Crashing Through: A true Story of Risk, Adventure and the Man who Dared to See
By Robert Kurson
Just released, this is the story of Mike May, a blind, California-based entrepreneur. Mike was blinded at the age of 3 by a chemical accident. He learned in his forties that his sight could be restored with a new procedure. This is his story, and it is a fascinating and articulate look at the issues of sight restoration, the fears, the risks, the triumph, and the ultimate reconciliation with reality. Mike shares candidly thoughts and fears that all blind people, including me, must feel at one time or another. He becomes one of perhaps 20 people in the last several hundred years who were blind as children and had vision restored as adults. The majority of these people, surprisingly perhaps, did not find their new vision to be a panacea. Rather, they often became profoundly depressed. Mike’s story is of coping, and learning to put his vision, not perfect as it turns out, in a useful place in his life. I can see this book wrapped and ribboned under the Christmas tree this year.
Showing posts with label book review. Show all posts
Showing posts with label book review. Show all posts
Sunday, August 12, 2007
Saturday, May 26, 2007
Forgiveness
Book Review
Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst The Rwandan Holocaust
By Steve Irwin and Immaculee Ilibagiza
This is a story which will stay with you. Autobiographical, the narrator tells of her childhood as a Tutsi in Rwanda and her narrow escape from the government-sponsored genocide intended to eradicate all Tutsis in Rwanda. Her family was murdered, and she survived because of the sometimes grudging charity of a Hutu Protestant pastor who hid her and six, later eight, other Tutsi women in a tiny bathroom where they crowded together for three months while the Hutu rampage went on, sometimes outside their window, and sometimes inside the house.
The most remarkable aspect of her story is her spiritual journey during those months in the bathroom. Born and raised Catholic, she spent the time, as she puts it, in a corner of her mind communing with God, praying constantly, begging Him for help, and receiving at strategic moments direct help from God. She struggled with the demons of despair and unbelief, and forced her way each time back to God through prayer and meditation. She was able to view her Hutu hunters with compassion and forgiveness. These Hutu who hunted her relentlessly, knowing they had not yet accounted for her death, were her neighbors, her childhood playmates, her teachers and her parents’ friends.
How could she bring herself to forgive those who betrayed and murdered her father, who tortured and dismembered her favorite brother, who clubbed her mother to death? How could she forgive a government who sanctioned, encouraged, inflamed this genocide?
And yet do we not pray daily to “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”? Are we not enjoined to love our enemies? Are we not given models of this love and forgiveness—Jesus on the cross, “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.”; Maria Goretti, a modern saint who forgave her rapist/murderer before she died and appeared to him later with forgiveness, prompting his conversion?
How often I have struggled with forgiveness. Just saying I forgive you doesn’t really do the job. I think true forgiveness requires letting go of the anger, the pain, the resentment that an offense causes. But it’s even more than that. It is a positive act of love, replacing that anger and pain with love—the kind of love Paul talks about—patient, kind, accepting, … It’s easy to say I forgive you, but its really hard to do. The resentment lurks in hidden corners of the soul and leaps out unexpectedly as a sarcastic comment, a surge of resentment, a moment of renewed anger, or a poor-me-focused story shared for sympathy or attention.
I believe that forgiveness is a unilateral act, as modeled by Christ and by Maria Goretti. It does not require contrition or reform on the part of the forgiven. Repentance is also a unilateral act. When you bring forgiveness and repentance together, you can effect reconciliation. But forgiveness can be accomplished independent of repentance or reconciliation.
I have heard the term forgiveness referred to as psychobabble. I think the genesis of that approach is the reality that true forgiveness, deep-rooted, erasure of the emotions of injury, anger, resentment and pain is so easy to say and so hard to accomplish.
It is not mine, but God’s, to judge the depth of Imaculee’s forgiveness, but I accept it and wonder if I could come to that myself.
Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst The Rwandan Holocaust
By Steve Irwin and Immaculee Ilibagiza
This is a story which will stay with you. Autobiographical, the narrator tells of her childhood as a Tutsi in Rwanda and her narrow escape from the government-sponsored genocide intended to eradicate all Tutsis in Rwanda. Her family was murdered, and she survived because of the sometimes grudging charity of a Hutu Protestant pastor who hid her and six, later eight, other Tutsi women in a tiny bathroom where they crowded together for three months while the Hutu rampage went on, sometimes outside their window, and sometimes inside the house.
