The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness by Simon

You are a prisoner in a concentration camp. A dying Nazi soldier asks for your forgiveness. What would you do? Withe responses by Robert Coles, The Dalai Lama, Matthew Fox, Mary Gordon, Harold S. Kushner, Dennis Prager, Dith Pran, Desmond Tutu, Harry Wu, and forty-four others.

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl

Viktor Frankl survived more than one concentration/death camp, including Auschwitz, during World War II. His father, mother, brother, and wife all died in the camps. He lost everything he’d owned. Frankl was also a psychiatrist. In his classic Man’s Search for Meaning, he reflects on why some people survive in the most horrific circumstances possible. He asks –and answers—how can man find life worth living?

Those of us who’ve worked with teens for awhile know that you ask yourselves this difficult question. Just because you’re young doesn’t mean that you haven’t had a crisis, a ‘dark night of the soul.’ If you do worry about life having any meaning, reading this book is a great start toward answering your questions.

The book has two parts. The first part reviews some of Frankl’s experiences in the death camps. He looks at what causes friends to give up hope and what brings moments of happiness. In every case, the individual has to make sense out of his suffering. Frankl believes that all suffering (even that which ends in death) has meaning. Man can rise above his fate by choosing to be worthy of his suffering.

The second part covers logotherapy, Frankl’s school of psychotherapy. In this second part, the reader sees how Frankl uses his experiences to help ordinary people who feel that life isn’t worth living.

Many students ask for books by or about Holocaust survivors. This is different from others because it delves into life’s purpose as much as it does into the story of Frankl’s captivity. I found myself wanting to copy down quotations to remember.

“The majority of prisoners suffered from a kind of inferiority complex. We all had once been or had fancied ourselves to be ‘somebody.’ Now we were treated like complete nonentities. (The consciousness of one’s inner value is anchored in higher, more spiritual things, and cannot be shaken by camp life. But how many free men, let alone prisoners, possess it?)”

“I remember two cases of would-be suicide, which bore a striking similarity to each other. Both men had talked of their intentions to commit suicide. Both used the typical argument—they had nothing more to expect from life. In both cases it was a question of getting them to realize that life was still expecting something from them; something in the future was expected of them.”

“From all this we learn that there are two races of men in this world, but only two—the ‘race’ of the decent man and the ‘race’ of the indecent man. Both are found everywhere; they penetrate into all groups of society. No group consists entirely of decent or indecent people. In this sense, no group is of ‘pure’ race.”

“What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment. To put the question in general terms would be comparable to the question posed to a chess champion: ‘Tell me, Master, what is the best move in the world?’ There simply is no such thing as the best or even a good move apart from a particular situation in a game and the particular personality of one’s opponent. The same holds true for human existence. One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated.”

There’s much hope for all of us in this little book. If you’re in the middle of a tough time and looking for purpose, check it out.

Teachers who are thinking outside the box will let you read this for your biography/memoir assignment, and what a great opportunity!

The story of Henrietta Lacks is more than a biography of an individual woman, It’s the story of the first person’s cells that scientists could cause to grow in a lab—that could live outside the body and be shipped around the world, thus making new research possible. It’s the story of a family that knew nothing of the cells or the fact that they had been removed from the cancer-stricken and dying Henrietta. It’s about the effect that this medical miracle had on Henrietta’s children. It’s about medical treatment for African-Americans in the 1950s South.

Henrietta Lacks grew up in poverty in Clover,Virginiain the segregated, pre-civil-rights-era South. Her family were tobacco farmers, and the house she was raised in was once slave quarters. (The author discovers a white branch of the Lacks family, but they refuse to acknowledge their biological connection to Henrietta.) Amazingly, before Henrietta died on October 4, 1951, cells taken atJohnsHopkinsHospitalduring a gynecological exam for her cervical cancer had become the first cells to be cultured in a lab and survive. The cells, known as HeLa, were so strong, that they could be shipped to medical labs everywhere. These cells become the necessary component for medical advances such as the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, understanding the effects of nuclear bombs, and part of the search for a cure for AIDS.

Knowing this, you’d think that Henrietta’s children would have become wealthy. Ironically, they spent years without medical insurance, and for twenty years, didn’t even know that their mother’s cells existed. They couldn’t afford the benefits of the research done with their mother’s cells. In fact, they suffered from secrets as well as con men. Especially hard hit was Henrietta’s daughter Deborah, who, without the educational background necessary to understand how the cells survived, became prey to every report that her mother had been cloned or that her cells had been fused with those of other life forms.

