, , , , , ,

565. How to Stop Time

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:    Matt Haig

Genre:   Fiction, Historical Fiction, Romance, Science Fiction, Fantasy

352 pages, published June 11, 2019

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

Tom Hazard has a extremely rare medical condition that does not allow him to age like the rest of us.  While he looks 41 years old, he was born centuries earlier during the Elizabethan Age.  As a member of the Albatross Society, Tom has to follow their cardinal rule:  don’t fall in love.  However, after he moves back to his old home of London and starts working as a history teacher, Tom meets a , his old home, to settle down and become a high school history teacher. And on his first day at school, he becomes smitten with an enchanting French teacher.  He must then navigate the dangerous territory between his heart and his head.

Quotes 

“And, just as it only takes a moment to die, it only takes a moment to live. You just close your eyes and let every futile fear slip away. And then, in this new state, free from fear, you ask yourself: who am I? If I could live without doubt what would I do? If I could be kind without the fear of being fucked over? If I could love without fear of being hurt? If I could taste the sweetness of today without thinking of how I will miss that taste tomorrow? If I could not fear the passing of time and the people it will steal? Yes. What would I do? Who would I care for? What battle would I fight? Which paths would I step down? What joys would I allow myself? What internal mysteries would I solve? How, in short, would I live?”

 

 “Whenever I see someone reading a book, especially if it is someone I don’t expect, I feel civilisation has become a little safer.”

 

“That’s the thing with time, isn’t it? It’s not all the same. Some days – some years – some decades – are empty. There is nothing to them. It’s just flat water. And then you come across a year, or even a day, or an afternoon. And it is everything. It is the whole thing.”

 

“Everything is going to be all right. Or, if not, everything is going to be, so let’s not worry.”

 

“People you love never die. That is what Omai had said, all those years ago. And he was right. They don’t die. Not completely. They live in your mind, the way they always lived inside you. You keep their light alive. If you remember them well enough, they can still guide you, like the shine of long-extinguished stars could guide ships in unfamiliar waters.”

 

“To talk about memories is to live them a little.”

 

“Music doesn’t get in. Music is already in. Music simply uncovers what is there, makes you feel emotions that you didn’t necessarily know you had inside you, and runs around waking them all up. A rebirth of sorts.”

 

“It made me lonely. And when I say lonely, I mean the kind of loneliness that howls through you like a desert wind. It wasn’t just the loss of people I had known but also the loss of myself. The loss of who I had been when I had been with them.”

 

“As far as I can see, this is a problem with living in the twenty-first century. Many of us have every material thing we need, so the job of marketing is now to tie the economy to our emotions, to make us feel like we need more by making us want things we never needed before. We are made to feel poor on thirty thousand pounds a year. To feel poorly travelled if we have been to only ten other countries. To feel too old if we have a wrinkle. To feel ugly if we aren’t photoshopped and filtered. No one I knew in the 1600s wanted to find their inner billionaire.  They just wanted to live to see adolescence and avoid body lice.”

 

“Maybe Shakespeare was right. Maybe all the world was a stage. Maybe without the act everything would fall apart. The key to happiness wasn’t being yourself, because what did that even mean? Everyone had many selves. No. The key to happiness is finding the lie that suits you best.”

 

“Human beings, as a rule, simply don’t accept things that don’t fit their worldview.”

 

“She laughs. It is the simplest, purest joy on earth, I realise, to make someone you care about laugh.”

 

“There is only the present. Just as every object on earth contains similar and interchanging atoms, so every fragment of time contains aspects of every other.  In those monents that burst alive the present lasts for ever, and I know there are many more presents to live. I understand you can be free. I understand that the way you stop time is by stopping being ruled by it. I am no longer drowning in my past, or fearful of my future. How can I be? The future is you.”

 

“Maybe that is what it takes to love someone. Finding a happy mystery you would like to unravel for ever.”

 

“The longer you live, the harder it becomes. To grab them. Each little moment as it arrives. To be living in something other than the past or the future. To be actually here.  Forever, Emily Dickinson said, is composed of nows. But how do you inhabit the now you are in? How do you stop the ghosts of all the other nows from getting in? How, in short, do you live?”

 

“History was, is, a one-way street. You have to keep walking forwards, but you don’t always need to look ahead. Sometimes you can just look around and be happy right where you are.”

 

 “She gave me peace just by looking at her, which might explain why I looked at her for too long, and with too much intensity in my eyes. The way people never look at people anymore. I wanted her in every sense.”

