Review of Emotional Vampires, by Albert J. Bernstein

Emotional Vampires

Dealing with People Who Drain You Dry

by Albert J. Bernstein, PhD

McGraw-Hill, New York, 2001. 242 pages.

If you have enough difficult people in your life that you want to read a book to boost your ability to deal with them — well, you might as well have some fun with it!

This light-hearted look at difficult people actually has some very helpful tips. And it does make you laugh when the comparison with vampires seems especially apt.

The author explains that most emotional vampires you will encounter do not have full-fledged personality disorders, but the ways they think and act do seem to fall into patterns of five types: Antisocial Vampires, Histrionic Vampires, Narcissistic Vampires, Obsessive-Compulsive Vampires, and Paranoid Vampires.

He also explains that most difficult people are a blend of two or more types, so feel free to use whichever technique works best for dealing with them. I also liked this paragraph:

“If you see yourself among the vampires, take heart; it is a very good sign. We all have some tendencies in the direction of personality disorders. If you recognize your own, they are apt to be less of a problem than if you have no insight.”

Here are some attitudes that apply to all emotional vampires:

“My Needs Are More Important Than Yours.”
“The Rules Apply to Other People, Not Me.”
“It’s Not My Fault, Ever.”
“I Want It Now.”
“If I Don’t Get My Way, I Throw a Tantrum.”

Then he gives some general qualities of emotional vampires:

“VAMPIRES PREY ON HUMANS
Night-stalking vampires will drain your blood. Emotional Vampires will use you to meet whatever needs they happen to be experiencing at the moment. They have no qualms about taking your effort, your money, your love, your attention, your admiration, your body, or your soul to meet their insatiable cravings. They want what they want, and they don’t much care how you feel about it.”

“VAMPIRES CAN CHANGE THEIR SHAPES
Storybook vampires can change themselves into bats, wolves, or a cold, formless mist that seeps through unguarded windows. Emotional Vampires can turn themselves into whatever you want to see, but only long enough to lure you in. To say that they are consummate actors doesn’t do them justice. Often, they play their roles so well that they fool themselves into believing they are who they pretend to be.”

“VAMPIRES CAN’T SEE THEMSELVES IN A MIRROR
If you want to know if someone is a vampire, hold up a mirror and see if there’s a reflection. If you want to know if someone is an Emotional Vampire, hold up a self-help book that describes his personality perfectly and see if there’s a spark of recognition. With both kinds of vampires there will be nothing there. Night-stalking vampires have no reflections; Emotional Vampires have no insight.”

“VAMPIRES ARE MORE POWERFUL IN THE DARK
Both kinds of vampires thrive on darkness. Blood-hungry vampires stalk the night. Emotional Vampires lurk in the darker side of human nature. They take power from secrets. Your dealings with them will usually involve a few little details that you’d rather not share, because other people wouldn’t understand.”

“A VAMPIRE’S BITE CAN TURN YOU INTO A VAMPIRE
Throughout the ages, vampirism has been contagious. A few bites and vampires can have you acting just as immaturely as they do.”

The book goes on to help you recognize different types of vampires and understand how best to respond. Some of the advice seems particularly brilliant:

“The maddening thing about Passive-Aggressives is that their words are so different from their actions. If you ask them what they want, they’ll say they want to make you happy, even as they do things to make you miserable.

“On the surface, their actions make no sense, but there is an underlying logic. If you want to understand Histrionics, read their actions as if they were sad, angry adolescent poems about how the expectations of others are a prison from which they can never escape.

“If you’re involved with Passive-Aggressive Histrionics, you cannot avoid being perceived as the person who is imprisoning them. Don’t try. Instead, focus on your own behavior, and try to be a compassionate jailer.”

“Forget any attempt to make Passive-Aggressive vampires admit to what they really feel. It’ll only make your headache worse. Don’t make the mistake of demanding that they talk to you directly about problems. You might as well demand that they speak in rhyming couplets.

“There really are no battles you can win with the Passive-Aggressive. Once the situation turns into a battle, you have already lost.”

“Explicit instructions, while absolutely necessary will not work as well as you think they ought. Passive-Aggressive vampires deal with the world by misunderstanding and by being misunderstood. The thing they never misunderstand is praise. Use gobs of it.”

“Passive-Aggressive vampires will always do whatever you pay the most attention to. If you make a big deal out of forgetting, complaining, surliness, negative body language, or whatever, that’s what you’ll get. With Passive-Aggressives it is possible to waste considerable time and effort trying to get them to improve their attitude rather than getting the job done. Make sure your contingencies favor the behaviors you really want rather than the ones you find most annoying. What’s the point of rewarding people for giving you headaches?”

Of course, as helpful as this book was in getting me to understand how best to deal with certain difficult people, it also opened my eyes to why it might be difficult to live with me:

“Perfectionism is a vice that masquerades as a virtue. It can lead to excellence, but it usually doesn’t. Doing everything correctly can become the top priority, eclipsing the importance of the task or the feelings of other people. The wake of Obsessive-Compulsive vampires is an orderly row of insignificant tasks done to perfection, and significant people leaving in frustration because they don’t measure up.”

“Perfectionists, bless their neurotic little hearts, don’t have a clue about what a pain they are to everyone around them. It’s not that they don’t care what the people close to them feel; it’s just that they get so distracted by little details in the process of living that they miss the overall product….

“Perfectionists never do anything spontaneously, except perhaps to notice mistakes. To Obsessive-Compulsives, the notion of a pleasant surprise is an oxymoron.”

“If your feelings are hurt, say so. Don’t try to make your point indirectly by rebelling, withdrawing, ‘accidentally’ making mistakes, or griping to friends, family, and coworkers. Passive-aggressive behavior just makes Perfectionists feel more justified in their anger. There’s no point in throwing gas on the fire.”

“Show some appreciation. You can be sure that however hard they are on you, Perfectionists are twice as hard on themselves.”

