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Boys’ Week at Semicolon

Jun4

I’m declaring this to be Boys’ Week at Semicolon because:

1) My first little boy, Computer Guru Son, just graduated from high school, and I can’t believe he’s practically grown. If having a six foot tall eighteen year old son won’t make you feel humble, nothing will.
2) My second little boy, Karate Kid, is afloat amidst a sea of sisters, and he could use a week of attention focused just on boys.
3) I want to write about boys, which should be reason enough.

So, we’re going to discuss boys’ toys, boys’ books, and living with boys. Feel free to chime in with any thoughts you might have on the subject. Goodness knows, I’m no expert on boys. When my first boy was born about eighteen and a half years ago, I said, “But, Lord, I don’t know nothin’ ’bout raisin’ no boys!” I’ve learned a little since then, but only a little. Boys are still aliens to some extent to the mind of this girl. But they’re good aliens. I like them. Really.

So let’s have some fun talking about boys, and if you are one, be sure to explain yourself to the rest of us who are in the other half of the human race.

This and That

Jun3

Here are links to a few articles and essays that have caught my eye in the last week or two:

Children Are the Good Life by Roberto Rivera y Carlo. In which Mr. Rivera reveals his ambivalence about the boom in books and movies about autistic children and reminds us that children are an unqualified blessing, whether or not they can shoot a basket.

Theodore Dalrymple says what I’ve always believed about addiction to drugs, but he says it with more authority than I can since he’s a doctor. “Contrary to the orthodoxy, drug addiction is a matter of morals, which is why threats such as Mao’s, and experiences such as religious conversion, are so often effective in ‘curing’ addicts.”

An article on the mysterious death of Edgar Allan Poe and one author’s attempts to ascertain the details of Poe’s demise.

An excerpt from Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption by Laura J. Miller.

SETHSA

Jun2

If any of my readers are planning to be at the SETHSA (Southeast Texas Homeschool Association) conference this weekend, I’d love to meet you. I’ll be working registration Saturday morning and wandering around, penniless but happy, the rest of the weekend. Come up and tell me that you’re a Semicolon fan, and I’ll try to give you a (small) token of my appreciation.

Waking Lazarus by T.L. Hines

Jun2

O.K., so I was fairly sure I had figured out who the bad guy was about three-fourths of the way through the book, and I was right. There were still other questions that kept me reading. And there were some things I never did figure out about this book.

Waking Lazarus by T. L. Hines is a CBA thriller, published by Bethany House, publication date, July, 2006. Its themes and plot elements are a mixture of child abduction, paranoia, miracle working, and resurrection from the dead. In fact, the novel begins with this line: “The first time Jude Allman died, he was eight years old.” How’s that for a hook?

Jude Allman dies a few more times over the course of the novel, and in order to do so, he must first, like Lazarus in the Bible, be raised from the dead. In fact, the recurring motif in the book is life and death. What does it mean to be alive? Can someone who is dead come alive again? What about the spiritually dead? Can those who are mentally exhausted and spiritually dead be revived? If the events in this novel were to be believed, there are formerly dead people, and nearly dead people, and mostly dead people, walking around all over Nebraska and South Dakota, the novel’s setting.

Jude Allman fits all three categories, and he’s also paranoid, believing that “they” are watching him, out to get him. His paranoia becomes a part of the mystery in the story since the reader is never sure whether he’s getting a true picture of what’s happening in the novel or a picture distorted by mental illness. It’s a made-for-TV movie in which no one is who he seems to be and not even the main character, Jude, is sure that what he’s experiencing is real.

Waking Lazarus never does deal with the deeper questions of why some people get a miracle and others don’t, or why Jude gets resurrected and others die. Nor do the characters in the novel take too much time out for pondering the meaning of life; they’re too busy responding to the bad guys and saving the kids. Still, Waking Lazarus tells a good story and the underlying Christian worldview is evident but not obtrusive.

The story is taut and free of dangling plot strands. The characters act, well, weird, but that’s because most of them are somewhat mentally unbalanced. I did have a few questions at the end of the novel, but you may not want to read them until you’ve read the novel itself:

Why does Ron suddenly recover from his mental illness, if that’s what it is?
Why does he have to touch people to get a message?
How did he lose his memory?
Why was being Jude so traumatic for Mr. Gress?
Why does he keep counting things? Is counting a symptom of paranoia?

Come back and tell me about it after you read the book.

Oh, I received a free advance reading copy of this book from Bethany House. Thanks, guys.

Isaac’s Storm by Eric Larson

Jun1

“As we watched from the porch were amazed and delighted to see the water from the Gulf flowing down the street. ‘Good,’ we thought, ‘there would be no need to walk the few blocks to play at the beach, it was right at our front gate.'”


The deadliest hurricane in U.S. history was not the one that hit New Orleans last year. It was the Galveston hurricane of September 8,1900; author Eric Larson calls it “Isaac’s Storm.” (Hurricanes did not begin receiving official names from the U.S. Weather Bureau until the late 1940’s.) Isaac Cline was the chief weatherman for the U.S. Weather Bureau on Galveston Island in the year of the hurricane.

