Review of The New York Times Book of Mathematics, edited by Gina Kolata

Mathematical, Nonfiction Review 0

ny_times_book_of_mathematics_largeThe New York Times Book of Mathematics

More than 100 Years of Writing by the Numbers

edited by Gina Kolata
Foreword by Paul Hoffman

Sterling, New York, 2013. 480 pages.

If you’re at all interested in mathematics, this is a fascinating book covering the history of major developments in mathematics in the twentieth century and the start of the twenty-first, as told in the pages of The New York Times.

Since the articles are from The New York Times, they are written for the general public, and the articles aren’t too lengthy. I mostly read one a day for a very long time. Incredible as it may seem, the book was never on hold when I wanted to renew it.

My only complaint was that I had to learn to check the date – given at the end of each article – before reading the article rather than after, because all are reported as happening in the present – it was nice to know when the major development had actually happened in 1936 (though there are more from recent years than going that far back).

Of course, having once been in a PhD program in Mathematics (though I settled for my Master’s), I was extra interested to get tastes of what’s going on before and after my time in the math department. For me, it was interesting to place the articles as before or after my time at UCLA.

The articles are grouped in chapters of related articles. You’ll get an idea of what to expect from the chapter titles: “What Is Mathematics?”; “Statistics, Coincidences and Surprising Facts”; “Famous Problems, Solved and As Yet Unsolved”; “Chaos, Catastrophe and Randomness”; “Cryptography and the Emergence of Truly Unbreakable Codes”; “Computers Enter the World of Mathematics”; and “Mathematicians and Their World.” Try this book for a bird’s-eye view of that fascinating world.

sterlingpublishing.com

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

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

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Review of $2.00 a Day, by Kathryn J. Edin & H. Luke Shaefer

Current Issues, Nonfiction Review, Starred Review 0

2_dollars_a_day_large$2.00 a Day

Living on Almost Nothing in America

by Kathryn J. Edin & H. Luke Shaefer

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston, 2015. 210 pages.
Starred Review

This book was published in 2015, so it was written before the election season got going, but it has strong political repercussions.

The book puts faces on extreme poverty, but the approach is a scientific one. Nothing here is sensationalized. The authors took statistics and facts, then dug deeper to give an understanding of what’s going on so that such deep poverty has become so widespread. At the end, they offer some ideas for things we can and should do about this.

This book is based on academic studies and census data. In the 1990s, author Kathryn Edin did an in-depth study of welfare recipients. But in 2010, she found more families in much worse shape.

In the summer of 2010, Edin returned to the field to update her work on the very poor. She was struck by how markedly different things appeared from just fifteen years before. In the course of her interviews, she began to encounter many families living in conditions similar to those she would find when she met Susan and Devin Brown in 2012 — with no visible means of cash income from any source. These families weren’t just poor by American standards. They were the poorest of the poor. Some claimed food stamps, now called SNAP, for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. A few had a housing subsidy. Most had at least one household member covered by some form of government-funded health insurance. Some received an occasional bag of groceries from a food pantry. But what was so strikingly different from a decade and a half earlier was that there was virtually no cash coming into these homes. Not only were there no earnings, there was no welfare check either. These families didn’t just have too little cash to survive on, as was true for the welfare recipients Edin and Lein had met in the early 1990s. They often had no cash at all. And the absence of cash permeated every aspect of their lives. It seemed as though not only cash was missing, but hope as well.

Edin dug deeper and met Luke Shaefer, a leading expert on the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP).

That fall, during an early morning meeting in her office in Cambridge, Edin shared with Shaefer what she had been seeing on the ground. Shaefer immediately went to work to see if he could detect a trend in the SIPP data that matched Edin’s observations. First, though, he needed to determine what income threshold would capture people who were experiencing a level of destitution so deep as to be unthought-of in America. Accordingly, he borrowed inspiration from one of the World Bank’s metrics of global poverty in the developing world — $2 per person, per day. At the time, the official poverty line for a family of three in the United States worked out to about $16.50 per person, per day over the course of a year. The government’s designation of “deep poverty” — set at half the poverty line — equated to about $8.30 per person, per day. As far as Shaefer and Edin could tell, no one had ever looked to see whether any slice of the American poor fell below the even lower threshold of $2 a day for even part of a year. With the SIPP, it was fairly easy to estimate how many American families with children were reporting cash incomes below this very low threshold in any given month….

The results of Shaefer’s analysis were staggering. In early 2011, 1.5 million households with roughly 3 million children were surviving on cash incomes of no more than $2 per person, per day in any given month. That’s about one out of every twenty-five families with children in America. What’s more, not only were these figures astoundingly high, but the phenomenon of $2-a-day poverty among households with children had been on the rise since the nation’s landmark welfare reform legislation was passed in 1996 — and at a distressingly fast pace. As of 2011, the number of families in $2-a-day poverty had more than doubled in just a decade and a half.

