Good Books Archives - Read. Think. Act.

Drama High – Lou Volpe – Michael Sokolove

(June 2018) “I’m not here to make you a great actor. That’s not my job. The reasons you should be taking this class are far more important. I want you to gain confidence, learn something about life, grow up a little bit. I want to help you see who you are.”– Lou Volpe, Truman High School – Theater I Class.

The author Michael Sokolove was one of Lou Volpe’s English students back in the early 1970’s at the beginning of Volpe’s career in education. Four decades later, he returned to tell the story of how this teacher inspired his students and the community of Levittown, PA, by creating a first class theater program in a working class town. The book was published in 2013 and concludes with Lou Volpe’s retirement from teaching. In March of 2018, the television show Rise, inspired by this book, debuted on NBC with trans actor Ellie Desautels among the cast members and Lou Volpe on board as a consultant to the show.

The book is more than just an homage from a former student to a teacher who inspired him. There is a lot of background contained in these pages having to do with the genesis of the community itself and the students and families who live there. Levittown, PA, is one of the communities that sprung up after World War II when there was a desperate need for housing and the GI Bill made homeownership possible for returning veterans. Sokolove’s father Leonard was one such returning veteran who received both housing and educational benefits, getting an undergraduate degree and a law degree following the war. Sokolove doesn’t shy away from talking about how William Levitt’s creation of post-war suburban America was for whites only, a topic discussed in depth in The Color of Law. The working class community of Levittown is still predominately white, with a small population of Hispanics in residence now. The industries that once employed many who lived in the town are now shuttered. Volpe’s students come from families who are struggling in a variety of ways.

Lou Volpe was not involved in theater as a high school student himself. He started out at 21 as an English teacher at the high school and applied to be the assistant Theater Director. He was given the job of Theater Director when the current incumbent left the school and from that point forward became a self taught theater producer and director. Throughout the book there are references to Volpe’s love for Stephen Sondheim and particularly the musical Sunday in the Park with George, which he has seen performed more than 25 times. For him, the play is life changing. He clearly wants to create those life changing moments for his students.

It is quite remarkable that such an underfunded theater program was revered by those on Broadway who came to admire and respect what Volpe was able to do with his program and his students. Musical Theatre International (MTI), which licenses plays for production, tapped Lou Volpe to adapt several Broadway musicals for the high school stage. Among them were Les Miserables, Rent and Spring Awakening. Sokolove spent two years researching this book and in those years was there for Truman’s productions of Good Boys and True and Spring Awakening (which was re-created in the season finale of Rise on May 18th.) Some of the most interesting parts of this book are his detailed descriptions of the creative process and the student actors.

As a former high school theater student myself, everything about this book resonated with me. I took four years of Drama classes at William Byrd High School in Vinton, VA, along with my best friend Jeff. (We were the only two students in Drama III and Drama IV.) While neither of us ended up as Broadway actors, we both gained a lot from our love of the theater and our pursuit of mastery within it. And that is really the goal that Lou Volpe has from the beginning for his students.

As he retired from teaching in 2013, he thanked his fellow teachers and their commitment to keeping arts eduction alive at Truman High School: “When I leave here, I know that our students will not be just skilled or trained. They will be educated. And that’s what’s most important to me.”

I loved everything about this book. I can see how it inspired a television show in a time when arts education is seen as optional and unimportant in the grand scheme of things. Many of us understand that arts education is everything. What would humanity be without the arts?

by Catherine Read

Finer Women: Zeta Phi Beta Sorority 1920 – 1935

(May 2018) This is such a remarkable book. The clue to how good it is comes down to how many pages I read aloud to my husband Tom, punctuated with “Did you KNOW this?” My favorite read aloud section of the book is Chapter Six “Honorary Members.” I learned more about black history in the pages of this book than I have in the last 50 years.

Author Tilu Khalayi has amassed the personal biographies not only of distinguished Honorary Members of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, but also of the very interesting and accomplished young women who founded the Zetas from it’s charter at Howard University in 1920 through it’s amazing national and international charter of chapters to 1935. It’s extraordinary. Full stop. It just is.

The style of the book reminded me of an actual college yearbook – personal biographies of the women founders, histories of the individual chapters, the Honorary Members, and Selected Writings and Speeches. Khalayi walks us through the genesis of Zeta Phi Beta as a sister organization of the already established Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity at Howard University. There were already two well established sororities on campus, Alpha Kappa Alpha (AKA) and Delta Sigma Theta (Delta).

