The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

Renée is the 54 year old concierge in an upscale Paris apartment building, and Paloma is a 12 year old girl living there with her family; they are the voices in which this story is told. What the two have in common is intelligence and the need to play social roles in which they keep their intelligence hidden. Renée's duplicity is somewhat offensive, because she hides behind her role of servant and makes fun of others, thus appearing fearful, small-minded, and arrogant. Paloma is seriously disturbed and planning suicide. Gradually, the residents of the building reveal themselves through interaction, and events lead to opportunities for growth.

There is much display of erudition in The Elegance of the Hedgehog and on the whole this is challenging and interesting. However, it sometimes gets a little too abstruse and even tiresome.

Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl

Jewish psychiatrist Viktor Frankl (1905-1997) reflects on his experiences in Nazi death camps with a focus on how and why some people did better than others under those extremely stressful conditions. Newcomers to the camps soon became emotionally detached from the horrors they saw every day, the detachment serving as a survival technique. Frankl concludes that people must feel that their lives have meaning, and the meaning differs from person to person as they seek to fulfill the tasks their individual lives set for them.

There are over 12 million copies of Man's Search for Meaning in print worldwide, making it a classic of the 20th century. Besides being insightful and profound, it is also surprisingly readable.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

A young woman writer based in London becomes interested in the World War II experiences of residents of the British Channel island of Guernsey. The story of her growing relationship with them is told in a series of letters. A light fun read.

Eternal Life: A New Vision by John Shelby Spong

In the culmination of a lifetime's spiritual journey, retired Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong presents his take on what it means to have eternal life. In the process he pretty much tosses out the creeds and dogma of Christianity. I'm sure he would object to my saying "tosses out;" he'd prefer the word "transcends." In his spiritual life he has come to see that God is not separate from his creation but is one with everything, and this makes him a great friend of the Unity movement. While he still clings to the warmth of the Episcopal tradition, he actually says (on p. 202) "Increasingly I saw the church as an organization for the spiritually immature, as a body of children vying for the affirmation of the heavenly parent." And as for eternal life, it's simply that consciousness continues within the greater consciousness. Sounds good to me.

Revelation; The Road to Overcoming by Charles A. Neal

This little book is out of print, but was used as the basis for much discussion in our metaphysics class at church. By looking at the Bible's Book of Revelation metaphysically, one begins to see a little sense behind all those monsters and angels doing impossible things. The horrors represent the mental anguish people go through, and their presentation reinforces the Unity concept that people draw to themselves conditions that accord with the tone of their thinking. As the subtitle suggests, Revelation's message is that by choosing the path that aims towards oneness with God, people can overcome the adversities of human life.

A Long Long Way by Sebastian Barry

The trench warfare of WW I jumps vividly alive in this novel about a young Irish soldier. There is an underlying conflict for the Irish who were looking for Home Rule and were in that sense rebelling against England. Nevertheless, a lot of Irishmen enlisted with the British in the war to save Europe from "the Hun." The story's hero, Willie, is only nineteen when he goes off to fight in Belgium and the experiences of his service affect his relationships with his girlfriend and his family. Sad and poignant, A Long Long Way is also poetic and beautifully written.

A Free Life by Ha Jin

How does a Chinese immigrant deal with cultural, political, and emotional adjustment to his new country while struggling to support himself and pursue his not-very-remunerative passion for writing poetry? Author Ha Jin brings to this subject his own experience as a literary immigrant who has won many awards including a National Book Award. In A Free Life (Jin's fifth novel) he focuses most on his hero's inner life, but the lives of his wife and son also draw the reader in. The painful struggle to gain an economic foothold in this country yields gradually to the ability to pursue interests beyond the need for simple subsistence. It's Maslow's hierarchy written from the gritty bottom to the top in a cross cultural situation. Great book.

