New Book Review: I'll Watch Your Baby

Title: I'll Watch Your Baby

Author: Neena Viel

Date: May 2026

Publisher: St Martins

ISBN: 978– 1– 250– 28916– 2

Quote: "Selling children is the natural order."

In the mid-twentieth century a woman whose original name was Martha Louise White became infamous under one of twenty-some names she used, "Linda Taylor," as the "Welfare Queen." Her many hustles, which included various victimless crimes as well as welfare cheating and allegedly included fraud, theft, child trafficking, and possibly murder, may or may not have made her a millionnaire. Nobody was ever sure. Nobody ever proved most of the charges against her; all that was known for sure was that, in the early 1970s, she was taking welfare money under a few different names, claiming more children than were actually found living with her, covered in furs and jewelry and owning three expensive new cars. Welfare payments were supposed to be for women abandoned by men, but "Linda Taylor" had several beaux on her string. For a woman who lived mostly in the North she was quite the Southern Belle. She claimed to be Black, White, or other things as suited her purposes; usually White when she was claiming to be married to a White man. She might have been a sociopath. Ronald Reagan's speeches about welfare reform often referred to the one crime that was proved against her, the welfare fraud, and often suggested that others were doing the same thing. There has never been any shortage of welfare cheats but neither has there ever been a confirmed case of welfare-cheating on anything comparable to the scale on which "Linda Taylor" did it. She was unique.

In order to be the supreme scam artist of her time Martha Louise White had, as Neena Viel brings out in this horror story base on her, to be intelligent (though she had no education to speak of) and charismatic; some of her identities were spiritualists and at least one claimed the title "Reverend." Photo evidence shows that she was pretty, a femme fatale. She could as easily have been a heroine as she chose to be a criminal. She was truly a legend in her own time.

This web site's first Black History Month book pick (tomorrow we'll look at a Valentines Day romance) is based on the legend that was "Linda Taylor." Viel's antiheroine, Lottie Turner, seems made of equal parts of Cassy in Uncle Tom's Cabin and Scarlett in Gone with the Wind with a sprinkling of Marie Laveau. Her most significant long-term relationship is with another classic motif in the American literary tradition: the haunted site where bad things done in the past have attracted a malevolent spirit. This is a horror story, though for most of its beginning it deals with natural, if very unpleasant, events in the lives of living, if unadmirable, people, and seems like a gross-out story. The ghost isn't named as a ghost until the last quarter of the book. The gross-outs seem attributable to human nastiness, drinking and drugs. The ghost may remind you of the more malevolent ghost in Stephen King's Bag of Bones, as the vivid (and nasty) sensory details may remind you of Stephen King's horror stories generally. One of Lottie's admirers may remind you of Inspector Javert in Les Miserables, too. Those are strong characters that tap into enduring archetypes. The effect of mixing those archetypes in one novel is intense.

Lottie is obsessed, and the younger people who gather around her in her old age become obsessed, with red-eyed white flies. Lottie thinks she remembers them from her childhood in Tennessee, sees them everywhere she goes, and seems to be projecting them into the minds of the young people. Houseflies have red eyes, but there are no red-eyed white flies in Tennessee; what gardeners call whiteflies are something different. Those unnatural white flies and their white larvae appear wherever Lottie goes throughout the book. There's a red nightgown that keeps popping up in spooky ways, too, and a photo of a woman with a baby and anywhere from one to ten other children.

The story starts when Lottie, fleeing the scene where she's been convicted of welfare fraud, becomes the friend of Phyllis, "Filly," a woman for whom she works as a baby-sitter. In the 1970s tuberculosis was treatable, but Filly apparently does not benefit from the treatment; lots of TB gross-outs lie ahead. "Linda Taylor" may or may not have murdered a family for whom she worked and burned down their house. Lottie at first remembers being poor, lonely, and aggrieved when she was young in Tennessee, and occasionally thinks she hears an inner voice warning her not to have "another friend." Then Filly's husband confronts her with the fact that she's the Welfare Queen, escaped from justice. Lottie thinks  of killing him, thinks of fleeing, but hasn't done either when her dying friend "turns into a werewolf." Lottie recognizes that although she didn't want to kidnap and sell Filly's children, for the sake of friendship, and didn't need the money, something wanted her to sell the children; Filly says she's arranged for Lottie to "get the children and the house," but something makes sure that can't happen. 

Later some younger people go to a big house in Tennessee where an old woman who calls herself Mrs. Gibson is dying of tuberculosis. The two young men and two young women are friends, almost siblings, not couples. They are, of course, children Lottie trafficked. One of them wants to do to Mrs. Gibson all that she believes Lottie did to her family. Others just want to cheat the old woman out of money. But things get weird. The young people think some of them have drugged, changed the clothes of, damaged the property of, others of them. They are wrong. They're being led to meet the ghost of a slave who was especially badly treated. Her name has been lost. She's the Queen of Flies.

Exactly what's going on isn't always clear. Lottie has a vivid imagination and often speaks metaphorically. Some major events and some details are hallucinations, dreams, or drug trips, and some are metaphors, and some are part of fictive reality. When a character describes something bizarre you have to wait and see whether other characters saw it too, or whether the character describing it expected that they would.

In an afterword Viel identifies Martha Louise White with her mother--whether she's confessing any literal physical relationship, or only saying that her mother took welfare and may have taken more than she was entitled to, she refuses to say. Thus Lottie can't be the cheerful sociopath many like to imagine that "Linda Taylor" was. For Viel the welfare-cheating is trivial, and it's important to Viel to establish that Lottie hated the child trafficking she did, didn't actually commit the murders people thought she did, and didn't particularly relish the sex offenses she perceives as being done to her. 

If you want a real Tale of Blood and the Supernatural, I'll Watch Your Baby is one that will be hard to forget. If you have a sensitive heart and/or a sensitive stomach, read something else.

(How can I be reviewing a book that's supposed to be published in May when it's only February? As regular readers know, publishers sometimes send advance copies of a manuscript they're going to publish to reviewers in order to generate publicity before the book is available in stores. This review is based on an advance copy.)

Book Review: You and I and Yesterday

This review appeared here many years ago, when I had a physical copy of the book for sale. It sold. These short essays go all through the year; some of them fit into the Christmas theme. 

Title: You and I and Yesterday

Author: Marjorie Holmes

Publisher: William Morrow & Company

Date: 1973

Length: 191 pages

Amazon ASIN tracking number: B002K4YKZK

Illustrations: line drawings, presumably by the author

Quote: "[T]he Good Old Days. Were they all that good? No, frankly not...The pain and humiliation of that desperate time left scars. But the Depression stiffened our backs and toughened our moral muscles. Nobody brainwashed us into thinking that the government owed us a living."

Marjorie Holmes was a gracious, gentle, witty Washington hostess. When she died in 2004, she was 91 years old. Women of her age and type did not beat people over the head with their religious and political views. Holmes was both Christian and conservative--and that's "conservative" in terms of my grandparents' generation--but, although this book describes the background of a Christian conservative growing up in the early twentieth century, it's almost pure reminiscence. Vivid sensory images. Adults' chores, children's games, the food people ate, the cars they drove, the movies they watched. You and I and Yesterday is a work of cultural history that was targeted toward a Christian conservative market...but if you're not Christian or conservative, you can still enjoy reading it.

Holmes' classes and conversation were liberal, in that sense, too. It used to be expected of Washingtonians.

What readers learn about in this book are kites, Maypoles, roller skates, gardening, parades, street games, canning vegetables, making fudge, silent movies, street peddlers, playgrounds, hanging out laundry on the line, haymaking, aprons, mail-order catalogues, singing as evening entertainment, antique cars, circuses, Chautauquas, Christmas trees, and a few brief glances at the personalities of Holmes' parents.

You and I and Yesterday can be shared with children. In fact it begs to be shared with children. The vocabulary should be an enjoyable challenge to middle school readers, and the reminiscences of things children did in the 1920s and 1930s should inspire many hours of frugal fun.

