Friday, May 23, 2008

Lovers of the written word will love "The Florist's Daughter"

THE FLORIST'S DAUGHTER,
by Patricia Hampl

Scanning through radio stations while driving, I happened upon Patricia Hampl reading from her latest memoir. The life she brought to the words she read instantly made me stop the scan function, and for the next I don't know how many minutes I was mesmerized by her storytelling.
I knew I had to get the book.

"The Florist's Daughter" proved even better as a read.

The woman can flat out write.

Details of her life growing up in St. Paul, Minn. after World War II serve as the structure for Hampl to tell us what she really wants us to know, and that's who her parents were and what her relationship was with them.

She does that so well that you feel you know her chain-smoking Irish-American mother and her handsome, reserved Czech father -- the florist of the title -- well enough that you could write their obituaries if asked to. In fact, maybe that's what Hampl has done -- at book length.

So much of the book is about what the author was thinking during the events of those growing-up years, how she reacted to the events of life that her family lived, and especially how she both remained the same and yet grew.

How many adult children might empathize with Hampl when she writes about agreeing out of a sense of duty to travel with her elderly mother to Ireland -- to "offer it up," as she inserts -- only to acknowledge afterward that her mother turned out to be the best travel companion ever.

Can't you just picture a middle-aged woman sneaking a bottle of chardonnay and a pack of Merit 100s into the senior living center so her mother can enjoy those forbidden pleasures?

Later on she tells of visiting her mother on her death bed this way: "She would hang by her fingernails from the ledge of life."

Hampl makes it ease to picture the flooded streets of St. Paul's old Italian levee neighborhood by describing them as "suddenly Venetian." Minnesota itself, she writes, is situated "at the nosebleed north of the country."

During car trips in the family Ford, she and her brother would be "enacting the turf wars of the backseat."

Catholics will be teased throughout as memories of religious practice float through the text, and -- because she grew up in its shadow, the Cathedral of St. Paul almost takes on the role of a character as Hampl crafts this wonderful story out of, to use her phrase, "the delicate scrim of daily life."

There is a sense of place that this University of Minnesota professor has preserved for us, first for the very Catholic hometown of her childhood, perhaps best explained with this quote from the book:
"Ours was a pre-freeway St. Paul, a time-place where it was possible to spend an entire lifetime without straying over the Minneapolis line where the Scandinavians went about their Lutheran business."

But there is another sense of place Hampl brings us to, the place of a daughter, the roles that fall to daughters, and maybe this paragraph sums it up:
"I sit with my mother, as has been destined since time began because a daughter is a daughter all her life. We stay like this, hand in hand. We have all the time in the world -- world without end, amen. Words we recite by heart when she asks me to say the Rosary with her, the last phrase of the Gloria, the little prayer at the end that puts to rest all the Hail Marys."

Thanks, Patricia. -- bz

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Everybody thinks they have a book in them

It must be part of modern culture that everyone who ever received a B+ or better on a high school essay has a gut feeling that they could write a book someday.

Whether prompted by illusions of penning the great American novel, delusions that a lot of other people will care about your life story or sincere conviction that others will benefit by knowing your take on a topic, the urge to write can be overwhelming.

Also overwhelmed, in turn, are book reviewers.

Write a few reviews and the hopeful of the literary world beat a path to your in box.

That's okay, though. Keep 'em coming.

As I crack the spines of new deliveries that appear with the request for reviews, a question that regularly comes to mind is this: Who does the person who wrote this think will be interested in this?

That may be a valid question, but others, and a better ones are: Might there be people out there who would get something out of reading this? Are there gems in here that make this worthwhile?
Let me give you a couple of examples.

Ready for your coffee table?

Judy McCabe, who lives in Minnetonka, put together some of her thoughts of home with photos -- some good, some just ordinary -- to create a well-design, coffee table book titled, um, "Thoughts of Home."

McCabe, a member of St. Patrick in Edina, has moved around the country, and she wrote, "What I really want to do with the book is open a dialog for people who are relocated or transferred." Could viewing scene of normal, every-day life around homes of various kinds inspire fond memories and help people appreciate home life?