Awakening into Oneness by Arjuna Ardagh

"Oneness," as used in this book, is the dissolution of the sense of a fixed, separate self. "Once we realize that our concept of the self is an illusion, we become capable of experiencing ourselves as a flow of consciousness that is no longer subject to the conditioning of the mind." This is what is being taught at Oneness University in India, Fiji, and Italy and at events in various places around the world. Thousands of seekers have been given the deeksha or Oneness Blessing which is said to bring personal peace and joy. The hope is that when enough people realize there is no difference between me and not-me, problems in relationships of all kinds will melt away.

"Awakening into Oneness" is essentially an advertisement for the Oneness movement which can be easily written off as a cult. However, I believe that the basic idea of oneness is gaining credibility, at least among people who are grounded in spirituality. Although the book is weak in science, it is another example of the coming together of ancient philosophy with the cosmologies of contemporary science.

People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks

An expert in identifying and restoring ancient books is invited to work on the Sarajevo Haggadah, a book used in Jewish homes during passover. The restoration work forms the framework on which hangs the story of how the haggadah made its centuries-long journey from its origin in Spain to Venice, Vienna, and Sarajevo. Antisemitism and vicissitudes of war send the little book into hiding along the way, and the reader is given glimpses of European life in various eras. Informative and a good read.

The Yoga of Jesus by Paramahansa Yogananda

There is a legend that Jesus spent his young manhood (about ages 14 to 28) in India. The story comes from the discovery in a Tibetan monastery of a manuscript about Saint Issa from Israel "in whom was manifest the soul of the universe." Issa/Jesus was said to have traveled around India and the Himalayas learning and preaching; then he returned to his native country were he was reviled, condemned, and put to death. A Russian traveler saw the Saint Issa manuscript and published notes about it in 1894. In the 1920s at least two other people saw the manuscript but eventually the monks would or could no longer make it available.

Wether or not you choose to believe Jesus was ever in India, the similarities of spirituality as taught by Jesus and by yoga is interesting. They both come down to the idea that God or the Universe emanates divine love and wisdom to guide all beings back to infinite consciousness.

A Circle of Souls by Preetham Grandhi

Rather simplistic but a fun read, Grandhi's novel deals with a child whose death has officials stymied until they realize that the dreams of another child seem to be providing clues.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl

An amusing use of pedantry mocks the world of academia in this novel about a peripatetic college professor and his daughter. I enjoyed it at first, and just as I was getting sick of it, the plot took over and pulled me along as I tried to understand the adolescents in an exclusive high school and the teacher who befriended them. The story builds in suspense as it reaches the deaths of a couple of characters and the uncovering of a bizarre political conspiracy. A really good novel.

The Letter Kills But the Spirit Gives Life by Kathleen L. Housley

An article in The Hartford Courant led me to this wonderful book about five Smith sisters who lived extraordinary lives on a farm in Glastonbury, CT. They were abolitionists, feminists, and women of unusual faith. Most of the book focuses on the two youngest girls, Julia and Abby. Julia was the first woman ever to translate the Bible from the original Greek and Hebrew and to publish it.

The incident that brought notoriety to Julia and Abby Smith was a run-in with the Glastonbury tax collector. They noticed that their taxes had jumped and on investigation found that the increase was levied only against themselves and two widows in town. None of the male taxpayers had had an increase. The sisters appealed through town meetings and eventually through the courts, arguing that this was taxation without representation since women did not have the vote. The newspapers of the day loved the story, and the women were invited to speak at feminist meetings as far away as Washington, D.C.

The Book by Alan Watts

I originally bought this book because I thought its title was clever. Underneath The Book is a subtitle that adds On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are. Recently I re-read it and found it still very compelling. Watts' theory is that humans suffer from the illusion that we are somehow separate and distinct from our environment and from each other. This idea is deeply imbued in our common sense, hammered into us by our childhood caretakers and by language itself. He argues that humans are not separate persons, but (like everything else) are focal points at which the universe expresses itself. For "universe" you can substitute "God" or whatever term expresses wholeness and unity for you. "For every individual is a unique manifestation of the Whole, as every branch is a particular outreaching of the tree."

