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Love, Charleston by Beth Hart Webb

Aug16

This novel had a couple of strikes against it going in as far as I’m concerned: I don’t read romance novels, and I especially don’t read Christian romance novels, even though I am a Christian. However, it was nominated for the INSPY awards in the “general fiction” category, and although it turned out to be what I would call a romance novel, it was a pretty darn good romance.

Charleston’s Anne Brumley has long dreamed of romance while ringing the bells at St. Michael’s, but those dreams are beginning to fade. Her sister Alicia and cousin Della encourage her to strike out and make her own way—after all, she’s thirty-six. But the tall redhead is sure God said, “Stay here and wait.”

Widower Roy Summerall has happily ministered to the country folks of Church of the Good Shepherd for years. So why would the Lord call him and his daughter away to Charleston—the city that Roy remembers from his childhood as pretentious and superficial? Surely the refined congregation of St. Michael’s won’t accept a reverend with a red neck and a simple faith.

Meanwhile, Anne’s sister, Alicia, struggles with her husband’s ambition which seems to be taking him further and further from their dreams of a happy family together. And Cousin Della’s former fiancé has returned to Charleston, making her wonder if she chose the wrong path when she married her gifted but struggling-artist husband.

So the strongest part of this three strand plot is the story of Licia, who, spoiler here, ends up suffering from postpartum depression. Of course, mental illness manifests itself differently in different people, and Licia’s illness turns out to be a particularly vicious and hard-to-cure form of postpartum depression. She needs the help and support of not only her doctors, but also her husband and her life-long friends, Della and Anne. I applaud Ms. Hart for tackling this difficult subject, and I believe she did so quite realistically and sympathetically. As I said, Licia’s part of the story is the strongest and the most engaging.I really wanted to know what would happen to her and her husband and their three children.

Anne and Della have issues, too. But I didn’t sympathize with Della much, and Anne’s problem was resolved a little too neatly and predictably. Still, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this story of three friends coping with life through faith in Charleston, South Carolina.

1905: Books and Literature

Aug8

The Noble Prize for Literature was awarded to Henryk Sienkiewicz. Kirjasto calls him a “Polish novelist, a storyteller, and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1905.” Also, “His strongly Catholic worldview deeply marked his writing.” He wrote the historical fiction novels With Fire and Sword, The Deluge, Pan Michael, and Quo Vadis?.

Fiction Bestsellers:
1. Mary Augusta Ward, The Marriage of William Ashe Love and marriage in British society turns into disgrace and death as William Ashe and his nineteen year old bride, Kitty, wreck their marriage with jealousy and bad decisions.
2. Alice Hegan Rice, Sandy
3. Robert Smythe Hichens, The Garden of Allah A Trappist monk runs away from his vows into the North African desert.
4. Thomas Dixon Jr., The Clansman This book was the inspiration for DW Griffith’s 1915 silent movie The Birth of a Nation. It was a novel (and a movie) that glorified white supremacy, racial segregation, and the Ku Klux Klan.
5. George Barr McCutcheon, Nedra
6. Katherine Cecil Thurston, The Gambler
7. Katherine Cecil Thurston, The Masquerader (alternate title: John Chilcote)
8. Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth I think Edith Wharton is almost as good a writer and observer of human nature as Jane Austen. Here are my thoughts on House of Mirth.
9. C. N. and A. M. Williamson, The Princess Passes
10. Kate Douglas Wiggin, Rose o’ the River

Critically Acclaimed and Historically Significant:
Albert Einstein, Special Theory of Relativity
Lincoln Steffens, Shame of the Cities
Mary Chesnut, Diary from Dixie I have Ms. Chesnut’s diary, but I haven’t read it. Ken Burns quoted from Mary Chesnut’s diary extensively in his Civil War series, and she seems to have been a keen observer of the Southern civilian experience during the war.
The Return of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Because fans were reluctant to let him go, this collection of short stories about the famous detective resurrects him from the dead and brings him back to entertain more readers.
Baroness Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel This one is really fun. Set during the French revolution, the novels chronicles the adventures of a British lord who goes undercover to rescue French nobles who are bound for the guillotine. Read with A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens for a taste of the British perspective on those crazy “Frenchies.”

