Lift Up Your Hearts!

Asian buffet restaurants are kind of like IHOP as far as I'm concerned:  you need to go there every few years to remind yourself of why you don't go there more often.  The idea always sounds so good ... and the reality always disappoints.

We had a coupon for the new World Gourmet restaurant in town, so we went there after church on Sunday.  (The link is to the one in California, but it looks like the same thing.)  You can't say they don't have variety:  I wouldn't go so far as to say world, but there was what I'd call standard American fare in addition to the Asian food.  But as usual, the quality just wasn't there, nor can you expect it with all that quantity and variety.

Still, the selection was nice, the honey chicken was especially good, and—when I made a point to be the first one in line when the new batch came out—so were the French fries.  Whenever I'm in a place like that, I think of a football-playing friend of Heather's in high school:  he could really have done it all justice.  Me?  I took what I liked, and for once didn't eat too much.  Someone has to make up for the football players.

Cooked:  A Natural History of Transformation by Michael Pollan (Penguin, 2013)

(This is a long post, with many excerpts from the book.  Consider it an appetizer.)

I almost always start writing reviews in my mind before finishing the book.  I'd planned to begin this one with, "I've never met a Michael Pollan book I didn't love.  Having made my way through the 468 pages, I can still say that with honesty, though honesty also compels me to admit the last quarter of the book was somewhat of a trial.

For all his interest in food, Pollan hadn't given cooking much thought.

Until, that is, I began trying to unpack a curious paradox I had noticed while watching television, which was simply this:  How is it that at the precise historical moment when Americans were abandoning the kitchen, handing over the preparation of most of our meals to the food industry, we began spending so much of our time thinking about food and watching other people cook it on television?  The less cooking we were doing in our own lives, it seemed, the more that food and its vicarious preparation transfixed us.

I see this less as a paradox and more as a repeated pattern:  the less we commit to and invest of ourselves in the heart and meaning of something, the more we extravagantly value the form, and set others to doing it for us.  When the marriage itself was the raison d'être of a wedding, a reception created and overseen by "women of the church" was sufficient to honor the couple and the guests.  Now we have devalued the marriage vows and it's the reception, professionally catered, decorated, and orchestrated, into which the time, money, and attention are poured.  The less we make music ourselves, in our families and communities, the more we value the concert tickets, recordings, and iPods that bring the work of the professional musician into our lives.  How many sports fans, ever-ready to critique the missed basket, the dropped ball, the faulty kick, get any closer to a real game than driving their children to practice?

But I digress.  What Pollan did was to get serious about cooking for himself and his family.

[The decline of home cooking] is a problem—for the health of our bodies, our families, our communities, and our land, but also for our sense of how our eating connects us to the world.  Our growing distance from any direct, physical engagement with the processes by which the raw stuff of nature gets transformed into a cooked meal is changing our understanding of what food is.  Indeed, the idea that food has any connection to nature or human work or imagination is hard to credit when it arrives in a neat package, fully formed.  Food becomes just another commodity, an abstraction.  And as soon as that happens we become easy prey for corporations selling synthetic versions of the real thing—what I call edible foodlike substances.  We end up trying to nourish ourselves on images.

It has been argued that it is more efficient to work an extra hour at the office, doing what we do well, and let restaurants do what they do best.

Here in a nutshell is the classic argument for the division of labor, which, as Adam Smith and countless others have pointed out, has given us many of the blessings of civilization.  It is what allows me to make a living sitting at this screen writing, while others grow my food, sew my clothes, and supply the energy that lights and heats my house.  I can probably earn more in an hour of writing or even teaching than I could save in a whole week of cooking.  Specialization is undeniably a powerful social and economic force.  And yet it is also debilitating.  It breeds helplessness, dependence, and ignorance and, eventually, it undermines any sense of responsibility.

Pollan divides his cooking adventures, cleverly and classically, into Fire, Water, Air, and Earth.  Fire is a dissertation into the earliest and most primitive cooking method:  meat over flame.  Along the way he explores the "cooking hypothesis," a recent theory that attempts to explain the development of Homo erectus, "the first primate to bear a stronger resemblance to humans than apes."

Anthropologists have long theorized that the advent of meat eating could account for the growth in the size of the primate brain, since the flesh of animals contains more energy than plant matter.  But ... the alimentary and digestive apparatus of Homo erectus is poorly adapted to a diet of raw meat, and even more poorly adapted to the raw plant foods that would still have been an important part of its diet, since a primate cannot live on meat alone.  The chewing and digestion of raw food of any kind requires a big gut and big strong jaws and teeth—all tools that our ancestors had lost right around the time they acquired their bigger brains.

The control of fire and discovery of cooking best explain both these developments. ... Appliying the heat of a fire to food transforms it in several ways—some of them chemical, others physical—but all with the same result:  making more energy available to the creatures that eat it. ... [C]ooking opened up vast new horizons of edibility for our ancestors, giving them an important competitive edge over other species and, not insignificantly, leaving us more time to do things besides looking for food and chewing it. ... [Anthropologist Richard Wrangham] estimates that cooking our food gives our species an extra four hours a day.  (This happens to be roughly the same amount of time we now devote to watching television.)

By freeing us from the need to feed constantly, cooking ennobled us, putting us on the path to philosophy and music.  All those myths that trace the godlike powers of the human mind to a divine gift or theft of fire may contain a larger truth than we ever realized.

Yet having crossed this Rubicon, trading away a big gut for a big brain, we can't go back, as much as raw-food faddists would like to. ... By now, "humans are adapted to eating cooked food in the same essential way as cows are adapted to eating grass," Wrangham says.

