Stones into Schools by Greg Mortenson

Stones into Schools
by Greg Mortenson
read by Atossa Leoni
2009

What is particularly wonderful about this book is the pervasive optimism. At a time when I often feel hopeless in the face of atrocities I can’t fight, this is a story about a guy who figured out how to fight. And by fight, I mean arrange the building of schools for girls in rural Pakistan and Afghanistan.

I may be the last person to know about this book since it’s a sequel to “Three Cups of Tea”, which I vaguely recall from that having been on the New York Times Best Seller list for a gazillion weeks some years back, but I never read. I now probably need to do so. But I picked up “Stones into Schools” kind of randomly as one of the few audiobooks at my local library that looked like an interesting read for my work commute. And it really was.

Apparently, in the first book, Mortenson talks about having been a mountain climber who got lost in Pakistan, winding up in a small rural village where a very goal-oriented young child wrangles a promise out of him that he will return and build her a school in her village. There’s some extreme mission creep, as happens, and he winds up with a nonprofit that builds a number of schools in a number of rural villages.

The second book, this one that I’ve just read (ie, listened to), starts with Mortenson checking in on one of these schools along the Pakistan-Afghan border, when horseriders come down from the Afghan mountains to meet him. They explain that they had heard he was in the area, and by area, they meant a mere six-day horseride away, and had come to ask him to build a school for their community of nomadic yak herders in the heights of the mountainous Wakhan Corridor. This was in 1998.

The book covers the next ten years of Mortenson’s attempt to get that school built, through the rise of Taliban and the complex series of relationships, favors given and owed, with all the people and communities along the way.

The book does an amazing job of introducing the people he meets and works with, in all their complexities of personal histories and motives, and how, in the end, they align in trying to bring literacy to rural girls. It also really introduced me for the first time to exactly how horrific the Taliban was to the people it claimed as its own, and how few they truly numbered for all their viciousness. The Taliban created an unsustainable society that hates its own women, but the women and the men who cared for them continued to strive for better.

This book makes me feel hopeful. And that is something I desperately need right now.

When I checked my library catalog to make sure they had “Three Cups of Tea” for my future reading/listening (they do), I discovered another book “Three Cups of Deceit” all about how Mortenson is a liar and a fraud and just the title felt like a slap in the face after such optimism. I looked up both that book and Mortenson on Wikipedia to figure out what the actual truth was and, as far as I can tell, the “Three Cups of Deceit” guy was angry that Mortenson isn’t perfect, nonprofits are always weird, rural schools for girls haven’t immediately created peace in the middle east, and decided to ride the coattails of fame with a clickbait title, while doing his best to turn optimism into cynicism and hope into despair. Mortenson promotes his successes and talks less about his failures and there’s no more financial shenanigans in his nonprofit than in many others. I think the ultimate lesson here is: you don’t have to be flawless to still be good. Find a quest, like-minded people will join you on the quest, and do as much good in the world as you possibly can.

The Bible: Psalms

Feb5 by Rebecca

I had actually been really looking forward to Psalms because I thought there would be some good poetry here. I’m not a big poetry reader, not because I dislike it but because I am incredibly picky about it. But I like John Donne’s poetry, and Rita Dove’s poetry, and Ramprasad Sen’s poetry, and I’ve been getting a kick out of the “I lik the bred” poetry meme. As it turns out, I’m not a big fan of King David’s, King Solomon’s, or various other poets’ poetry that wound up in Psalms.

The introduction on the audio book version also raised expectations because apparently a lot of these are lyrics, intended to be set to music, and the original text includes instructions on the music. Cool!* If nothing else, I was going to amuse myself by trying to find Christian rock bands who had put the Psalms to music in a modern fashion. But the results are pretty rough. I mean, the music is fine, less rock and more spiritual/celtic maybe, which is disappointing, but the lyrics…

Just, wow, the Pslams are whiney. Either whiney or really blatantly hypocritical. Often, they’re both whiney and hypocritical. Just oof. I was disappointed. There’s just a lot of “these people are being mean to me, you need to beat them up” along with “you hate people who do violent things but love people who obey you, so let’s all do violent things to the people who don’t obey you.”

So just, nope.

Now, keep in mind that Psalms is broken into 5 sections and 150 poems, from a variety of poets discussing a variety of issues, so while I didn’t like the vast majority of it, that isn’t to say there aren’t a few exceptions.