Parts of Watts' arguments got a little beyond me, but on the whole The Book is highly readable, and I enjoy the author's tongue-in-cheek humor. Watts (1915-1973) had a master's degree in theology and a doctorate of divinity. He spent about four years as an Episcopal priest and many more years in academia, but he was essentially a free-lance philosopher living on his output of books and lectures. He had a large following but also many critics. When questioned by some, he asserted that he was not an academic philosopher but rather "a philosophical entertainer."

Finding Your Own North Star by Martha Beck

Our book club doesn't usually do self-help books but this one was selected because it is by the author of Expecting Adam which we had all enjoyed. Martha Beck is a life coach and fills her book with lots of stories of clients. The core advice she gives is somewhat like that in The Secret. Figure out what it is you really want, commit to it, take baby steps in the direction of getting there, and watch events fall out in a way that helps you. Some of us in book club thought we were too old to gain much from this kind of advice and didn't need it; but it is well written.

God Stories by C. Michael Curtis, editor

What makes literature "spiritual?" Some people seem to think the presence of a clergyperson in the story does it, but I think that spirituality has nothing to do with clergy; it relates to addressing philosophic issues, moral and ethical dilemmas, personal priorities, and the success or failure of characters in making choices that help them grow. The stories that Curtis selected as "God Stories" did not strike me as particularly spiritual, but they are still excellent literature by well known authors, e.g. James Baldwin, Andre Dubus, Louise Erdrich, James Joyce, Bernard Malmud, Philip Roth.

The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo by Stieg Larsson

A disgraced journalist gets hired by an elderly Swedish financier to write his family's history. The project is a cover for the financier's real motive which is to solve the mystery of what happened to his niece who disappeared thirty years before. The journalist knew he was dealing with a dysfunctional family but even so is horrified by what he discovers. Along the way he enters an association with an odd young woman named Lisbeth Salander whose research skills do much to keep the plot moving along. Lisbeth ("The Girl" of the title) is the most interesting character in this novel and she appears again in two following novels that make up a trilogy. Larsson died in 2004 at age 50 and his novels are being published posthumously. Lots of characters to keep track of but a fun read.

The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein

Car racing as a metaphor for life is the theme of this beautiful story told in the first person by a dog named Enzo. Much of the philosophy is like what we've been taught at Unity Church: We are the creators of our own destiny. You are responsible for what you are and what you have done. Live in the moment. Your car goes where your eyes go (or as we say at church "What's held in mind produces in kind.")

While struggling with his lack of an opposable thumb and with a tongue that won't let him form words, Enzo reflects sensitively on the career and family problems of his owner, a professional race car driver. This is truly an excellent novel both for its plot and for Enzo's personality and philosophy.

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

Thirteen short stories make up this novel about the people of a small town in Maine. The first story is about Olive's husband Henry and the last is about Olive herself. In between are stories entirely unrelated to the Kitteridges, but in which they might be mentioned as they are all living in a small town. So you pick up some clues as to what Olive is like before you see her with all her flaws in the last story. Overall the book gives you a sense of how isolated we are from knowledge of our neighbors' struggles, but also how connected we are. Paradox. Excellent fiction.

Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay

Sarah is a ten year old child who gets swept up in 1942 when the Paris police (at the behest of the Nazis) round up thousands of French Jews and send them off to Auschwitz. Sarah's story is interwoven with that of a forty-five year old American woman living in Paris in 2002. Julia is a journalist assigned to write up the story of that roundup of Jews. She stumbles across the start of Sarah's story and refuses to rest until she has chased down what happened to Sarah and her family. Excellent novel for anyone who enjoys family stories mixed with real history.

The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb

At 793 pages of small print, this novel should have been edited down by at least 200 pages, and Lamb was repetitive enough that the story wouldn't have been harmed. It is told in the first person by a teacher whose wife witnesses the Columbine killings. Her breakdown and legal troubles provide the main action while the husband quietly struggles with his own issues. He uses liquor to ameliorate the pain of a troubled marriage and career and financial problems. In spite of its length The Hour I First Believed is a good read.

