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Black Butterfly Review presents 2009 Best...



Please take this opportunity to vote for your 2009 Best literary categories.

The deadline for submission will be December 15th and the winners will be
announced December 20th.



The link below will take you to the site.

http://www.eSurveysPro.com/Survey.aspx?id=86644618-490b-4bb2-99c3-6e5e88a4e876


Thanks for your continued support.



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Eleanor S. Shields
Black Butterfly Review
www.blackbutterflyreview.com


      

Similarly, Cynthia Stephen writes in her piece entitled "The Stuff Legends are made of" : “The young couple faced severe opposition from almost all sections. Savitribai was subject to intense harassment everyday as she walked to the school. Stones, mud and dirt were flung at her as she passed”. Cynthia goes further to describe how the perseverance of the Phules succeeded in spite of all these malicious deeds by representatives of the Brahmanical mainstream. By gaining the goodwill of people from different walks of life including a distinguished Muslim gentleman, few scholars, officials and educationists the schools run by the Phules got firmly established in a short period of time. By  1852 November, the educational department of the government even organized a public
felicitation of the Phule couple. There is another interesting narration of an attempt on the life of Phule by two dalit men hired by local Brahmans. They broke into his home with swords to assassinate him one hight, and how they were left terribly impressed
by the great personality. Following a brief dialogue with these misguided persons, these men ended up joining the revolutionary  in his plank of social reform.

The bold strides made by Savithribai and her husband through the Satyasodhak Samaj, in providing the most needed social space for widows, children of unwed mothers subjected to ostracism by the Hindu culture, remarrying of young Hindu widows sans ceremonial service of Brahman priests, educating women and the underprivileged etc., would perhaps be unthinkable even for the present day reformers in spite of being equipped by the unique constitutional mechanism of Independent India.

Victor Paul  in the essay titled ‘A Relentless Truth seeker’ lashes out at the Brahmanical nationalists while  juxtaposing their typical attitude with that of the  Phule couple’s preceding agenda of social reforms in the pre independent India: “(Nationalism in India….)While depicting the British period as a shameful and forgettable episode in an otherwise glorious historical and cultural saga of their nation, the nationalists conveniently overlook the fact that they themselves were the great beneficiaries of the plunder of the colonial era. Not surprisingly, almost  all nationalist intellectual exercises of the period, appear to be an attempt to hoodwink the masses by blaming the British for all uncomfortable and nefarious internal issues..”

Many of the vital aspects of reforms taken up by Jyotiba and Savitribai  remain to be fulfilled these days, despite the heightened
awareness on caste and Hinduism thanks to the teachings of Babasaheb Ambedkar and by many others  later. Unfortunately for many of us, this state of affairs is much likely to continue as long as the failure of the agenda of social reforms does not get acknowledged at a wider level.  This book arrives at precisely this juncture to remind us of this fact, both in first person accounts and otherwise.

Title: Coconut Water for health and healing

Author: Dr. Bruce Fife

Publisher: Piccadilly Books, Ltd.

ISBN: 978-0-941599- 66-5

Genre: Non-Fiction / Health

Presentation - Soft Cover

The water of a tender (green) coconut is a natural electrolyte, rich in
potassium and other minerals needed. It is thus a natural sports drink. I knew
that much before I accepted this book for review and was curious how a book
could be written about that!

I was in for a pleasant surprise when I received this beautifully printed book
with a colorful cover and found it well edited, printed well with a good
collection of photos to drive the points home.

In 10 chapters, a few appendixes and 223 pages, the author succeeds in educating
us about all the health benefits of coconut water. Did you know that Coconut
water cured the cataract of eyes of a person? Well, I did not know that! Did you
know that coconut water is a good way of detoxing without many problems
associated with plain water fast and fruit juice fasts?

There are many more uses of tender coconut water and many of the same benefits
are obtained from packaged coconut water too. Coconut milk is not to be confused
with coconut water. Dr. Fife has given several recipes at the end of this book
that use coconut water, coconut milk or desiccated coconut etc. Fresh tender and
mature coconuts are of course available in many parts of the world and can be
used.

All in all, this is a highly readable book on the several health benefits of
coconut water. I am lucky to be in a country where tender coconuts are sold
roadside and also packed coconut water is available in departmental stores just
in case, I need to travel to places where fresh coconuts may not be available.

Bruce Fife, N.D. is the author of 18 books including The Coconut Oil Miracle
(formerly titled The Healing Miracles of Coconut Oil), Coconut Lover's Cookbook,
and Eat Fat, Look Thin, The Detox Book, Saturated Fat May Save Your Life, and
Health Hazards of Electromagnetic Radiation etc. He is the director of the
Southern Colorado chapter of the Weston A. Price Foundation and serves as the
editor of the Healthy Ways Newsletter.

