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Christmas in Belgium, Bastogne, 1944

Dec8

From Band of Brothers by Stephen Ambrose.

On the afternoon of Christmas Eve, the men received General McAuliffe’s Christmas greetings. “What’s merry about all this, you ask?” was the opening line. “Just this: We have stopped cold everything that has been thrown at us from the North, East, South, and West. We have identification from four German panzer Divisions, two German Infantry Divisions and one German Parachute Division. . . . The Germans surround us, their radios blare our doom. Their Commmander demanded our surrender in the following impudent arrogance.” (There followed the four paragraph message, “to the U.S.A. Commander of the encircled town of Bastogne” from “the German Commander,” demanding an “honorable surrender to save the encircled U.S.A. troops from total annihilation,” dated December 22.)

McAuliffe’s message continued: “The German Commander received the following reply: ’22 December 1944. To the German Commander: NUTS! The American Commander.’

“We are giving our country and our loved ones at home a worthy Christmas present and being privileged to take part in this gallant feat of arms are truly making for ourselves a Merry Christmas. A.C. McAuliffe, Commanding.”

The men at the front were not as upbeat as General McAuliffe. They had cold white beans for their Christmas Eve dinner, while the division staff had a turkey dinner, served on a table with a tablecloth, a small Christmas tree, knives and forks and plates.

On the day after Christmas, Patton’s Third Army broke through the German lines relieving the siege of the American troops at Bastogne.

Unplanned by Abby Johnson

Nov3

Unplanned: The dramatic true story of a former Planned Parenthood leader’s eye-opening journey across the life line by Abby Johnson with Cindy Lambert.

Abby Johnson was the director of the Planned Parenthood clinic in Bryan, Texas (home of Texas A&M and the Texas Aggies). She was committed to her work with Planned Parenthood because she truly believed that the services they provided helped women in crisis and had the long-term effect of making abortion less common by decreasing the incidence of unwanted pregnancies. She was idealistic, hard-working, and somewhat naive.

Then, in September 2009, Abby was called into an exam room at the Planned Prenthood clinic to help with an ultrasound-guided abortion. What she saw in the ultrasound picture changed her mind about abortion, about the pro-life movement, and ultimately about her own relationship with a loving God who loves Abby Johnson and the women who have abortions and the children who die in abortion clinics like Planned Parenthood every day.

One of the main things I got out of this book was not a change in my opinions about abortion; I know what I believe about the value of every human life. But I was so impressed by the loving persistence of the pro-life volunteers who loved and prayed for Abby Johnson for years before she finally saw the truth. I am so impatient. I have friends and family members who need to see God, who need to trust Jesus Christ, who need, and I have been praying for them and doing my best to love them as Christ loves me. But I am tired sometimes and discouraged. Will my loved ones ever see their needs and turn to a loving Saviour? How long, O Lord?

It took eight years for Abby Johnson to see the ugliness and greed behind her work at Planned Parenthood. Eight years. I have people I’ve been praying for only half that long, and it already feels like a lifetime. So, I learned from reading this book, something I already know: I can’t give up. Persistence, faith, love, and hope are gifts from the Holy Spirit indeed.

I am also moved to pray for Abby Johnson, whenever I think about her. It can’t be easy to have your life turned upside down, even when it’s God who does the turning.

My story is not neat and tidy, and it doesn’t come wrapped in easy answers. Oh, how we love to vilify our opponents—from both sides. How easy to assume that those on “our” side are right and wise and good; how those on “their” side are treacherous and foolish and deceptive. I have found right and good and wisdom on both sides. I have found foolishness and treachery and deception on both sides as well. I have experienced how good intentions can be warped into poor choices no matter what the side.

Don’t slam this book shut because of what I’ve just said. Read it for that very reason. Read it to understand the surprising hopes and motivations on the “other” side.~ Abby Johnson

For the Thrill of It by Simon Baatz

Oct26

For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Chicago by Simon Baatz.

“The heart of the matter is that . . . all people are divisible into ‘ordinary’ and ‘extraordinary.’ The ordinary must live obediently and have no right to transgress the law—because, you see, they’re ordinary. The extraordinary, on the other hand, have the right to commit all kinds of crimes and to transgress the law in all kinds of ways, for the simple reason that they are extraordinary. That would seem to have been your argument, if I am not mistaken.” ~Fydor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment, Part 3, Section 5.

