Patricia Wells, France and Fallot Mustard
As I was scrambling through the Salmiyya Sultan, looking desperately for a few good ingredients on Thanksgiving morning, I stopped short in sheer wonder. There, on the shelves, here in Kuwait, were mustards by Edmond Fallot.
Monsieur Fallot makes the best mustards in the entire world. One year, we did a “French” turkey, slivered with a thousand slices of garlic carefully placed in a thousand tiny slits just under the turkey skin. It was magnificent. We served the turkey that year with a variety of Monsieur Fallot’s mustards.
We lived in Germany, and we often travelled to France for a couple weeks at a time, exploring different regions. We used lots of books, but the three we used most often for France were Patricia Wells Food Lover’s Guide to France, Patricia Wells Food Lover’s Guide to Paris, and a book published annually called Europe’s Wonderful Little Hotels and Inns.
We didn’t have a lot of money, but what we lacked in money, we made up in energy, optimism and research. We found wonderful places to stay, fabulous meals and affordable side trips. We lunched out of charcouteries and boulangeries, we dined demi-pension in Michelin “Red R’s” (good local food at reasonable prices.) We found ourselves in the Burgundy area again and again, and Patricia Wells led us to Monsieur Fallot’s mustard factory in Beaune. Click there for a virtual visit to his factory in preparation for your real time, in person visit.
As I stood there, transfixed, in the Sultan Center, I was back in Beaune, travelling in France with some history and “foodie” friends, and we made a special stop at M. Fallot’s factory, whose address was listed in the original Food Lover’s Guide to France I was using then. I am guessing he has asked NOT to have his address given any more, maybe he had too many visitors like us. We couldn’t get enough of his mustards – we stayed and watch him filling jars with many different kinds, and bought at least one of each variety. His mustard is the gold standard of mustards. Worth a trip to Beaune.
Except you don’t have to go to Beaune – you can find M. Fallot in the Sultan Center in Salmiyya, or in William-Sonoma if you are in the U.S. and in other parts of the world where you find fine condiments.
The latest edition I could find of the Food Lover’s Guide to France was 1987, for $1.99 used, through Amazon. The latest edition I could find of Food Lover’s Guide to Paris was 1999, and the cost, used, was $9.99, again through Amazon. (Disclaimer/Disclosure: yes. I do own stock in Amazon. Help me keep Amazon stock high, please. 🙂 ) I imagine some of the information in both books is outdated, restaurants have closed, newer, haute-er places are open, but I would still say they are worth the price.
Both guides list market days for various arrondisement/towns/villages, and for that alone, they are worth the price. Wells describes local specialities, and best of all, Wells is deliciously readable. Even if you don’t have a trip to Paris or France in your near future, Wells’ books are fun to read, and full of wonderful, valuable information.
The most recent edition I can find of Europe’s Wonderful Little Hotels and Inns on Amazon is 2003, but I know there are more recent editions because mine is 2004. It is edited by Adam & Caroline Raphael, and has hotels listed throughout Europe, not just France, although the lion’s share of hotels listed ARE in France. They range from budget to unbelievable luxury – and the twist is, this book is made up solely of recommendations from customers. Someone has to recommend the hotel, another has to second the recommendation, and readers keep the postings up to date. We have found some truly memorable hotels using this guide, hotels full of charm but affordable for the region. Most of the hotels were awesome. Even used, even outdated, one good hotel stay at a charming but reasonably priced hotel will pay the cost of the book.
Still Learning – Alhamdallah
Another Side of Thanksgiving . . .
My friend asked about my father, and when I told her he was slipping away, losing a little more every day, she said “Alhamdallah!”
I was caught up short. Her face was smiling. I had just told her my father is dying and she says “Thanks be to God?”
I know this woman like my own sister. Her daughters are my own daughters. I am welcome in every corner of her house, I pray for every one of her children, and being in her home is like being in my own home, we are all so comfortable together.
“No,” I said, “You’ve misunderstood what I said!” and she hugged me and said “I understood, but no matter what happens, we say ‘alhamdallah’. If you father is dying, we say ‘alhamdallah’. If Hurricane Katrina strikes, we say ‘alhamdallah’. All things come from Allah, and He knows all things. It is his will, so we say ‘alhamdallah’.”
