CelestialFamily

Red Explosion

Sarah Vowell loves history and giving her opinion. She inserts her witty comments through out this book about the Puritans coming to America and our vanilla, or white washed version of history. Her comment on page 21, "...Americans have learned history from exaggerated popular art for as long as anyone can remember." Vowell and I are about the same age, so her pop culture references make a lot of sense to me. Her very first paragraph sucked me in to the book, "The only thing more dangerous than an idea is a belief. And by dangerous I don't mean thought-provoking. I mean: might get people killed." The conflict among the Puritans was really fascinating. The trials that removed Roger Williams from the flock to start over in Rhode Island was really fascinating, especially his continued correspondence with John Winthrop.
The story of Anne Hutchinson and the Native American population is fascinating, too. Many eloquent and inspiring writings came from flawed individual, which we all happen to be. By trying to gloss over the dilemmas and trials these people went through it keeps those willing to learn from history intellectually hog-tied. I expect people to have flaws and to live in that shade of grey. I also expect them to try their best to overcome those flaws and to treat others as they wish to be treated themselves.
I, thoroughly, enjoyed reading this book and I need to grab a copy for my shelf soon. If you like history infused with some frequent barbs and jabs of sarcastic wit, you might like this book, too.


The story of Molly a descendant of the Mohawk tribe who has been told the folktales of her tribe. One of these tales is about the Skeleton Man who eats an entire family save one girl. Molly becomes entangled in a modern version of this tale when her parents mysteriously disappear and a man who claims to be her uncle comes to take her in. Molly is a dreamer who has a spirit guide in the form of a rabbit that helps her. This story maintains a sinister and creepy tone throughout, so don't expect anything lighthearted. The author has a moment when Molly goes to see the school counselor to make a somewhat subtle statement against the use of drugs like Ritalin.

Overall, the book is an interesting creepy tale of Mohawk folk legends mixed with the modern day.



This book is a series of essays about ideas and places that interest Sarah Vowell. She infuses her stories with comparisons between her staunch Democratic beliefs and her parents' staunch Republican beliefs, while remember through the bickering that they have shared memories and love one another. She also speaks of her relationship with her fraternal twin sister, Amy, and some of its dichotomies. In the essay titled "Wonder Twins" she brings up the cartoon characters that always drove me nuts as a kid...well, they still do. "Form of a gorilla"..."Form of a ice"...there powers just plain stunk. ARGH!
She also has a reverence for the National Parks (I say that realizing she is an atheist and the definition has more than a religious meaning). Her angst over politics is presented very strongly throughout. Her essay Cowboys vs. Mounties that talks about the polite Canadians is a truly amusing insight. In her explaining why she loves to visit National Parks and historical sites of some of the most heinous parts of our American history she explains some of why I love to do history vacations, "So if I have gleaned anything useful from reading and daytripping through the tribulations of the long dead, it's to count my blessings, to try and quit bellyaching, buck up."
I thought this book was a good read from someone who loves history, as do I, and she knows a ton more than I do about it. She has come to some different conclusions on some things, or similar conclusions that she expresses more harshly than I would state them, but she has done the research to back most of them.


The book was a sad glimpse into the world of Fundamental Mormons. Brent Jeffs gives his account of how life with 3 moms and several siblings was mostly chaos. His father, a Vietnam vet, suffered from PTSD, which was exacerbated by feuding sister wives and the sheer quantity of people who clambored for his attention. Brent speaks of his memories of abuse by Warren Jeffs, who assisted by his brothers, raped Brent. Brent's family is forced out of the community due to harboring gentiles, which happen to be Brent's older brothers who had left the church. The view of how families were created and torn apart was disheartining. The machinations of the church hiearchy for control and their thumping the word "Obedience" into everything gave them a malleable and frightened group that was ineffectual at protecting themselves, or their children from abuse. Brent later is part of a lawsuit against Warren Jeffs and as other "Lost Boys" are interviewed the extent to which Warren Jeffs violated the community begins to paint an ominous picture of life among the FLDS.
The odd thing to me on the literary aspect of the book was the word usage. The book was surprisingly sophisticated except for the expletives sprinkled throughout. The expletives made a sort of since coming from a young man with little education and having done an enormous amount of drugs in his life. It wasn't until the end that I saw that he thanked the female writer that assisted him. Then the mix of grammar styles made since. The more feminine-sophisticated word choices made sense.
The book is worth reading to explain to people that blind obedience is a recipe for disaster and that the math does not work for polgamy to be successful.