It further appeared that the experience of living below the $2-a-day threshold didn’t discriminate by family type or race. While single-mother families were most at risk of falling into a spell of extreme destitution, more than a third of the households in $2-a-day poverty were headed by a married couple. And although the rate of growth was highest among African Americans and Hispanics, nearly half of the $2-a-day poor were white.

One piece of good news in these findings was that the government safety net was helping at least some households. When Shaefer added in SNAP as if it were cash — a problematic assumption because SNAP cannot legally be converted to cash, so it can’t be used to pay the light bill, the rent, or buy a bus pass — the number of families living in $2-a-day poverty fell by about half. This vital in-kind government program was clearly reaching many, though not all, of the poorest of the poor. Even counting SNAP as cash, though, Shaefer found that the increase in the number of families with children living in $2-a-day poverty remained large — up 70 percent in fifteen years. And even after throwing in any tax credits the household could have claimed in the prior year, plus the cash value of housing subsidies, the data still showed a 50 percent increase. Clearly, the nation was headed in the wrong direction.

Reflecting on these numbers, we, Shaefer and Edin, sought out even more confirmation that what we had found represented a real shift in the circumstances of families at the very bottom. With this in mind, we began to look for other evidence, beyond the SIPP, of the rise of $2-a-day poverty. Reports from the nation’s food banks showed a sizable rise in the number of households seeking emergency food assistance since the late 1990s. A look at government data on those receiving SNAP revealed a large increase in the number of families with no other source of income. And reports from the nation’s public schools showed that more and more children were facing homelessness. Taken together, these findings seemed to confirm the rise of a new form of poverty that defies every assumption about economic, political, and social progress made over the past three decades.

The questions the authors bring to these numbers reflect what they’re trying to explain in this book:

Statistics can help identify troubling trends like these, but they can’t tell us much about what’s going on beneath the numbers. In fact, these statistics led to more questions than answers. What had caused the rise in $2-a-day poverty among households with children? Was the landmark welfare reform of 1996 partly to blame? Were these families completely detached from the world of work? Or were they enmeshed in a low-wage labor market that was itself somehow prompting spells of extreme destitution? How was it even possible to live without cash in modern America? What were families in $2-a-day poverty doing to survive? And were these strategies different from those poor families had been using prior to welfare reform, when AFDC still offered such families a cash cushion against extreme destitution? What was so indispensable about cash — as opposed to in-kind resources such as SNAP — for families trying to survive in twenty-first-century America?

In 2012, they launched an in-depth study in four different areas in America.

In each of these places, we looked for families with children who had spent at least three months living on a cash income of less than $2 per person, per day. In most cases, these spells of such dire poverty proved to be much longer. We visited with these families over the course of many months — and, in some cases, years — talking with them frequently, sharing meals, and observing their daily lives. As common themes emerged from their stories — such as their surprisingly high level of attachment to the formal labor market and the frequency with which doubling up with family or friends precipitated a spell of $2-a-day poverty — we looked back to the SIPP and to other sources of data to see if we could see them there as well.

In the end, we followed eighteen families, eight of them featured here. As had been true of those Edin first encountered in the summer of 2010, some of these households received SNAP or lived in subsidized housing. But others weren’t getting even those benefits. During the course of our fieldwork, some of these families escaped $2-a-day poverty; others did not. Most escaped only to fall back into extreme destitution again.

The book does show the reader these families, helps the reader understand what’s going on, puts faces on this level of poverty. Rather than demonizing the poor as just looking for government hand-outs, we can see and begin to understand how people can get trapped in this.

Here’s the concluding section of the Introduction:

America’s cash welfare program — the main government program that caught people when they fell — was not merely replaced with the 1996 welfare reform; it was very nearly destroyed. In its place arose a different kind of safety net, one that provides a powerful hand up to some — the working poor — but offers much less to others, those who can’t manage to find or keep a job. This book is about what happens when a government safety net that is built on the assumption of full-time, stable employment at a living wage combines with a low-wage labor market that fails to deliver on any of the above. It is this toxic alchemy, we argue, that is spurring the increasing numbers of $2-a-day poor in America. A hidden but growing landscape of survival strategies among those who experience this level of destitution has been the result. At the community level, these strategies can pull families into a web of exploitation and illegality that turns conventional morality upside down.

None of the people whose stories appear in this book see a hand-out from the government — the kind that the old system provided prior to welfare reform — as a solution to their plight. Instead, what they want more than anything else is the chance to work. They would like nothing better than to have a full-time job paying $12 or $13 an hour, a modest dwelling in a safe neighborhood, and some stability above all else. In the 1990s, we, as a country, began a transformation of the social safety net that serves poor families with children. More aid has been rendered to a group that was previously without much in the way of government assistance — the working poor. Extending the nation’s safety net in this way has improved the lives of millions of Americans. But there are simply not enough jobs, much less good jobs, to go around. And for those without work, there is no longer a guarantee of cash assistance.

