The UmBlog

Last night, on the eve of my 44th birthday, my mind drifted towards a very old, but very vivid memory. I remember being a youngster in the backseat of my grandparents' car at a drive-in. I think it was the long closed Waterford drive-in. This memory drifts by regularly in the flotsam of my mind, so I've considered it many times. I figured I was about six years old. I also think my grandparents had expected me to be asleep by the time of the 2nd movie. I don't remember what the first movie was. I only remember the end of this movie in my memory. I got out of bed and thought I'd see what Google could do for me. I searched for "7 0's movie, guy crucified on a box car ." The clip on YouTube has enough screaming in it to wake a toddler. Yeah, that image is a bit much for a youngster to digest and forget. Google came through. Boxcar Bertha is a Martin Scorcese movie before he hit his stride and became famous starring David Carradine. Many reviewers...

Darwin's Ghosts is like a walk through a garden where one stops at the prettiest flowers then flits to other ones down the path. It's enjoyable and a pleasant way to spend an afternoon, but it's not strenuous. The sub-title of the book is "The secret history of evolution ." I thought I would learn more than I did about Darwin's forerunners, which is not to say I didn't learn, but not as much as I expected. Stott expanded on Darwin's own afterword in his later editions of The Origin of Species , which is included as an appendix in this book, cherry-picking eleven or twelve from his list. Between Aristotle and Wallace, I learned about Jahiz in Baghdad, Leonardo DaVinci , the salons of Paris, a couple odd balls, including a guy in Kentucky. I'm fond of history and biographies, so a series of biographies in a large history, was a delight for me. But with only 400 pages to work in, the depths of the biographies are adequate but not great. In the ...

The book description of Autopsy of War suggests this successful dermatologist, John Parrish, will look at his four decade struggle with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder , a topic I've grown more interested in as I've read ever more soldier memoirs. But after reading more than two-thirds of it, I returned it to the library. I think there is a line between unflinching and exhibitionist, and only the second leaves me feeling slimy after experiencing it. He starts with his parents' childhoods and the awful upbringing of his father, his born-again conversion to Jesus, and his adult life as a successful, hypocritical, mentally ill, narcissistic , philandering preacher. The author repeats his father's example, but adds a few chapters of his time in Vietnam, and finds success in dermatology instead of preaching. I do not deny his reality of living with the stress of flashbacks to the war, his nightmares, his fear of helicopters, his emotional disconnection, as a result of PTSD, ...

The bestselling biography of Steve Jobs was not high on my reading list but I was lent it and devoured it in a week. Since it wasn't my book and I couldn't write in it, I don't have excerpts, but I have a couple responses. Isaacson is a great writer. I agree with Steve Jobs himself that he was an a-hole, but Isaacson made the life of this a-hole very interesting. Steve Jobs was an a-hole. I'm not disagreeing with his own self-assessment. Steve was an artist with an artist's petulant demeanor. The serious girlfriend in his life before he married concluded he exhibited Narcissistic Personality Disorder . See my earlier blog on that. I think she's right. How could a company succeed with such a self-centered person? How could a company succeed without such a focused person? Notice the two sides of that disorder? He lacked empathy. People who survived and thrived in his employ learned to cope with his insults. He pursued beauty instead of profits.  He sa...

Last year we took a family vacation in Lancaster County about the same time this book, Growing up Amish by Ira Wagler, came up as a pre-pub review option. I heartily recommend the Old Summer House we stayed at, and I was so intrigued by the culture we visited that I really wanted to get into this book back then. But I was too late, all available copies were claimed, and I put the book on my Amazon wish list. But I didn't get to it until it recently showed up on sale on Amazon's Top 100 Kindle titles. I'm glad I did.   Ira Wagler is not a Lancaster Amish but was born in Canada, to an Old Order Amish family that had relocated from an Indiana Amish town. He enjoyed his childhood, but not the religious cultural restrictions. His older siblings also had difficulties and left the community to the shame of his father, an influential writer in Amish circles. So he relocated the family again to another community in Iowa. But the change in scenery, did not address the heart iss...

John Perry has contributed to Thomas Nelson's Christian Encounters series with a new biography on George Washington Carver . Carver's life is fascinating. Born at the beginning of the Civil War in Missouri into slavery, orphaned when he and his mother were kidnapped by slavers, raised by the childless couple who owned him and his brother as free children. Being a sickly child, possibly due to being born prematurely, kept him near the house and out of hard labor, allowing his brilliant mind and keen observation skills to blossom. He withstood racism his entire life, when his merits preceded him, earning him a welcome, only to be rescinded when his presence revealed the melanin levels in his skin. The author, John Perry, brings a beneficial extra perspective to this biography as he has previously written about the life of Booker T. Washington , the great African American statesman who hired Carver to Tuskegee Institute, which he presided over. Their dynamic was fiery. Carver woul...

