This I Believe

National Public Radio (NPR) had a series called This I Believe, which ran from 2005 to 2009.  It was "based on a 1950s radio program of the same name, hosted by acclaimed journalist Edward R. Murrow. Each day, Americans gathered by their radios to hear compelling essays from the likes of Eleanor Roosevelt, Jackie Robinson, Helen Keller, and Harry Truman as well as corporate leaders, cab drivers, scientists, and secretaries — anyone able to distill into a few minutes the guiding principles by which they lived."  Two books of essays came from the most recent series.  A few months ago, I was given a copy of This I Believe (2006), and this week I borrowed This I Believe II (2008) from my library.  Three quotes stick out for me from this second collection of essays.

Number 1 — "Sticking My Nose in the World's Business" by Brigid Daull Brockway (pp. 38-40):

I believe in sticking my nose into other people's business.

When I was a teenager, a man I knew killed his son and himself. On the TV news the neighbors were shocked that something like this would happen here, and they had no idea the family was in such trouble.

It was a lie. We all knew what that man did to his kids. ... I helped kill that kid, like everyone else, in the name of minding my own business.  (p. 38)

Read the whole essay and/or listen to Brigid read it by clicking this link to NPR.  It was aired on NPR's All Things Considered on February 11, 2008.  And now for the fun part -- Brigid's blog, "On Words," has been on my sidebar for months, under "Blogs I Read."  But I didn't know about her essay on NPR and in the book until this week.  I think this is fantastic and told her so on her current post, What I've Learned.  Way to go, Brigid!

Number 2 — "The Deeper Well of Memory" by Christine Cleary (pp. 56-58):

I believe there is a difference between memory and remembering.  Remembering has to do with turning the oven off before leaving the house, but memory is nurtured by emotion.  It springs from a deeper well, safe from dementia and the passage of time.  (p. 58)

Number 3 — "We Never Go Away" by Dennis Downey (pp. 68-71):

I believe that a book is a box because a book carries something from some one person to another and because it is used (and can be used) to carry ideas across time.  Which is how ideas build up.  (p. 70)

Even though I haven't finished the first book, I highly recommend both of them to you.  Each essay is around 300 words, short enough to read while waiting or when you don't want to start something long and involved at bedtime.  Next time, I'll share quotes from the first of the two books.  I rate each of them 9 of 10, an excellent book.

Sleeping on a Caturday

Cats sleep.  A lot.  We cat nap, but we also sleep deep.  Some of you talked to me last week by commenting on my Caturday post.  It's funny that you talked more when I said very little.  Here's the conversation we had:

Bookfool:  "Awww! So pretty!"
Kiki:  "I know, I know! I'm a beautiful cat. So nice of you to say so. Kiki"
Beth:  "Awww, Kiki...you don't need beauty rest. You are already gorgeous!"
Bonnie:  "Kiki would probably say she's gorgeous BECAUSE she sleeps a lot."
Kiki:  "Bonnie! What do you mean, I sleep a lot? I never sleep more than a cat's usual 16 hours a day. Thank you, Beth. I like the sound of gorgeous. I'm a gorgeous girl. Bonnie, why don't you start saying "gorgeous girl" instead of "good girl" when I do something that pleases you? Kiki Cat, the Gorgeous Girl, signing off (purrrrrrrr)"

And then Bonnie sneaked back and said,

"Well, I see Kiki's been here when I wasn't looking. It must have been a hit-and-run posting of her comment because she is currently asleep on my bed with her nose between her paws. Yes, Gorgeous Girl, you sleep a lot, compared to humans. But I love you, just the same. You know that. By the way, Gorgeous Girl, thank you for letting me sleep mornings until I wake up. Thank you for cuddling up next to me and waiting, rather than scratching or meowing to get breakfast sooner (like 4:00 in the morning). You're a good girl. I mean, you're a gorgeous girl."

It didn't take much to get HER trained, did it?

Kiki Cat, the Gorgeous Girl, signing off

P.S.  Here are two more pictures of sleeping cats.  Yes, yes, we cats do know how to nap.

Book Beginnings ~ it's 1913, and we're in Tennessee

My book is Page from a Tennessee Journal by Francine Thomas Howard (2010), which was a book prize from Color Online.  Here's how it starts, unless there were changes from this ARC version before its February publication:

Annalaura Welles stirred out of her fitful sleep to the certainty of two things.  Husband John was gone for good this time, and even with the help of her four young children, she would be unable to bring in the tobacco harvest by the end of August.  Though this was coming up the second year she'd sharecropped the McNaughton mid-forty, she still wasn't used to living in the converted upper reaches of a barn.

Reading these three sentences tells me several things. Annalaura's husband has done this before ("this time," she says), so she's been expecting it to happen again. They are sharecroppers, farming someone else's land. It's almost harvest time. John and Annalaura have four young children, and they live in a barn. That's quite a lot to pack into a couple of sentences!  It made me want to know what Annalaura would do in such a situation.

If you want to play along, this meme is hosted by Katy at A Few More Pages.  Share the first sentence or two of the book you are reading.  (Sometimes it takes several sentences to get the full thought.)  Then, share your impressions of that beginning.  Click this link to see what others say about the books they are reading this week.

Write It Right ~ two books on writing (no, three)

I was too busy to respond a month ago, when Chris of Chrisbookarama wrote Thoughts on Two Books about Writing.  I had been re-reading the third edition of The Elements of Style by Strunk and White (that would be the 1979 edition), and it was beside me on my desk as I read her post praising the book.  The other book Chris mentioned was The Writing Life by Annie Dillard.  Chris asked, "Do you have any favorite books on writing you would recommend?"

  The one that immediately came to mind was William Zinsser's On Writing Well, now in its seventh edition.  It's an excellent book on writing, and I was surprised that no one else mentioned it.  Wikipedia says,

"Zinsser emphasizes word economy."

