My husband and I just started a book club with a few people in our area, and the inaugural book was Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies. I’d read some of her stuff on writing (and Bird by Bird is particularly excellent, especially if you tend to beat yourself up about your writing or get discouraged easily), but not her stuff on faith. So I was delighted and pleased that Traveling Mercies was just as rejuvenating as Bird by Bird. There’s no “plot” to this kind of […]
Traveling Mercies
I’ve never read anything by Anne Lamott before, although I’ve heard her name. So when a member of my book club suggested Traveling Mercies, I was excited to see what her writing was all about. And I’m glad I did. Lamott is from the San Francisco Bay Area, a place I’m familiar with having been born and lived in Northern California for several years. It was refreshing to hear mention of places I knew or could relate to her experiences at the beach while looking […]
And the Beat Goes On…
I picked this book last year based on a Cannonball Read 5 review and added it to my list of books to read. To see what I thought about it (good things!), head over to my blog to take a read!
Art as Ambassador
“In life you’ll meet a lot of jerks. If they hurt you, tell yourself that it’s because they’re stupid. That will help keep you from reacting to their cruelty. Because there is nothing worse than bitterness and vengeance… Always keep your dignity and be true to yourself.” – Persepolis I mentioned in my last review that I’ve been reading books for this Cannonball, so far, that are out of date. I mean that they are books published within the last ten to twenty years, but […]
Cruel Humanitarians
In Polemical Pain: Slavery, Cruelty, and the Rise of Humanitarianism, Margaret Abruzzo examines the contested origins of the idea of humanitarianism by investigating the proslavery and antislavery debates over the meaning of pain. This is an excellent book for understanding not only the intellectual development of the pro and antislavery positions, but also for breaking apart the concept of humanitarianism, to understand it as a contested and not static term. Read more at my blog…
Less Sexism Than I Expected
Yet another selection from class. I wasn’t exactly looking forward to this one though the length was going to be a nice break compared to the rest of the reading list so I was actually pleasantly surprised when I read this. I think what little previous interactions I have had with Rousseau have involved his later work in which he comes off as a sexist, misogynistic ass that romanticizes nature and “man’s natural state” way too much. Imagine my surprise when in this, he states […]