Fortunately, he also has good tips for self-help if you recognize vampire qualities in yourself. For perfectionistic vampires, among other things, he tells us:

“Goof Off. Spend a little time every day just sitting and doing nothing. Computer solitaire was invented for this purpose. Learn some sort of relaxation technique and practice it every day, especially on the days you think you’re too busy.”

Hmmm. Sounds like a good excuse to start a computer game!

Another good tip: “Always Know Your Top Priority. Not for the moment, but for your whole life. Think about what you’d like to have carved on your tombstone and work toward that. The other details will take care of themselves.”

A funny thing happened after I wrote this review: At work the next morning, I was happily doing an excessively detail-oriented task. (Checking Y’s and N’s on an attendance sheet against what had been put in the computer.) I realized there’s a reason I related to the Perfectionistic statements. Now, there is a good side to being detail-oriented — but this book pointed out some ways that being too perfectionistic in relationships can cause conflict and barrel over people’s feelings.

I thought it was a bit ironic that they specifically mentioned how Perfectionistic vampires and Passive-Agressive vampires can particularly antagonize one another. When they are in love, their strengths can dovetail nicely. But when in conflict, they can definitely make things worse if they don’t take care.

In summary, this book has some valuable tips on interacting with difficult people and becoming less of a difficult person. As you can see, I focused on the ones that applied to my life. I’m sure the other categories are equally insightful if that’s what relates to you. All of the suggestions and insights are handled in a light-hearted, easy-to-swallow way.

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Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Nonfiction/emotional_vampires.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Review of The Numbers Behind Numb3rs

The Numbers Behind Numb3rs

Solving Crime with Mathematics

by Kevin Devlin and Gary Lorden

Plume (Penguin), 2007. 243 pages.
Starred Review

Okay, I admit that I’m a math geek. All I have to do to prove it is tell you about my prime factorization sweater.

So, it’s a no-brainer that I love the TV show Numb3rs. This book is written by Keith Devlin, “NPR’s ‘Math Guy,'” a consulting professor at Stanford, and Gary Lorden, “the Math Consultant on Numb3rs,” a math professor at Caltech (the school after which the fictional Calsci is modelled). They take the episodes of the first season of Numb3rs, explain the math concepts behind them, and talk about actual criminal cases where these concepts were used.

I think they do a great job of making the concepts understandable without getting bogged down with equations. I shouldn’t be surprised, since on the show Charlie always uses metaphors to explain what they can do with numbers.

A few of the things they talk about — with examples from actual cases — are DNA profiling, finding meaningful patterns in masses of information, using Bayesian Inference to detect the future, and making and breaking codes.

I don’t think I need to say much more about it. If you find this stuff fascinating, you know who you are! All I have to do is tell you this cool book exists.

If, on the other hand, this sounds mind-numbing and not the least bit cool to you, then no amount of my talking is likely to convince you, and I admit that you probably will not like the book.

But if you want to be dazzled by the power of numbers and get a handle on some of the powerful concepts that can be used to fight crime, you will thoroughly enjoy this book, as I did.

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/nonfiction/numbers_behind_numb3rs.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Review of You Can Be Happy No Matter What, by Richard Carlson

You Can Be Happy No Matter What

Five Principles for Keeping Life in Perspective

by Richard Carlson, PhD

New World Library, Novato, California, 1997. 141 pages.

You Can Be Happy No Matter What hit the spot for me. Some nice, practical advice on being happy.

Since my husband left me a few years ago, and I’m still going through a divorce, my life has not turned out the way I planned — not at all. But I’m bound and determined that I don’t want choices someone else made to ruin my happiness. Richard Carlson gives you some nice practical advice to help yourself be happier more of the time.

Here are some passages I liked:

“When you can recognize the feeling of happiness when it’s there, you will realize that this feeling is what you have been looking for all along. The feeling isn’t leading somewhere else — it’s the goal, not the means to a goal. If the bride-to-be understands that her happiness comes first from within, she can make the decision to marry or not to marry from a place of wisdom, not from a place of lack. If she is already happy, the marriage will also be happy. If the couple then decides to have children, the children will grow up in a happy environment without the pressure of being someone’s source of happiness. The same will be true throughout the life of any happy person. Happiness breeds a happy existence and a joyous way of looking at life….

“Happiness is right now. Your life is not a dress rehearsal for some later date — it is right here, right now. The invisible quality of happiness we have all been looking for is right here in a feeling.”

He reminds us that we don’t have to be led by our thoughts down unhappy paths:

“There’s nothing to fear from thought itself, once we understand that it’s just thought.

“Perhaps the greatest misinterpretation of this principle is to believe that the goal is to control what you think about. It isn’t. The goal is to understand thought for what it is: an ability you have that shapes your reality from the inside out. Nothing more, nothing less. What you think about is not ultimately going to determine the quality of your life, but rather the relationship you have to your own thinking — the way you manufacture your thoughts and respond to them. Do you hear your thinking as reality, or as thought?”

Another insightful comment was to lower our tolerance for stress, which I interpreted as meaning to be more aware of your feelings if you want to have positive feelings:

“Surprisingly, the solution to stress is to begin to lower our tolerance to stress. This is the opposite of what most of us have been taught, but it is the truth. Lowering our tolerance to stress is based on the simple principle that our level of internal stress will always be exactly equal to our current tolerance. This is why people who can handle lots of stress always have to do just that.

“People with extremely high levels of stress tolerance might end up with a stress-related heart attack before they begin to pay attention to what the stress is telling them. Others may end their marriage or find themselves in a recovery center for alcohol or drugs. People with lower tolerance might begin paying attention to their stress earlier, when their job first begins to seem overwhelming or when they find themselves snapping at their children. Still others, who can’t tolerate stress at all, sense that it’s time to slow down and regain perspective when they start merely having negative thoughts about their friends or family.