Author James J. Kilpatrick, in his book The Writer's Art says that if he were limited to just one book on how to write, it would be William Zinsser's On Writing Well. He adds,

"Zinsser's sound theory is that 'writing improves in direct ratio to the number of things we can keep out of it.'"

Some teachers even go as far as to tell their students to "Zinsser" their work (to zinsser means to take the clutter out of their essays).  The cover pictured here is the 30th anniversary edition.

I also have Writing to Learn (1988) by Zinsser, on how to write and think clearly about any subject at all.  The title of the second chapter may sound familiar to teachers:  "Writing Across the Curriculum."  Think of it as an interdisciplinary approach to writing.

Zinsser's web site has excerpts from several of his books, including On Writing Well and Writing to Learn.

This Write It Right post is part of my new series about words and writing.

Cady's ready for Christmas ~ and winter's chill

Hummingbirds ~ by Joshua Gaylord, 2009

Helen said about the characters in Joshua Gaylord's Hummingbirds:

"I had a difficult time getting into this book, but I think I just wasn't in the right space because once I started reading it during the Dewey Read-a-Thon I plowed right through it. As a teacher this was an interesting book to read and, I must confess, at times it made me really uncomfortable to read the parts  about the sexual tension between the students and the teachers. I know that exists in real life for some teachers and some students, but it just seems so wrong."

She also said, about the students, "It's all about posturing..." I'd add that it isn't just the students who are posturing.  I got really annoyed with the writing style, long about page 104, and these snips are ALL from that page:

"Instead, he just sits for a few minutes inside the rattling sound of his wife's fingers on the keyboard and thinks about dry, weightless things -- dead leaves, insect legs, empty aluminum cans rolling down street gutters in hot desert winds. ... It's the face of an angel, the face of an infant, the face of a cartoon dog, the face of a total stranger, the face of a carnivorous cat, the face of laughing Buddha.  He knows that face. ... Sarah's face -- a face like clarity, like decency, like home fronts."

It's his wife's face, for Pete's sake!  Enough, already!  Maybe the author intends for me to hate the protagonist.  If so, he is succeeding.  Maybe the problem is that this semester I'm technically an English teacher myself.  I could SO relate to this long passage from pages 119-120:

Of all his responsibilities as a teacher of English -- the report cards and the faculty meetings, the roll-taking and the conferences with irate parents -- there is no duty more objectionable to Binhammer than the grading of papers.  The thing about papers is that they accumulate in the most tyrannical of ways.  They stack up in unruly piles with torn corners and awkwardly stapled edges hanging out everywhere.  They are always too many to carry around as a single quantity, and so it is necessary to break them into smaller piles -- knowing as you finish grading each pile that this is only one small part of the whole.  And most of them, in Binhammer's experience, offer little more than plagiaristic sentiments by the paragraphful.  All in neat little trains of black letters on endless leaves of white.

He always thinks about the plural quantity of papers as a "brick of papers," and uses it in the same way that you might talk about a brace of fowl or a herd of buffalo.

"What have you got there?" Walter asks this morning, leaning over the table in the teachers' lounge where Binhammer is holding a ballpoint pen -- in frozen potentiality -- over one such brick of papers.  He has read the same line five times.  He has memorized the words, but he can't seem to make them stick together or make sense in any way -- and down they plummet through the gutter of his consciousness.

"Papers," he replies.

"Papers, sure."  Then, after a pause:  "That's a lot of papers you've got there."

Walter takes a unique pleasure in Binhammer's suffering.  If he were an old soldier, he would be the kind to want new recruits hammered and humiliated into shape just as he once was.

Binhammer reads the line again.  He underlines it to help him focus.  But now he has to write something beside it to justify the underline.

"Are they good?" Walter asks as he sits down in a chair across the table and leans back.

Binhammer looks up.  "Not particularly."

"That's a shame."   Walter is glowing.

The other thing about this odious task is that it feels like work being dropped down a well.  The comments are made, the grade is given -- and the student's next paper might as well be a photocopy of the previous assignment with the title of one book whited out and another scrawled in.  It seems to make no difference what he writes -- whether it is thoughtful, articulated criticism or half-conscious nonsense.  Everything, he sometimes thinks, sounds like nonsense to teenage girls.  The whole world is nonsense.

He kicks himself awake and, even though his eyes have been concentrating on it for a long time now, looks at the paper before him with renewed vigor.  He has managed to get that line lodged securely in his head, now that he has underlined and starred it.  The next few lines he reads at a breakneck speed to the end of the paragraph, where he lets out a sign of relief.  Nothing.  The girl is saying nothing.  Nonsense piled on top of nonsense.  He circles a misplaced comma and moves on.

Pardon me while I get back to grading my latest brick of papers. Here's a link to my teaser, written the day the book arrived.  And here's an interview with the author that Helen posted. I rate this book 6 of 10, above average.

Chains ~ by Laurie Halse Anderson, 2008

Rap review of Chains



Synopsis:  As the Revolutionary War begins, thirteen-year-old Isabel wages her own fight for freedom. Promised freedom upon the death of their owner, she and her sister, Ruth, in a cruel twist of fate become the property of a malicious New York City couple, the Locktons, who have no sympathy for the American Revolution and even less for Ruth and Isabel. When Isabel meets Curzon, a slave with ties to the Patriots, he encourages her to spy on her owners, who know details of British plans for invasion. She is reluctant at first, but when the unthinkable happens to Ruth, Isabel realizes her loyalty is available to the bidder who can provide her with freedom.

Book trailer for Chains



I rate this YA book 9 of 10, an excellent book. Didn't the young man make a fantastic rap video? That's not the way I did homework.