There are some individual verses that ring out with power and touch the heart… but there’s always another verse that pretty much delivers the opposite message.

A couple of verses that spoke to me particularly strongly given the current political situation in the US are:

Psalm 94:20-21:

But you are opposed to dishonest lawmakers
Who gang up to murder innocent victims

Psalm 101:6-7 (by King David):

I will find trustworthy people to serve as my advisors
And only an honest person will serve as an official
No one who cheats or lies
Will have a position in my royal court

So, for a moment, it was a salve to my soul, a bit like watching West Wing.

But then there’s Psalm 106:34-35:

Our Lord, they disobeyed you
By refusing to destroy the nations.
Instead they were friendly
With those foreigners and followed their customers

So there really is something for everyone in these psalms, including the pro-genocide bigots. That is not a good thing.

But if you ever want to have a bible verse to support your position on any given issue, Psalms probably has you covered. You just have to decide to ignore all the context and hypocrisy.

Summary: A book of poetry that varies between emo whining and questionable historical accounts.

Moral: If you alternate between flattering and whining to a powerful being, they might be willing to act on your behalf.

* Especially cool since I have recently run across a lot of interesting discussions of how versatile hip-hop is, and how versatile Shakespeare is in much the same vein as hip-hop, and I just had high expectations.

Next Up: Proverbs

The Bible: Chronicles 1

Dec12 by Rebecca

This broke me. Not the book itself, although it took an audiotape and a long drive to get through it, but the write up. I had originally planned to illustrate it with a family tree. Except that the first four verses of the first chapter are a vertical family tree through thirteen generations from Adam to Japheth. The fifth verse lists Japheth’s seven sons. Verses six and seven list the sons of two of Japheth’s seven sons, one of whom had three sons and the other four. And it just keeps going.

There are more than a hundred names (although only approximately 75 unique individuals because of course every father is listed twice, once as a “son of” and then again as a “father of”) within the first 26 verses of chapter 1, at which point we get to the sons of Abraham: Isaac and Ishmael, who at least are names I recognize. After that, there are a lot more names that I don’t recognize at all. A lot.

The first chapter has 54 verses. The book as a whole has 29 chapters. And it’s the first of two scrolls that make up Chronicles 1 and Chronicles 2 respectively.

What do you even do with this?

Although as a baby name book, it’s pretty excellent. If you can get over some of the names themselves. I do feel like no one should be named after Ham (1:4), but then there’s Tilgathpilneser (king of Assyria, listed in 5:6 and again in 5:26 because why make things easy to keep track of?), since that is a bitching name.

“I wanted to give my son a biblical name, but also a unique one.”

“So, little baby Tilgathpilneser?”

“We call him Tilgy.”

(Also, rather than just a name in a list, like so many are, we learn that God roused Tilgathpilneser’s spirit in order to punish the Israelites – even the Reubenites! – so… there’s that? 5:26)

The family trees just keep going, but we do occasionally get some few verses dotted here and there giving a few details about what’s actually happening with and to at least some of these people.

There’s also the occasional woman mentioned, such as Hammoleketh who bore three children of unspecified gender (but certainly not unspecified name!) listed in 7:18. And then there’s Sherah (7:24) who makes me grin because Shera! Princess of Power! which was a favorite cartoon that dates me horribly (and also aged horribly.)

We also get to a few parts where the people don’t always have names, but do have hereditary positions of employment such as porters of various quarters, overseers of vessels, cooks, and singers. Of course, sometimes they do have names, and those many, many names are listed. (chapter 9.)

And, sometimes there isn’t familial connections, just being in the same battle but still needing a chapter devoted to the roll call of those valiant warriors. (chapter 11).

By chapters 15, it became too much for the original writer apparently because it breaks down into numbers rather than lists of names, or at least lists of names associated with the number of children rather than lists of names associated with lists other lists of names.

Chapters 16-22 actually get back to story telling with King David and the ark of the covenant, a list of rules of behaviors, and the temple that David really wants to build and has very specific ideas about but that can’t be built within his lifetime because God says so and thus needs to be described to his son Solomon for him to do later.

After that break, chapters 23-27 are back to genealogies and employment records.

Chapters 28-29 are a rousing speech that King David gives, somewhat about the greatness of the Lord but mostly about exactly what the temple he wants built after he dies to look like, described in extremely excruciating detailed instructions. It all finally ends with a quick summary of King David’s reign (good) and his biographies (three of them) and mention that King Solomon is the next king.

