Just checked the Amazon.com page for The Little Way Of Ruthie Leming, and was gratified to see that it has 10 reviews, all five-star notices. From the newest one:

It would be difficult to do justice to Rod’s tender treatment of his sister’s battle with cancer. Suffice it to say that it would take Oscar Wilde’s proverbial heart of stone to read this account and not be moved. It is always painful when bad things happen to good people; Ruthie’s goodness is so evident that it pains us all the more. Yet despite it all–because of God, because of the way the people of St. Francisville could lean on one another–there is a strange peace, too.

So after a long journey, Rod returns; he and his wife pack up their three kids and move back home. He writes: “My friends and I talked a lot about the fragmentation of the modern family, about the deracinating effects of late capitalism, about mass media and the erosion of localist consciousness, about the consumerization of religions and the leviathan state and every other thing other the sun that undermines our sense of home and permanence.” Yet, “The one thing none of us did was what Ruthie did: stay.”

Seeing that passage highlighted puts into relief the point I was trying to make with language: that I was (am) the kind of person who intellectualizes everything, in contrast to my plain-spoken sister, who just did things.

It’s a hard balance to strike, the one between contemplation and activity, between thinking and doing. As I have said, I don’t think my sister got it entirely right. She was the school valedictorian, and an intelligent and academically accomplished woman — but an anti-intellectual. She viewed academic achievement through a moral lens — it was somehow morally right to make good grades, because it showed that you were a hard worker — and also through the lens of instrumentality (i.e., one achieved academically so one could go out into the world and apply that knowledge in practical ways). I think that is too narrow a vision. That said, Ruthie was more correct than I realized in that she had a way of cutting through the sophistry and bullshit that tangled me up as I tried to make my way through life.

Neither one of us had the completely correct take on life. But as someone who often gets lost in the weeds of complexity, I’ve begun to learn the value of simplicity from her example — and I hope others will too, through this book.

UPDATE: No. 26 on the NYT Bestseller List! Woo. If I leap ahead of the book by the Duck Dynasty guys, my nine-year-old son Lucas, who worships the Robertsons, will never forgive me.