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460. Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Vivek Murthy

Genre:   Non Fiction, Health, Psychology, Self Improvement, Public Policy

352 pages, published April 28, 2020

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

In Together, former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy argues that loneliness is at the root of our current mental health and drug abuse crisis’s.  In response, he advocates social and community connection as a cure for loneliness.

Quotes 

“Like thousands of others, we survived the storm and the many dark days that followed because of the kindness of strangers who brought food, water, and comfort’.”

 

“To be real is to be vulnerable.”

 

“Intimate, or emotional, loneliness is the longing for a close confidante or intimate partner—someone with whom you share a deep mutual bond of affection and trust. Relational, or social, loneliness is the yearning for quality friendships and social companionship and support. Collective loneliness is the hunger for a network or community of people who share your sense of purpose and interests. These three dimensions together reflect the full range of high-quality social connections that humans need in order to thrive. The lack of relationships in any of these dimensions can make us lonely, which helps to explain why we may have a supportive marriage yet still feel lonely for friends and community.”

 

“Solitude, paradoxically, protects against loneliness.”

 

“What often matters is not the quantity or frequency of social contact but the quality of our connections and how we feel about them.”

 

“loneliness overlaps with and is often inherited with anxiety disorders or depression.”

 

“Loneliness is the subjective feeling that you’re lacking the social connections you need. It can feel like being stranded, abandoned, or cut off from the people with whom you belong—even if you’re surrounded by other people. What’s missing when you’re lonely is the feeling of closeness, trust, and the affection of genuine friends, loved ones, and community.”

 

“we need to more deeply appreciate the relationship between loneliness, social connection, and physical and emotional health.”

 

“Most of us are interacting with lonely people all the time, even if we don’t realize it.”

 

“We all need to know that we matter and that we are loved.”

 

“Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family. Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one. You need one because you are human.”

 

“John Cacioppo helped us understand an additional way loneliness causes mental and physical exhaustion: it takes a toll on the quality of sleep. When we’re profoundly lonely, we tend to sleep lightly and rouse often, just as our ancestors did to prevent being overtaken by wolves or enemies.”

 

“When we become chronically lonely, most of us are inclined to withdraw, whether we mean to or not.”

 

My Take

I enjoyed reading Together and wholeheartedly agree with its message.  As illustrated in real time by the Covid pandemic, human beings are social creatures and we suffer when our opportunities for social interaction are diminished.

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458. White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Scot Reader

Author:   Shelby Steele

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

208 pages, published May 29, 2007

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

In 1955 the killers of Emmett Till, a black Mississippi youth, were acquitted because they were white. Forty years later, despite the strong DNA evidence against him, accused murderer O. J. Simpson went free after his attorney portrayed him as a victim of racism. The age of white supremacy has given way to an age of “white guilt” and neither has been good for black Americans.  In this deeply thought analysis and personal recollections, acclaimed scholar Shelby Steele examines how liberal in the United States has undermined the black community by absolving them of personal responsibility thereby debilitating their ability to lift themselves up as equal members of American society.

Quotes 

“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.”

“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.”

 

“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.”

 

“One of the delights of Marxian-tinged ideas for the young is the unearned sense of superiority they grant.”

 

My Take

I found White Guilt to be a compelling read, especially in light of the “moment” our country is having with protests and rioting.  Shelby Steele offers a counter narrative to the one projected in the media and advanced by the woke Left, i.e. that America is irredeemably racist and it is impossible for blacks to get ahead in the face of so much discrimination.  Rather than accept this defeatism, Steele posits that the only way forward for black Americans is to embrace a culture of personal responsibility and empowerment.  The guilt of whites has made that harder to achieve as they have low expectations of blacks and seek to make allowances for them that actually serve to depress their initiative.  A “must read” for anyone interested in race relations.

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455. The Unwinding of the Miracle: A Memoir of Life, Death, and Everything That Comes After

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Frank and Lisanne

Author:   Julie Yip-Williams

Genre:   Non Fiction, Memoir, Health

315 pages, published January 8, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

In her late 30’s, young mother and accomplished attorney Julie Yip Williams receives a terminal diagnosis of colon cancer.  In a very personal blog, she chronicled her story.  She wrote about her early childhood in Vietnam where her grandmother wanted her euthanized because she was born legally blind, her emigration to the United States where her sight was restored, her time at Williams and Harvard Law School and her incredible love for her husband and two girls.  She also writes about forgiveness and the importance of living life to the fullest while learning to accept death.

Quotes 

“Walk through the fire and you will emerge on the other end, whole and stronger. I promise. You will ultimately find truth and beauty and wisdom and peace. You will understand that nothing lasts forever, not pain, or joy. You will understand that joy cannot exist without sadness. Relief cannot exist without pain. Compassion cannot exist without cruelty. Courage cannot exist without fear. Hope cannot exist without despair. Wisdom cannot exist without suffering. Gratitude cannot exist without deprivation. Paradoxes abound in this life. Living is an exercise in navigating within them.”

