Interlibrary loan

I just requested a book through interlibrary loan for the first time! The book is The Promise of Mediation: The Transformative Approach to Conflict, by Robert A. Baruch Bush and Joseph P. Folger. I am very particularly interested in this book, as I think it will discuss the sort of mediation I was envisioning when I became a mediator, but my public library doesn't have it and it is priced at $35 on Amazon (apparently there is only a hardcover edition). I don't think finding it at a used book store is very likely. So I was feeling rather disappointed when I noticed the button on the library catalog that said "search other libraries" - and voila, it came up and I could request it to be picked up at my usual library. I am really looking forward to the book and to using interlibrary loan again! I already have another book in mind to request sometime, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations, by Jonathan Sacks. The only copy in my library system is listed as lost and paid. A whole new world has opened up with interlibrary loan!

Sunday Salon

Happy Sunday everyone! Here are a few miscellaneous thoughts to round out the week.


This week I finished On Borrowed Wings, by Chandra Prasad. I don't intend to write a separate post reviewing it because I don't have too much to say beyond that it was really, really good. As I mentioned last week, it is about a girl who pretends to be a boy in order to attend Yale in the 1930s. But it is so much more than that. In addition to presenting an engaging coming-of-age story, Prasad manages to address many important issues and concerns, including racism, sexism, classism, homosexuality, and identity. I would put this novel in the class of literature - it is well-written, enjoyable, a good story and more than a story. I highly recommend it!

After that I started Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, by Barbara Kingsolver. I'm not too far into yet, but it is quite interesting. Much of what she says about the state of food in this country is not new to me, since I have read The Omnivore's Dilemma, but the personal story is engaging and there are many tidbits of information. For example, I learned that asparagus is a perennial!

Friday night I watched the movie "Stardust," which is based on the Neil Gaiman book. I really enjoyed the movie and it made me want to read something by Neil Gaiman. I know he is particularly famous for his graphic novels, but I am still a bit hesitant about that form, so I think I will start with one of his prose novels.

This week I will be traveling and have been thinking about what to bring with me for reading material. I don't think I will bring Animal, Vegetable, Miracle since I don't think it is quite engaging enough for travel reading. I'm thinking about bringing Daggerspell, by Katharine Kerr, which feels slightly risky because I have never read anything by her so I may end up not liking it. But it looks good so I will take a chance. I may also bring a Robin McKinley book (which I'm confident I'll like) and possibly another paperback I have lying around.

That's all for today. Have a good week!

A Short History of Progress (thoughts)

Note: I also posted this on my other blog, Musings on Peace.

My thoughts on A Short History of Progress, by Ronald Wright, can be summarized as follows: first, that everyone should read it, and second, that it triggered a minor existential crisis. Why, you might ask, do I think everyone should read a book that has the potential to trigger an existential crisis? Well, first of all, not everyone will react the same way that I did (the are other things going on in my life right now that likely contributed to my existential crisis; if that hadn't been the case this book may not have triggered one). But in fact I think everyone should read it precisely because of its power to make you think about and question the meaning of existence.

Essentially Wright takes you a giant step back from your daily life and gives you a bird's-eye perspective on human civilization and progress. He looks at four case studies of civilizations in human history that continued down the path of "progress" to the point of collapse. Over and over, humans have followed the pattern of overusing their environment until it can no longer sustain their numbers, continuing towards collapse even when it should be clear that they are living unsustainably. His point is that we are currently following the same exact pattern - our growth is accelerating in a clearly unsustainable manner, and we are causing environmental change that will be our downfall. However, there is a crucial difference from past civilization collapses: during the time periods of the cases he presents, there were many mostly isolated civilizations on earth, and the collapse of one did not significantly impact humans living on the other side of the world. Now, all humans are a part of one big civilization, and if it collapses it will impact all living beings on the entire earth.

Before I reached the end of the book, I started feeling that all our attempts to reverse climate change and prevent civilization collapse are both helpless and pointless. In the grand scheme of things, why does it really matter if our civilization falls apart or not? Why does it even matter if the human species continues to exist or not? Someday it will not. Someday the entire earth will fall into the sun. Deep in my heart I feel that it does matter, but I lost my grasp of why.

As I said, these questions arose for me before I finished the book. As it turns out, Wright addresses some of these very questions in the last chapter. His answers were interesting, although I think that ultimately each of us needs to figure out answers for ourselves and find our own meaning:

The most compelling reason for reforming our system is that the system is in no one's interest. It is a suicide machine... I honestly don't know what... the hard men and women of Big Oil and the far right... think they are doing. They have children and grandchildren who will need safe food and clean air and water, and who may wish to see living oceans and forests. Wealth can buy no refuge from pollution; pesticides sprayed in China condense in Antarctic glaciers and Rocky Mountain tarns. And wealth is no shield from chaos, as the surprise on each haughty face that rolled from the guillotine made clear.