Mr. Baatz begins his tale of the “murder that shocked Chicago” and the nation in 1924 with a longer excerpt from Dostoyevsky’s fictional crime novel because the quotation captures the attitude of at least one of the murderers, Nathan Leopold. The facts of the case are stark and indisputable: on Wednesday, May 21, 1924, nineteen year old Nathan Leopold, and his friend, eighteen year old Richard Loeb, kidnapped fourteen year old Bobby Franks, murdered him, and left his naked body in a drainage culvert. All three boys came from wealthy Jewish families living in Chicago’s exclusive Kenwood neighborhood. Leopold and Loeb both said, after their capture and in their confessions, that they knew Bobby Franks only slightly and had nothing against him. They simply killed him “for the thrill” of planning and carrying out the master crime.

One of the questions I asked myself as I was reading this nonfiction account of such a horrific murder was “why?” Not only why did Leopold and Loeb kill Bobby Franks, but also why was I interested in reading about the sometimes sordid details. Why is Raskolnikov of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment such a fascinating character? I think we can learn something from these stories, both true crime and fictional, some negative and cautionary lessons that are worth considering.

It has almost become a trite truism, but ideas have consequences. Nathan Leopold, in particular, saw himself as a Nietzschean superman, a man to whom the ordinary laws of moral behavior did not apply.

“It didn’t concern him, Nathan replied. He had no moral beliefs and religion meant nothing to him: he was an atheist. Whatever served an individual’s purpose—that was the best guide to conduct. In his case, well, he was an intellectual: his participation in the killing had been akin to the desire of the scientist to experiment. They had killed Bobby Franks as an experiment; Nathan had wanted to experience the sensation of murdering another human being. It was that simple.” Baatz, p.148.

Not only did the ideas that Nathan Leopold fed into his depraved mind have tragic consequences, the philosophy of his and Loeb’s lawyer, Clarence Darrow, was just as twisted and confused and consequential as Nietzche’s philosophy was. Darrow, the most famous defense lawyer in the United States, even in 1924 before the Scopes trial, held to a kind of deterministic philosophy that excused crimes, even the most premeditated and heinous, on the basis of the criminal’s inability to control his hormones and his psychological make-up. In other words, criminals were not to be blamed for their crimes because a person’s behavior is predetermined by psychology and by physical genetic make-up. In his summation, Darrow said:

“I know . . . that one of two things happened to this boy; that this terrible crime was inherent in his organism, and came from some ancestor, or that it came through his education and his training after he was born. I do not know what remote ancestors may have sent down the seed that corrupted him, and I do not know through how many ancestors it may have passed until it reached Dickie Loeb. All I know is, it is true, and there is not a biologist in the world who will not say I am right.” Baatz, p. 374.

Nature or nurture, either way, Loeb and Leopold were not responsible for the murder of Bobby Franks. They were compelled to the crime by their own physical and psychological make-up, and to punish them for a crime that they had no choice about committing would be both unjust and useless.

Hogwash. Both Nathan Leopold and Clarence Darrow have latched onto ideas that they believe in but refuse to carry to their logical conclusions. If Leopold’s interpretation of Nietzche is correct, then I can declare myself a superwoman, above all human law, and I can murder Leopold or Clarence Darrow or anyone else if I choose to do so. I certainly have the right to do so. And if Darrow is right, no one can hold me responsible for that action, and punishment is a ridiculous concept. As is mercy. I am totally at the mercy of my biological and psychological impulses, a machine that may work properly according to the workings of the majority of human machines in the world or a machine that may malfunction (according to most people’s standards) and do something criminal. Either way, I am not responsible.

These are the ideas that produced the murder of Bobby Franks, and a few years later, the rise of Naziism and the scourge of the modern eugenics movement.

I didn’t know before I read this book:

Clarence Darrow was successful in saving his clients form the death sentence that the prosecutor asked to be imposed. Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold were sentenced to life imprisonment for murder and 99 years for the kidnapping of Bobby Franks. Richard Loeb died in prison, victim of a murderer himself. Nathan Leopold was released on parole in 1958. Leopold died of a heart attack in 1971.

The Alfred Hitchcock move Rope was based on a play by playwright Patrick Hamiliton that took the murder of Bobby Franks and the characters of Leopold and Loeb as its source. The play moved the action from Chicago to London. Hitchcock’s 1948 movie version starred Jimmy Stewart as a Nietzschean philosopher who is appalled when his ideas are made real by the murder committed by two former students of Cadell, the Jimmy Stewart character. Rope was one of Hitchcock’s least commercially successful films.