Pollan discusses animal sacrifice, and why fire-cooked meat-eating grew up as a sacred act, hedged in by a multitude of rules and governed by a priestly class.  From there he moves naturally to the modern barbecue, which retains obvious vestiges of those ancient cultures.  I dare you (unless you happen to be a diehard vegetarian) to read this section of the book without your mouth watering.  For the record, "authentic barbecue" has nothing to do with what you do when you slap a steak on your gas grill.  It is pork, pork alone, and preferably the whole pig, cooked with as many rules as any ancient sacrifice.  It's a pity I didn't know anything about barbecue culture when my in-laws lived in South Carolina! (More)

Make the Bread, Buy the Butter:  What You Should and Shouldn't Cook from Scratch—Over 120 Recipes for the Best Homemade Foods by Jennifer Reese (Free Press, 2011)

In 2008, like many people, Jennifer Reese lost her job.  I don't know what that job was, but if it didn't involve writing, losing it was not a tragedy, but a blessing.  She's a wonderful writer:  clear, informative, and funny.  Definitely funny.

Faced with the opportunity to reconsider her life, Reese decided to focus on food, and the modern tension between do-it-yourself and buy-it-off-the-shelf:

Where is that sweet spot between buying and making?  What does the market do cheaper and better?  And where are we being deceived, our tastes and habits and standards corrupted?  Could I answer this question once and for all?  I didn't want an answer rooted in ideology, or politics, or tradition, or received wisdom.  I wanted to see the question answered empirically, taking into account the competing demands—time and meaning, quality and conscience, budget and health—of everyday American family life.

And so, over the next months and years, I got some chickens, which I loved; and some ducks, which I loathed; and some turkeys, which we slaughtered.  I learned to make cheese and keep bees and worried that the neighbors were going to call Animal Control.  I cured bacon and salmon, canned ketchup, baked croissants, and made vanilla extract and graham crackers.  I planted tomatillos and potatoes and melons and squash.  My son, Owen, joined 4-H and practically moved into the yard, while my teenage daughter, Isabel, refused to step outside the back door at all, especially after the goats turned up.  My husband, Mark, rolled his eyes at all of it except the homemade yogurt.  That, he ate by the quart.  At the height—or maybe it was the depths—of my homemaking experiment, I had pickles lacto-fermenting on the counter and seven varieties of jam, ranging from banana-chocolate to plum, arrayed in the pantry, and absinthe and Taleggio cheese mellowing in the crawl space behind my closet.  I was overwhelmed and a bit of a mess, but I had my answers.

Turkeys?  Homemade bacon?  This was no simple save-money-by-making-my-child's-school-lunch project.  But the results make for marvellous reading.  It's a treasure trove of recipes, too, and I would be tempted to add a copy to my collection, if I weren't busy trying to get rid of a vast collection of cookbooks gathering dust on the shelves because when I need a recipe and it's not handy, I immediately turn to Chef Google.

The answer to the question that drove me to reading the book, Why not make the butter? is a simple matter of economy.  Making butter is easy, and the result delicious, but cream is expensive.  Store butter is good enough that the author can't justify the extra expense of homemade.  "Unless," she adds, "you have a cow."

Reese might have chosen a different title:  Make the Bun, Buy the Hot Dog.  What she went through to make hot dogs leaves me all the more glad that Oscar Mayer now has a nitrate/nitrite-free hot dog that is delicious.

Make the Bread, Buy the Butter is much more than a recipe book.  For each entry, you get a story (often funny), a recipe, a difficulty rating, a cost comparison, and a "make it or buy it" recommendation.  Sometimes the answer is "both."  There's nothing like homemade mayonnaise, for example, but "Hellmann's has its place."

Maybe my favorite quote:

"Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself," Michael Pollan writes in Food Rules. ... "Chances are good it won't be every day."

Oh Michael Pollan, you underestimate me.

Finally, a longish quote from the Afterward, which sums things up well:

It's empowering to know I can cure bacon, brew vanilla, age Camembert, extract honey from a hive, and behead a chicken, even if I have no desire to do at least one of those things ever again.  Even if, in the end, I spent more money than I saved.  (A few costly projects like the chickens and the bees ate up all the savings of from scratch cooking.)  Big food companies flatter us by telling us how busy we are and they simultaneously convince us that we are helpless.  I am moderately busy, but not all that helpless.  Neither are you.  Everything I did in the course of my scratch-cooking era—with the possible exceptions of eviscerating poultry and stuffing hot dogs—was very, very easy.  [She must have blocked out the experience of making croissants:  "unbelievable hassle," though she still recommends making them, unless you live near a good French bakery.]

But the more helpless we feel, the lower those food companies move the bar of our expectations, and the bar is now very low at your local supermarket.  Trust me.  I have eaten my way through mine.  It makes me quite furious when I think about the sicketating powdered hollandaise sauce, the extortionate price of the vanilla extracts, the pathetic bread, the soups sweetened with corn syrup, the abomination of Pillsbury "creamy vanilla" canned frosting that contains neither cream nor vanilla.  It upsets me that we pay as much for these foods as we do.

Almost everything is better when it's homemade.  While this may have started out as opinion (though I'm not sure it did), I would now state it confidently as fact.  Almost everything.  But not everything.  Which makes me inordinately happy.  Because I think it's reassuring that you can walk into a supermarket and buy a bag of potato chips and a tub of rice pudding that are better than anything you can make at home.  I wish there were more foods like that.  I really don't want to spend my life standing over a stove, muttering about the evils of ConAgra and trans fats.  It seems a tragic waste to shape one's life around doctrinaire rejection of industrial food.  Which means, I suppose, both insisting on high standards most of the time and then, sometimes, relaxing them.