Regretful Book Review: Perspectivas de Mujeres

Title: Perspectivas de Mujeres en Direccion de Proyectos en Latinoamerica

Author: Angelica Maria Larios Arias

Date: "Si bien la ultima decada mostro un aumento constante en las mujeres gerentes de proyectos, todavia hay mucho espacio para que mas mujeres asumen estos roles y desarrollen su carrera profesional." 

When I reviewed the English edition of this e-book I noted that what I'd received was more of a book proposal than a book, and looked forward to reading the rest of the original Spanish version. It is a sad duty to report that what I received in Spanish is still a book proposal not a book. 

The policy of this web site is not to reward writers who promise readers e-books and send us book proposals. It's understandable that, before investing a lot of time and money in researching and writing a book, writers want to know that the book will be published, sold, and read. However, if writers want to enlist reviewers to help market a book proposal to publishers, they need to pay for our time--and frankly they'd be cheating themselves; a reviewer has a different job and skill set from an agent. 

Book Review: The China I Knew and My Several Worlds

Title: The China I Knew (condensed from My Several Worlds)

Author: Pearl S. Buck

Date: 1954

Publisher: John Day Co.

ISBN: none

Quote: “[T]his is not a complete autobiography. My private life has been uneventfully happy.”

The question is whether you can be content with the condensed version of Pearl Buck’s memoir, or must have the long one. I’ve read both. If you have the luxury of time to read a long book, get My Several Worlds; Buck had enough memories to make it worth reading. If you’re not sure how much time you want to spend with one of the most remarkable women of her generation, The China I Knew is a good short read.

Briefly, as a missionary child Buck was allowed more contact with Chinese people than many missionary children, remaining in Asia even after the revolution. She studied Chinese with native teachers; apparently she was the sort of borderline child prodigy who finds adults more interesting than children until they’re old enough to tutor or baby-sit, and her friends were mostly Chinese women. She understood the things people said about “the foreign devils,” and often heard instances of kindness, as when people not exactly ready to be baptized listened to her father’s evangelical sermons: “He is making a pilgrimage in our country so that he may acquire merit in Heaven. Let us help him to save his soul!” a Chinese elderwoman shushed the restless audience. Among themselves she often heard Chinese people laughing at foreigners, but “more often than not” someone would “say tolerantly” that “these Christians...do their best and we must not blame them for what they do not know. After all, they were not born Chinese.”

She describes Chinese cooking, child care, footbinding (already on the way out of fashion) and men’s “pigtails” (ditto), but of the things Buck saw in old China, perhaps the most relevant to new China is the way “the Manchu invasion of 1644 was success­ful in a military sense...the philosophical but intensely practical Chinese per­suaded them to move into palaces and begin to enjoy themselves...Since the Manchus were encouraged to do no work, the actual and tedious details of government were soon performed by Chinese...The Manchus were like pet cats.”

I don’t do foreign policy so I’ll stop there.

Buck knew children who were sold as slaves, who had no recourse against abuse but, as a status symbol, were often well treated. (The ones she knew were probably overworked and underfed, and complained about as much as well-off teenagers do.) She knew people who didn’t know how to walk up and down stairs. She met a woman who asked wistfully, “Is it true your husband speaks to you in the presence of other people? Not shameful?” (It was “shameful” for him to talk to his wife instead of his parents during family time, rude for her to talk to his female relatives unless she was spoken to—“This rigorousness of family decorum was of course not to be found except in the...most conservative Chinese families.”) As China briefly considered gradual change rather than revolution, another friend said to Buck, of daughters, “Small feet or education she must have, one or the other” (in order to marry well and maintain social status).

The longer version of Buck’s autobiography contains more personal stories, notably the one about why the second child in The Good Earth had brain damage: Buck had a brain-damaged child and became an advocate for those with cognitive impairments. The short one contains most, not all, the vignettes of Old China.

Book Review: Anny in Love

Title: Anny in Love

Author: Barbara Wright 

Date: 2024 

Publisher: Onslow Square 

ISBN: 979-8-9904036-1-1 

Quote: "William Makepeace Thackeray, author of Vanity Fair...died unexpectedly on Christmas Eve." 

It was 1863. He was survived by two daughters and a certifiably insane wife, and, because he had never remarried, his funeral was gate-crashed by a crowd of prostitutes. Wright tells us that it had become customary for women not to attend funerals so that they wouldn't find out that kind of thing about their fathers and husbands... 

What was wrong with Mrs. Thackeray? There's little overlap between psychiatric diagnoses of the 1860s and those in use today. Wright characterizes her in terms that suggest the tired old "Brilliant creative people are susceptible to ballooning-brain autistic disorders" theory. (Brilliant creative people are the ones who learn to work around autistic-type disorders, and other disabilities. There's a correlation between intelligence and becoming famous as having worked through or around disabilities, not one between intelligence and having disabilities.) Mrs. Thackeray was certified on the basis of things like throwing herself and dragging her children into deep water where they nearly drowned, tearing out her own hair and her children's. She was also Irish; she may have had the really rather rare combination of genes that seems to allow classic schizophrenia to develop. In any case, Wright clearly concluded after studying the evidence, Mrs. Thackeray was genuinely dangerous to herself and others, not one of the women (and Irish people) who were declared insane merely because they were inconvenient to someone. 

Wright thinks William Makepeace Thackeray honestly loved his wife and daughters. Wright suggests that Anny and Minny Thackeray worried about having inherited "insanity" from their mother, and, since they hadn't done that, about having passed it on to Minny's daughter, Laura Makepeace Stephen. 

 What was wrong with Laura Stephen? Wright characterizes her as a classic case of autism, just functional enough that it must have broken her aunt's heart when Laura grew big enough to be dangerous and had to be put in an institution. In historical fact, Anny's mother and niece lived quite a long time in the institutions where they were kept, and Anny visited them whenever she could, though she wasn't always sure they knew. 

 The title of Anny in Love may seem ironic while you're reading the book. In a period where upper-middle-class women weren't supposed to cultivate any marketable job skills or do any kind of paid work, Anny was a writer just like her Papa. (Only not, so far as anyone has yet tried to claim, anywhere near as good.) She wasn't rich, beautiful, or sentimental. Young men left her alone. In the 1840s and 1850s "fat" was not automatically heard as meaning "ugly" or "repulsive." Thackeray called Anny fat, presumably in contrast to her sister Minny as being thin, but in their case Minny was skinny and tubercular. Anny was sturdy and strong; the scant evidence available indicates that she was ordinary-looking, but not obese. 

Portrait of Anne Thackeray Ritchie from Wikipedia.

Minny married first. Anny was the unmarried aunt who took care of sickly Minny and the one of her babies that survived, brain-damaged Laura Makepeace Stephen (no, not Stephens). Anny lived "in love" of her family with never a suitor in sight until she was old enough to create a scandal by marrying a much younger man--a relative of hers, at that. If she "fell in love" with him, as may have been the case, she concealed it well. She knew how to say no when she wanted to, so, Wright seems to conclude, when she said yes she must have meant it.

Anyway, because the Thackerays and most of their friends were literary types, they left enough details of their lives to make an enjoyable fact-based novel. When Wright describes the characters exchanging witticisms at a party, she's likely to be quoting the ones noted in their letters, diaries, or even published work. The result is fun to read and seems reasonably accurate. 

Book Review: A Woman of Genius

Title: A Woman of Genius

Author: Mary Austin

Date: 1912

Publisher: Doubleday

ISBN: none

Quote: “[I]f you are looking for anything ordinarily called plot, you will be disappointed. Plot is distinctly the province of fiction.”

I downloaded this book from Gutenberg.org. If you’re online, you can read, print, or download it too, paying only printing expenses. If you’re not, I’ll print a copy for you at cost.

