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514. The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Drue Emerson

Author:  Bill Bishop

Genre:  Non Fiction, History, Politics, Public Policy

384 pages, published May 7, 2008

Reading Format:   E-Book on Hoopla

Summary

The Big Sort is a social science look at the reasons why America has become so culturally and politically divided. In the past several decades, we have sorted ourselves by neighborhood, religion, political beliefs and culture to the point where many of us now live in echo chambers.

Quotes 

“As people seek out the social settings they prefer—as they choose the group that makes them feel the most comfortable—the nation grows more politically segregated—and the benefit that ought to come with having a variety of opinions is lost to the righteousness that is the special entitlement of homogeneous groups.”

 

“like-minded, homogeneous groups squelch dissent, grow more extreme in their thinking, and ignore evidence that their positions are wrong. As a result, we now live in a giant feedback loop, hearing our own thoughts about what’s right and wrong bounced back to us by the television shows we watch, the newspapers and books we read, the blogs we visit online, the sermons we hear, and the neighborhoods we live in.”

 

“Education is presumed to nurture an appreciation of diversity: the more schooling, the greater the respect for works of literature and art, different cultures, and various types of music. Certainly, well-educated Americans see themselves as worldly, nuanced, and comfortable with difference. Education also should make us curious about—even eager to hear—different political points of view. But it doesn’t. The more educated Americans become—and the richer—the less likely they are to discuss politics with those who have different points of view.”

 

“Over the last generation, however, these two moral syndromes emerged in families and then sorted into Republican and Democrat. In 1992, there was little difference between the parties on the child-rearing scale. By 2000, the differences were distinct, and by 2004 the gap had grown wide and deep. Answers to questions about child rearing, in fact, provided a better gauge of party affiliation than did income.* The parenting scale was also more closely aligned with “moral issues” than political orientation. Knowing whether a person was a nurturant parent or a strict father provided a better guide to his or her thinking about gay rights than knowing whether he or she was a liberal or a conservative, a Republican or a Democrat.”

 

“The child-rearing scale also helped explain the steady migration of the white working class away from the Democratic Party. It showed that Evangelicals were largely strict fathers. And in 2004, voters who had attended graduate school had a strict father score on the four-question survey that was only half that of voters who hadn’t graduated from high school. “Little wonder our politics today are polarized,” Hetherington and Weiler concluded. “The values of Republicans and Democrats are very much at odds. We do not agree about the most fundamental of issues.”

 

My Take

While I found The Big Sort to make some interesting points and got me thinking a bit more about our country’s polarization, it was a bit dense and at times a slog to get through.  It would have benefited from more personal anecdotes.

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513. This Is Where You Belong: The Art and Science of Loving the Place You Live

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Melody Warnick

Genre:   Non Fiction, Self Improvement

308 pages, published June 21, 2016

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Hoopla

Summary

In This Is Where You Belong, author Melody Warnick explores ways and methods to  love your new hometown.  She herself had already moved multiple times when her husband’s new job landed her in Blacksburg, Virginia.  Rather than hope this new town would be her family’s perfect fit, she decided to figure out how to fall in love with it.  From that desire and her subsequent actions sprang this book.

Quotes 

“We speak of searching for happiness, of finding contentment, as if these were locations on an atlas, actual places that we could visit if only we had the proper map and the right navigational skills.”

 

“What could I do to feel happier living here? …

  1. Walk more.
  2. Buy local.
  3. Get to know my neighbors.
  4. Do fun stuff.
  5. Explore nature.
  6. Volunteer.
  7. Eat local.
  8. Become more political.
  9. Create something new.
  10. Stay loyal through hard times.”

 

“Faced with developing a brand-new social network [after having moved cross-country to a new city], her approach was: Show up to everything; talk to everyone.”

 

“The more uprooted I felt, the more I longed to be moored in place. In a world that’s supposedly flat, loving where we live still matters, even when we move a lot. Maybe especially when we move a lot.”