Jennifer Reese has a blog, The Tipsy Baker.  I haven't read much yet, but I'm sure I'll find it clear, informative, and funny.

Getting Organized in the Google Era:  How to Get Stuff Our of Your Head, Find It When You Need It, and Get It Done Right by Douglas C. Merrill and James A. Martin (Broadway Books 2010)

Did I really need to read another book on organization?  Maybe not, but a friend recommended this, and although much of it covers familiar ground, there are some useful points.

Douglas Merrill was formerly Chief Information Officer at Google.  With that and a Ph.D. in cognitive science, he has an unusual perspective on what he sees as a mismatch between life today and the kind of life our brains are organized to handle.  Whether it's all true or not I don't know, but it's interesting.

Part of what makes me doubtful of his analysis in places is that his world is so different from mine as to be barely comprehensible—if at all.  I feel some of the same disorientation I felt while reading Leaving Microsoft to Change the World:  certainly the age difference between the authors and me must account for some of the disconnect, but a large part, I believe, is that they come from the rarefied atmosphere of West Coast High Tech, and I do not.  It's a different world out there.  Thus some of Merrill's thoughts on how our brains don't fit the modern world fall flat because I don't fit the world he describes, either.

To help our brains out in a world they weren't designed for, Merrill has a number of suggestions, many of them excellent I'm sure.  For all his innovations, however, he often thinks inside his own box.  It is axiomatic, for example, that we all have smart phones.  Period.  And while he touches a matter dear to my own heart, the ill fit between the design of our educational system and the way children learn best, he sees it through the lens of an absolute need for school to function as a daycare facility.  Homeschooling isn't anywhere on his radar, not even to dismiss it as impractical.

Merrill also ramps up the volume on pull-quotes, which I already disliked in a book:  the book is replete with excerpts from songs that he likes—which might mean something to other fans of the same music, but which I quickly learned to ignore.

The second part of the book is both the most practical and the most interesting.  If it's a little biased towards Google products, that's understandable.  For example, Merrill loves Gmail, and uses it for far more than mail:  to-do lists, document storage, reminder messages, and as an organizer—taking advantage of Google's free storage and excellent search ability.

Search, in fact, is what he sees—I believe rightly—as a sea change in our organizational lives.  Until recently, systems needed to be designed for retrieval.  You organized your data (physical or electronic) into folders in such a way that you could most easily find it again.  (And sometimes fought with your spouse over why your system was best and his/hers was impossible to figure out.)  Thanks to Google, searching is now so efficient that you might as well leave all your files in one big pile.  Indeed, that's what Merrill does with his e-mail:  He doesn't ascribe to the "empty inbox" theory, but keeps all his e-mails there, labelled and tagged with keywords; with Gmail he can choose to see only the items with a particular label or set of keywords, just as if they had been in their own folder.  And with Gmail's search he can find almost anything.  Of course, this doesn't work with physical files—but it almost does, as he sends himself emails detailing where physical documents can be found, thus putting that information into his Gmail system.  Obviously, Merrill doesn't have the same reservations I do about putting so much important personal information in the hands of Google.

• Did you know that you don't have to have your own domain to take advantage of multiple e-mail addresses?  Simply include a + sign and another identifier between your e-mail ID and @gmail.com, e.g. myID+whitehouse@gmail.com if you want a special address to use when writing to the President.
• I rarely use my Gmail account, but nonetheless this has inspired me to take better advantage of the tagging and filtering options in Thunderbird, my own e-mail program, and has given me some ideas for better organizing my Firefox bookmarks.  I'm not giving up the wonder and the glory of my empty inbox, however!

Google Search itself is much more powerful than most of us take advantage of.  Here are a few he mentions, some of which were new to me:

• Use an ellipsis to specify a range of numbers, e.g. use "digital camera" $100...$300 to find digital cameras with a price between $100 and $300.
• Using Google to search within a particular site is very often more productive than using that site's own search.  A Google search of organization site:salemsattic.com finds posts at both this blog and IrishOboe that mention organization.
• Another useful search modifier is filetype, e.g. filetype:pdf will find Acrobat documents.
• Here's a new one to me:  the tilde.  "paris hotels" ~affordable searches for sites containing "paris hotels" and synonyms of "affordable."
• One of my favorites:  using Google for unit conversions, e.g. "100 USD in CHF" to find the value of $100 in Swiss francs, or "3 m in ft," to convert from meters to feet.
• Weather Paris is all you need to get the current temperature in Paris.  Weather Emmen, however, will get the data for Emmen in the Netherlands.  Instead, you have to type weather Emmen Switzerland, and even then it will be inaccurate; it always is.
• Time Emmen works just fine for either, however.  It's the same in both the Netherlands and Switzerland.
• I type in Southwest Airlines 259 and immediately get flight information with departure and arrival times, and gate information.
• I use Google Translate for longer blocks of text, but simply googling, "I love you" in German immediately retrieves, "Ich liebe dich."
• Define ameliorate retrieves a dictionary definition, with pronunciation and synonyms.
• Get movie show times and locations by searching for the name of the movie and your zip code.
• It can be a bit awkward, but you can use Google as a calculator:  typing (cube root 27)**2 +1 not only gives the answer, 10, but pops up a handy calculator widget as well.
• Here's my favorite new discovery:  I have bookmarks for FedEx, USPS, UPS, and other shippers to use when tracking packages, but I no longer use them.  I just type the tracking number into Google, and the relevant information pops right up.

