiting
for the right man to come along," Lessing gives us Harriet, who retains
her virginity more than guards it, as she waits for Mr. Right: "She had
not thought of herself as a virgin, if this meant a physiological
condition to be defended, but rather as something like a present wrapped
up in layers of deliciously pretty paper, to be given, with discretion, to
the right person." Harriet's "right person" does come along, and Harriet and David, two peas in a pod, begin their lives together. Harriet's widowed mother becomes the unpaid housekeeper for their growing family, David's wealthy father and stepmother become financier for their larger-than-modern-life domestic undertaking, and David's mother and stepfather add a typically English, tweedy, Oxfordian note of practical disapproval to complete the cast of characters who make it possible for the two to fulfill their merged dreams of a large house bursting with joy, children, and family. Lessing could have stopped here, simply leaving us with this commentary about what size village it takes to raise children when educated, middle-class people breed indiscriminately and deliberately in a world that has too many mouths to feed. But of course she doesn't. This is Lessing. The plot must not only thicken, it must take a surrealistic turn. Harriet and David stop short of their goal of at least six children with Ben, their fifth. Lessing's work is always social commentary, and Ben's failure in school offers the opportunity for her comment on a modern education system that is ill equipped to deal with so many of our modern children: "As everyone knows, all these schools have a layer, like a sediment, of the uneducable, the unassimilable, the hopeless, who move up the school from class to class, waiting for the happy moment when they can leave. And, more often than not, they are truants, to the relief of their teachers." Lessing leaves us with a Harriet resigned to that which she cannot control and, as Ben leaves home, relieved that she no longer has a daily visual reminder that it was her and David's lovemaking, her body that produced this being that disrupted the dream of their perfect household. Lessing's writing is not lyrical. It is adequate in its most perfect form: solid, detailed, original, and achieving an amazing balance between simply adequate and over-the-top. Like the plots of so many of her novels, her language is bare and realistic, without being sparse, and constructed of common terms arranged in original ways to draw vivid portraits of the times and places and people who inhabit her stories. Harriet is the central character in this tale, but a grand surprise is in store. Twelve years later, Lessing produces the sequel, Ben, In the World, and readers get to hear Ben's side of the story. (August 2003) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Lessing, Doris, Stories. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978. This is a collection of all Lessing's short fiction up to 1978, excluding those with an African setting. As a Lessing fan, I continue to be interested in everything she writes, yet her published work is very uneven, particularly with regard to stories and essays. Some of these pieces are short descriptions of the sort one might find in a journal or perhaps the fruit of writing exercises similar to the thirty-minute dailies recommended by Natalie Goldberg. "The Temptation of Jack Orkney" was as sharp a piece of observation as one will find, even among Lessing's other finest writing, and her scenarios of heterosexual lust, with particular attention to love triangles ("The Other Woman" and "A Man and Two Women"), is so acutely and painfully accurate that readers re-live the experience (even if they never had it). There are perhaps a half dozen stories that demand to be read, yet despite the fine writing and keen observation to be found here and there in this collection, my favorite Lessing story remains "The Black Madonna." (January 2007) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Lessing, Doris, The Summer Before the Dark. New York: Vintage Books, 1983. (Original work published 1973). A classic from one of Britain's best-known women writers, The Summer Before the Dark is a midlife wife's tale. "You are young, and then you are middle-aged, but it is hard to tell the moment of passage from one state to the next. Then you are old, but you hardly know when it happened." Thus Lessing opens her novel, announcing that her character, Kate Brown, will be the exception. Lessing has created a character who bridges the midlife transition in a single summer, from typical upper-middle-class British housewifery to corporate executive to older-woman-younger-man romance to denouncing the hair color that masks her age. By the end of Kate Brown's summer, she is not entirely certain who she is, but quite clear on who she is not. Lessing is recognized as one of the important writers in the English language, and the body of literature on midlife women is enriched by her genius and wisdom. (January 1995) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Lessing, Doris, African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe. 1st U.S. ed. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. Lessing offers first a brief history of Southern Rhodesia, her childhood home, where her British parents attempted to build a life as farmers. She thinks back to that childhood: "I remember as a child hearing farmers remark, with the cynical good nature that is the mark of a certain kind of bad conscience: 'One of these days they are all going to rise and drive us into the sea.' This admission clearly belonged in a different part of the brain from that where dwelled the complacencies of Empire." When she returned in 1982, after an absence of more than 25 years (for many years having been declared a Prohibited Immigrant), the name had been changed to Zimbabwe, and the white man's empire was no longer in power. She returns again in 1988, 1989, and 1992, each time talking to people, mostly the indigenous population, recording their hopes and disappointments for their country, making note of the black-led government that slowly becomes their captor rather than their savior. Considering the present-day plight in Zimbabwe, Lessing has created an important archive in the history of the everyday lives of a people still struggling for their freedom, having involuntarily traded their slavery under white rule for slavery under black rule. (December 2004) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Lester, Yami, Yami: The Autobiography of Yami Lester. Alice Springs, NT, Australia: Institute for Aboriginal Development Publications, 1993. Yami's birth father was white, but he grew up with his mother's people, Australian Aboriginals who built a life around the work they found on the remote Australian cattle stations of central Australia. Yami's people were in the desert when atomic testing released enough radioactive material to kill some of his relatives and damage his own eyesight (which he eventually lost altogether). His memoirs are a fascinating recounting of the day-to-day life of an Aboriginal youth as he learned his trade as a horseman and cattle drover in the great Australian outback. The last half of the book deals with his becoming a rather famous social activist after losing his sight, being sent to a school for the blind and learning to speak English and read Braille. (February 2007) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Liberman, Jacob, Take Off Your Glasses and See: A Mind/Body Approach to Expanding Your Eyesight and Insight. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1995. ". . . I've found that our eyesight is simply a reflection of our view of reality. So when the mind begins to see more clearly, the eyes also begin to see more clearly — and that shift can be instantaneous." Get ready for a very different view of improving your vision. Without surgery, without eyeglasses or contact lenses or magnifying glasses, Liberman proposes that you can naturally improve your vision, even if you're nearly blind. In fact, he even recounts the story of a blind man who sees. In the Appendices, Liberman lists "behavioral optometrists" and "natural vision improvement practitioners" by state and country. Mind and vision are inseparable, he argues, and therefore the first step to healing your vision is to delve into the contents of your mind. I found this a fascinating read. (June 2004) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Liles, Maurine Walpole, Rebecca of Blossom Prairie: Grandmother of a Vice-President. Austin, TX, USA: Eakin Press, 1990. I saved this book from the giveaway pile when my brother was preparing his farm for sale. I saved it because it was about Texas history, and I have been researching my own Texas roots for over twenty years. As it turns out, none of my relatives (that I know of) appear in its pages. The Rebecca of the title is Rebecca Walpole Garner, whose grandson, John Nance Garner IV, was Vice President of the United States from 1933 to 1941. Little Rebecca met General Andrew Jackson, before he became president, while he was visiting her father, a story that must have been handed down in the family with great relish. When Rebecca's husband dies in 1847, she conceives a plan to sell the farm and join a wagon train to Texas. Four years later, with four children in tow and without the help of a man, her plan comes to fruition. Liles obviously researched the details of life in 1851 and the perils of the route taken by hundreds of wagon trains from Tennessee through Alabama and Arkansas to Texas (and some to Oklahoma, then Indian Territory). She describes cooking utensils of the era, cooking on an open fire, firearms that were used for hunting and protection, and other details that mark the era. The general story is true, but Liles has fictionalized it in order to add interest, as well as to create opportunities to educate young readers of the dangers their ancestors faced long before there were automobiles and highways. Liles's writing is typical of the genre, with the pen of the school teacher in evidence. The children for whom this is written are unlikely to notice that. This is a very creditable account of American pioneer life and the push west that began in the mid nineteenth century. The targeted audience appears to be ages 10 through 12, but precocious readers as young as 8 could easily tackle it. Adults with an interest in the subject matter will find it a quick and interesting read. (September 2011) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Linde, Paul R. Of Spirits and Madness: An American Psychiatrist in Africa. New York, et al.: McGraw-Hill, 2001. Linde is a psychiatrist whose wife is a pediatrician. It was her dream to work in Africa that brought him to the experience that is the subject of this memoir. Originally intending to spend his Africa years writing, Linde happened into a job as a staff psychiatrist in a government hospital for the mentally ill. Within the first few pages, I learn that treatment is often governed by budget, rather than by the welfare of the patient (not so unlike its contemporaries in the United States and other first-world societies, where the more effective drug with fewer side effects is often available but not within reach of the poor or those depending on HMOs for their healthcare). Linde's personal life is in the shadows here. His emphasis, and where the light shines, is on a rich African culture, where psychiatrists expect (and sometimes recommend) that their patients consult native healers. Linde is not the sort of psychiatrist with a couch in his office, and he is neither trained for, nor interested in talk therapy. His skill and training are with psychiatric drugs. As one of only ten or twelve psychiatrists in the country, Linde's expertise as an emergency-room psychiatrist fit the bill perfectly for his Zimbabwean post. Time was at a premium, and the competent and well-respected nurses ran the hospital, as well as filled in for absent doctors. Linde took advantage of his single year at the Harare Psychiatric Unit to learn about local African culture and African attitudes towards healing and spirituality. He displays considerable respect for the Africans with whom he worked, as well as those he treated. Linde is a good writer, and a fine writer-in-the-making. His parade of case histories, interspersed with information about drugs, psychiatry, and the practice of the "art of medicine" is never dull. (May 2007) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Lipsey, Roger. An Art of Our Own: The Spiritual in Twentieth Century Art. Boston: Shambhala, 1989. Lipsey describes the social and political scene that surrounded each of the major styles in art that emerged in the twentieth century and describes the art forms and thinking of many of the well-known artists within each movement—Cézanne's relentless pursuit of the essence of nature, Kandinsky's definitions of the spiritual quality of color and form, the poetry of structure in Cubism, Dada and Duchamp in reaction to World War I, the Russian Avant-Garde and