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449. In Six Days: An Eco-Terrorism Fable

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Mike Mendelsohn

Author:   Mike Mendelsohn

Genre:   Fiction, Thriller

289 pages, published 2020

Reading Format:  e-Book

Summary

In Six Days:  An Eco-Terrorism Fable is a thriller that follows a two eco-terrorists who are destroying ecological harmful sites throughout the U.S. in an escalating fashion.  It also follows a washed up, widower with a free spirited daughter who has made a small fortune trading bitcoin and a cabal of Republican congressmen who have blood on their hands.

Quotes 

I read this book as part of a book group of which the author, a first time fiction writer, is a member.  I commend him actually writing a book, something that is very hard to do.  As a conservative, I am not the target audience for this book.  I found the portrayal of the “evil” Republican congressmen to be one-dimensional and clichéd.   I imagine that those with a more left-wing persuasion might enjoy this book more than I did.

 

My Take

I read this book as part of a book group of which the author, a first time fiction writer, is a member.  I commend him actually writing a book, something that is very hard to do.  As a conservative, I am not the target audience for this book.  I found the portrayal of the “evil” Republican congressmen to be one-dimensional and clichéd.   I imagine that those with a more left-wing persuasion might enjoy this book more than I did.

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448. In the Unlikely Event

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:  Judy Blume

Genre:   Fiction, Historical Fiction

402 pages, published June 2, 2015

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

In the Unlikely Event takes place in Elizabeth, New Jersey during the early 1950’s when two airplanes crash, killing most of the passengers and explores the impact on the community and several of the residents.  It is also a time capsule, capturing a slice of America during that innocent time.

Quotes 

“Life is a series of unlikely events, isn’t it? Hers certainly is. One unlikely event after another, adding up to a rich, complicated whole. And who knows what’s still to come?”

 

“Anything could go wrong any day of the week. What’s the point of worrying in advance?” “How do you stop yourself from worrying?” “I think of all the good things in my life.” “What about the bad things?” “There’s no room for them inside my head. Not anymore. Now I say live and let live, and I kick those other thoughts away. You can do that, too.”

 

“When Miri asked if she believed in God, what was she supposed to say? ‘Of course I believe in God,’ she’d told her.  ‘But how could God let such a terrible thing happen?’ ‘It’s not God’s job to decide what happens,’ she’d said. ‘It’s his job to help you through it.”

 

“Not that memories were enough—they didn’t keep you warm on a cold winter’s night. They couldn’t hold you when you were frightened or sad. But they were better than nothing.”

 

My Take

I liked, but did not love, In the Unlikely Event.  As a tween and teenager, I read all of Judy Blume’s books and have fond memories of them.  I think she is a terrific young adult writer, able to really connect with her audience.  This book was enjoyable to read, but also pretty forgettable.  Blume does, however, do a pretty good job of capturing the early 1950’s era.

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447. A Discovery of Witches

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Joni Renee Zalk

Author:  Deborah Harkness

Genre:   Fiction, Fantasy, Romance

579 pages, published February 2011

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

The protagonist of A Discovery of Witches is, no surprise, a witch named Diana Bishop.  Diana is a professor at Yale who specializes in the study of alchemy.  Descended from a prominent family of witches, Diana rejects her gift until she discovers a bewitched alchemical manuscript while conducting research at Oxford’s Bodleian Library.  There, she meets Matthew de Clermont, a brilliant geneticist who also happens to be a vampire.  When Matthew and Diana fall in love, they defy the rules set down by the council of witches, vampires and daemons which forbid interspecies fraternization.

Quotes 

“It begins with absence and desire. It begins with blood and fear. It begins with a discovery of witches.”

“Just because something seems impossible doesn’t make it untrue,”

 

“As fast as I can tell there are only two emotions that keep the world spinning year after year…One is fear.  The other is desire.”

 

“Yes, I see that you are behaving like a prince but that doesn’t mean you won’t behave like a devil at the first opportunity.”

 

“It is a blessing as well as a burden to love so much that you can hurt so badly when love is gone.”

 

“All that children need is love, a grown-up to take responsibility for them, and a soft place to land.”