And a few random quotes:

[A challenge with bookmarks is that] Web pages are sometimes ephemeral.  A page you bookmarked two months ago may no longer exist when you revisit it.  So if the information you find online is critical to keep ... I'd suggest you copy the Web page's content and paste it into an e-mail to yourself.  You might also copy and paste into the e-mail the Web page's address in case you want to go to that specific page later, assuming it still exists.  By the way, before you copy the content, it helps to click the "Format for printing" option many Web sites give you, as this usually eliminates ads and other stuff you don't want to copy.  Then send the message to yourself.  If you're using Gmail, you might also add a label to the message to help you find it later.

Our short-term memory can hold between only five and nine things at once.  With endless to-do items competing for our attention, plus the countless bits of information we gather all day, it's no wonder we're constantly forgetting things.  Shifting from one task to another complicates matters too, by knocking out what we had in our short-term memories.  That's one reason that our brains simply can't handle multitasking.

Adjusting your brain to new contexts is difficult to do.  Multiply the effort involved in each context shift by the dozen that you make over the course of a long day, and it's no wonder you struggle just deciding what to eat for dinner.

Lots of context switching during a day also adds stress.  If you're trying to focus on accomplishing a specific task, and you keep getting distracted, you'll get frustrated.  Once you reach frustration, it's just a short stroll to Stressville.  The more stressed you become, the harder it can be to focus.  Suddenly, you're reunited with your old friend, the downward spiral.

[T]hink now about the voluntary context shifts you make every day.  Maybe you're frequently popping out of PowerPoint and into eBay.  What's up with that?  Are you overwhelmed, intimidated, or just bored by the presentation you're working on?  Maybe something bigger is at work here. Have you always been easily distrated?  Could you be a closet procrastinator?  Whatever the reason, try to identify it and organize around it.

How ... can you get a panoramic view of yourself and of which limitations are real and which aren't?  You could look back at other projects you've completed recently....  Where did you succeed?  Where could you have done a better job? ... If you examine how you performed two or more projects, you may find patterns that offer insights into where you tend to trip yourself up.

Also, pay particular attention to what scares, stresses, frustrates, and angers you.  If you're like me, you experience those emotions when you're being squeezed by one or more constraints.  The more intensely you feel those emtions, the bigger the constraint may be.

Finally, here's Merrill's summary of his organizational principles.  The two I've highlighted are the ones I think most distinguish Getting Organized in the Google Era from the many other books in the field.

1. Organize your life to minimize brain strain.
2. Get stuff out of your head as quickly as possible.
3. Multitasking can actually make you less efficient.
4. Use stories to remember.
5. Just because something’s always been done a certain way doesn’t mean it should be.
6. Knowledge is not power. The sharing of knowledge is power.
7. Organize around actual constraints, not assumed ones.
8. Be completely honest (but never judgmental) with yourself.
9. Know when to ignore your constraints.
10. Know exactly where you’re going (and how you’ll get there) before you start the engine.
11. Be flexible about the outcome of your goals.
12. Don’t organize your information; search for it.
13. Only keep in your head what truly needs to be there.
14. Break big chunks into small ones.
15. Dedicate time each week to reviewing key information.
16. There’s no such thing as a perfect system of organization.
17. Whenever possible, use the tools you already know.
18. Add relevant keywords to your digital information so you can easily find it later.
19. Take notes to help you shift contexts later.
20. Group tasks with similar contexts together.
21. Integrate work with life instead of trying to balance the two.

Life of Fred:  Apples (and a whole lot more) by Stanley Schmidt (Polka Dot Publishing, 2012)

Grandparents like to buy presents for their grandchildren.

Grandparents especially like to buy books as presents for their grandchildren.

Grandparents love to give books about subjects that their grandchildren love.

Now it gets complicated:  What books do you give a grandson whose number one passion is numbers?

(video link)

So you ask, and you search, and you discover ... the many volumes of Life of Fred.  The story of little Fred Gauss, the five-year-old math professor at KITTENS University in Kansas, twists and turns through mathematics from basic addition through fractions, algebra, calculus, and more—along with an incredible assortment of other facts about science, history, behavior, and almost anything else Stanley F. Schmidt's somewhat quirky mind can think of.  It's not intended for preschoolers, but it's a story with a lot of math in it, so there's hope.  What's more, it's a story about a small child who thinks about numbers a lot—and children like to see themselves in a book.

So far I've read the first two Elementary books (Apples and Butterflies), all three Intermediate books (Kidneys, Liver, and Mineshaft), and also Fractions, the first of the fifth-grade books.  (Elementary and Intermediate takes the student through fourth grade, if you follow the suggested timetable.  Not that we trouble ourselves with things like that.)  I confess that I did not stop and do the math, but skipped the problems for the sake of getting through all six books in a day and a half.  If you really want to learn the math, you must do the problems and not just read the stories.  (It isn't that much work:  one of the features of LoF is its avoidance of drill-and-kill.)  If I ever get LoF:  Statistics, I'll be sure to work all the problems, because I never did understand statistics, despite getting a B in my college course.

I'll say this:  I like math, and I was a math major in college, but never until now have I read a math textbook at any level that I would be happy to re-read.  Which is good, because that's the way preschoolers like their books.

