Cradle of Gold: The Story of Hiram Bingham, a Real-Life Indiana Jones and the search for Machu Picchu

by Christopher Heaney

New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010

Week 35 Non-fiction

My husband Thell’s mother always wanted to go to visit Machu Picchu in Peru, because she had read about it in National Geographic many years ago. Because she never got there, Thell has wanted to go in her stead. We finished reading Cradle of Gold by Christopher Heaney this week in anticipation of the trip we hope to make in the next year, while we are still young enough to travel to Cuzco, to ride the Hiram Bingham train, climb the steep cliffs and explore the ancient city of Machu Picchu.

One of the most colorful, but also unknown, figures of the late 19th and early 20th century, Hiram Bingham, was an American academic, archaeologist and adventurer. He spent much of his young adult life exploring in Peru, searching for the lost cities of the Incas, and the rest of his adulthood defending his discoveries.

Born of missionary parents, Bingham was educated at Harvard and married an heiress to the Tiffany fortune. Although he received a PhD from Harvard, he longed to teach at Yale, and to live a life of adventure and achievement. He was “caught between his family’s missionary ideals, his own Gilded Age desires, and hours spent devouring the books of Theodore Roosevelt, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad.”

Fate would take him to Peru where he began to search for Vilcabamba, the lost city of the Incas. He financed his early trips himself with his wife’s money; later trips were financed by National Geographic and Yale University where he became a professor. Along the way, he was led to the magnificent ruins of Machu Picchu, named for the mountain behind the city. He also explored other cities of the Incas, and brought back to Yale bones, pottery, and other artifacts of the waning days of the Inca Empire. These cities were not lost to the indigenous people; they were just lost to history.

The items he brought back to Yale were the stuff of controversy, because they included among other things, human bones—5415 pieces in all. Heaney outlines the several arrangements Bingham and Yale made with the various governments of Peru—there were failures and deceptions on both sides. Enshrined at the Peabody Museum at Yale, the artifacts remain controversial 100 years later. Recently, Peru sued Yale to have all the human remains returned to Peru; the court case is still pending.

Bingham went on to be a pilot during World War I and later a US Senator. He was truly a man of his age, and most likely the model for the movie hero, Indiana Jones. His was an amazing life, and Christopher Heaney does the man justice. We are at once fascinated and repelled by the man who would use his wife’s money and leave her at home alone with seven children.

The book is also about the history of the Incas and about Machu Picchu, the jewel of the empire. The last chapters discuss the controversy over archeological artifacts; to whom do they belong? Heaney also discusses his own adventures in Peru as he searched out the information to write this book.

It is engrossing reading of a subject about which not much has been written. The review in the Wall Street Journal was what encouraged me to read this book, which I read aloud with my husband. We both enjoyed it, and when we go to Peru, we will be glad that we had read it.

http://online.wsj.com/article/NA_WSJ_PUB:SB10001424052748703580904575131981352153478.html

Christopher Heaney is a professor at the University of Texas. Here is his website:

http://www.christopherheaney.net/

Here is an interesting interview Heaney did with the Yale Daily News. It deals with the ongoing controversy that Hiram Bingham looted Machu Picchu and that Yale is withholding valuable gold pieces from the Peruvian government.

http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/university-news/2010/04/16/alums-book-tackles-peru-expedition/

Women Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything

By Geneen Roth

New York, Scribner, 2010

Week 34      Spiritual

I do want to say at the outset that I am not reading any more self-help books this year. This one is disguised as a spiritual book, and I read it as such, but it is still self-help. That being said, I have empathy for what Geneen Roth is discussing in Women, Food, and God. And I do realize that for many women, the book has a great deal of resonance. If I were 37 instead of 67, I think that this book would have been a revelation.

I am also not going to discuss this book as a book about dieting--or not dieting. If I did, I would be writing an entire book myself. I am not going to get into that at all, because at this point in my life, I think that I have gained peace with my body and my weight—at least more than when I was a younger woman. Although as Nora Ephron might say, I Feel Bad about My Neck, or in my case, my upper arms! What I want to discuss is what I gleaned from her understandings about women and the search for identity.

Geneen Roth believes that the way you eat is inseparable from your core beliefs about being alive. Through this book, she helps women come to the bright center of their souls. She says, “How we use food is really a mirror to our inner happiness—our feelings of love, fear, self-worth, anger and our connection to God.” Our relationship with food brings us to a doorway to freedom--what we seek most. When we open that door, we can see the issues we are using food to avoid.