1918: Books and Literature

Oct1

American author Willa Cather published her novel, My Antonia, in 1918. It’s a story about the life of a Bohemian immigrant girl who lives on the prairie in a town called Black Hawk, Nebraska.

His Family by Ernest Poole won the first Pulitzer Prize for the novel in 1918.

Booth Tarkington continued to be a popular and prolific author, publishing his novel of the midwest, The Magnificent Ambersons in 1918. I wrote about The Magnificent Ambersons here. Orson Welles made a movie based on Tarkington’s book that I plan to watch someday.

And last but not least, professor William Strunk, Jr. wrote a little book called The Elements of Style, and he published it himself privately for use in his teaching at Cornell University. It was a writing style guide with eight rules of usage and ten principles of composition, and it greatly influenced a young student and writer named E.B. White (author of Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little); so much so, that White later found the little book, wrote a newspaper story about it, and revised it for publication by Macmillan Publishers in 1959. (Professor Strunk was, by this time, deceased.)

The little book, known informally as Strunk and White, became a best seller, and its influence on the writing habits and style of academic writers and common journalists has been incalculable. You can listen to an NPR story on the history of Strunk and White:

The Five Love Languages of Teenagers by Gary Chapman

Sep26

I have a low tolerance for psycho-babble. Although I don’t think this book is complete psycho-babble, there is an (un)healthy portion of it that just reads like psychological speculation and filler. I’ve read about the “five love languages” before, and there is a core of useful information there. I just think it can be explained in a simple way and in far fewer words than are in the several books that have been written and published on the subject.

So, the five love languages are:
1) words of affirmation
2) quality time
3) touch/physical expression of affection
4) gifts
5) acts of service

It is Mr. Chapman’s contention that everyone uses one of these five love languages as his or her primary way to express and receive love. The point of knowing your own primary love language and the primary love language of significant others in your life is to be able to express your love to them in a way that most plainly communicates love to that person. For example, if my primary love language is quality time, I will feel most loved by my husband, by my friends, and by my family when they decide to spend quality time with me. I will also tend to assume that that’s how they feel most loved by me. However, each of those people may have a different primary love language, and my husband or my teenage son may feel more loved and affirmed if I simply give them a a hug or a sincere compliment or a small gift or if I do something for them.

That’s it in a nutshell. The book takes a lot more words to say not much more than the preceding paragraph. If you want the concepts fleshed out with stories and lots of explanation and a few disclaimers and qualifications, read the book. Otherwise, just try to figure out how the people around you most readily receive and give love, and then try learning to give your affection to each one in a way that suits that person’s personality and “love language.” Not a bad idea at all, just too many words.

Meet Me in St. Louis: A Trip to the 1904 World’s Fair by Robert Jackson

Aug2

Facts:
Almost 20 million people from all over the world came to the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis.

President Theodore Roosevelt made two visits to St. Louis, once before the fair’s opening on April 30th and again later in the year before the fair closed on December 1st.

The fair was planned to take place in 1903 as a celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase, but it had to be postponed for a year due to the need for more preparations.

THe U.S. Congress invested five million dollars in the fair.

John Philip Sousa and his band performed on the opening day of the fair. Ragtime composer and Missouri resident Scott Joplin composed a piece especially for the fair, called The Cascades.

Thomas Edison himself came to the fair before it opened to help set up al the electric light displays.

Peanut butter and puffed rice, two foods not yet popular in the U.S., were promoted at the World’s Fair. Peanut butter was said to be a health food that was good for teeth.

Displayed in the Palace of Agriculture were a giant elephant made of almonds, a giant horse made of pecans, sculptures made of butter, and a corn palace.

Prince Pu Lun, nephew of the Emperor of China, Minister to His Imperial Presence, visited as the representative of his Emperor at the World’s Fair in St. Louis.

Geronimo lived at the fair for our months and signed autographs for ten cents each.

Ice cream in thin cone-shaped waffles became a favorite treat from the fair. Hot dogs and iced tea also became popular. Dr. Pepper was a fizzy new drink, introduced as a new kind of soda pop, made with 23 flavors.

The Ferris wheel from the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition was brought out of storage in Chicago and reassembled for the St. Louis fair. It was 265 feet high, and the cost for a ride was fifty cents.

