Reason to Return: why women need the church and the church needs women by Ericka Andersen
Women (and people in general) are leaving the Church at an all time high in the past few years. Ericka Anderson makes the case for why it's important, specifically for women, to come back. The book is divided into three sections - the reasons we leave, reasons to reconsider, and a call worth pursuing. Anderson does a great job of making her case without being condescending or shaming. And while I agree with her 100% the reality can be much harder. As a Christian woman who's chosen to not have children I've often felt like an outsider at church. I'm also an introvert which makes making friends much harder as I've gotten older and also makes the "join a serving team to meet people" harder too. But, I agree it's still worth it. Now, here's hoping I can find the right church for me sometime before Jesus returns!
Some quotes I liked:
"The Church and the local church are not about a day of the week or a building to walk into but about a people and a way of life. 'People don't enter a church; the church enters a building,' writes [Sam] Allberry." (p. 13)
"The 2016 election year seemed to put faith in the spotlight like none before. As one woman put it, the experiences with friends and family 'ground me into dust spiritually.'" (p. 87)
"After the atomic bombs were dropped near the end of World War II, C. S. Lewis wrote...If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things - praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts - not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds." (p. 199)
The Sentence by Louise Erdrich (Books & Banter book club)
Let me start off by saying I am just not a Louise Erdrich fan. That's not to say she's not a talented author, but her style is just not for me. All of the books I've read by her have been for book clubs and outside of The Birchbark House (her children's book response to The Little House on the Prairie series) I haven't liked any of them. They are just WAY too long and detailed and meandering. All of which applied to The Sentence as well. I'm also a public librarian and reading books whether fiction or non-fiction about libraries and book stores is also not my thing. Too close to being at work I guess.
The premise of this book sounds interesting - Tookie, a Native woman who just got out of prison after 10 years, is working at a local bookstore in Minneapolis. The store's most annoying customer dies and starts haunting the store and Tookie tries to figure out why so she can get the ghost to leave. Here are my issues in no particular order:
1) As another review stated Tookie seemed very one dimensional and everything in her life just seemed to happen to her - her crime, her incarceration, her marriage, everything. She didn't seem to have any agency over her life.
2) It seemed really weird to me that Louise Erdrich seemed to put herself and her bookstore into the storyline. Starting out with her book tour for The Night Watchman, although the title is never mentioned. Even using her own name and the name of her actual bookstore.
3) It was WAY too soon to be writing/reading books about COVID. And somehow this is already the second book I've read this year that dealt with it. Also, since the book is set in Minneapolis we have the added drama of the George Floyd murder and subsequent riots. I'm going to need a list of all the books that deal with COVID so I can avoid them in the future.
4) The ghost story gets completely sidetracked with COVID and the George Floyd riots. The book just takes a sudden turn and no more talk of the ghost for a good 1/3 of the book. Then when we get back to the ghost the issue is just suddenly resolved and seemed like an afterthought.
The things I did like - 1) Tookie did grow on me and I really loved her husband Pollux. If Erdrich had killed him off with COVID I would have thrown this book across the room. 2) She is a good writer and did a good job with the many interpretations of the title, The Sentence. That was very clever and well done. But, I still think she could use a stricter editor and not meander all over the place so much.
Some quotes I liked:
"Books contain everything worth knowing except what ultimately matters." (p. 4)
"Pollux was straightening [the eagle feathers] out by stroking the spines on a hot lightbulb...Over and over he drew the feather over the glass. This would only be normal in a Native person's house. The feather gradually straightened. It took a long time...The patience of him, the way he was devoted to that feather, worked on me. Again and again he warmed the feather, bent it the opposite direction, pulled it straight, warmed it again. He seemed the picture of human love. I knew the fan was for me. I knew the feathers actually were me - Tookie - straightened by warmth applied a thousand times." (p. 231)
Feral: losing myself and finding my way in America's National Parks by Emily Pennington
Premise: woman plans out a year-long trip to visit all 62 National Parks and despite setbacks (a breakup, COVID, etc.) learns resilience and self-reliance.