“We seek him here, we seek him there,
Those Frenchies seek him everywhere.
Is he in heaven? — Is he in hell?
That damned, elusive Pimpernel.”

G.K. Chesterton, Heretics and Orthodoxy. Semicolon thoughts on Orthodoxy and G.K. Chesterton.

Amy Inspired by Bethany Pierce

Aug1

About halfway through Amy Inspired, I had to look at the author blurb to see how autobiographical the novel was. The book is about Amy Gallagher, an almost-30, single, Christian, adjunct professor of English at a small college in Ohio Ms. Pierce is married, but she must have taken some of the characters and scenes in Amy Inspired from her own life as a single person before marriage. True-to-life and yet romantic describes the book perfectly.

Amy Gallagher so reminded me of my own Eldest Daughter and her friends who are also trying to navigate the waters of Christian single-hood. It’s not easy. Christian young women are supposed to be chaste but not frigid, open to marriage but not desperate, intelligent, beautiful, but not intimidating or vain, confident and independent but also submissive and selfless, and it goes on and on until a woman can get lost in all the expectations.

Amy is, frankly, a little lost. She’s a Christian, but she doesn’t know how to approach God except through the expectations that she believes He has for her life and behavior. Amy lives her life in lists–to do lists, grocery lists, lists of the rejection letters she’s received for her writing submissions, lists of former boyfriends lists of her lists–and when she meets Eli the artist who’s more of a free spirit with a checkered past, Amy isn’t sure whether it’s love or fear at first sight.

I don’t know how to convey the sheer goodness of this novel because I’m just not as skilled a writer as Ms. Pierce. It made me laugh out loud a couple of times. I never knew exactly what would happen or how the novel would end. I know some of the characters in the book—Amy’s annoying but lovable Mrs. Malaprop Mom (OK, maybe I AM the mom, a little), her tofu-loving roommate Zoe, the men in her life, self-centered and shallow, but trying to grow up, too. Amy herself reminds me, as I said, not only of Eldest Daughter, but also of several other single young women I know. The novel felt Real in a way that many Christian novels don’t manage to accomplish.

Amy Inspired made it onto my TBR list because it was nominated for the 2011 INSPY Awards in the category of General Fiction. I’m trying to read all of the nominated books that I find of interest, and I hope Amy Inspired makes the shortlist for the INSPY’s. It’s that good.

The Hardest Thing To Do by Penelope Wilcock

Jul24

I was re-reading The Peacemaker by Ken Sande of Peacemaker Ministries when I received Penelope Wilcock’s new book, The Hardest Thing To Do, in the mail. What a lovely (and convicting) serendipity! Ms. Wilcock’s new installment in the saga of the monks of St. Alcuin’s Abbey is a long time in coming. The original trilogy of books about St. Alcuin’s and Father Peregrine its abbot began with The Hawk and the Dove and continued in The Wounds of God and The Long Fall. These three books were published by Crossway in the early 1990’s.

Now we have a fourth book in the series, twenty years later, and it lives up to the fine standard set by the other three. In The Hardest Thing To Do, St. Alcuin’s has a new abbott, Father John, but the brothers are still serving each other and the same Lord, still living quiet, peaceable lives, still striving to practice the rule of St. Benedict in a fallen world. And of course, as is the way of this world, the brothers have a new challenge when they must decide what to do with a human “wolf” who has come into the sheepfold and who threatens to spoil both their peace and their way of life.

In The Hardest Thing To Do, Ms. Wilcock has dropped the framing story that she used in at least the first book of The Hawk and the Dove trilogy. In that first book, a mother was telling stories about the abbey of St. Alcuin’s to her daughters who were experiencing some of the same growing pains as the monks. The part of the novels that is most memorable, however, is the story of the monks themselves, so it was a good move to drop the frame and concentrate on the abbey.

I was concerned that this sequel, twenty years later, might not live up to the quality and depth of the first three books in the series, but I needn’t have worried. Ms. Wilcock, a Methodist minister, has a fine grasp of human foibles and sin and peace-making and the cost of following Christ in our interpersonal relationships. The book is about radical, costly forgiveness, and it doesn’t sugarcoat the difficulties of such a choice to forgive our enemies. Forgiveness and reconciliation in the face of real hurt truly are the hardest things to do.