 

My Take

My husband Scot and I are considering a cross-country move in a few years from Boulder, Colorado to Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  I picked up this book to see if there was any useful advice on how to adapt to a new place and build connections.  While there were a few tips that I will try to use, most of the recommendations are common sense or not germane to us.

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512. Don’t Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Nick Reader

Author:   Dave Rubin

Genre:  Non Fiction, Memoir, Politics, Public Policy

256 pages, published April 28, 2020

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

In his first book, host of the political talk show The Rubin Report, Dave Rubin writes about his political oddessey from an unquestioning left winger to a free thinking defender of liberty, i.e. a “classical liberal.”  He describes how the woke mob works to censor and shut down speech and ideas with which it disagrees.  He advocates the importance of standing up for classical liberal values and emphasizes that the future of our country depends on it.

Quotes 

“Don’t Burn This Book may not usher in world peace, balance the national debt, or improve your sex life, but while those are worthy pursuits, that wasn’t my goal. Instead, I want to champion the values that keep people safe, sane, and free.”

“Exhibit A: I’m guessing you’re no fan of socialism, which was a founding principle of the Nazi movement. The name “Nazi” is an acronym for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, which most of today’s Democrat socialists conveniently forget. Actually, that’s an understatement. These people don’t just overlook this truth, they’ve totally rewritten history on the matter. These days, Nazism gets associated with conservatism at the drop of a hat, but historically it stems from the left. Adolf Hitler? An art-loving vegetarian who seized power by wooing voters away from Germany’s Social Democrat and communist parties. Italy’s Benito Mussolini? Raised on Karl Marx’s Das Kapital before starting his career as a left-wing journalist and, later, implementing a deadly fascist regime.”

 

“Harvard University has chosen to make it harder for Asian applicants to be accepted into the university because they outperform their peers. So yes, systemic racism is real . . . at America’s top university.”

 

“I’ve reluctantly reached after years of watching my old “team” transform into a baying mob of hysterical puritans—a feral gang that sows division through identity politics and encourages societal tribes to rank themselves in a pecking order of “oppression.”

 

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” In other words, today’s progressives have now become the sexists and racists they’ve claimed to hate.”

 

“If we’re going to confront reality honestly, then nothing can be off-limits. Our power structures, our political leaders, and our religious institutions all must be fair game in a free society. There’s a fine line when jokes and mockery become cruel and pointless, but this is the line comedians have toed since the beginning of time. We must relentlessly defend their ability not only to push our limits but also to occasionally trip over the line into sacrilege and controversy.”

 

“Researchers at the University of Missouri had found a “gender equality paradox” when they studied 475,000 teenagers across the globe. They noted that hyperegalitarian countries such as Finland, Norway, and Sweden had a smaller percentage of female STEM graduates than countries such as Albania and Algeria, which are considered less advanced”

 

“Worse still, they implement all of these things with brute force: violence, censorship, character assassination, smear campaigns, doxing, trolling, deplatforming, and online witch hunts. Tricks that are deliberately designed to leave people down and out. Ideally, jobless and without the resources to push back.”

 

“This is because outward virtue signaling is separate from being a considerate, moral person. Whereas the latter is central for common decency (and is something we should all strive for), the former is just a display of faux morality. One that’s designed to offer protection from the mob ever turning on them. It’s a protection racket—a form of insurance. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.”

 

“The black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and discrimination, began rapidly disintegrating in the liberal welfare state that subsidized unwed pregnancy and changed welfare from an emergency rescue to a way of life.”

 

“Suddenly, out of nowhere, rationalizing Islamic terror had become a progressive position. According to progressives, it was another 2-D argument: brown people = good, white people = bad.”

 

“Free-thinking is the new counterculture, which makes it cutting-edge and subversive, like punk rock or hip-hop in the early 1980s.”

 

“It’s no coincidence that social justice warriors are frequently out of shape, poorly dressed, and have messy hair, along with their overall disheveled appearance. If some dress for success, they dress for failure.”

