Book #49: Real Moms: Making it Up as We Go by Lisa Valentine Clark

I've read Clark's sister-in-laws' blogs for years and years now (C. Jane and Stephanie Nielsen) and I've read about her being mentioned in those spaces. I remembered her because of her maiden name being Valentine and of course, that is cute and distinctive enough that it stood out. From what I've gathered about her, she is an actress and her husband is a playwright and director and they are very talented people, and this book just confirms that. She says that this is the book nobody asked her to write, that any mom could write a book about mothering, and she's definitely not trying to give advice, but she does share a lot of thoughtful ideas about parenting, mothering, and the struggles we all face, whether it be fears of our children resenting or rejecting us, or just trying to live in this era of Pinterest-style motherhood. Each chapter is like an essay with some funny moments, lots of real confessions about things that she has done and experienced as a mom, and musings about how we make our lives more difficult than we need to be and the amazingness of being a mom even with it all. I wish I had marked some of the chapters or places that really stood out to me, because I want to be more specific, but I can't really remember anything great right now except for the last chapter, where she talked about how the Atonement can make up for all of our fears of what our children will use their agency to do, and how we are all unified together through the Atonement. (The book isn't very preachy or churchy the majority of the time. It's clearly meant for an LDS audience with a few references to church stuff throughout but mostly she talks about things that apply to any mom out there.) At the end she talks about a race she did with her son, where he sprinted off at the end and she was trying to keep up with him, but then she realized in this race, like life, she was training him to run off without her. That's what we all do as moms; we are trying to create independent beings and work ourselves out of a job. It was a great way to end the book. I will re-read this one again, I'm sure, because she made me laugh and think and it helped me get out of a grumpy mom funk without being too sentimental and felt like someone was listening to me and understood why some days can just be junk.

Book #48: The Dorito Effect by Mark Schatzker

I heard about this book on my favorite podcast (Stuff You Should Know) and I downloaded the audiobook version to my phone from our library website (a first! I figured out how to do it!). It was super interesting and I really enjoyed listening to it. The main premise really struck me: Schatzker's thesis is that the current obesity epidemic is caused not by the unhealthy ingredients in foods, but instead by the lack of natural flavor in foods, which means that most foods (even foods like raw meat and chicken, and even fruits and veggies) are only getting their flavor by chemicals being added by food scientists. (Like Doritos, everything is over-flavored now.) He strongly makes the claim that our bodies have natural nutritional wisdom, where our bodies crave the foods that give us the nutrients we need, but only if the flavors we eat match the nutrients we are eating. All foods taste blander now than they did even fifty or sixty years ago, because they have been bred for yield and bug resistance and not flavor, and this blander food requires the addition of flavoring to make them palatable. Since so many of the foods we eat have added flavorings that make them taste like what they're not, our bodies are totally thrown off and we end up eating and needing more and more. When we eat things that are truly flavorful, we are fully satisfied by the end of the meal and don't need to keep eating and eating. And as an added bonus, truly flavorful foods in nature are also the most nutritious, as all of the chemicals that provide taste in foods also are linked to the vitamins and minerals and nutrients in each of those foods.

Near the end of the book, he summarizes his points with these three statements:

1. Humans are flavor seeking animals. The pleasure provided by food, which we experience as flavor, is so powerful that only the most strong-willed among us can resist it.

2. In nature, there is an intimate connection between flavor and nutrition.

3. Synthetic flavor technology not only breaks that connection, it also confounds it.

I was very interested in a lot of the research that he discusses in the book. He talks a lot about the experiments done by a researcher at Utah State with sheep and goats, and proving that nutritional wisdom truly does exist. The most interesting study that stood out to me was in 1926 when a woman took fifteen children and for six years let them eat whatever they wanted from a list of 34 foods that provided a balance of nutrients (fruits, veggies, meat, etc.). The children naturally fed themselves balanced diets, even as their preferences and needs changed. Their bodies knew what nutrients they needed, proving that anyone can be a nutritionist if their bodies can make the connection between what they're eating and what's in it. 