She wants women to really listen to their inner beings, not “the Voice” that tells you how bad you are, how things are never going to change, and you might as well not bother. She teaches women to meditate on the things that are good and the love that surrounds them. She says, “I believe in love. And beauty. I believe that every single person has something they find beautiful and that they truly love. The smell of their child's hair, the silence of a forest, their lover's crooked grin. Their country, their religion, their family. And I believe that if you follow this love all the way to its end, if you start with the thing you find most beautiful and trace it's perfume back to its essence, you will perceive an intangible presence, a swath of stillness that allows the thing you love to be visible like the openness of the sky reveals the presence of the moon."

In Companions in Christ, the course that I teach at my church, we learn many of the same principles, however from a Christian perspective. We really listen to each other (something that doesn’t always happen in the real world), we meditate with each other, and we become formed by the presence of God in our lives. I wish Roth had discussed in more depth the spiritual impact of her method, because the book is a guide to stepping outside of guilt and anxiety about our bodies and what we put in them and stepping into a new world where we are worth it.

Geneen Roth has been running workshops for many years as well as writing books. Her first book was When Food is Love: Exploring the Relationship between Eating and Intimacy. In this book she refutes the premise that if you could only be thin, then you would be happy. Her many books and workshops have been very popular. On another note, Geneen Roth appears to be a good friend of Anne Lamott , whose Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith I read earlier this year. So, I guess I have to say, any friend of Anne’s is a friend of mine.

I could not find a major review of Women Food and God, but I did find a intriguing interview with Oprah in O magazine:
http://www.oprah.com/health/Geneen-Roth-Talks-to-Oprah-About-Women-Food-And-God

Here is an interview with Erica Hill from CBS News: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCmxapqZAFs

The Elegance of the Hedgehog

By Muriel Barbery

New York, Europa Editions, 2006

Week 33      Fiction

I hardly know where to begin. I guess I will begin by saying that The Elegance of the Hedgehog is my favorite book of the year thus far, and probably one of my favorite books since I began reading purposefully for my book club, which has been in existence for 6 years.

Part philosophical meandering, part literary fiction, and part social satire, the book tells the stories of a 12-year-old girl, the daughter of wealthy intellectuals, and the concierge in her building, a 54-year-old recluse and closet intellectual. What we learn about them comes from their thoughts; for 12-yr.-old Paloma, they are written down in a journal and in a diary of “Profound Thoughts.” In these writings, she ponders her fate; is she to grow up and be just like her parents and sister, who she finds to be living unfortunate lives, or is she to kill herself before her thirteenth birthday? Madame Michel—Renee, on the other hand, ponders philosophy, music, literature, and good food, but feels she has to hide all this in order to survive as a concierge. So, she leaves the television running all day, wears clumsy slippers, and cooks cabbage to smell up her apartment. Paloma hides her true self behind a façade of petulance and sarcasm. Renee hides her true self behind a façade of self-loathing and quasi-ignorance.

The plot, if there is one, begins about mid-book when a retired Japanese businessman, Monsieur Ozu, moves into the building. He quickly sees beyond their facades and offers each of them a hand of friendship. He becomes intrigued with Paloma’s intelligence and asks her some probing questions that reveal her true nature. He recognizes in Renee a true soul mate; someone who appreciates all that he appreciates; someone who can share art, music, and literature with him. Age and class mean nothing to him, and he offers Renee and Paloma a place where they can belong. By the time the climax of the plot comes, all three characters have stretched and grown and become better people.

There is amazing writing in this book. The title comes from some of Paloma’s thoughts, when she begins pay attention to Madame Michel. She says: “Madame Michel has the elegance of the hedgehog: on the outside, she’s covered in quills, a real fortress, but my gut feeling is that on the inside, she has the same simple refinement as the hedgehog: a deceptively indolent little creature, fiercely solitary—and terribly elegant.”

As I said earlier, I loved this book, but if you are looking for a book with a lot of plot, action, and twists and turns, this is not a book for your summer reading. I was all alone at my sister’s cottage when I read it, and it was the perfect setting. I could become completely lost in the beauty of the words and ideas. I spent a long time thinking about the face we must show to the world, and the inner face we share with no one—or perhaps one or two others. My husband always says to me when I am sitting quietly, “What are you thinking about?” Sometimes I want to share my thoughts with him; sometimes I just want to sit with them—remain lost in those thoughts.

