Author: simchajfisher

Kate Essenberg: Heavenly Peace

Remember Kate Essenberg, the immensely talented baker who sent my family a large and gorgeous selection of edible art?  It turns out that this sweet woman’s generosity and talent extend even further:  she’s just come out with a CD of Christmas music, and it is lovely.

 

heavenly peace

 

You can check out some samples of the music on this album here.  Kate is the lucid and heartfelt soprano voice you will hear, accompanied by piano, harp, and violin.  There are fourteen songs in all, and my kids and I enjoyed the whole album.

Here’s the kicker:  She is donating 100% of the proceeds to the Savannah Care Center, a crisis pregnancy across the street from an abortion clinic in downtown Savannah. 

CDs are $15 each, plus $4 for shipping.  Kate would be happy to gift wrap a CD and mail it to someone on your list, too.  To order, just email Kate at

kavingate@hailmail.net

Lovely Christmas music to support a pro-life cause — couldn’t be better!

50 Books: William Steig

First, some bloggy business.  If you are an email subscriber to this blog, you may have stopped getting notifications (and I’m just hoping that you missed them so much that you came over here on your own to find out what happened!).  I think this is because my dear brother figured out how to import the subscriber list to my new blog, which obviously isn’t live yet; but I guess that means that those people are no longer subscribed to this, the old, current blog.  So, sorry about that, if you got dropped!  Please re-subscribe via the sidebar, and I hope to have the new blog up soon!

And now on to our book pick, which I kind of forgot about for a couple of days.

The other day, Melanie Bettinelli was bemoaning the terrible selection of books in the dentist’s waiting room — specifically, the “retellings” of Winnie the Pooh that turn these nutty, hilarious, clever stories into sentimental mush only a literary half-step above the Care Bears.   Our dentist,  happily, has one of those fun-house mirrors, plus a huge collection of germy Legos; so I don’t usually have to read more than one or two hideous books.  But every time we go, I resolve that I’m going to present our dentist with this book:

Doctor De Soto written and illustrated by William Steig

Doctor-De-Soto

One of the very few books, to my knowledge, that presents a dentist as a clever and courageous hero.  He’s also a mouse who has to decide what to do when a fox comes to him in pain.  I love how his wife tries to talk him out of finishing the job, because they both know that the fox intends to eat them; but Dr. De Soto says firmly, “Once I start a job, I finish it.  My father was the same way.”  I don’t know, that line slays me every time.  Same with his little glasses and his stodgy dentist’s smock.  Our family has also adopted the defeated fox’s exit line, “Frank oo berry mush” for use in many occasions.

I really like William Steig, but this one especially dodges some of his less appealing traits:  the way he uses super fancy words for no good reason, and, I forget what the other thing is.  I guess he can be a little brutal in his plot twists sometimes, which could be  hard on sensitive kids.  But this story is short, tidy, and satisfying, and highly original, and only has a little bit of blood.  The illustrations are funny and full of neat little details (some puppies playing jump rope in the city street below the office; the special double stairs, one for large animals and a miniaturized version for the De Sotos.  Steig uses delicate touches, both in his illustrations and in his words, to create solid characters and specific worlds for them to live in.

I also like Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, Shrek (we also say, “Pheasant, peasant?  What a pleasant present!”) (this is the original book on which the movie is VERY loosely based.  In the book, Shrek is not charming, not one little bit; and neither is his bride), The Amazing Bone, Caleb and Kate — oh, and of course Yellow and Pink,which appears to be selling at exorbitant prices, for some reason.  Could it be out of print?   What a shame.

oh fer

From the Weekly Standard:

President Obama declares Hanukkah “an opportunity for people of all faiths to recognize the common aspirations we share.”

He made this comment in his statement on the Jewish holiday emailed to the press:

Michelle and I send our warmest wishes to all those celebrating Hanukkah around the world.

This Hanukkah season we remember the powerful story of the Maccabees who rose up to liberate their people from oppression. Upon discovering the desecration of their Temple, the believers found only enough oil to light the lamp for one night. And yet it lasted for eight.

Hanukkah is a time to celebrate the faith and customs of the Jewish people, but it is also an opportunity for people of all faiths to recognize the common aspirations we share. This holiday season, let us give thanks for the blessings we enjoy, and remain mindful of those who are suffering. And let us reaffirm our commitment to building a better, more complete world for all.

From our family to the Jewish Community around the world, Chag Sameach.

Big words from a guy who doesn’t seem to realize that, in the Hanukkah story, HE IS ANTIOCHUS.