Malevich's Suprematism as integral to the Revolution of 1917, and the domination of abstract art after World War II. Lipsey's theme is that "Twentieth-century art embodied a stronger and wiser spirituality than we have fully acknowledged" (p. 5), and his choice of artists is governed not by the degree of their fame, but by the degree to which they succeeded in embodying a contemporary spirituality. Modern art is a statement of philosophy that differs from previous eras, Lipsey posits, in part because "twentieth-century artists have for the most part worked individually and without formal adherence to religious or spiritual traditions" (p. 11). Lipsey's careful and thoughtful exploration of the spiritual in twentieth-century art has enormously enlarged my ability to see abstract art and benefit from the experience. (December 1994) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Lodge, David. Thinks . . .. London: Penguin Books, 2002. (Orig. pub. London: Secker and Warburg, 2001). About half way through the book, one of Lodge's characters discusses "the novel as a thought experiment." That is the perfect genre for Thinks . . .. Lodge has an intriguing combination of three viewpoints. He writes in the first person for each of his main characters, one male and one female, then changes to the third-person perspective from time to time. At a point in the book where I am expecting loose ends to begin coming together, Lodge abruptly abandons his deep conversations on consciousness and introduces a series of new subplots, simultaneously introducing a new pace and sensibility. With so few pages left to resolve his many-pronged plot, Lodge crashes through the wall to his finish line. Thinks . . . should become a classic among experimental novels. Lodge has combined three viewpoints and two genres in a short novel, with a very interesting result. My greatest criticism would be that I was too aware of these shifts in viewpoint, pace, and interest as I was reading. Instead of becoming lost in the characters and action, I frequently found myself muttering, "Isn't that an interesting way to handle that." Perhaps a second (or third, or fourth) read might be needed to sort out my ambivalence. Lodge's "thought experiment" is a remarkable exercise, and although I question its entertainment value, I am certain of its considerable value as a topic of conversation. I think it's one of those rare books that, with the wry wit of the right screen play and direction, would be much better as a film. (November 2005) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Longaker, Christine, Facing Death and Finding Hope: A Guide to the Emotional and Spiritual Care of the Dying. New York: Doubleday, 1997. Twenty years ago, Longaker lost her husband to an incurable disease at the age of 25. In the ensuing years she has become internationally known for her pioneering work in the hospice movement. Though she writes from a Buddhist perspective, the advice offered can be adapted to any spiritual tradition. Facing Death and Finding Hope is an excellent guide for hospice volunteers and professionals, yet is well suited for anyone who has questions about how to deal with a dying loved one—or even how to face one's own death. (December 1997) [Click here to read an interview with Christine Longaker]. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Mace, John, Ph.D., How to Turn Upsets into Energy. Ringwood, Victoria, Australia: Brolga Publishing, 2000. I first became intrigued with Mace's work when I happened upon his website while researching anxiety and panic attacks. I later met him and bought his book at a local health and wellness expo. Mace, who is a Clinical Member of the Australian Counsellors Association, claims that his methods eliminate stress, depression, and addiction, rather than simply offering tools for management. He has trained a number of other therapists in his technique, including at least one American psychiatrist. His little book left me with one very powerful and useful image: He claims upset is caused by not getting one's way and compares it to two fire hoses turned on full blast and facing one another square on. Instead of meeting the blast (the invitation to anger, fear, distress, etc.) head on, Mace suggests simply moving your hose to the side so that there is no meeting of the powerful energies. A new way of expressing the old advice, "Just let it go!" Mace is interesting for several other reasons, too. For one, he is in his eighties and has the appearance of a healthy sixty-something. For another, he has written two other unrelated books: Teach Yourself Beginner Arabic Script and Teach Yourself Modern Persian. (January 2004) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Maclachlan, Lewis, Intelligent Prayer. London: James Clark, 1946. Maclachlan was a Presbyterian minister, whose most popular book, Intelligent Prayer, was continuously in print from 1946 to at least 1965. It is well written, well organized, and inspirational-0everything a book on prayer ought to be. In addition, it is practical. Sections titled "Prayer is Controlled Thinking," "The Power of Thought," and particularly, "Prayer Is Obedience to Natural Law" are strikingly similar to New Age teachings on the Law of Attraction. Prayer, states Maclachlan, is "an art to be learnt," and he ably sets forth step-by-step methods for accomplishing your goals through prayer. I recommend this little tome to Christians and others who value prayer—not just to learn the art of effective prayer, but also to read some profoundly comforting and sensible answers to some common questions: Is Trouble Sent by God? Does God Punish Us? Do We Get Our Deserts? and Is Prayer Selfish? There are plenty of used copies available from Internet booksellers. Check betterworld.com first. Their prices are not only the best (with international free shipping), but their profits internationally benefit libraries and literacy programs. (December 2008) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Maclagan, David, Creation Myths. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1977 (Orig. pub. 1979). A discussion of myth, its definitions and manifestations, is the backdrop to the history and re-telling of creation stories from many different cultures. Richly illustrated with mostly black-and-white illustrations (but a nice selection of nineteen in color), this would be a stunning book as a full-size, hardcover coffee-table book. The text is as rich and interesting as the illustrations. Though listed as a 1979 paperback reprint of the 1977 original, it appears to be a more recent reprint, as I purchased it as a new book in about 2000. (August 2004) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Macmurray, John, Search for Reality in Religion (Swarthmore Lecture 1965). London: George Allen & Unwin, 1979 (Orig. pub. 1965). Scottish philosopher John Macmurray took membership in the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in his seventies. When the Society invited him to deliver the annual Swarthmore Lecture, a British Quaker tradition since 1907, he writes, "On reflection, it seemed to me that I could serve this occasion best by setting myself to understand the processes and the pressures which led me, at the end of my public life, to seek the fellowship of the Society of Friends. In a real sense, this was the conclusion of a lifetime of religious reflection, which had been itself a search for reality in religion." Having just begun my own seventh decade, I find myself in much the same condition as Macmurray when he delivered his 1965 address. I, too, have come to the Quakers after a lifetime of religious reflection. Thus, as a seeker, I was very interested to read what one of the twentieth century's outstanding philosophers had to say about his search that culminated in the same religious community as my own. (May 2010) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Martel, Yann, Life of Pi. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2003. (Orig. pub. Canada: Knopf, 2002) Entwined with this engrossingly fantastic tale of a teenage boy lost at sea after a shipwreck are encyclopedic descriptions of captive animals and sea life. I am an information junkie. I love to listen to a good yarn. And I am addicted to meaning-of-life nuances in ordinary (and extraordinary) settings. The Daily Telegraph labeled Martel's story "a hilarious novel, full of clever tricks," the Daily Mail called it "an uplifting story," and The New York Times Book Review called it "a subtle and sophisticated fable about belief." I suppose all of these things are true. And if I read it again (and I will, as it demands I must), I am certain I will find dozens of other labels for it. As I finished the book, I wrote in my notes, "When the bare facts are impossible to live with, create a story that is." The idea that Pi may have experienced alternate realities is simply a hint at the end of the story. Did he tell his story in code, as it happened, or in the only form his mind could allow? I don't know how much was Martel's intention and how much derives from the way it touches the personal experience of every reader, a characteristic of all great literature. When the artist completes a work, ownership is transferred to the viewer, who may (and will) make of it many things never seen by the artist. (July 2007) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Martel, Yann, Beatrice and Virgil. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2010. (Orig. pub. 2008)
I picked up this short novel with the expectation of becoming immediately enchanted, as I had been with Life of Pi. The memory of that first experience of Martel’s writing kept me going as I trudged through the first hundred pages or so of Beatrice and Virgil. And then some sense of the meaning of it began to permeate my reluctant attention. All at once, at the end, I got it. I had my aha! My wow! My sigh of satisfaction. It had all been worth it, that trudging. There are stories nested within stories in Martel’s little narrative. At the core is a play about a donkey and a monkey, whose close bonds grew through a shared experience of torture and inhumanity at the hands of a group of cruel boys. Wrapped around this tale is the story of the mysterious taxidermist, Henry, the author of the play, who has in his shop the true-to-life stuffed versions of a howler monkey (Virgil) seated on the back of a donkey (Beatrice).
Wrapped around the story of the taxidermist is the story of Martel’s protagonist (also Henry), a writer who has had one enormously successful book. Henry the Writer has written another book, this one about the Holocaust, an essay and a novel under one cover; his publishers don’t like it, and he’s frustrated and irritated.
The final (outside) layer is the Holocaust; it could also be said to be the pit that dwells inside the core. So there we have it—the hard, dark pit of the Holocaust wrapped with four layers of consciousness: the tale of Beatrice and Virgil wrapped in the life of Henry the Taxidermist, wrapped in the life of Henry the Writer, wrapped in a personal urgent need to bring attention to the Holocaust in a new and different way.
There are similarities between Martel’s two novels, the most obvious being anthropomorphism, employing animals as human stand-ins. Another similarity is that Pi’s story of his months at sea after a ship wreck is a way of thinking about an event that is otherwise unthinkable to him, just as Henry the Taxidermist couches himself as a naughty boy taunting a donkey and a monkey, so that he can think about an event that is otherwise unthinkable. On the one hand, there is Pi offering an insurance investigator an optional story about the tiger and the raft, a story that he leaves to be accepted or rejected in favor of the original story. On the other hand, there is Henry the Writer revealing the truth about the taxidermist’s play, leaving the reader no choice but to reject the surface allegory and accept the dark truth of the pit.
Maybe it’s a fault of the novel that I trudged through the set-up, or maybe it’s a fault of the reader. This is one of those books that bears reading again. A work of substance, whether a book or a film, reveals new layers, bits of seemingly insignificant detail that become significant with each revisitation. I feel this will be true of Beatrice and Virgil.
I read the long section in the front of the paperback titled “Praise for Beatrice and Virgil.” I think the reading of these reviews colored my experience, perhaps even created my restlessness that made the first 100 pages such a plodding effort. But then again, if I had approached the story with no spoiler, perhaps I may have simply been puzzled with it, impatient with it—and then I may have written a review like the one that appeared in the New York Times, which I found to be lacking in insight—among other things.
The Times reviewer, as did others, fell into the comparison pit and never crawled out. Expecting another fascinating tale with a surprise ending, these reviewers were not prepared for the straightforward ending that left the reader with no doubt about what had transpired.
