(Friday's) Book Review: Bratfest at Tiffany's

Title: Bratfest at Tiffany’s

Author: Lisi Harrison

Publisher: Little Brown

Date: 2008

ISBN: 978-0-316-00680-4

Length: 227 pages plus advertising material

When I reviewed The Clique a few years ago, I didn’t expect it would become a series, but it did. A bestselling series, at that. Where baby-boomers had “Archie” comics, it seems, and Generation X had “Clueless,” millennials have “The Clique.” It’s not exactly an encouraging prospect, but there we are.

Archie and his school friends were kids who had a lot to learn, but they were goodhearted and well integrated; only a few of them were rich. The “Clueless” crew were uniformly rich and deliberately sheltered from knowing anything about the alternatives to being rich, but they meant well in their shallow juvenile way. “The Clique” are uniformly rich, consciously selfish, and intentionally mean. In the first book about them, when Massie and Claire were thrown together through their parents’ business relationship, Massie deliberately treated Claire badly, and poor silly Claire didn’t look around for a better friend but wormed her way into Massie’s very conditional and probationary good graces. In this book, which is volume eight, The Clique enter grade eight and, even before they’ve assigned nasty nicknames to everyone in grade seven, they all swear off having “boy friends” because they see the boys as rivals for their “alpha” social status. The Clique are not actually popular in the sense that people like them—only in the sense that shy selfconscious people are afraid of mean-mouthed Massie—so, if any other group can be seen as having got one up on them, the Clique will be “Losers Beyond Repair.” And still the others in The Clique want to be Massie’s “friends.”

“The Boyfast” is Massie’s idea. Massie doesn’t have a boy friend. The others have boy friends and worry about Massie throwing them out of The Clique if they continue to treat these boys as friends. Massie’s control cravings are so severe that this walking definition of “spoiled brat” sets herself in opposition to adolescent hormone surges. Massie, we’re told early in the story, does fantasize about talking to a psychologist, but she’s too busy fighting for emotional control of other people to do it.

Meanwhile, the Octavian Country Day School, which students call “OCD,” merges temporarily with another school called Briarwood, so the students can refer to their school as “BO.” To relieve the crowding, some students are temporarily assigned to special classes taught in old trailers at the back of the campus. The Clique are split, with Massie and Claire in a trailer. A TV reporter interviews Massie, observes some of the seventh-graders in the trailer, and spins her report on the school situation in such a way as to suggest that the trailers are being used for “special education.” The Clique have to find a way to “prove” that they’re “alphas,” not “special,” before the Briarwood school reopens and everyone returns to their regular classrooms, lockers, and cafeteria tables.

Possibly the appeal of this series is that readers agree with me that something does seem to be wrong with these kids, and a little “special education” might be in order for The Clique. As in, “Your parents, not you, will be asked to choose a total of three outfits for you to wear, from their, not your, choice of Wal-Mart, Target, or K-Mart. You will wipe your faces with alcohol before classes begin. Each of you will be allowed to speak to one person, who will be chosen for you from grade seven, and no one else for three months before you’re eligible to graduate from this special program. To graduate you will work your way through a year’s worth of grade nine algebra, a grade ten reading list, Towle’s Biology, a grade eleven history course, and, in view of the low standards of high school language classes, a college foreign language course. Plus Latin.”

Book Review with Tangent: Favorite Brand Name Diabetic Cooking

Title: Favorite Brand Name Diabetic Cooking

Author: Favorite Brand Name Recipe committee

Date: 2000

Publisher: Publications International

ISBN: none

Length: 96 pages

Illustrations: many full-color photos

Quote: “If you still love the taste of diner food, you won’t be disappointed with these updated versions.”

The verdict on this pretty little cookbook: If you’re not diabetic, it’s worth adding to your collection. If you are, buy The Starch Solution instead.

There are two general approaches to diabetic cooking. One is based on rat studies and presupposes that diabetics need to get as much as possible of their nutrient requirements from cow’s milk products. The other is based on human studies and acknowledges that some diabetics are lactose-intolerant and/or casein-intolerant and/or vegan. If your tastes (or your diabetic family member’s tastes) are like this web site’s, where some of us enjoy some dairy products but not every single day, the good news about this book is that our e-friends the McDougalls can advise diabetics on planning a less cowy diet.

There are, as most people know by now, two general kinds of diabetes. One is caused by permanent damage to the pancreas and is incurable. The dairy-based approach to diabetes was developed by doctors working with patients who have this kind, who can only try to “manage” their disease. The other kind is caused by poor diet and lack of exercise, and is usually curable. People have reversed “adult-onset” diabetes by strict adherence to either a dairy-based diet or a vegan diet. Either diet is a bit of a nuisance—you have to weigh out portions and eat small amounts of lots of different things at pre-set times that keep somebody in the kitchen for a good half of every single day—but worth it. The more exercise and fibre a diabetic individual can incorporate into the plan the individual works out with per doctor, the faster the individual is likely to recover. The vegan diet is generally higher in fibre and thus more likely to promote recovery, though individuals can incorporate lots of fibre into a dairy-based diet also.

Adayahi developed diabetes and cardiovascular disease to a life-threatening stage, was rushed to a hospital and given a prescription diet and exercise plan, and was able to reverse the disease and work and eat normally for decades, relying primarily on exercise. Grandma Bonnie Peters, who worked with several diabetic patients, used exercise to keep from developing diabetes, as do I now. As with many health concerns, adult-onset diabetes has a genetic component (and Adayahi asks “Have you ever met an (American) ‘Indian’ who was not diabetic?”) but people who suspect they have the gene can prevent the disease from developing and interfering with their lives. You might have inherited tendencies to diabetes if (after about age fifteen) you like sugar-based foods (candy, ice cream, sweet baked goods, soda pop), have food cravings, may faint under stress, are overweight and suspect that continual snacking is part of the reason, or feel tired or irritable after a few hours without food. You’re in no immediate danger of going diabetic if you can exercise before breakfast, can exercise vigorously without feeling sick or faint, can fast (taking water only) for a day, find it easy to stay at a reasonable weight, and are keeping those cravings for sweet, greasy, or starchy food under control—can do without them for several days even if you’ve eaten them as road food or party food.

Anyway I, personally, have neither reversed diabetes after developing it myself nor worked closely with patients who were doing that, but since Adayahi has done one of those things and GBP did the other I’ve been exposed to a lot of theoretical information, and can say: Of the members of this web site who’ve had any concerns about or experience with diabetes whatsoever, none would have much use for the recipes in this book, as written. For one thing most of those “favorite brand name” foods, especially the generic ones like all those delicious vegetables I have missed so sorely for so long, have tended to be full of glyphosate for the past five or ten years. For another thing, I like ice cream now and then, and Adayahi likes cheese now and then, but I’m not sure that I know any adult, diabetic or otherwise, who either wants or needs to ingest any dairy product every single day. Much as I enjoy one dish of ice cream on one day I certainly don’t want to eat ice cream again the next day. I’m not lactose-intolerant yet, which surprises me since both of my parents became lactose-intolerant around age 50, but I do not have and have never had the appetite of a calf.