There are only two things that get on my nerves a bit about LoF:  (1) Schmidt makes no attempt to keep his opinions about life out of the books.  There's nothing either unusual or wrong about this; all stories and many textbooks have the same feature.  But some parents are bound to disagree in places, and should be prepared to discuss the issues.  Which would be a good idea, anyway.  For example, some parents have objected to Dogs (volume 4 of the Elementary series) because of the implication that some dogs die at the end of the story.  (2) Despite Schmidt's insistence on good grammar and use of language in the books, e.g. pointing out that "alot" and "alright" are not acceptable words, I've noted more than one occurence of "different than" instead of "different from," "associate to" instead of "associate with," and the use of "their" as a singular pronoun.  I know he's a math teacher, not an English teacher, but he could use an editor.  It's an opportunity to diverge into your own grammar lessons—but it's yet another reason to make sure you know what it is your child is learning.

What will a three-year-old think of Fred?  Will he enjoy the math story?  Will he learn anything from it?  Will our other grandchildren, who are old enough to do the problems woven into Fred's adventures, learn the math as well as the author advertises?  They already have a great math curriculum, but mathematics, like history, deserves to be learned from several angles.

Time will tell.  All can say at this point is that I certainly hope our grandchildren find Life of Fred to be valuable, because then I'll be able to read the rest of the stories myself.

The Man Who Was Thursday:  A Nightmare by G. K. Chesterton (original copyright 1908)

We should have more such nightmares.  Wikipedia refers to The Man Who Was Thursday as a "metaphysical thriller," and I suppose that's as close as possible to giving it a label.  Like Chesterton's Manalive, this tale of anarchy and adventure is a wild ride, but it is shot through with goodness—not to mention Chesterton's characteristic mental gymnastics and wordplay.

It's hard to imagine that Garth Nix, author of the Keys to the Kingdom series, owes no debt to The Man Who Was Thursday in his use of the days of the week.  At least, having recently read the series on the recommendation of my grandson, it was obvious to me, especially since Nix throws in innumerable other literary references.  Equally obvious, and more signficant (because closer in intent and feeling), is the influence of the clothing in the final chapter on the gowns worn at the end of C. S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength.

Such is the nature of The Man Who Was Thursday that I can confidently quote a large section from near the end without fear of giving anything away:

"You! " he cried. "You never hated because you never lived. I know what you are all of you, from first to last—you are the people in power! You are the police—the great fat, smiling men in blue and buttons! You are the Law, and you have never been broken. But is there a free soul alive that does not long to break you, only because you have never been broken? We in revolt talk all kind of nonsense doubtless about this crime or that crime of the Government. It is all folly! The only crime of the Government is that it governs. The unpardonable sin of the supreme power is that it is supreme. I do not curse you for being cruel. I do not curse you (though I might) for being kind. I curse you for being safe! You sit in your chairs of stone, and have never come down from them. You are the seven angels of heaven, and you have had no troubles. Oh, I could forgive you everything, you that rule all mankind, if I could feel for once that you had suffered for one hour a real agony such as I—"

Syme sprang to his feet, shaking from head to foot.

"I see everything," he cried, "everything that there is. Why does each thing on the earth war against each other thing? Why does each small thing in the world have to fight against the world itself? Why does a fly have to fight the whole universe? Why does a dandelion have to fight the whole universe? For the same reason that I had to be alone in the dreadful Council of the Days. So that each thing that obeys law may have the glory and isolation of the anarchist. So that each man fighting for order may be as brave and good a man as the dynamiter. So that the real lie of Satan may be flung back in the face of this blasphemer, so that by tears and torture we may earn the right to say to this man, 'You lie!' No agonies can be too great to buy the right to say to this accuser, 'We also have suffered.'"

I hate using sunscreen.  It's sticky, it stinks, and if I get the water-resistant kind—what other is of any use?—I can't get it off my hands.  I try to avoid using it myself, and am, shall we say, less than generous when asked by someone else to "do my back."  As in "You want me to do what?  Can I walk across hot coals instead?  Please?"

Our trip to Hawaii may have changed my mind.  Advised by friends who had been there to invest in some SPF 50 sunscreen, we picked up some Ocean Potion.  I'd never heard of it, but it appeared to be the best choice.  I think so!  It turned out to have the most pleasant scent I've encountered in a sunscreen, and though it was water-resistant, did not feel oily, sticky, or any other kind of icky.  I found I didn't mind at all donning it for our beach or crater-crossing days.  Well, to be completely honest, I didn't mind as much.  But it was a great improvement.

I've been hoarding the remainder, assuming it was a brand local to Hawii, which was the only place I'd seen it.  But recent research has revealed that it is now available here, at Wal-Mart of all places.  Considering that Ocean Potion is made in nearby Cocoa, Florida, you'd think I would have run into it somewhere before.  Perhaps I had, but didn't "see" it because I didn't recognize the brand.  They also have an SPF30 version, which I plan to try out for latitudes more northern than Hawaii.

Lost Women of the Bible:  Finding Strength and Significance through Their Stories by Carolyn Custis James (Zondervan, 2005)

The Gospel of Ruth:  Loving God Enough to Break the Rules by Carolyn Custis James (Zondervan, 2008)

In mid-September of 2001, a friend pulled me through one of the most tumultuous times of my life.  (No, we weren't in New York City on September 11, but I was home alone, with movers packing up my earthly possessions, and scheduled to fly—yes, fly—to Boston in few days.)  This friend also gave me Carolyn Custis James' newly-published book, When Life and Beliefs Collide.  I need to read it again:  I'm pretty sure it was a good book, but as I said, life was a bit unsettled for me and I don't remember it.  Moreover, I was put off by the same problem that prevented me for more than a decade from seeking out James' subsequent books:  what I perceived at the time as a falsely positive reference to some very negative events in the life of our church.