I was so viscerally touched at the conclusion that I find myself intolerant of the critical reviews that I have read, wanting to shake the reviewers and shout in their faces, “You didn’t get it!” Reviews are mixed. Sounds like a classic. (August 2011) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Martz, Sandra H. (Ed.), When I Am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple: An Anthology of Short Stories and Poetry (2nd ed.). Watsonville, CA: Papier-mache Press, 1991. With a few exceptions, these vignettes of aging are from the viewpoint of young relatives of aging women. The title is a line from "Warning," a poem by Jenny Joseph. Joseph proposes that one of the benefits of aging is doing as one pleases, and what will please her is not just wearing purple, but spitting where she chooses and picking other people's flowers. My mother, herself at the age that Joseph yearns for, found this so offensive that she refused to look at any other part of the book. There are a few pieces that are particularly nice, including Sarah Barnhill's "Near Places, Far Places," in which a woman entering midlife begins to connect with her mother's values. The volume is riddled with the kind of typographical errors that would have easily yielded to a computer spellcheck, or even a cursory proofing (particularly irritating when this is a second edition). Though pleasing enough, I am of the opinion that the book is selling as well as it is on the strength of its titillating title—a testimony to the hunger for information of an aging population. (November 1994) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| May, Rollo, Love and Will (1st ed.). New York: W. W. Norton, 1969. This is another of those "classics" that have long been on my list of things-to-read. A few months ago, it fell into my hands and declared its time had come. Maybe it's because it's only been around for 39 years, or maybe it's because I'm a woman of a certain age, but I found May's insights as timely today as they were when the book was written. Perhaps May's words in his Foreword best describe the theme: "I have long believed that love and will are interdependent and belong together. Both are conjunctive processes of being—a reaching out to influence others, molding, forming, creating the consciousness of the other. But this is only possible, in an inner sense, if one opens oneself at the same time to the influence of the other. And will without love becomes manipulation—of which the age just preceding the First World War is replete with examples. Love without will in our own day becomes sentimental and experimental." I didn't find one superfluous word in May's 300+ pages. Possibly because his ideas complemented so well the reading I'd been doing on the Law of Attraction, the notion that we attract people and things and circumstances into our lives with our thoughts, emotions, and yearnings. I'm in love with this book! (December 2008) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Masters, William H., M.D., & Virginia E. Johnson, Human Sexual Response. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1966. I admit to reading only two chapters of this classic account of sex research: Chapter 8, "The Uterus: Physiologic and Clinical Considerations," and Chapter 9, "The Female Orgasm." In a nutshell: "The primary requirement in objective identification of female orgasm is the knowledge that it is a total-body response with marked variation in reactive intensity and timing sequence." (That's what I was trying to say, honey!) An impressive blow-by-blow description of orgasmic response involving not only the reproductive organs, but the total-body musculature, breasts, skin, and cardiorespiratory systems is followed by a brief discussion of psychosocial factors, which the authors say will be covered in another book. It was interesting that Masters and Johnson think to point out that arousal of the male is necessary to achieving pregnancy, while no satisfaction of any sort is necessary on the part of the female. They also note that faking orgasm may be a woman's way of ensuring male excitement to ejaculation. They proceed to declare that their work establishes female orgasmic physiology, thus allowing "an undeniable opportunity to develop realistically her own sexual response levels." The authors make it clear that the female reproductive system is far more complex than the male and that a woman has a broader range of choices. It makes one wonder to what extent ancient woman may have made her own bed, so to speak, in order to gain cooperation for purposes of reproduction and protection. Scary! It is worth reminding that these two researchers observed sexual behavior in their research laboratory using human volunteers, a fact that was the subject of outrage in some corners of the religious community. Married to others at the outset of their research, Masters and Johnson divorced their respective spouses and married one another by the time of its completion. (May 1994) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| McCourt, Frank, Angela's Ashes. New York: HarperCollins, 1996. "People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred long years." Thus McCourt prepares us to read the experience of his life, from his earliest memory as a three-year-old caring for his younger brother to the age of nineteen when his ship sails through and past New York harbor to dock overnight at Poughkeepsie, where he attends an onshore party as the guest of the ship's captain and a passenger priest. Gratefully but somewhat guiltily compromised by their hostess, McCourt knows the priest suspects what has happened: "He already wrote down my mother's name and address and now I'm afraid he'll write and say your fine son spent his first night in America in a bedroom in Poughkeepsie romping with a woman whose husband was away shooting deer for a bit of relaxation after doing his bit for America in the war and isn't this a fine way to treat the men who fought for their country." And this is how he tells his story—in rambling, runaway sentences, using minimal punctuation and never quotation marks. It works. I'm sitting in the pub with Frank McCourt, having a brew and listening to his life story. The pain and pathos leaks through his matter-of-fact narrative, occasionally showing itself full frontal, as it does when he collapses into the lap of a priest and sobs out the history of his fourteen years on earth—the deaths of his brothers and sister, the drunkenness of his father, the brokenness of his mother and every other terrible thing that ever happened to him and, mostly, that he fears he has sent an innocent girl to eternal damnation because she died before she got a chance to confess their afternoons of adolescent carnal pleasures. This last, of course, is told at the end of the evening, when we're both deep in our sauce and prepared to weep eternally for each other's sorrows. We have one more for the road, and I learn that his typically dysfunctional family is suffused with life-saving love, that the unrelenting hunger and poverty of his childhood was frequently interrupted with moments of childish joy, impish fun, and raucous laughter. McCourt's candor gives this memoir its fictional quality. Surely no one is willing to so scrupulously lay bare the truth about themselves; surely only the fly on the wall would dare tell it all with such honesty. My bit of words here contain more sentimentality than McCourt's own writing.(May 2007) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| McLaren, Brian D., Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2007. McLaren's view of Jesus is as a do-er, not a thinker of theological argument designed to make everyone else wrong. The author identifies himself as "a follower of God in the way of Jesus," thus acknowledging there are other paths to God. I needed to know that to continue reading. I'm one of the many who flinch at the word Jesus. Like any other word that is used repeatedly to exploit, derogate, or condemn, a lot of thinking people have gone on to another vocabulary of spirituality in place of the abused Christian lexicon. McLaren is a good writer, and in several of the chapters on the history of society's problems with environment and social justice, he made little reference to the J word or to the Christian Church, and I became lost in his thoughtful, well-documented analyses. He has covered the issues and offered solutions as good as the best among social-conscience writers. McLaren believes that the great teacher's words have been misunderstood and misused by many Christians. His Jesus is a tree-hugging liberal who preaches and practices social justice (except for a bad moment with a poor fig tree). McLaren does not assert that the worship of Jesus is the answer to the world's problems, but he does assert that Jesus's teachings, as he interprets the scriptures, are the answer. Whereas I and others may squirm a bit at the J word, this book is needed by the Christian community, and I hope it gains a wide and open-minded readership there. From a Christian standpoint, I should think, this is very exciting reading. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Mehdi, Sharon, The Great Silent Grandmother Gathering. London:
Michael Joseph, 2005. Mehdi's little tome is thirty-eight very small
pages with generous thirteen-point type. In other words, this is a short
story. "On a buffety, blustery, early summer day, when the news was bad
and the sky turned yellow, a strange thing happened in the town where I
live." That's how it starts, and if I tell you more, I'm in danger of this
little review being longer than the little book, which, incidentally,
deserves its own cover, its own place in the sun, not trapped with other
stories to detract from it. The publishers say it's "a story for anyone
who thinks she can't save the world." When I told Peter, who lent the book
to me, that I would be putting a little review on my website, he said I
would also need to put a silent space for thinking about it. So here it
is. (October 2008) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Miller, John, Australia's Writers and Poets. Wollombi, NSW, Australia: Exisle Publishing, 2007. I can't compare this little volume to others on the topic, because I haven't read any others. Miller opens with an essay on Aboriginal literature, then proceeds chronologically with Australian literature as a whole, from Colonial times to the time of the present volume's publication. The text is well written, informative, and full of titles that I have added to my list of prospective reading material. I do wonder at Miller's exclusion of George Johnston, the author of My Brother Jack, one of the few Australian novels I have read and one which I have added to my Top Ten List. I considered for a moment that Johnston is simply not as good or as important as the authors Miller included, which would mean I really have a treat in store for me as I work my way through the Australian authors he chooses to discuss. Though I do anticipate a lot of good reading from titles mentioned, I cannot conclude that Johnston was not a worthy or important Australian author. Though assessments of his early work are less than enthusiastic, the critical success of My Brother Jack cannot be denied. It won the prestigious Miles Franklin Award in Australia and was described by a reviewer in the Illustrated London News as "one of the greatest books written this century." I'm not going to worry further about this omission or any others that might have occurred. Miller's necessarily brief survey of Australian literature has succeeded in telling me a great deal more about the Australian literary tradition than I knew before I read it. And I was impressed enough with its ambition that I have ordered all the other titles in Exisle Publishing's "Little Red Books" series on Australia. (April 2009) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Milroy, Jill, The Art of Sally Morgan. Ringwood, VIC, Australia: Viking, 1996. This is my favorite sort of art book. Other than Milroy's few hundred words of introduction, the only text to accompany the full-page color plates of Morgan's paintings (her work from 1986 through 1995) is the usual title and size information. A trained artist, Sally Morgan's work is influenced by both outsider Aboriginal art and her personal search for her Aboriginal roots. Her style is her own, never to be confused with anyone else's. Colors are bright, bold, and exciting. A few of her 1993 canvasses are mindful of Kandinsky's later work (probably unintentionally), an intriguing style to which she did not return. It's been more than ten years since this collection was published. I'm hungry for another splash of Morganalia to sooth my summer evenings, pleasurably smoothing the oversized pages, drinking in the color-soaked images. (December 2007) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Minutaglio, Bill & W. Michael Smith, Mollie Ivins: A Rebel Life. New York: Public Affairs, 2009. Just as Franklin Roosevelt before her, Molly Ivins was accused of "betraying" her "class" when she looked beyond the blinders of her social privilege to the needs of the vast masses of underprivileged humanity. Growing up in a wealthy family in oil-rich Houston, Texas, she was very tall, very beautiful, and lived up to the reputation of red-haired women. She was blessed with a lion's share of personality and audacity. She defied her roots to become one of the most influential liberal journalists in America. Her short, brilliant bursts of insight were hilarious and painfully spot on. Shortly before Ivins's death, in her typical caustic fashion, she condemned American immigration policy: "We've already tried greed and stupidity; it's time to try something else"—a statement that could just as easily apply to any number of other contemporary issues. Minutaglio and Smith have done their research, and it shows. As a bonus, their fine writing, with its own brand of wit and irony, makes Mollie Ivins's life the page-turner that it ought to be. Where are you Hollywood? What a great film her life story would make. Put a red wig on Charlize Theron and get on with it! (March 2010) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Moody, Harry R., Ph.D. & David Carroll, The Five Stages of the Soul. London, Sydney, Auckland, Johannesburg: Rider, 1998 (orig. New York: Doubleday, 1997). Moody and Carroll assert that there are five stages of spiritual passage that are similar to Daniel Levinson's life "trigger points" that usher in each new phase of life at specific chronological markers (e.g., early adult, adult, midlife, middle adult). Moody and Carroll, however, seek to show that, though the spiritual stages can be described and will occur in a certain order, there is no specific chronology, but rather life-event triggers that launch each spiritual stage. A quantity of illustrative personal stories enrich the narrative. Although I began my reading of this book thinking it quite ordinary, it became richer as it progressed. And I feel richer for having read it. It is a quite nice treatment of the subject, gracefully combining popular and scholarly writing. (July 2003) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Morgan, John, The Life and Times of William Buckley. Edited and Introduced by Tim Flannery. Melbourne, Victoria, Australia: The Text Publishing Company, 2002 (Orig. work published Hobart, Tasmania, Australia: Archibald Macdougall, 1852.) As the reproduced original title page informs, William Buckley was "thirty-two years a wanderer amongst the Aborigines of the then unexplored country round Port Phillip." Buckley was an escaped British convict, but when he emerged from the bush, the white settlers were so intrigued with his long survival among the "savages" that he was not sent to jail. He spent the remainder of his life trying to get a better life and more rights for the First Australians. Morgan was a journalist, and there is some suspicion that he embellished parts of the story to make it more appealing to readers. It nonetheless has considerable value. Buckley describes tools, clothing, animals