, , ,

478. The Nickel Boys

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Carl Moor

Author:   Colson Whitehead

Genre:   Fiction, Historical Fiction

213 pages, published July 16, 2019

Reading Format:  Audiobook

Summary

In 1960’s Tallahassee, a young black boy named Elwood Curtis , a black boy growing up in 1960s Tallahassee is unjustly sent to an infamous juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy.  Struggling to survive, naïve and innocent Elwood becomes friends with a fellow Nickel boy named Turner who is street smart, a schemer and a survivor.  Based on the real story of a reform school that operated for 111 years and ruined the lives of thousands of children.

Quotes 

“We must believe in our souls that we are somebody, that we are significant, that we are worthful, and we must walk the streets of life every day with this sense of dignity and this sense of somebody-ness.”

 

“Make a career of humanity. Make it a central part of your life.”

 

“The boys could have been many things had they not been ruined by that place. Doctors who cured diseases or perform brain surgery, inventing shit that saves lives. Run for president. All those lost geniuses – sure not all of them were geniuses, Chickie Pete for example was not solving special relativity – but they had been denied even the simple pleasure of being ordinary. Hobbled and handicapped before the race even began, never figuring out how to be normal.”

 

“He who gets behind in a race must forever remain behind or run faster than the man in front.”

 

“You can change the law but you can’t change people and how they treat each other.”

 

“If everyone looked the other way, then everybody was in on it. If he looked the other way, he was as implicated as the rest. That’s how he saw it, how he’d always seen things.”

 

“If it is true for you, it is true for someone else, and you are no longer alone.”

 

“Perhaps his life might have veered elsewhere if the US government had opened the country to colored advancement like they opened the army. But it was one thing to allow someone to kill for you and another to let him live next door.”

 

“It was easy to root for the winners. No, he liked the punch-drunk ones, half walking at mile twenty-three, tongues flapping like Labradors. Tumbling across the finish line by hook or by crook, feet pounded to bloody meat in their Nikes. The laggards and limpers who weren’t running the course but running deep into their character—down into the cave to return to the light with what they found. By the time they got to Columbus Circle, the TV crews have split, the cone cups of water and Gatorade litter the course like daisies in a pasture, and the silver space blankets twist in the wind. Maybe they had someone waiting for them and maybe they didn’t. Who wouldn’t celebrate that?”

 

“The world continued to instruct: Do not love for they will disappear, do not trust for you will be betrayed, do not stand up for you will be swatted down. Still he heard those higher imperatives: Love and that love will be returned, trust in the righteous path and it will lead you to deliverance, fight and things will change. He never listened, never saw what was plainly in front of him, and now he had been plucked from the world altogether.”

 

“To forbid the thought of escape, even that slightest butterfly thought of escape, was to murder one’s humanity.”

 

“Throw us in jail, and we will still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and, as difficult as it is, we will still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities after midnight hours, and drag us out onto some wayside road, and beat us and leave us half-dead, and we will still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom.”

 

My Take

I had previously read The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, a book about blacks escaping slavery, and found it to be an interesting, but depressing book.  While The Nickel Boys is very similar, a depressing account of the inhumanity suffered by young black man, it is tighter and more engaging.

/by
, , , , , ,

477. Notes from a Small Island

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:  Bill Bryson

Genre:   Non Fiction, Travel, Foreign, Humor, Memoir, Essays

324 pages, published May 28, 1997

Reading Format:  Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

Notes from a Small Island is author Bill Bryson’s take on the two decades that he spent living in the United Kingdom.

Quotes 

“I know this goes without saying, but Stonehenge really was the most incredible accomplishment. It took five hundred men just to pull each sarsen, plus a hundred more to dash around positioning the rollers. Just think about it for a minute. Can you imagine trying to talk six hundred people into helping you drag a fifty-ton stone eighteen miles across the countryside and muscle it into an upright position, and then saying, ‘Right, lads! Another twenty like that, plus some lintels and maybe a couple of dozen nice bluestones from Wales, and we can party!’ Whoever was the person behind Stonehenge was one dickens of a motivator, I’ll tell you that.”

