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146. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Boulder Librarian

Author:   Mary Roach

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Science, Medicine

320 pages, published 2003

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

I learned a lot from reading Stiff about a subject I didn’t even know would be interesting:  the use of the dead for cadavers and as test subjects (think crash test dummies) and the brain dead for organ donation.  For over two thousand years, cadavers have been involved in advancing the cause of science.  In this unique book, Mary Roach explores what happens to our bodies postmortem and it is a fascinating tale.

 

Quotes

 “The way I see it, being dead is not terribly far off from being on a cruise ship. Most of your time is spent lying on your back. The brain has shut down. The flesh begins to soften.  Nothing much new happens, and nothing is expected of you.”

 

“You are a person and then you cease to be a person, and a cadaver takes your place.”

 

“One young woman’s tribute describes unwrapping her cadaver’s hands and being brought up short by the realization that the nails were painted pink. “The pictures in the anatomy atlas did not show nail polish”, she wrote. “Did you choose the color? Did you think that I would see it? I wanted to tell you about the inside of your hands. I want you to know you are always there when I see patients. When I palpate an abdomen, yours are the organs I imagine. When I listen to a heart, I recall holding your heart.”

 

“It is astounding to me, and achingly sad, that with eighty thousand people on the waiting list for donated hearts and livers and kidneys, with sixteen a day dying there on that list, that more then half of the people in the position H’s family was in will say no, will choose to burn those organs or let them rot. We abide the surgeon’s scalpel to save our own lives, out loved ones’ lives, but not to save a stranger’s life. H has no heart, but heartless is the last thing you’d call her.”

 

“We are biology. We are reminded of this at the beginning and the end, at birth and at death. In between we do what we can to forget.”

 

“The human head is of the same approximate size and weight as a roaster chicken. I have never before had occasion to make the comparison, for never before today have I seen a head in a roasting pan.”

 

“It’s the reason we say “pork” and “beef” instead of “pig” and “cow.” Dissection and surgical instruction, like meat-eating, require a carefully maintained set of illusions and denial.”

 

“Here is the secret to surviving one of these [airplane] crashes: Be male. In a 1970 Civil Aeromedical institute study of three crashes involving emergency evacuations, the most prominent factor influencing survival was gender (followed closely by proximity to exit). Adult males were by far the most likely to get out alive. Why? Presumably because they pushed everyone else out of the way.”

 

“Sharing a room with a cadaver is only mildly different from being in a room alone.

They are the same sort of company as people across from you on subways or in airport lounges, there but not there. Your eyes keep going back to them, for lack of anything more interesting to look at, and then you feel bad for staring.”

 

“Here’s the other thing I think about. It makes little sense to try to control what happens to your remains when you are no longer around to reap the joys or benefits of that control. People who make elaborate requests concerning disposition of their bodies are probably people who have trouble with the concept of not existing. […] I imagine it is a symptom of the fear, the dread, of being gone, of the refusal to accept that you no longer control, or even participate in, anything that happens on earth. I spoke about this with funeral director Kevin McCabe, who believes that decisions concerning the disposition of a body should be mad by the survivors, not the dead. “It’s non of their business what happens to them whey the die,” he said to me. While I wouldn’t go that far, I do understand what he was getting at: that the survivors shouldn’t have to do something they’re uncomfortable with or ethically opposed to. Mourning and moving on are hard enough. Why add to the burden? If someone wants to arrange a balloon launch of the deceased’s ashes into inner space, that’s fine. But if it is burdensome or troubling for any reason, then perhaps they shouldn’t have to.”

 

My Take

I always like learning about new things and I really learned about something new while reading Stiff.  Roach’s book gave me an appreciation for how important the use of human cadavers has been to understanding how the human body and disease work, as well as how to build better transportation options to protect the living.  We all owe a debt to those who came before us and donated their body to science and those who generously signed organ donation cards.

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142. The Good Girl

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Mary Kubika

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Thriller, Suspense

352 pages, published July 29, 2014

Reading Format:  Hoopla Audio Book

 

Summary

The Good Girl is a mystery/thriller with a big twist at the end.  One night, Mia Dennett enters a bar to meet her boyfriend.  When he doesn’t show, she makes a spur of the moment decision to leave with an enigmatic stranger.  At first Colin Thatcher seems like a safe one-night stand.  However, following Colin home will turn out to be the worst mistake of Mia’s life.