Zeta was “the first black sorority for which members were selected primarily on the basis of academic achievement.” [Audrey Kerr, Maryland University] Myrtle Tyler Faithful confirmed this, having stated that “we weren’t looking at how rich you were or what you looked like or how you dressed.” Instead the sorority considered young women for membership based on their unique abilities, and the famous writer Zora Neale Hurston is a great testament to that practice.

Students had to be academic standouts to get into the Zeta Phi Beta and they had to maintain that academic excellence to stay. The principles that they established as the ideological foundations of the sorority are scholarship, service, sisterly love and finer womanhood. They began with a “Finer Womanhood Week” that became “Finer Womanhood Month” and their annual Boulé meetings held each December featured speakers that focused on that theme of Finer Womanhood and how it is achieved.

I was captivated reading about where these young women came from, who their parents and grandparents were, where they went to school and how they came to be at Howard University, and what they did afterward. It is such a window to what the world was like for black women striving to better their own lives and those of other women. And there are all kinds of gems tucked into those biographies.

One of the first pledges of the new Zeta Alpha Chapter, Pauline Johnson Phillips, age 17, was the first black valedictorian of any high school in Connellsville, Pennslvania, graduating on June 16, 1917. What struck me about this biography was the fact that there were integrated schools in this country before de jure segregation of cities and neighborhoods forced them to be segregated. The local Connellsville Daily Courier reported: “She is the first colored graduate to take honors here and the entire occasion was made very impressive. She received an ovation as she rose to deliver her essay.” Having recently read Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law I’m infuriated all over again by how this country has perpetuated institutionalized racism with impunity.

Annie Turnbo Malone. Holy Cow, how could I possibly NOT know who this woman was? The first profile under “Honorary Members.” She was the Oprah Winfrey of the turn of 20th century America. The first self-made black woman millionaire, she built an empire on hair care products for black women. What an extraordinary woman. She pioneered the business model on which Avon and Mary Kay were built – giving women the opportunity and incentives to sell products and make money. She gave record breaking endowments and donations to Howard University and many other HBCUs, along with numerous charities. She built Poro College in St. Louis that became the center of black St. Louis. Who knew this?

Madam Evanti, the famous black opera singer I’ve never heard of. (Her great uncle, Hiram Revels, was the first black person to serve in the United States Senate.) Her race barred her from joining the Metropolitan Opera in this country, but she was celebrated and welcomed elsewhere in the world. She did perform at the White House for three presidents: Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower and was given a commendation by President Eisenhower for her work with the USO.

Nettie Langston Napier. She was considered “The First Lady of black Nashville.” Her father, John Mercer Langston, was the first black Dean of Howard University Law School, and the first black representative elected to Congress from Virginia in a contested election in 1888. Her husband J.C. Napier was a Register of the Treasury from 1911 -1913, and he would go down in history as one of only five black people whose signatures have appeared on U.S. currency. Her nephew was the poet Langston Hughes.

See what I mean about a whole lot of history stuffed into a few well crafted paragraphs?

What interested me about this book in the first place is the extraordinary power of black sororities. They are a powerhouse and their influence is fully a hundred years in the making. This was brought home to me by an article in The Atlantic in 2015 The Political Power of the Black Sorority. I see them in the gallery of Virginia’s House and Senate on Lobby Days (they are hard to miss!) and I am in awe of their ability to organize and apply pressure where it counts. This book shines a light on a history I did not know and I enjoyed every minute of discovering these women and what they accomplished.

I’ve never belonged to a sorority, but I know quite a few women who are active members of black sororities and I admire them greatly. I highly recommend this book to those who loves American history and are curious about the history they’ve never heard before.

by Catherine Read

The Color of Law – Richard Rothstein

(April 2018) On Wednesday, April 11, 2018, 90-year-old Walter F. Mondale wrote an op-ed about the 50th anniversary of the Fair Housing Act, which he co-authored as a U.S. Senator. The next day, a 14-year-old black student in Detroit was shot at by a homeowner when he rang their doorbell asking for directions to his high school. The Color of Law explains why a hundred years of public policy designed to segregate neighborhoods and communities made that moment inevitable, despite the 1968 Fair Housing Act.

