What one loves in childhood stays in the heart forever. Mary Jo Putney
After the storm.
Books Can Save a Life is a year old this month.
I’ve grown so fond of it here and of you who visit and comment. Meeting people from all over and re-connecting with friends and distant family – I never expected that.
Not to mention the beautifully conceived and produced blogs about books, writing, food, nature, gardening, travel, creativity, and other topics I’ve discovered, and the artistic geniuses behind them.
Books Can Save a Life is a lot like my backyard retreat, where I sit by our homemade pond after I walk or run. I always look forward to visiting Books to set down my thoughts and see who has stopped by.
To celebrate a year of Books, I’m having a book giveaway. By the end of February, leave a comment about a book you’re reading. a book you want to read, a book that’s becoming a movie, a book memory, or anything at all to do with reading, and I’ll put your name in a hat. (Actually, I use a rice bowl.) If I draw your name I’ll send you the book of your choice. If you can’t decide on a book, I’ll surprise you.
You might have noticed I’ve redecorated, too. I’ve chosen a new design theme in honor of the coming year and to signify a more expansive focus on topics beyond books. There’s so much I want to write about.
But you’ll still find plenty of books here.
Your comments and guest posts are what I absolutely love about this blog. Many of you spoke of books from your childhood that years later still evoke memories of family and loved ones, places you’ve been, and particular times in your lives. I think sometimes the very story or book we need comes along, or somehow we’re led to find it.
Here are a a few comments from readers of Books this past year. Please keep them coming.
I can’t imagine my room without my personal bookcase, or a world without books. (Giuseppe)
It’s hard to put yourself in their places [The Hunger Games], living their lives and going through what they do daily in their “world,” but that’s what’s so great about books, they take you to different places and times through the amazing imagination of the authors. (Diana)
I find many so called adult novels pretentious. I want a story. I return, often, to what is classified as young adult literature, mostly because these are stories of life. Stories – in the true sense of the word. And, I can’t help but say that, years ago, I was saying to people, “Have you read the Harry Potter book?” And everyone said no. Then came that glorious day on the L in Chicago, traveling home from work, and I saw not one, not two, but six adults reading the book. I wanted to laugh out loud at the thought of those six people entering into another world…. (Donna)
Agatha Christie wrote a story without heroes; to me, that was heroic honesty. Conversely, the inevitability of justice satisfied me. For all my contempt for two-faced authority, I still relished the idea of wrongdoers punished by divine oversight. My sense of my own weakness as a child needed that reassurance. (Doug)
Cooking from Moosewood, even with its imperfections, was utopian. Funny how small, utopian practices can make you feel, despite the deepest contradictions, that summer is everlasting and life is good. (Judith)
….even the smallest person can step away from comfort and into challenge, that change is possible on scales small and large, that our efforts and intentions matter. The story reinforced for me that there are things in this world worth protecting–fellowship and love, food and conversation, adventure and courage, songs and stories. These are the things that sustain us when life is difficult, when we are hurt or afraid and have to be so much braver than we feel. (Adrienne)
I like what Deborah has to say about one of her favorite cookbooks, published during World War II, because that was my parents’ era. Whenever I hear about Victory Gardens and rationing, I remember my mother telling me about how you couldn’t buy silk stockings back then, and how she and her siblings had to take turns tending the kitchen garden, and how there were no boys to go out with because they were all fighting overseas.
I think about my father in the Army in Europe, 1943. He missed his mother’s Italian cooking, and one cold November day while exploring Luxembourg he happened upon a tavern where there was an Italian wedding celebration. The family welcomed him with open arms and invited him to dinner the following day. It was my father’s last good meal before he was wounded at Cherbourg a few days later. He ate Army hospital rations for over a year while he recuperated.
Discovering book gems from the past is a pleasure quite different from cracking open a brand new book. I’m looking forward to tracking down a copy of Deborah’s family treasure.
Here’s what she had to say:
One of my favorite cookbooks was passed down to me from my mother: The Lily Wallace New American Cook Book, published in 1941. What I love about it is how it shows a whole different era of cooking “basics”. It has recipes for cooking frogs legs (3 recipes), grouse (3), rabbit (4), squirrel (2), turtle (2), snail (alas, 1) as well as other kinds of game (quail, partridge, venison, woodchuck, and pheasant.) It also has sections on preserving food, including canning, brining, and pickling.