(tangent)

I mention this because a few weeks ago another web site posted a discussion of the claim that it’s “racist” when restaurants dump cheese, whipped cream, cream sauce, etc., into everything they serve. I tend to feel that this claim is valid, myself. I’ve been chastised by Black e-friends for taking it up since “race” as such does not predict lactose tolerance. It’s a separate gene from the ones for skin color and hair texture. Some Black people can digest dairy products; quite a few White people, especially after age fifty, cannot. Still, lactase persistence is definitely a minority gene, not exclusively or definitively but typically a White Thing.

Casein intolerance, which is what I’ve always had, is a different thing. For me cheese is purely and simply an emetic and, if I wanted a purgative, rose petals certainly taste nicer. Even lobelia, a “power herb” I prefer not to use, would be cheaper and less unpalatable than cheese.

Making milk into cheese involves fermentation, with enzymes extracted from calves’ stomachs assisted by various fungi and bacteria. The process breaks down the lactose, a sugar, and concentrates the casein, a protein. In theory, if people succeed in digesting cheese, this allows lactose-intolerant people to get all that wonderful protein and calcium that many humans fail to absorb from cows’ milk. In fact, statistics suggest that cheese is junkfood for most of the people who do like it. For a large number of Americans cheese does not immediately make them sick, but either it just passes through them without them getting any benefit from the calcium, or if they do completely digest cheese they use up more calcium digesting the fat than they get from the cheese. Stooped, shrunken seniors are more numerous in cheese-eating cultures than in non-cheese-eating cultures.

People who like a dairy-based diet and people who don’t can, of course, just leave each other alone—in theory. In fact quite a lot of people find it possible to go into a restaurant where the staff are conscientious about serving “clean” food to people with different food tolerances, accurately identifying what does and does not contain dairy products or wheat or eggs or hot pepper or whatever else people are trying to avoid, and they sit down at one table, and each one orders something person can eat, and they can actually enjoy sharing the meal without touching each other’s actual food. Unfortunately, in the real world, there are food bullies. One of them popped up on that web site.

I’d posted a comment about restaurants, like Wendy’s, that lost a lot of the type of customers they thought they wanted by deliberately trying (at some locations) to discourage a different type of customers, and about how this can and should work for any person who needs to avoid any food. The successful bakery owners in my town went out of their way to advertise a range of gluten-free options. They’re conscientious about cleaning all those delicious wheat-flour products out of the kitchen when they bake gluten-free cookies and about serving gluten-free soups, salads, and snacks. They have sugar-free things; they have low-fat things; they have vegan things; they have decaf coffee, and tea, and root beer for those who don’t drink coffee. As a result Dad’s relatives, who are not celiacs but would not support a restaurant that snubbed Mother and me, have positively supported that bakery. If you visit my home town, I may or may not ever sit with a computer in a café all day again, but let me know when you’re coming and that café where I used to write is still where we’ll have lunch.

There was another restaurant where a food bully resented having to prepare a special order, just the meat and vegetables in a sandwich without letting them touch a bun or cheese, and after doing that for me once that restaurant advertised that meat-and-veg-without-the-bun would cost 60% more than the sandwiches. Quite a few people I know haven’t been in there since. In a small town, don’t you know, the coronavirus panic just wiped out restaurants where decisions had been made to discourage customers who required special orders. And I’ve gone into McDonalds a few times to use the computer, and in complete contrast to the way McDonalds used to be in Ray Kroc’s lifetime, the staff were aware of local market dynamics and they were very meticulous about preparing my clean, gluten-free meat and veg. (Too bad it became impossible to buy commercial veg that weren’t full of glyphosate. That was not the restaurant’s fault.)

You want to work in food service these days? Accept the fact that one person’s food is another’s poison. Deal with it. Restaurant owners make the highest profits when they can order large amounts of pre-mixed concoctions from which it’s not possible to clean away the ingredients that various customers can’t eat. This is not “racist” or otherwise offensive to anybody as long as the restaurant does serve some things that people avoiding any specific ingredient can eat. Just keep everything separated so that the food that contains sugar or aspartame or meat or corn never touches the food that doesn’t, and everybody can be happy.

But that wasn’t enough for the food bully, who posted a reply that can’t be quoted due to this web site’s contract, but it was insanely hostile, profane, obscene, really a bit libellous, and it contained a violent fantasy about forcibly feeding all people like me the things we weren’t built to digest. I didn’t want to feed the troll attention but that reply did arouse several different thoughts. The least violent of those thoughts was, “How interesting that anyone reacts so violently to the fact that some people don’t digest cow’s milk. I wonder if that tells us anything about his infancy?” When it’s possible to identify people like this who get jobs in restaurants, this kind of question deserves some attention from the psychiatrists responsible for medicating them, for the rest of their short lives behind bars.

Cheese is a food for most people; it’s not nearly as good a nutritional bargain in practice as it seems to be upon a merely chemical analysis, but it does contain enough calories to support life until people find more nutritious food. Cream is an even worse nutritional bargain, but it certainly offers an abundance of calories. There’s no reason why restaurants should be required to ban all the cow products, but as America “grays” restaurants will definitely be ahead if they keep most of the dairy products on the side. (If the menu says “ice cream,” the dish should contain ice cream. If it says “pie,” the restaurant should save money by letting people ask for ice cream or whipped cream on the side.) I wonder, though, about these people who want to dump cow products into everything they eat. I think the basic problem has to be that they were never properly nourished and properly weaned as infants. Psychoanalytical therapy might help them.

(/tangent)

Well, flipping through this short cookbook…there is a section on tropical fruits that will at least work for most of the vegans. (Some people, mostly those whose ancestors came from the Global North, can’t eat tropical fruits.) Nevertheless. Nearly all of these recipes are written to fit into the type of diabetic diet that assumes that a human is a big rat (or a small calf), not a different species that actually tends to thrive on different foods. The book acknowledges that using beans, whole grains, and nuts as primary proteins happens to be a more efficient approach for those diabetics who do it because the vegan diabetic diet contains more fibre, but it still assumes that you want to go on eating mostly meat with a lot of dairy products and simple carbs on the side. A lot of these recipes are the kind that, if diabetes weren’t involved, a lot of people could clean up to suit their diets, tastes, and even purses, by just leaving out those dollops of cream and sprinkles of crumbs. I don’t complain about this in recipes that aren’t advertised as being specifically for diabetic patients. It becomes a problem in recipes for diabetic patients because, when you leave out the useless-indigestible-calories-on-top as many diabetic patients will instinctively do, you mess up the “exchanges” and have to confer with the doctor or nutritionist about how to fix that.