$2.00 a Day shows that the transformation of the social safety net is incomplete, with dire consequences. We believe the time has come to finish the job. Doing something more to help these families won’t be easy; it will require a commitment by all of us. The government’s emphasis on personal responsibility must be matched by bold action to expand access to, and improve the quality of, jobs. But there will always be circumstances in which work as a primary approach to alleviating poverty won’t work. In those cases, we need a system that truly acts as a safety net for families in crisis, catching them when they fall.

The bulk of the book looks at the lives of these eight families in detail. It helps you understand and feel the pain of the plight they face. You have to admire some of the creative ways they’re finding to survive.

The authors particularly look at things like “perilous work” — jobs that even endanger health, that don’t offer reliable hours and terminate employment at the slightest “offense.” They look at housing problems and cobbled-together solutions, and what the poor will do to try to keep their children safe.

This is an academic study, but the authors are good at telling the stories of the people they encountered.

In their chapter on solutions, the authors don’t advocate going back to welfare, since it robbed people of their dignity and self-worth. They point out that the Earned Income Tax Credit has the opposite effect.

In-dept interviews with 209 EITC claimants in the Northeast and Midwest in 2007 showed that while TANF receipt confers stigma and shame, claiming the EITC gives people dignity and restores their pride. First, the EITC is tied to employment. Second, tax credits are included as part of your federal tax refund — along with wages that were overwithheld. This lends the impression that the government benefit is “earned,” a just reward for hard work. Third, you don’t have to go to a welfare office to apply — an address that in and of itself connotes stigma. Instead, roughly 70 percent of EITC beneficiaries find their way to a professional tax preparation firm such as H&R Block, Liberty Tax Service, or Taxman. There you are not a supplicant. Instead you are a customer, there to claim your tax refund like any other American.

I could relate to this because, when my husband joined the Air Force, before I found a job at our new assignment, we qualified for WIC. But to get the benefits, we had to sit through a “class” teaching about nutrition, and all the staff pretty much treated the applicants as idiots. I never went back. Fortunately, I found a part-time job, but I remembered that getting this government assistance meant giving up my dignity. (The Earned Income Credit, though, was another story.) That’s one thing I love about libraries. We offer help to all, and there is no shame tied to it.

The authors go on:

We are not arguing here that the EITC is a solution to $2-a-day poverty. But it does offer a critical lesson in how antipoverty policy ought to be crafted. Too often, America has gone down the road of trying to shame those in need. We’ve put up barriers. We’ve made people jump through hoop after hoop — all based on the not-so-subtle presumption that they are lazy and immoral, intent on trying to put something over on the system. TANF is a perfect example. Yet research shows that the intrusive treatment people typically receive at the welfare office can undermine their confidence in government and erode political participation. It stands to reason that this kind of treatment could also erode the very confidence that is so necessary for pulling yourself out of $2-a-day poverty. Shame may act as a barrier to claiming that little bit of cash that might stop a downward spiral. As a nation, the question we have to ask ourselves is, Whose side are we on? Can our desire for, and sense of, community induce those of us with resources to come alongside the extremely poor among us in a more supportive, and ultimately more effective, way?

There are many more ideas of things we can do in that final chapter.

Our approach to ending $2-a-day poverty is guided by three principles: (1) all deserve the opportunity to work; (2) parents should be able to raise their children in a place of their own; and (3) not every parent will be able to work, or work all of the time, but parents’ well-being, and the well-being of their children, should nonetheless be ensured.

There’s so much more in this book I’d like to copy out. Don’t rely on my review, because you’ll miss so much. This book is worth reading! It’s impeccably researched and clearly presented, and it will stir your heart.

hmhco.com

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

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

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Review of Exploring Calvin and Hobbes, by Bill Watterson

Humorous, Nonfiction Review 0

exploring_calvin_and_hobbes_largeExploring Calvin and Hobbes

An Exhibition Catalogue

by Bill Watterson

Andrews McMeel Publishing, Kansas City, 2014. 151 pages.

Can we all agree that Calvin and Hobbes is one of the best comic strips of all time? (I say “one of” because: Peanuts. I don’t even want to decide between them, but the fact that it’s very close says worlds about Calvin and Hobbes.)

This book is a retrospective. It accompanies an exhibition at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum. Besides a representative (and wonderful) sample of the strips, it’s got an extended interview with Bill Watterson at the front of the book, and includes some strips that influenced him as well as some examples of his early work before Calvin and Hobbes.

In some ways, reading this book is less satisfying than sitting down with one of the old collections. It did make me want to sit down with one of the old collections. It gives you tastes and reminders of this wonderful strip. It brought me back to the 80s when I was a newlywed and the early 90s when I was a young mother. Both my kids read these collections over and over when growing up.