I am glad to recommend this book for all interested in health of themselves and
or their family members, friends etc.

The reviewer is an author, editor, reviewer and a holistic healer. See
http://swamyreviews.blogspot.com for his reviews.

Probus Guide for Seniors

For the eighteenth successful year, Probus Club of Chennai (Tamil Nadu)has
brought out this Annual reference book â€" sort of Almanac. The book may be
considered to be in three parts, though no such distinction is claimed by the
compilers or publishers. First part gives background information about the club
in the form of a note by the President, the conceptual framework, nostalgic
account of how the series of annual publication began and developed, list of
contributors etc.  The list of contributors reads like a who is who among
eminent retirees of Chennai comprising of doctors, psychologists, engineers,
teachers, corporate executives, geriatricians, chartered accountants and so on.
The Educational Assistance offered by the club is commendable: With a corpus
grown to more than ten lakhs (from six lakhs last year), helping some 55 high
school students in four schools is praiseworthy. This activity will help
bridging the generation gap that senior citizens are prone to suffer.

The second part provides a series of short articles on various topics of
interest to the aged persons like: Law, Safety, Income Tax, Budget, Religion,
hobbies and health. As health appears to be one of the most important concerns,
there are about ten articles in this area alone. There are three articles in
Tamil. There is an account of Chennai in olden days â€" Madras: I liked it much
as my hometown is Madras. Apart from signed articles there are a good number of
extracts from the websites on topics like: home remedies, all about blood, quiz
on heart attack, quiz on angina, quiz on Alzheimers, organ donation, ambulance
and emergency services etc. An article on Reverse mortgage is timely and useful.
Among all contributions, there is an odd man out that does not fit into the
theme â€" you may discover it yourself if you read the whole book!

The third part is a sort of a directory. Items like Assistive and Enabling
devices, List of NGOs working for seniors, Eye banks, Blood banks, helpline,
important phone numbers, Old age Homes in Chennai and Tamil Nadu (130 out of 250
covered), Details of Doctors on House call, Facilities for renting wheel chairs,
walkers & the like, diagnostic labs etc are all given.  In the case of Old Age
Homes, coverage of other states and cities has been omitted this year. List of
Palliative care centers in South India is a welcome addition.  While we expect a
number of NGOs to be discussed under “Organizations working for the Elderly�
we find only HelpAge being described. List of Ambulance services (65) is
exhaustive. Doctors willing to do house calls (increased from 50 to 60 in this
year) are thoughtfully given area wise.

The number of advertisements in this 300 pages book has come down from 40 last
year to 23 this year â€" thus increasing the value for your money! This Annual
publication for 2009 is available from Sri KV Chary, Chennai Ph 24981099 for a
nominal donation of Rs 100 plus postage. I would recommend this book to all
interested in Ageing related issues and the ordinary retiree looking for a handy
book giving addresses, phone numbers of products and service providers for his
specialized needs.
                             ==========

Title: Southcrop Forest

Author: Lorne Rothman

Publisher: iUniverse

ISBN: 978-0595-49588-7

Genre: Fiction / Children / Science / Ecology

This book is presented as a novel but is in fact a good introduction to the
interdependence of various life systems in our world. The story is set in Canada
and involves many trees and a colony of crawlers with a single intelligence
(soul). The Colony of crawlers (caterpillars) calls itself Fur and is able to
communicate with the trees, starting with Auja, a young Oak and then through her
with others. Fur is persuaded by the trees to leave Southcrop, go to Riverside
Farm, collect some mysterious fungal spores, cross Oak River and carry the
spores to the forests of Deep Sky. The journey of Fur through the forest, the
many problems faced by Fur and how Fur pushes itself against its own impulses to
give up makes good reading.

Through the interesting and fairly readable medium of the story, the author
presents an interesting account of the various trees, birds, animals and insects
that inhabit the forests. He brings out the danger to the ecology that human
greed is bringing and succeeds in his message for a more holistic approach from
us towards the environment. The story ends with a startling discovery by Fur but
that is best left for you, the reader to find out.

It is an interesting concept and the author has succeeded in making a readable
book. The book is recommended for children in high schools and their educators,
parents etc.

Capital Secrets

The new Dan Brown puzzler is the scariest one yet.

Illustration by Christoph Niemann

Enlarge This Image

THE LOST SYMBOL

By Dan Brown

Illustrated. 509 pp. Doubleday. $29.95

Related

Times Topics: Dan Brown

Janet Maslin’s Review of ‘The Lost Symbol’ (September 14, 2009)

The Book’s Web Site

Audio

Enlarge This Image

Illustration by Christoph Niemann

It’s not so much the barbarous machinations of the villain, another one-dimensional, self-mortifying hulk, that sends chills down your spine. Or the plot, which is an Oedipal MacGuffin.

