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Left to Tell by Immaculee Ilibagiza

May6

Subtitled Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust, this autobiographical story tells one young lady, a mmember of the Tutsi tribe, who survived the slaughter by the Hutu majority of the Tutsis in Rwanda. Immaculee’s parents and her two brothers along with most of her extended family were killed during the Rwandan holocaust in 1994. Immaculee survived only because a Hutu pastor hid her and seven other women in a secret bathroom in his home for over three months.

During those three months, Immaculee came to know what it meant to depend on the grace and protection of God, and she came to believe that God preserved her life for a purpose. She also came out of hiding and was able to confront and then forgive those who had murdered her famly and tried to take her life, too.

I found this book difficult to read, difficult to believe that people could become so evil as to torture and murder the neighbors who grew up with them and the adults who taught and mentored them. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the Hutu/Tutsi enmity; according to Ms. Ilibagiza, there’s not even any simple way to tell members of the two tribes apart. Hutus feel that they were discriminated against in the past by the French-favored Tutsis. Tutsis felt that they were on the receiving end of the discrimination from the majority Hutus. And all the years of resentment and animosity exploded into violence and genocide after the death (assassination?) of Hutu President Habyarimana in April, 1994.

This book reminded me of Night, the book about the Jewish Holocaust during WW II that I read not too long ago. Not that the writing in Left to Tell was as distinctive and evocative as was that in Night, but the stories were much the same —unbelievable cruelty and tiny acts of mercy and charity nearly lost in a sea of horror. Immaculee emerges from her holocaust experience much more whole and able to grieve and forgive than did Mr. Wiesel; she seems to have a strong sense of God’s love for her and of His purpose in her life in spite of the suffering she had to endure in Rwanda.

Note: Although Immaculee herself talks and writes as an orthodox Roman Catholic Christian, her book was published by Hay House which is connected with the Hay Foundation, “established in 1985 to honor the work of metaphysical teacher, counselor, world-renowned author, and lecturer Louise L. Hay.” The foreword to the book is written by Dr. Wayne Dyer, another metaphysical, positive-thinking, New Age author and speaker. This connection doesn’t invalidate Immaculee’s experiences or insights, but it should make one cautious about reading and listening to her “friends.”

Cross-X by Joe Miller

May1

My initial, knee jerk reaction to this book? Despair.

Cross-X is subtitled “The Amazing True Story`of How the Most Unlikely Team from the Most Unlikely of Places Overcame Staggering Obstacles at Home and at School to Challenge the Debate Community on Race, Power, and Education.” It’s about the debate program at Kansas City’s Central High School and about how the author himself, a journalist, became a part of the story he was chronicling. Mr. Miller starts out observing and following the debating adventures of these black, inner city high school debaters, and by the end of the book he’s an assistant coach and an advocate for ending what he sees as institutional racism within the debate community and inside the education system as a whole.

The problem that I see is that these kids are being trained to see racism in everything that happens to them, and their teachers are so biased and despairing that the kids come (are lead) to the conclusion that the overthrow of the government and the education system is just about the only thing that will get them their “rights” as human beings. Their argument against any and all comers is that the system is racist and oppressive and until that fact is acknowledged and changed (how?) they won’t discuss anything else. Period. This argument is their response to problems in mental health care, foreign policy questions, and nuclear war, to name just a few of the debate questions that Central High debaters answer with their all-purpose “end racism first” response.

My near-despair comes from reading that we have students in inner city high schools who are being taught that making up a rhymed rap about how racist everything and everybody is will get them into the upper echelons of power and change the world for the better. In other words, if black young people can be trained to see themselves as victims and to articulate that vision, then eventually the white oppressors will see the light and —what? Reading this book reminds me of the OJ Simpson trial and what a gulf that trial revealed between the perspectives of white people and black people in this country. Are we really so far apart? And are we moving farther apart? I pray not, but I am discouraged by the stories in this book.

The Higher Power of Lucky and Another Place at the Table

Apr30

Another Place at the Table by Kathy Harrison. Not a children’s fiction title, this book reminded me of the dozens of women I know who are just like author Kathy Harrison, foster moms and adoptive moms who are called and able to parent damaged and abused children who come to their homes via CPS with love, courage, patience, and realism. In fact, I know of a little girl right now who’s adopted and in need of a heart transplant. She’s four years old, and her adoptive mom is pouring out her life at the hospital, taking care of and praying for C. Would you say a prayer for them, too?

