Good Stuff! Mr. Holmes and 13 Hours, the book

ByJohn Brown

Earlier this month I watched Mr. Holmes.

Mr._Holmes_poster

It left me with this fine peace. With this feeling of goodness and light, in spite of, or probably because of, a number of poignant moments. It also surprised me.

To write a story like this, to give people this kind of gift…

What a wonderful, powerful thing.

Now, it was not a thriller. It’s not an episode of Sherlock or Elementary. It’s not a murder mystery. It reminds me of Saving Mr. Banks most, but also of Miss Potter, maybe even The King’s English. It has that kind of tempo.

Basically, Sherlock Holmes is a much older man. He’s retired. And there’s a case he’s trying to solve. But, again, this isn’t a murder mystery. This story is about Sherlock himself and wisdom and the beauty of change whenever it occurs.

The story lingered with me, and I avoided reading or watching anything else for a few days to savor it. Give yourselves a treat. Watch this wonderful story.

*

The book 13 Hours: The Inside Account of What Really Happened in Benghazi was the answer to so many questions.

13_Hours_ZuckhoffWant really happened in Benghazi?

What we’re we doing there?

Who are the brave men who tried to save the ambassador?

It was also a thrilling read in the tradition of Marcus Luttrell’s Lone Survivor. As such, it purposely avoids the political aspect of the incident. It’s not about what the officials of the United States government did, said, or knew, or the political firestorm that ensued.

It’s not a hit piece on Clinton and Obama, nor is it any kind of defense. Instead it simply documents the events on the ground in those last 13 hours, relying most heavily on what the five American security contractors who rushed to give aid said happened. Those men–two former Marines, two former SEALs, and a former Army Ranger—teamed up with Mitchell Zuckoff, the writer, to simply set the record straight.

I couldn’t put the book down. Not only because the book’s well-written and the characters and situation are compelling, but also because of the insight it shared into some key dynamics within Libya itself. For example, it helps you understand why the revolt against Muammar Gaddafi centered in Benghazi, not Tripoli. It also touches on some of the currents inside these Muslim-majority countries close to the epicenter of Sunni extremism—Egypt and Saudi Arabia–so volatile. And it shares details, large and small, as only those who experience such things first hand can.

If you want a fascinating account of really happened on the ground in Benghazi, get this book.

 

Share

Similar Posts

  • Witchbreaker by Author James Maxey

    ByJohn Brown

    I’m supposed to do this tag thing where one author tells about his or her latest project and then tags other authors to tell about theirs and so on and so on until we turn into some weird internet author borg and eat your brains out. 

    Heck with that.

    I want to simply share something cool with you instead. James Maxey (who tagged me in the borg fest) writes stories with lots of action, fun, and character that also make you think. They always start with a bang and never let up. For example, look at how GREATSHADOW, his last book, starts.

    When Infidel grabbed me by the seat of my pants and charged toward the window, I didn’t protest. Partly this was due to the speed of her action, but mostly due to my inebriation from the sacramental wine we’d stolen.

    If an opening like that isn’t going to make you want to read more, I don’t know what will. Especially when the wine was stolen from a lava-pygmy temple carved into the sheer cliff face of a volcano.  I’m not alone in my appreciation of Maxey’s writing. Orson Card wrote this glowing review of GREATSHADOW earlier this year.

    Here is the opening to Maxey’s “To The East, A Bright Star” which was published in Asimov’s.  It has one of my favorite beginnings.

    There was a shark in the kitchen. The shark wasn’t huge, maybe four feet long, gliding across the linoleum toward the refrigerator. Tony stood motionless in the knee-deep water of the dining room. The Wolfman said that the only sharks that came in this far were bull sharks, which were highly aggressive. Tony leaned forward cautiously and shut the door to the kitchen. He’d known the exact time and date of his death for most of his adult life. With only hours to go, he wasn’t about to let the shark do something ironic.  

