July 2019 Cookbooks

Smoke, Roots, Mountain, Harvest by Lauren McDuffie

I was born in the Appalachian mountains of NC, so I was interested to check out this cookbook. While the photographs are beautiful, there weren't that many recipes I wanted to try. I did like that the book is organized by season and focuses on eating seasonally. After recently finishing Rick Bragg's The Best Cook in the World that also focuses on mountain/country Southern food, I think this book might be a little too fancy of a take on Appalachian food for me. There were a few recipes I wanted to try, but overall it was just a pretty cookbook to look through.

July 2019 Reviews

The Very Worst Missionary by Jamie Wright

Jamie Wright had a very interesting path to becoming a full-time missionary in Costa Rica. She grew up Jewish (by conversion, not birth) then fell away from church and became a very promiscuous and wild teenager dropping out of high school at 15 and getting pregnant at 17. She and her boyfriend Steve got married and miraculously stayed married having two more children. As a harried, young mother to three boys Wright started attending the local Christian church and really found a home there, eventually her husband joined her and they started leading the youth group together. After going on a few short-term mission trips to Costa Rica with their youth group kids, the family starts thinking about doing something "bigger" for God by going into the mission field full time. So the Wright family gets rid of most of their belongings and move to Costa Rica for 5 years. During that time they start to realize that much of the mission work they are involved in is unnecessary and doesn't really help the local's needs - jobs, money, etc. They also realize that (including themselves) there is no real screening process for who can go into full time missions, so they see a lot of people who really aren't doing good work. As Wright struggles with these conflicts The Very Worst Missionary is born - a blog where Wright gets real about the inconsistencies she is seeing and her own personal struggles. While several reviews I read complain about her language - there is a lot of cursing - I side with Wright that being real and failing is better than being fake and still failing while making everyone around you feel worse. A funny, yet heart-breaking look at one woman's not-so-great experience as a full time missionary that brings to light some real issues that the Church needs to address.

Some quotes I liked:

"The questions started during a study of the life of Christ, because that was the first time I truly looked beyond how everyone else was doing it and started to see how Jesus did it. I began to really see what he said and where he went and what he did and how he treated people. The guy touched lepers with his bare hands and hung out with the neighborhood undesirables. He talked to the impoverished, the infirm, the outcast as though they mattered as much as anybody. And when faced with greed and corruption in a house of God, Jesus braided a whip and quite literally overturned the tables of injustice. When I took the time to examine how he lived out his days on earth, it changed everything about how I saw the club. Following Jesus started to make a lot more sense - but the church started to look kinda wonky." (p. 63)

Pages 77-85 Wright's meltdown during a women's Bible study is HILARIOUS and sadly true.

"Pretending to be someone else is exhausting. I'd given so much energy to keeping up appearances that when I finally realized I could drop the act altogether, it was like stepping out of a furry suit on a hot summer day. In a word, it was refreshing. It was terrifying too, because all of a sudden I was seeing and feeling and experiencing the world as my own self, and I felt exposed. But for the first time ever, I also felt free." (p. 90)

"To be fair, many of these enthusiastic new missionaries didn't know what to make of me and Steve either. We were the nondenominational, egalitarian beer drinkers. Steve had tattoos and I had a ring in my nose. All of this was taken by some as evidence that we were heathens in need of the gospel. The frequency with which we were evangelized by fellow students was almost hilarious." 
(p. 129)

"I do believe that God can use anyone to do anything (that I am writing this book is a prime example), but I was beginning to see how that is a pretty weak standard by which to choose whom we send out into the world to 'be the hands and feet of Jesus,' or whatever you want to call it. This isn't about having unrealistic expectations of ordinary people, and it's not about negating God's ability to surprise us by doing amazing things. It's about recognizing that we have a responsibility, as the church, to choose whom we send, so that we send the right people to do the right things in the right places - and to not send them when it's not right. And therein lies the real problem: There's really not much choosing going on. If you raise your hand (and have enough cash), someone will send you out...Moreover, the Bible tells us that Jesus handpicked the first disciples and 'selected' the seventy-some pairs of missionaries he sent out. Like, he chose them from among a larger group of people he'd been teaching for months." (p. 133-34)