The sad part is that people who are not diabetic, who’ve been warned off this cookbook by the title (and the ads for diabetic supplies inside), can still have fun with these recipes, happily leaving out the junk they don’t want to clutter their plates with and enjoying the meat and/or veg and/or fruit. But diabetics who want to recover can’t afford to play around with their diets.

This is why, although some diabetic patients may still want to use this book, most of the ones I know would advise me to burn it. The recipes might be repackaged for the general public, but this book fails to serve the audience to which it is addressed. Typically a diagnosis of diabetes these days generates a time-tested generic diet plan that contains a reasonable number of calories and balance of nutrients for the individual’s size, with a few guidelines about allowable substitutions for anything the patient is known not to tolerate. If you are (or cook for) a diabetic patient who wants to explore food beyond that diet plan, I recommend exploring the vegan options the McDougalls will (unlike some M.D.’s!) be delighted to discuss with you. They have trained people to crunch the numbers and advise you on how much to cook, how much to serve, and what to serve with each recipe. Their consultations aren’t free, but they’re affordable and unlikely to leave you with an overwhelmingly expensive prescription.  Their recipes are the ones that, when served at buffet parties, lure the carnivores over to the vegan table and leave people saying “I wish there’d been more of the vegan food.”

Hunting the Limerick

(Magaly Guerrero suggested the theme of "hunting" at https://poetsandstorytellersunited.blogspot.com/2021/05/weekly-scribblings-69-of-hunt.html . Several people suggested limericks, ideally on the day of Edward Lear's birthday, but I didn't have Internet service at the time so I'm going with--or should we say shooting for?--the week.)

A hunter I'm glad I am not.

When shooting I waste all my shot.

Hunting veggies in Spring

Is a more pleasant thing:

They don't struggle when thrown in the pot.

Book Review, Take II: Oryx and Crake

First the update on me-me-me and my little laptop, known affectionately as The POG, or Piece Of Garbage, which I've wanted to replace since approximately half an hour after I turned it on. I'm not sure what's to blame or what else to try, but, whatever I do, all private Internet connections I've tried (I've tested those of three friends for whose service I was not paying, as well as one where I was) have seemed dysfunctional compared with those public computer places we're not supposed to use any more. The connection I'm using right now runs, when it runs at all, as if the electrons were being transferred by ones. 

That's by way of introduction to this review. This is the version of the review I attempted to schedule for the eleventh of May on the ninth of May. It was impossible to get this version into the Blogspot draft; after a few tries it became impossible to do anything on any of the internal pages within Blogspot--not read friends' blogs, not check page view count, not any thing. Then Blogspot went ahead and posted an earlier draft anyway...Feh. 

Lesson learned: Never pay for private Internet connections. All reliable Internet connections are in town where they are reserved for corporate-owned buildings. Walk into town and use those.

Anyway, here's the final draft: 

Title: Oryx and Crake

Author: Margaret Atwood

Publisher: Doubleday

Date: 2003

ISBN: 0-385-50385-7

Length: 383 pages

Quote: “He feels the need to hear a human voice…The salt water is running down his face again. He never knows when that will happen and he can never stop it.”

That’s Snowman, also known as Jimmy and as Thickney, trying to keep his sanity after reckless gene splicing, climate change, and pollution have made our world inhospitable to humans. Oryx and Crake, his friends, are dead and Snowman is remembering their friendship in painful detail, trying to keep himself alive, not really sure why. (At his last job the employees code-named themselves after extinct species. Snowman was into drugs, all right, and has behaved abominably, but he never liked “Thickney.”) Snowman is anything but a survivalist and his reactions to having been forced to become one are laughable, though this novel is kind enough to save the most coffee-snorting lines for the jokes the characters make.

In this possible future several bioengineered animal species have turned out to be hazardous to humans. Jimmy’s best friend Crake, the science genius, has bioengineered a tribe of fast-maturing humanoids who produce an odor that repels most of the new predators, but they’re not human enough for Snowman to enjoy being around them. His “one true love” Oryx, who learned several other languages before she learned English, taught the new humanoid race to speak English in their peculiar way. They call themselves the Children of Crake, and the animals the Children of Oryx. In addition to their repellent odor and biologically different brain wiring, the Children of Crake mature faster than humans, and are able to reproduce (possibly) once in three years. Crake meant them to be happier and healthier than humans are, but you probably wouldn’t enjoy being alone with them any more than Snowman does. They’ve made it possible for him to survive the first few months of grief for the loss of all the nearby humans, but they’re not wired to understand the way humans think.

The real plot and meaning of this book are in its past tense: how humans damaged the world and may have wiped themselves out as a species. There’s a hint of a present-tense plot, when Snowman finds that other humans have survived, but how long any of them will last is waiting for the sequels. There’s abundant food for thought and discussion about whether all humans are, like the three who are developed as characters in this book, mostly sympathetic characters who react to life stress by doing horrible things to one another; whether that’s the same view of humanity Atwood has taken in other novels, whether it should be described as a pessimistic view or a compassionate view.

A question an English teacher might want to discuss is whether this book is excellent science fiction, or not “really” science fiction (it’s not about the science fiction clichés of spaceships, time travel, and alien planets). Like 1984, Brave New World, Out of the Silent Planet, or Woman on the Edge of Time, Oryx and Crake qualifies as good “literary fiction” about the human condition (and it’s full of literary and cultural references, too—Snowman was a commercial art major, Crake prints literary quotes on refrigerator magnets); but there’s a lot of serious science in it.

Relative to the time when it was written I’d even include the climate warming model promulgated by Al Gore as serious scientific speculation. It turned out not to be accurate science, but at the time it was science. In this book Florida has drowned; Texas has dried up and blown away; we see Jimmy shading himself from the fierce heat in a future “New New York” that’s unrecognizably developed but probably used to be Toronto—and computers, unsettlingly, still work just the way the best ones did in 2001, probably using Windows ME.

In the school year 2003-4 I remember reading this novel, handing it to my husband, and agreeing that we would never put it on a reading list, but would tell students that it’s grim dystopian science fiction with snarky jokes and porn stars in it. It seemed that relevant. It still does, to me, though it doesn’t seem to have caught as much attention as The Handmaid’s Tale. Both books are basically warnings about the nasty places where some current trends are likely to lead. They’re not feel-good reading, and both books end with some question about how long the protagonist is going to survive, but thinking about the ideas these books present can help you motivate yourself to make the rather difficult, nonconformist choices to resist the trends that might make our world even slightly more like these fictional worlds than it already is.

