ALBERTA, Tim
The Kingdom, Power and the Glory
★★★★★
I had hoped that Tim Alberta’s book would be read by evangelicals given the subject matter and the author’s profession of evangelical beliefs. He’s the son of a conservative evangelical pastor and has remained within the evangelical church. As a journalist he would want to look deeply and objectively at the current situation within his church home. What could be a better pedigree?
Unfortunately, despite Alberta’s credentials I suspect this book won’t be read by evangelicals. The newsmagazine Tim Alberta writes for, The Atlantic, is left-leaning on the political spectrum. That certainly would dissuade the right-wing evangelical readership. With the polarization of politics and media this is not a time for crossing over. Reading challenging material from someone on the other side’s media is not on anyone’s map these days.
The Kingdom, The Power and The Glory will likely only be read by those who are perplexed by the evangelical support for the politics of Donald Trump and extreme right wing positions. For that curious and incredulous readership, this book will be chillingly informative.
As a journalist, Alberta approaches the issue from an interview and observe perspective. Significant conversations with many in the evangelical world are documented and described, some of those interviewed were influential and powerful. It is apparent from the writing that Alberta knows the evangelical lingo, and believes the theological premises. But there is more to see here than just mega-churches, congregational pastors struggling to know what to do, and the workings of conservative denominations and their institutes of higher learning.
There is scandal.
Financial and sexual scandal.
And there are hucksters and charlatans, there are political operatives using religious settings to their advantage. There are fractured families and fulsomely fractured congregations. There is a diversion of sermon time to temporal matters rather than spiritual ones.
This departure from what it had traditionally meant to be an evangelical Christian, to focus on politics rather than heavenly matters, didn’t start with Trump. However, he certainly has taken advantage of it, fuelling it in his own quest for power. In the process, the evangelical church has taken on Trump’s poor victim stance. It has been led to believe its survival is threatened by political oppression. It has a foe to vanquish through asserting its own political power, not trusting the victory to God but to the ballot box.
To his credit, only occasionally does Alberta lower himself to gratuitous derogatory characterization of those he references. For the most part, he simply describes what he sees and what is said to him. Alberta allows the reader to generate their own outrage and offence. Alberta also endeavours to point to solutions to the corruption within evangelicalism. I suspect that in doing so he’s trying to strike a hopeful note, that his church can make a comeback as a spiritual entity rather than burning out as a political one.
There is something I’m curious about that is not addressed in the book. Nowhere does Alberta identify why this particular branch of Christianity was so vulnerable to this level of corruption and its conversion of focus when other branches of the faith and religious orientations have not been. Perhaps that deserves a future look.
One final comment. The book is structured into parts based on the three elements as quoted from the Lord’s Prayer in its main title, a formatting that actually works against the otherwise good flow to the book. I suspect the title and section headings were chosen to make the book more acceptable to an evangelical readership. Good try, Tim Alberta. I doubt it will succeed.
Unfortunately, despite Alberta’s credentials I suspect this book won’t be read by evangelicals. The newsmagazine Tim Alberta writes for, The Atlantic, is left-leaning on the political spectrum. That certainly would dissuade the right-wing evangelical readership. With the polarization of politics and media this is not a time for crossing over. Reading challenging material from someone on the other side’s media is not on anyone’s map these days.
The Kingdom, The Power and The Glory will likely only be read by those who are perplexed by the evangelical support for the politics of Donald Trump and extreme right wing positions. For that curious and incredulous readership, this book will be chillingly informative.
As a journalist, Alberta approaches the issue from an interview and observe perspective. Significant conversations with many in the evangelical world are documented and described, some of those interviewed were influential and powerful. It is apparent from the writing that Alberta knows the evangelical lingo, and believes the theological premises. But there is more to see here than just mega-churches, congregational pastors struggling to know what to do, and the workings of conservative denominations and their institutes of higher learning.
There is scandal.
Financial and sexual scandal.
And there are hucksters and charlatans, there are political operatives using religious settings to their advantage. There are fractured families and fulsomely fractured congregations. There is a diversion of sermon time to temporal matters rather than spiritual ones.
This departure from what it had traditionally meant to be an evangelical Christian, to focus on politics rather than heavenly matters, didn’t start with Trump. However, he certainly has taken advantage of it, fuelling it in his own quest for power. In the process, the evangelical church has taken on Trump’s poor victim stance. It has been led to believe its survival is threatened by political oppression. It has a foe to vanquish through asserting its own political power, not trusting the victory to God but to the ballot box.
To his credit, only occasionally does Alberta lower himself to gratuitous derogatory characterization of those he references. For the most part, he simply describes what he sees and what is said to him. Alberta allows the reader to generate their own outrage and offence. Alberta also endeavours to point to solutions to the corruption within evangelicalism. I suspect that in doing so he’s trying to strike a hopeful note, that his church can make a comeback as a spiritual entity rather than burning out as a political one.
There is something I’m curious about that is not addressed in the book. Nowhere does Alberta identify why this particular branch of Christianity was so vulnerable to this level of corruption and its conversion of focus when other branches of the faith and religious orientations have not been. Perhaps that deserves a future look.
One final comment. The book is structured into parts based on the three elements as quoted from the Lord’s Prayer in its main title, a formatting that actually works against the otherwise good flow to the book. I suspect the title and section headings were chosen to make the book more acceptable to an evangelical readership. Good try, Tim Alberta. I doubt it will succeed.
ANSARY, Tamin
The Invention of Yesterday
★★★★★
A wee bit humbled, I am. This book did it for me.
The Invention of Yesterday illustrated in no uncertain terms how uneducated I am, this despite two university degrees. There is so much about this world and its peoples that I didn’t know.
And I thought all that not-knowing was inconsequential. Now I think again.
This is a book documenting history. Not the dry stuff of dates, and the names of kings, and the battles for this or that piece of sod. Certainly, there is some of that in there but that is not the focus of the book. If that had have been all there was to it, I wouldn’t have gotten through it—in the last year I threw into the waste-bin of incomplete reads on my eReader two such books of history.
But not this one.
This book tells the why not just the what. Three fundamental contributing factors (environmental challenge, tools and interconnectedness) interweave in our collective yesterday. Those threads create successions of story that embrace culture and civilization. And thus, eras of history emerge and retreat.
In The Invention of Yesterday 50,000 years of history float by in 450 pages. Sounds impossible, doesn’t it?
Tamin Ansary has done it.
While there were chapters in the book that were a slog, and this probably because of own background ignorance of those civilizations and cultures, most of the book was a delight. Throughout the read I found myself reflecting with Oh, that’s how that worked … or I never connected that with that before … or, So that’s where that came from … or, Gosh, that explains why … . It was all through the book. Those connections were always grounded in those three basic factors—environment, tools, communication. Rather than history being a bunch of dry facts, it suddenly had an overarching story with consistent plotlines acting out familiar roles in an increasingly complex context.
If I have any criticism it is of how the author muted his sense of humour until the last couple of chapters of the book. Maybe it was there all along and I was so captivated by the rest of the content that I missed it. But in those last few chapters—when history had become the present and the present started eking its way into the future—suddenly a dry and provocative humour cuddled the horror of where all this just might be going.
Sure the book entertains, amuses. But don’t read it for that. Read it because the world will make much more sense once you are done.
The Invention of Yesterday illustrated in no uncertain terms how uneducated I am, this despite two university degrees. There is so much about this world and its peoples that I didn’t know.
And I thought all that not-knowing was inconsequential. Now I think again.
This is a book documenting history. Not the dry stuff of dates, and the names of kings, and the battles for this or that piece of sod. Certainly, there is some of that in there but that is not the focus of the book. If that had have been all there was to it, I wouldn’t have gotten through it—in the last year I threw into the waste-bin of incomplete reads on my eReader two such books of history.
But not this one.
This book tells the why not just the what. Three fundamental contributing factors (environmental challenge, tools and interconnectedness) interweave in our collective yesterday. Those threads create successions of story that embrace culture and civilization. And thus, eras of history emerge and retreat.
In The Invention of Yesterday 50,000 years of history float by in 450 pages. Sounds impossible, doesn’t it?
Tamin Ansary has done it.
While there were chapters in the book that were a slog, and this probably because of own background ignorance of those civilizations and cultures, most of the book was a delight. Throughout the read I found myself reflecting with Oh, that’s how that worked … or I never connected that with that before … or, So that’s where that came from … or, Gosh, that explains why … . It was all through the book. Those connections were always grounded in those three basic factors—environment, tools, communication. Rather than history being a bunch of dry facts, it suddenly had an overarching story with consistent plotlines acting out familiar roles in an increasingly complex context.
If I have any criticism it is of how the author muted his sense of humour until the last couple of chapters of the book. Maybe it was there all along and I was so captivated by the rest of the content that I missed it. But in those last few chapters—when history had become the present and the present started eking its way into the future—suddenly a dry and provocative humour cuddled the horror of where all this just might be going.
Sure the book entertains, amuses. But don’t read it for that. Read it because the world will make much more sense once you are done.
BOOTHBY, Tara
Love and Love's Energy
★★★★☆
The central theme of Love and Love’s Energy is that each of us are Loved and Lovable. And, at our very essence, Loving.
Boothby asserts this from both a spiritual and a scientific perspective. On the level of science it focuses on the social science research into attachment. On the level of spirituality it proposes a view of God as the source of the most fundamental and natural love, there to flow through us all.
I confess that in reading Love and Love’s Energy I was outside my usual genres. I even struggle to define which genre this book happens to be … inspirational, self-help, mystical, metaphysical? As a work of non-fiction, the book provides some explanation about the world outside of ourselves. However, the force of Boothby’s book pushes relentlessly for the reader to consider the world within, within each of us.
The book is comprised of a mix of poetry, contemplative questions, and Boothby’s own reflections on human nature, parenting and her work as a psychologist. Then come the compelling and quirky metaphors she spins out around the experience of being human. These sparkle, captivating the reader. Love and Love’s Energy is deeply moving in places. At other times it floats the reader along on the buoyancy of its recurring theme. I must confess though, that I often found myself impatient with that float, wishing for more substance.
The book is courageous for a practicing psychologist. It focuses deeply on the subjective and the spiritual, topics that are an anathema for a blinkered profession which is stubbornly focused only on the objective and empirically demonstrable. The book is full of compassion for readers willing to delve into their own experience of the human condition.
Boothby proposes a spirituality that is an alternative for those turned off by toxic religion: a noble venture. While she has adequately referenced the science side of attachment I wished for more referencing of the alternative to toxic religiosity. The book sent me running to look up the writings of the Christian mystics. I wish Boothby had integrated their ancient wisdom into Love and Love's Energy as it has similarity to her own more mystical sense of the divine.
As a reader, I sense this book is an exploration of Boothby’s own healing -- her own deepening and spiritual growth as a healer, mother, and thinker. It is proffered to readers as a gift, a treasure for those willing to reflect, rethink and renew.
Boothby asserts this from both a spiritual and a scientific perspective. On the level of science it focuses on the social science research into attachment. On the level of spirituality it proposes a view of God as the source of the most fundamental and natural love, there to flow through us all.
I confess that in reading Love and Love’s Energy I was outside my usual genres. I even struggle to define which genre this book happens to be … inspirational, self-help, mystical, metaphysical? As a work of non-fiction, the book provides some explanation about the world outside of ourselves. However, the force of Boothby’s book pushes relentlessly for the reader to consider the world within, within each of us.
The book is comprised of a mix of poetry, contemplative questions, and Boothby’s own reflections on human nature, parenting and her work as a psychologist. Then come the compelling and quirky metaphors she spins out around the experience of being human. These sparkle, captivating the reader. Love and Love’s Energy is deeply moving in places. At other times it floats the reader along on the buoyancy of its recurring theme. I must confess though, that I often found myself impatient with that float, wishing for more substance.
The book is courageous for a practicing psychologist. It focuses deeply on the subjective and the spiritual, topics that are an anathema for a blinkered profession which is stubbornly focused only on the objective and empirically demonstrable. The book is full of compassion for readers willing to delve into their own experience of the human condition.
Boothby proposes a spirituality that is an alternative for those turned off by toxic religion: a noble venture. While she has adequately referenced the science side of attachment I wished for more referencing of the alternative to toxic religiosity. The book sent me running to look up the writings of the Christian mystics. I wish Boothby had integrated their ancient wisdom into Love and Love's Energy as it has similarity to her own more mystical sense of the divine.
As a reader, I sense this book is an exploration of Boothby’s own healing -- her own deepening and spiritual growth as a healer, mother, and thinker. It is proffered to readers as a gift, a treasure for those willing to reflect, rethink and renew.
