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175. Polio: An American Story

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Sue Deans and Darla Schueth

Author:   David M. Oshinsky

Genre:  Non-Fiction, History, Science, Medicine, Public Policy

342 pages, published September 1, 2006

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

In Polio:  An American Story, Historian David Oshinsky tells the gripping story of a world terrorized by polio and the intense effort to find a cure, from the March of Dimes to the discovery of the Salk and Sabin vaccines.  Drawing on newly available papers of Jonas Salk, Albert Sabin and other key players, Oshinsky paints a suspenseful portrait of the race for the cure, weaving a dramatic tale centered on the furious rivalry between Salk and Sabin. We also get an inside look at the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis which was founded in the 1930s by FDR and Basil O’Connor and which revolutionized fundraising and the perception of disease in America.

 

 

My Take

For the past five years, I have been a member of the Boulder Rotary Club.  From my first meeting, I became aware that eradicating polio from the face of the earth has been a long time mission of all Rotarians throughout the world and indeed, Rotarians have contributed mightily to making that happen.  Our Rotary Club just launched a book group for our club (how could I not join) and given Rotary’s history, it was no surprise that our first selection was Polio:  An American Story.  What was surprising was how much I enjoyed this book.  A well-deserved Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History (2006) and the Herbert Hoover Book Award (2005),   Oshinsky takes a potentially dry subject and breaths fascinating life into it.  Through the lens of polio, we see how the scientific, cultural, sociological and historical shifts in our nation as we progressed through the twentieth century.  Both a gripping scientific suspense story and a provocative social and cultural history, Polio:  An American Story provides fresh insight into post World War II era America.

 

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174. The Cuckoo’s Calling

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Boulder Librarian

Author:   Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling)

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Crime, Thriller, Suspense

455 pages, published April 30, 2013

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

While The Cuckoo’s Calling, a murder mystery and book one of a series featuring private detective Cormoran Strike, lists the author as Robert Galbraith, that is a pseudonym.  It is actually written by J. K. Rowling of Harry Potter fame.  The book opens with Detective Strike hired to investigate the death of supermodel Lula Landry (known to her friends as the Cuckoo) which has been ruled a suicide by the police.  After losing his leg to a land mine in Afghanistan, Cormoran Strike is barely scraping by as a private investigator.  He is down to one client, has creditors on his back, has just broken up with his longtime girlfriend and is living in his office.  The Landry case plunges Strike into the world of multimillionaire beauties, rock-star boyfriends, and desperate designers.

 

Quotes 

“Seven and a half million hearts were beating in close proximity in this heaving old city, and many, after all, would be aching far worse than his.”

 

“Other people his age had houses and washing machines, cars and television sets, furniture and gardens and mountain bikes and lawnmowers: he had four boxes of crap, and a set of matchless memories.”

 

“You’re like everyone else, Strike; you want your civil liberties when you’ve told the missus you’re at the office and you’re at a lap-dancing club, but you want twenty-four-hour surveillance on your house when someone’s trying to force your bathroom window open. Can’t have it both ways.”

 

“Humans often assumed symmetry and equality where none existed.”

 

“In the inverted food chain of fame, it was the big beasts who were stalked and hunted.”

 

“The dead could only speak through the mouths of those left behind, and through the signs they left scattered behind them.”

 

“When you are young, and beautiful, you can be very cruel.”

 

“There’s people who’d expect you to take a bullet for them and they don’t bother rememb’ring yuh name.”

 

“Couples tended to be of roughly equivalent personal attractiveness, though of course factors such as money often seemed to secure a partner of significantly better looks than oneself.”

 

“Strike was used to playing archaeologist among the ruins of people’s traumatised memories;”

 

“I am become a name.”

 

My Take

When my son Nick was in Elementary School (he is currently a college student), he and I read all of the Harry Potter books together and we both loved living in the wildly inventive and fantastic world created by J.K. Rowling.  Based in modern day London, Rowling has created a different type of world in The Cuckoo’s Calling, one that I also enjoyed inhabiting during the almost 16 hours that I spent listening to the audio book version.  The Cuckoo’s Calling has everything you could want from a mystery/suspense/thriller:  compelling and real characters, a gritty plot that hums along at a rapid clip, an inside look at a world different from the one you inhabit, plenty of red herrings to keep you guessing and some surprise twists at the end.  It’s no surprise that I’m looking forward to reading book 2 in this series.