My favorites are sections on: Ration Cooking, Saving Food for Victory, Saving Fuel, and Sugar Ration Cooking. The “Saving Food and Expense for Victory” chapter starts out:
“America may march to victory on its stomach. A nation’s morale and health depend greatly upon food. If the homemaker can do nothing else, she can wage an earnest battle for health and strength for her family in the kitchen, and thus contribute her share to ultimate victory on the military front.”
Another chapter I love is on menu planning, which includes sections on a Plan for a Liberal Diet ($3000 or over income) down to A Plan for a Restricted Diet for Emergency Use ($1000 or less annual income – this one restricts meats mostly–Thursday’s dinner consists of whole-wheat chowder with carrots and potatoes, and bread; Saturday’s dinner consists of Hominy soup, stewed prunes, bread and butter. Yum.)
Deborah has sailed around the world, and she blogs about her journey, and nature, and writing at her beautiful site, Living at the Edge of the Wild. She writes fiction, essays, articles, poems and book reviews. You can read her work at http://www.djbrasket.com/.
Please tell us about your favorite family cookbook in the comments, or share a family cookbook story with us – send me an email at valoriegracehallinan@gmail.com.
Next up: I’ll be celebrating the first-year anniversary of Books Can Save a Life with an “open house” and a book giveaway.
For three days I’ve been thinking about the families of the children who died in Newtown, Connecticut.
I’ve been thinking about what it’s like to be a parent.
Our first child was born prematurely on a bright, crisp autumn day. One minute I was lying in bed planning how I’d spend my Sunday, the next my husband and I were racing to the hospital. Our wee one seemed determined to make his appearance on planet earth right then and there on Interstate 90.
A few hours later – after a very short labor – we had a son.
I looked at him sleeping on his tummy in his isolette in the NICU. A scrunched-up bundle in a baby blanket with his little bottom in the air and a head of black Irish/Sicilian hair. Suddenly I knew I would sacrifice anything, even my life, for this new little person. It was like when you look at someone you’ve seen before and realize you’re in love – except it was much, much more than that. For a moment my ego dissolved. I was no longer the center of my own little universe.
As displayed in Queen Anne Books, Seattle
A few years later, when I read Anne Lamott’s words in Operating Instructions, I thought: she has it exactly right. Last week, I came across the same passage again on one of my favorite blogs, and I planned to share the post and add my thoughts. Then Friday happened and Lamott’s words took on a greater urgency for me as I shopped at the market for Christmas cookies and decorations.
Before I got pregnant with Sam, I felt there wasn’t anything that could happen that would utterly destroy me. . . . Now there is something that could happen that I could not survive: I could lose Sam. I look down into his staggeringly lovely little face, and I can hardly breathe sometimes. He is all I have ever wanted, and my heart is so huge with love that I feel like it is about to go off. At the same time, I feel that he has completely ruined my life, because I didn’t used to care all that much.
I think that moments of great joy and great tragedy shock us out of the ordinary and awaken within us a singular intensity of compassion, good will, and love. The boundaries between us and them, between the self and the other, fall away, if only temporarily.
There will be plenty of time later to ask why and bicker and debate the meaning of Newtown and what can be done to stop it from happening again.
The most important thing now is to ride the great wave of love and compassion this tragedy has released into the world – for as long as it lasts – and take care of our children, 27 heartbroken families, and each other.
Quote: Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year, Anne Lamott. Fawcett Columbine, New York: 1993.
I asked my brother, John, to contribute to my series on favorite family cookbooks. I’ve tasted some of the recipes from the cookbook below, prepared by John. Fabulous, unpretentious Sicilian cooking, the kind we grew up with.
I often consult The Sicilian Gentleman’s Cookbook [by Don Baratta] when I want to do some Sicilian cooking. I think cooking becomes very personal, because we all have different tastes. I remember my dad describing different ways to make tomato sauce. His mom, my grandmother, liked to make simple sauce. You cook down the tomatoes, add spices and, of course, garlic and onion, and you’re done….simple. But my grandfather had to have his sauce strained. Absolutely forbidden to have seeds and skin involved.
