Mama Makes Up Her Mind - Book 49

Do you remember Bailey White?  She used to be on NPR back in the 1990s.  Maybe she still is. I haven't seriously listened to NPR in a long time, but anyway she used to tell stories about her eccentric Mama and life in the the South.   (I think I stopped listening when the Clinton-Lewinsky thing was going on and I had young children I didn't really want listening to the news.) Anyway, I found the stories really enjoyable.  White has a lovely southern drawl and she told or read the stories well.  Mama Makes Up Her Mind and Other Dangers of Southern Living is a collection of stories about Mama and other things.  I found this book in a used bookstore in Yorktown, VA while Rick and I were off for our weekend away.

I shouldn't have read this book in such close proximity to the other collection of stories I've read recently, though.  These really paled by comparison.  I'll grant that they are in a completely different style.  The stories by J. Mulrooney were each separate works of fiction, finely tuned and deeply philosophical.  Mama Makes Up Her Mind are rather rambling tales about Bailey's Mama and the other eccentric, quirky southerners (including herself) that add flavor to her quiet country life.  The stories are funny, sometimes laugh out loud funny, but there is nothing much under the surface here.  Just light, charming reminisces.

The stories started out well but I found the book really lagged in the middle.  There just didn't seem to quite enough material to be a full book length.  I found my inner writing teacher coming out.  I kept having flashbacks to when I taught writing last year.  I wanted to write in the margin next to several of the final paragraphs, "weak wrap up' or 'conclusion is stilted and rushed.'    White is just recounting that one time when cousin so and so did that crazy thing.......and there isn't a conclusion to draw so she just kind of ends them awkwardly.

But then towards the end of the book, the stories picked up.  I especially loved her stories about teaching first graders.  I loved the story of visiting her favorite used bookstore!  And she mentions a writer I had never heard of before, Lafcadio Hearn!

Anyway, this book was a fun, light read.  For more book reviews go to Read 52 Books in 52 Weeks.

Thanksgiving 2014

Thanksgiving this year is weird.  Since Grandad's lady friend, Peggy had two recent deaths in her family, she really wanted to spend Thanksgiving with her kin (she's from Georgia so I can say 'kin!').  So we agreed to have the extended family Thanksgiving on Saturday.

Will came home on Wed.  First he was going to take a bus all the way from Boston but the weather promised to be very bad all up and down the east coast, so instead Rick somehow got him a plane flight.  He got home around one.  The snow was pretty but it pretty much melted within 24 hours.  Thanksgiving day was nice.  Will and I made it to mass and I not only remembered to bring the canned goods to drop off but I also remembered to bring some change collected in an old jar to put in the poor box.  Will saw a lot of old friends from CLC.  It was a nice mass.

Hannah cooked the whole Thanksgiving dinner with help from Becky.  We had stuffed roasted turkey, mashed potatoes, fruit salad and caesar salad.  I actually attempted to make homemade cranberry sauce but it hadn't set by the time we were ready to eat.  We didn't have dessert because we are all on diets.  We had Eileen over, which was nice.  I love that my kids and husband are so solicitous to her.  Then Hannah, Peter, Will, Josh, Sean and Becky all sat around and played games.  I think they played Resistance and the Boggle.  Rick played some too, but I sat and sipped decaf tea and watched the Trouble with Angels with Haley Mills.  

The pall that is cast over this Thanksgiving is that Steve is so sick.   He has been in ICU for two weeks.  He only has 20% kidney function and he is in Stage D heart failure.  Rick was reading about it today and the article said:  50% of people in Stage D heart failure die within a year.  Does that mean the ones that don't die sooner?  Or do the other 50% recover?  We couldn't tell but it seemed that they meant the former not the latter.  So we are having the extended family dinner tomorrow except no Jackie and no Steve.  Rick got up early on Thanksgiving morning and drove over to visit Steve for a little while.  Seems he is mostly just sleeping.  He is on a lot of antibiotics and painkillers.  The infection in his leg (which started this whole thing) gives him a lot of pain. 

So anyway, I made turkey broth from yesterday's turkey.  I plan to use it in making the stuffing for tomorrow.  We'll have another turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potato casserole, green beans, salad, fruit salad, rolls and pumpkin pie for dessert.  And Susan is bringing homemake cookies too.

Will and I went out for tea this afternoon, just to have a little date together.  We delivered 4 bags of giveaway clothes for the Thanksgiving Clothing Drive.  

I am very thankful for my husband and kids and all my blessings, but I do feel a bit depressed too.  I think it is Steve and the Ferguson unrest and the having two Thanksgivings for poor Peggy that has done it.  