 

“Suddenly, in the space of a moment, I realized what it was that I loved about Britain – which is to say, all of it. Every last bit of it, good and bad – Marmite, village fetes, country lanes, people saying ‘mustn’t grumble’ and ‘I’m terribly sorry but’, people apologizing to me when I conk them with a nameless elbow, milk in bottles, beans on toast, haymaking in June, stinging nettles, seaside piers, Ordnance Survey maps, crumpets, hot-water bottles as a necessity, drizzly Sundays – every bit of it.  What a wondrous place this was – crazy as fuck, of course, but adorable to the tiniest degree. What other country, after all, could possibly have come up with place names like Tooting Bec and Farleigh Wallop, or a game like cricket that goes on for three days and never seems to start? Who else would think it not the least odd to make their judges wear little mops on their heads, compel the Speaker of the House of Commons to sit on something called the Woolsack, or take pride in a military hero whose dying wish was to be kissed by a fellow named Hardy? (‘Please Hardy, full on the lips, with just a bit of tongue.’) What other nation in the world could possibly have given us William Shakespeare, pork pies, Christopher Wren, Windsor Great Park, the Open University, Gardners’ Question Time and the chocolate digestive biscuit? None, of course.  How easily we lose sight of all this. What an enigma Britain will seem to historians when they look back on the second half of the twentieth century. Here is a country that fought and won a noble war, dismantled a mighty empire in a generally benign and enlightened way, created a far-seeing welfare state – in short, did nearly everything right – and then spent the rest of the century looking on itself as a chronic failure. The fact is that this is still the best place in the world for most things – to post a letter, go for a walk, watch television, buy a book, venture out for a drink, go to a museum, use the bank, get lost, seek help, or stand on a hillside and take in a view.  All of this came to me in the space of a lingering moment. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I like it here. I like it more than I can tell you.”

 

“The tearoom lady called me love. All the shop ladies called me love and most of the men called me mate. I hadn’t been here twelve hours and already they loved me.”

 

“Is it raining out?’ the reception girl asked brightly as I filled in the registration card between sneezes and pauses to wipe water from my face with the back of my arm. ‘No, my ship sank and I had to swim the last seven miles.”

 

“To an American the whole purpose of living, the one constant confirmation of continued existence, is to cram as much as sensual pleasure as possible into one’s mouth more or less continuously. Gratification, instant and lavish, is a birthright”

 

“…it occurred to me, not for the first time, what a remarkably small world Britain is. That is its glory, you see–that it manages at once to be intimate and small scale, and at the same time packed to bursting with incident and interest. I am constantly filled with admiration at this–at the way you can wander through a town like Oxford and in the space of a few hundred yards pass the home of Christopher Wren, the buildings where Halley found his comet and Boyle his first law, the track where Roger Bannister ran the first sub-four-minute mile, the meadow where Lewis Carroll strolled; or how you can stand on Snow’s Hill at Windsor and see, in a single sweep, Windsor Castle, the playing fields of Eton, the churchyard where Gray wrote his “Elegy,” the site where The Merry Wives of Windsor was performed. Can there anywhere on earth be, in such a modest span, a landscape more packed with centuries of busy, productive attainment?”

 

“When the Duke [W.J.C. Scott-Bentinck] died, his heirs found all of the aboveground rooms devoid of furnishings except for one chamber in the middle of which sat the Duke’s commode. The main hall was mysteriously floor less. Most of the rooms were painted pink. The one upstairs room in which the Duke had resided was packed to the ceiling with hundreds of green boxes, each of which contained a single dark brown wig. This was, in short, a man worth getting to know.”

 

“The fact is that the British have a totally private sense of distance. This is most visibly seen in the shared pretense that Britain is a lonely island in the middle of an empty green sea. Of course, the British are all aware, in an abstract sort of way, that there is a substantial landmass called Europe nearby and that from time to time it is necessary to go over there to give old Jerry a drubbing or have a holiday in the sun, but it’s not nearby in any meaningful sense in the way that, say, Disney World is.”

 

“It sometimes occurs to me that the British have more heritage than is good for them. In a country where there is so astonishingly much of everything, it is easy to look on it as a kind of inexhaustible resource.”

 

“I can never understand why Londoners fail to see that they live in the most wonderful city in the world. It is, if you ask me, far more beautiful and interesting than Paris and more lively than anywhere but New York—and even New York can’t touch it in lots of important ways. It has more history, finer parks, a livelier and more varied press, better theaters, more numerous orchestras and museums, leafier squares, safer streets, and more courteous inhabitants than any other large city in the world.”