DAVISON, Jean
The Dark Threads
★★★★★
It was a profound shame that I felt, shame of a profession I once practiced. That, and deep respect for a buried resiliency that allowed an adolescent to survive the minions of that profession.
If the quality, the integrity, the legitimacy of a book lies in its capacity to make the reader feel, this book rises far above others. I’ve read many books within the mental health industry. This one made me feel, deeply.
The Dark Threads is a memoir written decades after five troubled years in the author’s life. It reads like fiction, first person narration, but tells a tale that sadly is not fictional. Memoir writing can be self-ingratiating, a bit proud. Not The Dark Threads. We are taken into the private life of a shy girl and the profound insensitivity of the profession she encountered when she looked for help.
The story is not whiny. It could’ve been for all the harm done to that girl. But it is a Kafkaesque. A litany of mind numbing, brain damaging practices flow from a single professional practice: an adolescent’s struggle and distress is considered to be symptom, the symptom is attached to a diagnosis, the diagnosis begs a treatment and thus the harm begins. The harm came in the form of powerful drugs, electroconvulsive treatment, and dehumanizing, infantilizing practices of ward experiences. The adverse impacts of all these were profound, adverse impact and no benefit.
And this is where my sense of shame comes in. Just a few years after the author’s experience I entered the profession, not as a psychiatrist, but on my journey to be a psychologist practicing within the mental health industry. What author Jean Davison describes I experienced, not from the point-of-view of the patient but as a professional expected to engage in that same dehumanizing practice: take struggle and suffering and call it symptom, add symptoms together to create diagnosis, apply treatment.
Davison is careful to acknowledge that what was done to her may have been necessary or helpful for others. Davison also shines a light of hope through the genuine and human response to her by certain helpers she did eventually encounter along the way. Ultimately, this is a story of a core strength, of a core intelligence within her that told her she had to get out of the clutch of psychiatry. Once she did she was able to reclaim the sanity that had always been within. Her intelligence was that she could question. And in questioning she could decide for herself what would be her life.
Bravo.
If the quality, the integrity, the legitimacy of a book lies in its capacity to make the reader feel, this book rises far above others. I’ve read many books within the mental health industry. This one made me feel, deeply.
The Dark Threads is a memoir written decades after five troubled years in the author’s life. It reads like fiction, first person narration, but tells a tale that sadly is not fictional. Memoir writing can be self-ingratiating, a bit proud. Not The Dark Threads. We are taken into the private life of a shy girl and the profound insensitivity of the profession she encountered when she looked for help.
The story is not whiny. It could’ve been for all the harm done to that girl. But it is a Kafkaesque. A litany of mind numbing, brain damaging practices flow from a single professional practice: an adolescent’s struggle and distress is considered to be symptom, the symptom is attached to a diagnosis, the diagnosis begs a treatment and thus the harm begins. The harm came in the form of powerful drugs, electroconvulsive treatment, and dehumanizing, infantilizing practices of ward experiences. The adverse impacts of all these were profound, adverse impact and no benefit.
And this is where my sense of shame comes in. Just a few years after the author’s experience I entered the profession, not as a psychiatrist, but on my journey to be a psychologist practicing within the mental health industry. What author Jean Davison describes I experienced, not from the point-of-view of the patient but as a professional expected to engage in that same dehumanizing practice: take struggle and suffering and call it symptom, add symptoms together to create diagnosis, apply treatment.
Davison is careful to acknowledge that what was done to her may have been necessary or helpful for others. Davison also shines a light of hope through the genuine and human response to her by certain helpers she did eventually encounter along the way. Ultimately, this is a story of a core strength, of a core intelligence within her that told her she had to get out of the clutch of psychiatry. Once she did she was able to reclaim the sanity that had always been within. Her intelligence was that she could question. And in questioning she could decide for herself what would be her life.
Bravo.
HAMILTON, David
How Your Mind Can Heal Your Body
★★★★☆
Alright, already. I get it. I’m convinced.
Not that I wasn’t before I read the book. From my work as a psychologist I know the power of the human mind to alleviate suffering and promote wellness.
Is mind-body healing a panacea? No, that would not be realistic. Is it placebo? If so, that is probably a good thing. Is it powerful? Certainly.
The strength of this book comes in its How-To of chapter 12. It reads a little like a YouTube video for those of us who are too old to go to YouTube to learn how to do something … you know, we who still think of books as the place to learn stuff. I was impressed with the wisdom and directness of that enabling chapter. To harness this power within us, diligence is required. The process of positive visualization to achieve better health is not a short-cut to wellness but a discipline of the mind that needs to be honed and practiced. But, in the final analysis, it is doable.
This is my first venture in decades into the world of self-help literature. It was rather a light read for me and I found myself wanting more depth of critical thought and complexity. And yet, even though I’m at the point of life when body parts are clicking past their best-before dates, I probably am not really the audience for this book. This book could most beneficially be read by someone already in pain, by someone suffering with the uncertainty of serious illness, someone cast into the position of passivity that goes with being a patient.
This book is an antidote to the culture of helplessness with regards to our illnesses, their treatments and limitations. Our subjective lives are acted upon from within by our maladies and from outside by drugs, doctors and mysterious machines. This book opens us to having a meaningful and powerful role in how things will progress. The irritation I had in how hard the author worked to convince the reader of the possibility of mind-body healing can best be seen as counterpoint to how much our culture has structured itself to believe the opposite.
If you are unwell, read this book. If you are likely to become unwell, read this book before you get there. Hmm, maybe I am the audience for this book after all.
Not that I wasn’t before I read the book. From my work as a psychologist I know the power of the human mind to alleviate suffering and promote wellness.
Is mind-body healing a panacea? No, that would not be realistic. Is it placebo? If so, that is probably a good thing. Is it powerful? Certainly.
The strength of this book comes in its How-To of chapter 12. It reads a little like a YouTube video for those of us who are too old to go to YouTube to learn how to do something … you know, we who still think of books as the place to learn stuff. I was impressed with the wisdom and directness of that enabling chapter. To harness this power within us, diligence is required. The process of positive visualization to achieve better health is not a short-cut to wellness but a discipline of the mind that needs to be honed and practiced. But, in the final analysis, it is doable.
This is my first venture in decades into the world of self-help literature. It was rather a light read for me and I found myself wanting more depth of critical thought and complexity. And yet, even though I’m at the point of life when body parts are clicking past their best-before dates, I probably am not really the audience for this book. This book could most beneficially be read by someone already in pain, by someone suffering with the uncertainty of serious illness, someone cast into the position of passivity that goes with being a patient.
This book is an antidote to the culture of helplessness with regards to our illnesses, their treatments and limitations. Our subjective lives are acted upon from within by our maladies and from outside by drugs, doctors and mysterious machines. This book opens us to having a meaningful and powerful role in how things will progress. The irritation I had in how hard the author worked to convince the reader of the possibility of mind-body healing can best be seen as counterpoint to how much our culture has structured itself to believe the opposite.
If you are unwell, read this book. If you are likely to become unwell, read this book before you get there. Hmm, maybe I am the audience for this book after all.
HARARI, Yuval Noah
★★★★★
To sum it up, this book is about how we’ve gotten to where we are and where we might end up.
Historian Harari takes us on this journey focusing on networks of communication that bind us together. While I’d never thought it through before, it turns out that the networks of communication are not there to convey information but to connect groups of people into common purpose.
Suddenly the whole misinformation, fake news, wing-ed media (left and right) of the American election makes sense. Totally awful sense. The media networks are not for informing us, but for binding us into loyalty and cooperation.
Harari has a sterling capacity for the long look at history, finding a thread that runs through it all. In Nexus that thread connects stone-age cavemen to bots through the role played by communication networks. Harari approaches history not in the terms of dates and battles but in the ways that humans have organized themselves and adapted into greater complexity. His mission in writing this book was to bring this perspective to the strange new world of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Computers have the potential to shift the course of humanity as their algorithms become increasingly effective by learning from massive data sets. This area of emerging technology might not seem like the subject for a historian, but Harari makes it so. It is all quite dystopian. His central concern is that as humans we may fail to develop effective regulation of the burgeoning computerized communication networks. This will lead to the ultimate existential crisis as computerized algorithms gain more and more power at humanity’s expense.
Nexus was not a quick read for me. Fortunately, the chapters are organized into chunks of around 2,000 words. I found myself only able to manage one chunk of at a sitting, needing to think through the implications present in Harari’s always rational application of principle to possibility. It all made sense. Totally awful sense.
The book is a worthy read. The ideas within are a worthy think. Its call, clarion.
Historian Harari takes us on this journey focusing on networks of communication that bind us together. While I’d never thought it through before, it turns out that the networks of communication are not there to convey information but to connect groups of people into common purpose.
Suddenly the whole misinformation, fake news, wing-ed media (left and right) of the American election makes sense. Totally awful sense. The media networks are not for informing us, but for binding us into loyalty and cooperation.
Harari has a sterling capacity for the long look at history, finding a thread that runs through it all. In Nexus that thread connects stone-age cavemen to bots through the role played by communication networks. Harari approaches history not in the terms of dates and battles but in the ways that humans have organized themselves and adapted into greater complexity. His mission in writing this book was to bring this perspective to the strange new world of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Computers have the potential to shift the course of humanity as their algorithms become increasingly effective by learning from massive data sets. This area of emerging technology might not seem like the subject for a historian, but Harari makes it so. It is all quite dystopian. His central concern is that as humans we may fail to develop effective regulation of the burgeoning computerized communication networks. This will lead to the ultimate existential crisis as computerized algorithms gain more and more power at humanity’s expense.
Nexus was not a quick read for me. Fortunately, the chapters are organized into chunks of around 2,000 words. I found myself only able to manage one chunk of at a sitting, needing to think through the implications present in Harari’s always rational application of principle to possibility. It all made sense. Totally awful sense.
The book is a worthy read. The ideas within are a worthy think. Its call, clarion.
HART, Matt
Win At All Costs
★★★☆☆
WIN AT ALL COSTS by MATT HART. (3 of 5 stars)
With a firm grasp of the particulars, Matt Hart takes us on a marathon of a tale.
Under the corporate auspices of the sportwear brand, Nike, American distance runners strive for ascendancy in the world of athletics that has come to be dominated by Ethiopian and Kenyan runners. Professing to reap the benefits of science, their coach—Alberto Salazar, himself a first place marathoner in his day—seeks to take a new generation of runners to the winner’s circle.
Amongst the athletes coached by Salazar are a couple, Kara and Adam Goucher. They, with Salazar, form the central axis of the tale. As a reader, my empathy goes to the Gouchers and antipathy to Salazar. While seemingly successful at his aim, over the course of the story Salazar is revealed to violate doping rules that put the health and integrity of his runners in jeopardy.
Matt Hart writes from the perspective of a journalist, seeking out iotas of information to provide integrity to his tale. As a reader who is a non-runner, I found the focus on runner’s times and placings to beg the larger question of why a person would be allowed to behave with such disregard for the wellbeing of others and his sport—a sport that is proudly the oldest within the history of western civilization.
The reader is left to draw one’s own conclusions around whence comes the lack of integrity in corporate culture, that and the egoistic dedication of a powerful individual to personal goals that sacrifice decency and humanity. What does this say about American culture?
I found this to be an instance of journalism to create a subjective experience of outrage. A theme all too common in this 21st Century. Are we better off knowing that corporate America is prone to behave in this way, and that seemingly successful individuals may be without morals? Is that all there is to capture our attention?
The goals and behaviours of Alberto Salazar are a tawdry tale of an attempt to create another example of American exceptionalism, this not only through the gifts of his athletes but also through seeking every advantage (fair and unfair) that technology and rule bending could provide. Alas, it is only exceptional arrogance and disrespect for others that is revealed.
By the end of the tale, better than 400 pages, I felt as though I had run a marathon myself, weary of the ways of a profoundly distasteful character. But also in the end, our couple, Kara and Adam, do finish their careers with a sense of having maintained their self-respect. And for that, I am grateful.
With a firm grasp of the particulars, Matt Hart takes us on a marathon of a tale.
Under the corporate auspices of the sportwear brand, Nike, American distance runners strive for ascendancy in the world of athletics that has come to be dominated by Ethiopian and Kenyan runners. Professing to reap the benefits of science, their coach—Alberto Salazar, himself a first place marathoner in his day—seeks to take a new generation of runners to the winner’s circle.
