Dreamland by Sam Quinones

Sep22

Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic by Sam Quinones.

Mr. Dreher told me to read Dreamland, and so I did. Click on the previous sentence link to read a synopsis. Or read an excerpt from the book here. I found the story to be fascinating and very sad.

“We need to tell young people the truth. Drug addiction is an epidemic, and it is taking too many of our young people,” Carly Fiorina said during the recent Republican debate. “My husband Frank and I buried a child to drug addiction.”

Deaths from overdose of prescription painkillers (opioids) are rising, and Dreamland shows how opiod abuse, if it doesn’t kill you, can lead directly and tragically to heroin addiction. The book also chronicles the rise of a Mexican drug business model that sells “black tar heroin”, specifically targeting mid-size Midwestern towns and cities where opioid (especially Oxycontin) abuse is already a problem. The book looks at the complicity and duplicity of the drug companies who sold these pain killers by emphasizing their supposed non-addictive qualities while knowing that patients were becoming addicted. Quinones also writes about the lives of young men from the Mexican state of Nayarit who come to the United States to take part in the family business of selling and delivering black tar heroin and get hooked on another “drug”, easy money and all the Levis, yes, blue jeans, that money can buy.

I was fascinated and appalled to read about the problem of heroin addiction and overdose that is manifesting itself yet again in American towns and cities. I remember the seventies when heroin addiction was enslaving and killing the hippies and the the wannabe hippies of my generation. I read The Cross and the Switchblade by David Wilkerson and other books of the same ilk, and I knew then that drug abuse was something that I never wanted to see “up close and personal,” certainly not in my own life or in that of my family.

Yet, I still have people, members of my own family, who tell me that marijuana isn’t like those other illegal drugs. Or alcohol is OK in moderation, and of course, they would never, never drink to excess. Or they can experiment with other drugs, cocaine for example, and still remain in control. I say they are playing with fire—and very likely to get burned. To extend the metaphor, if you need a little fire, perhaps a prescription painkiller for a limited time and for a specific purpose, to do a job, you had better be careful to use as directed and not become engulfed in the flames. Apparently, a lot of people are becoming enslaved to drugs, and many of them are dying of drug-related causes. I am willing to draw the lines sharp and clear in order not to become one of their number.

For me:
No alcohol. (it tastes nasty anyway)
No marijuana. (never tried it, not interested)
No illegal drugs of any kind.
Very few and limited prescription drugs, only when needed.

Your lines may be different, but please draw some and find your joy somewhere else besides in substance abuse or greed. If you’ve already become enslaved, Jesus is still in the business of rescue. Get some help, and turn to the One who resurrects dead people.

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman

Sep21

Anne Fadiman’s 1997 book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures won her literary prizes, national attention, particularly from the medical and social work communities, and many similar accolades. I read that the the book is required reading for first year medical students in many American medical schools, and I am convinced after reading the book, that it should be required reading for all doctors and medical students. It should also be required for spiritual “doctors”, missionaries and pastors, especially those who relate to refugee populations or who attempt to minster cross-culturally.

The book tells the story of a Hmong family from Laos and their difficulties with the medical system in Merced County, California, as it related to their epileptic daughter, Lia Lee. However, the story is much more than just a history of tragic misunderstandings across cultures. Ms. Fadiman also intersperses a great deal of the history and folklore of the Hmong people, and she explains some of the deep cultural differences between the Hmong and the Americans who welcomed them into this country. The story of Lia Lee and her family shows how those differences became insurmountable walls that led to Lia’s eventual “living death” of entering into a persistent vegetative state for the final twenty-six years of her life.

Hmong spiritual practices such as shamanism and ritual sacrifice clashed with modern medical practice. Hmong beliefs in patriarchy and demons causing sickness conflicted with doctors who believed that their authority and medical education entitled them to prescribe what treatment Lia should get. The doctors expected Lia’s parents to trust them and follow their directions. Lia’s parents expected the doctors to “fix Lia” and then leave them alone to care for her as they saw fit. Neither the doctors nor the parents were listening to the other, partly because of the language barrier, but even more because of a cultural barrier that made them disrespect and distrust one another. As a result of miscommunication and stubbornness on both sides, Lia became “quadriplegic, spastic, incontinent, and incapable of purposeful movement. Her condition was termed a persistent vegetative state.’