So I'm a slow learner.  Judgements made on small evidence are useless at best.  My only defense for avoiding James' books is that the list of good books to read is always heartbreakingly longer than the time available to read them, anyway.  Reading these two books is part of an effort to recover the locust-eaten years.

On the surface, these books would appear to be primarily for women; that judgement, also, would be a great mistake.  I can't say better than to quote J.I. Packer's comment about When Life and Beliefs Collide:  "Her 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."  I would add, however, that the adjective "Christian" is neither necessary nor helpful in the case of these two books, as most non-Christians would also have their conceptions of women and the Bible blown away by James' analysis.

Although both of these books tell great stories, their purpose is less narrative than theological and exegetical.  Therefore it is necessary to know something of James' abilities in these areas.  Since I'm not qualified to judge, I'll quote a few endorsements by people who are:

I have not read (nor, I expect, have you) a more discerning, humbling, thought-provoking, God-honoring, life-enhancing treatment of Ruth than this one.  It makes outstandingly fruitful study for believers of all ages and both genders. (J.I. Packer, Professor of Theology, Regent College)

Men and women will benefit from reading Carolyn James's engagingly written book.  In Lost Women of the Bible, she brings new insight to the biblical text and rightly expands our idea of what makes a woman godly.  I enthusiastically recommend this book.  (Tremper Longman III, Professor of Biblical Studies, Westmont College)

Carolyn Custis James gives the church a precious spiritual gift:  How ten unsung heroines of the Bible shaped and expanded the kingdom of God and continue to bolster the faith of the church.  Her penetrating and unforgettable biographies of these risk-taking biblical heroines are built on solid exegesis and a deft use of rhetorical criticism—though she never uses the term, seeing truths in the text that only a woman can see.  Her engaging style with lightning bolt sentences demonstrates the valuable resource God has given the church in her gifted daughters to minister in words and deeds.  This book explicitly challenges women of every social stratum to become the culture makers God intended them to be.  (Bruce Waltke, Professor of Old Testament, Reformed Theological Seminary)

So what do you think of Eve?  Carolyn James compares her with her own grandmother at the end of her life:

The vibrant woman I remembered—the woman God created her to be—was lost somewhere in a fallen, aging body that was no longer hospitable to her marvelous spirit.

The last time anyone saw Eve, she was only a shell of her former self too, a broken-down version of the woman God created her to be.  The original Eve was lost in Paradise.  Sadly, instead of remembering her in those earlier glory days, the world's memory of her was frozen in time at the worst possible moment—back in the Garden of Eden just as she swallowed a piece of forbidden fruit and served some to her husband. ...  We wouldn't dream of doing to my grandmother what we persist in doing to Eve.  We forget what Eve was like in her prime and try to reconstruct her legacy from the broken remnants that remained of her at the end.

James also turns the tables on our customary views of Noah's wife, Sarah, Hagar, Tamar, Hannah, Esther, Mary the mother of Jesus, and Mary Magdalene (reserving Ruth and Naomi for their own book).  It was the story of Tamar—the "bad girl" of the Bible, who played the part of a prostitute in order to seduce, and be impregnated by, her father-in-law—that took my breath away.  Read Lost Women of the Bible, and learn how a more careful analysis of the text and an understanding of her culture reveal Tamar as a righteous woman who rescued both the patriarch Judah and the human line of Christ.

Tamar shatters the traditional definition of what it means to be a woman by standing up to the most powerful man in her life. ... [S]he takes the symbols of authority away from the man who tells her whom to marry and where to live—a man who can sentence her to death without answering to anyone.  Before returning the articles ... she pointed Judah back to the God of the covenant, the only true authority over both of their lives. ... Judah gave Tamar the highest marks for her conduct and accepted her righteous rebuke. ... Her actions didn't emasculate or feminize him, as we are warned will happen if a woman takes the initiative.  She didn't rob Judah of his manhood.  To the contrary, he became a better man because of his encounter with her.  One wonders what would have become of Judah if Tamar had held her peace and remained passive.  The strength of a woman is a powerful weapon for rescue, healing, and peace when women like Tamar are "strong in the Lord."

The biblical Book of Ruth is often presented as a sweet romance, but the intense suffering and the questioning of God's goodness are more like the Book of Job than a love story.  And the heroic, other-centered, self-sacrificial actions of the three main characters—Naomi, Ruth, and Boaz—are an Old Testament prefiguring of the gospel in action.

Here are just a few more of the many quotes I could have pulled:

It's obvious to anyone who has experienced a significant loss that the sorrows of this world and the wounds they inflict in our souls cannot be compensated no matter how much good fortune and prosperity come our way.  Many holocaust survivors ended up wealthy, raised beautiful families, and enjoyed the good things in life.  But they never stopped hurting or felt their sufferings had evened out.  That's just not how life works.  To suggest that everything balanced out in the end for Naomi is to trivialize both her sufferings and also what God is trying to teach us through her story.

Naomi is completely unaware that the whole world is counting on the baby she cradles in her arms [grandfather of King David, and an ancestor of Christ] for the fulfillment of God's promises to redeem his people and put to right this fallen world.  Obed will not be the last boy born in Bethlehem to hold such a strategic place in the world's history.  Imagine the enormous responsibility of raising such a child.  You would want the wise men from the east to come.  Summon the teachers of the law, the priests, the rabbis.  God chose Naomi to be Obed's teacher.  And she is ready for the job, for Naomi has gained wisdom in the school of suffering.