We are both religious women. My faith says the same thing, to give thanks in all things. In my daily life, I sometimes forget. Truly, in my culture, you would never say “thanks be to God” if someone had just told you something very sad.
Being exposed to the Islamic world has complemented my own faith. No, I don’t need to be a Muslim; I think the differences between us are much smaller than the similarities. But truly, I thank God for all that I learn about my own faith by living is Moslem countries.
I love the call to prayer; nothing wrong with being reminded during the day – and night – to love and honor God. I love living among people who give thanks to God so many times a day, even for Hurricane Katrina, even for my failing father. I love watching the fathers and sons headed to the mosque on Fridays. There’s even a very gentle station with Moslem films in English that I watch from time to time because it is so peaceful, and tolerant and sweetly loving.
My friend took time from her very busy life and made a special trip to the bookstore to buy me a book called Don’t Be Sad. It’s a wonderful book by ‘Aaidh ibn Abdullah al-Qarni with chapters like “How to deal with bitter criticism,” “Do Not Carry the Weight of the Globe on Your Shoulders,” Do Not be Shaken by Hardships'” “Jealousy is Not Something New” and one of my favorites – “Do Not Be Sad – Do Good to Others.” This book is helpful to me in so many ways, including giving me good sura that are very similar to writings in our own book. This helps me clarify to others in my culture how alike we are, and how similar our faith is. My friend loves me, and I know she wants only the best for me. I give thanks to have her as a friend.
Every now and then, I come across something that shakes me – like when my friend said “alhamdallah” about my Father . . . but in the end, I learn something and my understanding broadens. Alhamdallah!
Philippa Gregory and Catherine of Aragon
Being sick has one advantage. . . you can catch up on some of your reading. Philippa Gregory is one of my favorite writers of historical fiction.
To my great shame, I have a very difficult time reading history. Unless it is vigorously written, it puts me to sleep. It is particularly embarassing when my husband has a degree in History, and his eyes light up discussing battles and strategems and who said what to whom and why it matters. It has to do with my hard-wiring, it’s not even a gender thing.
So I gravitate toward historical fiction; give me people and motivations and interactions any day, and I can remember it. Sometimes, I even learn something. Philippa Gregory never lets me down. She researches, she documents, and she might speculate, but you always have a clear idea what is real (historically documented) and what is a good story, putting meat on the bones of the history.
Out of sequence, I read The Queen’s Fool and The Other Boleyn Girl. Each of these books is peripheral to the story of Catherine of Aragon. The first features a woman chosen to be a Fool at the court of Queen Mary, Catherine’s daughter. She is of Jewish descent, hiding as a Christian, escaped from the fires of the Spanish Inquisition. She lives in fear of being caught out in her deception. With her father, a printer, she tries to secrete and maintain many of the books of Moorish Spain, the knowledge of the ancients, which the church begins to declare heretical in England. The second book, The Other Boleyn Girl, is about Anne Boleyn, but told from the perspective of her sister, Lady Mary, who was also mistress to Henry, King of England, while he was married to Catherine of Aragon. The Boleyn girls are portrayed as mere pawns in the great game of power in the English court.
So this newest book, The Constant Princess, opens in Spain, as Queen Isabella of Castile, Catherine’s mother, and King Ferdinand of Aragon fight to eliminate the Moors and to unite their lands into one Kingdom. The little girl, whose mother is the chief strategist and who fights in armor alongside her husband, learns battlefield tactics at her parent’s feet and in their camps and learns diplomatic skills in their throne rooms.
We follow Catherine to England, married first to Arthur, then after Arthur’s death, to Henry. She assures them her marriage to Arthur was never consummated, that Arthur was too young, and impotent. Gregory assumes this was a lie. We don’t know. I would guess that it was one of those lies that nobody believes but was convenient to all to pretend to believe, for money, for power, for alliances.
We stand with Catherine as she sends Henry off to fight the French, then leads her own troops up to vanquish the Scots. We agonize with her as she strives to become pregnant, to carry an heir to the throne full term to birth, and as she loses a seemingly perfect baby boy to infant death. We sit with her in stragegic councils, watch her balance the budgets for court and state, and scheme to protect the English borders against all threats. Whew! Being a Queen of England is hard work!
The book ends with Catherine facing the eccliastical trial as her own husband disputes the validity of her marriage to him and seeks to set her aside for his freedom to marry Anne Boleyn.