Amongst the athletes coached by Salazar are a couple, Kara and Adam Goucher. They, with Salazar, form the central axis of the tale. As a reader, my empathy goes to the Gouchers and antipathy to Salazar. While seemingly successful at his aim, over the course of the story Salazar is revealed to violate doping rules that put the health and integrity of his runners in jeopardy.
Matt Hart writes from the perspective of a journalist, seeking out iotas of information to provide integrity to his tale. As a reader who is a non-runner, I found the focus on runner’s times and placings to beg the larger question of why a person would be allowed to behave with such disregard for the wellbeing of others and his sport—a sport that is proudly the oldest within the history of western civilization.
The reader is left to draw one’s own conclusions around whence comes the lack of integrity in corporate culture, that and the egoistic dedication of a powerful individual to personal goals that sacrifice decency and humanity. What does this say about American culture?
I found this to be an instance of journalism to create a subjective experience of outrage. A theme all too common in this 21st Century. Are we better off knowing that corporate America is prone to behave in this way, and that seemingly successful individuals may be without morals? Is that all there is to capture our attention?
The goals and behaviours of Alberto Salazar are a tawdry tale of an attempt to create another example of American exceptionalism, this not only through the gifts of his athletes but also through seeking every advantage (fair and unfair) that technology and rule bending could provide. Alas, it is only exceptional arrogance and disrespect for others that is revealed.
By the end of the tale, better than 400 pages, I felt as though I had run a marathon myself, weary of the ways of a profoundly distasteful character. But also in the end, our couple, Kara and Adam, do finish their careers with a sense of having maintained their self-respect. And for that, I am grateful.
HIGHWAY, Tomson
Permanent Astonishment
★★★★★
When Tomson Highway was three months short of his seventh birthday he made his first airplane ride. He was off to Indian Residential School, leaving behind his family back in Brochet three hundreds of miles to the north. The Guy Hill Residential School was located near The Pas, Manitoba.
This is the fulcrum of the story. To that point in his life he had lived on the lakes, islands and forests of Northern Manitoba. He’d even been born in the brutal winter cold as his family travelled the sub-arctic north on dogsled. Only about half of his siblings survived coming into this world under such harsh conditions.
Now he was teetering into an entirely different world. With the encouragement of his father, he entered this new world with a sense of adventure and an expectation that he would succeed.
It is this knack to thrive in two very different worlds that Tomson Highway gifts to us in a memoir of the first fifteen years of his life. By the end of Permanent Astonishment we leave him at age 15, soon to go to High School in Winnipeg. Tomson Highway went on to be a concert pianist, a playwright, and a novelist. He is a two-spirited person, a speaker of six languages (both first nations and European).
Throughout this memoir Tomson Highway often referred to his native Cree as a trickster language. The memoir is laced with Cree expressions throughout that illustrate that trickster nature.
Until close to the end of the book, I was annoyed with the inclusion of the Cree in the text—transliterated into long strings of syllables using our English alphabet. I’d skip over them, get to the English word sometimes included in brackets afterward, try to remember the ones that kept recurring. But I always thought I was missing something -- that behind these strings of letters was great humour, great depth of meaning or irony that I was just not getting. I imagine that in including them, there was with a smile on Tomson Highway’s face and a twinkle to his eye as the trickster within him brought me into his very special world.
Trickster indeed. By the inclusion of the Cree, Tomson Highway gave me a glimmer of the experience he must have had in entering that Indian Residential School where he was to be taught and his life managed in the English language.
And this is the brilliance of this memoir. Tomson Highway shares the subjectivity of what it must have been like to go to that school hundreds of miles and a culture away from his family. And it wasn’t just a different language (as English speakers might experience French, Spanish or Italian) but in a language linguistically unrelated to the Cree in structure and ways of thought, a language evolved to survive in a very different world with its institutions and values.
But there is another aspect of this. Not only were the words different, but also the way that incidents were recounted. I often had to read passages several times to grasp the sense of them, the cultural context and actions, to try to decode the humour, the specialness, the meaning of it all. As would a seven-year-old boy who had lived his life up until then in tents, dogsleds and canoes but found himself in a three storey building with dormitory beds laid out in neat rows, a school of desks and books.
In Permanent Astonishment Tomson Highway escorts the reader into the stunning beauty of the Canadian sub-arctic. Tomson Highway gentles readers into respect for the great wisdom and skills of a people able to live off the land, surviving the harshest of conditions. Tomson Highway enlivens readers with a sense of playfulness, irreverence and joy—an ebullient optimism and delight.
This is a necessary read for us Canadians, an antidote to our Eurocentrism and ignorance. And damn funny in places too!
This is the fulcrum of the story. To that point in his life he had lived on the lakes, islands and forests of Northern Manitoba. He’d even been born in the brutal winter cold as his family travelled the sub-arctic north on dogsled. Only about half of his siblings survived coming into this world under such harsh conditions.
Now he was teetering into an entirely different world. With the encouragement of his father, he entered this new world with a sense of adventure and an expectation that he would succeed.
It is this knack to thrive in two very different worlds that Tomson Highway gifts to us in a memoir of the first fifteen years of his life. By the end of Permanent Astonishment we leave him at age 15, soon to go to High School in Winnipeg. Tomson Highway went on to be a concert pianist, a playwright, and a novelist. He is a two-spirited person, a speaker of six languages (both first nations and European).
Throughout this memoir Tomson Highway often referred to his native Cree as a trickster language. The memoir is laced with Cree expressions throughout that illustrate that trickster nature.
Until close to the end of the book, I was annoyed with the inclusion of the Cree in the text—transliterated into long strings of syllables using our English alphabet. I’d skip over them, get to the English word sometimes included in brackets afterward, try to remember the ones that kept recurring. But I always thought I was missing something -- that behind these strings of letters was great humour, great depth of meaning or irony that I was just not getting. I imagine that in including them, there was with a smile on Tomson Highway’s face and a twinkle to his eye as the trickster within him brought me into his very special world.
Trickster indeed. By the inclusion of the Cree, Tomson Highway gave me a glimmer of the experience he must have had in entering that Indian Residential School where he was to be taught and his life managed in the English language.
And this is the brilliance of this memoir. Tomson Highway shares the subjectivity of what it must have been like to go to that school hundreds of miles and a culture away from his family. And it wasn’t just a different language (as English speakers might experience French, Spanish or Italian) but in a language linguistically unrelated to the Cree in structure and ways of thought, a language evolved to survive in a very different world with its institutions and values.
But there is another aspect of this. Not only were the words different, but also the way that incidents were recounted. I often had to read passages several times to grasp the sense of them, the cultural context and actions, to try to decode the humour, the specialness, the meaning of it all. As would a seven-year-old boy who had lived his life up until then in tents, dogsleds and canoes but found himself in a three storey building with dormitory beds laid out in neat rows, a school of desks and books.
In Permanent Astonishment Tomson Highway escorts the reader into the stunning beauty of the Canadian sub-arctic. Tomson Highway gentles readers into respect for the great wisdom and skills of a people able to live off the land, surviving the harshest of conditions. Tomson Highway enlivens readers with a sense of playfulness, irreverence and joy—an ebullient optimism and delight.
This is a necessary read for us Canadians, an antidote to our Eurocentrism and ignorance. And damn funny in places too!
HUBL, Thomas
Healing Collective Trauma
★☆☆☆☆
In Healing Collective Trauma we learn that there is a single cause for all individual psychological and behavioural dysfunction as well as all societal, political, environmental and economic dysfunction as well.
And a single cure for it all, too. That cure can be found in a personal discipline and collective practice.
It is not like this idea is foreign to western thought. A core Christian teaching is that all of individual and societal ills result from the Fall in the Eden Garden and are atoned through the Crucifixion of Christ, actualized into the present through our devotion and participation in religious activity.
Hubl’s analysis is slightly different. The cause of it all isn’t the eating of an apple but unhealed, historical, collective trauma incurred as a result of war, genocide, and, racial hatred and annihilation. And, the cure is … well, it would be best to attend one of his workshops or training sessions for that. His accolytes, as quoted in the book, would certainly agree.
I suspect that leading those workshops and trainings Hubl is a powerful presence. While I haven’t attended one, I suspect if I were to do so I would be held in the thrall of his mysticism. In the workshop I would be carried along by the implicit hope that his message contains, the attainability of that healing of self and society. At the midday break I would line up to buy this book.
Hubl’s writing is highly repetitive, full of metaphor and invented or obscure words. This discourse begs us to go along with his authoritative assertions of the nature of human existence. I couldn’t help but reflect that his way of speaking was much like I was taught in my training on clinical hypnosis, the methodology of putting people into trance.
But rather than being held in his we-space of shared presencing (a sample of the language saturating the book) skepticism troubled me increasingly through the reading. I just couldn’t accept that by my participation in his workshop process I would ease the suffering of my ancestors caused by trauma and at the same time safeguard the wellbeing of my descendants.
In the book there is a description of me -- me in my unenlightened, constricted state that just couldn’t go along with Hubl’s diagnosis and cure. I would be considered by Hubl and his accolytes as “overidentified with my ego structure, my awareness contracted, and my capacities for insight and empathies are reduced” (Chapter 6).
Ouch! And I was under the illusion that it wasn’t my ego at play here, but his.
Two other things bothered me. This book has two authors. Only one is named on the cover, Thomas Hubl. The other’s name does appear on the title page and at the back identified as a professional ghostwriter and collaborator. She is female. I could detect her hand at several places in the book with its clear and direct style of relating the wisdom and experience of others. Quite a contrast to what I suspect was Hubl’s own writing in the book.
The second troubling thing is the inclusion of workshop protocol and tools. I have no doubt that Hubl’s workshops are immensely powerful. However, I wonder about the ethics of that power falling into the hands of those who simply want to trade on his process without sufficient background in insuring participant safety and wellbeing. While I recognize that Hubl wants his process to become a movement, and from there to become the dominant culture, the how-to provided seems rather treacherous to me in a pay-for-personal-development workshops sort of world.
By the end of the book I had quite tired of Hubl’s frankly narrow and simplistic view of what is wrong with us all.
And a single cure for it all, too. That cure can be found in a personal discipline and collective practice.
It is not like this idea is foreign to western thought. A core Christian teaching is that all of individual and societal ills result from the Fall in the Eden Garden and are atoned through the Crucifixion of Christ, actualized into the present through our devotion and participation in religious activity.
Hubl’s analysis is slightly different. The cause of it all isn’t the eating of an apple but unhealed, historical, collective trauma incurred as a result of war, genocide, and, racial hatred and annihilation. And, the cure is … well, it would be best to attend one of his workshops or training sessions for that. His accolytes, as quoted in the book, would certainly agree.
I suspect that leading those workshops and trainings Hubl is a powerful presence. While I haven’t attended one, I suspect if I were to do so I would be held in the thrall of his mysticism. In the workshop I would be carried along by the implicit hope that his message contains, the attainability of that healing of self and society. At the midday break I would line up to buy this book.
Hubl’s writing is highly repetitive, full of metaphor and invented or obscure words. This discourse begs us to go along with his authoritative assertions of the nature of human existence. I couldn’t help but reflect that his way of speaking was much like I was taught in my training on clinical hypnosis, the methodology of putting people into trance.
But rather than being held in his we-space of shared presencing (a sample of the language saturating the book) skepticism troubled me increasingly through the reading. I just couldn’t accept that by my participation in his workshop process I would ease the suffering of my ancestors caused by trauma and at the same time safeguard the wellbeing of my descendants.
In the book there is a description of me -- me in my unenlightened, constricted state that just couldn’t go along with Hubl’s diagnosis and cure. I would be considered by Hubl and his accolytes as “overidentified with my ego structure, my awareness contracted, and my capacities for insight and empathies are reduced” (Chapter 6).
Ouch! And I was under the illusion that it wasn’t my ego at play here, but his.
Two other things bothered me. This book has two authors. Only one is named on the cover, Thomas Hubl. The other’s name does appear on the title page and at the back identified as a professional ghostwriter and collaborator. She is female. I could detect her hand at several places in the book with its clear and direct style of relating the wisdom and experience of others. Quite a contrast to what I suspect was Hubl’s own writing in the book.
The second troubling thing is the inclusion of workshop protocol and tools. I have no doubt that Hubl’s workshops are immensely powerful. However, I wonder about the ethics of that power falling into the hands of those who simply want to trade on his process without sufficient background in insuring participant safety and wellbeing. While I recognize that Hubl wants his process to become a movement, and from there to become the dominant culture, the how-to provided seems rather treacherous to me in a pay-for-personal-development workshops sort of world.
By the end of the book I had quite tired of Hubl’s frankly narrow and simplistic view of what is wrong with us all.