 

“I’m black—not African American. That’s a term I don’t like. I was born in America and I’ve never been to Africa. It’s an absurd term. A term that Jesse Jackson crammed down the throats of the media. It’s ridiculous.”

 

“Elder was right and he damn well knew it. “The biggest burden that black people have is being raised without fathers,” he declared. “A black kid raised without a dad is five times more likely to be poor and commit crime, nine times more likely to drop out of school, and twenty times more likely to end up in jail. When I hear people tell me about systemic racism or unconscious racism I always say ‘give me an example.’ And almost nobody can do it. I give the facts . . . and [according to left-wingers] the facts are racist.”

 

“As he noted in The Daily Signal, children from fatherless homes are likelier to drop out of high school, die by suicide, have behavioral disorders, join gangs, commit crimes, and end up in prison. They are also more likely to live in poverty-stricken households. Conversely, nuclear families—whether black or white—are richer in all ways.”

 

 “Thomas Sowell nailed it when he said: “No government of the left has done as much for the poor as capitalism has. Even when it comes to the redistribution of income, the left talks the talk but the free market walks the walk.”

 

“But instead of contributing to the conversation like a grown-up, he basically shouted Harris and Maher down and called them racists, which has now become a standard debating tactic for most progressives.”

 

 “I’m a free-speech absolutist. Yes, even when it comes to opinions I find abhorrent. In fact, specifically when it comes to those opinions. The only exceptions to this rule have already been specified by the Supreme Court of the United States: calling for direct violence against a person or specific group, yelling “fire” in a crowded theater (with the intent to incite iminent lawless action), and defaming somebody through libel or slander. Everything else should get a free pass, every single time. No exceptions, ever.”

 

“The motto is no longer ‘I think therefore I am.’ It’s not even ‘I’m a victim therefore I am.’ It’s now, ‘I self-flagellate therefore I am,’” he says. “It’s almost a theater of the absurd. The currency is victimhood by proxy. Whoever can grovel the most is the currency of the radical left.” Don’t be like them. Be better.”

 

“For her, it’s profoundly absurd that people—specifically, fellow Americans . . . many of them educated, middle-class millennials who’ve never experienced anything like real hardship—can hate a country that frequently does so much good, both domestically and internationally.”

 

My Take

My son Nick gave me Don’t Burn This Book as a birthday gift.  I had vaguely heard of Dave Rubin before reading it, but really didn’t know anything about him.  After whipping through it in two days, I have to say that I am now a fan.  Rubin has an engaging, straightforward, humorous style that, along with spot-on content for our troubled times, made this book a pleasure to read.  I wholeheartedly agree with his robust defense of free speech and his analysis of other issues confronting our country.  I look forward to checking out The Rubin Report.

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511. You’re Not Enough (and That’s Ok): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Nick Reader

Author:   Alice Beth Stuckey

Genre:  Non Fiction, Memoir, Christian, Self Improvement

228 pages, published August 11, 2020

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

In You’re Not Enough, mother, Christian, and conservative thought leader Alice Beth Stuckey questions the narrative that to be happy, fulfilled and successful all you need to do is love yourself.  She believes that down this path of self love lies disappointment and disillusionment.  Instead, she advocates taking the focus off of yourself and putting it on others and Jesus Christ.

Quotes 

“If the self is the source of our depression or despair or insecurity or fear, it can’t also be the source of our ultimate fulfillment.”

 

 “This is an argument I made in a podcast episode titled “Three Myths Christian Women Believe”. The first myth was that you are enough. My counter was this: you’re not enough, you’ll never be enough, and that’s okay, because God is.”

 

“But if we were really enough as is, we wouldn’t have to try so hard to convince ourselves it’s true.”

 

 “When we follow Christ, we are never at risk of “losing ourselves,” because our identity is eternally found in him.”

 “The yoke of the god of self is difficult and its burden heavy, but God’s yoke is easy and his burden light. What a relief to know we don’t have to expend our precious energy serving ourselves. We make terrible, unworthy gods.”