encountered and hunted, as well as cultural practices. Buckley is the only white person known to have lived for such a very long time among Australian Aborigines while totally cut off from white society, and he experienced their communal life previous to their first contacts with white settlers. (May 2008) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Mundy, Linus, Elf-help for Overcoming Depression. St. Meinrad, IN: Abbey Press, 1998. I've been gifting copies of another Abbey Press Elf book, Forgiveness Therapy for years, yet I was still surprised at how spot on Elf-help for Overcoming Depression is. This is not a do-it-yourself manual for overcoming depression. Tip No. 3 states, "Information is your best weapon against depression. Learn all you can about its causes, types, treatments." No. 6 is "Because depression frequently has physical causes and effects, to really 'cheer up' or 'snap out of it' often requires medical assistance. Turn to the experts who can help you treat it and defeat it." These are two of the 38 tips, each occupying a page in this tiny (4x6") book with a black line-drawing illustration on its facing page. Whether reading at a sitting or using it as a daily meditation, its words are well-written comfort—even if you're just feeling a little blue. (November 2011) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Niffenegger, Audrey, The Time Traveler's Wife. London: Vintage Books, 2005. (Orig. pub. 2004). What a ride! This is a brilliant combination of mystery, science fiction, and romance. I had trouble getting acclimated to the overlapping time travel, but was helped over the hump by the title, which prepared me for the science-fiction aspects of the story. Niffenegger never gets lost in her intricate plot, and there are no loose threads at the end. The science in science fiction is satisfied (only fictionally), the mystery is resolved, and, in the closing words, it is the romance that wins the day. Niffenegger expertly and eloquently dances between ordinary reality and the suggestion of realities we are yet to know. This was, for me, a deeply satisfying read. (March 2009) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Obama, Barack, Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2004. In the Preface to this 2004 edition of Obama's 1995 memoir, he admits to an "urge to cut the book fifty pages or so." Me, too. I wished the book was one hundred pages shorter, yet I wouldn't know what to leave out. Though the pace definitely slowed from the middle onwards, I appreciated the opportunity to read every word of it. Perhaps it seemed slow because of my sense of urgency to know everything I can find out about this enigmatic and charismatic new personality who looks to be the Democratic Party's next presidential nominee. Or maybe it's because I'm anxious to move onto Obama's second book, The Audacity of Hope. Whatever the reason, I'm tempted to say the book is just too long, but there is not a single word I could wish I hadn't read. Obama is a skilled and graceful writer. I look forward to the other books that will surely sprout from his pen in the coming years. (July 2008) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Obama, Barack, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006. Obama talks about what's wrong with America and what he thinks it will take to fix it. His tone is indeed strong with hope, a hope for which the American people are hungry. This is the book that launched a popular clamor to claim Barack Obama as the country's next leader. Its popularity also resulted in the re-release of his 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father, which originally drew almost no readership. With both books on the bestseller list, people want to hear more, see more and know more about Barack Obama. His first two books not only paid off his and his wife's student loans left over from their Harvard Law School days, but it made them millionaires. (August 2008) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Oé, Kenzaburo, A Healing Family. Tokyo, NY, London: 1996. (Orig. pub. 1995 as Kaifukyu suru kazoku) The first of Kenzaburo Oé's three children was born profoundly handicapped, with his brain outside his skull. From that day forward, the theme of the handicapped son was integral to Oé's fiction. A Healing Family is autobiographical, the story of Oé's family and how it became, as he calls it, "a handicapped family." Without regret or complaint, he tells how his handicapped son, Hikari, was the center of the family and the central character in the lives of each of its members. And each seems to regard this fact as a stroke of good fortune. Oé writes his own story the way he writes his fiction—lacking in sentiment and infused with compassion for the human condition. (April 2011) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Oé, Kenzaburo, Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age!. Trans. by John Nathan. New York: Grove/Atlantic, 2002 (orig. pub. 1983 in Japan as Atarashii hito yo mezamayo). This is my fifth Oé novel, and I am always surprised at how one theme manifests in myriad fascinating plots. However, I am not surprised that he was the Nobel laureate in literature for 1994. Oé's writing is dominated by his decidedly masculine presence, but never loses itself in it. His descriptive language is eloquent without becoming mired in flocks of adverbs and adjectives (thanks also to a fine translation). In each of the novels I've read, a parent faces the challenges of a handicapped son, just as has Oé in real life. But in each of his fictitious works, the handicap varies and never duplicates his son's challenges nor the challenges of the characters in his other books. Rouse Up is a closer parallel to Oé's own experience than any of his other novels. It is decidedly autobiographical. No doubt he has used the novel format to cause some things to have a more satisfactory outcome than they may have had in real life. For instance, according to the Afterword written by translator John Nathan, Oé gives the fictional son a more robust ability to express himself than his real-life son. As Nathan describes it: "he is able to express himself in words, conveying wit and tenderness and compassion and his own brand of reductive wisdom about the world as he experiences it." Oé's real-life son, Hikari, has the gift of music. Though profoundly brain damaged, he has made his man's mark in the world as a celebrated composer. In an interview, speaking of Hikari's healing music, Oé commented, "My son's music is a model of my literature. I want to do the same thing." (see http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people/Oe/oe-con1.html) Rouse Up is about fathers and sons, about the elation and disappointments of parenthood, about the joys and burdens of responsibility. Every son's father will find himself there. And, ultimately, like Hikari's music and Kenzaburo's prose, the journey is about healing. (December 2007) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Oé, Kenzaburo, Somersault. Trans. by John Nathan. New York: Grove
Press, 2003 (orig. pub. 1999 in Japan as Chugaeriaby Kodansha). "For people who feel
the need for a savior deeply, on a personal and societal level, isn't even
a phony savior better than none?" This is one of the several questions Oé
explores through his characters in this contemporary fictional account of
the building of a New Age super church. The essential doctrines of the
Church of the New Man, founded by two old friends, Patron and Guide, are
the impending end of the world and the urgent need for repentance. Oé
doesn't bother to fill in the details. It isn't necessary. He writes about
a basic need for personal meaning, a need to be in a community with
meaningful goals, a need to love and be loved, and a need for a savior
figure or hero who relieves us of the personal responsibility to write the
rules that govern our lives. This is not a cautionary tale, but it
may be judged to be a social commentary. As is true of Oé's other books,
he is a nonjudgmental observer of human interaction. His characters
represent people we know, people we read about in the newspaper, people we
see on the evening news. He gives us cross-cultural personalities. They
have jobs, families, aspirations, and disappointments. The main character,
Kizu, is a university professor in his late fifties who is retiring in
anticipation of his death. Between diagnosis and death, he embarks upon a
new life, which begins when he falls in love with a young man. Oé's
explicit description of the first love-making between a heretofore
heterosexual, middle-class man and his young male paramour is neither
lascivious nor coy, neither clinical nor sentimental. These same elements
are found when he writes of heterosexual sex. He has an amazing ability to
write sex that is interesting, introspective, and detailed—and never
emotional. It simply is what it is. Just the way his characters are who
they are.
There are
several elements that I recognize from the three or four other Oé novels I
have read—his nonjudgment (even when his character finds his wife having
sex with another man), his acceptance of sex as a de facto aspect of
humanity to be observed, his distinctly male viewpoint (his maleness
permeates every word), and the motif of a mentally challenged son. In his
earlier writing the flawed son is a primary element in his male
protagonist's struggle. In Somersault, the son
appears late in the book, with a single mother rather than a conflicted
father, and plays a key role in resolving the plot. As a whole, the
book seems too long. The plot begins to unfold on page 266. That's 265
pages of descriptive preparation, of history, of setting up characters.
That's just too long. But truthfully, I'm not certain what needed to be
left out. If I compare that many pages to hours of looking at baby photos
and watching someone's vacation movies, it's clearly too many. But without
it, would I have known these people well enough to become involved in
their journey that unfolds in the last 300 pages? Every stray
fragment of plot is tidy by the time I reached the final sentence: "For
us, a church is a place where deeds of the soul are done." It's worth
mentioning that Somersault shares an underlying
theme with another of Oé's novels that I recently read, Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! It is another
insight of aging: There are a new population of young out there, and ready
or not, we have to turn the world over to them. (April 2007) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Paley, Grace, Grace Paley: The Collected Stories. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1994. Nearly every book I've read on aging women has included a reference to Grace Paley's "The Long Distance Runner." Here it is, along with 43 other stories Paley has written since the beginning of her writing career. Anticipating an anthology of stories, the Paley-ignorant reader is bewildered, awed, and delighted in turns as Paley's darkly metaphorical tales reveal her clever humor and, ultimately, her unflagging hope for humanity. Using common language with an uncommon twist, Paley's descriptions cause the reader to laugh with familiarity: "The table was the enameled table common to our class, easy to clean, with wooden undercorners for indigent and old cockroaches that couldn't make it to the kitchen sink" (p. 250). "The Long Distance Runner" is a powerful allegory about menopause, that mystical time in a woman's life when so much more is happening than the simple cessation of menstrual flow. Paley attributes her success as a writer to the wonderful luck of the birth of the women's movement, which coincided with the publication of her first stories. (February 1995) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Picoult, Jodi, Sing You Home. New York, et al.: Washington Square Press, 2011. As a wannabe novelist, I am fascinated how Picoult’s painstaking research is woven into the narrative about a woman whose life is driven by a desire to become a mother. In less skillful and adventurous hands, it would have been simply that: a tale of a personal voyage to motherhood. Instead, Picoult draws us into the world of a music therapist at work, the clash of values when a gay person comes out, a courtroom drama about the rights of a fetus, and much more. She never resorts to the easy way, to simply saying, for instance, that Zoe’s and Max’s IVF attempts were met with failure and the failures took a toll on their marriage. That would certainly have made it a shorter book—and maybe readers would have been no more the wiser. But Picoult doesn’t take the easy way, and we follow the young couple through the details of the procedure— the medical facts, as well as the emotional ups and downs. We even follow the husband into the tiny bathroom, where he must fill a cup with his juice of life, fearful that too little will reflect on him and too much will be worse. Drawing a picture of conflict between conservative Christian activists and gay rights activists, Picoult never takes a cheap shot, never makes one side unerringly right and the other the face of the devil. Each portrait is sympathetically drawn. The only cardboard, stereotypical character is a lawyer, who even manipulates his client in the service of victory, a victory that is being sought solely for personal aggrandizement. Judging from the number of legal experts Picoult consulted, this guy (or someone like him) exists in real life. To make Picoult’s yarn even more lifelike, the hardback comes with a CD of the original music that her character Zoe composes. (Paperback readers can download the music from the Internet at no cost.) I find two flaws in the work, the first negligible (and a little embarrassing to even mention), the second a gnawing dissatisfaction that is forgivable when balanced with the enormous accomplishments of the work. The first is the very thing that gives the writing so much authenticity: the researched detail. I can see the writer’s mind at work, carefully choosing the woof of fact to bring texture to the warp of plot. I would rather it had been more hidden. Admittedly, I was looking for it. The second was the unexplained outcome for a character who was so skillfully written that, at the end, she was (for me) a giant question mark in the center of an otherwise well-drawn ending. I miss her. I worry about her. I want to look her up on the Internet and find out what happened to her. Maybe I’ll find her in another Picoult novel down the road. In all, a stupendous effort! (November 2011) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Pierpaoli, Walter, M.D., Ph.D., & William Regelson, M.D., with Carol Coleman, The Melatonin Miracle. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. Melatonin, a neurohormone produced by the pineal gland, was the darling of the fit-for-life set, when this book was first published. For less than $10 a month melatonin promised to lower cholesterol, shrink cancerous tumors, restore a flagging sex life, and guarantee a good night's sleep. The authors were well known aging researchers who fed melatonin to laboratory mice with amazing results: a 30 percent increase in lifespan (equal to 25 human years) and complete freedom from illness and disease throughout their lives. Pierpaoli's story of how he came to relate the pineal gland and melatonin to the reversal of aging that he noted in his laboratory animals during early experiments is intriguing reading. Regelson and Pierpaoli said they wrote the book to draw attention to melatonin's potential as treatment for disease states as well as for its apparent ability to confer disease-free life. With enough demand from the public, the authors had hoped to attract a share of the limited federal research funds for clinical trials in human beings. Melatonin aspired to be a completely safe, nontoxic, effective treatment for cancer and AIDS. (March 1995) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Punshon, John, Portrait in Grey: A Short History of the Quakers. London: Quaker Home Service, 1986. Rev. ed. I've read one other of Punshon's books and find him a solid writer, very readable and careful with his details. Quaker history is the history of the English Civil War, the influence of William Penn's Quaker colony on the new American government, and the rise and fall of the various versions of European and American Protestantism. With a reputation for dedication, skill in peace negotiations, and fair dealings, Quakers have exercised far more influence in international affairs than their numbers (only about 300,000 worldwide) would suggest. Punshon does an admirable job of condensing over 350 years into less than 300 pages. A reader who is interested in learning about the background of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) will find Punshon's version accessible and reasonably complete. It is not a thrilling read, but adept enough to hold the interest of someone who is interested in its topic. (February 2008) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Quinn, Susan, A Mind of Her Own: The Life of Karen Horney. