Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand (Random House, 2010)
There are math prodigies. There are music prodigies. And then there is Louis Zamperini, who can only be called a survival prodigy.
Read the Unbroken before the movie comes out. Not that I know anything bad about the upcoming film, but I do know that movies have a track record of focussing on the action while missing the subtleties. Not that there aren't subtleties I'd rather have missed.
To summarize the story of Zamperini—Olympian, WWII pilot, prisoner of war—might give away too much. You could read the Wikipedia article, but I don't recommend it. Let Laura Hillenbrand be the storyteller; she does the job remarkably well.
One caveat: Although I recommend Unbroken highly—it is a remarkable story, horrifying and wonderful—I'm not sure about recommending it to anyone with an active, visual imagination. I'm not one who visualizes what I read well, as I'm usually in too much of a hurry to get on with the story. But evil images can make an impression in a flash, and one particular incident haunted me for days. It still does, though I'm getting better at banishing it when it intrudes. I certainly can't recommend the book to grandson Jonathan, for example, though it's well within his reading ability and would give him important insights into World War II, the clash of cultures, the depths of evil, and the power of grace. It would also scar his young soul. As an aunt, I'm even reluctant to encourage our nephews to read Unbroken, but I have to realize that, being teens and older, their souls have probably already been scarred. Certainly several of them are old enough to have been in the story had they lived at that time, which is another reason it's hard to read.
Three observations that should not be spoilers:
- As a child, Louis Zamperini could only be called a juvenile delinquent, despite a reasonably happy family life. The traits that made him so were apparent even when he was a toddler, though they were exacerbated by problems at school. It's clear that these same characteristics also drove him to be an Olympic athlete, a war hero, and a survivor in unspeakably brutal conditions. In a society where unruly children are routinely drugged into compliance, where they have no acceptable outlet for their wild energies, where their natural talents are quashed rather then channelled—where will our heroes come from when we need them?
- The brutality of the Japanese prison camp personnel was almost beyond belief. Take a generation or two of any society: abuse them physically and mentally, daily and as a matter of course, in school and in the military; teach them that surrender and capture are the ultimate in shame and degradation; above all, fill them with the certainty that they and their people are vastly superior to all other beings ... and then put the dregs of that society, the failures, and the mentally ill in charge of the prison camps. What is astonishing is not the consequences, but how quickly they come to fruition.
- Despite seeming evidence to the contrary, good is vastly more powerful than evil.
The Shadow Lamp by Stephen R. Lawhead (Thomas Nelson, 2013)
I'd been looking forward to the next installment of Lawhead's Bright Empires series since I finished #3, The Spirit Well. (#1 is The Skin Map and #2 The Bone House.) Fortunately, our library is generally quite responsive to suggestions for new books to acquire, and I recently finished #4, The Shadow Lamp. Glad to return to the adventures of the characters and to Lawhead's captivating, if disorienting, world, I was alas somewhat disappointed by this installment. The first three books I found increasingly interesting and well-written, but this one did not hold together as well. There are so many characters now that even 371 pages provide only snapshots where I was hoping for a movie.
What's more, as the story nears its climax, its Christian foundations have become more explicit. This is hard to articulate, as it's more an impression than something rational, but I found it more effective in the background. Unlike many Christian writers, certainly most modern ones, Lawhead does a good job of making it integral to the story rather than preachy. But that sort of thing is so very hard to do well. It's akin to the problem of portraying a truly good person; it was C.S. Lewis who expressed the problem best when he acclaimed George MacDonald all but unique as a writer whose good characters are believable and his villains "stagey," instead of the other way around (preface to George MacDonald: An Anthology). What Lewis called the "Kappa element" in a story (very roughly, the atmosphere, flavor, or tone that infuses the tale) is what makes it convincing for me, as in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, which is shot through from beginning to end with Christian truth that never comes explicitly to the foreground. The Shadow Lamp loses something by making it so obvious.
All that aside, it was good to become reacquainted with the characters and a truly fascinating and imaginative story, and I'm hoping for better in the final book, The Fatal Tree, due to be released in September. If you're interested in the stories, by the way, and haven't yet begun the series, I recommend waiting for the last book to be released, so as to be able to read them in quick succession. It's too complicated a tale to let many months go by between books.
Station X: Decoding Nazi Secrets by Michael Smith (TV Books, 1999)
Writers like Michael Pollan, John McPhee, and Rowan Jacobsen can take the oddest subjects and weave them into a riveting story. Would that any of them had written Station X! Michael Smith has a riveting story: the long-kept secret of the codebreakers that revealed so much of Axis strategy and tactics during World War II. The facts themselves kept me reading the book, but I'd have finished it in a day if it had been written as I'm sure it could be. Without a doubt it's a story worth knowing, and you can get a taste of it from Wikipedia.
I had heard, of course, that the British had cracked the Germans' supposedly uncrackable Enigma Machine in WWII, a fact that only became known much later—the techniques were still being used in the Cold War—leaving participants from the lowest level to Winston Churchill unable to talk about what they did during the war. Here are a few things I didn't know:
- The success was not due to a "big break" that solved the problem once for all, but to many little breaks that added up and to much tedious work—work and breaks that needed to be repeated and achieved every day. In addition to serious mathematics, cracking the codes required intuition, imagination, guesswork, and persistence. Old-fashioned, flesh-and-blood spying played a significant role, and good ol' human mistakes (such as starting a message with the very recognizable "Heil Hitler!") were essential.
Success depended very largely on German operators ignoring the rules. "We could usually break things when we identified the human error and that was what it was all about," said Mavis Lever. "If the Germans had kept to the rule book and done it properly, as they were instructed to do, then of course we wouldn't have been able to get it out."