 

“Somewhere in the center of my soul, a rusty chain began to unwind. It freed itself, link by link, from where it had rested, unobserved, waiting for him. My hands, which had been balled up and pressed against his chest, unfurled with it. The chain continued to drop, to an unfathomable depth where there was nothing but darkness and Matthew. At last it snapped to its full length, anchoring me to a vampire. Despite the manuscript, despite the fact that my hands contained enough voltage to run a microwave, and despite the photograph, as long as I was connected to him, I was safe.”

 

“If the butterfly wings its way to the sweet light that attracts it, it’s only because it doesn’t know that the fire can consume it.”

 

“there’s nothing more powerful than human fear—not magic, not vampire strength. Nothing.”

 

“Scholars do one of two things when they discover information that doesn’t fit what they already know. Either they sweep it aside so it doesn’t bring their cherished theories into question or they focus on it with laserlike intensity and try to get to the bottom of the mystery.”

 

My Take

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446. An Object of Beauty

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Steve Martin

Genre:   Fiction, Art

304 pages, published November 23, 2010

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Lacey Yeager is an attractive, ambitious young woman who comes to New York to make her way in the art world during its heyday from the late 1990s through today.  Starting out at Sotheby’s, she climbs the social and career ladders with ease, finally opening her own gallery.

Quotes 

“When someone less capable is ahead of me, I am not pleased. It makes me insane.”

 

“Lacey was just as happy alone as with company. When she was alone, she was potential; with others she was realized. Alone, she was self-contained, her tightly spinning magnetic energy oscillating around her. When in company, she had invisible tethers to anyone in the room: as they moved away, she pulled them in.”

 

“I have found that– just as in real life–imagination sometimes has to stand in for experience.”

 

“You want to know how I think art should be taught to children? Take them to a museum and say, ‘This is art, and you can’t do it.”

 

“…when the person beside you is making you alert and keen and the idea of being with anyone else is not imaginable…”

 

“she is nearing forty and not so easily forgiven as when her skin bloomed like roses.”

 

“She started converting objects of beauty into objects of value.”

 

“An artist who painted a face was now ‘playing with the idea of portraiture,’ or ‘exploring push-pull aesthetics,’ or toying with contradictions like ‘menacing-slash-playful,’ but he or she was never, ever, just painting a face.”

 

My Take

Written by iconic comedian Steve Martin, An Object of Beauty is a compelling character study of an ambitious young woman who also loves art.  I found it fascinating and learned a lot about the inner workings of New York art scene and how the market for art operates.

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445. Recursion

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Blake Crouch

Genre:   Fiction, Science Fiction, Thriller

336 pages, published June 11, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

New York City cop Barry Sutton is perplexed as he investigates the devastating phenomenon the media has dubbed False Memory Syndrome, a mysterious affliction that drives its victims mad with memories of a life they never lived.  Helena Smith has dedicated her life to research that will let us re-experience our most precious memories.  When Helena invents a technology that lets us re-set time and start over, she intersects with Barry and they team up to save the world from destroying itself.

Quotes 

“Life with a cheat code isn’t life. Our existence isn’t something to be engineered or optimized for the avoidance of pain. That’s what it is to be human – the beauty and the pain, each meaningless without the other.”

 

“Because memory…is everything. Physically speaking, a memory is nothing but a specific combination of neurons firing together—a symphony of neural activity. But in actuality, it’s the filter between us and reality. You think you’re tasting this wine, hearing the words I’m saying, in the present, but there’s no such thing. The neural impulses from your taste buds and your ears get transmitted to your brain, which processes them and dumps them into working memory—so by the time you know you’re experiencing something, it’s already in the past. Already a memory.”

“He has wondered lately if that’s all living really is—one long goodbye to those we love.”

 

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. —SØREN KIERKEGAARD”

 

“There are so few things in our existence we can count on to give us the sense of permanence, of the ground beneath our feet. People fail us. Our bodies fail us. We fail ourselves. He’s experienced all of that. But what do you cling to, moment to moment, if memories can simply change. What, then, is real? And if the answer is nothing, where does that leave us?”

 

“Time is an illusion, a construct made out of human memory. There’s no such thing as the past, the present, or the future. It’s all happening now.”

 

“I think balance is for people who don’t know why they’re here.”

