Confessions of a Book Sale Junkie

My family has been aware of my addiction for some time now, although I don’t think some of my grown children  realized how out of control it had become until they visited me in Virginia and saw the thousands of
books that now line my walls downstairs in the basement.  Our bookshelves have always been the focal point of our decor.  Whenever we moved...and we moved a lot...it never felt like home until the books were back on the shelves.

We had a respectably sized collection...until I discovered the Friends of the Library book sale.  That’s when I lost control.  And here on the East Coast, I’m not limited to THE annual book sale at one local library.  Oh no. I can find one just about every weekend.

My poor husband comes with me–a somewhat willing partner in crime-- as I pass off book bag after book bag loaded with books he gets to lug to the car.  How can I leave behind a 1912 set of a Young Folks’ Treasury when they’re 25 cents a book?  It doesn’t matter that I have ten other equally valuable sets I’ve rescued.

Rescued.

That’s why this has become such a problem.  I see a culture vanishing before my eyes and I’ve become a one-woman crusade to rescue it; a culture of refinement and decency and faith and family and love of liberty.  I know I’m probably chasing windmills, but I can’t help myself.  I don’t see the replacement culture  as a good thing.  If the pattern of history continues to repeat itself, the direction we’re heading doesn’t end well for us.

Several decades ago, two men wrote two books with visions of the future.  In Brave New World, people quit reading because they no longer cared about reading.  In 1984, people quit reading because the books were destroyed.   Today, in 2013, we are seeing both visions playing out.
IKEA has announced discontinuing the sale of book shelves because they’re not in demand any more. In the future they will have a narrower design so they can be used to display knick-knacks.  A school district in Utah threw away all their Charles Dickens books because the sentences were too long and the words were too hard for the students to understand.

But that’s not the worst of it.  I have been heartsick to read of book murderers out there.  Just a warning  if you continue to read...if you are a fellow book lover, you’ll be horrified by these shocking true accounts.

Back in August of 2008, following the scare when lead was found in toys shipped from China, Congress hastily passed the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act requiring that anyone who sold items for use by children under the age of 12 would need to have certification that the product was lead free. Included in the list of suspect products were children’s books printed before 1985 because they claimed there was lead in the printer’s ink before that time.  Even though a child would have to literally consume the entire book and there has never been a single case of that ever happening, and even though Congress was petitioned to exclude books from the law, the law went into effect February 1, 2009.  By the way, the cost of testing a single book runs between $300 to $600.  At the last minute, the penalty was increased from $5000 per incident violation to $100,000 per incident and potential imprisonment.

Needless to say, thrift store owners couldn’t take the risk.  And on that February 1st, reports like this came in from all over the country:

“I just came back from my local thrift store with tears in my eyes! I watched as boxes and boxes of children’s books were thrown in the garbage.  Every book they had on the shelves prior to 1985 was destroyed!”

Fortunately, three years later Congress finally exempted books from the Act, but you can’t bring back what’s already been destroyed.  Books published after 1923 are in copyright protection, which means many of these old books likely won’t see the light of day in our lifetime.  Publishers who hold the copyrights  aren’t interested in re-publishing books for a market that apparently doesn’t exist anymore.

And as if that isn’t horrifying enough, I was checking into Amazon’s new bookseller program.  (The agreement with my family is that I can keep my book fix if I sell at least as many books as I keep.)  For a small shipping fee, I can ship books I want to sell to a giant Amazon warehouse where they’ll store them, box them and ship them for me for just a small fee.  It sounded like a good deal until I got to the part where I read about what happens to the books that don’t sell.  If I get to the point I no longer want to pay the storage fee, they’ll ship them back to me for $3.00 a book.  Let me rephrase that.  THREE DOLLARS A BOOK. OR they’ll destroy them for 50 cents a book.  That’s the word they use.  DESTROY.

Suddenly I’m picturing book scavengers like myself snatching up the old children’s books, sending them off to an Amazon warehouse, and, not realizing their actual value is what’s written inside, will opt for the DESTROY option when they don’t sell.  And by so doing, will not only kill the books, but kill our culture as well.

So, yes, on the outside I’m an out-of-control book sale junkie.  But really, I’m  on a crusade.  My kids ask me what I’m going to do with all those old, dusty books downstairs.  I tell them I’m not sure.  But inside my heart,  I envision a young girl in some future day who looks just like a girl  I read about in a book. The book was a true story written by a young Chinese woman who lived through Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution; a time when culture was changed by destroying books.  She was one of the lucky few assigned to learn English and it just so happened a small collection of books had escaped destruction because they were written in English and were hidden away in a library attic.  I’ll let this young Chinese woman speak for herself:

“Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women was the first novel I read in English. ...My joy at the sensation of my mind opening up and expanding was way beyond description.