Things are moving so fast that inaction itself is one of the biggest mistakes. The 10,000-year experiment of the settled life will stand or fall by what we do, and don't do, now. The reform that is needed is not anti-captalist, anti-American, or even deep environmentalist; it is simply the transition from short-term to long-term thinking. From recklessness and excess to moderation and the precautionary principle.

Wright concludes with a strong call to learn from and avoid the mistakes of the past:

We are now at the stage when the Easter Islanders could still have halted the senseless cutting and carving, could have gathered the last trees' seeds to plant out of reach of the rats. We have the tools and the means to share resources, clean up pollution, dispense basic health care and birth control, set economic limits in line with natural ones. If we don't do these things now, while we prosper, we will never be able to do them when times get hard. Our fate will twist out of our hands. And this new century will not grow very old before we enter an age of chaos and collapse that will dwarf all the dark ages in our past.

Now is our last chance to get the future right.

A Short History of Progress is a compelling and important book. One way you can look at the present human situation is that we can either choose to change now and become a sustainable civilization, or we will be forced to change later by unpleasant circumstances out of our control. We have the opportunity to learn from the past, but will we take advantage of it? I believe humans are capable of much more than we currently demonstrate, and if we do not make the necessary changes now we will be failing our own capabilities.

I cannot more highly recommend A Short History of Progress. To conclude, here are a few more insightful passages:

At the gates of the colosseum and the concentration camp, we have no choice but to abandon hope that civilization is, in itself, a guarantor of moral progress.

Civilizations have developed many techniques for making the earth produce more food - some sustainable, others not. The lesson I read in the past is this: that the health of land and water - and of woods, which are the keepers of water - can be the only lasting basis for any civilization's survival and success.

Capitalism lures us onward like the mechanical hare before the greyhounds, insisting that the economy is infinite and sharing therefore irrelevant. Just enough greyhounds catch a real hare now and then to keep the others running till they drop. In the past it was only the poor who lost this game; now it is the planet.

We should therefore be wary of technological determinism, for it tends to underestimate cultural factors and reduce complex questions of human adaptation to a simplistic "We're the winners of history, so why didn't others do what we did?" We call agriculture and civilization "inventions" or "experiments" because that is how they look to hindsight. But they began accidentally, a series of seductive steps down a path leading, for most people, to lives of monotony and toil. Farming achieved quantity at the expense of quality: more food and more people, but seldom better nourishment or better lives. People gave up a broad array of wild foods for a handful of starchy roots and grasses - wheat, barley, rice, potatoes, maize. As we domesticated plants, the plants domesticated us. Without us, they die; and without them, so do we. There is no escape from agriculture except into mass starvation, and it has often led there anyway, with drought and blight. Most people, throughout most of time, have lived on the edge of hunger - and much of the world still does.

The concentration of power at the top of large-scale societies gives the elite a vested interest in the status quo; they continue to prosper in darkening times long after the environment and general populace begin to suffer.

[T]errorism cannot be stopped by addressing symptoms and not the cause. Violence is bred by injustice, poverty, inequality, and other violence. This lesson was learnt very painfully in the first half of the twentieth century, at a cost of some 80 million lives. Of course, a full belly and a fair hearing won't stop a fanatic; but they can greatly reduce the number who become fanatics.

Archeology is perhaps the best tool we have for looking ahead, because it provides a deep reading of the direction and momentum of our course through time: what we are, where we have come from, and therefore where we are most likely to be going. Unlike written history, which is often highly edited, archeology can uncover the deeds we have forgotten, or have chosen to forget.

Sunday Salon

I don't have too much to write about today, but I like checking in with my reading weekly. I finished A Short History of Progress, by Ronald Wright, midweek. It is an excellent but heavy book. Wright takes you a giant step back from your own life and gives you a perspective on the growth and collapse of human civilizations, making a compelling case for doing something about sustainability now. After that it was definitely time for some fiction, and I am now well into On Borrowed Wings, by Chandra Prasad. I am really enjoying it; it is a unique and well-written story about a girl in the 1930s who masquerades as a boy in order to take her deceased brother's place at Yale. After this I suspect I will continue with fiction or light non-fiction for awhile. I can't take too much heavy non-fiction at once!

I find it interesting that ever since my post two weeks ago where I gave myself permission to not review every book I read, I have actually felt inspired to write individual reviews for the books I have finished. One explanation may be that I am less busy right now. I also have gotten a new spurt of energy for blogging (perhaps as a consequence of being less busy). In any case, I am reminding myself now of that permission to make sure I don't ever start feeling obligated to write reviews!

