Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg

As I read Writing Down the Bones, the writing guide by Natalie Goldberg that was first published in 1984, I found myself being more courageous and honest in my writing. At least I’m more that way in the writing I do for myself.

That is where it starts. Better writing comes from the practice of writing. Goldberg recommends timed writing as a practice. Set the amount of time you plan to write, even if it is as short as 10 minutes, and write as fast and freely as you can.

I’ve been doing something similar for a while. What helped me break through to more scary and fruitful territory is Goldberg’s advice to write a little more. If you feel you’ve written all you can about something, write a little more. I found it pushed me to write down thoughts and feelings I didn’t want to admit I had. I don’t know that these confessions to myself had made me a better writer, but when I break through I feel like I may be able to deal with something I’ve been avoiding.

In both of these practices, writing is a kind of meditation, which Goldberg discusses in several of the book’s short chapters. She draws on Buddhist practices such as meditation throughout the book.

Her Buddhist practices also involve being present, which she suggests is helpful for writers. Be present in your everyday life and in your writing. Be attentive, listen, and you will fill your mind with the wonderful things. These become specific details that ground your writing in real life. Instead of writing about something, you can write what is; your readers will conjure up on their own the emotions associated with the experience you capture in your words.

“Whatever is in front of you is your life, so please take care of it,” Natalie Goldberg, Afterward to Writing Down the Bones

Goldberg believes writing should be tied to the rest of your life. Whatever you’re doing, you’re a writer, and even though you can and should give your full attention to the person or task in front of you, the writing mind is still being primed for its work. And writing is work; it requires effort. Like any worthwhile thing, you get out of it what you put into it. Writing is a process and it needs to be approached with joy, honesty and patience if it is to bear fruit.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Change Your Brain Change Your Body by Daniel G. Amen

Finding Your Writer’s Voice by Thaisa Frank & Dorothy Wall

Just Write by Walter Dean Myers

Keeping a Journal You Love by Sheila Bender

Mastering Fiction Writing by Kit Reed

The Relaxation Response by Herbert Benson with Miriam Z. Klipper

The Right to Write by Julia Cameron

Shut Up & Write! by Judy Bridges

Switch on Your Brain by Caroline Leaf

Take the Leap by Heather McCloskey Beck

Write Your Heart Out by Rebecca McClanahan

Goldberg, Natalie. Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within. 2^nd ed. Boston: Shambala, 2005.

Readings from Your Best Life Now by Joel Osteen

Daily Readings from Your Best Life Now, is a daily devotional adapted from Joel Osteen’s breakout bestseller Your Best Life Now. The primary divisions of the book follow that of the source material. Likewise, the body of each short chapters is adapted closely from the original material. However, this book is organized differently. It is divided into 90 chapters, each one kept short in order to fit into a daily reading schedule.

At the top of each chapter is a reference to a passage of scripture. The chapters in the book are not expositions on the scripture; Osteen is plain in the introduction that that was not his intention. Osteen’s books, like his televised sermons, are topical rather than expositional. I thought that the connection between the scripture reading and the chapters were sometimes tenuous.

I’ll admit I took much longer than 90 days to finish this book (I probably first opened it shortly after it was published in 2005). That may have injured my sense of the book as a whole, but I think that the book was written with the hope that each chapter would be able to stand on its own as a sermonette of encouragement.

Encouragement is a good word for the book. It’s the theme through every part from encouragement to dream bigger to encouragement to press on in the hard times.

That leads also to what I think is the weakness of the book, and Osteen’s ouvre in general. It seems to draw from the theme and concepts of self-help as much (or more) as from the Bible. Even in the introduction, Osteen speaks in one sentence of wanting people to draw near to God and in the next of helping readers “unlock the doors of a fuller life.” These are not mutually exclusive pursuits, but that depends a lot on your concept of a fuller life.

I don’t mean to be too critical of Osteen. Obviously, I read several of his books and books by his predecessors as preachers of positivity in popular culture, Robert H. Schuller and Norman Vincent Peale. I have felt encourage by reading the books of these men, but I also leave there books feeling like something much deeper is missing.

Joel Osteen also wrote

Break Out

I Declare

You Can, You Will

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Be All You Can Be! by John C. Maxwell

Creative Living for Today by Maxwell Maltz

Life's Not Fair, but God is Good by Robert H. Schuller

Positive Imaging by Norman Vincent Peale

Power in Praise by Merlin R. Carothers

The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale

Self-Love by Robert H. Schuller

You Can Become the Person You Want to Be by Robert H. Schuller

You Can if You Think You Can by Norman Vincent Peale

Osteen, Joel. Daily Readings from Your Best Life Now. New York: Warner Faith, 2005.

