This book was the February selection for our Old Town Library Book Club. It’s historical fiction about the Tennessee Children’s Home Society, a real organization, and children stolen and taken to an orphanage in Memphis. The truth is that many children were stolen or taken away from their parents under duress and false pretenses and kept in abusive children’s homes until they were adopted at exorbitant costs or died from abuse or neglect. Georgia Tann, the real-life leader of homes in Memphis, got away with this type of abuse for decades (1920s-1950). This horrible chapter of our history is brought to life through the story of Rill, the oldest of 5 children kidnapped off of their shanty-boat by corrupt police after their mom and dad have to go to a hospital to save the mom’s life while trying to birth twins. I liked her descriptions of the South, the river, the shanty-boat, Edisto Island, the cottage in Georgia. She’s a good writer, but the love story between modern day Avery and Trent was formulaic. The harrowing events in the orphanage were painful. Praying for all the young children in this dark world who are stolen away from their parents and abused. O God, be with them, guard and protect them, be their light in this awful, evil, dark world. Thankful to people who work to save them.
Interesting, short (189 pages), academic book on garbage, particularly e-waste, food waste, and plastic. Main take-away is we are producing more and more waste and it will take all of us to manage it. For e-waste, that means changing the way things are produced so that they can be repaired (Right to Repair movement) as well as making them safe to recycle in order to reclaim their useful parts. For food waste, that means changing expiration dates to be uniform and meaningful, for one thing. For plastics, that means developing alternatives to single use plastic and government involvement in many things but for example, waste to energy (burning) and recycling. China stopped taking the world’s plastic, paper, and other scrap in August 2018 causing an immediate shock to the whole world. We’ve still not overcome it.
I loved this book! I love its author, Hope Jahren! It’s a memoir about how she became a scientist with her very own lab, and her deep, deep friendship with a guy named Bill, who has been with her since the beginning of her journey. It’s laugh-out-loud funny, informative, uplifting and endearing. Loved this book from start to finish! She and Bill can spend hours upon hours doing meticulous research in the most painstaking detail. One time, they spend a whole day collecting teeny tiny moss samples in Ireland in test tubes, recording all the exact details, double-checking everything, only to have the whole thing trashed at the airport because they didn’t have a permit. But they love the process and they are such a team. You think they should be married, but they are not. They are the deepest of friends, two halves to a whole, but never live together, never marry. She is an original and her story is so, so good–thank you for sharing it, Hope!
I cannot believe this book won the Pulitzer Prize! I got so tired of it half-way through and am so glad I finally finished it and can return it to the library. It was 502 pages of new-age gobbledygook about trees and 5 humans that try to save them. I don’t disagree-trees are wonderful! But by the time I finished his book, I was really tired of them. I did not like any his characters and the story got so convoluted at the end that I am not sure what happened. Glad this one’s over.
What an amazing book! Everything you could ever want to know about keeping a home in 837 pages! She gives instructions on EVERYTHING – cleaning, what to do in what order and with what products, the actual chemistry behind cleaning products, how to set a table, stock a kitchen, clean anything and everything. She instructs us what to clean daily, weekly, monthly, and seasonally. She talks about fabrics and sheets and comforters and rugs and carpets. She talks about keepsakes, documents to keep and for how long, inventories, insurance, fire safety, general safety in the home, pets, how to shop for meals, how long to keep different types of food, home-made cleaners, a list of basic cleaners, etc. What a complete and thorough book! After reading this book (and I didn’t read every page), I bought a bottle of Fabuloso which is an all purpose cleaner, and stopped using ammonia. She also includes several pages of home-made cleaners, the most basic of which is 3/4 cup of bleach, 1 gallon of warm water, 1 tablespoon of powdered laundry detergent. Somewhere in this book, I read about Fabuloso, vinegar, and water as a good all purpose cleaner. I can’t find it in the book but I mixed up a spray bottle of it and am starting to use it to clean the bathroom, etc. Fabulous book!
Eye-opening book about the sorry state of American History textbooks in high schools. This was one of our Old Town Library Book Club selections for 2019-2020. He provides the truth about Woodrow Wilson (extremely racist), Helen Keller (ardent socialist), Christopher Columbus (extreme brutality to the natives), the first Thanksgiving, how racism is invisible in the history books, how anti-racism is invisible in the history books, how the history books completely overlook the Vietnam War, how they don’t cover the recent past, and why history is taught this way.