Author Richard Rothstein sets out to show how unconstitutional laws and unconstitutional public policies set up a system of de jure racial segregation in housing. Where once there was integrated housing and neighborhoods a century ago, a system of establishing “whites only” and “blacks only” housing and neighborhoods was engineered and promoted from the Oval Office and the Supreme Court to State Legislatures and City Planning Commissions, passing through court rooms that refused to uphold the tenants of our U.S. Constitution’s 5th and 14th Amendments.

In the Jim Crow era following reconstruction, there was collusion at every level to deny African Americans the right to buy housing any place where they could afford it. Integrated neighborhoods were systematically dismantled and policies put into place that would create separate and unequal housing for black Americans.

In 1926, the same year that the U.S. Supreme Court upheld exclusionary zoning, it also upheld restrictive covenants, finding that they were voluntary private contracts, not state action. With this decision to rely upon, successive presidential administrations embraced covenants as a mean of segregating the nation.

This march toward segregation in housing was exacerbated by the acceleration of home construction during World War II to support war workers around the country. The migration of black workers to industrial centers following war jobs, created a sudden influx of African Americans needing housing where there was none. The hasty construction of war housing created separate and very unequal communities, setting a pattern that would continue for decades afterward.

The post war housing boom in the 40’s and 50’s was fueled by GI bills and VA loans that made it possible for WHITE war veterans to afford to own their own homes in suburban neighborhoods that were “whites only.” Black war veterans were not able to use the benefits GI bills provided for housing and higher education. Very few higher educational institutions would even accept black students. And there were few homes for African Americans to buy and the housing finance industry would not approve mortgages for homes in “red lined zones.” The history of the Fair Housing Authority (FHA) is a dark one.

Rothstein does an outstanding job in presenting thorough and credible research about how segregated neighborhoods were a result of unconstitutional de jure policies rather than any de facto settlement patterns. He explores how discrimination in educational opportunities, within the federal civil service and the military, and even within labor unions systematically disadvantaged African Americans and depressed their earning potential. That disadvantage persists from one generation to the next. The heritable wealth that white Americans have passed down from one generation to the next has created a wealth gap in this country that will not be easily reversed by any policies created moving forward.

The neighborhoods created for “blacks only” were often on the edge of industrial and commercial zones used as buffers between white suburban neighborhoods and black communities. The proximity of that housing to industrial toxins and pollution are factors that have impacted the health of African Americans living in those communities. When we speak of “social determinants of health” things like the location of housing, overcrowding, the lack of job opportunities, food deserts and the lack of adequate public transportation all lead to poor health outcomes in predominantly black neighborhoods.

The role that the mortgage and real estate industries played in segregating the country is appalling. The “block busting” that preyed upon white homeowners and black homebuyers alike by real estate agents is unconscionable and for far too many years it went on unabated. The sub prime mortgage debacle a mere decade ago greatly disadvantaged minority homebuyers and homeowners and resulted in many losing their homes.

Upholding the validity of housing covenants right through the 1960s has left us with deeply segregated neighborhoods that have subsequently led to very segregated public schools. To this day, the zoning policies of towns, cities and counties across the country determine what types of housing are built, who can afford to live there, and how that housing stock impacts the make up of public school classrooms. The phrase “residential character of our neighborhoods” takes on a whole new meaning after reading this book.

I finished this book asking myself – again – why we do not teach public school students about the economic history of this country. The national mythology that passes itself off as history in our textbooks and school curriculums does not provide a foundation for young people to make better decisions as adults than their own parents did. We are truly ignorant of our own history and I see no movement to correct that.

The Color of Law would make an excellent AP History textbook. Our history does not dictate our future – unless we don’t know that history – in which case it’s very likely we will continue to make the same mistakes over and over again. I highly recommend this book to everyone.

by Catherine Read

Non Obvious 2018 – Rohit Bhargava

(March 2018) A trend is a unique curated observation of the accelerating present.

The future belongs to those who can learn to use their powers of observation to see the connections between industries, ideas, and behaviors and curate them into a deeper understanding of the world around us.

Preparing for the future starts with filtering out the noise and getting better at understanding today . . . as it alway has.

Rohit Bhargava – Trend Curator, Storyteller, Innovater – has been writing about Non Obvious Trends for a decade. They were first published on his blog, then as a visual presentation on Slideshare, followed by an e-book through Amazon, and eventually as a published book starting in 2011.