HUNTER, James Davison, and NEDELISKY, Paul
Science and the Good
★★★☆☆
Growing up there was never a question where our strong sense of what was moral and right came from. I was engulfed by the culture and theology of the Gospel Church. It was all right there in the Bible, or at least in our particular reading of the Bible.
Subjectively what is good, what is moral or right, runs unquestionably deep within each of us. We are perplexed when others don’t share the same sense of what is to be valued; to us it seems so fundamental. Those others are equally perplexed or angered that we don’t appreciate what their sense of the good is. Religion and politics become fractured into different camps taking opposing positions on complex issues. In arguing we all forget we’re living on the same planet with each other.
For hundreds of years philosophers endeavoured to use language with rational argument to define the good. But a new move is afoot. Could science, with its powerful tools of enquiry, its capacity for demonstration and, its edifice of the known answer the question for us? Can science finally tell us what is good, what is moral, what is to be valued, sought, practiced and, preserved?
Science and the Good: The tragic quest for the foundations of morality poses these questions. First comes an examination of the progress of philosophy around the delineation of the good. Then the book delves into the more recent efforts of science to address the issue. There are the findings of evolutionary psychology (for example, the prosocial behaviors such as apparent altruism in some primates) and those of neurobiology (with the identification of brain structures involved in ethical decision making). The conclusion? At this stage of enquiry, science can only tell us what is rather than how we ought to be. Unfortunately, science’s understanding of what is good happens to be wracked with methodological difficulties and over-reach in its interpretations.
So, is this a good book? I imagine it is as supplementary reading in a university philosophy course. With my long time interest in science, I was drawn to some of the accounts of the methods of moral scientists (thus described not as a comment on their character, just the focus of their endeavours). But I grew tired of the intellectual hand-wringing. It all seemed to just miss the point for me of why I feel so strongly my sense of the moral and the good while others feel so strongly differently, even oppositely, than do I.
What the book lacked for me was a sense of humanity and story. Obviously, those are strong in the sense for me of what is good when I read. A few poignant anecdotes would have gone a long way to suggest that the author’s not only thought about this, but actually reflected on it in a human sort of way.
That said, I could agree with the course of action proposed in the final chapter. Rather than seeking a morality that would be right at the exclusion of others, instead we can value differences, entering into dialogue for the purpose of respecting and understanding.
Subjectively what is good, what is moral or right, runs unquestionably deep within each of us. We are perplexed when others don’t share the same sense of what is to be valued; to us it seems so fundamental. Those others are equally perplexed or angered that we don’t appreciate what their sense of the good is. Religion and politics become fractured into different camps taking opposing positions on complex issues. In arguing we all forget we’re living on the same planet with each other.
For hundreds of years philosophers endeavoured to use language with rational argument to define the good. But a new move is afoot. Could science, with its powerful tools of enquiry, its capacity for demonstration and, its edifice of the known answer the question for us? Can science finally tell us what is good, what is moral, what is to be valued, sought, practiced and, preserved?
Science and the Good: The tragic quest for the foundations of morality poses these questions. First comes an examination of the progress of philosophy around the delineation of the good. Then the book delves into the more recent efforts of science to address the issue. There are the findings of evolutionary psychology (for example, the prosocial behaviors such as apparent altruism in some primates) and those of neurobiology (with the identification of brain structures involved in ethical decision making). The conclusion? At this stage of enquiry, science can only tell us what is rather than how we ought to be. Unfortunately, science’s understanding of what is good happens to be wracked with methodological difficulties and over-reach in its interpretations.
So, is this a good book? I imagine it is as supplementary reading in a university philosophy course. With my long time interest in science, I was drawn to some of the accounts of the methods of moral scientists (thus described not as a comment on their character, just the focus of their endeavours). But I grew tired of the intellectual hand-wringing. It all seemed to just miss the point for me of why I feel so strongly my sense of the moral and the good while others feel so strongly differently, even oppositely, than do I.
What the book lacked for me was a sense of humanity and story. Obviously, those are strong in the sense for me of what is good when I read. A few poignant anecdotes would have gone a long way to suggest that the author’s not only thought about this, but actually reflected on it in a human sort of way.
That said, I could agree with the course of action proposed in the final chapter. Rather than seeking a morality that would be right at the exclusion of others, instead we can value differences, entering into dialogue for the purpose of respecting and understanding.
KIRKBY, Bruce
Blue Sky Kingdom
★★★★★
A few months ago, I read the much lauded Eat Pray Love, still iconic 20 years after publication. I thought that perhaps there must be something to be said for that which has been so celebrated.
Memoir writing, particularly of a travel genre, is tricky I guess. It needs to be personal without being self-obsessed. It needs to celebrate what can be experienced of other places and circumstances without being self-indulgent. It needs to romanticize to amuse a wide swash of readership.
It must be hard to get it right. I suppose a lot of the devotees of EPL have thought it did.
But now I have read another.
Blue Sky Kingdom goes far beyond getting it right. It is deeply moving in authenticity. It is warped through and through with profound respect. It finds beauty within the barren as well as in the majesty of high mountains. It is fully, unabashedly, humble and gentle. It celebrates Buddhist life, not as religion but as a profoundly spiritual way to live. It doesn’t shy away from the difficult, it allows the difficult to transform. It not only acknowledges that life is hard, it participates in the hard.
A Canadian family, mom and dad and two young children, make for a Buddhist monastery in the Indian Himalayas. No, they don’t stay at an Ashram with a set program of spiritual discipline for westerners as did the author of EPL, they live for three months with an elderly Lama in his humble home and participate in the life of the community—life as it has been lived for hundreds (or maybe thousands) of years in a remote mountain valley. They trek in over high mountain passes, often with the father carrying his six-year-old son on his back. They stay long enough to be deeply transformed by the simplicity and hard work of survival as practiced by an ancient and functional people.
In the process the family grapples with the unique characteristics of a son diagnosed on the autistic spectrum. He flourishes under the more natural, less stimulating context. The bonds of relationship within the family deepen.
Throughout the narrative of EPL the author struggled with the emotional baggage she brought with her. I sort of remember there was finally some resolution of that—sort of, there was, wasn’t there? The experience of this Canadian family in the high Himalayan valley couldn’t be burdened by western emotional and cultural baggage, there was enough to carry for basic survival on their trek. No room for a relationship hangover while living with real people, managing real survival in the functional ways of sustainable agriculture and community.
Please don’t read Blue Sky Kingdom if you need to be entertained. There are other books, popular ones, that will provide that for you. Read Blue Sky Kingdom if you seek something that is real.
Memoir writing, particularly of a travel genre, is tricky I guess. It needs to be personal without being self-obsessed. It needs to celebrate what can be experienced of other places and circumstances without being self-indulgent. It needs to romanticize to amuse a wide swash of readership.
It must be hard to get it right. I suppose a lot of the devotees of EPL have thought it did.
But now I have read another.
Blue Sky Kingdom goes far beyond getting it right. It is deeply moving in authenticity. It is warped through and through with profound respect. It finds beauty within the barren as well as in the majesty of high mountains. It is fully, unabashedly, humble and gentle. It celebrates Buddhist life, not as religion but as a profoundly spiritual way to live. It doesn’t shy away from the difficult, it allows the difficult to transform. It not only acknowledges that life is hard, it participates in the hard.
A Canadian family, mom and dad and two young children, make for a Buddhist monastery in the Indian Himalayas. No, they don’t stay at an Ashram with a set program of spiritual discipline for westerners as did the author of EPL, they live for three months with an elderly Lama in his humble home and participate in the life of the community—life as it has been lived for hundreds (or maybe thousands) of years in a remote mountain valley. They trek in over high mountain passes, often with the father carrying his six-year-old son on his back. They stay long enough to be deeply transformed by the simplicity and hard work of survival as practiced by an ancient and functional people.
In the process the family grapples with the unique characteristics of a son diagnosed on the autistic spectrum. He flourishes under the more natural, less stimulating context. The bonds of relationship within the family deepen.
Throughout the narrative of EPL the author struggled with the emotional baggage she brought with her. I sort of remember there was finally some resolution of that—sort of, there was, wasn’t there? The experience of this Canadian family in the high Himalayan valley couldn’t be burdened by western emotional and cultural baggage, there was enough to carry for basic survival on their trek. No room for a relationship hangover while living with real people, managing real survival in the functional ways of sustainable agriculture and community.
Please don’t read Blue Sky Kingdom if you need to be entertained. There are other books, popular ones, that will provide that for you. Read Blue Sky Kingdom if you seek something that is real.
KLEIN, Ezra
Why We're Polarized
★★★★★
There is a quote in Chapter Five that sums it up pretty well: One way of looking at Trump is a disruptive force that crashed, like a once-in-a-generation comet, into American politics. But the other way of looking at Trump -- the correct way -- is as a master marketer who astutely read the market.
As a Canadian watching American politics, I’ve felt perplexed at how a country could allow itself to degenerate so. And, I am fearful that the same toxic mix of arrogance and entitlement is leaking across our own southern border to infect us here.
Why We’re Polarized offers an explanation of the current state of politics in the United States, one rooted in a sociological and historic reflection. It’s analysis is insightful, integrative and engaging. The book identifies a complex of factors including the very nature of how humans identify themselves, ideological focusing, demographic change, and media context that have combined to create the current situation.
The scary part is … the market the master marketer had astutely read was there for him to exploit.
As the chapters progressed, I found myself feeling more and more despondent about the situation in the USA. As I read on, it became clear that the current state is an outgrowth of systemic issues that will likely remain entrenched. What is happening isn’t an aberration (oh how comforting that would be!) but a natural consequence.
I found myself yearning for a last chapter that would provide hope. Klein offers some suggestions that could turn things around. Unfortunately, those suggestions seem unlikely to be pursued and paltry to face the contextual behemoth giving rise to the current political situation.
What Klein doesn’t provide are scenarios of where all this might yet lead. Perhaps, despite all that he has told us, that in itself would be too scary to even consider.
As a Canadian watching American politics, I’ve felt perplexed at how a country could allow itself to degenerate so. And, I am fearful that the same toxic mix of arrogance and entitlement is leaking across our own southern border to infect us here.
Why We’re Polarized offers an explanation of the current state of politics in the United States, one rooted in a sociological and historic reflection. It’s analysis is insightful, integrative and engaging. The book identifies a complex of factors including the very nature of how humans identify themselves, ideological focusing, demographic change, and media context that have combined to create the current situation.
The scary part is … the market the master marketer had astutely read was there for him to exploit.
As the chapters progressed, I found myself feeling more and more despondent about the situation in the USA. As I read on, it became clear that the current state is an outgrowth of systemic issues that will likely remain entrenched. What is happening isn’t an aberration (oh how comforting that would be!) but a natural consequence.
I found myself yearning for a last chapter that would provide hope. Klein offers some suggestions that could turn things around. Unfortunately, those suggestions seem unlikely to be pursued and paltry to face the contextual behemoth giving rise to the current political situation.
What Klein doesn’t provide are scenarios of where all this might yet lead. Perhaps, despite all that he has told us, that in itself would be too scary to even consider.
KOBES DU MEZ, Kristin
Jesus and John Wayne
★★★★★
There is something uniquely satisfying about a book that shatters what one has always thought; and then, absent that old notion, the world is rendered to make more sense.
Jesus and John Wayne did that for me.
Initially, I wasn’t going to read this book, turned off by the title. I was never a John Wayne fan but that was probably because my childhood family was too Christian to go to movies. And, I grew up with a Gospel Church Sunday School notion of a Jesus, one all wrapped up in believing what the hymns said. Those notions of Jesus did not sustain my adult spiritual development.
Yes, I was an Evangelical Christian in the early years of my life. I had to be, that’s what my family so fervently was. I’ve been able to get out of it, but never really got over it.
Then this book comes along, all about the evangelicalism that had been my childhood.
That old notion, the one now shattered, was that evangelicalism is a form of Christianity. It is not, at least not in America. It is a culture. To self-declare as an evangelical in the USA adherence to the actual teachings of Jesus is neither relevant nor appropriate (more about that later in this review). You may not even go to church. But you are probably a fan of Duck Dynasty.
American Evangelicalism (and I add “American” here because this book only considers evangelicalism from an American perspective) is about neither spirituality nor faith. It is about activism in politics and the entitlement of male privilege in society.
American Evangelicalism is about is a highly gendered society. Under the guise of religion it impels males to be hyper-masculinized and women to submit to male domination monikered as “leadership”. Men are to rule their families, protect the chastity of their daughters. Women are to provide the sexual outlet for men, sustain the home as a pleasant place and make babies. And that is it: the way society is to be ordered.