To me, TheSicilian Gentleman’s Cookbook is simple cooking. Just the way I imagine peasants cooked in Sicily, because they didn’t have much. They made do with what was available. I usually pull down the book for a quick idea and I go with what we have. Simple. I suggest the artichoke hearts with pasta, which is a family favorite when we get together with friends for Valentine’s Day. I also like the fish stew/soup recipe. It’s really a remarkable meal.
When we were visiting at Thanksgiving, I was browsing through the cookbook and found the Sicilian gentleman’s secret to losing weight: have a bowl of homemade soup every night for dinner. Sounds like a great idea for the long, cold winter nights to come. A hot bowl of homemade soup with a slice of fresh bread and a glass of Malbec or Beaujolais Nouveau, then a good book in front of the fire.
Elizabeth David’s literature of cookery
John’s story got me thinking about one of my favorite Italian cookbooks – Elizabeth David’s Italian Food. The recipes are somewhat antiquated and difficult to re-create, because you can’t always find the proper, authentic ingredients, but they’re mouthwatering all the same. David, who was British, raises food writing to a high art. This is a book you could read and enjoy by a winter fire every evening, without ever making a recipe.
It was difficult to choose an excerpt, the writing is so good, but here are two of my favorites:
It is worth noting that in the dining-cars of trains, where the food is neither notably good nor to everyone’s taste, a dish of uova al burro may always be ordered instead of the set meal and will be brought rapidly and with perfect amiability by the dining-car waiter. So browbeating are the attendants in certain French and English railway dining cars over this question of ordering eggs or sandwiches instead of the dull, expensive, six-course meal provided that I have thought the matter worth mentioning.
Here is David’s description of a Venetian fish market:
The colours of the peaches, cherries, and apricots, packed in boxes lined with sugar-bag blue paper matching the blue canvas trousers worn by the men unloading the gondolas, are reflected in the rose-red mullet and the orange vongole and cannestrelle which have been prised out of their shells and heaped into baskets….In Venice even ordinary sole and ugly great skate are striped with delicate lilac lights, the sardines shine like newly-minted silver coins, pink Venetian scampi are fat and fresh, infinitely enticing in the early dawn.
I’d like to continue this family cookbook series, so send me the titles of your favorite family cookbooks and I’ll list them here. If you have a story or anecdote about a particular cookbook, please send it along.
Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior goes to….
Darlene Niman, who owns and operates Out With a Friend, a senior companion service in New York City. She says one of the best books she’s read recently is That Summer in Sicily by Marlena De Blasi.
Quotes from:
Italian Food, Elizabeth David, Penguin Books, New York: 1987.
The Sicilian Gentleman’s Cookbook, 3rd Revised Edition, Don Baratta, Firefly Books, Buffalo: 2002.
Cooking from Moosewood…was utopian. – J. L. Newton
J. L. Newton’s well-used copy of the Moosewood Cookbook by Mollie Katzen
Just hours after I posted a call for stories and anecdotes about treasured family cookbooks, author J. L. Newton sent me a delightful excerpt from her forthcoming memoir, Tasting Home: Coming of Age in the Kitchen.
For me, nothing captures the essence of upstate New York’s lush, Finger Lakes farmland and local, fresh produce like the Moosewood cookbooks and the Moosewood Restaurant. I raised my kids on many a Moosewood recipe. Whenever we camped in Taughannock Falls State Park, we’d look forward to a meal at the restaurant in Ithaca. Our boys always ordered the macaroni and cheese.
A few years back, during a month-long artist-in-residence stay at the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, I enjoyed the home cooking of Judy Barringer, a Moosewood co-founder, who at the time was the Saltonstall chef and cook. Never in my life have I tasted such wonderful vegetarian comfort food. I didn’t know a hamburger made from polenta could taste so good.
So you can see why I was delighted when Judy Newton offered to share Moosewood memories from her “mini-commune” days. Here’s what she had to say:
In the summer of 1985, I was living with three men—-my first husband, Dick, who now had a boyfriend named Ed; my second husband, Max, whom I’d married with many misgivings the year before; and Nigel, a longtime friend of Max who was doing research in Philadelphia.
A photo shows me sitting with Dick and Max at the table on our deck. Pregnant and wearing striped work overalls, I have long, curly hair. I’m resting my head on my hand and looking pleased, as if paradise had come again.