 

“One day in 1987 Fallows was standing at a window in a London bank waiting to be served when a would-be robber named Douglas Bath stepped in front of him, brandished a handgun and demanded money from the cashier. Outraged, Fallows told Bath to ‘bugger off’ to the back of the line and wait his turn, to the presumed approving nods of others in the queue. Unprepared for this turn of events, Bath meekly departed from the bank empty-handed and was arrested a short distance away.”

 

My Take

Like Bryson, I am a committed Anglophile and agree with him that London is the best city on earth.  I enjoyed his insights and witticisms as he recounted the twenty years he spent living in the UK.  Reading this book made me want to plan another trip that special place.

/by
, , , , ,

476. Blackout: How Black America Can Make Its Second Escape from the Democrat Plantation

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Candace Owens

Genre:   Non Fiction, Memoir, Politics, Public Policy

240 pages, published September 15, 2020

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

In Blackout, political activist and social media star Candace Owens tells the story of her personal evolution from left-wing Democrat to freedom loving Republican.  She also expands on her theme that Democrats can only win by keeping blacks in their place on the “Democrat Plantation.”  Owens elucidates the myriad ways that liberal policies and ideals are actually harm African Americans and hinder their ability to rise above poverty, live independent and successful lives, and be an active part of the American Dream.

Quotes 

“My challenge to every American is simple: reject the Left’s victim narrative and do it yourself. Because we will never realize the true potential that this incredible country has to offer—in the land of the free and the home of the brave—if we continue to be shackled by the great myth of government deliverance.”

 

“Leftism is defined as any political philosophy that seeks to infringe upon individual liberties in its demand for a higher moral good.”

 

“The personality complex of a liberal savior is one that fascinates me, as I believe it to be centered on extreme narcissism. I imagine them to be addicted to the feeling of accomplishment that is derived from helping someone inferior to them.”

 

“We so often hear the expression “freedom is not free,” but what exactly does that mean? It means that freedom isn’t a young woman in an open field with her head tilted toward the sun. It’s more likely a young woman sitting at home, studying, even though she’d much rather be out with her friends. It’s a young man, getting accepted into a highly ranked university on the basis of his outstanding academic performance. Freedom is personal responsibility. It’s the sacrifices we make personally so that we may afford our lives certain privileges. Ronald Reagan famously said, “Freedom is never more than a generation away from extinction. We don’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.”

 

“World War II. And just a little more than two decades before then marked the start of World War I, battles fought among men whose average age was twenty-four but reached as low as just twelve years. Fast-forward to today and students are demanding safe spaces on college campuses because they view it as a form of torture to be exposed to opposing viewpoints.”

 

“Conservatism then is about sense and survival. Leftism is the plaything of a society with too much time on its hands.”

 

“Contrary to the Black Lives Matter narrative, the police have much more to fear from black males than black males have to fear from the police,” Mac Donald wrote. “In 2015, a police officer was 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male was to be killed by a police officer.”

 

“For those who believe that cop killings are simply due to excessive force, Cesario’s report contradicts that notion as well, revealing that between 90 and 95 percent of civilians who were killed by police officers were violently attacking either the cop or another person when they were killed. And while the media loves to report that blacks are repeatedly gunned down when their cell phone or another item is mistaken for a gun, these incidents are rare.”

 

“Our internal conflict is understandable—why shouldn’t the government, after years of slavery and Jim Crow, not eliminate black debt by subsidizing black housing, and otherwise funding black lives? The answer is simple: because a painkiller cannot eliminate cancer. No short-term fix, no Band-Aid over the deeply infected wound, will ever fix the underlying problems that plague our community.”

 

“It is unfathomable that black parents would continue to put their children’s future at risk by pledging allegiance to abysmal public schools when the option to drastically improve their educational circumstances sits before them. It is even more unfathomable that liberals would ask them to. Is it not ironic that the same people who claim the American workforce is racist and that black Americans have a harder time securing jobs and moving up the corporate ladder would at the same time do all they can to prevent workplace preparedness by advocating against the best available paths for education? It is too often the case that those with the loudest voices against school choice are the very same Democrats who send their own kids to private schools. Their astounding hypocrisy is evidence of a more sinister intention, I believe. Perhaps Democrats simply understand that uneducated black children transform into uneducated adults, and uneducated adults are far more easily controlled by mass propaganda than those who think critically for themselves.”