Being alone in the library was heaven for me.  My heart would leap as I approached it, usually at dusk, anticipating the pleasure of solitude with my books, the outside world ceasing to exist.  As I hurried up the flight of stairs . . . the smell of old books long stored in airless rooms would give me tremors of excitement, and I would hate the stairs for being too long.

 . . . I became acquainted with Longfellow, Walt Whitman, and American history.  I memorized the whole of the Declaration of Independence, and my heart swelled at the words “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” and those about men’s “unalienable Rights,” among them “Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”  These concepts were unheard of in China, and opened up a marvelous new world for me.  My notebooks . . . were full of passages like these, passionately and tearfully copied out.”*

Book junkie by day.  Caped  crusader by night.

I can live with that.


*(The book is Wild Swans by Jung Chang.  Highly recommended.)

Storytelling Minute-mom

Diann Jeppson is an inspiration to me.  Her influence in family education has been felt in thousands of homes.  I've been in her home where I saw floor to ceiling shelves everywhere filled with books.  I asked her to share with you what has helped foster a love of books and reading in her home.  It's no surprise to me---she's a storyteller!  Here are her thoughts:

My parents must have possessed supernatural story-telling powers because they always had something utterly fascinating to share, whenever one of their seven children would ask, "Will you please tell me a story?"  I realized this only after experiencing the challenge of responding to that same plea from my own little troupe of children.  After I exhausted every anecdote from my own life and the lives of everyone I could think of, as well as every story I could remember reading or hearing, the requests continued with insistent regularity.  Something had to be done about my now empty well of stories. What to do . . .

While browsing my local bookstore, I came across William Bennett's then newly published Book of Virtues. The title caught my eye. I began to thumb through it and was instantly struck with an epiphany. This was the answer. This was the water to re-fill my well of stories! I bought it immediately, and smiled all the way home. Now I had a treasury of new stories to tell my children.

I made a game for myself by reading the stories one at a time, to myself, pausing every few sentences to quietly rehearse to myself, the telling the story in my own words. I would then wait for an opportune time--a meal, a drive, or maybe just bedtime--to tell the story I had just read to my children.  I wouldn't allow myself to read and rehearse the next story in the Book of Virtues until I had told the previously read story to my children.  Since each story in that great collection lends itself well to discussion, I took full advantage, and asked questions, compared ideas with other stories, and measured the stories against our own experience.  They provided a perfect platform for some rich and thoroughly enjoyable family discussions.

It took a little over a year, but we finished the entire volume (except fort he poetry, I confess).  My favorite part was the delicious anticipation of watching for the perfect moment to share my most recently read story.  I felt like a story minuteman--always prepared with a story in my mental back pocket--ready at a moment's notice, whenever my children asked, "Mommy, will you please tell us a story?"

I hope you'll visit Diann's website at familyforum.co.  She has wonderful resources and excellent book lists of good reads for your family.

Broccoli and Candy Bars

Recently I planted myself on the floor of the children’s section of our little Appomattox Public Library.  I spend most of my time reading books written long ago for children that are no longer in circulation and I wanted to balance that out by reading what’s offered to children today.  So I started with the A’s and read the first 150 books.  Here’s what I found.

Out of those 150 books, there were two that had a traditional family of mother, father and children represented.  There wasn’t a single reference to God or faith.  I specifically looked for a value or principle that was taught.  A handful of the books taught lessons in kindness.  But far and away, the overriding purpose of creating the books seemed to be sheer entertainment.

Which shouldn’t surprise me. I’ve noticed in many guidelines for parents written by educators and school librarians,  their #1 suggestion is to look for books that entertain.  And the publishing industry is satisfying that demand.  As I’ve read what children’s books publishers are looking for, their #1 criteria is also entertainment.  Their reasoning is that if a book isn’t entertaining, a child won’t read it.  So they add more glitter and more color and even more shock. Lately when I walk into the children’s section of a book store,  I feel like I’m walking into a big Saturday morning commercial.  And I ask myself , seriously, how many more dilemmas can the Disney princesses find themselves in?

In fact, one time I specifically asked a sales person if she could help me find a book that taught a moral or a value for my little granddaughters.  She took me to the wall of children’s books where we stood scanning the titles.  She shifted from one foot to the other, scratched her chin, and finally reached over and handed me If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, adding that she was pretty sure it had a moral in it.