A Slight Trick of the Mind by Mitch Cullin

In A Slight Trick of the Mind, Mitch Cullin imagines the life of an aged Sherlock Holmes. He has lived through two world wars and seen most of his closest friends and family die. He is a man with no place in the world, and even the little place he has separated out for himself cannot hold back time.

This is not a crime story, but it deals with mysteries. These are not mysteries in the secret society sense of things revealed only to the cognoscenti. They are mysteries in the Christian sense of things that are beyond the understanding of man. The Holmes of this book is struggling with memory, death, war, abandonment, relationships, and grief. Even with diminished capacity, Holmes can tell how a boy died. What Holmes can’t grasp is how this boy he had come to love should die for no apparent reason while he has lived long after his place in the world faded away.

I have always thought that part of the appeal of Holmes was his humanity. Though he has a cool demeanor and focuses on reason, these things don’t motivate him. Beneath the surface is a passion for justice and a compassion for his fellow man. Cullin captures both of these sides of a very old Holmes who is struggling with mysteries that stump us all.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Fifth Heart by Dan Simmons

The Peerless Peer by Philip Jose Farmer

The Real World of Sherlock Holmes by Peter Costello

The Seven-Per-Cent Solution by Nicholas Meyer

The Sherlockian by Graham Moore

Cullin, Mitch. A Slight Trick of the Mind. 2005. New York: Anchor, 2006.

Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner

Economist Steven D. Levitt and journalist Stephen J. Dubner look into the unexpected relationships between aspects of our society in their book Freakonomics. They not particularly interested in the things you might expect economists to write about such as business, markets or investment. Instead, they look at cheating, crime, expertise and parenting.

There is no particular theme of the book, except possibly that common explanations and expectations are often off the mark. Levitt and Dubner are skeptical of conventional wisdom and expertise. They are interested in data and what questions can properly be put to that data.

They sometimes come to conclusions that some might find disturbing or troubling. For instance, they trace the drop in crime rates in the 1990s to the legalization of abortion in the 1970s. Many of the women who had abortions in the wake of Roe vs. Wade were poor, had low education, or very young. All of these traits in the parents tend to produce worse outcomes for children, including a higher likelihood of committing crime. As the first post-Roe cohort of children reached their teen years in the 1990s, there were fewer who had been raised in those conditions that may have pushed them into crime, and therefore fewer budding criminals and a decline in crime rates.

Reading this made me think of the arguments of eugenicists. They believed that a host of social ills, including crime, could be mitigated by keeping the unfit people from reproducing. To the eugenicists, unfit was essentially equivalent to nonwhite, though it also extended to the feebleminded (a disease a eugenically-minded psychiatrist or psychologist might have found in any poor, uneducated person). The eugenicists saw intelligence, criminality, poverty and host of other features as fixed and hereditary. Limiting the reproduction of the unfit through abortion or sterilization would reduce and eventually eliminate poverty and crime.

Of course, Levitt and Dubner are not eugenicists. Nor do they propose abortion as means to reduce crime. Crime does not have its roots in race or intelligence. It is strongly tied to poverty and low education. Charles Dickens chilling portrayed Ignorance and Want in A Christmas Carol, and they are still a threat to all of us.

Each chapter reveals an interesting twist on some subject, though few are as potentially charged as that on crime. In another chapter, the authors show that crime does not pay, except for those at the top, on unlike in a corporation. In spite of faddish thoughts on the issue, parents matter, though maybe not in the ways we’d like to think.

My previous reading has inclined me to focus on the darkest part of the book, but the overall tone is conversational and light, though the authors are not flippant about serous subjects. They are not technical either. Their use of statistics is straightforward. They do not delve deep into theory, though they focus much on the central theory of economics that people respond to incentives.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Better for All the World by Harry Bruinius

The Drunkard’s Walk by Leonard Mlodinow

How We Got Here by Andy Kessler

The Numbers Game by Michael Blastland & Andrew Dilnot

The Peter Principle by Laurence J. Peter & Raymond Hull

War Against the Weak by Edwin Black

Levitt, Steven D., & Stephen J. Dubner. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. New York: William Morrow, 2005.

The Innocent Man by John Grisham (audio book)

The Innocent Man by John Grisham (Random House, 2006)

Audio book read by Dennis Boutsikaris

This is the story of the trial of two men for the murder of Debra Sue Carter, a young woman who worked as a waitress in Ada, Oklahoma. Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz were convicted of a crime they did not commit, and the justice system consumed more than a decade of their lives before minimally correcting its error.