 

“Live while you’re living, friends.”

 

“Believe what you need to believe in order to find comfort and peace with the inevitable fate that is common to every living thing on this planet. Death awaits us all; one can choose to run in fear from it or one can face it head-on with thoughtfulness, and from that thoughtfulness peace and serenity.”

 

“I think God is beyond what my little, limited, human brain can fathom. But, perhaps, something my limitless soul can just being to grasp in my moments of utmost clarity.”

 

“Dying has taught me a great deal about living—about facing hard truths consciously, about embracing the suffering as well as the joy.”

 

“Live a life worth living. Live thoroughly and completely, thoughtfully, gratefully, courageously, and wisely. Live!”

 

“Life is not fair. You would be foolish to expect fairness, at least when it comes to matters of life and death, matters outside the scope of the law, matters that cannot be engineered or manipulated by human effort, matters that are distinctly the domain of God or luck or fate or some other unknowable, incomprehensible force.”

 

“It is in the acceptance of truth that real wisdom and peace come. It is in the acceptance of truth that real living begins. Conversely, avoidance of truth is the denial of life.”

 

“The worth of a person’s life lies not in the number of years lived; rather it rests on how well that person has absorbed the lessons of that life, how well that person has come to understand and distill the multiple, messy aspects of the human experience.”

 

“Well, I’m here to play the game, and I choose not to live or die by what the odds-makers say. I choose not to put faith in percentages that were assembled by some anonymous researcher looking at a bunch of impersonal data points. Instead, I choose to put faith in me, in my body, mind, and spirit. In those parts of me that are already so practiced in the art of defying the odds.”

 

“For me, raging and raging like a wild, irrational beast, denying one’s own mortality, clinging to delusion and false hopes, pursuing treatment at the cost of living in the moment, sacrificing one’s quality of life for the sake of quantity, none of this is graceful or dignified, and all of it denies us our contemplative and evolved humanity; such acts do not cultivate an invincible spirit; such acts are not testaments to inner strength and fortitude. For me, true inner strength lies in facing death with serenity, in recognizing that death is not the enemy but simply an inevitable part of life.”

 

“I believe, as I have always believed, that in honesty — a brutal yet kind and thoughtful honesty — we ultimately find not vulnerability, shame, and disgrace, but liberation, healing, and wholeness.”

 

“So much of life’s hardship becomes more bearable when you are able to build and lean on a network of loyalty, support, and love, and gather around you people…who will stand by you and help you. But the thing is you have to let them in; you have to let them see the heartache, pain, and vulnerability, and not cloak those things in a shameful darkness,

and then you have to let those people who care about you help you.”

 

“These are the times in life when we feel almost more than we are capable of feeling. These are the moments when—paradoxically, as we are closest to death—we are most painfully and vividly alive.”

 

“Similarly, there comes a time when one must recognize the futility of continuing the personal physical fight against cancer, when chemo is no longer a desirable option, when one should begin the process of saying goodbye and understand that death is not the enemy, but merely the next part of life. Determining that time is a deliberation that each of us must make with her own heart and soul. This is what Kathryn has done; she respects the force of nature acting on her body and has no delusions about somehow still overcoming; she made the cogent decision to evacuate ahead of the hurricane. To me, she has won her war against cancer so valiantly fought in the nonphysical realm.”

 

My Take

I was really moved by this beautifully written book.  Julie Yip Williams writes with such authenticity, love, and compassion about facing her own death with dignity, courage and acceptance.  She also is such a strong advocate for living your life to the fullest, taking risks, not being ruled by fear, and loving with the fullest heart your can.  Sage advice well taken.

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444. Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Chris Voss

Genre:   Non Fiction, Psychology, Self Improvement, Business

274 pages, published May 17, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Hoopla

Summary

Chris Voss, a former hostage negotiator for the FBI, explains his approach to negotiating.  He takes you inside the world of high-stakes negotiations, discussing the skills that helped him to save lives and applies them to a variety of real life situations.

Quotes 

“He who has learned to disagree without being disagreeable has discovered the most valuable secret of negotiation.”

 

“Negotiate in their world. Persuasion is not about how bright or smooth or forceful you are. It’s about the other party convincing themselves that the solution you want is their own idea. So don’t beat them with logic or brute force. Ask them questions that open paths to your goals. It’s not about you.”

 

“If you approach a negotiation thinking the other guy thinks like you, you are wrong. That’s not empathy, that’s a projection.”

 

“The fastest and most efficient means of establishing a quick working relationship is to acknowledge the negative and diffuse it.”

 

“The positive/playful voice: Should be your default voice. It’s the voice of an easygoing, good-natured person. Your attitude is light and encouraging. The key here is to relax and smile while you’re talking.”