What a strange book! I didn’t like it! It is about a LOT more than just his journey to Lilliput. In fact, that is only a short portion at the very beginning. He ends up going to many other places – a land of giants, another place governed by a floating island, and a land that is ruled and led by horses, the Houyhnhnms, with whom he falls in love, but their land is also populated by a despicable human-like race called the Yahoos. He so despised these Yahoos, and they were so much like humans, that when he returned to England, it took him 5 years to even tolerate his wife and children: “At the time of this writing it is five years since my last return to England: during the first year I could not endure my wife or children in my presence, the very smell of them was intolerable, much less could I suffer them to eat in the same room.” Wow!
Tragic true story by the author of ‘Cutting for Stone.’ He tells about his move to El Paso, Texas, to teach internal medicine at Texas Tech. He meets David Smith, a medical student who was a former tennis pro. They develop a deep friendship via the tennis court. Abraham is an avid, obsessed tennis player. David is the perfect tennis partner. Their tennis matches are what keeps Abraham afloat during the unraveling of his marriage and his moving out of the home he shares with her and his precious 2 sons. Unfortunately, David is a recovering cocaine addict, an “IVDA,” (intravenous drug abuser) and he falls back into using twice and the second time is his undoing – he is holed out in a motel room and the police come knocking on the door (called by Abraham and Emily to get him into detox) but David takes his own life with a shotgun in the mouth. Tragic, dark, wasteland of drug abuse. Very scary.
Loved reading this after enjoying the movie with George C. Scott every year for many, many years! I was surprised at how closely the movie follows the book, in most places word-for-word. I like the way he describes the ghosts better in the book than the way they are portrayed in the movie. There are only a few scenes in the book that were not in the movie, all of them with the Ghost of Christmas Present, called the second Spirit in the book: They visited the home of an old miner and his family, they visited two men working in a lighthouse, and many street scenes and shop scenes where people are festive and happy with the Christmas spirit.
by James E. Hansen II, Gordon A. Hazard, Linda M. Meyer, 2018
Very complete book giving pictures and history of EVERY building and even the places of Colorado State University. Especially liked the pictures of the first buildings in the late 1800s (the Pioneer Era from 1870-1909). They divided it into The Pioneer Era (1870-1909), Charles A. Lory Era (1909-1940), William E. Morgan Era (1949-1969), Modern University Era (1969-1990), and Digital Era (1990-2017). I especially liked:
1. Jesse Harris Spring (1901-present): stone fountain that is still standing to the north of Spruce Hall (on 100 block of Old Main Drive), donated by Jesse Harris, former Fort Collins mayor and State Board of Agriculture member. The water was piped from Bailey’s Spring, located on land in the foothills. “Many local citizens distrusted the city’s tap water and believed that the spring had medicinal qualities. They filled jugs at the Jesse Harris Spring to take home for drinking. The fountain proved its worth when an outbreak of typhoid was traced to the city supply, and the high sulfur content kept the spring water safe to drink…By 1921, the old iron pipes had rusted. The cost of pipe replacement, and the fact that the spring was running dry, led the administration to quietly decide that the Jesse Harris Spring should be connected to the city water tap…”
2. Every tennis court ever located at CSU. The first were three dirt courts in 1908. The courts Wayne played on while in college existed from 1961 until 2009; eight courts directly east of what would become Moby Arena. The current 12 courts located on Research Boulevard cost $2 million and opened in 2010. It is considered “one of the nation’s finest college facilities.”
3. Quonset huts that were used as housing for veterans from 1946-1961. Carla lived in one of these when she was a baby.
4. The dairy farm was originally the Hahn Farm which I think was located near West Prospect and South Shields Street, then moved in 1981 to north of the Veterinary Teaching Hospital, but closed in 1989 due to financial losses and complaints of odors.
5. Hughes Stadium: Pat Stryker gave $15 million towards it in 2003 to honor both Albert Yates and Sonny Lubick. Hughes Stadium existed from 1968 to 2017, the last playing season was 2016. The book was published before it was decided to make Hughes Stadium area into a residential development.
6. Includes pictures of Old Main, including after the fire on Friday, May 8, 1970. Someone started it in protest of the Vietnam War. The picture shows all that was left of this beautiful building was the brick and stone shell. It’s a haunting picture. What a terrible loss.
7. The new stadium – the most controversial facility ever built on campus. Funding fell short but even so, the Board of Governors authorized $239 million to build the structure, which opened in fall of 2017.
8. The Mountain Campus, 1914-present: originally named after “George W. Pingree (a Civil War veteran and participant in the infamous Sand Creek Massacre), who ran a logging camp there from 1868 to 1870 to supply railroad ties for the Union Pacific Railroad.”