 

 “That is one of the patterns: when nothing is happening, nothing continues to happen, but after a while the lull becomes too much and the drums need to kick in. Something has to happen. Often that need comes from yourself. You make a phone call. You say, “I can’t do this life anymore, I need to change.’ And one thing happens which you are in control of. And then another happens which you have no control over. Newton’s third law of motion. Actions create reactions. When things start to happen, other things start to happen. But sometimes it seems there is no explanation as to why the things are happening – why all the buses are coming along at once – why life’s moments of luck and pain arrive in clusters. All we can do is observe the pattern, the rhythm, and then live it.”

 

“This is so often the way with life. You spend so much time waiting for something – a person, a feeling, a piece of information – that you can’t quite absorb it when it is in front of you. The hole is so used to being a hole it doesn’t know how to close itself.”

 

“Nothing fixes a thing so firmly in the memory as the wish to forget it.”

 

“It is strange how close the past is, even when you imagine it to be so far away. Strange how it can just jump out of a sentence and hit you. Strange how every object or word can house a ghost.”

 

“I have been in love only once in my life. I suppose that makes me a romantic, in a sense. The idea that you have one true love, that no one else will compare after they have gone. It’s a sweet idea, but the reality is terror itself. To be faced with all those lonely years after. To exist when the point of you has gone.”

 

“Everything in life is uncertain. That is how you know you are existing in the world, the uncertainty. Of course, this is why we sometimes want to return to the past, because we know it, or think we do. It’s a song we’ve heard.”

 

“I loved her, instantly. Of course, most parents love their children instantly. But I mention it here because I still find it a remarkable thing. Where was that love before? Where did you acquire it from? The way it is suddenly there, total and complete, as sudden as grief, but in reverse, is one of the wonders about being human.”

 

“That is the whole thing with the future. You don’t know. At some point you have to accept that you don’t know. You have to stop flicking ahead and just concentrate on the page you are on.”

 

“There comes a time when the only way to start living is to tell the truth. To be who you really are, even if it is dangerous.”

 

My Take

Having thoroughly enjoyed Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library, I went in search of another book by this very creative, thought-provoking author.  After reading How to Stop Time, I was not disappointed. Like The Midnight Library, Haig takes a very interesting idea, adds in a relateable protagonist and creates a book that is a pleasure to read and to think about long after finishing.  Highly recommended.

/by
, , , , , , ,

564. The $64 Tomato

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Frank and Lisanne

Author:    William Alexander

Genre:   Non Fiction, Humor, Memoir, Environment, Food, Nature

304 pages, published March 2, 2007

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

Bill Alexander writes about his struggles to create an ideal garden on the acreage that comes with a house he and his wife buy in the Hudson River Valley of New York.  What follows is an adventure rivaling the Perils of Pauline.

Quotes 

“Gardening is, by its very nature, an expression of the triumph of optimism over experience. No matter how bad this year was, there’s always next year. Experience doesn’t count.”

 

“The great, terrifying existentialist question: If you were doomed to live the same life over and over again for eternity, would you choose the life you are living now? The question is interesting enough, but I’ve always thought the point of asking it is really the unspoken, potentially devastating follow-up question. That is, if the answer is no, then why are you living the life you are living now? Stop making excuses , and do something about it.”

 

“Environmentalists blame the farmers for overdosing with pesticides, and the farmers blame the consumers for demanding blemish-free fruit.”

 

 “One event is an anomaly, two is a coincidence, and three a pattern.”

 

“but I had set the precedent of declaring my preference for the solitary pleasures of gardening over social events.”

 

“Well, ah don’t weed; ah cultivate. (As it turns out, ah will cultivate a lot.) Whereas weeding evokes images of backbreaking labor, kneeling under a broad-brimmed hat while hand-yanking weeds into a basket to be dumped in a remote corner of the yard, cultivating suggests nurturing, caring for tender shoots, feeding, and raising. All of which you accomplish, of course, by kneeling and hand-yanking weeds into a basket to be dumped in a remote corner of the yard.”

 

My Take

The $64 Tomato was a very fun read.  With acerbic and humorous anectdotes, author Bill Alexander brings to life his mighty struggles to create the perfect garden.  This book confirmed my life long aversion to the big garden and made me happy with the few potted herbs and plants that I maintain along with the volunteers who populate our outdoor mountain area.

/by
, , , , ,

562. The Final Solution

Rating:  ☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Michael Chabon

Genre:   Fiction, Mystery, Crime, Historical Fiction

131 pages, published November 2005

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

After finishing this hard to follow book, I’m not really sure what it is about.  The characters include Linus Steinman, nine years old and mute, who has escaped from Nazi Germany with his African gray parrot and 89 old man who was once a famous detective.