The Higher Power of Lucky by Susan Patron. I read these two books back to back, by chance, and they meshed well. Another Place is nonfiction about one couple’s experience as foster parents in Massachusetts. The Higher Power of Lucky is Newbery Award winning fiction about Lucky, a young resident of hard Pan, CA (pop. 43, whose guardian is Brigitte, her father’s first wife from France. Lucky’s mom died in an accident, and Lucky is just as insecure about her place in the world and her future as are many of Mrs. Harrison’s foster children. The Higher Power of Lucky should be comforting and familiar for children like Lucky who live in fosterhomes and other insecure situations, and it mught just help the rest of us understand those children a little better. On top of that, it’s a good story and one which will add new words to some vocabularies (scrotum, crevice, commodity, cremation).

I recommend Another Place at the Table for anyone considering foster parenting or foster-to-adopt. ALso, people like me who are interested in children and in mental health issues should be able to learn something from Mrs. Harrison’s account of her experiences, both good and bad, in the foster care system. I recommend The Higher Power of Lucky for its quirky characters and setting and its true-to-life description of the thoughts and feelings of a kid trying to survive in a family and in a community that are both a little shaky and unstable at times.

Quirky Quotations:

“Lucky had a little place in her heart where there was a meanness gland. The meanness gland got active sometimes when Miles was around. She knew he knew he had to do what Lucky wanted, because if he didn’t , she’d never be nice to him. Sometimes, with that meanness gland working, Lucky liked being mean to Miles.”
(Don’t we all have one of those glands? I believe Christians call it a sin nature.)

” . . . the valve that kept secrets locked up in Lucky’s heart was clamped shut.”

“It made her feel discouraged, like if you took the word apart into sections of dis and couraged. It was getting harder and harder to stay couraged.”

“The sky arched up forever, nothing but a sheet of blue, hiding zillions of stars and planets and galaxies that were up there all the time, even when you couldn’t see them. It was kind of peaceful and so gigantic it made your brain feel rested. It made you feel like you could become anything you wanted, like you were filled up with nothing but hope.”

So, in spite of death (her mother) and desertion (by her father), Lucky’s got “a sense of hope.” And I, for one, am a lot more concerned about that aspect of a children’s book than about any scrotal references.

Three Houses by Angela Thirkell

Apr27

Angela Thirkell wrote approximately one novel per year beginning in 1933 when she was over forty years old. However, her first published book was a memoir of her own childhood entitled Three Houses. It’s not a bad way to start a writing career, especially if you have famous friends and relatives who can “drop into” the narrative. Ms. Thirkell did have that advantage. Her grandfather was the celebrated pre-Raphaelite artist Sir Edward Burne-Jones, and the pre-Raphaelites figure prominently in her childhood story, especially William Morris and his fabrics and furniture. As if that set of famous literati weren’t enough, Rudyard Kipling was Ms. Thirkell’s cousin, and she played Cavaliers and Roundheads with Kipling’s children. Little Angela and Kipling’s daughter, Josephine, who died young, were great friends and playmates.

“The Just So Stories are a poor thing in print compared with the fun of having them told in Cousin Ruddy’s deep unhesitating voice. There was a ritual about them, each phrase having its special intonation which had to be exactly the same each time and without which the stories are dried husks. There was an inimitable cadence, an emphasis of certain words, an exaggeration of certain phrases, a kind of intoning here and there which made his telling unforgettable.

Can’t you just imagine listening to Kipling read, “On the sea, once upon a time, O my Best Beloved, there was a Whale, and he ate fishes. He ate the starfish and the garfish, and the crab and the dab, and the plaice and the dace, and the skate and his mate, and the mackereel and the pickereel, and the really truly twirly-whirly eel. All the fishes he could find in all the sea he ate with his mouth–so!”
Or “In the High and Far-Off Times the Elephant, O Best Beloved, had no trunk. He had only a blackish, bulgy nose, as big as a boot, that he could wriggle about from side to side; but he couldn’t pick up things with it. But there was one Elephant–a new Elephant–an Elephant’s Child–who was full of ‘satiable curtiosity’, and that means he asked ever so many questions.”

Ms. Thirkell also gives her adult opinion of Pre-Raphaelite design:

“As for pre-Raphaelite beds, it can only have been the physical vigour and perfect health of their original designers that made them believe their work was fit to sleep in. It is true that the spring mattress was then in an embryonic stage and there were no spiral springs to prevent a bed from taking the shape of a drinking trough after a few weeks use, but even this does not excuse the use of wooden slats running lengthways as an aid to refreshing slumber. Luckily children never know when they are uncomfortable and the pre-Raphaelites had in many essentials the childlike mind.”