An excellent book – I love the old pictures from back in the 1870s to early 1900s.
Eye-opening book about a subculture of aging Americans living in RVs, vans, or cars and traveling around the country. Gretchen recommended this book. These Americans lost homes in the 2008 Great Recession, went through messy divorces, had physical injuries or illnesses, or a combination of factors that made them unable to afford rent along with everything else. They purchase used vans, RVs, or even cars and begin living in them. They work in terribly difficult, low-paying seasonal jobs like Amazon warehouses (“workampers”), the sugar beet harvest, campground hosts, tourist traps, and amusement parks. She focuses on one particular person, Linda May, and tells this most interesting and depressing of stories through her. Things I learned: You can clean foggy headlamps with insect repellent and an old t-shirt. Earthships are intriguing! Linda May dreams of building one. She finally purchases a cheap piece of ground near Douglas, Arizona, and will build one. Black people are not among these people; is it racism among these nomads? Or more than likely, black people know they would be fined, jailed, or possibly worse if police found them to be stealth camping in towns and cities, whereas white people are simply checked on and sometimes helped.
Adam saw this book over at Ben’s house so I got it from the library. Mom read it first and said, “This was an excellent read. I sense a slipping away of everyone in the U.S.A. focusing on ‘me!’ and self only.” It’s true and he gives three reasons for this: The whatever-it-takes-to-win politics (mainly started by Nixon and the Watergate scandal), whatever-it-takes-to-maximize profits (businesses used to care about their employees, their communities, their customers, and now it’s screw them, just make money. He uses Michael Milken and Jack Welch as examples of this ‘whatever-it-takes-to-maximize profits’ attitude). And the whatever-it-takesto rig the economy is the third reason we’ve lost our sense of the common good. He attributes this to Lewis Powell’s memo, Tony Coelho’s bargain, and the Wall Street bailout.
He says this is not a book about Trump. Trump is not the cause; he is a consequence of the loss of our sense of the common good. He lists and describes 52 incidents that have occurred since the mid-1960s that showcase the decline. Here is the one that gets me the most:
2016 Price-gouging by Mylan Pharmaceuticals. The firm ratchets up the price of its EpiPen emergency injection kit, containing only about $1 worth of the drug epinephrine, to $609 a box. Mylan has an effective monopoly on the lifesaving product. The company’s revenue skyrockets to $11 billion. In 2016, Robert Coury, Mylan’s chairman, receives compensation of $98 million (including vesting of prior stock options, $160 million).
from page 62 in the chapter entitled, “Exploitation”
Recommended by Christie, this is a sweet book about two young lovers in 1953 Tehran, Iran. They meet in the Stationery Shop, a shop filled with beautiful pens, papers, journals, books, etc. They decide to marry, despite the young man’s mother’s objections, and arrange to meet in the square at a certain time. The young lady (Roya) makes her way through a political mob to the place they had agreed to meet, but the young man (Bahman) never shows up. A letter from him received a few days later says his love was all a mistake and he is marrying someone else, the woman his mother wants him to marry.
Lora Lee told me about this book and the movie. The book has never been out of print and, second to the Bible, is the most popular book in the world. The writing style is Old English, of course, since it was written 350 years ago. At first it was hard to understand, but once you get used to it, it is easier. The story is about Christian, a man who leaves his City of Destruction, with a heavy burden on his back, to make his way to the Celestial City. Along the way, he faces all kinds of dangerous pitfalls: Obstinate, Pliable, the Slough of Despond, Worldly Wiseman, Sloth, Presumption, Formalist, Hypocrisy, Beezlebub Castle, Hill Difficulty, the lions, Bloody-Man, Maul, Slay-good, the valley of humiliation and death in which he has a battle with Apollyon; Talkative, the evil town of Vanity Fair in which his friend, Faithful, is given a mock trial and wrongly convicted by Envy, Superstition, and Pickthank and then burned at the stake; Giant Despair, Doubting Castle, Ignorance, Mistrust, Timorous, Turn-away, and Atheist just to name a few of the dangers and pitfalls that tried to turn him back. He also had to leave behind his wife and four sons because they refused to believe.
Who would have thought an octopus had a soul? But after reading this book, you can’t help but believe it! How sweet and precious this story is! She spends most of the book with octopuses in the New England Aquarium, and with the people who work and volunteer there. Through her great story-telling, I came to know and love the octopuses she describes: Athena, Octavia, Kali, and then Karma. She does learn to scuba-dive and takes two trips to find octopuses in the wild: First to Cozumel and then to Moorea. Loved this book! It was sweet and delightful. Danette recommended it to me. Sy Montgomery is the author of The Good, Good Pig.