And this novel, of course, is fiction, but it purports to be the memoir of a gifted actress and the men who get, more or less pleasantly, in her way. In many ways A Woman of Genius is the feminine of The Lovely Lady: a long, unpleasingly realistic study of an unadmirable person. Olivia is the only one who describes Olivia as a genius or her acting as art. She acts in plays, gets good reviews, quarrels with men who think theatre groups are Bad Company, is disgusted by men who make it so, and blames society for her not being “Good” in the sense of “chaste.” Her sins against chastity are, however, overshadowed by her sins against modesty, and other virtues, and other people.

In this case the resonance with the facts of Women’s History held my attention a little better than the man’s story failed to hold it in The Lovely Lady. A little, but not a lot.

 

Corrected: Book Review: Que Sucede Cuando las Mujeres Oren

OOPS! Due to a bug in Libre Office, I inadvertently posted the same Sunday book review twice in the same month. Here is the book review that should have appeared on Sunday, the 17th of September. (Actually, if I'd been a more alert reader this weekend, it would have been a new edition intended to introduce Soren Kierkegaard to the general reader. That one's forthcoming.) 

Book Review: ¿Qué Sucede Cuando las Mujeres Oran?

Author: Evelyn Christenson

Date: 1975 (English), 1978 (Spanish)

Publisher: SP Publications (1975), Libros Clie (1978)

ISBN: 84-7228-372-0

Length: 144 pages

Quote: “El primer emocionante resultado fue una conversión.”

In a book that’s been very popular in the original English, Christenson describes her experience when the church ladies’ group shifted their focus from busywork to actual prayer. “Certain things began to change.”

In 1975, some mainstream Protestant churches interpreted two passages attributed to St. Paul as meaning that women had no active role in the churches at all. The churches were packed with restless, underemployed housewives, and the men weren’t taking the (mostly unpaid) jobs the churches were trying to reserve for them. At most, women might get the church hierarchy’s blessing on organizing a mission project, especially if sewing or babies were involved. Reserving the serious religious “work” of praying, preaching, and teaching for men was supposed to inspire men to take the lead in their families’ spiritual lives.

In practice, there were women in 1975 for whom “patriarch” was not a dirty word, who were proud of coming from families that had real patriarchs and wanted to marry potential patriarchs. Nevertheless, most guys just don’t have the potential. A patriarchal family is not just any family where Daddy or Grandpa lays down the law for everyone else and makes everyone else do all the work. Almost any man can act like the boss or the bully when he’s at home alone with a tired young mother and a few little children, but the case could be made that this behavior is the direct opposite of being like the Real Patriarchs described in the Bible.

When we actually study the life of Abraham, the quintessential patriarch, we find that (a) any needs he felt to give orders were met in his daytime job where he supervised dozens of younger men, and (b) kings and priests asked him for help and advice (and his own father chose to follow Abraham rather than stay at home with his other son), and (c) when people, including his wife and his children and the servants, did not ask Abraham for advice but demanded their own way, Abraham let them learn from their mistakes. Lot, that ungrateful foster son he’d brought up, couldn’t keep his employees from quarrelling with Abraham’s own. The time had come for them to part. Abraham did not say “Take your employees and go away from us.” He invited Lot to choose the direction in which Lot wanted to move, and promised to move in the opposite direction. Lot proceeded to mess up his life. Abraham rescued him once. In patriarchal cultures, most men were probably doomed by chance to be scullions rather than patriarchs; Lot’s tragedy was that he was not kept in a subservient position all his life.

But in the twentieth century, American churchmen were not into actually studying how Abraham, or Moses for that matter, interacted with their families. Their attempts to pretend that any man could be a patriarch, to create a “patriarchal social structure” that automatically placed all males a notch or two above all females, had had results that could charitably be described as ludicrous. Because ancient Greek and Roman laws often left widows penniless, the apostolic church took upon itself the ministry of feeding and sheltering widows. Some of these widows were physically able to work, and did work for the church. (Not necessarily as preachers; the only woman positively identified as both a church worker and a widow is Dorcas, who “made clothes for the poor.”) So there were actually churches in the 1970s that preached that the mere fact that a woman had outlived her husband qualified her for a church ministry, but so long as she was blessed with a living husband, she was supposed to be silent in church and stay at home during the week. I am not making this up.

Other Protestants, of whom Christenson was one, believed that women could effectively minister to other women or to children, but were not called to teach men or speak out in mixed groups. (When the two Bible verses that have to be put together to produce this reading are restored to their contexts, their meaning is rather different.) Christenson reports that in 1969 her group were asked to lead a “Week of Prayer” service. “Immediately, without praying, I gave a response...‘Tell the deacons no. God has called me to teach ladies.’...The ladies’ response was also negative.” Nevertheless, “After praying fervently we concluded that this request was really God’s will for us.”

For some church types, this historical documentation may be annoying or embarrassing by now. In other congregations the battle is still raging. As a non-churchgoing Bible Christian, all I can say is that when I hear either that the men are trying to forbid women to do any particular job in a church, or that the women are demanding the “right” to do it, I think a lot of people need to spend more time reading the New Testament before they have any insights to share. Neither side of the dispute has ever seemed either justified or sanctified to me.

When people seriously want to practice a religion, rather than quarrelling about man-made rules, I suspect we find situations more like the one Christenson describes, where those who have been doing a job ask whether the others want to do it to and the others hesitate to attempt it. So I’m motivated to read on about the rules Christenson’s prayer group adopted. They kept the most troubled or talkative members from distracting the group with personal concerns (or gossip) by sticking to a prearranged theme for prayer. They reminded themselves to keep prayers short, simple, and specific. They took time for silence. They kept groups small.

Since it was first published in English and was a bestseller in English, I don't recommend this one to second-year Spanish students looking for a book to translate. I recommend it to bilingual church groups, for whom side-by-side bilingual reading can help everyone improve their fluency in both languages.

Book Review: The Lovely Lady

"Not another Gutenberg.org e-book!" someone wails. "You promised to review a book by Barb Taub!"

Patience, please, Gentle Readers. You all know Barb Taub's book is going to be hilarious. You know it's going to have an adorable, wise, yet stupid dog in it, and castles in Scotland, and travel and fun stuff and at least one coffee-snorting line per page. Some of its short chapters appeared as blog posts. I've been posting links to those blog posts. You do not really need me to tell you to buy Oh My Dog. You've probably bought it already. If not, do. I can tell you that you'll find out why the dog is called Peri.

Meanwhile, yes, what pops out of the can of pre-written reviews is a Gutenberg e-book. 

Title: A Woman of Genius

Author: Mary Austin

Date: 1912

Publisher: Doubleday

ISBN: none

Quote: “[I]f you are looking for anything ordinarily called plot, you will be disappointed. Plot is distinctly the province of fiction.”

I downloaded this book from Gutenberg.org. If you’re online, you can read, print, or download it too, paying only printing expenses. If you’re not, I’ll print a copy for you at cost.

And this novel, of course, is fiction, but it purports to be the memoir of a gifted actress and the men who get, more or less pleasantly, in her way. In many ways A Woman of Genius is the feminine of The Lovely Lady: a long, unpleasingly realistic study of an unadmirable person. Olivia is the only one who describes Olivia as a genius or her acting as art. She acts in plays, gets good reviews, quarrels with men who think theatre groups are Bad Company, is disgusted by men who make it so, and blames society for her not being “Good” in the sense of “chaste.”Her sins against chastity are, however, overshadowed by her sins against modesty, and other virtues, and other people.

In this case the resonance with the facts of Women’s History held my attention a little better than the man’s story failed to hold it in The Lovely Lady. A little, but not a lot.

Book Review: I Am Lidian

Book Review: I Am Lidian

Author: Naomi Lane Babson

Date: 1941

Publisher: Harcourt Brace & World

ISBN: none

Length: 245 pages

Quote: “Ninety years old...As if it were by her own choice that she had lived so long.”

Lidian is, according to the author, a composite of several people who lived between 1838 and 1928. By 1941 none of those people was left to tell us how accurately Lidian is represented in this book.

She remembers everything. She’s not overly patient with those who don’t. “That girl from the newspaper thought she was asleep. Let her think it, then. When you are ninety it’s your privilege to go to sleep in company if you choose. She wasr tired of answering questions anyhow.”

