Mike kept telling me what a great book Lois Lowry had written. So I read The Giver. It lives up to the recommendation.

It’s a dystopian tale; a young man is coming of-age in a dystopian world where everything is managed for the sake of ease, comfort and a sense of safety. But he has a gift, a gift the community recognizes when it selects him to receive memories of events long forbidden to be shared by the community at large.

What he learns stuns him. Love, it seems, really does make the world go round. Read this book.

I am an Islamophobe who worries about immigration. How different does that make me from earlier xenophobes? Not so different at all, it turns out.

I picked up a copy of Erika Kee’s America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States at a visit to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. earlier this year. I’m reading it slowly, one chapter at a time and asking myself just what it means to be an American.

I’ll let you know if I and when I find out.