Katrina’s 20th-Century Rivals

I’m surprised that John Barry’s Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America is all the way back at nearly #8,000 on Amazon’s rankings but pleased to note the synchronicity of the first two “Capitalized Phrases” the online retailer’s search engine found in the book being “New Orleans” and “Red Cross.”

And, wanting a little break from the slow crawl of actual information amidst all the “look at us in the rain” antics from CNN and MSNBC the other morning, I turned to Sudden Sea: The Great Hurricane of 1938, which tore up most of the Northeast, especially Connecticut and Rhode Island.

Harry Shearer’s been doing an okay job blogging about the aftermath of Katrina for the Huffington Post, but I’m thinking of what I suppose is an idealized dream scenario wherein an alternative media outlet with the kind of funding I imagine HuffPo to have could find somebody with specific expertise to dig into this story on short notice–and no, Salon’s excerpt of a 15-year-old John McPhee book doesn’t count. Not that you’ll ever hear a bad word about McPhee from this corner…

31 August 2005 | uncategorized |

The Spirit Doesn’t Wait for the Staircase

Dianne Sylvan is one of the most thoughtful spiritual writers I’ve read in a long time from any religious tradition, and certainly from the ranks of neopagan voices. It’s hard to believe it’s been two years since she debuted with The Circle Within, and I’m looking forward to doing more than just skim through my recently acquired galley of The Body Sacred, which is all about helping women to love their bodies as incarnations of the divine feminine. On her blog yesterday, Sylvan, who isn’t shy about her curvy figure, told a beautiful story about the perfect comeback to a thoughtless remark of the sort she hears all too often.

I’m not even going to quote from this, because the punchline is so perfect that you need to see the buildup just the way she presented it, with no more preparation than this.

30 August 2005 | uncategorized |