More to read and review soon! Later, gators!

I've owned Toyotas for over 300,000 miles and never had any major problems, but this is just funny.

So if you’re looking for a straightforward history that conforms neatly to the Thanksgiving story as depicted by your local elementary school kindergarten program then you might want to stay away from The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell . It’s a great book, but I’m just gonna warn you up front that it’ll upset your apple cart if you want to think of the Indians as the savages who didn’t deserve this country and you see Columbus and the pilgrims as the ones who brought civility to this land.

More than just a history Vowell frequently compares and contrasts the actions and beliefs of these early settlers to modern politics. She rarely misses an opportunity to tell how modern perceptions are wrong and even throws in quite a few digs at politicians who attempt to distort the pilgrim’s real goals and agendas. This was actually my favorite part of the book.

I found this book very eye opening. Too much of our early history has been romanticized and pretty much turned into a sacred American mythology. This book took away the nonsense and showed a much more believable account of history. Much like as in Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me it was refreshing to see our history displayed warts and all.

I listened to this book on CD. It’s narrated by the author. Sarah Vowell has a very funny voice. She played the voice of Violet Parr in The Incredibles. Many times while listening to this she made me giggle, not just because of the words, but by the funny way that she delivered them. There is also a small cast of male voices that are used to narrate quotes from male sources. Fans of The Daily Show will recognize several of them. They definitely added to the atmosphere of the CD.

I'm really getting tired of the word "epic". But only because I rarely hear it used correctly. My kids seem to think it's a synonym for “very” or “really” or just “neato”. Twenty years ago everything was “awesome”. And before that I guess it was ‘cool”. I guess I’m from the “cool” generation, which seems to have come after the “hip” generation.

Hollywood used to call movies that told the life of a historical figure an epic. Lord of the Rings is an epic.
But the kids were really excited that Victoria had bought Reese's Puffs cereal. I'm sorry but there's nothing epic about that.
In 1995 I went on a climbing trip to Yosemite. My partner had exaggerated his abilities and lied to me about having climbed the route we were planning on climbing before. We had to back off of a dangerous climb because he couldn't do a relatively simple technique. I ended up getting a massive sunburn after standing the whole day on the same little ledge 2000' up the rock. Then the next day we had to get rescued off another route because we made a mistake while trying to get back down off a climb. Somebody was at the base of the rock stealing our packs and we got in too much of a hurry. Then on the way home I blew the engine on my car in the middle of the Nevada desert and had to hitch-hike to the nearest city and then get a ride home to Salt Lake in a tow truck. Now that was epic.
As good as Reese’s Puffs cereal is, "epic" just isn’t the right choice of words.

Just a few pages of things the family has been doing lately:















Book reviews later. Smiles!

Vines 02212010
A little bit of a break from the models. Sunday was a beautiful day, so I went out to see if I could find anything interesting to shoot. I didn't expect to find much, but this flower had just started to bloom.

1. Why did you invent so many ways for things to fly? Birds, insects and bats all have very different means of flying. Wouldn't it have been more intelligent to figure out which was the most efficient method and make everything fly the same way?

2. Why do dolphin fins, bat wings, and my hands all have very similar skeletal structure? What is so intelligent about making basically the same design perform three drastically different jobs?

3. As a man what purpose do my nipples serve? Don't get me wrong. I've kind of grown used to them. I'm just curious what you had planned for me to do with them since male mammals don't lactate.

4. Why is human reproduction so ridiculously inefficient? In her life time an average human female will produce several hundred eggs and only a very small percentage will ever be fertilized. Don't get me started with human males. Millions of sperm die for every one that wins the race.

5. Would it have hurt for humans to have those cool closable nostrils like seals and otters? I've never been a very good swimmer but if I had nostrils like that I could do a lot better.

6. And speaking of seals, if they're gonna spend so much time in the water, wouldn't it have made more sense for them to have blow-holes like whales and dolphins?

7. Why did I have to have my wisdom teeth pulled? They never came in all the way and even if they had, it's not like I have to chew on sticks to get to the soft stuff in the middle.

8. Why did you design my eyeball with the rods and cones behind all the blood vessels? Wouldn't it be more intelligent to put the blood vessels behind the photo-receptive cells?

9. What's the design advantage of making me breath and eat using the same tube? Was this just your way of giving Heimlich something to invent?

10. Why did you design so many thousands of fossils that look as if life was evolving? As an engineer when I design something I sign my work. You seem to have signed your work “Evolution”.

February Strobist Meet II

February Strobist Meet I