The Hiding Place, by Corrie Ten Boom

As I continue to plan for my daughter’s future schooling, I am finding non-fiction books which I intend to use in her middle and high school years, instead of depending on information already compiled from textbook companies. Many errors have been found in classrooms across America which are not corrected, causing our students to believe pieces of history or details of the world around us that are simply not true.  Other details are not mentioned in texts, practically erasing them from our national memory.  Today’s book is one of those.

The Hiding Place, by Corrie Ten Boom

 

It is practically impossible to complete middle school anywhere in America without reading all or part of the book “A Diary of Anne Frank,” published by a grieving Jewish father going through the things of his daughter who died in a concentration camp during World War II. It is perfectly logical for middle school students to read this book – they are old enough to handle the content and reading level, and they are near Anne Frank’s age.  However, another book from this same time period shows another aspect of WWII in a book which is only advertised by word of mouth by those who have read it.  It is very well written, but because of some of the intense situations in the book, I would not recommend anyone younger than 16 read this book.  It does get very emotional at times and confronts many situations which you will want to discuss.  (Okay, I am over forty and I really want to discuss some situations with someone who has read it!)  There is a movie also which Corrie Ten Boom herself approved before it was released, and she even appears at the end, so even though it does not show everything that happens in the book, Corrie herself said it portrayed the scenes accurately.  It can be confusing, though, so read the book first.

Corrie Ten Boom and her family lived in Holland in the early 1900’s.  She and her sister, elderly spinsters, lived with their widowed father.  They were not a Jewish family, but instead they were a strong Christian family who believed in the God of the Bible and that He would keep His promises.  Daily,  Corrie voluntarily taught a group of special needs children about God.  She was also a certified watchmaker, like her father, and her sister helped them around the house.   Their shop was located on the bottom floor of their multi-story home, and they were very well known and liked by the citizens of their city of Haarlem in Holland.

 When the Nazis invaded Holland, life changed drastically for this family.  Corrie’s family saw and did not like the events around them.  Ration cards were issued and people whose identity cards were marked with a “J” had to wear a Star of David on their clothing.  In protest, Corrie’s father insisted on wearing a Star of David on his own clothing, something which everyone from the Nazi soldiers to Jews to his own pastor disapproved.  Corrie’s special needs classes were forced to stop. 

 The Ten Boom family found themselves using their home as a weigh station for Jews trying to escape before they were evacuated to concentration camps.  They follow the teachings of the Bible throughout the dangerous situations, refusing to participate in activities which will result in deaths.  Unfortunately, they are found out and Corrie, her father, and her sister are taken to concentration camps as political prisoners. 

 Through it all, and certainly inside the camps, Corrie and her sister depend on scripture for their strength.  After they have been relocated to Germany, they smuggled a Bible through the strip searches in a way that could only have been done with the help of God.  They use this little book to teach those in their cabin.  In one scene of the movie, a Nazi soldier is removing dead bodies from the cabins.  She and another soldier say that 23 were removed from one cabin that day, 18 from another, yet from the cabin where the Ten Boom sisters are staying, they did not remove any dead.  “Keep looking.  They must be there somewhere,” one soldier states.  God carried them through their struggles in ways that it is very obvious that His Hand is all that could have helped them.

Corrie includes family photos of the people mentioned in the book, and in the movie they worked hard to make the actors look like those they are portraying.  Keep a box (yes, a whole box) of tissues nearby as you read the book and you will need another one when you watch the movie (which you will want to do when you finish the book).  While I was sad that some scenes were omitted in the movie, it is impossible to show everything in two hours.  It does keep to the story, though, and shows (accurately, in my opinion) the main events from the book. 

Whether you are schooling a high school age homeschooler and are looking for material to read about WWII or you are an adult looking for a good book to read, I highly recommend reading “The Hiding Place” by Corrie TenBoom.

A Line That was Drawn, by Hugh Estlinbaum

While my daughter is still too young to read many of the books which I am recommending, I want to know what direction I want her to go in the future.  She is a fourth grader this year and we are reading classical literature.  Because of her abilities, we are reading a re-written, easier version of them, but we are still reading them.  As she gets older, if she wants to read the full versions, I will not stop her, but I want the Middle School and High School years of schooling to be focused on learning real things, not someone’s imagination (no matter how creative or realistic that imagination may be).  So, I am sharing some of the books which I intend on reading with her as she gets older.