"In the love our players developed for one another, the spirit of belonging they shared, and the promise of community that comes with being part of a team, the little world of Costa Rican semipro football felt in many ways like a church. Steve and I discovered that the growing connection and increasing intimacy we had within our football family felt more alive and meaningful than any part of the 'work' we were doing on campus as so-called missionaries." (p. 164)

"A few months into Steve's first season with the team, they went out to participate in a sports clinic hosted by a Christian athletic ministry from the States. The group would donate used football gear and a few hours of specialized instruction in exchange for the opportunity to evangelize. Every team in the league agreed to this deal from these complete strangers because they needed the gear, and the extra training was always helpful. On the morning of the event, though, this is what Steve witnessed: Local coaches and players who'd attended the same clinic the year before took a few minutes ahead of time to solicit volunteers to accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior. On our team of fifty, the head coach assigned a half dozen guys to raise their hands at the appointed time. Everyone else was urged to play along but not overdo it, so that the missionaries would feel successful and keep coming back...'It's mutual exploitation,' explained Mateo, who worked for Intel and played tight end. 'Everybody wins.' Caught between these two worlds, Steve and I felt conflicted. It was great to see the teams getting resources and support. But we knew those missionaries were gonna go back to their home churches and celebrate a false account of changed lives." (p. 167-38)

"For me, the experience of dismantling my simple ideology felt bittersweet. It was necessary and liberating, and at times it felt damn good, but it was also sad, and confusing, and lonely. It's scary to get back up after you've been crushed by the realization that the church you grew up in or the ministry you championed or the spiritual leaders you adored, supported, and trusted were perhaps not as awesome and amazing as you once believed. If they turn out to be abusers, liars, crooks, pathological narcissists, and/or asshats in general, it's worse, and some people never recover from the pain, anger, and disappointment." (p. 210)

Shame Nation: the global epidemic of online hate by Sue Scheff

If you are online in ANY way this book is a must read. In 2003 Sue Scheff was cyberattacked by a spiteful client. The attack almost ruined Scheff's business and nearly destroyed her self-confidence, but she chose to fight back and won a landmark lawsuit. Now she works to help people prevent and recover from cyberattacks. In Shame Nation Scheff explores why there has been such a rise in online hate and cyber-shaming, preventing and surviving a cyberattack, and how to recover after you've survived an attack and ways organizations are working to combat online hate. There are tons of real stories from people who've been bullied and shamed online to illustrate Scheff's points. And while these stories (and the thousands more that happen every day) and sad and terrible, Scheff does end the book on a hopeful note that this current tsunami of online hate will inspire a backlash of love and hope. Definitely eye-opening and worth reading.

Some quotes I liked:

"Strikingly, Chubb Limited recently became the first insurance firm to offer its clients coverage against cyberbullying and other forms of man-made digital disasters. For $70 a year, American families can add a protection plan to their existing policy and get reimbursed for up to $60,000 in costs resulting from online harassment, such as unwarranted job loss, technical support for tracking down cyberfoes, public relations support for image repair, and even therapy bills." (p. xix)

"Comedian and actress Margaret Cho spoke in an Observerarticle about taking a specific action she dubs 'hate shame.' People often say, 'Oh, don't feed the trolls.' I screenshot what they say, report it, and I'll send it to their employers, their spouses - things of that nature, where you're calling attention to the hatred and cutting it off at the same time with immediate hate shame. If you hate shame, it automatically forces them to revisit the hatred they're spewing, that can be potentially very damaging. And using it against them - as opposed to internalizing the trolling and feeling uncomfortable with it - it's a good opportunity to stand up for yourself and also bring reverence to the kind of racism, misogyny, and homophobia that these people perpetuate. We should all practice this kind of self-defense." (p. 95-6)

"Emily Lindin, author of Unslut: a Diary and a Memoir, has a strong message that always strikes a chord when she talks with teen girls about slut shaming: she points out that online porn is readily available, so these boys already have all the masturbatory material they could ever desire - what they are really after is power to lord over you, control you, even blackmail you. She asks young women pointedly, 'Do you really want to give them that power?'" (p. 148)