 

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173. Your Money and Your Brain

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Jason Zweig

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Personal Finance, Psychology, Economics

352 pages, published August 1, 2007

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

Your Money and Your Brain explores what happens inside our brains when we think about money?  The answer is quite a lot, actually, and some of it isn’t good for our financial health.  Author Jason Zweig, a veteran financial journalist, explains why smart people make stupid financial decisions and what they can do to avoid these mistakes.  Zweig’s investigation touches on the latest research in neuroeconomics, a new discipline that combines psychology, neuroscience, and economics to better understand financial decision making.  He shows why we often misunderstand risk and why we tend to be overconfident about our investment decisions.

 

Quotes 

“The market is a pendulum that forever swings between unsustainable optimism (which makes stocks too expensive) and unjustified pessimism (which makes them too cheap). The Intelligent Investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists.”

 

“The alluring, long-shot chance of a huge gain is the grease that lubricates the machine of innovation.”

  

My Take

In Your Money and Your Brain, Author Jason Zweig explores many different aspects of how our brain has evolved to deal with risk, gain, loss, greed and fear.  When we allow the reptilian amygdala portion brain to control our investing decisions, we get into trouble by doing things like selling after the market has taken a huge drop, thereby locking in our losses.  In the same manner as JL Collins explains in The Simple Path to Wealth, Zweig describes how a simple buy and hold strategy with index funds is the best way to outsmart your counterproductive inclinations.  Anyone who has ever looked back on a financial decision and marveled at their own stupidity will benefit from reading this book.

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172. Then Came You

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Jennifer Weiner

Genre:  Fiction

400 pages, published July 12, 2011

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

The lives of four very different women intertwine in unexpected ways in Then Came You.  Each woman has a problem: Princeton senior Jules Wildgren needs money to help her dad with one final shot at rehab.  Pennsylvania housewife Annie Barrow needs money to stay financially afloat.  In her early 40’s and unable to conceive, India Bishop wants to have a child.  India’s stepdaughter Bettina wants her original family back.  Through egg donation and surrogacy, we follow the stories of these four interesting women.

 

Quotes 

“The thing about bad decisions is that they don’t feel like bad decisions when you’re making them. They feel like the obvious choice, the of-course-that-makes-sense move. They feel, somehow, inevitable.”

 

My Take

Then Came You is a quick, fun, light read.  I enjoyed all of the characters and scenarios created by Jennifer Weiner and was interested in seeing how she would wrap up the story (she inserts an obligatory twist).  However, it is a bit on the fluffy side and has not stayed with me several weeks after finishing.

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171. Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Robin Sloan

Genre:  Fiction, Fantasy, Mystery

288 pages, published October 2, 2012

Reading Format:  Audiobook on Hoopla

 

Summary

The Great Recession finds protagonist Clay Jannon working in the San Francisco bookshop known as Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore.  Clay soon discovers that there is more to Mr. Penumbra and his bookstore than meets the eye.   There are only a few customers, but they come in repeatedly and never seem to actually buy anything, instead “checking out” obscure volumes from strange corners of the store, all according to some elaborate, long-standing arrangement with the enigmatic Mr. Penumbra.  A curious Clay and his archetypical friends (including a love interest who works for Google) embark on an adventure to discover the secrets hidden inside Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore.

 

Quotes 

“After that, the book will fade, the way all books fade in your mind. But I hope you will remember this:  A man walking fast down a dark lonely street. Quick steps and hard breathing, all wonder and need. A bell above a door and the tinkle it makes. A clerk and a ladder and warm golden light, and then: the right book exactly, at exactly the right time.”

 

“Walking the stacks in a library, dragging your fingers across the spines — it’s hard not to feel the presence of sleeping spirits.”

 

“…this is exactly the kind of store that makes you want to buy a book about a teenage wizard. This is the kind of store that makes you want to be a teenage wizard.”

 

“Why does the typical adventuring group consist of a wizard, a warrior, and a rogue, anyway? It should really be a wizard, a warrior, and a rich guy. Otherwise who’s going to pay for all the swords and spells and hotel rooms?”

