The Company of Strangers by Robert Wilson

A young English mathematician named Andrea Aspinall is recruited by British intelligence for duties as a spy in Portugal during World War II. The cast of characters she works for and against are indeed a company of strangers. Many of them are double agents. They appear, disappear, and reappear in Andrea's life throughout the novel's time period of 1940 to 1989. Towards the end, with the Berlin wall coming down, it becomes difficult to keep track of who is spying for whom. The twists and turns and surprises keep happening and it all leaves the reader wondering if anyone really knows anything about their compatriots.

Good spy novel.

The Art of Seeing by Cammie McGovern

A story of two sisters, one of whom is going blind, Cammie McGovern's first novel focuses (pun intended) on the sisters' relationship. There is much overt and implied reference to visual perception (the younger sister is a photographer) as the two girls move into adulthood both supporting and competing with each other. Tightly written, The Art of Seeing has inspired me to go buy McGovern's second book, Eye Contact.

Good novel.

The World Is Flat by Thomas Friedman

I can't believe I read the whole book! Thomas L. Friedman is fascinating in his exposition of how communications technology is globalizing and, as he puts it, flattening the world. I'm not sure he really needed to drag it out for 630 pages, but he is so entertaining in the stories he tells, especially of global businesses, that a little repetitiveness is easily forgiven.

His is a hopeful perspective paying much attention to India, China, Malaysia, and other countries with large populations of poor people. They are moving more and more people into the middle class, thanks to outsourcing in this country and the technological ease with which people can do business over great distances. Friedman realizes that Americans are going to have to compete more on a global basis and that we will probably experience some economic displacement because of this, but he believes that with better education Americans will adjust and remain leaders in innovation.

Furthermore, the world should be a better and safer place when wealth is more equitably distributed and more of us have a stake in keeping the global economic system going. It is almost as if what socialism and communism have failed to do, technology is going to bring about naturally with an underpinning of democracy rather than totalitarianism.

Excellent book.

Torch-Bearer to Light the Way by Neal Vahle

Ironically, I developed a cold while reading the biography of a spiritual healer. Torch-Bearer to Light the Way; the Life of Myrtle Fillmore is by Neal Vahle and includes an explanation of how Fillmore and her husband started the Unity movement from their home in Kansas City in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Along the way there is much connection with the contemporaneous Christian Science movement, but eventually the Fillmores distanced themselves from it. They felt it is more important to rely on your own inner knowing than to accept the dictates of outside authorities, especially in your spiritual life. And Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy appears to have been pretty dictatorial.

I try not to proofread when I'm reading for my own pleasure but this book was amazingly full of typos and mistakes. At one place I pondered over how a daughter could have been born before her mother until I finally realized that the author had inserted a birth date where he should have used a death date.

Adequate biography if you're interested in Unity.

On Beauty by Zadie Smith

The ladies of my book club loved On Beauty and were amazed that the author who was born in 1975 was so able to get into the minds of characters in their 50s. She sets up two academic families, one in England and one in Massachusetts. The English family is black and conservative while the American one is mixed race and liberal. There is professional competition and hard feelings between the two patriarchs; and when the English professor comes to teach at his competitor's college, the men take opposing stands with regard to academic politics. In the small town environment their families also develop interesting relationships.

The juxtaposition of liberal and conservative attitudes is interesting and I kept watching to see which the author was going to prefer. However, she revealed no bias and showed both liberals and conservatives as a mix of good and bad traits with a touch of hypocrisy and a little infidelity here and there.

Good novel.

The Death of the Mythic God by Jim Marion

Jim Marion is the founder and Director of the Institute for Spiritual Awareness in Washington, D.C. and one of the founding members of Ken Wilber’s Institute for Integral Spirituality. He is also a public policy lawyer and his book The Death of the Mythic God; The Rise of Evolutionary Spirituality ties levels of spiritual consciousness to contemporary world politics.

The thesis of this book is that people are evolving in spiritual consciousness both individually and within the human race as a whole. They are moving away from the old concept of God as a being who created everything but who is separate and distinct from his creation. They are moving toward a concept of God as the underlying consciousness (Source, Force, Energy, Whatever) of which the Universe and everything in it is made. It's all God.

Marion, who once studied to become a Catholic priest, has great respect for Christianity and all other religions. However, he believes that Christianity strayed from the teachings of Jesus as the early church grew in size and began to hammer out its formal beliefs. "Jesus taught that we are responsible for our own sins and our own salvation. It is not his responsibility but ours. Jesus did not die to save us from sin. That was a theological interpretation added later by others, and one that directly contradicts what Jesus himself taught." (p. 59)

This is a terrific book -- and short (167 pages). I read it in a couple of evenings.

The Hidden Face of God by Gerald Schroeder

In The Hidden Face of God Israeli physicist Gerald Schroeder pulls together quantum mechanics, neuroscience, and Bible study to conclude that mind, as exhibited by the ability to make choices, is inherent in every atom of the Universe.

The book shows the place where physics and metaphysics meet and greet (if not merge). In Schroeder's thesis the basic stuff of the Universe is information: "But when we look below the surface, we discover a world made of a mix of identical particles that are actually waves and then realize that the waves are massless expressions of information. Physics has exposed the metaphysical basis of existence." (p. 173)

Schroeder stops short of saying that the Creator and the Created are one thing, but he does seem to support the basic underlying unity of everything in the Universe -- call it God or a force or what-have-you.

One thing that I didn't like was the author's tendency to gush over how wonderfully complex the human body and brain are. To me this is anthropocentric thinking -- he assumes that human beings are smart enough to assess the complexities of reality. I can't help wondering if the perceived complexity is just a reflection of the limitations of our little animal brains.