Reviews on this book are a bit mixed. Several discussed the European flavor of the book and commented that an American writer most likely would not have written it. Muriel Barbery is a professor of philosophy and has written another book, Une Gourmandise, which is being translated into English following the success of The Elegance of the Hedgehog, which has also been made into a movie. I didn’t much like the review in the New York Times, but I thought that the Washington Post review was more insightful:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/11/AR2008091101955.html

I also was impressed with this blog posting on Huffington Post.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/delia-lloyd/why-emthe-elegance-of-the_b_503223.html

One of the interesting sidelights to this book is that it has pretty much grown in popularity by word of mouth. Isn’t it amazing, that some books or movies open to great fanfare, i.e. The DaVinci Code, or others of that type, while other books come to our consciousness sideways—by word of mouth or mention in an article or review of another book. I am grateful to my book club friend for bringing this book to us; my soul is better because of it.

The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature

By Daniel Levitin

New York, Dutton, 2008

Week 32 Non-Fiction

Ever had a song stuck in your head for days on end? Ever wondered how you were able to sing a lullaby to your baby that you hadn’t heard since you were a baby? Did you and your partner ever have “your song?” Daniel Levitin addresses these things and more in an enlightening book about music, biology, culture, history, and evolution. I listened to this in the car with the author reading the book.

Levitin is a musician, a music producer, a musicologist, a product of the 1970s, and a neuroscientist. He is imminently qualified to discuss this topic. He reduces the history of mankind (and throws in a huge dose of biology) to six types of song and how those six types can be found throughout history. They are: friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion, and love. Think about it—all the songs with lyrics that you know can fit into one of those categories. One of the most interesting stories he tells is about how ancient armies used drums to intimidate their enemies. Just the sound of the drumming as the army prepared for the attack struck fear into the hearts of the enemy who suddenly felt ill-prepared in the face of such solidarity. The MSU Fight Song—a friendship song; The alphabet song—a knowledge song; You are my Sunshine—a love song. Levitin calls music “the soundtrack of civilization.”

Along the way, Levitin helps us understand how music developed, how it survived, how some families are musical and some are not, and develops a theory for the power that music has played throughout history. One concept he presents over and over is that you are here with your genetic pool intact, because your ancestors didn’t die in childhood.

One interesting thing for me is to watch my grandchildren become another generation of singers, musicians and actors. I see my genetic pool at work. My granddaughter, Isabela, born in Guatamala, is musical to the core. Lucky her—to have me for a Grandma. I can help that gift develop, even if we have no idea of her genetic background.

This is a fascinating read. As I was listening to the CD, however, I wished that there had been more music. It needed to be there. Just telling me about a particular song wasn’t the same as hearing it. After all, I’m a musician.

I am sure that there are much more learned reviews of this book. But please, remember, I was listening to it on a long car trip. I didn’t have a chance to write anything down. Yet, I felt an affirmation that the music that is in my soul will be passed down to my children’s children. Our music is here to stay. And by the way, “Our song” (my first husband, Lee’s and mine), was the “Theme to Mondo Cane”—“More than the greatest love!” As song by Bobby Darin.

Here is Daniel Levitin’s website: http://www.sixsongs.net/

The New York Times review: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/31/books/review/Itzkoff-t.html

Interview with Daniel Levitin:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uBHbo7_hpg

Mennonite in a Little Black Dress: A Memoir of Going Home

by Rhoda Janzen

New York, Henry Holt and Co., 2009

Week 31      Memoir

Rhoda Janzen says that she was in a “weird personal space” when she wrote Mennonite in a Little Black Dress. She was on sabbatical from the English Dept. at Hope College in Holland, Michigan; her husband had left her for a guy he met on gay.com; and she had been in a terrible car accident with many broken bones. What to do when you are 43 years old, and your life is in shambles? Go home to your family?

Well, that is exactly what she did. She went back to the Mennonite community in California where her father and mother lived and where she had grown up. With nothing to do and time to kill, she began writing down the stories that her parents told, musing about the conservative and confining upbringing she had tried to escape, and putting her heritage into the context of her current life.