 

“But I kept at it with the help-wanted ads. My standards were sliding swiftly. At first I had insisted I would only work at a company with a mission I believed in. Then I thought maybe it would be fine as long as I was learning something new. After that I decided it just couldn’t be evil. Now I was carefully delineating my personal definition of evil.”

 

“You know, I’m really starting to think the whole world is just a patchwork quilt of crazy little cults, all with their own secret spaces, their own records, their own rules.”

 

“I’ve never listened to an audiobook before, and I have to say it’s a totally different experience. When you read a book, the story definitely takes place in your head. When you listen, it seems to happen in a little cloud all around it, like a fuzzy knit cap pulled down over your eyes.”

 

“Let me give you some advice: make friends with a millionaire when he’s a friendless sixth-grader.”

 

“So I guess you could say Neel owes me a few favors, except that so many favors have passed between us now that they are no longer distinguishable as individual acts, just a bright haze of loyalty. Our friendship is a nebula.”

 

“Have you ever played Maximum Happy Imagination?”

“Sounds like a Japanese game show.”

Kat straightens her shoulders. “Okay, we’re going to play. To start, imagine the future. The good future. No nuclear bombs. Pretend you’re a science fiction writer.”

Okay: “World government… no cancer… hover-boards.”

“Go further. What’s the good future after that?”

“Spaceships. Party on Mars.”

“Further.”

“Star Trek. Transporters. You can go anywhere.”

“Further.”

“I pause a moment, then realize: “I can’t.”

Kat shakes her head. “It’s really hard. And that’s, what, a thousand years? What comes after that? What could possibly come after that? Imagination runs out. But it makes sense, right? We probably just imagine things based on what we already know, and we run out of analogies in the thirty-first century.”

 

“… nothing lasts long. We all come to life and gather allies and build empires and die, all in a single moment – maybe a single pulse of some giant processor somewhere.”

  

My Take

Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore was an entertaining audio book (I especially enjoyed the voice of narrator Ari Fliakos).  The characters are engaging, there is an appealing fantasy oriented plot and there is a nice little romantic connection between the main character and a charming girl from Google.  However, while it was enjoyable to listen to at the time, once finished, it fades quickly, leaving not much to remember.   A far superior book in this genre is Ready Player One.

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170. The Chilbury Ladies’ Choir

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Heather Bohart

Author:   Jennifer Ryan

Genre:  Fiction, Historical Fiction, World War II

371 pages, published February 14, 2017

Reading Format:  E-Book on Overdrive

 

Summary

The Chilbury Ladies’ Choir is set during the early days of The Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet II in the bucolic village of Chilbury, England.  With many of the village men off to war, the ladies who remain in the village decide to ‘carry on singing’ as part of the “The Chilbury Ladies’ Choir.”  As they do, the war rages around them as Dunkirk is evacuated and the German drop bombs on their village.  The ladies suffer more than their share of loss.  However, they keep hope alive and life goes on with romances, intrigue and a bizarre and hilarious switched at birth story.

 

Quotes 

“Human nature defeats me sometimes, how greed and spite can lurk so divisively around the utmost courage and sacrifice.”

 

“I took a deep breath of the syrupy sweetness of summer, suffused with bees and birds, and I thought to myself how beautiful this world can be. How lucky we are to be here, to be part of it, for however long we have.”

 

“And I realized that this is what it’s like to be an adult, learning to pick from a lot of bad choices and do the best you can with that dreadful compromise. Learning to smile, to put your best foot forward, when the world around you seems to have collapsed in its entirety, become a place of isolation, a sepia photograph of its former illusion.”

 

 

“…we spoke about dying. [Prim] told me how she’d nearly died of malaria. She said that she didn’t mind the thought of death. That realizing you’re going to die actually makes life better as it’s only then that you decide to live the life you really want to live.”

 

Then I looked out onto the horizon myself and realized that loss is the same wherever you go: overwhelming, inexorable, deafening. How resilient human beings are that we can learn slowly to carry on when we are left all alone, left to fill the void as best we can. Or disappear into it.”

 

“If we don’t think about our death until we die, how can we decide how we want to live?”

 

My Take

During my thousand book quest, I have read a lot of books that take place during World War II (The Nightingale, The Girl You Left Behind, Life After Life, Going Solo, A God in Ruins, The End of the Affair, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, The Zookeeper’s Wife ) and for the most part, I have really enjoyed them.  The world at war, with the potential of a complete takeover by the Nazis, automatically raises the stakes in any book.  In a similar fashion to The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, The Chilbury Ladies’ Choir gives us the perspective of the British home front when invasion by the Germans felt imminent.  Jennifer Ryan is a skilled writer, creating a world that is easy to inhabit and characters that you want to get to know better.