God According to God; a Physicist Proves We've Been Wrong About God All Along by Gerald L. Schroeder

Like Fritjof Capra in The Tao of Physics, Gerald Schroeder, an MIT trained physicist, takes today's quantum mechanics and relates it to the wisdom of the ancients. Schroeder teaches Jewish studies in Israel and taps into his interpretation of what God is through Biblical translation and interpretation. For instance, he says that God's famous answer that "I am what I am" really translates "I will be that which I will be." This would mean that God is not a "never changing" being but one who is dynamic.

Schroeder believes that the universe is made of "mind stuff" and that mind is inherent in every atom. This belief is not uncommon among physicists. "If the discoveries in physics over the past century are correct, then that physically condensed energy of the big-bang creation is totally the expression of metaphysical wisdom (cited in Gen. 1:1) or information (J. A. Wheeler) or idea (W. Heisenberg) or mind (G. Wald). Physics not only has begun to sound like theology, it is theology." (p. 156)

Schroeder falls a little short of the ultimate implication of all this: that the Creator and the Created are One. But he states very explicitly that the wisdom of God is the substance of which everything is made. God According to God is a very readable and fascinating book filled with a new and engaging theory of what the Bible really says about God.

The Courtier and the Heretic; Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World by Matthew Stewart

Two of the most prominent philosophers of the 1600s were Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz.

Spinoza was the heretic who was booted out of his Jewish community and generally referred to as an atheist. Really more of a mystical pantheist, Spinoza propounded an idea of God that was too different from that of his peers and he was thus an outcast. He led a quiet and proper life in The Hague earning his living by grinding lenses for microscopes and telescopes.

Leibniz was the German courtier, very social and usually looking for court appointments to provide him with a living. He met Spinoza in 1676 and seems to have spent the rest of his life both fascinated by Spinoza and struggling to "correct" the man's theology.

Stewart's description of these two philosophers is lively and entertaining, and the differences between their theologies is interesting. But what really grabbed me was the differences in their personalities. Spinoza quietly adhered to reasoning he felt to be true; Leibniz would bend to social pressure. Spinoza focused purely on knowing Truth, at least to the extent that it can be determined by reason. Leibniz was also in love with reason, but he focused more on worldly affairs. Leibniz traveled a lot in his goal to reunite European Christianity; Spinoza pretty much stayed put. I thought it ironic that huge numbers of people turned out for Spinoza's funeral in spite of his life as a relative hermit and the opprobrium brought on by his theology. There were few, if any, people at Leibniz's funeral; he had long since fallen out of favor with the court and seemed to be thought of as a pesky old man. The lesson I took from this was that it is better to be true to your own nature than to play courtier (popularity) games.

You might also conclude that it's better to die young, but I think I'll pass on that one.

Paradoxology; Spirituality in a Quantum Universe by Mariam Therese Winter

The title is a made-up word that combines paradox and doxology, but little is said about paradox in this book; instead, it is basically a song of praise to God. It is very lyrical and contains a some lovely poetry written by the author. However, I have reservations about her use of the word "quantum," because the tie to physics is somewhat tenuous. Winter has definitely done her homework and knows about wave/particle duality, nonlocality, and the shift from a Newtonian based reality to a quantum one. But it seems to me that she is just stepping into a spiritual consciousness that was being presented at Universalist and Unitarian churches back in the 1950's.

Becoming Finola by Suzanne Strempek Shea

A thirty-something young woman travels to a small village in Ireland and becomes enmeshed in the life of the community. There she finds her true love, only to have his fabled ex-girlfriend (Finola) return to sort out things with the ex whom she had abandoned very suddenly. This is a nice story, but I felt it was a little overwritten in places. Perhaps it's only because I know Suzanne is now a teacher of creative writing at Baypath College, but it seems to me that Becoming Finola has a little artistic self-consciousness that wasn't in her earlier novels.