No, the terrifying thing about “The Lost Symbol” is that Brown — who did not flinch when the Vatican both condemned the “The Da Vinci Code” and curtailed the filming of “Angels & Demons” in Rome — clearly got spooked by that other powerful, secretive ancient sect, the Masons.

His book is a desperate attempt to ingratiate himself with the Masons, rather than to interpret the bizarre Masonic rites and symbols that illuminate — as in Illuminati! — how the ultimate elite private boys’ club has conspired to shape the nation’s capital and Western civilization ever since George Washington laid the cornerstone for the Capitol building in a Masonic ritual wearing full Masonic regalia, including a darling little fringed satin apron. If the Masons are more intimidating than the Vatican, if Brown has now become part of their semiotic smoke screen, then all I can say is, God help us all.

Or as Brown, who is more addicted to italics than that other breathless Brown, Cosmo Girl Helen Gurley, might put it: What the hell?

Of course, who can blame him? How can you not be frightened by a brotherhood that includes Mel Blanc, the voice of Bugs Bunny; Buzz Aldrin; and Dave Thomas, the founder of Wendy’s?

During the five years he researched this book, did Brown begin to believe those sensational stories about how, if you expose the secrets of the Masons, they will slit your throat? Did he discover that the Masons are not merely a bunch of old guys dressed up in funny costumes enjoying a harmless night away from the wives? Could they really be, as a recent Discovery Channel documentary on the ancient order wondered, “Godless conspirators bound to a death pledge who infiltrate institutions and run the world”?

Did Brown decipher the cryptic documents locked in a safe at the C.I.A. — founded by another Mason, Harry Truman! — and figure out that some of those wild tales were true? That Jack the Ripper was a Mason whose identity was covered up by the Masonic police commissioner? That Salieri and others murdered Mozart after the young Masonic composer revealed some of the order’s secret symbols in “The Magic Flute”?

I was really looking forward to Brown’s excavation of Washington’s mystical power, ancient portals, secret passageways and shadow worlds. As a native, I’ve loved the monuments here since I was little. I’ve often driven past the Scottish Rite Masonic temple with its two sphinxes on 16th Street. And my first memory as a little girl was picking up my dad from work at night from the brightly lighted Capitol. I was eager to learn occult lore about our venerable marble temples and access the lost wisdom of the ages.

So I happily curled up with Robert Langdon, the author’s anodyne, tweedy doppelgänger, and suppressed my annoyance that the Harvard symbologist was still wearing his Mickey Mouse watch, hand-grinding his Sumatra coffee beans and refusing to entangle with the latest brainy babe who materializes to help untangle ancient secrets.

This book’s looker, Katherine Solomon, is a lithe, gray-eyed expert in Noetic science, the study of “the untapped potential of the human mind.” Brown must also want to explore the untapped potential of the human body, since he has made his heroine 50 years old, something that no doubt caused the Hollywood studio suits to spritz their Zico coconut water. Katherine, a few years older than Langdon, may be a tribute to Brown’s wife and amanuensis, Blythe, who is 12 years older and helped him write “187 Men to Avoid: A Survival Guide for the Romantically Frustrated Woman.”

Emotions are the one thing Dan Brown can’t seem to decipher. His sex scenes are encrypted. Even though Katherine seems like Langdon’s soul mate — she even knows how to weigh souls — their most torrid sex scenes consist of Robert winking at her or flashing her a lopsided grin.

Brown’s novels are obviously inspired by Indiana Jones and “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” But he can only emulate the galloping narrative drive and the fascination with mythological archetypes, pyramids, Holy Grails, treasure maps and secret codes; he can’t summon the sexy, playful side of the Spielberg-Lucas legacy.

His metaphors and similes thud onto the page. ­Inoue Sato, an intelligence official investigating a disembodied hand bearing a Masonic ring and iconic tattoos that shows up in the Capitol Rotunda, “cruised the deep waters of the C.I.A. like a leviathan who surfaced only to devour its prey.” Insights don’t simply come to characters: “Then, like an oncoming truck, it hit her,” or “The revelation crashed over Langdon like a wave.” And just when our hero thinks it’s safe to go back in the water, another bad metaphor washes over him: “His head ached now, a roiling torrent of inter­connected thoughts.”

You can practically hear the eerie organ music playing whenever Mal’akh, the clichéd villain whose eyes shine “with feral ferocity,” appears. He goes from sounding like a parody of a Bond bad guy (“You are a very small cog in a vast machine,” he tells Langdon) to a parody of Woody Allen (“The body craves what the body craves,” he thinks).