Quotes 

“Long life wore away everything that was not essential.”

 

“The application of creative intelligence to a problem, the finding of a solution at once dogged, elegant, and wild, this had always seemed to him to be the essential business of human beings—the discovery of sense and causality amid the false leads, the noise, the trackless brambles of life. And yet he had always been haunted—had he not?—by the knowledge that there were men, lunatic cryptographers, mad detectives, who squandered their brilliance and sanity in decoding and interpreting the messages in cloud formations, in the letters of the Bible recombined, in the spots on butterflies’ wings. One might, perhaps, conclude from the existence of such men that meaning dwelled solely in the mind of the analyst. That it was the insoluble problems—the false leads and the cold cases—that reflected the true nature of things. That all the apparent significance and pattern had no more intrinsic sense than the chatter of an African gray parrot. One might so conclude; really, he thought, one might.”

 

“A delicate, inexorable lattice of inferences began to assemble themselves, like a crystal, in the old man’s mind, shivering, catching the light in glints and surmises.”

 

“it was the insoluble problems—the false leads and the cold cases—that reflected the true nature of things.”

 

“He did not fear death exactly, but he had evaded it for so many years that it had come to seem formidable simply by virtue of that long act of evasion. In particular he feared dying in some undignified way, on the jakes or with his face in the porridge.”

  

My Take

This book was in the Boulder Library’s “Recommended by a Librarian” and had the advantage of brevity, so I gave it a try.  What a disappointment! I cannot even tell you what the plot was.  I’ve enjoyed my previous readings of Michael Chabon (especially The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay), but this book was a Super Dud.  By all means, skip.

/by
, , , , , , ,

561. Die with Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Bill Perkins

Genre:   Non Fiction, Personal Finance, Happiness, Self Improvement, Business, Psychology, Economics

240 pages, published July 28, 2020

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

The premise of Die with Zero is that too many people save all of their lives for their retirement and that by the time they retire they can’t enjoy their money.  Instead, author Bill Perkins advocates a different approach to spending where you can maximize your enjoyment of your money throughout your life.

Quotes 

“At the high end, retirees who had $500,000 or more right before retirement had spent down a median of only 11.8 percent of that money 20 years later or by the time they died. That’s more than 88 percent left over—which means that a person retiring at 65 with half a million dollars still has more than $440,000 left at age 85! At the lower end, retirees with less than $200,000 saved up for retirement spent a higher percentage (as you might expect, since they had less to spend overall)—but even this group’s median members had spent down only one-quarter of their assets 18 years after retirement.”

 

“You might think that as people get older, they spend money more freely out of the sheer desire to make the most of it before it’s truly too late. But the opposite tends to happen. In general, spending among American households declines as people age. For example, the Consumer Expenditure Survey, conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, found that in 2017, average annual spending for households headed by 55-to-64-year-olds was $65,000; average spending fell to $55,000 for those between 65 and 74; and spending fell again to $42,000 for those 75 and older. This overall decline occurred despite a rise in healthcare expenses, because most other expenses, such as clothing and entertainment, were much lower. The decline in spending over time was even more acute for retirees with more than $1 million in assets, according to separate research conducted by J.P. Morgan Asset Management, which analyzed data from more than half a million of its customers.”

 

“The insurance companies that create annuities often make them seem like investments,” he wrote in a recent explainer about annuities. “But really they’re more like insurance.” Lieber went on: “Like insurance to stave off financial disaster, an annuity is something you purchase to guarantee that you won’t run out of money if you live a long time.” In fact, thinking of annuities as insurance makes them a lot more sensible than thinking of them as investments—because as investments they are not good at all. But that’s not their goal—their goal is to insure you against the risk of outliving your money.”

 

“It’s called consumption smoothing. Our incomes might vary from one month or one year to another, but that doesn’t mean our spending should reflect those variations—we would be better off if we evened out those variations. To do that, we need to basically transfer money from years of abundance into the leaner years. That’s one use of savings accounts. But in my case, I had been using my savings account totally backwards—I was taking money away from my starving younger self to give to my future wealthier self! No wonder Joe called me an idiot.”