I’m not surprised it took so long to overturn the convictions of these men. I’m surprised it got so far to begin with. The police investigation was very incomplete and shoddy, even for 30 years ago when technology and science played a much lesser role in collecting and analyzing evidence (Grisham strongly suggests the Ada police had ties to drug dealer, including one of the detectives on the case, and that influenced the investigation). The lawyers for the defense were competent, but they were not supplied with the means to mount a good defense for their poor clients. Williamson was clearly mentally ill, but there was never a proper determination of his fitness to stand trial. The evidence was so thin I’m surprised a trial was permitted. They even let a former Ada police chief sit on the jury (admittedly, he was not forthcoming during jury selection, but you would think someone in that small town would have known or pressed the issue more).

I can understand the thirst for answers, especially in a small community where a violent crime captures the public attention. It reminds me of the 2005 conviction here in central Missouri of Ryan Ferguson for the of journalist Kent Heitholt in 2001, when Ferguson was still in high school. The conviction rested on some uncertain eyewitness accounts, possibly influenced by police and prosecutors, and the confession Charles Erickson. There seems to be little evidence against Erickson except his drug-induced loss of memories of the night of the crime. He took a plea bargain to testify against Ferguson. As with Williamson, police and courts seemed to pay little attention to the mental state of Erickson.

In spite of the lack of evidence to back up the witnesses few, in my mind Erickson is a very sketchy witness even to his own involvement, the jury convicted Ferguson. People wanted answers, order, justice, and a sense that the issue was resolved so they could return to a safe life. This made them blind to all the problems with the case against Ferguson. The police felt those public pressures and were too ready to go with a problematic case rather than go through a tough investigation that might lead to no answers. The case had other problems, and as people began to admit to false confessions and prosecutorial influence of witnesses, the conviction was revisited and overturned in 2013, after Ferguson had spent most of his 20s in prison.

I think our justice system is often close to the mark and produces mostly good results. However, it should not take years, or decades, to correct such problematic cases as these. In fact, these cases should have never come to trial based on such flimsy evidence.

Miss Leavitt's Stars by George Johnson

The universe has grown a lot in the last century, at least in the estimation of astronomers. A series of observations, discoveries, and estimations have led from a view that the entirety of the universe is a smallish Milky Way galaxy to the present view in which many galaxies, and large clusters of galaxies, occupy a space that is billions of miles across.

One of the early, and still much used, discoveries that made measuring the universe possible was the period-luminosity relationship of a set of variable stars called Cepheids. Variable stars change in brightness over times. Cepheids change in brightness with a regular pattern. The length of that pattern, or period, is related to the average brightness of the star. Brightness and distance are hard to measure; the star appears brighter or dimmer based on how near or far away it is. Measuring the period of a Cepheid lets us know its brightness, and comparing that to its apparent brightness lets us know how far away it is (using a relationship called the inverse square law).

The Cepheid period-luminosity relationship was discovered by Henrietta Swan Leavitt. She was not recognized as a professional astronomer by the  academic leaders of Harvard University, where she worked, even though she had academic credentials and publications that put her on par with many who had doctorates in the field.

She was a woman and she was a computer. Before the invention of modern electronic computers, computers were people who managed data and performed calculations. Little is known about how Leavitt felt about the sexual discrimination that was common at the time, and she seemed to be contented with her life. Even so, if she had been a man, her accomplishments would very likely have earned her a plum appointment.

George Johnson’s book about this accomplished woman, Miss Leavitt’s Stars, is not a book about discrimination. It is a brief biography of a little-known astronomer who laid the groundwork for our understanding of the size of the universe.

Leavitt, who died relatively young, left a legacy in the science built on her work. Some of that appears in the work of famous Missourian Edwin Hubble, namesake of the Hubble Space Telescope, used Leavitt’s period-luminosity law to estimate the distance to Andromeda, and determine that it must be separate galaxy and not a cloud in the Milky Way. Astronomy has advanced a lot in the last 90 years, but astronomers continue to use Leavitt’s work to estimate distances in space when they can find Cepheids.

Johnson’s book is short. This is partly because Levitt didn’t leave much of a paper trail outside of her professional writing. It is about equal parts popular science and biography. I enjoyed it, yet I can imagine it being within the grasp of a high school student. It may be a good book for a budding astronomer or physicists. Unfortunately, there may not much more that we can learn about Leavitt, but her story is an introduction to Hubble, Einstein, and others who did important work relevant to astronomy.

Johnson, George. Miss Leavitt’s Stars: The Untold Story of the Woman Who Discovered How to Measure the Universe.  New York: Atlas, 2005.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Copernicus’ Secret by Jack Repcheck

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Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer

Have you ever wondered about those people who can remember names, phone numbers, birthdays and odd facts with ease? Some people have prodigious memories. How do they do it?

Joshua Foer began to ask these questions when he covered the 2005 U.S. Memory Championship for Slate. Within a few minutes, the mental athletes at this event could memorize a poem, a deck of cards or a thousand random numbers. A year later, he returned to that event as a competitor, and he won. Walking with Einstein is Foer’s recounting of his year of training in memory techniques and his exploration of the meaning of memory.

