Bookworm Room

Tony Snow, writing in 2005:
The art of being sick is not the same as the art of getting well. Some cancer patients recover; some don’t. But the ordeal of facing your mortality and feeling your frailty sharpens your perspective about life. You appreciate little things more ferociously. You grasp the mystical power of love. You [...]

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Children are not fungible — you can’t lose one and just replace it with another. Nevertheless, no matter the tragedy, life goes on and sometimes it seems as if a greater force than mere human will is determining the outcome.

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It’s inspiring at two levels:  modern science and human decency.

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We went on Saturday to the Christmas concert given by the Grammy award winning San Francisco Boys Chorus.  It was an auditory delight. The SFBC doesn’t pretend to any PC Christmas white out, but instead, inundates you with truly beautiful Christmas and Christmas music.  This year’s program included Oh Holy Night, I Saw Three [...]

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Rather surprisingly, NPR picked up and did a nice job with the story of Bill Krissoff, the 60 year old man who enlisted in the Navy’s medical corp to honor his son, First Lt. Nathan Krissoff of Reno, Nev., who was killed in Iraq last year.

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I heard it from the Paragraph Farmer, who heard it from the PalmTree Pundit, who read this incredible story of sacrifice, nobility and generosity at CDR Salamander. It’s not going to be a big story nationwide, of course, because it’s not about being a victim, it’s about being a hero. Still, I feel [...]

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Americans like to talk about ecumenicalism, which is an idea that concerns itself with “establishing or promoting unity among churches or religions.” We in America have proven to be very good at it, so much so that we think nothing of little news stories about the rabbi giving a talk to his neighbor’s church, [...]

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It’s inspiring because of the human spirit, because of compassion, because of bravery, and because of the reaches of modern surgery.  Watch it and be impressed.

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As you may recall, I thought it was a mistake to stave and dehydrate Terri Schiavo to death.  We know so little about the human brain and, as long as her parents were cheerfully willing to care for her, I thought it was out and out murder to bar them from providing that care.
It’s been [...]

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I don’t know about you, but it’s easy to read a whole bunch of quite uplifting symbolism into this story:
An 800-year-old, gold-plated crucifix that went missing after being seized by the Nazis has been found in a rubbish skip in Austria, police said.
The crucifix, made of copper and enamel, was crafted in Limoges, France, and [...]

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[I haven't had the chance to think this busy weekend, let alone blog.  For some reason, though, I can't get out of my head the WWII stories of a few people I met, long after the war, when they were old and gray.  I'm therefore resurrecting this post because I think it tells a story [...]

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We watched a humdinger of a movie yesterday, one you might already know about because it’s been out for a while, and received a lot of well-deserved acclaim. It’s a documentary called Murderball, which focuses on the lives of the United States Paralympic Rugby team.
These wheel chair bound rugby players, all with no leg [...]

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The West has developed a sophisticated capacity to destroy but, unlike any culture I can think of, it’s also developed a staggering ability to create, save and nurture:
A premature baby that doctors say spent less time in the womb than any other surviving infant is to be released from a Florida hospital Tuesday.
Amillia Sonja Taylor [...]

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Here’s a story that will cheer you up tremendously, if you need cheering, and that will make you feel even more cheerful if you started off in a good mood.� It’s a great reminder, too, the medicine is not infallible — and I say this as a strong believer in modern Western medicine and the [...]

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More news about the troops Kerry and Rangel casually insult. Again and again we learn that the same people Kerry and Rangel, safe in their offices, think are lazy slackers are, in fact, the best type of people:
Private First Class Ross A. McGinnis packed only 136 pounds into his 6-foot frame, but few have [...]

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As you may recall, Michael Monsoor fell on a grenade to save his comrades. It turns out that Michael Fumento, during a previous visit to Iraq, spent time with Monsoor’s unit. He has pictures of Monsoor, and some video footage, which he shares here.

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Despite the fact that more than 60 years have past since the end of the Nazi’s deranged regime, stories about survival and decency still crop up.  Here’s one that came through my email:
Here is an unknown story that I believe will be of interest and that you might like to pass on.  Carry your Leica [...]

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This is my day to write about dogs.  I noted earlier today that the Islamic horror over dogs isn’t even a religious proscription, it’s a cultural one.  This is also my day to write about sacrifice, since I posted on the death of Michael Mansoor, who threw himself on a grenade to save his fellow [...]

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This story, about Thomas Quasthoff, a world renowned bass-baritone is an amazing and wonderful one:
Thomas Quasthoff titled both his autobiography and a recent CD compilation “The Voice,” underscoring the bass-baritone vocal instrument that has made him an internationally acclaimed singer. But it is safe to say that the main thing an audience notices when Quasthoff [...]

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Danny Kaye had his first staring role in 1944’s Up In Arms. It’s quite a silly movie — with “silly” being a redundant adjective because we’re talking about Danny Kaye (whom I loved as a child and like as an adult).
In the movie, Kaye plays a hypochondriac who is drafted. (Dana Andrews, as [...]

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Joe Rosenthal shot the iconic Iwo Jima photograph that shows the Marines raising the second flag on that blood-soaked island. As Rosenthal made clear, this was not a posed photograph; it was not false propaganda:
Ten years after the flag-raising, Rosenthal wrote that he almost didn’t go up to the summit when he learned [...]

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Beautiful little story here about the human capacity for altruism and self-sacrifice. I’m still wiping away the tears.
UPDATE: Sometimes people take something and run with it. Just see what Kathryn did with this one little link.

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It’s stories such as this one that remind you why humans, unlike any other animals, have been able to survive in every part of the globe but for the extreme poles:
Three Mexican fishermen have been rescued after drifting for about nine months across thousands of miles of the Pacific Ocean in a small boat, an [...]

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I’ve been depressed lately by the sheer volume of scary and bad news: the Israeli/Hezbollah war and its pathetic outcome, with Israel actually believing that signing on to the defeatist UN ceasefire will improve her standing in world opinion; the planned London airplane bombings, which included mothers intentionally using their babies as bomb shields; [...]

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I wrote here about my Dad's Italian POWs in North Africa, and how charming they were.  One of the things he found especially memorably was how they coaxed gardens out of the desert.  Since it's Memorial Day, it's probably no coincidence that I found this NPR story, complete with amazing pictures, about people (soliders, civilians, [...]

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