Long &
Short Reviews asks reviewers which books we've recommended and why.
Hello? That's what this web site does, pretty much. I recommend that
everybody read books. For details about which books for whom, see the
whole blog.
But
can I recommend a sort of background reading list for the blog, for
those who came in late and want to know which books have influenced
the way I think, talk, and use words? Can I do a reasonably wordy Top
Ten List?
Why
not? In fact, how not?
1.
The Bible, King James' Authorized Version
If
you want to write in English, lack of familiarity with this Book of
Books is a handicap. If you want to understand the way I write and
think, it helps to begin with documents that presuppose that your
mental health is normal, your self-serving bias is strong, and most
of the time your ego needs deflation more than boosting. And I
respect people's right to be what they are; I respect all sincere
beliefs and both read and recommend some books from other faith
traditions, and this web site is not usually about specific religious
doctrines, but this web site is Christian.
2.
The Vision of the Anointed by Thomas Sowell
The
more education we've had, the more we've heard about helping and
serving Humanity. Well, some of what we've heard was actually
inspired by a neurotic Frenchman who didn't have the personality to
start a personality cult but spent his adult life writing the sacred
scriptures for one he hoped someone else would found. And, in a
roundabout and thankless way, a critical number of the world's
educators actually did. (See The Hate Factory by Erica Carle.
Auguste Comte was so far from being a charismatic cult leader that
studying his life and writing is actually a good way to debunk the
Secular Humanist influence we've all had.) Universities don't usually
say they're dedicated to the teaching and practice of Secular
Humanism as a religion, but they do quite a good job of teaching us
that everything has to be written for a Secular Humanist audience.
Anyway, whether we think of "Humanity" as the "real"
God or good, or as a part of God's Creation toward which we as humans
are most likely to be able to practice the discipline of Love, most
of us need to be challenged to think about whether we can really help
other people by indulging in a belief that we can know what they
need, or can meet their needs in any other way better than by
stepping aside and letting them meet their needs themselves. In the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries other writers raised this
challenge. Sowell said it best.
3.
The Hillary Trap by Laura Ingraham
This
analysis of where the twentieth century's left-wing feminism went
wrong really deserved to have been written and packaged as more than
an election-year book. Then again, while people are still kicking
around Hillary Clinton's calling her political opponents
"handmaidens"...Feminism is the belief that women are at
least equally as valuable as men. In a world where most of the jobs
people did called for male-type muscle, this belief was debatable. In
our world, where nearly all the jobs that called for muscle are now
done by machinery, it's not. We are all feminists; only a few of us bother to resent it. There is, however, no reason why
our feminism needs to resemble Gloria Steinem's or Bella Abzug's
or...Hillary Clinton's. In fact Mrs. Clinton's life is a good
argument that we should rethink what they thought on at least the ten
points raised in this book. There may be some point-scoring, some
younger-sisters-gleefully-point-out-older-sister's-bad-examples
feeling in this book, but I find it possible to read the book with
empathy toward Mrs. Clinton.
4.
What Are People For by Wendell Berry
In
some ways this late-in-career book summarized the author's previous
books, of which I'd recommend reading all that you can find. (They
were bold and independent enough that they're not easy to find.) He
wrote, often in specific and technical articles for Organic
Gardening & Farming and Mother Earth News, about the
benefit of living in a Green traditional way on ancestral land. He's
been accused of being "patriarchal," but surprise...nobody
minds when older people manage to be patriarchs, or
matriarchs. Problems arise only when societies try to operate as if
all families had been blessed with a patriarch or a matriarch,
when in reality many are not. So in my part of the world, if you
don't have a grandfather who can help with questions about and beyond
how to cultivate your garden, you can borrow Wendell Berry.
We've been blessed.
5.
