Flame, Glass and Ink are Poems, essays, and reading notes by Stefania Joori Suh

Category: book review

  • Daily Life in Victorian London by Lee Jackson

    Daily Life in Victorian London: An Extraordinary AnthologyDaily Life in Victorian London: An Extraordinary Anthology by Lee Jackson

    My rating: 5 of 5 stars

    This book is a fruitful archive of personal diaries, newspaper/magazine articles, letters both official and private, and other historical records, all of which portray a glimpse of the everyday life of the Victorian Londoners – the poor, the middles class, and the middlings in between – minus the poshness of Downton Abbey. In this book, the reader will peep into many lives of different folks, kinds of job they had, the work conditions, and the places they went for recreations on holidays, and feel empathic towards their victorian kindred spirits. However, this is not a book of insalubrious living conditions for the proletariat, nor the litany of existential woes in living hard lives. In fact, reading this book is like reading a Charles Dickens’s story featuring an Oliver Twists, a Pip, a David Copperfield, and many others of interesting characters working for odd jobs . This book is about the humble but vibrant in Victorian London who were never the boring.

  • Through a Dog’s Eyes by Jennifer Arnold

    Through a Dog's EyesThrough a Dog’s Eyes by Jennifer Arnold

    My rating: 5 of 5 stars

    If you are a dog person, reading this book will make you become better understanding of your dog or just any dog in sight – in his perspective. This book is written with knowledge and heart by Jennifer Arnold, the Executive Director of Canine Assistants, a school for educating dogs to help people with disabilities, including epilepsy, paralysis of broken spinal cords, and others that prevent them from functioning their ordinary tasks of daily lives . The author specifically emphasizes on the word “education” of her dogs, not “training” because the student dogs are taught to respond to foreseeable/unforeseeable situations that require their immediate problem-solving skills for the safety of their human partners based upon the author’s belief on ethology, the scientific and objective study of animal behavior, by incorporating Operant Conditioning method to modify a behavior by reinforcement and
    punishment.

    What Ms. Arnold avers in the book actually corroborates what I have always believed to be true: (1) that dogs do have feelings without filtering them through the intellect, which can be found in the cerebral cortex of human. But because of this absence, dogs are artless in expressing their emotions toward us; (2) that dogs’ characteristics of being loyal and empathetic indicates that consciousness, the state of being awake and aware, enables them to do what’s in the best interest of others; (3) that in no way, is a concept of “alpha dog” in a human-canine relationship useful or even sensical; and; (4) that operant conditioning with positive reinforcement (rewarding with a treat)  and negative punishment (not giving it) works the best to reinforce intended behaviors.

    You will find a kindred spirit in this book filled with laughters by the wonder dogs at the Canine Assistants, tears by the pains of those who were and are in need of their canine assistants, heartaches by those fallen dogs because of misunderstanding on our human parts, but most of all, joy by understanding our fido friends in their own paws.

  • Letters of Note by Shaun Usher

    Letters of Note: An Eclectic Collection of Correspondence Deserving of a Wider AudienceLetters of Note: An Eclectic Collection of Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience by Shaun Usher

    My rating: 5 of 5 stars

    It was from “A Way with Words” a public radio show about the English language, including the origins of words, the usages, and good books that I came to know this lovely book. It’s a stupendous compendium of letters from the famous and the ordinary from the ancient to the modern with beautiful photo copies of the letters reproduced in the book. The letters span the whole range of human emotions from kindness, passion, love, joy to heartbreak, anger, disappointment, and longing as the contents of the letters reveal the writer’s’ innermost thoughts, feelings, and emotions through the vehicles of pen and paper.

    Reading each of the letters made me feel deeply touched by the universality of humanity and reflective of the human nature manifested in writing without prejudice on the grounds of appearances and social standings, which influence our perceptions of individuals. Readers can find lots of very interesting letters in this book. Of all the letters in the book, the following three letters resonate in my mind: (1) E. B. White’s letter to his gentleman acquaintance regarding the importance of having hope for humanity; (2) Anaïs Nin’s rebuking letter to a faceless collector of her co-authored “Erotica” for his demand of more prevalent racy contents; and (3) a nameless German woman’s letter to her husband asking him to take her back home from a dreadful mental hospital she was in. It was so heartbreaking to read her brief letter to her husband that I could feel her pain, fear, and sadness alone in the grim place… I commiserated with her….

    Mr. Usher in his foreword states that if the readers are inspired to put pen to paper by reading the letters in the book, his intention of compiling the book will be fulfilled and greatly appreciated. That’s a very noble intention and sublime aspiration in this digital age. This book is a lovely work of art which the readers will never tire of.

  • He was my chief by Christa Schroeder

    He Was My Chief: The Memoirs of Adolf Hitler's SecretaryHe Was My Chief: The Memoirs of Adolf Hitler’s Secretary by Christa Schroeder

    My rating: 4 of 5 stars

    I read this book out of curiosity to find out what Hitler was like behind the public facade when he was backstage with his personal staff. I had done some research on the subject myself, but other books of the interest seemed to be written to provoke spotlight publicity and sensationalism by those who professed to work for him on a personal level, as a chauffeur or a secretary, or a bodyguard. I am not questioning the validity of their work experience, personal integrity, or character but the intention of publicizing such experience as if it were an excuse for asking for a public pardon for having worked for the Fuhrer. One of such illustrative example is Traudl Junge’s well known memoir on her time as a Hitler’s secretary in which she keeps trying to tell readers that she wasn’t part of the evil reich.

