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424. Life Undercover: Coming of Age in the CIA

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Katy Fassett

Author:    Amaryllis Fox

Genre:   Nonfiction, Memoir, Foreign

240 pages, published October 15, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Life Undercover: Coming of Age in the CIA is the memoir of Amaryllis Fox who writes about her life  as a young woman in the CIA.   Fox was an undergraduate at Oxford studying theology and international law when her writing mentor Daniel Pearl was captured and beheaded.  Roused by this horrific event, Fox applied to a master’s program in conflict and terrorism at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, where she created an algorithm that predicted the likelihood of a terrorist cell arising in any village around the world.  At the tender age of 21, Fox was recruited by the CIA where she went from analyzing hundreds of classified cables a day to help prepare the daily briefing for the president. She then worked on the Iraq desk in the Counterterrorism center. At twenty-two, she was fast-tracked into advanced operations training and then deployed as a spy under non-official cover as an art dealer specializing in tribal and indigenous art and sent to infiltrate terrorist networks in remote areas of the Middle East and Asia.

Quotes 

 

My Take

Life Undercover is a quick read.  I learned a lot about the CIA training and covert operations.  Fox is a good writer and has some interesting tales to tell about her live undercover and how she got there.

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422. The Bluest Eye

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Marlys Lietz

Author:   Toni Morrison

Genre:   Fiction, Historical Fiction

216 pages, published September 6, 2005

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison’s first novel and tells the story of 11 year old Pecola Breedlove.  Pecola, a poor black child from a dysfunctional family, prays for her eyes to turn blue so that she will be as beautiful and beloved as the blond, blue-eyed children in her town.

Quotes 

“Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover’s inward eye.”

 

“We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.”

 

“And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of an old idea the Revelation and the Word.”

 

“guileless and without vanity,we were still in love with ourselves then. We felt comfortable in our own skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness.”

 

“Anger is better.  There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.”

 

“Jealousy we understood and thought natural… But envy was a strange, new feeling for us. And all the time we knew that Maureen Peal was not the Enemy and not worthy of such intense hatred. The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her beautiful, and not us.”

 

“She left me the way people leave a hotel room. A hotel room is a place to be when you are doing something else. Of itself it is of no consequence to one’s major scheme. A hotel room is convenient. But its convenience is limited to the time you need it while you are in that particular town on that particular business; you hope it is comfortable, but prefer, rather, that it be anoymous. It is not, after all, where you live.”

 

“All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. All of us–all who knew her–felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used–to silence our own nightmares. And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength.  And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of an old idea the Revelation and the Word.”

 

My Take

I liked, but did not love, The Bluest Eye.  While it is well written and has something to say, I found it hard to relate to the characters and was not very engaged in the story.  Also, it is depressing.

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419. Loserthink: How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Scott Adams

Genre:   Nonfiction, Psychology, Self Improvement, Politics

256 pages, published November 5, 2019

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Loserthink is famed Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams take on why people make bad decisions, like letting your ego have too much control, thinking with words instead of reasons, failing to imagine alternative explanations, and making too much of coincidences.

Quotes 

“If bad memories are keeping you from being happy, try crowding out the destructive memories with new and interesting thoughts. Stay busy, in mind and body, and time is on your side.”

 

“There are three important things to know about human beings in order to understand why we do the things we do. Humans use pattern recognition to understand their world. Humans are very bad at pattern recognition. And they don’t know it.”

 

“The best solution to a problem is often unrelated to who is at fault. It is loserthink to believe otherwise.”

 

“If you can’t imagine any other explanation for a set of facts, it might be because you are bad at imagining things.”

 

“If all you know is how many times someone hit a target, it is loserthink to judge how accurate they are. You also need to know how many times they missed.”

 

“Never be yourself if you can make yourself into something better through your conscious actions. You are what you do.”

 

“It is helpful to think of your mind as having limited shelf space. If you fill that space with negative thoughts, it will set your mental filters to negativity and poor health, and there will be no space left for healthy, productive, and uplifting thoughts. You can control your mental shelf space—to a degree—by manipulating your physical surroundings. In the case of pharmaceutical commercials, it means changing the channel so you are not bombarded with unhealthy thoughts that can wreck your mind and body over time. I will pause here to note that science is solidly on my side.  So is nearly every self-help guru.”