 

“He thinks perhaps there’s a reason our memories are kept hazy and out of focus. Maybe their abstraction serves as an anesthetic, a buffer protecting us from the agony of time and all that it steals and erases.”

 

“He has made peace with the idea that part of life is facing your failures, and sometimes those failures are people you once loved.”

 

“He thinks how it will be winter soon, and then another year gone by and another one on the chopping block, time flowing faster and faster. Life is nothing how he expected it would be when he was young and living under the delusion that things could be controlled. Nothing can be controlled. Only endured.”

 

“This low point isn’t the book of your life. It’s just a chapter.”

 

“My soul knows your soul. In any time.”

 

“In high school, in college, she was encouraged again and again to find her passion-a reason to get out of bed and breathe. In her experience, few people ever found that raison d’etre.

What teachers and professors never told her was about the dark side of finding your purpose. The part where it consumes you. Where it becomes a destroyer of relationship and happiness. And still, she wouldn’t trade it. This is the only person she knows how to be.”

 

“Saint Augustine said it perfectly back in the fourth century: “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.”

 

“Life with a cheat code isn’t life. Our existence isn’t something to be engineered or optimized for the avoidance of pain. That’s what it is to be human—the beauty and the pain, each meaningless without the other.”

 

“Is this what you want? To drop yourself into a still-life painting of a memory because life has broken your heart?”

 

“He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past. —GEORGE ORWELL, 1984”

 

“When a person dies, he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past…All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. —KURT VONNEGUT, SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE”

 

“But on a night like this, of a restless mind and dreams of ghosts, time feels secondary to the true prime mover—memory. Perhaps memory is fundamental, the thing from which time emerges.”

 

“The three most important people in her life are gone, and she will never see them again. The stark loneliness of that knowledge cuts her to the bone.

She is forty-nine, and she wonders if this is what feeling old really means — not just a physical deterioration, but an interpersonal. A growing silence caused by the people you most love, who have shaped you and defined your world, going on ahead into whatever comes after.”

 

“Consciousness is a result of environment. Our cognitions – our idea of reality – are shaped by what we can perceive, by the limitations of our senses.”

 

“She realizes that children are always too young and self-absorbed to really see their parents in the prime of their lives.”

 

My Take

I found Recursion to be a highly engaging and fascinating read.  While it stands on its own as a SciFi thriller, author Blake Crouch also has a lot of interesting things to say about time and memory and the role they play in making us who we are.  Recommended.

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444. Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Chris Voss

Genre:   Non Fiction, Psychology, Self Improvement, Business

274 pages, published May 17, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Hoopla

Summary

Chris Voss, a former hostage negotiator for the FBI, explains his approach to negotiating.  He takes you inside the world of high-stakes negotiations, discussing the skills that helped him to save lives and applies them to a variety of real life situations.

Quotes 

“He who has learned to disagree without being disagreeable has discovered the most valuable secret of negotiation.”

 

“Negotiate in their world. Persuasion is not about how bright or smooth or forceful you are. It’s about the other party convincing themselves that the solution you want is their own idea. So don’t beat them with logic or brute force. Ask them questions that open paths to your goals. It’s not about you.”

 

“If you approach a negotiation thinking the other guy thinks like you, you are wrong. That’s not empathy, that’s a projection.”

 

“The fastest and most efficient means of establishing a quick working relationship is to acknowledge the negative and diffuse it.”

 

“The positive/playful voice: Should be your default voice. It’s the voice of an easygoing, good-natured person. Your attitude is light and encouraging. The key here is to relax and smile while you’re talking.”

 

“Though the intensity may differ from person to person, you can be sure that everyone you meet is driven by two primal urges: the need to feel safe and secure, and the need to feel in control. If you satisfy those drives, you’re in the door.”

 

“Another simple rule is, when you are verbally assaulted, do not counterattack. Instead, disarm your counterpart by asking a calibrated question.”

 

“Research shows that the best way to deal with negativity is to observe it, without reaction and without judgment. Then consciously label each negative feeling and replace it with positive, compassionate, and solution-based thoughts.”

 

“Psychotherapy research shows that when individuals feel listened to, they tend to listen to themselves more carefully and to openly evaluate and clarify their own thoughts and feelings.”

 

“The beauty of empathy is that it doesn’t demand that you agree with the other person’s ideas.”