This novel begins with the rather familiar device of assuring us that Lidian will survive her adventures by introducing her at age ninety, then presenting the rest of the story as the reverie into which she nods off while the reporter goes back to write a piece of “fiddle-faddle.” Lidian remembers being a child who was mute for a few years after putting lye in her mouth. She married the man one of her friends wanted; she lived to regret it,. She travelled from Massachusetts to Montana. She had children, and lost some. She became a widow and remarried. And did she kill a man, along the way, or merely contribute to his accidental death? She became, in any case, the sort of old lady who thinks and talks about her family relationships more than the “trash” of news and fashion.

If you have known, loved, and perhaps missed someone like that, you might enjoy Lidian’s company. Her story is not political but it qualifies as feminist literature; it celebrates a woman who was strong but not selfconsciously heroic, sexy but not foolishly romantic, loyal but not sentimental, polite but not affected, a whole person but not a saint.

If you need a reminder to listen to your mother’s or grandmother’s stories while you can, I Am Lidian is one.

Book Review: Memoirs of an Unfit Mother

Title: Memoirs of an Unfit Mother

Author: Anne Robinson

Date: 2001

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

ISBN: 0-7434-4896-0

Length: 325 pages

Illustrations: black-and-white photo insert

Quote: “[T]his book...is meant for all women who have struggled with moth­erhood, with a career, with trying to do the right thing.”

Sigh. It’s not that television has stopped exploiting women’s talents and energy to cater to men’s sexual fantasies. It’s merely that television has expanded and made room for more different ones. Modern television offers not only Doris Day, Liz Taylor, and Maureen O’Hara, but more unusual fantasy figures. There was a market for fifty-year-old British redheads in black leather. Who knew? Anyway, some readers probably remember a game show called “The Weakest Link.” Anne Robinson was the British redhead who told somebody after each show, “You are the weakest link. Goodbye.”

It was, she said in her memoir, the reward for a lifetime of putting up with sexist bigotry, at first in the traditional well-off British manner of drinking self-destructive quantities of alcohol, then by getting sober and enjoying the benefits of Britain’s quiet and gradual movement toward enlightenment. I think it’s because Robinson never was a militant feminist that reading her memoirs made me feel like one.

The aggressive, angry party within feminism always got attention but, as Robinson both explains and demonstrates, it has not in fact represented “women” very often or very well. The appeals to a popular model of “biology” that’s always leaped to embrace gender stereotypes based on incredibly weak evidence, that does not in fact fit either animal behavior or human behavior as well as its enthusiasts want to think it does, reflect a basic human tendency that’s not actually all that well correlated with gender. While a few feminist theorists still bewail the process of socialization by which women are “feminized” into accepting a little denial of our aggressive instincts as the price for a cozy domestic life, in observed fact it doesn’t take any really heavy or systematic oppression to sell that deal to men, either. When disappointed by her first husband’s sexist, judgmental immaturity, Anne Robinson had no trouble finding a sweet, supportive man who didn’t mind a bit letting her climb higher up the corporate ladder than he did and support his financial irresponsibility, and in fact, she tells us, her first husband and their child appreciated good old Johnny’s just-love-me-cos-I’m-cute personality too.

While baby-boomer women were quietly sailing past men in school and on almost every kind of performance-based measurement of promotability, the commercial media were squalling at us, “But...but...but...you don’t waaant to be smart, competent, hardworking, promoted, and rich! You’ll be looonely! A biological clock” (remember those purely theoretical biological clocks?) “will go off and one day when you’re thirty-five you’ll run out of the office screaming ‘I want to stay home and have babies!’ You’ll all come down with chronic fatigue syndrome!” (I am not making this up. When a “chronic” form of mononucleosis spread through measles vaccine affected a large group of young adults in the Northern States and Canada, a short-lived theory that the men at the vaccine companies must have loved was that more women than men got the disease because women just weren’t built to take the stress of competing with men in offices or universities.)

And the majority response, the most truly “feminine” response if “feminine” means “characteristic of women, or of a majority of women,” was: Anne Robinson’s. Yes, she says, of course most women would rather have a husband than not, would prefer a husband who can support them while they stay home with at least one baby through at least five “wonder years,” probably do care more about their success as mothers and grandmothers than about their successes in work or school. And they’re still good enough at work and school to move past most of the men. And they might even be just loyal and loving enough to stay with sweet, supportive, less successful husbands. Albeit, if he’s less successful because he’s less careful with money, in separate homes where he can’t jeopardize her investments...

I expected this book to be funny. It’s not, particularly. I think I chortled audibly once while reading it. But it’s true to the way so many women seem to feel, however different from Anne Robinson we may be and however different our careers may be. I suspect that for a lot of Robinson’s generation the best laugh is going to come at the end, where she mentions the fans who fantasize about her “with a whip.” Is that not the way it goes? When you hit fifty, if you’re still trim and healthy and therefore attractive to young men, but they do notice that you’re “a little older” than they are, their fantasies kink up. They want you to be the sexually abusive nanny or teacher they did not actually have. Many of us are willing to spank a silly boy for a price, because that scenario is not sexually interesting to us...

But if you remember the history, it’s worth adding another voice to the chorus. Robinson was told she was “not actually an unfit mother,” just not fit enough to get custody of the child, because she worked (fewer hours than her first husband) and was unfaithful to their marriage (less blatantly than her first husband)—but not because she was an Irish-type genetic alcoholic rapidly developing a “drink problem,” although she was. With Alcoholics Anonymous-level candor, no bitterness or denial of responsibility, she revels in the irony that during the child’s wonder years she did give up full-time work. By being unfit to do it. She coped with sexist exploitation while young and depended on the very imperfect loyalty it spawned to keep a job during her descent to “the bottom” of self-induced physical disability. The years when she was sobering up, recovering her health, and enjoying her seniority as corporate doors opened to more women, were the years when the daughter was in school and was tactful enough not to want to hurt Daddy’s feelings by spending too much more time with Mommy.

One section of the story I did not like was Robinson’s memories of the 1980s, when she was getting paid to be frankly bitchy and she—and her employers—overdid it. Even making allowances for the defective conscience that seems to cause extroversion, someone should have told her...People can respect, even admire, news commentary that jabs and slashes at the weak points in policies and those who impose them. Robinson was a dare-to-be-trendy left-winger who provided loyal opposition for Mrs Thatcher. When the Prime Minister blithely told young people (many of whom were unemployed welfare dependents) “to buy a BIG house at the very beginning. Then they won’t have to move when they have a family,” and Robinson was the “hound” who retorted that “not everyone can afford a big house” and Mrs Thatcher replied “You’ve made some money out of houses,” that was a fair “game, set and match.” British audiences loved it. Robinson did not share the mainstream British adoration of the royal family. Well, if she didn’t she didn’t; Americans generally think it’s adorably British that most Brits like having a royal family and peers, although this web site keeps a wary eye on some U.S. citizens whose taste for things British embraces any tendencies toward British elitism. The question of how much the Queen ought to be paid just for being an admirable old lady was fair game. Robinson had a right to score whatever points she could score off that...but a half-grown girl who married too young, whose late-adolescent hormones were raging in a physically dangerous imbalance, going through all that and being a mother too, was not fair game. Robinson of all people should’ve known enough to leave Diana Spencer alone. When she confessed just a few of the things she’d said about the Princess, I wanted to take a whip to Robinson. Yes, most humans of both sexes do have some degree of mean-spiritedness, but we should all be helping one another to repress it.

So...Robinson's talent for cheerful verbal cruelty was transferred first to daytime TV talk shows and then, as she had a talent for television, to the game show that made her an international TV star. And I will say for Robinson that she does recognize that the men who steered her newspaper career the wrong way didn’t get to enjoy that piece of luck and compensation, as she did. She had to smash her way through appalling amounts of bigotry, but she avoided the trap of thinking that everything was all about bigotry, that women always get the short end...Robinson, as an individual, just happened to be able to make a demotion into a promotion. Cheers.