  

My Take

During my reading quest, I had previously read Scott Adams’ How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big:  Kind of the Story of My Life and Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter.  I preferred both of these books to Loserthink.  It’s not a bad book and has some interesting ideas.  It’s just not nearly as good as Adams’ previous efforts.

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412. The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:  Marina Keegan

Genre:   Nonfiction, Fiction, Short Stories, Essays, Memoir

208 pages, published April 8, 2014

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

The Opposite of Loneliness is a collection of essays written by Marina Keegan , a talented young writer whose title essay captured the world’s attention in 2012.   Tragically, five days after her graduation from Yale, Keegan died in a car crash.  The 22 year old had a play that was to be produced at the New York International Fringe Festival and a job waiting for her at the New Yorker.  The essays and stories included in The Opposite of Loneliness give voice to the struggles young people confront as they try to figure out their place in the world.

Quotes 

“We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life.”

 

“What we have to remember is that we can still do anything. We can change our minds. We can start over.”

 

“We’re so young. We’re so young. We’re twenty-two years old. We have so much time. There’s this sentiment I sometimes sense, creeping in our collective conscious as we lie alone after a party, or pack up our books when we give in and go out – that it is somehow too late. That others are somehow ahead. More accomplished, more specialized. More on the path to somehow saving the world, somehow creating or inventing or improving. That it’s too late now to BEGIN a beginning and we must settle for continuance, for commencement.”

 

“We’re so young. We can’t, we MUST not loose this sense of possibility because in the end, it’s all we have.”

 

“I want enough time to be in love with everything . . .”

 

“I worry sometimes that humans are afraid of helping humans. There’s less risk associated with animals, less fear of failure, fear of getting to involved.”

 

“And I cry because everything is so beautiful and so short.”

 

“something about the stillness or my state of mind reminded me of the world’s remarkable capacity to carry on in every place at once.”

 

“We have these impossibly high standards and we’ll probably never live up to our perfect fantasies of our future selves.”

 

“What we have to remember is that we can still do anything. We can change our minds. We can start over. Get a post-bac or try writing for the first time. The notion that it’s too late to do anything is comical. It’s hilarious. We’re graduating from college. We’re so young. We can’t, we MUST not lose this sense of possibility because in the end, it’s all we have.”

 

“I will live for love, and the rest will take care of itself.”

 

“I blame the Internet. Its inconsiderate inclusion of everything.Success is transparent and accessible, hanging down where it can tease but not touch us. We talk into these scratchy microphones and take extra photographs but I still feel like there are just SO MANY PEOPLE. Every day, 1,035.6 books are published; sixty-six million people update their status each morning.  At night, aimlessly scrolling, I remind myself of elementary school murals. One person can make a difference! But the people asking me what I want to be when I grow up don’t want me to make a poster anymore. They want me to fill out forms and hand them rectangular cards that say HELLO THIS IS WHAT I DO.”

 

“The middle of the universe is tonight, is here, And everything behind is a sunk cost.”

 

My Take

While I enjoyed reading some of the essays in The Opposite of Loneliness, it is really written for a younger generation than me.  Keegan is also a bit uneven.  Some of her work is quite good, but other essays not so much.

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408. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   David Foster Wallace

Genre:   Nonfiction, Essays, Humor, Memoir

353 pages, published February 2, 1998

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

This book by the much praised David Foster Wallace is a collection of seven pieces on subjects ranging from television to tennis, from the Illinois State Fair to the films of David Lynch, from postmodern literary theory to the supposed fun of traveling on a Caribbean cruise.

Quotes 

“Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly.”

 

“I have filled 3 Mead notebooks trying to figure out whether it was Them or Just Me.”

 

“Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody’s ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear.”

 

“I have now seen sucrose beaches and water a very bright blue. I have seen an all-red leisure suit with flared lapels. I have smelled suntan lotion spread over 2,100 pounds of hot flesh. I have been addressed as “Mon” in three different nations. I have seen 500 upscale Americans dance the Electric Slide. I have seen sunsets that looked computer-enhanced. I have (very briefly) joined a conga line.”