 

“Johnson lowered poverty rates in the black community, yes, but not by supporting black-owned businesses or addressing racist hiring practices and the racial income gap. Instead, he passed a series of bills that essentially distributed checks to struggling black families, thereby giving them the fish instead of showing them how to fish on their own.”

 

“What is more, when the funds do run dry, blacks, having never learned how the dollars were earned, will be left in the position of once again needing to beg the government for survival. Handouts absent hard work render men weak, and with depleted self-esteem; they stifle the entrepreneurial spirit, by removing our innate senses of drive and aspiration. Poverty and despair become the life of the man who is given a fish but never learns to cast his own line. And though many will sympathize, prosperity will never be won until we become our own lifeline.”

 

“We cannot rely on a hopelessly inefficient and burdensome government to fix what we ourselves refuse to do.”

 

“Johnson’s legislation essentially crystallized a long-term pact between blacks and the Democrat Party that still exists today, lending credence to his alleged statement that he would “have those niggers voting Democrat for the next two hundred years.” There is some uncertainty about whether Johnson actually made that bold claim, but even if he did not, a quote attributed to the president by numerous historians and publications lays bare the actual intention behind his historic civil rights legislation: These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days and that’s a problem for us since they’ve got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this, we’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference. For if we don’t move at all, then their allies will line up against us and there’ll be no way of stopping them, we’ll lose the filibuster and there’ll be no way of putting a brake on all sorts of wild legislation. It’ll be Reconstruction all over again.”

 

“And so, because instead of learning about free markets, capitalism, and entrepreneurship, today’s curriculum overemphasizes the role that others play in our success. Students are being systematically disempowered, trained to resent the success of others. And that creates a self-fulling prophecy of sorts. We can never attain what we resent, just as we will never achieve what we loathe. If money and success become the objects of our loathing and resentment, then we can be certain they will never be within our grasp. Our subconscious mind will reject its opportunity seeking to prevent us from becoming that which we have been conditioned to hate.”

 

My Take

/by
, , , ,

475. Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   J.K. Rowling

Genre:   Fiction, Young Adult, Fantasy

652 pages, published September 16, 2006

Reading Format:  Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince is the sixth book in J.K. Rowling’s epic saga and follows Harry, Ron and Hermione in their sixth year at Hogwarts.  Ron and Hermione are prefects, Harry is captain of Griffindor’s quiditch team and all are struggling with teenage hormones and angst.  While Voldemort is regrouping with the death eaters in support, Dumbledore is preparing Harry for the battle that lays ahead.

Quotes 

“Do you remember me telling you we are practicing non-verbal spells, Potter?”

“Yes,” said Harry stiffly.  “Yes, sir.”  “There’s no need to call me “sir” Professor.”  The words had escaped him before he knew what he was saying.”

“It is the unknown we fear when we look upon death and darkness, nothing more.”

 

“He accused me of being Dumbledore’s man through and through.”

“How very rude of him.”

“I told him I was.”

Dumbledore opened his mouth to speak and then closed it again. Fawkes the phoenix let out a low, soft, musical cry. To Harry’s intense embarrassment, he suddenly realized that Dumbledore’s bright blue eyes looked rather watery, and stared hastily at his own knee. When Dumbledore spoke, however, his voice was quite steady.

“I am very touched, Harry.”

 

“Let us step into the night and pursue that flighty temptress, adventure.”

 

“Dumbledore says people find it far easier to forgive others for being wrong than being right.”

 

“It was, he thought, the difference between being dragged into the arena to face a battle to the death and walking into the arena with your head held high. Some people, perhaps, would say that there was little to choose between the two ways, but Dumbledore knew – and so do I, thought Harry, with a rush of fierce pride, and so did my parents – that there was all the difference in the world.”

 

“You’d think people had better things to gossip about,” said Ginny as she sat on the common room floor, leaning against Harry’s legs and reading the Daily Prophet. “Three Dementor attacks in a week, and all Romilda Vane does is ask me if it’s true you’ve got a Hippogriff tattooed across your chest.”

Ron and Hermione both roared with laughter. Harry ignored them.

What did you tell her?”

I told her it’s a Hungarian Horntail,” said Ginny, turning a page of the newspaper idly. “Much more macho.”

