Once in awhile I hit overload. Too much information comes in, and I need time to process it! And yet…to go without reading is like a day without breathing. Impossible. So I spent the last two days reading a couple of mildly interesting books that required little interaction on my part.
The first is Beautiful Boy by David Sheff. This is his website. What a powerful story! David Sheff tells about the life of his son, Nic, and his journey into and through drug addiction. Unlike similar memoirs I’ve read in the past, the author managed to portray Nic as the beautiful, loving, incredibly smart child that he was, as well as a sense of place to their life. This background of vivid writing helped me feel the rollercoaster ride as Nic picked himself up from relapse after relapse. I don’t have any addicts close to me (that I know of…one thing I learned from this book is that you truly don’t know whether that statement is true), but Beautiful Boy helped me build empathy for those who do. Like so many others, I have often been guilty of simplifying an addiction down to “Why don’t they just stop drinking/using/smoking.” Not any more. David Sheff opened my eyes to an alternate reality, and he made me care about his family. Well done.
The second book I read was Serve God, Save the Planet by J. Matthew Sleeth. Dr. Sleeth and his family embarked on a journey to reduce their ecological footprint and use the money savings to support relief efforts overseas and here at home. None of the ideas in this book were radically new, but Dr. Sleeth combined them with real life examples that reminded me that each of these ideas is quite doable. Did you know that if we all just replaced 5 lightbulbs with fluorescent or LED lightbulbs we could take 21 coal factories offline? Small, achievable goals are the focus of this short, fun read. Perhaps especially useful is the daily, weekly and yearly goal checklist in the back of the book. I didn’t think this book affected me a whole lot, but David keeps telling me I’m talking about it every ten minutes, and I did find myself wondering whether I shouldn’t go to Whole Foods EVERY day, but maybe should plan ahead? I’m kind of joking (and kind of not). David and I are trying to think through our stewardship of energy and resources, and this book was a helpful addition to that process.
That’s all for today…I’m taking a day for laundry, cooking something fun and watching David build a computer with his friend Matt.
May 19th, 2008 at 11:16 am
I kept seeing the Beautiful Boy book at my local Starbucks and read the first chapter. Let’s get this straight….would you still classify it as ‘mildly interesting’? maybe i’ll just read one chapter everytime I go in there like I did with One More Day by Mitch Albom.
May 19th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
John if I were you, and working in a people-intensive, youth-intensive situation I would consider it more than mildly interesting. I might even say it was really important, because I learned a LOT about the pathway that leads towards drug abuse and the ways that addicts can try to hide their addictions from everyone else, as well as the very concrete ways certain important people in his life helped him through the hardest times.
May 21st, 2008 at 9:51 pm
I have heard such great things about beautiful boy! I am definitely looking forward to reading it. At the same time I was reading about it, I was actually reading “Alive!” by Eileen DeClemente. She faced her own drug and alcohol deomons (for more than 25 years) and, with her family’s love and forgiveness (kind of like “Beautiful Boy”) she has been recovering for 20 years. She used her journals, started form when she went into recovery, to write this tale. It is SO powerful and inspiring.
June 19th, 2008 at 1:14 pm
Hi, my name is Dustin and I work with a Christian environmental organization called Christians in Conservation: A Rocha USA. I saw your post about the book “Serve God, Save the Planet”, and I thought that you might like to know that our organization sponsors its author, Dr. Matthew Sleeth, as a “creation care evangelist.” We would love for you to check us out at our website, en.arocha.org/usa. You might also be interested in the website for Dr. Sleeth’s book, http://www.servegodsavetheplanet.org.