Among his many achievements, Tiltman had helped to crack the cipher used by the Japanese naval attaché in Berlin, assisted by the latter's tendency to begin each of his reports with the phrase: "I have the honor to report to your excellency that..."
- Cracking the codes began during World War I.
- The Poles made the first critical break, providing both irony and concern later, during the Cold War.
- Bletchley Park workers were a motley crew of brilliant and eccentric folks. The initial group consisted mainly of liberal arts professors, on the grounds that codebreaking primarily required language skills. When mathematicians were brought in they and their work were viewed with suspicion: what could they possibly contribute? (More)
Half the Church: Recapturing God's Global Vision for Women by Carolyn Custis James (Zondervan, 2011)
I've reviewed three of Carolyn Custis James' books before (When Life and Beliefs Collide, The Gospel of Ruth, and Lost Women of the Bible); this is her most recent and I'm happy to say our library added it to their shelves at my request. I'm not even going to attempt to rank the four, but just say that Carolyn James isn't losing any steam. She continues fleshing out her discoveries concerning a Biblical view of the role of women, not only in the church but in all creation. This time her vision was inspired and enhanced by her reading of Half the Sky (Kristof/WuDunn).
As usual, and despite her own assurances to the contrary, I think James underestimates both the difficulty and the importance of full-time, long-term motherhood, and is in danger of heaping still more burden and guilt on those who are already struggling. I truly get her position that "marriage and babies" is an insufficient—downright paltry—vision of God's overall plan for his daughters, implying that the young, the old, and those without husbands or incapable of bearing children are second-class citizens in God's Kingdom. However, I believe that a vision of childrearing as only a short interlude in one's life is also deficient, and that James misses important contributions of those who have committed to large families (now defined as more than two children), childrearing as full-time work, and homeschooling. She also appears not to understand how difficult and intellectually challenging it is to do well in such a profession, and how little such people are respected by society (including most churches).
But that is not James' battle, and one cannot cover all bases in every book. What she does cover, she handles superbly.
As usual, here are a few random quotations, to give you a feel for Half the Church, and to remind my future self of what's inside.
Literary experts tell us every good story has conflict. ... In fact without conflict a story has no plot. ... Which made me wonder, if God is the master storyteller—the creator of story—and if conflict makes the story, is there conflict before Genesis 3? ... If humanity had never fallen into sin, would we be living in a plotless story now? For that matter, will heaven be plotless? Is conflict only and always destructive and the result of fallenness? Or is there a healthy, necessary, constructive variety of conflict that creates a gripping plot and is designed to make God's image bearers flourish and grow? (pp. 66-67)
Conflict brings out the leader in us, transforms our lives from the mundane to the cosmic, and by God's grace forges us into more compassionate, selfless leaders. Conflict in our stories isn't in the way; it is the way—to becoming better leaders, better image bearers, to creating a better story—to the fulfillment of the Story. (p. 97)
Nunsense was written in 1985, but neither of us had seen it until Sunday. We went to the performance at Sanford's Wayne Densch Performing Arts Center because our friend Linda was the music director for the show. As it turned out, we knew one of the main cast members, too—a friend of Heather's from high school. She played Sister Hubert and did a fantastic job. Everyone did a great job, actually, though some had better enunciation than others, so we didn't always get the jokes because we didn't catch all the words.
A few of the jokes were less than family-friendy, but they'd probably go over the heads of anyone who shouldn't hear them, and compared with much of what can be seen today, the show is fitting for—well, for a convent!
Afterwards we had a (too) quick bite to eat at the Willow Tree Café. German food is not normally my favorite out-to-eat meal, but this was excellent and I'd love to have an excuse to go back.
We had the Gourmet Potato Pancakes and the Sausage Sliders from this menu. Both were worth repeating, although next time I may want to try the Reisen Bretzen.
How to Be Idle by Tom Hodgkinson (HarperCollins, 2005)
The Idle Parent by Tom Hodgkinson (Penguin Books, 2009)
Porter recently earned his ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) certification. Not to be outdone, I read these books to obtain my IDLE certification. (A joke that only works if you read it out loud, I guess.) Unlike Porter's efforts, mine required no exam, although How to Be Idle did at times test my patience.
I read the second book first, on Janet's recommendation, and I'm glad I did. It is by far the better, as evidenced by having over 30 of my sticky notes whereas the other only has eight. I suspect that parenthood gave Hodgkinson a little more maturity, as it does most of us. Even though I know he's exaggerating to make a point, in How to Be Idle there's still 'way too much disdain for effort, responsibility, and moral standards, and much too much praise for smoking, excessive drinking, drug use, unlimited sex, and all-night partying. On the plus side, he mentions Paul Verlaine twice, a poet I'd never heard of till Stephan introduced me to him. I love to find connections like that.
From the chapter on meditation, a sentiment I can relate to:
It's hard to drift off into nowhereland when your arousal hormones are circulating wildly as a result of your rage at mobile phone users. Fantasies of hurling their mobile phones from the train window tend to disturb the search for inner calm.
Much of what Hodgkinson praises I cannot relate to, even a "pleasure" as innocent as remaining in bed until noon. He's not even talking about getting a good night's sleep—as one would need after another of his pleasures, staying awake till three or four in the morning—but of lolling around, simply being idle. Even if I were a night person for whom a 4 a.m. to noon sleep felt normal, I'd be climbing the walls if I couldn't wake up, get up, and get to work! I never did get how breakfast in bed was supposed to be a luxury.
On the other hand, this touches on one of the book's best points: that we have—unnaturally and to our harm—separated work from life. We focus our educational efforts too much on training our children to get a well-paying job working for someone else, when we should be teaching them how to discover what they love to do and leverage it into self-employment. Although he quotes G. K. Chesterton several times, Hodgkinson does not mention one of my favorite of Chesterton's ideas, though I'm sure he would agree with it: the world does not really have too many capitalists (owners of the tools of production), but too few.
