February books |

I admit I was wrong. I thought that January was going to be the biggest reading month of the year, but it ended up tying with February. From here though, I’m in for a huge change. I’m beginning two new courses and I probably won’t have much time for “fun” reading until this summer.

It’s currently cold here, though it switches from hot to cold fairly often. I like the days when I can turn on the fireplace and dunk shortbread cookies in to hot tea.

Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience by Brené Brown

I pre-ordered this book in October and started reading it but set it aside, so I was excited that the audiobook came out this month. Brené is so funny… she imbues every part with her casual yet honest personality. It’s as if she pulled up a chair at the kitchen table and says, “Ya’ll, who the hell let us watch this stuff as kids???” She reads definitions twice for emphasis, adds examples from her personal life, and tells it like it is.

I learned important distinctions between related emotions. For example: shame, guilt, humiliation, and embarrassment.

Shame: “I am bad.”
Guilt: “I’m a good person but I did something bad.”
Humiliation: “I’ve been put down and didn’t deserve it.”
Embarrassment: “I’ve done something uncomfortable but I know other people have too.”

My favorite section talked about the difference between pity, compassion, empathy, and sympathy. Do you think you are self-compassionate? You can take a test here.

“Shame is not the cure [of unethical behavior]; it’s the cause. Don’t let what looks like a bloated ego and narcissism fool you into thinking there’s a lack of shame. Shame and fear are almost always driving unethical behavior. We’re now seeing that shame often fuels narcissistic behavior. In fact, I define narcissism as the shame-based fear of being ordinary. Grandiosity and bluster are easy to assign to an over-inflated ego. It’s tough to get a glimpse of the fear and lack of self-worth that are actually behind the posturing and selfishness, because posturing leads to weaponizing hurt and turning it on people. The last thing that shame-driven people need is more shame. What they need is more accountability for their behavior and their lack of empathy. Yes. More shame just makes them more dangerous — gives them the opportunity to redirect attention to the shaming behavior and weirdly, it can drum up support from others who are also looking for a way to discharge their own pain and are looking for an enemy to blame.

“Shame is not a compass for moral behavior. It’s much more likely to drive destructive, hurtful, and self-aggrandizing behavior than it is to heal it. Why? Because where shame exists, empathy is almost always absent. That’s what makes shame dangerous. The opposite of experiencing shame is experiencing empathy. The behavior that many of us find so egregious today is more about people being empathyless, not shameless.” (From this book, but quoted from Dare to Lead.)

There is a strong connection between humiliation and aggression/violence. Hmm.

I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness by Austin Channing Brown

“I was too white for Black people, and too Black for white people. I had a boy’s name and bad acne.” Given a “white” name to help her gain an entry to job interviews later in life, Brown shares her life experiences about what it’s like to exist in a Black body surrounded by white people. I honestly try to surround myself with a variety of opinions from people of all races and religions, but lately I’ve noticed how difficult that is to do sometimes. I appreciate personal stories like this one to open my eyes to bias. Highly recommend.

“My story is not about condemning white people but about rejecting the assumption—sometimes spoken, sometimes not—that white is right: closer to God, holy, chosen, the epitome of being. My story is about choosing to love my Black femaleness, even when it shocks folks who expected someone quite different. It’s about standing before roomfuls of Christians and challenging them to see Blackness without the baggage of racist bias. It’s about surviving in a world not made for me.“

I have to admit, I had not once considered this perspective: “Her eyes flashed. She knew she had them. ‘Of course not. I’m just saying that segregation didn’t have to be followed with integration. Surely relegating us to the back of the bus could have stopped without us having to give up all the businesses that died because we started going to white folks. Think about all that we lost—the doctors’ and dentists’ offices, the grocery store owners and auto mechanics. I mean, could we have kept a great number of Black teachers if we had demanded equal funding for our schools rather than busing ourselves to theirs?’”

“It’s work to be the only person of color in an organization, bearing the weight of all your white co-workers’ questions about Blackness. It’s work to always be hypervisible because of your skin—easily identified as being present or absent—but for your needs to be completely invisible to those around you. It’s work to do the emotional labor of pointing out problematic racist thinking, policies, actions, and statements while desperately trying to avoid bitterness and cynicism. It’s work to stay open to an organization to learn new skills without drinking in the cultural expectations of body size, personality, interests, and talents most valued according to whiteness.”

Becoming Mrs. Lewis: The Improbable Love Story of Joy Davidman and C. S. Lewis by Patti Callahan

unlikely friendship turned true love between Joy Davidman and C. S. Lewis. Patti Callahan breathes life into this fascinating woman whose hunger for knowledge leads her to buck tradition at every turn. In a beautifully crafted account, Patti unveils Joy as a passionate and courageous—yet very human—seeker of answers to the meaning of life and the depths of faith.

