Tricotomania and more

I picked up Donna Jo Napoli’s Fire in the Hills at the library the other week. We’ve read some of her work before (The King of Mulberry Street) and really enjoyed it. Excellent historical fiction. This one is shelved in the teen section and refers to things younger kids might not be ready for (like rape and prostitution; no vivid descriptions or anything, but recognition that it happened). But this is another excellent book about WWII that focuses on something that I certainly haven’t come across much.

The main character is an Italian boy, Roberto, who is 14 at the beginning of the story and 16 by the end. The novel covers the period from 1943 to the end of the war and tells the story of Roberto’s return to his home city of Venice. Through flashbacks you get some of the story of how he came to be on an American ship attacking Sicily at the beginning of the book and some idea of what he’s seen of the war before this story begins. I notice on the jacket that it is a sequel to Stones in the Water. We haven’t read the first book and that didn’t affect our enjoyment of this at all.

The bulk of the book deals with Roberto’s involvement with the Italian resistance, the partigiani. This is fascinating material and gives a very interesting perspective on the war. First of all it indicates how complicated allegiances were and how and why they might have shifted. You get a view of the war from the ground but kind of from the margins.

But you also get a very good sense of both the horror of war and how people might respond to that. It is interesting that Roberto has seen a lot of horror and this has made him more pacifist. He doesn’t want to kill anyone. This is treated as a valued option within the story and he finds many ways to help the resistance that don’t involve killing anyone. This aspect of the story provides a realistic treatment of some very complicated ethical dillemmas. And they are treated well. We see the necessity of fighting back against brutality. We see the illogic of much of the violence. And we see a very human character grapple with notions of honour and pacifism. There are no easy answers and the book doesn’t give any. There is no Hollywood ending.

For people who want to avoid representations of violence and brutality, you won’t want to read this book. We all respond to representations of violence differently and we need to make our own judgements. For those who are prepared to read about violence if it is dealt with well, I recommend this book. It certainly doesn’t pull any punches on the brutality of war. But it doesn’t glorify violence either or provide unnecessarily graphic detail. There is no attempt at some kind of sado-masochistic pleasure and the violence is not there to entertain. But war is brutal and this is not glossed over.

Tigger did not seem upset by the book though we haven’t talked about it in detail. She did say that it was definitely a daytime book. I would not recommend this as a bedtime read aloud.

As with many of the best historical novels, there are some notes at the end providing some of the basic facts. In addition, the songs of the partigiani are an important part of the story and the author directs you to websites where you can hear some of these songs and learn the lyrics. She states that the most well known of the resistance songs is Bella Ciao which you can learn here. The music is one of the things that Roberto uses to conquer his fear and keep himself going in hard times. It might be interesting to learn some of the songs and talk about them in relation to how music can help us through difficult times.

For those who want their children to learn about war without glorifying it and to address the complex issues war raises, this would be a good addition to your library. I might now have a look at Stones in the Water, too, though I think it might deal with the more well worn issues of deportation and life in the camps.

Last year I met another homeschooler here in town that I don’t have a lot of naturally occurring opportunities to meet up with. Our kids are diffferent ages and have different interests so we don’t end up at the same activities or anything. But we quite like each other and occasionally make efforts to get together to build our friendship. When I suggested we meet for coffee this summer, she mentioned to me a book that she had read that she’d love to discuss with someone. So I got it out of the library. We had coffee anyway. And then we met another time for coffee and discussion. I don’t do that kind of thing very often and it was really fun.

The book was The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell (published over 10 years ago but I’ve obviously been living under a rock). The story is set in the future and involves space travel, not something that would normally have me pulling a book off the shelf. It is written in two time periods, a past (around 2019) and a present (around 2060) alternating between the aftermath of that journey to another planet and the story of how the main character happened to get there in the first place and the early part of the trip. It is clear pretty early on that something went horribly wrong and he doesn’t want to talk about it.

The main character is a Jesuit priest, consciously echoing the important role that Jesuits played in the “discovery” of the “New World”. The author is exploring serious issues about contact with new people in ways that try to recognize the violence that “discovery” and colonization did to people and cultures while at the same time recognizing that those explorers and colonizers did not set out to harm and were even driven by a desire to do good or to discover goodness.