Schatzker suggests that you avoid eating things with flavorings (which means processed foods, plus a whole lot of other "natural" foods), but I think that's pretty difficult to do when you don't have farmer's markets easily accessible and lots of money to put towards buying heirloom chickens or tomatoes. Maybe someday we could have chickens, but not now. I really enjoyed this book and the perspective he included (he seemed very balanced and not super aggressive against Big Agriculture, just a little bit), although the last chapter really bugged me. He ended the book with a big meal made of all these heirloom foods he'd talked about through the book, and dragged out how dramatic it was to get the meal ready at the same time, and blah blah blah. It was pretty annoying. But I appreciated his overall argument nonetheless.

Book #47: The Biography of Gordon B. Hinckley: Go Forward with Faith by Sheri L. Dew

I've been thinking about reading this book forever. I took it from my parents' house before they moved so that I would actually start it, and then it sat on my bedside stand for three months. I loved reading about President Hinckley and learning more about his character and personality. I was surprised by how many of the stories or anecdotes in the book I was already familiar with, like he had told them in Conference talks or people had included them in lessons in church that I have heard.

Things I loved learning about President Hinckley:

-How hardworking he was. He really valued a strong work ethic and had one himself. He may have been a sort of workaholic, but he was always dedicated, particularly since he saw himself as working to further the work of the Church.
-He built their entire house with his own hands. He was extremely handy and knew how to do everything, from the plumbing to electrical, etc. He was constantly making up projects and remodeling their house just for fun or for major events. He would take down walls and put them back up for any little reason.
-He came home from his mission in England and went to report to the First Presidency on something for his mission president (asking for more and better missionary materials). Then he thought he would apply to journalism school back East. But two days later, the First Presidency asked him to work for the Church and be in charge of the project he had proposed to them--and to be their main PR guy. He basically became the PR and missionary departments at the Church headquarters. And he worked for the Church for the rest of his life (except for two years during WWII when he worked for the railroads). This really prepared him to be a leader later because he knew every aspect of the Church and its functions.
-He spent many years traveling to Asia and getting to know the people there, in Hong Kong, Korea, the Philippines, and all over. He went to tiny towns and talked to individual members, and he saw their sufferings and their lives. He may have only lived in Salt Lake City his whole life, but he was very aware of the issues of the world.
-His sweet relationship with his wife. He always wanted her to travel with him, even when they had young kids at home, and he hated being separated from her. They were a completely equal partnership (even though he didn't do all that much of the parenting at home, because he was always gone)--he never tried to tell her what to do. Pretty awesome when they got married in the Great Depression.
-He was very humble. He was very shaken every time he was called one step up the chain of command--when he was called to be an Assistant to the Twelve, then an apostle, then second counselor in the First Presidency, then first counselor, then of course when he became the prophet. Every time was very nerve-wracking and scary to him, and he struggled with a lot of self-doubt and concern. But he always felt relieved reminding himself that it was the Lord's church and not himself that mattered. He didn't love it when people would all stand when he'd come into the room and sing "We Thank Thee, O God, for a Prophet", because he didn't want all the attention. He struggled with the loneliness of leadership and being separate from everyone else, especially in the First Presidency and as prophet. It's so interesting/nice to know that even the prophet has moments of self-doubt.

I was disappointed in this book for several reasons though. First, it was published right after he became President of the Church, so it only covered about 18 months of his term as President. I didn't realize that when I started reading it, and I wished it went longer because I wanted to learn more about the years in which I remembered him as prophet. He is the only prophet I remember as a child (although I was six or seven when he became prophet, so I should probably have remembered Presidents Hunter or Benson) and I was disappointed that I didn't get to read more about what he did as prophet. I was also disappointed that this book was so focused on what he did every year. It seemed like there was so much minutiae about every trip he took and every assignment he had that it dragged a lot. I didn't feel like this format gave me as much information about what he was really thinking or feeling, like you usually get from biographies. (Probably part of the reason of that was that he was still alive while she was writing/publishing this, and he didn't want the book to be written anyways, so he may not have wanted it to get too personal.) But it felt like she just got a hold of his calendar and journal from his whole career and just expounded on everything he did each year. It really was dry. I feel like it might have been more interesting if she'd had a whole chapter just on his trips to Asia over the years instead of every chapter talking about another trip to Asia, and another trip to Asia, and another trip to Asia. All of them sounded the same and all of them were a ton of work and he loved the people there, yadda yadda yadda. That might have been an abnormal format for a biography but it would have helped to keep it feel like it was dragging.