One difference between Atwood’s major works of, oh right, speculative fiction, may influence some readers’ choice of which to buy first. In The Handmaid’s Tale sex acts take place and are described in some detail, but the point of those descriptions is that none of the participants in these sex acts is having much fun. In Oryx and Crake, although humans were meant to mate in pairs rather than triads, the three Bright Young Things love each other with the destructive bipolar intensity of youth, and Oryx is hotter than a two-dollar pistol and sweeter than cherry wine. She’s been a porn star and a prostitute, but what makes her stand out is a radically, heroically Buddhist worldview, a detachment with compassion, that showed on her face before she was even half grown. Crake, who may have Asperger’s Syndrome or may merely be reacting to a horrific childhood, and Jimmy, the admitted sex addict, really do love her for her pure soul—the part of it that is pure, anyway. So there’s that.

Bioengineered virus? This web site is staying as far away from the current unverified rumors as it can get, but it’s a topic we need to be thinking about, perhaps best as the kind of hypothetical future possibility it is in Oryx and Crake and other good speculative fiction.

Corporations taking over the functions of government in a global economy? You know it would happen; that’s one reason to oppose any movement toward “globalizing” anything, arguably even to limit corporate operations to one nation (or state). A “communist” economy where a Big Government authorizes only one Big Corporation to produce each type of its products is, of course, even more hopelessly enslaved to corporate greed than other kinds of economy are.

(A quick update: Consider what Bayer’s doing today, which is not all that different from things other corporations did in the late twentieth century. While stalling payments intended to help very sick patients pay for treatment with the intention that many of those patients would die, and getting my very mild, moderate, peaceable and bipartisan Glyphosate Awareness chats censored on Twitter, Bayer promised to pull “Roundup” off the market at least in the United States. They continued marketing the same formula under different labels in other countries. Now, while the Biden Administration makes noises about being Green, including the old movement-killer stereotype about being too Green to bathe, the Biden Administration has allowed “Roundup” to be returned to the U.S. market. One way to trace the bewilderingly varied effects glyphosate may have on your family is to notice how much better you felt in 2020, when less of this particular poison was in your air and water. How much relief you had from chronic health problems, physical or mental, that your doctor probably hesitated to ascribe to glyphosate—a poison that has as many different effects as glyphosate is known to have, obviously, has to work with individuals’ genetic weaknesses. And one way to confirm the degree to which the symptoms of these chronic conditions have been aggravated by glyphosate is to notice how much ground everyone loses this summer.

Even in the Glyphosate Awareness movement we have a lot of people who want to make this kind of corporate control of government into a partisan political issue, use glyphosate as something for which to blame the Democrats (because glyphosate pollution got out of hand during the Obama Administration) or the Republicans (because Trump actively denied and resisted Glyphosate Awareness)—but glyphosate is better understood as an illustration of how corporate funders attach little strings to all political parties. A totalitarian monopoly, of course, operates almost the same way a corporation that has to stay competitive does, except that the totalitarian monopoly has even lower standards, both for product quality and for ethics.

In 2003, of course, nobody knew that Al Gore’s vision of “global warming” was going to be as wrong as corporate promises that glyphosate was safe. Those of us whose minds are not stuck in the 1930s know those things now. When present-time “Greens” are still blathering about “climate change” and ignoring glyphosate, they are self-identifying as Soros’ corporate dependents, not to be trusted on ecological questions. True Greens know that local warming is real, and a real problem in places where it’s been allowed to develop, but glyphosate—and gene splicing, and overpopulation, and other things—are more serious problems for the whole world.)

Perversions of sex and perversions of religion dominated the dystopian vision in The Handmaid’s Tale. Those perversions are still present in Oryx and Crake, though they’re not the focus of attention. The women in Oryx and Crake have jobs and money and the freedom to act out their own perverted fantasies. Nobody seems to think less of Oryx—if anything they admire her more—for having fondled all those older men in those Hott Totts videos; the married women who enable Snowman’s sex addiction don’t seem concerned about being beheaded, or even divorced. (As is typical for Atwood, the discussion of sex is usually PG-13, a comment on characters’ relationship here and a dirty joke there. Details are made clear only when a sex act is really grotesque, like the violence-porn in Bodily Harm and the unnatural relationships in The Handmaid’s Tale.) Nevertheless, kiddie porn is alive and well; while Oryx is appearing in it, Snowman and Crake are avidly watching it. Religion is not much talked about in Oryx and Crake, except that Crake claims to believe neither in God nor in Nature, Oryx is quietly but splendidly Buddhist, and Snowman certainly can’t be described as a Christian even though that’s what his grandparents probably claimed to be. Possibly it’s the absence of talk about God in the culture that allows characters like Crake to “play God” by tampering with DNA. The Children of Crake weren’t supposed to have “spirituality centers” in their brains. Snowman enjoys the irony, even thinks of it as a kind of revenge on Crake, that they obviously do have numinous feelings they project onto Oryx and Crake, who are clearly developing into the Goddess and God of Craker mythology, and (more unsettlingly for him) Snowman, too, who seems already to be a demigod and may become a Devil or Trickster. As in The Handmaid’s Tale, the perversions of the future are more or less logical developments of present-time perversions.

Both books are triumphs of the writer’s art. Both make mercifully improbable, hypothetical future conditions feel real. Characterizations are credible. Dialogue is lifelike. If you liked the literary skill and/or the willingness to confront unpleasant thoughts in one, you’ll probably like those things in the other book, though there’s no connection among the characters or events; each book generated its own sequel.

Book Review: War Party

Title: War Party

Author: Louis L’Amour

Publisher: Bantam

Date: 1975

ISBN: 0-553-25393-X

Length: 152 pages

Quote: “Dead, all right. But dead drunk!”

Here are ten short stories by the classic “western” adventure story writer. All the standard elements of western adventures are here: your hired killer (with a code of honor), your gold miner travelling with a beautiful woman, your pioneer who claims to have walked from Tennessee on a diet of cougar meat and branch water (“and I killed my own cougars”). I’m positive I’ve watched some of these stories as episodes on TV series like “Gunsmoke” or “Bonanza.” Well, if you like “Gunsmoke” or “Bonanza” reruns, here is your chance to rustle up a copy of one of the books on which those shows were based.

Short review? Short book, but, for people who like this kind of thing, it’s the kind of thing they like.

Book Review: Jesus the One and Only

Title: Jesus the One and Only

Author: Beth Moore

Publisher: B&H

Date: 2002

ISBN: 0-8054-2489-X

Length: 340 pages

Quote: “I really struggled with the overwhelming task of writing a book on the life of Christ…others far brighter and more knowledgeable already filled the shelves of libraries.”

Which accounts for what I find not to like about this book.

On the whole I do like it. It’s another of the detailed, cross-referenced, word-studied Bible commentaries for which Moore is known. I learned a few new words from it and so very likely will you.