Dick’s honey-colored mustache droops seductively. Max has a Jewish Afro and a wide, full beard. Pink flowers float above a green vase in the center of the table, and our plates are full of chicken, rice, and broccoli. It is a plain meal, with few ingredients, which means Max cooked it.
Dick took his recipes from gourment magazines, but Nigel and I had discovered Moosewood Cookbook. On the (separate) nights we cooked that summer, dinner consisted of our garden on a plate.
Excerpt from Tasting Home: Coming of Age in the Kitchen:
I never looked to Moosewood for two-star recipes. Indeed, many of its dishes squeaked by, in our rating system, with only a star above a check, meaning they were fine for everyday meals but not for guests. “Swiss Cheese and Mushroom Quiche” fell into this category, though it involved a cup and a half of tangy gruyere cheese. My note in the margin said Julia Child’s version was better. Was it the Moosewood crust, partly whole wheat and made with buttermilk instead of water? Was it that Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking used heavy cream and nutmeg rather than milk and mustard? Was it that the mushrooms in Moosewood were innocent of shallots and Madeira?
Several Moosewood dishes earned only a check above a star, which translated as “not worth the effort.” We assigned “Vegetarian Chili” (with kidney beans, bulgur, celery, carrots, peppers, and tomatoes) to that category. “Don’t bother,” I wrote in the margin. Was it the tomato juice? Did I under spice?
Going wrong with Moosewood recipes was a drag because they usually called for a ton of ingredients. It was great when the recipes worked because they allowed you to unload a basket of summer produce (after a good deal of chopping) into a single pot.“Vegetable Stroganoff” called for onions, mushrooms, and six cups of broccoli, carrots, cauliflower, zucchini, peppers, and cherry tomatoes.
“Vegetable Stew” featured potatoes, carrots, celery, eggplant, zucchini, broccoli, mushrooms and tomatoes. Both were tasty dishes in the check/star category.
But “Ode to Chang Kung” with its broccoli, mushrooms, bean sprouts, water chestnuts, bamboo, tofu and sesame seeds (plus cashews, scallions, and chopped green peppers on top) came out weird and bland. Was it the quarter cup of something called “taman?”
“Never again!” Nigel wrote at the top of the recipe.
At other times Moosewood recipes, with their cornucopia of ingredients, demanded additions that seemed designed to remind us of their hippie roots. Why else would “Spinach-Rice Casserole” (which featured brown rice, spinach, onion, garlic, eggs, milk and a cup-and-a-half of cheddar cheese) call for tamari and a quarter cup of sunflower seeds?
Why did “Vegetable Stew,” an otherwise straightforward dish, demand molasses? And why did “Broccoli Noodle Casserole” with its decadent three cups of ricotta, one cup of cheddar, and one cup sour cream even bother with wheat germ sprinkled over the top?
But it didn’t matter. I cooked from Moosewood that summer because I liked the idea of it. The book was produced by a collective, and we were a collective too. The restaurant had no “boss,” and despite Max’s alpha personality, our house had no boss either. We rotated shopping, cooking, and washing dishes, which made me feel heady, and slightly guilty, about having such domestic and culinary leisure.
I was also drawn to the Moosewood philosophy of “convenience and economy” which we certainly got to practice since our ingredients came from our garden outside the kitchen door.
Moosewood celebrated “health, lightness, purity,” a trinity I wanted to pursue, and I liked the homemade quality of the book itself – the hand lettering, the sparkly drawings.
Our favorite recipe, “Spinach–Rice Casserole,” was illustrated with a hairy unicorn encountering a large, strange bird. Hand drawn unicorns called attention to the creativity, love, and labor that, often invisibly, go into making the sweetness of the everyday.
Cooking from Moosewood, even with its imperfections, was utopian. Funny how small, utopian practices can make you feel, despite the deepest contradictions, that summer is everlasting and life is good.
Judith Newton’s memoir, Tasting Home: Coming of Age in the Kitchen, will be published by She Writes Press in February, 2013. Visit her blog at tasting-home.com.
Judith is Professor Emerita in Women and Gender Studies at U.C. Davis. She is the author and co-editor of five works of nonfiction on nineteenth-century British women writers, feminist criticism, women’s history, and men’s movements. Four of these works will be reprinted as E-Books by Routledge and the University of Michigan Press in the fall of 2012.