Have a good Monday everyone!

Experience and Education

I am very interested in education, and in particular in non-traditional models of education. Sometime last year when I was browsing at a used bookstore a slim book by John Dewey titled Experience and Education caught my eye. I had never heard of John Dewey (although I initially mistakenly thought it was the same Dewey who invented the Dewey Decimal System), but the book looked intriguing.

The book is short at 91 pages, but the writing is quite dense, with complex and long sentences. It took me awhile to get through it and a few parts were tedious or difficult to follow, but I stuck with it because the ideas are interesting. Dewey presents a lucid and logical discussion on how education can and should be based on the life experience of individual students.

Essentially, his is an argument for individualized education that looks at the particular needs and life experiences of each student in devising an educative plan for them. Here are a few quotes to give a sample:

It is not enough that certain materials and methods have proved effective with other individuals at other times. There must be a reason for thinking that they will function in generating an experience that has educative quality with particular individuals at a particular time.

What avail is it to win prescribed amounts of information about geography and history, to win ability to read and write, if in the process the individual loses his own soul: loses his appreciation of things worth while, of the values to which these things are relative; if he loses desire to apply what he has learned and, above all, loses the ability to extract meaning from his future experiences as they occur?

The institutions and customs that exist in the present and that give rise to present social ills and dislocations did not arise overnight. They have a long history behind them. Attempt to deal with them simply on the basis of what is obvious in the present is bound to result in adoption of superficial measures which in the end will only render existing problems more acute and more difficult to solve.

Dewey's arguments are to some extent a direct response to the thinking of the time (1930s) about education, and the concept of "progressive" schools that was arising. However, I found his points compelling and quite applicable to today. I am most struck by the fact that traditional schools still, 70 years later, use methods contradictory to his important suggestions. It is quite depressing to think how little progress we have made. If you are interested in education, I definitely recommend this book.

The Bonesetter's Daughter

I was a bit disappointed by The Bonesetter's Daughter, by Amy Tan. It is the third book I've read by her, and it felt very similar to the other two (The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God's Wife). Like her other books, the main theme is a troubled relationship between a Chinese immigrant mother and her American-born daughter. The conflict and the issues the daughter struggled with in this book did not feel new to me, but rather like rehashing of the same thing that was in the two previous books I read.

One of the reviews on the back cover of my copy describes The Bonesetter's Daughter as "A strong novel, filled with idiosyncratic, sympathetic characters, haunting images, historical complexity, significant contemporary themes, and suspenseful mystery." This gave me high hopes for the book but I just didn't find it all that compelling. Besides the sense that the themes were not fresh, I also was not grabbed by the supposedly haunting parts or by the supposedly suspenseful mystery (assuming I even have the right mystery in mind - there were a couple aspects that could be considered a mystery, but neither in the detective sense).

The first part of the book is in the present day from the third person point of view of the daughter. In the middle of the book, it switches to a first-person narrative of the mother's childhood, and then the last portion of the book returns to the present day. I found myself getting bored and losing interest during the memoir-style narrative of the mother's life in China. It really did read like someone's memoir, albeit a well-written one, with very detailed and at times almost tedious descriptions of the events. I kept reading only because I was eager to find out how the book would end (which it did in a satisfying manner). Normally I like historical fiction (which is essentially what this section of the book was) so it surprises me a little that it did not keep my interest better.

Amy Tan is a good writer, and that makes her books worth reading. Overall The Bonesetter's Daughter was a good, but not great, read.

Sunday Salon

Happy Sunday evening! I had a bit of a slow reading week. I finished The Bonesetter's Daughter, by Amy Tan, and felt a bit at loose ends regarding what I wanted to read next. The loose ends were not helped by the fact that it was the middle of the week and I didn't have time to go to the library until the weekend. I eventually picked up a short book from my shelf that I had acquired from a used bookstore a while back - Experience and Education, by John Dewey. I finished it today (although it is short, it is also dense) and will review both it and The Bonesetter's Daughter in separate posts.

In the meantime, I did finally get to the library yesterday. I still wasn't sure what I felt like reading so I got quite a mix. I picked out four books from my to-read list: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver, Daggerspell, by Katharine Kerr, On Borrowed Wings, by Chandra Prasad, and Taking on the Big Boys, or Why Feminism is Good for Families, Business, and the Nation, by Ellen Bravo. I also got one random book that looked intriguing: A Short History of Progress, by Ronald Wright. As it turns out, the book that was most appealing to me to start today was the random selection and not the ones from my to-read list! Go figure. I have noticed that some books on my to-read list sound less interesting to me several months later. So we'll see how the other books go.