Book Review: Althea

Title: Althea 

Author: Sally H. Jacobs

Date: 2023

Publisher: St Martin's

ISBN: 978-1-250-24656-1

Quote: "When Venus and Serena published a Black History Month newsletter in their high school years it was Althea who they put on the back cover,"

All tennis stars' biographies have one plot: Once upon a time there was a young person who played tennis better than all per friends did. Person was sponsored and encouraged, and per game got better. Person grew older and more interested in more adult pursuits; person retired and, if the story is written long enough after the person's birth, person died. The End. I find in this book much more than a tennis star's biography. For one thing it may shed some light on today's concerns about atrazine-damaged boys wanting to play girls' sports as "trans-women"...but read on.

Althea Gibson's story gains some additional drama from the extraordinary amount of bigotry she had to deal with. She caught hate on at least six different levels: as a Black athlete, as a woman athlete, as an underprivileged athlete, as the child of a dysfunctional family, as an introvert, and as a person who may have been genuinely gender-confused, though the few people who seem to have seen her wearing less than she wore in the photo above seem to have accepted her as female. 

She had a few other nicknames besides the predictable "Gib" and "Gipper," explained in the book, but the one that seems to have lasted longest was "Big Al." In a generation where the average woman's height was 5'2", Gibson was 5'10". At birth she was described as a boy, a "big fat one" though she wasn't fat for long, and was called Alger. Before she was a year old this had been dismissed as a mistake, and the name was changed to Althea. Her lanky build, low voice, and athletic carriage were often perceived as mannish. College dorm mates thought she was a lesbian, though no suspected girlfriends were ever named. As a teenager she was told by a doctor that she'd never have children. She had boyfriends; apparently there was the one on whom she had a crush, the one who was a lifelong good friend, the one she married later on for practical reasons, and possibly more. Jacobs seems to accept the claim that she was a lesbian while presenting evidence that seems more supportive of a claim that she was physically gender-confused. A female roommate said she talked about sex, presumably with men, though women of their vintage often tried to be so indirect and use so many euphemisms that it was hard to be sure. At least, neither the man with whom she reportedly spent days locked in a room, nor either of the men to whom she was married, reported any surprises or complaints. Some people who have male, or partly male ("chimeric"), DNA develop superficially complete but sterile female parts; Gibson might have been one of them.

 As a teenager she was more of a mess than average. Reports of her learning to fight by hitting her abusive father back, spending weeks on end on the streets, brawling and stealing and so on, may leave local readers with one really burning question: "She wasn't one of our Gibsons was she?" Apparently not. "Gibson" was a fairly common English name. Althea's family traced it to an English slavemaster in South Carolina, not the English freethinker from whom our Gibsons descend. Anyway tennis "saved" her from a life of crime, but she was seen as a wild child, a neglected brat from the ghetto, with neither manners nor morals, for a long time. 

But she was good at tennis. She went to FAMC, Florida's all-Black college, on a tennis scholarship and coached as her student labor job. She did well enough in the all-Black tennis league to be invited to play in the White league. The expectation apparently was that the presumed inferiority of the Black mind would keep a girl like Gibson from actually beating the likes of Margaret Dupont or Louise Brough. Gibson trounced them--and, luckily for her, they enjoyed the novelty of being challenged. The image of big, often Black, challengers mopping the floor with cute, naive rich kids who thought they were athletes was a thoroughly worn-out stereotype before it started being used against the Williams sisters; Gibson did more than anyone else to create it.

Her career may even have owed its peaks of success to a horse. In the early 1950s Maureen Connolly was the brightest star in the sky of women's tennis. Big Al had a five-inch height advantage, but Little Mo was Irish. As Jacob tells it, both athletes had actually been longing to meet someone who could give them a real game, so they liked and respected each other. Connolly won a good two-thirds of the time and looked adorable while doing it. Then she had that tiresome injury, riding her horse, and retired, leaving a clear path for her only real competitor to become the Queen of Tennis.

All through the 1950s and 1960s Gibson smashed one prestigious "amateur" title after another. She was sent on world tours to show the world how successful it was possible for Black Americans to be. She won Wimbledon. She curtsied to the Queen of England. She was given a ticker tape parade in New York City. She was barred by league rules from ever earning more than $75 per month from tennis, barred by her tennis schedule from having a better paid job, and, when she'd established that she owned the sport, barred from cashing in as a tennis "professional" by sponsors' reluctance to invest in promoting women's games. Her fellow athletes, some of whom were close friends, married and had children. Gibson didn't have children and didn't stay married long, and after reaching retirement age she felt "broke." 

For the next generation of tennis stars, the game was much more profitable. Arthur Ashe, Jimmy Connors, Billie Jean King, and their colleagues didn't have their incomes capped to maintain "amateur" status, and were free to earn what their talents were worth on the market while still being eligible for events like Wimbledon. Gibson seemed carefully to avoid directing resentment toward the young stars who admired her. When Chris Evert beat her, Gibson laughed. When invited to appear in public with Ashe, making some sort of public-spirited statement--apparently it happened often--Gibson did; she seemed partial to Ashe in a motherly way, more than resentful of the "class" difference. She blamed the "system," not the young athletes. She was, nevertheless, bitter about the fact that this younger generation of tennis stars were getting so much more money with so much less effort than she ever had. 

It wasn't only the income cap, or the stricter rules about dress codes and other aspects of "ladylike" conduct, Jacobs shows. Gibson was always given clearly to understand that her breaks and her sponsorship depended on her being a good sport about the state of race relations--in other words, her ability to deny that, at the time, the state of race relations was a sort of undeclared war. She was ghetto girl enough to look people in the eye and deny, deny, deny that she'd encountered any particular difficulties because she was Black. In historical fact, Jacobs documents, she had. Gibson did encounter friendly, supportive White people--probably more often than the other kind--and her early life in the ghetto had been so wretched that the close friends of her middle-class adult life were a mixed group, mostly White. Still, there were occasions when her affirmations of interracial good will must have felt like efforts to persuade herself, or like outright lies. If some White people made very large gestures of good will and respect for her, and they did, she still had to shrug off plenty of petty, tacky little gestures of White hostility.

By way of reward for denying large parts of her reality, after whippersnappers like Evert started beating her Gibson was employed by the federal government to deliver public-spirited messages to the world. She addressed, for example, seniors groups on the topic of exercise. Her wages were low, and her Social Security pension, when she qualified for one, unlivable. At one point she threatened suicide. Her better paid friends rallied around to set up a fund that raised her income to what she and they agreed would be modest comfort, in which she spent the rest of her life (1927-2003).

One way this book could have been improved would have been a recognition that. even if her way of communicating it was a product of her ghetto experience, Gibson's introvert personality was as much a permanent physical part of her as her height and color were. She was remarkably free from any need for "mental health care," heroically levelheaded about reality, even the reality that after reaching a certain level of age and illness she wasn't able to live on her income. No matter how many people, in the twentieth century, bought into Sigmund Freud's erroneous belief that all people suffered from extroversion, the medical fact is that many of us don't. What introverts need is respect. In Gibson's lifetime, respect for the personality that made it possible for a juvenile delinquent from the ghetto to mature into a gracious and lovable "self-made" adult, though obviously deserved, was as rare as appreciation for Gibson's kind of face and hair. (At least a similar historical coincidence allowed Gibson's shape to be described in the media as a "rangy" and "supple" "gazelle," in the 1950s, rather than the sort of "You're ugly!" reaction Alice Walker showed a thin young woman getting in the 1920s.) Gibson was wired to understand how much better it was to become a responsible, law-abiding adult, even if she had to lean heavily on denial to do that, rather than to flame out as the sort of "wild child" she'd been. 