Summary: There are a lot of people and population increases geometrically over time if couple has more than two kids. They’re mostly employed being porters, priests, singers, cooks, warriors, and kings. And wow, does King David want to be in charge of building his temple even if it can’t be started until after he dies.

Moral: As time goes by, being one more name in a long list of names is not a great legacy, in my ever so humble opinion.

Next up: Chronicles 2

World War Z

Oct24 by Rebecca

World War Z
By Max Brooks
2007

So I “read” this as an audio book that was marked as unabridged, but does appear to have lacked a few sections from the original book written in 2006. I now need to go back and read that whole book, because this was AMAZING and there are still parts I haven’t read!

Just, wow! So, so good!

The audio book was particularly good for an audio book because it was read by a full cast of voice actors, not just a single reader, and it really highlighted the way that this book was presented as an oral history.

For the rare person who doesn’t recognize it, it’s a fictional book inspired by the nonfiction book The Good War: An Oral History of World War II. In World War Z, though, the war in question is the zombie war, but for all the fantasy element, it’s addressed in a serious manner. I love the world building that went into figuring out how a zombie war could start, how different people would react, and how it would eventually end. I also loved the characters, who were all faced with this impossible conflict and did the best that they could.

I may very well be the last person to have gotten around to reading this book, so it hardly needs me to recommend it, but if you happen to have been living under a rock for the last decade, you really should read this!

The only thing that could have made it better is if it were longer, and apparently that wish got granted since there’s more for me to read once I get a text copy to read. (I really want to know more about the blind Japanese mountain man! But I’ll also take anything else.)

As a side note: ignore the movie. They took a really unique book essentially consisting of dozens of epic interlinking short stories and tried to shoehorn it into a traditional movie plot.

Maya Angelou

Jan3 by Rebecca

I read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sing in high school after my particularly awesome English teacher won her stare-down with the school board. Unfortunately, I don’t actually remember it all that well and didn’t remember much about the author either, for all her name recognition. Clearly that needed to change.

So for my Christmas road trip, I picked up (thank you public libraries!) three of Maya Angelou’s audio books, each of which she read herself. I like audio books that have been read by their authors. All readers add their own nuances to texts and when the authors read them you know it’s the intended nuance. Maya Angelou has the added benefit of actually being a professional performer and reciter.

Curiously, her speech pattern reminded me of William Shatner’s, and I wonder if he modeled his after hers. Very well enunciated, and with frequent, intentional pauses. She carries the style off better, though.

A Song Flung Up To Heaven
2002

Maya Angelou had a pretty amazing life with many ups and downs. Where before my impression of her was as this iconic individual almost out of sight on a pedestal, this autobiography shows her as fully human with all the attending strengths and weaknesses. One of her many strength is surely her willingness to show the world her weaknesses.

Rather than a single long book, this felt like a themed collection of short stories. Rather than telling the story of her life, she’s telling stories from her life, giving the reader a look at different times and events. Each chapter could potentially stand alone and be well worth reading.

Mom & Me & Mom
2013

Wow. Maya Angelou’s mother, Vivian Baxter, sounds like a truly amazing woman who lived her life to the fullest. As tumultuous as Maya Angelou’s life has been, her mother’s seems to have been that much more so. This book focuses on Maya’s relationship with her mother, which was excellent, but I also wish there was a full biography of Vivian Baxter, because just the glimpses we see into her life as it intersected with her daughter are pretty amazing. She was strong and determined and opinionated and just an amazing woman but she was not necessarily a comfortable woman to be around. She seems to have been utterly and completely herself and lived out loud.

Letter To My Daughter
2009

This struck me as pretty much a perfect graduation gift (highschool? college? some other major life transition where you’re not sure what you’re going to be doing next?). Many of the chapters are slightly edited versions of chapters from her other books, but they’re collected here for a reason. The overall message of this book is that life is going to throw a lot of different things your way, some wonderful opportunities and some awful experiences, so stay strong and try your best to take advantage of the first and get through the second.

I recommend all of these.

The Man Who Loved Books Too Much

Dec27 by Rebecca

The Man Who Loved Books Too Much
By Allison Hoover Bartlett
2010
Read by Judith Brackley

This was an interesting look into the both the rare book collecting community and the criminal mentality as a journalist recounts her research into an unrepentant book thief and the book seller who tracked him down to bring to justice.