To be perfectly honest -- and I told McCabe this -- the book didn't do anything for me. I did like the book's design, and I think it works as a coffee table book to browse through. The ordinariness of the home life she describes, though, doesn't compel me to give a ringing endorsement of "Thoughts of Home," but McCabe deserves at the very least a pat on the back for not letting her creative urge lie inert.
Find out more about McCabe and her work at http://www.thoughtsofhome-judymccabe.com/.

Life story of interest?

Then there's Bill Mori. Mori is a member of St. Paul in Ham Lake who pulled together his memories of growing up in Fort Dodge, Iowa, during the 1950s.
"East End Italian" is a series of brief chapters that, for the most part, aren't unique. Life in Fort Dodge and at Holy Rosary Parish there isn't much different from life elsewhere in the country that I could see. Yet....

There are slices of small town life that Mori has preserved by being willing to try this authorship thing. My favorite concerns his job at the local mom-and-pop grocers, a holdout to the supermarkets of the day. Customers came in to Brechwald's with a list of items, and schoolboys like Mori ran through the aisles to "fetch" them, as he writes. Never heard of that before.

Mori's got some funny, funny anecdotes. There's a great story about being fascinated with airplanes, writing away to obtain photos from the manufacturers like Lockheed, Boeing and McDonald Douglas, only to have the government agents show up at their door, wanting to question a certain William Mori who was so curious about the latest military aircraft.

If you want to know more, contact the author at bmori@comcast.net.

Spiritual poetry, anyone?

Margaret Peterson has been rhyming for years, and now her poems are collected in her first book, "The Pearl of Great Price: Spiritual Poetry to Life the Soul."

My guess is that poetry experts might judge her work as syrupy, Pollyannish maybe, and definitely old fashioned, as if that's a crime. But I liked it. It wore on me.

Yeah, it's a bit on the sweet side, but I'm going to bet Peterson is sweet, too. This is a lady who has taught 4th grade faith formation at her parish, St. Bonaventure in Bloomington, for more than 20 years, and just loves doing it, we hear.

There is surely simplicity in some of her poems, but others carry wisdom -- and do so with great economy. Two samples:

Mirrors
A mirror reflects
Whatever it views
We reflect
The paths we choose.
The Pearl of Great Price
God is the pearl
In the ocean of life;
Will we love Him or cast Him aside...
And spend our lives searching
For something unknown
To ease the longing inside?
Find out more by looking her up at http://www.margaretpetersonpoetry.com.

Courage counts

These are just three examples of local people who have yielded to the urge and tried their hand at the book world. Their work may or may not be your cup of tea or may have value for just a small number of readers.

But if wholesale endorsement of a work isn't in the cards, anyone with the courage to work hard at getting a book out of their system deserves applause for at least that effort. And who know when the next author of bestsellers might be one of those folks brave enough to put words on paper. -- bz