At the same time, the book is an exploration of faith and the nature of God. The main character, Emilio, is described by another character in the book as “a soul searching for God” and in many ways the book is a meditation on what that might mean. Other characters act as foils for that search bringing out different understandings of both what God might mean/be and how we might serve God. For someone in my position of great doubt about many of these things, I found that the book provided considerable food for thought.

The edition I borrowed from the library has an interview with the author in the appendix. I don’t think it gives to much away to say that the author claims that one of her goals was to show that God was not going to come and save you from horrible things. She states that she was trying to explore faith in a post-Holocaust world. For her, one of the things the Holocaust teaches is that God will not save you. When I first read the interview, I could see this. This version of what was going on in the story made sense. Emilio had suffered terribly and his suffering, like the suffering of the Jews in WWII, does throw into question any simple sense that God would save us.

But the more I think of it, the more it doesn’t make sense even in terms of her own fictional narrative. It seems to me that Emilio is saved, in several senses. He is physically removed from the place where the trauma was being enacted (continuously). And his faith, which has been tested greatly, is restored at the end (I hope that doesn’t spoil it for you either, but it might help you through the really tough parts). Well if by restored we mean that he becomes (again) “a soul searching for God”. In that sense, it seems to me that this story follows more of the format of the faithful being tested and coming through it.

Thinking that through also brought to mind a sermon I heard this summer, where the lesson was that we shouldn’t predecide how God might save us. The priest told the story of the man refusing help as the flood waters rise saying that God will save him and when he dies and gets to heaven he asks why he wasn’t saved to which God (or St. Peter, depending on the story) says “We sent you a rowboat and a helicopter, what more did you want us to do?” I was thinking that the simple understanding of God saving us, the one that the Holocaust firmly counters, is the version that says that God will save you by making the floodwaters stop rising. The more complex version is that the floodwaters might continue to rise but God might still save you. You won’t be the same you. And you won’t avoid suffering altogether.

There is a lot of other stuff in it to spark further contemplation.

But there are also some interesting things that are perhaps less central to the main theme. One is how noticeable it is that something big changed after 9/11. Our images of the future, even the dystopian ones, seem to have significantly shifted. It is hard to imagine that anyone would imagine the future in the way Russell has today. I think the fact that her “past” is so close to us now (only 11 years away) makes it seem implausible. It seems that we couldn’t get from here to there in the next 10 years. But maybe it was plausible 10 years ago.

Remarkable details: Muslims do not figure at all in the narrative. The US economy has collapsed as has their political power. The Japanese are now the world superpower. The Japanese came to power in a “trade war”.

Other things are more believable: hurricanes and other severe weather events; the end of oil;

It is interesting how in 1997, despite the first Gulf War, the future is not imagined as one that has come about because of a “hot” war (those these do figure in the telling of history in the narrative) but rather by economic domination. I also think that today even the economic “enemy” would be imagined differently. China perhaps. This tells us interesting things about how the world looked only 10 years ago. It also tells us that 10 years ago we could predict the end of oil and the effects of climate change, things we still aren’t really doing anything about (or anything near adequate to the scale of the problem).

I am really glad that my friend suggested that I read this book. It is not something I would have picked up otherwise. And it is so rich in thought provoking ideas about faith, about politics, about family, about the nature of society and politics (I didn’t even touch on that; but the world they discover is very interestingly structured)… I highly recommend this book.

I’m reading Madeleine L’Engle’s Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage and came across this today (page 125 of the edition I have).

There are many times when the idea that there is indeed a pattern seems absurd wishful thinking. Random events abound. There is much in life that seems meaningless. And then, when I can see no evidence of meaning, some glimpse is given which reveals the strange weaving of purposefulness and beauty.

The world of science lives fairly comfortably with paradox. We know that light is a wave, and also that light is a particle. The discoveries made in the infinitely small world of particle physics indicate randomness and chance, and I do not find it any more difficult to live with the paradox of a universe of randomness and chance and a universe of pattern and purpose than I do with light as a wave and light as a particle. Living with contradiction is nothing new to the human being.

Not that many of us think much about particles and waves but since I read that cloud book…

Whoever recommended Geraldine Brooks to me: Thank you! Year of Wonders was an amazing novel. I loved it.