No More Wacos by David Kopel and Paul Blackman
For
Americans who were conscious in the 1990s, the Waco and Ruby Ridge
disasters, in which armed federal agents wrongfully killed innocent
citizens, were a turning point. Many of us had accepted the rhetoric
of what Sowell called "the anointed" about how a bigger
government could help rather than harm people. In 1995 we saw the
error in that line of thought: Human government must be made up of
human beings who may be just as bad as the human beings from whom
it's claimed that others need protection. This book summarizes those
stories and several other true stories of government abuses, and
outlines methods for constructive activism to add helpful checks and
balances on unelected bureaucrats. (In the long run, I think Elon
Musk may come to agree that he would have done more good in the US
government by reading this book.)
6.
How Children Learn by John Holt
He
wrote a half-dozen more books on this topic, and a wonderful series
of newsletters reflecting his ongoing pen friendships with actual
children. (I was just a little too old to be one; my brother was one
of those children.) Basically he argues that learning takes place in
the moments when children are interested in something and are free to
explore it in their own ways. Adults can and should stimulate
children's interests in a wider variety of things than most do, not
by pushing them through assembly-line-style courses, but just by
hanging out and doing things with children and, when appropriate,
showing the children how adults reach specific goals. Without some
guidance children might never "discover" the alphabet or
the multiplication table, but guidance is often more, not less,
efficient when it takes the form of "I want to accomplish --.
How am I going to do it?" rather than "Sit still, don't
look out the window, and pay attention while I repeat what put your
mind to sleep last week." I think all children who ever met John
Holt liked him.
7.
Pain Erasure by Bonnie Prudden
Most
of us don't need "pain medication." We need what might be
called "pain management skills." I use and recommend a
whole library of books on this topic; my own pain management skills
include breath control and stretching more than trigger-point
massage. However, when I was gaining life experience in the factories
near my home town, I saw a lot of laborers liberate themselves
from repetitive stress injuries with the help of this first book on
trigger-point massage. I've used these techniques on myself. I've
used them on other people. They work. I've not used them, myself, to
restore sight to the blind (actually it's more often a matter of
getting eye test scores above the required level to do a job, or
drive, or just restoring the person's ability to enjoy reading) but I
know they can restore some sight to some people whose vision loss may
reach a level called "blind." I have used the techniques to
restore hearing to people with serious hearing loss, and to restore
the use of arms and legs to people with disabling injuries.
8.
Back to Eden by Jethro Kloss
In
the history of naturopathic medicine, several of the biggest names
appear in a single story. Sylvester Graham, an unhappy fellow,
preached that young people could avoid the many horrible diseases
that started with thinking about sex and (horrors!) masturbation by
eating whole grains and regularizing their digestion. The reasoning
behind this idiocy was that tuberculosis had reached North America,
and at a certain stage of that disease some people were apparently
obsessed with sex. Their care givers didn't want to inflame anything
by saying it in so many words, but that's what can easily be read
"between the lines." A lot of people hated Dr. Graham,
though.
Anyway, in the 1840s little Ellen Harmon, the miracle child
who had apparently recovered from tuberculosis through a series of
dramatic healing visions, endorsed what Graham said. Ellen and the
man she married when she grew up, James White, inspired doctors from
their Bible study group, notably the Kellogg brothers and Charles
Post, to build "sanatoria" for people who had or thought
they had tuberculosis. These were a sort of combination of primitive
hospitals and spas. Actually a lot of trial and error went on; genius
though Ellen Harmon White was, her visions did not lead her
directly to everything medical science would learn about the immune
system over the next hundred and fifty years. Her visions and her
doctor friends' experiments did. If she was divinely guided, and
she may have been, she was guided to respect the principles of
medical science. Most of their "successful" treatments of
tuberculosis, and cancer, led to long remissions but they did learn
how to cure cardiovascular disease and diabetes.
Young Dr. Jethro
Kloss came to the sanatorium movement late, about the time Ellen
White died (old, in Australia). His own "chronic obstructive
pulmonary disorder" was probably just some combination of
susceptibility to "colds" and mold allergies, but such
conditions made people more vulnerable to pulmonary tuberculosis.