 

“Though the intensity may differ from person to person, you can be sure that everyone you meet is driven by two primal urges: the need to feel safe and secure, and the need to feel in control. If you satisfy those drives, you’re in the door.”

 

“Another simple rule is, when you are verbally assaulted, do not counterattack. Instead, disarm your counterpart by asking a calibrated question.”

 

“Research shows that the best way to deal with negativity is to observe it, without reaction and without judgment. Then consciously label each negative feeling and replace it with positive, compassionate, and solution-based thoughts.”

 

“Psychotherapy research shows that when individuals feel listened to, they tend to listen to themselves more carefully and to openly evaluate and clarify their own thoughts and feelings.”

 

“The beauty of empathy is that it doesn’t demand that you agree with the other person’s ideas.”

 

“ Identify your counterpart’s negotiating style. Once you know whether they are Accommodator, Assertive, or Analyst, you’ll know the correct way to approach them.   Prepare, prepare, prepare. When the pressure is on, you don’t rise to the occasion; you fall to your highest level of preparation. So design an ambitious but legitimate goal and then game out the labels, calibrated questions, and responses you’ll use to get there. That way, once you’re at the bargaining table, you won’t have to wing it.  Get ready to take a punch. Kick-ass negotiators usually lead with an extreme anchor to knock you off your game. If you’re not ready, you’ll flee to your maximum without a fight. So prepare your dodging tactics to avoid getting sucked into the compromise trap.   Set boundaries, and learn to take a punch or punch back, without anger. The guy across the table is not the problem; the situation is.  Prepare an Ackerman plan. Before you head into the weeds of bargaining, you’ll need a plan of extreme anchor, calibrated questions, and well-defined offers. Remember: 65, 85, 95, 100 percent. Decreasing raises and ending on nonround numbers will get your counterpart to believe that he’s squeezing you for all you’re worth when you’re really getting to the number you want.”

 

“What does a good babysitter sell, really? It’s not child care exactly, but a relaxed evening. A furnace salesperson? Cozy rooms for family time. A locksmith? A feeling of security. Know the emotional drivers and you can frame the benefits of any deal in language that will resonate.”

 

“Negotiation is not an act of battle; it’s a process of discovery. The goal is to uncover as much information as possible.”

 

“It all starts with the universally applicable premise that people want to be understood and accepted. Listening is the cheapest, yet most effective concession we can make to get there. By listening intensely, a negotiator demonstrates empathy and shows a sincere desire to better understand what the other side is experiencing.”

 

“The last rule of labeling is silence. Once you’ve thrown out a label, be quiet and listen.”

 

“First, let’s talk a little human psychology. In basic terms, people’s emotions have two levels: the “presenting” behavior is the part above the surface you can see and hear; beneath, the “underlying” feeling is what motivates the behavior. Imagine a grandfather who’s grumbly at a family holiday dinner: the presenting behavior is that he’s cranky, but the underlying emotion is a sad sense of loneliness from his family never seeing him. What good negotiators do when labeling is address those underlying emotions. Labeling negatives diffuses them (or defuses them, in extreme cases); labeling positives reinforces them.”

 

“This really juices their self-esteem. Researchers have found that people getting concessions often feel better about the bargaining process than those who are given a single firm, “fair” offer. In fact, they feel better even when they end up paying more—or receiving less—than they otherwise might.”

 

“A good negotiator prepares, going in, to be ready for possible surprises; a great negotiator aims to use her skills to reveal the surprises she is certain to find. Don’t commit to assumptions; instead, view them as hypotheses and use the negotiation to test them rigorously. People who view negotiation as a battle of arguments become overwhelmed by the voices in their head. Negotiation is not an act of battle; it’s a process of discovery. The goal is to uncover as much information as possible. To quiet the voices in your head, make your sole and all-encompassing focus the other person and what they have to say. Slow. It. Down. Going too fast is one of the mistakes all negotiators are prone to making. If we’re too much in a hurry, people can feel as if they’re not being heard. You risk undermining the rapport and trust you’ve built. Put a smile on your face. When people are in a positive frame of mind, they think more quickly, and are more likely to collaborate and problem-solve (instead of fight and resist). Positivity creates mental agility in both you and your counterpart.”

 

“The Rule of Three is simply getting the other guy to agree to the same thing three times in the same conversation. It’s tripling the strength of whatever dynamic you’re trying to drill into at the moment. In doing so, it uncovers problems before they happen. It’s really hard to repeatedly lie or fake conviction.”

 

“Mirrors work magic. Repeat the last three words (or the critical one to three words) of what someone has just said. We fear what’s different and are drawn to what’s similar. Mirroring is the art of insinuating similarity, which facilitates bonding. Use mirrors to encourage the other side to empathize and bond with you, keep people talking, buy your side time to regroup, and encourage your counterparts to reveal their strategy.”