I don’t review every book I read, but I was captivated by the cross cultural threads in this book, and by the fact that while we all know the basic facts of the story – Henry divorces Catherine of Aragon to marry Anne Boeyn – Catherine’s history, her talents, her strengths and victories were news to me. The influence of her upbringing in Moorish Spain and the influence it played on her growing understanding of the world is a golden thread woven throughout the story.
Early in her first marriage, the young princess tells her beloved husband of her childhood in Grenada:
” . . . We walk in their gardens, we bathe in their hammams, we step into their scented leather slippers and we live a life that is more refined and more luxurious than they could dream of in Paris or London or Rome. We live graciously. We live, as we have always aspired to do, like Moors. Our fellow Christians herd goats in the mountains, pray at roadside cairns to the Madonna, are terrified by superstition and lousy with disease, live dirty and die young. We learn from Moslem scholars, we are attended by their doctors, study the stars in the sky which they have named, count with their numbers which start at the magical zero, eat of their sweetest fruits and delight in the waters which run through their aquaeducts. Their architecture pleases us: at every turn of every corner we know that we are living inside beauty. . . . We learn their poetry, we laugh at their games, we delight in their gardens in their fruits, we bathe in the waters that have made flow. We are the victors, but they have taught us how to rule. . . .”
I can hardly wait for a trip to Spain!
Lisey’s Story: Stephen King
Mostly I wait for books to come out in paperback, so that they don’t hurt me if I fall asleep while I am reading (!), but for a few authors I will make an exception. One, James Lee Burke, I told you about in a previous post He Had Me From Hello.
My most recent exception was for Lisey’s Story, the newest novel out by Stephen King. It’s a departure from Stephen King as we know him, and yet, there are resonances and echoes of earlier writings. Stephen King is brilliant at capturing the terrors of childhood, and the diaphanously thin membrane separating reality as we know it (not that we agree on what “reality” is! 😉 ) from the “otherworld”. In the Dark Tower series, the otherworld was where all the bad things were created and passed over to this side through leaks, places where the membrane holding worlds apart thinned and even disappeared.
This book is covered with flowers, bright pink and fushia and purple peonies, lupin and daisies, shading into blacks, whites and greys at the top, so that the holleyhocks are only faintly blue. It’s a very odd cover for a Stephen King book, but this is a very odd book. Early reviews say it is about as autobiographical a book by Stephen King as he has ever written, and I believe it. Stephen King writes what he knows – from Misery, written shortly after his nearly fatal accident as he was walking along a road near his Vermont farm and was hit by a van and nearly crippled for life, to this one, Lisey’s Story, in which we spend a lot of time in a dead author’s writing loft in an old barn in – you guessed it – Vermont.
As Lisey’s Story opens, we learn that she is the widow of an author (an author a whole lot like Stephen King) who has made a fortune writing fantasy/horror books. As the book unfolds, we walk with her through her devastating grief, bitter anger, and the endless exhaustion of trying to clear out her husband’s study. Every time she tackles the task, she is distracted by vivid and disturbing memories, memories she has tried to keep deeply buried because of their troubling implications.
King is writing on multiple levels. On one level, it is about a widow coming to terms with the death of her life partner. On another level, it is about a woman who doesn’t know her own strength and who comes to understand more about herself and about her relation to the world, and to her family of sisters. We’re there. We walk with her. If you’ve ever had sisters, you will particularly appreciate King’s treatment of how sisters relate to one another, and how that relationship both stays strong and loyal, and also evolves as sisters become adult people facing adult crises.
Throughout the book are whispers reminding us that the dead are all around us, leaving hints and reminders that their reality, too, is only a thin membrane away from our own.
And, on the most obvious level, King is writing about a boy and the source of his nightmares, the same source of his healing powers, the real life nightmares that haunt us all, and how with bravery and goodness and tools we don’t even know we have, we can triumph over evil.
Stephen King taps into the child within us all. He knows the terrors of our childhood, and he knows that evil gains power from the ability to terrify. Stephen King believes good can triumph over evil – when good people band together, evil can be beaten. In every book, there is a moment when one has to make a choice to stand against evil or be crushed by evil, and while his heroes and heroines are flawed and human – they are good, and they choose to stand against the evil. They may come out scarred and bloody, but they also come out triumphant.
It may not be great literature, but it’s a fine read. Stephen King’s books also are great vocabulary builders. He uses unusual and precise words to paint his word pictures.