But…so many words, on a topic that as the author admits is bigger than one book, and Moore found space for speculation about people’s complexion and clothing styles while leaving out most of Jesus’s actual recorded words? Yes. She did. Because so many other commentaries are full of comments on His words. And Moore’s audience and publishers wanted her books to sound “feminine.” Any time you want to sound more “feminine,” you just comment in detail on clothes. That Bible characters’ bones, not to mention their clothes, are all dust by now need not interfere with Moore’s happily reporting research into what historians think people probably wore. And the typical physical looks they had, and the typical hairstyles.

The result makes reading this book a bit like eating a sandwich made with bread sliced an inch thick and just a teaspoon of peanut butter. If the book had been 680 pages long, the lingering on the shadows of Jesus’ early life at home would not have crowded out a proportionate amount of attention to His adult career, but in 340 pages it sort of does.

So that’s what’s not to like, and then on the other side of the ledger we have solid research, flawless prose, and an effervescent enthusiasm for the material.

There are a few passages that may stretch the tolerance of some Christian readers. How literally we’re meant to take the Bible’s descriptions of “the devil” and “the demons” has been a point of disagreement for a long time. Some traditions emphasize that the Bible often very clearly identifies its “devils” as sins and/or diseases, while their counterparts the “angels” are, as the word literally meant, messages (or messengers). Moore writes from within a tradition that imagines both angels and devils as literally existing, in some sense of the word. In the United States we don’t formally identify churches as High and Low, but we all understand the concept; Moore’s tradition is a little further on the Low side than mine, perhaps than yours. Taking “angels” and “devils” literally is almost always Low Church. Some Christians won’t read a Christian document that contains phrases from a tradition other than their own. I do. I remind myself that even though Christians have disagreed strongly and seriously about important matters, most of our differences are still different ways of talking about the same thing.

Some things readers will learn, or re-learn, by reading this book:

. Beth Moore loves Jesus.

. In Bible days, being “espoused” or “betrothed” was legally the same as being married except that couples weren’t living together yet. Waiting proved chastity; life was short; teenagers were classified as adults, and parents typically arranged betrothals when their children were thirteen or fourteen.

. Scripture is the most powerful tool in our fight against temptation.

. When “all spoke well of” Jesus after his comments on the book of Isaiah, he said, “A prophet is not without honor, except in his own country.” Sometimes words that seem flattering, only in the wrong way, wound people to the heart. “You are a great speaker” generally means “…but I wasn’t paying attention to what you actually said.”

. The Bible tells us that God esteems people who practice humility.

. A woman whose name is carefully omitted from the record, who may have been one of the New Testament characters generally described as the great saints, or may have merely tried to emulate what she had heard that one of them did, was described by a word translated as “a heinous and habitual sinner.” Allowing her to wash His feet, Jesus was accused of having no idea “what dirt” this wretched woman was. Jesus said that her sins were forgiven.

. In addition to twelve men and an unspecified number of women disciples who travelled in His entourage, Jesus commissioned seventy-two other disciples who travelled on their own, teaching, healing, and preparing people to meet Jesus and His entourage. Unlike modern churches that find it most profitable except when it’s dangerous to hire a single individual and put that individual on the road, Jesus sent His disciples out ana duo, which literally means “by twos,” or “two by two” or “two and two” or “in pairs.”

(I used to attend a church that sent college students out to sell books and tracts in summer. How I wanted to do that, and so did a school friend I liked and admired. Because I had neither a car nor a driver’s license, and my friend had been supplied with both because she had a disability, it seemed obvious to both of us that we’d have to work as a team. After all, studies showed that door-to-door sales, fundraising, or even polling are most efficiently done by teams of two women; many people are intimidated when approached by an unknown man, and many don’t want to get into a conversation with one unknown woman, but two women tend to be invited into houses! But no. The church’s policy was to send students out by ones, so there was no question about which one had earned a commission on a sale. Two little girls never got the summer or the scholarship of their dreams, and one of them really needed that scholarship! How many times I’ve wished that that church had followed Christ’s example. Whatever kind of ministry people are sent out on, they should be sent out by twos!)

. Those distracted by service…miss how much Jesus cares. Martha came to Christ and asked, “Lord, don’t you care?”

. “His father saw him and was filled with compassion for him” (verse 20). The Greek word for “compassion” in this verse means “to feel deeply or viscerally, to yearn.” The father of the Prodigal Son yearned for that stupid kid to come home! He ran to meet his son.

. Jesus miraculously healed a lot of begging lepers. (Those fellows really needed security. They travelled by tens.) When told to go and show themselves to the priest and be certified “clean” and fit to go home, nine of them ran straight into town as fast as they could go. Only one looked back to thank Jesus. Jesus said mildly, “Where are the nine?” Moore wonders whether this extra-polite leper was “the one with the most spots.”

(A good rabbi was expected to use wit, jokes, and sarcasm as teaching tools. Jesus certainly did this. Moore recognizes “Where are the nine?” as “the punch line,” and so it undoubtedly was...and still, as a good commentator, Moore can't resist capping it.)

As shown by these examples, Jesus the One and Only does contain some studies of Jesus’s adult career, from which readers and their churches may be blessed with insights. (I still wish there had been more of these, but there are more than I’ve listed here.) If you are looking for a good commentary on the Book of Luke, some others may be more thorough, but this one, organized into 53 short chapters, will be easy and pleasant to read, alone or with a class.

Book Review: Wild Mind

Title: Wild Mind

Author: Natalie Goldberg

Publisher: Bantam

Date: 1990

ISBN: 0-0553-34775-6

Length: 238 pages

Quote: "Life is not orderly...What writing practice, like Zen practice, does is bring you back to the natural state of mind."

In between Writing Down the Bones, which introduced the idea of writing practice, and Riding Wild Horses Home, which discussed the idea of editing whatever is publishable in all that practice writing, comes Wild Mind, which basically encourages writers to keep practicing. 

This writing is still being done primarily for personal growth purposes. Goldberg encourages us to wallow in the details of our memories and experiences that editors usually don't want to read. Somewhere in a writer's life these details need to find words, she says. She gives the example of a writer who really wants to write about something observed in a bar where the writer was out late drinking alcohol, but this writer doesn't think people need to know that the writer went to a bar, so the writer edits the story prematurely with changes that cut off the whole point and purpose: "Last night, I drank a glass of milk and went to bed early." So, Goldberg says, go ahead and write about going to the bar, getting drunk, having inappropriate feelings about people you do or don't know...admit it if you were the one who was thrown out of the bar... Commenting later, I would add: Personal and subjective though good blogs are, a blog is not a good place for this type of writing. Write it on paper and keep it locked out of sight until you're ready to pick out any real treasures in the pile and burn (or compost) all that paper. Blogs are for sharing brutally honest opinions about books, not for describing exactly how it felt to do something that someone inclined to sue you might not otherwise be able to prove that you did.