 

“I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life’s sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time. It is dreadful. But since it’s my own choices that’ll lock me in, it seems unavoidable–if I want to be any kind of grownup, I have to make choices and regret foreclosures and try to live with them.”

 

“One of the few things I still miss from my Midwest childhood was this weird, deluded but unshakable conviction that everything around me existed all and only For Me. Am I the only one who had this queer deep sense as a kid? — that everything exterior to me existed only insofar as it affected me somehow? — that all things were somehow, via some occult adult activity, specially arranged for my benefit?”

 

“Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval.”

 

“I think the world divides neatly into those who are excited by the managed induction of terror and those who are not. I do not find terror exciting. I find it terrifying. One of my basic goals is to subject my nervous system to as little total terror as possible. The cruel paradox of course is that this kind of makeup usually goes hand in hand with a delicate nervous system that’s extremely easy to terrify.”

 

“Because of the way human beings relate to narrative, we tend to identify with those characters we find appealing. We try to see ourselves in them. The same I.D.-relation, however, also means that we try to see them in ourselves. When everybody we seek to identify with for six hours a day is pretty, it naturally becomes more important to us to be pretty, to be viewed as pretty. Because prettiness becomes a priority for us, the pretty people on TV become all the more attractive, a cycle which is obviously great for TV. But it’s less great for us civilians, who tend to own mirrors, and who also tend not to be anywhere near as pretty as the TV-images we want to identify with. Not only does this cause some angst personally, but the angst increases because, nationally, everybody else is absorbing six-hour doses and identifying with pretty people and valuing prettiness more, too. This very personal anxiety about our prettiness has become a national phenomenon with national consequences.”

 

“How can even the idea of rebellion against corporate culture stay meaningful when Chrysler Inc. advertises trucks by invoking “The Dodge Rebellion”? How is one to be bona fide iconoclast when Burger King sells onion rings with “Sometimes You Gotta Break the Rules”? How can an Image-Fiction writer hope to make people more critical of televisual culture by parodying television as a self-serving commercial enterprise when Pepsi and Subaru and FedEx parodies of self-serving commercials are already doing big business? It’s almost a history lesson: I’m starting to see just why turn-of-the-century Americans’ biggest fear was of anarchist and anarchy. For if anarchy actually wins, if rulelessness become the rule, then protest and change become not just impossible but incoherent. It’d be like casting a ballot for Stalin: you are voting for an end to all voting.”

 

“….basically the sort of guy who looks entirely at home in sockless white loafers and a mint-green knit shirt from Lacoste.”

 

“Can you “choose” something when you are forcefully and enthusiastically immersed in it at an age when the resources and information necessary for choosing are not yet yours?”

 

My Take

While I had heard of David Foster Wallace of Infinite Jest fame, I had never read his writing.  Thus, when I saw A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again recommended as part of best of the nonfiction books of the past 30 years, I decided to give it a try.   Wallace is a unique and talented voice and made me think about certain things in a new way.  His essay on the cruise vacation also had some very funny moments.  However, other parts of the book were a bit too dense for me and more of an acquired taste.

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405. At the Water’s Edge

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Joni Renee

Author:    Sara Gruen

Genre:   Fiction, Historical Fiction, Romance, Foreign, World War II

348 pages, published March 31, 2015

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

At the Water’s Edge tells the story of Maddie Hyde, a young ingénue who has entered into a disastrous marriage with Ellis Hyde (who may be gay), a high society Philadelphia playboy.  On New Year’s Eve of 1942, Ellis is cut off financially by his father, a former army Colonel who is already embarrassed by his son’s inability to serve in WWII due to colorblindness.  To redeem himself, Ellis embarks on a quest to find the Loch Ness monster, a venture his father had attempted but failed at in a very public manner.  While in Scotland during the war, the Hyde’s marriage begins to fall apart as Maddie discovers there is greater meaning in her life than being a socialite.

Quotes 

“I paused beneath the arched entrance, where the drawbridge had once been, imagining all the people who had passed in and out over the centuries, every one of them carrying a combination of desire, hope, jealousy, despair, grief, love, and every other human emotion; a combination that made each one as unique as a snowflake, yet linked all of them inextricably to every other human being from the dawn of time to the end of it.”

