Charles and Emma ~ by Deborah Heiligman, 2009

Charles and Emma: The Darwins' Leap of Faith by Deborah Heiligman (2009) fits within the guidelines for both reading challenges I'm taking part in this year.  The "leap of faith" these two people took when they married each other centered on her religion and his science.

World Religions Challenge

Emma was religious, and Charles worried even before he proposed to her that his religious doubts could be a problem.  She did worry that they would not spend eternity together because, if he did not accept Christianity, he would be in hell.  Yet they continued to discuss it all their lives, while continuing their love and devotion to each other.  Here are their positions:

Charles (p. 185):  "He had already figured out that humans had a common ancestor with apes (not that people evolved from apes, as many people still misunderstand it).

Emma (p. 98):  "Not everything can be proven, Emma reasoned, but that does ot mean something that cannot be proven is wrong.  Belief comes from a different place than science."

After he died an old man, Emma edited out of his autobiography passages he had intended only for the family to read, including this one (p. 231):  "I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to bed true: for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished.  And this is a damnable doctrine."

Yet Charles always needed her and she was always there for him (page 58):  "When he was traveling around the world on the Beagle, Charles was wretchedly seasick almost evewry day he was on board he ship.  He lived for the times he could get off the rolling, rocky seas and onto solid land.  Emma might not be passionate like his old girlfriend, Fanny Owen, was; she might not be sophisticated the way the Horner girls were, but she was brilliant and she was open-minded and she was unflappable.  She could be his solid land in the tumultuous seas of his heretical thoughts."

Emma lived from 1808 to 1896, nearly all of the nineteenth century.  The women of her day went through a lot that most women in Western culture don't have to deal with, at least not on the same scale.  Learning about the way they lived makes this book appropriate for the Women Unbound reading challenge.

Women Unbound

When Emma got pregnant -- they had ten children -- she had the added concern that she needed to persuade Charles before they were parted by death.  Even though I was born only 44 years after Emma died, and even though the women in the generations before me passed on the fears that death was always a possibility during childbirth, I was nevertheless startled to read that Emma worried about death so young.  The death of Charles, that is.  If she should die, she wanted him to have already espoused her faith so that eventually he would join her in heaven.

She also had the added worry about her children dying.  I didn't make a note of it, but somewhere in the book I seem to remember reading that one in four or five children died.  Of their ten children, one died the year she was born, one at age ten, and one around two or three.  That was heartbreaking.

So was the loss of other loved ones.  They never knew when someone else would die, and Emma had the added worry that Charles was sick a lot.  It seemed to me that he was always sick, possibly from anxiety.  He did have panic attacks thinking of how people would react to his ideas.

I highly recommend this book.  Not only is it an award-winning book (Printz Honor Book for Excellence in Young Adult Literature, National Book Award Finalist, and winner of the ALA's Excellence in Young Adult Nonfiction), but I rate it 9 of 10, an excellent book.

Dewey's 24-hour Read-a-Thon

Okay, I've decided (sort of at the last minute) to do the 24-hour Read-a-Thon.  I've participated before, as cheerleader and as reader, when Dewey first started it.  This time I'm a reader, doing it in memory of Dewey.

Date:  April 10, 2010
Time:  starting at 8:00 a.m.
in my (Eastern) time zone
Sign up:  here
My sign-up number:  300
(Yikes!  We have a crowd!)
Updates: will be posted here

Infidel ~ a teaser (with my comment)

The moral of every one of my grandmother's stories rested on our honor. We must be strong, clever, suspicious; we must obey the rules of the clan. Suspicion is good, especially if you are a girl. For girls can be taken, or they may yield. And if a girl's virginity is despoiled, she not only obliterates her own honor, she also damages the honor of her father, uncles, brothers, male cousins. There is nothing worse than to be the agent of such catastrophe.

This tells me that women must be more powerful than men in that culture. Men seem to be totally dependent upon women for who they are. Without women, the men wouldn't have any honor. This quote comes from page 6 of Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali (2007), but the interpretation is entirely my own.

Eve's Daughters

Today's teaser is from Eve's Daughters: The Forbidden Heroism of Women by Miriam F. Polster (1992).  The book explores differences in how men and women are heroes, like this from page 31:

"The woman hero usually relies less on muscular strength than her male counterpart and invents other ways to achieve a desired end.  Women rely more on persuasion and argument.  They also attend as much to the manner in which something is done as to the ultimate purpose.  The woman hero may find alternatives to direct confrontation, for example, finding common purposes that make opposition unnecessary."

I found more about the ways that women and men are heroic on pages 106 and 107:

"What was womanly about her heroism is its affinity to the setting where it occurred.  For her, geography was neither a stage for a grand adventure nor an adversary to be conquered:  it was a pervasive context for interactions with her surroundings. ... The personal well from which she draws her heroic strength is her sense of response to challenge in relationship to, not victory over."

I'm crazy about Raegan

She walks, she talks ("ma ma ma ma ma"), she makes motor sounds with her mouth (see those fast-moving fingers at her lips).  The photo below shows my children:   Barbara (left) and Sandra (right) with their "little brother" David.  The twin on the right is Raegan's grandmother, but (last photo) I'm the GREAT-grandma.

And sometimes a tired girl's gotta take a break from all these relatives.

Teaser ~ Half Broke Horses

Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls is "a true life novel" about the life of the author's grandmother, Lily Casey Smith.  Lily was sent home halfway through the school year, and her father met her when she arrived on the stagecoach.

"So you took my tuition money and bought dogs?"

"Watch that tone," Dad said. ...

"Did you take Buster out of school, too?"

"No.  He's a boy and needs that diploma if he's going to get anywhere."  Dad pushed the dogs over and found a spot for my suitcase.  "And anyway," he said, "we need you on the ranch."

Phillis Wheatley ~ a teaser

This quote is from My Name Is Phillis Wheatley: A Story of Slavery and Freedom by Afua Cooper (2009).  Phillis Wheatley was born free in Senegal in West Africa in 1753, where she was known as Penda Wane.  She was captured by slave-traders from Boston and got a new name.  The book starts in June 1773 when she was nineteen years old, being feted by the British upper- class at a reception in London.  She is remembering her earlier life (page 12):

"I am in my house, engaged in music lessons with my mother.  Her name is Asta.  She is a griot, a bard, a praise singer and poet, and it is understood that I will follow her path.  My mother's mother and her mother before her were griots.  It is my family's calling.  We memorize our people's history, laws, customs and traditions, and recite these narratives as poetry, admonitions, lectures and songs.  Out family carried the traditions of our people even as they moved across great tracts of land in their many migrations."