Another important point, hidden in his obsession with what I'd call slothful idleness, is how essential to the creative process are unscheduled time, daydreaming, staring into space, meandering walks to nowhere, and the like. Yet we feel guilty for these idle times, and others feel free to interrupt them, because we're "not doing anything."
The Idle Parent retains a modicum of the prejudice against Christianity in general and Puritanism in particular (or rather, the author's misinterpretation of them), and a bit too much respect for Rousseau, Locke and others who seem to know more about theoretical children than real ones. And he still exaggerates at times to make his point. But there are some real gems here.
Here follows a ridiculously long list of quotations, and I won't blame you if you are put off by the quantity. But at least half the reason for making the effort to post them here is so that I'll be able to find them again myself, so I don't apologize. They're worth taking the time to read, really. (More)
Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War by Joe Bageant (Crown, 2007)
It is good for me occasionally to read something written by someone I disagree with. After all, I frequently find wisdom in unexpected places, and have been trying for five years to put my aphorism, "the wise man recognizes truth in the words of his enemies," into common usage. (With spectacular lack of success, I might add. A Google search nets seven results, all from my own blog.) This book was difficult, and I haven't yet been wise enough to discern much useful truth, though by the end I was able to understand the author a bit better, I think—and to feel sorry for him. He's ashamed of his background, he's afraid of the future, he's angry at the injustice he sees, and he thinks he knows where to assign the blame.
It was not my Christmas present. I was only the courier, and if I don't like it, well, that's what I get for reading someone else's gift merely because it passed through my hands in the delivery.
Joe Bageant grew up in a small town in Virginia, not all that far from my own West Virginia/Western Pennsylvania ancestors. Unlike most of his neighbors, he went off to college and, as my strongly right-leaning friend would say, became thoroughly drunk on the "Liberal Kool-Aid." He became a hippie and a journalist and a hardline socialist.
Writing about his roots, he occasionally comes across as sympathetic to the sorrows of those who share his hometown, but mostly with a condescension that is difficult to stomach: Surely the only reason they don't see the world the way he does is that they have been ground down by their corporate, industrialist, Republican masters who conspire to keep the serfs stupid, ignorant, poor, and sick!
By the end of the book I was convinced that his conflicted response to his own people—alternate sympathy and loathing—is due to his own self-hatred. Sorry to go all pop-psychology on you, but he clearly has never forgiven himself for being white, and Scots-Irish at that. To hear him tell it, all the troubles of the world are the fault of people who are white, of Scots-Irish descent, and/or Christian. He himself is guilty of the first two, and if he managed to shed the last, to his embarrassment his own brother is a pastor—even one who admits to having cast out half a dozen demons in his time. In an attempt to atone for these sins, Bageant indulges in what would clearly be branded "hate speech" and earn him the harshest opprobrium were the objects of his screed black, of Hispanic descent, and/or Buddhist.
The best chapter, oddly enough, is the one on guns, hunting, and the Second Amendment. I say "oddly" because I dislike both guns and hunting, but appreciate Bageant's demolition of the standard Liberal gun-control reasoning. Here he seems at last to understand his own people, even though he no longer has use for guns himself. I suspect the recipient of this book will like this chapter a lot.
Although there are many places where I nearly threw the book across the room because of what I see as Bageant's ignorance and irrationality, he occasionally has some impressive insights: as, for example, when he accurately predicted the subprime mortgage crisis well before it became obvious to the world. On the other hand, Porter predicted that, too. It's a lot easier to see that something is a house of cards than it is to do something constructive about it.
I'm also struck, again, by how much the far Left and the far Right have in common. It's the Right that usually gets mocked for stockpiling food and water and otherwise preparing for the coming Doomsday, but Bageant is just as pessimistic. He may see different causes for the impending disaster, but he's sure it's coming. It's those of us in the middle who just keep on keeping on with life, expecting neither heaven nor hell anytime soon.
Here are a few quotes—then I have to go wrap the book. :) (More)
Better Than School by Nancy Wallace (Larson Publications, 1983)
Child's Work: Taking Children's Choices Seriously by Nancy Wallace (Holt Associates, 1990)
These stories of the education of Ishmael and Vita Wallace have been high on my list of favorite books since our own homeschooling days. Recently I re-read them both, confirming my suspicions that the Wallaces—flying by the seat of their pants in an era when homeschooling was almost unheard of, and often illegal—discovered many of the principles now refined in Project-Based Homeschooling.
The last time I read about the Wallaces' struggles with onerous regulations and imperious school boards, I noted how blessedly out of date it was, for although there are still those in the United States who would make homeschooling illegal again if they could, for the most part homeschoolers here can rest in the knowledge that the right to direct the education of our own children is recognized in all fifty states. This time, however, I read those parts of the books with renewed interest, since Switzerland, while much more advanced than the U.S. in some areas, is woefully behind us in this. Some of the Wallaces' experiences and arguments may turn out to be relevant, or at least to give inspiration.
Don't you just hate it when you read an inspiring story from the past and have no idea what happened to the characters in subsequent years? With Vita and Ishmael, at least, that question can be answered by visiting their Orpheo Duo website.
Here are a few, somewhat random, quotations. You really need to read the books to get a good sense of the story, however.