Men have to have the balls to militarily kill others (war is a good thing because it provides the outlet for male aggression). One is not to love one’s enemies as the Christ Jesus taught. One is to militantly defend against them, at home and abroad, annihilating them as the very personification of evil.
From Billy Graham and John Wayne of a half century ago, to the current High Priest of Evangelicalism, Donald Trump, a war for the minds and loyalty of Americans has been fought. I use the term “war” deliberately as the Evangelical identity is to always be that of a warrior, never a peacemaker.
Dozens of like-minded men took over church hierarchies and pastoral training to champion the male cause, writing books on family life and sexuality, speaking in churches. They theologized male domination, promoting it as a part of a God-given responsibility for the men to be the leaders in their families and churches. Along the way, couple of influential women pushed forward the female side of the gender equation, subservient to the right of males to lead (dominate) and the responsibility of women to submit. A doctrinal stance (complementarianism) was elucidated. Over decades this prominently male run movement prepared America to accept and embrace a highly masculinized High Priest to rule their land, as a Christian nation. They did so with the tools of culture (media, church and politics) and in so doing turned what had been faith and belief in God into adherence to a culture of authoritarian power and male dominance.
Donald Trump fit the role. Despite his ignorance of the Bible, his character flaws, his arrogance of wealth, his disdain for the structures and laws of American society, he fit given his wealth, masculinity and charisma. American Evangelicals flocked to his support and continue to do so. It had taken 50 years to acculturate the teachings of church and faith into a movement which would prepare America. Donald Trump was able to detect the opportunity that movement created to further his wealth and power.
Often as I read this book, I thought about the one “sermon” that we have in the Biblical Gospels as given by Jesus: the Sermon on the Mount containing the Beatitudes. I wondered whether that teaching (which includes the blessedness of being meek, being peacemakers, being pure of heart) would be mentioned in this book. Well, it was. Twice. Both times it was dismissed as inappropriate and irrelevant to what America needed to embrace within its politics and militaristic place in the world. No need of the teachings of Jesus in this American Evangelicalism; they’d just get in the way.
Over the last handful of years I’d been incredulous as to how Donald Trump would be so highly embraced by Evangelicals in America.
Now it all makes sense. Sad and scary sense.
Jesus and John Wayne did that for me.
Initially, I wasn’t going to read this book, turned off by the title. I was never a John Wayne fan but that was probably because my childhood family was too Christian to go to movies. And, I grew up with a Gospel Church Sunday School notion of a Jesus, one all wrapped up in believing what the hymns said. Those notions of Jesus did not sustain my adult spiritual development.
Yes, I was an Evangelical Christian in the early years of my life. I had to be, that’s what my family so fervently was. I’ve been able to get out of it, but never really got over it.
Then this book comes along, all about the evangelicalism that had been my childhood.
That old notion, the one now shattered, was that evangelicalism is a form of Christianity. It is not, at least not in America. It is a culture. To self-declare as an evangelical in the USA adherence to the actual teachings of Jesus is neither relevant nor appropriate (more about that later in this review). You may not even go to church. But you are probably a fan of Duck Dynasty.
American Evangelicalism (and I add “American” here because this book only considers evangelicalism from an American perspective) is about neither spirituality nor faith. It is about activism in politics and the entitlement of male privilege in society.
American Evangelicalism is about is a highly gendered society. Under the guise of religion it impels males to be hyper-masculinized and women to submit to male domination monikered as “leadership”. Men are to rule their families, protect the chastity of their daughters. Women are to provide the sexual outlet for men, sustain the home as a pleasant place and make babies. And that is it: the way society is to be ordered.
Men have to have the balls to militarily kill others (war is a good thing because it provides the outlet for male aggression). One is not to love one’s enemies as the Christ Jesus taught. One is to militantly defend against them, at home and abroad, annihilating them as the very personification of evil.
From Billy Graham and John Wayne of a half century ago, to the current High Priest of Evangelicalism, Donald Trump, a war for the minds and loyalty of Americans has been fought. I use the term “war” deliberately as the Evangelical identity is to always be that of a warrior, never a peacemaker.
Dozens of like-minded men took over church hierarchies and pastoral training to champion the male cause, writing books on family life and sexuality, speaking in churches. They theologized male domination, promoting it as a part of a God-given responsibility for the men to be the leaders in their families and churches. Along the way, couple of influential women pushed forward the female side of the gender equation, subservient to the right of males to lead (dominate) and the responsibility of women to submit. A doctrinal stance (complementarianism) was elucidated. Over decades this prominently male run movement prepared America to accept and embrace a highly masculinized High Priest to rule their land, as a Christian nation. They did so with the tools of culture (media, church and politics) and in so doing turned what had been faith and belief in God into adherence to a culture of authoritarian power and male dominance.
Donald Trump fit the role. Despite his ignorance of the Bible, his character flaws, his arrogance of wealth, his disdain for the structures and laws of American society, he fit given his wealth, masculinity and charisma. American Evangelicals flocked to his support and continue to do so. It had taken 50 years to acculturate the teachings of church and faith into a movement which would prepare America. Donald Trump was able to detect the opportunity that movement created to further his wealth and power.
Often as I read this book, I thought about the one “sermon” that we have in the Biblical Gospels as given by Jesus: the Sermon on the Mount containing the Beatitudes. I wondered whether that teaching (which includes the blessedness of being meek, being peacemakers, being pure of heart) would be mentioned in this book. Well, it was. Twice. Both times it was dismissed as inappropriate and irrelevant to what America needed to embrace within its politics and militaristic place in the world. No need of the teachings of Jesus in this American Evangelicalism; they’d just get in the way.
Over the last handful of years I’d been incredulous as to how Donald Trump would be so highly embraced by Evangelicals in America.
Now it all makes sense. Sad and scary sense.
LIPSKY, David
The Parrot and the Igloo
★★★★☆
Notice the subtitle of this book: Climate and the Science of Denial.
It’s a bit of sleight of hand, that particular subtitle. But then, so is much of this book (more about that later in this review).
The book is certainly about climate. It is about the ever burgeoning body of scientific evidence our planet is being warmed by human activity through the burning of fossil fuels, evidence increasingly accumulated by meticulous scientists over more than a century. And the book is certainly about the denial of it all.
But this book is not about the science of that denial. It is about the mechanisms of that denial.
The honing of these denial mechanisms did not start with the climate debate. They were developed by the tobacco industry to deny the link between smoking and cancer. That denial went on for decades until the late 1990s when a lawsuit over second hand smoke sent the tobacco industry into retreat from its denial. The tactics, and indeed some of the same folk, that led the cause of denialism for tobacco then came into the service of climate change denial.
Certainly, the deniers claim there to be science in their denials. They seek out spokesmen purporting to be scientists (often those without legitimate scientific credentials specific to climate, or even those who are not scientists at all) to push forward their claims. Whatever they could find that looks like science supporting their position they labelled as sound science and whatever provides evidence that the climate is changing and the planet is warming was labelled as junk science.
And that in itself is quite the sleight of hand: the use of those two little adjectives.
That was but one of the mechanisms to shift public opinion away from action on the climate. Here’s another. When there were scientific findings that did not support their position, they repeatedly stated that more research is needed before any policy could be created or action taken based on what has already been found. Delay is almost as good as denial.
Oh, and another little trick they came up with was adding the prefix gate onto the word climate. Nothing like duping the American public by warning them that they’re being duped. Clever indeed.
It didn’t really matter that tobacco smoke killed its users, the industry just needed them to support its business bottom line by buying cigarettes. Thus it needed to deny the linkage between the product and the illness it contributed to. And it makes no difference that we warm the planet into eventual catastrophic climate change; we just need people to keep burning fossil fuels, supporting the oil industry with its capitalistic motives and the political ideology that supports it. There is money, and ego, and power at stake.
But there’s another sleight of hand in this book. It is way this book is written. Initially I was annoyed by the writing style, a style intent on being entertaining, amusing even. It is full of metaphor and pop culture analogy. For most of the book I actually found the style quite distracting. It was a style that begged the reader to look here, look at the clever way I have written this: much like the magician creates distraction to cover the movements that create the trick. Then by the end of the book I was shaken out of being annoyed by the sudden realization how incredibly angry I felt. We’ve been tricked! And we never even knew it was happening.
I do thank the author for illustrating the mechanisms used by denialists. But, what about that subtitle, the promised science of denial? Unfortunately, that science is not reported in this book. I suspect it can be found somewhere in understanding the architecture of the human brain, or the way the mind cogitates and morphs external reality in the service of identity continuity and accustomed lifestyle. Perhaps anthropologists and sociologists might be able to help us understand tribalism and how it safeguards internal social order by lying about and mischaracterizing others, vilifying them into enemies. Historians might help us see the ascent of civilizations and their subsequent decline through denying the need to change.
No, this book is not about the science of denial. That subtitle is just sleight of hand. It is about denial of science when it would make us uncomfortable and force us to take responsible action.
Finally, a personal note.
When I worked as a psychologist I had two clients who smoked themselves to death, literally. They still sought out the comfort of their cigarettes on their lung cancer death beds. Now we are doing the same to our planet.
It’s a bit of sleight of hand, that particular subtitle. But then, so is much of this book (more about that later in this review).
The book is certainly about climate. It is about the ever burgeoning body of scientific evidence our planet is being warmed by human activity through the burning of fossil fuels, evidence increasingly accumulated by meticulous scientists over more than a century. And the book is certainly about the denial of it all.
But this book is not about the science of that denial. It is about the mechanisms of that denial.
The honing of these denial mechanisms did not start with the climate debate. They were developed by the tobacco industry to deny the link between smoking and cancer. That denial went on for decades until the late 1990s when a lawsuit over second hand smoke sent the tobacco industry into retreat from its denial. The tactics, and indeed some of the same folk, that led the cause of denialism for tobacco then came into the service of climate change denial.
Certainly, the deniers claim there to be science in their denials. They seek out spokesmen purporting to be scientists (often those without legitimate scientific credentials specific to climate, or even those who are not scientists at all) to push forward their claims. Whatever they could find that looks like science supporting their position they labelled as sound science and whatever provides evidence that the climate is changing and the planet is warming was labelled as junk science.
And that in itself is quite the sleight of hand: the use of those two little adjectives.
That was but one of the mechanisms to shift public opinion away from action on the climate. Here’s another. When there were scientific findings that did not support their position, they repeatedly stated that more research is needed before any policy could be created or action taken based on what has already been found. Delay is almost as good as denial.
Oh, and another little trick they came up with was adding the prefix gate onto the word climate. Nothing like duping the American public by warning them that they’re being duped. Clever indeed.
It didn’t really matter that tobacco smoke killed its users, the industry just needed them to support its business bottom line by buying cigarettes. Thus it needed to deny the linkage between the product and the illness it contributed to. And it makes no difference that we warm the planet into eventual catastrophic climate change; we just need people to keep burning fossil fuels, supporting the oil industry with its capitalistic motives and the political ideology that supports it. There is money, and ego, and power at stake.
But there’s another sleight of hand in this book. It is way this book is written. Initially I was annoyed by the writing style, a style intent on being entertaining, amusing even. It is full of metaphor and pop culture analogy. For most of the book I actually found the style quite distracting. It was a style that begged the reader to look here, look at the clever way I have written this: much like the magician creates distraction to cover the movements that create the trick. Then by the end of the book I was shaken out of being annoyed by the sudden realization how incredibly angry I felt. We’ve been tricked! And we never even knew it was happening.
I do thank the author for illustrating the mechanisms used by denialists. But, what about that subtitle, the promised science of denial? Unfortunately, that science is not reported in this book. I suspect it can be found somewhere in understanding the architecture of the human brain, or the way the mind cogitates and morphs external reality in the service of identity continuity and accustomed lifestyle. Perhaps anthropologists and sociologists might be able to help us understand tribalism and how it safeguards internal social order by lying about and mischaracterizing others, vilifying them into enemies. Historians might help us see the ascent of civilizations and their subsequent decline through denying the need to change.
No, this book is not about the science of denial. That subtitle is just sleight of hand. It is about denial of science when it would make us uncomfortable and force us to take responsible action.
Finally, a personal note.
When I worked as a psychologist I had two clients who smoked themselves to death, literally. They still sought out the comfort of their cigarettes on their lung cancer death beds. Now we are doing the same to our planet.
MARSH, Charles
Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer
★★★★☆
So I was curious.
I’d read somewhere about a German theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, how he’d been a part of a plot to assassinate Hitler.