Thanks,” said Harry, grinning. “And what did you tell her Ron’s got?”

A Pygmy Puff, but I didn’t say where.”

 

“Why are you worrying about YOU-KNOW-WHO, when you should be worrying about YOU-NO-POO? The constipation sensation that’s gripping the nation!”

 

“Harry looked around; there was Ginny running toward him; she had a hard blazing look in her face as she threw her arms around him. And without thinking, without planning it, without worrying about the fact that fifty people were watching, Harry kissed her. After several long moments, or it might have been half an hour-or possibly several sunlit days- they broke apart.”

 

“And Harry saw very clearly as he sat there under the hot sun how people who cared about him had stood in front of him one by one, his mother, his father, his godfather, and finally Dumbledore, all determined to protect him; but now that was over. He could not let anybody else stand between him and Voldemort; he must abandon forever the illusion he ought to have lost at the age of one, that the shelter of a parent’s arms meant that nothing could hurt him. There was no waking from this nightmare, no comforting whisper in the dark that he was safe really, that it was all in his imagination; the last and greatest of his protectors had died, and he was more alone than he had ever been.”

 

My Take

It was a pleasure to read the sixth Harry Potter book as I continue to work my way through the audio versions of this classic series.  As with all of the installments, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince did not disappoint.  J.K. Rowling is truly such a talented and creative writer and listening to the excellent and exuberant voice work of actor Jim Dale is a rare treat.

/by
, , , , ,

474. The Yellow House

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Julie Horowitz

Author:   Sarah M. Broom

Genre:   Nonfiction, Memoir, Biography, Cultural

376 pages, published August 13, 2019

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

In The Yellow House, writer Sarah M. Broom tells the stories of her large family of twelve children that lived in and out of mother Ivory Mae’s shotgun house in New Orleans East.  Broom starts in the late 1800’s and concludes with life in post-Katrina New Orleans.

Quotes 

“Distance lends perspective, but it can also shade, misinterpret.”

 

“The mythology of New Orleans—that it is always the place for a good time; that its citizens are the happiest people alive, willing to smile, dance, cook, and entertain for you; that it is a progressive city open to whimsy and change—can sometimes suffocate the people who live and suffer under the place’s burden, burying them within layers and layers of signifiers, making it impossible to truly get at what is dysfunctional about the city.”

 

“Dresses you might wear for special occasions she wore every day. In this way she and Joseph were alike. They dressed to be seen, which is how it came to be that they built up a reputation for floor showing, as Uncle Joe calls it. “Yeah, we knew we looked good.” They danced wherever there was a floor—a bar or a ball. The sidewalk, sometimes. “We used to go in clubs and start dancing from the door. For a poor man I used to dress my can off,” he says. “That’s what used to get me in so much trouble and thing with the ladies.” He and his baby sister, Ivory, would swing it out, jitterbugging and carrying on. Ivory was always fun and always light on her feet. She was especially gifted at being led and men generally loved this quality in her.”

 

“Zora Neale Hurston said, “There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”

 

“The house’s disappearance from the landscape was not different from my father’s absence. His was a sudden erasure for my mother and siblings, a prolonged and present absence for me, an intriguing story with an ever-expanding middle that never drew to a close. The house held my father inside of it, preserved; it bore his traces. As long as the house stood, containing these remnants, my father was not yet gone. And then suddenly, he was.”

 

“When the house fell down, it can be said, something in me opened up. Cracks help a house resolve internally its pressures and stresses, my engineer friend had said. Houses provide a frame that bears us up. Without that physical structure, we are the house that bears itself up. I was now the house.”

 

“For the longest time, I couldn’t bear to hear his voice. This is such a difficult thing to write, to be that close to someone who you cannot bear to look at, who you are afraid of, who you are worried will hurt you, even inadvertently, especially because you are his family and you will allow him to get away with it.”

 

“That was the story coming out of city hall, the small-print narrative on the full-page advertisements that appeared in glossy local magazines. Except none of these projections would ever come true. New Orleans would not hold steady, not in the least. The city’s population reached its apex in 1960. But no one knew that then.”

 

My Take

Winner of the 2019 National Book Award for non fiction, The Yellow House provides the reader with a unique point of view on New Orleans during the past 40 years and the lives of a large African American family that lived just outside the city in New Orleans East.  While I enjoyed the book, it was a bit meandering and verbose at times.