More Moosewood
The November/December 2012 issue of Spirituality & Health includes a feature story, “40 Years of Mooosewood.” (Print version only.) The restaurant is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year.
Do you have a tried and true Moosewood recipe? Tell us in the comments below.
Do You Have a Treasured Family Cookbook?
Between now and the New Year, my readers and I will be sharing our favorite family cookbooks. Please tell us in the comments below about special cookbooks meaningful to you and your family. Or, send your stories and anecdotes to valoriegracehallinan@gmail.com.
In one of my recent posts, Children’s lit of my ancestry, my Italian cousin wrote about a book traditionally read by Italian families, and I wondered if my father read it when he was growing up.
A friend of mine commented that she’d inherited many of her father’s children’s books, and her grandmother had passed on to her a family Czech cookbook.
That gave me the idea of sharing our best-loved family cookbooks and food traditions as we approach the holiday season. I’ve a few books I’d like to share, and it would be fun to hear from you, too.
Is there a much-loved, well-worn cookbook your mother, father, grandparents or even great-grandparents used? What is special about it or meaningful to you? It could be out of print or a familiar classic. I’d like to share an eclectic mix of titles and traditions.
Maybe you have a story to tell in connection with a particular recipe, meal, holiday, or family memory.
Over the next two months, as we prepare to cook some of our favorite holiday meals, I’d love to hear about cookbooks unique and special to your family. Guest posts about a valued family cookbook or food tradition, or slice-of-life memoir snippets are especially welcome. Please send cookbook titles, comments, anecdotes, and inquiries about doing a guest post to my email at valoriegracehallinan[at]gmail[dot]com.
“I want to know what it feels like to have a close encounter with my DNA, this invisible, digital self that lies curled up like a fetus in every single cell of my body.” –Lone Frank
When asked by the researcher if she has first-degree relatives with mental health problems, Lone Frank says yes.
Asked which ones, Lone says: all of them.
Depression, multiple suicides, bipolar disorder, alcoholism. With mordant humor, Lone Frank describes her family history. She’s forthcoming about her own three episodes of depression, then lies to the researcher about how many drinks she has each week. Fourteen glasses of red wine, for the health benefits. (But it’s really closer to twenty drinks or more. At least, that’s what she tells the reader.)
Lone, a Danish science journalist with a PH.D. in neurobiology, volunteered to take part in a major research project to study the connection between personality, an inclination toward depression, and specific genes.
In My Beautiful Genome: Exploring My Genetic Future One Quirk at a Time,she takes us along as she undergoes genetic testing, completes questionnaires and personality tests, and talks with multiple experts who interpret the results. Along the way she grapples with many questions.
Does she, indeed, have genes that predispose her to depression?
How does the environment factor in, as well as her upbringing and her own free will to pull herself out of depression and make cognitive and lifestyle changes to prevent it?
Does she unwittingly contribute to her own dark moods and temperament by building her own, unique environment – under the influence of her genes – that is conducive to depression?
On the other hand, does she possess certain genes or genetic variations that give rise to traits that help her excel in certain areas?
Chromosome 2 (click twice for larger image) Genome Management Information System, Oak Ridge National Laboratory Human Chromosomes from “Human Genome Landmarks: Selected Genes, Traits, and Disorders” Poster, 2002. (Gene Gateway)
Do some genetic variations mitigate the effects of others?
Are there “good” and “bad,” “healthy” and “unhealthy” genetic variations, or simply variations that lead to different outcomes depending on one’s circumstances?
I won’t give away what Lone discovers, but she finds out a lot and, in the end, concludes the information is enormously helpful.
Let me stress that the average lay person could not mine their own genome for this information the way Lone did. Because she’s a journalist with a doctorate in neurobiology, she had access to sophisticated genetic tests and, more importantly, to experts who could interpret the results and how they might affect her personality and behavior.
Nonetheless, mining Lone’s genome with her is a glimpse into what may be possible for all of us, eventually, if we want it.
How much would you want to know about your genes and how they might shape your personality and behavior? Please share your thoughts in the comments.
Coming up, what Lone’s DNA reveals about her future health.