I have no idea how this was not on my radar before now. I picked up this book at the popup bookstore operated by Book People at the SXSWEdu in Austin, TX, earlier this month. This is precisely why it’s important to have a well curated selection of books to browse. Books are put before us through excellent curation that we would otherwise miss.

Bhargava sets about collecting ideas throughout the year, marking the hardcopy pages with the salient idea that caught his attention, then he sets them aside in a folder. These are articles from magazines, websites and other resources. He makes it a point to pick up magazines that are wildly disparate in their themes and target audiences – like model train enthusiasts.

Curiosity is key here. And having a wide range of interests is also important. We tend to gravitate to the things we enjoy, or impact our business and career, or validate our existing beliefs. Being open to a broad mix of topics helps to elevate trends away from the the specific subject to the behaviors that might be associated across that broad spectrum.

I like the way this book is put together. Having never read any of his previous Non Obvious books, it was all quite fresh to me in how he explained his process. He talked about his team and how they went about sorting, grouping and naming emerging trends. And his final trends all have well crafted names – another factor that he sees as very important to helping people understand the trend and what it means. At the back of the book, there is a section where he goes back and lists all of his Non Obvious Trends going back to 2011 and rates how well he predicted their impact. That is very interesting.

Some of Non Obvious Trends have been brought forward from earlier years as the concept have evolved, taken shape and grown in their impact. Some of the more interesting ones out of the 15 he identifies for this year are:

Ungendered
Brand Stand
Manipulated Outrage
Data Pollution
Approachable Luxury

Each of the 15 trends have their own section where he talks about how he came to identify the trend and wonderful examples of where they can be seen – using varied examples across multiple industries. I was fascinated by Approachable Luxury and some of the examples he used there. I had no idea they are producing quality diamonds in labs now.

I highly recommend this book. It’s a very interesting and engaging read. I am of a most curious mindset and I enjoy reading the works of writers who are as well.

by Catherine Read

Educated: A Memoir – Tara Westover

(March 2018) “I am not the child my father raised. But he is the father who raised her.”

A gripping memoir. From the opening passage to the final sentence, I was pulling for Tara Westover to make it.

Raised in a Mormon family in Idaho that eschewed modern medicine, public education and was deeply fearful of the government, Tara did herself and the world a great favor by keeping journals from a very early age. The word that kept flashing in my brain throughout this book was “gaslighting.” She was constantly being made to feel that SHE WAS THE CRAZY ONE by her family – her parents, her siblings and the larger Mormon community.

Despite never having attended school at all (nor having the “homeschooling” her parents claimed to provide), she managed to enroll in Brigham Young University based on her high ACT score at the age of 17. From that point, she was fortunate to connect with people who recognized her ability and wanted to help her to realize her potential. Those professors and mentors kept opening doors that she walked through to claim her future.

At the same time, she kept striving to remain a member of her nuclear family.

I never knew what would happen next. It is an emotional rollercoaster. Keeping a journal turned out to be central to this memoir. All of us have faulty memories. It’s hard to be accurate in hindsight when intervening events color our memories of the past. Having a contemporary account of what happened in the immediate aftermath of traumatic events provided a more reliable witness to her life.

Perhaps I’m just particularly drawn to memoirs of strong women these days. Tara’s internal struggles to reconcile her life with her desire to stay connected to her family reminded me of Emily Nunn’s memoir The Comfort Food Diaries which addressed similar issues. (Both authors changed the names of their immediate family members to protect their privacy.) Where does our commitment to our family begin, and end, when it impacts our ability to live a full and healthy life?

I would highly recommend this book. It is a testament to the triumph of the human spirit in the most difficult circumstances. Our history does not dictate our future. Our origination story is not the only story. We can write a narrative for ourselves that accepts that where we have come from is only part of who we are. Our “self” is in our heads. We do have choices. And self preservation is the choice we have to make first.

by Catherine Read

Mustard Seed – Laila Ibrahim

(March 2018) We don’t get to pick how big our good gets to be, but each of us picks if we gonna do some good right where we are.”– Mattie Freedman

One of my favorite passages from this remarkable book.

Mustard Seed is a sequel to Ibrahim’s Yellow Crocus, and as historical fiction goes, it’s outstanding. The narrative of both books unfolds in Virginia. And the author captures so vividly the lives of slaves both before the Civil War and the injustices done to them afterward.

