This I Believe II

by Jay Allison, Dan Gediman (Editor)

The new paperback in the bestselling series of inspiring personal philosophies

This collection of This I Believe essays gathers seventy-five essayists―ranging from famous to previously unknown―completing the thought that begins the book's title. With contributors who run the gamut from cellist Yo-Yo Ma, to professional skateboarder Tony Hawk, to ordinary folks like a diner waitress, an Iraq War veteran, a farmer, a new husband, and many others, This I Believe II , like the first New York Times bestselling collection, showcases moving and irresistible essays.

Included are Sister Helen Prejean writing about learning what she truly believes through watching her own actions, singer Jimmie Dale Gilmore writing about a hard-won wisdom based on being generous to others, and Robert Fulghum writing about dancing all the dances for as long as he can. Readers will also find wonderful and surprising essays about forgiveness, personal integrity, and honoring life and change.

Here is a welcome, stirring, and provocative communion with the minds and hearts of a diverse, new group of people―whose beliefs and the remarkably varied ways in which they choose to express them reveal the American spirit at its best.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Philosophy, Memoir, Audiobook, Inspirational, Self Help

282 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Jay Allison is one of public radio's most honored producers. He has produced hundreds of nationally broadcast documentaries and features for radio and television. His work has earned him the duPont-Columbia and five Peabody Awards, and he was the 1996 recipient of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's Edward R. Murrow Award for outstanding contributions to public radio, the industry's highest honor. He was the curator and producer of This I Believe on NPR and he produces The Moth Radio Hour. Before his career in broadcasting, Jay was a theater director in Washington, D.C. He is also the founder of the public radio stations for Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket, and Cape Cod where he lives.

http://us.macmillan.com/author/jayall...

Reviews

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Each year the high school at which I teach selects one book for all students and faculty to read. This is the book that was chosen for summer 2010. It consists of 75 personal essays, each no more than 500 words long. Some of the contributors are famous and some are 'average' citizens. Some are young (a 14 year old boy) and some are old (Studs Turkel was in his 90s when he wrote his essay). Each tells about a core belief and how/why the individual came to have that belief. Some stories are heart-breaking. Some make you smile. Each makes you think about what you believe. This assignment should lead to some very interesting discussions with our students next fall.

[Eric in Ohio · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve been reading this forever. Reading one of these essays takes about as long as I need the coffee to steep in the a.m., which is also a good time to “meet” someone new and dwell with their chief belief. I like that these are “real people,” most not (or not yet) famous, and from a variety of walks of life. Some were a bit “meh,” in all candor, but every day that I read one I felt like I was meeting someone new and being nudged to think a little more broadly about life. One essay was so powerful to me, I tried to track down the author and mailed them a note of thanks. I wasn’t sure if I had the right person - they were in a different state and there wasn’t really much to connect them to the piece they wrote 15 years earlier, plus I was mailing them at their work address (creepy, I know). It turns out I did find them, and they wrote back! (I guess it wasn’t that creepy.) The collection ends with a reflection by the editors and the challenge to the reader to explore your “this I believe.” Maybe I should write about the power of a letter, of reaching out, to shrink the world and help tether us to each other.

[Donna · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is like a mini-drama marathon. I would rather read something with more substance.

[Odessa · Rating 3 out of 5]

"What would you say in five hundred words to capture a core principle that guides your life? Can you name a belief that underlies your actions? In the discovered truths of your experience, what abides?"

"Advice, after all is cheap. These essays are more like prayers than sermons. They do not contain counsel for others, as such. They hold, instead, the wrestling and reckoning of individuals wanting to make things clear to themselves. Some essayists tell us, "I didn't know what I wanted to say until I began to write."

"I have faith that time makes changes in all of us we cannot avoid or ignore."

"This is not the life I would have expected for myself thirty years ago and it isn't one I would recommend to others, but it is my life. At fifty I have come to the conclusion it is not the life I have that defines me, it is the way I choose to live this life. I choose to live it being faithful. This brings me peace, this allows me to have joy."