 

“ Identify your counterpart’s negotiating style. Once you know whether they are Accommodator, Assertive, or Analyst, you’ll know the correct way to approach them.   Prepare, prepare, prepare. When the pressure is on, you don’t rise to the occasion; you fall to your highest level of preparation. So design an ambitious but legitimate goal and then game out the labels, calibrated questions, and responses you’ll use to get there. That way, once you’re at the bargaining table, you won’t have to wing it.  Get ready to take a punch. Kick-ass negotiators usually lead with an extreme anchor to knock you off your game. If you’re not ready, you’ll flee to your maximum without a fight. So prepare your dodging tactics to avoid getting sucked into the compromise trap.   Set boundaries, and learn to take a punch or punch back, without anger. The guy across the table is not the problem; the situation is.  Prepare an Ackerman plan. Before you head into the weeds of bargaining, you’ll need a plan of extreme anchor, calibrated questions, and well-defined offers. Remember: 65, 85, 95, 100 percent. Decreasing raises and ending on nonround numbers will get your counterpart to believe that he’s squeezing you for all you’re worth when you’re really getting to the number you want.”

 

“What does a good babysitter sell, really? It’s not child care exactly, but a relaxed evening. A furnace salesperson? Cozy rooms for family time. A locksmith? A feeling of security. Know the emotional drivers and you can frame the benefits of any deal in language that will resonate.”

 

“Negotiation is not an act of battle; it’s a process of discovery. The goal is to uncover as much information as possible.”

 

“It all starts with the universally applicable premise that people want to be understood and accepted. Listening is the cheapest, yet most effective concession we can make to get there. By listening intensely, a negotiator demonstrates empathy and shows a sincere desire to better understand what the other side is experiencing.”

 

“The last rule of labeling is silence. Once you’ve thrown out a label, be quiet and listen.”

 

“First, let’s talk a little human psychology. In basic terms, people’s emotions have two levels: the “presenting” behavior is the part above the surface you can see and hear; beneath, the “underlying” feeling is what motivates the behavior. Imagine a grandfather who’s grumbly at a family holiday dinner: the presenting behavior is that he’s cranky, but the underlying emotion is a sad sense of loneliness from his family never seeing him. What good negotiators do when labeling is address those underlying emotions. Labeling negatives diffuses them (or defuses them, in extreme cases); labeling positives reinforces them.”

 

“This really juices their self-esteem. Researchers have found that people getting concessions often feel better about the bargaining process than those who are given a single firm, “fair” offer. In fact, they feel better even when they end up paying more—or receiving less—than they otherwise might.”

 

“A good negotiator prepares, going in, to be ready for possible surprises; a great negotiator aims to use her skills to reveal the surprises she is certain to find. Don’t commit to assumptions; instead, view them as hypotheses and use the negotiation to test them rigorously. People who view negotiation as a battle of arguments become overwhelmed by the voices in their head. Negotiation is not an act of battle; it’s a process of discovery. The goal is to uncover as much information as possible. To quiet the voices in your head, make your sole and all-encompassing focus the other person and what they have to say. Slow. It. Down. Going too fast is one of the mistakes all negotiators are prone to making. If we’re too much in a hurry, people can feel as if they’re not being heard. You risk undermining the rapport and trust you’ve built. Put a smile on your face. When people are in a positive frame of mind, they think more quickly, and are more likely to collaborate and problem-solve (instead of fight and resist). Positivity creates mental agility in both you and your counterpart.”

 

“The Rule of Three is simply getting the other guy to agree to the same thing three times in the same conversation. It’s tripling the strength of whatever dynamic you’re trying to drill into at the moment. In doing so, it uncovers problems before they happen. It’s really hard to repeatedly lie or fake conviction.”

 

“Mirrors work magic. Repeat the last three words (or the critical one to three words) of what someone has just said. We fear what’s different and are drawn to what’s similar. Mirroring is the art of insinuating similarity, which facilitates bonding. Use mirrors to encourage the other side to empathize and bond with you, keep people talking, buy your side time to regroup, and encourage your counterparts to reveal their strategy.”

 

“By repeating back what people say, you trigger this mirroring instinct and your counterpart will inevitably elaborate on what was just said and sustain the process of connecting.”