Reactions:
Edward V. P. Schneiderhahn: “It is unthinkable what may all be seen. The mind reels at the mass of various and wonderful exhibits.”
Anonymous visitor: “My idea is to take in just as much as I can in the time I have.”
A farmer: “By George, I’ve plowed all day many a time; and I know hard work as well as the next man. But this is the hardest day’s work I’ve ever done–it uses you up. But it’s worth it.”
Edmund Philbert: “The view from the top of the wheel was very fine. We made two trips in the afternoon, and in the evening two more to view the illumination which looked fine.”
President Roosevelt: “I count it, indeed, a privilege to have had a chance of visiting this marvelous exposition. It is in very fact, the greatest Exposition of the kind that we have ever seen in recorded history.”

Related books:
Still Shining! Discovering Lost Treasures from the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair by Diane Rademacher.
Beyond the Ice Cream Cone: The Whole Scoop on Food at the 1904 World’s Fair by Pamela Vaccaro.
The Great Wheel by Robert Lawson. Newbery honor fiction about an Irish worker who helped build the great Ferris wheel in Chicago in 1893.
Fair Weather by Richard Peck. Fiction about a farm family’s visit to the Chicago World’s Fair.
The Minstrel’s Melody by Eleanora Tate. Twelve year old Orphelia longs to perform at the St. Louis World’s fair, but she must win a competition to do so. An American Girl history mystery through time.

American Eve by Paula Uruburu

Jul19

American Eve: Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White, the Birth of the “It” Girl, and the Crime of the Century by Paula Uruburu.

So, a photograph of Evelyn Nesbit was the inspiration for L.M. Montgomery’s description of the innocent, youthful, and inspirational Anne of Green Gables. And yet the true story of Evelyn Nesbit, The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing, is as sordid and debauched a tale as could be imagined. The contrast between the fictional character of Anne and the true character of young Evelyn Nesbit is heartbreakingly sad.

Evelyn Nesbit was born on December 25, 1884 (or maybe 1885). Her father died when she was ten or eleven, leaving the family in desperate straits. Young Evelyn managed to catch the attention of a newspaper photographer, then became a model for several artists in Philadelphia where the family was living in poverty, and finally moved with her mother and younger brother to New York where she became the most photographed young woman of the time. Photographers and artists stood in line to paint or take her picture. She was The American Beauty, the “It” Girl, Psyche, a Sibyl, the Sphinx, or “the glittering girl model of Gotham.” All this, and she was only sixteen years old.

And it all came crashing down, of course. One older New York millionaire seduced her, and another forced her into marriage and then defended her “honor” by murdering his rival on June 25, 1906 at the rooftop theater of Madison Square Garden. It was the Crime of the Century, and according to some, Evelyn Nesbit was completely responsible for the death of one man and the insanity of another. In her book about the drama, Ms. Uruburu takes the side of the underdog, Evelyn Nesbit. Everyone around Evelyn is described as “depraved” and “negligent” and “wicked”–all of which they probably were— but Evelyn is young and deceived and makes, not horrid, greedy choices, but rather “mistakes”. She is always trapped by her circumstances, unable to escape her fate, a victim of the manipulative, wealthy men and women who make her life into an obscene celebrity spectacle.

I thought the book was interesting in that it told a story that I have never read before. According to Uruburu, Evelyn Nesbit is a major character in E.L. Doctorow’s novel, Ragtime. I only made through about 100 pages of Ragtime, if that, and I never saw the movie based on the book. I also never saw or heard of the Joan Collins movie that was made about Evelyn Nesbit’s life, entitled The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing. As a defense of Evelyn Nesbit, the book succeeds for the most part, although her “mistakes” were a bit more culpable than the author wants to make them seem to be. It’s a mistake to find yourself unexpectedly alone with a married lecherous man; it’s a really bad choice to become the lecher’s mistress.

Warning: Some of the details of the story are lurid, and Ms. Uruburu’s prose gets a bit purplish at times. However, I doubt the author could have done much to sensationalize the story any more than it already was.

Evelyn Nesbit was definitely a sensation.

54 Wonderful Projects

Jul18

I love projects: reading projects, relationship projects, educational projects, travel projects, daily projects, weekly projects, goofy projects, serious projects, all kinds of projects. There’s something about the discipline and the long term commitment to a project that intrigues me, even though I’m much better myself at beginning projects and reading about them than I am at actually completing them.

Here are a few of the projects that I have been working on, or I wish I could do, or I wish I’d thought of, or I plan to try someday, or I at least want to read about:

1. Wave at the Bus. This dad dressed up in a different costume every day for an entire school year to wave at his high school son’s school bus as it passed by the house.

2. The Reading Promise: My Father and the Books We Shared by Alice Ozma. Alice (actually Kristin Brozina) and her dad Jim read together every night for at least ten minutes, usually longer, for 3218 consecutive nights, or nine years. Wow! A review of the book by Sam Sattler at Book Chase.