"Try to be happy within the context of the life we're actually living. Happiness is not a situation to be longed for, or a convergence of lucky happenstance. Through the power of our minds, we can help ourselves."

"I believe that grief, fully expressed, will change over time into something less overpowering, even granting us a new understanding, a kind of double vision that comprehends both the beauty and fragility of life at the same time. When I grieve, when I stand by others as they grieve, even in the midst of seemingly unbearable sorrow, grief becomes a way to honor life-a way to cling to every fleeting, precious moment of joy."

"I believe how we treat the people we dislike the most and understand the least...says a lot about the freedoms we value in America: religion, speech, and personal liberty."

"If you join the dancing, you will feel foolish. If you do not, you will also feel foolish. So, why not dance? ...If you do not dance, we will know you are a fool. But if you dance, we will think well of you for trying."

"I fear the shrinking of life that goes with aging. I fear the boredom that comes with not learning and not taking chances. I fear the dying that goes on inside you when you leave the game of life to wait in the final checkout line. I seek the sharp, scary pleasure that comes from beginning something new-that calls on all my resources and challenges my mind, my body, and my spirit, all at once."

"Being present isn't easy. On a good day, I'd say I'm conscious 1 to 2 percent of the time. The rest of the time I'm reacting. Usually those reactions are not particularly thoughtful. They're just responses, old patterns, or the repetition of what I did yesterday. Now I try to ask questions, not give answers. This isn't easy for me to do. I'm someone with a lot of answers. I have to restrain myself. Not reacting takes a lot of work, but the more I'm able to do it, the more I feel like I'm being the person I aspire to be. I see that my own mind can be my greatest limitation (and on bad days, it always is), or the gateway to what matters most to me...if we don't believe in our own ability to make them happen, they never will."

"Kindness is like a breath. It can be squeezed out, or drawn in. To solicit a gift from a stranger takes a certain state of openness."

"Mending something is different from fixing it. Fixing it suggests that evidence of the problem will disappear. I see mending as a preservation of history and a proclamation of hope. When we mend broken relationships we realize that we're better together than apart, and perhaps even stronger for the rip and the repair."

"Many of us have lost a sense of neighborhood and community, and we really crave that."

"I believe that God loves honesty more than conformity. And so I decided to go where the spirit moved me, even if that was away from the spiritual home of my ancestors."

"I was taught to respect my body, but to remember that it was only a vehicle that carried the important things: my brain and soul."

"a friend reminded me that you only have to talk about what you do for 5 mins at parties, but you have to live what you do every day of your life, so better to do what you love, and forget about how it looks."

"Strings of unexpected encounters mark my life. I believe that change has guided me-jolted me sometimes-onto paths I wouldn't have chosen but needed to follow whether I knew it or not. Chance encounters have led me across continents and into unanticipated worlds."

"The more alone I am with the Alone, the more I surrender to ambivalence, to happy contradictions and seeming inconsistencies in myself and almost everything else, including God. Paradoxes don't scare me anymore."

"Einstein once observed that Westerners have a feeling the individual loses his freedom if he joins, say a union or any group. Precisely the opposite's the case. The individual discovers his strength as an individual because he has, along the way, discovered others share his feelings-he is not alone, and thus a community is formed."

"I believe that whatever we receive we must share. When we endure an experience, the experience cannot stay with me alone. It must be opened. It must become an offering. It must be deepened and given and shared. And of course I am afraid that memories suppressed could come back with a fury, which is dangerous to all human beings, not only to those who directly were participants but to people everywhere, to the world. for everyone. And so, therefore, those memories that are discarded, shamed, somehow they may come back in different ways, disguised. Perhaps seeking another outlet.
Granted, our task is to inform. But information must be transformed into knowledge, knowledge into sensitivity, and sensitivity into commitment.
How can we therefore speak, unless we believe that our words have meaning, that our words will help others to prevent my past from becoming another person's-another people's-future. Yes, our stories are essential. Essential to memory. I believe that the witnesses, especially the survivors, have the most important role. They can simply say, in the words of the prophet, I was there. What is a witness if not someone who has a talk to tell and lives only with one haunting desire-to tell it. Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization. No society, no future.
After all God is God because He remembers." -Elie Wiesel