The stories in this memoir depict a delightfully sheltered and rich childhood. No exciting revelations or even adventures take place, but Ms. Thirkell’s world, the late nineteenth century, is a nice place to spend an afternoon.

Resurrection Reading: Night by Elie Wiesel

Apr7

No, I’ve never read this account of Mr. Wiesel’s experiences during the final days of World War II as he is enslaved in first Birkenau, then Auschwitz, then Buna, and finally Buchenwald, not until this week. It’s not a long book, only a little over a hundred pages, but it’s about the most powerful indictment of the evil that lies deep inside every man that I’ve ever read. If you don’t believe in “original sin,” Night will change your mind. It’s a very, very dark story, and the fact that it’s true and told in a quite factual manner makes it even more disturbing. The Nazi persecution and near-extermination of the Jews happened; it’s depressing, but unavoidable. And as Mr. Wiesel shows in his book, even those who were enslaved and murdered were not able to remain pure; he tells over and over again of how son turned against father, how friends fought each other for a scrap of bread, and of how he found himself doing and thinking things that would have been unthinkable before his captivity.

So why is this “Resurrection Reading”? Well, despite the “night” that pervades this book and despite the death that is its constant theme, the book points me, as a Christian, to resurrection. Jesus said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.” By extension, only the dead need a resurrection, and only he who is aquainted with both the depravity of man and the evil that is within his own being is aware of his need of a saviour.

As the book ends, Mr. Wiesel has been liberated from Buchenwald, but he looks into the mirror and sees a corpse. Only a resurrection can help this particular patient.

Night is definitely appropriate and powerful reading for a Holy Saturday of darkness.

Resurrection Reading: Bury the Chains by Adam Hochschild

Apr2

I finished reading this nonfiction account of the campaign to end the British slave trade in late February, about the time I went on blog break. Then, sometime in March I went to see the movie Amazing Grace, a treatment of the same subject, at the movie theater with twelve year old Brown Bear Daughter. I thought the book and the movie dovetailed and gave me a much fuller picture of this episode in history than I would have gotten from either alone.

The push to end the trade in human slaves by British merchants took place in the late eighteenth century and in the early 1800’s, the time of poets Wordsworth and Coleridge, just after the American Revolution (or the loss of the American colonies, as the British themselves would have named it). During the decades that Wilberforce and his supporters worked to end the slave trade, the French Revolution devastated France and threatened the British aristocracy and later Toussaint L’Ouverture led the slaves in Haiti to revolt, and Napoleon became an even bigger threat to the British monarchy. Wilberforce and his cohorts, Thomas Clarkson, Granville Sharp, and others, tried to keep the focus on the abolition of the slave trade, but of course the other events that were shaking their world and forming public opinion could not help but influence the course of their movement. Wilberforce began to campaign against the slave trade in 1787; the trade was finally abolished on March 23, 1807. The movie, Amazing Grace was released on March 23 of this year to mark the 200th anniversary of the abolition by Parliament of the slave trade by British subjects.

“To the British abolitionists, the challenge of ending slavery in a world that considered it fully normal was as daunting as it seems today when we consider challenging the entrenched wrongs of our own age:
—the gap between rich and poor nations
—the spread of nuclear weapons
—assaults on the earth, air and water
—the habit of war.

I don’t know Mr. Hothchld’s political persuasion, but these are the analogies he sees when he compares the campaign to abolish the slave trade to the need to end evil institutions in our time. I immediately see a different analogy: the Abolition of Abortion. These and other similarities have been noted before by others, but they are striking:

It’s all for the best: Slave owners and slave traders argued, outrageously, that the slaves were happy to leave a barbaric existence in Africa, to sail across the ocean in near-luxury on slave trading ships, to work for kind Christian masters on delightful Caribbean islands. The reality was, of course, much grimmer and likely to end in disease, dismemberment, or death for the “happy slaves.”
Abortion proponents argue, outrageously, that aborted children are better off dead. They would not have wanted to be born into poverty or into abusive families. In both cases the claim to read minds and to know that death and slavery are best for another person is hubris and infamously cruel.

Property rights: Slaves were property, argued the slave owners and traders, and couldn’t be freed without compensation to the slave owners.
Unborn babies are the property of their mothers (not fathers for some reason), and abortion cannot be abolished unless we compensate those mothers who will be forced to bear unwanted children.

