Manners & Customs in the Bible, 3rd edition by Victor H. Matthews

Posted on May 20, 2013 by MrPopularSentiment

Read: 6 April, 2013

In Manners & Customs, Matthews covers the major periods of biblical history, from the Ancestral Period down to the Intertestamental and New Testament Period. In each section, he covers some of the historical background of the period, such as what was going on politically both in Hebrew lands and nearby regions. This is followed with specific discussions of construction methods and styles, marriage customs, clothing and adornment, weapons and military technology, and more.

I found the text interesting, particularly in its range, though I was a bit disappointed by how heavily it relied on the books of the Bible for its sources – mainly because I’m also reading the Bible and thus have access to those same passages. What I wanted was more information on what other texts from the period and the archaeological evidence have to say. Though I suppose I might have been unreasonable given that the title of the book specifies that the manners and customs are in the Bible.

It also led to some issues where Matthews took the Bible at face value in the absence of any corroborating outside evidence, but he was using the same matter-of-fact voice he uses elsewhere when there is corroboration. So, for example, he talks about the exodus as a discrete event, as it’s presented in the Bible, without mentioning the possibility of a folk tradition that glomped together multiple migration events, or simply a cultural memory of Egyptian occupation.

All in all, I found it to be an interesting read. There are better introductions to “biblical times” resources, though I appreciated Matthews’ focus on domestic customs – even though I found these to be far more sparse than the title had led me to believe.

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How Clean Is Your House? by Kim Woodburn and Aggie MacKenzie

Posted on May 15, 2013 by MrPopularSentiment

Read: 21 March, 2013

“Slovenly” would be a very kind word to use for my housekeeping skills, particularly when I first moved out from under my parents’ feather duster. I got a lot better when my son was born and I was on maternity leave – not only because I had a lot more time on my hands, but also because I had an added incentive not to let yummy edible dust bunnies accumulate. Still, though, there were/are a lot of gaps in my knowledge about how to properly take care of a home.

So I took to one of my parent groups and asked if anyone could recommend a good “quick and dirty” beginners’ guide.

I’d tried to flip through a few housekeeping books in the past, but they all assumed a level of proficiency that I just didn’t have. They would skip over the basics, or they’d just go into so much detail that I felt overwhelmed.

The first response in my request was that I should pick up How Clean Is Your House? A few people offered practical advice of their own but, mostly, everyone agreed that I should pick up Woodburn and MacKenzie’s book.

Unfortunately, it seems to be out of print, at least in Canada. But I did find a really cheap copy on Amazon’s “New & Used” section.

And it’s exactly what I needed.

I think that it would be far too simplistic for someone who has already been caring for their home for a while, since they really do only cover the very basics. In fact, the amount of text in the book is quite limited – most of the page space being taken up by photos of Woodburn and MacKenzie wearing rather ostentatious rubber gloves and posing as they look in disgust at something off-screen, or close-up photos of cleaning implements or objects in need of cleaning.

If I’d paid more than $10 for the book, that might upset me. But considering that I paid less than $4 including shipping, it’s not a big deal. And, in fact, the focus on only the most vital information was precisely what I had asked for.

The book is divided into sections for each room in the house, plus a bit about “getting started” and a special section for all the lovely messes pets make. Some sections have a little information about how to deal with the big accidents, but the focus is mainly on what to do for normal day-to-day maintenance (plus a bit in the “getting started” about what to do when conquering a house that hasn’t been cared for in a long time).

Perhaps the most useful part of the book is the section where they break down a daily, weekly, and monthly routines, plus a checklist of those special “once a year” type of chores. This was perhaps the most helpful section for me in the entire book.

I think that this book would make a fantastic gift for someone about to strike out on their own for the very first time. I wish someone would have given it to me so I wouldn’t have spent all of five years wallowing in my own filth!

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How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler & Charles van Doren

Posted on May 5, 2013 by MrPopularSentiment

Read: 28 March, 2013

This book was recommended to me by a homeschooling mother, and I can certainly see why. It’s a wonderful little primer on how to read books in such a way that the reader is able to get as much from the experience as possible. It covers how to make notations in a book, how to write an outline, how to use external materials effectively, and how to engage in a conversation between reader and writer. It even has a section where it goes into the specifics of how to read different kinds of texts.

I think that it would be a fantastic foundational text for a high school level English class – whether in a classroom or a homeschool (or, even, to be read by an industrious individual looking for a little self-improvement). It’s not a book best read at once, but rather digested chapter by chapter over the span of, say, a school year. It’s a little dry, so if you’re planning to use it with students, be prepared to liven it up with fun exercises, conversations, and sample readings. But taken in smaller chunks, it shouldn’t be too painful, and I think it would be well worthwhile.