But Brown tops himself with these descriptions: “Wearing only a silken loincloth wrapped around his buttocks and neutered sex organ, Mal’akh began his preparations,” and “Hanging beneath the archway, his massive sex organ bore the tattooed symbols of his destiny. In another life, this heavy shaft of flesh had been his source of carnal pleasure. But no longer.”

Brown has always written screenplays masquerading as novels, but now he’s also casting. Warren Bellamy, the Masonic architect of the Capitol, is described as an elderly African-­American man with close-cropped, graying hair who enunciates his words with crisp precision: “Bellamy was lithe and slender, with an erect posture and piercing gaze that exuded the confidence of a man in full control of his surroundings.” Morgan Freeman, call Ron Howard.

The Bellamy character provides an­other opportunity for Brown to burnish the Masons, as when the architect tells Langdon: “The craft of Freemasonry has given me a deep respect for that which transcends human understanding. I’ve learned never to close my mind to an idea simply because it seems miraculous.”

The author has gotten rich and famous without attaining a speck of subtlety. A character never just stumbles into blackness. It must be inky blackness. A character never just listens in shock. He listens in utter shock.

And consider this fraught interior monologue by the head of the Capitol Police: “Chief Anderson wondered when this night would end. A severed hand in my Rotunda? A death shrine in my basement? Bizarre engravings on a stone pyramid? Somehow, the Redskins game no longer felt significant.”

My dad always said in his day that the Masons were not welcoming to Catholics. The Catholic Church once considered the Masons so anti-­Catholic, Catholics who joined were threatened with excommunication. Now the church hierarchy merely disapproves. (They like secret rites, blood rituals and the exclusion of women only when they do it.) But Langdon suggests to his Harvard students that the Masons are “refreshingly open-minded” and do not “discriminate in any way.” To a student protesting that Masonry sounds like a “freaky cult,” Langdon counters that it’s “a system of morality.” He notes, “The Masons are not a secret society . . . they are a society with secrets.”

He debunks stories of the founding fathers’ supposedly building a Satanic pentacle and the Masonic compass and square into the capital’s street design, scoffing, “If you draw enough intersecting lines on a map, you’re bound to find all kinds of shapes.”

The Masons are represented in the dazzling person of Peter Solomon, Katherine’s older brother, a handsome, wealthy historian and philanthropist who runs the Smithsonian Institution and inspired the young Langdon’s interest in symbols.

In interviews, Brown has said he was tempted to join the Masons, calling their philosophy a “beautiful blueprint for human spirituality.” In the next opus, Langdon will probably be wearing a red Shriner’s fez with his Burberry turtleneck and Harris tweed.

In this book, Langdon helps stop the villain from releasing a video to YouTube that he has surreptitiously taped during his Masonic initiation rites. The blind­folded initiate drinks blood-red wine out of a human skull and has a dagger pressed to his bare chest; he has to take part in an enactment of his own brutal murder — “there were simulated blows to his head, including one with a Mason’s stone maul” — and hear a biblical reference to human sacrifice, “the submission of Abraham to the Supreme Being by proffering Isaac, his firstborn son.” These are meant partly as warnings about what can befall anyone who leaks the order’s secrets — warnings Dan Brown clearly took to heart.

“Langdon could already tell that the video was an unfair piece of propaganda,” Brown writes, adding that the symbologist thought to himself, “the truth will be twisted . . . as it always is with the Masons.” Brown skitters away from giving us the book we expected: one that might have clued us in on which present-day politicians are still Masons and what mumbo jumbo they’re up to.

That job was left to Eamon Javers of Politico, who uncovered a list of Freemasons in Congress that reads like a vast right-wing conspiracy. Joe “You lie!” Wilson is a member of the Sinclair Lodge of West Columbia, S.C. Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the House minority whip, who’s trying to suffocate President Obama’s health care plan, is a member of a Richmond lodge his dad and uncle belonged to. Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, who chimed in against “death panels,” urged Javers: “Don’t judge us by the funny hats we wear.”

Even more ominously, President Obama suddenly left the White House on a recent night and went to the Washington Monument, the obelisk that figures in Brown’s climactic scene, and stayed inside for 20 minutes. If you add the 13 minutes it probably took to walk to the limo and drive back to the White House and return to his residence, you reach the magic Masonic number of 33!

In the end, as with “The Da Vinci Code,” there’s no payoff. Brown should stop worrying about unfinished pyramids and worry about unfinished novels. At least Spielberg and Lucas gave us an Ark and swirling, dissolving humans. We don’t get any ancient wisdom that “will profoundly change the world as you know it” — just a lot of New Agey piffle about how we are the gods we’ve been waiting for. (And a father-son struggle for global domination, as though we didn’t get enough of that with the Bushes.)

What the hell, Dan?!