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1988. (Original work published 1987). There are two particularly interesting points of focus in Quinn's book, the more obvious being the development of Horney's work as the first feminist psychiatrist (and Freudian psychoanalyst) at a time when psychoanalysis was not acceptable to the new specialty of psychiatry (that itself had only just become acceptable to neurology by declaring itself to be a specialty of brain diseases). The second theme, a natural concomitant of the first, is the revelation that Europe at the dawn of the twentieth century--the time and place where Horney was coming of age and beginning her study of medicine--was, contrary to my previous impression, rather sexually open (at least among the intelligentsia) and a time of great advances in women's rights. Her life, from her first diary entries in 1898 at age 13 to her death in 1952, was a struggle to dissect herself to achieve self-understanding. Her earliest work was a slight divergence from pure Freudian theory; her later work was a true Horneyan theory, derived less from the brilliant organization of Freud and more from her life experience as a woman and a human being. From the beginning, Horney measured the validity of Freud's theories against her own experience, concluding that the female experience was worthy of its own body of theoretical work. Quinn has allowed Horney to be human, painstakingly documenting her genius, as well as her chaotic personal life that clearly furnished much of the material for developing her own psychoanalytic theory. (November 1994) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Read, Cathy, Preventing Breast Cancer: Politics of an Epidemic. London: HarperCollins, 1995. Dr. Read has assembled all the facts and fallacies of breast cancer in a fascinating, if chilling, read. Lifestyle factors and an environment bombarded with potent, life-altering chemicals seem to be the causes for breast cancer that science has not yet been able to prove. Read concludes that social change is the most potent preventative to the rising breast cancer rates worldwide. Many of the risk factors for breast cancer are related to delayed childbearing as women get their educations and establish in careers. Among other startling suggestions, Read proposes that society offer more support to women so that they may begin having children at an earlier age. With public and work-site facilities for breastfeeding, guaranteed educational opportunities for young mothers, and help with childcare, women would be able to begin their families at a younger age. (December 1994) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Ridley, Matt, Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters. New York: Harper Collins, 2000 (Orig. pub. in Great Britain by Fourth Estate, 1999). Each chapter features the characteristics of one of the 23 pair of human chromosomes, not attempting to give an exhaustive review, but rather to give a taste of some of the things that are known about it. Ridley is a great science writer for the untutored-but-interested reader. He has a gift for breaking down a complex subject into bite-size pieces. This book deserves its bestseller status. (May 2008) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Rountree, Cathleen, On Women Turning 50: Celebrating Mid-Life Discoveries. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1993. This is a collection of interviews of famous and not-so-famous women who have navigated their fiftieth birthdays. The women as individuals may be described as admirable, fascinating, witty, and even awesome (check out Dolores Huerta who has spent most of her adult life as a full-time human rights activist, living in poverty or near-poverty, while giving birth to 11 children--most of whom are now college graduates--and periodically catering to the demands of one of her three husbands). A more interesting aspect of this collection is what these women have in common. They each find this time in their lives more free, more focused on making a contribution to society, less focused on physical appearance and pleasing others, and less concerned (if not unconcerned) with having men in their lives. Tabra Tunoa, jewelry designer and manufacturer, said, "You waste a lot of time in your thirties trying to look twenty and in your forties trying to look thirty"--one comment from among several in the interviews which imply that the forties are for clearing up the vestiges of denial of age, and the fifties are for embracing its gifts. Said Gloria Steinem, "I learned that to be defiant about age may be better than despair--it's energizing--but it is not progress." Rountree has done a fine job of asking the right questions, eliciting illuminating answers, and photographing 18 women who are worth hearing from. (March 1995) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Rowling, J. K., Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. London: Bloomsbury, 2003. Rowling's imaginative genius is delightful and amazing. Throughout this long series, she has been consistent with her characters and the smallest details of their magical world. This is the fifth in the series and a continuation of the Harry Potter saga. If you have not read any of this series, do not start here. The first book is the best of the lot, and the rest are a continuation of the story. I was very aware in the first few pages of this volume that there would be a lot missed and misunderstood if the reader had not read at least the first in the series. I have loved them all and will read them through to her promised seven volumes. (September 2004) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Rowntree, Joseph S. The Sincere Desire: A Study in Prayer. London: Headley Bros., 1907. I discovered this little book in the library of West Australia Regional Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). I was seeking precursors to late twentieth-century and early twenty-first century writers who espouse mind-over-matter methods of materializing the things and conditions that we desire in our lives. This was a segment of my study of desire, which I believe to be the engine that drives all creation -- no matter what definition of creation is under discussion. What has come to be called the Law of Attraction, the writings of Esther and Jerry Hicks in the 1990s, Norman Vincent Peale's 1950s classic The Power of Positive Thinking, and Lewis Maclachlan's Intelligent Prayer published in the 1940s -- and don't forget Napoleon Hill -- all speak to the notion that our thoughts can be focused to produce desired results. Rowntree's short treatise, too, addresses these ponderings, both in its text and in its title. But rather than describing prayer as itself being the expression of desire that sets creation into motion, he places its value in its role as a bridge to God.
"The sense of the love and of the support of God, calms the wild trouble and excitement of the soul, steadies the nerves through the steadying of the mind," he writes. And thus, he believes, it "releases our intelligence." Then, he proposes, "Our intellect is awake and ready, our experience is fit for use; and a soul and body in this quest and quick condition often conquers disease both in ourselves and others by the careful and intelligent use of the powers and opportunities which nature affords us for cure. We are quicker in this temper to find out the causes and the remedies of the disease. We are at peace within, and for that reason we are intelligent without, in action and in precaution." Rowntree's views on prayer, though couched in traditional religious terms, are in keeping with the more liberal religious view that God's miracles are an unfolding of the laws of nature -- not an interruption of the normal flow of life, but rather fortuitous events in keeping with natural law.
Rowntree is a Quaker, and his views reflect the purpose of the Quaker Meeting as practiced in unprogrammed (silent) meetings. The silence is not meditation in the usual sense, but rather an attempt to align the human mind with the mind of God, thus influencing worshippers to live more God-like in their daily lives. Talking to God and listening to God, Rowntree says, builds our brain power.
His short treatise is a worthy addition to the literature of prayer. (December 2008)
| Sacks, Oliver, The Man Who
Mistook His Wife for a Hat. London: Picador, 1986. (Orig. pub.
1985). My sister long ago recommended this book, and its title has
stuck with me through the years. Finally, at a used-book sale for charity,
it fell into my hands. I learn that the author is the very person characterized by Robin Williams in the movie, Awakenings. In fact, one of the essays
relates the circumstances that are re-enacted in the film. The 24 essays
are case histories of Sacks's patients, some of the most interesting and
unusual from among the many he has encountered as a neurologist. The man
who mistook his wife for a hat had a diagnosis of visual agnosia, he saw
things inaccurately. He might pat a fire hydrant, thinking it the head of
a child, or try to put his wife's head on his own head because, to him,
she looked like a hat. We meet Christina, whose reaction to antibiotics
was to develop a rare neuritis that caused her to feel disconnected from
her body; she was no longer able to feel its presence and had to use
mirrors to feed and dress herself. Ninety-year-old Natasha had what she
had labeled "Cupid's Disease," after the inappropriate thoughts that kept
running through her mind. Her condition was a neurosyphilis that had
finally made itself known after seventy years. Treatment cured the medical
condition, but it did nothing to alter the brain damage that had already
occurred. Natasha was stuck with feeling giddy, young, and extravagantly
euphoric for the rest of her life. The other 21 essays are just as
intriguing, each of them exposing another fascinating aspect of our brains
and how they can alter our realities. (December 2008) | Santmyer, Helen Hooven, . .
. And Ladies of the Club. New York: G P Putnam's Sons, 1984. (Orig.
pub. Ohio State University Press, 1982). Santmyer finished this novel
shortly before she died. Incapacitated from advanced age and living in a
nursing home, she dictated the final chapters to a volunteer, who wrote
them out by hand. I am indebted to Santmyer's persistence in completing
this work she began fifty years before and to the volunteer who made it
possible. The publishers were rushing to press, trying to get the book
published before the author's death. Their haste is evident in the several
typographical errors that dot nearly every page in the book. Nonetheless
the story and fine writing shine through. The story begins with the events
of 17 June 1868 in an Ohio town, when and where fourteen young women
graduate from the Waynesboro Female College. The lives of these and other
women in the Waynesboro community are followed until the 1932 death of the
last member of their social group, the founders of the Waynesboro Woman's
Club, a literary society intended to challenge and develop the minds of
its members. With great ease, Santmyer draws the reader into the daily
lives and politics of middle-class Middle America from the viewpoint of
its women. I rank this as one of the most important books I've read,
certainly one of my 25 top favorites. As a history lesson, it is easy to
digest, and as an account of the human condition, it is poignant and
engaging. (1996) | Santmyer, Helen Hooven, Farewell, Summer. New York: Harper & Rowe,
1988. This is a different sort of coming-of-age story. Eleven-year-old
Elizabeth Lane vicariously earns a bit of worldly wisdom through her
sometimes surreptitious observance of her cousin as he falls in love with
a girl from a wealthy family, whose father has already chosen a husband
for her. Told from Elizabeth's viewpoint, it was her emotions and her
lessons learned that I experienced. Santmyer is such a consummate
craftsperson with her writing, and her life's work as an English professor
is happily in evidence. Though certainly not the master work of her
earlier published novel, . . . And Ladies of the
Club, this short novel is a deceptively easy read. It seemed an hors
d'ouevre, until two days after completing it, I realized I was still full
with the experience of having read it. (March 2007) | Schacter-Shalomi, Zalman, & Ronald S. Miller,
From Age-ing to Sage-ing: A Profound New Vision of
Growing Older. New York: Warner Books, 1995. What is the purpose
of life lived long past the reproductive years? Using their concepts of
"elderhood" and "the art of life completion," Schacter-Shalomi and Miller
survey the societal changes that they believe are synchronistic events
that give meaning and purpose to the burgeoning population of elders in
American society and other developed countries. An increasing number of
writers share these men's belief that the aged are needed to guide
humanity in its values, to influence the young to make changes that
consider the distant future as well as the present. Rabbi Schacter-Shalomi
has spent his adult life studying numerous spiritual disciplines. He
believes that the present easy access to ancient spiritual teachings that
were once passed secretly from one generation of adepts to the next is for
the purpose of allowing large populations to prepare themselves for their
contribution to humanity as wise elders. The major theme of this work
could be said to be the art of living and dying with meaning. Going beyond
the usual observations of the characteristics of our rapidly aging
population, Schacter-Shalomi and Miller have offered sound advice on how
an individual can find purpose in life beyond reproduction and career.
They even offer specific "Exercises for Sages in Training." (March 1995)
| Sebold, Alice, The Lovely
Bones. London: Picador, 2003. Alice Sebold has crafted a
mesmerizing story with four-dimensional characters – yes, four. Sebold has
gone beyond the usual three – unless you're thinking of the three
dimensions of body, mind, and soul. The main character is dead; her spirit
not only narrates the story, but participates. What begins as an apparent
crime thriller with an occult twist becomes a story about life after death
– for the departed and her survivors – and the ripple effect of a death
event on family and community. It is a surprise ending – not startling,
but unexpected. The resolution I looked forward to never happens. That
doesn't mean that Sebold left me hanging, it means she resolved what I
dismissed at the outset as unresolvable and left me too pleasantly
satisfied with the result to care about those other loose ends that were
undoubtedly intentional. And so what! I was oddly comforted by the message
that life is unfair, and the only defense is to adjust expectations and
keep living. This is Sebold's first novel. I was aware of a certain
adolescent gangliness about the writing, yet it suited the narrative, and
little succeeded in interfering with my reading once I began. Not since my
first Harry Potter have I postponed everything I could in order to finish
a book. I didn't manage one sitting, but I did accomplish it in one day.
