Heather Irvine

Traveling With Pomegranates: A Mother-Daughter Story

admin — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 09:00:00 +0000

Traveling With Pomegranates tells the two parallel stories of its authors, a mother and daughter. The two women learn about themselves while abroad in Greece and France, as well as in their respective homes in South Carolina.

Ann comes to terms with her disappointment in receiving a rejection letter from the only affordable school offering a Master's degree in Greek history. During the year that follows, she is plagued with depression that follows this blow to her confidence. While traveling with her mother, Ann maps out her path as a writer, even though she had long resisted following in her mothers footsteps. (She didn't want to risk a lifetime of being compared to her mother.) Ann finds out she a unique knack for travel writing, which helps her to preserve her independent spirit.

Sue’s discoveries bring forth the ideas, imagery, and symbolism that formed her hugely successful book, The Secret Life of Bees. While Traveling With Pomegranates contains some of the same Southern magic and mystique as The Secret Life of Bees, it hits a little closer to home for the average reader. These women’s lives are at once ordinary and extraordinary, but the way they tell their tale of reconnecting with the energizing spirit of Greece is inspiring.

With Greek mythology guiding their tour, Sue and Ann are each profoundly influenced Persephone, Demeter, and various portrayals of Mary they find in various places: a cave, cathedrals, a convent in the mountains, the coast of South Carolina, books, the tiny pomegranate charms they wear. This modern mom-and-daughter travel story tells of the magic of Greece, which the pair find in odd coincidences and signs they encounter. The magic for the reader is in their scintillating descriptions of the country's architecture, taxi drivers, performers, and lovers.

The connection between these two is exceptional. The cohesion of their experiences and concern for each other creates a mutual understanding and emotional response to their trip that all of us an learn from. Traveling With Pomegranates imparts wisdom in its perspectives on accepting rejection, coping with depression, managing life changes after marriage, settling into menopause, and seizing the day.

Written by: Heather Irvine, February 23rd 2010

A Community Organizer's Tale: People and Power in San Francisco

admin — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 01:00:00 +0000

By Mike Miller

Heyday Books

A Community Organizer’s Tale: People and Power in San Francisco is a radical history with a heap of theory folded in and a touch of imagery. It would be fascinating and informative to anyone interested in community organizing, housing issues, ethnic and labor struggles, civil rights, the history of San Francisco, or community-friendly city planning. The author, a San Francisco native, has been deeply involved in community organizing in the area for most of seventy-two years. He has a long resume of primary and supportive positions with communities, many central to famous movements and connected to famous organizers in San Francisco and other cities. He touches on details of his experience during the '60s in significant famous events in the civil rights and labor movements and the climates that developed into one another consecutively.

Major connections are revisited several times, which was helpful for me since I am a reader without a lot of previous understanding of the timing or significance of all the events, as well as terms like urban renewal and model cities. Strategies of urban renewal and model cities, for example, have had different outcomes for each city, depending on how the greater number of individuals and cohesive organizations in the communities responded. If you are wondering what Miller’s opinion of those strategies is, it’s not all good, at least not historically. He presents the simple, logical, and real reasons why.

In addition to describing what was going on nationally and how the top organizers worked, Miller tells of his experience as an organizer, emphasizing his various organizations goals and what political and economic decisions meant for middle class workers, minorities, unemployed, and homeowners and tenants in various communities. If you live in or are familiar with San Francisco, you might be tickled or heartbroken by truths revealed about causes of change in particular neighborhoods. Individual churches, blocks, restaurants, and business people are painted in a favorable light. One of my favorite lines depicting neighborhood politics is where he states, “We were regulars there, so the owner didn’t mind his cook taking breaks to be a community leader.” My other favorite line is a quote before the introduction, a former New York Governor on community organizing: “[Barack Obama] was a community organizer... I don’t even know if that’s a job.”

This would be a great educational piece for interested students, or workers in the field. That is, anyone wanting to get up to speed on what has happened in community organizing in San Francisco, Chicago, and nationally. I recommend it to anyone wanting to be part of the future of this movement, because history really does inspire greatness.

