Any book that makes me pour tears in the last chapter is worth five stars to me, and this book fit that bill to a tee. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the war in Cambodia with the Khmer Rouge opened a limited slots for one family to emigrate to Vermont. The quota only allows room for three: an older brother, his wife, and one sister. The rest of the family had to separate.…
The most important step in preparing for a water feature in one’s yard is preparation. Therefore, I read this book and one other. This book was slightly more accessible, but definitely less authoritative, than the other one. Its chapter on waterfalls was helpful to orient me to the overall process required to build a small stream with a pump. It didn’t have a ton of obscure but invaluable “tricks of the trade” to help me,…
In my yard, I have the perfect area for a waterfall feature. It’s on a 5-foot downhill slope in a sunny area. It’s hard to get anything but weeds to grow there instead of fescue grass because of perpetual, late-summer sun. We have many gardens, but I’m concerned that the heat would do many plants in. So I want to install a waterfall feature to bring sounds alongside flair, but I’m unsure how to do…
Primum non nocere, reads a key line of the Hippocratic Oath: “First do no harm.” For millennia, healthcare workers have tried to remember this ethical principle, yet human nature still often takes over. As is too common with religious differences, it’s far easier to squabble than to collaborate. In our modern world, science supersedes belief, no? And enlightened, western religion supersedes mystical religions of the land, right? In the past 40-or-so years, many have come…
Those of us with bipolar disorder understand firsthand the upheavals this mental illness can exert on a life. Before diagnosis, moodiness can lead to a lack of linearity in life. Diagnosis typically only comes after a crisis. Self-awareness can grow after diagnosis, but medications and therapy cannot fully “cure” this disease. Many stories in this genre focus on hardships and a general lack of life control – not exactly fodder for inspiration. Into this millieu,…
Like many, I had parents who tried to engineer their lives for “success,” but paid no attention to my passions, interests, and approach to life. Firsthand, I’ve seen that parenting style’s folly and futility and want to take a different angle with my daughter and with other children I have influence over. Enter The Self-Driven Child. This book helped concretize abstract beliefs into a coherent philosophy. It distills basic child psychology into a workable format…
When my daughter was younger, I enjoyed reading Love and Logic for parents of young children. I found it helpful for establishing a good relationship with my daughter. And she has become a healthy preteen now. She is socially conscious, in an academic magnet school, and mostly interested in mature things. Importantly, she has become friends with my wife and me. Some of the credit for that goes to the framework the Love and Logic…
Even my 11-year-old daughter observes that World War II still defines our modern era. It brought the United States of America into prominence; it ushered in a relatively peaceful Europe; it set the boundaries of communism and democracy; it opened up Americans’ eyes to the global order. Many younger people are realizing this history’s impact as their parents and grandparents have recently deceased. In this book, Brown seeks to kindle one fictional family’s history, from…
J.R.R. Tolkien is most well known as the author behind the famed series The Lord of the Rings. He was also an Oxford don (in the field of Anglo-Saxon literature) and a family man who was widely adored for his overactive imagination. He wrote little publicized letters to his children every year at Christmastime by posing as Father Christmas (the equivalent of Santa Claus), replete with this trademark imagination and with drawings and paintings. His…
Anyone who has had a baby in the social media age knows how difficult successfully traversing the social-media landscape is. Fringe groups are given equal (or maybe even greater) voice compared to established medical voices. As the authors chronicle well, technical and lay experts have their voices intermixed so that the distinction between the two seems somewhat arbitrary. Johnson and Quinlan share that this blurring process started a long time ago but has been amplified…