Irregular Books

When I was preparing to graduate from college and get a place of my own, my mother gave me a lot of advice and one really useful book: Where’s Mom Now That I Need Her? It was a very sweet way for my mother to say that she loved me and that she wanted me to be careful. Many years later now I’m married and I’m expecting a child of my own, but I’ve still got this book and use it regularly.

Where’s Mom Now That I Need Her? is basically a recipe book with a few extras thrown in. The special thing about all these recipes is that they’re all easy to make, great for young men like myself who are more likely to spend reading a book, taking a run, hanging out with friends or doing anything else than preparing a meal. My mom was no slouch, and she taught me to cook and to bake, but I still appreciate this great variety of simple recipes — some don’t even require cooking! The Better Homes and Gardens cookbook just doesn’t seem so approachable when compared with this collection.

Mom’s always been on my case about my not-so-well-balanced eating habits, and I suspect that she gave me the book in the hopes that its recipes would encourage me to eat more fruits and vegetables. They didn’t, but at least they got me to prepare more home-cooked meals.

Besides, there’s more than just serious food recipes in this book. There are deserts as well. I particularly recommend the recipe for gooey oatmeal cookies — miraculously, these stay soft days after they’re made.

In addition to the recipes, there are a few other small how-to-take-care-of-yourself sections: laundry and clothing repair, simple first aid, basic self-diagnosis and car and bicycle maintenance. I admit that I’ve looked at these sections a few times, but usually the answer I’m looking for is not there - when I’m feeling rotten or need a tip, I call my mother direct.

The only problem I’ve got with this book is the concept behind the title. On the one hand, I’ve got to admit that my mother did a lot of taking care of me before I set out on my own. On the other hand, my mother was a lot more to me than just cooking, cleaning and first-aid medical care. I’d like to think that she knows she can’t be replaced with a book.

I also understand that there’s a companion book: Where’s Dad Now That I Need Him?, that covers separate sorts of issues (I don’t know which ones because I haven’t read the book). This sort of of Leave It To Beaver gender-specific separation of tasks just doesn’t fit with the way that families live today. My experience is that whatever needs to get done gets done by whoever happens to be there to do it. Mothers can take over traditional fathering roles and besides giving birth and breastfeeding, fathers can do the reverse. I understand the need for catchy titles that sell books, but I hate to have parenthood of any sort reduced to a list of chores.

Where’s Mom Now That I Need Her? makes a great gift for a graduating son or daughter. In addition to working as a sourcebook when Mom isn’t available, its title on the bookshelf is a good reminder to give your real mother a call just to say howdy. This book is no surrogate, but do your best to ignore the sexist title: there’s stuff in there that’ll make early adulthood a lot more liveable.

In what ought to be an embarrassing reminder of its attempts to censor the birth of science during the early Renaissance, a small group of Roman Catholic extremists are trying to silence a voice of religious dissent. Author Philip Pullman has been writing great books for years, and has been a good source of materials for his publishers, but now, a group that calls itself the Catholic League is trying to force Scholastic to stop carrying the book The Golden Compass, which is appearing as a movie in American theatres in a little over a week.

The Catholic League complains that The Golden Compass contains ideas that disagree with Catholic theology, as so ought not to be offered by Scholastic. It’s a bold reassertion of the idea that Catholics ought to be able to control what ideas even non-Catholics are exposed to.

Fortunately, many Catholics are rejecting the Catholic League’s attempts to censor The Golden Compass. Teacher P.S. Naumann, for example, writes, “Teaching English for thirty odd years in a Jesuit high school, I kept looking for a contemporary novel that could, would, and should provoke questions and discussions. Philip Pullman’s book is an eye-opener and window-opener that can bring kids, parents, and teachers together to talk. The windows in our own minds, and in our own Church, open onto a secular society and a multi-cultural world, as Pope John XXIII knew. How to deal with that? Sooner or later students will open windows for themselves; it’s part of growing up. If they don’t ask any questions in the process, we may have lost our opportunity. The Golden Compass will help in that direction, and if the book brings kids and parents together to discuss important ideas, think of the good it is doing.”

Honest thinkers don’t need censorship to protect them. Their minds are strong enough to distinguish worthwhile ideas from trash. The consensus seems to be that The Golden Compass contains a worthwhile presentation of ideas. Perhaps that’s what bothers The Catholic League so much.