Goldberg's teaching style is personal, illustrated with bits from her own life. Some readers might think Wild Mind gives us too much information about her; more of the original audience probably thought she was right to continue the stories she'd already told them. Well, she was a classic 1960s hippie and did well enough with it to stick with it. 

Wild Mind is definitely a fun read, written in a witty and likable voice, and its suggestions for personal, not-originally-meant-for-publication, free-form writing practice are definitely fun to work through. Will it help writers become published, rich, and famous? In the long run I think it might; having a place to stash all the emotional drama of our lives can help us detach long enough to write things that other people want to read. Eventually, having all our own emotional drama written out can help us decide which stories are worth fictionalizing, if we choose to write novels. 

Book Review: Over on the Dry Side

Title: Over on the Dry Side

Author: Louis L’Amour

Publisher: Bantam

Date: 1975

ISBN: 0-553-10742-9

Length: 184 pages

Quote: “Why Pa ever took a notion of stopping on that old Chantry place I never did know.”

Louis L’Amour was known for straightforward adventure stories told in the third person, mostly from one man’s point of view. This time, however, he experimented with having part of the story narrated in first person by young Doby Kernohan, who is squatting with his father on the abandoned Chantry ranch when Owen Chantry returns to it. Owen’s brother might or might not have found treasure; he was murdered for it but the gang who killed him never found the treasure, so, hearing that Owen is back in the neighborhood, they return to force Owen to lead them to the treasure. Even a hero like Owen Chantry wouldn’t be able to fight off the whole Mowatt gang alone so it’s lucky for him that Kernohan senior is loyal and grateful and that Doby is yearning to be a hero. But will the treasure for which Clive Chantry died turn out to be only his partial collection of the classics of English literature?

It's another Western adventure story, with a part for just one actress, talent optional. Doby dreams of rescuing a pretty girl, and in the course of this adventure he gets to rescue Marny—right after she’s rescued him. Doby is too young to marry anybody Marny is not, so no points for guessing how her role in the story ends.

But, like most of Louis L’Amour’s novels, it’d make a great “western” movie, with lots of scenery and horses in it, too many gun fights for some tastes, but mercifully little kissing.

Title: American Heiress

(Here's what Blogspot was meant to have posted for the fourth of May.)

Title: American Heiress

Author: Daisy Goodwin

Original (UK) title: My Last Duchess

Publisher (US): St Martin’s Press

Date: 2010

ISBN: 978-0-312-65865-6

Length: 465 pages plus book group discussion guide

Quote: “The whole of America knows you are going to europe,t of ind a suitable consort for the Cash millions.”

Cora Cash would rather stay in the States and marry her long-term boyfriend, but he’s afraid people will despise them and think he married her for money alone. So, after disgracing herself by kissing the man to whom she would like to become engaged and having him step back, she goes to England and marries Ivo, the Duke of Wareham. But can he really love her? Can she really love him? Has she done anything but sell her body for a title?

Daisy Goodwin’s answers to these questions might fit into a Harlequin Romance, but in an effort to give this novel a little Social Relevance Goodwin gives Cora a maid, Bertha, who also marries an Englishman. Bertha has a light complexion for someone who identifies as Black. In England she’s still mostly overlooked, but for her social status as a maid rather than her alleged color, and in no time at all a nice fellow domestic called Jim is calling her his “black pearl.” Bertha’s plans for an independent life involve a little discreet theft but also a lot of honest extra work and scrimping and saving, so, arguably, she deserves to make this novel a double romance, especially after the humiliation of confessing some of her petty larceny.

Anyway it’s a nice thick double romance with a touch of trendy interracial sex and lots of historical details about the manners and styles of the 1890s, a period many people enjoy reading about more than I do. There’s a little more sex than I would like a child to catch me reading in a novel, but it’s not more explicit or likely to traumatize a child than I would like a child to discover in a nonfiction book, so reader discretion is all that can be advised. People who usually enjoy romances are likely to enjoy this one more than I did.

Book Review: Borden Chantry

Title: Borden Chantry 

Author: Louis L'Amour

Date: 1977

Publisher: Bantam

ISBN: 0-553-27863-0

Length: 170 pages

Quote: "Dead man out in the street." "Again? Third this week."

Borden Chantry is yet another Louis L'Amour hero, another mostly nice guy who has no alternative to killing a lot of other guys, mostly by shooting them. Like most of the heroes in his genre he shows the benefits of the hard work and discipline that really "won the West," but somehow we never see him doing the work. In the course of this novel he has to track down and kill a serial murderer who doesn't even start a fair fight before killing another man. We know he will be safe because in genre fiction serial murderers always lose the ability to shoot straight when they confront the hero. 

Meh. I laugh at it in books but I watch the movies made from those books--for the landscapes and the horses, of course. I'm not going to scold the people who now collect paperback "westerns." I've found some of the best of the genre for them.

Book Review: Managing Your Emotions

Title: Managing Your Emotions 

Author: Joyce Meyer

Date: 1997

Publisher: Harrison House

ISBN: 1-5779-026-1

Length: 280 pages

Quote: "Nobody will ever reach a point in life of not experiencing a wide variety of feelings."

The Christian life is a rational life, a practice of a discipline that does not leave room for us to follow wherever our emotions might lead. The civil law already gave us some regulations that interfere with our emotional impulses: we can't just take things because we want them or beat people up because they annoy us. Common sense added more rules to that: we can't accept every invitation that comes along,  or say everything we might think to everyone we know. Christianity can be seen as adding even more rules to that, although the Bible doesn't actually say as much about our little passing feelings as some people think it does, and at this point some people ask why anyone wants to burden ourselves even further by being Christians. 

Christianity itself is not the source of all the rules people have accepted about their emotions, because Christians do not always accept the same rules. Rules about which emotions we "should" express and how we "should" express them come from our social cultures, not from Christianity. 

As a result we have our current mess in which one self-appointed guide tells young students "You must protect yourselves and learn to say things like 'I don't want to talk about this'," and then another one says, "Oh, cold! You hurt Pushy Pat when you said 'I don't want to talk about this' in that horrible, scary, chilling to-o-one!" and nobody wants to talk about what is actually going on, which is that although they may be the same age and neither one is paying the other to be a teacher or counsellor, Pushy Pat has decided that s/he is supposed to play a dominant role in a social relationship with Defensive Del. Nobody wants to talk about whether it's acceptable for a Christian to make that kind of decision. Pushy, bossy individuals tend to think that anyone who is not pushing and bossing as doggedly as they are must want to be pushed and bossed. This is false. 