 

Quotes

“I love the quietness of the library, the gateway to knowledge, to the French language and medieval history and hydraulic engineering and fairy tales, learning in a very primitive form: books, something that’s quickly giving way to modern technology.”

 

“The goal with teenagers is simply getting through it alive, with no permanent damage.”

 

“Teenagers believe they’re invincible—nothing bad can happen. It isn’t until later that we realize that bad things do, in fact, happen.”

 

“As it was, being a bad mother was child’s play compared to being a good mother, which was an incessant struggle, a lose-lose situation 24 hours a day; long after the kids were in bed the torment of what I did or didn’t do during those hours we were trapped together would scourge my soul.”

 

“What did you want?” she asks. What I wanted was a dad. Someone to take care of my mother and me, so I didn’t have to do it myself. But what I tell her is Atari.”

 

“Having a best friend is a wonderful thing. There needs be no proofreading, no refinement, of the comments that come from my head.”

 

My Take

I enjoyed listening to The Good Girl, but didn’t love the book.  Not as gripping as Gone Girl, but The Good Girl is still worth a read, especially if you like the suspense/thriller genre.  It will be interesting to see what they do with the film version.

 

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130. Secrets of the Millionaire Mind: Mastering the Inner Game of Wealth

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:   

Author:   T. Harv Eker

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

212 pages, published February 15, 2005

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

Secrets of the Millionaire Mind is not your typical personal finance book.  Rather than focusing on procedures for getting rich, T. Harv Ecker (“Harv”) emphasizes that before you can achieve great wealth, you may need to change your mindset.  Harv states: “Give me five minutes, and I can predict your financial future for the rest of your life!” He does this by identifying your “money and success blueprint” and shows how rich people think and act differently than most poor and middle-class people.  According to Harv, we all have a personal money blueprints ingrained in our subconscious minds, and it is this blueprint, more than anything, that will determine our financial lives.  Harv then shows you how to reset your money blueprint to create natural and automatic success.

 

Quotes

“If you want to change the fruits, you will first have to change the roots. If you want to change the visible, you must first change the invisible.”

 

“When you are complaining, you become a living, breathing “crap magnet.””

 

“Recall that thoughts lead to feelings, feelings lead to actions, and actions lead to results. Everything begins with your thoughts—which are produced by your mind.”

 

“The purpose of our lives is to add value to the people of this generation and those that follow.”

 

“Money will only make you more of what you already are.”

 

“The number one reason most people don’t get what they want is that they don’t know what they want.”

 

“What you focus on expands.”

 

“If your motivation for acquiring money or success comes from a nonsupportive root such as fear, anger, or the need to “prove” yourself, your money will never bring you happiness.”

 

  1. Rich people believe “I create my life.” Poor people believe “Life happens to me.”
  2. Rich people play the money game to win. Poor people play the money game to not lose.
  3. Rich people are committed to being rich. Poor people want to be rich.
  4. Rich people think big. Poor people think small.
  5. Rich people focus on opportunities. Poor people focus on obstacles.
  6. Rich people admire other rich and successful people. Poor people resent rich and successful people.
  7. Rich people associate with positive, successful people. Poor people associate with negative or unsuccessful people.
  8. Rich people are willing to promote themselves and their value. Poor people think negatively about selling and promotion.
  9. Rich people are bigger than their problems. Poor people are smaller than their problems.
  10. Rich people are excellent receivers. Poor people are poor receivers.
  11. Rich people choose to get paid based on results. Poor people choose to get paid based on time.
  12. Rich people think “both”. Poor people think “either/or”.
  13. Rich people focus on their net worth. Poor people focus on their working income.
  14. Rich people manage their money well. Poor people mismanage their money well.
  15. Rich people have their money work hard for them. Poor people work hard for their money.
  16. Rich people act in spite of fear. Poor people let fear stop them.
  17. Rich people constantly learn and grow. Poor people think they already know.”

 

“Robert Allen said something quite profound: “No thought lives in your head rent-free.”

 

“It’s not enough to be in the right place at the right time. You have to be the right person in the right place at the right time.”

 

“The first element of change is awareness. You can’t change something unless you know it exists.”

 

“just realize that no amount of money can ever make you good enough. Money can’t make you something you already are.”

 

“How will I know when I’ve completed my mission?” The answer? “If you are still breathing, you are not done.”