Rick and I are trying to eat better and exercise more.  We got up early on Monday and took turns on the elliptical.  But poor Rick is recovering from the nasty cough so many seem to have right now.  Poor guy.  Today we went for a walk outside but it was cold so we didn't walk as much as we could have.  Rick even said to me:  if you want to cook healthy food, I'll try to eat it.  I think Steve's collapse is scaring him.  

Arabella - Book 47 and The Nonesuch - Book 48

I went on a little Georgette Heyer jag, ok?  So don't judge me!  Sometimes I crave release from the present and Heyer's world of romance and Regency manners is a nice escape.

Arabella is about a a young, shabby genteel daughter of a very conscientious minister.  She doesn't have money but she does have looks and so she gets to have a season in London by dint of her mother's tug on better connections.  Hopefully she'll snag a nice wealthy husband who will help her younger sisters marry well. Arabella is game.  She is excited to go to London and experience new things.  Worrying about so many dresses, manners, etc is heady business.  While it is a bit diverting, it isn't really in her heart.  That heart is an impetuous one who can't stand to see others suffer.

On her way to London to stay with her Godmother, who will sponsor her debut there, the old carriage they've borrowed breaks down.  She and her chaperone wind up taking refuge at the closest estate, which just happens to be the 'hunting box' of the most eligible bachelor in England.  He thinks the whole thing is a ruse because women are forever trying to ensnare him.  Arabella overhears him and on impulse pretends she is very rich.  While she is wonderfully spirited, she also is very naive and basically a country bumpkin.  She's never been exposed to the lifestyles of the rich and famous before.  Beaumaris sees right through her. Beaumaris' friend Lord Fleetwood, who is also there is more gullible,  He gossips about the new and beautiful debutante and word naturally gets around that she is wealthy.   Arabella has no idea how to persuade people she isn't.  She loves all the social events but she has a growing dread that she will be found out.  She begins to think she must flee back home and give this marriage thing up as a failure.  She's sitting on a bomb waiting to go off!

But what comes to her rescue is Beaumaris' fascination with her.  She forgets to to keep up her poised front she shows society, and instead impetuously reacts when she witnesses people cruelly whip their horses, mistreat dogs or enslave chimney sweep apprentices who are small orphaned boys.  Her great heart wins over Beaumaris' cynical one.

It was a very satisfying story.

However, I enjoyed The Nonesuch more.  I simply liked the two main characters better.  They seemed to me very wonderfully developed.  I think I read this one a few years ago but couldn't remember it for the life of me.  As I read though, I began to recall it more and more.  This time it is the male main character, the Nonesuch himself, who is the one concerned with orphans.  The love interest Sir Waldo Hawkridge pursues is Ancilla Trent, a mere governess, whose calm intelligence, sense of humor and natural dignity draw him to her like a moth to a flame.  But what is really great about this book is the humor, the entertaining characters, the clever dialogue and the perfectly unfolding plot.  I heartily enjoyed it.  Heyer was at the height of her craft when she wrote this.

For more book reviews go to Read 52 Books in 52 Weeks.

The Day Immanuel Kant Was Late - Book 46

I haven't read a collection of short stories in a long time.  I think the last two collections in the past few years have been an anthology of Father Brown mysteries and Agatha Christie short stories on audio.  I forgot how compact and economical a good short story has to be.  It has to create a relatable world right away.  These stories by J. Mulrooney blew me away, basically.  In The Day Immanuel Kant Was Late; Philosophical Fables, Pious Tales, and Other Stories, the author creates vivid immersive worlds, by turns absurd, funny, provocative, grotesque, ironic, wise, gentle and startling, and maybe all that within the same story!

It is hard to review this book because there are so many stories of so many different styles. Every single one of them is memorable in its own way.  There isn't one clunker among the bunch!  I never knew what direction one would go in and I was amazed at the deftness of Mulrooney's writing.  Some of the stories are fanciful in a disturbing way, but the lovely thing was that they never left me despairing.  I avoid much of modern writing because I can not stand the existential hopelessness and tawdriness that is so oppressively alway lurking there.  Here, the stories were both told gracefully (even when talking about shocking things) and had a sense of grace about them.

Two different stories both had the theme of  young, privileged men who use others, especially sexually and haven't got a clue about anything deeper.  They go around hurting and causing pain and yet are successful in a worldly way.  In fact many of the stories are about sin and how much damage it does.  One of the most gripping stories, which I thought was just brilliant, was The Devil's Confession. It's a stand off between a good but very human priest and the devil.  Another story recounts how two people lose the person they have come to solely rely on in a mysterious and incomprehensible way and how each one copes.  In another, a manipulative reporter manages to do the right thing by a child kidnapped in a custody battle, but only because she still has some very dim memory of what decency is and because her cameraman chances to point it out so bluntly.  And the one entitled Michael's Pillow - Oh my God!  That one cuts deep. And that's only a small sampling.