/by
, , , , , ,

473. Better

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:  Atul Gawande

Genre:   Non Fiction, Health, Medicine, Science, Memoir, Essays

273 pages, published April 3, 2007

Reading Format:  Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

In Better, surgeon and author Atul Gawande explores different aspects of medical care (hygiene, obstetrics, medical malpractice, battlefield surgical tents in Iraq, doctor assisted administration of the death penalty, the treatment of polio in India) and explores how to bring improvements to different systems.

Quotes 

“Better is possible. It does not take genius. It takes diligence. It takes moral clarity. It takes ingenuity. And above all, it takes a willingness to try.”

 

“People underestimate the importance of dilligence as a virtue. No doubt it has something to do with how supremely mundane it seems. It is defined as “the constant and earnest effort to accomplish what is undertaken.”… Understood, however, as the prerequisite of great accomplishment, diligence stands as one of the most difficult challenges facing any group of people who take on tasks of risk and consequence. It sets a high, seemingly impossible, expectation for performance and human behavior.”

 

“The seemingly easiest and most sensible rule for a doctor to follow is: Always Fight. Always look for what more you could do.”

 

“We are used to thinking of doctoring as a solitary, intellectual task. But making medicine go right is less often like making a difficult diagnosis than like making sure everyone washes their hands.”

 

“The hardest question for anyone who takes responsibility for what he or she does is, What if I turn out to be average?”

 

“Doctors quickly learn that how much they make has little to do with how good they are. It largely depends on how they handle the business side of their practice.”

 

“Indeed, the scientific effort to improve performance in medicine—an effort that at present gets only a miniscule portion of scientific budgets—can arguably save more lives in the next decade than bench science, more lives than research on the genome, stem cell therapy, cancer vaccines, and all the other laboratory work we hear about in the news.”

 

“Ingenuity is often misunderstood. It is not a matter of superior intelligence but of character. It demands more than anything a willingness to recognize failure, to not paper over the cracks, and to change. It arises from deliberate, even obsessive, reflection on failure and a constant searching for new solutions.”

“We always hope for the easy fix: the one simple change that will erase a problem in a stroke. But few things in life work this way. Instead, success requires making a hundred small steps go right – one after the other, no slipups, no goofs, everyone pitching in.”

 

“Human birth…is a solution to an evolutionary problem: how a mammal can walk upright, which requires a small, fixed, bony pelvis, and also possess a large brain, which entails a baby whose head is too big to fit through that small pelvis…in a sense, all human mothers give birth prematurely. Other mammals are born mature enough to walk and seek food within hours; our newborns are small and helpless for months.”

 

“Betterment is perpetual labor. The world is chaotic, disorganized, and vexing, and medicine is nowhere spared that reality. To complicate matters, we in medicine are also only human ourselves. We are distractible, weak, and given to our own concerns. Yet still, to live as a doctor is to live so that one’s life is bound up in others’ and in science and in the messy, complicated connection between the two It is to live a life of responsibility. The question then, is not whether one accepts the responsibility. Just by doing this work, one has. The question is, having accepted the responsibility, how one does such work well.”

 

My Take

I always think the mark of a good non fiction book is how much I learned from reading it.  Well, I learned a lot about modern medicine after reading Better.   It also didn’t hurt that Atul Gawande (author of Being Mortal) is a talented writer with something to say.

/by
, , , , , ,

472. The Ascent of Money

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Niall Ferguson

Genre:   Non Fiction, Economics, History, Business, Finance

442 pages, published November 13, 2008

Reading Format:  Audiobook on Hoopla

Summary

In The Ascent of Money, Scottish historian Niall Ferguson writes about the human story behind the evolution of finance, from its origins in ancient Mesopotamia to its recent impact on our modern world.   Ferguson demonstrates that finance is the foundation of human progress and that financial history underlies all human history. He specifically looks at the following questions:  What is money? What do banks do? What’s the difference between a stock and a bond? Why buy insurance or real estate? And what exactly does a hedge fund do?

Quotes 

“The ascent of money has been essential to the ascent of man.”

 

“Money, it is conventional to argue, is a medium of exchange, which has the advantage of eliminating inefficiencies of barter; a unit of account, which facilitates valuation and calculation; and a store of value, which allows economic transactions to be conducted over long periods as well as geographical distances. To perform all these functions optimally, money has to be available, affordable, durable, fungible, portable and reliable.”