 

“Creating unconditional positive regard opens the door to changing thoughts and behaviors. Humans have an innate urge toward socially constructive behavior. The more a person feels understood, and positively affirmed in that understanding, the more likely that urge for constructive behavior will take hold. “That’s right” is better than “yes.” Strive for it. Reaching “that’s right” in a negotiation creates breakthroughs. Use a summary to trigger a “that’s right.” The building blocks of a good summary are a label combined with paraphrasing. Identify, rearticulate, and emotionally affirm.”

 

My Take

I had previously read Getting to Yes: Negotiating an Agreement Without Giving In, another book on negotiating, but prefer the ideas in Never Split the Difference.  Author Chris Voss provides lots of detailed instructions and ideas on how to get the result you want in any negotiation.

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443. Plainsong

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Kent Haruf

Genre:   Fiction

301 pages, published August 22, 2000

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Plainsong tells the story of several residents of Holt, a small town in the high plains of rural Colorado.  We meet a high school teacher who is left to raise his two young boys alone, a teenage girl who is kicked out by her mother when she finds herself pregnant and taken in by two elderly, bachelor brothers who raise cattle and a town bully with a proclivity for evil.

Quotes 

“A girl is different. They want things. They need things on a regular schedule. Why, a girl’s got purposes you and me can’t even imagine. They got ideas in their heads you and me can’t even suppose.”

 

“You’re going to die some day without ever having had enough trouble in your life. Not of the right kind anyway.”

 

“You understand? If you can read you can cook. You can always feed yourselves. You remember that.”

 

“Don’t you have any scars? Inside. Do you? Of course. You don’t act like it. I don’t intend to. It doesn’t do much good, does it?”

 

“Why hell, look at us. Old men alone. Decrepit old bachelors out here in the country seventeen miles from the closest town which don’t amount to much of a good goddamn even when you get there. Think of us. Crotchety and ignorant. Lonesome. Independent. Set in all our ways. How you going to change now at this age of life?  I can’t say, Raymond said. But I’m going to. That’s what I know.”

 

“You’re not talking to her, Maggie Jones said. You and Raymond don’t talk like you should to that girl. Women want to hear some conversation in the evening. We don’t think that’s too much to ask. We’re willing to put up with a lot from you men, but in the evening we want to hear some talking. We want to have a little conversation in the house.”

 

My Take

Having previously read and enjoyed Our Souls at Night by Kent Haruf, I had high hopes for Plainsong.  While Plainsong is not quite as good as Our Souls, it is still a very good read and the author has some interesting insights into the human condition.  I especially enjoyed the story of two elderly brothers who run a remote ranch and take in a pregnant teenage girl who brings out the best in them.

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442. Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Darla Scheuth and Sue Deans

Author:   Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund

Genre:   Non Fiction, Science, Psychology, Economics, History, Public Policy

342 pages, published January 25, 2018

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Factfulness is an exploration of how the world is doing so much better than people think.  When asked simple questions such as why the world’s population is increasing, how many young women go to school, or how many people live in poverty, most people get the answers wrong by a large order of magnitude regardless of their education, experience or expertise.  Written by Professor of International Health Hans Rosling, along with his two long-time collaborators Anna and Ola, methodically demonstrates how the world is doing much better than we might think.

Quotes 

“There’s no room for facts when our minds are occupied by fear.”

 

“Look for causes, not villains.”

 

“human beings have a strong dramatic instinct toward binary thinking, a basic urge to divide things into two distinct groups, with nothing but an empty gap in between. We love to dichotomize. Good versus bad. Heroes versus villains. My country versus the rest. Dividing the world into two distinct sides is simple and intuitive, and also dramatic because it implies conflict, and we do it without thinking, all the time.”

 

“Forming your worldview by relying on the media would be like forming your view about me by looking only at a picture of my foot.”

 

“Think about the world. War, violence, natural disasters, man-made disasters, corruption. Things are bad, and it feels like they are getting worse, right? The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer; and the number of poor just keeps increasing; and we will soon run out of resources unless we do something drastic. At least that’s the picture that most Westerners see in the media and carry around in their heads. I call it the overdramatic worldview. It’s stressful and misleading. In fact, the vast majority of the world’s population lives somewhere in the middle of the income scale. Perhaps they are not what we think of as middle class, but they are not living in extreme poverty. Their girls go to school, their children get vaccinated, they live in two-child families, and they want to go abroad on holiday, not as refugees. Step-by-step, year-by-year, the world is improving. Not on every single measure every single year, but as a rule. Though the world faces huge challenges, we have made tremendous progress. This is the fact-based worldview.”