While attending a session at the SXSW Education conference today on Black Education in America, the very wise Dr. Howard Fuller of Marquette University made this observation: “There is a difference between being liberated and being free.” It sent a shiver up my spine for how it perfectly captured the story of Mustard Seed.

In the 1850s, Mattie escapes Fair Oaks Plantation with her daughter Jordon to join her husband Emanuel and their son Samuel who earlier escaped to the free state of Ohio. Returning to Virginia in 1868 to extricate her newly “freed” cousin Sarah from the plantation, Mattie and her family experience some of the most egregious oppressions of Reconstruction. Slavery did not end with the Emancipation Proclamation. Slavery transformed into mass incarceration. As evident in Virginia today as it is in many other parts of the United States.

There were moments in this book that made me want to scream out loud. It truly touched a raw nerve after a floor speech by Del. Nick Freitas (R-Culpeper) on Friday, March 2nd, that threw the House of Delegates into chaos. In his remarks are the historic echoes of enraged white men – as if it was transferred genetically from one generation in Virginia to the next.

Today, I watched on YouTube as three African American Delegates stood on the floor of that same House chamber and addressed Delegate Freitas’s remarks. Delegates Luke Torian, Delores Quinn and Lamont Bagby pushed back. As they should. Because the story of what happened in Richmond in the past few days is not so different from the story this book tells. Racism, oppression and injustice is woven in the fabric of Virginia’s culture.

“We realize that we live in a ugly political moment. So while we were offended, we were not surprised,” Bagby said. “It should embarrass every member of this body that we have allowed such rhetoric to enter these chambers. Bringing up a very painful past to make a political point is disgusting and poisonous.”

Our history does not have to define our future. However, ignorance of our history most assuredly allows past wrongs to go unacknowledged and ignorance to be perpetuated by future generations. Historical fiction has a place in education when it is based on thorough research and grounded in factual and verifiable accounts. You feel what the characters are going through, not just absorbing a recounting of events.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who can read and everyone who considers themselves a Virginian.

by Catherine Read

Code Girls – Liza Mundy

(Feb 2018) People in her family knew Dot [Dorothy Braden Bruce] was doing something for the war, but they assumed it was secretarial and low-level. She could not even tell her mother. But even as she admired the Navy women’s outfits, it never occurred to Dot that the WAVES might be engaged in the same war work that she was, endeavoring – just as she was – to beat back the fascist menace and break the codes that would bring the boys home.

I’m familiar with the wonderful writing of journalist and author Liza Mundy. A long time resident of Arlington, VA, she attended North Cross School in Roanoke, VA, before going on to earn degrees at both Princeton University and the University of Virginia. She is a talented writer who brings to life this amazing story of the thousands of women who helped the Allies win in World War II.

My aunts, Maggie Catasca and Madeline Catasca, left their home in Roanoke to join the war effort as well. Aunt Maggie was a WAVE and Aunt Madeline had a civilian job and they shared an apartment in Arlington, VA, along with another roommate. My Aunt Mary Jane recalls that she and my mother went up to visit them over the summers while they were there. I recalled that my mother told me Madeline had worked on the code team that decoded the Japanese surrender. When I asked her daughter, my cousin Maggie, what her mother did during the war, she responded, “She never talked about what she did in the war. Neither did my father. I think it was secretarial.”

All the women who worked on code breaking teams were sworn to secrecy. Even roommates did not talk about their work with each other. And ALL OF THEM were told to say they did secretarial work.

On the eve of Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Army had 181 people working in its small, highly secret code-breaking office in downtown Washington. By 1945 nearly 8,000 people would be working stateside for the Army’s massive code-breaking operation, at a much-expanded suburban Virginia venue called Arlington Hall, with another 2,500 serving in the field. Of the entire group, some 7,000 were women. This means that of the Army’s 10,500 person-strong code-breaking force, nearly 70 percent was female. Similarly, at the war’s outset the U.S. Navy had a few hundred code breakers, stationed mostly in Washington but also in Hawaii and the Philippines. By 1945, there were 5,000 Naval code breakers stationed in Washington, and about the same number serving overseas. At least 80 percent of the Navy’s domestic code breakers – some 4,000 – were female. Thus, out of about 20,000 total American code breakers during the war, some 11,000 were women.