 

“By repeating back what people say, you trigger this mirroring instinct and your counterpart will inevitably elaborate on what was just said and sustain the process of connecting.”

 

“Creating unconditional positive regard opens the door to changing thoughts and behaviors. Humans have an innate urge toward socially constructive behavior. The more a person feels understood, and positively affirmed in that understanding, the more likely that urge for constructive behavior will take hold. “That’s right” is better than “yes.” Strive for it. Reaching “that’s right” in a negotiation creates breakthroughs. Use a summary to trigger a “that’s right.” The building blocks of a good summary are a label combined with paraphrasing. Identify, rearticulate, and emotionally affirm.”

 

My Take

I had previously read Getting to Yes: Negotiating an Agreement Without Giving In, another book on negotiating, but prefer the ideas in Never Split the Difference.  Author Chris Voss provides lots of detailed instructions and ideas on how to get the result you want in any negotiation.

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442. Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Darla Scheuth and Sue Deans

Author:   Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund

Genre:   Non Fiction, Science, Psychology, Economics, History, Public Policy

342 pages, published January 25, 2018

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Factfulness is an exploration of how the world is doing so much better than people think.  When asked simple questions such as why the world’s population is increasing, how many young women go to school, or how many people live in poverty, most people get the answers wrong by a large order of magnitude regardless of their education, experience or expertise.  Written by Professor of International Health Hans Rosling, along with his two long-time collaborators Anna and Ola, methodically demonstrates how the world is doing much better than we might think.

Quotes 

“There’s no room for facts when our minds are occupied by fear.”

 

“Look for causes, not villains.”

 

“human beings have a strong dramatic instinct toward binary thinking, a basic urge to divide things into two distinct groups, with nothing but an empty gap in between. We love to dichotomize. Good versus bad. Heroes versus villains. My country versus the rest. Dividing the world into two distinct sides is simple and intuitive, and also dramatic because it implies conflict, and we do it without thinking, all the time.”

 

“Forming your worldview by relying on the media would be like forming your view about me by looking only at a picture of my foot.”

 

“Think about the world. War, violence, natural disasters, man-made disasters, corruption. Things are bad, and it feels like they are getting worse, right? The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer; and the number of poor just keeps increasing; and we will soon run out of resources unless we do something drastic. At least that’s the picture that most Westerners see in the media and carry around in their heads. I call it the overdramatic worldview. It’s stressful and misleading. In fact, the vast majority of the world’s population lives somewhere in the middle of the income scale. Perhaps they are not what we think of as middle class, but they are not living in extreme poverty. Their girls go to school, their children get vaccinated, they live in two-child families, and they want to go abroad on holiday, not as refugees. Step-by-step, year-by-year, the world is improving. Not on every single measure every single year, but as a rule. Though the world faces huge challenges, we have made tremendous progress. This is the fact-based worldview.”

 

“here’s the paradox: the image of a dangerous world has never been broadcast more effectively than it is now, while the world has never been less violent and more safe.”

 

“When things are getting better we often don’t hear about them. This gives us a systematically too-negative impression of the world around us, which is very stressful.”

 

“People often call me an optimist, because I show them the enormous progress they didn’t know about. That makes me angry. I’m not an optimist. That makes me sound naive. I’m a very serious “possibilist”. That’s something I made up. It means someone who neither hopes without reason, nor fears without reason, someone who constantly resists the overdramatic worldview. As a possibilist, I see all this progress, and it fills me with conviction and hope that further progress is possible. This is not optimistic. It is having a clear and reasonable idea about how things are. It is having a worldview that is constructive and useful.”

 

“Being intelligent—being good with numbers, or being well educated, or even winning a Nobel Prize—is not a shortcut to global factual knowledge. Experts are experts only within their field.”

 

“The macho values that are found today in many Asian and African countries, these are not Asian values, or African values. They are not Muslim values. They are not Eastern values. They are patriarchal values like those found in Sweden only 60 years ago, and with social and economic progress they will vanish, just as they did in Sweden. They are not unchangeable.”

 

“The goal of higher income is not just bigger piles of money. The goal of longer lives is not just extra time. The ultimate goal is to have the freedom to do what we want”

 

“Last year, 4.2 million babies died. That is the most recent number reported by UNICEF of deaths before the age of one, worldwide. We often see lonely and emotionally charged numbers like this in the news or in the materials of activist groups or organizations. They produce a reaction. Who can even imagine 4.2 million dead babies? It is so terrible, and even worse when we know that almost all died from easily preventable diseases. And how can anyone argue that 4.2 million is anything other than a huge number? You might think that nobody would even try to argue that, but you would be wrong. That is exactly why I mentioned this number. Because it is not huge: it is beautifully small. If we even start to think about how tragic each of these deaths is for the parents who had waited for their newborn to smile, and walk, and play, and instead had to bury their baby, then this number could keep us crying for a long time. But who would be helped by these tears? Instead let’s think clearly about human suffering. The number 4.2 million is for 2016. The year before, the number was 4.4 million. The year before that, it was 4.5 million. Back in 1950, it was 14.4 million. That’s almost 10 million more dead babies per year, compared with today. Suddenly this terrible number starts to look smaller. In fact the number has never been lower.”