 

“WEALTH PRINCIPLE: When the subconscious mind must choose between deeply rooted emotions and logic, emotions will almost always win.”

 

My Take:   I found a lot of Secrets of the Millionaire Mind to be rather hokey.  For example, at the end of every chapter, Harv advises his readers to put their hands on their heads and repeat the mantra “I have a Millionaire Mind.”  Count me skeptical, but I don’t see that working for me.  I did, however, think he had some interesting insights into how certain people will never be wealthy, or will quickly lose their wealth should they somehow obtain some, because of a mindset that is anti-wealth.  I’ve observed this first hand among a few friends and family members.  If you are envious or resentful of rich people, it is highly unlikely that you will ever be rich yourself.   On a related note, my husband and I have noticed that it is very difficult for people to hold onto money when they did not play a part in earning that money in the first place.  I also found Harv’s observation that when you are complaining, you become a living, breathing “crap magnet” to be hilarious and true.

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125. The Undoing Project

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:   

Author:   Michael Lewis

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Psychology, Biography, Economics, History, Public Policy

362 pages, published December 6, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

The Undoing Project highlights the research performed by Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky which focused on undoing our assumptions about the decision-making process. Their papers showed the ways in which the human mind systematically erred when forced to make judgments about uncertain situations. Their work created the field of behavioral economics, revolutionized Big Data studies, advanced evidence-based medicine, and led to a new approach to government regulation. Kahneman and Tversky are more responsible than anybody for the powerful trend to mistrust human intuition and defer to algorithms.

 

Quotes

“When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice.”

 

“The nice thing about things that are urgent,” he liked to say, “is that if you wait long enough they aren’t urgent anymore.”

 

“Maybe the mind’s best trick of all was to lead its owner to a feeling of certainty about inherently uncertain things.”

 

“Here was another way Israel was different from the United States: Its wars were short, and someone always won.”

 

“It’s hard to know how people select a course in life,” Amos said. “The big choices we make are practically random. The small choices probably tell us more about who we are. Which field we go into may depend on which high school teacher we happen to meet. Who we marry may depend on who happens to be around at the right time of life. On the other hand, the small decisions are very systematic. That I became a psychologist is probably not very revealing. What kind of psychologist I am may reflect deep traits.”

 

“It is amazing how dull history books are, given how much of what’s in them must be invented.”

 

“It is sometimes easier to make the world a better place than to prove you have made the world a better place.”

 

“Life is a book. The fact that it was a short book doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good book. It was a very good book.”

 

“The way it feels to me,’ he said, ‘is that there were certain ideas that I was put on this earth to think.  And now I can think them.”

 

“Wall Street trading desks at the end of each year offer a flavor of the problem. If a Wall Street trader expects to be paid a bonus of one million dollars and he’s given only half a million, he feels himself to be, and behaves as if he is, in the domain of losses. His reference point is an expectation of what he would receive. That expectation isn’t a stable number; it can be changed in all sorts of ways. A trader who expects to be given a million-dollar bonus, and who further expects everyone else on his trading desk to be given million-dollar bonuses, will not maintain the same reference point if he learns that everyone else just received two million dollars. If he is then paid a million dollars, he is back in the domain of losses. Danny would later use the same point to explain the behavior of apes in experiments researchers had conducted on bonobos. “If both my neighbor in the next cage and I get a cucumber for doing a great job, that’s great. But if he gets a banana and I get a cucumber, I will throw the cucumber at the experimenter’s face.” The moment one ape got a banana, it became the ape next door’s reference point. The reference point was a state of mind. Even in straight gambles you could shift a person’s reference point and make a loss seem like a gain, and vice versa. In so doing, you could manipulate the choices people made, simply by the way they were described.”

 

“No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story.”

 

“There was what people called “present bias”—the tendency, when making a decision, to undervalue the future in relation to the present. There was “hindsight bias”—which he thought of as the tendency for people to look at some outcome and assume it was predictable all along.”

 

“Confirmation bias,” he’d heard this called. The human mind was just bad at seeing things it did not expect to see, and a bit too eager to see what it expected to see. “Confirmation bias is the most insidious because you don’t even realize it is happening,” he said. A scout would settle on an opinion about a player and then arrange the evidence to support that opinion.”

 

““He suggested a new definition of the nerd: a person who knows his own mind well enough to mistrust it.”