And they were sworn to secrecy. Which may account for why the children and grandchildren, parents and siblings of these 11,000 women had no idea what they did in the war. This story NEEDS to be told! The comparison to Hidden Figures is justified – why did it take decades for these stories to be told? There is a whole generation of girls who grew up with no idea that women were mathematicians, scientists, technology pioneers . . . and war heroes.

In 1942, only about 4 percent of American women had completed four years of college. Both the Navy and the Army recruited these young women right out of their college classrooms in a highly secretive mission where they themselves were not certain of what they had signed up for. They next set their sights on recruiting school teachers from all over the country, as they too showed an aptitude for code breaking work. But as the war progressed and more and more women came to Washington and Arlington, they discovered there was no way to really predict who would be good at this type of work.

Administrators were finding to their chagrin that there often was not a correlation between a person’s background and how well that person would do at breaking codes. Some PhDs were hopeless, and some high school dropouts were naturals. There was a stage actress who was working out wonderfully, as was a woman with little formal education who had been a star member of the American Cryptogram Association, a membership group for puzzle and cipher enthusiasts. Code breaking required literacy, numeracy, care, creativity, painstaking attention to detail, a good memory, and a willingness to hazard guesses. It required a tolerance for drudgery and a boundless reserve of energy and optimism. A reliable aptitude test had yet to be developed.

The research here is excellent and captivating. The personal stories of these women really shine a light on what it was like to live and work in such an intense time where the lives of their husbands and brothers hinged on how well they could do this work. Liza Mundy did extensive interviews with Dorothy Braden Bruce, a native of Lynchburg, VA, and a long time resident of Richmond, VA. Dot saved the many letters that were sent and received while her future husband, Jim Bruce, was overseas and that contemporaneous account of that era is priceless.

This is one of those books that needs to be a “must read” for those who believe they know the history of World War II. That knowledge is incomplete without understanding the contributions of 11,000 women whose stories have never been told. Their contributions to victories like the Battle of the Midway and other pivotal battles of the war, saved the lives of countless U.S. soldiers and sailors. They are truly unsung heroes, many of whom went to their graves committed to keeping the secret of their work as they promised. I highly recommend this book to everyone who can read.

by Catherine Read

The Lost Art of Listening – Michael P. Nichols, PhD

(Feb 2018) Genuine listening involves a suspension of self. Holding your tongue while someone speaks is not the same thing as listening. To really listen, you have to suspend your own agenda. Forget about what you want to say, and concentrate on being a receptive vehicle for the other person.

Just because something is simple, doesn’t mean it’s easy. Actively listening is much harder than we believe it is and this book covers the subject from so many aspects. The author is a family therapist and his wisdom comes from years of helping individuals, families and couples to figure out better ways of communicating – which starts with cultivating better listening skills.

How we communicate – and listen – goes back to how we learned to do that in our families. Our parents may be the most important unfinished business of our lives.

We relate to people in the present on the basis of expectations from the past. We continue to live in the shadows of the families we grew up in. The sometimes vast difference between words spoken and message intended is nothing compared to the often vaster difference between what is said and what it heard.

Nichols makes an excellent point about self acceptance as the foundation of being an empathetic listener.

When you are trying to figure out why you or anyone else overreacts, keep in mind one of the great ironies of understanding: We are likely to be as accepting of others as we are of ourselves. That’s why those lucky enough to be raised with self respect make better listeners. If you learn to respect other people’s feelings, you will learn to treat your own feelings more kindly in the process. What we can’t tolerate in others is what we can’t tolerate in ourselves.

In addressing the hurdles encountered by couples, he has some very profound observations to make:

A relationship isn’t some you have, it’s something you do.

Sometimes marriage isn’t about resolving differences, but learning to live together with them.

Second and third marriages don’t fail because people keep picking the wrong partners. They fail because it’s not differences that matter, but how they are negotiated.

If you want the truth from someone, you must make it safe for him or her to tell it.

While he addresses listening in the work place in very effective ways, I found the most interesting parts of the book to be about the challenges of listening to the people who matter the most to us – our family members.

Ironically, our ability to listen is often worst with the people closest to us. Conflict, habit and the pressure of emotions makes us listen least well where listening is most needed. As we move outside the family circle to those we care about but don’t live with, we tend to be more open, more receptive and more flexible. Primarily because those relationships are less burdened with conflict and resentment.