3. The Whole Five Feet: What the Great Books Taught Me About Life, Death, and Pretty Much Everything Else by Christopher Beha. New York TImes Book Review.

4. Praying for Strangers by River Jordan. Ms. Jordan not only prays for a stranger each day, but she also often feels led to tell the person that she will be praying and asks for prayer requests. That’s a little intimidating. See, I’m really rather shy and reserved. The idea of going up to a complete stranger and telling them that I’ll be praying for them is, well, actually terrifying. I did try doing this, but I can’t make myself go up and talk to people I don’t know. So I’ve been sort of praying covertly.

5. Use a plan to read through the entire Bible in a year. I have done this project and plan to continue doing it each year. THis book looks good (reviewed by Becky): Read Your Bible One Book At A Time: A Refreshing Way To Read God’s Word with New Insight and Meaning by Woodrow Kroll. And here’s a Semicolon post with more ideas for Bible study and Bible reading projects.

6. Scratch Beginnings: Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream by Adam Shepard. Adam Shepard went to Charleston, South Carolina with $25, a sleeping bag, and the clothes on his back. His goal was, by the end of a year, to have a car, a furnished apartment, and $2500 in the bank.

7. A Walk Across America by Peter Jenkins. I read this book when I was in high school, I think, and it may be the book that inspired my fascination with people who take on Big Projects. The second half of Mr. Jenkins’ walk across the United States is chronicled in The Walk West.
I also read this nonfiction book about two women at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century who walked across the country: Bold Spirit by Linda Lawrence Hunt. Two fictional accounts of this mother/daughter walk are The Daughter’s Walk by Jane Kirkpatrick and The Year We Were Famous by Carol Estby Dagg.

8. A family I know had a project of visiting and taking a picture of every county courthouse in Texas. That’s 254 pictures of 254 county seat courthouses. What a great idea for learning and family bonding.

9. From The Bard Blog: “One big undertaking in 2010 was my Summer Shakespeare extravaganza. I made sure to see as many productions of the Bard as I could within a 2 month period.” Or for more Shakespeare madness, one could try out this project: reading Shakespeare’s 38 plays in 38 days, one each day.

10. Tolstoy and the Purple Chair by Nina Sankovich. Sankovitch vowed to read one book a day for an entire year and blog about it as a way of coping and working through her grief over the death of her sister.

11. In A Severe Mercy by Sheldon VanAuken, the author relives his courtship and marriage with his beloved wife Davy, who died of cancer. He celebrates their life together by consuming the music, the books, old letters, notes, diaries, and other artifacts of their marital life. He calls it The Illumination of the Past. It seems to me to be an almost obsessive way to mourn, but the way Mr. Van Auken writes about his journey makes it a healing process.

“I travelled through the past at the rate of a month or two a day. I could not go much faster and still listen to the music–often whole symphonies–and read the poems. The books, novels, and the like, I read at night, after I had written to her.”

12. No-Man’s Lands: One Man’s Odyssey Through The Odyssey by Scott Huler. The author retraces the route of Odysseus from Troy to Ithaca. I haven’t read the book, but I’d like to someday.

13. The Year of Living like Jesus: My Journey of Discovering What Jesus Would Really Do by Ed Dobson. The fact that this book is recommended by Rob Bell, who annoys me, is something of a letdown. But it still sounds intriguing.

14. The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible by A.J. Jacobs. Mr. Dobson was inspired to do his Jesus project by his reading of Mr. Jacobs’ book. Mr. Jacobs was (is) a nonobservant Jewish man who took a year to endeavor to live a strictly Biblical, law-abiding life.

15. The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World by A.J. Jacobs. Before he “got religion”, Mr. Jacobs chronicled his journey as he read through the entire Encyclopedia Brittanica in a year.

16. Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages by Ammon Shea. If one man can read an entire encyclopedia in a year, why can’t another read the twenty volume Oxford English Dictionary in a year? And then write a book about it.

17. Walking the Bible: A Journey by Land Through the Five Books of Moses by Bruce Feiler. Mr. Feiler. an American Jew, made a 10,000-mile journey from Mount Ararat to Mount Nebo, following in the footsteps of the patriarchs.

18. Howards End Is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home by Susan Hill. “In pursuit of a book on her shelves, Susan Hill encountered dozens of others that she had never read, forgotten she owned, or wanted to read for a second time. The discovery inspired her to embark on a year-long voyage through her books in order to get to know her own collection again.”