A Good Man Is Hard To Find by Flannery O'Connor

Beautifully written short stories are tinged with darkness in this collection. The title story has nothing to do with romance; it is about evil men doing evil things. O'Connor leads with this story of evil, and the mood of subsequent stories rises just a little. But in spite of the overall sadness, the stories are compelling and highly readable.

What the Dead Know by Laura Lippman

This is a silly little murder mystery not worth writing about.

Wholeness and the Implicate Order by David Bohm

I am truly in love with the mind of David Bohm even though a good chunk of Wholeness and the Implicate Order was over my head. You need a thorough grounding in math and physics to understand all of this book. I was chuckling over terms like "vector in Hilbert space" and "Riemannian geometry." However, Bohm's conclusion that relativity and quantum theory imply oneness (and therefore connectedness) is something I've believed for a long time. Holography plays a big part in his rumination because he sees reality as "interference patterns" in energy that enfolds and unfolds. Holographic images "can distinguish different orders and measures in the whole illuminated structure." I think that this means the images contain information we humans lose when our eyes assemble the picture that makes sense in our minds.

Sometimes Bohm uses the word "autonomous" in describing how the universe works. To me autonomy suggests consciousness (How can you make decisions if you're not conscious of choices? Is growth a manifestation of autonomy?) but Bohm does not explicitly state that the Universe is conscious, so evidently that conclusion -- to which I believe science is pointing -- remains a leap of faith.

The other belief Bohm corroborates for me is that there is no such thing as nothing. What we perceive as "empty space" is actually a huge background of energy; and what we perceive as "matter" is small wavelike excitations in this background like ripples on a vast sea (p. 242).

I Know This Much Is True by Wally Lamb

Sometimes I get tired of heavy duty reading, and I pick up something light and fun. Wally Lamb provided me with 900 pages of escape reading in his wonderful novel I Know This Much Is True. He tells the story of twin brothers, one of whom is schizophrenic and an incredible burden to his twin. A dysfunctional family, broken marriage, career problems, and a couple of mysteries about parentage give Lamb plenty to write about, but I do think the book could have been edited down. There were times when I felt that the author was deliberately putting off getting to the story.

Discover the Power within You by Eric Butterworth

My metaphysics group took two or three months to work through this book which is loaded with spiritual insight. It provided a lot of fodder for discussion, and my own copy is now rumpled and underlined and coffee stained. It is filled with:
1) philosophy ("Regardless of the forms it takes, what we call evil is simply the concealment of good." p. 118) and
2) psychology ("Man harbors a kind of subconscious sense of self-pity for the inequities of life." p. 139) and
3) theology ("...even as the subatomic particle has no existence outside of the electromagnetic field that holds the atom together, but IS the field expressing as a particle, so man has no existence outside of God, but IS the activity of God expressing as man." p. 75).

Even though I did not agree with everything and do have one page marked as "This page is BS," I would highly recommend Butterworth's work to anyone interested in spiritual growth.

Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri

Lahiri's short stories in Unaccustomed Earth are wonderful vignettes of smart Bengalis who have made the jump into American life. Her writing is excellent even though I quarreled with her word choice occasionally. For instance, I find it odd to refer to bathrooms in private homes as "the restroom." The last story at 110 pages is more like a novela. It is a romance that tracks two people through their less than perfect lives and leaves the woman with a difficult heart vs head situation. I think Jhumpa Lahiri's work is marvelous.

Nice to Come Home To by Rebecca Flowers

I probably would not have bought this book had the author not sat down for a chat at our table at the recent Baypath College book club event. Ms. Flowers was charming and is an interesting and accomplished lady. Nice to Come Home To is her first novel and a fun read about two sisters in their thirties looking for love in Washington, D.C.

The Miracle at Speedy Motors by Alexander McCall Smith

I have followed the adventures of Precious Ramotswe of the Ladies #1 Detective Agency for several years. This ninth book of the series did not disappoint. I still enjoy the author's drollness in depicting the proper ladies of the agency and their adventures.