 

 

My Take

Die with Zero met one of my basic criteria for a non-fiction book, e.g. it made me think about things in a new way.  My husband Scot and I retired in 2020 (after several years of tapering off) in our early and mid 50’s and have already adopted a lot of the ideas Perkins advocates.  We are spending a lot of money on travel to experience as much of the world as possible before we are too old and/or infirm to do so.  We also plan to use our money to help our kids while we are still alive and it will have the most benefit. We don’t plan to “die with zero,” but we do plan to maximize our enjoyment of life while we can.

/by
, , , ,

560. Red Island House

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Andrea Lee

Genre:   Fiction, Foreign, Race

288 pages, published March 23, 2021

Reading Format:  Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

Red Island House tells the story of Shay, an African American Literature Professor from Berkley, and her older, Italian husband Senna.  Senna builds Shay an idyllic beach house on the island of Madagascar.  Over several decades, we witness the rise and fall of Shay and Senna as they start and raise a family and then inevitably drift apart.

Quotes 

“Outsiders always want something from Madagascar. The emotion is always the same, whatever the thing desired: whether to establish the country as a locus for fabulous legends … as a source for gemstones, rare butterflies, rosewood, spices, slaves; or as fertile ground to produce sugar … or even – as Hitler once planned – as a convenient penal colony for the exiled Jews of Europe.”

 

My Take

While the book has a few interesting insights, I did not love Red Island House.  I never became invested in any of the characters and the plot was boring.

/by
, , , , , , ,

559. One by One

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Ruth Ware

Genre:   Fiction, Suspense, Thriller, Crime, Mystery, Foreign

372 pages, published September 8, 2020

Reading Format:   Audio Book

Summary

Getting snowed in at a mountain chalet in the Swiss Alps is just the beginning of the problems facing the membes of the tech company Snoops who are there for a corporate retreat to decide whether or not to take a huge buyout offer.  Bigger problems ensue for them and the two Chalet employees when the murders start, one by one.

Quotes 

“I stop, thinking of Topher and his cushioned, monied existence–the way he has had everything handed to him on a plate, the way he’s never had to scrap for anything, never had to swallow a snub from a boss, or pick up a stranger’s dirty underwear, or do any of the myriad demeaning, boring jobs the rest of us take for granted.”

 

“They are arrogant, that’s what I realize–maybe not Liz and Carl quite so much, but all of them to some degree. They are protected by the magic of their shares and their status and their IP. They think that life can’t touch them–just like I used to do.”

 

“Only now it has. Now life has them by the throat. And it won’t let go.”

 

 “Behind him is a girl with fluffy yellow hair that cannot possibly be her real shade. It’s the color of buttercups and the texture of dandelion fluff.”

 

 “But it’s not just her body language that sets her apart—it’s everything. She’s the only one wearing clothes that look more H&M than D&G, and though she’s not the only one w

earing glasses, the others look like they’re wearing props provided by a Hollywood studio.”

 

My Take

One by One is a crackling thriller.  I had previously read her books In a Dark, Dark Wood and The Woman in Cabin 10 and had really enjoyed them.  I liked One by One even more.  It was very  suspenseful and kept me guessing throughout.  The main character and Chalet Manager Erin is also well developed and gives the reader someone to identify with and root for.

/by
, , , ,

558. The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:    V.E. Schwab

Genre:   Fiction, Romance, Fantasy

442 pages, published October 6, 2020

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue tells the story of Addie LaRue, a French woman who makes a deal with the devil in 1714 to avoid an unwanted arranged marriage.  She strikes a bargain that she does not fully appreciate the implications of.  She will live forever, but is cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets.  We follow Addie over the course of 300 years until she meets a young man who remembers her name and that changes everything.

Quotes 

What she needs are stories.

Stories are a way to preserve one’s self. To be remembered. And to forget.

Stories come in so many forms: in charcoal, and in song, in paintings, poems, films. And books.

Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives—or to find strength in a very long one.”

 

“What is a person, if not the marks they leave behind?”

 

 “…it is sad, of course, to forget.

But it is a lonely thing, to be forgotten.

 

 “Because time is cruel to all, and crueler still to artists. Because visions weakens, and voices wither, and talent fades…. Because happiness is brief, and history is lasting, and in the end… everyone wants to be remembered”

 

“Three words, large enough to tip the world. I remember you.”

 

 “There is a defiance in being a dreamer”

 

“Blink, and the years fall away like leaves.”

 

“Stories are a way to preserve one’s self. To be remembered. And to forget.”

 

“Blink and you’re twenty-eight, and everyone else is now a mile down the road, and you’re still trying to find it, and the irony is hardly lost on you that in wanting to live, to learn, to find yourself, you’ve gotten lost.”