Book #46: Tales of Beedle the Bard by J. K. Rowling

Since I just got off this Harry Potter kick (and Tommy and I are watching the movies again, on the rare nights we're both home and available), I thought it would be fun to check this book out. It's super short--seriously took about an hour to read. It's a collection of children's fairy tales for the magical world, the most important of which is The Tale of the Three Brothers, as any Harry Potter reader knows. There are only about six stories in the book, but each story has some commentary about it, written theoretically by Albus Dumbledore. The commentary was the most entertaining part, with lots of interesting information about the wizarding world. It was a cute book.

Book #45: Killing Kennedy: The End of Camelot by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard

This book basically takes you through the high and low points of Kennedy's term as president and the time leading up to his assassination in Dallas. (Which is actually very interesting to read about for me now since we live in Dallas and have visited Dealey Plaza several times now to show people.) I honestly was bored out of my mind through a lot of this book. I skimmed quite a few pages because I didn't pick this book up to read about JFK's affairs or a blow-by-blow rehearsal of the Cuban Missile Crisis. I thought it was going to be a lot more about the theories behind his assassination. I am not a conspiracy theory person but I think it could be interesting to learn (in an unbiased way) what theories are out there and what evidence there is to support them. But O'Reilly specifically avoids all of that and just tells what happened on the day of the assassination, from Oswald's perspective as well as the President's. After building up to the assassination throughout the whole book--O'Reilly literally calls JFK "the man who has three months left to live" (or whatever length of time) maybe 30 times throughout the book, which was VERY melodramatic and annoying--it felt very short-lived and not worth all of the build-up he promised throughout the whole rest of the book. He really could have and should have included a lot more information about Jack Ruby and that whole shooting, and all of the other conspiracy theories out there that might explain a lot about what happened. He didn't even explain anything about the Warren Report or what the official stance on the assassination is. I don't know; it seems like there was a lot missing.

Additionally, it felt very morbid to read about his shooting in detail. I felt really uncomfortable and sad reading about it after thinking about him as a person throughout the whole book. Overall, not my favorite book I've read and I don't plan to read any others by him. It was kind of interesting reading this book so soon after finishing Upstairs at the White House and comparing the portrait of JFK and Jackie that I got from both. Both books made me feel very sorry for Jackie and not a huge fan of JFK as a person. This book especially paints him as a sex addict (which maybe he was).

Book #44: The Chosen by Chaim Potok

I feel like this is a book everyone was assigned to read in high school. Or should have been. Or it used to be. I don't know why, but it was a book I felt pretty ashamed of not having read. (This and The Good Earth fall into the same category for me. Still haven't read The Good Earth but planning on it in a few months for book club.) My book club read this one for September but we were actually out of town for it and I never got around to it, but I finished it this week because I didn't want to totally miss this opportunity to be forced to read this book.

Potok writes about two young Jewish boys in Brooklyn in the forties during WWII (as the book opens). Reuven Malter, the narrator, is an Orthodox Jew but his father is also open to English learning and the need to be open to the rest of society. He attends a Jewish yeshiva that teaches both Talmud and English classes, with an equal emphasis on both (which many other Orthodox Jews look down on because studying more than the Talmud is not important). Malter meets Danny Saunders, a Hasidic Orthodox Jew, from a sect that is totally hardcore, when their baseball teams play each other and Danny hits him on purpose in the face with a baseball, and Reuven has to go to the hospital. Danny comes to his hospital room to apologize to him and they actually become best friends. They find that each of them are different than the stereotypes they would expect, and meeting Danny opens Reuven's eyes to different perspectives and viewpoints on the world. My favorite part of the book is how amazed and astounded Reuven is after getting to know Danny, and finding out how different he is from what he looks like. Reuven's experience in the hospital is life-changing to him and gives him much more appreciation for his health and his eyes after seeing the people without any hope to get things fixed. I loved how he came home and walked around thinking that everything looked different, even though it was all the same--his perspective had simply changed, HE had changed.