Reality: LOTS of whining and complaining and weird sexual references/scenes
Pennington mentions the book Wild by Cheryl Strayed as some of her inspiration, but this book is no Wild. Pennington ironically started planning this trip after a breakup with the man who inspired her to be adventurous outdoors, "What if I was less in love with David and more in love with the adventures he introduced me to? What if I struck out on my own and planned a yearlong journey across America, solo?" (p. 176) She then proceeds to get into a new relationship not long into the planning and alternately irritated by her boyfriend Adam when he does come along and then desperately lonely and unhappy when he doesn't. I thought after their breakup in chapter 4 or 5 it would get better - but it didn't. The whole book is mostly her drama before, during, and after the break up, being sick (she must have a horrible immune system), being worried about being sick when COVID comes around, and very weird sexual experiences/descriptions/situations that did not help the book AT ALL. I feel like a jerk saying this, but she was just AWFUL. Adam didn't seem like a winner either, but I felt bad for him and how she portrayed him in the book. The parks were often just barely mentioned or glossed over and her obvious disdain for any "tourists" who weren't hardcore hikers/backpackers/etc. was very off putting. Also, if you're going to write a book like this and talk about all the pictures you took it would have been nice to have some color pictures included in the book. There were black and white photos at the beginning of each chapter, but that could have helped bring this book back to what it was supposed to be - a yearlong adventure in the 62 National Parks. Overall, I really wish I had quit reading it when she and Adam were in Alaska or not picked it up at all.
A MUCH better National Parks book is Leave Only Footprints by Conor Knighton.
Forager: field notes for surviving a family cult by Michelle Dowd
Michelle Dowd grew up in a cult called The Field that was in the Angeles National Forest. Her grandfather founded the cult and demanded full submission from everyone. Michelle could see the contradictions between what they were taught and their reality from a young age, but questions were definitely not encouraged so she learned to be very good at listening to try to figure things out for herself. Her parents were beyond neglectful and obviously didn't want to be parents. I guess they had kids because they needed bodies to do more work? The cult also focused heavily on foraging and wilderness survival. Part of their theology was that comfort was bad, so they lived in poverty and often went without food or medical attention. Michelle was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease and spent months in a hospital alone - her father never came and her mother only rarely. There was also some veiled references to sexual abuse she (and I'm assuming other children) experienced. A weird part of their cult was that men were so favored that there were very few women or girls at all (but without women there is no procreation, so I don't know how they expected to keep going with it being 75% men in the cult). It seemed terrifying to be a child around all these teen and young adult men who are all being told men are more important and you have to do anything and everything they tell you to do. As a teenager Michelle starts working on a plan to get out and eventually her survival skills kick in for more than just foraging for wild food, she forages her way out of The Field in back into the real world.
I love a good cult memoir, but I would have liked less about her childhood spent foraging and more about how she left and what she did when she got out. She was SO afraid of getting pregnant, but then shortly after getting out she got married and quickly had four kids. But that's all that's said about that - I want to know more about her life AFTER the cult. Especially how she was with her kids since her own childhood was so lonely and terrible. She definitely didn't have any decent parenting role models. Her whole story just shows how resilient people can be. From a very young age she knew there was more and better out there somewhere even if she had never seen it. Overall, it was interesting but left me wanting to know more.