My Take

I am a fan of Michael Lewis, having read Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, Coach, The Big Short, and The Blind Side as well as many of his blog entries on Slate.  I really enjoyed his writing and was therefore looking forward to The Undoing Project which focused on Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky, Israeli behavioral psychologists who studied how and why we make certain decisions.  While the book was interesting at times, there was a lot of meandering that was less than compelling.  It was definitely not a page turner.  I don’t regret reading it, but am reluctant to give it a big recommendation.

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121. Little Bee

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:   

Author:   Chris Cleave

Genre:  Fiction, Historical Fiction

266 pages, published February 16, 2010

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

Little Bee follows the stories of two very different women.  Little Bee is the name of a teenage girl from Nigeria who manages to sneak her way into England only to be discovered thrown into an asylum detention centre for several years.  Sarah O’Rourke is a magazine editor from Surrey with a young son and a troubled marriage.  When the lives of the two women intersect both in Nigeria and the UK both of their lives are dramatically altered.   

 

Quotes

“On the girl’s brown legs there were many small white scars. I was thinking, Do those scars cover the whole of you, like the stars and the moons on your dress? I thought that would be pretty too, and I ask you right here please to agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. But you and I, we must make an agreement to defy them. We must see all scars as beauty. Okay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.”

 

“I could not stop talking because now I had started my story, it wanted to be finished. We cannot choose where to start and stop. Our stories are the tellers of us. ”

 

“I’m telling you, trouble is like the ocean. It covers two thirds of the world.”

 

“Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive. The next thing you know something fine will happen to her, something marvelous, and then she will turn around and smile.”

 

“Life is savagely unfair. It ignores our deep-seated convictions and places a disproportionate emphasis on the decisions we make in split seconds.”

 

“To be well in your mind you have first to be free.”

 

“Psychiatry in this place is like serving an in-flight meal in the middle of a plane crash. If I wanted to make you well, as a doctor, I should be giving you a parachute, not a cheese-and-pickle sandwich.”

 

“Life is extremely short and you cannot dance to current affairs.”

 

“There was no quick grief for Andrew because he had been so slowly lost. First from my heart, then from my mind, and only finally from my life.”

 

“This is the forked tongue of grief again. It whispers in one ear: return to what you once loved best, and in the other ear it whispers, move on.”

 

“I planned how I would kill myself in the time of Churchill (stand under bombs), Victoria (throw myself under a horse), and Henry the Eighth (marry Henry the Eighth).”

 

“There’s eight million people here pretending the others aren’t getting on their nerves. I believe it’s called civilization.”

 

“People wonder how they are ever going to change their lives, but really it is frighteningly easy.”

 

“What is an adventure? That depends on where you are starting from. Little girls in your country, they hide in the gap between the washing machine and the refrigerator and they make believe they are in the jungle, with green snakes and monkeys all around them. Me and my sister, we used to hide in a gap in the jungle, with green snakes and monkeys all around us, and make believe that we had a washing machine and a refrigerator. You live in a world of machines and you dream of things with beating hearts. We dream of machines, because we see where beating hearts have left us.”

My Take

Little Bee was an enjoyable read and opened my eyes to the plight of African refugees.  The author’s contrast of the lives of two women:  teenage “Little Bee,” an illegal refugee from Nigeria, and 30-something Sarah O’Rourke, successful magazine editor with a young son and unhappy marriage, and how they impact each other held my attention and deepened my interest in their stories.  Not the best book I’ve read this year, but certainly not the worst.

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119. The Problem of Pain

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  

Author:   C.S. Lewis

Genre:  Christian, Theology, Non-Fiction

176 pages, published 1940

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

For centuries people have tried to answer the existential question: If God is good and all-powerful, why does he allow human beings to suffer pain? And why do animals suffer when they neither deserve pain nor can be improved by it?  C.S. Lewis, one of the twentieth century’s greatest Christian thinker, endeavors to answer this tough questions and make his case for God.   

 

Quotes

“We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”

 

“To enter heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth; to enter hell, is to be banished from humanity.”

 

“We regard God as an airman regards his parachute; it’s there for emergencies but he hopes he’ll never have to use it.”

 

“Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself”

 

“The human spirit will not even begin to try to surrender self-will as long as all seems to be well with it. Now error and sin both have this property, that the deeper they are the less their victim suspects their existence; they are masked evil. Pain is unmasked, unmistakable evil; every man knows that something is wrong when he is being hurt.”