This book is not a manual on memory techniques, though Foer briefly describes them. You can find them described in more detail elsewhere. Many of the techniques are ancient, or elaborations on ancient techniques. The discovery of the primary technique is attributed to Simonides, a Greek poet who lived about 500 years before Christ. After the collapse of a banquet hall, which he narrowly escaped because he stepped out to greet a messenger, he discovered he could picture in his mind where every guest had been seated, and was able to identify the location of the bodies. Later authors built upon this idea of a “memory palace,” and it was widely used before the invention of printing.

The basic idea is simple. We have amazing capacities to remember locations and images, so just tie things we want to remember to an image and place. First, pay attention to what you want to remember (it may only take a second). Next, form a memorable image that will remind you of the thing you want to remember. The more outrageous the image is the better it will work. Serious mnemonists develop systems of images. Finally, “place” those images in a memory palace, preferably some real place you know very well. It turns out that the main thing may be the attentiveness all of this technique requires and the multiple paths to remembering you create.

Like Foer, I was disappointed that feats mental athletes perform are not things I want to do. I’d like to be better at remembering names, but all I may need to do to improve is pay attention. I’d like to be able to remember passages of text, but this is very difficult even using mnemonics.

The more interesting thing in the book turns out to be Foer’s exploration of the place of memory in our history and culture. In an age before books, and especially before indexed books, it was very difficult to store information anywhere outside of memory. Even if you read something on a scroll, it would not be easy to find it again. If you wanted quick access to something, you needed to memorize it. People would intensely study the few texts they had and got to know them very well, possibly memorizing them entirely.

Books made accessing information much easier and therefore remembering less important. The Internet has made tons of information accessible in an instant. We have shifted away from valuing intensive study to valuing extensive study, or being widely read. We don’t know as deeply, but we know how to access information for a variety of places.

Memory is not a valueless art in our age. Memorizing techniques engage the imagination to create memorable images. In reverse, our memories are the feedstock of our imaginations. Our creativity, innovation, and invention draws upon the things we remember and the many connections we form between memories. For a creative mind to invent, it needs to be stocked with useful memories.

Similarly, memory has value in defining ourselves. Who we are as an individual is largely defined by our habits and memories. In a sense, the more we remember, the fuller are our lives. Shared memories are part of how we relate to others, and shared knowledge is important to culture.

I started reading this book with an interest in improving memory. My takeaway ends up being that I want to be more attentive to life. I want to form the most vivid memories I can of the people and events that are important to me.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Genius in All of Us by David Shenk

How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard

Idea Mapping by Jamie Nast

Your Intelligence Makeover by Edward F. Droge, Jr.

If you want to improve you memory, you may also be interested in a fish oil supplement.

Foer, Joshua. Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. New York: Penguin, 2011.

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Just Say Thanks! by R. T. Kendall

Kendall, R. T.  Just Say Thanks!  Lake Mary, FL: Charisma House, 2005.

I have written before that it is my opinion that gratitude is essential to happiness.  Our first duty is gratitude to God.  As R. T. Kendall puts it in Just Say Thanks!, “When God grants us sovereign mercy, it ought to make us exceedingly grateful.”

Though it is an obligation to be grateful to God, Kendall notes that God takes notice when we express thanks.  The Bible records many expressions of people’s gratitude to God.  It may be a duty that could be beneath notice, but it seems that God delights in those who do it far beyond  what a mere duty would imply.

The first thing Christians should be thankful for is our salvation.  We should be constantly praising God for all He did for us in and by Jesus Christ to atone for our sins, to implement His mercy and to reconcile us to Himself.  God’s grace is fundamental to the Christian life, both to bring is unto it and to help us live it, and because that grace is a constant presence we should be constantly grateful.

Kendall even discusses a doctrine of gratitude, which is often called sanctification.  Christians refer to two parts of our salvation.  First is justification, in which our sins are forgiven and the righteousness of Christ is imparted to us.  We are made right with God through Christ.  The second part is sanctification, in which we are transformed over time so that we increasingly act right and become more the kind of people we are supposed to be.  Kendall describes sanctification as a process of gratitude.  If we are grateful for what God has done for us, we will act like it by praising Him, sharing the good news what He  has done, loving Him and showing love to people because He loves them, obeying Him and doing what is right.

One of the things I thing is important about gratitude that is discussed by Kendall is that it puts things in perspective, especially when times are tough.  We shouldn’t wait until everything seems good to be thankful.  We should always be acknowledging kindnesses, mercies, answer, help and other good things; we experience them even in the midst of trouble.  In addition, Kendall wrote, “Every trial has a built-in time scale.  It will end!  God will see to it.”  We can be grateful that better times are ahead, and for Christians the trials of this age will seem very brief in comparison to eternity in God’s blessing.