Walking into the meeting knowing that we had a majority [of the school board] on our side was a lot better than not knowing what to expect, but I guess I really wanted more than that. I wanted the whole board to admit that we were doing a terrific job with our kids and to be interested in our approach to education. After all, there was a lot the public schools could have learned from us. What disturbed me the most was that not only were two of the board members completely uninterested in what we were doing but they seemed to want the kids to go to school no matter what. When I wrote about this to John Holt, he responded with some very insightful remarks that I'll never forget. "One of the saddest things I've learned in my life," he said, "one of the things I least wanted to believe and resisted believing for as long as I could, was that people in chains don't want to get them off, but want to get them on everyone else. 'Where are your chains?' they want to know. 'How come you're not wearing chains? Do you think you are too good to wear them? What makes you think you're so special?'" (BTS, 114-115)
Project-Based Homeschooling: Mentoring Self-Directed Learners by Lori Pickert (independently published at CreateSpace, 2012)
Janet's enthusiasm over Project-Based Homeschooling led me to be sure I read the book while I had access to it in Switzerland. I had to get over some misconceptions, and I found the ideas intimidating, but I agree: it's a must-read for homeschoolers, and in truth important for all parents. Maybe for everybody.
The Misconception Way back when, in our homeschooling days, a popular approach was called Unit Studies. Here's an essay on unit studies as they relate to what's now called Classical Education; it give a pretty good idea of what they are about. Basically, you pick a topic you hope your child will be interested in, and integrate the teaching of all subjects into a study of that topic. At the time, I found the method too structured, too school-at-home, and too much work. I assumed project-based homeschooling was a re-working of unit studies.
I was wrong. There are similarities: a child working on a project is integrating many disciplines and skills together. But project-based homeschooling is an excellent example of why unschooling, well done, is absolutely not the "let the kid play video games all day" approach its detractors think it is.
Projects of this sort are the child's idea and the child's responsibility. That doesn't mean, however, that the parents are off the hook. It seems to me that the work involved in observing and coaching a project is much harder than following a curriculum. Which leads me to ...
The Intimidation I love the ideas. I really do. But even as a do-it-yourself, lone wolf kind of homeschooler, this is out-of-my-comfort-zone thinking. Probably because if Earth is my comfort zone, art projects are somewhere around Neptune, and so much of the examples here involve using art materials. The author seems to think it natural to work through one's ideas by making a painting or modelling in clay. I don't believe I've ever in my life even thought about doing that—and I've live a lot of years—so the idea of coaching a child to do so leaves me queasy. Fortunately, Lori Pickert was kind enough to explain, in a comment on Janet's review, that "if drawing and painting make you nervous, there’s still building, writing, designing t-shirts and websites, putting on skits, making brochures and posters, etc. etc. etc.—it’s more about helping kids figure out a way to help others learn and along the way that reinforces what they know/don’t know and how you collaborate, share, etc."
Also, she's careful to give the neophyte a break:
Surprisingly often, people will champion self-directed learning for children but not allow those children's parents the same freedom and respect. It's their way or the highway, and you had better start doing it the right way (their way) right away. Your kids should learn at their own pace, follow their interests, and you should trust that they'll eventually learn everything they need to know. You, on the other hand, should get with the program, right now, 100%, or else. You don't need to have your own opinions or ideas; ours will suffice. There's no time to experiment and see if these ideas work for you; take it on faith or you're part of the problem.
If your child deserves to learn at his own pace and have his own ideas, so do you. Whatever you champion for your child, make sure you also give to yourself: the right to follow your own path, work at your own pace, follow your own interests, make mistakes, and try again. Whatever you want for your children, you are far more likely to help them achieve it if you live it yourself.
It's hard to do justice to the project-based homeschooling concept without taking a lot more time and effort than I'm willing to put forth at the moment—not to mention that I'd need the book, which presently is some 4500 miles away. However, I do have some excerpts, which I copied down before relinquishing the book. (More)
3 Theories of Everything by Ellis Potter (Destinée Media, 2012)
It’s a good thing this little book is only 111 pages long, and easy to read to boot, because with our whirlwind sightseeing schedule—or what passes for whirlwind when 1.5- and three-year-old tornados are involved—there hasn’t been much time for reading.
The author is a former pastor of my son-in-law’s church, and that’s all I know about him because there’s no author blurb and I’m writing this “blind”: we’ve had no Internet for two days. And when it comes back I’ll be too busy/lazy to change the above. [Correction: I did find this short bio of Ellis Potter that covers a good deal.]
As I said, it’s a quick read, but well worth the attention. Potter’s search for absolute reality took him all over the map, so to speak, two of the notable stops being as a Buddhist monk and as a Christian pastor. 3 Theories of Everything is a brief and admittedly greatly simplified look at Monism, Dualism, and Trinitarianism, its strongest point being the obvious respect Potter has for all three, despite having decided that Trinitarianism comes closest to describing the true nature of the universe.
I’ve had my fill of arguments that think to prove their premises by sketching a false picture of their opponent’s position and mocking it into oblivion. What kept me reading this book, which had the potential to be just that, is that it isn’t. Potter is not one of those preachers who sees nothing but irrationality and evil in other religious beliefs and practices, even though he feels strongly about the truth of his own.
Besides that, my favorite part of 3 Theories of Everything is the discussion of relationship as the heart of Trinitarianism: God alone is God, and God is not alone. Unity and diversity, relationship, love, service, obedience, and sacrifice existed in God Himself before the creation of the world, and thus are fundamental to the very nature of the universe. Adam needed his relationship with similar-but-different Eve to be fully human. We are not ourselves in ourselves, but in relationship with others.
Potter is annoying sometimes, a little too Baptist in some places and a little too patriarchal in others, but his humility makes this easy to forgive.