I have always enjoyed these short biographies in the Christian Encounters Series from Thomas Nelson and this one on J.R.R. Tolkien is no exception. I prefer biographies, but I don't always have the patience for 700 page tomes, nor will brief internet posts or encyclopedia entries suffice either. However, I am not a Lord of the Rings fanboy either. I read them in elementary school and enjoyed the ideas in my head more than the story. I also enjoyed the movies. But this short book intrigued me because it showed me his life as an orphan with his brother in a rented room, unsupported by his extended family because of his mother's conversion to Catholicism before her death. I wish I learned more about his relationship with his brother, who became a farmer, into adulthood. In that boarding house, he met his future wife, 3 years older, and Protestant. Like the other biographies in this Christian Encounters series, this is a mere biographical appetizer, and this appetizer is the ba...

Update January 2015: The trip to heaven story is fiction, according to Alex  himself. I thought I was getting another book when I ordered this one . It turns out, there are several books about people's trips to heaven. Even the New Testament has a couple stories of Paul and John visiting heaven. I started reading it after dinner and I could not put it down. I finished it a little after my usual sleep time, but I had to get to the end. It is an amazing story and very well written and edited. The dad's story is interleaved with quotes from those involved in Alex from the scene of the accident to the emergency room to the pastoral care. Alex tells his story simply and with the intent to glorify Jesus. His dad, Kevin, also makes sure we know he is not a saint. He was on his cell phone when the other car struck his. He tells about the arguments with his wife and regrets over words said in anger and frustration. Even towards the end of the book he tells another story of nearly gett...

Finishing this book was like eating a supreme pizza but in the personal size, oh so good, but not enough. At almost 200 pages, Rick Marschall , has introduced me to a world I'm woefully clueless about and put an intense desire in me to indulge in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach until my ears bleed. My musical upbringing consisted of pop music then heavy metal then grunge then alternative pop music and now my teenagers listen to hip hop. I find myself as the parent who seeks out the classical station on the car radio and at work as well. I have no clue what I'm listening to, or by whom, but now I know what I want to listen to and it seems that if I really wanted, I could listen to Bach for a long time before anything repeated itself. Marschall brings to the forefront an essential dimension of Bach's music, his Lutheran faith. I love this quote of Bach's, "The aim and final reason of all music should be none else but the glory of God and refreshing the soul. Wher...

If you are like me, and know little to nothing about Chesterton, then don't do what I did and start in the middle of the book. However, if you are a fan then go right ahead. I was lost trying to bumble my way through an alphabetical list of topics, until I read the first of 10 essays spread throughout the book. As I learned more and more about Chesterton as Christian apologist, mystery writer, essayist, friends with great artists, man of letters, journalist, literary critic, novelist, philosopher and poet, I became more and more appreciative of the quotes Belmonte selected. I now have many pages dog eared for quotes to share on Facebook. Here is an example of one I liked. It has often been said, very truly, that religion is the thing that makes the ordinary man feel extraordinary; it is an equally important truth that religion is the thing that makes the extraordinary man feel ordinary. p.225, from his critical study of Charles Dickens. If you have a friend who already likes G. ...

There so many great quotes to pull from Eric Metaxas's biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer . I am thoroughly enjoying getting to know this man. He was incredibly bold to break away from the state church, it's Nazi compromised form calling themselves " German Christians ". He also had many sympathizers who wanted him to help them change it from within, but Bonhoeffer had no hope for that approach. He had become convinced that a church that was not willing to stand up for the Jews in its midst was not the real church of Jesus Christ. On that he was quite decided. He was far ahead of the curve, as usual. Some wondered whether he was just kicking against the goads, but when someone asked Bonhoeffer whether he shouldn't join the German Christians in order to work against them from within, he answered that he couldn't. "If you board the wrong train," he said, "it is no use running along the corridor in the opposite direction." pp. 186-7 He was part...

I finished the abridged version of Bullock’s Hitler: A Study in Tyranny . I want to share a couple more quotes from it before I give my final book report. War, the belief in violence and the right of the stronger, were no corruptions of Nazism, they were its essence. Recognition of the benefits which Hitler’s rule brought to Germany in the first four years of his régime needs to be tempered therefore by the realization that for the Führer, and for a considerable section of the German people- these were the by-products of his true purpose, the creation of an instrument of power with which to realize a policy of expansion that was to admit no limits. (199) A relative of mine asserts that Hitler did many good things for Germany, but the data show the benefits were only a by-product of gearing up for empire building. He stopped paying war reparations and put people to work by ordering weapons and munitions for his near future intentions. Hitler had been brought up as a Catholic and was imp...

after reading about Ghengis Khan and Thermopylae where the Greek Spartans faced the Persian army and held them in check despite being outnumbered for several days and reading about the battles afterwards between Athens and Sparta I had to read about Alexander the Great, King of Macedonia and King of Asia. The biography by NGL Hammond, The Genius of Alexander the Great seemed to do the job. Obviously, from the title, we can guess that Hammond is a fan of AtG. He is as much a fan of AtG as Weatherford was of Ghengis. In the same way, this author made me wish AtG was my king. If your city surrendered to him, he didn't kill you. If your city resisted, he'd kill all the men and sell all the women and children into slavery, as the Greeks typically did. But that was only if he wanted to make an example in a new region. One abused city convinced the other cities to surrender. He had no tolerance for traitorous Greeks, even if their treachery was decades old. One city had caved in t...