    Which brings us to the fact that Maxey has another book out called WITCHBREAKER. That’s such a cool title I wish I could off Maxey and steal it for myself. The book has, as you have seen to the right, a fabulous cover as well. About 5000% better than the horrid thing Solaris put on GREATSHADOW.

    Maxey talks about what inspired WITCHBREAKER in this blog post, which I recommend you read in full. But just in case you’re a lazy son-of-a-gun like me, here’s the meat of the thing. WITCHBREAKER is about a woman named Sorrow. Says Maxey:

    Her father was a judge who hung his own mother after she was accused of being a witch. Sorrow rebelled by becoming a witch herself, but her hatred isn’t directed directly at her father, it’s directed at the religious and political institutions that empowered him. So, Sorrow’s life mission is to overthrow that system. She’s one woman against the world, fighting to make it a better place even though everyone she meets keeps insisting that the world isn’t so bad. I’ve got a soft spot in my heart for characters locked into a lifelong battle against forces more powerful than they will ever be.

    Blast that dang Maxey and his character genius. I’m not envious at all. No, sir. Which is why I suggest you give Maxey a go. Maybe you’ll appreciate him as much as thousands of other readers do. Read the first few pages of WITCHBREAKER here with Amazon’s look inside.

    Share

  • Good Stuff: Poldark, Monk, and the cure for dragon feet

    ByJohn Brown

    For all of you longing for just one more season of Downton Abbey, I’ve found a new series from the BBC I think you’ll enjoy (thank you Duane Robinson for the recommendation).

    It’s called Poldark and is set in the late 1700s in Cornwall, that little southwestern leg of England that juts out into the Atlantic. The dark-haired and handsome Ross Poldark returns to England after having fought in the American War of Independence and finds that his father has died, and he’s inherited the estate. Except the estate is in ruins.

    The house, which is a long way from being anything grand, is a mess and being inhabited by the deceased father’s last two servants. A man and a wife who are equal parts louts and lushes. The land isn’t producing. The mine is closed. And Poldark has very little money.

    By the way, when we think of British aristocracy, we most often think of dances and fine clothing and large tracts of lands. We seldom think of mines. But Cornwall has been mining tin for a very long time, and so were its lords. In fact, Cornwall was known outside of the Isles anciently, and some historians suggest that Cornwall was probably selling tin to the seafaring Greeks and Phoenicians many hundreds of years B.C.

    So our young and handsome lord has come home to a mess and very little money. But he immediately sets about trying to repair things. And what unfolds is a wonderful story with love, action, humor, injustice, and villains plotting Poldark’s downfall.

    We loved Downton in part for the refinement and high society (and Lady Grantham’s hilarious one-liners). However, Poldark isn’t about the top of the aristocracy. It’s about a man almost at the bottom. And many of those of the lower class who are his friends. There’s a refreshing earthiness about it even while you still have scenes of the high society and all that goes with it.

    We just finished the first season and are hooked. In fact, I stood up and cheered at the end of the last episode we watched. So if you love English historicals, you’re going to enjoy Polkdark.

    *

    The humorous detective series Monk debuted in 2002 and ran for eight seasons. It was a huge hit. But because I’m a cave dweller I didn’t get to it until now. But, boy, I’m happy I did.

    If you haven’t seen it yet, you’re in for a treat. Monk is one of those brilliant detectives like Patrick Jane in The Mentalist or Sherlock Holmes who sees all sorts of details that so many others miss. But unlike those guys, Monk has obsessive-compulsive disorder plus a number of phobias.

    And so he can’t just walk in and stun everyone with his brilliance because at any moment he might get sidetracked straightening pictures or moving lamps or trying to avoid germs. In one funny scene he’s being chased on foot by someone intent on killing him, and he can’t help but touch the poles as he runs by. However, he’s not all helpless because he’s hired a female nurse, Sharona Fleming, to help him. And the interaction between the two of them adds another enjoyable dimension.

    And so you get to experience all the awe of watching someone like Sherlock solve crimes plus laugh along the way. I couldn’t help but laugh out loud during a number of episodes.

    If you like The Mentalist, Elementary, or Psych, I think you’ll really enjoy Monk.