A rescue effort is underway.  Lives are at risk.  There's a kingdom to build.  A planet to reclaim.  God doesn't intend to do any of this without us.  He burdens our hearts.  He opens our eyes to see faces, needs, and possibilities.  He is counting on his daughters to live and proclaim his gospel.  Whether we're tucking a child into bed; ministering to a friend; pursuing a heart that is hardened to the gospel; working in the corporate world, the church, and the community; or fighting for justice in some remote region of the earth—God is advancing his kingdom through our efforts and our gifts..  And you never know when some small everyday battle you are fighting may turn the tide for the kingdom in a big way.

I highly recommend both Lost Women of the Bible and The Gospel of Ruth.  Those who know me will understand more of how impressed I am with these books, because they know

1. As my previous reviews show, I'm decidedly unimpressed by both the content and the writing of much contemporary Christian literature.  (I use that final word loosely.)  Carolyn Custis James is a serious researcher, a clear thinker, and a good writer.
2. I've complained in previous reviews of authors who speculate about the conversations, thoughts, and emotions of the characters in biblical narratives.  A lot of that must happen in order to flesh out the Bible's spare descriptions of these women's lives, but here I don't mind it.  All I can say in my defense is that these speculations seem natural, believable, and fitting to the text, rather than awkwardly imposing modern thought on a distant culture.
3. One feature common to many contemporary Christian books is a "discussion questions" section at the end of each chapter.  I loathe this.  I always have, at least since its first appearance in my school textbooks.   Both of these books have that unpleasant feature (which I literally overlook), and yet I still love them.

Next up?  Steeling myself to reread When Life and Beliefs Collide (my mind knows I'll enjoy it; my gut still has issues), and requesting that our library add to its collection Carolyn Custis James' latest book, Half the Church, written to complement Half the Sky.

When to Speak Up and When to Shut Up:  Principles for Conversations You Won't Regret by Michael D. Sedler (Chosen Books, 2003)

I jumped at the opportunity to review this book, because conversations are often difficult for me.  As an introvert, I generally find conversations mentally and emotionally taxing, and thus tend to avoid them in situations where others might seek them out, such as with strangers on an airplane, or in those awkward "get to know each other" social gatherings.  Over the years, I have attempted to improve my skills in this area, with the result that I'm now much more likely to initiate and contribute to conversations.  Perhaps too likely.  Once started, I can be hard to stop.  I talk too much, running roughshod over others.

Hence my enthusiasm for reading this book.  I was looking for help in achieving the proper balance, that is, when to speak up, and when to shut up.

Unfortunately, the book does not deliver what I was expecting.  It is not so much about conversation as about confrontation:  the times you should speak your mind, the times you should hold your tongue, and how to tell the difference between the two. (More)

The Spirit Well by Stephen R. Lawhead (Thomas Nelson, 2012)

I am now totally hooked on Lawhead's Bright Empires series, and the next book isn't due out until September of this year.  Keeping track of the action is a challenge, as the story jumps through multiple generations, eras, and places, but such dislocations are no more than the protagonists are expected to endure, and by this third book I've become an experienced traveller.  Roller coasters can be great fun if you don't expect your equilibrium to remain unchallenged.  (For one as face-blind as I am, it's actually easier than watching an ordinary movie.)

It's risky to praise a series from the middle—I thought Harry Potter had great potential, but grew more and more disappointed after the third book.  So far, however, Bright Empires just gets better and better.  This is probably because I like characters and mystery more than action, and this volume has a better thought-to-violence ratio than The Skin Map and The Bone House.

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell (Little, Brown, and Company, 2000)

I’ve enjoyed some of Malcolm Gladwell’s other books (Blink, and Outliers), and heard a lot about The Tipping Point, so I expected to like this one better than I did.  Certainly the story of how New York City cleaned up its subways and lowered its crime rate is encouraging, and well worth the whole book.  Mostly I found it terribly depressing, however.  As with the Heaths’ Switch and Made to Stick, I really don’t like learning that so many people in positions of trust are using every trick in the book and then some to manipulate us.  Worse, these authors seem less concerned with arming the public against such efforts and more with teaching the tricks to those with “good” motives.  But I say, if it’s wrong to manipulate a child to beg his parents for a toy, it’s still wrong to manipulate him to learn the alphabet.  And what you learn about Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues from Tipping Point is not going to make you happy about plunking your child in front of the television, for all Gladwell’s approbations.

Even more depressing is the book’s description of fashion, style, what’s “cool” and how it gets that way.  By contrast, Calvin’s views on Total Depravity are light and optimisitic.

Worst of all is the section on teen smoking, and other places where Gladwell reveals just how low his expectations are of teens, and how little he thinks parents can influence their children.  It’s peers that matter, and if you move into a bad neighborhood, or adopt troubled children, expecting that your family strength, love, and high values will protect your children from the negative influences of their environment, you are tragically mistaken.  A child is much better off in a bad family in a good neighborhood than the other way around.  It’s normal, and even right, for teens to admire troublemakers, reject anything suggested by an adult, and seek out stupid, life-threatening, risks.  There may be something to what he says—certainly no one should enter naïvely into a dangerous ministry—but such a hopeless, dystopian view is more than I can take, at least in my current fighting-the-remnants-of-the-flu state.  For a reality check, I stop and look at our wonderful nephews, and remember my own life, where it was God’s grace through my family and nothing else that saved me from getting into a lot of trouble in the 1960’s.