    However, this book is relatively devoid of such grandiose content, pomposity of authenticity, and glorification of the fallen reich, which of course, the author could be unable to manifest anyway. Rather, Ms. Schroeder’s coldly objective narrative carries a certain tone of authority in recounting her work experience as senior personal secretary to Hitler who was so reliable and trusty that she was always available and ready to work on call even in the middle of night. Unlike her junior secretary Traudl who was a bit of a celebrity by appearing on as many interviews as possible while she was alive, Ms. Schroede rarely made public appearances and stayed out of limelight.

    If you want eye-catching episodes or Hitler’s personal secrets, this is not a book for you. As the title of the book says, Hitler was her chief, her boss by whom she was employed for her secretarial service. That Hitler was kind and understanding to his secretaries and some of his other attendants could be a revelation in this book. For the clarity of the contents and the author’s objective approach to the subject matter, this book is distinguished from other books of similar subject matter.

    Caveat: For some more information on Christa Schroeder, Wikipedia will provide readers  with a concise biography as linked herein. Hitler’s Senior Secretary

     

  • Savory Word Searches by Dave Tuller

    Savory Word SearchesSavory Word Searches by Dave Tuller

    My rating: 5 of 5 stars

    When I first saw the cover of this book, I assumed that this book was full of words related to biscuits and crackers as shown thereon. No wonder the cover led me to prejudge the contents of the book, since this is a series of the puzzle books with food-associated adjectives and the matching pictures. (i.e., “Delicious”, “Gourmet”, “Scrumptious”, “Tasty”, and “Yummy”.) On the back cover the book, the author clearly expresses his reason for such tasty titles of the books as follows:

    “If you’re hungry for some great puzzles, Savory Word Searches is sure to satisfy your appetite. “

    What a brilliant idea of titling the puzzle books! I have so far liked this book much because (1) it is spiral bounded; (2) the covers are quite sturdy; and (3) the unused letters in each word search form a message in relation to the theme. I might buy another book from this series once I complete this puzzle book.

  • Bartleby, the Scrivener A Story Of Wall-Street by Herman Melville

    Bartleby, the Scrivener A Story Of Wall-StreetBartleby, the Scrivener A Story Of Wall-Street by Herman Melville

    My rating: 5 of 5 stars

    It was more than 10 years ago when I first read Herman Melville’s Bartleby, a short story about an unwonted young man employed as a scrivener by a Wall Street lawyer. At that time, Bartleby struck me as a plain eccentric, imprudent worker who had the temerity to reject his boss’s orders. He was just a mentally deranged man with only a few words, other than the monumental diction of “I would prefer not to do …“

    But now I think of him differently. Maybe it’s because I have more experiences in a journey/sailing of life than I had when I first encountered the Bartleby character. Whatever it may be, my perspective of the character has been changed in a humane way. Since I re-read the story this afternoon, I have felt bottomless sympathy for Bartleby. Mixed with pathos and sprinkles of humor in the narrative of his benevolent former employer, the figure of Bartleby evokes springs of human compassion and humanity itself. And my feelings for this tragic scrivener amount to what the narrator felt about his former employee.

    I am not hereby intent on “analyzing” the psychological aspects of Bartleby and his former Wall Street lawyer boss. And I don’t think that even the writer Melville himself ascribed such psychoanalytical theory to these characters in mind when he wrote the story. To me the story itself tells what drove a sensitive man like Bartleby to such demise in the eyes of a compassionate man – and a decent employer seldom found these days. Loneliness, Hopelessness, Sorrow, and Reality of Death all packaged in letters to be burned in flames deprived the humanness of the forlorn scrivener. The Death of Humanity, that is. Having worked in the Office of Dead Letters at Washington must have been a traumatic experience to someone like Bartleby with eggshell sensitivity. Surely, there is no doubt that Bartleby was mentally disturbed, but who would hate or even despise him for his malaise?…

    Readers will conclude that it’s only a fictional story in which no such characters will/would exist in reality. But I don’t think so. As a matter of fact, I have always believed that fictions are always built upon factual elements of human life to a certain degree. Dismissing stories as creations of imaginativeness seems to miss the fundamental truths laid behind the subject matters of stories. That the multitudes of change and choice of our human life with a bit of creative imaginations is a substance of any story. Ditto Stephen King, who has once said that the stories are artifacts that are not really made up, but that are based upon preexisting objects we discover. Ditto Shakespeare who once said we are all actors and actress on a stage called a “Life.”

    The tall, lean, pallid and lugubrious image of Bartleby the Scrivener still lingers in my mind… All those returned/erturning letters flooded into the office every single day might have come from those who died in despair, those who died hopeless, and those who died suffocated by insurmountable sufferings; Bartleby had lost his own sense of existence, feeling utterly dispirited, pessimistic, and lethargic in performing demands of his duty. It was the loss of meaning of life that made him passively resistant to all the ordinary functions of daily life which all seemed insignificant to him. The life itself was nihilistic and hence non-existential to Bartleby. Humanity in the expressions of feelings and emotions meant nothing to him; it had ceased to exist in the form of dead letter attesting to existential horrors, which had led the authors to death, which had taken the poor Bartleby as the witness thereof.

    Thus the lamentable outcry of the narrator still deeply reverberates in my mind even after I closed the book: “Ah, Bartleby! Ah, Humanity!”