Now I love If You Give Mouse a Cookie and my children loved it and my grandchildren love it.  But I somehow don’t think it’s going to be enough.

Here’s what I’ve been thinking.

If I hold out a stalk of broccoli in one hand and a candy bar in the other and ask my five-year-old granddaughter to choose, I’ll tell you which one she’ll choose every single time.  But what responsible parent would ever fill up their children’s dinner plates with candy because that’s what they like?  We teach them, rather, to acquire a taste for broccoli and we limit the amount of candy we give them.  Candy is enjoyable as a snack but hardly works as the main course.

We’re starving our children’s souls when we don’t help them to love the literature that demonstrates the how’s and why’s of happy living.

 Why do we see a breakdown in the family?  Why the exodus away from God?  Why the moral vacuum in our society?

To answer those questions, for starters I suggest spending a few hours on the floor of your own public library, starting with the letter ‘A’.

Using Stories in the Grieving Process

We took in a stray cat several months ago and named her Juliet.  Actually, it turned out we took in three cats, because she was already expecting.  My granddaughter, seven year old Kayleigh, immediately claimed her as her own.  She took her to bed at night, fed  her, played with her and loved her.  She even cleaned out the kitty litter.  When the mama cat was ready to deliver the babies, she delivered the first one in Kayleigh’s hair in the middle of the night.  Now, that’s a bonding experience.

We usually kept Juliet in the house, but one night she ran out the front door.  If you’ve ever owned a cat, you know you don’t coax a cat home if she’s not willing.  We kept opening the door and calling to her, but finally had to go to bed, hoping she’d come back when she was ready.

The next morning my husband left early before the sun came up, and there was our little Juliet, laying by the side of the road.  He said it was apparent she hadn’t suffered.  But our hearts hurt at the thought of having to tell Kayleigh.

Soon, I could hear Kayleigh’s footsteps upstairs as she anxiously ran around looking for Juliet, calling her name.  She came running into the kitchen: “Where’s Juliet?”  My daughter put her arms around her, and with lots of tears, told her what had happened.    

Kayleigh didn’t say anything, but ran into her bedroom where she drew a picture of Juliet lying on the foot of her bed, nursing her two little babies.  She glued it to a simple paper picture frame and hung it next to her bed.  There were tears on the picture.  Later in the day she created a little book by stapling some papers together.  The first picture was Juliet on the back patio when she found her. There was a drawing of the night the kitten was born in her hair.  And then came the hardest drawing of all–drawing a car with headlights and Juliet running towards it.  The final picture was out under the trees with the leaves falling all around where Juliet was buried.

Within a few days, Kayleigh’s dad came home from a deployment and the family moved back on the army base.  Dad said, “No more cats.”  He’s not heartless.  Just practical.  And Kayleigh became quiet and withdrawn. She continued to draw cats- hundreds and millions and billions of cats. But in the busy-ness of life and moving, the stories had stopped.   One day I suggested to her dad that he take time to ask Kayleigh to share the stories about Juliet and they started flooding out of her heart. She told him about the time Juliet left a ‘gift’ of a dead mouse on the basement floor.  And how, one time,  Juliet carried one of her baby kittens upside down-- by her bottom. She always told that story with a giggle.  And, of course, how the baby came to be born in her hair in the middle of the night.  And in so doing, once again moved along the process of healing a broken heart.

Kayleigh started smiling and laughing again.

Without the stories, raw emotions can be unbearable.  Stories help us sort through feelings and provide a means of releasing them.

Stories are a powerful heart-healer.

Thanksgiving and the Face of Evil

When we went to bed last night, my husband suggested we use one of our prayers to just thank God for our many blessings without asking for a single thing.

So I’ve been thinking about what I’m thankful for, and mingled up there at the top of my list which includes family, faith and health is my freedom. Which leads my thoughts to something I’ve been mulling over in my mind the last while.

We just finished another election and both sides are hurling accusations that the other side is ‘evil’.  Now, when I look at the word ‘evil’, I notice it is ‘live’ spelled backwards which pretty much sums up the problem with evil.  Evil is the opposite of live.   Instead of ‘living’, evil is about ‘dying’–dying hope, dying happiness, dying dreams.   Evil is a destructive force, not a creative force; it crushes spirits and suppresses energy.  But the question of the hour is, “What does the face of evil look like?”  Will I recognize it when I see it?