 

“A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word ‘darkness’ on the walls of his cell.”

 

“His Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense. There is no limit to His power.

If you choose to say, ‘God can give a creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it,’ you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prifex to them the two other words, ‘God can.’ It remains true that all things are possible with God: the intrinsic impossibilities are not things but nonentities. It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of His creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not because His power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.”

 

“Love may, indeed, love the beloved when her beauty is lost: but not because it is lost. Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal. Love is more sensitive than hatred itself to every blemish in the beloved… Of all powers he forgives most, but he condones least: he is pleased with little, but demands all.”

 

“The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.”

 

“For you will certainly carry out God’s purpose, however you act, but it makes a difference to you whether you serve like Judas or like John.”

 

“The mold in which a key is made would be a strange thing, if you had never seen a key: and the key itself a strange thing if you had never seen a lock. Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions.  Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it — made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand.”

 

“Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say “My tooth is aching” than to say “My heart is broken.”

 

“All your life an unattainable ecstasy has hovered just beyond the grasp of your consciousness. The day is coming when you will wake to find, beyond all hope, that you have attained it, or else, that it was within your reach and you have lost it forever.”

 

“My own idea, for what it is worth, is that all sadness which is not either arising from the repentance of a concrete sin and hastening towards concrete amendment or restitution, or else arising from pity and hastening to active assistance, is simply bad; and I think we all sin by needlessly disobeying the apostolic injunction to ‘rejoice’ as much as by anything else.”

 

“Let me implore the reader to try to believe, if only for a moment, that God, who made these deserving people, may really be right when He thinks that their modest prosperity and the happiness of their children are not enough to make them blessed: that all this must fall from them in the end, and if they have not learned to know Him they will be wretched. And therefore He troubles them, warning them in advance of an insufficiency that one day they will have to discover. The life to themselves and their families stands between them and the recognition of their need; He makes that life less sweet to them.  If God were proud He would hardly have us on such terms: but He is not proud, He stoops to conquer, He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him, and come to Him because there is ‘nothing better’ now to be had.”

 

“The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God who loves, is only insoluble so long as we attach a trivial meaning to the word “love”, and look on things as if man were the centre of them. Man is not the centre. God does not exist for the sake of man. Man does not exist for his own sake. “Thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.” We were made not primarily that we may love God (though we were made for that too) but that God may love us, that we may become objects in which the divine love may rest “well pleased”.”

 

“Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment.”

 

“Love, in its own nature, demands the perfecting of the beloved.”

 

“Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it — tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest — if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself — you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say “Here at last is the thing I was made for.”

 

“We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something with which He will not be satisfied until it has a certain character. Here again we come up against what I have called the “intolerable compliment.” Over a sketch made idly to amuse a child, an artist may not take much trouble: he may be content to let it go even though it is not exactly as he meant it to be. But over the great picture of his life—the work which he loves, though in a different fashion, as intensely as a man loves a woman or a mother a child—he will take endless trouble—and would doubtless, thereby give endless trouble to the picture if it were sentient. One can imagine a sentient picture, after being rubbed and scraped and re-commenced for the tenth time, wishing that it were only a thumb-nail sketch whose making was over in a minute. In the same way, it is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but then we are wishing not for more love but for less.”

 

“We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. I have heard others, and I have heard myself, recounting cruelties and falsehoods committed in boyhood as if they were no concern of the present speaker’s, and even with laughter. But mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin. The guilt is washed out not by time but by repentance and the blood of Christ: if we have repented these early sins we should remember the price of our forgiveness and be humble.”

My Take

When I listened to the audiobook version of The Problem of Pain, I had just finished reading two books about St. Paul (I Live, No Longer I and Galations for You).  Since a large part of Pauline theology discussed in these books deals with how we approach human suffering, I was receptive to the message of The Problem of Pain, i.e. human suffering is necessary to bring us closer to God.  When everything is going well in my life, my thoughts only sometimes turn to God.  It is only when the world is crashing down do I really implore God for help.  As C.S. Lewis so eloquently explains, if we handle it correctly, the suffering that we necessarily experience as human beings can help mold us into better people.  In The Problem of Pain, Lewis implores us to take a hard look at how we are living our lives and consider whether our actions are bringing us closer to God.