My thoughts about this story tended toward the spiritual, even though the very few brief mentions of Christians or Christianity in the book are uniformly disparaging. How would I talk about Jesus or share His love with a Hmong neighbor? To begin to communicate the love of Christ to a person of a very different background and culture would take what Eugene Peterson called “long obedience in the same direction.” (The phrase actually comes from Nietzsche, of all people.) I would have to put myself and my own feelings aside and live my life before God as a loving and patient and understanding neighbor, always being ready to give a reason for the hope within me. In fact, that’s what we are going to have to do more and more as our culture moves away from a Christian consensus such that there’s a deep cultural chasm between Christians and almost anyone else that we try to love and evangelize. We have to be patient and kind and persistent and faithful.

And we have to be willing to fail, and leave the ending to God and His mercy.

Lia Lee 1982-2012
Lia Lee died on August 31, 2012. She was thirty years old and had been in a vegetative state since the age of four. Until the day of her death, her family cared for her lovingly at home.

The Harvester by Gene Stratton Porter

Sep18

This romance, by the author of Freckles and Girl of the Limberlost, reminded me of the novels of Grace Livingston Hill, an author I hadn’t thought about in a long time.

Hill’s messages are simple in nature: good versus evil. As Hill believed the Bible was very clear about what was good and evil in life, she reflected that design in her own works. She wrote about a variety of different subjects, almost always with a romance worked into the message and often essential to the return to grace on the part of one or several characters.
If her clear-cut descriptions of evil in man and woman were Hill’s primary subjects in her novels, a secondary subject would always be God’s ability to restore. Hill aimed for a happy, or at least satisfactory, ending to any situation, often focusing on characters’ new or renewed faith as impetus for resolution. ~Wikipedia

As in Livingston Hill’s novels, the romance in The Harvester is central to the action and theme of the story. The Girl, Ruth Jameson, has been brought low, physically, mentally, and spiritually, by grinding poverty, the death of her beloved mother, and the cruelty of her uncle, her only remaining family. The Harvester, a paragon of a man, carved and fortified by his closeness with nature, sees a vision of Ruth before he meets her, and he is determined to court her and teach her to return to health, enjoy the natural world, and eventually love The Harvester as he loves Ruth at first sight. The entire 375-page book chronicles this enormously high-minded and virtuous romance as well as The Harvester’s views on life, nature, and ethics. The Harvester (whose name is David Langston, but who is most often called simply “The Harvester” in the book) brings Ruth back from the brink of death, both physical and spiritual, by the force of his unassuming and principled stance, and he searches for ways to show her his undying love while never forcing her to feel as if she must respond to his feelings in kind.

What more could a girl ask for? The Harvester is a very old-fashioned story with an antiquated paradigm of human perfectibility (The Harvester) as well as human frailty (The Girl). Nevertheless, it was fascinating. Ms. Porter published this book in 1911, and the atmosphere of the story is definitely early twentieth century or turn of the century. There’s a whiff of fine Teddy Roosevelt “muscular Christianity” along with several nods to a softer, kinder Darwinian evolution and survival of the fittest. We are shaped by our environment and by our decisions, and God shapes the world through the process of evolution.

Toward the end of the book, David Langston preaches to a convention of medical doctors while giving a speech about his work of harvesting the medicinal plants of the woods where he lives:

“I am pleading with you, as men having the greatest influence of any living, to tell and to teach the young that a clean life is possible to them. The next time any of you are called upon to address a body of men tell them to learn for themselves and to teach their sons, and to hold them at the critical hour, even by sweat and blood, to a clean life; for in this way only can feeble-minded homes, almshouses, and the scarlet woman be abolished. In this way only can men arise to full physical and mental force and become the fathers of a race to whom the struggle for clean manhood will not be the battle it is with us.”

