Category Archives: Reviews

Japanese Art of Tidying Up

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TidyI read a strange little book – little at about 100 pages, strange because it’s a self-help book. That’s not the usual choice for this blog.

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, by Marie Kondo, caught my eye first because I thought the word “tidying” was a funny choice – too cute. The book is translated from Japanese (by Cathy Hirano), so that may explain the choice.

The title looked like typical self-help hyperbole otherwise. But there was a long waiting list at my library. It’s a New York Times Best Seller, and has four and a half stars on Amazon with over 5,000 reviews. What could it be?

Best Parts

For me, the best parts of the book have little to do with its tidying mission.

I found several interesting bits of Japanese culture to enjoy. I don’t know how universal these scraps are – Kondo takes a fairly spiritual approach and most of her clients (she tidies for a living) seem to be single women. One client said tidying was “far more effective than feng-shui or power stones and other spiritual goods” for her life.

I’d be nonplussed if Kondo “greeted” my house on a consultation. She will “kneel formally on the floor… address the house in my mind… Then I bow.” She says this is based on the etiquette of entering a Shinto shrine and shows respect for her client. See what I mean about Japanese culture?

There are other tidbits:

  • Japanese people believe a clean home brings good luck
  • Dobutsu uranai is a popular form of Japanese astrology, and there is also “zoological fortune-telling.” (The whole world’s culture doesn’t descend from ancient Greece!)
  • Herbal tea is popular.
  • A typical young-adult apartment may be a “seven-mat room (seven tatami mats take up about ten by thirteen feet of floor space) with a built-in closet and three sets of shelves.”
  • Koromogae occurs in June – the annual switch to summer clothing. It “originated in China and was introduced to Japan as a court custom during the Heian period (794-1185 AD).” In the late nineteenth century it spread to schools and businesses, and later to homes. October goes the other way.
  • “The recent trend in Japan” is to attend early morning seminars and keep materials handed out by the lecturer as a “badge of honor.”

I also found small reminders of my own family and myself. Hey – I fold my socks that way (in “potato-like lumps”). My mother did that. I’ve tried this. Sometimes “right” and sometimes “wrong,” I enjoyed the memories.

I won’t burden you with my memories – read the book and enjoy your own. As Kondo says, “order is dependent on extremely personal values.”

KonMari System

You may be curious what her system is – it’s simple. Continue reading →

Prisoner B-3087

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Front book cover of Prisoner B-3087This book was recommended to me by a granddaughter from her summer school reading list. It is a fictional account by Alan Gratz based on a true story told by Ruth and Jack Gruener of a young Jewish boy in living in Poland when the Nazis invaded and begin imprisoning Jews to either use them as forced laborers or to execute them. The dust cover of the book mentions that the boy “…encounters evil he could never have imagined, but also sees surprising glimpses of hope amid the horror.” The book recounts innumerable examples of evil, but I’m hard pressed to think of more than a very few events that would give anyone a “glimpse of hope.” The book documents countless Nazi atrocities and the extraordinary will to live that was required to survive despite conditions that would make most want to die to escape. The book is dedicated “For Jack, who survived.”

The story begins with a ten year old boy and his Jewish family living comfortably in Krakow, Poland. The boy’s Polish name was Yanek, but the family called him Jakob. Everyone realized Jews were being threatened because of Hitler’s comments about the “Jewish menace,” and making statements such as, “The Jews must disappear from Europe.” Hitler had already annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia and the British and French had declared war against Germany. The ominous conversation one evening was about the German invasion of Poland. Jakob’s father dismissed the threat with, “Mark my words: This war won’t last more than six months.” Only six days after the beginning of the invasion there was an announcement on the radio, “Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt this broadcast with the news that the German army has reached Krakow.” German soldiers escorted by their panzers soon filled the streets. Continue reading →

The Nuclear Jihadist

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Front book cover of Nuclear JihadistI was surprised at how much I struggled at finishing this book by Douglas Franz and Catherine Collins. The long subtitle for the book is “The True Story of the Man Who Sold the World’s Most Dangerous Secrets…And How We Could Have Stopped Him.” The dust cover description could substitute for reading the full book. Pakistani’s Abdul Qadeer Khan is described as the “…father of the Islamic bomb, a research scientist who stole European nuclear plans, masterminded Pakistan’s successful atomic program, and then established a network of smuggling technology and blueprints to other countries seeking nuclear capabilities. Intelligence authorities (including especially the U.S.) watched Khan for decades and could have stopped him before Pakistan became a nuclear power, but amazingly, our political leaders consciously chose to watch, wait, and concentrate on what they believed to be more immediate strategic priorities.” I’m struggling to explain why I did not find the book compelling reading. The subject matter was something that I should have found interesting and the book seems very well researched. Perhaps I was just put off by the ineffectiveness of the world’s anti-nuclear proliferation efforts to stop a corrupt man who developed a massive network of associates driven by the quest for lucrative profits.

