Donbas: A True Story of an Escape Across Russia

This book was recommended to me by a friend.  I knocked it out in about 5 hours of reading.  I couldn't put it down.  It is an autobiographical story of a young man who was forced into a Russian slave labor shortly after the end of WWII.  He was 17 when he was picked up off the street on his way to school.  In an odd twist of fate, his father saw him locked in his train car.  Their eyes met for just a moment before the train pulled away.  Although he later was able to communicate with his parents after his escape, he never saw his father again.  After 2 1/2 years in a mining slave labor camp he makes a miraculous escape to freedom.  It is an incredible story and would be worthwhile for teenagers to read just to come to understand the great blessings of freedom that we enjoy and that those things are worth fighting for to maintain.

Aristotle's Children

Aristotle's Children is a history of Western civilization from about 600 BC to 1300 AD. Why that range? Because the focus of the book is how Aristotle's ideas were lost, then rediscovered at different times by Jews, Muslims, and finally Christians, and how his ideas caused big changes in those societies.

I don't know about you, but I sometimes have a hard time reading "general" histories---ones that wander through the timeline trying to highlight any event that might be important to someone. I enjoy histories that pick one or two themes and focus on them over several centuries. That's why I enjoyed this one. You got to see how Aristotle's ideas influenced Greek science, were imposed on Jews, were adopted by Muslims and then rejected because of some ways they conflicted with religion, and then were (literally) rediscovered in the form of some unearthed scrolls in Spain in the 1100s. Whereas Muslim civilization ultimately decided they weren't worth the threat to certain doctrines, Christian civilization hung onto them---for better or worse. They led to huge advancements in science (in fact, his ideas pretty much define the scientific method now) but they've also led to atheism and anti-religious sentiment.

The author often pointed out which Greek ideas agreed with traditional Christianity, and which ones didn't. One fun task was to keep a similar mental chart of which ones agreed with the Restored Gospel and which one didn't it ended up being a three-way Venn diagram. For example, I learned about the Cathars (a heretical group in France in the 1100s), the Cathar heretics reasoned their way into a different interpretation of the Fall of Adam, and some of their criticisms of the Catholic interpretation are spot on. They ended up a little closer to Restoration doctrines in some ways, but then they'd go awry in their reasoning---for example, deciding that all sex and birth are bad. It was fascinating to watch group after group correctly reject some false ideas, but then never quite get all the right ideas in one set of beliefs. It was a terrific study in the limits of reason and the need for revelation.

I do wish the book had spent more time talking about Jewish and Muslim history---it really only touches it lightly in one of the early chapter. However, this is a great survey of about 1500 years of human history, especially for understanding some of the roots of modern Western civilization. I was introduced to several personalities I'd never heard of before (like Peter Abelard) and some I previously knew very little about (like Thomas Aquinas). I found Boethius in particular to be a really admirable person, worth mentioning as a role model when teaching history.

The Sign of the Beaver

Kelly recommended The Sign of the Beaver to me and I just finished reading it. It's the story of a young boy who is left to care for his family's house in the deep woods of Maine in the early days of this country. It is a tale of his developing relationship with local Indians. The description of the relationships rings true without getting sentimental. It's a great coming-of-age story for kids, particularly boys, to read.

Someone Named Eva - Joan M. Wolf

Wow! This was an intense novel based on actual events that occurred during WWII. It is the story of a Czech girl who is taken to her family to be "repurposed" to become a "good German girl" and adopted by a German family. It is not light reading and if you want someone under the age of 12 to read it, I would pre-read it just to be sure they can handle the idea of concentration camps and other horrors of Nazi Germany.

But like other books such as Diary of Anne Frank, it is important to remember the difficult events in world history so we can prevent them from ever happening again.

John Adams

The first time I read David McCullough's John Adams it was a borrowed book and the impulse to underline and annotate was so strong I had to return the book after only about 70 pages. I eventually came into a copy of my own and this has become one of my favorite biographies. John Adams has emerged as one of my favorite Founding Fathers. He was a temperamental, opinionated man who felt the fear of being a nobody. Of all the Founding Fathers he has felt the most near my own thoughts and desires to make a difference as well as a keen awareness of personal faults. He feels like a real person to me. I would love to meet him someday. I would strongly recommend this book for your high-schooler. The relationship between John and Abigail should go down in history as one of the most intimate of friendships.

Kelly and I also watched the HBO adaptation of the book. While we liked it (3 stars), be aware that there are several scenes that are inappropriate for kids including: a tarring and feathering of a naked man, a leg amputation, a highly amorous, clothed love scene when John and Abigail see each other for the first time after a long separation. We fast-forwarded the love scene because it was uncomfortable but I don't believe there was any nudity. I didn't think the HBO series was anywhere near as good as just reading the book. That sounds familiar, doesn't it?