I could write an in depth analysis of each story.  There is much here to explore.  I was amazed by and appreciated each tale.  They are worthy of many rereads.

Dappled Things did a review of this book and an interview with the author.

I highly recommend The Day Immanuel Kant Was Late by J. Mulrooney.  I plan to pass this on to my 22 year old son, who I know will love them.  This book is an early Christmas gift.

For more book reviews, go to Read 52 Books in 52 Weeks.

Advent School 2014

I miss when my kids were younger.  We used to change things up for Advent and do things like focus on art and poetry, read a new read aloud and do some activity or activities that reflected the season.  We stopped much of any academic work we were doing and just did what seemed right for Advent, which often included shopping, preparing for Christmas, cleaning the house and watching movies.

This year though with one in 10th grade and one in 8th, they both have to muscle through with outside classes during Advent.  Well, Becky has math and science with her tutor.  Sean has math with the same tutor, Physics class and American Literature class.

But I'd still like to switch things up a little for Advent:

• Make the O Antiphons our copy work
• Do my own Jesse tree and include the kids in on it (if they want).
• Read Christmas poetry
• Read The Man Born to be King by Dorothy L. Sayers through Advent and Christmas
• Focus on learning prayers in Latin
• Bake cookies
• Help out with the Giving Tree at church
• Help out the needy in some other way
• Start the new RE dvd program I got for Becky (and for Sean as her sponsor)
• Learn Advent hymns
• Make gifts/shop for gifts
• Deep clean the house - straighten study and basement for Christmas party
• And finally this isn't for Advent but I have been thinking of having an open house brunch type thing for New Years Day.  I haven't done anything neighborly for years.  Maybe it's time.  We are getting new next door neighbors; in fact,  I am not even sure if they have moved in or not.
• Almost forgot!  I'd like to watch our annual viewing of It's a Wonderful Life, but I'd also like to see Amahl and the Night Visitors and watch the movie Joyeux Noel, though I suppose the movies could be watched during the Christmas season and not necessarily Advent.

A Climate of Crisis - Book 45

A Climate of Crisis; America in the Age of Environmentalism is by Patrick Allitt, one of my favorite professors from The Great Courses company.  He is a professor of American history at Emory University even though he is originally from England.  I really like just about everything he does so when I somehow found out he had written a history of the environmental movement in America, I knew I wanted to read it.

The book was like a trip down memory lane for me!  As I was growing up the environmental movement was taking off.  Allitt actually starts before I was born at the dropping of the atomic bombs when people realized just what radiation poisoning does to the survivors of the actual bomb.  From concern about nuclear fall out, other issues involving the environment moved into the limelight.  Air and water pollution had become a real and terrible problem.  I remember hearing about Love Canal and Three Mile Island and the like as I was becoming more politically aware.  I remember when my sister joined the Ecology club in high school and used to have passionate debates with my father over the proposal to build a new highway from DC out to Dulles airport.  That must have been back in 1975 or 76.  My friends and I were all No Nukes because all the rocks stars we loved were anti-nuke.  So I came of age under the influence of very pro-environmental ideas.  And I still consider myself an environmentalist.  As a Catholic I take seriously our role as stewards of the earth.  I like the St. Kateri Tekakwitha Catholic Conservation Center.  While I am sympathetic to environmental concerns and feel we have a duty to protect the earth, I always thought there were some folks who took it too far.  There is an awful lot of the-sky-is-falling emotionalism.  And now it has gotten to a weird level where people hate their own species and take very radical and to me often ridiculous views that they want to enforce on others.

I found Allitt's recounting of the developments in environmentalism pretty objective.  He states up front that his point of view is that while there certainly have been environmental problems, some of great proportion, American's initiative and political will have dealt very well with them so far.  And so he is optimistic that this will continue to happen.  He thinks that the freedom in the west - where there is both freedom of ideas and of the marketplace, and a responsive government that allows people to deal with whatever issues arise, is far better equipped to find answers than totalitarian regimes.  This is striking when he contrasts what happened in the Soviet Union and what happened in the U.S. environmentally speaking during the same period of time.  And I think he gently chides the pro-global warming folks who want to repress those who are skeptical.  Again, it is the exchange of ideas in public discourse that creates the political will.  You need that messy interchange between people of reasonable but conflicting opinions to get to the heart of the matter and come up with a solution.