What can be done to counter this attempt at suppression of non-Catholic ideas?

The most effective thing to do is to vote with your pocketbook. Don’t let the censors of the Catholic Church control what books you read, what movies you see, and what ideas you think. Show Scholastic Books that most people support its decision to contribute to the publication of Philip Pullman’s books.

- Buy the Golden Compass book.
- After you’ve read the book, go to see the Golden Compass movie.
- After you’ve read the book and seen the movie, tell a friend about them.

The 2008 presidential election season is upon us, and in just a little bit more than a month, Americans are going to start voting in their state primaries and caucuses in order to select their political parties’ presidential candidates.

To help them, they will have 2,008 reasons. That’s the project begun by Irregular Times two years ago: Compile 2,008 reasons to elect a progressive President by January 1, 2008.

The new political encyclopedia covers history, economics, war and peace, freedom, community, and education, as well as the follies of the Democratic and Republican parties. Here’s just one of the 2,008 reasons they’ve assembled for this book, to be published in January of the coming year:

Under the leadership of right wing politicians in the Republican and Democratic parties, the United States become more intolerant than South Africa, the nation which ended apartheid less than a generation ago. The nation of South Africa now embraces racial equality, but it doesn’t stop there. In November of 2006, South Africa’s Parliament voted in favor of a Civil Union law that gives same-sex couples the same marriage rights as heterosexual couples.

Here in the United States, our Congress has refused to grant equal marriage rights to same-sex couples. Even that refusal isn’t nasty enough for them, though. Right wingers are seeking an amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America that would override the right to equal protection under the law and make it a crime for same-sex couples to get married.

It used to be known that the United States of America was known around the world as a nation that valued equality for all people. The growing power of right wing Republicans and Democrats, however, has led us into moral decay. For the sake of America’s traditional progressive civic values, we need to elect a progressive President who will promote the restoration of the ethic of equality in American culture. (Source: Reuters, November 15, 2006)

My wife and I picked up a copy of The Joseph Campbell Companion during a vacation on North Carolina’s outer banks. We were in need of a some reading material for our time away from the beach, and this book seemed worthwhile. By the end of the trip, however, I was slightly ashamed to bring it out in front of family members.

The context for the publication of the book reveals the problems present throughout its pages. Editor Diane K. Osbon “knew” Joseph Campbell through a series of small workshops with him, the point of which seemed to be little more than to bask in his wisdom. Osbon mews about how great it was just to be in the presence of Campbell, as if his ideas would soak into her psyche more efficiently through physical proximity.

This book is a mishmash of selections of text from Campbell’s already published books, works from other authors that Campbell liked to refer to, personal lectures from the workshops with Campbell that the Osbon reconstructed from her notes, and strange little verse-like eruptions of unclear origin that don’t make much sense. For example, on page 175 Osbon inserts:

If you read Christian mythology
In the Gnostic way,
It makes universal sense.

I’m not going to argue about the concept of these three lines, which makes some sense. What doesn’t make sense to me the way that the author puts what really is just a simple narrative sentence into verse form. What’s added by the new format? What does it mean?

This kind of thoughtless organization of deep thoughts is characteristic of the Joseph Campbell Companion. Because the book is nothing but a collection of short selections, the work doesn’t flow in any kind of comprehensive structure. Campbell’s words are cut short so that deep ideas are left half-explored, superficially explained.

That’s a shame, because the whole point of Campbell’s work was to explore deep meaning. I wonder how much editor Osbon actually listened. Campbell’s most famous saying was “Follow your bliss.” By this he meant that each individual must find his or her meaning on his or her own path. Other individuals or systems of teaching could act as partial guides, but Campbell regarded it as a dangerous misstep to mistake these guides for the bliss itself.

The Joseph Campbell Companion seems to operate from the assumption that the words of Joseph Campbell are important because they were uttered or written by Joseph Campbell. Missing from this book are the careful references Campbell used to support his interpretations. This book is full of teachings, which the editor clearly takes on as a student, not as an independent thinker.