Even if you updated that language, can you imagine such a speech being given at an AMA convention nowadays? The Harvester would be laughed off the stage. Since the book is his, however, by virtue of the author’s having written it so, The Harvester gets an ovation and multiple accolades from the newspapers and from the doctors in attendance. And in the end he also gets the girl–a fine ending for an idealistic and exemplary romance.

What I’ve Been Reading Online

Sep11

I still read a lot of books, over one hundred so far this year. However, I must admit that I read a lot of interesting and thought-provoking posts and articles on the internet, too. I believe I can do both. I try to take care that it doesn’t get out of balance, not too much internet reading, and not all my reading confined to books that are by their nature not up to the moment in their commentary.

Anyway, here are links to few things I’ve read on the internet lately that you might find of value:

Isn’t the Green Ember Like Watership Down? by S.D. Smith at The Rabbit Room. “When I finally read Watership Down, I discovered I had built a lego hut in the shadow of the Taj Mahal.” Surely, one can appreciate both books for what they are. As Madeline L’Engle liked to say, “Comparisons are odious.”

Love Faith, and Devotion: The Inspiration of Frances Chesterton, an article about G.K. Chesterton’s wife by Nancy Carpentier Brown, author of the biography The Woman Who Was Chesterton.

What Tolkien Can Teach Us About Love and Family by Mark Judge at Acculturated. “What sustains Frodo on his journey to Mordor is love, his love of his home, the Shire, his love of his friends, and of his Uncle Bilbo.”

Reviews of books I want to read:
The Amazing Age of John Roy Lynch by Chris Barton, reviewed at Fuse #8.
The Hired Girl by Laura Amy Schlitz, reviewed by Abby the Librarian.
7 Women and the Secret of Their Greatness by Eric Metaxas, reviewed by Brenda at Coffee, Tea, Books, and Me.

Gianna Jessen

Sep10

If abortion is about women’s rights, then what were mine?

Planned Parenthood receives $500 million dollars of taxpayer money a year, to primarily destroy and dismember babies. Do not tell me these are not children. A heartbeat proves that. So does 4-d ultrasound. So do I, and so does the fact that they are selling human organs for profit. Do not tell me this is only a woman’s issue. It takes both a man and a woman to create a child.

William Penn, Quaker Hero by Hildegarde Dolson

Sep9

One of the Landmark series of non-fiction histories and biographies, William Penn, Quaker Hero is a very readable biography of a perseverant and courageous man. There’s not much in the book about what the Quakers (Society of Friends) actually believed, nor does the book really explain why they were so hated and persecuted. But it does show a man who came to his beliefs with much investigation and forethought and who clung to those beliefs with a strength and tenacity that would put most Christians in the United States during the twenty-first century to shame.

I posted this famous quotation from William Penn on my Facebook the other day when I read it in the book:

“My prison shall be my grave before I will budge a jot; for I owe my conscience to no mortal man.” William Penn, 1668

Any guesses as to what contemporary news story this declaration reminded me of?

I would probably not agree completely with Mr. Penn as to theology or ecclesiology, just as I don’t agree with Mrs. Davis and her theology or the details of her conduct in regard to issuing marriage licenses. However, I do admire them both for their courage and trust in the Lord to sustain them in following their conscience rather than the orders of an unjust government.

Getting back to Penn, he was a quite admirable man, a bit lax and inattentive about money matters, but absolutely a good and faithful husband, a conscientious governor, and a brave dissenter who rescued other Quakers from imprisonment and endured prison himself to stand for the principles of democracy, religious freedom, and trial by jury. I would be proud to have my children read about his life and come to admire him.