Quote from My Beautiful Genome: Exploring My Genetic Future One Gene at a Time, by Lone Frank, Oneworld Publications, Oxford, 2011.
In the first pages of Lone Frank’sMy Beautiful Genome, I discovered that what has always been a mystery is indeed still a mystery.
In a previous post, I talked about my mother’s schizophrenia, and how that had been a factor in whether or not my husband and I would have children.
Chromosome 1 (click for larger image) Genome Management Information System, Oak Ridge National Laboratory Human Chromosomes from “Human Genome Landmarks: Selected Genes, Traits, and Disorders” Poster, 2002. (Gene Gateway)
Lone tracked down the curmudgeonly and controversial James Watson (who, with Francis Crick, discovered the chemical structure of DNA in 1953) and, among other things, they discussed the heritability of schizophrenia. Watson’s son has schizophrenia.
After several major studies involving some 50,000 patients, next to nothing is known about the heritability of schizophrenia.
No particular genes were found to be associated with schizophrenia (except in a very small percentage of cases), and the few genetic links found were not the same genes in all patients.
This is known as missing heritability. Lone Frank calls it the “dark matter” of the genome.
Watson and others theorize that the cause of schizophrenia and other diseases and conditions for which there is no obvious genetic inheritance may be due to rare variants – genetic changes not inherited from the parents, but which occur spontaneously in the afflicted person.
With a kind of despair, Watson said it may be ten years before the genetics behind serious psychiatric illness is better understood. This knowledge won’t help his son, of course. But, as Watson says, many people are suffering.
I would like to see the suffering of schizophrenia end, too.
Of course, Watson is a scientist, and he wants to know. So do I. Ten years doesn’t sound long to me, considering I’ve been living with this mystery for nearly fifty years.
This may be an illusion, but if I could better understand the dark matter of my mother’s life, perhaps it would be a comfort. We all want to make sense of our suffering.
I think My Beautiful Genome may be one of the most important books I’ll ever read in my adult life. For me, it’s personal, but it’s personal for all of us. Genetics is giving us (and our children) powerful information humans have never had before.
Do you want to know what the new genetics could mean for your future health or the health of your children and grandchildren? What can genetics tell us about mental illness? How will knowing our own genome influence our romantic relationships and how we choose the person with whom we’ll have children?
Lone Frank wanted to know the answers to these and other questions. In future posts, I’ll tell you a little bit about what she found out.
…we are each of us temporary depositories of information that has an almost eternal life, and which is passed on and on and on… Lone Frank, My Beautiful Genome
Staring at the luminous model of the strand of DNA on my computer screen, a sculpture of great beauty, perfect function, and masterful design, I wondered. Who is the designer? And is this a question that even makes sense?
I say perfect function but, when it isn’t perfect, there can be disease, pain, suffering. Or simply quirkiness that doesn’t amount to much, just makes you a little different – a bit of rheumatism in your right big toe, for example, so you can’t wear high heels.
My medical librarian colleagues and I were learning how to search the data generated from the Human Genome Project and other ongoing genetics-based research. Our instructor, a bioinformatics librarian with a PH.D. in molecular biology and years of research under her belt, showed us how to look up the gene associated with cystic fibrosis in humans. We found a map of the gene’s location on a specific chromosome and links to places where you can order a clone of the DNA for research.
And over the course of the two-day class, our instructor, who is also a storyteller, told us the tale of research into the human genome, the explosion of data that’s resulted in a very short time, and how far we’ve yet to go.
A few months later, I discovered Lone Frank’sMy Beautiful Genome: Exposing Our Genetic Future, One Quirk at a Timeand added it to my reading list. Over the next weeks, I’ll be reading and discussing it on Books Can Save a Life as I decide whether or not to explore my own beautiful, quirky genome. I’m reasonably certain I will explore my genome unless I’m persuaded otherwise. It’s not a matter of if, but when. There is so much turmoil and confusion surrounding consumer-based genetic testing, I may wait until things settle down a bit.
The lure of this kind of knowledge – the secret of my own, one-of-a-kind, unlike-no-other-in-the-history-of-the-world genetic makeup – is something I don’t think I can resist for long, though.
As with everyone else, it’s personal.