 

“here’s the paradox: the image of a dangerous world has never been broadcast more effectively than it is now, while the world has never been less violent and more safe.”

 

“When things are getting better we often don’t hear about them. This gives us a systematically too-negative impression of the world around us, which is very stressful.”

 

“People often call me an optimist, because I show them the enormous progress they didn’t know about. That makes me angry. I’m not an optimist. That makes me sound naive. I’m a very serious “possibilist”. That’s something I made up. It means someone who neither hopes without reason, nor fears without reason, someone who constantly resists the overdramatic worldview. As a possibilist, I see all this progress, and it fills me with conviction and hope that further progress is possible. This is not optimistic. It is having a clear and reasonable idea about how things are. It is having a worldview that is constructive and useful.”

 

“Being intelligent—being good with numbers, or being well educated, or even winning a Nobel Prize—is not a shortcut to global factual knowledge. Experts are experts only within their field.”

 

“The macho values that are found today in many Asian and African countries, these are not Asian values, or African values. They are not Muslim values. They are not Eastern values. They are patriarchal values like those found in Sweden only 60 years ago, and with social and economic progress they will vanish, just as they did in Sweden. They are not unchangeable.”

 

“The goal of higher income is not just bigger piles of money. The goal of longer lives is not just extra time. The ultimate goal is to have the freedom to do what we want”

 

“Last year, 4.2 million babies died. That is the most recent number reported by UNICEF of deaths before the age of one, worldwide. We often see lonely and emotionally charged numbers like this in the news or in the materials of activist groups or organizations. They produce a reaction. Who can even imagine 4.2 million dead babies? It is so terrible, and even worse when we know that almost all died from easily preventable diseases. And how can anyone argue that 4.2 million is anything other than a huge number? You might think that nobody would even try to argue that, but you would be wrong. That is exactly why I mentioned this number. Because it is not huge: it is beautifully small. If we even start to think about how tragic each of these deaths is for the parents who had waited for their newborn to smile, and walk, and play, and instead had to bury their baby, then this number could keep us crying for a long time. But who would be helped by these tears? Instead let’s think clearly about human suffering. The number 4.2 million is for 2016. The year before, the number was 4.4 million. The year before that, it was 4.5 million. Back in 1950, it was 14.4 million. That’s almost 10 million more dead babies per year, compared with today. Suddenly this terrible number starts to look smaller. In fact the number has never been lower.”

 

“And thanks to increasing press freedom and improving technology, we hear more, about more disasters, than ever before. When Europeans slaughtered indigenous peoples across America a few centuries ago, it didn’t make the news back in the old world. When central planning resulted in mass famine in rural China, millions starved to death while the youngsters in Europe waving communist red flags knew nothing about it. When in the past whole species or ecosystems were destroyed, no one realized or even cared. Alongside all the other improvements, our surveillance of suffering has improved tremendously. This improved reporting is itself a sign of human progress, but it creates the impression of the exact opposite.”

 

“Ask yourself, “What kind of evidence would convince me to change my mind?” If the answer is “no evidence could ever change my mind about vaccination,” then you are putting yourself outside evidence-based rationality, outside the very critical thinking that first brought you to this point. In that case, to be consistent in your skepticism about science, next time you have an operation please ask your surgeon not to bother washing her hands.”

 

“The next generation is like the last runner in a very long relay race. The race to end extreme poverty has been a marathon, with the starter gun fired in 1800. This next generation has the unique opportunity to complete the job: to pick up the baton, cross the line, and raise its hands in triumph. The project must be completed. And we should have a big party when we are done.”