 

“And thanks to increasing press freedom and improving technology, we hear more, about more disasters, than ever before. When Europeans slaughtered indigenous peoples across America a few centuries ago, it didn’t make the news back in the old world. When central planning resulted in mass famine in rural China, millions starved to death while the youngsters in Europe waving communist red flags knew nothing about it. When in the past whole species or ecosystems were destroyed, no one realized or even cared. Alongside all the other improvements, our surveillance of suffering has improved tremendously. This improved reporting is itself a sign of human progress, but it creates the impression of the exact opposite.”

 

“Ask yourself, “What kind of evidence would convince me to change my mind?” If the answer is “no evidence could ever change my mind about vaccination,” then you are putting yourself outside evidence-based rationality, outside the very critical thinking that first brought you to this point. In that case, to be consistent in your skepticism about science, next time you have an operation please ask your surgeon not to bother washing her hands.”

 

“The next generation is like the last runner in a very long relay race. The race to end extreme poverty has been a marathon, with the starter gun fired in 1800. This next generation has the unique opportunity to complete the job: to pick up the baton, cross the line, and raise its hands in triumph. The project must be completed. And we should have a big party when we are done.”

 

“Most important of all, we should be teaching our children humility and curiosity. Being humble, here, means being aware of how difficult your instincts can make it to get the facts right. It means being realistic about the extent of your knowledge. It means being happy to say “I don’t know.” It also means, when you do have an opinion, being prepared to change it when you discover new facts. It is quite relaxing being humble, because it means you can stop feeling pressured to have a view about everything, and stop feeling you must be ready to defend your views all the time. Being curious means being open to new information and actively seeking it out. It means embracing facts that don’t fit your worldview and trying to understand their implications. It means letting your mistakes trigger curiosity instead of embarrassment. “How on earth could I be so wrong about that fact? What can I learn from that mistake? Those people are not stupid, so why are they using that solution?” It is quite exciting being curious, because it means you are always discovering something interesting.”

 

My Take

While Factfulness is an interesting book, it reminded me very much of two other books that I have read on my quest:  Abundance and It’s Better Than It Looks.  All of these books preach the same message, i.e. that things are actually going a lot better in the world than we think they are and that worldwide poverty is in decline.  Factfulness author Hans Rosling backs everything up with facts and makes a compelling case.  I’m not sure how things are going in the world in the age of covid-19 and global shutdown.  I’m hoping we can get back on the positive trajectory that Rosling describes.

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440. Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   David Epstein

Genre:   Nonfiction, Business, Psychology, Self Improvement, Science

352 pages, published May 28, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

In Range, author David Epstein takes on the accepted wisdom that the key to success in most fields involves singular focus from a young age combined with thousands of hours of deliberate practice, i.e. the 10,000 hour rule immortalized in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers.  Think Tiger Woods or Mozart.  Epstein takes a contrarian view and explores the view that the most effective path to success is to dabble and/or delay.  He looks at research on the world’s top performers, from professional athletes to Nobel laureates, and shows that early specialization is the exception, not the rule. Inventors who cross domains and engage in multiple disciplines have the greatest impact.  Range makes the case that failing is the best way to learn and shows that frequent quitters end up with the most fulfilling careers.

Quotes 

“We learn who we are in practice, not in theory.”

 

“If we treated careers more like dating, nobody would settle down so quickly.”

 

“Modern work demands knowledge transfer: the ability to apply knowledge to new situations and different domains. Our most fundamental thought processes have changed to accommodate increasing complexity and the need to derive new patterns rather than rely only on familiar ones.  Our conceptual classification schemes provide a scaffolding for connecting knowledge, making it accessible and flexible.”

 

“Whether chemists, physicists, or political scientists, the most successful problem solvers spend mental energy figuring out what type of problem they are facing before matching a strategy to it, rather than jumping in with memorized procedures.”

 

“Like chess masters and firefighters, premodern villagers relied on things being the same tomorrow as they were yesterday. They were extremely well prepared for what they had experienced before, and extremely poorly equipped for everything else. Their very thinking was highly specialized in a manner that the modern world has been telling us is increasingly obsolete. They were perfectly capable of learning from experience, but failed at learning without experience. And that is what a rapidly changing, wicked world demands—conceptual reasoning skills that can connect new ideas and work across contexts. Faced with any problem they had not directly experienced before, the remote villagers were completely lost. That is not an option for us. The more constrained and repetitive a challenge, the more likely it will be automated, while great rewards will accrue to those who can take conceptual knowledge from one problem or domain and apply it in an entirely new one.”