Written by: Heather Irvine, December 23rd 2009

Doctor Olaf Van Schuler’s Brain

admin — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 23:33:00 +0000

By Kristen Menger-Anderson

Algonquin Books

A thriller that spans five centuries, Doctor Olaf Van Schuler’s Brain is entertaining and thought provoking. Thirteen generations of eccentric New York City doctors navigate genius, madness and morality. This book is eerie, smart, unique, and very delicately crafted, telling many stories in every layer of time.

The Van Schulers and Steenwycks are a family of eccentric, genius, medical people, mostly doctors, some more on the fringe than others, some mad. Each has his unique specialty. Their fallibilities play out over obsessions with the brain and the mind. Each generation is engaged in inventing a medical fad of the era. For some, the result is tragic. For most it is less clear whether the result has been heroic or tragic. Always, someone has been fooled.

One physician hides both his mother’s extreme madness and his study of the brain from the Catholic Church. He is convinced he will cure her. He also suffers from lunacy. His obsession with collecting the brains of deceased animals escalates into a gruesome, out of control spiral that condemns them both. Others are almost as odd, though less secretive and polarized. One testifies in favor of a philandering widow, that his deceased wife died of spontaneous combustion by alcoholism. Another performs an experimental surgery, one of the first lobotomies, on his younger sister, hiding this from his older sisters. One Steenwyck is a medicine showman. Wives swallow gulps of radium to promote fertility and feed it to their husbands, revealing secret wishes.

The Steenwycks continue the tradition of cutting edge medicine into the modern era. The protagonists in the last two or three chapters happen to be women. Neither the oddness nor the deceit seem quite as striking or overt in the last era. But maybe that is because we are living in the same time. This novel is quite a reflection on changes in beliefs and the application of science. The only time the change seemed abrupt was the later shift to the 1980s, though maybe that is because it is closer to now. This is what makes it so thought provoking: the gradual transition from backward ways that were once new, all the way to the controversial new.

The novel was truly a pleasure to read and thoroughly researched. The odd medical techniques are real, and nested in the beliefs and social climate of each era. It would be especially fun for anyone interested in the history of medicine. It would be interesting to use to generate discussion in a seminar related to ethics, the history of medicine, or the history of New York City.

Written by: Heather Irvine, April 17th 2009

Emotional Bullshit: The Hidden Plague That Is Threatening to Destroy Your Relationships—And How to Stop It

admin — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 10:42:00 +0000

By Carl Alasko, Ph.D.

Tarcher

Emotional bullshit, however far flung, rarely consists of strategies for conflict aversion. Carl Alasko’s Emotional Bullshit: The Hidden Plague that Is Threatening to Destroy Your Relationships—And How to Stop It consists of strategies for identifying and replacing those habits. Denial, delusion, and blame sneak into our repertoire, to make us look or feel better about our job, our part in a relationship, or role in our family, how far we’ve digressed from our goals and integrity, or keeping promises, to ourselves and others. In some it is tastelessly obvious, in others it is virtually undetected, at least for a while.

Alasko describes three common habits: denial, delusion and blame as a self-camouflaging sequence, in addition to that pesky, prickly good feeling we get from serotonin when we’re in love can help us get hooked on delusions about a relationship, even when we at first see bad signs. Like any good self-help book, it makes a lot of sense, and yet it is original and interesting.

My eager endorsement of the book may be self-incriminating; allow me to follow a genre approach to elucidate: Do you often spend time, energy or other resources avoiding conflict? Do you rationalize your own or others behavior? Following a confrontation do you have thoughts about how right or how much better you are? Are you often lonely or are you usually in relationships that are parasitic or filled with strife? In short, anyone who has strife in a relationship of any kind could theoretically benefit.

There are a couple strategies on how to deal immediately with conflict, even if you are in a position where you cannot respond, or are incapacitated to respond well. And there are more complex strategies for engaging in ongoing discussion with someone you have an intimate relationship with and are committed to. These are "fool proof if you follow all the steps/rules." Realistically, I can imagine very many alternate "out of bounds" responses and outcomes for every case study that went well.