 

“Without the Bible as our basis for justice, we get a system based on the only tool we have without a supreme moral Lawgiver: the self.”

 

“Because the self can’t be both the problem and the solution.”

 

“The self isn’t enough—period. The answer to the purposelessness and hollowness we feel is found not in us but outside of us. The solutions to our problems and pain aren’t found in self-love, but in God’s love.”

 

“While self-love depletes, God’s love for us doesn’t. He showed us His love by sending Jesus to die for our sins so that we could be forgiven and live forever with Him. Self-love is superficial and temporary. God’s love is profound and eternal.”

 

My Take

I was given You’re Not Enough by my son Nick as a birthday gift.  It was my first encounter with the conservative, Christian personality Alice Beth Stuckey.  I found her book to be a quick read with an important idea at its core.  It reconfirmed to me how foolish it is to base your self worth on how you look, what you weigh, how much you achieve, or any other temporal basis.  Worth a read.

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510. Shame: How America’s Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Shelby Steele

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

208 pages, published February 24, 2015

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

In Shame, Shelby Steele (a Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the grandson of a slave) writes about the roots of the polarization that we are experiencing today in the United States.  Amid the fighting and mistrust, we have squandered the promise of the 1960s when the nation came together to fight for equality and universal justice.  Shelby Steele posits that this impasse can be traced back to the 60’s when we uncovered and dismantled our national hypocrisies of racism, sexism, and militarism which caused liberals to internalize the idea that there was something inauthentic, if not evil, in the America character. Since then, liberalism has been wholly concerned with redeeming modern American from the sins of the past, and has derived its political legitimacy from the premise of a morally bankrupt America. The result has been a half-century of well-intentioned but ineffective social programs including Affirmative Action which have not only failed but caused harm to the minorities they were designed to help.  Steele argues that only by reviving our founding principles of individual freedom and merit-based competition can the troubling legacy of American history be redeemed, and only through freedom can we ever hope to reach equality.

Quotes 

“Poetic truth—this assertion of a broad characteristic “truth” that invalidates actual truth—is contemporary liberalism’s greatest source of power. It is also liberalism’s most fundamental corruption.”

 

“there also comes a time when he must stop thinking of himself as a victim by acknowledging that—existentially—his fate is always in his own hands.”

 

“It was the first truly profound strategic mistake we made in our long struggle for complete equality. It made us a “contingent people” whose fate depended on what others did for us.”

 

 “despite all he had endured as a black in the South in the first half of the twentieth century, he taught the boys that America was rich in opportunities for blacks if they were willing to work.”

 

“The problem is that this “place” is in the past. And it does no good to adapt to a past that is only an echo now. There is no refuge there.”

 

“conservatives suddenly saw that they needed to contest liberalism’s capture of the political and cultural establishment.”

 

My Take

After reading two books written by Shelby Steele (White Guilt and Shame), I consider him to be one of the most original and compelling thinkers of the conservative movement.  He writes eloquently about the brutal racism his father experienced and the less than brutal, but still direct and odious, racism that he experienced as a young man.  In Shame, he explores how liberalism since the 1960’s has sought to capitalize on America’s shameful past of racism, sexism, and less than total fealty to the equality promises contained in our founding documents.  However, rather than elevate blacks, the liberal policies of welfare, preferences and affirmative action have hobbled them instead by leading them to believe that they are inferior to whites and need special dispensations to succeed.  Steele argues that only when we embrace a truly colorblind society will blacks rise to meet the challenges that freedom bestows on them.

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509. Tax-Free Wealth, 2nd Edition: How to Build Massive Wealth by Permanently Lowering Your Taxes

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Tom Wheelwright

Genre:  Non Fiction, Business, Self Improvement

282 pages, published April 2, 2019

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

Tax-Free Wealth is about tax planning concepts and how to use tax laws to your benefit. Author Tom Wheelwright explains how the tax laws work and how they are designed to reduce you taxes, not to increase them, as long as you do things the government wants you to like start a business or own real estate.