Some quotes I liked:
"One time, when Danny was three, he started falling asleep in the aisle and Grandpa kicked him in the head with his big black shoe to wake him up. Grandpa may have been a prophet, but that was the first time I knew he would never be my god." (p. 29)
"'A lot of things are hard about being a woman,' she said, 'but that's our lot in life. You've got to be smarter than your predators, but don't let them know it.'" (p. 32)
"We are told the best way to withstand the temptations of the flesh, with which Outsiders will try to defile our bodies, is to teach ourselves not to desire anything by repudiating pleasure in all forms. This included tobacco, liquor, tasty foods, worldly music, entertainment for entertainment's sake, reading (other than the Bible), and anything that inspires laughter or affection. We aren't even allowed to hug one another." (p. 78-79)
"The way he describes how the Pharisees use religion to make themselves righteous reminds me of everything we do at the Field." (p. 181)
"I think a lot about rules these days. Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba. The women who get credit for producing Jesus didn't follow rules. Men were in charge of their lives, and they maneuvered in whatever ways they needed to survive. Did Grandma think about that when she taught me their stories?" (p. 209)
"Like Jezebel, I'd rather be evil than powerless." (p. 261)
We Were Once a Family: a story of love, death, and child removal in America by Roxanna Asgarian
On March 26, 2018 an SUV was found at the bottom of a steep cliff on the Pacific Coast Highway in California. Inside two adult women and several children were found - all deceased. Once they identified the women as Jennifer and Sarah Hart a quick social media search showed that this couple had adopted two sets of African-American siblings (6 children total) and were VERY prolific on social media. Soon this tragedy took a darker turn - it became obvious that this was a murder suicide and what appears to have triggered the event was a visit from social services the day before. While the Hart adults were the focus of all kind of scrutiny after this terrible event, they seemed to have escaped scrutiny in the 10 years they had these children. The investigation turned up claims of abuse and calls to social services against the women in three states. Each time they moved to avoid staying on the social service radar.
In We Were Once a Family Roxanna Asgarian looks into not just the Hart women, but more the birth families of the sets of siblings who were adopted. Both sets of siblings were adopted from Texas and sent to Minnesota to the Harts. Asgarian looks at what triggered these siblings going into foster care to begin with and why they were adopted out of state. Horrifically, in both cases the children had family members who were willing to take them in, but in each case that was denied and the children were allowed to be adopted out of state. The second set of siblings, the Davis children, had an older sibling who was separated from his siblings and subsequently struggled his entire life because of that separation. He was able to reconnect with his father at age 16, but he spent 6 years in a Residential Treatment Center - basically a juvenile detention type center for children with behavioral problems in foster care. Asgarian also looks into specifically the Texas foster care system which routinely seeks to sever parental rights the moment children are removed from the home for any reason. In the case of these two sets of siblings the reasons the children were removed were minor - they were no allegations of abuse or neglect - just parents/caregivers making one bad choice or mistake. While both families were poor and there were some drug issues, all the children were loved and had several supportive family members around them. On the other hand, the Hart women had several allegations of physical abuse and neglect that were reported to social services by the children's teachers - the Harts decided to pull their kids from public school and move. They had more reports from friends and neighbors, but each time the children were not removed and no one seemed concerned when they would pick up and move again.
It was so heartbreaking to read about these children's biological families who were fighting so hard to keep them and then they are handed over to these women who end up killing them. And to top all of it off - the biological families were not notified by law enforcement of their deaths. The Davis children's family's lawyer heard about the case and thought it sounded familiar and let the family know. The other siblings' family was found by the author and notified. There is definitely a place for foster care and removing children from dangerous or abusive homes, but as this book highlights there is definitely a double standard and many, many children are removed from loving homes because of issues around poverty. Another issue is that for foster parents or potential adoptive parents there are standards that have to be met (which is good), but often family members of foster children can't meet those standards and are denied. But, if a biological parent has 6 kids in a two bedroom house there is no one telling them they can't do that, but if a family member has their own kids and wants to take in their nieces/nephews they are told they can't because their home isn't big enough. There has to be a better way to deal with this issue. I think the worst part about this whole story is that the Harts and some of these issues were only highlighted because of the murder/suicide. How many other children are adopted out daily that have biological family member being denied the foster/adoption of them? How many adopted kids go to worse homes than they were pulled out of? Unless a larger tragedy occurs we will likely never know.