This history is not the best organized one I’ve ever read. The narrative skips back forth from Thursday to Saturday to Friday and back again. However, I did learn some fascinating facts about the Galveston Hurricane and about Isaac Cline:

1) Before being sent to Galveston, Isaac Cline was stationed at Fort Concho in West Texas, a fact which is of interest to me because I was born and grew up in San Angelo, Texas, the town that formed in the shadow of Fort Concho.

2) On Galveston Island at least 6000 people died in the hurricane, possibly as many as 10,000. Records were not carefully kept, and the dead had to be buried or burned rather quickly to prevent disease.

3) In 1891 Isaac Cline wrote that “[t]he coast of Texas is according to the general laws of the motion of the atmosphere exempt from West India hurricanes and the two which have reached it followed an abnormal path which can only be attributed to causes known in meteorology as accidental.” The two hurricanes of which he wrote struck Indianola, Texas in 1875 and again in 1886. After the second hurricane, the town was abandoned.

4) After the Indianola hurricanes, the residents of Galveston did make plans to build a seawall, but it was never built—until after 1900.

5) The storm surge in 1900 covered the island with water, uprooted trees, toppled houses, and carried masses of debris that did as much damage as the water itself.

6) Isaac Cline’s pregnant wife, Cora, died in the hurricane, and Cline’s brother, Joseph, who also worked for the Weather Bureau, became estranged from Isaac apparently as a result of the events of that day.

The most interesting aspect of the story was the failure of the U.S. Weather Service to warn Galveston of the approaching hurricane. Weather forecasting methods were not as sophisticated or accurate as they are now, but other problems included a rivalry between the U.S. Weather Bureau in Cuba and Cuban weather forecasters and a reluctance to frighten the public with possibly false alarms. In fact weather forecasters were not even allowed to use the word “hurricane” in their forecasts without permission from Washington. This failure followed upon the the failure of the weather service to warn the public of the Blizzard of 1888 and both caused people to further lose faith in the ability of the weather service to predict storms and precipitated changes in the organization and leadership of the weather bureau in order to improve its performance.

Nevertheless, we are dealing with some of the same problems today. When is it prudent and/or necessary to tell the people of a large metropolitan area to evacuate in the face of a possible hurricane? How accurately, even now, is it possible to predict the path of such a hurricane? Can we trust the instructions given by government bureaucrats, or should we trust our own judgment? Even as the freeways backed up and became impassable in Houston before Rita, we were being told not to leave yet, but rather to wait until the next day. Was this advice, heeded by hardly anyone, good or bad? Would it really be possible to evacuate Galveston Island and the coastal areas behind the Island and up towards Houston in the face of a major storm? Would people listen to evacuation notices, or was Rita the “false alarm” that would cause people to stay home and take their chances rather than face gridlock and dehydration and gas lines on the freeways again?

Lots of unanswered questions even 100 years after the Galveston Hurricane that practically destroyed that city once. By the way, hurricane season in the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico officially begins today.

Works for ME Wednesday

May31


A bookcase headboard is a wonderful thing. Engineer Husband built our bed and headboard a long time ago. If you don’t have a bookcase built into your bed, I suggest a small bookshelf near the bed. Where else can you keep those books you’re planning to read as soon as you can get to them? Stacks on the floor are neither aesthetically pleasing nor convenient to access.

So, my simple works-for-me Wednesday tip for readers is: keep those books near the bed in the headboard or in a small bookshelf. Then, read yourself to sleep.

The Walking Drum by Louis L’Amour

May30

Despite the fact that Mr. L’Amour is famous for his novels of the American West, this book, The Walking Drum, is not about the West at all. It’s set in 12th century Europe and the Middle East and concerns a young man named Kerbouchard, the son of a druidic Celtic woman and a pirate father. As the novel begins, Kerbouchard’s father has been captured and sold into slavery and his mother has been murdered before his eyes by a neighboring enemy. Kerbouchard sets out to find and free his father and to avenge his mother’s death, but before long, he is himself taken captive by a band of corsairs.

I said this novel wasn’t a western, but Kerbouchard is a twelfth century cowboy adventurer by another name. His philosophy of life is summed up in these words: ” . . a strong man need wish for no more than this: a sword in the hand, a strong horse between his knees, and a woman he loves at the battle’s end.” Kerbouchard travels from Moorish Spain to Paris to Kiev to Constantinople, usually on the run from various enemies he has made in the course of his travels. He finds and leaves a girl in every port —or city. His quest is to find his father, but he takes a rather roundabout way to get there. The plot of the novel is made up of battles, daring rescues, escapes from prison, strangely chaste love scenes, and more battles. Kerbouchard is a self-proclaimed pagan, but when in Spain he takes on the outward practices of the Muslims and in Paris he taunts the Christians with their superstitious ways. The author clearly preferred medieval Islamic culture to medieval Christian culture, and he tells us again and again how refined and educated and tolerant were the Muslims of Spain and the Middle East and how superstitious and backward and intolerant the Christians of Frankish lands were. Perhaps so, although I doubt the contrast was quite so great as this book makes out.