Anyway Kloss made a career of treating patients' immune systems,
using all that the Whites, the Kelloggs, Post, and many other doctors
had learned over their lifetimes, and he wrote down what he learned
about diet, exercise, rest, meditation, herbs, massage, and
hydrotherapy in this exhaustive reference book for home nurses. There
is also a Back to Eden Cookbook, written mostly by the
doctor's daughter, to feed into the publicity cycle for her father's
book, but Back to Eden is not a cookbook. It's an
encyclopedia.
(I
should mention that, perhaps because envious people didn't want to
believe that little Ellen's lungs had self-collapsed during her
visions, later on a young German called Charlotte Selver was able to
collapse her own lungs using a self-hypnosis technique she later
taught in the US as "Sensory Awareness." Ellen White was
born too early to have documentation that she'd had tuberculosis as
distinct from, say, a long hard time with pneumonia. Selver was not.
In the 1970s one of Selver's students, Marylou McKenna, wrote the delightful Serenity Book about Sensory Awareness. It's hard to find
now; in the 1980s I used it during my long hard time with
post-vaccine "chronic mononucleosis," and I'd recommend it
if people could find it.)
9.
The Last Word: On the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense by
Suzette Haden Elgin
Not
only are there people who don't understand why some people's
conversation is so hard on their emotions. There are people who are
hard on other people's emotions and don't know why--they just know
that modelling their remarks on someone else's sounds "educated,"
perhaps as part of a regional accent, and has a devastating effect on
the arguments, and the feelings, of their "opponents." I
was one of those people when, around age twenty, I had the great good
fortune to find this book in a public library. It explained exactly
what some Marylanders hated about the kind of Maryland accent I'd let
myself pick up at college, and how to fix that. Elgin acknowledged
that some of the "She's so smart...that's why everyone
hates her" routine is misogyny and/or other forms of bigotry,
some is jealous envy, some may involve the "smart" person
disturbing social hierarchies, but some of it is also a matter of
simple rules of grammar that make those "nice knock-down
arguments" into emotional abuse. In this book readers learn what
makes some "unanswerable" utterances hurtful, and also
learn to use the same rules of grammar to build arguments that
are convincing but not so hurtful.
10.
The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron
I'm
no expert on how to write great books in English. I can teach
people how to write and say things that will be easily recognized as
English. I've written a lot of things in English. Most of them
didn't sell. Many of them are available at this web site, free of
charge, where some may say that they're not doing a great deal to
"sell" me as a writer and should probably be suppressed.
This web site is finally getting more daily page views than my
Associated Content collection did. Some days ten times more, some
days a hundred times more! Hurrah! But it's not bringing in thousands
of dollars to go with the thousands of page views and it may be being
fed into plagiarism programs for computers in the
non-English-speaking countries from which so many views come. So,
yes, one thing to be learned from my experience, Gentle Readers, is:
If you want to keep this web site available, feed it now. You can
feed it suggestions for topics (which may include links to your
business site) or private requests for research, proofreading,
copy-editing, or co-writing, all of which are preferred to
"donations," but you need to feed it something in
the form of US postal money orders.
Anyway,
another thing to be learned is that, twenty-some years ago, Cameron
put together a beautiful inspiring collection of beautiful inspiring
tips and quotes for "creative" thinkers of all kinds. Hers
was not the first, nor will it be the last, but it is the one
that best states the need not only for daily practice of our Art, but
for daily long brisk solitary walks that feed our "creative"
brains. (Actually, if you can do it, I find the most effective way to
keep those solitary walks from becoming encounters with all the
deservedly unpopular pests and bores in town is to do them with
another person, or persons, who understand that the idea is to be
silent together. Maintain a healthy distance, don't speak, try to
arrange that the people you can see as part of Nature on the road are
people with whom you either don't have relationships beyond silent
walking or are so close that you can always talk to them later in
the day. The next best way is to walk before daylight or in the
rain.)