Here If You Need Me by Kate Braestrup

In this memoir the author tells of losing her husband in an auto accident and deciding to fulfill his dream of becoming a Unitarian-Universalist minister. She managed to get through seminary while raising four children and ultimately became the chaplain for the Maine game wardens. Her role involved her in desperate searches for people lost in the woods and sometimes the retrieval of bodies. She comforts families of the victims and shores up the wardens when the work is gruesome and painful. In a straightforward way Braestrup amuses the reader with a wonderful mix of the personal and the professional.

Why God Won't Go Away; Brain Science & the Biology of Belief by Andrew Newberg et al.

Andrew Newberg is a radiologist and instructor in religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He teamed up with his colleague there, psychiatrist Eugene d'Aquili; and together they ran studies aimed at understanding the neurobiology of spiritual experiences. They located an area of the brain called the orientation area, which is associated with knowing where the body ends and the rest of the world begins, giving us a perception of where we are in space. When people who meditate reach a deeply spiritual state, the orientation area becomes quiescent and the meditator experiences a transcendent reality beyond the normal reality of our everyday experience. The authors believe that the brain's capacity for transcendent experience is the basis for mysticism which is historically found in religions and cultures across the globe; it is the neurobiological aspects of spiritual experience that support humankind's sense of the realness of God. This spiritual state is analogous to the concept being developed in today's quantum mechanics that "both observer and observed are merging and interpenetrating aspects of one whole reality, which is indivisible an unanalysable." [David Bohm in Wholeness and the Implicate Order]

Lolly Willowes or the Loving Huntsman by Sylvia Townsend Warner

The very first Book-of-the-Month club selection back in 1926, Lolly Willowes is a peculiar tale of an English maiden aunt who becomes a witch and follower of the devil (the eponymous Huntsman.) With its blatant departure from realism the tale is obviously meant to be taken as allegory. When Lolly emerges from the restrictions of proper English family life and attempts to go her own way, why does she fall into witchcraft? Is the Loving devil good or bad? Is a mature woman's departure from self-sacrifice good or bad? Is the devil the only thing that can propel women into personal self-expression? Is it evil for women to want to leave the family and pursue independence? Is life in the outside world just too dangerous for a single woman? It beats me.

Setting a Trap for God; The Aramaic Prayer of Jesus by Rocco A. Errico

Errico goes back to the original Aramaic words that Jesus spoke in what we commonly refer to as "The Lord's Prayer" and he pays special attention to cultural setting and the nuances of the Aramaic language. What he comes up with is not so different from what we already know, but he emphasizes the sense of intimacy with God that Jesus encouraged. He also objects to "lead us not into temptation," as something a loving father would not do. He prefers "leave us not in temptation." Errico's book is sensible and has little to disagree with. However, those of us who see the Universe as God (there's nothing that's not God) still wonder whom you are addressing when you pray. Even though this is a Unity book, it seems to emphasize human separation from God -- as does all prayer. Personally, I think meditation and "intention" is the way to go.

The Translator by Daoud Hari

Daoud Hari is an African of the Zaghawa tribe in Darfur. Using his talent for language, he left his home to support himself in Chad by translating. His adventures took him to Egypt and Israel dodging authorities eager to enforce immigration laws. As Sudan's war against its native Africans heated up, Daoud's job became escorting journalists into Darfur to report on conditions there. He was also part of a commission to establish that the Arab Sudanese government was indeed committing genocide. For me this was an excellent introduction to the problems in Darfur.

The Space Between Us by Thrity Umrigar

Bhima is an illiterate old woman who lives with her granddaughter in the slums of Bombay. She works as a housemaid in a wealthy home headed by a widow named Sera. Over decades of employment Bhima and Sera have become friends who look out for each other's families. Bhima endures the drudgery of housework and the humiliation of servanthood (she is not allowed to sit on the furniture in Sera's house.) Sera, who has endured her own pain and unhappiness, comes to Bhima's aid with money or influence when needed. Eventually events conspire to make clear the boundaries and distance between them. Thrity Umrigar is a good story teller who takes you deep into Indian culture in this page-turner.