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Don’t Know Much About the Bible by Kenneth C. Davis

Posted on March 30, 2013 by MrPopularSentiment

Read: 1 March, 2013

I’ve been working on my Bible reading project over at Carpe Scriptura and I came across a recommendation to read this book. Though the stated objective of my project is just to chronicle my personal impressions of the text, I do like to cheat and get some outside perspectives occasionally, particularly when I raise questions that require more historically-founded answers.

Don’t Know Much About the Bible is a great introduction to the Old and New Testaments. Davis has a summary of each book, including a discussion of the themes, issues, and current scholarly thoughts for most. He also covers some of the bible basics, such as the Document Hypothesis. In that sense, I found it to be a perfect little primer for cultural Christians and others who just want a crash course on the contents of the Bible but lack the patience to slog through the actual text (which I fully understand). I could also see it working well as a quick reference book for someone who does enough Bible-talk to need one, but not enough to memorize all the information.

I found the information to be well presented and the writing style to be accessible. That being said, I did notice a few issues. Most notably, Davis seems rather intent on calling women in the bible prostitutes, such as Rahab (which is a little iffy). Worse, he presents their professions as if they were undisputed facts, stated explicitly in the text. I suppose he should get some credit for dispelling the myth about Mary of Magdala being a prostitute – though that correction is nearly more famous than the original myth by now.

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The Undead and Philosophy edited by Richard Greene and K. Silem Mohammad

Posted on December 30, 2012 by MrPopularSentiment

Read: 17 December, 2012

When I reviewed Game of Thrones and Philosophy, I complained that the book was just out to explain philosophical concepts, and it’s tie to the ostensible subject rested solely on using a few names and events for illustrations. In The Undead and Philosophy, on the other hand, the subject matter is much more integrated in the articles – each chapter using the Undead to discuss things like issues of personhood, or the relationship between desires/impulses and civilization.

In some cases, it worked really well and I felt that my consumption of the Undead genre was enriched by the thoughtfulness of the article (such as “Heidegger the Vampire Slayer: The Undead and Fundamental Ontology” by Adam Barrows). Others were just uninteresting. And still others were simply hilarious – such as the article that argued that zombies are giant erections with vagina mouths (“The Undead Martyr: Sex, Death, and Revolution in George Romero’s Zombie Films” by Simon Clark).

I can’t really think of the right audience for this book. I think that anyone with an interest in philosophy will either already be familiar with all of the concepts or will be able to find a much better introduction. Zombie and vampire aficionados may well be enriched by some of the new perspectives, but I don’t think it’s worth the price of the whole book. Maybe this is just one of those books that libraries were made for.

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Building Green: A complete how-to guide to alternative building methods by Clarke Snell & Tim Callahan

Posted on August 25, 2012 by MrPopularSentiment

Read: 15 August, 2012

I’ve read a few books about sustainable/green building, and I must say that this one is the best I’ve seen so far.

It covers the usual range of green materials – such as cob, cordwood, and straw bale – of course, but where Building Green really shines is in its discussion about general building principles. There’s information about load distribution on the frame and foundation, on proper water drainage to prevent damage to the structure, and on passively regulating temperatures.

I also rather enjoyed that the sections on building materials gave an honest appraisal of the downsides to each, something that I’ve found many authors would rather gloss over.

While I’m not actively planning to begin a construction project, I was able to learn quite a bit about the principles of construction (and of physics, more generally). And oooh are cob houses ever gorgeous!

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The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home by Susan Wise Bauer and Jessie Wise

Posted on August 20, 2012 by MrPopularSentiment

Read: 19 August, 2012

I’ve found this to be a fantastic resource, whether you’re homeschooling or not. The book is divided by age, and offers a sample schedule and resources for each of the core subjects for that grade level (math, science, history, etc.). Even Preschool and Kindergarten are covered, so I’m already making use of it.

The philosophy of the approach is that education should take place in three parts: Grammar (focus on memorization and absorbing as much information about the world as possible), Logic (learning how to reason, building on the accumulated facts of the first stage), and Rhetoric (learning how to express the ideas developed in the second stage).

It’s an interesting idea that focuses on many elements of classical education that have been (or are being) dumped from public school curricula, such as the study of Latin, the emphasis on proper handwriting, etc.

One aspect that I really like about the approach is that while each subject is taught separately, they are also integrated so that each subject tackles the same general topic from its own unique vantage.