 

 “Nothing is all good or all bad,” she says. “Life is so much messier than that.”

 “Being forgotten, she thinks, is a bit like going mad. You begin to wonder what is real, if you are real. After all, how can a thing be real if it cannot be remembered?”

 

“It is just a storm, he tells himself, but he is tired of looking for shelter. It is just a storm, but there is always another waiting in its wake.”

 

“The old gods may be great, but they are neither kind nor merciful. They are fickle, unsteady as moonlight on water, or shadows in a storm. If you insist on calling them, take heed: be careful what you ask for, be willing to pay the price. And no matter how desperate or dire, never pray to the gods that answer after dark.”

 

“His heart has a draft. It lets in light. It lets in storms. It lets in everything.”

 

“You know,” she’d said, “they say people are like snowflakes, each one unique, but I think they’re more like skies. Some are cloudy, some are stormy, some are clear, but no two are ever quite the same.”

 

“But this is how you walk to the end of the world. This is how you live forever. Here is one day, and here is the next, and the next, and you take what you can, savor every stolen second, cling to every moment, until it’s gone.”

 

“But a life without art, without wonder, without beautiful things—she would go mad. She has gone mad.”

 

 “I am stronger than your god and older than your devil. I am the darkness between stars, and the roots beneath the earth. I am promise, and potential, and when it comes to playing games, I divine the rules, I set the pieces, and I choose when to play.”

 

 “I remember seeing that picture and realizing that photographs weren’t real. There’s no context, just the illusion that you’re showing a snapshot of a life, but life isn’t snapshots, it’s fluid. So photos are like fictions. I loved that about them. Everyone thinks photography is truth, but it’s just a very convincing lie.”

 

“Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives—or to find strength in a very long one.”

 

“Humans are so ill-equipped for peace.”

 

“And there in the dark, he asks if it was really worth it.

Were the instants of joy worth the stretches of sorrow?

Were the moments of beauty worth the year of pain?

And she turns her head, and looks at him, and says ‘Always.”

 

 “March is such a fickle month. It is the seam between winter and spring—though seam suggests an even hem, and March is more like a rough line of stitches sewn by an unsteady hand, swinging wildly betw

een January gusts and June greens. You don’t know what you’ll find, until you step outside.”

 

My Take

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue was a wonderful read.  The author takes an interesting premise, what would happen if you could live forever but no one would remember you, and goes to town with it.  Addie is a fascinating character and her repartee with Luke (aka the Darkness) who controls her fate is highly entertaining.  I listened to the audio version which was very well done and which I highly recommend.

/by
, , , , , ,

557. One Good Turn

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Kate Atkinson

Genre:   Fiction, Mystery, Thriller, Foreign, Crime

418 pages, published September 10, 2007

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

One Good Turn takes place during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland when a near-homicidal attack occurs which changes the lives of everyone involved. Jackson Brodie, ex-army, ex-police, ex-private detective, is also an innocent bystander – until he becomes a murder suspect.

Quotes 

“They said love made you strong, but in Louise’s opinion it made you weak. It corkscrewed into your heart and you couldn’t get it out again, not without ripping your heart to pieces.”

 

“Love was the hardest thing. Don’t let anyone ever tell you different.”

 

“Julia’s vocabulary was “chock-full” of strangely archaic words – “spiffing,” “crumbs,” “jeepers” – that seemed to have originated in some prewar girls’ annual rather than in Julia’s own life. For Jackson, words were functional, they helped you get to places and explain things. For Julia, they were freighted with inexplicable emotion.”

 

“You said five little words to someone–How can I help you?–and it was as if you’d mortgaged your soul out to them.”

 

“The Grim Reaper, Gloria corrected herself – if anyone deserved capital letters it was surely Death. Gloria would rather like to be the Grim Reaper. She wouldn’t necessarily be grim, she suspected she would be quite cheerful (Come along now, don’t make such a fuss).”

 

 

“Gloria regretted that she wasn’t a knitter, she could be producing a useful garment while waiting for Graham to die.”

 

“Boxes within boxes, dolls within dolls, worlds within worlds. Everything was connected. Everything in the whole world.”

 

“One of the things Jackson liked about Julia was her independence, one of the things he didn’t like about Julia was her independence.”

 

“Sometimes you wondered why anyone bothered crawling out of the cradle when what lay ahead was so darn difficult.”

 

 “No one ever warned you about how ferocious mother love could be, let’s face it, no one warned you about anything.”