Every year we seem to read another news story about another ghetto youth whose athletic or musical ability may be as promising as hers was, but who doesn't seem to understand what he (most of them are male) needs to give up in order to get the benefit of his talents. Getting Althea Gibson from the streets into a teacher training course required the school to cut her some slack (Gibson apparently romped over several college rules) and also required her to give up brawling and stealing, and she did. At the time social support for "Judeo-Christian morality" provided reinforcement for the improvement in teen Althea's behavior, even though popular culture blamed and hated her insistence on privacy and adherence to her contractual obligation not to become the sort of civil rights activist some wanted her to be. Today, with people in the school system openly preaching atheism and challenging our culture's "traditional morality," we badly need support for the physical structure in Gibson's brain that supplied that crucial sense that becoming a law-abiding adult would be better than remaining a delinquent. We badly need to understand that Gibson's insistence on privacy was a valuable aspect of that vital part of her brain, even more valuable than her talents for music and tennis.

Some of us may not yet be capable of recognizing that depression (a symptom more often than a separate disease) and thrill-seeking "suicidality," as discussed by Clancy Martin (probably a distinct disease) and a clearheaded, rational rather than emotional, sense of conditions with which we are and are not willing to live, are three separate things. Even if we want to focus on preventing suicide as an end in itself, we need to realize that when people think and talk about ending their lives because they're not willing to live with certain levels of illness, poverty, dependency, etc., handing them serotonin boosters for a quick emotional "high" is likely to make them feel happier and more decisive about suicide. Althea Gibson would not have lived nearly as long as she did if she'd suffered much from depression or thought of suicide as a response to depression/ She seems much more like the type of person who is, by nature, cheerful and confident enough to be able to feel, acknowledge, and recover from the unpleasant emotions that come and go. When Gibson called an old friend to say she'd decided to end her life, she was expressing a mature, detached consideration of her medical condition, her finances, and the value her presence had for other people. Fortunately for her (and, I believe, for her friend's prospects in the hereafter!), the people Gibson knew were intelligent enough to recognize that the only possible way to improve her situation was to demonstrate the value her presence had for them, specifically, by improving her finances. 

So, if young readers of this book don't want to pay their debts and live within their means, should they read this book as encouragement to threaten suicide whenever they could use some money? Of course not. No doubt it was helpful for Gibson's friends that, by the time Gibson decided her situation was unlivable, she'd been coping with reality quite well for at least the last fifty years, and her income was much lower and her medical expenses were higher than her friends'. What they should take away from this book is that her friends had enough sense not to leap to conclusions about her suffering from depression as a separate disease (she didn't) or needing to be punished with a clumsy, misguided, utterly irrelevant approach to "mental health." Gibson's mental health was fine. Even her physical health was better than many of her generation's. She just plain didn't have enough money to live on. In that case, and not in the cases of depressive or thrill-seeking suicide threateners, the one correct solution to her problem was a cash infusion. She got that, and lived fairly happily until some additional disease factor ended her life with a brief physical illness, diagnosed as blood poisoning, in her late seventies.

What I'd like to see older readers take away from this book is an appreciation of the fact that Gibson's friends also knew better than to babble about "help" coming from the federal government. In the late twentieth century, federal funding was allocated to "supplemental security" for retirees who couldn't live on their Social Security pensions. Bureaucrats prefered to subsidize various unhelpful boondoggles that promised direct relief of their agreed-upon "needs," such as slum "housing" and horrific nursing homes to address rent, mortgage, and housekeeping expenses, but in some cases, recognizing the morale-boosting benefits of making one's own budgetary decisions, they actually sent these retirees supplementary checks. This was not what Gibson wanted or needed, and her friends had enough sense to recognize the fact. There are retirees, like Carolyn Heilbrun, who--rationally, not emotionally--choose to end their lives rather than depend on large-scale handout "programs" for anything. Gibson fortunately didn't have to make that additional decision, because her friends knew that a big part of her decision was based on their affirmation of the value her individual life and work had for them. 

Telling people "There's a program that might meet your need for..." is, in fact, telling them "You have no worth; you are only a bundle of needs; your existence has no value to me." If you are concerned about someone you know, even if you feel tempted to rationalize that as long as what the person needs can be expressed in dollars and cents and the federal government just collected several dollars and cents from you last month, be very sure you don't mention handout programs or "needs." Never let that kind of thought cross your mind! If the people of concern to you are, like Gibson or Heilbrun, responsible competent adults whose reality problems involve money, bear in mind at all times that money becomes a reality problem for people to whom money represents the value other people set on their worth. They have no "needs." They have only worth--if you want to be heard as telling them anything other than "Choose suicide now." (They probably will not choose suicide now just because they hear you telling them to, but they will most certainly revise their opinions of you.) If these people wanted cash alone, they could be exploiting their credibility, as active and competent seniors, to set up all kinds of frauds and scams. If you want this type of person to be able to live with any level of disability, be sure you use the word "need" only in reference to yourself, as in "I need to show my appreciation of what you do and have done."

Book Review: Needlepoint for Everyone

Title: Needlepoint for Everyone

Author: Mary Brooks Picken & Doris White

Date: 1970

Publisher: Harper & Row

ISBN: none, but click here to see it on Amazon

Length: 207 pages plus index

Illustrations: photos, mostly black and white, and some charts

Quote: “Needlepoint, which is embroidery on canvas, was a type of needlework highly developed by the English.”

Needlepoint for Everyone gives a few details from the history of needlepoint, but there’s not a great deal of history in this book. Neither is there a great deal of exposition. There are examples of needlepoint found in museums and historic mansions, explanations of techniques, and chapters about specific styles and subjects for needlepoint. There are lots of pictures. Most of them are black and white, but most are clear enough to inspire crafters.

Specific topics discussed in this book include the needlepoint of Blair House (“the Guest White House”), needlepoint in rehabilitation programs, samplers and mottoes, devotionals, needlepoint for children, needlepoint for men, needlepoint in advertising, needlepoint treasures in museums, and needlepoint symbols.

This ambitious, somewhat eccentric book contains far more photographs than charts, but even knitters and weavers—as well as needlepointers and cross-stitches—can find some inspiration in Needlepoint for Everyone.

By looking her up online, I’ve learned that Mary Brooks Picken was quite an interesting character. She died, around age ninety-five, before I became a serious needle crafter. Back in 1916 she had founded the “Women’s Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences.” As what one pattern publisher still calls “the original fashion authority,” she wrote ninety-six books on sewing and textile crafts. Someone looking for fresh material for a Women’s History Month project might want to research her life and work. 

Categories Book, Crafts Tags needlepoint, Washington D.C., women's history 

Book Review: Powered by Wellesley

Title: Powered by Wellesley 

Author: Jin Lan McCann

Date: 2017

Publisher: Newgrange

ISBN: 978-0-9989899-4-5 

Length: 288 pages

Illustrations: several photos 

Quote: "I thought I was an open minded modern Chinese woman when I came to the US in 2001." 

If novels by Bette Bao Lord, Amy Tan, and Lisa See have left you wondering about the lives of privileged young women in modern China, Jin Lan McCann is here to answer your questions. For all the rhetoric about equality and being proletarians...privileged Chinese people did not actually want or intend to be sent to work on farms. The young Jin Lan Deng worked on a cruise ship for rich tourists, met some and eventually married one of the super-rich men who were able to tour China in the late twentieth century. 

We learn, though, how some previous relationships went, and how modern Chinese given names translate into English, and how important private restaurants were in China's recovery from the Mao era. We learn more than we may have wanted to know about what can be substituted for tofu in authentic Chinese food. We learn what sort of misconduct did and didn't get people imprisoned, denounced, dismissed from their jobs, or even scolded by their families. 

Revelling in the freedom of good connections, the author invested in restaurants, became rich enough to help a less than deserving friend, was free to admire Henry Kissinger ("such a sweet old gentleman") and Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, and, once married to an American, to pursue a degree in economics at Mrs. Clinton's old college. Wellesley required its students to present "unique" points of view, to write credible papers even from cranks' points of view if necessary. Required to consider the "conservative" economic viewpoint, she realized that she'd already seen how much better it had worked than the socialist economic system did. 