My sister used to tell me when I had kids, they’d end up just like Calvin. And I have to say, if they gained some of Calvin’s curiosity and creativity and divergent thinking, who am I to say that Bill Watterson didn’t have something to do with that?

It’s a magical world, Hobbes, ol’ buddy . . .

Let’s go exploring!

andrewsmcneel.com

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

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

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Review of Headstrong, by Rachel Swaby

Biography, Nonfiction Review, Science, Starred Review, True Stories 0

headstrong_largeHeadstrong

52 Women Who Changed Science – and the World

by Rachel Swaby

Broadway Books, New York, 2015. 273 pages.
Starred Review

I was going to write that all parents of daughters should read this book. Then it occurred to me that this would be a fabulous book to hand to a teenage daughter. Then I realized that all educators should read this book. Finally, I realize that I think this is a book everyone should read.

Quick, name a scientist who was female and who changed the world with her work. Most people think of Marie Curie and draw a blank when they try to come up with any further names. Rachel Swaby specifically left out Marie Curie from this book. But she found 52 other women who did world-changing scientific work.

I heard Rachel Swaby speak at the 2015 National Book Festival. She was wonderful, so delighted and intrigued by the stories she’d uncovered about these amazing women. I checked out the book and since then have been reading one chapter a day. The fifty-two chapters are an easily digestible 3-4 pages, but highlight the way these women changed the world.

The author chose women who are already dead (“whose life’s work has already been completed”) and she leaned toward women who overcame obstacles, so these stories are inspiring as well as informative. She includes women who worked in the fields of medicine, biology, genetics, physics, geometry, astronomy, math, technology, and invention.

The Introduction explains why this book is so needed:

This book about scientists began with beef stroganoff. According to the New York Times, Yvonne Brill made a mean one. In an obituary published in March 2013, Brill was honored with the title “world’s best mom” because she “followed her husband from job to job and took eight years off from work to raise three children.” Only after a loud, public outcry did the Times amend the article so it would begin with the contribution that earned Brill a featured spot in the paper of record in the first place: “She was a brilliant rocket scientist.” Oh right. That.

The error – stroganoff before science; domesticity before personal achievement – is so cringe-worthy because it’s a common one. In 1964, when Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin won the greatest award that chemistry has to offer, a newspaper declared “Nobel Prize for British Wife,” as if she had stumbled upon the complex structures of biochemical substances while matching her husband’s socks. We simply don’t speak of men in science this way. Their marital status isn’t considered necessary context in a biochemical breakthrough. Employment as an important aerospace engineer is not the big surprise hiding behind a warm plate of noodles. For men, scientific accomplishments are accepted as something naturally within their grasp. . . .

We need not only fairer coverage of women in science, but more of it. . . .

As girls in science look around for role models, they shouldn’t have to dig around to find them. By treating women in science like scientists instead of anomalies or wives who moonlight in the lab as well as correcting the cues given to girls at a young age about what they’re good at and what they’re supposed to like, we can accelerate the growth of a new generation of chemists, archeologists, and cardiologists while also revealing a hidden history of the world.

By her own standards, Hertha Ayrton was a good scientist. So was the detail-oriented seismologist Inge Lehmann, and the firecracker neuroembryologist Rita Levi-Montalcini, too. The scientists in this book aren’t included because they were women practicing science or math in a time when few women did – although by that criterion, many would fit. They’re included because they discovered Earth’s inner core, revealed radioactive elements, dusted off a complete dinosaur skeleton, or launched a new field of scientific inquiry. Their ideas, discoveries, and insights made earth-shaking changes to the way we see the world (and that goes for the seismologist, too). . . .

So instead of calling every standout woman in science the Marie Curie of her field, the next time someone really lives for their work, let’s call them the Barbara McClintock of their specialty. If a scientist charts new territory, let’s refer to them as the Annie Jump Cannon of their particular exploration. If a researcher puts herself in physical danger for an experiment, let’s say she’s like any number of the scientists here who worked with radioactivity or mustard gas.

There are fifty-two profiles in this book. Read one a week, and in a year you’ll know whose research jump-started the Environmental Protection Agency, who discovered wrinkle-free cotton, and even whose ingenious score has now saved generations of struggling newborns. So little coverage has been dedicated to these scientists elsewhere that, in going through these profiles, I hope you’ll feel like you’ve gained a breadth of knowledge that rivals that of Salome Waelsch.

This book hit home to me because I was one of a small minority of women in a graduate mathematics department in the 1980s. It would have done me good to know that outstanding scientists and mathematicians who were women were nothing new at all.

And the book is interesting, too! Each brief biography begins with an intriguing paragraph and then gives you the rest of the story about these women who indeed overcame challenges and accomplished great things.

This book would be a fantastic place to start for novelists looking for actual historical characters with fascinating lives. I say this because I’ve already read a wonderful novel about one of the featured scientists, Sophie Kowalevski, Beyond the Limit, by Joan Spicci. I’m left wanting to know more about most of these amazing women.