If you really want to understand what Joseph Campbell thought about myth and meaning, I have two pieces of advice:

1. Read some of his original works and leave the Joseph Campbell Companion on the shelf. I particularly suggest The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

2. Don’t confuse Campbell’s guideposts to the personal quest for meaning as teachings that are important in themselves. Myth and meaning is everywhere, in the commercials on television as much in the old legends of traditional folklore. Don’t fall into Osbon’s trap of devoting yourself to any individual or system of thought as a replacement for truly independent questing. The answers are out there, but if you don’t find them on your own, you will never truly understand what they mean.

Olivia Mellan doesn’t claim that her book Money Harmony is a guide to “objective truth” about financial psychology, and such an admission of her book’s limitations is welcome. Nonetheless, one wonders why a person would write a book about people’s money personalities unless that person had some sort of information from which to base an attempt at uncovering the truth.

The problem with Money Harmony is that it seems to be written off the top of Ms. Mellan’s head. Her understanding of people in general appears to come from the experiences of herself and her close friends. Even though she claims to have gathered information from a variety of people, Money Harmony seems to focus on the middle-aged and relatively well-to-do. Her ideas don’t recognize the financial and emotional needs of regular folks. For example, although she discusses investment a great deal, she dismisses the issue of debt as if it is a problem only in extreme cases.

When I was engaged, my fiance and I took her money personality quiz, which reminded us of an “Is Your Boyfriend a Fabio or a Fabian?” survey from Cosmopolitan. Again and again, we found that Mellan’s questions and the answers that we had to choose from failed to reflect our financial realities. We were forced to make selections that only roughly approximated our true feelings. Such a mismatch between our personalities and Mellan’s money personality types shows the crude nature of her understanding of human motivation.

As one reads Money Harmony, Mellan’s political opinions become very clear. She romanticizes poverty and pities the unhappy rich, reminding us again and again that money cannot buy happiness. Of course money does not bring happiness, but it can and does prevent a great deal of unhappiness. That the poor have real needs that are not being met doesn’t seem to occur to her. Entire chapters of the book seem to be expressions of her own guilt over earning money.

Even though it is fundamentally flawed, Money Harmony is a good tool to get couples to talk about their financial needs and weaknesses. It’s an easy read with only about one hour’s worth of real reading content.

Of course, one concrete step that everyone can take to help themselves financially is to stop spending money on silly books that give advice on how to manage money. If you really think that you need help, read Money Harmony, but don’t buy it. Get yourself a library card and check it out for a free overnight skim instead. You’ll be glad that you can return it at no cost.

Never fear, the hippos don’t really go berserk, issuing cries of bloodlust as they slash their enemies to pieces on the battlefield. They’re cartoons.

Hippos Go Beserk, a board book by Sandra Boynton, is by no means great literature. On the other hand, if it were, it wouldn’t work for the very young children for whom it has been made.

Hippos Go Beserk is best read to the youngest group of children: Kids from a few months old to around two or three years of age. These kids are not exactly readers, but they’ll pay attention to the right kind of book — the kind with simple, dramatic illustrations that catch the eye and simple yet entertaining concepts that capture the young mind’s attention. Hippos Go Beserk is just that kind of book.

Even more importantly, Hippos Go Beserk won’t get on the nerves of its secondary audience: the parent. Those of you who have little ones know what I’m referring to here: as much as your children spend time with their little books, you’ll spend time with the books too, reading them aloud again and again and again. The truth is that I find the premise Hippos Go Beserk to be kind of entertaining. The idea of a bunch of fun-loving hippopotamuses sneaking into and out of a house to have a party is original and funny, yet not so sickly cute and sweet as to turn off a well-seasoned papa such as myself. Just looking at the title of this great little book, I’m slightly jealous, thinking back to the days when my reading consisted of such zany stuff. The generic, yet interesting illustrations round out the interest for gazers of all ages.

Now, my eight-month old son is just a tad young to be learning about numbers, much less addition and subtraction, but these simple mathematical concepts are nonetheless present in Hippos Go Beserk. As the hippos come and go, the reader counts them and comes to the total of 44. I doubt that much of this information will get through to my son, but I appreciate an infant’s book that gets higher level concepts in there just in case. Let’s face it: as parents we all have the irrational hope that our kids will learn things ahead of schedule. Who knows?

All in all, Hippos Go Berserk is a book worth buying. It isn’t exactly a classic, but it’s a fine piece to add variety to the nursery library, and keep you from going berserk from the repetition of the babes’ bedtime books.