You see in terms of church life, Hitler had taken over. In that takeover he’d been embraced by the German Evangelical Church in the 1930s. But participating in a plot to assassinate him, well that seemed like an unusual sort of thing for theologian Bonhoeffer to do.
And I thought reading about it would fulfil our exhortation to learn from the past. In our last few years I’ve observed the steamy relationship between the former President and the current evangelical church in the United States, how conservative Christians have embraced him. Could these two interlacings of authoritarian leader and organized church be the religious equivalent of the Spanish flu coming back as Covid a century later?
In my curiosity, I sought out this biography of Bonhoeffer.
Now a word of explanation, and keep in mind that I’m no scholar of church history. The nature of the German Evangelical Church was quite different from the current evangelicalism in the US. The sense I got from this biography was the German church was quite established and structured -- like with bishops and doctrine -- the dominant Christian church in the country.
Hitler took over the German Evangelical Church by authoritarian decree as German Chancellor, pushing his agenda for Aryan control of all German institutions. Indeed, the person Hitler appointed as Reichsbishof turned around and granted Hitler himself the title of Summas Episcopus (the head of the State church).
This is where dear Dietrich comes in. He felt that the church should be welcoming of all who would confess belief, including those of the Jewish race, not limited to those Aryan.
A collision course arises between the two. Indeed.
Hitler’s actions by authoritarian decree have a different flavour than Trump’s more recent courting of the American religious conservative movement. Shamelessly in his own pursuit of power, Trump dangled sparkling baubles of attraction before the religiously conservative—moving the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, appointing judges who while wearing the badge of religious freedom would limit the freedom of others, that sort of thing. Shamelessly, American religious conservatism accepted the seduction with its promise of power to influence the entire society. So it is different, now by seduction rather than decree.
Anyway, I’ve wondered if by any great repeat of history an American theologian would rise, like Bonhoeffer, to decry the politicization of the church. So far, I don’t think so. And reading the Bonhoeffer biography, perhaps I can understand why.
Hitler had Bonhoeffer executed for his treasonous involvement.
And to be clear here, it seems as though Bonhoeffer had relatively little to do with the assassination plot and struggled with the whole killing aspect of it. But he was rounded up as a result of evading being conscripted into the Nazi army. Then, with the others involved the assassination planning, he was put to death in the dying days of the Nazi regime.
So that’s the central story line.
As someone who believes that pursuit of theological correctness is the devil’s most devious device (although, I’m not a believer in a devil) I still regarded with some interest the evolution of Bonhoeffer’s theological stance. I could even relate to some of where he ended up toward the end of his short life. And that of course, was a pivotal part of this biography as well.
But what I found fascinating was the other subplot of the story. At the small seminary Bonhoeffer created he found companionship with one of his students, Eberhard Bethge. This companionship evolved to become his primary relationship, lasting the rest of his life. The two gave gifts to others signing as a couple, traveled together and shared the deepest of spiritual understandings. While it never was described as being sexual, this relationship is depicted as deeply integral for Bonhoeffer on a spiritual, emotional and companionship level. With the degree of ardor expressed in Bonhoeffer’s letters to Bethge, it’s a stretch to image it was not physical as well.
A biography need not detail sexual behaviour. We can allow privacy of that vulnerable aspect of human identity and life. Indeed these two men were in treacherous territory for it to be revealed if their relationship had extended to the sexual. Both were pastors and one was an internationally esteemed theologian. This whole story takes place with the background of Hitler’s persecution of homosexual persons.
I did a quick dive into commentary on this issue. Understandably, those in conservative religious ideology wanting to claim Bonhoeffer’s theological contributions would certainly declare that a sexual relationship between Bonhoeffer and Bethge is not to be presumed.
Just another curiosity I guess. But it does make the whole story somewhat more human.
Finally, I confess it took me weeks to get through this book (and I didn’t even bother to consult the hundreds of pages of end notes). I was determined, but it was a slog of a read.
As perhaps also is this lengthy review.
I’d read somewhere about a German theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, how he’d been a part of a plot to assassinate Hitler.
You see in terms of church life, Hitler had taken over. In that takeover he’d been embraced by the German Evangelical Church in the 1930s. But participating in a plot to assassinate him, well that seemed like an unusual sort of thing for theologian Bonhoeffer to do.
And I thought reading about it would fulfil our exhortation to learn from the past. In our last few years I’ve observed the steamy relationship between the former President and the current evangelical church in the United States, how conservative Christians have embraced him. Could these two interlacings of authoritarian leader and organized church be the religious equivalent of the Spanish flu coming back as Covid a century later?
In my curiosity, I sought out this biography of Bonhoeffer.
Now a word of explanation, and keep in mind that I’m no scholar of church history. The nature of the German Evangelical Church was quite different from the current evangelicalism in the US. The sense I got from this biography was the German church was quite established and structured -- like with bishops and doctrine -- the dominant Christian church in the country.
Hitler took over the German Evangelical Church by authoritarian decree as German Chancellor, pushing his agenda for Aryan control of all German institutions. Indeed, the person Hitler appointed as Reichsbishof turned around and granted Hitler himself the title of Summas Episcopus (the head of the State church).
This is where dear Dietrich comes in. He felt that the church should be welcoming of all who would confess belief, including those of the Jewish race, not limited to those Aryan.
A collision course arises between the two. Indeed.
Hitler’s actions by authoritarian decree have a different flavour than Trump’s more recent courting of the American religious conservative movement. Shamelessly in his own pursuit of power, Trump dangled sparkling baubles of attraction before the religiously conservative—moving the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, appointing judges who while wearing the badge of religious freedom would limit the freedom of others, that sort of thing. Shamelessly, American religious conservatism accepted the seduction with its promise of power to influence the entire society. So it is different, now by seduction rather than decree.
Anyway, I’ve wondered if by any great repeat of history an American theologian would rise, like Bonhoeffer, to decry the politicization of the church. So far, I don’t think so. And reading the Bonhoeffer biography, perhaps I can understand why.
Hitler had Bonhoeffer executed for his treasonous involvement.
And to be clear here, it seems as though Bonhoeffer had relatively little to do with the assassination plot and struggled with the whole killing aspect of it. But he was rounded up as a result of evading being conscripted into the Nazi army. Then, with the others involved the assassination planning, he was put to death in the dying days of the Nazi regime.
So that’s the central story line.
As someone who believes that pursuit of theological correctness is the devil’s most devious device (although, I’m not a believer in a devil) I still regarded with some interest the evolution of Bonhoeffer’s theological stance. I could even relate to some of where he ended up toward the end of his short life. And that of course, was a pivotal part of this biography as well.
But what I found fascinating was the other subplot of the story. At the small seminary Bonhoeffer created he found companionship with one of his students, Eberhard Bethge. This companionship evolved to become his primary relationship, lasting the rest of his life. The two gave gifts to others signing as a couple, traveled together and shared the deepest of spiritual understandings. While it never was described as being sexual, this relationship is depicted as deeply integral for Bonhoeffer on a spiritual, emotional and companionship level. With the degree of ardor expressed in Bonhoeffer’s letters to Bethge, it’s a stretch to image it was not physical as well.
A biography need not detail sexual behaviour. We can allow privacy of that vulnerable aspect of human identity and life. Indeed these two men were in treacherous territory for it to be revealed if their relationship had extended to the sexual. Both were pastors and one was an internationally esteemed theologian. This whole story takes place with the background of Hitler’s persecution of homosexual persons.
I did a quick dive into commentary on this issue. Understandably, those in conservative religious ideology wanting to claim Bonhoeffer’s theological contributions would certainly declare that a sexual relationship between Bonhoeffer and Bethge is not to be presumed.
Just another curiosity I guess. But it does make the whole story somewhat more human.
Finally, I confess it took me weeks to get through this book (and I didn’t even bother to consult the hundreds of pages of end notes). I was determined, but it was a slog of a read.
As perhaps also is this lengthy review.
ONISHI, Bradley
Preparing for War
★★★★★
Donald Trump’s unwavering support from Evangelicals didn’t used to make any sense. Then Onishi explained it. Now it does. Horrifying and ominous sense.
In his youth, Onishi was a part of a Friends community. Not the sitcom, the Quakers. As a faith community, the values of social justice, pacifism and modesty of lifestyle characterized the Friends. Onishi was avid, and evangelical, in that faith. Thirty-five or so years later some of those former Friends were a part of a violent attack the US Capitol in support of a man who bragged about sexually assaulting women, touted his accumulation of wealth as his value, lied, disrespected others, used his political power to consort with oppressive dictators. Somehow the values of those Friends had flipped to the antithesis of what they'd used to be.
Onishi posits in Preparing for War that this is not an aberration. Trump’s idolization within the Evangelical church comes as a culmination of decades of political history that readied the Evangelical Church for him. Quite possibly, his political emergence and the events of January 6, 2020 are simply Act I of a still unfolding political drama. An ideological civil war is afoot dividing the United States of America as White Christian Nationalism wants to reclaim its reign, to take America … back.
Onishi traces the sixty year history of political conservatism’s dance with evangelical religion in the United States. America’s choice of a multiply-married movie star for President over a devout Baptist Sunday School teacher (Reagan over Carter in 1980) foreshadows the current Trump Biden contest. What Onishi doesn’t address is why this particular branch of the Christian religion, the evangelicals, was so vulnerable to become the delivery vehicle for authoritarian and xenophobic politics.
On the surface, this book is about Christianity in America. But just one formulation of Christianity is focused on here. Just one branch of the faith has been being used, appropriated, in the interests of entitlement and political power. The evangelicals have fallen for it. Sadly, it is not about spiritual matters at all, but ideological ones of privilege and power.
Of course, not all who profess a Christian faith want to use it to oppress those who are BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Colour) and the LGBTQ+. Not all Christians wish to entitle powerful men to take away rights from women. I expect that there are still both Friends, and friends, who wish to assist the poor in our communities, to live out their faith with a sense of kindness and fairness rather than entitlement and oppression.
I doubt if those in the Evangelical enclaves will read Onishi’s book. They are currently heady or complacent within their new-found political power. But it is important for the rest of us to do so. For those who want to live in a society that is diverse, peaceable, and just this book helps to understand the ideology of those who do not. It is important for us to understand how this has come to be, and where it is headed. They are preparing for war. If they can’t convert us into their camp, or if we happen not to be straight members of the white race, we are their enemy.
In his youth, Onishi was a part of a Friends community. Not the sitcom, the Quakers. As a faith community, the values of social justice, pacifism and modesty of lifestyle characterized the Friends. Onishi was avid, and evangelical, in that faith. Thirty-five or so years later some of those former Friends were a part of a violent attack the US Capitol in support of a man who bragged about sexually assaulting women, touted his accumulation of wealth as his value, lied, disrespected others, used his political power to consort with oppressive dictators. Somehow the values of those Friends had flipped to the antithesis of what they'd used to be.
Onishi posits in Preparing for War that this is not an aberration. Trump’s idolization within the Evangelical church comes as a culmination of decades of political history that readied the Evangelical Church for him. Quite possibly, his political emergence and the events of January 6, 2020 are simply Act I of a still unfolding political drama. An ideological civil war is afoot dividing the United States of America as White Christian Nationalism wants to reclaim its reign, to take America … back.
Onishi traces the sixty year history of political conservatism’s dance with evangelical religion in the United States. America’s choice of a multiply-married movie star for President over a devout Baptist Sunday School teacher (Reagan over Carter in 1980) foreshadows the current Trump Biden contest. What Onishi doesn’t address is why this particular branch of the Christian religion, the evangelicals, was so vulnerable to become the delivery vehicle for authoritarian and xenophobic politics.
On the surface, this book is about Christianity in America. But just one formulation of Christianity is focused on here. Just one branch of the faith has been being used, appropriated, in the interests of entitlement and political power. The evangelicals have fallen for it. Sadly, it is not about spiritual matters at all, but ideological ones of privilege and power.
Of course, not all who profess a Christian faith want to use it to oppress those who are BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Colour) and the LGBTQ+. Not all Christians wish to entitle powerful men to take away rights from women. I expect that there are still both Friends, and friends, who wish to assist the poor in our communities, to live out their faith with a sense of kindness and fairness rather than entitlement and oppression.
I doubt if those in the Evangelical enclaves will read Onishi’s book. They are currently heady or complacent within their new-found political power. But it is important for the rest of us to do so. For those who want to live in a society that is diverse, peaceable, and just this book helps to understand the ideology of those who do not. It is important for us to understand how this has come to be, and where it is headed. They are preparing for war. If they can’t convert us into their camp, or if we happen not to be straight members of the white race, we are their enemy.