Here are a few introductory paragraphs to get you intrigued:

Maria Sibylla Merian loved bugs long before scientists had uncovered their mysteries, loved them at a time when few people were interested in those vile, disgusting things. Acquantances assigned credit or blame for her unusual passion to her mother, who had looked at a collection of insects while Merian was still in the womb. Something about those pinned and polished bodies, shimmering powdery wings, and articulated legs instilled a fascination in the child growing inside her.

Two members of the division of war research at Columbia University spent an entire day grilling Chien-Shiung Wu about her work in nuclear physics. Regarding their own top-secret projects, the interviewers remained dutifully mum until the very end of the day, when they asked if Wu had any idea what they were up to. She cracked a smile. “I’m sorry, but if you wanted me not to know what you’re doing, you should have cleaned the blackboards.” They asked her to start work the next morning.

During the last two and a half decades of her 103 years, Italians liked to joke that everyone would recognize the pope, so long as he appeared with Rita Levi-Montalcini. Though she stood only five feet, three inches, the stories of her work and her life were as large and dramatic as her iconic sideswept hair.

Alice Hamilton’s professional successes – of which there were many – fell at the intersection of science and social issues. Although she earned a degree in medicine from the University of Michigan, gaining further training in bacteriology and pathology at the University of Leipzig and the University of Munich, she didn’t think herself capable of becoming anything more than a “fourth-rate bacteriologist.” But what she lacked in bravado, she made up for in her dedication to problems both “human and practical”: typhoid outbreaks, lead poisoning, and the widespread horror of occupational disease.

Learn the fascinating stories of these and forty-eight other women and along the way become better informed about history and better understand how capable women are and have long been at being scientists.

rachelswaby.com
broadwaybooks.com

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

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

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Review of Men Explain Things to Me, by Rebecca Solnit

Current Issues, Musings, Nonfiction Review, Starred Review 0

men_explain_things_to_me_largeMen Explain Things to Me

by Rebecca Solnit

Dispatch Books, Haymarket Books, Chicago, Illinois, 2014. 130 pages.
Starred Review

I’m afraid most intelligent women need to hear nothing more than the title of this book to give a knowing smile. Rebecca Solnit starts the essay with a particularly stunning example of a man who knew nothing about a topic Rebecca had written a book about, trying to explain things to her. He even mentioned an “important book” she should have read, which it turned out he had not actually read but had read about in the New York Times Book Review. This was the book she had written.

I like incidents of that sort, when forces that are usually so sneaky and hard to point out slither out of the grass and are as obvious as, say, an anaconda that’s eaten a cow or an elephant turd on the carpet.

Yes, people of both genders pop up at events and hold forth on irrelevant things and conspiracy theories, but the out-and-out confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant is, in my experience, gendered. Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they’re talking about. Some men.

Every woman knows what I’m talking about. It’s the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men’s unsupported overconfidence.

Now, she does make clear that she’s not talking about all men, nor even the majority of men. But there are men out there who don’t respect women’s knowledge or opinions and feel they automatically have more important things to say. My first Master’s degree was in mathematics, and I always felt like I had to prove myself. And always, I must admit, took great delight in getting higher scores than my male classmates on math tests – which was more about me than about them. But where did I get the idea I had to prove myself?

The rest of the essays in this book talk about other ways women are silenced and marginalized. There’s also some discussion about marriage equality in that context.

The phrase [“marriage equality”] is ordinarily employed to mean that same-sex couples will have the rights different-sexed couples do. But it could also mean that marriage is between equals. That’s not what traditional marriage was. Throughout much of its history in the West, the laws defining marriage made the husband essentially an owner and the wife a possession. Or the man a boss and the woman a servant or slave.

Another essay is about a powerful international figure who raped a hotel maid in his luxury suite – and how that can be a metaphor for many things.

The opening essay begins with what is really a humorous scene. But this is not a humorous book. Overall, it’s about feminism and how we’ve made progress, but there is still progress that needs to be made.

Rebecca Solnit will make you think and consider and speak.

rebeccasolnit.net
TomDispatch.com
haymarketbooks.org

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

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

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Review of Patterns of the Universe, by Alex Bellos and Edmund Harriss

Art, Mathematical, Nonfiction Review, Starred Review 1

patterns_of_the_universe_largePatterns of the Universe

A Coloring Adventure in Math and Beauty

by Alex Bellos and Edmund Harriss

The Experiment, New York, 2015.
Starred Review

I was going to wait until I’d colored more patterns to review this book, but now I’ve decided that having read all the text, I can tell about how fascinating it is.

