Program features books, books, books and a moving story of life after loss
Tome on the Range manager Michael Siewert brought another
stack of wonderful reading options to the Tuesday, March 13 program.
Crazy Like Us:
The Globalization of the American Psyche, by Ethan Watters, will be the
featured book at the Tome on the Range Sunday Salon, 3 p.m., March 18. Mental
illness and how it is handled in this country is having an unexpected but
perhaps predictable ripple affect across the world. Join Tome owner Nancy
Colalillo in the discussion.
From
the Crazy Like Us website:
“The most devastating consequence of the spread of American culture across the
globe has not been our golden arches or our bomb craters, but our bulldozing of
the human psyche itself. American-style depression, post-traumatic stress
disorder, and anorexia have begun to spread around the world like contagions,
and the virus is us. Traveling from Hong Kong to Sri Lanka to Zanzibar to
Japan, acclaimed journalist Ethan Watters witnesses firsthand how Western
healers often steamroll indigenous expressions of mental health and madness and
replace them with our own. In teaching the rest of the world to think like us,
we have been homogenizing the way the world goes mad.”
Michael also talked about, The
Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, by
Jonathan Haidt. “Why can’t our political leaders work together as threats loom
and problems mount? Why do people so readily assume the worst about the motives
of their fellow citizens? In The Righteous Mind, social psychologist
Jonathan Haidt explores the origins of our divisions and points the way forward
to mutual understanding.”
This excerpt from the Random House website
sets the stage for a book that explores the hide-bound opinions and cultural
perceptions that prevent us from seeing the “other side” of a question. Common
ground doesn’t have to mean changing one’s philosophy, but rather listening
with an open mind to the opinions of others, even when we don’t agree with
them.
Which lead Michael to a discussion of the book, Religion
for Atheists, by Alain de
Botton. This is a book a little outside my ken, so I include an excerpt
from de Botton’s blog, which you may want to read in full:
Religion for Atheists
suggests that rather than mocking religions, agnostics and atheists should
instead steal from them – because they're packed with good ideas on how
we might live and arrange our societies. Blending deep respect with total
impiety, Alain (a non-believer himself) proposes that we should look to
religions for insights into, among other concerns, how to…”
Another of Michael’s current favs is, Turing’s
Cathedral, by George Dyson. I
suspect by Michael’s commentary, the book may be a little dense with technical
minutia, but I also imagine it is a fascinating look at what we now think of as
the “computer age,” when in reality it began with a person and an idea back in
1936.
From the Random House website: “It is possible to invent a
single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence,”
twenty-four-year-old Alan Turing announced in 1936. In Turing’s Cathedral,
George Dyson focuses on a small group of men and women, led by John von Neumann
at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, who built one of
the first computers to realize Alan Turing’s vision of a Universal Machine.
Their work would break the distinction between numbers that mean things
and numbers that do things—and our universe would never be the same.”
Michael read from a small book that manages to say quite a lot in few well chosen words. Poetry in prose form, Almost
Invisible, by Mark Strand is made up of small vignettes that make you think, smile, chuckle and even laugh out loud.
From the Random House website: “From Pulitzer Prize–winner Mark Strand comes
an exquisitely witty and poignant series of prose poems. Sometimes appearing as
pure prose, sometimes as impure poetry, but always with Strand’s clarity and
simplicity of style, they are like riddles, their answers vanishing just as
they appear within reach. Fable, domestic satire, meditation, joke, and fantasy
all come together in what is arguably the liveliest, most entertaining book
that Strand has yet written.”
There were other books discussed, but for a real treat, go
to Tome and do some browsing. They love it when you do that.
"Leaving the Hall Light" On Defines Hope and Resilience
My call-in guest, Madeline Sharples,
is a woman with a lot of courage. Her book, Leaving the Hall Light On, is part
memoir, cathartic journal, story of recovery and the steps she took to rebuild
her life after the suicide of her son who lived for years with bipolar disorder.
It is a personal story and goes to the heart of mental illness, which affects the afflicted individual and all those with whom he or she comes into
contact.
The interview with Madeline was open and honest, leaving one
with the impression that nothing in her life is a surprise, and there is
nothing in her life she can’t handle. She and her family walked with Paul - the
son and brother whose illness lead to his suicide - through hell, and then
endured another kind of hell in the weeks, months and years following his
death.
I’ve read Leaving the Hall Light On, and my heart and
sympathies go out to anyone who has had to learn how to live with and through
horrendous tragedies.
The book is organized around Madeline’s poetry. An
accomplished writer she hadn't written much poetry until after Paul’s death.
As a consequence of attending a writing workshop at Esalen Institute in
California, she found poetry to be intensely personal and therapeutic. “I was able
to get all the personal, dark and bad stuff onto the page through poetry.” For
Madeline it proved to be another means of dealing with an almost unfathomable loss
Her publisher encouraged her to use more of her
poetry in the book and to organize the content around the poetry. When you read Leaving
the Hall Light On, you can understand how one literary form draws strength from
the other.
The book is about Paul’s “...journey into madness,” and the
life Madeline and her family rebuilt after his suicide. She said she has survived and prospered in unexpected way. She is a web journalist and
working on a novel.
Leaving the Hall Light On, refers to her “magical thinking"
following Paul’s death that if she lived life a certain way, like leaving the
hall light on, not moving from their home, not changing the telephone number, Paul
would be able to find his way back to them. Her years of living with this
tragedy inspired her to write the book and provides information about resources
available to help others experiencing similar situations.
The book is worth
your time, especially if you are seeking information about bipolar disorder,
mental illness and hope.
For more about Madeline
go to any one of the following links: “Leaving
the Hall Light On,”
Book trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TMOVHAmSlc
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