Eiseley, Loren:  The Immense Journey

I first read this book when I was a sophomore in college and the book was relatively new (published about 3 years before I read it).  I was going through a “faith crisis” as the time with the fundamentalist teachings of the church I had belonged to as a child being badly shaken by what I was studying in college.   It had been my choice of church-not my parents; I’m sure my Presbyterian Dad didn’t realize just how fundamentalist they were since he was out at sea so much and never really attended and Mom was raised Baptist so probably didn’t notice.  Now more than 40 years later I remember vividly how much Eiseley’s  book had seemed like a life-line helping me to reconcile what I was learning about Darwinism (a very big topic in the 50’s and early 60’s) and what I had been taught about creationism in Sunday School.  The most vivid image from the book that stayed with me all these years was his floating down the river on his back-what he called the river of time-and feeling at one with the universe.  I wondered how much power I would feel from his essays so many years-and so many life experiences-later when I didn’t need it bolster my faith.  That essay still carried the same impact it had in my youth.  The other essays were still very enjoyable, also, although perhaps I read them a little more critically now.  It is interesting that both Tucker (who gave me this copy so I would read it) and I both give it 5 stars even though we disagree about much in our life views.

One of the great attractions of the essays is the beautiful, at times almost poetic, writing:

p. 11: …has come to stand symbolically in my mind for a dimension denied to man, the dimension of time.  Like wisteria on the garden wall he is rooted in his particular century.  Out of it-forward or backward-he cannot run.  [note: --this is why we love fantasy.  At the same time as I was reading this book I read a series of young adult novels in which certain characters with special powers could do just that-go forward and backward in time! See reviews of  "The Dark is Rising" series]

p. 13-14:  If my record, like those of the sixteenth century voyagers, is confused by strange beasts or monstrous thoughts or sights of abortive men, these are no more than my eye saw or my mind conceived.  On the world island we are all castaways, so what is seen by one may often be dark or obscure to another.

p. 20-21  If [Thoreau] had been possessed of the geological knowledge so laboriously accumulated since his time, he might have gone further and amusedly detected in the planetary rumblings and eructations which so delighted him in the gross habits of certain frogs, signs of that dark interior stress which has reared sea bottoms up to mountainous heights.  He might have developed an acute inner ear for the sound of the surf on Cretaceous beaches where now the wheat of Kansas rolls.

p. 37 …were all a part of one of Life’s strangest qualities-its eternal dissatisfaction with what is, its persistent habit of reaching out into new environments and, by degrees,  adapting itself to the most fantastic circumstances.

Zachter, Mort:  Dough

Mort Zachter was a young boy growing up on the Lower East Side of New York where his uncles continued to run a discount resale bakery that had been started by his immigrant grandparents.  His mom, the sister of the uncles, spent many hours working in The Store without pay meaning she had to give up her teaching job and could only substitute when she wasn’t needed at the store.  Mort gave up his dream of being able to major in English and become a writer because he needed a steady job so he became lawyer and accountant with expertise in taxation.  When Mort is in his thirties and his father is in the hospital he has to get Uncle Harry’s mail and he discovers that the uncles had amassed a fortune of millions which they never spent or shared.  He learns that his parents knew this but were too proud to ask for money.  The memoir is beautifully written as Mort remembers his family when he was a child and comes to terms with what they did.  He learns to accept what was and then he learns an even harder lesson-not to repeat the same mistake of hoarding.

This was on this year’s list that my former book group in Savannah sent me which is how I happened to read it.  It is one of the best memoirs I’ve read.  You understand what a hardship was caused for his family by his uncles’ actions yet Zachter doesn’t complain and also seems to accept rather than blame his uncles.  We should all take life’s kicks in the stomach with such grace!

Sayers, Dorothy L.:  The Man Born to Be King

This is a cycle of 12 radio dramas depicting the life of Christ.  I think I will make reading this a Lenten tradition.  The introduction is wonderful and full of Sayer’s theological views as well as explaining about the plays.  Dorothy Sayers was a scholarly and devout Christian who had a way of driving home her points that makes her theological writing exciting to read.  But in this volume it is the drama and emotion of the plays that draws us into the life and times of Jesus Christ in such a powerful and realistic way that I felt I was actually experiencing these events with the disciples.  In all my years I have never experienced so deeply what Jesus must have been like when he walked the earth and lived a human life just as we do.  I found this even more moving that the movie “The Passion of Christ.”  This was a masterful work and I wish every Christian could have the chance to read this.  Even better, I wish we could have the chance to hear it as it was intended by Sayers.

Paulos, John Allen:  A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper

I bought this book several years ago and never got around to reading it.  Therefore the news stories he talked about were old news-but at least familiar to me.  However the currency of the stories had little to do with his premise that most people don’t recognize much of the bias in news reporting because they are not familiar with how math influences the reporting.  Also, they often don’t recognize if the numbers quoted were really the result of valid testing or just thrown out to bolster a (probably weak) argument.  I was able to follow some of the math but not all.  What I chiefly learned is that all the math I learned way back in school  actually taught me to be a more critical reader-and a more skeptical one.  I am always questioning the validity of arguments and on what basis they are made.  I also notice that many people will take what they read as “gospel”-because if it’s in the paper it must be true!  Most people don’t recognize false correlations because they’ve never studied logic.  If our nation is going to remain strong we must improve the critical thinking skill of our next generation of voters. They have declined even further since this book was written.