God Is Red: The Secret Story of How Christianity Survived and Flourished in Communist China by Liao Yiwu, translated by Wen Huang (HarperOne, 2011)
After reading Liao Yiwu's The Corpse Walker, I knew I had to order God Is Red. Being pressed for time Having grandchildren to play with, I'm going to take the lazy way out with this review and quote the dust jacket:
When journalist Liao Yiwu first stumbled upon a vibrant Christian community in the officially secular China, he knew little about Christianity. In fact, he'd been taught that religion was evil, and that those who believed in it were deluded, cultists, or imperialist spies. But as a writer whose work has been banned in China and has even landed him in jail, Liao felt a kinship with Chinese Christians in their unwavering commitment to the freedom of expression and to finding meaning in a tumultuous society.
Unwilling to let his nation lose memory of its past or deny its present, Liao set out to document the untold stories of brave believers whose totalitarian government could not break their faith in God, including:
- The over-100-year-old nun who persevered in spite of beatings, famine, and decades of physical labor, and still fights for the rightful return of church land seized by the government
- The surgeon who gave up a lucrative Communist hospital administrator position to treat villagers for free in the remote, mountainous regions of southwestern China
- The Protestant minister, now memorialized in London's Westminster Abbey, who was executed during the Cultural Revolution as "an incorrigible counterrevolutionary"
This ultimately triumphant tale of a vibrant church thriving against all odds serves as both a powerful conversation about politics and spirituality and a moving tribute to China's valiant shepherds of faith, who prove that a totalitarian government cannot control what is in people's hearts.
Because I can't resist and in order to make this a little more personal, here are a few quotations.
The surgeon's story is particularly interesting.
A critical skill of an ER surgeon is to diagnose fast and accurately, and then act. You can't play games. But as an administrator, none of the skills I had acquired applied. They played by a different set of rules. In my leadership position, I initiated some reform measures. The school assigned me a ... car, but I asked the authorities to sell it and spend the money on the hospital. I rode my bike to work every day. I abolished the traditional big staff banquets during holidays and banned the use of public money for eating and drinking. I also tightened up on reimbursing expenses. All of those measures hurt the interests of other leaders; they hated my guts and conspired against me. It was very frustrating and depressing. ... I got hold of a Bible. I was examining my life at that time. I felt extremely frustrated with my work as a deputy dean. The Bible taught me to be in awe of God and to love, two important qualities that the Chinese people lacked. Too many Chinese will do anything for trivial material gains and have no regard for morality, ethics, or the law. How do we change that? Can we rely on the Communist Party? Can we rely on government rules and regulations Apparently not.
Why does this description of the medical problems in Communist China sound just a little too familiar?
I couldn't work [at the big government-run hospital] out of conscience. Say a patient, tortured by illness, sits in front of you, staring at you, hoping you can find a cure for him. What kind of medicine should you prescribe? Many meds do the same thing, but their prices can vary sharply. I would prescribe the cheapest and most effective. But if I continued to do that, the pharmacy and the hospital would be upset because I have undermined their profits, disrupting the cozy deal between pharmaceutical companies and hospitals. When you break hidden rules and harm the collective interests of hospitals and doctors, you find yourself very alienated. ... As a Christian, I have to tell my patients the truth. I cannot lie to get more money out of them.
American television isn't all bad. Who'd have thought M*A*S*H could be an answer to prayer?
I told the minister that I would do [breast cancer surgery] for free, that I had done far more complicated surgery than what was required here, and he needed to trust me. He looked at me in disbelief, as did the villagers gathering around us. I'm not sure which of my assertions they had the most trouble believing.
I wanted to take the woman back with me to Kunming so I could use a proper operating room, but she didn't want to leave her home. That night, I knelt and prayed, and as I was praying, an old American TV show popped into my mind—a team of cheerful doctors doing surgery while cracking jokes, a mobile army hospital, tents in an open field, the war in Korea. ... I felt inspired. The next day, I bought some basic surgical instruments to supplement the ones I carried with me, and we did the operation in her bedroom. Her bed was a wooden plank; no table necessary. ... The room was very dark; even after we opened all the windows, it was still pretty bad. I tied four flashlights together and had the grandpa hold them as operating lights. That grandpa was strong and in great health. He stood there for hours without moving, holding the light steady. ... It was a sweet feeling to be there with the poor villagers and to do God's work, though I never thought I'd ever have to perform surgery in quite those conditions.
From another man's story of life under Chairman Mao, evidence that if some of China's ills aren't that far from ours, some are almost unimaginable.
You are too young to understand what it was like. We were treated much worse than animals. People would torture us whenever they felt like it. During the peak of the campaign, the government work teams fanned the sentiment of hatred. Even the nicest and kindest peasants began to wave their fists and slap or kick us. Toward the end, revolutionary peasants didn't need a reason to kill a landlord. At public denunciation meetings, people became carried away with their emotions and would drag someone out and shoot him on the spot. ... Nobody questioned this ruthless practice or took responsibility. ... The work-team members didn't dare ignore the voice of the people. Once people became brainwashed by Communist ideology and by Mao's propaganda, their thinking became chaotic. All humanity was lost. At its peak, even the work team found it hard to rein in the fanaticism.
Let me explain. In this area, it was rare to find anyone who was not addicted to opium or gambling. Only those who had embraced God had the stamina to kick their habits. When I was a kid, I remember that people in this area didn't grow crops. Instead, they grew poppies. ... They also gambled heavily. This was a very strange phenomenon. People's wealth switched hands very quickly. In the afternoon, the person might be a rich landowner. By evening he was homeless, having gambled everything away—his land, his house, even his wife.
When the Communists came, they banned opium smoking and gambling, and they banned Christianity. Apart from working in the fields, people didn't have anything else to do in the evenings. Political campaigns turned into a form of entertainment. They devoted all their extra energy to beating up people, killing people, and confiscating the property of others. Those homeless drug addicts and gamblers suddenly became loyal revolutionary allies. They didn't have to pay off their debts; their gambling and drug habits, their poverty, the practice of pawning their wives and children for drug money, their homelessness, everything was the fault of landlords exploiting poor revolutionaries.