“The lower our tolerance is for stress, the better off we are psychologically. When our goal is to feel our stress as early as possible, we can “nip stress in the bud” earlier, and return more quickly to a positive feeling state. We have choices; in fact, we have a series of “choice points,” in any situation. The longer we wait to disregard the stressful thoughts, the more difficult it becomes to bring ourselves back to our natural state of mind. Eventually, with practice, any of us can get to the point where we are aware of our negative thoughts before they pull us off track.”

The basic format of the book covers five principles for being happy, and then talks about how to apply them. The chapters are short and simple, but there are definitely some dynamic principles here. The chapters made nice selections to read at the beginning of the day to remind me of things like this:

“To a happy person, the formula for happiness is quite simple: Regardless of what happened early this morning, last week, or last year — or what may happen later this evening, tomorrow, or three years from now — now is where happiness lies. Happy people understand that life is really nothing more than a series of present moments to experience. Mostly, they understand that right now, this very moment, is where life is truly lived.”

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

The Ten Things to Do When Your Life Falls Apart

The Ten Things to Do When Your Life Falls Apart

An Emotional and Spiritual Handbook

by Daphne Rose Kingma

New World Library, Novato, California, 2010. 214 pages.
Starred Review

This book brought wonderful encouragement to me right when I was losing my job at the library.

A lot of books about dealing with crisis don’t move me. I know this stuff. I’ve been dealing with my husband leaving me for almost five years now, and it’s been an enormous crisis, and I’m coming out the other side.

But as I faced the new crisis of losing the job which had been some of my consolation in the divorce, it was a good time to think again about what I knew and how I should face this new crisis, along with the ongoing crisis of divorce.

Daphne Rose Kingma has a way of putting the principles that raises a cry of recognition. Not in the sense that I know this and don’t need to go over it again, but instead like a lovely song of truth that I want to keep singing.

Just this evening, as I’m writing this review, I’ve been struggling with a desire to call up my husband and say, “Hey, why don’t we just call the whole thing off?” Even though I know that would be pursuing him again — and I really need to let him go, after all this time. There’s a part of me that still doesn’t believe it really happened. And maybe that’s the same part of me that really wants to be back in a librarian job. (Hmmm. Come to think of it, maybe this was all brought on by a new assignment in my new job of particular boredom today.)

So, for my own sake, I’d like to list The Ten Things to Do When Your Life Falls Apart, and give some quotations from each one, to give you a feel for the helpful encouragement in this book.

The first step deals with the raw emotion of what’s happening to you: “Cry Your Heart Out.”

“We live in a culture that’s afraid of grieving; we don’t know how to cry. When our lives fall apart in one way or another, we usually try to take control of things and solve them, forget them, or deny them — rather than experience them, accept them, or see the meaning they may hold for us. That’s because underlying many of our responses to difficulty is the unstated assumption that we should be able to engage in life, liberty, and the unbridled pursuit of happiness without ever having to grieve — over anything. It’s almost as if we believe that pain, suffering, and challenge are bad and should never be a part of our path.

“The truth is that pain is one of our greatest teachers, hurt can be a birth, and our sufferings are the portals to change. This being true, we need to know how to grieve, to mourn, to shed our tears, because grief is the cure for the pain of loss. Tears are the medicine of grieving.

“When life is hard, when you’re in a crisis, you should cry not because you’re weak but because crying holds the power of healing. Tears, in fact, are the vehicle for transformation. When you cry, your loss moves through you to the point of exit. What was holding you up and eating you up, what was stuck inside your body, gets released and moves outside your body. Your physical structure is quite literally cleansed and, like a blackboard sponged clean, is available to receive the imprint of whatever wants to come next. That’s why, when you have cried, you will be reborn, free to begin again.”

The second Thing to Do is to Face Your Defaults — examine what’s your normal response.

“Your defaults are whatever you do when you don’t know how to cope or what to do next…. Defaults are habitual behaviors, and they’re not always the best way to cope. New — and especially, difficult — circumstances howl out for new solutions: improvisation, imagination, ingenuity. But when we’re intimidated, scared, and overwhelmed, most of us resort to our default behaviors because, well, we always have, and there they are.”

“A crisis is always a chance not only to scrape away the film of your defaults but to see that life is inviting you to develop, to move in the direction of your own creative aliveness, to become more of who you are. In this way, pain is the initiator of great change, and crisis is definitely an opportunity. Indeed, it is an unsolicited chance to become more of yourself, more than you ever have been.”

The third step is to Do Something Different.

“When a crisis occurs, it’s asking not only that we scramble and find some tools to deal with the vexing problems at hand, but also that we grow. Tough times, pain, illness, radically changed circumstances, walls that cave in, rugs that get pulled out from under us, floods that inundate, fires that turn our worlds to heaps of ashes — these ‘inspire’ us to do something different, to become more, better, other than we have been. Indeed, these disasters are all the ways the cosmos has of saying: we’ve been wanting you to do something different. You didn’t get it the first time — or the first hundred times — so, we’ve provided yet another opportunity, a ‘discount special’ for This Life Only, for you to make the changes your soul has been crying out for.”

You won’t be surprised by the fourth step. You knew it had to be in there somewhere: Let Go.

“We’re not used to letting go. We’re used to hanging on for dear life. We hang on for lots of reasons: because something is familiar; because the past is a known commodity and the future is a question mark; because we lack imagination and can’t conceive of a future better than the past we’ve had; because blankies (no matter how ragged and trashed they are) and relationships (no matter how complete they already are or inappropriate they have become) are a comfort to us. We hang on because we’ve been taught that persistence is good and we should never give up. Or we’re simply afraid of the free fall, afraid of coming alive as ourselves….

“Letting go, on the other hand, asks you to believe that somewhere across the Big Tent of Life there will be another trapeze bar that you can take hold of after you’ve let go of this one. It’s an act of terror and freedom, of trust and faith that when you let go, you will find something new, better, different.”