Part of this biography of Henrietta and her cells is about the sad way that African-Americans were treated in medical experiments. (In this sense, Henrietta’s daughter Elise, who was sent to a state hospital and diagnosed with “Idiocy”—and then experimented on in a horrific manner—is just as interesting as Henrietta’s story.) But part of this book details the fascinating fact that no one has any rights over their cells, their discarded tissues. Even if this tissue becomes valuable, as Henrietta’s did, and makes millions of dollars for the companies and individuals that market it, it is considered a waste product, trash that the individual has discarded. (And most of the time tissue/cells aren’t worth anything—people have moles, appendixes, and gallbladders removed all the time.) So the horrible way that the Lacks family was treated also figured into the rise of bioethics—of getting informed consent from patients before using their tissue for medical experiments.

This great book embraces so many themes. Deborah’s life with its grounding in both superstition and spirituality is just as important to the reader as is Henrietta’s. The author has the ability to show us so many things about life, science, treatment of Africa-Americans, medical research—and we can understand it all because she is so good at making it clear. The only part of the story that she doesn’t dig into is the life of Henrietta’s husband, David Lacks. I wondered a lot about him as Henrietta’s cancer was caused by repeated STDs that he gave her. After she died at age 31, he allowed a new woman in his life whose cruel abuse of the children permanently scarred them—destroying the life of at least one of the five kids. Yet David is given a pass on everything. Perhaps the author didn’t feel that his story was crucial to the arc of the overall family story, but it was the one missing piece that bothered me. Still, this is one of the best books of its kind. Any student interested in medicine, the history of the treatment of African-Americans by researchers, the rise of bioethics—or just a good story of a suffering family—will want to read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

      The Last Summer of the Death Warriors

Like a lot of great books, this one is hard to quickly describe, hard to ‘sell’ in a few paragraphs. And like a lot of great books, it’s the one that I want most to sell—the one you’ll get most out of when you read it.

Pancho’s got a sad life. His hardworking, sometimes misused father died in an accident. Pancho takes over responsibility for his mentally disabled older sister, Rosa. When she is murdered, he feels some responsibility—he hadn’t been paying attention to details that indicated she was in danger. Alone, his only choice is to go live in St. Anthony’s Home, a Catholic boys’ orphanage. There he rediscovers his love of fighting. He also finds that he has the job of caring for D.Q., who’s dying of a brain cancer. This job may give Pancho the opportunity to find his sister’s killer, who walks freely since the police consider her death an accident.

Caring for D.Q. turns out to be a much weirder job than Pancho expected. He’d never wanted to be in charge of a sick person, but D.Q. also has specific ideas about the best way to die. Plus, he never shuts up. He’s been writing the ‘Death Warrior Manifesto’—a guide to living fully while dying—and he tells Pancho that he, too, is a death warrior. Pancho is to help D.Q. reconnect with the lovely Marisol, a girl he’d met inAlbuquerqueat a home-away-from-home from cancer patients. Meanwhile, Pancho has to deal with D.Q.’s mother, a now wealthy woman, who dumped D.Q. in the orphanage when he was a child.

Now, you know that when a guy meets a girl as wonderfully compassionate and beautiful as Marisol, he’s going to fall for her himself. But what is real friendship when your buddy is dying? Do you talk honestly about the girl you both love? After all—D.Q.’s warrior manifesto is starting to make sense. There’s faith and there’s forgiveness, and Pancho’s got to decide if he’s going to live like a true death warrior or continue to be the kind of fighter who can’t do more than throw angry punches at the world.

You’ll love the depth of these characters and become entangled in their quest to love life, even in the most difficult situations. If you only read one book this summer, make it this one.

Peace, Love and Baby Ducks

I bought this book for the library quite a while ago, but didn’t read it myself because, based on the title and cover (I know, I know!), I thought it was mind candy, a sort of literary junk food. And I’m a believer in the feel-good value of junk food, both for the body and the mind, but I’m too busy trying to keep up with other reading to have much time to indulge.

I’m so glad I did get around to reading Peace, Love, and Baby Ducks. I highly recommend this story of sisterhood and friendship, of religion (and religious hypocrisy), and of romantic relationships.

