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Sarah Masters reviews the audio series

Understanding Islam: A Listener’s Guide

This is an opportunity for chaplains to revisit the story of Islam through the eyes of the renowned authority on comparative religions, Huston Smith. Dr. Smith provides his listeners with wonderful insights into the most “persistently misunderstood religion in the world.” He follows unique themes such as how, as a new faith tradition, Islam received much of its inspiration from Greek philosophy.

Understanding Islam: A Listener’s Guide is a condensed version of Huston Smith’s Religions of the World audio series that included an in-depth examination of Islam. This CD comes with an updated introduction about this wisdom tradition.

Dr. Smith’s animated description of the rights of women as put forth in the Qur'an, and his thoughtful examination of the Qur'an’s passages on both mercy and violence, are two highlights that will resonate with the listener.

Completed: 2002
Running Time: 70 Minutes
Publisher: Sounds True

If you are interested in purchasing this CD, you can do so at www.hartleyfoundation.org. Just click on “Sages of Our Age” on the homepage and scroll down to Huston Smith for more information. The cost for the CD is $15.95.

Sarah Masters is the Managing Director of the Hartley Film Foundation, a non-profit foundation dedicated to cultivation, support, production and distribution of the best documentaries and audio meditations on world religions, spirituality, ethics and well-being.

Book Review

Rabbi Dr. David J. Zucker reviews

Good Grief, A Novel

“Death ends a life, but it does not end a relationship, which struggles on in the survivor’s mind toward some final resolution, some clear meaning, which it perhaps never finds.” Robert Anderson (I Never Sang For My Father)

Many of us deal with dying and death on a regular basis. We offer words of comfort or unspoken support in other ways to those who are grieving. In the moment, we can be of great help to them. Yet, what happens to those people in the months following their loved one’s death? And especially, what happens to those people who have to face death suddenly, unexpectedly? This novel addresses that question. In this work we follow the initial year of grieving in the life of fictional Sophie Stanton, whose husband died of Hodgkin’s Disease. Ethan Stanton died a few months following his diagnosis of cancer, but with a little imagination we can imagine that he was a soldier killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. Unexpected widowhood (widowerhood) takes many forms.

Winston takes us though the disorienting world of suddenly being forced to remake your life even as you work through your pain-filled sense of loss. Many chapter headings follow Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ rubrics of Denial, Anger, Depression, but this is a witty novel. Interspersed with Denial and Depression is a chapter titled Oreos [Sophie comforts herself by eating family-size packages], and in addition to Bargaining and Accepting there are chapters titled Lust, Dating, and Baking, as we accompany her along her journey.

The opening paragraph of the book sets the stage for the reader: “How can I be a widow? Widows wear horn-rimmed glasses . . . and have crepe-paper skin and names like Gladys or Midge and meet with their other widow friends once a week to play pinochle. I’m only thirty-six. I just got used to the idea of being married, only test-drove the words my husband for three years . . . after all that time being single!” (3)

When Sophie goes back to work, she thinks she is over the worst of her grief. She is wrong, and soon has a kind of mini-breakdown. The past flashes into her head. “I remember that when I got home from Ethan’s memorial service I couldn’t believe the house was still there. How could the clocks tick? How could the air-conditioning run? How could there be mail in the box? The relentless soldiering on of the world hurt my feelings.” (88)

The novel takes on some of the clichés of Support Groups. When asked to share something she missed about Ethan, Sophie thinks, “This seems too big a question to answer. Besides, wouldn’t we make it easier on ourselves if we tried to recall something we didn’t miss about our loved ones? . . . But that’s the problem with dead people. They’re perfect. They never argue or chew with their mouth open.” (103)

This first novel by Lolly Winston can be lighthearted even as it walks readers through the valley of deepest darkness. In some ways it is too ambitious, and she does not resist the call to tie up loose ends. The novelist’s desire to have Sophie heal by novel’s close is disappointing. Leaving Sophie to continue to struggle would have been a more convincing finish. That said, there is much to commend this work.

Lolly Winston, Good Grief: A Novel, New York, Boston: Warner, 2004, 344 pp.

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