“We need to let go because whatever we’re holding on to is keeping us attached to the problem. Hanging on is fear; letting go is hope. Holding on is believing that there’s only a past; letting go is knowing that there’s a future. In letting go, we surrender the weight of our burdens and find the lightness of being with which to begin once again. We open a door for the intervention of the divine….

“New lands await, freedom abounds. Opportunities hide like rain in the clouds waiting for the moment to reveal themselves. The white canvas, crying out for paint, is alive with possibility. The freed man is free to fall in love again; the freed woman to claim her strength, find her true work, begin again at a deeper and more satisfying level.”

Next, you need to Remember Who You’ve Always Been.

“In the midst of the current frazzling fray, it’s probably easy to feel as if somehow everything’s your fault — not because it is, of course, but simply because you’re overwhelmed. You feel as if you ought to have the stamina, the resources, the savvy, or the moxie to get yourself out of or through all this — whatever your particular “this” is — and you don’t. You feel as if you should have been able to prevent the crisis from happening in the first place — but you didn’t. You may feel utterly hopeless, helpless, and defeated as all hell breaks loose in your life, like you have nothing to work with, nothing to count on right now. You may wake up in the morning (or at three in the morning) feeling stripped of everything you ever were, every talent and strength you ever had.

“But that’s simply not true. When the tectonic plates of the world are shifting beneath your feet, it is hard to remember that there’s a continuous thread of genius, of power, of responsiveness that runs through your life, that, since the beginning, you’ve had certain qualities to bring to the task at hand — no matter how fraught it may be with challenge and frustration.

“Who you are now is who you’ve always been. You didn’t wake up today as somebody else. You are a single, talented, rare, unrepeatable human being. There is something at your core that’s unique to you, that always has been and always will be. This is the throughline of your personal essence, the chiming chord of your unique existence. It has carried you through every day of the year, every year of your life, and it is what will sustain you now. The you who has always been you has been preparing for this moment. The power that is in you will rise to this occasion. You are equal to it with your gifts.”

“Crisis is a challenge to express your strengths at their highest arc, which is when you also are at your most beautiful.”

The sixth Thing to Do When Your Life Falls Apart is to Persist.

“Persistence is the spiritual grace that allows you to continue to act with optimism even when you feel trapped in the pit of hell. It is the steadfast, continual, simple — and at time excruciatingly difficult — practice of trudging forward until the difficult present you’re scared will go on forever is replaced by a future that has a new color scheme.”

“When you decide to persist, it’s not because you’re an idiot, not because you don’t know from the inside or from looking around just how dire your current circumstances are. It’s because in the face of perhaps thousands of reasons to be discouraged, you choose to be bold, to carry on, to keep on duking it out, no matter how grizzly, tedious, intractable, or seemingly hopeless the present situation may seem. The power of persistence is required especially when we’re dealing with intense, emotionally devastating circumstances or bunches of hugely difficult things that have stacked up all at once.”

“In this sense, persistence is visionary. Expectant. A sacred journey resplendent with hope. When you persist, you know, on a visceral level, that you are enacting your part in the invisible contract between you and the cosmos. Instead of feeling powerless, you feel alive. Instead of feeling hopeless, you have a sense that you’re on the path to somewhere. Instead of feeling like a victim, you feel like a person of action; in your deep self you know that this choice for action will one day be rewarded with a response.”

The seventh step in dealing with crisis is to Integrate Your Loss.

“In order to get through the crisis you’re in, you will have to accept what has happened and then integrate it into the fabric of your life. Your integration of the content and the meaning of the crisis will be the sign, the hallmark, that you are moving through this challenge.”

“Crisis cajoles us to move toward integration, to expand, to accept more. This process of acceptance is not incidental to a challenging time; it is one of its intended purposes. That is because, while our human nature prefers distinction, separation, and confusion, our spiritual nature seeks wholeness, inclusion, and union. Since we are ultimately spiritual in nature, life keeps pointing us in the direction of this growth. Like the kaleidoscope, it keeps offering us the pieces that we must put together.

“Integration can arrive in an instant, when, through the free fall of surrender, you finally accept each one of the parts of your existence, even the ugly ones, even the irritating ones, even the ones you want to negate, destroy, and disown. Or it can come more slowly, as day by day, episode by episode, you gradually come to accept what has happened. When you do, you become whole. You become whole not because you have finally gotten rid of the painful or offensive item, not because you have escaped, but because you have embraced it. This is the process of integration in ourselves, in others, in the world. When we have achieved full integration, we know that there is only wholeness, which is enlightenment itself.

“Moving toward integration, to the space in yourself where you can see the wholeness of life, gives you a sense of hope. It also brings great peace because you know that your life, even in this crisis, and your soul, for all eternity, are nestled in the blanket of wholeness where everything, even this very difficult time, has its perfect place.”

The eighth Thing to Do When Your Life Falls Apart is to Live Simply.

“Living simply is paring away — stuff, obligations, expectations, people. It’s removing all the glut and rubble from your life, making space in your house, your heart, your brain, and your life for exactly and only what you need.”

“It’s good to live simply when things are going well, but when life is difficult, it’s essential. That’s because every object, habit, movement, conversation, undertaking, responsibility, and reaction takes energy. The more people, circumstances, widgets, emails, objects, people, and tasks you’re dealing with, the less energy you have….

“You will need to live simply through this crisis or else you won’t have enough energy to get through it. Once you have lived through it, you will understand more about what’s really important in life. In fact, maybe that’s why it showed up in the first place.”

Ninth in the list, if you want to get through this crisis, you will have to Go Where the Love Is.

“When we’re beset by crisis, we also begin to recognize our own vulnerability. We see that in one realm or another we, ourselves, could use some assistance. And so, from the chalice of our own need, we start reaching out for help. That’s because once we’ve been taken apart by life, we are more humble, more open, more willing to both give and receive. We take bigger chances. We speak up. We reveal ourselves. We ask. We break down. We accept comfort. Words. A blanket. A meal. In time, we realize that something amazing has happened: that the more we reach out to others, the less lonely we feel ourselves. Somehow, even in the midst of our chaos, we are actually feeling loved. And the beautiful thing is that, the more love we need, suddenly the more we have to give.

