The Help by Kathryn Stockett

A book about a book, The Help is set against the background of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. It describes the lives of the black housemaids of Jackson, Mississippi and their relationships with the white families they serve. A young white woman organizes and leads the maids in the effort to put together a book that tells of their experiences as maids and the circumstances, both loving and hateful, found with their employers. Thick with colorful plot (almost soap-opera-ish at times) The Help is a real page-turner.

The Red Thread of Passion; Spirituality and the Paradox of Sex by David Guy

"It is one of those rules that must be broken to be maintained," says David Guy in his description of the lax attitude of Zen monks towards novices who sneak out to visit brothels. I picked this book up because of my interest in paradox and because there really does seem to be a communality between sexual and spiritual passion -- a transcendence of the day-to-day babble of our human minds. With, perhaps, more emphasis on sex than on spirituality Guy examines the lives of Walt Whitman, D.H. Lawrence, philosopher Alan Watts and pornographer Marco Vassi. Then he delves into the beliefs and practices of lesser known contemporaries who have become sex therapists. Along the way there is much support for Buddhist approaches to life. "In the West," he writes, "God is the architect of the universe and has a plan, but in the East the universe is a spontaneous process of growth." In the end, the author seems to meld spirit and sex as simply forms of universal energy. He quotes William Blake as saying "Energy is eternal delight."

Shanghai Girls by Lisa See

A good immigrant story provides description of assimilation, insight into a foreign culture, and a new perspective on one's own culture. Shanghai Girls does not disappoint in these respects, but goes further with the portrayal of a complex relationship between two sisters who are both very close and very different from each other. Pearl and May Chin work as models in Shanghai until their father hastily marries them off to a Chinese-American family. Their trip to America is hampered by the fact that China in 1937 was being invaded by the Japanese. Their life in Los Angeles is burdened with economic and immigration problems. Their story is a real page-turner with lots of food for thought.

The Strangest Man; the Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom by Graham Farmelo

For those of us interested in how quantum mechanics came into being and flourished during the 1920s and 1930s, Farmelo's biography of Paul Dirac is a wonderful review of the period. Dirac was among the giants of the field along with Albert Einstein, Neils Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, Peter Kapitza, Wolfgang Pauli, and Robert Oppenheimer. But he was also very human with a complex and painful family situation.

When he came to eminence in his 20s, Dirac was extremely reticent and seemed almost devoid of normal human emotions. Lots of Dirac stories developed among his colleagues based on the fact that it was difficult to get him to say anything at all. Here is an example of his conversational style. This is late in his life when he was a little more open and was talking to the artist who was painting his portrait:

Artist: Can you put into layman's terms what you're working on, Professor?
Dirac: Yes. Creation.
Artist: Wow! Tell me more.
Dirac: Creation was one vast bang. Talk of a steady state is nonsense.
Artist: But if nothing existed beforehand, what was there to bang?
Dirac: That is not a meaningful question.

Gradually, fellow physicists lured the young Dirac into more connection with the outside world with hiking and mountain climbing and family visits. His social life became full and warm, a minor miracle given his early reclusiveness.

The portrayal of Dirac's social and emotional characteristics is deeply thoughtful and deftly placed in the scene of changing political realities during the years before and after WWII. Many people at Cambridge University were hopeful that Russia's experiment with communism would lead to greater prosperity and a more civilized society. The Stalin era dampened that hope, but Dirac remained friends with his Russian colleagues through it all, and he often visited the USSR. He traveled alot, doing sabbatical years at Princeton and being dragged around the world when his wife wanted him out of Cambridge because a lady friend seemed to have her eye on him.

Farmelo has given us a warm and enriching life story in a very readable way in spite of the need to include explanations of very complex intellectual abstractions.