Toward the end of 2015, I started hearing about the latest fad for adult coloring books. I saw this one based on math, and knew how I wanted to try participating in the fad! I asked for it for Christmas, and two of my sisters sent me a copy. That turns out to be a good thing. I’m going to color one and copy pages out of the other. I think I will copy the pi-related coloring page to give as a prize for our scavenger hunt on Super Pi Day (3/14/16). I’m also thinking about having a math coloring program at the library and using various pages, along with my own coloring sheets. (I figure copying a few pages will tantalize people into buying the book!)

The idea is wonderful: Mathematical patterns to color! There are 57 designs to simply color, and then my favorites are 12 more designs that you help create.

Some of the designs are based on Voronoi diagrams, transformations, fractals, tilings, knots, polyhedra, Fibonacci numbers, and, yes, prime numbers.

The one pattern I have already finished coloring is the Sevenn — a Venn diagram of seven sets. And coloring it made me glad I have another book from which I can make copies and try it again.

Sevenn

The later, more interesting (to me) patterns come under the section heading “Creating,” as opposed to simply “Coloring.”

This is where they have more patterns involving prime numbers and randomness, as well as cellular automata, Latin squares, and space-filling curves.

Here are the instructions for the pi-related coloring page:

PI WALK

The digits from 0 to 9 represent the directions in the key at right. Choose a color for each of them. Starting at the dot, draw a short line (about half an inch) for each of the digits in pi (given above) in the direction of that digit. So, start with the 3 color in the 3 direction, then continue from that point with a new line in the 1 direction in the 1 color, and so on.

When I looked at this section, it occurred to me that my mathematical knitting projects are an example of mathematical coloring — with yarn!

They did have a way of coloring prime numbers. Personally, I think my own way is more interesting, assigning primes a color and then coloring each multiple according to its prime factorization, whether in a grid as in my original sweater or the prime factorization blankets, or in a line in the prime factorization scarf or the prime factorization cardigan. However, the cool thing is there are quite a lot of new ideas that could be translated to knitting — and this book got my brain spinning in new ways.

It also made me realize that I could make my own coloring sheets. My knitting is coloring with yarn, and why not make these patterns available for people to try with their own colors? This book was the nudge that got me to pull out the diagrams and post them on my Sonderknitting page. I’m not an artist, so they are simply made with tables, but I think the prime factorization chart is especially helpful for learning about primes. And the prime factorization charts in other bases are helpful for understanding other bases. The Pascal’s Triangle charts show you pretty patterns from Pascal’s Triangle, and the normal distribution chart gives you a gut-level feeling for the normal distribution that’s different from what you think when you see a bell-shaped curve.

I’m looking forward to what new ideas will spark as I color the rest of the patterns in this book! And I’m also looking forward to seeing how pretty these patterns will turn out and what new insights I’ll get. It’s a win all the way around.

alexbellos.com
maxwelldemon.com

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Source: This review is based on my own copy.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

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Review of Rising Strong, by Brené Brown

Nonfiction Review, Personal Growth, Starred Review 0

rising_strong_largeRising Strong

The Reckoning. The Rumble. The Revolution

by Brené Brown

Spiegel & Grau, New York, 2015. 301 pages.
Starred Review

I have perfectionistic tendencies, so the first book of Brené Brown’s that I read, The Gifts of Imperfection, hit the spot for me. It was a 2011 Sonderbooks Stand-out. Then came Daring Greatly, a 2014 Sonderbooks Stand-out. Daring Greatly talks about vulnerability and wholeheartedness.

Now she’s written Rising Strong, about getting up when you fall down — which is going to happen if you are Daring Greatly.

In the Introduction, she says:

While vulnerability is the birthplace of many of the fulfilling experiences we long for — love, belonging, joy, creativity, and trust, to name a few — the process of regaining our emotional footing in the midst of struggle is where our courage is tested and our values are forged. Rising strong after a fall is how we cultivate wholeheartedness in our lives; it’s the process that teaches us the most about who we are.

She says that if we’re carrying out the call of her other books, we’re going to need this one.

If we’re going to put ourselves out there and love with our whole hearts, we’re going to experience heartbreak. If we’re going to try new, innovative things, we’re going to fail. If we’re going to risk caring and engaging, we’re going to experience disappointment. It doesn’t matter if our hurt is caused by a painful breakup or we’re struggling with something smaller, like an offhand comment by a colleague or an argument with an in-law. If we can learn how to feel our way through these experiences and own our stories of struggle, we can write our own brave endings. When we own our stories, we avoid being trapped as characters in stories someone else is telling.

Basically, this book gives us a procedure for getting back on our feet when we fall on our face in the arena. That’s where the subtitle comes in.

Here’s a summary of the Rising Strong process:

The goal of the process is to rise from our falls, overcome our mistakes, and face hurt in a way that brings more wisdom and wholeheartedness into our lives.

The Reckoning: Walking into Our Story
Recognize emotion, and get curious about our feelings and how they connect with the way we think and behave.

The Rumble: Owning Our Story
Get honest about the stories we’re making up about our struggle, then challenge these confabulations and assumptions to determine what’s truth, what’s self-protection, and what needs to change if we want to live more wholehearted lives.