 

“You have people walking around with all the knowledge of humanity on their phone, but they have no idea how to integrate it. We don’t train people in thinking or reasoning.”

 

“The challenge we all face is how to maintain the benefits of breadth, diverse experience, interdisciplinary thinking, and delayed concentration in a world that increasingly incentivizes, even demands, hyperspecialization.”

 

“The labs in which scientists had more diverse professional backgrounds were the ones where more and more varied analogies were offered, and where breakthroughs were more reliably produced when the unexpected arose.”

 

“breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer. That is, the more contexts in which something is learned, the more the learner creates abstract models, and the less they rely on any particular example. Learners become better at applying their knowledge to a situation they’ve never seen before, which is the essence of creativity.”

 

“Whether or not experience inevitably led to expertise, they agreed, depended entirely on the domain in question. Narrow experience made for better chess and poker players and firefighters, but not for better predictors of financial or political trends, or of how employees or patients would perform.”

 

“While it is undoubtedly true that there are areas that require individuals with Tiger’s precocity and clarity of purpose, as complexity increases—as technology spins the world into vaster webs of interconnected systems in which each individual only sees a small part—we also need more Rogers: people who start broad and embrace diverse experiences and perspectives while they progress. People with range.”

 

“First act and then think…We discover the possibilities by doing, by trying new activities, building new networks, finding new role models.” We learn who we are in practice, not in theory.”

 

“A separate, international team analyzed more than a half million research articles, and classified a paper as “novel” if it cited two other journals that had never before appeared together. Just one in ten papers made a new combination, and only one in twenty made multiple new combinations. The group tracked the impact of research papers over time. They saw that papers with new knowledge combinations were more likely to be published in less prestigious journals, and also much more likely to be ignored upon publication. They got off to a slow start in the world, but after three years, the papers with new knowledge combos surpassed the conventional papers, and began accumulating more citations from other scientists. Fifteen years after publication, studies that made multiple new knowledge combinations were way more likely to be in the top 1 percent of most-cited papers. To recap: work that builds bridges between disparate pieces of knowledge is less likely to be funded, less likely to appear in famous journals, more likely to be ignored upon publication, and then more likely in the long run to be a smash hit in the library of human knowledge.”

 

My Take

I enjoy reading books that challenge long held assumptions and Range falls squarely into that camp.  I have long believed the conventional wisdom that early focus, repetitive practice and hyper specialization were the road to success.  However, author David Epstein makes a compelling case, backed up with data, that the road to greatness is often a meandering one, with failure, course changes and a broad range of interdisciplinary influences rating as essential elements.  In reading this book, I was reminded of Leonardo da Vinci, the biography of the iconic artist and inventor who drew on a wide range of influences for some of his most creative and groundbreaking work.

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439. Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  David and Tammis Matzinger

Author:   Adam Higginbotham

Genre:   Non Fiction, History, Science, Foreign

561 pages, published February 12, 2019

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Midnight in Chernobyl is an exhaustive look at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster which follows individuals from many different facets of the story, from those working in the plant to the scientists who desperately try to mitigate the crisis to the leaders who make the ultimate decisions of life and death.  The book also provides the reader with an inside look at the corruption and rot within the Soviet system that led to both the nuclear disaster and the eventual downfall of the USSR.

Quotes 

“a society where the cult of science had supplanted religion, the nuclear chiefs were among its most sanctified icons—pillars of the Soviet state. To permit them to be pulled down would undermine the integrity of the entire system on which the USSR was built. They could not be found guilty.”

 

“Radiation is all around us. It emanates from the sun and cosmic rays, bathing cities at high altitude in greater levels of background radiation than those at sea level. Underground deposits of thorium and uranium emit radiation, but so does masonry: stone, brick, and adobe all contain radioisotopes. The granite used to build the US Capitol is so radioactive that the building would fail federal safety codes regulating nuclear power plants. All living tissue is radioactive to some degree: human beings, like bananas, emit radiation because both contain small amounts of the radioisotope potassium 40; muscle contains more potassium 40 than other tissue, so men are generally more radioactive than women. Brazil nuts, with a thousand times the average concentration of radium of any organic product, are the world’s most radioactive food.”

 

“Yet the economists in Moscow had no reliable index of what was going on in the vast empire they notionally maintained; the false accounting was so endemic that at one point the KGB resorted to turning the cameras of its spy satellites onto Soviet Uzbekistan in an attempt to gather accurate information about the state’s own cotton harvest.”

 

“For the first time, Soviet scientists admitted that 17.5 million people, including 2.5 million children under seven, had lived in the most seriously contaminated areas of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia at the time of the disaster. Of these, 696,000 had been examined by Soviet medical authorities by the end of 1986. Yet the official tally of deaths ascribed to the disaster to date remained the same as that announced the previous year: 31.”

