Pleasantly Surprised!

I'll start by saying that I know nothing about Karen Armstrong other than what you find here. I can say that I definitely disagree with her theology but enjoyed here factual presentation of a faith that I am ashamed to say I have little understanding of. This book was recommended to me by a friend, Eric Huxley. Who if you have a chance to talk to, you should. He is in Guatemala right now but seriously you should talk to this guy. Anyway, he recommended this book as a nice introduction to Islam.
The thing that I appreciated about this book was that it was written with a western sensibility. It was not a textbook by any means and was written with a Euro-American audience in mind. This is by no means an assault on the writer. I felt that the book portrayed the followers of Islam fairly and in fact spoke highly of the adherents of the faith. It is hard in "the West" to filter through a "Fox News" presentation of a group of people that most of us have little contact with. I felt this short history did a good, but succinct job of catching the reader up on the last 1,400'ish years. I by no means feel I am a scholar, but I don't have to pretend I know the differences between Shi'ites and Sunnis. I now know what a Sufi is and ultimately I can better understand my faith. I come from a Judeo-Christian culture, a and a Christian family, but it would be ignorant in this day and age, or any for that matter, to pretend that the role of Islam in the world does not impact my life on a near daily basis. If knowledge is power then I desire to be powerful in my understanding of God, and I feel like this read encouraged that.

I didn't get the idea for the art show from this book

Have you ever wondered what evolutionary biologists think about music? I haven't, but it turns out to be pretty interesting. I'm not on the evolution wagon, but I don't have a problem listening to opposing points of view,especially when they cover a topic I haven't put much thought into.
In The World in Six Songs by Daniel J. Levitin we get to take a glimpse into the mind of a brilliant scientist as he tries to explain (via Darwinian evolution)not only where our music came from, but why, and why it was able to survive through the genetic landslide that is "survival of the fittest." Levitin looks at many of our current day "tribal" peoples for a glimpse into their use of music for communication. Levitin theorizes that music was originally a system used for warning, threatening, and generally communicating before the development of written language. Then due to the fact that the people who could warn each other of danger managed to live longer those genetic predispositions were passed on and that thousands of years later we are watching The Killers on Laye Night with Jimmy Fallon. This is all a stretch for me, but what I really enjoyed were the "Six Songs." I assumed he would discuss six specific songs that summed up the world succinctly. Not quite, instead Levitin discusses six topics that essentially all of the worlds lyric music falls into. Friendship, self explanatory...think "I believe that we are gonna be friends." by the White Stripes. These are songs of peace and cooperation or as the author says, War (what is it good for?) Next is Joy, along the lines of Jeremiah was a Bullfrog. People like joy, that should be no surprise, so as a result we sing about it. Comfort, we all know the its okay that that guy broke your heart song, it's a universal theme of music. Knowledge, many of the earliest songs that we know of are songs teaching people which plants were safe to eat, where the local cannibals lived, which animals would prefer to eat you. This continues today, we have songs to learn the capitols, to tie our shoes, and the books of the Bible. The last 2 topics go without saying, Religion and Love. Anyone who has spent any time in an organized religion knows that music is a critical part of worship and a sense of unity for the followers of said religion. One easy to feel connected to a group of people is to share a common vocabulary of songs. Finally, Love, most songs on the radio (at least FM) are songs of expressions of love, songs of unrequited love, or torch songs (thank you Phil Collins.) Music would cease to exist if we couldn't sing about love.
So in closing, I don't care how music got to where it is today, I personally believe we serve a creative God that put it in us to create music for him. But whatever you believe I think we can all agree, music is good, and this planet would be a drag without it.

4 Loves and 19 Books

I have been meaning to read this book since the late 1990's but I just seemed to never get to it, so I finally did. I probably would have been better off having read it a while ago. I love reading Lewis's writing. It is at once elevated and accessible, I seem to find comfort in his grasp of words and his grasp of a theology of the people. To me he seems a brilliant man, with a knack for speaking to common man.
As he spoke of love I was convicted on many levels and had my eyes opened to the many threads that run through each type of love. Love is a complex thing, so complex that there are multiple types of love ranging from the love of friendships to the love of husband and wife, but even that is not a tidy enough way to categorize things. Each love is unique and requires its own finesse and intense study to master, as if mastery was the end goal. I now see that all levels of love require a commitment, the commitments are different, and the priorities you place on those commitments varies but the commitments are necessary none-the-less. Just as my marriage requires my attention daily, my friendships can not function at their optimal levels without similar attention. Obviously this will look different than my commitment to Emily, and my relational obligations will look differently with God. What people ask, enjoy, and need from you will differ, as will your ability and willingness to provide those things for them, but what can not differ is love. Love is constant, and as you may, or may not, have heard is able to cover a multitude of sins but Love without Jesus may be a love half delivered.
For me, I can not be the friend I am called to be, or the husband I am required to be, or the disciple I long to be, if the love I am cultivating for Jesus is not at the very least alive. There are times it may not flourish, even times that it struggles to breathe and grow at all, but it must be a true, honest, love of my King if any of my other loves are to prosper. That can be overwhelming, but so can love.