 

My Take

While I’m a fan of some of Kate Atkinson’s books (Life After Life and A God in Ruins), other ones that I have read (Transcription and Behind the Scenes at the Museum) are a bit clunky.  You can put One Good Turn in the clunky category.  Actually, it is the most clunky Atkinson.  In this case, One Good Turn does not deserve another.  Skip.

/by
, , , , , ,

556. Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Pat Walsh

Author:   Martin Luther King, Jr.

Genre:   Non Fiction, Race, History

Summary

Stride Toward Freedom tells the story of the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott in 1955 led by Martin Luther King, Jr. that changed the trajectory of the civil rights movement.  Written by Dr. King, it includes his letters, speeches and a first hand account of the 50,000 Blacks who incorporated the  principles of nonviolence into their fight for equality.

Quotes 

“[Nonviolence] is directed against forces of evil rather than against persons who happen to be doing the evil. It is evil that the nonviolent resister seeks to defeat, not the persons victimized by evil.”

 

“Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. It is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding; it seeks to annihilate rather than to convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love.”

 

“…the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek.”

 

“There are several specific things that the church can do. First, it should try to get to the ideational roots of race hate, something that the law cannot accomplish. All race prejudice is based upon fears, suspicions, and misunderstandings, usually groundless. The church can be of immeasurable help in giving the popular mind direction here. Through its channels of religious education, the church can point out the irrationality of these beliefs. It can show that the idea of a superior or inferior race is a myth that has been completely refuted by anthropological evidence. It can show that Negroes are not innately inferior in academic, health, and moral standards. It can show that, when given equal opportunities, Negroes can demonstrate equal achievement.”

 

“The mere fact that we live in the United States means that we are caught in a network of inescapable mutuality. Therefore, no American can afford to be apathetic about the problem of racial justice. It is a problem that meets every man at his front door. The racial problem will be solved in America to the degree that every American considers himself personally confronted with it. Whether one lives in the heart of the Deep South or on the periphery of the North, the problem of injustice is his problem; it is his problem because it is America’s problem.”

 

“God is not interested merely in the freedom of black men, and brown men, and yellow men; God is interested in the freedom of the whole human race.”

 

“There is a pressing need for a liberalism in the North which is truly liberal, a liberalism that firmly believes in integration in its own community as well as in the Deep South. It is one thing to agree that the goal of integration is morally and legally right; it is another thing to commit oneself positively and actively to the ideal of integration—the former is intellectual assent, the latter is actual belief. These are days that demand practices to match professions. This is no day to pay lip service to integration; we must pay life service to it.”

 “Economic insecurity strangles the physical and cultural growth of its victims. Not only are millions deprived of formal education and proper health facilities but our most fundamental social unit—the family—is tortured, corrupted, and weakened by economic insufficiency. When a Negro man is inadequately paid, his wife must work to provide the simple necessities for the children. When a mother has to work she does violence to motherhood by depriving her children of her loving guidance and protection; often they are poorly cared for by others or by none—left to roam the streets unsupervised. It is not the Negro alone who is wronged by a disrupted society; many white families are in similar straits. The Negro mother leaves home to care for—and be a substitute mother for—white children, while the white mother works. In this strange irony lies the promise of future correction.”

 

 “The nonviolent approach does not immediately change the heart of the oppressor. It first does something to the hearts and souls of those committed to it. It gives them new self-respect; it calls up resources of strength and courage that they did not know they had. Finally it reaches the opponent and so stirs his conscience that reconciliation becomes a reality.”

 

“Since crime often grows out of a sense of futility and despair, Negro parents must be urged to give their children the love, attention, and sense of belonging that a segregated society deprives them of.”

 

“Casualties of war keep alive post war hate.”

 

“During a crisis period, a desperate attempt is made by the extremists to influence the minds of the liberal forces in the ruling majority. So, for example, in the present transition white Southerners attempt to convince Northern whites that the Negroes are inherently criminal.”

 

“The accusation is made without reference to the true nature of the situation. Environmental problems of delinquency are interpreted as evidence of racial criminality. Crises arising in Northern schools are interpreted as proofs that Negroes are inherently delinquent. The extremists do not recognize that these school problems are symptoms of urban dislocation, rather than expressions of racial deficiency. Criminality and delinquency are not racial; poverty and ignorance breed crime whatever the racial group may be.”

 

“Many white men fear retaliation. The job of the Negro is to show them that they have nothing to fear, that the Negro understands and forgives and is ready to forget the past. He must convince the white man that all he seeks is justice, for both himself and the white man.”