Prediction: Kuwaiti Best Sellers
(Whooping with laughter!) I’m on a roll today – again, Kuwaiti Times, page 6
There is no surer way to guarantee books make the best-seller list than to ban them. Imagine the fun you will have smuggling books by Kuwaiti writers Mohammed Abdul Qadar Al-Jassim (Sheikhs of Dignity) and Zaid Jlewi Al-Enezi (25 Constituencies . . . The Best Choice) into the country.
Al-Jassims book is banned because it “discusses taboos concerning Kuwait’s political leadership and the ruling family.” Al-Enezi’s book is banned “for discussing sectarian and tribal issues concerning the electoral system followed in Kuwait.
Even dull books are bought once they are banned. Maybe the Ministry of Information is using reverse psychology?
Addiction and Amy Tan
“I’ll just go in to get the birthday cards,” I said to myself, but the moment I opened the large brass-handled swinging doors, my heart started pounding, my breath came faster and like a moth to the flame, I headed straight toward that huge pile of “Best Sellers” just inside the door.
Mentally slapping myself and forcing myself back on the planned path, I forced myself away from the new arrivals and towards the cards. But oh, the temptations along the path . . . new sudoku. . . .oh a new Gregory Maguire . . . oh! oh! oh!
With great discipline, I manage to buy the cards and only two new books, a new Stephen King book, hot off the press, (my son had mentioned it and that it was getting great reviews) and the new Amy Tan book. Rationalization – I am returning to Kuwait and it is a looooooooooooonnnnnngggggg trip, easily a two book trip. But when you have an addiction, any excuse will do.
Amy Tan is always a rollicking good read. For one thing, her books focus on that big favorite theme of mine, cross cultural communication – and miscommunication. She has a keen eye, rapier sharp wit, and filets her characters neatly, but humanely.
Saving Fish from Drowning is about a tour group en route to China and Burma, told from the point of view of the tour group organizer – an art and museum patron who dies before the trip begins! She is with the group, however, in spirit – able to see everything, know what people are thinking, but not to intervene. Without her guidance, the group goes desperately awry – and it is funny, but also very very scary. You know something BAD is going to happen, and it isn’t going to be pretty.
Tan writes some great prose. Here is an excerpt about the main character, as she looks back over her life:
“But I ask myself now – was there ever a true great love? Anyone who became the object of my obsession and not simply my affections? I honestly don’t think so. In part, this was my fault. It was my nature, I suppose. I could not let myself become that unmindful. Isn’t that what love is – losing your mind? You don’t care what people think. You don’t see your beloved’s faults, the slight stinginess, the bit of carelessness, the occasional streak of meanness. You don’t mind that he is beneath you socially, educationally, financially and morally – that’t the worst I think, deficient morals.
“I always minded. I was always cautious of what could go wrong, and what was already “not ideal.” I paid attention to the divorce rates. I ask you this: What’s the chance of finding a lasting marriage? Twenty percent? Ten? Did I know any woman who excaped from having her heart crushed like a recyclable can? Not a one. From what I have observed, when the anesthesia of love wears off, there is always the pain of consequences. You don’t have to be stupid to marry the wrong man.”
Whew! Amy! You said a mouthful!
Mary Doria Russell Duo
Some of the very best books on cross-cultural miscommunications are written in science fiction, and by some of the greatest names, the oldies but goodies. Now I know by naming a couple, I am going to offend some of those out there by leaving out your favorites – please feel free to jump in (comments section) and make additonal recommendations.
One of the great classics is Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. It is a hilarious book, with occasional moments of pathos, but an easy read, and an unforgettable book.
Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness is another primer in the kinds of misunderstandings that can come with the best of intentions. She also deals with the changes that living in an alien culture makes in the visitor, as well as the visited.
More recently written is a duo by Mary Doria Russell. Her hero, Father Emilio Sandoz, is a Jesuit priest. Sent as an intergalactic evangelist, he runs into some serious problems. These are very strong book, adult books with adult topics and sexual content, not for those who want an easy read and feel good at the end. It is about spiritual testing, as well as survival. There are parts of these two books where you will laugh out loud, and parts where you will be so depressed you don’t want to continue reading. At the same time, they are deeply spiritual.