“Learning to love, loving more, that’s the bottom line of what a crisis is really all about. Through it, we are being asked to expand beyond the inordinate focus on ourselves — our obsession with what we need, want, and desire — to notice what we can share, how we can serve and be of help to one another. In short, we are being asked to enlarge the circle of our love. Of course, it’s not always easy to do this. It may be unfamiliar. But when we do engage, when we see and hear and respond to one another, life starts to seem less scary. The more you get and give help, the more it seems that you will actually make it through your own unbelievably painful passage. You sense that there really is a new future. Even in the heartbreaking present you realize that you’re not alone. Not only that, but instead of wearing out your biceps holding up a thousand-pound iron defense shield in front of your heart, you can let down your guard, let down your hair, give up your pride, have a good cry, and, in gratitude, receive the love that’s coming toward you.”

“Dogs and cats can love you. Nature can love you. Music that sounds like you’ve heard it your whole life can love you. Art can love you. Beauty can love you. Whenever you deliver yourself to the experiences, sights, and sounds that make you feel loved, your experience will change. Your problems won’t be instantly solved, but in the arms of love, they will start to feel different. You will feel different. Instead of being in the foreground, your difficulties will recede into the background and your experience of your catastrophe will be transformed. That’s because Love is the highest vibration in the universe, and when you can feel it for even a nanosecond, everything else in your life will fall into its proper — and lesser — place.

“Of course, we don’t want love just in the abstract and in general. We want it to be personal and particular. That is, we want to feel and share love with real people in our lives. As you’re going through this extremely difficult time, therefore, lean on the people who love you. Run, walk, or hopscotch, take a train, a plane, or a bus, to the people who can give you some love. They are your family, your friends, your neighbors and colleagues. Sometimes they’re even strangers. Whoever they are, you’ll know them by how they make you feel. With them, you feel happy and whole. They are the people who recognize your spirit, who touch your sensivity, who nourish and enliven your body, who make you laugh, who “speak your language,” who share your interests, who ask how you’re doing, who call to see if you got the job, won the case, could get the car fixed for less than six thousand dollars.

“They are the ones who will say the words that will carry you through.”

Finally, the tenth thing Daphne Rose Kingma suggests for you to do when your life falls apart is to Live in the Light of the Spirit.

“At the beginning, your crisis may have seemed like an unbearable tragedy, an insult from the gods, something you couldn’t possibly live through. But perhaps as you have, in fact, found yourself moving through it a single day, a single breath at a time, you’ve started to get a sense of its deeper meaning. That’s because one of the gifts of crisis is that it always holds the seeds of seeing life and ourselves in a new and larger frame.

“The most profound gift of any crisis — its backbone, heart, and brain — is that it calls us to restructure ourselves along spiritual lines. But just as we don’t always operate from love in comfortable times, we don’t always live from an awareness of our spirits either.”

“Crisis is the crucible of expanded awareness because it gets us to respond to life in ways that are not patterned or familiar. It changes our energy, pushes our emotions around, taxes our bodies, gives us sleepless nights and heartache, so that our very physical structures and our psyches are vulnerable to information and perceptions that ordinarily elude us. When we are taken apart at the seams, we are vulnerable and permeable; our structures are out of sync enough, revised enough, flimsy enough to entertain some new information. We are open. We can be changed. And we do change.”

The book closes with a blessing:

“May the depth of your crisis remind you of who you really are. May your pain bring you into the light of awareness. May your journey through it give you hope. And when you have made it through the storm, may you feel great peace and joy.”

There you have it. The Ten Things to Do When Your Life Falls Apart. I’d like to wish that none of my readers would ever need it, but on the other hand Daphne Rose Kingma has reminded me of all the many ways that crisis brings growth. So instead I will wish that when crisis comes, you will be able to transcend it. And if you need some encouragement, I highly recommend this book.

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Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Review of Everything I Need to Know I Learned from a Children’s Book

Everything I Need to Know I Learned from a Children’s Book

Life Lessons from Notable People from All Walks of Life

edited by Anita Silvey

Roaring Brook Press, New York, 2009. 233 pages.
Starred Review

Here’s a fabulous and thought-provoking celebration of children’s books. I read it slowly and savored it, enjoying a few pages a day. I definitely want to purchase my own copy so I can go through it again many times.

In the Introduction, Anita Silvey explains what she has accomplished with this magnificent book:

“In this book 110 society leaders from various areas — science, politics, sports, and the arts — talk about a children’s book that they loved and its impact on their lives. Funny, insightful, and inspiring, these stories testify to the amazing power of the right book for the right child — at the right time.

“A single illustration from Treasure Island created by N. C. Wyeth made his son Andrew want to become a painter and inspired Robert Montgomery to become an actor. Sometimes a specific book sent an individual on a career path: Steve Wozniak of Apple Inc. read the Tom Swift books, knew he wanted to be an inventor, and eventually created Apple I and Apple II. Characters became role models; Jo March of Little Women inspired actress Julianne Moore, television commentator Judy Woodruff, and writer Bobbie Ann Mason. A book revealed a truth about the person’s character, as Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel did for Jay Leno. At times single lines from a book have resonated for a lifetime: William DeVries, the cardiothoracic surgeon who implanted the first artificial heart, has thought about a statement from The Wizard of Oz all of his career — ‘I will bear all the unhappiness without a murmur, if you will give me a heart.’…

“All of the essays reveal interesting details about the person who wrote them. Many of the people in this volume remember the name of their librarian or teacher, the bookstore they frequented, or the person who handed them a beloved book. When we give children books, we become part of their future, part of their most cherished memories, and part of their entire lives.