PANG, Camilla
An Outsider's Guide to Humans
★★★★☆
Compelling, Challenging, Inspiring.
This book is a must read for all neurotypicals who are in relationship with neurodivergent individuals. It will be particularly helpful for mental health professionals and others who need to develop working relationships with neurodivergent persons such as educators, employers, and healthcare workers. Camilla self-identifies as on the Autistic Spectrum plus struggling with ADHD and Anxiety Disorder. Camilla Pang's analysis of how humans behave is rooted in her understanding of the sciences. She draws analogies from scientific theory to explain and predict the overwhelming complexity of social behaviour that challenges her as a neurodivergent individual. Sometimes the metaphors (and the science they represent) are baffling to the reader, much like life has been for Camilla Pang.
The book is both thoughtful and thought provoking.
This book is a must read for all neurotypicals who are in relationship with neurodivergent individuals. It will be particularly helpful for mental health professionals and others who need to develop working relationships with neurodivergent persons such as educators, employers, and healthcare workers. Camilla self-identifies as on the Autistic Spectrum plus struggling with ADHD and Anxiety Disorder. Camilla Pang's analysis of how humans behave is rooted in her understanding of the sciences. She draws analogies from scientific theory to explain and predict the overwhelming complexity of social behaviour that challenges her as a neurodivergent individual. Sometimes the metaphors (and the science they represent) are baffling to the reader, much like life has been for Camilla Pang.
The book is both thoughtful and thought provoking.
PARKER, Tim
Trapped by the High
★★★☆☆
Addiction: such a powerful and destructive force within the life of a person and the fabric of society. How are we to understand it?
Trapped by the High takes the reader to the molecular, cellular and structural nature of the human brain to provide a foundation of understanding. There, Parker, deftly relates the actions of substances of abuse (e.g. opioids, cannabis, stimulants, alcohol) on neurons in the pleasure circuitry of the mammalian brain to what is observed behaviourally when these substances are abused.
Parker zooms back out to the perspective of history and politics to set a context for the current state of societal problems of addiction. All of this is done in service of sorting out the most effective way legally, and in terms of societal response, to address the problems of addiction. He has some clear recommendations in his final chapter.
Parker’s delight in how pieces of the puzzle fit together comes through strongly in his writing. The back cover describes him as a seasoned professor of psychology, and one suspects that he would have been entertaining as well as enlightening as a lecturer.
This book will never become buried too deeply on my shelf. From it I learned a lot about the drugs of abuse and will be sure to use this book as a reference to refresh my understanding of their mechanisms and treacheries.
This book is not currently available through distribution networks but you can obtain a copy by direct request to Dr. Parker at https://timparkerphd.ca/index.php/trapped-by-the-high/
Trapped by the High takes the reader to the molecular, cellular and structural nature of the human brain to provide a foundation of understanding. There, Parker, deftly relates the actions of substances of abuse (e.g. opioids, cannabis, stimulants, alcohol) on neurons in the pleasure circuitry of the mammalian brain to what is observed behaviourally when these substances are abused.
Parker zooms back out to the perspective of history and politics to set a context for the current state of societal problems of addiction. All of this is done in service of sorting out the most effective way legally, and in terms of societal response, to address the problems of addiction. He has some clear recommendations in his final chapter.
Parker’s delight in how pieces of the puzzle fit together comes through strongly in his writing. The back cover describes him as a seasoned professor of psychology, and one suspects that he would have been entertaining as well as enlightening as a lecturer.
This book will never become buried too deeply on my shelf. From it I learned a lot about the drugs of abuse and will be sure to use this book as a reference to refresh my understanding of their mechanisms and treacheries.
This book is not currently available through distribution networks but you can obtain a copy by direct request to Dr. Parker at https://timparkerphd.ca/index.php/trapped-by-the-high/
SACKS, Oliver
Musicophilia
★★★★☆
As neurology is his life work, the appreciation of music must one of his life loves. Oliver Sacks ably integrates both in this fascinating account of how the brain and music intertwine.
Comprised almost entirely of case studies, Sacks illuminates the complexity of the brain’s processing of music. We must depart the facile model of discrete components contributing their own separate functions---within the skull is not at all like under the hood of the car, or the linking together of components in an entertainment system. Instead, in this book we come to appreciate a processing model that is diffuse and interwoven throughout the myriad structures and connections of the human brain.
Through the examinations of what can go wrong through genetics, strokes, atrophy and infection Sacks reveals the complexity of how music is subjectively experienced. From rhythm to pitch to emotion and personal meaning our brain’s work with and through music is complexly interconnected. What seems singular, the production or appreciation of music, is revealed as many facetted.
Rather than a didactic treatise, this collection of thematically related case studies leads us to an inductive appreciation of how the brain works to create the mind. For those unfamiliar with the architecture of the human brain, having a model to refer back to would likely be helpful in the reading of this book. It may also be handy to have a musical library such as a streaming service at hand to hear the pieces referred to.
Sacks weaves into his science a deep appreciation and respect for the human beings whom he has observed and treated in his work as a neurologist. As such there is a strong sense of reverence and humanism in his writing.
This is not a simple read. Just a fascinating one.
Comprised almost entirely of case studies, Sacks illuminates the complexity of the brain’s processing of music. We must depart the facile model of discrete components contributing their own separate functions---within the skull is not at all like under the hood of the car, or the linking together of components in an entertainment system. Instead, in this book we come to appreciate a processing model that is diffuse and interwoven throughout the myriad structures and connections of the human brain.
Through the examinations of what can go wrong through genetics, strokes, atrophy and infection Sacks reveals the complexity of how music is subjectively experienced. From rhythm to pitch to emotion and personal meaning our brain’s work with and through music is complexly interconnected. What seems singular, the production or appreciation of music, is revealed as many facetted.
Rather than a didactic treatise, this collection of thematically related case studies leads us to an inductive appreciation of how the brain works to create the mind. For those unfamiliar with the architecture of the human brain, having a model to refer back to would likely be helpful in the reading of this book. It may also be handy to have a musical library such as a streaming service at hand to hear the pieces referred to.
Sacks weaves into his science a deep appreciation and respect for the human beings whom he has observed and treated in his work as a neurologist. As such there is a strong sense of reverence and humanism in his writing.
This is not a simple read. Just a fascinating one.
SAKAMOTO, Mark
Forgiveness
★★★★★
As a psychotherapist I had the privilege to be with clients struggling with the whole idea of forgiveness. They had the notion that forgiving the person who’d harmed them was the path to healing and recovery. But some folk couldn’t navigate that maneuver and remained stuck. I urged them to consider the capacity to forgive as a spiritual gift that one might have occasion to receive but not an obligation or a necessary step for healing.
And so, I approached this book called Forgiveness with apprehension. What could be written on this perilous topic that would unlock the mystery?
Author Mark Sakamoto begins his memoir with interlacing chapters documenting the stories of two of his grandparents. His maternal grandfather, Ralph, a resident of the Magdalene Islands on Canada’s east coast, signs up to fight in WWII and is dispatched to Hong Kong. This small British colony is soon overrun by Japanese soldiers and Ralph survives years in the brutality of POW camps. At the same time, Mark’s paternal grandmother, Mitsue, a young Japanese Canadian living in Vancouver, is displaced from her home. With her family she is stripped of her possessions and community to slave in harsh and barely livable conditions on the prairies.
The cruelty sustained by both could have lead to bitter hatred, but … Mark’s father (Mitsue’s son) and mother (Ralph’s daughter) fall in love. To support their love, both Ralph and Mitsue embrace this young interracial couple. They do so despite the past trauma of their own lives. The harm done by Canada to the Japanese on the Canadian West Coast and the harm done by the Japanese to Canadian POWs in Hong Kong fades to the background, replaced by love for the young couple.
Breaking down is the easy part. Anyone, at any time, can break down. The act of coming together again is what makes the hero. Moving on, with an open heart, seems, at times, impossible. But it’s not. (Chapter 11).
But Mark has his own journey of forgiveness. It comes in his grief after the death of his mother. His own childhood became difficult as his mother left his father and entered an abusive relationship, eventually taking to alcohol to cope. Mark disengaged from his mother to move on his life, distancing himself with his studies and career from the misery of her later life. Flying back across the country to her death bed, Mark struggles with his own decision to disengage from her in her final years. Then, remembering of the love she showed in his early childhood, he spreads her ashes in a place she would have wished. It is his embrace of forgiveness.
I realized now that forgiveness is not a transaction. It is not an exchange. Forgiveness has nothing to do with the past. (Chapter 15).
As was true for Ralph and Mitsue, forgiveness for Mark was moving on with an open heart, being gracious and respectful in the present.
There was much compelling in Mark’s life story. I was taken by the irony of one scene in particular. Mark, as a young lawyer working as an aide to the Leader of the Opposition for the Canadian Parliament, found himself in the Canadian war room where the decisions were made to send Canadian soldiers to Hong Kong and to dispossess and displace Japanese Canadians on the West Coast. The decisions made there had been devastatingly consequential to the grandparents he so loved.
This book, Forgiveness, challenges Canadians to have open hearts. Within our history is the sacrificing our young men in war and the commission of the cultural genocide of a racial group within our own country. To move on we must respect and honour what has happened but have our hearts remain open to living with grace in the present.
And so, I approached this book called Forgiveness with apprehension. What could be written on this perilous topic that would unlock the mystery?
Author Mark Sakamoto begins his memoir with interlacing chapters documenting the stories of two of his grandparents. His maternal grandfather, Ralph, a resident of the Magdalene Islands on Canada’s east coast, signs up to fight in WWII and is dispatched to Hong Kong. This small British colony is soon overrun by Japanese soldiers and Ralph survives years in the brutality of POW camps. At the same time, Mark’s paternal grandmother, Mitsue, a young Japanese Canadian living in Vancouver, is displaced from her home. With her family she is stripped of her possessions and community to slave in harsh and barely livable conditions on the prairies.
The cruelty sustained by both could have lead to bitter hatred, but … Mark’s father (Mitsue’s son) and mother (Ralph’s daughter) fall in love. To support their love, both Ralph and Mitsue embrace this young interracial couple. They do so despite the past trauma of their own lives. The harm done by Canada to the Japanese on the Canadian West Coast and the harm done by the Japanese to Canadian POWs in Hong Kong fades to the background, replaced by love for the young couple.
Breaking down is the easy part. Anyone, at any time, can break down. The act of coming together again is what makes the hero. Moving on, with an open heart, seems, at times, impossible. But it’s not. (Chapter 11).
But Mark has his own journey of forgiveness. It comes in his grief after the death of his mother. His own childhood became difficult as his mother left his father and entered an abusive relationship, eventually taking to alcohol to cope. Mark disengaged from his mother to move on his life, distancing himself with his studies and career from the misery of her later life. Flying back across the country to her death bed, Mark struggles with his own decision to disengage from her in her final years. Then, remembering of the love she showed in his early childhood, he spreads her ashes in a place she would have wished. It is his embrace of forgiveness.
I realized now that forgiveness is not a transaction. It is not an exchange. Forgiveness has nothing to do with the past. (Chapter 15).
As was true for Ralph and Mitsue, forgiveness for Mark was moving on with an open heart, being gracious and respectful in the present.
There was much compelling in Mark’s life story. I was taken by the irony of one scene in particular. Mark, as a young lawyer working as an aide to the Leader of the Opposition for the Canadian Parliament, found himself in the Canadian war room where the decisions were made to send Canadian soldiers to Hong Kong and to dispossess and displace Japanese Canadians on the West Coast. The decisions made there had been devastatingly consequential to the grandparents he so loved.
This book, Forgiveness, challenges Canadians to have open hearts. Within our history is the sacrificing our young men in war and the commission of the cultural genocide of a racial group within our own country. To move on we must respect and honour what has happened but have our hearts remain open to living with grace in the present.
SALBERG, Jill and GRAND, Sue
Wounds of History
★★★★☆
Over the last decade, news media in Canada have reported extensively on the profound trauma experienced by our First Nations peoples in the Indian Residential Schools. It has saddened us, and motivated us to acknowledge this tragedy perpetrated onto our aboriginal peoples. In this reflecting on this aspect of our history, we have come to appreciate that historical trauma does not remain only in the past, but is passed down to subsequent generations..
This book, Wounds of History: Repair and Resilience in the Trans-Generational Transmission of Trauma provides a collection of scholarly papers on the phenomenon from the psychoanalytic perspective.