The Intention Experiment by Lynne McTaggart

I loved McTaggart's book called The Field, but was a little disappointed in this one. It is about attempts of science to prove that prayer or thoughtful "intention" can have long distance effects. There are a lot of past experiments that prove it to be true and several that prove nothing. With this book McTaggart and her colleagues have set up an internet site (www.theintentionexperiment.com) which allows anyone who has read the book to participate online in experiments aimed at proving the effectiveness of human "intention" on living things. If this were a subject close to my heart, I would join in; but it seems to me that results thus far are scant and unpredictable and I doubt we'll be able the use this method to achieve world peace anytime soon. Nevertheless, McTaggart's writing is wonderfully clear and her facts thoroughly documented. If you should doubt any of the research she's writing about, you can check her endnotes and run down the source yourself.

The Shack by Wm. Paul Young

Why did I not like this book which has over six million copies in print? Perhaps it was the combination of a rather realistic tragedy with a magical encounter with God. Perhaps it was the puerile writing. Perhaps I just didn't like the theology. At times the sickening sweetness of it embarrassed me.

Faust in Copenhagen by Gino Segre

Subtitled "A Struggle for the Soul of Physics," this book humanizes physics and sets it into historical context in the early years of quantum mechanics. In 1932 prominent physicists Bohr, Heisenberg, Einstein, Ehrenfest, Dirac and others gathered in Copenhagen for a free form discussion of their work. This was an annual event for them and as part of it the men did a skit based on Goethe's Faust. They wrote it in rhyme and poked fun at their own personalities and work. Segre includes a lot of biographical information and stories about physics discoveries told in an easy-to-understand way. My only complaint is that it skips back and forth in time; I think the material could have been better arranged in either straight chronological order or physicist by physicist.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski

Like A Prayer for Owen Meany Wroblewski's novel centers around a young boy who is markedly different from his peers. Edgar Sawtelle was born with an inability to speak, but he learned to use sign language with his parents and thrived on the farm where they bred and trained dogs for people who were willing to pay the $1500 they charged. Edgar's father dies early in the story and circumstances of his death create a mystery that tortures Edgar, who had the unfortunate fate of finding the body. I liked this book in spite of the fact that the writing seemed a little poetically self indulgent. It could have been edited down to about two-thirds the size of its 562 pages.

Loving Frank by Nancy Horan

The woman is Mamah Borthwick Cheney; the man is the famous American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. They each left a spouse and children to pursue the love affair that scandalized Chicago in 1909. In this first novel, Nancy Horan sticks as close to actual facts as she can, but imagines the situation from the point of view of Mamah. Loving Frank is a good read that generated much discussion and many points of view at our book club meeting. A few members couldn't get over the fact that Mamah chose romantic love over being with her children. But some of us saw an overarching theme of the conflict between the need for personal fulfillment versus commitment to family. All of us felt that the story was tragic.

Quantum Shift in the Global Brain by Ervin Laszlo

Such a wonderful title -- such a terrible book. I learned a lot from Laszlo's Science and the Akashic Field, but was very disappointed with Quantum Shift in the Global Brain. It seemed to me that Laszlo and his publisher (Inner traditions) just hashed together bits and pieces of writing to put something on the market.

What the author means by "Quantum Shift" is just improved relationships to each other and to nature. He writes with both pedantry and idealism and gets quite preachy at times. The middle section of the book is best because Laszlo is explaining implications of current developments in quantum physics, and he is very good at it. The ending deals with the Club of Budapest which he founded in 1996. Membership includes people like Desmond Tutu, Liv Ullmann, Peter Ustinov, Elie Wiesel, Arthur C. Clarke, Bianca Jagger, Mikhail Gorbachev -- an interesting mix. The club calls for increased creativity, diversity, responsibility, and planetary consciousness. The attitude is "Smarten up or we're doomed."