The saddest, funniest, most horrible part of all is that the worst things happen as a result of the very best intentions. Russel’s characters try to get into one another’s way of thinking – and fail miserably. The results are horrorific.
And yet . . . in the end, there is redemption. These are books that get you thinking, and keep you thinking for a long time. They stretch your mind, opening topics you never dreamed existed.
You can read either of these two books, The Sparrow and The Children of God as a stand-alone read, or you can read them together. I personally found The Children of God the better book, but because I find Russell so addictive, so insightful, I recommend them both. They are available from Amazon at around $10/each in paperback.
John Milton and Freedom of the Press
John Milton wrote the Areopagitica in 1644, in protest of a law passed in England which required all books and pamphlets to be OK’ed by a group of censors before being published. He believed that if England allowed licensing of books – who could be printed and who could not – it would be an attempt at controlling what the people were thinking. Milton is not easy reading, but I still get a thrill reading his defense of freedom of the press.
This comment on Milton is from the St. Lawrence Institute:
“While knowledge of this context is important to an understanding of the nature of Milton’s passion in writing this pamphlet, it is not essential to a modern appreciation of its contents. Milton’s words are just as powerful today in their call for freedom of thought as they were in his own. The issue he is addressing is still with us: the debate between legitimate societal control and freedom – whether of printing, speech, or thought – is on-going, and will continue to be of central importance in our media-dependent culture.”
This is John Milton’s most often quoted paragraph:
“And perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evil, that is to say of knowing good by evil. As therefore the state of man now is; what wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbear without the knowledge of evil? He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true warfaring Christian. I can not praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.”
If you are looking for a challenge, you can read the whole Areopagitica here:
He had me from “hello”
I like James Lee Burke so much that when his newest book came out – Pegasus Descending – I went ahead and pre-ordered it in hardcover. We usually wait for books to come out in paperback; they don’t hurt so much when you accidentally fall asleep and the book falls on your face. 😉
My first James Lee Burke mystery was A Morning for Flamingos. Here is the opening paragraph:
“We parked the car in front of the parish jail and listened to the rain beat on the roof. The sky was black, the windows fogged with humidity, and white veins of lightening pulsated in the bank of thunderheads out on the Gulf.
‘Tante Lemon’s going to be waiting for you,’ Lester Benoit, the driver, said. He was, like me, a plainclothes detective with the sheriff’s department. He wore sideburns and a mustache, and had his hair curled and styled in Lafayette. Each year he arranged to take his vacation during the winter in Miami BEach so that he would have a year-round tan, and each year he bought whatever clothes people were wearing there. Even though he had spent his whole life in New Iberia, except for time in the service, he always looked as if he had just stepped off a plane from somewhere else.”
Holy Smokes! He had me from”hello!” This beautiful prose in a detective series?
The main character in the New Iberia (Louisiana) series is Dave Robicheaux, a deeply flawed sometimes-detective. A former drunk, he follows the 12 step programs, attends meetings, and introduces us to the complexities of crime and detective work in the arcane society of deep-South Louisiana. Occasionally, he will fall off the wagon, and you can feel it happening with anticipation and dread. You can hear the seductive siren of Jim Beam calling to him in his weakest moments. I’ve never been a drunk, and I’ve never lived in Louisiana, but thanks to James Lee Burke, I feel like I have. He puts us inside the skin of Dave Robicheaux, for better or worse.
He also takes us inside the social issues – race relations, big oil, organized crime, organized gambling, and all the other issues of louche Louisiana. Burke’s most deeply held convictions come through shining clearly – that crime not only damages the innocent, but damages those who choose the criminal track. His greatest scorn is for those who commit the crimes, and then crave social respectability.
Burke’s books are not only intensely visual, they are deeply sensual – you hear the sounds of the crickets, you taste the crawdads at the celebration on the village green, you suffer the beatings, and your skin crawls when you meet some of the nastiest-every day villains you will ever meet. They all seem to swarm to New Orleans and New Iberia.
This is from Pegasus Decending:
“It was hot and breathless outside, and the sound of dry thunder, like crackling cellophane, leaked from clouds that gave no rain. Through the back window I could see vapor lamps burning in City Park and a layer of dust floating on the bayou’s surface. I could see the shadows of the oaks moving in my yard when the wind puffed through the canopy. I could see beads of humidity, as bright as quicksilver, slipping down the giant serrated leaves of the philodendron, and the humped shape of a gator lumbering crookedly across the mudband, suddenly plunging nto water and disappearing inside the lily pads. I saw all these things just as I heard helicopter blades soaring by overhead, and for just a second, I saw Dallas Klein getting to his knees on a hot street swirling with yellow dust in Opa-Locka, Florida, just like a man preparing himself for his own decapitation.”