Mr. L’Amour’s novel is full of historical references and details, and for anyone interested in twelfth century European life, it would be a wonderful beginning to a study of that century. (L’Amour in the Author’s Note at the end of the book: “One of the best means of introduction to any history is the historical novel.”) For instance, here’s a description of the course of study in the Paris universities of the time:

Hungry for learning, young men came to Paris to learn, many of them walking for days to reach the city. Only a few had sufficient money to maintain themselves. Books were scarce, paper expensive, teachers diverse in attitude. After three years a student might be received bachelier-des-arts, but two years more were required to get his master’s degree or license. To become a doctor of medicine required eight years of study, and to earn a degree of doctor theology the student had to present and defend four theses. The last of these was a challenge only the exceptional dared attempt, for the candidate was examined from six in the morning until six at night, nor was he allowed to leave his place to eat, drink, or for any other purpose. Twenty examiners, relieving each other every half hour, did their best to find flaws in the preparation of the student.

Ah! students today are such wimps; a two hour test is considered cruel and unusual punishment. And we romanticize classical education if we believe it only consisted of the delightful study of Latin and rhetoric in an open-air classroom. All educational systems and methods have their advantages and their difficulties.

L’Amour obviously planned to write a sequel to The Walking Drum; he says as much in the Author Notes. However, according to his official website, he never got around to writing the two other books in his planned trilogy about Kerbouchard and his adventures. Kerbouchard, who thinks of himself as a student and a philosopher, is not really a deep thinker (see philosophy of life above), but he’s an interesting character. It might have been fun to see what difficulties L’Amour could have dropped him into and retrieved him from in the sequels. As it is, you’ll have to make do with volume one of the life and adventures of Kerbouchard, student, merchant, pirate, soldier, and rescuer of fair maidens.

Two more nuggets from L’Amour/Kerbouchard:
“Reading without thinking is as nothing, for a book is less important for what it says than for what it makes you think.”
“There is no miraculous change that takes place in a boy that makes him a man. He becomes a man by being a man, acting like a man.”

Yes and amen.

Friday’s Center of the Blogosphere

May25

Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere. Blaise Pascal

Calling all Walmart-haters, here’s another chain for you to demonize–Nakumatt. Next time I’m in Kenya (ha!), I think I’ll check it out.

Ariel at Bittersweet Life on obedience in the Christian life: ” . . . the cliff is where we always live. Obedience is always a desperate situation. We are constantly living in a state of moral emergency from which only Christ can extricate us. And awful things begin to happen when we make out as if obedience is merely a hobby.
When we remember that life in Christ is lived out on a cliff face, then we habitually drink deep of Jesus, the “fountain of life.” Obeying him is never easy. But we become addicted to Christ instead of our sin.”

Sarah Louise has some practical advice for graduates and for their parents, pretty good advice from an experienced graduate.

And Diane at Circle of Quiet writes about plans for the summer: ” . . .math for our family is like a cranky relative who gets resentful if you don’t visit often enough. Take the summer off? Well, you could get the cold shoulder for weeks, maybe months. It’s as if you’d never seen each other before. All those afternoons getting acquainted over tea could be for naught! So, we take care to nurture our math relationships all summer long. It saves a lot of trouble, and a lot of wasted time.” Absolutely, I agree. My best advice for homeschooling during the summer is, “Keep doing a little math every day.” Read for pleasure or for information, and DO MATH DAILY.

Book Friends

May24

“That book that can give me an idea or a new slant on an old idea is my friend.”–Louis L’Amour

Which books are your friends? I know, you like this about one book, you learned something from another. But which ones are true friends? What books gave you new ideas or enlarged old ideas and became your friends? Which ones do you return to over and over because they are not just aquaintances, books you passed an hour or two with once, but friends?

Mr. L’Amour shares about both friends and acquaintances in Education of a Wandering Man. We can certainly learn from both. But let me introduce you to some of my best friends. Maybe you know them, too.

The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien. Hobbits make wonderful friends–loyal, brave, trustworthy and fun to know. They give out birthday presents on their own birthdays, and they’re fond of good cooking and frequent meals.

The Severed Wasp by Madeleine L’Engle. I keep on learning about community from Mrs. L’Engle, and about spiritual growth and about Christ.

The Important Book by Margaret Wise Brown. It’s important to know what’s important, to distill the essential meaning in a leaf or an apple or even a person.

The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis. It’s probably time to re-read Screwtape. For a demon, he’s a pretty smart fellow.

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. It’s time to re-read this one, too. I love Dickens’ scenes and characters.

I could go on and on. Who are your book friends?