Quotes 

“The hardest thing in the world to understand is income taxes. – Albert Einstein”

“TAX TIP: Put your family to work. Make your business a family business. Then when you travel for business, your family’s travel is deductible. And you can shift income from your higher tax bracket to their lower tax bracket. This creates permanent tax savings.”

 

My Take

As an inveterate optimizer, I am always looking for ways to lower our taxes.  However, since my husband and I have both recently retired, a lot of this book (which is geared toward business owners) is not applicable to us.  But I did pick up some useful tips on real estate depreciation that I plan to use when we buy a beach house rental in the next few years.

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508. One Vote Away: How a Single Supreme Court Seat Can Change History

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Ted Cruz

Genre:  Non Fiction, Law, Public Policy, Politics, Memoir

271 pages, published September 29, 2020

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

In One Vote Away, Senator (and former Supreme Court litigator as Texas Solicitor General) Ted Cruz writes about seminal Constitutional law cases before the Supreme Court and how the decision was often rendered by a single vote.  His detailed discussion includes cases impacting school choice, abortion rights, the right to bear arms, religious liberty, state and national sovereignty, freedom of speech, capital punishment, the rights of criminal defendants, and the criteria Republicans should use when selecting judges.

Quotes 

“The Supreme Court is supposed to protect our constitutional rights. It is also charged with securing our Constitution’s defining structural features, federalism and the separation of powers. Both doctrines protect Liberty by dividing power, by establishing checks and balances to prevent any branch of government from becoming too powerful…Over the past six decades, the Court has arrogated to itself far too much power– well beyond what it is entitled to under the Constitution. It has seized this power at the expense of Congress, the executive branch, the states, and We the People alike.

 

“An individual’s life prospects increase dramatically with each successfully completed phase of education.”

 

“Education is antecedent to most of our other public policy concerns. From poverty to crime to healthcare to substance abuse, if kids don’t get an education, we know that those other challenges are far more likely to follow; conversely, if children do get an excellent education, each of those problems is much more likely to be overcome. It is a damning stain on America’s conscience that a child’s chances of life success are so heavily influenced by– perhaps dictated by– the zip code in which he or she is raised. It is a profound civil rights crisis… the urgent need to secure access to a quality education– and access to educational choice, in particular– for every young American… In a just world, teachers unions would enthusiastically support school choice…But the union bosses who lead the teachers unions have decided that school choice is an existential threat to their power, and so they demand partisan fealty above all.

 

“There is no moral and just government that does not respect the religious liberty protections of its people. True political liberty, free speech, social stability,and human flourishing all depend upon a robust and durable protection, under the rule of law, of our fundamental right to choose our faith. And, on the flip side, efforts to undermine religious liberty and to persecute religious minorities are a telltale sign of tyrannical government.”

 

“In the Citizens United fight for free speech rights, “ While Senate Democrats sought to empower Congress to restrict individual citizens’ political speech rights, they did not want to apply that same treatment to giant media corporations like CNN and the New York Times…Citizens United was a conservative nonprofit corporation that made a movie critical of Hillary Clinton. And Senate Democrats now wanted to give the federal government the constitutional authority to punish anyone for criticizing Hillary Clinton or any other political candidate.”

 

“I believe in capital punishment. I believe in carrying out justice for those who commit unspeakable crimes, retribution for those who have been horribly victimized, and strong deterrence for the community to prevent horrific crime from happening again.”

 

“The way the First Step Act passed, through policy, legal, and constitutional arguments about what is right, appropriate, and just, through a consideration of facts and data and evidence about what is most effective in deterring crime and preventing recidivism– all of it was done through the legislative process That is how our system is supposed to work. Elected legislatures exist to consider and to weigh policy arguments and to reflect the wishes and values of the voters who elected them. When unelected judges seize issues of the criminal law and mandate that violent criminals receive lesser punishments, they are going against both the constitutional structure and their responsibility as judges.”