Guest post: Hope Fulfilled

Today’s book pick, an excellent choice for a Christmas present, is recommended by my sister, Sarah Johnson:

*****

The Story of Holly and Ivy

by Rumer Godden, illustrated by Barbara Cooney

 

cooney_the_story_of_holly_and_ivy

Yes, this book does contain orphans and dolls, but no, it is not sappy.  Ivy is a girl who falls through the cracks of a community’s system of charity– she’s the only orphan at St. Agnes’s not to be invited to a patron’s home for Christmas.   She finds herself on a train bound for the Infants Home, the only place available to take her in. But in a moment of nothing-to-lose recklessness, she gets off at a different  stop– to look, she says, for her grandmother.  In the face of another child’s cruelty, she has insisted that this grandmother lives in Appleton, a name she remembers from somewhere.  So when she learns from fellow passengers that Appleton is a real place, she jumps at the chance that her grandmother, too, might be real.   She’s young enough to operate in that in-between world where fantasy and actuality are not distinct territories.  But what she finds in Appleton– the market in full swing on Christmas Eve– is a sensory feast:  

 

There were stalls of turkeys and geese, fruit stalls with oranges, apples, nuts, and tangerines that were like small oranges wrapped in silver paper .  .  . A woman was selling balloons and an old man was cooking hot chestnuts.  Men were shouting, the women had shopping bags and baskets, the children were running, everyone was buying or selling and laughing.  Ivy had spent all her life in St. Agnes’s; she had not seen a market before; and, “I won’t look for my grandmother yet,” said Ivy.

She doesn’t give up the quest, but neither does she pass up this chance to experience everything a market square has to offer.  She spends all the money in her pocket on chestnuts and tea and a blue balloon.  That’s one reason I say this story isn’t sappy:  Ivy isn’t an ideal designed to gratify our emotions;  she acts the way a real child might act.

The book is delicious, though, in the perfect weaving-together of its narrative strands, and it has the happiest ending you could ask for. It’s a Christmas story that doesn’t mention the Christ child, yet the mystery of the first Christmas pervades it in a natural, unobtrusive way.  Here’s an example:  after the market shuts down, Ivy finds shelter in a shed built against the back of a bakery; the oven’s heat, retained by the bricks, is enough to keep her warm through most of the night.  This image works beautifully in its own right;  only several hours after putting the book down did I recognize the echo of a child sheltered in Bethlehem, “house of bread.”

And not till even later did I see the deeper resonance of Mrs. Jones, the “grandmother” Ivy finds. The narrator tells us, “This is a story about wishing.”  What that statement finally means is that it’s a story of grace really given, in spite of being too good to hope for– like the grace promised in the prophecy from Isaiah:  “For it is written, ‘be glad, O barren woman, who bears no children; break forth and cry aloud, you who have no labor pains; because more are the children of the desolate woman than of her who has a husband.’” The sad Mrs. Jones and the lost, wandering Ivy turn out to be very apt representations of fallen mankind.   All the emotion of their fulfilled hope is present in the story, but in a quiet, subdued, and very English way.

The Story of Holly and Ivy  works wonderfully as a read-aloud for children as young as six.  The Viking Kestrel edition, with Barbara Cooney’s luminous illustrations, would make a terrific Christmas gift.

50 Books: zip pop

Self-help books (from yesterday) always make me think of Walker Percy, and Walker Percy always makes me think of Tom Wolfe, and Tom Wolfe makes everyone think ofThe Bonfire of the Vanities , but have you ever read

From-Bauhaus-to-Our-House

From Bauhaus to Our House ?  By Tom Wolfe?

This slim volume (I love saying that) from 1981 tells the bizarre story of how we, the consumer, were quietly conned into accepting “grim and hideous” as the two main pillars of modern architecture — not that pillars have any place in modern architecture.  There has been a small movement back toward beauty and ornamentation in the last few years, but the metal and glass box still has a firm grip on our aesthetic sensibility (gosh, I’m tired.  Well, you know what I mean).

Anyway, even if you’re not normally interested in architecture (and you should be!  What we build tells you who we are, or who we want to be), this weird and hilarious book will open your eyes to What Happened; and it’s a great intro to the non-fiction writing of Tom Wolfe, which I prefer to his fiction.  Ha ha, and Playboy magazine reviewed it thus:  “Sharp serpent’s-tooth wit, useful cultural insight, and snazzy zip! pop! writing.”  So there you have it.  Snazzy and zip pop.

50 Books: Guest Post: Peace and Balance

Today’s book picks are by my sister, Rosie Herreid, who recommends some very timely reads for Advent:

*****

Searching for and Maintaining Peace: A Small Treatise on Peace of Heart by Fr. Jacques Philippe

searching for an maintaining peace

I felt noticeable more peaceful while I was reading this book.  At first glance it seems to offer the kind of cliche spiritual advice that is hard to take to heart, but it is actually full of extremely practical advice about breaking destructive mental habits.