    *

    This last review is for all of you who have dragon feet.

    That’s what I had until two months ago. Dry dragon feet. So dry and with such sharp and jagged calluses that I regularly wore the area on my sheets around my feet to shreds. Nellie’s side of the sheets were nice and smooth. My side, after a year or two, looked like the dog had attacked it.

    The calluses were so bad I periodically sanded them off with 400 grit sandpaper.

    I also got stress cracks in the winter, which I tried to heal with band-aides and Neosporin. And that worked a decade ago. But the stress cracks were just getting more frequent and longer-lasting. This last winter I had three that stayed for weeks and weeks.

    And so when I went into my dermatologist for my annual skin cancer check, I asked him if there was anything to be done. He said, “Get CeraVe cream with SA, salicylic acid. It has to have SA.”


    After the appointment, I promptly drove to Walmart and walked down to the cosmetic aisle and purchased a little tub of CeraVe Renewing SA Cream. And I began to use it that night, putting socks on after I applied it. I applied it every morning and night.

    And, miracle of miracles, a few weeks later my feet were normal human feet again. The calluses were gone. The stress cracks gone. The pain gone. My sheets love me. My wife loves me. I’m saving money on sand paper.

    Folks, if you have dragon feet and want to be human again, let me suggest CeraVe with SA.

    Share

  • “Scatter and Return, the Eyes of the Princess” by Willow Fagan

    ByJohn Brown

    I wasn’t meaning to read this story. I drifted over from Codex (an online writers group I belong to) and thought I’d check the opening, nothing more. But the voice and the story were so compelling that the next thing I knew I was halfway through and had to finish.

    There are a few things in this story I don’t know if I like. But I’m not going to mention them here and prejudice you because the narration was fabulous. The story situations compelling. The dry understatement, the mixture of the mundane and fantastic, the oddness of the tale—all lovely and delicious. But that’s not all. There was something else with the cadence of the writing that drew me. And the solution the golem finds in the end, oh my gosh, it was wonderful.

    It’s free, dang it, so follow this link and enjoy.

    Share
  • | |

    Building Expertise by Ruth Colvin Clark

    ByJohn Brown

    When we find a great teacher, we prize them not only because what we learn improves our lives but also because good learning can be one of the most exhilirating things we experience. Unfortunately, a lot of teaching stinks. It’s boring, rambling, forgettable.

    I’ve made a study of teaching. I’ve had to. For almost 20 years I’ve taught and designed courses in the private sector. And for many of those years my work has been in a revenue generating department. What that means is that if my classes are ineffective and dull, nobody signs up, revenue falls, and a lot of folks will stand around and wonder if it might not be better to just replace me with a potted plant. At least a plant would be something pleasant to look at, plus it would also clean the air.

    Now not everything I do is stellar (I wish that were so). Sometimes in the quality, cost, speed triangle, quality is the thing that takes the hit. But the point is I have to be alert and try to miminize the schlock. But how do you do that? How do you develop and deliver effective and interesting education?

    Luckily, the field of instructional technology (I’m not talking about computers, but principles of instruction) has come a long way in identifying what works and what doesn’t. This is important because teaching theories of the past (many of which are still used today) often relied on rules of thumb and anecdotal evidence. Their precriptions were often ineffective and sometimes counterproductive. What’s exciting is that in the last few decades researchers in this area have put techniques and principles to the test. We know better now than ever before how to structure learning that is effective and interesting. And I have yet to find a better explanation of the proven techniques and principles than Ruth Colvin Clark’s Building Expertise: Cognitive Methods for Training and Performance Improvement, 3rd Edition.  

    Don’t let the “training” part fool you. We often associate “training” with learning procedures and simple tasks (which is what leads to the “we want to provide sex education, not sex training” obfuscation). But Clark isn’t using the term that way. Training here includes all types of learning.

    What Clark does is not only share the techniques that build expertise, but also the psychological reasons and research-based evidence for those techniques. This isn’t nonsense based on personality or political correctness. It’s practical and proven.