19. Prayer Walking: A Journey of Faith by Dan Crawford and Calvin Miller. Recommended by Joe McKeever. This prayer project seems to me just as intriguing as the praying for strangers book (#4). But how does one develop the self-discipline to be consistent in prayer?

20. Racing Odysseus by Roger H. Martin. Recommended at Seasonal Soundings. “Roger H. Martin, president (at the time) of Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia goes back to school as a freshman at the age of 61. Martin’s sabbatical takes him to St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland.”

21. Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana. This project is one that I would not dare to undertake even if it were possible in this day and age. Nevertheless, it would be worth reading about. Recommended by Lars Walker at Brandywine Books.

22. A memory project: Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art & Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer. Absolutely fascinating.

23. My 20th Century history project.

24. I’ve mentioned this Blank Bible Project before, and I still think it’s a great idea. I’m not doing this project, but I have been writing notes in my Bible for several years with the intention of giving the Bible to one of my children someday.

25. My Newbery project. The plan is to eventually read all of the Newbery Medal books and all of the honor books, too.

26. My Reading Through Africa project.

27. 100 Movies of Summer. I started this project last year, and of course, we didn’t finish. But we did watch several old movies (actually, nine) that I either hadn’t seen or hadn’t shared with the urchins. I think we’ll try again this summer to watch some more—maybe we’ll finish all 100.

28. Make some art, maybe a photograph or a painting or a drawing. Put the art in a nice frame, one that isn’t brand new. Then, hang your framed art in a place you aren’t supposed to, but where people will assume it is supposed to be, like the lobby of your apartment building, in the hallway at your office, on the smallest wall in a motel room, in the quiet corner of a library, outside the downstairs restroom at a restaurant or bar, the back room of a club, in the bathroom of a museum. From the website 52 projects.

29. List the years that you have been alive. Then, in a word, sentence or short paragraph, write down a significant memory from each year. From the website 52 projects. It sounds like a great birthday project, doesn’t it?

30. 1000 Gifts by Ann Voskamp. Anne Voskamp started a list of 1000 reasons to be grateful to God. She ended up with a life full of gratitude and blessing, even in the hard times.

31. In the Neighborhood: The Search for Community on an American Street, One Sleepover at a Time by Peter Lovenheim. “When a murder-suicide occurred in his community, a suburb of Rochester, NY, Lovenheim, a journalist and author who teaches writing at the Rochester Institute of Technology, set out to get to know his neighbors and create a sense of community that is lacking in contemporary America by asking if he could spend the night at their houses.”

32. The Film Club: A True Story of a Father and Son by David Gilmour. I have a feeling from reading the reviews that this book might be a little too male for my taste, but I’d like try it. Father David Gilmour allows his sixteen year old son, Jesse, to drop out of high school with two conditions: he couldn’t do drugs, and he had to watch three movies a week with dad. The book is about their movie-led “homeschooling” experiment.

33. 1000 Places to See Before You Die by Patricia Schultz. If I had the money, I’d do it –or write my own list. No doubt.

34. 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die: A Comprehensive Reference Source, Chronicling the History of the Novel. Preface by Peter Ackroyd. General Editor: Peter Boxall. Arukiyomi has a spreadsheet for keeping track of the book you’ve read from the 1001. Of the books on the 2008 list, I’ve read 126. I think it’s skewed toward the last hundred and eleven years, and I’ve read many more nineteenth century novels than twentieth century and beyond. Nevertheless, it’s a fun project.

35. One Red Paperclip. I remember hearing about this project: this guy traded his red paper clip for something a little better. Then he traded again. And again. “I’m going to make a continuous chain of ‘up trades’ until I get a house. Or an island. Or a house on an island. You get the idea.”

36. England’s Thousand Best Churches by Simon Jenkins and Paul Barker. Now wouldn’t visiting all of these churches be a project to remember!

37. In 2008 Stephanie Dean made a New Year’s resolution to use her slow cooker every single day for the entire year. Here’s a list of the recipes she used.

38. While we’re on the subject of cooking projects, Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously by Julie Powell was the inspiration for the movie Julie and Julia (which I haven’t seen). Ms. Powell’s project was to cook all 524 recipes in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume I in a year.

39. Then, of course, there are the “40 days” spiritual projects (based on the 40 days of Lent?):
Rick Warren’s The Purpose-Driven Life,
Get out of That Pit: A 40-Day Devotional Journal by Beth Moore,
40 Days Living the Jesus Creed by Scot McKnight.