Wow. Doesn’t that just take your breath away?
James Lee Burke has won an astonishingly rare two Edgar Awards – Best Mystery of the year. His heros are gritty, there is violence and bloodshed – these are not feel-good stories. And yet, in small moments, there is redemption. His hero is both self-destructive and takes good care of his wild housecat, Snuggs, and his three legged racoon, Tripod. In this book he is on his third wife – I wonder if he kills off his current wife when the author is angry with his real-life wife? He wouldn’t be the first author to take his ire out on his characters!
If you like a good, can’t-put-it-down read, if you can handle the brutality of police work, and if you like a book that transports you to a new culture and new location and makes you feel like you have lived there, then James Lee Burke will delight you. I am so addicted, that I pre-order his books when I know a new one is coming out. He is that good.
Dave Robicheaux Novels:
The Neon Rain
Heaven’s Prisoners
Black Cherry Blues
A Morning for Flamingos
A stained White Radiance
In the Electric Mist with the Confederate Dead
Dixie City Jam
Burning Angel
Cadillac Jukebox
Sunset Limited
Purple Cane Road
Jolie Blon’s Bounce
Last Car to the Elysian Fields
Crusader’s Cross
Pegasus Descending
Billy Bob Holland Novels (Montana deeply flawed, former alcoholic detective a lot like Dave Robicheaux)
Cimmarron Rose
Heartwood
Bitterroot
In the Moon of Red Ponies
Other Fiction:
Half of Paradise
To the Bright and Shining Sun
Lay Down my Sword and Shield
Two for Texas
The Convict
The Lost Get-Back Boogie
White Doves at Morning
James Lee Burke(R) in New Iberia
We Need to Talk About Kevin
This morning on BBC, as part of the coverage on the horrorific murders in the peaceful Amish country of Pennsylvania, they interviewed Lionel Shriver, author of the award winning book “We Need to Talk About Kevin.”
This is not a recommendation. Shriver’s book, which has won several awards for literary excellence, is not for the faint-hearted. It is a tough, muscular, bleak examination of a similar, fictional incident, written after the Columbine High School massacres.
My best friend and I read this book at the same time – it was a book club selection, paired with another book on a similar theme, “Early Leaving.” We ended up exchanging horrified e-mails every morning, discussing events in the book as if they were a part of our daily life, and speculating on where this was all going.
It is from a mother’s point of view, written to her husband, from whom she is separated after . . . .something . . . We don’t know what that something is. The book unfolds steadily and relentlessly. You want to stop. Truly you do, I am not exaggerating. The book rolls on, so dark, so ominous, you know it is leading up to something truly horrible. You don’t want to look. And you can’t stop reading.
“Why are we reading this???” we asked each other in agony. And we didn’t stop.
“Why did you want me to read this?” your friends will say, as you pass this book along, and then, shell shocked, they will come to you to discuss it. Most often, I didn’t even recommend the book, but friends would overhear other friends talking about it in hushed, horrified voices, and would insist.
The book is the scariest, most real book I have ever read. It hits at the heart of every mother’s secret fears – what if we have done something wrong while raising our child? What if our child turns into a monster? Do we ever really know anyone – our children? Our husbands? Ourselves? We are all so vulnerable in our mothering skills, so quick to blame ourselves for our children’s failings, and this book bravely explores that fear, that vulnerability, without taking the easy way out and giving easy answers.
If you read this book you will find yourselves talking about it months – even years – after you read it. It is a terrifying book.
And after you read it you will understand why my heart is breaking for everyone involved in this unthinkable killing in Pennsylvania. Were I some superstitious person, it would be so easy – it is clearly the devil’s work. I can’t imagine what this man could have been thinking, but he chose his victims – young, innocent girls – with purpose. My heart aches for his wife and children, who will bear this shame for the rest of their lives, and for his parents, who will wonder where they went wrong. My heart breaks especially for the peaceable Amish, revered throughout America for their simplicity and commitment in living their faith, who must try to find a way to forgive the man who took their innocent daughters’ lives.
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