The other thing this book is about is the relationships that Reuven and Danny have with their fathers. Reuven is very close with his father, who is open-minded and scholarly. Danny's father is raising him "in silence," literally never speaking to him except for when they study the Talmud together. Reuven thinks this is barbaric and begins to hate Danny's father by the end of the book. But at the very end, his father explains to Danny (through Reuven) why he has been doing this: Danny is so brilliant that it was impossible for him to understand or care about others' feelings or sufferings, but he needs to be able to do that to be a rabbi like he is supposed to become. This "raising him in silence" was to teach him empathy for the sufferings of others because of his withdrawals from having a relationship with his father.

After WWII ends and they discover about the horrors of the Holocaust and the extent of the deaths of their people in Europe, Reuven's father becomes very involved in the Zionist movement. Reuven is concerned that his father is working himself to death. Reuven's father tells him something that was so moving to me--and seemed like almost the crux of this book to me:

“Human beings do not live forever, Reuven. We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity. So it may be asked what value is there to a human life. There is so much pain in the world. What does it mean to have to suffer so much if our lives are nothing more than the blink of an eye? I learned a long time ago, Reuven, that a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing. But the man who lives that span, he is something. He can fill that tiny span with meaning, so its quality is immeasurable though its quantity may be insignificant. Do you understand what I am saying? A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life. It is hard work to fill one's life with meaning. That I do not think you understand yet. A life filled with meaning is worthy of rest. I want to be worthy of rest when I am no longer here.”

Book #43: Upstairs at the White House: My Life with the First Ladies by J. B. West

This is the book for book club this month, and I almost wasn't going to read it (I have only gone to book club maybe twice, because of being on trips and not having read the book), but I did think it sounded interesting. And our library had an e-copy that I could instantly download and start reading. I really enjoyed it. This book is exactly what it sounds like: West was an usher and the Chief Usher at the White House for twenty-eight years, from the Roosevelts through the Nixons, and he spent a lot of time interacting with the First Ladies of those presidencies. The usher basically runs all of the complicated details of the White House, from event planning to decorating to answering any of the First Family's demands. He therefore spends a lot of time writing about each First Lady and their personalities, and hardly any time at all about the Presidents (who were less involved with the day-to-day running of the White House). I loved how West was very complimentary about each First Lady--I'm sure that there must have been many annoying things about working for each one of them, but from the way he wrote, they were all amazing, generous, opinionated but nice human beings. I bet a lot of people wanted to read this book and get some dirt about some of these First Ladies, but he definitely did not give it to anyone. He spent a lot of time trying to give each one the benefit of the doubt; when writing about the Kennedys, he talked about how they possibly could have been closer, but they had only been married for ten years and they were trying really hard to spend time together and be on the same page (which maybe hints at the fact that they weren't that close?). I think Bess Truman sounded like the nicest, and Mamie Eisenhower. (Two women I have literally never thought about.) I liked how the Trumans were such a close-knit family--he said that they spent all their time together and Bess was Truman's top advisor. He spent a lot of time talking about how the ladies redecorated the house, the types of entertaining they did, the huge renovation of the White House to make it safer during the Truman administration, and what each lady's priorities were as the First Lady. I thought that was so fascinating to learn about, and to just see what it's like working right up close and seeing these families in a closer light.

The only thing I didn't like about this book was that there wasn't really an overarching point to it. Each section just goes through each administration, and then moves on to the next. I feel like there could have been more of a theme running throughout, or more discussion of each transition (sometimes I felt left hanging). But overall, this was a very enjoyable book and I am glad to have read it (even if I had to read it on my phone, which is NOT enjoyable to me. The Kindle is way better, but it doesn't seem to work for this specific library app that this book fell under). And after reading this, it made me wonder about the more recent first ladies--what was it like for the rest of them? I'd love to know how it has changed in the recent era with First Ladies that are more involved and do more than just running the house (although some of his First Ladies did that too). I guess we need to get the more recent Chief Ushers to write memoirs too.