Excellent book by an Evangelical who is an American history professor and chair of the history department at Messiah College in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. He dedicates the book, “To the 19 percent.” He seeks to explain how 81% of evangelical Christians voted for Donald Trump. He starts with the politics of fear: First, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio played the politics of fear in their campaigns, and it worked so well, Donald Trump was seen as the only one who was strong enough to save them from the fear of rapist, drug-dealing illegal immigrants; Muslims coming to murder us; evil Liberals taking over our country.
Al H. recommended this book. Redeemer Lutheran was reading it. It’s about loving everyone always, even your most despised enemies. It’s full of stories about the creative ways in which he has loved others. There’s a chapter about not telling people about the good you have done because you’ve done it to Jesus so He already knows, but then this book is full of stories about the good he’s done. He is very funny, but I didn’t like him. (So much for loving everybody always!) However, the last few chapters were about him going after a witch doctor in Uganda and being the first one to get one convicted and sent to prison. Then, he adopted the little boy the witch doctor almost killed, but even more, he went and visited the witch doctor in the horrible prison in Uganda. The witch doctor wanted forgiveness and came to Christ, and Bob Goff says they both came closer to Christ through this. He has since set up schools for the witch doctors and more and more are coming to Christ. That is simply wonderful! The colorful splotches on the cover of the book are actually the fingerprints of some of these witch doctors.
He’s from San Diego, extremely wealthy, was a lawyer and a diplomat to Uganda. He loves his wife, Sweet Maria, and his children, one of whom is named Adam and is quite the adventurer; sky diving, flying, motorcycling. His first book is Love Does, and he has a charitable organization called lovedoes.org. The one thing that stands out is that Jesus did call us to love our enemies, and that is not easy, but beautiful things happen when you do.
Fantastic book about the history of cancer. The hundreds of years of unnecessary, radical mastectomies, and the evilness of Big Tobacco stand out. Also, the futility of trying to cure cancer. There are only a few cancers for which we’ve discovered what might be termed cures: CML, Hodgkin’s, breast cancer which is positive for estrogen receptor and can be treated with tamoxifen, and/or Her-2 amplified and can be treated with Herceptin.
Here are some quotes, this first from the chapters on how smoking causes lung cancer: “It is difficult for me to convey the range and depth of devastation that I witnessed in the cancer wards that could be directly attributed to cigarette smoking….It remains an astonishing, disturbing fact that in America–a nation where nearly every new drug is subjected to rigorous scrutiny as a potential carcinogen, and even the bare hint of a substance’s link to cancer ignites a firestorm of public hysteria and media anxiety–one of the most potent and common carcinogens known to humans can be freely bought and sold at every corner store for a few dollars.”
Short biography of Akiane, the girl who painted the picture of Jesus that the little boy from Heaven Is for Real identified as the Jesus he saw in heaven. This book tells the story of her life up to age 10 and includes her poetry and her paintings. I find the paintings haunting and dark, and the poetry is incomprehensible. However, she says something about one of her paintings, the one of Eve, that is incredibly insightful: “The knowledge of good and evil is simply too much for a human to understand and experience, and now Eve is looking up to God for forgiveness and help.” Same thing that Wayne said about humans and the fall – we are not equipped to deal with the knowledge of evil. Also, although she never mentions the Bible in this book, she does speak God’s will for us – to love Him and to love others. She also has painted pictures of a young Asian girl, about 2 years old, and another one of two African babies, who were abandoned and left to die but who were adopted and cared for and became healthy. She has a heart for abandoned children. She says, “It is because of our selfishness that they suffer and die.”
This book takes you into the world of 16-year-old Starr; I hated the world but fell in love with her and her precious family. They live in the ghetto and Starr witnesses her childhood best friend, Khalil, get shot and killed by a white cop. She has brothers (Seven and Sekani), Dad (Maverick – former gang member and drug dealer), Mom (a nurse and the best mom ever), Uncle Carlos (a cop), and Chris (her rich, white boyfriend). Starr lives in two worlds; the world of her childhood which is the ghetto, drug dealers, gang members, violence, but a beloved family that has risen above all of that; and the rich, mostly white world where she attends high school. When the white cop kills her childhood friend, the two worlds collide. Starr eventually chooses to speak and tell exactly what happened to detectives, the media, and a grand jury. The white cop was not charged with murder. Riots and violence erupt. We understand the rage. Excellent book!