40. Experiencing God: Knowing and Doing the Will of God by Henry Blackaby and Claude King is one of the best Christian “project books” that I’ve ever read. Mr. Blackaby walks you through the steps to knowing God through Christ and then knowing and doing His will in your life. I need to repeat this project.

41. Do you believe this one? Organizing Magic: 40 Days to a Well-Ordered Home and Life by Sandra Felton. I tried Flylady, and I crashed. I’ve read other organizing books, and the authors obviously didn’t have eight children and a husband who wants to store everything in the attic until he can get around to using it or fixing it.

42. The Six Hundred Club was a project for memorizing some of the most famous and inspirational 600 lines of poetry or 600 lines from Shakespeare’s plays, a brainchild of my English professor, Dr. Huff. Dr. Huff invented The Six Hundred Club, and I am a proud member. You can read more about it here, and if you would like to embark upon this particular project, email me. I’ll be happy to send you the lines from Shakespeare or the particular poems to be memorized.

43. A poem-writing project: Where I Am From. Here are some instructions for writing your own “where I am from” poem. If you write one, please come back and share it with the rest of us.

44. The U.S. Presidents Reading Project has a list of all of the U.S. presidents and suggested reading selections (non-fiction) for each one. The challenge is to read one biography of each one. A couple of years ago I read biographies of George Washington, John Adams, James and Dollie Madison, and Alexander Hamilton (I know, not a president, but closely related). Last year I read about John Quincy Adams and his wife Catherine and about my favorite president, TR, “Teddy” Roosevelt. I have American Lion by Jon Meacham on my shelf awaiting me, and I also have two presidential books in my library basket, 1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft and Debs–The Election That Changed the Country by James Chase and Florence Harding: The First Lady, the Jazz Age, and the Death of America’s Most Scandalous President by Carl Serrazza Anthony.

45. Texas Tuesday Project. I also plan to go back to posting about books set in or published in or related to Texas on Tuesdays. Or at least on most Tuesdays. Some Tuesdays?

46. My Madeleine L’Engle reading project, with a goal of reading or re-reading her complete oeuvre, is ongoing. It started out as a project for January 2007, but I quickly saw that I’d need more time to read all of the books. Here’s a link to my annotated bibliography of Madeleine L’Engle’s books.

47. The Happiness Project: Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun by Gretchen Rubin. Reviewed by Amy at Hope Is the Word.

48. I forgot all about Carrie’s Reading My Library Challenge. She and her children are reading all of the children’s picture books in her library. And BekahCubed plans to read Every Single Book in her local branch library in Lincoln, Nebraska. Maybe the two of them should write a book together.

49.Among Schoolchildren by Tracy Kidder. Back in the 1980’s author Tracy Kidder spent a year in a fifth grade classroom—and lived to write about it. I remember it as an excellent and insightful look into the life of a teacher and her students. Kidder also wrote House about the trial and joys of having your own house built. Now that’s a project!

50. Moonwalking With Einstein by Joshua Foer. Mr. Foer spent a year developing his memory so that he could compete in the U.S. Memory Championships. Reviewed by Alice at Supratentorial.

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Can you suggest more projects or project books to fill out the list? Why 54? Stay tuned to find out . . . next week.

The Fear: Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe by Peter Godwin

Jul11

Peter Godwin is the award-winning author of When a Crocodile Eats the Sun and Mukiwa. Born and raised in Zimbabwe, he was educated at Cambridge and Oxford and became a foreign correspondent, reporting from more than 60 countries. Since moving to Manhattan, he has written for National Geographic, the New York Times Magazine, and Vanity Fair. He has taught at Princeton and Columbia, and in 2010 received a Guggenheim fellowship.

The Fear covers events and stories of people in Zimbabwe mostly during 2008-2009, the time of an historic election in Zimbabwe which resulted in a new government to replace that of the octogenarian dictator, Robert Mugabe. I knew a very little about current and recent events in Zimbabwe going into this book—only that Mugabe was a dictator and that the economy of Zimbabwe was in a shambles as a result of his rule.

Now, I know a lot more, even though the narrative was somewhat confusing at times. Godwin travelled around the country, interviewing this person and that, and telling the stories mostly of the opposition party that actually won the election in 2008, the MDC. Mugabe’s thugs, the ZANU-PF, are uniformly seen as just that—thugs, murderers, and torturers. I tend to think that one-sided picture is accurate. Even though MDC presidential candidate Morgan Tsvangirai won the election in 2008, Mugabe refused to give up power, and eventually the two men and their political allies were forced to enter into a power-sharing agreement brokered by South Africa. In spite (because of) of widespread election violence and persecution of those who voted for the MDC, Tsvangirai decided to avoid a civil war by becoming part of the government and trying to work for change from within.