Some quotes I liked:
"The court rejected Priscilla's bid for adoption, partly because, according to state law, children must stay in a prospective adoptive home for six months before an adoption can be finalized. Even though that requirement can be waived, the judge chose not to do so. The Davis kids had spent five and a half months with Priscilla, two weeks shy of the requirement." (p. 39)
Pages 56-7 highlight some of the most egregious actions of the judge who ruled on the Davis children's adoption. His daughter literally killed someone while driving drunk and underage for drinking anyway. She spent four months in jail.
"When people adopt children from the U.S. foster system, most of them qualify for a state or federal monthly adoption subsidy that continues to assist in the care of the child until the child turns eighteen, or sometimes twenty-one. At the time the Harts pulled the children from school, Texas was sending them nearly $1,900 a month in adoption subsidies, making up half of their household income...teachers had reported six incidents to the state's social service agency in 2010 and 2011...After a while, the school stopped calling the Hart home, 'because they didn't want the children being disciplined or punished,' a later CPS investigation notes." (p. 102-3)
"Unlike kids in family homes, kids in foster care today rely on a separate state agency, Residential Child Care Investigations, to look into reports of suspected abuse or neglect. That agency has a tendency to downgrade abuse reports without ever investigating them. During four months in 2019, the agency ruled out nearly half of the more than nine hundred abuse reports it received - with no investigation whatsoever. In contrast, when an allegation of abuse is made against a child in a family home, CPS sends an investigator out to look into the complaint in every single case." (p. 116-17)
"The photo [of Devonte (Davis) Hart] was widely shared as a vision for racial harmony, with some who saw it not even realizing that it was taken at a Black Lives Matter solidarity protest. Others saw the photo differently, even at the time. In Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson wrote that she was immediately unsettled by Devonte's face: 'People saw what they wanted to see...People saw a picture of black grace when what the world was actually looking at was an abused hostage.'" (p. 133)
"But in the larger mainstream narrative of the case, it was as if Tammy and Sherry [the birth mothers] didn't exist at all. Many narratives focused on Jennifer as the ringleader, and cast Sarah as potentially another victim, although the evidence for this view is minimal. By hyper-individualizing the story - making it about one woman with dark psychological problems - the media largely let the state systems that failed the birth mothers off the hook. It let listeners and readers off the hook, too - free to enjoy the wacky and bizarre tale without thinking of how it came to occur." (p. 216)
[At the custody trial for Dontay Davis's son who had also been taken into foster care, this was during COVID so several court appearances were via Zoom] "Gloria Glover, the county attorney, was also logged in from home. On her lap bounced her own baby, seemingly home from day care due to the pandemic. This wasn't the first of Ye's hearings Glover attended while rocking her baby; no one brought it up in court, but outside court, Rhoda, Peaches's mom, expressed her displeasure that the attorney could sit in court holding her own baby while arguing to take Rhoda's daughter's baby away from her." (p. 239) [And at the end of the book you still don't know what happened with Ye and if Dontay and Peaches got custody back or not. Their case was so delayed because of COVID and limited court appearances dragged out the whole process even more than normal.]
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (Evening Edition book club)
I've always heard of Silent Spring and it's impact on the modern environmental/green movement, but hadn't actually read it until now when one of my book club's selected it. I've read quite a bit about industrial farming/agriculture vs. regenerative agriculture so I was hoping this would be more up my alley of personal reading. But, while I'm sure it was groundbreaking at the time, it was harder to read than I expected. It's extremely scientific and I understand that she was a scientist, but there are ways to write about topics from a scientific viewpoint that are more reader friendly to the general public - I didn't think this really was like that. It was also somewhat repetitive with whole chapters on how devastating DDT and various other toxic chemicals are for specific species - a whole chapter on birds dying, a whole chapter on fish dying, etc. And while I think it's good to note why these chemicals are so deadly and how they accumulate in internal organs, etc. all the very specific scientific explanations made it tedious to read (in my opinion). Reading it in 2023 it's also frustrating to see that not much has changed. We're not spraying DDT from airplanes anymore, but a HUGE amount of Roundup is used all over the country in both industrial and home uses. And the EPA like every other government run regulatory body is NOT helping clean up the environment despite their origin. Chemical companies and industrial agriculture companies are doing all the same shit they were in the 1940's and 50's it's just more hidden from public view. So, while I understand why this book was groundbreaking it doesn't offer any solutions outside the EPA being formed and some public pushback of the most obvious chemical spraying. I feel almost certain that my book club people are going to hate it and not finish it.