The Revolution
Write a new ending to our story based on the key learnings from our rumble and use this new, braver story to change how we engage with the world and to ultimately transform the way we live, love, parent, and lead.

The book fleshes out these ideas with lots of examples, explaining what this looks like.

It was interesting to me that while I was in the middle of reading this book, something came up that reminded me of a hurt at the end of my marriage. It popped up seemingly out of nowhere. But armed by this book, I looked at the stories I was telling myself about that incident, and was able to examine what was true and what wasn’t true. I was able to do some forgiveness work and tell myself a better story.

The whole idea of saying, “The story I’m telling myself is…” can be eye-opening, and gives us more power over our feelings and the ability to revolutionize our lives and relationships.

You can tell I love Brené Brown’s writings, because once again, lots of quotes from this book show up in Sonderquotes. I bought myself a copy so I can look through it again.

I highly recommend all of her books. If you ever face difficulty? Grab this one. It will help you rise strongly, ready to dare greatly again.

BreneBrown.com
randomhousebooks.com
spiegelandgrau.com

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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 my own copy, purchased via Amazon.com.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

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Review of Loveability, by Robert Holden

Nonfiction Review, Personal Growth, Starred Review 0

loveability_largeLoveability

Knowing How to Love and Be Loved

by Robert Holden

Hay House, Carlsbad, California, 2013. 219 pages.
Starred Review
2015 Sonderbooks Stand-out: #4 Other Nonfiction

Robert Holden’s books are written in a conversational style and the concepts aren’t hard to understand. But they pack a surprising punch. Carrying out these ideas isn’t necessarily as simple as they sound, and the results can be life-changing.

This one’s about one of the fundamentals of a happy life: Knowing how to love and be loved.

Here’s how Robert Holden puts it in the introduction:

This book, Loveability, is a meditation on love. It addresses the most important thing you will ever learn. All the happiness, health, and abundance you experience in life comes directly from your ability to love and be loved. This ability is innate, not acquired. It does not need to be taught afresh, in the way you might learn some new algebra theory or memorize lines from Romeo and Juliet. It is a natural ability that is encoded in the essence of who you are. Any learning feels more like remembering something you have always known about.

He does start with self-love. He says that the basic truth is “I am loveable” and the basic fear is “I am not loveable.” He gives exercises that will help you access that basic truth. And the book goes on to help you build your love for others by looking at common blocks to love, such as trying to place conditions on love and refusal to forgive.

This book resonated with me, and I found myself quoting from it often in Sonderquotes. Check those quotes, and if this sounds like a message that would do you good, you may want to take a closer look. I guarantee you will be uplifted and your life will be enriched by this closer look and helpful advice on how to love.

robertholden.org
hayhouse.com

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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 my own copy, purchased at a bookstore in Portland, Oregon.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

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Review of Nine Essential Things I’ve Learned About Life, by Harold S. Kushner

Musings, Nonfiction Review, Stand-outs, Starred Review 0

9_essential_things_largeNine Essential Things I’ve Learned About Life

by Harold S. Kushner

Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2015. 169 pages.
Starred Review
2015 Sonderbooks Stand-out: #5 Other Nonfiction

The wise rabbi who wrote When Bad Things Happen to Good People is 80 years old, and he has some wisdom to share with the world.

Even though I’m not Jewish, I can see the deep wisdom in most of the “essential things” Rabbi Kushner talks about. I have a few minor disagreements with some theological points. (Most notable is that I do think thoughts can be sinful even without actions. What does he do with the commandment “Thou shalt not covet”?) But overall, I find myself filling this book with post-it notes marking outstanding quotes. May we benefit from his years of experience and his wisdom.

In the first chapter, he talks about the influences that shaped and changed his view of God from the theology he was taught as a child.

More than anything else, my half century of congregational service and my dozen or so books have been dedicated to reformulating that traditional theology. I’ve done this not to protect God from bad theologians and people’s righteous anger, but to rescue people who need God from having to choose between a cruel God and no God at all.

An idea I liked very much indeed was found in the second chapter, “God Is Not a Man Who Lives in the Sky.” It is that when someone tells you he is an atheist, you can respond, “Tell me about the God you don’t believe in; maybe I don’t believe in him either.”

He talks about many versions of God which he doesn’t believe in and concludes that chapter:

The God I believe in is under no obligation to be the kind of God we would like Him to be, or even the kind of God we need Him to be. Begging Him, bargaining with Him, even living by His mandates will not cause the rain to fall and give us an abundant harvest, nor will it cure our disease or help us win the lottery. God’s role is not to make our lives easier, to make the hard things go away, or to do them for us. God’s role is to give us the vision to know what we need to do, to bless us with the qualities of soul that we will need in order to do them ourselves, no matter how hard they may be, and to accompany us on that journey.