To the author's credit, attempts one, two and three to getting it right are often described. Some of the couples' true stories are very moving. I can't help but think that they benefited particularly by having the author as their therapist, and that undertaking the strategy, however simple, as "amateurs" and without a neutral, and professional, mediator, could take a lot more tries. Still, better self-awareness, at least, can be achieved by reading Emotional Bullshit: The Hidden Plague that Is Threatening to Destroy Your Relationships—And How to Stop It.

Written by: Heather Irvine, March 29th 2009

Patient Listening: A Doctor’s Guide

admin — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 11:44:00 +0000

By Loreen Herwaldt

University of Iowa Press

We talked for 45 minutes. It didn’t take much. You’re not asking them to be a guru, a Tibetan monk, a psychologist, or practice in a different field. Just ask one more question, two more questions. Somehow everything comes into place much quicker.

This patient’s story captures the meaning of this collection of prose by twenty-four writers who have extensive experiences as patients. Loreen Herwaldt is a physician and educator in Internal Medicine and Epidemiology at the University of Iowa who selected close to one hundred pieces in Patient Listening in order to help students and medical practitioners appreciate the importance of communication and listening in their service.

An introduction and additional section, along with responses from other professionals, orient educators and practitioners on how to use this book. Here, a section of prose by a patient summarizes the purpose of what follow, “Medical training is fantastically narrow and intensive. It has to be…I’m not saying doctors need to go to liberal arts college…but I think it would be important to get the patient’s point of view.”

The patients' experiences are negative and positive, sometimes both are heard from the same author. Some experience alienation, for example, while overhearing a teaching physician excitedly pegging her as “a great case” and telling students “[t]hey were going to have an opportunity to do things they didn’t normally do.” Another appreciates a statement made by a surgeon who suddenly gets that the two don't have a good rapport: “No, you’ve had enough trouble with your eyes, you’re not having trouble with your doctors as well.”

Patients also take responsibility for their own experiences: “I thought if I got really sick, people would pay attention.” Another woman, who had a bone marrow replacement, describes taking the advice of hospital staff: to put up a picture of herself when she was healthy, so friends would remember and other staff members would be more likely to treat her like a “normal” person. Another appreciative piece relates, “I could not imagine getting 87,000 phone calls the way my hematologist does and not being half crazy. But he’s not… When I see him he is incredibly focused… and he’s very compassionate."

On average, the prose in Patient Listening has a tone that is critical of patient-doctor relationships, but there are many positive examples interwoven. In short, this book would be helpful read for anyone in either of the “two classes” described by one author: the “healthy in white coats, calling the shots” and “the great cases.”

Written by: Heather Irvine, July 23rd 2008

Emerita Natural Lubricant

admin — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 19:39:00 +0000

Babeland

Anything that crosses my pantyline has to appeal to my senses and pass a rigorous background check. This lube scored an eight on appeal, and a ten on personality. The packaging is attractive: subtle, unique, neither boring nor racy, more hip and less incriminating than a bottle of other top brand lubes. The two-ounce bottle is discreet enough for a first date and ample enough for at least a third and fourth. The price, $8.99, seems right, comparable to what I’ve paid for other natural lubricants. I also like that it is practically odor-free, more than other ‘unscented’ lubricants. Like most water-based lubes, it washes out easily. The one let-down, ubiquitous to most water-based lubes I’ve found, is evaporation. I really put it to the test, using it during the driest part of my cycle, which for me is like trying to raft in the Mojave desert. The lube got a little bit sticky and pasty as it dried up, but rehydrated just fine.

After researching the company, I wanted the lube to perform a bit more miraculously than it did. Emerita is a woman-owned and operated company with a variety of natural, herbal products for skin care, perimenopausal and menopausal women, and my favorite category of care: sexual vitality! The website contained understandable information about the ingredients that agreed with what I’ve learned as an herbal student. I was also pleased by the images on the website: women enjoying their healthy, beautiful bodies - cellulite, wrinkles and all.