    Among other things, you’ll learn:

    • Why working memory is key to instruction and how to overcome its limits
    • How to motivate learners
    • How to structure learning
    • When to use lecture and when to put learners into action
    • What methods work best

    You’ll learn when taking notes can actually be counterproductive and what you can do about it. Or how making your delivery more personable (and what that means) can actually improve attention. You’ll see why lots of practice isn’t always the best answer–sometimes your child will learn more if you do half of their homework questions for them.

    You’ll find that there “Is no Yellow Brick road” in teaching. Instead, you’ll see that the effectiveness of any method depends on whether it’s suited to the specific situation. And Clark will explain what the key factors in any situation are so you know which methods to apply and the trade-offs you’ll make when you do.

    If you’re a teacher in any setting–family, job, church, school, or recreation–or if you’re trying to teach yourself, this book (specifically the 3rd edition) will be a goldmine for you. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

    Share
  • |

    Brain Nazis and Feeling Good by David D. Burns, M.D.

    ByJohn Brown

    Have You Got a Brain Nazi?

    If you’re conscious, you’re monitoring your environment. You have to. It’s how you survive. This is not something you can turn off. It’s just one of those systems that runs automatically, like your liver. You’re always appraising the situation.

    And as soon as you encounter something that’s likely to be of importance to you or yours, your monitor kicks off a physical response to prepare you to deal with or take advantage of it.

    The problem is that sometimes a Nazi propagandist worms his way into the monitoring station. And like any good Nazi, he distorts reality.

    Sometimes those distortions lead to burning resentment, sometimes to unwarranted shame or anxiety, sometimes to eating disorders, sometimes to grave depression. When I heard of the tragic suicide that occurred in our community a few months ago, my heart went out in sympathy to the girl, her family, and friends.  I’m not a doctor. I don’t know the situation. But I’m positive she was dealing with one of these villains.

    I wished I’d been able to share something that’s been a literal life saver to me. Now, it might not have changed anything. But hopefully it can change things in the future for you and others you know who may have to deal with a Nazi in the brain.

    And you will have to deal with a brain Nazi at some time.

    This is not something that affects a miniscule portion of the population. In any given year you can expect more than 15% of a population to experience some form of this [1]. That’s roughly 238 of the estimated 1,592 people 18 years and older in the little county where I live [2]. Rates for teens are similar [3]. Besides, you don’t have to have a full-blown case of a depression for distortions to affect you. How many of us haven’t made faulty comparisons with others? “Oh, she’s so thin and has such great hair; I’m so dumpy.” “Oh, he’s doing so well, and I’m not. I’ll never be a success.”

    The question is not whether you or someone important to you will have to deal with it. The question is how prepared you’ll be when you do. Everyone deals with distortions now and again.  Which means everyone can find a little more enjoyment in life by showing their brain Nazis the door.

    So how does it all work? How do you show the villain out?

    I’m going to summarize it below, but I’ll tell you right now that the book that saved my life was Feeling Good by David D. Burns, MD. This isn’t positive mental attitude. It’s not neuro-linguistic programming. It’s not the mumbo jumbo of Freud and Jung. This is practical and proven. It is the most prescribed intervention for dealing with these issues in the current medical community. It’s prescribed because it works.

    Your Brilliant Appraisal-Emotion System

    To understand this, you have to understand how emotions work. As I said before, you’re always monitoring your situation. You hear a buzz and see a rattlesnake on the path two feet away. Your monitor immediately responds. Alarm, adrenaline, increased blood flow–all of that to get you ready to deal with the situation. Your monitor writes “alarm” on your face to communicate it to those around you–to warn and ask for help. This happens in less than a blink of an eye.

    But this doesn’t just happen with danger. It happens when we encounter unfamiliar things. When we encounter positive things. You see a great friend who makes you laugh all the time. Boom, your monitor responds. You smile. Feel. Focus. You do so because you not only want to avoid dangers, you also want to seek out the things that make you happy.