 

“there really is no such thing as ‘the future’, singular. There are only multiple, unforeseeable futures, which will never lose their capacity to take us by surprise.”

 

“only when savers can put their money in reliable banks that it can be channelled from the idle to the industrious.”

 

“poverty is not the result of rapacious financiers exploiting the poor. It has much more to do with the lack of financial institutions, with the absence of banks, not their presence. Only when borrowers have access to efficient credit networks can they escape from the clutches of loan sharks, and only when savers can deposit their money in reliable banks can it be channeled from the idle rich to the industrious poor.”

 

“perennial truths of financial history. Sooner or later every bubble bursts. Sooner or later the bearish sellers outnumber the bullish buyers. Sooner or later greed turns to fear.”

 

“The subprime butterfly had flapped its wings and triggered a global hurricane.”

 

My Take

While there are some interesting ideas and food for thought in The Ascent of Money, it is too long and would benefit tremendously from some heavy editing.

/by
, , ,

471. The Glass Hotel

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Emily St. John Mandel

Genre:   Fiction, Mystery

302 pages, published March  24, 2020

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

The Glass Hotel is a fictional novel about money, beauty, white-collar crime, ghosts, and moral compromise.  It follows the story of Vincent, a beautiful young woman who works as a bartender at the five-star glass and cedar Hotel Caiette on an island in British Columbia, who becomes involved with Jonathan Alkaitis who works in finance and owns the hotel.   The day they meet, Vincent’s half-brother, Paul, writes on the windowed wall of the hotel: “Why don’t you swallow broken glass.”  From there, the story unfolds.

Quotes 

“Memories are always bent retrospectively to fit individual narratives.”

 

“There is exquisite lightness in waking each morning with the knowledge that the worst has already happened.”

 

“What kept her in the kingdom was the previously unimaginable condition of not having to think about money, because that’s what money gives you: the freedom to stop thinking about money. If you’ve never been without, then you won’t understand the profundity of this, how absolutely this changes your life.”

 

“One of our signature flaws as a species: we will risk almost anything to avoid looking stupid.”

 

“I’m no expert, but I remember reading somewhere, every time you retrieve a memory, that act of retrieval, it corrupts the memory a little bit. Maybe changes it a little.”

 

“It is possible to leave so much out of any given story.”

 

“A revelation earned only in hindsight: beauty can have a corrosive effect on character. It is possible to coast for some years on no more than a few polished lines and a dazzling smile, and those years are formative.”

 

“Did I say I liked working with her? I loved working with her. I considered her a friend. You know how rare it is to work with someone who loves their life?”

 

“It’s possible to both know and not know something.’ ”

 

“She’d never believed in love at first sight but she did believe in recognition at first sight, she believed in understanding upon meeting someone for the first time that they were going to be important in her life, a sensation like recognizing a familiar face in an old photograph: in a sea of faces that mean nothing, one comes into focus.”

 

“It’s just one future slipping away and being replaced by another.”

 

“Leon would not have predicted that he and his wife would turn out to be the kind of people who’d abandon a house. He would’ve imagined that such an act would bury a person under fathoms of shame, but here on the expressway in the early morning light, abandoning the house felt unexpectedly like triumph.”

 

“You know what I’ve learned about money? I was trying to figure out why my life felt more or less the same in Singapore as it did in London, and that’s when I realized that money is its own country.”

 

“In their late thirties they’d decided not to have children, which at the time seemed like a sensible way to avoid unnecessary complications and heartbreak, and this decision had lent their lives a certain ease that he’d always appreciated, a sense of blissful unencumberance. But an encumbrance might also be thought of as an anchor, and what he’d found himself thinking lately was that he wouldn’t mind being more anchored to this earth.”

 

“Maybe this could be enough. Maybe not everyone needs to have a specific ambition. I could be the sort of person who just goes to beautiful places and owns beautiful things.”