For the homeschooling family, the book provides sample schedules and inspiration for developing curricula. For the family sending children to be educated in a classroom setting, the resource lists can still provide a lot of ideas for additional learning in the evenings or on weekends.

There were some iffy moments, such as the discussion about teaching religion in the Grammar section that started getting dangerously close to proselytizing (“Do fathers love their babies because of the urge to see their own genetic material preserved or because fathers reflect the character of the father God?”). It was completely gratuitous. But at least the authors do seem to acknowledge that some of their readers may be secular/atheists/other-theist and they do give warnings when a resource they are listing is God-heavy.

My last complaint is with the lists of famous people through history to learn about. These lists are titled as “Great men and women to cover,” but many of them have very few – if any – women. And it’s not like no women were doing important things during those time periods, so examples could have been found if the authors had bothered to look.

All in all, I’ve really enjoyed the book and, as I said, I’ve already started to make use of it. It’s written very much as a list of prompts and resources, so there’s plenty of wiggle room to substitute your own materials as you please and to design your own curricula. I definitely recommend that all parents at least pick it up from the library and read through the section for your children’s grade levels.

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Game of Thrones and Philosophy edited by Henry Jacoby

Posted on August 15, 2012 by MrPopularSentiment

Read: 14 August, 2012

I’ve been aware of the pop culture philosophy books for a few years now, but I’ve never actually taken the time to read one. But when they mentioned Game of Thrones and Philosophy on a recent episode of Sword & Laser, I reserved a copy from the library.

If you majored in Philosophy in college or enjoy reading Foucault in your free time, this isn’t the book for you. But as someone who has only had snippets of exposure to philosophical thought without much context or explanation, I did find this book useful. A few basics of thought are illustrated using examples from the Song of Ice and Fire series.

There were quite a few problems with the book, though. For one thing, it seems to be just a grab bag of articles with little organization. I feel that it would have been more useful to organize the articles into a sort of “history of philosophy,” or something along those lines. That would have made this a far more useful book than the current “hey, something this guy wrote kinda sounds like something this other guy wrote” higgledy-piggeldy mixture we currently have.

I felt that the connection to Game of Thrones was tenuous. Some of the articles did try to offer some insight from philosophical thought into the series (and visa versa), but for the most part, the chapters were simply explaining philosophy in layman’s terms while shoe-horning names and phrases from the series whenever grammatically possible – particularly in the early chapters.

I also got the feeling that some of the authors may have never read the Song of Ice and Fire series, or at least not in a long time, given that some of the errors were on rather egregious. For example, on page 13, the author writes that a character could “flee into exile with the surviving Targaryens, like Ser Jorah Mormont…” Except that Mormont’s exile had absolutely nothing to do with the Targaryens. Or on page 224, the author writes of Daenerys: “Fleeing King’s Landing, her mother, Rhaella, gives birth to Dany and Viserys aboard a ship and then dies.” Well, for one thing, neither Daenerys nor Viserys was ever born on a ship. Also, Viserys is many years older than Daenerys. But I suppose that at least the names and familial relationships were correct…

Anyways, as I said, I think that a fan of Game of Thrones who wants a quick introduction to a few snippets of philosophical thought set in a familiar context may get something from this book. Otherwise, give it a pass.

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The Birth Partner by Penny Simkin

Posted on June 20, 2012 by MrPopularSentiment

Someone on a mommy board I like to troll recently asked if it was worthwhile getting a doula for her upcoming labour. This reminded me of the The Birth Partner, and how useful my family found it when my son was born.

My gentleman friend and I are fairly private, and it can take us a long time (far longer than the tight time-frame of a pregnancy affords) to learn to trust new people. We resigned ourselves to the idea that some kind of medical professional should attend us, but we didn’t want to add more people on top of that. When we discussed this with our midwife, she recommended that D read The Birth Partner.

We looked at a few other labour resources during our pregnancy, but we found that most were either way to clinical or way to kooky (orgasmic births, anyone?). But we found that The Birth Partner actually covered the full spectrum – from “natural” pain management to medical intervention. It also discusses the stages of labour and ways to cope with each, and provided helpful lists of things to prepare ahead of time.

I read through it once, but D studied it quite closely. This was invaluable when the time came because he was prepared to handle me in all my states and was able to guide me through. He found it so useful in helping him prepare for his role as my “partner” that he has been recommending to all dads-to-be that they pick up a copy.

It’s a great book for giving dads-to-be a way to prepare and feel like they have something to contribute during what is generally a very stressful and overwhelming time.

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P.S. Library

A chronicle of that which passes before my eyes…

Category Archives: Non-Fiction