    Our emotions prepare us to fight, flee, seek, and pitch woo. Our little monitoring and physical response system is brilliant.

    But there’s more. We don’t rely on just the automatic subconscious monitoring. We also have a cognitive (conscious thinking) part. Let’s go back to the rattlesnake. You walk out into the garden, step on a slither, and immediately go into alarm mode. Then you look, consciously see the slithery thing is not a snake, but the garden hose. You relax. Laugh.

    The quick subconscious appraisals keep us alive, because with snakes and other things, if you’re slow, you’re dead. We don’t have time for thought. If you touch a hot stove, you want an immediate reflex. You don’t want to ponder it for a second or two. On the other hand, the cognitive appraisals help us further appraise a situation. They bring more of our resources to bear on the situation.

    How Does the Nazi Get In?

    So there are three parts of the appraisal-emotion system: the subconscious appraisal of the situation, the physical response, and the cognitive appraisal. Each of the three parts affects the other two. And when things are running smoothly, we don’t have problems. But sometimes we get a distortion mucking up the works. We make a faulty appraisal of the situation. And therefore have a faulty physical response.

    For example, you’re a mother. You’ve had a hard day. The kids make a huge mess with flour in the kitchen. You yell, freak out. When they’re cowering in their rooms and you’re cleaning up the flour, you think, “There I go again. I’m a total failure. I can’t stand it! I never do anything right! I’m a terrible mother.” These thoughts make you even sadder.

    And that’s the propaganda. That’s your brain Nazi with his all-or-nothing thinking, telling you that you either perform perfectly or you’re a failure.

    But is that true? No, it’s not. You might be a B+ mother, filling the lives of your kids with all sorts of goodness. You might have just had a great time reading with the kids not thirty minutes before. But the brain Nazi tells you to forget that. “Vatch dis film,” he says, “und see de horrors of vut you are!”    

    And the all-or-nothing thinking gambit is just one of ten common weapons he uses. Furthermore, this happens so quick that we often don’t notice it. In fact, we’ve often repeated some of these distortions so often than they’ve become almost automatic.

    Mr. Nazi, Meet Mr. Bazooka

    The good news is that you can pull the lid off the lies. You can open the door, spot the brain Nazi that slipped in, and take him out. You can do this because one of the three parts of the system is our cognitive appraisal. This means you can consciously stop the movie, pin the distortion on the wall, and uncover the truth. Once you do that, it’s like the rattlesnake scenario above—oh, it’s a hose, we realize, not a snake, and the appropriate emotions immediately follow.

    But you need to know how to stop the movie. You need to know how to spot the lies. David D. Burns, MD tells you exactly how to do this in his book Feeling Good. (By the way, DON’T get this book confused with his Feeling Good Handbook–you DON’T want the handbook; you want Feeling Good, the book.)  In the book, Burns talks about the theory, the results, and then gets right down to the practical techniques used to blow the brain Nazi to kingdom come.

    A few years ago I hit a bad patch with a brain Nazi that had taken up residence. A very bad patch. He’d been there for quite some time. This book and a good counselor saved me. I thank the Lord for that. By the time I went to see a medical doctor to assess whether chemical issues might be playing a role, I was stable. I wasn’t out of the woods yet, but I had opened the lid and found the villain at the controls. I used the techniques Burns gave me, and I’m happy to say that while the brain Nazi still comes round every once in a while, I can spot him. And I can take that sucker out.

    Go to the library and check out the book and take the assessment test. If you, or someone you know, scores in the mild range, maybe you’ve just experienced a very sad event. But maybe you’ve also got a villain in residence. Get the book. Read it. Be happy. Nobody needs to live with a Nazi at the controls.

    For Authors

    By the way, fiction authors should pay special attention to this stuff. Not because we’re more susceptible to brain Nazis than others, although we do have to deal with our fair share as we develop and share our stories. No, we should because the emotion process is exactly what we’re trying to tap into. Knowing the principles can be very useful indeed. Let me recommend you read the books on emotion listed on the Learning With Pros page.