"Researchers at the University of Michigan crunched data that tracked years of incoming college freshman's empathy, and found that empathy has declined by 40 percent in the last three decades - while narcissism has risen by 58 percent. This inability to see those on the other side of the computer screen as people deserving of our compassion is one of the huge drivers of our Shame Nation." (p. 227)

Maid: hard work, low pay, and a mother's will to survive by Stephanie Land

I almost didn't read this one based on the very mixed reviews, but decided to give it a try. When I saw that Barbara Ehrenreich wrote the introduction, I thought surely it can't be terrible if Barbara Ehrenreich is writing the introduction. Was this book Evicted or Nickel and Dimed? No. But, it was still a well-written account of one woman's struggle to provide a better life for her daughter and how hard that can be with no family safety net at all. Stephanie Land is twenty-eight when she unexpectedly gets pregnant and decides to keep the baby. She hoped her boyfriend Jamie would step up to the plate, but never did except when he could do something to throw in her face. When he starts to become violent Land finds herself and her infant daughter homeless. She is able to cobble together enough government assistance and work to stay barely above water, but there is always the looming dread of something unexpected - illness, car accident, etc. Her family was almost as broke as she was, but were also abusive and not to be relied on. Land realizes that her only escape is education. She enrolls in community college and by the end of the book she is able to transfer to a University and there is a lot more hope for her and her daughter. 

A lot of the bad reviews of this book pointed out every little mistake or bad decision Land made. Did she make some really bad decisions and mistakes? Yes. Haven't you? It's nice to know there are so many people out there making NO MISTAKES AT ALL in their personal lives. I feel like Land is honest with the bad decisions she made and owns it. Several reviews complained that she played the victim and never took responsibility, but I didn't read it that way at all. One thing she sees over and over in the houses she cleans is that it doesn't matter how much money you make you can still be miserable - not that having more money doesn't make things easier, but just money in and of itself doesn't make you happy. Overall, I was pleasantly surprised based on the reviews I read and am looking forward to what Stephanie Land will write in the future.

Beauty in the Broken Places by Allison Pataki

Allison and her husband Dave are expecting their first child and on their way to a "babymoon" trip to Hawaii when Dave suffers a massive stroke. After an emergency landing Alli is alone in the hospital with her 30-year-old husband in a coma. Miraculously Dave survives and is transferred back to Chicago to the hospital where before their trip he was working in his medical student residency. Slowly Dave starts to recover, but the recovery is hard on everyone. Alli struggles with worrying whether Dave will recover fully or become a dependent she has to care for along with their soon-coming baby. But, Dave does recover and while it is a long, slow recovery by the one year anniversary of his stroke he is mostly back to his old self. Beauty in the Broken Places is Alli's story of how she and Dave met and fell in love interspersed with his stroke and the aftermath. While what they went through is terrible and Alli doesn't shy away from describing that time, the book as a whole is more hopeful because it's written on the other side after Dave's recovery. A beautiful story of what it can look like when "in sickness and in health" and "for better or for worse" actually play out in a marriage.

A quote I liked:

Ultimately, I realized, this was the moment when things between God and me finally got real. This was when I needed to live the faith that I had been thinking, for thirty-one years, that I had been living. I did not understand why the things that had happened had happened. But did I still - even in that place of not knowing or understanding, especially in that place of not knowing or understanding - believe that God was with me? Was He there beside me in my pain and brokenness, just as I had always believed Him to be beside me in my joy? Did I believe that God could take this heartbreak and this fear and this fatigue and somehow weave something beautiful from all of the frayed and feeble threads? That there was a divine plan at work here, a much larger picture than the one I could see, a framework that exceeded my capacity to understand? Yes, I realized. I did. I did still believe that God was beside us." (p. 214)

I Will Not Fear: my story of a lifetime of building faith under fire by Melba Pattillo Beals

Melba Beals was one of the "Little Rock Nine" - nine African-American high school students who were the first to integrate Central high school in Little Rock, Arkansas. Growing up Melba was raised in the Christian faith by her grandmother India. India instilled her deep faith in Melba and helped her see that while they experienced hate and discrimination from white people, God loved them and would always help them. Melba had to draw on her own faith to get through that first year at Central, but she did. After that Little Rock shut down all public schools as a backlash to the forced legal integration. Beals had to leave Little Rock for her own safety. She ended up in California and her time there really shaped her life. She lived with a white family and was able to heal some of the racist wounds she had from growing up in Little Rock. She eventually married a white man and they had a daughter together. But, Beals wanted more than just to be a stay-at-home wife and mother. That was not what her husband wanted so they divorced when her daughter was young. She went on to finish college and earned a doctorate and worked in journalism and as a college professor. She later adopted twin boys and raised them as well. Throughout her life her faith was her foundation. Dr. Beals is an inspiration and example.

