Category Archives: Book/Movie Recommendations

Good news: Monday night, over a hundred people from around these here parts watched this film. (Ironically, I had to miss it because I needed to spend some time with other Quakers talking about Leadings—and my leading has something to do with what this film was about!)

If you might be tempted to ask, “Did you like the Beatles?” of someone you’d just met, as one character does in “Another Year,” then you just might love Mike Leigh’s new film.

I do and did. And found how the film’s four middle-aged characters—two aging pretty gracefully, two not so much—enormously touching.

Yesterday I discovered that a different route to where I needed to go—Davis Square and Porter Square—was 98% smooth sailing; sidewalks were mostly cleared, mostly easy to walk on. Yet this morning, about to walk to Porter Square again, hesitated to take off my YakTrax.

Whoa, I realized. I am really, really scared to fall. Even when I know my journey will involve, tops, a couple of yards of ice.

Time to reconnect with Learning to Fall, I advised myself, striding along.

May I suggest you do, too?

Last night at Porter Square Bookstore, twenty-nine year old Melissa Febos read from her amazing book, Whip Smart, a beautifully written, insightful, totally honest, redemptive memoir re being a dominatrix and drug addict—until she wasn’t. (Full disclosure: She’s the daughter of a dear friend.)

More than once during the Q & A, when to further explain something she’d touched upon during her reading, she’d answer, in effect: “Humans are incredibly complicated, I’m complicated, sadomasochism is complicated. Please don’t ask me to give you a quick answer to complex topics. None of this is easy or facile. That’s why I wrote a book about it. Because after four years of being a dom, I know stuff. About power. About shame. About ‘God-shaped holes.’ Read my book.”

Yes. Do.

This month’s history theme came up because my dear friend Lissa gave me a copy of Richard J. Evans’ The Coming of the Third Reich (if you know Lissa, you know that such a book is a pretty typical offering. If you know me, you know how grateful I am to have a friend like Lissa.)

“Gripping,” “Comprehensive,”  Magisterial,” “Definitive,” claims the paperback’s covers. All true.

That I was reading this gripping, . . .  book the weekend Barney Frank and John Lewis were verbally abused made this page-turner even more compelling.

Today’s lesson: One reason the Nazis  rose to power? A pervasive, ominous, well-publicized threat of violence. Yes, certainly the Brownshirts and the Stormtroopers outright attacked  newspaper offices, union headquarters, assaulted Jews, university professors, Communists.

But for the exhausted Germans, debilitated by war and hyper-inflation and shame (I am becoming more and more fascinated by shame; more anon), that this violent, might-is-right movement (in its earliest days, Nazis called themselves a movement, not a political party) had been unleashed [great word, huh] was enough. Even if the Brownshirts hadn’t burned any books in your town, you were likely to think and act and vote as if they had.

So listen up, Sarah Palin. As a Quaker, I “utterly deny all outward wars and strife and fightings with outward weapons.” (That’s from our Peace Testimony which we announced “to the whole world” in 1661.) And now that I’m hip to how incredibly effective just threatening violence can be, well, I’m asking you to cut it out. Okay?