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

Evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins objects to belief in the kind of God many of us have outgrown: the Big-Daddy-in-the-Sky or Celestial-Parent type of God. It is true that this is the kind of God most people believe in, but many of us have moved beyond the duality of "the Creator" and "the created." Dawkins summarizes and dispenses with more sophisticated theistic thinking in his first chapter. He describes pantheism as using "the word God as a non-supernatural synonym for Nature, or for the Universe." His only argument against pantheism or what he calls "Einsteinian religion" is semantic; he thinks it is misleading and confusing to use the word "God" as something other than a supernatural being.

Dawkins does a drum beat on the theme of if-it's-not-rational-don't-believe-it. He is so incredibly left-brained that you might as well chop out his right brain and throw it away. Overall, I don't have much to quarrel with in his book. However, he is asking us to get rid of religion without putting anything else in its place; and his defense against this objection is a feeble attitude of look-how-wonderful-science-is. In going after fundamentalists and people who take the Bible literally, Dawkins oversells Darwin and evolutionary theory. Personally I never felt that evolution was in conflict with religion.

On the very last page Dawkins seems to have remembered his right brain and for the first time he uses the word "intuitive." He has been forced into it by consideration of the weird science found in quantum mechanics and cosmology. If you are fundamentalist in your religion, you should probably stay away from this book. But it's an interesting read for those of us who think knowing the nature of reality (the Truth) is more important than whether there's a God or not.

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

Originally published in 1922, Siddhartha enjoyed a surge of popularity in the 1960's, a time of hippies, drug use, flower power, and spiritual searching. I was one of many young people who were reading it. Decades later I re-read it and found myself much more receptive to its spiritual message.

The title confused me because the personal name of Buddha is said to have been Siddhartha, but this novella is not about Gautama Buddha whose statues we often see. Rather, it is about a fictional Siddhartha who lives at the same time as Buddha.

The spiritual journey of this Siddhartha takes him first into living the austere and disciplined life of a monk; then through a period of worldly pleasures enabled by a businessman who hires him and leads him to wealth and debauchery. The novel's climax seems to be a middle road between these extremes. When Siddhartha finally turns to a simpler life, he reaches a stage of enlightenment that brings him peace and joy and the ability to love all people.

Hermann Hesse does a better job at describing enlightenment than Deepak Chopra does in his novel about Buddha. Hesse foreshadows much of what Eckhart Tolle says about ego and the goal of recognizing and overcoming the ego's needs. Siddhartha comes to realize that wise men are constantly aware of the unity of all life; they feel and breathe unity.

Danish physicist Niels Bohr said that a simple truth is a truth where the opposite is not true and a deep truth is a truth where the opposite is also true. Hesse writes "...the opposite of every truth is also just as true!" Here again is a point where philosophy and physics seem to come together as it does when Siddhartha makes the point that there is no such thing as time.

Buddha by Deepak Chopra

Chopra does an excellent job of pulling together what little is known of the life of Gautama Buddha, the founder of Buddhism, who lived roughly from 563-483 B.C. His story is told in easy-to-read contemporary English and gets inside what it must have been like to live as a sheltered prince of that time. Isolation, loneliness, friendship, strife, romance, and marriage all figure into Buddha's life before he leaves at age 29 to become a monk. The experience of reaching nirvana that we connect with Buddha is briefly described because it is essentially ineffable, impossible to put into words.

The human predicament is said to be that people are unconscious of their true nature which is that everyone is Buddha or God. Suffering is caused by the illusion that we are separate from each other and from God. Good and evil, summer and winter, light and darkness are described as all just part of nature, and Buddha says that he did not conquer evil or embrace good; he simply detached himself from both. Going beyond good and evil is very scary to many of us because the concepts of good and evil seem so necessary to organizing human life on earth -- they have served us well. But if you are moving more deeply into philosophy and spirituality, they are seen more as human tools, not absolute truths.