C.A. Gray's Blog, page 13
September 26, 2023
Reviews of Christy, Books 1-3
The Bridge to Cutter Gap: Christy, #1
On a vacation in which we flew into Asheville, NC and then drove to the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, I thought of Christy and meant to watch the series again. I couldn’t find it in streamable format anywhere, but as I searched for it, I found a book series instead! I had only known about the novel, “Christy.” I now wonder if these novellas were the basis for the screenplay of the series. It’s perfect to read them “on location,” as it were: Christy, a 1900s teacher from Asheville, is moved for spiritual reasons to travel to middle-of-nowhere Tennessee, called Cutter Gap. There, the very rustic people have next to nothing, and they’re both backwoods and backwards in every way. Yet with kindness and compassion, Christy and fellow missionaries Miss Alice and David (the preacher), begin to understand their ways and join their community.
“The Bridge to Cutter Gap” is very episodic, and yet this one is the story of how Christy came to Cutter Gap, and met all the main characters, so it must be a reprise of what’s in the novel. I’ll have to reread that one next. The episodes work well for this kind of story though– it’s about the “feel” more than the plot.
My rating: ****
Silent Superstitions: Christy, #2
The conflict in this one is that a great granny in Cutter Gap, threatened by the new teacher, spreads rumors after a series of mishaps that she is cursed. She convinces the children to stay away from school or else to wear a smelly concoction of herbs around their necks to ward off Christy’s “curse.” Christy almost leaves Cutter Gap over it, convinced that she will never manage to break through to the people… but a heartwarming simple turn of events changes her mind.
My rating: ****
The Silent Intruder, Christy #3
The conflict in this one is a combination: Christy writes home for donations, but fails to check with Miss Alice and David first, and finds that she’s stepped on toes. This feeds into the second but more major conflict: someone is writing threatening messages and scaring Christy, trying to convince her to leave. She has one bully in her class whom she suspects, but she can’t prove it’s him. Meanwhile, there’s a love triangle amongst three of her students, which seems to mirror Christy’s own budding love triangle between David, the preacher, and Dr MacNeill.
My rating: ****
Language for all three: none
Sexual content: none
Violence: none
Political content: none
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September 22, 2023
Notes from a Small Island
I’m not one to pick up a travel diary, but this was a definite exception… it’s a series of travel essays from a trek throughout the British Isles, which are nostalgic for me, as I studied abroad there in college and left a piece of my heart behind me. I’d forgotten a lot of the details that Bryson brought out, and it also just felt like England. He happens to be hilarious as well, which helped. It’s the perfect bedtime read… I don’t have to know what happens next, and there is no plot, just meandering from one place to the next and recording his episodic mishaps along the way.
My rating: *****
Language: there’s some, but it’s done in a funny way
Sexual content: not that I recall but he’s pretty irreverent, so I wouldn’t put it past him.
Violence: none
Political content: not that I recall, but it was written awhile ago.
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The Fourth Phase of Water, Gerald Pollack
Today’s podcast comes from this blog review of The Fourth Phase of Water.
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September 15, 2023
The Fourth Phase of Water
Groundbreaking!
I heard of Gerald Pollack in my naturopathic practice about a decade ago, as a scientist who had postulated that water has a “memory,” and therefore might be used as an explanation for the mechanism of homeopathy, at least loosely. I didn’t know the particulars, and at the time, since he worked for a traditional university, I rather suspected that he would object to that association. It was only recently, when I started studying fluid dynamics within the human body with a strong sense that this was a key somehow to adequate detoxification, that I stumbled upon this book.
The fourth phase of water isn’t what I thought it was, at least not precisely. It’s called “EZ water,” which sounds like easy water, though it stands for Exclusion Zone water–and it seems exceedingly likely to be exactly what Pollack postulates, based upon not only his own experiments, but also its ability to elegantly explain many of water’s previously familiar but inexplicable properties. It’s so called, because it excludes all solutes that might otherwise be dissolved within “bulk water,” or what we think of as normal liquid water. It does this by forming what’s almost a gel-like crystalline structure, with charge separations between the EZ and bulk water. Its formation can be triggered by a hydrophilic surface, yet water doesn’t need such a surface to form an EZ–it also forms spontaneously within “bulk water,” which is the reason for the mosaic-like reflective patterns we see within a body of water. When water evaporates, it does so within the bulk water columns bordered by EZ, which is why steam follows a similar mosaic pattern. EZ also forms just at the point of transition of water to ice as well. Such a surface explains how things float, how “Jesus lizards” and certain insects can run across water’s surface, how water ascends to the reach the tops of trees, how the fluid line within a straw rises above the regular water’s surface, how one can skate on top of ice (and yet if you lick a frozen flagpole, you’re likely to stick), why Brownian motion occurs (he’s so bold as to revise Einstein on this), and both how and why water forms both droplets and bubbles. (It never occurred to me to think of this as peculiar before, but it really is peculiar!)
What really blew my mind about all of this is the concept that the EZ, due to its charge separation, is a perpetual potential source of energy–just like a battery. The EZ, and thus the charge separation–spontaneously grows in response to infrared light… and we have a free, ready source of this in the sun. The implications of this, to me, are enormous, and Pollack does allude to this at the end of the book (I’d hoped he’d take it much further, but I guess that’s for some engineer to take his concept and build upon it). I’m trying very hard to see how I can work this concept into my next book…
My rating: *****
Language: none
Sexual content: none
Violence: none
Political content: none
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The Paradigm, Jonathan Cahn
Today’s podcast comes from this blog review of The Paradigm by Jonathan Cahn.
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September 8, 2023
Who Not How, Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy
Today’s podcast comes from this blog review of “Who Not How.”
The post Who Not How, Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy appeared first on C.A. Gray.