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118. Galatians for You

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  First Presbyterian Church

Author:   Timothy Keller

Genre:  Christian, Theology, Non-Fiction

199 pages, published February 12, 2013

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

The first book in a series of expository guides to the Bible, Timothy Keller’s Galatians For You closely examines the text of Galatians and demonstrates how it relates to your own life.  

 

Quotes

“Our hearts love to manufacture glory for themselves.”

 

“But we need to realize that there are deeper harvests that happen even when we don’t meet with much outward success. We will find our own character changing deeply through ministry. Our consciences will be clear and our hearts happier, since we’re less self-indulgent. We’ll develop a less selfish and more satisfied character, which will serve us well when we are under pressure. We may not reap quickly, and we may not see all that we reap; but we can know that there is a great harvest for those who sow to please the Spirit.”

 

“Verse 20 is a restatement of verse 14: we need to live our lives “in line” with the truth of the gospel. Now that Christ’s life is my life, Christ’s past is my past. I am “in Christ” (v 17), which means that I am as free from condemnation before God as if I had already died and been judged, as if I had paid the debt myself. And I am as loved by God as if I had lived the life Christ lived. So “it is not me that lives, but Christ” is a triumphant reminder that, though “we ourselves are sinners”, in Christ we are righteous.”

 

“Now when I live my life and make my choices and do my work, I do so remembering who I am by faith in Christ, who loved me so much! The inner dynamic for living the Christian life is right here! Only when I see myself as completely loved and holy in Christ will I have the power to repent with joy, conquer my fears, and obey the One who did all this for me. Everything or Nothing? It’s worth remembering that Paul is still speaking to Peter here! And so he finishes by reminding Peter that the Christian life is about living in line with the gospel throughout the whole of life, for the whole of our lives. We must go on as Christians as we started as Christians. After all, if at any point and in any way “righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!” (v 21). Christ will do everything for you, or nothing. You cannot combine merit and grace.”

 

“If justification is by the law in any way, Christ’s death is meaningless in history and meaningless to you personally. Imagine that your house were burning down but your whole family had escaped, and I said to you: Let me show you how much I love you! and ran into the house and died. What a tragic and pointless waste of a life, you would probably think. But now imagine that your house was on fire and one of your children was still in there, and I said to you: Let me show you how much I love you!, ran into the flames, and saved your child but perished myself. You would think: Look at how much that man loved us. If we could save ourselves, Christ’s death is pointless, and means nothing. If we realize we cannot save ourselves, Christ’s death will mean everything to us. And we will spend the life that He has given us in joyful service of Him, bringing our whole lives into line with the gospel.”

 

“The gospel comes and turns them all upside down. It says: You are in such a hopeless position that you need a rescue that has nothing to do with you at all. And then it says: God in Jesus provides a rescue which gives you far more than any false salvation your heart may love to chase.”

 

“Christians who are no longer sure that God loves and accepts them in Jesus, apart from their present spiritual achievements, are subconsciously radically insecure persons, much less secure than non-Christians, because of the constant bulletins they receive from their Christian environment about the holiness of God and the righteousness they are supposed to have. Their insecurity shows itself in pride, a fierce defensive assertion of their own righteousness and defensive criticism of others. They cling desperately to legal, pharisaical righteousness, but envy [and] jealousy and other … sin grow out of their fundamental insecurity.”

 

“Second, the gospel leads to emotional freedom. Anyone who believes that our relationship with God is based on keeping up moral behavior is on an endless treadmill of guilt and insecurity. As we know from Paul’s letters, he did not free Gentile believers from the moral imperatives of the Ten Commandments. Christians could not lie, steal, commit adultery and so on. But though not free from the moral law as a way to live, Christians are free from it as a system of salvation. We obey not in the fear and insecurity of hoping to earn our salvation, but in the freedom and security of knowing we are already saved in Christ. We obey in the freedom of gratitude. So both the false teachers and Paul told Christians to obey the Ten Commandments, but for totally different reasons and motives. And unless your motive for obeying God’s law is the grace-gratitude motive of the gospel, you are in slavery. The gospel provides freedom, culturally and emotionally. The “other gospel” destroys both.”