Church schools and youth groups can talk about concepts like dominant and submissive social displays, introversion and extroversion, and our tendency to perceive that people we perceive as inferior are doing something "wrong" if they have any personal boundaries at all while people we perceive as higher in status aren't doing anything "wrong" even if they violate others' boundaries. They can be places where everyone defends the rights and boundaries of younger people, people who have less, people who are quiet, people who are shy (a separate category), and people living with disabilities. More often, unfortunately, they are places that support the status quo and tell young people that it's ba-a-ad if they don't like being pushed and pawed and called by the wrong names. 

Can you imagine a church where people stood up and said, "Pushy Pat, can't you see that Del didn't want to talk to you? Sit down! Be quiet! Nobody has to talk to you, Pushy, and if you can't keep your hands in your pockets and your mouth shut, you can't come back here!" Neither can I but if there were a church like that I'd probably attend it. I'm not particularly shy; I do, however, believe that church is a place to worship God and if we're not going to keep our attention on God, if we're going to clutter our minds with mere everyday socializing, our own homes would be better places to worship God. Some Christians actually have noticed that the yappy members of the congregation are not God. Yes, fellowship is the reason why it ever occurred to people to worship God as a group, but fellow believers of mine build fellowship outside the sanctuary. Most churches sponsor secular activities for groups of Christians, like dinners and day trips, where "Don't you remember me? We met once fifteen years ago!" and "So then he said 'Let's go to McDonald's' and she said 'I'd rather go to Burger King' and he said..." are still tedious, but at least they're not interrupting prayers...

Fellow believers of mine also believe that personal boundaries are set by the person. We don't have rules that try to specify at what precise age A is allowed to pat B. We have a rule that if B doesn't want to be patted, even if B is an infant or a dog or both, then B is not to be patted. Period. End of discussion. Even people who are obviously senile need to be surrounded by others who steer them away from anyone who's not seeking their attention, so that they don't annoy people who are not responsible for them. 

Protecting individual boundaries is one very important way to keep Christian fellowship from becoming snarled up in emotions. Once when I was eighteen or nineteen years old I visited a church with someone who called herself a friend at school; she was a few years older. She introduced me to a grandmotherly type she knew, using my real given name, which is a common one most people can pronounce correctly. (Introductions among individuals, in church--should have been a red flag.) Then a few minutes later grandma-type introduced me to someone else, using some other person's given name that doesn't even sound much like mine. (This can be a sign of personal hostility; even when people are clearly confused, both their confusion and their insistence on calling people by some name whether it's theirs or someone else's can be caused by deep, generalized hostility for which the person should be seeking help.) If my real name were Priscilla, she might have said "This is Patricia." So I quietly said to this new acquaintance, "It's Priscilla, actually." So on the way home my self-appointed friend scolded me: "Miss Daffy heard you correct her! That's not nice! She's so much older!" And never mind the fact that if you failed to correct my elders on things like that, if you treated them as if they were too senile to be expected to get things right, now that would be an insult. I thought about a church like that, where, right at the very beginning of things, the people being called by the wrong names are constantly having their emotions rubbed the wrong way, and so are the people who think they have some sort of right to rechristen everyone who's younger than they are. Is there any point at which this emotional friction is ever going to get better? Does anyone in this crowd ever actually like anyone else? Does any of them ever even think about God, while their heads are full of all those feelings about one another?

This is one of several things that Joyce Meyer does not discuss in Managing Your Emotions, the book version of a series of seminars she led with church groups. Well, she's an extrovert, not to be expected to think about how much emotional friction is avoided when, as people enter a church, they join a choir singing "Let all mortal flesh keep silence...ponder nothing earthly-minded..." Extroverts tend to feel very uncomfortable with the discipline of silent, or even worse solitary, prayer and meditation. It would be interesting to read more about what Meyer has learned by, she tells us, practicing the discipline of solitary worship. She says she has made that a practice but she doesn't tell us whether she felt fear, rage, even flulike symptoms, when she began. 

For me, personally, this book had little to say. Meyer was summarizing a lot of basic psychology most adult Christians had already absorbed before 1997. Since she was doing this to help younger Christians, many of whom were presumably extroverts, this book did have something of value to say to them. Not all of them had heard before that one way to discern whether things that come to our minds as we pray are coming from God or from our reactions may be that "Emotions urge us toward haste...godly wisdom tells us to wait until we have a clear [understanding] of what it is we are to do and when we are to do it." Not all of them had heard that "People who have a great deal of fear of others are good candidates to come under a controlling spirit," that evil spirit that compels extroverts to chatter in church because watching others meditate triggers their fears. Not all of them had heard that, for people troubled by overwhelming depression, it may be helpful to distrust overwhelming manic happiness and high energy. 

(Meyer discusses this in the context of clinical psychiatrists working with certified bipolar patients, and could be more specific about its relevance to teenagers: If teenagers really ride those waves of crazy teenage energy, work and/or play and/or study and/or socialize for twenty-one hours without a break and get up after sleeping for three hours, they're likely to crash into overwhelming teenage fatigue after a day or two. This is normal and does not require medication, but it's worth bearing in mind when teenagers really want to get something done, pass an exam, etc.) 

Meyer tells us a bit about her early life when, though strong-willed, she also knew she had suffered emotional damage and sought out a calm "phlegmatic" husband who could serve as a sort of emergency backup counsellor in their home. "Dave kept telling me, '...Don't you understand that I love you and that the decisions I make are best for you? God has given me that job'." Probably most readers would not want our children making any commitments to that kind of relationship. Here Meyer stands to testify that it actually worked for her.

We as a society do need to confront the problem of anyone being allowed to assume that men generally are more rational than women. Not only do men tend to be, in some ways, more emotional than women; male-pattern emotionalism is involved in a majority of all violent crime. There have been tendencies, not throughout all of North American culture but in a majority of families, to indulge girls in crying, whining, expressing fear and anxiety, and professing shame and harsh self-judgment, while indulging boys in expressing anger, grabbing for control, and reframing their fears and insecurities as hostility and even "controlled violence" like breaking pencils and throwing glass bottles. We need to stop allowing men to judge women as "stupid" or "crazy" or anything of the kind. We need to start telling men, "When you don't have a rational refutation of what she's said, but pass harsh judgments on her as a person, we understand you to say that YOU ARE EMOTIONAL, probably because SHE SAID NO TO YOU." We need to be serious about this: Male scientist dismisses female scientist as "a kook," end of male scientist's career, right there. Maybe some university can hire him as a secretary to the more rational and competent women scientists. 