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169. The Simple Path to Wealth

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   JL Collins

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Personal Finance, Self Improvement, Economics

288 pages, published June 17, 2016

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

Legendary Blogger JL Collins has written an easy to understand (but not simplistic) book about personal finance, money and investing that grew out of a series of letters to his daughter.  His premise is that since money is the single most powerful tool we have for navigating the complex world we live in, understanding it is critical.   Collins outlines an uncomplicated approach to money that is not only easy to understand and implement, it is more powerful than anything more complex or complicated.  Here are the topics he discusses:

Debt:   Why you must avoid it and what to do if you have it.

The importance of having F-you Money.

How to think about money, and the unique way understanding this is key to building your wealth.

Where traditional investing advice goes wrong and what actually works.

What the stock market really is and how it really works.

Why the stock market always goes up and why most people still lose money investing in it.

How to invest in a raging bull, or bear, market.

Specific investments to implement these strategies.

The Wealth Building and Wealth Preservation phases of your investing life and why they are not always tied to your age.

How your asset allocation is tied to those phases and how to choose it.

How to simplify the sometimes confusing world of 401(k), 403(b), TSP, IRA and Roth accounts.

TRFs (Target Retirement Funds), HSAs (Health Savings Accounts) and RMDs (Required Minimum Distributions).

What investment firm to use.

Why you should be very cautious when engaging an investment advisor and whether you need to at all.

Why and how you can be conned, and how to avoid becoming prey.

Why dollar cost averaging is not recommended.

What financial independence looks like and how to have your money support you.

What the 4% rule is and how to use it to safely spend your wealth.

The truth behind Social Security.

 

Quotes 

“There are many things money can buy, but the most valuable of all is freedom. Freedom to do what you want and to work for whom you respect.”

 

“I may not have owned a Mercedes, but I owned my freedom.  Freedom to choose when to leave a job and freedom from worry when the choice wasn’t mine.”

 

“Being independently wealthy is every bit as much about limiting needs as it is about how much money you have. It has less to do with how much you earn—high-income earners often go broke while low-income earners get there—than what you value. Money can buy many things, none of which is more important than your financial independence.

 

“It’s a big beautiful world out there. Money is a small part of it. But F-You Money buys you the freedom, resources and time to explore it on your own terms. Retired or not. Enjoy your journey.”

 

“It’s not hard. Stop thinking about what your money can buy. Start thinking about what your money can earn. And then think about what the money it earns can earn.”

 

“Three things saved us:  Our unwavering 50% savings rate. Avoiding debt. We’ve never even had a car payment. Finally embracing the indexing lessons Jack Bogle—the founder of The Vanguard Group and the inventor of index funds—perfected 40 years ago.”

 

“Look again at those people around you. For most, debt is simply a part of life. But it doesn’t have to be for you. You weren’t born to be a slave.”

 

“If your goal is financial independence, it is also to hold as little debt as possible. This means you’ll seek the least house to meet your needs rather than the most house you can technically afford.”

 

“Wisdom comes from experience. Experience is often a result of lack of wisdom.”

 

My Take

I have long been a reader of JL Collins’ blog and especially recommend reading his famous Stock Series, which provides the best explanation and analysis of investing in stocks that I have come across (and I have read a lot on this subject).  The Simple Path to Wealth is expands on the Stock Series and contains a lot of straightforward, easy to understand (but not always easy to do) advice on how to save and invest so that you can’t help but become wealthy (and it won’t take too long to do it).  I have given my 19 year old son and my teenaged niece and nephew this book to read and I will be ordering more copies to give away as high school and college graduation gifts.  While my husband and I are already basically retired, we could have gotten here a lot sooner by starting to follow the advice set forth in The Simple Path to Wealth when we first married 23 years ago.