Here are some quotes I liked:
[Quote on the Epigraphs page] "I am pessimistic about the human race because it is too ingenious for its own good. Our approach to nature is to beat it into submission. We would stand a better chance of survival if we accommodated ourselves to this planet and viewed it appreciatively instead of skeptically and dictatorially. - E.B. White" (p. 7)
"Single-crop farming does not take advantage of the principles by which nature works; it is agriculture as an engineer might conceive it to be. Nature has introduced great variety into the landscape, but man has displayed a passion for simplifying it. Thus he undoes the built-in checks and balances by which nature holds the species within bounds." (p. 31)
[On the environmental impact of the Rocky Mountain Arsenal of the Army of Chemical Corps in Denver, CO] "...the most mysterious and probably in the long run the most significant feature of the whole episode was the discovery of the weed killer 2,4-D in some of the wells and in the holding ponds of the arsenal...the mystery lay in the fact that no 2,4-D had been manufactured at the arsenal at any stage of its operations. After long and careful study, the chemists at the plant concluded that the 2,4-D had been formed spontaneously in the open basins." (p. 65)
"The Michigan spraying was one of the first large-scale attacks on the Japanese beetle from the air. The choice of aldrin, one of the deadliest of all chemicals, was not determined by any peculiar suitability for Japanese beetle control, but simply by the wish to save money - aldrin was the cheapest of the compounds available. While the state in its official release to the press acknowledged that aldrin is a 'poison,' it implied that no harm could come to human beings in the heavily populated areas to which the chemical was applied." (p. 111)
"As the aerial spraying of DDT increased, so did the number of suits filed in the courts. Among them were suits brought by beekeepers in several areas of New York State. Even before the 1957 spraying, the beekeepers had suffered heavily from use of DDT in orchards...in May of that year this man lost 800 colonies after the state had sprayed a large area. So widespread and heavy was the loss that 14 other beekeepers joined him in suing the state for a quarter of a million dollars in damages." (p. 183)
"The contamination of our world is not alone a matter of mass spraying. Indeed, for most of us this is of less importance than the innumerable small-scale exposures to which we are subjected day by day, year after year." (p. 197)
"To have risked so much in our efforts to mold nature to our satisfaction and yet to have failed in achieving our goal would indeed be the final irony. Yet this, it seems, is our situation. The truth, seldom mentioned but there for anyone to see, is that nature is not so easily molded and that the insects are finding ways to circumvent our chemical attacks on them." (p. 269) [Same for current weed/farming use of Roundup creating super weeds that are Roundup resistant]
"The major chemical companies are pouring money into the universities to support research on insecticides. This creates attractive fellowships for graduate students and attractive staff positions. Biological-control studies, on the other hand, are never so endowed - for the simple reason that they do not promise anyone the fortunes that are to be made in the chemical industry. These are left to state and federal agencies, where the salaries paid are far less. This situation also explains the otherwise mystifying fact that certain outstanding entomologists are among the leading advocates of chemical control. Inquiry into the background of some of these men reveals that their entire research program is supported by the chemical industry...Can we then expect them to bite the hand that literally feeds them? But knowing their bias, how much credence can we give to their protests that insecticides are harmless?" (p. 282-83) [Same goes for pharmaceutical companies and why you can't always just "believe the science" when it's often paid for.]
"The effects of pesticides and other toxic chemical pollutants on the environment and public health had been well documented before Silent Spring, but in bits and pieces scattered through the technical literature. Environmental scientists were aware of the problem, but by and large they focused only on the narrow sector of their personal expertise. It was Rachel Carson's achievement to synthesize this knowledge into a single image that everyone, scientists and the general public alike, could easily understand." (p. 375)