What an odd and entirely delightful blend of psychological drama and
suspense, interspersed with the sort of romance that makes a female heart
glad. From start to finish, a completely original piece of work. (January
2008) | Shapiro, Robert, The Human
Blueprint: The Race to Unlock the Secrets of Our Genetic Script. New
York: St. Martin's Press, 1991. Touching on early beliefs about
heredity and Mendel's careful experiments with garden peas, Shapiro
quickly moves to a blow-by-blow description of the discovery of the
structure of DNA and the various individuals and laboratories who were
involved in the search for the carrier of our genetic information. He
delves just far enough into the private lives of the scientists to bring
them to life as human beings. From Mendel's experiments with garden peas
to Watson's and Crick's discovery of the double helix, Shapiro carries us
to the threshhold of mapping the human genome. Shapiro's text is as
relevant today, when the mapping of the human genome is complete, as it
was in 1991 when his book was published. The history is still the same and
the science leading up to the human genome map is as valid as it was then.
Without a good background in science, I sometimes found it a bit hard
going, but Shapiro's clear prose carried me through on the back of my
intense interest in his topic. (December 2007) | Sheehy, Gail, New
Passages. New York: Random House, 1995. Sheehy offers an
interesting categorization of life stages in the context of American life
as she has known it and lived it. She uses excerpts from the hundreds of
interviews she conducted throughout the United States while preparing this
book to prove her theory. Her stages have catchy labels: Tryout Twenties,
Turbulent Thirties, Flourishing Forties, Flaming Fifties, Serene Sixties.
Sheehy's attempt to make meaning of the mature years is most likely to
become an artifact of its era, unable to cross cultures or time. Her
passages depend too heavily on life as it is being lived in the 1990s in
the United States of America. With the work of Erikson and Jung on
developmental aging already on the book shelf and thoughtful contributions
by such as Friedan, Schacter-Shalomi and Miller, and others, Sheehy's
contribution is disappointing. (March 1995) | Sinclair, Billy Wayne & Jodie Sinclair, A Life in the Balance: The Billy Wayne Sinclair
Story. New York: Arcade, 2000. When I accepted the job to retype a
prison memoir for computer input, I was completely unprepared for the
story that unfolded as my fingers flew over the keyboard. I think the Publishers Weekly
review was right on target. Sinclair has spent 35 years in the toughest
prison in the country. Just as anyone who has lived in a community for
that many years, he has seen people, events, and history come and go. With
a powerful commitment to not becoming an animal, he carved out a life of
service and dedication, both to redeem himself for his crime and to create
a meaningful existence where none seemed to exist for so many. Graphic
(but not gratuitous) violence spills throughout much of the first half of
the book. The characters are vivid and sometimes inspiring - Swede who was
on death row and gave him classics to read, and the lifer who died trying
to save young prisoners from the inevitable rape that awaited them at
Angola. This is a worthy read. (January 2001) Update (January 2012): Sinclair was paroled in 2006. He and his wife have written another book, Capital Punishment: An Indictment by a Death-Row Survivor, which was published in 2009. | Skinner, M. L., The Fifth
Sparrow. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1972. Molly Skinner was
a daughter of one of Perth's (Western Australia) founding fathers
descended from the British aristocracy that realized England (and the
entire United Kingdom, for that matter) was not nearly big enough to hold
the egos and ambitions of the upper classes who had most benefited from
the improved infant mortality rates. Molly was multi-talented and made a
scanty, but respectable living as a nurse, sometimes owning her own
"nursing home," which was the designation of small private hospitals in
the early 1900s in Australia (and presumably in all countries influenced
by European medical practices). | She was a gifted writer who caught the
eye of D. H. Lawrence when he and his wife traveled to Australia and
stayed in the equivalent of a bed and breakfast that she operated with a
capital partner in southwestern Australia, some distance south of Perth.
He was so taken with her potential that he took her uneven, disjointed
novel and created bridges of thought to link passages, adding two chapters
in the process to give it what he considered a respectably literary
ending. It was titled The Boy in the Bush and
was published in the U.S., England, and Germany (in translation), showing
D. H. Lawrence and M. L. Skinner as authors. She had some really lovely
correspondence with Lawrence, which is included in the latter part of the
memoir. She ends with Lawrence's death, thus leaving out a third of her
life span, since she died in 1955 and Lawrence died in 1928 or 1929 (she
just says shortly after receiving a letter from him dated in December
1928). Lawrence
persisted, from the time he met her (a dowdy woman, with intense blue
eyes, approaching the age of fifty) until his death, in encouraging her to
produce more writing. Though she thought of herself as a writer (and had
since a teenager), The Boy in the Bush and an
early textbook on midwifery were the only commercially successful
publications she produced, and apparently two of the only three worth
reading. She would allow herself to become immersed in the activities of
producing the necessary living and drift for years in daily activities
without writing a word. A couple of well-known young Australian writers,
who were her friends in her later years, tackled the problem of
constructing her disjointed memories into a readable (and, for me, hard to
put down) account of the first 53 years of her life, which was not
published until 1972. (January 2003) The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, On the Future of Art: Essays by Arnold J. Toynbee,
Louis I. Kahn, Annette Michelson, B.F. Skinner, James Seawright, J.W.
Burnham, and Herbert Marcuse. New York: Viking, 1970. The essays
in this collection by noted figures in the United States of the 1960s and
1970s are examples of a continuing attempt to use words to grasp the
meaning of modern art forms and styles--to get a handle, so to speak, on
that which was created because there were no words to express it. While
historically important as a reflection of the thinking at the time they
were written, some of the essays are artifacts of thought. Skinner's
essay, for example, sought a way to popularize art by a system of
reinforcement. The result was cold, uninteresting, and silly. The true
value of the collection lies in its successful communication of the
opposing viewpoints concerning modern art that were extant in the late
1960s. (March 1997) | Stevens, Anthony, On
Jung. London: Penguin Books, 1991. (Original work published 1990).
The reader is treated to both a concise statement of Carl Gustav Jung's
theories of life-stage development and a parallel narrative of Jung's
experiences as he moved through each of these stages. Jung was the son of
a clergyman and grandson of a physician who established a home for
mentally retarded children and attempted to establish a psychiatry chair
at the university in Basel, Switzerland. His maternal grandfather was a
spiritualist "who held regular conversations with his first wife after her
death" (p. 5) and his second wife (Jung's grandmother) was a clairvoyant
from a family of clairvoyants. Growing up in such an atmosphere, where
matters of the spirit were daily fare and things that go bump in the night
were an accepted part of life, it seems quite natural that Jung had a
lifelong interest in the paranormal. Stevens traces the idea of the
unconscious from its conception (which he believed to be around 1700) to
the earliest investigations by Freud in the 1890s. The split between Freud
and Jung (essentially spirituality versus sexuality) is described as
having a profoundly shattering effect on Jung, as it had on others ejected
from the Freudian camp for their failure to endorse, without question,
Freud's theories that all neuroses is based in sexual development. (Two of
these ex-Freudians actually committed suicide after being spurned by
Freud). Stevens's unique method of combining a primer of Jung life-stage
theory with a biography of Jung is an effective introduction to the man
and his work. (February 1995) | Suzaki, Kiyoshi, Results from
the Heart. New York, London, Tokyo, Sydney, Singapore: The Free Press,
2002. I've long been interested in methods of introducing
soul-satisfying ethics into everyday business activities. That's what
motivated me to buy and give away several copies of Tom Chappell's The Soul of a Business. In the case of Suzaki's
book, I was drawn, first, by the banner at the top of the front cover that
reads "Foreword by His Holiness the Dalai Lama" and, second, by the
subheading "How Mini-Company Management Captures Everyone's Talents and
Helps Them Find Meaning and Purpose at Work." Chappell's book is a
recounting of his personal journey in building a business that reflects
his values (Tom's of Maine personal hygiene products). Suzaki's book is a
management manual, called by one reviewer a "Tao of Work," that outlines
how to put his methods into operation in a business of any size. As a
successful international management consultant, there is nothing
impractical in Suzaki's approach. As slim a volume as it is, he has
included everything a business would need to know to replicate his proven
management techniques that produce a satisfied workforce and a responsible
corporate citizen. Not a small task for such a small book. (June 2003)
|
Sykes, Bryan, The Seven
Daughters of Eve. London: Corgi Books, 2002. (Original work published
2001) Sykes offers a readable account of his struggles to
understand mitochrondrial DNA and his greater struggle to get his work
accepted by his peers. Sykes is informative without succumbing to
scientific dryness and succeeds in conveying his excitement and urgency as
he completes each step in proving his theories about the ancestors of
modern Europeans. In order for a scientist to keep her or his funding, he
explains, it is necessary to publish research findings on a regular basis,
preferably beating others to the punch. So, in addition to the usual ego
involvements, competing and being the first to scramble to the finish line
is necessary for professional survival. Sykes allowed these rivalries due
notice, as they related to his work, without dwelling on them to the
detriment of his main story. It's an interesting tale, intriguing at its
root, with the connotation that all of modern humanity, all of genus homo sapiens, are descended from a single woman,
whose daughters and chosen consorts have populated our entire planet in a
brief 80,000 years. In his Acknowledgments, Sykes recognizes the work of
others in his field who have contributed equally to the current accepted
science. I would rather that information had been included in his first
chapter where it would be more widely read, where the reader would, at the
outset, understand that Sykes is one of a dozen or more scientists
contributing to the DNA knowledge base that has made the "Out of Africa"
theory the most widely accepted theory of modern mankind's beginnings. But
then it's his book and his chance to toot his
horn. (July 2005) | Thomas, Lewis, The Lives of
a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher. New York: Viking, 1974. A
physician and medical educator of some repute, Thomas proves beyond a
doubt that he is a writer of lyrical proportions. His Lives informs as it reveals his personal musings
on the origin and meaning of life. Ours is a world of community, he
convinces us, the community of all living
things, "accountable," he writes, "by the high probability that we
derived, originally, from some single cell, fertilized in a bolt of
lightning as the earth cooled. . . . the resemblance of the enzymes of
grasses to those of whales is a family resemblance" (3). From Theodor's
experiments, in which the smaller of two individuals of the same species
voluntarily begins to disintegrate, to the communal lives of ants,
locusts, and termites, Thomas invites us to relate the lives of simpler
creatures to our own lives. He sees art, particularly music, as an
integral part of our biological being, mindful of Kandinsky and many other
artists who saw color as musical notes. Reminiscent of the aboriginal
creation tale that tells of the world being sung into being, Thomas sees
creation as having been orchestrated by a grand musical score. Like all
great artists, he entices us to look at life in new and different ways.
This National Book Award winner is timeless in its subtle theme of
humanity's search for meaning. (October 1996) | Thurber, James, Further
Fables for Our Time. Mitcham, VIC, Australia: Penguin Books, 1960.