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168. Everything I Never Told You

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Celeste Ng

Genre:  Fiction

304 pages, published August 14, 2014

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

Leo Tolstoy’s famous opening line from Anna Karenina “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” is certainly applicable to Everything I Never Told You which tells the story of an American family in the 1970’s.  Parents James and Marilyn and James Lee are an interracial couple.  James is Chinese and has always felt a desire to fit in.  Marilyn is a frustrated stay at home mother who abandoned her Medical School dreams when she got pregnant in college.  Together, James and Marilyn pour all of their expectations and unattained dreams into Lydia, their oldest daughter, with tragic consequences.

 

Quotes 

“The things that go unsaid are often the things that eat at you–whether because you didn’t get to have your say, or because the other person never got to hear you and really wanted to.”

 

“It would disappear forever from her memory of Lydia, the way memories of a lost loved one always smooth and simplify themselves, shedding complexities like scales.”

 

“What made something precious? Losing it and finding it.”

 

“How had it begun? Like everything: with mothers and fathers. Because of Lydia’s mother and father, because of her mother’s and father’s mothers and fathers.”

 

“You loved so hard and hoped so much and then you ended up with nothing. Children who no longer needed you. A husband who no longer wanted you. Nothing left but you, alone, and empty space.”

 

“Before that she hadn’t realized how fragile happiness was, how if you were careless, you could knock it over and shatter it.”

 

“Lydia, five years old, standing on tiptoe to watch vinegar and baking soda foam in the sink. Lydia tugging a heavy book from the shelf, saying, “Show me again, show me another.” Lydia, touching the stethoscope, ever so gently, to her mother’s heart. Tears blur Marilyn’s sight. It had not been science that Lydia had loved.”

 

“You never got what you wanted; you just learned to get by without it.”

 

“You don’t feel like smiling? Then what? Force yourself to smile. Act as if you were already happy, and that will tend to make you happy.”

 

“Sometimes you almost forgot: that you didn’t look like everyone else. In homeroom or at the drugstore or at the supermarket, you listened to morning announcements or dropped off a roll of film or picked up a carton of eggs and felt like just another someone in the crowd. Sometimes you didn’t think about it at all. And then sometimes you noticed the girl across the aisle watching, the pharmacist watching, the checkout boy watching, and you saw yourself reflected in their stares: incongruous. Catching the eye like a hook. Every time you saw yourself from the outside, the way other people saw you, you remembered all over again.”

 

“He can guess, but he won’t ever know, not really. What it was like, what she was thinking, everything she’d never told him.”

 

My Take

In Everything I Never Told You, Celeste Ng tells a compelling story about a dysfunctional family and the dangers of parents who try to work out their own issues through their children.  Ng makes you feel the incredible weight that parental expectations can place on a child.  In my own life, as both a child and a parent, I have had to navigate this difficult terrain.  While we all want to please our parents and see our children succeed (at least most of us do).  We need be true to ourselves and give our children the freedom to do the same.

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167. Sweet Tooth

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Ian McEwan

Genre:  Historical Fiction, Fiction

378 pages, published November 13, 2012

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

In 1972, Cambridge student Serena Frome’s beauty, intelligence and staunch anti-Communism make her an ideal recruit for the UK’s intelligence service MI5.  Once there, Serena becomes a part of operation “Sweet Tooth,” the intelligence agency’s efforts to manipulate the cultural conversation by funding writers whose politics align with those of the government.

Serena, a compulsive reader of novels, recruits Tom Haley, a promising young writer and they begin a tempestuous love affair.   With Serena fearing that Tom will discover her role in his financing, Sweet Tooth finishes with an unexpected twist.

 

Quotes 

“Love doesn’t grow at a steady rate, but advances in surges, bolts, wild leaps, and this was one of those.”

 

“There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on an authorial whim. The invented had to be as solid and as self-consistent as the actual. This was a contract founded on mutual trust.”

 

“By degrees, he joins that sorry legion of passive men who abandon their children in order to placate their second wives.”

 

“Arguing with a dead man in a lavatory is a claustrophobic experience.”

 

“My needs were simple.   I didn’t bother much with themes or felicitous phrases and skipped fine descriptions of weather, landscapes and interiors. I wanted characters I could believe in, and I wanted to be made curious about what was to happen to them. Generally, I preferred people to be falling in and out of love, but I didn’t mind so much if they tried their hand at something else. It was vulgar to want it, but I liked someone to say ‘Marry me’ by the end.”

 

“I was irritated by the way he conflated his own shifting needs with an impersonal destiny. I want it, therefore…it’s in the stars!”