Asking for forgiveness:

I am filled with terror lest you turn me away. I long for the beautiful Gospel that has always puzzled me, but that I know has a beacon in the life of this house. For the forgiveness and gentleness I have found, I should like the chance to show my gratitude. For the hurt and anger I have caused, I should like time to try and make amends. And I have glimpsed the face of Christ here. Before that glimpse dims and is smutched and bleared by the sordid life of the world, I should like to try if I might to touch for myself the vision of that fair loveliness. . . compassion . . . faith . . . peace.

I would pray that all of us could be enabled to do the hard work of forgiving and asking and receiving forgiveness because it’s the only way to true heart peace.

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson

Jul6

Published in 1938, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day is a book about grace and joy. Miss Pettigrew, a poverty-sticken, middle-aged, rather incompetent governess accidentally finds herself in the apartment of a promiscuous night-club singer, Delysia LaFosse. Even though Miss Pettigrew knows she should tell Miss LaFosse the truth, that she is there under false pretenses, and even though she knows the folly of Miss LaFosse’s way of life with men in and out of the apartment as if it had a revolving door, Guinevere Pettigrew can’t tear herself away from the first adventure that has ever presented itself in her entire life.

I found this one oddly delightful. Miss Pettigrew begins as the stereotypical repressed spinster, but she turns out to be surprisingly full of wisdom and intuition and zest for life. She just needs the right soil in which to grow and bloom, and Delysia LaFosse and her friends provide that avenue for growth. Delysia and her set are rather shocking in their behavior, but one gets the idea that they are more naive than calculating. And Miss Pettigrew is able, with her clear-sighted advice and her knack for saying the right thing at the right time, to straighten them out and make sure that the right man wins the hand of the fair lady and that the lady takes her chance when it is offered.

I’m rather skeptical about the movie based on this book. I think it would take a deft hand to keep the story from becoming a sexually titillating farce, and I see very little indication in the reviews that it didn’t become just that when Hollywood got hold of it. If I’m right, the book is much better.

Missionary Fiction

Jun23

In an episode of what Madame Mental Multivitamin calls synchronicity/serendipity/synthesis, I read two works of fiction this week based on the lives of the authors’ missionary grandparents. I’ve also been thinking a lot about sending two “missionaries” from my own home to Slovakia in a couple of weeks and about my mother and my father-in-law and the legacy of faith they have given to me and to my family.

The first book, The Moon in the Mango Tree by Pamela Binnings Ewen, was just O.K. The writing quality is somewhat uneven, and the characters sometimes enigmatic. The story opens in 1916 in Germantown, Pennsylvania, when Barbara (Babs), a schoolgirl and aspiring opera singer, meets Harvey Perkins, a young medical student. As the two grow together, get married, and then endure being parted while Harvey serves in the military in France during The Great War, Barbara learns that she must subordinate her choices to those of her loving but firm-minded husband. The couple go to Thailand to serve as medical missionaries, even though Barbara must give up her hopes for a career in opera and even her enjoyment of classical music itself to live in a remote mission outpost in Northern Thailand. Of course, with such different outlooks and goals in life and with what I suppose was a typical (?) early twentieth century lack of communication in the marriage, trouble is bound to ensue. And it does.

Besides the fact that the characters’ motivations were sometimes obscure, I guess what I disliked about the story was that neither Harvey nor Barbara seemed to have much of a faith in God to lose. They do lose their faith, both of them, in the face of suffering and hardship in Thailand. But I couldn’t figure out whether they believed in anything much in the first place, other than themselves and their own ability to “be a team” and improve the physical lives of the Thai villagers. The book was good, but not great, although I liked the ending and the ideas about the legacy we leave as a result of the choices we make.

The second book I read had the same basic premise as the first: a young couple goes to the mission field, China this time, in the early twentieth century. However, City of Tranquil Light by Bo Caldwell made me cry. It’s very, very difficult to write a book about Good People, about heroes and heroines, without making them larger than life, unapproachable, and unrelatable. (The dictionary says “unrelatable” isn’t a word, but it should be, and I’m going to use it anyway.) Will and Katherine Kiehn are ordinary, fallible people, and yet they are heroes. They go to China as young, untested volunteers with only their calling and their faith in God’s love and mercy to sustain them, and they survive disease and poverty and famine and family tragedy and war and persecution. Each of the two has a “crisis of faith”, maybe even more than one, but they manage to hold onto the the God who is always holding on to them, even when doubt and fear threaten to overwhelm. The story is told in first person from Will’s point of view, interspersed with excerpts from Katherine’s sporadically kept journal. The whole novel is just golden.

