“Love Your Brain: The 7 Habits Of Brain Health To Recharge & Surge”

Chico ophthalmologist David Woods faced many losses. His Paradise ophthalmology practice was destroyed in the Camp Fire. Rebuilt, the new office “sat nearly empty for months” due to Covid-19. Then, in 2021, “my world shifted in a way I had never really had preparation. My beloved and wonderful mother, Sharron, passed away. I felt as if the ground beneath me crumbled.” 

Though the practice began to thrive, and his family offered support, Woods struggled through “the fog of grief.” He started to research the brain and its response to loss. “I began to see, especially after the age of 40, how our lifestyle choices … have a monumental impact on the health and vitality of our brain cells.”

Teaming with Chico State grad Rory Ferguson, who will be pursuing her PhD in cognitive neuroscience at Lehigh University, Woods provides an encouraging guide for how to “Love Your Brain: The 7 Habits Of Brain Health To Recharge & Surge” ($12.15 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle).

The book begins with charts for a 15-week “transformation plan” and a weekly “brain health check-in” on the seven habits: good diet; optimal sleep; cardio and exercise; “connecting and caring”; “the power of supplements for brain nutrition”; “meditation, faith, spirituality”; and “the power of learning” (“You want a brain that’s always growing? Then learn something every day. Creation and imagination are the seeds of success, and they begin with a curious mind.”)

Woods markets supplements under the names Nutrua and the trademark Brain Health 360, but he is careful to note that it’s important not to “overlook interactions between supplements and medications, which can lead to unintended side effects.” An appendix provides research on each ingredient; there’s also a section on how seasonal allergies affect brain health.

We need to be honest with ourselves, he writes, and develop healthy rituals that move the brain away from constant “survival mode” (doomscrolling, anyone?). One key is journaling. “Whatever challenge you face in your life of stress, you will unlock ideas and personal change when you write, clarify, and put words on the issues in your mind. You will zoom!” 

“Right Place, Write Time: A Lifetime Of Memories With Sports Legends”

Tiger Woods “won nine times in 2000,” Chico State grad Mark Soltau writes, “a year many consider the best stretch in golf history. He won three majors and returned to Pebble Beach in June to capture the U.S. Open by a record 15 strokes.” 

A longtime sportswriter for the San Francisco Examiner, who worked for Tigerwoods.com from 1997 through 2018, Soltau says that “at most tournaments, I would spend time with Tiger … and wish him well. The first time I said, ‘Good luck,’ he glared at me. ‘It’s not luck,’ he said. From then on, I have always said, ‘Play well.’” 

Tiger “did a surprise video when I was inducted into the Chico State Athletics Hall of Fame in 2007.”

Soltau covers his five decades in sports writing with an exuberant memoir, “Right Place, Write Time: A Lifetime Of Memories With Sports Legends” ($19.95 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle). No stranger to football (“I covered the NFL for almost 25 years”), Soltau “spent much of my childhood attending games with my mother at Kezar Stadium…. My father, Gordy, was an all-pro end and place kicker for the San Francisco 49ers (1950-58) and led the NFL in scoring in 1952 and 1953.”

Soltau’s book, loaded with photographs, includes chapters on Bill Walsh, Steve Young, John McEnroe, Barry Bonds, Walter Payton (at Laguna Seca Raceway), and Joe Montana (who used the sideline phone, meant to connect with coaches, to call his wife: “I’m just sitting here on the sideline and thought I’d call and tell you I Love You”).

In 1977, as a Chico State senior, Soltau’s father gifted him two tickets to Super Bowl XI, pitting the Oakland Raiders against the Minnesota Vikings at Pasadena’s Rose Bowl. He and a buddy managed to get there and found their seats “were on the 50-yard line on the press box side in the middle of American Football Conference owner’s section.” The Raiders won, 32-14. The two made it back to Chico the next day, “tired and euphoric.”