The narrator, Carly, lives in a very affluent neighborhood (Buckhead) in Atlanta, Georgia. When she comes home from a summer of outdoor volunteer work, she is thin and has hairy legs. But Carly is her own person—or so she believes—and she thinks she just might buck the girly trend of her private Christian school classmates, those that Carly derides as Holy Rollers. Although Carly is also a believer, she has a fine sense of when classmates are doing good in order to be perceived as the right kind of people (and to pad their college-entrance applications). One particularly poignant example of this is when a group of students is delivering Christmas stockings to poor children. Carly goes along because she wants to hang out with the guy she has a crush on. When she questions whether they should have given the stockings to the adults, privately, so that they in turn could give them to the children later as a surprise from Santa, one of the more devout girls says, ‘But we are Santa’—with the implication that they need to take credit for that. Details like this throughout the novel indicate that Myracle is having fun with the old idea that going to church doesn’t make you a Christian anymore than standing in a garage makes you a car.

So Carly is an oddball at school, but she has always had a deep and loving connection with her younger sister Anna. But Anna is changing, and Carly notes when she arrives home from her summer volunteer experience that Anna has blossomed physically. Yes, Anna has curves and big breasts, a figure type nothing like Carly’s. When the two go back to school at the end of summer vacation, Anna is perceived as a hottie and people ask Carly what it’s like to have a sister who is so gorgeous. And, despite herself, Carly is jealous.

This is where the story could break down into cliché, but Myracle treats the changes in the girls with depth. Other students—especially boys—and teachers—especially males—objectify Anna. She is Anna’s breasts more than she is Anna. And she’s uncomfortable with this. Even her own mother is quietly reprimanding her for gaining too much weight until Carly has the guts to come to Anna’s rescue, telling their mom that ‘they are breasts,’ not fat and to get over it.

Carly—deemed the confident child, the individual, the nonconformist—is used to coming to Anna’s rescue since Anna is a year younger. So it’s pretty rough on her when Anna seems to have more in common with Carly’s lifelong best friend than Carly does. Carly’s great hope for connection is with the new guy at school, Cole, who has ‘soulful eyes’ and loves classic rock music, just as Carly does. But, sadly for Carly, she is going to learn a hard lesson about what soulfulness is.

As the sisters’ relationship shifts, they are, at times, truly vicious to each other. Their ‘fashionista’ mom and social climbing dad aren’t much help. (In fact, if there’s a weakness in the book, it’s that these detached, one-dimensional parents could have raised such great kids.) But the lessons learned and the feel-good ending are rewards.

I think you’re going to like this one.

Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion by Fr. Gregory Boyle

Another book for ‘Character Month’

Father Gregory Boyle is the LA priest who founded Homeboy Industries and Homegirl Café.

Their motto: Nothing stops a bullet like a job.

Father Boyle—“G-dog” as he is known by his homies—acts in a way that is very much centered in his faith (Catholicism) as a Christian, but is also so unusual that his story makes a startling read. And here’s why: he believes that every individual has equal value in society. And unlike most of us, he doesn’t just say it. He truly believes it. For Father Greg, there are no throw-away people. He never stops caring—and so the subtitle of this book—The Power of Boundless Compassion—is apt. When I say that his compassion is amazing, I know that the word ‘amazing’ is so overused that you may not understand what I mean. But I think it is the right word—I’m filled with wonder at the life of this man.

Father Greg’s stories of gang bangers leaves us to wonder—Am I really a good person or have I just been sheltered from the things that would make me bad? When you read what many of the ‘homies’ in this book have gone through, you’ll wonder how they ever made it out to a normal, productive life. And you will wonder at the life of ‘G-dog’—who, in the twenty-five or so years that he has been working with LA gang members, has helped so many out of the gang life only to bury them later, when they are shot in drive-bys or targeted. Father Greg has buried almost 200 gang or former gang members. And yet, he keeps the faith.

Father Greg tells the reader that centering one’s life on love will get a person through the worst. Gangsters often tell him that they don’t want people to ‘mistake their kindness for weakness.’ But as Boyle shows, “sooner or later, we all discover that kindness is the only strength there is.”

Even with boundless love, a person needs a real sense of humor to find joy in this life, and Father Greg has it. Many of his anecdotes about dealing with young men and women are really funny. My favorite is when he writes about gangsters reading aloud and replacing words they don’t know with words they do. Thus in Bible passages referring to the ‘Gentiles,’ they use the word ‘genitals.’ Father Greg says this really livens up the public readings!

Yes, you will laugh—and you’ll cry, quite a bit. But do read this book. It will remind you that saints have a beginning as real human beings.