Unfortunately, gratitude does not come naturally to us.  It is something we must learn.  We must intentionally remember the good God and others have done for us.  We need to rehearse the benefits that have come our way and do it often.  When we forget, we easily become ungrateful, and I think unhappy as well.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

365 Thank Yous by John Kralik

The 4:8 Principle by Tommy Newberry

Gratitude by Melody Beattie

Power in Praise by Merlin R. Carothers

Thanks! by Robert A. Emmons

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Attitude in a Nutshell by Sam Glen

Glenn, Sam.  Attitude in a Nutshell.  Sam Glenn, 2005.

Sam Glenn has the kind of rags-to-riches story that you might expect of a motivational speaker.  He failed in his early jobs and a disaster brought down the family business, which he was running.  One little thing helped him persevere in those hard days and empowered him to turn his life around.  I give you one guess what it was.

It was his attitude.  More to the point, it was a change in his attitude. Instead of staying negative, pessimistic and angry, which probably would have kept him in a bad place, he chose to be positive, optimistic and good-humored, and this attitude help him to see opportunities and make choices that improved his life.

Glenn writes about this in Attitude in a Nutshell.  As the title suggests, it is a short book.  I suspect it draws heavily on his presentations, especially given the informal style, generally conversational tone, and brevity of the chapters.

The author doesn’t seem to bring much new subject of attitude.  Don't take that as harsh criticism.  Recently published books, especially in the self-help genre,  tread much the same ground as their predecessors from 50 or 100 years ago.  Jack Canfield hasn’t added much to W. Clement Stone, except shrewdness in marketing books.  Stone didn’t add much to Napoleon Hill, though he didn’t emphasize Hill’s wilder ideas.  Hill had many antecedents and contemporaries in writing about success, though the patronage of Andrew Carnegie allowed him to take an approach that was unique for his time.

Specifically, the book covers self-talk, humor, courage, character and a few other subjects related to attitude.  Like some other self-help books I’ve read recently, it hangs together mainly on the topic.  Other than the theme of “have a good attitude,” there is no strong thread connecting the different parts of the book.

If he doesn’t stand out as an author of self-help, he may make up for it as a speaker.  I know someone who has seen him present.  His presentation incorporates the creation of chalk art.  It sounds like a gimmick, but a gimmick that draws an audience’s attention, enlivens a presentation, and makes it more memorable is a worthy one.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Attitude is Everything by Jeff Keller

The Difference Maker by John C. Maxwell

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The Victory of Reason by Rodney Stark

Stark, Rodney. The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success. New York: Random House, 2005.

Rodney Stark argues in The Victory of Reason that the West grew to prominence in science, technology, commerce, and power because of its foundations in Christianity. Personal freedom, democracy, and capitalism grew and eventually flourished in Western Civilization because Christianity provided a philosophy and set of beliefs that such things were possible, achievable, and valuable. These things failed, stumbled, and declined in other parts of the world because the cultures, particularly religions, that prevailed there supported philosophies and beliefs that lead another direction.

It starts with a notion of God that is almost unique to Christianity: God is a being of reason. Therefore they could use human reason, however imperfect, to understand God and increase our understanding of Him. Christian theology wasn’t simply asserting scripture, but reasoning about God and His Word to increase, refine, and improve knowledge and doctrine.

The Christian faith embraced progress through reason in doctrine. Christians looked forward to becoming progressively better believers. God is immutable, but those who believe Him can grow in understanding as they mature and with successive generations. This religion of belief contrasted with religions of practice, which inherently looked backward to established law.

These foundational beliefs in reason and progress carried over into Christian views of the physical world. It was a real place made by God. In addition, because God created the world using His reason, we can understand it using ours, just as we can use reason to increase our understanding of God. This belief gave impetus to modern science. Some credit goes to the ancient Greek philosophers, some of who had faith in reason and others in experimentation, though not both at the same time. Islamic philosophers admired, preserved and closely studied the Greeks. However, it was Christians who took these resources and added their own worldview to create modern science. Early scientists were Christians, often supported by the church directly or through universities, which were connected to the church at the time. Western nations gained a lead in science that they still hold.

Progress carried over to social and political issues as well. In particular, Christian beliefs about human equality made the church a leader in the abolition of slavery in Europe and later the Americas. It also gave rise to increasingly democratic governments, personal freedoms, and property rights. This created an environment where capitalism could flourish. Capitalism love technological development, and it didn’t hurt that it was growing in cultures that were amenable to science, and these things grew together creating new levels of freedom, opportunity, and wealth. Christian theologians had the flexibility and reasoning power to adapt doctrine to these new developments while remaining true to received scripture.