As a reviewer, I feel as if I ought to be able to tell you how Ms. Caldwell was able to write such a true story about people that I believe in as much as I believe in my own parents and grandparents, but I can’t. The humility and the honesty displayed in the characters of both Katherine and Will inspire imitation. I wanted to sit beside an elderly Will Kiehn, listen to his stories of China, and absorb some of his wisdom and his indomitable meekness.

City of Tranquil Light is one of the best fictional accounts of missionary life I’ve ever read. It ranks right up there with Elisabeth Elliot’s No Graven Image, a book I mentioned (and recommended) here. City of Tranquil Light has the added advantage of painting a wonderful picture of a committed, growing marriage.

Can you tell I really, really liked this book? I happened to pick it up from the library and read it because it’s one of the books on the long list of nominations for the 2011 INSPY Awards. Thanks to whomever nominated this book. If all the nominated books are as good as this one, the judges will have an impossible job.

The Ambition by Lee Strobel

Jun13

Nominated for the INSPY awards in the category Mystery and Thriller.

Written by the best-selling author of The Case for Christ, The Case for Faith, The Case for a Creator and many other nonfiction books of Christian apologetics.

A legal/journalistic thriller in the tradition of John Grisham, with more emphasis on the journalism and on Christians in politics than Grisham’s books.

The Ambition is not a subtly nuanced novel about ambition and its insidious effect on the Christian believer. That’s there to some extent, but this is a thriller: lots of action, plot twists, intrigue, and corruption in high places. Strobel is not Grisham–yet–but on the other hand, Mr. Strobel’s first novel does deliver a readable story with interesting and unpredictable characters. Since my main complaint about Christian fiction is its predictability, the depth of characterization in what could have been a action-packed story full of cardboard characters was welcome. The mega-church pastor/protagonist is neither a saint without fault nor a hypocritical money-grubber, although he’s suspected of being one or the other throughout the novel. The cynical reporter is cynical, but not unlikeable, and he doesn’t have the come-to-Jesus moment that we tend to expect for this kind of character in a “Christian” novel. By the end of the novel, reporter Garry Strider may be a bit more open to considering the claims of Christ and the church, but that’s all. And it’s OK. Strobel has left room for these characters to grow and change and perhaps surprise us some more in another book. Or maybe we get to finish the story in our own minds, not a bad way to end a book either.

I have a couple of complaints. Pastor-turned-politician Eric Snow seems a a little too eager to jettison his association with the church he helped to build without adequate motivation. If he still sees himself as committed to Christ and to Christianity, no matter how rusty and secondary that commitment has become, would he really agree to not even set foot inside church after his resignation from the pastorate? And Garry’s girlfriend who has become a Christian is a little too didactic and too unquestioning in her immediate commitment to chastity. “Not to be unequally yoked” sounds perfectly reasonable to me since I’ve grown up in the faith, but I’m not sure it would be so immediately understandable to a new convert who has been immersed in our culture or to her boyfriend.

Those are minor points, however. For a beach read this summer, The Ambition would be a good pick. It’s well-paced, intricate, and unpredictable. Thanks, Mr. Strobel.

A Canticle for Leibowitz

Jun11

The current Faith ‘n Fiction Roundtable book is A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller, Jr. I read the book a few years ago and honestly didn’t feel like a re-read. So this post is what I wrote back then, edited to include some discussion points that came up as the other people in the group read the book.

I thought the book was . . . interesting. In some ways, the ideas were fascinating. The plot was somewhat outdated; published in 1959, the book posits a world decimated by nuclear war in which culture and literacy are preserved only by a small group of Catholic monks. And even the monks don’t understand half of what they’re preserving. The barbarians have taken over the world, and only a few isolated outposts of civilization remain. Near the end of the book, euthanasia is a major issue, and that section was startlingly relevant to contemporary culture.