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read the first one last year and suggested it to a friend, so we read the second together for book club. Again, so many different viewpoints and ideas. I think I knew who less of these people were, whether that's because they're famous and I haven't heard of them, or they were more everyday people. It was interesting reading them not knowing, then reading their short bio and sometimes being very surprised. Some I really resonated with, some, I aspire to be, and some I was completely alienated by. I still don't know what my essay would say.

[Rachel · Rating 2 out of 5]

Only okay. Some stories are insightful and interesting and charming. Many though, are boring and generic. Will not be looking into the others in this series.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was only able to finish half of the book before I had to return it but from what I did read I liked:)

[Mr. Armstrong · Rating 5 out of 5]

So. Many. Mentors.

[Mary Bruno · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the type of book you can pick up, read one or a few essays and then put it down again. The essays can be moving, thought provoking and funny. So far I have several dog-eared pages. I have listened to the NPR segment on the radio and I have always enjoyed it. I thought it might be difficult to read the essays rather than listen to the authors read them (as on NPR). I thought listening to them in my voice might make them less meaningful but this is certainly not the case. A great read. I think I will read the first book as well.

[MB Shakespeare · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fave quotes: "Physics explains my body, not my soul."
"We can't choreograph life events, but we can clasp the hands of those who appreciate us in our path and see where they lead us."
"The development of the mind, heart and soul determines who you are and who you will become...I. am so much more than a body."
"...the slavery of fear made men afraid to think."
"I believe in old women who learn new tricks - gutsy, wrinkled broads who eat alone in restaurants and pump their own gas."

[Burcia · Rating 4 out of 5]

really enjoyable to me

[Brice Karickhoff · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a compilation of maybe 60 or 70 500 word essays written by individuals, each explaining their personal philosophy. Each essay contains a little 2 sentence blurb at the end about its author. From my understanding, there was a website where people could submit these essays, and they’d often be selected and read on NPR, and this book is a (semi)random selection of those essays.

As you could imagine, some are silly, some are deep, some are enjoyable, some are odd, etc etc. Any given essay could be 5 stars or 1 star, so this book is a little difficult to rate.

I did really appreciate the fact that the book contained a great variety of personal philosophies. The editors obviously put their own philosophies and biases on the shelf to select a true smattering of essays. Of course, there’s still the selection bias problem that most of these essays were written by the kind of people who would listen to NPR and take the time to write a 500 word essay about their beliefs and submit it online. Not exactly a representative sample of our country, much less humanity.

For what it’s worth, my favorite essays were “Teaching a Bad Dog New Tricks”, “Living What You Do Every Day”, and “The Long Road to Forgiveness”.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this volume just as much as the first one - it had a little different flavor in that many of the authors described defining events that occurred much more recently (the Iraq War, Katrina, etc.) whereas the first volume must have been compiled prior to those. This one seems to have a few more teenager entries, likely submitted as a result of the project having made its way to classrooms across the country, and also did not have any "historical" essays from the initial radio series. While there were definitely still a number of famous names, I recognized less in this edition than the first, but that didn't make the essays any less thoughtful or profound. Again, it's a book to savor over time...reading only a few entries at a time and using them as a reflection on one's own life.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Building upon the success of the first volume, this collection of essays continues to explore the depths of human thought and emotion, providing readers with a rich tapestry of personal philosophies. Curated by Jay Allison and Dan Gediman, This I Believe II continues to be a testament to the power of storytelling. The book is comprised of concise essays, each dedicated to a singular core belief held by the author. In these snippets of personal wisdom, readers encounter an array of perspectives, from the profound to the everyday, that challenge preconceived notions and provoke introspection. Though certain essays may resonate more deeply with some readers than others, the anthology, as a whole, is a poignant exploration of the human condition.