(Orig. pub. 1956). Ah the joys of an estate sale when the departed was
a discriminating reader! One of the gems I picked up at just such a sale
was Thurber's second book of fables. James Thurber was one of the
brightest spots in the literary milieu of the 1950s, when I became old
enough to discover his witty, self-illustrated short pieces. He began
writing in the 1920s and continued until his death in 1961. His fables,
two to three pages in length, are all designed to entertain rather than
illuminate, and they each succeed. I won't stop at recommending this slim
volume; read anything Thurber you can find. (December 2007) | Thurber, James, The 13
Clocks. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1950. A beautiful princess
is under a spell in a gloomy castle, far, far away on a lonely hiil. Of
course, the prince rescues the princess, but not before Thurber takes us
on a journey through dark corners and secret stairways peopled with
original Thurbian monsters and creepy crawlies. With periodic lapses into
near-Seussian verse and twists and turns and glib, quick-witted,
distinctly Thurbian dialog, the reader of any age will happily turn page
after page of a quick-paced one-hour read. Adults will enjoy the
characteristic Thurber; children will enjoy the unique characters in a
familiar blend of good and evil, heroes and villains, magic and reason.
For it is a lively combination of magic and reason that resolve the plight
of the bewitched princess. (January 2008) | Uitz, Erika, The Legend of
Good Women: The Liberation of Women in Medieval Cities. Wakefield,
Rhode Island and London: Moyer Bell, 1994. (Original work published 1988
as Die Frau in der Mittelalterlichen
Stadt). Through a careful examination of documents (letters,
wills, deeds, contracts, and other public documents) Uitz traces the
growth of new urban centers in Europe in the twelfth through fourteenth
centuries. The lifeblood and reason for being for these towns and cities
was commerce. Their life came into being and depended on the new trade
routes that opened during this era. The demand for trade goods resulted in
the growth of craft guilds that governed the lives of craftsmen and their
families. The guilds, in turn, were governed by the town burghers--similar
to present-day city councils, but far more powerful in dictating the
details of the lives of town citizens. Women's lives were radically
changed by the economic demands of production for export. Both the need
for women's labor in creating goods and conducting business and the
partnership aspect that grew within marriages because of this need
resulted in widespread changes in law that allowed women to own property,
conduct business, and participate in the decisions about their lives.
Though it could not be said, from the evidence offered by Uitz, that women
were treated as equals, the economic characteristics of the middle ages
created the first opportunities in modern history for women to experience
some degree of independence and begin the centuries-long process of
escaping chatteldom. This is a carefully crafted academic study, allowing
readers the kind of solid documentation that will make this work a classic
reference. (December 1994) | University of Michigan (Ed.), Aging in the Modern World: A Book of Readings. Ann
Arbor: Author, 1957. This compilation of writings on personal
experiences with aging spans the centuries from early Greece to 1950s
America. I have a few favorites. Writing in 16th-century Italy, one man
looks back on his life from the perspective of a man in his 70s,
concluding that he was 43 when he "began to get his breath." Life became
easier for him at that point (though never easy, according to his
account). In a short piece, author D. H. Lawrence writes of his passion
for "making pictures" at 40, when he abandoned his longtime hobby of
copying famous paintings and began painting his own compositions. And what
collection would be complete without a social scientist who denied that
midlife crisis existed? (March 1995) | Updike, John, Just
Looking. New York: Knopf, 1989. What do great writers do when
they're not writing books? Updike is among those financially successful in
their own lifetimes who wrote for whatever magazine would pay well for
their work, and happily, in the case of Updike, that included many essays
on art. Without apology, venom, or regret, he tells it like he sees
it—chastising Renoir for not being quite as great as Monet and Degas and
unself-consciously, yet fondly, labeling a Diebenkorn Abstract
Expressionist painting as "an expensive variety of wallpaper" (p. 80).
Updike is teaching us, by example, how to view a painting. In Richard
Estes's Telephone Booths the viewer may see a
well-executed, realistic painting of people in telephone booths, a common
urban sight. Updike sees "The sun is shining on a car hood. A fat woman is
striding past a mannequin. Merchants are proclaiming their names and wares
in visual shouts reduced to isolated letters" (p. 21). He offers us models
of contemplative essays. Just Looking is richly
illustrated with full-color plates of the paintings discussed. Through
Updike's words, the masters become our familiars, and we care that they
painted—and what they painted. Updike's knowledge indeed seems to come
from a lifetime of "just looking," and he sees with an eye that the
uneducated art observer can understand. He is accessible. He offers a way
to view art that allows us to appreciate what we initially could not
understand—and to dislike it if we must. (November 1996) |
Vipont, Elfrida, A Faith To Live By. London: Bannisdale Press, 1965. Elfrida Vipont is one of the pen names of Elfrida Vipont Brown (1902-1992), who also sometimes used her married name, Foulds. She was a popular award-winning British writer of children’s fiction and also wrote adult nonfiction on Quaker topics. In Quakerism: A Faith To Live By, Vipont gives a whirlwind survey of Quaker history through 16 short biographies of key figures in Quaker history. Beginning with George Fox (1624-1691), generally considered founder of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), and Margaret Fell (1614-1702), whom many consider the architect of the early Quaker organization, she counts down the years to American philosopher and mystic Rufus Jones (1863-1948). This is a good collection for someone who wants to get a quick impression of who the Quakers are, or for someone who is just beginning their study of Quakerism. Vipont’s usual fine writing is in evidence, offering an entertaining and educational read. (August 2007)
| Vipont, Elfrida, Sparks
Among the Stubble. London: Oxford University Press, 1950. This
collection of short stories based on the lives of early Quakers is
intended for readers 10-14; however, it is suitable for reading aloud to
younger children. There are nine stories—five of them essentially fact
with some speculative, fictionalized detail and four that are loosely
based on the original stories. The last story, "Precious Seed," is the gem
of the collection, telling the story of George Edmondson, who traveled to
Russia with Quaker horticulturalist Daniel Wheeler. At the request of Tsar
Alexander of Russia, Wheeler was sent to drain the swampy land around St.
Petersburg and reclaim the land for agricultural purposes. Longer than the
others, Edmondson's story has all the elements of a great adventure novel:
true love that stands the test of time, foreign travel and a series of
coincidences that work to bring the tale to a happy end. In all cases, the
moral of the story (that made each story popular with Quaker parents) is
in evidence, but skillfully woven into the story. Any parent who wishes to
make his/her children aware of issues of social justice will find these
stories useful as teaching stories, as well as great adventures.
(September 2007) |
Vonnegut, Kurt, Breakfast
of Champions. New York: Delacourt, 1973. Breakfast of Champions was written on the occasion
of Vonnegut's fiftieth birthday. He chose this auspicious occasion to
revisit the life of one of his characters who appeared in earlier
novels--Kilgore Trout, an obscure science fiction writer, whom Vonnegut
now allows to become rich and famous, despite Trout's total lack of
interest in fame and fortune. Vonnegut's beautiful phrases are few and far
between. His ironic truths are delivered in short, straightforward
sentences--a sometimes gentle, sometimes not so gentle confrontation.
Vonnegut is in a class all by himself. Unlike other satirists, he shows a
genuine affection for his characters, reflecting what must be a great love
for the human race--despite its foibles that he so expertly identifies.
His black comedy is rendered with a sensitivity that elicits tender
feelings and fondness for his characters, who are neither heroes nor
villains, but people like ourselves who have stubbed their toes walking
life's path. His comic irreverence always serves to let us know ourselves
better, and he leaves no sacred cow unsullied. About the discovery of
America in 1492, he says, "Actually, millions of human beings were already
living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was
simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them"
(10). Breakfast of Champions is among
Vonnegut's finest writings, something of a summary of his first fifty
years of experience as a human being. (March 1997) | Vonnegut, Kurt & Lee Stringer, moderated by Ross Klavan, Like Shaking Hands with God: A Conversation About Writing. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999.
This small, slim volume is a transcription of two public-performance conversations between much-loved perennial bestselling author Kurt Vonnegut and Lee Stringer, author of bestselling
Grand Central Winter.Any five-minute commentary or two-paragraph writing by Vonnegut will be dripping with quotable quotes.
I have two favorite Vonnegutisms from these conversations. The first is "practicing any art . . . is not a way to make money or become famous. It’s a way to make your soul grow.”
And second, "music is the proof of the existence of God.” Oh, what the hell. I'll throw in another one. He quotes from his book Timequake: “We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different!”
Lee Stringer was living on the streets of New York and strung out on cocaine when he began writing. He successfully completed a drug-treatment program for his cocaine habit and continues to write.
Grand Central Winter: Stories from the Street, which became a bestseller, is a memoir of his years on the streets. That Stringer is a writer of rare talent seems to be unanimous among critics, readers, and other writers.
Vonnegut wrote the foreword, which is most likely why he joined Stringer for the conversations that comprise this text. Reviews of Stringer's book frequently mention that he is not writing social commentary or a plea for the homeless,
but rather it is a memoir of a turning point in one man's life. He never writes about "the homeless," his reviewers write, but about the individuals he knew during his years on the street. Struggling writers hungry for any morsel of advice from
someone who's "made it" will find a word or two of encouragement. Or if you are a Vonnegut collector, no doubt you'd be
happy to have this little book on your shelf. Otherwise, why not pick up Grand Central Winter instead and find out why Vonnegut says that Stringer is a better writer than he is. (November 2011)
| Wallis, Velma, Two Old
Women: An Alaska Legend of Betrayal, Courage and Survival. New York:
HarperCollins, 1994. (Original work published 1993). There are
multilayered lessons of life in this Athabascan Indian legend which
traditionally passes from mother to daughter. During a time of hunger and
limited resources, two old women are left behind to perish when their
tribe finds they no longer have the strength and resources to serve the
old, as had always been their custom. Calling on the skills learned in a
lifetime and their strong will to live, the two old women survive--and
even thrive. Returning two years later, the tribe, still suffering from
lack and want, are elated to find them alive, but the women do not trust
them. The old women learned to "use it or lose it," that humility is a
friend, and that work is the substance of life. Tribal members learned
that listening to and valuing the old ones was a greater sign of respect
than attempting to take care of their every physical need and that the old
are not burdens for they hold much knowledge that aids survival. Both the
women and their tribe concluded that fear moves people to very uncivilized
acts. The final lesson, as the legend closes with a happy ending, is the
value of forgiveness. (January 1995) | Walther, Ingo F., Pablo
Picasso 1881-1973: Genius of the Century. Cologne: Benedikt Taschen,
1986. A study of twentieth-century art is impossible without the
inclusion of Pablo Ruiz, who began using his mother's name, Picasso, as
his signature at the age of 13, when his art teacher father handed the
young artist his palette and never again painted. The text in this volume
of Benedikt Taschen's series on important artists is not gracefully
executed. The reader feels distinctly that English is not the author's
native tongue and certain elements of carelessness in the writing suggest
that Walther was more concerned with the manuscript deadline than
scholarship. Picasso's own words, appearing as blocked quotes in the
margins, are not dated, nor sources given. The reader is not able to
chronologically trace the change in philosophy reflected in his words.
This was particularly irritating when the great artist contradicts
himself, as was evident in three of the quotations: | Paintings are
nothing but research and experiment. I never paint a picture as a work
of art. Everything is research. I keep researching, and in this
constant enquiry there is a logical development. (p. 51) and I have never burdened myself with
searching. I paint what I see, sometimes in one form, sometimes in
another. I do not brood, nor do I experiment. When I feel I want to say
something, I say it in such a way as I feel I ought to. (p. 57) and The different styles I have been using
in my art must not be seen as an evolution . . . I have never had time
for the idea of searching . . . I have never made radically different
experiments . . . Different themes inevitably require different methods of
expression. This does not imply either evolution or progress, but it is
a matter of following the idea one wants to express and the way in which
one wants to express it. (p. 72) Walther's poorly disguised gut reaction
of disgust and shock in describing some of Picasso's work is a monument to
the reaction many must have felt (and apparently continue to feel) in
viewing some of the artist's paintings. Walther uses words such as
"horror," "grotesque," "misshapen," and "ugly," at one point writing,
"Picasso wanted to destroy absolutely everything" (p. 37). Aside from the
book's technical problems (including an inordinate number of typographical
errors), the facts of biography are presented, and an abundance of
full-color plates and numerous black-and-white photographs and
reproductions of Picasso's drawings are made available to the viewer.