Some questions brought up in this novel:

Is it possible for an entire culture to be destroyed or lost and then revived or regained?

Long ago, during the last age of reason, certain proud thinkers had claimed that valid knowledge was indestructible–that ideas were deathless and truth immortal. But that was true in only the subtlest sense, the abbot thought, and not superficially true at all. There was objective meaning in the world, to be sure: the nonmoral logos or design of the Creator; but such meanings were God’s and not Man’s, until they found an imperfect incarnation, a dark reflection, within the mind and speech and culture of a given human society, which might ascribe values to the meanings so that they became valid in a human sense within the culture. For Man was a culture-bearer as well as a soul bearer, but his cultures were not immortal and they could die with a race or an age, and then human reflections of meaning and human portrayals of truth receded, and truth and meaning resided, unseen, only in the objective logos of Nature and the ineffable Logos of God. Truth could be crucified; but soon, perhaps, a resurrection.

Is there meaning in suffering? Particularly, why do children suffer?

“I cannot understand a God who is pleased by my baby’s hurting!”
The priest winced. “No, no! It is not the pain that is pleasing to God, child. It is the soul’s endurance in faith and hope and love in spite of bodily afflictions that pleases Heaven. Pain is like negative temptation. God is not pleased by temptations that afflict the flesh; He is pleased when the soul rises above the temptation and says, ‘Go Satan.’ It’s the same with pain, which is often a temptation to despair, anger, loss of faith –”
“Save your breath, Father. I’m not complaining. The baby is. But the baby doesn’t understand your sermon. She can hurt, though. She can hurt, but she can’t understand.”

Maybe this book isn’t outdated at all. Maybe the barbarians are at the gates. Maybe we are danger of destroying ourselves and our culture either with our nuclear weapons or with our gene-tampering technologies or in some other way that I can’t foresee. Perhaps we are becoming so illiterate and TV-obsessed that the treasures of Western culture and of Christianity may only be preserved in isolated communities and homes. Or maybe the sky isn’t falling. It’s worth thinking about.

Several of the characters in A Canticle for Leibowitz seem to carry deep symbolic meaning but I’m not really sure what that meaning is. There’s a Mad Poet, who is either a prophet or a fool. And Benjamin the Old Jew of the Mountain who lives out in the desert alone, waiting for the Messiah, or waiting for something, is intriguing, but I can’t exactly tell you what his character is supposed to signify either. Some of my fellow readers thought he was Lazarus, and others thought he was drawn from the legend of the Wandering Jew. Then at the end of the novel there’s an old “tumater woman” with two heads. Is she significant or just odd? (The other FnF roundtable readers struggled with the meaning of the two-headed tumater woman, too.) My guess is that all these ambiguous characters are thrown in to hint at meaning, maybe to tease the reader. After all, the question that runs through the entire novel is that of whether life has any meaning at all. I think the novelist intends us to keep asking.

I did a little research and read that not only did Mr. Miller renounce his Catholicism later in life after the publication of A Canticle for Leibowitz, he also suffered from depression and finally committed suicide. It’s a sad ending, and it contradicts the hope inherent in A Canticle for Leibowitz. But the book also indicates that men are inconsistent at best.

More discussion at the following blogs participating in this round of Faith ‘n Fiction Roundtable:

  • Book Addiction
  • Book Hooked Blog
  • Books and Movies
  • Crazy-for-Books.com
  • Ignorant Historian
  • Linus’s Blanket
  • My Friend Amy
  • Roving Reads
  • The 3 Rs Blog // Reading, ‘Riting, and Randomness
  • Tina’s Book Reviews
  • Victorious Café
  • Word Lily

    • 1900: Books and Literature

    Jun7

    Fiction Bestsellers:
    1. Mary Johnston, To Have and To Hold. Available in reprint edition from Vision Forum.
    2. Mary Cholmondeley, Red Pottage Virago reprint available.
    3. Robert Grant, Unleavened Bread. Semicolon review and thoughts here.
    4. James Lane Allen, The Reign of Law, a Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields.
    5. Irving Bacheller, Eben Holden, a Tale of the North Country.
    6. Paul Leicester Ford, Janice Meredith, a Story of the American Revolution. Semicolon review here.
    7. Charles Frederic Goss, The Redemption of David Corson. Available online.
    8. Winston Churchill, Richard Carvel
    9. Charles Major, When Knighthood Was in Flower, the love story of Charles Brandon and Mary Tudor, the king’s sister, and happening in the reign of … Henry VIII..
    10. Maurice Thompson, Alice of Old Vincennes.
    All ten of these books are available to download and read as ebooks at Project Gutenberg.