Loosely based on the history of the village of Eyam in Derbyshire and set in 1665-66, the year plague hit that village, Brooks does a masterful job of bringing the characters and relationships in this time and place to life. The story is told from the point of view of Anna, a young widow who is a part-time servant at the rectory. We experience how the inhabitants of this village lived through a very trying time, imposing a quarantine on themselves to contain this horrible disease. The complexities of religious differences, class, gender, and education are all subtly conveyed in a gripping story. Brooks has mastered the language of this time and place, drawing you into life in the village.

I’ve already said that I seem to enjoy novels with rich characterization and this is another. Several of the characters are deeply and subtly drawn. And known facts of that period, such as the ways some individuals would blame witchcraft and scapegoat particular women in an attempt to eradicate the disease, are well described to give a sense of how people can be caught up in mob violence in stressful circumstances and yet others do not get drawn in. The main character is sympathetic and easy to identify with, at least for me.

The author’s note at the end of the book teases out the relationship to the historical facts in more detail. This is a fascinating addition to a book that stands on its own as just a good story. The insight into the author’s inspiration and process are very interesting.

Highly recommended.

Steph reviewed Skeletons at the Feast by Chris Bohjalian recently. It looked good so I requested it at the library. It came in fast. And it is a great book. Hard to put down. So now I’ve finished it. Since she gave a good sense of what it was about, I’ll let you read her review and reflect instead on some of the themes. As a reminder, the book is set at the end of WWII in Germany and follows 3 sets of characters (whose paths intersect at times; often without them knowing) as they travel across Germany as the Russians advance.

I think the main thing that this very well written novel got me thinking about was how one would deal with hardship. One of the main characters is a young woman from a privileged background who becomes a refugee. She reminisces at one point about a time when she had a servant who would lay out her clothes for her in the morning, for example. Compared to other refugees, she is still relatively privileged. She has horses and a wagon, for example, and food for some of the time. And good boots. And yet comparatively she is making do with next to nothing. Walking towards no clear goal. Sleeping in anything from abandoned houses or schools to barns to the wagon. Often sharing what sleeping quarters there are with strangers. Desperate strangers. Eating sporadically after the initial provisions run out. And through all this she is very strong. She is often generous to strangers. She doesn’t just keep going, she rises to the challenge. She makes sacrifices to the benefit of others, like her younger brother.

It makes me wonder whether I would do the same. If faced with a sudden change in my circumstances, how would I cope? Do I have the skills necessary to survive? Or could I learn what I needed to quickly enough? Would I be as gracious in adversity?

I suppose one thing that this novel shows you is that the change of circumstance is somewhat gradual. While there are moments when a radical change occurs, as when the family leaves their home to travel west, a lot had already changed beforehand. The servants were long gone. The danger had already been close enough that her mother had buried a downed pilot. Food had become scarce, if not so scarce for them as farmers. But the change was gradual enough that adaptation could be gradual, too. And perhaps one wouldn’t notice it as much until you looked back to “before” and really recognized the extent of the change over a longer period. Maybe there is hope for all of us.

The other thing that this novel provokes is serious reflection on how we, as individuals, react to inhumanity committed in our name. Bohjalian does not shy away from the details of that inhumanity in its various forms. There are several disturbing passages. I think this is a good thing, as it forces us to face the scale of it. Because one of our reactions, as for the characters in the novel, is to deny the extent of the horror. Sometimes it is good to be forced to face the details instead of relying on abstract notions like “torture” or “inhumane treatment of prisoners” or even “murder” or “rape”. Because our instinct is to imagine the least horrific form of these notions.

And that instinct has consequences. Some people do not leave because they genuinely do not believe that anything too horrible will happen to them. (It does.) Some people turn a blind eye to the horror right in their midst. And many people just avoid seeking details of what might be happening that does not touch on their own daily lives. We all do this. We stop reading the newspapers. We dismiss certain reports as sensationalist, exaggerated, or downright lies. And we do this often out of a generosity of spirit. We cannot believe that people like us, even (or especially) people who represent us, could do such horrific things. It enables us to go on. Because the truth is often paralyzing.

But even while doing these things, even while effectively condoning the horror by not opposing it strongly or effectively, in their daily lives the characters in this novel show great capacity for compassion and generosity even in very difficult circumstances. This is not a Hobbesian world of each man for himself and the strong will survive. This is a world in which even the hungry share their food. Where forgiveness is common.