(November 1994) Wardlaw, Alvia J, The Art
of John Biggers: View from the Upper Room. Forew. Peter C. Marzio.
Introd. Jeanne Zeidler. Essays by Maya Angelou, Edmund Barry Gaither,
Alison de Lima Green, and Robert Farris Thompson. New York and Houston:
Abrams and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1995. John Biggers came to
artistic maturity in an academic setting far from the art centers of New
York. Indeed, he was repulsed by the New York art scene that had so
summarily dismissed black art when he had participated in a MOMA black
student art exhibit while a Hampton Institute student. Perhaps his
avoidance of the centers of art commerce were as responsible for the late
acceptance of his genius as was the segregationist mindset in the United
States during Biggers's early career. He holds B.S., M.A., and Ph.D.
degrees in art education from Penn State. His work as an educator was as
important to him, if not more important, than creating a body of work. As
well as producing important paintings, drawings, and sculpture, Biggers is
one of this country's most important muralists, creating more than twenty
major murals in fifty years. As Biggers's official biographer, Wardlaw had
the advantage of extensive personal interviews with the artist and members
of his family. Wardlaw's emotional reaction to her subject is evident, yet
the analytical tone of typical art history writing seems out of place in a
life such as Biggers's, dramatic in both content and context. Wardlaw
draws a clear portrait of African-American life in the black section of a
sharply segregated Gastonia, North Carolina, where Biggers grew up in the
1930s, and the rich family and community life of rural black America of
the time. The other essays, written by noted scholars, are more polished
in style, tracing the history of Biggers's artistic career through a
careful study and analysis of his body of work. (January 1997) | Weaver, Rix, The Old Wise
Woman: A Study of Active Imagination. Boston & London: Shambhala,
1973. Active Imagination is a Jungian psychotherapeutic technique
which utilizes artistic expression as a means to access subconscious
material. Weaver states that it "is not valuable for its artistic quality,
but for its symbolism, which, taken into account with the conscious
situation, gives deeper and wider meaning to life" (p. 1). Weaver uses her
personal interactions in fantasy with "The Old Wise Woman" to illustrate
the progression and value of Active Imagination. Her exploration of her
dream material included creative writing (creating a fairy tale that told
her more about the figures in her dream) and sculpture, making the figures
from her dream come alive in clay. The importance of Weaver's work for
herself, and as a model for Jungian therapists, is in its efficacy in
aiding therapy clients to reach and understand the symbolism of their
dream material. Jung's theories are based on the idea that becoming more
conscious of our hidden motivations is our life work, and Active
Imagination is one of the tools a therapist may use to help a client
become "consciously involved" with the archetypes and symbols from their
unconscious. (February 1995) | Weil, Andrew, Spontaneous
Healing: How to Discover and Enhance Your Body's Natural Ability to
Maintain and Heal Itself. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995. A
comprehensive analysis of the value of various alternative medical
treatments is included, along with the book's main topic: how to
capitalize on your body's built-in disease-fighting system. Weil outlines
a system for achieving maximum health. What distinguishes his work from
that of others is that what he proposes seems achievable. With a
bachelor's degree in botany and an M.D. from Harvard Medical School,
Weil's credibility is enhanced. For those who are disillusioned with
establishment medicine, his open-mindedness and healthy critique of both
disease-oriented modern medical practice and prevention-oriented
alternative therapies is a breath of fresh air. The information is good,
the writing is clear, and Weil has contributed a very important book to
the body of literature on medical consumerism. (March 1995) | Wilton, Elizabeth, A
Ridiculous Idea. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1967. When
16-year-old Sarah Haydon announces to her relatives that she is going to
Australia to join her father, and that she's taking her four younger
brothers and sisters with her, they all agree that it is "a ridiculous
idea." But young Sarah gets her way. When the children arrive in
Australia, they find their father's homestead, but their father is not
there. He is away on business. He does not know that his wife has died or
that his children await him. Helped by the young man who is tending the
farm and neighbouring farm families, the children experience a series of
adventures as they come to terms with their new lives. As the months pass,
the children realize that their father has been gone far too long and that
he may not return. This is a carefully researched and skillfully written
work of historical fiction for young readers from the age of about 10 to
the age of about 14, and perhaps a bit older. (November 2008) | Windle, Janice Woods, Hill
Country. Atlanta, GA: Longstreet, 1998. Weaving fact with fancy
(to fill in the details), Janice Woods Windle builds page-turning fiction
from family records. Her family were the first settlers in Texas's Hill
Country, the central Texas highlands west of Austin. Photographs of the
people whose fictionalized biographies are featured appear at the
beginning of each chapter, reminding the reader that history is
intertwined with fiction. My own family is mentioned on a page or two,
incidentally neighbors of Windle's family, which influences my interest.
Most history buffs, though, would enjoy reading about the young Lyndon
Johnson and how events during his college days at San Marcos birthed his
political career. (February 2010) | Wollstonecraft, Mary & Clare Morgan (Ed.), A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Cologne:
Könemann Verlagsgesellschaft, 1998. (Orig. pub. 1790 & 1792) Nearly
two hundred years before the forceful flowering of feminism in Western
countries, Mary Wollstonecraft penned two important essays (both in the
form of letters of protest to the writings of male thinkers of the time),
the first setting forth her protest against social injustices of her time,
and the second declaring the intellectual equality of women and setting
forth in detail the actions needed to correct the unfair status of women.
The complete text of both Vindications are
included in this edition. Often Wollstonecraft alluded to matters that
were not clearly stated, but were known to readers of the time. This is
where the detailed end notes are wonderfully helpful. For instance,
Wollstonecraft states "Hume observes ..." and the editor's note reads:
"David Hume, (1711-76). Scottish philosopher and historian who argued that
the perceptions of the mind were essentially impressions from sensations,
emotions and ideas." For the casual reader (if there is such a thing),
these notes are essential to a full understanding of Wollstonecraft's
arguments within the context of her time. It is of interest to note that
she did not manage her personal romantic affairs as wisely as her essays
suggest she would have liked. She had one daughter out of wedlock and died
giving birth to another after her marriage to William Godwin. This second
daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, married political radical and poet
Percy Bysshe Shelley. Even as the daughter of the two most famous radicals
of the time and as the wife of another, Mary Shelley became, in the long
term, more famous than any of them as the author of the novel Frankenstein. (April 2003) | Woolfe, Sue, The Mystery of
the Cleaning Lady. Crawley, Western Australia: University of Western
Australia Press, 2007. Intermingled with her research into the origins
of creativity, Woolfe recounts her several-year struggle with extracting
her novel, The Secret Cure, from piles of
handwritten notes and diary entries. Novel writers of any ilk, published
and unpublished, will likely find this a good read. The facts reported by
neuroscientists, the impressions (and confessions) shared by a number of
writers who participated in the research, and Woolfe's personal insights
are intriguing and informative. She makes reference to Isabel Allende,
which seems particularly suitable, since Allende's style of starting a
story without knowing where it is going is quite similar to Woolfe's own
style of working. A bonus for new writers is Woolfe's synopsis of The Secret Cure given as an appendix at the end of
the book. Every publisher wants a synopsis of your book; here's a good
example. (June 2008) | Yalom, Marilyn, A History
of the Wife. New York: HarperCollins, 2001. Look at the title! How
could a once-married career divorcée resist? Yalom has carefully
documented marriage customs over the centuries, with an emphasis on how
women have variously been enslaved, freed, honored, dishonored, exploited
and protected by their roles in marriage. Her emphasis is on Western
traditions. She predicts that "it is unlikely that the nuclear family
consisting of a married couple and their children, which peaked
numerically for blacks in 1950 and for whites in 1960, will return to its
former hegemonic position in American society" (p. 397). Not only has the
meaning of being a wife changed radically since 1950, Yalom concludes, but
so has the meaning of family. Society is now in the early stages of
recreating a model that has been in use for thousands of years. This is a
carefully researched and competently written academic work that is
presented in a reader-friendly, informative manner. (October 2007) | Yelen, Alice Rae, Passionate Visions of the American South: Self-Taught
Artists from 1940 to the Present. Essays by William Ferris, Susan
Larsen, Jane Livingston, and Lowery Stokes Sims. New Orleans: New Orleans
Museum of Art, 1993. Since the 1950s, the New Orleans Museum of Art
(NOMA) has had regularly scheduled exhibitions of self-taught artists;
NOMA began an active program of acquisition of their works in the 1960s.
Exhibits have included such celebrated artists as Grandma Moses (1952),
Clementine Hunter (1955, 1973, 1985), and Sister Gertrude Morgan (1973,
1988). The present volume is the catalog of an exhibition and national
tour organized by NOMA, featuring 270 works by eighty artists from
thirteen southern states. The full-page color plates are accompanied with
Yelen's text describing each work, often offering the artists' own words
to describe their pieces. These artists, for the most part, are not
concerned with issues of preservation or conservation in their selection
of materials. Their relationship to their materials is organic. Several of
the artists paint in mud, a practice they continued even after interested
patrons and gallery owners supplied them with proper paints. Many of the
artists depended on their natural and found materials to give direction
and inspiration for their creations. Sculptor Charlie Lucas said: | I think the metal
talks to me more when I'm scrounging around looking for it, rather than when I'm
looking for a specific piece. . . . the piece will tell me exactly
what it is, what I want. (p. 56) Most self-taught artists, says Yelen,
begin their art late in life, usually after retirement. They often create
as a directive from God, His angels, or from visions in dreams; they feel
a spiritual connection to their work. Said Thornton Dial, Sr.: Anything you pick
up, somebody know about. You picking up the spirit of somebody . . . Leaves
fall off a tree got a spirit in them. Cows, dirt, rocks, the whole world, all
that stuff carry on life . . . That's what recycle is all about. When
God died, he rose again. (p. 57) The essays are well written and
informative, but the art itself speaks most eloquently. Short biographies
with accompanying photographs of the artists are arranged in alphabetical
order at the end of the book. The difficult job of presenting so many
artists is accomplished gracefully and efficiently. (March 1997) Zweig, Connie (Ed.), To Be
a Woman: The Birth of the Conscious Feminine. Los Angeles: Jeremy P.
Tarcher, 1990. A good collection of contemporary writings on woman's
place in American society, both descriptions of the problems and proffered
solutions. Of particular interest to the midlife woman are Elizabeth
Strahan's piece that proposed rituals to celebrate menopause and Marion
Woodman's essay on mother, virgin, and crone as archetypes in the Jungian
tradition. (December 1994) | Zusak, Markus, The Book
Thief. Sydney: Picador, 2005. I didn't see any reviews or comments
on this book before I read it. I didn't even read the back-cover blurb.
I'm glad. I came into it completely unaware of the plot or characters or
setting. Set in World War II Germany, this is the story of a German
gentile family who hide a Jew in their home to save him from being sent to
a death camp. I really don't want to say more than that. The unfolding of
the story is too breathtaking to be spoiled. (August 2008) |
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