“Much of our friendship and our lives found its way into that novel: my Fairyland and his North, his Island. Our views on longing and need and joy. Our accusations and questions for the gods. Our shared history of mythology and its ability to offer meaning. And for me, the problem of obsessive love. There was a tangled twine ball of us in that myth, unraveling day by day with our discussions and our readings, our bantering and our debate. There were moments in the writing of that novel that we merged into one without ever touching.”

The Magnolia Palace: A Novel by Fiona Davis

Here is how Davis describes her inspiration for this novel: “On a cold winter’s day in late 2019, after taking a marvelous tour of the Frick Collection, I stared up at the front entrance and wondered what might have happened if the woman who posed for the figure in the pediment above the door—considered the “supermodel” of the 1910s—encountered Helen Clay Frick, the headstrong adult daughter of Henry Clay Frick. The storyline for this book bloomed from there, although there is no evidence the two women ever crossed paths.”

I enjoyed the two stories that Davis tells here and especially loved how they come together in the end, which usually does not happen in her novels. The main characters are strong, likable women. This is based on a true story.

“Maybe, with Mr. Frick gone, Miss Helen would be free to figure out where she stood in the world without a parent scrutinizing her at every turn, comparing her unfairly to a long-dead sibling. It might be exciting, thrilling, to watch Miss Helen come into her own. She had every advantage—intelligence, social standing, a passion for her library, money—and maybe that would be enough to eradicate her pettiness and quell her temper so that she would become a softer version of herself. A kinder version.”

The Office of Historical Corrections: A Novella and Stories by Danielle Evans

The title story here was so fun to read and had a shocking ending. Just the idea that there’d be a government service going throughout the public correcting historical inaccuracies and misinformation… such a good idea!

“This was one of the Free Americans’ rallying cries: ‘We are the future!’ A cheerful way of saying the shame of the U.S. past wasn’t genocide or terror, but the fact that it hadn’t completely worked yet. It was nothing I hadn’t heard before, but it was rattling. It was the ubiquity, or it was the persistence. It was the way the Free Americans, and their claims on being the only Americans, transcended facts and time and progress. The way they always seemed to be around the corner. The way, however lacking in general insight they might be, they could somehow hear the ticking clock of the question, the ‘Do they know I’m human yet?’ The way they took delight in saying ‘No.’ The way they took for granted that it would always be their question to answer.”

This next quote is from my favorite story of the collection, “Anything Could Disappear,” about a young girl asked to watch a baby on a bus and the mother does not return. The girl raises the baby as her own for about a year, and they had a wonderful life and she cared for him very well, until she realizes that he has a father who is missing him desperately.“She liked the pattern of her life now. The domestic monotony coupled with the rush of feeling always close to the edge something; the sensation of having the thing she loved and valuing it all the more because she knew it could all go wrong at any minute. And then, everything did.”

It Could Happen Here: Why America is Tipping from Hate to the Unthinkable – and How We Can Stop It by Jonathan Greenblatt

The review for this book is HERE.

The Kindest Lie: A Novel by Nancy Johnson

I got an email from BookBub specifically recommending only this book that came out this month. As I put it on my “Want to Read” list in Goodreads, I noticed a couple friends were already reading it, so I figured I would as well. It was a gripping story and I liked the main character immediately. So much of her pain and regret came through in the writing that I cried a few times just feeling it all. Ruth is happily married and about to begin a family when memories of her past come up. Forced to give up her baby at 17, she goes home to finally find out what happened to her son. Her family members each carry their own remarkable stories of struggle through race issues and class distinctions. It was a short read but very memorable. I am thinking about the characters still.

“Midnight stopped talking, but not even Daddy could control his thoughts. What went on in his mind belonged to him. No guardrails, no judgment from the grownups, no rules to break. Just a private space in a cluttered world that was his and his alone.”

“Midnight barely had one parent, and he wasn’t sure that one loved him sometimes. A bubble of happy that had been growing in Midnight’s heart popped. How had he been so stupid? He hadn’t even had time to decide exactly how he felt, whether he wished Ms. Ruth were his mom or his girlfriend. The only thing he did know was that when Ms. Ruth looked at him, only him, and asked him questions, he felt special… to her, if to nobody else. Nobody except mom had treated him like that before. When she died, he had given up on hoping for much of anything. If Ms. Ruth thought he mattered, maybe he really did.”

Honey from the Rock: An Easy Introduction to Jewish Mysticism by Lawrence Kushner

I wouldn’t call this an introduction to mysticism, since it assumes knowledge that I don’t yet have, but it was still full of depth and richness.

“Eternal life is only awareness. Understanding that everything participates in circles of return. That everyone will be transfigured and reborn. Even a stone will become earth in which a tree will bear fruit to be eaten by a child which will become the twinkle of an eye. Everything will change. And the Holy One will meet everything backstage, in between performances. He will answer all our questions and show us all of eternity from one end to the other.”