Stark supports his arguments with examples from history. One of the more interesting things about the book is the way he compares examples from the Christian world to counterexample from other cultures, such as China or Islam. China was a prominent, technologically advance culture that did not hold its lead. Islam preserved Greek knowledge during Europe’s supposedly dark ages, but did not advance. It was the late bloomers in the Christian West who had the philosophical tools to build success upon success. He also contrasts the winners and decliners in Europe and the Americas, showing how successful and wealthy nations became that way by embracing religious liberty, democracy, and capitalism, while those that declined held to or recreated feudal systems.



If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
Copernicus’ Secret by Jack Repcheck
Descarte’s Secret Notebook by Amir D. Aczel
God Wants You to Be Rich by Paul Zane Pilzer
How We Got Here by Andy Kessler
The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization by Anthony Esolen
The Richest Man Who Ever Lived by Steven K. Scott
The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World by Bryan Lee O’Malley

O’Malley, Bryan Lee. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. Portland, OR: Oni Press, 2005.


Scott Pilgrim is an immature jerk. You might like him, though. He’s in a cool band. Though he’s a coward in ordinary thing, he’s incredibly brave in fantastical fisticuffs.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is a continuation of the titular character’s adventure that started in Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Precious Little Life. The boiled down version of the six-volume series of graphic novels is that Scott must defeat Ramona Flowers’ seven evil exes to win the right to date her.

In this second book, Scott defeats the second evil ex, a vain movie star who used to be a skate boarder. It’s a funny scene, but other parts of the book are better.

We get to see Scott create his own evil ex when he breaks up with his girlfriend, high-school girl Knives Chau. It’s probably a good thing for him to break up with Knives, but Scott is insensitive, selfish, and untruthful. In this sense, Knives isn’t evil in the grand sense of hating all that is good. She’s a wounded, jealous girl who is acting a little crazy, which is evil enough. It leads to one of the books fight scenes (they have the feel of video games and comics, which is a strange mix of weird and accepted in the fantasy of Toronto), which is longer and cooler than Scott’s fights.

Though Knives seems to be almost dismissed early in the book and could be dismissed as a nut in the middle, her story arc begins to open up in this volume. It’s not strictly a fall, but is a move from seemingly innocent ignorance to knowledge of the scary world of young adulthood and complicated relationships. Scott introduced her to this world, but he a poor guide. He would have been a poor guide even if he hadn’t abandoned her.

O’Malley reveals more about Scott’s other relationships. It looks like he might have a string of wounded exes. This includes band mate Kim and Envy Adams, leader of rival band The Clash at Demonhead.

O’Malley’s art in this and other Scott Pilgrims book is a little like manga with big-eyed characters. It is also simplified, cartoony. It has a rough feel. It’s better than I’ve made it sound. The black and white art is textured. It has varied, sometimes painterly, lines. It is full small touches that convey emotion, especially humor. Whatever one might think of the style, I’d say it is good comic book are because it interestingly conveys the story and reveals (not just depicts) the characters.

Bryan Lee O’Malley also wrote
Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life


If your interested in this book, you may also be interested in
Maus by Art Spiegelman
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Film)

Walk Away the Pounds by Leslie Sansone

Sansone, Leslie. Walk Away the Pounds. New York: Warner, 2005.



Leslie Sansone says people can improve their health and lose weight without changing their eating habits. They have to exercise, but it’s mostly putting one foot in front of the other.

The opening chapters deal with the benefits of exercise. There is a particularly focus on the benefits of walking.

This leads to a description of the exercises that are used in the program that makes up much of the book. It walking and several moves that can be done while walking to mix things up. It also includes resistance exercises that can be done with light dumbbells, weighted balls or bands. There is also a chapter devoted to shoes and other equipment to help you get off on the right foot.

The middle of the book lays out a 6-week program of walking. It starts out with a mile of walking (about 2,000 steps) and builds of up to 4 to 5 miles (8,000 to 10,000 steps). Along the way, it adds periodic resistance exercises. Following the program, you’ll walk 64 miles in the six weeks. The pages make a diary for keeping track of your progress through the program.

From there, walkers can keep going. Sansone devotes a chapter to continuing the program, ramping it up, and overcoming plateaus.

What about eating? Though Sansone says it’s not a necessary part of the program, she suggests that you’ll probably want to improve your eating habits as your health improves and your body demand nutrition to support its new level of activity. She discusses this in a chapter that includes a nutrition primer and several tips on better eating habits.

Sansone also devotes chapters to dealing with stress and having a balanced life. Exercise can alleviate stress and its negative effects, but there are other things busy people can do to reduce stress, make life less hectic, and find more balance.