 

“A year after Calder Hall opened, in October 1957, technicians at the neighboring Windscale breeder reactor faced an almost impossible deadline to produce the tritium needed to detonate a British hydrogen bomb. Hopelessly understaffed, and working with an incompletely understood technology, they operated in emergency conditions and cut corners on safety. On October 9 the two thousand tons of graphite in Windscale Pile Number One caught fire. It burned for two days, releasing radiation across the United Kingdom and Europe and contaminating local dairy farms with high levels of iodine 131. As a last resort, the plant manager ordered water poured onto the pile, not knowing whether it would douse the blaze or cause an explosion that would render large parts of Great Britain uninhabitable. A board of inquiry completed a full report soon afterward, but, on the eve of publication, the British prime minister ordered all but two or three existing copies recalled and had the metal type prepared to print it broken up. He then released his own bowdlerized version to the public, edited to place the blame for the fire on the plant operators. The British government would not fully acknowledge the scale of the accident for another thirty years.”

 

“As the Era of Stagnation began, the Soviet scientific establishment lavished resources on the immediate priorities of the state—space exploration, water diversion, nuclear power—while emergent technologies, including computer science, genetics, and fiber optics, fell behind.”

 

“and leveling inconveniently situated mountains with atom bombs—or, as the Russian expression went, “correcting the mistakes of nature.”

 

“But of the dozens of dangerous incidents that occurred inside Soviet nuclear facilities over the decades that followed, not one was ever mentioned to the IAEA. For almost thirty years, both the Soviet public and the world at large were encouraged to believe that the USSR operated the safest nuclear industry in the world. The cost of maintaining this illusion had been high.”

 

“the atomic chieftains of NIKIET and the Kurchatov Institute apparently believed that a well-written set of manuals would be enough to guarantee nuclear safety.”

 

“So, to save time, Sredmash decided to skip the prototype stage entirely: the quickest way to find out how the new reactors would work in industrial electricity generation would be to put them directly into mass production.”

 

“the origins of the accident lay with those who had designed the reactor and the secret, incestuous bureaucracy that had allowed it to go into operation.”

 

“The temperature inside the reactor rose to 4,650 degrees centigrade—not quite as hot as the surface of the sun.”

 

“Slowly at first, but then with gathering momentum, the Soviet public began to discover how deeply it had been misled—not only about the accident and its consequences but also about the ideology and identity upon which their society was founded. The accident and the government’s inability to protect the population from its consequences finally shattered the illusion that the USSR was a global superpower armed with technology that led the world. And, as the state’s attempts to conceal the truth of what had happened came to light, even the most faithful citizens of the Soviet Union faced the realization that their leaders were corrupt and that the Communist dream was a sham.”

 

My Take

When I first picked up a thick copy of Midnight in Chernobyl (which clocks in at 561 pages and had been assigned by one of my book groups), I was expecting a bit of a long slog.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Author Adam Higginbotham is a skilled writer who weaves a gripping tale of what went wrong in Chernobyl and how a corrupt Communist system built on deception and covering up unpleasant truths laid the ground work for one of the biggest manmade disasters in the history of the world.  I learned a lot and highly recommend this book.  I also recommend the HBO miniseries Chernobyl which is an engrossing watch.

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437. A Thousand Days in Venice

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Joni Renee Zalk

Author:   Marlena de Blasi

Genre:   Non Fiction, Travel, Foreign, Memoir

290 pages, published June 3, 2003

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

A Thousand Days in Venice tells the story of Marlena de Blasi, a divorced, middle aged American chef and restaurateur, who meets the Italian banker Fernando on the last day of her trip to Venice.  That meeting turns into a romance which turns into a marriage after Marlena uproots her life to become a Venetian and give love another chance.

Quotes 

“Living as a couple never means that each gets half. You must take turns at giving more than getting. It’s not the same as a bow to the other whether to dine out rather than in, or which one gets massaged that evening with oil of calendula; there are seasons in the life of a couple that function, I think, a little like a night watch. One stands guard, often for a long time, providing the serenity in which the other can work at something. Usually that something is sinewy and full of spines. One goes inside the dark place while the other one stays outside, holding up the moon.”

 

“Much of my crying is for joy and wonder rather than for pain. A trumpet’s wailing, a wind’s warm breath, the chink of a bell on an errant lamb, the smoke from a candle just spent, first light, twilight, firelight. Everyday beauty. I cry for how life intoxicates. And maybe just a little for how swiftly it runs.”

 

“How strange it is, sometimes, which conversations or events stays with us while so much else melts as fast as April snow.”

 

“Some people ripen, some rot.”

 

“Life is this conto, account,” said the banker in him. “It’s an unknown quantity of days from which one is permitted to withdraw only one precious one of them at a time. No deposits accepted.”