It reminded me of a combination of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, with its quirky book lovers, and The Art of the Steal, with its discussions of how con jobs and thefts are both implemented and guarded against. With a side of Marching Powder, with it’s unpleasant main character who just gets less sympathetic the more he tries to explain his perspective.

And actually, regarding that last bit, Gilkey’s (the thief) attempts at gaining sympathy and explaining his rational is so crazy that even the Bartlett (the journalist) is completely taken aback by it. But she’s still more accepting of it than I am, to the extent that her writing almost reads like an unreliable narrator as she first recounts a conversation verbatim and then describes how he still seems like such a nice, polite guy… and I’m going: nope!

But it’s still quite fascinating and does make me want to visit a rare book convention and see the stalls where different book sellers set up with their books with prices that range from less than a $100 to more than $100K.

The Opposite of Fate

Apr22 by Rebecca

The Opposite of Fate
written by Amy Tan
read by Amy Tan
2004

This was a really interesting set of nonfiction essays by the writer Amy Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God’s Wife. Since it’s a collection, rather than a single piece, there was a great deal of overlap in the topics being discussed, and that actually made it more interesting for me, rather than less. Because the topics were often the same or similar but the writing time and intended audience varied, it gave very different perspectives on some of the events in her life. And she has had a quite eventful life.

While Tan’s fiction is very much fictional, I can see why so many of her readers think these stories are true. Tan’s real life would fit right in with that of her fictional characters.

I particularly liked her perspective on minority authors, and how they don’t need to be and shouldn’t be required to be minority spokespeople. The best stuff speaks to the human condition, not just the minority condition.

I was reminded of reading The Thousand and One Nights, the set of recursive stories that Scheherazade tells to her husband over the course of three years so as to postpone her execution. Her husband believes that all women and certainly all wives are evil and deceptive and deserve to die before they get the opportunity to betray their husbands. So Scheherazade tells story within story about people being people: men and women and husbands and wives and children and lovers who are variously good or evil or strong or weak or smart or stupid or silly. Because while Scheherazade’s husband believes all women are evil, the lesson Scheherazade is trying to teach him is not that all women are good, but that women are people just like men and each individual must be judged by their own merits.

Anyway, I enjoyed this book, but also think that I will probably not read any of her other books. I like to keep a certain amount of distance when looking at the human condition, and Tan seems to dive right in to look at the difficult and the gritty parts of being human.

Marching Powder

Nov15 by Rebecca

Marching Powder
By Rusty Young
Read by Adrian Mulraney
2003

This was a fascinating book, but, once more, this was a book that I would not have managed to get through in anyway other than an audiobook. Even as an audio book, I almost quit it multiple times.

It’s essentially the memoirs of Thomas McFadden, a young British drug smuggler, about his years in Bolivia’s San Pedro Prison. I say “essentially” because I’m a bit unclear on why this book isn’t listed with two authors: it’s written in the first person and there are direct descriptions of how Rusty came to the prison and recorded McFadden’s story on audio cassettes.

The hardest part of getting through this book is that there was no one in the book that I liked. There were better and worse people. And there were definitely situations that no one should have to live through, no matter how nice or not they are, but being a victim doesn’t always make a person innocent. I went into this book knowing it was about a prison and a drug smuggler, but he’s described as being very personable, and I guess he is? But it came across to me as a highly manipulative, almost psychopathic type of personability where I couldn’t actually feel a connection and, through his recounting, couldn’t feel a connection to anyone else, either. As the book described actions, reactions, and motivations, I found myself just generally disliking both Thomas (the narrator) and Rusty (the author) and most of the other people too, regardless of whether Thomas was trying to present them in a good or bad light.

Surprisingly, while the people made the book difficult to get through, the events recounted were not as difficult. I’d gone into this book prepared by Hollywood and stereotypes to hear the conditions of a third-world drug prison (ie, awful, awful, awful conditions). I was surprised that while, yes, at some points in time and in some circumstances, it did live up to those expectations, at other times and in other situations, the prison as a whole acted more like a small city-state with strict immigration laws: ie, you couldn’t leave, but it wasn’t a half-bad place to settle down, start a business, and raise a family.

The corruption described is so prevalent that the it struck me that this wasn’t a corrupt justice/prison system at all, but was something entirely different, merely masking itself to the outside eye as a justice/prison system. It seemed like more of a state-run hostage business or some other money-making scheme that I don’t quite understand, but certainly wasn’t interested in either justice, rehabilitation, or even punishment. This is not is a justice/prison system marred by corruption, because the corruption has taken over. The corruption is so prevalent that it creates it’s own structure, completely replacing the structure that might otherwise have been there.