The big word going around TV land about publishing over the last few days has been the Kindle, an electronic reading device. Amazon is getting all twittery, and ahead of itself with big announcements about its debut:

“Today we at Amazon are excited to announce Kindle, a wireless portable reading device with instant access to more than 90,000 books, blogs, magazines and newspapers.”

Wow. I have to say that this is exactly something I’ve never felt the need for. I have never once thought, “Why can’t I read this book electronically, guddurnit?”

“Is there a way to get the emotions and experiences I love from books, but combined with the possibilities of advanced technology?”

This is like asking, “Is there a way to get the flavor I love from pizza, but combined with the possibilities of advanced technology?” Pizza doesn’t need to be combined with advanced technology. Neither do books… or your coffee… or your toothpaste… or your pillow.

“No computer is needed…”

Well, if no computer is needed, then what’s the point? What’s the point of getting information electronically, if you as the user are not then able to use and enhance it with the full power of a computer? If you’re just going to be a passive reader, like with a book, but use up batteries with the electricity in the Kindle, then why not just save the batteries and buy the book?

I already have access to magazines, newspapers, blogs and books with my laptop computer, which has wireless access and is portable, just like the Kindle. What is the Kindle bringing me that my computer can’t? Restrictions and limitations, that’s what.

The Kindle is the Segway of the book world.

Rodale’s All-New Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening is a fantastic guide within its scope. The information and perspective offered by the reference are are likely to contribute to the maturation of any new gardener.

However, the book is not much of an encyclopedia. Think of it as a thick guide. Of course, this is a shortcoming shared with all purported gardening encyclopedias. Each encyclopedia covers a certain amount of territory while leaving other areas unaddressed.

A gardener can only go so far with Rodale’s All-New Encyclopedia, and I’ll bet they’re counting on that. Rodale sells a huge number of gardening guides, and if you put them all together you might have the start of an encyclopedia.

I have chosen to supplement the Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening with other works, most prominently Wyman’s Gardening Encyclopedia, which contains much more attention to detail, though much less vision. The two complement eachother well in their opposing approaches to the garden gate.

Alan Greenspan has made quite an impression with his new book, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World. It’s not the impression that many people expected, however.

In his new book, Alan Greenspan:

1) Says that the Bush White House and Republican Congress were “out of control” on economic policy.
2) Acknowledges that the Iraq War is being fought for oil.
3) Writes that the Republicans deserved to lose the 2006 congressional elections.

Coming from a life-long Republican and Bush White House insider, those are mighty strong words. The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World is being released tomorrow.

A few months after the attacks of September 11, an old friend of mine suggested that I read Lie Down With Lions in order to get a more complete idea of what life in Afghanistan is really like. It’s a piece of potboiler fiction, written in the 1980s when the Soviet Union was still trying to hold on to the country, but the book does contain some information about Afghanistan, and I guess I’m glad that I have that information in my head now.

The problem with Lie Down With Lions is that what information there is gets lost in an unsophisticated story with shallow characters who behave in completely predictable ways. I understand that characters need to act out of their own motivation, and in such a sense should be predictable. What I can’t stand about this book, however, is that the motivation of the characters is so cartoonishly simple. I want characters who develop in significant ways, so that by the end of the book they belie the apparent simplicity of their earlier identities, not John Wayne sorts of good guys and bad guys.

I’m not going to give away the plot of this book, because that’s pretty much all that it is. Unfortunately, there’s not much deeper meaning to it. So there’s a Cold War and some Islamic rebels and a romantic triangle. So what? I need a “so what”, and this book fails to deliver it.

I won’t say that Lie Down With Lions is entirely worthless. At least it communicates the important point that quick fixes like an American invasion are not going to truly solve the problems that have made Afghanistan a haven for desperate people bent on violence.

If you really want to find out about Afghanistan, though, a story like this isn’t the best way to go. I suggest, instead, that you read the book Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism by John K. Cooley. Supplement that work with the CIA Factbook entry on Afghanistan and some ethnographic (anthropological) studies of the peoples of Afghanistan.

Of course, if that’s too much hard work for you, you can rely on the likes of Geraldo Rivera on the clownish Fox News network. You can rely on entertaining but shallow stories like Lie Down With Lions. To me, being a citizen in a democracy demands a little bit more of us than that. Issues of life and death are in our hands, and it’s our duty to educate ourselves beyond the depth of the bestsellers list.