 

A Line that was Drawn was a book written by Hugh Estlinbaum.  Hugh’s sister Lorie was one of my two best friends in High School.  We lost touch for many years, but we now meet periodically for Chai Tea at Panera Bread and catch up on the big and small events in life. When I think of Hugh, I think of a 9 year old little boy who would enjoy sticking his nose into whatever game we were playing. His sister, as most teenager sisters would do, would quickly send him off doing something else. 

I was getting ready for work one morning in 2009, the television blaring the morning news in the background, when I heard the name Estlinbaum.  Since it is not a common name, I perked up and walked into the room with the television. That was when I heard about Hugh’s son, Tony.  The Swine Flu (H1N1, as it later was called) was a new virus at the time and many people were dying quickly from it.  I said many prayers for Tony through this time and e-mailed his sister Lorie, who I had recently reconnected with, for updates on Tony’s condition.  I was teaching a 5^th grade class at church on Sundays and I put Tony’s name on the prayer list that first Sunday.  One of the boys immediately said, “Tony? He’s on my football team.  I didn’t know he was sick.” 

 Tony Estlinbaum, Hugh’s son, was one of the first hospitalized cases of the H1N1 virus.  He almost died many times in the months he was hospitalized.  Unlike others who caught the virus, Tony had no pre-existing conditions.  He was a healthy 10 year old who came home from his first football game with a headache.  Fortunately, his parents recognized that something was very wrong and took him to a trusted Oklahoma City hospital emergency room before it was too late, but the hospital had difficulty caring for him. Only an experimental procedure saved his life. 

 

A Line that was Drawn was written by the father of an extremely ill son only a few months after Tony went home from the hospital.  You can see the shock of a parent finding out his otherwise healthy oldest son may not survive the night.  He takes you through the continued prayers of his family and why he decided to go public by calling in a local news organization.   As time passes and his son’s condition continues for months to be critical, Hugh and his wife must balance being at his son’s bedside and spending time with his healthy children who were not allowed into the ICU.  His family and faith grew stronger as the very life of his child was beyond the control of Hugh and the highly skilled doctors caring for him.

 This is a book which I highly recommend for parents, but I wouldn’t recommend children read it before High School years.  There is no bad language in it or any situations which Middle Schoolers should not read, but the content is very intense at times. I suggest having a box of tissues nearby when you read the chapters where Tony was at his most critical.  Even though this book was written months after Tony came home, it’s easy to see how difficult it was for a parent to describe the near death experience of his child.  One reason Hugh wrote this book was to help other parents to see how important immediate medical care was. Had they waited any longer than they did, there is no doubt that Tony would not have made it.

A Line That was Drawn by Hugh Estlinbaum

Meet me in the Gloaming

            I am figuring out that it is so important to keep fictional reading in the “entertainment” category and non-fiction in the “school” category. The exceptions will be fictional books which include a lot of facts.  Since nonfiction books are not widely read, I want to share a series of non-fiction books that I intend to use in our homeschool with my daughter as she gets older.  Meet Me in the Gloaming by Carol Vinzant will definitely be one of them.

I suppose I should disclose that Carol Vinzant, the author of this book, is a friend of mine.  I have known her for many years and I know that she planned on writing this book for many years before she actually did.  I have a great deal of respect for Carol, and even more since she pushed through a great number of difficulties to publish this amazing book which relates the life of her grandmother.  Carol inherited her grandmother’s diaries, stacks and stacks of them.  She remembers her grandmother puttering around the kitchen when Carol was a child, but she had no idea the exciting life she lived until she began to read what Clemmie had written over the years about events that had occurred. 

 

 About ninety-five percent of this book tells content directly from these diaries, while five percent is fictional conversations which she had to include to show progression which was necessary but was not described in the detail she needed to use.  She worked very hard to keep these fictional sections to a minimum, though, and worked very hard to keep them true to the people involved.  Some members of her family complained to her about including some portions which they did not want published, but Carol said it is part of her grandmother’s story so it should be told.  The title comes from an old hymn of the same name.