    Critically Acclaimed and Historically Significant:
    Josiah Royce, The World and the Individual
    Clarence Stedman, An American Anthology
    Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie Semicolon review here.
    Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
    L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published by the George M. Hill Co. in Chicago on May 17, 1900. Download the ebook at Project Gutenberg. An unabridged dramatic audio performance of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz directed and narrated by Karen M. Chan with the Wired for Books Players and featuring Nicoletta Mazzocca as Dorothy.
    Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim
    John Dewey, The School and Society

    It’s interesting that all of the bestsellers, as far as I can tell, were historical fiction. Genres go in and out of style, don’t they? Nowadays the fiction bestseller list would be mostly thrillers and mysteries, I would guess.

    Picture Books Set Around 1900, the turn of the century I’ve read a few of these picture books:
    The Edwardian wordless books by John Goodall are fun to explore.
    Glorious Flight: Across the Channel with Louis Bleriot by Alice and Martin Provenson won a Caldecott Award. It’s the story of one of the pioneers of flight, Frenchman Louis Bleriot who flew his plane across the English Channel in 1909.
    My Great-Aunt Arizona by Gloria Houston is a lovely depiction of a school teacher in the late 1800’s/early 1900’s in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

    Children’s and YA Fiction Set in 1900:
    Brooklyn Rose by Ann Rinaldi.
    Galveston’s Summer of the Storm by Julie Lake.
    The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly. (1899) Semicolon review here.

    In this post, Edwardian, Turn of the Century and the Great War I comment on a few books and TV series that depict the late nineteenth century/early twentieth century ambiance and culture, especially in England.

    The Story of Beautiful Girl by Rachel Simon

    May28

    The story begins in 1968. A beautiful girl and her friend, a deaf black man, show up on the doorstep of a widow and retired schoolteacher, Martha. The beautiful girl is Lynnie, a developmentally disabled girl who has just given birth to a baby. The man is Homan, not intellectually challenged but limited in his ability to communicate because of his deafness and his lack of a proper education. The couple have run away from the School for the Feeble-Minded in which they have been, for all practical purposes, incarcerated, and now, having seen Martha’s lighthouse mailbox, they are hoping for a safe haven.

    Rachel Simon also wrote the nonfiction memoir, Riding the Bus With my Sister, about her relationship with her developmentally disabled sister, a book that I appreciated and that later was adapted as a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie. So Ms. SImon has some experience and expertise in thinking from the point of view of a mentally handicapped person. The book is written in shifting points of view, from Lynnie to Martha to Homan, and sometimes that shift and the limited knowledge of the characters made the book confusing. Still, I hung in there, willing to work at seeing through the eyes of a hearing-impaired black man who usually didn’t even know the real names of the people who were his most intimate friends and caretakers. Or I saw how confusing life could be from the point of view of a young woman who has a history and a personality but doesn’t understand time and the passage of time in the same that most us do.

    I liked this book very much, and I especially liked the way Ms. Simon incorporated religion and religious experience into her story, naturally and with an absence of agenda or proselytizing. Lynnie’s family is Jewish, but Lynnie herself doesn’t understand “God” and doesn’t know if she believes in Him or not. Homan is befriended by a couple of maybe sincere, but probably money-hungry faith healers, and later by a couple who run a Buddhist retreat center. One of Lynnie’s most important mentors and friends is Kate, a Christian who works through her need to forgive and to repent of her own sins of omission and fearfulness.

    The main themes of the book, though are not religion, per se. What Ms. Simon seems to be interested in relating is the infinite worth of every human being, the need of all people to be treated with dignity and respect, and the importance and the difficulties of clear and timely communication. It’s a good story within which is contained a capsule history of the changes in the treatment and public perception of both mentally handicapped and hearing impaired individuals.

    Worth reading. What books can you recommend that have given you insight into the lives and needs of mentally disabled persons in particular?