 

“One Crow for sorrow, Two Crows for mirth, Three Crows for a wedding, Four Crows for a birth, Five Crows for silver, Six Crows for gold, Seven for a secret, never to be told.”

 

“The monster—if there was one—never revealed itself to me again. But what I had learned over the past year was that monsters abound, usually in plain sight.”

 

“Life. There it was. In all its beautiful, tragic fragility, there was still life, and those of us who’d been lucky enough to survive opened our arms wide and embraced it.”

 

“It seems there’s nothing so good or pure it can’t be taken without a moment’s notice. And then in the end, it all gets taken anyway.”

 

“It was full of luxurious trappings and shiny baubles, and that had blinded me to the fact that nothing about it was real.”

 

“I did not take enough care with my hair, but a permanent wave would fix that. I was not thin enough, but for that, alas, there was no quick fix. I should never put more than the equivalent of three peas on my fork at a time, or one small disk of carrot. I should always leave two thirds of my meal on my plate, and was never to eat in public.”

 

My Take

I had previously read Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen and really enjoyed it.  At the Water’s Edge is a lesser book with a bit too much romantic melodrama and characters who could use a bit more development.  Still, it was a decent read.

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404. An American Summer: Love and Death in Chicago

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Sue Deans

Author:  Alex Kotlowitz

Genre:   Nonfiction, Crime, Sociology

304 pages, published March 5, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Alex Kotlowitz, the bestselling author of There Are No Children Here, embeds himself in Chicago’s most turbulent neighborhoods during one summer to give a report from the inside.  The violence is staggering.  Over the past twenty years in Chicago, 14,033 people have been killed and another roughly 60,000 wounded by gunfire.  An American Summer paints a bleak portrait of despair and violence in America.

Quotes 

“. . .you can’t talk about death without celebrating life. How amid the devastation, many still manage to stay erect in a world that’s slumping around them. How despite the bloodshed, some manage, heroically, not only to push on but also to push back. How in death there is love.”

 

“There are so many . . . who carry the violence, who keep moving forward enshrouded in its aftermath. Yet there doesn’t seem to be any sense of urgency, especially among the rest of us.”

 

“In a nation that likes to see itself as forgiving, we are mulishly unforgiving of those who have committed a felony…”

 

“Do you directly target the violence because it so discourages any kind of economic development? Or do you bring in jobs and rehab homes, knowing that with a sense of opportunity the violence will diminish?”

 

“The only thing you can do is love, because it is the only thing that leaves light inside you, instead of the total, obliterating darkness.”

 

“I’m going to share something I learned since I been here and that is us as people when we have difficulty on our journey of life we tend to focus on what we need at the moment that we forget what we already have…”

 

“People have a capacity to keep going even when their world has been shattered. We all long for connection, for affirmation that our lives matter.”

 

“You grow up in a community with abandoned homes, a jobless rate of over 25 percent, underfunded schools, and you stand outside your home, look at the city’s gleaming downtown skyline, at its prosperity, and you know your place in the world.”

 

“The shooting doesn’t end. Nor does the grinding poverty. Or the deeply rooted segregation. Or the easy availability of guns. Or the shuttered schools and boarded-up homes. Or the tensions between police and residents. And yet each shooting is unlike the last, every exposed and bruised life exposed and bruised in its own way.”

 

My Take

Man, this was a depressing book.  While Alex Kotlowitz does a good job of vividly describing the heartbreaking violence and hopelessness in the gang infested parts of Chicago, he offers no solutions.  We discussed this book at my Rotary book club and also were disheartened.  There are no easy answers.

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399. The Future of Humanity: Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality and Our Destiny Beyond Earth

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Mike Brady

Author:   Michio Kaku

Genre:    Nonfiction, Science, Technology

368 pages, published February 20, 2018

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

The Future of Humanity focuses on human space travel and colonization of other planets.  Futurist Michio Kaku explores how developments in robotics, nanotechnology, and biotechnology could enable us to build habitable cities on Mars, nearby stars might be reached by microscopic spaceships sailing through space on laser beams, and technology might one day allow us to transcend our physical bodies entirely and achieve immortality.