The Fear is a harrowing book. The tales of torture and suffering that fill the book are quite overwhelming. I wondered how people could be so cruel and evil, and then I remembered that we are all capable of great evil and only held in check by the grace of God. I also wondered how people can continue to live relatively normal lives in the face of such brutality, and I remembered that humans are remarkably resilient.

Sometimes I had trouble remembering who was who as the narrative moved from one political figure or common person to another, and much of the terminology was not explained. I could have used a glossary, at least. Part of the problem was reading the book on my Kindle, where I’ve found it is difficult to look back and remind oneself of what has gone before, who a particular character is, or what information may have been explained in the second chapter and merely referenced in the fourth or fifth. I prayed for the people of Zimbabwe as I read, however, and I was moved to pity by their plight.

Of course, the questions in my mind throughout my reading were: “What is going on now in Zimbabwe? How have these people fared? Have conditions improved?” Recent headlines are not encouraging:

Bomb blast hits Zimbabwe official’s home
Police violently break up Zimbabwe rally
Zimbabwe in a state of ‘crisis’
Mugabe depends on diamonds for power
Mugabe begins anti-sanctions campaign

If you are interested in Zimbabwe in particular or African governments and politics in general, you will appreciate the information in Mr. Godwin’s book. You will also wonder how people can be so cruel and how you can help the people of Zimbabwe who have suffered so much for so long. I would suggest prayer and possibly a contribution to one of these charities in Zimbabwe.

Lost in Shangri-La by Mitchell Zuckoff

Jun10

World War II, in addition to being The Good War fought by the Greatest Generation, continues to provide a wealth of lessons, images, illustrations, and just good stories for authors to mine and for readers to appreciate. Lost in Shangri-La, subtitled “A True Story of Survival, Adventure, and the Most Incredible Rescue Mission of World War II,” is one of those many stories that can inspire and educate us today, some sixty odd years later.

The episode took place in Dutch New Guinea (later called Irian Jaya and West Papua, a part of Indonesia) in the waning years of the war, 1945-1946. Twenty-four AMerican servicemen and WAC’s boraded a transport plane for a sight-seeing trip over the Baliem Valley, also called by the service personnel that discovered, Shangri-La Valley because it reminded them from the air of James Hilton’s novel, Lost Horizon. The plane crashed, and three of the twenty-four miraculously survived the crash. However, the three were trapped inside a valley that was inaccessible to airplanes, and between them and the coast where Allied base were, was miles and miles of jungle, home to possibly hostile tribesmen and also possibly filled with Japanese soldiers who had yet to surrender. And to compound the problem of getting back to their comrades, the three survivors were covered with serious burns from the crash that were in danger of turning gangrenous.

The mountains were too high for helicopters. The valley was too narrow for planes to land, and there was no suitable runway anyway. The jungle was too thick fro planes to even spot the survivors from the air. How were the three to be rescued? The story of how and who did it and what the crash survivors encountered in the valley of “Shangri-La” is quite fascinating.

I was reminded of the missionary story, Peace Child by Don Richardson. Mr. Richardson worked with the Sawi people of Papua somewhere in or near the Baliem Valley where the people in Lost in Shangri-La were marooned. He was also in contact with the Dani and Yali tribes, the same peoples with whom the survivors of the Shangri-la plane crash found refuge. After the war, many of these isolated Papuan tribespeople were introduced to Christianity and prepared by missionaries for their inevitable encounter with Western culture.

It was fascinating to get a glimpse of these tribes in their pre-Western-influenced and pre-Christian cultures. Obviously, the coming of Western influences to these tribes has been a mixed blessing. Before World War II the Baliem Valley was largely unexplored and isolated from the rest of the world. Now, although the valley is still somewhat isolated because of its inaccessibility, most of the native people claim to be Christians, and the wars between villages that took place with regularity before are no more the men’s favorite pastime.

At any rate, if you’re interested in these sorts of things—isolated people groups and cultures, World War II stories of adventure and bravery, historic encounters between modern and prehistoric groups of people— Lost in Shangri-La should be just the ticket.

Similar and related books:
The Airmen and the Headhunters: A True Story of Lost Soldiers, Heroic Tribesmen and the Unlikeliest Rescue of World War II by Judith Heimann.
Peace Child by Don RIchardson.
Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand.

What is your favorite (true) World War II story?