And as I reflect on this I think that there is something about the possible. It is possible to share what you have with your neighbour, if we mean neighbour in the concrete sense of the person sitting right there beside you. This person, however well you know them, is sitting right there, is hungry, and you have food (however little) to share. It is possible to make a judgment about your capacity to change a horrific situation that you are witnessing and, if you judge it possible, to actually intervene. Generalized action against distant horrors is harder to even imagine much less execute. In the context of the novel, even if the characters had known the real extent of the horrors being committed in their names, what could they have done? They did not know. They did not try to know.

But those tactics we all use for denying ourselves knowledge of that type of thing are so common precisely because knowing doesn’t seem to change anything. What good would it do to know and feel impotent to do anything about it? And yet when the scale of the thing is smaller and closer, we often can imagine possible interventions. And in those circumstances people can and do act. And they know. Because knowing has the possibility of leading to action and change.

As I reflect on this, I think about how it relates to our own situation today. We know that our governments are involved in killing people. In torturing people. And in various acts of humanity. We know that they are committing these acts in our name. We shrink from the details. We dismiss reports as sensationalist or even traitorous. We focus on all the good things those same governments are doing (because no one, not even a government, is wholly good or evil). And on some level, who can blame us. What can I do, realistically, that will make any difference to how Omar Khadr is being treated by the Americans and to how my own government is colluding in that treatment? What difference could I make? Or you? And everything being done in Iraq and Afghanistan and anywhere else in my name (and yours). At what point do these actions tarnish our own humanity?

I have no answers. The situation is remarkably complex. But it is novels like Bohjalian’s Skeletons at the Feast that enable us to think about these issues in all their complexity and perhaps begin to face our own place in these horrific circumstances.

How come I have never heard of Stevie Davies?! I found a copy of The Eyrie on one of those display shelves at the end of the library stacks. I know one shouldn’t judge a book by its cover but a good cover often entices me to actually pick a book up and read the jacket blurb. (BTW, the cover on the copy in my library is different from the one at that link.) So, if there are any librarians out there, keep sticking random books on those display shelves, because it really does help some of us deal with the overwhelming nature of the full collection.

The Eyrie is set in and around an old Victorian mansion that has been turned into flats (apartments for the Americans). It is near Swansea and thus on the sea. The novel revolves around 3 characters: Dora, a 92 year old Scottish communist, veteran of the International Brigades and many struggles since; Eirlys, whose age I’m not sure is mentioned but is in her 60s I think, a veteran of the Welsh nationalist movement; and Hannah, in her 40s, and looking for her roots. The relationships among these 3 women and others around them are the real meat of the book. They are very well drawn and touch on issues of love, family, politics, and death in thought provoking ways.

I find myself drawn to this kind of novel. I am never sure how to describe it but I like books that are about characters, as long as they are well written. This one is.

One of the inside pages indicates that this woman has written 9 other novels. Well, I guess I won’t run out of things to read anytime soon.

The third book in Deborah Ellis’s trilogy, Mud City shifts focus to Parvana’s friend Shauzia. In Kabul, she also dressed as a boy and worked in the market to earn money for her family. In this book, we encounter her in a refugee camp in Pakistan, and follow her as she leaves the refugee camp to try to make her own way in the city of Peshawar.

As with the other books, we get a good sense of the specificities of life in war time and yet the story focuses on what could be a universal theme of a young girl struggling with balancing her own needs and desires with her relationship to the society in which she lives. Shauzia has dreams and she tries valiantly to work to realize those dreams. She chafes against the urging to help others, to train for a profession, to wait for things. She is, in other words, a reasonably normal teenaged girl, albeit one living in difficult times.

Having read all three of the books now, I think this is probably the great strength of this trilogy. There are points of contact with the everyday experience of the kids likely to read these books — struggles with siblings, struggles with parents, the desire for freedom and the need for connection. Those points of similarity enable the reader to identify with the characters despite the myriad ways in which their lives differ. And that makes the level of detail about the situation in Afghanistan and the refugee camps that much more powerful. These are not people who are so different from us that we cannot identify with them and understand their lives. We can understand things from their perspective if we try just a little bit.

This is illustrated well by the following exchange near the end of the book. Shauzia has been lost in the camp and come across a subsidiary camp outside the walls of people waiting to get into the main camp. She gets picked up by an aid worker who takes her back to where she belongs. She asks him about all these people:

“Who are they?” Shauzia asked.