Depressing as much of it may be, The Tipping Point does have some interesting ideas.  One section I particularly enjoyed was “The Law of the Few,” in which Gladwell explains the unexpectedly great influence held by a few people, and not because they are rich or obviously powerful.  Those he calls Connectors, for example, are far above average in the number and variety of people they know.  They have mastered the art of the “weak connection,” a relation greater than mere acquaintance but far less than true friendship, and maintain this connection with a long list of folks from elementary school friends to college buddies, from fellow summer campers to people met on an airplane flight, from work colleagues to the people who mow their lawns.  These “weak” connections are actually very powerful, because breakthroughs in our lives often come, not from our own circle of friends, but from those whose knowledge and resources are not so similar to our own.

The Tipping Point was written in 2000; I’d love to see an update, because with all his analysis of connectedness, information, and influence, leaving out social media and the Internet is a glaring, even incomprehensible, omission in 2013.

Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry; audiobook published by christianaudio Fiction and narrated by Susan Denaker

With Hannah Coulter, Wendell Berry has half made me want to live in Kentucky, which—all my Kentucky ancestors notwithstanding—was not even on my places-to-visit list.  Susan Denaker doesn't so much narrate the book as become Hannah Coulter, telling the story of the people of rural Kentucky, who "keep on living" through the sorrows and changes brought by the 20th century.  I found it spell-binding.

Denaker's skill, I think, helps save Berry from the hubris of writing a first-person narrative as a woman.  He mostly succeeds, though there are places—most obvious when Hannah is talking about her children, or sex—when the point-of-view comes across more like a man trying to think like a woman and not quite getting it.

There is beauty here, and sorrow, and strength, along with places where I wished I could argue with Hannah:  it might be a good choice for a book club, because there are several interesting discussion points.

I'd heard about Wendell Berry, but this was for me the first of his novels.  There are several more about the fictional town of Port William, Kentucky that will probably be worth reading eventually.

Leaving Microsoft to Change the World:  An Entrepreneur's Odyssey to Educate the World's Children by John Wood (Collins, 2006)

I don't believe one gets closer to God simply by climbing physically higher, but there must be something special in the rarefied air of the Himalayas.  Greg Mortenson returns from a climbing expedition inspired to build schools for isolated, impoverished communities in Central Asia; John Wood visits Nepal, then quits his high-level, very highly paid job at Microsoft, and begins building libraries for poor children all over the world.

The organization Wood founded, Room to Read, has earned the highest Charity Navigator rating of four stars.  That it has grown explosively and yet responsibly is as much a tribute to Wood's business accumen as to his good heart.  His years at Microsoft were preparation for his life's mission, though he didn't know it at the time.

As for the book, it's fascinating to read, as much for the insights into Microsoft as for the larger story.  There is, perhaps, a bit too much of Wood himself.  I find him, like Mortenson, to be rather too much full of himself. John Wood does not seem like a pleasant person to live or to work with. I was particularly bothered by his abrupt decision to drop all previous commitments to get on with his mission.  He broke up with his girlfriend, whom he supposedly loved, and with whom he was apparently serious enough not only to live with but to follow when her job moved her to China.  He made (as far as I could see) no attempt to work things out, to give her time to adjust to the radical idea and catch his vision—just "my way or the highway" (never mind that his way was the highway). He quit his job abruptly, leaving his boss and coworkers in the lurch, not giving his employer a reasonable amount of time to find a replacement and make a smooth transition—just "Goodbye."

But one does not have to be good in all aspects of life to accomplish good things, even great things. And it may be said that full-of-yourself, aggressive personalities are much better at getting certain types of things done.  Wood (and Mortenson, recent problems notwithstanding) certainly have done and are doing amazing work.  Leaving Microsoft to Change the World is a great testimony to how important to a community it is to include members with different strengths and different personalities, even personalities we dislike.  Even more, it's a brilliant example of what can be accomplished—beginning with a single, inspired, hardworking, driven individual—when great vision and solid business sense come together.

The History of the Medieval World:  From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade by Susan Wise Bauer (W. W. Norton, 2010)

I am now caught up with Bauer's history series, at least until The History of the Renaissance World becomes available later this year.  The History of the Medieval World is as good as the first book, The History of the Ancient World, though I will admit to some disappointment, as I was hoping for a little less of the "kings and battles and political intrigue" factor and more about art, music, and everyday life.  But alas, the former provide the background on which the rest of life is played out—and the book is 667 pages long as it is.  I'll have to be content with building up my times-people-places framework, and look elsewhere for the rest of the story.

Although the history of China, Japan, India, the Americas, and a few other parts of the world are important, it's harder for my euro-centric brain to keep the names straight, so my knowledge of those areas is still weaker.  Not that it's easy with Europe:  Just because "Charles" fits better into my memory than "Suryawarman," that doesn't mean keeping all those Germanic kingdoms straight isn't mind-boggling.  I can't even manage the Wars of the Roses yet.

The sections on European history were the most interesting to me for a different reason:  Having genealogy as a hobby means that many of the names are familiar.  Recognizing Henry the Fowler as my 34th great-grandfather, for example, lends an unusually piquant flavor to the story.

I Like Birds is a video story created by my cousin, D.B. McLaughlin.  The words, music, and photos are all his.

Think of this video as a children's book, read on a tablet by a caring adult to someone who is hungry to know more about their world. Pause the video or mute the music as you wish.

I hate to think of tablets replacing printed books, but that being said, this is great.  Perhaps some of his first cousins once removed would enjoy it.  (Update:  I see I wrote "once removed"; I had meant to say "twice removed," but no doubt the parents will enjoy it, too!)