A Century of Wisdom

Title: A Century of Wisdom
Author: Alice Herz-Sommer
Publisher: Two Roads Books
ISBN: 9781444737608

From the publisher: At 108 years old, Alice Herz-Sommer is the world’s oldest living Holocaust survivor. She is also the world’s oldest concert pianist.

Born in 1903 Prague to a family of Jewish intellectuals and musicians, Alice Herz-Sommer socialised with the likes of Kafka and Brod.

But in 1943, Alice, a prominent concert pianist, her husband and young son, were deported to Theresienstadt concentration camp.

Alice’s mother and husband perished, but Alice and her young son survived. Alice played more than 100 concerts for her fellow prisoners in the camp, giving them and herself comfort and hope. Her son was one of only 93 children (out of 15,000) to survive that camp.

A Century of Wisdom is a collection of Alice Herz-Sommer’s life stories and the lessons she has taken from them. Despite living through terrible experiences, her outlook is one of understanding, optimism and joy.

Despite all she has suffered and witnessed, Alice Herz-Sommer harbours no bitterness, which she believes only eats away at the hater.

Alice says, ‘only when we are old, do we realise the beauty of life – life is a present’.

And Still Peace Did Not Come

Title: And Still Peace Did Not Come: A Memoir of Reconciliation
Author: Agnes Kamara-Umunna
Publisher: Hyperion Books
ISBN: 140132357X

From the publisher: When bullets hit Agnes Kamara-Umunna’s home in Monrovia, Liberia, she and her father hastily piled whatever they could carry into their car and drove toward the border, along with thousands of others. An army of children was approaching, under the leadership of Charles Taylor. It seemed like the end of the world.

Slowly, they made their way to the safety of Sierra Leone. They were the lucky ones.

After years of exile, with the fighting seemingly over, Agnes returned to Liberia—a country now devastated by years of civil war. Families have been torn apart, villages destroyed, and it seems as though no one has been spared. Reeling, and unsure of what to do in this place so different from the home of her memories, Agnes accepted a job at the local UN-run radio station. Their mission is peace and their method is reconciliation through understanding and communication. Soon, she came up with a daring plan: Find the former child soldiers, and record their stories. And so Agnes, then a 43-year-old single mother of four, headed out to the ghettos of Monrovia and befriended them, drinking Club Beer and smoking Dunhill cigarettes with them, earning their trust. One by one, they spoke on her program, Straight from the Heart, and slowly, it seemed like reconciliation and forgiveness might be possible.

From Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, Africa’s first female president, to Butt Naked, a warlord whose horrific story is as unforgettable as his nickname — everyone has a story to tell. Victims and perpetrators. Boys and girls, mothers and fathers. Agnes comforts rape survivors, elicits testimonials from warlords, and is targeted with death threats — all live on the air.

Set in a place where monkeys, not raccoons, are the scourge of homeowners; the trees have roots like elephant legs; and peacebuilding is happening from the ground-up. Harrowing, bleak, hopeful, humorous, and deeply moving — And Still Peace Did Not Come is not only Agnes’s memoir: It is also her testimony to a nation’s descent into the horrors of civil war, and its subsequent rise out of the ashes.

Here If You Need Me

Title: Here If You Need Me
Author: Kate Braestrup
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 9780316066310

From the publisher: When the oldest of Kate Braestrup's four children was ten years old, her husband, a Maine state trooper, was killed in a car accident. Stunned and grieving, she decided to pursue her husband's dream of becoming a Unitarian minister, and eventually began working with the Maine Game Warden Service, which conducts the state's search and rescue operations when people go missing in the wilderness.

Louisa says: The range and depth of this book surprised me. Braestrup writes with sincerity, humour, honesty and quiet compassion, not shying away from areas often ignored such as the practicalities of death. Her anecdotes illuminate some of the challenges faced by Maine state troopers and the sensitivity, strength and courage needed for chaplaincy.

A View Of The Ocean

Title: A View Of The Ocean
Author: Jan de Hartog
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 978-0-375-42470-0

From the publisher: The internationally best-selling novelist, playwright Jan de Hartog, author of The Captain and The Peaceable Kingdom, moves and inspires us with this simple, elegant story of his mother and himself.

She was a quiet, unassuming woman married to a giant of a man, a famous Protestant theologian and pastor, simple, bighearted and big-muscled, who moved through life with gusto and the commotion of a wagon train and who, but for God, might have become a pirate or a general. He adored his wife and didn’t like anyone else around to claim her attention. Their sons saw him as a monster of egocentricity, a tyrant, a blustering bully; to her he was a sensitive, shy, helpless man with a mission. She believed in him from the moment they met, and under the wings of her faith in him as a philosopher, he became one.

During their thirty years of marriage this woman’s only concern was to enable her husband to hearken to “the voice of God.”

After his death she discovered somewhere deep inside a core of drop-forged steel. She rose to the challenge of widowhood and, continuing his work, took his place in the world. The full splendor of this tiny, frail woman’s character, intelligence, and courage became evident during her World War II internment in a Japanese camp in the Dutch East Indies, when she managed to arrange a cease-fire between the Dutch Army and Indonesian guerillas.

After her release from prison camp, she returned to Amsterdam, and resumed her simple life, offering spiritual advice to those seeking solace. Finally, she was faced with the ultimate test of her spirit: a diagnosis of a cancer too far advanced for treatment.

De Hartog tells us how his mother’s blazing courage through it all inspired his own spiritual awakening as he found, in her final months, the strength, the power, and the acceptance to see her through to the end.