The book is not a tell-all, but a “let me tell you about my friends.” Well played, Mark.

“Doko: Trails, Teahouses, And Turmoil At The Top Of The World”

Toby is sixteen. Three months after his birthday celebration “in our Northern California town,” he and his father are enroute to Nepal for what turns out to be the adventure of a lifetime and a young boy’s life or death decision.

Chico novelist Kristi Davids, a world traveler herself, tells the story in Toby’s voice, one that wonders at first what his dad is up to with this surprise trip. “Doko: Trails, Teahouses, And Turmoil At The Top Of The World” ($16.99 in paperback from Palmetto Publishing) finds a somewhat self-centered and resentful Toby discovering the meaning of fatherly love and the crucial importance of looking out for others. It’s a young adult novel with a big heart and a heart-pounding conclusion.

A doko is a basket “to carry things from one town to the next on our backs….” It’s also a metaphor for what Toby must discover about himself. There are times he must be carried—and times he must carry others. Good leaders do that, Toby’s dad tells him.

The family lived in Nepal a decade earlier while Toby’s father “worked on a project with USAID” to help farmers “create more productive and sustainable methods for food production.” Then six-year-old Toby made friends with another boy the same age. He and Prem were buddies and are destined to meet again on Toby’s birthday trip.

The goal is to trek the “Annapurna Circuit” in the Himalayas, taking two weeks to ascend to Thorong La Pass at 17,800 feet and then descend back into an oxygen-rich atmosphere. The hike encompasses daunting cliff trails and many small villages along the way. Unexpected blizzards are constant threats.

Toby and his father, along with the guide Kumar, and, as porters, Prem and a boy Toby befriends named Pratik, work as a team for each leg of the journey. Yet, for Toby, something seems off. Indeed so, and the consequences will be disastrous.

Chiya tea is present at every stop. Ah, the smells: “Cinnamon, cardamon, nutmeg, and cloves….” But as the trek continues, young Toby must put comfort aside and find wisdom deep within his soul. Readers will be enthralled.

“The Virtue Of Loyalty”

How far should loyalty extend? As Chico State philosophy professor Troy Jollimore writes, “The very notion of being on some side or other, and being ‘true’ to that side through thick and thin, seems in tension with the idea that one should always strive to be on the right side, to join and support those whose actions are morally justifiable and supportable.”

Being loyal—to a spouse or country—would seem to be a virtue, contributing “to the goodness of human life or the functioning of human societies.” But, as Jollimore points out in his introduction to a series of essays on the subject, it’s a “contested topic.” What would it mean to stay loyal to a family member or political figure caught up in wrongdoing?

“The Virtue Of Loyalty” ($35.00 in paperback from Oxford University Press; also for Amazon Kindle), edited by Jollimore, includes ten chapters, by philosophers and others, which consider how family loyalty arises, the sting of betrayal, love and loyalty, and more. The writers, Jollimore notes, address “whether loyalty can motivate and justify actions which have horrific consequences or which are inherently morally awful….”

A key chapter by Jollimore, one of recipients of the University’s Professional Achievement Honors “as a philosopher, teacher, and poet,” asks whether loyalty is indeed a virtue, whether it actually gives us reasons for acting. 

Loyalty (too often?) would seem to lead to pernicious behavior: If a soldier is ordered to massacre women and children out of “patriotic duty” loyalty plays no role in determining the morally right thing to do; it impedes it. And if a soldier is ordered to save women and children, loyalty is irrelevant to knowing that’s the right thing to do.

Jollimore pushes back against these objections in a thoughtful and accessible essay, pointing out that loyalty doesn’t exist in a vacuum: “A loyal friend need not always overlook your imperfections, but they will not seize immediately upon them as a reason for abandoning you and ending their relationship with you.” As for political loyalties, he writes, the greatest “expression of patriotism” might lie in refusing “blind devotion or unconditional subservience.” 

Loyalty is a virtue, but a profoundly complex one.