I don’t think you have to be either religious or questioning religion to enjoy reading this memoir. If she preaches anything like she writes, then I know why Barbara Brown Taylor was once selected as one of the top 12 preachers in the English language by Baylor University. Even on my best days, I very rarely approach the kind of personal insight that Taylor seemingly accomplishes with ease in this book. It’s a very good and fast read, her story of how she came to immerse herself in the ministry of the church, and how and why she left that same ministry to pursue teaching.

I’ve gotten my large shipment of summer reading from Amazon. I have so much that I must read during school year that when summer comes, it seems a pure luxury to me to read what I want, when I want, as slow as I want. I’ll periodically post here about books I’m reading.

First up is a book on a subject very close to me. You all know that I was adopted at birth and that in 1998 I reunited with my birth mother, Barbara, after a blessedly short search. Although Barbara and I have spoken some about what it was like for her during her pregnancy with me, I really didn’t have an accurate understanding of what it must have been like for her. One book will crack your heart wide open with compassion for those women who relinquished children to adoption. It is “The Girls Who Went Away : The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade” by Ann Fessler. It’s a gripping book, every page full of poignancy, based on over 100 oral histories of women who became pregnant and placed their children for adoption in the 50s and 60s. See what The New York Times, National Public Radio, Mother Jones and other well respected journalists are talking about.

Yesterday was my last final in modern European history from 1789-1949. I like this professor so much, but because of things happening around me I wasn’t able to be as prepared as I wanted to be. I think I did OK on the objective and short answers part of the final. The last cumulative essay question – I don’t know. Since the final is only 20% of the grade and I did really well on the other four portions of the grade, I’m hoping to still pull an A out of it.

The last book we read and which I finished only hours before the final was Gerda Weissman Klein’s “All But My Life,” the justifiably famous Holocaust account of her years in Polish labor camps where she was spared from certain death because of her abilities as a textile worker. I always find these Holocaust memoirs a gut wrenching read, but in a way they carry a stubborn hope within them, given as they naturally would be only by those who survived. There is a part of me that feels like I have to read them to bear witness to the lives whose stories could never be told in the first person. For purely personal reasons, I identified with Klein when she wrote that survival is at once an exalted privilege and a terrible burden. I understood that feeling. All I can say is that if you haven’t read this book and have any appreciation for reading Holocaust memoirs, please pick up this book and read it. It won’t be easy, but you’ll be glad you did.

If you don’t know about Gerda & Kurt Klein and want to learn more, these sites will help:

http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/phistories/phi_individuals_kurt_gerda_klein_uu.htm

http://www.kleinfoundation.org/

http://www.tolerance.org/teach/magazine/features.jsp?&is=37&ar=610

There are many more. I’d suspect that you would find material at the Yad Vashem web site in their archives and in other places as well.