I’ve been trying to think of a good simile and the best I can come up with is that calling this part of a justice system with some corruption would be like calling a fishing net a sailboat sail with some holes. They can’t really be compared.

To sum up, I’ll steal Kinsey’s three-word review style and say, this book was: informative, interesting, off-putting.

Melting Stone

Nov10 by Rebecca

Melting Stone
By Tamora Pierce
Full cast audio
2007

This was interesting.

Tamora Pierce was a guest speaker at the National Book Festival this year and I was delighted. I was also somewhat shocked that the line to get a book signed by her started forming in front of the signing tent at least an hour before she gave her talk at a completely different tent, and several hours before she would start signing anything.

I’m pleased that she’s popular, but I think the kids in that line made a mistake in going for a signature rather than listening to her speak. She’s a wonderful and witty speaker, with a certain acerbic quality that I enjoy. Seeing her at the festival was also my first notice that her next book has come out: Battle Magic.

I put a hold on it at my local library and checked out Melting Stone.

I grew up reading Tamora Pierce and I still love her books, but I hadn’t gotten around to reading Melting Stone, in large part because it was a born-audio book. While it also came out in traditional book format, that was only after it was published as a full-cast audio-book: meaning each character was voiced by a different voice actor and some sound effects were included, too.

This is not the only thing that’s unusual about this book. The main character, Evvy, was first introduced in a different book, Street Magic. Street Magic, in turn, in the second book that focuses on the character of Briar Moss. Both of those books focused on Briar Moss are single parts in four-book series. Melting Stone also references a lot of events that happen in Battle Magic, a book that was only just published recently in 2013, some six years later. It’s hard for me to tell exactly, given that I know this book series quite well and for some time, but I think this book was intended to be able to stand alone and even introduce the universe to a new generation of readers, who can then go back, if they’d like, and read the backstory of the original books, but don’t have to if they don’t want to, and can continue to read future books as they come out.

Anyway, it was fun, even though it was also intended for a younger audience even than most of Pierce’s books. As Kinsey noted in her last post, we all like reading YA fiction, but generally the audience of those books are teens or the particularly precocious, and the intended audience for this book was more elementary school.

One of the things I love about well-written fiction is that it’s often also well-researched and you can learn a fair bit of non-fiction facts along with enjoying a story with characters and plot-arch. This book, in particular, I thought did a good job of including some basic geology for kids.

So while I enjoyed the story and the characters, I was mostly interested in my own meta analysis of this book. Are audiobooks really becoming more mainstream and standard? Regardless of format, it’s rather brilliant of Pierce to break up the continuity a bit in order to bring in a new generation of kids. I wonder: are there people out there who grew up reading her books who are now introducing them to their own kids?

Predictably Irrational

Oct11 by Rebecca

Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions
by Dan Ariely
2008
read by Simon Jones

I took a couple of courses in grad school about the information business, which is a growing industry that deals with the interesting paradox of having to use information as both a marketing tool and a product. It’s fascinating and complex, but was also my first introduction as an adult to standard economic theory.

Both my immediate and ongoing reaction is: standard economic theory is idiotic. It’s just blatantly false, based on two assumptions: 1. All decisions made by individuals are rational. 2. All those rational decisions are made with the primary goal of increasing that individual’s personal financial wealth.

Standard economic theory has a real hard time trying to explain nonprofits. Or, you know, families and friends.

Ariely is one of the active researchers opening up a new field of study: Behavioral economics. This is a field that comes out of psychology more than economics, and it looks at how people actually make decisions. (And is something of a balm to my soul after trying to comprehend what regular economics think.)

How do biases work, or habits form? How do our decisions change when we have an audience or not? Rather than always acting rationally, how do we rationalize some of our less acceptable behaviors?

He studies this, and he does so through a series of small experiments. (His students at MIT should really have started to be suspicious of some of his odder requests. And I imagine the neighborhood kids roll their eyes at this point.)

It’s an excellent book, with a great deal of humor to it, but also caused a certain amount of introspection as I thought about how I make my own decisions, and a certain amount of horror, given the current political state of my country, in regards to how politicians make their decisions.

I highly recommend this book. My three word review: funny, fascinating, and important.

Biblio-therapy

Tag Archives: audiobook