Fr. Philippe begins by dismantling the subtle temptation to fight the “wrong battle,” which he describes as the misplaced desire to attain peace by conquering all of our faults and all of the external obstacles to peace.

…if we expect peace…because everything is going well…and our desires are completely satisfied, …then it is certain that we will never know peace or that our peace will be extremely fragile and of short duration.

Instead, the first step towards finding peace is to look for it in the right place: trusting in God.   He describes his own interior peace this way: “The external situation was always the same, there were always problems to solve, but the heart had changed, and from then on, I could confront them peacefully.”  This is a small, extremely easy-to-read little book, written in a gentle and tender tone.

One more snippet, a prayer upon making a decision, which demonstrates how effectively Fr. Philippe cuts through mental confusion and scrupulosity:

“Lord, I have thought about it and prayed to know Your will.  I do not see it clearly, but I am not going to trouble myself any further.  I am not going to spend hours racking my brain….I know well that, even if I am mistaken, You will not be displeased with me, for I have acted with good intentions.  And if I have made a mistake, I know that You are able to draw good from this error….’  And I remain at peace.

*****

God Help Me!  This Stress is Driving Me Crazy: Finding Balance through God’s Grace by Gregory Popcak

god help me popcak

This is the book Fr. Philippe would have written if, in addition to being a wise spiritual adviser, he was also a very practical psychotherapist with an annoying sense of humor.  Dr. Popcak does an impressive job of smoothly weaving together spiritual advice, traditional therapy techniques, and extremely practical, specific, and step-by-step guidelines for extricating yourself from the pit of anxiety.  This is the book for the person who is warily venturing into the field of self-help books, but afraid of running into ideas that clash with Christianity or offer vague psychobabble instead of concrete advice.

Dr. Popcak’s approach combines surprisingly deep theological insights with practical ways to recognize and dismantle bad mental habits.  One of my favorite examples, on the mental habit of magnification:

Imagine standing in the middle of the railroad tracks.  A train is bearing down on you, and all you can think is, ‘How am I ever going to lift this train before it crushes me?’  Never mind that if you stepped five paces to the left or right you would be just fine.  Magnification causes us to feel that our problems are so big there is nothing to do but become paralyzed by them.  We forget that no matter how big our problems are, God always obliges us to act….

Avoid platitudes like ‘Don’t worry.  You’re going to be OK.  God won’t give you any more than you can handle.’  All of these statements may be true, but they lack the weight needed to be any real help to you or anyone else….If you can’t figure out what to do, make that your main mental occupation, not worrying…Put all of your energy into finding solutions, not into nursing your stress.

This book made me realize that God wants me to be healthy in every way, and that includes psychologically; that He blesses psychotherapy and self-help books just as much as spiritual help and taking care of your body, because He wants you to use everything He has provided to make yourself well.

50 Books: Who is coming to our house?

One of the sweetest animal Christmas stories I’ve ever seen:

Who Is Coming to Our House? by Joseph Slate, illustrated by Ashley Wolff

who is coming cover

It’s very short and simple.  All the animals in the stable know that someone is coming to their house, and they wonder and wonder who it could be.  They do what they can to prepare for their guest, and at the end, everyone welcomes Him.

A very warm, gentle, and happy book (and Mary is shown lying down and snuggling the baby after giving birth, which I always appreciate!).

who is coming to our house interior

I’ve linked to the sturdy board book version, because I think little guys will appreciate the warm colors and friendly animal faces — but I always find the little story moving and comforting, myself.

 

50 books: Guest Post by Steve Gershom

Okay, so I just completely forgot to post a book pick yesterday.  Today, I’m featuring two good books for Advent reading.  The first recommendation is written by the wonderful Steve Gershom (Catholic, Gay, and Feeling Fine, Thanks).

****

The Golden Key by George MacDonald

illustrated by Maurice Sendak

Everybody runs the risk of doing what Revelation 2:4 warns about: forsaking their first love. I come back to The Golden Key often, to remind me what my first love was and is.
It’s a children’s story, and my mother first read it to me when I was maybe eight years old, but it laid the groundwork for all the things that, when I am at my best, I am able to remember about life: that it is terribly good and terribly exciting; that the stakes couldn’t be higher; that real goodness is a thing that glows white hot; that our final destination is a beauty so deep you could never hit bottom.
Not that kids will get all of that at first. It works as a standard fairy tale, too: the quest for a magical object, the strange, sage-like figures met along the way, the tests and trials. The adult will see further, and if he’s reading it out loud, should probably have several kleenexes at hand.
                                                                                                                                                                                                   –Steve Gershom
*****
And, since I owe you a book from yesterday, let me remind you that ADVENTHOLOGY has broken free from the murky realms of pre-ordering, and is now on sale.  Here is the cover for my contribution:
Here is an excerpt:

But what if we’re too sick, too busy, or too lazy to enter into a full observance of each season?  What if we’re just half-hearted draftees as the calendar reels by?  Or what if we get so caught up in the preparation that we miss the main event?  What if we’re never sure we did it right?