“Khan started down the nuclear path as a patriot, stealing secret European nuclear designs out of determination to protect his country from its archrival, India. After playing a central role in developing Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, he shifted course and employed his global network to sell those same nuclear secrets to some of the most repressive regimes in the world, transforming himself into a nuclear jihadist devoted to payback for real and imagined grievances suffered by Muslims around the world. In the process, Khan grew arrogant, corrupt, powerful, operating with impunity as he amassed a fortune from his black-market deals.” Khan’s network is described as providing technology for enriching uranium and design information for building a nuclear weapon from the enriched material to Libya, Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. There were other possible customers including Saudi Arabia. I didn’t find explanation for how he acquired the weapon design information except that it was referred to at least twice as being from a warhead design used in a 1996 Chinese missile test. The CIA learned of Khan in 1975 when it learned he “…had stolen top-secret plans for the latest uranium enrichment technology and taken them home to Pakistan.” The CIA seemed to be more interested in the countries willing to buy from Khan rather than wanting to take action to stop the spread of nuclear technology he was willing to sell. Continue reading →

Plutopia

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Front book cover of PlutopiaThe subtitle of this book by Kate Brown, “Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters,” reveals that the author was not a fan of plutonium production. The book focuses on the Hanford plant near Richland (site “W” in Manhattan Project language) in eastern Washington State and the Soviet Maiak facility near Ozersk (“Lakedale”) in the southern Russian Urals. People who lived in nuclear cities that were havens for workers, especially in the Soviet Union, but the primary focus of the book is about the hazards created. “Each kilogram of final product generates hundreds of thousands of gallons of radioactive waste.“Ozersk was one of ten nuclear cities in the Soviet Union that existed secretly, off the map…” One statement that expresses the general conclusion of the author is that, “The lethal landscapes surrounding the plutonium plants are pockmarked with landmines of percolating radioactive waste and people who are persistently sick…” Continue reading →

The Quartet – Founders of the America We Live In

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QuartetJoseph J. Ellis sub-titles his book Orchestrating the Second American Revolution 1783 – 1789.

In 1776, thirteen American colonies won their independence and prepared to go their separate ways, “destined to become a western version of Europe, a constellation of rival political camps and countries.” The Articles of Confederation were a Peace Pact among them, not a national government. Any far-away government was distrusted like the “quasi-paranoid hostility towards… London… [and] described as inherently arbitrary, imperious, and corrupt.” (Distances were hard to overcome back then.)

Ellis sketches biographies and covers pre-Constitution attempts at governance, the Revolutionary War, the dawning Enlightenment, the Great Debate that led to the US Constitution, and the “not-so-vacant” western lands that rendered “the local and state perspective… pathetically provincial.” Ellis provides a lot of detail on the flaws in the Confederation and political machinations that created the US Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Drawing on “massive,” “recently published” primary sources as well as other scholars; Ellis presents a compact 174 pages (Epub edition) with appropriate notes – fattened by appendices containing the texts of the Articles of Confederation, Constitution of the United States, and The Bill of Rights.

The vast majority of Americans had no interest in an American nation. It was “a small group of prominent leaders, in disregard to popular opinion, [who] carried the American story in a new direction.” Continue reading →

Swastika – Symbol Beyond Redemption

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swastikaRecent debate over the Confederate Battle Flag led me to dig out a book I read years ago about another symbol: The Swastika: Symbol Beyond Redemption? by Steven Heller.

With widely spaced lines and half-page margins filled with illustrations, Heller’s slender volume is more a long essay than a book, so this is a short review. He asks, “Can the same image that represents the Holocaust ever represent anything else?”

Before Aryan mystics appropriated the swastika and Hitler adopted it for the Nazis, it was a good-luck symbol and decorative motif appearing all over the world. The swastika became so strongly associated with the Nazis that, during World War II, Native Americans burned tribal textiles with the symbol and Jewish congregations chiseled it out of mosaic floors in synagogues. Americans destroyed thousands of items adorned with swastikas, from Girls’ Club magazines to US Army shoulder patches. Continue reading →