Out of sight, out of mind: British slaves were, for the most part, far away from England on Carribean island sugar plantations.Abolitionists had to demonstrate the evils of slavery to a population, most of whom had never seen slavery enacted nor even met a slave in person. Some of the British people may have known slave owners, absentee plantation owners, but not know the source of their great wealth. (The Church of England actually owned vast sugar plantations worked by slaves in the Caribbean.)
Similarly, abortion in the United States takes place almost clandestinely. I may know an abortionist, or someone who has had an abortion, probably I do, but I have no idea who it might be.

The Means to Abolition: In his book Hochschild writes that the abolitionists learned that “. . . the way to stir men and women to action is not by biblical argument, but through the vivid, unforgettable description of acts of great injustice done to their fellow human beings.”
I believe that we will end the evil of abortion, finally, not by appeals to Scripture nor even to reason, but rather when we are able to demonstrate to enough people, especially young people, what a violent and abhorrent act it is to murder an innocent child who has barely even had the opportunity to begin his or her life.

The slaves in the British West Indies were finally freed on August 1, 1838. On that date, over fifty years after Wilberforce first took up the cause of ending slavery, nearly 800,000 men, women, and children throughout the British Empire officially became free. In the United States, during the next two and a half decades prior to the Civil War, free blacks in the North and many sympathetic whites celebrated August 1, Emancipation Day, with parades, outdoor meetings, and church services—and with hope that emancipation and the abolition of slavery would come to the slave states of the United States, too.

William WIlberforce’s epitaph in Westminster Abbey:

“To the memory of William Wilberforce (born in Hull, August 24th 1759, died in London, July 29th 1833); for nearly half a century a member of the House of Commons, and, for six parliaments during that period, one of the two representatives for Yorkshire. In an age and country fertile in great and good men, he was among the foremost of those who fixed the character of their times; because to high and various talents, to warm benevolence, and to universal candour, he added the abiding eloquence of a Christian life. Eminent as he was in every department of public labour, and a leader in every work of charity, whether to relieve the temporal or the spiritual wants of his fellow-men, his name will ever be specially identified with those exertions which, by the blessing of God, removed from England the guilt of the African slave trade, and prepared the way for the abolition of slavery in every colony of the empire: in the prosecution of these objects he relied, not in vain, on God; but in the progress he was called to endure great obloquy and great opposition: he outlived, however, all enmity; and in the evening of his days, withdrew from public life and public observation to the bosom of his family. Yet he died not unnoticed or forgotten by his country: the Peers and Commons of England, with the Lord Chancellor and the Speaker at their head, in solemn procession from their respective houses, carried him to his fitting place among the mighty dead around, here to repose: till, through the merits of Jesus Christ, his only redeemer and saviour, (whom, in his life and in his writings he had desired to glorify,) he shall rise in the resurrection of the just.”

Resources:
The Amazing Change: How You Can Help to End Modern Day Slavery.

Study guide to accompany Amazing Grace, the movie.

Ending Slavery: An Unfinished Business, a study guide on the history and current status of slaves and slavery around the world.

BBC Interactive Map on the Abolition of British Slavery.

Books by and About William WIlberforce.

Wind, Sand, and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Jul8

I did manage to find this 1939 book and read it:
“And these human relations must be created. One must go through an apprenticeship to learn the job. Games and risk are a help here. When we exchange manly handshakes, compete in races, join together to save one of us who is in trouble, cry aloud for help in the hour of danger —only then do we learn that we are not alone on earth.” p. 29

“What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step.It is always the same step, but you have to take it.” p.38

“Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction. There is no comradeship except through union in the same high effort.” p. 215

I think I’ve read that last quotation in a greeting card somewhere, but that only makes it shopworn, perhaps, not untrue. Saint Exupery’s strength in Wind, Sand, and Stars is the stories he tells about his almost death of dehydration stranded in the Sahara desert, about his experiences in Spain during the Spanish civil war, about flying over the Pyrenees and the Andes. To get those stories, you’ll have to read the book.

His diagnosis of the plight of mankind and the cause of war is not so profound. He says that we all believe in something, and “fulfillment is promised each of us by his religion.” All beliefs are essentially the same, and we must not discuss ideologies. We must instead understand that “what all of us want is to be set free.” “There are two hundred million men in Europe whose existence has no meaning and who yearn to come alive,” writes Saint Exupery.

I don’t know if Saint Exupery was a Christian although he was educated in Jesuit schools. Nevertheless, he ends his book with these rather cryptic words: “Only the Spirit, if it breathe upon the clay, can create Man.”

Read the book, and his other classic Le Petit Prince and draw your own conclusions.