 For example, my daughter visited China awhile back and went to the tomb of Chairman Mao where she joined thousands of Chinese as they reverently filed past his remains.  She learned sometimes a hundred thousand people pass by in a single day.  How could this be?  Wasn’t the man ‘evil’?  Didn’t tens of millions of Chinese die under his brutal hand?  She carefully posed the question to a man next to her, who replied that, yes, many had died.  Mao had flaws.  But what he intended to do was good.  And for that the Chinese honored him.  I had previously read Mao’s own words.  He told the youth that as much as they thought their own fathers loved them, Mao loved them more.

I thought of other brutal dictators of the last century.  Hitler’s aim was for the ‘perfect society’.  He loved beautiful art, beautiful music, beautiful literature.  He was a gifted artist himself.

Laura Ingalls Wilder’s daughter, Rose, saw Lenin up close and personal.  She said he was a “sincere and extremely able man” who dedicated his life to the passionate belief that he could create a society where “insecurity, poverty, and economic inequality shall be impossible.”

How can that be ‘evil’?

I’ve read the writings of Karl Marx.  He had seen firsthand the brutal heartache of poverty.  What if a society could be created so there were no poor among us?  Specifically, what if a mother, now stooped over trying to scrape together a few crusts of bread to feed her starving children could turn her energies to pursuing art and literature?  Is that such an ‘evil’ desire?

And yet, in their passion to do ‘good’, they did the work of pure evil where hopes and dreams were crushed and millions of lives perished in the wake.

So it brings me back to the original question:  What is the line that separates the ‘good’ from the ‘evil’?  What does evil look like? We have many do-gooders among us, all vitally interested in our ‘best good’.  How do we sift the ‘good’ from the ‘evil’ before the damage is done and we experience the fallout of their good intentions?

And this is what I’ve come up with so far.  I’m still applying the idea to  a variety of situations to see if the model works, and I ask you for your help in the experiment.  But so far I haven’t found an exception.   I believe the line separating good from evil comes down to the element of coercion or ‘force’.  You can have the most wonderful intentions in the world, but once you introduce the factor of force to the equation, you have turned those good intentions into evil.

Mao forced his ‘good’ ideas onto the Chinese people.  He destroyed their connections to the ideas of the past by destroying their antiquities and their books–he even had their grass and trees and flowers torn up and destroyed. He needed them to think like him.  He replaced what he destroyed with a little red book everyone was required to carry on their persons at all times and to study diligently.  How many of these ideas found in his little red book do you have a problem with?

“It is important for a country to retain modesty, and shun arrogance.”

“It is the duty of the Party to serve the people.  Without the people’s interests constantly at heart, their work is useless.”

“China’s road to modernization will be built on the principles of diligence and frugality.”

“A communist must be selfless.”

“The multiple burdens which women shoulder are to be eased.”

“In order to get rid of blindness . . . we must . . . learn the method of analysis .”

Hitler promoted motherhood and family. What can be ‘gooder’ than that?  He once said, ‘I believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator.”

And in the name of ‘goodness’, these men worked pure evil.

As Rose Wilder Lane summed it up: “The Soviet government exists to do good to its people, whether they like it or not.”

Christianity is a tremendous power for good until it is ‘forced’ upon people.  The Spanish Inquisition comes to mind. Once Spain purged the country of all their perceived ‘evil’, the country died.

 Who would take issue with any of the five pillars of Islam?  They believe in worshiping one God and of praying to him daily; of taking care of the poor; of looking on all people as equal in the eyes of God; of self-restraint.  Yet, once those ideas are ‘forced’ upon people, as some radical  Muslims have taken upon themselves, does it not turn the good into evil?

So if force becomes the line where good crosses into evil, it makes me question the wisdom of things like  compulsory education where learning is forced, for example.   And it certainly makes me examine many of the ideas being put out there by government officials, federal and local, under a new lens.

Obviously the idea needs to be explored a lot more than this and I’ve gone on far too long for a beautiful Thanksgiving morning like today.  But I’ll continue mulling because I pray that next year and the year following and the year after that will still find me writing about my gratitude for being free.

I have a feeling the realization of that prayer may be tied into how many people recognize the face of ‘evil’ for what it truly is before our freedom is lost.

LIGHT AND WARMTH

To continue with my thoughts on balancing heart and mind, if you live where it gets very cold in the winter, you know that you can step outside on a January morning and see the sun shining just as brightly in the middle of winter as it does in the middle of July.  Yet, without its warmth, nothing grows.

John Dewey who is recognized as the father of modern educational philosophy added his name to a document known as the Humanist Manifesto back in the 1930's.  What I draw from this effort is that a group of 'smart' people  decided if we can learn to be guided by our intellects, we can stop the cycle of repeating humanity's dumb mistakes.  From an intellectual standpoint, who would ever think war is smart?  This line of reasoning has carried into today's current focus on critical thinking skills and scientific facts in our schools.  What I see  happening is while the school's attention is placed on the mind (light), they're ignoring the heart (warmth).  And our schools are failing.