The book wraps up dealing with motivation. Proper motivation is needed to stick to a healthy lifestyle and Sansone discusses perspective, habits, and environmental changes to help walkers stay on track.

The book is written to a female audience, though program is probably just as suitable to men. Several short success stories appear throughout, briefly discussing the success of women who have tried the program.

A DVD is included with the book. It is a walk-in-place program that leads the viewer through a 1-mile walk in about 18 minutes.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
The 6 Day Body Makeover by Michael Thurmond
8 Minutes in the Morning for Extra-Easy Weight Loss by Jorge Cruise
How Much Does Your Soul Weigh? by Dorie McCubbrey

Your Intelligence Makeover by Edward F. Droge, Jr.

Droge, Edward F., Jr. Your Intelligence Makeover: An Easy Way to Learn All You Need to Know. New York: Free Press, 2005.



Your Intelligence Makeover is part essay on intelligence and learning, part instruction on learning techniques and part reference manual on a multitude of subjects. If you want to perform better in school, kick start new learning or plan to follow you intellectual dreams, Droge’s book is a good place to start.

Droge begins by discussing intelligence, particularly that there are many types of intelligence and the reader is likely to have a strength and at least one of them. Any of these intelligences can support the pursuit of your intellectual dreams to learn, study, grow, get a degree, write a book or any other intellectual pursuit. In the course of explaining this, Droge shares his own interesting personal story.

The pursuit of intellectual dreams is also supported by what Droge calls “super tools.” These are speed-reading, speaking and writing techniques and memorization techniques. He lays out a three-week program for learning these technique that will aid learning.

He also lays out a method for planning to achieve your intellectual dreams. This carries the reader from laying out their big picture goals down to the daily activities they’ll need to undertake to achieve them.

In the last section of the book, Droge introduces 13 areas of knowledge including history, literature, math, science, art and even sports. These chapters include many references, many suitable for an introduction or summary and some more specific, covering the subjects both in print and online.

Throughout the book are a series of quizzes. These quizzes allow the reader to evaluate their familiarity with 15 areas of knowledge. Using the results, a reader can quickly refer to appropriate chapters of the book to find a quick introduction to the subject and a host of resources including books, articles and web sites.

I found the quizzes tended to confirm may interests. I knew quite a bit about math, science and nature, as one might expect of an environmental engineer. I also did well in history and religion, which are subjects I find interesting. I didn’t do so well in music and psychology, but I don’t think they have a big enough place in my intellectual dreams to invest the effort into learning more except to support some other interest. I knew very few answers to the sports questions, but I care so little I didn’t even read the chapter on sports.

If you want to be well rounded, Droge’s book can help you get started. If you don’t care to be well rounded, but would rather delve into your interests, it can help you find many additional resources.

The Private Investigator’s Handbook by Chuck Chambers

Chambers, Chuck. The Private Investigator’s Handbook. New York: Perigee, 2005.

Chambers pulls back the curtain on private investigation with instructions for the do-it-yourself investigator. He also provides advice to those seeking to protect their privacy and their assets.

That is an interesting aspect of the book. In one chapter, Chambers will reveal the techniques of investigations. In the next, he’ll describe how to protect yourself from investigators. He doesn’t assume an investigator is the person in the right and the investigated is up to know good. Some one might take up an investigation to seek justice or to exact revenge, steal an identity and harass an enemy.

Many might be interested in how to protect their identity and assets. Even if you don’t need to go as far as Chambers suggests you can, you might still be surprised at the number of ways you give out your identifying information when you don’t have too. You may not need to hide anything or trip up investigators, but you don’t need to make things easier for identity thieves.

You might also be surprised about how much information about a person you can collect from public records. If you have internet access, plenty of time and a little bit of money, you can get a lot of information about a person. Finding key pieces of information opens the door for a lot more.

The tone of the book is surprisingly light, sometimes tongue-in-cheek. For instance, the first chapter is entitled, “How to Catch the Cheating Bastard.” Chambers isn’t flippant, but the occasional touch of humor and examples from his own investigations makes the serious material readable.



Chambers is careful to point out what is within the grasp of amateurs, when to call in the professionals and when to call the police. He is careful to steer reader away from activities that are illegal those some may find to be shady like pretext work (i.e. lying).

Descarte’s Secret Notebook by Amir D. Aczel

Aczel, Amir D. Descartes’ Secret Notebook. New York: Broadway, 2005.

A famous mathematician with suspected ties to a secretive cabal of global reformers dies from possible poisoning at the hand of a doctor employed by a European power. A French official surveys his papers, including a coded notebook, and has them quietly sent to the safekeeping of a relative. Years later, another brilliant mathematician, suffering from attacks on his reputation, seeks out the notebook to uncover its secrets.