Letters From Burma

Title: Letters From Burma
Author: Aung San Suu Kyi
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780141041445

From the publisher: In these unforgettable letters, Aung San Suu Kyi reaches out beyond Burma's borders to paint for her readers a vivid and poignant picture of her native land.

Here she celebrates the courageous army officers, academics, actors and everyday people who have supported the National League for Democracy, often at great risk to their own lives. She reveals the impact of political decisions on the people of Burma, from the terrible cost to the children of imprisoned dissidents - allowed to see their parents for only fifteen minutes every fortnight - to the effect of inflation on the national diet and of state repression on traditions of hospitality. She also evokes the beauty of the country's seasons and scenery, customs and festivities, that remain so close to her heart.

Through these remarkable letters, the reader catches a glimpse of exactly what is at stake as Suu Kyi fights on for freedom in Burma, and of the love for her homeland that sustains her non-violent battle.

Appalling Silence

Louisa says: This is not about politics, this is not even about religion, this is about education, this is about educating yourself against ignorance and fear. I am deeply disturbed by the number of Islamophobic remarks I have heard recently, all the more so as they were from people I sincerely believe should know better. After what this island has experienced in the recent past, we are the last people who should blithely attach a religious label to political or cultural practices we disagree with. This is especially true if we have not bothered to try to understand these political or cultural differences, or how they have morphed from the religious beliefs of their adherents.

It is easy and lazy to demonise those we do not understand; it takes courage to stand in the shoes of those we fear, of those we disagree with, of those we find repellent. It takes courage because we may find that they are not so scary, that we share common ground with them, that they are not really so very different after all, and that we should be ashamed for ever having thought otherwise. Have courage, educate yourself against fear, know when you are being lied to by those who would keep you scared and by sensationalist media, speak out against bigotry. If you say to me, "I hate the way Muslim men treat their women", I will challenge you - when was the last time you talked with a Muslim of either gender on the subject? If you say to me, "The Koran incites violence", you'd better have at least read the book.

What do you know of Islam? What do you know of Muslims? Do you understand more than the TV cable news? More than the attention-grabbing headlines? Below are three books by Karen Armstrong, the tip of the iceberg but a good place to start. For further reading, there are articles online and suggestions of books at www.islamfortoday.com, a site which began as "practical and theological information about Islam" by a Western convert who states in the introduction, "I consider it essential to make a clear distinction between, on the one hand, the theology and religion of Islam and, on the other, politics and terrorism involving Muslims who sometimes swathe their local culture or regional geopolitical concerns in the cloak of Islam."

Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people."

Title: Islam: A Short History
Author: Karen Armstrong
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 978-0-8129-6618-3

From the publisher: In the public mind, Islam is a religion of extremes: the world’s fastest-growing faith; more than three-quarters of the world's refugees are Islamic; it has produced government by authoritarian monarchies in Saudi Arabia and ultra-republicans in Iran. Whether we are reading about civil war in Algeria or Afghanistan, the struggle for the soul of Turkey, or political turmoil in Pakistan or Malaysia, the Islamic context permeates all these situations.

Karen Armstrong's elegant and concise book traces how Islam grew from the other religions of the book, Judaism and Christianity; introduces us to the character of Muhammed; and demonstrates that for much of its history, the religion has been a force for enlightenment that promoted liberties for women and allowed the arts and sciences to flourish. Islam shows how this progressive legacy is today often set aside as the faith struggles to come to terms with the economic and political weakness of most of its believers and with the forces of modernity itself.

No religion in the modern world is as feared and misunderstood as Islam. It haunts the popular imagination as an extreme faith that promotes terrorism, authoritarian government, female oppression, and civil war. In a vital revision of this narrow view of Islam and a distillation of years of thinking and writing about the subject, Karen Armstrong’s short history demonstrates that the religion is a much more complex phenomenon than its modern fundamentalist strain might suggest.

Title: Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet
Author: Karen Armstrong
Publisher: Orion
ISBN: 9781842126080

From the publisher: Most people in the West know very little about the prophet Muhammad. The acclaimed religious writer Karen Armstrong has written a biography which will give us a more accurate and profound understanding of Islam and the people who adhere to it so strongly. Muhammad also offers challenging comparisons with the two religions most closely related to it - Judaism and Christianity.

Title: A History Of God
Author: Karen Armstrong
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 9780099273677

From the publisher: The idea of a single divine being - God, Yahweh, Allah - has existed for over 4, 000 years. But the history of God is also the history of human struggle. While Judaism, Islam and Christianity proclaim the goodness of God, organised religion has too often been the catalyst for violence and ineradicable prejudice. In this fascinating, extensive and original account of the evolution of belief, Karen Armstrong examines Western society's unerring fidelity to this idea of One God and the main conflicting convictions it engenders. A controversial, extraordinary story of worship and war, A History of God confronts the most fundamental fact - or fiction - of our lives.

The Wisdom To Know The Difference

Title: The Wisdom To Know The Difference
Author: Eileen Flanagan
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9781585428298

From the publisher:
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can change; and wisdom to know the difference.

Millions of people have been moved by these famous last lines from the Serenity Prayer to make important and lasting changes in their lives. But how exactly can we know the difference? How can we acknowledge the real limits that we face without negating the possibility for dramatic change? In this wise book, Eileen Flanagan guides readers in determining what they can - or perhaps should - change in their lives, accepting what they cannot, and discovering the "wisdom to know the difference."

Drawing on her own Quaker faith as well as a range of other religious and spiritual traditions, Flanagan shows readers how such practices as sifting through culturally preconceived notions and listening to our own inner voice can help us determine when a change is needed in our lives or when instead acceptance is the answer.