An Army of Davids

I've thought long and hard about what to write about this book and I am blank so I am going to let someone else do it.

From Publishers Weekly
In this testament to the power of the little guy, law professor and blogger Reynolds gleefully hails the emergence of a new entrepreneurial class resulting from the democratizing power of technology-the manifestation of his observation that "a society that's rich and free will have citizens who-entirely on their own-develop a wide range of skills." Among the skills he cites are citizen terrorist-busters, hackers and average Joe techies who set up phony jihad sites to foil terrorism in the U.S. Others have taken on big media, forcing newspapers and networks into something "akin to what happened to the Church during the Reformation." Reynolds shows how technology opened up markets to software companies in Poland and to filmmakers and musicians in Africa. Proclaiming good blogging as a combination of "rapid response times" and "personal voice," Reynolds praises the explosion of cyber-self expression, seeing it as yet another way to proliferate information and build knowledge among communities. And while Reynolds may seem naïve in ignoring any potential negatives that could arise from widespread, unmitigated, technology-enabled empowerment and does little to touch upon the ethical implications of the everyman becoming a superman, he brings a contagious sense of optimism to this "new reality."
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

So basically if you want to read a book about normal people helping to keep journalism alive, and space travel feasible, and the colonization of mars something still on the radar, and eBay a viable career path (they provide health insurance to sellers who net more than $1000 per month) then this is a book for you. If all of that sounds meaningless, then skip it.

Jeans are the American Uniform...AHHHH!

I hate dressing up, but I love uniforms. As a kid I had this set of encyclopedias and they had full color charts in them and I would alternately spend weekends drawing either, all the flags it showed, or the military uniforms that it showed. I especially enjoyed the completely impractical uniforms that predated camouflage and and long distance battle. I love the idea of wearing red into battle with a giant purple plume extending from your already ridiculously tall hat. I guess in the days where you had to be within 15 feet of someone to end their life there was no reason to hide. If you are going to fight hand to hand, or at least saber to saber then you ought to look like a high class drum major to do it.
So when I saw Uniforms: Why We are What We Wear I had to give it a read. I will get my only complaint out of the way first. The author never addressed sports uniforms. I love sports uniforms, if you do to check this out. Any way, I never really thought to look at uniforms from a psychological viewpoint but that is where this book is coming from. Some of the highlights are as follows:

Q: Why do the Marines look so much badder than the rest of the military?
A: Because they are and you aren't going to tell them otherwise. If they want to kill people in full dress uniform while carrying a saber who is going to stop them.

Q: Why did nurses used to wear white when they deal with so much bodily fluid?
A: It looks sterile and sanitary if you are able to keep it clean.

Q: Why do nurses now wear Betty Boop scrubs?
A: They got tired of keeping their whites, white.

Q: Why do the Navy Seaman uniforms look like Schoolboy costumes?
A: Apparently they like them, Admiral Zumwalt tried to change them in the 1970's and people went bananas.

Q: Why do commercial airline pilots where quasi-military looking uniforms?
A: We trust them more that way.

Q: Whats with Hotel Bellboys?
A: Who knows?

So basically uniforms say a lot about who we are, from class, to income level, to our ideas about sex and ultimately about our culture. Some of what they say isn't good, and some show that we are a society of order, and that we respect our superiors, and that shiny buttons will never go out of style for the people in charge.

A fiction book I loved?

"Exquisitely harrowing...very strange and brilliantly conceived...A sort of metaphysical murder mystery." - The New York Times Book Review.

I don't want to tell you anything about this book, because it could ruin it, so I'll let that review tell you what you need to know. For the record the story has some adult elements to it but nothing you can't handle. I would highly recommend this book for a monsoon afternoon. It is 120 very quick pages, and the intrigue will keep you reading. 3 hours well spent, and the level of detail that Marquez provides is astonishing. If you like to read, check it out.

Sorry Dad, I don't get it

On the short list of people I would consider personal heroes of my father the following four I can assure would make the cut; Jesus, Abraham Lincoln, FDR, and Ernest Hemingway. So, I thought I would give a Hemingway classic a reading. I went into this with some pretty high expectations, but I have to be honest and admit that I didn't see what the big deal was. Hear me out, I am in no way saying that this book isn't a classic, or even a masterfully written piece of American literature, but nothing in the story resonated with me. I can't explain why it was so detached from anything I identify with but I had a very hard time engaging in the story. I suppose there is a generational gap, but it was more than that. I wouldn't say that I liked, or identified with any of the characters, I even disliked most of them. I felt pity for most of them, not sympathy, but genuine "I wish there was more substance to their lives than drinking and bullfights." To me this was a dismal tale of a few overly privileged, disenfranchised, American and British ex-patriots complaining about life, but doing nothing to change it. I'm sure it was me, I don't claim to be a literary expert, and I often struggle with fiction, so if anyone has something to share please do. I want to understand. I feel like a bad American.

One last thing, as you can see on the cover image there is a picture of a bullfight. So I was under the impression that the book was centered around bullfighting. It takes almost half of the book before you meet a bull, and I wouldn't consider the story a bullfighting tale. I don't know why this matters but I felt a little deceived. The cover should have been a picture of people drinking a lot.