i'm sure my vacation reading choices are abnormal and a sign of some psychological issues. Philip Short has written an excellent biography with insights into the genocidal mind of Pol Pot . Before he changed his name, after Stalin's custom, Pol Pot's name was Saloth Sar. "The Cambodian revolutionaries could care very little about Communism. It was only a means to an end. The end was the overthrow of the monarchy, personified in Prince Sihanouk. Hence, although Marx's theory was the workers would overthrow their oppressors, Cambodia had very few in the working class which the Communists couldn't rally so the revolution had to come from the peasants. Subsequently, as in most Communist thought, the refusal of reality to conform to theory meant that the workers had been wrecked, "by 1965 they decided that the factories had been 'infiltrated' and 'the workers transformed into enemy agents'. From then on, factory workers were systematically refus...

the new book section of the library beckons me like the sirens and i fell for a newer Stalin biography called Stalin the Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore who noted that the widely read Stalin found some inspiration from Ivan the Terrible . so after reading Stalin i found a 1975 biography by Robert Payne and Nikita Romanoff called Ivan the Terrible . after reading both biographies, i believe it impossible to write about one without looking over the shoulder at the other. both had wives die young, Stalin's by suicide, and both men were predictably damaged. both were ready to quit. regarding Ivan's wife She died at the wrong time and in the wrong way...Grief, which has struck him so hard, loosened the bonds. Henceforth violence became a way of life; murder was his companion; to see the dead around him was his solace...His character seemed to change overnight. The man who had been deeply religious and conscientious in his duties, carefully weighing the advice of h...

i got sucked back into WW2 history by this book, Warlords: An Extraordinary Re-Creation of World War II Through the Eyes and Minds of Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, And Stalin by Simon Berthon and Joanna Potts, 2006. They have ambitiously attempted to synthesize the diaries of the warlords themselves or those close to them in a chronological order to highlight understandings and misunderstandings between them. It was an enjoyable read and did provide some insights for me. For example, i never realized the British reluctance for the cross channel invasion of France, nor the constant delay of that invasion and its effects on Russia. I also never knew how much Roosevelt despised Empire England, and yet, at the same time, did not see the same threat from Stalin. However, a novice to WW2 history would be under-served by this book. It helps a great deal to know more than the authors provide of the fronts involved simultaneously. For example, you would barely know there was a war in the Paci...

i didn't know most students in high school and college read Elie Wiesel 's book Night , because i didn't. i only heard about it recently as i was skimming through the radio dial and stopped briefly at an NPR interview with him regarding the new edition of this book. i forgot about it quickly until i was stymied during a quick search in the new book section at the library and came across it. i don't regret reading it. it was so sad though. in the book he lost his faith. its not hard to understand his doubts. in the preface to the new edition he remarks, "The infants thrown into fiery ditches...I did not say that they were alive, but that was what I thought. But then I convinced myself: no, they were dead, otherwise I surely would have lost my mind. and yet fellow inmates also saw them; they were alive when they were thrown into the flames. Historians, among them Telford Taylor, confirmed it. and yet somehow I did not lose my mind." p xiii-xiv would he have los...

"Australia's aboriginal integration program of the 1930s broke countless hearts -- among them, those of young Molly (Evelyn Sampi), Gracie (Laura Monaghan) and Daisy (Tiana Sansbury), who were torn from their families and placed in an abusive orphanage. Without food or water, the girls resolve to make the 1,500-mile trek home. Meanwhile, a well-intentioned tracker is trying to return the girls to the authorities." cultures die all the time, but when their death is forced, the noun "genocide" comes up. here a dominant, invading white culture is not pleased with the miscegenation between whites and aborigines and devise a plan to compel their progeny back into white society. the story is tragic and the fall-out from the "solution" to the "problem" will last more generations than if the "problem" had been left alone. the fall-out includes the Stolen Generations without family identity, only orphanage identities, orphanages not populat...

i didn't think this book would have any tie-in to the two genocide books i read this vacation but it does. this is a well told story of a nice family and two "nice" murderers, who might have been better off with a court sympathetic to the insanity plea. capote spends plenty of pages explaining the debate on the insanity defense. the issue is, can they tell right from wrong and do they understand the consequences of their actions. a more recent insanity defense takes into consideration their upbringing, passion at the moment, etc. he didn't dive into it that much. he worked very hard at explaining one of the murderer's life history, which was tragic and horrible. the other was mostly a high achieving athlete who might be considered ADHD now, or OC, whose only flaw was overspending, murder conspiracy, larceny, and pedophilia. they attacked a family that the less tragic guy heard in jail was very successful. so, assuming there was a lot of money in the house, kept th...

when i'm not blogging, i'm on vacation reading. i got alot read. some of the books were recommended by friends and family and some by my choice. for fun i read Marley and Me , by John Grogan. i don't think i would have liked it as much without having the empathy of a fellow dog owner. in short, "i laughed, i cried, it was better than cats." some topics mentioned are for mature audiences, especially the trials and tribulations of trying to get pregnant...the dog was a trial run at nurturing. the other books i read were about genocide in one form or another. not light reading.