“Children’s books change lives. Everything I Need to Know I Learned from a Children’s Book provides insight into how they do this. I hope the essays in this book will inspire you to find great books for the children in your life and move you to read to them. The act of reading to a child is the most important contribution to the future of our society that adults can make.”

The large format of the book includes a one-page excerpt with a picture from the book that the famous person is remembering. On the page about their remembrances, there is a sidebar about the background of the book and the person who was touched by it.

The books chosen and remembered present an amazing range of titles. There are picture books, chapter books, and even books considered adult books. Given the ages of the contributors, many of the books were written long ago, but a large number of them are still in print and much beloved today.

Here’s a passage that I enjoyed from Kyle Zimmer, who talked about falling in love with The Hobbit as a child and later reading that same book to his own son. Perhaps I especially loved that essay because the same is true of me and that very book. But his summing up applies to so many more books and so many more people:

“When we read great books with our children, we teach them to turn to great books throughout their lives for comfort, humor, and for illumination of the human experience. The most influential leaders and thinkers in the world have consistently relied on literature for inspiration at their most difficult moments. Nelson Mandela turned to Steinbeck during his imprisonment and says it changed his life. Lincoln was criticized for reading novels in the middle of the Civil War; he defended himself by saying that it kept him sane.

“Whether we are called upon to govern a nation or organize a birthday party for too many children, the key to both surviving our days and cultivating our next generation of leaders is many books, well chosen.”

In many ways, that sums up why I love being a children’s librarian and think of it as more of a calling, than a job. (So I am still a children’s librarian, even though I am currently not employed as one.)

As Jerry J. Mallett says in the very last essay, “It is never too late to have your life changed by a children’s book.”

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Review of The Gift of an Ordinary Day, by Katrina Kenison

The Gift of an Ordinary Day

A Mother’s Memoir

by Katrina Kenison

Springboard Press, New York, 2009. 310 pages.
Starred Review

I think that Katrina Kenison’s two sons must be right in between the ages of my two sons. I remember reading her book Mitten Strings for God about being the mother of young boys when my boys were young. Now she’s written a book about being the mother of teenage sons who are growing up and finding their way in the world. It resonates with me, because my oldest son has graduated from college and moved out, and my youngest son is about to be a junior in high school.

That wasn’t the only thing I liked about this memoir. In the book, Katrina Kenison deals with so many issues of midlife. They leave their home of many years and find a dream home that needs to be rebuilt. She leaves her long time job. There are so many issues of change and meaning that a woman deals with at this time of life, and I was encouraged and uplifted to read about Katrina Kenison’s journey.

I liked this paragraph about parenting during the difficult times:

“It is always a relief to be reminded that my job is not to control, or judge, or change my son, but simply to help him remember, with words and touch, who he really is. Loving him this way, I am better able to find within myself the faith and patience necessary to survive his painful transformations. I know to hold a space for his beauty, even when it slips from sight. And I come a little bit closer to understanding his true essence, to remembering the goodness that resides just beneath the surface of even his very worst behavior, behavior that is usually rooted in fear and confusion and self-protection.”

Here’s a nice passage about the changes and growth of midlife:

“The world is filled with need. If I am to be of some use, I must first rise to the challenge of my own rebirth and growth, must engage in the gradual, demanding process of discovering the person I am meant to be now and taking up the work I am called to do.

“’Go into yourself, and see how deep the place is from which your life flows,’ the poet Rainer Maria Rilke once instructed an aspiring young writer. The advice might as easily have been written for a middle-aged woman contemplating her emptying nest. The work my friends seem compelled to undertake in their forties and fifties is no longer what they think they should do. It is what they feel, in their deepest souls, that they are meant to do. What the example of their lives suggests, what I desperately want to believe, is that once we have weathered these changes, honored our sorrows and released them, there is also great joy in moving on.”

And here’s a wonderful part about growing up as a mother:

“Now, we’re in a different place and a different time, and I need to become a different kind of mother. A mother who knows how to back off. A mother whose gaze is not quite so intently focused on her own two endlessly absorbing children, but who is engaged instead in a rich, full life of her own. A mother who cares a good deal less than she used to about what time people in her household go to bed, what they eat for breakfast, whether they wear coats or not, and what they choose to do, or not do, with their own time. A mother who, though her protective, maternal instincts run as fierce and deep as ever, manages, in all but extreme moments, to keep those instincts in check. A mother who trusts in who her children are, even if they aren’t exactly who she thinks they ought to be. Who keeps faith in their futures, even when the things they do, and the words they say, give her pause in the present. A mother who remembers, above all else, that the greatest gift she can give to her own two wildly different, nearly grown sons is the knowledge that, no matter what, she loves them both absolutely, just exactly as they are.”

I enjoyed this book tremendously. Reading it is like having a friend to talk to along the exciting and interesting journey of midlife. She makes it feel a little less uncharted and scary.

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Review of Mountains Beyond Mountains, by Tracy Kidder

Mountains Beyond Mountains

The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World

by Tracy Kidder
read by Paul Michael

Books on Tape, 2003. Unabridged. 9 compact discs, 10 hours, 51 minutes.

I checked out Mountains Beyond Mountains because of how much I was moved by Tracy Kidder’s Strength in What Remains, the story of Deogratias.

In Deo’s story, he was deeply moved by reading one of Dr. Paul Farmer’s books, and he ended up working for Dr. Farmer’s organization, Partners in Health. Deo ultimately established a clinic in Burundi under that organization’s sponsorship.

So when I learned that Tracy Kidder had written an earlier book about Dr. Paul Farmer, I made sure to get my hands on it.

Dr. Farmer’s story is inspiring. From a kid in a large family who lived on a bus, he became a Harvard specialist in infectious diseases and founded an organization that saves thousands of lives in the poorest parts of the world.

One thing I learned from this audiobook is that millions of people in the world die early because they are poor. Dr. Farmer’s work is about bringing healthcare to the poor. He has pioneered ways of battling diseases like drug-resistant tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS that effectively heal poor people who were not being treated. He has now helped people in poverty all over the globe.