The book is more a memoir than an economic study. It's told in an authentic, conversational voice; you'll hear traces of an accent. Fiscal conservatives might wish there was more exposition of the economic arguments, but that's what Thomas Sowell and Veronique de Rugy do. Powered by Wellesley offers a fresh, unique variation on the "This was what we used to do in China, and then we came to America" story. 

Other readers might wish there were more recipes, more poems, even more about fashion in this book--creating a market for future books, perhaps.

I recommend it particularly to those interested in Chinese history and women's history, but anyone who likes fact-based stories could enjoy Powered by Wellesley.

Book Review: And It Was Good

Title: And It Was Good

Author: Madeleine L’Engle

Publisher: Shaw

Date: 1983

ISBN: 0-87788-046-8

Length: 21 pages

Quote: “It has long struck me with joy and awe that the theory of evolution is not contrary to the teaching of the Bible.”

Like many people my age I discovered A Wrinkle in Time in the school library in grade six, where I recognized it as science fiction. I liked it enough to read the other books beside it on the shelf, also genre fiction. When I found The Moon by Night I was surprised; not because the story turned the usual conventions of teen romance stories upside down, which I liked, but because the heroine was meditating on a Psalm before, during, and after the romance. Could someone who wrote genre fiction be a Christian?

Well, actually, yes. As explained in the nonfiction books she was able to publish only after building a reputation for writing excellent genre fiction, L’Engle was a very active, even orthodox, member of the Episcopalian church. On some points that church’s doctrines were more liberal than those of some other Protestant churches. The competing substitute-for-religion of evolutionism was very noisy and dogmatic at the time, and had apparently bullied many Episcopalians into accepting faith in the dogma of macroevolution, as preached by the prophet Darwin, as objective, scientific fact. They had discovered that they didn’t have to reject the book of Genesis in order to accept the alternative origin myth. The book of Genesis is a collection of poems and legends about a time long ago. It could be “poetic truth,” a metaphor…

As a doctrine to take seriously and teach, that one never satisfied me either. Why, I wondered, is it so difficult for some people to accept the objective scientific facts about the origins of life? We. Do. Not. Know. There is no empirically verifiable way of “scientifically studying” any of the various origin stories floating about. “The fossil record” seems to tell a nice clear story, supported by carbon dating, of “simpler” lifeforms being displaced by “more complex” lifeforms, until you realize that it was put together for that purpose. Microevolution, the rule that natural or human-guided selection will cause a population to evolve toward one or another extreme of what is possible within their species, is a scientific fact students can verify. Macroevolution, the idea that one species can evolve into another species, is a theory that many people treat as a religious doctrine; it can’t be scientifically verified. Like the Anglo-Israelite Theory of more recent prehistory, it’s logical, it fits into the incomplete collection of known facts, it has emotional appeal for some people, but it can never be proved or disproved. Good people can take such theories seriously; that doesn’t make them true, or scientific. Giving a theory the status of a fact moves thought from the category of "science" to the category of "religion," and I prefer my Christianity neat, not watered down with other religions. I don't mind at all a discussion of "If this fossil is what I think it is...," nor do I mind the most literal interpretations of the stories in the book of Genesis, but I don't think it's either good science or good religion to blather about "the myths of Creation and the facts of Evolution." That' is, in my opinion, proselytizing for an antichristian religion that's been tagged as "Scientism," a thoroughly unscientific worship of scientists...

So, when I found And It Was Good in a public library, some years after its publication, I can’t say I was thrilled by L’Engle’s treatment of the stories of the Creation as myths to which writers can add whatever fanciful details they like. The whimsies L’Engle adds to the story of Cain illuminate a serious Christian consideration of moral responsibility, and prefigure the speculative novel later published as Many Waters…but, but…that’s just not the way many Christians were taught to approach Bible stories.

If, like me, you find it simpler to say that our faith is that life on Earth was created (because that takes fewer leaps of credulity than believing it evolved without some sort of “intelligent design”), then you may feel that L’Engle wastes a lot of words, and mental energy, philosophizing about something you could have explained much more simply—“elegantly,” if you will. Christians believe that our world was created by a Supreme Being, a force of “Powerful Goodness,” and that originally our Creator pronounced it good; what was not good came later. Once you accept the idea of a Creator there is no reason to doubt any of the extraordinary things the Bible writers say the Creator has done. We have not necessarily been told how it was done. There is no reason to feel positive that what the words they used suggest to our minds is what we would have seen and heard if we had been there when whatever they tried to describe happened, but also no reason to doubt that, if the Creator did choose some extraordinary ways to make things happen, a Being capable of creating life could have done those things too.

A Being capable of creating life could have evolved it through "more primitive" forms of life as easily as created it by fiat, and the Bible never says that when the waters parted and the dry land appeared, there were no fossils from previous eras of which we are told nothing. The Bible not only never says that there were no dinosaurs, but affirms that ancient people were familiar with an idea of "dragons." But We. Do. Not. Know.

“How can the world be round,” a nineteenth century literalist supposedly exclaimed, “when the Bible speaks of its four corners?” At tremendous risk and expense, in the twentieth century a few humans were able to step back and get a look at the world, and it is round. There is no need to make fun of the literalist, though. Israel and its surrounding countries, the Bible writer’s world, occupy a piece of earth bounded almost entirely by water, technically a peninsula rather than a large island or small continent, and its shape is basically four-cornered.

Those ancient kings of whom nothing is known, who lived hundreds of years, the one of them who was closest to God living fewer years than the others. L’Engle apparently had not read that non-Hebrew historians had the same list of long-gone kings whose dynasties lasted the same numbers of years that the book of Genesis suggests the individual kings lived.

Even the ages of Moses’ ancestors, which some people find hard to believe…Some Christians dogmatically believe that this family lived their lives at about half the speed most people do, and Sarah gave birth at age ninety and Jacob’s thirteen (or more) children were all born after he was seventy, because of their faith in a God with Whom all things are possible. The Creator has in fact given a minority of humans “longevity genes.” Maybe the family of Abraham were given super-longevity genes to impress the Semitic tribes to whom they preached against the apparently prevalent custom of human sacrifice. Maybe. Then again, in some cultures, especially in climates that have wet and dry “seasons” rather than hot, cold, and transitional seasons, time is counted in seasons, two to a year.

The Bible does not contradict itself on the deep level at which it has meaning, but it does contain disparities. Maybe the lesson to be learned is that “we’ll understand it better by and by.” That we are hard-wired to believe in Powerful Goodness suggests that there must be some truth behind our belief. The Bible is by far the most credible ancient document of this belief…but our faith needs to be in God, rather than in the details of any ancient document.

L’Engle plays with the details, teasing psychological meaning out of them. Maybe her poetic visions are true. Maybe in the afterlife Moses will tell her “That is not what I meant, at all.” Who knows. L’Engle does take some pains, in this book and in her other Christian books, to make a clear distinction between what Christianity has historically taught and what L’Engle, personally, thought.

It was probably this more sophisticated (High Church) Anglican thought, reflected in those of their books that are most accessible to children, that got both L’Engle and C.S. Lewis onto a list of books some busybody recommended not making available to children. This list was misreported to L’Engle as a list of “pornographic” books, and she marvels both at being compared with Lewis and with either writer’s being considered “pornographic.” (Sometimes I wish now that, while she was living, I’d written to tell her that I started buying her books at the same time I started buying Lewis’s and, since the main difference between Anglicans and Episcopalians is nationality, I found many similarities.) As all book lovers remember, the only references to sex in either the Narnia books or the series that started with A Wrinkle in Time are the words that have genders: he, she, mother, father. What would have scared the busybody would be the “Christian mythology.” Is it impious to imagine God incarnated in a world of rational animals as a Lion? In Wrinkle the “three ladies” who guide the children on their adventure aren’t called angels, but it’s fairly obvious that they’re meant to be messengers of God teaching the children how to be messengers from God. “Apprentice angels” is my phrase not L’Engle’s. I’m comfortable with the idea of Christians thinking of ourselves as apprentice angels. Not everyone is. We are not yet pure spirits, like the angels, that can survive travel between solar systems; perhaps we will be. I’m not perturbed by the idea of God choosing to incarnate as a talking lion in a world different from ours, either, and I’m comfortable with the cute little fauns in Narnia and the hobbits in Middle-Earth too. Not everyone is. L’Engle usually managed to sustain the dry bemused tone with which she reports how people just didn’t understand her work, in And It Was Good; my take on a late work, The Rock That Is Higher, was that in that late work the old lady indulged in a bit of whining. Some people should only apply the creativity with which they misread other people’s books to writing books of their own.