 

“But they were citizens of a shadow country that in his previous life he’d only dimly perceived, a country located at the edge of an abyss. He’d been aware of the shadowland forever, of course. He’d seen its more obvious outposts: shelters fashioned from cardboard under overpasses, tents glimpsed in the bushes alongside expressways, houses with boarded-up doors but a light shining in an upstairs window. He’d always been vaguely aware of its citizens, people who’d slipped beneath the surface of society, into a territory without comfort or room for error;”

 

“None of these scenarios seemed less real than the life she’d landed in, so much so that she was struck sometimes by a truly unsettling sense that there were other versions of her life being lived without her,”

 

My Take

I really loved The Glass Hotel and could not put it down.  Emily St. John Mandel is a very talented writer who has created compelling characters, a fascinating plot and intriguing themes.  I’ve been personally recommending this book for the past month and will continue to do so.

/by
, , , , , , ,

470. So You Want to Talk about Race

Rating:  ☆☆

Recommended by:  Darla Schueth, Sue Deans

Author:   Ijeoma Oluo

Genre:   Non Fiction, Politics, Sociology, Cultural, Public Policy

248 pages, published January 16, 2018

Reading Format:  Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

In So You Want to Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo offers her take on the racial landscape in America, addressing issues including privilege, police brutality, intersectionality, micro-aggressions, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the “N” word.

Quotes 

“When we identify where our privilege intersects with somebody else’s oppression, we’ll find our opportunities to make real change.”

 

“If you live in this system of white supremacy, you are either fighting the system of you are complicit. There is no neutrality to be had towards systems of injustice, it is not something you can just opt out of.”

 

“To refuse to listen to someone’s cries for justice and equality until the request comes in a language you feel comfortable with is a way of asserting your dominance over them in the situation.”

 

“1. It is about race if a person of color thinks it is about race. 2. It is about race if it disproportionately or differently affects people of color. 3. It is about race if it fits into a broader pattern of events that disproportionately or differently affect people of color.”

 

“You are racist because you were born and bred in a racist, white supremacist society. White Supremacy is, as I’ve said earlier, insidious by design. The racism required to uphold White Supremacy is woven into every area of our lives. There is no way you can inherit white privilege from birth, learn racist white supremacist history in schools, consume racist and white supremacist movies and films, work in a racist and white supremacist workforce, and vote for racist and white supremacist governments and not be racist.”

 

“Systemic racism is a machine that runs whether we pull the levers or not, and by just letting it be, we are responsible for what it produces.”

 

“And if you are white in a white supremacist society, you are racist. If you are male in a patriarchy, you are sexist. If you are able-bodied, you are ableist. If you are anything above poverty in a capitalist society, you are classist. You can sometimes be all of these things at once.”

 

My Take

I read So You Want to Talk About Race as part of my Boulder Rotary Club book group.  While the women who assigned it were well meaning, I found it to be a very offensive, counterproductive book.  It’s hard to take Ijeoma Oluo too seriously when she spends a chapter talking about how soft her hair is and how much she resents people asking to touch it.  Really?  My bigger issue with this polemical book is her basic premise that America is systemically racist.  This is the big lie being perpetrated in 2020.  If you disagree with this viewpoint, read Heather MacDonald’s comprehensive article on the subject (https://www.manhattan-institute.org/police-black-killings-homicide-rates-race-injustice).  The police make approximately 10 million arrests a year.  For the last five years, the police have fatally shot about 1,000 civilians annually, the vast majority of whom were armed or otherwise dangerous.  In 2019, the police shot 14 unarmed black victims and 25 unarmed white victims, 0.2% of the total.  This hardly constitutes an epidemic of police brutality.  Moreover, defunding the police will only worsen conditions in minority areas.

Tellingly, Oluo, whose mother is white and whose father is from Nigeria, routinely criticizes her mother who struggled as a single mother to raise Oluo and her brother after being abandoned by her black husband when Oluo was a toddler, while having nothing negative to say about her absentee father who provided her with zero support as she grew up.  Indeed, I believe that absent fathers is the real crisis in the black community which has a shockingly high 77% out of wedlock childbirth rate.  Children raised in single parent households face myriad obstacles that negatively impact their life prospects.  I (and many others) assert that this is the primary cause of black underperformance rather than systemic white supremacy argued by Oluo.  Today, the only law on the books which discriminates on the basis of race is affirmative action.  Accusing Americans of being white supremacists may make Oluo and others like her feel better, but it will do little to improve the lives of other black Americans.  To do that, the black community needs to take a cold-eyed look at their culture and advocate changes to it that will actually make a difference.

/by