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.

Twice Told: Original Stories Inspired by Original Art has stories by many wonderful YA writers and drawings by Scott Hunt.

When a teacher asks you to read short stories, check this book out. Each section has art work–a pencil drawing. Following the drawing are two stories that interpret that piece of art. It’s great to see what a creative mind comes up with–how different the two stories can be and how far they can venture  from that beginning in the drawing (which is the point–the art is something of a prompt, but once the creativity gets going, the story takes on a whole new dimension).  Some of the story writers happen also to be some of my favorite YA authors–Sarah Dessen, Bruce Coville, Neal Shusterman, Margaret Peterson Haddix, M. T. Anderson, and Alex Flinn. Judging from books that checkout here, I think these are some of your favorites as well. Other story authors are new to me–which is great because it gives me the opportunity to meet them and then find out about other works they’ve written.

I also want to recommend this book to you if you’re a budding writer. What sort of story will you write after contemplating the drawing? The art is just right to start those creative juices flowing.

More great short stories! I had to buy this book for a class I was taking—then I lost the book and bought another one—then I found the first one—so, I donated one of my two copies to the COHS library. I’ve read many of the stories and they really are the best!

Some stories such as “Man and Wife” will shock you by taking as very ordinary situations that are taboo. Others speak to the difficulties of growing up, such as “Virgins.” Still others deal with the supernatural as a part of ordinary life as in “Vampires in the Lemon Grove.” (By the way, the author of “Vampires in the Lemon Grove”—Karen Russell—also has a great short story in the 2007 Best book—about girls raised by werewolves. You’ll love both of these stories!)

If your teacher assigns short story reading—or if you just like to read them—you can’t go wrong with this volume. In addition, if you are an emerging author yourself, you may like the contributors’ notes at the end, in which the authors discuss the inspiration for writing the story.

For senior students who are reading “Frankenstein” and then comparing it to other works of fiction, “A New Life” is a great story. I understand that those of you in Mrs. Gebhart’s class have read it.

Campbell’s fiction takes “Frankenstein” and looks at the story from the point of view of the ‘monster’—who isn’t a monster at all, but rather, the brain and intellect of a serious philosopher placed in a body that feels too big, “bloated.” The philosopher—who taught in a university and reflects on Pythagoras, Plato, Kant, von Herder, and Goethe—had tried to save a little girl from drowning in the Danube and himself drowned in the effort. Upon awakening in a pitch-dark cell, he moves through a series of thoughts. Is he alive and saved? Is he dead? Is he in hell, with demons coming in to torture him?

Anxiety turns to deep fear of his condition. This works well with the ethical questions on ‘creating life’ that you are being asked as you study “Frankenstein.” After reading about the philosopher turned monster, I wonder whether you stopped to think about humankind’s responsibility in creating life. Could you discuss these question which you will later debate in class?

1. What is a soul? Does a soul differ from a spirit?

2. Where does a soul come from? Does it only begin to exist at the time of birth, at conception, or possibly before conception? Does it ever cease to exist?

3. Do other animals have souls or are they unique to human beings?

4. In man’s quest to study and manipulate the natural process of reproduction and the creation of life, does man have an ethical or spiritual responsibility to protect, advance, or abstain from scientific experimentation with human life in any form, or should there be no limit to experimentation in the name of science and medical advancement?

Best American Short Stories 2007 edited by Stephen King

Every Man for Himself edited by Nancy E. Mercado (but all the stories are written by men)

When teachers assign short story reading to their students, many of the students just pick any collection of short works off the shelf and read the first story in the book. I imagine that doesn’t hurt anything—students have been exposed to some good fiction in this way—but there are some really good stories available in the library that you might want to check out. I recently read two collections that I really enjoyed.

This summer I read “Best American Short Stories 2007” which was edited by Stephen King. This is one in a series of yearly collections that have a different guest editor each year. So the taste of the editor influences the choices somewhat. King says he likes action, but I found his choices good for thought, too. My favorite story was “Findings and Impressions” by Stellar Kim, narrated by a radiologist who diagnoses a woman with breast cancer after examining her mammogram images. I know it sounds like a weird premise, but it is this unusual take that makes the story the good. The woman isn’t a person to the radiologist in the beginning—he doesn’t know her. She is only a diagnosed cancer. But he does get to know her, to like her, and is afraid for his son to become too close to her because he is sure the woman is going to die—and his son has already experienced the death of his own mother. It’s sad and full of compassion at the same time. A really different story is “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves.” St. Lucy’s is like the homes for ‘wayward’ (pregnant) girls back in the day. But in this home, girls who are human children of werewolves are being civilized. Very creative! For those who like lots of action, “The Boy from Zaquitos” is about a guy who is trained to be a germ warfare assassin. He has special implants in his teeth that he cracks open and emits plagues, silently killing thousands. “Wait” is a story of international air passengers who end up stranded in an airport somewhere in African (I don’t think the story indicates where) and the whole group starts enacting the world political situation. A metaphor for current life. The 2008 version is on order for our library!

“Every Man for Himself” is meant to appeal to guys, but I liked it a lot. I had to get past the cover art though—two urinals on a tiled bathroom wall, one lower for a small boy, one higher for an adult man. Clearly, the stories are about growing up, but—maybe because I’m not a guy—I thought the cover was a little gross. Stories I remember best are “Shockers” about a boy whose girlfriend is only dating him (a sort of goth kid) to shock her parents. But the boy has lost his own father and makes a connection with her dad. Another I liked was a little mini graphic novel “Strange Powers,” a story of how love changes a guy’s perception of the world. In a story called “Princes” a boy challenges his parents, letting them know he is gay by insisting that he be allowed to bring a male date to his brother’s bar mitzvah. It’s really a story about courage and the connection between the two brothers. My favorite of the group was Walter Dean Myers’ story “The Prom Prize” in which a pretty popular guy allows his friends to have a lottery to choose his prom date. The boy is an African American athlete. The winning girl is white. Everyone has something to say about the date, what should or shouldn’t happen between the couple—everyone in the school thinks it’s their business and the results are pretty funny. All the stories have a pretty good sense of the trials of being a guy. I hope you’ll read them.