In struggling to figure out just how much bandwidth I have to truly listen to the people I engage with everyday, I’ve come to the conclusion that not every person I encounter needs my full and undivided attention. In fact, there are people who demand attention in ways that mean it’s being taken away from others in my life who are important to me. Social media demands attention in ways that are often overwhelming and many times unproductive. Emails come flowing into several email accounts at all hours, seven days a week, with an immediate response expected. So intentionality is required to make certain that the people who should have our undivided attention are the ones actually getting it.

Sometimes it makes sense to write off unrewarding relationships that aren’t central to your life. That is a hard thing to do. Ultimately, saying “no” to that which is unrewarding means leaving more room for that which is rewarding.

I found this book an excellent read. If for no other reason, it reminded me of things I know to be true, but don’t always practice. Honing the skill of being an active listener is an endeavor worth undertaking.

by Catherine Read

Periods Gone Public: Taking a Stand for Menstrual Equity

(Nov 2017) “Tampons and sanitary towels . . . have always been considered a luxury. That isn’t by accident, that’s by design of an unequal society, in which the concerns of women are not treated as equally as the concerns of men.” – Stella Creasy, Member of British Parliament

I was fortunate to hear author Jennifer Weiss-Wolf talk about her book and her advocacy at Bards Alley in Vienna, VA, on Nov. 28th. The next day I was on a panel of women and girls giving a briefing on menstrual equity issues on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, to legislative staff members in the offices of Senator Tim Kaine, Senator Cory Booker and Congressman Gerry Connolly. Rep. Grace Meng made opening remarks and addressed the strides New York City has made in putting these sanitary hygiene products in public schools, homeless shelters and prisons free of charge. The work of Council Member Julissa Ferreras-Copeland of the New York City Council was instrumental in passing a bill in June of 2016 that was the first of its kind in the country.

Two young women on the panel, Ashley (24) and Jennifer (22) talked about their lack of access to needed menstrual supplies when they were incarcerated in jail. (They are both in a Virginia based re-entry program for formerly incarcerated women, Friends of Guest House.) They had to ask guards for pads, and it was up to the guards as to who got how many and when they received them. Requests were handled at the guards’ discretion and at their convenience. Ashley and Jennifer recreated for the hearing room a demonstration of how they made “prison tampons” out of substandard pads because they were more effective than the cheap flimsy pads. Being caught with a “prison tampon” was considered having contraband for which the prisoner could be charged.

Weiss-Wolf talks about her own dawning awareness of how many women in this country and around the world are impacted by the lack of access to the basic hygiene products that menstruation management requires. It affects women’s ability to get an education, to work, and to fully engage in productive daily activities. Factors like poverty, homelessness and incarceration leave many women and girls without access to products that are as necessary as toilet paper and soap – which are mandated by law to be in public restrooms.

The author talks about 2016 as “The Year of the Period.” From her own New Year’s Day thunderbolt to the Women’s March on January 21, 2017, to the trips she made to other parts of the world to research what was being done to address the issue of meeting women’s basic needs so we can fully function in society every day of the year.

Menstrual Equity is on the agenda of cities and states around the country, as well as in countries around the world with populations of women and girls living in poverty. There has been some innovation in place like India around creating small businesses that manufacture pads the poor women can afford. It also creates jobs for them.

In this country, there is a movement to roll back “The Tampon Tax” that places another financial burden on top of the expense of buying these products every month Since only people who menstruate use these products, only those people are paying the tax. The book also addresses the fact that transgender men and gender non-conforming individuals also menstruate. We need to move away from the term “feminine hygiene products” and call them menstrual hygiene products. This is less about a gender binary than acknowledging it as an issue of civil rights and basic human rights.

Weiss-Wolf also addresses the need to have better testing and full labeling on what is in the tampons women are using. Potentially toxic chemicals or artificial fibers need to be tested and consumer informed. She also points out that there is an environmental impact to providing more disposable products to more women around the world. Even bio-degradable products will take longer to breakdown than the lifespan of the people who have used them. Greater innovation needs to take place around how development menstrual management products that don’t have an adverse impact on the planet.

Locally here in Northern Virginia, Holly Seibold has founded BRAWS: Bringing Resources to Aid Women’s Shelters. This organization does product drives and distributes products to shelters and schools around the DC Metro area. They are also engaged in issue advocacy around Menstrual Equity. Delegate Jennifer Boysko is sponsoring two bills in Virginia’s 2018 legislative session, HB24 and HB25, that will address the elimination of “The Tampon Tax.”