Ms. Dolson’s writing is complemented by the illustrations of Leonard Everett Fisher. I love Fisher’s woodcut silhouette illustrations. Such a talented artist. Whoa, I looked, and Mr. Fisher is still living (b.1924). He’s illustrated more than 250 books. “Fisher has also designed 10 United States postage stamps including 8 Bicentennial issues, 1975 Stamped Envelope Liberty Tree and the 1978 commemorative ‘Legend of Sleepy Hollow.'” (Wikipedia)

To learn more about the Landmark series of biographies and history books for young people, check out this podcast episode, Parts 1 and 2, of Plumfield Moms, What Are Landmark Books? Why Do They Matter?

And Some More Bookish Questions

Sep8

I found these post with these seven questions in my drafts folder. I don’t know where it came from or why I saved it. But here it is.

1. What propelled your love affair with books — any particular title or a moment?
I know it’s trite, but my mom read to me—and took me to the library.

2. Which fictional character would you like to be friends with and why?
Sam Gamgee and Rosie? Anne of Green Gables? Frances the badger?

3. Do you write your name on your books or use bookplates?
Neither. Well, some of my books have my name stamped in them, particularly those books that I loan out frequently to other homeschoolers.

4. What was your favourite book read this year?
So far, of the 117 books I have read this year, my favorite book has been The Dean’s Watch by Elizabeth Goudge.

5. If you could read in another language, which language would you choose?
Hebrew or Greek, to read the Bible in the original languages.

6. Name a book that made you both laugh and cry.
The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien. I always laugh at Sam Gamgee’s folksiness, his taters and his oliphaunts, and I almost cry at the end when things are made right, but a price must be paid.

7. Share with us your favourite poem?
My favorite poem used to be Annabel Lee by Edgar Allan Poe. Then, this happened.
My favorite now? Maybe Very Like a Whale by Ogden Nash. Or Renascence by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Or The Prodigal Son by James Weldon Johnson. Yes, I think The Prodigal Son is my favorite (today).

Young man—
Young man—
Your arm’s too short to box with God.

But Jesus spake in a parable, and he said:
A certain man had two sons.
Jesus didn’t give this man a name,
But his name is God Almighty.
And Jesus didn’t call these sons by name,
But ev’ry young man,
Ev’rywhere,
Is one of these two sons.

Puritan Adventure by Lois Lenski

Sep7

Lois Lenski was a prolific children’s writer who wrote “a collection of regional novels about children across the United States” and a number of historical novels about children of different periods of American history. In Puritan Adventure, Aunt Charity comes to a fictional colony in New England to live with her sister’s family, and she brings joy and kindness into the oppressive atmosphere of the Puritan colony, and especially to the colony’s children. Aunt Charity, to the dismay of the authorities in the colony, teaches the children to celebrate Christmas and Shrove Tuesday and May Day—with a maypole! Horrors!

Puritan Adventure gives the Puritans of seventeenth century New England a bad rap. The Puritans did outlaw the celebration of certain feasts, particularly Christmas because it was associated with drunkenness, and they did by necessity work hard and expect everyone in the household to work together for the sake of survival. However, the Puritans and other religious pilgrims who came to America in the seventeenth century were not quite the dour, frightened, suppressed people that Lenski’s book makes them out to be. They celebrated their own holidays and family times. They enjoyed their Sabbath rest and worship each Sunday. Puritan Richard Baxter wrote:

“All Christ’s ways of mercy tend to, and end in the saints’ joys. He wept, suffered, sorrowed that they might rejoice; He sendeth the Spirit to be their comforter; He multiplieth promises, he discovers their future happiness, that their joy may be full; He aboundeth to them in mercies of all sorts; He maketh them lie down in green pastures, He leadeth them by the still waters, yea, He openeth to them the fountain of living waters, that their joy may be full.”

Thomas Watson, another Puritan writer, said simply: “The more we enjoy of God, the more we are ravished with delight.”

So, Aunt Charity, with her idealization of Old England and its celebrations would likely have been looked upon as an anomaly in a Puritan colony, but not necessarily hounded and bought before the magistrate as she was in the book. And drunken celebrations would have been discouraged, but Aunt Charity’s child-centered Christmas and Shrove Tuesday celebrations would most likely have been looked upon as odd, but harmless. Neither Old England nor New England had a very child-centered culture. Children were little adults, given as much responsibility as they could possibly handle and sometimes more.