My Take

I read Galations for You as part of a Women’s Bible Study at my church.  The book and Keller’s questions interspersed throughout the text sparked some excellent conversations that allowed us to go deep into our faith.  I also appreciated Keller’s careful analysis of the seemingly contradictory concepts of being saved by accepting Christ rather than by “following legalistic biblical precepts,” but that the life of anyone who truly accepts Christ will necessarily reflect those precepts.  Good food for thought.

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116. Everything That Remains: A Memoir by the Minimalists

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  

Authors:   Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus

Genre:  Memoir, Self-Improvement

234 pages, published December 23, 2013

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

Well known for their website on minimalism, Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus ask the reader to consider the question of what if everything you ever wanted isn’t what you actually want?  On the corporate fast track in his late twenties, Millburn thought he had it all.  A wife, an executive position with the promise of upward mobility, a large house filled with designer furniture and objects, and a late model car.  After losing both his mother and his marriage in the same month, Millburn started questioning every aspect of the life he had built for himself, ditched almost all of his belongings and discovered a lifestyle known as minimalism.  Everything That Remains tells the story of Millburn’s journey with commentary provided by his best friend and fellow minimalist Nicodemus.  

 

Quotes

“The things you own end up owning you.”

 

“You can’t change the people around you, but you can change the people around you.”

 

“For me, minimalism has never been about deprivation. Rather, minimalism is about getting rid of life’s excess in favor of the essential.”

 

“We’re taught to work foolishly hard for a non-living entity, donating our most precious commodity—our time—for a paycheck.”

 

“A ROLEX WON’T GIVE YOU MORE TIME”

 

“Unless you contribute beyond yourself, your life will feel perpetually self-serving. It’s okay to operate in your own self-interest, but doing so exclusively creates an empty existence. A life without contribution is a life without meaning. The truth is that giving is living. We only feel truly alive when we are growing as individuals and contributing beyond ourselves. That’s what a real life is all about.”

 

“Now, before I spend money I ask myself one question: Is this worth my freedom? Like: Is this coffee worth two dollars of my freedom? Is this shirt worth thirty dollars of my freedom? Is this car worth thirty thousand dollars of my freedom? In other words, am I going to get more value from the thing I’m about to purchase, or am I going to get more value from my freedom?”

 

“The most important reason to live in the moment is nothing lasts forever. Enjoy the moment while it’s in front of you. Be present. Accept life for what it is: a finite span of time with infinite possibilities.”

 

“It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.”

 

“Truthfully, though, most organizing is nothing more than well-planned hoarding.”

 

“In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never feel you have enough. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, you will end up feeling like a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.”  —David Foster Wallace, This Is Water”

 

“Success = Happiness + Constant Improvement”

 

“a career is one of the most dangerous things you can have if you want to find fulfillment.”

 

“Happiness, as far as we are concerned, is achieved through living a meaningful life, a life that is filled with passion and freedom, a life in which we can grow as individuals and contribute to other people in meaningful ways. Growth and contribution: those are the bedrocks of happiness. Not stuff. This may not sound sexy or marketable or sellable, but it’s the cold truth. Humans are happy if we are growing as individuals and if we are contributing beyond ourselves. Without growth, and without a deliberate effort to help others, we are just slaves to cultural expectations, ensnared by the trappings of money and power and status and perceived success.”

 

“When purchasing gifts becomes the focal point of the season, we lose focus on what’s truly important.”

 

“Go without. This option is almost taboo in our culture. It seems radical to many people. Why would I go without when I could just buy a new one? Often this option is the best option, though. When we go without, it forces us to question our stuff, it forces us to discover whether or not we need it—and sometimes we discover life without it is actually better than before.”

 

“People often avoid the truth for fear of destroying the illusions they’ve built.”

 

“When I had the opportunity to meet Leo Babauta four months ago during a trip to San Francisco, he said there were three things that significantly changed his life: establishing habits he enjoyed, simplifying his life, and living with no goals.”

 

“Ultimately most of us come to believe there’s more value in a paycheck—and all the stuff that paycheck can buy us—than there is in life itself.”