While her story is incredible, I enjoyed the first half of this book more than the second half. The first half is about her growing up and the struggle of that year at Central high school, then going to California and how her life changed there. The second half of the book seemed to really jump in time and some of the stories with the twins seemed very bizarre - not that I didn't believe it happened, but just bizarre and maybe needed more explanation. Overall, it was a good book and it did focus on how faith shaped her life.

A quote I liked:

[At an NAACP meeting with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.] "At this point we were three weeks into the semester at Central High, and I was exhausted, depressed, and disappointed. I was still in shock at the price integrating that high school was exacting from me. I was somehow convinced someone would change things in an instant, so I couldn't stop myself from spilling my feelings about how much I was suffering to Dr. King. His quick answer was loud and clear as his huge eyes held mine with a commanding stare. 'Melba, don't be selfish. You're not doing this for yourself. You are doing this for generations yet unborn.' His voice was kind, his face empathetic...I had been waiting for white students to change, extend kindness, and welcome me, when maybe it was my task to change...Dr. King's statement was life-changing." (p. 55-6)

The Cooking Gene: a journey through African American culinary history in the Old South by Michael Twitty

I had heard so much about how amazing this book was, but I was disappointed. I'm not sure what exactly I was expecting, but it was very repetitive and seemed to go over the same things in almost every chapter. At the beginning of the book Twitty says, "The early and antebellum South is not where most African Americans want to let their minds and feet visit. It's a painful place, and the modern South is just beginning to engage the relationship between the racial divide, class divisions, and cultural fissures that have tainted the journey to contemporary Southern cuisine. It's an entangled and deeply personal mess that has been four centuries in the making. This book is about finding and honoring the soul of my people's food by looking deep within my past and my family's story." (p. 6) As a white Southerner I completely understand that Southern food is inextricably tied to slavery and the African people who were forced to come here and work. And I also feel like I understand Twitty's desire to understand his roots - both in the slavery of the South and in the parts of Africa where his ancestors were taken from. The first several chapters were very interesting, but once he got to the chapter about DNA genealogy I started losing interest. After that it seemed very repetitive with both the food and his family. I felt like the same stories were told over and over again and I'm still not sure why. I think this could have been an amazing book, but it was just so all over the place and focused on the same few things over and over again. Maybe I'm not getting it, but I was disappointed.

Some quotes I did like:

"I want to be clear: my dream was to be able to put myself in the evolving narrative of Southern food from it's beginnings to now, and to do so I had to be able to do what most African Americans had the most difficulty doing - trace my ancestry to Africa and follow the lineages across the Southern map into the present day." (p. 125)

"Long before the current movement to taste the past and revive forgotten terroir, it made sense to me that the Caseknife pole bean from Wesley and the Cowhorn okra from Peter and yam potato from William were something more than just neat relics. They were the very taste of how my ancestors survived slavery." (p. 268)

"History did not let the historical black garden go unremarked. These spaces were little landscapes of resistance: Resistance against a culture of dehumanizing poverty and want, resistance against the erasure of African cultural practices, resistance against the destruction of African religions, and resistance against slavery itself." (p. 269)

"Earlier that summer, I had been in Donaldsonville, Louisiana, where during the time of Jim Crow black farmers and landowners got together and decided that sharecroppers in the cotton and sugarcane fields had enough trouble to not be in debt to white planters, so they created a community farm where all who were hungry could get produce. That was 1912. The year of my travels was 2012, and somehow, without black Twitter, without Facebook, without Instagram or Snapchat, black farmers in a time of Klansmen and lynch law solved the problem of food insecurity. Thankfully, the secret weapon, the garden, had not been forgotten." (p. 275)