Category Archives: Book/Movie Recommendations

So here we are this week (at least in this part of the world): the Red Sox have won 50 games; strawberries are deliciously in season—and especially plump this year from all the rain, rain, rain; day lilies are in bloom; a water lily graces our little koi pond; and red, white, and blue’s everywhere.

As our nation prepares to celebrate its birthday with fireworks and bunting, I’m finding my waxes-and-wanes appreciation for my country enlarged by Team of Rivals. (Sorry to recommend such wrist-challenging books: Far from the Tree: 706 pp. This one: 754 pp!)

Having gone to a segregated high school in Lynchburg, Virginia, my knowledge of “The War of Northern Aggression” had been spotty, at best. Certainly Miz Wallace, my American History teacher, was not Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of Team of Rivals, i.e. not a Pulitzer Prize historian nor resident of abolitionist-haven Concord, Massachusetts.

Given that Miz Wallace may have displayed a Confederate flag in her classroom*, it’s easy for me to accept Ms. Goodwin’s gushing over Abraham Lincoln whose “political genius” saves the day again and again. (Sometimes the outcome seemed more about luck than cunning.) Because, of course, the larger story—and at 754 pp, that larger story is well elucidated—is page-turning dramatic: warring political factions, terrible conflicts among Lincoln’s cabinet members, a devastating civil war, the dehumanizing and passionately-felt issues of slavery, The Lincolns’ marriage and family life. We’re even treated to People Magazine-like peeks Inside The Beltway as the First Lady and Kate Chase, the stunningly beautiful daughter of Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon Chase, vie to outdo the other in home decor and entertaining.

Here’s what I’m especially appreciating: I get presidential. Although appalled by slavery, Lincoln was often condemned by people like Frederick Douglass and other abolitionists for not taking a strong enough stand against that evil. But when I read page after page of all the factors Lincoln took into account, knowing he wanted to resolve the war so as to continue a United States, I see why he was so mealy-mouthed, sometimes. (And, by extension, why Obama is, too, I guess.)

Which is not to say that I applaud mealy-mouthedness. I guess that’s what presidents have to do, sometimes. BUT: now I see more clearly how incredibly important activist, progressive voices are!

So let’s hear it for all our forefathers and foremothers. Let’s hear it for “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Let’s hear it for the birthplace of  that endearing, self-evident truth that we are all equals at the (summer-fare-laden) table.

*Dr. Lynda Woodruff, another E.C. Glass grad, asserts that Miz Wallace indeed did.

When it comes to book recommendations, my friend Lissa is rarely wrong. So when she urged me to go right out and buy a $40, 706 pp. book , I did.

And yes, Far From The Tree is truly amazing. Worth every penny. (Almost) every sentence is a gem: Like this one from the Introduction: “Though I have gathered statistics, I have relied primarily on anecdotes because numbers imply trends, while stories acknowledge chaos.”

[FYI: The queue to be the next person to read my water-damaged-from reading-at-the-(Palm Springs)pool-copy is, so far, exactly one person. So get in line!]

Andrew Solomon spent 6 years interviewing over 300 parents and their children, families who know all about deafness, being homosexual, autistic, gifted, et al because the children of these families are so; in other words, families whose children were not, as the saying goes, apples that fell close to the tree. He writes beautifully about love and ambivalence, about coping and falling apart. He quotes all kinds of parents, all kinds of studies. He uses words like “shimmering humanity.” If he finds a parent overbearing—this is especially true in the “Prodigies” chapter—he says so. If he discovers a parent whose caregiving overwhelms him with its tenderness and wisdom, his writing about that parent will make you cry.

So get in line!

Slooowly reading Joanna Macy’s World as Lover, World as Self: Courage for Global Justice and Ecological Renewal. My glacial speed is partly because I never read books like this very fast (it takes me months to finish anything byPema Chodron) but mostly because Macy’s so freakin’ Right On!

So still absorbing her analysis re how we look at the world:

World as Battleground.

World as Trap

World as Lover

World as Self

And wouldn’t you know it? Am discovering that, good Quaker that I strive to be, much of how I relate to the world IS about “the reassuring sense that you are fighting God’s battle—and that ultimately you will win.”

Whoa!

Macy talks about a variation of this paradigm: “A more innocuous version of the battlefield image of the world is the one I learned from my grandparents. it is the world as a classroom, or a kind of moral gymnasium, where you are put though tests to prove your mettle and shape you up, so you can graduate to other arenas and rewards.”

Macy’s “innocuous version”  describe an insidious trait of mine and shared by my Cambridge/Somerville/intellectual friends—and they ARE my friends—I’ve shorthanded to “The Harvard Syndrome.” Although I did not go to Harvard, must admit I see myself struggling in that “moral gymnasium,” sometimes.

Ouch.