Poverty became a badge of honor, and the children of the poor became the offspring of the true proletariat. They felt superior to everyone else and were well fed and clothed. They didn't even have to take any responsibility when killing someone at public denunciation meetings. That was more fun than smoking opium and gambling, don't you think?
The Communist Party's policies might have been well meant, but the people who implemented them took a lot of liberties and interpreted them in their own way. Random killing was quite liberating.
The stories of those whose faith saw them through the impossible years is humbling and inspiring. As in The Corpse Walker, Liao Yiwu is careful to place more blame on past administrations than present, but he does give a glimpse into the struggles of the modern Church in China, including the friction between the official, state-controlled churches and the house church movement. Perhaps the attitude of this new convert is also eerily familiar.
[T]hree religions are practiced in our home. Everyone does his or her own stuff. Why can't they form a uniform family religion so we don't have to fight all the time? It's kind of strange. As a kid, I would go with my dad to Buddhist temples and mimic the gestures and facial expressions of the Buddhist statues. ... When I was with my mom, I would attend services at an old church. People sang hymns. It was kind of grand and cool.
I prefer Christianity. Buddhism is too regional, secular, and not cool. Those old men and women, those wealthy businessmen or government officials, go to the temples, burning incense and praying for trivial stuff, such as more money, more promotions, and more luck. Taoism is way too highbrow, not attainable. I think Christianity is the only one that's all encompassing. ...
People in your age group are too political. You guys are too interested in politics. It's different with my generation. Sometimes it bothers me. I attended a house church one time. When we were reading the Bible, a minister or a church elder suddenly stood up. Without getting everyone's approval, he started to deliver a political statement and then asked eveyrone to pray for so-and-so who had died for the Lord, and then so-and-so who had been arrested by the government. He also asked us to pray for the sins of the government. He totally changed the mood of the gathering, making it depressing and tragic. Several members started to cry after hearing his political plea. I guess I was too young and didn't have that much experience. I felt awkward. I thought, Why don't we let God do God's work and Caesar do Caesar's? Why do we always mix the two? The government wants to politicize religion, and some Christians are doing the same thing. These things kill my spiritual appetite.
What I Saw In America by G. K. Chesterton (originally published 1922)
In 1921, G. K. Chesterton embarked on a lecture tour of the United States, and "everybody who goes to America for a short time is expected to write a book," so he did. This is no travelogue, however, but a set of serious essays inspired by Chesterton's observations.
It was only after graduating from college that I began to have an appreciation for the study of history. During my school years, the world was divided into "math/science people" and "English/history people." Being both good at math and an avid reader of science fiction, I was clearly one of the former. The reasoning behind this idea that one should not be good at, nor even interested in, all of the above escapes me as much as why I allowed myself to be so labelled.
While I would still choose reading and mathematics as of all the school subjects the most important for a child to master "early and often," I'd now put history a close third. I know of no other way to counter what C. S. Lewis called "chronological snobbery." It is far, far too easy for us to assume that progress only goes in one direction, that we have come "sooo far" from our predecessors socially as well as technologically. Reading history—especially writings that were current at the time—is the best way I know to understand that the people of the past were human beings like us rather than incomprehensible, unenlightened savages. To use an extreme example, it is easy to hate Adolph Hitler, almost as easy to revile the German people (and others) for not rebelling wholesale against the evil he brought on, and pathetically easy to assure ourselves that we would never let anything like that happen today. But never in all my schooling did I experience a serious attempt to understand historical events and situations as they were seen at the time by intelligent, thoughtful, normal people. We are appalled when Hitler speaks of the "Jewish problem," but don't make the effort to figure out what it was about the circumstances that made the Jews a particularly acceptable scapegoat. We're taught, as I was in school, that white southerners were evil to resist having their children bussed across town to attend black schools; I never had an appreciation for the many non-racially-motivated reasons not to place your child on that sacrificial altar until I spoke with someone who had lived through it. By no means do I subscribe to the theory that in the attacks of September 11, 2001 we "got what we deserved," but if we—or at least our policy analysts—had been in the habit of looking at ourselves and our actions through other eyes, we at least would not have been so surprised.
What I Saw in America is a great antidote. Chesterton is so insightful that it's easy to think of him as outside of his cultural and historical surroundings, but he was writing nearly a century ago. Think for a minute of what the world was like during his 1921 American tour. (Maybe you do this kind of thinking all the time, but it's new for me.) The Civil War was closer to 1921 than the Korean War to 2013. Arizona and New Mexico had only been states for nine years, and last of the Indian Wars were but a few years past. Prohibition was new. Harding was the newly-elected president. The Panama Canal was a mere seven years old. Chesterton's essays glow with the perspectives of both another culture (British) and another time.
I don't claim Chesterton is always easy to understand, especially for someone who knows little about America in that era, and who doesn't possess the everyday knowledge he expects to be common to his British audience. But he's always worth reading, nonetheless. Very thought-provoking, but alas, not further-post-provoking at this time. Life calls.
Is College Worth It? by William J. Bennett and David Wilezol (Thomas Nelson, 2013)
It is the best of times and the worst of times for education. From preschool through higher education, there has been a steady decline in the quality of public education in at least the half-century I’ve been observing it. If my father is to be believed—and he was always a very reliable source—it’s been declining for a lot longer than that. He was frequently appalled at my generation’s ignorance of basic history, geography, and literature. (He’d have said the same thing about basic arithmetic, but he was surrounded by engineers.) It doesn’t take much observation to realize that today the average American’s grasp of those subjects makes me look brilliant.