Quotes 

“I sometimes think about how easy it is for a nation to slip into complacency and ruin after decades of basking in the sun. Since science is the engine of prosperity, nations that turn their backs on science and technology eventually enter a downward spiral.”

 

“Do we have enough food to feed the people of the world as they become middle class consumers? The hundreds of millions of people in China and India who are now entering the middle class watch Western movies and want to emulate that lifestyle, with its wasteful use of resources, large consumption of meat, big houses, fixation on luxury goods, et cetera. He is concerned we may not have enough resources to feed the population as a whole, and certainly would have difficulty feeding those who want to consume a Western diet.”

 

“Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, once declared, “I visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans, and I’m rooting for the machines.”

 

“It’s easy to imagine that, in the future, telepathy and telekinesis will be the norm; we will interact with machines by sheer thought. Our mind will be able to turn on the lights, activate the internet, dictate letters, play video games, communicate with friends, call for a car, purchase merchandise, conjure any movie-all just by thinking. Astronauts of the future may use the power of their minds to pilot their spaceships or explore distant planets. Cities may rise from the desert of Mars, all due to master builders who mentally control the work of robots.”

 

“One reason why childhood lasts so long is because there is so much subtle information to absorb about human society and the natural world.”

 

“An even more advanced form of uploading your mind into a computer was envisioned by computer scientist Hans Moravec. When I interviewed him, he claimed that his method of uploading the human mind could even be done without losing consciousness. First you would be placed on a hospital gurney, next to a robot. Then a surgeon would take individual neurons from your brain and create a duplicate of these neurons (made of transistors) inside the robot. A cable would connect these transistorized neurons to your brain. As time goes by, more and more neurons are removed from your brain and duplicated in the robot. Because your brain is connected to the robot brain, you are fully conscious even as more and more neurons are replaced by transistors. Eventually, without losing consciousness, your entire brain and all its neurons are replaced by transistors. Once all one hundred billion neurons have been duplicated, the connection between you abd the artificial brain is finally cut. When you gaze back at the stretcher, you see your body, lacking its brain, while your consciousness now exists inside a robot.”

 

“If we scan all the life-forms that have ever existed on the Earth, from microscopic bacteria to towering forests, lumbering dinosaurs, and enterprising humans, we find that more than 99.9 percent of them eventually became extinct. This means that extinction is the norm, that the odds are already stacked heavily against us. When we dig beneath our feet into the soil to unearth the fossil record, we see evidence of many ancient life-forms. Yet only the smallest handful survive today. Millions of species have appeared before us; they had their day in the sun, and then they withered and died. That is the story of life.”

 

My Take

As a lifelong lover of science fiction and futurism, The Future of Humanity was an fascinating read for me.  Kaku writes about lots of interesting ideas in a manner that is accessible to the lay reader.  I also learned a lot.

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388. American Wolf

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Lisa Goldberg

Author:   Nate Blakeslee

Genre:    Nonfiction, Animals, Nature, Science, History, Environment

320 pages, published August, 2018

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

American Wolf follows the story of Rick McIntyre, a park ranger in the Lamar Valley of Yellowstone National Park, who spends all of his time studying and teaching about wolves.  We also learn a great deal about the different wolf packs that inhabit Yellowstone and the legal fight to protect them.

Quotes 

“Rick’s dream, though he seldom described it as such, was to someday tell a story so good that the people who heard it simply wouldn’t want to kill wolves anymore.”

 

“Can a wolf in the wild experience what we know as joy and happiness?” Rick said, his voice breaking noticeably. “And my answer is yes.”

 

“What we normally mean by ‘education,’ ” he once told a crowd of wolf advocates, is, “I want someone else to know what I know so they will have my values.” In his experience, it didn’t work that way.”

 

“But wolves, Rick felt, were more like humans than they were given credit for, in their tribal ways and territoriality; in their tendency to mate for life; and in the way male wolves provided food and care for their offspring, so unusual in the animal world. He loved to quote the early-twentieth-century English philosopher Carveth Read: “Man, in character, is more like a wolf… than he is any other animal.”