 

My Take

A Thousand Days in Venice reminded me a lot of A Year in Provence as it is the type of book that transports and immerses you completely in a different place and culture.  While reading it, I felt like I was in Venice.   De Blasi is a talented and passionate writer and I enjoyed taking this trip with her.

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435. The Conservative Heart: How to Build a Fairer, Happier, and More Prosperous America

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author: Arthur C. Brooks

Genre:   Non Fiction, Public Policy, Politics, Philosophy, History, Economics

261 pages, published July 14, 2015

Reading Format:  e-Book on Hoopla

Summary

In The Conservative Heart, former American Enterprise Institute President and author Arthur C. Brooks writes about his vision for conservatism as a movement for happiness, unity, and social justice that will challenge the liberal monopoly on “fairness” and “compassion.”  While Progressives have always presented themselves as champions of the poor and vulnerable, Brooks argues that they have failed the people they are trying to help as more and more people are hopeless and dependent on the government while Conservatives possess the best solutions to the problems of poverty and declining mobility.  However, because the right doesn’t speak in a way that reflects their concern and compassion, many Americans don’t trust them.  In response to this problem, Brooks presents a social justice agenda grounded in the four “institutions of meaning”:  family, faith, community, and meaningful work.

Quotes 

“No one sighs regretfully on his deathbed and says, “I can’t believe I wasted all that time with my wife and kids,” “volunteering at the soup kitchen,” or “growing in my spirituality.” No one ever says, “I should have spent more time watching TV and playing Angry Birds on my phone.” In my own life, nothing has given my life more meaning and satisfaction than my Catholic faith and the love of my family.”

 

“The ideals of free enterprise and global leadership, central to American conservatism, are responsible for the greatest reduction in human misery since mankind began its long climb from the swamp to the stars.”

 

“There is a lot to be mad about in America today, but we must never forget that our cause is a joyous one. Conservatives should be optimists who believe in people. We champion hope and opportunity. Fighting for people, helping those who need us, and saving the country—this is, and should be, happy work.”

 

“Meaningful progress toward social justice cannot be made in sclerotic education systems that put adults’ job security before children’s civil rights.”

 

“the best data consistently show that more than eight in ten Americans like or love their jobs. And incredibly, that result holds steady across the income distribution. This notion that “knowledge work” is fulfilling, but everyone who works in a garage or a restaurant loathes his or her life, is an incredible act of condescension masquerading as concern. The truth is much more egalitarian. Again, economic mobility is crucial, and stagnant wages are a huge problem for American families. But this doesn’t change the deep truth that work, not money, is the fundamental source of our dignity. Work is where we build character. Work is where we create value with our lives and lift up our own souls. Work, properly understood, is the sacred practice of offering up our talents for the service of others.”

 

“When Ronald Reagan made his case to the American people, he didn’t spend a lot of time talking about what he was fighting against. He spent most of his speech talking about who he was fighting for. This is what conservatives too often forget.”

 

“Households headed by a “conservative” give, on average, 30 percent more dollars to charity than households headed by a “liberal.”

 

“First, we should concentrate each day on the happiness portfolio: faith, family, community, and earned success through work. Teach it to those around you, and fight against the barriers to these things. Second, resist the worldly formula of misery, which is to use people and love things. Instead, remember your core values and live by the true formula: Love people and use things. Third, celebrate the free enterprise system, which creates abundance for the most people—especially the poor. But always remember that the love of money is the root of all evil, and that the ideal life requires abundance without attachment.”

 

“But at the same time, a bloated welfare state that nudges middle-class citizens away from the labor force is moving our society away from the dignity of earned success.”

 

My Take

I had previously read and enjoyed Love Your Enemies by Arthur Brooks, so I had high hopes for The Conservative Heart.  I was not disappointed. Brooks posits compelling ideas and makes a strong case for him.  He also weaves in a lot of on point anecdotes which makes the book very readable.  I was also struck by his thought that the ideal life requires abundance without attachment.  It made me think about my relationship to things and how I need to hold them loosely.  Recommended.

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433. The Case for Easter: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for the Resurrection

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Karen Reader

Author:   Lee Strobel

Genre:   Non Fiction, Theology, Christian

90 pages, published March 26, 2019

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

The Case for Easter is a very short book that focuses on empirical arguments for the resurrection of Jesus Christ.  Author Lee Strobel interviews experts from a number of disciplines to methodically make his case.  In journalistic fashion, he looks at the medical evidence of Christ’s death on the cross, the evidence of the missing body from the tomb and the evidence of Christ’s appearances after death.

Quotes 

 

My Take

While The Case for Easter is a quick read at just 90 pages, author Lee Strobel (who also wrote The Case for Christ), makes compelling and evidenced based arguments for the resurrection of Christ.  Highly recommended during the Easter season.

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