It sounds like the plot of a thriller. Amir Aczel uses it to frame his biography of philosopher and mathematician René Descartes.

Descartes’ greatest hit as a philosopher was, “Cogito, ergo sum” (I think, therefore I am). He was a leader in rationalism, a philosophy that emphasizes the discovery of truth by use of reason. His method focused on methodical doubt by which he aimed to find truth (to him, all knowledge was connected, not discreet, unrelated truths) by reasoning out those things that could not be doubted. Thusly he reasoned his existence because he couldn’t very well doubt it when he was sitting there thinking about it. His method set him against the prevailing philosophy of the day, scholasticism, which focused on learning from authoritative figures and sources, particularly Aristotle.

High school algebra students will immediately recognize Descartes’ contribution to math. From today’s perspective, it may be hard to understand why it was such a big deal in the 17th Century. Descartes created analytic geometry, which uses algebraic equations to describe and understand geometric shapes. Before this, geometry and algebra were distinct fields, not parts of a unified mathematics. As part of this, he gave us Cartesian coordinates, the familiar x,y graph that has makes so many high school kids cross-eyed. Despite complaints that they’ll never use it, behind the scenes Cartesian coordinates are ubiquitous.


Descartes was not part of a secret society. He was a devout Catholic and was careful not to publish anything that would put him in direct conflict with the church. Even so, the writings of the Rosicrucians, a group of philosophers who sought political and religious reform and the advancement of science, influenced him. He even knew one of the brotherhood, though he may have been unaware of it. Despite his efforts to distance himself from the Rosy Cross, his books used terms that made some believe he was a Rosicrucian and his notebook included alchemical symbols that the group used.

Gottfried Leibniz, co-creator of calculus, was under attack from proponents of Isaac Newton, who independently created calculus contemporaneously with Leibniz. Other accused Leibniz of deriving his work from Descartes, which is why he diligently tracked down the Frenchman’s papers.

What did Descartes’ secret notebook contain? Leibniz handily decoded it. Descartes discovered Euler’s theorem. For polyhedrons, the sum of the number of faces (F) and the number of vertices (V) minus the number of edges (E) is 2 (F + V – E = 2). Descartes kept his discovery secret because some may have construed it as supporting a theory of Johann Kepler that used regular polyhedrons to describe planetary orbits in a Copernican model of the solar system. This was contrary to the teaching of the church, which Descartes wanted to avoid because of his personal devotion and because conflict with the Inquisition could be a career-ending (and life-ending) move.

Amir D. Aczel also wrote Chance.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
1089 and All That by David Acheson
Fortune’s Formula by William Poundstone
The Numbers behind NUMB3RS by Keith Devlin & Gary Lorden
The Unfinished Game by Keith Devlin

What I Read (6)

Date: October 31, 2005
Title: Einstein’s Clocks, Poincare’s Maps: Empires of Time Author: Peter Galison
Thoughts: It’s amazing how many things, ideas, philosophy, technology, science, can come together within people to revolutionize our understanding of the world.

Date: November 2, 2005
Title: How We Got Here
Author: Andy Kessler
Thoughts: Tongue in cheek. Readable. Interesting.

Date: November 16, 2005
Title: Sea of Glory Author: Nathaniel Philbrook
Thoughts: A great adventure turned cautionary tale. Wilkes certainly had determination, perseverance and dedication. He lacked character, integrity and patience. With what he had he accomplished something great, and by sad display of what he lacked he denied himself the fame he sought.

Date: December 4, 2005
Title: The Power of Positive Thinking Author: Norman Vincent Peale
Thoughts: I’m going to improve my thinking and keep at it. I’m going to do what it takes to have the good life I desire.

Date: January 1, 2006
Title: Simple Pictures Are Best
Author: Nancy Willard, illustrations by Tomie De Paola
Thoughts: Possibly my favorite book. It has influence me more than any book except the Bible. I am a firm believer in simplicity.

My parents got me a copy as a child and I’ve always remembered it.

Date: January 3, 2006
Title: The Millionaire Maker Author: Loral Langemeier
Thoughts: I’m looking forward to being a millionaire. Even more, I’m looking forward to financial freedom.

Date: January 10, 2006
Title: IBM and the Holocaust
Author: Edwin Black
Thoughts: Heavenly Father, keep me always aware of the eternal value of righteousness and justice.

Date: January 16, 2006
Title: No More Christian Nice Guy Author: Paul Coughlin
Thoughts: “God is an odds-breaker—He loves that game, and when you flex even a small amount of faith, he’ll open doors for you” (quote from the book).

Date: January 16, 2006
Title: Starting from Scratch
Author: Wes Moss
Thoughts: I’m starting a successful business, too.

Other parts of What I Read:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5