“They’ve just left Afghanistan,” the aid worker told her. “People are rushing to get across the boarder before the Americans attack.”

“The Americans are going to attack?”

“They’re angry about what happened in New York City.”

“What happened?”

The aid worker kept one hand on the steering wheel while he fished around on teh floor with his other.

“Here it is.” He handed Shauzia a piece of newspaper he had found.

Shauzia looked at the photograph. Smoke poured out of the mangled remains of a building.

“Looks like Kabul,” she said, letting the paper drop back to the floor.

If you didn’t see the comments to my last post on this series, someone from the publisher commented providing information about other books they are publishing that might also be of interest to those addressing the issue of war. They are non-fiction books by the same author, this time focused on Iraq.  There are no details on their website yet, but I plan to check them out.

The danger with any books about war is that they simplify too much. Usually for good reasons. But the morality of war is complex. There are rarely clear good guys and bad guys. While it might be difficult to communicate that to children, even older children, I think we need to try. And having read this series, I think Deborah Ellis has the skill to do that in an accessible and interesting way.

Parvana’ Journey is the 2nd book in Deborah Ellis’ trilogy set in Afghanistan in the mid-’90s. We read The Breadwinner in the fall, while we were on our trip, and somehow hadn’t got around to acquiring the other two books until recently.

In my review of the first book, I suggested that the nature of the story might make this more appropriate for a day time read aloud. The second book comes with a similar recommendation. The subject matter might be disturbing for many children and the book doesn’t leave you thinking about stuff you generally want to think about right before going to sleep. It is a children’s book, written to be accessible to children (of probably 10 and up) but it is set in wartime with all that that entails. Use your judgment about your own child’s reaction to what used to be called “man’s inhumanity to man”.

Parvana’s Journey takes place some time after the action in The Breadwinner. The main character is still dressing as a boy for social and economic reasons. The book opens as she is burying her father, leaving her alone travelling through Afghanistan searching for her mother and sisters. The rest of her family had gone from Kabul to Mazar-e-Sharif at the end of the first book for a wedding but there were bombings shortly afterwards and Parvana and her father were searching for them. This book is the tale of Parvana’s journey through her war torn country to find them. Some of this she undertakes alone. Some with other children she meets along the way.

Ellis treats this difficult subject with compassion. She does not spare us difficult details of life in war but she deals with them in very sensitively. Although I was sometimes moved to tears, I did not find the book dispiriting. The relationships are well drawn and give reason for hope in difficult times. Somehow Ellis manages to show us that there are universal qualities to relationships that endure despite significant differences in context. The relationship between Parvana and Asif, a boy she meets on route who joins her, is particularly funny.

“It would probably really annoy you if I came with you, wouldn’t it?” Asif said. “You’d probably hate it. You’re probably wishing and wishing that I’ll stay behind.”

Parvana smoothed the wrinkles out of one of the washed diapers. She didn’t say anything.

“In that case,” Asif said, “I’ll come. Just to annoy you.”

Parvana felt a strange, surprising relief. She had known, deep inside, that she wouldn’t have been able to leave him behind.

“Please don’t,” she said.

“Forget it,” he said. “My mind is made up. And don’t try to sneak away without me, because I’ll catch you, and you’ll be sorry.”

(page 73-74)

The book raises some important issues that you might want to discuss. About the morality of stealing when you are very hungry, for example. Or the fact that bombs and landmines often kill non-combatants.

They watched as a group of planes streamed across a corner of the sky. A moment later there was a sound like thunder rumbling in the distance. They saw dust rise up from the far hills.

The girls had seen these planes before. They were nothing special.

“Grownups killing each other,” Parvana said, and she turned away to look for her mother in the other direction.

“I kill,” Leila said.

Parvana looked at her.

“I kill pigeons,” Leila said. “I don’t like to do it, but it,s not hard. It must be much harder to kill a goat or a donkey. It is hard to kill a child?” she asked suddently.

“It should be,” Parvana said, “but some people seem to find it awfully easy.”

“As easy as killing a pigeon?”

“Easier, I think.”

“We eat dead pigeons,” Leila said. “What do they do with all the dead children?”

Parvana didn’t even try to answer that question. She put her arm around her new little sister, and together they watched the bombs go off, way in the distance.