At the same time—and my father would concur—in some fields, for some people, knowledge and ability has soared. As a science fair judge, he was blown away by the scope and quality of the research done by high school students. His own high school had offered no math beyond trigonometry, and it was rare among high schools to offer even that. My high school offered only one Advanced Placement course—and that for seniors—whereas our children had at least a dozen to choose from, beginning as freshmen. And yet only a few students were actually prepared to take advantage of the generous offerings: back in fifth grade, I would have said the expectations of their teachers were well below those of my own, and far below those of my father’s.
Despite the best efforts of educators to mush us all into a sameness at any level—better all low than some higher than others—there has always been an upper class and a lower class when it comes to education, and there always will be. What I’ve been noticing is that the highs are getting higher, the lows are getting lower, and the middle class is rapidly descending—much as is happening with economic measures.
I’m hoping the economic situation does not lead to revolution, but there’s a crisis and a revolution coming in education and I say, bring it on! (More)
When Life and Beliefs Collide: How Knowing God Makes a Difference by Carolyn Custis James (Zondervan, 2001)
As I mentioned before, I first read When Life and Beliefs Collide in personal circumstances that led to a great reluctance to tackle any of the author’s excellent subsequent books. Only a few years previously, we had left the church which remains to this day both our best and our worst church experience. Because James’ husband was in the leadership of what had become (or revealed itself to be; I’m still not certain which) an oppressive, even abusive situation, I had assumed that he and his family were in agreement with and partially responsible for the oppression. This was confirmed in my mind when I read glowing, positive comments about “our church” in When Life and Beliefs Collide. Re-reading it now, I’m amazed at how effectively that blinded me to the strengths of the book, how bold it was, and indeed how much of a risk James took in writing it.
This is a “women’s book,” written as it was in a situation where women, no matter how qualified, did not teach men, but as theologian J. I. Packer said, “[This] book seems to me to be a must-read for Christian women and a you'd-better-read for Christian men, for it gets right so much that others have simply missed.” The heart and soul of James’ work is the importance of theology in the lives of everyone: male and female, young and old. Don’t let the word scare you into thinking this is a dry, academic subject: as James says on the masthead of her website, the moment the word “why” crosses your lips, you are doing theology.
James makes many excellent points, every single one of which I missed the first time because of the prejudice I brought to my reading. Mighty scary, that.
As usual in my reviews, the following quotations are not meant to be a summary of the book as a whole, but are instead ones that struck me for one reason or another and which I want to remember.
Many Christian men seek wives who know far less than they do or who have little interest in theology. The assumption is that a woman who knows less will make a better wife. Her ignorance will be an asset to the relationship, or as another woman put it, “The less a woman has in her head, the lighter she is for carrying.” This assumption leads women to conclude that the godly thing to do is hold back for his sake. And so the age-old game carries on—a woman keeps herself in check to make a man look good. It happens all the time.
How differently the Bible portrays women. There they are admired for their depth of theological wisdom and their strong convictions. Women in the Bible did not need anyone to carry them. Their theology strengthened them to get under the burden at hand. Contrary to current fears, these wise women did not demean, weaken, or overthrow the men. They empowered, strengthened, and urged them on to greater faithfulness and were better equipped to do so because of their grasp of God’s character and ways.
Far from diminishing her appeal, a woman’s interest in theology ought to be the first thing to catch a man’s eye. A wife’s theology should be what a husband prizes most about her. He may always enjoy her cooking and cherish her gentle ways, but in the intensity of battle, when adversity flattens him or he faces an insurmountable challenge, she is the soldier nearest him, and it is her theology that he will hear.
Glory is the uncovering of God’s character—the disclosure of who God is.
I love that last quote. I haven't thought much about it yet, but if it's a reasonable description of what is meant when the Bible talks about God's glory, many Biblical passages suddenly make a lot more sense, particularly the ones that appear to show God as a petty tyrant, concerned most of all with making himself look good at others' expense. (More)
Difficult Personalities: A Practical Guide to Managing the Hurtful Behavior of Others (and Maybe Your Own) by Helen McGrath and Hazel Edwards (The Experiment, 2000, 2010)
When I was in college, I remember this complaint from the psychology majors: taking the required Abnormal Psychology course convinced them that they—and all their friends—were abnormal and psychotic. Reading Difficult Personalities is like that, or like reading a list of symptoms and convincing yourself that you have some deadly disease. The book is an exhausting, if not exhaustive, description of difficult personality types, and it's impossible not to think, "Oh, that's just like him," "She does that all the time!" and "Oh, no! Is that really what I'm doing to others?" Worst of all is the section on the sociopathic personality, which will have you seeing sociopaths around every corner and looking askance at those you think you know best. That may be a slight exaggeration, but it's pretty scary to realize that most sociopaths are hard to identify before it's too late and they've done extreme damage.
What makes the book more useful is realizing its limitations. In this I was saved before the page numbers got into double digits, since the section on signs of extroversion includes that extroverts "tend to think out loud. In talking, they find out what they think," and "often interrupt without realizing that they are doing it." That is such an accurate description of dyed-in-the-wool introvert me that I wasn't a bit surprised to find that not only I but nearly everyone I know has some characteristics of most of the personality categories the authors analyze, even those that appear to be polar opposites.
Although meant to be accessible to a lay audience, the book reads more like a textbook: quite technical, and frequently referencing the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. I think it might be more useful as a reference book than as one borrowed from the library for casual reading. There are many suggestions for (1) dealing with someone who exhibits difficult personality traits (especially in the workplace), and (2) controlling one's own quirks and minimizing the damage done to others. If I knew that I, or someone else, was clearly struggling with a particular problem, I might find the suggestions useful, but short of that I find the content far too broad—even contradictory—and overwhelming. The authors do give some real-life, specific examples, but the book could use a lot more of them, and more examples of successful ways of dealing with problems, rather than just delineations of the problems themselves.