Just like plants in winter, human beings don't grow on light alone.  We need warmth. 

The danger of light without warmth is pointed out in the following thoughts of Oliver deMille, former president of George Wythe University:

"As Allan Bloom pointed out in his classic bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind, the last society to be highly trained [light] and as poorly educated [warmth] as the current U.S. was Germany in the 1930's.  A significant number of German engineers were highly enough trained to build cutting-edge weaponry, submarines, missiles, airplanes and so on, but not well-read enough in history to vote against Hitler or refuse to do his bidding.

"Same with German scientists, who understood chemicals and genetics enough to experiment on their neighbors when they were thrown immorally into prison camps, but not learned enough in ethics, morals, history, psychology or basic politics to not elect Hitler or refuse to torture their countrymen.

"Critics could say that by the time submarines were being launched and people were being tortured, it was too late to do anything.  But only the combination of top technical training [light] and poor Leadership Education [lack of warmth] could have allowed this all to happen.  A less highly-trained people could not have done it, and a truly educated people would not have done it. "

Put one more way, knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit.  Wisdom is knowing you don't put it in a fruit salad.

Light and warmth; mind and heart; knowledge and wisdom; reason and faith. 

The equation must be balanced if we want to start growing again.

JEFFERSON LIES?

I’ve been following with interest the discussion over Thomas Nelson’s decision to pull David Barton’s Jefferson Lies off the shelves and to stop production over ‘factual errors’.  As I’ve studied the errors in question, I find myself scratching my head as to why these things would warrant such a drastic measure.  Mostly, I ask myself, isn’t it really a matter of one opinion over another?

The day the news broke about the Jefferson book,  I happened to be reading the introduction to a book about Christopher Columbus written almost 120 years ago.   Even then, the world was divided over whether Columbus was worthy of admiration or scorn.   The author addressed this very issue of discerning the ‘facts’ of history.  He asked why it was that several well-educated, learned men can look at identical original source material and draw contradicting conclusions.  Washington Irving greatly admired Columbus and Von Humboldt offered nothing but praise while Harrisse had nothing but cold criticism and Winsor gave a ‘sneering invective’.

I believe his response is worth considering:

“Where this amazing difference in judgment?  Why does Mr. Winsor blame where others praise?  Mr. Winsor thinks that it is due to his own superiority as a critical and scientific historian.  Is Mr. Winsor right?  Where does the province of the critical and scientific historian lie?  In the gathering and sifting of historical evidence, in the full command of historical authorities, in the quick eye that sees historical contradictions and impossibilities, in the faculty sympathizing with the age and the feelings of the men he treats, in the power to see what under given environment is possible or impossible, is likely or unlikely.  All this will aid the historian to form a just and a correct idea of a hero’s character, and yet he may have all this, and err completely in his verdict.

“In every day life knowledge, human nature and knowledge of men is not the exclusive privilege of the man of many facts and varied lore.  Often the plain man of common sense, the man who has studied men in the concrete, living among them with open eyes and keen quick wit, knows his fellow men more truly and do them justice more fairly, than the scholar who has conquered ten thousand volumes and swallowed the dust of libraries for a quarter of a century.

“What is there to hinder the man of action, who has seen again and again how men act in real life, amidst difficulties, and struggles and crises and triumphs and failures,–what is to hinder such a man when put in possession of the facts and placed face to face with the innermost thoughts of any great historical character to judge him and judge him correctly?  Why may he not arrive at a fairer and truer verdict, than the scholar who has mastered dates and details, but fails to see flesh and blood, because the man of flesh and blood does not fit in with the imaginary world which the scholar has created in his mind?

“All honor to the critical historian, when he collects, compares and sifts testimony, but if his judgment of the world’s great men is to stand, he must prove himself to be more than a scientist and a critic, he must be a judge not only of books and facts, but of men–of their hearts, of their sympathies, of their feelings, of their passions, of their actions, of their judgments.”

(Taken from The Voyage of Christopher Columbus: The Story of the Discovery of America (1892))

As a storyteller and a sharer-of-stories with children, you will be called upon to make your own judgment and assessment of the great lives of the past.  Relying on the most credentialed scholar for the ‘truth’ may not reveal the truth at all. Sometimes, you just have to follow your heart.

And I’m pretty sure that somewhere in the world, I just made a scholar cringe.