The most remarkable aspect of her story is her spiritual journey during those months in the bathroom. Born and raised Catholic, she spent the time, as she puts it, in a corner of her mind communing with God, praying constantly, begging Him for help, and receiving at strategic moments direct help from God. She struggled with the demons of despair and unbelief, and forced her way each time back to God through prayer and meditation. She was able to view her Hutu hunters with compassion and forgiveness. These Hutu who hunted her relentlessly, knowing they had not yet accounted for her death, were her neighbors, her childhood playmates, her teachers and her parents’ friends.
How could she bring herself to forgive those who betrayed and murdered her father, who tortured and dismembered her favorite brother, who clubbed her mother to death? How could she forgive a government who sanctioned, encouraged, inflamed this genocide?
And yet do we not pray daily to “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”? Are we not enjoined to love our enemies? Are we not given models of this love and forgiveness—Jesus on the cross, “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.”; Maria Goretti, a modern saint who forgave her rapist/murderer before she died and appeared to him later with forgiveness, prompting his conversion?
How often I have struggled with forgiveness. Just saying I forgive you doesn’t really do the job. I think true forgiveness requires letting go of the anger, the pain, the resentment that an offense causes. But it’s even more than that. It is a positive act of love, replacing that anger and pain with love—the kind of love Paul talks about—patient, kind, accepting, … It’s easy to say I forgive you, but its really hard to do. The resentment lurks in hidden corners of the soul and leaps out unexpectedly as a sarcastic comment, a surge of resentment, a moment of renewed anger, or a poor-me-focused story shared for sympathy or attention.
I believe that forgiveness is a unilateral act, as modeled by Christ and by Maria Goretti. It does not require contrition or reform on the part of the forgiven. Repentance is also a unilateral act. When you bring forgiveness and repentance together, you can effect reconciliation. But forgiveness can be accomplished independent of repentance or reconciliation.
I have heard the term forgiveness referred to as psychobabble. I think the genesis of that approach is the reality that true forgiveness, deep-rooted, erasure of the emotions of injury, anger, resentment and pain is so easy to say and so hard to accomplish.
It is not mine, but God’s, to judge the depth of Imaculee’s forgiveness, but I accept it and wonder if I could come to that myself.
Friday, May 4, 2007
Book Review--Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Infidel
By Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Islam, says the author, is not a religion of peace. It is a religion of submission, of oppression, of violence sanctioned by its holy book. It is a religion frozen in time, a time of desert tribes, of violence. The people who embrace fundamental Islam, she says, are not the poor, down-trodden looking for a better way of life. They are fanatics, educated in the Madrasas of Germany and the United States, filled with holy hatred, the hatred of all that is not them, the infidel, the American. She warns that this resurgence of fundamentalist Islam is a major threat to the west, and that pretending that it is harmless, or that we should tolerate it, excuse it, leave it to flourish in religious schools, is suicidal.
She speaks from her own experience, growing up within Islam in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Kenya, and eventually Germany and Holland. She tells her own story, what she experienced, how she lived, how her people lived. She tells of her grandmother, fresh from the desert nomads of Somalia, trying to teach her the ways of the desert, trust noone, be suspicious, attack first, learn your ancestry, recite it-the clan will protect you. Djins, desert spirits, desert ways. Her mother, enthralled by the Saudi way of life; her father fighting for freedom, independence and democracy and still totally within the clan structure. Her escape from an arranged marriage and eventually from the clutches of Islam. A fascinating and revealing story of a world that is hard to imagine and yet must be considered, must be believed and, to the extent that a Christian American can, understood. Her warnings are dire, and real.
It reads like a novel, but depicts scenes hard to imagine from my safe Midwestern country home.
I strongly recommend it to anyone who has any interest in unraveling the complexity of our “modern” world. Will it help me understand Iraq? Will it help me develop a position on terrorism, war, and what we as Americans ought to do? It seems to me that it complicates the issue, focuses it, makes it more frightening In a way. If women’s rights are the focus, it tells a terrifying story of immigrant women, beaten, subjugated, excised (female circumcision), depressed. And the women for the most part complicit—they don’t know any better. They have been taught by their own mothers and grandmothers from infancy that Allah wills that they be beaten, degraded, killed, repressed, treated like property, chattels, livestock. Allah wills it according to the Koran.
By Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Islam, says the author, is not a religion of peace. It is a religion of submission, of oppression, of violence sanctioned by its holy book. It is a religion frozen in time, a time of desert tribes, of violence. The people who embrace fundamental Islam, she says, are not the poor, down-trodden looking for a better way of life. They are fanatics, educated in the Madrasas of Germany and the United States, filled with holy hatred, the hatred of all that is not them, the infidel, the American. She warns that this resurgence of fundamentalist Islam is a major threat to the west, and that pretending that it is harmless, or that we should tolerate it, excuse it, leave it to flourish in religious schools, is suicidal.
She speaks from her own experience, growing up within Islam in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Kenya, and eventually Germany and Holland. She tells her own story, what she experienced, how she lived, how her people lived. She tells of her grandmother, fresh from the desert nomads of Somalia, trying to teach her the ways of the desert, trust noone, be suspicious, attack first, learn your ancestry, recite it-the clan will protect you. Djins, desert spirits, desert ways. Her mother, enthralled by the Saudi way of life; her father fighting for freedom, independence and democracy and still totally within the clan structure. Her escape from an arranged marriage and eventually from the clutches of Islam. A fascinating and revealing story of a world that is hard to imagine and yet must be considered, must be believed and, to the extent that a Christian American can, understood. Her warnings are dire, and real.
It reads like a novel, but depicts scenes hard to imagine from my safe Midwestern country home.
I strongly recommend it to anyone who has any interest in unraveling the complexity of our “modern” world. Will it help me understand Iraq? Will it help me develop a position on terrorism, war, and what we as Americans ought to do? It seems to me that it complicates the issue, focuses it, makes it more frightening In a way. If women’s rights are the focus, it tells a terrifying story of immigrant women, beaten, subjugated, excised (female circumcision), depressed. And the women for the most part complicit—they don’t know any better. They have been taught by their own mothers and grandmothers from infancy that Allah wills that they be beaten, degraded, killed, repressed, treated like property, chattels, livestock. Allah wills it according to the Koran.
Saturday, April 21, 2007
Wicked--a book review
Wicked: the Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West—Gregory McGuire
‘wicked is an easy read, based on a familiar story. The author attempts to define what makes a person wicked. what happens to them? What portents, conditions, outside and internal influences make a simple green baby with shark's teeth turn, eventually, into a vengeful, greedy, angry witch. Okay, simple green baby with shark’s teeth is a bit over the top but the author presents her as, well if not lovable, at least believable. She is a horrible baby but grows into an obedient and loving sister. She loves a man; she loses him.
The book doesn't rise to its own challenge. The adolescent discussions of evil are inset and superficial, and the witch's decline from a good and loving sister to her final unhappy self is put down to the lack of forgiveness for causing the death of her lover. Then she refuses to give the same forgiveness to Dorothy for killing her sister. But does her lack of forgiveness cause her descent into jealousy and evil?
It's challenging to take a completely unsympathetic an “historic” character like the wicked witch of the west and make her into a living, breathing, real girl, and then bring her back at the end to her wickedness. The decline didn't work for me. But the story
was relatively entertaining.
It's not a book I would give as a gift, but it will make an interesting book discussion, which is why I read it in the first place.
‘wicked is an easy read, based on a familiar story. The author attempts to define what makes a person wicked. what happens to them? What portents, conditions, outside and internal influences make a simple green baby with shark's teeth turn, eventually, into a vengeful, greedy, angry witch. Okay, simple green baby with shark’s teeth is a bit over the top but the author presents her as, well if not lovable, at least believable. She is a horrible baby but grows into an obedient and loving sister. She loves a man; she loses him.
The book doesn't rise to its own challenge. The adolescent discussions of evil are inset and superficial, and the witch's decline from a good and loving sister to her final unhappy self is put down to the lack of forgiveness for causing the death of her lover. Then she refuses to give the same forgiveness to Dorothy for killing her sister. But does her lack of forgiveness cause her descent into jealousy and evil?
It's challenging to take a completely unsympathetic an “historic” character like the wicked witch of the west and make her into a living, breathing, real girl, and then bring her back at the end to her wickedness. The decline didn't work for me. But the story
was relatively entertaining.
It's not a book I would give as a gift, but it will make an interesting book discussion, which is why I read it in the first place.
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