Books

Listen to Michelle Obama’s Memoir as You Cook!

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Becoming by Michelle Obama

I’ve always had a soft spot for Michelle Obama. A First Lady with sass and class, I thought. I never voted for her husband, but that’s okay. You don’t have to agree with someone politically to like that person. So when I started hearing about the tremendous buzz that her new memoir, Becoming, was generating, I decided to use my Audible.com credit for the month to get it right away. (As of the very moment I’m writing this post, there are 332 holds on 15 copies of the downloadable audiobook in the Arapahoe Library system.) She reads it herself, so I got an extra layer of exposure to her as I listened.

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How to Listen to the Real Experts

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The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters by Tom Nichols, professor at the U.S. Naval War College and foreign policy analyst, available in various formats.

I try to keep politics off of this blog (but you can head over to Intentional Conservative or my personal Facebook page to read what I have to say on the current state of affairs). I will just explain here that I got acquainted with Tom Nichols when I first started reading about the upcoming election in the spring/summer of 2016. He showed up in this article on The Federalist Blog (which is not the same as The Federalist Society, btw). Wow, I thought, What clarity, and what courage. I’ve been following him ever since. He suspended his blog about a year ago and he writes very few articles these days, but man! Whenever he does so I am so on it. I also periodically go onto his Twitter account when I feel the need for a blast of fresh air and common sense. He’s one of those people who gets attacked from all sides, so he must be doing something right—right?

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Twists and Turns of a Bald-Faced Liar

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Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou, Knopf, 2018.

Well! Recently on the Happier podcast Liz mentioned that she had just read a fascinating book and she was buttonholing everyone she knows and insisting that they read it too. It sounded so good that I figured maybe I should take a look, especially since Liz is in the midst of producing a new TV series and barely has time to breathe. If she read it, well, it must be worth a look, I thought. My new month’s Audible credit was in place, so I decided to go ahead and use that. Wow. I was absolutely entranced and stayed so to the very end. The audiobook is voiced by a great reader, by the way.

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A Light-Hearted Look at 1920’s France

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Our Hearts Were Young and Gay by Cornelia Otis Skinner and Emily Kimbrough, originally published in 1942, now available in many formats. France in the Twenties is a charming place, and the authors are charming, too.

I was reminded of this book (how many of my reviews start that way?) while I was writing some travel tips based on our recent trip to France. One of my recommendations, passed on from Rick Steves, Mr. European Travel himself, was to wear a money belt. His statement brought to mind the so-called “security pocketbooks” that Cornelia and Emily were forced to wear during their own trip to 1920’s France. This was, of course, during the days before women wore pants very much, and while they weren’t wearing layers of petticoats their skirts were longish and baggy. So see if you can picture this: an elastic belt around the waist with a narrow band attached to it hanging down and a purse thingy attached to that, dangling between the wearer’s legs. As long as you stand still or walk slowly the thingy should be unobtrusive, but if you’re at all active it will start swinging. There’s a very funny scene early on when Emily and Cornelia are dancing (I think it’s onboard their ship) and their purses start bumping into the knees of their dancing partners. Both girls exit the dance floor looking embarrassed, followed by their partners who look puzzled.

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You Won’t Enjoy this Book. Read It Anyway.

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Sex Matters: How Modern Feminism Lost Touch with Science, Love, and Common SenseSex Matters: How Modern Feminism Lost Touch with Science, Love, and Common Sense by Mona Charen, 2018, available in several formats. Audio version is read by the author and is highly recommended. Author’s website is at monacharen.com.

If you follow my postings over on my personal Facebook page, or if you read the conservative news outlet National Review, or if you were following the news back in February when she was booed at the CPAC convention for daring to say that it was perhaps a bit hypocritical for conservatives to excoriate Bill Clinton for his sexual misbehavior but to give Donald Trump a free pass, then you know the name of Mona Charen. (Read her NYT editorial about her CPAC experience here.)

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An Escape Artist Tells Her Story.

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Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover, 2018, published by Random House, available in a number of formats.Also visit the author’s website at tarawestover.com.

Hi folks! I’m finally back to the blog after five weeks off. My last post was written on May 14, three days before we departed on our big trip to France. My intentions were good about writing some posts from the road, but that never happened. I think I started one post early on and never came back to it; after that I just let it slide. When we got home I had tons of ideas I wanted to write about, but they weren’t the kind of thing that lends itself to an article. Rather, I’m working on a short book, tentatively titled “The Intentional Traveler: An Insanely Detailed and Practical Guide” or some such. Originally I thought of it as a Kindle single and a downloadable PDF, thinking that I’d shoot for about 10,000 words. Well, I’ve written only two sections and am already well over that mark. There’s just so much about traveling, just as there is about life in general, that never gets discussed. Well, I’m your person on the spot for that. I always want to know that backstory, the details, the procedure. If you’ve ever read one of my recipes you’ll know that my notes are sometimes as long as the recipe itself. I want you to know all about how to make it!

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Monday Miscellany

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Well, we take off on Wednesday for a three-week trip to France. Now that the Chorale concert season is over and I’ve done the shopping for tomorrow night’s member dinner, I’m sitting down for one last post before we leave. Don’t know if I’ll get anything posted during the trip. May I encourage you, by the way, if you enjoy my posts, to forward your e-mail to someone who might also enjoy them? You can pick an individual post that you think will be particularly interesting to your forwardee. I’d like to see the blog grow.

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Take Your Hands Off the Wheel–At Least Some of the Time.

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Next Wednesday, May 16, Jim and I will be boarding a plane for FRANCE. I said last year that I’d like to visit Paris for our 25th anniversary, but with everything that was going on in 2017 (our move, a big trip already planned that included a family reunion and taking Gideon to grad school) it just didn’t seem doable. There was some talk of perhaps going in the fall, but that just never got off the ground. (Ha.) So we decided to go this year. The Cherry Creek Chorale’s last concert is this weekend, the annual business meeting is next Tuesday, and then the season is over. (You’d think that the Chorale was my job, or something.)

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A Blast of Impassioned Pleading for Our Endangered Democracy.

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Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy by Jonah Goldberg, available in Kindle, hardback, and audiobook formats through Amazon.com and other outlets. (Link is to Amazon.) The audiobook is highly recommended; if you are not currently a member of Audible.com you can get the book for free if you sign up for an Audible.com membership; access that page here. Visit the author’s website at jonahgoldberg.com.

I have a very simple goal in writing this post, linking to it on Facebook and Twitter, and perhaps sending out a separate e-mail blast: I want to do my small part to make Jonah Goldberg’s new book #1 on the NYT best-seller list. Right now he’s #4 on the combined print/e-book list and #5 on the hardcover-only list. (James Comey’s compendium is #1 on both of those lists; I somehow think I won’t bother with that one.) In order for this much-desired result to occur, people have to buy the book. I re-activated my Audible.com account in order to get the audiobook, all 16 hours and 2 minutes of it. It was well worth my time.

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You can’t appreciate what you can’t see.

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I was struck with this thought while working on the material I presented a couple of weekends ago at a Christian women’s retreat. My actual topic was about the different choices we make about the food we eat, which I placed in the following hierarchy:

Level 1: Choices controlled by actual health conditions: true food allergies, celiac disease, diabetes, etc.
Level 2: Choices controlled by conscience or conviction: vegetarianism because of discomfort with the suffering of the animals killed for meat, keeping kosher either because of personal religious beliefs or because of a desire to maintain connections with family members who hold those beliefs, etc.
Level 3: Choices controlled by preference or by belief in the efficacy of a certain diet or lifestyle, often based on faulty information and often harking back to an idealized vision of the past.

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