 

“If history teaches anything, it is that when people tell you they want to kill you, believe them. Or, at a minimum, don’t give them hundreds of billions of dollars to help them accomplish their objective. But, for whatever reason, Obama desperately wanted a deal with Iran.”

“Republicans have, historically speaking, been absolutely terrible at judicial nominations–…Republicans at best bat .500. Once confirmed as justices, at most, half of Republicans’ Supreme Court nominations actually behave as we hoped they might behave in terms of remaining faithful to their oath of office and the Constitution…The most important criteria that I believe should be applied is whether that individual (1) has a demonstrated proven record of being faithful to the Constitution and (2) has endured pounding criticism– has paid a price for holding that line.

 

My Take

One Vote Away was a quick and fascinating read.  I especially enjoyed all of the behind the scenes details that Cruz provides.  Rising from poverty, he has had quite the life.   However, I am an attorney and a Republican so I am the choir that Ted Cruz is preaching to.  Liberals may not like this book too much.

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507. The Best of Me

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Art Drake

Author:    David Sedaris

Genre:  Non Fiction, Humor, Memoir, Essays, Short Stories

387 pages, published November 3, 2020

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

The Best of Me is retrospective compilation of Humorist David Sedaris’ stories and essays from the past twenty-five years.

Quotes 

“A Dutch parent has a decidedly hairier story to relate, telling his children, “Listen, you might want to pack a few of your things together before going to bed. The former bishop of Turkey will be coming tonight along with six to eight black men. They might put some candy in your shoes, they might stuff you into a sack and take you to Spain, or they might just pretend to kick you. We don’t know for sure, but we want you to be prepared.”

 

“If you read an essay in Esquire and don’t like it, there could be something wrong with the essay. If it’s in The New Yorker, on the other hand, and you don’t like it, there’s something wrong with you.”

 

“It’s pathetic how much significance I attach to the Times puzzle, which is easy on Monday and gets progressively harder as the week advances. I’ll spend fourteen hours finishing the Friday, and then I’ll wave it in someone’s face and demand that he acknowledge my superior intelligence. I think it means that I’m smarter than the next guy, but all it really means is that I don’t have a life.”

 

“Real love amounts to withholding the truth, even when you’re offered the perfect opportunity to hurt someone’s feelings”

 

“If you read someone else’s diary, you get what you deserve.”

 

“On Undecided Voter​s: “To put them in perspective, I think​ of being​ on an airplane.​ The flight attendant comes​ down the aisle​ with her food cart and, eventually,​ parks​ it beside my seat.​ “Can I inter​est you in the chick​en?​” she asks.​ “Or would​ you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broke​n glass​ in it?”  To be undecided in this elect​ion is to pause​ for a moment and then ask how the chick​en is cooked.”

 

“I said that Santa no longer traffics in coal. Instead, if you’re bad he comes to your house and steals things.”

 

“Asking for candy on Halloween was called trick-or-treating, but asking for candy on November first was called begging, and it made people uncomfortable.”

 

“I often see people on the streets dressed as objects and handing out leaflets. I tend to avoid leaflets but it breaks my heart to see a grown man dressed as a taco. So, if there is a costume involved, I tend not only to accept the leaflet, but to accept it graciously, saying, “Thank you so much,” and thinking, You poor, pathetic son of a bitch. I don’t know what you have but I hope I never catch it.”

 

“On my fifth trip to France I limited myself to the words and phrases that people actually use. From the dog owners I learned “Lie down,” “Shut up,” and “Who shit on this carpet?” The couple across the road taught me to ask questions correctly, and the grocer taught me to count. Things began to come together, and I went from speaking like an evil baby to speaking like a hillbilly. “Is thems the thoughts of cows?” I’d ask the butcher, pointing to the calves’ brains displayed in the front window. “I want me some lamb chop with handles on ’em.”