I highly recommend this book as one everyone should read – men, women and children. We need to remove the stigma around discussing periods. Men and boys should understand this very natural and normal bodily function and should support menstruating individuals by advocating for greater access to menstrual hygiene products for those who need them. It is past time for our culture and our society to normalize that people have periods – every month – for most of their lives. I urge being informed and being an advocate on this issue.

by Catherine Read

The Comfort Food Diaries – Emily Nunn

(Oct 2017) I listened to The Comfort Food Diaries as an audiobook on a long drive from Northern Virginia to Dalton, GA, and back home again. I wanted my husband Tom to listen to this book with me because I didn’t think it was a book he would read otherwise. We both loved it.

Tom was drawn into Emily Nunn’s story without knowing any of the people in the book. I was drawn into the story because I knew many of the people in this book and I wanted Tom to know them too. I became aware of Emily’s journey on her Comfort Food tour because of Facebook. After connecting with her Aunt Mariah on Facebook, I ended up connecting with her cousins Toni and Susan, and then with Emily. There’s a point in the book when she talks about posting a question on Facebook asking people what they think of as their comfort food. I remember answering that question.

Galax is a small city in southwestern Virginia near the North Carolina border. The five Nunn siblings and the five Sublett siblings attended the same Methodist Kindergarten. My family lived next door to her Uncle John and Aunt Mariah Nunn (to whom she has dedicated this book) and their three daughters until we moved in 1968. The parts of her memoir that talk about her childhood in Galax have a familiarity to me that is uniquely personal, and yet it could be the story of many small rural towns in the 1960s and 70s.

As I listened her memoir unfold, it also brought to mind a famous quote from Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

I can’t speak for other people’s relationship to food, but in my family, when we think of our best childhood memories, food always has a central role. Is that just a Southern thing? I’m not sure. But the recipes in this book speak to both the dishes of my childhood and the life I live now married to a “foodie.”

She talks about making Morning Custard at the Bluebird Café in Athens, GA, when she was a student at the University of Georgia, and that reminded me I had made a video several years ago of my 90 year old Tia Sylvia showing my sister and I how to make our Granny’s baked custard. Does this happen in all families? I have no way of knowing. Emily’s memoir, centered around food, family dysfunction and failed relationships resonated with me.

My daughter Emily called me tonight to ask me recipe questions – she can’t make out her Grandma Sublett’s handwriting on her signature meatloaf recipe. In a meandering conversation about her childhood, she observed that sometimes she wonders if she and her sister Allison actually lived in the same house because they remember things so differently. That was a real “aha” moment for me. As one of five children myself, I’m sure we each experienced our lives in the same family and household quite differently.

That is a significant point that I don’t want to overlook. This is Emily Nunn’s story of her life the way she experienced it. It’s not up for a vote on “right or wrong” or “good or bad” nor is it anyone else’s story but her own. Her relationships with her family, fiancee and friends are relayed to the reader as she lived them. It’s not about them . . . it’s about her relationship with them. This is her journey. She owns it and she’s sharing it through this memoir. Writing a book about the most personal aspects of your life is likely quite cathartic and satisfying on a number of levels. The vulnerability required to then look at reviews written by friends, colleagues and total strangers about that book, is beyond anything I can imagine. That takes strength and fortitude I’m not sure I have.

After hearing the wonderful audiobook version of The Comfort Food Diaries, my husband Tom ordered the hardcopy book so we would have the recipes. It was a glorious experience to hear Emily’s descriptions of dishes, meals and so many aspects of food preparation while sitting in a traffic backup on I-81 in Virginia. We’ll always remember where we were when we heard her talk about Cathy’s mother’s Sour Cherry Pie, which I knew immediately was the book’s cover photo.

Spending time with this book, experiencing it with someone I wanted to understand the people and places contained in its pages, was a beautiful thing. Life is about the journey. We need to embrace it all – it’s what we have. My heart aches for the loss of Emily’s brother, as my heart aches for the loss of my own brother – who, quite ironically, was born the same day in the same hospital as her cousin Toni Nunn. My dad was the hospital administrator. Because that’s how life was in Galax in the 1960s.

I highly recommend this book. It’s unique. It’s thoughtful and hopeful and real. And the recipes are out of this world wonderful!