I don’t know what to recommend about Puritan Adventure. I will keep it in my library. Ms. Lenski was a great writer of children’s books, and she tells a good story in her novel of Puritan New England. However, that good story is based on a skewed idea of the Puritans’ joylessness. Maybe it would be a good book to read with children and to discuss. One could discuss the dangers of legalism and also the dangers of lawlessness, as exemplified by Patty, the servant girl. Readers could also talk about the misunderstanding that is prevalent today in regard to the difference between temporal pleasures and eternal joy. We should teach the children (and the adults) to choose joy every time—and to not be afraid of a little innocent pleasure.

All the Bright Places by Jennifer Niven

Aug31

A couple of years ago I made a “bliss list” of 52 subjects that hook me into reading and enjoying a book: everything from community to eccentricity to Winston Churchill. Number 3 on that list was “insanity, mental illness, and mental differences and disabilities. Everything from schizophrenia to autism to deafness and blindness and how those affect perceptions and ideas.”

All the Bright Places certainly taps into that particular fascination, even though Finch, one of our two protagonists, doesn’t like labels and refuses to think of himself as bipolar or mentally ill. Finch refuses to be characterized by his illness, doesn’t believe that he is the “freak” that the other kids call him, but he definitely isn’t quite normal. He thinks about death and suicide nearly 24/7—until he meets Violet Markey at the top of the school bell tower where he talks her down from the ledge. Everyone else thinks it was Violet who talked Theodore Finch, the Freak, down from jumping off the bell tower, but Violet and Finch know the truth. And now Finch is fascinated with Violet, and vice-versa.

I liked the book, sort of. Ms. Niven did a good job of showing the quirky thought processes of boy who, whether he wants to be labeled or not, is dealing with serious mental illness. And I liked the way the book shows that Theo Finch is actually a real person, not defined by his mania or depression, but definitely becoming more and more enslaved to the sickness as the story progresses.

That said, I had issues with some of the plot and characterizations in this book. Theo’s family is a joke. His father is alternately abusive and absent, and his mother is . . . out of touch? She doesn’t feel like a real person. Theodore lives in a closet half the time, and his mother doesn’t do anything at all. He doesn’t sleep, and he goes out running at all hours of the day and night, and mom is oblivious. He disappears, and she still doesn’t do anything. Do these kind of people exist? Maybe, but I don’t get it.

Then there’s the financial aspect of the story. A lot of YA fiction seems to be written by people who are unaware or actively ignoring the financial realities of middle class life. Theo has a car (why?), but no job. I couldn’t see how he managed to pull twenty dollar bills out of his pocket to pay for books, or keep his car gassed up, or buy gallons and gallons of paint, or buy a huge bouquet of flowers for Violet. His dad didn’t seem like the type to chip in any funds, and Theo’s mom worked two part time jobs, one of them at a bookstore. Violet, too, has all the money she needs to eat out, travel around exploring Indiana with Theo, and do anything else she happens to want to do. Violet also has no job. And both Theo and Violet have the excruciating problem of simply deciding which university they want to attend, with no discussion or consideration of cost. This lack of financial limitations seems to be the case in a majority of YA novels. It only matters which university sends you an acceptance letter; money is no object for these basically middle class teens.

Lastly, All the Bright Places almost glamorizes suicide. Yes, we need to be sympathetic and offer help and not stigmatize those are mentally ill or those who are victims of their own suicidal thoughts. However, the other extreme is to make suicide look good, so cute and quirky. Theo is so creative and intelligent. He’s romantic, even in the throes of suicidal compulsions. He’s the only one who understands Violet. He manages to make his bipolar ravings sound like some kind of esoteric wisdom. SPOILER ALERT: Theo dies, but Violet halfway believes that “[p]eople like Theodore Finch don’t die. He’s just wandering.” At the end of the book, Violet writes an epitaph for Theo: “I was alive. I burned brightly. And then I died, but not really. Because someone like me, cannot, will not die like everyone else. I linger like the legends of the Blue Hole.”