Friday, May 2, 2008

History worth knowing about link between capitalism and religion

"GOD AND GOLD,"
by Walter Russell Mead

Capitalism’s ability to raise the standard of living in the English-speaking world – and to spread British and American social and economic culture around the globe – owes no small part of its success to a religious element, perhaps even a religious foundation.
And religion can continue to play a role in humanity’s pursuit of peace and development.
That’s a key take-away from the reading of “God and Gold,” a compelling book that’s worth a slow, reflective read.
Author Walter Russell Mead, a U.S. foreign policy expert, forces readers to view the past 300 years of history from both an inward looking perspective and that of an outsider, forcing us to see how others see us.
Mead’s premise is that the rise of first British then American capitalism is the most important development in the history of the modern world, and that the capitalistic culture that the United States leads today may be an enduring one, unlike fallen empires of old.
He backs up his hypothesis with hundreds of pages of historical evidence, but maybe more important is his work to help us understand the challenges that our country faces today, especially from some of the Muslim faith who also champion a religious fervor but who – tied down by refusals to change and to be open and tolerant – have failed to take advantage of capitalism’s fruits.
Mead moves readers from the importance of domination of the seas – ala England’s defeat of the Spanish Armada and the U.S. efforts to protect the oil markets of the Persian Gulf – to the importance of the willingness to try new methods and technologies, to continually adapt and move on, and to be tolerant and accepting of various expressions of religious faith.
Societies that insist on the domination of one religious sect or persuasion and societies that are unaccepting of ethnic diversity have proven unable to utilize the gifts of immigrants and those of other faiths that have so enriched more tolerant cultures.
That spirituality plays such a large role in economic and societal success is a pivotal slice of American pie, just as important as it had been for the Brits before.
“Since the 17th century,” Mead notes, “the English-speaking world or at least significant chunks of it have believed that embracing and even furthering and accelerating change – economic change, social change, cultural change, political change – fulfills their religious destiny.”
As successful as English speakers have been the past 300 years, the religious fervor that plays such a positive role also lends a dark side. Leaders from Cromwell through Roosevelt, Reagan and Bush II demonize the enemies of their states – and if they do so with lies, so be it. The Soviet Union isn’t merely an aggressive if brutal competitor during the Cold War years, it is labeled an “evil empire.”
Fulfilling the destiny of the British and Americans sometime led to sinful trampling on and even annihilation of native peoples, a concern that rarely troubled people of faith at the time yet something that is embarrassing to think of today.
Today, Mead sees Evangelical Protestantism as the one social movement with the power to sway public opinion, and that is a cause for concern in his mind.
Diplomacy with other cultures is paramount to peace and development around the globe – and continuation of American social and economic dominance – yet “Evangelical America is often considered – as it has often been – the section of the population most committed to uncritical flag waving, to simplistic understanding of foreign peoples and culture, and resistant to complex and nuanced discussions of the international issues facing the United States.”
A saving grace?
Common opposition to abortion and a common desire to defend the place of religion in American society are connecting evangelicals and Catholics, and Mead finds this a positive.
“The encounter with Catholicism, both at a personal and at an intellectual level, has also exposed many evangelicals to a much richer and more complex body of Christian thought and social reflection than they have previously known.”

QUOTES FROM “GOD AND GOLD”

“Since the seventeenth century, the English-speaking world or at least significant chunks of it have believed that embracing and even furthering and accelerating change – economic change, social change, cultural change, political change – fulfills their religious destiny.”

“The idea that the world is built (or guided by God) in such a way that unrestricted free play creates an ordered and higher form of society is found in virtually all fields and at virtually all levels of the Anglo-Saxon world.”

“Foreign opinion is often bemused by the way in which the Anglo-Saxon powers are so frequently troubled by the existence of conditions that are almost as old as humanity and likely to be just as long-lived. Bribery, protectionism, cruelty to animals, smoking, sexual harassment in the workplace, the excessive use of saturated fats in cooking, unkind verbal epithets for low-status social groups, ethnic cleansing: in much of the world things like these are deplored, but a vigorous and puritanical attempt to suppress them altogether is viewed, not entirely unreasonably, as a cure that can be worse than the disease.”

“An open, dynamic, and capitalistic society generated innovations in finance, technology, marketing, and communications. These innovations offered the open society enormous advantages in world trade. The wealth gained in this way provided the basis for military power that could withstand the largest and mightiest rival empires of the day.”

“The ability of the overseas English-speaking societies to welcome and assimilate vast numbers of immigrants from all over the world remains a key factor in the continuing strength of the United States (and other countries) to the present day.”

“The power of mass consumption, harnessed by flexible markets to the economic interest of the talented, may be the most revolutionary human discovery since the taming of fire.”

“The rise of new classes to unprecedented affluence, the changed world created by emergent technologies and media, the opportunities for self-expression in a culture largely free of political (though never of cultural or moral) censorship: these helped create the popular culture of the English-speaking world that has horrified and hypnotized foreigners ever since.”

“A St. Francis of Assisi, A St. Catherine of Siena, A Martin Luther, A St. Ignatius Loyola, or a Martin Luther King Jr. is seized by a vision of a new way to live and, under its influence, goes on to live a different kind of human life than any seen before. One woman or one man experiences the vision directly or subjectively, but the power of the ideal is so strong that others, seeing it second- or third-hand or reading about i8t in books, feel the power and are inspired to live this way themselves. They permanently enrich and deepen the world’s perception of what it is to be human, and they give the rest of us new choices and new possibilities.”

“The countries which are in most respects the most thoroughly modernized by any definition that rests on economic and technological progress – Britain of the nineteenth century, the United States today – are significantly more religious than most.”

