The gospel according to Desmond Tutu

I recently had the privilege of interviewing Nobel Peace Prize winner Tutu. We talked about peace and reconciliation somewhat indirectly, as the subject was Tutu's forthcoming Children of God Storybook Bible, which will feature his favorite Bible stories and center on themes of reconciliation and forgiveness. But peace was certainly in the room. He has an infectious laugh and lots of personal warmth. I had read his brand new Made for Goodness, which answers the good question, " 'How do you keep your faith in people when you see so much injustice, oppression, and cruelty?' " The answer in the book takes more than 200 pages, so here is a summary that uses the bits I couldn't stick in the Bible story.

He said: "This is a moral universe. This is a universe where right and wrong do matter. When you look at the evidence of history, (Stalin, Hitler, and their ilk) end up being part of the flotsam and jetsam. At home in the darkest hours, that what's we used to say: 'the apartheid government has already lost. ' It's not just whistling in the dark. There is a heck of a lot of evil around. Where the heck is God in all of this? Yes, God is there. ... Yes, people are good and in the end that good will remain."

After spending only a brief time in his presence, I felt deeply encouraged. As much as his joy, his hope -- he doesn't consider himself an optimist, but does have hope -- is contagious.

Imagine that

As a book reviewer and journalist who covers publishing, I sometimes think that everybody should read the same book I am, or, horrors, no one is going to be reading any books in the near future because they're all playing with their smart phones. Then I go to a Reading by a Famous Author -- Neil Gaiman as part of Naperville Reads -- and am seated in an auditorium with a thousand other people who like this author, and am enthralled to hear him read and it's all good. They sure sold a lot of books, too.

Gaiman reads his own work exceptionally well (OK, the English accent helps, but maybe he'll pick up a little ya-dere, hey-dere from living near Minneapolis) and is exceptionally able to write across media (scripts, prose, graphic novels) and audiences; he writes for kids and adults. In this day and age of narrowcasting to specific groups, he's broader than many and way more imaginative than most. Maybe the energy of his young fans was contagious, but imagination has energy too. A lot of us still and always love stories, never mind the form.

What I'm reading

The Zookeeper's Wife. Diane Ackerman.

If Hitler had a hierarchy of hate, Poles were somewhat better off than Jews, but not by many rungs. Ackerman's book is a truly fresh perspective on the Holocaust, from inside Warsaw (85 percent destroyed in WWII) and from the viewpoint of Antonina Zabinski, wife of Jan, keeper of the Warsaw Zoo. Animal life took a beating along with everything else in the war -- the zoo was bombed during the 1939 invasion. In a beautiful twist, the mostly empty zoo became a place of shelter for 300 Polish Jews during the war years. The Holocaust and WWII are so overwhelmingly evil and destructive that I am compelled to understand the resistance to Nazis. It is documented at Auschwitz, and documented here; at the Zabinski home, Jews lived in hiding alongside Jan (who worked with armed Resistance forces), Antonina, their little boy Rys, a chicken, a hamster, a badger, a muskrat, a rabbit (those were among the various house pets.) A wide circle of species, interconnected, learning survival.