 

“After the opposition had failed to negotiate us into a compromise, it turned to subtler means for blocking the protest; namely, to conquer by dividing. False rumors were spread concerning the leaders of the movement. Negro workers were told by their white employers that their leaders were only concerned with making money out of the movement. Others were told that the Negro leaders rode big cars while they walked. During this period the rumor was spread that I had purchased a brand new Cadillac for myself and a Buick station wagon for my wife. Of course none of this was true.”

 

 “Even where the polls are open to all, Negroes have shown themselves too slow to exercise their voting privileges. There must be a concerted effort on the part of Negro leaders to arouse their people from their apathetic indifference to this obligation of citizenship. In the past, apathy was a moral failure. Today, it is a form of moral and political suicide.”

 

“As he continued, one could see obvious disappointment on the faces of the white committee members. By trying to convince the Negroes that I was the main obstacle to a solution they had hoped to divide us among ourselves. But Ralph’s statement left no doubt. From this moment on the white group saw the futility of attempting to negotiate us into a compromise.”

 

“Many of them had predicted violence, and such predictions are always a conscious or unconscious invitation to action. When people, especially in public office, talk about bloodshed as a concomitant of integration, they stir and arouse the hoodlums to acts of destruction, and often work under cover to bring them about. In Montgomery several public officials had predicted violence, and violence there had to be if they were to save face.”

 

“I have earnestly worked and preached against violent tension, but there is a type of constructive nonviolent tension that is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, we must see the need of having nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men to rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.”

 

“Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation. No individual or nation can be great if it does not have a concern for “the least of these.”

 

“One of the great problems of mankind is that we suffer from a poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually.”

 

“The American racial revolution has been a revolution to “get in” rather than to overthrow. We want a share in the American economy, the housing market, the educational system and the social opportunities. This goal itself indicates that a social change in America must be nonviolent. If one is in search of a better job, it does not help to burn down, the factory. If one needs more adequate education, shooting the principal will not help. If housing is the goal, only building and construction will produce that end. To destroy anything, person or property, cannot bring us closer to the goal that we seek.”

 

“It seems to me that this is the method that must guide the actions of the Negro in the present crisis in race relations. Through nonviolent resistance the Negro will be able to rise to the noble height of opposing the unjust system while loving the perpetrators of the system. The Negro must work passionately and unrelentingly for full stature as a citizen, but he must not use inferior methods to gain it. He must never come to terms with falsehood, malice, hate, or destruction.”

 

“…Agape does not begin by discriminating between worthy and unworthy people, or any qualities people possess. It begins by loving others for their sakes. It is an entirely ‘neighbor-regarding concern for others,’ which discovers the neighbor in every man it meets. Therefore, Agape makes no distinction between friend and enemy; it is directed toward both. If one loves an individual merely on account of his friendliness, he loves him for the sake of the benefits to be gained from the friendship, rather than for the friend’s own sake. Consequently, the best way to assure oneself that love is disinterested is to have love for the enemy-neighbor from whom you can expect no good in return, but only hostility and persecution.”

 

My Take

While a short book, Strive Toward Freedom packs a lot of punch.  I learned a lot about the Montgomery bus boycott and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s moral philosophy, strategy and tactics.  I came away with an increased respect (from an already high level) for this extraordinary man and the movement he championed.

/by
, , , , , ,

555. Seeing Further: Ideas, Endeavours, Discoveries and Disputes — The Story of Science Through 350 Years of the Royal Society

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Art Drake

Author:    Bill Bryson (Editor, Introduction), James Gleick (Goodreads Author) (Contributor), Henry Petroski (Contributor), Georgina Ferrey (Contributor), Steve Jones (Contributor), Philip Ball (Contributor), Paul C.W. Davies (Contributor), Ian Stewart (Contributor), John D. Barrow (Contributor), Oliver Morton (Goodreads Author) (Contributor), Maggie Gee (Contributor), Stephen H. Schneider (Contributor), Margaret Atwood (Goodreads Author) (Contributor), Gregory Benford (Contributor), Martin J. Rees (Contributor), Margaret Wertheim (Contributor), Neal Stephenson (Goodreads Author) (Contributor), Rebecca Goldstein (Contributor), Simon Schaffer (Contributor), Richard Holmes (Contributor), Richard Fortey (Contributor), Richard Dawkins

Genre:   Non Fiction, History, Essays, Science, Nature

490 pages, published 2010

Reading Format:   e-book on Hoopla

Summary

Edited and introduced by Bill Bryson, and with contributions from Richard Dawkins, Margaret Atwood, David Attenborough, Martin Rees and Richard Fortey, Seeing Further was compiled to celebrate the 350th anniversary of the Royal Society.  The Society was started after a small audience listened to a lecture by  twenty-eight year old Christopher Wren on astronomy with the intention of promoting the accumulation of useful knowledge.  Since its inception, the

Royal Society has fostered scientific exploration and discovery and includes Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Thomas Bayes, Albert Einstein, Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, Joseph Banks, Humphry Davy, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, John Locke, and Alexander Fleming as fellows.  Members of the Royal Society have split the atom, discovered the double helix, the electron, the computer and the World Wide Web. In short, it is has played an enormous role in the creation of modern science.