Traits covered include Extroverts and Introverts, Planners and Optionizers, Thinkers and Feelers, Negativity, Superiority, Bossiness, The Anxious Personality, The Inflexible Personality, The Demanding Personality, The Passive-Aggressive Personality, The Bullying Personality, and The Sociopathic Personality. Each is discussed in terms of how normal people exhibit these traits, what is typical of someone for whom this is a significant pattern of behavior, what the person is thinking as he acts in that way, reasons behind such behavior, strategies for dealing with someone of this personality, and strategies for changing your own behavior if you see the trait in yourself. Sometimes the authors point out the positive side of a particular disordered trait as well.
Here are a few quotations, in no particular order and of no particular importance other than they were the ones I typed up before getting tired of the exercise.
Some people prefer a relatively decisive lifestyle in which events are ordered and predictable. ["Planners"] prefer to have closure and structure in their lives and make reasonably speedy decisions in most areas.. Deadlines are kept. They like structure, routine and order, and they plan to make their lives reasonably predictable.
Others have a preference for a less structured and ordered lifestyle, characterized by keeping their options open. ["Optionizers"] are reluctant to make decisions, always feeling they have insufficient information and that something better might come along. An optionizer prefers a lifestyle that is flexible, adaptable, and spontaneous, and not limited by unnecessary restrictions, structure or predictabillity.
I sent the following quote to Lenore Skenazy of Free-Range Kids, who is always berating "worst-first thinking." Turns out it has a psychological category all its own.
Protective pessimism can take many forms, but essentially it is about always assuming the worst will happen and behaving accordingly. Protective pessimists believe that if something can go wrong, it will. If something bad can happen, it will happen, and it will happen to them. Rarely do they expect good outcomes. So they miss out on the joy of anticipation and dwelling pleasurably on the "nice" aspects, in case the gap between pleasurable "dreams" and the reality is too great. They are not game to tempt fate by hoping, dreaming, or wanting, in case they get caught unprepared by negatives. They prepare for disillusionment, sadness and tragedy by protecting their projections with pessimism so they will not get caught by future disappointments. Instead of living up to expectations, they live down, and are often negative in other ways. Other people don't like being around pessimistic people because they can be contagious.
Mistakenly, bullies are often perceived as poor souls with a marked inferiority complex and low self-esteem who bully others because of inadequacy. Research, however, suggests that few playground or workplace bullies are like this, although domestic bullies may be. Bullies were once believed to be socially inept oafs, but research now confirms that they are more likely to be highly skilled people capable of sophisticated interpersonal manipulation of others. They can send a victim over the edge without anyone seeing the "pushes" they use.
Only about 5 percent of the population has such severe problems with anxiety that their behavior would meet the criteria for a diagnosis of generalized anxiety disorder. ... However, research suggests that maybe up to 30 percent of the population has an anxiety predisposition, that is, a mild to severe tendency to magnify threat and, too readily, release adrenaline and other fear hormones into their bloodstreams. They often feel stressed all day with no real justificaton.
Early experiences of fearful situations can then create minds that are biased toward exaggerating the potential for danger. They remember every frightening experience and, on being exposed again to similar situations or reminders of those situations, retreat from the threat or freeze in fear. ... [W]e have termed these people flooders as they are often flooded with fear.
- Flooders have a hair-trigger response to any situation that they perceive to be threatening, even if sometimes they are not verbalizing to themselves that a situation is actually threatening.
- They experience fear reactions to a great many situations that others would not interpret as threatening. Because their body is often awash with fear, they train their brains to retain fearful memories, to selectively attend to potential threat, and to overinterpret situations as threatening.
- They tend to be less able to "turn off" the fear hormones once they are discharged into the bloodstream. It can take up to 60 minutes for the body to return to normal after a strong adrenaline surge, and flooders have often had several surges in a row without realizing it.
That hit home to me more than anything else in the book. Most of the authors' suggestions for dealing with the problem, such as "focus on facts and statistics to reassure yourself that the likelihood of a particular danger is less than you believe it to be," I don't find to be of much help. I know that. But in the fraction of a second it takes my body to react to the ringing of the phone, a loud noise, or even the quiet but potentially painful words, "we need to talk," there is no room for rational thought. I know that it's only a very small portion of phone calls that bring me news of death or disaster, that most loud noises are harmless, and that few conversations actually require me to make difficult decisions or accept painful criticism. But that knowledge only allows me to begin the process of calming the fear reaction after it has begun; it's not preventative.
["Successful sociopaths"] are no less sociopathic than the "unsuccessful" type, they just do it differently. There is often no violence involved, although some pay others to be violent on their behalf. They differ from the "unsuccessful" category in that they are adaptive, that is, they have enough skills and advantages to be successful by honest effort if they choose. But they don't. Out of greed, an overwhelming drive for power, and a thrill-seeking orientation, they choose deceit and dishonesty instead. They are more likely to get away with their sociopathic behavior for a long period, as they are often charming, well-networked, and know how to exploit the system. Their associates often cover for them, not realizing the extent of their antisocial and exploitive orientation. ... Sociopathic patterns of behavior are found in many powerful individuals who achieve political, entrepreneurial, sports, and business success. But their behavior threatens the safety, well-being, and security of individuals, businesses, and our overall society.
One other thing I learned from Difficult Personalities: As I had suspected, psychologists think we're all crazy, and the line between normal and abnormal is only a matter of degree. It reminds me of a brain developmental specialist who said that everyone is brain-damaged, but it's more obvious in some than in others.