    Sources

    1. 1. http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/the-numbers-count-mental-disorders-in-america/index.shtml
    2. 2. http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/49/49033.html (find your state and county and see how many folks are likely dealing with a brain Nazi in your area)
    3. 3. http://www.oas.samhsa.gov/2k5/youthDepression/youthDepression.htm
    Share

  • Good Stuff! The winning Lady Rebels and Lady Tigers

    ByJohn Brown

    RichRebelsBB360x240Cody Lundgren, Jesse Calder, and Louie Stewart led our Lady Rebel basketball team to a 10- 10 record in the regular season and a 2-2 performance at the state tournament that earned our girls second place in our region and sixth at state.

    It’s interesting that the wins and losses were split right down the middle, which means it wasn’t a losing season, but it wasn’t a winning season either.

    Or was it?

    Now, I love it when our kids win. But I’ve never believed that winning should be the ultimate measurement or objective of high school sports. In fact, I will go so far as to say that it’s possible to win every game and become the state champion and utterly fail. Because, for me, high school sports are not about winning games. They are about the lessons that can only be learned by striving for excellence through competition.

    Lessons such as learning to:

    • Work hard
    • Work smart
    • Push yourself over a long period to obtain something you desire
    • Not give up in the face of adversity
    • Not give up even when you’re behind or the odds are against you
    • Play on a team, including supporting other team members in their roles, especially during the bad times
    • See mistakes and losses as feedback and triggers for learning instead of labels
    • Exert control over your future instead of feeling nothing you do makes a difference
    • Deal with both success and defeat
    • Deal with competitors who haven’t quite yet caught the vision

    I could list many more. The opportunities for learning key lessons about winning in life litter the ground in our gyms and on our fields and on our mats.

    The question is: did our coaches help our kids seize those opportunities? Did they help them learn what really matters and have a good time doing it?

    I’m pleased to report from what I and others observed that the three amigos listed above helped our girls do just that.

    They built positive and fun relationships.

    They asked the girls to meet high standards of performance and kept the girls busy in practice with useful drills that built skills.

    They taught them instead of yelled at them, and they praised them when they did well and when they attempted to do well but weren’t yet able to execute the skills right.

    They taught them to play with skill, not with cheap shots, as was displayed by one team at the state tournament that had learned to punch the opposing team’s stomachs when they went up for shots.

    They demonstrated, by example, how to deal with losses and mistakes.

    Coach Lundgren also worked in a demonstration of how tricky the lines on the court can be for old guys, tripping them and causing them to slide across the floor (grin).

    This was a winning season for me. Coaches are really just a certain type of teacher, and I’m sure they have things they want to improve in their curriculum. But this was a fabulous season full of opportunities to learn the things that really matter in life.

    TabionaTigersBB360x240And it wasn’t just the Lady Rebels learning these kinds of lessons. For those of you that didn’t go to the tournament, you should know about the Lady Tigers from Tabiona. They’re one of our region opponents. One that we beat both times we met them in the regular season.

    In our second game of the tournament, one of our girls, one of our top rebounders, a demon under the basket, broke her hand. She knew it hurt like heck, enough to bring tears to her eyes, but didn’t know she’d broken it, and so she played the last quarter and a half with a broken hand. (Is there a lesson there?) Well, Tabiona was our next game.

    Now stop and think about this. We beat Tabiona both times this season. I think we’ve probably beaten them a lot more than they’ve beaten us these last few years. You know what you feel when a team keeps beating you.

    So the Lady Tigers found out that one of our starters, one of the players that was supposed to have played them the next day, had broken her hand. And the girls, not their coaches, decided to get her . . . flowers.

    Flowers. For a player on their region opponent’s team.

    Who does that?

    Well, the Lady Tigers do. I talked to their coach, and he said it was all the girls’ idea.

    They’re learning things down in Tabiona that go far beyond basketball.

    And they’re learning things that go far beyond basketball here, thanks to Lundgren, Calder, and Stuart.

    That’s good stuff, baby. That’s excellent stuff.

    Share