[Richard Brand · Rating 5 out of 5]

A collection of short personal statements of what is a central affirmation of different writers. These have been selected from 63,000 that have been part of the radio program on NPR. I think these pieces were picked because almost all of them had some rather traumatic event that focused their credal position. I do not know how you could have improved upon this book. The writing is effective. In fact most of these writers had writing as a job or a blog or communication as a career. There were a few very well known people, but most of them were not familiar to me. I received this as a Christmas present and enjoyed it. But I do not think I will go looking to buy the first edition.

[Megan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I loved the first collection of essays edited by Jay Allison. I found them powerful and challenging and insightful. I don't know if it's the time of my life or another factor but I was severely underwhelmed by this collection. It may be in part because these essays are much shorter and there is less time to really delve into each person's story before moving on to another one. I wasn' very impressed.

[Karah N · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating to listen to the beliefs of others (not just religious) and compare and contrast each with your own beliefs. I was introduced to so many core beliefs I hadn't thought of (at least as beliefs) and really got to think about how I view life and the world.
Each short essay was read by it's writer, which added to the interest and beauty of hearing people share their views.

[Jason · Rating 2 out of 5]

This I Believe Drinking Game: take a drink every time someone says "I've been all over the world, and" or when someone's essay sounds more like a job interview question or a commercial (looking at you, Craigslist worker, but a lot of them feel like this to a lesser degree) as opposed to something genuine. There are a few good ones in here but the signal to noise is really low.

[lalalandance · Rating 4 out of 5]

some of the essays will inspires you and leave you in awe, while others will give you an outlook about another’s life. I don’t usually highlight a leisure book, but ‘This I Believe’ had me doing it pages after pages, sentence after sentence, as it spoke to me.

some essays were also very relatable, and it was also the book that helped me grief.

[Paula Boyce · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading the 500 word essays of so many diverse people. Some were very touching, others funny, and still others very upbeat and positive. This book is filled with so many good stories by so many good writers who are brave enough to share their strong beliefs and the details that support them. It sure does take all kinds of different people to make the world go round!

[Alex Barron · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wonderful range of topics and voices here, from Tony Hawk to Yo-Yo Ma to an unnamed Interragator or suspected terrorists. My only complaint is that it's hard to remember and engage with seventy-five short essays, especially when you read them consecutively. This book is probably best read in chunks, a little at a time, rather than beginning to end.

[Cindy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a thought provoking book. The 2-3 page essays can be read in between other things. This collection gave me much to think about and spurred some interesting discussions with family and friends.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic concept. I can’t wait to listen to the original. I love that the authors of each essay read their own writings in the audio version of the book. I have really thought about what I would write and it has caused a lot of reflection.

[Peter Harrington · Rating 3 out of 5]

I gave this book three stars. Great book to hear about others life perspectives. It was ok but clearly it has been done before; "This I Believe...2". My own fault for not paying close attention to the tittle.

[Kenneth · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was quite enjoyable, listening to these various viewpoints.
Truly, I would say that there were really only about 5 classic essays here,. I am not sure how all of these made the grade, but it was pleasant listening to the five Cds and I am ordering the first volume from my library now.

[Nina Chatterjee · Rating 4 out of 5]

I still feel like a lot of the same concepts are repeated, but for some reason this one went a lot better for me than the first installment. The writing felt improved and the topic choice was much more interesting

[Gabby Galla · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very cute, thoughtful read. I loved reading so many individuals stories and belief’s. It was eye opening and really gave me something to think about. It was also a nice quick read that had me continuously flipping the page!

[amma.keep.reading · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a great exercise to use in engaging conversation about current hot button topics. Definitely a thought provoking read.

[Kim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not as interesting as the first one for some reason.

[Kathy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Many essays describe beliefs that are held by many humanistic Americans. Some displayed cultural or social biases yet the essays as a whole avoided negative statements.