 

“When a hurricane damaged my father’s house, my brother rushed over with a gas grill, three coolers of beer, and an enormous Fuck-It Bucket – a plastic pail filled with jawbreakers and bite-size candy bars. (“When shit brings you down, just say ‘fuck it,’ and eat yourself some motherfucking candy.”

 

“Boys who spent their weekends making banana nut muffins did not, as a rule, excel in the art of hand-to-hand combat.”

 

 “Hugh consoled me, saying, “Don’t let it get to you. There are plenty of things you’re good at.”

 

When asked for some examples, he listed vacuuming and naming stuffed animals. He says he can probably come up with a few more, but he’ll need some time to think.”

 

“At the end of a miserable day, instead of grieving my virtual nothing, I can always look at my loaded wastepaper basket and tell myself that if I failed, at least I took a few trees down with me.”

“I find it ridiculous to assign a gender to an inanimate object incapable of disrobing and making an occasional fool of itself. Why refer to lady crack pipe or good sir dishrag when these things could never live up to all that their sex implied?”

 

My Take

I have long been a fan of writer and humorist David Sedaris.  I was introduced to him back in the mid-90s when my husband Scot and I saw him read his essay The Santaland Diaries where he recounts with side splitting humor his time working as an elf at a major department store in New York.  If you haven’t read it, do so immediately.  The Best of Me, a collection of his best essays and stories, doesn’t include this classic gem which is a real shame.  I’ve read most of Sedaris’ books, including several reviewed on this website (Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls  and Calypso) and found them highly entertaining.  While there are many good choices included in The Best of Me, there are unfortunately some great essays and stories that were omitted.

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506. The Kindness of Strangers: How a Selfish Ape Invented a New Moral Code

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:    Michael McCullough

Genre:  Non Fiction, Psychology, Sociology, Public Policy

368 pages, published May 12, 2020

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

In The Kindness of Strangers, psychologist Michael McCullough explores the issue of why human beings are altruistic.  He first looks at this question through an evolutionary lens and then traces the development of increasing altruism and help to our fellow man throughout human history.

Quotes 

“Natural selection is a penny pincher.  People tend to actively avoid feeling empathy for strangers.”

 

“Reason is the slave of the passions.” David Hume

 

 “Modern humans’ concern for the welfare of perfect strangers has no analog in the rest of the animal kingdom or even in our own history as a species. It’s a true one-off.”

 

“Our stone-age ancestors didn’t care very much at all about the well-being of true strangers.”

 

“The 21st-century explosion of social media revolutionized philanthropy, allowing instant appeals and massive responses from “bathrobe humanitarians” sitting at their computers.”

 

My Take

The Kindness of Strangers and its exploration of the reasons why human beings are altruistic and seek to help their fellow man is a fascinating read.  I was especially interested in the section discussing how altruism is the result of natural selection. Cooperation and tamping down selfish instincts often led to greater survivability.  Worth a look.

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504. The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:    Ainissa Ramirez

Genre:   Non Fiction, Science, History

328 pages, published April 7, 2020

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

In The Alchemy of Us, scientist Ainissa Ramirez explores a variety of different materials (e.g. steel, carbon, silicon, glass, copper) and the impact that inventions using those materials have had on human beings.  Each chapter contains a story about a particular invention, including the creation of steel, Edison’s invention of the light bulb and the phonograph, the invention of the telegraph and telephone, and the development of the hard drive.  Rameriz then describes how these inventions have shaped our world.  For example, the invention of the railroad (after steel was created) helped commercialize Christmas.  The necessary brevity of the telegram influenced Hemingway’s writing style.

Quotes 

“Scientists fail all the time. We just brand it differently. We call it data.”

 

“Standardized testing teaches skills that are counter to skills needed for the future, such as curiosity, problem solving, and having a healthy relationship with failure.”

 

“Failure is not falling down but refusing to get up.”

 

My Take

The Alchemy of Us meets one of my tests of a non fiction book in that I learned something new.  Actually, I learned a lot new and was given a lot of food for thought in this easily readable and engaging book.

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