The following reviews by COHS students are on “The ” by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

The book begins with Alyosha dedicating his life to religion and the highly respected monk Zosima who he will study under. Alyosha is the youngest of three brothers and a very benevolent character.. The oldest is Dmitri the middle is Ivan. Ivan is a very logical character and he struggles with morality throughout the story, not being able to accept the evil in the world and the idea of a benevolent good at the same time, though he wishes he could and flips back and fourth between the ideas many times. Dimitri is a very sensual and impulsive person, but through the progression of the book he begins to regret his past ways, especially the many love triangles he was involved in: him, Ivan and Katerina and him his father and Grushenka. The ladder of these two affairs leads to the climax of the book when he is wrongly accused of patricide. This is also the tipping point for Ivan, when he is confronted by Smerdyakov he is told that it was actually him who committed the murder, using Ivan’s own logic to justify it. This leaves Ivan in a state of confusion. Dmitri is found guilty, and sentenced to 20 years hard labor in Siberia, something the finally confirms him to the man he was trying to become.

The Brother Karamazov was a truly inspirational and thought provoking book. It posed many questions that I have already been struggling with. Things such as: do good and evil exist, and how do you define them? What is morality? Does god exist and if he does is he malevolent of benevolent? Not only was the content good, but the presentation was nothing less than respectable, the extreme character development and vastly deep and dynamic characters made items of everyday life seem philosophically deep as it offered new insight into them from three completely different perspectives. Though it was a little hard to follow at times the plot never dragged and it most certainly makes my list of top ten books.

1. The author of The Brothers Karamazov wrote the novel in order to show the classic struggles and burdens that man is encumbered by throughout his life; good versus evil.
2. The theme of this novel is the classic struggle between good and evil and the complications that ideas like freewill and religion can impose on this struggle.
3. This central theme is developed by several very dynamic characters, at the center of which are the three brothers. The story is told through the eyes Alexei Fyodrorvich, or Alyosha as he is called, though he is not the narrator. He is a man of very pure and kind hearted ideals, while his brothers, Dimitri and Ivan, are more sensual and logical respectively. And through the trials that these brother go through the theme is presented.
4. The main issue the book raises is that of morality and religious faith, a question of logic versus reason. This is to push the question of what these thing mean to a persons life, is it better to be logical or faithful? The book clearly sides with faith.

Raskolnikov kills two people and robs them. Later on he is speaking with the murderers and faints so the police start to suspect him. He calls off his friends wedding and later falls in love with the bride-to-be. His friend Sonya tries to make him confess and it works. Raskolnikov is taken to the prison in Siberia and Sonya moves to the town outside the prison. After he is freed Razumikhin and Dunya are married for a short while. Then he realizes his true feelings for Sonya.

Crime and Punishment was an interesting book because of the issues. At the same time it was hard to know what was happening. Even though I didn’t enjoy it as much as I had hoped I would still recommend it to friends because of the entertaining story.

1. Dostoyevsky’s purpose for writing Crime and Punishment was to show that people can change overtime.
2. The theme of Crime and Punishment is to think about the consequences before you commit the action.
3. The way the author shows changes in the novel is very slowly; with an increase in tension.
4.  The main issue that Crime and Punishment raises is: is it correct to cause someone psychological pain? The way the author solves the issue is by punishing Raskolnikov years later.

“Mistaken Identity” by Don and Susie Van Ryn and Newell, Colleen and Whitney Cerek with Mark Tabb

I must have been in hiding in 2006 because I don’t remember this story from the news at all. However, it is so bizarre, the fact that it is true boggles the mind. I think you’ll race through this memoir of two families (despite the fact that the writing isn’t great) because your disbelief will keep you turning the pages.

Whitney Cerak and Laura Van Ryan were students at Taylor University, a small, Christian college with campuses in Michigan and Indiana. Both are victims of an accident that killed five of the six students in a school van. One girl, who lived, was thrown 50 feet from the accident and sustained traumatic brain injuries. She was identified as Laura Van Ryn by someone from the university. For five weeks, the Van Ryn family stayed with their daughter round the clock, helping her to recover. Until she wasn’t their daughter anymore. She was actually Whitney Cerek. Laura had died in the accident. Whitney had lived. Imagine the pain for both families—Whitney’s family had already had a funeral and was grieving, believing she was dead. Laura’s family was posting a regular blog on her progress. Now they needed to understand that she had never made it through the accident.