 

“After a series of promotions—store manager at twenty-two, regional manager at twenty-four, director at twenty-seven—I was a fast-track career man, a personage of sorts. If I worked really hard, and if everything happened exactly like it was supposed to, then I could be a vice president by thirty-two, a senior vice president by thirty-five or forty, and a C-level executive—CFO, COO, CEO—by forty-five or fifty, followed of course by the golden parachute. I’d have it made then! I’d just have to be miserable for a few more years, to drudge through the corporate politics and bureaucracy I knew so well. Just keep climbing and don’t look down. Misery, of course, encourages others to pull up a chair and stay a while. And so, five years ago, I convinced my best friend Ryan to join me on the ladder, even showed him the first rung. The ascent is exhilarating to rookies. They see limitless potential and endless possibilities, allured by the promise of bigger paychecks and sophisticated titles. What’s not to like? He too climbed the ladder, maneuvering each step with lapidary precision, becoming one of the top salespeople—and later, top sales managers—in the entire company.10 And now here we are, submerged in fluorescent light, young and ostensibly successful. A few years ago, a mentor of mine, a successful businessman named Karl, said to me, “You shouldn’t ask a man who earns twenty thousand dollars a year how to make a hundred thousand.” Perhaps this apothegm holds true for discontented men and happiness, as well. All these guys I emulate—the men I most want to be like, the VPs and executives—aren’t happy. In fact, they’re miserable.  Don’t get me wrong, they aren’t bad people, but their careers have changed them, altered them physically and emotionally: they explode with anger over insignificant inconveniences; they are overweight and out of shape; they scowl with furrowed brows and complain constantly as if the world is conspiring against them, or they feign sham optimism which fools no one; they are on their second or third or fourth(!) marriages; and they almost all seem lonely. Utterly alone in a sea of yes-men and women. Don’t even get me started on their health issues.  I’m talking serious health issues: obesity, gout, cancer, heart attacks, high blood pressure, you name it. These guys are plagued with every ailment associated with stress and anxiety. Some even wear it as a morbid badge of honor, as if it’s noble or courageous or something. A coworker, a good friend of mine on a similar trajectory, recently had his first heart attack—at age thirty.  But I’m the exception, right?”

My Take

After taking and keeping a “no-buy” pledge last year (something everyone should try), I was interested in learning more about the concept and culture of minimalism.  Everything that Remains fulfilled that desire.  Millburn recounts his inspiring journey from an unhealthy, overweight, dissatisfied workaholic with a lot of stuff to a relaxed, content, fit person who enjoys and is fulfilled by the present.  This book made me think about the wisdom of always acquiring more and better things and challenged me to be happy with what I have or, even better, with a lot less than what I have.

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114. Reimagine Government, a 21st Century Solution

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Christopher Funk

Author:   Christopher Funk

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Public Policy

100 pages, published 2016

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

Reimagine Government casts a critical eye on our current political system and proposes another solution based on the rapid technological change that the United States and the world will experience during the next 20 years due primarily to information technology and artificial intelligence.  Funk argues that intelligent systems prospective ability to outperform their human counterparts means that we will finally have the means to solve some of our most intractable problems.  His main focus is what this paradigm shift will mean for our government and envisions a new form of government comprised of intelligent systems rather than human politicians.   Citizens would evaluate and vote for plans rather than candidates and the intelligent systems would implement the plans.

 

My Take

Full disclosure, Reimagine Government was written and self-published by my father, Chris Funk.  He asked me to read it prior to a weekend visit and I was happy to comply.  The reading style is easy.  It is not dense at all.  In the first part of the book, he identifies numerous problems facing our nation and the world.  While I did not agree with his take on the nature and scope of the problems (eg. I don’t think income inequality is per se a big problem), I think he did a good job with this section.  My disagreement with his thesis arose with his solution.  He advocates an all citizen vote for different plans to then be implemented by intelligent systems.  As an attorney with a great deal of admiration and belief in the United States Constitution, I would never voluntarily agree to scrap our founding document and trust the majority and the machines with our precious Constitutional rights.

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113. Escape to Cabo

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Pam Dupont

Author:   S. A. Lapoint

Genre:  Memoir, Crime

221 pages, published October 14, 2014

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

Scott Frieze (aka S. A. Lapoint) had a comfortable life in Tuscon until he decided to act on his lifelong fantasy of robbing a bank.  He got away the first time, but during his second bank job, he was apprehended and thrown into the maw of our criminal justice system.  Escape to Cabo documents how he got there and his pre and post incarceration experience.

  
My Take

Escape to Cabo was assigned by my fellow book group member Pam Dupont in anticipation of a trip with our book group to her condo in San Jose del Cabo.  Pam had met the author while in Cabo and thought it would be fun to read this book before our journey.  She was right.  It was a fun read.

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