In the 1960s and 70s, there was a lot of bipartisan cooperation between conservatives and liberals on the environment.  Everybody worked together to clean up rivers and the air.  Nobody on either side of the aisle thought it was right to build housing developments on toxic waste dumps!  While there were always extremists on either side, most people worked together.  However, this changed with Ronald Reagan.  Allitt calls Reagan's environmental policy foolish.  He, James Watt and Ann Gorsuch really polarized things and the environmental movement has never really recovered from it.  This is unfortunate.

Allitt's major thesis is that only countries that have elevated their standard of living through industrialization can actually afford to care about their environment.  Once people are no longer starving and have the basic necessities of life and a certain quality of living, can they turn their attention to cleaning up the environment, saving endangered species and worrying about global warming.  You have to have money to attend to the environment and if you don't have the money, feeding and educating your people and developing a functional economy is de facto first priority.  Allitt says that the environmentalists who want to dial back time, and force people to return to a simpler, lower level economy are going about it all wrong.  The countries that are like that simply don't have the wherewithal to deal with environmental crises.  On the contrary, in the U.S. we have endangered species like the wolf, for example, making a comeback.  We have cleaner air and cleaner water than ever before.  We have MORE parks and trees than we had earlier in our history.  So he really feels it is reasonable to be optimistic.  He advises studying the issues historically to get a better balanced view of how things have played out.

Allitt covers many issues in a systematic and highly readable way.  Almost every sentence is footnoted.  In my kindle edition, the text takes up 69% of book while footnotes take up the rest!  That is a well documented book!  I really appreciated Allitt taking so much information and making it comprehensible and even a pleasure to read.  If you are a die hard environmentalist who is 100% certain that globe warming is a looming disaster for the world, you might be irritated with Allitt because while he is pretty objective, he is perhaps a bit sympathetic to the skeptics.  I found his very reasonable voice and his optimism refreshing.  The world is not full of people who care vs. stupid evil people who want to ruin the earth.  The world is full of people who see things differently, disagree about the interpretation of scientific studies, have biases, different focuses, etc.  Solving environmental issues is necessarily complex, messy, imperfect and always in process, so it can be hard to maintain perspective.  For instance, you can get things like the National Audubon Society suing a wind farm.  The wind farm is focused on trying to come up with a viable, renewable energy resource; the Audubon society is concerned with saving birds.  So conflict happens even within the environmentalist movement, let alone between loggers and those who want to protect spotted owls.

Allitt is more supportive of GMO's than I am.  I kept wishing he'd talk about the disappearance of honeybees, but he never did address that.  And while he mentions recycling, he doesn't address the problem of plastic pollution which is something I am particularly concerned with.  Really, environmental issues are so myriad, it is hard to address everything in this one book, which is really meant to be an historical overview of the movement.

The Wall Street Journal reviewed this book.  You can read it here.

If you are interested in recent U.S. political history and especially if you want to read an attempt at an objective presentation on environmental issues, this book will suit your purposes.  I thought it was an interesting and informative history, well organized and well told.

For more book reviews go to Read 52 Books in 52 Weeks.

A Wizard of Earthsea - Book 44

I never would have chosen this book except that I joined the Wall Street Journal Book Club on Facebook and this was the book they were starting.  So I gave it a go.  I had a hard time getting started with it and for some reason I had a hard time finishing it, but I would say it is a very good book!  I wound up enjoying it and being pleasantly surprised by it.  I think Becky would really like it, so I am planning on giving her a copy for Christmas.  It is of the coming-of-age, young adult fantasy genre.

Duny is a poor peasant, rather unlikable son of a not very nice bronze-smith in a little village in the medievalesque world of Earthsea.  He discovers early on that he has special magical powers.  After he saves his village from a Viking-like attack, the word gets around and a kind old Gandalf-like wizard appears to take him and teach him how to be a wizard.  Because Duny, now Ged, that's his secret real name (he's also known as Sparrowhawk), is so powerful, Ogion, his mentor sends him off to wizard school (40 years before Hogwarts!) where Ged learns a lot but still is bubbling with a longing for power.  He gives into temptation and unleashes a terrible evil.  And now he must find it and conquer it even though he doesn't know how.

Duny/Ged/Sparrowhawk slowly grows into the person/wizard he should be through many trials and errors.  The story has a lot of suspense and all the themes seem familiar except you don't quite know which way things will turn.  The others at the WSJ book club got lots of stuff out of this book and unfortunately because I read it in such a distracted way, I think I would have to go back and reread to really analyze it.  But there is a lot more to this book then just a simple fairy tale.

At first Le Guin's writing style seemed stilted and almost claustrophobic to me but as I read I began to appreciate her writing more and more.  She really creates a mood and a world.  I think if I had read this book in a more immersive way, I wouldn't have gotten so confused by all the strange geographical names (and people names).

I would recommend this book to those interested in fantasy.  For more book reviews go to Read 52 Books in 52 Weeks.