What sustains both families is their faith. In a world where such a situation just sings LAWSUIT, the families don’t lay blame and look to God to sustain them. The book includes many examples of others who are so moved by the families’ faith, that their own faith is renewed. You’ll enjoy this on many levels—the strangeness of the story, the dedication of both families. And if stories of faith inspire you, these families will renew your belief in the goodness that is possible in the worst of times.

“” by Cheryl Moss Tyler

I’m writing a blurb on this novel not because it’s got terrific writing, but because the story is one I’ve wanted to read—or at least see available—for a long time. I’ve often thought about the moral dilemma it presents and how various parties would react.

One of the protagonists, Alex Marshall, is a gay man dying of AIDS in 1994. In the 1980s, as a young man, he ran away from home and his community of fundamentalist Christians in Hallton, Wisconsin because he couldn’t face them and the truth about himself. After a period of wildness, he settles down with his partner, Scott, and becomes a lawyer who is active in the gay community. Other than at his father’s funeral, he hasn’t seen his family members since he left for Atlanta.

Annie Whitley, another of the book’s protagonists, is Alex’s sister. She’s shocked when he calls her out of the blue, and asks her to care for him as he is dying of AIDS. Her church and community hold a stance of keeping away from bad influences—and they regard Alex as just that. Yet, Annie had always loved her brother and believes that a Christian should have unconditional love for others. With this in mind, her husband encourages her to go care for Alex.

The novel details Annie’s discomfort in living with a gay couple and the gay couple’s discomfort in living with someone who judges them as sinners bound for hell. Both parties soon recognize how important they are to one another, how much they love one another. With this, Annie decides to bring both Scott and Alex back to Hallton. The community squares off—those who oppose this, believing the devil is taking over Annie’s goodness, and those who are there to support Annie, remembering how they loved Alex when he was young. And, of course, other secrets of the town’s most upstanding members start to come out.

So, this is a good story about opposing values and how people can accept one another without necessarily condoning one another’s behavior. (FYI—there’s nothing in here that’s beyond a PG-13 rating. Very mild stuff, intended for conservative Christians.) The one problem I had with the novel is that, frequently, the characters talked as though they were reading paragraphs from an essay. That is, they were just mouthpieces for the two philosophical points of view, and didn’t sound like real people. Overall, though, it’s worth reading as it deals with the basic Christian tenets of reconciliation and forgiveness.

]]> http://colonylibrarylady.com/2009/01/08/and-you-invited-me-in/feed/ 0 Ms. Waddle And You Invited Me In http://colonylibrarylady.com/2008/12/04/same-kind-of-different-as-me/ http://colonylibrarylady.com/2008/12/04/same-kind-of-different-as-me/#comments Thu, 04 Dec 2008 18:02:22 +0000 Ms. Waddle http://colonylibrarylady.wordpress.com/?p=191 ]]> “Same Kind of Different as Me” by Ron Hall and Denver Moore with Lynn Vincent

Ms. G here at COHS recommended this book to me because it was so moving that she couldn’t put it down. It’s quite a tale—and I think you, too, will be moved to tears.

Author Ron Hall is married to a woman who cares so deeply for others that her story is pure inspiration to the reader. Debra Hall’s willingness to not only feed and clothe but befriend the homeless shows us what true faith can do—it knocks the patronizing ego right off the shelf and helps us see the real person we are connecting with. Debra’s faith is the force that lets her recognize Denver Moore as a man for whom God has big plans.

Denver was a homeless African-American who came to the Union Gospel Mission for meals, but who kept himself apart from others and trusted no one–with good reason. Denver grew up in the American South not only under Jim Crow laws, but as a sharecropper—which translates as a sort of modern slavery. He lived in a place that time left behind, where he works land he doesn’t own and owes money to ‘the man’ for bare essentials. He never went to school; being illiterate, there seems to be no escape for him from desperate poverty. (There’s a story of racism in the book that will chill your bones, but I don’t want to give away the whole book!)

Denver and other homeless people start referring to the Halls as “Mr. and Mrs. Tuesday” because they work at the homeless mission every Tuesday, unlike most folks who are just holiday volunteers. Soon Deborah is spending many days each week helping, organizing outing, and more. Denver’s faith is revived through Deborah’s actions.

When tragedy strikes the Halls, the tables turn and Denver’s friendship helps them keep their faith. As Denver says, using fishing as his metaphor, true friendship isn’t a catch-and-release program. It’s for keeps.

When your teacher asks you to read a biography or memoir, pick this one up and see how ordinary people overcome extraordinary obstacles.