Or the nature of family. There are also more mundane issues like the importance of hygiene and how housework makes life more pleasant.

“Mother wouldn’t recognize me,” Parvana laughed, “doing housework without being told.”

I have been reading this to Tigger as she works on beading. We haven’t really talked much about the broader historical context of the setting of this book, though Tigger is aware that there is still war going on in Afghanistan. Issues get discussed as they come up. But then I often find that Tigger will recall things like this some time later and bring it into a conversation about something else. But that is one of the joys of homeschooling. We can just read things together and enjoy them. If we want to discuss them, fine. But if that doesn’t seem appropriate right now, we can do it another time.

Read alouds have also tailed off a bit in the past several weeks. We still read at bedtime but that is dominated by the Agatha Christie marathon that Tigger and her Dad are on. Day-time non-fiction read alouds have been few and far between. So it has taken us a while to finish The Road to There: Mapmakers and Their Stories by Val Ross, which I tempted you with back at the end of June.

Tigger is the grand-daughter of a high school geography teacher (retired) and her dad is kind of into maps. So a history of maps and map-making was likely to be popular around here. There are 13 chapters beginning with one about forgery and the Vinland map as a way to introduce the importance of maps. The following chapters are arranged chronologically and take us from the 12th century through to the present day. Each chapter begins with a short anecdote (in bold text to set it off from the rest of the narrative) before providing a detailed narrative of this particular contribution to map-making. There are relevant illustrations, often in colour, and text boxes providing extra detail on particular elements of the story. The early chapters focus on particular individuals considered important, including Cheng Ho, Gerard Mercator, Captain Cook, and others. But the history of maps is as much about technology and changing economic and political landscapes as it is about individual mapmakers.

Ross weaves the story of mapmaking into a broader history in an interesting way. There are plenty of points of connection to other subjects: the sciences of astronomy and mathematics, especially as the link to navigation; exploration and the discovery by Europeans of Australia and the Americas; changing trading relationships; wars and empire building;  the opening up the western U.S; the Cold War. While the book stands on its own, it would also make a good complement to your history studies more broadly.  As such, even those who like to plan out their curriculum might find it a useful addition to the bookshelf, whether its in the plan or just an interesting book someone might pull off the shelf.

Highly recommended.

I started First You Build a Cloud quite a while ago and it got put down with a couple of chapters to go during all the kitchen reno. I also switched to the history book because I knew I wouldn’t be able to renew it at the library. This was one of those impulse buys after someone on the Living Math yahoo group posted a list (with links) of good books that they’d found at a good price at Book Closeouts. I thought I’d give it a try. And am I ever glad I did.

K.C. Cole is a science journalist and writes very engagingly about physics. Some of this material is pretty hard to understand but she takes you through a lot of that difficult stuff slowly and carefully, explaining in an engaging way some very complicated concepts. Of course, the most complicated issues in physics (as in a lot of science) are epistemological (how we know what we know). She tackles those issues head on with 5 chapters in part 1 “The Art of Knowing”. And the final chapters return to some of those big questions about order and disorder, cause and effect, and the importance of (some) small differences. As she states in the introduction, “The idea that science is inseparable from philosophy is a theme that pervades this book.” (p. 4)

This is reading that I’m doing for myself to get more comfortable with the big picture of science and mathematics so I can help guide Tigger through some of this territory in interesting ways. As I’ve said before, I’m not happy with the way a lot of science textbooks are organized, but I need more knowledge of the subject to be able to go text-book free (or to work out what we can use and what we can ignore and where to supplement).

This book won’t tell you how to teach physics to your kids. Nor will it give you all the physics knowledge you need to do so. But it will give you a deeper appreciation for what science is, how scientists think, and what scientific questions look like. Along with Nathalie Angier’s The Canon (reviewed by Becky here) and a range of other books, it should help you build up some sort of confidence with the scientific enterprise that will enable you to have interesting discussions about important topics or at least feel like you can begin to take part in those.

It seems that the popularity of classical education of various sorts is related to its simple goal that education should enable us to take part in the Great Conversation. So much of that conversation in the 21st century is about science and yet so many of us feel utterly unprepared to engage in that part of the conversation. This book would be a good first step to building our own ability to engage in this broader conversation. The beauty of Cole’s approach is that she treats it as the same conversation, linked in with humanist concerns with metaphor, truth, and argument.