“Disagreement and controversy are not signs of a decadent society; they are the necessary conditions of spiritual progress.”

“Pluralism, even at the cost of rational consistency, is necessary in a world of change. Countervailing forces and values must content. Reason, scripture, tradition: they all have their uses, but any one of them, unchecked, will go too far. Moreover, without constant disputes, constant controversy, constant competition between rival ideas about how society should look and what it should do, the pace of innovation and change is likely to slow as forces of conservative inertia grow smug and unchallenged.”

“We are always saying goodbye to something we love, always leaving our fathers’ homes for an unknown future. . . . Yet at the same time, there must be room for nostalgia and a resistance to change. There must be religious voices denouncing godless secularism and calling mankind back to eternal principles.”

“Christianity in the American context is less and less a matter of family or ethnic identity, more and more a matter of personal choice. . . . Religion today is increasingly part of a self-constructed, chosen identity for Americans. It is perceived as a response to a call – an inherently dynamic religious orientation, even if the doctrines embraced are venerable.”

“To engage in the struggle for change and reform is not to oppose the religious instinct, but to give it its fullest expression.”

“To abolish war, we must, surely, vanquish the causes of war. Mass poverty can clearly no longer be accepted if war is to be eliminated. . . . Peace is impossible without justice and economic development.”

“Americans . . . generally believe that their country has a covenanted relationship with the power or person who directs the historical process. America is on a mission from God – and the well-being of the United States depends on how faithful Americans are to their mission.”

“It is when we are most confident that we are acting righteously, most sure of the moral ground beneath our feet that we are in the greatest danger.”

“The quest for more scientific and technical knowledge, and for application of the fruits of that knowledge to ordinary human life, is not simply a quest for faster cars and better television reception. It is a quest to fulfill the human instinct for change, arising out of a deep and apparently built-in human belief that through change we encounter the transcendent and the divine. The material and social progress that is such a basic feature of Anglo-American society and of the broader world community gradually taking shape within the framework the Anglo-Americans have constructed ultimately reflects a quest for meaning, not a quest for comfort and wealth. . . . From the Anglo-Saxon point of view, participating in this adventure is not materialist, even if the quest brings material benefits. Abandoning the quest is materialist; to turn aside from this challenge is to embrace a merely material existence and to abandon the spiritual values that make human life truly human.”--
bz

Thursday, May 1, 2008

Book of Prayers from the stars needs less stats and more prayer

"A Book of Prayers: To the Heavens from the Stars,"
by Chuck Spinner

Chuck Spinner knew he didn't have this project exactly right. He says so right up from by acknowledging some weaknesses.

The idea of asking celebrities from the sports and media world their favorite prayer is a good one, and even better is Spinner's introductory remark about the purpose of his book. Actually a quote from former football coach and present 49ers' GM John McVay about the importance of formal prayer, the purpose is to "get us started talking to God."

That's a great measure of success, and to that end, Spinner has been successful.

But I think he could have done better. And I think this could have been a book that really touched folks deeply and done a lot to initiate more conversations with God.

I think readers will find there is a bit too much celebrity biography and not enough prayer.

I'm not sure how many readers will care to know all the years that Ann B. Davis won Emmy's for "The Brady Bunch." Was it crucial to include U.S. Olympic hockey hero Mike Eruzione, telling all his collegiate all-star mentions, when his favorite prayer is the Our Father!

That repetition of prayers is one of the weaknesses of the book that Spinner acknowledges, but after the third time he includes the text of The Lord's Prayer or the Memorare, it's not reinforcing or even interesting, it's plain irritating.

And some celebrities sent in poems, not prayers; they should have been edited out.

There are gems, though, and the salvation of the book comes when you find them.

There's the ending sentence from Olympic softball star Leah O'Brien-Amico's favorite: "Change me from the inside out and make me the person you want me to be."
Pitcher for the old Brooklyn Dodgers Carl Erskine sent in: "Lord, I don't pray for life to be easier, but for you to make me stronger."

All in all, I'm forced to say that this is a use book of prayer. Advice to readers might be, ignore the biographical introductions to all these folks and search for prayers that touch you. Mark them somehow, and return to them when you need a kick start for your own conversations with God. -- bz