If you resist reading what you disagree with, how will you ever acquire deeper insights into what you believe? The things most worth reading are precisely those that challenge our convictions. ~Author Unknown
My current read is We Band of Angels : The Untold Story of American Nurses Trapped on Bataan by the Japanese because a few months ago I caught the replay of an interview in 1999 with the author, Elizabeth Norman and Brian Lamb. I haven’t gotten very far, but it is time well spent. Good biographies can be like tourist guides of all the streets worth seeing in a grand city. They can also show me back alleys I would not know to venture – Ms. Norman’s book is such a guide, introducing me to women and events about which I did not know. More on this, later. I am also reading David McCullough’s The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris – another delightful guide to people, places and times, many of which were familiar, and several others whose lives historians and biographers heretofore ignored.
Equally engaging were three recorded books to which we listened on our travels to Maryland and back to Texas – and I found some quotes about reading and books that sums up my impression of them:
· The Mayflower, (mentioned earlier.) What the people want is very simple. They want an America as good as its promise.
~Barbara Jordan
How grateful I am for good books:
· Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers. ~Charles W. Eliot
· It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it. ~Oscar Wilde
· The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them. ~Mark Twain, attributed
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No man can be called friendless who has God and the companionship of good books. ~Elizabeth Barrett Browning
No man can be called friendless who has God and the companionship of good books. ~Elizabeth Barrett Browning
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