The dynamic that worked for Meyer and for many other extroverts is not "husband is wife's backup counsellor," but "calm philosophical LBS introvert is emotional extrovert's backup counsellor." I don't know that any other type of introvert would be a good choice of personal counsellor-for-life; I for one wouldn't take that job if someone were telling me God had given it to me, but there are too many cases where LBS introverts have succeeded in this role for anyone to deny that this type of relationship can work. Men have been known to choose a calm, rational wife to be "the rock I lean on," too, and those relationships can also work. The key to making them work is for the more emotional partner to accept the guidance she or he originally sought from the calmer one. It's a total reversal for the extrovert who has probably careened through her or his teen years bullying other people into doing things her or his way, to humble herself or himself and seek guidance from someone whom a part of the extrovert probably perceives as weak. It may be the only way some of these extroverts are ever able to recover from the emotionality that would otherwise disable them.

Meyer's discussion of "healing of damaged emotions," therefore, may seem irrelevant to some readers (and may be misdirected at some people by social bullies in the churches who want to score points), but it may also be very helpful to strong-willed people who have clashed, attracted abuse, been hurt and bullied, and done their share of hurting and bullying others, and would like to stop clashing all the time and have healthy social relationships. 

It should be mentioned that of course, if you've watched her on TV, Meyer still comes across as a very abrasive, bossy, and confused individual--to those who take the time to analyze why they just want to turn off the TV the minute her shows begin. The lead-in to the Glenn Beck show still puts me off even though Beck's books and online presence don't. Meyer's face and voice have similar effects on many people I've watched trying to watch the local Christian TV channel. Presumably her fellow extroverts are less alienated by her face, voice, and manner, which must work for some people or they'd never be broadcast at all. Possibly, if you like her show, that would be an indication that you'd get some benefit from reading her books.

Meyer wrote a whole book on the subject of forgiveness, which I read, reviewed, resold a few years ago, and in this book she makes what I consider the same mistake she made in that book. Two different things can be called "forgiveness." Secular psychologists were the first to apply that word to a relatively chilly process of releasing our feelings of anger and vengefulness at the end of the day, mentally placing those who offend us in God's hands, and hoping to enjoy the sight if God chooses to deal very harshly with these people. (Is anything more pleasant than seeing stacks of a book you despised, in Sam's Club or better yet Big Lots, not selling? Well, actually, yes; winning a lawsuit that requires someone who attacked you unfairly to pay you a lot of money is very nice. Seeing someone who was still spraying poison on a field catch a blast right in his own face, choke, claw at his eyes, and then collapse, paralyzed, would be even more fun.) Secular psychologists urge people to "forgive" people whose evil work still needs to be opposed and who certainly are not ready to be restored to fellowship with the family members they've abused, or even the neighbors they've robbed or cheated. 

When Christians talked about forgiveness, originally they were talking about the forgiving love of God toward sinners, a warmhearted experience that occurs when the offender has repented and made restitution and is ready to be welcomed back into full fellowship with people who no longer even feel hurt by this person. Not all offenses are as easy to forgive as a blind person's stepping on your foot in a crowd, but when we do forgive offenses, they feel to us more like a blind person's having stepped on our feet in a crowd. Forgiveness in this sense begins with repentance. A person who tries to feel the joy of forgiveness before that repentance is complete is foolish, delusional, certainly being controlled by inappropriate emotions.

Meyer talks at length about forgiveness when what she obviously means is releasing the emotion of anger. I see no benefit to the language in misusing words this way. In this book Meyer uses other words in ways that seem more likely to confuse than to help people. For most of us "deep thinking" means the kind of thorough analytical consideration of things that help people like Dave help people like the young Joyce Meyer, but Meyer uses it to mean "always asking '...How can I keep life under control so I don't get hurt any more?'"--a particular, "neurotic," kind of thinking that was unlikely to go very deep, though it was likely to take up as much of Meyer's time as if she'd been pondering deep questions! She says then that "a deep thinker never gets to enjoy life." Say what? We do, actually, not that the extrovert brain seems capable of even imagining...most of the things HSPs notice, and other people don't notice, are pleasant things. 

Meyer's insights into mood swings and depression are also invaluable for people who can relate to these "emotional problems," because Meyer's approach, which has eventually been successful, was to retrain herself to control her emotional reactions. For some of us this takes much longer than it does for others. For me, even as a teenager adjusting to the new reality of having hormone cycles, any awareness of the source of an emotional mood tends to shut it down. Some people need to talk themselves through these things over and over:

"Why am I even thinking old angry thoughts from the past when that trivial event is over. If I were really angry about something that needs to be changed, it would be something that is serious and still going on. I am having a mood swing. Since the mood is angry it's probably caused either by testosterone in my blood, or by poor digestion of something I ate, or possibly both." (It might also be caused by a reaction to chemical pollution and perhaps other things, but testosterone and indigestion are incredibly common causes of feeling angry.) 

"Oh yes, that person is certainly attractive. Nevertheless, why is my feeling of attraction so much stronger this week than it was last week? Of course I'm not 'falling in love'--I barely know this person, but what I know does not suggest that I'd want this person as a partner for life--even if I don't already have one. I'm feeling intensely attracted to this person, this week, because of hormones." 

You could even apply this process to an aversion to a specific food, if you felt one. "Turnips are not my favorite food. I only planted them in the garden because Tracy likes them. Nevertheless, I want to eat my garden produce rather than the probably contaminated food in the supermarket, so I've been eating these good healthy turnips. Why did I feel so sick the last time I looked at turnips on a plate? I'm not allergic to turnips; I'd been exposed to Norwalk Flu. I can eat turnips again today." 

Meyer talked herself out of feelings of self-hate and depression by repeating "God loves me," first, and then adding Bible verses. This is certainly safer than attempting to medicate those feelings with drugs. You might discover that anxiety and depression, especially, are physical reactions you have to physical conditions you may or may not be able to control. (A lot of middle-aged White Americans find themselves crying real tears from depressive feelings, or redirecting those feelings into angrily blaming others, after they've eaten dairy products. They could digest milk at thirty, but they can't digest milk any more at fifty.) Reasoning your way through the emotional feeling, then scientifically identifying its causes, is the way to a real cure for chronic "mood disorders"--if there is one. Some people develop "mood disorders" as symptoms of fatal diseases, but far more often people develop "mood disorders" just by failing to think rationally about their emotional moods.

Co-dependency and the needs of an "inner child" are considered last, as topics of less personal relevance to Meyer that she studied because a lot of people were talking about them. Some of her insights into the "inner healing" ministries that were going on in the 1990s are particularly valuable, and not necessarily familiar, to all churches that have such ministries. 

Every piece of psychological truth (as distinct from Meyer's personal recollections) in this book was familiar to me, if not in 1997, certainly long before 2021 when I read this book. Most of them are probably familiar to most readers of this web site. Some of them may, however, be fresh and relevant to younger readers. This is still a good book; it's just written for a lower grade level than I believe most of us have currently reached.