 

Meet Me in the Gloaming takes place primarily in Texas, where Clemmie lived all of her life.  Her family struggled financially, which only got worse during the Great Depression.  See life through her diaries as she goes through love and loss.  She struggles to be a spinster school teacher, in spite of her difficulties controlling the bullies in every class in which she taught.  After she marries, she does all she can to keep food on the table and a roof over her family’s head, all the while maintaining her belief in God and keeping her morals high.  She describes events of her time, including an entire town which moved a couple of miles so they could be closer to the railroad (something which happened in many towns in Texas and Oklahoma which were close but not exactly on the track of the railway when it came through).  When available, actual photographs are included throughout the book.

 

If you are studying the history of the United States during the depression era and afterward, I highly recommend you use this book as part of your studies to see exactly what the depression years were like for most families during this difficult time.  There are many situations in this story which will provide discussion points about life as well as giving you a variety of events of the time which you can further research.  I highly recommend reading Meet Me in the Gloaming by Carol Vinzant.

 

http://www.amazon.com/Meet-Gloaming-Carol-Mitchell-Vinzant/dp/1606969749

The Clockwork Universe, by Edward Dolnick

The Clockwork Universe

By Edward Dolnick

            I have started looking for “classics” for my daughter and I to read when she gets into middle and high school years.   If you have not yet read my blog about A Thomas Edison Education, then I highly recommend for you to read it so you understand my purpose for looking for educational classics (of course, I recommend you read the BOOK, too, not just my blog!  ..lol..)

          In the Thomas Edison book, I was surprised to discover that there were “classic” books in every field of study, not only in literature, and so I started a quest to discover books written by the “great minds” of history.  The first which I found was a book written by Euclid.  Since that book was written by him, with notes added by another, more modern mathematician, I had no idea who he was or why I wanted to read about what he said about the subject of Math – it was simply the first name on a list which I made of names to look for.  While I learned a fabulously easy way to find the Greatest Common Factor, the rest was difficult for me to follow. I would not recommend reading Euclid to begin reading about the classics (although I discovered that the MOST boring parts of the book were not actually Euclid’s writing at all, but instead were the writings of the person who chose to edit his works!).  I will probably eventually go back to him, but I’m not ready yet (and my daughter certainly isn’t!).

             The book I am reviewing today, The Clockwork Universe by Edward Dolnick, was my second attempt to discover a Mathematical Classic.  I think I struck gold! 

            It is not that this book is an especially deep thinking book (thankfully! – I don’t think I was ready for another of those so soon!).  What struck me as exciting about using this book for our homeschooling instruction in middle school years is that this book tells me about several of the mathematical geniuses.  I have heard of Sir Isaac Newton, Aristotle, Kepler, and Galileo.  Descartes’s name came up in some of my reading, though I couldn’t remember EVER having seen his name before my recent readings.  I knew that between the 1600’s and the 1900’s there had been a lot of changes in the way Science and Mathematics were viewed, but I quickly discovered that I had never really read or been taught about any of that in any depth. 

            TheClockwork Universe, I believe, is a good book to start with in educating your children about Mathematical and Scientific classics.  It gives a brief biography of these early geniuses, and allows us to see a brief glimpse of how their thought processes worked.  It shows how in their day, science and math were not separate subjects of study.  They were also not designed to be taught separate and apart from the real world, but instead, the real world demonstrates daily what math and science prove.  Most importantly, to me at least, it does not take today’s view of ignoring a person’s religion altogether when writing about what a person did in his life.   Whether or not he agrees that the God of the Bible is the one and only true God, Edward Dolnick acknowledges throughout the book that these great scientists believed that, and a good many of their experiments and discoveries were designed to prove what they already believed. They saw beauty in the orderly system of nature, and fully believed that only a divine being who was much greater than we are could have created so much precision and beauty. 

            The Clockwork Universe tells me who these people called geniuses actually were, why they did the experiments they did, what serious mistakes they made, what serious misconceptions they maintained through part or all of their lives, and who their contemporaries were.  It tells how the bubonic plague affected many of these men, either directly or indirectly, and gives some insight as to each person’s personality.  I can use this information as a springboard to dive into other studies in the future, this time understanding a little better who I will be reading about and knowing why I care what they have to say.

            Whether you’re homeschooling, helping a child who attends public or private school, or just interested in learning more on your own, The Clockwork Universe gives interesting insight into the men who helped advance our mathematics and sciences into the technological advances which we have today.