Forty-one False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers by Janet Malcolm

I’d not heard of this author until it came up on Amazon as recommended. (Where do those algorithms come from?) (Does anyone remember when Amazon had actual humans sitting at desks writing book reviews? And you could follow them and write to them?)

Ian Frazier wrote the introduction to this collection, talking about “Ms. Malcolm’s quick and precise sketching of interiors and related domestic details.” My favorite piece was a profile of the portraitist who photographed Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip for an exhibition celebrating her sixty years as queen.

Otherwise, she seems to write about people who are slightly crazy… fiction writers, painters, other photographers. The title story confused me thoroughly until I understood what she was doing!

“Autobiography is an exercise in self-forgiveness. The observing “I” of autobiography tells the story of the observed “I” not as a journalist tells the story of his subject, but as a mother might. The older narrator looks back at his younger self with tenderness and pity, empathizing with its sorrows and allowing for its sins. I see that my journalist’s habits have inhibited my self-love. Not only have I failed to make my young self as interesting as the strangers I have written about, but I have withheld my affection. In what follows I will try to see myself less coldly, be less fearful of writing a puff piece. But it may be too late to change my spots.”

A Marvellous Light by Freya Marske

I couldn’t begin to classify this book. It’s fantasy, magic, and romance and unlike anything I’d ever read before. There’s a deadly curse, a disappearance, and two main characters who fall in love. I’d say the R-rated scenes should have kept me away, but by the time I realized it, I was already hooked by the story.

“When he began to understand that what he was seeing at home (when his parents gathered well-dressed people into sparkling rooms and made pretty speeches about charity) was the adult version of the same game, only half of which was played to the victim’s face. The other half was the whispers, the casual venom, the two-facedness. The brutal construction of one’s reputation on the shreds of those you flattered with one hand and tore down with the other.”

Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right by Cynthia Miller-Idriss

The review for this book is HERE.

On Animals by Susan Orlean

Orlean writes with humor and humility about her love of animals of all kinds. Her story about how she came to keep backyard chickens was so funny to me, and I loved learning about how the modern supermarket came to be. She writes knowingly and humorously of pandas, deer, donkeys (“The donkey I’ll never forget was coming around a corner in the walled city of Fez, Morocco, with six color televisions strapped on his back.”), lions, dogs, animal actor rights, Oxen pairs, and rabbits.

“Although we may think of the animal world as something separate from us, like a moon orbiting around the earth, it’s more of a weave, with some animals farther away from the cross-threads of the human world and others closer. But we are certainly cohabitants of one place, and the separation is shrinking rather than expanding.”

“I had reveled in the animals’ friendship and their strangeness; the way they are so obvious and still so mysterious; their colors and textures, their fur and feathers; the sounds and smells of their presence. I liked the way their needs set the rhythm of every day, and how caring for them felt elemental and essential. Living among them, as I had on the farm, was just as satisfying as I imagined it would be.”

Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

I wrote a series of 5 posts about this one:

Political religious extremism – what is it and why is it happening now?
What social and psychological processes lead to altruistic evil?
What is the first warning sign of a world order in danger of collapse?
What does “apocalyptic politics” mean and what causes it?
Where do we go from here?

Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest by Suzanne Simard – Simard grew up in a logging family, but began noticing that today’s practices of wiping clean an entire area differed from how things used to be done, where new growth was fostered amidst old growth. Now a scientist, she looks into how trees make social and cooperative networks to communicate and protect each other. This was a loooong read for me, but still fun to read about the tools and methods used by researchers.

“Wood wide web:” competition or cooperation? Simard spent her career fighting against clear-cut policies in Canada forests, arguing that trees form networks of mycorrhizal fungi underground, communicating with each other and providing essential nutrients to each other. Some of her stories were hilarious… a pig that fell into the outhouse that led her to discover a world in the soil. Some were heartbreaking, like the break up of her marriage. Simard shares her excitement and struggles in being a woman researcher, with many tales of dismissal and intimidation by the policy-makers and foresters. It is ultimately her life as a mother and her struggle through cancer that makes the book personal.

“I was over the moon, ecstatic. The grin on my face irrepressible. I threw my arms up to the wind and I shouted, ‘YES!’ Deep down in our own ways, we both knew that we’d picked up something miraculous happening between the two tree species, something other-worldly, like intercepting a coded conversation over the airwaves that could change the course of history.”

“The inland rainforest my family had logged seemed indestructible; the big old trees the keepers of the communities. What mattered was that loggers once stopped and carefully gauged and evaluated the character of the individual trees to be cut. Transportation by rivers kept cutting small and slow, whereas trucks and roads exploded the scale of operations.”