I wanted to say, loudly, to whomever might read this book:

Suicide is NOT glamorous.

It hurts (you and other people).

You won’t linger like a legend.

At the end, you really do die.

Warnings: mild language, and of course, obligatory YA sex.

The Envoy by Alex Kershaw

Aug26

The Envoy: The Epic Rescue of the Last Jews of Europe in the Desperate Closing Months of World War II by Alex Kershaw.

On Saturday morning, I went to this protest at Planned Parenthood, Gulf Coast, the site of the largest and most lucrative abortion facility in the United States. On Saturday afternoon and evening, I read The Envoy, the story of the final months of World War II in Hungary and the genocide organized by Adolf Eichmann as a “final solution” to the “Jewish problem” in Hungary. Even though, as Jen Fulwiler writes in this piece, the analogy between the Jewish Holocaust of World War II and the abortion holocaust of the United States (and much of the developed world) is not complete or tidy, the parallels are obvious and undeniable. In both cases, a class of people were/are “dehumanized”, spoken of and then treated as less than human, unworthy of basic human rights and protections. (Bob DeGray on The Christian Response to Dehumanization)

The more I read about World War II or about Hitler’s Holocaust, the more I realize that I have huge swaths of ignorance about what took place during that time. Did you know that during the summer of 1944, when it was becoming clearer and clearer that the Germans were losing the war and that the Russian army was headed toward Budapest, Eichmann insisted upon continuing his program of exterminating the Jews of Hungary? During that summer, from May to August, over 500,000 Jewish men, women and children were transported to Auschwitz, mostly from Hungary’s provinces, outside of Budapest itself. The deportations were suspended in late August because the Romania had surrendered, putting the Russian army only weeks away from Budapest. However, after the Germans blackmailed Hungary’s puppet regent, Miklas Horthy, into resigning by kidnapping his son and holding him hostage, the Arrow Cross, Hungary’s viciously anti-Semitic Nazi party, took over the government. “The pogroms began that evening. Hundreds were pulled from their homes or off the streets and slaughtered in plain sight in the first hours of the Arrow Cross regime.” (p.160)

Then, Eichmann returned to his pet plan for liquidating the Jews of Budapest. When he couldn’t get trains to transport the Jews to Auschwitz, he forced them to march to the Polish border on foot, by the thousands. Many died on the way, and others were killed as soon as they reached Poland. Even though Eichmann (and everybody else) knew that the Russians would soon take Budapest, he was intent on killing as many Jews as possible before the Nazis were defeated.

All these details were things I didn’t really realize about the Holocaust, not set in context as they are in The Envoy. I had heard of Raoul Wallenberg; I read an account somewhere of his using his Swedish diplomatic immunity and his ingenuity to save Jews. However, The Envoy puts Wallenberg and his heroic work to rescue the Jews of Budapest into perspective. I was amazed at Wallenberg’s courage and that of many others during the latter half of 1944, and I was surprised and saddened to learn of Wallenberg’s fate after his work in Budapest was over. Probably, Wallenberg never knew that many of the Jews he rescued with fake diplomatic protection did survive the war, and he may very well have thought that no one knew or cared about his attempts to rescue at least a remnant of Hungary’s Jewish population.

Reading the story of Raoul Wallenberg and the Jews of Budapest made me remember that many of us, maybe most of us, will never know in this life the results of our attempts at kindness, courage, truth-telling, and goodness. Sometimes those actions bear fruit many years later. Sometimes Satan deceives us into thinking that our actions don’t really matter, that no one is listening, nothing is changing, no one cares, and evil wins. But God wins, and goodness outlasts and extinguishes evil, and our actions, for good or for ill, do matter. One man, or even a group of men, may not have been able to save all the Jews from the evil that was Hitler’s and Eichmann’s final solution, but one man and his co-conspirators made a difference. And I am determined to use my one voice and my one life to do whatever I can to make a difference for truth and justice, too.