 

“Most important of all, we should be teaching our children humility and curiosity. Being humble, here, means being aware of how difficult your instincts can make it to get the facts right. It means being realistic about the extent of your knowledge. It means being happy to say “I don’t know.” It also means, when you do have an opinion, being prepared to change it when you discover new facts. It is quite relaxing being humble, because it means you can stop feeling pressured to have a view about everything, and stop feeling you must be ready to defend your views all the time. Being curious means being open to new information and actively seeking it out. It means embracing facts that don’t fit your worldview and trying to understand their implications. It means letting your mistakes trigger curiosity instead of embarrassment. “How on earth could I be so wrong about that fact? What can I learn from that mistake? Those people are not stupid, so why are they using that solution?” It is quite exciting being curious, because it means you are always discovering something interesting.”

 

My Take

While Factfulness is an interesting book, it reminded me very much of two other books that I have read on my quest:  Abundance and It’s Better Than It Looks.  All of these books preach the same message, i.e. that things are actually going a lot better in the world than we think they are and that worldwide poverty is in decline.  Factfulness author Hans Rosling backs everything up with facts and makes a compelling case.  I’m not sure how things are going in the world in the age of covid-19 and global shutdown.  I’m hoping we can get back on the positive trajectory that Rosling describes.

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441. Childhood’s End

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:    Arthur C. Clarke

Genre:   Fiction, Science Fiction

234 pages, published August 1953

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Written in 1952, Childhood’s End describes a world in which a group of beings from outer space appear in spaceships over every city on earth.  Called the Overlords, the extraterrestrial beings are intellectually, technologically, and militarily superior to humankind and exert their benevolent will to unify the planet, eliminate poverty, end war and improve life. With only a few pockets of resistance, humankind agreed and a golden age began.  However, it was not to last.

Quotes 

“No utopia can ever give satisfaction to everyone, all the time. As their material conditions improve, men raise their sights and become discontented with power and possessions that once would have seemed beyond their wildest dreams. And even when the external world has granted all it can, there still remain the searchings of the mind and the longings of the heart.”

 

“Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the nonexistence of Zeus or Thor, but they have few followers now.”

 

“Science is the only religion of mankind.”

 

“Utopia was here at last: its novelty had not yet been assailed by the supreme enemy of all Utopias—boredom.”

 

“In this single galaxy of ours there are eighty-seven thousand million suns. […] In challenging it, you would be like ants attempting to label and classify all the grains of sand in all the deserts of the world. […] It is a bitter thought, but you must face it. The planets you may one day possess. But the stars are not for man.”

 

“man’s beliefs were his own affair, so long as they did not interfere with the liberty of others.”

 

“Western man had relearned-what the rest of the world had never forgotten-that there was nothing sinful in leisure as long as it did not degenerate into mere sloth.”

 

“The world’s now placid, featureless, and culturally dead: nothing really new has been created since the Overlords came. The reason’s obvious. There’s nothing left to struggle for, and there are too many distractions and entertainments. Do you realize that every day something like five hundred hours of radio and TV pour out over the various channels? If you went without sleep and did nothing else, you could follow less than a twentieth of the entertainment that’s available at the turn of a switch! No wonder that people are becoming passive sponges—absorbing but never creating. Did you know that the average viewing time per person is now three hours a day? Soon people won’t be living their own lives any more. It will be a full-time job keeping up with the various family serials on TV!”

 

“Everybody on this island has one ambition, which may be summed up very simply. It is to do something, however small it may be, better than anyone else. Of course, it’s an ideal we don’t all achieve. But in this modern world the great thing is to have an ideal. Achieving it is considerably less important.”

 

My Take

Prior to Childhood’s End, I had never read anything by Arthur C. Clarke.  My favorite science fiction writer has always been Isaac Asimov.  It turned out to be a real treat to read this fascinating tale by one of the genre’s master storytellers.  Although written in 1952, Childhood’s End holds up well.  I had a hard time putting it down and recommend you check it out.

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440. Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   David Epstein

Genre:   Nonfiction, Business, Psychology, Self Improvement, Science

352 pages, published May 28, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

In Range, author David Epstein takes on the accepted wisdom that the key to success in most fields involves singular focus from a young age combined with thousands of hours of deliberate practice, i.e. the 10,000 hour rule immortalized in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers.  Think Tiger Woods or Mozart.  Epstein takes a contrarian view and explores the view that the most effective path to success is to dabble and/or delay.  He looks at research on the world’s top performers, from professional athletes to Nobel laureates, and shows that early specialization is the exception, not the rule. Inventors who cross domains and engage in multiple disciplines have the greatest impact.  Range makes the case that failing is the best way to learn and shows that frequent quitters end up with the most fulfilling careers.