Behind the Burqa

Jan31

The full title is Behind the Burqa: Our Life in Afghanistan and How We Escaped to Freedom by “Sulima” and “Hala” as told to Batya Swift Yasgur. I’ll do a quick review in light of the fact that this book is propaganda, not in a bad sense, but propaganda nevertheless. The purpose of the book is to “anger you, frighten you, and ultimately, inspire you with the compelling and suspenseful stories of these women.” The author wants you and me to care about the plight of Afghan women and about the difficulties of illegal immigrants who are seeking asylum in this country, and she even includes an appendix at the end of the book on “how you can help” with ideas, addresses, and websites for those who want to do something in response to the stories in the book.

I already find that I care just as much or more about what is happening to the people, especially the women and children, of Afghanistan as I do about Iraq. I would say that reading The Kite Runner last year was responsible for bringing my interest in Afghanistan to the surface. So after seeing Behind the Burqa in the bookstore, I was interested in reading this account of two sisters’ lives in Soviet and Taliban ruled Afghanistan and of their escape to the United States. My evaluation: the book is good, well-written, and accomplishes the purpose the author set out to accomplish. I did come away from the book wanting to do something to help those who flee to the U.S. to escape persecution only to be trapped inside our immigration system. I’m not sure what that “something” will be yet, but the appendix again suggests several websites to go to for more information about helping both Afghanistan and asylum seekers in the U.S. I don’t know enough about them to recommend all these organizations, but if you are interested, I would suggest you check out the websites for yourself.

Women for Afghan Women
Equality NowEquality Now
Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service
Lawyers Committee for Human Rights
Physicians for Human Rights
Hebrew Immigration and Aid Society

The Biscuit

Jan15

I finished reading Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand today, and I must say it’s been a good read. I really like nonfiction that tells a story, is rich in detail but doesn’t get bogged down in meaningless facts and figures. Seabiscuit, as everybody already knows because of the movie, is the story of a race horse. Most of the action takes place just before World War 2, 1936-1940. The book is about the horse, his owner, Charles Howard, his trainer, Tom Smith, and his two jockeys, George Woolf and Red Pollard. They’re a colorful lot. Seabiscuit himself is almost deformed in the knees, a horse that loves to eat and sleep–and run. One of his jockeys is blind in one eye; the other has chronic diabetes. Smith the trainer is eccentric, to say the least, and Seabiscuit’s owner is a self-made millionaire from San Francisco who started out as a bicycle repairman. All of these characters come together to create an unforgetable episode in American history. I’ve never been interested in horseracing, but I am interested in people and in history. I thought Hillenbrand captured the personalities of the people in her book (and even of the horses) and made me want to know what happened to them. What decisions did they make? How did each of their life’s “races” turn out?
Pollard, for example, was a Canadian, “an elegant young man, tautly muscled, with a shock of supernaturally orange hair. . . he lived entirely on the road of the racing circuit, sleeping in empty stalls, carrying with him only a saddle, his rosary, and his books: pocket volumes of Shakespeare, Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat, a little copy of Robert Service’s Songs of the Sourdough, maybe some Emerson, whom he called ‘Old Waldo.’ The books were the closest things he had to furniture, and he lived in them the way other men live in easy chairs.” Don’t you already want to know what will happen to a man like that when he meets up with Seabiscuit, a championship horse with so many quirks that only Pollard, and his friend Woolf, understand him well enough to ride him to victory?
Seabiscuit showed me a whole subculture that I knew nothing about, the horse racing world. And it was a fascinating world.
Some other worlds you may want to visit:
One Child by Torey Hayden–The world of mentally disturbed children and their teacher.
Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder–The world of computer geeks and computer wizards.
Men to Match My Mountains by Irving Stone–The world of the Wild West; a readable history of Utah, Nevada, Colorado, and California.
Small Victories by Samuel Freedman–The scary world of public high school in New York City.
A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Van Auken–The world of a very special marriage.
The Conquering Family by Thomas B. Costain (and its sequels, The Three Edwards, The Magnificent Century, and The Last Plantagenets)–The world of medieval England and its royal family.

So there you have it, some of my very favorite nonfiction worlds.

Cartoon King

Nov26

He was born on November 26, 1922, and his friends called him “Sparky.” He became “the highest paid, most widely read cartoonist ever.” The very first Peanuts comic strip, written by Charles M. Schulz, appeared in seven newspapers on October 2, 1950.

A few good words from Sparky:

There’s a difference between a philosophy and a bumper sticker.

Don’t worry about the world coming to an end today. It’s already tomorrow in Australia.

I love mankind; it’s people I can’t stand.

I have a new philosophy. I’m only going to dread one day at a time.

All you need is love. But a little chocolate now and then doesn’t hurt.