The explanation of the misunderstanding is also discussed, briefly, in And It Was Good. Christianity is not Positive Thinking, which tries to dismiss unpleasant things as “negative,” not really there. Christianity has historically recognized that evil things, evildoers, and an Evil Principle exist. Neither is Christianity a dualistic philosophy in which good and evil are equal or balance each other. Christianity teaches that Powerful Goodness will prevail in the end. L’Engle, like her characters, got through difficult times by clinging to memories of good things. Yet the Evil Principle often—some Christians say, consciously and deliberately—corrupts even the best things. No writer is infallible. Anyone who writes very much has written some things that were wrong, that might have confused, deceived, or distracted somebody somewhere.

Sincere Christian readers criticize Christian books (as I’m doing here) and recommend them with reservations, but we don’t want them banned or censored; we recognize that even something that harmed us might have helped someone else. One person’s temptation to a bad investment of time or money may be another’s encouragement to a good one; one person’s “soft on New Age groups like that awful cult that…” is another’s “Blessed may this author be for affirming that there are good things about my non-Christian heritage.” There are books—as a bookseller I’ve received some books—that, upon thoughtful reading, we decide may be most useful for their bulk, to raise a seat or cover a crack, or perhaps for their chemical properties, to absorb water or light fires. I’ve burned multiple copies of once-popular novels in which characters have sex at age twelve (or under), doctors prescribe medications that would be likely to kill patients in real life, anyone speaking as an expert recommends something that’s now known to be counterproductive. I’m not going to resell those books; others have a right to sell their copies if they choose. I’d agree with, and extend, something L’Engle said in And It Was Good: it’s when I confuse my bookseller’s right to choose my stock with the Voice of God, and start pontificating, ‘Nobody should read this, nobody should see it, it should be banned,” that I am in grave spiritual danger.

I recommend And It Was Good to those who would like to know more about the author of A Wrinkle in Time, to all students of women’s history and especially of women’s spirituality. For those who want to know more about the Bible and Christianity, other books would be better studied before this one. I like this book very much; every book is not meant, does not need, to be a first book on its topic.

Book Review: The Story of My Life

Title: The Story of My Life

Author: Helen Keller

Date: 1902 and many times since

Publisher: Penguin (1988 reprint) and many others

ISBN: 0-451-52447-0

Length: 218 pages

Illustrations: Braille and sign language alphabets are standard; some editions also have photos

Quote: “I like to knit and crochet. I read...I play...checkers or chess.”

Born in 1880, Helen Keller was just learning to talk when fever destroyed her sight and hearing. For a few years adults assumed she couldn’t learn anything and would have to be locked up throughout a lonely, wasted life. Then young Anne Sullivan, whose interest in communicating with the blind probably owed something to the weakness of her own eyes, undertook to try to teach little Helen finger-spelling. It seemed a hopeless task since Helen hadn’t properly learned words, but once Helen figured out that Sullivan was using signs in place of the words Helen had just begun trying to say, her frustrated mind awakened, and her education progressed fast. At twenty-one, despite doubts that she could possibly be answering all the questions and doing all the work herself, Helen Keller had a college degree and had written a book-length memoir about her education.

By the time she died in 1968 I was just beginning to notice the scarcity and poor quality of biographies of interesting women for little girls to read. Bored by Madame Curie and soon to notice the lack of solid facts in a then-popular series of “Childhood of Famous Americans” about whose childhood little was really known, I remember reading half a dozen editions of Helen Keller’s autobiography, each with some “special material”—biography, letters, biography of Anne Sullivan Macy—and finding her story about the most interesting on the “children’s biographies” shelves.

Rereading The Story of My Life as an adult, I find Keller’s Victorian Southern Lady style affected and off-putting—but she was only half grown when she wrote it, so in her memoir as in her early letters, Keller was writing as girl to girl. I didn’t find her affectations nearly as bad as those in some “children’s books” written by people old enough to know better, even when I was twelve or fifteen. Reading the edition that contains her letters, I note that even Keller’s baby sister Mildred complained about her affectations. As a teenager Keller wrote to Mildred “not to blame me for using big words, as you do the same.” Keller’s small words could also sound terribly twee, with lots of belaboring about how good and kind everyone was and what a happy little friend she was to all her correspondents, but she was a late Victorian as well as a child. Allowances must be made.

Helen Keller’s life can be summarized in a sentence, or even a phrase: “deaf-blind pioneer activist.” In a world that takes for granted that all deaf-blind children deserve access to education, Keller no longer seems the heroine she used to be. Do we still need to know the names of all her teachers, tutors, friends, every book she read and place she visited? Is it an unnecessary exercise in embarrassment to realize that, in 1890, many people thought educating any girl beyond the ABC’s and basic arithmetic was a waste of time, many more thought educating children who were either blind or deaf was a waste of time, and most thought educating anyone who was both deaf and blind was simply impossible?

While agreeing that it’s embarrassing, I’ll suggest that children may still enjoy Keller’s account of her own childhood. I know I did. I can’t say exactly why. Adults who used to worry about how to occupy the mind of a child prodigy used to poke the ideas of Braille, finger-spelling, and sign language at my brother and me; we didn’t mind pleasing adults and we enjoyed using finger-spelling as a secret code, but I remember some positive pleasure in little Helen as a storybook character that I don’t feel now. As a child I must have thought she seemed good and kind, which in fact she was. (At one point in childhood she was interested in having a Seeing Eye dog, but postponed that adventure in order for the money to be spent on sharing her dear Teacher with another deaf-blind child.) As an adult I think that, after a miserable embarrassing time of screaming and throwing things in sheer frustration, she overcompensated and became a goody-goody with no noticeable sense of humor—but children will forgive a storybook character for worse shortcomings than that if the character guides them through a good story.

Perhaps, too, my loss of attraction to Helen Keller as storybook character has something to do with having read her obscure adult writings. She grew up to become a writer. She wrote some short pieces, notably the famous “Three Days to See” article, that deserved the success they enjoyed, and some full-length books that deserved the oblivion into which they sank like stones. Her politics were Socialist, her religion was Swedenborgian, and she wrote as if people my parents’ or grandparents’ age took either of those schools of thought seriously. The ones I knew did not. Her other experience was narrowed, hard though she tried to broaden it, not even so much by her being a Victorian Southern Lady as by others seeing her as a freak. She seems always to have accepted that people were likely to buy her books merely because they saw her as a freak, and try very very hard to be a nice, lovable freak.

It remains for today’s more privileged deaf-blind authors to write vividly of their own experience, not just “seeing through friends’ eyes” on a boat ride that the leaves of trees on the riverbank were crimson and gold, but feeling the boat rock slightly when a bird perched on a rail, perhaps, or smelling the fishy mess of the herons’ roost. Helen Keller took the trouble to repeat that the leaves were crimson and gold. (She liked boats; she didn’t try to steer, but as a kid she loved to row.) Nevertheless her autobiography and letters are worth reading once, and probably the earlier in life, the better.

If I were to publish The Story of My Life with “special contents” as a book, I’d want to include “Three Days to See,” which is unfortunately missing from most existing editions. Few things are as likely to stop people taking the pleasure of eyesight for granted as “Three Days to See.”

(One of those things is, however, the subject of this week's post at michellesmirror.com, where the blogger describes how treatment for cancer has caused her vision to come and go. Strictly for brave, non-depressive readers.)