This week’s selected media, June 29, 2025: two about Corrie ten Boom, Mathematics of Love, Pomodoro Technique
This week I finished:
A Faith Undefeated, about Corrie ten Boom: I learned about Corrie ten Boom from Edith Eger’s The Choice. Eger only mentioned ten Boom’s name.
Corrie ten Boom was a Dutch woman who lived with her family in Haarlem, Holland. The family ran a watchmaking and repair store that had operated over a century. They were devout Christians and when the Nazis took over, they helped Jews by hiding them in their house and helping them escape.
They were betrayed. They were imprisoned and sent to concentration camps. Her father died soon, though Corrie didn’t learn until after the war.
She and her sister were imprisoned and enslaved for years. Her sister died in December 1944. Corrie was released twelve days later, due to a clerical error, and survived. She spent the rest of her life educating people about what happened, remaining very evangelical. This movie is a documentary.
The Hiding Place, about Corrie ten Boom: This movie is a dramatization made in 1975, featuring Corrie briefly at the end describing her mission.
The movie is long, but I found that it conveyed her and her family’s life before and during occupation effectively, at least it made me think and feel more of how life under occupation felt. I assume it was accurate since she was involved with it. Still, I don’t expect I could really imagine feeling the risks of helping Jews under Nazi occupation.
Her life with her sister in the camps showed the brutality and hopelessness there.
The movie was produced by Billy Graham and several reviewers complained about the evangelism. There was plenty, but probably accurate, given her own speaking.
I recommend the movie to anyone, especially those looking to live by their values in difficult times.
The Mathematics of Love: Patterns, Proofs, and the Search for the Ultimate Equations, by Hannah Fry: I was curious about the book as a physicist who studied a fair amount of math. Plus it was short and, if you haven’t noticed, I’m doing a month of having the word love in the title of every blog post, so need books or movies with the word in the title.
The book was interesting, but I didn’t learn much new. After reading it, I looked up Fry and see she’s done a lot of work making math accessible or applying it to new places.
The Pomodoro Technique, by Francesco Cirillo: I’d heard about the Pomodoro Technique for years but hadn’t looked into it beyond working in 25-minute blocks.
I was glad to learn more of its practice and plan to apply it. I’ll post results, though not sure how soon or often I’ll try it.
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