What emerged is a very funny narrative of those months among the Mennonites, a clear-eyed look at her circumstances, and the emergence of gratitude for life with all its ups and downs. Janzen says that she wrote with humor because sometimes “serious content is best framed with levity and humor.” Often the stories are laugh-out-loud funny, sometimes they are poignant, but always they are filled with love for family, friends, and life.

The New York Times reviewer says: “Janzen is as sharp about the cognoscenti and academics she now lives among as she is about Mennonites and her family’s eccentricities. Her tone reminds me of Garrison Keillor’s deadpan, affectionate, slightly hyperbolic stories about urbanites and Minnesota Lutherans, and also of the many Jewish writers who’ve brought mournful humor to the topics of gefilte fish and their own mothers, as well as to the secular, often urban, often intellectual world they call home now. It’s the narrative voice of the person who grew up in an ethnic religious community, escaped it, then looked back with clearsighted objectivity and appreciation.”

I think the best part of the book is the portrayal of her family and particularly her mother. I was reminded of the deadpan way David Sedaris tells stories about his family, with love and a lot of self-deprecating humor. Janzen’s mother says what’s on her mind, no matter what, when, or where. And her observations are both pithy and funny. I also enjoyed her descriptions of the agonies of growing up Mennonite—the food, the clothes, the embarrassment of public school. The chapter on the five worst Mennonite school lunches is particularly funny. As a child who never had a HoHo or package of potato chips in my lunch, I really got a kick out of her descriptions, although I never had to face cold hot potato salad or borsht in my lunch.

As Janzen comes to grips with her husband’s betrayal and plots a course for her future, the nurturing warmth of her family helps her move forward. She says that this time for her was a demonstration of what it means to love—to go backward in order to go forward.

I am in Duluth this week with my mother, and I was telling the hospice chaplain about the book, about Janzen’s appreciating anew her background that she had tried so hard to forsake. I mentioned that for most of us, the faith of our childhood has given way to something quite different. My mother looked at me keenly and said, “In what way is your faith different now?” I was a bit stunned at the clarity with which the question was asked; my mother is currently not known for her clarity! I responded that I think that my faith is more inclusive now; there are not so many dos and don’ts that guide me, and that I am more intuitive in my thinking and less didactic. Yet, I—like Janzen—treasure the upbringing that made me the person I am today. I can do all the things Janzen says she learned—to put together a dinner for ten in an hour; to sew a dress, or in my case, a costume, and celebrate the arrival of a host of overnight guests. Training obviously pays off!

I can highly recommend this book. It has gleaned lots of critical support and is sure to become a book club favorite.

Here is the New York Times review:
 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/books/review/Christensen-t.html

This narrative video shows Janzen at her home on Lake Allegan (familiar to many people from West Michigan) and shows a lot of family pictures:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoprlAJN3mQ

An insightful interview:
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbRGYcLvt9g&feature=related

I See You Everywhere

By Julia Glass


New York, Anchor Books, 2008

Week 30       Fiction

While I was reading this novel, I had my twin granddaughters at my house, and as the novel unfolded, I compared the relationship of Maya and Cecilia, my granddaughters, to Clem and Louisa in the book. Maya and Cecilia are incredibly close and supportive. Louisa and Clem have had a rivalry from birth for primacy in their mother’s life. Rather early on, Louisa realizes that Clem is her mother’s favorite, and while that colors her feelings about her sister, they are bonded to each other, as only sisters can be.

Louisa has a life as a magazine editor in New York, and is monogamous. Clem is a biologist, who travels the world rescuing animals and bedding co-workers. Yet, whenever something happens in one of their lives, they immediately seek out the other. The book spans a 25-year period, and the two sisters take turns telling the story, a device that seems to work well.

Frankly, I didn’t really relate well to this book; I couldn’t help but love the adventurer, Clem, and never got “into” Louise and her anxieties. Yet, when an unexpected tragedy emerges in the last part of the book, I couldn’t stop reading. At that point, I found that I cared. Like all good novels, the reader’s identification with the characters intensifies until the book’s climax. I did think that the cover really told the story well.

Reviewers called this Glass’s most auto-biographical novel. One of her books, Three Junes, was the National Book Award winner, so her writing is well acknowledged. The Seattle Times reviewer says,

“There is a constant danger that this story, with its recurrent theme of feuding between the sisters, will become monotonous. But such is the power of Glass' writing that we glide along with her. A deft twist at the end makes for a most moving finish.”