This book goes on rather long. But the story is amazing. Tracy Kidder presents Dr. Paul as someone full of quirks and human weaknesses, definitely not a saint, who is yet a remarkable person who is changing the world. I did enjoy listening to it. I might not have gotten all the way through if I had been reading to it, but listening in the car, I did find myself interested in finding out about the next challenge Dr. Farmer faced and overcame.

He began in Haiti, and has made a huge difference there. The whole time I was listening, I grieved for the people of Haiti, knowing that they would later face an earthquake. I am sure that no one is better equipped to help the people of Haiti to recover than Partners in Health, since they already have helped so many people there.

This book will inspire you with the story of one man making a huge difference. It could have been written as a propaganda tool for Partners in Health, but Tracy Kidder does fill the book with facts that show the effectiveness of their methods. He’s not trying to fudge results. He’s not trying to paint Paul Farmer as a saint. He’s telling about a great work that’s being done. Even if you don’t read the book, I highly recommend taking a look at the Partners in Health website at www.pih.org.

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library audiobook from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Review of This Book Is Overdue! by Marilyn Johnson

This Book Is Overdue!

How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

by Marilyn Johnson

Harper, 2010. 272 pages.
Starred Review

Two and a half weeks ago, I got laid off from the job I love so much as Youth Services Manager at a busy public library. Since last Fall, we knew serious budget cuts were being threatened. In the campaign to convince the community and particularly the Board of Supervisors that public libraries are essential services, not luxuries, I became more and more proud to be a librarian.

We were not successful, and I’m very sad to leave the job I love, and very sad for the community. The people who will be particularly hurt by the budget cuts are students who don’t have internet access, people out of work looking for jobs, people who need to learn English, homeless people who want somewhere to stay and learn during the day, young moms who want to get their children comfortable around books, and so many others.

This book is indeed overdue! I wished so much that I could afford to send a copy to each member of the county Board of Supervisors! Marilyn Johnson looks at many different aspects of librarianship and explains why we need librarians more than ever in the information age, as well as in a recession. This book also made me proud to be a librarian.

Here are some quotations I enjoyed:

“Good librarians are natural intelligence operatives. They possess all of the skills and characteristics required for that work: curiosity, wide-ranging knowledge, good memories, organizational and analytical aptitude, and discretion.”

“The profession that had once been the quiet gatekeeper to discreet palaces of knowledge is now wrestling a raucous, multiheaded, madly multiplying beast of exploding information and information delivery systems. Who can we trust? In a world where information itself is a free-for-all, with traditional news sources going bankrupt and publishers in trouble, we need librarians more than ever.”

“Librarians’ values are as sound as Girl Scouts’: truth, free speech, and universal literacy. And, like Scouts, they possess a quality that I think makes librarians invaluable and indispensable: they want to help. They want to help us. They want to be of service. And they’re not trying to sell us anything. But as one librarian put it, ‘The wolf is always at the door.’ In tight economic times, with libraries sliding farther and farther down the list of priorities, we risk the loss of their ideals, intelligence, and knowledge, not to mention their commitment to access for all — librarians consider free access to information the foundation of democracy, and they’re right. Librarians are essential players in the information revolution because they level that field. They enable those without money or education to read and learn the same things as the billionaire and the Ph.D. In prosperous libraries, they loan out laptops; in strapped ones, they dole out half hours of computer time. They are little ‘d’ democrats of the computer age who keep the rest of us wired.

“In tough times, a librarian is a terrible thing to waste.”

This book explores many different aspects of librarianship. They weren’t surprising to me, having plunged into this world twelve years ago and found it home. But some of the chapters will be surprising to the general public. Marilyn Johnson’s giving away some of our secrets — like the Book Cart Drill Team Championships at ALA National Conference. She talks about librarians taking a stand for freedom of speech, librarians blogging, librarians interested in archiving all sorts of obscure topics.

I like the way she finishes the book:

“It didn’t matter who I was, or what I did, or where I paid taxes, or how long I stayed. I’m sure it didn’t matter if the book had RFID tags or a checkout card with a ladder of scrawled names, though tags were neat. I knew the librarians would help me figure out anything I needed to know later — This town is hurting economically, right? How many parking spaces in your lot? What do you call sign-making skills (wayfinding)? And which of your librarians likes figs?

“I was under the librarians’ protection. Civil servants and servants of civility, they had my back. They would be whatever they needed to be that day: information professionals, teachers, police, community organizers, computer technicians, historians, confidantes, clerks, social workers, storytellers, or, in this case, guardians of my peace.

“They were the authors of this opportunity — diversion from the economy and distraction from snow, protectors of the bubble of concentration I’d found in the maddening world. And I knew they wouldn’t disturb me until closing time.”

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Review of Love and War, by John and Stasi Eldredge

Love & War

Finding the Marriage You’ve Dreamed Of

by John and Stasi Eldredge

Doubleday Religion, New York, 2009. 222 pages.
Starred Review

I recently filed for divorce, more than four years after my husband abandoned me. Why would I torment myself by reading a book on marriage?

I have a few reasons: First, is that I want to know what went wrong so I don’t repeat the same mistakes. I still believe that God told me that some day our marriage would be restored, and I would want that marriage to be a harmonious partnership before God. It’s inspiring to read about how that can happen.

Actually, I picked up the book ready to quickly turn it back in if I found the contents painful or not applying at all. But I avidly read the whole book, liking it more and more the further I read.

I like everything I’ve already read by John & Stasi Eldredge, particularly Captivating, and The Sacred Romance. I like their way of taking the big picture when talking about the Christian life. They see the Christian life as a grand fairy tale, and I love that approach, as is evidenced by the fact that I’m also reading secular books talking about what fairy tales teach us about life, such as Once Upon a Midlife, by Allan B. Chinen, and Women Who Run With the Wolves, by Clarissa Pinkola Estes.