Oh William!: a novel by Elizabeth Strout

This novel reads like you’re sitting down with a friend and she’s reminiscing about various times in her life. She is feeling reflective, generous, and nostalgic. The book explores the ongoing connection she has with her ex-husband, father of their 2 girls. How well can you truly understand another person? A very quick read.

“I have always thought that if there was a big cork board and on that board was a pin for every person who ever lived, there would be no pin for me. I feel invisible is what I mean, but I mean it in the deepest way. It is very hard to explain and I cannot explain it… truly it is as if do not exist… I mean, I do not exist in the world. It could be as simple as the fact that we had no mirrors in our house when I was growing up, except for a very small one high above the bathroom sink. I really do not know what I mean, except to say that on some very fundamental level, I feel invisible in the world.”

The Impact of the Presidency of Donald Trump on American Jewry and Israel (The Jewish Role in American Life: An Annual Review) edited by Steven F. Windmueller

Windmueller contacted these writers two years ago to represent voices across the political spectrum to write 11 essays about the relationship between the Trump presidency and American Jews. The contributors include academics, journalists, lobbyists, activists, and pollsters who write about the uniqueness of Donald Trump’s presidency and its impact on the American political story and the US-Israel relationship. Saba Soomekh wrote in her essay that “there are many shades of gray when it comes to Trump, antisemitism, his relationship with American Jewry, and Israel.” I think this collection proves that there are at least differences of opinion.

While it was difficult for me to read from the Trump defenders, I thought they were a little more interesting than the critics, who generally spoke of Trump’s uprooting of many established norms, his undermining of pluralist democracy, his weakening of civility in American national discourse, and his attempts to destroy its moral compass… all things I’ve heard about ad nauseum. True, but not very interesting!

Mark Mellman: “Donald Trump’s pro-gun, anti-choice, anti-immigration, anti-environment, anti-LGBTQ, racist agenda was guaranteed to elicit antipathy from American Jews.” and “To quote a Republican operative describing a campaign from which Trump drew inspiration, “We created a hate campaign. We put all the hate groups into one big pot and let it boil.” (Anthony Lewis, 1978, writing about Ed King, who beat Governor Dukakis in the Democratic primary) “Trump took it a step further. He did not just allow it to boil, he applied the heat required to make it boil. Exploitation of grievance and the mobilization of resentment, or in the words of one-time GOP strategist Kevin Phillips, ‘knowing who hates who,’ was the lodestar of the Trump campaign and his Presidency.“

Michael Berenbaum: “As the President left office unwillingly at 12:00 noon on January 20, 2021—the day I first drafted this piece—the nation he led was living through at least seven simultaneous crises. A health crisis An economic crisis A social justice crisis A climate crisis A leadership crisis A democracy crisis A crisis of truth And we were failing, pulling apart rather than together, muddling through without direction, with indecision and misdirection.” (The United States has 4% of the world’s population and 20% of the infections.)

Gilbert N. Kahn wrote his piece to explain why Orthodox Jews supported Trump. Morton A. Klein and Elizabeth A. Berney, Esq. wrote: “We believe that history will ultimately recognize Donald Trump as one of the greatest presidents ever for the Jewish people, Israel and America.” Ehud Eiran explained the gap between Trump’s support in Israel and lack of support from Jews at home.

Matthew Brooks and Shari Hillman somehow write of the “remarkable successes of the Trump administration in those policy areas of particular concern to the American Jewish community: President Trump’s Middle East policy, his support of religious liberty, and his efforts to combat anti-Semitism in the US.” I can acknowledge the Abraham Accords (although I don’t grant these milestones to Trump’s work).

In his concluding essay, Windmueller divides Jewish voters into five categories, and explained the pro-Trump/Israel-focused voters: “For these activists Israel is an extension of their American story. For this voting sector, Judaism frames their political identity and supports their civic behavior and beliefs. For others, Israel has specifically replaced their religious identity. The Jewish State serves to reinforce their political orientation and most certainly their specific and unique passion to view Israel’s political well-being as part of their Americanism.”

I also agree that, as Dan Schnur writes, “Trump has been as much a symptom of the populist and pugnacious rage that fueled his campaigns as a cause of those sentiments. Trump didn’t create the working-class uprising, the rural and exurban resentments, and the grassroots anger that reshaped the nation’s political landscape over the course of his presidency. But whether intentionally or intuitively, he tapped into those emotions and channeled them toward the political leaders of both parties effectively enough to propel himself to the White House.”

Windmueller concludes: “The very core of America’s social fabric appears to be coming apart. Civility has left the public square, partisanship has trumped patriotism, and communalism has given way to self-aggrandizement. Sadly, hate and distrust are the new protocols. When conspiracy and mythology replace reason and meaning, a society loses its credibility and credence. To be clear, these unsettling conditions were not singularly the product of the Trump Presidency but rather seems to have been embellished by this President and his allies.”