The interesting thing to me is that I wasn’t annoyed with the feuding, as were many of the reviewers; I only saw the bond. Could that be because I am so bonded to my own sisters that it was what I recognized? Or is it because feuding is just one component to the complex sister relationship that I know so well? I am reminded of the old song, “Lord, help the mister, who comes between me and my sister, and Lord help the sister that comes between me and my man!” I sang that song to my granddaughters, and even though they are just nine, they understood.

Here is the review in the New York Times:
www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/reviews/schillinger-t.html

Sacred Contracts: Awakening Your Divine Potential

By Caroline Myss


New York, Harmony Books, 2001

Week 29 Spiritual

Frankly, I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel about this book. I slogged through the first 200 pages of Sacred Contracts: Awakening Your Divine Potential thinking all the time “I am really out of my league this time.” The book was lent to me by my quilter, Patrick, as a spiritual book that I must read. Before I began to read it, people noticed it and commented: “Oh, you’re reading Caroline Myss now.” So, it was with some anticipation I began this alternative (for me) spiritual book. After 200 pages, I decided I just didn’t care anymore. So, dear readers, for the first time since beginning my year of reading, I quit a book.

Caroline Myss has a PHD in religion and is a mystic and medical intuitive (whatever that is). In Sacred Contracts she lays out a plan for human potential that includes some sacred, some psychology, some hocus-pocus. She makes the case that every soul has a sacred contract signed before they are born, and our lives are spent trying to learn the lessons of the contract. She discusses the 12 archetypes that rule our lives, and we are to discover which archetypes are in our souls and understand how we should operate with them.

This part of the book I found interesting, because she uses several examples to show how the archetypes operate within specific individuals. In the back of the book, she describes a huge selection of archetypes along with examples of these archetypes at work in various movies and literature. She also includes a long series of questions to ask yourself to try to figure out which 12 archetypes fit into your life. I didn’t take the time to ask those questions or try to figure out the answers. An interested reader could use the book as a workbook to chart a life course.

There’s just too much going on in this book—archetypes, chakras, spinning wheels. I think that if she had just devoted a book to archetypes, I would have thought it was an innovative and interesting book. I also had questions about the basic premise that we each have a sacred contract that comes before our birth. She defines sacred contract as “an agreement your soul makes before you are born. You promise to do certain things for yourself, for others, and for divine purposes.” Our goal in life is “manage your personal power and fulfill your sacred contract.” I did like this quote: “We fear our own empowerment because it represents changes in our lives that would remove us from the warmth of those who love us for being vulnerable. And we fear being empowered because then we can no longer claim that we are not responsible for our actions.”

This is what Publisher’s Weekly had to say in a review of the book: “Myss offers her readers a new system for blowing away pedestrian notions of their purpose on the planet. She espouses the ancient notion that our souls enter into a kind of contract before birth that we agree to have various human experiences and even (in Myss's version) to encounter certain people in order to learn lessons. The author includes a technique for arriving at 12 archetypes that rule different areas of our life from career to sex to our highest aspirations. While each of us is controlled in different ways by four "survival" archetypes Child, Victim, Prostitute, Saboteur the other archetypes that flavor our relations to the world are up to us and as richly different as Vampire and Messiah. One value of Myss's ingenious system is that, like the I Ching, it teaches readers to use symbols not as one-dimensional descriptions but as a call to reflection and imagination and a means to see ourselves in a greater light.”

This would be a valuable book to utilize in a workshop or a class. It was too much for a one-week read. I became overburdened with concepts and ideas and work that needed to be done for it all to make sense. I needed to hear Myss speak in order for it to make sense to me.


I just watched a video Caroline Myss talking about another of her books, Anatomy of a Spirit, and there was a lot of psychology in the interview that made sense to me. The thought I had as I was watching the interview is that she may be better in workshops and interviews than she is in her books. She comes across as very logical and sincere. Authoritative even. Here is a brief interview about the book Spiritual Contracts. The second part deals with the book (about 5 minutes into the video). http://www.shiftinaction.com/node/3467

Here is her website: http://www.myss.com/

She also has a weekly Sacred Contracts radio show on Sirius Radio, which you can find out about on her website.