Written by: Heather Irvine, July 19th 2007

Handbook of the Evolution of Human Sexuality

admin — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 02:07:00 +0000

Edited by Michael R. Kauth

Haworth Press

The style and content in a sentence: Professional enough for an academic, but thought provoking for the general public. If you’re reading this with thoughts that the “Evolution” part of this title might limit the diversity of coverage of “Human Sexuality,” read on. Most of what we might have learned about evolution and sex on public television, in high school biology, health class and even in psychology 101 leaves everything other than heterosexual, reproductive, cave-man sex in the archeological dust. Handbook of the Evolution of Human Sexuality balances out former schooling in an extremely intelligent way.

The chapters are peer reviewed articles, also published as part of the Journal of Psychology and Human Sexuality. Chapters include The Evolution of Sexual Pleasure, How Ecology, Genes, Fertility and Fashion Influence Mating Strategies, Sexual Strategies Across Sexual Orientations and several chapters on same-sex orientation. The authors, mostly US & UK leaders in psychology, include an independent researcher, a clinical psychologist and an archeologist well read in sex, art and ethno-botany.

Artifacts in the form of art and traditions are provided and sociological explanations for sexual orientations and behaviors throughout human evolutionary history are proposed. Early images of women are interpreted as images of power rather than simply as sex-objects. Male-male sexual interactions are explained as adaptive alliances rather than subversions of society. Cross dressing, transgender and trans-sex are given a history much older than this century in places other than metro-sexual.

The articles are written to stand intellectual scrutiny, but the average person could probably read parts as an amendment to traditional text-book biology. Fascinating observations about same-sex interactions in social species are described. Historical evidence of accidental and intentional hormone alteration by humans with natural agents - such as consumption of hormones in mare’s urine (think 'premarin'), estrogenic plants and plants used for birth control - make the handbook memorable, quotable and eye opening to a history of human use of drugs affecting sex, often considered to be new or unnatural.

Sociologists, biology nerds, LGBTQ allies, alternative academics and anyone who’s spent lonely evenings reading about the science and history of sex could enjoy this book. Evolutionary psychologists ought to keep it as a professional reference. Though written to expand a discipline’s understanding of human behavior, this book appeals to curiosity about diversity in sexuality and individual choice.

Written by: Heather Irvine, July 4th 2007

The Anti 9-5 Guide: Practical Career Advice for Women Who Think Outside the Cube

admin — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 12:52:00 +0000

By Michelle Goodman

Seal Press

Offering variations on the theme of independence + passion + thrift = making it, Goodman combines personal experiences, interviews with women doing it their way, statistics and strategies to inspire and prepare us for better living outside the cube, or inside, if that’s where we currently happen to be.

Themes include devoting more time to a pet project, getting a more flexible work schedule, working abroad, finding your dream career, breaking into your dream industry, learning to build a house, fight wildfires and do other unladylike (ahem!), non-secretarial things for a living. Working from home, being your own boss and stitching up the seams of your patchwork paycheck and used clothing are covered somewhere between asking for Friday off and jumping out of the plane.

As a consolation, an appendix called "A Temp’s Survival Guide" reassures us it’s OK to take a normal job some of the time, and provides details on how to do it with dignity and flexibility and how to get your feet off the ground one lunch break, subway ride or underemployed year at a time.

I recommend this book to women and men for recognizing pitfalls and potentials in time management, shoestring budgeting and fundraising. I’ll keep it for the bibliography, references, free accounting and legal services for beginning businesses and NGOs and glossary of legalese. I used the “No-Fear Negotiation” advice to muster more out of my first “What do you require?” talk.

The bonus for women goes beyond the atypical use of “she” as the default pronoun. If this is a woman’s book, it is not through a degradation of men or even praise of women. It does, however, dedicate a substantial chapter to women’s personal experiences and advice on entering and thriving in predominately male fields. An astronaut, fire jumper, construction worker, fisherwoman, ranger and pastor relate their experiences of being a female rookie, discrimination, job demands, job satisfaction and talking to their families about what they do. Other chapters challenge boring roles in ordinary workplaces. It is still more normal for women than men to be in mediocre cube or front desk jobs. This book offers a variety of break-out-of-job-jail strategies, most safer than fire jumping, but thrilling nonetheless. Anyone changing careers or looking to siphon more time, energy or funds into a project they feel passionate about could apply the advice and inspiration in this employment improvement how-to guide.

Written by: Heather Irvine, June 20th 2007