The authors tie into that concept right away. In the introduction, Stasi describes watching her husband John conduct a wedding ceremony.

“No matter how many weddings I attend, there is something inexplicably stirring about all this — the ceremony, the making of vows, the great cloud of witnesses, something about this remarkable act feels — how does one describe it? Mythic.”

She gives some of John’s message to the crowd:

“‘Dearly Beloved, you see before you a man and a woman. But there is more here than meets the eye. God gave to us this passion play to reenact, right here and now, the story of the ages. This is the story of mankind, the one story we have been telling ourselves over and over again, in every great myth and legend and poem and song. It is a love story, set in the midst of desperate times, set in the midst of war. It is a story of a shared quest. It is a story of romance. Daniel and Megan are playing out before you now the deepest and most mythic reality in the world. This is the story of God’s romance with mankind.’

“I’m curious what the audience is thinking. When John speaks of love and marriage as deeper than fairy tale, what does our heart say in reply? I know the young women listening just said in their hearts, Oh I hope that is true! I long for that to be true! The young men are wondering, If that is true, what is this going to require of me? The older women filter this through the years of our actual marital experience; they are thinking, Hmmm. (It is a mixture of Yes, I once longed for that, and, Perhaps it will come true for her; I wonder if it still might come true for me.) And the older men sitting here now are simply thinking, I wonder if the reception will have an open bar.

“‘You don’t believe me,’ John says. ‘But that’s because we don’t understand fairy tales and we don’t understand the Gospel which they are trying to remind us of. They are stories of danger; they are stories where evil is very, very real. They are stories which require immense courage and sacrifice. A boy and a girl thrown together in some desperate journey. If we believed it, if we actually saw what was taking place right here, right now, we would cross ourselves. We would say desperate prayers, earnest prayers. We would salute them both and we would hold our breath for what happens next.'”

I love John’s charge to the couple:

“Daniel, Megan, in choosing marriage you have chosen an assignment at the frontlines in this epic battle for the human heart. You will face hardship, you will face suffering, you will face opposition, and you will face a lie. The scariest thing a woman ever offers is to believe that she is worth pursuing, to open her heart up to pursuit, to continue to open up her heart and offer the beauty she holds inside, all the while fearing it will not be enough. The scariest thing a man ever chooses is to offer his strength without knowing how things will turn out. To take the risk of playing the man before the outcome is decided. To offer his heart of strength while fearing it will not be enough.

“A lie is going to come to both of you, starting very soon, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. It can’t be done. It’s too hard. We had unrealistic expectations. It isn’t worth it. The lie to you, Megan, will be, ‘You are nothing more than a disappointment.’ And the lie to you, Daniel, will be, ‘You are not really man enough for this.’ And so, I have two words for you today. Words that I want you to keep close in your hearts as you go forward: You are. Megan, you are radiant, you shimmer, you shine, you are a treasure of a woman, a gem, you are. Daniel, you are a man, you are strong, and you are valiant. You have what it takes. Hold this close to your hearts. It can be done. And it is worth it.”

Early on in this ordeal of my marriage falling apart, I found help and encouragement from rejoiceministries.org. One helpful lesson they taught me right from the start is that my spouse is not my enemy. Instead Satan himself is the enemy of our marriage. John and Stasi Eldredge echo that message. The “War” in the title is the battle that a man and his wife do together against the Enemy of their marriage.

Right away, they give us tips about how that battle is carried out, with lies. A wife starts believing the lie that she is not valuable, and so she gets petty about wanting her husband to do more around the house, to show that he values her. Then her husband, in turn, doesn’t feel like his wife thinks he is an adequate man, and resentment builds up on both sides.

This isn’t a book about communication techniques or about how to get your spouse to treat you right. This is a book with stories to explain how you can see marriage as a team effort against a mutual enemy. John and Stasi give stories from their own marriage to show how this can play out — both failures and successes.

Love & War is a wonderful book for romantics. It tells you that a great marriage is indeed possible. It gives you a lofty vision and inspires you to work with your spouse to go after it.

And don’t we all start out in marriage as romantics?

Read the book! I won’t try to summarize each chapter, since I would have too much to say. I’ll finish the review with some inspiring words from the authors at the end of Chapter One:

“Because marriage is hard, sometimes painfully hard, your first Great Battle is not to lose heart. That begins with recovering desire — the desire for the love that is written on your heart. Let desire return. Let it remind you of all that you wanted, all that you were created for.

“And then consider this — what if God could bring you your heart’s desire? It’s not too late. It isn’t too hard. You are not too far along nor are you and your spouse too set in your ways. God is the God of all hope. He is, after all, the God of the Resurrection. Nothing is impossible for him. So give your heart’s desire some room to breathe.

“What if the two of you could find your way to something beautiful?

“That would be worth fighting for.”

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Review of Firstlight, by Sue Monk Kidd

Firstlight

The Early Inspirational Writings of Sue Monk Kidd

GuidepostsBooks, New York, 2006. 227 pages.

Sue Monk Kidd got her start writing for Guideposts. She wrote many inspirational pieces for them and for other publications for many years.

Firstlight is a collection of some of her early writings. They make an inspiring, uplifting collection. I made a habit of reading a section or two in the morning during my devotional time.

I think her philosophy is summed up by these words:

“I believe in stories. The world has enough dogma. It’s stories we need more of, stories that reverence the still, small voice that sings our life. As Anthony de Mello observed, “The shortest distance between a human being and Truth is a story.” Jesus, himself, told stories about the most common things in the world: a lost sheep, a seed that falls on rocky ground, a woman who sweeps her house in search of a coin, a man whose son runs away from home.

“All personal theology should begin with the words: Let me tell you a story.

Sue Monk Kidd writes her devotionals as stories — stories that illustrate the hand of God, or perhaps a lesson about life, or perhaps a reminder of joy.

This book will give you something to smile about as you start your day.

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.