 

“By the 1920’s, the wolves had been all but eliminated from the continental United States, except for a small population in northern Minnesota and Michigan’s upper peninsula. It was a campaign unprecedented in its scope and thoroughness. One species almost completely whipped out another. The impetus for the killing was clear enough, but as Barry Lopez asked in “Of Wolves and Men”, his seminal meditation on the fraught relationship between the two species, why did the pogrom continue, even after the threat to the westerner’s way of life was essentially gone? Why did our ancestors feel they had to rout out every last wolf, and why were hunters still so eager to shoot them in the few places they remained?

There was hate, Lopez decided, but there was something else, too. Something more akin to envy. Here is an animal capable of killing a man, an animal of legendary endurance and spirit, an animal that embodies marvelous integration within its environment. This is exactly what the frustrated modern hunter would like, the noble qualities imagined, a sense of fitting into the world. The hunter wants to be the wolf.”

 

My Take

Well, I learned a lot about wolves after reading this book.  If you have an interest in them, then I highly recommend this book.  If you don’t, you still might like it.

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387. Quichotte

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Steve Atlee

Author:  Salman Rushdie

Genre:   Fiction, Fantasy

416 pages, published September 3, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Quichotte is a modern day take on Don Quixote.  In it, spy thriller writer Sam DuChamp creates the character of Quichotte, a befuddled salesman obsessed with television, who falls impossibly in love with a reality TV star.  Along with his imaginary son Sancho, Quichotte sets off on a quest across America to prove worthy of her hand.  Interspersed with Quichotte’s story, DuChamp deals with issues all his own.

Quotes 

“BE A LAWYER in a lawless time was like being a clown among the humorless: which was to say, either completely redundant or absolutely essential.”

 

“Men on the road together have three choices. They separate, they kill one another, or they work things out.”

 

“AS I PLAN MY QUEST,” Quichotte said, drinking from a can of ginger ale, “I ponder the contemporary period as well as the classical. And by the contemporary I mean, of course, The Bachelorette.”

 

“Every quest takes places in both the sphere of the actual, which is what maps reveal to us, and in the sphere of the symbolic, for which the only maps are the unseen ones in our heads.”

 

“He devoured morning shows, daytime shows, late-night talk shows, soaps, situation comedies, Lifetime Movies, hospital dramas, police series, vampire and zombie serials, the dramas of housewives from Atlanta, New Jersey, Beverly Hills and New York, the romances and quarrels of hotel-fortune princesses and self-styled shahs, the cavortings of individuals made famous by happy nudities, the fifteen minutes of fame accorded to young persons with large social media followings on account of their plastic-surgery acquisition of a third breast or their post-rib-removal figures that mimicked the impossible shape of the Mattel company’s Barbie doll, or even, more simply, their ability to catch giant carp in picturesque settings while wearing only the tiniest of string bikinis; as well as singing competitions, cooking competitions, competitions for business propositions, competitions for business apprenticeships, competitions between remote-controlled monster vehicles, fashion competitions, competitions for the affections of both bachelors and bachelorettes, baseball games, basketball games, football games, wrestling bouts, kickboxing bouts, extreme sports programming and, of course, beauty contests.”

 

“When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished,’ Czesław Miłosz once said.)”

 

“Other hurdles were ideological. ‘I’m not fucking fighting to defend women’s right to wear the veil, the hijab, the niqab, whatever,’ she declaimed. ‘All these young women these days who describe the veil as a signifier of their identity. I tell them they are suffering from what that presently unfashionable philosopher Karl Marx would have called false consciousness. In most of the world the veil is not a free choice. Women are forced into invisibility by men. These girls in the West making their quote- unquote free choices are legitimising the oppression of their sisters in the parts of the world where the choice is not free. That’s what I tell them, and they are very shocked. They tell me they find my remarks offensive. I tell them I feel the same way about the veil. It’s exhausting. I’ve become embittered. I just needed to stop.”

 

My Take

This is the first Salman Rushdie book that I have read and it was a pretty good, not great, experience.  Rushdie writes from a deep vein of creativity and has some unique insights into the human condition.  I also liked his use of Don Quixote quest as the theme of his book.  I myself am on a quest to read 1000 books during my 50’s and can relate to Quichotte’s quest on a certain level.

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