Quotes 

“We learn who we are in practice, not in theory.”

 

“If we treated careers more like dating, nobody would settle down so quickly.”

 

“Modern work demands knowledge transfer: the ability to apply knowledge to new situations and different domains. Our most fundamental thought processes have changed to accommodate increasing complexity and the need to derive new patterns rather than rely only on familiar ones.  Our conceptual classification schemes provide a scaffolding for connecting knowledge, making it accessible and flexible.”

 

“Whether chemists, physicists, or political scientists, the most successful problem solvers spend mental energy figuring out what type of problem they are facing before matching a strategy to it, rather than jumping in with memorized procedures.”

 

“Like chess masters and firefighters, premodern villagers relied on things being the same tomorrow as they were yesterday. They were extremely well prepared for what they had experienced before, and extremely poorly equipped for everything else. Their very thinking was highly specialized in a manner that the modern world has been telling us is increasingly obsolete. They were perfectly capable of learning from experience, but failed at learning without experience. And that is what a rapidly changing, wicked world demands—conceptual reasoning skills that can connect new ideas and work across contexts. Faced with any problem they had not directly experienced before, the remote villagers were completely lost. That is not an option for us. The more constrained and repetitive a challenge, the more likely it will be automated, while great rewards will accrue to those who can take conceptual knowledge from one problem or domain and apply it in an entirely new one.”

 

“You have people walking around with all the knowledge of humanity on their phone, but they have no idea how to integrate it. We don’t train people in thinking or reasoning.”

 

“The challenge we all face is how to maintain the benefits of breadth, diverse experience, interdisciplinary thinking, and delayed concentration in a world that increasingly incentivizes, even demands, hyperspecialization.”

 

“The labs in which scientists had more diverse professional backgrounds were the ones where more and more varied analogies were offered, and where breakthroughs were more reliably produced when the unexpected arose.”

 

“breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer. That is, the more contexts in which something is learned, the more the learner creates abstract models, and the less they rely on any particular example. Learners become better at applying their knowledge to a situation they’ve never seen before, which is the essence of creativity.”

 

“Whether or not experience inevitably led to expertise, they agreed, depended entirely on the domain in question. Narrow experience made for better chess and poker players and firefighters, but not for better predictors of financial or political trends, or of how employees or patients would perform.”

 

“While it is undoubtedly true that there are areas that require individuals with Tiger’s precocity and clarity of purpose, as complexity increases—as technology spins the world into vaster webs of interconnected systems in which each individual only sees a small part—we also need more Rogers: people who start broad and embrace diverse experiences and perspectives while they progress. People with range.”

 

“First act and then think…We discover the possibilities by doing, by trying new activities, building new networks, finding new role models.” We learn who we are in practice, not in theory.”

 

“A separate, international team analyzed more than a half million research articles, and classified a paper as “novel” if it cited two other journals that had never before appeared together. Just one in ten papers made a new combination, and only one in twenty made multiple new combinations. The group tracked the impact of research papers over time. They saw that papers with new knowledge combinations were more likely to be published in less prestigious journals, and also much more likely to be ignored upon publication. They got off to a slow start in the world, but after three years, the papers with new knowledge combos surpassed the conventional papers, and began accumulating more citations from other scientists. Fifteen years after publication, studies that made multiple new knowledge combinations were way more likely to be in the top 1 percent of most-cited papers. To recap: work that builds bridges between disparate pieces of knowledge is less likely to be funded, less likely to appear in famous journals, more likely to be ignored upon publication, and then more likely in the long run to be a smash hit in the library of human knowledge.”

 

My Take

I enjoy reading books that challenge long held assumptions and Range falls squarely into that camp.  I have long believed the conventional wisdom that early focus, repetitive practice and hyper specialization were the road to success.  However, author David Epstein makes a compelling case, backed up with data, that the road to greatness is often a meandering one, with failure, course changes and a broad range of interdisciplinary influences rating as essential elements.  In reading this book, I was reminded of Leonardo da Vinci, the biography of the iconic artist and inventor who drew on a wide range of influences for some of his most creative and groundbreaking work.

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