In the USA the psychoanalytic understanding of trans-generational trauma has largely come from the immigration of WW2 Holocaust survivors. The psychoanalytic approach to psychiatry had immigrated to the USA with them. It took the passing of decades and generations for the one heritage to aid in the healing from the other.
Generational trauma (collective trauma against a generation, or generations, of a race) has occurred in other settings than just the Canadian Indian Residential Schools and the Holocaust. The collection of papers in Wounds of History illustrates the tragedy of generational trauma in several additional contexts. The slave trade of African Americans, the Chinese immigrating to the USA following the Cultural Revolution, the genocide of Armenians in the early 20th Century are other examples.
This book is not an easy or pleasant read. It is both sobering and disturbing. For the most part, the technical nature of this book’s content is not daunting. There was only one chapter in which I felt buffaloed by the psychoanalytic jargon. In addition to the theoretical analysis, the examples of trans-generational trauma are told by the survivors looking back into their own family history, or clinicians reviewing case treatment.
There is one glaring and disturbing omission in this collection of papers. When the impact on North American aboriginal peoples was discussed it referred only to the American Indians and the Alaskan Natives. Canada is far ahead of the USA in the social acceptance of responsibility for assisting the healing of subsequent generations of its First Nations peoples.
Canadian churches began making formal apologies for their role in the Indian Residential Schools in the 1990s. The Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, apologized on behalf of the government and the people of Canada in 2008, (the same year as did the Australian Prime Minister to the aboriginal peoples of Australia). In 2015 The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) published a report with recommendations to promote healing. A process for the survivors and nation has begun: respectfully listening to survivors speaking of the trauma; acknowledging that it has occurred; understanding the trans-generational impact; and, implementing culturally restorative practices.
Thus, this book displays an academic and cultural myopia I have found in other American non-fiction publications. Why is the wisdom from other parts of the world ignored? War and colonialism has plagued aboriginal peoples with abuse and disenfranchisement throughout history. It is regrettable that this collection is only able to give attention to what is being identified within the USA.
This book, Wounds of History: Repair and Resilience in the Trans-Generational Transmission of Trauma provides a collection of scholarly papers on the phenomenon from the psychoanalytic perspective.
In the USA the psychoanalytic understanding of trans-generational trauma has largely come from the immigration of WW2 Holocaust survivors. The psychoanalytic approach to psychiatry had immigrated to the USA with them. It took the passing of decades and generations for the one heritage to aid in the healing from the other.
Generational trauma (collective trauma against a generation, or generations, of a race) has occurred in other settings than just the Canadian Indian Residential Schools and the Holocaust. The collection of papers in Wounds of History illustrates the tragedy of generational trauma in several additional contexts. The slave trade of African Americans, the Chinese immigrating to the USA following the Cultural Revolution, the genocide of Armenians in the early 20th Century are other examples.
This book is not an easy or pleasant read. It is both sobering and disturbing. For the most part, the technical nature of this book’s content is not daunting. There was only one chapter in which I felt buffaloed by the psychoanalytic jargon. In addition to the theoretical analysis, the examples of trans-generational trauma are told by the survivors looking back into their own family history, or clinicians reviewing case treatment.
There is one glaring and disturbing omission in this collection of papers. When the impact on North American aboriginal peoples was discussed it referred only to the American Indians and the Alaskan Natives. Canada is far ahead of the USA in the social acceptance of responsibility for assisting the healing of subsequent generations of its First Nations peoples.
Canadian churches began making formal apologies for their role in the Indian Residential Schools in the 1990s. The Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, apologized on behalf of the government and the people of Canada in 2008, (the same year as did the Australian Prime Minister to the aboriginal peoples of Australia). In 2015 The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) published a report with recommendations to promote healing. A process for the survivors and nation has begun: respectfully listening to survivors speaking of the trauma; acknowledging that it has occurred; understanding the trans-generational impact; and, implementing culturally restorative practices.
Thus, this book displays an academic and cultural myopia I have found in other American non-fiction publications. Why is the wisdom from other parts of the world ignored? War and colonialism has plagued aboriginal peoples with abuse and disenfranchisement throughout history. It is regrettable that this collection is only able to give attention to what is being identified within the USA.
THEISE, Neil
Notes on Complexity
★★★★☆
Was I ever looking forward to reading Notes on Complexity. I was all set to have someone else explain some things that I'd noticed, explain it better than could I.
But I was disappointed.
Not that there wasn’t good stuff in the book. There was. In reading the book I have a better understanding of complexity theory and workings of complex systems. It was just that what I had noticed didn’t get mentioned.
The author, Neil Theise, a medical doctor with a specialty in pathology, found complex systems in entirely different places than I would ever have thought to look. I knew a bit about complexity theory and thought it was a far better foundation for understanding human behaviour, including mental health disorder, than the linear causation and the categorical approach that had characterized my education. The properties of complex systems posed by complexity theory, including self-regulation of systems, emergent properties and non-hierarchical relationships, would have provided a more nuanced way to understand and address the phenomena of my life work.
Further, in my own musings, as I broadened my consideration of the human condition to the social, cultural, economic, political and ideological level, the principles of complexity theory seemed to explain a whole lot there, too.
But those are not the sciences the author examined in illustrating complexity theory. Starting within his area of medical specialty, cellular biology, Theise identifies the principles of complexity at play in that fundamental component of all living things, the cell. But even more basic to that, he applies the same principles to explain what happens on the molecular level. And then, going even deeper, he takes those principles down to the atomic level. It appears that complexity theory within the natural sciences might very well be a unifying theory of everything. Okay.
I eagerly anticipated the jump the author was going to make in the second half of the book to the thorny issue of understanding consciousness. As a professional psychologist the main focus of my life work was the consciousness of my clients as manifest in their thoughts and feelings. How does that arise, emerging from the complexity of the human brain and mind? However, in pursuing the problem of consciousness, Notes on Complexity shifts attention to philosophy, especially the metaphysical including meditative spiritual practices, and theoretical mathematics. It all seemed to make incredibly amazing sense to the author. To him, more than to me.
When it comes right down to it, the thoughts and feelings that bubble up within my conscious mind, the things that give me a sense of meaning and identity, the interlacing multi-determinants of human behaviour, are yet another manifestation of that harmonious everything that this book elucidates. The same principles fit so well. I’ll just have to figure out how to elucidate them with the same rigor Neil Theise applies to the natural sciences and spiritual/philosophical thought.
By the way, you might want to check out the blog to be posted on September 15, 2024 where I apply the principles of complexity theory to my creative process as a musician and author.
But I was disappointed.
Not that there wasn’t good stuff in the book. There was. In reading the book I have a better understanding of complexity theory and workings of complex systems. It was just that what I had noticed didn’t get mentioned.
The author, Neil Theise, a medical doctor with a specialty in pathology, found complex systems in entirely different places than I would ever have thought to look. I knew a bit about complexity theory and thought it was a far better foundation for understanding human behaviour, including mental health disorder, than the linear causation and the categorical approach that had characterized my education. The properties of complex systems posed by complexity theory, including self-regulation of systems, emergent properties and non-hierarchical relationships, would have provided a more nuanced way to understand and address the phenomena of my life work.
Further, in my own musings, as I broadened my consideration of the human condition to the social, cultural, economic, political and ideological level, the principles of complexity theory seemed to explain a whole lot there, too.
But those are not the sciences the author examined in illustrating complexity theory. Starting within his area of medical specialty, cellular biology, Theise identifies the principles of complexity at play in that fundamental component of all living things, the cell. But even more basic to that, he applies the same principles to explain what happens on the molecular level. And then, going even deeper, he takes those principles down to the atomic level. It appears that complexity theory within the natural sciences might very well be a unifying theory of everything. Okay.
I eagerly anticipated the jump the author was going to make in the second half of the book to the thorny issue of understanding consciousness. As a professional psychologist the main focus of my life work was the consciousness of my clients as manifest in their thoughts and feelings. How does that arise, emerging from the complexity of the human brain and mind? However, in pursuing the problem of consciousness, Notes on Complexity shifts attention to philosophy, especially the metaphysical including meditative spiritual practices, and theoretical mathematics. It all seemed to make incredibly amazing sense to the author. To him, more than to me.
When it comes right down to it, the thoughts and feelings that bubble up within my conscious mind, the things that give me a sense of meaning and identity, the interlacing multi-determinants of human behaviour, are yet another manifestation of that harmonious everything that this book elucidates. The same principles fit so well. I’ll just have to figure out how to elucidate them with the same rigor Neil Theise applies to the natural sciences and spiritual/philosophical thought.
By the way, you might want to check out the blog to be posted on September 15, 2024 where I apply the principles of complexity theory to my creative process as a musician and author.
WINEGARD, Timothy
The Mosquito
★★★★★
During my four decades of work as a mental health professional I found a number of metaphors useful in capturing the subjective experience of distressed clients. One of those metaphors was the elephant in the living room. It was an elephant that no one dared speak of, this despite the difficulties it created in the family. Typically, the elephant of this metaphor was the substance abuse of a parent.
And now, broadening the perspective from the living room to our entire narrative of human history, I realize what else that elephant is, that thing of which we do not speak. It is the mosquito. Timothy Winegard’s book reveals the mosquito as much more than a slap on the side of the head. Mosquitos are the most deadly predator of our species, have been throughout recorded history.
We tend to think of history in terms of nations with their commerce and isms, battles with their men and weaponry, human progress with its cultures and knowledge. All that anthropocentric history leaves out the most enduring battle of survival on our planet: man versus mosquito.
Well, thanks to Winegard, not any more.
I live at 53 degrees latitude, far enough north that malaria and the other mosquito vectored deadly diseases don’t reek their havoc on us fortunate folk here. Of course, given climate change and planetary warming, even this far north we’re probably not out of the woods yet. In our cooler climate, we tend to think of mosquitos as just annoying. We lather up with pungent chemicals and layer up with long sleeves and long pants. And I guess we’re lucky this far north, lucky that the mosquito’s intrusion in our life is just a brief distraction from the beauty of a hike or the social life of the barbeque. The hum-buzz-slap annoys us but it’s not a battle with deadly disease.
But near the end of the book, Winegard comments that for most of us there will be some connection to the deadly battle between man and mosquito. It turns out to be too true in my case. My father just about died of malaria, contracted when he visited Africa. Professionally, in debriefing a member of the Canadian military I heard a story that suggests to me how potentially, albeit indirectly, the mosquito played a role in the death of a certain young man and in the demise of an entire Canadian regiment.
Winegard’s book will appeal to readers who enjoy exploring of the wide swath of history, with science and medicine thrown in, sparkled with an interesting human narrative or two along the way.
I’m just glad that I didn’t read The Mosquito during the summer here in Canada, that I could do so without checking out that bloody smear on the palm of my hand or scratching that suddenly itchy bump on the back of my leg.
And now, broadening the perspective from the living room to our entire narrative of human history, I realize what else that elephant is, that thing of which we do not speak. It is the mosquito. Timothy Winegard’s book reveals the mosquito as much more than a slap on the side of the head. Mosquitos are the most deadly predator of our species, have been throughout recorded history.
We tend to think of history in terms of nations with their commerce and isms, battles with their men and weaponry, human progress with its cultures and knowledge. All that anthropocentric history leaves out the most enduring battle of survival on our planet: man versus mosquito.
Well, thanks to Winegard, not any more.
I live at 53 degrees latitude, far enough north that malaria and the other mosquito vectored deadly diseases don’t reek their havoc on us fortunate folk here. Of course, given climate change and planetary warming, even this far north we’re probably not out of the woods yet. In our cooler climate, we tend to think of mosquitos as just annoying. We lather up with pungent chemicals and layer up with long sleeves and long pants. And I guess we’re lucky this far north, lucky that the mosquito’s intrusion in our life is just a brief distraction from the beauty of a hike or the social life of the barbeque. The hum-buzz-slap annoys us but it’s not a battle with deadly disease.
But near the end of the book, Winegard comments that for most of us there will be some connection to the deadly battle between man and mosquito. It turns out to be too true in my case. My father just about died of malaria, contracted when he visited Africa. Professionally, in debriefing a member of the Canadian military I heard a story that suggests to me how potentially, albeit indirectly, the mosquito played a role in the death of a certain young man and in the demise of an entire Canadian regiment.
Winegard’s book will appeal to readers who enjoy exploring of the wide swath of history, with science and medicine thrown in, sparkled with an interesting human narrative or two along the way.
I’m just glad that I didn’t read The Mosquito during the summer here in Canada, that I could do so without checking out that bloody smear on the palm of my hand or scratching that suddenly itchy bump on the back of my leg.