Review of The Paradigm
Jonathan Cahn has a distinctive nonfiction style, of finding historical patterns and matching them, quite compellingly, to current events. In this case, he compared the “paradigm” of an Old Testament set of individuals to a parallel set of modern-day individuals (though I’m not sure this is the correct usage of the word — or at least it isn’t my understanding of it). Specifically, he highlighted a number of parallels between the compromised King Ahab and the evil Queen Jezebel from 1 Kings to Bill and Hillary Clinton (and boy, I immediately wondered, could they sue him for libel, or is this still considered protected free speech? I guess it must be…) He further compared Barack Obama to their son Joram, the successor to Ahab, and compared Trump to Jehu, the brash outsider who took everyone in ancient Israel by surprise. The parallels range from what each character stood for, their personalities, their relationship to the God of Israel, the causes they championed, the scandals connected with them, and–most surprisingly–the exact lengths of their “reigns,” as well as the timing within their time upon the national stage when various events took place. I didn’t go back to 1 Kings to see if Cahn was right about all of it, but if he was, it certainly is eerie.
My question is, what’s the point, though? If all of those events line up so precisely, why? It would imply that there is some supernatural something (a paradigm, perhaps) at play, but since humans all have free will–as Cahn doesn’t dispute, and even makes a point of this on numerous occasions–then how does this happen first of all, and second, why would God orchestrate such a thing?
He doesn’t answer this question; he leaves that to the reader to decide. Even though it was a compelling read, I only gave it four stars, because I was still left with a sense of, “Okay, so what?”
My rating: ****
Language: none
Sexual content: none
Violence: none (except what’s in the scriptures)
Political content: TONS (of course, by the nature of the topic)–though it’s the opposite of woke.
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September 1, 2023
Who Not How
I’m a new fan of this duo, as this is the second of their team-up books I’ve read, and both have been equally challenging.
I’d previously read “The Gap and the Gain,” by recommendation, and was pleasantly surprised. I guessed just from the title that I knew the bottom line of this book and hadn’t planned to read it, until the same person (my brother) recommended I give this one a go also… and he was right. It’s terrific.
The concept is what I thought–the idea that you should delegate to multiply your effectiveness, rather than trying to do everything yourself. The reason I was skeptical about the premise is because I’ve tried to do that in the past, with mixed results… largely, I think, because I’m often limited by the tasks I feel are necessary (I might be wrong) and because I’m also delegating to strangers, who may or may not be good at the thing I’m hiring them to accomplish. I’ve wasted a lot of money that way, in various endeavors, and usually ended up discouraged and right back where I started.
What was different in this book was that the author (Dr Hardy) and the inspiration for the book (Dan Sullivan) don’t recommend coming up with the task that needs to be done and then delegating that. They back up a step, recommending that instead, you postulate the ultimate goal, and then find an expert in that realm, leaving the “how” (the specific tasks of how to get there) to them. That really is a new paradigm to me. I also love how the authors approach reaching goals as collaborative and not competitive, and how the ultimate goal is really to increase human connection, and to make everyone’s lives better. Dr Hardy is overtly Christian, though the book isn’t–I just like how that worldview permeates his approach to business.
The book prompted me to journal about my own various endeavors, clarify my goals, and then search for experts I could hire in those arenas to tell me how to get there. I’m still of course at the mercy of said experts to know their stuff… but that really is a freeing concept.
My rating: *****
Language: none
Sexual content: none
Violence: none
Political content: none
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August 25, 2023
Doomsday Match
This was very different for a Jeff Wheeler book — aside from the memoir I read about his writing style, this is the only one (that I’ve read anyway, and I think I’ve read most of his books) that isn’t high fantasy. I guess this would be considered urban fantasy, though it takes awhile for the fantasy elements to come in.
The story follows Roth, a middle aged bestselling author (I have to assume Wheeler identified with him, as some of the things Roth said about his own experiences sounds like something I assume is true of Wheeler himself), and his family: his wife Serena, and their kids, Suki, and twins Bryant and Lucas. Family friends, the Beasleys, invite them to Cozumel, Mexico for Christmas, to an off grid resort, all expenses paid. They agree, but almost as soon as they arrive, at least Suki and then a few of the others begin to get a “weird vibe,” that something is wrong. One of the Beasley boys breaks one of the twins’ noses, and Serena, a nurse, uses this as a pretext to try to take them to a hospital–just to see if they are allowed to leave. As they attempt this, the little Beasley girl, Jane Louise, sneaks into their van and begs them to take her with them, and says that if they don’t flee, they’ll die. Roth leads them into the jungle, even though he has no idea what he’s doing… and unfortunately, Serena is a Type 1 diabetic, and she left her insulin behind.
Meanwhile, the story shows us what’s going on behind the scenes: Jacob, a Mayan Jaguar priest (who literally shapeshifts into a Jaguar) seeks vengeance for how the European explorers treated his people hundreds of years before. The Beasleys, a very athletic family, was aware that they were inviting Roth’s family to an ancient match to the death. The winners will be spared when one day the Mayans take over the Western world, as they fully intend to do, and they will also inherit all the property of the losers. The losers will be sacrificed by having their hearts cut out while they are still living.
The story was easy to follow, well-paced, and an intriguing concept. I didn’t for some reason connect with the characters as much as I would have liked, though, which is why I only gave it four stars. One thing I loved about it was how Wheeler managed to subtly weave in Christian values without being preachy at all, though.
My rating: ****
Language: none
Sexual content: none
Violence: it’s not actually in there, but there’s some graphic threats
Political content: none
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Doomsday Match, Jeff Wheeler
This week’s podcast review comes from this blog review of Doomsday Match.
The post Doomsday Match, Jeff Wheeler appeared first on C.A. Gray.
