Books and weather

The Good Life ~ by Erin McGraw, 2004, stories, 208 pages

These stories feature characters battling daily demons of envy, fear, and disillusionment while somehow maintaining an abiding optimism.  They are trying to weather the confounding people of the world — the chronically successful, the lucky in love, the athletically gifted — clinging to their cynicism while admitting that hope and passion demand a suspension of skepticism.  (This is one of the 28 books I got on sale back in February and wrote about HERE.  I'm finally reading it.)

The Feminine Mistake: Are We Giving Up Too Much? ~ by Leslie Bennetts, 2007, feminism, 380 pages

Women are constantly being told that it's simply too difficult to balance work and family, so if they don't really "have to" work, it's better for their families if they stay home.  Not only is this untrue, Leslie Bennetts says, but the arguments in favor of stay-at-home motherhood fail to consider the surprising benefits of work and the unexpected toll of giving it up.  It's time, she says, to get the message across — combining work and family really is the best choice for most women, and it's eminently doable.

Bennetts and millions of other working women provide ample proof that there are many different ways to have kids, maintain a challenging career, and have a richly rewarding life as a result.  Earning money and being successful not only make women feel great, but when women sacrifice their financial autonomy by quitting their jobs, they become vulnerable to divorce as well as the potential illness, death, or unemployment of their breadwinner husbands.  Further, they forfeit the intellectual, emotional, psychological, and even medical benefits of self-sufficiency.

The truth is that when women gamble on dependency, most eventually end up on the wrong side of the odds.  In interviews with women from a wide range of backgrounds, the author tells their dramatic stories — some triumphant, others heartbreaking.  This book will inspire women to accept the challenge of figuring out who they are and what they want to do with their lives in addition to raising children.  Not since Betty Friedan has anyone offered such an eye-opening and persuasive argument for why women can — and should — embrace the complex lives they deserve.

Farmers' Almanac winter 2023 predictions

"Winter arrives this year on December 21, 2023.  On the winter solstice, those of us who live in the Northern Hemisphere are tilted as far away from our Sun as possible.  Winter brings cooler weather, the joy of winter sports, curling [up] by the fire, and the holiday spirit.  It also brings shoveling, snowblowing, dealing with bad roads, and sometimes unbearable temperatures.  What will winter bring this year?  A Winter Wonderland!"

Deb Nance at Readerbuzz

hosts The Sunday Salon.

Thinking about a couple of books I've found during my move

Seizing the Apple: A Feminist Spirituality of Personal Growth ~ by Denise Lardner Carmody, 1984, feminism, viii + 184 pages

By creatively employing the insights of feminist psychologists, novelists, and what she calls the new transcendentalist school of Lonergan, Voegelin, and Rahner, the author (1935-2023) offers us a distinctly feminist spirituality — one that's characterized by self-transcendence or personal growth.  The model she uses is that of a helix or upward spiral, and the goal is to establish harmony between the demands of freedom on the one side — the freedom to push ahead, stretch one's horizons, seize the apple — and the call to loving holism, caring, making connections on the other side.  Moving from theory to practice in the last part of the book, the author applies her model to four zones of personal life:  prayer, work, family life, and politics.

Word of the Day #1

ho·lism / noun = the theory that parts of a whole are in intimate interconnection, such that they cannot exist independently of the whole, or cannot be understood without reference to the whole, which is thus regarded as greater than the sum of its parts.  Holism is often applied to mental states, language, and ecology.  Example:  "Carmody's goal was to establish harmony between the demands of freedom (on one side) and loving holism, caring, and making connections (on the other side)."

Working but Poor: America's Contradiction ~ by Sar A. Levitan and Isaac Shapiro, 1987, political science / economics, ix + 142 pages

The American ethos equates work with material progress, but nine million Americans labor in poverty.  Two million of them work at year-round, full-time jobs.  "In a nation as affluent as the United States," the authors say, "the persistence of the working poor challenges the fairness of the rules governing the distribution of economic rewards."

I unearthed a stack of books I got in the 1980s; I have never read either of these.  I bought the upper one like new and paid only $2.00 for it on sale in 1986.  The original Cokesbury price was $10.95, but today this paperback would cost me $17.61 online.

The lower one was brand new and still in shrink wrap, but a half-torn-off price sticker was taped to the front.  That may means I bought it on sale, but maybe not.  Since I never opened it, it's still a "new" book decades later!

Word of the Day #2

shrink-wrap / verb = package (an article) by enclosing it in clinging transparent plastic film that shrinks tightly on to it.  Example:  "The Johns Hopkins University Press carefully shrink-wrapped this book."