It’s the liturgical calendar to the rescue again.  Just like any life, the life of the Church includes healthy doses of Ordinary Time.  Mother Church, in her wisdom, knows that her children need regular lulls of boredom and routine in order to process everything that happened to us during the feasts and fasts.  The great celebrations of the liturgical year are a tremendous gift to us, but ordinary time is something just as valuable:  time to unpack the gifts we received.  Time to see what we really have.

And time to remember that Christ was born as a baby.  The thing about babies?  They need time to grow.

Stay tuned for more excerpts from the other contributors, Dorian Speed and Brandon Vogt (and click here for an excerpt of Dan Lord’s contirbution).  Also check out the editor Ryan Charles Trusell’s redesigned website, where he’s recently started blogging!

50 books: speaking of heathen stuff

Today’s book pick is one I just read to my kids last night, and it’s just as good as I remembered it from my childhood.

The Flying Carpet by the wonderful Marcia Brown 

(retold from Richard Burton’s translation of The Arabian Nights)

Very lavish and rhythmic, so much fun to read out loud (warning:  plot spoiler!)

“Alas!  We have traveled far and wide for hope of wedding the Princess Nur-al Nihar.  But in vain!  She lies on her bed, sick unto death.  Her women weep and wail in sorrow.  O my brothers, if you would see her for the last time, take a look before she is no more!”

Ali and Ahmad looked into the tube.  Indeed Nur-al Nihar was about to die.  Ahmad turned to his brothers.  “Come, she is not yet lost.  I can save the princess!” He pulled from his pocket the magical apple and told them what it could do.

“My carpet!” cried Prince Husayn.  “It shall fly us in the twinkling of an eye straight to our beloved!”

The illustrations are like what you’d get if Marc Chagall were an Arab — gorgeously gaudy,  just absolutely perfect to completely satisfy a child’s thirst for brilliant color, emotion, texture, and action.  We love this book!

50 Books: Guest post by Abba

Today’s book pick is from my father, Phil Prever, who not only read us The Odyssey, but he let us act it out as he read, which must have been the most annoying thing ever.

******

   About a hundred years ago when I was a college freshman, I took a survey course in Western literature.  One of the reading assignments was excerpts from Homer’s Odyssey.  The book made no particular impression on me then, but I do remember a comment offered by a bright young woman during a class discussion.  “The only thing remarkable about it,” she said of the Odyssey, “is that anyone could have written it so long ago.”  I knew she was wrong, but I didn’t know why.  Now, after reading it close to a dozen times over the decades, I know why.

   The Odyssey is remarkable in many ways.  On one level there are the fabulous adventures: magical encounters with the gods, brutal conflicts with hideous monsters, a terrifying visit to the land of the dead, and audiences with wise and legendary kings.  These adventures make the book a wonderful read-aloud, as I believe all eight of my children will attest.

    On another level, Homer probes with startling psychological depth the relations between husband and wife, father and son, and citizen and homeland.  Furthermore, the Odyssey records the reintegration of a man’s soul as he is redeemed from the wreckage wrought by war and pillage by his struggles to reclaim the things in life that are most important.

   Above all, the Odyssey appeals to and satisfies the desire we all have to make things right, to correct injustice, to restore the divine order in our lives.  At the end we can say with Shakespeare, “Jack shall have Jill, nought shall go ill…and all shall be well.”  And even more, we can look forward to the time when “God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.”

   So the question is not, how could anyone have written the Odyssey so long ago but, why in almost three thousand years has no one written anything better?  Since I have failed in my feeble attempts to learn Homeric Greek, I have had to read the Odyssey in translation.  If you like that sort of thing, Richmond Lattimore’s version reads like it is incised on marble tablets.  Robert Fitzgerald’s is airy and fast-moving, but I find that Fitzgerald’s Homer sounds an awful lot like Fitzgerald’s Virgil.  Last time around I read the translation of Robert Fagles.

It was delightful, with real meat on real bones, and seemed to me to have the best of everything.  I read it very slowly because I didn’t want it to end.