 

“And feeling clever, I’ve always thought, is just a sigh away from being cheerful.”

 

“What I took to be the norm — taut, smooth, supple — was the transient special case of youth. To me, the old were a separate species, like sparrows or foxes.”

 

“Four or five years – nothing at all. But no one over thirty could understand this peculiarly weighted and condensed time, from late teens to early twenties, a stretch of life that needed a name, from school leaver to salaried professional, with a university and affairs and death and choices in between. I had forgotten how recent my childhood was, how long and inescapable it once seemed. How grown up and how unchanged I was.”

 

“Everyone knew as much as they needed to know to be happy.”

 

“Here were the luxury and priviledge of the well-fed man scoffing at all hopes and progress for the rest. [He] owed nothing to a world that nurtured him kindly, liberally educated him for free, sent him to no wars, brought him to manhood without scary rituals or famine or fear of vengeful gods, embraced him with a handsome pension in his twenties and placed no limits on his freedom of expression. This was an easy nihilism that never doubted that all we had made was rotten, never thought to pose alternatives, never derived hope from friendship, love, free markets, industry, technology, trade, and all the arts and sciences.”

 

My Take

Having previously read Atonement, Amsterdam, On Chesil Beach, The Children Act, Saturday and Nutshell, I am a big fan of the brilliant English writer Ian McEwan.  While not his best work, Sweet Tooth is still a very interesting book with a compelling female lead character (Serena Frome) who delivers an inside look at the Cold War mentality in Britain during the early 1970’s.  McEwan also has a lot to say about the pleasures and purposes of reading (something I can relate to) and some fascinating asides on logical math problems.

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166. The Darlings

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Christina Alger

Genre:  Fiction

347 pages, published February 16, 2012

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

The Darlings tells the story of an elite New York family dealing with a financial scandal that threatens all of them in different ways.  When he married Merrill Darling, attorney Paul Ross became part of the wealthy Darling family.  He has grown comfortable with their luxurious lifestyle and feels compelled to keep it going after his high flying law firms implodes in 2007.  Against his better judgment, Paul accepts a job as General Counsel at his father in law’s hedge fund.  When the manager of the fund’s primary investment apparently commits suicide and is revealed to be a Bernie Madoff type, all the wheels start to come off for the Darlings.  Paul must decide whether save himself while betraying his wife and in-laws or protect the family business at all costs.

 

Quotes 

“The greatest strength you can have is to know your own strengths. You’ve got to figure out what you’re good at and make the most of it.”

 

“How inexplicable and enviable, never to want to be anywhere other than where you already are.”

 

“To be jealous of money is uninspired … You can only be jealous of someone who has something that you can never have. More style, for example, or wit. Money is easily earned.”

 

“You’re perfect. To me you are. You always will be. When you’re small you think that about your parents. When you’re old, you think that about your kids. You’ll see.”

 

“Diving in is no fun, but it’s a hell of a lot better than drowning.”

 

“And what should he have known? Well, who could answer that? Thought he was closer to all the players than anyone, he still couldn’t identify who was responsible and who wasn’t. Really responsible, not just “look the other way” responsible. They all were, in some larger sense. And yet, while he knew this was a wholly indefensible position, he felt that somehow none of them were, either. Just like the guys at Lehmen, or Bear Stearns, or AIG. Just like the guys at Delphic. It became a game, a contest; the only rules that governed were what made you money and what didn’t. All Paul did was hang the hell on and try not to get thrown.”

 

“The constant mental fight made him irritable. He had never had a temper before. Some days, he felt as if his entire body were a raw nerve, its membrane receptive even to the smallest passing slight.”

 

“And all women wanted something. Ines felt strongly that women were rarely friends with one another unless they could get something out of it. Female friendships were like strategic alliances: Each party had to bring something to the table in order to maintain equity.”

 

My Take

The Darlings is a fast reading page turner that I had a hard time putting down.  Cristina Alger takes you inside the privileged world of New York City.  While most of her focus is on the financial sector, she also offers a glimpse inside high powered law firms, the newspaper industry and leisure in the Hamptons for the millionaires and billionaires.  It would have been a more satisfying novel, and earned a higher score from me, if it had fleshed out and developed the side characters a bit more.  However, even with that deficiency, I recommend reading it.  Perfect escapism.

 

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