Quotes 

“We are not only what we do, we are also what we imagine.”

 

 “Each mobile phone today – indeed, each washing machine – has more computing power than NASA could deploy on the Apollo programme.”

 

“Experimentation without mathematical explanation is blind; mathematical explanation without experimentation is empty.”

 

“Human memories are short and inaccurate.”

 

“Almost all the energy that now comes from within the Earth was put there, in one form or another, at the time of its creation (a tiny amount is now added by the flexing of the planet under the tides of Moon and Sun, but it is the merest smidgen).”

 

 “The Earth thus started off with vast supplies of heat inside it, and a rocky planet, like any other rock, takes a long time to cool down. Stones in a campfire may still be hot the morning after; a stone the size of the Earth can hold heat for billions of years.”

 

“The upward flow of ancient heat to the Earth’s surface is measured in tens of milliwatts per square metre; the flow from the Sun above is measured in hundreds of watts per square metre.”

 

“The amount of energy actually liberated in the burning of these fossil fuels is tiny by planetary scales – ten terawatts or so a year, not that much more than the nuga-tory contribution made by the tides. But the side effects are huge.”

“The sciences are sometimes likened to different levels of a tall building: logic in the basement, mathematics on the ground floor, then particle physics, then the rest of physics and chemistry, and so forth, all the way up to psychology, sociology – and the economists in the penthouse.”

 

“A straightforward way of defining metaphysics is as the set of assumptions and practices present in the scientist’s mind before he or she begins to do science. There is nothing wrong”

 

 “To agree with Ingold is no to say that everything must be local first and last, nor to deny that there are environmental problems on a planetary scale. It is to say that they are not the planet’s

 

“A quick Google search reveals there to be seven, ten, five, four or eight ‘years to save the planet’, depending on your headline writer and expert of choice (‘Eleven years to save the planet’ seems at the moment a rallying cry still up for grabs).”

 

“And to see a plant grow armed with the knowledge that it does so out of thin air – that is, after all, where the carbon that makes up most of its mass comes from – is to realise that something else must be restoring that nutritive goodness to the atmosphere.”

 

“Very little arrives (those asteroid impacts are few and far between), and only a whisper of gas escapes. Everything else must be endlessly recycled: and so it is. The rain becomes the ocean and the ocean becomes the rain, the mountains are ground down to cover the sea-floors with silt, ancient silts rise up to make new mountains.”

 

“There is energy of all sorts flowing through our world; it is not hard to imagine new ways in which that energy can do the work of humanity, new ways to align our needs and the planet’s behaviours.”

 

“As the Bhagavad Gita says, ‘There never was a time when I was not . . . there will never be a time when I will cease to be.’ Since time and space began together – as both St Augustine and the big bang attest – the Bhagavad Gita has a point. The chicken and the egg arrived at the same time.”

 

“Bacon’s dichotomy is still germane today: a former President of the Royal Society, George Porter, encapsulated it by the maxim ‘there are two kinds of science, applied and not yet applied’.”

 

“It may seem topsy-turvy that cosmologists can speak confidently about galaxies billions of light years away, whereas theories of diet and child rearing – issues that everyone cares about – are still tentative and controversial.”

 

“For minds and cogitation are, to Leibniz, the ultimate reality, and unless the minds have free will, they are not minds at all but physical mechanisms numbly obeying deterministic rules.”

 

“It’s easy to make bricks, but making houses requires far more than throwing a pile of bricks in the air.”

 

My Take

Having previously read and enjoyed several books by Bill Bryson, I was looking forward to this one.  Unfortunately, Bryson only serves as the Editor and contributes a brief introduction.  Each chapter is written by a different scientific or literary luminary and focuses on some aspect of life related to the Royal Society.  Some are very interesting and some are incredibly dense, causing my eyes to glaze over.  If you are interested in science, you may like this book but I recommend an ala carte approach.

/by