My genetic make-up was of special concern years ago when my husband and I were deciding whether to have children. We’d gone to a genetic counselor to find out the chances of our children inheriting my mother’s schizophrenia. Fortunately, they were quite low. The counselor could tell us this by simply taking a family history and looking at the heritability data of the grandchildren of people with schizophrenia.
More recently, I was curious to know what the Human Genome Project and other research has revealed about the heritability of schizophrenia, and what a look at my signature genome might tell me. I’ll be exploring that, among other things, as I make my way through My Beautiful Genome.
Possessing this kind of personal genetic knowledge will become commonplace, I believe, and learning how to live with it ethically, in a way that will benefit humanity, will be one of the great adventures of our time.
Do you think we’re overreaching, like the mythic Prometheus? Wanting to know more than is good for us and we can responsibly handle? Please comment if you have thoughts about this.
Mindfulness Meditation
In My Beautiful Genome, Lone Frank talks about how everything we perceive is filtered through our brains, which are influenced by our genes, and how our behavior may be genetically determined. I just happen to be starting a mindfulness meditation class that will take place over the next several weeks. It will be my second time through this type of meditation instruction, a refresher that will bolster the meditation practice I began five years ago. So, while I read My Beautiful Genome, I’ll also be highlighting some of my favorite books about meditation. If you’ve tried meditation yourself or have a practice, please join in the discussion.
Nena (Ho Mi Hyung) and her Korean mother, Ho Soon Ja, 1956
After I asked readers to share stories about books that have made a difference in their lives, I was thrilled to hear from my best friend from childhood.
Nena Adams Benhoff and I go way back. We shared Nancy Drew books. We played piano duets and went to Brownie meetings together. We were in Mrs. Ryan’s kindergarten class of 1960 at Broadway Elementary School. Nena’s first job was in my family’s flower shop, where my father taught her floral design.
Sometimes I was a little jealous of Nena, because she was something of a celebrity in our town.
But even best friends don’t tell each other everything, and I didn’t know the whole story.
So when she sent this guest post, I was amazed. I’m still getting to know my best friend after all these years.
Here is Nena’s story.
I was born in South Korea and adopted by an American family when I was 15 months old. In my new hometown, it was a newsworthy occasion because foreign country adoptions were unheard of in the 1950s. Articles were printed in the Cleveland Press, The Plain Dealer, and the local papers. My life story was known to just about everyone in our town.
When I started school, my teachers always spoke about how wonderful it was that I, a poor little Korean orphan, was given a chance to grow up in the United States. I was expected to bring in my Korean clothes to share with the class and talk about Korea. Now, I had no memories of Korea, I wasn’t even walking when I arrived, so I really didn’t have anything to share. Only half Korean, I thought I looked more Italian than Asian. Everyone thought I should think and act Korean, when I looked and thought, “American.”
I was confused about myself and my place in the world.
When I was about thirteen, a librarian recommended a book to read.
That book was The New Year by Pearl S. Buck, the story of a mixed race boy, half Korean and half Caucasian, who was brought to the United States by his birth father’s wife at the age of ten. While his story was not at all like mine, he had doubts, like me, about who he was. In Korea he was considered American, while in the United States he was considered Korean. Pearl Buck explained about mixed race children being like “bridge organisms,” not wholly of one world or another, but joining the best attributes of both.
After reading The New Year, I must admit I was thinking quite highly of myself, as being better than anyone!
But after a short time, I came back to reality, and started the journey of just becoming myself.
Nena Adams Benhoff has been a floral designer for over forty years. She lives in Oklahoma City.
The New Year is out of print but available from used booksellers and libraries.
About Pearl S. Buck
Pearl S. Buck won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1938 and the Pulitzer Prize, among other high honors and awards. She published dozens of novels, as well as short stories, biographies, and other nonfiction.
Visit Book Tips – Pearl S. Buck on the official site of the Nobel Prize to see comments by readers of Pearl Buck’s books, and to comment on your favorite books by Nobel Prize winners.
Share your book stories
If you’d like to share a story about a book that is special to you, send an email to valoriegracehallinan[at]gmail[dot]com with the subject line: My Book Story. Please include a post of about 500 words or less in the body of the email or an idea/book you’re interested in writing about.
I often consult 
Books Can Save A Life 