The remaining chapter titles will give you an idea of the topics covered in the other Essential Things: “God Does Not Send the Problem; God Sends Us the Strength to Deal with the Problem,” “Forgiveness Is a Favor You Do Yourself,” “Some Things Are Just Wrong: Knowing That Makes Us Human,” “Religion Is What You Do, Not What You Believe,” “Leave Room for Doubt and Anger in Your Religious Outlook,” “To Feel Better About Yourself, Find Someone to Help,” and “Give God the Benefit of the Doubt.”

Check Sonderquotes for some bits of wisdom. If you like what you read, I do recommend this book. Read one Essential Thing each morning, and you’ll be uplifted, encouraged, and motivated.

Rabbi Kushner closes with “A Love Letter to a World That May or May Not Deserve It,” which is simply beautiful. The first paragraph talks about all he and the world have been through together. Then he says:

But with it all, I choose to love you. I love you, whether you deserve it or not (and how does one measure that?). I love you in part because you are the only world I have. I love you because I like who I am better when I do. But mostly I love you because loving you makes it easier for me to be grateful for today and hopeful about tomorrow. Love does that.

There. Simply typing that out made my day suddenly much better. Rabbi Kushner is right. And there are many more wise gems where that came from.

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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 Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

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Review of Searching for Sunday, by Rachel Held Evans

Christian, Nonfiction Review, Starred Review 0

searching_for_sunday_largeSearching for Sunday

Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church

by Rachel Held Evans

Nelson Books, 2015. 269 pages.
Starred Review

Lee Ann, a friend from church, told me about this book, which seems appropriate. Rachel Held Evans is young, but she cuts to the heart of what is wrong with church today. However, while she does point out some negatives, this book wouldn’t speak to me if that were all it is. She also articulates a vision of what church should be and what we should find from Christ-followers.

Her introductory chapter had me hooked. She says she’s often asked to talk about why young adults are leaving the church, and she can’t talk about all the nuances of what’s going on in every denomination.

But I can tell my own story, which studies suggest is an increasingly common one. I can talk about growing up evangelical, about doubting everything I believed about God, about loving, leaving, and longing for church, about searching for it and finding it in unexpected places. And I can share the stories of my friends and readers, people young and old whose comments, letters, and e-mails read like postcards from their own spiritual journeys, dispatches from America’s post-Christian frontier. I can’t provide the solutions church leaders are looking for, but I can articulate the questions that many in my generation are asking. I can translate some of their angst, some of their hope….

I told them we’re tired of the culture wars, tired of Christianity getting entangled with party politics and power. Millennials want to be known by what we’re for, I said, not just what we’re against. We don’t want to choose between science and religion or between our intellectual integrity and our faith. Instead, we long for our churches to be safe places to doubt, to ask questions, and to tell the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable. We want to talk about the tough stuff — biblical interpretation, religious pluralism, sexuality, racial reconciliation, and social justice — but without predetermined conclusions or simplistic answers. We want to bring our whole selves through the church doors, without leaving our hearts and minds behind, without wearing a mask.

I explained that when our gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender friends aren’t welcome at the table, then we don’t feel welcome either, and that not every young adult gets married or has children, so we need to stop building our churches around categories and start building them around people. And I told them that, contrary to popular belief, we can’t be won back with hipper worship bands, fancy coffee shops, or pastors who wear skinny jeans. We millennials have been advertised to our entire lives, so we can smell b.s. from a mile away. The church is the last place we want to be sold another product, the last place we want to be entertained.

Millennials aren’t looking for a hipper Christianity, I said. We’re looking for a truer Christianity, a more authentic Christianity. Like every generation before ours and every generation after, we’re looking for Jesus — the same Jesus who can be found in the strange places he’s always been found: in bread, in wine, in baptism, in the Word, in suffering, in community, and among the least of these.

This book does tell her story, and it presents a picture of what Christ-followers should be for, a loving and joyful message.

Rachel Held Evans has a way with words. I was reading a library copy, so I didn’t write in it, but I kept using post-it notes to mark sections to put into Sonderquotes.

She talks frankly about her own doubts and failings and her own journey. And she presents glimpses of the beauty that is so present in the church.

I think what makes this book so uplifting is that she’s honest, but she doesn’t focus on what we should be against. She focuses on what the church should be for.

And even still, the kingdom remains a mystery just beyond our grasp. It is here, and not yet, present and still to come. Consummation, whatever that means, awaits us. Until then, all we have are metaphors. All we have are almosts and not quites and wayside shrines. All we have are imperfect people in an imperfect world doing their best to produce outward signs of inward grace and stumbling all along the way.

All we have is this church — this lousy, screwed-up, glorious church — which, by God’s grace, is enough.

rachelheldevans.com
@RachelHeldEvans
thomasnelson.com

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Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Nonfiction/searching_for_sunday.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 Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

What did you think of this book?